The guy who correctly tore me a new one over the deerhunter sent me an email saying he came back and tunes in, and sincere thanks, best Giftmas present ever since the last until the next. He remembers being angry more that I fuckyeahed the story since it was a (I think) preteen kid who found the father's body (and: Yes, Larkin) than that I fuckyeahed the death of a bambikiller who may have been hunting for his family's winter provisions. Thanks to Pushing Upwards for your email too!
Also, weird Giftmas: the people I know who usually enjoy it are sour, many I know who loathe it aren't enjoying their loathing like they like to. Strangest days of my life.
Also, links are going to be sparse. I'll post what's available, some music and poetry, but barring KABOOM! I'm mailing it in for a few slow days, one way and another.
Also, I'm now halfway through 1Q84 and holyfuck! the novel and holyfuck! I can read again! (even if I don't have the time and have old eyes when I do).
Also, I have no idea why I thought of Tiny Desk Unit, but there's a connection between the slavia I'm Knez of and Tiny Desk Unit I'd completely forgotten until I thought of Tiny Desk Unit for no reason.
Also, Planet tells me no one - none of her friends here, none of her friends at Bamgier - she has shown Kids in the Hall to gets it at all. What the fuck?
STONEHENGE
Albert Goldbarth
Each morning he’d anoint the room’s four corners
with an arc of piss, and then—until
he was forcibly halted—beat his forehead open
on the eastern wall, the “sunrise wall,”
incanting a doggerel prayer about God
the Flower, God of the Hot Plucked Heart; and
she, if loose in the halls, would join him,
squatting in the center of the room and masturbating
with a stolen bar of soap. This isn’t why
they were sent to the madhouse: this is what
they needed to do once in the madhouse: this
is the only meaningful ritual they could fashion
there, created from the few, make-do
materials available. It isn’t wondrous strange
more than the mega-boozhwah formulaic splendor
of my sister’s wedding ten, eleven years ago:
her opulent bouquet of plastic flowers
(for the wilting pour of wattage at the photo session),
nigglingly arranged to match the real bouquet
she carried down the aisle, bloom per bloom;
the five-foot Taj Mahal of sculpted pastel sherbet;
endless “Fiddler on the Roof”; I’m sorry
now I cranked my academic sneer hauteur in place
all night. I’m sorry I didn’t lose myself
like a drunken bee in a room-sized rose,
in waltzing Auntie Sally to the lush swell
of the band. We need this thing. There’s not one
mineral in Stonehenge that our blood can’t also raise.
One dusk, one vividly contusion-color
dusk, with my fists in my pockets and
a puzzle of fish-rib clouds in the sky, I
stopped at the low-level glow of a basement window
(Hot Good Noodle Shop) and furtively looked in:
a full-grown pig was splayed on the table,
stunned but fitfully twitching, it looked as if
it had grasshoppers under its skin. A man and a woman
slit that body jaw-to-ass with an ornate knife,
and then they both scooped out a tumble
of many dozens of wasps, preserved
by the oils of living pig to a beautiful black and amber
gem-like sheen. I saw it. Did I
see it? From inside this, over their wrists
in the tripes, they carefully removed
the wooden doll of a man and the wooden doll of a woman
maybe two inches tall, a tiny lacquered sun
and matching brass coin of a moon, and then
a child’s-third-grade-version of a house
made out of pallid wax: a square of walls,
a pyramid roof, and a real smoking chimney.
