However You Imagine or Care to Name That Machine We Hear Idling in the Engine Room at Night

Yesterday was simultaneously the busiest and slowest pingday of the year. Slowest because it's the Sunday before Giftmas, I had the fewest hits from regulars since Thanksgiving, busiest since Atrios linked to the blog five years ago because Blogbud Lambert was Sundaying naked capitalism's daily links and Kindly linked to my post on the first anniversary of Beefheart's death and KABOOM! Thanks much. I think some thought I was saying Beefheart had just died, my sincere apologies for my lack of clarity. The music was listened to, so all's good.

As for standard duh and daily suckagain: Obama signs into law detention infinity, it's not like power's torturing more, it's codifying what you knew they always did but pretended to imagine they didn't into what you expect them to do, which is what you expect to happen to you if you are disobedient (as it's expected you will be at America's serbianization), which is the motherfucking point of power.

• Bleakest era ever?
• The four occupations of Planet Earth.
• How business schools got like they are. There are times I wish I could write about where I work, cause the largest concentration of malevolent fucksticks I've ever encountered....
• Yes, you are responsible.
• UPDATE! The Newt you deserve.
• Dropping like flies.
• Dropping like flies.
• Stronger than yesterday.
• Art as occupation.
• Inside every comment is a blogpost.....
• Another Paulbot.
• Rightwing bloggers against Paul.
• On the (tangentially) above.
• Maureen McHugh? Good thing I have access to a university library's stacks.
• An invitation.
• Neil Halstead covers Kate Bush.
• Bill Nelson turned 63 yesterday:

APRIL 20

Campbell McGrath

Talking in class about rhetorical posture.
The students, several of whom are extravagantly
gifted, have been so deeply indoctrinated
with the depersonalizing jargon of critical theory
that they can barely accommodate the notion
of authorial agency, let alone the concept of a speaker.
Where is the speaker situated in this poem?
Not the speaker but the voice. Not the voice
but the self. Not the self but the locus of issuance.
How can I convince them that poems if texts
are human texts, that texts if artifacts
are artifacts forged in the furnace
of the heart, the soul, the psyche, however
you imagine or care to name that machine
we hear idling in the engine room at night.
Springlike today, near seventy, sunny and blue.
Budding trees no longer skeletal as logic.
The particular hickory or maple in the alley
whose sheaves of hairline branches engraved
discrete linear designs upon the iridescent sky
has swollen into generality, a fuzzy abstraction.
Another week should see the bloom-out
of purest, whisper-green shoots, darkening
all summer to fall.