- Turboparalysis.
- The American fascist sandwich.
- Population explosion.
- The big lie.
- Toward the end of plutocracy.
- Children dressed as animals dressed as children.
- Motherfucking cops.
- Santorum is surging!
- Can't be funky.
- Jim's blog's birthday.
- William Gass and the music of prose. This was actually going to be the meat of the post (and I suppose it still is even if it's not the lede): it's connected to both how I think I'm reading now (now that I'm reading again) and especially how I listen to music now. It reminded me of conversations I've had lately with Earthgirl and friends, that it's Schumann and Beethoven and even (and this shocks me) Chopin that make no sense to me at all, that sounds like inchoate noise that has no relationship to the world I live in. Then I looked down and what I'd written wasn't like what I like to write, so this paragraph instead. Also, once I finish 1Q84 (and I haven't been inhabited like this since The Lonely Ones a year or more ago), 3rd time into The Tunnel is next.
- Piano phase.
- Joseph Arthur. I missed his new album this year because I had stopped listening to KEXP - that fatuous dj introducing Arthur in the first vid is one of the two who not only wouldn't play Beefheart the day after his death but wouldn't even acknowledge my email, this after I'd given the station literally hundreds of dollar every year for a decade. Screw her, but I do like Joseph Arthur, played some here within the past month.
- Stand up and fight.
UPPER WORLD
Rae Armantrout
If sadness
is akin to patience,
we're back!
Pattern recognition
was our first response
to loneliness.
Here and there were like
one place.
But we need to triangulate,
find someone to show.
*
There's a jolt, quasi-electric,
when one of our myths
reverts to abstraction.
Now we all know
every name's Eurydice,
briefly returned
from blankness
and the way back
won't bear scrutiny.
High voices
over rapid-pulsing synthesizers
intone, "without you" --
which is soothing.
We prefer meta-significance:
the way the clouds exchange
white scraps
in glory.
No more wishes.
No more bungalows
behind car-washes
painted the color of
swimming pools
