I Wanted to Kiss Your Lips, which Remained Supple, but All the Water in Them Had Been Replaced with Embalming Compound

Paul Westerberg is still four months and three days younger than me and turns 53 today. This is Day Three of Aarghfreeness. I'm broadening the scope of what can be posted, another way of saying I'm narrowing the scope of what I call aargh, which is another way of saying I'm buying the rounds at this week's Thursday Night Pints. >>Deleted (or at least delayed) bleggalgazing<<  Lines from the reports of the investigative committees. Vampire capitalism and the fear of inoculation. FascistBook strikes again. Gun control + unlawful wars. His generation's greatest academic fraud. I say that admiringly (though joke(r) getting old). Blog round-up. Blooger, btw, is skeevier than ever. According to my template, this blog's title is 50 point Ariel in maroon, the post font is 16 Times New Roman in blue. According to a blogger help forum, the Apply to Blog button on template is broken, blooger either doesn't know and doesn't care or does know and doesn't care. This is indirectly related to the >>Deleted (or at least delayed) bleggalgazing<< Mentioned in case the settings kick in - it wasn't me. Bleggalgazing. Cartophilia. SeatSix gave me a replica 1865 MOCO map for Giftmas, gonna hang it in the big room when I get around to it, did you know the area around Laytonsville once was a township called Cracklintown? ICC. Touring the Doll Hospital. Moonlight monologue for the new kitten. 2013: Year of Repeat Repeat Repeat. Nine most newsworthy dogs of 2012. Five great darknesses. Wolpe: Quartet for Trumpet, Tenor-Sax, Percussion, Piano. Your Ancient NYC Klaus Nomi Fix.





POPPIES

Henri Cole

Waking from comalike sleep, I saw the poppies,
with their limp necks and unregimented beauty.
Pause, I thought, say something true: It was night,
I wanted to kiss your lips, which remained supple,
but all the water in them had been replaced
with embalming compound. So I was angry.
I loved the poppies, with their wide-open faces,
how they carried themselves, beckoning to me
instead of pushing away. The way in and the way out
are the same, essentially: emotions disrupting thought,
proximity to God, the pain of separation.
I loved the poppies, with their effortless existence,
like grief and fate, but tempered and formalized.
Your hair was black and curly; I combed it.

Their Small Chests Swell as They Dispute a Crumb or the Empty Space Where a Seed Once Was

 
Patti Smith is sixty-six today. Hard to believe, once her music was fresh, exciting, vital. I was young once too. I was asked six times yesterday where I'm watching tonight's Washington-Dallas helmetball game. I grew up a Redskins fan, remember watching games every Sunday with this guy for years (for some reason I remember best watching games at that yellow townhouse behind the Montgomery Village Texaco and Exxon stations). I don't remember precisely why I fell out with helmetball, though there was a girl and posturing involved I'm sure, plus wanting to spend my Sunday afternoons outside, plus then I took the job at Hilltop and my schedule was Sunday-Thursday the first ten years so I couldn't have watched even had I wanted to. Plus Dan Snyder. Yesterday I overheard two MOCO cops make a bet at the coffee bar at a 7-11 in Bethesda, one betting the other they'll bust more drunk drivers tonight at checkpoints after the Redskins game than they will at checkpoints New Years Eve. Speaking of once being young and fresh and exciting and vital, tomorrow is Paul Westerberg's birthday, requests solicited.





Day Two of the aargh-free four-day weekend. So far no jones - that's not entirely true, I'm thinking about the jones I don't have which is a form of jones. Still unsure how much retweeting aargh I consider retweetworthy taints the aarghlessness here. I've only retweeted a few, resisted retweeting more. As for content here, Blogs of Aargh post more and more often than lit-blogs and music-blogs, so linkages are sparser when aarghless only are used. Oh well. I chose not to participate in this years Jon Swift Memorial Round-Up, but stuff to see. I've said this before - Jon Swift did me major Kinds, some of you reading this found me via him. On Patrick White's centenary. I tried Voss, failed, I take the blame, mean to get back to his novels in some hypothetical future. Richard's read him. Capitalism, Modernism, Postmodernism. (This is not aargh by my admittedly sloppy taxonomies.) Death Wobbles. New lows. That was now, this was then. A perfect mess. Stockhausen. New to me: Elizabeth Velden. Playlist by Mandrew. Schoenberg String Quartet. Watch Charlie Chaplin's overlooked masterpiece. The Complete Piano Pieces of Charles Ives. The lives they lived. Tablets and calligraphy? Jonesing for the end? I told you there is Holly Herndon in your future:





   
THE PLAY OF LIGHT AND SHADOW

D. Nurkse

We want to give ourselves away utterly
but afterwards we regret it, it is the same
with the sparrows, their eyes burn so coldly
under the dusty pines, their small chests swell
as they dispute a crumb, or the empty space
where a seed once was: this is our law too,
to peck and peck at the Self, to take turns
being I, to die in a fierce sidelong glance,
then to hold the entire forest in one tilt
of a tufted head, to take flight suddenly
and fuck in midair, tumbling upward.

F Coughs

Know what? Barring a KABOOM! I can't ignore in the world I call Motherfucking this bleg is an aargh-free zone until the New Year. I doubt I can make it, feel compelled to try. This is for me, though you may as well benefit too. Songs, poems, lit-links, non-aarghful links, friend's playlists (gimme), birthdays, yes, aargh-free monologues, yes and/or no, arbiter of aargh me. Promised myself a Birchville Cat Motel cascade, today's the day. Hey, William Gaddis was born eighty-five years ago today. This is from The Recognitions:

And then... is it possible? can a man be jealous of himself? Damn it, listen Esther, did you see what she tried to do? she almost kissed me goodbye? Why, she's insane. But she goes out on the street and nobody's surprised to see her, she talks and nobody's surprised to hear her. It's suffocating. Right this minute, she's talking. They're down there right this minute and that woman with the granulated eyelids is talking. You look up and there she is, people... the instant you look at them they begin to talk, automatically, they take it for granted that you understand them, that you recognize them, that they have something to say to you, and you have to wait, you have to pretend to listen, pretend you don't know what's coming next while they go right on talking with no idea what they're talking about, they don't even know but they go right on, trying to explain who they are because they take it for granted you want to know, not that they have the damnedest idea as far as that goes, they just want to know what kind of receptacle you'll be for their confidences. How do they know I'm the same person that... Who are they to presume such intimacy, to... go right on talking. And they really believe they're talking to me!

Of course there will be bleggalgazing. There's nothing but bleggalgazing.




  
Then there's twitter, which I use to bookshelf links I want to give you, many of the most aarghful links I see first there. Retweeting aargh is no different, in a major sense, than linking out to the site originally seen via tweeting: either way I'm a Relayer. Yes, an old gag, it still makes me smile. So, um, I going to try the 2013 Proustathon. Like a dope, I just dropped $50 on the editions they're gonna use. In my effort to remain hip and current, I've committed 2013 to reading Proust and rereading Olson. Leaving Proust. Three book reviews and a bleggalgaze. Deleuze, for those of you who do. Ruefle reads Ashbery. Unlikely materials. Carnation Instant Non-Fat Karma. Silence as resistance. The three-legged dog at the heart of our home. Free associations. Inherent Vice: The Movie? The Librarian. Sojourns in the parallel world. Drumming. I confess I like the block and alternating link colors now to the bulletpoints, I'll no doubt flip back to bulletpoints soon, but. darkblack's Sunday Overnight. Metal from Randal. Mining the digital motherlode. Sharon Van Etten, who's opening for Nick Cave in March at Strathmore, covers Big Star. News from a friend.




A PRIMER OF THE DAILY ROUND

Howard Nemerov

A peels and apple, while B kneels to God,
C telephones to D, who has a hand
On E's knee, F coughs, G turns up the sod
For H's grave, I do not understand
But J is bringing one clay pigeon down
While K brings down a nightstick on L's head,
And M takes mustard, N drives to town,
O goes to bed with P, and Q drops dead,
R lies to S, but happens to be heard
By T, who tells U not to fire V
For have to give W the word
That X is now deceiving Y with Z,
     Who happens, just now to remember A
     Peeling an apple somewhere far away

of the cake and flesh I now have windings of as steep and left-ward twisting as those ice-rock grindings were the giant river ran over and caught where ground itself is a fucking hole

 

First, thanks Edmond for that Stereolab youtube yesterday. I always short-shrift Stereolab here proportional to how much I love Stereolab even though I say so again and again and say I'll post more again and again. One last Giftmas present for you. Yes, today is Alex Chilton's birthday. This week in war. But, but, she's a Democrat. See, I didn't say motherfucking Democrats, though I thought it. The hehhing. Occupy, not dead, just resting? You can play that Python clip in your head, I don't need to post a youtube. Deprogramming progressives. Last on this. Drones. Double standards. Economicide. An anarchist Giftmas. Crossing the painted road. Imperial lockstep. Elizabeth Drew against the neo-cons. I respect Elizabeth Drew, I've always thought her the best of Villagers. While you were Giftmassing. Route 15 toll fizzles. Where Earthgirl grew up. Fuck Sunderland. STAND! or stay home (or at least sit on wussy side). The whole nine yards: a startling development! Bleggalgazing. So you are where now? Anthony's links of the week (and thanks for the Kind words). Until the pouring out of respect at his passing the past two days, I'd never heard of Dennis O'Driscoll. Any of you !!! with his poetry, can recommend a place to start? :: wood s lot ::, as you'd expect, has some. Nicholas Royle? New at the other place. Dye. Hauntology. Literary moist aversion. Twelve soundfiles to mouse over. Holly Herndon? There's Holly Herndon in your future. There's Birchville Cat Motel in your future. Zombie playlist. No more hotdogs. Rust worship. The Stereolab song you hear most.




STAGE FORT PARK

Charles Olson

an ice-plug a wherry where I hid my car a nights a fucking

and they tell me this was a gore under ice where the rocks made a whirlpool

when the land was then depressed below the level

of where the sea now is but the sea was out and here

in the hole of Stage Fort Park forty feet further down and then let up was the bed

of a Merry mac as wide as Massachusetts


                              the earth was down from the weight of the ice upon it

and great beds of water flowing under carried detritus

was my kame and those hollows and the rise

of choke-cherry trees I have eaten my father

piece by piece I love my cannibalism


of the cake and flesh I now have windings of as steep and left-ward twisting

as those ice-rock grindings were

the giant river ran over and caught

where ground itself is a fucking hole

Born 102 Years Ago Today

MAXIMUS TO GLOUCESTER, LETTER 27 [WITHHELD]

Charles Olson

I come back to the geography of it,
the land falling off to the left
where my father shot his scabby golf
and the rest of us played baseball
into the summer darkness until no flies
could be seen and we came home
to our various piazzas where the women
buzzed

To the left the land fell to the city,
is of a tent spread to feed lobsters
to Rexall conventioneers, and my father,
a man for kicks, came out of the tent roaring
with a bread-knife in his teeth to take care of
a druggist they'd told him had made a pass at
my mother, she laughing, so sure, as round
as her face, Hines pink and apple,
under one of those frame hats women then


This, is no bare incoming
of abstract form, this

is no welter or the forms
of those events, this,

Greeks, is the stopping
of the battle

          It is the imposing
of all those antecedent predecessions, the precessions

of me, the generation of those facts
which are my words, it is coming

from all that I no longer am, yet am,
the slow westward motion of

more than I am


There is no strict personal order

for my inheritance.


               No Greek will be able

to discriminate by body.

                    An American

is a complex of occasions,

themselves a geometry

of spatial nature.


          I have this sense,

that I am one

with my skin


               Plus this - plus this:

that forever the geography

which leans in

on me I compel

backwards I compel Gloucester

to yield, to

change

          Polis

is this

It's been 25 years since I read The Maximus Poems. A friend has been badgering me to revisit Olson, especially since I've been posting Black Mountain occasionally the past year; The Library's beaten, pencil-marked and high-lighted copy has been on my desk since last week when I grabbed it from a pile of discharged books; I stumble upon his birthday today; I've giftcards to Amazon in my wallet: 2013 to be  The Year I Reread The Maximus Poems, expect lots of his poems here.


THE CONDITION OF THE LIGHT FROM THE SUN

on ground level
up on top of the world
the Bulgar and his sons
in the eye of ice
over the left shoulder
North North East
on a line extending
directly half way distance
between the left neck
and the ridge above
the road which passes over
the top of the world
constituted of color
divided among them
the Throne the Kingdom the Power

Into What Bulk Has Method Disappeared?

I'm constantly shedding a belief system, haven't yet come near addressing my need for a belief system. This is backwards, yes, I've known for decades. My semi-annual apologies for hectoring you. I've fallen hard out of love with a particular uniform, not fallen out of love with or lost the need for loving a particular uniform at any and all times. I'm barking loudly at the throw-rug of my lost faith, sacrificing nothing, overvaluing my bark's self-scourging currency. Abandoning whatever silliness I zealously held as beyond reproach doesn't make me less a zealot, it makes me zealously anti-whatever I was zealous for before, a gleefully desperate zealot deliberately in a vacuum.




    
Songs here today signify nothing other than they're in my head. Yes, I post this Thom Gunn poem (many Thom Gunn poems) all the time. Will again. Blooger stopped allowing me to change the font size of the blog title three, four days ago, something I do often when I post blogheaders at night, usually from 730 to 730, three, four nights a week. I go to Dashboard - Template - Customize - Blog Title, I'm told now the blog title is 16 point Ariel in maroon. Will not change no matter what I try. Five, six days ago a new edition of Misha Glenny's History of the Balkans came out on a new book truck, being Balkan I grabbed it, opened it, thumbed it, read of the Slaughter of the Knezes, saw Knez in Cyrillic, copied and pasted to sub-title field in Dashboard - Layout, and now this blog's title is 80 point New Times Roman in white though the gears say 16 point Ariel in maroon no matter what I click and save to change it. The situation is flavorful, it's juicy, it's well-prepared, it's the universal truth, that's effing good ham. Links return sooner enough or later enough.






MOLY

Thom Gunn

Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake.

I woke. What beasthood skin she made me take?

Leathery toad that ruts for days on end,

Or cringing dribbling dog, man’s servile friend,

Or cat that prettily pounces on its meat,

Tortures it hours, then does not care to eat:

Parrot, moth, shark, wolf, crocodile, ass, flea.

What germs, what jostling mobs there were in me.

    These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough.

No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof.

Into what bulk has method disappeared?

Like ham, streaked. I am gross—grey, gross, flap-eared.

The pale-lashed eyes my only human feature.

My teeth tear, tear. I am the snouted creature

That bites through anything, root, wire, or can.

If I was not afraid I’d eat a man.

Oh a man’s flesh already is in mine.

Hand and foot poised for risk. Buried in swine.

    I root and root, you think that it is greed,

It is, but I seek out a plant I need.

Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy,

To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly:

Cool flesh of magic in each leaf and shoot,

From milky flower to the black forked root.

From this fat dungeon I could rise to skin

And human title, putting pig within.

I push my big grey wet snout through the green,

Dreaming the flower I have never seen.

1000

  
This is not my 1000th blog post ever but it is the 1000th at this location since I migrated here from typepad twenty-six months ago. I promise I did not schedule the past week's posts to land #1000 on Giftmas, though, Bless Serendipity, it worked out when I noticed I was at 999 last night. So, in typical clumsy, inept, and graceless self-indulgence, here, Happy Giftmas, this blog's theme songs in order they were so designated, minus any other bleggalgazing, of which there is lots, though not today.


*
*
*
*
*

other kinds of balm

• I've posted Gubaidulina often hear though never her Piano Concerto, found this morning on the amazing Atonality.net, a simply astonishing resource. It also encourages reading the web while listening to it since I'm already on the web listening to it, discourages the reading of novels since I can't read fiction while music is playing. So have links.
• >>Deleted bleggalgazing<< Two Giftmas presents for you today!
• Six rules for criticizing Obama over Social Security.
• Not fiscal cliff, descent into lawlessness.
• Taxation with representation.
• I have no idea what a Piers Morgan is, but he pissed off Liberals by saying something so Liberals sign petition to have him deported. 
• UPDATE! While I'm still not sure what a Piers Morgan is, multiple people tell me that I have it ass-backwards - that it's conservative gun-supporters who want to deport him. My sincerest apologies, I'll double-check my sources from now on when reading something about someone I know nothing about. 
• No, I wasn't advocating Loomis be fired, I advocated acknowledging what a hypocritical assclown he is.
• I've offered a blogfriend looking for a rebrand free rights to this tag: Straddling the International Date Line Like a Perpetual February 29th. I like it, anyway.
• The same fucking card every year. 
• Oh look, Fuckface Hiatt gave column inches to Max Boot:

 

• Haven't had a chance to use that gag in a while. 
• Happy Blegday. I steal links from them all the time, thanks!
• Gamification.
• Fuck the US Park Service.
• Wonder what the main topic of conversation in DMVtown will be this week? I hope the Racist Slurs win for all my beloved who are Racist Slurs fans. As for the authoritarian in me, the Racist Slurs, when they wear the gold pants, have the best uniform in Helmetball.
• My current and future hell.
• Quick review of Ashbery's Quick Question.
• On The Grand Inquisitor. Maybe it's my imagination, but I'm seeing Fyodor (especially C&P) show up in more litblogs this past year than in recent memory.
• End of Oulipo?, The
• Sonata.
• British currency. What is a Robbie Williams?
• The 50 Most Anticipated Albums of 2013? Number Two disqualifies the whole list. Fuckingsuck.
• Trust the cloud with your music?

85. A FINAL SHOPPING LIST

Julie Carr

hands.
melted ice.
sun.
shine.
wire.
wire.
that which can be.
that which cannot.
a strategy.
the end of the day.
the heat at my neck.
sugar high.
the inside of his mouth.
the mother skirt.
hot sidewalk by the DMV.
the buzz in my head.
the fear running up the side of it.
partitions.
balm.
other kinds of balms.
whatever the children want.

Darken with Kindness

  

Double birthdays today. Jorma Kaukonen is 72 today. Holyfuck, the memory cascades, this song especially. Hey, there's a new blogroll on the right column, New Here. I'd added a dozen or so sites this month, they so quickly blended into the constantly updating other blogrolls I lost the chance to enjoy the newness too soon. This is solely for me, though there's no reason you shouldn't benefit also; I love you almost as much as I love me, your mileage with me may vary. After a month or so I'll move them to whichever permanent blogroll as is my whim as кнез. As always, if there's someone you think I might find kaboom please send a link, as always if you're Kinding me but me not you let me know, as always, thanks for reading. Hey, Adrian Belew is 63 today.





  

• Not many links today, it's the weekend before Giftmas, not many people posting, but first and foremost, Merry Giftmas, Hamster, look what I found looking for today's Belew.
• Someone translated me into Lithuanian yesterday (I don't think it had anything to do with me, sssh), here's the not-monologue in Lithuanian: Rick Nielsen yra 66 šiandien. Man patinka trečdalį Cheap Trick dainų, meh kitas trečdalis, neapkęsti likusį trečdalį, jie buvo kasdienio garso takelį prieš tris dešimtmečius, šaudyti man. Štai šiandien monologas. Aš buvau ketinate rašyti, ką rašiau apie pietų vakar su draugu ir buvęs poli / mokslas profesorius, kuris specializuojasi Amerikos politinės kultūros, bet (a) Man reikia pagalvoti apie tai daugiau (b) savaitgalį prieš Giftmas, aš prieš Giftmas dalykų, kad padaryti (c) ji yra savaitgalis, žmonės turi ką daryti ir ir didelis yra ne čia (d) matyti šį Rašyti savo pavadinimą ir (e) diskusija pasuko į argumentą, per mažiau-shittism, nei pakeitė kitos Šalies protas, šūdas, perdirbimas, kad, bent jau šiandien. Been a while - I used to get these fairly often, I'd forgot about them, I guess I assumed new algorithms made old ways unnecessary.
• Police state.
• If this be Socialism.... 
• I've not said anything about the Loomis Clusterfuck, recusing myself because he wrote the fucking turdliest attack against antilessshittiers I saw so my opinion about the fuckingsmug fuck is, admittedly, biased, so here's one take on the Loomis Clusterfuck, here's another. As for the matter of free speech, I'm sure the smug fuckingfuck has never called for the firing and/or boycotting of ANYONE for exercising his or her free speech.
• A Defense Secretary of Their Own. This was the argument my exprof/friend wouldn't accept: that if there's an a political vacuum that power finds abhorrent - that as the GOP collapses Obama must move to the right for the sake of future elections of Corporate Dogcatcher - there is not more or less shitty, just shitty. I used my Yankees versus Red Sox analogy, that whichever team wins the pennant the league wins. Nope for him.
• Motherfucking Democrats and the fiscal cliff.
• Krugman's obamapostasy will never be ready no matter how close he walks up to the line.
• On killing sprees.
• Learning to speak American. 
• I admit, watching Mourinho collapse into the black hole of his ego is entertaining.
• Moby Dick. Serendipitously (this is true, she can vouch), last night Planet asked me what I thought about Moby Dick, she's never read it, do I like it, do I have a copy? Do I have a copy.
• Pathless with untrodden snow.
• Anne Lauterbach.
• Yes, I've posted that James Wright poem below dozens of times, now dozens of times plus one. Happy Giftmas, L.
• Drumming.
• darkblack's Weekend Overnight.
• Adrian Belew was lead guitarist for the best Talking Heads line-up ever. That tour, three of the best nights of my life:

A BLESSING

James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies

Darken with kindness.

They have come gladly out of the willows

To welcome my friend and me.

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture

Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness   

That we have come.

They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.

There is no loneliness like theirs.   

At home once more,

They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.   

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,

For she has walked over to me   

And nuzzled my left hand.   

She is black and white,

Her mane falls wild on her forehead,

And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear

That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

A Scholar Mentions the War, the Problems of Pleasure, and Sips His Wine. This, a Condescending Sentence to Write

    

• Rick Nielsen is sixty-six today. I love a third of Cheap Trick songs, meh another third, loathe the remaining third, they were on the daily soundtrack three decades ago, shoot me. That's today's monologue. I was going to post what I wrote about lunch yesterday with a friend and former poli/sci professor who specializes in American political culture, but (a) I need to think about it more (b) it's the weekend before Giftmas, I've things to do (c) it's the weekend before Giftmas, people have things to do and by and large aren't here (d) see this post's title and (e) the discussion turned to argument over less-shittism, neither changed the other's mind, fuck rehashing that, at least today.
• Enacting Democracy.
• Crony capitalism's power couple.
• The coming drone attack on America.
• Beware of criminal gangs.
• Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?

• Deficit is the wrong word and concept.
• Why he doesn't much like Liberals.
• The Republicans have already won.
• Liberal Republican? Moderate Republican.
• Rimbaud Conservatism.
• Senator Frank?
• Externalities and the dubious defense of gun rights.
• You can have my pseudo ephedrine when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

• Philosophical delusion and therapy.
• Raging contradictions.
• Parasites.
• Drumming.
• Drumming.
• Rick Nielsen is sixty-six. Fuck I'm old.
• Fucked Up playing free show in Brooklyn tonight (for the few of you here from there).
• Fabulous first song of Bryce's show by Pork Queen. Never heard of Pork Queen, googled it. Gah, the band is not near the top of google hits for Pork Queen.
• Holyfuckedness! Oh man, where has this website been all my life?

   
45

Julie Carr

A novelist calls me brave for writing about violence. This seems a condescending thing to say. A scholar mentions the war, the problem of pleasure, and sips his wine. This, a condescending sentence to write. The tulips bow their heads. Ruskin: "All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the 'pathetic fallacy.'"


My baby wakes up and I am saved by the winds of chance, says the soldier on returning to his two-story home in Pensacola.

Long Red Nights in His God-Studio

So, no slide show of Kensington-Frederick-Hagerstown-Hancock-Cumberland-Morgantown-Washington-Wheeling-Zanesville-Bamgier. Caution won: it can't be a good sign winter storms now get names, but Draco, at the time when decisions needed making, made the Cumberland-Morgantown part at best potentially clusterfuckful, at worse dangerous. Planet flies in tomorrow, we'll pick up the skunk and goats that need to come home when we take her back. O! Fleabus photos by way of request. The renaissance of Fleabus (Sarah's death was pivotal) is remarkably lovely, she's herself again, the best cat ever. Photo above is by me a few nights ago; her old photographer, that's one of her Fleabus photos below, flies home Saturday. Yay!
   

• What the fuck did you expect? Obama will dismantle more of security net before his second inauguration than Romney could have by his reelection campaign in 2016.
• People concerned about the leadership chaos in House GOP, don't worry, Obama will save the party.
• And visa versa. His obamapostasy will never be ready.
• Celebrate the failure of The Great Betrayal?
• Call me when Obama steps to a microphone and calls bullshit on his own creation.
• Bug splats.
• This week in war.
• Pundits wrong about $$$ and 2012 election?
• Left Side of the Aisle #87. 
• Things you might have missed.
• Сеча кнезова. 
• MOCO to try fucking over PG yet again. It's a rite.
• Here: Cup an ear and listen very, very carefully. Hear that high-pitched squeaking noise? That's the sound of thousands of Geordie buttocks chafing in unison at the prospect of Saturday's home match against Queens Park Rangers.
• Can anyone tell me why motherfucking blooger shrunk the maximum width of blog headers from 910 to 760, the motherfuckers?
• The photography of Marion Post Walcott. Goodness.
• Bought myself these for Giftmas. Will share, as soon as today.
• My fatal flaw.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• Why yes, the song at postbottom is this shitty blog's Theme Song. 
• Happy Holidays from Yo La Tengo.
• Oh my. There's your Giftmas present.
• Was reading some subobobosubsubobjest last night when I clicked the song below. Guess what won!

50

Julie Carr

My son is wroth. Dear summer, dear aging, the bottoms of cups:

If bearing children is a game one plays
with fate and

is a joke: trees as yet unleaved, a sunny -


     My son is wroth, my daughter too, and me, myself, I am wroth. A fugitive

     on the earth, and a vagabond. Dear opposition, dear trashed strollers, dear

     torn to pieces: Wasn't, won't be, isn't me

     collecting swords, hanging them on my living room wall, that's my

     neighbor, he's recording God-songs, God-songs for the radio, suited up for

     long red nights in his God-studio.

     Their ordinary cloths, their rubber gloves: "Have you seen a body?

      Have you seen one?"


Wroth.

MY FATAL FLAW


My fatal flaw is I don't sand my keystone.
My fatal flaw is I don't sand my keystone.
I don't want to be king.
I don't want to be king, I resent
I resent not being king.
not being king. I'm happiest
I'm happiest when surlily
surlily scolding the king
scolding the king from my pinhole.
from my balcony. My fatal flaw
My fatal flaw: I'm smart enough to know
is smart enough to know my percentile.
my percentile, I could be an asshole,
I could be an asshole, have fewer
have fewer, better scars.
deeper scars. My fatal flaw cheats,
My fatal flaw competes, disqualifies itself.
disqualifies itself while in the lead.
My fatal flaw expects congratulations.
My fatal flaw expects congratulations
My fatal flaw counts syllables
for being disqualified. My fatal flaw
regardless. My fatal flaw would smoke
won't do what I want it to because I want it to
if offered. My fatal flaw is fluent
when offered. My fatal flaw can't read
in insignificance: stoppered, what isn't?
its own handwriting. My fatal flaw
My fatal flaw is I don't want to be king
believes its ark should make it king.
but since I can't be king I'm a shitty prince.

But Where, Oh Where Is the Holy Idiot, Truth Teller and Soothsayer, Familiar of Spirits, Rat Eater, Unhouseled Wanderer Whose Garble and Babble Fill Rich and Poor, Homeless and Housed, with Awe and Fear?

Tomorrow isn't Alex Chilton's birthday, L said at a Wednesday edition of Thursday Night Pints. I know, I said, I'm an idiot, I should have double-checked wikipedia against the birthday lists I use to remind me of these dates before asking for requests, I usually do, got busy, life is a fucking clusterfuck right now. What a shitty semester, said L, what a shitty Fall. We each recited our woes. What are you going to do about the Chilton? asked D. Play your requests tomorrow, I said. El Goodo is mine, Thank You Friends is L's, September Girls is D's, Kangaroo is mine again. K, not knowing who Alex Chilton was, was made to march to bar to retrieve a round of ridiculously priced Scotch. Jeebus, people, you drink this shit for fun? I said handing L the remainder of mine, getting up to get myself a pint.

• Politico-psychopathology (h/t, though yes, I know I posted a link to this back in September.)
• Why does neo-liberalism persist?
• Global capitalism and the Left.
• The well-orchestrated dance.
• You will be assimilated.
• A case to indict Obama.
• The princess and the pea-brain.
• Blinded by thrift store irony.
• Settlers of Catan: Greenhouse Rules.

• It brightens my day to see that either Man Fucking United or Real Fucking Madrid cannot win the Champions League.
• It brightens my day to see that either Fucking Milan or Fucking Barca cannot win the Champions League.
• Though there's no fucking chance, it brightens my day to daydream that Celtic takes out Fucking Juve. 
• Riddled's beer fridge.
• 25 points about Infinite Jest. My advice? Google the calendar, get your chronology of sponsored years right from the start. Cheat, in other words.
• Just plain doomed.
• Death.
• Badiou, for those of you who do.
• Anthony's links of the week.
• Assemblage #38.
• Dog poems.
• K, do you know who Joe Strummer was?
• History of electonic music. Holyfuck. Yes, I know I've linked before.

FABLE

Tom Sleigh

But where, oh where is the holy idiot,
truth teller and soothsayer, familiar

of spirits, rat eater, unhouseled wanderer
whose garble and babble fill rich and poor,

homeless and housed, with awe and fear?
Is he hiding in the pit or walkie-talkie,

its grid of holes insatiably hungry,
almost like a baby, sucking in the police sergeant's

quiet voice as he calls in reinforcements?
Oh holy idiot, is that you sniffing the wind

for the warm turd smell on the mounted policemen
backing their horses' quivering, skittish

haunches into the demonstrators' faces?
Oh little village among the villages,

the wild man, the holy Bedlamite is gone,
and nobody, now, knows where to find him....

Lying in mud? lying caked in mud, hair elfed into knots?
Some poor mad Tom roving the heath

for a warm soft place to lie his body down,
his speech obsessed with oaths, demons,

his tongue calling forth the Foul Fiend, Flibbertigibbet
as horse back slowly, slowly into the crowd

as he eats filth, he crams his ravenous mouth with filth -
and then he sits on his stool in the trampled hay

and deep-rutted mud, he anoints himself
with ashes and clay, he puts on his crown

of fumiter weed and holds his scepter
of a smouldering poker and calls the court to order.

Invisible Man Who Can Sing in a Visible Voice

 
Lots of requests to honor and tomorrow is an Egoslavian High Holy Day so the music focus is set if not the songs selected and Friday and Saturday I'll be on the road, so here, now, in the order they were requested, the above requested by Hamster, the first below by anne (which is not what she requested, but I posted that song within the last month or two so have this one instead), the second below by Randal, which wasn't what he asked for which I couldn't find (or get the joke if it was a joke) though I do understand more metal.


   



   



 
Egoslavian High Holy Day tomorrow? Birthday of the whom the song below is named. Requests solicited, Boxtops, Big Star, solo all welcome, not requesting welcome too.


 

The Oval Portrait of a Dog Was Me at an Early Age

Holyfuck, heard that band for first time yesterday, will be on the soundtrack of the drive to Ohio and back this Friday and Saturday to retrieve Planet, you'll be (getting a slide show of Garrett County snow) hearing more. Meanwhile, as they're scurrying to shit-proof their moral basements with sump-pumps of preemptive fake obamapostasies against the punking they surely knew was imminent, a song for those professional progressives like Charles Pierce and Paul Krugman who scolded me and others as childish for our reluctance to be as slavishly less-shitty-punked as they happily were, are, will always be.

• Because Obama's post-election Job One is defusing any clamor from the left demanding payback for their support.
• Terror Tuesday Torture Tempest!
• Imperialism of the peasants.
• Paying for the crimes of the elite.
• But he cried on TV! 
• Mush.
• Motherfucking Democrats.
• I have a friend who says Obama knows the House GOP will never agree to anything and he's offering these compromises aware he'll never need honor them. I emailed back, but by linking Social Security to this bogus cliff Obama has made it a chip in all future negotiations. God, I'm a cynic, I was told.
• Bailouter-in-Chief.
• Five unbelievably creepy surveillance tactics! (he types into his blog and plunges publish). 
• The Death of Postmodernism? Whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism’s typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety: Bush, Blair, Bin Laden, Le Pen and their like on one side, and the more numerous but less powerful masses on the other. Pseudo-modernism belongs to a world pervaded by the encounter between a religiously fanatical segment of the United States, a largely secular but definitionally hyper-religious Israel, and a fanatical sub-section of Muslims scattered across the planet: pseudo-modernism was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was interred in its rubble. In this context pseudo-modernism lashes fantastically sophisticated technology to the pursuit of medieval barbarism – as in the uploading of videos of beheadings onto the internet, or the use of mobile phones to film torture in prisons. Beyond this, the destiny of everyone else is to suffer the anxiety of getting hit in the cross-fire. But this fatalistic anxiety extends far beyond geopolitics, into every aspect of contemporary life; from a general fear of social breakdown and identity loss, to a deep unease about diet and health; from anguish about the destructiveness of climate change, to the effects of a new personal ineptitude and helplessness, which yield TV programmes about how to clean your house, bring up your children or remain solvent. This technologised cluelessness is utterly contemporary: the pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes, but does not know how to make him or herself something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the advanced, the powerful and the helpless. For varying reasons, these are people incapable of the “disbelief of Grand Narratives” which Lyotard argued typified postmodernists.
• Hope? I suck at object/subject/subject/object, though using time as a currency seems smart to me.
• Hope. (Frances, click to his site for current post, your hometown gets a mention.)
• Beckett, for those of you who do, after that seems smart to me too.
• What is the mother of god?
• Melville.
• Buy me this for Giftmas! Krasznahorkai: I'm in the middle of Melancholy of Resistance. I hate it. I love it. I read it twenty pages entranced, twenty-first page I'm done for two weeks, rinse, start again. Something good is going on, off, on.... It's the cinder block paragraphs composed of sentences of more than forty clauses, they're claustrophobic. On purpose. My panic at lack of air, that's on me.
• I confess I had never come across Jake Adam York.
• Ladies and Gentleman, renowned music critic Tom Friedman: Pussy Riot probably is no Tupac, but the band members were iconoclasts who broke the mold, albeit in an offensive and obnoxious manner.
• Live Furs set below the poem via.
• Zombie does Giftmas songs. This is the greatest and only Giftmas song I love:

THIS ROOM

John Ashbery

The room I entered was a dream of this room.
Surely all the feet on the sofa were mine.
The oval portrait
of a dog was me at an early age.
Something shimmers, something is hushed up.

We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.

Sixty-Four Today (Plus Giftmas Present from Hamster!)

Holyfuck, thank Baal the ass-end of December is full of Egoslavian Holy Days High, Medium, and Low. Also too, Hamster sent along this Giftmas present:

My Eyes, My Mouth, Between Them a Skull&#39;s No-Nose

From Pynchon's Vineland (1990):

Zoyd's reference to the Uzi submarine gun, "Badass of the Desert," as it is known in its native Israel, had been appropriate. Isaiah's business idea was to set up first one, eventually a china, of violence centers, each on the scale, perhaps, of a small theme park, including automatic-weapon firing ranges, paramilitary fantasy adventures, gift shops and food courts, and video game rooms for the kids, for Isaiah envisioned a family clientele. Also part of the concept were a standardized floor plan and logo, for franchising purposes. Isaiah sat at the cable-spool table, making diagrams with tortilla chips and pitching his dreams - "Third World Thrills," a jungle obstacle course where you got to swing on ropes, fall in the water, blast away at surprise pop-up targets shaped like indigenous guerrilla elements... "Scum of the City," which would allow the visitor to wipe from the world images of assorted urban undesirables, including Pimps, Perverts, Dope Dealers, and Muggers, all carefully multiracial so as to offend everybody, in an environment of dark alleys, lurid neon, and piped-in saxophone music... and for the aggro connoisseur, "Hit List," in which you could customize a lineup of videotapes of the personalities in public life you hated most, shown one apiece on the screens of old used TV sets bought up at junkyard prices and sent past you by conveyor belts, like ducks at the carnival, so your pleasure at blowing away these jabbering, posturing likenesses would be enhanced by all the imploding picture tubes.

• Here, links while they're fresh.
• Reposting Silber's latest.
• Warrior dreams and gun control fantasies.
• End of the affair.
• Death and delusion.
• Another 3M to the capitalist death rolls.
• On professional liberals.
• Bear with her, or not.
• Our third war.
• The visible government.
• Continued, or to be continued.
• His generations greatest academic fraud (I say that admiringly) on Santa Claus.
• Serendipity: The opening scene in Elkin's The Franchiser (said novel evoked in the Beefheart post): Ben Flesh is trying to buy used TVs for rooms in the hotel he dreams of building.
• Frank O'Hara.
• Josipovici, for those of you who do.
• The mouse, the bird, the difficult novel.
• Seidel candy dispenser.
• Steve Reich documentary.
• Menche.

HISTORY

Robert Lowell

History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to fumbling all we had - -
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes.
Abel as finished; death is not remote,
a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic,
his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire,
his baby crying all night like a new machine.
As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory,
the beautiful, mist-driven hunter's moon ascends - -
a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes,
my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull's no-nose - -
O there's a terrifying innocence in my face
drenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost.

A One-Year-Old Post Composed of Three Two-Year-Old Posts - My Favorite Post Ever - Now with Updated Links, How I Solved *That* Stupid Bleggal Ethics Issue

RIP, Captain Beefheart.

1/15/41 - 12/17/10
UPDATE 12/17/11: Zen Dave remembers too.

I'll post more over the weekend. No eulogy from me, I promise.

UPDATE! Another song.

UPDATE!

Please read and listen to this.


That's 1   here's   2





Another broken promise: here's my eulogy -

Whatever truths, myths, fables, lies about Beefheart and Zappa's relationship - and I like Zappa, but I love Beefheart - in my cosmology they are bound, and it's apt that Beefheart died during Zappadan.

I love Beefheart, but I love love love Pere Ubu and all the other sounds that wouldn't exist if not for Don Van Vliet. No Beefheart, no Pere Ubu. I can't imagine.

And the uncanniness of serendipity - just as I'm falling in love again with Stanley Elkin, finishing up The Franchiser, the first novel in which he introduces his own battle with multiple sclerosis, Van Vliet's death from MS and the chance to fall in love again again.

• Goodbye, Captain.
• Captain Beefheart's innocent soul.
• Top 14 reasons why Captain Beefheart was a true American genius.
• Early performance.
• Rolling Stone obit.

3


I sent this email request yesterday morning (subject line = Beefheart) to the AM DJ of the station I listen to:

Get you to play a song or two? He's grandpa to at least half the bands you play.

All best.

No Beefheart, no return email.

Sent this email to midday host of the station I listen to:

Hi Chxryl, can I get you to play some Beefheart please, how about "Sue Egypt" off *Doc at the Radio Station* please and thanks.

I must confess, I'm shocked at how little air love Beefheart has got at KxXP. From what I can tell from looking at the playlists since the news of Beefheart's death there has been one song played (on Cole's show Friday).

I realize I'm older (by far) than many of the DJs there who may never have heard or heard of Beefheart, but half the bands and solo acts you all play are descended by some greater or lesser degree to Beefheart. Anyway, I dig the man and his music.

All best. Have a great holiday.

No song. No return email.

First, Sue Egypt:

I don't care they didn't play Beefheart - I'm old, they're young; they may know the name but not the music and don't feel comfortable playing something they've never heard; they may know the music and not like it; they may have had their sets planned out and couldn't find a good seque; whatever: I've never expected all my requests to be played; it's their show. Still, I've been listening to and interacting with and giving money to this station for a decade, these djs aren't friends by any means but they know that I'm a loyal listener. Acknowledge the motherfucking email.

I thought about bitching in a post then decided no, don't be petty, when into my mailbox came (I swear to St Benny of Olsen and will forward the time-stamped email to you if so requested):

’Tis the season. I watched A Christmas Carol with George C. Scott playing Scrooge as though it was the first time I’d heard the story, and thought, “Now there’s a great message, I’ve got to remember that!” (That guy can act!) So, now my heart is bursting with good cheer and thankfulness.

I’m thankful for KxXP listeners like Jenneviere from San Francisco, who recently wrote this to John Richards: “You routinely surprise me by seemingly reading my emotional landscape and playing music that is a direct reflection of how I'm feeling on any particular day… Without ever having met me, you, day after day, mix the soundtrack of my life, and have moved me to laugh, to cry, to dance, to sing...  I am most sincerely grateful.”

KxXP’s staff and volunteers work tirelessly to bring you these incredible music experiences. No matter where or how you listen, please support the music community that brightens your day and brings you hours of inspiration and enjoyment.

Why is it important to donate now?

Angriest year of my life. Every day a renewed apostasy, every day a replayed apostasy. I'm dumber today than yesterday. I can't see anything but angrier ahead.
   

• Re: that last statement from two years ago? I sense a trend.
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CALL ME ISHMAEL

Jackson Mac Low

Circulation. And long long
Mind every
Interest Some how mind and every long

Coffin about little little
Money especially
I shore, having money about especially little

Cato a little little
Me extreme
I sail have me an extreme little

Cherish and left, left, 
Myself extremest
It see hypos myself and extremest left,

City a land. Land. 
Mouth; east,
Is spleen, hand mouth; an east, land.