Serendipitous gah - when I re-packaged the old pregah site from the beta-post safe house into VNTY'SGRVYRD I didn't create a new site to act as beta-post safe house, so when I accidentally deleted last night three paragraphs of holiday weekend bleggalgazing prompted by someone sending me an invitation to Pinterest you were, despite my fully-hearted but ultimately half-assed attempts at recreating the paragraphs, spared. I am reminded to compose in tablet, not on screen, I am reminded to create a new beta-post safe house, I am reminded today is Dave Wakeling's 56th birthday which reminds me of the above, easily one of the five most air-guitared songs of my life.
- UPDATE! Verily fuck the fuck who blocked the original Save It For Later promo video on youtube. Verily, with a rusty spork.
- I have a waiter's access to Villagers, and when Robert Reich made his "no responsible American should accept a 10 percent risk of a President Gingrich" he was reflecting Villager doctrine that while Gingrich is an occasionally useful idiot the Villager's think he's batshit insane: Newt doesn't know he's a useful idiot, not only doesn't he know he's no more than a Villager jobber, he thinks he's working the Villagers and that makes Gingrich monstrously unimaginable as Emperor of Villagers to Villagers. You'd expect the history faculty at Hilltop to think Gingrich batshit insane, but the neo-liberals in government and the assholes in econ think Gingrich is batshit insane, by which they mean they've no faith they can control him. I've heard this yesterday in the sandwich line of Wagshel's from the mouths of two Villagers who've publicity-stills on Wagshel's walls: "Newt is fucking batshit insane." And no, I said nothing, ran neither fucker down in the parking lot.
- Hard-hitting, dissenting journalism w/out the hard-hitting and dissent.
- Scoring the global war on terror.
- Admitting you have a problem.
- Virginia is for shovers.
- Re: pinterest - apparently you need give them access to either a facebook or twitter account and they populate your page for you from who and what you read and post and fuck that. Which isn't what I wrote about and lost other than the fuck that.
- Cindy Sherman.
- Reading list from Barthelme.
- I officially give up on Flame Alphabet. I blame me. Only thing working now is poetry, and that not that well either.
- Poets in performance. (h/t Sasha)
- Charts and diagrams.
- It's also Stephen Dobyn's 71st birthday today.
IT'S LIKE THIS
Stephen Dobyns
Each morning the man rises from bed because the invisible
cord leading from his neck to someplace in the dark,
the cord that makes him always dissatisfied,
has been wound tighter and tighter until he wakes.
He greets his family, looking for himself in their eyes,
but instead he sees shorter or taller men, men with
different degrees of anger or love, the kind of men
that people who hardly know him often mistake
for him, leaving a movie or running to catch a bus.
He has a job that he goes to. It could be at a bank
or a library or turning a piece of flat land
into a ditch. All day something that refuses to
show itself hovers at the corner of his eye,
like a name he is trying to remember, like
expecting a touch on the shoulder, as if someone
were about to embrace him, a woman in a blue dress
whom he has never met, would never meet again.
And it seems the purpose of each day’s labor
is simply to bring this mystery to focus. He can
almost describe it, as if it were a figure at the edge
of a burning field with smoke swirling around it
like white curtains shot full of wind and light.
When he returns home, he studies the eyes of his family to see
what person he should be that evening. He wants to say:
All day I have been listening, all day I have felt
I stood on the brink of something amazing.
But he says nothing, and his family walks around him
as if he were a stick leaning against a wall.
Late in the evening the cord around his neck draws him to bed.
He is consoled by the coolness of sheets, pressure
of blankets. He turns to the wall, and as water
drains from a sink so his daily mind slips from him.
Then sleep rises before him like a woman in a blue dress,
and darkness puts its arms around him, embracing him.
Be true to me, it says, each night you belong to me more,
until at last I lift you up and wrap you within me.
