- Blogsick and blogpissed. Fuck it. Not here, not elsewhere.
- Regardless, enjoy the new Tindersticks! Is excellent.
- Totem and taboo.
- I hope the Nobel committee strips Obama of his peace prize for his warmongering because I want to see what conservatives, who were furious Obama received it, do and say when Obama's punished for being as big a war-criminal as the conservatives want to be.
- Chasing the bone off the porch.
- Confederacy-light.
- Of course the decline is real and self-inflicted.
- I caught five minutes of the fuckwitted Tom Ashbrook interviewing Charles Murray and Joan Walsh last night, and if Ashbrook and Walsh are our designated Liberal intellectuals, sooooo fucked.
- I permit myself a gif.
- Don't tweet about this.
- If you see Richard H Bradley today, tell him to fuck himself.
- Did you know Washington DC is run by clowns?
- Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?
- Scattered post-mortem thoughts on Mike Kelley.
- Beckett, for those of you who do.
- O! My mood needed this: one of my favorite books, scheduled to be reread later this year, early next year. Remember when Antonia tried to set Maqroll on fire and then stole his gold? Good times.
- Waiting for Wotan, the never-ending saga.
- Stream a Marissa Nadler song.
LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES PARTIALLY ERASED
D.A. Powell
First, it's just the faces disappearing.
Because, deflected, as the faces long have been,
with their hunched trunks
and mercilessly twisted necks,
they can only be regarded from a ground's-eye view.
The bellwort tips its fallow head down
in the hot tomato field. The green snake rests
beneath the green leaves, and the air is toast.
Diesel tractors grind to the frontage and idle there,
their heads bowed, too, like giant wooden horses
meant to sack an unsuspecting city.
Down come the earthen walls.
My father used to pour libations onto the ground
from the gas pump's nozzle, and I'd swirl
its iridescence, respire it into my lung's core,
so woozy, so sick, and awed by the vapors.
Fire beguiled me, too. As did the concept of force.
Whole villages burned in a single spritz.
Even now the past gets altered. We forget
because our friends won't suffer that subject again.
Because the students tap their pens uncomfortably,
look around to see if anyone else is taken in.
That's when we figure it's best to make a joke.
I've wandered, now, from the corrugated sheds,
with people half in and half out of nuclear range.
My retention of the facts is not a silo.
Even if it were, some disrepair gets fallen into.
I like to think we dismantle thought
as much as tortuous thought dismantles us.
I have seen sharp men lose limbs. Women too.
A hand pulled off, conveyed into the hopper.
But these were country matters.
Like frilled silhouettes of flowering wild carrot,
white against the mackerel white sky,
the texture is imperishable, the details
so far off. These bodies: their contours
uncertain. Just a general cast to the light.
