United 4, Dallas 1

 

Hot damn. From unreasonable despair to unreasonable expectations in two weeks! Beautiful goals, is that too much to ask?





Hope the embed stays - in the past it stops working after a few hours. Gotta run, leaving for Ohio in minutes. Here's Fullback, here's Martin, here's some guy at Ive's, I'll post more and more links later, or not. Oh, DeLeon? I understand why, for now, Pontius is on the bench.

The Seriously Happy Heart Is a Problem

Somewhere I once read that March 30 is David Thomas' birthday but I can't find where. Wikipedia and other places list just March 1953, so regardless whether today is actually David Thomas' 59th birthday, today is a High Egoslavian Holiday. In my sillyass Desert Island Five game, all Thomas' projects, but especially Pere Ubu, have one of three permanent seats (yes, the Yo La Tengo petition I submitted to myself to make YLT  the fourth permanent member I rejected: nothing against YLT, I just want two rotational spots and I'm not kicking out Kate Bush or GbV/Pollard or Thomas). If you want lots of Pere Ubu/Thomas songs, use the search box up top, they're all over this shitty bleg. Hey, did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?





It's true, and we have a date tonight, then tomorrow Earthgirl and I rent a car and drive to Bamgier to take Planet and three friends out to dinner at the only Four Star restaurant in the county! Sunday we take Planet into the greater Vount Mernon metroplex to shop for basics, then we're going to take a four hour drive together on roads I've never driven and yap and don't yap and take photos and don't. Once Planet tells us to go away, she has homework, we'll start driving to wherever it is we want to disc (me) and paint (Earthgirl): I rented a big enough car Earthgirl can bring all the canvases she wants and I'm bringing the red bag. We're thinking of Forked Run State Park, with a world class 24 hole course and scenic views perfect for landscape artists. Tuesday we drive back to Bamgier - on as many scenic green-dashed roads as time allows - and take Planet out to dinner one more time, then drive home Wednesday. I will not seek to beat my 5.5 hour drive of last time. Expect lots of photos, travel narrative, the stuff most people hate but is my favorite flavor (besides bleggalgazing, of which I am always bursting, but) of blegging.

• My fantasy of Rohn Joberts being hit by a bus so Obama need choose his replacement on a very pro-Corporate SCOTUS is not going to happen, no doubt to his deep relief if he thought about it.
• American rubes.
• Motherfucking crackers.
• Motherfucking crackers.
• Motherfucking crackers.
• Republican conservatism: an infantile disorder?
• You know, an increasing dislike and distrust of professional progressives IS NOT OFFSET by a lessening of contempt for American conservatives. In fact, each increases the loathing of the other. I know I keep saying this - hopefully less than the everyday I used to - but this is not a Corporate bug, it's a Corporate feature.
• Motherfucking hipster libertarians.
• Racism: not what it used to be.
• Reality you make, reality you don't.
• On a clear day.
• Peter Nowak: still a dick.
• Literature flowchart.
• On Harry Crews. Read a couple, understand why they sang to people even if they didn't sing to me, have friends who love him.
• On Harry Crews.
• On Harry Crews.
• On Harry Crews.
• On Earl Scruggs. See above comment about Crews, transcribe.
• On Adrienne Rich.
• On Adrienne Rich.
• Twenty-one love poems.
• Five poems.
• On Adrienne Rich.
• On Adrienne Rich.
• Yesterday's link to a Dustin Wong song reminded me of Ponytail (or, rather, reading about Dustin Wong, I discovered he was in Ponytail).
• This shitty bleg's Official Theme Song 2:

TROUBLE

Jack Gilbert

This is what the Odyssey means.
Love can leave you nowhere in New Mexico
raising peacocks for the rest of your life.
The seriously happy heart is a problem.
Not the easy excitement, but summer
in the Mediterranean mixed with
the rain and bitter cold of February
on the Riviera, everything on fire
in the violent winds. The pregnant heart
is driven to hopes that are the wrong
size for this world. Love is always
disturbing in the heavenly kingdom.
Eden can not manage so much ambition.
The kids ran from all over the piazza
yelling and pointing and jeering
at the young Saint Chrysostom
standing dazed in the church doorway
with the shining around his mouth
where the Madonna had kissed him.

His Head Smashed In and His Heart Cut Out and His Liver Removed and His Bowels Unplugged and His Nostrils Raped and His Bottom Burned Off and His Penis Split and His...

Hamster reminds me that Brave Sir Robin is 69 today.

Also, four song set that isn't but feels necessary.












.

I Came to See the Damage That Was Done and the Treasures That Prevail

I'm aware that one of the reasons Adrienne Rich's poetry works but doesn't sing to me, I said to L last night as we met for a drink: she's a polemicist using accusatory second person. So are you, L said. I know, I said, and it's not that Rich is a better poet than me, though obviously she is by universes, it's that I don't like to write using the accusatory second person, I can't help it, I fight it but can't help it, I'm a hector who likes hectoring too much (and have no cause to hector as Rich had cause to hector) and don't like being hectored. Yes, said L, that's why it was vitally important that Rich hectored you, hectored everyone, hectored the world. And then L told me stories about Adrienne Rich, her friend and colleague, stories general and personal, some of which I'd love to but can't tell you.

• Not kablooey but ka-ching.
• E Pluribus go F@#k yourself.
• Enemy sighted, enemy met.
• A short history of privatization in the UK.
• Is disorganization damaging Occupy?
• Professional progressive indicts professional conservatives.
• Get ready for Rubio-overload.
• Take it from white guys.
• Defending pink slime.
• Howard Street Tunnel.
• Social media explained.
• The politics and poems of Adrienne Rich.
• Adrienne Rich.
• Rich interview.
• The Court Composer of Kalamazoo. I have a listening assignment.

DIVING INTO THE WRECK

Adrienne Rich

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

I Know You Are Reading This Poem as the Underground Train Loses Momentum and Before Running Up the Stairs Toward a New Kind of Love Your Life Has Never Allowed

Adrienne Rich has died. I enjoy and respect her poetry though I don't love it (though I love what she is saying) but I've dear and smart friends who deeply and profoundly do, and I recognize her importance not only in poetry but in many branches of theory (I don't know if it's still true, but when I was in grad school, Rich's Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience was - not by curricular rules, but by sense - required reading for any theory class).

FROM AN ATLAS OF A DIFFICULT WORLD

I know you are reading this poem

late, before leaving your office

of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window

in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet

long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem

standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean

on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven

across the plains' enormous spaces around you.

I know you are reading this poem

in a room where too much has happened for you to bear

where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed

and the open valise speaks of flight

but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem

as the underground train loses momentum and before running

up the stairs

toward a new kind of love

your life has never allowed.

I know you are reading this poem by the light

of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide

while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.

I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room

of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.

I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light

in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,

count themselves out, at too early an age. I know

you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick

lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on

because even the alphabet is precious.

I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove

warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your

hand

because life is short and you too are thirsty.

I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language

guessing at some words while others keep you reading

and I want to know which words they are.

I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn

between bitterness and hope

turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.

I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else

left to read

there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

I'll post obits and reflections as I see them. L, I'm sorry, love, see you soon.

UPDATE! Here.

Arrayed I Set Out, This Once Obedient, Toward the Hive's Domed Skeps On Evening's Hill

UPDATE! Yes, I've removed the eyeball that was here, considering...

• We're so exceptional: Law, after all, constrains power, and the United States, like any great power, is likely to support a law-bound international order only if it ties up the power of its competitors more than it constrains its own. Other great powers have subscribed to this realist calculus in advancing international law. America is exceptional in combining standard great-power realism with extravagant idealism about the country’s redemptive role in creating international order. Since Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the US has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them, while seeking by hook or by crook to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application. From Nuremberg onward, no country has invested more in the development of international jurisdiction for atrocity crimes and no country has worked harder to make sure that the law it seeks for others does not apply to itself.
• Empire of innocents.
• On the above: selective morality.
• Yes, the one-post-a-month when the gif ban is lifted!
• Letter to a granddaughter. I haven't warbled this in months, but mine is the first generation in American mythology that has no illusions we're leaving the next generation a better America than was given us.
• Send Robert Reich an email, ask him, WTF?
• A Communist critique of the media.
• Thuggification.
• Conformity v obedience: As far as the difference between conformity and obedience goes, we can submit that Cordelia obeys, whereas the Regan and Goneril conform. Obedience in the realm of the social construct can cause us to be misunderstood, even censored. To obey the organic truth underlying principles is much more dangerous than conforming to their outward resemblance. Many great writers pay a price, not for being disobedient, but for being obedient to some necessity beyond mere conforming. To be a non-conformist in this sense means to obey the deeper truth and risk being mistaken as a rebel. Nothing is more perverse to the status quo than true obedience. Goodness doesn't need the status quo. Evil and mediocrity insist upon it.
• Waiting for Wotan, continued.
• This Is Entertainment, continued.
• New Paul Weller?

TELLING THE BEES

Deborah Digges

It fell to me to tell the bees,
though I had wanted another duty—
to be the scribbler at his death,
there chart the third day's quickening.
But fate said no, it falls to you
to tell the bees, the middle daughter.
So it was written at your birth.
I wanted to keep the fire, working
the constant arranging and shifting
of the coals blown flaring,
my cheeks flushed red,
my bed laid down before the fire,
myself anonymous among the strangers
there who'd come and go.
But destiny said no. It falls
to you to tell the bees, it said.
I wanted to be the one to wash his linens,
boiling the death-soiled sheets,
using the waters for my tea.
I might have been the one to seal
his solitude with mud and thatch and string,
the webs he parted every morning,
the hounds' hair combed from brushes,
the dust swept into piles with sparrows' feathers.
Who makes the laws that live
inside the brick and mortar of a name,
selects the seeds, garden or wild,
brings forth the foliage grown up around it
through drought or blight or blossom,
the honey darkening in the bitter years,
the combs like funeral lace or wedding veils
steeped in oak gall and rainwater,
sequined of rent wings.
And so arrayed I set out, this once
obedient, toward the hives' domed skeps
on evening's hill, five tombs alight.
I thought I heard the thrash and moaning
of confinement, beyond the century,
a calling across dreams,
as if asked to make haste just out of sleep.
I knelt and waited.
The voice that found me gave the news.
Up flew the bees toward his orchards.

Born Eighty-Six Years Ago Today

MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY

Frank O'Hara

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change?

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don't I? I'm just like a pile of leaves.

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they're missing? Uh huh.

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only i had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It's not that I'm curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it's my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

Now there is only one man I like to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How best discourage her?)

St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How I am to become a legend, my dear? I've tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, "to keep the filth of life away," yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

Destroy yourself, if you don't know!

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

"Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho' She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too.—Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her.—I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds."—Mrs. Thrale.

I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to. It's only afternoon, there's a lot ahead. There won't be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

You Will Not Be This Quick to Redden Forever

• How to start a blog in 2012. I've never run google analytics on this bleg - I've friends who assure me, design-wise, ease of viewing-wise, this blog sucks. That's more than good enough for me.
• The above video is BLCKDGRD - Theme Song 9, or would be if motherfucking blogger let me add it to the Me and Mine blogroll.
• Derp.
• Prove you're not a slut.
• Shot for pot.
• Shot for pot.
• Graeber interview.
• Motherfucking Obama.
• Motherfucking crackers.
• That's the only either/or we're told we have.
• Divide and conquer.
• Pastor Sanctimonious scolds the crackers.
• MCPS ditching Pink Slime.
• Satie on nylon-string guitar.
• Hear some new Sigur Ros.

MARS BEING RED

Marvin Bell

Being red is the color of a white sun where it lingers
on an arm. Color of time lost in sparks, of space lost
inside dance. Red of walks by the railroad in the flush
of youth, while our steps released the squeaks
of shoots reaching for the light. Scarlet of sin, crimson
of fresh blood, ruby and garnet of the jewel bed,
early sunshine, vestiges of the late sun as it turns
green and disappears. Be calm. Do not give in
to the rabid red throat of age. In a red world, imprint
the valentine and blush of romance for the dark.
It has come. You will not be this quick to redden
forever. You will be green again, again and again.

Born One Hundred Thirty-Four Years Ago Today

THE SILKEN TENT

Robert Frost

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightlest bondage made aware.

Also too, Spock, in both universes, is 81 today. Holyfuck you're old.

I didn't feel like rolling on tacks then jumping into a vat of vinegar last night and I still don't today, so no links today though have this and this and this and this and

Answering the Challenge of Apocalyptic Times Even If This Meaning Sounds Apocalyptic

• Bartok was born 131 years ago today.
• I've not used the CWCF (Canary, weathervane, Cassandra, fool) tag on myself as much as before when (a) I hadn't had my obamapostasies micro and macro yet and (b) I hadn't realized how long, slow, and routine the road to apocalypse is, mentioned because of this post's title and the realization that, for all my yodeling, I'm not CWCFing as much or as hard as I did when I had belief in Liberal progress and certainty of its failure (as opposed to no belief in Liberal progress and certainty of its failure). 
• Civil liberties, for instance.
• Breaking up with the Sierra Club, for instance.
• The shape of the future.
• Imperialist tactics.
• Three Villager models, reviewed by Villager.
• Greed is the beginning of everything.
• Lord Hee-Haw.
• In the blood.
• Fredric Jameson reviews the new Žižek: As every schoolchild knows by now, a new book by Žižek is supposed to include, in no special order, discussions of Hegel, Marx and Kant; various pre- and post-socialist anecdotes and reflections; notes on Kafka as well as on mass-cultural writers like Stephen King or Patricia Highsmith; references to opera (Wagner, Mozart); jokes from the Marx Brothers; outbursts of obscenity, scatological as well as sexual; interventions in the history of philosophy, from Spinoza and Kierkegaard to Kripke and Dennett; analyses of Hitchcock films and other Hollywood products; references to current events; disquisitions on obscure points of Lacanian doctrine; polemics with various contemporary theorists (Derrida, Deleuze); comparative theology; and, most recently, reports on cognitive philosophy and neuroscientific ‘advances’. Žižek is, after all, his generation's greatest academic fraud. As always, I sincerely say that admiringly.
• The speeds of change.
• Bud Sasha sends me notice that yesterday was Ferlinghetti's 93rd birthday!

POETRY AS INSURGENT ART [I AM SIGNALING YOU THROUGH THE FLAMES]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am signaling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words....

Vancouver 0, United 0

The thing about Boskovic - his contract is up in July. If Olsen/Kasper/Payne truly haven't already conceded he's a dry well, that no decision has been made whether to release or resign him, then, if he is fit (and he may not be - I think he probably isn't - full match fit), play him from start to finish and give him a chance to find his form. I suspect O/K/P have already conceded Boskovic is a dry well (and if he is a dry well, well, who signed him, hmmm?), that Boskovic's style isn't rugged enough for MLS thuggishness (he's easily dispossessed with a shove, his dig on defense isn't enough), that his work rate isn't Olsenian-enough, but Boskovic shows flashes of class that suggest with time on the field he could produce as a DP should. If/when this fails, I'll always remember Steve Fucking Nicol ordering his players to cripple Boskovic at the US Open Cup game in Germantown last summer just as Boskovic was rounding into form - we'll never know what would have happened if Ningland hadn't deliberately taken out Branko's knee for nine months.

Yes, yes, yes, marked improvement last night v Vancouver than the prior two weeks against vastly superior teams. The marking was stronger, the defense kept its shape and head, and the second half, in which St Benny of Olsen introduced both Pontius and Boskovic, was easily the best 45 minutes of offense this season, and United was clearly the better side. More importantly, enough improvement and result to brake the panic had United shown poorly - Goff tweeted a sarcastic reply to a twoot suggesting Benny be fired. We all wonder at Benny's selections. Had United been 3-0ed last night, I can imagine the yodeling in this and other corners. Two home games next, Friday against the Burn and the following Saturday against Seattle, two quality teams. Had United been 3-0ed last night, the prospect of an 0-5 season start (as opposed to a still very possible 0-1-4 start) would have loomed as almost probable. So a shitty point last night which, depending on how it plays, might in retrospect be remembered as the most important of the season. Or not.

Did You Know Washington DC Has a Professional Soccer Team?

It's true, and they're playing tonight at 1000 EDT in Vancouver (run by Fire Tom Soehn). If you're watching and wanna we can yap as United ensuckens.

Here's Goff's projected starting line-up in this morning's YFWP: GK Joe Willis; Ds Robbie Russell, Brandon McDonald, Emiliano Dudar, Daniel Woolard; MFs Danny Cruz, Marcelo Saragosa, Stephen King, Chris Pontius; Fs Dwayne De Rosario, Maicon Santos. Jeebus Salihibranco, I will - - - wait and see (a) who St Benny of Olsen puts on the field and (b) what they do, but sweet boskovichamdi - - -  I will wait and see.

Left standing in the entrance hall, I took the opportunity to take a good look at my surroundings. There could be little doubt both Sophie and Boris expected me to know my way around, and certainly, the longer I stood gazing at the choice of half-open doors facing me, the dingy yellow wallpaper with its faint floral pattern, the exposed piping climbing from floor to ceiling behind the coat stand, I could feel some memory of this entrance hall gradually returning to me.

After a few minutes I went through into the living room. Although there were a number of features I did not recognize - the pair of old sunken armchairs to either side of the disused fireplace were undoubtedly recent acquisitions, my impression was that I could remember this room more clearly than I had the entrance hall. The large oval dining table pushed against the wall, the second door leading through to the kitchen, the dark shapeless sofa, the tired orange carpet were all distinctly familiar.

Ishiguro, The Unconsoled.

Let me urge Ishiguro on you one more time, please. Also too, was in downtown Gaithersburg today for the first time in a year, it was wonderfully uncanny, completely familiar and like the thousandth first time ever. Strange, sometimes happily, days. Here's the high school me and this guy went to: I don't remember it looking like this at all.

Nor Does It Suffice to Make Simple Correspondences Between Bunkers and One Man's Isolation

• Links while they're fresh. Stumbled onto the Basinski looking for something else, holyfuck! My reading is so-so - I'm still The Unconsoled, it's working, just not as much as I want, which is on me - but my ears are fully functioning.
• Blood makes the grass grow.
• Trayvon Martin and the end of excuses.
• Trayvon Martin, Rorschach blot.
• Trayvon Martin and the history of lynching.
• Motherfucking Obama.
• On the above.
• Refresh your obamapostasy.
• Schizo facebook nation.
• Kleptocracy.
• Australia's crackers.
• JCO's new novel. It's been a decade since I read Oates; I tired for many of the reasons expressed in the review.
• Regrets at Fordham.
• Fiction notes.
• Tusk documentary. Serendipitously, I commented on twitter earlier this week how much WFMU DJs play Tusk, see this this morning.
• Tusk.
• Complete electronic music of Iannis Xenakis.
• This is entertainment, part two.  
• Warsaw.

THE ORACLE

Tom Sleigh

Because the burn's unstable, burning too hot
in the liquid hydrogen suction line
and so causing vortices in the rocket fuel

flaming hotter and hotter as the "big boy"
blasts off, crawling painfully slowly
up the blank sky, then, when he blinks

exploding white hot against his wincing
retina, the fireball's corona searing
in his brain, he drives with wife and sons

the twisting road at dawn to help with the Saturday
test his division's working on: the crowd
of engineers surrounding a pit dug in snow

seeming talky, joky men for 6 a.m., masking
their tension, hoping the booster rocket's
solid fuel will burn more evenly than the liquid

and keep the company from layoffs rumored
during recess, though pride in making
chemicals do just what they're calculated to

also keys them up as they lounge behind
pink caution tape sagging inertly
in the morning calm: in the back seat, I kick

my twin brother's shin, bored at 6:10 a.m.
until Dad turns to us and says, in a neutral tone,
Stop it, stop it now, and we stop and watch:

a plaque of heat, a roar like a diesel blasting
in your ear, heatwaves ricocheting off gray mist
melting backward into dawn, shockwaves rippling

to grip the car and shake us gently, flame
dimly seen like flame inside the brain confused
by a father who promises pancakes after,

who's visibly elated to see the blast shoot
arabesques of mud and grit fountaining up
from the snow-fringed hole mottling to black slag

fired to ruts and cracks like a parched streambed.
Deliriously sleepy, what were those flames doing
mixed up with blueberry pancakes, imaginings of honey

dripping and strawberry syrup or waffles,
maybe, corrugated like that earth, or a stack
of half-dollars drenched and sticky...?

My father's gentle smile and nodding head—
gone ten years, and still I see him climbing
slick concrete steps as if emerging from our next door

neighbor's bomb shelter, his long-chilled shade
feeling sunlight on backs of hands, warmth on cheeks,
the brightness making eyes blink and blink...

so like his expression when a friend came
to say goodbye to him shrunken inside
himself as into a miles-deep bunker...

and then he smiled, his white goatee
flexing, his parched lips cracked but welcoming
as he took that friend's hand and held it, held it

and pressed it to his cheek... The scales, weighing
one man's death and his son's grief against
a city's char and flare, blast-furnace heat melting

to slag whatever is there, then not there—
doesn't seesaw to a balance, but keeps shifting,
shifting...nor does it suffice to make simple

correspondences between bunkers and one man's
isolation inside his death, a death
he died at home and chose...at least insofar

as death allows anyone a choice, for what
can you say to someone who's father or mother
crossing the street at random, or running

for cover finds the air sucked out
of them in a vacuum of fire calibrated
in silence in a man's brain like my father's

—the numbers calculated inside the engineer's
imagination become a shadowy gesture as in Leonardo's
drawing of a mortar I once showed my father

and that we admired for its precision, shot raining
down over fortress walls in spray softly pattering,
hailing down shrapnel like the fountain of Trevi

perfectly uniform, lulling to the ear and eye
until it takes shape in the unforgiving
three dimensional, as when the fragile,

antagonized, antagonistic human face
begins to slacken into death as in my own
father's face, a truly gentle man except

for his work which was conducted gently too—
since "technicals" like him were too shy for sales
or management, and what angers he may have had

seemed to be turned inward against judging
others so the noise inside his head was quieter
than most and made him, to those who knew him well,

not many, but by what they told me after he died,
the least judgemental person
they'd ever known—who, at his almost next to last

breath, uncomplaining, said to his son's
straining, over-eager solicitation,
—Is there something you need, anything?

—That picture—straighten it... his face smoothing
to a slate onto which light scribbles what? a dark joke,
an elegant equation, a garbled oracle?

The Tin Crank of Canned Do-Wop

Dick Fucking Durbin, I said at Thursday Night Pints, wants to grandstand on bounty-hunting in the NFL. Everybody bounty-hunts, said D. Always have, said L. In one form or another, sure, said K. I looked this up before I left, I said, Dick Fucking Durbin is on Appropriations, Defense, Labor committees, he wants to grandstand on bounty-hunting in the NFL. If you don't hit as hard as possible you lose your job, said D. If you hit hard spectacularly you're on SportsCenter, said L, make more money. Think of those tomahawk stickers Florida State puts on helmets, that's a reward for successful violent behavior, said K. I said, Dick Fucking Durbin is arguably one of the half-dozen most powerful professional Democrats, his gleeful desire to investigate the National Football League on bounty-hunting everyone blithely assumes has existed since Red Grange is so pathetically and transparently standard asshatery, it pisses me off so thoroughly I'm surprised, I haven't been so irrationally pissed at standard professional Democrat asshatery in months. D said, Mike Ditka said the way to get rid of concussions in football is to get rid of the helmet. I went and bought a round. The bartender wore a New Orleans Saints hat, CNN on the screen flashing Durbin news. Whatcha think, I asked, handing him cash. Showboating asshole, he said. Yup, I said.

• Ignorance is strength.
• No, they're not.
• Fred Hiatt says calling the Palins inbred weirdos is wrong, and he's right, though it's just pathetic and transparent standard asshatery and serves no purpose than the aggrandizement of Fred Hiatt.
• But Obama is a good assassin no matter what Rove says!
• Motherfucking Obama.
• Afghanistan and the myth of public opinion.
• Searching for false equivalencies.
• On the above.
• Using prejudice.
• Coercion, part two.
• His generation's greatest academic fraud. I say this admiringly.
• On two political books.
• Before and after science. You can thank Smut for today's musical selections.

PEEP SHOW

Meghan O'Rourke

Tokens in the slot:
ka-shot, shot, shot.
A figure in the darkness.
The tin crank
of canned do-wop.

Someone is always watching -
don't you think?
Duck, turn, and wink.
Bodies at a distance -
that's what we are,

raises, renovations, Florida,
dinner by the sea.
Look at you.
The waves go swiftly
out of sight -

a long ellipsis
of glaciers swallowing the sun -
come quick, not time for this,
the girls in thongs
are glancing at the clock.

Day Like This?

Two perspectives. You know how to ask if you want a song.





UPDATE! For K. See you soon!

Spat a Phrase

I'm guessing I've been told as many times as I've forgot that J.S. Bach shares a birthday with Planet. I deeply respect but don't love Bach, just as I deeply respect but don't love Richard Powers who - I swear this is true - I thought about yesterday afternoon when someone asked me about post-911 novels and I told her about The Echo Maker and who wrote an astonishing novel that I deeply respect but don't love called Goldbug Variations which, yes, Bach-structured. Bless serendipity. As for the Gould, when I remember Bach I remember the Gould. Hey! Know who turns 81 today?

• Lest you think I kid about my faith in serendipity, the Bowie cover I posted Tuesday night I discovered listening that morning to an archive of that early morning's Dark Night of the Soul.
• The Desperate Edges of Now. 
• My antenna are off - I thought Axelrod's "mittzkrieg" comment would have caused a firestorm.
• Also, I wonder who called off the Great Goldberg/Sullivan War of Beinart.
• Power and politics.
• Fucking shoot me:

• Silliman's incredibly generous lit links.
• Waiting for Wotan, continued.
• Roky Erickson!
• Robert Pollard! More later today, probably.
• Heard Bolcom on the radio. Have some.

ETYMOLOGY

Marilyn Nelson

The filth hissed at us when we venture out -
always in two or threes, never alone -
seems less a language spoken than one spat
in savage plosives, primitive, obscene:
a cavemob nya-nya, limited in frame
of reference and novelty, the same
suggestions of what we or they could do,
a should, ad infinitum. Yesterday
a mill girl spat a phrase I'd never heard
before. I stopped and looked at her, perplexed.
I derived its general meaning from the context,
but was stumped by the etymology of one word.
What was its source? Which demon should we thank
for words it must be an abomination to think?

Also Too

Nineteen

She Drove a Plymouth Satellite

After feedback, some regarding how deleted posts suck on readers and feeds but mostly because just as when Krola, lying in the Enterprise's SickBay after a botched suicide attempt meant to make Ryker look like an assassin, pleads with Durken, please Chancellor, you mustn't, a loved one (who was the first not-Earthgirl, not-me, not-doctor, not-nurse to hold tomorrow's honoree) asks me to stop, and I agree, I pat his hand, say, I know, my foolish old friend, I know, I stop. I hereby impose this one rule on the WTF24HRMAX posts, that there will be no more WTF24HRMAX posts, just the occasional, not deleted, not comment-closed, post at night hence. Still playing w/header, yo.

Since tomorrow's post is planetary in scope, let me just say now that the latest Bleggal Overlord War over Israel that's just broke out and is going to dominate tomorrow's twooterspew and what's left of Blegsylvania is going to be the nastiest loudest ugliest and suckiest since the last until the next. Here's a giveaway hint about tomorrow's post's Egoslavian significance.

Anything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Badly

That's from my drivers-seat looking out my cellophane-taped lack of window glass, the switch to the automated window upper/downer (we're such lazy fucks, fuck manually rolling up a car window, where's my electric toothbrush!) snapped off in my left hand with the glass down. Of course it thunderstormed this morning. Fine metaphors abound. I'm prodded, I'm having fun. I'm told by six people fuck yeah, half-dozen people stop. See this post's title.

• That's now BLCKDGRD - Theme Song 8, or would be, but fucking blooger won't let me rename it in the Me and Mine blogroll. Fine metaphors....
• There.
• UPDATE! Also too.
• UPDATE! Also too. That's four today, counting mine. CWCF.
• The noose is up.
• Interrogative(s).
• On the above.
• Power is poisonous.
• Who's responsible when robots kill? When I really want to freak myself out, I read articles on the technologies being developed to herd and control us. It occurs to me, at 52 years of age, this might be why I've resisted scifi. Doh.
• On banks and analog money, for instance.
• The new urban militarism of law enforcement.
• And then I think, the fucks that fucked up analog are the fucks in charge of digital. You don't the Rupert Murdoch is paying for the best cryogenics a billionaire psychopath can buy?
• Capitalism: A Ghost Story.
• Crimson Haze.
• Helping Wall Street collect your money.
• Motherfucking Obama.
• Politicians.
• Ironies.
• Six month anniversary.
• Bloomberg's Army.
• They'll never get near the motherfucking cracker. And if they really wanted to do this, they wouldn't have announced it until he was under citizens arrest.
• Kevin Drum gets the vapors! And it was remarkably sloppy that Axelrod would say "mittzkrieg." Wonder how much Romney paid him.
• Let's talk about sex (trafficking). Planet told me that Vount Mernin, the county seat of Bamgier County three miles from Yenkon, is renowned as the sex trafficking capital of east-central Ohio.
• Happy Birthday and Merry Bleggalgazing!
• rerererereading.
• Yes, I've posted the Gilbert poem below before.
• Sonnets Uncorseted.

FAILING AND FLYING

Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

# 6 Was Born Eighty-Four Years Ago Today

     'What are you doing?' Sophie's voice said behind me. 'We ought to be going in.'
     I realized she was talking to me, but I had become so taken up by the discovery of the old car that I murmured something back without really thinking. Then I heard her say:
     'What's got into you? You seem to have fallen in love with that thing.'
     Only then did I realize I was holding the car in a virtual embrace; I had been resting my cheek on its roof while my hands made smooth circular motions over its scabbed surface. I straightened with a quick laugh, and turned to see Sophie and Boris staring at me.
     'In love with this? You have to be joking.' I gave another laugh. 'It's criminal the way people leave wrecks like this lying around.'
     They continued to stare at me, so I shouted: 'What a disgusting heap!' and gave the car a few good kicks. This seemed to satisfy them and they both turned away. I then saw that Sophie, despite her show of hurrying me, was still preoccupied with Boris's appearance and had now resumed combing his hair.  
     I turned my attention back to the car, anxiety mounting that I might have inflicted some damage with my kicks. Closer examination showed that I had done no more than dislodge a few rusted flakes, but I was already full of remorse at having shown such callousness. I made my war through the grass around to the other side of the vehicle and peered in through the rear side window. Some flying object had struck the window but the glass had stayed intact, and I stared through the spiderweb cracks into the rear seat where I had once spent so many contented hours. Much of it, I could see, was covered with fungus. Rain water had pooled in one corner where the seat cushion met the arm-rest. When I tugged at the door, it came open with little trouble, but then became stuck half-way in the thick grass. There was just enough of a gap to enable me to squeeze in, and after a small struggle I managed to clamber onto the seat.

Ishiguro, The Unconsoled.

Gax 3, United 1

First, I didn't see it, fuck you very much MLS Live for blacking out a fracking Galavision game in the zip code I was inhabiting, you morons - any eyes are good eyes. Second, here's Goff, here's Fullback, here's Serrano, here's Martin, here's Webb, and I also was receiving emails from Landru and SeatSix during the game: the consensus seems to be that United's defense sucks unto last year's. Third, here's my question: St Benny of Olsen pointed to the stormed-out last preseason game in which (he claims) he would have started his first eleven for the first eleven's suck in the season opener vs Kansas City, citing lack of cohesion: using St Benny of Olsen's own logic,  why would he bench Boskovic and Salihi in game two, to build cohesion? Fourth, I really don't want to spend this season listening to St Benny of Olsen bitch about effort as if effort trumps tactics and will trumps skill, cause shut the fuck up. Fifth, I didn't see it, it's only the second game, but if United vomits on its shoes this Saturday in Vancouver the following Friday home game vs the Burn could be fascinating for all the wrong reasons.

Born One Hundred-Seventy Years Ago Today

REMINISCENCE

Stéphane Mallarmé
Translated by Henry Weinfield

Orphan, I was wandering in black and with an eye vacant of family: at the quincunx, the tents of a fair were unfolded; did I experience the future and that I would take this form? I loved the odor of the vagabonds, and was drawn toward them, forgetting my comrades. No cry of a chorus clamoring through the canvas rift, nor distant tirade, the drama requiring the holy hour of the footlights, I wanted to speak with an urchin too unsteady in his wavering to figure forth among his people, in a nightcap cut like Dante's hood—who was already returning to himself, in the guise of a slice of bread and soft cheese, the snow of mountain peaks, the lily, or some other whiteness constitutive of internal wings: I would have begged him to admit me to his superior meal, which was quickly shared with some illustrious older boy who had sprung up against a nearby tent and was engaged in feats of strength and banalities consistent with the day. Naked, he pirouetted in what seemed to me the surprising nimbleness of his tights and moreover began: "Your parents? — I have none. — Go on, if you knew what a farce that is, a father...even the other week when he was off his soup, he still made faces as funny as ever, when the boss was flinging out smacks and kicks. My dear fellow!" and triumphantly raising a leg toward me with glorious ease, "Papa astounds us"; then, biting into the little one's chaste meal: "Your mama, maybe you don't have one, maybe you're alone? Mine eats rope and everyone claps his hands, you have no idea what funny people parents are, how they make you laugh." The show was heating up, he left: myself, I sighed, suddenly dismayed at not having parents.

Lives with Only Emergencies, Births, and Fishing for Excitement

• Did the Blockhouse Trail (and some of its side-trails) off River Road yesterday, gonna go throw plastic at metal today  (I can already see the side-effects of our not-Winter, the gnats out already, I picked two ticks off my socks, the cherry blossoms on our frontyard tree have already bloomed and fallen, and it's still technically Winter), so yes, more avoidance of confronting my complicity by indulging my complicity; still, have some links before they go stale.
• Madness is not the issue.
• Fucking panopticon.
• Fucking NYPD.
• Police brutality reports.
• Fucking American conservatives.
• Will the ghost of Breitbart yell "stop raping people" at Tea Partiers?
• Fucking American liberals.
• Fucking American liberals.
• Fucking Americans.
• Fucking Americans.
• kill chain nation.
• The precariat is not a class.
• Giant Carnivorous Termite Caucus.
• Fuck the AARP.
• "The comma is a giveaway," from an obit of a philosopher that caught my eye, though I'd never heard of her. Let's continue:“Once you combine ‘necessarily’ with ‘All humans are mortal,’ ” Professor Neale explained, “there are actually two ways of doing it: ‘Necessarily, all humans are mortal’ and ‘All humans are necessarily mortal.’ They sound the same, and a grammarian would say, ‘What’s the difference?’ But in logic they’re quite different.”The difference hinges on how much of the sentence the modal word modifies. In Sentence 1, “Necessarily, all humans are mortal,” the word “necessarily” casts a wide semantic net: it takes into account not only the real world, but also any hypothetical ones.“The comma is a giveaway,” Professor Neale said. “You’re saying, ‘In every possible world, everything that’s a human in that world is mortal.’ ”In Sentence 2, “All humans are necessarily mortal,” “necessarily” has a narrower scope: it ignores the merely possible and attends only to what actually exists. This sentence means, roughly, “Every human (who actually exists in this world) has the property of being mortal (in every world).”Such issues may seem of small consequence, but the need to talk about them is necessarily the meat of philosophical logic. In the literary arena, questions like these are played out masterfully in the work of Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges. But philosophy itself lacked a formal framework that would make rigorous discussion possible. 
• I suck at logic - the If Ralph ate tomatoes on Tuesday what did Amy eat on Thursday section of the GRE? Sucked.
• Brooklyn Pilsner is my favorite brew in the world.
• On complaining: It’s an interesting question: why did the philosophers of logic pass the test of political commitment, while the philosophers of subjectivity failed? Roudinesco proposes logic itself as a ‘philosophy of heroism’, making a link between the lack of authorial subjectivity in Cavaillès’s philosophical writings and his selflessness in sacrificing his life for his country. By following ‘the logic of the Resistance’, Cavaillès, like Canguilhem, established ‘a logical coherence, grounded in the primacy of the concept, between political commitment and intellectual activity’. This claim, which seems to imply the politicisation of logic itself, strikes me as very strange. Is one to understand that the philosophers of commitment lacked the logic to live according to their writings? That the only people who had enough logic to do it were logicians? What, then, drew the philosophers of logic to the philosophy of commitment in the first place?
• Happiness.
• Let's go exploring! Good thing I work in a library - the massive three volume collected is sitting on my desk - serendipitously, I thought of Calvin and Hobbes just days before bensix's post. 
• Is silence going extinct? Cool sounds.
• Throbbing Gristle.
• It's true the two songs below were in my head when I woke up Saturday morning - I couldn't find the song that was in my head this morning. Apologies.

SOUTH

Jack Gilbert

In the small towns along the river
nothing happens day after long day.
Summer weeks stalled forever,
and long marriages always the same.
Lives with only emergencies, births,
and fishing for excitement. Then a ship
comes out of the mist. Or comes around
the bend carefully one morning
in the rain, past the pines and shrubs.
Arrives on a hot fragrant night,
grandly, all lit up. Gone two days
later, leaving fury in its wake.

Theme Song March 2012

Whenever the Script Says *Dances,* Whatever the Actor Does Next Is Dance

Yes, there was overnight bleggalgazing here, but because of the sillyass rules on rulelessness I impose on myself, once I tagged the post WTF12HRMAX I was required to delete the post from here though I clownishly keep it - and all WTF12HRMAX posts - there. Because of the sillyass rules on rulelessness I impose on myself, since two friends tagged the post in the comments field of the prior post - because of the sillyass rules on rulelessness I impose on myself I don't enable comments for WTF12HRMAX posts - I am required to make mention of the WTF12HRMAX post in this post.  Yes, I've said all this before, no doubt will say it all again. Also too, news about United's new lease agreement with DC, including the tarping of the entire upper bowl. Also too, I am never eating at Fucking Founding Frauders again after last night's clusterfuck with Planet, Earthgirl, SeatSix, Planet's grandparents, holyshit, did it suck. Suck. Also too, I dropped Planet off at BWI three hours ago, damn. Also too, busy, I'll try to add some of the sparser than normal links (see said bleggalgaze) around lunchtime, or not, but have another Jack Gilbert poem and a song I hadn't though about in at least a decade that was in my head when I woke up this morning.


TO SEE IF SOMETHING COMES NEXT

Jack Gilbert

There is nothing here at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and the dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally, and the sounds of roosters
in the bright heat where he lives with the dead
woman and purity. Trying to see if something
comes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.
Maybe, he thinks, it is like the No-.: whenever
the script says dances, whatever the actor does next
is dance. If he stands still he is dancing.

God's Vigorish

No, I do give a fuck it just need honor the what the fuck, I said at a Wednesday night TNP, changed at my request because Thursday night is Planet's last in town until - fuck - middle of May. I was asked by K about blogging, but I could have been talking about POTUS12 and the general clusterfuck or Hilltop gossip or a loved team that has a stupid red third kit or any of the other things I daily knead the yodel over here. For instance, I continued, I read how Little Danny Fucktard is angry at his fellow billionaire fucktards' sudden fetish with the rules of inside fucktard fucktardery - like there are rules in fucktardery, right? - and I read how Leon Panetta flew into Afghanistan today to rescue an American psychopath and mass-murderer from sovereign Afghan jurisprudence, because you know what just might fuck-up Obamalame's recoronation? An American soldier receiving righteous Afghan retribution on TV. Christ, you're in a bad mood, said L. No, I said, look at what should have just posted automatically if blooger worked when you get home, do it before eight tomorrow morning, I'm in as good and as pure-as-I'm-capable what-the-fuck mood at least half the time, even if it's the dark and unread half.

• The capitalist rush back to the feudal past.
• Capitalism.
• What is coercion?
• Drones.
• The most obvious reason Obamabhorent lets the Yemeni rot in jail is because if he intervenes the professional Right and their cracker base will scream TERRORIST APPEASER! Which makes the professional Left and their pwoggle base worse.
• On the above. On the above.
• Congratulations! You've been targeted for assassination.
• Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest academic fraud of his generation! (I say this admiringly.)
• My future hell.
• Fuck-me-jig.
• Waiting for Wotan, continued.
• Blue's playlist. I confess, I was born w/o the blues gene.

PROSPERO WITHOUT HIS MAGIC

Jack Gilbert

He keeps the valley like this with his heart.
By paying attention, being capable, remembering.
Otherwise, there would be flies as big as dogs
in the vineyard, cows made entirely of maggots,
cruelty with machinery and canvas, sniggering
among the olive trees and sea grossly vast.
He struggles to hold it right, the eight feet
of heaven by the well with geraniums and basil.
He will rejoice even if the shepherd girl
does not pass anymore at evening. And whether
or not she ate her lamb at Easter. He knows
that loneliness is our craft, that death is
God's vigorish. He does not keep it fine
by innocence of leaving things out.