Brahms was born 179 years ago today. I've asked Hamster to dj today but haven't yet got his playlist, I'll post it when it appears (UPDATE! got it! thanks! it'll be a stand-alone later this afternoon), but here, have a piano sonata. Also too, the general election is six months - that's half a year - from tomorrow, the longest fucking six months of your life since the last until the next. Also too, first call for Blog Days of Summer! I mean, I know this blog sucks, but hasn't started sucking as precipitously as the drop in action here and around Blegsylvania the past week. With the Blog Days of Summer comes bleggalgazing, spared you only so far as this post's sentences - yes, that's a threat - but, as I wrote elsewhere, why write elsewhere what I don't write here or won't write here?
- On the French election.
- Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
- The Walrus makes unintentionally accurate and ironic pun in column title.
- American character.
- Winning hearts and minds. Think about this first sentence: NATO airstrikes killed Afghan civilians in two provinces, local officials reported Monday, and at least two dozen others dies when floods swept through villages in a third province. Think about that sentence.
- Property rights in the cloud.
- Goober's dead.
- History of the Potomac.
- Shenandoah.
- Chick Young was a baldy wee twat.
- Two types of metafiction.
- Finnegans Wake with bunny.
- Have some lit links.
- How to watch a poem.
- Today is Tchaikovsky's birthday too. I've never dug much, but if you want to try and change my mind, PLEASE, suggestions solicited.
- New Animal Collective.
THE WOMAN AT THE WASHINGTON ZOO
Randall Jarrell
The saris go by me from the embassies.
Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet.
They look back at the leopard like the leopard.
And I. . . .
this print of mine, that has kept its color
Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null
Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so
To my bed, so to my grave, with no
Complaints, no comment: neither from my chief,
The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief--
Only I complain. . . . this serviceable
Body that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses
But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns,
Wavy beneath fountains--small, far-off, shining
In the eyes of animals, these beings trapped
As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap,
Aging, but without knowledge of their age,
Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death--
Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!
The world goes by my cage and never sees me.
And there come not to me, as come to these,
The wild beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas' grain,
Pigeons settling on the bears' bread, buzzards
Tearing the meat the flies have clouded. . . .
Vulture,
When you come for the white rat that the foxes left,
Take off the red helmet of your head, the black
Wings that have shadowed me, and step to me as man:
The wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn,
To whose hand of power the great lioness
Stalks, purring. . . .
You know what I was,
You see what I am: change me, change me!
