Eric Dolphy was born eighty-four years ago today. Playlist from Hamster, with whom I'll be eating tapas in about nine hours. Look, it's the Blog Days of Summer, the urge to bleggalgaze is high, I'm fighting it off better than you think I am, oh yes I am, and what I'm writing about in tablets that I can't publish here is driving me nuts, e.g.: predators and professors, plus the UVA clusterfuck. I will not write about work, I will not write about work, I will not write about work, I will not write about work, I will not write about work, I will not write about work, I will not write about work, I will not write about work, I will not write about work, I will not write about work. Or I will but not publish it here. Does appear occasionally in one of two other venues, which isn't true of what my life's hot topic is, it's fucking nuts (though everyone is fine), which does appear in tablets but won't be digitalized. I still feel a need to bullet, poem, and song you, but please, send me playlists.
- The city we built that they stole.
- Five bad arguments for government keeping secrets.
- Don't let the dot org full you.
- Of course. Back in 2008 when HRC was running for POTUS I had a running gag that mocked people for hammering HRC for blatantly overt political pandering. I mean, motherfucking Obama forever, but....
- Villager court jester has a fainting spell.
- Yesterday I thought about linking to an exceptionally sanctimonious Pastor Sanctimonious column but said fuck it - luckily, this guy didn't.
- Motherfucking media complains about motherfucking POTUS 12.
- Kill the poor.
- Go big or don't go.
- On his generation's greatest academic fraud. I call him that admiringly.
- Fun with copyright traps.
- On the virtues of not having the ball.
- Say yes to Branko!
- Attendance. Weirdest schedule ever.
- Klinsmann's dives.
- Half horse, half alligator. Ahab as America?
- Glière? Good thing I have access to a university library's music stacks.
- Epistrophy.
- Alone Together.
- Out There.
- Come Sunday.
- Densities.
- Out of Nowhere.
FROM MY LIFE: A NAME TRIMMED WITH COLORED RIBBONS
Lyn Hejinian
A name trimmed They are seated in the shadows
with colored husking corn, shelling peas. Houses
ribbons of wood set in the ground. I try to
find the spot at which the pattern on
the floor repeats. Pink, and rosy,
quartz. They wade in brackish water.
The leaves outside the window
tricked the eye, demanding that one see them, focus on them,
making it impossible to look past them, and though holes
were opened through the foliage, they were as useless as port-
holes underwater looking into a dark sea, which only reflects
the room one seeks to look out from. Sometimes into
benevolent and other times into ghastly shapes. It speaks of a
few of the rather terrible blind. I grew stubborn until blue as
the eyes overlooking the bay from the bridge scattered over
its bowls through a fading light and backed by the protest of
the bright breathless West. Each bit of jello had been molded
in tiny doll dishes, each trembling orange bit a different
shape, but all otherwise the same. I am urged out rummaging
into the sunshine, and the depths increase of blue above. A
paper hat afloat on a cone of water. The orange and gray
bugs were linked from their mating but faced in opposite
directions, and their scrambling amounted to nothing. This
simply means that the imagination is more restless than the
body. But, already, words. Can there be laughter without
comparisons. The tongue lisps in its hilarious panic. If, for ex-
ample, you say, “I always prefer being by myself,” and, then,
one afternoon, you want to telephone a friend, maybe you
feel you have betrayed your ideals. We have poured into the
sink the stale water in which the iris died. Life is hopelessly
frayed, all loose ends. A pansy suddenly, a web, a trail
remarkably’s a snail’s. It was an enormous egg, sitting in the
vineyard—an enormous rock-shaped egg. On that still day
my grandmother raked up the leaves beside a particular
pelargonium. With a name like that there is a lot you can do.
Children are not always inclined to choose such paths. You
can tell by the eucalyptus tree, its shaggy branches scatter
buttons. In the afternoons, when the shades were pulled for
my nap, the light coming through was of a dark yellow, near-
ly orange, melancholy, as heavy as honey, and it made me
thirsty. That doesn’t say it all, nor even a greater part. Yet it
seems even more incomplete when we were there in person.
Half the day in half the room. The wool makes one itch and
the scratching makes one warm. But herself that she obeyed
she dressed. It talks. The baby is scrubbed everywhere, he is
an apple. They are true kitchen stalwarts. The smell of
breathing fish and breathing shells seems sad, a mystery, rap-
turous, then dead. A self-centered being, in this different
world. A urinating doll, half-buried in sand. She is lying on
her stomach with one eye closed, driving a toy truck along
the road she has cleared with her fingers. I mean untroubled
by the distortions. That was the fashion when she was a
young woman and famed for her beauty, surrounded by
beaux. Once it was circular and that shape can still be seen
from the air. Protected by the dog. Protected by foghorns,
frog honks, cricket circles on the brown hills. It was a
message of happiness by which we were called into the room,
as if to receive a birthday present given early, because it was
too large to hide, or alive, a pony perhaps, his mane trimmed
with colored ribbons.
