Fifty-Five Today

  
Of course I didn't forget whose birthday is today, the person who wrote the above, the greatest one minute song ever, who wrote this blog's Theme Song Three,





and whose entire portfolio - solo, Boston Spaceships, all bands and projects, and of course Guided by Voices - has one of three permanent spots on My Sillyass Deserted Island Game. More songs below fold (and here in days to come).

You'll Need a Spieliologist's Desire for Rebirth and a Miner's Paranoia of Gases

Jeabus, sorry, those of you on readers, I hadn't brainfarted and accidentally published a post before it was finished in half a year. The above Sonic Youth song played last night on Dan Bodah's Airborne Event (and all artists this post taken from past Airborne Event playlists), usually Monday nights nine-midnight, last night from his living room because Sandy knocked out the electricity to WFMU studios in Jersey City; DJs are broadcasting from home on their laptops through an MP3 machine, or something, WFMU-in-Exile! it's called. Irwin's going to do a four and a half hour show this afternoon (UPDATE! and because the show wasn't terrestrial but internet only Irwin was able to use his full vocabulary and imagination, pray that it's archived!). Sandy has also knocked out WFMU's three day record fair, a major source of income for WFMU, and today is the last day of 31 Days of October, their silent fundraiser. They are $200K short of money needed to stay on air and on internet (Dan's show last night, for instance, would have been archived for your streaming by now if not for hurricane). SEND THEM MONEY please and thanks.

• Meme logic.
• The cost of voting the lesser evil (h/t Mr Alarum).
• A progressive's case for voting Green.
• UPDATE! Pierce endorsed Obama, he couldn't resist taking a shot at those of us on the Left who won't follow orders, used the tribalist rimshot-word "unicorns," (ouchy! dagger!).  I didn't feel like responding to his taunts. Thankfully, Susan did.
• A progressive's case for Obama.
• Still puzzled.
• Who's to blame?
• He's not voting for Romney either.
• >>Deleted scab-scraping<<
• Occupy was a success?
• Maintaining fidelity to Occupy.
• A very good question.
• Thoughts on Graeber's Debt.
• The machine stops.
• >>Deleted bleggalgaze<< re: >>Deleted scab-scraping<<
• Ninety-Fifth Street.
• The next new thing.
• The Museum of Hypothetical Lifetimes.
• Corson's Inlet.
• Randal's Halloween playlist.
• The Dowser's Ear.
• Prunella's latest playlist.

HOW TO LOVE BATS

Judith Beveridge

Begin in a cave.

Listen to the floor boil with rodents, insects.

Weep for the pups that have fallen. Later,

you’ll fly the narrow passages of those bones,

                                                       but for now —

open your mouth, out will fly names

like Pipistrelle, Desmodus, Tadarida. Then,

listen for a frequency

lower than the seep of water, higher

than an ice planet hibernating

beyond a glacier of Time.

Visit op shops. Hide in their closets.

Breathe in the scales and dust

of clothes left hanging. To the underwear

and to the crumbled black silks — well,

give them your imagination

and plenty of line, also a night of gentle wind.

By now your fingers should have

touched petals open. You should have been dreaming

each night of anthers and of giving

to their furred beauty

your nectar-loving tongue. But also,

your tongue should have been practising the cold

of a slippery, frog-filled pond.

Go down on your elbows and knees.

You’ll need a spieliologist’s desire for rebirth

and a miner’s paranoia of gases —

but try to find within yourself

the scent of a bat-loving flower.

Read books on pogroms. Never trust an owl.

Its face is the biography of propaganda.

Never trust a hawk. See its solutions

in the fur and bones of regurgitated pellets.

And have you considered the smoke

yet from a moving train? You can start

half an hour before sunset,

but make sure the journey is long, uninterrupted

and that you never discover

the faces of those Trans-Siberian exiles.

Spend time in the folds of curtains.

Seek out boarding-school cloakrooms.

Practise the gymnastics of web umbrellas.

                                             Are you

floating yet, thought-light,

without a keel on your breastbone?

Then, meditate on your bones as piccolos,

on mastering the thermals

beyond the tremolo; reverberations

beyond the lexical.

                                           Become adept

at describing the spectacles of the echo —

but don’t watch dark clouds

passing across the moon. This may lead you

to fetishes and cults that worship false gods

by lapping up bowls of blood from a tomb.

Practise echo-locating aerodromes,

stamens. Send out rippling octaves

into the fossils of dank caves —

then edit these soundtracks

with a metronome of dripping rocks, heartbeats

and with a continuous, high-scaled wondering

about the evolution of your own mind.

But look, I must tell you — these instructions

are no manual. Months of practice

may still only win you appreciation

of the acoustical moth,

hatred of the hawk and owl. You may need

to observe further the floating black host

through the hills.

She Added that Tired Magic about How Atoms of Julius Cheezer and Napoleon and Beethoven Did Their Fleet Anachronistic Dance in Every Inhalation of Ours

All's fine in Napistan. Yes, I've waited a year to snap this photo and a chance to use that pun. Napoleon our feral cat decided to become Napoleon our fifth indoor cat and spent the night inside, made buddies with Stanley. Napoleon is the Kind older brother Stanley, runt of his litter, always wanted. We lucked out - never lost power, basement didn't flood. Hey, Thudner has a proposal for you! You vote for Jill Stein in your safe blue state, he votes for Obama against the motherfuckers who vote for Romney in Ohio. I'm in, but I was going to vote for Stein anyway.

• Democrats and SCOTUS. 
• The pie of sacrifice: Obama doesn't have to sacrifice Social Security.  It doesn't contribute to the deficit; there's no fiscal necessity to cut the program.  As with the pre-emptive tax cuts in his 2009 stimulus bill, Obama offered cuts in social programs to the Republicans during the debt-ceiling fight without their having to demand them.   He's not obligated to accept Simpson and Bowles recommendations, since they aren't binding -- but he did appoint those two deficit hawks to his deficit-reduction commission, knowing in advance that they are advocates of cutting Social Security and Medicare.  Nor is there support in the general population for cutting Social Security and Medicare; they are both very popular, which is why Social Security has long been called the Third Rail of American politics.  Only Obama's wealthy campaign donors support his intentions, but as both his left critics and his right-wing supporters have been saying, once he's re-elected he'll be beholden to no one.  He doesn't have to cut Social Security and Medicare -- he wants to.  And he's always wanted to.
• The cynicism of calling it a Great Bargain.
• When Frankenstorms are normal.
• Of course they are.
• Update on fuckers (plus other stuff).
• Nurblings.
• I want to believe.
• She doesn't live in North Bethesda, she lives in Rockville. THERE IS NO NORTH BETHESDA!
• A.R. Ammons.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• Once upon a time I would have been morally indignant that Penguin and Random House merge. Now? Fuck it.
• BTW, stay-tuned for Birchville Cat Motel and other Campbell Kneale projects. Thanks, Helen, for the CDs! I'm hooked.

THE POEM OF THE LITTLE HOUSE AT THE CORNER OF MISAPPREHENSION AND MARVEL

Albert Goldbarth

“He was mortared to death.”

A pity, how we misspeak and mishear.

—Or “martyred”? Not that/coin-flip/either

makes a difference to the increasingly cooler

downtick of a corpse’s cells. “We heard the crazy mating joy

of the loon across the water.” Yes, but what

do we know, amateurs that we are? Loon, shmoon.

It might have been dying, announcing

its pain in those trilling pennants. It might

have been the girl who was lost in these woods last week

and never found by the volunteer searchers,

it might have been her ghost

with an admonishment. The truth is,

even among ourselves we often can’t distinguish pain

from pleasure, not in our beds, our hearts, the tone

of a poem on the final exam (a coin-toss). A pity, because

we know the urgency of some utterance;

and the intended goodwill of our listening; and

the marvelous basic mechanics of speech,

of lung: 300 million alveoli that, “if spread out flat,”

as my eighth-grade science teacher preened, “would come to

750 square feet, the entire floor space of an average house,”

and she added that tired magic about how atoms

of Julius Caesar and Napoleon and Beethoven did

their fleet anachronistic dance in every inhalation

of ours, although at thirteen I preferred to think

that the atoms of Cleopatra’s body—my Cleopatra,

inflating her see-through empresswear

with husky breaths—commingled with my blood, and also

realized in my own dim way it wasn’t only Einstein,

Shakespeare, Madame Curie populating my oxygen,

but also the smelly and scabby old man

from across the street who’d died last year

when the late-shift ward nurse heard (as she said in her testimony)

“med injection” instead of (as the outgoing

ward nurse told her) “bed inspection”—altogether

an unfortunate example of my theme . . . although

exempla abound, misapprehension

also dancing inside us at the atomic level.

Someone thought the gate was locked, she always locked

the gate in the late afternoon when the haze set down

and the sun for a moment seemed to carmelize the lake top,

so the gate was locked; except that it wasn’t,

and seven days into it nobody’s found the girl

or a scraggle of hair or a single ribbon. I tell you

we’re amateurs, we’re sometimes bungling amateurs,

of the minutiae of our own lives. When I heard the sounds

that gurgled from my chest as my wife was leaving

into the dense, conspiratorial Austin, Texas night,

I couldn’t have said if it was defeat

or relief. She couldn’t have said which one

she’d have been happiest to cause. We only knew

that I’d been wrong at times, and she’d been wrong at times,

and that our total errors, if spread out flat,

become the house we live in. They’re another system

inside us, along with the cardiac and the pulmonary,

they’re moving us toward the horizon line. And when

enough errors accumulate there, that’s what

we call the future. Even now, as you read this,

someone in that unknowable distance

is breathing you in.


 

I Want to Love You but I&#39;m Getting Blown Away

  
 
Hey, Bryan Ferry turned sixty-seven last Friday, I've mentioned this, I had a post teed up but couldn't swing. I can simultaneously bless Serendipity while damning the storm, fine metaphors abounding as always. Neil Young's original below. Regular programming returns tomorrow or not depending as much or more on the storm and its power outages than my damn and its power outages. 

  

The Desire to Show Is Destruction

Lordy, I got multiple google hits on yard cow since posting Planet's cow two days ago. In the past two years we've had two freak snowstorms, an earthquake, a deracho, and we're about to absorb a hurricane. Weirder, United just finished with 58 points, an total I'd have bet my left nut against at season's start, they have the third highest point total in MLS heading into MLS' sillyass and rinkydink playoffs and - here's the thing - they suck! Then there's this whole motherfucking POTUS 12 wetfart that won't stop, I can't stop, so that new Matmos song above not only prompts a Matmos cascasde, that song is Theme Song of Our Constant and Forever Clusterfuck.





   

• Not lesser evil, more effective evil.
• Police state.
• Disposition matrix.
• My Life as a Subject.
• Police state. 
• Canadian police state.
• Oh noes! Silver dips .8 Romney's way! Intensify the crackerification noise at wavering emoprogs!
• Is this true?
• Fuckers.
• The Meadow.
• Rewind Silber.
• Suffer the children.
• Stalinism insurance.
• Joe Biden scheduled to visit Bamgier on Tuesday. When we drove to Delaware last weekend we passed through southwest corner of Knox County which is growing exurbia, though the county went 57% McCain in 2008 I guess they think they might peel a percentage point or two off that number.
• When only $1B will do.
• Austerity, peasants.
• The rose is not a beauty.
• Interludinal interlude.
• Mr Alarum recommended I start here w/Robbie Basho:

  

AUBADE 

Garrett Caples

the desire to show is destruction

in lessons forgot before learned

no shrunken heads hang by wires

no mourning songs of half-remembered

shutters open the width of an eyelash

it is enough for vision to run

its finger along, for access to steal

from forbidden shores the still-cold

beams of night and pack them in ice

but a child couldn’t live here nonetheless

in the morning is come a bell that summons

a fortune that reads she will soon

cross the water and the intended instructions

which may not florish after all

she leaves a painting outside her room

and in the morning it’s gone

and not one word is spoke between them

but her father carries it to his grave

the desire to show is destruction

and we are not hung with skins

we must follow internal echoes

commit ourselves to memory

    

I&#39;ve Eaten a Bag of Green Apples

  
Conlon Nancarrow was born one hundred years ago today. A friend asked me this morning what's with the birthdays, here are four reasons: (1) They mark time, (2) people need remembering - would you have thought of Sylvia Plath or Conlon Nancarrow today? (3) they're blogfodder, (4) they are somehow related to my obsession with maps. More Saturday Bleggalgazing: I had a Bryan Ferry birthday post teed up since Tuesday for release yesterday afternoon but I didn't want to so I didn't. This is significant to me and only me on multiple levels including but not limited to both the practice of my personal faith and, more or less significantly depending on what day it is, my blogwhoring. Oh, I deleted Rob Payne from my blogroll, he'd thought he'd killed his blog but no, it appeared twice at top of Because Right blogroll in past week hijacked, spammed, I sent him an email, at his request I've removed the zombie blog from the blogroll. So, the monthly reminder that if you are doing me a Kind and me not you, please let me know, and thanks for reading. Hey! if anyone got my WCW joke yesterday I didn't hear a heh. Here's a hint:

• Throw Arthur the coins in your pocket, please.
• The death of blogging.
• The progressive case against Obama. 
• The case for Jill Stein.
• No.
• The locus of ownership has nothing to do with it. 
• Speaking in memes.
• Krugman, whose obamapostasy will never be ready, taunts Ba'al. 
• Richard Mourdock or Abu Hamza? 
• Motherfucking crackers.
• Rightwing pig tells you the real problem with drones.
• Sideshow's links include someone I'm not related to but share a last name.
• Mt St Marys is $33K a year?
• Denis Johnson short story.
• Sylvia Plath born 80 years ago today.
• The Theory Generation.
• Throw WFMU the coins in your pocket, please.
• Looking for the Nancarrow I found and remembered this Lutoslawski; clicking on the Lutoslawski I found and remembered the Faure:

  
METAPHORS

Sylvia Plath

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

Am I Not Your Animal?

That's Planet's cow, I said, showing the above photo to Thursday Night Pinters on my iPhone. It's going in our front yard after we uHaul it from Ohio over the mountains in December, best garden statuary ever, it'll look great next to the red reflecting ball I'm getting Earthgirl for Giftmas. K said, Planet needs to get it to an all white depth-crunching studio to really capture the negative space. I said, we'll do snow this winter, provided we don't die this weekend via Sandy, the androgynously-named hurricane. Is it a boy or a girl? Of course we scraped scabs bloody re: motherfuckingly motherfuckful motherfucking POTUS 12, our disgust, our surprise at our disgust, our disgust at our surprise, what motherfucking rubes we are, were we always, must we have been? We don't know. We talked about Berryman, how we daydreamed of being a giant but knew, know, we weren't, aren't, we who compete to be top tier interpreters of giants. L said, so, Roxy Music tomorrow, yes? No, said K, I mean yes, but a Julie Doiron cascade too please. Nope, said D, who follows me on twooter, Lambchop. Maybe, I said. Soon. Yup.

• Monsters and their sycophants.
• Mordor, orcs, pigs, capitalism.
• The Reds under Romney's bed. (h/t) 
• Robert Reich thinks you're stupid, will write the same column in 2014 and 2016 and... 
• Fuck Robert Reich.
• Lawrence O'Donnell (whoever the hell he is) urges you to vote third party unless you live somewhere your vote may matter.
• An honest question: Why isn't the Obama campaign and the DNC screaming SCOTUS! SCOTUS! SCOTUS! 
• Copied/pasted from Naked Capitalism: Disposition matrix: “A paramilitary spy agency empowered to kill in secret via remote control. What could go wrong?” … Disposition matrix: “”It really is like swatting flies. We can do it forever easily and you feel nothing. But how often do you really think about killing a fly?” (CFR) … Disposition matrix: “Like last year’s NY Times piece that first detailed the murder racket being run directly out of the White House, the new Washington Post story is replete with quotes from ‘senior Administration officials’ who have obviously been authorized to speak. Once again, this is a story that Obama and his team WANT to tell.” … Disposition matrix: “[T]he government wants Americans to know all about the horrors. It is increasingly eager to discuss its programs and to describe how it goes about murdering ever greater numbers of people. The government does this so that Americans become accustomed to the murders, precisely so that Americans regard the murders as a matter of routine, everyday business.” … Disposition matrix: “In response to the Post story, Chris Hayes asked: “If you have a ‘kill list’, but the list keeps growing, are you succeeding?” The answer all depends upon what the objective is” (cf. self-licking ice cream cone). … Disposition matrix: “A bureaucratized paramilitary killing program that targets people far from any battlefield is not just unlawful, it will create more enemies than it kills.” … Disposition matrix: “When the president kills you with a drone strike, that means you are a terrorist.” … Disposition matrix: “If politicians can get away with not knowing what a ‘kill list’ is, which has been prominently featured on the front page of The New York Times, who’s guessing they’ll be able to plead ignorance about something as bureaucratically innocuous-sounding as ‘disposition matrix’?” … Disposition matrix: “[T]he NCTC is also the government outfit in charge of crafting a ‘disposition matrix’ to oversee the management and institutionalization of the US government’s extrajudicial assassinations — a power the Obama administration asserts it can (without due process) apply to US citizens as well as foreigners.” … Disposition matrix: “Should he win the election in two weeks, Romney will inherit an institutionalized, bureaucratic machine for using lethal robots to target and kill suspected terrorists and their allies. Killing Osama bin Laden was a one-time event; this ‘Disposition Matrix’ is Barack Obama’s real national-security legacy.” 

• Of course Romney's an asshole.
• Of course Romney's a piece of shit who'll say anything he thinks serves his ambition. I've never suggested otherwise.
• Of course Ayn Rand was a stunted adolescent.
• Greens and science.
• Oh dear, there's a 75% chance I'm gonna be fucked by Sandy!
• Oh deer, there's a 1 in 114 chance I'll hit a deer.
• ICC! growing 3% a month!
• Your Frederick headline of the day! Will be my neighbor to the left once we've installed the cow in the front yard.
• Objecting to irregardless is futile.
• Something seemed funny about Copa America 16, and then I remembered Copa America is played the year after a World Cup, in an odd-numbered year, and yes, there will be a regular Copa America in 2015, 2016 is a special Copa America, presumably about testing the market in the northern hemisphere, and cool, I understand, it sours me a bit, but irregardless I'll watch. 
• WCW poem. Not about Arn Anderson or Tully Blanchard.
• Merwin's Berryman.
• Josipovici, for those of you who do.
• Hey, for whatever reason I've a large Robbie Basho gap in my musical files - suggestions where to start solicited please.
• Oh! John Fahey too, please.
• Strange, heavy psychedelic guitar shreddage.

TO THE ANGELBEAST

Eduardo C Corral

All that glitters isn't music.

Once, hidden in tall grass,
I tossed fistfuls of dirt into the air:
doe after doe of leaping.

You said it was nothing
but a trick of the light. Gold
curves. Gold scarves.

Am I not your animal?

You'd wait in the orchard for hours
to watch a deer
break from the shadows.

You said it was like lifting a cello
our of its black case.

Fainting with Interest, I Hungered Back

DREAM SONG 133

John Berryman
    

As he grew famous - ah, but what is fame? -
he lost his old obsession with his name,
things seemed to matter less,
including the fame - a television team came
from another country to make a film of him
which did not him distress:

he enjoyed the hard work & he was good at that,
so they all said - the charming Englishmen
among the camera & the lights
mathematically wandered in his pub & livingroom
doing their duty, as too he did it,
but where are the delights

of long-for fame, unless fame makes him feel easy?
I am cold & weary, said Henry, fame makes me feel lazy,
yet I must do my best.
It doesn't matter, truly. It doesn't matter truly.
It seems to be solely a matter of continuing Henry
voicing & obsessed.

DREAM SONG 105

As a kid I believed in democracy: I
'saw no alternative' - teaching at Big Place I ah
put it in practice:
we'd time for one long novel: to a vote -
Gone With the Wind they voted: I crunched 'No"
and we sat down with War & Peace.

As a man I believed in democracy (nobody
ever learns anything): only one lazy day
my assistant, called James Dow,
& I were chatting, in a failure of meeting of minds,
and I said curious, 'What are your real politics?'
'Oh, I'm a monarchist.'

Finishing his dissertation, in Political Science.
I resign. The universal contempt for Mr. Nixon,
whom I never liked but who
alert & gutsy served us years under a dope,
since dynasty K swarmed in. Let's have a King
maybe, before a few mindless votes.

• John Berryman was born 98 years ago today. I was 21 when Pary Gittenger, an English teacher at Montgomery College, Rockville, loaned me his copy of Dream Songs. Thank you, Pary.
• Paths of resistance. The most important thing you'll read today.
• Neoliberalism kills, part one.
• Neoliberalism kills, part two.
• Beyond the welfare state: 
• Welcome to the age of hell.
• Is the progressive blogosphere dead?
• Can it have come to this?
• Infinite jestice.
• Just another day.
• Hobsbawm.
• The fountain of truth.
• Berryman interview: As for the graduate students, some of the work they do is damned interesting. A woman somewhere in the South did an eighty-page thesis investigating the three little epigraphs to the 77 Dream Songs and their bearing on the first three books of the poem. I must say that her study was exhaustive—very little left to be found out on that subject! But it's good, careful work. I take a pleased interest in these things, though there is ineptness and naïveté, and they get all kinds of things wrong and impute to me amazing motives. Another woman thought I was influenced by Hebrew elegiac meter. Now my Hebrew is primitive, and I don't even know what Hebrew elegiac meter is—and, moreover, neither does she. It's a harmless industry. It gets people degrees. I don't feel against it, and I don't feel for it. I sympathize with the students. I can vouch a heh.
• Mr Jones.
• Copa America 2016 will be in US!
• Three hours of Hall & Oates? Beats Fitz and the Tantrums.
• You loved me.
• BARTOK!
• HEY! THERE'S A NEW JULIE DOIRON ALBUM!
• Adventures close to home.

DREAM SONG 4

Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken paprika, she glanced at me twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying
"You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance." I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni. - - Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.

--Black hair, complexion Latin, jeweled eyes
downcast... The slob besides here      feasts... What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
--Mr. Bones: There is.

Born 98 Years Ago Tomorrow/Turns 67 Friday

Egoslavian High Holy Day tomorrow. Another one Friday.

Something Tethered in Us, Hobbled Like a Donkey

While true I wanted to create another movie to reinforce the process so I remember it for when I need it in the months ahead, more true is there is no gag or gimmick I won't hump as long as it makes me giggle (>>deleted bleggalgaze<<), so here, all the Fleabus photos taken by Planet when both she and Fleabus and you and me were younger. Fleabus is still and always the best cat ever, it's wonderful, she's having a resurgence of fleabusnous - I hate to say it, Sarah dying has been a boon to all four indoor cats but Fleabus most: she's happy, playful again. Fine metaphors abound. What, another movie?

• That's the sunset trip to Ohio, three weekends back, left Kensington rush hour Friday, all photos in Maryland, Washington and Allegheny counties, 70 then 68.
• Disposition Matrix!
• On the above.
• On the above.
• Oh dear. Is it time to declare Digby a fucking hippie? And I call bullshit on Joe Scarborough finding god now.
• Waive that flag, Progressives!
• Think of six impossible things before voting.
• Activism and the politics of enclosure.
• (Imaginary) Living after the Death of Falsity.
• Whatever's up, wish him and his well.
• They got nothing.
• An incoherent debate for an unsettled world.
• CEO disease.
• Saturated fat.
• The consolation of skepticism.
• Yes, Illtophay's colors are blue and gray. Home gray sucks.
• Good for Brunswick.
• Denise Levertov was born 89 years ago today.
• The seeds of its unfolding.
• In California During the Gulf War.
• New Guided by Voices song!
• Look what cassette I found last night.

    

SOJOURNS IN THE PARALLEL WORLD

Denise Levertov

We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension--though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal--then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we've been, when we're caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
--but we have changed, a little.

Take a Dog to the Vet&#39;s, He Knows What You&#39;re Doing

So I figured it out, both how to make a movie of a folder of photos and how to drive away readers. Well, I always knew the latter. That's this past Saturday, our drive to Columbus and back and Delaware and back. All photos by Earthgirl. Yes some are sideways, sorry, it took an hour to figure out how to make the movie, I love you but I don't have two hours to right-side up the portraits she shot. I showed her the movie last night, she said, why don't you fix the sideways photos, I said, here's the folder, you spend two hours straightening them out, she said, Fuck that. What the fuck, I caught myself deliberately writing a sonnet, complete with end-rhymes?

• This bodes well. This bodes ill.
• Blood is their argument.
• Had coffee yesterday with a former teacher and better than associate but not to level of friend, he teaches conventional Political Science from a Chris Lasch and Robert Putnam is on the required reading list (or were at the time I took his class: substitute in whatever's today's analog) perspective. He's a pox on both sides but .06% more pox on Republicans person. Obama should have governed further left, he said, his assumption being - and if Obama loses I think this will be takeaway of the disappointed (that and Hillary regret) - that Obama ran towards a false middle against his liberal instincts for errant political reasons. My friend said - correctly, we've all yodeled this - that Obama could have governed as George Barry Wallace Goldwater and not gained a single vote from the 47% who'd never vote for anyone in a Democratic uniform. We disagree about Obama's liberal instincts, I said, but here's why he's in danger: he came off in the first debate as if he'd already won, like he takes our votes for granted (as he should in most cases).
• So, who won? I caught two minutes on the radio, bromides of condescending standard speak from both.
• Since Washington Post's resident Romney cheerleader isn't hyperventilating over a Romney victory, I have to assume Obama won the debate.
• O'Reilly blasts Romney. Guess Romney lost.
• Peacenik Mitt? A liberal gloats.
• Bayonets are today's hot-button issue?
• McGovern's letter to Obama.
• Come home, America.
• The war we're not debating.
• On the need to point out that no one has gone to jail over The Clusterfuck.
• Who needs intellectuals?
• A list of Marxist historians?
• Emotional work and cultural capital.
• Bleggalgazing 10K posts.
• Today in bleggalgazing: overnight I got pinged repeatedly on pj harvey ()aked ()ex ()ideo. There's a pj harvey ()aked ()ex ()ideo?
• Skull-blogging.
• St Benny of Olsen.
• Silliman's always awesome litlinks.
• Every trip to Ohio includes at least one Tindersticks album.

EFFIGIES

Gerald Stern

Take a dog to the vet's, he knows what you're doing,
a cat becomes a muscle, she leaps from your arms
and oh, and ah, you won't kiss your dog
because of where his mouth was, and ah,
your cat has delivered a rat at your door
so lie down on the left side, or the right,
and let me find a place for my arm

for what can the police do
or the effigies floating over us
made of cloth and stuffed with cotton,

one only with a whistle,
one only with a sheet of white paper.

Born Two-Hundred and One Years Ago Today

 
  

  

His Fiery Death&#39;s Renowned, but Don&#39;t Look Now, Someone with a Camera&#39;s Drawing Down on You

• So. The above on US 36 heading into Delaware Ohio, the below the creepy avatar for the Ohio Wesleyan University Fighting Bishops. Anyone know how to take a folder of photos and create a rapid slideshow that can play like a youtube. I've two folders full of Earthgirl photos that'd each be a good movie.
• Though it needs be said that other than the loyalest of loyals, these travel posts are wildly unpopular, easily the least read posts here, even taking into consideration they are posted mostly on weekends. They're my favorite.
• And while I'm bleggalgazing, I'd love to give you links, but Blegsylvania is quiet. Dead even. Happened in 2008 too in weeks before the election. This seems completely counter-intuitive to me, but I'm a dope. Anyway, I've saved the few I have for today, will post tomorrow with new ones if there are new ones.
• Twitter's been weirdly slower, quieter too. Freaking weird.
• BTW, since two of you asked, Planet is registered to vote in Ohio. She's going to vote for Obama. Yes, we talk about it (three of you have asked). I tell her what I think, not what she should think. She thinks it cool that her vote counts more there than it would at home. And yes, Prunella, the Obama Kills Coal (or whatever varying language) signs up everywhere.
• As for Ohio signage, all the counties we were in other than Franklin (Columbus) voted McCain heavily in 2008, Romney signs outnumbered Obama 10-1, which means nothing.
• Oh, on watching Fox News yesterday morning with a room full of hunter in the breakfast lounge of the Holiday Inn Express in Zanesville Ohio. Fox went full bazooka on Obama and Libya, the hunters goddamn Obama-ing, expressing praise for Darrell Issa (who of course is a mendacious shitsmear) for blithely sacrificing the lives of brown men working for American imperial interests by releasing documents on the Benghazi clusterfuck to advance Republican election prospects. I say this not to support brown men who work for American imperial interests but to reiterate what a motherfucking mendacious shitsmear Darrell Issa is.
• So expect Romney to go all-in on Benghazi at the debate tonight I'll not be watching.
• Expect everyone to reach the conclusions post-debate they had pre-debate regardless of hwat happens at the debate.
• Fuck blaager, btw. I'm sure some % of the new deadness in Blegsylvania can be attributed to people confronting the new motherfucking blaager interface and saying fuck it.
• But yes, it's not that I don't care about POTUS 12, it's that I'm interested different. 
• And yes, I am enjoying it more than I think I am, I bet.
• This is true: when eating at Bun's we were boothed next a table with a dozen of Delaware County's elderly white members of the Delaware County Republican Party who gathered to eat and discuss the election. They smiled at us, wished us pardon when the needed to squeeze by, and visa versa. They wished us a good night when we left.
• Adding, THANKS! Robert for The Necks CDs. Awesome.
• So, more tomorrow. Or not.

THE TRUTH ABOUT SMALL TOWNS

David Baker

1. THE TRUTH ABOUT SMALL TOWNS

It never stops raining. The water tower’s tarnished   

as cutlery left damp in the widower’s hutch.

If you walk slow (but don’t stop), you’re not from nearby.   

All you can eat for a buck at the diner is

cream gravy on sourdough, blood sausage, and coffee.   

Never lie. The preacher before this one dropped bombs

in the war and walked with a limp at parade time.   

Until it burned, the old depot was a disco.

A café. A card shoppe. A parts place for combines.   

Randy + Rhonda shows up each spring on the bridge.

If you walk fast you did it. Nothing’s more lonesome   

than money. (Who says shoppe?) It never rains.

2. GRAVEYARD

Heat in the short field and dust scuffed up, glare   

off the guard-tower glass where the three pickets   

lean on their guns. The score is one to one.   

Everybody’s nervous but the inmates,

who joke around—they jostle, they hassle   

the team of boys in trouble and their dads.   

It’s all in sport. The warden is the ump.

The flat bleachers are dotted with guards; no

one can recall the last time they got one   

over the wall. The cons play hard, then lose.   

And the warden springs for drinks all around—

something he calls graveyard,which is five kinds   

of soda pop poured over ice into

each one’s cup, until the cup overflows.

3. COUNCIL MEETING

The latest uproar: to allow Wendy’s

to build another fast-food burger shack

on two acres of wetlands near Raccoon Creek,   

or to permit the conservationist

well-to-do citizenry to keep their green   

space and thus assure long, unsullied views   

from their redwood decks, picture windows,   

and backyards chemically rich as golf greens.

The paper’s rife with spats, accusations,   

pieties both ways. Wendy’s promises   

flowers, jobs. The citizens want this, too,   

but want it five miles away where people

don’t care about egrets, willows, good views.   

Oh, it’s going to be a long night: call   

out for pizza, somebody brew some tea.   

Then we’ll all stand up for what we believe.

4. CHARMING

The remnant industry of a dying town’s itself.

Faux charm, flaked paint, innuendo in a nasal twang.   

Now the hardware store’s got how-to kits to make   

mushrooms out of plywood for the yard,

and the corner grocery’s specialty this week

is mango chutney, good with rabbit, duck, or spread   

for breakfast on a whole-wheat bagel fresh

each morning at the small patisserie across

the way from the red hotel. Which reminds me.   

Legend has it that the five chipped divots   

in the hotel wall—local lime and mortar—

are what remains of the town’s last bad man.

His fiery death’s renowned, but don’t look now   

Someone with a camera’s drawing down on you.