Wishful thinking, this post's title. Saturday bleggalgazing: I'd promised to post all Elliott Carter requests and I'm happy to do so today, not intentionally on the slowest day of the week in Blegsylvania but because I had an attack of Mekons. I promised to post all Mekons requests, I promise to get to them next post. Since it is the slowest day of the week I will reveal this much: for privacy reasons I can't write about the details of my conversation about the election with a smart and reliable and generous human who's also a devout and distraught young conservative this past Wednesday morning beyond saying it was horrifying and heartbreaking and I'll remember it always, but I also find I can't write about it in tablet without sounding the condescending ass. I'm a dope at the other end of the tug-of-war rope at Corporate's once every four years company picnic too even if I didn't play this year for varsity, just applauded the other side's varsity losing. As just proven, in trying to be bigger I make myself smaller.
- My rage is a life force, part 1.
- Would love to be proven wrong, but no.
- The ecstasy of Ned. Elric brought home a homeless Ned once.
- I'm hearing this thesis a lot: The Democrats could not have won so handily without the Citizens United ruling. That is what enabled the Koch Brothers to spend their billions to support right-wing candidates that barked and growled like sheep dogs to give voters little civilized option but to vote for “the lesser evil.” This will be President Obama’s epitaph for future historians. Orchestrating the election like a World Wrestling Federation melodrama, the Tea Party’s sponsors threw billions of dollars into the campaign to cast the President’s party in the role of “good cop” against stereotyped opponents attacking women’s rights, Hispanics and nearly every other hyphenated-American interest group. The irony being that I've yodeled for four years that Obama would run for reelection by appealing to peoples' fear of a greater Crackerstan, I never thought that Corporate, Rightwing Division, would spend so much to help Obama win.
- Of course he'll name this fucker.
- Is this child dead enough for you?
- David Harvey interview.
- Postcolonial melancholia.
- Left Side of the Aisle #81.
- I call bullshit.
- Rules for living.
- Space Clinton wins the election.
- Theses on monsters. I know I've asked before but I've never had time, please tell me where to start if I wanted to get Mieville.
- HEY! DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn't spy on you.
- Anne Sexton was born 84 years ago yesterday.
- Music swims back to me.
- Unknown girl in the maternity world.
- The greatest academic fraud of his generation. I say that admiringly.
- Saturday bleggalgazing - some new additions to Because Left, Because Right, and Listening, please check them out. As always, if you are doing me a Kind but me not you, please let me know.
- Philip Roth says he's done. The strangest relationship I have with an author: I read everything, like it when reading it, can't remember a damn thing about it. I'd always thought this an effect of Roth's prolific output, but Harrington was almost as prolific for a matching two decades and wrote about the same place with the same characters over and over and I can remember each novel as distinct, I can't say that about my memory of Roth's novels. I went through a massive Iris Murdoch phase in my early twenties, no one wrote the same novel over and over as often as Iris Murdoch, I can still separate each in my head, it's been twenty years at least since I've read one. It's true I felt obligated to read each of Roth's new novels, but I felt obligated to read each of Updike's, and I can remember distinctions between each of them. Anyway.
- Terry Riley on film. I haven't played enough Riley here, will fix soon.
THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GHOSTS
Tom Clark
Whoso list to haunt could do worse than to
Obtain the license, get the picture.
Spook finders must find spooks to put the face,
Name and space coordinates together.
What is kept in the mind perimeter
Retains a wild autonomy through fate.
I will retreat to the precorporate.
Let fate have what is fate's and allow
This spirit to slip through time's difficult
Nets with the devious fingers of
A wild wind, while I run along behind.
