- UPDATE! If motherfucking blooger and motherfucking soundcloud aren't playing nice on your browser, song is at link.
- If progressives didn't exist, big business would invent them.
- When Villagers attack, or: Why Krugman is the most useful tool in Obama's toolbox.
- UPDATE! Reading the bloggers who called those of us who refused to default to lesser-evil pragmatism before the election childish get angry when they are told they're being childish for not shutting up and embracing the pragmatism when they protest professional Liberal plans to gut safety nets by their progressive Village superiors makes me happy in my tiny and childish and I told you so way.
- Grumpy Old Man.
- The assassin as global brand.
- Bleggalgazing.
- >>Deleted bleggalgazing<< Though I admit fuck this is occurring to me more and more often.
- Dear anne, I don't know if you're around or not, but for the first time in months I looked at the spam-catcher in blooger and saw a few of your comments. I released them into the mainstream, my apologies, but please believe me, I didn't know they were there nor have I ever banished any comment of yours.
- Illtophay.
- GIF of a dancing Greatest Academic Fraud of His Generation! I say that admiringly.
- Forty years of Hagerstown Almanac.
- I've read and loved the Hejinian - been posting poems from it here for the past year - but I was totally unaware of the Tony Lopez. Normally here's where I'd say good think I have access to a university library's stacks, but I'm going to have to buy this. That's fine.
- Ashbery has a new book.
- Poetry and the limits of binary thinking.
- UPDATE! Serendipitously, a meditation on science fiction posted nine minutes before I posted this post.
- Hey, Randal, of these 40, what say you?
- Grandpas on tour! I love those Yes albums, and if they were coming to DC and someone bought me a ticket I'd go, but.....
- But yes, you've not seen the Best of List cascades I've done in the past because fuck that.
- UPDATE! Object permanence.
- Hey, Sharon Van Etten is opening for Nick Cave in March. Suggestions on where to start to form a favorable first impression? Alternatively, fuck that.
- RIP Charles Rosen.
- Yes, Messiaen was born 104 years ago today. Nobody requested anything.
[THE CLOWN CANNOT ESCAPE GRAVITY]
Lyn Hejinian
The clown cannot escape gravity; it cannot be light.
With its round paper-white baby face and enormously exaggerated facial features, the clown must appear to a child like a nightmarish caricature of the figure at which the child first smiled.
The clown is at once both newborn and a ruin. Gesticulating like a flailing infant but too big to be one, it is then the epitome of a senile being - and under its preposterous baggy pants perhaps a diapered one. We begin as small clowns and end as repulsive overgrown ones - perhaps this is the truth which with the clown frightens us.
The clown is a swollen prototypical human, its flopping inflated body a travesty of the rounded features of young creatures that we see as adorable, vulnerable, vivacious, which is to say "cute." It appears before us to taunt us for the inadequacy of our sentimentality, the limits of our generosity, and to deny us the narcissistic pleasure of nurturing tiny beings through which life has a future.
This goofy, looming, unpredictable, garish, frantic, bouncy, nonsensical parody of the child has emerged from beyond the horizon of childish optimism; it is clear from its expression that it has come forth out of despair to reproduce its own failure.
Like an adolescent, its feet are too big for it - as if it had yet to grow into them, but it never will. The only fate left to the clown is to accept its punishment, its humiliation, and then depart.
We laugh awkwardly and perhaps to loudly, as we identify with the clown.
