lonely as the red noses of four clowns thrust up through snow, or: Fifty-Four Today

Westerberg is 54 today, above requested by Mr Abonilox. I confess the Mats haven't aged as well for me (or me for them) (and there is a Beatles' affect; I don't need to hear the Mats, I can listen to them in my head anytime I want, often when I don't) as Westerberg's solo music, so solo music today.

• The Goat will be back whenever I feel like it, don't worry (or do worry, your choice). I actually backed the green blog up in case the reboot didn't work so I wasn't risking much, but very nice to have a dashboard that works, expect lots more fucking around, I'm thoroughly enjoying it, and I realize you're the one who will suffer for it, I appreciate your forbearance, understand your lack of it too.
• I didn't forget the daily Maqroll precept, I forgot to put the book in my backpack last night and it's sitting on my desk at work.
• DC United will have a new stadium before the Washington Racial Slurs win another Super Bowl as long as they're owned by Puny DaiMon Snyder and DC United will never have a new stadium, Fuck Me Jig.
• Anybody! Photoshop me Puny DaiMon Snyder into a Ferenghi, I'll send you $20 to buy your favorite beverage(s).
• Speaking of motherfucking oligarchs, $6 billion over the next ten years is pocket change to the motherfuckers who own NFL teams, who rule the world. Adding, consider that if the oligarchs are happy to chisel benefits from those who protect their power, imagine what they've planned for those they consider leaches.
• Kidding. They consider those who protect their power leaches too.
• Oligarchs love Sioux Falls South Dakota!
• A goodbye to teaching.
• On childhood and parenting.

• When Saturday Comes' best and worse of English soccer part one.
• When Saturday Come's best and worse of English soccer part two.
• The top 5 ideological practices reinforced by end-of-the-year "Best Of" lists!!! via Edmond via twitter:

1. The fashion-system (obsession w/ small differences in context of a large but unremarked sameness; the importance of being “up-to-date).
2. The star-system (which items are common to most lists? which item will “win”?).
3. Construction of social and personal identity as the sum of market choices.
4. Manifest populism (Anyone can do it – it’s fun! Who’s on your list? Here's mine! etc).
5. Latent elitism (The last word always really goes to the cultural arbiters & gatekeepers).

• The Past. Tom's latest. 
• Reminder: back-up to this blog is in mosaic.
• WFMU's Liz Berg has 99 good free songs you can download.
• Live Julianna Barwick (one of her songs make overnight appearances here occasionally as soundtrack to a Planet video posted when I need to).

GRACIOUS LIVING     'TARA'

Tom Raworth

lonely as four cherries on a tree

at night, new moon, wet roads

a moth or a snowflake

whipping past glass
 

lonely as the red noses of four clowns

thrust up through snow

their shine four whitened panes

drawn from imagined memory
 

lonely as no other lives

touching to recorded water

all objects stare

their memories aware
 

lonely as pain

recoiling from itself

imagining the cherries

and roses reaching out

Seeing the Distant City Bathed in Moonlight and Staring Seriously at Them They Liken the Moon to a Cow and Its Light to Milk

Went to sleep listening to and woke up with Henry Cow in my head. Today's Maqroll precept: A caravan doesn't symbolize or represent anything. Our mistake is to think it's going somewhere, leaving somewhere. The caravan exhausts its meaning by merely moving from place to place. The animals in the caravan know this, but the camel drivers don't. It will always be this way. There wasn't a cow at Planet's petting zoo at Gambier this past October but there was a goat, photo above. Sorry, you missed the goat. She'll be back.







KORA IN HELL: IMPROVISATIONS XI

William Carlos Williams

XI

1

     Why pretend to remember the weather two years back? Why not? Listen close then repeat after others what they have just said and win a reputation for vivacity. Oh feed upon petals of edelweiss! one dew drop, if it be from the right flower, is five years’ drink!

  _______________

     Having once taken the plunge the situation that preceded it becomes obsolete  which a moment before was alive with malignant rigidities.

2

     When beldams dig clams their fat hams (it’s always beldams) balanced near Tellus’s hide, this rhinoceros pelt, these lumped stone—buffoonery of midges on a bull’s thigh—invoke,—what you will: birth’s glut, awe at God’s craft, youth’s poverty, evolution of a child’s caper, man’s poor inconsequence. Eclipse of all things; sun’s self turned hen’s rump.

     Cross a knife and fork and listen to the church bells! It is the harvest moon’s made wine of our blood. Up over the dark factory into the blue glare start the young poplars. They whisper: It is Sunday! It is Sunday! But the laws of the country have been stripped bare of leaves. Out over the marshes flickers our laughter. A lewd anecdote’s the chase. On through the vapory heather! And there at banter’s edge the city looks at us sidelong with great eyes—lifts to its lips heavenly milk! Lucina, O Lucina! beneficent cow, how have we offended thee?

________________

     Hilariously happy because of some obscure wine of the fancy which they have drunk four rollicking companions take delight in the thought that they have thus evaded the stringent laws of the county. Seeing the distant city bathed in moonlight and staring seriously at them they liken the moon to a cow and its light to milk.

This Morning We Shall Spend a Few Minutes Upon the Study of Symbolism, Which Is Basic to the Nature of Money, or: Born Ninety-One Years Ago Today

Even though I should have known from The Recognitions that the world was not waiting breathlessly for my message, that it already knew, and was quite happy to live with all these false values, I’d always been intrigued by the charade of the so-called free market, so-called free enterprise system, the stock market conceived of as what was called a “people’s capitalism” where you “owned a part of the company” and so forth. All of which is true; you own shares in a company, so you literally do own part of the assets. But if you own a hundred shares out of six or sixty or six hundred million, you’re not going to influence things very much. Also, the fact that people buy securities—the very word in this context is comic—not because they are excited by the product—often you don’t know what the company makes—but simply for profit: The stock looks good and you buy it. The moment it looks bad you sell it. What had actually happened in the company is not your concern. In many ways I thought . . . the childishness of all this. Because JR himself, which is why he is eleven years old, is motivated only by good-natured greed. JR was, in other words, to be a commentary on this free enterprise system running out of control. Looking around us now with a two-trillion-dollar federal deficit and billions of private debt and the banks, the farms, basic industry all in serious trouble, it seems to have been rather prophetic.

 - William Gaddis in a 1986 interview.

• RIP Walter McCabe. Rake, fraud, friend.
• Today's Maqroll precept: Hawks screaming above the precipices and circling as they hunt their prey are the only image I can think of to evoke the men who judge, legislate, govern. Damn them.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Jon Swift Memorial Blog Round-Up. Jon Smith did me many Kinds. Many of my long-time regulars (thank you) found me via Jon Smith.
• A reminder: if you are Kinding me but me not you, please let me know.
• The least marketable skills in America.

• darkness hollows.
• Sequenza 21 recommends 31 albums of 2013.
• More on rock song intros.
• More on rock song intros.
• My four contributions. I've always thought India, the first song on the first Furs album, the best first song on a first album ever, in part because of the intro.
• More on rock song intros.
• This:

MONEY

  
Howard Nemerov
  

This morning we shall spend a few minutes   

Upon the study of symbolism, which is basic   

To the nature of money. I show you this nickel.   

Icons and cryptograms are written all over

The nickel: one side shows a hunchbacked bison   

Bending his head and curling his tail to accommodate   

The circular nature of money. Over him arches

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, and, squinched in   

Between that and his rump, E PLURIBUS UNUM,

A Roman reminiscence that appears to mean   

An indeterminately large number of things   

All of which are the same. Under the bison

A straight line giving him a ground to stand on   

Reads FIVE CENTS. And on the other side of our nickel   

There is the profile of a man with long hair   

And a couple of feathers in the hair; we know   

Somehow that he is an American Indian, and   

He wears the number nineteen-thirty-six.

Right in front of his eyes the word LIBERTY, bent   

To conform with the curve of the rim, appears   

To be falling out of the sky Y first; the Indian   

Keeps his eyes downcast and does not notice this;   

To notice it, indeed, would be shortsighted of him.   

So much for the iconography of one of our nickels,   

Which is now becoming a rarity and something of   

A collectors’ item: for as a matter of fact

There is almost nothing you can buy with a nickel,   

The representative American Indian was destroyed   

A hundred years or so ago, and his descendants’   

Relations with liberty are maintained with reservations,   

Or primitive concentration camps; while the bison,   

Except for a few examples kept in cages,

Is now extinct. Something like that, I think,

Is what Keats must have meant in his celebrated   

Ode on a Grecian Urn.

                               Notice, in conclusion,

A number of circumstances sometimes overlooked   

Even by experts: (a) Indian and bison,

Confined to obverse and reverse of the coin,   

Can never see each other; (b) they are looking   

In opposite directions, the bison past

The Indian’s feathers, the Indian past

The bison’s tail; (c) they are upside down

To one another; (d) the bison has a human face   

Somewhat resembling that of Jupiter Ammon.

I hope that our studies today will have shown you   

Something of the import of symbolism

With respect to the understanding of what is symbolized.

They Find a Soul, and Their Dim Moan is Wrought into a Singing Sad and Beautiful, or: Born Sixty-Three Years Ago Today

Alex Chilton was born sixty-three days ago today. Not going to type it all out again, click the Alex Chilton and Big Star tags for other posts here on Chilton. El Goodo is probably on all of them, it's my first and favorite love. I just used one of my gift cards at the joint of one evil motherfucker on the DVD:







Love love love, but did you see, around the 2:00 mark, a blurb exclaiming that this documentary was going to introduce Big Star to a whole new generation? No, all but a very few of the whole new generation (roughly the same percentage as my old generation) will never understand the mythologizing of Alex Chilton by a few of my generation, all of us who aren't geniuses but are brighter than our stations and see in Chilton's failures to achieve his deserved super-stardom a comforting robe to warm in after another cold bath at our station, nor will the whole new generation listen to Big Star any more than almost everyone of my old generation.

• But the music stands.
• Today's Maqroll precept: Some things must be paid for, others must remain debts forever. That's what we believe. The trap lies in the "must." We go on paying, we go on owing, and often we don't even know it.
• Rest in Peace, John Harvill. Yes, he was famous in Gaithersburg as the football coach, he also taught me to drive (did you know, young people, that Drivers Ed used to be offered in public schools) and lived in my neighborhood on Gaither Street and even years after I graduated he would remember my name and shake my hand. Good guy.
• Off Vesta's review of Off Vesta 2013.
• Willfully Obscure's review of Willfully Obscure 2013.
• The Top Ten most popular articles of 2013 at New Inquiry.
• Sinkhole of Dreams: locating Boston's "literary renaissance."
• Styx. More beauty via Tom.
• Re: below link. Serendipity is awesome and awful: Styx's Sail Away is possibly the worst rock song intro ever.
• Best rock intro contest!
• Was going to play this Giftmas but waited until today, BUT WHY ISN'T THIS RECOGNIZED AS THE GREATEST CHRISTMAS SONG EVER!

MOUNTAIN PINES

Robinson Jeffers

In scornful upright loneliness they stand,
       Counting themselves no kin of anything
       Whether of earth or sky. Their gnarled roots cling
Like wasted fingers of a clutching hand
In the grim rock. A silent spectral band
       They watch the old sky, but hold no communing
       With aught. Only, when some lone eagle's wing
Flaps past above their gray and desolate land,
Or when the wind pants up a rough-hewn glen,
       Bending them down as with an age of thought,
       Or when, 'mid flying clouds that can not dull
Her constant light, the moon shines silver, then
       They find a soul, and their dim moan is wrought
       Into a singing sad and beautiful.

Her Father's Daughter's Gift to Her Father

My daughter Planet has watched me read and reread Moby Dick year after year for years, hours into days, days into weeks, weeks into months. For Giftmas this year she special ordered for me an abridgment that distills the novel to its essence so I don't spend three months of 2014 rereading the full version yet again. I've read the abridged 42 times since Giftmas. Wait.......43. Like the original, it gets better with each rereading.

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

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*

It Is Undone Business I Speak Of, This Morning, or: Born 103 Years Ago Today

MAXIMUS TO GLOUCESTER, LETTER 27 [WITHHELD]

Charles Olson

I come back to the geography of it,
the land falling off to the left
where my father shot his scabby golf
and the rest of us played baseball
into the summer darkness until no flies
could be seen and we came home
to our various piazzas where the women
buzzed

To the left the land fell to the city,
is of a tent spread to feed lobsters
to Rexall conventioneers, and my father,
a man for kicks, came out of the tent roaring
with a bread-knife in his teeth to take care of
a druggist they'd told him had made a pass at
my mother, she laughing, so sure, as round
as her face, Hines pink and apple,
under one of those frame hats women then


This, is no bare incoming
of abstract form, this

is no welter or the forms
of those events, this,

Greeks, is the stopping
of the battle

          It is the imposing
of all those antecedent predecessions, the precessions

of me, the generation of those facts
which are my words, it is coming

from all that I no longer am, yet am,
the slow westward motion of

more than I am


There is no strict personal order

for my inheritance.


               No Greek will be able

to discriminate by body.

                    An American

is a complex of occasions,

themselves a geometry

of spatial nature.


          I have this sense,

that I am one

with my skin


               Plus this - plus this:

that forever the geography

which leans in

on me I compel

backwards I compel Gloucester

to yield, to

change

          Polis

is this

I posted this and the two poems and photo last year on Olson's birthday:
  

It's been 25 years since I read The Maximus Poems. A friend has been badgering me to revisit Olson, especially since I've been posting Black Mountain occasionally this past year; the Library's beaten, pencil-marked and high-lighted copy has been on my desk since last week when I grabbed it from a pile of discharged books; I stumble upon his birthday today; I've got Amazon gift cards in my wallet: 2013 to be the year I reread The Maximus Poems, expect lots of poems here.

UPDATE! 2013 was also supposed to be the year of Proust, that didn't work out, but it WAS! the year of The Maximus Poems, not every day - on purpose, the first time since the last time until the next time that's worked - but in sequence, the first half of 2014 (at least) will be year I finish rereading The Maximus poems. As for lots here, my favorite ones are hard to find to copy and paste, ridiculously hard if not impossible to type, and I didn't think anyone would mind.

THE CONDITION OF THE LIGHT FROM THE SUN

on ground level
up on top of the world
the Bulgar and his sons
in the eye of ice
over the left shoulder
North North East
on a line extending
directly half way distance
between the left neck
and the ridge above
the road which passes over
the top of the world
constituted of color
divided among them
the Throne the Kingdom the Power

 

• The Bettie Serveert song is Theme Song Four because it makes me stupidly happy, I daydream I could someday be that happy, but when I change bloglook like I compulsively need to every time since the last until the next it's the Theme Song I don't think is ceremoniously necessary on the first day, the only one necessary on the second.
• The Surface.
• Today's Maqroll precept:

A knife in the body of a sleeping man. The bare lips of a wound that does not bleed. Vertigo, the death rattle, the final stillness. Like certain truths that life fires at us - insoluble, unerring, erratic, indifferent life.

• Mirror and self: on narcissism.
• Modernity, enchantment, fictionalism.
• Top 100 Tweeting Bloggers! I've only 371,883 fewer followers than number one.
• Professional Suicide, part 1.
• Vote Goat in 2014!
• Ten history books you need read?
• RIP Paul Blair.
• 2014 is going to be the year I really read Emily Dickinson for the first time.
• Emily Dickinson writes a letter. 
• Alright, have this Olson poem below the song.
• Fell asleep listening to Coil, woke up with Coil in my head. I realize Coil doesn't really fit with Charles Olson poems (though I could be wrong). I am not allowed to listen to Coil on trips to and from Ohio to visit Planet. More in weeks ahead.

MAXIMUS, TO HIMSELF

Charles Olson

I have had to learn the simplest things

last. Which made for difficulties.

Even at sea I was slow, to get the hand out, or to cross   

a wet deck.

               The sea was not, finally, my trade.

But even my trade, at it, I stood estranged

from that which was most familiar. Was delayed,

and not content with the man’s argument

that such postponement   

is now the nature of

obedience,

               that we are all late

               in a slow time,

               that we grow up many

               And the single   

               is not easily

               known

It could be, though the sharpness (the achiote)   

I note in others,

makes more sense

than my own distances. The agilities

               they show daily

               who do the world’s   

               businesses

               And who do nature’s   

               as I have no sense   

               I have done either

I have made dialogues,

have discussed ancient texts,

have thrown what light I could, offered   

what pleasures

doceat allows

               

               But the known?

This, I have had to be given,

a life, love, and from one man   

the world.

               Tokens.

               But sitting here

               I look out as a wind   

               and water man, testing   

               And missing

               some proof

I know the quarters

of the weather, where it comes from,   

where it goes. But the stem of me,   

this I took from their welcome,

or their rejection, of me

               And my arrogance

               was neither diminished   

               nor increased,

               by the communication

2

It is undone business

I speak of, this morning,   

with the sea

stretching out

from my feet

Another Way of Putting It Is Like Slathering Jam on a Scrape

Did you see yesterday's maroon (and bleggalgazing explanation)? Gone. The maroon, not the bleggalgazing: blooger can only one template at a time. As predicted, ended up with Scuba Dog. As requested, dark type on white background and larger print for easier reading. By request, no more bleggalgazing theory today. By request, more bleggalgazing theory soon. By indirect request, I've reduced the number of blogs displayed on page so page loads quicker; use the expansion avatar to see other blogs - no one has been purged. By personal edict, more fuck this and fuck it and a different flavor of damnlessness. I know this looks much better on wider screens than narrower, I don't know what to do to fix it, suggestions solicited. Please let me know of other bugs and shit should you find any (and suggestions how to fix if you know how). I'd say regular programming returns soon, but it never left. Here's Bleggalgazing Anthem Number Two, played here far too often:

• Today's Maqroll, Precept Number Two: Every day we're different, but we always forget the same is true for others as well. Perhaps this is what people call solitude. If not, it's solemn imbecility.
• Scuba-Dog is default background but there will be swaps.
• The essence of NeoLiberalism and the Sorcerer's Apprentice.
• A Christmas Speculation: Democrats, Republicans, bible-wrestling, much more.
• Very serious populists: voting and maintenance of hegemony.
• Status of Fuck-Me-Jig: latest on DC United's new stadium.
• The Hot Mess: new work by Frances.
• Nightly encounters: new work by Tom.
• Intro to Oulipo.
• A review of the new Coen Brothers' movie, The Hobbit 2: The Desolation of Smaug.
• Three-Mountain Pass: beautiful post on Vietnamese poetry, serendipitously found this morning a few days after a discussion with a friend who was telling me of the wonders of Vietnamese poetry, she a native speaker and poet.
• Guess which of three poems was written by a student.
• Prunella's trip to California and latest playlist.
• Ira and Georgia (these guys) DJed last night on WFMU.
• Here's Bleggalgazing Anthem Number Three, played here far too often, and below the poem Bleggalgazing Anther Number Four, played here far too often.

ONE LOVE STORY, EIGHT TAKES

Brenda Shaughnessy

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
                                    Roland Barthes

                                               1

One version of the story is I wish you back—

that I used each evening evening out

what all day spent wrinkling.

I bought a dress that was so extravagantly feminine

you could see my ovaries through it.

This is how I thought I would seduce you.

This is how frantic I hollowed out.

                                                   2

Another way of telling it

is to hire some kind of gnarled

and symbolic troll to make

a tape recording.

Of plastic beads coming unglued

from a child’s jewelry box.

This might be an important sound,

like serotonin or mighty mitochondria,

so your body hears about

how you stole the ring made

from a glittery opiate

and the locket that held candy.

                                                    3

It’s only fair that I present yet another side,

as insidious as it is,

because two sides hold up nothing but each other.

A tentacled skepticism,

a suspended contempt,

such fancies and toxins form a third wall.

A mean way to end

and I never dreamed we meant it.

                                                    4

Another way of putting it is like

slathering jam on a scrape.

Do sweets soothe pain or simply make it stick?

Which is the worst! So much technology

and no fix for sticky if you can’t taste it.

I mean there’s no relief unless.

So I’m coming, all this excitement,

to your house. To a place where there’s no room for play.

It is possible you’ll lock me out and I’ll finally

focus on making mudcakes look solid in the rain.

                                                    5

In some cultures the story told is slightly different—

in that it is set in an aquarium and the audience participates

as various fish. The twist comes when it is revealed

that the most personally attractive fish have eyes

only on one side and repel each other like magnets.

The starfish is the size of an eraser and does as much damage.

Starfish, the eponymous and still unlikely hero, has

those five pink moving suckerpads

that allow endless permutations so no solid memory,

no recent history, nothing better, left unsaid.

                                                    6

The story exists even when there are no witnesses,

kissers, tellers. Because secrets secrete,

and these versions tend to be slapstick, as if in a candy

factory the chocolate belted down the conveyor too fast

or everyone turned sideways at the same time by accident.

This little tale tries so hard to be humorous,

wants so badly to win affection and to lodge.

Because nothing is truly forgotten and loved.

                                                    7

Three million Richards can’t be wrong.

So when they levy a critique of an undertaking which,

in their view, overtakes, I take it seriously.

They think one may start a tale off whingy

and wretched in a regular voice.

But when one strikes out whimsically,

as if meta-is-better, as if it isn’t you,

as if this story is happening to nobody

it is only who you are fooling that’s nobody.

The Richards believe you cannot

privately jettison into the sky, just for fun.

You must stack stories from the foundation up.

From the sad heart and the feet tired of supporting it.

Language is architecture, after all, not an air capsule,

not a hang glide. This is real life.

So don’t invite anyone to a house that hasn’t been built.

Because no one unbuilds meticulously

and meticulosity is what allows hearing.

Three million Richards make one point.

I hear it in order to make others. Mistake.

                                                    8

As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story.

I was wrong to tell you how muti-true everything is,

when it would be truer to say nothing.

I’ve invented so much and prevented more.

But, I’d like to talk with you about other things,

in absolute quiet. In extreme context.

To see you again, isn’t love revision?

It could have gone so many ways.

This just one of the ways it went.

Tell me another.

A Man Marooned No Longer Looks for Ships, Imagines Anything on the Horizon

So, um, yeah. Return to maroonish. This blog's Theme Song and Theme Songs Seven (the Official Bleggalgazing Anthem), Two, and Three required to celebrate the shameless self-indulgence. The green was driving me nuts, not the color, the inability to manipulate the template. Changing BLCK2DGRD to dynamic also made the inability to manipulate the template here exponentially more maddening. I needed to stop thinking about not being able to change the template. It doesn't surprise people who know me it got to be an obsession, not being able to change the template. I needed to stop thinking about it, it had long ago creeped into other territories, was becoming a main topic, had passed from metaphor to topic. So I changed the template this morning to dynamic then changed it back to basic, the conversion freeing the Apply to Template functionality, so yay me if not you. I didn't deliberately wait for the second slowest day of the year in Blegsylvania, I woke up this morning and said, Fuck it, do it or shut up, and I'm incapable of shutting up. Fine metaphors abound. More dicking around to come! yay me if not you. If I can figure out how to add blogrolls to dynamic templates, might end up there.

• Marooned.
• The Laid-Back Guy.
• As promised, the Thirteen Precepts of Maqroll the Gaviero, one a linky post until done. Number one: Thinking about time, trying to find out if past and future are valid and, in fact, exist, leads us into a labyrinth that is no less incomprehensible for being familiar.
• Hints of others.
• A midwinter celebration. 
• Bleggalgazing. I'm flattered the term stuck elsewhere.
• Bleggalgazing and remembering Jon Swift.
• Proust, for those of you who do.
• Bomb Party's Top Ten songs of year.

MYSELF I SING

George Oppen

Me! he says, hand on his chest.
Actually, his shirt.
          And there, perhaps,
The question.

Pioneers! But trailer people?
Wood box full of tools—
               The most
American. A sort of
Shrinking
          in themselves. A
Less than adult: old.

A pocket knife,
A tool—
          And I
Here talking to the man?
               The sky

That dawned along the road
And all I've been
Is not myself? I think myself
Is what I've seen and not myself

A man marooned
No longer looks for ships, imagines
Anything on the horizon. On the beach
The ocean ends in water. Finds a dune
And on the beach sits near it. Two.
He finds himself by two.
               Or more.
'Incapable of contact
Save in incidents'
               And yet at night
Their weight is part of mine.
For we are all housed now, all in our apartments,
The world untended to, unwatched.
And there is nothing left out there
As night falls, but the rocks

I Am the Snouted Creature That Bites Through Anything, Root, Wire, or Can

Always with the Theme Songs. Long-timers here can vouch that the bottom live song has been Theme Song of a Month more than any other song. Also too, here, this shitty blog's back-up and archive renamed and reworked to display history of this blog in images - gifs working - plus a favorite poem (probably the poem posted here most often) and futile second use of a tag.







MOLY

Thom Gunn

Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake.

I woke. What beasthood skin she made me take?

Leathery toad that ruts for days on end,

Or cringing dribbling dog, man’s servile friend,

Or cat that prettily pounces on its meat,

Tortures it hours, then does not care to eat:

Parrot, moth, shark, wolf, crocodile, ass, flea.

What germs, what jostling mobs there were in me.

    These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough.

No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof.

Into what bulk has method disappeared?

Like ham, streaked. I am gross—grey, gross, flap-eared.

The pale-lashed eyes my only human feature.

My teeth tear, tear. I am the snouted creature

That bites through anything, root, wire, or can.

If I was not afraid I’d eat a man.

Oh a man’s flesh already is in mine.

Hand and foot poised for risk. Buried in swine.

    I root and root, you think that it is greed,

It is, but I seek out a plant I need.

Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy,

To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly:

Cool flesh of magic in each leaf and shoot,

From milky flower to the black forked root.

From this fat dungeon I could rise to skin

And human title, putting pig within.

I push my big grey wet snout through the green,

Dreaming the flower I have never seen.

With Its Miniature Plastic Knives, Its Tuna Salad and Saran-Wrapped Genitalia Will Somebody Please Get Me Out of Here, Sorry

  


Double birthdays today. Jorma Kaukonen is 73 today. Holyfuck, the memory cascades, this song especially.

Hey, Adrian Belew is 64 (fixed, thanks Davidly) today. Ask Hamster about seeing The Bears mid-80s with Earthgirl and Smam Pith.





  

• Yes, these are the traditional songs. I don't know why I do some birthdays one way and some birthdays another.
• What Surveillance Valley knows about you. Exactly what you think its about, Surveillance Valley, if anyone there cared, could run algorithms, tell me which musicians get new songs every birthday, same songs every birthday on purpose, same songs every birthday because of my laziness, or a mix of old and new because of my laziness.
• How your data are deeply-mined.
• Christmas surveillance in Scarfolk.
• Happy Festivus from the Stiftung. 2013 in review. Dr Leo and I often agree, often disagree, which is cool.
• Cherokee in snow. Another gorgeous post from Tom.
• A white American in South Africa.

• OK, the first and last two are traditional, the above is by request by Edmond. 
• Fuck me and my manic over-compensation of responsibility now for all the years I was a manic irresponsible shit. I was an accomplished irresponsible shit.
• It's related to the compulsiveness that drives this shitty blog.
• Gonna spend the next week seeking wisdom from Mutis's Maqroll. 
• Early in the first of seven novellas that make up Alvero Mutis' The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, Maqroll says: I know it's naive and useless, but I've established certain precepts, one of my favorite exercises. It makes me feel better, makes me think I'm bringing order to something inside me. Remnants of life at the Jesuit academy, they do no good, lead nowhere, but they have that quality of benign magic I always turn to when I feel the foundations giving way. Here they are. Well, hello mirror, I know someone else who thinks like this. Actually not starting today, there will be one a day hence each linky post until they are spent, should be the about the same number of days it takes me to finish my annual reading of the book.
• I still have one extra copy, if anyone wants it.
• UPDATE! Is claimed.
• New Inquiry's Sunday readings.
• Lydia Lunch, self-help guru.
• David Byrne interviewed on the music industry(and more) and the dangers of streaming.
• Adrian Belew was lead guitarist for the best Talking Heads line-up ever. That tour, three of the best nights of my life:

DEDICATION

Franz Wright

It’s true I never write, but I would gladly die with you.

Gladly lower myself down alone with you into the enormous mouth

that waits, beyond youth, beyond every instant of ecstasy, remember:

before battle we would do each other’s makeup, comb each other’s

                   hair out

saying we are unconquerable, we are terrible and splendid—

the mouth waiting, patiently waiting. And I will meet you there

                   again

beyond bleeding thorns, the endless dilation, the fire that alters

                   nothing;

I am there already past snowy clouds, balding moss, dim

swarm of stars even we can step over, it is easier this time, I promise—

I am already waiting in your personal heaven, here is my hand,

I will help you across. I would gladly die with you still,

although I never write  

from this gray institution. See

they are so busy trying to cure me,

I’m condemned—sorry, I have been given the job

of vacuuming the desert forever, well, no more than eight hours

                   a day.

And it’s really just about a thousand miles of cafeteria;

a large one in any event. With its miniature plastic knives,

its tuna salad and Saran-Wrapped genitalia will somebody

                   please

get me out of here, sorry. I am happy to say that

every method, massive pharmaceuticals, art therapy

and edifying films as well as others I would prefer

not to mention—I mean, every single technique

known to the mouth—sorry!—to our most kindly

compassionate science is being employed

to restore me to normal well-being

and cheerful stability. I go on vacuuming

toward a small diamond light burning

off in the distance. Remember

me. Do you

remember me?   

In the night’s windowless darkness

when I am lying cold and numb

and no one’s fiddling with the lock, or

shining flashlights in my eyes,

although I never write, secretly

I long to die with you,

does that count?

So to Speak Its External Expression Etcet

Rick Nielsen is sixty-seven today. Sixty-seven. Sixty-fucking-seven. My Standard Cheap Trick Disclaimer: I love a third of Cheap Trick songs, meh another third, loathe the remaining third, they were on the daily soundtrack three decades ago, shoot me. That's today's monologue.

• Wasn't going to post today but discovered today is Niel Nielsen's birthday so matter is out of my hands.
• A new political woman.
• When silence is power.
• Constructing the shitting citizen.
• Medieval pet names.
• Interactive map of American English dialects. 
• Top minority language map of Europe. 
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Shimmering neon lights.
• Trembling Blue Stars.
• Brecht, for those of you who do.
• Ceravolo reading.
• Death and the Powers: A Robot Pageant.
• Busker with a Harp.

THE CONSOLATIONS OF SOCIOBIOLOGY

Bill Knott

Those scars rooted me. Stigmata stalagmite

I sat at a drive-in and watched the stars

Through a straw while the Coke in my lap went

Waterier and waterier. For days on end or

Nights no end I crawled on all fours or in

My case no fours to worship you: Amoeba Behemoth.

—Then you explained your DNA calls for

Meaner genes than mine and since you are merely

So to speak its external expression etcet

Ergo among your lovers I’ll never be ...

Ah that movie was so faraway the stars melting

Made my thighs icy. I see: it’s not you

Who is not requiting me, it’s something in you

Over which you have no say says no to me.

We Must Have Heard the Same Dogs Barking, or: Tricky Work Sometimes Not to Smell Yourself, Ferment Being Constant, or: I Had All These Precious Things to Burn, or: Theme Songs December 2013

HARD WORK

Roddy Lumsden

Tricky work sometimes not to smell yourself,

ferment being constant—constant as carnival sweat

(a non-stock phrase I palmed from a girl from Canada,

a land where I once saw this graffiti: life is great).

And I have tasted myself, especially when I spilled

sinigang all down my arm in a Pinoy workers' caff

in Little Manila. I drank sinigang (is soup drunk?)

in Big Manila too, with all its dead skyscrapers.

Seen myself? In looking glasses or, looking down,

stocky as a shift working cop, maybe a Mexican cop

full of beans (frijoles, I mean, not vim), paunch full

of sopa de vigilia, pulling over a sozzled bus driver.

Heard myself speak fluently in my own language,

have heard myself too described as hard work

(as hard to get through as Scotch broth), though once

someone rather bladdered told me I was magnetic.

And I may as well admit that I have touched myself

(who hasn't?). In a forest, on a train, in New York

and Paris with unparalleled handiwork, sinning   

as I go, merry as an office boy spooning onion soup.

The Secret of This Journey Is to Let the Wind Blow Its Dust All Over Your Body, to Let It Go on Blowing, to Step Lightly, Lightly All the Way Through Your Ruins, and Not to Lose Any Sleep Over the Dead, Who Surely Will Bury Their Own, Don't Worry

Yo La Tengo offers a holiday present. Download the whole show here.

Yo La Tengo would be in the inner orbit of bands rotating through the two non-permanent spots of My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game even if they weren't Kind folk.







So you're going to do a Yo La Tengo cascade tomorrow, K said at what we hope is the penultimate but is probably the last Thursday Night Pints of 2013 after I said Holyfuck! at a tweet that offered the above. Yup, I said. Giftmas shit was all over the bar, crappy Giftmas rock played every other song on the muzack, not a single unexpected song in the playlist. Nothing, said L, reminds me more I hate Bruce Springsteen than his fucking Christmas song. True that, I said, getting up to buy a pint for me and two squat tumblers filled to the sixteenth with ridiculously priced amber Nyquil for my friends. At the bar, waiting, I looked at the empty fourth chair at the table that used to be filled by D, when I got back K and L were talking about D, how the next time the three of us see each other we're more likely to be wearing Show Respect Clothes than drinking in a Georgetown bar. Well, fuck, I said, sitting down. Peace, D, said L. Clink.

• Harder not faster. 
• No one in Yo La Tengo is going to read this shitty blog, but just in case, Thanks! for your generosity with your music.
• I fail a hundred times for every time I succeed so who am I to harangue, but be Kind, motherfuckers, it's not as much work or mandatory shit-swilling as legend suggests.
• Barring KABOOM! music & poems alone this weekend (if anything, besides possible template watershedding).
• A friend has gone into my coding and says she thinks I can now change templates even if I still can't change anything on the template currently used. It'd be a throw the switch see what happens moment. She says she doesn't know whether the Apply to Template button which doesn't work now on my current template will work if I change templates, meaning if I change template and can't alter its appearance I not only will never get back to this green again, I will be stuck with whatever defaults the template I move to, and all subsequent templates, default to.
• What to do, what to do? Tune in Saturday to see either change or not, and everyday! though if I do it it will be this weekend, unless it's next Wednesday, or...
• Never mind, I'm not going to throw the switch, who am I kidding, fine metaphors abound.
• A reminder for regulars, perhaps news to newbies, a dark type on light background version of this shitty blog exists here, it was created during a domain name/Blooger crisis this past summer, now used as back-up for the upcoming Blooger crises, whenever, whatever.
• There are multiple new sites in blogrolls, please visit when they float to the top with new posts.
• There are multiple old sites in blogrolls, please visit when they float to the top with new posts.
• Please let me know if you are Kinding me and me not you.
• Thanks for reading. 

• I-Glasses. New Tom.
• but mostly she's just itching to kick. New Brad.
• Arcology is not the scholarly study of arks.
• Freddie Mercury's home videos.
• Prunella's 2013 playlist.
• Randal's 2013 playlist.
• Both have excellent taste with the unfortunate exception of Alice in Chains, a band of Soundgarden level suck.
• As Kindly put as I'm capable.
• At the Executed Murderer's Grave. A poem by James Wright, D's favorite poet.
• A Secret Gratitude. Ibid.
• In Response to a Rumor that the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling West Virginia  Has Been Condemned. Ibid.
• The Blessing. Ibid.
• D sent me the Wright poem below in an email over the summer, no doubt for a reason.

THE JOURNEY

James Wright

Anghiari is medieval, a sleeve sloping down   

A steep hill, suddenly sweeping out

To the edge of a cliff, and dwindling.

But far up the mountain, behind the town,   

We too were swept out, out by the wind,   

Alone with the Tuscan grass.

Wind had been blowing across the hills

For days, and everything now was graying gold   

With dust, everything we saw, even

Some small children scampering along a road,   

Twittering Italian to a small caged bird.   

We sat beside them to rest in some brushwood,   

And I leaned down to rinse the dust from my face.

I found the spider web there, whose hinges   

Reeled heavily and crazily with the dust,

Whole mounds and cemeteries of it, sagging   

And scattering shadows among shells and wings.   

And then she stepped into the center of air   

Slender and fastidious, the golden hair

Of daylight along her shoulders, she poised there,   

While ruins crumbled on every side of her.   

Free of the dust, as though a moment before   

She had stepped inside the earth, to bathe herself.

I gazed, close to her, till at last she stepped   

Away in her own good time.

Many men

Have searched all over Tuscany and never found   

What I found there, the heart of the light   

Itself shelled and leaved, balancing   

On filaments themselves falling. The secret

Of this journey is to let the wind   

Blow its dust all over your body,

To let it go on blowing, to step lightly, lightly

All the way through your ruins, and not to lose

Any sleep over the dead, who surely   

Will bury their own, don’t worry.