You'd Think There'd Be a Way of Cutting Out Those Self-Destructive Layers of Introspection

United lost, didn't go, didn't watch. Five games in June, three at RFK, two in Germantown, I went to none. I sense a trend. United sucks, but that's not it, United sucked in 2010 and I didn't miss more than two and missed those because real life left me no choice: in fact, that was one of my favorite years at RFK, only the loyalest were there, we congratulated ourselves on our loyalty. Landru and SeatSix both have had valid reasons for missing all five games, that's no excuse, I've gone by myself countless times, it was never a consideration to not go because they weren't there. This blog's lamest gag - what I think is this blog's lamest gag, you may think another gag(s) is lamer, say a month of at least one Pere Ubu song a day - is/was comparing my fervor or torpor towards United with my fervor or torpor towards my political tribalism, lame because the comparison was both cliched and true. The currencies aren't precisely pegged any more: my fervor or torpor towards my political tribalism is simply being redirected, my fervor or torpor towards my soccer team is descending into disinterest. I'd like to think the timing belt connecting the two still spins, but it's whining.

• But yes, finishing up a month of at least one David Thomas song a day with my favorites. The one at top is this shitty blog's Theme Song Two. 
• Liberals love me, this I know.
• PRISM slides.
• Why were some PRISM slides withheld?
• Secondary action.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Don't be a relay in the network.
• PDF of Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians.
• Beckett and self-translation.
• So, today's the last day of google reader. Types F-U-C-K-I-N-G  G-O-O-G-L-E into google free blogging platform. I think I've transferred all the sites I google readered to the self-updating blogrolls on google's free blogging platform - I use the self-updating blogrolls on Google's free blogging platform as my bookmarks, whenever I think F-U-C-K-I-N-G  G-O-O-G-L-E I remember the self-updating blogrolls, how much I like and use them, then type a sentence remarkably similar to this one.
• And then there's this shitty blog's total dependence on F-U-C-K-I-N-G  G-O-O-G-L-E's youtube for music content. 

ALL THE MEMBERS OF MY TRIBE ARE LIARS

John Fuller

Think of a self-effacing missionary
Tending the vices of a problem tribe.
He knows the quickest cure for beri-beri
And how to take a bribe.

And so the mind will never say it’s beaten
By primitive disturbance of the liver;
Its logic will prevent its being eaten,
Get it across the river.

But faced with this assured inconsequence
That damns the very method that is used,
It leaves the heart unproselytised and hence
Admits that it’s confused.

I know I’m acting, but I still must act.
I melt to foolishness, and want it ended.
Why it continues is this simple fact:
I’d hate to end it.

For now the jungle moods assert their terms
And there’s no way to check them if they lie:
The mind attempts to solve the thing, but squirms
And knows exactly why.

The world is everything that is the case.
You cannot see it if you are inside it.
That’s why the tortoise always wins the race:
the very terms decide it.

I cannot help it if I am contented
With being discontented that I falter:
That’s why psychology was first invented
So that we needn’t alter.

It is a strange position to be in.
It would be different if I didn’t know
Why the unlikely animal should win,
Which cannibal should row.

You’d think there’d be a way of cutting out
Those self-destructive layers of introspection.
To reach the truth at last without a doubt
Of making the connection.

That’s why the missionary, on his guard,
Is wondering why the cannibal’s so merry,
And why it is so very very hard
To be a missionary.

Keep Your Units Pliable and Folded, the Recourse a Mere Specter, Like You Have It Coming to You, Awash with the New Day and Its Abominable Antithesis

Two days left in June, two more Pere Ubu songs. When I started the gag June 1 in celebration of David Thomas' music having one of three permanent spots in My Sillyass Deserted Island Game (Thomas turned 60 on June 14th) I had no idea it would result in a Pere Ubu concert being scheduled for September in DC. Thank me, I'm welcome. In fact, had Prunella not alerted me to a Pere Ubu concert in Columbus Ohio I wouldn't have gone to Ubu Projex to look at the tour schedule - when last I looked in early June all scheduled concerts were in Europe, none for the US. That, combined with the fact that Pere Ubu never comes to DC, means I need reevaluate my promise that the July 30th birthday of another permanent member of My Sillyass Deserted Island Game doesn't mean a Kate Bush song every day of July. She doesn't tour. As of today.

• When I mentioned this on twitter yesterday I got four votes for a daily Bush song.
• Yes and yes.
• NSA surveillance and the male gaze.
• The dark forces behind Snowden smears.
• The wonderful American world of informers and agents provocateurs.
• Daily yodel: the surveillance is not about terrorism.
• How to circumvent the will of the people.
• Police state Canada.
• Reflections on violence.
• Song that can only be sung once.
• Bleggalgaze: coffee, sofa, quiet, reading, aggregating, writing on Saturday morning, my favorite post of the week on the slowest blogday of the week.
• Pyrography.
• Epistle: Leaving.
• Two people have recommended InoReader as google reader replacement. Haven't tried in yet so can't vouch. Anyone use it?
• What we need is a new sort of paintbrush.
• One possible meaning.
• Lost fugue for Chet.
• Jim's Hawaiian Adventure, part four.
• You thought the Buckingham cascade was over?

MOTTLED TUESDAY

John Ashbery

Something was about to go laughably wrong,
whether directly at home or here,
on this random shoal pleading with its eyes
till it too breaks loose, caught in a hail of references.
I’ll add one more scoop
to the pile of retail.

Hey, you’re doing it, like I didn’t tell you
to, my sinking laundry boat, point of departure,
my white pomegranate, my swizzle stick.
We’re leaving again of our own volition f
or bogus patterned plains streaked by canals,
maybe. Amorous ghosts will pursue us
for a time, but sometimes they get, you know, confused and
forget to stop when we do, as they continue to populate this
fertile land with their own bizarre self-imaginings.
Here’s hoping the referral goes tidily, O brother.
Chime authoritatively with the pop-ups and extras.
Keep your units pliable and folded,
the recourse a mere specter, like you have it coming to you,
awash with the new day and its abominable antithesis,
OK? Don’t be able to make that distinction.

From the Green Country You Reconstruct in Your Brain, from the Rubble and Stink of Your Occupation, There Is No Moving Out

Are liberals stupid? K said as she read the title of this blog post on her tablet at Thursday Night Pints. That's the first sentence I'm going to type for the post, I said, capture the hypocrisy and irony of three well-off upper middle class white people bemoaning the state of progressivism in America on our digital devices while drinking designer beer and single malt scotches. My son, said L, tells me to go live a teepee and crap in a pit when I bitch about Democrats. It's like being told America, love it or leave it when I was protesting Vietnam in the early 70s. When I managed Crown Books stores in the early/mid 80s, I said after we each gave today's version of the same conversation regarding the Less-Shitty Problem updated for topicality, we sold Harlequin romances that literally were the same book over and over - the publisher's salesmen showed me - nouns blanks to be filled in for next months' editions, each book ending on the same page at the same place. They even had a formula, I said the salesman said, if the location was San Francisco the heroine's name was Kate, if the heroine's name was Francesca the location was London. K's phone rang, L made a phone call, I bought a round. Hilltop crosstalk for a small bit, real life for a bigger bit. We miss you, D. Then a return upon leaving to the Less-Shitty Problem, it's irresoluteness, for all the ________ of my opinions, all the _______ of yours. Write this sentence, said L: peggy pegs peg blanks with pegs.

• Jesse put that Lindsey Buckingham song in my head yesterday, immediate cascade sparked.
• Hamster, do you remember the name of the Random House sales rep? He was the Harlequin guy?
• Do you remember the name of the grey-haired hippie woman who was spooky sexy/unsexy, I think she was the Dell sales rep?
• For the record, L was calling us pegs.
• The time and space of contemporary war.
• Snowden: when China helped the US?
• The criminal NSA.
• The service of Snowden.
• Ex-con.
• Triskelions.
• Biggest Triskelion scandal yet?
• Triskelions and free speech.
• Triskelions and the profits of a police state.
• We, the Corporations?

UPDATE! 

PERE UBU PLAYING DC SEPTEMBER 10th!

Who's in? Just bought six tickets, Earthgirl and me, Richard, Mr Alarum, Hamster already in, who else? I can get more tickets.

• UPDATE! And they may be coming to a town near you too!
• You will jog for the master race.
• The perils of Paula Deen.
• No one who has ever dealt with any flavor of DC area Park Police will find this story surprising.
• Proverbial details.
• nighthawk.
• 80s indie pop remembered.
• WOWEE! Prunella just sent me news that Pere Ubu is playing Columbus, an hour's drive from Bamgier, in September. FIELD TRIP? 
• Forgive me, I love Lindsey Buckingham's music.

APPARITION OF THE EXILE

Bruce Weigl

There was another life of cool summer mornings, the dogwood air and the slag stink so gray like our monsoon which we loved for the rain and cool wind until the rot came into us. And I remember the boys we were the evening of our departure, our mothers waving through the train’s black pluming exhaust; they were not proud in their tears of our leaving, so don’t tell me to shut up about the war or I might pull something from my head, from my head, from my head that you wouldn’t want to see and whoever the people are might be offended.

From the green country you reconstruct in your brain, from the rubble and stink of your occupation, there is no moving out. A sweet boy who got drunk and brave on our long ride into the State draws a maze every day on white paper, precisely in his room of years as if you could walk into it. All day he draws and imagines his platoon will return from the burning river where he sent them sixteen years ago into fire. He can’t stop seeing the line of trees explode in white phosphorous blossoms and the liftship sent for them spinning uncontrollably beyond hope into the Citadel wall. Only his mother comes these days, drying the fruit in her apron or singing the cup of hot tea into his fingers which, like barbed wire, web the air.  

Mad-Eyed from Stating the Obvious

• I feel like shutting the fuck up today, though have reads, songs, poems since I'd collected them already.
• Start from common humanity.
• Luckily someone saves me from typing more than this sentence on Reiteration of Problems of -.06% Less-Shittyism.
• Seventeen contradictions and the end of capitalism.
• Challenging casino capitalism and authoritarian politics in an age of disposability.
• The war on contingency or, the outsourcing of commerce to the consumer.
• Corporate doesn't give a flying fuck about DOMA, Corporate got the SCOTUS decision it wanted.
• The Accidental Bricoleurs.
• One mile from my house.
• SeatSix finds a restaurant website that speaks my language.
• Shards of summer.
• Bleggalgazing a hiatus if not death.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• Krasznahorkai: Krasznahorkai, in other words, has invented a way of writing disenchanted fables. 
• I finished War and War and liked it but feel I'm not reading well enough to have appreciated what all the work it took was worth. Cause his books are work.
• Reading Gass' Middle C now, if it works (if my reading eye is working) I will return to Krasznahorkai's latest next.
• I killed a man who looks like you.
• Yes, I've been remiss giving you PJ Harvey songs.

 
ADVICE TO A PROPHET

Richard Wilbur

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,   

Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,

Not proclaiming our fall but begging us

In God’s name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,   

The long numbers that rocket the mind;

Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,   

Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.   

How should we dream of this place without us?—

The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,   

A stone look on the stone’s face?

Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive   

Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost

How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,   

How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip   

Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,

The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,

The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn

As Xanthus once, its gliding trout

Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without   

The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?   

Ask us, prophet, how we shall call

Our natures forth when that live tongue is all

Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean   

Horse of our courage, in which beheld

The singing locust of the soul unshelled,

And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose   

Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding   

Whether there shall be lofty or long standing   

When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

Tablespoons of Blue Lentils

 

• Mark McKinney is 54 today, two months and two days older than me. One of the funniest, saddest, wisest skits I've ever seen.
• Good lord, he's wearing the same glasses I have in the interview at the end. 
• I hearby pledge to watch the interviews at the end of KITH skits as they now exist on youtube via Nerdest whenever I need to squelch the urge to bleggalgaze.
• Good news: if you want to comment you no longer have to decipher the spam-catcher. Bad news, I've enabled comment moderation. Regulars can guess why.
• Opaque zones of empire.
• Triskelions.
• The costs of maintaining a Triskelion lifestyle are rising at the same time Triskelions enforce austerity on the peasants and increase surveillance on peasant dissent. Coincidence?
• Between the SCOTUS decision yesterday and the Snowden Incident's likely crescendo towards some noisy resolution this is going to be an especially cordial week between Obama supporters and Obama's critics from the Left. During the election cycle I fervently wished often here that John Roberts would walk in front of a bus on such a date that Obama would need name in the weeks of the conventions/Labor Day weekend both a Chief Justice and, if it wasn't the same person but a sitting Justice (and which would he choose in that case), a new Justice. The strongest argument (and the most dearly held) for Obama according to the Obama supporters I read or directly interacted with was who would name the replacements for retiring Justices between January 2013 to January 2017. Wouldn't it be great, I said, if Obama was forced to show his hand if he had to name a swing judge, one that would tip the Court left in 5-4s, while his political career is in the balance both with his voting base and with his Corporate sponsors?
• Still, it's never to late for John Roberts to walk in front of a bus.
• Because I am genuinely curious who Obama would pick.
• I'm guessing for easy legacy's sake - because I don't think Obama would nominate the swing-vote Justice you think you voted for Obama for - Obama hopes he only need replace Liberal justices during his second term.
• But say Obama need replace Roberts or Scalia or Alito or Kennedy or Thomas: if Obama named who you think you voted for Obama for, and Obama fought for that nominee's Senate ratification, spent the real political capital it would take for that person who you think you voted for Obama for, I wouldn't, for instance, dismiss as rank lies and false promises everything that Obama said in his climate speech yesterday.
• Today in self-incrimination.
• Your Fucking Washington Post pens a love letter to "top Democratic NSA defender" Dianne Feinstein, fails to mention her husband a war profiteer.

• Blindness.
• Insert cat video here interlude.
• Jim's Hawaiian Adventure, Part Three.
• Hamster! Are you alive? I've sent you emails. Do you want to join me and Planet and Ari tonight in Germanboyd's for DCU v Ningland Open Cup game? SeatSix probably game-day scratch, Landru out still with a pulled lung. Email me. Better yet, be at Napoleon's house at five, or if you're working in Ziosville, we can pick you up. And get a pizza.
• Barnes & Noble dying faster than expected.
• Slowly we rot.
• Shards of summer.
• Insect assassins.
• In case you missed it, there's a Big Star documentary being released next week.
• Brad reminded my of Anna Thorvaldsdottir. I know the name, know I've heard some music, fell of my radar. 

APOCALPYSE

Gerald Stern

Of all sixty of us I am the only one who went
to the four corners though I don't say it
out of pride but more like a type of regret,
and I did it because there was no one I truly believed
in though once when I climbed the hill in Skye
and arrived at the rough tables I saw the only other
elder who was a vegetarian--in Scotland--
and visited Orwell and rode a small motorcycle
to get from place to place; and I immediately
stopped eating fish and meat and lived on soups;
and we wrote each other in the middle and late fifties
though one day I got a letter from his daughter
that he had died in an accident; he was
I'm sure of it, an angel who flew in midair
with one eternal gospel to proclaim
to those inhabiting the earth and every nation;
and now that I go through my papers every day
I search and search for his letters but to my shame
I have even forgotten his name, that messenger
who came to me with tablespoons of blue lentils.

  

In Which I Will Go to a Movie Theater Next Week

   
Wait a minute: there's gonna be a Big Star documentary?

Here's Chris Bell's I Am the Cosmos solo album.






 
Here's the 2011 edition of the annual Alex Chilton birthday post. Have I ever mentioned I love Big Star? Here's one of my five favorite songs ever.
 

A Man Appeared Out of an Alley and Stopped Me and Said, "Did You See That Man Made Out of Leaves Go By?"

So, um, about three and a half hours from the time I type this sentence and a hundred yards from the cube in which I'm sitting the President is giving a speech. Security is swarming campus, no one can cross campus, I can only imagine the activity on the roof of the building I work in. Good news though: a friend of mine emails to say she may be sitting at that table if any of those assigned need a break, and as such reminds me of a Pere Ubu song, one I've played already this Month of David Thomas Songs but which I now play again.







DEAR MR PRESIDENT

James Tate

Dear Mr. President,

      I saw someone coming in the distance, but couldn't make out who it was. The closer they got the more blurred the face became. Until finally I saw it was just a whirlwind of leaves. It was only me on a football field walking toward the street with my handbag thrown over my shoulder with this big funnel of leaves coming toward me like a man. Then it passed me and went up the street. And then it disappeared. I walked on, toward the bank where I had some business to do. A man appeared out of an alley and stopped me and said, "Did you see that man made out of leaves go by?" "I did, could have fooled me," I said. "Hey, do you suppose you could lend me a dollar for a cup of coffee?" "No, I can't. I'm on my way to the bank," I said. I left him there and went on my way. Pretty soon a little boy crossed my path. He stopped me in my path and said, "I know who you are. You're the Man-of-Leaves. You just took your coat off. You can't fool me." "You're a pretty smart fellow, but you're wrong this time," I said, and went on my way. When I got to the bank I went in and waited to see an officer. When I saw one was free I went in. In the chair behind the desk sat a pile of leaves. It said, "Can I help you?" I stumbled at first, but managed to say, "I'm looking for a small loan, a thousand dollars for, say, twelve months." "Of course. Would you like a 4 1/2% or a 5 1/2% loan?" it said. "I'd like the 4 1/2% if you don't mind," I said. "Very good choice," it said. It made out the paper and handed them to me. "Have a nice day," it said. "It's windy out there," I said. "You're telling me," it said, smoothing himself with satisfaction.

 Have a great four years.

                         Yours sincerely,

                         James Tate

Deactivating the Napoleon and Momcat Emergency System

They were home when Earthgirl got home an hour ago. Turned it on last night, works every time, it's freaking cool and uncanny. Regular tag-line restored.

The Me Who So Loves to Garden Because It Prevents the Heaving of the Ground and the Untimely Death of Porch Formula

Terry Riley (here's the MP3 library at Ubuweb) was born 78 years ago today. Here's an all Riley show from Bryce in 2012. The recently released Don Cherry - Terry Riley 1975 live concert from Koln is another best release of 2013, it's today's cascade. It's only on vinyl that I can find, fucking iTunes is useless as usual, HEY! someone with a turn-table, if I buy this and send it to you will you please burn me a CD? Archive that direct appeal for a partner in copyright theft, Copper!

• The elite are not primarily concerned about terrorism.
• Unearthing chthonic conspiracies.
• The Ten Commandments of Neoliberalism.
• The Thirteen Commandments of Neoliberalism.
• How to protect - to a point - yourself.
• I actually did phone canvassing for hours in the weeks leading up to the 2004 election and physically canvassed voters in Harrisburg on election day in 2004 for this motherfucker, gave his campaign hundreds of dollars, the current SoS. He lost the election in significant part due to a campaign labeling him a traitor for speaking out against the atrocities in Vietnam. Irony's a bitch.
• Michael Hastings and the war on journalism.
• Obama is making a speech on campus tomorrow, in the extraordinary security precautions going into effect the building in which I was to attend a meeting I dread will be closed so the meeting needs rescheduling, so thanks, Obama.
• Bleggalgazing, of a sort, and more.
• I have read at least six variations of the joke on the irony that Snowden might go to Cuba to avoid US courts where did he get that idea. 
• I am also reminded that during breaking news people report to their digital overlords for info and instruction.
• The Napoleon and Momcat Emergency Alert tagline remains until....
• Map of MOCO tweets.
• Ten Mile Creek!
• New Inquiry's Sunday links.
• World Cup of Short Form of Cricket.
• Anthony's links of the week.
• To a mouse.
• Ashbery and the pragmatist sublime.
• Twee started earlier than you think it did. Remember arguing, Belle and Sebastian, twee or fey?

   
THE DEFINITION OF GARDENING

James Tate

Jim just loves to garden, yes he does.

He likes nothing better than to put on

his little overalls and his straw hat.

He says, "Let's go get those tools, Jim."

But then doubt begins to set in.

He says, "What is a garden, anyway?"

And thoughts about a "modernistic" garden

begin to trouble him, eat away at his resolve.

He stands in the driveway a long time.

"Horticulture is a groping in the dark

into the obscure and unfamiliar,

kneeling before a disinterested secret,

slapping it, punching it like a Chinese puzzle,

birdbrained, babbling gibberish, dig and

destroy, pull out and apply salt,

hoe and spray, before it spreads, burn roots,

where not desired, with gloved hands, poisonous,

the self-sacrifice of it, the self-love,

into the interior, thunderclap, excruciating,

through the nose, the earsplitting necrology

of it, the withering, shriveling,

the handy hose holder and Persian insect powder

and smut fungi, the enemies of the iris,

wireworms are worse than their parents,

there is no way out, flowers as big as heads,

pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently

at me, the me who so loves to garden

because it prevents the heaving of the ground

and the untimely death of porch furniture,

and dark, murky days in a large city

and the dream home under a permanent storm

is also a factor to keep in mind."

ʍow⊂ɐʇ ᴤ!ɓuɐꞁ ᗄⅽʇ!٨ɐʇөq

My apologies, tomorrow's Terry Riley post tonight is the second blogfart of the week. This time it was motherfucking blooger, the schedule on dashboard says publish this date 2014. THIS is the attention-slutting, blogwhoring, Baal-beseeching Sunday evening post.

This is an activation of the Napoleon and Momcat Emergency System, both beacons and script. Neither has been seen since Tuesday and Wednesday some motherfucking asshole who lives two blocks away neighborhood-listserved that he was going to call the county about two black feral cats and ridding the neighborhood of the vermin. These activations of the Napoleon and Momcat Emergency System have always worked in the past, but I will gut with a grapefruit-spoon the motherfucker if my cats aren't home by Tuesday.

similar cases in "temporary amnesia" are also known

United won. I didn't go, Landru out injured, SeatSix RFPed at work, I go now more to hang out with them as to see United. Three years ago it would have been inconceivable to me to miss home games, oh well, things change. Instead I attended a second consecutive Saturday night edition of Thursday Night Pints. We agreed to not talk about obamaclusterfuckery then talk devolved into obamaclusterfuckery. It was odd, I said, that DOJ would release news of Snowden's indictment on a late Friday afternoon. That's the traditional news dump for stories POTUS doesn't want much play. K said, maybe Obama thinks Americans understand this story is about them, not terrorism. L said, I'm sure plans for a major bogus we-stopped-a-terrorist-attack are in the works, the FBI providing dopes dummy bombs as we speak. Can you go another day without posting links, K asked. Probably not, I said. More yap on clusterfuckery, then, while we were talking Snowden, L said, when Snowden leaves Hong Kong, does US Air Force intercept airplane and force it to land even at the cost of an international incident?

• And serendipitously, news this morning..... as of now the plane, to anyone's knowledge has not been shot down....
• "Hammer this fact home." It will be against the law to not narc out anyone, everyone.
• Lordy, Digby nears, but her obamapostasy will never be ready. 
• The amnesiatic society and institutions of permanent memory.
• He got my first POTUS vote in 1980.
• When Nancy Pelosi committed civil disobedience.
• Pelosi booed.
• Total knowledge capture.
• Your fucking Washington Post.
• A cataloging of hypocrisy.
• Cops.
• The Phantom Planter and Motherfucking Metro.

    

• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• I fell asleep last night having given up on Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers midway through an interminably boring set piece of a dinner party of New York City artists when I remembered that William Gaddis did set pieces of dinner parties of New York City artists much better 58 years earlier in The Recognitions.
• Serendipitously I woke up this morning to this review of The Flamethrowers.
• Anthony's review of The Flamethrowers.
• I fully accept responsibility for failing The Flamethrowers.
• What happens to people.
• On Frank O'Hara.
• Thom Gunn interview from 1995.
• The Balustrade.
• Today's David Thomas song: 

the second hundred: for sid luft

David Antin

1.

there are two sides to every story and to abbreviate one side is to diminish a side of a wall creating an absence that is stronger than any presence and making any attempt at accurate construction hopeless sid luft is such an accusative absence perhaps you have never had to address yourself to a wraith to proceed adverbially naming effects as of the wind upon trees or Van der Waals forces on a surface but sid luft was a test pilot had flown grumman p 47's called thunderbolts and twin-fuselaged p 38's called lightnings and thought it an agreeable task his eye proceeding over the control panel checking the readings on all of the luminous dials letting his ear discriminate among the complex series of metallic sounds that would allege a private relaxation the way it takes the sharp eyes and quick ears of an astronaut to foresee a future failure in the allusion of a single dial what is out there is altogether conjectural that is the attraction that can take a smart boy out of his apartment and suspend him over an entire atmosphere this applies also to arctic explorers whom also some bubble must arouse let this be an attempt at assessment

2.

you know how a small deviation in the suspension of a balance wheel can lead to a barbarous inflection of the entire mechanism? bringing a belgian police dog to sit in your lap or a bicycle to rest under a moving van and the imperfection is only borne in upon you once it has passed a certain boundary?

3.

and in a car a defect in the low speed carburetor circuit will leave the entire carriage sucking for air at anything below the highest throttle speeds so it is necessary to go on a splurge in cincinnati and choose a tomato soup red oldsmobile before going to chef's college to infuse a vessel with air here becomes a commission it is required to create a sense of competition where there isnt any on a farm by the connecticutt then to stand back at a street corner refraining from criticism like roger de coverley as much of a spectator and as kindly a moss covered rock coolly withstanding the current

4.

such a machine is guaranteed to bring you to despair precisely when the situation isnt desperate because a mounting anxiety approaches a maximum when you have nothing to record in your diary and you have nothing to fall back upon except a tenuous self-discipline

5.

which supposes not only a set of earnest resolutions promises made to Eliot for a regimen of self-improvement to be undertaken in the doldrums dance lessons at 12:00 voice in the afternoon and strict control of your diet the problem is how to go on being enthusiastic about swallowing air in the evening it means being equipped with the sense of a soft worm under the shell of a mollusc which is an excellent image but finally fails to exhilarate if you have never seen it

6.

yet what continues to fascinate us in the shell are the continuous depositions of calcium which we undertake to unwind like a bandage while each roll is just like the last allowing for minor accidents and merely somewhat smaller it does not fulfill our expectations but the belief that there is something to fulfil in our expectations is fundamental

7.

a guard outside of a warehouse suggests there is something to protect

8.

the idea of hypocrisy is expensive

9.

for someone to scream incidentally and interrupt lunch

10.

similar cases in "temporary amnesia" are also known

11.

all you have to do is go to the library to become convinced that they are very likely energy coming from somewhere striking like lightning

12.

annulling a marriage in a minute such impulsive behavior modifies the entire history of a landscape when a car breaks down it appears there was always something wrong with the motor

13.

to a man on a tightrope the Falls at Niagara are the truth of a river and living to ninety appears like a sudden nomination

14.

its hard to maintain your obedience to impulse when you know that at 5 o'clock you're about to enter Mercy Hospital for a colitis operation which leaves you nothing to do but pretend that under the ether you're going back for a look at your origin

15.

have you noticed how psychological states are all nouns Happiness Sorrow Rage Fear and Shame are never named participially say like Smiling-Preceding-the-Storm or Lining-the-Depths-of-an-Outer-Darkening or Something-Preferred-to-Nothing? its almost worth becoming a professor and obtaining a right to prophesy erecting a science of naming and calling it Pyschology finding a net in our hands meaning that there is something we pursue

16.

Judith what i have to say will be lost in this quiet for which i was never quite successful at promoting an antidote

17.

the knack of a child cupping a radio to his ear on his walk through the traffic i would really have liked to wrap you in music in elevators and airliners which i could recommend over amphetamine for its more regular rhythm

18.

to engineer another moment in the wings at the palladium and wait for an illumination from the scene to come and seize you what we can expect of speaking sincerely is an elevation of feeling that we can equate with sincerity which makes Wearing-Your-Heart-On-Your-Sleeve more than a becoming fashion that can fit any college sophomore and be successful it needs a desire to be stretched while you are still superintendent of your passions to which you will ultimately surrender

19.

and recalling the moment of your triumph is a roll call of reporters in which i even remember Ted Thackerey of the Compass the last time we were truly together

20.

though in your memory it was undoubtedly different

21.

maybe you remember a village where i was a villain

22.

and the weather was bad yet you didn't know whether to leave or take Joey and Lisa to the movie the separate inventories of facts in the memories of people who have shared common experiences are weird though perhaps only this division preserves the welfare of individuals and is insurance against the inevitable separations of pairs of men and women

Theme Songs June 2013

Exactly, +/- the S I love drone, gonna all day long.

Today's David Thomas song.

By request, the Galaxie 500 song from Thursday's oops! post.

Pants We Call Chaos

• Siegfried has been this shitty blog's and my digital avatar since Blog Day One. Bernie Koppel, Siegfried on Get Smart (and Ann Marie's neighbor Jerry Bauman in That Girl and, unfortunately if more famously, Doc on Love Boat), was born 80 years ago today, his birthday noted every year here. Every eight or nine months I think for a few minutes of changing the avatar, not on the blog, I'm Dan Snyder about the logo on the blog, but perhaps at Twitter or on any of the other blogs I start when I feel like I'm writing cowardly here then abandon when I stop writing cowardly here, but fuck that too.
• Surveillance and blackmail.
• Revolutions happen on Wednesdays.
• Ten rules for recording cops and authority figures.
• A love letter to the NSA agent who is monitoring his online activity.
• Reading Salon makes you a threat.
• The observer, the stone, the stone, the observer, the stone the observer, the observer the stone, the stone the observe the stone, the observer the stone the observer, infinity.
• Sorry for the now deleted oops post of last night, I hadn't blogfarted like that in months, I fully admit I'm a slut but not that much. Great Galaxie 500 song though.
• Don't eat fast food chains for better reasons than your health. Though don't eat fast food chains also for your health.
• More autobiography: Willy Bayne and wife rented a house on Bartonsville Road, we used to park at that parking area on Reels Mill Road in the photo in this story to hike down along Bush Creek to its mouth on the Monocacy to bass fish and party.
• Badiou and Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Moby-Cock, or: The Term Paper.
• On listening to Barber's Adagio for Strings after seeing the first firefly of the summer.
• Jim's latest playlist.
• Chaos is the new calm.
• My sad captains.
• The final morbidity of the interior embezzler.
• This fucking blog, this fucking me.

THE BOOK OF THE DEAD MAN (THE FOUNDRY)

Marvin Bell

1. About the Dead Man and the Foundry

The dead man hath founded the dead man's foundry.
He acted in the past perfect, he funded it with clean dirt, pure water
     and the spotless air.
Then he was melted, he was molded, he was poured and shook out.
He was ground and sanded, he was machined to a sweet tolerance.
The dead man took pains to stay alive, this was how.
It was the undersong of the self, the subtext, the no-man's-land's calling.
For the dead man was subterranean to start.
He was the tuber in the sun, the worm warming, the root that stays put.
The dead man became again what he was, he germinated.
It was the foundry of the sun, the foundry of the earth's core, the foundry
     of the electric light and the dry cell.
It was the retrofit energy that did it, the assemblage after dispersion,
     the kick in the pants we call chaos.
We are the children of a hothouse, among orchids that grow in lava.

2. More About the Dead Man and the Foundry

The foundry of the dead man pops and smolders with re-creation.
It is recreated in the titanic and the miniature, every detail.
Within the dead man, the same fire burns.
The same furnace, the same raw materials that made flesh.
The same red water, the same liquid sinew cooling.
The dead man's foundry has made weapons and ploughshares, and
     those who use them.
The foundry and the forge, the shapes imprisoned in the molten streams
     of rough matter, these are precursors of the human, too.
The steam escaping from a wounded body is the foundry.
The heat of exhalation, the blush of desire, the red sun under the skin—
     they are the foundry.
And the high temperature of the ill, and the heat of the first foundry reassembling
     at its source.
If you believe in the reformation of energy, then you believe as well in the
     dead man.
He is heating up, and what is emotion?

In a Corner of the Labyrinth of Fences

This is the marina house and marina in Deale, Maryland that Earthgirl and I lived in for two and a half years years from January 1988 through Summer 1990 at the beginning of our marriage. The family friend who owns the marina and rented us the house in 1988 thought we'd enjoy seeing the inside of the house in 2013 - he's between renters and he's made improvements on the interior since 1990, the last time we were inside the house - so yesterday Earthgirl and I and Planet and Ari drove down. Photos and paragraphs for the five or six of you who've been there though not for twenty-three years.

One Deale story: I went out for coffee one Sunday morning to the 7-11, crowded because it was the only place open for five miles in any direction, so I parked next to the dumpster. Come out with two coffees, set them on the roof of an off-gold Honda Civic hatchback (which was stolen from the street at the next house we lived in in Glen Echo), and I hear whimpering inside the dumpster. Eight week old puppy in a taped cardboard box. Katie.

Our family friend and former landlord also took us to his farm in Calvert County (the blueberries are five or six days from perfect, dang), then took us to lunch at a cafe back in Deale that served - and I shit you not - the best homemade crab-cakes and tartar sauce and cole slaw and fries I have ever eaten. I shit you not. Over lunch he treated us - kindly, gently, avuncularly, as if giving us advice he doesn't give to any but family - to his inner Rush Limbaugh on economic matters and inner Michael Savage on classifications of work habits of particular racial groups. No, I mean he cites with approval assertions Limbaugh and Savage make. Always has. He's a retired world class psychiatrist who has saved the lives of countless broken and hurting people, he is one of the kindest, most generous persons I've known in my lifetime. I nodded and ate.

• He thinks of us as brainwashed liberals yet loves us anyway because of how we've lived our lives.
• I think of him as brainwashed conservative but love him anyway for how he's lived his life.
• He is not the problem. I am not the solution.
• Here's how nuts I am (and by I I mean nobody but me): No, I don't think that Michael Hastings was wet-jobbed by Corporate, though such are the days we live in the possibility is certainly plausible, but then I thought, what if he was wet-jobbed in the sloppiest fashion at a moment when a majority of Americans are temporarily freaked at confirmation of what they imagined but never thought they'd hear spoken as incontrovertibly true re: the police state we live in in order to taunt the conspiracy nuts into paroxysms of paranoid claims that damages the nuts credibility when more sloppy wet-jobs start increasing in frequency? Work with me. Strange days we live in, that's plausible too.
• Suggesting what might be plausible.
• Reactions to suggesting what might be plausible.
• UPDATE! On the above.
• UPDATE! Hastings' last article - Why Democrats love to spy on Americans.
• Strange days, everything is plausible. For the record, I don't think Snowden is a plant. My contention is that while Snowden's revelations temporarily (and wonderfully) inconvenience Power's panopticon upper management, operators, and technicians Snowden's revelations also advance the long-term interest of Power.
• Domestic spying with drones! but only in very minimal way.
• Hot XXX drone-on-drone action. Not that I'll see the movie.
• Life under NYPD surveillance.
• Another zombie lurch towards police state.
• On bitcoin.

• What actually happens.
• The Church songs via Jim's requests in comments yesterday.
• Olney! Batchellors Forest Road is a cool road.
• Bear spotted near Casa Satanica!
• Clarksburg continues to morph into motherfucking Germantown.
• Later.
• UPDATE! Trolling poetry readers.
• UPDATE! Trolling Kafka readers.
• Coetzee, for those of you who do, first thoughts on his new novel.
• Why yes, this is still the year I read The Maximus Poems.
• UPDATE! Know what? Fuck this.
• The Mind.
• Radio on.
• Morton Feldman.

THE LIBRARIAN

Charles Olson

The landscape (the landscape!) again: Gloucester,

the shore one of me is (duplicates), and from which

(from offshore, I, Maximus) am removed, observe.

In this night I moved on the territory with combinations

(new mixtures) of old and known personages: the leader,

my father, in an old guise, here selling books and manuscripts.

My thought was, as I looked in the window of his shop,

there should be materials here for Maximus, when, then,

I saw he was the young musician has been there (been before me)

before. It turned out it wasn’t a shop, it was a loft (wharf-

house) in which, as he walked me around, a year ago

came back (I had been there before, with my wife and son,

I didn’t remember, he presented me insinuations via

himself and his girl) both of whom I had known for years.

But never in Gloucester. I had moved them in, to my country.

His previous appearance had been in my parents’ bedroom where I

found him intimate with my former wife: this boy

was now the Librarian of Gloucester, Massachusetts!

 

                         Black space,

                         old fish-house.

                         Motions

                         of ghosts.

                         I,

                         dogging

                         his steps.

                         He

                         (not my father,

                         by name himself

                         with his face

                         twisted

                         at birth)

                         possessed of knowledge

                         pretentious

                         giving me

                         what in the instant

                         I knew better of.

 

                         But the somber

                         place, the flooring

                         crude like a wharf’s

                         and a barn’s

                         space

I was struck by the fact I was in Gloucester, and that my daughter

was there—that I would see her! She was over the Cut. I

hadn’t even connected her with my being there, that she was

here. That she was there (in the Promised Land—the Cut!

But there was this business, of poets, that all my Jews

were in the fish-house too, that the Librarian had made a party

I was to read. They were. There were many of them, slumped

around. It was not for me. I was outside. It was the Fort.

The Fort was in East Gloucester—old Gorton’s Wharf, where the Library

was. It was a region of coal houses, bins. In one a gang

was beating someone to death, in a corner of the labyrinth

of fences. I could see their arms and shoulders whacking

down. But not the victim. I got out of there. But cops

tailed me along the Fort beach toward the Tavern

                         The places still

                         half-dark, mud,

                         coal dust.

                         There is no light

                         east

                         of the Bridge

                         Only on the headland

                         toward the harbor

                         from Cressy’s

                         have I seen it (once

                         when my daughter ran

                         out on a spit of sand

                         isn’t even there.) Where

                         is Bristow? when does I-A

                         get me home? I am caught

                         in Gloucester. (What’s buried

                         behind Lufkin’s

                         Diner? Who is

                         Frank Moore?  

We Are Interested in Rigorously Arranging Emotions by Color as We've Never Been Fully Divested of Blues

SeatSix, who I love like a brother, is forty-two today, Happy Birthday! He digs The Church, sent this playlist this past December Reptile, June, You're Still Beautiful, Paradox, Antenna, Under the Milky Way, All the Young Dudes, Tear It All the Way. Thanks!

• "Intelligence," Corporatism, and the Dance of Death.
• Political ideology and the avoidance of dissonance-arousing situations.
• Via the invaluable :: wood s lot:: who you should ping daily.
• More than fifty! 
• NSA stopped skin cancer too!
• No, NSA didn't. 
• And the FBI never makes mistakes.
• Partisanship.
• RIP Michael Hastings.
• RIP Michael Hastings.
• RIP Michael Hastings. 
• RIP Michael Hastings.
• Motherfucking Econ Departments. I can vouch.
• Photography is not a crime.

• Nick Drake was born 65 years ago today. Every year I write some version of I really like but don't love Nick Drake but I've friends who do so have songs on his birthday.
• Fuller story tomorrow, or not, but me and Earthgirl (and Planet and Ari) are today visiting the marina on they Bay we lived in during our very earliest years together 27 years ago.
• Kafka, for those of you who do.
• Elizabeth Bishop, for those of you who do.
• Gaddis, for those of you who do.
• If you only read one link today please read this one, I swear it's Ed's take on Pynchon's Against the Day and not payback for his Kindness.
• The consolation of sociobiology.
• Today's David Thomas song. 
• Demetrio Stratos.
• When I try to sort the blur of some of those years into some semblance of categories when I think of The Church I think of Catherine Wheel and the Teardrop Explodes song (psst, one of my favorite songs and most air-guitared songs ever) if for no other reason that if I was someplace hearing one of the bands odds were prohibitive I'd be hearing the others.

THE NATIONAL INTEREST

Ted Mathys 

We are interested in long criminal histories
because we've never bedded down in a cellblock.
With the sibilance of wind through the swaying
spires of skyscrapers as my witness. When I say
cover your grenades I mean it's going to rain I mean
there is mischief in every filibuster of sun.

We are interested in rigorously arranging
emotions by color as we've never been fully
divested of blues. With drinking till my fingernails
hurt as my witness, with hurt as my witness.
When I say be demanding I mean be fully
individual while dissolving in the crowd.

We are interested in characters who murder
because we've never committed it or to it.
With an origami frog in a vellum crown spinning
on a fishing line from the ceiling as my witness.
When I say please kneel with me I mean between
every shadow and sad lack falls a word.

We are interested in ceaselessly setting floor joists
because we've never pulled a pole barn spike
from a foot. With bowing to soap your ankles
in the shower as my witness, lather as my witness.
When I say did you see the freckle in her iris I mean
the poem must reclaim the nature of surveillance.

We are interested in possessing others who possess
that which we possess but fear losing in the future.
With a fork as my witness. A dollop of ketchup,
hash brown, motion, with teeth as my witness.
When I say you I don't mean me I don't mean
an exact you I mean a composite you I mean God.

We are interested in God because we can't
possess God, because we can't possess you.
With a scrum of meatheads in IZOD ogling iPods
as my witness, technological progress as my witness.
When I say no such thing as progress in art I mean
"These fragments I have shored against my ruins."

We are interested in ambivalence as ribcages
resist being down when down, up when up.
With the swell of the argument and the moment
before forgiveness as my witness. When I say power
is exclusion I mean a box of rocks we don't
desire to deduce I mean knowing is never enough.