- The promised Coil cascade.
- Wheels falling off the Imperial reality-creating machine?
- The post-imperial moment has come and gone?
- The banality of empire.
- Debated yesterday afternoon with a friend: would Obama be facing as strong a public pushback against cowardly launching cruise missiles from a boat hundreds of miles from danger into a civilian population if the NSA stories hadn't broke in the past two months?
- Kevin Drum walks up to his Red Line of Obamapostasy, then weasels away. In same column he says: Obama never should have set a red line in Syria in the first place, and once he did he should simply have found a way to weasel out of it. It's not that hard. At least he showed Obama how not that hard it is.
- The War Masters: Syria Edition.
- Chris Fucking Van Fucking Hollen sign? Fuck no.
- The NYPD Division of Un-American Activities. Run by Obama's rumored first choice for head of HSA.
- Actually there is three more requirements of holiday weekend bleggalgazing traditions to uphold: first, the acknowledgement on the futility of blogging on holiday weekends, the second to point out that there are numerous new members of blogrolls left and right, please check them out, third to thank you for reading, if you are Kinding me but me not you please let me know.
- This week in water.
- Since I botched the link yesterday and though it's fixed now, on the distinction between scifi and fantasy, for those of you who do one or the other or both.
- Coetzee's new novel reviewed by Joyce Carol Oates.
- Seamus Heaney interview.
- Some Heaney poems. Walked up to the Fifth Floor stacks yesterday, the rereading has commenced.
- A poem on Heaney's death.
- Serendipitously to the already planned Coil cascade I opened one of the books and read the poem typed out below. All praise to Serendipity.
- Casualty.
- Now (from the Truth Game).
NORTH
Seamus Heaney
I returned to a long strand,
the hammered curve of a bay,
and found only the secular
powers of the Atlantic thundering.
I faced the unmagical
invitations of Iceland,
the pathetic colonies
of Greenland, and suddenly
those fabulous raiders,
those lying in Orkney and Dublin
measured against
their long swords rusting,
those in the solid
belly of stone ships,
those hacked and glinting
in the gravel of thawed streams
were ocean-deafened voices
warning me, lifted again
in violence and epiphany.
The longship’s swimming tongue
was buoyant with hindsight—
it said Thor’s hammer swung
to geography and trade,
thick-witted couplings and revenges,
the hatreds and behind-backs
of the althing, lies and women,
exhaustions nominated peace,
memory incubating the spilled blood.
It said, ‘Lie down
in the word-hoard, burrow
the coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.
Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.
Keep your eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known.’
