2013/10/31

which isn't 121 anymore, the state giving the section between 28 and Boyds to MOCO to maintain (Boyds home to the now underwater Ten Mile Creek Road, where Willy Bayne in a cocaine and whiskey-fueled fury ran down the cat), then, or: Fifty-Seven Today





Four last songs for Robert Pollard's birthday, these all either solo or other bands other than GbV. I love his music. It's related to this and Gass' boxes.





 
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And only Robert Pollard could get me to post a Halloween video on Halloween:



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Caught Between the Tongue and the Taste, or: 57 Today












  • Halloween is the fucking Arcade Fucking Fire of holidays. Even my favorite DJs on WFMU are playing motherfucking Halloween related songs. Fuck Halloween fuck Halloween fuck this fuck Halloween.
  • United and De Rosario part ways. SeatSix sends me a photo - they cut him and he gets to leave stadium watching workers take down his banner. New United ownership - always classy.
  • Red Sox fan dedicates trash can he's lighting on fire to Marathon victims.
  • I haven't thought of the Willard Grant Conspiracy in a decade. I've a couple of CDs somewhere.
  • Saariaho.
  • Paris Review just tweeted a quote from 1988 interview with Anthony Hecht so have a 1988 interview with Anthony Hecht.
  • Beneath the below GbV song is XXIV: Freedom from Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, I love you but it's too long to type out, sorry. If they don't embiggen on this blog (and a hearty FUCK YOU! - as opposed to a Salty Salute - to my free blogging platform) the will embiggen here. Autobiography of Red is by far the best thing I've ever read since the last until the next, expect LOTS of Anne Carson poetry (though Autobiography of Red is a novel) in this blog's near future.









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2013/10/30

Graffiti on the Stonework Around the Service Entrance Makes the Doorway at Night Look Like the Mystagogic Mouth of a Big Beast, Amphibious, Outfitted with Fangs, Snout, the Suggestion of a Tongue, Throat, and Alimentary Canal Leading to a Complex of Caves, Tunnels, Temples . . .





LOUD! please. Robert Pollard, holder of one of three permanent seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, is fifty-six tomorrow, requests solicited, Guided by Voices of course but solo and other band projects, like the above, the greatest one minute song in human history. Below the next song, this shitty blog's Theme Song Three, is a brilliant poem by Timothy Donnelly that in the stupid rules for blogging I impose on myself is too long for day posts but perfect for night posts, and that poem is followed by the greatest two minute song in human history. Unless it's another Pollard song. Tune in tomorrow.







GLOBUS HYSTERICUS

Timothy Donnelly

1
 
A pity the selfsame vehicle that spirits me away from
factories of tedium should likewise serve to drag
me backwards into panic, or that panic should erect
 
massive factories of its own, their virulent pollutants
havocking loved waterways, frothing all the reed-
fringed margins acid pink and gathering in the shell
 
and soft tissues of the snails unknowingly in danger
as they inch up stems. Through the bulkhead door
I can hear their spirals plunk into the sluggish south-
 
bound current and dissolve therein with such brutal
regularity their dying has given rise to the custom
of measuring time here in a unit known as the snailsdeath.
 
The snailsdeath refers to the average length of time,
about 43 seconds, elapsing between the loss of the first
snail to toxic waters and the loss of the next, roughly
 
equivalent to the pause between swallows in a human
throat, while the adverb here refers to my person
and all its outskirts, beginning on the so-called cellular
 
level extending more of less undaunted all the way down
to the vale at the foot of the bed. I often fear I’ll wake
to find you waiting there and won’t know how to speak
 
on the subject of my production, or rather my woeful
lack thereof, but in your absence, once again, I will begin
drafting apologies in a language ineffectual as doves.
    
2
 
Daybreak on my marshland: a single egret, blotched,
trudges through the froth. I take its photograph
from the rooftop observation deck from which I watch
 
day’s delivery trucks advance. I take advantage of
the quiet before their arrival to organize my thoughts
on the paranormal thusly: (1) If the human psyche
 
has proven spirited enough to produce such a range
of material effects upon what we’ll call the closed
system of its custodial body, indeed if it’s expected to,
 
and (2) If such effects might be thought to constitute
the physical expression of that psyche, an emanation
willed into matter in a manner not unlike a brand-
 
new car or cream-filled cake or disposable camera,
and (3) If the system of the body can be swapped out
for another, maybe an abandoned factory or a vale,
 
then might it not also prove possible for the psyche
by aptitude or lather or sheer circumstance to impress
its thumbprint on some other system, a production
 
in the basement, or in a video store, as when I find you
inching up steps or down a shady aisle or pathway,
dragging your long chains behind you most morosely
 
if you ask me, the question is: Did you choose this, or was it
imposed on you, but even as I ask your hands move
wildly about your throat to indicate you cannot speak.
    
3
 
After the memory of the trucks withdrawing heavy
with their cargo fans out and fades into late-morning
hunger, I relocate in time to the lit bank of vending
 
machines still humming in the staff-room corner for a light
meal of cheese curls, orange soda, and what history
will come to mourn as the last two cream-filled cakes.
 
Eating in silence, a breeze in the half-light, absently
thinking of trying not to think, I imagine the Bethlehem
steel smokestacks above me piping nonstop, the sky
 
wide open without any question, steam and dioxides
of carbon and sulfur, hands pressed to the wall as I walk
down the corridor to stop myself from falling awake
 
again on the floor in embarrassment. If there’s any use
of imagination more productive or time less painful
it hasn’t tried hard enough to push through to find me
 
wandering the wings of a ghost-run factory as Earth
approaches the dark vale cut in the heart of the galaxy.
Taking shots of the sunbaked fields of putrefaction
 
visible from the observation deck. Hoping to capture
what I can point to as the way it feels. Sensing my hand
in what I push away. Watching it dissolve into plumes
 
rising like aerosols, or like ghosts of indigenous peoples,
or the lump in the throat to keep me from saying that
surviving almost everything has felt like having killed it.
 
4
 
(Plunk) Up from the floor with the sun to the sound of
dawn’s first sacrifice to the residues of commerce.
On autofog, on disbelief: rejuvenation in a boxer brief
 
crashed three miles wide in the waves off Madagascar,
cause of great flooding in the Bible and in Gilgamesh.
Massive sphere of rock and ice, of all events in history
 
(Plunk) thought to be the lethalmost. A snailsdeath
semiquavers from pang to ghost where the habit of ghosts
of inhabiting timepieces, of conniving their phantom
 
tendrils through parlor air and into the escapements
of some inoperative heirloom clock on a mantel shows
not the dead’s ongoing interest in their old adversary
 
(Plunk) time so much as an urge to return to the hard
mechanical kind of being. An erotic lounging to reanimate
the long-inert pendulum. As I have felt you banging
 
nights in my machine, jostling the salt from a pretzel.
This passion for the material realm after death however
refuses to be reconciled with a willingness to destroy
 
(Plunk) it while alive. When the last of the human voices
told me what I had to do, they rattled off a shopping
list of artifacts they wanted thrown down open throats.
 
That left me feeling in on it, chosen, a real fun-time guy
albeit somewhat sleep-deprived; detail-oriented, modern,
yes, but also dubious, maudlin, bedridden, speechless.

5
 
Graffiti on the stonework around the service entrance
makes the doorway at night look like the mystagogic
mouth of a big beast, amphibious, outfitted with fangs,
 
snout, the suggestion of a tongue, throat, and alimentary
canal leading to a complex of caves, tunnels, temples . . .
There are rooms I won’t enter, at whose threshold I say
 
this is as far as I go, no farther, almost as if I can sense
there’s something in there I don’t want to see, or for which
to see means having wanted already to forget, unless
 
stepping into the mouth at last, pressed into its damp,
the advantage of not knowing is swapped out for the loss
of apartness from what you’d held unknown, meaning
 
you don’t come to know it so much as become it, wholly
warping into its absorbent fold. I can’t let that happen
if it hasn’t already. What draws me on might be thought
 
canine, keen-sighted, but it’s still incapable of divining why
the constant hum around or inside me has to choose
among being a nocturne of toxic manufacture, the call
 
of what remains of the jungle, or else just another prank
on my gullible anatomy. Am I not beset in the utmost
basement of industry? Is that basement itself not beset
 
by the broad, black-green, waxy leaves of Mesoamerica?
And haven’t I parted those selfsame leaves, discovering me
asleep on my own weapon, threat to no one but myself?
 
6
 
Asked again what I miss the most about my former life,
I remember to pause this time, look left, a little off-camera
an entire snailsdeath, an air of sifting the possibilities,
 
I eliminate certain objects and events from the running
right off the bat, such as when their great displeasure
brought the gods to turn to darkness all that had been
 
light, submerging mountaintops in stormwater, the gods
shocked by their own power, and heartsick to watch
their once dear people stippling the surf like little fishes.
 
Or when the flaming peccary of a comet struck the earth
with much the same effect, waves as high as ziggurats
crashing mathematically against our coastlines, scalding
 
plumes of vapor and aerosols tossed into the atmosphere
spawning storms to pummel the far side of the earth,
approximately 80 percent of all life vanished in a week.
 
Or when we squandered that very earth and shat on it
with much the same effect, and more or less on purpose,
emitting nonstop gases in the flow of our production,
 
shoveling it in as ancient icecaps melted, what difference
could another make now. And so I clear my throat, look
directly into the camera, and even though it will make me
 
come off bovine in their eyes, I say that what I miss the most
has to be those cream-filled cakes I used to like, but then
they prod me with their volts and lead me back to the barn.
 
7
 
After the panic grew more of less customary, the pity
dissolved into a mobile fogbank, dense, reducing visibility
from the rooftop observation deck. Mobile in the sense
 
that it possessed mobility, not in the sense that it actually
moved. Because it didn’t. It just stayed there, reducing
visibility but not in the sense that it simply diminished it
 
or diminished it partly. Because it didn’t. It pretty much
managed to do away with it altogether, as my photography
will come to show: field after field of untouched white.
 
After the possibility of change grew funny, threadbare,
too embarrassing to be with, I eased into the knowledge
that you’d never appear at the foot of the bed, the vale
 
turned into a lifetime’s heap of laundry, and not the gentle
tuffets and streambanks of an afterlife it seems we only
imagined remembering, that watercolor done in greens
 
and about which I predicted its monotony of fair weather
over time might deaden one all over again, unless being
changed with death means not only changing past change
 
but past even the wish for it. I worried to aspire towards
that condition might actually dull one’s aptitude for change.
That I would grow to protect what I wished to keep from
 
change at the cost of perpetuating much that required it.
In this sense I had come to resemble the fogbank, at once
given to motion but no less motionless than its photograph.
 
The last time I saw myself alive, I drew the curtain back
from the bed, stood by my sleeping body. I felt tenderness
towards it. I knew how long it had waited, and how little
 
time remained for it to prepare its bundle of grave-goods.
When I tried to speak, rather than my voice, my mouth
released the tight, distinctive shriek of an aerophone of clay.
 
I wanted to stop the shock of that from taking away from
what I felt. I couldn’t quite manage it. Even at this late hour,
even here, the purity of a feeling is ruined by the world.
8
 
The noises from the basement were not auspicious noises.
I wanted to live forever. I wanted to live forever and die
right then and there. I had heard the tight, distinctive shriek.
 
Here again and now. I no longer have legs. I am sleeping.
Long tendrils of tobacco smoke, composed of carbon dioxide,
water vapor, ammonia, nitrogen oxide, hydrogen cyanide,
 
and 4,000 other chemical compounds, penetrate the room
through the gap beneath the door and through heating vents
with confidence. They are the spectral forms of anaconda.
 
The ruler of the underworld smokes cigars. A certain brand.
Hand-rolled. He smiles as if there is much to smile about.
And there is. He is hollow-eyed, toothless. His hat, infamous:
 
broad-brimmed, embellished with feathers, a live macaw.
His cape is depicted, often, as a length of fabric in distinctive
black and white chevrons. Otherwise, as here, the full pelt
 
of a jaguar. On a barge of plywood and empty milk cartons
he trudges through the froth. He is the lord of black sorcery
and lord of percussion. He is patron of commerce. He parts
 
the leaves of Mesoamerica, traveling with a retinue of drunken
ax wielders, collection agents. His scribe is a white rabbit.
Daughter of moon and of night. Elsewhere, you are having
 
your teeth taken out. There is no music left, but I still feel held
captive by the cinema, and in its custom, I believe myself
capable of protecting myself by hiding my face in my hands.




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Three Times a Day She Put the Boat on Autopilot and Went Down the Cool Silent Pantry




  • Those are the fog photos from yesterday morning. Ask me elsewhere and if I trust you I'll tell you.
  • OK, redactions for protection of me! and the loved one I emailed last night: Your dad and his brother, not particularly fond of each other in a Jeff/Bruce way? Cause I don't know if I'd return from vacation in France if Bruce was similarly sick, and I've no doubt it wouldn't even occur to Bruce. There's a big family wedding coming in December in Norfolk, my cousin Kirk, we've a hotel room at the reception hotel, Lynn and me planned to get toasted if not shitfaced. I plan to check my old hiding places at Oakton to see if I can find some stashed and forgotten eedway. Could be a disastorisly funny evening when a shitfaced Lynn tells Bruce she knows who his parents are and she can introduce him to them if he wants.
  • That captures my current Bleggal Depressive Syndrome and concludes today's bleggalgazing.
  • Songs from roadtrip soundtrack:














BY CHANCE THE CYCLADIC PEOPLE

Anne Carson

9.4. They put stones in their eye sockets. Upper-class people put precious stones.

16.2. Prior to the movement and following the movement, stillness.

8.0. Not sleeping made the Cycladic people gradually more and more brittle. Their legs broke off.

1.0. The Cycladic was a neolithic culture based on emmer wheat, wild barley, sheep, pigs and tuna speared from small boats.

11.4. Left hand on Tuesdays, right hand on Wednesdays.

10.1. She plied the ferryboat back and forth, island to island, navigating by means of her inner eye.

9.0. When their faces wore smooth they painted them back on with azurite and iron ore.

12.1. All this expertise just disappears when a people die out.

2.0. They wore their faces smooth with trying to sleep, they ground their lips and nipples off in the distress of pillows.

4.4. How you spear it, how you sheer it, how you flense it, how you grind it, how you get it to look so strangely relaxed.

4.0. Mirrors led the Cycladic people to think about the soul and to wish to quiet it.

1.1. The boats had up to fifty oars and small attachments at the bow for lamps. Tuna was fished at night.

16.0. As far as the experience of stirring is concerned, small stillness produces small stirring and great stillness great stirring.

3.3. A final theory is that you could fill the pan with water and use it as a mirror.

2.1. It was no use. They’d lost the knack. Sleep was a stranger.

14.1. There it was plunging up and down in its shallow holes.

6.1. The handbag, that artefact which freed human beings from having to eat food wherever they found it.

3.0. While staying up at night the Cycladic people invented the frying pan.

11.0. Three times a day she put the boat on autopilot and went down below to the cool silent pantry.

7.1. Abstention from grain is helpful.

9.3. Their eyes fell out.

11.3. The food was tastier that way.

11.5. This may sound to you like a mere boyish stunt.

11.1. The pantry, what a relief after the splash and glare of the helm.

4.1. To uncontrive.

6.0. To the Cycladic people is ascribed the invention of the handbag,

3.1. Quite a number of frying pans have been found by archaeologists. The frying pans are small. No one was very hungry at night.

9.1. Did I mention the marble pillows, I think I did.

2.3. This became a Cycladic proverb.

5.2. Proust liked a good jolt.

7.2. Abstention from grain is the same for men and women. You put your lungs in an extraordinary state of clear coolness.

13.0. One night there was a snowfall, solitary, absurd.

6.3. And after dinner, harps.

1.2. The Cycladic was an entirely insomniac culture.

2.2. Well, they said, these are the pies we have. It was a proverb.

4.2. My point of view is admittedly faulty. My nose is always breathing. I am worn out with breathing. I suspect you have days when you choose not to breathe at all.

14.0. That was the night she looked to her soul.

3.2. Or they may have been prestige frying pans.

9.2. They painted wonderful widow’s peaks on themselves or extra breasts.

5.1. Possibly because of his blanket refusal to listen to another person’s dreams at the breakfast table, for Proust dismissed this type of recollection as ‘mere anamnesia’.

16.1. There it lay, the foredeck in the moonlight, more silver than the sea.

9.5. Perhaps now they were glad after all that they did not sleep.

5.3. That moment when everyone sees exactly what is on the end of their fork, as William S. Burroughs said of celebrity.

15.1. See me leaving you better hang your head and cry, she liked songs like that. Honkytonk influence.

16.3. All of her leapt before her eyes.

8.1. They worried about this and kept their arms close to the body, clasping the torso right arm below left, like a cummerbund.

11.6. She thought it a good idea to silence mental conversation.

12.0. Clouds every one of them smell different, so do ocean currents. So do rocky reefs.

10.2. Her inner eye grew sharp enough to slaughter goats.

15.0. She’d been a pretty good harpist before the die-off.

6.2. So began the dinner parties.

10.0. Eventually the Cycladic people died out all except one, a ferryboat captain.

8.2. Left arm below right was considered uncouth.

7.0. To play a stringless harp requires only the thumbs.

5.0. The Cycladic people were very fond of Proust.

4.3. Is it because you don’t want the impact.

11.2. In the pantry she sat at the counter and ate with her hands.

16.0. As far as the experience of stirring is concerned, small stillness produces small stirring and great stillness great stirring.



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2013/10/29

Ohio 229 East of Mt Vernon at 7:15 this Morning




Two hour drive through orange and red fog. Story tomorrow, or not. Loved ones: all's fine. Slide show tomorrow, or not. Meanwhile, discovered new Mogwai last night






which made old Mogwai part of today's soundtrack:


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2013/10/28

Wrapped Up in Yourself Like a Spool, Trawling Your Dark as Owls Do




  • Conlon Nancarrow was born 101 years ago yesterday. I confess, after I watched that for the fourth time last night I almost broke my promise to myself not to post anything Sunday unless kaboom or Egoslavian Holy Day.
  • RIP Lou Reed, but I'm not the person to eulogize Lou Reed. It's not hate, it's not love. VU has aged badly for me (but not for others), Reed's solo work by and large didn't interest me. That's on me. And there are plenty of links to eulogies, a sign that if Lou Reed didn't sing to me he sang to a lot of people whose music opinions I value.
  • Here's one. Here's another. Here's a third.
  • I promised myself I wasn't going to post yesterday barring kaboom, and Reed's death is not a kaboom to me, and I'm certain (and you'll have to trust me) that had I not promised myself not to post barring kaboom I wouldn't have posted a stand-alone RIP Lou Reed post. This did get me thinking of borderline kabooms. John Cale, KABOOM, but say... well I won't say, I'm sure, if I keep promising myself days off, I will be tested soon enough.
  • Theses on austerity and how to fight it.
  • Krugman's errors.
  • Another lesson on proper whistleblowing.
  • Maggie's weekly links.
  • { feuillton }'s weekly links.
  • The New Inquiry's Sunday readings.
  • Bernhard, for those of you who do. I confess, I don't do well with German novelists, acknowledged irony from a far shittier bleggalgazer, reading bleggalgazing sucks to me.
  • But hey! bleggalgazing: I can! I can not post everyday! I'll see what tomorrow's blog-pressure numbers are.
  • On Bach, for those of you who do.
  • Bach defended against his devotees. (h/t guy in link above)
  • Linda Thompson interview!
  • Sylvia Plath was born 81 years ago yesterday. See kaboom and Nancarrow bullet above.






YOU'RE

Sylvia Plath

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,   
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,   
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense   
Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode.   
Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,   
Trawling your dark as owls do.   
Mute as a turnip from the Fourth   
Of July to All Fools’ Day,
O high-riser, my little loaf.

Vague as fog and looked for like mail.   
Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn.   
Snug as a bud and at home   
Like a sprat in a pickle jug.   
A creel of eels, all ripples.   
Jumpy as a Mexican bean.   
Right, like a well-done sum.   
A clean slate, with your own face on.



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2013/10/26

Not That Anyone Will Care, but as I Was Sitting There on the 8:07 to New Haven, I Was Struck by Lightning


   


Bryce played parts three and four of Chris Watson's El Tren Fanstama yesterday. Here are all ten parts of the work (though they are not labeled so on youtube screenshot). It's... love. 

Over the past year I've gone back and listened to Bryce's show archives and and Jeff Mullan's show archives not only for the composed music but for the field recordings they play, it's a new obsession, field recordings, I've spared this blog, until now.




   


Here: In his book Civilizations, historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto focuses on man’s overriding impulse timpose its will on the world, "a relationship to the natural environment, recrafted, by the civilising impulse, to meet human demands". This process lies at the very heart of El Tren Fantasma, a composite document of a train ride across Mexico, describing a passage "from Los Mochis to Veracruz, [from] coast to coast, Pacific to Atlantic". While Chris Watson’s previous sets – such as 2003’s critically acclaimed Weather Report – have generally concerned themselves with this planet’s myriad beasts and habitats, this narrative inevitably bears an anthropological mark. Indeed, the first voice we hear doesn’t belong to a cuckoo or coyote, but station announcer Ana Gonzalez Bello putting out one "last call for the ghost train". It’s an unusually contrived opening gambit, from which point the listener is jettisoned into a collision of screeching brakes, rolling stock rattle and hot hydraulic huff. Over half of El Tren Fantasma’s tracks (pun definitely intended) are given over to locomotive sound – gears shifting, hoots, bells and whistles – climaxing with El Divisadero, where Watson manipulates the monolithic machinations into a surging, phantasmal bellow, like a choir of angels struggling to be heard over the rumbling thrum of running gear. Imagine if Phill Niblock had scored Different Trains instead of Steve Reich and you’d be somewhere close.




   


I knew of Watson as a member of Cabaret Voltaire, a band I don't play here enough, and I'd already owned Weather Report, which is - and this is high praise from me though it may not sound like it - always listened to when I have a high fever (but not listened to only then, why, it's being listened to right now as I type) and will be posted here next weekend and all weekends hence will have at least one field recording.




   


I'll start with the weekends, I said this past Thursday at Thursday Night Pints when I was asked about the blog and blogging and then was allowed to answer at length. K asked, why do you feel compelled to post every day and I said I'm an attention-slut, duh, though it's getting harder finding content now that I don't feel like documenting the daily instances of my political disillusionments, pointing and repeatedly screaming See! See! We're So Fucked! L said, you told me that's what drives new readers to the blog. And keeps most of the regular readers, I said. I just posted a song that mentions Jack Spicer (twenty minutes before we met) and some Spicer poems, not a single link to aargh, those posts aren't why most people visit. K said, but you still do it anyway, the aargh every day. I'm trying to stop, I said, I'll start with the weekends.




   


So, weekends. One post only barring major birthdays and Egoslavian Holy Days or exceptionally kaboomy clusterfuck kabooms. Conlow Nancarrow and Sylvia Plath have birthdays tomorrow, I'll see if I can wait until Monday to post Nancarrow pieces and Plath poems. Field recordings. No links to topical instances of clusterfuckery though there can be links to good reads. Bleggalgazing, or not, depending on weekend, confronting and embracing the self-indulgence.







THE TRAIN

David Orr

Not that anyone will care,
But as I was sitting there

On the 8:07
To New Haven,

I was struck by lightning.
The strangest thing

Wasn't the flash of my hair
Catching on fire,

But the way people pretended
Nothing had happened.

For me, it was real enough.
But it seemed as if

The others saw this as nothing
But a way of happening,

A way to get from one place
To another place,

But not a place itself.
So, ignored, I burned to death.

Later, someone sat in my seat
And my ashes ruined his suit.



 


IN THE LOOP

Bob Hicok

I heard from people after the shootings. People
I knew well or barely or not at all. Largely
the same message: how horrible it was, how little
there was to say about how horrible it was.
People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed
because they know I teach at Virginia Tech,
to say, there’s nothing to say. Eventually
I answered these messages: there’s nothing
to say back except of course there’s nothing
to say, thank you for your willingness
to say it. Because this was about nothing.
A boy who felt that he was nothing,
who erased and entered that erasure, and guns
that are good for nothing, and talk of guns
that is good for nothing, and spring
that is good for flowers, and Jesus for some,
and scotch for others, and “and” for me
in this poem, “and” that is good
for sewing the minutes together, which otherwise
go about going away, bereft of us and us
of them. Like a scarf left on a train and nothing
like a scarf left on a train. As if the train,
empty of everything but a scarf, still opens
its doors at every stop, because this
is what a train does, this is what a man does
with his hand on a lever, because otherwise,
why the lever, why the hand, and then it was over,
and then it had just begun.




   


On the below piece: Penultimate track 'El Tajin' begins with a cacophony of animal and insect sounds, oppressive and seemingly recorded at night. Without the certainty of the train, all this undefinable noise leads our minds into fear of the unknown. Watson is recording the landscape before it was tamed by the demystifying, 'civilising' influence of our technology. 




    

A SECOND TRAIN SONG FOR GARY

Jack Spicer

When the trains come into strange cities
The citizens come out to meet the strangers.
                                        I love you, Jack, he said
                                        I love you, Jack, he said
                                        At another station.
When passengers come in from strange cities
The citizens come out to help the strangers.
                                        I love you too, I said
                                        I love you too, I said
                                        From another station.
The citizens are kind to passing strangers
And nourish them and kiss their lips in kindness.
                                        I walk the unbelieving streets
                                        I walk the unbelieving streets
                                        In a strange city.
At night in cold new beds the welcomed strangers
Achieve in memory the city's promise.
                                        I wake in love with you
                                        I wake in love with you
                                        At last year's station.
Then say goodbye to citizens and city
Admit this much—that they were kind to strangers.
                                        I leave my love with you
                                        I leave my love with you
                                        In this strange city.



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2013/10/25

Eighty-Two Years Old Yesterday




  
Sofia Gubaidulina, love love love, I didn't forget, just didn't have chance for a stand alone. More tomorrow, or not. Click on the label below for more songs in the meantime. Or not. Just as Berio made me love a bassoon piece, Gubaidulina makes me love an accordion piece.





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Starts Again Always in Henry's Ears the Little Cough Somewhere, an Odor, a Chime, or: Born Ninety-Eight Years Ago Today



DREAM SONG 133

John Berryman
    
As he grew famous - ah, but what is fame? -
he lost his old obsession with his name,
things seemed to matter less,
including the fame - a television team came
from another country to make a film of him
which did not him distress:

he enjoyed the hard work & he was good at that,
so they all said - the charming Englishmen
among the camera & the lights
mathematically wandered in his pub & livingroom
doing their duty, as too he did it,
but where are the delights

of long-for fame, unless fame makes him feel easy?
I am cold & weary, said Henry, fame makes me feel lazy,
yet I must do my best.
It doesn't matter, truly. It doesn't matter truly.
It seems to be solely a matter of continuing Henry
voicing & obsessed.






DREAM SONG 105

As a kid I believed in democracy: I
'saw no alternative' - teaching at Big Place I ah
put it in practice:
we'd time for one long novel: to a vote -
Gone With the Wind they voted: I crunched 'No"
and we sat down with War & Peace.

As a man I believed in democracy (nobody
ever learns anything): only one lazy day
my assistant, called James Dow,
& I were chatting, in a failure of meeting of minds,
and I said curious, 'What are your real politics?'
'Oh, I'm a monarchist.'

Finishing his dissertation, in Political Science.
I resign. The universal contempt for Mr. Nixon,
whom I never liked but who
alert & gutsy served us years under a dope,
since dynasty K swarmed in. Let's have a King
maybe, before a few mindless votes.












DREAM SONG 29

John Berryman

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart   
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time   
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odor, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind   
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,   
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;   
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.   
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.



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2013/10/24

Jack Spicer Is Music to My Ears, Everything Is Possible





Heard that song for the first time today, a song mentioning Jack Spicer, and since tomorrow is an Egoslavian Holy Day and another poet will get all the space, the song, two Spicer poems and a Nurse with Wounds cover I found plus a favorite John Fahey song I found while looking for the Vince Taylor all get play tonight. As for Spicer, any chance to post Spicer I will post Spicer. Click on tag below for more poems.


A POEM FOR DADA DAY AT THE PLACE APRIL 1, 1958

Jack Spicer

I
    
The bartender
Has eyes the color of ripe apricots
Easy to please as a cash register he
Enjoys art and good jokes.
Squish
Goes the painting
Squirt
Goes the poem
He
We
Laugh.

II
    
It is not easy to remember that other people died
          besides Dylan Thomas and Charlie Parker
Died looking for beauty in the world of the
          bartender
This person, that person, this person, that person
          died looking for beauty
Even the bartender died

III 
     
Dante blew his nose
And his nose came off in his hand
Rimbaud broke his throat
Trying to cough
Dada is not funny
It is a serious assault
On art
Because art
Can be enjoyed by the bartender.

IV
     
The bartender is not the United States
Or the intellectual
Or the bartender
He is every bastard that does not cry
When he reads this poem.
   






[ANY FOOL CAN GET INTO AN OCEAN]

Jack Spicer

Any fool can get into an ocean   
But it takes a Goddess   
To get out of one.
What’s true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming   
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the
    water hardly moves
You might get out through all the waves and rocks
Into the middle of the poem to touch them
But when you’ve tried the blessed water long
Enough to want to start backward
That’s when the fun starts
Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural
You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth
But it takes a hero to get out of one
What’s true of labyrinths is true of course
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.



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As the World Now Becomes without Sequence, or: Born Eighty-Eight Years Ago Today





Berio's birthday, an Egoslavian Holy Day before there was Blegsylvania, Egoslavia, reminds me now of my early blogging days. I was invited to join a group blog called Best of the Blogs. It still exists though I only recognize Max's name on the roster of contributors. I think I quit in 2007, 2008, Sasha might remember since I helped enlist her to join. She quit too. I don't remember the parameters of the mostly amicable divorce or the details of final straws. I was invited by Jerry Bowles, still proprietor of Best of the Blogs and, more importantly, proprietor of Sequenza 21, a wonderful group blog on contemporary classical music (whatever the fuck that term means, but you come up with something better). For X time - I think it more than a year, less than two - I had a blog on Indie music on Sequenza 21. I quit because I sucked at it - you may have noticed, I don't write reviews, I don't like to write reviews, I'm not good at writing reviews, and more than that, I'm an indiscriminate slut (Kinder people than me have called my taste eclectic), music has got to suck for me to hate it. Point being, I think of bleggal history on Berio's birthday because Sequenza 21 was named for Berio.







Serendipity is awesome: the second group blog I contributed too was Agitprop, now dead dead dead, though I'm still digital friends with most if not all of the contributors, including Montag - who I saw this past Friday on Sideling Hill in Washington County, Augusta, and El Serracho who I saw at a petting zoo in Ohio this past Sunday. I didn't remember today is Berio's birthday until yesterday afternoon when I scanned the birthday lists.

















UNDER THE SIGN

Ann Lauterbach

Having dreamed of my dead sister
raging with urgent

need, she
conducting us through intolerable

passages, now forgotten, I
have burned by right hand

after sunset
small dark clouds above

the river I cannot see
while listening to

a scratched CD of a Haydn
piano sonata so that

certain passages
rapidly repeat

and having spend some moments
thinking of the vision

that accommodates
all that is unforeseen

as the world now
becomes without sequence.



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2013/10/23

We Are Fond of the Little Bunny with the Bent Ear Who Stands Alone in the Moonlight Reading What Little Text There Is on the Graves

















THE BUNNY GIVES US A LESSON IN ETERNITY

Mary Ruefle

We are a sad people, without hats.
The history of our nation is tragically benign.
We like to watch the rabbits screwing in the graveyard.
We are fond of the little bunny with the bent ear
who stands alone in the moonlight
reading what little text there is on the graves.
He looks quite desirable like that.
He looks like the center of the universe.
Look how his mouth moves mouthing the words
while the others are busy making more of him.
Soon the more will ask of him to write their love
letters and he will oblige, using the language
of our ancestors, those poor clouds in the ground,
beloved by us who have been standing here for hours,
a proud people after all.



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