- Jim's mention of WFMU DJ Frank O'Toole in comments put O'Toole's signature show-ender in my head all day yesterday and into this morning, I just finished a section of Sebald's Austerlitz in which Austerlitz, talking about his upbringing as an adopted child in Wales, riffs on the physical sensation of nostalgia, and I get a physical charge of nostalgia every time I hear that Nelson Riddle song. It's the song, not the show. I don't remember watching Route 66, ever, my father and mother must have watched it when I was too young to know what was going on on-screen, but the music? Boom.
- On Miriam Carey's temper.
- Fred Hiatt senses chance to destroy Social Security, urges Obama to cave.
- Which has been the plan all along.
- Avedon Carol's obamapostasy.
- Pain is not a dolphin: on misunderstanding analogies.
- Dear Moron Tool at the Gazette: 270 goes nowhere near Potomac. It's called Rockville.
- Nighthawks: on dreams.
- An incoherent list of books!
- Krasznahorkai, for those of you who do. I picked up Seiobi Down Below this past Tuesday at Politics and Prose, it's after the Sebald (it's working; more later, or not) and the Coover (and maybe the Pynchon, what the fuck; more later, or not).
- September Song part one.
- September Song part two.
- Woke up with Zoviet France in my head:
A MAN MAY CHANGE
Marvin Bell
As simply as a self-effacing bar of soap
escaping by indiscernible degrees in the wash water
is how a man may change
and still hour by hour continue in his job.
There in the mirror he appears to be on fire
but here at the office he is dust.
So long as there remains a little moisture in the stains,
he stands easily on the pavement
and moves fluidly through the corridors. If only one
cloud can be seen, it is enough to know of others,
and life stands on the brink. It rains
or it doesn’t, or it rains and it rains again.
But let it go on raining for forty days and nights
or let the sun bake the ground for as long,
and it isn’t life, just life, anymore, it’s living.
In the meantime, in the regular weather of ordinary days,
it sometimes happens that a man has changed
so slowly that he slips away
before anyone notices
and lives and dies before anyone can find out.
