Without Asking, The Assistant Re-Sprays Her w/Glycerine

• Bryce's tribute to Bernard Parmegiani yesterday on wfmu.org. 
• Verily, for both reasons I don't want to share and for reasons I do but can't, I'm in as vile a mood as I'm capable, I was going to give you Vile Mood Theme Songs One and Two (old-timers can vouch), bracketing these bullets. Happily, therapeutically, Parmegiani instead.
• Of the five dead days of the five deadest days of the year in Blegsylvania the Saturday is the deadest of the dead. Which requires a post according to my bleggal teleology.
• A summary and conclusion to Tarzie's leak-keeper series.
• Information monopoly defines the deep state.
• Motherfucking humans and motherfucking Giftmas.
• Not an original observation, but fuck that the day after we are told to sanctimoniously give thanks for all we have we're told we have enough shit, go buy some, and many people do.
• How retail sees it's workers.
• I was going to post a link to the Washington Post and Villager Court Jester Dana Milbank calling today for a return to mandatory military service, but the fucking Washington Post says this was my eleventh look at one of their articles in November so give them money, and fuck that. 
• Here, something not angry, Rachel Blau DuPlessis.
• Also too, Rae Armantrout.
• Kristen Hersh on new Throwing Muses album.

THE OBJECTIFIED MERMAID

Matthea Harvey

The photographer has been treating her like a spork all morning. “Wistful mouth, excited tail! Work it, work it!” He has no idea that even fake smiling spreads to her eyes and her tail and there’s nothing she can do about it short of severing her spine. Without asking, the assistant re-sprays her with glycerine. It’s gonna be hell getting all that grease off her scales tonight but she can’t scum up her tank at the bar—its weekly cleanings seem more like monthly these days, and fewer and fewer patrons have been inviting (read: paying) her for a Tankside Mertini and quick feel of her tail. There’s one regular who lapses in and out of consciousness and he’s the real reason she stays. Every once in a while he seems to have forgotten where he is and he looks at her with the kind of wonder she imagines her grandmother inspired when she first risked coming ashore. After an hour under the studio spotlights, she’s starting to smell pretty fishy. Can’t blame it (as she has before) on her standard seaweed bra because this fool of a photographer has her holding two clear fishbowls in front of her breasts so it looks like goldfish are swimming past her nipples. She’s supposed to pretend it tickles. She wants to ask if he’s heard the phrase "gilding the lily" which she recently learned at Land Berlitz. When asked if she’s tired, she lies. A downward spiral means the opposite up here.

Is It Your Hermeneut's Helmet Not Letting Me Filter Through?

• So I wanted to get the hawk gif from the top of the page and return Momcat to her banner, so that's Reason Two for this post. Reason Three is the promised Stereolab cascade, Reason Four to post another Matthea Harvey poem. Reason Five is to give you these links, Reason Six because what the fuck. Reason One you know, it's the tag (besides My Complicity) that adorns each and every post.
• America's future.
• Foucault on how neoliberalism enters the soul.
• Why he wants to fuck Boris Johnson.
• Krasznahorkai, for those of you who do. I confess, I am not in shape for Seiobo, though I feel as if I'm getting there.
• I had forgot the havoc that cutting and pasting from Word can wreck on my motherfucking free blogging platform.
• We talked about death again at Thanksgiving.
• DT: I have no pastimes on the road. I sit in the van staring straight ahead. I go to the venue and wait until I have to soundcheck. Afterwards I sit in the dressing room and wait for the show. People bring me food. I do the show. After the show I wait to go back to the hotel. At the hotel I wait to go to bed. In the morning I wake up and go to the lobby to wait to get into the van. I don't have a book or magazine or newspaper. I don't watch TV. No radio or other music is allowed in the van. I don't talk to anyone in the van. I wait and I sing. My pastime, then, is waiting.
• Boulez. 
• WFMU's Winter/Spring schedule is out, Blumin and Berger and Ryker return, and other than Sue's Solid Gold Hell (she's taking a break) no one I will miss is gone. 

SAD LITTLE BREATHING MACHINE

Matthea Harvey

Under its glass lid, the square
of cheese is like any other element

of the imagination--cough in the tugboat,
muff summering somewhere in mothballs.

Have a humbug. The world is slow
to dissolve & leave us. Is it your

hermeneut's helmet not letting me
filter through? The submarine sinks

with a purpose: Scientist Inside
Engineering A Shell. & meanwhile

I am not well. Don't know how to go on
Oprah without ya. On t.v, a documentary

about bees--yet another box in a box.
The present is in there somewhere.

[We Talked About Death Again at Thanksgiving]

We talked about death again at Thanksgiving
like we always do, who is, how to.
Scattered ashes versus donated

organs versus taxidermy. Aunt
Wanda, who won't die again this week.
Teeth - cavities, root canals, implants,

crowns, general decay - dominates
dessert conversations three past years,
the competition for most anguish

endured not fierce but mean. Every meal
like every meal, holiday after
holiday: accounting for who died,

inventorying the remaining,
recitations of new impairments,
begrudged happiness that I was there.

The Subject May Hoard His or Her Bubbles

THERE'S A NEW GUIDED BY VOICES SONG? Dang, I can't find how to embed it and dang, when Robert Pollard says: As frontman Robert Pollard told Rolling Stone recently, the song was a metaphor about his lack of desire to compete with other bands. "No competition, no pressure, no rules. The way I do things now is an absolute blast," he said. "I think one earns it when entering one's golden years. It also means that you don't necessarily have to act your age," I mean, he's as full of shit as I am when say I don't care about D-List Bleggal Ladder-Matches, yet another reason Robert Pollard has one of three permanent seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game.

• Following up on yesterday, Jorge Bergoglio channeling Karl Polanyi.
• At the closing of an age.
• Beer: street wisdom.
• It's time for year end lists. Earthgirl gave the Messud a Meh +.
• It's time for year end lists. Under Fiction & Poetry the NYTBR lists fifty novels, one book of poetry, Bidart's Metaphysical Dog (which is very good).
• It's time for year end lists, this one authors' choices (includes Josipovici, for those of you who do).
• It's always time for lists! The high school literature zodiac, offered for your amusement only.
• I never heard of Nico Muhly until yesterday. Infrequently but occasionally I like doing research. 
• Matthea Harvey has just been given her own tag here, I'm almost certain her poetry is going to be my next obsession.

PITY THE BATHTUB ITS FORCED EMBRACE OF THE HUMAN FORM

Matthea Harvey

1.   

Pity the bathtub that belongs to the queen its feet

Are bronze casts of the former queen’s feet its sheen

A sign of fretting is that an inferior stone shows through

Where the marble is worn away with industrious

Polishing the tub does not take long it is tiny some say

Because the queen does not want room for splashing

The maid thinks otherwise she knows the king

Does not grip the queen nightly in his arms there are

Others the queen does not have lovers she obeys

Her mother once told her your ancestry is your only

Support then is what she gets in the bathtub she floats

Never holds her nose and goes under not because

She might sink but because she knows to keep her ears

Above water she smiles at the circle of courtiers below

Her feet are kicking against walls which cannot give

Satisfaction at best is to manage to stay clean

2.

Pity the bathtub its forced embrace of the whims of

One man loves but is not loved in return by the object

Of his affection there is little to tell of his profession

There is more for it is because he works with glass

That he thinks things are clear (he loves) and adjustable

(she does not love) he knows how to take something

Small and hard and hot and make room for

His breath quickens at night as he dreams of her he wants

To create a present unlike any other and because he cannot

Hold her he designs something that can a bathtub of

Glass shimmers red when it is hot he pours it into the mold

In a rush of passion only as it begins to cool does it reflect

His foolishness enrages him he throws off his clothes meaning

To jump in and lie there but it is still too hot and his feet propel

Him forward he runs from one end to the other then falls

To the floor blisters begin to swell on his soft feet he watches

His pain harden into a pretty pattern on the bottom of the bath

3.

Pity the bathtub its forced embrace of the human

Form may define external appearance but there is room

For improvement within try a soap dish that allows for

Slippage is inevitable as is difference in the size of

The subject may hoard his or her bubbles at different

Ends of the bathtub may grasp the sponge tightly or

Loosely it may be assumed that eventually everyone gets in

The bath has a place in our lives and our place is

Within it we have control of how much hot how much cold

What to pour in how long we want to stay when to

Return is inevitable because we need something

To define ourselves against even if we know that

Whenever we want we can pull the plug and get out

Which is not the case with our own tighter confinement

Inside the body oh pity the bathtub but pity us too

The Laws the Linguists Thought Up Were Particularly Lissome, Full of Magical Loopholes that Spit Out Medals

Found my Bevis Frond stash looking for something else. Hey, Wednesday officially begins the five slowest days of the year in Blegsylvania, bar none, something that didn't occur to me until after I'd spent too much time on this post. One of the days, because I promise myself a Stereolab cascade every time I note that I don't play enough Stereolab here (like I did last week) considering how much I like and listen to Stereolab, so tomorrow or Friday, cascade. Requests solicited, I know at least one of you, if you're tuned in over the holiday, dig Stereolab. Requests for other cascades solicited, this being the slowest five days of the year in Blegsylvania.

• My recently deceased Aunt Julia (a run of 97 years, I'd buy that right now), a kind if stern women and the most devout conservative Catholic I've personally known would hate this pope, which means he must be preaching (as in sales-pitching for his Corporation, I know, don't get me wrong) something that pisses off devout conservative Catholics, which I admit I'm still small enough to enjoy.
• Pope Francis or Karl Marx? Posted not only because of the above but because (a) unkind comment about the fellow blogger and blog linked to related to blogging and my edict to myself not to link to her and (b) fucking facebook and (c) what does this say about my priorities between my bleggal principles and my jones for an echo to a point? 
• My jones for an echo to a point: regardless of whether Jorge Bergoglio is sincere and genuinely desires to move the Catholic Church in the direction I would applaud or whether Jorge Bergoglio is a skilled and cynical barker preaching populist biscuits to the world's billions of disenfranchised that comprise the future survival of Catholic Corporation (and of course he is an infinite combination of both, like we all are), wouldn't it be nice if Jorge Bergoglio is enough of an independent rube that Catholic power-brokers are scared the puppet they cast as pope might break kayfabe?
• Obama's new constraint. Hey! yesterday was Kill List Tuesday!
• Obama threw a party! and held an off-the-record meeting with MSNBC hosts and liberal pundits on Thursday, POLITICO has learned. Present at the meeting: MSNBC's Ed Schultz and Lawrence O'Donnell, Washington Post economics blogger Ezra Klein, Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn, Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall, ThinkProgress editor-in-chief Judd Legum, Atlantic senior editor Garance Franke-Ruta, Salon political writer Brian Beutler and Fox News contributor Juan Williams.
• Judd Legum? A peanut in the Beverly Hillbillies?
• A fake slum for luxury tourists?

• There are new sites on many of the blogrolls, please check them out when they rise to the top.
• Literary recipes (quite astonishing).
• One more new project.
• Steven Moore interview.
• I am unfamiliar with Elizabeth Jennings, which I can fix.
• I am unfamiliar with Mary Burger, which I can fix.
• The eight of swords.
• Mervyn Peake. I've a dear friend whose love of Peake has prompted me to try Gormenghast repeatedly, alas, without success.
• Tull, REM, Throwing Muses, and a rumination.
• Sunno))) which I haven't played here in a while, perhaps a cascade this weekend, the slowest five days of the year in Blegsylvania.

THE FUTURE OF TERROR 3

Matthea Harvey

The generalissimo's glands directed him
to and fro. Geronimo! said the über-goon
we called God, and we were off to the races.
Never mind that we could only grow
grey things, that inspecting the horses' gums
in the gymnasium predicted a jagged
road ahead. We were tired of hard news—
it helped to turn down our hearing aids.
We could already all do impeccable imitations
of the idiot, his insistent incisors working on
a steak as he said there's an intimacy to invasion.
That much was true. When we got jaded
about joyrides, we could always play games
in the kitchen garden with the prisoners.
Jump the Gun, Fine Kettle of Fish and Kick
the Kidney were our favorites. The laws
the linguists thought up were particularly
lissome, full of magical loopholes that
spit out medals. When we ran out of room
on our uniforms, we pinned them to
our mourning bands, to our mops.
We had made the big time, but night nipped
at our heels. The navigator's needle swung
strangely, oscillating between the oilwells
and ask again later. We tried to pull ourselves
together by practicing quarterback sneaks
along the pylons, but the race to the ravine
was starting to feel as real as the R.I.P.'s
and roses carved into rock. Suddenly the sight
of a schoolbag could send us scrambling.

[One More New Project]

One more new project
to replace an unfinished
now abandoned plan.

In the previous
my attempted confessions
failed predictably,

a designed success,
my private boring secrets
mute, wormed, kept from me.

Already amiss
with explanation, adrift
in defensive pose

more prose than poem (is
poem one syllable or two?),
after five stanzas

exit strategies
are contemplated. What I
can't write for myself

is what this poem can't
be. What every poem I write
is: about itself

and what I refuse
to admit. A viable
system and program

for filling tablets
with squiggles without effect
much less personal

edification.
I can write the kind of poem
I don't like to read,

self-referential,
concerned with clasping objects
against their subjects.

Now, stanzas again,
counting beats, repeating ploys
that work by failure.

Furious to Free Himself from His Hatred of Factories

• It's 8:20 PM EDT as I type this bullet. This tweet appears in my timeline - the fucking Washington Racist Slurs invited geriatric Navajos to pose on the sideline in Racist Slur garb. Shortly afterward, I saw Andrew's post below re: boredom, and when I youtubed the Iggy song the mandatory youtube advertisement was a fifteen second screed against Iran and the new Iran nuclear deal that showed celebrating Iranians in 1979 and asked, How can anybody trust Iranians? Meanwhile, on twitter, defenders of Greenwald and his deal with scummy billionaires battled defenders of NSFW and their deal with scummy billionaires over which side was purer of heart.
• I wrote more about each. I threw each away. I then wrote again about why of the three the fucking local helmetball team pissed me off the most. It's still a work-in-progress.
• Fuck Hollywood too.
• I should follow my own advice:

• Decoding the ideological bullshit of a bourgeois simpleton, part two.
• When the world was square.
• Who owns history? and other annoying questions.
• An unquestioning frame of mind.
• Our aesthetic categories.
• A 1991 BBC documentary on Don DeLillo. Been thinking of DeLillo since I wondered why his Libra wasn't mentioned on the litblogs I visit in the run-up to the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination in particular, and not much anywhere recently. Accepting that out of sight out of mind is at work, I remember when DeLillo, who I read diligently, dutifully, with neither hate or love, was once a big deal. I went to stacks to find White Noise, it's gone, forgot about it. Tried Libra, lasted ten pages (and I didn't like it when it came out). I can see Underworld in my mind's eye on my bookshelf in the basement, fuck that. Next time I'm in a used book store I'll look for White Noise (the one I'll attempt a rereading if I attempt a rereading) if I remember.
• It wasn't easy to create an all-consuming blobmonster.
• Her dog, the cyborg.
• Krasznahorkei, for those of you who do.
• Gass, for those of you who do.
• Bodeh read a Hejinian poem on his show last night.
• A bibliography of boredom. Andrew asked for suggestions on literary works that explore concepts of boredom, and of course the first one I thought of was:

YOUTH

James Wright

Strange bird,

His song remains secret.

He worked too hard to read books.

He never heard how Sherwood Anderson

Got out of it, and fled to Chicago, furious to free himself   

From his hatred of factories.

My father toiled fifty years

At Hazel-Atlas Glass,

Caught among girders that smash the kneecaps

Of dumb honyaks.

Did he shudder with hatred in the cold shadow of grease?   

Maybe. But my brother and I do know

He came home as quiet as the evening.

He will be getting dark, soon,   

And loom through new snow.

I know his ghost will drift home

To the Ohio River, and sit down, alone,

Whittling a root.

He will say nothing.

The waters flow past, older, younger   

Than he is, or I am.

Every Idea I Have Is Nostalgia

And with that I complete the second half of a goading (though payment won't be until at least next week), plus provide a detailed account and and review, with observations and bleggal theorizing, on yesterday's mass migration of sites moribund on live blogrolls to moribund on the new blogroll called Moribund (the burgermeister).  I cheated - two of the three sub-poems were already written. I am again reminded that I don't do Fuck-It well, my first instinct as always to immediately apply rules to anything supposedly ruleless, the defining and applying of rules more fun than playing without them.

• Was reminded of Jessica Bailiff last night on Mandl's show.
• Zing! The Bayern Munich coach Pep Guardiola had little time to celebrate his team's 3-0 league win at Borussia Dortmund on Saturday, threatening instead to uncover a mole he said has been leaking team details to the media. "It does not matter who it is, heads will roll," Guardiola was quoted in the Bild newspaper as having told his players after the game, angry that tactics had made their way into the press before the game. "I will throw him out. He will not play under me again." The club's chief executive Karl-Heinz Rummenigge confirmed the existence of a mole, saying he should stop or face action from the club. "We will obviously not bring in the NSA [National Security Agency] to find out who it is," Rummenigge told Sky television. "But I advise him to stop doing it or he will have a serious problem not only with Pep Guardiola, but also the entire club."
• How advertising turned anti-consumerism into a secret weapon.
• Women's justice in New Mexico.
• The New Inquiry's Sunday readings.
• I have no idea why this would be, but since moving the moribund to their own locale the blog seems to be loading much faster.
• Szybist interview: I experiment a lot. Sometimes I allow poems to work toward their form; sometimes I begin with form to provide what Lyn Hejinian describes as an intentional ‘field of inquiry’ in which to improvise. For me, to write a poem is to experiment with form, or experiment with how different limitations provoke different kinds of language, different imaginations. 
• Requiem for a wood sprite.
• Chrostowska? Good thing I have access to a university library.
• Happy Birthday, Prunella! Her latest playlist has the guy with whom she shares a birthday. I confess I don't know as much about Mark Lanegan's music as I should, and who the hell does birthdays on blog anyway?

THE TROUBADOURS ETC

Mary Szybist

Just for this evening, let's not mock them.

Not their curtsies or cross-garters

or ever-recurring pepper trees in their gardens

promising, promising.

At least they had ideas about love.

All day we've driven past cornfields, past cows poking their heads

through metal contraptions to eat.

We've followed West 84, and what else?

Irrigation sprinklers fly past us, huge wooden spools in the fields,

lounging sheep, telephone wires,

yellowing flowering shrubs.

Before us, above us, the clouds swell, layers of them,

the violet underneath of clouds.

Every idea I have is nostalgia. Look up:

there is the sky that passenger pigeons darkened and filled—

darkened for days, eclipsing sun, eclipsing all other sound

with the thunder of their wings.

After a while, it must have seemed that they followed

not instinct or pattern but only

one another.

When they stopped, Audubon observed,

they broke the limbs of stout trees by the weight of the numbers.

And when we stop we'll follow—what?

Our hearts?

The Puritans thought that we are granted the ability to love

only through miracle,

but the troubadours knew how to burn themselves through,

how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.

The spectacular was never behind them.

Think of days of those scarlet-breasted, blue-winged birds above you.

Think of me in the garden, humming

quietly to myself in my blue dress,

a blue darker than the sky above us, a blue dark enough for storms,

though cloudless.

At what point is something gone completely?

The last of the sunlight is disappearing

even as it swells—

Just for this evening, won't you put me before you

until I'm far enough away you can

believe in me?

Then try, try to come closer—

my wonderful and less than.

I Had the Happy Idea That the Dog Digging a Hole in the Yard in the Twilight Had His Nose Deep in Mold-Life

• Penderecki turned eighty yesterday.
• Decoding the ideological bullshit of a bourgeois simpleton, part one.
• Optimism of the will has come to represent denial of reality.
• Elizabeth Drew's obamapostasy, of a sort. Going into the mid-terms and POTUS 16 this will be the Democrats rallying cry: Obama: incompetent and puny, not evil.
• Foucault (for those of you who do) on the state.
• On false flags.
• Bleggalstuff: in a preposterous waste of time for reasons you don't want to hear about and signifying more to me than you want to hear about, I'm going to create a cemetery(s) for sites on the blogrolls that haven't posted in more than six months. Alright, I'm going to tell you two of the thirteen reasons I just scribbled down: one, Blegsylvania fascinates me - have I mentioned this before? - and two, when zombies arise I sometimes miss them in the mass of the living. No one is going to be purged and, btw, there are three new places added within the past week, look for them as they float to the top.
• UPDATE! And immediately there are questions. The first blog I click on to get URL to transfer to Moribund has gone private, so while the URL works to a log-in, the site is unavailable to me, and the feed comes in nameless. I've renamed it and added it since it's presumably alive (and as an aside, I think I know why it went private). The third blog I clicked on is dead and gone, as is does not exist anymore. What to do? This may be more interesting (to me and probably me alone) than I thought it would be.
• This is on the radio as I type this sentence:

• Why does Metro suck?
• Kensington's best bartender.
• Food links. 
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Beckett and Coetzee, for those of you who do.
• The views expressed do not necessarily reflect..... Adding, the GbV comment has been expressed to me by a few over the years too.
• I think Mary Szybist, poem below, is going to be this coming week's obsession.
• I think Dean Roberts is going to be this coming week's obsession:

HAPPY IDEA

Mary Szybist

I had the happy idea to suspend some blue globes in the air

and watch them pop.

I had the happy idea to put my little copper horse on the shelf so we could stare at each other

all evening.

I had the happy idea to create a void in myself.

Then to call it natural.

Then to call it supernatural.

I had the happy idea to wrap a blue scarf around my head and spin.

I had the happy idea that somewhere a child was being born who was nothing like Helen or

Jesus except in the sense of changing everything.

I had the happy idea that someday I would find both pleasure and punishment, that I would

know them and feel them,

and that, until I did, it would be almost as good to pretend.

I had the happy idea to call myself happy.

I had the happy idea that the dog digging a hole in the yard in the twilight had his nose deep in

mold-life.

I had the happy idea that what I do not understand is more real than what I do,

and then the happier idea to buckle myself

into two blue velvet shoes.

I had the happy idea to polish the reflecting glass and say

hello to my own blue soul. Hello, blue soul. Hello.

It was my happiest idea.

Non-Comprehensive Review of Bonnie Prince Billy at Gonda Theater, Georgetown University, November 22, 2013

Well, that was amazing. Solo. Opened with the above.

Explained that when Bonnie Prince Billy came to him Bonnie Prince Billy told Will Oldham to lighten up, have fun, and Will agreed and wrote the following song.







Closed the set with a raucous (really):






Holyfuck. Plus I scored this hat.

Parmegiani

RIP Bernard Parmegiani. This wasn't part of today's Point A to B plan. I thought, Parmegiani is dead? Grate. Sorry, it's true.

Greyhoos, from whom I heard the news, thought of the piece I first thought of when hearing the news, picks another piece, and links to Simon who has many more pieces and thoughts.

Be Wet with a Decent Happiness

Thursday Night Pints consisted of neither Thursday night or pints, but in Thursday Afternoon Emails L challenged me to post a particular poem of mine she likes as header last night. It'd been posted before. There is new product, I'm just not posting it. L thinks I should, encourages me to post at the other place, dared me to post the poem I posted last night as header hoping to kick-start something. Do you want me to tell you - this isn't Thursday Night Pints dialogue, I'm talking to you - do you want me to tell you my theories on why I'm not posting new product? No, I didn't think you did. Besides thinking of you, I'm thinking of me: I'd have to post the poems I don't want to post to explain why I don't want to post the poems. I posted a link to a friend's meditation on silence, another friend tweeted about a nice, small, quiet novel. I think of myself as nice, but small and quiet are adjectives that have never been used to describe me by me, by anyone. Sorry, here's a theory: I'm working on smaller and quieter, wildly unsuccessful here in this format, by refusing to post here the work that matters to me most (except when I do).







Today is Britten's centenary. I mentioned it first three weeks ago. I wasn't planning to post a piece a day in countdown to his birthday but I expected to have posted far more than I have. It's not work yet, an oh-fuck yet listening to Britten, but I find myself resisting the music when once it was drop the needle, flow. I picked up the nice, small, quiet novel my friend recommended, from admittedly light skimming it seems a Point A to B plot. I deal with Point A to B plots in real life, many of them more enforced because ridiculously contrived than the ridiculously contrived Point A to B plots in novels I no longer force myself to read. I have no patience for (all novels but especially) novels with Point A to B plots. The two, my new reaction to Britten's music and my now apparently calcified reaction to Point A to B plots in novels, are of course related symptoms. I have a theory, but.






I wrote this paragraph Thursday night. I am seeing Bonnie Prince Billy Friday night with Earthgirl and Hamster and Mr Alarum and Xtina. I'm going to get up at 7:00 Friday morning (if I'm lucky: I'll be wide awake at 5:30, cats chirping in ears, head-butting my forehead, for breakfast, I might be able to fall back asleep, though doubtful), drink coffee, finish this post, then go to an oral surgeon for the consultation appointment for removing this fucking wisdom tooth which waited 54 years to spurt, after which I will drive to work and find an email box full of fuck. I'll deal with it, I'll deal with this, I'll deal with that. I'll leave work at four and squelch the urge to stop for reward-sushi in Glen Echo and drive home and meet Hamster. If Earthgirl and I feel like quickly picking up we'll let Hamster in the house, most probably we'll meet him on the steps in front of our house, hopefully kept company by Napoleon, MomCat, and Frankie. The three of us will drive to the library - I'll park my car in Lot 9 as always - and meet Mr Alarum and Xtina on the library's loading dock. I will immediately insist that even though we are standing on the loading dock of the building I and Mr Alarum work in and the concert is in a building of my and Mr Alarum's employer WE CAN NOT AND WILL NOT DISCUSS WORK! This won't be a problem. We will walk down Prospect, possibly stopping to eat at a better than decent Thai restaurant, maybe walking down to M until we find a restaurant we all agree upon. Food, beer, wine, laughs. We'll trudge uphill back to Hilltop. We'll see an opening act or not and see Bonnie Prince Billy either solo or with a band, we don't know. It will be marvelous, charming, funny, if past Bonnie Prince Billy shows I've seen are predictors of tomorrow's show. We'll leave the theater, it will be colder than we expect though everyone thinks they're prepared for cold, but. Earthgirl and Hamster and I will say good night to Mr Alarum and Xtina, we'll walk to my car. I'll take Prospect to 35th to M to Canal to Clara Barton Parkway to Glen Echo Parkway to the Beltway to 355 to Beach to home. Napoleon and MomCat and Frankie will hear the sound of my car and see the angles of my headlights as I park the car and run out to greet us. A most enjoyable Point A to Point B plot. I will or won't write about it Saturday morning and post field recordings.







Yes, I've posted the Creeley poem below before, more than once, I love it, titled other posts with the same line I used for this post. I wasn't going to say more about writing (and I wasn't going link-farming today either), but flowerville's most recent post in which he posts a photo of his Decomposition Book prompts me to note that in a startling (for me) development I've stopped, after thirty-five years, maybe temporarily, I'll find out, working in Moleskins, a decision both impromptu and significant, I have theories why,  I'll spare you. I'm now working in:

THE RAIN

Robert Creeley

All night the sound had

come back again,

and again falls

this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself

that must be remembered,

insisted upon

so often? Is it

that never the ease,

even the hardness,

of rain falling

will have for me

something other than this,

something not so insistent—

am I to be locked in this

final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,

lie next to me.

Be for me, like rain,

the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-

lust of intentional indifference.

Be wet

with a decent happiness.

"I Didn't Think of It as Killing Them," the Executioner from the Late Eighteenth Century Said to Charlie Rose, Still Wearing a Hood, His Axe Resting on the Wood Table I've Assumed Is Oak

Fell asleep listening to a different Eloy (hear below), woke up with that in my head. Couple of things: I still have three tickets to see Bonnie Prince Billy tonight in Annapolis, you can have them for free. No one's claimed them yet, I doubt anyone will now, but one last offer. Second, tomorrow is Britten's centenary, if you've a particular piece you'd like to hear let me know. It's not going to be a big production: listening to pieces this past week, they don't work for me like they used to. Yet another side-effect of the strangest days of my life. A happy ending. On the logic behind mass spying. No, billionaires don't want to overthrow the government. Hey! did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team? It's true (that I haven't used this gag in a long time, yet another side-effect of the strangest days of my life), and they are second to bottom in MLS in net worth, below the Columbus Yellow (h/t SeatSix). United doesn't get that new stadium United is gone. As in, Jerk. Someone besides me not thrilled about the Python reunion. Because, a former copyeditorial interlude. I've never heard of James McBride or his novel The Good Lord Bird, but it just won the National Book Award. I have heard of Mary Szybist whose book of poems Incarnadine won, I haven't read it yet but it's on my desk, good thing I have access to a university library stacks. Leonid Tsypkin? On the quality of silence, silence something I seem incapable of producing. No, I'm not asking anyone to migrate bookmarks or update blogrolls. I don't play nearly enough Stereolab here, cascade in your future. Prunella's latest playlist.








WHY WE MUST SUPPORT PBS

Bob Hicok

"I didn't think of it as killing them," the executioner
from the late eighteenth century said to Charlie Rose,
still wearing a hood, his axe resting on the wood table
I've assumed is oak. "I don't know how to put this:
it's as if I loved them in the moment I swung, loved them
and wanted to offer them peace." Charlie Rose was smiling,
excited. Even more than usual, the joy of an otter
seemed to be swimming through the long river of his body
when he put a hand on the man's memoir and said,
"But then something happened that made you question
your entire existence up to that point." It was hard
to see the man all in black on Charlie Rose's black set,
as if midnight were speaking, saying, "Yes. One day
I looked down and there was the son I'd never had
staring up at me from the block, I could tell
by his eyes, this was my boy, this was my life
flowing out, reaching beyond the sadness of its borders."
"You knew this," Charlie Rose said. "I knew this,"
the executioner replied. "Even though you'd never been
with a woman." "Never. I was all about career." "You knew
because the eyes tell us something." "Because the eyes
tell us everything." "And you couldn't go on." "No.
I couldn't go on." They changed gears then and honestly
I drifted off, half-dreamed I'd arranged a tropical
themed party on a roof without testing how much dancing
and vodka the roof could hold, people were falling
but still laughing, falling but still believing
there was a reason to put umbrellas in their drinks,
that otherwise their drunkenness would be rained on,
rained out, when I heard the executioner say, "We
were running and running. Finally we made it to the border
and I put my arms around my son and told him, you have a future
but no pony. Get a pony." Charlie Rose smiled
like he was smiling for the otter, for whatever is lithe
and liquid in our spirits, and repeated, "Get a pony."
"That's the last time I saw him," the executioner said.
"And that's why you've refused to die." "Yes."
"To keep that moment alive." "Yes." "And you believe eternity
is an act of will." "Yes," Mr. Midnight said. "Will.
Will and love. Love and fury." 

Seventy-One Today

Meredith Monk is 71 today. I'm rebumping the top two pieces and oops from last night (the original oops here now deleted - some people saw it - kept there):

Meredith Monk will be 71 tomorrow. This is true: the above youtube of Monk's Possibility of Destruction was meant to be posted alone (as in not here) at BLCKDGRDXLD just now to consecrate BLCKDGRDXLD as home blog in my mind if not in practice. This post is there now too (where it looks excellent) but consecration need wait. BLCKDGRD and BLCKDGRDXLD are on different google accounts for reasons pertaining to my technical ineptitude and the blogtrauma of the domain name renewal, I wanted a back-up blog on a different account in case BLCKDGRD's account was lost, dropped, or somehow compromised through either my digital clumsiness or google's bulldozering of clients while paving new profits. I like what I do here, I don't want to lose it, I go back for songs and poems. On my laptop I run BLCKDGRD on Firefox and BLCKDGRDXLD on Chrome so I can keep both accounts open simultaneously as I move back and forth. I need to youtube in Firefox since my youtube account is on the same log-in as my BLCKDGRD account, I opened what I thought was a new post at BLCKDGRDXLD, pasted the youtube, plunged Publish, oops. Have another piece.







And adding these pieces:

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Once There Was a Detective on a Bridge Who Longed to Tell Everyone Everything He Knew and Therefore He Started Running Across the Bridge as Fast as He Could

Most important things first: the new Juana Molina is out Wednesday.

For an hour or so yesterday half the youtubes on this blog wigged out, showed an error message (I paraphrase): Haha, we fucked up, thousands of monkey's are working to fix it. No really, it did say monkeys were working to fix it. Thank you, monkeys, everything seems fine now. I don't know if it was blogger or youtube or Daddy Google that produced the quirk. Now that Daddy Google rules the world and says its children have to play with each other or else all Google's children act skeevy.

I got three emails from friends, each slobbering to tell me, hey, have you seen your blog, IT'S FUCKED UP! See the last line in the Franz Wright poem on Sunday's post. Heh! sorry to disappoint, I didn't go blogspastic, I saw the fucked-up youtubes, I thought, fuck my free blogging platform, it'll fix itself or not, fuck it. Didn't run to the abandoned wordpress blog and hissy-fit the google-fart. Once, always until as recently as early last summer (during the Renew Domain Name in Blogger episode), I would have. Since the youtubes did fix themselves I've no way to prove what I'd do right now as you read this, hours after the event, if blooger was still broken. I'm certain the fuck it wouldn't be as relaxed and unconcerned. The fuck-up occurred at the back-up blogger blog too, so when I say that spiritually that blog is no longer the back-up blog, this is now the back-up blog (though you'll notice no difference in product or production because this is totally symbolic and important only to me), that's because I can manipulate the appearance there while I'm suffocating in green here because this blog's Apply to Template button is permanently broken, not because of yesterday's and today's and tomorrow's inevitable Daddy Google fuck up.

• Greenwald, Scahill, Rosen, and the price of one's journalistic soul.
• Omidyar media adviser in his own words.
• Creating sociopathic corporate leaders.
• Detroit as template for democracy's destruction.
• The passive aggressive rot sets in.
• This week in water.
• BRT!
• History of English in ten minutes.
• Juana Molina interview.

• Graham Chapman is still dead, but one last money grab.
• UPDATE! From the hallelujahs on twitter and blogs I am apparently the only person who doesn't think of this as a marvelous miracle. Forgive me, I took members seriously when they said there would be a reunion when Graham Chapman rose from the dead, forgive me, I'm a cynic, in light of those statements I question current motives. On top of which, reunions not only always suck compared to the original, they diminish the original by the reunion's suck.
• Purgatory/paradise. At least he's not on blooger.
• Earthgirl hired Planet's bestfriend's boyfriend to set up a professional looking website for her art work, he always uses wordpress. Will add to Me and Mine once it's up and running.
• He doesn't blame youtube.
• A blog called Golden Notebooks remembers Lessing.
• I announced that I wasn't going to worry that not only does Arcade Fire's music suck unto suck but that the band is comprised of insufferable poseurs, but they are making it fucking difficult.
• A friend asked yesterday if Lyn Hejinian is currently the most important writer working in English. Maybe.
• I don't know why I never created a Juana Molina tag until today, but search her name in the top box on this blog and on the old blogs for lots more songs.

[ONCE THERE WAS A GOOSE...]

Lyn Hejinian

     Once there was a goose who floated midstream from the moment she woke to the moment she slept.

     Once there was a girl who knocked a spider into a river and was thus compelled to put a leaf between her teeth and swim far out into the current holding her head above the stream to rescue it.

     Once there was a family gathered in a small backyard and once there was a turtle on a log and when the family and the turtle are mentioned one after the other the turtle flops off its log and the members of the family laugh.

     Each such episode suggests a moment in an imaginable universe - or, rather, each fills an imaginable and not (by our standards) unreal universe with its own uniqueness, and each uniqueness has staying power.

     Once there was a branch that fell into a stream and the new patterns that swirled around it spelled a name that drifted downstream and disappeared around a bend and no one spoke it nor knew whose it was.

     Once there was a detective on a bridge who longed to tell everyone everything he knew and therefore he started running across the bridge as fast as he could.

Here's a Guess: We Will Sit on a Wooden Lawn-Chair in the Sun, and We Will Like It

Do people click all the links? Do they listen to all the songs? K asked me Saturday night at a Saturday Night Edition of Thursday Night Pints. I know, I said, some regularly do, most don't though I'd guess more click through to the links than listen to the music, I have one good friend who tells me he never listens to the music. L said, depends on the music for me, the experimental music, fuck that. That ended this week's questions about this blog. Minor wonderment at obamaclusterfuck that handed the GOP a lifeline after the GOP had its ass clocked in kabukifuck re: Obama's incompetence: real, fake, death to the Either/Or. L said, I've never seen incompetence so competently executed, it must be by design. Design, I said, as in Battling Tops. Huh? said K. He's old, said L. More music you don't like Sunday, I said to L, you'll like Monday's.

• And she will.
• The business of free speech: Freedom of speech isn’t freedom from the consequences of speech. Freedom of speech is not a protection against people telling you that your views are hateful. Freedom of speech doesn’t oblige other people or organizations to support you in your privileged position as a broadcaster, or journalist, or blogger. Freedom of speech isn’t a guarantee of permanent employment when the thing you are selling is your opinion, nor does freedom of speech compel the public to buy said opinion from you.
• New Inquiry's Sunday readings.
• A pandemonium of word demons.
• The staying away.
• Emotional.
• The NYT obit for Lessing. She was someone who I always liked what she was saying better than I liked the way she said it.
• List of Lessing links.
• Bump: I've still three tickets to Bonnie Prince Billy in Annapolis on Thursday that I cannot use and the YOU CAN HAVE FOR FREE.
• Iva Bittova documentary.
• Feldman and Beckett (yes, again) for those of you who do.

IN A LANDSCAPE: IV

John Gallaher

Now the scene changes, we say, and the next few years 

are quiet. It's another curse, the inverse of the "interesting times" 

the Chinese were said to go on so about. Nevertheless, there it is, 

as the emptiness needs a something in order to be defined as empty, 

which means we spend the next few years talking about other years, 

as if that's what's important. Maybe that is what's important. It was terrible, 

the hospital stay. The children. Not the children in the abstract way, 

but those times worried that this would go wrong, or that, and then things 

do go wrong and it almost feels like we'd wished for it to happen, 

so not only do we have to go through this terrible time, but we also 

have to keep reminding ourselves that we didn't wish for it. It's Problem 

One. And there's our two-year-old son strapped to a board with an IV, crying. 

And doesn't it feel like a formal device then? As if expecting it 

were the same--or is the same--as willing it, but then almost willing it anyway, 

saying something like, "Please God, or whomever, get it over with already . . ." 

if the world isn't going to be a museum only, as museums keep calling out 

that there's so much more to find in the past, like ourselves, for instance. 

The simplification of our forms. The question of why it might be important 

to save our dinnerware, or Yo-yos. We have these accidents 

in common: last night I was pulling a filing cabinet upstairs on a hand truck, 

and at the 90 degree turn it fell on top of me and I had to hold it like that, 

one wheel on the stair, one in mid-air. So I had some time on my hands, 

waiting for Robin to get home. They say that if you relax, lying there 

is 80% as restful as sleep. And knowing how to relax is key, they say. 

Here's a guess: we will sit on a wooden lawn-chair in the sun, and we 

will like it. We will run the numbers and think it sounds like a good 

proposition. We will consult a map, even ask directions. The sun's 

out right now, in fact, and it's all a matter of doing the next big thing. 

Driving home, say. And then it's a manner of having done something. 

Driving past the car wash. Yes, forcing a matter of doing the next 

thing, which is filling out the accident report, while the old man 

who hit my pickup is crying in the street. And then I'm walking around, 

picking up the fender and light pieces and putting them in the bed.

The Clouds Were Pretending to Be Clouds When in Fact They Were Overheard Comments Regarding His Recent Behavior

My insomnia and Serendipity brings you the above highlights of a Manchester football club you don't have to hate. Yesterday I saw and at three o'clock this morning remembered and read this Guardian article on FC United of Manchester, who play in the Northern Premier League, the seventh tier of English football. Here's the current table:

1.	Skelmersdale	19	13	2	4	41:27	41
2.	Chorley	17	12	4	1	39:12	40
3.	Fylde	18	10	5	3	41:14	35
4.	Worksop	18	11	2	5	55:43	35
5.	Marine	20	8	8	4	37:30	32
6.	Blyth	20	9	5	6	33:31	32
7.	Kings Lynn	19	9	4	6	38:27	31
8.	Matlock	19	9	4	6	29:20	31
9.	Ilkeston	21	9	4	8	38:30	31
10.	Buxton	18	8	5	5	26:20	29
11.	United of Manche...	17	8	4	5	34:21	28
12.	Grantham	19	8	4	7	36:32	28
13.	Rushall	17	8	4	5	25:29	28
14.	Whitby	20	6	9	5	32:31	27
15.	Barwell	21	7	5	9	30:35	26
16.	Ashton	18	6	6	6	33:30	24
17.	Nantwich	20	6	5	9	32:29	23
18.	Witton	17	6	3	8	29:27	21
19.	Frickley	20	5	6	9	28:33	21
20.	Trafford	18	6	3	9	27:34	21
21.	Stamford	19	5	3	11	28:44	18
22.	Stocksbridge	20	3	4	13	34:56	13
23.	Stafford	19	2	3	14	20:52	9
24.	Droylsden	18	0	2	16	12:70	2

About an hour ago blogfriend Hamish Mack retweeted the above video highlights of yesterday's FCUM v Frickley game which includes a spectacular own goal, so Serendipity must be honored with this post.

While I'm here, have Maggie's weekly links and { feuilleton }'s weekly links and Joyce dug Defoe and hear Anne Lauterbach read her poems and this lovely piece on the death of a cat and sanctuary and RIP Doris Lessing (who I read dutifully decades ago, it wasn't love it wasn't hate) and Hilary Mantel's review of Lessing's autobiography.






STAY

Franz Wright

The clouds were pretending to be clouds
when in fact they were overheard comments
regarding his recent behavior, but muffled

as though heard through a wall. Unlike
the personal messages being conveyed to him
in the form of asides by people on TV, chilling

in their clam and unequivocal malevolence.
In the garden the roses were opening,
chanting in unison, My name is Mary and

you really don't want to come near me,
not if I was the last little swastika nympho
on earth, and what was that supposed to mean!

Then there the others who lived there.
(Was he living there now?) They were indifferent
to him with the very striking exception of

two friends. He could tell they were friends
by the marked improvement in their mood
when his was at its most truly desolate.