- That's on my current drive home from work air guitar playlist. It's my favorite Furs song ever, nothing else comes close. I had a Britten piece in mind, but I didn't want to make it two days in a row in advance of his centenary so I've started another gag based on compulsion. Lurched from compulsion to compulsion. Please use last sentence as my epitaph.
- Usually used for the Sillyass Star Trek allusion gag, the below is also related to the above, free digital pint if you get it:
- Yes, all this for that.
- Meanwhile, in a blue county in a blue state....
- Corporate pillage, part one.
- Zizek once again says what I've been saying in every fucking blog post 4ever. When I call him the greatest academic fraud of his generation it's more than a gag, it's envy.
- On shouting at Ray Kelly and polite liberal behavior.
- Studying war.
- A profile of William T Vollmann in Newsweek. I bought Book of Dolores (pun intended, yo, I bet), it arrived last Saturday, I haven't had time to but glance, it's a beautiful object to hold, hope to read this weekend). I bought a used copy of Argall at the Montgomery County Library bookstore in the weird shopping center in the weird country of Boiling Brook, and I still have an extra copy of Fathers and Crows, so if you're a bud and want one let me know.
- Starling murmurations.
- I found out about the Vollmann article because the author tweeted it and it ended up somehow in my timeline. I tweeted him, hey, do you get the pun in the title? and he tweeted back huffily, it's an allusion, and I tweeted back, sure, but it's also a pun on dolorous, get it? No response.
- Hey! Edmond posted! He's alive.
- In Evidence: 16.
- What you can buy me for Giftmas.
- There's an Elizabeth Bishop biopic?
- Musique Concrète Soundtracks To Experimental Short Films (1956-1978).
- So, two more drive home from work air guitar playlist songs. Looking for the below reminded me to listen to Broken Social Scene even a quarter as much as I used to. The one between the poems possibly the song posted most often here, certainly in the top ten. The bottom song is actually the only one of this shitty blog's Theme Songs that is on the drive home from work air guitar playlist.
THE LOST PILOT
James Tate
Your face did not rot
like the others—the co-pilot,
for example, I saw him
yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,
the poor ignorant people, stare
as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.
But your face did not rot
like the others—it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their
distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,
down from your compulsive
orbiting, I would touch you,
read your face as Dallas,
your hoodlum gunner, now,
with the blistered eyes, reads
his braille editions. I would
touch your face as a disinterested
scholar touches an original page.
However frightening, I would
discover you, and I would not
turn you in; I would not make
you face your wife, or Dallas,
or the co-pilot, Jim. You
could return to your crazy
orbiting, and I would not try
to fully understand what
it means to you. All I know
is this: when I see you,
as I have seen you at least
once every year of my life,
spin across the wilds of the sky
like a tiny, African god,
I feel dead. I feel as if I were
the residue of a stranger’s life,
that I should pursue you.
My head cocked toward the sky,
I cannot get off the ground,
and, you, passing over again,
fast, perfect, and unwilling
to tell me that you are doing
well, or that it was mistake
that placed you in that world,
and me in this; or that misfortune
placed these worlds in us.
ADDICTION
A.F. Moritz
I wish we could control this revolting
want of control: these people
with their spongy eyes, their mouths
of trembling shoehorns, billhooks for penises
and bear traps for vulvas.
One taste of sunlight and at once
they can’t do without it. Water,
the same, and food, and air,
and a dozen other squalid habits.
Some—like their copulation,
a rusting carnation in a cut-glass neck—
are not physically compulsive but
the partners can’t stop wanting them to be:
so we desire to be raped
by love, who would fill us, they say,
with an oil from the lit braziers of stars.
What if, doing it every day,
we resemble pistons, and the slow poison
cuts our lives off at 70:
it’s the grim determination
of our passion. And beyond this, even I—
defended in childhood by my strong father
the piano and my mother the virtuoso
from knuckles among warehouses—even I
am addicted to the mild light of words.
