- Durutti Column! Oh man, I know what my next few days is going to sound like.
- A press as deadly as the state: One of the key pillars supporting the pretense of a "responsive democracy" is the belief in a "free," "adversarial" press. But as described above -- and there is much, much more that could be said on the subject -- it is difficult to imagine how the NSA/surveillance story could redound more fully to the benefit of the States involved while simultaneously maintaining the illusion of "adversarial" journalism. It is a propaganda coup for the State of notable proportions.
- Germane nooze.
- Literature and bureaucracy.
- The Pervert's Guide to Ideology: Those lies and a way to get at the truths they conceal, the very fragile nature of the truth, are the subject of The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology by Sophie Fiennes, sister of Ralph and poor Joe (how many moons ago was Shakespeare in Love?), about the psychoanalytic film criticism of the Slovenian philosopher and critic and celebrity Slavoj Žižek. Released theatrically at the beginning of the month, it is a follow up to her 2006 film A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. The newer film follows a very similar formal strategy as the earlier one, intercutting between clips of classic films from Hollywood to Scandinavia to Soviet Russia, while Žižek appears intermittently on sets and in costumes drawn from the very movies he claims to mine hidden and often unintentional meanings from using his patented mix of Hegelian dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
- Oh, and in a photo, Žižek appears as Blofeld circa Diamonds Are Forver.
- Diamonds Are Forever, of course, has the famous scene of Dema Kovalenko being castrated by his own bomb as he's thrown off the side of a luxury cruise ship. Regulars here can play it in their head without my needing to post the youtube for the zillionth time.
- Anyway, there was a zebra.
- Ruefle's Observations on the Ground: Besides burying the dead in the ground, we bury our garbage, also called trash. Man-made mountains of garbage are pushed together using heavy equipment and then pushed down into the ground. The site of this burial is called a landfill. The site of the dead buried in boxes is called a cemetery. In both cases the ground is being filled. A dead body in a box can be lowered into the ground using heavy equipment, but we do not consider it trash. When the dead are not in boxes and there is a man-made mountain of them we use heavy equipment to bury them together, like trash. It is estimated that everywhere we walk we are walking on a piece of trash and the hard, insoluble remains of the dead. Whatever the case, the dead and the garbage are together in the ground where we cannot see them, for we do not relish the sight or smell of them. If we did not go about our burying, we would be in danger of being overcome.
- All that was signal dissolves into noise.
- Hey! It's Zappadan!
- Bleggalgazing.
- Food links.
- Fuck the Washington Racial Slurs.
- Fucking Ohio. Maryland too!
- Growing a bear.
- Area under surveillance.
HIS CARPETS FLOWERED
Lorine Niedecker
I
—how we’re carpet-making
by the river
a long dream to unroll
and somehow time to pole
a boat
I designed a carpet today—
dogtooth violets
and spoke to a full hall
now that the gall
of our society’s
corruption stains throughout
Dear Janey I am tossed
by many things
If the change would bring
better art
but if it would not?
O to be home to sail the flood
I’m possessed
and do possess
Employer
of labor, true—
to get done
the work of the hand…
I’d be a rich man
had I yielded
on a few points of principle
Item sabots
blouse—
I work in the dye-house
myself
Good sport dyeing
tapestry wool
I like the indigo vats
I’m drawing patterns so fast
Last night
in sleep I drew a sausage—
somehow I had to eat it first
Colorful shores—mouse ear...
horse-mint... The Strawberry Thief
our new chintz
II
Yeats saw the betterment of the workers
by religion—slow in any case
as the drying of the moon
He was not understood—
I rang the bell
for him to sit down
Yeats left the lecture circuit
yet he could say: no one
so well loved
as Morris
III
Entered new waters
Studied Icelandic
At home last minute signs
to post:
Vetch
grows here—Please do not mow
We saw it—Iceland—the end
of the world rising out of the sea—
cliffs, caves like 13th century
illuminations
of hell-mouths
Rain squalls through moonlight
Cold wet
is so damned wet
Iceland’s
black sand
Stone buntings’
fly-up-dispersion
Sea-pink and campion a Persian
carpet
