[I Liked the Look of the Last One]

I liked the look of the last one
as I was writing it. It's exhibition
not regular season. The new
camera angles, insect-
eyed replays relay
memory, imprint
memory. It's the color
of the t-shirt, watermark
of logo. We're not wrong
in eating more, hating faster.
Slap-single switch-hitter helmet,
brand of ownership mendacity. Sniff.
We didn't kill them when we had the chance
and for that we will never forgive them.

Up the Facades, His Shadow Dragging Like a Photographer's Cloth Behind Him, He Climbs Fearfully, Thinking That This Time He Will Manage to Push His Small Head Through That Round Clean Opening and Be Forced Through, as from a Tube, in Black Scrolls on the Light

The Story of The Clean, part one.







The Story of the Clean, part two.

• I am getting my car serviced today, estimated wait time two hours, I will be live blogging parts if not the whole of the waiting room experience between ten and whenever. No I won't. Maybe some.
• This Week in Water. We in DCstan laugh at Atlantans and snow like Ninglanders laugh at DCstanners and snow.
• Famous last words.
• American Ninja Warriors.
• My future hell.
• SeatSix's future hell.
• Hamster sends along this 1963 Irving Howe piece on Robert Frost written after Frost died. As he said in his email, fuck the front of The New Republic, the back of The New Republic was once tremendous.
• Arvo Pärt, for those of you who do. No, this wasn't posted there because Arvo Pärt is two posts down here.
• One moment. 
• Richard's 2013 in music and bleggalgaze.
• Hey, Schubert was born 217 years ago today. I have a vague memory that Hamster once gave me a post full of Lieder but I can't find it and am probably wrong anyway. I like the piano pieces better in any case.

THE MAN-MOTH

Elizabeth Bishop

Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.”
  
 

Here, above,

cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.

The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.

It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,

and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.

He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,

feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,

of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.

                     But when the Man-Moth

pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,

the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges

from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks

and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.

He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,

proving the sky quite useless for protection.

He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.

                     Up the façades,

his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him

he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage

to push his small head through that round clean opening

and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.

(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)

But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although

he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.

                     Then he returns

to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,

he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains

fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.

The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way

and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,

without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.

He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.

                     Each night he must

be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.

Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie

his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,

for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,

runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease

he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep

his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.

                     If you catch him,

hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,

an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens

as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids

one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.

Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention

he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,

cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

Dogs and Crocodiles, Sunlamps

Hey, that's new Wye Oak.

I caught myself late last night reading from the New York Review of Books blog Jeff Madrick's analysis of Obama's SOTU from Tuesday night and by extension his presidency as a whole. I responded strongly, actually c/p-ing a couple of paragraphs into this very blog post and adding comments. Before reading the article I'd had drinks with a friend, a staunch Obama supporter who insists on what staunch Obama supporters insist upon. We enjoyed the squabble way too much. This is two-way snark: He started it and persisted when I initially voiced disinterest in our old game, but once taunted I insisted on what obamapostates insist upon with the passionate obstinance that makes hearing others' impassioned obstinance hard to hear. Neither my friend's nor my passionate obstinance will be reported here, I didn't hear what he had to say though I know what he said, he didn't hear what I had to say though he knows what I said, you know what he said, you know what I said, and there will not be paragraphs from Madrick's post nor my now deleted responses to them. Since I hope (but am not hopeful) this paragraph's last sentence is true this needs saying one more time: Madrick's point of view is a good example of my friend's (and once and always my) rationalizing a hero's failures, or at least this hero. I'm always horny for the possibilities of the next false hero, am hornier for my next apostasy just like the last, just like the next. I'm hoping (if not hopeful) this is the last time I post another version of this paragraph, or at least the part about Obama.

Hey, this is older Wye Oak.

• Pete Seeger and the avant garde. Silliman's re-posting of his article from 1987.
• Neil Halstead playing some Slowdive songs.
• My favorite Neil Halstead song ever.
• Slight housekeeping note: updated the blogrolls: moved more moribund to moribund, added a couple of new sites to both New Gags, please check them out as they float to the top.
• That moribund list is going to be the largest blogroll on the blog within a year if current trends in Blegsylvania continue.
• Mr Alarum sent me this article on a new record store opening in Georgetown and asking if I wanted to go on a field trip. Yes, I do. Orpheus was the headshop where I bought bongs after Sights and Sounds closed.
• Lordy, Jack Spicer. If I played My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game with poets....
• My favorite book of anything is this century is Spicer's My Vocabulary Did This to Me, which of course he wrote last century.
• It would be my favorite book of last century too.
• This Wye Oak song and the two below via Richard, who gave me Wye Oak when I didn't know them.

A RED WHEELBARROW

Jack Spicer

Rest and look at this goddamned wheelbarrow. Whatever
It is. Dogs and crocodiles, sunlamps. Not
For their significance.
For their significant. For being human
The signs escape you. You, who aren't very bright
Are a signal for them. Not,
I mean, the dogs and crocodiles, sunlamps. Not
Their significance. 

Which Do You Think the Fixtures Are in the Bathroom at the White House, Gold or Brass?

's 471 (11347.2) 1573 (4146.14) 2529 (1602.59) 16.939
jobs 151 (3637.85) 289 (761.751) 439 (278.188) 14.242
why 85 (2047.8) 75 (197.686) 222 (140.678) 13.623
businesses 70 (1686.42) 75 (197.686) 140 (88.7161) 12.093
that 912 (21971.7) 4629 (12201.2) 19589 (12413.3) 11.936
get 98 (2360.99) 171 (450.725) 300 (190.106) 11.873
i'm 61 (1469.6) 79 (208.23) 136 (86.1813) 10.653
don't 56 (1349.14) 82 (216.137) 137 (86.815) 9.752
can't 44 (1060.04) 54 (142.334) 102 (64.636) 9.161
like 83 (1999.61) 199 (524.528) 572 (362.469) 8.541
we'll 42 (1011.85) 61 (160.785) 98 (62.1013) 8.498
innovation 24 (578.202) 13 (34.2656) 40 (25.3475) 7.982
republicans 27 (650.477) 24 (63.2596) 49 (31.0506) 7.862
kids 28 (674.569) 29 (76.4387) 50 (31.6843) 7.761
college 41 (987.761) 70 (184.507) 128 (81.1118) 7.730
because 114 (2746.46) 399 (1051.69) 870 (551.307) 7.634
what 128 (3083.74) 462 (1217.75) 1282 (812.386) 7.547
companies 33 (795.027) 37 (97.5252) 167 (105.826) 7.471
we've 64 (1541.87) 175 (461.268) 251 (159.055) 7.438
democrats 25 (602.294) 24 (63.2596) 47 (29.7833) 7.434

the 1840 (44328.8) 23017 (60668.6) 133003 (84282.2) -8.955
of 1022 (24621.8) 13939 (36740.7) 86737 (54964) -8.133
must 53 (1276.86) 1583 (4172.5) 2843 (1801.57) -7.308
in 651 (15683.7) 8433 (22227.8) 33474 (21212) -6.237
peace 8 (192.734) 670 (1766) 1736 (1100.08) -5.699
program 16 (385.468) 618 (1628.93) 730 (462.591) -5.244
federal 22 (530.018) 737 (1942.6) 1315 (833.297) -5.216
freedom 8 (192.734) 472 (1244.11) 691 (437.877) -4.922
which 18 (433.651) 1072 (2825.6) 11029 (6988.93) -4.732
economic 21 (505.927) 614 (1618.39) 852 (539.901) -4.655
billion 9 (216.826) 425 (1120.22) 462 (292.763) -4.603
nations 16 (385.468) 601 (1584.13) 1651 (1046.22) -4.560
world 82 (1975.52) 1369 (3608.43) 2239 (1418.82) -4.508
free 17 (409.56) 554 (1460.24) 1166 (738.878) -4.366
national 17 (409.56) 566 (1491.87) 1837 (1164.08) -4.104
programs 16 (385.468) 440 (1159.76) 470 (297.833) -3.937
hope 7 (168.642) 324 (854.005) 769 (487.305) -3.638
be 175 (4216.05) 2499 (6586.91) 16149 (10233.4) -3.585
war 29 (698.66) 652 (1718.55) 2567 (1626.67) -3.449
provide 8 (192.734) 295 (777.566) 641 (406.193) -3.308
policy 8 (192.734) 333 (877.727) 1199 (759.79) -3.305

Explanation of the two text boxes here: I took X as Barack Obama's five SOTU addresses so far (41,508 "words", as per my tokenization), Y as the SOTU addresses of all other presidents since WWII (Truman through George W. Bush), and Z as the all SOTU addresses since 1790.  I then fed in all the words in SOTU addresses since Truman, Obama included, and sorted the results according to the weighted log-odds ratio. Here's the positive end of the list (i.e. tokens favored by Obama). Each line presents WORD XCount (XPerMillion) YCount (YPerMillion) ZCount (ZPerMillion) SCORE

So, I promised both Arvo Pärt and Swans cascades, here, perhaps for the first time in recorded human history, alternating Pärt and Swans pieces! Instead of watching SOTU, I was here:

• Among the crowd at Carrow Road: Being season-ticket holders and having been to most home games we went to Carrow Road last night to watch Norwich play Newcastle. It was our first evening game of the season and we were looking forward to it. Everything feels different under floodlights: the ground is more theatre than pitch, it's colder, noises arise out of the dark of the terraces, the far end of the pitch looks further away. The rain, which was heavy at times, and the swirling wind were effects we saw illuminated, the dimpling of small pools, the rain swept in this or that direction. The stand is a mixture of rough and delicate music.
• Food links.
• I ordered Miss McIntosh, My Dear from Dalkey last week, received an email from them yesterday, they are out of Volume 2 and there are no plans to publish more, did I want a refund or another book of the same value. I asked for a copy of Elkin's Franchiser, it yours to the first taker.
• A clarification on the typograph from Shohir's Stalin Is Dead posted yesterday. The typographs aren't Shohir's, they are the translator's, Ornan Rotem, as is the note on the typograph.
• Surzhyk.
• In defense of regionalism: Yet there are many ways to succeed as a poet. The California-born Jack Spicer never felt a need to prove himself on the East Coast. In college he encountered kindred spirits Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser, forming the Berkeley Renaissance. Spicer went on to cofound San Francisco’s Six Gallery, where Allen Ginsberg would later present an early draft of “Howl,” and in addition to teaching he informally mentored writers through his Circle sessions in North Beach. Spicer’s West Coast setting is usually obscured by allusion in his work. But his openness to poetry as dictation, as discourse with unruly spirits, reflects a specific cultural landscape. When water is the key motif, the Bay’s ecology surfaces; in “Any fool can get into an ocean…,” Spicer invites us to “Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly / Out in the middle of the poem.”
• Robert Creeley, for those of you who do.
• Re: top Arvo Pärt piece and the poet below the next Arvo Pärt piece - there are many happy accidents here, but sometimes things are done on purpose.
• Have I ever mentioned how much I love Jack Spicer's poetry? Fell asleep reading James Tate, woke up with the Tate poem below in my head, so more Spicer poems tomorrow, days to come.

THE MOTORCYCLISTS

James Tate

My cuticles are a mess. Oh honey, by the way,

did you like my new negligee? It’s a replica

of one Kim Novak wore in some movie or other.

I wish I had a foot-long chili dog right now.

Do you like fireworks, I mean not just on the 4th of July,

but fireworks any time? There are people

like that, you know. They’re like people who like

orchestra music, listen to it any time of day.

Lopsided people, that’s what my father calls them.

Me, I’m easy to please. I like ping-gong and bobcats,

shatterproof drinking glasses, the smell of kerosene,

the crunch of carrots. I like caterpillars and

whirlpools, too. What I hate most is being the first

one at the scene of a bad accident.

Do I smell like garlic? Are we still in Kansas?

I once had a chiropractor make a pass at me,

did I ever tell you that? He said that your spine

is happiest when you’re snuggling. Sounds kind

of sweet now when I tell you, but he was a creep.

Do you know that I have never understood what they meant

by “grassy knoll.” It sounds so idyllic, a place to go

to dream your life away, not kill somebody. They

should have called it something like “the grudging notch.”

But I guess that’s life. What is it they always say?

“It’s always the sweetest ones that break your heart.”

You getting hungry yet, hon? I am. When I was seven

I sat in our field and ate an entire eggplant

right off the vine. Dad loves to tell that story,

but I still can’t eat eggplant. He says I’ll be the first

woman President, it’d be a waste since I talk so much.

Which do you think the fixtures are in the bathroom

at the White House, gold or brass? It’d be okay with me

if they were just brass. Honey, can we stop soon?

I really hate to say it but I need a lady’s room.

With My Hemophilia, I Needed the Water to Bear the Weight of the Leech

I was listening to Dave Mandl's show Sunday night and he played Robert Wyatt. After the song I found Wyatt on my iPod and fell asleep listening and woke up with in my head and posted Wyatt songs yesterday as a result. It wasn't until lunch yesterday while I was looking for today's birthdays that I discovered that Robert Wyatt is sixty-nine today. Like winning one of the tiny lotteries that renews ridiculously and knowingly foolish embraced false hope in winning large lotteries.

• RIP Pete Seeger.
• UPDATE! Thunder requests Banks of Marble.
• UPDATE! Hamster sends along these Seeger links.
• UPDATE! Landru has songs.
• On the state of The State of the Left: This is the real problem with the current leftist infighting: rather than being too vicious, it’s not vicious enough. I’m not going to make prescriptions about how this stratum of contest can be reformed; it’s a useless husk, and its uselessness is affirmed by how seriously everyone involved takes it. Calls for unity and pleasantness in a State of the Left already clotted into paralysis miss the point entirely. If anything, more splits, more divisions; everyone knows that communist cells reproduce asexually. But if we are to have a pointless squabbling sideshow to left activism, the very least it could do is make itself interesting.
• Scenes from the Midwest.
• The four principles of prosperity.
• The other Las Vegas.
• I'd watch the motherfucking Grammys before I'd watch the motherfucking SOTU and I'd kill myself before I'd watch the motherfucking Grammys.
• The role of the poet-critic. Logan has never sung to me though I haven't given him a chance for over a decade at least.
• Here's the promised typograph from Shohir's book:

• The notes say: The immense red letters (migdal) are erected on Babel. Migdal translates as tower, but the word itself is derived from 'big' hence its literal meaning is something like 'an immensity.' The four letters of migdal are jumbled up, confused one is tempted to say, and lurking inside the tower, though clearly visible, are many other words, among which are: become larger or grown up, sickle, wave, meagre, fish, bear, heart, flag, dub, segregate, blossom, skip, roll up, confound.
• I like that on this silly map of state stereotypes Pennsylvania's is haunted, cause it is.
• Arvo Pärt interview. Now you know about tomorrow's music, or the next day, or the next day depending on whose birthday tomorrow I find at lunch today.
• NEW SWANS! Now you know about tomorrow's music, or the next day, or the next day depending on whose birthday tomorrow I find at lunch today.
• That was a gag, I posted about the new Swans last night, the Swans cascade will be the day after Arvo's pieces depending on birthdays I find at lunch in meantime.
• Anyone else's iTunes and PC get skeevied by the latest iTunes upgrade?
• The Pixies played Strathmore last night. Ponder that sentence.
• Prunella's latest playlist. 
• That's Wyatt singing lead on this Phil Manzanera song:

   
OBSERVANCES UPON RETURNING

Christopher Bolin

I

The bats, in the hold of the ship, crossed back and forth, picking fruit-flies
from above the crates of food,

though only the few, eating lice from the stowaways' hair, would survive.

II

I remember the wall of your home, casting a bamboo skiff
across the water of the paddy

and freshwater mussels, unable to attach to the mere significance
of the world above, littering the bottom.

With my hemophilia, I needed the water to bear the weight of the leech.

III

How high were the terrace walls?                         The black necked cranes disappeared.

And our children will not believe that they existed here. They will say surely
you mean the cranes were carved on the temple stairs (as they were) and never
made a sound (as they had) and this is why you could do nothing to save them:
there was nothing to save.

And there was some wisdom in this, though it had not come to pass,
and we were happy we had raised such children.

Me and Faith

New SWANS! May 13.

Each Morning He'd Anoint the Room's Four Corners with an Arc of Piss - and Then, Until He Was Forcibly Halted - Beat His Forehead Open on the Eastern Wall

I was brought up Roman Catholic (at least until I was thirteen and refused to go any further and my mother grew disenchanted herself with the Catholic Church enough to not fight me). Sunday mass and CCD at St Martins, corner of Summit and Frederick in Olde Towne Gaithersburg Maryland. Here's the thing: while I never bought, even when young, the religion, I dug the rituals. This doesn't surprise you if you know me, the most ritual driven fuck I know. See the gag in the previous sentence. This past Saturday I attended the memorial service for my friend Steven Jackson, a good guy, in a beautiful small chapel on campus, in a beautiful small ceremony full of traditional rituals, candles and stained-glass and deafening silences of communal prayer and reflection. I was blissfully crushed by it. I am the most ritual driven fuck I know.

• So, guess who I fell asleep listening to and woke up with in my head.
• Seven thousand trillion floppy disks: What’s most striking here – even more explicitly than in the case of Gordon Bell’s vision of the dullest life imaginable, lived forever – is the connection between immortality and a surveillance society described with all the tropes of the available dystopian literature. Nowadays this connection is framed a little less crudely or naively, but it survives in the efforts to master immortality by the likes of Google, whose overarching goal remains that of controlling and manipulating the majority of the world’s personal information. Your past is who you are and who you are is what the computer networks seek to acquire and reproduce with absolute fidelity, until it’s more you than the original. Hyper-text. Hyper-real.
• Bleggalgazing!
• Because I am tablet-blocked.
• My apologies, I was going to scan a page of Rachel Shihor's typograms for you today, the book is on my bedstand, I walked out this morning without it.
• Received an email - how can I simultaneously post a Jewish writer and support Palestinian rights, asked the moron.
• Boycott sodastream. Imagine, that link in the same post as a Jewish poet's poem.
• The New Inquiry's Sunday reads.
• There will never be a new soccer stadium in DC.
• The Woman, the River, the Sand.
• Sailing in style.
• Boots, not made for walking.

STONEHENGE

Albert Goldbarth

Each morning he’d anoint the room’s four corners

with an arc of piss, and then—until

he was forcibly halted—beat his forehead open

on the eastern wall, the “sunrise wall,”

incanting a doggerel prayer about God

the Flower, God of the Hot Plucked Heart; and

she, if loose in the halls, would join him,

squatting in the center of the room and masturbating

with a stolen bar of soap. This isn’t why

they were sent to the madhouse: this is what

they needed to do once in the madhouse: this

is the only meaningful ritual they could fashion

there, created from the few, make-do

materials available. It isn’t wondrous strange

more than the mega-boozhwah formulaic splendor

of my sister’s wedding ten, eleven years ago:

her opulent bouquet of plastic flowers

(for the wilting pour of wattage at the photo session),

nigglingly arranged to match the real bouquet

she carried down the aisle, bloom per bloom;

the five-foot Taj Mahal of sculpted pastel sherbet;

endless “Fiddler on the Roof”; I’m sorry

now I cranked my academic sneer hauteur in place

all night. I’m sorry I didn’t lose myself

like a drunken bee in a room-sized rose,

in waltzing Auntie Sally to the lush swell

of the band. We need this thing. There’s not one

mineral in Stonehenge that our blood can’t also raise.

One dusk, one vividly contusion-color

dusk, with my fists in my pockets and

a puzzle of fish-rib clouds in the sky, I

stopped at the low-level glow of a basement window

(Hot Good Noodle Shop) and furtively looked in:

a full-grown pig was splayed on the table,

stunned but fitfully twitching, it looked as if

it had grasshoppers under its skin. A man and a woman

slit that body jaw-to-ass with an ornate knife,

and then they both scooped out a tumble

of many dozens of wasps, preserved

by the oils of living pig to a beautiful black and amber

gem-like sheen. I saw it. Did I

see it? From inside this, over their wrists

in the tripes, they carefully removed

the wooden doll of a man and the wooden doll of a woman

maybe two inches tall, a tiny lacquered sun

and matching brass coin of a moon, and then

a child’s-third-grade-version of a house

made out of pallid wax: a square of walls,

a pyramid roof, and a real smoking chimney.

[I Am Tablet-Blocked and My Pens Can Ink but Cannot Write]

I am tablet-blocked. My pens can ink but can't write.
I tried composing a poem in Word. Why I am tablet-blocked
and my pens ink but can't write is another poem.

I learned to not to compose in Word and cut/paste to Blogger.
Cut/pasting Word into Blogger fucks up the poem's
display. Line breaks are lost, stanzas collapse then reform

into (sometimes better poetry - which I can't use by the same
moral self-strictures that've tablet-blocked me, made my pens
ink but not write, though particulars vary) deformed

blocks and jagged single lines. The HTML coding is forty times
longer than the poem before the poem starts. Each line of the poem
has five times as much coding as line. If I remove one <br/ >

to delete a line or add one  <div /> to separate stanzas
Blogger's pink banner of Fuck You, You Idiot!
mocks me when I try to save the clusterfuck. But typing

versus calligraphy as salve? Workaround? Unfaithfulness?
Salvation? When I'm tablet-blocked and my pens can ink
but I can't write? Is working. I'm happier with what's typed

the past few months than what was scribbled in tablet the three
months preceding (though I know how much I adore
redefining old rules: it's how I invigorate my product line).

So Fast Was the Passing Train and So Slow Were My Movements in the Mine

THE DRAWER THAT GOT STUCK

Rachel Shihor

I pushed my hand into the jammed drawer of my escritoire, and it nearly got stuck there. It was trapped in the narrow impalpable gap between the rim of the drawer and the wooden panel above it. In fact, the tiny old Neil Sedaka records that were leaning on a stack of playing cards jammed it. With my other hand I searched for a way to make a clearing and I tried looking inside, but the drawer gloomily looked back at me from the beyond; there was no discernable obstruction that, if moved, would relieve me. I said to myself that I needed to resign myself to the idea that not everything could be mended, but still, I didn't give to despair. I thought about the dead gazing at me from the gloomy beyond, just after their souls had departed and right before someone shoved their bodies into the dark drawers of the municipal morgues.





 

• Two requested more Shihor, so have more Shihor along with the links I'd collected for tomorrow today.
• Also, I have this need to post posts that mean more to me than many others on days when I know they'll be least read, an application common in all aspects of my life.
• Yes, it has been a while since I posted Stars of the Lid. Apologies.
• No one would have noticed had I not showed up.
• Holding Chomsky to Chomsky's standards.
• The political uncanny.
• The principle of our negative solidarity: It seems appropriate to begin a review of Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism with a story like this, that illustrates how a commonality of interests and ideas intersects with an institution geared toward individuation and competition. That we live in an “age of individualism” perhaps goes without saying. However, such a judgment raises as many questions as it answers. At what level are we to locate the individual? Is it, to borrow words from Foucault, an “illusion,” an “ideological effect,” or is it a real functioning element of society? In short, are people deluded into seeing themselves as individuals, or is individuation a real material effect of practices?
• Justin Bieber and the aesthetics of destruction.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Bleggalgazing.
• How to find Kentucky on a map.
• Dickenson: raw or cooked?
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Prunella's latest playlist.

 
I LEFT A BAD IMPRESSION

Rachel Shihor

I left a bad impression, definitely a bad impression, on the patrons of the Munich Opera House when they were listening to Judith Triumphant. And I didn't even have to make an effort. The severed head was enough.





  
THE TRAIN

Rachel Shihor

It was my misfortune to have been born inside a mine.There I spent my youth and there I grew up. No one knew of this and no one invited me over. They did not know me, they did not ask me to come up so that I might entertain them.

Sometimes trains would pass above the mine. When the train was far away I would feel the high walls of the mine vibrating faintly; when the train came closer, these vibrations became stronger, and when the train passed, little chunks of granite from the ceiling would fall on my head. So fast was the passing train and so slow were my movements in the mine.

Once I climbed up to see the light of day and to see the world. Along black rail tracks I saw crushed weeds.

[No One Would Have Noticed Had I Not Showed Up]

No one would have noticed had I not showed up.
People were surprised and seemed pleased to see me.

Nods from heads swiveling in pre-service
reconnaissance, shouldered neighbors

heads turning, faces smiling, in recognition: I
don’t socialize with my co-workers, go to staff

meetings, holiday parties, though I’m cordial
when necessary and always friendly with many.

I rarely, as in today makes the fourth time
in twenty-five years, am in a room

with co-workers when we are not working.
The hired string quartet stopped, a priest

walked to the altar, the service started.
I was unashamedly tearful

when and where I’m trained to be tearful.
The chapel was beautiful, small and large

with stain-glassed sunlight. My friend helped me
when I needed him, I think he needed me
   

when I helped him. At the reception
people I haven’t seen in years,  people

I see every workday, sought me out,
me, I know it might not sound sincere,

I never imagined any of them seeking me out
as more than a colleague, me, dope, 
  
at a memorial service for a co-worker
who helped save my life, and me his.

Among Us Was a Tall and Old Man in Slippers Who Suggested that We Sit Where We Stood and that We Wait for the Arrival of the Good Driver

The weekend post, barring some flavor of kaboom. Lawrence English is my greatest obsession since the last until the next, as is Rachel Shihor, whose Stalin Is Dead I'm now on my third trip through, below are three of her aphorisms/flash stories/poems, whatever you want to call them. Translated from the Hebrew, it's full of beautiful typograms in Hebrew script, I don't have access to a scanner as I type this, I will scan a page for you Monday. There are 49 of the aphorisms/flash stories/poems, none of them longer than a page and a half, all of them uncanny, some more uncanny than the next.







THE TINIEST ANIMAL

Perhaps the tiniest animal in the world that cannot be put to death because it is so tiny, is God.







THE CONCERT

An old lady leaves the concert hall and so as not to fall holds onto another - herself not so young - who holds onto the banister lest she fall, but the full weight of the first lady, falling, descends on her and smashes her shoulder; from here on: emergency room, x-rays, admission to hospital and, following due consultations, surgery, lengthy recovery in a rehabilitation ward and physiotherapy sessions.

While in rehabilitation, the touch of the hand of a black caregiver, who was in the past an immigrant from Sudan, enchants her. A new meaning to life sneaks in and vanquishes her. Where she fully recovers, she will abandon her wretched husband and leave him the one-storey house, she will stop being at the beck and call of her children, she will observe Islamic law. Her beloved is honey-eyed. Glistening teeth. He is a prince.

Alas, she never recovered.





THE BUS

It so happened that once a bus passed us by and did not stop. We shouted and waved our hands about: Stop! We did this to the second bus and to the third bus too, till the day was over. Money, we had none. As evening approached, an omnibus went by and its driver - still driving - threw us a cloth pouch. Inside were coins. We opened the pouch, and saw the pennies; these were of the kind that were common here many years ago and long went out of circulation. The thing is we were survivors, but we were unwanted. And among us was a tall and old man in slippers who suggested that we sit where we stood and that we wait for the arrival of the good driver. Probability theory confirms that this would eventually happen, he said. The good driver must show up. We sat where we stood and we established the first refugee camp. Later on, the land was full of them.

No Clothes, No Skin, No Flesh, No Heart, an Emperor!

• Couldn't read last night (not slump-based, just couldn't, it happens, I've learned forcing myself to read can lead to a slump, so night off), put on GY!BE, surfed for the links below, fell asleep listening to GY!BE, woke up with GY!BE in my head.
• Against the rage machine: To say “I deserve to be heard!” today is a vexed proposition. Right and left, tech corporations beg you to say your piece for the sake of content-generation, free publicity, hype, and ad sales. America’s speech is so free, it pays—just not you. Even when we don’t opine, just clicking around, we’re like cilia on the tracheal lining of some gross beast, and our small work of enthusiasm, liking or passing along or reiterating or linking, is like the wriggle of a hair, pushing the story down the throat of the culture, filling its lungs so that it may breathe. We can accept this. We are a hair. And we would quietly concede our $5 annual value to Facebook and Twitter, if only they stopped asking us what’s on our minds—if only they left us alone.
• Does Discipline and Punish need a new translation?
• Consumer manipulation: Consider, first, confusion by design: Las Vegas casinos are mazes, carefully crafted to draw players to the slot machines and to keep them there. Casino designers warn against the “yellow brick road” effect of having a clear route through the casino. (One side effect: it takes paramedics a long time to find gamblers in cardiac arrest; as Ms Schüll also documents, it can be tough to get the slot-machine players to assist, or even to make room for, the medical team.)
• HalluciNation.
• Not that we would have driven this section of Rockville Pike tonight when we go out to dinner tonight with Hamster, but now we absolutely won't.

• Have you laughed at Arsene Wenger today?
• Changing our stories: Let me toss out a provocation, not for the sake of stirring the water, but because I have begun to suspect it is true: most of our finest narratives, films as well as novels, however formally innovative and politically anti-establishment, are actually conservative, even inhibiting, in their consequences and implications.
• Evening Train.
• Eminent hipsters: Today, when we identify a hipster, it carries entirely different connotations from the word’s original, darkly lustrous charge. “Hipster” is now a slight, because hipsters now are slight—not so much a soulful tribe as a fly-eyed pose looking for somewhere to land. Hipsters move into your locale, and before you know it, brittle quotation marks are strung everywhere. Hipsters have become little more than an advance guard for the arcadia of “hip capitalism.” Once, though, it truly mattered how hip you were. In Fagen’s day, things were different. Born in 1948, he belongs to a baby-boomer generation for whom the benediction of hip was most devoutly to be desired. It was a dark and uncertain thing, an arduous rite of passage, almost a spiritual gamble.
• I like Steely Dan, but they were ruined for me by Kark Mantarow who, when we were tripping, played them and played them and became an asshole about playing them, would freak out and bad-trip (or fake bad-trip) if they weren't on. I stopped tripping with Kark Mantarow after the second time, but association with Steely Dan was frozen permanent.
• Dr Z still sees Steely Dan whenever they are on tour, wears Steely Dan t-shirts when we are discing, which we haven't in a couple of months, fucking winter.
• I do find fascinating the black licorice aspect of Steely Dan, most folk I've met dig or hate them (or did, long ago, when we were young, couldn't give a fuck either way now that we're old).
• You're right, it has been too long since I posted a Jack Spicer poem.

[IMAGINE LUCIFER}

Jack Spicer

Imagine Lucifer

An angel without angelness

An apple

Plucked clear by will of taste, color,

Strength, beauty, roundness, seed

Absent of all God painted, present everything

An apple is.

Imagine Lucifer

An angel without angelness

A poem

That has revised itself out of sound

Imagine, rhyme, concordance

Absent of all God spoke of, present everything

A poem is.

                            The law I say, the Law

Is?

What is Lucifer

An emperor with no clothes

No skin, no flesh, no heart

An emperor!

I See: It&#39;s Not You Who Is Not Requiting Me, It&#39;s Something in You Over Which You Have No Say Says No to Me

There's an ad running on local radio. The announcer says there's exciting news about a new male testosterone pill with effects so incredible the company can't keep the product on the shelves! He asks the Vice President of Product Distribution for the pill company if it's true it can't be kept in stock. It's a nice problem to have, says the Vice President of Product Distribution, chuckling immodestly. See, it's made from oil from flax grown only on the east bank of the Ob River in Arctic Circle Siberia, and we just can't get enough to meet demand in stores no matter how much we charge. That's why, through this special radio offer, we're giving away free bottles to anyone who calls this toll-free number. Fine metaphors abound.

• Then Dr Hornsby starts talking, he wants to send me a free $30 book, A Doctor's Guide to My Neuteredness!, he'll cocktail a boner for me IN HIS OFFICE! or my visit is free.
• Then an add for a free sample of a weight-loss pill only - ONLY - for men between 25 and 65, WARNING! if your weight loss is TOO DRAMATIC! only take one pill per day.
• No logic or theme to today's songs, they were in my head this morning is all.
• The only coherent position? and the only position that is responsive even vaguely to reality has to be: oppose all coercive hierarchies. otherwise i'm telling you this just gets worse and worse. it gets worse under neocons. it gets worse under leftists: they all have the same position, really, and it is underlain by the desire to subordinate and to be subordinated. i don't actually see the distinction between the positions of paul wolfowitz and mao. or rather i hear their opposed rhetoric and i see their identical reality. i think that paul ryan and elizabeth warren have the same position, stated in slightly different ways for slightly different audiences. they do not know this about themselves, but they are perfectly complementary: we can oscillate between reinforcing the state hierarchy and reinforcing the corporate hierarchy, but these are the very same hierarchy. but also the tea party and occupy don't know this about themselves either, but they are on the same side too: the only other side.
• An old friend was in town for the first time in a little more than four years this past week, we found time last night. He is an honest and devout less-shittier. If both sides are equally complicit in fighting to win first access to ownership's tap to guarantee ownership maintains ownership of said tap, he says, root for and support the team, even as it increases its shittiness to keep pace with the increasing shittiness of the other team, with the less-shitty, and I said, Stop. We do this by email, nobody ever wins, it's wrestling in the dead cricket legs that remain after the rest of the cricket bodies have dusted, tell me more about your daughters, tell me what would be a good weekend this summer to take me to a Pirates game at PNC.
• Death comes for Lamy.
• Doug Duncan and the Battle of Ten Mile Creek.
• Boyds!
• You take Manhattan.
• Bill Knott.
• Yes, I've posted his poem below before, I like it.
• I got a copy of Marguerite Young's Miss McIntosh, My Darling, through consortium loan service (another perk of working at a library), it was on the list of 25 fat novels I posted a week or so ago, I'd never heard of it. Here, an early paragraph on one of the novel's major themes: What was the organization of illusion, of memory? Who knew even his own divided heart? Who knew all hearts as his own? Among beings strange to each other, those divided by the long roarings of time, of space, those who have never met or, when they meet, have not recognized as their own the other heart and that heart's weakness, have turned stonily away, would there not be , in the vision of some omniscient eye, a deep web of spidery logic establishing the most secret relationships, deep calling to deep, illuminations of the eternal darkness, recognitions in the night world of voyager dreams, all barriers dissolving, all souls as one and united? Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is one illusion.
• So, I'm going to try.

THE CONSOLATIONS OF SOCIOBIOLOGY

Bill Knott

Those scars rooted me. Stigmata stalagmite

I sat at a drive-in and watched the stars

Through a straw while the Coke in my lap went

Waterier and waterier. For days on end or

Nights no end I crawled on all fours or in

My case no fours to worship you: Amoeba Behemoth.

—Then you explained your DNA calls for

Meaner genes than mine and since you are merely

So to speak its external expression etcet

Ergo among your lovers I’ll never be ...

Ah that movie was so faraway the stars melting

Made my thighs icy. I see: it’s not you

Who is not requiting me, it’s something in you

Over which you have no say says no to me.

Every Mud Hut and Igloo, Every Penthouse and Farm I&#39;ll Shine Down from Heaven and I&#39;ll Do My Snake-Charm

Biblioklept made me think of Richard Thompson. I'm changing a subject with a friend - details tomorrow. I want to bump the header, a Planet trip from a year and a half ago, it's related to changing the subject with a friend - details tomorrow. It's shameless attention sluttery. It's liking this MacBook while talking myself out of next machine being a MacBook, maybe more, maybe tomorrow. It's Biblioklept made us think of Richard Thompson, the above is my choice, the gorgeous and HOLYFUCK! below is T's choice.

Sometimes What Looks Like Disaster *Is* Disaster

(A) I feel asleep listening to and woke up with Bardo Pond in my head and (B) call that today's theme song and (C) I wanted that bingo thing off the top of the blog and (D) I spent part of yesterday's snow day watching Star Trek Next Generation, I was reminded that for every brilliant episode (Darmok) there are two ridiculously stupid ones (for instance: Picard, Ro, Whoopy, O'Brien's wife turned into children - though there is a scene in the episode which pays homage to the original Star Trek when Kirk teaches mobster henchmen how to play Fizzbin, or the one where Worf and child play spaghetti western) and five boringly mediocre episodes, the stand-alones, not in a story arc, the Geordi episode, the Ryker episode, the Data episode, the Troi episode, the Crusher episode and (E) when I did read yesterday if wasn't online so no links today and (F) fuck it and fuck this and (G) the uncanny phenomenon of a Jane Kenyon poem complimenting (H) Bardo Pond:







THE POND AT DUSK

Jane Kenyon

A fly wounds the water but the wound   

soon heals. Swallows tilt and twitter   

overhead, dropping now and then toward   

the outward-radiating evidence of food.

The green haze on the trees changes   

into leaves, and what looks like smoke   

floating over the neighbor’s barn   

is only apple blossoms.

But sometimes what looks like disaster   

is disaster: the day comes at last,

and the men struggle with the casket   

just clearing the pews. 

In That Kind Climate the Mere Thought of Snow Was but a Wedding Cake

• Stuck at home in the snow? Play Philosophy Bingo! Or, if you suck at object subject subject object subject like me, play the center square, declare stalemate, quit.
• Stuck at home in the snow? Rai and Jiri at Lungha. Rai of Lowani. Lowani under two moons. Jiri of Ubaya. Ubaya of crossroads, at Lungha. Lungha, her sky gray, one of the best TNGs, is on right now. 
• Just saw a commercial for Chrysler, the conceit is great things have begun in garages, Wright Brothers, Disney, Hewlitt Packard, began in garages as did the Ramones, whose Rock and Roll Radio is the bed music.
• Academic cowards and why she doesn't post anonymously.
• Virtual identity and the control society.
• William Gass reading from Middle C.
• Time-travelling verb tenses must will have existed. 
• I saved the Hecht poem below on his birthday last week for a day like today.
• Woke up with Primitive Calculators in my head.

  
SESTINA d'INVERNO

Anthony Hecht

Here in this bleak city of Rochester,
Where there are twenty-seven words for “snow,”
Not all of them polite, the wayward mind
Basks in some Yucatan of its own making,
Some coppery, sleek lagoon, or cinnamon island
Alive with lemon tints and burnished natives,

And O that we were there. But here the natives
Of this grey, sunless city of Rochester
Have sown whole mines of salt about their land
(Bare ruined Carthage that it is) while snow
Comes down as if The Flood were in the making.
Yet on that ocean Marvell called the mind

An ark sets forth which is itself the mind,
Bound for some pungent green, some shore whose natives
Blend coriander, cayenne, mint in making
Roasts that would gladden the Earl of Rochester
With sinfulness, and melt a polar snow.
It might be well to remember that an island

Was blessed heaven once, more than an island,
The grand, utopian dream of a noble mind.
In that kind climate the mere thought of snow
Was but a wedding cake; the youthful natives,
Unable to conceive of Rochester,
Made love, and were acrobatic in the making.

Dream as we may, there is far more to making
Do than some wistful reverie of an island,
Especially now when hope lies with the Rochester
Gas and Electric Co., which doesn’t mind
Such profitable weather, while the natives
Sink, like Pompeians, under a world of snow.

The one thing indisputable here is snow,
The single verity of heaven’s making,
Deeply indifferent to the dreams of the natives,
And the torn hoarding-posters of some island.
Under our igloo skies the frozen mind
Holds to one truth: it is grey, and called Rochester.

No island fantasy survives Rochester,
Where to the natives destiny is snow
That is neither to our mind nor of our making.

It Might Also Be Useful to Look Down a Lonesome Road and for the Future to Stare into the Gray Static of a Television Screen

• We talked mostly about things which I don't discuss here at a Sunday night edition of Thursday Night Pints, a somber affair, the finality of the empty fourth chair dampening mood. Helmetball was on all the big screens. Troy Aikman (I think) says, "what people need to realize is that big plays often lead to scoring opportunities." Who knew? Between the pick-up and beer commercials an ad for a new gladiator movie ran and ran and ran again, every commercial break it seemed and there was nothing but commercial breaks sometimes interrupted for helmetball. I'd think, said K, they'd be running ads for that Afghanistan war porn survivor movie. L, who watches helmetball, said, they did when that movie opened weeks ago. What I wonder, I said, is who the fuck is Bruno Mars to be the headliner of Helmet Bowl halftime? I've always heard of the halftime acts even if I've never listened to any of them. Am I that out of touch? The stuff you've been listening to lately? said L. Yes.
• Giving up your life for a total lie.
• Bullshit jobs and the collapse of capitalism.
• 2014 and the limits of New Romanticism.
• The retail death rattle.
• Alternative culture is over.
• This week in water.
• Bleggalgazing.
• We did talk about this blog in general and me in particular. Something's up. You'll not be spared, I'm just not done thinking about what was said. 

• I like David Toop's music.
• Does anyone know Mark Wood? He's been quiet for almost a month. I hope this is a desired and designed hiatus.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• The New Inquiry's Sunday Readings.
• Notes on a discussion of indeterminacy in poetry.
• It also appears that Thursday Night Pints will be happening on Sundays from now on that L no longer comes to campus regularly and getting into town is much easier on a Sunday night than during rush hour Thursdays. This opens up fascinating issues of rebranding I'm sure to bore you with in weeks to come.
• Slide show on the cave wall.
• Niedecker, for those of you who do.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Lispector, for those of you who do. I try, I trying, I'm halfway through Hour of the Star, I know something remarkable is going on but I'm not hearing the singing.
• Arno Schmidt, for those of you who do.
• Throwing Muses, for those of you who do. 

CALLIGRAPHY ACCOMPANIED BY THE MOOD OF A CALM BUT DEFINITIVE STANCE

Dick Allen

Make your strokes thus: the horizontal:

as a cloud that slowly drifts across the horizon;

the vertical: as an ancient but strong vine stem;

the dot: a falling rock;

and learn to master the sheep leg, the tiger’s claw,

an apricot kernel, a dewdrop, the new moon,

the wave rising and falling. Do these

while holding your arm out above the paper

like the outstretched leg of a crane.

The strength of your hand

will give the stroke its bone.

But for real accomplishment, it would be well

if you would go to live solitary in a forest silence,

or beside a river flowing serenely.

It might also be useful

to look down a lonesome road,

and for the future

to stare into the gray static of a television screen,

or when lost in a video game

to accept you may never reach the final level,

where the dragon awaits, guarding the pot of gold,

and that you’ve left no footprints, not a single one,

despite all your adventures,

anyone following you could ever follow.

[On the Road in Bad Weather Conditions]

On the road, in bad weather conditions,
team behind, a young quarterback panics
mouths the washed-up running-back
on the ESPN deaf scroll. I'm Martian in these places.
I have friends but I don't know citizens,
this woman telling strangers
about her husband, two lovers, six
kids. Guys suck she tells a table of guys.
There is truth in loathing benefactors'
questionable motives. Why should
we help the help, though if that's
the max consider the pits. Which
is to say I wouldn't be eating
the best pizza of my life
at dark dingy wainscotted Shamrocks
on Wisconsin 35, Superior,Wisconsin,
but for the recommendation
by the minimum-waged desk clerk
with meth-addict's acne
of the Duluth Minnesota Holiday Inn.

It Makes It Important to Wake Up from the Winter Nap to the Smell of Pine Smoke, Snow, and the Light That Comes in the Frost-Thick Window, Pale and Lonesome as Distant Music

NOON POINT

Clark Coolidge

I think I wrote a poem today but I don't know well.
Though well do I seize the trees shale but am not given pause.
The lights are every one of them out, we see it all so well.
Nothing is taken care of, everything lies.
Everyone rise.







WINTER NAP

Tom Hennan

On a sunny winter afternoon I fill the stove with wood. When it is hot it makes the purring sound of the heart of a man revived after being dead a few minutes. I pull up a chair to the heat, sit down with a book, and fall asleep. I leave my body and fly out over the snow-heavy fields. I sail about, avoiding treetops, ignoring airplanes, gliding past the sheds full of the cold metallic silence of tractors. I've always had to work with machines, be a machine, or less, part of a machine. Only those who don't need to earn their living chained to technology can afford to be romantic about it. The machine breaks down the nerves. Its rhythm is different from the rhythm of life. Its steel and plastic voice wedges itself between each beat of the heart. It throws the who body off center so that it can't digest moonlight or sunshine or understand a single chirping cricket. It makes it important to wake up from the winter nap to the smell of pine smoke, snow, and the light that comes in the frost-thick window, pale and lonesome as distant music.

Sometimes, in Desperation, He&#39;d Look Toward a Mannequin or a Window Dresser with a Penchant for Parsing

Andy Kaufman was born 65 years ago today. Rest in peace, Mae Young. I fully confess the manic twice a day postings are 97/100ths an attention-slut's desperation to make up for lost pings now that I don't yodel motherfucking this motherfucking that like I used to at peak ping. Why I think putting out more of what those who visited for the motherfuckering don't want will increase pings falls under rules of self-fulfilling prophecy and its satisfying negative rewards. 1/100th is the freedom of the new template, the escape from the green prison, another 1/100th is simply fuck you fuck me fuck this, but the last 1/100th is that I'm finding myself desperately, frighteningly angry at

• for instance, frighteningly enraged, finding myself desperately sad, alarmingly crazed, I thought not motherfuckering would help but it doesn't, I find myself thinking of what the fuck actions I can take and then recognizing their futility (like the ineffectual futility of posting twice a day) had I the guts to enact them, find myself imagining the world my daughter will need survive when she's my age in 2047...
• I stopped paying attention to professional wrestling once the motherfucking McMahon's won, and fine metaphors abound.
• Onism.
• How do you see yourself?
• The ambient special you didn't ask for.
• A review of Obama's spy speech before Obama's spy speech.
• Just because I don't motherfuckering as much doesn't mean I won't link to others motherfuckering, though admittedly, by design, there's less and less of that too.
• Radical notions: on creating the enemy one seeks.
• Living with power.
• Joseph Conrad's An Anarchist.
• Anxiety and writing.
• On the above.
• Counting and telling. More stuff that makes me wish I'd been born a linguist.
• What Earthgirl and me are doing February 22nd, anyone wanna go? dinner before at the great Hillandale Indian joint? or maybe down to Tiffin or Udupi in Langley Park? Email me by Sunday, I'm buying tickets Monday, I'll buy your ticket, you buy us dinner.
• Kenneth Koch, for those of you who do.
• Margaret Drabble, for those of you who do (like Earthgirl).
• I've read 17 of the 25, tried the Johnson and failed and probably won't try again, tried Proust and failed and may or not try again, tried the Levin and will try again, and I've never heard of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.
• A related phenomenon to the change in blooger readership has been the change in twooter readership since I've stopped motherfuckering as much there, watching those who followed for the motherfuckering drop away, seeing those who actually like the music and poetry join up. Thanks!
• Lunch Poem.
• Prunella's latest playlist.
• My current favorite obsession:

IN LOVE, HIS GRAMMAR GREW

Stephen Dunn

In love, his grammar grew

rich with intensifiers, and adverbs fell

madly from the sky like pheasants

for the peasantry, and he, as sated

as they were, lolled under shade trees

until roused by moonlight

and the beautiful fraternal twins

and and but. Oh that was when

he knew he couldn’t resist

a conjunction of any kind.

One said accumulate, the other

was a doubter who loved the wind

and the mind that cleans up after it.

                                           For love

he wanted to break all the rules,

light a candle behind a sentence

named Sheila, always running on

and wishing to be stopped

by the hard button of a period.

Sometimes, in desperation, he’d look

toward a mannequin or a window dresser

with a penchant for parsing.

But mostly he wanted you, Sheila,

and the adjectives that could precede

and change you: bluesy, fly-by-night,

queen of all that is and might be.