- Those of you who had 24 hours - like me - for as long as I could go without posting would have lost but all of us who bet I couldn't go the weekend win. Song above explains.
- Uncle Bill was Bajoran?
- Towards global authoritarianism.
- For example.
- davidly gets screwed trying to buy Kate Bush tickets, reacts with letter, great Kate Bush song.
- As much as I like much of the New York Review of Books I sometimes forget a certain hawkishness - here's someone calling Obama a pussy towards Putin - in foreign policy articles.
- Maggie's weekly links.
- Bryce played three hours of Robert Ashley this past Friday.
- I've been re-watching - it feels more like watching for the first time - Deep Space Nine on the recommendation of friends. Watching on Netflix allows me not only to miss commercials but to skip the interminable opening. Last light I saw the episode with Uncle Bill. Jody, Buffy, and Cissy were mutes, their tongues cut out by Cardassians. There was no sign of Mr French. I got to wondering who is the actress who plays Major Kira Nerys, which allows me, to my giggling delight, to play an Ashley piece and use this gag:
- Yes, post today because I need contact, but mostly because I can't sit on that gag for another 24 hours.
- Another Moby Dick book acquired.
- { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
- Tom introduces me, via her poem, to Nin Andrews. In comments it turns out she lives in the traffic jam called Nova.
- Long playlist from Prunella.
- My favorite road in MOCO. Fuck the Pattons, you bought there knowing, assholes.
- A contemplation on Ashbery's poetics: I sort of seized upon this quote with a ridiculous kind of “yes!” because I felt like it was describing in a wonderful prescient and powerful way the poetics of Ashbery. In Ashbery’s poems, the page is a kind of experimental and experiential laboratory, in and through which new meanings, new metaphors, are attempted. Through this process, the “meaning of the present” is amplified, and we are taken so far out of (and so near towards?) our customary thinking that we are then able to think more clearly about our present values, preoccupations, habits, beliefs, etc. It is in this sense that we can think of Ashbery’s work as an exploration of what a moral imagination means, which is another of saying that Ashbery attempts to give us the most robust, diverse, and rich possible answer to this question. His poetry is therefore an unprecedentedly moving and powerful example of the moral imagination at work, while at the same time it teaches us the importance and relevance of the imagination as the primary means by which we actually think and live.
- Below Durutti Column, without doubt the most-posted poem here ever.
VAUCANSON
John Ashbery
It was snowing as he wrote.
In the gray room he felt relaxed and singular,
But no one, of course, ever trusts these moods.
There had to be understanding to it.
Why, though? That always happens anyway,
And who gets the credit for it? Not what is understood,
Presumably, and it diminishes us
In our getting to know it.
As trees come to know a storm
Until it passes and light falls anew
Unevenly, on all the muttering kinship:
Things with things, persons with objects,
Ideas with people or ideas.
It hurts, this wanting to give a dimension
To life when life is precisely that dimension.
We are creatures, therefore we walk and talk
And people come up to us, or listen
And then move away.
Music fills the spaces
Where figures are pulled to the edges,
And it can only say something.
Sinews are loosened then,
The mind begins to think good thoughts.
Ah, this sun must be good:
Doing a number, completing its trilogy.
Life must be back there. You hid it
So no one could find it
And now you can't remember where.
But if one were to invent being a child again
It might just come close enough to being a living relic
To save this thing, save it from embarrassment
By ringing down the curtain,
And for a few seconds no one would notice.
The ending would seem perfect.
No feelings to dismay,
No tragic sleep to wake from in a fit
Of passionate guilt, only the warm sunlight
That slides easily down shoulders
To the soft, melting heart.
