For the first time in months a Thursday night Thursday Night Pints. We talked about Napoleon and rabies. The mind is weird, I said. Every year during the first two weeks of pollen's return I get slight allergy symptoms - my nose gets stuffed while I sleep, I blow technicolor snot in the morning - while my body adjusts to pollen then returns to normal. I know this. It happens every year. And I know that the odds that the cat that bit Napoleon had rabies are 100,000 to 1 and I know that even if the cat that bit Napoleon did have rabies the odds that rabies in Napoleon would have reached his salivary glands this soon are 1,000,000 to 1 and even if the rabies had reached his salivary glands he would either need to bite me or lick an open wound on me, which he hasn't, but when I blew my technicolor snot into a paper towel this morning I thought, fuck, rabies. L said, why not just get the shots for peace of mind? I might, I said, as much for others' peace of mind as my own.
- Mark Ames vs Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman over USAID.
- K asked, so are you really going to reengage with the clusterfuck? We had been talking about how all the NSA/Snowden noise has ceased now that the noise's value to Power has accrued to Power (as I and probably everyone who reads this blog predicted). The mind is weird, I said. Every year during the first two weeks of pollen's return I get slight allergy symptoms - my nose gets stuffed while I sleep, I blow technicolor snot in the morning - while my body adjusts to pollen then returns to normal. I know this. It happens every year. And I know that the odds that any action I take has any effect other than a self-congratulatory moral boost is a trillion to one, but when I blew my technicolor snot into a paper towel this morning I thought, fuck, fucking fine metaphors abound.
- This week in water.
- For those following the Napoleon story: the Animal Control officer cancelled his Friday morning visit to the house. I'm going to drive out to the new Animal Control headquarters in Redland (where Kobin Rlippel grew up, or One of Four in her Borglandru designation) and get much needed information.
- Hand of doom.
- Blasting opera forward.
- Heinlein, for those of you who do.
- Mark Strand is eighty today.
- What does poetry do? or: Ashbery, for those of you who do.
- Yes, I deleted last night's Ashbery post and post the youtube here:
EATING POETRY
Mark Strand
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
