It's So Self-Indulgent to Think You Like This Song

That has been this blog's Bleggalgazing Gag from Day One. It is by far the most posted youtube in this blog's history. I've watched it at least a dozen times each time I've posted it. Of the almost 12K views, I'm guessing 1K are mine. It gets better, deeper with each viewing. I'm writing this sentence at eight o'clock Friday night. I've already watched it seven times, by the time this is posted Saturday morning I'll watch it a half dozen more. There is nothing I can write - nothing I can imagine anyone far more talented than me writing - that bleggalgazes better, deeper. It restores my faith in my fuck it, my fuck this. Chris Elliott is fifty-four today. Today is an Egoslavian High Holy Day. Here's this blog's official Bleggalgazing Anthem:







So today I bleggalgaze. Friends analog and digital have told me they like when I write. I like when I write. One of this blog's oldest mantras is I do this for me and mine. I need occasional reminding. There will be no hiatus, no abandonment, Egoslavian Holy Days will be observed. I will, however, try to release myself - how successfully and for how long I'll find out - from the obsessive bleggal obligations masquerading as responsibility to the reader I use to feed my attention sluttery. It's not that I want to post less, it's that I want to stop posting like a motherfucking addict. Fuck it, fuck this, fuck that. That includes not posting daily. It includes not not posting daily. It means not posting compulsively, it means not posting for pings, it means posting what I know will drive away pings (hiking, travelogs, and, especially, bleggalgazing) because they are my favorite posts. It means not spending two hours an evening fishing for links every evening if I don't feel like spending two hours that evening fishing for links. It requires distinguishing when I want to post and when I don't, when all I want is attention when I've nothing but fished links and songs and a poem to offer, it means posting when all I have is a song I want you to hear and a poem I want you to hear. I do know the difference, will try to honor it.

As always, thanks for reading. If you are Kinding me and me not you please let me know. Here, this shitty blog's Number One Theme Song, has been since Day One:

Wisteria, Extreme

The penultimate day of the birthdayiest month in Egoslavia. Pauline Oliveros is eighty-two today.

Saturday is a High Egoslavian Holy Day, I said at Thursday Night Pints, certainly the last Thursday Night Pints for the summer, probably the last forever though we promised ourselves at least one more. We've already lost D, rest in peace. K has offers in Ann Arbor and Palo Alto, will take one or the other, will be out of town much of the summer. L has grandchildren in Atlanta, stupidly lucrative house-flipper offers for her house in Arlington, will be out of town much of the summer. I'd take the Palo Alto offer, I said to K. I said to L, I'd take the stupidly lucrative money and buy a single floor condo near your grandchildren instead of living alone with two bad hips in a 1940s Cape Cod with three floors and narrow and steep stairs. I was agreeing with the choices they've already made. I can't imagine going to Atlanta for any reason, I can totally imagine going to Northern California, I'll have places to stay in either case.

That's the Thursday Night Pints bleggal pre-eulogy, eulogy, and post-eulogy. Combined with else and tomorrow's High Egoslavian Holy Day fine metaphors abound, or could or might or will.







UPDATE!

• I wasn't going to post links today but I may not post links tomorrow and these will go stale soon.
• The return of Fuck You Friday.
• Monster capitalism and the complicit state.
• Privatizing profits, socializing losses.
• On the urgent necessity of anti-imperialism.
• The anxieties of big data.
• Daniel Ellsberg on the odious John Kerry. This is true: on election day POTUS 2004 I went door to door in Harrisburg Pennsylvania canvassing votes of John Kerry.
• Those who own the goal posts.
• Silber sends a brief update. Please, if you can spar the coins in your pocket consider giving them to Arthur.
• Ten words used only in Irish English.
• Walter Benjamin, for those of you who do.
• On location: Place and placelessness; conflicting histories and transmuted genre; mythologized frontiers and one notion of “the West” blurring into a socio-historic another, somewhere just beyond the usual reach of cinematic allegory and metaphor...
• Charles Simic remembers Russell Edson (whose poetry I barely know) and Bill Knott (whose poetry I love).
• The legacy of William Meredith, who I used to read but don't think about any more (which says more about me than the poetry of William Meredith).

EXTREME WISTERIA

Lucie Brock-Broido

On abandon, uncalled for but called forth.

                                                                              The hydrangea

Of   her crushed each year a little more into the attar of   herself.

Pallid. Injured, wildly capable.

A throat to come home to, tupelo.

                                                Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable.

Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear.

Wistful, woke most every afternoon

                                In the green rooms of the Abandonarium.

                                                Beautiful cage, asylum in.

Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not

                                 Have been there.

So few wild raspberries, they were countable,

                                 Triaged out by hand.

Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others,

                                 Sateen. Extreme hyacinth as evidence.

Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves

                                 Will (perhaps tomorrow) die.

High editorial illusion of   “Control.” Early childhood: measles,

                                                                              Scarlet fevers;

Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home.

Convinced Gould’s late last recording of the Goldberg Variations

Was put down just for her. Unusual coalition of early deaths.

Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence,

In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of   such.

                                                                                          Wisteria, extreme.

There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home.

IF A GARDEN OF NUMBERS

Cole Swensen

If a garden is the world counted

                                                           and found analogue in nature

One does not become two by ever ending

                                                                           so the stairs must be uneven in number

and not exceed

thirteen without a pause

of two paces’ width, which

                                                 for instance, the golden section

                            mitigates between abandon

and an orchestra just behind those trees,

gradations of green that take a stethoscope: we risk:

Length over width

                                  to make the horizon run straight

equals

            to make the pond an oval:

                                                            Width

                                                            over length minus the width

                              in which descending circles curl

into animals exact as a remainder.

                              Which means excess. The meaning of the real

always exceeds that of the ideal, said someone.

                                                                                      He was speaking of Vaux-le-Vicomte,

but it’s equally true of parking, or hunting, or wishing you could take it back. He

                              who is Allen Weiss, actually said, “The meaning

of a plastic or pictorial construct always surpasses the ideal meaning of that work.”

Which is something else entirely. Said

the axonometric

divided by

the anamorphic.

                               There is nothing that controls our thoughts

more than what we think we see,

which we label “we.”

A Talent for Self-Realization Will Get You Only as Far as the Vacant Lot Next to the Lumber Yard

Iannis Xenakis was born ninety-two years ago today. Play loud.

The Egoslavian birthdayiest month of the year continues. Will continue. There's one last May birthday, an apt Egoslavian High Holy Day day after tomorrow for finishing.

Persepolis one, two, three, four, five, six.

Bohor one, two.

Xenakis here before one, two, three. Can't find the rest.

The Complete Electronic Music of Iannis Xenakis.








LIFE IS A DREAM

John Ashbery

A talent for self-realization
will get you only as far as the vacant lot
next to the lumber yard, where they have rollcall.
My name begins with an A,
so is one of the first to be read off.
I am wondering where to stand - could that group of three
or four others be the beginning of the line?

Before I have a chance to find out, a rodent-like
man pushes at my shoulders. "It's that way," he hisses.
"Didn't they teach you anything at school? That a photograph
of anything can be real, or maybe not? The corner of the stove,
a cloud of midges at dusk-time."

I know I'll have a chance to learn more
later on. Waiting is what's called for, meanwhile.
It's true that life can be anything, but certain thinkgs
definitely aren't it. This glove hand,
for instance, that glides
so securely into mine, as though it intends to stay.

So

done
I screenshot
last word

Every Tonal Difference, Every Sound

The Egoslavian birthdayiest month of the year continues: as of this moment, all three posts on the blog's front page are birthday posts. Gyorgy Ligeti was born eighty-six years ago today. As always with me and composers, I love most if not all of a composer's work but always love the solo piano pieces best. Here's Ubuweb's typically generous Ligeti sound page.

Earthgirl and Planet and I had dinner last night with B, the young woman who stayed at our house when moving to DC for a new job while looking for an apartment who has become not only our cat-sitter but our friend. The combined ages of Planet and B is ten years younger than me. As always, I thought, what the fuck world will my daughter be inhabiting when she is my age in 2047? It seems to me the descent to clusterfuck is increasing both in angle and in speed. When I got home I found myself link-fishing the clusterfuck. I can still get angry, to no effective purpose, apparently. Then I listened to Ligeti piano sonatas while looking for poems for this post.

• Austerity and neo-liberalism lead to the neo-fascist right. Duh, of course, but worth reminding.
• Pierre Omidyar and Narendra Modi.
• Categorizing the poor.
• Building a lasting legacy of death.
• Is violence cultural?
• A primer on the new religion of the gun.
• When intellectuals go to war.
• NYT's public editor slaps Michael Kinsley around. Psst. Michael Kinsley doesn't care.
• If Pope Francis pisses off the asshole Netanyahu then Pope Francis gets a point in my book.
• Consent is impossible.
• Skull-blogging, face-in-the-frost edition.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.

from MOZART'S THIRD BRAIN

Goran Sinnevi

Translated by Rika Lesser

CV

Not-Orpheus is singing   He sings his nothing   He sings his night   

He sings all the names   The name of nothing   The only name    Since   

long ago   He didn’t know it   And knew it in his night   

All things sing   All names sing   Every tonal difference, every

sound   All music in its destruction   In its sublation   Toward which point?

The mountain of nothing hovers   Before it crushes us   With its night   With its

   song  

In the evening I walked through town with you, Dearest, along the river   

A clear cold spring evening, the half-moon shone   As if walking in a foreign city   

Though I recognized parts of it   You said it was almost like   

walking in Prague, where we would have been if my mother hadn’t fallen ill   

When we stood by one corner of the Hotel Svea, where I played in a dance band in

    1957,   

the huge flock of jackdaws, in the trees by the bastion near the castle, flew   

out over the river, in micropolyphonic conversation    As in a piece by Ligeti   

That night I dreamed I crossed a bridge spanning the river, now very broad   

The long bridge was swaying, huge ocean swells entering the river from the sea   

I walked with a girl, kissed her on the mouth, on the opposite bank   

In the morning you came into my bed, Dear, we slinked like teenagers, so my   

       mother wouldn’t hear us,

where she slept, in the room outside ours   She’s already much better   

I look at my face in the bathroom mirror   Will I manage to go out into the Brain  

Trucks pass   Traffic goes on, in the great exchange of goods   

Gulls, trees, people   The degree of virtuality in different goods, the phantasms   

also in what we eat, conceptions of origin, contents, effects

Fear    Cultivated tastes    We are in the immediacy of memory    Only in a flash of

astonishment can memory be broken   But even lightning is informed    I look at

    the

      magical   

diagrams of Giordano Bruno, read his texts   See that all this is exactly as in   

Jung, fundamental magical forms, for guiding the divine,   

the unknown within the soul   Also the similarity with tantric forms      

    Yes, that’s   

        how it is,   

I think, both Freud and Jung are magicians, the difference in rationality is   

only marginal, Jung’s a little older, Freud’s more modern, a continuation of   

Descartes, developed later in Spinoza’s pneumatic model for the passions,   

and yet both are found, subsumed in Bruno’s love-flow, the lineage backward,   

the tantric flow, also Plato’s Diotima, her flow . . .   

Hölderlin saw the stream of people in dark water, streaming over   

the ledges in the human-geological world, the levels of the abyss,   Para-   

       dise’s various degrees of stasis   

What use can I make of these magical forms? I’m no magician    And yet

I acknowledge their power, also within my self   If they prevail, sovereignty   

is crushed   Libero arbitrio   There the forms also break down   

The stream of love breaks down    Fluid lightning    The flash of vibrating being   

But also the flash of darkness   The light of Beatrice’s eyes, their lightning

    flash   How  

am I to understand this? How to understand unknowing   That I do not!

INFINITE RICHES IN THE SMALLEST ROOM

Lucie Brock-Broido

Silk spool of the recluse as she confects her eventual mythomania.

If it is written down, you can't rescind it.

Spoon and pottage bowl. You are starving. Come closer now.

What if I were gone and the wind still reeks of hyacinth, what then.

Who will I be: a gaudy arrangement of nuclei, an apple-size gray circle

On the tunic of a Jew, preventing more bad biological accidents

                                From breeding-in. I have not bred-

In. Each child still has one lantern inside lit. May the Mother not

Blow her children out. She says her hair is thinning, thin.

The flowerbed is black, sumptuous in emptiness.

Blue-footed mushrooms line the walkway to my door. I would as soon

Die as serve them in a salad to the man I love. We lie down

In the shape of a gondola. Venice is gorgeous cold. 3 December,

Unspeakable anxiety about locked-in syndrome, about a fourth world.

I cannot presume to say. The violin spider, she

Has six good eyes, arranged in threes.

                                The rims of wounds have wounds as well.

Sphinx, small print, you are inscrutable.

                                                            On the roads, blue thistles, barely

Visible by night, and, by these, you may yet find your way home.

Born Eighty-Four Years Ago Today

The traditional Egoslavian birthday post for John Barth. If I played the Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game with novelists I'd....

I could do the math and fuck that but I'd guess May is the birthday-iest month in Egoslavia, there are a couple more, including a High Holy Day still left to come. These are simultaneously my favorite posts and this blog's least read posts. Sweet. I would not read and think like I do if Gary Pittenger, English 101 professor at Montgomery College, had not pushed Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor into my hands in 1980. John Barth interview from 1985. PDF of Sot-Weed Factor. On Sot-Weed Factor, part one, part two. Discovering Sot-Weed Factor. The Case for John Barth. On Giles Goat-Boy. Here's the opening to my second favorite Barth novel, Giles Goat-Boy:

Publisher's Disclaimer

The reader must begin this book with an act of faith and end it with an act of charity. We ask him to believe in the sincerity and authenticity of this preface, affirming in return his prerogative to be skeptical of all that follows it.

The manuscript submitted to us some seasons ago under the initials R.N.S., and by us retitled Giles Goat-Boy, is enough removed from the ordinary and so potentially actionable as to make inadequate the publisher's conventional disclaimer: "Any resemblance to persons living or dead," etc. The disclaimer's very relevance-which we firmly assert-was called into question even prior to the manuscript's receipt, as has been everything about the book since, from its content to its authorship. The professor and quondam novelist whose name appears on the title-page (our title-page, not the one following his prefatory letter) denies that the work is his, but "suspects" it to be fictional-a suspicion that two pages should confirm for the average reader. His own candidate for its authorship is one Stoker Giles or Giles Stoker- whereabouts unknown, existence questionable-who appears to have claimed in turn 1 ) that he too was but a dedicated editor, the text proper having been written by a certain automatic computer, and 2) that excepting a few "necessary basic artifices" * the book is neither fable nor fictionalized history, but literal truth. And the computer, the mighty "WESCAC"-does it not too disclaim authorship? It does.

* The computer's assumption of a first-person narrative viewpoint, we are told. is one such "basic artifice." The reader will add others, perhaps challenging their "necessity" as well.

Frankly, what we hope and risk in publishing Giles Goat-Boyis that the question of its authorship will be a literary and not a legal one. If so, judging from the fuss in our office these past months, the book affords more pregnant matter for controversy. Merely deciding to bring it out has already cost us two valued colleagues, for quite different reasons. Five of us were party to the quarrel, which grew so heated, lengthy, and complex that finally, as editor-in-chief, I was obliged to put an end to it. No further discussion of the book was permitted. Inasmuch as the final responsibility was mine I requested from each of my four associates a brief written statement on the questions: should we publish the manuscript entitled Giles Goat-Boy? If so, why, and if not, why not?

Their replies anticipate, I think, what will be the range of public and critical reaction to the book. I reprint them here (with signatures and certain personal references omitted) not in the hope of forestalling that reaction, but to show that our decision was made neither hastily nor in bad faith:


Editor A

I am quite sensible that fashions have changed since my own tenure as editor-in-chief: marriage has lost its sanctity, sex its mystery; every filthiness is published in the name of Honesty, all respect for law and discipline is gone-to say nothing of proprietyand seemliness, whose very names are sneered at. Cynicism is general: the student who eschews cheating like the young girl who eschews promiscuity or the editor who values principle over profit, is looked upon as a freak. Whatever is old-a man, a building, a moral principle is regarded not as established but as obsolete; to be preserved if at all for its antiquarian interest, but got rid of without compunction the moment it becomes in the way. In the way, that is, of self-interest and the tireless sensualism of youth. Indeed fashions change, have always changed, and there's the point. Granted that every generation must write its own "New Syllabus" or re-interpret the Old one, rebel against its teachers, challenge all the rules-all the more important then that the Rules stand fast! Morality like motion has its laws; each generation takes its impetus from the resistance of its forebears, like runners striving against the ground, and those who would abolish the old Answers (I don't speak of restating or modifying them, which is eternally necessary) would turn the track underfoot to quickmire, with fatal consequences for the race of men.

This Revised New Syllabus is nothing new, but as old as sickness of the spirit- not a revision of anything, but a repudiation of all that's wholesome and redeeming. It is for us to repudiate it. Publishing remains despite all a moral enterprise, and is recognized as such in its heart of hearts even by the public that clamors for gratification of its appetites. The sensational, the vulgar, the lurid, the cheap the hackneyed-there is an innocence about these things in their conventional and mass-produced forms, even a kind of virtue; the novelists everyone purchases do no harm as they line our pockets and their own. They are not difficult; they do not astonish; they rebel along traditional lines shock us in customary ways, and teach us what we know already. Their concerns are modest, their literary voice and manner are seldom wild, only their private lives, which make good copy: in straightforward prose they reveal to us how it is to belong to certain racial or cultural minorities; how it is to be an adolescent, a narcotic, an adulterer a vagabond- especially how it is to be the Author, with his particular little history of self-loathings and aggrandizements. Such novels, I conceive, are the printed dreams of that tiny fraction of our populace which buys and reads books, and the true dwelling-places of art and profit. In serving the dream we prevent the deed: vicariously the reader debauches, and is vicariously redeemed; his understanding is not taxed; his natural depravity may be tickled but is not finally approved of; no assaults have been made upon his imagination, nor any great burden put on his attention. He is the same fellow as before, only a little better read, and in most cases the healthier for his small flirtation with the Pit. He may even remark, "Life is absurd, don't you think? There's no answer to anything"; whereafter, his luncheon-companion agreeing absolutely, they have another cocktail and return to more agreeable matters.

Consider the difference with R.N.S.: here fornication, adultery, even rape, yea murder itself (not to mention self-deception, treason, blasphemy, whoredom, duplicity, and willful cruelty to others) are not only represented for our delectation but at times approved of and even recommended! On aesthetic grounds too (though they pale before the moral), the work is objectionable: the rhetoric is extreme, the conceit and action wildly implausible, the interpretation of history shallow and patently biased, the narrative full of discrepancies and badly paced, at times tedious, more often excessive; the form, like the style, is unorthodox, unsymmetrical, inconsistent. The characters, especially the hero, are unrealistic. There never was a Goat-boy! There never will be!

In sum it is a bad book, a wicked book, and ought not-I will say must not-be published. No computer produced it, but the broodings of an ineffectual megalomane: a crank at best, very possibly a psychopath. As the elder, if no longer the ranking, member of this editorial group I urge that we take this opportunity to restore a part of the moral prestige that was ours when our organization was more dedicated and harmonious, if less wealthy; to reverse our lamentable recent policy of publishing the esoteric, the bizarre, the extravagant, the downright vicious. I urge not only that the manuscript in question be rejected forthwith, but also that the "Author's" superiors, his Dean and Department Chairman, be advised what they are exposing undergraduate minds to. Would the present editor-in-chief, I wonder, permit his own daughter to be taught by such a man? Then in the name of what decent principle ought we to make his scribbling available to all our sons and daughters?


Editor B

I vote to publish the Revised New Syllabus and agree with the Editor-in-chief that Giles Goat-Boy is a more marketable title for it. We all know what [A's] objections to the manuscript are; we also know why he's not editor-in-chief any more, after his rejection of __* on similar "moral" grounds.

* Not to injure unnecessarily the reputation of that splendid (and presently retired) old gentleman here called A, let it be said merely that his distinguished editorial career never regained its earlier brilliance after the day some years ago when, in a decision as hotly contested as the present one, he overrode the opinions of myself and several other of his protegé's to reject the novel here cited by B which subsequently made the fortune of our largest competitor. No further identification of the book is needed than that it concerns the adventures, sexual and otherwise, of a handsome, great-spirited young man struggling against all odds and temptations to fulfill what he takes to be his destiny- that the plot was admittedly not original with the now-famous author; and that the book bids fair to remain a best seller forever.

What I must add, at the risk of "impropriety," is that in addition to his predictable bias against anything more daring than Gay Dashleigh's Prep-School Days, he may have a private antipathy for this particular manuscript: his own daughter, I happen to know, "ran off" from college with a bearded young poetry-student who subsequently abandoned her, pregnant, in order to devote himself to sheep-farming and the composition of long pastoral romances in free verse, mainly dealing with his great love for her. Her father never forgave her; neither has he, it seems, forgiven bearded heterosexuality or things bucolic, and it is a mark of his indiscrimination that he makes a goat-boy suffer for a sheep-boy's sins. Much as I respect your request that these statements remain impersonal, and hesitate as a new employee to criticize my colleagues in addition to disagreeing with them, I must argue that the "personal" and "professional" elements are so bound together in this case (indeed, are they ever separable in literary judgments?), that to take a stand for or against Giles Goat-Boy is to do likewise on the question whether this organization will prosper in literary judgments?), that to take a stand for or against Giles Goat-Boy is to do likewise on the question whether this organization will prosper in harmonious diversity or languish in acrimonious dissension. In choosing to publish or reject a manuscript, one oughtn't to bear the burden of choosing professional friends and enemies as well. Where such has become the case, the new man's only choice is to follow his best judgment, laying his future resolutely on the line; and I respectfully suggest that the responsible administrator's best hope for curing the situation is to turn any threatening ultimatums (like A's) into opportunities for revitalizing and reharmonizing the staff.

The fact is, I happen to agree-I think we all do-that Giles Goat-Boy is tough sledding in places, artistically uneven, and offensive (we'll call it challenging, of course) to certain literary and moral conventions. Personally I am no great fan of the "Author's"; like [Editor C, whose opinion follows] I found his early work lively but a bit naïve and his last novel wild and excessive in every respect. I frankly don't know quite what to make of this one. Where other writers seek fidelity to the facts of modern experience and expose to us the emptiness of our lives, he declares it his aim purely to astonish; where others strive for truth, he admits his affinity for lies, the more enormous the better. His fellows quite properly seek recognition and wide readership; he rejoices (so he says) that he has but a dozen readers, inasmuch as a thirteenth might betray him. So far from becoming discouraged by the repeated failure of his novels to make a profit, he confesses his surprise that no one has tarred and feathered him. Apparently sustained by the fact that anyone at all has swallowed his recentest whopper, he sets about to hatch another, clucking tongue at the compass and bedazzlement of those fabrications. Plot, for the young novelists we applaud, is a naughty word, as it was for their fathers--storyto them means invention, invention artifice, artifice dishonesty. As for style, it is everywhere agreed that the best language is that which disappears in the telling, so that nothing stands between the reader and the matter of the book. But this author has maintained (in obscure places, understandably) that language is the matter of his books, as much as anything else and for that reason ought to be "splendrously musicked out"; he turns his back on what is the case, rejects the familiar for the amazing, embraces artifice and extravagance; washing his hands of the search for Truth, he calls himself "a monger after beauty," or "doorman of the Muses' Fancy-house." In sum, he is in a class by himself and not of his time; whether a cut above or a cut below, three decades ahead or three centuries behind, his twelve readers must decide for themselves.

My own net sentiment comes to this: the author in question has, I'm told, a small but slowly growing audience, more loyal than discerning or influential, of the sort one needs no expensive promotion to reach, as they have their own ways of spreading the word around: penniless literature students, professors in second-rate colleges, and a couple of far-out critics. Giles Goat-Boyisn't likely to make anybody rich, but if we can saturate this little group it should at least pay its own way, and may even redeem our losses on the man's other books. One day those penniless students may be pennied enough- those professors may rise to more influential positions; the far-out critics may turn out to have been prophets . . . Alternatively, the author's luck may change (rather, our luck, as he seems not to care one way or the other): by pure accident his next book might be popular, stranger things have happened. Meanwhile we may write off our losses to that tax-deductible sort of prestige associated with the better publishing houses; the thing to do is keep the advance and advertising expenses as low as possible while holding him under contract for the future, in the meantime exploiting whatever ornamental or write-off value he may have.


Editor C

I vote against publishing the book called The Revised New Syllabus, not for reasons of morality, law, or politics, but simply on aesthetic and commercial grounds. The thing won't turn us a profit, and I see no ethical or "prestigial" justification for losing a nickel on it. Publishing may be a moral enterprise, as [A] likes to claim, but first of all it's just an enterprise, and I for one think it's as unprofessional to publish a book for moral reasons (which is what young [B's] enthusiasms amount to) as to reject one for moral reasons. [A] quite obviously has personal motives for rejecting the book; I submit that [B] has motives equally personal, if more sympathetic, for pushing its acceptance. He's new to our profession, and knows very well that discovering fresh talent is a road to success second only to pirating established talents from the competition. He has a young man's admirable compassion for lost causes, a young scholar's sympathy for minor talents, and a young intellectual's love of the heterodox, the esoteric, the obscure. Moreover he's a writer of fiction himself and no doubt feels a certain kinship with others whose talents have brought them as yet no wealth or fame. Finally, it's no reflection on his basic integrity that on the first manuscript he's been asked his opinion of, he might be less than eager to oppose the known judgment of the man who hired him; but that circumstance probably oughtn't to be discounted-especially since his vote to publish is a "net sentiment" by his own acknowledging, arrived at over numerous and grave reservations.

I think I may say that my own position is relatively objective. I agree that there are inferior books which one does right to lose a bit of money on in order not to lose a superior author, and there are superior books (very rare!) which one publishes, regardless of their commercial value, merely to have been their publisher. But the book in question I take to be neither: it's a poor-risk work by a poor-risk author. It wants subtlety and expertise: the story is not so much "astonishing" as preposterous, the action absurd. The hero is a physical, aesthetic, and moral monstrosity; the other characters are drawn with small regard for realism and at times lack even the consistency of stereotypes the dialogue is generally unnatural and wanting in variety from speaker to speaker-everyone sounds like the author! The prose style-that unmodern, euphuistic, half-metrical bombast-is admittedly contagious (witness [A's] and [B's] lapses into it), even more so is syphilis. The theme is obscure, probably blasphemous- the wit is impolite, perhaps even suggestive of unwholesome preoccupations; the psychology-but there is no psychology in it. The author clearly is ignorant of things and people as they really are: Consider his disregard for the reader! Granted that long novels are selling well lately, one surely understands that mere bulk is not what sells them; and when their mass consists of interminable exposition, lecture, and harangue (how gratified I was to see that windy old lunatic Max Spielman put to death!), it is the very antidote to profit. Indeed, I can't imagine to whom a work like R.N.S.might appeal, unless to those happily rare, more or less disturbed, and never affluent intelligences-remote, cranky, ineffectual-from whom it is known the author receives his only fan-mail.

What I suggest as our best course, then, is not to "protect our investment" by publishing this Revised New Syllabus(and the one after that, and the one after that), but to cut our losses by not throwing good money after bad. My own "net sentiment" is a considered rejection not only of this manuscript but of its author. He has yet to earn us a sou; his very energy (let us say, inexorableness), divorced as it is from public appeal, is a liability to us, like the energy of crabgrass or cancer. Despite some praise from questionable critics and a tenuous repute among (spiritually) bearded undergraduates-of the sort more likely to steal than to purchase their reading matter-he remains unknown to most influential reviewers, not to mention the generality of book-buyers. In the remote event that he becomes a "great writer," or even turns out to have been one all along, we still hold the copyright on those other losers of his, and can always reissue them. But no, the thing is as impossible as the plot of this book! He himself declares that nothing gets better, everything gets worse: he will merely grow older and crankier, more quirksome and less clever; his small renown will pass, his vitality become mere doggedness, or fail altogether. His dozen admirers will grow bored with him, his employers will cease to raise his salary and to excuse his academic and social limitations; his wife will lose her beauty, their marriage will founder his children will grow up to be ashamed of their father. I see him at last alone, unhealthy, embittered, desperately unpleasant, perhaps masturbative, perhaps alcoholic or insane, if not a suicide. We all know the pattern.


Editor D

Failed, failed, failed! I look about me, and everywhere see failure. Old moralists, young bootlickers, unsuccessful writers; has-beens, would-bes, never-weres; failed artists, failed editors, failed scholars and critics- failed husbands fathers, lovers; failed minds, failed bodies, hearts, and souls-none of us is Passed, we all are Failed!

It no longer matters to me whether the Revised New Syllabusis published, by this house or any other. What does the Answer care, whether anyone "finds" it? It wasn't lost! The gold doesn't ask to be mined, or the medicine beg to be taken; it's not the medicine that's worse off when the patient rejects it. As for the Doctor-who cares whether he starves or prospers? Let him go hungry, maybe he'll prescribe again! Or let him die, we have prescription enough!

Let him laugh, even, that I've swallowed in good faith the pill he made up as a hoax: I'm cured, the joke's on him! One comes to understand that a certain hermit of the woods is no eccentric, but a Graduate, a Grand Tutor. From all the busy millions a handful seek him out, thinking to honor and sustain him- we bring him cash and frankincense, sing out his praises in four-part harmony, fetch him champagne and vichyssoise. Alas, our racket interrupts his musings and scares off the locusts he'd have suppered on the wine makes him woozy, he upchucks the soup; he can't smell the flowers for our perfume or hear the birds for our music, and there's not a thing to spend his money on. No wonder he curses us under his breath, once he's sober again! And thinking to revenge himself with a trick, he puts on a falseface to scare us away. We had asked for revelations- he palms off his maddest dreams. "Show us Beauty," we plead; he bares his rump to us. "Show us Goodness," we beg, and he mounts our wives and daughters. "Ah, sir!" we implore him, "Give us the Truth!" He thrusts up a forefinger from each temple and declares, "You are cuckolds all."

And yet I say the guller is gulled, hoist is the enginer: the joke's on the joker, that's the joker's joke. Better victimized by Knowledge than succored by Ignorance; to be Wisdom's prey is to be its ward. Deceived, we see our self-deception; suffering the lie, we come to truth, and in the knowledge of our failure hope to Pass.

Publish the Revised New Syllabus or reject it- call it art or artifice, fiction, fact, or fraud: it doesn't care, its author doesn't care, and neither any longer do I. I don't praise it, I don't condemn it- I don't ask who wrote it or whether it will sell or what the critics may make of it. My judgment is not upon the book but upon myself. I have read it. I here resign from my position with this house.

One sees the diversity of opinion that confronted me (I do not even mention the disagreement among our legal staff and such nice imponderables as the fact that it was Editor A who gave me my first job in the publishing field, or that Editor D-present whereabouts unknown-happens to be my only son); one sees further something of what either option stood to cost. One sees finally what decision I came to-with neither aid nor sympathy from the author, by the way, who seldom even answers his mail. Publishing is a moral enterprise, in subtler ways than my dear A asserted; like all such, it is spiritually expensive, highly risky, and proportionately challenging. It is also (if I understand the Goat-Boy correctly) as possible an avenue to Commencement Gate as any other moral enterprise, and on that possibility I must bank.

Herewith, then, Giles Goat-Boy: or, The Revised New Syllabus, "a work of fiction any resemblance between whose characters and actual persons living or dead is coincidental." * Let the author's cover-letter stand in all editions as a self-explanatory foreword or opening chapter, however one chooses to regard it; let the reader read and believe what he pleases; let the storm break if it must.


The Editor-in-Chief

* In the absence of any response from the author, whom we repeatedly invited to discuss the matter with us, we have exercised as discreetly as possible our contractual prerogative to alter or delete certain passages clearly libelous, obscene, discrepant, or false. Except for these few passages (almost all brief and of no great importance) the text is reproduced as it was submitted to us. [Ed.]

A Complete Set of Nude Photos of You, Taken by You and Sold Back to You - at a Discount

Siouxsie born fifty-seven years ago today. She was on the daily soundtrack of my twenties. I think the music has aged well, but then I think I've aged well, so take that into consideration.

For the few of you following along: We did the two-car tandem and the eight miles on the Appalachian Trail this past Sunday. It was admittedly the easier north-south down to the Potomac than the south-to-north climb to South Mountain's ridge above the Potomac. Combined with Friday's five miler around Blockhouse and yesterday's six miler finishing up Little Bennett's twenty-three miles of hikes (we've just two miles left to do) that makes nineteen miles for the three day weekend. We'll go for the same or more in two days this coming weekend.

Other than this photo meditation on a Robert Creeley poem and this meditation (with songs) on Queen and this article on what to name my future hell (I vote NoBeSoRo if it's not to be called Rockville, which is what it is) you get nothing else but more Siouxsie and two poems because (I needed to get that Gregg Popovich gif off the top of the page) because.








BRAND NEW PRODUCTS

Linh Dinh

A vigilant gun that always picks out

The right target—even if it’s you—

No matter who you’re aiming at.

A computer that listens and blows you,

As you blow it, to your favorite tune.

Meat that cleans your teeth

As you’re masticating it.

A truck so awesome, only the President

Of the United States of America’s allowed

To careen in it, to his own beat.

A dictionary with positive adjectives only.

A dictionary with no wet verbs.

A dictionary with negotiable definitions.

A dictionary that defines words by their antonyms.

All the greatest hits from the last millennium

Performed live, on stage, on the inside

Of your state of the art, acoustically-enhanced skull.

A complete set of nude photos

Of you, taken by you and sold

Back to you—at a discount.

A sex doll with a mirror for a face.

A sex doll with a Ph.D.

A sex doll with adjustable skin tone.

A sensitive sex doll that just wants

To be friends—a Platonic sex doll.

Rain water in a bottle, sunshine in a box

And ambience sounds from a bus stop

Down the street, recorded on a CD.

A 24-hour video of what you did yesterday.

A 24-hour video of what you’ll do tomorrow.

A super realistic photo of what’s outside

Your window, pasted to your window.

A baseball game that never ends,

To be played simultaneously with

A football game that never ends.

Cluster bombs that scatter copies of Leaves of Grass

Over a thousand mile radius, for a thousand years.

Landmines made with dough,

Topped with mozzarella and all

Your favorite toppings.

An airplane that never lands.

And, finally, your favorite fairy tale

Painted on your new plastic limbs.

SOFT MONEY

Rae Armantrout

They’re sexy

because they’re needy,

which degrades them.

They’re sexy because

they don’t need you.

They’re sexy because they pretend

not to need you,

but they’re lying,

which degrades them.

They’re beneath you

and it’s hot.

They’re across the border,

rhymes with dancer—

they don’t need

to understand.

They’re content to be

(not mean),

which degrades them

and is sweet.

They want to be

the thing-in-itself

and the thing-for-you—

Miss Thing—

but can’t.

They want to be you,

but can’t,

which is so hot.

Even the Dirt Kept Breathing a Small Breath

No, I am not related to Gregg Popovich, head coach of the San Antonio Spurs, this gif I found on my twitter timeline taken last night during a playoff game. It makes me laugh. I am often asked when presenting a form of ID or when asked my name, Hey, are you related to Gregg Popovich? Popovich, it once took up pages of white pages in Pittsburgh and Youngstown and Cleveland and Chicago and Milwaukee, it's one of the most common Serbian surnames. Youngsters, white pages, also known as phone books, were the slide rules of finding phone numbers back in the Pleistocene.

• Miles Davis was born eighty-eight years ago today. 
• So, finally, after two days of Futile Weekend Blogging, have some Lazyass Weekend Blogging.
• Heat Vampirism: a refresher.
• Left/right coalitions: a refresher.
• Armed, angry white men: a refresher. 
• A primer for the new religion of the gun. 
• The 49th Law of Power: A dystopian reality event game.
• The state knows what you did last summer. 
• Some thoughts on imperialism and anti-imperialism.
• Reviewing Lawrence Summer's review of Piketty.
• Walking, sweating, having visions.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• The New Inquiry's Sunday reads.
• Mariel Rukeyser!

ROOT CELLAR

Theodore Roethke

Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
Shoots dangled and drooped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks!—
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

Born One-Hundred Six Years Ago Today

DOLOR

Theodore Roethke

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.




THE SURLY ONE

Theodore Roethke

1

When true love broke my heart in half,
I took the whiskey from the shelf,
And told my neighbors when to laugh.
I keep a dog, and bark myself.

2

Ghost cries out to ghost–
But whose afraid of that?
I feel those shadows most
That start from my own feet.



THE WAKING

Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?   

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?   

God bless the Ground!  I shall walk softly there,   

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?   

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do   

To you and me; so take the lively air,   

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   

What falls away is always. And is near.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

Floyd Atmosphere Had His Cups Repossessed

Paul Weller is 56 today. These are the songs I play every Paul Weller birthday, I love each and every one of them, especially and forgive me this Style Council song (it has a false start, give it a few seconds):







We did a five and a half mile, two out and back, hike at Blockhouse yesterday. There is a new trail in MOCO that follows Muddy Branch Creek from its mouth at the Potomac near Pennyfield Lock north to the bridge where 28 (near Casa Satanica) crosses the creek. This is true, people can vouch: one of the sources of Muddy Branch is a spring in my parents' back yard. You can stand on the rock top, it used to be our pitching mound. We parked at the lot on River and did the 1.5 of the 1.75 to almost Esworthy Road (the last quarter of the trail was a gas line cut full of uncut grass and presumably ticks) and back and then the 1.25 mile to and from the parking lot down to Pennyfield Lock. Nothing special, but nice enough for evenings when we've limited time and a need to get to woods.

Today we take two cars to South Mountain, park one at the parking lot below Weverton Cliffs, double-ride north to Gathland State Park, hike eight miles south on Appalachian Trail, with lunch on Weverton Cliffs, to car parked below Weverton Cliffs, then double-ride north to Gathland State Park to take two cars home. Monday's hike TBD.

A postscript to yesterday's post: it occurs to me that I didn't think about The Grand Budapest Hotel at all yesterday - it never came up in conversation on the hike or around the house - until I read yesterday's post before starting to write this one. I did, however, hear Durutti Column songs in my head as I hiked while thinking about the Stephanie Young poem I posted yesterday as well as the Robert Coover novel I'm reading as well as a poem I'm near abandoning and calling finished. Today in Earthgirl's backpack is a watercolor palette and block, in mine the Coover novel, a book of Clark Coolidge's sonnets (the Coolidge below not a sonnet) and a notebook. I took into consideration portability and practicality for going into forests forty years ago when setting my priorities.








SETTLED IN AUGUST

Clark Coolidge

Floyd Atmosphere had his cups repossessed
they were amethyst and the buckweed falls
I think it's arbitrary the poem
shaped by idiots rising like a sun
thinking the universe doesn't get it
Gogo Flam arrived home goose step by back stoop
I'll give the wall everything even blood it's higher
Spodumene Bob presiding draws mouth on glass
a highway to the moon the only bout they'll join
ugh said the centipede it's a classic!
and Monk names tunes by trying to name them
well we'll see but now the loquat is gone
no semblance even but plenty of mirrors
aren't the heroes nervous? psilocybin notation
to outright cry and be ready for the beach
scooter then the cash cow the bulk finagle
I watch TV I'm no longer a Cherokee
just a live impersonation till the ceiling falls
join you then join you in bed maybe
I live in a borrowed multiplicity
my brothers are the smoke

I Guess Entering a Sex Cinema Dressed in a Black Shirt, Jeans with the Crotch Removed, and a Machine Gun Slung Over Her Shoulder Is Not in the Cards Now

Fell asleep listening to, woke up with Durutti Column in my head. Be in yours.

Saw The Grand Budapest Hotel last night with Earthgirl and Planet. I liked it, with quibbles, but I am not qualified to judge movies. Or rather, I don't feel qualified to judge movies like I feel qualified to judge music or novels or poetry. Whether I am qualified to judge music or novels or poetry is up to you. I think I am, though your opinion may differ. I just rarely watch movies. This is not a moral decision - I like watching movies, I don't think it wrong to watch movies - it is a decision based on recognition of my personal finite time and my tendencies towards obsession. Long ago, forty years ago, I made the conscious choice to obsess over music and novels and poetry at the expense of drama and cinema. I do not regret the choice - I love music, novels, poetry. It was the right choice for me. I'd make it again. Of course I have seen movies in those forty years, but whenever I have felt the urge to learn more about cinema - and I do not have even the most rudimentary knowledge of basic cinematography nor the history of movies (for instance, when I mentioned to friends I was offered tickets to The Grand Budapest Hotel they said, oh, I love Wes Anderson (not Carpenter, as I wrote at first, to Richard's amusement), and I said who? and they looked at me and said, you know, The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore, Moonrise Kingdom, and I said, what?) - I deliberately chose to squelch that urge. I have only so much time to feed the obsessions I already have. It occurs to me this morning that I unconsciously picked Durutti Column last night to appease my music obsessions for having betrayed them for spending two hours watching a movie, choosing a sound I hold holy.

(What I was reminded of most last night as I sat in the next to back row of a Bethesda Row Landmark Theater is how much I hate going to movie theaters, the buttered popcorn smell, the cavernous sterility that produces acute anxiety in me, the sitting in the dark with strangers. I like to think I chose music and novels and poetry forty years ago at the expense of cinema and drama because I genuinely prefer them - and I believe that to be true - but I hated to go to theaters then when DVDs and streaming movies in solitude, in light, in my own space, was unimaginable, and I'm certain that hate was a contributing factor in my choice of obsessions.)

Reading is harder, physically harder, these days. My eyes strain easier now I'm older. I can't read in bed, I fall asleep, fall into those daytime naps that leave me unpleasantly buzzed and yellow when I wake up. I don't try anymore. Now, my mind tells me, now is the time to turn to cinema for those reasons alone. That doesn't seem honorable, turning to a new obsession because my eyes are getting too old and strained for old obsessions. Silly, but there it is, I feel morally compelled to maintain loyalty to obsessions even if the time given to those obsessions is spent on bad sleep and dull headaches caused by eye strain.

I'll see. Perhaps someday I'll solicit advice and syllabi from you for a Freshman class in what movies I should have in my mental cultural database. It's improbable though no longer impossible that I'd ask.








ESSAY

Stephanie Young

after Bernadette Mayer

I guess it's too late to live on the farm

I guess it's too late to enter the darkened room in which a single light

illuminated the artist stripped from the waist down, smeared with

blood, stretched and bound to the table

I guess it's too late to inhabit a glass-fronted, white, box-like room,

dressed in white, against which the menstrual blood was visible

I guess it's too late to start farming

I guess it's too late to start struggling to remain standing in a

transparent plastic cubicle filled with wet clay, repeatedly slipping and

falling

I guess it's too late to buy 60,000 acres in Marfa

I guess it's too late to begin appearing on the subway in stinking

clothes during rush hour with balloons attached to her ears, nose, hair

and teeth

I guess we'll never have an orgiastic Happening

I guess we're too old to carry out maintenance activities in public

spaces, during public hours

I guess we couldn't afford to simulate masturbation while President

Josip Broz Tito's motorcade drove by below

I guess we're not suited to "I am awake in the place where women die"

I guess we'll never have a self-inflicted wound in front of an audience now

I guess entering a sex cinema dressed in a black shirt, jeans with the

crotch removed, and a machine gun slung over her shoulder is not in

the cards now

I guess Clive wouldn't make a good photographic montage in which

their male and female faces became almost indistinguishable

I guess I can't expect we'll ever have a selection of photographs derived

from images produced by the beauty industry now

I guess I'll have to give up all my dreams of being seen, clothed and

unclothed, being systematically measured by two male 'researchers'

who record her measurements on a chart and compare them with a set

of 'normal' measurements

I guess I'll never be waiting for my body to break down, to get ugly

We couldn't get tied together by our hair anyways though Allen

Ginsberg got one late in life

Maybe someday I'll have the foreshortened barrel of a gun pointing

toward the viewer

I guess joining our hands around the base's perimeter fence into which

they weave strands of wool is really out

Feeding the pigs and the chickens, walking between miles of rows of crops

I guess examining women's working conditions is just too difficult

We'll never have a, never-really-a-collective, a group of women who

came together to work on a public mural

Too much work and still to be poets

Who are the simultaneously-the-beneficiary-of-our-cultural-heritage-

and-a-victim-of-it-poets

Was there ever a poet who had a self-sufficient loss of certainty

Flannery O'Connor raised peacocks

And Wendell Berry has raised large-scale spirals of rusted industrial

materials in incongruous natural and commercial spaces

Faulkner may have spent three days in a gallery with a coyote, a little

And Robert Frost asked a friend to shoot him at close range with a .22

caliber rifle

And someone told me Samuel Beckett lay hidden under a gallery-wide

ramp, masturbating while vocalizing into a loudspeaker his fantasies

about the visitors walking above him

Very few poets are really going to the library carrying a concealed tape

recording of loud belches

If William Carlos Williams could be a doctor and Charlie Vermont too,

If Yves Klein could be an artist, and Jackson Pollock too,

Why not a poet who was also dying of lymphoma and making a series of

life size photographs, self-portrait watercolors, medical object-sculptures

and collages made with the hair she lost during chemotherapy

Of course there was Brook Farm

And Virgil raised bees

Perhaps some poets of the past were overseers of the meticulous

chronicle of the feeding and

                    excretory cycles of her son during the first six months of his life

I guess poets tend to live more momentarily

Than life in her body as the object of her own sculpting activity would allow

You could never leave the structures made of wood, rope and concrete

blocks assembled to form

                    stocks and racks, to give a reading

Or to go to a lecture by Emerson in Concord

I don't want to be continuously scrubbing the flesh off of cow bones

with a cleaning brush but

                    my mother was right

I should never have tried to rise out of the proletariat

Unless I can convince myself as Satan argues with Eve

That we are among a proletariat of poets of all the classes

Each ill-paid and surviving on nothing

Or on as little as one needs to survive

Steadfast as any person's glottis, photographed with a laryngoscope,

speaking the following

                    words: "The power of language continues to show its trace for

a long time after silence"

                    and fixed as the stars

Tenants of a vision we rent out endlessly