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.”
