Born One-Hundred Three Years Ago Today

INITIATION

Czeslaw Milosz

Vanity and gluttony were always her sins
And I fell in love with her in the phase of life
When our scornful reason is the judge of others.

Then I went through a sudden initiation.
Not only did our skins like each other, tenderly,
And our genitals fit once and for all,
But her sleep at arm's length exerted its power
And her childhood in a city she visited dreaming.

Whatever was naive and shy in her
Or fearful in the disguise of self-assurance
Moved me, so that - we were so alike -
In an instant, not judging anymore,
I saw two sins of mine: vanity, gluttony.



SECRETARIES

Czeslaw Milosz

I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing
That is dictated to me and a few others.
Secretaries, mutually unknown, we walk the earth
Without much comprehension. Beginning a phrase in the middle
Or ending it without a comma. And how it all looks when completed
Is not up to us to inquire, we won't read it anyway.



PREPARATION

Czeslaw Milosz

Still one more year of preparation.
Tomorrow at the latest I'll start working on a great book
In which my century will appear as it really was.
The sun will rise over the righteous and the wicked.
Springs and autumns will unerringly return,
In a wet thicket a thrush will build his nest lined with clay
And foxes will learn their foxy natures.

And they will be the subject, with addenda. Thus: armies
Running across frozen plains, shouting a curse
In a many-voiced chorus; the cannon of a tank
Growing immense at the corner of  street; the ride at dusk
Into a camp with watchtowers and barbed wire.

No, it won't happen tomorrow. In five or ten years.
I still think too much about the mothers
And ask what is man born of woman.
He curls himself up and protects his head
While he is kicked with heavy boots; on fire and running
He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit.
Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy.

I haven't learned yet to speak as I should, calmly.



A FELICITOUS LIFE

Czeslaw Milosz

His old age fell on years of abundant harvest.

There were no earthquakes, droughts or floods.

It seemed as if the turning of the seasons gained in constancy,

Stars waxed strong and the sun increased its might.

Even in remote provinces no war was waged.

Generations grew up friendly to fellow men.

The rational nature of man was not a subject of derision.

It was bitter to say farewell to the earth so renewed.

He was envious and ashamed of his doubt,

Content that his lacerated memory would vanish with him.

Two days after his death a hurricane razed the coasts.

Smoke came from volcanoes inactive for a hundred years.

Lava sprawled over forests, vineyards, and towns.

And war began with a battle on the islands.

YOU WHO WRONGED

Czeslaw Milosz

You who wronged a simple man

Bursting into laughter at the crime,

And kept a pack of fools around you

To mix good and evil, to blur the line,

Though everyone bowed down before you,

Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way,

Striking gold medals in your honor,

Glad to have survived another day,

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.

You can kill one, but another is born.

The words are written down, the deed, the date.

And you’d have done better with a winter dawn,

A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.

THEODICY

Czeslaw Milosz

No, it won’t do, my sweet theologians.

Desire will not save the morality of God.

If he created beings able to choose between good and evil,

And they chose, and the world lies in iniquity,

Nevertheless, there is pain, and the undeserved torture of creatures,

Which would find its explanation only by assuming

The existence of an archetypal Paradise

And a pre-human downfall so grave

That the world of matter received its shape from diabolic power.  

ACCOUNT

Czeslaw Milosz

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,

Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,

Would have tended nevertheless towards the candle's flame.

Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,

The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.

I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,

The time when I was among their adherents

Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.

But all of them would have one subject, desire,

Of only my own - but no, not at all; alas

I was driven because I wanted to be like others.

I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.

The history of my stupidity will not be written.

For one thing is is late. And the truth is laborious.

WINDOW

Czeslaw Milosz

I looked out the window at dawn and saw a young apple tree translucent

          in brightness.

And when I looked out a dawn once again, an apple tree laden with fruit

          stood there.

Many years had probably gone by but I remember nothing of what happened

          in my sleep.

Therefore, Since We Have to Do Our Business in Spite of Things, Why Not Make It in Spite of Everything?

We hiked! Six miles at Little Bennett, a circuit we'd done clockwise once we did counter-clockwise yesterday. Not rigorous at any point, Earthgirl thought it a good hike to test her knee, both before we started and when we ended, her knee was stiff when she started, fine when finished. Today's content? Here's content from Saturday which features a Resident's cascade, here's content from yesterday which features a This Heat cascade.

Two High Egoslavian Holy Days approaching, one in twenty-eight days, one in thirty, the latter an irreplaceable permanent member MSADI5G. Expect a lot of these two in the upcoming days, not everyday necessarily, but a lot.








PYROGRAPHY

John Ashbery

Out here on Cottage Grove it matters. The galloping

Wind balks at its shadow. The carriages

Are drawn forward under a sky of fumed oak.

This is America calling:

The mirroring of state to state,   

Of voice to voice on the wires,

The force of colloquial greetings like golden

Pollen sinking on the afternoon breeze.

In service stairs the sweet corruption thrives;

The page of dusk turns like a creaking revolving stage in Warren, Ohio.

If this is the way it is let’s leave,

They agree, and soon the slow boxcar journey begins,   

Gradually accelerating until the gyrating fans of suburbs   

Enfolding the darkness of cities are remembered   

Only as a recurring tic. And midway

We meet the disappointed, returning ones, without its   

Being able to stop us in the headlong night

Toward the nothing of the coast. At Bolinas

The houses doze and seem to wonder why through the   

Pacific haze, and the dreams alternately glow and grow dull.   

Why be hanging on here? Like kites, circling,   

Slipping on a ramp of air, but always circling?

But the variable cloudiness is pouring it on,

Flooding back to you like the meaning of a joke.

The land wasn’t immediately appealing; we built it

Partly over with fake ruins, in the image of ourselves:

An arch that terminates in mid-keystone, a crumbling stone pier   

For laundresses, an open-air theater, never completed

And only partially designed. How are we to inhabit

This space from which the fourth wall is invariably missing,   

As in a stage-set or dollhouse, except by staving as we are,   

In lost profile, facing the stars, with dozens of as yet

Unrealized projects, and a strict sense

Of time running out, of evening presenting   

The tactfully folded-over bill? And we fit   

Rather too easily into it, become transparent,   

Almost ghosts. One day

The birds and animals in the pasture have absorbed   

The color, the density of the surroundings,   

The leaves are alive, and too heavy with life.

A long period of adjustment followed.

In the cities at the turn of the century they knew about it   

But were careful not to let on as the iceman and the milkman   

Disappeared down the block and the postman shouted   

His daily rounds. The children under the trees knew it   

But all the fathers returning home

On streetcars after a satisfying day at the office undid it:   

The climate was still floral and all the wallpaper   

In a million homes all over the land conspired to hide it.   

One day we thought of painted furniture, of how   

It just slightly changes everything in the room

And in the yard outside, and how, if we were going

To be able to write the history of our time, starting with today,   

It would be necessary to model all these unimportant details   

So as to be able to include them; otherwise the narrative   

Would have that flat, sandpapered look the sky gets   

Out in the middle west toward the end of summer,   

The look of wanting to back out before the argument   

Has been resolved, and at the same time to save appearances

So that tomorrow will be pure. Therefore, since we have to do our business   

In spite of things, why not make it in spite of everything?   

That way, maybe the feeble lakes and swamps

Of the back country will get plugged into the circuit   

And not just the major events but the whole incredible

Mass of everything happening simultaneously and pairing off,

Channeling itself into history, will unroll

As carefully and as casually as a conversation in the next room,   

And the purity of today will invest us like a breeze,

Only be hard, spare, ironical: something one can

Tip one’s hat to and still get some use out of.

The parade is turning into our street.

My stars, the burnished uniforms and prismatic   

Features of this instant belong here. The land

Is pulling away from the magic, glittering coastal towns

To an aforementioned rendezvous with August and December.   

The hunch is it will always be this way,   

The look, the way things first scared you   

In the night light, and later turned out to be,   

Yet still capable, all the same, of a narrow fidelity   

To what you and they wanted to become:   

No sighs like Russian music, only a vast unravelling   

Out toward the junctions and to the darkness beyond

To these bare fields, built at today’s expense.

Ghosts' Perennial Goal of Revoking the Sensation of Repose

• See bottom bullet for more, but my eyes ache after an hour of reading novels, ease but ache again after an hour of reading poetry, which is not excuse but part explanation why I fish links to post on days very few read since I'm reading online anyway, which doesn't hurt my eyes, or maybe does when I read from a book. As for the rash of thwarted bleggalgazing of late, I had a long email from L last night, the Death of Thursday Night Pints has denied me a vital spigot.
• The Disruption Machine: Every age has a theory of rising and falling, of growth and decay, of bloom and wilt: a theory of nature. Every age also has a theory about the past and the present, of what was and what is, a notion of time: a theory of history. Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God’s favor, corruption. Beginning in the eighteenth century, as the intellectual historian Dorothy Ross once pointed out, theories of history became secular; then they started something new—historicism, the idea “that all events in historical time can be explained by prior events in historical time.” Things began looking up. First, there was that, then there was this, and this is better than that. The eighteenth century embraced the idea of progress; the nineteenth century had evolution; the twentieth century had growth and then innovation. Our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is atavistic. It’s a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence.
• Another murderous milestone: Our 21st century intervention in Iraq has killed far more people much more quickly, of course. But as we gear up for yet another round of slaughter in the country we have recently demolished, it’s good to be reminded that none of this is new or unusual; it is, very simply — and quite horribly — the way the bipartisan American elite do business. Violence is their profession, their religion, their guiding light. They use violence to advance their agenda, then use more violence to deal with the inevitable horrific consequences spawned by their violence, on and on in an endless cycle.

• Guess what I fell asleep listening to and woke up with in my head. Click tab in footer for more. Expect more in coming days. MSADI5G, yes, they are in the inner circle.
• But yes, Fuck It, Fuck This, Fuck Me.
• The Obscene.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Sacasas's links.
• Reality Check.
• The cost of almost apprehending anything.
• He, for one, welcomes our invisible piano-teacher overlords.
• If Brazil ends up winning this World Cup remember that Chilean ball of the crossbar in the 120th. And I suspect that if anyone is going to beat Brazil it will be Colombia.
• See, Solar Crumpet works as long as I'm not distracted but I'm easily distracted and my eyes are old and ache after an hour. Long ago I made a rule that I can only read one novel at a time - I'm curious re: my dilemma when I finish Sawn Yawns - do I immediately go to A Bounded Thriving Wig or read something else? I put down Sawn Yawns at eye ache, picked up Hejinian (another rule: no music permitted when reading novels, music allowed when reading poetry) and found my This Heat on the iPod.

[A DREAM, STILL CLINGING LIKE LIGHT TO THE DARK, ROUNDING]

Lyn Hejinian

A dream, still clinging like light to the dark, rounding
The gap left by things which have already happened
Leaving nothing in their place, may have nothing to do
But that. Dreams are like ghosts achieving ghosts' perennial goal
Of revoking the sensation of repose. It's terrible
To think we write these things for them, to tell them
Of our life - that is, our whole life. Along comes a dream
Of a machine. Why? What is being sold there? How is the product emitted?
It must have been sparked by a noise, the way the very word "spark"
Emits a brief picture. Is it original? Inevitable?
We seem to sleep so as to draw the picture
Of events that have already happened so we can picture
them. A dream for example of a procession to an execution site.
How many strangers could circle the space while speaking of nostalgia
And of wolves in the hills? We find them
Thinking of nothing instead - there's no one to impersonate, nothing
To foresee. It's logical that prophesies would be emitted
Through the gaps left by previous things, or by the dead
Refusing conversation and contemplating beauty instead.
But isn't that the problem with beauty - that it's apt in retrospect
To seem preordained? The dawn birds are trilling
A new day - it has the psychical quality of "pastness" and they are trailing
It. The day breaks in an imperfectly continuous course
Of life. Sleep is immediate and memory nothing.

[The Cost of Almost Apprehending Anything]

The cost of almost apprehending anything
is ignoring almost everything else
and misapprehending the gibberish
that seeps in. John

Ashbery's birthday in a month, first
sentence a pedant's
prescription
for how not to read Ashbery

when plasma raindrops
the size of Ireland
thunder the sun. The world,
plagued by John Ashbery wannabes.

As In an Abandoned Railway Car

• I was asked this past week why I post so little Residents. I didn't have a good answer. There, have forty one minute songs.
• Some blog maintenance this weekend - loading is slowing up again so I'll check the blogrolls for sites that have either not updated for three or more months or have disconnected their feed. Not-updating blogs will be moved to Moribund, dead blogs removed.
• There are a number of new joints in New Here and Newest Gags First and Second. Please check them out as they float to the top of the blogrolls. As always, please send me sites you read you think I might like. As always, thanks for reading.
• So, World Cup. I love it. Forgive me.
• A dance of light and shadow.
• This bloody, beautiful World Cup.
• A Colombian on The Best World Cup Ever.
• This could be The Best World Cup Ever? 
• Well, the group stage was the best I remember and I understand your joy at three exhilarating wins if you're Colombian: if knockout plays at, or, please Baal and Diablo, exceeds the level of group I might never lose this fucking habit. 
• The Global Game (subscription required, but you should be reading Harpers anyway):  The World Cup at which I first grasped the fading of old-style nationalism was 2006, in Germany. That summer you could see a shift to a kind of carnival nationalism: people from around the world dressed up, each in their own national colors, and then watched games together on public squares with giant screens. Oliver Bierhoff, the German team's general manager, remarked with surprise that fans had become less interested in results. Above all, they were out to have fun. It was no longer a matter of national virility, or life and death... 
• I don't buy in whole the essay, but worth a read.

• Inside the new stadiums you could be anywhere: Inside Brazil’s stadiums of old—the original Maracanã, the Mineirão, Castelão, Verdão, etc.—there were no clocks, just crappy scoreboards with broken lightbulbs. Everyone knew to look at their watches or listen to the radio if they wanted to keep up with the time and the score. Indeed, many of the best known, most beloved stadiums in Latin America are minimalist structures designed to hold tens of thousands of people for two hours as they jump up and down, light fireworks, and tumble over each other. They are not be the most comfortable places to watch a soccer match (or do anything else), but they are actual places. Stands are for standing. If they weren´t, they would be called something else. The new stadiums are cleaner and more comfortable, but they are non-places. These Brazilian stadiums could be anywhere, which makes them feel as though they are nowhere in particular. Once inside, the outside is closed off and the spectacle is secured.
• Luis Suarez, former street-sweeper.
• USMNT is on the far easier side of the bracket. And it's a shame there can be, at most, only two South American team can make the semifinals, Argentina one, one Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, whichever survives that sub-bracket. So yes, Brazil v Argentina in the finals is still the chalk bet.
• My counter to my anti-Bradleyism: yes, considering that Bradley has spent the last five years of his life training to pop balls over offside traps for a true striker it's entirely possible his suckitude is a direct result of Altidore's injury and that he and Dempsey, in current roles, don't talk.
• RIP Allen Grossman. 
• On Josipovici's new novel (for those of you who do) on/about/considering the life of Joseph Cornell (for those of me who do). I ordered it last night.
• As well as Carson's pamphlets on Albertine. I'm telling you, please Baal and Diablo, I'm not taunting you, if I'm somewhere where I can read without distraction Clamors Erupt works, which is one of the themes don't you know.

TOWN ON THE WAY THROUGH GOD'S WOODS

Anne Carson

Tell me.
Have you ever seen woods so.
Deep so.
Every tree a word does you heart stop?
Once I saw a cloud over Bolivia so deep.
Mountains were cowering do you ever?
Look in the quick you see the secret.
Word inside the word?
As in an abandoned railway car.
One winter afternoon I saw.
The word for "God's Woods."

Tottering and Elastic, Middle Name of Groan

• Album reissued, I downloaded it last night.
• You know, if you think there's been too much Pere Ubu/David Thomas here this month, go back and look at June 2013 where there were multiple songs all thirty days.
• Data Storms and the tyranny of manufactured forgetting: It bears repeating: reality is now shaped by the culture’s infatuation with a narrow, depoliticizing rationality, or what Frankfurt School theorist Max Horkheimer called instrumental reason. Bruce Feiler, writing in The New York Times, argues that not only are we awash in data, but words and "unquantifiable arenas like history, literature, religion, and the arts are receding from public life, replaced by technology, statistics, science, and math. Even the most elemental form of communication, the story, is being pushed aside by the list."[19] Historical memory and public space are indeed the first casualties in this reign of ideological tyranny, which models agency only on consumerism and value only on exchange value. The cult of the measurable is enthralled by instant evaluation, and fervently believes that data hold the key to our collective fate.
• Photographs that push the boundaries of photography.
• Countries still in the World Cup seen from satellites.
• I saw the first half of the USMNT v Germany, second half I was in a motherfucking _______ committee meeting, o the things I don't write about on this blog. I don't think Jozy Altidore a world class striker, his injury is not the difference between nine points out of three games and four points out of three games but it does put Clint Dempsey out of position and changes the roles of everyone in midfield to some extent. I don't know if this explains some of Michael Bradley's shocking suckitude: he was never great, but he had never been shitty like this before. USMNT had one shot on goal in first half (Zusi's 20 yarder over the goal) and from what I've read zero shots in the second half. Klinsmann has the offense running through Bradley, which makes the one shot in a game not a coincidence.
• The Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike.
• Re: the song below the poem. Please skip to 1:16, skip the ridiculous opening.
• Hey, as soon as you hear the guitar you'll know Richard Thompson was once a member of the Pedestrians!

PEDESTRIAN

Thomas Lux

Tottering and elastic, middle name of Groan,   

ramfeezled after a hard night

at the corpse-polishing plant, slope-

shouldered, a half loaf

of bread, even his hair tired, famished,   

fingering the diminished beans

in his pocket—you meet him.

On a thousand street corners you meet him,   

emerging from the subway, emerging   

from your own chest—this sight’s shrill,   

metallic vapors pass into you.

His fear is of being broken,

of becoming too dexterous in stripping   

the last few shoelaces of meat

from a chicken’s carcass, of being moved by nothing   

short of the Fall of Rome, of being stooped   

in the cranium over some loss he’s forgotten   

the anniversary of.... You meet him,   

know his defeat, though proper

and inevitable, is not yours, although yours also   

is proper and inevitable: so many defeats   

queer and insignificant (as illustration:   

the first time you lay awake all night

waiting for dawn—and were disappointed), so many   

no-hope exhaustions hidden,

their gaze dully glazed inward.—And yet we all   

fix our binoculars on the horizon’s hazy fear-heaps   

and cruise toward them, fat sails

forward.... You meet him on the corners,   

in bus stations, on the blind avenues

leading neither in

nor out of hell, you meet him

and with him you walk.

We Are Each Our Own Culture Alive With the Virus That's Waiting to Unmake Us

• I was going to repost the Ubu post from last night that I couldn't wait until today to post and add links, but fuck that. Have I ever mentioned how much I love Pere Ubu?
• Besides, I found my Chapterhouse stash last weekend, been listening.
• Magical thinking: I still believe if I post a post that means more to me than most posts, even if I post it at nine in the evening, it meaning more to me will generate more than normal hits for a post posted at nine in the evening, as in very very few, by dint that the post means more to me than most posts, that dint radiating out into Dead Blegsylvania. The reminder is always needed.
• The central paradox of the 21st century? Ever since the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago, we have learned that from the sweat of our brow we will earn our daily bread. This deep-seated truth is now out of date.  Capitalism and technology have in large part solved the problem of supply.  We need to solve the problem of demand. The first step is to realize we live in a post scarcity economy, that austerity is not the answer.  The second stem is to recognize we need to divorce work from consumption.  Otherwise, technological progress will impoverish us rather than enrich us and that would be tragic, ironic, and absurd.
• Haunted by magical thinking.
• The broken thread of culture.
• Challenging misconceptions, with Hobsbawm.
• The mark of an agent.

• The bite.
• Food links.
• In defense of football's flaws: What if football, like a peak predator, is already perfectly adapted to its environment? Or, if not perfectly adapted, at least evolving at a rate congruent with its enormous audience’s needs? So: no. Let’s not rid the game of its vital strengths: the sense that anything is possible, the joy in getting away with an unlikely victory, the perverse joy in having been robbed (the intensity of a loser’s feelings, an intensity that, as in life, convinces you that you lost through no fault of your own, that you lost because arbitrary forces were involved). Few native speakers of this game would wish to lose the organic narrative that emerges out of its randomness, the way a good novel might gather seemingly unrelated facts and incidents into an emotional peak. If football’s “flaws” were as intolerable as American writers would have us believe, it would neither be the world’s biggest sport nor one of its biggest forms of cultural expression.
• I have a motherfucking website committee meeting scheduled precisely to make me miss the second half of today's USMNT v Germany game. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
• Ramshackle, with William Carlos Williams' poem.
• Lost Time, with Proust, Josipovici, others.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Residents, Tuxedomoon, others.
• Live Marissa Nadler set! Planet, Air, Earthgirl, and I are seeing her with Mr Alarum in July!

THE YEAR OF WHAT NOW

Brian Russell

I ask your doctor

of infectious disease if she's

read Williams   he cured

sick babies I tell her and

begin describing spring

and all   she's looking at the wall

now the floor   now your chart

now the door   never

heard of him she says

but I can't stop explaining

how important this is

I need to know your doctor

believes in the tenacity of nature

to endure   I'm past his heart

attack   his strokes   and now as if

etching the tombstone myself   I find

I can't remember the date

he died or even

the year   of what now

are we the pure products   and what

does that even mean   pure   isn't it

obvious   we are each our own culture

alive with the virus that's waiting

to unmake us

Self-Expression Is Evil

Another new promo for forthcoming new Pere Ubu album. Ubuprojex says Tour Dates to Be Announced Soon. I'm checking daily. Will travel within the time zone. Have I ever mentioned how much I love Pere Ubu? Look, I've finally added the tag MSADI5G, though I'll not track back. Lordy, the below is one of dozens of my five favorite Pere Ubu songs ever.

Look, I've Already Ruined It or It's Ruined Me

If I'd known - rather, if I'd thought to look, though I've no idea whether I could place a bet online at a European oddsmaker - I'd have put $10 on this:

The online bookmaker Betsafe had been offering odds of 175-1 that the Uruguayan, twice banned for biting, would sink his teeth into an opponent during the World Cup in Brazil. Sure enough, more than 100 gamblers decided that it was worth a punt. When Suárez seemingly did just that to Chiellini near the end of their Group D clash in Natal, it was time to celebrate.

Easy money. As is any bet that I couldn't go more than six months without daydreaming of changing this blog's appearance. I'm not going to - yet - since it's not this blog's appearance but it's content that I daydream most about changing. I dicked around and created another joint for giggles and fuck it and fuck me and probable abandonment, not even writing there - yet, he says - what I don't allow myself to write here. No, it's not on any of the blogrolls. I am the self-Suarez of bleggalgazers.








AFTER LIGHGHT

Tom Thompson

Look, I’ve already ruined it
or it’s ruined me.
The dawn I see by doesn’t need me
like I need it
and any extra letters it brings.

What we call mountains
is a deep violet strip
narrowly rising and falling over the green.
You might call them clouds
and be right

or hand me something crisp
call it money or flowers
and set it alight.

Were You Ready to Place Your Foot in the Gaps

Today is Primary Day in Maryland. Earthgirl has not asked me to vote for Board of Education so I won't vote. The above is the elementary school across the street from my front yard, photo taken last night, there is a voting booth less than a hundred yards from my front door. I look forward to my phone's incessant ringing from numbers I know are pleaders ceasing, forward to strangers stopping knocking on my door, forward to my mailbox not refilling daily with fliers I consign immediately to the recycling bin. I think I've finally, after ten years since I gave my fucking cellphone number to the fucking Kerry organization when dopelikeme canvassed for John Fucking Kerry, told everyone who had that number in the Democratic Beg Department to LOSE MY FUCKING NUMBER! and they have finally lost that fucking number. If only I could get the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra to stop calling me, IT WAS ONE FUCKING NICK CAVE CONCERT AT STRATHMORE, YOU ASSSHOLES, I DON'T KNOW WHY YOU HAVE MY NUMBER, TAKE MY NUMBER OFF YOUR FUCKING CALL LIST!

• Mr Alarum news! His bio doesn't mention that he's a friend of mine. Fucking editors.
• Post-America.
• The United States of Amnesia.
• Bernie Sanders for POTUS? Link posted mostly because I spent a half hour yesterday working with the article's author getting an antique microfilm reader to work so he could do research on his next book. 
• I was at my mother's birthday party Sunday evening, the only part of the USMNT-Portugal game I saw was from a minute before Dempsey's goal and the end. Since I only saw that small sample I can't comment on how much Michael Bradley sucked before Dempsey's goal, but I can comment on how much Michael Bradley sucked after Dempsey's goal. Michael Bradley sucks. Sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks. DeMarcus Beasley too.
• Dear Jurgen Klinsmann, shut the fuck up. You, not FIFA, left DeMarcus Beasley in when he was a dead man walking, it's no accident Ronaldo's cross came from Beasley's flank.

• I want to write - well, I did write, I want to post but won't - about my brother-in-law's wedding and my mother's birthday party. There is more that I want to post but don't than there is what I do post. Call it discretion, call it cowardice, it's somewhere between. I don't even post it in poetry, I eat most of my poems. What I mostly want to write about my brother-in-law's wedding is how people compete to be the visibly more important than others to either the bride and groom. It happens in all aspects of life of course, but events like weddings bring out the urge more obviously. What I mostly want to write about my mother's wedding has nothing to do with any of you who read this blog though I won't say more. I briefly thought about opening a new joint and then burying the joint unannounced on a blogroll, but I quickly stabbed myself in my left hand's poem with my maroon Sarasa pen and all is better now.
• And lordy, the bleggalgazing that would be there. Stabs self in right palm with maroon Sarasa pen.
• The lost wedding album.
• A life update, plus help :-p make music
• We begin in the middle.
• Desolate. Earthgirl and Planet can vouch, you can't get me to go to the zoo.
• Bjork was young once too. If her music doesn't sing to me like it once did, that's on me.
• Audial Interlude II.

WERE YOU

John Taggert

Were you ready                         ready ready                         ready for train time
                              were you                             were you
time to be fed                                tongue                       feed the train inside you
                              were you                             were you
train in                              in waves of a as in father                             amen train
                   were you                                                     were you


you were ready you were you were as you were as ready as you were
ready as you could be ready for ready for train time the violet
train you were as ready as ready for the love train "let's start a
love train" you were ready to pull the train ready as could be
to pull the train through the summer night "let's start" ready for
the end of the song "come on come on" ready for violet tongue to
tongue to feed violet train inside train in the train of pulses in
pulses inside you "come on come on" inside you in waves of a
waves of a as in father ready for the end of the father's tongue
you were ready for the father father's tongue to touch your teeth  


Were you ready                         ready ready                         ready for train time
                              were you                             were you
time to be fed                                tongue                       feed the train inside you
                              were you                             were you
train in                              in waves of a as in father                             amen train
                   were you                                                     were you


                         Were you ready to place your foot in the gaps
                         were you ready to place confidence in the gaps
                         were you ready to enter a trance in the gaps.  

Theme Song June 23 2014 0728 EDT

What Really Kills Me Is Standing in the Need of Prayer I'm Standing in the Need of Jokes That Come Back

• Found my Go-Between stash yesterday while looking for something else.
• Here, some links fished Sunday morning before Act Three of My Brother-in-Law's wedding.
• Acts One and Two were fine, highlighted in Act Two by an old man who looked like Gauron who posted himself beside the open bar and didn't move the rest of the night. 
• Yes, 30% of the motivation for this post was that gag. I knew it the instant I saw him.
• I didn't realize Rob had reopened the shop.
• The cybernetics of Occupy: an anarchist perspective.
• More defenders have meant more goals: All defenders make mistakes. On Thursday, Gary Cahill’s poor positioning and misjudgment of the flight of the ball left Luis Suarez with a free run at goal to score the 86th minute goal that chucked England out of the tournament. But Cahill will always find forgiveness from English fans because not only is he a talented defender, but he has the short back and sides, steely-eyed seriousness and complete lack of adventure that assures the English that their goal is being defended by a good, honest, straightforward sort of chap. When Luiz made mistakes for Chelsea, these were invariably taken as symptoms of profound personal failure as a center half. Not only had he been caught out of position, or risked dribbling past an opponent, but he had done so with a trademark mop of long curly hair and an unmistakable sense of personal style.
• Fine metaphors abound: the above applies to more than half of English language lit-bloggers when judging English language lit-bloggers too. Though I'm bald. 
• Adding, this blog may indeed be shitty, though the above bullet is true. 
• The ninety-minute anxiety dream: The positive lesson to be learned from the negative dialectic of England’s failure can be summarized in two words: Costa Rica. Los Ticos have shown tactically how soccer should be played. They maintain a high defensive line, they are incredibly well-organized by their passionate and very shrewd coach, Jorge Luis Pinto, they are physically fit, young, and strong, they relentlessly close down the opposition in midfield, they have great passing accuracy and are fast on the break into attack. Costa Rica didn’t just win against Italy, they completely dominated the Italians in every part of the game.
• Catenaccio is dead! Or at least resting. Hardly any buses have been parked – most matches, with a few exceptions, have been free-flowing. Among the explanations so far: sides are trying to emulate Spain’s one-time-dominant tiki-taka; the heat is causing more gaffes; formations are more fluid; the international talent gap is closing; and the spate of early strikes has forced sides to attack. The goals per game stats are the best since 1958 – which was also the last time England folded in the group stage.
• England out? What did you expect?
• Secrets of the keeper.

• Lit-links.
• Full metal Zizek.
• Serendipitously if inadvertently, the same author mentioned in the above is mentioned here. I have access to a university library's stacks and will check out said author, though I am sure to fail the scifi test again.
• Meanwhile, sssh, 2013's failed Year of Reading Calmer Stupor is resurrected and 2014's Year of Reading Car Elm Sprout is proceeding calmer, without stupor.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Adrienne Rich poem.
• Another poem that's not Auden's on Brueghel's Icarus.
• I had picked up John Taggart's In Music three or four years ago, the book got buried on my desk, it needed to be returned to the consortium school I had borrowed it from and I unforgivably forgot about it. Good thing I still have access to a university's consortium loan services.

ALL THE STEPS

John Taggert

     1

Those who hear the train they had better worry worry

those who hear they had better worry worry.
 

     2

No disgrace to worry to have the worried life blues

might do some good to be worried in the hour of our need.
 

     3

Run run run away going to run run run away

there are those who think they’re going to run away.
 

     4

To hear and to be facing and to be facing what is heard

to hear and to be face to face with what is heard.
 

     5

Run run run away they’re going to run run run away

there are those who think they’re going to run away from the train.
 

     6

Fort built to protect the community from desert raiders

community thought to protect itself from raiders.
 

     7

Those who hear the train they had better worry worry

better worry worry about a gift of tears.
 

     8

Those who are gathered in the fort had better learn

they had better learn how to cure their wounds.
  

     9

The train with its poison and its tongue

the lurking train with its poison and its tongue.
 

     10

Those who are gathered better learn to be insensitive

learn how to put on a show of being insensitive.
 

     11

Danger of its poison and of its tongue

danger of its poison and of its tongue against our teeth.
 

     12

Had better break the habit the habit of prayer

better let the jokes come back to us when we’re at prayer.
 

     13

What really kills me is standing in the need of prayer

standing in a gathering in the need of prayer.
 

     14

Don’t if we don’t if we don’t break the habit

we will be made to climb all the steps of the ladder.

     15

Brood over someone else’s dream: three-story red tower

beneath the tower the train is always departing.
 

     16

Danger of its tongue for those gathered like a group

gathered like a group of all virgins with their downcast eyes.
 

     17

There is this problem with cutting off the prayer hand

there is this problem with the other hand.
 

     18

How insensitive is how those who hear better be

how insensitive how unmoved and cold they had better be.
 

     19

You can call him you can call him up and ask him

if we had only asked for “Sleep Walk by Santo & Johnny.
 

     20

Red tower green sky three-story tower against green sky

beneath the tower the train is always departing.
 

     21

Don’t break it be made to climb all the steps

we don’t break it we’ll be made to climb all the steps.
 

     22

Ant on the floor the small ant on the kitchen floor

the small ant anticipates by sound or shadow.
 

     23

Light turns out in the kitchen when somebody pulls on the string

those gathered not able to anticipate the danger.
 

     24

If we had only stayed in the school of the prophets

in the school of the prophets who catch thoughts from words.

     25

Ant on the floor the small ant on the kitchen floor

those gathered not able to anticipate the danger.
 

     26

Those who are gathered are fondled and taken by the hand

taken by the hand and made to climb all the steps.
 

     27

Perfectly built fort bound to make the community unhappy

bound to make those in the community unhappy.
 

     28

What really kills me is standing in the need of prayer

I’m standing in the need of jokes that come back.
 

     29

Standing in the need of prayer in a perfectly built fort

bound to make you unhappy bound to make me unhappy.

     30

Not broken the habit of prayer not been broken

those who are gathered better learn how to cure their wounds.

Nothingness Unseamed Itself for Me Too

Bernie Kopell is 81 today. I loved Get Smart, especially in black and white. I yodel always, TV toggled to color when I was a kid, a toggle that chimes me. Here is Siegfried's traditional Egoslavian High Holy Day decree, copied & pasted from last year's.

Siegfried has been this shitty blog's and my digital avatar since Blog Day One. Bernie Koppel, Siegfried on Get Smart (and Ann Marie's neighbor Jerry Bauman in That Girl and, unfortunately if more famously, Doc on Love Boat), was born 80 years ago today, his birthday noted every year here.

This is true: I have my iPod set to shuffle the 2000+ songs, driving home Thursday night (this is serendipitous but not as serendipitous as if it happened last night) the Second Egoslavian Bleggalgazing Anthem (lyrics) came on and I realized what a colossal fuck-up by me for not posting it on The Annual Egoslavian Bleggalgazegasm three weeks ago, so shazam! how's this for futile weekend blegging and brazen blogwhoring and attention sluttery in Dead Blegsylvania?

• My brother-in-law is getting married today. We have to go to the service this morning, then a dinner tonight, and then a brunch tomorrow morning. This is proof I love my wife. Further proof: I will not write about it beyond this.
• Links below from friends, blog friends, blog comrades, mostly. Sorry friends, if patterns hold this will be the deadest weekend yet this Summer in Blegsylvania.
• The Left/Right Spectrum is bogus.
• BroadSnark's things you might have missed.
• But you must write. A bleggalgaze of sort.
• Binging on Anne Carson.
• Dang! 15th again.
• Becoming language here and now.
• The pattern of tides.
• A lifetime of watching England lose.
• Here's the Feldman yesterday's mention of Rothko made inevitable here, with bonus Feldman below a new to me Szymborska poem.
• Since My Sillyass Deserted Island Game seems only to include bands and acts the could be sloppily classified as rock Morton Feldman isn't included in the game, though Morton Feldman is going to the island with me. Click the tag in footer for LOTS more.

A POEM

Wislawa Szymborksa
Translated by Clare Cavanaugh

Nothingness unseamed itself for me too.
It turned itself wrong side out.
How on earth did I end up here—
head to toe among the planets,
without a clue how I used not to be.

O you, encountered here and loved here,
I can only guess, my arm on yours,
how much vacancy on that side went to make us,
how much silence there for one lone cricket here,
how much nonmeadow for a single sprig of sorrel,
and sun after darknesses in a drop of dew
as repayment—for what boundless droughts?

Starry willy-nilly! Local in reverse!
Stretched out in curvatures, weights, roughnesses, and motions!
Time out from infinity for endless sky!
Relief from nonspace in a shivering birch tree’s shape!

Now or never wind will stir a cloud,
since wind is exactly what won’t blow there.
And a beetle hits the trail in a witness’s dark suit,
testifying to the long wait for a short life.

And it so happened that I’m here with you.
And I really see nothing
usual in that.

The Dog in Humble Inquiry Along the Ground, the Child Who Credits Dreams and Fears the Dark, Know More and Less Than You

That's new Yo La Tengo, serendipitously discovered yesterday as I planned some cascades by bands and artists in the Inner Most Circle of Bands and Artists That Rotate In and Out of the Two Non-Permanent Spots in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game now that I'm fixated on My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, what with the recent coup. Here are five of them.

Two unrelated to My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game updates for those who follow along despite updates to My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game:

Earthgirl's leg is much improved. It is far less colorful, the bruise around her ankle is gone, and the sensation of a thousand bees stinging is down to a couple of hundred. She wouldn't have been hike-worthy this weekend, but we're booked socially this weekend - Saturday for her family, Sunday for mine.

Napoleon only has three months and twenty-two days in quarantine left! Still no sign of rabies. His hair that was shaved to fix the bite wound has grown back. He complains rarely. He's lovely.

• The debate over the local helmetball team's nickname has exploded in DC over a recent court ruling. Iraq falling apart, Eric Cantor losing his power, the midterm elections and their impact on POTUS 16, the biggest political storm in DC is the helmetball team's nickname. Same game, different topping is all, the hate, people are gleeful. Fine metaphors, as always, abound.
• Something you should know about DC: baseball's Nats, basketball's Bullets Wizards, ice soccer's Caps could all go undefeated through a season and the playoffs and win championships and the local Helmetball team, off a 3-13 season, would still be the only team in DC. This debate, it can't be avoided around here. 
• Let me give you an unassailable truth about the Washington helmetball team's fight to retain the current nickname: no matter whether the name is changed or not, this will never be over, and the team will be referred to as The Redskins forever in and around DC even if the name is changed.
• Me, I'm all about despising Tiny Daimon Snyder, fucking fuck. If the nickname debate is causing him grief, then yay. He's Tiny Daimon Snyder, fucking fuck.

• Matters of character.
• Derrida and Zizek, for those of you who do.
• On football and national identity.
• An autopsy for Spain and Tika Taka. It's interesting to me the two biggest bores in international football, Spain (on purpose) and England (because they're England) have both crashed out two games into group.
• Been a bad couple of months for Stevie England, yes?
• The terrible embarrassment of the goalie on the Crown Prince's birthday.
• Rockville weighs in on NoBeSoRo.
• David Markson, for those of you who do.
• Beckett (Molloy in particular), for those of you who do.
• Rothko and Taggert, for those of you who do.
• Not today, but yes, the word Rothko sets off a Morton Feldman cascade in my head, soon here.
• Tuxedomoon, for those of you who do.

DOGS ARE SHAKESPEAREAN, CHILDREN ARE STRANGERS

Delmore Schwartz

Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers.

Let Freud and Wordsworth discuss the child,

Angels and Platonists shall judge the dog,

The running dog, who paused, distending nostrils,

Then barked and wailed; the boy who pinched his sister,   

The little girl who sang the song from Twelfth Night,   

As if she understood the wind and rain,

The dog who moaned, hearing the violins in concert.   

—O I am sad when I see dogs or children!

For they are strangers, they are Shakespearean.

Tell us, Freud, can it be that lovely children   

Have merely ugly dreams of natural functions?   

And you, too, Wordsworth, are children truly   

Clouded with glory, learned in dark Nature?   

The dog in humble inquiry along the ground,   

The child who credits dreams and fears the dark,   

Know more and less than you: they know full well   

Nor dream nor childhood answer questions well:   

You too are strangers, children are Shakespearean.

Regard the child, regard the animal,   

Welcome strangers, but study daily things,   

Knowing that heaven and hell surround us,   

But this, this which we say before we’re sorry,   

This which we live behind our unseen faces,   

Is neither dream, nor childhood, neither   

Myth, nor landscape, final, nor finished,   

For we are incomplete and know no future,   

And we are howling or dancing out our souls   

In beating syllables before the curtain:   

We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.

A Troubled Cure for a Troubled Mind

Nick Drake was born 66 years ago today. I sometimes forget how much I dig. Fuck the advertising douches who use his songs to sell product to hipsters, it's not Nick Drake's fault.

Also too, Happy Birthday SeatSix!

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A Moment of Intrusion

Another place lamely explains this post better than this post lamely explains itself. Hiatus bluff of a different sort than the normal hiatus bluff - this is not a bleggalgaze - but probably just as empty.








56 (from 100 NOTES ON VIOLENCE)

Julie Carr

I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.
          (Dostoevsky)
Actually, he, Alexander, was innocent. Wasn't he? (Acker)
We know he was made, like all of us, from a moment of sexual intention.
I want a horse, but I am a horse.
Or intrusion. A moment of intrusion.
I am a sick man. A spiteful man.
"Where have you been, sister?" "Killing swine." (Macbeth)

A man and his family are driving to a vacation spot. Once a write, now an insurance broker with two kids in the back, wife beside him, map open on her lap. It's hot. They stop at a gas station so the kids can pee, the wife can buy some gum. Gas up. In the gas station bathroom the man catches another man's face in the mirror. For a moment his heart pounds. Something like desire. But this passes. The man is someone he knew in college. Not possible! It is! And the grin, almost embrace. How are you? What are you doing? Etc. The man walks his friend to the car, introduces him to his wife and kids. The kids take little notice. The wife smiles, but seems impatient. It is decided the man will follow along in his car, will join the family for dinner when they arrive at their destination. During the three-hour's drive, the first man tells his wife all about this friend: antics, parties. Why, she thinks, have I never heard of this man before? As evening falls, they arrive at the hotel - old and worn-down, concrete and carpet - not far from the North Carolina coastline. Dump their bags in the room, kids jump beds, they head down to the restaurant where the friend is waiting for them. He smiles and rises when they ---