What I Am Thinking While Being Berated By a Grad Student Outraged There Is a Block on His Record for Willfully Not Returning a Recalled Book, and All Analogous Situations

Kill me. Sharpen
plastic Diet
Pepsi bottle
caps, octopus
sucker to hands
and fingers, slap
me - face, arms, throat -
cumulative
death by trickles,
minutes, hours,
semesters, years.

How We Picnicked in Pine Forests, in Coves with the Water Always Seeping Up, and Left Our Trash, Sperm, and Excrement Everywhere, Smeared on the Landscape, to Make of Us What We Could

• I am the bullets: On Gaza.
• And then the Alien turned towards Zanna: On Gaza.
• Am I going to die tonight, Daddy?
• Dehumanization? Here's today's monologue: of course dehumanization is the project, but the project isn't the dehumanization of the other. That shit's already been done. 
• And it's working. The hate seething through me now scares the fuck out of me. My lizard brain is far too easily stimulated. 
• Ladies and Gentleman, the wit and wisdom of Fuckface Hiatt, who I daydream of braining with a shovel over and over and over and...
• The rule of lizards.
• The grey light of morning: As real as the political subtext was, it’s a mistake to see the myth of progress purely as a matter of propaganda. During the heyday of industrialism, that myth was devoutly believed by a great many people, at all points along the social spectrum, many of whom saw it as the best chance they had for positive change. Faith in progress was a social fact of vast importance, one that shaped the lives of individuals, communities, and nations. The hope of upward mobility that inspired the poor to tolerate the often grueling conditions of their lives, the dream of better living through technology that kept the middle classes laboring at the treadmill, the visions of human destiny that channeled creative minds into the service of  existing institutions—these were real and powerful forces in their day, and drew on high hopes and noble ideals as well as less exalted motives.
• America.
• the wearing-out of language.
• Motherfucking gunfucks fuck with Sugarloaf.
• Food links.
• Vollmann in his studio.
• Drummage.
• Bosh reminded me of Leatherface last night.

STREET MUSICIANS

John Ashbery

One died, and the soul was wrenched out   

Of the other in life, who, walking the streets   

Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on   

The same corners, volumetrics, shadows   

Under trees. Farther than anyone was ever   

Called, through increasingly suburban airs   

And ways, with autumn falling over everything:   

The plush leaves the chattels in barrels   

Of an obscure family being evicted

Into the way it was, and is. The other beached   

Glimpses of what the other was up to:

Revelations at last. So they grew to hate and forget each other.

So I cradle this average violin that knows   

Only forgotten showtunes, but argues

The possibility of free declamation anchored

To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself   

In November, with the spaces among the days   

More literal, the meat more visible on the bone.   

Our question of a place of origin hangs

Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests,

In coves with the water always seeping up, and left   

Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared   

On the landscape, to make of us what we could.

surpassing things we've known before passing on its effect

       There had been other troubles, with a chief called Big Head wounded while on a friendly visit to Fort Kearny. The Cheyenne felt especial put upon, for by their lights they had always been amiable to white men. Even after all these bad things, they sent a delegation to see the Government Indian agent and apologized. They also returned a woman they had captured. but you see the complication was this: Indians wasn't ever organized. Them that come in to apologize wasn't the same as what killed the whites. And them that the soldiers usually punished was never the ones who had committed the outrages. The white people on who the Indians took revenge had no connection with the soldiers.
     It was pretty early on that I come to realize that most serious situations in life, or my life anyway, were like that time I rubbed out the Crow: he spared me because I was white, and I killed him because I was Cheyenne. There wasn't nothing else either of us could have done, and it would have been ridiculous except it was mortal.

Thomas Berger, Little Big Man

Yesterday two blogfriends discussed Berger on Twooter, I didn't stop to think why, adding to the conversation that when I read Little Big Man when I was nineteen it was KABOOM! Today I discovered why he might have been being discussed: he died this past July 13th.

It has been years since I read Berger. I liked the Reinhart Tetrology, especially when read against Updike's Rabbit Tetrology for comparison and contrast in style, tone, themes, I liked his second historical novel, Arthur Rex, I liked some of his genre-examining novels like Who Is Teddy Villanova and Nowhere, but all failed when measured against Little Big Man. I didn't know it when I read it, but it engaged many of the concerns I encountered in Theory in grad school, especially but not limited to its examination of passing: see the excerpt above. I am about to find out if it's KABOOM! still.

• If you want one and I like you I can send you a copy.
• A friend of mine recommended Silver Apples to me. I vaguely remember the name, it sounds familiar (I think it was on the soundtrack for the Needwood Summer ePod 1979 - ask Elric), but I'd never have been able to put the sound to the name.
• Have mercy, do you have a heart?
• Osama bin Laden in the Wall Street Journal.
• The Terror War's disastrous course.
• I heard from Arthur Silber yesterday, he can really use your help, please consider throwing him the coins in your pocket.
• The true cost of a burger.
• I daydream I am.
• Thirty "essential" Emo songs? Jawbox was emo?

[constant change figures]

Lyn Hejinian

constant change figures

the time we sense

passing on its effect

surpassing things we've known before

since memory

of many things is called

experience

but what of what

we call nature's picture

surpassing things we call

since memory

we call nature's picture

surpassing things we've known before

constant change figures

experience

passing on its effect

but what of what

constant change figures

since memory

of many things is called

the time we sense

called nature's picture

but what of what

in the time we sense

surpassing things we've known before

passing on its effect

is experience

[I Daydream I Am]

I daydream I am
who I didn't when I could.

Backpacker,
digital mute,

knows different thistles
medicinal properties,

tells time
by fists and sun.

Finishes novels.
Dinners with family.

Unpublished
self-published

poet, not too
high a credit

score
not me.

and every finger is a toe

That's my left big toe - it looks worse than it feels unless I kick a wall with it. Was crossing a creek on Saturday's hike, slipped on a wet rock, jammed the toe against a second. I'd rather take off my shoe and kick a wall with that toe than clusterfuck today. Friday my swag package for donating to WFMU last Winter arrived, I asked for nothing but music, thirteen discs in all. Each is prepared by one of the DJs just to be Marathon swag (and many DJ discs - from both current and former DJs - are still available, it's fun to pick). I'll post a song from each, most below the fold, and in no particular order other than how they were shuffled when I took them out of the mailing package. This is from Jeffrey Davidson's CD, Small Wonder:

• Alright, one clusterfuck link. Kicks wall with shoeless toe.
• Everyone has the issue that jabs him or her to blind rage at his or her powerlessness before the motherfuckers of the world, mine is....
• Killing us while we're sleeping. Kicks wall with shoeless toe.
• Repetition and death in the colony. Kicks wall with shoeless toe.
• Copyrighting cartography with fictional places.
• Sweet Dreams Maisy versus Global Warning's Terrifying New Math.
• Chel$ki and Special One to reunite with Drogba. Lordy, I hope Chel$ki smoke Premiership, clinch by March. Yes, me.
• Malevich.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• New Lisa Robertson book of poetry this September!
• Throwaway almost genius bullshit!
• Tuxedomoon.
• The song below the poem is from Dan Bodah's Head Cleaner for Supportive Listeners, this song immediately below from Irwin's 2014 disc.

[as freedom is a breakfastfood]

E.E. Cummings

as freedom is a breakfastfood

or truth can live with right and wrong

or molehills are from mountains made

—long enough and just so long

will being pay the rent of seem

and genius please the talentgang

and water most encourage flame

as hatracks into peachtrees grow

or hopes dance best on bald men’s hair

and every finger is a toe

and any courage is a fear

—long enough and just so long

will the impure think all things pure

and hornets wail by children stung

or as the seeing are the blind

and robins never welcome spring

nor flatfolk prove their world is round

nor dingsters die at break of dong

and common’s rare and millstones float

—long enough and just so long

tomorrow will not be too late

worms are the words but joy’s the voice

down shall go which and up come who

breasts will be breasts thighs will be thighs

deeds cannot dream what dreams can do

—time is a tree(this life one leaf)

but love is the sky and i am for you

just so long and long enough

• This from Evan Funk Davies' Starting with the 70s vol.3:

• Bryce, whose Friday show is my favorite three hours of radio each week (have I mentioned this?) hasn't done a disc since 2009, I picked it up. It is of course sleeveless and of course the tracks can't be identified by the CD reader, so I've gone back to his 2009 playlists and picked something I especially like.

• More from Bodah, whose Airborne Event Monday evening is what my Tuesday morning sounds like, this from his 2011 The Hissing of Chrome Snakes disc:

 



 

• From Faye's What's the Point of Being Good? disc:

  



 

• From Mary Wing's The Ladies of the Year disc

 

• From Thomas Storck's Love Is a Launderette, taken from UK cassettes 1979 - 1985. It's not the Dogma Cats' song he picked, but it's the one I found and what suffices for my religion requires I post it:

 

• From Stan's Destination Saturn:

• From Fabio's Enlightenment Through Failure:

 

• From Bethany Ryker's Locomotion:

• From Dave Mandl's Hippies:

• Oh, new Wire Tapper came in mail same day, because I love you, even those of you who didn't click below the fold, but especially for the three of you who did, thanks. Wait, I couldn't find anything on youtube, these are all too new. Have an older Hiorthey:

Ink-Black, but Moving Independently Across the Black and White Parquet of Print, the Ant Cancels the Author Out

High Holy Day in Egoslavia. Diana Rigg, first, still best crush ever, is 76 today. The Avengers, the Honor Blackman/Katherine Gale years in b/w, the Diana Rigg/Emma Peel years, but especially the first Emma year, in b/w, first, best crush ever. Two years ago I was able to post some episodes, last year some motherfuckers claimed rights and blocked them. Last year I was able to post the black & white opening theme song, this year some motherfuckers claimed rights and blocked that, here, have the vastly inferior color opening to the second Emma Peel season (which, fine metaphors abounding, was vastly inferior - though still better than almost everything else then, since, forever - to the first season in black and white):







That doesn't give me the toe-curling waves of nostalgic pleasure like the black & white opening still does. I haven't mentioned this here in a while: I remember seeing the Flintstones in color, the first time I'd see a color TV, I was five? six? I don't remember whose house, a relative's presumably, I know it was in western Pennsylvania, but I am convinced that seminal event, followed by a decade of TV repeats after school, home when sick or faking sick, color then B/W then B/W then color then less and less B/W as the old shows fell out of syndication, and especially the shows in syndication like Avengers and Get Smart and Bewitched whose first years were in B/W then toggled to color, influence, for good and bad, how I apprehend and interpret the world still.

Yes, I post a version of that paragraph every year on July 20. Here's the only black & white scene I can find:







Hey, then there's this email:

Hello,
Congratulations!
Your Google Apps domain name, blckdgrd.com, was successfully renewed with enom for one year. You can now continue using Google Apps through July 18, 2015 and your account will soon be charged for the purchase.
Please do not reply to this email; replies are not monitored.

Sincerely, The Google Apps Team

I'll believe it if this shitty blog is still here the morning of the 26th.

• Marmoud Darwish: Under Siege.
• Quotable: On Resistance.
• The bitter fruits of bellicose policy.
• Money as class dictatorship.
• Thomas Frank finally has his obamapostasy. Well, not really, but he tries.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Knausgaard, for those of you who do: on critical hype and book sales. For the record, I gave Book One a hundred pages and it didn't work for me. I'll take 9/10ths blame and reserve 1/10th for Knausgaard: the piece linked to does reveal that James Wood likes Knausgaard, so there's a chance it's not me.
• Thought Experiment: Mary in the Black and White Room.
• Oh, yesterday's hike? Not nearly as scenic as the guidebook suggested, I enjoyed myself for the workout, the other three? Not so much.
• All praise to Seattle Sounders.
• Summer hiatus: posted not only because it's a bleggalgaze but because of the photo: last night, on way home from my parents, we stopped at the Food Lion in Walnut Hill to buy half-and-half for the coffee I'm currently drinking, said Food Lion once and originally a Grand Union. People can vouch for the stop, Landru (yes, I put his name in a sentence next to a Kate Bush song) can vouch in was a Grand Union.

FABLE OF THE ANT AND THE WORD

Mary Barnard

Ink-black, but moving independently   

across the black and white parquet of print,   

the ant cancels the author out. The page,   

translated to itself, bears hair-like legs   

disturbing the fine hairs of its fiber.

These are the feet of summer, pillaging meaning,   

destroying Alexandria. Sunlight is silence   

laying waste all languages, until, thinly,   

the fictional dialogue begins again:   

the page goes on telling another story.

Which Only Quiet Walking Ever Instructs

Six-miler around Catoctin yesterday with Earthgirl. From Chimney Rocks, the rock outcrop and view about two-thirds through, you can see Sugarloaf twenty-five miles to the southeast. Today is Corbin Cabin in Shenandoah with Planet and Air too. Also, Happy Birthday to my father (who reads this blog daily to monitor news of his grand-daughter and daughter-in-law) who got us the hell out of Ghost Town, Pennsylvania in 1964 for which I don't thank him enough. He's BBQing salmon tonight for us.

Saturday intermittent tradition is to post songs heard on Bryce's Friday show. Bryce was off today, fill-in host was Ira the K. Below the poem is Ira the K's band's latest single, first, the Morton Feldman piece Ira the K played yesterday:








RIVERS AND MOUNTAINS

John Ashbery

On the secret map the assassins   

Cloistered, the Moon River was marked   

Near the eighteen peaks and the city

Of humiliation and defeat—wan ending   

Of the trail among dry, papery leaves   

Gray-brown quills like thoughts

In the melodious but vast mass of today’s   

Writing through fields and swamps

Marked, on the map, with little bunches of weeds.   

Certainly squirrels lived in the woods   

But devastation and dull sleep still   

Hung over the land, quelled

The rioters turned out of sleep in the peace of prisons   

Singing on marble factory walls   

Deaf consolation of minor tunes that pack   

The air with heavy invisible rods   

Pent in some sand valley from

Which only quiet walking ever instructs.   

The bird flew over and

Sat—there was nothing else to do.

Do not mistake its silence for pride or strength

Or the waterfall for a harbor

Full of light boats that is there

Performing for thousands of people   

In clothes some with places to go   

Or games. Sometimes over the pillar   

Of square stones its impact

Makes a light print.

So going around cities

To get to other places you found   

It all on paper but the land

Was made of paper processed   

To look like ferns, mud or other   

Whose sea unrolled its magic   

Distances and then rolled them up   

Its secret was only a pocket

After all but some corners are darker

Than these moonless nights spent as on a raft

In the seclusion of a melody heard   

As though through trees

And you can never ignite their touch   

Long but there were homes

Flung far out near the asperities   

Of a sharp, rocky pinnacle

And other collective places

Shadows of vineyards whose wine   

Tasted of the forest floor

Fisheries and oyster beds

Tides under the pole

Seminaries of instruction, public   

Places for electric light

And the major tax assessment area   

Wrinkled on the plan

Of election to public office

Sixty-two years old bath and breakfast   

The formal traffic, shadows

To make it not worth joining

After the ox had pulled away the cart.

Your plan was to separate the enemy into two groups   

With the razor-edged mountains between.

It worked well on paper

But their camp had grown

To be the mountains and the map   

Carefully peeled away and not torn   

Was the light, a tender but tough bark

On everything. Fortunately the war was solved   

In another way by isolating the two sections   

Of the enemy’s navy so that the mainland   

Warded away the big floating ships.   

Light bounced off the ends   

Of the small gray waves to tell   

Them in the observatory   

About the great drama that was being won

To turn off the machinery

And quietly move among the rustic landscape   

Scooping snow off the mountains rinsing

The coarser ones that love had   

Slowly risen in the night to overflow   

Wetting pillow and petal   

Determined to place the letter

On the unassassinated president’s desk

So that a stamp could reproduce all this

In detail, down to the last autumn leaf

And the affliction of June ride

Slowly out into the sun-blackened landscape.

the flower-visiting species

We are going to the woods today, we are going to the woods tomorrow (w/Planet and Air!), we are going to the woods on Sunday. Something will be here or nothing will be here Saturday morning, Sunday is a High Egoslavian Holy Day so that ritual will be observed.

Quick:

• Another stunning sunset: On Gaza. 
• They Do Not Exist.
• Israel and our complicity. 
• The slavishness of American politicians.
• Enjoy the hypocrisy of nation states!
• The hypocrisy of nation state media.
• France bans pro-Palestine rallies.
• Under the Influence of Melee Treble Seven.

remembering; and with the aid of; ventilation; and production; the poem

Christian Hawkey

must balance; this risk; a tablet; peak plasma; the first alphabet;
with the clinical need; finger-sized; it makes sense; the fingers;
were the first; to make sense; this risk; 31 letters; the flower-visiting            species;
as opposed to; dung-feeding; the terminal phase; and the;
distribution phase; never; in my life; the relationship; logarithmic;
propriate or; propion; to make sense; this risk; and the;
as opposed to; had i imagined; that’s business; he was as soft as;
bill nodded; his neck trembling; a tablet; peak plasma; 31 letters;
throwing my body; the flower-visiting species; with the clinical need;
in front of; and with the aid of; that’s business; the distribution phase;
and the; on-coming; volunteers; reflected; in the moment of; the                   fingers
the first alphabet; peak plasma; bill nodded; pooled analyses; in                     my life;
this risk; the fingers; reappropriated; his neck trembling; numb

It Was a World. What a World! What a World? What a Big World but a World to Be Drowned In. It's Just a Joke Man.

True, but not the world. New album out this September, old song here right now.

Here Is the Man Night-Walking Who Derives Tomorrow's Manifestos from This Midnight Meeting

So today's the day this blog's domain name is supposed to automatically renew. Blooger has been sending me email every week for the past month warning me to renew or else and sending me email every week for the past month telling me all is fine, my automatic renewal is good as long as billing information is up to date. We're talking ten dollars after all for the exclusive domain name ownership of this shitty blog on a free blogging platform, ten dollars on vanity. My billing information DID change since last year's debacle and rescue: Earthgirl lost the credit card, we put a block on it immediately, were issued new cards. I logged into Blooger's weirdass and creepy Blogger admin site and made the change a month ago. I'm told I'm good by one email. Another email tells me I'm not. Maybe I'll get a confirm later today. Maybe this blog will disappear in a week. It's a win-win.

• Yes, I do post this particular Gubaidulina all the time.
• Silence for Gaza.
• America's war crimes in Gaza.
• Israel's war crimes in Gaza.
• A slowly unfolding genocide.
• I haven't wasted breath saying Motherfucking Obama because duh but what the fuck, Motherfucking Obama.
• The stupidest propaganda since the last until the next.
• In praise of weariness: So why would Americans not be weary? The survey results that worry Kagan and Rice – that show Americans growing wary of overcommitment abroad – are actually a sign of vernacular wisdom. They suggest a dawning public recognition that the problems of boarded-up storefronts and evacuated cities present more urgent policy concerns than the remaking of regions abroad that resist remaking. Interventionists will need to evade or overcome this wisdom if they intend to embark on further misadventures overseas. Let us give weariness its due, as a necessary counterweight to the centrifugal force of an activist foreign policy, ever on the prowl for investments to explore and wrongs to set right. Maybe weariness can bring us home before dark.
• The real world plainly bores us.
• The weaponized naked girl. The best thing you'll read today.
• Bossa Nova: on the World Cup and nationalism and stuff.
• The future of Rocketville? I expect it means our favorite vegetarian Chinese restaurant in a dumpy little strip will disappear as well as our favorite Peruvian restaurant in a dumpy little strip too.
• A reference of female-fronted punk bands!
• Shuffling tropes.
• The serenity and vitality of Proust. I can only read Proust when I'm calm and not angry. I'm rarely calm and not angry, so slow going, but when Proust works it's wonderful.
• I was not calm and was angry last night, instead of reading Proust I listened to Gubaidulina and read Muriel Rukeyser.

METAPHOR TO ACTION

Muriel Rukeyser

Whether it is a speaker, taut on a platform,
who battles a crowd with the hammers of his words,
whether it is the crash of lips on lips
after absence and wanting : we must close
the circuits of ideas, now generate,
that leap in the body's action or the mind's repose.

Over us is a striking on the walls of the sky,
here are the dynamos, steel-black, harboring flame,
here is the man night-walking who derives
tomorrow's manifestos from this midnight's meeting ;
here we require the proof in solidarity,
iron on iron, body on body, and the large single beating.

And behind us in time are the men who second us
as we continue. And near us is our love :
no forced contempt, no refusal in dogma, the close
of the circuit in a fierce dazzle of purity.
And over us is night a field of pansies unfolding,
charging with heat its softness in a symbol
to weld and prepare for action our minds' intensity.

Here Come the Bald Arbiters with Their Eyes on Chains

At three friends' encouragement I have been watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from beginning to end. I know the original series by heart; when I was managing Crown Books 826 and hired Hamster for a second key, we'd look through a TV Guide and compete to guess the episode by the episode's title (we also had a John McLaughlin head taped to a black file cabinet by the swinging door into the cash register and manager's office area, but that's another story). I know Star Trek: The Next Generation by heart from Season Three to finale: Seasons One and Two SUCK! SUCK! SUCK! and Maria Muldour as Doctor Polanski can send her camel to bed, so much do the first two seasons suck. I remember watching Star Trek: Voyager but nothing much about it other than Seven, second-in-command Chipotle, and Captain Janeway, now a Russian prisoner in some show, Chartreuse Is the New Vermillion, that Earthgirl and Planet watch.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - I never got. I never stopped to think why beyond what episodes I saw didn't make me want to care. My friends insist DS9 is vastly superior to Voyager (I have friends with whom I've discussed this who insist those who think DS9 vastly superior to Voyager are fucking nuts). The friends' book and music recommendations to me have been uniformly solid (even if a particular book or musician don't sing to me - I was the poorer receptacle, I can read or hear the merits even if I don't receive right), so I downloaded Netflix and started the series.

I'm in Season Five now: I don't dislike the series, I don't like the series. It does some story lines well, it develops some characters better than others. I really like Rom. I really dislike Deep Space Nine's homages to Star Trek legacies, its stroking of uberfans, which peaked last night when Sisko and Dax and O'Brien and Bashir and Odo beam over to Kirk's enterprise to stop a Klingon spy from stealing a Bejoran magic orb and going back in time to blow up Kirk with a Tribble. That's not the stupid part. (Here's a stupid part: O'Brien sees The Original Series Klingons who don't have face plates, looks at Worf, Worf says, We don't talk about it with outsiders.) Throughout the episode DS9 producers interwove scenes from The Original Series' Tribbles episode into the DS9 episode, superimposing DS9 actors into the scenes. That's fine, that's schtick I can handle. At the very end, though, Sisko, after an episode of We must not take chances to alter the timeline bullshit, alters the timeline to meet and shake hands with Kirk (to no timeline-changing harm, of course). That's not the really stupid part. No, for this scene producers didn't use The Original Series' Tribble episode for Kirk, they used the end of Mirror Mirror when Kirk recognized, on his Enterprise, the body double of the Captain's Woman he'd been banging in the alternative universe, Sisko interposed as the Captain's Woman, I....

I..... but.... fine metap..... am going to play two more  Kate Bush songs and post another John Ashbery poem in anticipation of their upcoming High Holy Days....








INSTEAD OF LOSING

John Ashbery

Anyone, growing up in a space you hadn't used yet
would've done the same: bother the family's bickering
to head straight into the channel. My, those times
crackled near about us, from sickly melodrama
instead of losing, and the odd confusion... confusion.

I thought if it then, and in the mountains.
During the day we perforated the eponymous city limits
and then some. No one knew all about us
but some knew plenty. It was time to leave that town
for an empty drawer
into which they sailed. Some of the eleven thousand
virgins were getting queasy. I say, stop the ship!
No can do. Here come the bald arbiters
with their eyes on chains, just so, like glasses.
Heck, it's only a muskrat
that's seen better years, when things were medieval
and gold....

So you people in the front,
leave. You see them. And you understand it all.
It doesn't end, night's sorcery notwithstanding.
Would you have preferred to be a grownup in earlier times
than the child can contain or imagine?
Or is right now the answer - you know, the radio
we heard news on late at night,
out checkered fortunes so pretty.
Here's your ton of plumes, and your Red Seal Recors.
The whole embrace.

What a Big Bald Spot You Have!

My sincerest apologies, I hadn't blogfarted like that in months, I'd been diligent about saving drafts by setting publishing dates a year ahead to prevent such blogfarts. I mean I know I'm an attention slut but posting a draft of the next post tonight was an accident. Since I pumped the feed I feel responsible to fill the feed, I hate those The Post You Clicked Doesn't Exist messages, this seems a .06% less-shitty solution, fine metaphors abound. Hope you like the songs (lyrics to above!). They'll be gone, as will this post, when the post I didn't mean to post is posted Wednesday (or Thursday)...

UPDATE! I didn't expect anyone to comment but since Thunder did the post has to stay. This is another example of why I am always writing about rules.

And This Is How the Dead Rise to Us, Transformed: Wet and Singing, the Tide of Voices Pearling in Our Heads

Ian Curtis was born fifty-eight years ago today. So yes, another monologue on My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game (MSADI5G). Joy Division rarely gets within two circles of rotating bands/musicians that alternate appointments to the two non-permanent seats in MSADI5G. I understand the importance of and like Joy Division but it was never sloppy reckless love. I love sloppy reckless love. There is no set number of bands/musicians in any given circle and I don't keep a list, digital, scrap paper, mental, of who is in what circle at any given time: even I'm not that compulsive. But bands/musicians wax and wane depending on when last I listened and what color the music left in my brain. The last two years I've posted the mandatory Curtis' birthday post the color got more olive then browner and this year I expected greyer but to my delight and surprise and head-chime this year the music is school bus yellow almost to orange. A band in a severe relegation tailspin, New Order, related to Joy Division of course, went from the innermost circle of rotating bands less than six years ago to fog grey today. Remember, long-timers, when a running - and true - gag here was that there was always a New Order song in my head? After the school bus yellow almost orange of Joy Division today I tried some New Order: greyer than last time's grey. Since I had many more life experiences when New Order was on the daily soundtrack than Joy Division (because of my age) I would have suspected full orange after Joy Division's school bus yellow revival, so highly do I credit my addiction for nostalgia to influence my coloring. This is unexpected and excellent and promises to, um, compulsively fascinate nobody but me. More to come!

• Foucault's legacy: Foucault's great studies of disciplinary society are useful above all because they allow us to delineate, through contrast and comparison, the digital governmentality that subjects us to new forms of control, which are less vertical, more democratic and, above all, no longer burdened by any anthropological ballast. Homo digitalis today participates in, is the primary agent of, the surveillance of himself. Digital society is becoming a form of mutualised control.
• Speaking of old gags here, let me bitch and moan then press plunge and hope I get noticed enough to incriminate myself, or at least draw a pencil-pusher's attention.
• The Truth About Our Libertarian Age. That's the name of the article. Offered not as endorsement but for your consideration. The author taught a semester here at Illtophay last academic year, a friend I trust insists he is an honorable thinker and person even though the friend disagrees at points with the author. Me, I can see all points at this point for all the good it does.
• Reflections on internet leftism (h/t): Internet leftism can and does produce the illusion that an active website possesses a significant level of political strength simply because it regularly publishes analyses and debates with other websites that also produce a similar quantity of theoretical engagements.  To claim that this demonstrates the efficacy of organization, without investigating whether this internet leftism communicates to any concrete mass organizing, simultaneously demonstrates the limits of this kind of discourse.  We often discover (and I have been guilty of this) a theory alienated from practice due to the fact that the only practice is internet ideological engagement, a refined version of the "talk-shop".  A theory divorced from any form of revolutionary activity amongst the masses in the social context in which one lives is a theory that cannot thrive on a deep form of social investigation; it investigates only amongst a vague internet population from anywhere and everywhere––it is close to book worship.
• The politics of we must change the government (the Problem of Less-Shittism: a view from New Zealand): It is that suffering, and the greater evil of Tory rule, that demands we settle for the lesser evil of the other, more humane parties of business. Yet, when faced with it, I don’t fully reject this logic. I’m a Marxist, which in the current climate is one of the most futile and impractical things a person can be – almost as much as an intellectual. I do indeed have a strong case of the pip. And whatever aversion I feel towards our current government is balanced by the conviction that Labour and the Greens (and as of now quite possibly Mana, too), are in fact more committed to capitalism and invested in it than National, convinced as they appear to be that it holds the key to a sustainable future and our very survival as a species. To me, it’s not a matter of lesser but of different evils. But I also get that concerning people’s so-called everyday lives, including my own, National is – to flip the adage – like Labour, only worse. That it will never raise benefits. That it will only reduce workers’ bargaining rights and entitlements further. That it will continue to critically weaken our environmental protections and democratic institutions. That it will be reluctant to accept social change and in all things be more racist, more sexist, more homophobic. All these may be matters of degree, large or small, but the weaker the working class is, the worse the conditions in which it lives, the more small differences become a matter of outright survival, until social justice grows in the imagination to become a sneering, grey concept, and not something that can be concretely aspired to and worked towards.
• Oil and blood in a burning world.
• Maps of/for pain.

• You really do always choose the slowest line.
• The Nationals local TV numbers are down dramatically. It wasn't me: they broadcast booth is incredibly shitty, Barker and Color both. Listen to Charlie and Dave on the radio while using your eyes on the printed word or with closed eyes falling asleep during a night game.
• This is a post in a past gag I would have non-bulleted - and it would have worked, but some gags get old, though not the gag about old gags.
• Adidas has already added the fourth star, buy your shirt today!
• 25 novels on failure: I've read eight, heard of eight, never heard of eleven, am taking advantage of having access to a major university's library stacks and consortia.
• A Deep Space Nine update: there are no permanent members of my DS9 MSADI5G, there are no members of the innermost circle of rotating cast members and the second innermost circle of rotating cast members there is only Rom. Mr Alarum told me to give him time.
• In the circle I would jettison and never look back: the rest of the cast.
• Rebuilding the House of Stones.
• Books out the second half of 2014.
• There are many more Joy Division songs below the song below the poem:

TIDE OF VOICES

Lynda Hull

At the hour the streetlights come on, buildings

turn abstract. The Hudson, for a moment, formal.   

We drink bourbon on the terrace and you speak

in the evening voice, weighted deep in the throat.

They plan to harvest oysters, you tell me,

from the harbor by Jersey City, how the waters

will be clean again in twenty years. I imagine nets

burdened with rough shells, the meat dun and sexual.

Below, the river and the high rock

where boys each year jump from bravado

or desperation. The day flares, turns into itself.

And innocently, sideways, the way we always fall

into grace or knowledge, we watched the police

drag the river for a suicide, the third this year.   

The terrible hook, the boy’s frail whiteness.

His face was blank and new as your face

in the morning before the day has worked

its pattern of lines and tensions. A hook

like an iron question and this coming

out of the waters, a flawed pearl—

a memory that wasn’t ours to claim.   

Perhaps, in a bedroom by lamplight,   

a woman waits for this boy. She may riffle drawers

gathering photographs, string, keys to abandoned rooms.

Even now she may be leaving,   

closing the door for some silence. I need

to move next to you. Water sluiced

from the boy’s hair. I need to watch you

light your cigarette, the flickering

of your face in matchlight, as if underwater,

drifting away. I take your cigarette

and drag from it, touch your hand.

Remember that winter of your long fever,   

the winter we understood how fragile

any being together was. The wall sweated   

behind the headboard and you said you felt

the rim where dreams crouch

and every room of the past. It must begin in luxury—

do you think—a break and fall into the glamour

attending each kind of surrender. Water must flood

the mind, as in certain diseases, the walls

between the cells of memory dissolve, blur

into a single stream of voices and faces.   

I don’t know any more about this river or if

it can be cleaned of its tender and broken histories—

a tide of voices. And this is how the dead

rise to us, transformed: wet and singing,   

the tide of voices pearling in our hands.

 

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If the Rich Can Survive Dust-Storms Thanks to Their Red-and-Gold Liveried Postilions, Then You Are Playing with an Alphabet Here: Nothing You Invent Can Be a Plenipotentiary, Turn Itself Inside-Out, Radiate Iron Spokes at the Mini-Landscape, and So Side with a Population of Bears, Who Knows?

Earthgirl and I gave ourselves a weekend, a drive Saturday southwest to below Charlottesville to hike to the top Crabtree Falls then a good dinner and sleep in Staunton (pronounced STAN-ton, don't you know), then yesterday drove the entire Skyline Drive south-to-north, stopping to hike the Rose River Loop. The video above is Earthgirl's photos of the Rose River Loop hike. Look for the bear - we saw two, only one stayed around long enough to be photoed. Oh heck, because I love you, here's a  mini-movie of the bear:







Crabtree Falls was OK, very crowded, full of fools, uphill immediately which is - for me - the worst a hike can start - no chance to warm up, to find the breathing rhythm, for old knees and ankles to loosen before work. Rose River Loop was wonderful, a hard hike with a payoff. It's the typical Shenandoah National Park hike: straight downhill on side trails off the Skyline Drive/Appalachian Trail spine through gorges and hollows and then straight uphill back in a loop. The Hog Camp Branch uphill of the loop was longer, steeper than Crabtree Falls uphill but not nearly as hard. We picked up the latest book of circuit hikes in Shenandoah at the Visitor Center at Big Meadows. Our $15 pass for entering Skyline Drive yesterday is good through next Sunday, so....

• There's a story about The Bears and a concert we saw at the original 930 back in 1987. Ask Hamster.
• Today's dose of aargh: What US citizens need to know about Israel and Palestine.
• One more: Massacre of the innocents. On Gaza.
• One more: James Boyd's (and our) hell.
• Briefer futility: a bleggalgaze, reminiscent of bleggalgazes elsewhere, with more determination to act rationally on its conclusion than that other guy.
• Outer Heaven in our time.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• New Inquiry's Sunday reads.
• Oh, the World Cup. The better team won, the lesser team should have one, gacked two sitters, but that's why they are the lesser team. And shut the fuck up, Higuain, you choking whiner.
• After Planet texted us photos of a foster puppy she met on Sunday I thought of Jim's post on his puppies this past Saturday. We set ourselves up for heartbreak.
• Josipovici, for those of you who do.
• Blogfriend reviews blogfriend's novel. Ed had sent me a copy, I promptly set it down, it got caught up in a house-cleaning, I searched and found it last week or two, it's next.
• The Last Ramone.
• I know enough about jazz to know the name Charlie Haden, not enough to make a playlist for you. Here, Kurt does.

KOREAN SOAP OPERA

John Ashbery

My sister and I don’t seem to get along too well anymore. 
She always has to have everything new in her house. Cherished ideals 
don’t suit her teal, rust and eggshell color scheme. 
Of course, I was a buyer when she was still on the street 
peddling the Communist youth weekly. I have a degree 
in marketing. Her boyfriend thinks I’m old-fashioned. 
Well, I guess I do have an old-fashioned mentality. 
What kind of a mentality 
causes men to commit suicide in their air-conditioned glass boxes? 
It has been a life of adjustments. I adjusted to the postwar boom 
though it broke up my family. Some took their honor to the mountains, 
to live on wood and water. But the investment years 
wrought havoc with the landscape. Everything is modular now, even the trees. 
Under the dizzying parabolas of the railroad bridge, where the thud 
of laundry mallets used to resound, the swiftly flowing 
current is like green cream, like baize unfit for fulling. 
So old are the ways, 
for lunch one might select a large smelly radish. 
In the streets, as always, there is a smell of frying fish 
no one notices. The rain cannot make up its mind. 
Other people like it other ways. 
I need to interact with postal employees, civil servants, that sort of thing. 
Just being asleep isn’t enough. 
I must cry out against injustice in whatever position 
sleep overtakes me. Only then will I have understood what the world 
and servants mean by self-abolishment, the key, it is said, 
to success. To stand and contemplate the sea 
is to comprehend part of the package. What we need, therefore, 
is market gardens bringing a sense of time with them, 
of this time, honed to razor-sharpness. Yet the whole 
scheme is invisible to any shareholder, and so the feeling 
lessens, the idea that a composite portrait 
may not be so important after all takes over like the shoulder 
of a mill-wheel, slogging patiently under water, then back 
to the zenith, where the watchword presumably is. 
In schools they teach things like plus and minus 
but not in the gorge, not in boiling mud. 
Area residents were jolted to find what in essence 
was a large swamp, pythons and all, in their communal front yard. 
To me, this is insensate. I cannot stand the wind at my back 
making of me nothing, to be handed 
over, in turn, to this 
man, this man. For though he weathered patiently 
the name, the one that occurs to all of us, he went out 
and came in, not in the best interests of abundance; 
not, it seems, being anything but about to fall. 
Here’s a paradox for you: if the men are segregated 
then why are the women not? 
If the rich can survive dust-storms thanks to their red-and-gold liveried 
postilions, then you are playing with an alphabet here: nothing 
you invent can be a plenipotentiary, 
turn itself inside-out, radiate 
iron spokes at the mini-landscape, and so side with a population 
of bears, who knows? Who knows how much there can be 
of any one thing if another one stops existing? And the word you give to this 
man, this man, is cold, 
fossil fuel. 
One snorts in the laundry, another 
is broken beside the bed. A third is suspended 
in a baobab for all the sins 
no one ever knew, for sins of omission are like pearls 
next to the sin of not knowing, and being excused 
for it. So it all comes round 
to individual responsibility and awareness, 
that circus of dusty dramas, denuded forests and car dealerships, a place 
where anything can and does happen, and hours and hours go by.

These Are the Words That the Voice Was Repeating

This year's edition of the traditional post. Here what I wrote last year:

Fifty-three today, this guy. When we met in 5th grade forty-four years ago neither of us predicted the weirdest year of our lives would be 2013.

So this year it's been forty-five years since we met, and this year makes last year look normal, though I'll add this reminder this year: Landru was the first human not Earthgirl not me not a doctor or nurse to hold Planet.

   
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The Prevalence of Those Grey Flakes Falling?

Per occasionally observed tradition, Saturday's music via Bryce's Friday show, the best three hours of radio each week. These are the musicians but not the pieces Bryce played, except the Radigue - I couldn't find the pieces he played on youtube. This is why I write about rules. A blogfriend has recently returned from a hiatus, I asked him why the hiatus, why the return. I think about a hiatus, think I only think about hiatus because of Kindnesses not reciprocated or content here not being appreciated, but then I smack my self sensible: I mean, it's partially true (and to be honest, this bleg is, within the climate of Blegsylvania vis a vis the ten years of it's existence, doing fine, and thanks), but I've long known that I'm both niche and licorice, I've long figured out the patterns of Blegsylvanian busy and slow. My blogfriend was beaten silent by relentless clusterfuck, how to respond with proper arrgh to the awfulness of the daily duh. It's important to be reminded of the awfulness of the daily duh, aargh consisting of too fucking many reminders of duh. It's not that I think of a hiatus from blogging, I daydream of a clusterfuck-free blog - you, those of you still here, may notice - but I cannot rid myself of the idea of a bogus duty to acknowledge the awfulness of the daily duh not only here but in all iterations of my life. It's how I was trained. And now that I'm being desensitized daily by faster fresh reiterations of duh - there was a shooting somewhere a couple of nights ago, half a dozen killed, dozens wounded, or something, plus routine atrocities since - now that I'm being trained that the daily duh of clusterfuck is in fact routine, move along, and I do, I...

... can vouch for these pieces of music, tomorrow's a High Egoslavian Holy Day, tune in, rest assured, I'll never go longform aargh on you, there are much better than me, let me link to them, have more Ashbery poems.








HOW TO CONTINUE

John Ashbery

Oh there once was a woman

and she kept a shop

selling trinkets to tourists

not far from a dock

who came to see what life could be

far back on the island.

And it was always a party there

always different but very nice

New friends to give you advice

or fall in love with you which is nice

and each grew so perfectly from the other

it was a marvel of poetry

and irony

And in this unsafe quarter

much was scary and dirty

but no one seemed to mind

very much

the parties went on from house to house

There were friends and lovers galore

all around the store

There was moonshine in winter

and starshine in summer

and everybody was happy to have discovered

what they discovered

And then one day the ship sailed away

There were no more dreamers just sleepers

in heavy attitudes on the dock

moving as if they knew how

among the trinkets and the souvenirs

the random shops of modern furniture

and a gale came and said

it is time to take all of you away

from the tops of the trees to the little houses

on little paths so startled

And when it became time to go

they none of them would leave without the other

for they said we are all one here

and if one of us goes the other will not go

and the wind whispered it to the stars

the people all got up to go

and looked back on love

AS ONE PUT DRUNK INTO THE PACKET-BOAT

John Ashbery

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
Elsewhere we are as sitting in a place where sunlight
Filters down, a little at a time,
Waiting for someone to come. Harsh words are spoken,
As the sun yellows the green of the maple tree....

So this was all, but obscurely
I felt the stirrings of new breath in the pages
Which all winter long had smelled like an old catalogue.
New sentences were starting up. But the summer
Was well along, not yet past the mid-point
But full and dark with the promise of that fullness,
That time when one can no longer wander away
And even the least attentive fall silent
To watch the thing that is prepared to happen.

A look of glass stops you
And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?
Did they notice me, this time, as I am,
Or is it postponed again? The children
Still at their games, clouds that arise with a swift
Impatience in the afternoon sky, then dissipate
As limpid, dense twilight comes.
Only in that tooting of a horn
Down there, for a moment, I thought
The great, formal affair was beginning, orchestrated,
Its colors concentrated in a glance, a ballade
That takes in the whole world, now, but lightly,
Still lightly, but with wide authority and tact.

The prevalence of those gray flakes falling?
They are sun motes. You have slept in the sun
Longer than the sphinx, and are none the wiser for it.
Come in. And I thought a shadow fell across the door
But it was only her come to ask once more
If I was coming in, and not to hurry in case I wasn't.

The night sheen takes over. A moon of cistercian pallor
Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed,
Finally involved with the business of darkness.
And a sigh heaves from all teh small things on earth,
The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons
Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower
Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night.
The summer demands and takes away too much,
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.