Disdaining Age, Ignoring Pain, Avoiding Mirrors

 
What never got mentioned at Tuesday Night Pints: Democrats, Republicans, Barack Obama, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, the Midterm Elections; Hillary Clinton and Hillarian Inevitability, Joe Biden, Martin O'Malley, Elizabeth Warren, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, POTUS 16; Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Dianne Feinstein, the NSA, the panopticon state, the police state, the surveillance state; Glenn Greenwald, people who love Greenwald, people who hate Greenwald, people who loved Greenwald but now hate Greenwald, people who hated Greenwald but now love Greenwald, Greenwald as avatar of zeitgeist; the Koch Brothers, Pierre Omidyar, Ken Langone, Bill Gates, or any other oligarch; Vladimir Putin, Ukraine, Crimea; Hilltop, Hilltop politics, Hilltop president, Hilltop provost, Hilltop English Department, the plan to add a PhD to Hilltop English Department, professors in English Department, English Department chair; blegging, bleggal theory, bleggal compulsion, bleggal interventions, bleggal hiatus, furious and futile blegging in a dying Blegsylvania, dying Blegsylvania. None of these were mentioned, not by design but by natural flow of conversation. They never came up. It was only driving home that I thought about it. I've theories what it signifies, some positive, some negative: my nagging sense of responsibility for bitching about what I can't change is both alarmed and relieved. I'm giving up, I'm smartening up. A good time was had.

• Number Six was born eighty-six years ago today.
• Finding new ways to hide in plain sight: It’s strange, then, that after decades of moving toward an ever more conspicuous readability of the self, to mark out in dress and style and dialect who we are, that we’re witnessing a turn to obfuscation as a mode of individualism; this is the very trend lying behind the much-discussed idea of normcore. Outlined in a clever, insightful essay by Fiona Duncan in New York Magazine, normcore is ostensibly a shift in fashion toward a kind of deliberate blankness, one that recognizes either the increasing impossibility of true uniqueness, or that one might not be read by others at all. No ostentatious individualism for the normcore faithful, but, rather, a decided shift toward the camouflage of appearing to be ordinary.
• The gravest threat of totalitarianism.
• Bringing light. A friend writes about a friend.
• UPDATE! Frances had to pull the above on the advice of her friend's lawyer. She hopes it will be live again soon.
• Derelict ship on an asphalt sea.
• Three days late, New Inquiry's Sunday Reads.
• Food links.
• Ranciere, for those of you who do: Returning to so many early influences has again reminded me to thrive in partiality. Like a good mentor, I have been prompted not to be a vampire, to not be a tourist, to make the first maneuver toward originality by looping back around and returning to where I departed, reexamining the point of origin and all the detritus that litters and hides it from me. Not to relearn what has been forgotten, but to forget what has been learned. To search deteriorated notions and oppressed positions. These microscopic transgressions form the phenomenal ground of varied arts that help me live. The message has been a relief: adhere to the indeterminate in all of us. Go small, go slow, go weird and unknown, and you won’t have to worry about being interesting.
• Two words.
• Brad reads Ammons, as in out loud (as all poetry should be read).
• Listen to Ashbery read one of his poems.
• Jason Molina died a year ago. Have some songs.
• Prunella has Husker Du (Hart songs) and Lush for you.

PARENT'S PANTOUM

Carolyn Kizer

Where did these enormous children come from,
More ladylike than we have ever been?
Some of ours look older than we feel.
How did they appear in their long dresses

More ladylike than we have ever been?
But they moan about their aging more than we do,
In their fragile heels and long black dresses.
They say they admire our youthful spontaneity.

They moan about their aging more than we do,
A somber group--why don't they brighten up?
Though they say they admire our youthful spontaneity
They beg us to be dignified like them

As they ignore our pleas to brighten up.
Someday perhaps we'll capture their attention
Then we won't try to be dignified like them
Nor they to be so gently patronizing.

Someday perhaps we'll capture their attention.
Don't they know that we're supposed to be the stars?
Instead they are so gently patronizing.
It makes us feel like children--second-childish?

Perhaps we're too accustomed to be stars.
The famous flowers glowing in the garden,
So now we pout like children. Second-childish?
Quaint fragments of forgotten history?

Our daughters stroll together in the garden,
Chatting of news we've chosen to ignore,
Pausing to toss us morsels of their history,
Not questions to which only we know answers.

Eyes closed to news we've chosen to ignore,
We'd rather excavate old memories,
Disdaining age, ignoring pain, avoiding mirrors.
Why do they never listen to our stories?

Because they hate to excavate old memories
They don't believe our stories have an end.
They don't ask questions because they dread the answers.
They don't see that we've become their mirrors,

We offspring of our enormous children.

Born Eighty-Eight Years Ago Yesterday, Eighty-Eight Years Ago Today

György Kurtág was born 88 years ago today! A.R. Ammons was born 88 years ago yesterday.





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*

Born Eighty-Eight Years Ago Today

MECHANISM

A.R. Ammons

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,

          morality: any working order,

       animate or inanimate: it

has managed directed balance,

          the incoming and outgoing energies are working right,

       some energy left to the mechanism,

some ash, enough energy held

          to maintain the order in repair,

       assure further consumption of entropy,

expending energy to strengthen order:

          honor the persisting reactor,

       the container of change, the moderator: the yellow

bird flashes black wing-bars

          in the new-leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay,

       startles the hawk with beauty,

flitting to a branch where

          flash vanishes into stillness,

       hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight:

honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,

          the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies

       of control,

the gastric transformations, seed

          dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into

       chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge,

blood compulsion, instinct: honor the

          unique genes,

       molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into

sets, the nucleic grain transmitted

          in slow change through ages of rising and falling form,

       some cells set aside for the special work, mind

or perception rising into orders of courtship,

          territorial rights, mind rising

       from the physical chemistries

to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male

          and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper

       racial satisfaction:

heat kept by a feathered skin:

          the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen

       burner under the flask)

so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates

          interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum

       efficiency—the vessel firm, the flame

staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise and

          necessary worked out of random, reproducible,

       the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the

goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operations

          that stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a

       great songster) in the bay cherry bushes wild of leaf. 

h/t self-portrait and interview with Ammons. Here's a profile of Ammons by David Lehman. His 1993 book length Garbage is quite possibly the single volume of poetry I've read most often. If I played My Sillyass Des.....

Click Ammons tag for more poems.



THE CITY LIMITS

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then the
heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.



HYMN

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth

and go on out

     over the sea marshes and the brant in bays

and over the hills of tall hickory

and over the crater lakes and canyons

and on up through the spheres of diminishing air

past the blackset noctilucent clouds

           where one wants to stop and look

way past all the light diffusions and bombardments

up farther than the loss of sight

    into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth

inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes

trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest

     coelenterates

and praying for a nerve cell

with all the soul of my chemical reactions

and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

You are everywhere partial and entire

You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum

has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut

and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark

chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down

and if I find you I must go out deep into your

    far resolutions

and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

The Song Sparrow Puts All His Saying into One Repeated Song

Relinking to Richard's review of his Music 2013 not only because I added it late to yesterday's post and not only because it is full of great music suggestions but mostly because he mentioned the Pere Ubu show at Rock and Roll Hotel we attended last September and I was reminded that I recorded the above, a live version of this shitty blog's long-time Theme Song Two, it's over to the left, has been for years.

• I did not know that. See Theme Song Three.
• Chomsky as moral compass?
• On Chomsky in the role of moral compass and his fans.
• Good friend Jay Paleo Old Arra Dirty 101 Bama and I emailed last night, this post's title came to mind when I wrote this: As always it comes down to each individual's level of moral pragmatism. Give that Chomsky serves power in ways he's either unaware of (which, being Chomsky, I find highly improbable) or is aware of his situation and decides that there IS no alternative to Capital's power, there's only ways of mitigating its rapacious drive. Um, less-shittyism, let's call it. I'm always reminded of George Carlin's definition of the difference between a jerk and and asshole: a jerk is someone who drives slower than you, an asshole someone who drives faster. 
• Brutality and complexity in the global economy.
• Slap-single switch-hitter batting helmet as brand for Corporate mendacity. 
• He, for one, welcomes his new insect overlords.  
• Anne Carson's Glass Essay.
• Philip Glass turned 77 yesterday. Here's Metamorphosis, here's:

GLASS

A.R. Ammons

The song

sparrow puts all his

saying

into one

repeated song:

what
  

variations, subtleties

he manages,

to encompass denser

meanings, I’m

too coarse

to catch: it’s
  

one song, an over-reach

from which

all possibilities,

like filaments,

depend:

killing,
  

nesting, dying,

sun or cloud,

figure up

and become

song—simple, hard:

removed.

praying for a nerve cell with all the soul of my chemical reactions and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

Found that last night. I'd completely forgot about Dara until Biblioklept wrote about The Lost Scrapbook a few weeks ago. I went to find my copy and couldn't, was afraid it might have been accidentally scooped up in a bookshelves purge some months ago. The above is a first edition, I bought it immediately after reading the glowing review excerpted on the back by Richard Powers. Book arrived, I left it on the floor, and Katie

(the one on the right) chewed and slobbered on it. I put it on a bookshelf to dry out and there it remained, buried behind others, until discovered last night when looking for something else. Read twenty pages, I know myself too well enough to not express a judgment to myself yet*, but... the hold-up scene early is promising. What else I want to note is Richard Powers: He hasn't a novel since 2009's Generosity. His 2006 Echo Maker I've called the best 911 novel I've read. Mention of possible future Nobel for Powers used to circulate. I haven't thought of or heard anything about a new Powers in two, three years. Wiki suggests there's a 2014 novel on tap.

• Greyhoos said XTC's cover of All Along the Watchtower is one his three favorite covers and Charlie in comments to same post offered his list of three best covers - and thanks to both! - but the greatest cover of all time is the Futurehead's cover of Kate Bush's Hounds of Love. Nothing comes close.
• One post on Veterans Day, a second post on Veterans Day.
• There are a couple of new sites in Newest Gag First and Newest Gag Second. Check them out when they float to top of self-updating blogrolls.
• Please consider sending Arthur the coins in your pocket.
• An object lesson in where bigotry comes from.
• Joyless nihilism and the latest Star Trek movie.
• *The pattern of my novel reading this past year: initial over-enthusiasm at first fifty pages, diminishing enthusiasm leading to boredom over the next fifty, listening to music, reading poetry, abandoning the novel by the 150th page. 
• Kraftwerk as religious music.
• Britten's centenary in Britain v America.
• Via above link, the Britten Centenary website.
• Prunella's latest playlist.
• Which won't get to me first, Hamster's Britten playlist or Mr Alarum's Bill Orcutt playlist?

HYMN

A.R. Ammons

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth

and go on out

     over the sea marshes and the brant in bays

and over the hills of tall hickory

and over the crater lakes and canyons

and on up through the spheres of diminishing air

past the blackset noctilucent clouds

           where one wants to stop and look

way past all the light diffusions and bombardments

up farther than the loss of sight

    into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth

inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes

trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest

     coelenterates

and praying for a nerve cell

with all the soul of my chemical reactions

and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

You are everywhere partial and entire

You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum

has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut

and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark

chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down

and if I find you I must go out deep into your

    far resolutions

and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

Past the Blackset Noctilucent Clouds

 
More songs for long quiet solo drives over beautiful mountains.  Hey! is Rush the most hated band ever? Elric (who no longer reads this) played Rush and has praised Geddy Lee's bass-playing (Elric was a bass-player) as superlative, says Geddy Lee plays keyboards with his feet while singing and playing bass. I didn't mind hearing Rush though at parties I mostly heard the same few songs the Rush zealots always played so the songs got old. Every band has it's zealots, say Pere Ubu or Guided by Voices or XTC or Archers of Loaf or Roxy Music, those zealous fucks always annoy non-zealots to the respective bands' unfair detriment. I'd heard anti-Rush sentiment but not nearly as much as I've heard anti-Steely Dan sentiment. Dr Z loves Steely Dan, I really like some Steely Dan tunes, and the deep disdain for Steely Dan by some friends always surprises me. Other than Dr Z, I haven't talked with anyone about Steely Dan in more than a decade. Posed the most hated band question last night on twitter, responses there and by email, got real Rush hate, real Steely Dan hate, real Steely Dan love.

• But no, I don't feel like posting a Steely Dan cascade, it's just been awhile since I thought about black licorice bands.
• Just to clarify, I don't believe Elizabeth Warren is a progressive savior - there are no progressive saviors - I think she plays one on TV. I'd like to be wrong, I bet you any number of pints you specify I'm not. I'd love to see, for my selfish entertainment, her piss off senior Democratic Party leaders and freak out the Party establishment as the apparently and avowedly sincere progressive savior she plays on TV with a deep run into the 2016 primaries (and even then the freakout wouldn't be about her policies but about the Party's rites of succession), but it's not going to happen, I'm betting pints it won't. It's the progressive savior thingee I'm noting, having been infected with it before myself.
• Pissing off friends is a doomed strategy.
• Sharing science is a crime.
• The Toobin Principle.
• Petulant fuck confirmed. Not that it needed confirming.
• Petulant fuck goes on Leno?
• Fred Hiatt's views on the Purple Line, which will never be built. 
• Arguing over Jesus.
• This week in water.
• Hey! I have tickets for Bonnie Prince Billy in Annapolis at Rams Head for late November, a week before Thanksgiving. Looked at Rams Head ticketing this morning, looks like I didn't need to pounce the minute the tickets went on sale yesterday.
• Hey! Some new sites added to the blogrolls, check them out. I may do some maintenance on them over the next few days, consolidating a few to make my browsing easier. I may not. As always, if there's someone you think I would enjoy reading please let me know, as always if you're Kinding me but me not you please let me know.

• O'Donnell's closes. Haven't eaten at O'Donnell's in decades but remember when it was a mainstay on Wisconsin in Bethesda. There was a competitor seafood place in Bethesda, they were near if not directly next to each other, I can't remember it's name.
• UPDATE! Bish Thompson's.
• Corridor City Transitway!
• A British take on Dempsey's move to Seattle: 1. American footballer fights from a tough upbringing to become one of the best 50 footballers in one of the top leagues in the world. 2. He battles for playing time each season and proves himself to new coaches and new teams. 3. Told for the sixth consecutive time that his services are surplus to requirements, he finally says: "Fuck it, I'm the star. I'm not getting a Champions League shot, except as a squad guy at a discount. I don't need to prove anything else. Why should I go down or make a move across to Sunderland or Everton for less money? To prove what?" 4. An MLS club wiggles a massive paycheck, four-year security and a chance to settle his family back in the States. And validate him – more than Europe could or would at this point – telling him that he is the star.
• Philosophy and its double.
• Blockbuster movies will still suck in 2015. (h/t Walter)
• Americans turning against beer?
• Geilivable!
• Reflection.
• RIP George Duke.
• Cat-whisperer!

HYMN

A.R. Ammons

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth

and go on out

     over the sea marshes and the brant in bays

and over the hills of tall hickory

and over the crater lakes and canyons

and on up through the spheres of diminishing air

past the blackset noctilucent clouds

           where one wants to stop and look

way past all the light diffusions and bombardments

up farther than the loss of sight

    into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth

inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes

trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest

     coelenterates

and praying for a nerve cell

with all the soul of my chemical reactions

and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

You are everywhere partial and entire

You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum

has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut

and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark

chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down

and if I find you I must go out deep into your

    far resolutions

and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

Killing, Nesting, Dying

       
I know I posted Gnod within the past week or so, have it again, it's so good, but yes, the two people whose opinions matter like the new glasses. Planet actually helped with the selection, I texted her photos of me trying them on in a mirror, the crew at Lenscrafters amused. Two bits of bleggalgazing: first, since I said I was going to take last night's header photo of Rosie and the sub-lede down I feel obligated to make this post though I thought for two hours I could stall it until Thursday, whattadope. Second, I also want to spend a sentence demonstrating how small I am by thanking the three people I linked to for the first time each taking one second to see where the traffic was coming from before deciding my unworthiness: Blegsylvanians, sheesh, be Kind, motherfuckers. Also What class. Not a bug, a feature. My future hell. Boatload of links. Panting for breath on a virtual shore. Know truth v avoid error. Tunneling under New York. Anatomy of a spambot. A poet on the road. Who is a contemporary poet? The glass essay. What would jesus christ sexx godd do? Gnod's soundcloud. Feldman. Also so good, the new Anthroprophh, a song below the poem, lots more will be here soon.





GLASS

A.R. Ammons

The song
sparrow puts all his
saying
into one
repeated song:
what

variations, subtleties
he manages,
to encompass denser
meanings, I'm
too coarse
to catch: it's

one song, an over-reach
from which
all possibilities,
like filaments,
depend:
killing,

nesting, dying,
sun or cloud,
figure up
and become
song - simple, hard:
removed.

The Ruined Banisters of the A, a Bridle-Ring of the O, the Saddle of the U

Wowee, this was on a new book cart yesterday, I've already read the first five poems, I've already bought my copy from the publisher, I hope I get it by Monday before we head for Ohio Tuesday - more tomorrow, someone turns twenty - so I can beat it up in my hands and write in the margins like a book of poetry needs to be read and held and dog-eared and underlined and loved, here, have this poem:


THE VOWELS PASS BY IN ENGLISH

Brenda Hillman

          -& the owl drops flowers
     from its eyes [Dentaria californica]
   the raceme, the stubbed stem lands straight
in the woods - as the ancients do;
on a hazel branch, a cocoon
     hoists itself.... with a worm's mind -;

i-eee is released in winter
     as humans hold bones to the fire -
they were there a long time,
                    (interpreting the dead loves
as meaning seeped through the cracks
     of centuries held by everyone --);

     the ocean rises by inches -- when
the wave withdraws, plovers pick evidence
     from married footprints as the lyric does,
                   or sanity... Luminescent creatures
           sink red in the sand --
for they have swallowed... all 3 sunsets!

& the vowels pass by in English,
   the ruined banisters of the A, a bridle-
ring of the O, the saddle of the U
         brought from the underworld;
I had to negotiate with devils
   to retrieve even this much
from the language of the colonizers.


Wowee, huh? I tweeted in defeat Monday night that I am utterly incapable of reading fiction, as in I can read it for half an hour but none of it sticks. I've bitched about as it's steadily got worse the past three years, but here's good or bad news depending on moment: the guilt, the panic is easing. If I can just stop buying fiction I can't read in effort to fix the problem I'll save money too. HEY! tonight me and Earthgirl and Hamster see this guy:

• You won't hear about it or see photos from the concert until Thursday because tomorrow is Egoslavia's Most Sacred Day.
• No links tomorrow either tomorrow, Egoslavia's Most Sacred Day. Have some today.
• But not many, besides the link directly below I'm going to skip the Iraq scab-picking not because the scabs don't need picking, they just don't need re-picking here.
• UPDATE! Heroes in error. 
• Barbarian Rhapsody. Yes, again, icymi.
• Yves on Cyprus.
• Steubenville and Jock Culture.
• Scoffing at the sacred cow.
• Oldblogbud Ed's latest project. I'm good for a postcard, more if he makes it to Indiana, then...
• There are new places to read over in New Here, go look for them.
• For instance, on the death of google reader. Google has removed the link to reader in my gmail accounts, can still get by - fuck me - googling google reader.
• Anacostia.
• Dickens and Blegsylvania.
• Archie Ammons.
• Another anthology I need get.
• UPDATE! Zombie playlist for a lost one.
• Most of the poems in The Arcadia Project are too long for me to type out, I may jpeg some and post, but below song, another.

OPERATIVE SPRING

Eric Linsker

near/gaseous twigs lacking fluency in the chunks of branch pipe
rot centered shade, and the shade of the thrush
          stained by the suthering wind, loosens from the
other, bit-green/brown flap of sound, restart, touring on its side, a grass/attempt
     sticking
with snow seen by, it brushing/delineated yellow ashes of human dropped
forsythia like thrush, who handles its world when it looks away, the
powers are marching hitherward it is known before
            where they arrive they move
belike some things I know not what/whatever, cannot hear them, cannot hear
thrush now, I think we should slaughter them

I've Pressed So Far Way from My Desire that If You Asked Me What I Want I Would, Accepting the Harmonious Completion of the Drift, Say Annihilation, Probably

That's Rosie in a tunnel, shot last night. Abbreviated bleggalgazing - I took a day off, nothing more, thanks for asking. That's not entirely true, I was asked, yes, that's true. Was going to take today off too but in view of the fact that A.R. Ammons was born eighty-seven years ago today and today is an Egoslavian High Holy Day, can't. Use the search box top left of this blog to find many of his poems. All you need know about Obama: the fucker tucks his polo shift into his short pants. Sludge in the hour glass. Your Fucking Washington Post gives Sunday oped inches to Donald Rumsfeld to complain about the elimination of Olympic wrestling. Your Fucking Washington Post gives Sunday oped inches to E.J. Dionne to make an impassioned case that the next pope should be a nun. I say the next pope should be a duck. There is a better chance I will be happy before E.J. Dionne. Blinder leading the blind. History unfolding. The discontents of post-democracy. The logic of surveillance. Of course they are. The Lincoln Myth of Social Mobility. No, I don't make fun of rightwingers much anymore (since I was asked why I don't much anymore over the weekend), though once that was what drew new eyes here, and probably still would. Fabulous heh. Boatloads of links. MOCO seeks to be hip! Lordy, Arsenal losing makes me giddy. Robbie Rogers. Blanchot novella, for those of you who do. Beckett, for those of you who do. Barth, for those of you who do. Quest into the unknown. The problem with anthologies. Well, not the problem, some of many problems.  A Greyhoos playlist. Messiaen. Via Edmond, Mike Watt & The Missingmen cover Wire. Three hours of excellent. Three hours of excellent. Here's Stanley on a balcony from this morning.

CONTINUITY

A.R. Ammons

I've pressed so
far way from
my desire that

if you asked
me what I
want I would,

accepting the harmonious
completion of the
drift, say annihilation,

probably.