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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We Had So Skipped a Stage That the Great Wave of the Past, Compounded in Derision, Submerged Idea and Non-Dreamer Alike in Falsetto Starlight Like "Purity" of Design that Had Been the First Danger Sign to Wash the Sticky, Icky Stuff Down the Drain - Pfui!

• Kurt Wagner tweeted last night that Lambchop is doing two concerts of the complete Nixon album in support of his wife Mary Mancini's campaign for the Tennessee State Senate. Any excuse for a Lambchop cascade is a good excuse.
• To be honest, Nixon is my least favorite Lampchop album, which is to say I love it (and really really really love the song above) but love the others more.
• If you get to the concert, you'll get to hear Wagner's falsetto.
• Your brain is on the brink of chaos.
• The value of labor theory and the uselessness of labor theorists.
• Does Glenn Greenwald care more than you?
• On Gaza.
• On Gaza.
• Drone flight over the Mormon Temple in Silver Spring - see avatar for blogroll Mocomofo - two miles from my house. The guy had permission to fly the drone, btw.
• LEGO sells helicopter surveillance toy.
• First time in ages, blooger ate a post, this one, I typed a period at the end of a sentence, hit enter, everything disappeared. GODDAMN MY FREE BLOOGING PLATFORM! I know I'm missing a couple of links, they were the bestest links evar, sorry.
• The effects of repeatedly being called Jeffy-Weffy Ding-Dong on the human rage response in subjects named Jeff. 
• The mystery of the vanishing screwball. I was always told it destroys elbows.
• Earthgirl and I are driving up and down Skyline Drive this weekend and hiking, so Lambchop will be on the playlist. Any excuse for a Lampchop cascade is a good excuse.

THE BUNGALOWS

John Ashbery

Impatient as we were for all of them to join us,

The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away

So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth

Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them—

Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last.

And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.

They are the same aren’t they,

The presumed landscape and the dream of home

Because the people are all homesick today or desperately sleeping,   

Trying to remember how those rectangular shapes

Became so extraneous and so near

To create a foreground of quiet knowledge

In which youth had grown old, chanting and singing wise hymns that   

Will sign for old age

And so lift up the past to be persuaded, and be put down again.

The warning is nothing more than an aspirate “h”;

The problem is sketched completely, like fireworks mounted on poles:   

Complexion of evening, the accurate voices of the others.

During Coca-Cola lessons it becomes patent

Of noise on the left, and we had so skipped a stage that   

The great wave of the past, compounded in derision,   

Submerged idea and non-dreamer alike   

In falsetto starlight like “purity”

Of design that had been the first danger sign

To wash the sticky, icky stuff down the drain—pfui!

How does it feel to be outside and inside at the same time,

The delicious feeling of the air contradicting and secretly abetting

The interior warmth? But the land curdles the dismay in which it’s written   

Bearing to a final point of folly and doom

The wisdom of these generations.

Look at what you’ve done to the landscape—

The ice cube, the olive—

There is a perfect tri-city mesh of things

Extending all the way along the river on both sides

With the end left for thoughts on construction

That are always turning to alps and thresholds

Above the tide of others, feeding a European moss rose without glory.

We shall very soon have the pleasure of recording

A period of unanimous tergiversation in this respect

And to make that pleasure the greater, it is worth while

At the risk of tedious iteration, to put first upon record a final protest:   

Rather decaying art, genius, inspiration to hold to

An impossible “calque” of reality, than

“The new school of the trivial, rising up on the field of battle,   

Something of sludge and leaf-mold,” and life

Goes trickling out through the holes, like water through a sieve,   

All in one direction.

You who were directionless, and thought it would solve everything if you found one,

What do you make of this? Just because a thing is immortal

Is that any reason to worship it? Death, after all, is immortal.   

But you have gone into your houses and shut the doors, meaning   

There can be no further discussion.

And the river pursues its lonely course

With the sky and the trees cast up from the landscape

For green brings unhappiness—le vert Porte malheur.

“The chartreuse mountain on the absinthe plain

Makes the strong man’s tears tumble down like rain.”

All this came to pass eons ago.

Your program worked out perfectly. You even avoided

The monotony of perfection by leaving in certain flaws:

A backward way of becoming, a forced handshake,

An absent-minded smile, though in fact nothing was left to chance.

Each detail was startlingly clear, as though seen through a magnifying glass,   

Or would have been to an ideal observer, namely yourself—

For only you could watch yourself so patiently from afar

The way God watches a sinner on the path to redemption,

Sometimes disappearing into valleys, but always on the way,

For it all builds up into something, meaningless or meaningful

As architecture, because planned and then abandoned when completed,   

To live afterwards, in sunlight and shadow, a certain amount of years.   

Who cares about what was there before? There is no going back,   

For standing still means death, and life is moving on,

Moving on towards death. But sometimes standing still is also life.

Counterproductive, as You Realize Once Again That the Longest Way Is the Most Efficient Way, the One That Looped Among Islands, and You Always Seemed to Be Traveling in a Circle

This past Tuesday night. That's Canal to Clara Barton to Cabin John Parkway to Beltway, was supposed to be all the way to exit for Rockville Pike (though the signs on the Beltway call it Wisconsin Avenue - it doesn't change to Wisconsin until a further mile south) but either the iPhone cut it off prematurely, in which case fuck that, or I screwed up and accidentally turned it off, in which case fuck me.

Planet took us out to dinner for our anniversary last night and then I did no link-fishing (and a quick scan of Blegsylvania this morning suggests not much was posted yesterday at least in my Stringtown - though :-p wants to start a band, and Ethan has a mediation on taking scifi as seriously as those who distrust it - it's summer, blogs lay dormant then suddenly love come in spurts). As threatened, have two Kate Bush songs and a John Ashbery poem in anticipation of their Egoslavian Holy Days later this month. Please! send me links to Kate Bush songs you'd like to hear, the rarer the better.








JUST WALKING AROUND

John Ashbery

What name do I have for you?

Certainly there is not name for you

In the sense that the stars have names

That somehow fit them. Just walking around,

An object of curiosity to some,

But you are too preoccupied

By the secret smudge in the back of your soul

To say much and wander around,

Smiling to yourself and others.

It gets to be kind of lonely

But at the same time off-putting.

Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way,

The one that looped among islands, and

You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.

And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.

There is light in there and mystery and food.

Come see it.

Come not for me but it.

But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.

Where the Paths Through the Elms, the Carnivals, Begin, or: Born One-Hundred Sixty Years Ago Today

Leoš Janáček was born 160 years ago today. An old blogfriend you should bookmark and read named his blog after the above, it's one of my favorite piano pieces, though the one I truly love is In the Mists. Murakami made the Sinfonietta the soundtrack for his novel 1Q84.

Holiday Blegging for a Three Day Holiday Weekend in Dead Blegsylvania starts now: there either will or won't be posts, those posts either will or won't have links. There may or not be Galaxie 500 here tomorrow, but there will not be that song. There may or not be X here tomorrow, but there won't be that song. No, I haven't forgot my Kate Bush and John Ashbery threat, Ashbery poems below the Sinfionetta, Kate will show up over the weekend.








LIKE A SENTENCE

John Ashbery

How little we know,   

and when we know it!

It was prettily said that “No man

hath an abundance of cows on the plain, nor shards

in his cupboard.” Wait! I think I know who said that! It was . . .

Never mind, dears, the afternoon

will fold you up, along with preoccupations   

that now seem so important, until only a child   

running around on a unicycle occupies center stage.   

Then what will you make of walls? And I fear you   

will have to come up with something,

be it a terraced gambit above the sea

or gossip overheard in the marketplace.

For you see, it becomes you to be chastened:

for the old to envy the young,

and for youth to fear not getting older,

where the paths through the elms, the carnivals, begin.

And it was said of Gyges that his ring

attracted those who saw him not,

just as those who wandered through him were aware

only of a certain stillness, such as precedes an earache,

while lumberjacks in headbands came down to see what all the fuss was about,

whether it was something they could be part of

sans affront to self-esteem.

And those temple hyenas who had seen enough,

nostrils aflare, fur backing up in the breeze,

were no place you could count on,

having taken a proverbial powder

as rifle butts received another notch.

I, meanwhile . . . I was going to say I had squandered spring   

when summer came along and took it from me   

like a terrier a lady has asked one to hold for a moment

while she adjusts her stocking in the mirror of a weighing machine.   

But here it is winter, and wrong

to speak of other seasons as though they exist.   

Time has only an agenda

in the wallet at his back, while we

who think we know where we are going unfazed

end up in brilliant woods, nourished more than we can know

by the unexpectedness of ice and stars

and crackling tears. We’ll just have to make a go of it,

a run for it. And should the smell of baking cookies appease

one or the other of the olfactory senses, climb down   

into this wagonload of prisoners.

The meter will be screamingly clear then,

the rhythms unbounced, for though we came

to life as to a school, we must leave it without graduating   

even as an ominous wind puffs out the sails

of proud feluccas who don’t know where they’re headed,   

only that a motion is etched there, shaking to be free.

ELECTIVE INFINITIES

John Ashbery

Thirsty? They race across ampersands,
scrolling. He isn't sure it's his head.
There's a delay right now. Smoke backed up.
Ladies please remove hats.

It was all over by morning. The village idiot
was surprised to see us. "....thought your were in Normandy."
Like all pendulums we were surprised,
then slightly miffed at what seemed to be happening
back in the bushes. Keep your ornaments,
if that's what they are. Return to sender, arse.

At the intersection a statue of a policeman
was directing traffic. It seemed like a vacation,
halloween or something. Process
was the only real thing that happened.
We wove closer to the abyss, a maze of sunflowers.
The dauphin said to take our time.

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.

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

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

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

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

Bohor one, two.

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

The Complete Electronic Music of Iannis Xenakis.








LIFE IS A DREAM

John Ashbery

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

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

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

When I Get on My Knees and Lick Her Hand She Screams

    
For the first time in months a Thursday night Thursday Night Pints. We talked about Napoleon and rabies. The mind is weird, I said. Every year during the first two weeks of pollen's return I get slight allergy symptoms - my nose gets stuffed while I sleep, I blow technicolor snot in the morning - while my body adjusts to pollen then returns to normal. I know this. It happens every year. And I know that the odds that the cat that bit Napoleon had rabies are 100,000 to 1 and I know that even if the cat that bit Napoleon did have rabies the odds that rabies in Napoleon would have reached his salivary glands this soon are 1,000,000 to 1 and even if the rabies had reached his salivary glands he would either need to bite me or lick an open wound on me, which he hasn't, but when I blew my technicolor snot into a paper towel this morning I thought, fuck, rabies. L said, why not just get the shots for peace of mind? I might, I said, as much for others' peace of mind as my own.





      

• Mark Ames vs Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman over USAID.
• K asked, so are you really going to reengage with the clusterfuck? We had been talking about how all the NSA/Snowden noise has ceased now that the noise's value to Power has accrued to Power (as I and probably everyone who reads this blog predicted). The mind is weird, I said. Every year during the first two weeks of pollen's return I get slight allergy symptoms - my nose gets stuffed while I sleep, I blow technicolor snot in the morning - while my body adjusts to pollen then returns to normal. I know this. It happens every year. And I know that the odds that any action I take has any effect other than a self-congratulatory moral boost is a trillion to one, but when I blew my technicolor snot into a paper towel this morning I thought, fuck, fucking fine metaphors abound.
• This week in water.
• For those following the Napoleon story: the Animal Control officer cancelled his Friday morning visit to the house. I'm going to drive out to the new Animal Control headquarters in Redland (where Kobin Rlippel grew up, or One of Four in her Borglandru designation) and get much needed information.
• Hand of doom.
• Blasting opera forward.
• Heinlein, for those of you who do.
• Mark Strand is eighty today.
• What does poetry do? or: Ashbery, for those of you who do.
• Yes, I deleted last night's Ashbery post and post the youtube here:

EATING POETRY

Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

There is no happiness like mine.

I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.

Her eyes are sad

and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.

The light is dim.

The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,

their blond legs burn like brush.

The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.

When I get on my knees and lick her hand,

she screams.

I am a new man.

I snarl at her and bark.

I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

Lock Yourself in the Lugubrious Gondola

More new Fennesz. A brief Napoleon update - he's fine - then songs and poems (including another new John Ashbery poem below the Baker) only this Dead Blegsylvania today.







THE ENTHUSIASTS

John Ashbery

That building has won over everything.
Here in high school opportunities are numerous,
but what are they for?
You could live like a girl of thirteen
in a single dream,
quash outside solicitations,
go back to sleep every time,
wherever your suns take you.

This is outside, and remiss:
It takes tools to deploy the core of your dream,
face a common ford others have crossed too,
on Saratoga waters, now and again imbibing
notes of lemongrass and coconut.
I told him we don’t get anything from North Dakota.
Bilingual bullying was on the next floor.

We had the most beautiful morning and afternoon.
    We just had lunch with
Dean Pavlov’s proxy; the entire breeze,
right on the tabletop here.
They’re not going to sue their money,
accident waiting to happen, which you would need
    anyway.
Leonard doesn’t take himself for just anybody.

Ah, ça alors! Mais pas du tout!
A very good guide, no doubt,
bringing up fine images in the guts of the past.
Occupy it by dint of occupying it.
I was saying that to you when
plotting new frescoes:
It was a comestible kind of love.
Get in and learn something.

Go smack into Mrs. Duvet. The heart’s buildings—
simply ripping. Half a building up
(and we need many), lock yourself in
the lugubrious gondola. He was
just standing over there,
talking to them.








DISSONANCE ROYAL TRAVELLER

Barbara Guest

sound opens sound

shank of globe             strings floating out

                something like images are here

                opening up avenues to view a dome

       a distant clang reaches the edifice.

                              

                understanding what it means

                to understand music

       cloudless movement   beyond the neck’s reach

       an hypnotic lull in porcelain   water break   mimics

       tonality   crunch of salad under waddling

                a small seizure

                from monumentality

                does not come or go   with understanding

       the path will end

       birdhouse    of trembling cotton

       or dream   expelled it   

       parcel   on the landlocked moor.

                              

                              explaining music

       and their clothes entangled

       who walk into a puddle of minnows;

                      minnows in a bowl

       consonant with water.

the drifted footpad

       ambushed by reeds signals the listening

       oars.

                              music disappears into oars.

                              

       in the middle the world is brown;

       on the opposite side of the earth

       an aroma of scarlet.

       this accompanies our hearing music;

       the sleeve of heaven

       and the hoof of earth

       loosed from their garrison.

       dissonance may abandon miserere

       on bruised knee hasten to the idol.   

                              

       and what is consonance—the recluse—

       entering and exiting   

       as often as a monarch butterfly   

       touches a season;

       by accident grips the burning flowers.

       in the stops between terror

       the moon aflame on its plaza.

                              

       autumn of rippling wind

       and the noise of baskets

       smell of tin fists.

       and harsh fists   

       on the waterfall changing the season;

       the horse romps in flax

       a cardboard feature

       creating a cycle of flax.

               music imagines this cardboard

       horse in cardboard jacket

               flagrant the ragged grove

                              red summit red.

       dissonance royal traveller

                              altered the red saddle.                         

I Hate It When We're Made of Snot One Minute, Stone So Simple the Next

I still haven't heard from MOCO Animal Services (or whatever they call themselves). The vet is coming to the house today to remove Napoleon's abscess drains. I talked with his receptionist yesterday afternoon when she called to confirm the appointment, she said they haven't heard from MOCO Animal Services either. Planet sent me a link provided to her by The Boyfriend (who had to have a round of rabies vaccinations late last year when a bat got loose in his parents' house - it's now shots in the butt, not the nightmarish shots in the stomach of yesteryear) to the CDC webpage on rabies, it said confinement for cats in similar situations is ten days, not six months.

Further complications: we're planning on driving to Ohio on Sunday to spend four days with Planet. We'd arranged a cat-sitter. We're taking her out to dinner Wednesday night (it had been planned before the Napoleon crisis) and are going to tell her what little, misinformed, contradictory things we know and tell her if she doesn't want to risk a rabies infection, no matter how small the odds, we'll completely understand. Earthgirl says I can ask some of you reading this to make a daily visit to feed the other four and cautiously slide food into Napoleon but (a) I think Beth will be OK and still house-sit and (b) I don't want to ask you. Worse case scenario is Earthgirl goes out to Ohio while I stay home and then when she gets home I go out by myself.

• Non-governmental force multipliers. NGOs and neoliberalism.
• Everything you need to know about US foreign policy in one paragraph.
• The Quiet Coup: Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique—the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large.
• David Harvey interview.
• The Age of Insomniacs: Critics of the neoliberal world order are quickly marginalized or silenced by the new mediatainment systems. As Crary reports any questioning or discrediting of what is currently the most efficient means of producing acquiescence and docility, of promoting self-interest as the raison d’être of all social activity, is rigorously marginalized. To articulate strategies of living that would delink technology from a logic of greed, accumulation, and environmental despoliation merits sustained forms of institutional prohibition.
• Red Lines and Rat Lines. On Obama and Syria.
• False Flags and Imperial Facades. On the above.
• Some unsolicited social media advice for activists. (h/t)
• Interrogation.
• A last word on Mozilla.
• Lefebvre, for those of you who do.
• Is America finally ready for the literary wizard of the Hamptons? Gaddis, for those of you who do.
• Nixon, Noxin, Dioxin, Toxin.
• Donald Barthelme's book recommendations.
• Realism for everybody. More Barthelme.
• The time Man Forever and William Basinski collaborated.
• WFMU DJs been playing the fuck out of Perfect Pussy, I endorse the noise!

THE SPONGE OF SLEEP

John Ashbery

Why waver? He won’t stab me for
when we sat down widely pixillated
between the horizon and the lice.
We’re off to the sea, someone said.
Let’s direct it to us
and our various enjoyment. I hate it when
we’re made of snot one
minute, stone so simple the next.
I would think first,
and then we were there
sooner other than that.

Here’s the flooding group
as if there is
when I reached thirty.
What did Russia
(boxes on the road)…

All this could have been avoided if
we aren’t doing anything.
Serviceberry shot down by squirrels,
you don’t have to thank everybody.
The charm of abuse sings in ways we are not.
Or we can sit and travel, aimless ceremony.
I paint feet. Summer pants. A wave of translation
on the apples, like the friendly air out there.
If they do so, they do so disproportionately
to his three-year-old brother-in-law,
who patted the expats in a purgatorial whisper.
The inside of the crate had expanded exponentially
from carrying one load of artichokes.

Be one of those on whom nothing is lost, advises Henry.
Well, OK. I’m awake. No problem
that I can see, unless it’s running out of raw material,
like, his dog Jerry opted out of the transubstantiation process.
It was ever thus:

Cabochon pluots weighted down with
ananas en belle vue. They drank Salada tea
in a statement.
We just gotta keep that stranded one safe as before,
and getting out of here.
How far is the Old Log Inn?
I’d love to read it.
The woods are sorry for them.
Small rain will land somewhere.