The Local Minister Is Thinking of Moving to Holland, Exchanging His Old Ballads for Some Lingerie

Yes, updated from last night with added buttons and some links. There is a Student Employee Appreciation party today, colleagues have borrowed a button machine from Headquarters to use at the event. Guess what I made. Other than Planet and me I can't think of anyone who'd want a Siegfried, but let me know if you do, and soon, say noon Eastern Daylight Time Thursday, my access to Headquarters button machine is short!

If you'd rather have a Fleabus Dandelion or Planet Hand, that can be arranged too. They look better than these photos suggest.

UPDATE 10:15 AM: Fleabus 12, Siegfried 0. A predictable rout.

UPDATE 3:00 PM: Final score: Fleabus 16, Siegfried 2. Will borrow machine next week.

• May Day.
• May Day.
• David Harvey on May Day.
• What about communism?
• Be they race-bait gaming labor?
• Today in motherfucking cops.
• Please consider throwing Arthur the coins in your pocket.
• 258 Fake.
• Moving House.
• Josipovici and Handke, for those of you who do one or the other or both.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.

A VAGABOND

James Tate

A vagabond is a newcomer

in a heap of trouble.

He’s an eyeball at a peephole

that should be electrocuted.

He’s a leper in a textile mill

and likely to be beheaded, I mean,

given a liverwurst sandwich

on the break by the brook

where the loaves are sliced.

But he oughtn’t meddle

with the powder puffs on the golf links—

they have their own goats to tame,

dirigibles to situate.

He can act like an imbecile

if the climate is propitious,

a magnate of kidnap

paradising around the oily depot,

or a speck from a distant nebula

wishing to purchase a certain skyscraper ....

Well, if it’s permitted, then

let’s regulate him, let’s testify

against his thimble, and moderate his gloves

before they sew an apron.

The local minister is thinking

of moving to Holland, exchanging

his old ballads for some lingerie.

“Zatso!” says the vagabond.

Homeless, like wheat that tattletales

on the sermon, like wages swigged.

“Zatso, zatso, zatso!” cries the vagabond.

The minister reels under the weight

of his thumbs, the vagabond seems to have

jutted into his kernel, disturbed

his terminal core. Slowly, and with

trifling dignity, the minister removes

from his lapel his last campaign button:

Don’t Mess with Raymond, New Hampshire.


    

Second Floor Promises

As promised, a rendering of the 2nd floor of the house built by my maternal grandparents, memories sparked by Bartok's birthday. Click, yo, to enlarge. There are at least two people I felt an obligation to follow through at least with this floor. This is obviously not to scale, so obvious my incompetence at architectural drawing. I could do the basement easily enough but I've found the 3rd floor completely impossible, not only the physical layout of the floor but the secret universes the maze of attics lead to are utterly unmappable.

Here are the keys:

• A - Chair except at Giftmas; Giftmas tree goes there.
• B - Corner of house wrecked when car flew of Fellsburg Road into side of house.
• C - Broken Philco record player/radio console/cabinet - my favorite toy.
• D - Small china cabinet.
• Star - Where my grandfather, crippled by arthritis in his knees, sat staring out the window hour after hour day after day after day.
• E - Philmore refrigerator.
• F - Double-sink looking out window at vegetable garden
• G - White radio always tuned to KDKA.
• H - Bag of candy, never eaten, pink, chalky mint, think fat Necco Wafers.
• I - Bottles of Lemon Blend.
• J - Left side of hoosier had large, built-in, flour sifter.
• K - Green and white sliding davenport. Summers I would sit on davenport with my grandfather and listen to Pirates games while he rolled and smoked cigarettes out of a red Prince Albert can.
• L - Bathroom closet where a box of Chinese Checkers and a game of Racko were kept.
• M - Kitchen stove/oven. Pilot light needed lighting each time. Oven door swung left/right, not up/down.
• N - Dresser where my grandmother kept the Time Magazines and books on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution - the start of all this.
• O - Creepy wooden mothbally wardrobe.
• P - Secretary.
• Q - Clock on piano that was broke at 1:35 forever, now on my bookshelf in my bedroom.
• R - Bathtub - no shower, no hot water - all hot water in house had to be heated on stove.
• S - End table piled with back issue of Readers Digest.
• T - Notice, no TV.

The three of you who know this place send me additional 2nd floor notations if you'd like and I will add them. As for the 3rd floor, I'm still trying to get my head around its vast and tiny distances and the mysteries of the attics' labyrinth and where it leads to, I doubt I'll ever be able to ink it down.

UPDATE! I just realized Spock was born was born 83 years ago today.

I can't tell you how it pleases me that the thought of posting Fleabus as a stand alone is too slutty even for me.

As Soon as I Speak, I Speaks

Apparently Major League Soccer's subscription livestream service auto-renews because I was able to watch United lose another game in precisely the manner they've lost countless games since the dumb-luck run to the Eastern Conference final in 2012 without having to submit a credit card number. United losing: True, it's only two games and true, Toronto seems a much improved team, though when I say Toronto went out and signed Jermaine Defoe from the starting line-up of Spurs and Michael Bradley off the bench of Roma and United signed three defenders in wheelchairs cut by their teams and a striker everyone expects to be a major malcontent by July this is not to criticize United's front office and ownership. Or wait, yes it is.

>>Deleted additional bitching about United's front office and ownership<< I'll leave it as this: short-sighted cheap-ass motherfuckers across all levels from product on the field to treatment of season ticket holders. Instead of details have a weekend's worth of links.

• A prediction of intentionally-spawned scandal for Rand Paul.
• New David Harvey: But what is so striking about crises is not so much the wholesale reconfiguration of physical landscapes, but dramatic changes in ways of thought and understanding, of institutions and dominant ideologies, of political allegiances and processes, of political subjectivities, of technologies and organisational forms, of social relations, of the cultural customs and tastes that inform daily life. Crises shake our mental conceptions of the world and of our place in it to the very core. And we, as restless participants and inhabitants of this new emerging world, have to adapt, through coercion of consent, to the new state of things, even as we, by virtue of what we do and how we think and behave, add our two cents’ worth to the messy qualities of this world.
• Some motherfuckers, etc: Now, I do like this - all this death and destruction is your fault because your government, wholly independently of your opinion on the matter, refuses to drop high explosives on Damascus. There's something bracingly bullshitty about entirely accepting that "there is no appetite for putting military pressure on Assad" in the UK or the US, and then laying the blame for this on "kneejerk peaceniks" who have, as has been repeatedly and graphically demonstrated, no influence whatsoever on foreign policy. Whether the Brit stole this from Ghoul Kristol or Ghoul Kristol just gave the American version, who cares.

• Rat's Alley: The "Global War on Terror" may have been semantically erased by the propagandists of the Obama Administration, but on the ground, it is still going on -- and still spawning a multititude of malevolent consequences, as Patrick Cockburn details in a powerful series of articles. Cockburn's look at the historical record doesn't begin with 9/11, of course; the fatal alliance between Washington and the most retrograde and repressive forms of Islam -- which gave rise to the Terror War and its present reality -- go back several decades. [The first three parts of the series are here, here and here.]
• In defense of Fred Phelps.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• New Inquiry's Sunday links.
• The Dream's Navel.
• Yes, at least a dozen dozen times.
• My guarantee to you: blog a post named after a Guided by Voices song and post that song and I will link to it.
• The Creeley poem below put this Laurie Anderson song in my head. This is true: I really didn't know she was married to Lou Reed. I confess it still creeps me out.
• Guess what I was listening to last night (after enduring DS9 Season 1, Episode 11, featuring an aged Ferenghi's cackling orgasms - yo, this show sucks; friends keep telling me it's going to get better - Mr Alarum just reminded me that seasons 1 & 2 of Next Gen sucked too - but....).

THE PATTERN

Robert Creeley

As soon as   

I speak, I   

speaks. It

wants to   

be free but   

impassive lies

in the direction   

of its

words. Let

x equal x, x   

also

equals x. I

speak to   

hear myself   

speak? I

had not thought   

that some-

thing had such

undone. It   

was an idea   

of mine.

And If My Style Was Too Nostalgic and Where Were You When I Was Burning Alive, Nightingale?

Friend davidly gets mail:

We are contacting you as you are eligible to participate in the fan pre-sale for the "Before the Dawn" concerts in August & September 2014 at Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith 48 hours ahead of the general ticket sale on 28th March 2014.

Please visit www.eventim.co.uk at 9.30am on 26th March 2014, locate the show you’d like to attend, select the fan pre-sale from the drop-down menu and enter the unique access code below for your chance to purchase tickets to one of the shows:

Access code: xxxxxxxx

**ACCESS CODES ARE STRICTLY ONE USE ONLY AND SHOULD BE ENTERED AS DISPLAYED ABOVE IN LOWER CASE.  IF YOU LEAVE THE PAGE AND TRY TO USE THE CODE AGAIN IT WILL BE INVALID.**

**THE ACCESS CODE WILL BE INVALID IF YOU HAVE NOT RECEIVED THIS EMAIL DIRECTLY FROM KATEBUSH.COM**

**ALL NEW SIGNEES TO THE KATEBUSH.COM MAILING LIST FROM 00:00AM ON 1ST MARCH 2014 WILL NOT BE ELIGIBLE FOR PRE-SALE TICKETS**

This event is for fans only and the following rules are in place to ensure that tickets do not get sold on and fans do not pay a higher price for their tickets.

• Ticket purchases are limited to a maximum of 4 per order.  For example, you can try to purchase up to 4 tickets for just 1 of the 15 concerts, or 1 ticket for 4 separate shows.  All tickets MUST be purchased in the same transaction in order for the access code to remain valid.
• The name of the lead booker will be printed on each ticket. The name cannot be changed once the booking has been made.
• The lead booker will be asked to present ID to gain entry into the venue. Failure to adhere to the terms and conditions may result in the customer's order being void. There are no exceptions to this rule.
• If you are booking more than one ticket your guests must arrive at the concert at the same time as you. Failure to do so will result in the guests being turned away.
• Tickets cannot be resold or transferred under any circumstances. If the promoter reasonably believes this to be the case the barcode on the ticket will be voided, prohibiting entry to the concert.
• Age Restriction: 14+ (ALL UNDER 16's MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY AN ADULT)

As the number of tickets reserved is limited they will be allocated on a first-come first-served basis.  Sadly this means that not everyone receiving this offer has a guarantee of securing a ticket during the pre-sale, but anyone who doesn’t manage to get one will still be able to try again when general ticketsgo on sale at 9.30am 28th March 2014.Before The Dawn at London's Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith:

August:

Tuesday, 26th August
Wednesday, 27th August
Friday, 29th August
Saturday, 30th August

September:

Tuesday, 2nd September
Wednesday, 3rd September
Friday, 5th September
Saturday, 6th September
Tuesday, 9th September
Wednesday, 10th September
Friday, 12th September
Saturday, 13th September
Tuesday, 16th September
Wednesday, 17th September
Friday, 19th September

We hope to see you there.

Kindest regards,
The Fish People

• From The Guardian: Kate Bush will play her first series of shows since 1979, performing August and September in the UK. Bush will play 15 shows at London’s Eventim Apollo starting 26 August as part of her Before the Dawn series of shows. Announcing the news on her website on Friday, the singer said: “I hope you will be able to join us and I look forward to seeing you there.” Famously, Bush has only toured once before, during a six-week jaunt around Britain and mainland Europe. “By the end,” she subsequently recalled, “I felt a terrific need to retreat as a person, because I felt that my sexuality – which in a way I hadn’t really had a chance to explore myself – was being given to the world in a way which I found impersonal.” Theories to explain her absence from the tour circuit have included a fear of flying, perfectionism and the death of her lighting director, Bill Duffield, who was killed in an accident during her 2 April 1979 concert at Poole Arts Centre. In an interview with Mojo magazine in 2011, Bush said she’d also endured extreme exhaustion as a result of the tour. “It was enormously enjoyable. But physically it was absolutely exhausting.” “I still don’t give up hope completely that I’ll be able to do some live work,” she added, “but it’s certainly not in the picture at the moment because I just don’t quite know how that would work with how my life is now.”
• Not that we can afford to fly to London to see Kate Bush, but even if we could afford to fly to London to see Kate Bush the show dates coincide with (a) taking Planet back for the start of her senior year in college and (b) the start of the academic year for Earthgirl at her elementary school and (c) the three hardest weeks of my job at Hilltop. Fun to daydream though.
• davidly says he's gonna try for a ticket.
• Hopefully this all means a new album. Hopefully she enjoys this experience so she considers touring more. I doubt she'd ever tour Murka. Yurp yes, Murka no.

• Have I ever mentioned I love Kate Bush?
• Somebody posted a Kate Bush song yesterday I post here all the time, most recently for David Gilmour's birthday.
• Please consider throwing Arthur the coins in your pocket.
• Meanwhile at Hilltop. Not quite as dramatic as the discovery of a meth lab in the freshmen dorm a couple of years ago.
• Scenes from the Inhumanity Museum. From Gass' Middle C, which I am just now beginning, my first attempt thwarted a year ago by what was - Baal be taunted - a currently dormant reading slump.
• This is my favorite lazyass aarghfree post since the last until the next.
• Yes, the guy in the middle of the header is 83 today.
• Party animals.
• Adventures in time and space.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• It's probably Martha & the Muffins most known song. Not my favorite, not my least.

BOLERO

Gerald Stern

So one day when the azalea bush was firing

away and the Japanese maple was roaring I

came into the kitchen full of daylight and

turned on my son’s Sony sliding over the

lacquered floor in my stocking feet for it was

time to rattle the canisters and see what

sugar and barley have come to and how Bolero

sounds after all these years and if I’m loyal

still and when did I have a waist that thin?

And if my style was too nostalgic and where

were you when I was burning alive, nightingale?   

21

Holiest Day of Egoslavia. Happy Birthday, Sweetie.

Also too, a birthday card from the first human not me or Earthgirl or a nurse or a doctor to hold Planet.

Oh, below the song, have three dozen of my favorite three Planet photos of Fleabus:







THE WRITER

Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

How Strange They Arrive at All, Nights on Planet Earth

• Tomorrow is the Holiest Day of Egoslavia, so links today (friends have stirred) and then not again until the weekend at the earliest, though I'll add through the afternoon as good ones are found. Speaking of the Holiest Day of Egoslavia, the above is my favorite of many favorites of Planet photos of Fleabus.
• Between popular Democratic uprising and Fascist putsch.
• Game theory and the Ukraine debacle.
• Here's Frances' post on the legal problems of a friend. It was taken down for a few hours yesterday, amended slightly to please the friend's lawyer.
• The fundamental problem with US News college rankings.
• There are two kinds of novelists?
• Bleggalgazing note: it's quite a competition between a spambot my stat-program says is in Tel Aviv and a spambot in Novosibirsk to generate thousands of pings in the past 24 hours AND countless comments that make it through the squiggles meant to deter them. 
• It's gonna be weird when the late 90s are cool again.
• Mimesis and The Lego Movie.
• The Charles Pierce column you would expect on the William Kristol column you would expect.
• Mimesis.
• The Boy with Spyrograph Eyes, now on sale! Dave, the paypal link isn't working! (and it works on other sites for me).
• Lispector and Ruefle!
• Tu Fu watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake.

A LITTLE TOOTH

Thomas Lux

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and
rue nothing. You did, you loved, your
feet are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.







NIGHTS ON PLANET EARTH

Campbell McGrath

Heaven was originally precisely that: the starry sky, dating back to the earliest Egyptian texts, which include magic spells that enable the soul to be sewn in the body of the great mother, Nut, literally "night," like the seed of a plant, which is also a jewel and a star. The Greek Elysian fields derive from the same celestial topography: the Egyptian "Field of Rushes," the eastern stars at dawn where the soul goes to be purified. That there is another, mirror world, a world of light, and that this world is simply the sky—and a step further, the breath of the sky, the weather, the very air—is a formative belief of great antiquity that has continued to the present day with the godhead becoming brightness itself: dios/theos (Greek); deus/divine/diana (Latin); devas (Sanskrit); daha (Arabic); day (English).

—Susan Brind Morrow, Wolves and Honey

1

Gravel paths on hillsides amid moon-drawn vineyards,

click of pearls upon a polished nightstand

soft as rainwater, self-minded stars, oboe music

distant as the grinding of icebergs against the hull

of the self and the soul in the darkness

chanting to the ecstatic chance of existence.

Deep is the water and long is the moonlight

inscribing addresses in quicksilver ink,

building the staircase a lover forever pauses upon.

Deep is the darkness and long is the night,

solid the water and liquid the light. How strange

that they arrive at all, nights on planet earth.

2

Sometimes, not often but repeatedly, the past invades my dreams in the form of a familiar neighborhood I can no longer locate,

a warren of streets lined with dark cafés and unforgettable bars, a place where I can sing by heart every song on every jukebox,

a city that feels the way the skin of an octopus looks pulse-changing from color to color, laminar and fluid and electric,

a city of shadow-draped churches, of busses on dim avenues, or riverlights, or canyonlands, but always a city, and wonderful, and lost.

Sometimes it resembles Amsterdam, students from the ballet school like fanciful gazelles shooting pool in pink tights and soft, shapeless sweaters,

or Madrid at 4AM, arguing the 18th Brumaire with angry Marxists, or Manhattan when the snowfall crowns every trash-can king of its Bowery stoop,

or Chicago, or Dublin, or some ideal city of the imagination, as in a movie you can neither remember entirely nor completely forget,

barracuda-faced men drinking sake like yakuza in a Harukami novel, women sipping champagne or arrack, the rattle of beaded curtains in the back,

the necklaces of Christmas lights reflected in raindrops on windows, the taste of peanuts and their shells crushed to powder underfoot,

always real, always elusive, always a city, and wonderful, and lost. All night I wander alone, searching in vain for the irretrievable.

3

In the night I will drink from a cup of ashes and yellow paint.

In the night I will gossip with the clouds and grow strong.

In the night I will cross rooftops to watch the sea tremble in a dream.

In the night I will assemble my army of golden carpenter ants.

In the night I will walk the towpath among satellites and cosmic dust.

In the night I will cry to the roots of potted plants in empty offices.

In the night I will gather the feathers of pigeons in a honey jar.

In the night I will become an infant before your flag.

Clapping 123123

Re-posting as fresh Monday morning last night's post (with links and poem added):

Sunday evening is the stupidest time to post and certainly the worst time to beg (I've heard Sunday night is the biggest stupidass soap opera night on TV), but WFMU has just started it's marathon and I need you give them money for me. I can't imagine not having this resource - I - I'll try not to badger the fuck out of you. I also need you give them money for you; you either know why and would be an ingrate not to give or you need find out why and not be an ingrate once you do.







All four songs in this post were culled from four different shows from the past week (Storck, Bethany, Berger, Davidson). No, I couldn't wait till morning, a chance to be a slut for more than just me? I will post these songs again in the morning as a fresh post (with the template below filled in, a new title - a line stolen from a poem - and this section rewritten) unless someone comments, in which case I'll find four more songs from four different shows. Hint.

Added Monday morning: No one took the hint. No one read the post Sunday night.

• The making of capitalist patriarchy: an interview with Silvia Federici.
• The political use of extreme poverty.
• Use Politics and Prose instead of Amazon when ordering books.
• On hording books. (UPDATE! Hoarding, not hording: see comments)
• UPDATE! By DJ request I'm twitter-bumping the post. They need the money.
• DC United has a new shirt sponsor, Leidos, a gov't contractor. Can't wait to hear what fucks they are.
• Gaithersburg! Creepy as Fuck!
• You got good taste.
• Mandl's Marathon DJ CD cover!
• What to do with pleasure.

BEASTGARDEN

Lucy Ives

first garden

Beastgarden.

second garden

Bees go mad on late summer evenings, should

People stray from their jobs towards water

Beastgarden.

third garden

Who makes the rented red boat's

Oars turn

Who is the younger one always

Turning up

Who professes to be better because

He is just looking

Who says he is worse off as

He cannot look

Beastgarden.

fourth garden

The unicycle girl, thin

Like one with a sexual problem,

Goes through

The Schlosspark. This follows:

Father rolling his eyes

Beastgarden.

fifth garden

The man from Manchester

Has my breast in his hand

These are funny

They don't do anything do they

Being burnt by a fire I say

Beastgarden.

sixth garden

Similarly, if only

You grasped some

Titanic misery or a

Love like an old man's

Beastgarden.

seventh garden

Where were we

A ballroom competition goes on

A yellow satin bikini

A fuchsia floor-length are

Dancing; an audience is

Drinking, clapping 1 2 3 1 2 3

Beastgarden.

Conflagrations Leap Out of Every Poor Furnace

Wasn't going to post links today but discovered this morning that blogfriends have new content and I want to bump them while the links are fresh (and before the weekend Blegsylvanian deadness):

• Tarzie reviews Pierre's latest acquisition.
• Don Durito bleggalgazes, debuts the new site's template.
• Zombie on Turdwaffle.
• Greyhoos on X. Serendipitously, yesterday was Billy Zoom's birthday.
• :-P on Rush, wants to hear about bands you love that critics hate.
• Tom has Thoreau, for those of you who do.
• Mark posts links to RIPs Mavis Gallant.
• Abonilox cleans house.
• Me, today's W.H. Auden birthday post.
• Prunella's latest playlist.
• Here, my favorite X song:

Of Course You Lack Maps of the Underworld, There Are No Maps of the Underworld

Maps fascinate me, always have, the above one of the many maps SeatSix gave me this past Giftmas, a 1951, pre-interstate Maryland/Virginia/West Virginia/Delaware gas station road map. I did not know the current Maryland 45 north from Baltimore towards York PA was once signed US 111. Also note that what is now US 40 between Frederick and Hagerstown was Alt US 40 in 1951, what is now ALT US 40 then US 40. The Giftmas before the most recent SeatSix gave me a giant map on MOCO circa 1830, it's gorgeous, as soon as I figure out how to get it home I'll get it out of our parents' basement. Anyway, there seem to me a recent spate of articles about mapping, here's another. I gladly admit I look for map-shit, I admit it might be my imagination, this recent spate, but I'm curious as to why (I suspect it's new mapping technology in conjunction with the expanding police state, yo) in all the places I normally look there's more on map-yap than usual.

• Who are the deserving rich? Rentiers, apparently.
• I am fully aware that as a homeowner in MOCO this is in my self-interest: Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) joined Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) and Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D) of Baltimore to sign an agreement that will help solidify the county’s plans to build the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence in Rockville. “We want Maryland to be the epicenter for cybersecurity in the United States,” Mikulski told Capital News Service. As is the new policy, I note the irony vis a vis my yodeling hypocrisy but spare everyone, and by everyone I mean me, the gratuitous aargh, and it's such a great sentence from the Patron Saint of Fort Meade.
• Yes, I know cybersecurity is more than my being surveilled, though neither are exclusive from the other ever.
• Police state.
• The long slow surrender of American Liberals. Subscription required, I'm afraid, but I recommend subscribing to Harpers, and it's cheap!
• I certainly don't want to imply that I am not one of the surrenderers. This blog exists to pick my scabs.
• Three of you plus me say FLEABUS! so I'll work on creating more headers.

• On the Winter Olympics. I've acquaintances apparently invested in the Men's Ice-Soccer tournament, but in more important and happy soccer news, both Man City and Arsenal are down each by two away goals to Barca and Bayern Munich respectively. Lordy, let Arsenal crash, let Chelsea win the tournament and The Premier League by one point, may Arsene Wenger be caught live on camera when his head explodes from the mocking of the crowing Special One.
• Why the German away kit is green.
• I've been asked by a loved one and a few friends recently to consider reactivating a Facebook account for ease of communications, and no, not passing a moral judgment, it's just not for me for all the same reasons that 90% of the people I know (and knew - the ghosts that would appear asking me to be their friend was creepy) don't know about this shitty blog. I could pretend it's Facebook's business ethics or something for the reason I'm not on Facebook, but for you to read that sentence I'd have to type it into the dashboard of a Google product.
• Murakami's latest out in English in August.
• At the laundromat. Tom's latest.
• Catapult.
• Aphex Twin. It's been a few months, I'll get myself another cascade soon.
• Not quite sure how I missed the lastest The Fall release, but better late than....

THE WORKFORCE

James Tate

Do you have adequate oxen for the job?

No, my oxen are inadequate.

Well, how many oxen would it take to do an adequate job?

I would need ten more oxen to do the job adequately.

I'll see if I can get them for you.

I'd be obliged if you could do that for me.

Certainly. And do you have sufficient fishcakes for the men?

We have fifty fishcakes, which is less than sufficient.

I'll have them delivered on the morrow.

Do you need maps of the mountains and the underworld?

We have maps of the mountains but we lack maps of the underworld.

Of course you lack maps of the underworld,

there are no maps of the underworld.

And, besides, you don't want to go there, it's stuffy.

I had no intention of going there, or anywhere for that matter.

It's just that you asked me if I needed maps. . . .

Yes, yes, it's my fault, I got carried away.

What do you need, then, you tell me?

We need seeds, we need plows, we need scythes, chickens,

pigs, cows, buckets and women.

Women?

We have no women.

You're a sorry lot, then.

We are a sorry lot, sir.

Well, I can't get you women.

I assumed as much, sir.

What are you going to do without women, then?

We will suffer, sir. And then we'll die out one by one.

Can any of you sing?

Yes, sir, we have many fine singers among us.

Order them to begin singing immediately.

Either women will find you this way or you will die

comforted. Meanwhile busy yourselves

with the meaningful tasks you have set for yourselves.

Sir, we will not rest until the babes arrive.

Theme Song January 2014

This Time I&#39;m Not Going to Say a Thing about Deity

Saw all three and petted two of the ferals yesterday afternoon after Sunday morning's catfights. MomCat - she's the cat in the banner above - has not sat in my lap since she did once a few months ago but runs tail-up to me and head-butts my shins. Her son Frankie is a coward, her son Napoleon has me completely trained, under the chin first, then ears, I said at a special Sunday Night Edition of Thursday Night Pints, all three of us busy in our own ways during the past week and busy possibly through November, so. I didn't realize I'd have to run a sobriety check point on the way home, said L, noting the major presence of Metro Police in Georgetown at six o'clock. A cop said, L said, when I asked him what's with all the cops, cop said always after <Racist Slurs'> games, lots of DUIs. K asked, as replays of the game ran on TVs around the bar as we sat down, what's with the <Racist Slur> uniforms, why don't they match the helmets? I said, I think they play a home game a year in the true burgundy but I thought they usually wear it with the old burgundy spear helmet. For the record, the Racial Slurs were wearing their standard darker-than-red but brighter-than-burgundy helmets with the Indian-profile logo on the side but minus the yellow stripe that runs down the middle. K said, you notice this shit? L snorted, noticed? He has a theory! True! I said, buy me a pint and I'll tell you.

• The above two photos, long-timers can vouch, is Fleabus shot by Planet, once upon a blog every day had a Fleabus photo. I didn't ask and it didn't even occur to me to ask for new photos and it didn't occur to her this past unexpected week. All's better. 
• Fleabus is best cat ever. She has to be nine, ten, we can't remember, she might be eleven, the best cat ever. Click tag Ask Fleabus for more photos. For a lot more, click tag Ask Fleabus at old joint.
• Planet sends these winter-housing ideas for your feral cats.
• I said, I think Tiny Danny Snyder said, change the helmet from norm but keep the Indian-profile logo because I met this past week with NFL administrative assistant Goodell and I want to tell the world FUCK YOU! it's the <Racist Slurs'> now and forever for there is no profit in rebranding.
• Someone with skills, please photoshop for me Tiny Danny Snyder as a Ferengi. Tiny Damon Snyder. Join me in calling the local helmetball team the Ferengi.
• Who the fuck uses stupidass Star Trek allusion?

• Modern violence, resistance, calculus of revolution.
• The downward arc of the American dream.
• Another brick in the wall.
• The New Inquiry's Sunday readings.
• Also saw and heard on the bar's TVs an add for some high definition home television product that used Dead Boys' Sonic Reducer as background music. Shoot me.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Kafka, for those of you who do.
• It's been a while, but luckily for both of us I woke up with Sea and Cake in my head!

ACCEPTANCE SPEECH

Dean Young

This time I’m not going to say a thing   

about deity. It’s not the blizzard,

it’s three days after. Trinkle from thawing   

roofs, ruined crocus pronging through.   

Ruin, I promise, won’t be mentioned again.   

Trees, sure, still begging in the road, split

to the bole but this isn’t about the chainsaw.   

A pruning saw will have to do. The puppets   

aren’t hanging themselves in each other’s   

strings. Everyone’s easily identifiable

beneath the funny mask. Somewhere in Oregon,

Mary has another month to go, she’s comfortable   

in any position for thirty-five seconds. Lulu,   

we know you’re in there but no one’s   

blaming you for reluctance to come out.   

Poetry is the grinding of a multiplicity   

throwing off sparks, wrote Artaud

and look what that got him: toothlessness

and shock therapy. Your dad, who has the worst   

teeth of anyone I know, once ordered eggplant   

in a steakhouse. Do not order eggplant   

in a steakhouse turned out to be more   

than aphoristicly true. Do not spend a lot   

of time in an asylum writing cruel poems   

if you can help it, one Artaud is enough.   

In Kandinsky’s Blue 2, there’s a shape   

in two rows of shapes that seems okay   

although to the right’s a capsized canoe   

full of mathematicians, to the left a bow   

about to launch the killer astrolabe.   

By what manner is the soul joined to

the body? How about climbing a ladder   

of fire? No thanks. On TV, a rhino’s

lying in some red dust, munching a thorn.   

You wouldn’t think he could ejaculate

for half an hour straight, but you’d be wrong.   

See that cloud, it might weigh 10,000 pounds   

which is about average for a cloud.   

Happy birthday, happy birthday to you.

Tony says Mary is always writing about the sacred.   

Talcum powder, binoculars, this decimated   

planet. I know, a promise has been made   

but Tony’s been sick for years and no one   

knows with what. Flax oil, bark tinctures,   

corticosteroids. He’s not exactly someone   

you’d trust to drive your car, but still.

Something awful’s coming, isn’t it?   

Would it help if I said Amen? 

&amp; if that&#39;s not enough (he says to himself in the voice of a black-and-white actor whose name is a moth that keeps avoiding the tip of his flaming tongue) to bring you home, well, there it is again, already exhausted by your efforts to make it comfortable enough to stay

• Caught last night and tweeted out. What's worse, that subhead, that Alexander says it aware of the irony, that he says it unaware of the irony?
• My apologies, but I've re-enabled the spam-blocker in comments. What was funny at a couple of dozen a day has now turned into hundreds a day - Friday and Saturday past over three hundred - and fuck that. Thanks to everyone for their comments, I understand if between the word verification to stop spambots and mediation to stop trolls you say fuckit.
• Shutdownkabuki in three paragraphs.
• Some impromptu thoughts on Left unity.
• All of you who've questioned Greenwald's motives, for what it's worth, I'm feeling you.
• A heat vampire in search of a movie deal.
• Hey, Susan's back from her hiatus!
• Was going to post three photos of Confederate flags currently leading three different articles on Salon as of 8:00 AM EDT Sunday 10/13/13 and write something about it, but fuck that every single day but especially on a Sunday of a three day weekend when nobody reads this blog, so have links, songs, a poem, and a photo of my cats:

• Purple Line!
• Maggie's weekend links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekend links.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• I bought Evan Dara's Last Scrapbook when it came out in 1995 and - this is true  - Katie ate it, gnawed a corner of print off, slobbered all over the rest, and I forgot about it.
• Ungaretti: Sunset.
• An open letter to The Poetry Foundation, a resource I, in full disclosure, use constantly, consider invaluable. I hate research, think I have to here.
• A confession of love for alt-country.
• Alt-country? Thanks! for programming Sunday's music. LOTS of great alt-country can be found on Meredith Ochs' playlists!

JUST ANOTHER PARADIGM SHIFT

Paul Grant

Just a shadow. Hardly that. But audible.

Coming out of the woods, whispering

Happily Ever After.

                          Even in that light—

stars with the skeletons of animals

and old friends—

                       visible

to the eye behind the one always

left open on the east side of the house,

downhill. Where the coffee trees

and hemp and the graves of old dogs lie,

buried themselves in leaves and left

to the sputtering wind of memory.

& if that's not enough (he says

to himself in the voice of a black-and-white

actor whose name is a moth that keeps

avoiding the tip of his flaming tongue)

to bring you home, well, there

it is again,

              already exhausted

by your efforts to make it

comfortable

enough to stay. Impatient,

                                   already headed

back down into the woods, whispering

Once Upon A Time . . .

The Semi-Lust of Intentional Indifference

There was a time when every post on this blog had a Fleabus photo. Here's an article about Maryland Tea Partiers wanting western Maryland to secede from Maryland. I can think of six primary and dozens of secondary snarkassholistic responses (including, wearily, this one) to bump the story, but fuck that. As Mr Abonilox told me last night as we discussed our respective cases of damnlessness, the "new zeitgeist is mental exhaustion resulting in passive acceptance of the fucked-uppedness of everything." And yes, as Jim noted yesterday in comments, "This doesn't feel like the standard aarglebaargle©®. Feels like something's afoot: change?" Here? Yes, no, I don't know. Earthgirl and Planet and me are fine, and these are the hardest weeks of work of the year and they always beat the fuck out of my mood, but here, and by extension the urge to wear colors and waive flags and participate in rituals like the indoctrinated bee I am? Yes, no, I don't know. I know I'm trying to write about it, so far twenty or so rejected first drafts. I tried link-farming last night - it's the links that drive the traffic here, the angrier and clusterfuckier the links the greater the traffic - but that sucked so I decided to write about why greater traffic here means something to me though suddenly, surprisingly, not so much, decided fuck that too, read 150 pages of Coover's Origin of the Brunists which I'm rereading in anticipation of the release of the sequel, best, most focused novel-reading in what seems like years. I put the book down when my eyes insisted, thought about writing about reading well, thought fuck that too. Strange days. More later, or not. Will I write about things tonight? Nope! tonight with Earthgirl and Hamster and Mr Alarum and Richard I'm seeing Pere Ubu, and while I'm not as excited as once I would have been I still have a pulse so at least I know my case of damnlessness isn't thoroughly comprehensive.






THE RAIN

Robert Creeley

All night the sound had   

come back again,

and again falls

this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself

that must be remembered,   

insisted upon

so often? Is it

that never the ease,   

even the hardness,   

of rain falling

will have for me

something other than this,   

something not so insistent—

am I to be locked in this

final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,   

lie next to me.

Be for me, like rain,   

the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-

lust of intentional indifference.

Be wet

with a decent happiness.

What the...?

Lordy, you only think you've seen bleggalgazing. What's happened in the 48 hours since this blog went dark? After there, tell me, knowing by the end of this sentence that I cannot change anything about the appearance of this blog, the colors, the fonts, the width, the button is dead dead dead, do you prefer the dark over the light? As for the story of how and how I need reevaluate everything I held to be true, tomorrow.

UPDATE! After twitter-polling past thirty minutes, GREEN is winning 7-0.

UPDATE! Funniest last two hours of my life since the last until the next. 

There&#39;s a Jolt, Quasi-Electric, When One of Our Myths Reverts to Abstraction

 

• Went to sleep with that Sonic Youth song in my head.
• That novel I posted a photo of yesterday? It failed me, I didn't fail it, I gave a hundred pages, fifty more than I should have because I thought it was my fault the novel sucked, it wasn't, the novel sucked. Baal save me from first novels written in the first person in which every character in every dialogue competes to be the smartest and most cuttingly ironically detached social observer. Sure, it's like twitter, or Stringtown, or your staff lounge, it's me, doesn't mean I want to read it. I can't tell you how liberating it is to know in this one case with this one novel it wasn't me at fault. Best SHAZAM! that's happened to me since the last until the next. An unshackling.
• We talked about trolls last night at Thursday Night Pints. Analog trolls, digital trolls, trolls at work, trolls in real life, trolls in Stringtown. The trolls we are, to others, to ourselves. There were details in the stories I can't talk about (analog trolls) and details in the stories I could talk about (digital trolls) but only the first is interesting, the second, fuck that. The history of trolling - there's always been trolling - and technological innovations in trolling. Fuckwads in our lives, how we can avoid being fuckwads in return. And fail.
• Contained selves: In the machinery of social media, none of this experience need be particularly transgressive to be felt as transformative. Posting videos of one’s cat is sufficient to tremble the network. The contradictions and intensities and dangers of attempting to write the truth about oneself are made accessible to anyone with a Tumblr, and at the same time, new resources other than opaque language are readily available to convey affect on social-media sites. These resources (gifs, links, images, likes, screen grabs, serial selfies, cut-and-paste collages, etc.) can seem to express the self without the same limits brought about by the imprecision or, maybe more often, the overprecision of one’s own words, which come from some posited central location of the “I.” That “I” is a transcendental trap, binding one to the posited position of the speaking subject.

• Into the Darkness? Silber's bleggal history, +
• Branding strategies for the viscous phallic-monster.
• Repercussions.
• Joe Fucking Biden calling Latin American presidents, telling them they only *think* they know what a motherfucking asshole America can be, so remember your fucking place.
• Design as virus #16.
• A road I drive on nearly every day.
• BRT!
• The history of English in ten minutes.
• Bleggalgazing.
• Easy.
• Ohio River. This is true: The Ohio is the bigger river when it merges with the Mississippi, it should be the Ohio River that flows through New Orleans.
• Why we abandom books.
• Notes on Auden.
• When uniforms go wrong.
• Return of one of the dullest debates ever.
• The Transparent Man.
• Why we abandon blogs. In the works.
• Simic interview.
• Woke up this morning with This Heat in my head:

UPPER WORLD

Rae Armantrout

If sadness
is akin to patience

                            we're back!


Pattern recognition
was our first response

to loneliness.

Here and there were like
one place.

But we need to triangulate
for someone to show.


*

There's a jolt, quasi-electric,
when one of our myths
reverts to abstraction.

Now we all know
every name's Eurydice,
briefly returned
from blankness

and the way back
won't bear scrutiny.

High voices
over rapid-pulsing synthesizers
inton, "without you"---

which is soothing.

We prefer meta-significance:

the way the clouds exchange
white scraps
in glory.

No more wishes.

No more bungalows
behind car-washes
painted the color of
swimming pools.