Starts Again Always in Henry's Ears the Little Cough Somewhere, an Odor, a Chime, or: Born Ninety-Eight Years Ago Today

DREAM SONG 133

John Berryman
    

As he grew famous - ah, but what is fame? -
he lost his old obsession with his name,
things seemed to matter less,
including the fame - a television team came
from another country to make a film of him
which did not him distress:

he enjoyed the hard work & he was good at that,
so they all said - the charming Englishmen
among the camera & the lights
mathematically wandered in his pub & livingroom
doing their duty, as too he did it,
but where are the delights

of long-for fame, unless fame makes him feel easy?
I am cold & weary, said Henry, fame makes me feel lazy,
yet I must do my best.
It doesn't matter, truly. It doesn't matter truly.
It seems to be solely a matter of continuing Henry
voicing & obsessed.

DREAM SONG 105

As a kid I believed in democracy: I
'saw no alternative' - teaching at Big Place I ah
put it in practice:
we'd time for one long novel: to a vote -
Gone With the Wind they voted: I crunched 'No"
and we sat down with War & Peace.

As a man I believed in democracy (nobody
ever learns anything): only one lazy day
my assistant, called James Dow,
& I were chatting, in a failure of meeting of minds,
and I said curious, 'What are your real politics?'
'Oh, I'm a monarchist.'

Finishing his dissertation, in Political Science.
I resign. The universal contempt for Mr. Nixon,
whom I never liked but who
alert & gutsy served us years under a dope,
since dynasty K swarmed in. Let's have a King
maybe, before a few mindless votes.

• The required litany: John Berryman was born 98 years ago today. I was 21 when Pary Gittenger, an English teacher at Montgomery College, Rockville, loaned me his copy of Dream Songs and changed my life. Thank you, Pary.
• STREAM THE NEW NECKS!
• 44 explicit points on creating a better world?
• Let's get this class war started?
• The coercive power of capitalism?
• You want full communism?
• Armed, brutal, cowardly.
• The state as lover from hell.
• Who's winning the internet?
• This is how big a dope I am: I post Jack Spicer, Nurse w Wound, and John Fahey, announce it on twitter, think EVERYONE will go HOLYFUCK! - I mean, Jack Spicer! Nurse w Wound! John Fahey! - and am surprised as always and stupidly disappointed when nobody - nobody - clicks through.
• Prunella was just in Oberlin too.
• Lemming tree.
• Szymborska, for those of you who do and those of you who should.
• In which Dracula is a character in Bolano's 2666.
• Yes, I know I missed Gubaidulina's birthday yesterday. Lots later today and/or tomorrow.

DREAM SONG 29

John Berryman

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart   

só heavy, if he had a hundred years

& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time   

Henry could not make good.

Starts again always in Henry’s ears

the little cough somewhere, an odor, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind   

like a grave Sienese face a thousand years

would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,   

with open eyes, he attends, blind.

All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;   

thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,

end anyone and hacks her body up

and hide the pieces, where they may be found.

He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.   

Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.

Nobody is ever missing.

Am I Not Your Animal?

That's Planet's cow, I said, showing the above photo to Thursday Night Pinters on my iPhone. It's going in our front yard after we uHaul it from Ohio over the mountains in December, best garden statuary ever, it'll look great next to the red reflecting ball I'm getting Earthgirl for Giftmas. K said, Planet needs to get it to an all white depth-crunching studio to really capture the negative space. I said, we'll do snow this winter, provided we don't die this weekend via Sandy, the androgynously-named hurricane. Is it a boy or a girl? Of course we scraped scabs bloody re: motherfuckingly motherfuckful motherfucking POTUS 12, our disgust, our surprise at our disgust, our disgust at our surprise, what motherfucking rubes we are, were we always, must we have been? We don't know. We talked about Berryman, how we daydreamed of being a giant but knew, know, we weren't, aren't, we who compete to be top tier interpreters of giants. L said, so, Roxy Music tomorrow, yes? No, said K, I mean yes, but a Julie Doiron cascade too please. Nope, said D, who follows me on twooter, Lambchop. Maybe, I said. Soon. Yup.

• Monsters and their sycophants.
• Mordor, orcs, pigs, capitalism.
• The Reds under Romney's bed. (h/t) 
• Robert Reich thinks you're stupid, will write the same column in 2014 and 2016 and... 
• Fuck Robert Reich.
• Lawrence O'Donnell (whoever the hell he is) urges you to vote third party unless you live somewhere your vote may matter.
• An honest question: Why isn't the Obama campaign and the DNC screaming SCOTUS! SCOTUS! SCOTUS! 
• Copied/pasted from Naked Capitalism: Disposition matrix: “A paramilitary spy agency empowered to kill in secret via remote control. What could go wrong?” … Disposition matrix: “”It really is like swatting flies. We can do it forever easily and you feel nothing. But how often do you really think about killing a fly?” (CFR) … Disposition matrix: “Like last year’s NY Times piece that first detailed the murder racket being run directly out of the White House, the new Washington Post story is replete with quotes from ‘senior Administration officials’ who have obviously been authorized to speak. Once again, this is a story that Obama and his team WANT to tell.” … Disposition matrix: “[T]he government wants Americans to know all about the horrors. It is increasingly eager to discuss its programs and to describe how it goes about murdering ever greater numbers of people. The government does this so that Americans become accustomed to the murders, precisely so that Americans regard the murders as a matter of routine, everyday business.” … Disposition matrix: “In response to the Post story, Chris Hayes asked: “If you have a ‘kill list’, but the list keeps growing, are you succeeding?” The answer all depends upon what the objective is” (cf. self-licking ice cream cone). … Disposition matrix: “A bureaucratized paramilitary killing program that targets people far from any battlefield is not just unlawful, it will create more enemies than it kills.” … Disposition matrix: “When the president kills you with a drone strike, that means you are a terrorist.” … Disposition matrix: “If politicians can get away with not knowing what a ‘kill list’ is, which has been prominently featured on the front page of The New York Times, who’s guessing they’ll be able to plead ignorance about something as bureaucratically innocuous-sounding as ‘disposition matrix’?” … Disposition matrix: “[T]he NCTC is also the government outfit in charge of crafting a ‘disposition matrix’ to oversee the management and institutionalization of the US government’s extrajudicial assassinations — a power the Obama administration asserts it can (without due process) apply to US citizens as well as foreigners.” … Disposition matrix: “Should he win the election in two weeks, Romney will inherit an institutionalized, bureaucratic machine for using lethal robots to target and kill suspected terrorists and their allies. Killing Osama bin Laden was a one-time event; this ‘Disposition Matrix’ is Barack Obama’s real national-security legacy.” 

• Of course Romney's an asshole.
• Of course Romney's a piece of shit who'll say anything he thinks serves his ambition. I've never suggested otherwise.
• Of course Ayn Rand was a stunted adolescent.
• Greens and science.
• Oh dear, there's a 75% chance I'm gonna be fucked by Sandy!
• Oh deer, there's a 1 in 114 chance I'll hit a deer.
• ICC! growing 3% a month!
• Your Frederick headline of the day! Will be my neighbor to the left once we've installed the cow in the front yard.
• Objecting to irregardless is futile.
• Something seemed funny about Copa America 16, and then I remembered Copa America is played the year after a World Cup, in an odd-numbered year, and yes, there will be a regular Copa America in 2015, 2016 is a special Copa America, presumably about testing the market in the northern hemisphere, and cool, I understand, it sours me a bit, but irregardless I'll watch. 
• WCW poem. Not about Arn Anderson or Tully Blanchard.
• Merwin's Berryman.
• Josipovici, for those of you who do.
• Hey, for whatever reason I've a large Robbie Basho gap in my musical files - suggestions where to start solicited please.
• Oh! John Fahey too, please.
• Strange, heavy psychedelic guitar shreddage.

TO THE ANGELBEAST

Eduardo C Corral

All that glitters isn't music.

Once, hidden in tall grass,
I tossed fistfuls of dirt into the air:
doe after doe of leaping.

You said it was nothing
but a trick of the light. Gold
curves. Gold scarves.

Am I not your animal?

You'd wait in the orchard for hours
to watch a deer
break from the shadows.

You said it was like lifting a cello
our of its black case.

Fainting with Interest, I Hungered Back

DREAM SONG 133

John Berryman
    

As he grew famous - ah, but what is fame? -
he lost his old obsession with his name,
things seemed to matter less,
including the fame - a television team came
from another country to make a film of him
which did not him distress:

he enjoyed the hard work & he was good at that,
so they all said - the charming Englishmen
among the camera & the lights
mathematically wandered in his pub & livingroom
doing their duty, as too he did it,
but where are the delights

of long-for fame, unless fame makes him feel easy?
I am cold & weary, said Henry, fame makes me feel lazy,
yet I must do my best.
It doesn't matter, truly. It doesn't matter truly.
It seems to be solely a matter of continuing Henry
voicing & obsessed.

DREAM SONG 105

As a kid I believed in democracy: I
'saw no alternative' - teaching at Big Place I ah
put it in practice:
we'd time for one long novel: to a vote -
Gone With the Wind they voted: I crunched 'No"
and we sat down with War & Peace.

As a man I believed in democracy (nobody
ever learns anything): only one lazy day
my assistant, called James Dow,
& I were chatting, in a failure of meeting of minds,
and I said curious, 'What are your real politics?'
'Oh, I'm a monarchist.'

Finishing his dissertation, in Political Science.
I resign. The universal contempt for Mr. Nixon,
whom I never liked but who
alert & gutsy served us years under a dope,
since dynasty K swarmed in. Let's have a King
maybe, before a few mindless votes.

• John Berryman was born 98 years ago today. I was 21 when Pary Gittenger, an English teacher at Montgomery College, Rockville, loaned me his copy of Dream Songs. Thank you, Pary.
• Paths of resistance. The most important thing you'll read today.
• Neoliberalism kills, part one.
• Neoliberalism kills, part two.
• Beyond the welfare state: 
• Welcome to the age of hell.
• Is the progressive blogosphere dead?
• Can it have come to this?
• Infinite jestice.
• Just another day.
• Hobsbawm.
• The fountain of truth.
• Berryman interview: As for the graduate students, some of the work they do is damned interesting. A woman somewhere in the South did an eighty-page thesis investigating the three little epigraphs to the 77 Dream Songs and their bearing on the first three books of the poem. I must say that her study was exhaustive—very little left to be found out on that subject! But it's good, careful work. I take a pleased interest in these things, though there is ineptness and naïveté, and they get all kinds of things wrong and impute to me amazing motives. Another woman thought I was influenced by Hebrew elegiac meter. Now my Hebrew is primitive, and I don't even know what Hebrew elegiac meter is—and, moreover, neither does she. It's a harmless industry. It gets people degrees. I don't feel against it, and I don't feel for it. I sympathize with the students. I can vouch a heh.
• Mr Jones.
• Copa America 2016 will be in US!
• Three hours of Hall & Oates? Beats Fitz and the Tantrums.
• You loved me.
• BARTOK!
• HEY! THERE'S A NEW JULIE DOIRON ALBUM!
• Adventures close to home.

DREAM SONG 4

Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken paprika, she glanced at me twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying
"You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance." I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni. - - Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.

--Black hair, complexion Latin, jeweled eyes
downcast... The slob besides here      feasts... What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
--Mr. Bones: There is.

Born 98 Years Ago Tomorrow/Turns 67 Friday

Egoslavian High Holy Day tomorrow. Another one Friday.