The Dog in Humble Inquiry Along the Ground, the Child Who Credits Dreams and Fears the Dark, Know More and Less Than You

That's new Yo La Tengo, serendipitously discovered yesterday as I planned some cascades by bands and artists in the Inner Most Circle of Bands and Artists That Rotate In and Out of the Two Non-Permanent Spots in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game now that I'm fixated on My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, what with the recent coup. Here are five of them.

Two unrelated to My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game updates for those who follow along despite updates to My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game:

Earthgirl's leg is much improved. It is far less colorful, the bruise around her ankle is gone, and the sensation of a thousand bees stinging is down to a couple of hundred. She wouldn't have been hike-worthy this weekend, but we're booked socially this weekend - Saturday for her family, Sunday for mine.

Napoleon only has three months and twenty-two days in quarantine left! Still no sign of rabies. His hair that was shaved to fix the bite wound has grown back. He complains rarely. He's lovely.

• The debate over the local helmetball team's nickname has exploded in DC over a recent court ruling. Iraq falling apart, Eric Cantor losing his power, the midterm elections and their impact on POTUS 16, the biggest political storm in DC is the helmetball team's nickname. Same game, different topping is all, the hate, people are gleeful. Fine metaphors, as always, abound.
• Something you should know about DC: baseball's Nats, basketball's Bullets Wizards, ice soccer's Caps could all go undefeated through a season and the playoffs and win championships and the local Helmetball team, off a 3-13 season, would still be the only team in DC. This debate, it can't be avoided around here. 
• Let me give you an unassailable truth about the Washington helmetball team's fight to retain the current nickname: no matter whether the name is changed or not, this will never be over, and the team will be referred to as The Redskins forever in and around DC even if the name is changed.
• Me, I'm all about despising Tiny Daimon Snyder, fucking fuck. If the nickname debate is causing him grief, then yay. He's Tiny Daimon Snyder, fucking fuck.

• Matters of character.
• Derrida and Zizek, for those of you who do.
• On football and national identity.
• An autopsy for Spain and Tika Taka. It's interesting to me the two biggest bores in international football, Spain (on purpose) and England (because they're England) have both crashed out two games into group.
• Been a bad couple of months for Stevie England, yes?
• The terrible embarrassment of the goalie on the Crown Prince's birthday.
• Rockville weighs in on NoBeSoRo.
• David Markson, for those of you who do.
• Beckett (Molloy in particular), for those of you who do.
• Rothko and Taggert, for those of you who do.
• Not today, but yes, the word Rothko sets off a Morton Feldman cascade in my head, soon here.
• Tuxedomoon, for those of you who do.

DOGS ARE SHAKESPEAREAN, CHILDREN ARE STRANGERS

Delmore Schwartz

Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers.

Let Freud and Wordsworth discuss the child,

Angels and Platonists shall judge the dog,

The running dog, who paused, distending nostrils,

Then barked and wailed; the boy who pinched his sister,   

The little girl who sang the song from Twelfth Night,   

As if she understood the wind and rain,

The dog who moaned, hearing the violins in concert.   

—O I am sad when I see dogs or children!

For they are strangers, they are Shakespearean.

Tell us, Freud, can it be that lovely children   

Have merely ugly dreams of natural functions?   

And you, too, Wordsworth, are children truly   

Clouded with glory, learned in dark Nature?   

The dog in humble inquiry along the ground,   

The child who credits dreams and fears the dark,   

Know more and less than you: they know full well   

Nor dream nor childhood answer questions well:   

You too are strangers, children are Shakespearean.

Regard the child, regard the animal,   

Welcome strangers, but study daily things,   

Knowing that heaven and hell surround us,   

But this, this which we say before we’re sorry,   

This which we live behind our unseen faces,   

Is neither dream, nor childhood, neither   

Myth, nor landscape, final, nor finished,   

For we are incomplete and know no future,   

And we are howling or dancing out our souls   

In beating syllables before the curtain:   

We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.

The Rails That Take Us to Her Pass Boxcar After Boxcar Like the Successive Selves We Are, or: Sixty-Five Today, Sixty-Three Today

Bill Nelson is sixty-five today. I listen to his solo music often, much more than Be Bop Deluxe, though I spent last night split equally.

Martha Johnson is sixty-three today. I still listen to This Is the Ice Age many times a year, usually once each trip to and from Ohio to see Planet. The night they opened for The Furs at the Ontario Theater on Columbia is one of dozens of the best five nights of my life. We saw Martha and the Muffins the next night at 930, the original on F St, I shared a joint with Martha out on the street, one of dozens of the best five nights of my life.

• Holyfuck, I'm old.
• I heard from three people who told me they would prefer that I either describe what I link to explicitly in the link itself and/or explain what they might find behind a cryptic link title. I make no promises for long-term sustainability, but I'll try since I wouldn't put these here if I didn't want you to go read them.
• We are now a police state.
• A nation of patsies. Kennedy, assassination, 50 years on.
• Anyone reacting with outrage to the Santa is White foodfight, you do know you're being trolled, yes?
• Food links.
• Eddie Johnson deal done. I understand why United made the move, I hope it works, I'm not anti-taunting Baal when I say I don't think it will.
• USMNT has third hardest draw at WC14.
• an old stain deeply set. Poem by Brad.
• My Bonnie Prince Billy concert post from last month translated into Czech. According to my stats, that post has been translated into Romanian, German, Lithuanian, and Armenian, which is all about Bonnie Prince Billy, nothing about me.
• Roaring City. Edwin Denby poem and James Jowers photographs.
• Coetzee, for those of you who do.
• Knocking of Nothing. Szybist poem.
• Paper Cuts. Paper's decline before digital and ramifications for poetry.
• Boy about Town. Song you haven't heard since last time you heard it, plus stuff.
• Scale. Song you haven't heard since last time you heard it.
• Black Intention III. Gorgeous piano piece I'd never heard, with scrolling score. Lordy, I love the scrolling scores.

A VISIT

Tom Sleigh

What she is waiting for never arrives

or arrives so slowly she can't see it:

         Like the river

         bluing silver

and wearing minutely deeper into its channel,

the flow hardens to carved stone as she fidgets

         beneath the whirling fan

         impatient for the train

that rocks us above the water to arrive:

Her sisters and brothers gone, she ventures alone

         through sunlight

         and moonlight

weaving shadowy faces across the peeling walls...

—Speeding toward her, is it you and me she spies

         in the trembling train

         windows while the engine

hauls us down rails that swerve under wheels

rolling through her brain? Faces burn

         through dirty glass,

         smears of lips and eyes

dissolve to spots of darkness swarming between

her eyes so that swaying apartment towers

         crumble as her nostrils

         prickle from the landfill's

ammonia that hangs above the stacked, crushed cars.

The rails that take us to her pass boxcar after boxcar

         like the successive selves we are

         as she dreams us coming closer,

switching track to track: Now the super unbolts

her door as she calls: “Oh is it really you?”

         —the wheel's rolling

         through her head bringing

us face to face with raveled bandages, crutches

leaned in dusty corners, terraced mountains of

         yellowing newspaper.

         Framed above her chair

a picture of a prairie sprawls round a covered wagon

and the horse she rode as a girl, her eyes

         fading points of light...

         Again she calls out

above the train's approaching rumble: “Is it you at last?”

My eyes have got so bad peoples’ faces

         are all blurry...Now

         tell me, is it really you?”

But already the rails are switching, bearing

our waving hands away at the speed of thought

         over the stony waters that

         ceaselessly pour out.



Non-Comprehensive Review of Bonnie Prince Billy at Gonda Theater, Georgetown University, November 22, 2013

Well, that was amazing. Solo. Opened with the above.

Explained that when Bonnie Prince Billy came to him Bonnie Prince Billy told Will Oldham to lighten up, have fun, and Will agreed and wrote the following song.







Closed the set with a raucous (really):






Holyfuck. Plus I scored this hat.

"I Didn't Think of It as Killing Them," the Executioner from the Late Eighteenth Century Said to Charlie Rose, Still Wearing a Hood, His Axe Resting on the Wood Table I've Assumed Is Oak

Fell asleep listening to a different Eloy (hear below), woke up with that in my head. Couple of things: I still have three tickets to see Bonnie Prince Billy tonight in Annapolis, you can have them for free. No one's claimed them yet, I doubt anyone will now, but one last offer. Second, tomorrow is Britten's centenary, if you've a particular piece you'd like to hear let me know. It's not going to be a big production: listening to pieces this past week, they don't work for me like they used to. Yet another side-effect of the strangest days of my life. A happy ending. On the logic behind mass spying. No, billionaires don't want to overthrow the government. Hey! did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team? It's true (that I haven't used this gag in a long time, yet another side-effect of the strangest days of my life), and they are second to bottom in MLS in net worth, below the Columbus Yellow (h/t SeatSix). United doesn't get that new stadium United is gone. As in, Jerk. Someone besides me not thrilled about the Python reunion. Because, a former copyeditorial interlude. I've never heard of James McBride or his novel The Good Lord Bird, but it just won the National Book Award. I have heard of Mary Szybist whose book of poems Incarnadine won, I haven't read it yet but it's on my desk, good thing I have access to a university library stacks. Leonid Tsypkin? On the quality of silence, silence something I seem incapable of producing. No, I'm not asking anyone to migrate bookmarks or update blogrolls. I don't play nearly enough Stereolab here, cascade in your future. Prunella's latest playlist.








WHY WE MUST SUPPORT PBS

Bob Hicok

"I didn't think of it as killing them," the executioner
from the late eighteenth century said to Charlie Rose,
still wearing a hood, his axe resting on the wood table
I've assumed is oak. "I don't know how to put this:
it's as if I loved them in the moment I swung, loved them
and wanted to offer them peace." Charlie Rose was smiling,
excited. Even more than usual, the joy of an otter
seemed to be swimming through the long river of his body
when he put a hand on the man's memoir and said,
"But then something happened that made you question
your entire existence up to that point." It was hard
to see the man all in black on Charlie Rose's black set,
as if midnight were speaking, saying, "Yes. One day
I looked down and there was the son I'd never had
staring up at me from the block, I could tell
by his eyes, this was my boy, this was my life
flowing out, reaching beyond the sadness of its borders."
"You knew this," Charlie Rose said. "I knew this,"
the executioner replied. "Even though you'd never been
with a woman." "Never. I was all about career." "You knew
because the eyes tell us something." "Because the eyes
tell us everything." "And you couldn't go on." "No.
I couldn't go on." They changed gears then and honestly
I drifted off, half-dreamed I'd arranged a tropical
themed party on a roof without testing how much dancing
and vodka the roof could hold, people were falling
but still laughing, falling but still believing
there was a reason to put umbrellas in their drinks,
that otherwise their drunkenness would be rained on,
rained out, when I heard the executioner say, "We
were running and running. Finally we made it to the border
and I put my arms around my son and told him, you have a future
but no pony. Get a pony." Charlie Rose smiled
like he was smiling for the otter, for whatever is lithe
and liquid in our spirits, and repeated, "Get a pony."
"That's the last time I saw him," the executioner said.
"And that's why you've refused to die." "Yes."
"To keep that moment alive." "Yes." "And you believe eternity
is an act of will." "Yes," Mr. Midnight said. "Will.
Will and love. Love and fury." 

Here's a Guess: We Will Sit on a Wooden Lawn-Chair in the Sun, and We Will Like It

Do people click all the links? Do they listen to all the songs? K asked me Saturday night at a Saturday Night Edition of Thursday Night Pints. I know, I said, some regularly do, most don't though I'd guess more click through to the links than listen to the music, I have one good friend who tells me he never listens to the music. L said, depends on the music for me, the experimental music, fuck that. That ended this week's questions about this blog. Minor wonderment at obamaclusterfuck that handed the GOP a lifeline after the GOP had its ass clocked in kabukifuck re: Obama's incompetence: real, fake, death to the Either/Or. L said, I've never seen incompetence so competently executed, it must be by design. Design, I said, as in Battling Tops. Huh? said K. He's old, said L. More music you don't like Sunday, I said to L, you'll like Monday's.

• And she will.
• The business of free speech: Freedom of speech isn’t freedom from the consequences of speech. Freedom of speech is not a protection against people telling you that your views are hateful. Freedom of speech doesn’t oblige other people or organizations to support you in your privileged position as a broadcaster, or journalist, or blogger. Freedom of speech isn’t a guarantee of permanent employment when the thing you are selling is your opinion, nor does freedom of speech compel the public to buy said opinion from you.
• New Inquiry's Sunday readings.
• A pandemonium of word demons.
• The staying away.
• Emotional.
• The NYT obit for Lessing. She was someone who I always liked what she was saying better than I liked the way she said it.
• List of Lessing links.
• Bump: I've still three tickets to Bonnie Prince Billy in Annapolis on Thursday that I cannot use and the YOU CAN HAVE FOR FREE.
• Iva Bittova documentary.
• Feldman and Beckett (yes, again) for those of you who do.

IN A LANDSCAPE: IV

John Gallaher

Now the scene changes, we say, and the next few years 

are quiet. It's another curse, the inverse of the "interesting times" 

the Chinese were said to go on so about. Nevertheless, there it is, 

as the emptiness needs a something in order to be defined as empty, 

which means we spend the next few years talking about other years, 

as if that's what's important. Maybe that is what's important. It was terrible, 

the hospital stay. The children. Not the children in the abstract way, 

but those times worried that this would go wrong, or that, and then things 

do go wrong and it almost feels like we'd wished for it to happen, 

so not only do we have to go through this terrible time, but we also 

have to keep reminding ourselves that we didn't wish for it. It's Problem 

One. And there's our two-year-old son strapped to a board with an IV, crying. 

And doesn't it feel like a formal device then? As if expecting it 

were the same--or is the same--as willing it, but then almost willing it anyway, 

saying something like, "Please God, or whomever, get it over with already . . ." 

if the world isn't going to be a museum only, as museums keep calling out 

that there's so much more to find in the past, like ourselves, for instance. 

The simplification of our forms. The question of why it might be important 

to save our dinnerware, or Yo-yos. We have these accidents 

in common: last night I was pulling a filing cabinet upstairs on a hand truck, 

and at the 90 degree turn it fell on top of me and I had to hold it like that, 

one wheel on the stair, one in mid-air. So I had some time on my hands, 

waiting for Robin to get home. They say that if you relax, lying there 

is 80% as restful as sleep. And knowing how to relax is key, they say. 

Here's a guess: we will sit on a wooden lawn-chair in the sun, and we 

will like it. We will run the numbers and think it sounds like a good 

proposition. We will consult a map, even ask directions. The sun's 

out right now, in fact, and it's all a matter of doing the next big thing. 

Driving home, say. And then it's a manner of having done something. 

Driving past the car wash. Yes, forcing a matter of doing the next 

thing, which is filling out the accident report, while the old man 

who hit my pickup is crying in the street. And then I'm walking around, 

picking up the fender and light pieces and putting them in the bed.

Some Say Get Over It, But There You Are, Surrounding It

• No one has yet claimed the three free tickets for Bonnie Prince Billy a week from tonight at Rams Head. If you're in DC/Baltimore area, even if you can't or don't want to go, if you have friends who are Will Oldham fans ask them if they want them. They are very good seats, not to close to stage, not too far from stage, would be a shame for them to go to waste. Will bump again next week if no one claims in meantime, not going to bang this daily.
• Glad you're waking up to this.
• Caught myself: last night had cheap easy snarky link to clusterfuck, this morning purged the motherfucker. 
• UPDATE! Fiasco by design. What I was going to snark: the theory that the Obamacare clusterfuck was designed for maximum clusterfuck to undermine the principle that power has an obligation for the well-being of its subjects. So yes, same old song.
• From the Guardian's football rumor column: Zlatan Ibrahimovic is a target for Chelsea and Manchester City but might turn down both to go and play in the MLS, because. Meanwhile Clint Dempsey might be on his way back from America, with Tottenham, Everton and Aston Villa all eyeing the Seattle Sounders forward. Tottenham have first refusal. Dempsey for Ibrahimovic does not seem like a fair trade. Hummina, no, but DC United have first draw - in theory, this is motherfucking MLS after all, if Ibrahimovic wants to come to MLS (and he doesn't want to come to MLS) he will tell MLS where he will play.
• Like I need a reason to hate Arsenal.
• Every bit of this friendly inconsequence is meant merely to preface his intention for writing at all.
• Insomnia, Lacan, Beckett.
• Today's edition of Good Thing I Have Access to a University Library's Stacks.
• What this blog would look like right now if its Apply to Template button worked.
• UPDATE! Isn't everyone here a phony?
• Does it matter if a poem that seems autobiographical is actually fiction?
• What is a poet?
• Britten's Curlew River, plus other great stuff.
• Cornelius Cardew's piano music.
• Lots of Ramones, including previously unheard interview.
• Listened to Ghédalia Tazartès last night, the album Transports, can't find any on youtube, have these instead.

FOR ONE WHOSE LOVE HAS GONE

Brenda Hillman

      There was a crack
    in ecstasy; it split the oak
with flameless fire.
A raptor left good bones
in the divided tree (the spine?
  of a mouse?) & then flew off
     for a muffled sanctuary . . .


Some say get
     over it, but there you are,
surrounding it. Slant sun
     shines in. Bring it along,
bone-reader, bring the banquet.

By Insisting on Love We Spoil It

• I bought tickets months ago to see Bonnie Prince Billy at Rams Head in Annapolis next Thursday November 21, 2013. Unfortunately, Earthgirl has since been roped into an evening work function that night so we can't go. Anyone want the tickets? You can have them, not trying to recoup the money, just would be a shame for them to go to waste. I have them and can scan them into PDF and email them to you. Let me know.
• Chilling effects.
• The most banal man alive, the most banal man to have ever lived.
• The bigot's convention.
• Paypal as weapon of the powerful.
• Death to everyone.
• What did they do to education?
• Silliman's always generous lit-links.
• When he called scifi a field.
• Ashbery's "Coconut Milk."
• Jack Gilbert died a year ago today.
• Fortunately, Bonnie Prince Billy is playing the next night, Friday the 22nd, in a building less than 200 yards from where I type this sentence, going with Earthgirl and Hamster and Mr Alarum and Xtina. The woman at the box office also said Oldham is buds with a faculty member in the Music dept and will be giving free workshops on song-writing on campus open to all GU people, and like, holyfuck!

TEAR IT DOWN

Jack Gilbert

We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within the body.

The Carrion-Stinking Dog, Who Is Calf and Human and Wolf, Is Chasing and Eating Little Blood Things the Humans Scatter, and All Me Run Away, Over Smells, Toward the Sky

• Songs taken from last night's World of Echo (except for the Henry Wolff/Nancy Hemmings at very bottom - couldn't find the one Dave played but dug the one I found).
• Links while they're fresh.
• The Unknown Citizen.
• Drones and drama.
• There is not a foreign leader the NSA doesn't spy on.
• The UK Syria debate as seen by a rodent in Edinburgh.
• The issue isn't this particular episode of Middle East Clusterfuck, the issue is why every fucking actor in the Middle East keeps repeating the same fucking episode of Middle East Clusterfuck, the answer which we know. And will repeat forever, both the clusterfuck and rhetorical question and answer, amen.
• Formula.
• Steal this article.
• Tracking consumers: breaking kayfabe. One of my futile gestures of defiance: I'm buying less stuff.

• New Inquiry's Sunday links.
• Maggie's weekend links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekend links.
• Inner peace.
• 5th birthday bleggalgaze.
• An American blogging on the third day of an American holiday weekend is especially stupid, both the blogging and the blogger.
• UPDATE! A comment in email from Anonymous! May I simply just say what a comfort to find
  somebody that really knows what they're discussing on the net. You definitely understand how to bring a problem to light and make it important. More people should check this out and understand this side of your story. I can't believe you are not more popular since you most certainly have the gift. Feel free to surf to my blog post; Penis Advantage Review () 
• Summer Chronograph series.
• Baseball stadium epiphany.
• What Seamus Heaney taught him.
• New Robert Coover short story.
• Prunella's latest playlist.
• I confess I hadn't thought about Bikini Kill or Le Tigre in a while. Cascade next cascade.

THE COWS ON KILLING DAY

Les Murray

All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining.

All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still   

from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths   

that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out.

All me standing on feed, move the feed inside me.

One me smells of needing the bull, that heavy urgent me,   

the back-climber, who leaves me humped, straining, but light   

and peaceful again, with crystalline moving inside me.

Standing on wet rock, being milked, assuages the calf-sorrow in me.

Now the me who needs mounts on me, hopping, to signal the bull.

The tractor comes trotting in its grumble; the heifer human   

bounces on top of it, and cud comes with the tractor,   

big rolls of tight dry feed: lucerne, clovers, buttercup, grass,   

that’s been bitten but never swallowed, yet is cud.

She walks up over the tractor and down it comes, roll on roll   

and all me following, eating it, and dropping the good pats.

The heifer human smells of needing the bull human   

and is angry. All me look nervously at her

as she chases the dog me dream of horning dead: our enemy   

of the light loose tongue. Me’d jam him in his squeals.

Me, facing every way, spreading out over feed.

One me is still in the yard, the place skinned of feed.   

Me, old and sore-boned, little milk in that me now,   

licks at the wood. The oldest bull human is coming.

Me in the peed yard. A stick goes out from the human   

and cracks, like the whip. Me shivers and falls down

with the terrible, the blood of me, coming out behind an ear.   

Me, that other me, down and dreaming in the bare yard.

All me come running. It’s like the Hot Part of the sky   

that’s hard to look at, this that now happens behind wood   

in the raw yard. A shining leaf, like off the bitter gum tree   

is with the human. It works in the neck of me

and the terrible floods out, swamped and frothy. All me make the Roar,

some leaping stiff-kneed, trying to horn that worst horror.

The wolf-at-the-calves is the bull human. Horn the bull human!

But the dog and the heifer human drive away all me.

Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving.

All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed,   

and a slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me.

The carrion-stinking dog, who is calf of human and wolf,   

is chasing and eating little blood things the humans scatter,   

and all me run away, over smells, toward the sky. 

Something of a Clock Glimpsed in a Dream

Borges born 115 years ago today. Dig these. What did you think ESPN would do when Helmetball said JUMP! said L to K at a special Friday Night Edition of Thursday Night Pints when K offered the story as shuttlecock of a friendly rally. It's the times, I said to K, bruised, everybody's pissed at everybody but mostly pissed at the people they most like and agree with 99.94% of the time. L said, I see what you did there. My phone chirped. A blog friend emailed me, she asked - this is true, she can vouch, or choose not to - and I paraphrase, what the fuck is the Kind? I texted my bud bleggal and existential context in one or two sentence each. I loved With, said L - the Donald Harington novel where Kind has Borgesian onion layers of meaning. If you and me are Kind - I'm talking to you now - I'll buy you a copy of that amazing novel. L's lending K the one I gave her. I've been promising you, I didn't say last night, I'm talking to you now D, love, the traditional Bonnie Prince Billy cascade.

• Yes, I play that all the time.
• Fuck The Guardian, Long Live the Independent?
• I got a good scrubbing from four to five this morning by either an individual or a bot from Heimat Sicherheitsdeinst Geschäftsstelle linking from the above blogfriend.
• Making sense from Snowden.
• Why look here? The jerk is in your hands.
• What is totalitarianism today?
• Harassment is about power.
• On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs.
• Logistics and opposition.
• Death to the either/or and all, but really, is this more Obama thinks you're stupid or Obama is saying Kiss my ass?

• Yes, posting on Saturday's in August is proof of compulsive and futile attention sluttery. 
• On DC history and equality by a friend of mine.
• BRT.
• BRT.
• What you can buy me for my birthday.
• ZOMG! The Vegans! An argument for. I'm not near, I'm working on in, not to worry, long-timers and loyalists, I'll not be documenting progress towards or retreat from, but I do have a goal.
• Vegan Symphony #9.
• 100 free classics. I just finished Silas Marner last night, I forget to bring Vollmann, in the college book store was a Dover edition for $2.50, 150 pages later I remember what I like about Eliot (for intance, her brilliant use of English in her exquisitely constructed aphorisms of moral scolding) and what I didn't like (for instance, the moral scolding).
• The rage for order.
• Raskolnikov in Afghanistan?
• I am alive.
• Monk, not Meredith per usual, another one.
• Julianne Barwick interview. Yes, the Evening Planet post will return when one or both of us need it.
• On Caberet Voltaire.

A COMPASS

Jorge Luis Borges
translated by Robert Mezey

All things are words belonging to that language
In which Someone or Something, night and day,
Writes down the infinite babble that is, per se,
The history of the world. And in that hodgepodge

Both Rome and Carthage, he and you and I,
My life that I don't grasp, this painful load
Of being riddle, randomness, or code,
And all of Babel's gibberish streams by.

Behind the name is that which has no name;
Today I have felt its shadow gravitate
In this blue needle, in its trembling sweep

Casting its influence toward the farthest strait,
With something of a clock glimpsed in a dream
And something of a bird that stirs in its sleep.

Past the Blackset Noctilucent Clouds

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

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

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

HYMN

A.R. Ammons

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

and go on out

     over the sea marshes and the brant in bays

and over the hills of tall hickory

and over the crater lakes and canyons

and on up through the spheres of diminishing air

past the blackset noctilucent clouds

           where one wants to stop and look

way past all the light diffusions and bombardments

up farther than the loss of sight

    into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

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

inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes

trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest

     coelenterates

and praying for a nerve cell

with all the soul of my chemical reactions

and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

You are everywhere partial and entire

You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum

has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut

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

chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down

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

    far resolutions

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

Re-Running the Reels

A friend suggests Obama operatives leaked the IRS story to rev-up the Right noise machine to drown out the noise of those who are screaming about the DOJ/AP story, Obama operatives fearful the docile and compliant fealty towards Obama by professional liberals and a tame media might be ever-so-slightly tainted. Sure, I'll bite, it's plausible, adding whenever Obama, by incompetence and/or design, kicks the Right's noise machine into full volume you can expect Obama to lurch to the right using the Right's noise machine as cover. But here's the most important issue today: the world's shittiest professional liberal has ruined Star Trek for me forever (and pushed this post's publication date eighteen hours ahead of schedule), so no more shittyass Star Trek allusions for you. Thanks Obama. Worse than Nixon? Major sea change? Machinations of double-headed beasts. Things you might have missed. DC United beer: what should it be called? When baseball isn't baseball. The Vein. Speaking of a shitty professional liberal ruining things. Bowie. Herbert Eimert. Swans' posters. What the fuck is a novel/how do I destroy it? So-so countdown list of Will Oldham albums. Cascade tomorrow, or soon, or not. Sensations.  Eno's Obscure Records catalog, w/sound.






YOU RUINED MY EVENING/YOU RUINED MY LIFE

Tom Raworth

i would be eight people and then the difficulties vanish

only as one i contain the complications

in a warm house roofed with the rib-cage of an elephant

i pass my grey mornings re-running the reels

and the images are the same but the emphasis shifts

the actors bow gently to me and i envy them

their repeated parts, their constant presence in that world

i would be eight people each inhabiting the others’ dreams

walking through corridors of glass framed pages

telling each other the final lines of letters

picking fruit in one dream and storing it in another

only as one i contain the complications

and the images are the same, their constant presence in that world

the actors bow gently to me and envy my grey mornings
        

i would be eight people with the rib-cage of an elephant

picking fruit in a warm house above actors bowing

re-running the reels of my presence in this world

the difficulties vanish and the images are the same

eight people, glass corridors, page lines repeated

inhabiting grey mornings roofed with my complications

only as one walking gently storing my dream

Behind These Eyes a Desert Spirit

Will Oldham covers Jason Molina:





Mark Kozelek covers Jason Molina:




Info on tribute album here. Hat tip Stephen Mitchelmore via twitter.

I'm Talking About a Cheap Paperback Which Fans and Slips to the Floor with a Hush

There hasn't been enough Guided by Voices around this shitty blog lately, my apologies. In another offering to your Kindness, I won't tell you about my latest failed attempt to break my novel reading slump and my latest new idea how to break it. White men. no enemies (because they are to the left of me). Winning hearts and minds. Turn off your computers. Dozens of links. Bleggalgazing. Bleggalgazing. Bleggalgazing: like the header? I put them up at night, my night, I'm five hours behind Greenwich (four hours soon, whenever we toggle to Daylight Savings Time), will leave up today because (a) what the fuck and (b) there are signs of life in tablet, woot. I've also decided to lose the >>deleted bleggalgazing<< gag, I'll either bleggalgaze or not bleggalgaze and not tell you when I'm deliberately not bleggalgazing. So, bleggalgazing: Holyfuck, all but half a dozen of you don't want to read about DC United. Season lasts only eight more months. Sexism and Star Trek. The dog domesticated us. Brad reviews the new William Gass.  New Coetzee, for those of you who do. A.M. Homes, for those of you who do or, like me, want to. 338 years ago today Vivaldi's mother didn't strangle him at birth, dammit. Stockhausen. Mashayekhi. Harvey. More songs for Hitchcock's birthday yesterday. I must admit, his playing with The Motherfucking Decembrists changes everything - this may be Hitchcock's last mention here. Classical music as story-teller in digital age. I love a genuine rubiness, my heart broken good:

[It Was Jessica Grim the American Poet]

Lisa Robertson

It was Jessica Grim the American poet

who first advised me to read Violette Leduc.

Lurid conditions are facts. This is no different

from the daily protests and cashbars.

I now unknowingly speed towards

which of all acts, words, conditions —

I am troubled that I do not know.

When I feel depressed in broad daylight

depressed by the disappearance of names, the pollen

smearing the windowsill, I picture

the bending pages of La Bâtarde

and I think of wind. The outspread world is

comparable to a large theatre

or to rending paper, and the noise it makes when it flaps

is riotous. Clothes swish through the air, rubbing

my ears. Promptly I am quenched. I’m talking

about a cheap paperback which fans and

slips to the floor with a shush. Skirt stretched

taut between new knees, head turned back, I

hold down a branch,

There&#39;s One Regular Who Lapses In and Out of Consciousness and He&#39;s the Real Reason She Stays

If Bonnie Prince Billy in red beret and pink scarf isn't proof I love and trust you, what is? bullshit social climber faux anti-racism. (UPDATE: Freddie's follow-up to the previous.) My passive aggressive tool of maintaining privilege is Kindness. I give money to save cats, give apples and oranges to beggars on Rockville Pike. I was told last Thursday, I don't got no teeth, I don't want your fucking apple, she was standing at the corner of Nicholson and Rockville (NOT NORTH BETHESDA) Pike. I had a dentist appt yesterday to temp-crown the root canal of a month ago, dentist in building across from Dietles IN ROCKVILLE, NOT NORTH BETHESDA, THERE IS NO NORTH BETHESDA, IT'S ROCKVILLE. Dentist said, eat soup today, I drove to Whole Foods (which could exist in a hypothetical North Bethesda if such a place were possible) a block away, see woman who told me she doesn't want my fucking apple, buy her a small container of Chicken Noodle soup, walk it out to her, she didn't remember me or my apple, she took the soup, said Bless you. VICTORY FOR ME! Kindness, bitches. The killing of Callion Hamblin. The shocking savagery of America's Early History. Shocking only if one never stopped to consider America. Rewards in capitalism. Postmodern irony and the appreciation of tits. Whenever I think Obama is failing, I try to remember whose metrics I'm using. The Notebooks of Obama. The long death of the middle brow. Symbols. Why we can't have nice things. Whatever House of Cards is (I know it's a TV show, no idea what about), Jake Backpack ruins it for you! Though I know enough that if your agent comes to you and says I've got a lead role in a made-for-cable series that's perfect for you, I know my leading man Hollywood days are over. Atheist. If an atheist is someone who never believes my leading man Hollywood days are over, no matter how many tickets are sold, that's me. More retro and cities. Gula. This is true: I wish I was a born linguist. Ten of the most divisive authors? A short riff on Moby Dick. My newest theory on my reading block is that whatever I'm reading I feel like I should be rereading Moby Dick. Lord Garth. Silliman's always generous litlinks. Blanchot, for those of you who do. Stream the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs' single. I heard the Yeah Yeah Yeahs bed music a Cadillac commercial this past weekend, remember (this is an old gag, forgive me) the outrage at Clapton "selling-out" for his Michelob commercial 30+ years ago? I tweeted about the YYYs' Cadillac commercial yesterday to resounding disinterest except from a Cadillac bot who is now following me. Penderecki. Jim's Stereolab playlist. Wanna hear the second single from Bowie's new album?






THE OBJECTIFIED MERMAID

Matthea Harvey

The photographer has been treating her like a spork all morning. “Wistful mouth, excited tail! Work it, work it!” He has no idea that even fake smiling spreads to her eyes and her tail and there’s nothing she can do about it short of severing her spine. Without asking, the assistant re-sprays her with glycerine. It’s gonna be hell getting all that grease off her scales tonight but she can’t scum up her tank at the bar—its weekly cleanings seem more like monthly these days, and fewer and fewer patrons have been inviting (read: paying) her for a Tankside Mertini and quick feel of her tail. There’s one regular who lapses in and out of consciousness and he’s the real reason she stays. Every once in a while he seems to have forgotten where he is and he looks at her with the kind of wonder she imagines her grandmother inspired when she first risked coming ashore. After an hour under the studio spotlights, she’s starting to smell pretty fishy. Can’t blame it (as she has before) on her standard seaweed bra because this fool of a photographer has her holding two clear fishbowls in front of her breasts so it looks like goldfish are swimming past her nipples. She’s supposed to pretend it tickles. She wants to ask if he’s heard the phrase "gilding the lily" which she recently learned at Land Berlitz. When asked if she’s tired, she lies. A downward spiral means the opposite up here.

It&#39;s Not You Who Is Not Requiting Me, or: Honduras 2, USMNT 1

Didn't see it, Honduras scheduled the opening Hex-game in the middle of a tropical afternoon knowing USMNT either wintering in Europe or the States and I was at work. Didn't occur to me to take the time off. The game was on beIN, 726 on your MOCO Comcast, it's where GolTV was, it's better than GolTV, live French and Italian League games, so I could have taken the late afternoon off but I swear, before I started giving a lesser general damn about (most everything but me and mine) soccer I don't believe I took time off from work to watch a Hexagonal though I would make an effort in real life to catch a game in evenings and on weekends, especially against Mexico. I can't imagine I will this cycle. It's not newly discovered repulsion against gross patriotism in national team sports: I've long been complicit with that, comforted, true, by most American's indifference or hostility to soccer. I've bought my DCU season tickets and parking, but I'm not jonesing for season's start, I'm not jonesing about anything (but me and mine). Wait - holyfuck!




               
Oh, Spoon, there was a twitter spurt amongst buds re: Sleater-Kinney and their legacy in the Carboniferous Period, then later yesterday a friend tweeted the above Spoon song which sparked in me the same reaction. While I'm reyodeling: remember, the point of the White Paper is to routinize the process: imagine what's being done now that isn't planned on being routinized for another ten years. More. Toward the world of nightmare. Thirteen questions. Five questions. More questions. Drone go changing. Things you might have missed. Shitload of links. His generation's greatest academic fraud. I say that admiringly, though not as admiringly as once. Hail Columbia! Gaithersburg ethics! Alexandria! Darkness which may be felt. Phenomenological xenoarchaeology? Cause and effect and cosmology. O'Hara writes to Schuyler. Drummage. Jim requested this Eels song. Prunella's latest playlist (we strongly agree about some, strongly disagree about others). Playlist and photos and spotify access to a Richard Thompson show this past Tuesday night in Brooklyn. New Richard Thompson song:




             
THE CONSOLATIONS OF SOCIOBIOLOGY

Bill Knott

Those scars rooted me. Stigmata stalagmite

I sat at a drive-in and watched the stars

Through a straw while the Coke in my lap went

Waterier and waterier. For days on end or

Nights no end I crawled on all fours or in

My case no fours to worship you: Amoeba Behemoth.

—Then you explained your DNA calls for

Meaner genes than mine and since you are merely

So to speak its external expression etcet

Ergo among your lovers I’ll never be ...

Ah that movie was so faraway the stars melting

Made my thighs icy. I see: it’s not you

Who is not requiting me, it’s something in you

Over which you have no say says no to me.