Wisteria, Extreme

The penultimate day of the birthdayiest month in Egoslavia. Pauline Oliveros is eighty-two today.

Saturday is a High Egoslavian Holy Day, I said at Thursday Night Pints, certainly the last Thursday Night Pints for the summer, probably the last forever though we promised ourselves at least one more. We've already lost D, rest in peace. K has offers in Ann Arbor and Palo Alto, will take one or the other, will be out of town much of the summer. L has grandchildren in Atlanta, stupidly lucrative house-flipper offers for her house in Arlington, will be out of town much of the summer. I'd take the Palo Alto offer, I said to K. I said to L, I'd take the stupidly lucrative money and buy a single floor condo near your grandchildren instead of living alone with two bad hips in a 1940s Cape Cod with three floors and narrow and steep stairs. I was agreeing with the choices they've already made. I can't imagine going to Atlanta for any reason, I can totally imagine going to Northern California, I'll have places to stay in either case.

That's the Thursday Night Pints bleggal pre-eulogy, eulogy, and post-eulogy. Combined with else and tomorrow's High Egoslavian Holy Day fine metaphors abound, or could or might or will.







UPDATE!

• I wasn't going to post links today but I may not post links tomorrow and these will go stale soon.
• The return of Fuck You Friday.
• Monster capitalism and the complicit state.
• Privatizing profits, socializing losses.
• On the urgent necessity of anti-imperialism.
• The anxieties of big data.
• Daniel Ellsberg on the odious John Kerry. This is true: on election day POTUS 2004 I went door to door in Harrisburg Pennsylvania canvassing votes of John Kerry.
• Those who own the goal posts.
• Silber sends a brief update. Please, if you can spar the coins in your pocket consider giving them to Arthur.
• Ten words used only in Irish English.
• Walter Benjamin, for those of you who do.
• On location: Place and placelessness; conflicting histories and transmuted genre; mythologized frontiers and one notion of “the West” blurring into a socio-historic another, somewhere just beyond the usual reach of cinematic allegory and metaphor...
• Charles Simic remembers Russell Edson (whose poetry I barely know) and Bill Knott (whose poetry I love).
• The legacy of William Meredith, who I used to read but don't think about any more (which says more about me than the poetry of William Meredith).

EXTREME WISTERIA

Lucie Brock-Broido

On abandon, uncalled for but called forth.

                                                                              The hydrangea

Of   her crushed each year a little more into the attar of   herself.

Pallid. Injured, wildly capable.

A throat to come home to, tupelo.

                                                Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable.

Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear.

Wistful, woke most every afternoon

                                In the green rooms of the Abandonarium.

                                                Beautiful cage, asylum in.

Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not

                                 Have been there.

So few wild raspberries, they were countable,

                                 Triaged out by hand.

Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others,

                                 Sateen. Extreme hyacinth as evidence.

Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves

                                 Will (perhaps tomorrow) die.

High editorial illusion of   “Control.” Early childhood: measles,

                                                                              Scarlet fevers;

Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home.

Convinced Gould’s late last recording of the Goldberg Variations

Was put down just for her. Unusual coalition of early deaths.

Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence,

In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of   such.

                                                                                          Wisteria, extreme.

There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home.

IF A GARDEN OF NUMBERS

Cole Swensen

If a garden is the world counted

                                                           and found analogue in nature

One does not become two by ever ending

                                                                           so the stairs must be uneven in number

and not exceed

thirteen without a pause

of two paces’ width, which

                                                 for instance, the golden section

                            mitigates between abandon

and an orchestra just behind those trees,

gradations of green that take a stethoscope: we risk:

Length over width

                                  to make the horizon run straight

equals

            to make the pond an oval:

                                                            Width

                                                            over length minus the width

                              in which descending circles curl

into animals exact as a remainder.

                              Which means excess. The meaning of the real

always exceeds that of the ideal, said someone.

                                                                                      He was speaking of Vaux-le-Vicomte,

but it’s equally true of parking, or hunting, or wishing you could take it back. He

                              who is Allen Weiss, actually said, “The meaning

of a plastic or pictorial construct always surpasses the ideal meaning of that work.”

Which is something else entirely. Said

the axonometric

divided by

the anamorphic.

                               There is nothing that controls our thoughts

more than what we think we see,

which we label “we.”

Every Tonal Difference, Every Sound

The Egoslavian birthdayiest month of the year continues: as of this moment, all three posts on the blog's front page are birthday posts. Gyorgy Ligeti was born eighty-six years ago today. As always with me and composers, I love most if not all of a composer's work but always love the solo piano pieces best. Here's Ubuweb's typically generous Ligeti sound page.

Earthgirl and Planet and I had dinner last night with B, the young woman who stayed at our house when moving to DC for a new job while looking for an apartment who has become not only our cat-sitter but our friend. The combined ages of Planet and B is ten years younger than me. As always, I thought, what the fuck world will my daughter be inhabiting when she is my age in 2047? It seems to me the descent to clusterfuck is increasing both in angle and in speed. When I got home I found myself link-fishing the clusterfuck. I can still get angry, to no effective purpose, apparently. Then I listened to Ligeti piano sonatas while looking for poems for this post.

• Austerity and neo-liberalism lead to the neo-fascist right. Duh, of course, but worth reminding.
• Pierre Omidyar and Narendra Modi.
• Categorizing the poor.
• Building a lasting legacy of death.
• Is violence cultural?
• A primer on the new religion of the gun.
• When intellectuals go to war.
• NYT's public editor slaps Michael Kinsley around. Psst. Michael Kinsley doesn't care.
• If Pope Francis pisses off the asshole Netanyahu then Pope Francis gets a point in my book.
• Consent is impossible.
• Skull-blogging, face-in-the-frost edition.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.

from MOZART'S THIRD BRAIN

Goran Sinnevi

Translated by Rika Lesser

CV

Not-Orpheus is singing   He sings his nothing   He sings his night   

He sings all the names   The name of nothing   The only name    Since   

long ago   He didn’t know it   And knew it in his night   

All things sing   All names sing   Every tonal difference, every

sound   All music in its destruction   In its sublation   Toward which point?

The mountain of nothing hovers   Before it crushes us   With its night   With its

   song  

In the evening I walked through town with you, Dearest, along the river   

A clear cold spring evening, the half-moon shone   As if walking in a foreign city   

Though I recognized parts of it   You said it was almost like   

walking in Prague, where we would have been if my mother hadn’t fallen ill   

When we stood by one corner of the Hotel Svea, where I played in a dance band in

    1957,   

the huge flock of jackdaws, in the trees by the bastion near the castle, flew   

out over the river, in micropolyphonic conversation    As in a piece by Ligeti   

That night I dreamed I crossed a bridge spanning the river, now very broad   

The long bridge was swaying, huge ocean swells entering the river from the sea   

I walked with a girl, kissed her on the mouth, on the opposite bank   

In the morning you came into my bed, Dear, we slinked like teenagers, so my   

       mother wouldn’t hear us,

where she slept, in the room outside ours   She’s already much better   

I look at my face in the bathroom mirror   Will I manage to go out into the Brain  

Trucks pass   Traffic goes on, in the great exchange of goods   

Gulls, trees, people   The degree of virtuality in different goods, the phantasms   

also in what we eat, conceptions of origin, contents, effects

Fear    Cultivated tastes    We are in the immediacy of memory    Only in a flash of

astonishment can memory be broken   But even lightning is informed    I look at

    the

      magical   

diagrams of Giordano Bruno, read his texts   See that all this is exactly as in   

Jung, fundamental magical forms, for guiding the divine,   

the unknown within the soul   Also the similarity with tantric forms      

    Yes, that’s   

        how it is,   

I think, both Freud and Jung are magicians, the difference in rationality is   

only marginal, Jung’s a little older, Freud’s more modern, a continuation of   

Descartes, developed later in Spinoza’s pneumatic model for the passions,   

and yet both are found, subsumed in Bruno’s love-flow, the lineage backward,   

the tantric flow, also Plato’s Diotima, her flow . . .   

Hölderlin saw the stream of people in dark water, streaming over   

the ledges in the human-geological world, the levels of the abyss,   Para-   

       dise’s various degrees of stasis   

What use can I make of these magical forms? I’m no magician    And yet

I acknowledge their power, also within my self   If they prevail, sovereignty   

is crushed   Libero arbitrio   There the forms also break down   

The stream of love breaks down    Fluid lightning    The flash of vibrating being   

But also the flash of darkness   The light of Beatrice’s eyes, their lightning

    flash   How  

am I to understand this? How to understand unknowing   That I do not!

INFINITE RICHES IN THE SMALLEST ROOM

Lucie Brock-Broido

Silk spool of the recluse as she confects her eventual mythomania.

If it is written down, you can't rescind it.

Spoon and pottage bowl. You are starving. Come closer now.

What if I were gone and the wind still reeks of hyacinth, what then.

Who will I be: a gaudy arrangement of nuclei, an apple-size gray circle

On the tunic of a Jew, preventing more bad biological accidents

                                From breeding-in. I have not bred-

In. Each child still has one lantern inside lit. May the Mother not

Blow her children out. She says her hair is thinning, thin.

The flowerbed is black, sumptuous in emptiness.

Blue-footed mushrooms line the walkway to my door. I would as soon

Die as serve them in a salad to the man I love. We lie down

In the shape of a gondola. Venice is gorgeous cold. 3 December,

Unspeakable anxiety about locked-in syndrome, about a fourth world.

I cannot presume to say. The violin spider, she

Has six good eyes, arranged in threes.

                                The rims of wounds have wounds as well.

Sphinx, small print, you are inscrutable.

                                                            On the roads, blue thistles, barely

Visible by night, and, by these, you may yet find your way home.

Gambier to Martinsburg to St Louisville to Newark to Somerset to New Lexington to Corning to Glouster to Chauncey to Athens to Chauncey to Glouster to Ringgold to McConnellsville to Meigs to Chandlersville to Zanesville to Nashville to Fallsburg to Martinsburg to Gambier

Long two, Earthgirl took over a 15K photos. I had to reduce time per photo to a second a shot to get it to two slideshows uploadable by youtube. This is what we do for fun: long long day-long drives. Many of the photos are from The Rim of the World, easily one of the coolest roads I've ever driven, this being the third time. Planet had never seen Ohio University, she was curious, for me, driving 78 over the Rim of the World again from Glouster to 284 east of McConnellsville and then 284 north to Chandlersville - my third time - was the fun.

• Then pizza - SeatSix, we finally tried Donatos, it was very good, good enough to get again - in the room while Planet did homework and Earthgirl painted and I link-fished, it was wonderful. 
• A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF BOB ROSS PAINTINGS!
• David Harvey interview. (I don't think I've posted this one yet, if yes, oh well.)
• Gardening and imperialism.
• Ames v Greenwald et al continued: I’ll start by saying that the fact that Marxists and anarchists now call a billionaire by his first name is reason enough to keep looking at/writing about the social phenomena that brought that about. So getting accused of monomania for doing so is getting very old, especially since people like Henwood are no less obsessed. They’re just obsessed in a different way.  The right way. Accusing people who are making a point of not applauding of obsession is just another way of getting people to shut up — another form of ostracism.
• Naming Bethesda for marketing profits. 
• Sandy Spring. 
• The view out my window at 7:00 this morning in Gambier looks like an Earthgirl painting.

• And very well could be someday. 
• Yes, that's snow.
• Lust for life (not Iggy).
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Tangerine Dream.
• Chris Forsyth.
• For Alvin Lucier.
• Harry Partch.
• Prunella's latest playlist.
• Planet has told me she wants to be picked up May 14th and 15th. I have a ticket to see Swans at Black Cat on 14th. Planet wins, but damn. Hey! New Swans!

FATHER, IN DRAWER

Lucie Brock-Broido

Mouthful of earth, hair half a century silvering, who buried him.

With what. Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it.

                                                             Also directives from our  DNA.

The nature of  his wound was the clock-cicada winding down.

                                                            He wound down.

July, vapid, humid: sails of sailboats swelled, yellow boxes

Of   cigars from Cuba plumped. Ring fingers fattened for a spell.

                                                            Barges of coal bloomed in heat.

It was when the catfish were the only fish left living

                                                            In the Monongahela River.

Though there were (they swore) no angels left, one was stillbound in

The very drawer of salt and ache and rendering, its wings wrapped-in

                                                            By the slink from the strap

Of his second-wife’s pearl-satin slip, shimmering and still

                  As one herring left face-up in its brine and tin.

The nature of  his wound was muscadine and terminal; he was easy

                 To take down as a porgy off the cold Atlantic coast.

                 In the old city of   Brod, most of the few Jews left

Living may have been still at supper while he died.

That same July, his daughters’ scales came off in every brittle

                                                            Tinsel color, washing

To the next slow-yellowed river and the next, toward west,

                                                            Ohio-bound.

                This is the extent of that. I still have plenty heart.

We Have Come to Terms with Our Self Like a Marmoset Getting Out of Her Great Ape Suit

I for one want more Gwendolyn the Goat. She's four months old, she's the size of a terrier. Blue eyes are rare in (whatever breed Gwendolyn is) goat, said her handler, a Columbus Crew fan. He laughed at my DC United sweatshirt. We talked MLS, USMNT, why United sucks, will Olsen keep his job. I didn't tell him of my United apostasies and anger over new ownership and the pricing for next season that plainly indicates LOUD SIDE's eventual banishment to an endzone in a new stadium and my lack of damn and self-extortionist's angst over next season's season tickets: that's just for you, loyal readers. I know two people, goat-wise, a wife and daughter, they'd own goats in our backyard the day after MOCO legalizes goat-ownership in tract-housing neighborhoods. OK.

We rent a car when we visit Planet at college in Ohio. We end up, going back and forth and the drives in between, easily clocking 1200 miles, most times more, and rental rates are as cheap or cheaper than the wear-and-tear on our cars if we used them trip after trip. It's fun to drive something different, to plow up the mountain to Frostburg from the Potomac in Cumberland at 80 MPH on someone else's engine. Rentalcarco gives us two sets of keys on one metal cord. The cord is welded into a rivet that makes both ends undetachable from the other. I always figured we got two sets of keys so they could be separated so if one was lost a trip could continue (while paying replacement price one of my dozen initials on contract surely made me liable for). I'd always wondered why the welding, but because I misplaced the keys for two scary minutes this trip the question stayed in my head. We returned the car Monday evening. I asked the salesperson about the keys, how do you separate the two sets. You don't, he said. I asked, what's the point of giving me two sets of keys if I can't separate them so that if I lose one I lose both. He said, we want them together so that if you drop off a car at a different location than this one they're still together. I said, you all don't allow cars to be dropped off at a different location than the one where the car was picked up, I talked with you (as in the same salesperson) last January when we wanted to rent a car one way (for reasons I reminded him and he acknowledged but whose details aren't important to this post) and you thanked me for my loyalty but fuck me, you said politely, we don't rent one way. Alright, he said, it's because we sell the cars after a set period (depending on make/model (as opposed to remake/remodel I add here, didn't add then, though thought it)) and we get less of a price for only one set of keys, minimal though it be, headquarters is insistent the two sets stay together. A manager walked in, saw me shaking my head in amusement, asked if all was OK. This is Mr Popovich, said the salesperson, he was just returning his keys. Are you related to Gregg? he asked. I said, everyone here asks me that, fine metaphors abound. What? he said. I said, I said I am such a goat. Huh? he said.

• Lordy, I feel like I should be drinking a Pliny the Elder in Southern California.
• So yes, all that for a KITH and Roxy gag. Again.
• Baseline predictions for  the next 60 years.
• You may think you have nothing to hide.
• Are we puppets in a wired world?
• One hundred years alive, ten years dead.
• UPDATE! Mr Abonilox returns to Blegsylvania, writes on Obamacare, anarchism, libertarianism....
• a figure caught in language.
• Ceravolo, for those of you who do.
• UPDATE! Fwoan too returns to Blegsylvania.
• FirstWave (not Second Wave as I called it yesterday) on Sirius also played a Roxy Music/Bryan Ferry song every second hour, but only late Roxy, which I found interesting for vaguely irritating taxonomic reasons related to how I used to sort baseball cards.
• UPDATE! Mr Alarum's band's new single! Of if not a single, the song they made available.
• Prunella's latest playlist.

YOU HAVE HARNESSED YOURSELF RIDICULOUSLY TO THIS WORLD

Lucie Brock-Broido

Tell the truth I told me                                When I couldn’t speak.

Sorrow’s a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship                Or a child

Who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer

In the 1930s                                       Toward the iron lung of polio.

According to the census I am unmarried                And unchurched.

                                    The woman in the field dressed only in the sun.

Too far gone to halt the Arctic Cap’s catastrophe, big beautiful

Blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of  ice.

I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible.

For whom left am I first?

                                                          We have come to terms with our Self

Like a marmoset getting out of  her Great Ape suit.