Awful, Dull, Brutally Inconsequential

• NEW PERE UBU! Best opening monologue ever since the last until the next. See previous post for this blog's required Pere Ubu chorus. Yes, the song at the very bottom is certainly one of the five most posted songs on this shitty blog.
  
• Voting is magic! Electoral representation in the post-ideological age has far more in common with apotropy than politics. Very few people vote to choose their leaders; instead they vote to prevent the other guy from winning. The genealogy of voting follows a very different path from that of democracy. In classical Athens, which is to a greater or lesser extent to blame for both practices, governmental positions were usually determined by lots, to counteract the advantages enjoyed by rich citizens and great orators. If, as a fifth-century Athenian citizen, you were actually voting for a politician, chances are you were casting an ostrakon: voting for them to be exiled from the city and its civic life. Voting is an apotropaic act. Little has changed. In this week’s European elections, millions of people will vote for the individuals they want to be torn from their homes and families and sent away to the godforsaken marshy swamplands of Brussels.
• The Dark Flows of Capital: Capital is that lack, it infiltrates the dead body-without-organs, the hollow body like a dark god animating it with illusionary desires, producing that which entices us, allures us toward our enslavement. “The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim  to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the productions of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy.”
• Catipal.
• Compete to win a free copy of Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life! 
• Actually, today's monologue and bleggalgaze in post title.
• Without Compunction: Herein lies the Pun-Off’s ontological dilemma. In real life, the best puns tend to be spontaneous: many are funny in the moment but fail to rise to the higher standard to which we hold jokes that are given time to grow and improve in the course of being committed to paper. And yet the sustained, absolute spontaneity that comes of scraping out pun after pun onstage quickly pulls every contestant down to the bottom of the barrel—a low stratum I think of as “[blank]er, I barely know her” territory. People who know me can vouch for the punishment I've inflicted.
• A self-referential reading of self-reference.
• Robert Creeley was born eighty-eight years ago today (lots of Creeley here):

SELF-PORTRAIT

Robert Creeley

He wants to be

a brutal old man,

an aggressive old man,

as dull, as brutal

as the emptiness around him,

He doesn’t want compromise,   

nor to be ever nice

to anyone. Just mean,

and final in his brutal,

his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,   

the gentle, the “oh,

let’s hold hands together”

and it was awful,

dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he’ll stand on

his own dwindling legs.   

His arms, his skin,   

shrink daily. And

he loves, but hates equally.

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.

Be Wet with a Decent Happiness

Thursday Night Pints consisted of neither Thursday night or pints, but in Thursday Afternoon Emails L challenged me to post a particular poem of mine she likes as header last night. It'd been posted before. There is new product, I'm just not posting it. L thinks I should, encourages me to post at the other place, dared me to post the poem I posted last night as header hoping to kick-start something. Do you want me to tell you - this isn't Thursday Night Pints dialogue, I'm talking to you - do you want me to tell you my theories on why I'm not posting new product? No, I didn't think you did. Besides thinking of you, I'm thinking of me: I'd have to post the poems I don't want to post to explain why I don't want to post the poems. I posted a link to a friend's meditation on silence, another friend tweeted about a nice, small, quiet novel. I think of myself as nice, but small and quiet are adjectives that have never been used to describe me by me, by anyone. Sorry, here's a theory: I'm working on smaller and quieter, wildly unsuccessful here in this format, by refusing to post here the work that matters to me most (except when I do).







Today is Britten's centenary. I mentioned it first three weeks ago. I wasn't planning to post a piece a day in countdown to his birthday but I expected to have posted far more than I have. It's not work yet, an oh-fuck yet listening to Britten, but I find myself resisting the music when once it was drop the needle, flow. I picked up the nice, small, quiet novel my friend recommended, from admittedly light skimming it seems a Point A to B plot. I deal with Point A to B plots in real life, many of them more enforced because ridiculously contrived than the ridiculously contrived Point A to B plots in novels I no longer force myself to read. I have no patience for (all novels but especially) novels with Point A to B plots. The two, my new reaction to Britten's music and my now apparently calcified reaction to Point A to B plots in novels, are of course related symptoms. I have a theory, but.






I wrote this paragraph Thursday night. I am seeing Bonnie Prince Billy Friday night with Earthgirl and Hamster and Mr Alarum and Xtina. I'm going to get up at 7:00 Friday morning (if I'm lucky: I'll be wide awake at 5:30, cats chirping in ears, head-butting my forehead, for breakfast, I might be able to fall back asleep, though doubtful), drink coffee, finish this post, then go to an oral surgeon for the consultation appointment for removing this fucking wisdom tooth which waited 54 years to spurt, after which I will drive to work and find an email box full of fuck. I'll deal with it, I'll deal with this, I'll deal with that. I'll leave work at four and squelch the urge to stop for reward-sushi in Glen Echo and drive home and meet Hamster. If Earthgirl and I feel like quickly picking up we'll let Hamster in the house, most probably we'll meet him on the steps in front of our house, hopefully kept company by Napoleon, MomCat, and Frankie. The three of us will drive to the library - I'll park my car in Lot 9 as always - and meet Mr Alarum and Xtina on the library's loading dock. I will immediately insist that even though we are standing on the loading dock of the building I and Mr Alarum work in and the concert is in a building of my and Mr Alarum's employer WE CAN NOT AND WILL NOT DISCUSS WORK! This won't be a problem. We will walk down Prospect, possibly stopping to eat at a better than decent Thai restaurant, maybe walking down to M until we find a restaurant we all agree upon. Food, beer, wine, laughs. We'll trudge uphill back to Hilltop. We'll see an opening act or not and see Bonnie Prince Billy either solo or with a band, we don't know. It will be marvelous, charming, funny, if past Bonnie Prince Billy shows I've seen are predictors of tomorrow's show. We'll leave the theater, it will be colder than we expect though everyone thinks they're prepared for cold, but. Earthgirl and Hamster and I will say good night to Mr Alarum and Xtina, we'll walk to my car. I'll take Prospect to 35th to M to Canal to Clara Barton Parkway to Glen Echo Parkway to the Beltway to 355 to Beach to home. Napoleon and MomCat and Frankie will hear the sound of my car and see the angles of my headlights as I park the car and run out to greet us. A most enjoyable Point A to Point B plot. I will or won't write about it Saturday morning and post field recordings.







Yes, I've posted the Creeley poem below before, more than once, I love it, titled other posts with the same line I used for this post. I wasn't going to say more about writing (and I wasn't going link-farming today either), but flowerville's most recent post in which he posts a photo of his Decomposition Book prompts me to note that in a startling (for me) development I've stopped, after thirty-five years, maybe temporarily, I'll find out, working in Moleskins, a decision both impromptu and significant, I have theories why,  I'll spare you. I'm now working in:

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.

hearing all bells at once instructs the final exhale

As promised, Chris Watson's Weather Report this weekend. I know I know one person (not counting me) and think I know more two people who might dig this. Hope you do. Back Monday (probably) barring kaboom (there are no Egoslavian Holy Days this weekend). Last week Bloggod tested me kaboom with Lou Reed, I'm hoping Bloggod takes the weekend off too.








READING STARLIGHT WITH ONE EYE LIKE CREELEY

Ca Conrad

hearing all bells at

                              once instructs the final exhale

                              Camelot in thimble of  the gods

                              Marilyn Monroe’s ambulance

lost on the way to the palace of  temperament

a branch of government for the magical arts

                              punch wall of forest for

                              an oaken

                              desk

                              another dream we

                              needed agitating the

               sentence as it rows across a

               newly destroyed heart folding

               following tormenting one another

                              we were all once young and

                              beautiful squandering everything

                              it’s what we came here to do

                              cut off engines to the child

                              registering disposition of the

                              cat in the dark as the

                              size of the darkness

DREAMS

Wisława Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak

Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft,

mocking magnets, graphs, and maps—

in a split second the dream

piles before us mountains as stony

as real life.

And since mountains, then valleys, plains

with perfect infrastructures.

Without engineers, contractors, workers,

bulldozers, diggers, or supplies—

raging highways, instant bridges,

thickly populated pop-up cities.

Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen—

crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us

and when to vanish.

Without architects deft in their craft,

without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers—

on the path a sudden house just like a toy,

and in it vast halls that echo with our steps

and walls constructed out of solid air.

Not just the scale, it’s also the precision—

a specific watch, an entire fly,

on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers,

a bitten apple with teeth marks.

And we—unlike circus acrobats,

conjurers, wizards, and hypnotists—

can fly unfledged,

we light dark tunnels with our eyes,

we wax eloquent in unknown tongues,

talking not with just anyone, but with the dead.

And as a bonus, despite our own freedom,

the choices of our heart, our tastes,

we’re swept away

by amorous yearnings for—

and the alarm clock rings.

So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books,

the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,

the doctors with couches for analyses—

if anything fits,

it’s accidental,

and for one reason only,

that in our dreamings,

in their shadowings and gleamings,

in their multiplings, inconceivablings,

in their haphazardings and widescatterings

at times even a clear-cut meaning

may slip through.

At the dentist, the little mirror, the dinosaur prong is put into the mouth. Mouth: the first darkness. Nearby: the mobile with straw eyeless fishes. The dentist will go home to her family, having briefly reached inside the visible mystery and found nothing

While Barack Obama gave his Second Inaugural Speech I was getting my botched root canal fixed by the head of her dental firm, not a new young associate, and double-yay! me. And single-yay! you, who get to look up my nostrils and are spared my looking at my political soul and mirroring it back to you as an accusatory George Carlin joke, the difference between an asshole and a jerk is jerks drive faster than me, assholes slower. Regular aargh-programming resumes soon, or not. Enigma of arrival and departure. New Pere Ubu. New old Wire. Ashbery and Creeley and heroes. Several errands (the poem where this post's title is from, thank you for the Kind email, but no, I didn't write that). It's obvious. Three effing excellent hours.