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.

We Were Entering Dark Houses, Always More Dark Houses, Hushed and Abandoned

                 

• Dance!
• Non-aargh links seem to be far less read than the aarghful links.
• Have this aargh one: The Obama years have given us an America that looks something like a bad Kurt Russell movie from the 80s: a weird, garish dystopia, where the president runs a death squad out of the White House, wages robot wars in foreign lands, operates a techno-panopticon sucking up every message, musing and secret desire of the populace, and lets tens of millions of citizens sink into poverty and despair in their gutted communities and crumbling infrastructure while he doles out trillions of dollars to rapacious elites gleefully bleeding the country dry... Add to this such things as the corporate-backed ALEC movement stifling the ability of the people’s elected representatives to pass measures on matters of vital importance to their communities, such as gun violence, pollution, collective bargaining, etc; the return of Jim Crow laws openly designed to rob the dusky races (and poor white trash) of access to the ballot box; the incarceration of a greater percentage of its own population than any regime in human history; the reckless sell-off of public services, public lands and the environment itself to frackers, venture cap vultures and other corporate profiteers; and the relentless persecution of any government employee who dares to inform the people of even a few of the sickening crimes being done in their name. It ain't incrementalism, and it ain't to the left.
• Found it looking for something else, started rereading for WTF, been a decade or more, the horse killing dream of Raskolnikov, lordy. And it's been such a while since I've read something that's beams and pillars and joists are so right-squared and obvious, is weird, like discovering a new form. Anyway, he's just axed the pawnbroker and her step-sister. The pages and pages of polyphonic splaining are coming, I'll see.
• OK OK OK, one more: Martin O'Motherfucking O'Malley (trademark claim) campaigns for Cory Motherfucking Booker.
• UPDATE! OK, one more: Obama thinks you're stupid.
• Ornery.
• Fortunately I sat down to consolidate the blogrolls and realized fuck that. There are a couple more new places that were added.
• A hubristic flea.
• Creative tyranny.
• What you can buy me for my birthday. 
• Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina.
• I like Tanya Donelly's new song better than Neko Case's new song but it's nice to have both.
• On Benjamin Britten's new biography. 
• Gubaidulina.
• Summer Song.

THE WHITE ROOM

Charles Simic

The obvious is difficult
To prove. Many prefer
The hidden. I did, too.
I listened to the trees.

They had a secret
Which they were about to
Make known to me--
And then didn't.

Summer came. Each tree
On my street had its own
Scheherazade. My nights
Were a part of their wild Storytelling.

We were
Entering dark houses,
Always more dark houses,
Hushed and abandoned.

There was someone with eyes closed
On the upper floors.
The fear of it, and the wonder,
Kept me sleepless.

The truth is bald and cold,
Said the woman
Who always wore white.
She didn't leave her room.

The sun pointed to one or two
Things that had survived
The long night intact.
The simplest things,

Difficult in their obviousness.
They made no noise.
It was the kind of day
People described as "perfect."

Gods disguising themselves
As black hairpins, a hand-mirror,
A comb with a tooth missing?
No! That wasn't it.

Just things as they are,
Unblinking, lying mute
In that bright light--
And the trees waiting for the night.