And This Is How the Dead Rise to Us, Transformed: Wet and Singing, the Tide of Voices Pearling in Our Heads

Ian Curtis was born fifty-eight years ago today. So yes, another monologue on My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game (MSADI5G). Joy Division rarely gets within two circles of rotating bands/musicians that alternate appointments to the two non-permanent seats in MSADI5G. I understand the importance of and like Joy Division but it was never sloppy reckless love. I love sloppy reckless love. There is no set number of bands/musicians in any given circle and I don't keep a list, digital, scrap paper, mental, of who is in what circle at any given time: even I'm not that compulsive. But bands/musicians wax and wane depending on when last I listened and what color the music left in my brain. The last two years I've posted the mandatory Curtis' birthday post the color got more olive then browner and this year I expected greyer but to my delight and surprise and head-chime this year the music is school bus yellow almost to orange. A band in a severe relegation tailspin, New Order, related to Joy Division of course, went from the innermost circle of rotating bands less than six years ago to fog grey today. Remember, long-timers, when a running - and true - gag here was that there was always a New Order song in my head? After the school bus yellow almost orange of Joy Division today I tried some New Order: greyer than last time's grey. Since I had many more life experiences when New Order was on the daily soundtrack than Joy Division (because of my age) I would have suspected full orange after Joy Division's school bus yellow revival, so highly do I credit my addiction for nostalgia to influence my coloring. This is unexpected and excellent and promises to, um, compulsively fascinate nobody but me. More to come!

• Foucault's legacy: Foucault's great studies of disciplinary society are useful above all because they allow us to delineate, through contrast and comparison, the digital governmentality that subjects us to new forms of control, which are less vertical, more democratic and, above all, no longer burdened by any anthropological ballast. Homo digitalis today participates in, is the primary agent of, the surveillance of himself. Digital society is becoming a form of mutualised control.
• Speaking of old gags here, let me bitch and moan then press plunge and hope I get noticed enough to incriminate myself, or at least draw a pencil-pusher's attention.
• The Truth About Our Libertarian Age. That's the name of the article. Offered not as endorsement but for your consideration. The author taught a semester here at Illtophay last academic year, a friend I trust insists he is an honorable thinker and person even though the friend disagrees at points with the author. Me, I can see all points at this point for all the good it does.
• Reflections on internet leftism (h/t): Internet leftism can and does produce the illusion that an active website possesses a significant level of political strength simply because it regularly publishes analyses and debates with other websites that also produce a similar quantity of theoretical engagements.  To claim that this demonstrates the efficacy of organization, without investigating whether this internet leftism communicates to any concrete mass organizing, simultaneously demonstrates the limits of this kind of discourse.  We often discover (and I have been guilty of this) a theory alienated from practice due to the fact that the only practice is internet ideological engagement, a refined version of the "talk-shop".  A theory divorced from any form of revolutionary activity amongst the masses in the social context in which one lives is a theory that cannot thrive on a deep form of social investigation; it investigates only amongst a vague internet population from anywhere and everywhere––it is close to book worship.
• The politics of we must change the government (the Problem of Less-Shittism: a view from New Zealand): It is that suffering, and the greater evil of Tory rule, that demands we settle for the lesser evil of the other, more humane parties of business. Yet, when faced with it, I don’t fully reject this logic. I’m a Marxist, which in the current climate is one of the most futile and impractical things a person can be – almost as much as an intellectual. I do indeed have a strong case of the pip. And whatever aversion I feel towards our current government is balanced by the conviction that Labour and the Greens (and as of now quite possibly Mana, too), are in fact more committed to capitalism and invested in it than National, convinced as they appear to be that it holds the key to a sustainable future and our very survival as a species. To me, it’s not a matter of lesser but of different evils. But I also get that concerning people’s so-called everyday lives, including my own, National is – to flip the adage – like Labour, only worse. That it will never raise benefits. That it will only reduce workers’ bargaining rights and entitlements further. That it will continue to critically weaken our environmental protections and democratic institutions. That it will be reluctant to accept social change and in all things be more racist, more sexist, more homophobic. All these may be matters of degree, large or small, but the weaker the working class is, the worse the conditions in which it lives, the more small differences become a matter of outright survival, until social justice grows in the imagination to become a sneering, grey concept, and not something that can be concretely aspired to and worked towards.
• Oil and blood in a burning world.
• Maps of/for pain.

• You really do always choose the slowest line.
• The Nationals local TV numbers are down dramatically. It wasn't me: they broadcast booth is incredibly shitty, Barker and Color both. Listen to Charlie and Dave on the radio while using your eyes on the printed word or with closed eyes falling asleep during a night game.
• This is a post in a past gag I would have non-bulleted - and it would have worked, but some gags get old, though not the gag about old gags.
• Adidas has already added the fourth star, buy your shirt today!
• 25 novels on failure: I've read eight, heard of eight, never heard of eleven, am taking advantage of having access to a major university's library stacks and consortia.
• A Deep Space Nine update: there are no permanent members of my DS9 MSADI5G, there are no members of the innermost circle of rotating cast members and the second innermost circle of rotating cast members there is only Rom. Mr Alarum told me to give him time.
• In the circle I would jettison and never look back: the rest of the cast.
• Rebuilding the House of Stones.
• Books out the second half of 2014.
• There are many more Joy Division songs below the song below the poem:

TIDE OF VOICES

Lynda Hull

At the hour the streetlights come on, buildings

turn abstract. The Hudson, for a moment, formal.   

We drink bourbon on the terrace and you speak

in the evening voice, weighted deep in the throat.

They plan to harvest oysters, you tell me,

from the harbor by Jersey City, how the waters

will be clean again in twenty years. I imagine nets

burdened with rough shells, the meat dun and sexual.

Below, the river and the high rock

where boys each year jump from bravado

or desperation. The day flares, turns into itself.

And innocently, sideways, the way we always fall

into grace or knowledge, we watched the police

drag the river for a suicide, the third this year.   

The terrible hook, the boy’s frail whiteness.

His face was blank and new as your face

in the morning before the day has worked

its pattern of lines and tensions. A hook

like an iron question and this coming

out of the waters, a flawed pearl—

a memory that wasn’t ours to claim.   

Perhaps, in a bedroom by lamplight,   

a woman waits for this boy. She may riffle drawers

gathering photographs, string, keys to abandoned rooms.

Even now she may be leaving,   

closing the door for some silence. I need

to move next to you. Water sluiced

from the boy’s hair. I need to watch you

light your cigarette, the flickering

of your face in matchlight, as if underwater,

drifting away. I take your cigarette

and drag from it, touch your hand.

Remember that winter of your long fever,   

the winter we understood how fragile

any being together was. The wall sweated   

behind the headboard and you said you felt

the rim where dreams crouch

and every room of the past. It must begin in luxury—

do you think—a break and fall into the glamour

attending each kind of surrender. Water must flood

the mind, as in certain diseases, the walls

between the cells of memory dissolve, blur

into a single stream of voices and faces.   

I don’t know any more about this river or if

it can be cleaned of its tender and broken histories—

a tide of voices. And this is how the dead

rise to us, transformed: wet and singing,   

the tide of voices pearling in our hands.

 

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Everything Stands on Its Head in the Pavilion of Green and White Porcelain

Gustav Mahler, born 164 years ago today. I had dinner with Hamster last night, forgive me, we got distracted with matters of life and death (serendipitously - serendipity indifferent to its tank-tracks vis you, me - Mahler completed this song cycle to delay writing his 9th Symphony, superstitious, fearful of death), I meant to badger Hamster for a playlist - he'd created one before but I can't find it. For another consecutive year I type some variation of the sentence, If I fall farther away from the symphonies each year, I dig the Lieder more. Serendipitously, it just occurs to me, since I had no idea what the lyrics are when I fell in love with this song cycle, it's proof of this morning's statement on me and sound versus lyrics.

Where the Paths Through the Elms, the Carnivals, Begin, or: Born One-Hundred Sixty Years Ago Today

Leoš Janáček was born 160 years ago today. An old blogfriend you should bookmark and read named his blog after the above, it's one of my favorite piano pieces, though the one I truly love is In the Mists. Murakami made the Sinfonietta the soundtrack for his novel 1Q84.

Holiday Blegging for a Three Day Holiday Weekend in Dead Blegsylvania starts now: there either will or won't be posts, those posts either will or won't have links. There may or not be Galaxie 500 here tomorrow, but there will not be that song. There may or not be X here tomorrow, but there won't be that song. No, I haven't forgot my Kate Bush and John Ashbery threat, Ashbery poems below the Sinfionetta, Kate will show up over the weekend.








LIKE A SENTENCE

John Ashbery

How little we know,   

and when we know it!

It was prettily said that “No man

hath an abundance of cows on the plain, nor shards

in his cupboard.” Wait! I think I know who said that! It was . . .

Never mind, dears, the afternoon

will fold you up, along with preoccupations   

that now seem so important, until only a child   

running around on a unicycle occupies center stage.   

Then what will you make of walls? And I fear you   

will have to come up with something,

be it a terraced gambit above the sea

or gossip overheard in the marketplace.

For you see, it becomes you to be chastened:

for the old to envy the young,

and for youth to fear not getting older,

where the paths through the elms, the carnivals, begin.

And it was said of Gyges that his ring

attracted those who saw him not,

just as those who wandered through him were aware

only of a certain stillness, such as precedes an earache,

while lumberjacks in headbands came down to see what all the fuss was about,

whether it was something they could be part of

sans affront to self-esteem.

And those temple hyenas who had seen enough,

nostrils aflare, fur backing up in the breeze,

were no place you could count on,

having taken a proverbial powder

as rifle butts received another notch.

I, meanwhile . . . I was going to say I had squandered spring   

when summer came along and took it from me   

like a terrier a lady has asked one to hold for a moment

while she adjusts her stocking in the mirror of a weighing machine.   

But here it is winter, and wrong

to speak of other seasons as though they exist.   

Time has only an agenda

in the wallet at his back, while we

who think we know where we are going unfazed

end up in brilliant woods, nourished more than we can know

by the unexpectedness of ice and stars

and crackling tears. We’ll just have to make a go of it,

a run for it. And should the smell of baking cookies appease

one or the other of the olfactory senses, climb down   

into this wagonload of prisoners.

The meter will be screamingly clear then,

the rhythms unbounced, for though we came

to life as to a school, we must leave it without graduating   

even as an ominous wind puffs out the sails

of proud feluccas who don’t know where they’re headed,   

only that a motion is etched there, shaking to be free.

ELECTIVE INFINITIES

John Ashbery

Thirsty? They race across ampersands,
scrolling. He isn't sure it's his head.
There's a delay right now. Smoke backed up.
Ladies please remove hats.

It was all over by morning. The village idiot
was surprised to see us. "....thought your were in Normandy."
Like all pendulums we were surprised,
then slightly miffed at what seemed to be happening
back in the bushes. Keep your ornaments,
if that's what they are. Return to sender, arse.

At the intersection a statue of a policeman
was directing traffic. It seemed like a vacation,
halloween or something. Process
was the only real thing that happened.
We wove closer to the abyss, a maze of sunflowers.
The dauphin said to take our time.

Born Ninety-One Years Ago Today

CHILDREN OF OUR ERA

Wisława Szymborska
Translated by Joanna Trzecia

We are children of our era;
our era is political.

All affairs, day and night,
yours, ours, theirs,
are political affairs.

Like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin a political cast,
your eyes a political aspect.

What you say has a resonance;
what you are silent about is telling.
Either way, it's political.
 
Even when you head for the hills
you're taking political steps
on political ground.

Even apolitical poems are political,
and above us shines the moon,
by now no longer lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
Question? What question? Dear, here's a suggestion:
a political question.

You don't even have to be a human being
to gain political significance.
Crude oil will do,
or concentrated feed, or any raw material.

Or even a conference table whose shape
was disputed for months:
should we negotiate life and death
at a round table or a square one?
Meanwhile people were dying,
animals perishing,
houses burning,
and fields growing wild,
 just as in times most remote
and less political.



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.



CAT IN AN EMPTY APARTMENT

Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Die—you can’t do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here
but nothing is the same.
Nothing’s been moved
but there’s more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,
but they’re new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.

Something doesn’t start
at its usual time.
Something doesn’t happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Every closet’s been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken:
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.

Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.



THE END AND THE BEGINNING

Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Joanne Trzeciak

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.



SOME LIKE POETRY

Wislawa Szymborska

Some--
that means not all.
Not even the majority of all but the minority.
Not counting the schools, where one must,
and the poets themselves, there will be perhaps two in a thousand.
Like--
but one also likes chicken noodle soup,
one likes compliments and the color blue, one likes an old scarf,
one likes to prove one's point,
one likes to pet a dog.

Poetry--
but what sort of thing is poetry?
More than one shaky answer
has been given to this question.
But I do not know and do not know and clutch on to it,
as to a saving bannister.

Born One-Hundred Three Years Ago Today

INITIATION

Czeslaw Milosz

Vanity and gluttony were always her sins
And I fell in love with her in the phase of life
When our scornful reason is the judge of others.

Then I went through a sudden initiation.
Not only did our skins like each other, tenderly,
And our genitals fit once and for all,
But her sleep at arm's length exerted its power
And her childhood in a city she visited dreaming.

Whatever was naive and shy in her
Or fearful in the disguise of self-assurance
Moved me, so that - we were so alike -
In an instant, not judging anymore,
I saw two sins of mine: vanity, gluttony.



SECRETARIES

Czeslaw Milosz

I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing
That is dictated to me and a few others.
Secretaries, mutually unknown, we walk the earth
Without much comprehension. Beginning a phrase in the middle
Or ending it without a comma. And how it all looks when completed
Is not up to us to inquire, we won't read it anyway.



PREPARATION

Czeslaw Milosz

Still one more year of preparation.
Tomorrow at the latest I'll start working on a great book
In which my century will appear as it really was.
The sun will rise over the righteous and the wicked.
Springs and autumns will unerringly return,
In a wet thicket a thrush will build his nest lined with clay
And foxes will learn their foxy natures.

And they will be the subject, with addenda. Thus: armies
Running across frozen plains, shouting a curse
In a many-voiced chorus; the cannon of a tank
Growing immense at the corner of  street; the ride at dusk
Into a camp with watchtowers and barbed wire.

No, it won't happen tomorrow. In five or ten years.
I still think too much about the mothers
And ask what is man born of woman.
He curls himself up and protects his head
While he is kicked with heavy boots; on fire and running
He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit.
Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy.

I haven't learned yet to speak as I should, calmly.



A FELICITOUS LIFE

Czeslaw Milosz

His old age fell on years of abundant harvest.

There were no earthquakes, droughts or floods.

It seemed as if the turning of the seasons gained in constancy,

Stars waxed strong and the sun increased its might.

Even in remote provinces no war was waged.

Generations grew up friendly to fellow men.

The rational nature of man was not a subject of derision.

It was bitter to say farewell to the earth so renewed.

He was envious and ashamed of his doubt,

Content that his lacerated memory would vanish with him.

Two days after his death a hurricane razed the coasts.

Smoke came from volcanoes inactive for a hundred years.

Lava sprawled over forests, vineyards, and towns.

And war began with a battle on the islands.

YOU WHO WRONGED

Czeslaw Milosz

You who wronged a simple man

Bursting into laughter at the crime,

And kept a pack of fools around you

To mix good and evil, to blur the line,

Though everyone bowed down before you,

Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way,

Striking gold medals in your honor,

Glad to have survived another day,

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.

You can kill one, but another is born.

The words are written down, the deed, the date.

And you’d have done better with a winter dawn,

A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.

THEODICY

Czeslaw Milosz

No, it won’t do, my sweet theologians.

Desire will not save the morality of God.

If he created beings able to choose between good and evil,

And they chose, and the world lies in iniquity,

Nevertheless, there is pain, and the undeserved torture of creatures,

Which would find its explanation only by assuming

The existence of an archetypal Paradise

And a pre-human downfall so grave

That the world of matter received its shape from diabolic power.  

ACCOUNT

Czeslaw Milosz

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,

Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,

Would have tended nevertheless towards the candle's flame.

Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,

The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.

I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,

The time when I was among their adherents

Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.

But all of them would have one subject, desire,

Of only my own - but no, not at all; alas

I was driven because I wanted to be like others.

I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.

The history of my stupidity will not be written.

For one thing is is late. And the truth is laborious.

WINDOW

Czeslaw Milosz

I looked out the window at dawn and saw a young apple tree translucent

          in brightness.

And when I looked out a dawn once again, an apple tree laden with fruit

          stood there.

Many years had probably gone by but I remember nothing of what happened

          in my sleep.

Nothingness Unseamed Itself for Me Too

Bernie Kopell is 81 today. I loved Get Smart, especially in black and white. I yodel always, TV toggled to color when I was a kid, a toggle that chimes me. Here is Siegfried's traditional Egoslavian High Holy Day decree, copied & pasted from last year's.

Siegfried has been this shitty blog's and my digital avatar since Blog Day One. Bernie Koppel, Siegfried on Get Smart (and Ann Marie's neighbor Jerry Bauman in That Girl and, unfortunately if more famously, Doc on Love Boat), was born 80 years ago today, his birthday noted every year here.

This is true: I have my iPod set to shuffle the 2000+ songs, driving home Thursday night (this is serendipitous but not as serendipitous as if it happened last night) the Second Egoslavian Bleggalgazing Anthem (lyrics) came on and I realized what a colossal fuck-up by me for not posting it on The Annual Egoslavian Bleggalgazegasm three weeks ago, so shazam! how's this for futile weekend blegging and brazen blogwhoring and attention sluttery in Dead Blegsylvania?

• My brother-in-law is getting married today. We have to go to the service this morning, then a dinner tonight, and then a brunch tomorrow morning. This is proof I love my wife. Further proof: I will not write about it beyond this.
• Links below from friends, blog friends, blog comrades, mostly. Sorry friends, if patterns hold this will be the deadest weekend yet this Summer in Blegsylvania.
• The Left/Right Spectrum is bogus.
• BroadSnark's things you might have missed.
• But you must write. A bleggalgaze of sort.
• Binging on Anne Carson.
• Dang! 15th again.
• Becoming language here and now.
• The pattern of tides.
• A lifetime of watching England lose.
• Here's the Feldman yesterday's mention of Rothko made inevitable here, with bonus Feldman below a new to me Szymborska poem.
• Since My Sillyass Deserted Island Game seems only to include bands and acts the could be sloppily classified as rock Morton Feldman isn't included in the game, though Morton Feldman is going to the island with me. Click the tag in footer for LOTS more.

A POEM

Wislawa Szymborksa
Translated by Clare Cavanaugh

Nothingness unseamed itself for me too.
It turned itself wrong side out.
How on earth did I end up here—
head to toe among the planets,
without a clue how I used not to be.

O you, encountered here and loved here,
I can only guess, my arm on yours,
how much vacancy on that side went to make us,
how much silence there for one lone cricket here,
how much nonmeadow for a single sprig of sorrel,
and sun after darknesses in a drop of dew
as repayment—for what boundless droughts?

Starry willy-nilly! Local in reverse!
Stretched out in curvatures, weights, roughnesses, and motions!
Time out from infinity for endless sky!
Relief from nonspace in a shivering birch tree’s shape!

Now or never wind will stir a cloud,
since wind is exactly what won’t blow there.
And a beetle hits the trail in a witness’s dark suit,
testifying to the long wait for a short life.

And it so happened that I’m here with you.
And I really see nothing
usual in that.

A Troubled Cure for a Troubled Mind

Nick Drake was born 66 years ago today. I sometimes forget how much I dig. Fuck the advertising douches who use his songs to sell product to hipsters, it's not Nick Drake's fault.

Also too, Happy Birthday SeatSix!

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These Tumblers Empty Themselves and Yet I Persist

I didn't remember until noon yesterday that June 5th is Richard Butler's birthday, yesterday his 57th. Fuck we are old. The above is my favorite Psychedelic Furs song, or is it this one? at least this very moment:







At least a half a dozen of the one of five best nights of my life revolved around Furs concerts.

Hey, I get mail:

I am writing to you today to inform you that Nuestar, the Registry Operator for the .US domain, will be increasing its annual registration price by $0.50 USD.   As a result of this notification, eNom must raise our pricing for this domain name extension. The purpose of this notice is to inform you of the upcoming price increase and give you advance notice should you want to renew any names ahead of the price change.

On July 1st, 2014 your price for .US will increase by $0.50

I thought about last summer's domain name dramafuck last night, thought I'd better check the email account I use for non-personal correspondence this morning, and shazam. I can spare the fifty cents, can't bare the aggravation of last summer this summer. I was assured last summer that there will be no repeat of the dramafuckery this summer. I have modest hope, massive dread. So: it's that time of year, if this blog goes dark without announcement like it did last summer the domain renewal is why. I know you know if I killed the blog there would be a loud melodramafuck production.

• What we learned from the Snowden Affair.
• Goodbye, normal genes.
• Purple Line.
• My two months of traffic hell began today.
• Mark introduces me to Marie-Claire Bancquart.
• Jim's Hawaiian vacation.
• Ira goes to Canada.
• A dialectical appreciation of twee?
• Eulogy for a cat.
• Joseph Ceravolo: what chemicals have we forgot?

TWENTY-TWENTY VISION

Mark Ford

Unwinding in a cavernous bodega he suddenly
Burst out:--Barman, these tumblers empty themselves
And yet I persist; I am wedged in the giant eye
Of an invisible needle. Walking through doors
Or into them, listening to anecdotes or myself spinning
A yarn, I realize my doom is never to forget
My lost bearings. In medias res we begin
And end: I was born, and then my body unfurled
As if to illustrate a few tiny but effective words--
But--oh my oh my--avaunt. I peered
Forth, stupefied, from the bushes as the sun set
Behind distant hills. A pair of hungry owls
Saluted the arrival of webby darkness; the dew
Descended upon the creeping ferns. At first
My sticky blood refused to flow, gathering instead
In wax-like drops and pools; mixed with water and a dram
Of colourless alcohol it thinned and reluctantly
Ebbed away. I lay emptied as a fallen
Leaf until startled awake by a blinding flash
Of dry lightning, and the onset of this terrible thirst.            

Ladies and Gentlemen, It Gives Me a Pleasure

Pere Ubu fixes things.

Henry Cow? More here (bonus: w/great William Carlos Williams poem).







No I didn't forget, Chuck Barris is 85 today this year, he was 89 last year, I hope it's him that keeps fucking with his wikipedia page.

A Talent for Self-Realization Will Get You Only as Far as the Vacant Lot Next to the Lumber Yard

Iannis Xenakis was born ninety-two years ago today. Play loud.

The Egoslavian birthdayiest month of the year continues. Will continue. There's one last May birthday, an apt Egoslavian High Holy Day day after tomorrow for finishing.

Persepolis one, two, three, four, five, six.

Bohor one, two.

Xenakis here before one, two, three. Can't find the rest.

The Complete Electronic Music of Iannis Xenakis.








LIFE IS A DREAM

John Ashbery

A talent for self-realization
will get you only as far as the vacant lot
next to the lumber yard, where they have rollcall.
My name begins with an A,
so is one of the first to be read off.
I am wondering where to stand - could that group of three
or four others be the beginning of the line?

Before I have a chance to find out, a rodent-like
man pushes at my shoulders. "It's that way," he hisses.
"Didn't they teach you anything at school? That a photograph
of anything can be real, or maybe not? The corner of the stove,
a cloud of midges at dusk-time."

I know I'll have a chance to learn more
later on. Waiting is what's called for, meanwhile.
It's true that life can be anything, but certain thinkgs
definitely aren't it. This glove hand,
for instance, that glides
so securely into mine, as though it intends to stay.

Born Eighty-Four Years Ago Today

The traditional Egoslavian birthday post for John Barth. If I played the Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game with novelists I'd....

I could do the math and fuck that but I'd guess May is the birthday-iest month in Egoslavia, there are a couple more, including a High Holy Day still left to come. These are simultaneously my favorite posts and this blog's least read posts. Sweet. I would not read and think like I do if Gary Pittenger, English 101 professor at Montgomery College, had not pushed Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor into my hands in 1980. John Barth interview from 1985. PDF of Sot-Weed Factor. On Sot-Weed Factor, part one, part two. Discovering Sot-Weed Factor. The Case for John Barth. On Giles Goat-Boy. Here's the opening to my second favorite Barth novel, Giles Goat-Boy:

Publisher's Disclaimer

The reader must begin this book with an act of faith and end it with an act of charity. We ask him to believe in the sincerity and authenticity of this preface, affirming in return his prerogative to be skeptical of all that follows it.

The manuscript submitted to us some seasons ago under the initials R.N.S., and by us retitled Giles Goat-Boy, is enough removed from the ordinary and so potentially actionable as to make inadequate the publisher's conventional disclaimer: "Any resemblance to persons living or dead," etc. The disclaimer's very relevance-which we firmly assert-was called into question even prior to the manuscript's receipt, as has been everything about the book since, from its content to its authorship. The professor and quondam novelist whose name appears on the title-page (our title-page, not the one following his prefatory letter) denies that the work is his, but "suspects" it to be fictional-a suspicion that two pages should confirm for the average reader. His own candidate for its authorship is one Stoker Giles or Giles Stoker- whereabouts unknown, existence questionable-who appears to have claimed in turn 1 ) that he too was but a dedicated editor, the text proper having been written by a certain automatic computer, and 2) that excepting a few "necessary basic artifices" * the book is neither fable nor fictionalized history, but literal truth. And the computer, the mighty "WESCAC"-does it not too disclaim authorship? It does.

* The computer's assumption of a first-person narrative viewpoint, we are told. is one such "basic artifice." The reader will add others, perhaps challenging their "necessity" as well.

Frankly, what we hope and risk in publishing Giles Goat-Boyis that the question of its authorship will be a literary and not a legal one. If so, judging from the fuss in our office these past months, the book affords more pregnant matter for controversy. Merely deciding to bring it out has already cost us two valued colleagues, for quite different reasons. Five of us were party to the quarrel, which grew so heated, lengthy, and complex that finally, as editor-in-chief, I was obliged to put an end to it. No further discussion of the book was permitted. Inasmuch as the final responsibility was mine I requested from each of my four associates a brief written statement on the questions: should we publish the manuscript entitled Giles Goat-Boy? If so, why, and if not, why not?

Their replies anticipate, I think, what will be the range of public and critical reaction to the book. I reprint them here (with signatures and certain personal references omitted) not in the hope of forestalling that reaction, but to show that our decision was made neither hastily nor in bad faith:


Editor A

I am quite sensible that fashions have changed since my own tenure as editor-in-chief: marriage has lost its sanctity, sex its mystery; every filthiness is published in the name of Honesty, all respect for law and discipline is gone-to say nothing of proprietyand seemliness, whose very names are sneered at. Cynicism is general: the student who eschews cheating like the young girl who eschews promiscuity or the editor who values principle over profit, is looked upon as a freak. Whatever is old-a man, a building, a moral principle is regarded not as established but as obsolete; to be preserved if at all for its antiquarian interest, but got rid of without compunction the moment it becomes in the way. In the way, that is, of self-interest and the tireless sensualism of youth. Indeed fashions change, have always changed, and there's the point. Granted that every generation must write its own "New Syllabus" or re-interpret the Old one, rebel against its teachers, challenge all the rules-all the more important then that the Rules stand fast! Morality like motion has its laws; each generation takes its impetus from the resistance of its forebears, like runners striving against the ground, and those who would abolish the old Answers (I don't speak of restating or modifying them, which is eternally necessary) would turn the track underfoot to quickmire, with fatal consequences for the race of men.

This Revised New Syllabus is nothing new, but as old as sickness of the spirit- not a revision of anything, but a repudiation of all that's wholesome and redeeming. It is for us to repudiate it. Publishing remains despite all a moral enterprise, and is recognized as such in its heart of hearts even by the public that clamors for gratification of its appetites. The sensational, the vulgar, the lurid, the cheap the hackneyed-there is an innocence about these things in their conventional and mass-produced forms, even a kind of virtue; the novelists everyone purchases do no harm as they line our pockets and their own. They are not difficult; they do not astonish; they rebel along traditional lines shock us in customary ways, and teach us what we know already. Their concerns are modest, their literary voice and manner are seldom wild, only their private lives, which make good copy: in straightforward prose they reveal to us how it is to belong to certain racial or cultural minorities; how it is to be an adolescent, a narcotic, an adulterer a vagabond- especially how it is to be the Author, with his particular little history of self-loathings and aggrandizements. Such novels, I conceive, are the printed dreams of that tiny fraction of our populace which buys and reads books, and the true dwelling-places of art and profit. In serving the dream we prevent the deed: vicariously the reader debauches, and is vicariously redeemed; his understanding is not taxed; his natural depravity may be tickled but is not finally approved of; no assaults have been made upon his imagination, nor any great burden put on his attention. He is the same fellow as before, only a little better read, and in most cases the healthier for his small flirtation with the Pit. He may even remark, "Life is absurd, don't you think? There's no answer to anything"; whereafter, his luncheon-companion agreeing absolutely, they have another cocktail and return to more agreeable matters.

Consider the difference with R.N.S.: here fornication, adultery, even rape, yea murder itself (not to mention self-deception, treason, blasphemy, whoredom, duplicity, and willful cruelty to others) are not only represented for our delectation but at times approved of and even recommended! On aesthetic grounds too (though they pale before the moral), the work is objectionable: the rhetoric is extreme, the conceit and action wildly implausible, the interpretation of history shallow and patently biased, the narrative full of discrepancies and badly paced, at times tedious, more often excessive; the form, like the style, is unorthodox, unsymmetrical, inconsistent. The characters, especially the hero, are unrealistic. There never was a Goat-boy! There never will be!

In sum it is a bad book, a wicked book, and ought not-I will say must not-be published. No computer produced it, but the broodings of an ineffectual megalomane: a crank at best, very possibly a psychopath. As the elder, if no longer the ranking, member of this editorial group I urge that we take this opportunity to restore a part of the moral prestige that was ours when our organization was more dedicated and harmonious, if less wealthy; to reverse our lamentable recent policy of publishing the esoteric, the bizarre, the extravagant, the downright vicious. I urge not only that the manuscript in question be rejected forthwith, but also that the "Author's" superiors, his Dean and Department Chairman, be advised what they are exposing undergraduate minds to. Would the present editor-in-chief, I wonder, permit his own daughter to be taught by such a man? Then in the name of what decent principle ought we to make his scribbling available to all our sons and daughters?


Editor B

I vote to publish the Revised New Syllabus and agree with the Editor-in-chief that Giles Goat-Boy is a more marketable title for it. We all know what [A's] objections to the manuscript are; we also know why he's not editor-in-chief any more, after his rejection of __* on similar "moral" grounds.

* Not to injure unnecessarily the reputation of that splendid (and presently retired) old gentleman here called A, let it be said merely that his distinguished editorial career never regained its earlier brilliance after the day some years ago when, in a decision as hotly contested as the present one, he overrode the opinions of myself and several other of his protegé's to reject the novel here cited by B which subsequently made the fortune of our largest competitor. No further identification of the book is needed than that it concerns the adventures, sexual and otherwise, of a handsome, great-spirited young man struggling against all odds and temptations to fulfill what he takes to be his destiny- that the plot was admittedly not original with the now-famous author; and that the book bids fair to remain a best seller forever.

What I must add, at the risk of "impropriety," is that in addition to his predictable bias against anything more daring than Gay Dashleigh's Prep-School Days, he may have a private antipathy for this particular manuscript: his own daughter, I happen to know, "ran off" from college with a bearded young poetry-student who subsequently abandoned her, pregnant, in order to devote himself to sheep-farming and the composition of long pastoral romances in free verse, mainly dealing with his great love for her. Her father never forgave her; neither has he, it seems, forgiven bearded heterosexuality or things bucolic, and it is a mark of his indiscrimination that he makes a goat-boy suffer for a sheep-boy's sins. Much as I respect your request that these statements remain impersonal, and hesitate as a new employee to criticize my colleagues in addition to disagreeing with them, I must argue that the "personal" and "professional" elements are so bound together in this case (indeed, are they ever separable in literary judgments?), that to take a stand for or against Giles Goat-Boy is to do likewise on the question whether this organization will prosper in literary judgments?), that to take a stand for or against Giles Goat-Boy is to do likewise on the question whether this organization will prosper in harmonious diversity or languish in acrimonious dissension. In choosing to publish or reject a manuscript, one oughtn't to bear the burden of choosing professional friends and enemies as well. Where such has become the case, the new man's only choice is to follow his best judgment, laying his future resolutely on the line; and I respectfully suggest that the responsible administrator's best hope for curing the situation is to turn any threatening ultimatums (like A's) into opportunities for revitalizing and reharmonizing the staff.

The fact is, I happen to agree-I think we all do-that Giles Goat-Boy is tough sledding in places, artistically uneven, and offensive (we'll call it challenging, of course) to certain literary and moral conventions. Personally I am no great fan of the "Author's"; like [Editor C, whose opinion follows] I found his early work lively but a bit naïve and his last novel wild and excessive in every respect. I frankly don't know quite what to make of this one. Where other writers seek fidelity to the facts of modern experience and expose to us the emptiness of our lives, he declares it his aim purely to astonish; where others strive for truth, he admits his affinity for lies, the more enormous the better. His fellows quite properly seek recognition and wide readership; he rejoices (so he says) that he has but a dozen readers, inasmuch as a thirteenth might betray him. So far from becoming discouraged by the repeated failure of his novels to make a profit, he confesses his surprise that no one has tarred and feathered him. Apparently sustained by the fact that anyone at all has swallowed his recentest whopper, he sets about to hatch another, clucking tongue at the compass and bedazzlement of those fabrications. Plot, for the young novelists we applaud, is a naughty word, as it was for their fathers--storyto them means invention, invention artifice, artifice dishonesty. As for style, it is everywhere agreed that the best language is that which disappears in the telling, so that nothing stands between the reader and the matter of the book. But this author has maintained (in obscure places, understandably) that language is the matter of his books, as much as anything else and for that reason ought to be "splendrously musicked out"; he turns his back on what is the case, rejects the familiar for the amazing, embraces artifice and extravagance; washing his hands of the search for Truth, he calls himself "a monger after beauty," or "doorman of the Muses' Fancy-house." In sum, he is in a class by himself and not of his time; whether a cut above or a cut below, three decades ahead or three centuries behind, his twelve readers must decide for themselves.

My own net sentiment comes to this: the author in question has, I'm told, a small but slowly growing audience, more loyal than discerning or influential, of the sort one needs no expensive promotion to reach, as they have their own ways of spreading the word around: penniless literature students, professors in second-rate colleges, and a couple of far-out critics. Giles Goat-Boyisn't likely to make anybody rich, but if we can saturate this little group it should at least pay its own way, and may even redeem our losses on the man's other books. One day those penniless students may be pennied enough- those professors may rise to more influential positions; the far-out critics may turn out to have been prophets . . . Alternatively, the author's luck may change (rather, our luck, as he seems not to care one way or the other): by pure accident his next book might be popular, stranger things have happened. Meanwhile we may write off our losses to that tax-deductible sort of prestige associated with the better publishing houses; the thing to do is keep the advance and advertising expenses as low as possible while holding him under contract for the future, in the meantime exploiting whatever ornamental or write-off value he may have.


Editor C

I vote against publishing the book called The Revised New Syllabus, not for reasons of morality, law, or politics, but simply on aesthetic and commercial grounds. The thing won't turn us a profit, and I see no ethical or "prestigial" justification for losing a nickel on it. Publishing may be a moral enterprise, as [A] likes to claim, but first of all it's just an enterprise, and I for one think it's as unprofessional to publish a book for moral reasons (which is what young [B's] enthusiasms amount to) as to reject one for moral reasons. [A] quite obviously has personal motives for rejecting the book; I submit that [B] has motives equally personal, if more sympathetic, for pushing its acceptance. He's new to our profession, and knows very well that discovering fresh talent is a road to success second only to pirating established talents from the competition. He has a young man's admirable compassion for lost causes, a young scholar's sympathy for minor talents, and a young intellectual's love of the heterodox, the esoteric, the obscure. Moreover he's a writer of fiction himself and no doubt feels a certain kinship with others whose talents have brought them as yet no wealth or fame. Finally, it's no reflection on his basic integrity that on the first manuscript he's been asked his opinion of, he might be less than eager to oppose the known judgment of the man who hired him; but that circumstance probably oughtn't to be discounted-especially since his vote to publish is a "net sentiment" by his own acknowledging, arrived at over numerous and grave reservations.

I think I may say that my own position is relatively objective. I agree that there are inferior books which one does right to lose a bit of money on in order not to lose a superior author, and there are superior books (very rare!) which one publishes, regardless of their commercial value, merely to have been their publisher. But the book in question I take to be neither: it's a poor-risk work by a poor-risk author. It wants subtlety and expertise: the story is not so much "astonishing" as preposterous, the action absurd. The hero is a physical, aesthetic, and moral monstrosity; the other characters are drawn with small regard for realism and at times lack even the consistency of stereotypes the dialogue is generally unnatural and wanting in variety from speaker to speaker-everyone sounds like the author! The prose style-that unmodern, euphuistic, half-metrical bombast-is admittedly contagious (witness [A's] and [B's] lapses into it), even more so is syphilis. The theme is obscure, probably blasphemous- the wit is impolite, perhaps even suggestive of unwholesome preoccupations; the psychology-but there is no psychology in it. The author clearly is ignorant of things and people as they really are: Consider his disregard for the reader! Granted that long novels are selling well lately, one surely understands that mere bulk is not what sells them; and when their mass consists of interminable exposition, lecture, and harangue (how gratified I was to see that windy old lunatic Max Spielman put to death!), it is the very antidote to profit. Indeed, I can't imagine to whom a work like R.N.S.might appeal, unless to those happily rare, more or less disturbed, and never affluent intelligences-remote, cranky, ineffectual-from whom it is known the author receives his only fan-mail.

What I suggest as our best course, then, is not to "protect our investment" by publishing this Revised New Syllabus(and the one after that, and the one after that), but to cut our losses by not throwing good money after bad. My own "net sentiment" is a considered rejection not only of this manuscript but of its author. He has yet to earn us a sou; his very energy (let us say, inexorableness), divorced as it is from public appeal, is a liability to us, like the energy of crabgrass or cancer. Despite some praise from questionable critics and a tenuous repute among (spiritually) bearded undergraduates-of the sort more likely to steal than to purchase their reading matter-he remains unknown to most influential reviewers, not to mention the generality of book-buyers. In the remote event that he becomes a "great writer," or even turns out to have been one all along, we still hold the copyright on those other losers of his, and can always reissue them. But no, the thing is as impossible as the plot of this book! He himself declares that nothing gets better, everything gets worse: he will merely grow older and crankier, more quirksome and less clever; his small renown will pass, his vitality become mere doggedness, or fail altogether. His dozen admirers will grow bored with him, his employers will cease to raise his salary and to excuse his academic and social limitations; his wife will lose her beauty, their marriage will founder his children will grow up to be ashamed of their father. I see him at last alone, unhealthy, embittered, desperately unpleasant, perhaps masturbative, perhaps alcoholic or insane, if not a suicide. We all know the pattern.


Editor D

Failed, failed, failed! I look about me, and everywhere see failure. Old moralists, young bootlickers, unsuccessful writers; has-beens, would-bes, never-weres; failed artists, failed editors, failed scholars and critics- failed husbands fathers, lovers; failed minds, failed bodies, hearts, and souls-none of us is Passed, we all are Failed!

It no longer matters to me whether the Revised New Syllabusis published, by this house or any other. What does the Answer care, whether anyone "finds" it? It wasn't lost! The gold doesn't ask to be mined, or the medicine beg to be taken; it's not the medicine that's worse off when the patient rejects it. As for the Doctor-who cares whether he starves or prospers? Let him go hungry, maybe he'll prescribe again! Or let him die, we have prescription enough!

Let him laugh, even, that I've swallowed in good faith the pill he made up as a hoax: I'm cured, the joke's on him! One comes to understand that a certain hermit of the woods is no eccentric, but a Graduate, a Grand Tutor. From all the busy millions a handful seek him out, thinking to honor and sustain him- we bring him cash and frankincense, sing out his praises in four-part harmony, fetch him champagne and vichyssoise. Alas, our racket interrupts his musings and scares off the locusts he'd have suppered on the wine makes him woozy, he upchucks the soup; he can't smell the flowers for our perfume or hear the birds for our music, and there's not a thing to spend his money on. No wonder he curses us under his breath, once he's sober again! And thinking to revenge himself with a trick, he puts on a falseface to scare us away. We had asked for revelations- he palms off his maddest dreams. "Show us Beauty," we plead; he bares his rump to us. "Show us Goodness," we beg, and he mounts our wives and daughters. "Ah, sir!" we implore him, "Give us the Truth!" He thrusts up a forefinger from each temple and declares, "You are cuckolds all."

And yet I say the guller is gulled, hoist is the enginer: the joke's on the joker, that's the joker's joke. Better victimized by Knowledge than succored by Ignorance; to be Wisdom's prey is to be its ward. Deceived, we see our self-deception; suffering the lie, we come to truth, and in the knowledge of our failure hope to Pass.

Publish the Revised New Syllabus or reject it- call it art or artifice, fiction, fact, or fraud: it doesn't care, its author doesn't care, and neither any longer do I. I don't praise it, I don't condemn it- I don't ask who wrote it or whether it will sell or what the critics may make of it. My judgment is not upon the book but upon myself. I have read it. I here resign from my position with this house.

One sees the diversity of opinion that confronted me (I do not even mention the disagreement among our legal staff and such nice imponderables as the fact that it was Editor A who gave me my first job in the publishing field, or that Editor D-present whereabouts unknown-happens to be my only son); one sees further something of what either option stood to cost. One sees finally what decision I came to-with neither aid nor sympathy from the author, by the way, who seldom even answers his mail. Publishing is a moral enterprise, in subtler ways than my dear A asserted; like all such, it is spiritually expensive, highly risky, and proportionately challenging. It is also (if I understand the Goat-Boy correctly) as possible an avenue to Commencement Gate as any other moral enterprise, and on that possibility I must bank.

Herewith, then, Giles Goat-Boy: or, The Revised New Syllabus, "a work of fiction any resemblance between whose characters and actual persons living or dead is coincidental." * Let the author's cover-letter stand in all editions as a self-explanatory foreword or opening chapter, however one chooses to regard it; let the reader read and believe what he pleases; let the storm break if it must.


The Editor-in-Chief

* In the absence of any response from the author, whom we repeatedly invited to discuss the matter with us, we have exercised as discreetly as possible our contractual prerogative to alter or delete certain passages clearly libelous, obscene, discrepant, or false. Except for these few passages (almost all brief and of no great importance) the text is reproduced as it was submitted to us. [Ed.]

A Complete Set of Nude Photos of You, Taken by You and Sold Back to You - at a Discount

Siouxsie born fifty-seven years ago today. She was on the daily soundtrack of my twenties. I think the music has aged well, but then I think I've aged well, so take that into consideration.

For the few of you following along: We did the two-car tandem and the eight miles on the Appalachian Trail this past Sunday. It was admittedly the easier north-south down to the Potomac than the south-to-north climb to South Mountain's ridge above the Potomac. Combined with Friday's five miler around Blockhouse and yesterday's six miler finishing up Little Bennett's twenty-three miles of hikes (we've just two miles left to do) that makes nineteen miles for the three day weekend. We'll go for the same or more in two days this coming weekend.

Other than this photo meditation on a Robert Creeley poem and this meditation (with songs) on Queen and this article on what to name my future hell (I vote NoBeSoRo if it's not to be called Rockville, which is what it is) you get nothing else but more Siouxsie and two poems because (I needed to get that Gregg Popovich gif off the top of the page) because.








BRAND NEW PRODUCTS

Linh Dinh

A vigilant gun that always picks out

The right target—even if it’s you—

No matter who you’re aiming at.

A computer that listens and blows you,

As you blow it, to your favorite tune.

Meat that cleans your teeth

As you’re masticating it.

A truck so awesome, only the President

Of the United States of America’s allowed

To careen in it, to his own beat.

A dictionary with positive adjectives only.

A dictionary with no wet verbs.

A dictionary with negotiable definitions.

A dictionary that defines words by their antonyms.

All the greatest hits from the last millennium

Performed live, on stage, on the inside

Of your state of the art, acoustically-enhanced skull.

A complete set of nude photos

Of you, taken by you and sold

Back to you—at a discount.

A sex doll with a mirror for a face.

A sex doll with a Ph.D.

A sex doll with adjustable skin tone.

A sensitive sex doll that just wants

To be friends—a Platonic sex doll.

Rain water in a bottle, sunshine in a box

And ambience sounds from a bus stop

Down the street, recorded on a CD.

A 24-hour video of what you did yesterday.

A 24-hour video of what you’ll do tomorrow.

A super realistic photo of what’s outside

Your window, pasted to your window.

A baseball game that never ends,

To be played simultaneously with

A football game that never ends.

Cluster bombs that scatter copies of Leaves of Grass

Over a thousand mile radius, for a thousand years.

Landmines made with dough,

Topped with mozzarella and all

Your favorite toppings.

An airplane that never lands.

And, finally, your favorite fairy tale

Painted on your new plastic limbs.

SOFT MONEY

Rae Armantrout

They’re sexy

because they’re needy,

which degrades them.

They’re sexy because

they don’t need you.

They’re sexy because they pretend

not to need you,

but they’re lying,

which degrades them.

They’re beneath you

and it’s hot.

They’re across the border,

rhymes with dancer—

they don’t need

to understand.

They’re content to be

(not mean),

which degrades them

and is sweet.

They want to be

the thing-in-itself

and the thing-for-you—

Miss Thing—

but can’t.

They want to be you,

but can’t,

which is so hot.

Born One Hundred Years Ago Today

Here's UbuWeb's Sun Ra page.

Here's a boatload from a Bryce 2008 playlist.

Here's a boatload from an Irwin 2013 playlist.

Sun Ra Archives remastered for iTunes.

Thanks to @ShaharOzeri for requesting the below!