The Prevalence of Those Grey Flakes Falling?

Per occasionally observed tradition, Saturday's music via Bryce's Friday show, the best three hours of radio each week. These are the musicians but not the pieces Bryce played, except the Radigue - I couldn't find the pieces he played on youtube. This is why I write about rules. A blogfriend has recently returned from a hiatus, I asked him why the hiatus, why the return. I think about a hiatus, think I only think about hiatus because of Kindnesses not reciprocated or content here not being appreciated, but then I smack my self sensible: I mean, it's partially true (and to be honest, this bleg is, within the climate of Blegsylvania vis a vis the ten years of it's existence, doing fine, and thanks), but I've long known that I'm both niche and licorice, I've long figured out the patterns of Blegsylvanian busy and slow. My blogfriend was beaten silent by relentless clusterfuck, how to respond with proper arrgh to the awfulness of the daily duh. It's important to be reminded of the awfulness of the daily duh, aargh consisting of too fucking many reminders of duh. It's not that I think of a hiatus from blogging, I daydream of a clusterfuck-free blog - you, those of you still here, may notice - but I cannot rid myself of the idea of a bogus duty to acknowledge the awfulness of the daily duh not only here but in all iterations of my life. It's how I was trained. And now that I'm being desensitized daily by faster fresh reiterations of duh - there was a shooting somewhere a couple of nights ago, half a dozen killed, dozens wounded, or something, plus routine atrocities since - now that I'm being trained that the daily duh of clusterfuck is in fact routine, move along, and I do, I...

... can vouch for these pieces of music, tomorrow's a High Egoslavian Holy Day, tune in, rest assured, I'll never go longform aargh on you, there are much better than me, let me link to them, have more Ashbery poems.








HOW TO CONTINUE

John Ashbery

Oh there once was a woman

and she kept a shop

selling trinkets to tourists

not far from a dock

who came to see what life could be

far back on the island.

And it was always a party there

always different but very nice

New friends to give you advice

or fall in love with you which is nice

and each grew so perfectly from the other

it was a marvel of poetry

and irony

And in this unsafe quarter

much was scary and dirty

but no one seemed to mind

very much

the parties went on from house to house

There were friends and lovers galore

all around the store

There was moonshine in winter

and starshine in summer

and everybody was happy to have discovered

what they discovered

And then one day the ship sailed away

There were no more dreamers just sleepers

in heavy attitudes on the dock

moving as if they knew how

among the trinkets and the souvenirs

the random shops of modern furniture

and a gale came and said

it is time to take all of you away

from the tops of the trees to the little houses

on little paths so startled

And when it became time to go

they none of them would leave without the other

for they said we are all one here

and if one of us goes the other will not go

and the wind whispered it to the stars

the people all got up to go

and looked back on love

AS ONE PUT DRUNK INTO THE PACKET-BOAT

John Ashbery

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
Elsewhere we are as sitting in a place where sunlight
Filters down, a little at a time,
Waiting for someone to come. Harsh words are spoken,
As the sun yellows the green of the maple tree....

So this was all, but obscurely
I felt the stirrings of new breath in the pages
Which all winter long had smelled like an old catalogue.
New sentences were starting up. But the summer
Was well along, not yet past the mid-point
But full and dark with the promise of that fullness,
That time when one can no longer wander away
And even the least attentive fall silent
To watch the thing that is prepared to happen.

A look of glass stops you
And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?
Did they notice me, this time, as I am,
Or is it postponed again? The children
Still at their games, clouds that arise with a swift
Impatience in the afternoon sky, then dissipate
As limpid, dense twilight comes.
Only in that tooting of a horn
Down there, for a moment, I thought
The great, formal affair was beginning, orchestrated,
Its colors concentrated in a glance, a ballade
That takes in the whole world, now, but lightly,
Still lightly, but with wide authority and tact.

The prevalence of those gray flakes falling?
They are sun motes. You have slept in the sun
Longer than the sphinx, and are none the wiser for it.
Come in. And I thought a shadow fell across the door
But it was only her come to ask once more
If I was coming in, and not to hurry in case I wasn't.

The night sheen takes over. A moon of cistercian pallor
Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed,
Finally involved with the business of darkness.
And a sigh heaves from all teh small things on earth,
The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons
Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower
Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night.
The summer demands and takes away too much,
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.

Catnip to a Brat Placated by Model Airplane Kits Kids My Size Lack Motorskills For

• Exactly.
• I suppose there are updates on the latest intramural food fight on King of Anarchists.
• I would ask those happy-dancing the defeat of Eric Cantor (the ridiculous Joan Walsh, for instance) to consider... 
• Today will be especially slow for us littles in Blegsylvania as people flock to Bleggal Overlords to read Brat-slamming, Brat-baiting, Brat-debate, Brat-analysis, be told what to Brat-think.
• Dear Overlord, of course Brat is a rightwing asshole.
• The true aims of the War on Terror: Now those who remember what the world was like before the Second World War -- the ugly, despairing poverty and inequality that Smith writes about so movingly -- are almost gone. Even those of us who remember when the idea of human betterment seemed a realistic possibility for society, a practical goal to be pursued despite many difficulties, not a pipe dream scorned by the "savvy," are fading away. There are now generations well into adulthood who have never known anything but the war principle and the neoliberal ascendancy as "normality," the natural state of things. Indeed, in a very few years, we'll see the first generation of adults who will have lived their entire lives under the reign of the Terror War. The relentless assault of the elites who have thrived under the war principle, increasing the unequal proportion of their wealth and power to unimaginable levels, have left these new generations very little to build upon. On so many fronts, so many levels, they will essentially have to start from scratch, re-discover old skills and insights that have been lost, re-fight old battles,  and of course, create new ways of trying to go forward (like the Occupy movement).
• I live in Maryland's 8th Congressional District. Gerrymander much?
• I have not seen a single sign from a Democratic challenger to Chris Van Hollen in the upcoming primary in which I will not vote (except if Earthgirl asks me to vote for certain people for Board of Education, she being a MCPS teacher).

• World Cup opinions: Politics, geography and good old schadenfreude seem to play a strong role in rooting. A plurality of Mexican respondents named the United States as their least-favorite team. Brazilians chose Argentines, and vice versa. Greeks named their bankers: both Germany and the United States.
• Food links.
• Jeebus, blooger is extra-skeevy today.
• sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously....
• Houllebecq, for those of you who do.
• New thing elsewhere, for the few of you who do.
• Reading, the struggle: Now, on the contrary, every moment of serious reading has to be fought for, planned for. Already by the late 1990s, translating on computer with frequent connections (back then through a dial-up modem) to check email, I realized that I was doing most of my reading on my two or three weekly train commutes to Milan, two hours there, two hours back. Later, with better laptop batteries and the advent of mobile Internet connections, that space too was threatened. The mind, or at least my mind, is overwhelmingly inclined toward communication or, if that is too grand a word, to the back and forth of contact with others. It's true, beloveds, it's your fault I'm not finishing novels.

THE CLOSET

Bill Knott

(...after my Mother's death)

Here not long enough after the hospital happened   

I find her closet lying empty and stop my play   

And go in and crane up at three blackwire hangers   

Which quiver, airy, released. They appear to enjoy

Their new distance, cognizance born of the absence   

Of anything else. The closet has been cleaned out   

Full-flush as surgeries where the hangers could be   

Amiable scalpels though they just as well would be

Themselves, in basements, glovelessly scraping uteri   

But, here, pure, transfigured heavenward, they’re

Birds, whose wingspans expand by excluding me. Their   

Range is enlarged by loss. They’d leave buzzards

Measly as moths: and the hatshelf is even higher!—

As the sky over a prairie, an undotted desert where   

Nothing can swoop sudden, crumple in secret. I’ve fled   

At ambush, tag, age: six, must I face this, can

I have my hide-and-seek hole back now please, the   

Clothes, the thicket of shoes, where is it? Only   

The hangers are at home here. Come heir to this   

Rare element, fluent, their skeletal grace sings

Of the ease with which they let go the dress, slip,   

Housecoat or blouse, so absolvingly. Free, they fly

Trim, triangular, augurs leapt ahead from some geometric   

God who soars stripped (of flesh, it is said): catnip

To a brat placated by model airplane kits kids

My size lack motorskills for, I wind up glue-scabbed,   

Pawing goo-goo fingernails, glaze skins fun to peer in as

Frost-i-glass doors ... But the closet has no windows,

Opaque or sheer: I must shut my eyes, shrink within   

To peep into this wall. Soliciting sleep I’ll dream   

Mother spilled and cold, unpillowed, the operating-

Table cracked to goad delivery: its stirrups slack,

Its forceps closed: by it I’ll see mobs of obstetrical   

Personnel kneel proud, congratulatory, cooing

And oohing and hold the dead infant up to the dead   

Woman’s face as if for approval, the prompted

Beholding, tears, a zoomshot kiss. White-masked   

Doctors and nurses patting each other on the back,   

Which is how in the Old West a hangman, if

He was good, could gauge the heft of his intended ...

Awake, the hangers are sharper, knife-’n’-slice, I jump   

Helplessly to catch them to twist them clear,   

Mis-shape them whole, sail them across the small air   

Space of the closet. I shall find room enough here

By excluding myself; by excluding myself, I’ll grow.

Like You, They May Be Waiting Separately at Their Own Levels, Inside Their Own Portions of Your Incoherent Flat

Biblioklept's posting of this Vollmann quote last night:

My critique of American society remains fundamentally incoherent. Would I really have preferred my grandfather’s time, when Pinkertons were cracking Wobblies over the head, or my father’s, when Joe McCarthy could ruin anyone by calling him Red? All I know is that although I live a freer life than many people, I want to be freer still; I’m sometimes positively dazzled with longing for a better way of being. What is it that I need?

serendipitously mirrored a conversation I was simultaneously enjoying with my Obamaphile friend. He was particularly enthused by Krugman's Obamaphile pep talk from Monday and ready for argument. My friend brought out the Green Lantern, insisted I expect too much from Democrats in general and Obama in particular. He earnestly reminded me of the dangers of the American Right (citing both the Right's reaction to the Bergdahl story, which I haven't followed, and gun nuts reaction to a surprisingly sensible NRA statement and subsequent NRA submission to gun nuts). I earnestly reminded him that while some of the American Right is fuckawful, the American Left doesn't exist except as a counterweight character reacting to the stimuli of a stimulated fuckawful American Right in the oligarchy's kabuki called Democracy. Even if that's true, he said, if that's the only game in town, shouldn't we try to make it as least shitty as possible. Ah, less-shitty, I said, it always comes back to that. I understand the argument, I sympathize with the argument, I agree with the argument just .06% less than I disagree with the argument, I debated the pluses and minuses of less-shittism for eight fucking years on this blog, I recognize the argument's deployment to justify acceptance of greater shittiness, and what our Triskelion overlords have planned is more shittiness, I.... I got home, turned on the laptop, saw the Vollmann quote, realized the word I was looking for was incoherent, the motives for my attempts to disengage from the clusterfuck, the motives for my inability to disengage from the clusterfuck despite my impotency (and self-interest) before it.

• Omidyar and the Oligarch's Code.
• Savage capitalism is back.
• Graeber interviewed.
• One percent America.
• Too little, too late.
• On Assata Shakur: But the anger... it should be simple, but the ongoing history of white supremacy in this country makes nothing simple. That Assata Shakur's daughter should ever have been separated from her mother, that she should have believed that her mother did not want to be out of prison: these are great crimes, inexcusable crimes, all too common crimes. There has been much talk in recent weeks of reparations for slavery. It's not clear to me how a debt like that could ever be repaid. How even individual crimes, like those against Assata Shakur and her daughter, could ever be adequately atoned for.
• A bleggalgaze: I feel like I keep saying this every few blog posts, or maybe I just think about it in the shower: I need to write more, I’ve lost the purpose of this blog, I need to be more interesting, I need more clicks (I almost typed “dicks”—and yes … perhaps), I need more retweets, I need the favs, am I alive, etc., and I know people are like, shut up already, what are you, a narcissist, what are you, a woman, what are you, and the crux of it is I hate myself for having those thoughts and for wanting to write and for wanting attention. What this means is that I’ve lost the ability to not give a fuck and write. When I say “lost” I mean “I never had it”. This is not a bad thing at all but capitalist ideology posits solipsism as a triumph, an admirable thing, a wonderful starting point. Or maybe it’s both the starting point and the goal. You are supposed to not care. I know that this idea of not-caring-what-you-think-of-me needs to be historicised, raced, and gendered, before it can mean anything. Some of us get away with not-caring! Are rewarded handsomely, in fact! Make pots of money off of not-caring! And some of us care too much and then we die.
• Anne Carson, for those of you who do.
• Josipovici, for those of you who do.
• The life of John Fahey, American guitarist.

IN RUBBLE

David Wagoner

Right after the bomb, even before the ceiling

   And walls and floor are rearranging

      You and themselves into a different world,

You must hold still, must wait for them

   To settle down in unpredictable ways,

      To bring their wars, shuddering,

To an end, and only then should you begin

   Numbly to feel what freedom may be left

      To your feet or knees, to your elbows

Or clenched fingers. Where you used to walk

   Or lean or lie down or fix your attention

      At a whim or stomp your foot

Or slump in a chair, you'll find a new

   Architecturally unsound floor-plan

      To contend with, if you can move

At all. Now you may remember others

   Who were somewhere near you before

      This breakdown of circumstances. Caught by surprise

Like you, they may be waiting separately

   At their own levels, inside their own portions

      Of your incoherent flat. They may be thinking

Of you, as you are of them, and wondering

   Whether some common passageway, no matter

      How crooked or narrow, might still exist

Between you, through which you might share the absence

   Of food and water and the cold comfort

      Of daylight. They may be expecting you

To arrive at any moment, to crawl through dust

   And fire to their rescue as they find their bodies

      Growing more stiff, assuming even more

Unusual attitudes at every turn

   Of a second hand, at every sound

      Of a bell or an alarm, at every pounding

Of a door or a heart, so if you can't reach them

   Now and they can't reach you, remember, please

      Remember, whatever you say,

Whatever you hear or keep to yourself, whatever

   You scream or whisper, will need to make

      Some kind of sense, perhaps for days and days.

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.

And the Time It Says Nothing One Moves

• A preface to metaphysics.
• Darkblack closes shop: I have decided not to continue contributing to this blog. I no longer have the time, money, or inclination to merely poke fun at the monsters in the mist of America's twilight - for the dream is quite over, and I am incapable of cynically profiting from and promoting my trifles within the phantasmagorical ruins of a nightmare.
• Happening more and more. Speaking only for me, the despair is in knowing nothing can be changed by protest - and remember, it will be 2047 when my daughter is my age, what the fuck world will that be (assuming there is a world of humans in 2047) - while remaining chained to the indoctrinated belief that one must engage or any happiness one seeks and obtains is morally invalid. Working on it.
• The Blog Days of Summer are starting, be sadly interesting to see how many blogs go to Moribund between now and the end of August.
• I have a bleggalgaze in a different format that feels like it's ready for abandoning to post, but I've been reading my latest obsession, Clark Coolidge, so much I'm certain the poem is as much him as me, so....
• Hey, go fund Jim's voice. He's a blogfriend and fellow Mocomofo!
• The Statist Dilemma.
• Pynchon, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Adorno. If I see the book in the library catalog or consortium catalog I'll grab to read the intro, I have learned my lesson he says again about reading from front to back a non-fiction book. At least I've learned not to spend the money on a book I'll never read beyond the introduction.
• Fearing Google.
• Two-thirds of the American League East in feathers.
• The Death of the Novel: this year's model.
• I never heard of Rosemary Tonk until yesterday. 
• Ere Mine Errs Wer E'en O'er.
• Learning to write: repetition, imitation, relaxation.
• I'm driving out to Ohio next week to bring Planet back from college for the summer. Earthgirl can't go, which sucks and means no slideshows, but it does mean I can listen to whatever I want out and back. Am working on the playlists, added my SOoA to iTunes last night.

BUT IT SAYS NOTHING

Clark Coolidge

But it says nothing. And one is as quiet

as if to say nothing moves me. Then

there is the chair. And one speaks of

the chair sitting at the table.

Scraping against surfaces, opening the mouth.

The object is a piece of thing before. One

shifts in a chair and opens the talk.

And the time it says nothing one moves.

The table is too long as the wall. Not

a thing but it stays and one opens

as a mouth will begin. Speaking of

the table, nothing but to avoid that of

the wall. One could return over and over

to the chair, the wall one is sitting at.

Least ways it says nothing. And the

thing is, it stays still before

speaking of. The object of nothing, even

speech.

The Local Minister Is Thinking of Moving to Holland, Exchanging His Old Ballads for Some Lingerie

Yes, updated from last night with added buttons and some links. There is a Student Employee Appreciation party today, colleagues have borrowed a button machine from Headquarters to use at the event. Guess what I made. Other than Planet and me I can't think of anyone who'd want a Siegfried, but let me know if you do, and soon, say noon Eastern Daylight Time Thursday, my access to Headquarters button machine is short!

If you'd rather have a Fleabus Dandelion or Planet Hand, that can be arranged too. They look better than these photos suggest.

UPDATE 10:15 AM: Fleabus 12, Siegfried 0. A predictable rout.

UPDATE 3:00 PM: Final score: Fleabus 16, Siegfried 2. Will borrow machine next week.

• May Day.
• May Day.
• David Harvey on May Day.
• What about communism?
• Be they race-bait gaming labor?
• Today in motherfucking cops.
• Please consider throwing Arthur the coins in your pocket.
• 258 Fake.
• Moving House.
• Josipovici and Handke, for those of you who do one or the other or both.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.

A VAGABOND

James Tate

A vagabond is a newcomer

in a heap of trouble.

He’s an eyeball at a peephole

that should be electrocuted.

He’s a leper in a textile mill

and likely to be beheaded, I mean,

given a liverwurst sandwich

on the break by the brook

where the loaves are sliced.

But he oughtn’t meddle

with the powder puffs on the golf links—

they have their own goats to tame,

dirigibles to situate.

He can act like an imbecile

if the climate is propitious,

a magnate of kidnap

paradising around the oily depot,

or a speck from a distant nebula

wishing to purchase a certain skyscraper ....

Well, if it’s permitted, then

let’s regulate him, let’s testify

against his thimble, and moderate his gloves

before they sew an apron.

The local minister is thinking

of moving to Holland, exchanging

his old ballads for some lingerie.

“Zatso!” says the vagabond.

Homeless, like wheat that tattletales

on the sermon, like wages swigged.

“Zatso, zatso, zatso!” cries the vagabond.

The minister reels under the weight

of his thumbs, the vagabond seems to have

jutted into his kernel, disturbed

his terminal core. Slowly, and with

trifling dignity, the minister removes

from his lapel his last campaign button:

Don’t Mess with Raymond, New Hampshire.


    

We Each Bought an Hour with the Grief Puppet

The traditional aarghy Egoslavian song cocktail, posted last night in response to a conversation I had with the obamaphile friend telling me of the existential importance of this Fall's midterm election, re-posted this morning with context and content. Sterling Bundy, don't you know. But, Democrats, I said. Fleabus on drums and guitars, Stanley singing on the above.

• But, Democrats.
• Piketty Diketty Riketty.
• On civility, again. I hadn't thought about McArdle in months.
• Colton Burpo, all grown up.
• Marking territory.
• Pain and parentheses.
• Hilary Mantel interview. (h/t Hamster)
• On Damon Albarn's first solo album.
• Albert Camus dancing.
• XTC's Skylarking fixed?
• Doom and gloom from the tomb: The Clean live 1981!
• I played this a couple of months ago, h/t today to Scarlet Tracery.

GRIEF PUPPET

Sandra Beasley

In the nearby plaza, musicians would often gather.
The eternal flame was fueled by propane tank.
An old man sold chive dumplings from a rolling cart,
while another grilled skewers of paprika beef.
Male turtledoves would puff their breasts, woo-ing,
and for a few coins, we each bought an hour with
the grief puppet. It had two eyes, enough teeth,
a black tangle of something like hair or fur,
a flexible spine that ran the length of your arm.
Flick your wrist, and at the end of long rods
it raised its hands as if conducting the weather.
Tilt the other wrist, and it nodded. No effort
was ever lost on its waiting face. It never
needed a nap or was too hungry to think straight.
You could have your conversation over and over,
past dusk when old men doused their charcoal,
into rising day when they warmed their skillets.
The puppet only asked what we could answer.
Some towns had their wall, others their well;
we never gave the stupid thing a name, nor
asked the name of the woman who took our coins.
But later, we could all remember that dank felt,
and how the last of grief’s flock lifted from our chests.

Born Ninety-Two Years Ago Today

No, I didn't forget, and my apologies, the large collection of Mingus youtubes I've archived on the blog to be posted on his birthday - those I've found, those suggested by Hamster and Greyhoos and others - are all dead, removed by demand of some right's holder. Send me working Mingus youtubes and I'll add them.

My standard Mingus birthday paragraphs:

I don't know as much about jazz as I wish - there are only so many hours - but I was turned onto Mingus by an English professor at Anne Arundel Community College (there's a story) about the time Earthgirl and I first lived together in a marina house in Deale MD (google map 6064 Drumpoint Road, Deale MD and you can see it), and while true that Mingus' music strikes pleasure tines in my brain most jazz - most music - doesn't, I also associate Mingus with wonderful times sitting in the backyard listening to Mingus, watching the sailboats come and go while steaming the blue crabs we pulled from our pots we threw off the docks and BBQing fresh bluefish friendly fisherman gave us, and awful times too, sitting in the backyard listening to Mingus with my friend Henry, a black man, and his white wife Donna, and being called over in private by two boat owners who demanded I get the fucking nigger and his white whore off the property, waking up in the morning after I told them to fuck off to find my car tires slashed. The local cops taking the police report thought it was funny.

There was a big gun control vote in Maryland during POTUS 88 when we were living in Deale, I had a bumpersticker on my car advocating whatever the liberal position was (I don't remember the details), I woke up one morning to find my tires slashed and my car encased in pro-gun bumperstickers. The local cops taking the police report thought it was funny. 

We never intended to live for long in Deale - the marina house belonged to a family friend from Earthgirl's side, he rented it to us to give us a place to see if we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, but we both worked in DC/MOCO, the commute was hell, we would have moved back sooner or later, the incidents with the locals just made it sooner. 

Yes, that story is related to my incipient ismlessism, both its necessity and its futility.

My Attic Hurts, and I'd Like to Quit the Committee for Naming Tornadoes

• Dave's book arrived, thanks for the extra goodies! Order yours here.
• The Geography of Poverty. Gorgeous, sad, disturbing, provocative website.
• The Limits of Libertarianism. Offered for consideration, not chum. OK, for chum too. I confess I now try to maintain a state of Ismlessism, I'm willing - am eager - to hear all flavors torture their contradictions and hypocrisies and attendant justifications while trying to sell me a set of encyclopedias I desperately pray I don't buy.
• Ismlessism? L asked at Monday Night Pints. You don't make up words nearly as much as you used to, she said. Apathyatrophyitus, I said. K brought up POTUS 16, Team Democrat (serendipitously mentioned this morning by Corrente's Clinton v Warren). Warren isn't running if Clinton tells her not to, L said. I'm fuckbarren, I said.
• I also confess I've seen Piketty-this, Piketty-that, but have only read this Piketty profile.
• Re: turning back the inexorable oligarchic slow tsumami in a peaceable manner is not an option, cause they aren't turning back peaceably.
• Joseph Conrad and contemporary terrorism.
• The roots and fruits of terror war.
• Torturers, looters, and oligarchs get freaky.
• Péladan, for those of you like me who never heard of him.
• Joanna Russ, for those of you who do.
• Hamster just told me I missed Robert Smith's birthday yesterday. Don't know how that happened, but he'll have another one next year.
• And yes, it's John Waters' birthday today, here is the standard youtube.
• Woke up with Teardrop Explodes in my head. This is one of dozens of my favorite songs ever.

SCHWINN

Matthew Zapruder

I hate the phrase “inner life.” My attic hurts,

and I’d like to quit the committee

for naming tornadoes. Do you remember

how easy and sad it was to be young

and defined by our bicycles? My first

was yellow, and though it was no Black

Phantom or Sting-Ray but merely a Varsity

I loved the afternoon it was suddenly gone,

chasing its apian flash through the neighborhoods

with my father in vain. Like being a nuclear

family in a television show totally unaffected

by a distant war. Then we returned

to the green living room to watch the No Names

hold our Over the Hill Gang under

the monotinted chromatic defeated Super

Bowl waters. 1973, year of the Black Fly

caught in my Jell-O. Year of the Suffrage Building

on K Street NW where a few minor law firms

mingle proudly with the Union of Butchers

and Meat Cutters. A black hand

already visits my father in sleep, moving

up his spine to touch his amygdala. I will

never know a single thing anyone feels,

just how they say it, which is why I am standing

here exactly, covered in shame and lightning,

doing what I’m supposed to do.

tained pun

Was in Politics and Prose on Connecticut in NW last night, doopty-doo, looking over the new fiction shelves, hey, there's Jacob's new novel, Jacob a digital friend, better known in Blegsylvania as IOZ. So he's sold at least one book. I guarantee it will be read, I double-guarantee it will not be reviewed here.

Bought that too, along with the below, all three of which will be read on my vacation which starts tomorrow with a visit - finally - from a MOCO Animal Services officer. I did verify with two other vets and then the officer that the six months quarantine for Napoleon is the correct length. Will take all three books to Ohio when visiting Planet! Over dinner last night (yo, Mocomofos, Masala Art in Tenleytown turned major suck) we appraised our cat-sitter of the rabies situation and she's comfortable feeding Napoleon, so yay!

• That's actually the library's copy photoed this morning - I need to underline and notate in margins, that's why I bought my own copy, but there was no reason to schlep it to work this morning after I forgot to photo it last night at home.
• Where is the protest? If we are serious about moving beyond the revolutionary moment of 2011 and building a radically democratic anti-capitalist movement that can actually endure and change the material constitution of society, we will first of all need to find ways to disarm the structural and ideological mechanisms of capitalist control. While I do not pretend to have any easy answers on how to do this — David Graeber’s grassroots organizing in Occupy and his direct involvement in the Strike Debt campaign is much more instructive in this respect — it seems to me that recognizing the systemic importance of precarity, anxiety and futility is a crucial first step in the process of revamping the resistance. Only by directly targeting the structural, ideological and psychological mechanisms that sustain the rule of capital can we begin to recover a sense of social solidarity and craft lasting and meaningful alternatives to financial dictatorship.
• The four industrial revolutions.
• Vicious disequilibrium: Try to imagine the mountain of cash on which corporations in the United States and Europe are sitting, too terrorized by the prospect of insufficient consumer demand to invest in the production of things that society needs. We now have it on good authority that some $2 trillion of surpluses are slushing around within corporate America. Another $700 billion is loitering within the United Kingdom’s circuits of finance, refusing to be channeled into productive investments. A further $2 trillion is “lost” in the no man’s land of idle savings, which circulate in continental Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Nearly $5 trillion of idle money is hardly a sign of a world in the process of “rebalancing.”
• The revolution in reverse: In the face of all this catastrophism, the placid certainties of neoliberal ideology rattle on as though nothing has happened. Remarkably, our governing elites have decided to greet a moment of existential reckoning for most of their guiding dogmas by incanting with redoubled force the basic catechism of the neoliberal faith: reduced government spending, full privatization of social goods formerly administered by the public sphere, and a socialization of risk for the upper class. When the jobs economy ground to a functional halt, our leadership class first adopted an anemic stimulus plan, and then embarked on a death spiral of austerity-minded bids to decommission government spending at the very moment it was most urgently required—measures seemingly designed to undo whatever prospective gains the stimulus might have yielded. It’s a bit as though the board of directors of the Fukushima nuclear facility in the tsunami-ravaged Japanese interior decided to go on a reactor-building spree on a floodplain, or on the lip of an active volcano.
• A return to conspiracy and its theories: Since the ruling class produces notions of desirability, it defines belonging, or at least the sense of belonging. This means that it also maintains methods for ostracizing. When I examine the behavior of Greenwald, and even the behavior of his co-workers under Omidyar, since he has gained access to one of the richest men in the world, I see uses of some of the most common techniques for maintaining group cohesion and for humiliating dissenters using tried-and-true ad hominem attacks. These attacks include diagnoses of pathology, accusations of failure, a stated belief in individualized responsibility for that failure, and, finally, the ultimate ostracization tool in the realm of political dispute, charges of conspiracy theory, even though in this case the charge is implied rather than outright stated. 

• The antinomies of realism: Fredric Jameson examines the most influential theories of artistic and literary realism, approaching the subject himself in terms of the social and historical preconditions for realism’s emergence. The realist novel combined an attention to the body and its states of feeling with a focus on the quest for individual realization within the confines of history. In contemporary writing, other forms of representation—for which the term “postmodern” is too glib—have become visible: for example, in the historical fiction of Hilary Mantel or the stylistic plurality of David Mitchell’s novels. Contemporary fiction is shown to be conducting startling experiments in the representation of new realities of a global social totality, modern technological warfare, and historical developments that, although they saturate every corner of our lives, only become apparent on rare occasions and by way of the strangest formal and artistic devices.
• Ordered that last night at Politics and Prose. So yes, I seem to be reengaging. I recognize this is part of the pattern of my manic and crash cycles. This feels different in ways I may share, though I promise there will be no lectures.
• Revisiting the New York School.
• A poem Jackson Mac Low futzed around with for sixteen years.
• Lowercaseness: E.E. Cummings and the state of biography.
• National Laureate. Do.
• Failure: a Postconceptual Poem.
• Ceravolo, for those of you who do.
• Animal Collective's Sung Tongs is ten years old.
• Jon Langford, for those of you who (Mekons) do.
• Steve Roden.

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