Bequeathing to the Groin a Pang of Distance

Bartok born 133 years ago today. I've told this history before: my mother's grandparents are Hungarian, my mother's mother forbade my mother and her sister from speaking Hungarian. I learned about Bartok on my own; though my mother is an excellent pianist, her fingers never left the 19th century, though when I listen to Bartok I wish I spoke fluent Hungarian.

This part is new. My mother's father and mother built a freaky house in Fellsburg Pennsylvania up the hill from Donora in that weird finger of Westmoreland County that grasps for the Monongahela. My grandmother kept Time Magazines and remaindered books on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution on a dresser in the downstairs bedroom in the corner to the right of the window that looked down on the steep carport. I asked her why once, she gave me a look that said Shut Up. In that room I once was lying under the bed while listening to Bob Prince calling a Pirates game with my grandfather when my grandmother came in, didn't know I was under the bed, and cursed him out in both English and Hungarian for being the arthritic cripple he was when I knew him. I never heard Bartok in that house but when I hear Bartok I think about this. I made the link when I was thirteen, fourteen, first time I heard Bartok: it's a facile and tenuous connection, but it stuck. I've been trying to draw a floor plan in 3D of the three floors of the house since this past Saturday when I realized Bartok's birthday was approaching. I can't stop thinking about it. I have no skills to draw architectural floor plans in 2D much less 3D, though I promise a rendering tomorrow or Thursday at the latest if solely to rid myself of the motherfucking obsession. SeatSix, help. Hell, Elric, if today's the day you tune in, help. Oakton, you're the mathematician, I'll post a rendering of yours. Must be included: the broken stereo/radio in the front lobby; the piano in the living room as well as an arrow to the corner of the living room crushed by a car flying off Fellsburg Road; an accurate drawing of the stupidass hallway/dining room design, the point on the dining room table Frank sat at; the Philmore in the kitchen, the hoosier in the kitchen, the white radio on the hoosier tuned to KDKA; the basement, the root cellar, the door to the sky blue Ford Falcon in the garage under the back porch; the green and white davenport on the back porch; upstairs, the weirdest floor of all time, the captain's walk of the master bedroom, all the mazes of the attics, the secret kingdoms they lead to. I dream about that house to this day, last night. I was asked last week, what the fuck is with all the birthdays here? More Bartok:

• Four myths about the surveillance state.
• The opaque politics of the internet: My hypothesis is that the public sphere – a space of centralising ideologies in which a general consensus can be formed, as proposed by Habermas -- becomes a network of differences when applied to the internet. Differences within the internet are broken down to the level of the individual and at such a micro-level that the macro, i.e. the political, has already disappeared. In the enhanced subjectivity of personal monitor space (Breen 110-111), ideology becomes subjective and individualised. In such a space, the unifying modality of ideology gives way to the differential processing of the algorithm which shapes social space as a controlled experiment, and which may be adapted to create different output results. I will argue that in its capacity to shape the social space of the individualised internet user, the algorithm has now become a more effective method of intellectual oppression than the ideology of the outdated mass media technologies.
• More links to above subject at yesterday's wood_s_lot.
• Fish surfaces to reiterate the Problem of -.06% Less-Shittiness: I get it, I really do. The Republican party is bugshit crazy. There are some areas on the margins where real relief to people is provided by Democrats. Things that cannot be trivialized. The lesser evil argument connects with a solid left. Here's the problem: If I accept this framing, if I accept that 1% less evil is enough, I embrace despair., nothing less. Because I do not see Democrats and Republicans as two teams fighting it out for what is right, I see a winch and a pawl, one party squeezing tighter and the other merely preventing the backslide. Voting for the pawl means I have accepted that this arc of history is inevitable. That the plutocrats will always win. I am Winston Smith after his treatments, toothless, impotent.
• Hi Fish! I agree! Fuck TBogg and Digby!

• Should you be in Albuquerque today. Back story here.
• Purple Line.
• Purple Line.
• Laytonsville!
• New bibliological definitions added.
• Bauhaus (the band) and jelly.
• Ashbery, for those of you who do and those of you who should.
• Krasznahorkai, for those of you who do.
• Fennesz cascade tomorrow, OK?
• Prunella's latest playlist.

DISAPPOINTMENT

August Kleinzahler

A faint smell of urine

embroidering that bouquet of mold the big cushions   

give off days the fog won’t lift,

and a shelf of bone

growing out over the eyelids like evening’s shadow   

across a field of corn—

The whole parade

leaking out from your shoulders, bequeathing   

to the groin a pang of distance;

then that metallic taste in the mouth   

and a voice you had let yourself believe   

was dead

close now by your ear, intimate and sweet:

                                  Well, well, well,   

look what we have here.

Not That Anyone Will Care, but as I Was Sitting There on the 8:07 to New Haven, I Was Struck by Lightning

   

Bryce played parts three and four of Chris Watson's El Tren Fanstama yesterday. Here are all ten parts of the work (though they are not labeled so on youtube screenshot). It's... love. 

Over the past year I've gone back and listened to Bryce's show archives and and Jeff Mullan's show archives not only for the composed music but for the field recordings they play, it's a new obsession, field recordings, I've spared this blog, until now.

   

Here: In his book Civilizations, historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto focuses on man’s overriding impulse timpose its will on the world, "a relationship to the natural environment, recrafted, by the civilising impulse, to meet human demands". This process lies at the very heart of El Tren Fantasma, a composite document of a train ride across Mexico, describing a passage "from Los Mochis to Veracruz, [from] coast to coast, Pacific to Atlantic". While Chris Watson’s previous sets – such as 2003’s critically acclaimed Weather Report – have generally concerned themselves with this planet’s myriad beasts and habitats, this narrative inevitably bears an anthropological mark. Indeed, the first voice we hear doesn’t belong to a cuckoo or coyote, but station announcer Ana Gonzalez Bello putting out one "last call for the ghost train". It’s an unusually contrived opening gambit, from which point the listener is jettisoned into a collision of screeching brakes, rolling stock rattle and hot hydraulic huff. Over half of El Tren Fantasma’s tracks (pun definitely intended) are given over to locomotive sound – gears shifting, hoots, bells and whistles – climaxing with El Divisadero, where Watson manipulates the monolithic machinations into a surging, phantasmal bellow, like a choir of angels struggling to be heard over the rumbling thrum of running gear. Imagine if Phill Niblock had scored Different Trains instead of Steve Reich and you’d be somewhere close.

   

I knew of Watson as a member of Cabaret Voltaire, a band I don't play here enough, and I'd already owned Weather Report, which is - and this is high praise from me though it may not sound like it - always listened to when I have a high fever (but not listened to only then, why, it's being listened to right now as I type) and will be posted here next weekend and all weekends hence will have at least one field recording.

   

I'll start with the weekends, I said this past Thursday at Thursday Night Pints when I was asked about the blog and blogging and then was allowed to answer at length. K asked, why do you feel compelled to post every day and I said I'm an attention-slut, duh, though it's getting harder finding content now that I don't feel like documenting the daily instances of my political disillusionments, pointing and repeatedly screaming See! See! We're So Fucked! L said, you told me that's what drives new readers to the blog. And keeps most of the regular readers, I said. I just posted a song that mentions Jack Spicer (twenty minutes before we met) and some Spicer poems, not a single link to aargh, those posts aren't why most people visit. K said, but you still do it anyway, the aargh every day. I'm trying to stop, I said, I'll start with the weekends.

   

So, weekends. One post only barring major birthdays and Egoslavian Holy Days or exceptionally kaboomy clusterfuck kabooms. Conlow Nancarrow and Sylvia Plath have birthdays tomorrow, I'll see if I can wait until Monday to post Nancarrow pieces and Plath poems. Field recordings. No links to topical instances of clusterfuckery though there can be links to good reads. Bleggalgazing, or not, depending on weekend, confronting and embracing the self-indulgence.

THE TRAIN

David Orr

Not that anyone will care,

But as I was sitting there

On the 8:07

To New Haven,

I was struck by lightning.

The strangest thing

Wasn't the flash of my hair

Catching on fire,

But the way people pretended

Nothing had happened.

For me, it was real enough.

But it seemed as if

The others saw this as nothing

But a way of happening,

A way to get from one place

To another place,

But not a place itself.

So, ignored, I burned to death.

Later, someone sat in my seat

And my ashes ruined his suit.

 

IN THE LOOP

Bob Hicok

I heard from people after the shootings. People

I knew well or barely or not at all. Largely

the same message: how horrible it was, how little

there was to say about how horrible it was.

People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed

because they know I teach at Virginia Tech,

to say, there’s nothing to say. Eventually

I answered these messages: there’s nothing

to say back except of course there’s nothing

to say, thank you for your willingness

to say it. Because this was about nothing.

A boy who felt that he was nothing,

who erased and entered that erasure, and guns

that are good for nothing, and talk of guns

that is good for nothing, and spring

that is good for flowers, and Jesus for some,

and scotch for others, and “and” for me

in this poem, “and” that is good

for sewing the minutes together, which otherwise

go about going away, bereft of us and us

of them. Like a scarf left on a train and nothing

like a scarf left on a train. As if the train,

empty of everything but a scarf, still opens

its doors at every stop, because this

is what a train does, this is what a man does

with his hand on a lever, because otherwise,

why the lever, why the hand, and then it was over,

and then it had just begun.

   

On the below piece: Penultimate track 'El Tajin' begins with a cacophony of animal and insect sounds, oppressive and seemingly recorded at night. Without the certainty of the train, all this undefinable noise leads our minds into fear of the unknown. Watson is recording the landscape before it was tamed by the demystifying, 'civilising' influence of our technology. 

    

A SECOND TRAIN SONG FOR GARY

Jack Spicer

When the trains come into strange cities

The citizens come out to meet the strangers.

                                        I love you, Jack, he said

                                        I love you, Jack, he said

                                        At another station.

When passengers come in from strange cities

The citizens come out to help the strangers.

                                        I love you too, I said

                                        I love you too, I said

                                        From another station.

The citizens are kind to passing strangers

And nourish them and kiss their lips in kindness.

                                        I walk the unbelieving streets

                                        I walk the unbelieving streets

                                        In a strange city.

At night in cold new beds the welcomed strangers

Achieve in memory the city's promise.

                                        I wake in love with you

                                        I wake in love with you

                                        At last year's station.

Then say goodbye to citizens and city

Admit this much—that they were kind to strangers.

                                        I leave my love with you

                                        I leave my love with you

                                        In this strange city.

What Is Behind It? - Space, Plenty of Empty Space. And Who Is Talking Now? - A Man Asleep Under His Hat.

That's the photo I wanted to post the other day but pulled down because I fucked up the coding and photos displayed differently than before. It's looking east from Grove Church Road, Martinsburg Ohio, between Sycamore and Deal Rds, at 7:45 Sunday morning September 15, 2013 just after we'd abandoned our daughter at college. As I've written dozens of times, for over two years now I've been unable to change anything at this blog that requires the use of the Apply to Template button: I can't change colors, fonts, font sizes, layout, column widths, etc. Until I accidentally deleted a <div> code in a post earlier this week and ignored Blogger's warning and pushed publish anyway, when I posted photos wider than the center column the photos bled over the right blogroll, but since I fucked up the blogroll now lays over the photos. Laid. Fuck that, fuck it, fuck this. Right blogroll has been moved to left blogroll. The cemetery and soccer blogrolls have been killed. The number of blogs displaying in each individual blogroll has been reduced to the ten most recently updated. Since fewer and fewer people are updating their blogs you may not even notice even if you are one of the few who link out from the page, and if you are you can always click the Show All button at the bottom of each blogroll. My apologies for the inconvenience, but I was choking here between the two columns. Also, it's been five days since we've seen him, I usually wait a week, but Earthgirl has asked me to activate the Napoleon Alert System.

• Another reason for the change, an unimpeded signal.
• Multiplying in a column M by F.
• And youtubes will be bigger too.
• Neoliberalism depends upon and rewards one form of neurosis. 
• Grand Theft Auto and the extinction of being.
• All linkedin and nowhere to go.
• Krugman's obamapostasy will never be ready. Last time. Call me when Krugman writes a column asking why Democrats/Obama peg their shittiness to GOP shittiness. He knows why.
• Obama's "I am not a crook," moment.
• On the Ayn Rand apostle who called Lloyd Blankenfeld holier than Mother Teresa.
• I'm 80 pages into Bleeding Edge and more than meh, but not by much. I haven't read that review yet, btw, or any review (I want to read the book first) though I did read Kakutani's, I knew she'd hate it, knew she'd misread it.
• Psalm to be read with closed eyes.
• Breakfast with Thom Gunn.
• Bright day.
• Elliot Carter's Changes.
• Was going to post two more fever songs - I'm fine, this turned out to be, so far, fingers crossed, an intense but only 48 hour drive-by cold - this first song, serendipitously, posted here hours before SeatSix sent me a playlist in the middle of the night for Johnette Napolitano for her birthday tomorrow, he being a HUGE Concrete Blonde fan. I like, not love, but do love this song, especially with a 103 degree fever. Longtimers, hearing the below Concrete Blonde song, can probably guess what song's below the poem.

TAPESTRY

Charles Simic

It hangs from heaven to earth.

There are trees in it, cities, rivers,   

small pigs and moons. In one corner

the snow falling over a charging cavalry,   

in another women are planting rice.

You can also see:

a chicken carried off by a fox,

a naked couple on their wedding night,

a column of smoke,

an evil-eyed woman spitting into a pail of milk.

What is behind it?

—Space, plenty of empty space.

And who is talking now?

—A man asleep under his hat.

What happens when he wakes up?

—He’ll go into a barbershop.

They’ll shave his beard, nose, ears, and hair,   

To make him look like everyone else.

For Though He Cannot Fly, He Is an Excellent Clamberer, or: What to Do with a 102 Degree Fever

JUBILATE AGNO

Christopher Smart

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon
**his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having considered God and himself he will consider his neighbor.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness
**he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction if he is well-fed, neither will he spit
**without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness when God tells him he's a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him, and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of
**the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defense is an instance of the love of God
**to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord's poor, and so indeed is he called by benevolence
**perpetually—Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can sit up with gravity, which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick, which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master's bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Icneumon rat, very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire.
For the electrical fire is the spiritual substance which God sends from heaven
**to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.






FEVER 103

Sylvia Plath

Pure? What does it mean?

The tongues of hell

Are dull, dull as the triple

Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus

Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable

Of licking clean

The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.

The tinder cries.

The indelible smell

Of a snuffed candle!

Love, love, the low smokes roll

From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright

One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel,

Such yellow sullen smokes

Make their own element. They will not rise,

But trundle round the globe

Choking the aged and the meek,

The weak

Hothouse baby in its crib,

The ghastly orchid

Hanging its hanging garden in the air,

Devilish leopard!

Radiation turned it white

And killed it in an hour.

Greasing the bodies of adulterers

Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.

The sin. The sin.

Darling, all night

I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.

The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.

Three days. Three nights.

Lemon water, chicken

Water, water make me retch.

I am too pure for you or anyone.

Your body

Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern——

My head a moon

Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin

Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.

Does not my heat astound you! And my light!

All by myself I am a huge camellia

Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.

I think I am going up,

I think I may rise——

The beads of hot metal fly, and I love, I

Am a pure acetylene

Virgin

Attended by roses,

By kisses, by cherubim,

By whatever these pink things mean!

Not you, nor him

Nor him, nor him

(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)——

To Paradise.

INSECT LIFE OF FLORIDA

Lynda Hull

In those days I thought their endless thrum

   was the great wheel that turned the days, the nights.

      In the throats of hibiscus and oleander

I’d see them clustered yellow, blue, their shells

   enameled hard as the sky before the rain.

      All that summer, my second, from city

to city my young father drove the black coupe

   through humid mornings I’d wake to like fever

      parceled between luggage and sample goods.

Afternoons, showers drummed the roof,

   my parents silent for hours. Even then I knew

      something of love was cruel, was distant.

Mother leaned over the seat to me, the orchid

   Father’d pinned in her hair shriveled

      to a purple fist. A necklace of shells

coiled her throat, moving a little as she

   murmured of alligators that float the rivers

      able to swallow a child whole, of mosquitoes

whose bite would make you sleep a thousand years.

   And always the trance of blacktop shimmering

      through swamps with names like incantations—

Okeefenokee, where Father held my hand

   and pointed to an egret’s flight unfolding

      white above swamp reeds that sang with insects

until I was lost, until I was part

   of the singing, their thousand wings gauze

      on my body, tattooing my skin.

Father rocked me later by the water,

   the motel balcony, singing calypso

      with the Jamaican radio. The lyrics

a net over the sea, its lesson

   of desire and repetition. Lizards flashed

      over his shoes, over the rail

where the citronella burned merging our

   shadows—Father’s face floating over mine

      in the black changing sound

of night, the enormous Florida night,

   metallic with cicadas, musical

      and dangerous as the human heart.

You Can Hear It in the Dark from Beyond What Was Once the Amusement Park

That's me, trapped in my car parked outside my house, recording Thursday night's storm. Yes I posted it last night too. I'm not trying to drive away readers I had said to K at Thursday Night Pints in response to her question of why the fuck I'm posting what the fuck I've been posting. I wasn't supposed to attend Thursday Night Pints - Thursday was my father's 80th birthday and we were to go out to dinner - but between my recovery from plague and Planet's full-on plague we cancelled, not wanting to give my father plague as his present. K has been asked to contribute to a site recently added to Because Left (I added it before I knew she'd been asked), she'll have a piece in a couple of months, she's threatened to start a blog for two plus years, go ahead, I dare you, it'd be like opening a nail salon in a dying strip mall, she wants to ask me blog questions, knows I want her to ask me blog questions, she studies this shit professionally, I fixate on it because I'm a dope. I wasn't going to write about this episode of Thursday Night Pints because it was mostly (FUN!) bleggalgazing. It's not that I'm trying to not drive readers away either, though bleggalgazing does it, almost as much as United posting. We hadn't heard of the Batman shooting, of course, but K sent me an email yesterday which included the line, I bet today is busy in Blegsylvania, and I responded no, not only because breaking news days drive eyes to big mouths in Blegsylvania, not only because Blegsylvania is dying, but because, what, another mass shooting spree in America, pfft, please, this is news?

• Yes! I think of the song below the links when I think of that song above the links too!
• Motherfucking Obama: “There are going to be other days for politics,” Obama told an audience that had gathered for what was originally intended to be a political speech in Fort Myers. “This, I think, is a day for prayer and reflection.” He led the audience in a moment of silence “for the victims of this terrible tragedy,” their loved ones and for “all the victims of less publicized acts of violence that plague our communities every single day.” Today is a day for craven cowardice couched as polite decorum, especially in an election year. Someone tweeted - I'd love to give credit but I forget who it was, don't have time - or will - to go down timeline - that these bullshit timeouts prove the bullshit of the game.
• Oh, be fair to Obama, you say. OK: he'd be craven and cowardly even if this wasn't an election year.
• The price of gun control?
• This isn't over yet, Batman.
• The mystification of state power.
• Police state.
• Six reasons motherfucking Obama will hate Barofsky's book.
• Motherfucking Geithner. Which means motherfucking Obama.
• Please remember, the money doesn't exist.
• Occupy as anarchy.
• Journalism v propaganda.
• Eat less totalitarianism.
• Motherfucking Democrats.
• Yes, I know, but just because motherfucking Obama progressives doesn't mean motherfucking crackers aren't motherfucking crackers.
• Yes, I know, but just because motherfucking Obama's doesn't mean motherfucking Romneys aren't motherfucking Romneys.
• Speaking of United, they play tonight in Columbus so there will be a post tomorrow, though there's a big birthday thing for my father tonight: I might get to see the second half.
• Heh, the same bleggalgaze as me the other day.
• Dreaming of a world of no intellectuals.
• Fifty photos of Bill Clinton's forehead. Yes, the same joke occurred to me.
• Some Russian futurists?

BEFORE DAWN ON THE BLUFF ROAD

August Kleinzahler

The crow’s raw hectoring cry
scoops clean an oval divot
of sky, its fading echo
among the oaks and poplars swallowed
first by a jet banking west
then the Erie-Lackawanna
sounding its horn as it comes through the tunnel
through the cliffs to the river
and around the bend of King’s Cove Bluff,
full of timber, Ford chassis, rock salt.

You can hear it in the dark
from beyond what was once the amusement park.
And the wind carries along as well,
from down by the river,
when the tide’s just so,
the drainage just so,
the chemical ghost of old factories,
the rotted piers and warehouses:
lye, pigfat, copra from Lever Bros.,
formaldehyde from the coffee plant,
dyes, unimaginable solvents—
a soup of polymers, oxides,
tailings fifty years old
seeping through the mud, the aroma
almost comforting by now, like food,
wafting into my childhood room
with its fevers and dreams.
My old parents asleep,
only a few yards across the hall,
door open—lest I cry?
I remember
almost nothing of my life.

Taking My Plastic Medicine Seriously

I'm better, thanks! The grippe broke yesterday just after I saw a Sportsbog about St Benny of Olsen photobombing at a charity tennis event Tuesday night in DC. I'd been thinking this just a so-so fever, a When Did Wednesday Go From Being the Busiest Weekday in Blegsylvania to the Slowest kind of fever, but these two photos seared into my brain's rolodex as only images when first observed feverish can sear. Here's the standard homage to Olsen:





He's been elected to DC United's Hall of Tradition, to be inducted before the September 15 game v Ningland, and I didn't know he wasn't in the Hall of Tradition. I just assumed he was in. And what the fuck were 19% of the voters thinking. But yes, I felt better enough to get some reading done so links for you who tune in for links, not grippe updates. Whatcha think?

• Today in Swallow My Hypocrisy and Complicity and Like It: Olsen’s team, “The Stars,” also included radio personality Mark Plotkin, Ward 7 Councilwoman Yvette Alexander, former Indiana Governor Evan Bayh, ex-Louisiana Senator John Breaux (holding the trophy above), former Redskins linebacker Rocky McIntosh, economist Alan Krueger, National Economic Council director Gene Sperling, Ohio Congressman Steve LaTourette and a few Kastles regulars. Motherfucking Kastles regulars.
• Obedience.
• Attic Amnesia is primarily about Greece, but does open with this shot: The catastrophic situation in Greece has disappeared from the headlines in recent weeks, replaced largely by lurid reports from Syria, where religious extremists aligned with al Qaeda are wreaking carnage with suicide bombers in the capital -- to the cheers of America's adamant anti-terrorists.
• Real democracy.
• Lands, empires, multiculturalism.
• I confess, listening to Republicans squeal about Corporate hardball intramural politics still makes my heart pitter-pat even it's lost the last ter in my mostly unsuccessful fight to untribalize myself. 
• I give that ter to motherfucking Democrats.
• What's a socialist?
• The answer is Yes.
• Against community.
• Good to the last drop.
• Things you might have missed.
• Measured existence.
• Want to see/hear. Buy me and Earthgirl and Planet tickets to Paris, hotel rooms, we'll pay for our own meals, thanks, for this weekend after tomorrow for my birthday, please and thanks. Ironically, I couldn't go next weekend because United has a home friendly v PSG. Go to both!
• Poemflow.
• Brian May, who wrote the two Queen songs below, is 65 today.

ON THE SUBJECT OF DOCTORS

James Tate

I like to see doctors cough.
What kind of human being
would grab all your money
just when you're down?
I'm not saying they enjoy this:
"Sorry, Mr. Rodriguez, that's it,
no hope! You might as well
hand over your wallet." Hell no,
they'd rather be playing golf
and swapping jokes about our feet.

Some of them smoke marijuana
and are alcoholics, and their moral
turpitude is famous: who gets to see
most sex organs in the world? Not
poets. With the hours they keep
they need drugs more than anyone.
Germ city, there's no hope
looking down those fire-engine throats.
They're bound to get sick themselves
sometime; and I happen to be there
myself in a high fever
taking my plastic medicine seriously
with the doctors, who are dying.

Fresh Name, Doner Game, Fair Meat, All the Same

More fever songs cause kaboom continues. It's not a coincidence all have been at least one month's Theme Song, the above at least four times. I usually know grippes are coming two days ahead. My body twinks that oh-fuck, I think, fuck, I haven't had a cold since when, two days later day one. This one, WHAM! in half-an-hour, no warning. Weird bout, good thing I'm not writing about it. I was talking with Mr Alarum Tuesday morning (I think I've landed another Harington fan) about POTUS 12 and Occupy (as in, where is it? rhetorically asking, wonder if the police kettlings and beatings achieved their strategic aim, plus how peaceful and thankfully chalk-free, if heavily policed, Charlotte will be this August), and duhdumpduhdump, I go completely blank on what I was going to say after I said I go back everyday to four years ago on this blog and read what I wrote then. I used to think it enough to support Obama because he'd drive the American Right nuts, I bet pints on his reelection based on his driving the Right scary crazy, and..... huh, fever wee-wooing and a behind the right eyeball super-sneeze catastrophically building....





Well, you follow. Anyway, if I'm upright I'm busy next two nights, I might tell you about them, if I'm prone I'm busy the next two nights asleep. I'm out until I'm back, though I'd urge you to check the Because Left, Right, there are new additions plus blogfriends who've been dormant stirring. Dance, please.