How We Picnicked in Pine Forests, in Coves with the Water Always Seeping Up, and Left Our Trash, Sperm, and Excrement Everywhere, Smeared on the Landscape, to Make of Us What We Could

• I am the bullets: On Gaza.
• And then the Alien turned towards Zanna: On Gaza.
• Am I going to die tonight, Daddy?
• Dehumanization? Here's today's monologue: of course dehumanization is the project, but the project isn't the dehumanization of the other. That shit's already been done. 
• And it's working. The hate seething through me now scares the fuck out of me. My lizard brain is far too easily stimulated. 
• Ladies and Gentleman, the wit and wisdom of Fuckface Hiatt, who I daydream of braining with a shovel over and over and over and...
• The rule of lizards.
• The grey light of morning: As real as the political subtext was, it’s a mistake to see the myth of progress purely as a matter of propaganda. During the heyday of industrialism, that myth was devoutly believed by a great many people, at all points along the social spectrum, many of whom saw it as the best chance they had for positive change. Faith in progress was a social fact of vast importance, one that shaped the lives of individuals, communities, and nations. The hope of upward mobility that inspired the poor to tolerate the often grueling conditions of their lives, the dream of better living through technology that kept the middle classes laboring at the treadmill, the visions of human destiny that channeled creative minds into the service of  existing institutions—these were real and powerful forces in their day, and drew on high hopes and noble ideals as well as less exalted motives.
• America.
• the wearing-out of language.
• Motherfucking gunfucks fuck with Sugarloaf.
• Food links.
• Vollmann in his studio.
• Drummage.
• Bosh reminded me of Leatherface last night.

STREET MUSICIANS

John Ashbery

One died, and the soul was wrenched out   

Of the other in life, who, walking the streets   

Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on   

The same corners, volumetrics, shadows   

Under trees. Farther than anyone was ever   

Called, through increasingly suburban airs   

And ways, with autumn falling over everything:   

The plush leaves the chattels in barrels   

Of an obscure family being evicted

Into the way it was, and is. The other beached   

Glimpses of what the other was up to:

Revelations at last. So they grew to hate and forget each other.

So I cradle this average violin that knows   

Only forgotten showtunes, but argues

The possibility of free declamation anchored

To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself   

In November, with the spaces among the days   

More literal, the meat more visible on the bone.   

Our question of a place of origin hangs

Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests,

In coves with the water always seeping up, and left   

Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared   

On the landscape, to make of us what we could.

and every finger is a toe

That's my left big toe - it looks worse than it feels unless I kick a wall with it. Was crossing a creek on Saturday's hike, slipped on a wet rock, jammed the toe against a second. I'd rather take off my shoe and kick a wall with that toe than clusterfuck today. Friday my swag package for donating to WFMU last Winter arrived, I asked for nothing but music, thirteen discs in all. Each is prepared by one of the DJs just to be Marathon swag (and many DJ discs - from both current and former DJs - are still available, it's fun to pick). I'll post a song from each, most below the fold, and in no particular order other than how they were shuffled when I took them out of the mailing package. This is from Jeffrey Davidson's CD, Small Wonder:

• Alright, one clusterfuck link. Kicks wall with shoeless toe.
• Everyone has the issue that jabs him or her to blind rage at his or her powerlessness before the motherfuckers of the world, mine is....
• Killing us while we're sleeping. Kicks wall with shoeless toe.
• Repetition and death in the colony. Kicks wall with shoeless toe.
• Copyrighting cartography with fictional places.
• Sweet Dreams Maisy versus Global Warning's Terrifying New Math.
• Chel$ki and Special One to reunite with Drogba. Lordy, I hope Chel$ki smoke Premiership, clinch by March. Yes, me.
• Malevich.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• New Lisa Robertson book of poetry this September!
• Throwaway almost genius bullshit!
• Tuxedomoon.
• The song below the poem is from Dan Bodah's Head Cleaner for Supportive Listeners, this song immediately below from Irwin's 2014 disc.

[as freedom is a breakfastfood]

E.E. Cummings

as freedom is a breakfastfood

or truth can live with right and wrong

or molehills are from mountains made

—long enough and just so long

will being pay the rent of seem

and genius please the talentgang

and water most encourage flame

as hatracks into peachtrees grow

or hopes dance best on bald men’s hair

and every finger is a toe

and any courage is a fear

—long enough and just so long

will the impure think all things pure

and hornets wail by children stung

or as the seeing are the blind

and robins never welcome spring

nor flatfolk prove their world is round

nor dingsters die at break of dong

and common’s rare and millstones float

—long enough and just so long

tomorrow will not be too late

worms are the words but joy’s the voice

down shall go which and up come who

breasts will be breasts thighs will be thighs

deeds cannot dream what dreams can do

—time is a tree(this life one leaf)

but love is the sky and i am for you

just so long and long enough

• This from Evan Funk Davies' Starting with the 70s vol.3:

• Bryce, whose Friday show is my favorite three hours of radio each week (have I mentioned this?) hasn't done a disc since 2009, I picked it up. It is of course sleeveless and of course the tracks can't be identified by the CD reader, so I've gone back to his 2009 playlists and picked something I especially like.

• More from Bodah, whose Airborne Event Monday evening is what my Tuesday morning sounds like, this from his 2011 The Hissing of Chrome Snakes disc:

 



 

• From Faye's What's the Point of Being Good? disc:

  



 

• From Mary Wing's The Ladies of the Year disc

 

• From Thomas Storck's Love Is a Launderette, taken from UK cassettes 1979 - 1985. It's not the Dogma Cats' song he picked, but it's the one I found and what suffices for my religion requires I post it:

 

• From Stan's Destination Saturn:

• From Fabio's Enlightenment Through Failure:

 

• From Bethany Ryker's Locomotion:

• From Dave Mandl's Hippies:

• Oh, new Wire Tapper came in mail same day, because I love you, even those of you who didn't click below the fold, but especially for the three of you who did, thanks. Wait, I couldn't find anything on youtube, these are all too new. Have an older Hiorthey:

Which Only Quiet Walking Ever Instructs

Six-miler around Catoctin yesterday with Earthgirl. From Chimney Rocks, the rock outcrop and view about two-thirds through, you can see Sugarloaf twenty-five miles to the southeast. Today is Corbin Cabin in Shenandoah with Planet and Air too. Also, Happy Birthday to my father (who reads this blog daily to monitor news of his grand-daughter and daughter-in-law) who got us the hell out of Ghost Town, Pennsylvania in 1964 for which I don't thank him enough. He's BBQing salmon tonight for us.

Saturday intermittent tradition is to post songs heard on Bryce's Friday show. Bryce was off today, fill-in host was Ira the K. Below the poem is Ira the K's band's latest single, first, the Morton Feldman piece Ira the K played yesterday:








RIVERS AND MOUNTAINS

John Ashbery

On the secret map the assassins   

Cloistered, the Moon River was marked   

Near the eighteen peaks and the city

Of humiliation and defeat—wan ending   

Of the trail among dry, papery leaves   

Gray-brown quills like thoughts

In the melodious but vast mass of today’s   

Writing through fields and swamps

Marked, on the map, with little bunches of weeds.   

Certainly squirrels lived in the woods   

But devastation and dull sleep still   

Hung over the land, quelled

The rioters turned out of sleep in the peace of prisons   

Singing on marble factory walls   

Deaf consolation of minor tunes that pack   

The air with heavy invisible rods   

Pent in some sand valley from

Which only quiet walking ever instructs.   

The bird flew over and

Sat—there was nothing else to do.

Do not mistake its silence for pride or strength

Or the waterfall for a harbor

Full of light boats that is there

Performing for thousands of people   

In clothes some with places to go   

Or games. Sometimes over the pillar   

Of square stones its impact

Makes a light print.

So going around cities

To get to other places you found   

It all on paper but the land

Was made of paper processed   

To look like ferns, mud or other   

Whose sea unrolled its magic   

Distances and then rolled them up   

Its secret was only a pocket

After all but some corners are darker

Than these moonless nights spent as on a raft

In the seclusion of a melody heard   

As though through trees

And you can never ignite their touch   

Long but there were homes

Flung far out near the asperities   

Of a sharp, rocky pinnacle

And other collective places

Shadows of vineyards whose wine   

Tasted of the forest floor

Fisheries and oyster beds

Tides under the pole

Seminaries of instruction, public   

Places for electric light

And the major tax assessment area   

Wrinkled on the plan

Of election to public office

Sixty-two years old bath and breakfast   

The formal traffic, shadows

To make it not worth joining

After the ox had pulled away the cart.

Your plan was to separate the enemy into two groups   

With the razor-edged mountains between.

It worked well on paper

But their camp had grown

To be the mountains and the map   

Carefully peeled away and not torn   

Was the light, a tender but tough bark

On everything. Fortunately the war was solved   

In another way by isolating the two sections   

Of the enemy’s navy so that the mainland   

Warded away the big floating ships.   

Light bounced off the ends   

Of the small gray waves to tell   

Them in the observatory   

About the great drama that was being won

To turn off the machinery

And quietly move among the rustic landscape   

Scooping snow off the mountains rinsing

The coarser ones that love had   

Slowly risen in the night to overflow   

Wetting pillow and petal   

Determined to place the letter

On the unassassinated president’s desk

So that a stamp could reproduce all this

In detail, down to the last autumn leaf

And the affliction of June ride

Slowly out into the sun-blackened landscape.

the flower-visiting species

We are going to the woods today, we are going to the woods tomorrow (w/Planet and Air!), we are going to the woods on Sunday. Something will be here or nothing will be here Saturday morning, Sunday is a High Egoslavian Holy Day so that ritual will be observed.

Quick:

• Another stunning sunset: On Gaza. 
• They Do Not Exist.
• Israel and our complicity. 
• The slavishness of American politicians.
• Enjoy the hypocrisy of nation states!
• The hypocrisy of nation state media.
• France bans pro-Palestine rallies.
• Under the Influence of Melee Treble Seven.

remembering; and with the aid of; ventilation; and production; the poem

Christian Hawkey

must balance; this risk; a tablet; peak plasma; the first alphabet;
with the clinical need; finger-sized; it makes sense; the fingers;
were the first; to make sense; this risk; 31 letters; the flower-visiting            species;
as opposed to; dung-feeding; the terminal phase; and the;
distribution phase; never; in my life; the relationship; logarithmic;
propriate or; propion; to make sense; this risk; and the;
as opposed to; had i imagined; that’s business; he was as soft as;
bill nodded; his neck trembling; a tablet; peak plasma; 31 letters;
throwing my body; the flower-visiting species; with the clinical need;
in front of; and with the aid of; that’s business; the distribution phase;
and the; on-coming; volunteers; reflected; in the moment of; the                   fingers
the first alphabet; peak plasma; bill nodded; pooled analyses; in                     my life;
this risk; the fingers; reappropriated; his neck trembling; numb

It Was a World. What a World! What a World? What a Big World but a World to Be Drowned In. It's Just a Joke Man.

True, but not the world. New album out this September, old song here right now.

Here Is the Man Night-Walking Who Derives Tomorrow's Manifestos from This Midnight Meeting

So today's the day this blog's domain name is supposed to automatically renew. Blooger has been sending me email every week for the past month warning me to renew or else and sending me email every week for the past month telling me all is fine, my automatic renewal is good as long as billing information is up to date. We're talking ten dollars after all for the exclusive domain name ownership of this shitty blog on a free blogging platform, ten dollars on vanity. My billing information DID change since last year's debacle and rescue: Earthgirl lost the credit card, we put a block on it immediately, were issued new cards. I logged into Blooger's weirdass and creepy Blogger admin site and made the change a month ago. I'm told I'm good by one email. Another email tells me I'm not. Maybe I'll get a confirm later today. Maybe this blog will disappear in a week. It's a win-win.

• Yes, I do post this particular Gubaidulina all the time.
• Silence for Gaza.
• America's war crimes in Gaza.
• Israel's war crimes in Gaza.
• A slowly unfolding genocide.
• I haven't wasted breath saying Motherfucking Obama because duh but what the fuck, Motherfucking Obama.
• The stupidest propaganda since the last until the next.
• In praise of weariness: So why would Americans not be weary? The survey results that worry Kagan and Rice – that show Americans growing wary of overcommitment abroad – are actually a sign of vernacular wisdom. They suggest a dawning public recognition that the problems of boarded-up storefronts and evacuated cities present more urgent policy concerns than the remaking of regions abroad that resist remaking. Interventionists will need to evade or overcome this wisdom if they intend to embark on further misadventures overseas. Let us give weariness its due, as a necessary counterweight to the centrifugal force of an activist foreign policy, ever on the prowl for investments to explore and wrongs to set right. Maybe weariness can bring us home before dark.
• The real world plainly bores us.
• The weaponized naked girl. The best thing you'll read today.
• Bossa Nova: on the World Cup and nationalism and stuff.
• The future of Rocketville? I expect it means our favorite vegetarian Chinese restaurant in a dumpy little strip will disappear as well as our favorite Peruvian restaurant in a dumpy little strip too.
• A reference of female-fronted punk bands!
• Shuffling tropes.
• The serenity and vitality of Proust. I can only read Proust when I'm calm and not angry. I'm rarely calm and not angry, so slow going, but when Proust works it's wonderful.
• I was not calm and was angry last night, instead of reading Proust I listened to Gubaidulina and read Muriel Rukeyser.

METAPHOR TO ACTION

Muriel Rukeyser

Whether it is a speaker, taut on a platform,
who battles a crowd with the hammers of his words,
whether it is the crash of lips on lips
after absence and wanting : we must close
the circuits of ideas, now generate,
that leap in the body's action or the mind's repose.

Over us is a striking on the walls of the sky,
here are the dynamos, steel-black, harboring flame,
here is the man night-walking who derives
tomorrow's manifestos from this midnight's meeting ;
here we require the proof in solidarity,
iron on iron, body on body, and the large single beating.

And behind us in time are the men who second us
as we continue. And near us is our love :
no forced contempt, no refusal in dogma, the close
of the circuit in a fierce dazzle of purity.
And over us is night a field of pansies unfolding,
charging with heat its softness in a symbol
to weld and prepare for action our minds' intensity.

Here Come the Bald Arbiters with Their Eyes on Chains

At three friends' encouragement I have been watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from beginning to end. I know the original series by heart; when I was managing Crown Books 826 and hired Hamster for a second key, we'd look through a TV Guide and compete to guess the episode by the episode's title (we also had a John McLaughlin head taped to a black file cabinet by the swinging door into the cash register and manager's office area, but that's another story). I know Star Trek: The Next Generation by heart from Season Three to finale: Seasons One and Two SUCK! SUCK! SUCK! and Maria Muldour as Doctor Polanski can send her camel to bed, so much do the first two seasons suck. I remember watching Star Trek: Voyager but nothing much about it other than Seven, second-in-command Chipotle, and Captain Janeway, now a Russian prisoner in some show, Chartreuse Is the New Vermillion, that Earthgirl and Planet watch.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - I never got. I never stopped to think why beyond what episodes I saw didn't make me want to care. My friends insist DS9 is vastly superior to Voyager (I have friends with whom I've discussed this who insist those who think DS9 vastly superior to Voyager are fucking nuts). The friends' book and music recommendations to me have been uniformly solid (even if a particular book or musician don't sing to me - I was the poorer receptacle, I can read or hear the merits even if I don't receive right), so I downloaded Netflix and started the series.

I'm in Season Five now: I don't dislike the series, I don't like the series. It does some story lines well, it develops some characters better than others. I really like Rom. I really dislike Deep Space Nine's homages to Star Trek legacies, its stroking of uberfans, which peaked last night when Sisko and Dax and O'Brien and Bashir and Odo beam over to Kirk's enterprise to stop a Klingon spy from stealing a Bejoran magic orb and going back in time to blow up Kirk with a Tribble. That's not the stupid part. (Here's a stupid part: O'Brien sees The Original Series Klingons who don't have face plates, looks at Worf, Worf says, We don't talk about it with outsiders.) Throughout the episode DS9 producers interwove scenes from The Original Series' Tribbles episode into the DS9 episode, superimposing DS9 actors into the scenes. That's fine, that's schtick I can handle. At the very end, though, Sisko, after an episode of We must not take chances to alter the timeline bullshit, alters the timeline to meet and shake hands with Kirk (to no timeline-changing harm, of course). That's not the really stupid part. No, for this scene producers didn't use The Original Series' Tribble episode for Kirk, they used the end of Mirror Mirror when Kirk recognized, on his Enterprise, the body double of the Captain's Woman he'd been banging in the alternative universe, Sisko interposed as the Captain's Woman, I....

I..... but.... fine metap..... am going to play two more  Kate Bush songs and post another John Ashbery poem in anticipation of their upcoming High Holy Days....








INSTEAD OF LOSING

John Ashbery

Anyone, growing up in a space you hadn't used yet
would've done the same: bother the family's bickering
to head straight into the channel. My, those times
crackled near about us, from sickly melodrama
instead of losing, and the odd confusion... confusion.

I thought if it then, and in the mountains.
During the day we perforated the eponymous city limits
and then some. No one knew all about us
but some knew plenty. It was time to leave that town
for an empty drawer
into which they sailed. Some of the eleven thousand
virgins were getting queasy. I say, stop the ship!
No can do. Here come the bald arbiters
with their eyes on chains, just so, like glasses.
Heck, it's only a muskrat
that's seen better years, when things were medieval
and gold....

So you people in the front,
leave. You see them. And you understand it all.
It doesn't end, night's sorcery notwithstanding.
Would you have preferred to be a grownup in earlier times
than the child can contain or imagine?
Or is right now the answer - you know, the radio
we heard news on late at night,
out checkered fortunes so pretty.
Here's your ton of plumes, and your Red Seal Recors.
The whole embrace.

What a Big Bald Spot You Have!

My sincerest apologies, I hadn't blogfarted like that in months, I'd been diligent about saving drafts by setting publishing dates a year ahead to prevent such blogfarts. I mean I know I'm an attention slut but posting a draft of the next post tonight was an accident. Since I pumped the feed I feel responsible to fill the feed, I hate those The Post You Clicked Doesn't Exist messages, this seems a .06% less-shitty solution, fine metaphors abound. Hope you like the songs (lyrics to above!). They'll be gone, as will this post, when the post I didn't mean to post is posted Wednesday (or Thursday)...

UPDATE! I didn't expect anyone to comment but since Thunder did the post has to stay. This is another example of why I am always writing about rules.

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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*

 
 

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*

 
*

But Poet, Sucker, Fool, It's Your Job to Find Meaning in All This Because You Are Delusional Enough to Believe That, Yes, Poetry Is a Sickness, but Somehow If You Can Just Scrape Together Enough Beauty and Truth to Recall, Yes, That Broadway Car Crash Was Fucked Up, but the Way the Rain Fell to Wash Away the Blood Not Ten Minutes After the Ambulance Left Was Gorgeous

• I really really really like Fucked Up. Especially when the news in the world pisses me off. They are in the Second Circle of MSADI5G.
• I know I said there wouldn't be links today but (a) many of the few people who come here and who know Earthgirl and me and were at our wedding 26 years ago today have all seen today's anniversary post and (b) the links need go out today before their expiration dates hit and (c) the news of the world pisses me off and (d) once I made the connection between the band and poem I was incapable of waiting for tomorrow and (e) tomorrow's post plans now just include a homemade video and haikus of Deep Space Nine episodes and (f) I'm a fucking attention slut and (g) sometimes I need to scream so I can move on to the next scream.
• Chomsky's provisional fascism.
• All we are saying is give hell a chance.
• The MUCH greater evil: The idea that neocons have been in the ‘wilderness’ during the Obie years seems rather strange to me, though of course Hillary is and always has been much more deeply committed to the neocon program than the pathetic outgunned nonentity who currently lives in the White House, desperately trying to split all the differences he can find. Even stranger, then, is the idea that an alliance between neocons and Hillary might be something to express in the future tense or subjunctive mood. The Clintons — and Hillary in particular — have always been committed, aggressive interventionists and sedulous water-carriers for Israel. From a neocon point of view, what’s not to like?
• Israel does not want peace: There is nothing I have ever written that I would be happier to be proved wrong about. But the evidence is piling up. In fact, it can be said that Israel has never wanted peace – a just peace, that is, one based on a just compromise for both sides. It’s true that the routine greeting in Hebrew is Shalom (peace) – shalom when one leaves and shalom when one arrives. And, at the drop of a hat, almost every Israeli will say he wants peace, of course he does. But he’s not referring to the kind of peace that will bring about the justice without which there is no peace and there will be no peace. Israelis want peace, not justice, certainly not anything based on universal values. Thus, “Peace, peace, when there is no peace.” Not only is there no peace: In recent years, Israel has moved away from even the aspiration to make peace. It has despaired utterly of it. Peace has disappeared from the Israeli agenda, its place taken by the collective anxieties that are systematically implanted, and by personal, private matters that now take precedence over all else.
• Today in motherfucking cops.

• Here, happier links: 
• Price Reductions.
• Food links.
• Through the Looking-Glass: Well, it won’t be the Bite for which this World Cup is remembered after all. Something more shocking did happen. The form book turned out to be a useless guide (Brazil were undefeated in twelve games before last night). Home advantage counted for nothing in the end. Goldman Sachs got it wrong. Stephen Hawking got it wrong. I got it wrong. Everyone got it wrong. Sure, there will be people saying that this Brazilian team was there for the taking, that someone was bound to expose its manifold weaknesses. But no one predicted that result. It simply doesn’t happen that big teams concede seven goals at home against major rivals. It doesn’t happen in the Premier League or in La Liga or in Serie A. It’s inconceivable that Chelsea or Barcelona or Juventus would ship seven at home to anyone, no matter how weakened their team or how unlucky the performance. It doesn’t happen in the Champions League or in the European Championships. It’s certainly never happened at the World Cup. Before last night’s match some bookmakers had Germany as the slight favourites to win, but the margin of their victory is perhaps the biggest upset in the history of the sport.
• I'm glad that Germany stomped for the sole reason that had Brazil lost close and heartbreakingly they would have whined Neymar unto eternity. 
• The US are now World Cup regulars and it's time to expect better: Something else about these finals has me feeling old. Commentators here burbled incessantly about the growing ratings, the traveling support and the viewing parties like they were the new new thing. The latest generation of viewers and journalists shows up every four years, and for them, everything must be new because they're seeing it for the first time. The incremental, evolutionary and massive growth of football in America since 1990 is there for all to see. But they don't, and I'm tired of repeating myself. One ESPN commentator said of getting out the group: "It's a heck of a landmark day for US soccer." No, not really.
• Heroes and Villians: If I was an American conservative who valued art and literature (there are still a few such benighted individuals around), I would find Adam Bellow's recent screed, "Let Your Right Brain Run Free," deeply embarrassing. While he claims he is not calling for outright propaganda in his plea for assistance in creating a "counterculture" that will arise through the efflorescence of a new "conservative fiction" (he wants money to publish it, of course), it hardly seems a contribution to literature to advocate for writers who "craft dramatic situations and pick heroes and villains that serve more subtly to advance their point of view." Advancing a point of view, whether it be from the right or the left, is not an act of creating culture but of doing politics by other means, although Bellow is not overly scrupulous to disavow that his ultimate goal is transparently political.
• LOTS OF FREE MUSIC FROM MERGE!

POETRY IS A SICKNESS

Ed Bok Lee

You write not what you want,

but what flaws flower from rust

You want to write about the universe,

how the stars are really tiny palpitating ancestor hearts

watching over us

and instead what you get on the page

is that car crash on Fourth and Broadway—

the wails of the girlfriend or widow,

her long lamentation so sensuous

in terrible harmony with sirens in the distance

Poetry is a sickness

You want to write about Adoration,

the glistening sweat on your honey's chest

in which you've tasted the sun's caress,

and instead what you get

is a poem about the first of four times

your mother and father split up

Want to write about the perfection of God

and end up with just another story

of a uniquely lonely childhood

If I had a dime for every happy poem I wrote

I'd be dead

Want to write about the war, oppression, injustice,

and look here, see, what got left behind

when all the sand and dust cleared

is the puke-green carpet in the Harbor Lights Salvation Army treatment center

A skinny Native girl no older than seventeen

braids the reddish hair

of her little four- or five-year-old Down's Syndrome daughter

Outside, no blinking stars

No holy kiss's approach

Only a vague antiseptic odor and Christian crest on the wall staring back at you

I didn't say all this to that dude who sent me his poems

from prison

You want everyone to feel empowered

Want them to believe there is beauty locked in amber

inside each of us, and you chip away at that shit

one word at a time

You stampede with verbs, nouns, and scalpel adjectives

Middle-finger your literalist boss

Blow grocery cash on library fines

Sprain your left knee loading pallets all day for Labor Ready

You live in an attic for nine years

You go bankrupt

You smoke too much

Drink too much

Alienate family and friends

Say yes, poetry is a sickness, but fuck it

Do it long enough, and I promise like an anti-superhero

your secret power will become loss

Loss like only old people must know

when the last red maple on the block goes

and the drizzle turns to snow

Maybe the best poem is always the one you shouldn't have written

The ghazal that bled your index finger

Or caused your sister to reject your calls for a year

The sonnet that made the woman you loved fear

That slam poem you're still paying for

The triolet that smiled to violate you

through both ears

But Poet, Sucker, Fool

It's your job

to find meaning in all this because

you are delusional enough to believe

that, yes, poetry is a sickness,

but somehow if you can just scrape together enough beauty and truth

to recall, yes, that Broadway car crash was fucked up,

but the way the rain fell to wash away the blood

not ten minutes after the ambulance left

was gorgeous

Or how maybe your mother and father would sometimes scream,

but also wrapped never-before-seen tropical

fruit for one another every Xmas Eve

How in the morning before opting out I watched

that tiny Native girl fumbling

to braid her own and her now-

snoring mother's long black hair

together

                   in a single cornrow—

If I can just always squiggle

down like this:

                                even half as much

as what I'd otherwise need

to forget

maybe these scales

really will one day tip

to find each flaw that made us

Exquisite

Bad Love Is Easy to Do

New Guided by Voices. Re: MSADI5G, the song is not about my recent decision to kick GbV out of a permanent spot and into the circle of rotating spots, though the song title's sentiment applies.

By the way, tomorrow is one of three posts not labeled My Complicity (that's right! I'll be wearing a suit and dancing with Bjork!), so this blog is linkless - if that's why you come here - until at least Thursday.

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.

Is My Destroyer and I Am Dumb

• Why Destroyer today? See last link in post.
• Like the compulsive attention slut and fool I am I posted all three days of the fourth slowest weekend of the year in Blegsylvania, please, those of you who were sensibly elsewhere than Blegsylvania, please check out the links to those posts below, there are some links to very good and important reads.
• Though if history repeats itself, the Monday after a three day weekend is as slow if not slower in Blegsylvania than the three days of the weekend themselves. See post title.
• Here, Friday's post.
• Here, Saturday's post.
• Here, Sunday's post.
• I bought this album in a Santa Cruz record store during our 2008 vacation in San Francisco/NoCal, it became the trip's soundtrack, Earthgirl won't remember, Planet can vouch:

• Here, a bleggalgaze of sorts.
• Pack my trunk.
• The painful consequences of liking fake subway maps.
• The art of the hyperreal soccer dive.
• There is no garden for us to return to: a bleggalgaze of sorts.
• I love Will Oldham's music, I love Dan Bejar's music, I love Bill Callahan's music, never once did I say to myself, hey, they are sons of Bob Dylan.
• I don't hate Bob Dylan's music. I don't want to hear Bob Dylan's music. Ever.
• This is true: I loved music before I discovered poetry, to this day, when I hear a song, I privilege sound over words. I love songs with dumb lyrics if the sound makes me tingle, I don't love songs with good lyrics that don't make my ears' toes curl. Fine metaphors abound.

[THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER]

Dylan Thomas

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force the drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; the dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; the ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

The Excruciating Crawl of the World

• The Return of a Futile Weekend Blogging tradition, music today from Bryce's show yesterday. It's my favorite three hours of music each week.
• A constant tradition of Futile Weekend Blogging continues with Futile Weekend Blogging.
• Court and Caliphate: The rulings by the conservative majority on the Court are part of a relentless, decades-long effort to reassert control of women's sexuality. In this, America's super-patriotic, politicized right-wing Christians share a common cause with the Islamic sectarians they hate so much (and are so scared of). Women's sexuality is apparently the most volatile, dangerous force in the world -- much, much more dangerous than, say, nuclear war or the heat-death of the planet, which concern them not at all. The amount of time, energy, money -- and frenzy -- spent on repressing and controlling women's sexuality is truly extraordinary. Or rather, it is, tragically, all too ordinary, part of an effort that has been going on since homo sapiens first emerged.
• Chomsky's whitewashing: I am struck, first of all, by how bizarre it is that Chomsky addresses the perennial question, “What Can We Do?” not with concrete suggestions for political engagement, but with a starry-eyed assessment of the state’s ability to persecute dissenters. Above all, I’m struck by how mind-numbingly stupid Chomsky’s remarks are, and, also — in their obliviousness to Gitmo, drone executions, and mass incarceration — how racially biased.
• Fuck Europe and Fuck Zizek too: Zizek wants us to believe the choice is between the EU or UKIP, National Front, AfD and Golden Dawn, when in fact the UK, France, Germany and Greece are already historically obsolete. The choice we face today is between “Europe” and mankind — and this last doesn’t need treaties between states. Every attempt to save “Europe” is a cynical attempt by the nation states of Europe to maintain their death grip on the throat of mankind.

• Against mastery: Do we imagine that complete control over our biological fates will necessarily make us happier? Perhaps it will. But one can as easily imagine that there might be little room for uninhibited joy or exuberance in such a world. More likely it will be a tightly wound world, saturated with bitterness and anxiety and mutual suspicion, in which life and health will be guarded with all the ferocity of Ebenezer Scrooge guarding his money. Growing mastery means growing responsibility, and the need to assign blame, since nothing happens by chance. Some of the blame will be directed at the parents, politicians, doctors, and celebrities who make plausible villains, or conspiracy theories that explain why someone else is always at fault. But much of the blame will devolve upon ourselves, since in being set free to choose so much about our lives, we will have no one else to blame when we make a complete mess of things.
• Freedoom.
• Predating down the road: No more should one see analog's return in spite of it's not being wholly engorged by a more highly resolved depictionary. 
• Afro-Europe in the World Cup: This year, there will be two additional African teams in the competition: France and Belgium. If they are going to the World Cup at all, it is thanks to goals scored by the children of African migrants: Romelu Lukaku for Belgium, and Mamadou Sakho for France. I’m not sure if these old colonial powers deserve the help, but they’ve gotten it: Africa has come to the rescue. In fact, it might be worth giving new names to these two football teams: Françafrique and AfroBelgica, perhaps? (If we make that change, though, we also might need to make another: most of Algeria’s team is French born and raised: they similarly represent a trans-regional space, something like North and South Mediterranean-Algiers…)
• I really really really really wanted Brazil to not win this World Cup, but I didn't want them to not win (and they still might win) because its star player had his back broken. 
• At this point, but for Costa Rica, I'd just as soon Brazil win: the gloating will not be as insufferable as the whining if it loses. 
• That broken back, btw, is on the ref: if he'd shown a couple of deserved yellows early on in the match the two teams wouldn't have been kicking each other with sincere malice throughout the second half.
• Poetry and/or Prose.
• Bend or break: on diving in soccer and free verse.

EGO

Denise Duhamel

I just didn’t get it—

even with the teacher holding an orange (the earth) in one hand

and a lemon (the moon) in the other,

her favorite student (the sun) standing behind her with a flashlight.

I just couldn’t grasp it—

this whole citrus universe, these bumpy planets revolving so slowly

no one could even see themselves moving.

I used to think if I could only concentrate hard enough

I could be the one person to feel what no one else could,

sense a small tug from the ground, a sky shift, the earth changing gears.

Even though I was only one mini-speck on a speck,

even though I was merely a pinprick in one goosebump on the orange,

I was sure then I was the most specially perceptive, perceptively sensitive.

I was sure then my mother was the only mother to snap,

“The world doesn’t revolve around you!”

The earth was fragile and mostly water,

just the way the orange was mostly water if you peeled it,

just the way I was mostly water if you peeled me.

Looking back on that third grade science demonstration,

I can understand why some people gave up on fame or religion or cures—

especially people who have an understanding

of the excruciating crawl of the world,

who have a well-developed sense of spatial reasoning

and the tininess that it is to be one of us.

But not me—even now I wouldn’t mind being god, the force

who spins the planets the way I spin a globe, a basketball, a yoyo.

I wouldn’t mind being that teacher who chooses the fruit,

or that favorite kid who gives the moon its glow.