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.

When Divine Mother Love Wears Out, I Just Reverse the Robe From Blue to Red

Look, it's not that I love Guided by Voices less.....

Well, I still love soccer. I actually knew that before last night's USMNT game v Ghana. It seems I still have affection for the home team - I screamed when Brooks' header broke the draw in the 86th - forgive me, abandon me, do what you need.

Psst. USMNT is not very good, and it lost for the tournament it's only striker - only player, actually - who can outrun a defender. I do not get the fascination for Michael Bradley, who would make a fine holding midfielder but just sucks as an offensive facilitator.

In 2010 I not only wrote constantly about the World Cup but live-blogged the USMNT games, some of you participated. Not going to happen this year for no greater reason than I don't want to. Progress, I suppose, of some sort, with tradition Fine Metaphors Abounding applying.

• Rainy fascism island: How to characterize this period post-crash, or post-post-crash if we assume that the measures taken (austerity, the destruction of the welfare state) have largely been set in motion, if not completed? The deliberate shifting of blame that saw the public sector punished for the crimes of the private allowed various other modes of the dis- or rather misplacement of resentment to be mobilized. The targets are the same as they ever were—migrants, the un- or underemployed, those in need of help or support—but, given that the structures that enabled help and support had largely been dismantled even before “austerity” measures were imposed, there seems little left to attack. Those outraged by people receiving benefits, or those telling people to just get a job, must know that what meager benefits there are do not support a life, and that in many places there simply are no jobs to get. But nevertheless, resentment remains, or at least, somehow, a fantasy version of it can be mobilized such that resentment acts as a kind of looping device, self-nourishing and ever-expanding. What should we call this state of affairs? How best to identify it, in order to redirect or dismantle its energies?
• Giovanni puts the right words in Tony Blair's mouth.
• Nobody politics.
• Indistinction.
• Memory as genre in contemporary art: The dread spectacle of the Whitechapel’s (useful) anthology is enough evidence, turning any historical practice of memory to use, turning the brand of memory (“on account of their scars“) into a brand in the other sense, a personal brand to be replicated & circulated, the market niches of identity politics: memory becomes a genre in contemporary art in the way that, half a century ago now, Pop was. Part of the blame can be laid on Sebald’s Anglophone (particularly English) reception, in wh/ genuine historical anguish came to function as an alibi for an endless trot down memory lane.
• Nocturnal existence.
• :-p with a World Cup update.
• Skull blogging.

BLOODY MARY

April Bernard

Note who’s got to go

today, don’t fuss

about the means,

just go ahead behead,

impale, starve, strappado,

the sheer assortment

of choices enough

to make a crown

crow. They never

loved me enough.

It must be said: They

were a disappointment.

When divine mother

love wears out, I just

reverse the robe

from blue to red.

I like a flat ground

to build the next town,

city, empire of disgust.

All the waste you see,

that’s what I did,

none of that happened

to me. I did that.

I made that. I killed that. I.

A Wounded Eardrum Wasn't Much in the Scheme

• Yes, re-posted again, this new GbV song,  I couldn't resist posting it last night, posted again especially considering the Tomasky link below the next new GbV song. New Guided by Voices out today. Yay! I recently saw a review of Guided by Voices which used a baseball metaphor to describe Pollard as essentially Rob Deer or Steve Balboni, and fuck you and heh!
• Header photo of Fleabus, Best Cat Every, via my daughter Planet. This shitty blog used to feature a Fleabus photo per post back when Planet was in middle school, first years  of high school, and was taking photos regularly. Not going to make it a regular feature again, am going to post some now and then more than I have of late.
• Epistemic panic and the problem of life: This image of the fragile and naked human-animal, now hopelessly out-performed, manipulated and threatened by its own technological systems, presents itself as the risk and stakes of epistemic acceleration as a strategy of resistance to capitalism’s lethal acceleration. It begs the question of whether accelerationism demands that we somehow leave behind the frailty of the organism, with its limited scope of experience and self-interestedness, in order ultimately to defend it and its environment at the brink of man-made planetary extinction? In other words, whether we must work against the inherent proclivities of the living in order to protect ‘Life itself’? Or, taking this one anti-humanist step further, even to free thought itself from the limitations of the life-form, with its inherent conservatism, in the interest of knowledge itself! Or whether we must liberate reason from its capitalist control in order that particularity, which includes the contingent experiences of actual lives, may reemerge as a basis for understanding and action? What has knowledge based in embodied experience got to do with all this?
• I saw Steve Balboni ground into a triple play against the Orioles at Memorial Stadium once. Saw him strike out numerous times at Memorial Stadium over multiple games. Rob Deer too back when the Brewers were in the American League.

• Tomasky and the New York Review hop the Elizabeth Warren train. Offered for your consideration - Tomasky, NYRB, Warren; I feel sure you know my yodel - and for old time's sake.
• The new nature of maps.
• The New Inquiry's Sunday readings.
• Burying violins.
• A history of synthesizers.
• Santino Quaranta new head coach of wonderfully named Baltimore Bohemians!
• [[I] [Lied] [Dog] [Died] [Sword] [Profess] [Thimbles] [No]] abandoned, for now.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Marvin Bell poem.
• Walt Whitman, for those of you who do.
• Flarf is life.
• Have I ever mentioned that GbV/All Pollard Projects have one of three permanent seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Game and that any day in which there is a new release is a High Egoslavian Holy Day, cause it's true.

THE UNIFORM

Marvin Bell

Of the sleeves, I remember their weight, like wet wool,

on my arms, and the empty ends which hung past my hands.   

Of the body of the shirt, I remember the large buttons   

and larger buttonholes, which made a rack of wheels   

down my chest and could not be quickly unbuttoned.   

Of the collar, I remember its thickness without starch,

by which it lay against my clavicle without moving.   

Of my trousers, the same—heavy, bulky, slow to give   

for a leg, a crowded feeling, a molasses to walk in.   

Of my boots, I remember the brittle soles, of a material   

that had not been made love to by any natural substance,   

and the laces: ropes to make prisoners of my feet.   

Of the helmet, I remember the webbed, inner liner,   

a brittle plastic underwear on which wobbled

the crushing steel pot then strapped at the chin.   

Of the mortar, I remember the mortar plate,

heavy enough to kill by weight, which I carried by rope.   

Of the machine gun, I remember the way it fit

behind my head and across my shoulder blades   

as I carried it, or, to be precise, as it rode me.

Of tactics, I remember the likelihood of shooting

the wrong man, the weight of the rifle bolt, the difficulty   

of loading while prone, the shock of noise.

For earplugs, some used cigarette filters or toilet paper.   

I don’t hear well now, for a man of my age,

and the doctor says my ears were damaged and asks   

if I was in the Army, and of course I was but then   

a wounded eardrum wasn’t much in the scheme.

High Egoslavian Holy Day Eve

   
New Guided by Voices out tomorrow. More new songs here tomorrow.

The Song Sparrow Puts All His Saying into One Repeated Song

Relinking to Richard's review of his Music 2013 not only because I added it late to yesterday's post and not only because it is full of great music suggestions but mostly because he mentioned the Pere Ubu show at Rock and Roll Hotel we attended last September and I was reminded that I recorded the above, a live version of this shitty blog's long-time Theme Song Two, it's over to the left, has been for years.

• I did not know that. See Theme Song Three.
• Chomsky as moral compass?
• On Chomsky in the role of moral compass and his fans.
• Good friend Jay Paleo Old Arra Dirty 101 Bama and I emailed last night, this post's title came to mind when I wrote this: As always it comes down to each individual's level of moral pragmatism. Give that Chomsky serves power in ways he's either unaware of (which, being Chomsky, I find highly improbable) or is aware of his situation and decides that there IS no alternative to Capital's power, there's only ways of mitigating its rapacious drive. Um, less-shittyism, let's call it. I'm always reminded of George Carlin's definition of the difference between a jerk and and asshole: a jerk is someone who drives slower than you, an asshole someone who drives faster. 
• Brutality and complexity in the global economy.
• Slap-single switch-hitter batting helmet as brand for Corporate mendacity. 
• He, for one, welcomes his new insect overlords.  
• Anne Carson's Glass Essay.
• Philip Glass turned 77 yesterday. Here's Metamorphosis, here's:

GLASS

A.R. Ammons

The song

sparrow puts all his

saying

into one

repeated song:

what
  

variations, subtleties

he manages,

to encompass denser

meanings, I’m

too coarse

to catch: it’s
  

one song, an over-reach

from which

all possibilities,

like filaments,

depend:

killing,
  

nesting, dying,

sun or cloud,

figure up

and become

song—simple, hard:

removed.

The Subject May Hoard His or Her Bubbles

THERE'S A NEW GUIDED BY VOICES SONG? Dang, I can't find how to embed it and dang, when Robert Pollard says: As frontman Robert Pollard told Rolling Stone recently, the song was a metaphor about his lack of desire to compete with other bands. "No competition, no pressure, no rules. The way I do things now is an absolute blast," he said. "I think one earns it when entering one's golden years. It also means that you don't necessarily have to act your age," I mean, he's as full of shit as I am when say I don't care about D-List Bleggal Ladder-Matches, yet another reason Robert Pollard has one of three permanent seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game.

• Following up on yesterday, Jorge Bergoglio channeling Karl Polanyi.
• At the closing of an age.
• Beer: street wisdom.
• It's time for year end lists. Earthgirl gave the Messud a Meh +.
• It's time for year end lists. Under Fiction & Poetry the NYTBR lists fifty novels, one book of poetry, Bidart's Metaphysical Dog (which is very good).
• It's time for year end lists, this one authors' choices (includes Josipovici, for those of you who do).
• It's always time for lists! The high school literature zodiac, offered for your amusement only.
• I never heard of Nico Muhly until yesterday. Infrequently but occasionally I like doing research. 
• Matthea Harvey has just been given her own tag here, I'm almost certain her poetry is going to be my next obsession.

PITY THE BATHTUB ITS FORCED EMBRACE OF THE HUMAN FORM

Matthea Harvey

1.   

Pity the bathtub that belongs to the queen its feet

Are bronze casts of the former queen’s feet its sheen

A sign of fretting is that an inferior stone shows through

Where the marble is worn away with industrious

Polishing the tub does not take long it is tiny some say

Because the queen does not want room for splashing

The maid thinks otherwise she knows the king

Does not grip the queen nightly in his arms there are

Others the queen does not have lovers she obeys

Her mother once told her your ancestry is your only

Support then is what she gets in the bathtub she floats

Never holds her nose and goes under not because

She might sink but because she knows to keep her ears

Above water she smiles at the circle of courtiers below

Her feet are kicking against walls which cannot give

Satisfaction at best is to manage to stay clean

2.

Pity the bathtub its forced embrace of the whims of

One man loves but is not loved in return by the object

Of his affection there is little to tell of his profession

There is more for it is because he works with glass

That he thinks things are clear (he loves) and adjustable

(she does not love) he knows how to take something

Small and hard and hot and make room for

His breath quickens at night as he dreams of her he wants

To create a present unlike any other and because he cannot

Hold her he designs something that can a bathtub of

Glass shimmers red when it is hot he pours it into the mold

In a rush of passion only as it begins to cool does it reflect

His foolishness enrages him he throws off his clothes meaning

To jump in and lie there but it is still too hot and his feet propel

Him forward he runs from one end to the other then falls

To the floor blisters begin to swell on his soft feet he watches

His pain harden into a pretty pattern on the bottom of the bath

3.

Pity the bathtub its forced embrace of the human

Form may define external appearance but there is room

For improvement within try a soap dish that allows for

Slippage is inevitable as is difference in the size of

The subject may hoard his or her bubbles at different

Ends of the bathtub may grasp the sponge tightly or

Loosely it may be assumed that eventually everyone gets in

The bath has a place in our lives and our place is

Within it we have control of how much hot how much cold

What to pour in how long we want to stay when to

Return is inevitable because we need something

To define ourselves against even if we know that

Whenever we want we can pull the plug and get out

Which is not the case with our own tighter confinement

Inside the body oh pity the bathtub but pity us too

which isn't 121 anymore, the state giving the section between 28 and Boyds to MOCO to maintain (Boyds home to the now underwater Ten Mile Creek Road, where Willy Bayne in a cocaine and whiskey-fueled fury ran down the cat), then, or: Fifty-Seven Today

Four last songs for Robert Pollard's birthday, these all either solo or other bands other than GbV. I love his music. It's related to this and Gass' boxes.





 
*






And only Robert Pollard could get me to post a Halloween video on Halloween:

Caught Between the Tongue and the Taste, or: 57 Today

• Have I ever mentioned I love Guided by Voices and all Robert Pollard projects, that Pollard has one of three permanent seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game? Pollard is 57 today. Today is a High Egoslavian Holy Day. More songs later, requests if you give me any.
• Greenwald and the doctrine of exceptionalism.
• Taylorism, progressivism, and rule by experts.
• The contradictions of capital.
• The future is a foreign country.
• The logic of stupid poor people.
• America as carnival bumcombe.
• A brief history of the devil.
• There are new sites added to Newest Gags First and Second. Check them out. As always, if you are Kinding me but me not you please let me know.

• Halloween is the fucking Arcade Fucking Fire of holidays. Even my favorite DJs on WFMU are playing motherfucking Halloween related songs. Fuck Halloween fuck Halloween fuck this fuck Halloween.
• United and De Rosario part ways. SeatSix sends me a photo - they cut him and he gets to leave stadium watching workers take down his banner. New United ownership - always classy.
• Red Sox fan dedicates trash can he's lighting on fire to Marathon victims.
• I haven't thought of the Willard Grant Conspiracy in a decade. I've a couple of CDs somewhere.
• Saariaho.
• Paris Review just tweeted a quote from 1988 interview with Anthony Hecht so have a 1988 interview with Anthony Hecht.
• Beneath the below GbV song is XXIV: Freedom from Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, I love you but it's too long to type out, sorry. If they don't embiggen on this blog (and a hearty FUCK YOU! - as opposed to a Salty Salute - to my free blogging platform) the will embiggen here. Autobiography of Red is by far the best thing I've ever read since the last until the next, expect LOTS of Anne Carson poetry (though Autobiography of Red is a novel) in this blog's near future.

*

Graffiti on the Stonework Around the Service Entrance Makes the Doorway at Night Look Like the Mystagogic Mouth of a Big Beast, Amphibious, Outfitted with Fangs, Snout, the Suggestion of a Tongue, Throat, and Alimentary Canal Leading to a Complex of Caves, Tunnels, Temples . . .

LOUD! please. Robert Pollard, holder of one of three permanent seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, is fifty-six tomorrow, requests solicited, Guided by Voices of course but solo and other band projects, like the above, the greatest one minute song in human history. Below the next song, this shitty blog's Theme Song Three, is a brilliant poem by Timothy Donnelly that in the stupid rules for blogging I impose on myself is too long for day posts but perfect for night posts, and that poem is followed by the greatest two minute song in human history. Unless it's another Pollard song. Tune in tomorrow.







GLOBUS HYSTERICUS

Timothy Donnelly

1
 

A pity the selfsame vehicle that spirits me away from

factories of tedium should likewise serve to drag

me backwards into panic, or that panic should erect
 

massive factories of its own, their virulent pollutants

havocking loved waterways, frothing all the reed-

fringed margins acid pink and gathering in the shell
 

and soft tissues of the snails unknowingly in danger

as they inch up stems. Through the bulkhead door

I can hear their spirals plunk into the sluggish south-
 

bound current and dissolve therein with such brutal

regularity their dying has given rise to the custom

of measuring time here in a unit known as the snailsdeath.
 

The snailsdeath refers to the average length of time,

about 43 seconds, elapsing between the loss of the first

snail to toxic waters and the loss of the next, roughly
 

equivalent to the pause between swallows in a human

throat, while the adverb here refers to my person

and all its outskirts, beginning on the so-called cellular
 

level extending more of less undaunted all the way down

to the vale at the foot of the bed. I often fear I’ll wake

to find you waiting there and won’t know how to speak
 

on the subject of my production, or rather my woeful

lack thereof, but in your absence, once again, I will begin

drafting apologies in a language ineffectual as doves.

    

2
 

Daybreak on my marshland: a single egret, blotched,

trudges through the froth. I take its photograph

from the rooftop observation deck from which I watch
 

day’s delivery trucks advance. I take advantage of

the quiet before their arrival to organize my thoughts

on the paranormal thusly: (1) If the human psyche
 

has proven spirited enough to produce such a range

of material effects upon what we’ll call the closed

system of its custodial body, indeed if it’s expected to,
 

and (2) If such effects might be thought to constitute

the physical expression of that psyche, an emanation

willed into matter in a manner not unlike a brand-
 

new car or cream-filled cake or disposable camera,

and (3) If the system of the body can be swapped out

for another, maybe an abandoned factory or a vale,
 

then might it not also prove possible for the psyche

by aptitude or lather or sheer circumstance to impress

its thumbprint on some other system, a production
 

in the basement, or in a video store, as when I find you

inching up steps or down a shady aisle or pathway,

dragging your long chains behind you most morosely
 

if you ask me, the question is: Did you choose this, or was it

imposed on you, but even as I ask your hands move

wildly about your throat to indicate you cannot speak.

    

3
 

After the memory of the trucks withdrawing heavy

with their cargo fans out and fades into late-morning

hunger, I relocate in time to the lit bank of vending
 

machines still humming in the staff-room corner for a light

meal of cheese curls, orange soda, and what history

will come to mourn as the last two cream-filled cakes.
 

Eating in silence, a breeze in the half-light, absently

thinking of trying not to think, I imagine the Bethlehem

steel smokestacks above me piping nonstop, the sky
 

wide open without any question, steam and dioxides

of carbon and sulfur, hands pressed to the wall as I walk

down the corridor to stop myself from falling awake
 

again on the floor in embarrassment. If there’s any use

of imagination more productive or time less painful

it hasn’t tried hard enough to push through to find me
 

wandering the wings of a ghost-run factory as Earth

approaches the dark vale cut in the heart of the galaxy.

Taking shots of the sunbaked fields of putrefaction
 

visible from the observation deck. Hoping to capture

what I can point to as the way it feels. Sensing my hand

in what I push away. Watching it dissolve into plumes
 

rising like aerosols, or like ghosts of indigenous peoples,

or the lump in the throat to keep me from saying that

surviving almost everything has felt like having killed it.
 

4
 

(Plunk) Up from the floor with the sun to the sound of

dawn’s first sacrifice to the residues of commerce.

On autofog, on disbelief: rejuvenation in a boxer brief
 

crashed three miles wide in the waves off Madagascar,

cause of great flooding in the Bible and in Gilgamesh.

Massive sphere of rock and ice, of all events in history
 

(Plunk) thought to be the lethalmost. A snailsdeath

semiquavers from pang to ghost where the habit of ghosts

of inhabiting timepieces, of conniving their phantom
 

tendrils through parlor air and into the escapements

of some inoperative heirloom clock on a mantel shows

not the dead’s ongoing interest in their old adversary
 

(Plunk) time so much as an urge to return to the hard

mechanical kind of being. An erotic lounging to reanimate

the long-inert pendulum. As I have felt you banging
 

nights in my machine, jostling the salt from a pretzel.

This passion for the material realm after death however

refuses to be reconciled with a willingness to destroy
 

(Plunk) it while alive. When the last of the human voices

told me what I had to do, they rattled off a shopping

list of artifacts they wanted thrown down open throats.
 

That left me feeling in on it, chosen, a real fun-time guy

albeit somewhat sleep-deprived; detail-oriented, modern,

yes, but also dubious, maudlin, bedridden, speechless.

5
 

Graffiti on the stonework around the service entrance

makes the doorway at night look like the mystagogic

mouth of a big beast, amphibious, outfitted with fangs,
 

snout, the suggestion of a tongue, throat, and alimentary

canal leading to a complex of caves, tunnels, temples . . .

There are rooms I won’t enter, at whose threshold I say
 

this is as far as I go, no farther, almost as if I can sense

there’s something in there I don’t want to see, or for which

to see means having wanted already to forget, unless
 

stepping into the mouth at last, pressed into its damp,

the advantage of not knowing is swapped out for the loss

of apartness from what you’d held unknown, meaning
 

you don’t come to know it so much as become it, wholly

warping into its absorbent fold. I can’t let that happen

if it hasn’t already. What draws me on might be thought
 

canine, keen-sighted, but it’s still incapable of divining why

the constant hum around or inside me has to choose

among being a nocturne of toxic manufacture, the call
 

of what remains of the jungle, or else just another prank

on my gullible anatomy. Am I not beset in the utmost

basement of industry? Is that basement itself not beset
 

by the broad, black-green, waxy leaves of Mesoamerica?

And haven’t I parted those selfsame leaves, discovering me

asleep on my own weapon, threat to no one but myself?
 

6
 

Asked again what I miss the most about my former life,

I remember to pause this time, look left, a little off-camera

an entire snailsdeath, an air of sifting the possibilities,
 

I eliminate certain objects and events from the running

right off the bat, such as when their great displeasure

brought the gods to turn to darkness all that had been
 

light, submerging mountaintops in stormwater, the gods

shocked by their own power, and heartsick to watch

their once dear people stippling the surf like little fishes.
 

Or when the flaming peccary of a comet struck the earth

with much the same effect, waves as high as ziggurats

crashing mathematically against our coastlines, scalding
 

plumes of vapor and aerosols tossed into the atmosphere

spawning storms to pummel the far side of the earth,

approximately 80 percent of all life vanished in a week.
 

Or when we squandered that very earth and shat on it

with much the same effect, and more or less on purpose,

emitting nonstop gases in the flow of our production,
 

shoveling it in as ancient icecaps melted, what difference

could another make now. And so I clear my throat, look

directly into the camera, and even though it will make me
 

come off bovine in their eyes, I say that what I miss the most

has to be those cream-filled cakes I used to like, but then

they prod me with their volts and lead me back to the barn.
 

7
 

After the panic grew more of less customary, the pity

dissolved into a mobile fogbank, dense, reducing visibility

from the rooftop observation deck. Mobile in the sense
 

that it possessed mobility, not in the sense that it actually

moved. Because it didn’t. It just stayed there, reducing

visibility but not in the sense that it simply diminished it
 

or diminished it partly. Because it didn’t. It pretty much

managed to do away with it altogether, as my photography

will come to show: field after field of untouched white.
 

After the possibility of change grew funny, threadbare,

too embarrassing to be with, I eased into the knowledge

that you’d never appear at the foot of the bed, the vale
 

turned into a lifetime’s heap of laundry, and not the gentle

tuffets and streambanks of an afterlife it seems we only

imagined remembering, that watercolor done in greens
 

and about which I predicted its monotony of fair weather

over time might deaden one all over again, unless being

changed with death means not only changing past change
 

but past even the wish for it. I worried to aspire towards

that condition might actually dull one’s aptitude for change.

That I would grow to protect what I wished to keep from
 

change at the cost of perpetuating much that required it.

In this sense I had come to resemble the fogbank, at once

given to motion but no less motionless than its photograph.
 

The last time I saw myself alive, I drew the curtain back

from the bed, stood by my sleeping body. I felt tenderness

towards it. I knew how long it had waited, and how little
 

time remained for it to prepare its bundle of grave-goods.

When I tried to speak, rather than my voice, my mouth

released the tight, distinctive shriek of an aerophone of clay.
 

I wanted to stop the shock of that from taking away from

what I felt. I couldn’t quite manage it. Even at this late hour,

even here, the purity of a feeling is ruined by the world.

8
 

The noises from the basement were not auspicious noises.

I wanted to live forever. I wanted to live forever and die

right then and there. I had heard the tight, distinctive shriek.
 

Here again and now. I no longer have legs. I am sleeping.

Long tendrils of tobacco smoke, composed of carbon dioxide,

water vapor, ammonia, nitrogen oxide, hydrogen cyanide,
 

and 4,000 other chemical compounds, penetrate the room

through the gap beneath the door and through heating vents

with confidence. They are the spectral forms of anaconda.
 

The ruler of the underworld smokes cigars. A certain brand.

Hand-rolled. He smiles as if there is much to smile about.

And there is. He is hollow-eyed, toothless. His hat, infamous:
 

broad-brimmed, embellished with feathers, a live macaw.

His cape is depicted, often, as a length of fabric in distinctive

black and white chevrons. Otherwise, as here, the full pelt
 

of a jaguar. On a barge of plywood and empty milk cartons

he trudges through the froth. He is the lord of black sorcery

and lord of percussion. He is patron of commerce. He parts
 

the leaves of Mesoamerica, traveling with a retinue of drunken

ax wielders, collection agents. His scribe is a white rabbit.

Daughter of moon and of night. Elsewhere, you are having
 

your teeth taken out. There is no music left, but I still feel held

captive by the cinema, and in its custom, I believe myself

capable of protecting myself by hiding my face in my hands.

Bird Zone: Tonight's the Rodeo

Part Monday dischaaarghe, part Woot the Fuck, part Fuck It, part Fuck This, part fuck my free blogging platform, part bleggalgaze, part my favorite post ever, certainly part brazen blogwhoring and attention sluttery, this post. Above, a brand new Robert Pollard project, Circus Devils, Holy the Fuck. There are Circus Devils in your future, oh yes indeed. Below, new Pollard solo.

The User Interface Has the Following Format

• New Robert Pollard. Yes, there's always new Robert Pollard.
• David Thomas interview.
• Pere Ubu US tour is on despite visa problems.
• Listened to the new Pollard on way to and from hiking on Sugarloaf w/Earthgirl today, just saw the Thomas/Ubu links now, I'd gathered the links below over coffee this morning, was going to save them for tomorrow, but two of three of the permanent members in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game in my head, I'll not be able to listen to anything else today less I post this now.
• Sometime in my early 20s Park Mrebelic and Willy Bayne and I were drinking pitchers and shooting pool in a bar on Wilkins off Parklawn when a boatload of bikers rolled in. We were told the table was theirs, don't bother finishing our game. OK, finished our pitcher at the bar, poured quarters into the juke box, punched Linda Ronstadt's Blue Bayou thirty-two times, left. Nonetheless, wouldn't wish Parkinsons on anyone.
• You'll have to go find them since I've used up my free views in August for both the NYT and WP and fuck if I'll give them money, but both have articles today in which the ledes I can see suggest liberals are asking her to leave SCOTUS now because they fear (a) a Republican will win the White House in 2016 and (b) then she'll die.
• Tarzie's interrogation of The Guardian continues.
• Vanity and venality.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• New Inquiry's Sunday links.
• The best vegetarian restaurants in DC area. (h/t SeatSix for these two)
• The seven best vegan restaurants in DC area.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Borges, for those of you who do.
• Borges, politics, and the postcolonial. 
• Debord, for those of you who do.
• Lovecraft, for those of you who do. I confess, I never did, though I know some of you do.
• Melville, for those of you who do. 

DODGING 1985

Philip Nikolayev

The user interface has the following format. Upon accessing the URL,
the user sees a welcome message with some explanation of the service
provided. The user is prompted to enter his or her name, date of birth,
When everything else fails, try something new. and email address,
For instance, try the central mental hospital, then to left click on the
sit back and mumble enjoying the belle vue submit button. Based on
until the nurse has counted you all. this information, the CGI script
Our group files in fresh from the courtyard walk, generates “on the
a pageant of male flesh in ugly dress. fly” an appropriate horoscope
There’s bundles of excitement but little talk. reading for the end user,
The chess-players are breaking out their chess. or displays the logs
No one to mention the Afghan War. The state, and user Statistics if
crumbling, buys me my sparse and forkless lunch. the current user is
This latest novel fails to kill my worries, the site admin. Parse CGI
The Plexiglas window withstands a teenage a punch. variables (or
God, I must prove completely nuts, by fate lookup logged record) to
unfit for active military service. obtain user’s birthday. Parse user’s
stats, verify and save to log file. Compute user’s Zodiac sign based on
birth date. Print personalized greeting. Generate a horoscope reading and
send it to user’s browser} else if (user   ==   administrator)  {compute stats.

When Good News Arrives by Email, Destroy the Computer

The one of  who asked in person, the four who asked via email, all recent friends and readers who weren't aware of certain Blegsylvanian history, have been answered re: yes, yes I did delete a comment yesterday because hate aimed at me is fine but leave my _________ out of it. Three friends who know Blegsylvanian history emailed to laugh, one dared me to write about this (Brooklyn Pilsner, please), one suggested enabling comment moderation, said this is precisely why he enabled his, and no, not yet, though who knows.

So, a Pere Ubu or Two Pale Boys or Rocket from the Tombs or some David Thomas production song a day for the month of June. This is an executive decision: you don't have a say.

• What's the matter with metadata.
• What metadata can do.
• Underestimating the surveillance state.
• PRISM and the Pentagon Papers.
• Drones and the quiet American.
• Who the fuck is David Simon and why should I care?
• American-made.
• Being rude to politicians.
• BroadSnark's things you might have missed.
• Paro.
• For in each of us there is a hidden realm.
• Extreme close-ups of dogs he walks.
• Lisa Robertson interview.
• Rae Armentrout reading and talking.
• Rogaine Bunny Sonnet.
• Juliana Barwick 2008.
• Yeah, I know I posted this within the past three months, I woke up with it in my head:

A REACTIONARY TALE

Linh Dinh 

I was a caring husband. I bought socks for my family.

My swarthy wife liked to wear these thick woolen socks that came up to her milky thighs.

I had a lover also. People could see me walking around each evening carrying a walking stick.

My most vivid memory, looking back, is of a pink froth bubbling out of my infant's mouth.

Not everything was going so well: one morning, malnourished soldiers marched down our tiny street, bringing good news.

When good news arrives by mail, the cuckoo sang, tear up the envelope. When good news arrives by e-mail, destroy the computer.

When an old friend came by to reclaim an old wound, I said to my oldest son: Go dump daddy's ammo boxes into the fragrant river.

To reduce drag, some of my neighbors were diving headfirst into a shallow lake.

We were rich and then we were poor. A small dog or maybe a cat now pulls our family wagon.

It Turns Out That a Redone Sky Implies a Redone God

• Been banging tablet, I've learned that if I'm hammering there best not to yammer here (I can read, just not yammer), have new Guided by Voices in lieu of monologue.
• May Day and modern politics.
• You have the right to be lazy.
• May Day.
• The history of May Day. (h/t Richard)
• Obama condemns himself.
• Advanced obamapologetics.
• Surveillance as datafication.
• NYRB finally gets around to reviewing Graeber's Debt.
• Graeber interviewed.
• Professional homosexuals and the military-industrial complex.
• Badiou and Zizek should both be shot in the head.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• Marie Wintzer's Sight.
• Kurtag.
• Have I mentioned lately that GbV/all Pollard projects has one of three permanent seats in my sillyass Deserted Island Five game?

COCK

Albert Goldbarth

Chile, 1834

A month before his dinner with the visiting Spanish lawyer,

he had “set out for the purpose of geologizing,”

and rode back over the ridge of the Chilecauquen

with a huge jute bag of living shells

from the sandy flats at the coast, and with another,

as full, of dead barnacles scraped from the rock.

A few months forward from that dinner

—on the island of San Pedro, where the Beagle was anchored

awaiting him—he would be sneaking up on a fox

“of a kind very rare” and donking it stoutly

“on the head with my geological hammer.” (The fox,

he’ll write, “is now in the Zoological Society.”)

So what does he think, when the Spanish lawyer expresses a disbelief

that the King of England would be so loco as to bother

to ship to this sensible, orderly country a man

“to pick up beetles and lizards, and to break stones”?

No, the whiff of something “off ”—like suspect meat—attends

eccentric stunts like these. “I do not like it:

if one of us were to go and do such things in England,

do not you think the King of England would very shortly

command us to leave his shores?” Renous,

another student of bugs and rocks, from Germany,

is also there at dinner, and he mentions then

that once, in a house in San Fernando, he’d been discovered

contemplating the transformation of caterpillars to butterflies.

He couldn’t deny it: there they were,

the writhing green proof, in an open box!

“The Padres and the Governor consulted, and agreed

it must be some heresy”—and so Renous was arrested.

Darwin can only shake his head in a quiet bemusement

as his guests converse. Those inchling creatures

crawling over their chopped-up foliage, heads as blunt

as thimbled thumbs . . . heretical? How

could anybody believe that the innocent jumble

in the baskets and flasks of a naturalist is dangerous?

*

And Lillian Colton—the woman in Owatonna,

Minnesota who for forty years has avidly collected

the seeds of that state and, with them (“poking them

into place with toothpicks and gluing them down”),

has portraitured “American presidents,

movie stars, country musicians, rock and roll legends,

scientific and religious leaders (including Mother Teresa)”

—what suspiciousness might seize the Spanish lawyer

if he saw her on her rounds? What edgy wariness

would grip him if he chanced on Nellie Staves,

“at 87 perhaps the most famous Adirondack trapper,”

out in the summer to harvest shell-shaped fungus

off the dead trees of those shaded, spinous hills?

—she’ll work for twenty hours straight on one,

with the point of an old school compass, stippling it

into the scene of a great alert-eyed ram

or a sunrise, watching as the fungus’s own interior,

brown juices dye the image into permanence.

Who would these represent, for the Spanish lawyer, what

forbidden Other?—a girl in the corner, walling her attention

away from her sisters’ strident hip-hop, by reading

a fanciful tale of witches? a girl on a dancer pole

at Sturgis, strobing her tits for the boys in a quick 1-2-1

semaphore of fuck-the-work-week revelry? Surely

not. Surely these are no threat to his world. And yet

for nothing more than positing a newly ordered

sky map, Giordano Bruno was led in chains

from his cell in the Roman prison of Castel San’Angelo, there

where he’d spent eight years as the Inquisition hammered

at his ideas and his calm resolve. It was February 19th,

1600; he was tied to an iron stake; a wedge

was stuffed in his mouth, to prevent any final

utterance of blasphemy; and he was burned alive.

The leg skin bubbled off of his body like a Christmas pig’s.

It turns out that a redone sky implies

a redone God—and a God is intolerant of this,

a God is jealous of any counter claim to the pedigree

of His cosmos. Yes, but . . . surely not

this mushroom picker? not this boy who simply speaks

to invisible friends as he wanders around the alleys?

Oh but that would depend on the given Spanish lawyer

of that given day and circumstance. In Ghent,

a cock was put on trial and sentenced to death

for repeatedly disturbing the peace of the Lord’s day,

Sunday. It had been warned; so now

it was just, to lead this beast to a chopping block

—restoring the sanctified order.

*

Kansas, 2004

Ah, for a witty transition from “cock”

to my neighbors Suzette and Edie!—lesbians, now

in love with each other for over a decade and wanting

only to declare their love in a marriage vow,

“like anyone,” as Edie says. Not that

my schoolboy humor would find favor

in their reading life . . . although we get along;

some shared affinity enables The Church

of the Gay Girls and The Orthodox Congregation of Guy

to coexist with an amiability. Still, I’ve witnessed

other people pass them by with the slitted,

ophidian stare of xenophobia. Suzette and Edie

—are they the new apostasy? are they our own

Anne Hutchinson? In 1638 she was found guilty,

after a two-day trial, of heresy—of being “a woman

not fitt for our Society.” With will, she had embraced

doctrinal misinterpretations, “some of them blasphemus, others

erroneus and all Unsafe, and of the Devill of Hell,”

and she was excommunicated from Massachusetts Bay Colony

“evermore.” Her actual crime?—a claim

“the Holy Spirit illumines the heart of every true believer”

without the need of a minister intervening.

For this, she was harried into the wilds

—it was called a “hiving-out”—and set at the mercy of wolf

and of winter, “and it were Death to return.” Her other

actual crime?—that after a pregnancy, she had been delivered

“of thirtie monstrus Births or therabowts at once,

some of them Bigger, some Lessr, some of one shape,

some of An other, few of any Perfect shape, None at all of them

of Human shape”—which perhaps is what you’d expect

from a woman of “nimble Witt and active Spirit and verie

Voluble Tonggue.” At the Republican convention,

it was, indeed, the voluble tongue that Edie always flapped

so saucily (and too, I’d guess, her rainbow-hue

WE’RE ALREADY BEDDED . . . WHY NOT WEDDED? T-shirt)

that (on her side) led inevitably to the violence.

A surly officer suggested that she move. She pointed out

how she was already in the caged-off square

allowed for free-speech protest, and had no intention

of leaving. There were “gestures they exchanged”. . . and then

a stun gun’s 50,000 volts were suddenly alive inside her,

just enough to crumple her into helplessness so that,

when the panic began, she was trampled by friends and police

alike. A lung was crushed, and when I visited

three weeks later, her skin was still a nightmare

Turkish rug of bruise. (For a moment, I saw in the air

around her the first disabling gust of snow in the woods

at the border of Massachusetts Bay in 1638.) To be fair,

I should add that the confrontational officer doing crowd control

went home with his head little more

than a pocket of blood and neural damage. Do not,

I warn you, ever lightly cross a Wiccan bowler.

*

Terms I haven’t yet used, from my pile of notes:

separatist, sedition, dogma. Finally, though, when those clouds

of abstraction open up, it’s always one specific

ordinary rainy day, in Chicago, in 1961. I’m thirteen,

squeaky-voiced, and with an adam’s apple popping

from my thin throat like a doorknob—while my father is large,

he fought the neighbor’s crazy German shepherd

to a standstill once, and behind him are generations of him,

solemn and knowing. We’re standing there

in front of the house, in a dim autumnal downpour,

and it wouldn’t look to anyone else like an even match,

my scrawny shouts, his thousands of years of righteousness;

and yet, in emotional terms, I have the upper hand.

I won’t believe in his God. I won’t believe

in any God, in any synagogue, in any mumbo jumbo

or rabbinical teetotum, and I’m screaming this

and screaming this and screaming this, until I see

the rain become his face, and for the only time

except his mother’s funeral on a similar day

of wet and chill in a shivering mix,

my father cries in front of me.

And God, if He’s there, must write my name down

on a list that He’ll turn over to His deputies on Earth

—His Spanish lawyers.

There are many terms for this,

but only one rain. Now it’s falling, grayish twill,

on a hill along the coast of the Chonos Archipelago islands.

1835. A mound of seals in the distance, “huddled together,

asleep: they appeared to be of a loving disposition;

but even pigs would be ashamed of their dirt,”

which is picked at by the turkey-buzzards. Terns,

gulls, black-necked swans. A deposit of sandstone.

“Four great snowy cones” of the local volcanoes.

He couldn’t be happier. He has computed the number of eggs

in a tenth-of-an-inch of a sea-slug’s potent slime,

he has suggested how “a great volume might be written,

describing one of these beds of sea-weed.” The otter.

The spunky Chilean mouse. He has read

“a most interesting discussion on the history

of the common potato.” He couldn’t be more mesmerized

in the grand salons of Paris than here, in the rain,

with his sodden insect net. And who

would complain? He isn’t any rooster. He isn’t

going to rudely wake anyone from a long sound sleep.