And Will It Make Us Run for the Picklier Taste of Irony Rolled Around Protectively on Our Tongues Like a Grab of Greek Olives?

• Pat Paulsen was born 87 years ago today. The first time I was aware of POTUS and elections was watching his campaign on The Smothers Brothers Show in 1968. I'd vote for his corpse today.
• The List of Motherfuckers.
• Irony and Radicalism: But a funny thing happened to the radicals of the twentieth century: they began to combine their leftism with irony... In the West, by the fifties, no radical intellectual would think of making bombastic pledges about engineering the future without hedging them closely about with irony.
• Not doing is doing too: By not voting it would remove the legitimacy that the federal government hide behind. If everyone refused to vote it would shake the whole systyem to its rotten and putrid foundations.
• Communism is alive and kicking? Communism as political possibility and communism as philosophical concept mutually reinforce each other. Without the active movements in opposition to austerity, cuts, debt, and inequality, the theoretical discussions would have failed to resonate. They would have remained stuck in libraries and lecture halls, dusty remnants of past struggles rendered objects of scholarly reflection. Likewise, without the conceptual reemergence of communism as an idea, the movements of 2011 would not have appeared as a common struggle. The connections between education struggles in England, austerity struggles in Greece and Spain, and anti-foreclosure struggles in the U.S. would not have jumped from their local contexts and become legible as moments in the same struggle, a struggle against capitalism. (h/t)
• The Difference.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• unessence.
• The Good Bad Poet: An Extinct Species?
• I know I said there would be Kate Bush songs this weekend, but no, apparently there won't be, I spent last night with Swans, woke up with Swans in my head.
• To Be Kind is one of a dozen of my favorite album of 2014 so far.

SENTIMENTAL

Albert Goldbarth

The light has traveled unthinkable thousands of miles to be   

condensed, recharged, and poured off the white white pages

of an open Bible the country parson holds in front of this couple   

in a field, in July, in the sap and the flyswirl of July

in upper Wisconsin, where their vows buzz in a ring in the air

like the flies, and are as sweet as the sap, in these rich and ritual minutes.   

Is it sentimental? Oops. And out of that Bible the light continues   

to rush as if from a faucet. There will be a piecrust cooling   

out of its own few x’ed-out cuts. And will it make us run   

for the picklier taste of irony rolled around protectively on our tongues   

like a grab of Greek olives? My students and I discuss this   

slippery phenomenon. Does “context” matter? Does

“earned” count? If a balled-up fidget of snakes

in the underbrush dies in a freeze is it sentimental? No,   

yes, maybe. What if a litter of cocker spaniels? What

if we called them “puppydogs” in the same poem in that same hard,   

hammering winter? When my father was buried,

the gray snow in the cemetery was sheet tin. If I said

that? Yes, no, what does “tone” or “history” do

to the Hollywood hack violinists who patiently wait to play   

the taut nerves of the closest human body until from that   

lush cue alone, the eyes swell moistly, and the griefs

we warehouse daily take advantage of this thinning

of our systems, then the first sloppy gushes begin . . .

Is that “wrong”? Did I tell you the breaths

of the gravediggers puffed out like factorysmoke

as they bent and straightened, bent and straightened,

mechanically? Are wise old (toothless) Black blues singers   

sentimental?—“gran’ma”? “country cookin’”? But

they have their validity, don't they, yes? their

sweat-in-the-creases, picking up the lighting

in a fine-lined mesh of what it means to have gone through time   

alive a little bit on this planet. Hands shoot up . . . opinions . . .

questions . . . What if the sun wept? the moon? Why, in the face

of those open faces, are we so squeamish? Call out

the crippled girl and her only friend the up-for-sale foal,   

and let her tootle her woeful pennywhistle musics.

What if some chichi streetwise junkass from the demimonde

gave forth with the story of orphans forced through howling storm   

to the workhouse, letting it swing between the icy-blue   

quotation marks of cynicism—then? What if   

I wept? What if I simply put the page down,   

rocked my head in my own folded elbows, forgot   

the rest of it all, and wept? What if I stepped into   

the light of that page, a burnished and uncompromising   

light, and walked back up to his stone a final time,   

just that, no drama, and it was so cold,

and the air was so brittle, metal buckled

out song like a bandsaw, and there, from inside me,   

where they’d been lost in shame and sophistry

all these years now, every last one of my childhood’s   

heartwormed puppydogs found its natural voice.

The Soft Whirr of the Hygrometer Promises Oxidation of Iron

 

• Serendipitously, news of David Letterman's retirement announcement coincides with an urge to bleggalgaze, gives me opportunity to satisfy the second with the above, this blog's Theme Song Seven.
• James Boyd's hills.
• How the FBI goes after activists. 
• A meditation on America.
• The decline of Europe.
• The Pointlessness of Unplugging: Unplugging seems motivated by two contradictory concerns: efficiency and enlightenment. Those who seek efficiency rarely want to change their lives, only to live more productively; rather than eliminating technology, they seek to regulate their use of it through Internet-blocking programs like Freedom and Anti-Social, or through settings like Do Not Disturb. The hours that they spend off the Internet aren’t about purifying the soul but about streamlining the mind. The enlightenment crowd, by contrast, abstains from technology in search of authenticity, forsaking e-mail for handwritten letters, replacing phone calls with face-to-face conversations, cherishing moments instead of capturing them with cameras. Both crowds are drawn to events like the Day of Unplugging, and some members even pay premiums to vacation at black-hole resorts that block the Internet and attend retro retreats that ban electronics. Many become evangelists of such technological abstinence, taking to social media and television, ironically, to share insights from their time in the land of innocence.
• Not only do I not daydream any longer of detaching my cords, I no longer daydream I ever daydreamed of detaching my cords.
• The oceanic void.

• Biblioklept's List w/No Name #45.
• Crow's reflections after surgery.
• Purple Line.
• At a stop light in Rockville.
• Why zebras have stripes.
• USMNT World Cup 14 away kits honor Dominos Pizza deliverers around the world. For the home kit USMNT wearing England uniform.
• Knausgård, for those of you who do.
• Knausgård, for those of you who do.
• I've tried, I confess I don't get Knausgård. 
• Science fiction, Peter Handke, for those of you who do one or the other or both.
• Talking with Albert Goldbarth. For a bunch of his poems click the tag in footer.
• Anemmeffingobjectsubjectobjectpoem. And thanks for feedback, and yes, last today's might not be yesterday and tomorrow's today though I do seem to abandon them after a bit.
• The mental life of plants and worms.
• Why publish poetry?
• I am a fool for female singer-songwriters.

SESTINA: AS THERE ARE SUPPORT GROUPS, THERE ARE SUPPORT WORDS

Albert Goldbarth

The name of his native country pronounced on a distant shore
could not please the ears of a traveller more than hearing
the words “nitrogen,” “oxidation of iron” and “hygrometer.” —Alexander von Humboldt, nineteenth-century scientist-explorer

When visiting a distant (and imponderable) shire,

one longs to hear the cry “Hygrometer!

Fresh hygrometer for sale!” Yes, and when the fair

sex sidles close and coyly murmurs “nitrogen”

into a burly masculine ear, I guarantee you: the translation

is very easy. The allurements of a local siren,

whispering the kind of patois a traveler like Lord Byron

favors, never fail to comfort, and to reassure,

evoking pleasant memories of one’s own beloved hygrometer

at home, kept fresh in Cosmoline and camphor

and awaiting one’s rearrival back in his native xenon and nitrogen.

Without these occasional reminiscences, any translation

from nation to nation, tongue to tongue, becomes a translation

difficult to sustain. I think of my grandmother: “We're not hirin’

today” “Go away” “Dumb Jew”—her share

of the language that greeted her here in the land of alien hygrometer

and freedom, where she was only one more funny-skirted for-

eigner yearning to hear a lulling Hungarian nitrogen

hum her to sleep. Eventually, of course, the American nitrogen

sufficed. Her daughter could speak, in free translation,

both uranium and argon; and her granddaughter gigs with Fire ’n

Ice, a skinhead punk-grunge group that performs in sheer

black nighties and clown wigs—she plays mean electric hygrometer

in the first set and then, for a twofer,

(very American, that) plays paper-and-comb. Far

out. She’s so fluent in various World Wide Webbery that nitrogen

in a thousand different inflections is her birthright, and almost any translation,

mind to mind, gender to gender, is second nature. “I earn

my keep, I party, I sleep” is her motto. Though she’s for-

tunate in having a lover who’s CEO at Hygrometer,

Potassium, Klein & Wong: it helps to pay the “hygrometer

man” when he knocks at the door. I won’t say that they fear

this guy exactly, but he’s a major badass nitrogen-

sucking cyberwired ninja-kicking shitheel (or, translation:

call him Sir). It makes one pine for a land where the birds all choir in

sweetly trilling melodies on a flower-scented shore,

and a translation sings all night. Row gen-

tly toward it. The tender forests sigh, and the soft whirr

of the hygrometer promises oxidation of iron.

Some Multibody Hid His Second Exoneural Projecto-Self in a Pocket of Subspace, Masking It Over with Molecules of Landscape-Sim

• Three more Ashley pieces.
• Rebumping In Memory of Robert Ashley.
• Rebumping Ashley's Ubuweb page.
• Rebumping Imperfect News but Art in All Directions.
• Kyle Gann remembers Ashley.

• Remember to give to WFMU during their marathon, widget over in left column. Do it for me.
• I'm reminded that during Big News Spasms - Ukraine in this instance - Blegsylvania, at least my Stringtown in Blegsylvania, slows up. It no longer surprises me - people go to their usual and favorite big sources to keep up with latest news/assimilate their tribe's common wisdom on the event. 
• How the internet is narrowing our minds: As our options have grown, so has the overwhelming dominance of a generic set of crowd-pleasing blockbusters. Mainstream culture, aided and abetted (or thwarted and warped) by the frenetic pace of the Internet, has fallen into a punishing pattern: a few books—the ones that win prizes, are heavily promoted, or feature at least one vampire—rake in all the media attention and readers. All others are flops. In the book economy, the middle class is dying. The idea of an eHarmony for books is similarly a way of narrowing choices in the face of an overwhelming field of options. Paradoxically, because personalization relies on shared categories, its results can flatten the real differences between individuals.
• Food links.
• Belward Farm!
• Delmore Schwartz, for those of you who do.
• Philip Roth, for those of you who do.
• Thanks to Hamster for the above and below links plus for finding me the Ashley vimeo page.
• Berio, for those of you who do.
• Alex Chilton, for those of you who do.
• UPDATE! Yes yes yes, I know it's Mark E Smith's birthday today, a The Fall cascade is already in the can, will be posted later this afternoon.

DOOZEY

Albert Goldbarth

"A bun in her oven? Geez Louise, isn't that
malarkey? Estelle? Miss Goody-Two-Shoes?"
      "I thought it was bunkum too,
when I heard it. Really: you coulda knocked me
for a loop. But Alice told me, and she's jake."
Alice: the provenance, the gatekeeper. So it wasn't all hooey.
It was the real goods. Aunt Ruby
hadn't shown up for her visit last month and,
well, Estelle was in a pickle, was between the proverbial
rock and its cousin the hard place, friendless,
paddleless up that famous defecatory creek and down
in the dumps, and while vernacular studies

isn't my speed, I love the way we used to talk.
We also used to say the autumn light is lambent
on the lake top, and the waves display a heraldic curl
as in halcyon days . . . and that was also a fine,
fine thing to say. Or that some multibody hid
his second exoneural projecto-self in a pocket of subspace,
masking it over with molecules of landscape-sim
. . . that's how they talk in sci-fi-ville, while over
in the empirical records of science, someone is saying
the reagent deliquesces although
in its previous state it underwent resorption. All
of the languages are appropriate to their purposes—are

fine. Jack Gilbert's poem in honor of wabi
—that's the Japanese word for, roughly,
finding a beauty in ruin that one can only
find in ruin—reminds us that to lack the word
for a concept is really to lack the concept.
Let the word occur, though, and then suddenly
in a fingersnap, in a trice, and like a bolt out of the blue,
I can see my friend for whom Estelle is an avatar
in stanza one, and the formerly unacknowledged
stores of dignity and perseverance
that carried her through the shame of the abortion
—her wabi—flower forth. One story goes
 

she fucked up big-time, Mick was a saint but
nooo, she had to get knocked up by an asshole
like Kenny. Another story: her mind is part dissociative, and
so requires positive reinforcement from multiple sources.
Actually they're the same story, only told in different languages.
Or actually because they're different languages, they're
different stories. In mine, she's just returned
from the doctor, and needs to tell Mick. She's sitting
surrounded by thousands of happy memories—the light
through the louvers is lambent—but we all know
how the story goes: life is jim-dandy, a peacheroo, then
words get spoken, and overnight the whole world goes kablooey.

Each Morning He'd Anoint the Room's Four Corners with an Arc of Piss - and Then, Until He Was Forcibly Halted - Beat His Forehead Open on the Eastern Wall

I was brought up Roman Catholic (at least until I was thirteen and refused to go any further and my mother grew disenchanted herself with the Catholic Church enough to not fight me). Sunday mass and CCD at St Martins, corner of Summit and Frederick in Olde Towne Gaithersburg Maryland. Here's the thing: while I never bought, even when young, the religion, I dug the rituals. This doesn't surprise you if you know me, the most ritual driven fuck I know. See the gag in the previous sentence. This past Saturday I attended the memorial service for my friend Steven Jackson, a good guy, in a beautiful small chapel on campus, in a beautiful small ceremony full of traditional rituals, candles and stained-glass and deafening silences of communal prayer and reflection. I was blissfully crushed by it. I am the most ritual driven fuck I know.

• So, guess who I fell asleep listening to and woke up with in my head.
• Seven thousand trillion floppy disks: What’s most striking here – even more explicitly than in the case of Gordon Bell’s vision of the dullest life imaginable, lived forever – is the connection between immortality and a surveillance society described with all the tropes of the available dystopian literature. Nowadays this connection is framed a little less crudely or naively, but it survives in the efforts to master immortality by the likes of Google, whose overarching goal remains that of controlling and manipulating the majority of the world’s personal information. Your past is who you are and who you are is what the computer networks seek to acquire and reproduce with absolute fidelity, until it’s more you than the original. Hyper-text. Hyper-real.
• Bleggalgazing!
• Because I am tablet-blocked.
• My apologies, I was going to scan a page of Rachel Shihor's typograms for you today, the book is on my bedstand, I walked out this morning without it.
• Received an email - how can I simultaneously post a Jewish writer and support Palestinian rights, asked the moron.
• Boycott sodastream. Imagine, that link in the same post as a Jewish poet's poem.
• The New Inquiry's Sunday reads.
• There will never be a new soccer stadium in DC.
• The Woman, the River, the Sand.
• Sailing in style.
• Boots, not made for walking.

STONEHENGE

Albert Goldbarth

Each morning he’d anoint the room’s four corners

with an arc of piss, and then—until

he was forcibly halted—beat his forehead open

on the eastern wall, the “sunrise wall,”

incanting a doggerel prayer about God

the Flower, God of the Hot Plucked Heart; and

she, if loose in the halls, would join him,

squatting in the center of the room and masturbating

with a stolen bar of soap. This isn’t why

they were sent to the madhouse: this is what

they needed to do once in the madhouse: this

is the only meaningful ritual they could fashion

there, created from the few, make-do

materials available. It isn’t wondrous strange

more than the mega-boozhwah formulaic splendor

of my sister’s wedding ten, eleven years ago:

her opulent bouquet of plastic flowers

(for the wilting pour of wattage at the photo session),

nigglingly arranged to match the real bouquet

she carried down the aisle, bloom per bloom;

the five-foot Taj Mahal of sculpted pastel sherbet;

endless “Fiddler on the Roof”; I’m sorry

now I cranked my academic sneer hauteur in place

all night. I’m sorry I didn’t lose myself

like a drunken bee in a room-sized rose,

in waltzing Auntie Sally to the lush swell

of the band. We need this thing. There’s not one

mineral in Stonehenge that our blood can’t also raise.

One dusk, one vividly contusion-color

dusk, with my fists in my pockets and

a puzzle of fish-rib clouds in the sky, I

stopped at the low-level glow of a basement window

(Hot Good Noodle Shop) and furtively looked in:

a full-grown pig was splayed on the table,

stunned but fitfully twitching, it looked as if

it had grasshoppers under its skin. A man and a woman

slit that body jaw-to-ass with an ornate knife,

and then they both scooped out a tumble

of many dozens of wasps, preserved

by the oils of living pig to a beautiful black and amber

gem-like sheen. I saw it. Did I

see it? From inside this, over their wrists

in the tripes, they carefully removed

the wooden doll of a man and the wooden doll of a woman

maybe two inches tall, a tiny lacquered sun

and matching brass coin of a moon, and then

a child’s-third-grade-version of a house

made out of pallid wax: a square of walls,

a pyramid roof, and a real smoking chimney.

That Tired Magic about How Atoms of Julius Caesar and Napoleon and Beethoven Did Their Fleet Anachronistic Dance in Every Inhalation of Ours, or: Born Two-Hundred Thirty-Three Years Ago Today

• Unsurprisingly to me, I love the late Sonatas best.
• Walter invited us over, he wanted to see us before he dies.
• It's us or them.
• Lordy, people (a) watch 60 Minutes and (b) are surprised 60 Minutes ran a positive promo for NSA and (c) are outraged by positive promo?
• The kiss.
• New Inquiry's Sunday reads.
• The madness of the planets.
• Peaches particularly admires Anne Carson.
• a wonder of indifferent efficiency.
• Winter.
• Report from a Pere Ubu home concert. $1000, those of you who've been in my house can vouch that the big room, with Earthgirl's studio for a balcony, would be excellent, all I need do is get past the mortification I would feel as a slurpy fanboy so I can start soliciting attendees.

THE POEM OF THE LITTLE HOUSE AT THE CORNER OF MISAPPREHENSION AND MARVEL

Albert Goldbarth

During Napoleon iii’s coup d’état one of  his officers, Count de Saint-Arnaud, on being informed that a mob was approaching the Imperial Guard, coughed and exclaimed, with his hand across his throat, “Ma sacrée toux! (my damned cough).” But his lieutenant, understanding him to say “Massacrez tous! (massacre them all),” gave the order to fire, killing thousands—needlessly.
                   —Guy Murchie

“He was mortared to death.”

A pity, how we misspeak and mishear.

—Or “martyred”? Not that/coin-flip/either

makes a difference to the increasingly cooler

downtick of a corpse’s cells. “We heard the crazy mating joy

of the loon across the water.” Yes, but what

do we know, amateurs that we are? Loon, shmoon.

It might have been dying, announcing

its pain in those trilling pennants. It might

have been the girl who was lost in these woods last week

and never found by the volunteer searchers,

it might have been her ghost

with an admonishment. The truth is,

even among ourselves we often can’t distinguish pain

from pleasure, not in our beds, our hearts, the tone

of a poem on the final exam (a coin-toss). A pity, because

we know the urgency of some utterance;

and the intended goodwill of our listening; and

the marvelous basic mechanics of speech,

of lung: 300 million alveoli that, “if spread out flat,”

as my eighth-grade science teacher preened, “would come to

750 square feet, the entire floor space of an average house,”

and she added that tired magic about how atoms

of Julius Caesar and Napoleon and Beethoven did

their fleet anachronistic dance in every inhalation

of ours, although at thirteen I preferred to think

that the atoms of Cleopatra’s body—my Cleopatra,

inflating her see-through empresswear

with husky breaths—commingled with my blood, and also

realized in my own dim way it wasn’t only Einstein,

Shakespeare, Madame Curie populating my oxygen,

but also the smelly and scabby old man

from across the street who’d died last year

when the late-shift ward nurse heard (as she said in her testimony)

“med injection” instead of (as the outgoing

ward nurse told her) “bed inspection”—altogether

an unfortunate example of my theme . . . although

exempla abound, misapprehension

also dancing inside us at the atomic level.

Someone thought the gate was locked, she always locked

the gate in the late afternoon when the haze set down

and the sun for a moment seemed to carmelize the lake top,

so the gate was locked; except that it wasn’t,

and seven days into it nobody’s found the girl

or a scraggle of hair or a single ribbon. I tell you

we’re amateurs, we’re sometimes bungling amateurs,

of the minutiae of our own lives. When I heard the sounds

that gurgled from my chest as my wife was leaving

into the dense, conspiratorial Austin, Texas night,

I couldn’t have said if it was defeat

or relief. She couldn’t have said which one

she’d have been happiest to cause. We only knew

that I’d been wrong at times, and she’d been wrong at times,

and that our total errors, if spread out flat,

become the house we live in. They’re another system

inside us, along with the cardiac and the pulmonary,

they’re moving us toward the horizon line. And when

enough errors accumulate there, that’s what

we call the future. Even now, as you read this,

someone in that unknowable distance

is breathing you in. 

The Tender Forests Sigh, and the Soft Whirr of the Hygrometer Promises Oxidation of Iron, or: Born One-Hundred Five Years Ago Today

• Olivier Messiaen was born 105 years ago today. High Egoslavian Holy Day. 
• The interest-divergence dilemma between tech companies and NSA.
• Readers' supplement to Chris Hedge's piece on the white-hatting of Snowden.
• Against the police.
• When I visit the old iterations of this blog to search for a song or a poem (like I did for the Messiaen piece below the bullets, above the poem) I look at the blogrolls there to see both who I was reading and what I was writing to reflect on where I was then versus where I am now. Fuck, I once blogrolled the asshole TBogg in pathetic hopes his Malkin-Baiting Overlordness would recognize my existence. What a puny and craven partisan fuck I was. Point of this bullet being, of the Left Blegsylvanian Bleggal Overlords I once read daily I think the only one I still read regularly is Atrios, who's had his apostasies, perhaps not as severe as mine, but fuck more than most of those overlords I desperately wanted to notice me. Disclosure - he did me a few Kinds.
• For instance, Corrente finds two I no longer read.
• Which is not to suggest I'm not a puny and craven fuck now, I just don't root for the team in the bullet below anymore.
• Asshole hires asshole to try and save asshole's ass. 
• Blessed are the idiots.
• Change the world without taking power?
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• Fissure.
• 2013 end game.

SESTINA: AS THERE ARE SUPPORT GROUPS, THERE ARE SUPPORT WORDS

Albert Goldbarth

The name of his native country pronounced on a distant shore
could not please the ears of a traveller more than hearing
the words “nitrogen,” “oxidation of iron” and “hygrometer.” —Alexander von Humboldt, nineteenth-century scientist-explorer

When visiting a distant (and imponderable) shire,

one longs to hear the cry “Hygrometer!

Fresh hygrometer for sale!” Yes, and when the fair

sex sidles close and coyly murmurs “nitrogen”

into a burly masculine ear, I guarantee you: the translation

is very easy. The allurements of a local siren,

whispering the kind of patois a traveler like Lord Byron

favors, never fail to comfort, and to reassure,

evoking pleasant memories of one’s own beloved hygrometer

at home, kept fresh in Cosmoline and camphor

and awaiting one’s rearrival back in his native xenon and nitrogen.

Without these occasional reminiscences, any translation

from nation to nation, tongue to tongue, becomes a translation

difficult to sustain. I think of my grandmother: “We're not hirin’

today” “Go away” “Dumb Jew”—her share

of the language that greeted her here in the land of alien hygrometer

and freedom, where she was only one more funny-skirted for-

eigner yearning to hear a lulling Hungarian nitrogen

hum her to sleep. Eventually, of course, the American nitrogen

sufficed. Her daughter could speak, in free translation,

both uranium and argon; and her granddaughter gigs with Fire ’n

Ice, a skinhead punk-grunge group that performs in sheer

black nighties and clown wigs—she plays mean electric hygrometer

in the first set and then, for a twofer,

(very American, that) plays paper-and-comb. Far

out. She’s so fluent in various World Wide Webbery that nitrogen

in a thousand different inflections is her birthright, and almost any translation,

mind to mind, gender to gender, is second nature. “I earn

my keep, I party, I sleep” is her motto. Though she’s for-

tunate in having a lover who’s CEO at Hygrometer,

Potassium, Klein & Wong: it helps to pay the “hygrometer

man” when he knocks at the door. I won’t say that they fear

this guy exactly, but he’s a major badass nitrogen-

sucking cyberwired ninja-kicking shitheel (or, translation:

call him Sir). It makes one pine for a land where the birds all choir in

sweetly trilling melodies on a flower-scented shore,

and a translation sings all night. Row gen-

tly toward it. The tender forests sigh, and the soft whirr

of the hygrometer promises oxidation of iron. 

Cradles in the Milkiest Arms of the Universe

  
Yes, it's sure to disappoint, these comebacks are never fully satisfying (though the two songs from 2011 are pretty effing good, one of them below), but still, blessed news, the chance to post Mazzy Star. Have I ever mentioned I love Mazzy Star? There, that's one of the rhetorical tics I referenced earlier today. The song below the Goldbarth poem has to be one of this shitty blogs five most posted songs ever. Two more tics in that sentence. Thanks to Hamster for the heads-up (he also sends news of a capella versions of Bowie's *Starman* and *Five Years* - I'm glad he reads Slate because I always forget too until I remember William Salatin and Matthew Yglesias write there and deliberately don't read it - though I do like Dahlia Lithwick). Anyway, bad mood gone for me but not for thee. I've never been called an *ipecac wretcher.* And the Goldbarth is claimed.





...one of whom had apparently died in childbirth; we found the skeleton of an infant within her remains

Albert Goldbarth

- it was, in it's way,
a pietà.

And the pictures in the planetarium gallery
of a star in all the stages of its last progression,
dying - first a "white dwarf," then a "black dwarf,"
then a "black hole," that the composition
cradles in the milkiest arms of the universe. 

Angry Aeriel Display of Flapping

Here's that story. Running up to grocery this morning to get coffee I forgot to buy yesterday heard first a radio commercial for University of Maryland Shock Trauma in which a man talks to an air-gun hammer - as in Hey, Air-Gun Hammer, you don't scare me - which was followed by a Norwegian Cruise Line commercial in which a woman tells her husband, a dolphin, that she loves his salty mouth and then tells him to now come over here and give me some sugar. So, links, offered by and large without much commentary, a practice I've learned to employ when I'm in an angry mood and am jonesing to write everything mean and spiteful. Criminal trial is a privilege of whiteness. As some have correctly noted, in is entirely "possible to think the jury made the right choice based on evidence and that Zimmerman is entirely at fault for what happened." I think that's most likely - Coates and Silbur think so too, but of course other possibilities exist too. And while I'm parroting ideas, someone tweeted - I paraphrase - has the NRA come out and said Martin wouldn't have been killed if he had been armed and called for the arming of all young black males? They speak of race. How the system works. Putin laughs. The mindset of an NSA defender. The mindset of the State Dept. Oopsy! Breaking kayfabe. An important rhetorical question. Austerity attacks. Had interesting bleggal interactions yesterday with a couple of bleggal overlords, once allies fallen out - more bored with each other than fallen out to be more accurate - each in their own way (un)intentionally reminded me that I am a little. Previous sentence written as unspitefully as I am capable. Speaking of blegging, I'm not sure what's gonna happen when a certain date comes around and I'm not precisely sure what blooger is threatening me with or what the repercussions will be, but should this place go dark it (a) won't be me and (b) here's the fallout shelter. Alternatively, fuck this. All powerful masters. I expected more fall out from Seidel's review of Kushner. It was mean and spiteful. I have Goldbarth if anyone wants some. The genesis of the bleggal overlord dispute was the use of rhetorical tics in writing, I said, lordy, nobody use rhetorical tics more than I do, like this one: Some days anger calls for Sun Kil Moon, other days it calls for these, posted together countless times when I'm enjoying a pissy mood:






27,000 MILES

Albert Goldbarth

These two asleep . . . so indrawn and compact,
like lavish origami animals returned

to slips of paper once again; and then
the paper once again become a string

of pith, a secret that the plant hums to itself . . . .
You see? — so often we envy the grandiose, the way

those small toy things of Leonardo’s want to be
the great, air-conquering and miles-eating

living wings
they’re modeled on. And the bird flight is

amazing: simultaneously strength,
escape, caprice: the Arctic tern completes

its trip of nearly 27,000 miles every year;
a swan will frighten bears away

by angry aerial display of flapping wingspan.
But it isn’t all flight; they also

fold; and at night on the water or in the eaves
they package their bodies

into their bodies, smaller, and deeply
smaller yet: migrating a similar distance

in the opposite direction.

Please Refrain from Talking During the Movie

No, not really, but taking a few days off from the noise. I'm working on something which is about the clusterfuck by not being about the clusterfuck and working on something else about the clusterfuck which is about the clusterfuck, how the value of Snowden's revelations isn't in the extent of the spying but in the reactions of people to the event of Snowden and the gut-punches of that never-ending, always craptacular, debate over less-shittiness, but the post's nowhere near ready and the yodel is old and I think I just posted enough so expect no more. Craptacularity. The regularity of craptacularity. The ubiquitous taint of craptacularity. The either/or claw of craptacularity. I'm as crippled as anyone. Anyway, I was working on both last night at the cost of not finding you reads today, sorry. Tomorrow is one of two days a year a post is not tagged My Complicity and I got a date tomorrow night, so nothing but songs and dance and poems the next few days. Fennesz cascade coming - thanks for requests, requests solicited - but not today, in which I didn't take the day off at all.





PLEASE REFRAIN FROM TALKING DURING THE MOVIE

Robert Polito

When I can’t make you understand I repeat myself

I repeat

If you don’t stop asking me all these questions how

Will I understand anything

Please refrain from talking during the movie

I need a life that isn’t just about needing

To escape my life

Please God please may Carrie please fall for me

I want to show off my hidden camera

I’m an informer but I have my limits

You hurt him once before now what

If she’s there I don’t know if I can go

Please refrain from talking during the movie

Leave a message if you can’t reach me

To exit press enter and don’t forget your receipt

When I think I read new things I want

A life where I read and think new things

Please refrain from talking during the movie

I want to know nothing

Again

Please God please may Carrie please fall for me

I repeat myself when I can’t

Make you understand I repeat

THE POEM OF THE LITTLE HOUSE AT THE CORNER OF MISAPPREHENSION AND MARVEL

Albert Goldbarth

During Napoleon iii’s coup d’état one of  his officers, Count de Saint-Arnaud, on being informed that a mob was approaching the Imperial Guard, coughed and exclaimed, with his hand across his throat, “Ma sacrée toux! (my damned cough).” But his lieutenant, understanding him to say “Massacrez tous! (massacre them all),” gave the order to fire, killing thousands—needlessly.
                   —Guy Murchie

“He was mortared to death.”

A pity, how we misspeak and mishear.

—Or “martyred”? Not that/coin-flip/either

makes a difference to the increasingly cooler

downtick of a corpse’s cells. “We heard the crazy mating joy

of the loon across the water.” Yes, but what

do we know, amateurs that we are? Loon, shmoon.

It might have been dying, announcing

its pain in those trilling pennants. It might

have been the girl who was lost in these woods last week

and never found by the volunteer searchers,

it might have been her ghost

with an admonishment. The truth is,

even among ourselves we often can’t distinguish pain

from pleasure, not in our beds, our hearts, the tone

of a poem on the final exam (a coin-toss). A pity, because

we know the urgency of some utterance;

and the intended goodwill of our listening; and

the marvelous basic mechanics of speech,

of lung: 300 million alveoli that, “if spread out flat,”

as my eighth-grade science teacher preened, “would come to

750 square feet, the entire floor space of an average house,”

and she added that tired magic about how atoms

of Julius Caesar and Napoleon and Beethoven did

their fleet anachronistic dance in every inhalation

of ours, although at thirteen I preferred to think

that the atoms of Cleopatra’s body—my Cleopatra,

inflating her see-through empresswear

with husky breaths—commingled with my blood, and also

realized in my own dim way it wasn’t only Einstein,

Shakespeare, Madame Curie populating my oxygen,

but also the smelly and scabby old man

from across the street who’d died last year

when the late-shift ward nurse heard (as she said in her testimony)

“med injection” instead of (as the outgoing

ward nurse told her) “bed inspection”—altogether

an unfortunate example of my theme . . . although

exempla abound, misapprehension

also dancing inside us at the atomic level.

Someone thought the gate was locked, she always locked

the gate in the late afternoon when the haze set down

and the sun for a moment seemed to carmelize the lake top,

so the gate was locked; except that it wasn’t,

and seven days into it nobody’s found the girl

or a scraggle of hair or a single ribbon. I tell you

we’re amateurs, we’re sometimes bungling amateurs,

of the minutiae of our own lives. When I heard the sounds

that gurgled from my chest as my wife was leaving

into the dense, conspiratorial Austin, Texas night,

I couldn’t have said if it was defeat

or relief. She couldn’t have said which one

she’d have been happiest to cause. We only knew

that I’d been wrong at times, and she’d been wrong at times,

and that our total errors, if spread out flat,

become the house we live in. They’re another system

inside us, along with the cardiac and the pulmonary,

they’re moving us toward the horizon line. And when

enough errors accumulate there, that’s what

we call the future. Even now, as you read this,

someone in that unknowable distance

is breathing you in. 

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.