surpassing things we've known before passing on its effect

       There had been other troubles, with a chief called Big Head wounded while on a friendly visit to Fort Kearny. The Cheyenne felt especial put upon, for by their lights they had always been amiable to white men. Even after all these bad things, they sent a delegation to see the Government Indian agent and apologized. They also returned a woman they had captured. but you see the complication was this: Indians wasn't ever organized. Them that come in to apologize wasn't the same as what killed the whites. And them that the soldiers usually punished was never the ones who had committed the outrages. The white people on who the Indians took revenge had no connection with the soldiers.
     It was pretty early on that I come to realize that most serious situations in life, or my life anyway, were like that time I rubbed out the Crow: he spared me because I was white, and I killed him because I was Cheyenne. There wasn't nothing else either of us could have done, and it would have been ridiculous except it was mortal.

Thomas Berger, Little Big Man

Yesterday two blogfriends discussed Berger on Twooter, I didn't stop to think why, adding to the conversation that when I read Little Big Man when I was nineteen it was KABOOM! Today I discovered why he might have been being discussed: he died this past July 13th.

It has been years since I read Berger. I liked the Reinhart Tetrology, especially when read against Updike's Rabbit Tetrology for comparison and contrast in style, tone, themes, I liked his second historical novel, Arthur Rex, I liked some of his genre-examining novels like Who Is Teddy Villanova and Nowhere, but all failed when measured against Little Big Man. I didn't know it when I read it, but it engaged many of the concerns I encountered in Theory in grad school, especially but not limited to its examination of passing: see the excerpt above. I am about to find out if it's KABOOM! still.

• If you want one and I like you I can send you a copy.
• A friend of mine recommended Silver Apples to me. I vaguely remember the name, it sounds familiar (I think it was on the soundtrack for the Needwood Summer ePod 1979 - ask Elric), but I'd never have been able to put the sound to the name.
• Have mercy, do you have a heart?
• Osama bin Laden in the Wall Street Journal.
• The Terror War's disastrous course.
• I heard from Arthur Silber yesterday, he can really use your help, please consider throwing him the coins in your pocket.
• The true cost of a burger.
• I daydream I am.
• Thirty "essential" Emo songs? Jawbox was emo?

[constant change figures]

Lyn Hejinian

constant change figures

the time we sense

passing on its effect

surpassing things we've known before

since memory

of many things is called

experience

but what of what

we call nature's picture

surpassing things we call

since memory

we call nature's picture

surpassing things we've known before

constant change figures

experience

passing on its effect

but what of what

constant change figures

since memory

of many things is called

the time we sense

called nature's picture

but what of what

in the time we sense

surpassing things we've known before

passing on its effect

is experience

Ghosts' Perennial Goal of Revoking the Sensation of Repose

• See bottom bullet for more, but my eyes ache after an hour of reading novels, ease but ache again after an hour of reading poetry, which is not excuse but part explanation why I fish links to post on days very few read since I'm reading online anyway, which doesn't hurt my eyes, or maybe does when I read from a book. As for the rash of thwarted bleggalgazing of late, I had a long email from L last night, the Death of Thursday Night Pints has denied me a vital spigot.
• The Disruption Machine: Every age has a theory of rising and falling, of growth and decay, of bloom and wilt: a theory of nature. Every age also has a theory about the past and the present, of what was and what is, a notion of time: a theory of history. Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God’s favor, corruption. Beginning in the eighteenth century, as the intellectual historian Dorothy Ross once pointed out, theories of history became secular; then they started something new—historicism, the idea “that all events in historical time can be explained by prior events in historical time.” Things began looking up. First, there was that, then there was this, and this is better than that. The eighteenth century embraced the idea of progress; the nineteenth century had evolution; the twentieth century had growth and then innovation. Our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is atavistic. It’s a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence.
• Another murderous milestone: Our 21st century intervention in Iraq has killed far more people much more quickly, of course. But as we gear up for yet another round of slaughter in the country we have recently demolished, it’s good to be reminded that none of this is new or unusual; it is, very simply — and quite horribly — the way the bipartisan American elite do business. Violence is their profession, their religion, their guiding light. They use violence to advance their agenda, then use more violence to deal with the inevitable horrific consequences spawned by their violence, on and on in an endless cycle.

• Guess what I fell asleep listening to and woke up with in my head. Click tab in footer for more. Expect more in coming days. MSADI5G, yes, they are in the inner circle.
• But yes, Fuck It, Fuck This, Fuck Me.
• The Obscene.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Sacasas's links.
• Reality Check.
• The cost of almost apprehending anything.
• He, for one, welcomes our invisible piano-teacher overlords.
• If Brazil ends up winning this World Cup remember that Chilean ball of the crossbar in the 120th. And I suspect that if anyone is going to beat Brazil it will be Colombia.
• See, Solar Crumpet works as long as I'm not distracted but I'm easily distracted and my eyes are old and ache after an hour. Long ago I made a rule that I can only read one novel at a time - I'm curious re: my dilemma when I finish Sawn Yawns - do I immediately go to A Bounded Thriving Wig or read something else? I put down Sawn Yawns at eye ache, picked up Hejinian (another rule: no music permitted when reading novels, music allowed when reading poetry) and found my This Heat on the iPod.

[A DREAM, STILL CLINGING LIKE LIGHT TO THE DARK, ROUNDING]

Lyn Hejinian

A dream, still clinging like light to the dark, rounding
The gap left by things which have already happened
Leaving nothing in their place, may have nothing to do
But that. Dreams are like ghosts achieving ghosts' perennial goal
Of revoking the sensation of repose. It's terrible
To think we write these things for them, to tell them
Of our life - that is, our whole life. Along comes a dream
Of a machine. Why? What is being sold there? How is the product emitted?
It must have been sparked by a noise, the way the very word "spark"
Emits a brief picture. Is it original? Inevitable?
We seem to sleep so as to draw the picture
Of events that have already happened so we can picture
them. A dream for example of a procession to an execution site.
How many strangers could circle the space while speaking of nostalgia
And of wolves in the hills? We find them
Thinking of nothing instead - there's no one to impersonate, nothing
To foresee. It's logical that prophesies would be emitted
Through the gaps left by previous things, or by the dead
Refusing conversation and contemplating beauty instead.
But isn't that the problem with beauty - that it's apt in retrospect
To seem preordained? The dawn birds are trilling
A new day - it has the psychical quality of "pastness" and they are trailing
It. The day breaks in an imperfectly continuous course
Of life. Sleep is immediate and memory nothing.

I’ll Get a Library Card at Last and I Won’t Pay $100 for It Feeling Tired but Only as Tired as One Would Normally Feel at Sea Level After, Say, a Five Hour Hike

Earthgirl's leg is (a) better (b) worse (c) we have no fucking idea. (Background here for those who don't know/are curious why Earthgirl's knees are on the blog - short version, she took a bad spill on the trail last Sunday - and there were updates during the week.) The bruise migrates. She wouldn't have been able to hike today regardless because of a school project with the 5th graders but she wouldn't have be able to hike today because of her leg. She hopes she can hike next weekend. I'm out the door in ten minutes to do a seven mile circuit on Sugarloaf. I wish Earthgirl could join me. I love hiking by myself.

Have I been talking about electric cigarettes on this blog? I don't recall talking about electric cigarettes on this blog, but in the past week I've sixteen comments complimenting me on this blog's design and content and offering me links to discount pricing on top of the line electric cigarettes. I guess the bots have concluded they've solved my discount Viagra problem for me. It occurred to me that it was about this time last year that I enabled moderation in comments (and not for the comments the spam filter doesn't block) and looking back in archives it is. I was right to enable moderation, though I apologize for the delays that sometimes occur between when a comment is made and the comment is posted. Thanks to all who still play.

Meanwhile, in New Mexico:

• :-p's Life Lessons.
• I've yodeled about this before, have a long yodel written and in the digital freezer, but Thunder's comment yesterday on the Death of Liberalism draws these sentences out of me: I know honorable Liberals who, while not putting it this way themselves, feel that Liberalism went further in America then could have been dreamed of a hundred years ago, that Liberalism's retreat is inevitable, that advancing a Liberal economic agenda is impossible, and that the most achievable goal for current Liberals is to preserve as much of the economic gains vis a vis Robber Barons as possible. My opinion is, how should I put it, incoherent.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• The Baffler's week that was.
• It's crap like moving a game to motherfucking FedEx field that's killing my United damn.
• On the difficulty of reading poetry in translation.
• Faye reminded me last night of Bogshed:

[HOME WHOSE NAMES ARE PRODUCED BY MOTION]

Lyn Hejinian

Home whose names are produced by motion   

is where people go (one following

the next as she hums to herself or he hums to himself   

at some risk to all) to stay in a family plot   

the tales of which are spinning like blades   

on a pinwheel wafted by my desire to talk to you. Fate   

and desire, chance and intention, from time to time   

converge. Most people want things to be good   

but taking a programmatic approach to getting it

would be despicable and none of it would ever get to you   

except via a raucous garage sale. The owner of the pharmacy

at this very moment is screaming in jubilation   

at a silver toaster, I want it

even if it doesn’t work! Two firemen have broken down   

mid-sentence and gone out to look, you know   

the ones. The purport comes all at once   

at the end in such a way that one is thrown back

to the poem again to carry out the ”again“ that the poem is

about. I’ll get a library card at last and I won’t pay $100 for it

feeling tired but only as tired as one would normally feel at sea level   

after, say, a five hour hike, and it was the same

when it was just getting light—a murky gray

that never brightened. I don’t know you well enough to break   

away from my conversations in order to barge in   

on yours and give the illusion that I often know   

where I’m going or where I want to go with certainty   

of motive to propel the prose

or some version of certainty of my own, not knowing   

where one is going but going anyway. Perhaps the trip

will be purposeless. Destiny is simply a good excuse for experience.   

There are birds chirping, smoke is rising

from kerosene-splattered barbecue briquettes, it is summer   

and now, humiliated (I am so damned naive

sometimes), swinging the hips to the right to avoid the edge   

of the worktable, then to the left to avoid toppling the cactus   

I shout, “Things! Things! Get out of my way!”   

I’ve never lost my capacity for being angry. I feel   

that it is justified, even necessary, though I admit that   

after the first hour my improvisations contribute nothing   

but motion to the composition.

The Alphabet and the Cello Can Represent Horses but I Can Only Pretend to Be a Dog Slurping Pudding

Bryce played Felix Kubin yesterday. Bryce's show is my favorite three hours of radio each week. Yes, an unintended though fortunate tradition has arisen here: what interests me most from Bryce's show is often played here Saturday. I seek out Friday evening what Bryce played Friday afternoon to hear more, learn more, hope to discover new things via ricochet and tangents. Sometimes I own some of the music, most often not, as was the case with Kubin, who I know of but don't know much. I go to WFMU and in the search box on the left column I type the name of the musician and/or band and then look at the songs in the all the playlists the music appears then find the music if possible. Sometimes, depending of when and how WFMU archived their shows there are convenient pop-ups, but WFMU only began providing the pop-up format a couple of years ago, most of the time I need find the songs on youtube or elsewhere. I did this for Kubin last night. Turns out I don't find Kubin that interesting (I'll take the blame), though in looking at playlists I was reminded of Laurie Spiegel whose Expanding Universe is one of my favorite albums. Spent last night with it, in fact.







More Spiegel later, but here, a hastily shot video from my dining room yesterday morning, a 30 second clip of  (extraordinary bad quality) robins, mad with hunger, in a holly bush.





    

• Earthgirl was with me, she can vouch: There must have been five, six dozen. They stripped that holly of berries in ten minutes. The ferals watched from the back porch (judging, I anthropomorphize, eight inches of heavy melting snow made for poor hunting), the insides watched from the dining table.
• I am so dope I think if I find something interesting all others, not just some others (much less no one) will find it interesting too (though a friend did tweet that he liked the Spiegel I tweeted last night). Fine metaphors abounding, life in general, this blog in particular. The same dope mechanism works for repeating gags I find funny.
• Wiki says a Spiegel piece was used for the "cornucopia scene" in the movie version of The Hunger Games. Forgive me if I don't draw the same gratuitous moral outrage at this as I did at motherfucking Eric Clapton's motherfucking Michelob commercial thirty-five years ago. I'm older, hope I'm smarter about how stupid I am for gratuitous moral outrage, save it for grander stupider things. Plus Clapton sucked long before the Michelob commercial and even longer after.
• This blog had a fuckload more readers when I indulged my gratuitous moral outrage on a large daily basis.
• The vile mood, lifted. I was asked last night by a dear friend why I've changed (and changed for the better, she claims). I said I haven't changed. She cited examples, gave me a chance to consider before I'd deny and she could call me a liar. I conceded. It's too much work, I said, to think everyone of bad faith even if the faith they have is bad in my bad faith opinion. 
• This post did not start out to be intentionally relatively link free - it did set out to be a lazyass weekend post - but check the blogrolls, people by and large are (sensibly) hibernating. 
• Re: the above - bleggalgazing.
• The above method for finding the benefits of ricochets and tangents in music works for poetry too! Find a favorite poem and type what you think is a keyword into the search box of Poetry Foundation, for instance, and see what poets you had forgot, hadn't thought about it years, never heard of, pop up, then read them.

*



[A STRAIGHT RAIN IS RARE]

Lyn Hejinian

A straight rain is rare and doors have suspicions

and I hold that names begin histories

and that the last century was a cruel one. I am pretending

to be a truck in Mexico. I am a woman with a long neck and a good burden

and I waddle efficiently. Activity never sleeps and no tale of crumbling cliffs

can be a short one. I have to shift weight favorably. Happiness

can’t be settled. I brush my left knee twice, my right once,

my left twice again and in that way advance. The alphabet

and the cello can represent horses but I can only pretend

to be a dog slurping pudding. After the 55 minutes it takes to finish

my legs tremble. All is forgiven. Yesterday is going the way of tomorrow

indirectly and the heat of the sun is inadequate at this depth. I see

the moon. The verbs ought and can lack infinity and somewhere

between 1957 when the heat of the dry sun naughtily struck me

and now when my secrets combine in the new order of cold rains

and night winds a lot has happened. Long phrases

are made up of short phrases that bear everything “in vain” or “all

in fun” “for your sake” and “step by step” precisely. I too can spring.

I Believe I Have Acceded with Docility to Aesthetic Laws

• Is Michael Nesmith one of the greatest underrated musicians of our time? That's a Michael Nesmith song above, btw.
• When I was eight years old and my brother Elric and I played The Monkees with my cousins Jennifer and Wayne-Matthew, I was always Dolenz, Jennifer always Jones, Elric always Tork, Wayne-Matthew always Nesmith. Or visa versa on Elric Nesmith Wayne-Matthew Tork. Dolenz and Jones, via television, were the stars, Jennifer and me the oldest.
• When professors oppose unions.
• How academia resembles a drug gang.
• I've made a conscious if unsuccessful effort to drop the running haranguing gags re: power wins the whatever the fuck contest, but, re: power wins the whatever the fuck contest. The mulitple actors on multiple stages infrequently change, the plot never. Still, as I predicted - as did others - the NSA leaks strengthen power, doesn't diminish power, he types into his self-incrimination google machine.
• Home of the Whopper.
• Man, conqueror of Nature, dead at 408.
• The last thing you'll see if you're eaten to death by a penguin.
• This week in water.
• Wheaton skyline!
• VW tells DCU to fuck off. Pint bet the next shirt says Indonesia, either the country or the airline. Though Thorir might wait until he rebrands United and changes the kits to red to add the Indonesia.
• Waggish's books of the year.
• Sheepish.
• Rethinking E.E. Cummings.
• Yes, this is a Michael Nesmith song:

HEIR APPARENT

Lyn Hejinian

Thing now tone, aquatic tilt is real, stick and money thieve, turn the future,
          scratch gas, cricket

Listen

Little spider darting out from a hiding place behind a rolodex and racing to
          a cranny between piles of papers: something we saw, wanting it to
          come back, or wanting it to go, like a king when royalty is outmoded

Glenn Gould is still humming along like a Volkswagen on an autobahn

One day a mournful young man spat on a traffic cop’s shoe, but the man’s
          name was Ferdinando and the cop’s name was Matilda, and they
          lived together happily ever after

Actually, I am not addressing myself here to metaphysicians, nor to spirits,
          nor to pedants, because none of these know how to see the
          particular beauty of a rain-soaked field

I believe I have acceded with docility to aesthetic laws—so says Odilon
          Redon, but to what in the world around us might those laws
          pertain?

All good children envy mint, so tune your instruments accordingly, because
          mint is as obstinate as a god

A celebration takes place and in surprise my error is corrected

Parsimonious ethnicity, cowardly mind, constraining gender, uninherited
          class, deracinated citizenship

You are so tired and I am so timing and he is so tidy and then there are
          those others, all so tithed and tipped-off and titanic

Help, I’m clinging to the side of a cliff, gripping a crumpling outcropping of
          rock, a train is rumbling through the valley below, a passenger
          looks up

Then two tiny birds darted (jetted? bulleted? sped!) from one tree to
          another and I could see a band or spot of yellow on each, but they
          were too little and too fast for me and who cares about
          identification?

I am very busy, I have a lot of energy, I’ve got a lot of projects underway,
          I’ve a number of plans, I’m very active, I’m industrious, productive

*****

Cat in the redwood, chasing pie

Now in a sequence is a consequence, right?

Fred laughs, Ferdie scowls, Finnian drums, but whatever it is that Clarissa
          Shirley Jemma Moore does is whatever only she knows and maybe
          she doesn’t

You have only to slide some sprigs of thyme after the shallot and lemon
          into the cavity

In the tale the dachshund wears boots and the little girl, its companion, has
          a purse that replenishes itself with money whenever she buys
          kibble, cookies, or fruit

War warrant plate daring too doesn’t didn’t sum it

An autobiography offers a gloss to a life, but it’s a translator’s gloss, full of
          misunderstandings

She dared to ask and get canny and deride servility and temper glass and
          scatter candies, and that was a mighty horsewoman indeed, and she
          rode with chocolate spurs

I wouldn’t say particles exactly, I couldn’t capture particles of any single
          lifetime, because there is no single lifetime nor solid anchor nor
          sweaty pathos that doesn’t end up at the bottom of some sea

Slowly she swiftly turns and all that was said is to be long considered

The present cannot decipher

Make it language then, with no pictures

The ponderous sun hangs as rose and cream white fruits must if student
          loans doom college graduates to poverty

A love scout, that’s the term, is he or she who sometimes finds mourners,
          sometimes celebrants, sometimes children, sometimes no one at all

*****

Suppose ungainly twigs, somewhat

Lished itivity tent ample crates

You disappear into a duration, the where and while of which is called
          Heedlessness, Indifference, Absence, Mischief

Yesterday, let’s go out; tomorrow, we were kept indoors, now let’s eat
          grapes

Suppose the poet speaks and the language doesn’t answer

The passion has its turf but, whoops!—I thought it was better managed
          than that!

Nobody moves in the photograph, nor will they ever move

Rally roll and then the little girl went up the tree

Into an L-shaped alley the young son strolls harboring a month’s provisions
          in his velvet portmanteau

The radiator knocks, the jump rope knots

Digestion proceeds as we sleep, and it is for this reason that we fart upon
          waking

It had been raining for three days in that interstitial environment, home to
          local fauns, where men come out of oaks dark, smart, and with a
          hint of criminality

Speculate for me

One a tree, softly, two a right eye, tenderly, three a threshold, kindly, four
          a mallard, fortuitously

*****

Isn’t worry wooden?

Appearances burn to perfection, the same old frolic, permanent atoms
          becoming astronauts and then unbecoming them again

There was never and will be never and once she was like a gazelle
          commanding a field

Violent is the violin, deep is the speed with which the Great Wall of China
          wanders, serene is the soot far up the chimney venting the smoke
          from the “Longlife Log”

The sun keeps its secret, the daily news is sunk in light

This is a melody played on a cock harmonica, lyrics lost in a story buried
          under a bellicose rock

Could she and why?

What butter!

The barefoot musician fiddles on the ice with greater weight over the years
          and the juggler’s jugs get lighter

It’s not from an aphorism that you’d want our memories to rise—you’d
          resist, persist, preside

Life is full of indubitable data, indelicate stuff

Though drawn to the claims of the sky, I duck my vertigo and devour a
          huge sandwich, my commitment to gravity, which holds my shadow
          to the ground

We are subject to the ultimate disorientation, a cloud of invisible power

The sun is surefire

*****

She stilled cream-colored stones an eternity ago and one bird flying there
          too

This is a pictograph of sediment not sentiment, of unbound layers of mud
          not the sold ore of South African gold

It is said that seven sleepers slumbered for two centuries and then woke up

The dead have mixed

Writers dowse in books, and being one I find that the first two words on
          page 203 of the book are Wilfred Owen’s (bent double) and the first
          two on page 307 are Auden’s (amid rustle)—magic!

What might a demographer dare?

Behold the scooters and riders and divers, scooting and riding and diving up

The young woman on tiptoe said and we didn’t doubt

What’s desirable then isn’t writable—there are more walls than trees there

Clerk, haven’t you a pen with pigs in it?

Okay, I’m leaning back, as if that would help me remember from pungency
          and acerbic comments relegating Natasha Rostov to the makeshift
          stages of a sitcom, but I fall—off that stage!

Butter jumps

Curmudgeon

The autobiographical isn’t renewable—so who is she?

Once There Was a Detective on a Bridge Who Longed to Tell Everyone Everything He Knew and Therefore He Started Running Across the Bridge as Fast as He Could

Most important things first: the new Juana Molina is out Wednesday.

For an hour or so yesterday half the youtubes on this blog wigged out, showed an error message (I paraphrase): Haha, we fucked up, thousands of monkey's are working to fix it. No really, it did say monkeys were working to fix it. Thank you, monkeys, everything seems fine now. I don't know if it was blogger or youtube or Daddy Google that produced the quirk. Now that Daddy Google rules the world and says its children have to play with each other or else all Google's children act skeevy.

I got three emails from friends, each slobbering to tell me, hey, have you seen your blog, IT'S FUCKED UP! See the last line in the Franz Wright poem on Sunday's post. Heh! sorry to disappoint, I didn't go blogspastic, I saw the fucked-up youtubes, I thought, fuck my free blogging platform, it'll fix itself or not, fuck it. Didn't run to the abandoned wordpress blog and hissy-fit the google-fart. Once, always until as recently as early last summer (during the Renew Domain Name in Blogger episode), I would have. Since the youtubes did fix themselves I've no way to prove what I'd do right now as you read this, hours after the event, if blooger was still broken. I'm certain the fuck it wouldn't be as relaxed and unconcerned. The fuck-up occurred at the back-up blogger blog too, so when I say that spiritually that blog is no longer the back-up blog, this is now the back-up blog (though you'll notice no difference in product or production because this is totally symbolic and important only to me), that's because I can manipulate the appearance there while I'm suffocating in green here because this blog's Apply to Template button is permanently broken, not because of yesterday's and today's and tomorrow's inevitable Daddy Google fuck up.

• Greenwald, Scahill, Rosen, and the price of one's journalistic soul.
• Omidyar media adviser in his own words.
• Creating sociopathic corporate leaders.
• Detroit as template for democracy's destruction.
• The passive aggressive rot sets in.
• This week in water.
• BRT!
• History of English in ten minutes.
• Juana Molina interview.

• Graham Chapman is still dead, but one last money grab.
• UPDATE! From the hallelujahs on twitter and blogs I am apparently the only person who doesn't think of this as a marvelous miracle. Forgive me, I took members seriously when they said there would be a reunion when Graham Chapman rose from the dead, forgive me, I'm a cynic, in light of those statements I question current motives. On top of which, reunions not only always suck compared to the original, they diminish the original by the reunion's suck.
• Purgatory/paradise. At least he's not on blooger.
• Earthgirl hired Planet's bestfriend's boyfriend to set up a professional looking website for her art work, he always uses wordpress. Will add to Me and Mine once it's up and running.
• He doesn't blame youtube.
• A blog called Golden Notebooks remembers Lessing.
• I announced that I wasn't going to worry that not only does Arcade Fire's music suck unto suck but that the band is comprised of insufferable poseurs, but they are making it fucking difficult.
• A friend asked yesterday if Lyn Hejinian is currently the most important writer working in English. Maybe.
• I don't know why I never created a Juana Molina tag until today, but search her name in the top box on this blog and on the old blogs for lots more songs.

[ONCE THERE WAS A GOOSE...]

Lyn Hejinian

     Once there was a goose who floated midstream from the moment she woke to the moment she slept.

     Once there was a girl who knocked a spider into a river and was thus compelled to put a leaf between her teeth and swim far out into the current holding her head above the stream to rescue it.

     Once there was a family gathered in a small backyard and once there was a turtle on a log and when the family and the turtle are mentioned one after the other the turtle flops off its log and the members of the family laugh.

     Each such episode suggests a moment in an imaginable universe - or, rather, each fills an imaginable and not (by our standards) unreal universe with its own uniqueness, and each uniqueness has staying power.

     Once there was a branch that fell into a stream and the new patterns that swirled around it spelled a name that drifted downstream and disappeared around a bend and no one spoke it nor knew whose it was.

     Once there was a detective on a bridge who longed to tell everyone everything he knew and therefore he started running across the bridge as fast as he could.

Secretly Each Is Devoted to the Conviction that It Is Irreparably Different from All the Rest - in Fact, It Is This in Which They Are Most Fundamentally Alike

• No Egoslavian Holy Days this weekend, barring kaboom I'm squelching jones until Monday. Or not; or not.
• Against the Death of the Novel.
• Which spurred this post.
• Danto's The Artworld.
• Art thieves and gurus.
• Game theory and The Price is Right.
• There are new places in Newest Gags First and Second, please check them out as they float to the top. Thanks for the Kind to those of you who've floated me recently on yours. As always, if you are Kinding me and me not you please let me know.
• Neruda, for those of you who do. 
• Vollmann: self-images of a cross-dresser. 
• Return of Scuba-Dog.
• Melville's secrets. (h/t wood s lot, who you should ping daily)
• I confess I may not have given Franz Wright a fair chance because of who his father is, but "book of our time?" That's today's edition of thank Baal I have access to a university library's stacks.  
• Pere Ubu in Cork.
• No, not that Phavid Dillips:

LAMP

Franz Wright

Evening street of midnight blue with here and there a lighted window. Of the at home, or possible not. Concentrically into the air whose blue sphere gradually gives way to pure lethal space, wave after wave of a pale cadmium yellow expanding into emptiness and past the blood-brain barrier. Lamp manufactured unwittingly in the image of its make the mind, which goes on emitting dim rays from its frail bulb of skull, from its insignificant and evidently random sector of an infinite place all its own; mind illuminating not much: seen, say, from its own frozen and excommunicated Pluto, it is nearly indistinguishable from any other. All minds are pretty much the same, they'll tell you so themselves, but secretly each is devoted to the conviction that it is irreparably different from all the rest - in fact, it is this in which they are most fundamentally alike.





  

THE UNFOLLOWING 51, 56, 62, 71, 72

Lyn Hejinian

51

Afloat in a glass-bottom boat, I see into the sea—a miniscule emerald 
     memento
That the strongest social bonds are forged by language doesn’t nullify
             the power that dancing around the puppet effigies of the men
             in power has
On the solemn face of the glinting belly is a button baby
You have to know how to roll on the horizon
Followers follow, possibles possibulate, coruscations consider, blood
             coagulates

An allegory is a depiction of something that can’t be depicted
Mathias Madrid thrusts his fist toward his face in a mirror, Millicent
             Malcolm pets a faithful falcon on a perch, Margaret Mason
             makes fig jam to serve on cold toast with hard cheese
The pyrotechnical expanse, lacking azure, makes do with blatant
             blackness, unspoken light
Winter’s cover’s curled back by adjectives—whacking winter’s roadside
             cover
Stained owls and up over the ill rabbits they fly
Several hours go by but hours are impossible to perceive
I market, am marketed, mark, remark
We walk down a street under windows that let in noise that might
             prompt someone asleep in the room to dream of drummers,
             flautists, a man on stilts with a tuba, a sextet of giggling girls
What is it ghosts wonder?
   

56

It should not be strange to be a woman rewarded
Letters click as they wander, shift as they ascend, their altitudes attain
             autobiography
Next you are like dry steps’ passing sound and fall, and then you are
             like sweetened grapefruit

Everything applies in the hyper-patterning that retrospect
             attempts and to which the irreverent response is “How
             splay!”
In the small houses of the children in the house there are always
             complex simplicities and one was a vast pink stuffed
             equine thing called Star
Wet Brahms
Revocation of harm
By moving from window to window and carefully recording at
             each what we see, we...*
It is time you were told of the time I failed to defend the bull and
             indeed rejoiced in its murder
This is not hypocritical!
The statue at its fullest is emptiest of meaning
She speaks to another not about sex but about a particular game
             of truth
Sonorousness facilitates the descent of sunny motes from the
             ponderosa
Dancers have fleas—or, shall we say that fleas live on the planet
             of dancers?
   

62

Into the disordered shortening of a circle comes this little fury,
              this abdicated panic, this dirty Venus, this resemblance
              to nothing we know of the dead
Sky simultaneous bud, cavity contemporaneous slight
And from the tree a ripe peach falls and a puff of dust rises,
              gently circles, drifts, spreads, holds its shape, dissipates,
              and settles under the tree again and on the weeds nearby
Once there was a woman I’ll name another day and in her care
              were eight well-matched strong pelicans who flew low
              over the sea in careful configurations that brought her
              aesthetic pleasure and more fish than she or they could
              eat
Life is rife with erasure and time is rich with delay
Immediately the eater spots some defects (bits of meat, scraps of green)
No, I did not forget the sad vagrant shuffling about in his red

              speckled secrecy and I will never do so again!
You’ve been boasting of your cantaloupe pottage, you’ve provided
              us with thin toast, your glory increases all about you
Hush—ssshh—what is it?
The ancestor wandered toward the horizon, he craved
              recognition, but eons went by and he landed in a circus,
              there being no other work for a man from the gloom of
              origins
Cousins are composite, constructed, compared
Quick, lively, assembled ripples monitor, mosquitoes spill, and
              the children dine on candy
The sky is another point, this time of ambiguous blue
Why didn’t I think of that?
      

71

A grasshopper singing of death laughs long—as if a heavy-
             hearted granny spoke a light word
A shadow scuds over glass, the glass stands still
Insects seethe and they say that is the dream of language but
             what is language if not what is threading through the
             veins of an insect’s wings
What does it mean to say “now” now, as now surfaces in a gesture,
             as of a person pushing his eyeglasses up toward his brow
Our luggage is stacked sky-high, we are wearing twenty layers of
             clothes, every utterance is symphonic
I’ve never made curtains for these windows, stabbed by the mid-
             morning light
I pass with a broom, standing with a hose in my hand and my
             thumb against the nozzle
The loops of time droop, fall slack—and someone steps out of
             those that were his or hers, hers or his, his and hers, his
             and his, hers and hers—is it right, then, that we are left
             to hurtle alone
The girls danced in dead light, the cadavers lay in live light—but
             as for those girls, men with mouths like mare vaginas
             watched them

Every rough rupture demands elasticity of the imagination
The silver river is irreversible but you attentively watch its mouth
What you write achieves its independence though you are nimble,
             arrogant, sly and wise.
That is how you spend the day, which is itself a powerful force
             and raises the significant question “How did you get
             here?”
All suffering is in the egg—now suck it out of its shell and spit
             it away

72

Collective longer literature appeals to cloud variants over a
             crowd
See the gang, going to Alabama, tonguing cones, singing waka
             wasa bong
The robust thrush it is, stately as royalty, common as a
             pickpocket at a concert
I will not, I say, rest, I say, rotate
Let’s go now to the very next neologism and term it
             fragmentarily
Desperate he was to cry out and couldn’t, to say what he knew
             and know it
This takes adults—and very far indeed
The saxophonist breathes, takes a breath, inhales, gasps
Armadillo, yellow shovel, and empty oval
I sprawl across a bed strewn with breadcrumbs, ah ha!
At echo’s edge, a rock wall rises, a monument to leisure
The mourner chortles, she’s like a clown with sandpaper, at
             sorrow’s involuntary humor
Her remarks, his remarks, their remarks, our remarks, my
             remarks, your remarks betray
Oh there is a blading in this gentle bend

Milk Belongs to the Mythology of Cats But It Makes Them Sick

I wrote a rant after my encounter with my Obamapologist friend Friday after he accused me of indifference to, among many things, women's rights (I am willing to sacrifice my daughter's rights over her uterus, don't you know) because of my "fixation" with Obama's claims of power and the ever expanding police state. Fixation was his word; I accept it. I chose - and still choose - not to post the rant, though I offer these two thoughts: people of good will can disagree: if I prioritize A over B that does not necessarily mean I would willingly sacrifice women's rights nor does it mean if you prioritize B over A it necessarily means you support the King's imperial claims he can fucking well kill whomever whenever (in which case you're John Yoo, don't you know), and second, a new danger on the horizon:

     It's a herd of feral hamsters, a major herd, thundering across the yellow plains of the southern reaches of the Great Concavity in what used to be Vermont, raising dust that forms a uremic-hued cloud with somatic shapes interpretable from as far away as Boston and Montreal. The herd is descended from two domestic hamsters set free by a Watertown NY boy at the beginning of the Experialist migration in the subsidized Year of the Whopper. The boy now attends college in Champaign IL and has forgotten that his hamsters were named Ward and June.

     The noise of the herd is tornadic, locomotival. The expression on the hamsters' whiskered faces is businesslike and implacable - it's that implacable-herd expression. They thunder eastward across pedalferrous terrain that today is fallow, denuded. To the east, dimmed by the fulvous cloud the hamsters send up, is the vivid verdant ragged outline of the annularly overfertilized forests of what used to be Maine.

     With respect to a herd of this size, please exercise the sort of common sense that come to think of it would keep your thinking man out of the southwest Concavity anyway. Feral hamsters are not pets. They mean business. Wide berth advised. Carry nothing even remotely vegatablish if the path of a feral herd. If in the path of such a herd, move quickly and calmly in a direction perpendicular to their own.

• That's from Infinite Jest, this my fourth time through, IT'S WORKING! praise Baal, and also both a cheap gag for my amusement plus a thanks to Hamster for the Ornette Coleman cascade the other day, people dig it.
• The Cassandra Complex. Remember when I CWCFed?
• Of surveillance and scholarship.
• Surveillance culture.
• Not that I'm going to stop hectoring, I do think B depends on A more than A depends on B.
• Motherfucking Obama.
• Three Democratic myths used to demean the Paul filibuster.
• The seven worse reactions to Paul's filibuster. I must have been number eight.
• The submissive, indifferent Democrats.
• donkey pyramid scheme.
• Fifteen ways the War on Drugs benefits the state.
• On questioning the Jewish state.
• In post-post-racial America.
• What was neo-liberalism?
• Anatomy and dissection.
• Expert bullshitters.
• Dozens of good links.

• All youtubes in this post pulled from WFMU programming, it's their annual marathon, throw them the coins in your pocket, please.
• A possum entering the argument.
• The Iowa Secret Conviviality Society.
• An argument.
• Work is the force that gives us meaning.
• The argument.
• Maryland, of, by, and for Lockheed Martin.
• Argument over, accounting.
• Becoming a heroine.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• I know the sequence of sponsored years in Infinite Jest so I don't need to refer to the listing DFW finally provides on page 233, though the dog-eared bookmark falls open to the page when I set down the book.
• Lispector, for those of you who do.
• The literary stock market. Fuck it.
• MP3 of Beckett's Embers, for those of you who do.
• Airport posted a playlist.
• Stockhausen.

[REASON LOOKS FOR TWO, THEN ARRANGES IT FROM THERE]

Lyn Hejinian

Reason looks for        Where I woke and was awake, in the
two, then                  room fitting the wall, withdrawn, I
arranges it                had my desk and thus my corner.
from there                While waiting, waltz. The soles of
                               our boots wear thin, but the soles of
                               our feet grow thick. The difference
                               between “he presented his argument”   
and “they had an argument.”   I still respond to the academic
year, the sound of the school bell, the hot Wednesday morn-
ing after Labor Day. Must the physiologist stand apart from
the philosopher. We are not forgetting the patience of the
mad, their love of detail. The sudden brief early morning
breeze, the first indication of a day‘s palpability, stays high in
the trees, while flashing silver and green the leaves flutter, a
bird sweeps from one branch to another, the indistinct
shadows lift off the crumpled weeds, smoke rises from the
gravel quarry——all this is metonymy. The “argument”   is the
plot, proved by the book. Going forward and coming back
later. Even posterity, alas, will know Sears. As for we who
“love to be astonished,” there are fences keeping cyclones.
Might be covered, on the ground, by no distance. She spread
her fingers as she spoke, talking of artifice, which extends
beauty beyond nature. Perhaps it is only a coincidence. For,
as Neitzsche put it, “If a man has character, he will have the
same experience over and over again.” In the morning at eight
I sense the first threat of monotony. Give a penny with a
knife. Candor is the high pitch of scrutiny. I was tired of
ideas, or, rather, the activity of ideas, a kind of exercise, had
first invigorated me and then made me sleepy, so that I felt
just as one does after a long, early morning walk, returning
unable to decide whether to drink more coffee or go back to
sleep. The uncommon run of keeping oneself to oneself. The
piggy-back plant is o.k. Tell anyone who telephones that I’m
not home. I liked doing that, had made rooms for dolls on
trucks that way, looking in on them through windows. It was
a pretense of keeping our distance from anything that ap-
peared pretentious. A sorry mess, but well-framed. As if a
contorted checkerboard formed the portrait of a handsome
woman in a hat of several ochres and umbers. The dog circles
more than a moth before resting. Let the traffic pass. They
were on vacation and therefore bored. Someone wanted to go
away from everywhere forever but jumped into the bay. We
were warned such accidents happen while mothers talk on
phones. A doodled gnarled tree. Milk belongs to the
mythology of cats but it makes them sick. Ours was a stray
with ringworm. One night each year on Boston’s Beacon Hill
the curtains remained undrawn and the public was invited to
peek in. I didn’t wear my dark glasses because I didn’t want a
raccoon tan. Yet this needs shading in. It seemed that I didn’t,
after all, want a birthday empty of sentimentality. It’s on the
compulsive buyer’s rack up front. The real adversary of my
determination was determinism, regulating and limiting the
range and degree of difference between things of one day and
things of the next. I got it from Darwin, Freud, and Marx.
Not fragments but metonymy. Duration. Language makes
tracks.