If the Rich Can Survive Dust-Storms Thanks to Their Red-and-Gold Liveried Postilions, Then You Are Playing with an Alphabet Here: Nothing You Invent Can Be a Plenipotentiary, Turn Itself Inside-Out, Radiate Iron Spokes at the Mini-Landscape, and So Side with a Population of Bears, Who Knows?

Earthgirl and I gave ourselves a weekend, a drive Saturday southwest to below Charlottesville to hike to the top Crabtree Falls then a good dinner and sleep in Staunton (pronounced STAN-ton, don't you know), then yesterday drove the entire Skyline Drive south-to-north, stopping to hike the Rose River Loop. The video above is Earthgirl's photos of the Rose River Loop hike. Look for the bear - we saw two, only one stayed around long enough to be photoed. Oh heck, because I love you, here's a  mini-movie of the bear:







Crabtree Falls was OK, very crowded, full of fools, uphill immediately which is - for me - the worst a hike can start - no chance to warm up, to find the breathing rhythm, for old knees and ankles to loosen before work. Rose River Loop was wonderful, a hard hike with a payoff. It's the typical Shenandoah National Park hike: straight downhill on side trails off the Skyline Drive/Appalachian Trail spine through gorges and hollows and then straight uphill back in a loop. The Hog Camp Branch uphill of the loop was longer, steeper than Crabtree Falls uphill but not nearly as hard. We picked up the latest book of circuit hikes in Shenandoah at the Visitor Center at Big Meadows. Our $15 pass for entering Skyline Drive yesterday is good through next Sunday, so....

• There's a story about The Bears and a concert we saw at the original 930 back in 1987. Ask Hamster.
• Today's dose of aargh: What US citizens need to know about Israel and Palestine.
• One more: Massacre of the innocents. On Gaza.
• One more: James Boyd's (and our) hell.
• Briefer futility: a bleggalgaze, reminiscent of bleggalgazes elsewhere, with more determination to act rationally on its conclusion than that other guy.
• Outer Heaven in our time.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• New Inquiry's Sunday reads.
• Oh, the World Cup. The better team won, the lesser team should have one, gacked two sitters, but that's why they are the lesser team. And shut the fuck up, Higuain, you choking whiner.
• After Planet texted us photos of a foster puppy she met on Sunday I thought of Jim's post on his puppies this past Saturday. We set ourselves up for heartbreak.
• Josipovici, for those of you who do.
• Blogfriend reviews blogfriend's novel. Ed had sent me a copy, I promptly set it down, it got caught up in a house-cleaning, I searched and found it last week or two, it's next.
• The Last Ramone.
• I know enough about jazz to know the name Charlie Haden, not enough to make a playlist for you. Here, Kurt does.

KOREAN SOAP OPERA

John Ashbery

My sister and I don’t seem to get along too well anymore. 
She always has to have everything new in her house. Cherished ideals 
don’t suit her teal, rust and eggshell color scheme. 
Of course, I was a buyer when she was still on the street 
peddling the Communist youth weekly. I have a degree 
in marketing. Her boyfriend thinks I’m old-fashioned. 
Well, I guess I do have an old-fashioned mentality. 
What kind of a mentality 
causes men to commit suicide in their air-conditioned glass boxes? 
It has been a life of adjustments. I adjusted to the postwar boom 
though it broke up my family. Some took their honor to the mountains, 
to live on wood and water. But the investment years 
wrought havoc with the landscape. Everything is modular now, even the trees. 
Under the dizzying parabolas of the railroad bridge, where the thud 
of laundry mallets used to resound, the swiftly flowing 
current is like green cream, like baize unfit for fulling. 
So old are the ways, 
for lunch one might select a large smelly radish. 
In the streets, as always, there is a smell of frying fish 
no one notices. The rain cannot make up its mind. 
Other people like it other ways. 
I need to interact with postal employees, civil servants, that sort of thing. 
Just being asleep isn’t enough. 
I must cry out against injustice in whatever position 
sleep overtakes me. Only then will I have understood what the world 
and servants mean by self-abolishment, the key, it is said, 
to success. To stand and contemplate the sea 
is to comprehend part of the package. What we need, therefore, 
is market gardens bringing a sense of time with them, 
of this time, honed to razor-sharpness. Yet the whole 
scheme is invisible to any shareholder, and so the feeling 
lessens, the idea that a composite portrait 
may not be so important after all takes over like the shoulder 
of a mill-wheel, slogging patiently under water, then back 
to the zenith, where the watchword presumably is. 
In schools they teach things like plus and minus 
but not in the gorge, not in boiling mud. 
Area residents were jolted to find what in essence 
was a large swamp, pythons and all, in their communal front yard. 
To me, this is insensate. I cannot stand the wind at my back 
making of me nothing, to be handed 
over, in turn, to this 
man, this man. For though he weathered patiently 
the name, the one that occurs to all of us, he went out 
and came in, not in the best interests of abundance; 
not, it seems, being anything but about to fall. 
Here’s a paradox for you: if the men are segregated 
then why are the women not? 
If the rich can survive dust-storms thanks to their red-and-gold liveried 
postilions, then you are playing with an alphabet here: nothing 
you invent can be a plenipotentiary, 
turn itself inside-out, radiate 
iron spokes at the mini-landscape, and so side with a population 
of bears, who knows? Who knows how much there can be 
of any one thing if another one stops existing? And the word you give to this 
man, this man, is cold, 
fossil fuel. 
One snorts in the laundry, another 
is broken beside the bed. A third is suspended 
in a baobab for all the sins 
no one ever knew, for sins of omission are like pearls 
next to the sin of not knowing, and being excused 
for it. So it all comes round 
to individual responsibility and awareness, 
that circus of dusty dramas, denuded forests and car dealerships, a place 
where anything can and does happen, and hours and hours go by.

The Prevalence of Those Grey Flakes Falling?

Per occasionally observed tradition, Saturday's music via Bryce's Friday show, the best three hours of radio each week. These are the musicians but not the pieces Bryce played, except the Radigue - I couldn't find the pieces he played on youtube. This is why I write about rules. A blogfriend has recently returned from a hiatus, I asked him why the hiatus, why the return. I think about a hiatus, think I only think about hiatus because of Kindnesses not reciprocated or content here not being appreciated, but then I smack my self sensible: I mean, it's partially true (and to be honest, this bleg is, within the climate of Blegsylvania vis a vis the ten years of it's existence, doing fine, and thanks), but I've long known that I'm both niche and licorice, I've long figured out the patterns of Blegsylvanian busy and slow. My blogfriend was beaten silent by relentless clusterfuck, how to respond with proper arrgh to the awfulness of the daily duh. It's important to be reminded of the awfulness of the daily duh, aargh consisting of too fucking many reminders of duh. It's not that I think of a hiatus from blogging, I daydream of a clusterfuck-free blog - you, those of you still here, may notice - but I cannot rid myself of the idea of a bogus duty to acknowledge the awfulness of the daily duh not only here but in all iterations of my life. It's how I was trained. And now that I'm being desensitized daily by faster fresh reiterations of duh - there was a shooting somewhere a couple of nights ago, half a dozen killed, dozens wounded, or something, plus routine atrocities since - now that I'm being trained that the daily duh of clusterfuck is in fact routine, move along, and I do, I...

... can vouch for these pieces of music, tomorrow's a High Egoslavian Holy Day, tune in, rest assured, I'll never go longform aargh on you, there are much better than me, let me link to them, have more Ashbery poems.








HOW TO CONTINUE

John Ashbery

Oh there once was a woman

and she kept a shop

selling trinkets to tourists

not far from a dock

who came to see what life could be

far back on the island.

And it was always a party there

always different but very nice

New friends to give you advice

or fall in love with you which is nice

and each grew so perfectly from the other

it was a marvel of poetry

and irony

And in this unsafe quarter

much was scary and dirty

but no one seemed to mind

very much

the parties went on from house to house

There were friends and lovers galore

all around the store

There was moonshine in winter

and starshine in summer

and everybody was happy to have discovered

what they discovered

And then one day the ship sailed away

There were no more dreamers just sleepers

in heavy attitudes on the dock

moving as if they knew how

among the trinkets and the souvenirs

the random shops of modern furniture

and a gale came and said

it is time to take all of you away

from the tops of the trees to the little houses

on little paths so startled

And when it became time to go

they none of them would leave without the other

for they said we are all one here

and if one of us goes the other will not go

and the wind whispered it to the stars

the people all got up to go

and looked back on love

AS ONE PUT DRUNK INTO THE PACKET-BOAT

John Ashbery

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
Elsewhere we are as sitting in a place where sunlight
Filters down, a little at a time,
Waiting for someone to come. Harsh words are spoken,
As the sun yellows the green of the maple tree....

So this was all, but obscurely
I felt the stirrings of new breath in the pages
Which all winter long had smelled like an old catalogue.
New sentences were starting up. But the summer
Was well along, not yet past the mid-point
But full and dark with the promise of that fullness,
That time when one can no longer wander away
And even the least attentive fall silent
To watch the thing that is prepared to happen.

A look of glass stops you
And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?
Did they notice me, this time, as I am,
Or is it postponed again? The children
Still at their games, clouds that arise with a swift
Impatience in the afternoon sky, then dissipate
As limpid, dense twilight comes.
Only in that tooting of a horn
Down there, for a moment, I thought
The great, formal affair was beginning, orchestrated,
Its colors concentrated in a glance, a ballade
That takes in the whole world, now, but lightly,
Still lightly, but with wide authority and tact.

The prevalence of those gray flakes falling?
They are sun motes. You have slept in the sun
Longer than the sphinx, and are none the wiser for it.
Come in. And I thought a shadow fell across the door
But it was only her come to ask once more
If I was coming in, and not to hurry in case I wasn't.

The night sheen takes over. A moon of cistercian pallor
Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed,
Finally involved with the business of darkness.
And a sigh heaves from all teh small things on earth,
The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons
Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower
Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night.
The summer demands and takes away too much,
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.

Look, I've Already Ruined It or It's Ruined Me

If I'd known - rather, if I'd thought to look, though I've no idea whether I could place a bet online at a European oddsmaker - I'd have put $10 on this:

The online bookmaker Betsafe had been offering odds of 175-1 that the Uruguayan, twice banned for biting, would sink his teeth into an opponent during the World Cup in Brazil. Sure enough, more than 100 gamblers decided that it was worth a punt. When Suárez seemingly did just that to Chiellini near the end of their Group D clash in Natal, it was time to celebrate.

Easy money. As is any bet that I couldn't go more than six months without daydreaming of changing this blog's appearance. I'm not going to - yet - since it's not this blog's appearance but it's content that I daydream most about changing. I dicked around and created another joint for giggles and fuck it and fuck me and probable abandonment, not even writing there - yet, he says - what I don't allow myself to write here. No, it's not on any of the blogrolls. I am the self-Suarez of bleggalgazers.








AFTER LIGHGHT

Tom Thompson

Look, I’ve already ruined it
or it’s ruined me.
The dawn I see by doesn’t need me
like I need it
and any extra letters it brings.

What we call mountains
is a deep violet strip
narrowly rising and falling over the green.
You might call them clouds
and be right

or hand me something crisp
call it money or flowers
and set it alight.

A Moment of Intrusion

Another place lamely explains this post better than this post lamely explains itself. Hiatus bluff of a different sort than the normal hiatus bluff - this is not a bleggalgaze - but probably just as empty.








56 (from 100 NOTES ON VIOLENCE)

Julie Carr

I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.
          (Dostoevsky)
Actually, he, Alexander, was innocent. Wasn't he? (Acker)
We know he was made, like all of us, from a moment of sexual intention.
I want a horse, but I am a horse.
Or intrusion. A moment of intrusion.
I am a sick man. A spiteful man.
"Where have you been, sister?" "Killing swine." (Macbeth)

A man and his family are driving to a vacation spot. Once a write, now an insurance broker with two kids in the back, wife beside him, map open on her lap. It's hot. They stop at a gas station so the kids can pee, the wife can buy some gum. Gas up. In the gas station bathroom the man catches another man's face in the mirror. For a moment his heart pounds. Something like desire. But this passes. The man is someone he knew in college. Not possible! It is! And the grin, almost embrace. How are you? What are you doing? Etc. The man walks his friend to the car, introduces him to his wife and kids. The kids take little notice. The wife smiles, but seems impatient. It is decided the man will follow along in his car, will join the family for dinner when they arrive at their destination. During the three-hour's drive, the first man tells his wife all about this friend: antics, parties. Why, she thinks, have I never heard of this man before? As evening falls, they arrive at the hotel - old and worn-down, concrete and carpet - not far from the North Carolina coastline. Dump their bags in the room, kids jump beds, they head down to the restaurant where the friend is waiting for them. He smiles and rises when they ---

Wisteria, Extreme

The penultimate day of the birthdayiest month in Egoslavia. Pauline Oliveros is eighty-two today.

Saturday is a High Egoslavian Holy Day, I said at Thursday Night Pints, certainly the last Thursday Night Pints for the summer, probably the last forever though we promised ourselves at least one more. We've already lost D, rest in peace. K has offers in Ann Arbor and Palo Alto, will take one or the other, will be out of town much of the summer. L has grandchildren in Atlanta, stupidly lucrative house-flipper offers for her house in Arlington, will be out of town much of the summer. I'd take the Palo Alto offer, I said to K. I said to L, I'd take the stupidly lucrative money and buy a single floor condo near your grandchildren instead of living alone with two bad hips in a 1940s Cape Cod with three floors and narrow and steep stairs. I was agreeing with the choices they've already made. I can't imagine going to Atlanta for any reason, I can totally imagine going to Northern California, I'll have places to stay in either case.

That's the Thursday Night Pints bleggal pre-eulogy, eulogy, and post-eulogy. Combined with else and tomorrow's High Egoslavian Holy Day fine metaphors abound, or could or might or will.







UPDATE!

• I wasn't going to post links today but I may not post links tomorrow and these will go stale soon.
• The return of Fuck You Friday.
• Monster capitalism and the complicit state.
• Privatizing profits, socializing losses.
• On the urgent necessity of anti-imperialism.
• The anxieties of big data.
• Daniel Ellsberg on the odious John Kerry. This is true: on election day POTUS 2004 I went door to door in Harrisburg Pennsylvania canvassing votes of John Kerry.
• Those who own the goal posts.
• Silber sends a brief update. Please, if you can spar the coins in your pocket consider giving them to Arthur.
• Ten words used only in Irish English.
• Walter Benjamin, for those of you who do.
• On location: Place and placelessness; conflicting histories and transmuted genre; mythologized frontiers and one notion of “the West” blurring into a socio-historic another, somewhere just beyond the usual reach of cinematic allegory and metaphor...
• Charles Simic remembers Russell Edson (whose poetry I barely know) and Bill Knott (whose poetry I love).
• The legacy of William Meredith, who I used to read but don't think about any more (which says more about me than the poetry of William Meredith).

EXTREME WISTERIA

Lucie Brock-Broido

On abandon, uncalled for but called forth.

                                                                              The hydrangea

Of   her crushed each year a little more into the attar of   herself.

Pallid. Injured, wildly capable.

A throat to come home to, tupelo.

                                                Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable.

Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear.

Wistful, woke most every afternoon

                                In the green rooms of the Abandonarium.

                                                Beautiful cage, asylum in.

Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not

                                 Have been there.

So few wild raspberries, they were countable,

                                 Triaged out by hand.

Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others,

                                 Sateen. Extreme hyacinth as evidence.

Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves

                                 Will (perhaps tomorrow) die.

High editorial illusion of   “Control.” Early childhood: measles,

                                                                              Scarlet fevers;

Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home.

Convinced Gould’s late last recording of the Goldberg Variations

Was put down just for her. Unusual coalition of early deaths.

Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence,

In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of   such.

                                                                                          Wisteria, extreme.

There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home.

IF A GARDEN OF NUMBERS

Cole Swensen

If a garden is the world counted

                                                           and found analogue in nature

One does not become two by ever ending

                                                                           so the stairs must be uneven in number

and not exceed

thirteen without a pause

of two paces’ width, which

                                                 for instance, the golden section

                            mitigates between abandon

and an orchestra just behind those trees,

gradations of green that take a stethoscope: we risk:

Length over width

                                  to make the horizon run straight

equals

            to make the pond an oval:

                                                            Width

                                                            over length minus the width

                              in which descending circles curl

into animals exact as a remainder.

                              Which means excess. The meaning of the real

always exceeds that of the ideal, said someone.

                                                                                      He was speaking of Vaux-le-Vicomte,

but it’s equally true of parking, or hunting, or wishing you could take it back. He

                              who is Allen Weiss, actually said, “The meaning

of a plastic or pictorial construct always surpasses the ideal meaning of that work.”

Which is something else entirely. Said

the axonometric

divided by

the anamorphic.

                               There is nothing that controls our thoughts

more than what we think we see,

which we label “we.”

A Talent for Self-Realization Will Get You Only as Far as the Vacant Lot Next to the Lumber Yard

Iannis Xenakis was born ninety-two years ago today. Play loud.

The Egoslavian birthdayiest month of the year continues. Will continue. There's one last May birthday, an apt Egoslavian High Holy Day day after tomorrow for finishing.

Persepolis one, two, three, four, five, six.

Bohor one, two.

Xenakis here before one, two, three. Can't find the rest.

The Complete Electronic Music of Iannis Xenakis.








LIFE IS A DREAM

John Ashbery

A talent for self-realization
will get you only as far as the vacant lot
next to the lumber yard, where they have rollcall.
My name begins with an A,
so is one of the first to be read off.
I am wondering where to stand - could that group of three
or four others be the beginning of the line?

Before I have a chance to find out, a rodent-like
man pushes at my shoulders. "It's that way," he hisses.
"Didn't they teach you anything at school? That a photograph
of anything can be real, or maybe not? The corner of the stove,
a cloud of midges at dusk-time."

I know I'll have a chance to learn more
later on. Waiting is what's called for, meanwhile.
It's true that life can be anything, but certain thinkgs
definitely aren't it. This glove hand,
for instance, that glides
so securely into mine, as though it intends to stay.

Who Cannot Count His Change. Who Wake Up and Punch the Air

The sound system in the rental I'm driving this trip to and from Ohio takes my iPod and sorts then plays all the songs by alphabetical order. That's a more than satisfactory shuffling. Unfortunately, when I turn the car off to buy gas or stop to hug Planet and load her stuff into the rental to haul home and then we take a wonderful three hour drive together just the two of us on rural Ohio backroads, it will be a day I remember the rest of my life, the sound system goes back to the start of the sequence. I'm sure I could figure it out and fix, but I've only seven more hours in the car, I've over 1700 songs, I can forward or back from the start a couple hundred songs and never get the same song twice. Once I went backwards. Talking Heads' live version of "What a Day It Was" from Stop Making Sense came on. I've always thought it one of Talking Heads' lamer songs, it lasted three bars before being skipped, though I thought to myself, Jeebus, Talking Heads has soured on me (or me them) this past couple of years. Last night I did my birthdays check, discovered today is David Byrne's birthday. David Byrne's birthday has always been an Egoslavian Holy Day, bedecked with Talking Heads songs. Can I say it's still an Egoslavian Holy Day, skip the Talking Heads songs today?







Eno and Fripp have birthdays soon. Both Egoslavian Holy Days, both usually bedecked in songs. Both probably will be again, I've listened to both in the past months (unlike Talking Heads), though this whole post is of course not about Egoslavian Holy Days but solely about bleggalgazing. As is the absence of links. Consider this fair warning of potential bleggalgazing and hiatus bluffs to come, because Fuck This bulges of a sudden with increasing intervals of incidents. Because I love you, though, because I still cannot stop myself, here, songs from the back and front of the alphabet on my iPod heard yesterday while Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling to Zanesville to Bamgier (by myself) to Howard to Danville to Jelloway to Bunker Hill to Butler to Ankenytown to Fredericktown to Sparta to Green Valley to Mt Vernon to Gambier (with Planet).








AMERICAN INCOGNITO

David Gewanter

But to whatever animal we ascribe these remains, it is certain such a one has existed in America, and that it has been the largest of all terrestrial beings. It should have sufficed to have rescued the earth it inhabited, and the atmosphere it breathed, from the imputation of impotence. . . .

—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

 

 

I called for armour, rose, and did not reel.

But when I thought . . .

                                      I could feel

My wound open wide.

—Thom Gunn, “The Wound”

 

 

 

THE STATES

 

For he can creep.

 

Whose doctor said his bipolar was pre-existing.

Smacked in the head by a steel cargo door,

hinges tied with a hamburger bag.

The day he blew up: a sucking silence, mouth of tar,

     story told over and over.

 

bump and rattle, caissons rolling.

The blacked-out school bus window is

scratched to read GHOST RECON. Street signs flash by,

“This here is Georgia. Now I see New Hampshire,

     and here’s Colorado.” What country is this city?

 

Gorked on pain-relief cocktails, Iraq to Landstuhl Med

to Andrews Air Force, wheelchair bus to Walter Reed.

Wounded when burning poppies, now afloat

on morphine. “As a state,” he once emailed,

     “Afghanistan is next to Mars.”

 

The navigator slides along a wall:

“Sir, can you show me north?”

Where the gazebo is a tank. Where the manhole covers a bomb.

Who apologize for shaving cuts. Skull plate,

     40-lb. gain from meds, big ox baby.

 

“Fall in,” the heart-attack sergeant tells

the legless man. “At ease,” he tells the psychotics.

They limp by drug dealers for their scoop

of Baskin-Robbins. Are told,

     “Suck it up, get used to the outside world.”

 

Who are saved, but die in dreams,

salute with a mechanical arm.

 

 

CONSTITUTION AVE, CAPITALSAURUS DAY

 

Beneath the marble, beneath the paper laws;

the paved boglands and legs-up taverns,

the slave-built steps of the Capitol. Winter 1898,

a sewer-man digs up a dinosaur spine,

      a nomen nudum, naked & unnamed fossil

 

tombed later at the Smithsonian

near Jefferson’s Mammoth tooth

that rattled his pocket, cherished knuckle-bone

and proof against the French naturalist

      who with powdered hands

 

wrote that New World dampness and cold

had stunted flora, animals, and Man:

the American Degeneracy. 

Jefferson ordered Lewis & Clark to find

      a living Mammoth,

 

the “animal de l’Ohio”

grazing somewhere west

of Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, and—

lest a species wither, or Nation grow small—

      brought Mammoth bones to Monticello.

 

“WHEREAS, the remains of a large carnivorous dinosaur,

which may be an ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus rex,

were found at First and ‘F’ Streets, SE,

 

NOW, THEREFORE, I, MAYOR OF THE DISTRICT

OF COLUMBIA, do hereby proclaim January 28, 2001,

as ‘CAPITALSAURUS DAY.’”

 

Anthony A. Williams

 

 

DISCOVERY IN SIBERIA

 

Reindeer of the herdsman Jarkov nuzzle

a tusk frozen 20,000 years. Soon,

French naturalists arrive. Radar shows

the Holy Grail of Mammoth hunters,

      a frigid bulk, twice an elephant’s size—

 

Timber saws cut the block. Hoisted by

military helicopter to Stalin’s

gulag caves, frozen labs for scientist-prisoners,

now re-opened. Waving hair-dryers

      to sublimate the ice, so that Discovery

 

can film them planting clone eggs

inside an elephant, hatching a Mammoth

American defender to split the ramparts,

show scheduled for release in 2001

      —the year, in the sci-fi film,

 

the monkeys learn to talk;

when Mayor Williams greets      

the Capitalsaurus and the new President Bush;

when Mohammed Atta decides he

      cannot date a waitress.

 

 

SECURITAS

 

Weary headlands roll through zones of night,

red lights flash the muted streets,

crotch-of-moss draining a blue spark dawn—

We sleep, staring. Tree-shapes and stars prod us,

      the belt of Orion is a martyr’s bomb.

 

And the king, our godsbody, lies abed

groaning, chill spirit belaboring the flesh—

His spit and sperm are tallied; his temperature,

a weather report told by doctors. Until

      lady Securitas peers from a cloud—

 

her bloodlined hands, the blank, bureaucratic face!

We pray with our bodies: cold sweat, a hymn

of twitches, heart racing, shrieking dreams . . .

But fragrant Securitas has only

       come for him—

 

To compass him about.

Lifting out her breast.

Stoppers his mouth with a thick nipple.

Squeezing till the ichor throbs from his eyes,

      milk to make us thirsty—

 

 

IRAQ & TEXAS: DJINN ROADS

 

Helicopters park at Forward Base EXXON;

only the sand is flying today, and it breaks

the speed limits, 50 miles an hour. Visibility zero;

the air is hot as blood, the sky is burnt amber.

      Lord keep still our hands.

 

In Texas, teens patrol the roads by night,

burning the body’s fuel—State Troopers pull them over.

George, fishtailing dauphin, a graceful

falldown drunk, clouds the breathalyzer:

      FELONY DUI. Daddy’s name sinks the report—

 

Election night, heaven staring, and Laura’s

yellowcake Chevy mows down her boyfriend:

VEHICULAR HOMICIDE: the car found guilty.

“I know this as an adult, it was crushing,”

      she recalls. Her scented, unmarked body

 

sweats beneath foundation garments and paste.

His unmarked body, and fructifying breath,

his stone squint chasing snakes from the sun—

They walk, O my darling, the hill of light;

      the bite of remorse teaches them to bite.

 

Then it rains. What falls from the sky is not water

but mud, raindrops pulling clouds of sand

into large wet globs. “It was biblical,” says

Col. Gibbs. Lights a cigarette, his back to the storm:

      “You’ve got to embrace the suck.”

 

 

HOTEL AFTERMATH

 

From the dust, the limbs jerk up alive, stagger home

to camp. Martian: neck gators for the nose, goggles

seal off the eyes, baby wipes. WHAT DID YOU FIND THERE?

A slipper, an ear, some wire. A chemical suit.

      A map of water.

           ——

 

From Stalin’s cave, just bits of gristle—unreadable,

no Frankenstein DNA. They rewrite the Mammoth show.

 

From Walter Reed, “an aggressive campaign

to deal with the mice infestation.”

      Recovery rooms, “spit-polish clean.”

 

Whose mother swallows all the soldier medicine.

 

Who wheels himself in to play Texas Hold ‘Em.

 

Whose father says, “It was OK for my son

to give his body. They try in their power,

      but it reverses itself.”

 

Jefferson’s American Incognito

is ground up for fertilizer—

the maid said it was cow bones. Sweet heartland,

Governor Meriwether Lewis

      of Louisiana, depression pre-existing,

 

shoots himself in the chest and head.

 

Who sit by the apples and wingback chairs.

“If I had two hands, I’d order two vodkas”—

 

Who cannot count his change.

      Who wake up and punch the air.

the back wings of the hospital where nothing will grow lie cinders in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle

Today's poem, this post's title, Between Walls by William Carlos Williams. Barring kaboom or birthday I missed I'm taking a long weekend to work on other projects, true, but mostly to see if I can do it. I never made it through one of these stunts before, regulars can set their own over/under for when I fail again.

Theme Song March 2014

Stop & Shiver in It

Compulsive and futile weekend blogging: As promised, Theme Song March 2014. That song has been Theme Song of Month more than any other. No, I can't say how many times, that would be too compulsive even for me.

Two friends, one analog, one digital, have been urging me to give Star Trek: Deep Space Nine another chance. DS9 was my least favorite of the four shows for reasons I forget (I don't count Enterprise, which I've never seen and had and have no desire to see), though I remember thinking moving Worf to the show seemed a particularly desperate Hail Mary. But I trust the judgment of my friends and will give DS9 a new viewing. I watched the premier last night, things I had forgot: Sisco's wife was killed by Locutus; his son is motherfucking irritating; Dax is a trill; cameras will fixate on Kira's tits; the doctor is motherfucking irritating; Sisco will never call anyone Rockfish.

• Eight pronunciation errors that make English what it is today.
• Did Roger Ailes win POTUS 12 for Obama?
• The tyranny of money.
• Of being numerous: In that image—where a desire for insurrectionary freedom is paired with advanced technocapitalism’s ­surveillance-control apparatus—our current problem is crystallized. The devices we rely upon to communicate and gather information and build the solidarity necessary for contemporary protests also offer us up as ripe for constant surveillance. The surveillance state could not be upheld without its always already trackable denizens. To sidestep our tacit complicity in this would be to fail to recognize how deep it runs—it’s how we live. As my Salon colleague Andrew Leonard noted, “In 2013, the negative consequences of our contemporary lifestyles were impossible to ignore.”
• The nyancatcentipedes really tie the post together.
• Brad's serialized short story, part five.
• Brad's serialized short story, part six.
• Thomas Hardy's afterwards. 
• Heart's Needle. 
• Two new tags.

  
GYMNODPÉDIES NO. 3

Adrian Matejka

This sunlight on snow.

This decrescendo

of covered stumps & brush —

stop for it.

Stop before the sled end-

             over-ends down

             the chin of the hill —

the way it always will

at the rock ⅔ of the way down.

Stop & shiver in it: the ring

             of snow inside gloves,

             the cusp of red forehead

like a sun just waiting to top

the hill. Every ill-built

             snowball waiting to be thrown,

             every bell-shaped angel

stamped over the brown leaves.

When my daughter ranges

             in winter, she works

every dazzling angle —

             the crestfallen pinecones,

             the grizzled beards

of bushes in the morning,

a furnace’s windup huffing

             in this throat-

             clearing of snow.

chơ ăn đa gá ăn sôi

BODY EATS

Linh Dinh

The word minh, body, has wide application in Vietnamese. It is sometimes used as a first person pronoun, as in “body has lived here for a long time,” or “body does not know him.” Body is I. It is also we or us. As in: “Body eat rice; they eat bread.” Body is also used to address one’s spouse. As in: “Body, what would you like to eat today?”

A spouse can also be referred to as “my house.” As in: “My house is not home at the moment. Please call back later.” To be married is to live in a new house, to be engulfed in another body.

The core of the Vietnamese body is not the heart but the stomach. Instead of saying “I don’t know what’s in his heart,” a Vietnamese would say, “I don’t know what’s in his stomach.” To be in contentment is to have a happy stomach, vui long. To be in grief is to have a rotting stomach, thui ruôt. To be in extreme anguish is to have one’s stomach chopped into pieces, dut ruôt.

Eating is the body’s primary function. Whatever else the body does, it must an, must eat. To dress is to an mac, eat and dress. To talk is to an noi, eat and talk. To have sex is to an nam, eat and lie down with somebody. To be married is to an o, eat and live with somebody.

To win at anything, a bet, a soccer match, is simply to an, to eat, an echo back to the days when to win is to swallow one’s opponent whole, perhaps. To dominate or decisively defeat someone is to an song, eat raw.

To indulge in pleasures is to eat and play, an choi. To celebrate is to eat with happiness,an mung. To go to a party is to eat at a party, an tiec. One doesn’t celebrate the New Year, one eats during the New Year, an Tet.

To look for work is to look for something to eat, kiem an. To work is to make and eat, lam an. A good business prospect is described as having something easy to eat, de an. To do well in business is to eat customers, an khach.

To spend money is to eat and digest, an tieu. To take a bribe is to eat money, an tien. To work an illicit job, thievery, prostitution, is to eat dew, an suong. To steal is to eat in secret, an trom.

Eating, and how one eats, becomes a metaphor for nearly everything, as these proverbs testify:

A magpie, starved, eats banyan fruit. A phoenix, starved, eats chicken shit.

Fish eat ants, ants eat fish.

Have vegetable, eat vegetable. Have rice gruel, eat rice gruel.

The smart eat men, the stupid are eaten.

Tailors eat rags, artists eat paints.

Father eats salty food, son's thirsty.

Eating new rice, telling old stories.

Eat in front, swim behind.

Eat for real, fake work.

Arrive late, gnaw on a bone.

Ate rice gruel, pissed in the bowl.

A bowl of sweat for a bowl of rice.

A piece of meat is a piece of shame.

Selling ass to feed mouth.

Two hands, two eyes are just enough to feed one stomach.

Better to die sated than to live hungry.

To be homeless is to eat the wind and lie with the dew, an gio nam suong. This phase used to refer to the hardships of a long journey, a concept similar to the English “travel,” a variation on travail, from the French travailler, to work.

To inherit property is to eat fragrance and fire, an huong hoa, which refer to the incense and oil lamp on the ancestral altar present in most Vietnamese homes.

A remote place is described as where “dogs eat rocks, chickens eat pebbles,” chơ ăn đa gá ăn sôi.

To be primitive is to eat fur while living in a hole, an long o lo.

To die is to eat dirt,an dat.

A common Vietnamese greeting is, “Have you eaten yet?”

One should always answer: “After eating dew all night, I’m more than ready to eat and to lie down.”

As I Sit Looking Out of a Window of the Building I Wish I Did Not Have to Write the Instruction Manual on the Uses of a New Metal

Woke up with Van der Graaf Generator in my head. Posted before looking to when Peter Hammill's birthday is though I've a vague memory it's in the Fall. I am completely unsurprised I woke up with Van der Graaf Generator in my head, I know what plays in my head when certain moods strike. Also too, as per tradition, when I think of Van der Graaf Generator I think things I've lost, things I will lose, I think of my lost friend Bavid Degosian, if you see him tell him I say hi.

• It's not a bad mood. It is a sad mood. I enjoy it too much.
• The curious case of responsible NSA revelations.
• The New Inquiry's Sunday Reading.
• The blue static is far more popular than the grey static, and folk like the Kirk. I think I'm done dicking around with the template until I start dicking with it again.
• Thomas Bernhard, for those of you who do.
• "Literary fiction" is genre fiction.
• On transgressing genre boundaries.
• William Gass once.
• William Gass twice.
• I may have posted The Secret Auden already, worth reading.
• Vowel Movements.
• More on Robert Ashley (h/t).
• This mood also make Ashbery necessary.

THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL

John Ashbery

As I sit looking out of a window of the building

I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.

I look down into the street and see people, each walking with an inner peace,   

And envy them—they are so far away from me!

Not one of them has to worry about getting out this manual on schedule.   

And, as my way is, I begin to dream, resting my elbows on the desk and leaning out of the window a little,

Of dim Guadalajara! City of rose-colored flowers!

City I wanted most to see, and most did not see, in Mexico!

But I fancy I see, under the press of having to write the instruction manual,   

Your public square, city, with its elaborate little bandstand!

The band is playing Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov.

Around stand the flower girls, handing out rose- and lemon-colored flowers,   

Each attractive in her rose-and-blue striped dress (Oh! such shades of rose and blue),

And nearby is the little white booth where women in green serve you green and yellow fruit.

The couples are parading; everyone is in a holiday mood.

First, leading the parade, is a dapper fellow

Clothed in deep blue. On his head sits a white hat

And he wears a mustache, which has been trimmed for the occasion.

His dear one, his wife, is young and pretty; her shawl is rose, pink, and white.   

Her slippers are patent leather, in the American fashion,

And she carries a fan, for she is modest, and does not want the crowd to see her face too often.

But everybody is so busy with his wife or loved one

I doubt they would notice the mustachioed man’s wife.

Here come the boys! They are skipping and throwing little things on the sidewalk

Which is made of gray tile. One of them, a little older, has a toothpick in his teeth.

He is silenter than the rest, and affects not to notice the pretty young girls in white.

But his friends notice them, and shout their jeers at the laughing girls.   

Yet soon all this will cease, with the deepening of their years,

And love bring each to the parade grounds for another reason.

But I have lost sight of the young fellow with the toothpick.

Wait—there he is—on the other side of the bandstand,

Secluded from his friends, in earnest talk with a young girl

Of fourteen or fifteen. I try to hear what they are saying

But it seems they are just mumbling something—shy words of love, probably.

She is slightly taller than he, and looks quietly down into his sincere eyes.   

She is wearing white. The breeze ruffles her long fine black hair against her olive cheek.

Obviously she is in love. The boy, the young boy with the toothpick, he is in love too;

His eyes show it. Turning from this couple,

I see there is an intermission in the concert.

The paraders are resting and sipping drinks through straws

(The drinks are dispensed from a large glass crock by a lady in dark blue),   

And the musicians mingle among them, in their creamy white uniforms, and talk

About the weather, perhaps, or how their kids are doing at school.

Let us take this opportunity to tiptoe into one of the side streets.   

Here you may see one of those white houses with green trim   

That are so popular here. Look—I told you!

It is cool and dim inside, but the patio is sunny.

An old woman in gray sits there, fanning herself with a palm leaf fan.   

She welcomes us to her patio, and offers us a cooling drink.   

“My son is in Mexico City,” she says. “He would welcome you too   

If he were here. But his job is with a bank there.

Look, here is a photograph of him.”

And a dark-skinned lad with pearly teeth grins out at us from the worn leather frame.

We thank her for her hospitality, for it is getting late

And we must catch a view of the city, before we leave, from a good high place.

That church tower will do—the faded pink one, there against the fierce blue of the sky. Slowly we enter.

The caretaker, an old man dressed in brown and gray, asks us how long we have been in the city, and how we like it here.

His daughter is scrubbing the steps—she nods to us as we pass into the tower.

Soon we have reached the top, and the whole network of the city extends before us.

There is the rich quarter, with its houses of pink and white, and its crumbling, leafy terraces.

There is the poorer quarter, its homes a deep blue.

There is the market, where men are selling hats and swatting flies

And there is the public library, painted several shades of pale green and beige.

Look! There is the square we just came from, with the promenaders.   

There are fewer of them, now that the heat of the day has increased,   

But the young boy and girl still lurk in the shadows of the bandstand.   

And there is the home of the little old lady—

She is still sitting in the patio, fanning herself.

How limited, but how complete withal, has been our experience of Guadalajara!

We have seen young love, married love, and the love of an aged mother for her son.

We have heard the music, tasted the drinks, and looked at colored houses.   

What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do.

And as a last breeze freshens the top of the weathered old tower, I turn my

gaze

Back to the instruction manual which has made me dream of Guadalajara.

Coax the Detonation from the Static

 

• Yes, a return to my most favorite color, my beloved noxzema bottle blue. Hence this post headed by this shitty blog's Theme Song!
• Planet flies in early evening! and tomorrow is United's home-opener! so there will certainly be a United post Sunday with RFK photos - and, yes, stanchion porn - not sure what else the rest of the weekend.
• Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics: The reality of the crisis is identified as neoliberalism’s aggression against the structure of class relations that was organized in the welfare state of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries; and the cause of the crisis lies in the obstruction of productive capacities by the new forms capitalist command had to assume against the new figures of living labor. In other words, capitalism had to react to and block the political potentiality of post-Fordist labor.
• In which out self-proclaimed hero explodes himself, part one: Omidyar knew what he was buying when he hired Greenwald, Scahill, and the rest. He was buying a collection of journalists who would burnish his image of himself as a crusader for "privacy" and against government surveillance (although even that is very strictly limited in a manner most people appear not to grasp, as we shall see), as well as generally bolstering his PR campaign to portray himself as a "good" billionaire. He also bought one more thing: journalism that would never threaten his own interests in any way that need concern him.
• Ab hoedis me sequestra: The state grows under conservatives, and it grows under liberals. The difference is only a matter of emphasis, and frequently not even that. The truth is that these marriage traditionalists were perfectly content with state intervention in and support of their sacred institution when it hewed, more or less, to their membership requirements. Only when a bit of money and a bit of politicking rendered it a bit less restrictive, only then did those same agencies of the state become dangerous and a touch tyrannical.
• Why he blogs: For seven-and-one-third years this blog has weighed on my brain like a digital nightmare. Apart from a six month break in 2007 and 18 months 2011-12, I've been writing or thinking about writing content. Even when I took a leave of absence words, phrases, screeds of 500 words or more often tangoed across my eyeballs when the shutters came down at night. As our minds have allowed social media technologies to colonise and structure our perceptions - how many times have you thought of a real-life in terms of an instagram snap or a sharply-observed tweet? - so mine finds half-digested ideas immediately suited to bloggable form.
• The steampunk future revisited, or: more bleggalgazing: One of the things I’ve noticed repeatedly, over the nearly eight years I’ve been writing this blog, is that I’m the last person to ask which of these weekly essays is most likely to find an audience or hit a nerve. Posts I think will be met with a shrug of the shoulders stir up a storm of protest, while those I expect to be controversial get calm approval instead. Nor do I find it any easier to guess which posts will have readers once the next week rolls around and a new essay goes up.
• Have I ever mentioned I love Archers of Loaf?

• It's true.
• Here's today's monologue: Last weekend a systems fuck-up at eNom, who I pay for my domain name via Blooger, made any website with an eNom domain name someone tried to view via Comcast internet serviece unviewable, with language in the can't load page suggesting the website had been disappeared. I only found out about this through twitter after the matter had been resolved, but I sat on my sofa and didn't fucking freak out when this shitty blog wouldn't load. I consider this progress, especially when remembering back to the domain name clusterfuck of this past summer. I created both a now dead Wordpress blog and now abandoned Blooger back-up blog in panicked reaction. I'm not sparing you why this development delights me and what it signifies when I say I've not liked anything I've written about it. I'm less incoherent than I was when I wrote a similar sentence a week or so ago if only because now I know I need to know what I want to do if I want to change the mission statement.
• This is the 1503rd post since moving here from the typepad site three and a half years ago.
• The Inaesthetic, II: In other words: The sanctioned suspension of the standard protocols, but only for this occasion. Because the project -- no matter how noble (only connect!) its intentions -- is vastly subsumed by the context in which it appears, the same institution and hierarchies hold. Sure, this time you're allowed to touch the art, even "be a part of it"; but you're still in the same setting where normally there’d be someone there to remind you not to touch or lean in too closely when looking at the art, or to ask you to please pipe down if you get a little too heated while talking about what you’re looking at, as you can expect will be the case next time you visit. 
• Purple Line! 
• Why kits will suck at this summer's World Cup: England will not wear their traditional kit at this summer's World Cup after bowing to demands from FIFA, reports the Daily Mirror. The Zurich bureaucrats have urged nations to wear a single-coloured kit to improve the quality of HD pictures from Brazil meaning that England will wear white, not blue shorts with their white shirts when they run out in Manaus, Sao Paulo and Belo Horizonte. Brazil are believed to be sticking with their yellow shirt and blue shorts combination, but Germany have already caved in and they unveiled their all-white kit last month. Spain will be all-red, Italy all blue and Portugal all monotone as well.
• More people have said they liked the old new look (the grey static) than have said they disliked the old new look, though those who dislike it hate it more than those who like it like it. Long-timers can vouch this shitty blog ain't a fucking democracy. 
• PERU UBU NEWS! David Thomas on the album in progress: Assume, for the sake of this explanation, that Pere Ubu refocused rock music in the 70s. In the alternate universe that yields the new album, ‘Carnival of Souls,’ Pere Ubu refocused progressive music instead. Before I began, I listened to ‘Pawn Hearts’ on endless repeat for nearly 2 weeks, every waking moment. The album doesn’t sound anything like VDGG and it’s likely no one will ever make the connection but it’s there. Keith is also a huge fan of 70s prog, so that had been in my mind as well. Something to make him happy. Along the way I determined that I wanted to synthesize Kraftwerk and Suicide into one band, one methodology and one sound. I wanted to work with a balance of digital and analog sound, confusing the boundaries. I had the notion of turning the band into a synthesizer, a machine comprised of human beings but with a Midwest personality.
• Bleggalgaze: yes, the bleggal diddling can legitimately be considered a bleggal mid-life crisis, though with the return of noxzema blue I think the major diddling will stop for a while.
• And have more Archers of Loaf, dammit, it's been a while.

THE PLANET KRYPTON

Lynn Emanuel

Outside the window the McGill smelter

sent a red dust down on the smoking yards of copper,   

on the railroad tracks’ frayed ends disappeared   

into the congestion of the afternoon. Ely lay dull

and scuffed: a miner’s boot toe worn away and dim,   

while my mother knelt before the Philco to coax   

the detonation from the static. From the Las Vegas   

Tonapah Artillery and Gunnery Range the sound

of the atom bomb came biting like a swarm

of bees. We sat in the hot Nevada dark, delighted,   

when the switch was tripped and the bomb hoisted   

up its silky, hooded, glittering, uncoiling length;

it hissed and spit, it sizzled like a poker in a toddy.   

The bomb was no mind and all body; it sent a fire

of static down the spine. In the dark it glowed like the coils   

of an electric stove. It stripped every leaf from every

branch until a willow by a creek was a bouquet   

of switches resinous, naked, flexible, and fine.   

Bathed in the light of KDWN, Las Vegas,

my crouched mother looked radioactive, swampy,

glaucous, like something from the Planet Krypton.   

In the suave, brilliant wattage of the bomb, we were

not poor. In the atom’s fizz and pop we heard possibility   

uncorked. Taffeta wraps whispered on davenports.

A new planet bloomed above us; in its light

the stumps of cut pine gleamed like dinner plates.

The world was beginning all over again, fresh and hot;   

we could have anything we wanted.