Every Tonal Difference, Every Sound

The Egoslavian birthdayiest month of the year continues: as of this moment, all three posts on the blog's front page are birthday posts. Gyorgy Ligeti was born eighty-six years ago today. As always with me and composers, I love most if not all of a composer's work but always love the solo piano pieces best. Here's Ubuweb's typically generous Ligeti sound page.

Earthgirl and Planet and I had dinner last night with B, the young woman who stayed at our house when moving to DC for a new job while looking for an apartment who has become not only our cat-sitter but our friend. The combined ages of Planet and B is ten years younger than me. As always, I thought, what the fuck world will my daughter be inhabiting when she is my age in 2047? It seems to me the descent to clusterfuck is increasing both in angle and in speed. When I got home I found myself link-fishing the clusterfuck. I can still get angry, to no effective purpose, apparently. Then I listened to Ligeti piano sonatas while looking for poems for this post.

• Austerity and neo-liberalism lead to the neo-fascist right. Duh, of course, but worth reminding.
• Pierre Omidyar and Narendra Modi.
• Categorizing the poor.
• Building a lasting legacy of death.
• Is violence cultural?
• A primer on the new religion of the gun.
• When intellectuals go to war.
• NYT's public editor slaps Michael Kinsley around. Psst. Michael Kinsley doesn't care.
• If Pope Francis pisses off the asshole Netanyahu then Pope Francis gets a point in my book.
• Consent is impossible.
• Skull-blogging, face-in-the-frost edition.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.

from MOZART'S THIRD BRAIN

Goran Sinnevi

Translated by Rika Lesser

CV

Not-Orpheus is singing   He sings his nothing   He sings his night   

He sings all the names   The name of nothing   The only name    Since   

long ago   He didn’t know it   And knew it in his night   

All things sing   All names sing   Every tonal difference, every

sound   All music in its destruction   In its sublation   Toward which point?

The mountain of nothing hovers   Before it crushes us   With its night   With its

   song  

In the evening I walked through town with you, Dearest, along the river   

A clear cold spring evening, the half-moon shone   As if walking in a foreign city   

Though I recognized parts of it   You said it was almost like   

walking in Prague, where we would have been if my mother hadn’t fallen ill   

When we stood by one corner of the Hotel Svea, where I played in a dance band in

    1957,   

the huge flock of jackdaws, in the trees by the bastion near the castle, flew   

out over the river, in micropolyphonic conversation    As in a piece by Ligeti   

That night I dreamed I crossed a bridge spanning the river, now very broad   

The long bridge was swaying, huge ocean swells entering the river from the sea   

I walked with a girl, kissed her on the mouth, on the opposite bank   

In the morning you came into my bed, Dear, we slinked like teenagers, so my   

       mother wouldn’t hear us,

where she slept, in the room outside ours   She’s already much better   

I look at my face in the bathroom mirror   Will I manage to go out into the Brain  

Trucks pass   Traffic goes on, in the great exchange of goods   

Gulls, trees, people   The degree of virtuality in different goods, the phantasms   

also in what we eat, conceptions of origin, contents, effects

Fear    Cultivated tastes    We are in the immediacy of memory    Only in a flash of

astonishment can memory be broken   But even lightning is informed    I look at

    the

      magical   

diagrams of Giordano Bruno, read his texts   See that all this is exactly as in   

Jung, fundamental magical forms, for guiding the divine,   

the unknown within the soul   Also the similarity with tantric forms      

    Yes, that’s   

        how it is,   

I think, both Freud and Jung are magicians, the difference in rationality is   

only marginal, Jung’s a little older, Freud’s more modern, a continuation of   

Descartes, developed later in Spinoza’s pneumatic model for the passions,   

and yet both are found, subsumed in Bruno’s love-flow, the lineage backward,   

the tantric flow, also Plato’s Diotima, her flow . . .   

Hölderlin saw the stream of people in dark water, streaming over   

the ledges in the human-geological world, the levels of the abyss,   Para-   

       dise’s various degrees of stasis   

What use can I make of these magical forms? I’m no magician    And yet

I acknowledge their power, also within my self   If they prevail, sovereignty   

is crushed   Libero arbitrio   There the forms also break down   

The stream of love breaks down    Fluid lightning    The flash of vibrating being   

But also the flash of darkness   The light of Beatrice’s eyes, their lightning

    flash   How  

am I to understand this? How to understand unknowing   That I do not!

INFINITE RICHES IN THE SMALLEST ROOM

Lucie Brock-Broido

Silk spool of the recluse as she confects her eventual mythomania.

If it is written down, you can't rescind it.

Spoon and pottage bowl. You are starving. Come closer now.

What if I were gone and the wind still reeks of hyacinth, what then.

Who will I be: a gaudy arrangement of nuclei, an apple-size gray circle

On the tunic of a Jew, preventing more bad biological accidents

                                From breeding-in. I have not bred-

In. Each child still has one lantern inside lit. May the Mother not

Blow her children out. She says her hair is thinning, thin.

The flowerbed is black, sumptuous in emptiness.

Blue-footed mushrooms line the walkway to my door. I would as soon

Die as serve them in a salad to the man I love. We lie down

In the shape of a gondola. Venice is gorgeous cold. 3 December,

Unspeakable anxiety about locked-in syndrome, about a fourth world.

I cannot presume to say. The violin spider, she

Has six good eyes, arranged in threes.

                                The rims of wounds have wounds as well.

Sphinx, small print, you are inscrutable.

                                                            On the roads, blue thistles, barely

Visible by night, and, by these, you may yet find your way home.

A Friend from Boston Wrote Something to Me Last Week About Not Having the Intelligence to Take as Subject for His Poems Anything Other Than His Own Life

I said yesterday that May must have more Egoslavian Holy Days than any other month. Ligeti was born ninety years ago today. Xenakis is tomorrow, then a couple of days off, then the 31st, birthday of the  Patron Saint of Autoblogography (hint: look on Left Blogroll; without doubt the past, current, and future most posted youtube on this blog forever, amen). Serendipity, when Kind, is glorious, providing kayfabe-rich bleggal festivals to front-end the first weeks of the Blog Days of Summer and ease the pangs of seasonal bleg-ennui and blogblahs.

New stuff there, will be here tomorrow (or not) when I've not someone's birthday to blogwhoringly celebrate.

• I'm so fucking nuts I think it deliberate that within a week of Obama's speech on terrorism that news is leaked by officials that OFUCK! THE CHINESE!
• Teaching children to fear dissent.
• Disaster porn and elite panic.
• Data mining and digital death.
• Ken Cuccinelli, hard-right winger Virginia gubernatorial candidate, is absolutely correct to call Terry Motherfucking McAuliffe a carpet-bagger. He symbolizes Democratic Party decadence and corruption as well as anybody.
• MOCO parents upset with new report cards!
• Humans can be assholes.
• Things. Something he said reminded me of a favorite trick I do before starting any novel: open a novel more than one-third but not more than two-thirds and read one - only one - paragraph and then shut the book. When you come upon the paragraph in the regular course of reading a book get a cheap rush of deja vu. Fun!
• Catholicism, freedom, Patti Smith.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• Coetzee, for those of you who do.
• Lontano.

ANOTHER ATTEMPT AT RESCUE

M.L. Smoker

The time is important here—not because this   

has been a long winter or because it is my first   

at home since childhood—but because there is so much   

else to be unsure of. We are on the brink of an invasion.   

At a time like this how is it that when I left only a week ago

there was three feet of snow on the ground,

and now there is none, not even a single patch   

on in the shadow of the fence-line.   

And to think I paid a cousin twenty dollars   

to shovel the walk. He and two of his buddies,   

still smelling of an all-nighter, arrived at 7 am   

to begin their work. When I left them a while later   

and noticed their ungloved hands, winter made me feel   

selfish and unsure. This ground seems unsure   

of itself for its own reasons

and we do not gauge enough of our lives   

by changes in temperature.

When I first began to write poems

I was laying claim to battle.

It started with a death that I tried to say

was unjust, not because of the actual

dying, but because of what was left.

What time of year was that?

I have still not yet learned to write of war.

I have friends who speak out—as is necessary—

with subtle and unsubtle force.

But I am from this place and a great deal

has been going wrong for some time now.

The two young Indian boys who almost drowned

last night in the fast-rising creek near school

are casualties in any case.

There have been too many just like them

and I have no way to fix these things.

A friend from Boston wrote something to me last week

about not having the intelligence

to take as subject for his poems

anything other than his own life.

For a while now I have sensed this in my own mood:

This poem was never supposed to mention

itself, other writers, or me.

But I will not regret that those boys made it home,

or that thee cousins used the money at the bar.

Still, there are no lights on this street.

Still, there is so much mud outside

that we carry it indoors with us.

If He Stands Still He Is Dancing

• Yes, still monologueless since all that's appeared in tablet (see above) is bleggalgaze and bleggalgaze is less popular than Jack Gilbert and Elliott Carter and DC United and Andy Partridge and Neil Young. No, writing monologues on the return to quotidian motherfuckeringness (did you know the United States had a presidential election just nine days ago? feels three decades?) not only doesn't appeal (though it's far more popular than Jack Gilbert and Elliott Carter and DC United and Andy Partridge and Neil Young), it's inconceivable (see the Gilbert poem below) at least through today (prompting the bleggalgazing), especially when I all I need to is add a link and point, See? They're all still motherfuckers and will always be.
• Second time as tragedy.
• His generation's greatest academic fraud (I say that admiringly).
• Jeebusfuck.
• In the land of the free.
• Lessons in surveillance.
• Motherfucking crackers.
• Motherfucking police, same in any language.
• I didn't vote for this motherfucker who lives in the same town I do.
• Humphries. Fred Humphries. Yes, I recycle my fourteen hour old twooter bits here if I still giggle like a six year old at it.
• George Will drops acid, Fred Hiatt publishes. See?
• Riding the general staff.
• So the thumbsucking starts.

• Eternal recurrence.
• Still life.
• Wretchedness.
• Salvation.
• Rewards.
• Ramifications.
• Anthony's links of the week.
• Bleggalgazing.
• Myersville council member not happy with his iPad!
• BRT! 
• I can't do that. 
• My old friends at Agitprop! 
• Jokes toddlers make! 
• Remembering Gilbert. 
• UPDATE! Gilbert's NYT obituary.
• Henry James, for those of you who do.
• An evening in memory of Dragomoshchenko.
• Stream Robert Wyatt's remastered first solo album.
• Brother from another planet.

TO SEE IF SOMETHING COMES NEXT

Jack Gilbert

There is nothing here at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally, and the sound of roosters
in the bright heat where he lives with the dead
woman and purity. Trying to see if something
comes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.
Maybe, he thinks, it is like the No-: whenever
the script says dances, whatever the actor does next
is a dance. If he stands still he is dancing.

He Runs a Pet Shop and the Parrot Is His Trademark

• Yes. 
• If you think there's been a boatload of Ligeti played here this year, wait for 2013.
• A rage for life.
• The greatest academic fraud of his generation (I say this admiringly) on how the Left lost the argument.
• On organizing, post-election.
• The Obama narrative on the Obama narrative.
• Ladies and gentlemen, your first trial balloon of Obamatoo.
• I trademark Obamatoo.
• Yes, that's this post's monologue. All this to set up a pun based on a line from a Stephen Dobyns' poem I wanted to use as post's title.
• >>Deleted bleggalgazing<<
• The son of Milo Minderbinder.
• Heat-vampire liberals.
• Rearguarding.
• Indulging the schadenfreude.
• Motherfucking crackers.
• Honor the soldier, scorn the chickenhawk.
• Management theory and the Chicago school.
• Carbon democracy.
• Zero votes in 59 precincts. Commence minor shitstorm.
• An unboring history of the United States.
• Police state.
• The past isn't dead. And LOL, bye Alabama! 

 

• Forgive me, I am small.
• Narrative as collection.
• The semiautobiographers.
• Coming to belief, part three.
• never so invisible as when.... 
• Sugarland Road!
• The waste carpet.
• Prunella's Neil Young playlist. Unfortunately, someone hacked into her site and posted a Jack Fucking White song. Hey Jack, write the same fucking song again. Oh, you wrote six yesterday, three more already today? OK. 
• Blogwhoring at it's most honest.
• The problems of Bartleby. Don't know what parts of this were written before or after the author's fifth glass of wine (which he admitted to last night on twuuter).
• Holyfuck, listen to this. Found here, Holyfuck, three hours of 2012 singles you won't hear on for-profit radio. Edward Ka-Spel? Will listen to more. Please throw the coins in your pocket to WFMU, they're desperate. Do it for me.
• From that list: yes.
• Probably not in the first ten on the most times played here since 2004, but certainly in the second ten:

YELLOW BEAK

Stephen Dobyns

A man owns a green parrot with a yellow beak

that he carries on his shoulder each day to work.

He runs a pet shop and the parrot is his trademark.

Each morning the man winds his way from his bus

through the square, four or five blocks. There goes

the parrot, people say. Then at night, he comes back.

The man himself is nondescript—a little overweight,

thinning hair of no color at all. It's like the parrot owns

the man, not the reverse. Then one day the man dies.

He was old. It was bound to happen. At first people

feel mildly upset. The butcher thinks he has forgotten

a customer who owes him money. The baker thinks

he's catching a cold. Soon they get it right—the parrot

is gone. Time seems out of sorts, but sets itself straight

as people forget. Then years later the fellow who ran

the diner wakes from a dream where he saw the parrot

flying along all by itself, flapping by in the morning

and cruising back home at night. Those were the years

of the man's marriage, the start of his family, the years

when the muddle of his life began to work itself out;

and it's as if the parrot were at the root of it all, linking

the days like pearls on a string. Foolish of course, but

do you see how it might happen? We wake at night

and recall an event that seems to define a fixed period

of time, perhaps the memory of a beat-up bike we had

as a kid, or a particular chair where we sat and laughed

with friends; a house, a book, a piece of music, even

a green parrot winding its way through city streets.

And do you see that bubble of air balanced at the tip

of its yellow beak? That's the time in which we lived.