And This Is How the Dead Rise to Us, Transformed: Wet and Singing, the Tide of Voices Pearling in Our Heads

Ian Curtis was born fifty-eight years ago today. So yes, another monologue on My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game (MSADI5G). Joy Division rarely gets within two circles of rotating bands/musicians that alternate appointments to the two non-permanent seats in MSADI5G. I understand the importance of and like Joy Division but it was never sloppy reckless love. I love sloppy reckless love. There is no set number of bands/musicians in any given circle and I don't keep a list, digital, scrap paper, mental, of who is in what circle at any given time: even I'm not that compulsive. But bands/musicians wax and wane depending on when last I listened and what color the music left in my brain. The last two years I've posted the mandatory Curtis' birthday post the color got more olive then browner and this year I expected greyer but to my delight and surprise and head-chime this year the music is school bus yellow almost to orange. A band in a severe relegation tailspin, New Order, related to Joy Division of course, went from the innermost circle of rotating bands less than six years ago to fog grey today. Remember, long-timers, when a running - and true - gag here was that there was always a New Order song in my head? After the school bus yellow almost orange of Joy Division today I tried some New Order: greyer than last time's grey. Since I had many more life experiences when New Order was on the daily soundtrack than Joy Division (because of my age) I would have suspected full orange after Joy Division's school bus yellow revival, so highly do I credit my addiction for nostalgia to influence my coloring. This is unexpected and excellent and promises to, um, compulsively fascinate nobody but me. More to come!

• Foucault's legacy: Foucault's great studies of disciplinary society are useful above all because they allow us to delineate, through contrast and comparison, the digital governmentality that subjects us to new forms of control, which are less vertical, more democratic and, above all, no longer burdened by any anthropological ballast. Homo digitalis today participates in, is the primary agent of, the surveillance of himself. Digital society is becoming a form of mutualised control.
• Speaking of old gags here, let me bitch and moan then press plunge and hope I get noticed enough to incriminate myself, or at least draw a pencil-pusher's attention.
• The Truth About Our Libertarian Age. That's the name of the article. Offered not as endorsement but for your consideration. The author taught a semester here at Illtophay last academic year, a friend I trust insists he is an honorable thinker and person even though the friend disagrees at points with the author. Me, I can see all points at this point for all the good it does.
• Reflections on internet leftism (h/t): Internet leftism can and does produce the illusion that an active website possesses a significant level of political strength simply because it regularly publishes analyses and debates with other websites that also produce a similar quantity of theoretical engagements.  To claim that this demonstrates the efficacy of organization, without investigating whether this internet leftism communicates to any concrete mass organizing, simultaneously demonstrates the limits of this kind of discourse.  We often discover (and I have been guilty of this) a theory alienated from practice due to the fact that the only practice is internet ideological engagement, a refined version of the "talk-shop".  A theory divorced from any form of revolutionary activity amongst the masses in the social context in which one lives is a theory that cannot thrive on a deep form of social investigation; it investigates only amongst a vague internet population from anywhere and everywhere––it is close to book worship.
• The politics of we must change the government (the Problem of Less-Shittism: a view from New Zealand): It is that suffering, and the greater evil of Tory rule, that demands we settle for the lesser evil of the other, more humane parties of business. Yet, when faced with it, I don’t fully reject this logic. I’m a Marxist, which in the current climate is one of the most futile and impractical things a person can be – almost as much as an intellectual. I do indeed have a strong case of the pip. And whatever aversion I feel towards our current government is balanced by the conviction that Labour and the Greens (and as of now quite possibly Mana, too), are in fact more committed to capitalism and invested in it than National, convinced as they appear to be that it holds the key to a sustainable future and our very survival as a species. To me, it’s not a matter of lesser but of different evils. But I also get that concerning people’s so-called everyday lives, including my own, National is – to flip the adage – like Labour, only worse. That it will never raise benefits. That it will only reduce workers’ bargaining rights and entitlements further. That it will continue to critically weaken our environmental protections and democratic institutions. That it will be reluctant to accept social change and in all things be more racist, more sexist, more homophobic. All these may be matters of degree, large or small, but the weaker the working class is, the worse the conditions in which it lives, the more small differences become a matter of outright survival, until social justice grows in the imagination to become a sneering, grey concept, and not something that can be concretely aspired to and worked towards.
• Oil and blood in a burning world.
• Maps of/for pain.

• You really do always choose the slowest line.
• The Nationals local TV numbers are down dramatically. It wasn't me: they broadcast booth is incredibly shitty, Barker and Color both. Listen to Charlie and Dave on the radio while using your eyes on the printed word or with closed eyes falling asleep during a night game.
• This is a post in a past gag I would have non-bulleted - and it would have worked, but some gags get old, though not the gag about old gags.
• Adidas has already added the fourth star, buy your shirt today!
• 25 novels on failure: I've read eight, heard of eight, never heard of eleven, am taking advantage of having access to a major university's library stacks and consortia.
• A Deep Space Nine update: there are no permanent members of my DS9 MSADI5G, there are no members of the innermost circle of rotating cast members and the second innermost circle of rotating cast members there is only Rom. Mr Alarum told me to give him time.
• In the circle I would jettison and never look back: the rest of the cast.
• Rebuilding the House of Stones.
• Books out the second half of 2014.
• There are many more Joy Division songs below the song below the poem:

TIDE OF VOICES

Lynda Hull

At the hour the streetlights come on, buildings

turn abstract. The Hudson, for a moment, formal.   

We drink bourbon on the terrace and you speak

in the evening voice, weighted deep in the throat.

They plan to harvest oysters, you tell me,

from the harbor by Jersey City, how the waters

will be clean again in twenty years. I imagine nets

burdened with rough shells, the meat dun and sexual.

Below, the river and the high rock

where boys each year jump from bravado

or desperation. The day flares, turns into itself.

And innocently, sideways, the way we always fall

into grace or knowledge, we watched the police

drag the river for a suicide, the third this year.   

The terrible hook, the boy’s frail whiteness.

His face was blank and new as your face

in the morning before the day has worked

its pattern of lines and tensions. A hook

like an iron question and this coming

out of the waters, a flawed pearl—

a memory that wasn’t ours to claim.   

Perhaps, in a bedroom by lamplight,   

a woman waits for this boy. She may riffle drawers

gathering photographs, string, keys to abandoned rooms.

Even now she may be leaving,   

closing the door for some silence. I need

to move next to you. Water sluiced

from the boy’s hair. I need to watch you

light your cigarette, the flickering

of your face in matchlight, as if underwater,

drifting away. I take your cigarette

and drag from it, touch your hand.

Remember that winter of your long fever,   

the winter we understood how fragile

any being together was. The wall sweated   

behind the headboard and you said you felt

the rim where dreams crouch

and every room of the past. It must begin in luxury—

do you think—a break and fall into the glamour

attending each kind of surrender. Water must flood

the mind, as in certain diseases, the walls

between the cells of memory dissolve, blur

into a single stream of voices and faces.   

I don’t know any more about this river or if

it can be cleaned of its tender and broken histories—

a tide of voices. And this is how the dead

rise to us, transformed: wet and singing,   

the tide of voices pearling in our hands.

 

*

 

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*

 
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We Had So Skipped a Stage That the Great Wave of the Past, Compounded in Derision, Submerged Idea and Non-Dreamer Alike in Falsetto Starlight Like "Purity" of Design that Had Been the First Danger Sign to Wash the Sticky, Icky Stuff Down the Drain - Pfui!

• Kurt Wagner tweeted last night that Lambchop is doing two concerts of the complete Nixon album in support of his wife Mary Mancini's campaign for the Tennessee State Senate. Any excuse for a Lambchop cascade is a good excuse.
• To be honest, Nixon is my least favorite Lampchop album, which is to say I love it (and really really really love the song above) but love the others more.
• If you get to the concert, you'll get to hear Wagner's falsetto.
• Your brain is on the brink of chaos.
• The value of labor theory and the uselessness of labor theorists.
• Does Glenn Greenwald care more than you?
• On Gaza.
• On Gaza.
• Drone flight over the Mormon Temple in Silver Spring - see avatar for blogroll Mocomofo - two miles from my house. The guy had permission to fly the drone, btw.
• LEGO sells helicopter surveillance toy.
• First time in ages, blooger ate a post, this one, I typed a period at the end of a sentence, hit enter, everything disappeared. GODDAMN MY FREE BLOOGING PLATFORM! I know I'm missing a couple of links, they were the bestest links evar, sorry.
• The effects of repeatedly being called Jeffy-Weffy Ding-Dong on the human rage response in subjects named Jeff. 
• The mystery of the vanishing screwball. I was always told it destroys elbows.
• Earthgirl and I are driving up and down Skyline Drive this weekend and hiking, so Lambchop will be on the playlist. Any excuse for a Lampchop cascade is a good excuse.

THE BUNGALOWS

John Ashbery

Impatient as we were for all of them to join us,

The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away

So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth

Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them—

Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last.

And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.

They are the same aren’t they,

The presumed landscape and the dream of home

Because the people are all homesick today or desperately sleeping,   

Trying to remember how those rectangular shapes

Became so extraneous and so near

To create a foreground of quiet knowledge

In which youth had grown old, chanting and singing wise hymns that   

Will sign for old age

And so lift up the past to be persuaded, and be put down again.

The warning is nothing more than an aspirate “h”;

The problem is sketched completely, like fireworks mounted on poles:   

Complexion of evening, the accurate voices of the others.

During Coca-Cola lessons it becomes patent

Of noise on the left, and we had so skipped a stage that   

The great wave of the past, compounded in derision,   

Submerged idea and non-dreamer alike   

In falsetto starlight like “purity”

Of design that had been the first danger sign

To wash the sticky, icky stuff down the drain—pfui!

How does it feel to be outside and inside at the same time,

The delicious feeling of the air contradicting and secretly abetting

The interior warmth? But the land curdles the dismay in which it’s written   

Bearing to a final point of folly and doom

The wisdom of these generations.

Look at what you’ve done to the landscape—

The ice cube, the olive—

There is a perfect tri-city mesh of things

Extending all the way along the river on both sides

With the end left for thoughts on construction

That are always turning to alps and thresholds

Above the tide of others, feeding a European moss rose without glory.

We shall very soon have the pleasure of recording

A period of unanimous tergiversation in this respect

And to make that pleasure the greater, it is worth while

At the risk of tedious iteration, to put first upon record a final protest:   

Rather decaying art, genius, inspiration to hold to

An impossible “calque” of reality, than

“The new school of the trivial, rising up on the field of battle,   

Something of sludge and leaf-mold,” and life

Goes trickling out through the holes, like water through a sieve,   

All in one direction.

You who were directionless, and thought it would solve everything if you found one,

What do you make of this? Just because a thing is immortal

Is that any reason to worship it? Death, after all, is immortal.   

But you have gone into your houses and shut the doors, meaning   

There can be no further discussion.

And the river pursues its lonely course

With the sky and the trees cast up from the landscape

For green brings unhappiness—le vert Porte malheur.

“The chartreuse mountain on the absinthe plain

Makes the strong man’s tears tumble down like rain.”

All this came to pass eons ago.

Your program worked out perfectly. You even avoided

The monotony of perfection by leaving in certain flaws:

A backward way of becoming, a forced handshake,

An absent-minded smile, though in fact nothing was left to chance.

Each detail was startlingly clear, as though seen through a magnifying glass,   

Or would have been to an ideal observer, namely yourself—

For only you could watch yourself so patiently from afar

The way God watches a sinner on the path to redemption,

Sometimes disappearing into valleys, but always on the way,

For it all builds up into something, meaningless or meaningful

As architecture, because planned and then abandoned when completed,   

To live afterwards, in sunlight and shadow, a certain amount of years.   

Who cares about what was there before? There is no going back,   

For standing still means death, and life is moving on,

Moving on towards death. But sometimes standing still is also life.

Counterproductive, as You Realize Once Again That the Longest Way Is the Most Efficient Way, the One That Looped Among Islands, and You Always Seemed to Be Traveling in a Circle

This past Tuesday night. That's Canal to Clara Barton to Cabin John Parkway to Beltway, was supposed to be all the way to exit for Rockville Pike (though the signs on the Beltway call it Wisconsin Avenue - it doesn't change to Wisconsin until a further mile south) but either the iPhone cut it off prematurely, in which case fuck that, or I screwed up and accidentally turned it off, in which case fuck me.

Planet took us out to dinner for our anniversary last night and then I did no link-fishing (and a quick scan of Blegsylvania this morning suggests not much was posted yesterday at least in my Stringtown - though :-p wants to start a band, and Ethan has a mediation on taking scifi as seriously as those who distrust it - it's summer, blogs lay dormant then suddenly love come in spurts). As threatened, have two Kate Bush songs and a John Ashbery poem in anticipation of their Egoslavian Holy Days later this month. Please! send me links to Kate Bush songs you'd like to hear, the rarer the better.








JUST WALKING AROUND

John Ashbery

What name do I have for you?

Certainly there is not name for you

In the sense that the stars have names

That somehow fit them. Just walking around,

An object of curiosity to some,

But you are too preoccupied

By the secret smudge in the back of your soul

To say much and wander around,

Smiling to yourself and others.

It gets to be kind of lonely

But at the same time off-putting.

Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way,

The one that looped among islands, and

You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.

And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.

There is light in there and mystery and food.

Come see it.

Come not for me but it.

But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.

But Poet, Sucker, Fool, It's Your Job to Find Meaning in All This Because You Are Delusional Enough to Believe That, Yes, Poetry Is a Sickness, but Somehow If You Can Just Scrape Together Enough Beauty and Truth to Recall, Yes, That Broadway Car Crash Was Fucked Up, but the Way the Rain Fell to Wash Away the Blood Not Ten Minutes After the Ambulance Left Was Gorgeous

• I really really really like Fucked Up. Especially when the news in the world pisses me off. They are in the Second Circle of MSADI5G.
• I know I said there wouldn't be links today but (a) many of the few people who come here and who know Earthgirl and me and were at our wedding 26 years ago today have all seen today's anniversary post and (b) the links need go out today before their expiration dates hit and (c) the news of the world pisses me off and (d) once I made the connection between the band and poem I was incapable of waiting for tomorrow and (e) tomorrow's post plans now just include a homemade video and haikus of Deep Space Nine episodes and (f) I'm a fucking attention slut and (g) sometimes I need to scream so I can move on to the next scream.
• Chomsky's provisional fascism.
• All we are saying is give hell a chance.
• The MUCH greater evil: The idea that neocons have been in the ‘wilderness’ during the Obie years seems rather strange to me, though of course Hillary is and always has been much more deeply committed to the neocon program than the pathetic outgunned nonentity who currently lives in the White House, desperately trying to split all the differences he can find. Even stranger, then, is the idea that an alliance between neocons and Hillary might be something to express in the future tense or subjunctive mood. The Clintons — and Hillary in particular — have always been committed, aggressive interventionists and sedulous water-carriers for Israel. From a neocon point of view, what’s not to like?
• Israel does not want peace: There is nothing I have ever written that I would be happier to be proved wrong about. But the evidence is piling up. In fact, it can be said that Israel has never wanted peace – a just peace, that is, one based on a just compromise for both sides. It’s true that the routine greeting in Hebrew is Shalom (peace) – shalom when one leaves and shalom when one arrives. And, at the drop of a hat, almost every Israeli will say he wants peace, of course he does. But he’s not referring to the kind of peace that will bring about the justice without which there is no peace and there will be no peace. Israelis want peace, not justice, certainly not anything based on universal values. Thus, “Peace, peace, when there is no peace.” Not only is there no peace: In recent years, Israel has moved away from even the aspiration to make peace. It has despaired utterly of it. Peace has disappeared from the Israeli agenda, its place taken by the collective anxieties that are systematically implanted, and by personal, private matters that now take precedence over all else.
• Today in motherfucking cops.

• Here, happier links: 
• Price Reductions.
• Food links.
• Through the Looking-Glass: Well, it won’t be the Bite for which this World Cup is remembered after all. Something more shocking did happen. The form book turned out to be a useless guide (Brazil were undefeated in twelve games before last night). Home advantage counted for nothing in the end. Goldman Sachs got it wrong. Stephen Hawking got it wrong. I got it wrong. Everyone got it wrong. Sure, there will be people saying that this Brazilian team was there for the taking, that someone was bound to expose its manifold weaknesses. But no one predicted that result. It simply doesn’t happen that big teams concede seven goals at home against major rivals. It doesn’t happen in the Premier League or in La Liga or in Serie A. It’s inconceivable that Chelsea or Barcelona or Juventus would ship seven at home to anyone, no matter how weakened their team or how unlucky the performance. It doesn’t happen in the Champions League or in the European Championships. It’s certainly never happened at the World Cup. Before last night’s match some bookmakers had Germany as the slight favourites to win, but the margin of their victory is perhaps the biggest upset in the history of the sport.
• I'm glad that Germany stomped for the sole reason that had Brazil lost close and heartbreakingly they would have whined Neymar unto eternity. 
• The US are now World Cup regulars and it's time to expect better: Something else about these finals has me feeling old. Commentators here burbled incessantly about the growing ratings, the traveling support and the viewing parties like they were the new new thing. The latest generation of viewers and journalists shows up every four years, and for them, everything must be new because they're seeing it for the first time. The incremental, evolutionary and massive growth of football in America since 1990 is there for all to see. But they don't, and I'm tired of repeating myself. One ESPN commentator said of getting out the group: "It's a heck of a landmark day for US soccer." No, not really.
• Heroes and Villians: If I was an American conservative who valued art and literature (there are still a few such benighted individuals around), I would find Adam Bellow's recent screed, "Let Your Right Brain Run Free," deeply embarrassing. While he claims he is not calling for outright propaganda in his plea for assistance in creating a "counterculture" that will arise through the efflorescence of a new "conservative fiction" (he wants money to publish it, of course), it hardly seems a contribution to literature to advocate for writers who "craft dramatic situations and pick heroes and villains that serve more subtly to advance their point of view." Advancing a point of view, whether it be from the right or the left, is not an act of creating culture but of doing politics by other means, although Bellow is not overly scrupulous to disavow that his ultimate goal is transparently political.
• LOTS OF FREE MUSIC FROM MERGE!

POETRY IS A SICKNESS

Ed Bok Lee

You write not what you want,

but what flaws flower from rust

You want to write about the universe,

how the stars are really tiny palpitating ancestor hearts

watching over us

and instead what you get on the page

is that car crash on Fourth and Broadway—

the wails of the girlfriend or widow,

her long lamentation so sensuous

in terrible harmony with sirens in the distance

Poetry is a sickness

You want to write about Adoration,

the glistening sweat on your honey's chest

in which you've tasted the sun's caress,

and instead what you get

is a poem about the first of four times

your mother and father split up

Want to write about the perfection of God

and end up with just another story

of a uniquely lonely childhood

If I had a dime for every happy poem I wrote

I'd be dead

Want to write about the war, oppression, injustice,

and look here, see, what got left behind

when all the sand and dust cleared

is the puke-green carpet in the Harbor Lights Salvation Army treatment center

A skinny Native girl no older than seventeen

braids the reddish hair

of her little four- or five-year-old Down's Syndrome daughter

Outside, no blinking stars

No holy kiss's approach

Only a vague antiseptic odor and Christian crest on the wall staring back at you

I didn't say all this to that dude who sent me his poems

from prison

You want everyone to feel empowered

Want them to believe there is beauty locked in amber

inside each of us, and you chip away at that shit

one word at a time

You stampede with verbs, nouns, and scalpel adjectives

Middle-finger your literalist boss

Blow grocery cash on library fines

Sprain your left knee loading pallets all day for Labor Ready

You live in an attic for nine years

You go bankrupt

You smoke too much

Drink too much

Alienate family and friends

Say yes, poetry is a sickness, but fuck it

Do it long enough, and I promise like an anti-superhero

your secret power will become loss

Loss like only old people must know

when the last red maple on the block goes

and the drizzle turns to snow

Maybe the best poem is always the one you shouldn't have written

The ghazal that bled your index finger

Or caused your sister to reject your calls for a year

The sonnet that made the woman you loved fear

That slam poem you're still paying for

The triolet that smiled to violate you

through both ears

But Poet, Sucker, Fool

It's your job

to find meaning in all this because

you are delusional enough to believe

that, yes, poetry is a sickness,

but somehow if you can just scrape together enough beauty and truth

to recall, yes, that Broadway car crash was fucked up,

but the way the rain fell to wash away the blood

not ten minutes after the ambulance left

was gorgeous

Or how maybe your mother and father would sometimes scream,

but also wrapped never-before-seen tropical

fruit for one another every Xmas Eve

How in the morning before opting out I watched

that tiny Native girl fumbling

to braid her own and her now-

snoring mother's long black hair

together

                   in a single cornrow—

If I can just always squiggle

down like this:

                                even half as much

as what I'd otherwise need

to forget

maybe these scales

really will one day tip

to find each flaw that made us

Exquisite

At Waffle House, They Fired Her on the Spot

• It's been ages since I posted any PJ Harvey, what the fuck is wrong with me, she's in the second circle of MSADI5G. Been three year's since anything new.
• Jeebus Effing Crisco. (There's today's poem tie-in, btw.) The dilemma: is priming this country's soccer-neutrals into flag-waving jingoistic bandwagoneers worth pissing off this country's soccer-hating flag-waving jingoistic rightwing assholes?
• And the people who feed soccer-hating flag-waving rightwing assholes their jingoism: Coulter plugs in the usual culture-war critiques about the game -- that soccer is somehow socialistic and immigrant-ish and faintly fruity; you know this song. She gets her jokes off like the pro she is. But she is, as usual, mostly writing to remind readers of where they should stand. That is, that the people her readers have defined themselves against really like this stuff. That is her whole argument against the sport, finally.
• Teething troubles: on Suarez.
• How the world works: Luis Suárez has apologised to Giorgio Chiellini “and the entire football family” for biting the Italy defender, an offence that has earned the Uruguayan a four-month ban from football, and effectively admitted he lied to Fifa when contesting the charge handed down by the game’s governing body. In a move instigated without Liverpool’s knowledge and that will inevitably be considered as a public relations ploy from the striker’s camp before a mooted transfer to Barcelona, Suárez tweeted his apology on Monday from his home outside Montevideo. The forward, twice previously sanctioned for biting an opponent on the field of play, vowed there would “never again be another incident like this” and expressed his regret at what had occurred in Uruguay’s critical 1-0 Group D victory in Natal... Perhaps more pertinently, there had been strong suggestions in Spain that Barcelona would pursue the signing of Suárez from Liverpool only if he had issued a formal apology and vowed there would be no repeat of such behaviour in future. Barça hope to secure the player this summer, with the Chile forward Alexis Sánchez potentially moving to Anfield as an eye-catching makeweight, and have indicated they have the funds to compete at such a level in the transfer market.
• Barca's response to Suarez's apology.
• Is there such a thing as a beautiful defeat? If we’re lucky, we can focus on the victors, who sometimes—as in the case of Colombia the other day—feel like truly deserving ones for the way they brought us joy in the process of winning victory. In that odd calculus of the World Cup, we can root for France, and Karim Benzema, to avenge Algeria—instead of facing them, as many had begun hoping they would. But, in the end, slowly, we watch a tournament that whittles down to the usual European and South American teams, the familiar match-ups, a cycle of repetition. All the African teams are gone. I hope that there will be surprises ahead: maybe Costa Rica will defeat Holland, or the U.S. will make a historic run far into the tournament. But the settling process has begun, reminding us that at this stage of the tournament the dream of the radically unexpected, of the impossible, is usually replaced by that of the usual. Even as I look forward to the final weeks, I always find there is an odd sadness about this part of the tournament in which so many of the different possibilities we had envisioned vanish before our eyes.
• The Rise of the Red Devils. Yes, I'll be watching today with Planet. Then dinner at the best Thai restaurant, Ruan Thai in Wheaton, I've ever.

• Propaganda Hydrahead.
• Coywolves: Coywolves are about 62 percent coyote, 27 percent wolf and 11 percent dog, according to a 2013 paper by Monzon published in Molecular Ecology. Researchers have found them as close as Quantico, Va., and surrounding Prince William County, and game-management officials have confirmed their presence in Laytonsville, Md., in Montgomery County. We live two hundred yards from Rock Creek Park. We hear coyotes howl at night occasionally. Have seen coyotes. Don't think I've seen a coywolf yet.
• Tower Road! A long-lost friend used to live on Tower Road.
• Why do you study the shell?
• Star Trek: the HR Perspective.
• OK, Deep Space Nine: I'm midway through Season Four. Motherfucking Worf is on the show. The only character I like is Garak. I just saw an episode created solely to rif on early Bond movies, Garak was in it, it just sucked sooooo much. Now Ducat has a crush on Kira, everybody has a crush on Kira. I don't think I'm gonna make it.
• I did watch Strangelove again last night. I'd forgot the Ripper was McCluskey, got to break Pacino's jaw, forgot that Joe McCarthy was listed in actors' opening credits.

DOUBLE VISION

Wilmer Mills

At Waffle House, they fired her on the spot:

“You talk too much!”

                                        She’d told her customers

That “made” gets “mad” and “poet” goes to “pot”

Without the letter e. The “amateurs,”

She’d said, “inherit everything: the sand,

The stars, the world that only God possesses.”

While washing dishes with a bleeding hand,

She’d told them, “through ‘possession’s’ double ‘esses’

There’s a line that cleaves; things come apart;

‘Refrain’ means both ‘hold back’ and ‘go again’;

Things join in wholes of which they are a part.”

She “touched” the people. Was it such a sin?

Her broken pencil left a double line

On my tab, both legible as one design.

Therefore, Since We Have to Do Our Business in Spite of Things, Why Not Make It in Spite of Everything?

We hiked! Six miles at Little Bennett, a circuit we'd done clockwise once we did counter-clockwise yesterday. Not rigorous at any point, Earthgirl thought it a good hike to test her knee, both before we started and when we ended, her knee was stiff when she started, fine when finished. Today's content? Here's content from Saturday which features a Resident's cascade, here's content from yesterday which features a This Heat cascade.

Two High Egoslavian Holy Days approaching, one in twenty-eight days, one in thirty, the latter an irreplaceable permanent member MSADI5G. Expect a lot of these two in the upcoming days, not everyday necessarily, but a lot.








PYROGRAPHY

John Ashbery

Out here on Cottage Grove it matters. The galloping

Wind balks at its shadow. The carriages

Are drawn forward under a sky of fumed oak.

This is America calling:

The mirroring of state to state,   

Of voice to voice on the wires,

The force of colloquial greetings like golden

Pollen sinking on the afternoon breeze.

In service stairs the sweet corruption thrives;

The page of dusk turns like a creaking revolving stage in Warren, Ohio.

If this is the way it is let’s leave,

They agree, and soon the slow boxcar journey begins,   

Gradually accelerating until the gyrating fans of suburbs   

Enfolding the darkness of cities are remembered   

Only as a recurring tic. And midway

We meet the disappointed, returning ones, without its   

Being able to stop us in the headlong night

Toward the nothing of the coast. At Bolinas

The houses doze and seem to wonder why through the   

Pacific haze, and the dreams alternately glow and grow dull.   

Why be hanging on here? Like kites, circling,   

Slipping on a ramp of air, but always circling?

But the variable cloudiness is pouring it on,

Flooding back to you like the meaning of a joke.

The land wasn’t immediately appealing; we built it

Partly over with fake ruins, in the image of ourselves:

An arch that terminates in mid-keystone, a crumbling stone pier   

For laundresses, an open-air theater, never completed

And only partially designed. How are we to inhabit

This space from which the fourth wall is invariably missing,   

As in a stage-set or dollhouse, except by staving as we are,   

In lost profile, facing the stars, with dozens of as yet

Unrealized projects, and a strict sense

Of time running out, of evening presenting   

The tactfully folded-over bill? And we fit   

Rather too easily into it, become transparent,   

Almost ghosts. One day

The birds and animals in the pasture have absorbed   

The color, the density of the surroundings,   

The leaves are alive, and too heavy with life.

A long period of adjustment followed.

In the cities at the turn of the century they knew about it   

But were careful not to let on as the iceman and the milkman   

Disappeared down the block and the postman shouted   

His daily rounds. The children under the trees knew it   

But all the fathers returning home

On streetcars after a satisfying day at the office undid it:   

The climate was still floral and all the wallpaper   

In a million homes all over the land conspired to hide it.   

One day we thought of painted furniture, of how   

It just slightly changes everything in the room

And in the yard outside, and how, if we were going

To be able to write the history of our time, starting with today,   

It would be necessary to model all these unimportant details   

So as to be able to include them; otherwise the narrative   

Would have that flat, sandpapered look the sky gets   

Out in the middle west toward the end of summer,   

The look of wanting to back out before the argument   

Has been resolved, and at the same time to save appearances

So that tomorrow will be pure. Therefore, since we have to do our business   

In spite of things, why not make it in spite of everything?   

That way, maybe the feeble lakes and swamps

Of the back country will get plugged into the circuit   

And not just the major events but the whole incredible

Mass of everything happening simultaneously and pairing off,

Channeling itself into history, will unroll

As carefully and as casually as a conversation in the next room,   

And the purity of today will invest us like a breeze,

Only be hard, spare, ironical: something one can

Tip one’s hat to and still get some use out of.

The parade is turning into our street.

My stars, the burnished uniforms and prismatic   

Features of this instant belong here. The land

Is pulling away from the magic, glittering coastal towns

To an aforementioned rendezvous with August and December.   

The hunch is it will always be this way,   

The look, the way things first scared you   

In the night light, and later turned out to be,   

Yet still capable, all the same, of a narrow fidelity   

To what you and they wanted to become:   

No sighs like Russian music, only a vast unravelling   

Out toward the junctions and to the darkness beyond

To these bare fields, built at today’s expense.

Self-Expression Is Evil

Another new promo for forthcoming new Pere Ubu album. Ubuprojex says Tour Dates to Be Announced Soon. I'm checking daily. Will travel within the time zone. Have I ever mentioned how much I love Pere Ubu? Look, I've finally added the tag MSADI5G, though I'll not track back. Lordy, the below is one of dozens of my five favorite Pere Ubu songs ever.