We Try Out the Most Perverse Positions in the Practice of Our Nightly Act, the Penetration of the Denotative Body of the Work

 

• Got my Giftmas presents to myself yesterday, BOATLOADS of Zoviet France (replacing most of what I owned dubbed onto cassettes years ago, now useless), while listening to Zoviet France for hours last night I did some link-fishing since I while I can hear music and scan books simultaneously I can't listen to music and read novels or poetry at the same time (plus I did some link-fishing this morning over coffee). 
• Epic fail: a New Year's meditation.
• Bait and switch: the heavy price of social progress.
• Just as vile as the TSA.
• Fifteen feet of pure white snow: a New Year's meditation with news of another bleggal suicide and the Nick Cave you'd expect by the link's title.
• Harryette Mullen interview: If our attention is limited and if poets are valued according to the needs or preoccupations of each generation of readers, then cycles of memory and forgetfulness may be inevitable.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• Fiction without holes.
• Zoviet France is in the inner circle of musicians/bands for the two rotating spots in My Sillyass Deserted Island Game.

SLEEPING WITH THE DICTIONARY

Harryette Mullen

I beg to dicker with my silver-tongued companion, whose lips are ready to read my shining gloss. A versatile partner, conversant and well-versed in the verbal art, the dictionary is not averse to the solitary habits of the curiously wide-awake reader. In the dark night’s insomnia, the book is a stimulating sedative, awakening my tired imagination to the hypnagogic trance of language. Retiring to the canopy of the bedroom, turning on the bedside light, taking the big dictionary to bed, clutching the unabridged bulk, heavy with the weight of all the meanings between these covers, smoothing the thin sheets, thick with accented syllables—all are exercises in the conscious regimen of dreamers, who toss words on their tongues while turning illuminated pages. To go through all these motions and procedures, groping in the dark for an alluring word, is the poet’s nocturnal mission. Aroused by myriad possibilities, we try out the most perverse positions in the practice of our nightly act, the penetration of the denotative body of the work. Any exit from the logic of language might be an entry in a symptomatic dictionary. The alphabetical order of this ample block of knowledge might render a dense lexicon of lucid hallucinations. Beside the bed, a pad lies open to record the meandering of migratory words. In the rapid eye movement of the poet’s night vision, this dictum can be decoded, like the secret acrostic of a lover’s name.

If the Gods Implore Him to Hold His Saliva, He Doesn't Hear Them

• The traditional New Year's Song at this shitty blog.
• New Year's plagiarism!
• Today's Maqroll precept: Is it true we forget most of what has happened to us? Isn't it more likely that a portion of the past serves as seed, an unnamed incentive for setting out again toward a destiny we had foolishly abandoned? A crude consolation. Yes, we do forget. And it's just as well.
• 2013: It was a very bad year.
• Surveillance is so 2013. 
• 2014 predictions. 
• 2014.
• New term: flexian web, as in this is how the Flexians maintain continuity and control of important political and economic nodes in our Upwards Redistribution Nation. One big happy Flexian Family, which does not include us except as units of rent extraction.
• Don Durito's origins plus a bleggalgaze.
• Thoughts on a budding literary obsession. 
• Brad's 2013 reading list. I c/ped the Ruefle poem below from the post.
• HEY! Lee Ranaldo's new band:

SPIDER

Mary Ruefle

he spider can barely walk, his legs are so scared –
he’s got to get from the bar of soap to the uppermost
showerstall tile that is his home, and he has suffered
a betrayal so great he’s lost in his own neighborhood,
crawling on his hands and knees, so to speak, in and out
of the shadows of other tiles he’s passed before but
barely recognizes, given his state of shock and disbelief.
Spiders don’t hear very well — he can’t hear the rain
as it falls and cools his flaming legs, the distant screams
of another’s crisis means nothing to him, he can’t hear
his own heartbeat, an alarm casting his skeleton straight
into hell, his blood ignited by the bellows of loss.
If the gods implore him to hold his saliva, he doesn’t
hear them, he goes on crawling toward the one safe spot,
which has become, in his mind, the destination of his life
and this night rolled into one, a wet bag at the bottom
of which, were it to fall, would lie his demise –
too awful to discuss.

This Morning We Shall Spend a Few Minutes Upon the Study of Symbolism, Which Is Basic to the Nature of Money, or: Born Ninety-One Years Ago Today

Even though I should have known from The Recognitions that the world was not waiting breathlessly for my message, that it already knew, and was quite happy to live with all these false values, I’d always been intrigued by the charade of the so-called free market, so-called free enterprise system, the stock market conceived of as what was called a “people’s capitalism” where you “owned a part of the company” and so forth. All of which is true; you own shares in a company, so you literally do own part of the assets. But if you own a hundred shares out of six or sixty or six hundred million, you’re not going to influence things very much. Also, the fact that people buy securities—the very word in this context is comic—not because they are excited by the product—often you don’t know what the company makes—but simply for profit: The stock looks good and you buy it. The moment it looks bad you sell it. What had actually happened in the company is not your concern. In many ways I thought . . . the childishness of all this. Because JR himself, which is why he is eleven years old, is motivated only by good-natured greed. JR was, in other words, to be a commentary on this free enterprise system running out of control. Looking around us now with a two-trillion-dollar federal deficit and billions of private debt and the banks, the farms, basic industry all in serious trouble, it seems to have been rather prophetic.

 - William Gaddis in a 1986 interview.

• RIP Walter McCabe. Rake, fraud, friend.
• Today's Maqroll precept: Hawks screaming above the precipices and circling as they hunt their prey are the only image I can think of to evoke the men who judge, legislate, govern. Damn them.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Jon Swift Memorial Blog Round-Up. Jon Smith did me many Kinds. Many of my long-time regulars (thank you) found me via Jon Smith.
• A reminder: if you are Kinding me but me not you, please let me know.
• The least marketable skills in America.

• darkness hollows.
• Sequenza 21 recommends 31 albums of 2013.
• More on rock song intros.
• More on rock song intros.
• My four contributions. I've always thought India, the first song on the first Furs album, the best first song on a first album ever, in part because of the intro.
• More on rock song intros.
• This:

MONEY

  
Howard Nemerov
  

This morning we shall spend a few minutes   

Upon the study of symbolism, which is basic   

To the nature of money. I show you this nickel.   

Icons and cryptograms are written all over

The nickel: one side shows a hunchbacked bison   

Bending his head and curling his tail to accommodate   

The circular nature of money. Over him arches

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, and, squinched in   

Between that and his rump, E PLURIBUS UNUM,

A Roman reminiscence that appears to mean   

An indeterminately large number of things   

All of which are the same. Under the bison

A straight line giving him a ground to stand on   

Reads FIVE CENTS. And on the other side of our nickel   

There is the profile of a man with long hair   

And a couple of feathers in the hair; we know   

Somehow that he is an American Indian, and   

He wears the number nineteen-thirty-six.

Right in front of his eyes the word LIBERTY, bent   

To conform with the curve of the rim, appears   

To be falling out of the sky Y first; the Indian   

Keeps his eyes downcast and does not notice this;   

To notice it, indeed, would be shortsighted of him.   

So much for the iconography of one of our nickels,   

Which is now becoming a rarity and something of   

A collectors’ item: for as a matter of fact

There is almost nothing you can buy with a nickel,   

The representative American Indian was destroyed   

A hundred years or so ago, and his descendants’   

Relations with liberty are maintained with reservations,   

Or primitive concentration camps; while the bison,   

Except for a few examples kept in cages,

Is now extinct. Something like that, I think,

Is what Keats must have meant in his celebrated   

Ode on a Grecian Urn.

                               Notice, in conclusion,

A number of circumstances sometimes overlooked   

Even by experts: (a) Indian and bison,

Confined to obverse and reverse of the coin,   

Can never see each other; (b) they are looking   

In opposite directions, the bison past

The Indian’s feathers, the Indian past

The bison’s tail; (c) they are upside down

To one another; (d) the bison has a human face   

Somewhat resembling that of Jupiter Ammon.

I hope that our studies today will have shown you   

Something of the import of symbolism

With respect to the understanding of what is symbolized.

A Man Marooned No Longer Looks for Ships, Imagines Anything on the Horizon

So, um, yeah. Return to maroonish. This blog's Theme Song and Theme Songs Seven (the Official Bleggalgazing Anthem), Two, and Three required to celebrate the shameless self-indulgence. The green was driving me nuts, not the color, the inability to manipulate the template. Changing BLCK2DGRD to dynamic also made the inability to manipulate the template here exponentially more maddening. I needed to stop thinking about not being able to change the template. It doesn't surprise people who know me it got to be an obsession, not being able to change the template. I needed to stop thinking about it, it had long ago creeped into other territories, was becoming a main topic, had passed from metaphor to topic. So I changed the template this morning to dynamic then changed it back to basic, the conversion freeing the Apply to Template functionality, so yay me if not you. I didn't deliberately wait for the second slowest day of the year in Blegsylvania, I woke up this morning and said, Fuck it, do it or shut up, and I'm incapable of shutting up. Fine metaphors abound. More dicking around to come! yay me if not you. If I can figure out how to add blogrolls to dynamic templates, might end up there.

• Marooned.
• The Laid-Back Guy.
• As promised, the Thirteen Precepts of Maqroll the Gaviero, one a linky post until done. Number one: Thinking about time, trying to find out if past and future are valid and, in fact, exist, leads us into a labyrinth that is no less incomprehensible for being familiar.
• Hints of others.
• A midwinter celebration. 
• Bleggalgazing. I'm flattered the term stuck elsewhere.
• Bleggalgazing and remembering Jon Swift.
• Proust, for those of you who do.
• Bomb Party's Top Ten songs of year.

MYSELF I SING

George Oppen

Me! he says, hand on his chest.
Actually, his shirt.
          And there, perhaps,
The question.

Pioneers! But trailer people?
Wood box full of tools—
               The most
American. A sort of
Shrinking
          in themselves. A
Less than adult: old.

A pocket knife,
A tool—
          And I
Here talking to the man?
               The sky

That dawned along the road
And all I've been
Is not myself? I think myself
Is what I've seen and not myself

A man marooned
No longer looks for ships, imagines
Anything on the horizon. On the beach
The ocean ends in water. Finds a dune
And on the beach sits near it. Two.
He finds himself by two.
               Or more.
'Incapable of contact
Save in incidents'
               And yet at night
Their weight is part of mine.
For we are all housed now, all in our apartments,
The world untended to, unwatched.
And there is nothing left out there
As night falls, but the rocks