Birdsong, Face It, Some Male Machine Gone Addled - Repeat, Repeat - the Damage Keeps Doing, the World Ending Then Starting, the First Word, the Last, Etc.

• Birdsong today and then I'll keep Messiaen to myself until next time I don't.
• Prunella sends a clarification: she didn't receive the email, a colleague did. My apologies. The story has gone national, read more here.
• What's the point if we can't have fun? Is it meaningful to say an electron “chooses” to jump the way it does? Obviously, there’s no way to prove it. The only evidence we could have (that we can’t predict what it’s going to do), we do have. But it’s hardly decisive. Still, if one wants a consistently materialist explanation of the world—that is, if one does not wish to treat the mind as some supernatural entity imposed on the material world, but rather as simply a more complex organization of processes that are already going on, at every level of material reality—then it makes sense that something at least a little like intentionality, something at least a little like experience, something at least a little like freedom, would have to exist on every level of physical reality as well.
• Synecdochly embedded seppuku.
• You take the low road and I'll take the low road.
• RIP, Stuart Hall.
• Two Stuart Hall essays on neoliberalism.
• UPDATE! Lots more on Hall and lots of links.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• The New Inquiry's Sunday readings.

• Bleggalgazing. I don't think the Kate Bush allusion was intended (I hope I'm wrong) that has put Hounds of Love - the album, not just the song alluded to - on permanent replay today in my head. It's a good thing.
• Bleggalgazing - over the next few days I'm going to move more blogs that haven't updated in at least two months to Moribund: if and when the owner does blog again I want to be sure to see it, something easier to notice in Moribund than in the more active blogrolls. As always, unless the owner has killed the blog itself, no one is purged.
• Beatallica.
• People still care. Tom Clark's latest.
• [I] [Lied]. I'm surprised you're promoting it, said L last night at Sunday Night Pints, though I approve. Thank you, I said. I like what you sent me, said K. Thank you, I said. Are you going to point out what you're doing, L asked. Nope, I said. And that's today's Sunday Night Pints monologue, I love you, but much of what we talked about is none of your business.
• UPDATE! [I] [Lied] dead. [I] [Lied] [Dog] lives.
• The thousand somethings of someone.
• RIP, Maxine Kumin.
• More.
• Something that stutters sincerely: In the work of Hart, Lin, and others, I will argue, this deliberate embrace of failure is worked out through an explicit departure from an allegedly exhausted aesthetic and a movement toward a renewed emphasis on emotion. This ends up looking like a testing of the grounds between, on the one hand, the sincere or expressive, and on the other, the ironic or unemotional. The form this relation takes, though, depends upon thinking about postmodernism as representative of modes of discourse which thrive on techniques like parody and pastiche, on aesthetic distance and heightened self-consciousness through a variety of methods (recycling of old forms, appropriation, collage). hough postmodern art is obviously far more complex and diverse than the above characterization acknowledges, poets like Hart and Lin seem to see postmodernist poetics as having reached its limit, and are now in a position to critique its methods through (ironically) oscillating between an embrace and rejection of such techniques.

BIRDSONG, FACE IT, SOME MALE MACHINE

Marianne Boruch

Birdsong, face it, some male machine   

gone addled—repeat, repeat—the damage

keeps doing, the world ending then starting,

the first word the last, etc. It's that   

etcetera. How to love. Is a wire   

just loose? Build an ear for that. Fewer, they say.   

So many fewer, by far. He's showing off   

to call her back. Or claiming the tree.   

Or a complaint—the food around here,   

the ants, the moths, the berries. She's making   

the nest, or both are. In feathers, in hair or twigs,   

in rootlets and tin foil. Shiny bits seen

from a distance, a mistake. But fate   

has reasons to dress up. Stupid   

and dazzling have a place, a place, a place   

though never. She can't sing it.

Postscript to Last Night

Spent last night with Messiaen, spending tonight with Messiaen, here, have this if you want....

From Out at the Edge of the Key- and Fingerboards

,


I'm just short of a third through Richard Power's new novel Orfeo. I ordered a Kindle copy after opening Dalkey's first package with the wrong volume of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling and started reading before Dalkey made good on fixing its mistake, air-freighting the right volume. I've read every novel Powers has written to varying degrees of like to love. I haven't - so far, and so far it keeps getting better - been this engaged in a Power's novel since 1998's Gain (and I very much liked 2003's Plowing the Dark* and thought - think - 2006's The Echo Maker the best novel about immediate post-911 America I've read (or tried to read)).**

Disclosure: the main character of Orfeo is a composer of 20th C Classical music, the novel is full of 20th C Classical music and music theory in general and it's catnip to me, I mean Berio and Ligeti and Shostakovich and.... Olivier Messiean. Power's writes  a long, sweet, brutal twelve page love song (the post's title comes from it) to Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, describing the conditions under which he wrote Q4ET (Messiaen was a French POW in WW2 in a prison camp in Silesia, wrote the piece there) but also the musical structure (or the revolutionary lack of structure***) of Q4ET. Anyway, I'm listening to it two or three times tonight, it's in my head it can be in yours, maybe some might season their night with it.

__

* I miss John Leonard's book reviews. 
** All three are to reviews in NYRB and may be subscription only. I can get them to you via other means if you have no access and want one or other.
*** One of the book's major themes is the immediate obsolescence of revolution in art.

The Tender Forests Sigh, and the Soft Whirr of the Hygrometer Promises Oxidation of Iron, or: Born One-Hundred Five Years Ago Today

• Olivier Messiaen was born 105 years ago today. High Egoslavian Holy Day. 
• The interest-divergence dilemma between tech companies and NSA.
• Readers' supplement to Chris Hedge's piece on the white-hatting of Snowden.
• Against the police.
• When I visit the old iterations of this blog to search for a song or a poem (like I did for the Messiaen piece below the bullets, above the poem) I look at the blogrolls there to see both who I was reading and what I was writing to reflect on where I was then versus where I am now. Fuck, I once blogrolled the asshole TBogg in pathetic hopes his Malkin-Baiting Overlordness would recognize my existence. What a puny and craven partisan fuck I was. Point of this bullet being, of the Left Blegsylvanian Bleggal Overlords I once read daily I think the only one I still read regularly is Atrios, who's had his apostasies, perhaps not as severe as mine, but fuck more than most of those overlords I desperately wanted to notice me. Disclosure - he did me a few Kinds.
• For instance, Corrente finds two I no longer read.
• Which is not to suggest I'm not a puny and craven fuck now, I just don't root for the team in the bullet below anymore.
• Asshole hires asshole to try and save asshole's ass. 
• Blessed are the idiots.
• Change the world without taking power?
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• Fissure.
• 2013 end game.

SESTINA: AS THERE ARE SUPPORT GROUPS, THERE ARE SUPPORT WORDS

Albert Goldbarth

The name of his native country pronounced on a distant shore
could not please the ears of a traveller more than hearing
the words “nitrogen,” “oxidation of iron” and “hygrometer.” —Alexander von Humboldt, nineteenth-century scientist-explorer

When visiting a distant (and imponderable) shire,

one longs to hear the cry “Hygrometer!

Fresh hygrometer for sale!” Yes, and when the fair

sex sidles close and coyly murmurs “nitrogen”

into a burly masculine ear, I guarantee you: the translation

is very easy. The allurements of a local siren,

whispering the kind of patois a traveler like Lord Byron

favors, never fail to comfort, and to reassure,

evoking pleasant memories of one’s own beloved hygrometer

at home, kept fresh in Cosmoline and camphor

and awaiting one’s rearrival back in his native xenon and nitrogen.

Without these occasional reminiscences, any translation

from nation to nation, tongue to tongue, becomes a translation

difficult to sustain. I think of my grandmother: “We're not hirin’

today” “Go away” “Dumb Jew”—her share

of the language that greeted her here in the land of alien hygrometer

and freedom, where she was only one more funny-skirted for-

eigner yearning to hear a lulling Hungarian nitrogen

hum her to sleep. Eventually, of course, the American nitrogen

sufficed. Her daughter could speak, in free translation,

both uranium and argon; and her granddaughter gigs with Fire ’n

Ice, a skinhead punk-grunge group that performs in sheer

black nighties and clown wigs—she plays mean electric hygrometer

in the first set and then, for a twofer,

(very American, that) plays paper-and-comb. Far

out. She’s so fluent in various World Wide Webbery that nitrogen

in a thousand different inflections is her birthright, and almost any translation,

mind to mind, gender to gender, is second nature. “I earn

my keep, I party, I sleep” is her motto. Though she’s for-

tunate in having a lover who’s CEO at Hygrometer,

Potassium, Klein & Wong: it helps to pay the “hygrometer

man” when he knocks at the door. I won’t say that they fear

this guy exactly, but he’s a major badass nitrogen-

sucking cyberwired ninja-kicking shitheel (or, translation:

call him Sir). It makes one pine for a land where the birds all choir in

sweetly trilling melodies on a flower-scented shore,

and a translation sings all night. Row gen-

tly toward it. The tender forests sigh, and the soft whirr

of the hygrometer promises oxidation of iron. 

I've Pressed So Far Way from My Desire that If You Asked Me What I Want I Would, Accepting the Harmonious Completion of the Drift, Say Annihilation, Probably

That's Rosie in a tunnel, shot last night. Abbreviated bleggalgazing - I took a day off, nothing more, thanks for asking. That's not entirely true, I was asked, yes, that's true. Was going to take today off too but in view of the fact that A.R. Ammons was born eighty-seven years ago today and today is an Egoslavian High Holy Day, can't. Use the search box top left of this blog to find many of his poems. All you need know about Obama: the fucker tucks his polo shift into his short pants. Sludge in the hour glass. Your Fucking Washington Post gives Sunday oped inches to Donald Rumsfeld to complain about the elimination of Olympic wrestling. Your Fucking Washington Post gives Sunday oped inches to E.J. Dionne to make an impassioned case that the next pope should be a nun. I say the next pope should be a duck. There is a better chance I will be happy before E.J. Dionne. Blinder leading the blind. History unfolding. The discontents of post-democracy. The logic of surveillance. Of course they are. The Lincoln Myth of Social Mobility. No, I don't make fun of rightwingers much anymore (since I was asked why I don't much anymore over the weekend), though once that was what drew new eyes here, and probably still would. Fabulous heh. Boatloads of links. MOCO seeks to be hip! Lordy, Arsenal losing makes me giddy. Robbie Rogers. Blanchot novella, for those of you who do. Beckett, for those of you who do. Barth, for those of you who do. Quest into the unknown. The problem with anthologies. Well, not the problem, some of many problems.  A Greyhoos playlist. Messiaen. Via Edmond, Mike Watt & The Missingmen cover Wire. Three hours of excellent. Three hours of excellent. Here's Stanley on a balcony from this morning.

CONTINUITY

A.R. Ammons

I've pressed so
far way from
my desire that

if you asked
me what I
want I would,

accepting the harmonious
completion of the
drift, say annihilation,

probably.

This Goofy, Looming, Unpredictable, Garish, Frantic, Bouncy, Nonsensical Parody of the Child Has Emerged from Beyond the Horizon of Childish Optimism

Header is Momcat, matriarch of our ferals, greeting us Sunday night when we got home from dinner. After six years of appearing only when she thought we couldn't see her, in the past month she's started racing from her favorite perches as soon as she sees us or hears our cars pull to curb. Rubs against our legs, lets us pet her while she eats. Talks constantly. Kneads earth. Part of this is the ferals are prepping for winter, fattening up, always hungry, always asking for more food, but at this pace Momcat will be a cuddle slut by New Year unless the new puppy of our neighbors to the left, the unfortunately (Earthgirl and Planet can vouch) named Matt and Kim (I hate this fucking song, it plays in my head every time I see one of my neighbors, be in yours), freaks the ferals out. That's all I got other than noting I'm running out of gas at 150 pages of the Mieville, remembering why I always fail science fiction. Cactus people, frog people, horny winged retards giggling as they shit on pedestrians' heads. Also too, fuck blooger, what a motherfucking pain in the ass just to post the soundcloud widget below (and apologies for the pre-farting this post cause fucking blooger). HEY! New Pere Ubu album in January here's a new song:

• UPDATE! If motherfucking blooger and motherfucking soundcloud aren't playing nice on your browser, song is at link.
• If progressives didn't exist, big business would invent them.
• When Villagers attack, or: Why Krugman is the most useful tool in Obama's toolbox.
• UPDATE! Reading the bloggers who called those of us who refused to default to lesser-evil pragmatism before the election childish get angry when they are told they're being childish for not shutting up and embracing the pragmatism when they protest professional Liberal plans to gut safety nets by their progressive Village superiors makes me happy in my tiny and childish and I told you so way. 
• Grumpy Old Man.
• The assassin as global brand.
• Bleggalgazing.
• >>Deleted bleggalgazing<< Though I admit fuck this is occurring to me more and more often.
• Dear anne, I don't know if you're around or not, but for the first time in months I looked at the spam-catcher in blooger and saw a few of your comments. I released them into the mainstream, my apologies, but please believe me, I didn't know they were there nor have I ever banished any comment of yours.
• Illtophay.
• GIF of a dancing Greatest Academic Fraud of His Generation! I say that admiringly.
• Forty years of Hagerstown Almanac.
• I've read and loved the Hejinian - been posting poems from it here for the past year - but I was totally unaware of the Tony Lopez. Normally here's where I'd say good think I have access to a university library's stacks, but I'm going to have to buy this. That's fine.
• Ashbery has a new book.
• Poetry and the limits of binary thinking.
• UPDATE! Serendipitously, a meditation on science fiction posted nine minutes before I posted this post.
• Hey, Randal, of these 40, what say you?
• Grandpas on tour! I love those Yes albums, and if they were coming to DC and someone bought me a ticket I'd go, but.....
• But yes, you've not seen the Best of List cascades I've done in the past because fuck that.
• UPDATE! Object permanence.
• Hey, Sharon Van Etten is opening for Nick Cave in March. Suggestions on where to start to form a favorable first impression? Alternatively, fuck that.
• RIP Charles Rosen.
• Yes, Messiaen was born 104 years ago today. Nobody requested anything.

[THE CLOWN CANNOT ESCAPE GRAVITY]

Lyn Hejinian

     The clown cannot escape gravity; it cannot be light.
     With its round paper-white baby face and enormously exaggerated facial features, the clown must appear to a child like a nightmarish caricature of the figure at which the child first smiled.
     The clown is at once both newborn and a ruin. Gesticulating like a flailing infant but too big to be one, it is then the epitome of a senile being - and under its preposterous baggy pants perhaps a diapered one. We begin as small clowns and end as repulsive overgrown ones - perhaps this is the truth which with the clown frightens us.
     The clown is a swollen prototypical human, its flopping inflated body a travesty of the rounded features of young creatures that we see as adorable, vulnerable, vivacious, which is to say "cute." It appears before us to taunt us for the inadequacy of our sentimentality, the limits of our generosity, and to deny us the narcissistic pleasure of nurturing tiny beings through which life has a future.
     This goofy, looming, unpredictable, garish, frantic, bouncy, nonsensical parody of the child has emerged from beyond the horizon of childish optimism; it is clear from its expression that it has come forth out of despair to reproduce its own failure.
     Like an adolescent, its feet are too big for it - as if it had yet to grow into them, but it never will. The only fate left to the clown is to accept its punishment, its humiliation, and then depart.
     We laugh awkwardly and perhaps to loudly, as we identify with the clown.

Born 104 Years Ago Tomorrow

   
Lots more tomorrow. Requests solicited. Meantime, after listening to the quartet, head over to Zombie's and where he asks, what is the perfect album? and by perfect he means not favorite, but start to finish a perfect slab of LP that more often than not will be listened to as a whole bit rather than on shuffle. I nominated Lampchop's Nixon and Yo La Tengo's I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. Go nominate yours.