Here Come the Bald Arbiters with Their Eyes on Chains

At three friends' encouragement I have been watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from beginning to end. I know the original series by heart; when I was managing Crown Books 826 and hired Hamster for a second key, we'd look through a TV Guide and compete to guess the episode by the episode's title (we also had a John McLaughlin head taped to a black file cabinet by the swinging door into the cash register and manager's office area, but that's another story). I know Star Trek: The Next Generation by heart from Season Three to finale: Seasons One and Two SUCK! SUCK! SUCK! and Maria Muldour as Doctor Polanski can send her camel to bed, so much do the first two seasons suck. I remember watching Star Trek: Voyager but nothing much about it other than Seven, second-in-command Chipotle, and Captain Janeway, now a Russian prisoner in some show, Chartreuse Is the New Vermillion, that Earthgirl and Planet watch.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - I never got. I never stopped to think why beyond what episodes I saw didn't make me want to care. My friends insist DS9 is vastly superior to Voyager (I have friends with whom I've discussed this who insist those who think DS9 vastly superior to Voyager are fucking nuts). The friends' book and music recommendations to me have been uniformly solid (even if a particular book or musician don't sing to me - I was the poorer receptacle, I can read or hear the merits even if I don't receive right), so I downloaded Netflix and started the series.

I'm in Season Five now: I don't dislike the series, I don't like the series. It does some story lines well, it develops some characters better than others. I really like Rom. I really dislike Deep Space Nine's homages to Star Trek legacies, its stroking of uberfans, which peaked last night when Sisko and Dax and O'Brien and Bashir and Odo beam over to Kirk's enterprise to stop a Klingon spy from stealing a Bejoran magic orb and going back in time to blow up Kirk with a Tribble. That's not the stupid part. (Here's a stupid part: O'Brien sees The Original Series Klingons who don't have face plates, looks at Worf, Worf says, We don't talk about it with outsiders.) Throughout the episode DS9 producers interwove scenes from The Original Series' Tribbles episode into the DS9 episode, superimposing DS9 actors into the scenes. That's fine, that's schtick I can handle. At the very end, though, Sisko, after an episode of We must not take chances to alter the timeline bullshit, alters the timeline to meet and shake hands with Kirk (to no timeline-changing harm, of course). That's not the really stupid part. No, for this scene producers didn't use The Original Series' Tribble episode for Kirk, they used the end of Mirror Mirror when Kirk recognized, on his Enterprise, the body double of the Captain's Woman he'd been banging in the alternative universe, Sisko interposed as the Captain's Woman, I....

I..... but.... fine metap..... am going to play two more  Kate Bush songs and post another John Ashbery poem in anticipation of their upcoming High Holy Days....








INSTEAD OF LOSING

John Ashbery

Anyone, growing up in a space you hadn't used yet
would've done the same: bother the family's bickering
to head straight into the channel. My, those times
crackled near about us, from sickly melodrama
instead of losing, and the odd confusion... confusion.

I thought if it then, and in the mountains.
During the day we perforated the eponymous city limits
and then some. No one knew all about us
but some knew plenty. It was time to leave that town
for an empty drawer
into which they sailed. Some of the eleven thousand
virgins were getting queasy. I say, stop the ship!
No can do. Here come the bald arbiters
with their eyes on chains, just so, like glasses.
Heck, it's only a muskrat
that's seen better years, when things were medieval
and gold....

So you people in the front,
leave. You see them. And you understand it all.
It doesn't end, night's sorcery notwithstanding.
Would you have preferred to be a grownup in earlier times
than the child can contain or imagine?
Or is right now the answer - you know, the radio
we heard news on late at night,
out checkered fortunes so pretty.
Here's your ton of plumes, and your Red Seal Recors.
The whole embrace.

What a Big Bald Spot You Have!

My sincerest apologies, I hadn't blogfarted like that in months, I'd been diligent about saving drafts by setting publishing dates a year ahead to prevent such blogfarts. I mean I know I'm an attention slut but posting a draft of the next post tonight was an accident. Since I pumped the feed I feel responsible to fill the feed, I hate those The Post You Clicked Doesn't Exist messages, this seems a .06% less-shitty solution, fine metaphors abound. Hope you like the songs (lyrics to above!). They'll be gone, as will this post, when the post I didn't mean to post is posted Wednesday (or Thursday)...

UPDATE! I didn't expect anyone to comment but since Thunder did the post has to stay. This is another example of why I am always writing about rules.

These Are the Words That the Voice Was Repeating

This year's edition of the traditional post. Here what I wrote last year:

Fifty-three today, this guy. When we met in 5th grade forty-four years ago neither of us predicted the weirdest year of our lives would be 2013.

So this year it's been forty-five years since we met, and this year makes last year look normal, though I'll add this reminder this year: Landru was the first human not Earthgirl not me not a doctor or nurse to hold Planet.

   
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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.

Born Ninety-One Years Ago Today

CHILDREN OF OUR ERA

Wisława Szymborska
Translated by Joanna Trzecia

We are children of our era;
our era is political.

All affairs, day and night,
yours, ours, theirs,
are political affairs.

Like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin a political cast,
your eyes a political aspect.

What you say has a resonance;
what you are silent about is telling.
Either way, it's political.
 
Even when you head for the hills
you're taking political steps
on political ground.

Even apolitical poems are political,
and above us shines the moon,
by now no longer lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
Question? What question? Dear, here's a suggestion:
a political question.

You don't even have to be a human being
to gain political significance.
Crude oil will do,
or concentrated feed, or any raw material.

Or even a conference table whose shape
was disputed for months:
should we negotiate life and death
at a round table or a square one?
Meanwhile people were dying,
animals perishing,
houses burning,
and fields growing wild,
 just as in times most remote
and less political.



DREAMS

Wisława Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak
      

Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft,

mocking magnets, graphs, and maps—

in a split second the dream

piles before us mountains as stony

as real life.

And since mountains, then valleys, plains

with perfect infrastructures.

Without engineers, contractors, workers,

bulldozers, diggers, or supplies—

raging highways, instant bridges,

thickly populated pop-up cities.

Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen—

crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us

and when to vanish.

Without architects deft in their craft,

without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers—

on the path a sudden house just like a toy,

and in it vast halls that echo with our steps

and walls constructed out of solid air.

Not just the scale, it’s also the precision—

a specific watch, an entire fly,

on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers,

a bitten apple with teeth marks.

And we—unlike circus acrobats,

conjurers, wizards, and hypnotists—

can fly unfledged,

we light dark tunnels with our eyes,

we wax eloquent in unknown tongues,

talking not with just anyone, but with the dead.

And as a bonus, despite our own freedom,

the choices of our heart, our tastes,

we’re swept away

by amorous yearnings for—

and the alarm clock rings.

So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books,

the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,

the doctors with couches for analyses—

if anything fits,

it’s accidental,

and for one reason only,

that in our dreamings,

in their shadowings and gleamings,

in their multiplings, inconceivablings,

in their haphazardings and widescatterings

at times even a clear-cut meaning

may slip through.



CAT IN AN EMPTY APARTMENT

Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Die—you can’t do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here
but nothing is the same.
Nothing’s been moved
but there’s more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,
but they’re new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.

Something doesn’t start
at its usual time.
Something doesn’t happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Every closet’s been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken:
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.

Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.



THE END AND THE BEGINNING

Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Joanne Trzeciak

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.



SOME LIKE POETRY

Wislawa Szymborska

Some--
that means not all.
Not even the majority of all but the minority.
Not counting the schools, where one must,
and the poets themselves, there will be perhaps two in a thousand.
Like--
but one also likes chicken noodle soup,
one likes compliments and the color blue, one likes an old scarf,
one likes to prove one's point,
one likes to pet a dog.

Poetry--
but what sort of thing is poetry?
More than one shaky answer
has been given to this question.
But I do not know and do not know and clutch on to it,
as to a saving bannister.

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.

The Wine Tasted Like Sunshine in the Basement

That song and video break my heart each time. I didn't hike yesterday - I mowed the lawn, did yard work, my next weekend is booked, Saturday with something that will both spectacularly suck and be exceptionally entertaining, something I will dearly want to write about (and may, but not here), Sunday with something that will be nice and boringly entertaining that I will not want to write about anywhere, I thought, I may not get to the yard for two weeks better do it today. I'll try to sneak a hike in next Sunday morning, perhaps Earthgirl will be healed enough to join me. At dinner with my parents last night for Father's Day with Planet and SeatSix, SeatSix asked me why I just don't make it either a Sillyass Deserted Island Six Game or add a fourth permanent post in the Five. Silly SeatSix.







I don't do this lightly - it's been years since I swapped out a permanent seat. It's not that I love Guided by Voices/Robert Pollard projects less, it's that in this time in my mind in my life in my notebooks on my hikes on my drives when falling asleep nothing pings my chords, triggers cascades, more than Lambchop, now the third permanent member of My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game.








HAPPINESS

Jane Kenyon

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never

knew about, who flies a single-engine plane

onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes

into town, and inquires at every door

until he finds you asleep midafternoon

as you so often are during the unmerciful

hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.

It comes to the woman sweeping the street

with a birch broom, to the child

whose mother has passed out from drink.

It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing

a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,

and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots

in the night.

                     It even comes to the boulder

in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,

to rain falling on the open sea,

to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Sixty-One Today

That is easily one of the five most posted songs on this blog. David Thomas is 61 today. Pere Ubu (all editions) in particular and all Thomas projects in general have one of three permanent seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Game. Today is a High Egoslavian Holy Day, there are only two holier, one equal. Click the Pere Ubu tab in post footer for lots more songs - some of them the same songs over and over, I love them.







Thanks to David and Alfrey for Kind words and requests.

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Here, the full album - note its cover has been this blog's avatar for the music blogroll since day one - that changed my ears in 1978.

I Got A Vacuum Cleaner in My Head

Tomorrow is a High Egoslavian Holy Day, the song above this blog's Theme Song Two since day one, guess whose birthday. Requests - Pere Ubu, Two Pale Boys, Rocket from the Tomb, any Thomas project  - for tomorrow's deluge welcome.

Ladies and Gentlemen, It Gives Me a Pleasure

Pere Ubu fixes things.

Henry Cow? More here (bonus: w/great William Carlos Williams poem).







No I didn't forget, Chuck Barris is 85 today this year, he was 89 last year, I hope it's him that keeps fucking with his wikipedia page.

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.”

Born Eighty-Four Years Ago Today

The traditional Egoslavian birthday post for John Barth. If I played the Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game with novelists I'd....

I could do the math and fuck that but I'd guess May is the birthday-iest month in Egoslavia, there are a couple more, including a High Holy Day still left to come. These are simultaneously my favorite posts and this blog's least read posts. Sweet. I would not read and think like I do if Gary Pittenger, English 101 professor at Montgomery College, had not pushed Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor into my hands in 1980. John Barth interview from 1985. PDF of Sot-Weed Factor. On Sot-Weed Factor, part one, part two. Discovering Sot-Weed Factor. The Case for John Barth. On Giles Goat-Boy. Here's the opening to my second favorite Barth novel, Giles Goat-Boy:

Publisher's Disclaimer

The reader must begin this book with an act of faith and end it with an act of charity. We ask him to believe in the sincerity and authenticity of this preface, affirming in return his prerogative to be skeptical of all that follows it.

The manuscript submitted to us some seasons ago under the initials R.N.S., and by us retitled Giles Goat-Boy, is enough removed from the ordinary and so potentially actionable as to make inadequate the publisher's conventional disclaimer: "Any resemblance to persons living or dead," etc. The disclaimer's very relevance-which we firmly assert-was called into question even prior to the manuscript's receipt, as has been everything about the book since, from its content to its authorship. The professor and quondam novelist whose name appears on the title-page (our title-page, not the one following his prefatory letter) denies that the work is his, but "suspects" it to be fictional-a suspicion that two pages should confirm for the average reader. His own candidate for its authorship is one Stoker Giles or Giles Stoker- whereabouts unknown, existence questionable-who appears to have claimed in turn 1 ) that he too was but a dedicated editor, the text proper having been written by a certain automatic computer, and 2) that excepting a few "necessary basic artifices" * the book is neither fable nor fictionalized history, but literal truth. And the computer, the mighty "WESCAC"-does it not too disclaim authorship? It does.

* The computer's assumption of a first-person narrative viewpoint, we are told. is one such "basic artifice." The reader will add others, perhaps challenging their "necessity" as well.

Frankly, what we hope and risk in publishing Giles Goat-Boyis that the question of its authorship will be a literary and not a legal one. If so, judging from the fuss in our office these past months, the book affords more pregnant matter for controversy. Merely deciding to bring it out has already cost us two valued colleagues, for quite different reasons. Five of us were party to the quarrel, which grew so heated, lengthy, and complex that finally, as editor-in-chief, I was obliged to put an end to it. No further discussion of the book was permitted. Inasmuch as the final responsibility was mine I requested from each of my four associates a brief written statement on the questions: should we publish the manuscript entitled Giles Goat-Boy? If so, why, and if not, why not?

Their replies anticipate, I think, what will be the range of public and critical reaction to the book. I reprint them here (with signatures and certain personal references omitted) not in the hope of forestalling that reaction, but to show that our decision was made neither hastily nor in bad faith:


Editor A

I am quite sensible that fashions have changed since my own tenure as editor-in-chief: marriage has lost its sanctity, sex its mystery; every filthiness is published in the name of Honesty, all respect for law and discipline is gone-to say nothing of proprietyand seemliness, whose very names are sneered at. Cynicism is general: the student who eschews cheating like the young girl who eschews promiscuity or the editor who values principle over profit, is looked upon as a freak. Whatever is old-a man, a building, a moral principle is regarded not as established but as obsolete; to be preserved if at all for its antiquarian interest, but got rid of without compunction the moment it becomes in the way. In the way, that is, of self-interest and the tireless sensualism of youth. Indeed fashions change, have always changed, and there's the point. Granted that every generation must write its own "New Syllabus" or re-interpret the Old one, rebel against its teachers, challenge all the rules-all the more important then that the Rules stand fast! Morality like motion has its laws; each generation takes its impetus from the resistance of its forebears, like runners striving against the ground, and those who would abolish the old Answers (I don't speak of restating or modifying them, which is eternally necessary) would turn the track underfoot to quickmire, with fatal consequences for the race of men.

This Revised New Syllabus is nothing new, but as old as sickness of the spirit- not a revision of anything, but a repudiation of all that's wholesome and redeeming. It is for us to repudiate it. Publishing remains despite all a moral enterprise, and is recognized as such in its heart of hearts even by the public that clamors for gratification of its appetites. The sensational, the vulgar, the lurid, the cheap the hackneyed-there is an innocence about these things in their conventional and mass-produced forms, even a kind of virtue; the novelists everyone purchases do no harm as they line our pockets and their own. They are not difficult; they do not astonish; they rebel along traditional lines shock us in customary ways, and teach us what we know already. Their concerns are modest, their literary voice and manner are seldom wild, only their private lives, which make good copy: in straightforward prose they reveal to us how it is to belong to certain racial or cultural minorities; how it is to be an adolescent, a narcotic, an adulterer a vagabond- especially how it is to be the Author, with his particular little history of self-loathings and aggrandizements. Such novels, I conceive, are the printed dreams of that tiny fraction of our populace which buys and reads books, and the true dwelling-places of art and profit. In serving the dream we prevent the deed: vicariously the reader debauches, and is vicariously redeemed; his understanding is not taxed; his natural depravity may be tickled but is not finally approved of; no assaults have been made upon his imagination, nor any great burden put on his attention. He is the same fellow as before, only a little better read, and in most cases the healthier for his small flirtation with the Pit. He may even remark, "Life is absurd, don't you think? There's no answer to anything"; whereafter, his luncheon-companion agreeing absolutely, they have another cocktail and return to more agreeable matters.

Consider the difference with R.N.S.: here fornication, adultery, even rape, yea murder itself (not to mention self-deception, treason, blasphemy, whoredom, duplicity, and willful cruelty to others) are not only represented for our delectation but at times approved of and even recommended! On aesthetic grounds too (though they pale before the moral), the work is objectionable: the rhetoric is extreme, the conceit and action wildly implausible, the interpretation of history shallow and patently biased, the narrative full of discrepancies and badly paced, at times tedious, more often excessive; the form, like the style, is unorthodox, unsymmetrical, inconsistent. The characters, especially the hero, are unrealistic. There never was a Goat-boy! There never will be!

In sum it is a bad book, a wicked book, and ought not-I will say must not-be published. No computer produced it, but the broodings of an ineffectual megalomane: a crank at best, very possibly a psychopath. As the elder, if no longer the ranking, member of this editorial group I urge that we take this opportunity to restore a part of the moral prestige that was ours when our organization was more dedicated and harmonious, if less wealthy; to reverse our lamentable recent policy of publishing the esoteric, the bizarre, the extravagant, the downright vicious. I urge not only that the manuscript in question be rejected forthwith, but also that the "Author's" superiors, his Dean and Department Chairman, be advised what they are exposing undergraduate minds to. Would the present editor-in-chief, I wonder, permit his own daughter to be taught by such a man? Then in the name of what decent principle ought we to make his scribbling available to all our sons and daughters?


Editor B

I vote to publish the Revised New Syllabus and agree with the Editor-in-chief that Giles Goat-Boy is a more marketable title for it. We all know what [A's] objections to the manuscript are; we also know why he's not editor-in-chief any more, after his rejection of __* on similar "moral" grounds.

* Not to injure unnecessarily the reputation of that splendid (and presently retired) old gentleman here called A, let it be said merely that his distinguished editorial career never regained its earlier brilliance after the day some years ago when, in a decision as hotly contested as the present one, he overrode the opinions of myself and several other of his protegé's to reject the novel here cited by B which subsequently made the fortune of our largest competitor. No further identification of the book is needed than that it concerns the adventures, sexual and otherwise, of a handsome, great-spirited young man struggling against all odds and temptations to fulfill what he takes to be his destiny- that the plot was admittedly not original with the now-famous author; and that the book bids fair to remain a best seller forever.

What I must add, at the risk of "impropriety," is that in addition to his predictable bias against anything more daring than Gay Dashleigh's Prep-School Days, he may have a private antipathy for this particular manuscript: his own daughter, I happen to know, "ran off" from college with a bearded young poetry-student who subsequently abandoned her, pregnant, in order to devote himself to sheep-farming and the composition of long pastoral romances in free verse, mainly dealing with his great love for her. Her father never forgave her; neither has he, it seems, forgiven bearded heterosexuality or things bucolic, and it is a mark of his indiscrimination that he makes a goat-boy suffer for a sheep-boy's sins. Much as I respect your request that these statements remain impersonal, and hesitate as a new employee to criticize my colleagues in addition to disagreeing with them, I must argue that the "personal" and "professional" elements are so bound together in this case (indeed, are they ever separable in literary judgments?), that to take a stand for or against Giles Goat-Boy is to do likewise on the question whether this organization will prosper in literary judgments?), that to take a stand for or against Giles Goat-Boy is to do likewise on the question whether this organization will prosper in harmonious diversity or languish in acrimonious dissension. In choosing to publish or reject a manuscript, one oughtn't to bear the burden of choosing professional friends and enemies as well. Where such has become the case, the new man's only choice is to follow his best judgment, laying his future resolutely on the line; and I respectfully suggest that the responsible administrator's best hope for curing the situation is to turn any threatening ultimatums (like A's) into opportunities for revitalizing and reharmonizing the staff.

The fact is, I happen to agree-I think we all do-that Giles Goat-Boy is tough sledding in places, artistically uneven, and offensive (we'll call it challenging, of course) to certain literary and moral conventions. Personally I am no great fan of the "Author's"; like [Editor C, whose opinion follows] I found his early work lively but a bit naïve and his last novel wild and excessive in every respect. I frankly don't know quite what to make of this one. Where other writers seek fidelity to the facts of modern experience and expose to us the emptiness of our lives, he declares it his aim purely to astonish; where others strive for truth, he admits his affinity for lies, the more enormous the better. His fellows quite properly seek recognition and wide readership; he rejoices (so he says) that he has but a dozen readers, inasmuch as a thirteenth might betray him. So far from becoming discouraged by the repeated failure of his novels to make a profit, he confesses his surprise that no one has tarred and feathered him. Apparently sustained by the fact that anyone at all has swallowed his recentest whopper, he sets about to hatch another, clucking tongue at the compass and bedazzlement of those fabrications. Plot, for the young novelists we applaud, is a naughty word, as it was for their fathers--storyto them means invention, invention artifice, artifice dishonesty. As for style, it is everywhere agreed that the best language is that which disappears in the telling, so that nothing stands between the reader and the matter of the book. But this author has maintained (in obscure places, understandably) that language is the matter of his books, as much as anything else and for that reason ought to be "splendrously musicked out"; he turns his back on what is the case, rejects the familiar for the amazing, embraces artifice and extravagance; washing his hands of the search for Truth, he calls himself "a monger after beauty," or "doorman of the Muses' Fancy-house." In sum, he is in a class by himself and not of his time; whether a cut above or a cut below, three decades ahead or three centuries behind, his twelve readers must decide for themselves.

My own net sentiment comes to this: the author in question has, I'm told, a small but slowly growing audience, more loyal than discerning or influential, of the sort one needs no expensive promotion to reach, as they have their own ways of spreading the word around: penniless literature students, professors in second-rate colleges, and a couple of far-out critics. Giles Goat-Boyisn't likely to make anybody rich, but if we can saturate this little group it should at least pay its own way, and may even redeem our losses on the man's other books. One day those penniless students may be pennied enough- those professors may rise to more influential positions; the far-out critics may turn out to have been prophets . . . Alternatively, the author's luck may change (rather, our luck, as he seems not to care one way or the other): by pure accident his next book might be popular, stranger things have happened. Meanwhile we may write off our losses to that tax-deductible sort of prestige associated with the better publishing houses; the thing to do is keep the advance and advertising expenses as low as possible while holding him under contract for the future, in the meantime exploiting whatever ornamental or write-off value he may have.


Editor C

I vote against publishing the book called The Revised New Syllabus, not for reasons of morality, law, or politics, but simply on aesthetic and commercial grounds. The thing won't turn us a profit, and I see no ethical or "prestigial" justification for losing a nickel on it. Publishing may be a moral enterprise, as [A] likes to claim, but first of all it's just an enterprise, and I for one think it's as unprofessional to publish a book for moral reasons (which is what young [B's] enthusiasms amount to) as to reject one for moral reasons. [A] quite obviously has personal motives for rejecting the book; I submit that [B] has motives equally personal, if more sympathetic, for pushing its acceptance. He's new to our profession, and knows very well that discovering fresh talent is a road to success second only to pirating established talents from the competition. He has a young man's admirable compassion for lost causes, a young scholar's sympathy for minor talents, and a young intellectual's love of the heterodox, the esoteric, the obscure. Moreover he's a writer of fiction himself and no doubt feels a certain kinship with others whose talents have brought them as yet no wealth or fame. Finally, it's no reflection on his basic integrity that on the first manuscript he's been asked his opinion of, he might be less than eager to oppose the known judgment of the man who hired him; but that circumstance probably oughtn't to be discounted-especially since his vote to publish is a "net sentiment" by his own acknowledging, arrived at over numerous and grave reservations.

I think I may say that my own position is relatively objective. I agree that there are inferior books which one does right to lose a bit of money on in order not to lose a superior author, and there are superior books (very rare!) which one publishes, regardless of their commercial value, merely to have been their publisher. But the book in question I take to be neither: it's a poor-risk work by a poor-risk author. It wants subtlety and expertise: the story is not so much "astonishing" as preposterous, the action absurd. The hero is a physical, aesthetic, and moral monstrosity; the other characters are drawn with small regard for realism and at times lack even the consistency of stereotypes the dialogue is generally unnatural and wanting in variety from speaker to speaker-everyone sounds like the author! The prose style-that unmodern, euphuistic, half-metrical bombast-is admittedly contagious (witness [A's] and [B's] lapses into it), even more so is syphilis. The theme is obscure, probably blasphemous- the wit is impolite, perhaps even suggestive of unwholesome preoccupations; the psychology-but there is no psychology in it. The author clearly is ignorant of things and people as they really are: Consider his disregard for the reader! Granted that long novels are selling well lately, one surely understands that mere bulk is not what sells them; and when their mass consists of interminable exposition, lecture, and harangue (how gratified I was to see that windy old lunatic Max Spielman put to death!), it is the very antidote to profit. Indeed, I can't imagine to whom a work like R.N.S.might appeal, unless to those happily rare, more or less disturbed, and never affluent intelligences-remote, cranky, ineffectual-from whom it is known the author receives his only fan-mail.

What I suggest as our best course, then, is not to "protect our investment" by publishing this Revised New Syllabus(and the one after that, and the one after that), but to cut our losses by not throwing good money after bad. My own "net sentiment" is a considered rejection not only of this manuscript but of its author. He has yet to earn us a sou; his very energy (let us say, inexorableness), divorced as it is from public appeal, is a liability to us, like the energy of crabgrass or cancer. Despite some praise from questionable critics and a tenuous repute among (spiritually) bearded undergraduates-of the sort more likely to steal than to purchase their reading matter-he remains unknown to most influential reviewers, not to mention the generality of book-buyers. In the remote event that he becomes a "great writer," or even turns out to have been one all along, we still hold the copyright on those other losers of his, and can always reissue them. But no, the thing is as impossible as the plot of this book! He himself declares that nothing gets better, everything gets worse: he will merely grow older and crankier, more quirksome and less clever; his small renown will pass, his vitality become mere doggedness, or fail altogether. His dozen admirers will grow bored with him, his employers will cease to raise his salary and to excuse his academic and social limitations; his wife will lose her beauty, their marriage will founder his children will grow up to be ashamed of their father. I see him at last alone, unhealthy, embittered, desperately unpleasant, perhaps masturbative, perhaps alcoholic or insane, if not a suicide. We all know the pattern.


Editor D

Failed, failed, failed! I look about me, and everywhere see failure. Old moralists, young bootlickers, unsuccessful writers; has-beens, would-bes, never-weres; failed artists, failed editors, failed scholars and critics- failed husbands fathers, lovers; failed minds, failed bodies, hearts, and souls-none of us is Passed, we all are Failed!

It no longer matters to me whether the Revised New Syllabusis published, by this house or any other. What does the Answer care, whether anyone "finds" it? It wasn't lost! The gold doesn't ask to be mined, or the medicine beg to be taken; it's not the medicine that's worse off when the patient rejects it. As for the Doctor-who cares whether he starves or prospers? Let him go hungry, maybe he'll prescribe again! Or let him die, we have prescription enough!

Let him laugh, even, that I've swallowed in good faith the pill he made up as a hoax: I'm cured, the joke's on him! One comes to understand that a certain hermit of the woods is no eccentric, but a Graduate, a Grand Tutor. From all the busy millions a handful seek him out, thinking to honor and sustain him- we bring him cash and frankincense, sing out his praises in four-part harmony, fetch him champagne and vichyssoise. Alas, our racket interrupts his musings and scares off the locusts he'd have suppered on the wine makes him woozy, he upchucks the soup; he can't smell the flowers for our perfume or hear the birds for our music, and there's not a thing to spend his money on. No wonder he curses us under his breath, once he's sober again! And thinking to revenge himself with a trick, he puts on a falseface to scare us away. We had asked for revelations- he palms off his maddest dreams. "Show us Beauty," we plead; he bares his rump to us. "Show us Goodness," we beg, and he mounts our wives and daughters. "Ah, sir!" we implore him, "Give us the Truth!" He thrusts up a forefinger from each temple and declares, "You are cuckolds all."

And yet I say the guller is gulled, hoist is the enginer: the joke's on the joker, that's the joker's joke. Better victimized by Knowledge than succored by Ignorance; to be Wisdom's prey is to be its ward. Deceived, we see our self-deception; suffering the lie, we come to truth, and in the knowledge of our failure hope to Pass.

Publish the Revised New Syllabus or reject it- call it art or artifice, fiction, fact, or fraud: it doesn't care, its author doesn't care, and neither any longer do I. I don't praise it, I don't condemn it- I don't ask who wrote it or whether it will sell or what the critics may make of it. My judgment is not upon the book but upon myself. I have read it. I here resign from my position with this house.

One sees the diversity of opinion that confronted me (I do not even mention the disagreement among our legal staff and such nice imponderables as the fact that it was Editor A who gave me my first job in the publishing field, or that Editor D-present whereabouts unknown-happens to be my only son); one sees further something of what either option stood to cost. One sees finally what decision I came to-with neither aid nor sympathy from the author, by the way, who seldom even answers his mail. Publishing is a moral enterprise, in subtler ways than my dear A asserted; like all such, it is spiritually expensive, highly risky, and proportionately challenging. It is also (if I understand the Goat-Boy correctly) as possible an avenue to Commencement Gate as any other moral enterprise, and on that possibility I must bank.

Herewith, then, Giles Goat-Boy: or, The Revised New Syllabus, "a work of fiction any resemblance between whose characters and actual persons living or dead is coincidental." * Let the author's cover-letter stand in all editions as a self-explanatory foreword or opening chapter, however one chooses to regard it; let the reader read and believe what he pleases; let the storm break if it must.


The Editor-in-Chief

* In the absence of any response from the author, whom we repeatedly invited to discuss the matter with us, we have exercised as discreetly as possible our contractual prerogative to alter or delete certain passages clearly libelous, obscene, discrepant, or false. Except for these few passages (almost all brief and of no great importance) the text is reproduced as it was submitted to us. [Ed.]

I Would Arrange to Stand By Your Side During This Most Desperate Time of Your Roar - but I Have a Crib to Assemble in the Morning and My Screws Need to Soak in Sweat

It's Lazyass Weekday Blogging in the early Blog Days of Summer in dying and Dead Blegsylvania. It's not Lazyass Weekday Blogging in the early Blog Days of Summer in dying and Dead Blegsylvania.

Re: new Swans. I vouch. Every night since it's May 13th release, including tonight and tomorrow night and Saturday night too. Buy the album. Play it LOUD! or don't play it at all. Is so good.








SORRY, I DON'T TALK POETRY

Edwin Torres

don't want fixing

to happen just yet

don't want to lose such fragile heat

mere is mirror's ass scent
sorry I have a crib to assemble in the morning
just one wish, close eyes and breathe
altogether
no war is the chant
dear man
I would help you
and all your awakefulness at hypocrisy
and how the yang has been shifting without provocation
and how the ice cap is melting the wireless
and how language cuts chase by half
and how mirror spells faith inside out
I would arrange to stand by your side
during this most desperate time of your roar -
but I have a crib to assemble in the morning
and my screws need to soak in sweat

the lane the streak the lining the hour

That video shot yesterday, we're walking across the Appalachian Trail footbridge over I-70 on South Mountain in Maryland, downhill left towards Frederick, downhill right towards Hagerstown. We parked on 40 and climbed over Knob Hill to the cliffs at Annapolis and Black Rocks, seven good hard miles to and from. My legs are rounding, my knees are rounding, my hips, lungs, and heart are rounding into hiking shape, my fucking ankles, they are fragile motherfucking castanets. Which reminds me of a song:







This is true (and my apologies to those who've heard this before, but Serendipity demands): forty years ago this Spring (in Spring 1974 I would have been fourteen, I didn't do the math until last night, this isn't a planned gag; or rather, it was a planned gag once I saw the bridge, I did the video with this gag in mind though I didn't start the hike with this gag in mind) I and seven other members of Troop 1097's Senior Patrol were on a training hike for a summer trip to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. In Spring 1974 the hottest craze was Roger Miller's The Streak. Five of eight of us did, back and forth, across the AT footbridge over 70. Three split before we streaked, asking for ten minutes to get across the bridge before we streaked so they weren't implicated, we gave it to them, they waahed back to camp. In the video, when the camera nods up and down, that's where we stopped to wave to honking cars. One car didn't honk, a State Trooper, he bloop-blooped his siren, sped south to next exit. We made it almost back to camp thinking we'd won, dopes, but up the trail walks the Trooper and the Scout leaders. The three ratted us. I'll not pig latin their names: Mark Albright and Marshall Dobbins and Richard Bachmann, I hope you did not have the life of hell I wished upon you then, you collaborating motherfucking cowardly leader-worshiping future Fascist future Eagle Scouts, you.

I was going to quit after Philmont anyway. When asked to apologize for disgracing the Scout uniform, I said, how was I disgracing the Scout uniform by streaking?







FLAME

C.D. Wright

the breath               the trees               the bridge

the road                  the rain                the sheen

the breath               the line                  the skin

the vineyard            the fences             the leg

the water                the breath             the shift

the hair                  the wheels             the shoulder

the breath               the lane                the streak

the lining                the hour                the reasons

the name                the distance          the breath

the scent                the dogs                the blear

the lungs                the breath             the glove

the signal               the turn                  the need

the steps                the lights               the door

the mouth               the tongue             the eyes

the burn                  the burned            the burning

Évekkel Ezelőtt Született Sixty-Six Ma

Brian Eno volt ma született 66 évvel ezelőtt. Azt hiszem ez tetszett Eno ambient zenét nagy négy dolgot. A BLCKDGRD, bizonyos vagyok benne, hogy mothefucking POTUS 16 vagy több köze van bleggal szorongást, bármi. Nem tudom, mit kell tennie, hogy elkerülje a zaj nem okoz nagyobb zaj.

Nem, nem beszélni magyar. Bárcsak én is. Anyukája megtiltotta a lányok beszélni magyar. Igen, ez is csak egy másik BLCKDGRD sillyass.

UPDATE! Nem kapcsolódik Eno születésnapja, de válaszul az általános kétségbeesés kombinálva bleggal hiábavalóságát plusz három órát, hogy a munka a tervezett napot:

Born Eighty-Four Years Ago Today

Stanley Elkin, one of my Deserted Island Five even though I don't play Deserted Island Five with novelists and poets. These are the two excerpts I always use for his birthday, the first capturing one of Elkins's great themes, the second simply the most beautiful, heartbreaking paragraph, as stand alone but especially within the context of the novel, I've ever read:

Ben, everything there is is against your being here! Think of get-togethers, family stuff, golden anniversaries in rented halls, fire regulation celebrated more in the breach than the observance, the baked Alaska up in flames, everybody wiped out - all the cousins in from coasts, wiped out. Rare, yes - who says not - certainly rare, but it could happen, has happened. And once is enough if you've been invited. All the people picked off by plagues and folks eaten by earthquakes and drowned in the tidal waves, all the people already dead that you might have been or who might have begat the girl who married the guy who fathered the fellow who might have been your ancestor - all the showers of sperm that dried on his Kleenex or spilled on his sheets or fell on the ground or dirtied his hands when he jerked off or came in his p.j.'s or no, maybe he was actually screwing and the spermatozoon had your number written on it and it was lost at sea because that's what happens, you see - there's low motility and torn tails - that's what happens to all but a handful out of all the googols and gallons of come, more sperm finally than even the grains of sand I was talking about, more even than the degrees. Well - am I making the picture for you? Am I connecting the dots? Ben, Ben, Nick the Greek wouldn't lay a fart against a trillion bucks that you'd ever make it to this planet!

   
- The Franchiser

And it was wondrous in the negligible humidity how they gawked across the perfect air, how, stunned by the helices and all the parabolas of grace, they gasped, they sighed, these short-timers who even at their age could not buy insurance at any price, not even if the premiums were paid in the rare rich elements, in pearls clustered as grapes, in buckets of bullion, in trellises of diamonds, how, glad to be alive, they stared at each other and caught their breath.

 - Magic Kingdom 


Here's an interview from 1976. I reread Dick Gibson Show and the triptych novellas Searches and Seizures between last year's birthday and this year's. I wrote a Masters thesis on Elkin in 1996-97, going back to the novels since, while still an exhilarating and unique again experience, felt like chapters were due to D in the morning - quick, scan novels for highlights, my margin scrawls, scavenge my notebooks a seventh time before pounding out paragraphs before the morning. But this year I read Searches and Seizures, my favorite Elkin triptych of his three triptychs of novellas (and he loved novellas best), after D died this past Fall, D who loved Elkin too but loved "The Bailbondsman," the first of the three in Searches and Seizures, best. Reading Elkin last December didn't feel like research. Thursday Night Pints started when D was Head Signature on my Masters thesis on Stanley Elkin. Rest in Peace, D. Scheduled for the next year, Mrs Ted Bliss and Van Gogh's Room at Arles, respectively Elkin's last novel and last triptych of novellas.

Let me know if I can turn you on.

Prick of the Thistle, Queen of the Weeds

Loved ones, there is an Earthgirl story I'd love for Earthgirl to tell you from last night, ask her, it's not my story to tell. Today is 25 years, 300 days. I need post the gif more than once a year.









IN PERPETUAL SPRING

Amy Gerstler

Gardens are also good places

to sulk. You pass beds of

spiky voodoo lilies   

and trip over the roots   

of a sweet gum tree,   

in search of medieval   

plants whose leaves,   

when they drop off   

turn into birds

if they fall on land,

and colored carp if they   

plop into water.

Suddenly the archetypal   

human desire for peace   

with every other species   

wells up in you. The lion   

and the lamb cuddling up.

The snake and the snail, kissing.

Even the prick of the thistle,   

queen of the weeds, revives   

your secret belief

in perpetual spring,

your faith that for every hurt   

there is a leaf to cure it.

Seventy-One Today

Ba'al, I almost forgot, today is Dennis the Peasant's 71st birthday. Here's the second of Egoslavian traditional Michael Palin birthday skits:

Waking You at One A.M. to Say the Hamster Is Back

• Happy Birthday, Hamster! Pick a cool concert - any format - and I'll buy the tickets.
• Neko Case's Flaming Hamster Wheel of Panic About Publicly Discussing Poetry in This Respected Forum.
• Hamster's Birthday card from Landru. Not sure if the title is an intentional Pixie's allusion but regardless it put this in my head.

YOU CAN'T HAVE IT ALL

Barbara Ras

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.