Showing posts with label Napoleon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Napoleon. Show all posts

2014/04/19

The Game Enforces Smirks; but We Have Seen the Moon in Lonely Alleys Make a Grail of Laughter of an Empty Ash Can, and Through All Sound of Gaiety and Quest Have Heard a Kitten in the Wilderness












CHAPLINESQUE

Hart Crane

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.



2014/04/12

Macy's Hickory Farms Circuit City GNC Payless ShoeSource




As is becoming tradition for Futile Weekend Blogging I post music I heard on Bryce's Friday midday show, my favorite three hours of music a week. I went looking for Gelbart, the first musician he played yesterday, I couldn't find the song he played but found the above first, my beloveds both know it had to be posted and how hard it was not to post it last night.

I signed a contract yesterday with Montgomery County Animal Services that I will keep Napoleon quarantined in a bedroom until October 11th. They will make random visits to our house six times between now and then and if Napoleon is not in the bedroom we can be fined up to $500 per incident and they reserve the right to take the cat at any time if they deem him potentially rabid. They recommend that we wear vinyl gloves when we touch him or his water and food bowls, and we are never to wash bowls in the dishwasher and are strongly recommended to use plastic bowls and throw each away (with a hand in a vinyl glove) after one use.

I made contact yesterday with Montgomery County Health Services (I had been told to talk to Animal Control first so I could ask Health Services questions raised by Animal Control that Animal Control couldn't answer). Since Earthgirl and I have been in contact with Napoleon (he's licked both our hands up through Friday morning) there is an immediate observation period of ten days. Should we not make contact with him except through vinyl gloves over the next ten days and he displays no signs of illness of any sort then we were not infected by contact up through today.

Both Animal Services and Health Services discouraged us as much as they could while maintaining no legal liability of bad advice to NOT get rabies vaccines if and until Napoleon displays signs of illness. The odds of needing the shots are incredibly small, the possible side-effects a much greater risk than odds we'd need the shots, the shots incredibly expensive (as in thousands for the two of us), and most insurance companies will not cover the costs. I tried calling my insurance company, but after twenty minutes on hold the muzak started playing a Billy Joel song, and I'd rather pay thousands for a rabies shot than listen to Billy Joel.






  • Napoleon seems content. Our major concern isn't rabies, our major concern is he isn't miserable in a small bedroom for six months. Should he get sick we don't have a moral decision to make. Should he get desperately miserable, well....
  • Condoleeza Rice and DropBox. Forgive me if I can't summon the outrage.
  • On the above.
  • Contemptmanship.
  • A disgusting morbidity.
  • Purple Line.
  • MOCO schools are segregating. (A loved one responds in comments.)
  • Tomorrow we Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling to Zanesville to Gambier. I have time today to disc at Seneca on the first truly gorgeous weekend Spring day of the year or go to DCU game tonight. Disc at Seneca on the first truly gorgeous weekend Spring day of the year wins.
  • Bulb Heck to me.
  • Auden and campiness.
  • James Merrill. I've said this before: he never really sang to me, but he used to sing to a lot of people, was for a time in the debate about the greats, and seems to have fallen almost completely out of remembrance.
  • Josephine Miles' The Sympathizers.
  • These are the four Gelbart youtubes I can find. Like lots. Would not be allowed to listen tomorrow when we Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling to Zanesville to Gambier even if I had any on my iPod.






DIRECTORY

Robert Fitterman

Macy’s                               Hickory Farms
Circuit City                         GNC
Payless ShoeSource                   The Body Shop
Sears                                Eddie Bauer
Kay Jewelers                         Payless ShoeSource
GNC                                  Circuit City
LensCrafters                         Kay Jewelers
Coach                                Gymboree
H&M
RadioShack
Gymboree                             The Body Shop
                                     Hickory Farms
                                     Coach
The Body Shop                        Macy's
Eddie Bauer                          GNC
Crabtree & Evelyn                    Circuit City
Gymboree                             Sears
Foot Locker
Land's End
GNC                                  H&M
LensCrafters                         Kay Jewelers
Coach                                Land's End
Famous Footwear                      LensCrafters
H&M                                  Eddie Bauer
                                     Cinnabon
                                     LensCrafters
Foot Locker                          RadioShack
GNC                                  GNC
Macy's                               Sears
Crabtree & Evelyn                    Crabtree & Evelyn
H&M
Cinnabon
Kay Jewelers
Lands's End



2014/04/11

When I Get on My Knees and Lick Her Hand She Screams




    
For the first time in months a Thursday night Thursday Night Pints. We talked about Napoleon and rabies. The mind is weird, I said. Every year during the first two weeks of pollen's return I get slight allergy symptoms - my nose gets stuffed while I sleep, I blow technicolor snot in the morning - while my body adjusts to pollen then returns to normal. I know this. It happens every year. And I know that the odds that the cat that bit Napoleon had rabies are 100,000 to 1 and I know that even if the cat that bit Napoleon did have rabies the odds that rabies in Napoleon would have reached his salivary glands this soon are 1,000,000 to 1 and even if the rabies had reached his salivary glands he would either need to bite me or lick an open wound on me, which he hasn't, but when I blew my technicolor snot into a paper towel this morning I thought, fuck, rabies. L said, why not just get the shots for peace of mind? I might, I said, as much for others' peace of mind as my own.





      
  • Mark Ames vs Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman over USAID.
  • K asked, so are you really going to reengage with the clusterfuck? We had been talking about how all the NSA/Snowden noise has ceased now that the noise's value to Power has accrued to Power (as I and probably everyone who reads this blog predicted). The mind is weird, I said. Every year during the first two weeks of pollen's return I get slight allergy symptoms - my nose gets stuffed while I sleep, I blow technicolor snot in the morning - while my body adjusts to pollen then returns to normal. I know this. It happens every year. And I know that the odds that any action I take has any effect other than a self-congratulatory moral boost is a trillion to one, but when I blew my technicolor snot into a paper towel this morning I thought, fuck, fucking fine metaphors abound.
  • This week in water.
  • For those following the Napoleon story: the Animal Control officer cancelled his Friday morning visit to the house. I'm going to drive out to the new Animal Control headquarters in Redland (where Kobin Rlippel grew up, or One of Four in her Borglandru designation) and get much needed information.
  • Hand of doom.
  • Blasting opera forward.
  • Heinlein, for those of you who do.
  • Mark Strand is eighty today.
  • What does poetry do? or: Ashbery, for those of you who do.
  • Yes, I deleted last night's Ashbery post and post the youtube here:






EATING POETRY

Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.



2014/04/08

I Hate It When We're Made of Snot One Minute, Stone So Simple the Next





I still haven't heard from MOCO Animal Services (or whatever they call themselves). The vet is coming to the house today to remove Napoleon's abscess drains. I talked with his receptionist yesterday afternoon when she called to confirm the appointment, she said they haven't heard from MOCO Animal Services either. Planet sent me a link provided to her by The Boyfriend (who had to have a round of rabies vaccinations late last year when a bat got loose in his parents' house - it's now shots in the butt, not the nightmarish shots in the stomach of yesteryear) to the CDC webpage on rabies, it said confinement for cats in similar situations is ten days, not six months.

Further complications: we're planning on driving to Ohio on Sunday to spend four days with Planet. We'd arranged a cat-sitter. We're taking her out to dinner Wednesday night (it had been planned before the Napoleon crisis) and are going to tell her what little, misinformed, contradictory things we know and tell her if she doesn't want to risk a rabies infection, no matter how small the odds, we'll completely understand. Earthgirl says I can ask some of you reading this to make a daily visit to feed the other four and cautiously slide food into Napoleon but (a) I think Beth will be OK and still house-sit and (b) I don't want to ask you. Worse case scenario is Earthgirl goes out to Ohio while I stay home and then when she gets home I go out by myself.














THE SPONGE OF SLEEP

John Ashbery

Why waver? He won’t stab me for
when we sat down widely pixillated
between the horizon and the lice.
We’re off to the sea, someone said.
Let’s direct it to us
and our various enjoyment. I hate it when
we’re made of snot one
minute, stone so simple the next.
I would think first,
and then we were there
sooner other than that.

Here’s the flooding group
as if there is
when I reached thirty.
What did Russia
(boxes on the road)…

All this could have been avoided if
we aren’t doing anything.
Serviceberry shot down by squirrels,
you don’t have to thank everybody.
The charm of abuse sings in ways we are not.
Or we can sit and travel, aimless ceremony.
I paint feet. Summer pants. A wave of translation
on the apples, like the friendly air out there.
If they do so, they do so disproportionately
to his three-year-old brother-in-law,
who patted the expats in a purgatorial whisper.
The inside of the crate had expanded exponentially
from carrying one load of artichokes.

Be one of those on whom nothing is lost, advises Henry.
Well, OK. I’m awake. No problem
that I can see, unless it’s running out of raw material,
like, his dog Jerry opted out of the transubstantiation process.
It was ever thus:

Cabochon pluots weighted down with
ananas en belle vue. They drank Salada tea
in a statement.
We just gotta keep that stranded one safe as before,
and getting out of here.
How far is the Old Log Inn?
I’d love to read it.
The woods are sorry for them.
Small rain will land somewhere.



2014/04/06

As Though It Mattered, As If You Knew?




That's Kenilworth to East Capitol to RFK last night. United won, a strange sensation, 2-0, over Ningland. So I dated it wrong. Oops.

Napoleon is home, quarantined in the small first floor bedroom. (For those just tuning in, background here). He's a sweetie. I lie on the bed, he doesn't know how to cuddle, just knows that he wants to. My face lower than his as he looks down on my head on the pillow, this is the first time either of us has had this perspective. I think he will be a kneader: he climbs on my chest and starts but is disconcerted and thrown off balance by the up and down of my chest's breathing. He love-knocks foreheads. He still hasn't figured out the litter box. Something's gonna give.

UPDATE! He figured out the litter box!

Our vet tells us MOCO Animal Services takes these cases seriously to the point that is we don't follow their rules for animals with animal bites exactly they claim the legal authority to seize Napoleon and cut off his head to check his brain for rabies. The vet called MOCO Animal Services from my house on Friday and repeatedly Saturday morning. I called MOCO Animal Services Friday and talked to a receptionist who filed a "Bite Ticket." I have not heard from MOCO Animal Services. No doubt MOCO Animal Services is short-staffed, under-funded, and overwhelmed. This is a mixed blessing: they are, after all, less-likely to seize Napoleon and cut off his head to test his brain for rabies over a closely observed violation on our part of their policies because they are short-staffed, under-funded, and overwhelmed. Fine metaphors abound.

Have some stanchion porn:






Mr Alarum saw this VITALLY IMPORTANT NEWS! yesterday and Kindly tweeted it to me, knowing I've been asking every day for several years if and when it would ever happen: Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in a decade, The Buried Giant, will be released next March, his publisher Faber & Faber has announced. The book will be the first from the acclaimed author since 2005's Never Let Me Go, an unsettling examination of hope and mortality set in a dystopian near future. The Buried Giant was described by Faber as "sometimes savage [and] often intensely moving". The publisher would only reveal that the book, Ishiguro's seventh novel, will be about "lost memories, love, revenge and war". Stephen Page, chief executive, said that the book was "a truly sublime new chapter in one of the most significant bodies of work of anyone writing today". "It is as surprising, moving and brilliant as you could hope for, and we can't wait to publish," said Page. In 2008, Ishiguro told the Paris Review that he had "arrived at an odd setting for the novel I'm writing at the moment". "I'd wanted for some time to write a novel about how societies remember and forget," the author said at the time. "I'd written about how individuals come to terms with uncomfortable memories. It occurred to me that the way an individual remembers and forgets is quite different to the way a society does. When is it better to just forget?" Time to reread everything. No sure what order, just know The Unconsoled will be last.

This is the album that's playing in background of top video, David Van Tiegham x Ten's Fits and Starts:













TWENTY QUESTIONS

David Lehman

Why did the moth fly into the flame? Was it for the same reason
That Achilles died young? Who gets more fun out of sex,
The man or the woman? (Be sure to explain how you can tell.)
Which is more real to you, heaven or hell?
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? What causes the death of love—
The love of death? Did Adam and Eve have a choice?
Did the Virgin Mary? What are we afraid of, anyway?
Even agnostics have the right to say “thank god,” don’t they?
Looking at these dancing atoms, shall I say I saw a ring
Of pure and endless light? Or did I dream the whole thing?
Whom shall I say is calling? Are you in if it’s your wife?
Are you willing to relocate? Do you like your life?
What makes this night different from all other nights?
Would you say it’s your fate to be always,
Without exception, five minutes late? If you arrived
At 9:10, would the ceremony have started at 9:05
Though it had been scheduled for 9:15? As you walk down
The aisle, and the others rivet their attention to you,
Do you ask yourself what you’re going to do,
As though it mattered, as if you knew?



2014/04/05

Would He Like It Would Napoleon Would Napoleon Would He Like it. If Napoleon if I Told Him if I Told Him if Napoleon. Would He Like It if I Told Him if I Told Him if Napoleon. Would He like It if Napoleon if Napoleon if I Told Him. If I Told Him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I Told Him




That's Napoleon in a green vet's bag (and the vet's right arm) yesterday afternoon. Three days ago we noticed a bump on his back above the right leg, Thursday night we saw an open would seeping pus. I tried getting him in a cat carrier Friday morning, but that wasn't working, so I called the vet I had made an appointment with for Napoleon and they recommended a vet out of Gaithersburg that makes home visits. Their receptionist asked me to put Napoleon in a bathroom or walk-in closet before vet arrived so if he freaked out he couldn't hide. Vet walked into bathroom, walked out in thirty seconds with Napoleon in a bag.

This is our fault. We've tried to get him into cat carriers in the past couple of years to get him to a vet for rabies shots but his resistance has been such that we were afraid - he was born feral, he comes and goes - he'd be so traumatized by the caging, the vet, the shots, that as soon as we let him out he'd disappear and never come back. 

Bite, probably a cat bite, infected, abscessed. Napoleon spent last night recovering from surgery. The vet says though there is a 99% chance it was a cat bite and a 99% chance the cat that bit Napoleon wasn't rabid (he may have been bit countless times before but since none because infected we would never have known), but we are going to need quarantine him for six months in a crate in a room. We can let him out of the crate while we're in the room but he must be in a crate when the door to the room is opened to let us in or out: since there is a 99% chance he won't get rabies there's a 99% chance we won't need to get rabies shots as long as Napoleon is present to present no signs of rabies after six months; if he disappears, it's shots for us. MOCO Animal Control doesn't care whether or not we get shots but is concerned (reasonably) that a possibly rabies infected cat be released outdoors.






  • This is going to be hard on Napoleon. Will keep the six or seven of you who personally know him updated as well as those Kind few of you who follow along here updated too. 
  • So, a Futile Weekend Blogging Post! Have some links engaging the clusterfuck.
  • Ink black triptych.
  • Call him irresponsible... please: This brings us to the heart of the matter. Just as I view the State as monstrous and illegitimate, so too I view any and all spying and surveillance activities as entirely illegitimate and almost completely without merit of any kind. I've been over this ground many times. For the detailed argument as to why "intelligence" generally is an elaborate (and very profitable) fraud, you can start here and here. The links provide much more background. Always remember that "intelligence" is almost always wrong. I said that spying and surveillance are "almost completely without merit of any kind" only because there are very rare instances where the "intelligence" stumbles upon a small piece of information that is correct. And as rare as it is, even correct information will be disregarded when it runs counter to a policy that the government has already embraced.
  • A war on the imagination: Culture and politics, or at least the presentation of politics, have merged. Politics are entertainment. They are thought of as a movie, for the most part. Violence is expected in movies. What is perhaps more troublesome, however, is the trivializing of the entire culture. The validation of taking pride in one’s immaturity. The consciousness of, I think, a majority of the U.S. population, and probably a clear majority of those under thirty five, has created intellectual mechanisms to fuse and synthesize categories of experience. Watching Vice TV specials becomes the same as critical theory, and the same again as fictionalized History channel specials, and the same too with kitsch science fiction. I am not sure Battlestar Gallactica is perceived much differently than, say, 60 Minutes.
  • The Birth of Thanaticism: The role of the state is not to manage biopower but to manage thanopower. From whom is the maintenance of life to be withdrawn first? Which populations should fester and die off? First, those of no use as labor or consumers, and who have ceased already to be physically and mentally fit for the armed forces.





  • The Passenger.
  • The Crisis of Capitalism This Time Around. The prologue to David Harvey's new book, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism.
  • The last two chapters of Harvey's book: The difficulty with the humanist tradition in short is that it does not internalise a good understanding of its own inescapable internal contradictions, most clearly captured in the contradiction between freedom and domination. The result is that humanist leanings and sentiments often get presented these days in a somewhat offhand and embarrassed way, except when their position is safely backed by religious doctrine and authority. There is, as a result, no full-blooded contemporary defence of the propositions of or prospects for a secular humanism even though there are innumerable individual works that loosely subscribe to the tradition or even polemicise as to its obvious virtues (as happens in the NGO world). Its dangerous traps and foundational contradictions, particularly questions of coercion, violence and domination, are shied away from because they are too awkward to confront. The result is what Frantz Fanon characterised as ‘insipid humanitarianism’. There is plenty of evidence of that manifest in its recent revival. The bourgeois and liberal tradition of secular humanism forms a mushy ethical base for largely ineffective moralising about the sad state of the world and the mounting of equally ineffective campaigns against the plights of chronic poverty and environmental degradation. It is probably for this reason that the French philosopher Louis Althusser launched his fierce and influential campaign back in the 1960s to eject all talk of socialist humanism and alienation from the Marxist tradition. The humanism of the young Marx, as expressed in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Althusser argued, was separated from the scientific Marx of Capital by an ‘epistemological rupture’ that we ignore at our peril. Marxist humanism, he wrote, is pure ideology, theoretically vacuous and politically misleading, if not dangerous. The devotion of a dedicated Marxist like the long-imprisoned Antonio Gramsci to the ‘absolute humanism of human history’ was, in Althusser’s view, entirely misplaced.
  • Hey, new places on the blogrolls. Please check them oout as they float to the top.
  • Three guesses what I fell asleep listening to. 






IF I TOLD HIM, A COMPLETED PORTRAIT OF PICASSO

Gertrude Stein

If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him.
            Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.
            If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.
            Now.
            Not now.
            And now.
            Now.
            Exactly as as kings.
            Feeling full for it.
            Exactitude as kings.
            So to beseech you as full as for it.
            Exactly or as kings.
            Shutters shut and open so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters and so shutters shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut and so shutters shut and shutters and so. And so shutters shut and so and also. And also and so and so and also.
            Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly and resemblance. For this is so. Because.
            Now actively repeat at all, now actively repeat at all, now actively repeat at all.
            Have hold and hear, actively repeat at all.
            I judge judge.
            As a resemblance to him.
            Who comes first. Napoleon the first.
            Who comes too coming coming too, who goes there, as they go they share, who shares all, all is as all as as yet or as yet.
            Now to date now to date. Now and now and date and the date.
            Who came first Napoleon at first. Who came first Napoleon the first. Who came first, Napoleon first.
            Presently.
            Exactly do they do.
            First exactly.
            Exactly do they do.
            First exactly.
            And first exactly.
            Exactly do they do.
            And first exactly and exactly.
            And do they do.
            At first exactly and first exactly and do they do.
            The first exactly.
            And do they do.
            The first exactly.
            At first exactly.
            First as exactly.
            As first as exactly.
            Presently
            As presently.
            As as presently.
            He he he he and he and he and and he and he and he and and as and as he and as he and he. He is and as he is, and as he is and he is, he is and as he and he and as he is and he and he and and he and he.
            Can curls rob can curls quote, quotable.
            As presently.
            As exactitude.
            As trains.
            Has trains.
            Has trains.
            As trains.
            As trains.
            Presently.
            Proportions.
            Presently.
            As proportions as presently.
            Farther and whether.
            Was there was there was there what was there was there what was there was there there was there.
            Whether and in there.
            As even say so.
            One.
            I land.
            Two.
            I land.
            Three.
            The land.
            Three
            The land.
            Three.
            The land.
            Two
            I land.
            Two
            I land.
            One
            I land.
            Two
            I land.
            As a so.
            The cannot.
            A note.
            They cannot
            A float.
            They cannot.
            They dote.
            They cannot.
            They as denote.
            Miracles play.
            Play fairly.
            Play fairly well.
            A well.
            As well.
            As or as presently.
            Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.