At Waffle House, They Fired Her on the Spot

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

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

DOUBLE VISION

Wilmer Mills

At Waffle House, they fired her on the spot:

“You talk too much!”

                                        She’d told her customers

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

Without the letter e. The “amateurs,”

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

The stars, the world that only God possesses.”

While washing dishes with a bleeding hand,

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

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

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

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

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

Her broken pencil left a double line

On my tab, both legible as one design.

And Diving the Salt Will Kiss a Convex Eye

      

Since few saw this last night and of those only a few clicked below the fold, here again, ten songs from the 1990s via the first set of Therese's March 30th show. I confess, I didn't/haven't paid as much attention to Shellac as I should have/am. As for P.J. Harvey, who does after all have a tag on this shitty blog, I've theories why I haven't played her here as much as once, Occam's suggesting I played her to much. As for why I don't play more Stereolab, they do after all have a tag on this shitty blog, I've no idea.

   

• The most important thing you will read today.
• Cartoons and cueballs. A follow-up on yesterday's zeitgeist firestorm. It truly is a phenomenon, the vortex of rage - pro & anti, and even stranger, pro-anti & anti-pro - the mention of his name sparks.
• The endless apologia: on responsibility.
• A clockwork Hillary.
• So much for a new DCU soccer stadium, at least in the short term.
• More on the above.
• Priorities in DC.
• As good news and could be reasonably hoped for on Ten Mile Creek?
• He slept late with Chairman Mao.
• Food links.
• This isn't the Jean-Paul Sartre Experience song Therese played, I couldn't find it, my apologies.

   

• All things counter, original, spare, strange.
• News of a Beckett short story published for the first time.
• Lots of Gil Scott Heron.
• Sillliman's always generous lit-links.
• In Chinatown - Tom's latest.
• Go poets. I can vouch for Nick Laird.
• For Serge Gainsbourg's 86th birthday.
• 36 links from his life with Ubuweb.
• Jacob's (IOZ) new novel gets a rave review.
• New Bardo Pond!

  

CABOCHON

Nick Laird

She still has some cousins in Leitrim, 

the tall nurse broadcasting our secret, 

and bright eyes bright as trinkets 

when her pink nail taps the screen. 

Between the coda and the dipped head 

a flicker in the quadrant's grain 

steadies to a light bobbing 

rhythmically, unhindered ...

We stand before the elevator's 

mirror now like any other passengers 

disembarking at the gate, late, 

a silent weight of uncut gems 

stitched meticulously in the hems 

of your winter coat, my leather case.

   

PROFESSIONAL MIDDLE-CLASS COUPLE, 1922

Adam Kirsch

What justifies the inequality

That issues her a tastefully square-cut

Ruby for her finger, him a suit

Whose rumpled, unemphatic dignity

Declares a life of working sitting down,

While someone in a sweatshop has to squint

And palsy sewing, and a continent

Sheds blood to pry the gemstone from the ground,

Could not be justice. Nothing but the use

To which they put prosperity can speak

In their defense: the faces money makes,

They demonstrate, don’t have to be obtuse,

Entitled, vapid, arrogantly strong;

Only among the burghers do you find

A glance so frank, engaging, and refined,

So tentative, so conscious of  its wrong.

  

ANOTHER THING

David Mason

Like fossil shells embedded in a stone,

you are an absence, rimmed calligraphy,

a mouthing out of silence, a way to see

beyond the bedroom where you lie alone.

So why not be the vast, antipodal cloud

you soloed under, riven by cold gales?

And why not be the song of diving whales,

why not the plosive surf   below the road?

The others are one thing. They know they are.

One compass needle. They have found their way

and navigate by perfect cynosure.

Go wreck yourself once more against the day

and wash up like a bottle on the shore,

lucidity and salt in all you say.

[She goes, she is, she wakes the waters]

Karen Volkman

She goes, she is, she wakes the waters

primed in their wave-form, a flux of urge

struck into oneness, the solid surge

seeking completion, and strikes and shatters

and is its fragments, distinction’s daughters

and now, unholding, the cleave and merge

the hew and fusing, plundering the verge

and substance is the scheme it scatters

and what it numbers in substantial sun.

Her hands hold many or her hands hold none.

And diving the salt will kiss a convex eye

and be salt fact and be the bodied sky

and that gray weight is both or beggared one,

a dead dimensional, or blue begun.

A PRAYER FOR RAIN

Lisel Mueller

Let it come down: these thicknesses of air

have long enough walled love away from love;

stillness has hardened until words despair

of their high leaps and kisses shut themselves

back into wishing. Crippled lovers lie

against a weather which holds out on them,

waiting, awaiting some shrill sign, some cry,

some screaming cat that smells a sacrifice

and spells them thunder. Start the mumbling lips,

syllable by monotonous syllable,

that wash away the sullen griefs of love

and drown out knowledge of an ancient war—

o, ill-willed dark, give with the sound of rain,

let love be brought to ignorance again.

LIKE HOLDERLIN

Rosmarie Waldrop

got up early

left the house immediately

tore out grass

bits of leather in his pockets

hit fences with his handkerchief

answered yes and no

to his own questions

lies under grass

wilted flowers in his pockets

at the fence I pull my handkerchief

he liked to say no

“I’m no longer the same man”

and

“nothing is happening to me”

April Fools, It's the 1990s

The April Fools' Day song. I haven't listened to Rufus in a while (I listen to his mother and her sister all the time, they are on the Trip to Ohio and Back playlist), I forget how much he channels Todd Rundgren some songs.

Yes, there were 90s songs here, I'm moving them to Wednesday's post because I want to.

Mad-Eyed from Stating the Obvious

• I feel like shutting the fuck up today, though have reads, songs, poems since I'd collected them already.
• Start from common humanity.
• Luckily someone saves me from typing more than this sentence on Reiteration of Problems of -.06% Less-Shittyism.
• Seventeen contradictions and the end of capitalism.
• Challenging casino capitalism and authoritarian politics in an age of disposability.
• The war on contingency or, the outsourcing of commerce to the consumer.
• Corporate doesn't give a flying fuck about DOMA, Corporate got the SCOTUS decision it wanted.
• The Accidental Bricoleurs.
• One mile from my house.
• SeatSix finds a restaurant website that speaks my language.
• Shards of summer.
• Bleggalgazing a hiatus if not death.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• Krasznahorkai: Krasznahorkai, in other words, has invented a way of writing disenchanted fables. 
• I finished War and War and liked it but feel I'm not reading well enough to have appreciated what all the work it took was worth. Cause his books are work.
• Reading Gass' Middle C now, if it works (if my reading eye is working) I will return to Krasznahorkai's latest next.
• I killed a man who looks like you.
• Yes, I've been remiss giving you PJ Harvey songs.

 
ADVICE TO A PROPHET

Richard Wilbur

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,   

Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,

Not proclaiming our fall but begging us

In God’s name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,   

The long numbers that rocket the mind;

Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,   

Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.   

How should we dream of this place without us?—

The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,   

A stone look on the stone’s face?

Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive   

Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost

How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,   

How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip   

Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,

The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,

The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn

As Xanthus once, its gliding trout

Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without   

The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?   

Ask us, prophet, how we shall call

Our natures forth when that live tongue is all

Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean   

Horse of our courage, in which beheld

The singing locust of the soul unshelled,

And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose   

Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding   

Whether there shall be lofty or long standing   

When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

Everything Turns Away Quite Leisurely from the Disater

W.H. Auden was born 106 years ago today.

 

MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS


About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.





Some personal history: besides taking classes from Anthony Hecht, I did basic research grunt work for him on his final two books of criticism in exchange for his company, On the Laws of the Poetic Arts and The Hidden Law, a book specifically about Auden's poetry, which Hecht respected deeply. In the process of the research for and conversations with Hecht over years I must have read the majority of Auden's poems at least once, some countless times, some, like the above and below, literally dozens of dozens of times.

Until two years ago or so I hadn't read Auden since Hecht's book went to the publisher in 1992, not because I'd lost my love for Auden but because I was tired of my love for Auden. Serendipity always charms but is double-edged: I rediscovered Auden just when his poetry became fresh and relevant and urgent (to me) again.

EPITAPH ON A TYRANT

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

• Now you know my first name.
• Yes, this post is copy/pasted - except for this bulleted part, remember bullets, I used them before the blocks of alternating colored not-bullets - from last year's Auden birthday post.
• Yes, I updated the timeline within the cut and pasted.
• Yes, I deleted the links from last year's post.
• Of course you can have links if I'm reading links and think you'll like them. I said I wasn't going to aggregate out of obligation to me, to you, every effing day.
• I happened to be online last night, so have a few links.
• Money and collapse.
• Affect and the politics of austerity.
• Scale implosion.
• Undoing gender.
• Remembering DC.
• Seneca Creek! Used to party w/Rebilcpay and other Laytonsville folk down in there.
• My soccer team just signed the most disreputable diver of my soccer team's league's history, he is called El Pescodito, I hope to have a moral crisis at his success with United but fear he's washed up and my hate for him will not be disturbed. I don't even have hope my hate for him will be enhanced.
• United's re-branding will be like Cardiff's.
• Duh.
• Trends in dog-naming.
• Bringing up Hilary Mantel's body.
• Anthony's litlinks of the week.
• The fake short story boom.
• 100 sites for voracious readers. Once again, I must have been #101.
• Belle and Sebastion with Yo La Tengo opening at Merriwether this July. Merriwether blows.
• Stereotype.fm. Bonnie Prince Billy fans are most likely to be atheists, Guided by Voices fans are fifth most likely to be atheists.
• RIP Steve Deal. Evan Funk Davies played a set of his music last night.
• RIP Kevin Ayers. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here.

STOP ALL THE CLOCKS 

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

After Molting, Eat Your Own Shucked Skin for Strength, Keep Changing the Subject in Hopes that the Subject Will Change You

Poem via Sasha. I am very serious in my begging - send me poems, songs, requests, playlists, I am happy to share. Meanwhile, busy (the stories I can't tell you about asshole brother-in-law and asshole step-family-in-laws, hoo-wee, would be my favorite blog-posts ever), not even time for me to type out an Ishiguro paragraph (the Ishiguro is working, my head is rebooting) cause I didn't have time to read past where I'd stopped, have songs, a few links, a poem, back soon.

• The above is via me, the two below via Prunella.
• The vicious lie of isolated good deeds.
• The psychopathology of bleggalgazing subject/object/object/subject/subjest/object/subject/etc. The bleggalgazing spills over into comments. By the way, the count on OOOists (as opposed to SUNN O)))) clocking a single second and/or clicking home remains consistent at zero.
• UPDATE! Re: Bleggalgazing - there are four dudes in Amman, Jordan, two in Beirut, and three in Tbilisi who've been googling the shit out of this post for the past three days. Creepy.
• Are we grammar Nazis? NO! We are grammar Marxist-Leninists!
• Police state.
• Muddling towards the next crisis.
• Krugman's obamapostasy will never be ready. 
• UPDATE! Video of Obama's furious reaction to news of new Israeli settlements on West Bank.
• Both sides do it!
• Along came Fox.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• Hey, it's been almost a month since Mark posted at ::wood s lot:: You OK, dude?
• Virginia Woolf, for those of you who do.
• Feminine writing.a
• Trouble.
• Eno, for those of you who do.
• Zappadan!

HOW TO BE A SURREALIST

Dean Young

Sleep well. A gland in the command
center releases its yellow hornet
to tell you you're missing the point,
the point being that getting smacked
by a board, gored by umbrellas, tongue-
lashed by cardiologists, bush-wacked
by push-up bras is a learning experience.
Sure, you're about learned up. Weren't
we promised the thieves would be punished?
Promised jet-packs and fleshy gardenias
and wine to get the dust out of our mouths?
And endless forgiveness? A floral rot
comes out of the closet, the old teacher's
voice comes out of the ravine, red-wings
in rushes never forget their rusty-hinged
song. Moon-song, dread-song, hardly-a-song
at all song. Let's ignore that call,
let someone else stop Mary from herself
for the 80th time. It's never really dark
anyway, not even inside the skull. Take
my hand, fellow figment. Every spring
we'll meet, definite as swarms of stars,
insects over glazed puddles, your eyes
green even though your driver's license
says otherwise. And yes, mortal knells
in sleepless hours, hollow knocks of empty
boats against a dock but still the mind
is a meadow, the heart an ocean even though
it burns. As long as there's a sky, someone
will be falling from it. After molting,
eat your own shucked skin for strength,
keep changing the subject in hopes
that the subject will change you.