Small Reprieves of Coffee and Birdsong

• Was listening to a playlist of WFMU Marathon DJ premiums while driving through Glouster Ohio Monday with Earthgirl and Planet. The song is Hana No Kajimaya by Shoukichi Kina on Rich Hazleton's Floating Around the World with Inflatable Squirrel Carcass CD. 
• Upon review, the rental car is actually a Ford Fusion, not a Ford Focus, but....
• No long drives yesterday - Planet had classes. Went to dinner, hung out in the room after, was wonderful. Finished Jake's book (Jake (IOZ) interviewed) - no reviews here other than to say it had both the strengths and weaknesses of most first novels, and I encourage you to try it  - then link fished while Earthgirl read and Planet wrote a paper.
• We leave to take Planet out for breakfast in minutes and then we abandon her. 

  

• Was it ever so simple? Is an obsession with the past the sign of a morbid disposition? Obsession in the case meaning a constant rehashing of past occurrences and achievements – done for the sake of assuaging an anxious sense of stasis, degeneration, impasse, or reversion in the present. I find myself wondering this in recent months, as the news offers an incessant series of anniversaries – of this or that landmark legislation, historical milestone, technological innovation, tragic event or horrific massacre, etcetera etcetera etcetera. This, admittedly, might simply just another example of the news cycle doing what it does – filling news holes and broadcast time with whatever it can, especially if that whatever is easier to explain than (say) what's going on in Syria or Crimea.
• Metaphors for an Age of Surveillance.
• Power cannot be talked into giving itself up: If privilege is a relation between persons, then it will not go away until those relations are changed. It is unrealistic to expect those who have advantage to surrender it. They cannot be shamed. They will not be persuaded. No volume of study will present a factual enough case to change the thinking of those who use power and feel its many desirable effects. The more facts are presented, the more likely they will be suppressed. No amount of inspiring narrative or good will or forgiveness will cause hierarchies to dismantle themselves.
• Food links. 
• Two Carl Dennis poems.
• Merrill, for those of you who do. There does seem to be a stirring of interest again after years of his fading from his once superstar status.
• Like a honeymoon suite. 
• Lifehacks with Doctor Turin Horse.
• Yes, the above link logistically belongs farther up, but it made me think of Turin Brakes and songs go here:

I AM LEARNING TO ABANDON THE WORLD

Linda Pastan

I am learning to abandon the world

before it can abandon me.

Already I have given up the moon

and snow, closing my shades

against the claims of white.

And the world has taken

my father, my friends.

I have given up melodic lines of hills,

moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.

And every night I give my body up

limb by limb, working upwards

across bone, towards the heart.

But morning comes with small

reprieves of coffee and birdsong.

A tree outside the window

which was simply shadow moments ago

takes back its branches twig

by leafy twig.

And as I take my body back

the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap

as if to make amends.

How Strange They Arrive at All, Nights on Planet Earth

• Tomorrow is the Holiest Day of Egoslavia, so links today (friends have stirred) and then not again until the weekend at the earliest, though I'll add through the afternoon as good ones are found. Speaking of the Holiest Day of Egoslavia, the above is my favorite of many favorites of Planet photos of Fleabus.
• Between popular Democratic uprising and Fascist putsch.
• Game theory and the Ukraine debacle.
• Here's Frances' post on the legal problems of a friend. It was taken down for a few hours yesterday, amended slightly to please the friend's lawyer.
• The fundamental problem with US News college rankings.
• There are two kinds of novelists?
• Bleggalgazing note: it's quite a competition between a spambot my stat-program says is in Tel Aviv and a spambot in Novosibirsk to generate thousands of pings in the past 24 hours AND countless comments that make it through the squiggles meant to deter them. 
• It's gonna be weird when the late 90s are cool again.
• Mimesis and The Lego Movie.
• The Charles Pierce column you would expect on the William Kristol column you would expect.
• Mimesis.
• The Boy with Spyrograph Eyes, now on sale! Dave, the paypal link isn't working! (and it works on other sites for me).
• Lispector and Ruefle!
• Tu Fu watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake.

A LITTLE TOOTH

Thomas Lux

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and
rue nothing. You did, you loved, your
feet are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.







NIGHTS ON PLANET EARTH

Campbell McGrath

Heaven was originally precisely that: the starry sky, dating back to the earliest Egyptian texts, which include magic spells that enable the soul to be sewn in the body of the great mother, Nut, literally "night," like the seed of a plant, which is also a jewel and a star. The Greek Elysian fields derive from the same celestial topography: the Egyptian "Field of Rushes," the eastern stars at dawn where the soul goes to be purified. That there is another, mirror world, a world of light, and that this world is simply the sky—and a step further, the breath of the sky, the weather, the very air—is a formative belief of great antiquity that has continued to the present day with the godhead becoming brightness itself: dios/theos (Greek); deus/divine/diana (Latin); devas (Sanskrit); daha (Arabic); day (English).

—Susan Brind Morrow, Wolves and Honey

1

Gravel paths on hillsides amid moon-drawn vineyards,

click of pearls upon a polished nightstand

soft as rainwater, self-minded stars, oboe music

distant as the grinding of icebergs against the hull

of the self and the soul in the darkness

chanting to the ecstatic chance of existence.

Deep is the water and long is the moonlight

inscribing addresses in quicksilver ink,

building the staircase a lover forever pauses upon.

Deep is the darkness and long is the night,

solid the water and liquid the light. How strange

that they arrive at all, nights on planet earth.

2

Sometimes, not often but repeatedly, the past invades my dreams in the form of a familiar neighborhood I can no longer locate,

a warren of streets lined with dark cafés and unforgettable bars, a place where I can sing by heart every song on every jukebox,

a city that feels the way the skin of an octopus looks pulse-changing from color to color, laminar and fluid and electric,

a city of shadow-draped churches, of busses on dim avenues, or riverlights, or canyonlands, but always a city, and wonderful, and lost.

Sometimes it resembles Amsterdam, students from the ballet school like fanciful gazelles shooting pool in pink tights and soft, shapeless sweaters,

or Madrid at 4AM, arguing the 18th Brumaire with angry Marxists, or Manhattan when the snowfall crowns every trash-can king of its Bowery stoop,

or Chicago, or Dublin, or some ideal city of the imagination, as in a movie you can neither remember entirely nor completely forget,

barracuda-faced men drinking sake like yakuza in a Harukami novel, women sipping champagne or arrack, the rattle of beaded curtains in the back,

the necklaces of Christmas lights reflected in raindrops on windows, the taste of peanuts and their shells crushed to powder underfoot,

always real, always elusive, always a city, and wonderful, and lost. All night I wander alone, searching in vain for the irretrievable.

3

In the night I will drink from a cup of ashes and yellow paint.

In the night I will gossip with the clouds and grow strong.

In the night I will cross rooftops to watch the sea tremble in a dream.

In the night I will assemble my army of golden carpenter ants.

In the night I will walk the towpath among satellites and cosmic dust.

In the night I will cry to the roots of potted plants in empty offices.

In the night I will gather the feathers of pigeons in a honey jar.

In the night I will become an infant before your flag.

Disdaining Age, Ignoring Pain, Avoiding Mirrors

 
What never got mentioned at Tuesday Night Pints: Democrats, Republicans, Barack Obama, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, the Midterm Elections; Hillary Clinton and Hillarian Inevitability, Joe Biden, Martin O'Malley, Elizabeth Warren, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, POTUS 16; Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Dianne Feinstein, the NSA, the panopticon state, the police state, the surveillance state; Glenn Greenwald, people who love Greenwald, people who hate Greenwald, people who loved Greenwald but now hate Greenwald, people who hated Greenwald but now love Greenwald, Greenwald as avatar of zeitgeist; the Koch Brothers, Pierre Omidyar, Ken Langone, Bill Gates, or any other oligarch; Vladimir Putin, Ukraine, Crimea; Hilltop, Hilltop politics, Hilltop president, Hilltop provost, Hilltop English Department, the plan to add a PhD to Hilltop English Department, professors in English Department, English Department chair; blegging, bleggal theory, bleggal compulsion, bleggal interventions, bleggal hiatus, furious and futile blegging in a dying Blegsylvania, dying Blegsylvania. None of these were mentioned, not by design but by natural flow of conversation. They never came up. It was only driving home that I thought about it. I've theories what it signifies, some positive, some negative: my nagging sense of responsibility for bitching about what I can't change is both alarmed and relieved. I'm giving up, I'm smartening up. A good time was had.

• Number Six was born eighty-six years ago today.
• Finding new ways to hide in plain sight: It’s strange, then, that after decades of moving toward an ever more conspicuous readability of the self, to mark out in dress and style and dialect who we are, that we’re witnessing a turn to obfuscation as a mode of individualism; this is the very trend lying behind the much-discussed idea of normcore. Outlined in a clever, insightful essay by Fiona Duncan in New York Magazine, normcore is ostensibly a shift in fashion toward a kind of deliberate blankness, one that recognizes either the increasing impossibility of true uniqueness, or that one might not be read by others at all. No ostentatious individualism for the normcore faithful, but, rather, a decided shift toward the camouflage of appearing to be ordinary.
• The gravest threat of totalitarianism.
• Bringing light. A friend writes about a friend.
• UPDATE! Frances had to pull the above on the advice of her friend's lawyer. She hopes it will be live again soon.
• Derelict ship on an asphalt sea.
• Three days late, New Inquiry's Sunday Reads.
• Food links.
• Ranciere, for those of you who do: Returning to so many early influences has again reminded me to thrive in partiality. Like a good mentor, I have been prompted not to be a vampire, to not be a tourist, to make the first maneuver toward originality by looping back around and returning to where I departed, reexamining the point of origin and all the detritus that litters and hides it from me. Not to relearn what has been forgotten, but to forget what has been learned. To search deteriorated notions and oppressed positions. These microscopic transgressions form the phenomenal ground of varied arts that help me live. The message has been a relief: adhere to the indeterminate in all of us. Go small, go slow, go weird and unknown, and you won’t have to worry about being interesting.
• Two words.
• Brad reads Ammons, as in out loud (as all poetry should be read).
• Listen to Ashbery read one of his poems.
• Jason Molina died a year ago. Have some songs.
• Prunella has Husker Du (Hart songs) and Lush for you.

PARENT'S PANTOUM

Carolyn Kizer

Where did these enormous children come from,
More ladylike than we have ever been?
Some of ours look older than we feel.
How did they appear in their long dresses

More ladylike than we have ever been?
But they moan about their aging more than we do,
In their fragile heels and long black dresses.
They say they admire our youthful spontaneity.

They moan about their aging more than we do,
A somber group--why don't they brighten up?
Though they say they admire our youthful spontaneity
They beg us to be dignified like them

As they ignore our pleas to brighten up.
Someday perhaps we'll capture their attention
Then we won't try to be dignified like them
Nor they to be so gently patronizing.

Someday perhaps we'll capture their attention.
Don't they know that we're supposed to be the stars?
Instead they are so gently patronizing.
It makes us feel like children--second-childish?

Perhaps we're too accustomed to be stars.
The famous flowers glowing in the garden,
So now we pout like children. Second-childish?
Quaint fragments of forgotten history?

Our daughters stroll together in the garden,
Chatting of news we've chosen to ignore,
Pausing to toss us morsels of their history,
Not questions to which only we know answers.

Eyes closed to news we've chosen to ignore,
We'd rather excavate old memories,
Disdaining age, ignoring pain, avoiding mirrors.
Why do they never listen to our stories?

Because they hate to excavate old memories
They don't believe our stories have an end.
They don't ask questions because they dread the answers.
They don't see that we've become their mirrors,

We offspring of our enormous children.

Dearest I Cannot Loiter Here in Lather Like a Polar Bear

• New from Earthgirl. That's Stanley (named after Elkin) on the left, Rosie (named after Tremain) on the right. You can see more of her work here. Mocomofos, she has a show this coming April. Details TBA.
• Tremain, as opposed to Trelane.
• Who the hell does sillyass Star Trek jokes and allusions?
• See blog header.
• Language of resistance: Such slander campaigns could make the secret police in totalitarian regimes look like literary workshops. For what they do is create characters; they make people up and release them into the world. When, years after the collapse of communism, Müller gained access to her secret police file, she discovered that in the archives she was not one, but two distinct people. “One is called Cristina, an enemy of the state, who must be taken on.” Except for the name, this character looked familiar to Müller, a version of herself as reconstructed by the regime’s spies and scribes. The second character was pure fiction. To compromise the real one, the secret police created a fake Müller, Cristina’s “double.” This literary product had all “the ingredients that would be most damaging to me—hardened Communist, ruthless agent, party member.” Working for the Party—or for its “Shield and Sword,” as the secret police was endearingly called—was often seen as a dirty job, something that could rob you of social respectability. Apparently the inner Party knew this better than anyone else.
• Easy Make Totalitarian Salads!
• Today's healthy dose of duh.
• Bartleby, the president.
• LitCrit Wars, via Melville.
• [He Lived - Childhood Summers]
• Short films of Diana Rigg?
• Bleggalgazing and a request for blogs. Glad to see I'm not the only one.
• The Librarian.
• Bleggalgazing: yes, I'm over myself, at least for today, thanks.
• Lordy, downloaded this album last night, holyfuck:

HOME AFTER THREE MONTHS AWAY

Robert Lowell

Gone now the baby's nurse,
a lioness who ruled the roost
and made the Mother cry.
She used to tie
gobbets of porkrind in bowknots of gauze--
three months they hung like soggy toast
on our eight foot magnolia tree,
and helped the English sparrows
weather a Boston winter.

Three months, three months!
Is Richard now himself again?
Dimpled with exaltation,
my daughter holds her levee in the tub.
Our noses rub,
each of us pats a stringy lock of hair--
they tell me nothing's gone.
Though I am forty-one,
not forty now, the time I put away
was child's play. After thirteen weeks
my child still dabs her cheeks
to start me shaving. When
we dress her in her sky-blue corduroy,
she changes to a boy,
and floats my shaving brush
and washcloth in the flush. . . .
Dearest I cannot loiter here
in lather like a polar bear.

Recuperating, I neither spin nor toil.
Three stories down below,
a choreman tends our coffin's length of soil,
and seven horizontal tulips blow.
Just twelve months ago,
these flowers were pedigreed
imported Dutchmen; no no one need
distinguish them from weed.
Bushed by the late spring snow,
they cannot meet
another year's snowballing enervation.

I keep no rank nor station.
Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.

Is Door to the Forum, Is Cutter of Keys

• Was reminded by Storck an hour ago of Loud Animal Group.
• Capitalism's growing problem with anxiety: Consider the panic of losing a mobile phone, of having no access at all to the internet, to one’s games, movies, photos, or common nodes of social interaction that we call our friends or followers. A power-cut, a burglary… would it be wrong to call them addictions? Yet we have neither selected this basis of social organisation, nor should we guiltily consider ourselves lucky first-worlders gorging gluttonously on the backs of the deprived billions. Whilst digitised technologies have abstracted and placed many cultural forms on a single homogeneous platform, personal technologies have the worker connected and potentially labouring at all hours in ways that operate, at minute level, the exchanges and processes that neoliberal capitalism requires to function. Against such a backdrop, our politicians, the public face of neoliberal capitalism, cajole us through fear and envy to keep up our duty as citizens: spend, borrow, buy, 24/7, 365 days a year, be it Christmas, Valentine’s or whatever, one must never shirk in one’s duty to service the economy.
• The zombification of the West.
• Privatizing science.

• The only two Louder Animal Group songs I could find. 
• We just put Planet on an airplane. Egoslavia's Holiest Day is five days away. See tag Planet Poems.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• There are new additions to the blogrolls, please check them out as they float to the top. Recommendations for new things for me to read solicited. Later today those blogs that haven't updated in three months will be moved to Moribund. No one will be purged except those blogs that suicided. If you are Kinding me and me not you please let me know.
• Brad's serialized short story, part the last.
• riverrun.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Creeley, for those of you who do.
• Chris M just reminded me of Current 93.

BETWEEN

Marie Ponsot

(for my daughter)

Composed in a shine of laughing, Monique brings in sacks

of groceries, unloads them, straightens, and stretches her back.

The child was a girl, the girl is a woman; the shift   

is subtle and absolute, worn like a gift.

The woman, once girl once child, now is deft in her ease,   

is door to the forum, is cutter of keys.

In space that her torque and lift have prefigured and set free   

between her mother and her child the woman stands   

having emptied her hands.

Stop & Shiver in It

Compulsive and futile weekend blogging: As promised, Theme Song March 2014. That song has been Theme Song of Month more than any other. No, I can't say how many times, that would be too compulsive even for me.

Two friends, one analog, one digital, have been urging me to give Star Trek: Deep Space Nine another chance. DS9 was my least favorite of the four shows for reasons I forget (I don't count Enterprise, which I've never seen and had and have no desire to see), though I remember thinking moving Worf to the show seemed a particularly desperate Hail Mary. But I trust the judgment of my friends and will give DS9 a new viewing. I watched the premier last night, things I had forgot: Sisco's wife was killed by Locutus; his son is motherfucking irritating; Dax is a trill; cameras will fixate on Kira's tits; the doctor is motherfucking irritating; Sisco will never call anyone Rockfish.

• Eight pronunciation errors that make English what it is today.
• Did Roger Ailes win POTUS 12 for Obama?
• The tyranny of money.
• Of being numerous: In that image—where a desire for insurrectionary freedom is paired with advanced technocapitalism’s ­surveillance-control apparatus—our current problem is crystallized. The devices we rely upon to communicate and gather information and build the solidarity necessary for contemporary protests also offer us up as ripe for constant surveillance. The surveillance state could not be upheld without its always already trackable denizens. To sidestep our tacit complicity in this would be to fail to recognize how deep it runs—it’s how we live. As my Salon colleague Andrew Leonard noted, “In 2013, the negative consequences of our contemporary lifestyles were impossible to ignore.”
• The nyancatcentipedes really tie the post together.
• Brad's serialized short story, part five.
• Brad's serialized short story, part six.
• Thomas Hardy's afterwards. 
• Heart's Needle. 
• Two new tags.

  
GYMNODPÉDIES NO. 3

Adrian Matejka

This sunlight on snow.

This decrescendo

of covered stumps & brush —

stop for it.

Stop before the sled end-

             over-ends down

             the chin of the hill —

the way it always will

at the rock ⅔ of the way down.

Stop & shiver in it: the ring

             of snow inside gloves,

             the cusp of red forehead

like a sun just waiting to top

the hill. Every ill-built

             snowball waiting to be thrown,

             every bell-shaped angel

stamped over the brown leaves.

When my daughter ranges

             in winter, she works

every dazzling angle —

             the crestfallen pinecones,

             the grizzled beards

of bushes in the morning,

a furnace’s windup huffing

             in this throat-

             clearing of snow.