"When I woke up Mayakovsky He Was a Lot More Prompt," the Sun Said Petulantly

• Mstislav Rostropovich was born 87 years ago today. 
• The pianist in Shostakovich's Cello Sonata is Benjamin Britten, btw.
• Today's links while they're fresh.
• Protesting police violence in Albuquerque.
• Democrats are doomed.
• John Podesta's heroic battle against straw men.
• Destination Culture.

• Goats are more clever than previously thought.
• Crow is alive.
• What is forgetting?
• On the latest Jonathan Littell.
• What enemies say picking.
• Commercial Opportunities. Tom's latest.
• Hejinian, Whitman, and the politics of sleep.
• It's still Frank O'Hara's birthday.

A TRUE ACCOUNT OF TALKING TO THE SUN AT FIRE ISLAND

Frank O'Hara

The Sun woke me this morning loud

and clear, saying "Hey! I've been

trying to wake you up for fifteen

minutes. Don't be so rude, you are

only the second poet I've ever chosen

to speak to personally

                                  so why

aren't you more attentive? If I could

burn you through the window I would

to wake you up. I can't hang around

here all day."

                    "Sorry, Sun, I stayed

up late last night talking to Hal."

"When I woke up Mayakovsky he was

a lot more prompt" the Sun said

petulantly. "Most people are up

already waiting to see if I'm going

to put in an appearance."

                                       I tried

to apologize "I missed you yesterday."

"That's better" he said. "I didn't

know you'd come out." "You may be

wondering why I've come so close?"

"Yes" I said beginning to feel hot

wondering if maybe he wasn't burning me

anyway.

              "Frankly I wanted to tell you

I like your poetry. I see a lot

on my rounds and you're okay. You may

not be the greatest thing on earth, but

you're different. Now, I've heard some

say you're crazy, they being excessively

calm themselves to my mind, and other

crazy poets think that you're a boring

reactionary. Not me.

                                 Just keep on

like I do and pay no attention. You'll

find that people always will complain

about the atmosphere, either too hot

or too cold too bright or too dark, days

too short or too long.

                                 If you don't appear

at all one day they think you're lazy

or dead. Just keep right on, I like it.

And don't worry about your lineage

poetic or natural. The Sun shines on

the jungle, you know, on the tundra

the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were

I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting

for you to get to work.

                                    And now that you

are making your own days, so to speak,

even if no one reads you but me

you won't be depressed. Not

everyone can look up, even at me. It

hurts their eyes."

                          "Oh Sun, I'm so grateful to you!"

"Thanks and remember I'm watching. It's

easier for me to speak to you out

here. I don't have to slide down

between buildings to get your ear.

I know you love Manhattan, but

you ought to look up more often.

                                                    And

always embrace things, people earth

sky stars, as I do, freely and with

the appropriate sense of space. That

is your inclination, known in the heavens

and you should follow it to hell, if

necessary, which I doubt.

                                          Maybe we'll

speak again in Africa, of which I too

am specially fond. Go back to sleep now

Frank, and I may leave a tiny poem

in that brain of yours as my farewell."

"Sun, don't go!" I was awake

at last. "No, go I must, they're calling

me."

        "Who are they?"

                                  Rising he said "Some

day you'll know. They're calling to you

too." Darkly he rose, and then I slept.

Born 116, 110 & 107 Years Ago Today

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by ten food steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant in the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.

William Faulker, Light in August.

Mark Rothko born 110 years ago today. And one more piece of Shostakovich, born 107 years ago today.

A Beautiful Cacaphony Flutters in the Brightness of the Dead Calm as True Objects Lost in the Politeness Fill the Grail of a New Primitive

• Dmitri Shastokovich was born 107 years ago today. High Egoslavian Holy Day. I don't play the Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game with composers, though if I did Shostakovich would have a permanent seat.
• You're stupid, therefore I'm smart, QED.
• I'm told an unprincipled elitish asshole is an ambitious hypocrite who cares only for his own political fortune, goddamn the health of the nation if necessary. Oh my.
• And now that bet is paid off, G.
• Robert Reich, Inequality's Intellectual Fraudster.
• Dear James Goodale: the culture of lying is a feature, not a bug.
• I am snubbed again.
• Deleuze, for those of you who do, or: Life and the writer again.
• Prunella's latest playlist.
• Alcohol + syndrome + painting.
• The argument over Coetzee.
• On hating Mumford & Sons. You could play me a mega-big Mumford & Sons song, I've no doubt heard it, I couldn't identify it. I have heard what the act is and have heard the hate.
• The dress code of Mumford & Sons.
• Mingus.
• Gaddis's letters. He's America's best unknown writer?

TRIPTYCH FOR BELIEVERS

Richard Tagett

I

Hung up on body parts in the particulate daylight, you step out of a Beckett play to find yourself in a memory resisting itself, as meat hits the fan so to speak against the white blanket of the grainy void. You never know where it’s going, the body, the boy swathed in bullets with those black eyes pissing a letter-opener in the desert mud near a disabled Mercedes. When things enter the room you think bazooka and check your hat. A puddle of warm ice-cream in anticipation. Here’s where Coney Island drops like a discarded napkin and you can’t go home again. Mucous brimming the banks, a cake of dust in the shape of a rocking chair ticking away. But soon it will snow as exquisite dogs languish from inside a sandwich tied to a parachute. No time for ballads, the table is set.

II

Light solidifies in cells, the keeper of lost keys. They don’t belong to anyone, the keys. Playing the game backwards reveals nothing a blind child could not guess by the hairs on his arm. The lips on old men are lockboxes in the terminal of no-knowing without gratitude for the despair of angels. You have to suffer, you have to fill up in order to implode, to be recognized for the necessities of commerce. They unhinge, finally, the doors you walk through into phantom stairwells in telephonic hum smelling of wet coal and doll’s hair. Precipitous adjectives gush from a cracked faucet in the chancellery restroom. Someone is stifling laughter from underneath a card table where an electric utility had fallen from his sleeve. They say that trussed birds derive no pleasure from the music of mangled wagons and that gas seeps like a well-kept secret imperiling dust mites in the spleens of hooded maidens locked away from the light. Everything is descending, even the scholarship of the ancient adverbs. Mouths twist into almonds and you wonder how the noise can drown itself out with nothing but nouns and dinner plates and gallows, with history a hiccup waiting to happen.

III

The music is an absence of colliding masses. You can cut your feet on the proverbial and be too close to hear it, the other music, the suffocation of things that can’t fly. A beautiful cacophony flutters in the brightness of dead calm as true objects lost in the politeness of daylight fill the grail of a new primitive. You choke on little candles and all through the night your legs cramp in the sweat of the moonlight. For no good reason a tenderness of geese is billowing in the curtains, as holes in the face open and close and paper scorches sky with futile encryption. Those armchairs foundering in the scum of the surf. Deafness craving disaster green in the spine, knowing the cocktail party’s over. Now it’s all red and your lips are trembling in believability, but it’s only a flickering image in the dark quadrant of your eye bending the light as they mow the daisies under the stars, for no good reason.

Speaker Holds Up the Talks Held Last

• Sonic Youth is no more, doesn't mean there's no new Kim Gordon music. Downloaded Body/Head yesterday, you should today.
• When the state floods the zone reform is dead.
• Metadata = surveillance.
• Cliff notes for a pile-on.
• Samantha Powers has a sad.
• The answer is no. What will save the university are bogus masters and certificate programs awarded for the students' checks clearing, or at least that what provosts are betting on. And yes, the provosts have a different definition of what saving the university is than you or me.
• How different is de Blasio?
• My future hell.
• Blimp hovers over Frederick!
• Silicon and surveillance. Another review of Pynchon's Bleeding Edge that I'm bookmarking here to read after I've finished the novel. Halfway, it's OK, I'd be lying if I said it was love.
• The Ideal English Major (h/t wood s lot)
• The boy with spirograph eyes.
• RIP Alvaro Mutis. I cannot recommend the novellas of Maqroll highly enough. I've two extra copies, who wants one?
• UPDATE! Here's on obit from The Guardian.
• Quick question.
• Love Song.
• Tomorrow is a High Egoslavian Holy Day. Get your Shostakovich request in soon. Or not.

THE COUNTRY AUTUMNS

Clark Coolidge

But it could not be brought to see what it

could be brought. And the leaves are

away again, teamed. A parent at the

last and a parent in the middle. And

as stones I thought it right.

Two plates, and on the other side all the

forest pieces. The clock says stay.

The books lower the earth, and in gardens

flat stones spin. The volume was of waiting.

Today is today, until the preposition taken up.

Next to the tree sways.

The sky in pieces the leaves part the

leaves piece together. To and from a hand

given all directions. The bark comes from

below. Takes from the books of the moves under

the sky. Speaker holds up the talks held last.

Motors the dust and the yellow syllables.

A slant on which was never here or

only partly.

Born 87 Years Ago Today, 107 Years Ago Wednesday, 68 Years Ago Thursday

This is to note I did not forget that John Coltrane was born 87 years ago today. What I did forget was to ask Hamster for his playlist more than 24 hours in advance; I gave him fifteen minutes after he'd already got to work, so my fault.

 





I should mention there are two Egoslavian Holy Days imminent, Shostakovich's birthday Wednesday, Bryan Ferry's Thursday, so if you've requests get them to me or, alternatively, not.

I Pay Five Cents for a Daily Synopsis of Current History, Two Bits and the Late Lowdown on Hollywood, Twist a Dial for Stardust or Shostakovich, and with Each Bleacher Stub I reserve the Right to Shout “Kill the Bum” at the Umpire—

Dmitri Shostakovich was born 106 years ago today. Have I mentioned I love his music? Today's pieces via requests from three friends, THANKS! I've been asked to tell stories of Blegsylvanian history, NO THANKS! I hear that NFL owners are willing to ruin the integrity of the game to save pennies against billions of dollars of profit to squash a union. Heh, integrity of the game. You're funny. Fine metaph.... o, fuck it.

• How do you take your poison?
• The rack of inequality.
• Bleggalgazing.
• 25 random things.
• OK, Blegsylvanian history: Stringtown's been dying for years. The King of Anarchists (who is a good guy, has been Kind to me and this blog, and understands the irony of the gig) in our stringtown hasn't posted in months, hastening the dying by millimeters. His resurrection if it occurs will set off hosannahs, and some not on his blegrells will compete in his comments for his attention to be Vice-King of Anarchists (though not all who comment there are necessarily competing). 
• The half-life of ephemera.
• Re: Dylan and Nobel - I apologize to me for letting those two words in the same sentence yoink me though the yoinking felt good. I don't hate Bob Dylan's music, it just bores me, that's on me. Dylan is Hemingway/Ashbery-like, one can agree and disagree of the merit of the original but hate the influence each cast, the many motherfuckingly awful decades of imitators their influence spawned.
• Stay hungry.
• Quartets 11, 12, 13.

SELF-PORTRAIT

Frank Marshall Davis

I would be

A painter with words

Creating sharp portraits

On the wide canvas of your mind   

Images of those things

Shaped through my eyes

That interest me;

But being a Tenth American   

In this democracy

I sometimes sketch a miniature   

Though I contract for a mural.

Of course

You understand this democracy;

One man as good as another,

From log cabin to White House,

Poor boy to corporation president,   

Hoover and Browder with one vote each,   

A free country,

Complete equality—

Yeah—

And the rich get tax refunds,

The poor get relief checks.

As for myself

I pay five cents for a daily synopsis of current history,

Two bits and the late lowdown on Hollywood,

Twist a dial for Stardust or Shostakovich,

And with each bleacher stub I reserve the right to shout “kill the bum” at the umpire—

Wherefore am I different

From nine other Americans?

But listen, you

Don’t worry about me

I rate!

I’m Convert 4711 at Beulah Baptist Church,   

I’m Social Security No. 337-16-3458 in Washington,

Thank you Mister God and Mister Roosevelt!

And another thing:—

No matter what happens

I too can always call in a policeman!