Riptide of Rhythms and the Metaphor’s Seaweed

Spent another night last night with Jack Spicer's poems, here, I'm glad some of you enjoy hearing the poems rather than reading them. Then I listened to The Marshmallow Staircase.

Hardly any links to fish even if I had gone link fishing. Plus it's not Mark E Smith's birthday today so my internal bleg rules demand I move yesterday's birthday post down from top. Plus I like the new header, want to bump it. So this. Aggregating back tomorrow, or not.

No Clothes, No Skin, No Flesh, No Heart, an Emperor!

• Couldn't read last night (not slump-based, just couldn't, it happens, I've learned forcing myself to read can lead to a slump, so night off), put on GY!BE, surfed for the links below, fell asleep listening to GY!BE, woke up with GY!BE in my head.
• Against the rage machine: To say “I deserve to be heard!” today is a vexed proposition. Right and left, tech corporations beg you to say your piece for the sake of content-generation, free publicity, hype, and ad sales. America’s speech is so free, it pays—just not you. Even when we don’t opine, just clicking around, we’re like cilia on the tracheal lining of some gross beast, and our small work of enthusiasm, liking or passing along or reiterating or linking, is like the wriggle of a hair, pushing the story down the throat of the culture, filling its lungs so that it may breathe. We can accept this. We are a hair. And we would quietly concede our $5 annual value to Facebook and Twitter, if only they stopped asking us what’s on our minds—if only they left us alone.
• Does Discipline and Punish need a new translation?
• Consumer manipulation: Consider, first, confusion by design: Las Vegas casinos are mazes, carefully crafted to draw players to the slot machines and to keep them there. Casino designers warn against the “yellow brick road” effect of having a clear route through the casino. (One side effect: it takes paramedics a long time to find gamblers in cardiac arrest; as Ms Schüll also documents, it can be tough to get the slot-machine players to assist, or even to make room for, the medical team.)
• HalluciNation.
• Not that we would have driven this section of Rockville Pike tonight when we go out to dinner tonight with Hamster, but now we absolutely won't.

• Have you laughed at Arsene Wenger today?
• Changing our stories: Let me toss out a provocation, not for the sake of stirring the water, but because I have begun to suspect it is true: most of our finest narratives, films as well as novels, however formally innovative and politically anti-establishment, are actually conservative, even inhibiting, in their consequences and implications.
• Evening Train.
• Eminent hipsters: Today, when we identify a hipster, it carries entirely different connotations from the word’s original, darkly lustrous charge. “Hipster” is now a slight, because hipsters now are slight—not so much a soulful tribe as a fly-eyed pose looking for somewhere to land. Hipsters move into your locale, and before you know it, brittle quotation marks are strung everywhere. Hipsters have become little more than an advance guard for the arcadia of “hip capitalism.” Once, though, it truly mattered how hip you were. In Fagen’s day, things were different. Born in 1948, he belongs to a baby-boomer generation for whom the benediction of hip was most devoutly to be desired. It was a dark and uncertain thing, an arduous rite of passage, almost a spiritual gamble.
• I like Steely Dan, but they were ruined for me by Kark Mantarow who, when we were tripping, played them and played them and became an asshole about playing them, would freak out and bad-trip (or fake bad-trip) if they weren't on. I stopped tripping with Kark Mantarow after the second time, but association with Steely Dan was frozen permanent.
• Dr Z still sees Steely Dan whenever they are on tour, wears Steely Dan t-shirts when we are discing, which we haven't in a couple of months, fucking winter.
• I do find fascinating the black licorice aspect of Steely Dan, most folk I've met dig or hate them (or did, long ago, when we were young, couldn't give a fuck either way now that we're old).
• You're right, it has been too long since I posted a Jack Spicer poem.

[IMAGINE LUCIFER}

Jack Spicer

Imagine Lucifer

An angel without angelness

An apple

Plucked clear by will of taste, color,

Strength, beauty, roundness, seed

Absent of all God painted, present everything

An apple is.

Imagine Lucifer

An angel without angelness

A poem

That has revised itself out of sound

Imagine, rhyme, concordance

Absent of all God spoke of, present everything

A poem is.

                            The law I say, the Law

Is?

What is Lucifer

An emperor with no clothes

No skin, no flesh, no heart

An emperor!

Jack Spicer Is Music to My Ears, Everything Is Possible

Heard that song for the first time today, a song mentioning Jack Spicer, and since tomorrow is an Egoslavian Holy Day and another poet will get all the space, the song, two Spicer poems and a Nurse with Wounds cover I found plus a favorite John Fahey song I found while looking for the Vince Taylor all get play tonight. As for Spicer, any chance to post Spicer I will post Spicer. Click on tag below for more poems.


A POEM FOR DADA DAY AT THE PLACE APRIL 1, 1958

Jack Spicer

I
    

The bartender

Has eyes the color of ripe apricots

Easy to please as a cash register he

Enjoys art and good jokes.

Squish

Goes the painting

Squirt

Goes the poem

He

We

Laugh.

II
    

It is not easy to remember that other people died

          besides Dylan Thomas and Charlie Parker

Died looking for beauty in the world of the

          bartender

This person, that person, this person, that person

          died looking for beauty

Even the bartender died

III 
     

Dante blew his nose

And his nose came off in his hand

Rimbaud broke his throat

Trying to cough

Dada is not funny

It is a serious assault

On art

Because art

Can be enjoyed by the bartender.

IV
     

The bartender is not the United States

Or the intellectual

Or the bartender

He is every bastard that does not cry

When he reads this poem.

   

[ANY FOOL CAN GET INTO AN OCEAN]

Jack Spicer

Any fool can get into an ocean   

But it takes a Goddess   

To get out of one.

What’s true of oceans is true, of course,

Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming   

Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed

You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess

To get back out of them

Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly

Out in the middle of the poem

They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the

    water hardly moves

You might get out through all the waves and rocks

Into the middle of the poem to touch them

But when you’ve tried the blessed water long

Enough to want to start backward

That’s when the fun starts

Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural

You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown

Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth

But it takes a hero to get out of one

What’s true of labyrinths is true of course

Of love and memory. When you start remembering.

Like a Length of Coiled Rope Which Does Not Disguise in the Final Twists of Its Lengths Its Endings

Found that in files, shot three, four years ago, had forgotten about it. So, Never Let Me Go isn't working. It is my least favorite Ishiguro, so it was desperate stab. Ed's sheer delight in reading Pynchon's Against the Day makes me happy and envious, so after an anniversary dinner at our (until 6:30 last night) favorite Indian restaurant we walked the block to a Barnes and Noble to spend Earthgirl's gift cards. I sent my copy of Against the Day to someone (I don't remember who) after I finished my second reading early in 2012, I thought, it's my favorite Pynchon (yes, more than Gravity's Rainbow), it's three years ahead of scheduled rereading but why not pick it up and see what happens. Not on shelf. What was on shelf was the novel photoed below, I remember the buzz when it came out, it was mentioned in The Millions favorably in the past week, so what the fuck, 40 pages in all good, but this is me I'm talking about so I'm betting against me until I lose a bet.

• I did find a copy of Pynchon's Mason & Dixon in a used bookstore this past weekend. Anyone want it?
• OK, back to the arrgh-mines. Yes, I know, the arrgh-mines are a primary reason I bet against myself enjoying a novel - finish a novel? I can still do that, joyously enjoy a novel I can't.
• The problem with Privacy Moderates.
• On the above.
• Walter Pincus writes error-strewn anti-Snowden column.
• Greenwald guts him.
• On-the-above.
• America against Democracy.
• What force feeding at GITMO looks like.
• Speaking of Villager fucksticks.
• Austerity and the politics of neoliberalism.
• His generation's greatest academic fraud (I say that mostly admiringly) on global protests.
• They are an abomination.
• Production values.
• Poverty in MOCO.
• The neighborhood I grew up in. One block from my parent's house.

• Mathematical proof United sucks.
• Dead reckoning.
• Rancière, for those of you who do.
• Of Pilgrims and Anarchists: on a new book of criticism on Pynchon's Against the Day.
• Inventing literature.
• A 90s' playlist.
• Peter Greenaway on Four American Composers. I dated a woman once who raved about Greenaway's movies, took me to a few, I don't remember a thing about them, whereas I rave about Cage and Glass and especially Monk.
• Earthgirl's favorite novelist in trouble over sequel to Earthgirl's favorite novel.
• Recalling The Raincoats.
• Great dose of monotonous techno.
• Another primary reason I'm failing novels is I'm not failing poetry. I found the collected Jack Spicer when working on bookshelves, have more Spicer today, it is easily the book I've read most since it was published in 2010. More stunning each time. You know the drill.
• I couldn't make The Evens this past Monday. Fuck me. Have some Ian MacKaye product.

A BOOK OF MUSIC

Jack Spicer

Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers.
Where Did it end? There is no telling. No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death. Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons. Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope.

And There Are Kites Caught on the Wires Up Above the Street Lamps and the Storm Drains Are All Choked with Dead Branches

New Future Bible Heroes. Gonna go see them with Planet and Ari on July 26 at Black Cat. Anyone else want to go? Hamster, I'm looking at you. OK OK OK, have some links while they're fresh and since you won't get any tomorrow, though take my threats based on previous follow-through on said threats. Josh Marshall, megaload, says Daniel Ellsberg is old and stupid so don't listen to what Ellsberg says about Snowden. No link, go find or avoid on you own. Daily motherfucking Obama. Begging, charity, who we are now. We all need shelter. The symbolism of technology. New Inquiry's Sunday links. Yeah, United played last night, tied Colorado in Colorado 0-0, watched twenty minutes, went to bed. Apple just sent me an email telling me the best way to celebrate five years of Apple aps is to buy more Apple aps. New Coover coming, a sequel to his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists. Another riff on Against the Day. Three Mary Ruefle poems. Ashbery interview from 1983 - High Egoslavian Holy Day later this month. Circleville Ohio. Ligeti at the 50-yard line. Um, here's the real point of this afternoon brazen blogwhoring and attention-sluttery post: I HAD NO FUCKING IDEA WIRE IS PLAYING BLACK CAT THIS SUNDAY NIGHT!  $20. Anyone? Here, this song is easily one of the five most posted on this shitty blog ever.


    




PSYCHOANALYSIS: AN ELEGY

Jack Spicer

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water. Shedding it
Down empty acres of oak and manzanita
Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana
Driving the hills crazy,
A fast wind with a bit of dust in it
Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.
Or down in the city where the peach trees
Are awkward as young horses,
And there are kites caught on the wires
Up above the street lamps,
And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer
As slow getting started
As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza
After a lot of unusual rain California seems long in the summer.
I would like to write a poem as long as California
And as slow as a summer.
Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow
As the very tip of summer.
As slow as the summer seems
On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside
Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road
Between Bakersfield and Hell
Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now? 

I’m thinking that she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways
Traveling up and down her skin
Long empty highways
With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them
On hot summer nights.
I am thinking that her body could be California
And I a rich Eastern tourist
Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas
Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California
That I have never seen.
Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,
Send them.
One of each breast photographed looking
Like curious national monuments,
One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway
Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging
In the world’s oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?

I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated. How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

And If He Cries Put His Heart Out with a Lantern's Goat

Insomnia, cold, botched root canal, work suck, shittiest mood in months, and now this, motherfucking Obama's inauguration playlist:

1. Signed, Sealed, Delivered - Stevie Wonder
2. I Was Here - Beyonce
3. Mi Gente - Marc Anthony
4. Carry On - Fun.
5. New Day - Alicia Keys
6. Mud On The Tires - Brad Paisley
7. Turn Up The Love - Far East Movement, Cover Drive
8. Edge Of Glory - Glee Cast
9. Your Smiling Face - James Taylor
10. Ordinary People - John Legend
11. Firework - Katy Perry
12. Breakaway - Kelly Clarkson
13. My Mic - Nick Cannon ft. Biz Markie
14. Something Special - Usher
15. Higher And Higher - Walt Whitman and the Soul Children of Chicago
16. Get Ready - Smokey Robinson
17. Future - Mindless Behavior

What a motherfucker. What a lame-ass motherfucker. What a despicable lame-ass motherfucker. Hey, despicable lame-ass motherfucker, eat this:






HELEN: A REVISION

Jack Spicer

zeus: It is to be assumed that I do not exist while most people in the vision assume that I do exist. This is to be one of the extents of meaning between the players and the audience. I have to talk like this because I am the lord of both kinds of sky—and I don't mean your sky and their sky because they are signs, I mean the bright sky and the burning sky. I have no intention of showing you my limits. The players in this poem are players. They have taken their parts not to deceive you [or me for that matter] but because they have been paid in love or coin to be players. I have known for a long time that there is not a fourth wall in a play. I am called Zeus and I know this.

thersites: [Running out on the construction of the stage.] The fourth wall is not as important as you think it is.

zeus: [Disturbed but carrying it off like a good Master of Ceremonial.] Thersites is involuntary. [He puts his arm around him.] I could not play a part if I were not a player.

thersites: Reveal yourself to me and don't pretend that there are people watching you. I am alone on the stage with you. Tell me the plot of the play.

zeus: [Standing away.] Don't try to talk if you don't have to. You must admit there is no audience. Everything is done for you.

thersites: Stop repeating yourself. You old motherfucker. Your skies are bad enough. [He looks to the ground.] A parody is better than a pun.

zeus: I do not understand your language.

[They are silent together for a moment and then the curtain drops.]

*       *       *

And if he dies on this road throw wild blackberries at his ghost

And if he doesn't, and he won't, hope the cost

Hope the cost.

And the tenor of the what meets the why at the edge

Like a backwards image of each terror's lodge

Each terror's lodge.

And if he cries put his heart out with a lantern's goat

Where they say all passages to pay the debt

The lighted yet.

*       *       *

The focus sing

Is not their business. Their backs lay

By not altogether being there.

Here and there in swamps and villages.

How doth the silly crocodile

Amuse the Muse

*       *       *

And in the skyey march of flesh

That boundary line where no body is

Preserve us, lord, from aches and harms

And bring my death.

Both air and water rattle there

And mud and fire

Preserve us, lord, from what would share a shroud

and bring my death.

A vagrant bird flies to the glossy limbs

The battlefield has harms. The trees have half

Their branches shot away. Preserve us, lord

From hair and mud and flesh.