The Dog in Humble Inquiry Along the Ground, the Child Who Credits Dreams and Fears the Dark, Know More and Less Than You

That's new Yo La Tengo, serendipitously discovered yesterday as I planned some cascades by bands and artists in the Inner Most Circle of Bands and Artists That Rotate In and Out of the Two Non-Permanent Spots in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game now that I'm fixated on My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, what with the recent coup. Here are five of them.

Two unrelated to My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game updates for those who follow along despite updates to My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game:

Earthgirl's leg is much improved. It is far less colorful, the bruise around her ankle is gone, and the sensation of a thousand bees stinging is down to a couple of hundred. She wouldn't have been hike-worthy this weekend, but we're booked socially this weekend - Saturday for her family, Sunday for mine.

Napoleon only has three months and twenty-two days in quarantine left! Still no sign of rabies. His hair that was shaved to fix the bite wound has grown back. He complains rarely. He's lovely.

• The debate over the local helmetball team's nickname has exploded in DC over a recent court ruling. Iraq falling apart, Eric Cantor losing his power, the midterm elections and their impact on POTUS 16, the biggest political storm in DC is the helmetball team's nickname. Same game, different topping is all, the hate, people are gleeful. Fine metaphors, as always, abound.
• Something you should know about DC: baseball's Nats, basketball's Bullets Wizards, ice soccer's Caps could all go undefeated through a season and the playoffs and win championships and the local Helmetball team, off a 3-13 season, would still be the only team in DC. This debate, it can't be avoided around here. 
• Let me give you an unassailable truth about the Washington helmetball team's fight to retain the current nickname: no matter whether the name is changed or not, this will never be over, and the team will be referred to as The Redskins forever in and around DC even if the name is changed.
• Me, I'm all about despising Tiny Daimon Snyder, fucking fuck. If the nickname debate is causing him grief, then yay. He's Tiny Daimon Snyder, fucking fuck.

• Matters of character.
• Derrida and Zizek, for those of you who do.
• On football and national identity.
• An autopsy for Spain and Tika Taka. It's interesting to me the two biggest bores in international football, Spain (on purpose) and England (because they're England) have both crashed out two games into group.
• Been a bad couple of months for Stevie England, yes?
• The terrible embarrassment of the goalie on the Crown Prince's birthday.
• Rockville weighs in on NoBeSoRo.
• David Markson, for those of you who do.
• Beckett (Molloy in particular), for those of you who do.
• Rothko and Taggert, for those of you who do.
• Not today, but yes, the word Rothko sets off a Morton Feldman cascade in my head, soon here.
• Tuxedomoon, for those of you who do.

DOGS ARE SHAKESPEAREAN, CHILDREN ARE STRANGERS

Delmore Schwartz

Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers.

Let Freud and Wordsworth discuss the child,

Angels and Platonists shall judge the dog,

The running dog, who paused, distending nostrils,

Then barked and wailed; the boy who pinched his sister,   

The little girl who sang the song from Twelfth Night,   

As if she understood the wind and rain,

The dog who moaned, hearing the violins in concert.   

—O I am sad when I see dogs or children!

For they are strangers, they are Shakespearean.

Tell us, Freud, can it be that lovely children   

Have merely ugly dreams of natural functions?   

And you, too, Wordsworth, are children truly   

Clouded with glory, learned in dark Nature?   

The dog in humble inquiry along the ground,   

The child who credits dreams and fears the dark,   

Know more and less than you: they know full well   

Nor dream nor childhood answer questions well:   

You too are strangers, children are Shakespearean.

Regard the child, regard the animal,   

Welcome strangers, but study daily things,   

Knowing that heaven and hell surround us,   

But this, this which we say before we’re sorry,   

This which we live behind our unseen faces,   

Is neither dream, nor childhood, neither   

Myth, nor landscape, final, nor finished,   

For we are incomplete and know no future,   

And we are howling or dancing out our souls   

In beating syllables before the curtain:   

We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.

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”

The Privilege of Not Knowing If He Was Kind or Unkind as You Chamber Another, Waiting for Someone to Come for His Shoes

  
Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington (where I'm guessing the reconstruction of the I-70/I-79 interchange is a total clusterfuck) to Wheeling to Zanesville to Bamgier tomorrow, meaning today, Bamgier to Zanesville to Wheeling to Washington (where hopefully PDOT game it's employees Saturday off) to Morgantown to Cumberland to Hancock to Hagerstown to Frederick to Kensington Saturday (meaning Saturday), I said at Thursday Night Pint - no S for any of us, this was a drive-by, we're all busy. On the television Rafael Soriano got the third out top of the ninth for a Nats' save and pulled out his tucked in shirt, all the other Nationals untucked their shirts, and fat lobbyists in the expense account seats untucked their shirts. Can you explain this, asked K. Yes, I said. Don't, ordered L. Did you hear about the Nationals changing their rain-ticket policy on the fly Wednesday? K asked me, she and partner 10-Game season ticket holders, I've a standing invitation. Supposedly, when the Nationals became aware the Wednesday game v Detroit had a better-than-probably chance of a rain-out the Nationals changed their rain-ticket policy from any available seat the rest of the season to today's (meaning yesterday's) make-up game. L said, I read that Dan Snyder defiantly claimed yesterday (meaning Wednesday) that the Redskins will NEVER, in all caps, change their name. Have the Caps choked yet? I asked K. Fuck you, I was told. Google ads, I said, have toggled from promoting free beer night for random strangers at a United game to telling me I'm needed THIS SUNDAY for the Kansas City game. The Kansas City game is a week from this Sunday. So yes, fuck me, it used to be charmingly self-congratulatory to be a zealot not only for the rinkydinkiest operation in town but because it was the rinkydinkiest operation in town. That's gone.

• Crow's return.
• When being gay is outlawed, only outlaws will be gay.
• Radical notions.
• Dis-placement.
• Missing.
• On translations: reading it wrong.
• References provided upon request.
• Purple Line.
• I realize it's illusory, but I can at least imagine I see the fuck-it I'll never obtain better than last time, not as good as next time.
• Milton Babbitt was born 96 years ago.
• This is true: before defaulting Babbitt to the exceptionally generous Atonality, I went looking for Babbitt pieces I know and google via youtube, after the first Babbitt I picked, suggested the top Stereolab song, and shazam, it was - and now is again and will probably not be until it is again years from now - an old gag I'd unforgivably forgot about, but Holyfuck, I never play enough Stereolab here.

ROUND

James Hoch

Perhaps you covet something of
          its emptiness, its uselessness

in matters of yearning or feeling
          another's yearn, that it can't

know a damn thing, yet damns
          everything it touches: the water

it gathers along its passage,
          the air it pushes through,

swallow-like. It is no bird,
          though you envy the song

you hear only after it's gone,
          even if it sings through paper,

a goat, the neck of a man
          wearing a scarf that tufts just as

the rest of him flies out of
          his shoes and collapses in dirt.

Or, how it is like the dirt
          receiving him, the privilege

or not knowing if he was
          kind of unkind, as you

chamber another, waiting for
          someone to come for his shoes.