Ruddy Liturgically Sacrificial Hue

• Lazyass and Futile Weekend Blogging for the Blog Days of Summer in Dead Blegsylvania. 
• Going outside today and tomorrow though tomorrow is one of the Holiest Days in Egoslavia. 
• Hint: one of our rescue Maine Coons is named after the birthday celebrant.
• The Selfish Individual. On Sontag essays.
• Desert theory, rehashed.
• The compartmentalization of injustice.
• Three plateaus on noise aesthetics.
• America as Ahab though speaking as Ishmail.
• Did a major tune-up on blogrolls, purged bleggicides, migrated hibernating blogs to Moribund, added some new joints, please check them out when they float to the top. Only bleggicides were purged; if you are not where you were and you haven't posted in at least three months you've been moved to Moribund so that when you wake up I can see the pleasant surprise.
• Prunella's latest playlist.
• Guess what I fell asleep to, woke up with in head. Cause yes, it occurred to me this past Wednesday to open this post for Lazyass and Futile Weekend Blogging for the Blog Days of Summer in Dead Blegsylvania with the song at the top.

SUNT LEONES

Stevie Smith

The lions who ate the Christians on the sands of the arena

By indulging native appetites played what has now been seen a   

Not entirely negligible part

In consolidating at the very start

The position of the Early Christian Church.

Initiatory rites are always bloody

And the lions, it appears

From contemporary art, made a study

Of dyeing Coliseum sands a ruddy

Liturgically sacrificial hue

And if the Christians felt a little blue—

Well people being eaten often do.

Theirs was the death, and theirs the crown undying,

A state of things which must be satisfying.

My point which up to this has been obscured

is that it was the lions who procured

By chewing up blood gristle flesh and bone

The martyrdoms on which the Church has grown.

I only write this poem because I thought it rather looked   

As if the part the lions played was being overlooked.

By lions’ jaws great benefits and blessings were begotten   

And so our debt to Lionhood must never be forgotten.

Press Deeper, Touch the Little Bundle of Nerves Buried There, Buried in the Gristle, the Nerves that Make You Blink When the Light Bewilders You

• Activating the Napoleon Alert System. Saw him Saturday, I normally wait a week without seeing him before alerting the signal but it's zero outside as I type this. Saw Momcat and Frankie this morning, they are in the shelter of straw, cardboard, and blankets we built on the back porch, but no Napoleon.
• UPDATE! Works every time. As of 11:27 he's inside with Planet.
• Wonderful dinner last night with Planet and Landru, the most fun thing I've done in what seems like weeks, so limited link-fishing for that, plus the death of two friends in the past week or so (both of liver cancer, fuck) occupy my mind so limited link-fishing for that, plus the hardest weeks of my work year put me in a vile mood so limited link-fishing for that too, plus a serious dose of blegitus so limited link-fishing for that too.
• What boggles the image-nation?
• From the above's homepage I see that Rob Payne is alive.
• Snowden, Greenwald, journalism, progressive tone-police.
• Taking inventory at the sex-shop.
• Hagerstown.
• Laughing place.
• The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of 2014. Richard Powers! Sebald! Coover! Vollmann! Murakami! Only goes through August. Still no new Ishiguro.
• :-P's 2013 songs.
• Fell asleep, unsurprisingly to me in review considering the first and second bullets of this shitty post (minus the dinner with Planet and Landru), listening to Throbbing Gristle.

self-exam (my body is a cage)

Nick Flynn

Do this: take two fingers, place them on

the spot behind your ear, either

ear, the spot where your skull drops off

into that valley of muscle

& nerve—that is the muscle that holds up

the skull, that turns the dumb bone

this way & that, that nods your face up &

down when you think you

get it—press deeper, touch the little bundle of

nerves buried there, buried in

the gristle—the nerves that make you blink

when the light bewilders you, that make your tongue

slide in & out when you think you’re in

love, when you think you need a drink, touch

that spot as if you have an itch, close your eyes &

listen, please, close

your eyes—can you hear it? We think our souls live

in boxes, we think someone sits behind our eyes,

lording in his little throne, steering the fork to

the mouth, the mouth to the tit, we think

hungry children live in our bellies & run out with their

empty bowls as the food rains

down, we sometimes think we are those

hungry children, we think

we can think anything & it won’t

matter, we think we can think cut out her tongue,

& then ask her to sing.

Raise One Eyebrow

Woke up with Throbbing Gristle in my head. Have spam from Poland

piecznie spośród budynku. Pagina personale esterna dell'autore... Trzymając się cienia zszedł po pochyłości podwórza. W pobliżu kostnicy zachował się tudzież rozejrzał dokoła, otworzył http://www.polskieslicznotki.waw.pl kolosalne, drewniane przejścia i wszedł wewnątrz.

Stosownie aż do charakteru pokoje panowała tędy głucha ani mru mru!. Saracen zapalił przestrzeń niezadrukowana. Przy bitwy poruszył luźno osadzonym w ścianie wyłącznikiem tudzież na podłogę posypały się kawałki tynku. W najsampierw.

Unfortunately my Polish colleague started her vacation today so I've no idea how I'm being praised or what's being sold (I've killed the link so if you copy/paste it and get a blue screen it's on you). In any case, that takes care of my required Labor Day Weekend bleggalgazing. Yes, Coil cascade up next.

• Once upon a time (2007, actually) Joe Biden's case that waging war without consent of congress is an impeachable act: Absolutely. I want to stand by that comment I made. The reason I made the comment was as a warning. I don't say those things lightly, Chris. you've known me for a long time. I was Chairman of the Judiciary Committee for 17 years. I teach separation of powers in Constitutional law. This is something I know. So I brought a group of Constitutional scholars together to write a piece that I'm going to deliver to the whole United States Senate pointing out that the president HAS NO CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY to take this country to war against a country of 70 million people unless we're attacked or unless there is proof that we are about to be attacked. And if he does, I would move to impeach him. The House obviously has to do that, but I would lead an effort to impeach him. The reason for my doing that -- and I don't say it lightly, I don't say it lightly.
• Nancy Pelosi urges bombing Syria.
• Jonathan Chait stamps foot, says Obama better not be lying this time or else.
• Miley Cyrus, Syria, war as consumer item.

• On Kindness.
• New to me: Marzanna Bogumila Kielar.
• On the Thomas Pynchon trail: Let’s get a few things straight. First of all, it’s pronounced “Pynch-ON.” Second, the great and bewildering and, yes, very private novelist is not exactly a recluse. In select company, he’s intensely social and charismatic, and, in spite of those famously shaming Bugs Bunny teeth, he was rarely without a girlfriend for the 30 years he spent wandering and couch-surfing before getting married in 1990. Today, he’s a yuppie—self-confessed, if you read his new novel, Bleeding Edge, as a key to the present life of a man whose travels led one critic to reflect: “Salinger hides; Pynchon runs.” Now Pynchon hides in plain sight, on the Upper West Side, with a family and a history of contradictions: a child of the postwar Establishment determined to reject it; a postmodernist master who’s called himself a “classicist”; a workaholic stoner; a polymath who revels in dirty puns; a literary outsider who’s married to a literary agent; a scourge of capitalism who sent his son to private school and lives in a $1.7 million prewar classic six.
• Laziest literary link ever?
• Cyberpunk, for those of you who do.
• A distinction between scifi and fantasy, for those of you who do one or the other or both.
• RIP Seamus Heaney. I confess he never sang to me, which reminds me to speculate again (elsewhere, don't worry) why by and large contemporary non-American/Canadian English poetry, especially non-American/Canadian English poetry by men (Les Murray and Robin Robertson are the only two currently working poets whose new volumes I immediately seek out) doesn't sing to me. Suggestions on who to read pleaded for.
• New York lit circle Royal Rumble.

HOW TO BE A LAWYER

Jordan Davis

My father taught me how to play the beer bottle. It was Schlitz, and I was three or four. " You tuck your lower lip under, then blow air over the top of the bottle." I produced a tone, and we laughed. He paused. "You can make a different sound if there's less in the bottle," he said, motioning for me to take a sip. I did, then blew another note. We laughed again.

"Do you want to learn something else? Here's how to be a lawyer. Raise one eyebrow." I did so. "Good. Now hold it for a few seconds, turn to the jury, and say 'I see.'"