Who Cannot Count His Change. Who Wake Up and Punch the Air

The sound system in the rental I'm driving this trip to and from Ohio takes my iPod and sorts then plays all the songs by alphabetical order. That's a more than satisfactory shuffling. Unfortunately, when I turn the car off to buy gas or stop to hug Planet and load her stuff into the rental to haul home and then we take a wonderful three hour drive together just the two of us on rural Ohio backroads, it will be a day I remember the rest of my life, the sound system goes back to the start of the sequence. I'm sure I could figure it out and fix, but I've only seven more hours in the car, I've over 1700 songs, I can forward or back from the start a couple hundred songs and never get the same song twice. Once I went backwards. Talking Heads' live version of "What a Day It Was" from Stop Making Sense came on. I've always thought it one of Talking Heads' lamer songs, it lasted three bars before being skipped, though I thought to myself, Jeebus, Talking Heads has soured on me (or me them) this past couple of years. Last night I did my birthdays check, discovered today is David Byrne's birthday. David Byrne's birthday has always been an Egoslavian Holy Day, bedecked with Talking Heads songs. Can I say it's still an Egoslavian Holy Day, skip the Talking Heads songs today?







Eno and Fripp have birthdays soon. Both Egoslavian Holy Days, both usually bedecked in songs. Both probably will be again, I've listened to both in the past months (unlike Talking Heads), though this whole post is of course not about Egoslavian Holy Days but solely about bleggalgazing. As is the absence of links. Consider this fair warning of potential bleggalgazing and hiatus bluffs to come, because Fuck This bulges of a sudden with increasing intervals of incidents. Because I love you, though, because I still cannot stop myself, here, songs from the back and front of the alphabet on my iPod heard yesterday while Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling to Zanesville to Bamgier (by myself) to Howard to Danville to Jelloway to Bunker Hill to Butler to Ankenytown to Fredericktown to Sparta to Green Valley to Mt Vernon to Gambier (with Planet).








AMERICAN INCOGNITO

David Gewanter

But to whatever animal we ascribe these remains, it is certain such a one has existed in America, and that it has been the largest of all terrestrial beings. It should have sufficed to have rescued the earth it inhabited, and the atmosphere it breathed, from the imputation of impotence. . . .

—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

 

 

I called for armour, rose, and did not reel.

But when I thought . . .

                                      I could feel

My wound open wide.

—Thom Gunn, “The Wound”

 

 

 

THE STATES

 

For he can creep.

 

Whose doctor said his bipolar was pre-existing.

Smacked in the head by a steel cargo door,

hinges tied with a hamburger bag.

The day he blew up: a sucking silence, mouth of tar,

     story told over and over.

 

bump and rattle, caissons rolling.

The blacked-out school bus window is

scratched to read GHOST RECON. Street signs flash by,

“This here is Georgia. Now I see New Hampshire,

     and here’s Colorado.” What country is this city?

 

Gorked on pain-relief cocktails, Iraq to Landstuhl Med

to Andrews Air Force, wheelchair bus to Walter Reed.

Wounded when burning poppies, now afloat

on morphine. “As a state,” he once emailed,

     “Afghanistan is next to Mars.”

 

The navigator slides along a wall:

“Sir, can you show me north?”

Where the gazebo is a tank. Where the manhole covers a bomb.

Who apologize for shaving cuts. Skull plate,

     40-lb. gain from meds, big ox baby.

 

“Fall in,” the heart-attack sergeant tells

the legless man. “At ease,” he tells the psychotics.

They limp by drug dealers for their scoop

of Baskin-Robbins. Are told,

     “Suck it up, get used to the outside world.”

 

Who are saved, but die in dreams,

salute with a mechanical arm.

 

 

CONSTITUTION AVE, CAPITALSAURUS DAY

 

Beneath the marble, beneath the paper laws;

the paved boglands and legs-up taverns,

the slave-built steps of the Capitol. Winter 1898,

a sewer-man digs up a dinosaur spine,

      a nomen nudum, naked & unnamed fossil

 

tombed later at the Smithsonian

near Jefferson’s Mammoth tooth

that rattled his pocket, cherished knuckle-bone

and proof against the French naturalist

      who with powdered hands

 

wrote that New World dampness and cold

had stunted flora, animals, and Man:

the American Degeneracy. 

Jefferson ordered Lewis & Clark to find

      a living Mammoth,

 

the “animal de l’Ohio”

grazing somewhere west

of Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, and—

lest a species wither, or Nation grow small—

      brought Mammoth bones to Monticello.

 

“WHEREAS, the remains of a large carnivorous dinosaur,

which may be an ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus rex,

were found at First and ‘F’ Streets, SE,

 

NOW, THEREFORE, I, MAYOR OF THE DISTRICT

OF COLUMBIA, do hereby proclaim January 28, 2001,

as ‘CAPITALSAURUS DAY.’”

 

Anthony A. Williams

 

 

DISCOVERY IN SIBERIA

 

Reindeer of the herdsman Jarkov nuzzle

a tusk frozen 20,000 years. Soon,

French naturalists arrive. Radar shows

the Holy Grail of Mammoth hunters,

      a frigid bulk, twice an elephant’s size—

 

Timber saws cut the block. Hoisted by

military helicopter to Stalin’s

gulag caves, frozen labs for scientist-prisoners,

now re-opened. Waving hair-dryers

      to sublimate the ice, so that Discovery

 

can film them planting clone eggs

inside an elephant, hatching a Mammoth

American defender to split the ramparts,

show scheduled for release in 2001

      —the year, in the sci-fi film,

 

the monkeys learn to talk;

when Mayor Williams greets      

the Capitalsaurus and the new President Bush;

when Mohammed Atta decides he

      cannot date a waitress.

 

 

SECURITAS

 

Weary headlands roll through zones of night,

red lights flash the muted streets,

crotch-of-moss draining a blue spark dawn—

We sleep, staring. Tree-shapes and stars prod us,

      the belt of Orion is a martyr’s bomb.

 

And the king, our godsbody, lies abed

groaning, chill spirit belaboring the flesh—

His spit and sperm are tallied; his temperature,

a weather report told by doctors. Until

      lady Securitas peers from a cloud—

 

her bloodlined hands, the blank, bureaucratic face!

We pray with our bodies: cold sweat, a hymn

of twitches, heart racing, shrieking dreams . . .

But fragrant Securitas has only

       come for him—

 

To compass him about.

Lifting out her breast.

Stoppers his mouth with a thick nipple.

Squeezing till the ichor throbs from his eyes,

      milk to make us thirsty—

 

 

IRAQ & TEXAS: DJINN ROADS

 

Helicopters park at Forward Base EXXON;

only the sand is flying today, and it breaks

the speed limits, 50 miles an hour. Visibility zero;

the air is hot as blood, the sky is burnt amber.

      Lord keep still our hands.

 

In Texas, teens patrol the roads by night,

burning the body’s fuel—State Troopers pull them over.

George, fishtailing dauphin, a graceful

falldown drunk, clouds the breathalyzer:

      FELONY DUI. Daddy’s name sinks the report—

 

Election night, heaven staring, and Laura’s

yellowcake Chevy mows down her boyfriend:

VEHICULAR HOMICIDE: the car found guilty.

“I know this as an adult, it was crushing,”

      she recalls. Her scented, unmarked body

 

sweats beneath foundation garments and paste.

His unmarked body, and fructifying breath,

his stone squint chasing snakes from the sun—

They walk, O my darling, the hill of light;

      the bite of remorse teaches them to bite.

 

Then it rains. What falls from the sky is not water

but mud, raindrops pulling clouds of sand

into large wet globs. “It was biblical,” says

Col. Gibbs. Lights a cigarette, his back to the storm:

      “You’ve got to embrace the suck.”

 

 

HOTEL AFTERMATH

 

From the dust, the limbs jerk up alive, stagger home

to camp. Martian: neck gators for the nose, goggles

seal off the eyes, baby wipes. WHAT DID YOU FIND THERE?

A slipper, an ear, some wire. A chemical suit.

      A map of water.

           ——

 

From Stalin’s cave, just bits of gristle—unreadable,

no Frankenstein DNA. They rewrite the Mammoth show.

 

From Walter Reed, “an aggressive campaign

to deal with the mice infestation.”

      Recovery rooms, “spit-polish clean.”

 

Whose mother swallows all the soldier medicine.

 

Who wheels himself in to play Texas Hold ‘Em.

 

Whose father says, “It was OK for my son

to give his body. They try in their power,

      but it reverses itself.”

 

Jefferson’s American Incognito

is ground up for fertilizer—

the maid said it was cow bones. Sweet heartland,

Governor Meriwether Lewis

      of Louisiana, depression pre-existing,

 

shoots himself in the chest and head.

 

Who sit by the apples and wingback chairs.

“If I had two hands, I’d order two vodkas”—

 

Who cannot count his change.

      Who wake up and punch the air.

There Might Be a Planet

That Lloyd Cole pop goodness put in my head yesterday afternoon by Scott Williams on his WFMU show and it's stayed in my head since, be in yours.

Thirty minutes after this is posted I will be Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling to Zanesville to Bamgier to help Planet pack, take her out to dinner, and come home Wednesday for the summer. I must break the news to the one of me who watches the slideshows, there will be no slideshows, Earthgirl needs to work. She's promised us an artichoke lasagna when we get home. I can promise a soundtrack of the drive Wednesday morning as I get to play everything on the iPod Earthgirl never lets me play when I Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling to Zanesville to Bamgier. For instance, perhaps this Daniel Menche:

• Must. Keep. Eye. On. Speedometer. When. Listening. To. Daniel. Menche.
• A reminder of how Democratic Party mid-term disasters are interpreted by Democratic Party loyalists.
• On bagging: But it is not this performance or these particular pretensions that I want to talk about, but the absolute difference between bailing out of a book, a movie, and a theatrical performance. When you head for the exit in the cinema, something I do fairly often, you possibly bother the person next to you for a few seconds, but you can’t upset what’s happening on the screen or change the mood of the evening. However bad or good, the film is done and dusted. As for a book, when you’re not impressed by what you’re reading, your only resistance to putting it aside is the money spent and the time already invested. No one will be disturbed or offended when you send it off with the old newspapers for recycling. The theater is quite different, especially the small, intimate stages where experimental material first gets an airing. In this particular case, for example, our only exit from torment was via a door to the left of the stage. Leaving thus meant not only upsetting the people sitting either side of us, who might well themselves be struggling to get into the spirit of the piece, but likewise alerting the actors to our negative verdict, perhaps with disastrous consequences. Maybe the cast would lose what confidence they had. Perhaps others seeing us leave would get up and follow. So no sooner had my friend and I whispered to each other our desire to escape than I began to feel guilty. Give them a chance, I thought. Another ten minutes. No, another twenty.
• Here's the big news: when I got home last night Earthgirl had just front-to-backed Mary Ruefle's latest book of poems, Trances of the Blast, she says to me, Now I get what you've been yammering about for years. I gave her some Hejinian, wonder how that will work.
• For the two of you who might, new stuff at Hollowtide.
• Back to books.
• The page endures.
• Prunella's latest playlist.
• Tonight I will download the new Swans album, out today. Planet cannot leave Bamgier until noon tomorrow, it is highly unlikely I will be able to make the Swans show tomorrow night at Black Cat, if anyone wants a free ticket - you, Mr Alarum? - let me know, I can email it to you.
• There will be Peter Jefferies and Guided by Voices (have I ever mentioned the Robert Pollard products have one of three permanent seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Game?)!

D_____ L_____'s

Albert Goldbarth

Fathers are invariably great nuisances on the stage, and always have to give the hero or heroine a long explanation of what was done before the curtain rose, usually commencing with “It is now nineteen years, my dear child, since ...” etc., etc.
—Charles Dickens

There might be a planet. Before that,

though, there would have been a gas that coalesced   

into a planet . . . as, before that, there were dots of flux   

and energy that hadn’t yet declared themselves

in concert. There’s always “before”: there's more

each minute, more each person, yes and every one

of its smallest, irreducible subparticles—which I name   

the “beforeon”—is exerting force on us

that’s surely time’s own version of gravity: its purpose

is to tug, and to remind us. In the house of second marriages,

it causes the man to do what he and the woman had promised   

they never would: one night while she’s asleep, he snoops   

her bureau for telltale relics of the mysterious Mr.   

Number One. And why, or even what

he hopes to find, he couldn’t clearly say: a letter? photo?   

sex toy?—something, some objectified gossip, a fossil   

of bygone love. Essentially, we make of our own psyches   

a bureau and pay a shrink to snoop; as for the moment   

when our neural linkage first began to form,

as for the flavor of the fluids in the womb. . . we’re all

amnesiacs: and our earliest self, just like the universe’s   

earliest being, is a “phantom limb” with the faintest   

mnemonic of starbursts in an otherwise chill void. I have   

a friend D____ L____ (this poem is hers) who, orphaned   

as a newborn, is devoted to learning her origin

as doggedly as any cosmologist tracks light to its source, although   

her search (when not pure Internet) is more a matter

of tape-recording the beer-sour stories in sailor bars,

of sifting ashy memories in nursing homes,

one backwards inch of plotline at a time. And yet somebody

else is waking up this morning with the need   

to be detached from any history,

to stand here like a person in a play who enters   

onstage from a pool of perfect blankness. Then,

of course, he can start over, minute-zero-of-year-zero,   

unbesmirched. We could have told him that he’d be this   

anguished—sneaking in her drawer, below those folded   

pastel lozenges of lingerie, uncovering the one thing   

that could ruin them. Now he wants only to float (who   

doesn't, sometimes?) in an anti-world: appealing, but

illusory. We can’t unmoor ourselves from linearity,   

no more than any one of us can be a human being   

unconnected to a genome—and in fact, no more   

than Mama-All-of-Time-and-Space-Herself (I mean   

the cosmos) can unwrap her vasty body from its own   

twelve million years of Big Bang “background radiation”   

so it wafts—a tossed off, filmy scarf—far elsewhere.   

No; there isn’t any “elsewhere.” When we sleep   

or simply deepen into quietude enough, the voices   

come—the rhythmic, grave, ancestral murmur,

a woman bearing a ritual clamshell bowl . . .

a man with a done-deal sales contract . . . whispers,

knuckle-rap, cleared throats. . . . Her great-grandfather,   

D____ L____ has uncovered, was a lector—a reader they used   

to relieve the tedium of the leaf rollers’ shifts   

in cigar manufactories. Shakespeare, Dickens,   

union tracts, love letters, family diaries . . . . He’s   

walking through the tobacco aroma; he’s setting his text   

on his easel; and the story—the only story we know,   

the story of Before—is recited.

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.

Gambier to Martinsburg to St Louisville to Newark to Somerset to New Lexington to Corning to Glouster to Chauncey to Athens to Chauncey to Glouster to Ringgold to McConnellsville to Meigs to Chandlersville to Zanesville to Nashville to Fallsburg to Martinsburg to Gambier

Long two, Earthgirl took over a 15K photos. I had to reduce time per photo to a second a shot to get it to two slideshows uploadable by youtube. This is what we do for fun: long long day-long drives. Many of the photos are from The Rim of the World, easily one of the coolest roads I've ever driven, this being the third time. Planet had never seen Ohio University, she was curious, for me, driving 78 over the Rim of the World again from Glouster to 284 east of McConnellsville and then 284 north to Chandlersville - my third time - was the fun.

• Then pizza - SeatSix, we finally tried Donatos, it was very good, good enough to get again - in the room while Planet did homework and Earthgirl painted and I link-fished, it was wonderful. 
• A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF BOB ROSS PAINTINGS!
• David Harvey interview. (I don't think I've posted this one yet, if yes, oh well.)
• Gardening and imperialism.
• Ames v Greenwald et al continued: I’ll start by saying that the fact that Marxists and anarchists now call a billionaire by his first name is reason enough to keep looking at/writing about the social phenomena that brought that about. So getting accused of monomania for doing so is getting very old, especially since people like Henwood are no less obsessed. They’re just obsessed in a different way.  The right way. Accusing people who are making a point of not applauding of obsession is just another way of getting people to shut up — another form of ostracism.
• Naming Bethesda for marketing profits. 
• Sandy Spring. 
• The view out my window at 7:00 this morning in Gambier looks like an Earthgirl painting.

• And very well could be someday. 
• Yes, that's snow.
• Lust for life (not Iggy).
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Tangerine Dream.
• Chris Forsyth.
• For Alvin Lucier.
• Harry Partch.
• Prunella's latest playlist.
• Planet has told me she wants to be picked up May 14th and 15th. I have a ticket to see Swans at Black Cat on 14th. Planet wins, but damn. Hey! New Swans!

FATHER, IN DRAWER

Lucie Brock-Broido

Mouthful of earth, hair half a century silvering, who buried him.

With what. Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it.

                                                             Also directives from our  DNA.

The nature of  his wound was the clock-cicada winding down.

                                                            He wound down.

July, vapid, humid: sails of sailboats swelled, yellow boxes

Of   cigars from Cuba plumped. Ring fingers fattened for a spell.

                                                            Barges of coal bloomed in heat.

It was when the catfish were the only fish left living

                                                            In the Monongahela River.

Though there were (they swore) no angels left, one was stillbound in

The very drawer of salt and ache and rendering, its wings wrapped-in

                                                            By the slink from the strap

Of his second-wife’s pearl-satin slip, shimmering and still

                  As one herring left face-up in its brine and tin.

The nature of  his wound was muscadine and terminal; he was easy

                 To take down as a porgy off the cold Atlantic coast.

                 In the old city of   Brod, most of the few Jews left

Living may have been still at supper while he died.

That same July, his daughters’ scales came off in every brittle

                                                            Tinsel color, washing

To the next slow-yellowed river and the next, toward west,

                                                            Ohio-bound.

                This is the extent of that. I still have plenty heart.

Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling to Zanesville to Gambier to Mt Vernon to Marengo to Ashley to Delaware to Ashley to Marengo to Mt Vernon to Gambier

From Kensington to Frederick it's 31 miles, Frederick to Hagerstown 24 miles, Hagerstown to Hancock 28 miles, Hancock to Cumberland 37 miles, Cumberland to Morgantown 65 miles, Morgantown to Washington 43 miles, Washington to Wheeling 36 miles, Wheeling to Zanesville 70 miles, Zanesville to Gambier 40 miles (Zanesville to Nashville is 14 miles, Nashville to Fallsburg 10, Fallsburg to Martinsburg 10, Martinsburg to Gambier 6). I know this by heart. The halfway point between Kensington and Zanesville is the Bruceton Mills exit on I-68 six miles west of the Maryland border in West Virginia. The halfway point between Kensington and Gambier is the interchange of I-68 and I-79 in Morgantown. PennDot finally completed and opened the new flyover interchanged at I-79 and I-70 in Washington. I thought there was going to be a new soccer stadium in DC before that interchange was completed, and there will never be a new soccer stadium in DC.





   

• In search of found time.
• To think is to always follow the witches flight.
• The slaughter bench of history.
• Ames v Goodman & Greenwald, an update.
• Maggie's weekend links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekend links.
• New Inquiry's Sunday reads.
• Agamben, for those of you who do.
• 177 pages of good. Buy it! Dave, the paypal link won't work for me, please email me your address and I'll send you old-fashioned currency.
• Josephine Miles' Reason. Thank you, Tom, for reminding me of Miles. It has been a while.
• On Harry Partch. Serendipitously I found a collection of his work last week at the library, plan to begin listening/burning this coming week. I don't know enough about him.
• Told you there would be Lampchop.

ON INHABITING AN ORANGE

Josephine Miles

All our roads go nowhere.

Maps are curled

To keep the pavement definitely

On the world.

All our footsteps, set to make

Metric advance,

Lapse into arcs in deference

To circumstance.

All our journeys nearing Space

Skirt it with care,

Shying at the distances

Present in air.

Blithely travel-stained and worn,

Erect and sure,

All our travels go forth,

Making down the roads of Earth

Endless detour.

Wind Grieves at the Corners of the House and Rain Distills Pity to a Purity That Is Irresistible and Poison

Played 27 yesterday with Mr Z. Seneca consists of three nine hole circuits that all start and end at the parking lot. It's brilliant. Normally we start on whichever of the three seems to be the least crowded, all were open today, I can't remember the last time I played 1-27 in order. 333564344 445644543 454433444. I suck, fucking Winter. Excellent time. Earthgirl started a new painting in the woods off the first tee.

This is true, Earthgirl can vouch. Mr Z. (who I met more than ten years ago when he was a bartender at Dietles) has a ten year old daughter with a woman from Minnesota. He mentioned to Earthgirl that the woman went to Northfield Not St Olaf. Earthgirl goes, Me too! They did the math, Mr Z. said her last name, Earthgirl screams LAURIE? I was reminded that infinity runs into the small as much as the large.







We Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling to Zanesville to Gambier to visit Planet today. Another way to put it is we 270 to 70 to 68 to 79 to 70 to 146 to 586 to 62 to Grove Church Road to 229 to 308 today. Slideshows when photographers provide me with them. Next few days, links if I fish, none if I don't. Travelogues of course: what viewership Napoleon and now disc golf haven't killed - thank you, regulars - slideshows and commentary on rural Ohio back roads will. Distill.

The soundtrack, at least today's, by Edict of Earthgirl, will include Lampchop. By my edict, you are going to hear a fuckload of Lambchop if you're tuning in the next few days.







AS EVER AS EVER

Charlie Smith

I step back from the homespun,
the naturally dyed. Fresh vegetables
unnerve me with their husks
and peelings and little ruddy bits
to save for compost. Grass stains
and leaves choke the gutters and
berries ponk ponk and you can't
remember what you were thinking
bark chafes and flesh if you eat it
lies like a lump of chalcedony in
your gut, stopping the action.
Wind grieves at the corners of
the house and rain distills pity
to a purity that is irresistible and
poison. All know a flower's dumb stare.
Fruit is home for small black worms.
Trees thrive in mass groupings
that close behind you and shudder
and stir complex imaginings
we are wholly unsuited for. Better
a quiet nook uptown. A room
with faded yellow light and Monk
on the piano. The buckle
and belting of life are beside the point.

Three Times a Day She Put the Boat on Autopilot and Went Down the Cool Silent Pantry

• Those are the fog photos from yesterday morning. Ask me elsewhere and if I trust you I'll tell you.
• OK, redactions for protection of me! and the loved one I emailed last night: Your dad and his brother, not particularly fond of each other in a Jeff/Bruce way? Cause I don't know if I'd return from vacation in France if Bruce was similarly sick, and I've no doubt it wouldn't even occur to Bruce. There's a big family wedding coming in December in Norfolk, my cousin Kirk, we've a hotel room at the reception hotel, Lynn and me planned to get toasted if not shitfaced. I plan to check my old hiding places at Oakton to see if I can find some stashed and forgotten eedway. Could be a disastorisly funny evening when a shitfaced Lynn tells Bruce she knows who his parents are and she can introduce him to them if he wants.
• That captures my current Bleggal Depressive Syndrome and concludes today's bleggalgazing.
• Songs from roadtrip soundtrack:

• Progressive blog #Fail. Read comments too, please.
• Our invisible revolution?
• The true nature of the system laid bare.
• What full communism can not mean.
• On the paradoxes of a totalistic tolerance.
• Propagandists and anti-propagandists.
• OK OK OK.
• Living with ghosts.
• New Wheaton apartments target Millennials! Minimal snark meant, more probably delivered than intended. I just don't know where the current population of crowded Wheaton (and Glenmont) go if Wheaton and Glenmont become the hipster hives Ike Leggett and Ilk envision.
• LOTS of Stephen Collis, who I never heard of until reading Mark's wood::s::lot last night (like I do everyday, and so should you), but I now have a cool reading assignment.
• News of new Littell!
• Eno, for those of you who do (h/t Hamster).
• Vulnerable.
• Anne Carson is my next great infatuation. Now working my 2nd way through Autobiography of Red before reading Red Doc the first time. There will not be reviews. I don't do reviews.
• Krasznohorkai, up next after Carson.
• The Angels. 
• Criticism, presupposition, reading.
• I have mentioned too many time to count that this song, on yesterday's playlist, is one of my five favorite songs ever:

BY CHANCE THE CYCLADIC PEOPLE

Anne Carson

9.4. They put stones in their eye sockets. Upper-class people put precious stones.

16.2. Prior to the movement and following the movement, stillness.

8.0. Not sleeping made the Cycladic people gradually more and more brittle. Their legs broke off.

1.0. The Cycladic was a neolithic culture based on emmer wheat, wild barley, sheep, pigs and tuna speared from small boats.

11.4. Left hand on Tuesdays, right hand on Wednesdays.

10.1. She plied the ferryboat back and forth, island to island, navigating by means of her inner eye.

9.0. When their faces wore smooth they painted them back on with azurite and iron ore.

12.1. All this expertise just disappears when a people die out.

2.0. They wore their faces smooth with trying to sleep, they ground their lips and nipples off in the distress of pillows.

4.4. How you spear it, how you sheer it, how you flense it, how you grind it, how you get it to look so strangely relaxed.

4.0. Mirrors led the Cycladic people to think about the soul and to wish to quiet it.

1.1. The boats had up to fifty oars and small attachments at the bow for lamps. Tuna was fished at night.

16.0. As far as the experience of stirring is concerned, small stillness produces small stirring and great stillness great stirring.

3.3. A final theory is that you could fill the pan with water and use it as a mirror.

2.1. It was no use. They’d lost the knack. Sleep was a stranger.

14.1. There it was plunging up and down in its shallow holes.

6.1. The handbag, that artefact which freed human beings from having to eat food wherever they found it.

3.0. While staying up at night the Cycladic people invented the frying pan.

11.0. Three times a day she put the boat on autopilot and went down below to the cool silent pantry.

7.1. Abstention from grain is helpful.

9.3. Their eyes fell out.

11.3. The food was tastier that way.

11.5. This may sound to you like a mere boyish stunt.

11.1. The pantry, what a relief after the splash and glare of the helm.

4.1. To uncontrive.

6.0. To the Cycladic people is ascribed the invention of the handbag,

3.1. Quite a number of frying pans have been found by archaeologists. The frying pans are small. No one was very hungry at night.

9.1. Did I mention the marble pillows, I think I did.

2.3. This became a Cycladic proverb.

5.2. Proust liked a good jolt.

7.2. Abstention from grain is the same for men and women. You put your lungs in an extraordinary state of clear coolness.

13.0. One night there was a snowfall, solitary, absurd.

6.3. And after dinner, harps.

1.2. The Cycladic was an entirely insomniac culture.

2.2. Well, they said, these are the pies we have. It was a proverb.

4.2. My point of view is admittedly faulty. My nose is always breathing. I am worn out with breathing. I suspect you have days when you choose not to breathe at all.

14.0. That was the night she looked to her soul.

3.2. Or they may have been prestige frying pans.

9.2. They painted wonderful widow’s peaks on themselves or extra breasts.

5.1. Possibly because of his blanket refusal to listen to another person’s dreams at the breakfast table, for Proust dismissed this type of recollection as ‘mere anamnesia’.

16.1. There it lay, the foredeck in the moonlight, more silver than the sea.

9.5. Perhaps now they were glad after all that they did not sleep.

5.3. That moment when everyone sees exactly what is on the end of their fork, as William S. Burroughs said of celebrity.

15.1. See me leaving you better hang your head and cry, she liked songs like that. Honkytonk influence.

16.3. All of her leapt before her eyes.

8.1. They worried about this and kept their arms close to the body, clasping the torso right arm below left, like a cummerbund.

11.6. She thought it a good idea to silence mental conversation.

12.0. Clouds every one of them smell different, so do ocean currents. So do rocky reefs.

10.2. Her inner eye grew sharp enough to slaughter goats.

15.0. She’d been a pretty good harpist before the die-off.

6.2. So began the dinner parties.

10.0. Eventually the Cycladic people died out all except one, a ferryboat captain.

8.2. Left arm below right was considered uncouth.

7.0. To play a stringless harp requires only the thumbs.

5.0. The Cycladic people were very fond of Proust.

4.3. Is it because you don’t want the impact.

11.2. In the pantry she sat at the counter and ate with her hands.

16.0. As far as the experience of stirring is concerned, small stillness produces small stirring and great stillness great stirring.

Ohio 229 East of Mt Vernon at 7:15 this Morning

Two hour drive through orange and red fog. Story tomorrow, or not. Loved ones: all's fine. Slide show tomorrow, or not. Meanwhile, discovered new Mogwai last night






which made old Mogwai part of today's soundtrack:

Huffs Some Perfunctory Warmth on His Stiffening Hands then Bends Again to His Goat's-Horn of Ink

• That's Gwendolyn, who was joined by a sheep, a llama, two chickens, three rabbits, at North Campus Fall Petting Zoo yesterday.
• Crusoe in England.
• The car we've rented this trip has Sirius radio. When we got in it was already tuned to what Sirius calls SecondWave, a greatest hits of the New Wave 80s. U2, Police, Elvis Costello dominate, but the band that, after a dozen self-scourging hours of listening over three days, is played the most is Depeche Mode. A Depeche Mode song every hour. I neither like nor dislike Depeche Mode (compared to disliking Elvis Costello and hating U2 and despising Gordon Fucking Sumner), I'm just surprised that, in an admittedly small sample size, it's Depeche Mode every hour, I don't recall anyone I know owning or listening to Depeche Mode.
• UPDATE! Mr Alarum tweets that he owns lots of Depeche Mode, so I know one person (whose musical taste I thoroughly value and trust). I'm not anti-Depeche Mode, just surprised it gets the most air-time. 
• UPDATE! SeatSix, who I love like a brother, tells me he owns many Depeche Mode albums and that Depeche Mode was ubiquitous when he was in college and after.
• Lachesism.
• A late history.
• Does anyone else get the pink banner of error on every single composition page on motherfucking blooger? Damn my free blogging platform. 
• Carpe Demon.
• Bleak House. 
• An army of altruists.
• { feuilleton }'s Weekly Links.
• DC Day Two.
• Muriel Spark, for those of you who do. 
• Sasha recommends!
• Flann O'Brien, for those of you who do.
• Creature.
• Elliott Smith, for those of you who do.
• No, I'm not going to post any Depeche Mode.

IMPS

Albert Goldbarth

Fire isn’t allowed, for the sake of the books.

The lean monk-copyist who scribes the books is slate-blue at his fingertips

this steely late-November day in the year 1000. Brother Ambrosio

huffs some perfunctory warmth on his stiffening hands,

then bends again to his goat’s-horn of ink. For every line,

he believes, he’s forgiven a sin. And now he’s at his heavy

uncial letters, and will be for nine hours more,

until a slab of bread and a beet relieve his transcriptual ardor.

What he copies?—psalter, missal, hagiography:

the predetermined and sanctioned community passions

of a religious culture. Nothing like the twentieth century’s

prevalent kneejerk “self-expression.” Nothing like the priest,

excuse me: former priest, and former nun, on daytime talk TV,

who live, she tells us, in a “trinity of love” with the former

creator-of-tourist-ashtrays-out-of-catfish-heads. This is,

she insists, the final and jubilant stage of a lifelong “quest

to feel belongingness” initiated thirty years before

by parents skittering cross-country with the military: they

were wholly rootless, and so she grew up “unable to commit.” The following day,

a man confesses to pedophilia because of a lesbian aunt.

A woman says she robbed the Sack-N-Save of $13.42

“because of what they’re dumping in the water supply, it makes me

go all freaky.” Steve was bounced out from The Chicken Shack

“because I’m Scandinavian.” The culture

of blame is so completely exterior in its search for cause,

some days I wake to think I’ll find most people laboring

under the weight of sci-fi-style mind parasites, like fleshy turbans

spewing in, and feeding off, their brain blood. This (by “this”

I mean of course a recognition of the magic of objective correlative

boppin’ about in the spotlight) is, to some length,

understandable: you can’t beat the miniscule carry-along

convenience of a silicon chip invisibly set in something,

BUT for sheer persuasive visual power, that can’t touch

a 1940s generating plant, its giant Alcatrazian shape

against the sky, and the enormous wrestling electrical crackles

snaking its rooftop pylon. In the scriptorium, even

—such an isolated unit of human endeavor, its limited range

of reactions surely is pure—when Brother Ambrosio

nods off, sleepy in his long day’s long eighth hour

of thickly nibbed and careful letters, he knows

it’s imps in league with Satan that keep pulling down his eyelids.

If in scratching his flea-measled thigh he spills

a hand’s-expanse of ink across the vellum page, the fleas

are tiny devils on a guerilla mission from Hell.

And once a devilkin took lodging in his belly, and there

created “rumbling noises like a toad, and which, for hours,

spoiled the concentration of all of the other Brothers.”

We find parchment scraps with appropriate exorcisms:

“Away! you flaming sow, you poisoned udder,

you arse of the arch-fiend, shit-fly, stinking he-goat,

out out out, away, back into thine infernal kitchen,

you bestial puke!” We also find

those charming marginal doodles (sprigs in flower,

unicorns, seemingly every songbird in Creation): such

diminutive external bodies given to the longings of these

cooped-up men. And when they came to drag my friend Jess

screaming to the ward, because he was beating his head

on the lawyer’s steps, it was clear to us all that the chemicals

in his mind had turned against him. It was clear to Jess

that he was being hunted like prey by hounds from the moon.

Bellville to Fredericktown to Mt Vernon to Gambier to Mt Vernon to Howard to Danville to Greer to Nashville to Shreve to Wooster to West Salem to LaGrange to Oberlin to Wellington to Polk to Perrysville to Butler to Bellville to Fredericktown to Mt Vernon to Gambier to Mt Vernon to Fredericktown to Bellville

Or: Ohio 97 to Ohio 13 to US 36 to Ohio 308 to US 36 to Howard-Dansville Road to US 62 to Ohio 514 to Ohio 226 to Ohio 3 to Market St to Ohio 83 to Britton Road to US 42 to Ohio 301 to Ohio 303 to Ohio 58 to West College Street to North Professor St to Union Street to Woodland Street to West College Street to Ohio 58 to Ohio 89 to Ohio 95 to Ohio 97 to Ohio 13 to US 36 to Ohio 308 to US 36 to Ohio 13 to Ohio 97.

• Thanks Lambert for the bump at Naked Capitalism. For those of you unfamiliar with the above latest in a four year series, we are visiting our daughter at college in Ohio, we take long drives together to get off campus, Earthgirl takes hundreds of photos hoping for a few she wants to paint, I provide a slideshow. All songs posted listened to on drive.
• The History of Fear, part five.
• Continuing on a theme started elsewhere: the neutering of the NSA archives.
• I both said I would try to go clusterfuck-free this weekend and expressed doubt that I could.
• Book of Lamentations, or: DSM-5 as dystopic novel.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• Moby Dicks.
• Cultosaurus Erectus.
• :-p in DC, Day One.
• Aliens, cats, consciousness.
• I am a quarter through Handke's Repetition, it's working, I'm resisting, it's working, I'm resisting a fraction less, it's working, I'm resisting a fraction less.....
• Aphex Twin, for those of you who do.
• Regulars can vouch I don't wait for these trips to Ohio to listen to Guided by Voices.

FATHER IN DRAWER

Lucie Brock-Broido

Mouthful of earth, hair half a century silvering, who buried him.

With what. Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it.

                                                             Also directives from our  DNA.

The nature of  his wound was the clock-cicada winding down.

                                                            He wound down.

July, vapid, humid: sails of sailboats swelled, yellow boxes

Of   cigars from Cuba plumped. Ring fingers fattened for a spell.

                                                            Barges of coal bloomed in heat.

It was when the catfish were the only fish left living

                                                            In the Monongahela River.

Though there were (they swore) no angels left, one was stillbound in

The very drawer of salt and ache and rendering, its wings wrapped-in

                                                            By the slink from the strap

Of his second-wife’s pearl-satin slip, shimmering and still

                  As one herring left face-up in its brine and tin.

The nature of  his wound was muscadine and terminal; he was easy

                 To take down as a porgy off the cold Atlantic coast.

                 In the old city of   Brod, most of the few Jews left

Living may have been still at supper while he died.

That same July, his daughters’ scales came off in every brittle

                                                            Tinsel color, washing

To the next slow-yellowed river and the next, toward west,

                                                            Ohio-bound.

                This is the extent of that. I still have plenty heart.

Harris Glenn Milstead's Birthday Eve

Tomorrow is a High Egoslavian Holy Day. Also, on the drive to Ohio today I saw old blogbud Montag at the Sideling Hill rest stop in the future state of Augusta on I-68 today. Thought about Blegsylvania history almost all the way to Morgantown. Hope you and yours are well, Fellowjeff.

Rope of My Dead Grandmother's Unreproducible Sausage, Curing for Weeks on the Front Porch

Biblioklept put Destroyer in my head. When I think of Destroyer I think of our trip to San Francisco and Northern California in 2008: I was in a Destroyer fix and fortunately neither Earthgirl or Planet minded. Earthgirl and I are driving to Ohio today to spend a long weekend with Planet. Saul to Beach to Rockville Pike to I-270 to I-70 to I-68 to I-79 to I-70 to Exit 154 in Zanesville, State Street, to Ohio 146 to Ohio 586 to US 62 to Grove Church Road to Beckholt Road to Jacobs Road to Big Run Road to Ohio 229 to Duff Street to East Brooklyn Road to Planet. Reverse on Monday. Expect playlists and Earthgirl slideshows. It's still summer here in DC, I'm guessing won't be as orange over the mountains as usual these October trips, expect Earthgirl slideshows nonetheless. The scheduled long drive for Saturday is up through Oberlin for dinner in Vermillion so while there might be roads I've driven on before when I drove on them before Earthgirl hadn't started slideshowing. There might be birthdays to honor over the weekend, I don't look until the night before - today is not an Egoslavian Holy Day I discovered only last night, for instance. I've Frank Bidart's Metaphysical Dog - I posted the eponymous poem yesterday - and Krasznahorkai's Seiobo in backpack. I hope to have little time to read on the trip but when I do I hope to read them, though I've no illusions I won't be online. If links - and of course there will be some links - hopefully they will be clusterfuck-free barring kaboom, probably impossible for me, gonna try.







GLUTTON

Frank Bidart

Rope of my dead
grandmother's unreproducible

sausage, curing for weeks

on the front porch. My mother,
thoroughly

Americanized, found them

vaguely shameful.
Now though I

taste and taste

I can't find that
taste I so loved as a kid.

Each thing generates the Idea

of itself, the perfect thing that it
is, of course, not -

once, a pear so breathtakingly

succinct I couldn't
breathe. I take back that

"of course."

It's got to be out there again, -
... I have tasted it.

Gambier to Martinsburg to St Louisville to Granville to Alexandria to Johnsville to Sunbury to Delaware to Radnor to Delaware to Ashley to Marengo to Mt Vernon to Gambier

Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling to Zanesville to Planet

A Thousand Cheshire Cats Grin Inside of Me

    
When hungry domestic cats get desperate. We've no doubt Rosie was the brains and Stanley the muscle. Lordy, it'd been twenty-four hours since food last laid out, revolution, motherfuckers. Also too, you can go back through archives, every year Mannix's birthday is celebrated at this shitty blog, though it's true the static post was as much filler-as-filler as filler-as-bleggalgaze. Also too, four of the tradition drive home power pop songs. The drive home to Maryland after leaving Planet in Ohio requires power pop songs. But yes, those wondering if all's OK, thanks, everyone's safe, everyone's sad, everyone's fine. Regular programming returns tomorrow, of some sort, most likely.

UPDATE! LOUD! please.

  

   
*
   

           
*
           

           
*
             

A Weedy Speech, a Marshy Retainer

Feargal Sharkey is 55 today. We're driving to Ohio today to abandon our daughter at college Thursday morning. I'm driving a rental while Planet drives her car, she tells me she drives as fast as me, I'm glad Earthgirl will be in her car for that reason, glad too because I've music - listen to this blog's last week of songs, yo - I can listen to on the way out but won't play on the way back: the world is large, and Earthgirl loves Pere Ubu and lots of stuff I love for the seven hours back. Expect lots of Lampchop here the next few days: they are always part of this trip's soundtrack, here's your aargh, for instance. But, on abandoning my daughter: though it hurts to drive away, it's hyperbole to call it abandonment. Obligatory sentence: when Planet is my age it will be 2047. I'm told movies with top box-office stars are in movie theaters even as I type this that are conditioning her for that world. Anyway, what to say, and over and over? That takes care of angry links and their metaphors and overtones, nothing but songs, poems, photos, perhaps some non-angry links, travelogs until at least Friday, I can hope if not promise. The above song always reminds me of this Delays song:








[HE LIVED - CHILDHOOD SUMMERS]

Lorine Niedecker

He lived—childhood summers

    thru bare feet

then years of money’s lack

    and heat

beside the river—out of flood

    came his wood, dog,

woman, lost her, daughter—

    prologue

to planting trees. He buried carp

    beneath the rose

where grass-still

    the marsh rail goes.

To bankers on high land

    he opened his wine tank.

He wished his only daughter

    to work in the bank

but he’d given her a source

    to sustain her—

a weedy speech,

    a marshy retainer.

We Can Only Cleanse Our Bodies So Much Before We Realize It's Not Our Bodies That Need Detoxing

I dig Bartok, have since I first heard. Hey, tomorrow we Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling, whether we side trip from Wheeling up 250 then across 36 to Gambier (I've never driven 250 from Wheeling to Ulrichsville or 36 from Ulrichsville to Coshocton) or just Wheeling to Zanesville to Gambier per usual depends on how much snow in mountains last night and today, how soon we get on the road tomorrow. Beyond enjoying whatever minutes Planet gives us and publishing sucky slideshows of our daily drives, eating healthy on one of these trips for the first fucking time and exercising daily in the multiple state parks that grace Ohio, I've no set plans, though in my head the word I think of with desperate hope to describe my goal for tomorrow through when I walk in my house next Sunday is detox.

• Your God is too small.
• The collapse of time and space into search.
• Fine metaphors abound.
• Personality hunger and the regulation of consumptive choice.
• American oligarchy.
• Is Zachary Goldfarb a fooltool or a tooltool? Honest question.
• The New Inquiry's extraordinary Sunday Linkages.
• I don't watch much television (not for any righteous aesthetic motive, I just don't) so I'll not watch this, but I know a Zombie in Blegsylvania, he might be interested in how to tame a zombie. Or not.
• Some lateral thoughts, part one, part two.
• A person can dream Fuck This.
• Sebald, for those of you who do.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Creeley, for those of you who do.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• Godspeed, Jason Molina.

                 
DEAR CORPORATION

Adam Fell

                         I don't know how to
say how I feel politely, or poetically, or
without the jugular and collapse of the
immediate heart, so tonight, I won't
say anything at all. Just stare out the
window at our stunned little writhe. Hold
back the strongest urge to knock out a
few of the capitol's most critical walls,
replace its fiber optic cables with
lightning bugs, replace the investment
bankers all with bunker busters. I lock
eyes with the capitol's bright and empty
rooms and admit that, sometimes,
deep in my affluent, American cells, I
miss my body carved to projectile. I
miss trebuchet shoulders and knuckles
flaked to arrowheads, miss my hands
massive and molded from molten to
the bolts of ballistas. I miss blackjack
and cudgel and quarterstaff and
flintlock. I miss pummel and pike and I
am not proud of this. I know it's not a
healthy feeling. I try to un-arm, to
un-cock. I try to practice my breathing.
I try The Master Cleanse, The Stationary 
Bike, The Bikram Sweat, The Contortion 
Stretch, The Vegan Meatloaf, The Nightly,  
Scorching Bath, The Leafy Greens and  
Venom Television, The Self-Mutilation of a 
Winter's Run, but we can only cleanse
our bodies so much before we realize
it's not our bodies that need detoxing.

I don't know how to say how I feel politely, or poetically, or without the jugular and collapse of the immediate heart, so tonight, I won't say anything at all. Just stare out the window at our stunned little writhe. Hold back the strongest urge to knock out a few of the capitol's most critical walls, replace its fiber optic cables with lightning bugs, replace the investment bankers all with bunker busters. I lock eyes with the capitol's bright and empty rooms and admit that, sometimes, deep in my affluent, American cells, I miss my body carved to projectile. I miss trebuchet shoulders and knuckles flaked to arrowheads, miss my hands massive and molded from molten to the bolts of ballistas. I miss blackjack and cudgel and quarterstaff and flintlock. I miss pummel and pike and I am not proud of this. I know it's not a healthy feeling. I try to un-arm, to un-cock. I try to practice my breathing. I try The Master Cleanse, The Stationary Bike, The Bikram Sweat, The Contortion Stretch, The Vegan Meatloaf, The Nightly, Scorching Bath, The Leafy Greens and Venom Television, The Self-Mutilation of a Winter's Run, but we can only cleanse our bodies so much before we realize it's not our bodies that need detoxing. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/23243#sthash.Fjwa5uh7.dpuf