Under the Dry Pandanus, to the Scratching of Kangaroo Rats, I Achieve Psychic Onanism

When Paterno went rogue, announced his own retirement schedule, that's when Penn States's regents wanted to fire his ass beyond knowing they had to fire his ass, said L at Thursday Night Pints. I don't get the student rioting, said D. I said, you don't? K said, my sister's husband's bestfriend's brother's kid was in the crowd, it was mostly drunken frat boys, it was College Park after a Duke game, a chance for violence for the colors. When Paterno went rogue? I said. He didn't go rogue, the throne dropped out beneath him. He acted no different in announcing his own retirement schedule than he had for forty years. But I don't get why student's rioted, said D. You don't? said K. It was appropriate and acceptable tribal behavior, I said. L said, it wasn't only appropriate, it was required, a loyalty test. Loyalty? said D. To what? Exactly, said K, and made D go buy a round.

• Send blogbud Wis[s]e Words good thoughts please.
• Some (day after) Veterans Day reading.
• Principles.
• Lovely, wonderful thoughts.
• Nature is the 99% too.
• Wall Street v Elizabeth Warren.
• Why YFWP won't fire the World's Second Shittiest Human.
• The lighter side of incitement to genocide.
• The case for knee-jerk anti-interventionism.
• No flag large enough.
• Beware divide and conquer.
• If you see a guy in a United sweatshirt and hat at McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza this afternoon, say hi please. Thanks to L for the coats and blankets.
• Urban roots of the financial crisis.
• Business.
• It's the only thing.
• Jesus Christ's half-brother is....
• ICC.
• How's Klinsmann working out?
• Reconstructive post-modernism.
• [Response to the loyalty oath]
• Don't save us from the flames.
• Sign of love.

I AM AN ATHEIST WHO SAYS HIS PRAYERS

Karl Shapiro

I am an atheist who says his prayers.

I am an anarchist, and a full professor at that. I take the loyalty oath.

I am a deviate. I fondle and contribute, backscuttle and brown, father of three.

I stand high in the community. My name is in Who’s Who. People argue about my modesty.

I drink my share and yours and never have enough. I free-load officially and unofficially.

A physical coward, I take on all intellectuals, established poets, popes, rabbis, chiefs of staff.

I am a mystic. I will take an oath that I have seen the Virgin. Under the dry pandanus, to the scratching of kangaroo rats, I achieve psychic onanism. My tree of nerves electrocutes itself.

I uphold the image of America and force my luck. I write my own ticket to oblivion.

I am of the race wrecked by success. The audience brings me news of my death. I write out of boredom, despise solemnity. The wrong reason is good enough for me.

I am of the race of the prematurely desperate. In poverty of comfort I lay gunpowder plots. I lapse my insurance.

I am the Babbitt metal of the future. I never read more than half of a book. But that half I read forever.

I love the palimpsest, statues without heads, fertility dolls of the continent of Mu. I dream prehistory, the invention of dye. The palms of the dancers’ hands are vermillion. Their heads oscillate like the cobra. High-caste woman smelling of earth and silk, you can dry my feet with your hair.

I take my place beside the Philistine and unfold my napkin. This afternoon I defend the Marines. I goggle at long cars.

Without compassion I attack the insane. Give them the horsewhip!

The homosexual lectures me brilliantly in the beer booth. I can feel my muscles soften. He smiles at my terror.

Pitchpots flicker in the lemon groves. I gaze down on the plains of Hollywood. My fine tan and my arrogance, my gray hair and my sneakers, O Israel!

Wherever I am I become. The power of entry is with me. In the doctor’s office a patient, calm and humiliated. In the foreign movies a native, shabby enough. In the art gallery a person of authority (there’s a secret way of approaching a picture. Others move off). The high official insults me to my face. I say nothing and accept the job. He offers me whiskey.

How beautifully I fake! I convince myself with men’s room jokes and epigrams. I paint myself into a corner and escape on pulleys of the unknown. Whatever I think at the moment is true. Turn me around in my tracks; I will take your side.

For the rest, I improvise and am not spiteful and water the plants on the cocktail table.

Sixty-Six Today

Fifty-Eight Today

Happy Birthday Andy Partridge. XTC (and side-projects) are in the innermost circle of acts for one of the three rotating spots in my sillyass Desert Island Five game.

The Soul's a Petrified Fleck of Partridge

Fuckity, I'm sorry, watch this:





Jeebusfuck. Gabriel's 1982 Security tour, Warner Theater, literally, one of the best five nights of my life, but fuckity, my entire life has been a lie.

Fuckity, Obama's decided to not piss you off until after next year's election:

The Obama administration will reassess the proposed route through Nebraska for a major pipeline that would carry oil from Canada to Texas, according to State Department officials, a move that will delay a final decision beyond the 2012 election.

Fucker. Again, please please please please please please please please please please please please please may John Roberts get hit by a bus in March so Obama need name Roberts' replacement at the height of the election cycle. Please please please please please please please please please please please please please.

Fuckity, did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?

Fuckity, it's true, but not for fucking long:

We have to aggressively figure a solution out, and that solution needs to be figured out soon. I am concerned about where this team will be in 2012. They’ve been operating without a new lease. They’ve been in discussions on a lease to try to improve their terms. I’m shocked to say they could be paying more for their lease in RFK than any other team we have in the league. There is no doubt in my mind that it’s a stadium that is substandard to what soccer fans are able to experience in many other markets.

I don’t know where Kevin Payne is in his most recent conversations with the mayor. All I know is that Part One of this project is not asking the mayor to give us money to build a stadium in D.C.; the first part is to try to renew a lease at RFK that makes economic sense for a soccer team that is delivering great value and employing lots and lots of people and has been a good member of the community.

This occurred to me, it's far-fetched but give it a try: best case scenario is the DC government is corrupt and incompetent (your test for today: is corruption more a feature of incompetence or incompetence a feature of corruption), probable scenario is DC government is corrupt and incompetent but Vince Gray is right that politically there's no fucking way DC spends a cent on United, worse case scenario is the DC government is corrupt but not so incompetent it doesn't want United to fuck off elsewhere so RFK can be torn down so a motherfucking midget with a helmetball team can overspend for the property.

Adding, Kevin Payne. Why is Will Chang paying Kevin Payne, who has failed on the field and has failed in getting a stadium, who appears to have ZERO FUCKING OPTIONS other than move the team from DC? He was hired to produce winning teams and get a stadium built in DC or immediate surrounds. Yes, negotiating with the District sucks. Maybe negotiating with Kevin Payne sucks too.

Also, too. Also, beerless Byrd Stadium and Barra Brava and campus police who couldn't even get a job with the motherfucking Park Police. Win.

• Yes, there were Thursday Night Pints, interesting things were said by crotchedy old people, I'll tell you about it tomorrow, or not.
• Oakland.
• Occupy the narrative.
• I said this first, but I am not jodiworthy.
• How I learned to love Occupy.
• Occupy Des Moines.
• Capitalism.
• Worth a thousand words.
• A shocking twist.
• A momentary disintegration.
• Jeebus, this is why this post has generated 2K hits since yesterday.
• On the above.
• I asked first, but I am not worthy.
• Read this. I think Lisa Robertson poetry is major yes. I can't read fiction any more, I never could read non-fiction beyond intros and conclusions, but etc and yes....
• Embedded disabled by request. Air-whistling. Awesome.
• Paper and iron. Holyfuck.
• Yes, this post has the standard XTC vids. More Partridge birthday later.

THE SOUL

Ira Sadoff

The shaft of narrative peers down.
The soul's a petrified fleck of partridge this October. 
Mud-spattered, it thinks it's brush, it thinks 
it's one with the brush when God aims 

just below its feathers. It's too late to raise the soul, 
some ossified conceit we use to talk about deer 
as if we were deer, to talk about the sun, as if the cold 
autumn light mirrored our lover asleep in the tub. 

Nevertheless, I want to talk about it. Those scarred bodies 
on the hospital table, they're white chalk children use 
to deface the sidewalk. The deer fed in the gazebo, 
where the salt lick was barely safe from the fox. 

And when the wind didn't drag my scent to her,
I sat listless, half-awake, and watched her hunger 
surpass her timidity. I should have been changed. 
I should have been startled into submission 

by a very white light, I should have shed my misgivings 
as her tongue made that sticky sound on the lick
and two startled animals stared into what St. Francis
called a mystery. I should bring her back, the woman too, 

the woman who what why words fail me here. 
I should sanctify the hospital gown as it slides down
the tunnel of the catscan, to see where 
the nodules have spread into the thin, pliable tissues 

we call the innards in animals, because they dwell 
in scenery, they're setting for the poem, they provide 
a respite from the subject who's been probed and lacerated,
who's been skinned and eaten away by the story 

when I'm beguiled by the music the hooves made
on the pine floor. I can bring her back, can't I,
I'm bringing him back, the hero who was close enough 
so I could watch what was inside his face hover and scatter. 

Like a Sunbather, Whose Lids Retain a Greenish, Gemmed Impression of the Sun

As promised, Anthony Hecht's Green: An Epistle (with bonus poem). As always, click for better image, as always, read out loud if possible.

As for green, five to one Dark Green beat Noxzema-Bottle Blue (and the votes for Noxzema-Bottle Blue were mostly me on different PCs I walked by in the building I work in), so for the immediate future:





While playing that LOUD! take a guess who turns 58 tomorrow and what band you'll be listening to here. As always, Serendipity fills me with awe.

Also, because I was just thinking about my daughter and because she called while I was and because she'll be home from college in two weeks for Thanksgiving:

An Ark Sets Forth Which Is Itself the Mind Bound for Some Pungent Green

• Fucking pigs. Wonder if they waded into the State College rioters with such glee. Wonder if crackers would cheer the pigs wading into the State College rioters with the same glee they cheer the pigs wading into Occupiers. Actually, I don't wonder at all.
• Remorseless.
• Knowing our enemy, part two.
• The end of Loser Liberalism?
• How do you plead?
• Keynes v Hayek.
• Rhetorical question.
• In case you had any doubt.....
• From no occupation to Occupy.
• A framing memo for Occupy. 
• What does a General Assembly do?
• The view from Japan once, twice.
• Riot police.
• Panopticon.
• True.
• O! good. Excellent take down on The World's Second Shittiest Human.
• On New Zealand crackers. I'm sorry, crackers are funny.
• Life is busy, plus this is how my head is working now, hence the even more than usual abbreviated nature of recent posts. I can say that Dark Green is kicking Noxzema-Bottle Blues ass in the polling - please go vote if you haven't and give a shit (and not giving a shit is a voting option too!), so Dark Green for another day and until the novelty wears off enough I'm forced to confront the moral dilemma of my faithlessness to my favorite color. Give thanks I haven't school-bus yellowed you, yo.
• Shit, I can't find an online version of Hecht's Green: An Epistle. I'll scan it and post the pdfs later today. Or not.
• Mining the audio motherlode.
• You're gonna miss me.
• Woke up with this in my head:

SESTINA d'INVERNO

Anthony Hecht
Here in this bleak city of Rochester,
Where there are twenty-seven words for “snow,”
Not all of them polite, the wayward mind
Basks in some Yucatan of its own making,
Some coppery, sleek lagoon, or cinnamon island
Alive with lemon tints and burnished natives,

And O that we were there. But here the natives
Of this grey, sunless city of Rochester
Have sown whole mines of salt about their land
(Bare ruined Carthage that it is) while snow
Comes down as if The Flood were in the making.
Yet on that ocean Marvell called the mind

An ark sets forth which is itself the mind,
Bound for some pungent green, some shore whose natives
Blend coriander, cayenne, mint in making
Roasts that would gladden the Earl of Rochester
With sinfulness, and melt a polar snow.
It might be well to remember that an island

Was blessed heaven once, more than an island,
The grand, utopian dream of a noble mind.
In that kind climate the mere thought of snow
Was but a wedding cake; the youthful natives,
Unable to conceive of Rochester,
Made love, and were acrobatic in the making.

Dream as we may, there is far more to making
Do than some wistful reverie of an island,
Especially now when hope lies with the Rochester
Gas and Electric Co., which doesn’t mind
Such profitable weather, while the natives
Sink, like Pompeians, under a world of snow.

The one thing indisputable here is snow,
The single verity of heaven’s making,
Deeply indifferent to the dreams of the natives,
And the torn hoarding-posters of some island.
Under our igloo skies the frozen mind
Holds to one truth: it is grey, and called Rochester.

No island fantasy survives Rochester,
Where to the natives destiny is snow
That is neither to our mind nor of our making.

Shelby Refuses to Choose between Blue and Green on Principle

Press release:

In response to Denver Mayor Michael Hancock’s insistence that Occupy Denver choose leadership to deal with City and State officials, and drawing inspiration from the notion that corporations are people, Occupy Denver’s General Assembly has elected a leader: Shelby, a three year old Border Collie. “Shelby is closer to a person than any corporation: She can bleed, she can breed, and she can show emotion. Either Shelby is a person, or corporations aren’t people,” said a Shelby supporter at the time of her election.

Occupy Denver reserves the right to alter leadership status, but for now, Shelby exhibits heart, warmth, and an appreciation for the group over personal ambition that Occupy Denver members feel are sorely lacking in the leaders some of them have voted for on national, state, and local levels. Accordingly, Occupy Denver looks forward to communication with Mayor Hancock and Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper sometime this week to introduce their leadership.

Newly-elected leader Shelby will be leading this Saturday’s Occupy Denver march against Corporate Personhood, and invites all other civic minded dogs (and their leash-holders) to join.

I overheard two Chicago School-trained econ profs in a queue in front of me in the Union two hours ago bitching furiously and sneeringly about Occupy in general and Occupiers voting for the, ahem, bitch in particular, and fuck their dark hearts, it's completely incomprehensible to them, Occupy simply doesn't compute in their Corporate training for one-way, zero-sum negotiation.

Also four people say they like the green, two say the blue, another says to stop wanking (and I anticipate more), so here, a tried and proven bleggalgazing gimmick!





Fuck it, I'll keep it for a green for another day and might play with a header image or not, the true point of this post (beyond my assclownish self-absorption) is that Ken put the song below in my head this morning and it's not left yet and it needs to be in yours too. You're welcome.

GKRIEREKN

Watch the Paterno story the next two weeks - and we're not near full OMFG! yet, this has the potential to be a paradigm-nudging but not paradigm-changing event - as the usual suspects scramble for their usual narratives. Look at me! A pint to the first of you who finds a professional cracker linking Sandusky's behavior to public-urinating Occupiers.

Here's the deal: someone who serviced power's interest profitably and had power's blind eye when surfing power's sewage is to be humiliated and capped as aberration now that he's caught. This particular instance is complicated by helmetball, which is the most apt metaphor for late capitalism America. The World's Second Shittiest Human is outraged as she'd never be at droning Pakistani children or the deliberate impoverishment for profit of US citizens by Vikram Pandit.

Busy, no time to read last night, so this is it. Regular programming resumes tomorrow, or not. The green and the Kirk are gone with next post (though I like the green, you?). Let it not be said I don't honor my bets.

Blowholes in Rictus

Holyfuck, that photo makes me laugh out loud, it's launched me into the best mood I've had in a week. Forgive me my descents into the maudlin like I forgive me my descents into the maudlin, they produce, when molted out of, metaphors to float me for a month, and Lordy, there is no better metaphor in my brain for America in late terminal capitalism than the Washington Redskins, ownership and management.

Plus I'm busy, so one more, then links, poem, music....

• For that top photo's full glory, yo.
• Pastor Sanctimonious says Fuck you. He pays someone to cut his hair that way. Let's Occupy YWFP, yo.
• Knowing our enemy, part one.
• For fuck's sake.
• (One of) That guy's ex.
• Oligarchy.
• The class war has begun.
• Maryland tops 1%!
• The modern case of the one-eyed monster.
• Made you look.
• Obama's wacky liberals.
• The world is his throne. 
• He learns things.
• Best bleggalgaze ever.
• Beckett's reading list.
• A perfect poem?
• Black prince.

BECAUSE OUR WAITERS ARE HOPELESS ROMANTICS

Amy Beeder

              the plates are broken after just one meal:

plates that mimic lily pads or horseshoe crabs,

              swifts’ wings,

golden koi, whirlpools, blowholes in rictus:

              all smashed against the table’s edge—

. . . also our chef eschews pepper & salt

              for violets & vespers

& squid ink & honey from wasps

              rare lichen grown in local snow

authentic silt dark from the Nile or Tigris.

              Surely you know that poultry, if cooked right,

will cure most common psychic ills?

              It’s something to do with the feathers.

                                      ≈

. . . but you’re hungry. Come in. Sit. Taste.

              There’s breast of swan for shame.

Try a quail tart for rage,

              macaw on poached orchids for boredom.

And we serve so many other things.

              There’s really nothing you can’t order:

goat’s feet, orange groves, prophets & smoke

              convent orphans playing violins

flavors of memory, winter & wax, angles of sun, extravagant claims . . .

              Don’t worry, there’s plenty—

it’s a mysterious feast you attend, but it offers

              an affable scent of the cauldron, the light of abundance poured

over every table & marvelous barstool    

Come in—

                                      ≈

Now you’re getting the gist:

              at each table’s head that growing pile of shards

is not waste but homage to the potter.

              The world’s a dish to relish, to finish:

this conch afloat in broth

              a frilly and vertical eye  

though portent & probably tainted, is solace

              like these towers of loquats & glittering scales

or our bright pans’ brash mortal clanging.

              Blink back the sun and look inside.

Our tiny lights don’t at all resemble stars.  

              Come in, come sup. You’ll never feel full.

Send Me Home Damaged and Wanting

Listened to the below half an hour ago before seeing the above just now. Not claiming serendipity, not claiming synchronicity, not claiming anything but my reflexive habit of association and claiming these are the strangest days of my life, that I need start making more of them or at least stop making less of them....

the dresses of monday through friday swallow the long hips of weekends

• Be impossible, demand the realistic.
• Taking back from the 1%?
• The high price of ignorance.
• American autumn.
• Gate, kept.
• Call me when Obama says this.
• Thanks! to T in Laurel and K (yes, of Thursday Night Pints) of Arlington, stuff was delivered Saturday afternoon. I will be making another delivery this coming weekend, donations solicited (including books, I'm told, cause it can be motherfucking boring at Occupy)...
• The war on the homefront.
• On the blinkeredness of soi-disant progressives.
• Uh-oh.
• Occupy Fredneck?
• Yes, just links today, shoot me for my blegwhorishness. I could claim half-truthfully I've too much to say and not enough time to process, though full truth is I spent a big slice of yesterday at Strathmore listening to Beethoven's Pastoral and then having a quiet dinner with Earthgirl, so shoot me for my complicity too! More tomorrow (besides links), or not.
• Clumsiness and truth are so often intertwined.....
• The common lot.
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• Goat-legged country god.
• Motor.
• Douglas Leader.
• Remembering Bitch Magnet.

FLOATING TREES

C.D. Wright

a bed is left open to a mirror

a mirror gazes long and hard at a bed

light fingers the house with its own acoustics

one of them writes this down

one has paper

bed of swollen creeks and theories and coils

bed of eyes and leaky pens

much of the night the air touches arms

arms extend themselves to air

their torsos turning toward a roll

of sound: thunder

night of coon scat and vandalized headstones

night of deep kisses and catamenia

his face by this light: saurian

hers: ash like the tissue of a hornets’ nest

one scans the aisle of firs

the faint blue line of them

one looks out: sans serif

“Didn’t I hear you tell them you were born

on a train”

what begins with a sough and ends with a groan

groan in which the tongue’s true color is revealed

the comb’s sough and the denim’s undeniable rub

the chair’s stripped back and muddied rung

color of stone soup and garden gloves

color of meal and treacle and sphagnum

hangers clinging to their coat

a soft while bulb to its string

the footprints inside us

iterate the footprints outside

the scratched words return to their sleeves

the dresses of monday through friday

swallow the long hips of weekends

a face is studied like a key

for the mystery of what it once opened

“I didn’t mean to wake you

angel brains”

ink of eyes and veins and phonemes

the ink completes the feeling

a mirror silently facing a door

door with no lock no lock

the room he brings into you

the room befalls you

like the fir trees he trues her

she nears him like the firs

if one vanishes one stays

if one stays the other will or will not vanish

otherwise my beautiful green fly

otherwise not a leaf stirs

I Am Working on a Specimen So Pale It Is Like Staring at Snow from the Bow of a Ship in Fog

Are you an anarchist? Some questions!

• If there's a line to get on a crowded bus, do you wait your turn and refrain from elbowing your way past others even in the absence of police?
• Are you a member of a club or sports team or any other voluntary organization where decisions are not imposed by one leader but made on the basis of general consent? 
• Do you believe that most politicians are selfish, egotistical swine who don't really care about the public interest? Do you think we live in an economic system which is stupid and unfair?  
• Do you really believe those things you tell your children (or that your parents told you)?
• Do you believe that human beings are fundamentally corrupt and evil, or that certain sorts of people (women, people of color, ordinary folk who are not rich or highly educated) are inferior specimens, destined to be ruled by their betters? 

That last question, if he's asking what I think he's asking, is fucked constructually. That last question, if he is asking what he's asking, is fucked categorically.

Hey! The Glands reunited? I love The Glands.




The Glands - Mercury Lounge, NYC by brooklynvegan




The Glands - 2 - Mercury Lounge, NYC by brooklynvegan

• I would be flattered to have Condo Fuck open for me.
• New rallying cry.
• Moby octopad.
• Outing the ringers.
• Occupy DC settles in.
• Washington pre-occupied.
• Occupy Bill Clinton, Harvard, Towers Watson, Tysons Corners, SCOTUS.
• Return to hot chicken. 
• Recipe.
• The politics of austerity. 
• Damage.
• Occupy the fucking DC police.
• The lie and how we told it.
• Is Obama toast?
• Yes we can care less.
• Not even pretending anymore. 
• Thought provocateur.
• The Batrachian Candidate.
• YFWP. 
• My little corner of the world.
• I played NaNoWriMo for two weeks four or five years ago twenty years after I knew I wasn't a novelist. I point it out today only because four of five years ago Lit Blegsylvania wasn't the ghost town it is now.
• The Fall guy.

[white spring]

Lisa Olstein

I am working on a specimen so pale it is like staring at snow from the bow of a ship in fog. I lose track of things—articulation of wing, fineness of hair—as if the moth itself disappears, but remains as an emptiness before me. Or, from its bleakness, the subtlest distinctions suddenly increase: the slightest shade lighter in white begins to breathe with a starkness that’s arresting and the very idea of color terrifies. It has snowed and the evening is blue. The herders look like buoys, like waders the water has gotten too deep around. They’ll have to swim in to shore. Their horses are patient. They love to be led from their stalls. They love to sharpen their teeth on the gate. They will stand, knees locked, for hours.

I've pressed so far away from my desire that if you asked me what I want I would, accepting the harmonious completion of the drift, say annihilation, probably.

I'll be picking up coat and blanket donations in Laurel this afternoon and the Peoples Republic of Arlington Sunday morning (thanks!), please send me an email if you want to help with either product or delivery or if you want my cell in case you might want to play but can't commit to a time yet - I'll be offline much of today after twelve. Drop-off at Freedom Plaza tomorrow needs be by one at the latest.

And a slight defense of old complicit fucks like me: I haven't internalized my external knowledge that all is past repair, meaning I haven't internalized that nothing has broke that could ever be repaired. Everything has always been and will always be brute negotiation. I think any moment is as good as humans can do and think any moment is as good as humans can be, as shitty as both often are.

• I'd asked day or two ago if anyone knew anyone who knew Silber, if he was OK, and yesterday he posted. Not claiming any connection - he has no idea this shitty blog exists. Send him some coin if you can.
• Impertinent questions.
• I hear they smoke the barbeque.
• On Occupy Where.
• Occupy the Koch Brothers. 
• Occupy DC.
• Oakland.
• Oakland.
• The globalization of protest.
• Window-smashers v window-dressers.
• My theory of spontaneous similitude.
• Power v -
• Parlor game theory.
• All is meta.
• YFPW hates Social Security.
• The most stenchiful time of the year, or: your tags suck balls.
• Wait, what? Qatari investors have ploughed millions of euros into the Ligue 1 leaders since buying the club in May and the 36-year-old former England captain, whose Los Angeles Galaxy contract ends in the coming weeks, is seen as a key target. His Galaxy team-mate Landon Donovan has said the players are "assuming" Beckham, who has the right to buy an MLS franchise when he retires, will renew his contract with the LA club. Emphasis mine, because what the fuck does that mean?
• I've been thinking about, listening to, Paul Simon for the past three weeks: I heard, this is true, Mother and Child Reunion, what a great song, while filling up the rental car at a gas station in downtown Coshocton Ohio on my favorite day of the year since the last until the next, so I gleefully grasp at serendipity to note that Art Garfunkel is (holyfuck) 70 today:

CONTINUITY

A.R. Ammons

I've pressed so
far away from
my desire that

if you asked
me what I
want I would,

accepting the harmonious
completion of the
drift, say annihilation,

probably.

Time to Give Ourselves to Strange Gods' Hands

Once They Are Elected They Are Given a Bowl of Cream and a Puppy Clip

Please play that while reading the rest of this post, being careful to open each link in a new tab so you don't have to start the song over over and over. David Thomas' music has one of two permanent chairs in my sillyass Desert Island Five game.

At Thursday Night Pints, K especially, but D and L too, wanted to talk about blogging, macro/micro, general/particular, both why I do it and, more importantly, what do I hope to accomplish, I mean, why do I do it the way I do? so I told them.

Then we talked about Occupy. Like everyone else, none of us have anymore of a theory of hope than anyone else. Also, if you live in Metro DC and have blankets/old coats you don't need and want to donate to Occupy I'll come pick them up sometime Saturday afternoon and take them Downtown Sunday. You're welcome to join me.

• I didn't tell them anything I don't tell you every fucking day.
• UPDATE! No one cares about property damage.
• UPDATE! On the above.
• Era of small and many.
• Oligarchy, American-style.
• Pastor Sanctimonious says blame sluts and fags.
• The anarcho-liberal considered, part two.
• Humanity of the masses.
• The view from Oakland.
• Massive bluggy failure.
• There is a there there.
• Mike Bloomberg's Marie Antoinette moment. His day is full of them.
• Why Israel will not attack Iran. 
• Our universities: why are they failing?
• Obviously D, K, L and I talk about this shit all the time, and our place in particular, and no one there that I don't know reads me there and I have every intention of keeping it this way, but I can say that... no, I'll tell you when I see you if you ask me.
• Akrasia anonymous.
• Happened before it will happen again.
• Happened before it will happen again.
• Purple Line.
• NoMa?
• Bromo-Seltzer Tower! Hamster, let's go eat Korean in Bawlmer! Not this weekend, next: Earthgirl wants your eyes and thoughts for a pre-showing.
• Yes, James Tate usually shows up here when David Thomas does.
• Now play this one over and over:

HOW THE POPE IS CHOSEN

James Tate

Any poodle under ten inches high is a toy.
Almost always a toy is an imitation
of something grown-ups use.
Popes with unclipped hair are called corded popes.
If a Pope's hair is allowed to grow unchecked,
it becomes extremely long and twists
into long strands that look like ropes.
When it is shorter it is tightly curled.
Popes are very intelligent.
There are three different sizes.
The largest are called standard Popes.
The medium-sized ones are called miniature Popes.
I could go on like this, I could say:
"He is a squarely built Pope, neat,
well-proportioned, with an alert stance
and an expression of bright curiosity,"
but I won't. After a poodle dies
all the cardinals flock to the nearest 7-Eleven.
They drink Slurpies until one of them throws up
and then he's the new Pope.
He is then fully armed and rides through the wilderness alone,
day and night in all kinds of weather.
The new Pope chooses the name he will use as Pope,
like "Wild Bill" or "Buffalo Bill."
He wears red shoes with a cross embroidered on the front.
Most Popes are called "Babe" because
growing up to become a Pope is a lot of fun.
All the time their bodies are becoming bigger and stranger,
but sometimes things happen to make them unhappy.
They have to go to the bathroom by themselves,
and they spend almost all of their time sleeping.
Parents seem to be incapable of helping their little popes grow up.
Fathers tell them over and over again not to lean out of windows,
but the sky is full of them.
It looks as if they are just taking it easy,
but they are learning something else.
What, we don't know, because we are not like them.
We can't even dress like them.
We are like red bugs or mites compared to them.
We think we are having a good time cutting cartoons out of the paper,
but really we are eating crumbs out of their hands.
We are tiny germs that cannot be seen under microscopes.
When a Pope is ready to come into the world,
we try to sing a song, but the words do not fit the music too well.
Some of the full-bodied popes are a million times bigger than us.
They open their mouths at regular intervals.
They are continually grinding up pieces of the cross
and spitting them out. Black flies cling to their lips.
Once they are elected they are given a bowl of cream
and a puppy clip. Eyebrows are a protection
when the Pope must plunge through dense underbrush

in search of a sheep.

The Landlord's Control of Terror Is Implicit

• (h/t)
• Coming in 2012! Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to rally support in his cabinet for an attack on Iran, according to government sources.The country's defence minister Ehud Barak and the foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman are said to be among those backing a pre-emptive strike to neutralise Iran's nuclear ambitions. 
• Coming in 2012! Britain's armed forces are stepping up their contingency planning for potential military action against Iran amid mounting concern about Tehran's nuclear enrichment programme, the Guardian has learned. The Ministry of Defence believes the US may decide to fast-forward plans for targeted missile strikes at some key Iranian facilities. British officials say that if Washington presses ahead it will seek, and receive, UK military help for any mission, despite some deep reservations within the coalition government.
• Running out of ironic war-based titles.
• All the news that fits.
• Hey, anyone know anyone who knows Silber? Been a couple of months.
• No no no, it was the Liberal Media. Of course it was Perry, which means it wasn't Rove, who's thrown behind Romney, yes?
• One year of prison costs more than a year at Princeton.
• Occupy's new website.
• Oakland.
• Who is Occupy?
• Oakland.
• Class warfare in action. 
• Intransigence.
• Merkozy blackmail?
• I need remind myself three, four times a year I am not in fact a thrall to this blog's sillyass formatting tyrant, so I defiantly insert a sentence like this into the links instead of as header, hope it bumps the needle out of a bleggal skip.
• Creating a crisis.
• Drone.
• Election prediction.
• Mac McGarry retires! 
• Point of Rocks! 
• Speed cameras for Gaithersburg! 
• Green lights for Kensington!
• Say this about Occupy: our Stringtown reacts predictably, the competition to define Occupy's significance causing those you thought would be meaner be meaner, Kinder Kinder, louder louder, quieter quieter, more manic more manic, bleggalgazier bleggalgazier, all striving for insignificant significance. This is my entry.
• The previous tenants.
• A people's history of Howard Zinn.
• Cat physics! (h/t blog bud JV)
• Marquis Cha-Cha.
• Mining the audio motherlode.
• Holyfuck, listen to this, with good headphones, loud (h/t):

Magnetic Poetry - Follow Me by yvynyl


ALBANY

Ron Silliman

If the function of writing is to "express the world." My father withheld child support. forcing my mother to live with her parents. my brother and I to be raised together in a small room. Grandfather called them niggers. I can't afford an automobile. Far across the calm bay stood a complex of long yellow buildings, a prison. A line is the distance between. They circled the seafood restaurant, singing "We shall not be moved." My turn to cook. It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those hours when the sun was up. The event was nothing like their report of it. How concerned was I over her failure to have orgasms? Mondale's speech was drowned by jeers. Ye wretched. She introduces herself as a rape survivor. Yet his best friend was Hispanic. I decided not to escape to Canada. Revenue enhancement. Competition and spectacle. kinds of drugs. If it demonstrates form some people won't read it. Television unifies conversation. Died in action. If a man is a player, he will have no job. Becoming prepared to live with less space. Live ammunition. Secondary boycott. My crime is parole violation. Now that the piecards have control. Rubin feared McClure would read Ghost Tantras at the teach-in. This form is the study group. The sparts are impeccable1 though filled with deceit. A benefit reading. He seduced me. AFT, local 1352. Enslavement is permitted as punishment for crime. Her husband broke both of her eardrums. I used my grant to fix my teeth. They speak in Farsi at the comer store. YPSL. The national question. I look forward to old age with some excitement. 42 years for Fibreboard Products. Food is a weapon. Yet the sight of people making love is deeply moving. Music is essential. The cops wear shields that serve as masks. Her lungs heavy with asbestos. Two weeks too old to collect orphan's benefits. A woman on the train asks Angela Davis for an autograph. You get read your Miranda. As if a correct line would somehow solve the future. They murdered his parents just to make the point. It's not easy if your audience doesn't identify as readers. Mastectomies are done by men. Our pets live at whim. Net income is down 13%. Those distant sirens down in the valley signal great hinges in the lives of strangers. A phone tree. The landlord's control of terror is implicit. Not just a party but a culture. Copayment. He held the Magnum with both hands and ordered me to stop. The garden is a luxury (a civilization of snail and spider). They call their clubs batons. They call their committees clubs. Her friendships with women are different. Talking so much is oppressive. Outplacement. A shadowy locked facility using drugs and double-ceIling (a rest home). That was the Sunday Henry's father murdered his wife on the front porch. If it demonstrates form they can't read it. If it demonstrates mercy they have something worse in mind. Twice, carelessness has led to abortion. To own a basement. Nor is the sky any less constructed. The design of a department store is intended to leave you fragmented, off-balance. A lit drop. They photograph Habermas to hide the harelip. The verb to be admits the assertion. The body is a prison. a garden. In kind. Client populations (cross the tundra). Off the books. The whole neighborhood is empty in the daytime. Children form lines at the end of each recess. Eminent domain. Rotating chair. The history of Poland in 90 seconds. Flaming pintos. There is no such place as the economy, the self. That bird demonstrates the sky. Our home, we were told, had been broken, but who were these people we lived with? Clubbed in the stomach, she miscarried. There were bayonets on campus. cows in India, people shoplifting books. I just want to make it to lunch time. Uncritical of nationalist movements in the Third World. Letting the dishes sit for a week. Macho culture of convicts. With a shotgun and "in defense" the officer shot him in the face. Here, for a moment, we are joined. The want-ads lie strewn on the table.

The Andromedans Hear Your Voice Like Distant Amusement Park Music Converged on by Ambulance Sirens and They Understand Everything

I could pick Herman Cane out of a line-up but I've no idea what he sounds like or what he says. Since POTUS12 will be the first time I've played POTUS as an ever-recovering .06% less-shittierier, I can ask .06% more dispassionately, why the media shit-funnel aimed at Cane now? This sexual harassment story, primed and trip-triggered years ago, why the detonation now?

Market logic suggests the timing is nothing more than the story's maximum return on investment re: eyeballs and commercial dollars - Cain will never be bigger than he is now - but may I suggest, a daydream from my romantic pwoggle heart, that Occupy is scaring the 1%, that Corporate felt a need to whack the cracker hive, turn up the siren of the waambulance of Cracker Victimization at the hands of the Great Satan Liberal media bias, this time spiced with accusations of racist Liberal hypocritical Uncle Tomming, give the hippie-hating a jolt demonizing Occupy hasn't.

Plus the bonus that Corporate, Cracker Division, doesn't want Cain as nominee in POTUS12, can both damage Cain's chances when he's at his peak and blame the whack on Corporate, Pwoggle Division, making Corporates' stockholders happy. Maximum return on investment. It'd be brilliant if it wasn't standard operating procedure. Also, this blog's Official Theme Song Two:

• Deepest condolences to blog bud Agi and his family. 
• Oakland.
• Brad interviewed on Oakland.
• Rhetorical question.
• Towards another anarchism.
• This generation's greatest academic fraud (I say this admiringly) interviewed.
• One percent's defender.
• Sent from an iPad?
• Scaring the 1%.
• Movement campaigns in disarray. 
• Also, motherfucking crackers.
• Also, motherfucking crackers.
• Also, motherfucking christer crackers. 
• Life stinks.
• Things you might have missed.
• Fuck-me-jig: Soccer fans in the Baltimore area have begun receiving an MLS-commissioned survey to gauge interest about a team playing there through expansion or relocation. “We’ve been saying this could happen,” United President Kevin Payne told the Insider. “This isn’t a game. This is serious. This isn’t a bluff. Part of it is trying to understand what that means for our business." United has spent all 16 MLS seasons in Washington but club officials have said playing at 50-year-old RFK is not economically viable. Talks with D.C. officials have shown no signs of progress. Buzzard Point in Southwest D.C., near Nationals Park, has been the club’s primary focus. Previous negotiations, involving Poplar Point in Anacostia and then Prince George’s County in Maryland, collapsed.
• Planet could have gone to St Mary's College.
• My future hell: Four major intersections near the Bethesda hospital along Rockville Pike, Connecticut Avenue, Cedar Lane, Jones Bridge Road and Old Georgetown Road will become construction zones, and a $40 million underpass will be created beneath Maryland 355. Short-term intense hell to make permanent hell minutely less hellish. 
• RIP Tom Keith. 
• Artistic surface, artistic depth.
• Day of the Dead.
• Actually, I woke up with this in my head, added the above theme song as a result:

THE WHITE FIRES OF VENUS

Denis Johnson

We mourn this senseless planet of regret,
droughts, rust, rain, cadavers
that can't tell us, but I promise
you one day the white fires
of Venus shall rage: the dead,
feeling that power, shall be lifted, and each
of us will have his resurrected one to tell him,
"Greetings. You will recover
or die. The simple cure
for everything is to destroy
all the stethoscopes that will transmit
silence occasionally. The remedy for loneliness
is in learning to admit
solitude as one admits
the bayonet: gracefully,
now that already
it pierces the heart.
Living one: you move among many
dancers and don't know which
you are the shadow of;
you want to kiss your own face in the mirror
but do not approach,
knowing you must not touch one
like that. Living
one, while Venus flares
O set the cereal afire,
O the refrigerator harboring things
that live on into death unchanged."

They know all about us on Andromeda,
they peek at us, they see us
in this world illumined and pasteled
phonily like a bus station,
they are with us when the streets fall down fraught
with laundromats and each of us
closes himself in his small
San Francisco without recourse.
They see you with your face of fingerprints
carrying your instructions in gloved hands
trying to touch things, and know you
for one despairing, trying to touch the curtains,
trying to get your reflection mired in alarm tape
past the window of this then that dark
closed business establishment.
The Andromedans hear your voice like distant amusement park music
converged on by ambulance sirens
and they understand everything.
They're on your side. They forgive you.

I want to turn for a moment to those my heart loves,
who are as diamonds to the Andromedans,
who shimmer for them, lovely and useless, like diamonds:
namely, those who take their meals at soda fountains,
their expressions lodged among the drugs
and sunglasses, each gazing down too long
into the coffee as though from a ruined balcony.
O Andromedans they don't know what to do
with themselves and so they sit there
until they go home where they lie down
until they get up, and you beyond the light years know
that if sleeping is dying, then waking
is birth, and a life
is many lives. I love them because they know how
to manipulate change
in the pockets musically, these whose faces the seasons
never give a kiss, these
who are always courteous to the faces
of presumptions, the presuming streets,
the hotels, the presumption of rain in the streets.
I'm telling you it's cold inside the body that is not the body,
lonesome behind the face
that is certainly not the face
of the person one meant to become.

Visitor from the Ancestral Homeland

My father grew up in a Fayette County PA coal town called Republic, and fifteen minutes ago I got my very first ping from Republic! on the google lackbay ussypay and sslay uckingfay, which brought this result:

Fleabus wept, though, ham of truth, fine bleggal metaphors abound.

Push Your Face Toward November's Glint of Frost

• Let's get November 2011's Theme Song out of the way right now.
• Fuck Obama.
• Portrait of America in decline.
• The difference between. 
• The Great American Shakedown.
• What would Kurt Vonnegut say?
• Intro to an explanation.
• Now hear this.
• Stages of collapse, revised.
• A master class in occupation.
• Blanchot (for those of you who do) on Marx.
• Panopticon.
• The White House explains..... 
• Pastor Sanctimonious accepts inevitable, shovels horseshit. Do you know he pays someone to cut his hair that way?
• The Cain Scrutiny.
• Halloween is stupid; Halloween in Georgetown stupid x infinity.
  
• Another new painting from Earthgirl:

• I've got a secret and avant garde music.
• Paul Simon interview.
• The moderate man is contemptible.
• Comus. Not the Milton poem, not the MOCO village.
• Heaven in a black leather jacket.
• In the city in the rain.
• As you turn to go.
• You you you you.
• Karen O's new project.

AUBADE

Devin Johnston

A vacant hour
before the sun—
and with it a valve's 
pneumatic hush,
the deep and nautical
clunk of wood,
chanson du ricochet
of rivet gun,
trowel tap,
and bolt drawn—

the moon sets
and water breaks.

Curled within
a warm pleroma,
playing for time,
you finally turn
and push your face
toward November's 
glint of frost,
grains of salt,
weak clarities 
of dawn.