UPDATE!

Marched from McPherson Square down 15th Street to 1001 G St, the headquarters of The Podesta Group. Cops blocked entrance, of course, but word is some vanguards got in.





Marched back to McPherson Square and ran into Union protesters. Occupied K and 16th, K and 15th, K and 14th. I left about 120 for obligations I couldn't shirk; I'd love to be there now video witnessing. I have feeling there will be more opportunities.

Watch live. Or here.

Lots to think about, including that shit on the right who wasn't the only fucker in lobbyist suites to find derisive amusement in the march, though she was the fucking shittiest. Much much more tomorrow. Or not.

We Should All Have to Spend at Least Once Decade Carving What We Mean Into Stone

CD got hold of an email outlining K Street's concern about today's march. Snippet:

Washington, DC is now becoming a focus point for Occupy-related protests now that other cities have cracked down on the tent cities and the criminal mischief associated with the Occupy movement. Other than frigid Boston, Washington is the only City that continues to allow the Occupy tent cities to continue without disruption... The key day is Wednesday, December 7th when the group plans to "swarm" from K Street 14th Street to 22nd Street throughout the day. They intend to enter the buildings (and possibly the tenant spaces) of buildings containing lobbying firms, law firms which lobby or represent corporate interests, Buildings housing healthcare tenants, oil tenants, insurance tenants, bank tenants, or drug company tenants would also be targets of this group. In other words, just about every building on K Street is a potential target. Further, I would not rely on the logistics parameters supplied by the protest organizers. If you have a building with tenants in the target groups anywhere in the City, I would take the same precautions that we are suggesting for the K street buildings. In fact, regardless of your tenant base, if your facility is in the vicinity of the protesters, they may enter your building if they cannot get into their buildings of choice and you present an easier target.

Criminal mischief! I'll post photos here tonight and Thursday morning!

I made it to 2:03 of this bout in Grifter Championship Shitwrestling (h/t):

• Just so we're clear, here's a truth: I don't actually sing or chant at United games unless it's for a particular player at a particular moment. I stand and sway, stand and bitch, stand and jump, stand and spin and slam my hands into my orange seat, stand and clap at good play, stand and scream at the ref, stand and scream at the other team, stand and really scream at United fucking up, stand and scream at Landru and Ilse and SeatSix and at some sloppy drunk axe-murderer in the row in front of us, and if I'm blessed, three, four times a year I make a primal sound at a beautiful goal that is gloriously purgative and curative, but I don't sing or chant because I have to hate you to sing or chant for you, I've the worst voice in the world. People can vouch for all of this.
• Plus I'm not a revolutionary, which is true, but not why I'm not chanting.
• Plus, I'm in for K St, can't make the White House or SCOTUS.
• Occupy San Francisco evicted.
• America justice.
• Speaking of grifters.
• On the above.
• Another flavor of shock doctrine.
• Pot calling the kettle FOX.
• As for United, thank you Tommy Wells, and fuck-me-jig, DC United - this DC United, not a second Senators United - will never get a new soccer stadium in Washington DC.
• There are few thing stupider than the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
• Obscure Sound's 40-31. 
• Yes, more Bonnie Prince Billy.

I DON'T THINK I TRUST THAT CORN

Dara Wier

As far as you're concerned,
To sentimentalize your feelings about someone retrospectively,
Your sentiments exactly,
To realize you failed to feel something you should have,
You might have said so yourself,
To feel a realization as a physical sensation,
Aggravation comes in many colors,
To sentimentalize your feelings about someone retrospectively,
Your life depended on something you failed to feel adequately,
What were you doing while your life sped by like, oh, a speeding bullet—
To mutter about a battered book you read at sixteen,
To feel a realization as a physical sensation,
Tell me more about your understanding of our collective humanity
To react retroactively, to forgive everything,
To acquiesce like a dead sponge does,
To know how it feels to be erased by someone who's mattered
To murder your others on account of your brokenness,
You don't hear a lot about the families of hermits,
You don't run into many bands of anchorites.
Run of the mill stories about men, women, and children
Don't feel sufficient when their occasion is verbatim.
Tell me about the most recent mill you've crept up on.
Tell me more about your feelings of our value.
Verbatim is such a physical word. Like a rubber mallet.
Tell me how much you once loved me, that will surely
Solve all of the puzzles. One of the best things about putting
Anything into words—instantaneous acknowledgement
Of the relative good it will do you, to make it appear to be
Static when that is impossible, we should all have to spend at least one
Decade carving what we think we mean into stone,
That might engender a little mindful, severe silence,
Don't waste your words was often or always tossed at me,
We have degraded our trajectory, we have spiraled into the vortices of despondency,
Such a sad sorry, my beloved also watched me sideways, we were a
Pack of mis-used curs squabbling amongst ourselves in agony.
The one who most looked like a generic human baby in the body
Of a feral puppy, that was the one to be most remembered,
And repulsed by, fear and repulsion are emotional cousins,
Emotions in general do exist to be tangled, it is a wonder
We ever find ourselves out of troubled waters, that is an expression
I will spend all day sorting, and while I'm at it, searching for the famous oil
That often goes with it.

It's an Inevitable Verbal Tic -- Wouldn't You Say? -- For a Super-Clean Country

Screams a headline in today's YFWP:

In race for campaign funds from billionaires, Romney outpaces Obama.

• On the above.
• Also, too.
• Occupy DC Wednesday 12/7 action. I will be in a miserable, day-long training session, fucking shoot me. I have, however, activated a - yes, club me with a 9-iron - twitter account so if I'm getting ready to drive to Sugarloaf and I see on the computer (I have a dumb phone for the time being) that the police are moving in to dismantle a barn, I can change plans. I have no idea how to use twitter, I have no plans to post to twitter, but find me and send me stuff if you want.
• Goodbye, serenity.
• Special issue on Occupy.
• Masters' tools, masters' house.
• UPDATE! Occupy Frederick!
• Grappling with Graeber.
• 24-hour notice.
• Krugman calls The Walrus a liar.
• Obamasshole.
• Ron Paul defends Occupy.
• Vote for Ron Paul or the dog will be angry.
• 45th POTUS?
• For the record, before you start screaming at me, I'm not voting for anybody.
• Also, motherfucking crackers.
• Still crazy. I've dealt with this assclown in work-life, the asshole.
• Work, you, me, Tino Quaranta.
• I use my blogrolls as my bookmarking system, and sometime over the next week or two I'm going to take an hour and do some rearranging to make my life easier. In the meantime, suggestions solicited for people you recommend I should read. As always, if you're Kinding me and me not you, please let me know.
• Last night's playlist.
• Cruel.
• I'm not going to do many lists this Listmas, but Obscure Sound's annual countdown of his 50 favorite albums of the year is always awesome and generous. Here's 50-41.
• You're right: I haven't played Stereolab in a while.

A SUPER-CLEAN COUNTRY

Linh Dinh

You (almost) never see it in public so
You have to conjure it up all day long,
Drag it into every conversation,
To flesh out the corporate picture.

It's an inevitable verbal tic -- wouldn't you say? --
For a super-clean country.

Holy shit, that shit's wack.
She thinks she's hot shit but she ain't dogshit.
There's nothing but shit on the internet.
Why are you so hung up on shit like that?
I got some good shit at home, some far-out shit.
You're so full of shit, you dumbshit motherfucker.

Mondantidote

Jeebusfuck, I love that song. This one too: some motherfucker disabled it. This one too: youtube used to have the actual promovid, but some motherfucker removed it. This one too: youtube used to have the actual promovid, but some motherfucker removed it. Anyway, in a certain mood, this radio set plays in my head. LOUD! yo.





That too. Also, work, me, you, and Tino Quaranta. Also, too. This too:

this is ridiculous said the dog now they not only have to walk me they have to rush up with their sanitary plastic bags what is it but old-fashioned Imperialism

I swear I had not seen this until last night when I wrote Saturday evening about my inability to use language yet for what I want to say about Occupy (h/t):

Our language has not yet caught up with the political phenomenon that is emerging in Zuccotti Park and spreading across the nation, though it is clear that a political paradigm shift is taking place before our very eyes. It’s time to begin to name and in naming, to better understand this moment. So let me propose some words: “political disobedience.”

I didn't hear about the police action at McPherson Square until past six last night; I was on Sugarloaf. I would have been there taking photos if I'd known, but let me be clear: I would have done everything in my power, including moving the fuck out of the way if a cop in riot gear told me to get the fuck out of the way, to avoid arrest, not only because I owe too many creditors too much money, not only because I'm only pissed at potentially losing privileges I assumed were mine by birthright, not only because I believe in the uselessness of protest to genuinely alter the re-feudalization now inevitable by and out of control of our bankrupt warlords' craven greed (I do believe in the usefulness of the protests to further accelerate the implementation of our bankrupt warlords' daydreams of police state), but all three plus I can't find the language to imagine any other outcome than the slow and grim and inevitable re-feudalization.

• Occupy Portland.
• Sustainable?
• More Occupy Lincoln Center.
• Sasha did this two weeks ago.
• Theory and event.
• Moral relativism.
• Occupy drones.
• Fuckface Hiatt.
• Also, motherfucking crackers.
• Also, motherfucking Israeli crackers.
• Norbeck!
• Quaranta retires.
• Omensetter's Luck reading group. I'll follow along but probably not play as I am not worthy, I read the novel within the past year, and my reading slump is slowly but finally unclenching with the help of Murakami's 1Q84.
• Breakfast with Kissinger.
• Intelligence.
• Woke up with Bonnie Prince Billy in my head for the umpteeth thousandth time ever.
• The song at the bottom is one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.
• The southside of the world.

RIDICULOUS

Alicia Ostriker

This is ridiculous

said the literary old woman

nobody gives us any respect

the young in one another's arms

are talking on their ipods

the politicians are lying through their teeth

and our husbands are taking a nap

this is ridiculous

said the tulip

all those genetically altered blossoms

those stupid long-lived orchids

that are practically plastic

and those fancy designer grasses

getting more market share

this is ridiculous

said the dog

now they not only have to walk me

they have to rush up with their

sanitary plastic bags

what is it but old-fashioned

Imperialism

Fine Cobwebs Did Support the Frame

I like some Philip Glass much and some not at all; as I said to (don't fear) the griper, there's plenty of better shit that he'd hate more, adding, I try every fucking day! The post was more responding to Glass' participation in that Occupy moment and what it might signify, I was using my playbook of self-serving swerves, the playbook that allows me to live in reflexive minor self-scourging peace through whining on my shitty blog about my complicity's palette, how I'll poke it but not change it, which is to say I still haven't found the language to express how at best, with human's involved, the plus/minus ratio between more or less shitty at .06%, why I still invest more than wishful idolatry towards a mythical ideal as proof of some moral superiority though such investment is proof both for and against such ideals. Why always me?

• Occupy Empire.
• Threat level 99%.
• Occupy DC.
• Decaying facade.
• Janitors join Occupy.
• The untouchables of Zuccotti Park.
• Police state.
• Fried chicken still on the menu.
• bamboozled.
• She Is as Shitty... really hates Gingrich.
• Moses to God.
• That's what I said sometime last week.
• The Cabins.
• Earthgirl's second favorite novelist. As for George Herbert, Hecht constantly urged me to read him, though it never quite worked.
• It's almost Zappadan, yes? Reminder, I celebrate Zappadan and honor Zappadanis and will Kind when found, but while I admire and like Zappa, he's never been in any rotation for any sillyass desert game long before three of the five seats were filled.
• Vessels.
• Cloudscape.
• Pruit Igoe.
• The Grid.
• Prophecies.

THE WORLD

George Herbert

Love built a stately house, where Fortune came,
And spinning fancies, she was heard to say
That her fine cobwebs did support the frame,
Whereas they were supported by the same;
But Wisdom quickly swept them all away.

The Pleasure came, who, liking not the fashion,
Began to make balconies, terraces,
Till she had weakened all by alteration;
But reverend laws, and many a proclomation
Reforméd all at length with menaces.

Then entered Sin, and with that sycamore
Whose leaves first sheltered man from drought and dew,
Working and winding slily evermore,
The inward walls and summers cleft and tore;
But Grace shored these, and cut that as it grew.

Then Sin combined with death in a firm band,
To raze the building to the very floor;
Which they effected,--none could them withstand;
But Love and Grace took Glory by the hand,
And built a braver palace than before.

I’ve Also Been Pardoned Miraculously for Years by the Lava of Chance which Runs Down the World’s Gullies, Silting Us Back

That busted my sour mood, though, also, remember when some UC-Davis cop walked up and down a sitting line of student protesters and peppered-sprayed them and it caused a burp of dramatic pro-Occupy sentiment and created a (we thought) toxic meme as did the University president's perp-walk? Me too! Decades ago.

Also:

GROUP A - Poland, Greece, Russia, Czech Republic

GROUP B - Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Portugal

GROUP C - Spain, Italy, Republic of Ireland, Croatia

GROUP D - Ukraine, Sweden, France, England

Sure, fuck Denmark.

Also, I commented on myself how stupidly evil is the ritual turkey-pardoning POTUS photo-op and SHAZAM! I'm driving around last night, click to WETA to hear what shitty Haydn or Mozart they're playing, and the voice-over actor masquerading as classical DJ says, WETA is also sponsored by George Washington's Mount Vernon, which invites you to a candlelight Christmas - music, party favors, and meet the pardoned Thanksgiving turkey! Jeebusfuck, shoot me, but as always, awed nods of faith towards Serendipity.

Also: watch George Pakled and She Is As Shitty As the World's Shittiest Human try to draw the long knives against Gingrichgasm:

• Being-toward-#OneDayLeft.
• Police state.
• Panopticon.
• Police state.
• Panopticon.
• Police state.
• Of course they did. When I take blankets and shit to Freedom Plaza, I'm looked at w/suspicion, as I - and anyone else - should be. Tomorrow, for instance. Email me if you want to donate anything, I'll come pick it up.
• Motherfuckers.
• Lots of good news!
• Police state.
• I'm convinced Corporate wants Obamasshole reelected.
• The Democrats are not your friend.

ACCIDENTS OF BIRTH

William Meredith

Je vois les effroyables espaces de l’Univers qui m’enferment, et je me trouve attaché à un coin de cette vaste étendue, sans savoir pourquoi je suis plutôt en ce lieu qu’en un autre, ni pourquoi ce peu de temps qui m’est donné à vivre m’est assigné à ce point plutôt qu'à un autre de toute l’éternité qui m’a précédé, et de toute qui me suit.

—Pascal, Pensées sur la religion


The approach of a man’s life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive. The endless wonder of this meeting is what causes the mind, in its inward liberty of a frozen morning, to turn back and question and remember. The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here?

—Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

Spared by a car or airplane crash or

cured of malignancy, people look

around with new eyes at a newly

praiseworthy world, blinking eyes like these.

For I’ve been brought back again from the

fine silt, the mud where our atoms lie

down for long naps. And I’ve also been

pardoned miraculously for years

by the lava of chance which runs down

the world’s gullies, silting us back.

Here I am, brought back, set up, not yet

happened away.

                     But it’s not this random

life only, throwing its sensual

astonishments upside down on

the bloody membranes behind my eyeballs,

not just me being here again, old

needer, looking for someone to need,

but you, up from the clay yourself,

as luck would have it, and inching

over the same little segment of earth-

ball, in the same little eon, to

meet in a room, alive in our skins,

and the whole galaxy gaping there

and the centuries whining like gnats—

you, to teach me to see it, to see

it with you, and to offer somebody

uncomprehending, impudent thanks.

When You Consider the Abundance of Such Resource as Illuminates the Glow-Blue Bodies and Gold-Skeined Wings of Flies Swarming the Dumped Guts of a Natural Slaughter or the Coil of Shit and in No Way Winces from Its Storms of Generosity

Jeebusfuck, I'm busy, angry, frustrated, strung-out, empty, bursting to nothing, sad, manic, enervated, wired, anxious, aarghful, and then oddly serene for sporadic seconds at a time, plus there is terrible news for one of my Thursday Night Pint buds, so fast easy rage today for multiple reasons, then links, poem, songs:

GOP hopeful Newt Gingrich defended his stance against certain child labor laws during a campaign stop in Iowa Thursday, saying that children born into poverty aren’t accustomed to working unless it involves crime.

“Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday,” Gingrich claimed.

“They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of I do this and you give me cash unless it is illegal,” he added.

The lead headline, as I type this, at Your Fucking Washington Post:

Newt Gingrich as president could turn the White House into an ideas factory

• On YFWP's gingrichgasm. Thanks. Saves me the effort.
• That's actually one of my five favorite songs ever.
• Police state.
• Police state.
• Police state.
• Wag your beards.
• Police state.
• Foreverywhere war.
• Criminal state.
• Oligarchy.
• Police state.
• Debt and democracy.
• Occupy Democrats. 
• UPDATE! On the above.
• Throw Lenin a handful of coins if you can.
• Shock Doctrine from the left.
• Rocky Anderson? Not Dave Anderson of Hutton Street, at least.
• Excellent read on Shia-Sunni schism past and present.
• Jim does linkages.
• How much in tax dollars does this shit cost me?
• 15 MPH.
• Good news. Diver.
• On the diver. Oh, this too: Meantime, Yorks said English club West Brom liked what it saw in United’s Bill Hamid during the 21-year-old goalkeeper’s recent workouts and could approach the MLS club at some point this winter about a transfer. Hamid doesn’t have enough U.S. national team experience to receive a British work permit, but as the No. 2 keeper behind Tim Howard this year, he has a case to be approved. Maybe one more year at United, max, unless he's hurt or regresses.
• It's December, and already dark forces are gathering. I hadn't thought of Glen Baxter in a couple of years.
• Yes, I've posted the Wright poem
• Karen O covers Zeppelin's Immigrant Song. Goodheh! Badheh!
• List of music blogs.
• Woke up with this in my head. Goodheh! Badheh!

THE CITY LIMITS

A.R. Ammons

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

Should I Think Personally, Such as, This Week Seems to Have Been Crafted in Hell: What: Is Something Going On: Something Besides This Diddledeediddle Everyday Matter-of-Fact

Blegsylvania is still dying its slow geriatric death, and Blegsylvania, even in its more robust days, always slowed between Thanksgiving and Giftmas as it's slowing now, but this slowdown seems sadder, more exhausted, depressing, forlorn, feels like surrender to inevitabilites. Did anyone doubt how Occupy would - will - play out, does anyone doubt how shitful POTUS12 will look and sound and feel like as it readies the populace for POTUS16 and on and on? Yes, space travel is boring. Yes, I project my aargh across Blegsylvania, broadcast my resignation before late capitalism's inexorable track to all Blegsylvanians. Also, that stoplight, two, three times a day.

• Which isn't to suggest giving-up. 
• Who rules Oakland?
• Occupy, unions, NGOs and the peril of DC activism.
• Giving the people what they want.
• We're being heard, but who's listening?
• Occupy now part of the lexicon?
• What I was saying. And they pass on the price of the panopticon plus profit to you!
• Panopticon!
• The right way to engage.
• Grifter-on-grifter food-fight.
• Also, motherfucking Obama.
• Also, one motherfucking ambitious cracker.
• Also, motherfucking christers.
• Thank you for the Kind words.
• CCT!
• For the record, I want both Branko DeRossario and Dwayne Boskovic, I'm curious to see if it could work, cause I think it would.
• Unsurprisingly, predictably even, having written the paragraph above last night, I woke up with Mark Kozelek songs in my head.

CALLED INTO PLAY

A.R. Ammons

Fall fell:  so that's it for the leaf poetry:
some flurries have whitened the edges of roads

and lawns: time for that, the snow stuff: &
turkeys and old St. Nick: where am I going to

find something to write about I haven't already
written away: I will have to stop short, look

down, look up, look close, think, think, think:
but in what range should I think: should I

figure colors and outlines, given forms, say
mailboxes, or should I try to plumb what is

behind what and what behind that, deep down
where the surface has lost its semblance: or

should I think personally, such as, this week
seems to have been crafted in hell: what: is

something going on: something besides this
diddledeediddle everyday matter-of-fact: I

could draw up an ancient memory which would
wipe this whole presence away: or I could fill

out my dreams with high syntheses turned into
concrete visionary forms: Lucre could lust

for Luster: bad angels could roar out of perdition
and kill the AIDS vaccine not quite

perfected yet: the gods could get down on 
each other; the big gods could fly in from

nebulae unknown: but I'm only me: I have 4
interests--money, poetry, sex, death: I guess

I can jostle those. . . .

Honor a Going Thing, Goldfinch, Corporation, Tree, Morality

Internet Addiction Test. Not in real life, not in blog life, almost certainly in wage life I'll soon need twitter, venders I monitor now updating status via. I promise not to tweet in real life or blog life. I've still not bought a iPad or tablet or smart phone. I briefly thought about it last week when Planet and I went to a Verizon store to swap out her phone; we were hard-shopped the latest iPhone, and when Planet said can I have one and I said yes (while thinking, Would I like an iPhone?) the salesperson said no, not now, you can reserve one for a week from Saturday, so while fuck that, I got out without one but get only half-credit for willpower.

• The pink arrow painted on the curb in front of my house months ago was to mark where a new tree was to be planted, yesterday, three years after MOCO took down the maple. I know nothing about trees: you plant trees two days before December?
• Cultural materialism and identity politics.
• The resurgence of the civic.
• Public opinion is irrelevant.
• Occupy's enthusiasm and contempt for democracy.
• Occupy's anarchist roots.
• Mobs through the looking glass.
• Fuckers.
• British strike. As Yves comments, funny how little play it's getting is US.
• The unreasonable Left.
• Motherfucking Democrats.
• Dr Goebbels, pick up the white courtesy phone.
• Also, motherfucking christers.
• Brownback cockroach.
• I was going to mock Ruth Marcus, but here's Greenwald.
• Things you might have missed.

• Quaranta - gone. My lasting memory - stopping at one of the two Houses on 95 north of Baltimore on way home from 2010 game in Philadelphia with Landru and Ilse, ten at night, Quaranta walks by, sees us in United garb, says hi.
• Barklage, Burch, Cronin, McTavish, Morsink, Ngwenya, Simms, Zayner.
• Robbie Russell.
• First home game March 10.
• Fire Dale Hunter!
• A.R. Ammons interview. I love Ammons.
• Fucked Up.
• Thanks to Hamster for sending me deathbed compositions, which reminded me of the Berg Violin Concerto.

MECHANISM

A.R. Ammons

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,

          morality: any working order,

       animate or inanimate: it

has managed directed balance,

          the incoming and outgoing energies are working right,

       some energy left to the mechanism,

some ash, enough energy held

          to maintain the order in repair,

       assure further consumption of entropy,

expending energy to strengthen order:

          honor the persisting reactor,

       the container of change, the moderator: the yellow

bird flashes black wing-bars

          in the new-leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay,

       startles the hawk with beauty,

flitting to a branch where

          flash vanishes into stillness,

       hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight:

honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,

          the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies

       of control,

the gastric transformations, seed

          dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into

       chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge,

blood compulsion, instinct: honor the

          unique genes,

       molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into

sets, the nucleic grain transmitted

          in slow change through ages of rising and falling form,

       some cells set aside for the special work, mind

or perception rising into orders of courtship,

          territorial rights, mind rising

       from the physical chemistries

to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male

          and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper

       racial satisfaction:

heat kept by a feathered skin:

          the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen

       burner under the flask)

so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates

          interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum

       efficiency—the vessel firm, the flame

staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise and

          necessary worked out of random, reproducible,

       the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the

goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operations

          that stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a

       great songster) in the bay cherry bushes wild of leaf. 

Planet Called Re: George

Planet called from Bamgier asking why I hadn't blogged today's tenth anniversary of George's passing. Noted. I expect the fuck me and my calendar comment toot sweet even if I needed reminding by my daughter. As for George, I need a bigger desert island or a less stupid game. Death to the either/or.





UPDATE! A loved one emails to say play this. Yes.

Evidence Suggests Eight Complexly Folded Scuttling Works of Armament

Sam Brownback apologized (of a sorts) after his asshole staff hammered an eighteen-year-old smart-ass tweeter, and ask yourself, in Kansas (or your state) politics, what is more dangerous to Brownback's permanent Senate seat than cyber-dissent by high school seniors?

UPDATE! He's governor of Kansas now? Last time I thought of him he was a senator and 2008 Republican primary's Santorum.

Blogbud Duncan wrote about the incident, and here I plagiarize the email I sent him in response to the post, his email to me, my email to him:

Me: Re: tweet - when I stop to think of the ways I voluntarily - thoughtlessly - like this email, for instance - enter evidence into panopticon's data base, that's when I recognize with a thump how complicit I am. They know I bought tofu at Safeway yesterday, or, rather, not know, have stored the data I bought tofu at Safeway yesterday in case they ever want to know. We buy products that help us be tracked, easier and easier with every upgrade, 4D today, 5D tomorrow.

Duncan: Y'know, though, "voluntarily" and "thoughtlessly" mean two different things.  Most people aren't aware that everything they do that involves a computer is trackable, and many wouldn't be happy if they realized it.  I'm reading a good book on ethics right now that mentioned something that's bothered me before, the tendency to assume that if I voluntarily do something now, I somehow accept its most distant consequences.  This is invoked very selectively, of course: if a woman has unprotected sex, she's supposedly 'choosing' to get pregnant; if she goes for a walk alone, she's supposedly 'choosing' to be raped.  But it's not applied to other people: if a bank CEO decides to deal in risky derivatives and causes lots of people to lose their homes, he's not said to have 'chosen' to be strung up from a lamppost by an angry mob; if a very high government official chooses to have captives waterboarded, he's not 'choosing' to spend the rest of his life in a jail cell in the Hague.  But even distinguished professional philosophers have made that false connection.

Me: Yes, you're right, re: voluntarily v thoughtlessly - I thought about this when we were in the UK (London especially) when everyone everywhere is under constant surveillance when on the streets, the tube, everywhere; it's not precisely voluntary (one has to go out) and thoughtlessly is both a strategy and an avoidance.

Adding: as for tweetguilt, blogguilt, emailguilt, cellguilt, I burst to fill Our Overlord's Dossier Against Me, so far they don't (and rightfully) give a flying fuck though I flatter myself they're listening. Hey! Bankers suck! Up against the wall, motherfuckers!

• Dare I say, E.J. Dionne's revolutionary manifesto. It will convince Joe Lieberman to stop being a self-serving dick.
• Here's the sublede of a Pastor Sanctimonious column up on the front webpage at YFWP as I type this at 830 PM EST 11/28/11: Romney’s new ad is misleading, but Obama can’t complain about distortions. That may or not be gone by the time you read this sentence. What won't be gone is this final sentence in Pastor Sanctimonious' sermon on good and evil, typed without a hint of irony or self-awareness: In political advertising, it is not impurity that rankles most. It is the pretense of purity. He's a B-List asshole by YFWP's exceptionally awful standards of assholosity, but he's a sanctimonious asshole Pastor Sanctimonious is.
• Occupy London at crossroads.
• Post-democracy.
• I'm convinced Corporate wants Obama to win.
• As nature allows.
• You are what you buy.
• Narrative is distorting. 
• Someone else's children.
• Blogbud JV emailed, recommends this and this for your consideration.
• Also, motherfucking crackers.
• Hey, someone else thinks the new kits are lame.
• Hey, don't take tylenol.
• MOCO and big boxes. Hey, why are there no Sheetzs or WaWas in MOCO? I'm asking.
• What you can buy me for Giftmas.
• Elkin.
• Musashi plain moon.
• Yes, I did do some tweeking of the blog. The WFMU widget crashed so it's been removed, I've moved Me and Mine higher on the left, and I've expanded Because Left to twenty-five showing at once instead of ten. 
• There are some new occupants in Because Left and Because Right. As always, if you're Kinding me and me not you, let me know.

A GREEN CRAB'S SHELL

Mark Doty

Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like--

though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded

scuttling works
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws'

gesture of menace
and power. A gull's
gobbled the center,

leaving this chamber
--size of a demitasse--
open to reveal

a shocking, Giotto blue.
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin,

this little traveling case
comes with such lavish lining!
Imagine breathing

surrounded by
the brilliant rinse
of summer's firmament.

What color is
the underside of skin?
Not so bad, to die,

if we could be opened
into this--
if the smallest chambers

of ourselves,
similarly,
revealed some sky.

Pressed, Printed, Stomped, Tripped; Trapped, Tricked, Packaged, Shipped...

Jeebusfuck, those are United's new clown suits kits for 2012. What the fuck are those red things on the arms of the home blacks, red collars and armpits on the white road shirt, I mean, fuck adidas, and remember, just because there's not a stupidass third red kit shown doesn't mean there won't be a stupidass third red kit next year.

Gah, I'll save you! save me! have another GbV song:

I Am This Dream's Dog

King Shit & The Golden Boys. I surrender, I don't know why it took till now, but Guided by Voices (all Pollard projects) is now officially the third permanent member of my Sillyass Desert Island Five, leaving only two rotating spots. Be in your head:

• Cheyenne.
• Unreasonable Liberals.
• Things I will keep.
• Kleptocracy and you.
• This shitty blog's Theme Song 3.
• The coming age of Neocla.
• My kind of soldier.
• Contra-Naomi Wolf, redux.....
• Echos Myron.
• Also, motherfucking crackers.
• I am an scientist.
• Misanthropy's holiday.
• I am a tree.
• Banana Republic.
• Bright paper werewolves.
• Rhetorical question.
• Dodging invisible rays.
• Miller time.
• How's my drinking?
• The attempt to write.
• Big school.
• Silliman's always astonishingly generous lit-links.
• Hey Aardvark.
• Under the influence of ideals.
• Closer you are.
• On classic rock.

DREAM IN WHICH I MEET MYSELF

Lynn Emanuel

Even the butter's a block of sleazy light. I see that first,
as though I am a dreary guest come to a dreary supper.
On her table, its scrubbed deal trim and lonely as a cot,
is food for one, and everything we've ever hated: a plate of pallid
grays and whites is succotash and chops are those dark shapes glaring up at us.
Are you going to eat this? I want to ask; she's at the stove dishing up,
wearing that apron black and stiff as burned bacon, reserved for maids and waitresses.
The dream tells us: She is still a servant. Even here.
So she has to clean our plate. It's horrible to watch.
She pokes the bits of stuff into her mouth. The roll's glued shut like a little box
with all that sticky butter. Is this all living gets you? The room, a gun stuck in your back?
Don't move, It says. She's at the bureau lining up bobby pins.
Worried and fed up I wander to the window
with its strict bang of blind. My eyes fidget and scratch.
And then I see myself: I am this dream's dog. I want out.

Complete, in Ignorance, New Combinations

End of the slowest week of the year in Blegsylvania in a dying Blegsylvania, end of Planet's visit, she's back in Bamgier, end of Earthgirl's show, end of Earthgirl's paintings here*, end of Occupy - all Corporate had to do was wait for motherfucking Giftmas, let the motherfucking peasants pepper-spray each other over motherfucking game-boys, though punching fucking hippies was too much fun to resist. Meme the Davis cop onto motherfucking Rembrandt, peasants, see if Corporate cares, Black Friday sales up 7% over last year in a worse economy, revolution, you motherfucking indoctrinated motherfuckers, by which I mean me, out $175 on a pair of Vasque hiking boots with goretex against Ohio snow as an early Giftmas present for Planet.

• No, I don't think Occupy's dead, but I've been reminded of the improbability if not impossibility of its success however you wish to define it. Running some coats down this afternoon. Thanks! Neil and Tracy.
• Democracy v Plutocracy: The Chart.
• Rhetorical question.
• Canada too, and soon.
• Contra-Naomi Wolf.
• *UPDATE! Not never, just this show. You read monologues out loud, no? 
• Capitalism's side-effects.
• Like this will stop the U.S.
• They hate us for our freedoms and wholesome goodness.
• The good news at the end of the slowest week of the year in a dying Blegsylvania is not only did I not full bleggalgaze, I never came close to full bleggalgazing, nor wrote about what my not coming close to full bleggalgazing signifies, not even in tablet.
• General strike in England.
• A Daniel come to judgment.
• One of many problems with Ron Paul. 
• Also, is it my imagination or are all google products, blooger to gmail, clusterfucked recently re: loading? 
• Ten years ago I would have felt morally obligated to read new DeLillo.
• American Incognito.

THE ANNIHILATION OF NOTHING

Thom Gunn

Nothing remained: Nothing, the wanton name

That nightly I rehearsed till led away

To a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream.

In this a huge contagious absence lay,

More space than space, over the cloud and slime,

Defined but by the encroachments of its sway.

Stripped to indifference at the turns of time,

Whose end I knew, I woke without desire,

And welcomed zero as a paradigm.

But now it breaks—images burst with fire

Into the quiet sphere where I have bided,

Showing the landscape holding yet entire:

The power that I envisaged, that presided

Ultimate in its abstract devastations,

Is merely change, the atoms it divided

Complete, in ignorance, new combinations.

Only an infinite finitude I see

In those peculiar lovely variations.

It is despair that nothing cannot be

Flares in the mind and leaves a smoky mark

Of dread.

               Look upward. Neither firm nor free,

Purposeless matter hovers in the dark.

There's Just No Accounting for Happiness or the Way It Turns Up Like a Prodigal

I admit I've enjoyed not enjoying shit like this shit the past few days:

Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him—and yet that is done too.

That's David Frum's latest greatest anti-cracker apostasy, and here's what occurs to me beyond post-duh yawn on Frum's assclownery: assorted angles on bleggalgazing and my complicity via shorthanded code I assume you know ending in self-recrimination that's serious enough for self-mockery but not serious enough to make me materially change the life I'm vested in. I'll embed this block between photos of Earthgirl's latest paintings, her recent burst of creativity, width, depth, breadth, space and time, I don't feel a need to say more I assume you know what I mean, adding, save the landscapes and use as desktop backgrounds for full effect.

Also, too:

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors. When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement… well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

I admit I've enjoyed not enjoying shit like that duh the past few days.

• Next: Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa gave a lengthy tribute to Occupy LA protesters on Friday before telling them they must leave their encampment on the lawn of City Hall by 12:01 a.m. Monday, citing public health and safety concerns. Villaraigosa, who has expressed sympathy for the protest’s aims from its beginning seven weeks ago, announced the ouster at an afternoon news conference with police Chief Charlie Beck. He said the movement that has spread in two months from New York to numerous other U.S. cities has “awakened the country’s conscience” — but also trampled grass at City Hall that must be restored.
• Occupy the Action Committee.
• As I type, this piece of shit is the banner story at YFWP, displayed as a news story, not a self-serving op-ed by motherfucking John Kyl.
• YFWP embraces new Fox talking point on Occupy.
• This is true. Bloomberg also thinks you want Bloombergocracy.
• Tool and die.
• Fruits of liberation.
• Para-professional librarianism!
• Also, motherfucking crackers.
• Also, motherfucking crackers.
• Police shoot man threatening suicide.
• More lists.
• Beckett, for those of you who do and will.
• Fugazi!

HAPPINESS

Jane Kenyon

There's just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
       It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

New Fall

New The Fall. h/t and Mark E Smith Interview. And bookmark Quietus.





The Fall is in the short list for one of the three rotating spots in my Sillyass Desert Island Five Game. You are playing these LOUD! yes?

UPDATE! Also, this.