The Herman Melville Memorial Picnic and Softball Game Shall Be Open to Whosoever of Ye Writes a Poem about Following thy Captain into the Maw of Hell to Kill the White Whale

Friend Richard sent along a link to an article by Rick Moody published July 11, 2012 in NewMusicBox on Pere Ubu's New Picnic Time which Moody calls, his italics, the scariest album ever made. My first response is, any excuse for a Pere Ubu cascade is a good excuse.





Have I ever mentioned that I love Pere Ubu/David Thomas projects here? Love them so much I've given them permanent status as one of three permanent members of My Sillyass Desert Island Five Game, then badgered you repeatedly with song cascades? Eight-plus years? Cause even if I responded point by point to essays - and fuck that - I'm far too immersed in my mwah to respond to this one. By and large it's fair both to the music and to Pere Ubu's history. I've never suggested that David Thomas isn't weird, difficult, Ahab, driven by demons, that he doesn't speak in tongues, a flame above his head.

• Hey, send me links too.
• Red mist of partisanship. 
• Unrestrained savagery.
• OK, one more on Chik-fil-A.
• Sign language.
• Is the Media liberal? Well, to tell from Fox's 24-7 hysterical coverage of white cracker terrorism (and CNN's  and MSNBC's), no. It's a silly exercise, but imagine a brown male with a funny name in a turbin walked into a christer warehouse and emptied an assault rifle.
• Imagine the violations of American citizens' civil liberties and rights by the Federal Government happening this second against militant crackers and christers.
• But not as much as you: Analysts for the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security routinely monitor violent extremist Web sites of all kinds, including those attracting white supremacists, according to former officials of both agencies. But the department’s work on the topic has been criticized. In 2009, conservatives in Congress strongly objected to a department report titled “Rightwing Extremism,” which speculated that the recession and the election of a black president could increase the threat from white supremacists. Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, withdrew the report and apologized for what she called its flaws. Daryl Johnson, the homeland security analyst who was the primary author of the report, said last year that after the flap, the number of analysts assigned to track non-Islamic militancy had been reduced sharply. Homeland Security Department officials denied his assertion and said the department monitored violent extremism of every kind, without regard to its religious or political bent.
• But yes, motherfucking crackers.
• Contrast and compare.
• Revolutionary conditions.
• Historical capitalism.
• Capitalists criticize Obama for capitalism.
• One ambitious dude. POTUS 16, O'Malley v McDonnell?
• Couple of new sites in Becauses Left and Right.
• Gaithersburg versus Rockville! 
• My (and Fish's) future hell before minor salvation. 
• I call bullshit.
• Bethesda is America's 17th coolest city?
• Silliman's always generous lit-links.
• Scarlet Begonias cover.
• Here's a link to complete New Picnic Time.

RULES FOR CAPTAIN AHAB'S PROVINCETOWN POETRY WORKSHOP

Martin Espada

1. Ye shall be free to write a poem on any subject, as long as it’s the White Whale.
2. A gold doubloon shall be granted to the first among ye who in a poem sights the White Whale.
3. The Call Me Ishmael Award shall be given to the best poem about the White Whale, with publication in The White Whale Review.
4. The Herman Melville Memorial Picnic and Softball Game shall be open to whosoever of ye writes a poem about following thy Captain into the maw of hell to kill the White Whale.
5. There shall be a free floating coffin for any workshop participant who falls overboard whilst writing a poem about the White Whale.
6. There shall be a free leg, carved from the jawbone of a whale, for any workshop participant who is dismasted whilst writing a poem about the White Whale.
7. There shall be a free funeral at sea, complete with a chorus of stout hearties singing sea chanteys about the White Whale, for any workshop participant who is decapitated whilst writing a poem about the White Whale.
8. Ye who seek not the White Whale in thy poems shall be harpooned.

Stop Repeating Yourself. You Old Motherfucker. Your Skies Are Bad Enough. [He Looks to the Ground.] A Parody Is Better Than a Pun

Looking for cheap gag for today's monologue I went back to four years ago today to see what I was yodeling. In typepad, since I archived by month rather than weeks, I have to scroll from August 31 backwards. I rarely use the gag - today being an (not the) exception, but I look back often because every one in a while it sparks a Guided by Voices cascade. In fact every Guided by Voices cascade except for Pollard's birthday. Hey, have a complete show which has a serendipitous surprise!





So, August 6, 2008, I posted.... um, a lazyass August Blog Days of Summer linkful placeholder, what a motherfucking attention whore I was am and will always be. Hey, look what I found looking for August 6:

• We all had our stop-drop-and-roll assumptions on the motives of the latest mass American shooter down, especially when the victims are brown, yes?
• Don't try this at home, kids.
• Two faces of the police state.
• The power of propaganda.
• Three stooges.
• Last thing I'll post on Chik-fil-A.
• Commence rightwing shitstorm.... now.
• Late-summer reading list. The Jameson, the theorist, not the whisky, was required text in one and a secondary text in five of twelve of my grad classes. Van Gogh's boots, yo.
• A critique of Polanyi.
• Myths of human nature, part two.
• Please throw Arthur the coins in your pocket then read his reflections on Vidal.
• Maps as public art.
• Maps?YYY haven't aged well, I saddened to say.
• Now! at Whole Foods! There's a Whole Foods in Rocketville? The one in Congressional Plaza moved to what is Rocketville but is rebranded by CoC death threat North Motherfucking Bethesda. Does some Whole Foods spox need eliminating?
• Walking poem.
• Yes, it's that time again.
• 700 cats.
• Glenn Gould, craft witch.
• New Order stash. Not long ago there was always a New Order song in my head. Not so much anymore, I am saddened to say I'm not saddened to say. Still love.
• Prunella's latest playlist.
• Holyfuckedness.

HELEN: A REVISION

Jack Spicer

zeus: It is to be assumed that I do not exist while most people in the vision assume that I do exist. This is to be one of the extents of meaning between the players and the audience. I have to talk like this because I am the lord of both kinds of sky—and I don't mean your sky and their sky because they are signs, I mean the bright sky and the burning sky. I have no intention of showing you my limits. The players in this poem are players. They have taken their parts not to deceive you [or me for that matter] but because they have been paid in love or coin to be players. I have known for a long time that there is not a fourth wall in a play. I am called Zeus and I know this.

thersites: [Running out on the construction of the stage.] The fourth wall is not as important as you think it is.

zeus: [Disturbed but carrying it off like a good Master of Ceremonial.] Thersites is involuntary. [He puts his arm around him.] I could not play a part if I were not a player.
thersites: Reveal yourself to me and don't pretend that there are people watching you. I am alone on the stage with you. Tell me the plot of the play.

zeus: [Standing away.] Don't try to talk if you don't have to. You must admit there is no audience. Everything is done for you.

thersites: Stop repeating yourself. You old motherfucker. Your skies are bad enough. [He looks to the ground.] A parody is better than a pun.

zeus: I do not understand your language.

[They are silent together for a moment and then the curtain drops.]


* * *

And if he dies on this road throw wild blackberries at his ghost
And if he doesn't, and he won't, hope the cost
Hope the cost.

And the tenor of the what meets the why at the edge
Like a backwards image of each terror's lodge
Each terror's lodge.

And if he cries put his heart out with a lantern's goat
Where they say all passages to pay the debt
The lighted yet.


* * *

The focus sing
Is not their business. Their backs lay
By not altogether being there.
Here and there in swamps and villages.
How doth the silly crocodile
Amuse the Muse

* * *

And in the skyey march of flesh
That boundary line where no body is
Preserve us, lord, from aches and harms
And bring my death.

Both air and water rattle there
And mud and fire
Preserve us, lord, from what would share a shroud
and bring my death.

A vagrant bird flies to the glossy limbs
The battlefield has harms. The trees have half
Their branches shot away. Preserve us, lord
From hair and mud and flesh.

United 1, Columbus 0

So yay and all, but something is off-key if not outright wrong (though in fairness everything everywhere is off-key if not outright wrong so it might just be me). DeRossario seems extra slow, extra petulant, extra divey, doesn't play nice with Boskovic. See, it is me. Maybe DeRossario doesn't like playing withdrawn, maybe it's mileage and lingering knocks and not his head, but it's been games since he even flashed more than one or two hints of the dominating player he's been (and who he has to be for United to make a run).

Dudar's best game for United, good game for McDonald too (whom I'm told I rag too much on), steady game from Korb (who's a minor revelation), poor game, first in a while, for Woolard who was surely concussed and now gone for games. Jakovic on the left defensive line? Oh shit. Najar will be back from the stupidass Olympics for next Saturday's important game at Kansas City; suppose he'll start left back if Woolard is eskandarianed. Salihi has been frankonealed.

Here's Goff, here's Shatzer, here's Webb, here's the video. More iawon.

Currents Worry Themselves Coiled

• Woke up with that in my head. So, string quartets today.
• My apologies, I by no means meant to suggest that I would, or you should, regardless even if you think it the yummiest sandwich ever, eat at Chik-Fil-A and give the motherfucking christercrackerpig (and by no means did I mean to suggest the motherfucking christercrackerpig isn't a motherfucking christercrackerpig) money to motherfucking christercrackerpig front groups. What I was suggesting: I mentioned Uncle, my favorite person at hilltop, a conservative economist and an academic department Cold War vet, and when he gives me shit it's about a Rahm Emanuel not only censoring speech but suggesting legislating against speech Rahm Emanuel doesn't like. I know visa versa. So here's my problem: playing the visa versa.
• Now, whether or not local governments can deny licenses to Chik-fil-A based on their business practices (as opposed to thought crimes) is another and far more complicated issue.
• Why is McDonalds in my twitter timeline promoting its crap as Food of Olympians? Rhetorical question, that.
• But don't forget: on America's descent to Britaingreeceserbia, on the matter of your future catfood allowance measured against the Empire's estimate of your minimal caloric sustenance needs versus your usefulness to the Empire, our Overlords, regardless of which tribe they play for, are in complete agreement.
• Alternatives don't exist.
• Obama the pioneer.
• Police state.
• YMOBMC.
• YMOBMC.
• Landru and Ilse. after their visits to each other's in-laws stopped in Asheville, visited the Biltmore, the Vanderbilts' monument to themselves. Earthgirl, Planet and I visited seven years ago (I had just bought my Matrix, it's a 2005) on our way home from the Smokies, we, like hundreds of thousands of peasants, paid money to see a robber baron's family honor the legacy of their family's robber baroncy. Capitalism, bitches.
• Figures with meat.
• Another book from his generation's greatest academic fraud - I say that admiringly.
• Grammar of the real.
• So, the aargh: it's eased in four of five places, in the fifth it hasn't so much eased as been resigned: I won't go into details here (though up the road, who knows), but my MiL received her death sentence, three to six months. Both a good and sad thing. She and I reached an armistice a decade ago. We like and respect each other begrudgingly. Gonna be tough on Earthgirl. 
• I've always wanted to suspend my native English fluency for five minutes to hear what English sounds like to a non-English speaker.
• I didn't listen to Payne and Olsen on Kojoshow, because what the fuck else is Payne going to say.
• Home game tonight. I'd like multiple primal screams at multiple beautiful goals, please. 
• Why cats are better than people. When I said it was both a good and sad think, I was of course thinking about my MiL when we needed to euthanize Sarah. What is quality of life worth?
• The painter dreaming in the scholar's house.
• I'd forgot about This Heat.

IN MEMORIAM MAE NOBLITT

A.R. Ammons

This is just a place:
we go around, distanced,
yearly in a star’s

atmosphere, turning
daily into and out of
direct light and

slanting through the
quadrant seasons: deep
space begins at our

heels, nearly rousing
us loose: we look up
or out so high, sight’s

silk almost draws us away:
this is just a place:
currents worry themselves

coiled and free in airs
and oceans: water picks
up mineral shadow and

plasm into billions of
designs, frames: trees,
grains, bacteria: but

is love a reality we
made here ourselves—
and grief—did we design

that—or do these,
like currents, whine
in and out among us merely

as we arrive and go:
this is just a place:
the reality we agree with,

that agrees with us,
outbounding this, arrives
to touch, joining with

us from far away:
our home which defines
us is elsewhere but not

so far away we have
forgotten it:
this is just a place.

Where My Studebaker Takes Me

Real life busy good, busy blah, busy sad, busy suck, busy shitty. Back soon, or not. Think, it's been forty years since Roxy Music's first single. Holyfuck, we're old. Also too, have live Crooked Fingers.

Not Actually Inherent in Substances

>>>Deleted bleggalgazing<<< >>>Deleted clusterfuckblarging<<< Instead, yes, I know Herman Melville was born 193 years ago yesterday.  Time to re-Confidence Man, re-Pierre, Moby Dick's xteenth rereading due 2014, every World Cup year, makes scheduling easier. From Moby Dick:

Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other's live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tassled, the sharks, also, with the jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole affair upside-down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet there is no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whale-ship at sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.

• Motherfucker, I still can't help getting mad. Stupid me.
• Motherfucking Obama.
• Either would be excellent from a giggle's point of view.
• Go Jill Stein.
• 1943 = 2012.
• The perversion of scholarship.
• Gore Vidal.
• Eat Mor Chikin if you want. Don't if you don't. I was talking with a friend who was griefing me for griefing her for advocating gov't banning of new franchises, it dawned on me what scared her when I said, you give the guy grief for being a capitalist and yet he deliberately chooses to throw away one-seventh of his potential profits by closing on Sundays in the cause of his belief.  He acts on his faith more than she acts on hers.
• Because, also too. Stupid motherfucking liberals. And by that I mean me, not in this case, but elsewhere.
• Boatload of sillyass Star Trek allusions.
• Things you might have missed.
• I had a friend who lived on Moxley Road. Is it Clarksburg, is it Damascus? Automocoblogography, yo.
• Kevin Payne and Ben Olsen on Kojo Nnamdi show today at 1pm EDT.

Melville, Moby Dick

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

Once in a While You Get Shown the Light in the Strangest of Places If You Look at It Right

Jerry Garcia was born seventy years ago today. Yes, the above is a cover, but I listened to all of Europe 72 yesterday and I hadn't heard this in a decade. I see people writing - I've been writing - about the pathology of nostalgia as signature key of the clusterfuck, and a run of High Holy Days provokes from me the pangs I program it to, I'm a fucking romantic, I'm predisposed to the disease in good times. Anyway, I loved The Dead unto a lifestyle, fell away when I needed leave that lifestyle to save my life, cold-turkeyed to the point of self-disdain: Hey, what did the two Deadheads say to each other when the dope ran out? Hey Man, this music sucks. No, it doesn't.

• But yes, my response is always more self-indulgence.
• And yes, lots of Dead does suck, it always reminded me of baseball games, you sit through eighty shitty (versions of Scarlet Begonias) games for the one that abounds fine metaphors.
• Hegemony, nationalism, doxa.
• Tyranny of the synthetic.
• The Obama enabler's big lie.
• Panderer to plutocrats.
• Oligarchy.
• He's hip, her's cool, he's a libertarian.

• That was a buzz topic in Stringtown yesterday, the title of the post made me think of the KITH skit. The skit is posted for no other reason that my self-indulgence of my love for free association. Few things suck more than Definition: The Game. King of Anarchists is one.
• Had a conversation yesterday with Uncle, one of my favorite Hilltoppers, my favorite conservative economist, was reminded of the basic distinction between those who put a to after freedom and those who use a from.
• RIP Gore Vidal.
• RIP Gore Vidal.
• For the record.
• RIP Gore Vidal.
• UPDATE! Bad Vidal.
• RIP Gore Vidal.
• Vidal versus Buckley.
• Vidal and Cockburn.
• Bruce Cockburn.
• Oopsy.
• Visual sound.
• A great authors curriculum.
• Jack Spicer reading.
• New Deerhoof!

• Black Peter.
• St Stephen.
• Althea.
• Bertha.
• Dire Wolf.
• He's Gone.
• Not Fade Away.
• Cold Rain and Snow.

Got to Get Back Where You Belong

The excellent run of High Holy Days of Egoslavia continues tomorrow. The best part of the days is the day-before hunting.

It&#39;s Not a Test, S&#39;Not a Test, S&#39;Not a Test, I&#39;m a Broadcasting System

When I wrote automocoblogography almost three years ago I was driving backroads to a United game because it's love and remembered the paragraph from Gass' The Tunnel that gave yesterday's post its title. I'm gonna leave a couple hours early this Saturday before United v Columbus and drive backroads, it's been too fucking long. That's today's bleggalgaze. In blegistics, I'm getting major comment spam, rather than squiggle you I'm closing comment threads after twenty-four hours of dormency: it's not you, it's the lack of you. Fine metaphors abound. Also too, Theme Song for Meantime. Loud please. Dance please.

It Was Plain that Every Ten-by-Ten-by-Eight Container Contained Cubes which Were Nine by Nine by Seven, and Eight by Eight by Six, and Seven by Seven by Five, and so on Down to Three by Three by Two, as Well as Many Smaller, Thinly Sided One at Every Interval in Between, so That Out of One Box a Million More Might Multiply

William Gass is eighty-eight today. From Omensetter's Luck:

All those cities, those hollow house, all those lives, those graves, the graves of hope... With a madness like the madness to bury that seizes men, a craze to cover that overcomes all of them, the cities covered themselves with sand and mud, vines, grass, lava, with noisier cities, completer ruins, further graves and further grasses. I am their proper lordship, Furber thought. My credentials make me master of the resting places. That was the way - burial to burial, shame to shame - it had always been since Adam's fig had hidden him, his sex and death together and the same, and surely that was the way it would continue. He - Furber - would be lost in a swallow of persons. The stone in the corner of his garden would not truly speak of him, the great Leviathan would have him, he'd be buried in their bodies - cover after cover coming - for that was the whole of life on the earth, our bodies for a time athwart another's middle, our lives like leaves, generation after generation lifting the level of the land, the aim of each new layer the efficient smother of the last.

• Puke Britannia: Whatever the creators' intentions, whatever people now do to appropriate elements of this spectacle for their own agendas, the fact is that it's major achievement was to induce people to forget temporarily what a disgrace the Olympics are; how hated they are in the East End where the Olympics Green Zone has been implanted, protected by rooftop missiles that residents don't want; how poor people have been drive out of their homes as they always are when the Olympics comes to town; how much our civil liberties have already been attacked in the name of suppressing criticism of this ugly metro-plasty, as legislation and police exercises have been framed in the assumption that protest during these events is a potential terrorist plot; how preposterous it is that the 'security' for this montage of pointless exercises is being supplied by thousands of soldiers fresh from hunting shepherds in Afganistan; how fucked up it is that the major sponsors of this debacle, their names glowingly referenced all over the city's billboards, are corporations like McDonalds (which specialises in heart disease, bowel cancer and obesity), and Atos (which specialises in throwing disabled people off benefits and will no doubt have a special role in the Paralympics); and above all the fact that this is sports, pointless, boring sports, and the only reason anyone really wants to watch someone else swim forty lengths or jump over sandpits is because they're doing so on behalf of the nation.
• Towards a revised manifesto of auto-destructive art.
• Boyle's bicycles.
• Magic buttplug.
• From Kabul to Anaheim.
• Motherfucking Obama.
• Last kind words.
• Changling.
• How to become an unperson.
• They're not gaffes.
• Some fun from an empty suit.
• Motherfucking cracker christers.
• A geography of containization: The globalized geography of containerization comes with another, stranger phenomenon: the aestheticization of the container. At first, the fascination exercised by the box appeared to be zero, since it has none of the elements traditionally associated with the marine world. But an aesthetic revolution has intervened, making the container into a design object prized by artists and architects, who use it as a fixed object that can be inhabited under minimal and economical conditions. Shaped like a cabin, the box is the building block for clusters and montages of all kinds, to be used as student accommodation or hide-outs for illegal immigrants and the homeless. A matrix of intermodality, it can be fixed, immobilized and turned into a dwelling or place of refuge. As Virilio writes, the container's final role is as a terminal: "The bedroom is the ultimate box, while the high-speed terminal is just as much a container. The container is an architectural figure of the box. It becomes the interconnected locus solus.
• Gass interview.
• Gass interview.
• Byrne and St Vincent. I'm told their show this Fall at Strathmore sold out in hours.
• New Animal Collective. I really like Animal Collective, shoot me.

Gass, The Tunnel:

The other large carton unpacked in the same way - box into box - but the feeling it gave me was the opposite of that suggested by the endless nest of Russians dollies in otherwise resembled, for what I was opening was a den of spaces which now covered the floor near my feet. It was plain that every ten-by-ten-by eight container contained cubes which were nine by nine by seven, and eight by eight by six, and seven by seven by five, and so on down to three by three by two, as well as many smaller, thinly sided one at every interval in between, so that out of one box a million more might multiply, confirming Zeno's view, although at that age, with an unfurnished mind, I couldn't have known of his paradoxes let alone have been able to describe one with any succinctness. What I had discovered is that every space contains more space than the space it contains.

Fifty-Four Today

Hounds of Love has to be one of my three most listened to albums, and the song cycle of side two back in the days of album sides unquestionably the side of music I've listened to most. Dream of Sheep and Under Ice and Waking the Witch and Watching You Without Me and Jig of Life and Hello Earth and finishing with, and you must listen in order like I just did for full kaboom, holyfuck, I love this song:







The line between loving the music and loving the memories the music evokes (and there are ten formative years and three exceptional women - one of whom I'm still married to - when Kate Bush was on the daily soundtrack) has long blurred, but she's one of three permanent members in my Sillyass Desert Island Five Game for both reasons. Adding, for this year's celebration: listening to the albums this past week, nothing - nothing - gongs my soul's bells more than the first time I hear her voice after not hearing it for a week.

But Just Saying It Could Even Make It Happen

High Holy Day Eve. 333334333 344433343 454334344 at Seneca to celebrate.

United 1, Paris St Germain 1

That's first intermission, at the 22 minute mark, forty-five minute stoppage for lightning. Every season Baal requires at least one United game be interrupted by weather. As for the game, friendlies serve to remind that MLS athletes are smaller, weaker, slower than athletes of top flight European league teams. DeRossario can say If we can play with PSG, we can play with any team. Saying that, we just have to show up and play with that same confidence, but PSG opened United like a carp's belly with shocking ease the first ten minutes then parked the bus the remaining 80. This is not a complaint, just an observation - there's a reason a 32 year old Tim Cahill moves from Everton to Metros, not visa versa. This is not to denigrate the joyousness of attending professional soccer games in my city. It's love of course. Here's the second intermission, the standard soccer halftime. Look for Fleabus.

Popeye Chuckled and Scratched His Balls

John Ashbery is eighty-five today. Some poems I once loved have aged better than the majority that haven't, but however I read today first reading John Ashbery thirty-five years ago remains a transformational moment. Today's a High Holy Day in Egoslavia.

I got to know two poets at Hilltop, Tony Hecht, who I talk about all the time and who loathed Ashbery's influence but begrudgingly acknowledged the quality of the poetry, and Roland Flint, who hated every other poet but Ashbery particularly, his bad Lazarus to Flint's good.





Was funny. Hecht would wind Flint up then say something complimentary about Ashbery (or O'Hara or Sexton or Lowell) and Flint would flint, especially when ryed. I do understand and appreciate Hecht's resentment of Ashbery's influence: while Ashbery could successfully write Ashbery poetry, the poetry of a gigazillion Ashbery imitators, precious few of whom (Hecht said, raising that right eyebrow of owl feathers and skewering me) rise above derivative suck, sucks. So this is how I work in a shitty Star Trek allusion, proof Hecht's eyebrow knew of what it scowled.

• Why so many communist philosophers?
• Marx is back?
• Marxism is on the rise?
• More proof Krugman is a moron.
• Empty victories.
• Israeli prison guard hearts motherfucking Obama.
• YMOBMC.
• Romneyshambles. 
• YMOBMC.
• Those of you (most of you) who tune in here for the links probably know about Avedon Carol, who plays in a much higher Blog Ladder League than me, but those who don't know should check her blog.
• Because August is being debated.
• UPDATE: Yes, there was a hypothetical question here, typed in at two in the morning and showing that half-sleep phase, that I was removing as Sasha was commenting. See comments for more.
• İlhan Mimaroğlu.

FARM IMPLEMENTS AND RUTABAGAS IN A LANDSCAPE

John Ashbery

The first of the undecoded messages read: "Popeye sits in thunder,
Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,
From livid curtain's hue, a tangram emerges: a country."
Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: "How pleasant
To spend one's vacation en la casa de Popeye," she scratched
Her cleft chin's solitary hair. She remembered spinach

And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach.
"M'love," he intercepted, "the plains are decked out in thunder
Today, and it shall be as you wish." He scratched
The part of his head under his hat. The apartment
Seemed to grow smaller. "But what if no pleasant
Inspiration plunge us now to the stars? For this is my country."

Suddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country.
Wimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a number 2 can of spinach
When the door opened and Swee'pea crept in. "How pleasant!"
But Swee'pea looked morose. A note was pinned to his bib. "Thunder
And tears are unavailing," it read. "Henceforth shall Popeye's apartment
Be but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or scratched."

Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched
Her long thigh. "I have news!" she gasped. "Popeye, forced as you
     know to flee the country
One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened, duplicate
     father, jealous of the apartment
And all that it contains, myself and spinach
In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder
At his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant

Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant
Rays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the scratched
Tree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and thunder."
She grabbed Swee'pea. "I'm taking the brat to the country."
"But you can't do that--he hasn't even finished his spinach,"
Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment.

But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment
Succumbed to a strange new hush. "Actually it's quite pleasant
Here," thought the Sea Hag. "If this is all we need fear from spinach
Then I don't mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon over"
     --she scratched
One dug pensively--"but Wimpy is such a country
Bumpkin, always burping like that." Minute at first, the thunder

Soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder,
The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched
His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.

But If I Am Still There, Grant That We May See Each Other

Holyfuck, sixty straight hours of Conrad Schnitzler starting at 6PM EDT. Wish I could see some of it. Als0 to0, Ashbery is 85 tomorrow. Here's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Here's:


JUST WALKING AROUND

What name do I have for you?
Certainly there is not name for you
In the sense that the stars have names
That somehow fit them. Just walking around,

An object of curiosity to some,
But you are too preoccupied
By the secret smudge in the back of your soul
To say much and wander around,

Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets to be kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting.
Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way,
The one that looped among islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.

Is the Puckered Garance Satin of a Case that Once Held a Brace of Dueling Pistols Our Only Acknowledging of that Color?

Everyone at Thursday Night Pints expressed sustained disgust and bored contempt for every motherfucking participant in POTUS 12, ourselves included. Extra-loathing for Rahm Emanuel and his motherfucking American liberal tboggian glee club who don't see (or, worse and more probably, at least in the marketing department, do see) the similarities between an argument against a mosque you needn't attend and a fast food restaurant you needn't frequent. POTUS 12 reminds me, said L, of being a little girl on my uncle's farm year after year in Iowa for three weeks every summer with a bitch older sister and seven older asshole cousins. K said (I'm sorry K, I had no choice, start your own blog and dispense revenge, I dare you, it'd be like the office on the top level of Holbrook Shopping Center, the office where, when I was 20, I made cold calls for the Praternal Irder of Folice for a fund-raising benefit starring Bobby Vinton), POTUS 12? Who are the older cousins? It's not that direct a comparison, I said. L said, I'm just talking about the flavor of suck.

• Yesterday afternoon I provided a successful ten minute reference consultation for Shard Mields, who'll be on that crap PBS news show tonight "debating" Bavid Drooks. I was friendly, collegial, non-confrontational. I am such a motherfucking whore.
• We create the conditions that condition us.
• A philosophy of boredom. Apologies if I already posted that.
• A letter from IOPS.
• The urbanization of class struggle.
• If Obama's puppeteers were smart they'd have him on a podium today cynically saying, While I have profound differences on gay marriage with whatever that christer's name is, as long as his company meets the legal local standards necessary to open a franchise his company is welcome to open that franchise.
• Your Fucking Washington Post wants you to be scared of Iran.
• >>>Deleted bleggalgazing<<<
• Ashbery's holy day tomorrow, Bush's Monday.
• New Pinback!

DAFFY DUCK IN HOLLYWOOD

John Ashbery

Something strange is creeping across me.
La Celestina has only to warble the first few bars
Of "I Thought about You" or something mellow from
Amadigi di Gaula for everything--a mint-condition can
Of Rumford's Baking Powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy
Gonzales, the latest from Helen Topping Miller's fertile
Escritoire, a sheaf of suggestive pix on greige, deckle-edged
Stock--to come clattering through the rainbow trellis
Where Pistachio Avenue rams the 2300 block of Highland
Fling Terrace. He promised he'd get me out of this one,
That mean old cartoonist, but just look what he's
Done to me now! I scarce dare approach me mug's attenuated
Reflection in yon hubcap, so jaundiced, so déconfit
Are its lineaments--fun, no doubt, for some quack phrenologist's
Fern-clogged waiting room, but hardly what you'd call
Companionable. But everything is getting choked to the point of
Silence. Just now a magnetic storm hung in the swatch of sky
Over the Fudds' garage, reducing it--drastically--
To the aura of a plumbago-blue log cabin on
A Gadsden Purchase commemorative cover. Suddenly all is
Loathing. I don't want to go back inside any more. You meet
Enough vague people on this emerald traffic-island--no,
Not people, comings and goings, more: mutterings, splatterings,
The bizarrely but effectively equipped infantries of
happy-go-nutty
Vegetal jacqueries, plumed, pointed at the little
White cardboard castle over the mill run. "Up
The lazy river, how happy we could be?"
How will it end? That geranium glow
Over Anaheim's had the riot act read to it by the
Etna-size firecracker that exploded last minute into
A carte du Tendre in whose lower right-hand corner
(Hard by the jock-itch sand-trap that skirts
The asparagus patch of algolagnic nuits blanches) Amadis
Is cozening the Princesse de Cleves into a midnight
micturition spree
On the Tamigi with the Wallets (Walt, Blossom, and little
Sleezix) on a lamé barge "borrowed" from Ollie
Of the Movies' dread mistress of the robes. Wait!
I have an announcement! This wide, tepidly meandering,
Civilized Lethe (one can barely make out the maypoles
And châlets de nécessitê on its sedgy shore)
leads to Tophet, that
Landfill-haunted, not-so-residential resort from which
Some travellers return! This whole moment is the groin
Of a borborygmic giant who even now
Is rolling over on us in his sleep. Farewell bocages,
Tanneries, water-meadows. The allegory comes unsnarled
Too soon; a shower of pecky acajou harpoons is
About all there is to be noted between tornadoes. I have
Only my intermittent life in your thoughts to live
Which is like thinking in another language. Everything
Depends on whether somebody reminds you of me.
That this is a fabulation, and that those "other times"
Are in fact the silences of the soul, picked out in
Diamonds on stygian velvet, matters less than it should.
Prodigies of timing may be arranged to convince them
We live in one dimension, they in ours. While I
Abroad through all the coasts of dark destruction seek
Deliverance for us all, think in that language: its
Grammar, though tortured, offers pavillions
At each new parting of the ways. Pastel
Ambulances scoop up the quick and hie them to hospitals.
"It's all bits and pieces, spangles, patches, really; nothing
Stands alone. What happened to creative evolution?"
Sighed Aglavaine. Then to her Sélysette: "If his
Achievement is only to end up less boring than the others,
What's keeping us here? Why not leave at once?
I have to stay here while they sit in there,
Laugh, drink, have fine time. In my day
One lay under the tough green leaves,
Pretending not to notice how they bled into
The sky's aqua, the wafted-away no-color of regions supposed
Not to concern us. And so we too
Came where the others came: nights of physical endurance,
Or if, by day, our behavior was anarchically
Correct, at least by New Brutalism standards, all then
Grew taciturn by previous agreement. We were spirited
Away en bateau, under cover of fudge dark.
It's not the incomplete importunes, but the spookiness
Of the finished product. True, to ask less were folly, yet
If he is the result of himself, how much the better
For him we ought to be! And how little, finally,
We take this into account! Is the puckered garance satin
Of a case that once held a brace of dueling pistols our
Only acknowledging of that color? I like not this,
Methinks, yet this disappointing sequel to ourselves
Has been applauded in London and St. Petersburg. Somewhere
Ravens pray for us." The storm finished brewing. And thus
She questioned all who came in at the great gate, but none
She found who ever heard of Amadis,
Nor of stern Aureng-Zebe, his first love. Some
They were to whom this mattered not a jot: since all
By definition is completeness (so
In utter darkness they reasoned), why not
Accept it as it pleases to reveal itself? As when
Low skyscrapers from lower-hanging clouds reveal
A turret there, an art-deco escarpment here, and last perhaps
The pattern that may carry the sense, but
Stays hidden in the mysteries of pagination.
Not what we see but how we see it matters; all's
Alike, the same, and we greet him who announces
The change as we would greet the change itself.
All life is but a figment; conversely, the tiny
Tome that slips from your hand is not perhaps the
Missing link in this invisible picnic whose leverage
Shrouds our sense of it. Therefore bivouac we
On this great, blond highway, unimpeded by
Veiled scruples, worn conundrums. Morning is
Impermanent. Grab sex things, swing up
Over the horizon like a boy
On a fishing expedition. No one really knows
Or cares whether this is the whole of which parts
Were vouchsafed--once--but to be ambling on's
The tradition more than the safekeeping of it. This mulch for
Play keeps them interested and busy while the big,
Vaguer stuff can decide what it wants--what maps, what
Model cities, how much waste space. Life, our
Life anyway, is between. We don't mind
Or notice any more that the sky is green, a parrot
One, but have our earnest where it chances on us,
Disingenuous, intrigued, inviting more,
Always invoking the echo, a summer's day.

Hoping that We&#39;d Fail to Disappear

HEY! New Sea and Cake here, new album coming, old Sea and Cake above and below. Love love love love love, they are in the short rotation (all Prekop and Prewitt productions). S&C coming to Black Cat October 24. Who's in? More cascades to come before then.














Als0 to0, reaffirmation of love and deep awe before Serendipity: I posted Kate Bush's Aeriel this morning before I saw the news of new Sea and Cake, thought to post their Aeriel.

When the Sun Was Done Muttering, in an Optimistic Way, It Was Time to Leave that There

So the plan is to stop posting DRGDKCLB (click mosaic, yo) stuff here two days ago, but in lieu of embargoed bleggalgazing - you'd rather have nothing than this, this than bleggalgazing, I seem incapable of giving you nothing - you get this, plus now through July 30 a daily Ashbery poem and a daily Kate Bush song in anticipation of two of the holiest days in Egoslavia. I had two fascinating email threads working yesterday on Blegsylvania and... oh, right. Had a conversation with my obamapostle friend, the one who doesn't even want me to use a pseudonymous initial to identify him/her, s/he said.... oh, right.

• Some choices are more equal than others.
• Motherfucking Democrats.
• UPDATE! Motherfucking Democrats.
• OK, more Cockburn: this.
• Those who know me aren't surprised this is placed here.
• Villager Court Jester really dislikes Willard.
• Things you might have missed.
• I hate the motherfucking Olympics. Possibly more than The Motherfucking Doors. It's close.
• I hate the motherfucking Olympics. Possibly more than The Motherfucking Doors. It's close.
• Via this, there's this. I drive by it almost every day.

• The Marlo on Rocketville Pike that caught on fire yesterday ironically was built on the plot of land the Rocketville Fire Department held their annual fundraising carnival for years. 
• I am shocked to learn that Peter Nowak is a raging asshole. I've witnesses I've always said so, even in good times.
• Participatory art.
• Silliman's always awesomely generous litlinks.
• Will it be Mantel again? Wouldn't surprise me if they Bookered the whole trilogy. I tried reading Nicola Barker's Darkmans a few years ago, left it on Metro by accident, and....
• A Thurston Moore playlist from yesterday.

THE NEW HIGHER

John Ashbery

You meant more than life to me. I lived through
you not knowing, not knowing I was living.
I learned that you called for me. I came to where
you were living, up a stair. There was no one there.
No one to appreciate me. The legality of it
upset a chair. Many times to celebrate
we were called together and where
we had been there was nothing there,
nothing that is anywhere. We passed obliquely,
leaving no stare. When the sun was done muttering,
in an optimistic way, it was time to leave that there.

Blithely passing in and out of where, blushing shyly
at the tag on the overcoat near the window where
the outside crept away, I put aside the there and now.
Now it was time to stumble anew,
blacking out when time came in the window.
There was not much of it left.
I laughed and put my hands shyly
across your eyes. Can you see now?
Yes I can see I am only in the where
where the blossoming stream takes off, under your window.
Go presently you said. Go from my window.
I am in love with your window I cannot undermine
it, I said.

At Night Deer Drift from the Dark Woods and Eat My Garden. They&#39;re Like Enormous Rats on Stilts Except, of Course, They&#39;re Beautiful

I'll keep the details to myself, but I'll never swap out songs again because yesterday was the greatest example of serendipity ever though I haven't the timestamp to prove it, but Sherman Helmsley, who knew? which both is and isn't the point, though yes, Thurston Moore is 54 today.

• Drone-court advantage.
• 26 billionaires.
• Reinventing crony capitalism.
• Knives out for Barofsky.
• Police.
• Knives out for Barofsky.
• Mitt Romney, a hero in my mind.

• Predawn philosophers club.
• >>>Deleted bleggalgazing<<<
• Rats on stilts.
• St Benny of Olsen.
• Is his name Giles?
• Literature's brooder.
• An anti-novel?
• Modernism and the anti-novel.
• Music before revolution.

PRAYING DRUNK

Andrew Hudgins

Our Father who art in heaven, I am drunk.
Again. Red wine. For which I offer thanks.
I ought to start with praise, but praise
comes hard to me. I stutter. Did I tell you
about the woman whom I taught, in bed,
this prayer? It starts with praise; the simple form
keeps things in order. I hear from her sometimes.
Do you? And after love, when I was hungry,
I said, Make me something to eat. She yelled,
Poof! You’re a casserole!—and laughed so hard
she fell out of the bed. Take care of her.

Next, confession—the dreary part. At night
deer drift from the dark woods and eat my garden.
They’re like enormous rats on stilts except,
of course, they’re beautiful. But why? What makes
them beautiful? I haven’t shot one yet.
I might. When I was twelve, I’d ride my bike
out to the dump and shoot the rats. It’s hard
to kill your rats, our Father. You have to use
a hollow point and hit them solidly.
A leg is not enough. The rat won’t pause.
Yeep! Yeep! it screams, and scrabbles, three-legged, back
into the trash, and I would feel a little bad
to kill something that wants to live
more savagely than I do, even if
it’s just a rat. My garden’s vanishing.
Perhaps I’ll merely plant more beans, though that
might mean more beautiful and hungry deer.
Who knows?
I’m sorry for the times I’ve driven
home past a black, enormous, twilight ridge.
Crested with mist, it looked like a giant wave
about to break and sweep across the valley,
and in my loneliness and fear I’ve thought,
O let it come and wash the whole world clean.
Forgive me. This is my favorite sin: despair—
whose love I celebrate with wine and prayer.

Our Father, thank you for all the birds and trees,
that nature stuff. I’m grateful for good health,
food, air, some laughs, and all the other things
I’m grateful that I’ve never had to do
without. I have confused myself. I’m glad
there’s not a rattrap large enough for deer.
While at the zoo last week, I sat and wept
when I saw one elephant insert his trunk
into another’s ass, pull out a lump,
and whip it back and forth impatiently
to free the goodies hidden in the lump.
I could have let it mean most anything,
but I was stunned again at just how little
we ask for in our lives. Don’t look! Don’t look!
Two young nuns tried to herd their giggling
schoolkids away. Line up, they called. Let’s go
and watch the monkeys in the monkey house.
I laughed, and got a dirty look. Dear Lord,
we lurch from metaphor to metaphor,
which is—let it be so—a form of praying.

I’m usually asleep by now—the time
for supplication. Requests. As if I’d stayed
up late and called the radio and asked
they play a sentimental song. Embarrassed.
I want a lot of money and a woman.
And, also, I want vanishing cream. You know—
a character like Popeye rubs it on
and disappears. Although you see right through him,
he’s there. He chuckles, stumbles into things,
and smoke that’s clearly visible escapes
from his invisible pipe. It makes me think,
sometimes, of you. What makes me think of me
is the poor jerk who wanders out on air
and then looks down. Below his feet, he sees
eternity, and suddenly his shoes
no longer work on nothingness, and down
he goes. As I fall past, remember me.

Another Can of Worms

Was going to wait until tomorrow to post some songs, but inspired by Prunella's latest playlist (I don't know she thought of this when she posted a Sonic Youth song) have a Holy Day Eve song for Thurston Moore who's 54 tomorrow. FuckI'mold. AlsO toO: thisbit'soldtoo:

Tottering and Elastic, Middle Name of Groan

• Here's one on Alexander Cockburn, who I read enough to need to note his death but who did not move me enough to eulogize him now.
• Liberalism agonistes.
• The careerists.
• Shit.
• Triptych.
• Politics of the unconscious.
• Myths of human nature, part one.
• Empty pitchforks.
• Republicans, public goods, sheer idiocy.
• Republican governor, presidential hopeful based on his fiscal conservative posturing, asks for federal aid. YMOBMC.
• >>>Deleted bleggalgazing<<<
• The people of the other village.
• On Sally Ride.
• Stop time.
• The view from Missouri.
• Buy me Kapow for my birthday, please.
• Too late.
• Mary Garth. It's been a decade since I reread Middlemarch, probably time to make time again.
• A little touch of Schmilsson.
• Mission of Burma.

PEDESTRIAN

Thomas Lux

Tottering and elastic, middle name of Groan,
ramfeezled after a hard night
at the corpse-polishing plant, slope-
shouldered, a half loaf
of bread, even his hair tired, famished,
fingering the diminished beans
in his pocket—you meet him.
On a thousand street corners you meet him,
emerging from the subway, emerging
from your own chest—this sight’s shrill,
metallic vapors pass into you.
His fear is of being broken,
of becoming too dexterous in stripping
the last few shoelaces of meat
from a chicken’s carcass, of being moved by nothing
short of the Fall of Rome, of being stooped
in the cranium over some loss he’s forgotten
the anniversary of.... You meet him,
know his defeat, though proper
and inevitable, is not yours, although yours also
is proper and inevitable: so many defeats
queer and insignificant (as illustration:
the first time you lay awake all night
waiting for dawn—and were disappointed), so many
no-hope exhaustions hidden,
their gaze dully glazed inward.—And yet we all
fix our binoculars on the horizon’s hazy fear-heaps
and cruise toward them, fat sails
forward.... You meet him on the corners,
in bus stations, on the blind avenues
leading neither in
nor out of hell, you meet him
and with him you walk.

A Dog Racing in Tight Circles

Continuing the Blog Days of Summer airing of blemes: just finished my quadrennial reading of Pynchon's Mason & Dixon and mwah, the Vulcan golem still live-longing and prospering. Serendipitously, a bud who's the first link below also posted about Stephen Dixon who I mentioned a couple of weeks ago when posting a link to Millions' upcoming releases post. I confess Dixon has never sung to me, but perhaps now is the time to try again. I spent an afternoon reading Denis Johnson's Train Dreams and loved it, bought his Tree of Smoke and it's (or rather, I'm) not working. Found my paperback of Vollmann's Fathers & Crows, a new Vollmann, a Seven Dreams, mentioned in said Millions' list; even though they are not related narratively they are related thematically, I'm thinking of rereading at least one or two, Fathers & Crows my favorite. Gass has a new novel coming: The Tunnel is on my shelf Hey Sailoring me. So, no reading slump, yay me! Suggestions for something I've never read, maybe even heard of, solicited. Oh, never mind.

• Capitalism and definitions.
• The geopolitics of the financial crisis.
• C'est normal.
• The joke's on you.
• UPDATE! Stewart responds to the above.
• The nauseating grief of diseased America.
• Krugman's obamapostasy will never be ready.
• Yes, motherfucking Obama, but motherfucking crackers will now be designated YMOBMC.
• YMOBMC.
• Trust Me, I'm Lying.
• Thoughts on a Denise Duhamel poem.
• Presence in God's absence.
• Frances sends me a thank you. My pleasure. Thank you.
• The Charlie Parker story.
• Have some Goatwhore?
• Is there progress in music?
• We're through being cool.
• Someone else loves Kate Bush. Seven days to High Holy Day.
• Mr Alarum introduced me to Ferneyhough, which has an insider work pun only he and I will get:

DAMARISCOTTA

D. Nurkse

     1

How we loved to create a world.

Out of gray we made the pin-oak leaves
with their saw teeth and odd waxy sheen,
dry and matte to the touch, out of granite
we made the marriage house, and always
we added a flaw which we called fire
or time or the stranger.

     2

A drop of water on the lip of a jug,
trembling, trying to hold on
for another second to the idea of sphericity—
that was us, our nakedness.

     3

We worked to thwart our happiness
because it was so unexpected;
suffering tasted like our mouths.

     4

We had a flagstone path, a pond, four birches,
a dog racing in tight circles, helpless
against the dream of fresh snow.

Tomorrow that red Schwinn with training wheels
must find a way to pedal itself.

     5

World like a child who learned to walk
beyond our outstretched hands.

Columbus 1, United 0

I got home from a big family dinner celebrating my father's 80th birthday just in time to see Chris Korb slam a shot off the left post and then four minutes of stoppage, so I can't offer much. Olsen started Neal in place of Boskovic (dude, calf?) instead of pulling DeRossario back and moving Pontius back up top which surprised me. Goff says offense sucked all night and I can believe it. Noises made by Benny (though not blustery) and Pontius re: digging-in for effort, but let me suggest this: MLS front-loaded United's schedule, United rounded into form, MLS gave them a fucking month off and then two road games (plus Najar is away at the motherfuckingly stupidass motherfucking Olympics, of which I will watch not a motherfucking second) and these are like preseason games re: chemistry, see lack thereof.

Here's Shatzer, here's Webb (who suggests schedule issue too), here's some guy at Ives, lose the pop-ups, Galarcep, more if and when I find them, or not.