2012/09/19

humans falling over and their faces hitting the pavement or the carpet, or the grass or the side of a coffee table or some dog shit




HEY! New Sea and Cake. Longtimers can vouch I've always love love love. DOUBLE HEY! They're playing Black Cat October 24! I already have my and Earthgirl's tickets, let's eat dinner first then go to the show! Tickets are only $15, they're general admission, so hurry!





A taxonomy of dog-owners and dogshit from my neighborhood's listserv:

No way to phrase this delicately, but this is not a tasteful subject:

MOST Dog Walkers know that DOG POOP does NOT belong in RECYCLING CONTAINERS.
WHOEVER you are who doesn't know OR doesn't care: we're so pleased that you're taking the trouble to "scoop the poop". But would it be that much more trouble to carry your bag of scooped poop back to your own home and trash cans? We don't appreciate your dumping it in our containers full of green recycling -- and the county employees who have to deal with the aftermath won't either.

MOST dog walkers are GOOD NEIGHBORS, with a FEW UNFORTUNATE EXCEPTIONS:

(1) OPPORTUNISTS: TRASH DAY brings out the opportunists who can't resist the attraction of an open container full of brush, standing at the curb, waiting for pickup. Ah, so convenient, and who will ever notice?

(2) BRAZEN OPPORTUNIST: A fortunately RARE SUB-SPECIES of #1.
He/She operates on ANY DAY of the week, and before dawn.
His/Her MODUS OPERANDI - based on our post-discovery, Sherlockian deductions, made in the light of day:
Walks up our driveway, past our parked car; then throws bag of scooped poop in one of our partially-filled green-recycling containers;
Exits our driveway by walking across our property, then across our neighbors' lawn and driveway, back to the sidewalk.

To these FEW UNFORTUNATE EXCEPTIONS in the dog-walking community, whether you are:

(1) A Simply Thoughtless OPPORTUNIST,
OR
(2) An Enterprising AND Trespassing BRAZEN OPPORTUNIST,

Please STOP dumping your dog's poop where it doesn't belong!

The NEIGHBORS you pass on your dog-walking route will thank you for being more considerate;
AND
Your FELLOW DOG WALKERS will thank you for NOT besmirching their reputation!

The person who wrote this lets his kids cut through our yard down the hill through Earthgirl's garden. Haha, boys! gosh I'm sorry, get in the car, over and over. Fine metaphors abound.











gigantic mountains

Brandon Scott Morrell


when aliens come to the earth

they will land on top of gigantic mountains

they will see the people everywhere

each alien will communicate telepathically with another alien

on the opposite side of the sphere

that is its clone and itself at the same time

like an atom in quantum physics

the same alien in two places at once

and this multiplied by millions

on top of gigantic mountains

'the strategy is to destroy humans'

each alien will tell itself and its clone

humans will understand this strategy once

the killing started, immediately happening

in two places on opposite ends of the world at

once, an alien and itself

murdering two humans by looking at their faces

then that happening repeatedly or something

for some amount of time

the humans falling over and their faces hitting the pavement

or the carpet, or the grass

or the side of a coffee table

or some dog shit

*

there will be resistance

soldiers on all parts of the earth will fight with lasers

citizen militias will hold resistance meetings

a resistance against death

a no-death resistance

a movement for death later

a movement for a different, still-uncontrollable death

'humans don't want to die this way'

will be their manifesto, one sheet of paper

or a piece of cardboard or something

*

there will be humans in basements looking at each other

wandering, solitary humans that want more to find another human than to avoid dying

solitary, severely depressed and/or enlightened humans that commit suicide by seeking out alien faces and looking at them; these humans may feel happy inside an insane nervous breakdown

humans that kill other humans because they feel insane

humans that sit in a corner, feeling extremely small, maybe considering intense killing rampages/some indefinable, positive emotion for humanity

humans that watch tv, use the internet to read the newspaper, and drive their cars around; they will be motionless on couches with their eyes open

*

the fish and insects and trees

will have the ocean and the forest

pretty sure they won't care


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2012/09/18


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Gaveling the Courtroom to Order with a Four-Leaf Clover Is Over




I hear Mitt Romney lost the election yesterday with a release of a video of him saying 47% of Americans think they are victims, I'm never gonna get their vote, fuck'em. Romney is gonna lose because he's supposed to lose. Als0 to0: everybody in America - wait, fuck American exceptionalism - everybody in the world thinks they s/he's a victim. Motherfucking billionaires bitch like four year olds when they're called motherfucking billionaires. Hey, I bet there are 47% of Americans who agree with Mitt Romney in his hue (geddit?) and cry. But Romney's gonna lose because he's scheduled to lose; these fuck-ups aren't a bug, they're a feature. Jesusfuck, this isn't rocket science. Someone should tell Mitt.










WHAT NEXT

Frederick Seidel

So the sun is shining blindingly but I can sort of see.
It's like looking at Mandela's moral beauty.
The dying leaves are sizzling on the trees
In a shirtsleeves summer breeze.

But daylight saving is over.
And gaveling the courtroom to order with a four-leaf clover
Is over. And it's altogether November.
And the Pellegrino bubbles rise to the surface and dismember.


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2012/09/17

By the Road to the Contagious Hospital



That's at the top of the hill before the descent to Brunswick, photo taken yesterday on way to Harpers Ferry, deliberately stopped for the photo, it's been decades since Maryland put Maryland on a Maryland state route shield, this is the only one I know of.  My apologies, you wanted actual game analysis of United's 2-1 win over Ningland? Shambolic, United's defense. Read that first word in the last sentence again as you'd imagine a third tier British announcer doing a Bolton-Blackburn relegation battle last Spring, that accent. Now do Marv Albert saying "Yes!" This is just to say. Reminder, I'm closing comments after 24-hours stagnation not to shut you up but to fuck with spammers. I hate the captcha, assume you too do. Meanwhile, the not-clusterfuckage-but in what I can't talk about here continues even if perhaps it nears finish while the clusterfuckage I can talk about here but don't want to continues now and forever, un-amen.














SPRING AND ALL

William Carlos Williams

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines-

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches-

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind-

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined-
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance-Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken.


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2012/09/16

United 2, Ningland 1




Beautiful evening, wonderful time, ugly but good win. Benny into Hall of Tradition above, RFK from East Capitol street on way to game below.




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2012/09/15

These Are the Poems of a Man Like Plato, She Said, Meaning Something I Did Not Comprehend but which Nevertheless Offended Me



Nap last night. He knows the sound of my car, or if not the sound of my car then the angle of my headlights as I pull to the curb, but however he knows it's me - and pang goes my heart - when I'm sixty feet from pulling my emergency break goodnight he runs up the sidewalk from the beneath the front porch of our next door neighbor's (where besides shelter is no doubt game, a blog friend recently tweeted of a feral rocks-off torturing a baby squirrel, they're cats, it's what they do).  >>Deleted bleggalgaze<< Hey! Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?





It's true! and the first guy in that commercial? he scored for Albania in a WCQ last week, he's so deep in St Benny of Olsen's doghouse he hasn't played for DCU in six, seven or more weeks. The fourth guy in the video is, even on his career's downhill slope, still United's key player and now he's injured, gone for the season. Anyway, home game tonight. Only two after this (unless they make the playoffs, which they might, who knows), one I know I'll miss in October, one a week from tomorrow I hope to be at but might miss because love elsewhere wins. It doesn't trouble me that love elsewhere wins though it troubles me my regret at missing games isn't greater, more oh-shit than oh-well, here, elsewhere (but not everywhere).










THESE POEMS, SHE SAID

Robert Bringhurst

These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
who would leave his wife and child because
they made noise in his study. These are the poems
of a man who would murder his mother to claim
the inheritance. These are the poems of a man
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not
comprehend but which nevertheless
offended me. These are the poems of a man
who would rather sleep with himself than with women,
she said. These are the poems of a man
with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s
hands, woven of water and logic
and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These
poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant
as elm leaves, which if they love love only
the wide blue sky and the air and the idea
of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.
These poems, she said....
You are, he said,
beautiful.
That is not love, she said rightly.


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2012/09/14

A Myth Is an Expression, Unable to Surrender








[]

Arkadii Dragomoschenko

Translated by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova

Deceitful honesty and an honest lie - which
                                              should be given preference?
This sentence is a consequence
                             which you have not yet written,
corroborating the representation of time,
                                                               forestalling reality.
Pine forest solstice. The sea gull's insupportable stance
                                                         within the wing's boundaries.
The whole does not exceed the part, requiring a division
                                                                                              of spaces.

A myth is an expression, unable to surrender.
Transparency, asserting affinity, is more awful
                                                               than disintegration.
The birds turn yellow fiercely - the light has pressed
                                                                  their Archimedes flesh
displacing the equilibrium of resistance and force,
                                                      just like ice and water.
A warmblooded diamond, where the cell's instructions gathered,
the axes of bones, of magnetic fields: a ball of spirals,
                                                                the web of a nomad camp.
Steam from the mouth
                                           in September
and a tense procession of blue.

The cosmos of the plant is submitted to the hollow chain
of a handwriting that knows it better than the hand.
Is it sap cooling on the cut bark of a tree,
Is is apathy in the restoration of qualities
                                          to their things.... But the center
of life flows from everywhere
                          like a downpour of maple seeds
                                                                        of a pedestrian
in a mathematical text. And so, one can hear,
                                                       "You have your consolation,
a consequence and transformation of transformations
instead of a flying object musing on its own self-assessment."
As for lovers:


we will extend the body divined in a form
that after examination permits us to invent its properties
                                                           - description,
condemning no one to the torments of authority.


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2012/09/13

Fear Not the Tarnish and Diminishments of Age or Its Insane Revelations as You Creak, Leak, and Freak Your Way to the Grave



So I went to bulletpoint today's links. I bold them all then hit the bullet option on blooger's toolbar but I brainfarted and hit the Link link which ate all the links, hours' work poofed. Here's what you're missing: Teacher pay versus selected others. Two visions for Chicago schools. Class warfare in the classroom. Carbon Democracy. Spooked-up asshole. Villager Court Jester dances on Romney's grave. Professional progressive dances on Romney's grave. For the record, I've been offering 4-1 pint bets since 2008 that Obama wins POTUS 12. Ring of Fire. Krugman's obamapostasy will never be ready. Look! Corpse of bin Laden! Obama lies too. Same as Bush (with more killing). Compromising positions. My future hell. Some poems, some songs. You know the lyrics, can fill in the (b)links all by yourself, but blessed serendipity of a brainfart, I'm reminded of a lesson in dance and damnlessness I already knew but mostly ignore.





MIDLIFE LULLABY

Amy Gerstler

Fear not the tarnish and diminishments of age
or its insane revelations as you creak, leak, and freak
your way to the grave. Never relinquish ties
to exiles, to juiced-up boozers and the bamboozled.
Like you, they're solid citizens anguish nearly polished
off (but not yet!), burnished veterans gilded by loss,
who glint like old bowling trophies in the right light.
"Extinguishment is still far away," we repeat under
our breaths at bedtime, like children who can't
remember their prayers. Come morning we'll step
out for a meatloaf sandwich (one our grown son
dubbed "meat-load" sandwich back when he was a ticklish
kid squishing it flat with his little hand so it'd fit into
his mouth). A humble dish with radish garnish,
it gives sagging spirits a life and beguiles our tongues
with onions, mustard, and mortal sweetness welling
up from deep in the beef, which, if meat could speak
might moo or sigh: "Yes, I too was well fed in my time."




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2012/09/12

Eyes Missing, or Stuck Open or Closed



Oofdah, clobbered on multiple fronts (and may be the rest of the week), though I need ask, POTUS 12, tenor has changed past couple days, time for real shittiness, yes? Oh, and today's pukestorm, jesusfuck. Other than that links Yo La Tengo songs and a poem is all I got.





Opportunities. Hiatturd sees an opportunity. Romney and opportunism. Ryan and Rahm.  Karen Lewis. UPDATE! This. I'd forgot the unbump I get when I praise teachers as I did yesterday, admitting my bias. Growth is the problem. Politicopsychopathology. Great minds and all. Illtophay only up 1? Woe on campus. On the USMNT v Jamaica game. On United's season possibly being over. Fuck Notre Dame, fuck the ACC. Sebald for those of you who do. Hymn to the Neck. Can visionary poetry be edited? Delia Derbyshire. Whale Season.





TOURING THE DOLL HOSPITAL

Amy Gerstler

Why so many senseless injuries? This one’s glass teeth
knocked out. Eyes missing, or stuck open or closed.
Limbs torn away. Sawdust dribbles onto the floor
like an hourglass running out. Fingerless hands, noses
chipped or bitten off. Many are bald or burnt. Some,
we learn, are victims of torture or amateur surgery.
Do dolls invite abuse, with their dent-able heads,
those tight little painted-on or stitched-in grins?
Hurt me, big botched being, they whine in a dialect
only puritans and the frequently punished can hear.
It’s what I was born for. I know my tiny white pantaloons
and sheer underskirts incite violation. Criers and crib-
wetters pursue us in dreams, till we wake sweat-
drenched but unrepentant, glad to have the order
by which we lord over them restored. Small soldiers
with no Geneva Conventions to protect them,
they endure gnawing, being drooled on, banishment
to attics. Stained by cough syrup, hot cocoa, and pee,
these “clean gallant souls” wear their wounds as martyrs’
garments. We owe them everything. How they suffer
for our sins, “splintered, bursted, crumbled . . .”
Every bed in the head replacement ward is occupied tonight.
Let’s sit by the legless Queen doll’s tiny wheelchair
and read to her awhile if she wishes it. In a faint
voice she requests a thimbleful of strong dark tea.




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2012/09/11

What Should We Place, in All Good Faith, on the Horizon? A Stone? An Empty Chair? A Submarine?




I haven't given my standard full disclosure in a while: both my parents were teachers, my favorite aunts and uncles were teachers, a beloved friend is a teacher, my wife is a teacher, I have many friends who are teachers including my beloveds at Thursday Night Pints, some of the most influential people in my life have been teachers - I am incapable of an unbiased opinion when it comes to teachers. Thank a teacher today. Having said that, regarding the Chicago teachers strike, please READ THIS. I'd only add, good thing motherfucking Obama makes himself available constantly to reporters and constituents so when he's asked where he falls in the battle between teachers and his motherfucking former chief-of-staff he would certainly answer.... kidding. And anyone who bitches against the teachers because s/he thinks it might damage Obama's reelection campaign can, as Ed correctly guessed, grow fresh tomatoes, hello.










ART CLASS

James Galvin

Let us begin with a simple line,
Drawn as a child would draw it,
To indicate the horizon,

More real than the real horizon,
Which is less than line,
Which is visible abstraction, a ratio.

The line ravishes the page with implications
Of white earth, white sky!

The horizon moves as we move,
Making us feel central.
But the horizon is an empty shell—

Strange radius whose center is peripheral.
As the horizon draws us on, withdrawing,
The line draws us in,

Requiring further lines,
Engendering curves, verticals, diagonals,
Urging shades, shapes, figures…

What should we place, in all good faith,
On the horizon? A stone?
An empty chair? A submarine?

Take your time. Take it easy.
The horizon will not stop abstracting us.


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2012/09/10

Pollinated by Bats (which Tickles!) We Ripen the Mind



Stopped this morning at the 7-11 on Wisconsin in Bethesda like I do every morning on the way to work for coffee, LOOK! a fine metaphor abounds, if I wanted a large (or an extra large or a medium or a small) I had to choose, I was not offered a third choice. Fuck that. I've kept the all-white cup I got at the bakery on Arlington Road I bought after, I'm going to take a sharpee and write on it, NEITHER MOTHERFUCKER, Motherfucker! and stop tomorrow morning at the 7-11 and snap a photo of the above two next to my cup. Or not. More fine metaphors.




That's the very top of Sugarloaf, shot taken yesterday - the most beautiful day of weather in my world in months, mid-seventies, no humidity - hiked with Earthgirl between bouts of work suck for both of us and unbelievably suckful dying mother suck for Earthgirl - send Kind thoughts to Earthgirl. We are rededicated: our fat asses are gonna get fit again, we are going to mountains any and all weekends we're not going to see Planet (or we will once the must-not-speak-evil-of-the-dying dies, though I will give you cash money if my brother-in-law disappears without a trace and I can't be tied back to it). Back to the work suck: Links tomorrow, probably, two songs and a poem today.





CHANT OF THE HALLUCINOGENIC PLANTS

Amy Gerstler

God made nothing in vain. All herbs have purpose.
Pollinated by bats (which tickles!) we ripen the mind.
Sip our bitter milk. Smoke these weeds and shepherd
the immense. This blossom, when swallowed.
makes cowards eloquent. Haze of consolation
robs grief of her sting. Everything drips and merges.
Phosphorescent radiations overtake you. The banal
becomes ecstatic. Everlastingness pours forth.
Wrapped in a flame-colored cloud, swaddled
in mirth and trembly tenderness toward earth,
one prefers not to stir from this cave. God
is a substance, a drug. These erotic shocks,
this blizzard of images, this ambiguous wink
is his. Man is only a weed in these regions.


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2012/09/09

How Many Calories Are Consumed while Lolling in This Dimness, Mentally Lamenting the Lack of Anything to Indicate Some Faint Mirage of Right-Mindedness Has Been Sighted on the Horizon?




Woke up with that in my head, be in yours. Colonel Sanders was born one-hundred twenty years ago today. I saw that, thought, Hey, the Colonel Sanders scene in Elkin's The Franchiser when Ben Flesh is fooled by a fake Colonel Sanders, I'll post the spectacular paragraphs when Flesh realizes and reacts, fine bleggal-metaphors abound, but then I realized I loaned my copy to Pheven Stillups, I know you're reading this Pheven, if you've finished the book return it please, if you haven't finished the book finish the book and return it please. No, that's not bleggalgazing's end: I've been adding good new links, especially to Because Left, I've discovered Blooger has a limit of 125 per blegrell, so I've begun moving the moribund to Canned Hiatus below. No one has been purged; I doubt any of them read this bleg, but still. Also, suggestions for good reads always solicited. Also, as always, thanks for the Kind.















DOOMSDAY

Amy Gerstler

The dark that’s gathering strength
these days is submissive,
kinky, silken, willing;
stretched taut as a trampoline.
World events rattle by like circus
trains we wave at occasionally,
as striped, homed and spotted
heads poke out their windows.
Feels like I’m wearing a corset,
though I haven’t a stitch on.
Burn the place setting I ate from,
OK? and destroy the easy chair
I languished in. Let birds
unravel my lingerie
for nesting materials.
Fingers poised on the piano keys,
I can’t think what to play.
A dirge, a fugue?
What, exactly, are crimes
against nature? How many
calories are consumed while
lolling in this dimness,
mentally lamenting the lack
of anything to indicate
some faint mirage of right-
mindedness has been sighted
on the horizon? The world
is full of morbid thinkers,
miserable workers and compulsive
doodlers. Darling, my mother
used to croon, you were a happy
accident, like the discovery
of penicillin. When I sense
the zillions of cells in my body
laboring together, such grand
fatigue sweeps over me.
Once in a blue moon I smell
the future’s breath,
that purgatorial whiff
shot through with the scent
of burnt hair, like when sailors
have been drifting at sea
for a long time and suddenly
they see gulls circling
and the ripe composty odor
of land unfurls in the air,
but they’ve no idea whether
an oasis of breadfruit
and pineapple awaits them
or an enclave of cannibals.


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2012/09/08

To My Dog on Wheels I Tell My Pleasures and Woes




When I was in Mrs Feller's fourth grade class I held one of those clocks that rotate timezones like at 4:45 of that video, Way Jaters, who lived in the house next to the Highs on North Westland, brought one to class for show and tell, I thought it excellent, never held another one, have thought about it for forty-four years. That memory resparked by the Belle and Sebastian cascade which was sparked by Brad's tweet yesterday which itself had nothing to do with Belle and Sebastian but offered the word twee which reminded me of the fun Belle and Sebastian: Twee or Fey debates of two? three? lifetimes ago I'd have with friends and read in music magazines. Song above on Ed's playlist, thank you! his playlist continues below the fold along with some songs I picked. Back with links and shit tomorrow, or not.




Belle and Sebastian is in the third ring of rotation, I really really really like, it's almost almost love. Been too long since they had a cascade here. I'm remembering why is's almost almost love, but nice to have at least a sweet re-infatuation for a couple of days.








The majority of people advocated twee but those that favored fey were more passionate, arguing that Belle and Sebastian had an ironic edge that fey encompassed but twee couldn't. Yes, fey is the correct answer.

















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2012/09/07

The Fucking Dog Barks at the Night, Mad at the Stars All His Life and Then Again




If there is no difference, said B, a friend of K's, at Thursday Night Pints, if there is no difference between the Democrats and Republicans on Police State policy or bankster policy, even if I know I am fed social issues to keep me troughed, isn't thwarting crackers a cynical x cynical reasonable position? I paraphrase, but I hear some version of the question in my head constantly. Yes I'm yelling at you but I'm yelling mostly at me. I quickly gave my third generation Ellis Island disillusionment Mr Ed O! Wilbur story, successive fathers leaving children a better world more left of the world they inherited, so successful was the less-shittyism of the Left once upon a time. I use that as justification for my apostasies and proof of my still deep rubity. L gave her confession, she's twenty years older than me, the ripples of apostasy that radiate past the younger to older that I used to talk about capsized her goat (yes goat) after mine but her capsizing hurt her more than mine me. Your uterus is a negotiable prop, L said to B. Three of the flat-screens were showing the convention. We stared as the Foofucking Fuckingfighters came on stage. Fine metaphors abound, said L, whose anger I envy, who will not need buy a ridiculously prized Scotch at TNPs until the second Thursday after POTUS 12.














TO THE QUARRY AND BACK

Katia Kapovich

White hail pelting the frozen bog,
I’m stuck in the first line of January,
following my host’s dog
on his walk through the stone century,
around the quarry, slices of marble and mud,
past a herd of miners exhaling smoke,
past a barn smelling of merde,
and back to where I’m stuck and broke.
The fucking dog barks at the night,
mad at the stars all his life and then again.
I rethink kicking him out,
but being cool, I let him in.


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2012/09/06

Derusting Rings on the Coolant-Spouting Turntable













WHAT I KNOW ABOUT EPISTEMOLOGY

John Surowiecki

As the light goes, go.
Be the rustling in the grass, the fall from
convention's good graces: learn, or someone
will have you filing files or writing writs,
demonstrating cutlery or selling knowledge

door to door; someone might even drop
your lovely life into a factory and have you
derusting rings on the coolant-spouting
turntable of a vertical lathe.
It's best for everyone that what you know

is generally thought of as general knowledge.
You can find it in pool rooms and roadside bars,
in meadows as inviting as beds, in bedrooms
where it whispers like a ribbon untying;
you can even find it in schools. But be careful:

it's dangerous, inescapable and exact
down to every atom of everything there is,
to every name each thing goes by and every
law each thing obeys. And the best part is,
you always know more than you know.


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2012/09/05


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nor dingsters die at break of dong




John Cage born one hundred years ago today. It's not love - I admire and acknowledge his importance without adoring the music. When I think of Cage I think of E.E. Cummings, whose importance I admire and acknowledge without adoring the poetry. It's hard now to remember how innovative Cage's music and Cummings poetry were once, perhaps the highest testimony to their influence. It is on me that both now feel old. The above was suggested by Abonilox, thanks.

Monday night, driving home from dinner with Earthgirl and Hamster, we were talking about music, I said, the only thing I want to hear these days is music I've never heard before - I need to apply that to novels, too, yo, suggestions solicited. Good buddy Paleo Jay Arra Old Dirty Bama 101 commented at yesterday's post: It is becoming very sucky that we seem to converge. I need newness, yet we are mostly the same. We read the same things. We don't listen to the same things because I don't really listen anymore...I avoid reading, because it depresses me...except for blogs that I read everyday and I play video games that let my id blow the shit out of people and et cetera ad nauseum. Please help and/or advise. Speaking of serendipity, after yesterday's poem entitled Rondo this headline in The Guardian. Pursuing the serendipity (the best and only advice I have is to pursue serendipity), a twooter friend tweeted something with three names all with Ks in them will flashed me to Killdozer, a good thing and, serendipitously, just who I needed to listen to.










[as freedom is a breakfastfood]

E.E. Cummings

as freedom is a breakfastfood
or truth can live with right and wrong
or molehills are from mountains made
—long enough and just so long
will being pay the rent of seem
and genius please the talentgang
and water most encourage flame

as hatracks into peachtrees grow
or hopes dance best on bald men’s hair
and every finger is a toe
and any courage is a fear
—long enough and just so long
will the impure think all things pure
and hornets wail by children stung

or as the seeing are the blind
and robins never welcome spring
nor flatfolk prove their world is round
nor dingsters die at break of dong
and common’s rare and millstones float
—long enough and just so long
tomorrow will not be too late

worms are the words but joy’s the voice
down shall go which and up come who
breasts will be breasts thighs will be thighs
deeds cannot dream what dreams can do
—time is a tree(this life one leaf)
but love is the sky and i am for you
just so long and long enough


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2012/09/04

Butt In Their Bone Cage Surges to Bursting




  • John Cage centenary tomorrow. Requests solicited in comments or via email please and thanks. Provide links if possible, please.
  • Reminder: I'm closing comments after they've laid moribund for a day or two: I'm getting major spammed - Hi! Mr Indonesia, Mr Bangladesh! - and as much as I hate the comment-squiggles I'd just as soon not impose them on you.
  • Busy, have some linkages, songs, a poem.
  • Not enough crackers.
  • I'm going to try very hard not to bwah the Charlotte Bwah. Just failed.
  • UPDATE! Of course they are. Pay no mind.
  • Last call at the Playboy mansion.
  • If the Republicans were interested in winning.
  • Capitalism's ideological crutches.
  • Shameless pandering to My Little Pony fetishists.
  • Nietzsche, for those of you who do.
  • Hey! Magnetic Fields playing DC Saturday and Sunday November 17, 18. Wasn't going to go: other than three songs, the new album bores me. Driving Planet back to Gambier she played some from all the earlier albums, bored me. I remembered the show we saw in Philly earlier this year, was lots of fun but Merritt's I hate you you fucking fucks and I hate being here act bored me. Still, Earthgirl and Planet said please and Sunday the 18th is when Planet flies in for Thanksgiving Break, so we're going. Will be fun just to go. Someone named Emma Straub, Novelist, is opening, what the fuck? What's an Emma Straub? Anyway, join us! Tickets are general admission, let's have dinner first!
  • UPDATE! Handwritten Beefheart poem!
  • What, you expect a Mag Fields' song before the poem. NO! Have new Bob Mould single first, then the poem, then Mag Fields.





RONDO

Janet Holmes

The noun one keeps batting away
refuses declension.

He says, I don’t want to be
twenty-four again.
Twenty-four was a handful:

the flawless
meatflesh, best self, miraculous
leap/thump on the hardwood,
the twist and splash.

The exuberance
in the present tense,

the timebound blood pump
two throbbing lungs butt
in their bone cage

surges to bursting.
He does not perdure

in this internal defection:
so rare, and so heroic.


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2012/09/03

Our Lizard Boy Merely Flaunts Crusty Skin




  • Friday night there was a carnival on the main lawn of Illtophay, a Welcome Back! for the students, I've been thinking about carnival since: Bakhtin portrays carnival as an expression of a ‘second life’ of the people, against their subsumption in the dominant ideology. Ir replaces the false unity of the dominant system with a lived unity in contingency. It creates a zone in which new birth or emergence becomes possible, against the sterility of dominant norms (which in their tautology, cannot cretae the new). It also encourages the return of repressed creative energies. It is joyous in affirming that the norms, necessities and/or systems of the present are temporary, historically variable and relative, and one day will come to an end. Reading this in a contemporary way, we might say that carnival is expressive rather than instrumental. It involves the expression of latent aspects of humanity, direct contact among people (as opposed to alienation), and an eccentric refusal of social roles. It brings together groups and categories which are usually exclusive. Time and space are rearranged in ways which show their contingency and indissolubility. All of this is done in a mood of celebration and laughter.
  • That's today's bleggalgaze and explains all the twitter-based links below. Consider how much carnival is now digital and the implications, ISAs, protest and surveillance, etc....
  • Strike.
  • Shunning evil.
  • Malaise and third parties.
  • Failure to fetishize the troops or acknowledgment that Romney can't get to the right of Obama on bloodspilling? That's right, the or is an and.
  • Sasha, I think correctly, pointed out that O'Malley is running to be Hillary's VPOTUS in 2016, not POTUS as I suggested Sunday.
  • Metaphor Database. Sweet holyfuck. (h/t).
  • Careening.
  • Insomniac thoughts on blogging and twitter.
  • The Poet Laureate of twitter.
  • Four Points Hotel at BWI Airport is following me on twitter.
  • Twitter and free speech.
  • Hey! Why did you unfollow me on twitter?
  • Pentagon claims it's winning twitter war v Taliban.
  • Don't stop retweeting.
  • Download that Gilius Van Bergeijk deconstructing Schubert above.
  • Lordy, I get it. Strangest days of my life.
  • Houndmouth is a great band name.
  • Eisler.
  • Incredibly delicious Fleetwood Mac cover.
  • Two hours of Hal David songs. I didn't realize how often I heard these when I was a kid.
  • Someone else digs Kate Bush too.
  • Ear Candy from yesterday at work:





A WORD FROM THE FAT LADY

Gabrielle Calvocoressi

It isn't how we look up close
so much as in dreams.

Our giant is not so tall,
our lizard boy merely flaunts

crusty skin- not his fault
they keep him in a crate

and bathe him maybe once a week.
When folks scream or clutch their hair

and poke at us and glare and speak
of how we slithered up from Hell,

it is themselves they see:
the preacher with the farmer's girls

(his bulging eyes, their chicken legs)
or the mother lurching towards the sink,

a baby quivering in her gnarled
hands. Horror is the company

you keep when shades are drawn.
Evil does not reside in cages.


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