and having spent some moments thinking of the vision that accommodates all that is unforeseen

Friday on his message board during his Friday show I asked Bryce for advice on works and musicians to continue my latest compulsion for field-recordings, I don't know if he did it for me or because of me but the last set of the show was KABOOM! thanks! I posted a Forcucci piece yesterday, below is one of the Yannick Dauby pieces he played, above one I found. Holy the fuck, I have never listened to sound better in my life, I have never been hungrier for sounds I've never heard in my life, and everything is music. I was trained to categorize and discriminate. I'm unlearning that shit.

• Music is feeling.
• A photo-tour of Ostkreuz. 
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• New Inquiry's Sunday links.
• The first thing the baby did wrong.
• Trapped inside the novel. A response to this Tim Parks' piece I posted Friday: This conviction puts me decisively in the camp represented by Parks, the camp that admires Beckett and Bernhard.  But I wish this camp spent less time on Dawkins-like denunciations of its outgroup, a libidinal investment that leads it to mistake friends for enemies and to narrow its canon unduly. Fine metaphors abound.
• On the roll out of the new Arcade Fire album. Know what, fuck it. I'm tired of being a scold, of administering purity tests, my ears are sluts, who am I to judge? An added benefit? I care less about passing the purity tests I used to apply to and then worry about myself.
• Different mileage, mind, here and there, more or less, now and then, more failure than success, but there is a project in progress.
• What you can buy me for Giftmas.
• An anti-Best of 2013 Best of 2013 list.
• Figures in a landscape, III.
• I haven't forgot Britten's centenary in twelve days:

UNDER THE SIGN

Ann Lauterbach

Having dreamed of my dead sister
raging with urgent

need, she
conducting us through intolerable

passages, now forgotten, I
have burned my right hand

after sunset
small dark clouds above

the river I cannot see
while listening to

a scratched CD of a Haydn
piano sonata so that

certain passages
rapidly repeat

and having spent some moments
thinking of the the vision

that accommodates
all that is unforeseen

as the world now
becomes without sequence.

The Forty-Eight Keys of the Typewriter, Each an Eyeball That Is Never Shut

• Saturday's field-recording by Luca Forcucci. Field-recording requests for artists and pieces earnestly solicited. This is new to me. I've learned I really want to learn more.
• Thanks to everyone who sent Kind words via various methods re: Earthgirl and Planet's art. I've passed it on. Will post more occasionally, every few months or so. They both have blogs over in Me and Mine though both blogs have been dormant. Both say that's going to change. We'll see.
• Anthony's given his blog an excellent makeover. The content is why you should visit daily. This normally would lead to me whining about fucking blooger and my dead template button, but fuck it.
• We, the public (existing in your own word).
• After Sebalds' Austerlitz: Karen Stuke's photography.
• Sebald poem.
• Earthgirl lets me play Daniel Menche on trips to and from Ohio! I know I've played him here within the past few months. I like.
• The Book of Elements.
• Anne Sexton was born 85 years ago today. There's a story about a woman and Anne Sexton's poetry and my initiation into women and poetry which I've just told you all I'm ever going to tell you whether you're a digital or analog friend. There's a story Tony Hecht told me about Tony Hecht and Anne Sexton (and Hecht praised Sexton's poetry) which I won't tell here but if you ask me when you see me I'll tell you.

THE ROOM OF MY LIFE

Anne Sexton

Here,

in the room of my life

the objects keep changing.

Ashtrays to cry into,

the suffering brother of the wood walls,

the forty-eight keys of the typewriter

each an eyeball that is never shut,

the books, each a contestant in a beauty contest,   

the black chair, a dog coffin made of Naugahyde,   

the sockets on the wall

waiting like a cave of bees,

the gold rug

a conversation of heels and toes,

the fireplace

a knife waiting for someone to pick it up,

the sofa, exhausted with the exertion of a whore,   

the phone

two flowers taking root in its crotch,

the doors

opening and closing like sea clams,

the lights

poking at me,

lighting up both the soil and the laugh.

The windows,

the starving windows

that drive the trees like nails into my heart.   

Each day I feed the world out there

although birds explode

right and left.

I feed the world in here too,

offering the desk puppy biscuits.

However, nothing is just what it seems to be.   

My objects dream and wear new costumes,

compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands   

and the sea that bangs in my throat.

ALL MY PRETTY ONES

Anne Sexton

Father, this year’s jinx rides us apart

where you followed our mother to her cold slumber;

a second shock boiling its stone to your heart,   

leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber   

you from the residence you could not afford:   

a gold key, your half of a woolen mill,

twenty suits from Dunne’s, an English Ford,   

the love and legal verbiage of another will,   

boxes of pictures of people I do not know.

I touch their cardboard faces. They must go.

But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album,   

hold me. I stop here, where a small boy

waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come ...   

for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy   

or for this velvet lady who cannot smile.   

Is this your father’s father, this commodore

in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile   

has made it unimportant who you are looking for.   

I’ll never know what these faces are all about.   

I lock them into their book and throw them out.

This is the yellow scrapbook that you began

the year I was born; as crackling now and wrinkly   

as tobacco leaves: clippings where Hoover outran   

the Democrats, wiggling his dry finger at me

and Prohibition; news where the Hindenburg went   

down and recent years where you went flush   

on war. This year, solvent but sick, you meant   

to marry that pretty widow in a one-month rush.   

But before you had that second chance, I cried   

on your fat shoulder. Three days later you died.

These are the snapshots of marriage, stopped in places.   

Side by side at the rail toward Nassau now;

here, with the winner’s cup at the speedboat races,   

here, in tails at the Cotillion, you take a bow,

here, by our kennel of dogs with their pink eyes,   

running like show-bred pigs in their chain-link pen;   

here, at the horseshow where my sister wins a prize;   

and here, standing like a duke among groups of men.   

Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator,   

my first lost keeper, to love or look at later.

I hold a five-year diary that my mother kept   

for three years, telling all she does not say   

of your alcoholic tendency. You overslept,

she writes. My God, father, each Christmas Day   

with your blood, will I drink down your glass   

of wine? The diary of your hurly-burly years   

goes to my shelf to wait for my age to pass.   

Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.   

Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you,

bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you.

Not What Is Understood, Presumably, and It Diminishes Us in Our Getting to Know It

I haven't posted any of Earthgirl's art in awhile, have a recent piece. I haven't posted any of Planet's art in a while, here have this:

I haven't posted any of my stuff here or the other place recently. I haven't wanted to. I'm actually not unhappy with recent work, just haven't wanted to post it and - this is the weird part - beyond this sentence haven't wanted to post what I've written about why I don't want to post it here here. Though of course I have, just not directly. Have an old photo of mine of Rosie in a tunnel:

• Liberals should stop and frisk Bill de Blasio. Also, Charlie's leaving the google collective for an outpost in the WordPress quadrant, so rebookmark if you're so inclined.
• Fuck these google guys.
• This week in water.
• I haven't followed MLS this year, not surprising considering my United withdrawal, but hearing that Gax and Metros and that fucking lime green team in Seattle have all crashed out of MLS's stupidass playoffs pleases me.
• Literature without style.
• Ashbery and the Pragmatist Sublime.
• The summation of Ashbery's great theme (or, more precisely, my favorite of Ashbery's themes) is this line from the poem below (the most posted poem, I'd bet, on this shitty blog): It hurts, this wanting to give a dimension/To life when life is precisely that dimension.
• Posted because it's the first time I've thought about or seen mentioned James Merrill in a decade. He never sang to me, but once he was a big deal.
• Greyhoos' excellent Lou Reed post.
• Joni Mitchell turned 70 yesterday. Here's a cascade. I like her music a lot but don't love it unto a Holy Day.
• Yoko Ono is a bad dancer.
• Have a pop song! features the late Faye Hunter (of Let's Active fame) recorded in the months before her recent death:

VAUCANSON

John Ashbery

It was snowing as he wrote.
In the gray room he felt relaxed and singular,
But no one, of course, ever trusts these moods.

There had to be understanding to it.
Why, though? That always happens anyway,
And who gets the credit for it? Not what is understood,
Presumably, and it diminishes us
In our getting to know it.

As trees come to know a storm
Until it passes and light falls anew
Unevenly, on all the muttering kinship:
Things with things, persons with objects,
Ideas with people or ideas.

It hurts, this wanting to give a dimension
To life when life is precisely that dimension.
We are creatures, therefore we walk and talk
And people come up to us, or listen
And then move away.

Music fills the spaces
Where figures are pulled to the edges,
And it can only say something.

Sinews are loosened then,
The mind begins to think good thoughts.
Ah, this sun must be good:
Doing a number, completing its trilogy.
Life must be back there. You hid it
So no one could find it
And now you can't remember where.

But if one were to invent being a child again
It might just come close enough to being a living relic
To save this thing, save it from embarrassment
By ringing down the curtain,

And for a few seconds no one would notice.
The ending would seem perfect.
No feelings to dismay,
No tragic sleep to wake from in a fit
Of passionate guilt, only the warm sunlight
That slides easily down shoulders
To the soft, melting heart.

If I Could Cajole You to Come Back for an Evening, Down from Your Compulsive Orbiting, I Would Touch You

• That's on my current drive home from work air guitar playlist. It's my favorite Furs song ever, nothing else comes close. I had a Britten piece in mind, but I didn't want to make it two days in a row in advance of his centenary so I've started another gag based on compulsion. Lurched from compulsion to compulsion. Please use last sentence as my epitaph.
• Usually used for the Sillyass Star Trek allusion gag, the below is also related to the above, free digital pint if you get it:

• Yes, all this for that.
• Meanwhile, in a blue county in a blue state....
• Corporate pillage, part one.
• Zizek once again says what I've been saying in every fucking blog post 4ever. When I call him the greatest academic fraud of his generation it's more than a gag, it's envy.
• On shouting at Ray Kelly and polite liberal behavior.
• Studying war.
• A profile of William T Vollmann in Newsweek. I bought Book of Dolores (pun intended, yo, I bet), it arrived last Saturday, I haven't had time to but glance, it's a beautiful object to hold, hope to read this weekend). I bought a used copy of Argall at the Montgomery County Library bookstore in the weird shopping center in the weird country of Boiling Brook, and I still have an extra copy of Fathers and Crows, so if you're a bud and want one let me know.
• Starling murmurations.
• I found out about the Vollmann article because the author tweeted it and it ended up somehow in my timeline. I tweeted him, hey, do you get the pun in the title? and he tweeted back huffily, it's an allusion, and I tweeted back, sure, but it's also a pun on dolorous, get it? No response.
• Hey! Edmond posted! He's alive.
• In Evidence: 16.
• What you can buy me for Giftmas.
• There's an Elizabeth Bishop biopic?
• Musique Concrète Soundtracks To Experimental Short Films (1956-1978).
• So, two more drive home from work air guitar playlist songs. Looking for the below reminded me to listen to Broken Social Scene even a quarter as much as I used to. The one between the poems possibly the song posted most often here, certainly in the top ten. The bottom song is actually the only one of this shitty blog's Theme Songs that is on the drive home from work air guitar playlist.

THE LOST PILOT

James Tate

Your face did not rot

like the others—the co-pilot,   

for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-

mush: his wife and daughter,   

the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.

He was more wronged than Job.   

But your face did not rot

like the others—it grew dark,

and hard like ebony;

the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole

you to come back for an evening,   

down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you,   

read your face as Dallas,   

your hoodlum gunner, now,

with the blistered eyes, reads   

his braille editions. I would

touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page.   

However frightening, I would   

discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make   

you face your wife, or Dallas,   

or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy   

orbiting, and I would not try   

to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know   

is this: when I see you,   

as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life,   

spin across the wilds of the sky   

like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were   

the residue of a stranger’s life,   

that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky,   

I cannot get off the ground,   

and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling   

to tell me that you are doing   

well, or that it was mistake

that placed you in that world,

and me in this; or that misfortune   

placed these worlds in us.

ADDICTION

A.F. Moritz

I wish we could control this revolting

want of control: these people

with their spongy eyes, their mouths

of trembling shoehorns, billhooks for penises

and bear traps for vulvas.

One taste of sunlight and at once

they can’t do without it. Water,

the same, and food, and air,

and a dozen other squalid habits.

Some—like their copulation,

a rusting carnation in a cut-glass neck—

are not physically compulsive but

the partners can’t stop wanting them to be:

so we desire to be raped

by love, who would fill us, they say,

with an oil from the lit braziers of stars.

What if, doing it every day,

we resemble pistons, and the slow poison

cuts our lives off at 70:

it’s the grim determination

of our passion. And beyond this, even I—

defended in childhood by my strong father

the piano and my mother the virtuoso

from knuckles among warehouses—even I

am addicted to the mild light of words.

I Invoked the White Robes, Gleaming Blades Ready for Blood, and, Feeling the Scourge of Increase and Multiply, Made Affirmation: *Yes,* Deliver Us from Complicity

There were no elections in Maryland I could boycott yesterday. I work and am friends with Virginians, most complained about the choice for governor between a rightwing ogre and a Clintonian scumbag. The rightwing ogre enjoyed the passion of his base, the Clintonian scumbag enjoyed the fear his base has of the rightwing ogre's base and won by four points. Same game as always. A reminder: it is easy for me as a citizen of one of the bluest precincts in one of the bluest districts in one of the bluest counties in one of the bluest states to tell someone in a swing state he or she shouldn't allow themselves to be blackmailed into voting for Clintonian scumbags by fear of a state run by Ken Cuccinellis. A friend emailed yesterday, said that between the party of austerity and the party of austerity that would ban birth control and gay marriage she'd hold her nose and vote for the party of austerity. The majority of my friends and loved ones would agree with that position even if they agree with me that the game is fucked from top to bottom. Everyone knows the game is fucked from top to bottom, everyone is fully aware how the game works. Everyone knows he or she is being worked, everyone negotiates his or her participation and complicity within that work, which for me currently involves screaming about the fucking game in general and at you about your complicity in particular as infrequently as I can manage these days.

Ironically, it's screaming about the fucking game that has always drawn and kept readers here but fuck it. Meanwhile, the centenary of Benjamin Britten's birth is in sixteen days, expect lots, not a piece a day or such a self-imposed requirement, but expect lots. Requests solicited, I'm looking at you, Hamster.

THIRD AVENUE IN SUNLIGHT

Anthony Hecht

Third Avenue in sunlight. Nature’s error.   

Already the bars are filled and John is there.   

Beneath a plentiful lady over the mirror   

He tilts his glass in the mild mahogany air.

I think of him when he first got out of college,   

Serious, thin, unlikely to succeed;

For several months he hung around the Village,   

Boldly T-shirted, unfettered but unfreed.

Now he confides to a stranger, “I was first scout,   

And kept my glimmers peeled till after dark.   

Our outfit had as its sign a bloody knout,   

We met behind the museum in Central Park.

Of course, we were kids.” But still those savages,   

War-painted, a flap of leather at the loins,   

File silently against him. Hostages

Are never taken. One summer, in Des Moines,

They entered his hotel room, tomahawks   

Flashing like barracuda. He tried to pray.   

Three years of treatment. Occasionally he talks   

About how he almost didn’t get away.

Daily the prowling sunlight whets its knife   

Along the sidewalk. We almost never meet.   

In the Rembrandt dark he lifts his amber life.   

My bar is somewhat further down the street.

VASECTOMY

Philip Appleman

After the steaming bodies swept

through the hungry streets of swollen cities;   

after the vast pink spawning of family   

poisoned the rivers and ravaged the prairies;   

after the gamble of latex and

diaphragms and pills;

I invoked the white robes, gleaming blades   

ready for blood, and, feeling the scourge   

of Increase and Multiply, made

affirmation: Yes, deliver us from

complicity.

And after the precision of scalpels,

I woke to a landscape of sunshine where   

the catbird mates for life and

maps trace out no alibis—stepped   

into a morning of naked truth,

where acts mean what they really are:   

the purity of loving

for the sake of love.

I Was Fruitily Sentimental, Fluid

Peter Hammill is sixty-five today. When I hear Peter Hammill or Van der Graff Generator I think of  Bavid Dogosian, one of two Davids I was once strong and seemingly life-time friends with but haven't talked to in decades, don't know where either are - last I heard Bavid was in the New York in the Art business, Phavid Dillips raising kelp in the Pacific Northwest. Bavid and I would park my brown AMC Hornet (sold to me by Ruth; Hamster remembers) or more often Bavid's yellow bug in a cornfield off 355 where now the mcmansionist monstrosity called Millstone exists. He would play Van der Graaf Generator and Hammill solo often on his turns, it's been love for me for Hammill's music since. If you see Bavid, tell him give me a call. You'll recognize him: his uncle played Captain Ross on Law and Order: Criminal Intent, the facial resemblance is uncanny.







EFFORT AT SPEECH BETWEEN TWO PEOPLE

Muriel Rukeyser

:  Speak to me.          Take my hand.            What are you now?

   I will tell you all.          I will conceal nothing.

   When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit

   who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair    :

   a pink rabbit    :    it was my birthday, and a candle

   burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be happy.

:  Oh, grow to know me.        I am not happy.        I will be open:

   Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like music,

   like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm about me.

   There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing.

:  Speak to me.        Take my hand.        What are you now?

   When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental,

   fluid    :    and my widowed aunt played Chopin,

   and I bent my head on the painted woodwork, and wept.

   I want now to be close to you.        I would

   link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your days.

:  I am not happy.          I will be open.

   I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet poems.

   There has been fear in my life.          Sometimes I speculate

   On what a tragedy his life was, really.

:  Take my hand.          Fist my mind in your hand.          What are you now?

   When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide,

   and I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward death   :

   if the light had not melted coulds and plains to beauty,

   if light had not transformed that day, I would have leapt.

   I am unhappy.          I am lonely.          Speak to me.

:  I will be open.          I think he never loved me:

   He loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam

   that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls:

   he said with a gay mouth: I love you.          Grow to know me.

:  What are you now?          If we could touch one another,

   if these our separate entities could come to grips,

   clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . . yesterday

   I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,

   and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.

   Everyone silent, moving. . . . Take my hand.          Speak to me.

• A thought on the new math of going to college.
• Nothing is more vivid than electronic ghosts.
• What is that brain-looking fruit? Everywhere in Georgetown.
• Trespass and presumption. Howe and Rukeyser.
• Rukeyser's The Speed of Darkness.
• Sympathy for the golem.
• Fifty Incredibly Tough Reads for Extreme Readers contains the usual suspects. What's valuable to me are the ones I haven't read, good thing I have access to a university library's collection and/or consortia's.
• Gombrowicz, who I'm unfamiliar with (and will fix), who has a novel in the 50 above.
• Mr Abonilox, please check your twitter DM for a favor and offer of free beer.
• What is sex in Science Fiction? I have no idea, I can't read Science Fiction.
• Obscure Sound's Best of October w/sound.
• I completely forgot about NaNoWriMo, used to get a lot of bump in Blegsylvania, novelty must have worn off.
• The Cure, live in 1984.
• By request, this Fripp with Hammill on vocals:

POEM

Muriel Rukeyser

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane,

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

The news would pour out of various devices

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

This Time I'm Not Going to Say a Thing about Deity

Saw all three and petted two of the ferals yesterday afternoon after Sunday morning's catfights. MomCat - she's the cat in the banner above - has not sat in my lap since she did once a few months ago but runs tail-up to me and head-butts my shins. Her son Frankie is a coward, her son Napoleon has me completely trained, under the chin first, then ears, I said at a special Sunday Night Edition of Thursday Night Pints, all three of us busy in our own ways during the past week and busy possibly through November, so. I didn't realize I'd have to run a sobriety check point on the way home, said L, noting the major presence of Metro Police in Georgetown at six o'clock. A cop said, L said, when I asked him what's with all the cops, cop said always after <Racist Slurs'> games, lots of DUIs. K asked, as replays of the game ran on TVs around the bar as we sat down, what's with the <Racist Slur> uniforms, why don't they match the helmets? I said, I think they play a home game a year in the true burgundy but I thought they usually wear it with the old burgundy spear helmet. For the record, the Racial Slurs were wearing their standard darker-than-red but brighter-than-burgundy helmets with the Indian-profile logo on the side but minus the yellow stripe that runs down the middle. K said, you notice this shit? L snorted, noticed? He has a theory! True! I said, buy me a pint and I'll tell you.

• The above two photos, long-timers can vouch, is Fleabus shot by Planet, once upon a blog every day had a Fleabus photo. I didn't ask and it didn't even occur to me to ask for new photos and it didn't occur to her this past unexpected week. All's better. 
• Fleabus is best cat ever. She has to be nine, ten, we can't remember, she might be eleven, the best cat ever. Click tag Ask Fleabus for more photos. For a lot more, click tag Ask Fleabus at old joint.
• Planet sends these winter-housing ideas for your feral cats.
• I said, I think Tiny Danny Snyder said, change the helmet from norm but keep the Indian-profile logo because I met this past week with NFL administrative assistant Goodell and I want to tell the world FUCK YOU! it's the <Racist Slurs'> now and forever for there is no profit in rebranding.
• Someone with skills, please photoshop for me Tiny Danny Snyder as a Ferengi. Tiny Damon Snyder. Join me in calling the local helmetball team the Ferengi.
• Who the fuck uses stupidass Star Trek allusion?

• Modern violence, resistance, calculus of revolution.
• The downward arc of the American dream.
• Another brick in the wall.
• The New Inquiry's Sunday readings.
• Also saw and heard on the bar's TVs an add for some high definition home television product that used Dead Boys' Sonic Reducer as background music. Shoot me.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Kafka, for those of you who do.
• It's been a while, but luckily for both of us I woke up with Sea and Cake in my head!

ACCEPTANCE SPEECH

Dean Young

This time I’m not going to say a thing   

about deity. It’s not the blizzard,

it’s three days after. Trinkle from thawing   

roofs, ruined crocus pronging through.   

Ruin, I promise, won’t be mentioned again.   

Trees, sure, still begging in the road, split

to the bole but this isn’t about the chainsaw.   

A pruning saw will have to do. The puppets   

aren’t hanging themselves in each other’s   

strings. Everyone’s easily identifiable

beneath the funny mask. Somewhere in Oregon,

Mary has another month to go, she’s comfortable   

in any position for thirty-five seconds. Lulu,   

we know you’re in there but no one’s   

blaming you for reluctance to come out.   

Poetry is the grinding of a multiplicity   

throwing off sparks, wrote Artaud

and look what that got him: toothlessness

and shock therapy. Your dad, who has the worst   

teeth of anyone I know, once ordered eggplant   

in a steakhouse. Do not order eggplant   

in a steakhouse turned out to be more   

than aphoristicly true. Do not spend a lot   

of time in an asylum writing cruel poems   

if you can help it, one Artaud is enough.   

In Kandinsky’s Blue 2, there’s a shape   

in two rows of shapes that seems okay   

although to the right’s a capsized canoe   

full of mathematicians, to the left a bow   

about to launch the killer astrolabe.   

By what manner is the soul joined to

the body? How about climbing a ladder   

of fire? No thanks. On TV, a rhino’s

lying in some red dust, munching a thorn.   

You wouldn’t think he could ejaculate

for half an hour straight, but you’d be wrong.   

See that cloud, it might weigh 10,000 pounds   

which is about average for a cloud.   

Happy birthday, happy birthday to you.

Tony says Mary is always writing about the sacred.   

Talcum powder, binoculars, this decimated   

planet. I know, a promise has been made   

but Tony’s been sick for years and no one   

knows with what. Flax oil, bark tinctures,   

corticosteroids. He’s not exactly someone   

you’d trust to drive your car, but still.

Something awful’s coming, isn’t it?   

Would it help if I said Amen? 

It&#39;s Not Sleeplessness, It&#39;s Fear of What the Dark Will Do If I Don&#39;t Keep a Close Eye on It

It's 3:30 AM Eastern Standard Time as I type this sentence. I was awakened at 1:01 Eastern Daylight Time by cat fights outside my bedroom window. I haven't been able to sleep since. I was wide awake for 1:00 - 2:00 Eastern Daylight Time and 1:00 - 2:00 Eastern Standard Time. I heard cat screaming three times, ran to the door each time, saw not one cat. It's 7:27 EST as I type this sentence. A few minutes ago, three minutes before I typed this sentence, I saw MomCat but haven't yet seen Frankie or Napoleon. I'm not overly concerned, he tells himself. I tried reading to fall back asleep, both Coover's Origin of the Brunists which I'm 3/4th through, it's sort of working, it's sort of not, and Lucie Brock-Broido's new collection of poems, it's sort of working, it's sort of not, and neither worked between 2:00 and 7:00 AM Eastern Standard Time, so I went link-farming between failed attempts to get to sleep. Finding this didn't help sleep return. I could wait until tomorrow to post the link-farming as was the plan but fuck it, that would be more artificial than the artificiality of the original plan. America: Razor Sharp Cuts. Includes haunting photos of Baltimore and elsewhere as well as the Red Horse in Frederick the Mocomofos who visit here will recognize. Attention must be paid, or: Loving Petey: Corporate power will make possible journalism that will take an "adversarial position" -- to corporate power. Corporate power will tell us all when and how we can talk back to it. Corporate power will decide just how "aggressive and adversarial" journalism can be. I do try to stop thinking about these things but can't. Charity assets: It is not encouraging to see Omidyar claim he’s going to “support independent journalists,” apparently blind to the dependencies that support is creating. If there is one principle that he’s going to have to stand by it’s to establish a separation between his own goals and the “independent” journalism that he is funding. There is a history of arms-length trusts running newspapers, ironically including the Scott Trust which owns Greenwald’s previous home The Guardian, set up to ensure that proprietors could not mess with editorial independence. Such separation only comes about if you are aware of the dangers. The history of the Omidyar Network suggests that Greenwald, Poitras, and Scahill’s new patron has little such awareness. Since I've played Chris Watson's field-recordings this week and last and said I haven't played enough Caberat Voltaire on this shitty blog....

• Elizabeth Drew's nostalgia for Never-never-land.
• Why Obama doesn't do what progressives want: Like FDL or not, the last serious attempt by left-wingers other than gays to hold Obama accountable was when they refused to go along with the Affordable Care Act if it didn’t include a public option.  FDL said “if this bill has no public option, we won’t support it.”  When it didn’t, they didn’t.  You may think that’s not a good red-line, but they had a red line.  Of course FDL, virtually alone, did not have the juice: they could not inflict enough pain or take away enough funding  or create enough bad publicity for Obama to care, especially when powerful interests (read: insurance companies), didn’t want a public option.  (For doing so, FDL was attacked by all the usual suspects on “left-wing” blogs and labelled firebaggers.)
• NSA, Obama, and digital vandals.
• A hedgehog in a fox's world.
• Decadence and enlightenment. 
• Alpha Zulu.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feiulleton }'s weekly links.
• Luster.
• Bedruthan Steps. 
• Sleeping with the dictionary.

PRAIRIE OCTOPUS, AWAKE

Nicky Beer

The night’s turned everything to junipers   

shagged & spooked with cerulean chalk-fruit,   

weird berries whiffing of Martians in rut.   

I forget this isn’t my universe   

sometimes. Sometimes I think I was falling   

most of my life to land here, a lone skirl   

in the immaculate hush. In my world   

I waltzed with my ink-self, my black shantung.   

Owls swallow vowels in stilled trees. It’s not   

sleeplessness, it’s fear of what the dark will   

do if I don’t keep a close eye on it.   

Blue minutes leak from the pricked stars’ prisms,   

seep into the earth unchecked. Just as well—   

I’ve hardly enough arms to gather them.

hearing all bells at once instructs the final exhale

As promised, Chris Watson's Weather Report this weekend. I know I know one person (not counting me) and think I know more two people who might dig this. Hope you do. Back Monday (probably) barring kaboom (there are no Egoslavian Holy Days this weekend). Last week Bloggod tested me kaboom with Lou Reed, I'm hoping Bloggod takes the weekend off too.








READING STARLIGHT WITH ONE EYE LIKE CREELEY

Ca Conrad

hearing all bells at

                              once instructs the final exhale

                              Camelot in thimble of  the gods

                              Marilyn Monroe’s ambulance

lost on the way to the palace of  temperament

a branch of government for the magical arts

                              punch wall of forest for

                              an oaken

                              desk

                              another dream we

                              needed agitating the

               sentence as it rows across a

               newly destroyed heart folding

               following tormenting one another

                              we were all once young and

                              beautiful squandering everything

                              it’s what we came here to do

                              cut off engines to the child

                              registering disposition of the

                              cat in the dark as the

                              size of the darkness

DREAMS

Wisława Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak

Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft,

mocking magnets, graphs, and maps—

in a split second the dream

piles before us mountains as stony

as real life.

And since mountains, then valleys, plains

with perfect infrastructures.

Without engineers, contractors, workers,

bulldozers, diggers, or supplies—

raging highways, instant bridges,

thickly populated pop-up cities.

Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen—

crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us

and when to vanish.

Without architects deft in their craft,

without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers—

on the path a sudden house just like a toy,

and in it vast halls that echo with our steps

and walls constructed out of solid air.

Not just the scale, it’s also the precision—

a specific watch, an entire fly,

on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers,

a bitten apple with teeth marks.

And we—unlike circus acrobats,

conjurers, wizards, and hypnotists—

can fly unfledged,

we light dark tunnels with our eyes,

we wax eloquent in unknown tongues,

talking not with just anyone, but with the dead.

And as a bonus, despite our own freedom,

the choices of our heart, our tastes,

we’re swept away

by amorous yearnings for—

and the alarm clock rings.

So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books,

the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,

the doctors with couches for analyses—

if anything fits,

it’s accidental,

and for one reason only,

that in our dreamings,

in their shadowings and gleamings,

in their multiplings, inconceivablings,

in their haphazardings and widescatterings

at times even a clear-cut meaning

may slip through.

(&quot;Mere Protocol&quot;? - More Like a Second Backbone!)

• Holyfuck, listen to my new obsession. 
• Aesthetics, morality, politics, and disaster.
• The Kafkaesque world of data mining.
• Auto-pilot! 
• Sirota brings the duh.
• Hillarian inevitability: campaign against Obama's legacy from the right. Of course. And with that I hearby proclaim I suspend the use of the terms Hillarian inevitably, motherfucking Clinton, and motherfucking Clintons (which means they won't be mentioned at all) from this blog NOT because those terms aren't completely valid but because they are (though I allow myself this one last Fuck the Clintons, the two of them the perfect symbol for all that's fucked in American politics).
• Should be easy until 2016, then, probably not so much, though there's an obvious way to guarantee there's not talk of them in 2016 on this blog, executed on my end.

• Reminder (to me): field-recordings, music, poems, aargh-free links if links at all, one weekend post, tomorrow.
• BRT!
• CCT!
• Did you know new water-heaters cost $2600? It's true!
• Wolfson's has closed! (h/t SeatSix). I mean, it's been years since I was inside, but there's always been a Wolfson's on Diamond Avenue.
• Scharpling's show on Tuesday night's on WFMU never worked for me - I don't want to hear talk on the radio - but news of his retiring Best Show is noteworthy if for no other reason that it, by far, raised the most money during marathons.
• Fabio played an hour-and-a-half tribute to Lou Reed yesterday, but listen to the show for the two Meredith Monk pieces.
• Fifteen problems.
• Sebald, for those of you who do. I confess I have not felt compelled to pick up another since finishing Austerlitz, though that's more a matter of enthusiasm for other stuff than never-minding Sebald.
• Joyce Carol Oates v Robert Frost.
• Auden and ecopoetry.
• In Evidence: 3.
• New Eno interview.

INTELLIGENCE

Tom Sleigh

Wiretaps and tapes, concealed

bugs and mikes,

                           intercepted letters

full of passionate declarations, contradictory

intelligence—

                           how attached he’d grown

to the subject’s documents, revising and rearranging

the influx of intelligence

with a sentiment, he acknowledged, almost

                           like love: he felt

the cool gray eyes of his superiors

trained on him, rebuking him

                           for swerving, for letting

himself go—such tender obsession

occasioned by the file!

                           Not quite the professional style

he or the Agency expected…

But such official loyalties

                           seemed mere protocol to this!—

what was wrong with him,

                           he wondered, that he construed

the documents to make the subject

seem a hero,

                           a bastard whose sole patrimony

was a pair of shoes and a rusted sword

left by an unknown father beneath a stone?

And yet his exploits in the tabloids,

the headlines screaming,

SCOURGE OF MONSTERS STRIKES AGAIN!

HERO FOUNDS REPUBLIC

                           were these heroic

different in kind from the rumors,

unverified,

                           of a rape, a murder?

—But to have met undisguised the devouring monster!

To have escaped the twisting tunnels of the maze…

On balance, for such a life,

                           the hero’s reputation wasn’t bad:

think of the opportunities for evil

                           a man of such qualities must have had!

How well he knew him—an essential innocence

that followed impulse, blind

to protocol, not noticeably more kind

                           than he was cruel.

But to stamp Case Closed and cease

                           gathering intelligence,

to give the hero up, almost, he admitted,

like a lover…:

                           such limits the hero

unknowingly transgressed!

And the Agency, cold-blooded where

                           limits were concerned (“mere protocol”?—

more like a second backbone!), committed

                           to keeping order, could not afford

such sentiments—the Chief of Security

felt an awful pang: that the work of intelligence

                           should lead to this…

He leaned back in his chair and sighed:

                           a forged genealogy certifying

that the hero’s father was a king; a mutual

assistance pact

                           to aid in taking back the usurped crown:

he could see them now, the wind

blowing lightly, the two of them sweating

as they climbed the cliff, discussing

                           the terms, exchanging information,

intelligence—

                           how would his own face look

staring down across the sea

                           as he gestured earnestly toward

some island, saying,

                           “According to our sources,

the tax revenues…”

                           And then, edging

the hero closer to the cliff, pointing

                           out the harbor, he’d push.