United 0, Ningland 1

Ilse can vouch - one minute before Ningland scored I turned to her and said, "they're going to lose this game."

If Charlie Davies was one-tenth as good as he thinks he is he'd be starting for Barca. Who didn't expect him to gack the PK? He can't create his own shot, he has no imagination or skills with the ball on his feet, his only asset is his speed and the motherfucker won't run. Wait - throw yourself to the ground, you diving motherfucker.

And bless Clyde Simms for his years of service, he's worse than cooked, he's a liability, defensively, offensively. Good back pass, Clyde! PLEASE put Kitchen in holding mid and let him get seasoned. United's a mediocre team in a mediocre league - if and when they're good again Simms will be gone and Kitchen a fixture - give him the minutes at holding mid now, figure something out for right back.

Wondering If I'll Be Able to Decipher What He Means By His Yes

That's a screen shot from Talking Points Memo grabbed last night say 7:00, half a scroll down from the banner. Sorry for poor quality, but I'm a techtard. Still, notice: there are no accidents around here.

Think though, fellow pwoggles, as much as Corporate disdains us, think how much they disdain the cracker base, doubly-fucking the motherfuckers with a sell-out on economic principles while Hey Look! Legal Fags! on the other.

Hah, got you. They disdain us just as much, prove it daily as necessary, would and will fuck you over as blithely when needed.

Hey! Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?

It's true, and they've a game tonight v the team that deliberately crippled Branko Boskovic, the dirtiest team, season in, season out, in Major Lame Soccer, so win please, for Branko, for the points, but mostly to win a goddamn home game.

When modern devices fail, it is our nature to reach back among the cures of our fathers. If those fail, there were fathers before them. We can reach back for centuries. Gwyon appreciated the extended hands of his people less and less as the months passed. The doctors refused him information, guarding the frail secrets of their failing magic as carefully as Zuni priests planting prayer sticks. And there was that hallowed tribal agreement among them never to admit one another's mistakes, which they called Ethics.

On the other, spiritual hand, the congregation breathed out stale prayers for the boy's recovery. But in the end they always gave their God full leave to do as He wished, to remove the lad if such were His sacred whim, loading the fever-stricken boy with the guilt in had taken them generations to accumulate. They called this Humility.

- Gaddis, The Recognitions.

• On my complicity, your complicity, his complicity.
• Battered Obama Syndrome.
• Poke.
• The class politics of the debt ceiling crisis.
• Titanic.
• Foggy days.
• War.
• It isn't?
• Drones.
• The U.S. love affair with drones.
• Predator drones and the international mafia.
• Max Boot?

• Things you might have missed.
• Yes, yes I do know I'm unworthy. Thanks!
• Comus!
• The argument.
• Stream this week's new releases? I hadn't though about Shonen Knife in a decade.
• Agnes Obel. It's love.
• New M83.
• Hundred highways.
• Right now.
• The only one of you.
• Rejoinder. 
• Talking to myself.
• Woke up with this in my head:

YES

Denise Duhamel

According to Culture Shock:
A Guide to Customs and Etiquette 
of Filipinos, when my husband says yes,
he could also mean one of the following:
a.) I don't know.
b.) If you say so.
c.) If it will please you.
d.) I hope I have said yes unenthusiastically enough
for you to realize I mean no.
You can imagine the confusion 
surrounding our movie dates, the laundry,
who will take out the garbage
and when. I remind him 
I'm an American, that all has yeses sound alike to me.        
I tell him here in America we have shrinks 
who can help him to be less of a people-pleaser. 
We have two-year-olds who love to scream "No!" 
when they don't get their way. I tell him, 
in America we have a popular book,
When I Say No I Feel Guilty.
"Should I get you a copy?" I ask.
He says yes, but I think he means
"If it will please you," i.e. "I won't read it."
"I'm trying," I tell him, "but you have to try too."
"Yes," he says, then makes tampo,
a sulking that the book Culture Shock describes as
"subliminal hostility . . . withdrawal of customary cheerfulness
in the presence of the one who has displeased" him.
The book says it's up to me to make things all right,
"to restore goodwill, not by talking the problem out,
but by showing concern about the wounded person's
well-being." Forget it, I think, even though I know
if I'm not nice, tampo can quickly escalate into nagdadabog--
foot stomping, grumbling, the slamming
of doors. Instead of talking to my husband, I storm off
to talk to my porcelain Kwan Yin,
the Chinese goddess of mercy
that I bought on Canal Street years before
my husband and I started dating.
"The real Kwan Yin is in Manila,"
he tells me. "She's called Nuestra Señora de Guia.
Her Asian features prove Christianity
was in the Philippines before the Spanish arrived."
My husband's telling me this
tells me he's sorry. Kwan Yin seems to wink,
congratulating me--my short prayer worked.
"Will you love me forever?" I ask,
then study his lips, wondering if I'll be able to decipher
what he means by his yes.

No Luck, No Golden Chances, No Mitigating Circumstances Now. It's Only Common Sense, There Are No Accidents Around Here

There are no accidents round here: within twenty minutes these two items appeared on Your Fucking Washington Post (and everywhere else) this afternoon:

Corporate gets: Appearing at the regular White House news briefing, Obama said the bipartisan proposal is “broadly consistent” with the approach he has advocated in that it reduces discretionary spending and tackles health-care spending and entitlements while also raising additional revenue.

Pwoggles get: The Obama administration announced Tuesday that it will support a congressional effort to repeal a federal law that defines marriage as a legal union between a man and woman.

How it works: Corporate gets to start seriously gutting social safety nets, pwoggles get a vague promise on a social issue Obama will never have to repay (plus the admittedly wonderful and addictive joy at imagining motherfucking cracker head's exploding). I bet pints on Obamadick's reelection. I offer you 4-1.

Was going to lead with this tomorrow, but tomorrow is a High Holy Day at BLCKDGRD, and while BLCKDGRD is never completly aargh-free I try make High Holy Days as aargh-free as possible.







Besides, I desperately need to get this song and this song out of my head.

Amorous Ghosts Will Pursue Us for a Time, but Sometimes They Get, You Know, Confused and Forget to Stop When We Do, as They Continue to Populate This Fertile Land with Their Own Bizarre Self-Imaginings

I don't have a plan. I don't mean a plan like down in links your bleggal overlords wonk policy, with math and graphs and everything! They still believe enough of our elite are rational assholes misguided on best practices, that an equilibrium between elite greed and the helps' needs can be fairly negotiated. Our elite are rational assholes, and they've decided those Micronesian islands with no extradition treaties don't buy themselves. Our bleggal overlords are morons.







No, I mean I don't have a plan how I'm to integrate reading The Recognitions into the daily tongue-diving with kayfabe that is this shitty blog, but:


Three years later, that partisan Deity whose most recent attention to the family had been Aunt May's rescue from mortality, acted in Wyatt's direction (though as the boy and his father independently suspected, perhaps it was a different God altogether). Wyatt was taken with a fever which burned him down to seventy-nine pounds. In this refined state he was exhibited to medical students in the amphitheater of a highly endowed hospital. They found it a very interesting case, and said so. In fact they said very little else. Physicians, technicians, and interns X-rayed the boy from every possible angle, injected his arms with a new disease they believed they could cure, took blood by the bottleful from one arm to investigate, and poured the blood of six other people into the other. They collected about his bed and pounded him, tapped his chest, thrust with furious hands for his liver, pumped his stomach with a lead-weighted tube, kneaded his groin, palped his spleen, and recorded the defiant beats of his heart with electronic machinery.


Please read that out loud for full effect, to feel your mouth move.

I don't have a plan for The Recognitions beyond reading it (out loud when possible) and posting snippets that make me giggle and/or gasp here. No reading group is suggested nor will be housed here. Go find a copy yourself if you're curious, but POW! a novel about the nature of kayfabe in an era when the elite are breaking kayfabe? When nothing is more fun to consider than kayfabe? In July, during the Blog Days of Summer, in dying Stringtown Blegsylvania, the summer before a presidential election Blog Days of Summer year?

• There is no progressive case for deficit cutting.
• Left Neo-Liberalism versus Grassroots Liberalism.
• Left Neo-Liberalism versus Grassroots Liberalism.
• Left Neo-Liberalism versus Grassroots Liberalism.
• Liberal politics.
• Why Liberals are lame.
• Krugman is increasingly radical? Maybe, but not enough.
• Saying no to compromise.
• Alice in Billlionaireland.
• France next.
• Unmediated.
• The former.
• Cultural illogic.
• Today is SeatSix's and Elric's (who is still too pissed off about something to contribute here in comments any more) father's 79th birthday. 
• I am shocked to learn Vincent Gray is a corrupt asshole.
• Purple Line.
• Being a midget on PCP is no excuse.
• Herman Melville's lifetime literary earnings.
• Silliman's always awesomely generous lit links.
• They found it a very interesting case, and said so. In fact they said very little else. Think about those two sentences, square in the middle of the paragraph, physically and contextually.
• What you can buy me for my birthday. (h/t)
• Geek the girl.

MOTTLED TUESDAY

John Ashbery

Something was about to go laughably wrong,
whether directly at home or here,
on this random shoal pleading with its eyes
till it too breaks loose, caught in a hail of references.
I’ll add one more scoop
to the pile of retail.

Hey, you’re doing it, like I didn’t tell you
to, my sinking laundry boat, point of departure,
my white pomegranate, my swizzle stick.
We’re leaving again of our own volition
for bogus patterned plains streaked by canals,
maybe. Amorous ghosts will pursue us
for a time, but sometimes they get, you know, confused and
forget to stop when we do, as they continue to populate this
fertile land with their own bizarre self-imaginings.
Here’s hoping the referral goes tidily, O brother.
Chime authoritatively with the pop-ups and extras.
Keep your units pliable and folded,
the recourse a mere specter, like you have it coming to you,
awash with the new day and its abominable antithesis,
OK? Don’t be able to make that distinction.

But I Will Turn My Face Away from This Ruin of Summer, Collapse of Fur and Bone

Ken Beatrice (he doesn't eat the curly-fries, he's been told they're very good) always said that more games are lost than won. Crediting the USWNT with losing the game doesn't deny the Japanese their victory any more than crediting the Brazilians with losing the game didn't deny the USWNT a place in the semifinals (the symmetry of the two games is remarkable, actually). I point this out because once this bullshit kabuki plays out exactly like you think it will, the debate will be more about who lost the fight than who won. It's started already.

Also, this post exists because I've a bunch of good links with rapidly approaching expiration dates (if they haven't already passed), plus, guess what band's cassette tapes I found last night while looking for something else:

• Documenting the Peace Laureate's progressive atrocities.
• War in Iran this Fall?
• On the above.
• On the above.
• Now starring Yemen and Somalia!
• America's disappeared.
• We're spent.
• Crisis of growth.
• They're going to cut to the bone and keep the fat.
• It's started already.
• The glory of radicalism through inaction.
• Balloon payment.
• Mad libs.
• Moving closer.
• Convert's syndrome.
• Hacktacular!
• Motherfucking crackers come in all colors. 
• Politics and race in DC.
• Speaking of Beatrice, what was his favorite flavor milkshake?
• My future hell. 
• Speaking of Beatrice, a reminder that Kony Tornheiser is an asshole. 
• The Bayou.
• It's debatable whether I'm anti-Christian, though I can declare I'm anti-Christer. 
• UPDATE! Wait! Ro Laren is still on TV?
• The best fraud of his generation. I wonder if he's read The Recognitions. I am again, will be posting passages when I feel like it, like this, the opening sentence: Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at the critical moment it presumes itself as reality. A novel about the nature of kayfabe: sounds timely, is laugh out loud funny.
• Field trip.
• Field Mice.
• Forty noises that built pop.
• Benediction.
• Circulation.
• Well of loneliness.
• This Nelson Rockefeller.
• Should the Bible be banned?
• Get a knife between your teeth.

ON THE SKELETON OF A HOUND

James Wright

Nightfall, that saw the morning-glories float
Tendril and string against the crumbling wall,
Nurses him now, his skeleton for grief,
His locks for comfort curled among the leaf.
Shuttles of moonlight weave his shadow tall,
Milkweed and dew flow upward to his throat.
Now catbird feathers plume the apple mound,
And starlings drowse to winter up the ground.
thickened away from speech by fear, I move 
Around the body.  Over his forepaws, steep
Declivities darken down the moonlight now,
And the long throat that bayed a year ago
Declines from summer.  Flies would love to leap
Between his eyes and hum away the space
Between the ears, the hollow where a hare
Could hide; another jealous dog would tumble
The bones apart, angry, the shining crumble
Of a great body gleaming in the air;
Quivering pigeons foul his broken face.
I can imagine men who search the earth
For handy resurrections, overturn
The body of a beetle in its grave;
Whispering men digging for gods might delve
A pocket for these bones, then slowly burn
Twigs in the leaves, pray for another birth.
But I will turn my face away from this
Ruin of summer, collapse of fur and bone.
For once a white hare huddled up the grass,
The sparrows flocked away to see the race.
I stood on darkness, clinging to a stone,
I saw the two leaping alive on ice,
On earth, on leaf, humus and withered vine:
The rabbit splendid in a shroud of shade,
The dog carved on the sunlight, on the air,
Fierce and magnificent his rippled hair,
The cockleburs shaking around his head.
Then, suddenly, the hare leaped beyond pain
Out of the open meadow, and the hound
Followed the voiceless dancer to the moon,
To dark, to death, to other meadows where
Singing young women dance around a fire,
Where love reveres the living.

    I alone
Scatter this hulk about the dampened ground;
And while the moon rises beyond me, throw
The ribs and spine out of their perfect shape.
For a last charm to the dead, I lift the skull
And toss it over the maples like a ball.
Strewn to the woods, now may that spirit sleep
That flamed over the ground a year ago.
I know the mole will heave a shinbone over,
The earthworm snuggle for a nap on paws,
The honest bees build honey in the head;
The earth knows how to handle the great dead
Who lived the body out, and broke its laws,
Knocked down a fence, tore up a field of clover.

USWNT 2, Japan 2 (Japan 3-1 in PK)

In the 112th minute Ian Darke, ESPN carnival barker, says, "the US is eight minutes from winning and sparking a national celebration," which made me wish Japan would win, and I'm sorry. I wasn't invested in this team - it's not lack of damn but lack of time - but I've loved ones who are. But ESPN's shilling - and I don't watch helmetball or basketball, maybe they shill for everything - of the major significance of this game pissed me off, and anyone who thinks a victory would mean more to the US citizenship than the Japanese - as in Japan post-earthquake and tsunami - is a moron. (Speaking of morons and barkers: Julie Foudy.)

Game ball to Japan's Iwashimuzu who deliberately took a red card taking down a breakaway for Alex Morgan in the 120th minute, though to be fair, without the US's shockingly inept finishing, its clownish and panicky defending, and its choke-choke-choking in PK, Japan doesn't win. Japan doesn't win if the US doesn't think it won the game twice. Japan didn't win, the USWNT lost.

Read this guy. He knows the players on USWNT, having been a season-ticket holder for the Germantown Freedom before they up and split for Florida. He can speak towards his loathing for Rachel Buehler and why I'm wrong to say Hope Solo had a miserable game and why I'm wrong to ask why Alex Morgan didn't start (I thought she was the best player on the field).

But rely on me to draw the strained metaphor: there are echoes in the USWNT's choke and collapse amid media screaming of their exceptionality that redound on many levels. Perhaps I'll tease them out later, or not - we're going out to eat the best Indian food in MOCO with Hamster in a couple of minutes - though tease them out yourself, or not.

Dallas 0, United 0

God, that was a horrible soccer game. I'm gonna let this guy do most of the work, adding these bullets:

• Good thing Dallas sucks too.
• The white road kit only emphasizes how shitty the shitty red kit is.
• Kitchen's best game at right back, Hamid's best game in goal.
• Clyde Simms, bless his years of service, is beyond cooked, he's a liability. Those passes from White and McDonald that got intercepted? Most were because Simms can't get to where he needs to be.
• If United has a kangaroo court, they should be fining Chris Pontius $$$ every time he's in the box with the ball on his right foot that he doesn't shoot. Shoot the fucking ball.
• Expect all teams to play the same defense - anyone but De Rossario - here on out.
• It was a shocking reminder to see how thin United is with all the concussed players - Ngwenya? Fred (who will be gone after this Wednesday night's game)? Imagine the trialists and bottom reservists we'll see next Saturday in exhibition v Everton.

Yes, I'd have taken four points before the road trip with glee, yes, the game was played in 150 degree heat index, no, I didn't expect United to break even in possession, but no, I didn't expect them to come out flat. What a shitty game. I expect better this Wednesday night at home v Ningland, the most important three points since the last and until the next.

Enough Energy Held to Maintain the Order in Repair, Assure Further Consumption of Entropy

It's time for a friendly reminder: Fleabus is the greatest cat of all time and all her photographs are by my daughter Planet (unless otherwise noted).

And a Clops update: I haven't heard from the guy currently fostering Clops - he was supposed to call Friday to tell me about Clops' Thursday visit to the vet. I'd told him Monday that they should keep Clops if they want Clops - that I would relinquish any claim to Clops if the guy and his wife fell in love with Clops, and I think he thanked me - in any case he sounded relieved - though promised to keep me informed. I don't think Clops will come live with us - which is cool, the world is full of cats that need homes, we'll get one before the end of the summer - but just to taunt fate, if Clops does come to live with us we're now going to call him Aargh.

Meanwhile, I need to badger Planet to get me new Fleabus photos before Planet takes herself and her camera off to Ohio in ONE MONTH. Holyshit.

• UPDATE! Obvious things.
• Yes, you don't need to tell me that Elizabeth Warren was never the progressive dreamboat Liberals painted her; in one sense that makes Obama more of a pussy.
• Is Eric Cantor "dumb as a bag of rocks?"  I bet a pint I could win a round of Jeopardy against Eric Cantor if the categories were Postmodern American Fiction, Postmodern American Poetry, Pere Ubu, My Complicity, Bleggalgazing, and Kasper Payne's Calamitous Latin American Signings. I bet he could kick my ass at Corporate Calvinball.
• The new Let Them Eat Cake.
• Robert Reich is profoundly stupid.
• On the above.
• Haven't forgot about Iran.
• This week's top muckreads.
• Stenographers.
• How to do a coup.
• Robber barons.
• It's been twenty-five years at least, but I've walked this stretch of track literally thousands of times.
• Little Danny Snyder.
• English is a shameless whore.
• The art of cruelty. 
• HOLYFUCK! Somebody, please video and post to youtube!
• This.

MECHANISM

A.R. Ammons

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,

          morality: any working order,

       animate or inanimate: it

has managed directed balance,

          the incoming and outgoing energies are working right,

       some energy left to the mechanism,

some ash, enough energy held

          to maintain the order in repair,

       assure further consumption of entropy,

expending energy to strengthen order:

          honor the persisting reactor,

       the container of change, the moderator: the yellow

bird flashes black wing-bars

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

       startles the hawk with beauty,

flitting to a branch where

          flash vanishes into stillness,

       hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight:

honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,

          the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies

       of control,

the gastric transformations, seed

          dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into

       chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge,

blood compulsion, instinct: honor the

          unique genes,

       molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into

sets, the nucleic grain transmitted

          in slow change through ages of rising and falling form,

       some cells set aside for the special work, mind

or perception rising into orders of courtship,

          territorial rights, mind rising

       from the physical chemistries

to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male

          and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper

       racial satisfaction:

heat kept by a feathered skin:

          the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen

       burner under the flask)

so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates

          interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum

       efficiency—the vessel firm, the flame

staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise and

          necessary worked out of random, reproducible,

       the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the

goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operations

          that stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a

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

Born Fifty-Five Years Ago Today

Ian Curtis.

The Applause from the Talk Shows and Game Shows Washed Out the Propped-Open Door Like Distant Rain

It is interesting, said Thursday Night Pints' special guest W, a presidential historian, that there is ZERO effective push back from the Left on the gutting of progressive programs Obama is proposing. Every time Eric Cantor throws a shit fit Obama throws a shit fit about Cantor's shit fit and then moves right towards Cantor who then moves further right.

God bless Eric Cantor, I said, the skeevy motherfucker. Suppose, for giggles, Cantor has gone off-script and thoroughly pissed-off Corporate, wrecked Corporate's storyboard, wouldn't that be great? Too bad it's a motherfucking work.

Do you think Cantor's on- or off-script, D asked W. He's the trial balloon, said W. There's three weeks of drama to go before the August 3 deadline, watch how his string is played out and wrung back. Note what Cantor is demanding today to what Obama concedes by August 3.

Everything's a work, I said. I work you, you work me; we like or dislike each other over the way we work each other. Huh, asked W. He proposes the same fucking equation every week, said L. I bought her a scotch, she bought me a beer.

• When your bleggal overlords fight!
• A libertarian left is possible?
• The first Tea-Party president!
• Trust Obama? 
• Krugman's obamapostasy will never be ready: First of all, the modern G.O.P. fundamentally does not accept the legitimacy of a Democratic presidency — any Democratic presidency. We saw that under Bill Clinton, and we saw it again as soon as Mr. Obama took office.As a result, Republicans are automatically against anything the president wants, even if they have supported similar proposals in the past. Mitt Romney’s health care plan became a tyrannical assault on American freedom when put in place by that man in the White House. And the same logic applies to the proposed debt deals. Put it this way: If a Republican president had managed to extract the kind of concessions on Medicare and Social Security that Mr. Obama is offering, it would have been considered a conservative triumph. But when those concessions come attached to minor increases in revenue, and more important, when they come from a Democratic president, the proposals become unacceptable plans to tax the life out of the U.S. economy.
• On the above.
• Generic Republican Candidate!
• I'd vote for Donna Edwards if I could.
• Sealing our fate, part one.
• Secret prison!
• Gaithersburg!
• Germantown!
• The important of being Ernest.
• The dangers of plot-driven fiction. The only Gaddis on kindle is Agape.
• Looking for a spectrum.
• How about some Killdozer?
• Hungry so angry.
• Sweet 17.
• One of the greatest covers ever:

SONG OF YES AND NO [COFFEE & DOLLS]

April Bernard

It was a storefront for a small-time numbers runner, 
pretending to be some sort of grocery. Coffeemakers 
and Bustello cans populated the shelves, sparsely. 
Who was fooled. The boxes bleached in the sun, 
the old guys sat inside on summer lawn chairs, 
watching tv. The applause from the talk shows and game shows 
washed out the propped-open door like distant rain.

It closed for a few months. The slick sedan disappeared. 
One spring day, it reopened, and this time a sign 
decorated the window: COFFEE & DOLLS. 
Yarn-haired, gingham-dressed floppy dolls
lolled among the coffee cans. A mastiff puppy, 
the size and shape of a tipped-over fire hydrant, 
guarded as the sedan and the old guys returned.

I don't know about you, but I've been looking
for a narrative in which suffering makes sense.
I mean, the high wail of the woman holding her dead child,
the wail that filled the street. I mean the sudden
fatal blooms on golden skin. I mean the crack deaths,
I mean the ice-cream truck that cruised the alphabets
and sold crack to the same deedle-dee-dee tune as fudgsicles.
I mean the raw scabs of the beaten mastiff, and many other 
   things.

Crude Oil Will Do, or Concentrated Feed, or Any Raw Material, or Even a Conference Table Whose Shape Was Disputed for Months

I was at a full day conference/workshop yesterday (and will be a half day today) on emergency disaster training in libraries. I understand and appreciate the necessity and usefulness of these exercises even if I'd rather be anywhere else: there is a very real possibility pipes will burst in the building I work in and mold infest the stacks.

See the fucker in glasses and light blue shirt in center of the photo below? He's the motherfucker who LOVES! conferences and workshops, who not only looks forward to mandatory conferences and workshops but actively seeks out and registers for conferences and workshops, it's the motherfucking highlight of his job.

He's also the fucker who nods eagerly and constantly and (he hopes) with approving wisdom of everything the speakers have to say (regardless the subject and/or the competence of the speaker), but worse, he's the guy who considers himself more expert than the expert and feels compelled to expand for the group on what the expert is saying with personal work experience anecdotes, the guy who adds half-an-hour to a fifteen minute meeting just by walking into the room.

See the woman in dark blue three chairs up left? She's the person at every conference and meeting who sits the entire meeting concocting what she thinks a sophisticated, paradigm-capturing question of breadth and depth she hopes you grasp, a question that was answered two dozen times in the last hour if she'd been listening, then asks the same question again in what she thinks a sophisticated, paradigm-capturing rephrasing of the question after not listening to her first question be answered. God save you if this person in but one rung below real power in your organization - they'll never go any higher; their bosses put them there for a reason.

See this guy?







He's the guy who does a good job but doesn't love (and doesn't hate) his job, the guy people who love work but don't do as good a job as he, who know it in their bones but will never consciously admit it, hate. He's suspect, scribbling in his notebook instead of the conference handouts, wishing he was outside hiking, throwing plastic, wishing he was anywhere but at this conference, or any conference, any meeting.

He also didn't have much time to read last night (not that there's a lot to read: Blegsylvania be dying, yo), so light links today, a poem, songs.

• Greece now, America soon.
• Secret history of Monsanto.
• Bleggalgazing.
• Brief observation.
• Please please please please please be GOP candidate, not because she won't will the election but because (heh, she might) it'll be fun!
• Another day in The District, or: Why talk of DC converting back to Maryland is silly.
• Bethesda is silly too.
• Mining the audio motherlode.
• Love fade.
• Emperor Tomato Ketchup.
• Woke up with this in my head:

CHILDREN OF OUR ERA

Wislawa Szymborska

We are children of our era; 
our era is political. 

All affairs, day and night, 
yours, ours, theirs, 
are political affairs. 

Like it or not, 
your genes have a political past, 
your skin a political cast, 
your eyes a political aspect.
 
What you say has a resonance; 
what you are silent about is telling. 
Either way, it's political. 

Even when you head for the hills 
you're taking political steps 
on political ground. 

Even apolitical poems are political, 
and above us shines the moon, 
by now no longer lunar. 
To be or not to be, that is the question. 
Question? What question? Dear, here's a suggestion: 
a political question. 

You don't even have to be a human being 
to gain political significance. 
Crude oil will do, 
or concentrated feed, or any raw material. 

Or even a conference table whose shape 
was disputed for months: 
should we negotiate life and death 
at a round table or a square one? 

Meanwhile people were dying, 
animals perishing, 
houses burning, 
and fields growing wild,
just as in times most remote 
and less political. 

When I Finally Took Power in the Nomenclature, Simply by Outlasting My Rivals, Never Arriving Early or Too Late at the Meetings, Repertoire of Sage Nods, My Mind Had Distanced Itself from the World

Do you need any more proof Corporate wants Obama reelected than this:

• Next month Obama would receive approval to raise the debt ceiling $700 billion.
• A "resolution of disapproval" would then be taken up by Congress on an expedited basis (i.e., no filibusters allowed).
• If the resolution passes, Obama can veto it.
• If he vetoes it, it requires a two-thirds vote of both houses to override.
• If there's no override, the debt limit is increased, but Obama would be required to lay out a "hypothetical" set of budget cuts totalling $700 billion.
• This would be repeated (in $900 billion increments) in the fall of 2011 and summer of 2012.

The GOP Branch Office of Corporate can't be this stupid on purpose, proposing this transparently cynical plan just two hours after Obamadick told you no catfood for you in August, the motherf.....







Look who's fifty-one! today!

Aarp! Aarp! Aarp!







I was going to obsessively whine about my complicity and then bleggalgaze morosely, but instead I got you kittens! I'll drop them off Saturday.

• You're so easy to rule.
• Fear the coven.
• Motherfucking crackers.
• Vox populi.
• I saw this pigfucker in the Social Safeway a few weeks ago and shamelesslyfully didn't call him a pigfucker to his face.
• I have no idea who this fucker is at YWFP, but he asks his question without a dollop of irony.
• Holyfuck, I agree with Dana Milbank: whack this fucker with a shovel.
• Things you might have missed.
• This week's stuff.
• Why soccer is not a real sport.
• I'm pissed United isn't playing tonight.
• I can't go into why today is going to ucksay at orkway, but one reason is that I can't watch - or even track - the USWNT gave versus France. 
• Please put ::wood s lot:: into what feedreader you use.
• Remake/remodel.
• Remake/remodel.
• Try it before you buy it.
• Better than Camper van Beethoven.

EMPIRE OF DAYS

D. Nurkse

When I finally took power in the Nomenclature, simply by outlasting my rivals, never arriving early or too late at the meetings, repertoire of sage nods, my mind had distanced itself from the world. I no longer knew to whom I was talking, or the topic, though I was certain of myself. Hunger and desire lasted, savage as in boyhood. It was the names that flew away, leaving a maze of empty nests.
     I had devoted myself to the constellation of slights, shades of loyalty... now the maps rolled in front of me - a gesture of traditionalism, they could easily be projected - and the pincer movements of the army conveyed by pushpins.
     What army? What remote border? Who are the fat or excessively thin men in visored caps waiting for me to speak? Who is the soft-lipped stenographer?
     So the great victory was won, the Visigoths or Aleuts turned back, the Nile and Ganges were dammed, and my name is carved into the plinth of the statue by a mason who works so slowly... a tap at dawn, a tap at dusk: is he dreaming of home?

Come for the Festival, Have Ye?

No, no, no. Red Hour is tomorrow.

I Gave the Cat Half of My Sandwich to Buy My Life

This by Matt Taibbi is making the rounds:

I simply don't believe the Democrats would really be worse off with voters if they committed themselves to putting people back to work, policing Wall Street, throwing their weight behind a real public option in health care, making hedge fund managers pay the same tax rates as ordinary people, ending the pointless wars abroad, etc. That they won't do these things because they're afraid of public criticism, and "responding to pressure," is an increasingly transparent lie.

A question needs asking: there's no power to be had, no celebrity, no notoriety, as an honest advocate for progressivism or as a Clintonian fraud, a cynic of especial skill and duplicity? No money to be made? In a country that celebrates the entrepreneur as Avatar One and the con-man as Avatar Two, that holds the right to exploit motherfucking rubes as the Most Sacred Law in a society that proudly considers itself just, no power to be had? No fortune to be won, large or small, filling the obamavacuum roobish pwoggles like me luxuriate in?

Yes I've asked before. I'm rube enough still to be astonished there's not.

The adoption of Clops may have hit a speedbump. His foster parents are making wannakeepem noises. They have our blessing, I told the guy so, told him we'll uphold our commitment but PLEASE keep the cat if they want him, we have seven already and the world is full of cats that need homes, we'll get one of them.

Here's Napoleon, a wonder cat.

• Politics of austerity.
• Truth is a matter of opinion.
• Wars of whim.
• My country, wrong.
• Category error.
• Security State.
• Crackerfornia!
• Interview with a motherfucking christercracker. 
• Israel's motherfucking crackers.
• Welcome to Murdochia.
• As the News of the World turns.
• Murdoch and the rule of the oligarchy.
• Monday Gun Day!
• Soccer, New York, photos.
• On the bias against narrative poetry.
• Jack asks questions about what the success of a band as shitty as Fleet Foxes signifies. I was going to expound here, but have this comment instead.
• Paul Weller Monday?

ANOTHER INSANE DEVOTION

Gerald Stern

This was gruesome—fighting over a ham sandwich                  

with one of the tiny cats of Rome, he leaped

on my arm and half hung on to the food and half

hung on to my shirt and coat. I tore it apart

and let him have his portion, I think I lifted him

down, sandwich and all, on the sidewalk and sat

with my own sandwich beside him, maybe I petted

his bony head and felt him shiver. I have

told this story over and over; some things

root in the mind; his boldness, of course, was frightening

and unexpected—his stubborness—though hunger

drove him mad. It was the breaking of boundaries,

the sudden invasion, l but not only that it was

the sharing of food and the sharing of space; he didn't

run into an alley or into a cellar,

he sat beside me, eating, and I didn't run

into a trattoria, say, shaking,

with food on my lips and blood on my cheek, sobbing;

but only that, I had gone there to eat

and wait for someone. I had maybe an hour

before she would come and I was full of hope

and excitement. I have resisted for years

interpreting this, but now I think I was given

a clue, or I was giving myself a clue,

across the street from the glass sandwich shop.

That was my last night with her, the next day

I would leave on the train for Paris and she would

meet her husband. Thirty-five years ago

I ate my sandwich and moaned in her arms, we were

dying together; we never met again

although she was pregnant when i left her—I have

a daughter or son somewhere, darling grandchildren

in Norwich, Connecticut, or Canton, Ohio.

Every five years I think about her again

and plan on looking her up. The last time

I was sitting in New Brunswick, New Jersey,

and heard that her husband was teaching at Princeton,

if she was still married, or still alive, and tried

calling. I went that far. We lived

in Florence and Rome. We rowed in the bay of Naples

and floated, naked, on the boards. i started

to think of her again today. I still

am horrified by the cat's hunger. I still

am puzzled by the connection. this is another

insane devotion, there must be hundreds, although

it isn't just that, there is no pain, and the thought

is fleeting and sweet. i think it's my own dumb boyhood,

walking around with Slavich cheeks and burning

stupid eyes. I think I gave the cat

half of my sandwich to buy my life, I think

I broke it in half as a decent sacrifice.

It was this I bought, the red coleus,

the split rocking chair, the silk lampshade.

Happiness. I watched him with pleasure.

I bought memory. I could have lost it.

How crazy it sounds. His face twisted with cunning.

The wind blowing through his hair. His jaw working.

yes no maybe sometimes always never

That kitten performed her ass off yesterday to get me take her home at the Adopt-A-Cat windows of a corporate pet supply chain. We needed an orange bag of ridiculously priced cat food for the Ferals and a green bag of ridiculously priced diet cat food for the indoor fatties. It took all my heartlessness to not take her home.

I didn't buy anything for Clops - and he's ours, just when yet not sure, and I need to know he's healthy but the eye, know that the wound is totally healed; why buy food before talking to the vet? The woman on duty in cat adoption asked me, how many do you already have, I said seven, soon to be eight, and she laughed in spirit. HEY! why don't you adopt a cat this week and make two mortal and lonely creatures lives nicer, fuller, please?







Or what? Clops gonna cost me a thousand in immediate costs and thousands over the course of a lame lifetime, I'm not going to take him? Fuck it, put him to death?

See? I could only go two days before bringing The Clusterfuck back to blog.

• Obamahoover.
• Lesser evilism.
• The rationale.
• Pussies at war.
• Kill Social Security to save porn.
• False conventional wisdom in the UK too.
• Reagan mythology.
• The antichrist to our community.
• Let it bleed.
• Not so good categories the U.S. wins!
• Rhetorical question.
• Time to panic.
• The anti-communist industry.
• Promoting war. And why would Panetta make this statement for a mid-Summer Saturday news cycle?
• Fuckface: The well-focused candidate.
• Punishment beating.
• Should Maryland absorb DC? Never happen.
• More on multiplicity.
• I'm halfway through the first of the trilogy. Something's happening. I'm resisting but persisting. I don't not read stuff like this by choice but by inability. Something's happening.
• Tangibility of the word. I finished Silliman's Age of Huts about a month ago before the UK trip, taking a break before starting Tjanting, then the Alphabet. The power of echoes, holyfuck.
• Under my nose.
• Leader of incredibly shitty band covers incredibly shitty band's incredibly shittiest song. Motherfucking shoot me if I ever have to hear this.
• Laced.
• Another Sleater-Kinney fan! (My Carrie Brownstein crush is still awesome.)
• Why Guided by Voices still matters? This shitty blog's Theme Song 3:

SIX WORDS

Lloyd Schwartz

yes 
no
maybe
sometimes
always
never

Never?
Yes.
Always?
No.
Sometimes?
Maybe—

maybe 
never
sometimes.
Yes—
no
always:

always
maybe.
No—
never
yes.
Sometimes,

sometimes
(always)
yes.
Maybe
never . . .
No, 

no—
sometimes.
Never.
Always?
Maybe.
Yes—

yes no
maybe sometimes
always never.

Gender Equality

I haven't been following and hence not blogging the Women's World Cup; I don't lack damn, I lack time. Still, happily, I watched today's USWNT v Brazil game, one of the most remarkable soccer games I've ever seen for multiple reasons.







I can report that, in a sign of gender equality, the Brazil women's national team are every bit the filthy, diving, cheating, whining, dirty and despicable pieces of shit as the Brazilian men's national team, a squad of filthy, diving, cheating, whining, dirty and despicable pieces of shit to a man. Maybe the myth of beautiful Brazilian soccer was true once upon a time, but it's bullshit in my thirty-five years of soccer consciousness. Fuck Brazil, the filthy, diving, cheating, whining, dirty and despicable pieces of shit.

In another positive developments in gender equality, the all woman refereeing crew proved they can be (a) as incompetent as any four man crew and (b) as petulant when called on their incompetence as any crew of men. The suck was spread relatively evenly against both sides (USWNT got the breaks early, and should have had one player red-carded for a second yellow on a blatant handball, Brazil late - Brazil's goal in overtime was offside), but the refereeing sucked constantly.

Two and a half well-spent hours today, four and a half hours in the past eighteen hours of compelling, satisfying soccer bliss. This oughta drive the pings down.







Adding, I love Abby (as four of you can vouch), but since when is black a color of the US flag and, in a set back to gender equality, why are the USWNT players dressed as nurses. Shittier kit than even United's megashitty red.