Gong Clangs Siren Howls

THE GREAT FIGURE

William Carlos Williams


Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
fire truck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city


RE: WCW's birthday. (h/t) this guy.

Seattle 3, United 0

I chose that photo because James Riley is a filthy punkassbitch no matter what uniform he wears, including Seattle's ridiculous lime green, and Joseph Ngwenya looks like Nick Cave.

The game? Predictable. Seattle is better, Seattle was at home, United never plays well on artificial turf (and the ugliest, cheapest looking artificial turf I've ever seen), United was down Pontius and down emotionally. Olsen made the proper choice shutting down DeRossario and Davies early: the game was lost, there are two home games next, this Wednesday v Chivas USA and Saturday v Salt Lake, and four points minimum are necessary.

I'm making the same choice with this post.

Born One-Hundred Twenty-Eight Years Ago Today

THE POEM

William Carlos Williams

It's all in
the sound. A song.
Seldom a song. It should

be a song—made of
particulars, wasps,
a gentian—something
immediate, open

scissors, a lady's
eyes—waking
centrifugal, centripetal.

The Care with Which the Rain Is Wrong and the Green Is Wrong and the White Is Wrong, the Care with Which There Is a Chair and Plenty of Breathing

Listened to Immortals By My Side and Burdocks yesterday (via this guy and this guy), woke up with this in my head:

• Cool. (And yes, it was a different Karkowski piece - I may of heard some of his music before, but I'd never heard of him until yesterday - but I couldn't find that piece, so I listened to the one I linked to too.)
• Concept album.
• Hey, some new good reads in both Because Left, Because Right.
• This is true: I love to play the Sillyass Desert Island Game with novelists and musicians, I've never wanted to play it with poets. I point this out as a curiosity that always surprises me when I think about it, nothing more, though it surprises me more I don't think about it more since it always surprises me I don't think about it more when reminded.
• You want more Karkowski? Sure!

TENDER BUTTONS [A LIGHT IN THE MOON]

Gertrude Stein

A light in the moon the only light is on Sunday. What was the sensible decision. The sensible decision was that notwithstanding many declarations and more music, not even notwithstanding the choice and a torch and a collection, notwithstanding the celebrating hat and a vacation and even more noise than cutting, notwithstanding Europe and Asia and being overbearing, not even notwithstanding an elephant and a strict occasion, not even withstanding more cultivation and some seasoning, not even with drowning and with the ocean being encircling, not even with more likeness and any cloud, not even with terrific sacrifice of pedestrianism and a special resolution, not even more likely to be pleasing. The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.

He Was Perturbed, However, When He Found that the Funeral Home Was in a Bad Section of Town, Next to a Tattoo Parlor Named the Desultory Slut

As stated yesterday, busy, time to read and think but not (on half-purpose) react, so here, the second paragraph from the novelist Lorrie Moore's take on Circus Elephants in the New York Review of Books:

It is indeed the audiences who are getting scary. The MSNBC crowd last Thursday applauded the state of Texasʼs record-breaking death-row executions. On Monday in Tampa at least one person cheered the prospect of (in a question posed to Ron Paul) an uninsured man in a coma being left to die. Monday’s audience also booed Perryʼs defense of public education for children of illegal immigrants, as well as Paulʼs skeptical remarks about American exceptionalism (“We’re under great threat because we occupy so many countries. We have 900 bases around the world.”). This kind of hooha heartlessness is recession road rage at its worst, and that this is the electorate these candidates are trying to court often seems to startle even them, though this is reflected less in the policies they endorse than in their faces, which can veer to and from their lecterns in disorientation and fog.

I mean, I hate motherfucking crackers as much as the next person, but it's odd, all these intimations gaining greater media mention of a Cracker Rebellion that all started right after this past Labor Day Weekend, the traditional start of POTUS 2012.

• OK, so I reacted, the insomniac pingslut.
• We are so fucked.
• How the limits to growth was demonized.
• Anarchy and ometepe.
• May I sleep with knee-jerk ideology, please?
• Heh, my first reaction too.
• Latest lame Obama excuse.
• Carville realizes POTUS 12, wants to play.
• On the above.
• Just this.
• The gods of war.
• Bleggalgazing.
• BRAC!
• Chicken mascot's head stolen again in Rockville!
• Vasily Grossman. True: I was holding Life and Fate in my hands two nights ago, wondering when the hell I'd have time to reread it. This too.
• Up with people.
• Busy little bees.

PARABLE OF THE DESULTORY SLUT

Tony Barnstone

       When he read in the obituary section that he was dead, the famous author was at first amused and flattered. They love me so much, he thought, they have imagined me dead because they fear the loss of my genius above all else. So he put on his hat, combed his goatee to a waxed point, and sauntered out of his flat to attend his own funeral. How literary, he thought, like Huck Finn, and Everyone will be weeping.
       He was perturbed, however, when he found that the funeral home was in a bad section of town, next to a tattoo parlor named The Desultory Slut. He walked in past the unmanned front desk, to a back room of frayed velvet and gilt columns, where his coffin was on display, a faux mahogany monstrosity with painted pewter handles. The only people in attendance were four young professors from the local college, with leather patches on the elbows of their ill-fitting tweed jackets and long cruel faces of foxes and rats. He recognized one of them, a gangly fellow with pimply cheeks who had shaken his hand after his last reading and reverently asked for his signature.
       Do you have one of my books to sign? the author had asked.
       Oh no, the young professor had cried, baring his hairless chest, can you please sign here?
       Now the pimply fellow was sitting in a pew, whispering loudly to his neighbor, Isn’t it great, he said, The old bastard finally kicked.
       His neighbor nodded silently.
       Deeply disturbed, but well aware of the dramatic potential of the moment, the author took this as his cue to step boldly into the room, with a loud Ta daaa!
       For some reason, the professors ignored him, and continued their whispering.
       For a moment, he was afflicted with a strange vertigo, and stood like a clay golem, without a will of his own. Then a sudden rage took him, and the author snapped out of the spell and strode to the front of the room, waving his arms. Wait, I’m not dead at all. Here I am. It was all a mistake, he cried.
       But the professors did not see him. In fact one walked right through him, as if he were merely a ghost or spirit, and rushed up to the coffin. Do you realize what this means? the professor cried, This means we’re free, and he grabbed the body in the coffin and dragged it to the floor. The shocked author saw in the body his own likeness, lips and cheeks rouged into a grotesque semblance of life.
       He’s dead, he’s dead. Our enemy is finally dead, they chanted in a frenzy and the professors began trampling on the corpse, weeping with joy and relief.

Always More Dark Houses, Hushed and Abandoned.

Maryland's head coach, who has to be one of the five? ten? highest paid State of Maryland employees, tweeted that black shit is what the Terps will wear against West Virginia this weekend, and I can't go on this way, I may or not post a photo of what terrific to horrific clown suit Maryland wears week-to-week, but I can't waste energy debating the aesthetics of each combination of Maryland uniforms (and debating my debating my aesthetic reaction to each combination of Maryland uniforms) as long as United hasn't eliminated their stupid-ass red third kit. Or rather, of course the fuck I could, but, despite fine metaphors abounding ...

Plus busy, work and real life - I haven't mentioned this and won't beyond this post and won't go into the back-story now, but my mother-in-law has moved north from Florida, and I've some mother-in-law duties to attend to amongst many errands, so songs, links, poems, maybe for a day or three and - Yay Me! - just in time.

• Plus the urge to bleggalgaze is at the overwhelming stage that signals don't, so I'm going to, just somewhere else and analog....
• Obamafucker.
• But here is says.....
• Inconvenient.
• Apres wiener, le deluge.
• Stupid Democrats.
• The meaning of political rituals.
• By the most violent and absurd reasoning.
• Doopty-doo, whoa. That's three blocks from Inner Harbor, seven blocks from Camden Yards.
• Vollmann once, Vollmann twice.
• Creeley.
• That Malkmus guitar sound.
• Mining the digital motherlode.
• In case you missed it, new John Cale EP full-streamed.

THE WHITE ROOM

Charles Simic

The obvious is difficult
To prove. Many prefer
The hidden. I did, too.
I listened to the trees.

They had a secret
Which they were about to
Make known to me--
And then didn't.

Summer came. Each tree
On my street had its own
Scheherazade. My nights
Were a part of their wild

Storytelling. We were
Entering dark houses,
Always more dark houses,
Hushed and abandoned.

There was someone with eyes closed
On the upper floors.
The fear of it, and the wonder,
Kept me sleepless.

The truth is bald and cold,
Said the woman
Who always wore white.
She didn't leave her room.

The sun pointed to one or two
Things that had survived
The long night intact.
The simplest things,

Difficult in their obviousness.
They made no noise.
It was the kind of day
People described as "perfect."

Gods disguising themselves
As black hairpins, a hand-mirror,
A comb with a tooth missing?
No! That wasn't it.

Just things as they are,
Unblinking, lying mute
In that bright light--
And the trees waiting for the night.

Holyfuck!

New John Cale song? Catastrofuk! Stream the whole new EP! Holyfuck!

The Sense of Trap as a Narrowing Cone One's Got Stuck into and Any Movement Forward Simply Wedges Once More -- but Where or Quite When, Even with Whom, Since Now There Is No One Quite with You--Quite? Quiet?

Let me try this equation: I understand that in the scheme of late capitalism's inexorable grind to oblivion the decisions that Dixons and Geithners and every single smartest guy in the room makes for the 1% that own everything makes as much difference in the inexorable grind's end result as the decision I make in four hours on where I'm gonna eat lunch today. They, in the end, will be just as fucked as me, but I will be fucked first, just as Corporate planned. What? No?

Have some Elkin, from George Mills:

He didn't know what hit him. He didn't go to church. He didn't listen to evangelists on the radio. Nothing was healed in him. His back still hurt like hell from the time he had picked up a television funny. He didn't proselytize his neighbors. He talked as he always had. He behaved no differently. Not to his wife, not to the dispossessed whose furniture he helped Laglachio legally steal. Finally, he did not believe in God.

Holyfuck, if I was shown the last few posts three years from now when I read them I'd know I was reading Elkin when I wrote them, the rhythm and diction of what I write but mostly the frenzy he releases in my head when I'm happy, but this is busiest shittiest month of my working year, I'm reading four books simultaneously while thinking about what I'll read next, and these are the strangest days of my life, and what the fuck happened to my campaign to be quieter, calmer, more circumspect and peaceable?

• Endless political paralysis.
• Fayette Nam.
• Obama as curator.
• Narcissus and Echo.
• The misery of mullahs.
• That thing you do, whatever it is.
• Don't go out in the rain in your socks.
• Murphy. Once I'm done rereading this and this and reading this and this, 2012 is going to be the Year I Immerse Myself in Beckett.
• I understand why Nirvana was important even if I think their music meh and the imitators they spawned suckful of suck, but jeebus fricking christ.
• This week's new releases.
• Glacial wave.

AGE

Robert Creeley

Most explicit--
the sense of trap

as a narrowing
cone one's got

stuck into and
any movement

forward simply
wedges once more--

but where
or quite when,

even with whom,
since now there is no one

quite with you--Quite? Quiet?
English expression: Quait?

Language of singular
impedance? A dance? An

involuntary gesture to
others not there? What's

wrong here? How
reach out to the

other side all
others live on as

now you see the
two doctors, behind

you, in mind's eye,
probe into your anus,

or ass, or bottom,
behind you, the roto-

rooter-like device
sees all up, concludes

"like a worn-out inner tube,"
"old," prose prolapsed, person's

problems won't do, must
cut into, cut out . . .

The world is a round but
diminishing ball, a spherical

ice cube, a dusty
joke, a fading,

faint echo of its
former self but remembers,

sometimes, its past, sees
friends, places, reflections,

talks to itself in a fond,
judgemental murmur,

alone at last.
I stood so close

to you I could have
reached out and

touched you just
as you turned

over and began to
snore not unattractively,

no, never less than
attractively, my love,

my love--but in this
curiously glowing dark, this

finite emptiness, you, you, you
are crucial, hear the

whimpering back of
the talk, the approaching

fears when I may
cease to be me, all

lost or rather lumped
here in a retrograded,

dislocating, imploding
self, a uselessness

talks, even if finally to no one,
talks and talks.

(—a man told me I better think about my ‘system.’ Oh dear! I better think about my ‘system’—!)

It's true Corporate doesn't do competence in the micro,* but, macro-wise, doesn't jumping on 911 as means to create an accepted state of perpetual war in a world of diminishing resources exploitable by openly rapacious capital represent planning no matter how short-sided and self-defeating and brutally and callously and incompetently executed it may be?

I concede planning may be the wrong verb as initial act: power dictates without consideration. Power is knowing that lack of competence, when you have enough power, is no impediment to inexorability, and inexorability no impediment to self-destruction in the service of pathological accumulation.

• I remembered the poem below - in particular its last line - falling asleep last night, and there's no way (and nothing but hugs and kisses intended) I wasn't going to title this post after it. 
• * Some would argue - I'm not sure where I fall - that the incompetence is not a bug but a feature.
• On the invention of money.
• On the above.
• Real oppression.
• Remembering.
• A peculiar little facet of the current empire in decline.
• There was a Tea-Party debate?
• Republican inner-voice.
• That's what freedom's all about.
• Villagers Against Rick Perry.
• The World's Second Shittiest Human turns on Perry.
• Why motherfucking crackers distrust Perry.
• On the above.
• Communist desire, starring the greatest con-man in academia.
• The greatest con-man in academia on Marx Brothers, Freud.
• Bleggalgazing.
• Bleggalgazing. 
• Iconic Germantown oak tree near death!
• Elkin's Boswell.
• Silliman's always generous lit-links.
• Live Noveller.
• See you on rooftops.
• Cloudbusting.
• Two stones in my pocket.

SEVERAL ERRANDS

Brenda Hillman

The shoe repairman works behind the married shoes,

his whole hand inside the boot he’s shining,

everything cozy in the glass displays, laces paired

on gravel he’s spread out in the window, shoes

placed as though they’re walking, and beside them

propped up, the wooden tongues of shoe horns, poised

to serve the inanimate world ... He comes out mildly

attentive, soft accent, possibly a Scottish

childhood, possibly sheep to tend ... Clear day,

first summer divorced in Berkeley, a time of seamless, indescribable grief; he waits kindly in his blue apron,

fingering the well-worn inner sole, and I am grateful

for those who serve us knowing nothing of our lives ...

*

The cleaner waits behind the silver bell;

he’s from Cambodia and has free Christian literature

on the counter. He greets me with pleasant chatter,

searches through the coats, some left for years,

he says; they make a soft blue whistle as they circulate

on the ovals like the ones under those automatic boats.

As the clothes pass, little checks and prints under

the whooshing of motion, I see my husband’s coat—

how long will I call him my husband—like an old friend

passing by quickly not bothering to greet me. Odd now,

I don’t have to pick it up, the serious plaid will go

around between the women’s suits and stay all night. . .

*

I watch the young butcher flipping over the young

chicken: he takes one wing and sort of spins it,

first on its back, flinging the trimmed, watery

lemon-colored fat into the trash, then before

he starts on the legs he puts his hand so deeply in

that the finger comes out the neck ... The other butcher

sets the slab of beef under the saw: the riveting

intricate swirl as the dead flesh pulls away;

he goes off, shouts short words from the deep freeze—

to me or to the carcass hanging by the shank?—

I can wait, but the spaces can’t, there’s a slight

ticking, then the carcass swings and swings ...

Somehow I thought we would know everything

through the flesh. Perhaps. But my days have become

spirit. The young butcher splits the chicken

down the back, seems to enjoy the crack of the knife

as it enters the bone, so I try to. Housewives lean

against the cool glass to convey holiday news and he

responds without really looking up; I love that.

*

oh Berkeley summer mornings, aren’t they—

what? past the French Hotel, the glint of tiny spoons

so briefly and soberly allowed to rest on white saucers,

the plums just about over, the agapanthus—“lilies of denial”—

in the center dividers, blooming, or just about to—

like me, hearty and hesitant, not wanting to write it,

not wanting to ruin the perfection of the poem

by writing it . . . At the dentist, the little mirror,

the dinosaur prong is put into the mouth. Mouth:

the first darkness. Nearby: the mobile with straw

eyeless fishes. The dentist will go home to her family,

having briefly reached inside the visible mystery

and found nothing ... I imagine Wisdom in the text

is like this, creating the cosmos from the mind of God,

looking interested and competent; she touches

the physical place with her prong, and the pain shines ...

(—a man told me I better think

about my ‘system.’

Oh dear! I better

think about my ‘system’—!)

If You Would Recover, You Have to Get Over the Shattered Autos in the Backwoods Lot to that Bridge in the Darkness Where the Sentinels Stand Guarding the Border with Their Half-Slung Rifles, Warned of the Likes of You

To honor F9U1C1K I slept in until eight in the morning, remarkably late for me, but I'd stayed up past midnight watching United beat Goats USA the night before. After I made coffee I wrote a post about the game (and I reiterate: fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, adding, after reflection, fuck) in which I made My Official F9U1C1K Statement. I then took photos of Stanley and Rose, emailed some to Planet.

I've nothing to add to F9U1C1K other than note that Osama bin Laden didn't cause the converging clusterfucks but he sped up up the collapse, the inevitable serbianization of the United States, perhaps by a decade. Corporate saw 911 as as the greatest opportunity in a generation to crush balls, crushing it's own balls in it's greedy frenzy to crush my balls. just as bin Laden, or anyone like you, me, at our own paces, reflecting now, could have predicted Corporate would.

I'm warned against a teleological bent, but what's changed isn't Corporate's future but how they are speeding up the wringing of the last fucking drop of my profitablilty now that resources are short and deadlines are overdue before set. I'm asking: do you think Corporate wouldn't kill you for a cigarette? I've overseen the execution at 240 men, damn the DNA, and I'm running for President. I've killed thousands of women and children, ordered the execution of US citizens, and I'm running for reelection.

Maybe waterboarding wasn't scheduled to go mainstream until 2015 in Corporate's 2000 long-term plan and 911 gave Corporate the opportunity to rush the install, but fuck any moaning about fucking lost innocence: it never existed, and what was marketed to you as your innocence was never yours to lose.

• World of the warlord.
• Progressively losing.
• Lost dreams of American renewal.
• Boofuckinghoo. Fuckers criticize fucker.
• One-sided war.
• Crocodile tears.
• Never Forget! the time Rudy Giuliani....
• The day that changed everything.
• The day that changed nothing.
• Everyday is 911.
• Erev Nineleven.
• Commemoration. 
• Grief porn.
• The world after 911.
• Or against us.
• Decade of fear.
• Politics of fear.
• Police state. Remember, America will need be Britain before it can be Serbia.
• Strange politics of 2012.
• What the Tea Party is and isn't includes this (among many) breathtakingly stupid paragraph: That the tea party sprang to life during Obama’s presidency should have been less surprising than it was. According to Alan Abramowitz of Emory University, “The tea party movement can best be understood in the context of the long-term growth of partisan-ideological polarization within the American electorate and especially the growing conservatism of the activist base in the Republican Party.” It wasn't surprising at all, it was utterly, crackerifically, predictable (as predictable as my disdain for motherfucking crackers).
• 25 motherfucking crackers on 911. 
• Call me when any Senate Democrat or motherfucking Obama says Mitch McConnell would rather your car plunge through a hole in a bridge into the Ohio River than raise taxes on investment bankers, but until then, stfu.
• Weekend wrap-up.
• Little Danny Snyder drops lawsuit, the fuck.
• Mystery gunk in Anacostia River identified.
• Frates for Cello and Piano.
• Arvo Part turned 76 yesterday.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO GET OVER

Bruce Smith

Stumps. Railroad tracks. Early sicknesses,

the blue one, especially.

Your first love rounding a corner,

that snowy minefield.

Whether you step lightly or heavily,

you have to get over to that tree line a hundred yards in the distance

before evening falls,

letting no one see you wend your way,

that wonderful, old-fashioned word, wend,

meaning “to proceed, to journey,

to travel from one place to another,”

as from bed to breakfast, breakfast to imbecile work.

You have to get over your resentments,

the sun in the morning and the moon at night,

all those shadows of yourself you left behind

on odd little tables.

Tote that barge! Lift that bale! You have to

cross that river, jump that hedge, surmount that slogan,

crawl over this ego or that eros,

then hoist yourself up onto that yonder mountain.

Another old-fashioned word, yonder, meaning

“that indicated place, somewhere generally seen

or just beyond sight.” If you would recover,

you have to get over the shattered autos in the backwoods lot

to that bridge in the darkness

where the sentinels stand

guarding the border with their half-slung rifles,

warned of the likes of you. 

Chivas USA 0, United 3

At 11:19 PM EDT 9/10/11 I sent this guy this text about Chris Pontius, the best player on the field by far:

Partyboy is a weapon

followed up by

He's a + mls player and thats the league he plays in. He and derossario have good back forth.

Four or five brilliant runs and yet another assist on a Davies goal, then:

A marvelous night for Charlie Davies and D.C. United was spoiled by the gut-wrenching news late Saturday that Chris Pontius, the club’s most consistent attacking player who was enjoying perhaps the finest match of his MLS career, had fractured his right tibia and would almost certainly miss the remainder of the season....

Around midnight local time, United announced Pontius had suffered a non-displaced fracture. A timetable for his return hasn’t been set, but with just six weeks left in the regular season, he seems likely to miss the rest of the campaign. More details are expected Sunday.

I am texted as Pontius is stretchered off the field:

I think we can safely hold you responsible for Pontius' leg, yes?

Yes. Alone my praise wouldn't have done it, but after the third goal I found myself daydreaming of playoffs and the soft teams in the East just points ahead of United and United with games in hand. I'm fifty-two fucking years old, I'd've thought I'd know better while simultaneously knowing I don't. (Also, it was 911 here when Pontius got hurt but 910 in Los Angeles when he got hurt - fine metaphors abound.)

United might still - should - make the playoffs (they have tough road games left in Seattle this coming Saturday, at Phunion, Columbus, Vancouver, home games versus this shitty Chivas team, Salt Lake, finish the season with Chicago, Portland, and Kansas City), but that was joyous last night, the dynamic between Quaranta and the wings, especially Pontius, and DeRossario and, yes, a motivated, running Charlie Davies. Pontius and DeRossario had learned - and were still learning - to run off the other, and fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

He Was Set to Do Another Season of Superman, Then He Was Shot

I was going to write about how a majority of Americans wouldn't uninstall 911 even if they could and why, but this guy already did, so have some music, links, a poem.

• Civil war? I've always been queasy about piling on against the Republicans because it's intellectually too easy; I also worry a lot that the habit pundits have of choosing sides and simply beating on the other party contributes to the extremist tone of the culture war. But the time is coming when we are all going to be forced to literally take sides in a political conflict far more serious and extreme than we're used to imagining. The situation is such a tinderbox now that all it will take is some prominent politician to openly acknowledge the fact of a cultural/civil war for the real craziness to begin. See, if there was some push-back by Democrats, I'd easier concede Taibbi's conceit.
• Motherfucking Obama.
• As entirely credible as when Bush went from yellow to orange.
• Thirty Year's War.
• Vollmann.
• Daddy's song.
• Walking song.
• Dead Man's Will.
• One more dollar.
• Four years.

ZERO STAR HOTEL [AT THE SMITH AND JONES]


Anselm Berrigan

At the Smith and Jones Factory I get my Gear, don't smoke Don't vote, dry off With Madonna towel It's a field night For the roachies Smoked too many Crumbs, too much Genre manipulation	looks like nothing ever happened except everything's wet, singed cork rubbeth face, pay concierge/owner in red-checked pjs for Ross' 8 nights decapitate writer head and sacrifice to gods of buried vocals
DugRoth says id Keats Was here in our burgers He'd slug him every time If he played the Welt- Meister? Double Slug. West Nile Virus Strikes Bill Five Times Tho' he's scared to enter Queens, despite status As honorary Met	Metro musician speaks: "If the global workforce continues to be decimated by disease & natural catas- trophe it will be necessary to clone a workforce. please give in advance to help create this force in exchange for these accordion songs. Merci."
It takes a dick To raise a pyramid Motorcycle crash On the tongue, small Business buried, this short But expansive demonological Expose is, in all probability My own diabolized & garbled Version of raising "the listener" To the rank of dualist "believer"	three nines, plus fifteen two fours king high, lose five two fives ace high, lose five nothing ace high, lose finger right index. Zilch, ace high, lose left thumb ten and seven pairs, get thumb back, doesn't fit. Two fives hand back thumb. Six high lose hand, split.
The moral right of the author Has been deserted And tearful words that rhyme You are not crumbling and You are tired of crumbling The moral continuum Of the gobot's heresy Has been dejected With feelings of paranoia Thank Augustine, for	like Leonard Nimoy you and I are made mostly of water. But when the assholes play ukeleles and gloat about cheap rent the sight of the world quarters me. Thus I regress shame and embarrassment fucking up the life
Many otters are also Making current loans Whilst unable To find the function Button next to the Pause button. While you were invisible I was privvy To the seamscape Brutish preconfiguring was there	end poem with gambling write out dreams another personal rule broken to quote face death unquote, with apologies to the just now stomped roachie. "they were all my friends and they died," an old thread and a new one
Coptic are, blue lady Bahrain coin, midnight Medoc, Eddie snickers Insects attack, denim guy Who robs drug stores Yearning to speak: Cocktail fugitive angst Ball refuses to be thrown Be not frozen in cigar Store scared to emote	basically we need a cultural tilting of the bowl or diseased markets. Interrogation chairs pile up outside guides. Primitives drool intelligence. I can't find the light. Two degrees outside. The city at odds. poetry is my strength clothes are my weakness
Nobody comes over And never leaves anymore Incidental back to a sill Calm, poignant and terrified Volunteer me a busride Chase middle fingers with bats Blooming by the pond I did not hug the tranquil Endowment after a wedding Drank everything I could	pigeon now weird big books everywhere jogging in hollywood t-shirts we raised this park and built a pond by which to shoot movies they shot us on the pond and it was the best I hate that dog I ever had feeding with a bottle
Now Eddie's bored People invented God To excuse their bad Habits this roach Says to me. There Isn't anyone it Even wants to imitate Eddie and I play anti- Chess, both begin In check	now Ross is gone bearer of sock herb impresser of exiled temps. Um is my comment, leaking uranium on the sea bed. Others tilt ever so slightly swoopward, blame the spiritual outsider
At the reading reaching For the bar food "Well We've got to put those Subs somewhere or else Sell them as staples Of a fast food fat Reducing diet. Find And replace he said I see a crabby Peering through a crag	passenger next to antagonist all my darkness is product I sell it your way as wisdom you lose blue, use red I see my feet sometimes artificial's the right word clinical joy unreported poke a hole in a blanket and with your head go through it
I've never met any Mysterious musicians Sorry. I wish They stopped saying Lord, and ended This Pope business My relative Clapp Died at the Alamo Let's give Texas Back to Mexico	the original of this poem is available for $5,000. When I sell it I plan to buy a debris slide. I'm broke but I make more money than my parents did when they were my age
Solid boundless freefall My connective tissue My fine citizen centering Circles this frame Upside down flying Back first into Woods, flipped Over handlebars Brake cord detached Leaf imprint on back	what is interesting about him is also what is wrong with him rendering him electable he's the guy who poses for trophies, biologically but he is turning into bio-seitan, to be eaten by a despicably healthy human extending a lifespan
I can get a sparrow With a bow and arrow I can buy anything Cheaper than you Who wasted the miracle On the dove? The subject is SAME NAME. There's nothing To cross out. $5,000! Have a happy warning	if you don't understand don't be ashamed to ask three times the answer is TIGHT-LIPPED you have won $30,300 can I have a glass of water? the Americans had Judy Garland & we had Edie Piaf he was set to do another season of Superman, then he was shot

In an Effort to Get People to Look into Each Other’s Eyes More, and Also to Appease the Mutes, the Government Has Decided to Allot Each Person Exactly One Hundred and Sixty-Seven Words, Per Day

I didn't watch or listen to Obama's speech, I said. L didn't either, neither did K. We don't know whether D did or not: he was at home hoping his get me through one more storm, Lord sump pump didn't fail. L said, I can't remember seeing greener grass, greener leaves in September, then we were all comfortably quiet. How's the semester? somebody eventually asked and the other two mehhed. No one felt like talking. No one felt compelled to talk. K's husband called: find a different route home, and soon please, the main route is flooded. I mowed my lawn this past Sunday, I said. The sun hasn't shined since Saturday, the grass is neon green and needs cutting. L's partner txtd, Canal's closed. That's my usual way home too. She had to go across a jammed Key to Wherever Virginia, I needed labyrinth my way through NW and Bethesda to Kensington, Beach Drive closed. No time for a second round; no one had a chance to win the night's ridiculously priced scotch. One quick, gently quiet round then spooky drive home, a great uncanny night I'll always remember.

• An end of politics?
• F9U1C1K.
• F9U1C1K.
• F9U1C1K.
• F9U1C1K.  
• F9U1C1K.
• The neo-liberal mafia.
• The illusion of free markets.
• On the above.
• How to make your blog instantly popular.
• Tea Party's Cold War roots.
• Sabots and sans-culottes.
• Technoproles.
• Good-bye to all that.
• Bullshit.
• The Obama they elected.
• Shorter Obama job speech.
• Obama's speech at Your Fucking Washington Post op-ed page: Meyerson loved it, Milbank mehhed it, Rubin hated it, Dionne loved it, and the World's Shittiest Human would have hated it if he didn't have the day off, as anyone could have predicted.
• Gore's mini-obamapostasy!
• The ONLY THING the cracker base cares about is which mouth-breathing pig scares Liberals the most.
• K did ask me the traditional "how's blogging?" and I said "same," then when home, typed this into an email to a friend: I think the guy who claims to be an e-acquaintance meant that linking be blogwhoring - that's what was suspect, that I wasn't a tovarich, I was ginning for hits, not that I was an infiltrator, or anything like that. Just a slut. See, I've still problems thinking people understand my blog-speak. Happens in real life all the time too. This actually is one of my cruxes, and the main topic of just about everything I write: I think people know what I'm talking about when I'm abbreviating in advance. So, yeah: same.
• F9U1C1K.
• Top eleven existentialists novels?
• A great five minutes.
• A bell for every minute.
• Was in a meeting yesterday where a discussion on who should be the go-between between conflicting parties (guess who got nominated), so guess what's in my head:

THE QUIET WORLD

Jeffrey McDaniel

In an effort to get people to look

into each other’s eyes more,

and also to appease the mutes,

the government has decided

to allot each person exactly one hundred   

and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear   

without saying hello. In the restaurant   

I point at chicken noodle soup.

I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,   

proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.   

I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond,

I know she’s used up all her words,   

so I slowly whisper I love you

thirty-two and a third times.

After that, we just sit on the line   

and listen to each other breathe.

Comely Doesn't Come from Come

Even considering yesterday was the day of the first Cracker Theater, Starring Rick The Executioner Perry I would never have bet that the news that a crazed man with a Hispanic surname brandishing an AK-47 shot and killed multiple uniformed American soldiers would get ZERO! play in the national media. Lesson learned.

Didn't watch Cracker Theater, Starring Rick The Executioner Perry. An acquaintance asked me if turning against Obama and the Dems means I'll listen with fresh ears to what Republicans have to say, would I watch the debate, and I politely said no, it's not a balance where one side must rise if the other falls, that's the trap I'm trying to escape. I said, I can't watch it anyway, I have to rearrange my blogrolls.

A friend who always complains that this shitty blog takes too long to load suggested I pare down my blogrolls since they are what hang when he pings the site, and when I said I don't purge he suggested I make more blogrolls instead of loading up the current ones with dozens of sites each, so:

• New Toys was abandoned since the sites there are old toys now; they've been moved up into Because Right.
• I've reduced the number of sites in Because Left and Listening that display when page loads to ten since those tend to update less frequently than the sites in Because Right. You can always expand the blogrolls once the page has loaded.
• Canned Hiatus has been created and consists of sites from Because Left and Because Right that hadn't updated in two months or more, and Canned Hiatus displays only five sites on the page. It's not banishment, it's a resort. I hope they all come back from vacation.
• There is one blog site that hasn't updated in two months that I didn't move to comatose because hopefully we'll have lunch in the next month and his site can be moved up into Me and Mine. Four sites have either shut down completely or have changed their status to invite only and no longer provide a feed, but other than that, no one was purged.
• There are some good new sites in both Becauses and Listening, yo.
• I've also changed from four posts on front page to three. 

There! That's onanism I can believe in, much better than a recap of Cracker Theater, Starring Rick The Executioner Perry, yes? at least from where I was sitting. The changes seem to make some small difference in the motherfucking blog loading, and any ideas you have on how to make this blog load faster that doesn't involve posting fewer photos and youtubes please pass them along. As always, if I'm not returning a legitimate Kind, please let me know, as always, suggestions for new sites you think I'd like are solicited, as always, thanks for the Kind.

• Casualties of America's less casual violence.
• The Left must take Obama down.
• It's not laziness, dumbfuck.
• Bless the ACLU.
• I also intend to avoid as much of this weekend's mawkishness as possible.
• An end to empire.
• A friend killed in the wars.
• Mr. Fish's latest:

• Ten things pigs don't want you to know about Zombie Reagan.
• How much does the GOP nomination matter?
• Stuck in a moment.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Bad comedian.
• The reeducation of an American teacher. See yesterday's post for standard disclaimer.
• Findings. 
• O! that's Napoleon in the photos in case you don't recognize him from that angle. Stanley and Rose are one-third his size and terrorizing him. 
• Butt-slasher may have left area!
• Washington DC has a professional soccer team? It's true, they just haven't played a game in twenty-seven fucking years.
• Go to 16:40 for five minutes of one of my favorite places. I haven't played in months. When I could the weather sucked. This weekend, dammit.
• Oh, that guy who rolled the camera man? That's Craigger. Watch him ace at Duck:

• Yes, yes I have posted today's poem before. I like it.
• Creeley. I posted one of his poems in the past few days. He once was big to me, then gone to me, coming back to me.
• The Plate.
• The Fountain.
• Mathematics Considered as Vice.
• An Offering for Patricia.
• Dilemma.
• High roller. 
• Country freak.
• This week's new releases.
• HOLYFUCK! Stream new Mogwai!

ETYMOLOGICAL DIRGE

Heather McHugh

Calm comes from burning.
Tall comes from fast.
Comely doesn't come from come.
Person comes from mask.

The kin of charity is whore,
the root of charity is dear.
Incentive has its source in song
and winning in the sufferer.

Afford yourself what you can carry out.
A coward and a coda share a word.
We get our ugliness from fear.
We get our danger from the lord.

One Morning after a Storm.... So Poetry Configures Its Comparisons

I time-stamped the second I read about what I thought would be the next big media shitstorm - I though, think how happy the suits at Fox and CNN will be - because, regardless of any facts released since or in the future, everyone (including you, me) would hysterically and luxuriously default to his or her current moral/political zeitgeist's interpretation reflexively, in my case the arch self-congratulatory and self-deprecating self-rebuking of a recent apostate.

As of seven this morning, it's buried on the Post's front webpage, doesn't appear at all on the NYT's front webpage, and none of the mouth-breathers at the Corner have started woofing, so maybe I'm wrong about everyone but me. On the other hand, I was going to write more about Maryland's uniform in general and my willfully incoherent aesthetic of uniforms in lengthy particular (plus more Harkin v Obama nonsense), so lucky you, consider yourself spared. Look! I did it again!

• Towards an aesthetics of entropy (part two).
• Cassandra and the limits to growth.
• School Reform: A Failing Grade. Standard disclaimer: my wife is a public school teacher, one of my best friends is a public school teacher, my mother and father were public school teachers, some of my favorite aunts and uncles were school teachers, so I am completely pro-teacher; I post links about public education that strike me as important but because of my immense conflict of interest I wont hazard a comment past that.
• Neo-liberalism redux.
• Was there an alternative?
• Double-dose of Chomsky.
• Stoller has a new piece up on smearing Schneiderman and Your Fucking Washington Post's fucking washingtonpostness.
• Obamapologist responds to Stoller. 
• Disuse your illusion.
• Crackers and pigs.
• Do you suffer from PDS? 
• Two reasons it may not be the shitstorm I thought it would be: (1) those shot were soldiers, not a Villager, and the Villagers don't give a shit about soldiers, and (2) POTUS 12 sucks all the air out of the media vacuum. 
• Peter Pan finally to die. 
• My future hell.
• The million basic plots. 
• Twenty iconic book covers.
• The Long Booker. Nobel will be announced in a month, I haven't seen the traditional Is this the year Philip Roth wins the Nobel stories in Blegsylvania or real life yet.

Julianna Barwick & Ikue Mori - Rejoinder from RVNG Intl. on Vimeo.




HOW SIMILE WORKS

Albert Goldbarth

The drizzle-slicked cobblestone alleys 
of some city; 
                      and the brickwork back 
of the lumbering Galapagos tortoise 
they'd set me astride, at the "petting zoo"....

The taste of our squabble still in my mouth 
the next day; 
                      and the brackish puddles sectioning 
the street one morning after a storm....

So poetry configures its comparisons. 

My wife and I have been arguing; now 
I'm telling her a childhood reminiscence, 
stroking her back, her naked back that was 
the particles in the heart of a star and will be 
again, and is hers, and is like nothing 
else, and is like the components of everything.

Julianna Barwick & Ikue Mori - Dream Sequence from RVNG Intl. on Vimeo.

Corporate's Biggest All-Consuming Media Shitstorm Ever! (Since the Last Until the Next) Starts

now.

There Is No Fence, though Here and There a Weathered Post Asserts a Former Claim, Strands of Fallen Wire Taken by the Dust

Moo thinks her name is Rose, Woof thinks his Stanley. Rose comes when I say Rose and doesn't when I say Moo, Stanley comes running to Stanley, ignores me when I shout Woof, and OK, they've voted (and Earthgirl and Planet have voted) and I'm a democracy whenever I can be (which is whenever it's in my interest, just like you). Rose is more Rose than Moo anyway, Stanley Stanley. They are wonderful, happy, Rose sweet, Stanley the funniest, most fearless cat ever. Chirpers both, but best of all, bless Fleabus, she's trying, still the best cat ever.

Speaking of Stanley I left my copy of Gaddis' The Recognitions on my desk at work on Friday, and since The Recognitions is only available as an audio book on kindle, Saturday morning I started Elkin's George Mills (which is downloadable to kindle), and here's the title character summing up the book's main theme:

     "Don't be cowardly (said Guillalume). You're still my father's subject, you know. Mine, too, for that matter."
     "I'm everybody's subject," Mills groaned. "I have more law than a company of solicitors."
     It was true. If before he had felt slandered by their notion of him - the tapestry condition - now he knew himself crushed and circumscribed by the jurisdictional one: state, sultanate, realm, duchy, palatinate, empire, dominion, kingdom, and bog - all suzerainty's pie slice say-so.

I was self-imposing sillyass ethical rules on my reading and writing long before shitty bleggalethics. For thirty years I forbade myself reading two novels simultaneously, which really sucked if the novel I was reading sucked because I felt morally compelled to finish any novel I started if I read the first twenty pages; it didn't matter how shitty the remaining four hundred pages turned out. We're not only ruled from above and below but within. You'll get Gaddis or Elkin or nothing, and I'll like it.

• More tomorrow (or not) on that Stoller piece, though let me say that those of us who think Obama is a Corporate motherfucker rather than an honest broker doing the best he can are the romantic optimists here.
• Price of 911.
• Reflections of a cracker operative apostate.
• On the above.
• Tony Blair has mothered Murdoch's children.
• Will NATO intervene?
• Just asking.
• Nietzsche, for those of you who do.

• In a sign of how incoherent and inconsistent I am about uniform aesthetics, I absolutely love those Maryland flag uniforms. Love them. 
• I seem to be alone. For instance. Heh.
• Actually, about 50/50.
• Dzeko as Snow White.
• Hurricane fighter plane.
• Working girls.
• Labordaze jams.
• Darkblack's (Day after) Sunday Overnight.
• Coming in from the cold.
• Probably not coincidentally, I woke up with this in my head:

THE PROSE POEM

Campbell McGrath

On the map it is precise and rectilinear as a chessboard, though driving past you would hardly notice it, this boundary line or ragged margin, a shallow swale that cups a simple trickle of water, less rill than rivulet, more gully than dell, a tangled ditch grown up throughout with a fearsome assortment of wildflowers and bracken. There is no fence, though here and there a weathered post asserts a former claim, strands of fallen wire taken by the dust. To the left a cornfield carries into the distance, dips and rises to the blue sky, a rolling plain of green and healthy plants aligned in close order, row upon row upon row. To the right, a field of wheat, a field of hay, young grasses breaking the soil, filling their allotted land with the rich, slow-waving spectacle of their grain. As for the farmers, they are, for the most part, indistinguishable: here the tractor is red, there yellow; here a pair of dirty hands, there a pair of dirty hands. They are cultivators of the soil. They grow crops by pattern, by acre, by foresight, by habit. What corn is to one, wheat is to the other, and though to some eyes the similarities outweigh the differences it would be as unthinkable for the second to commence planting corn as for the first to switch over to wheat. What happens in the gully between them is no concern of theirs, they say, so long as the plough stays out, the weeds stay in the ditch where they belong, though anyone would notice the wind-sewn cornstalks poking up their shaggy ears like young lovers run off into the bushes, and the kinship of these wild grasses with those the farmer cultivates is too obvious to mention, sage and dun-colored stalks hanging their noble heads, hoarding exotic burrs and seeds, and yet it is neither corn nor wheat that truly flourishes there, nor some jackalopian hybrid of the two. What grows in that place is possessed of a beauty all its own, ramshackle and unexpected, even in winter, when the wind hangs icicles from the skeletons of briars and small tracks cross the snow in search of forgotten grain; in the spring the little trickle of water swells to welcome frogs and minnows, a muskrat, a family of turtles, nesting doves in the verdant grass; in summer it is a thoroughfare for raccoons and opossums, field mice, swallows and black birds, migrating egrets, a passing fox; in autumn the geese avoid its abundance, seeking out windrows of toppled stalks, fatter grain more quickly discerned, more easily digested. Of those that travel the local road, few pay that fertile hollow any mind, even those with an eye for what blossoms, vetch and timothy, early forsythia, the fatted calf in the fallow field, the rabbit running for cover, the hawk's descent from the lightning-struck tree. You've passed this way yourself many times, and can tell me, if you would, do the formal fields end where the valley begins, or does everything that surrounds us emerge from its embrace?