2012/07/13

Posted by at

Come for the Festival, Have Ye?



High Holy Day in Egoslavia.











Posted by at
Labels: , , , , ,

2012/07/12

Like One of those Novelty Dogs Destined to Gaze from the Back Windows of Cars




A friend thoughtfully sent along this Bush cover of Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing, but meh, I never liked the song, never listened to Gaye but on the radio, but I'd never heard the Bush cover, never knew about it. There are three High Holy Days of Egoslavia this month yet remaining, Kate Bush's birthday one of them, so while the above song washes the sounds of the bad cover out of my ears you'll have to wait until then to hear more. Speaking of yesterday's serendipity continuing, Beth Orton has a show at 6th and I Synagogue on September 27, and I'm going. Who's in? Please let me know asap as I'm guessing it will sell out rapidly (though who knows). Hamster? Richard (who sent me the Bush cover of Gaye, thanks for thinking of me!)? What, you don't like Kate Bush?














KINKY

Denise Duhamel

They decide to exchange heads.
Barbie squeezes the small opening under her chin
over Ken's bulging neck socket. His wide jaw line jostles
atop his girlfriend's body, loosely,
like one of those novelty dogs
destined to gaze from the back windows of cars.
The two dolls chase each other around the orange Country Camper
unsure what they'll do when they're within touching distance.
Ken wants to feel Barbie's toes between his lips,
take off one of her legs and force his whole arm inside her.
With only the vaguest suggestion of genitals,
all the alluring qualities they possess as fashion dolls,
up until now, have done neither of them much good.
But suddenly Barbie is excited looking at her own body
under the weight of Ken's face. He is part circus freak,
part thwarted hermaphrodite. And she is imagining
she is somebody else—maybe somebody middle class and ordinary,
maybe another teenage model being caught in a scandal.

The night had begun with Barbie getting angry
at finding Ken's blow up doll, folded and stuffed
under the couch. He was defensive and ashamed, especially about
not having the breath to inflate her. But after a round
of pretend-tears, Barbie and Ken vowed to try
to make their relationship work. With their good memories
as sustaining as good food, they listened to late-night radio
talk shows, one featuring Doctor Ruth. When all else fails,
just hold each other, the small sex therapist crooned.
Barbie and Ken, on cue, groped in the dark,
their interchangeable skin glowing, the color of Band-Aids.
Then, they let themselves go— Soon Barbie was begging Ken
to try on her spandex miniskirt. She showed him how
to pivot as though he was on a runway. Ken begged
to tie Barbie onto his yellow surfboard and spin her
on the kitchen table until she grew dizzy. Anything,
anything, they both said to the other's requests,
their mirrored desires bubbling from the most unlikely places.


Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

2012/07/11

I Dreamt I Was the Needle in a Compass Some Orienteer Bore through the Forest with a Spinning Heart




I woke up yesterday morning with the above song in my head and posted it at 8:15 EDT. I don't know why it was in my head, though I love the song. Exactly five hours later The Quietus posts news of a new Beth Orton album and links to a new song. The astonishing grace of Serendipity always rubs my faith shiny and new. Beyond the happy coincidence of the Orton songs, an opportunity for an opening monologue during an incredibly busy two days, so songs, links, poem.














HOMEWARDS

Robin Robertson

Our phone call spilled out into the dark
and glittered between the countryside and the town
like the mess of a knife-fight.
Afterwards, all night jittery and spent in the hotel bed,
I dreamt I was the needle in a compass
some orienteer bore through the forest with a spinning heart.


Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

2012/07/10

I Study the Muzzle of Perished Rubber




When I was in fourth/fifth grade my parents sent me to a speech pathologist because I couldn't er, as in farmah, buttah, mothafuckah. I was cured, though I can't trill my Rs so from me a Spanish dog is a but. The speech pathologist asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I said a play-by-play baseball announcer, so he played a videotape of a baseball game and had me do the play-by-play, stopping the tape, making me start over, when I said pitcha, catcha, battah. Very smart, I remember it like yestahday. I listened to Bob Prince broadcast the Pirates when visiting my grandparents. I switched allegiances to the Orioles first because of a girl but then because going to Memorial was a blast, Jon Miller was the voice, the best play-by-play man I've ever heard, if you've only heard him on ESPN you've no idea how good. Have I mentioned I once loved baseball? I've caught myself listening to Nats's games on the radio, the radio team was profiled in YFWP Sunday Magazine, and they're good. I remembered this story trying to not think about Sarah while falling asleep Sunday night.

Hey! if you'd looked at this shitty blog yesterday you'd have seen a clusterfuck-free front page (other than begging for a photo of the Fed's opulent dining room for Frances, no one has delivered), not a link, not a blurp, about the clustahfuck's actahs and enablahs, and nothing about United, who haven't played so long I'm going to rob a bank, not a word about DC United's ownership announcement today. Erick Thorir, an Indonesian business man, is buying a majority stake. The consensus is he wouldn't buy the club to move it to Baltimore, wouldn't buy the club without doing due diligence that a stadium deal with the District has proceeded beyond preliminary talks and some basic parameters have been agreed to even if brutal details need be hammered. My first thought was I hope Thorir doesn't order a Cardiff City on United and change the home kit to red for shirt sales in Asia. You heard it here first.



















CAT, FAILING

Robin Robertson

A figment, a thumbed
maquette of a cat, some
ditched plaything, something
brought in from outside:
his white fur stiff and grey,
coming apart at the seams.
I study the muzzle
of perished rubber, one ear
eaten away, his sour body
lumped like a bean-bag
leaking thinly
into a grim towel. I sit
and watch the light
degrade in his eyes.

He tries and fails
to climb to his chair, shirks
in one corner of the kitchen,
cowed, denatured, ceasing to be
anything like a cat,
and there's a new look
in those eyes
that refuse to meet mine
and it's the shame of  being
found out.  Just that.
And with that
loss of face
his face, I see,
has turned human.


Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

2012/07/09

Posted by at

24th

Posted by at
Labels: ,

2012/07/08

Sarah



A great cat. Rest in peace.
Posted by at
Labels: , ,

Understand, It Was the First Thing I Saw, That Was Fate, It Was the Ballistics!




I woke up like I always do with a Pere Ubu song in my head, the one immediately below. Wasn't going to post today, but saw Carl at Impostume posted the above, so (it is good to reengage the what the fuck) Sunday music.





HEY! Some computer advice. My home desktop hangs on youtubes and when I try to shut it down I get a can't shut down because there's a programs still running, and that won't shut down so I have to force shutdown to turn the thing off. Happens with both Firefux and Chrime. When I turn it back on I get a message:

MICROSOFT VISUAL C++ RUN TIME LIBRARY
RUNTIME ERROR!
PROGRAM C:\...

Um, what? How fix?

Als0 to0, this guy sent me a link to a comic book of Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs (which reminds me, there will be a Magnetic Fields off the latest album added to the traditional July 13 post):





Als0 to0, another bud send me babies that look like Mark E Smith; The Fall cascade is still planned, sooner rather than later, tomorrow even maybe, but only if and after the traditional July 9 post:


Posted by at
Labels: , , , , ,

2012/07/07

Because I Am So Happy and All the Dismal Issues Have Been Made Tractable at Last, and So I Say to Her that the Late Symphonies of Gustav Mahler Are More Lucid If You’re Sitting Close To, and Above, the Orchestra, so that You Can See the Contrapuntal Lines Moving from Strings to Woodwinds and Then Back Again




Gustav Mahler was born 152 years ago today. Serendipitously, listened to the above two weeks ago, the first below last week, the second below this past Tuesday, found Mahler's name on today's birthday search an hour ago. I'd ODed on Mahler in my thirties, rarely listened in my forties, caught the end of the 2nd on the radio a month ago, and... Hey, I'm still trying to find a photo of the Fed's opulent dining hall for Frances, help solicited, maybe one of you has a father who lives across the alley from Fred Fernancke who can ask his father to ask Fred (to die painfully, slowly) to take a photo of the dining room with his iPhone and send it along for a blogpost about what a motherfucking Corporatist stooge Fred is. Als0 to0: Freeform or Death has received a challenge grant from two anonymous donors.  If we can reach $67,000 by Tuesday night, they will kick in $13,000!  This opportunity is a dream come true that will greatly improve our ability to make festival deadlines for this coming year and ultimately help bring the film to a much larger audience. So give here. Als0 to0, yesterday I read this on this guy's recommendation, I recommend it to you, a couple hours of magic, it's been awhile since I read a work of fiction and daydreamed of air-guitaring it. Als0 to0, the good referenced yesterday is still good, the standard standard, the shitty improving, I acknowledge it really serves no purpose other than excuse, but regular programming will resume soon, or not, though I insist it never stopped.





PLEASE MARRY ME

Charles Baxter

We are stretched out on a dingy sofa, and I think
I must be barefoot because a woman whom no one knows
Is massaging the ankle of one leg of mine and the instep
Of the other, all this toward morning, and I have that
Occasional epiphany one has while still asleep
That I am floating down a river
Because I am so happy and all the dismal issues
Have been made tractable at last, and so I say to her
That the late symphonies of Gustav Mahler
Are more lucid if you’re sitting close to, and above,
The orchestra, so that you can see the contrapuntal
Lines moving from strings to woodwinds
And then back again, whereupon this woman,
Sitting (I now realize) at my feet, says, in the full
Heat of our dream life, and in that happiness,
“Please marry me. Your mother likes me,”
And so I wake, not laughing, although my mother

Has been dead for over thirty years, but in wonderment
Over what quality this dream-woman must have owned
To have pleased my mother so that she,
My late mother, would have said, despite her ban
On ordinary pleasantries, that she had liked someone,
Anyone, who might have cared for me, and as I lie
In bed I think of the last movement of Mahler’s Ninth
When the melodic lines go quiet for minute after minute
In a prolonged farewell to music and to life,
Which my mother would attend to in her bathrobe
Late at night, the stereo turned up, blended whiskey
In her highball glass mixed with milk as a disguise,
Leaning back, hand over eyes, silent-movie style
Like Norma Desmond listening as Von Stroheim plays
The organ wearing his white gloves. No, it wasn’t
Mahler, it was Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht,
Moon-drunk music, mad and inconsolable.


Posted by at
Labels: , , , , ,

2012/07/06

Posted by at

Co-Terminus with the Bleeding Hiatus




No Thursday Night Pints, as it should be on the Fifth of July, Redependence Day. Hey, Frances is looking for a photo for of the opulent dining room of the Federal Reserve building in DC for a project she's working on. If you can find one (I haven't so far) please send me the link or the photo and I'll forward it on. Life busy on three fronts, one good, one standard, one shitty. More later, or not.





APPRENTICESHIP

Will Alexander

     ... between impulses and repentances,
     between advances and retreats.
     —Octavio Paz, Eagle or Sun?


Here I am
posing in a mirror of scratch paper sonnets
sonnets as rare
as a live Aegean rhino

absorbing the cracklings of my craft
its riverine volcanoes
its spectacular lightning peninsulas
emitting plentiful creosote phantoms
from an ironic blizzard of unsettled pleromas

scouring through years of unrecognized pablums
of constant arch-rivalry with extinction
bringing up skulls of intensive discourse
by the claws in one’s mind
which seem to burn with systemic reduction

one then suffers poetic scorching by debris
by inaugural timber which flashes
by friction which flares up & harries
by unrecognized moltens collapsing in glass
of initial intuitive neglect

as if one’s fangs
were fatally stifled by incipience
by verbal range war didactics
by territorial driftwood
by sudden undemonstrative detractions
awed
by the diverse infernos of Trakl & Dante

one’s youngish body stands
devoured by reverential print trails
momentarily cancelled
by the loss of blasphemous nerves & upheaval
stung
by demeaning neutralities
ravaged
by a blank Sumatran solar psychosis
by a tasteless collision of rums in transition
by a conspiracy of obscured fertility by hubris

as one sucks in doubt from a wave of tumbling blister trees
there exists irradiations flecked with a gambled synecdoche
with indeterminate earthenware splinters
taking up
from aboriginal density
a forge of Sumerian verbal signs
cooked with a tendency
towards starfish hypnosis
towards psychic confrontational drainage
conducting one’s frictions in a torrential furnace of osmosis & ire

yes
apprenticeship
means poetry scrawled in unremitting leper’s mosaic
cringed in smoky interior cubicles
releasing various deleriums
as if pointed under a blackened Oedipal star
with its dark incapable tints
with its musical ruse of unspoken belladonna

poetics
an imaginal flash of Russian chamber lilies
stretching under a blue marsupial sun
like kaleidoscopic tumbleweed
fugaciously transfixed
upon an anomalous totem of glints
upon rainy Buenos Aires transfusions
above the urinal coppers of a flaming polar star rise

of course
kinetic
like magical malachite rivers
flowing from moons
blowing through the 3/4 summits of motionless anginas

I’ve looked
for only the tonalities that scorch
which bring to my lips wave after wave
of sensitivity by virulence

yes
a merciless bitterness
brewed by a blue-black tornado of verbs
in a surge of flashing scorpion chatter
in a dessicated storm of inferential parallels & voltage
like a scattered igneous wind
co-terminus with the bleeding hiatus & the resumption of breath

resolved by flash point edicts
by consumptive stellar limes
by curvature in tense proto-Bretonian fatigue

mixing magnets
juggling centripetal anti-podes & infinities
cracking the smoke of pure rupestral magentas

yes
hatcheries
floating through acetylene corruption of practiced mental restraint
to splendiferous vistas mingled with inspirational roulette
its mysteriums
always leaping like a grainy rash of scorching tarantellas
or leaking moon spun alloestrophas*
as if speaking
in irregular glossological green Dutch

a frenetic seminar on febricity
a reitteration of hendecasyllabic agitation & stinging
a ferocious vacillation
explosive as random “aggregational” nodes
mimed by a black consonantal dissection
its maximal priority
forked at “hypotactic inclusion”
with isochronous internal procedure
with ratios
with phonic penetralia by distortion
primed by anomalous “nuclear accent”
by a cadence composing syllables & compounds

yes
poetics
its force
jettisoned by “hypotaxis”
by ... paratactic co-ordination
& fire


Posted by at
Labels: , , , ,

2012/07/05

To Encourage Pursuit of Intellectual Professions a City's Central Thoroughfare Might Be Called Mathematics Avenue, Neurochemistry Street, Jurisprudence Boulevard, or Lit Crit Street while at the Edge of Town the Thoroughways and By Ways Could Commemorate Abstractions and Generalized Conditions (as in Global Capital Street, Logic Throughway, Affluence Alley, Interruption Boulevard, Domination Interstate, Accumulation Highway)




Dig these three paragraphs:

But Regan bluntly asserted that Scottish football simply cannot afford to have Rangers outwith the top two tiers of the league structure, with his argument not confined to the commercial impact their absence would have.

“Without Rangers, there is social unrest and a big problem for Scottish society,” claimed Regan. “They have a huge fan base and to contemplate the situation where those fans don’t have a team to support, where those fans are effectively left without a game to follow, I just think that could lead to all sorts of issues, all sorts of problems for the game.

“Tribalism in football is really important. It is part of the game. People follow their clubs with pride, it is passed down from generation to generation. There are thousands of Rangers fans whose fathers and parents and grandfathers have been Rangers fans. You can’t contemplate a situation without that and if Rangers weren’t to exist that could have real dire consequences."

Dig this paragraph:

“Do this research. If we don’t have a season, watch how much evil, which we call it crime, watch how much crime picks up when you take away our game,”  [Ray Lewis] said.

Ray Lewis was referring to the poor who'd lose a vitally important source of income schlepping beer up and down aisles for fucks like me if stadiums lost their two preseason and eight regular season home games (see here, and call me when a Villager asks Obama about this and he bwahahas), the Scottish fuck worried that out-of-tribe peasants will inconvenience the rich with tribal violence normally flood-channeled into hating Celtic. Still, it's an interesting contrast and compare, the metaphors finely abounding.

UPDATE! Fuckyousaurus Rex.










[THE LOST PINES INN WOULD BE A GOOD NAME FOR A MOTEL...]

Lyn Hejinian

The Lost Pines Inn would be a good name for a motel, or No Sheep in the Meadow, The Lost Egos, The Downtown Country Inn, Mike and Ann's, Doug and Diane's, Bob and Joe's or Just Joe's Hotel, Warm Toes Hotel, Anything Goes Inn, The Come Inn, The Company Retreat, The Hermit's Den, La Cave, The Little House Hotel, The Reliquary, The Happy Family Inn, The Rooster's Coop, The Corky Floor, The Henhouse Hotel, The Egg-in-a-Nest, The Rooks Retreat, The Cooks Inn, The Beat A Retreat, and a music group could call itself Crested Loader, or 10-Second Crossing, or 9 Car Train, or Thumb on the Space Bar, or the Unlike Minimums, The Shepherds Without Sheep, Sheep Without Sleep, Two Feminines, Autism, The Twice Maniacs, The Genetics, The Nasty Uncles, Interfering Women, but streets get named typically after numbers or trees of they're given the names of prominent as well as lesser-known citizens or the names of great cities of the world or the great letters of the alphabet from A to Z but in celebration of the things we consume the names of products and objects should be given to some streets (Tagliatelle Lane, Glue Stick Street, iPod Alley) and to encourage pursuit of intellectual professions a city's central thoroughfare might be called Mathematics Avenue, Neurochemistry Street, Jurisprudence Boulevard, or Lit Crit Street while at the edge of town the thoroughways and by ways could commemorate abstractions and generalized conditions (as in Global Capital Street, Logic Throughway, Affluence Alley, Interruption Boulevard, Domination Interstate, Accumulation Highway) and another great name for a motel would be The Soporif's Inn, or The Archive, and Duke, High Spot, Drummer, Archimedes, Shadow, Ranger, and Gamelon might name some of the 220 horses at work under the hood of the blue 2003 220-horse power P.T. Cruiser that got me home by bedtime.


Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , ,

2012/07/04

Theme Song July 2012

Posted by at
Labels: , , , , ,

The News from Fleabustan (a Pun It Took *Ten Months* to Occur to Me, WTF?), Plus Earthgirl's Power, Plus the Two Fourth of July Songs You'd Expect Me to Post















Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

2012/07/03

Posted by at

There Is a Certain Challenge in Being Humane to Hornets but Not Much




Here's the Long Fin Killie/Bows cascade I've been threatening. Because fine metaphors always abound, the SCOTUS Bowl and the post-game wrap-up and the post-Deracho powerlessness both serve emblematically for my scowling malaise here, there, everywhere, sorry for putting that McCartney song in your head, but it's in mine. Have I mentioned that in the midst of eye-slumps and heart-slumps and soul-slumps and general damn-slumps, my ears have never been better? Some may disagree. Here, have this Long Fin Killie song:










BURIED AT SPRINGS

James Schuyler

I

There is a hornet in the room
and one of us will have to go
out the window into the late
August midafternoon sun. I
won. There is a certain challenge
in being humane to hornets
but not much. A launch draws
two lines of wake behind it
on the bay like a delta
with a melted base. Sandy
billows, or so they look,
of feathery ripe heads of grass,
an acid-yellow kind of
goldenrod glowing or glowering
in shade. Rocks with rags
of shadow, washed dust clouts
that will never bleach.
It is not like this at all.
The rapid running of the
lapping water a hollow knock
of someone shipping oars:
it’s eleven years since
Frank sat at this desk and
saw and heard it all
the incessant water the
immutable crickets only
not the same: new needles
on the spruce, new seaweed
on the low-tide rocks
other grass and other water
even the great gold lichen
on a granite boulder
even the boulder quite
literally is not the same

II

A day subtle and suppressed
in mounds of juniper enfolding
scratchy pockets of shadow
while bigness—rocks, trees, a stump—
stands shadowless in an overcast
of ripe grass. There is nothing
but shade, like the boggy depths
of a stand of spruce, its resonance
just the thin scream
of mosquitoes ascending.
Boats are light lumps on the bay
stretching past erased islands
to ocean and the terrible tumble
and London (“rain persisting”)
and Paris (“changing to rain”).
Delicate day, setting the bright
of a young spruce against the cold
of an old one hung with unripe cones
each exuding at its tip
gum, pungent, clear as a tear,
a day tarnished and fractured
as the quartz in the rocks
of a dulled and distant point,
a day like a gull passing
with a slow flapping of wings
in a kind of lope, without
breeze enough to shake loose
the last of the fireweed flowers,
a faintly clammy day, like wet silk
stained by one dead branch
the harsh russet of dried blood.


Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , ,

2012/07/02

Bell Cosmos




Hamster discovered and sent along today a 2010 article on Chris Bell, Big Star's "other genius." I knew some of the history but not all; I haven't listened to Bell's I Am the Cosmos in maybe five years. I do have a Long Fin Killie cascade in the bloogercan but am too aarghed in real life and bloogerpooped here to fill in the blanks: verily, fuck it. Still, any excuse to post Big Star is a good excuse. All Big Star songs from Record #1, Bell singing lead.











Posted by at
Labels: , , ,

2012/07/01

(What's the Bus that Comes by Here?)




Just saying here so I don't say it there and I don't say it here tomorrow.

UPDATE! Als0 to0, Koi Pond and Bardo Pond.
Posted by at
Labels: , , , ,

United 3, Montreal 0




Couldn't make it, I feel horrible, but was on call because of the storm on four different fronts, couldn't see it because motherfucking Comcast blacks out Direct Kick in DC. Forgive me. Now there's not another home game until July 28, and that just a friendly, not another home league game until August 4th, weird-ass schedule this year. Here's Fullback, here's Goff, here's Webb, here's Shatzer.  Goddamn it, I feel I betrayed a faith.
Posted by at
Labels: , ,

2012/06/30

I Still Spill My Margins, My Line-Spacing, and Summon Crisis




At 2:58 PM EST yesterday afternoon Meredith Monk, with no prompting (I hadn't just heard a song on WFMU, wasn't thumbing through a stack of my CDs), started singing in my head. Besides this being a good thing, no one has submitted a playlist for today. In fact, consider this the last time I mention it - you are always welcome and encouraged to submit playlists, especially for weekend days in the Blog Days of Summer, but I'm not gonna badger you about it, though there will be a Wire cascade next non-United, non-birthday post unless I get one. It may be awhile; the greatest worst thunderstorm I've ever witnessed - and I'm going to be 53 in two months - roared through 1030 last night, fabulous to watch, horrible in after effect, so no electricity at home up to a week, possibly more if a repeat performance happens tonight as predicted. If you too experienced the storm, you're probably not reading this the same day that I typed it. I like dramatic weather events much more when they happen to other people. Fine metaphors abound.





  • Greenwald poses a thought experiment. I've always thought I'm more likely to be killed by a domestic terrorist act as a foreign (which is to say I'm more likely to be struck by lightning than either). I don't doubt that the same invasions of privacy and suspensions of civil liberties that I'm always barking about and that I railed against during Occupy - remember Occupy? -  are being used to keep me "safe" from this guy in Mississippi, which doesn't mean that guy in Mississippi didn't piss himself in glee at footage of Oakland cops busting Occupiers' heads.
  • The after-image of the surveillance state.
  • Raw hubris is still the rule.
  • Has any cracker blogged or tweeted yet the storm was Old Bearded White Guy w/Beard God's revenge for John Robert's treason?
  • Southern values revived.
  • Hey, did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team? It's true, and the home game scheduled for tonight is still on and yay, I plan on being there though there are suddenly obstacles in the way.
  • Branko!
  • Four lists of words.







Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

2012/06/29

Posted by at

Framed by Night and Dwarfed by a Ravenous Inward-Turning Light




Guess what we talked about at Thursday Night Pints. The whoever brings up POTUS 12 first buys two nights' rounds rule was suspended by agreement early. We vary on where in American politics kabuki turns kayfabe, but a face turn by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, regardless his motives (which we got to next), is an unexpected swerve in whatever narrative about America each of us believes; yes, in full admittance of our respective complicities vis a vis those narratives, it couldn't not be talked about. L held that Roberts was embarrassed by association with Alito, Thomas, especially Scalia, didn't want Harvard Law students reading history books in a hundred years unanimously calling him the worst Chief Justice ever. I said, maybe, but I think Roberts ruled for the corporate interests that stand to make hundreds of billions of dollars on a plan cooked up by the Heritage Foundation. Nobody suggested that Roberts carefully weighed the arguments for and against Obamacare and ran those algorithms through his keenly trained and logically honest mind then rendered a Solomonic judgment. All confessed to childish delight at cracker heads' exploding, you're never too small for schadenfreude. The whole SCOTUS/POTUS discussion took five minutes, then we talked about Balotelli and why the Mannschaft suck against Italy, Mantel's Bringing Up the Bodies, which both L and K read (and loved and really loved) since we last met, D's new grandson, nine and a half pounds, ouch, and a bit of a miracle, yay! and a bunch of stuff I'm not going to talk about here. So something has changed in each of our narratives of where kabuki turns kayfabe: the fuck-it has noticeably taken root. We debated whether that's good or bad, our kabuki and our kayfabe.










EVENING PRACTICE

D.A. Nurske

I asked my father,
“would you rather die
of cancer or a heart attack?
Would you rather be executed
or put in jail for life?
Which would you rather be—
a spy or a sentinel?”
And he tried to answer
honestly, combing his thinning hair
with his fingers, thinking of something else.
At last he fell silent. I ran out
to savor the dregs of dusk
playing with my friends
in the road that led to the highway.
The ball flew up toward day
and landed in night.
We chanted. Every other minute
a truck, summoned by our warnings,
brushed past in a gust of light,
the driver’s curses muffled
by distance: the oncoming wheels
were the point of the game,
like the scores in chalk
or the blood from scuffed knees
that we smeared across our faces:
so when my mother called,
her voice was quaint and stymied
and I took all the time in the world
trotting home past tarped barbecue pits,
past names of lovers filling with sap,
past tentative wind from sprinklers:
then I was stunned to see my golden window
where all faces, hanging plants, dangling pots
were framed by night and dwarfed
by a ravenous inward-turning light.


Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

2012/06/28

Powerless to Attain What You Desire, Yet Bitterly Desiring at All Costs









JEFFERS

Mark Jarmon

To raise a stump of rock into a tower, rolling a stone
     in place as the years pass.
Strangers who only know your silhouette bid it farewell and
     travel to Japan,
Cross China, venture into India, to Europe, and, changed
     by time and space,
Sail home over the bulging eye of ocean only to see, when
     landfall looms in view,
The stump of rock--your tower--on the headland, and you there,
     rolling a stone in place,
The edifice apparently no taller, as if each night you had
     dismantled it
And every day had raised it up again. To know, only in
     completion, the nisus
That dominates the spider when it spins, the bird building
     its nest, the gray whale
Turning toward Mexico and the sea lion clambering up shingle
     toward its mate--
The nisus of cairn-building, rock-piling, mortaring stone has
     dominated you.
It dominates the reader bent above the book, poised like a
     stork hunting; like sleep,
It is an utter unity of will and action, known--at least by
     man or woman--
Only when it is over. And when the work is over--tower
     building, poem writing--
You hear gulls cry and see them kiting at the bull terrier
     out in the garden.
He has snatched up some strip of bloody fur they meant to mince
     with beaks. Best to detach it
From his jaws, let gulls eat refuse like that. Go out into
     the damp twilight, feel
The chill along the arms, through cloth, and take the petty
     morsel from the pet dog, toss it
To the scolding gulls, down the rocky bank beyond the garden.
     And lead the dog to food
Inside the kitchen. Enter, expecting to see the woman, the two
     sons, and your place at table,
Waiting. And find you are alone. Even the dog at heel--
     vanished. The stone house
Glumly dark and a dumb cold coming from its walls, that only
     whiskey cuts.
The cold and dark conceal much, and memory must be evoked
     to penetrate them.
Meanwhile, they are the elements that starlight loves.
     Clear cold, pure darkness, outside the window,
Beside the guestbed, where you have planned to lie at last,
     viewing the pure, clear stars without
Obstruction by the crude suburban dwellings--that absurd roof,
     down there, like a coal scoop,
And the spite fences either side your property. Nothing
     in creation shows
More the supreme indifference to humanity, despite the patterns
     of the zodiac.
The stars, like bits of crystal ground into a griststone's
     granite rim, are small themselves.
Only the surrounding emptiness is great. Take comfort in the
     emptiness; lie down.
The drink will help you sleep awhile alone, without her, until
     that section of the night
You've come to know--that region you once sailed through
     peacefully, worn out by work and love.
Now, stranded there till dawn, sleepless, it will not matter
     that you foresaw the planet's end
Or our end on the planet. Only sleep will matter. At that
     hour, in those conditions,
Just out of reach, receding like the dark itself as daylight
     pushes in, sleep only
Will be the thing you want. Powerless to attain what you
     desire, yet bitterly
Desiring at all costs. Perhaps, then, memory, not starlight,
     will intercede,
And the stone house gather warmth from its hearth fire, and
     loved ones reappear, and you will sleep.


Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , ,

2012/06/27

What Goes Unsaid May or Not Be Two Pair and Half Bluff




Playlist today from good blogfriend Brad of Delayed Departure. I dig Afghan Whigs and most Dulli projects, though I've been told by my Seattle DJ friend that of all the musicians who've performed live at KEXP, Dulli is beyond doubt the biggest asshole any and all ever dealt with. Playlists are still solicited, c'mon people, I know some of you listen to music. It's the bloggiest Blog Days of Summer ever, I think why it puzzles and fascinates me so much is that it's also the Summer of POTUS, though I've always noticed that the clusterfuckier things are the quieter our stringtown in Blegsylvania gets except at the Big Box blogs. We may pride ourselves that we shop for better products though our consumer behavior is as predictably ingrained as everyone else. Hey, send me music.


















Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

2012/06/26

Posted by at

Too Late: Duty Has Become Habit, Habit a Duty




Fuck, the blogdays of summer, here's inside baseball to alienate everyone else, re: yesterday's United post - you do realize the danger of Shevchenko coming to United, yes, what a bullet that's been dodged that was never shot? Hear that sound Jill St John makes when she sees that Bombe Suprise? That's the sound Rosie, top shelf below, makes for treats. That EEE sound Jill St John makes when the kabobs are... wait, have I mentioned this?





....aflame? Rosie when we pick her up and put her in a room because she's on a vet-ordered diet. By the way, I may post links of the reflexive pukestorms over this week's SCOTUS rulings but I'm not going to flotsam in the SCOTUS pukestorm of jetsam this week, awoo. Somewhere Rod Dyachenko is failing another audition.










[UNTITLED]

Lyn Hejinian

Lost after all. You can leave any time
This rat's like me, she has a human soul
Too late: duty has become habit, habit a duty
Poems distilled from other poems will probably pass away
But there's dance in the old dame yet
No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before


Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

2012/06/25

Metros 3, United 2




Sorry, busy Monday to start plus car broke down at 650 this morning in an illegal parking spot near a 711 in Bethesda where I stop to get coffee, $300, two hours, and a new key later I'm drowning busy even more. I do want to say this: the backline sucks so much that St Benny of Olsen feels it necessary to play the fully-engined but horribly suckful Danny Cruz, who sucks sucks sucks sucks in everything but being a filthy defender, jeebusfuck he sucks, that cross in the 30th second notwithstanding. Sucks. McDonald is a dog, Russell is a fossil, Woolard is a stiff, Jakovic is a clown. Get Boskovic his new contract, AND GODDAMN PLAY HIM, MOVE DEROSSARIO TO WITHDRAWN FORWARD, go buy some defenders (not Shevchenko) in the August window, all will be fine.

Here's Fullback (congratulations!), Shatzer, Goff. More about game, about key, later, or not.
Posted by at
Labels: , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)