Fearful in the Disguise of Self-Assurance

The first guy I gave a POTUS vote to. On the previous. The drone that killed his grandchild. Today in motherfucking Obama. The decline in honesty. Vandalism, assault, blocking traffic, equally bad in the eyes of the law. OK, I've been trolled: idiots who think a Rolling Stone magazine cover will create more homegrown terrorists than the actions of the empire, idiots who defend capitalism bemoaning Rolling Stone for trolling for more readers. UPDATE! on the previous. Forensic topology via Greyhoos. I've never seen Game of Thrones, have neither inclination nor objection to perhaps seeing it one day, link posted solely because I was told yesterday that Emma Peel is in the show. You'll see more of the young Emma here on Saturday, a high holy day. Bicycles a proxy in culture wars? Seven ways utensils change the taste of food. Towne Crest! Check out digg.com, excellent so far. Original plagiarism. Eleven Stephen Dixon eBooks. I confess he's never worked for me, about to make my umpteenth every other year attempt. Knausgaard, for those of you who do. Niedecker, for those of you who do. Dogs and vision. The rise of the fragmented novel? Return of the silly season. The Milosz I sent a friend came back as undeliverable, I've her new address, will send soon, but first, for a few days, more Milosz typed out here. Prunella says stuff then provides a Sunny Day Real Estate cascade. You'll never beat dogs. Holyfuck, film production of Xenakis' Mycenes. Yes, I know I'm always posting Xenakis.






INITIATION

Czeslaw Milosz

Vanity and gluttony were always her sins
And I fell in love with her in the phase of life
When our scornful reason is the judge of others.

Then I went through a sudden initiation.
Not only did our skins like each other, tenderly,
And our genitals fit once and for all,
But her sleep at arm's length exerted its power
And her childhood in a city she visited dreaming.

Whatever was naive and shy in her
Or fearful in the disguise of self-assurance
Moved me, so that - we were so alike -
In an instant, not judging anymore,
I saw two sins of mine: vanity, gluttony.

You Can't Recall My Book, Don't You Know Who I Am?

 
Re: this comment yesterday, here's a typical encounter with a full professor.

To be fair, not a typical but not a rare encounter with a full professor, one that, bless Serendipity, started my day just a few hours after I posted that comment.

Cradles in the Milkiest Arms of the Universe

  
Yes, it's sure to disappoint, these comebacks are never fully satisfying (though the two songs from 2011 are pretty effing good, one of them below), but still, blessed news, the chance to post Mazzy Star. Have I ever mentioned I love Mazzy Star? There, that's one of the rhetorical tics I referenced earlier today. The song below the Goldbarth poem has to be one of this shitty blogs five most posted songs ever. Two more tics in that sentence. Thanks to Hamster for the heads-up (he also sends news of a capella versions of Bowie's *Starman* and *Five Years* - I'm glad he reads Slate because I always forget too until I remember William Salatin and Matthew Yglesias write there and deliberately don't read it - though I do like Dahlia Lithwick). Anyway, bad mood gone for me but not for thee. I've never been called an *ipecac wretcher.* And the Goldbarth is claimed.





...one of whom had apparently died in childbirth; we found the skeleton of an infant within her remains

Albert Goldbarth

- it was, in it's way,
a pietà.

And the pictures in the planetarium gallery
of a star in all the stages of its last progression,
dying - first a "white dwarf," then a "black dwarf,"
then a "black hole," that the composition
cradles in the milkiest arms of the universe. 

Angry Aeriel Display of Flapping

Here's that story. Running up to grocery this morning to get coffee I forgot to buy yesterday heard first a radio commercial for University of Maryland Shock Trauma in which a man talks to an air-gun hammer - as in Hey, Air-Gun Hammer, you don't scare me - which was followed by a Norwegian Cruise Line commercial in which a woman tells her husband, a dolphin, that she loves his salty mouth and then tells him to now come over here and give me some sugar. So, links, offered by and large without much commentary, a practice I've learned to employ when I'm in an angry mood and am jonesing to write everything mean and spiteful. Criminal trial is a privilege of whiteness. As some have correctly noted, in is entirely "possible to think the jury made the right choice based on evidence and that Zimmerman is entirely at fault for what happened." I think that's most likely - Coates and Silbur think so too, but of course other possibilities exist too. And while I'm parroting ideas, someone tweeted - I paraphrase - has the NRA come out and said Martin wouldn't have been killed if he had been armed and called for the arming of all young black males? They speak of race. How the system works. Putin laughs. The mindset of an NSA defender. The mindset of the State Dept. Oopsy! Breaking kayfabe. An important rhetorical question. Austerity attacks. Had interesting bleggal interactions yesterday with a couple of bleggal overlords, once allies fallen out - more bored with each other than fallen out to be more accurate - each in their own way (un)intentionally reminded me that I am a little. Previous sentence written as unspitefully as I am capable. Speaking of blegging, I'm not sure what's gonna happen when a certain date comes around and I'm not precisely sure what blooger is threatening me with or what the repercussions will be, but should this place go dark it (a) won't be me and (b) here's the fallout shelter. Alternatively, fuck this. All powerful masters. I expected more fall out from Seidel's review of Kushner. It was mean and spiteful. I have Goldbarth if anyone wants some. The genesis of the bleggal overlord dispute was the use of rhetorical tics in writing, I said, lordy, nobody use rhetorical tics more than I do, like this one: Some days anger calls for Sun Kil Moon, other days it calls for these, posted together countless times when I'm enjoying a pissy mood:






27,000 MILES

Albert Goldbarth

These two asleep . . . so indrawn and compact,
like lavish origami animals returned

to slips of paper once again; and then
the paper once again become a string

of pith, a secret that the plant hums to itself . . . .
You see? — so often we envy the grandiose, the way

those small toy things of Leonardo’s want to be
the great, air-conquering and miles-eating

living wings
they’re modeled on. And the bird flight is

amazing: simultaneously strength,
escape, caprice: the Arctic tern completes

its trip of nearly 27,000 miles every year;
a swan will frighten bears away

by angry aerial display of flapping wingspan.
But it isn’t all flight; they also

fold; and at night on the water or in the eaves
they package their bodies

into their bodies, smaller, and deeply
smaller yet: migrating a similar distance

in the opposite direction.

Don't Try This at Home. On Second Thought, Come In, Your Tumbling Face Ungladden

A friend who knows my love for George sent me that song as greetings last night. Read his latest post and work backwards. Also, keep it in front of you. Check the Terms of Service agreement. Eleven things he tries to do to achieve a marginally productive relationship with the internet. On not making a living. I don't think this means the rebirth of Old Dirty Bama's blog, though here's hoping.  Proust, for those of you who do. Beckett, for those of you who do. A collapsing sign. You choose: debut novelist or garage rocker? A slideshow from yesterday. Fourteen Joy Division songs for Ian Curtis' birthday. Aargh-noise returns tomorrow, or not. Yes, I post this all the time, the best Traveling Wilbury's song, a George song:





SUBURBAN BURMA

John Ashbery

Don't try this at home. On second thought, come in,
your tumbling face ungladden. And see what happens.

The boy said, I have the look of two
through the other side of the shower. And how do we
get that, except by adding it up
in one long, fateful column.
The others are with you. Space occurs. Naturally. Not every
impulse makes it through to. You have you.
Are you a big person in the morning.

Angels of the New Year winnow followers.
We go through the motions
again. And breezes come in.
Those who remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
Plus, it's part of history.
We, however, have no such druthers.
We'll build a higher vandalism, "with the look of ending."
We were both trying to hide.

A hotel is not a big clay window
stepfathered in,
resists any effort to change the subject.
Be calm and get your stuff.

Born Fifty-Eight Years Ago Today

Ian Curtis. Not a High Holy Day, but a Holy Day in Egoslavia nonetheless. Baker's dozen more songs below the fold.
 


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*

 
*
       


*


   
*


   
*

Let Seethe Rise, Punch Down, Rise Again

Baltimore Art Museum, July 14, 2013. In the galleries, in the lobbies, in the gift shop, urgent whispers, Zimmerman this, Zimmerman that. So, have some Holyfuck tonight, plus tomorrow is a Egoslavian Holy Day (see tags for hint, send me request soonish if you want particular song(s)) which I plan to elevate to a High Holy Day not only because recent re-listenings have curled toes but to take advantage to not urgently whisper, argue, taunt - this list in inclusive to me and my not urgently whispering, arguing, taunting, haranguing, screaming, damning, at least not tomorrow, yo - harangue, scream, or damn, yo. The below is a sculpture by Bruce Nauman.

Unless You Walk into It Freely, and with Open Despairing Eyes, You Can't Even See the Windows

• Napoleon Alert System Activated. It's been since early Monday morning since any of us has seen him. 
• UPDATE! Works every time. Deactivating Napoleon Alert System
• Wilfully Obscure reminded me yesterday of The Nobodys.
• The music if fine, but since I hadn't thought of them in at least two decades it reminded me that I was young once, though you may not believe it.
• Remember when mocking Michelle Malkin was Left Blegsylvania's most satisfying gag? Someone named Melissa Harris Perry scolded Edward Snowden for being - get this - an attention slut. Regardless of what confidential information Snowden reveals, the real value of the Snowden Affair - sorry, I keep repeating myself - is in the reaction not only of Power but in Power's liberal propagandists' behavior. Melissa Harris Perry - whoever the fuck she is, I'm told she's a load - is pissed Snowden's attention sluttery is eclipsing her attention sluttery, and Melissa Harris Perry is right.
• I say this with full admittance - my constant admittance - of my attention sluttery.
• Q&A w/Greenwald. I must confess, the visceral hatred of Greenwald by the professional Left propagandists fascinates me on sooooooooo many levels.
• Lesson learned: don't weaponize your sidewalk. But yes, I've not mentioned the Zimmerman trial much because what can be said about a country where a murdered black kid is put on trial for his own murder?
• Twenty-four hour moratorium on further comment self-imposed.
• This will be an exceptionally slow day here in smaller Stringtowns as most everyone goes to Stringtown's bleggal overlords to keep up with the story.
• How to get away with murder.
• You are the enemy.
• Weapons of mass distraction.
• The conspiracy matrix.
• Neither a rightist or leftist be.
• Angst of pianists.
• Today in motherfucking blooger, anyone here I trust know the back-end of blooger as in dealing w/google or know anyone they trust. Dear blooger:

• Picard was 73 yesterday, btw. And who the fuck uses sillyass Star Trek allusions?
• Midsummer.
• A feeling of emptiness. 
• A history of the secret.
• Using, rather than being used, by our devices.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links. 
• Maggie's weekly links.
• Cleveland 1911, for you two.
• Crunching literary numbers.
• Golf is punk rock.
• A history of the Cult of Mayonnaise.
• Spicer interview. 
• Heavy summer rain.
• That novel, Naked Singularity? that failed me, me not it. The PEN Awards say it was me.
• Just because I decided I wasn't going to post a Kate Bush song each day of July for her birthday at month's end doesn't mean there won't be any Kate Bush until her birthday. Went to sleep listening to this one, woke up, the song was still in my head:

[LETTER TO GARY BUTTONE]

Jack Spicer

Dear Gary,

   Somehow your letter was no surprise (and I think you knew that it was no surprise or you would have tried to break the news more gently); somehow I think we understand what the other is going to say long before we say it—a proof of love and, I think, a protection against misunderstanding. So I've been expecting this letter for five weeks now—and I still don't know how to answer it.

   Bohemia is a dreadful, wonderful place. It is full of hideous people and beautiful poetry. It is a hell full of windows into heaven. It would be wrong of me to drag a person I love into such a place against his will. Unless you walk into it freely, and with open despairing eyes, you can't even see the windows. And yet I can't leave Bohemia myself to come to you—Bohemia is inside of me, in a sense is me, was the price I paid, the oath I signed to write poetry.

   I think that someday you'll enter Bohemia—not for me (I'm not worth the price, no human being is), but for poetry—to see the windows and maybe blast a few yourself through the rocks of hell. I'll be there waiting for you, my arms open to receive you.

   But let's have these letters go on, whether it be days, years, or never before I see you. We can still love each other although we cannot see each other. We will be no farther apart when I'm in Berkeley than we were when I was in Minneapolis. And we can continue to love each other, by letter, from alien worlds.


   Love,
   Jack

And We Still Haven't Walked in the Glow of Each Other's Majestic Presence

Fifty-three today, this guy. When we met in 5th grade forty-four years ago neither of us predicted the weirdest year of our lives would be 2013.

There's a Jolt, Quasi-Electric, When One of Our Myths Reverts to Abstraction

 

• Went to sleep with that Sonic Youth song in my head.
• That novel I posted a photo of yesterday? It failed me, I didn't fail it, I gave a hundred pages, fifty more than I should have because I thought it was my fault the novel sucked, it wasn't, the novel sucked. Baal save me from first novels written in the first person in which every character in every dialogue competes to be the smartest and most cuttingly ironically detached social observer. Sure, it's like twitter, or Stringtown, or your staff lounge, it's me, doesn't mean I want to read it. I can't tell you how liberating it is to know in this one case with this one novel it wasn't me at fault. Best SHAZAM! that's happened to me since the last until the next. An unshackling.
• We talked about trolls last night at Thursday Night Pints. Analog trolls, digital trolls, trolls at work, trolls in real life, trolls in Stringtown. The trolls we are, to others, to ourselves. There were details in the stories I can't talk about (analog trolls) and details in the stories I could talk about (digital trolls) but only the first is interesting, the second, fuck that. The history of trolling - there's always been trolling - and technological innovations in trolling. Fuckwads in our lives, how we can avoid being fuckwads in return. And fail.
• Contained selves: In the machinery of social media, none of this experience need be particularly transgressive to be felt as transformative. Posting videos of one’s cat is sufficient to tremble the network. The contradictions and intensities and dangers of attempting to write the truth about oneself are made accessible to anyone with a Tumblr, and at the same time, new resources other than opaque language are readily available to convey affect on social-media sites. These resources (gifs, links, images, likes, screen grabs, serial selfies, cut-and-paste collages, etc.) can seem to express the self without the same limits brought about by the imprecision or, maybe more often, the overprecision of one’s own words, which come from some posited central location of the “I.” That “I” is a transcendental trap, binding one to the posited position of the speaking subject.

• Into the Darkness? Silber's bleggal history, +
• Branding strategies for the viscous phallic-monster.
• Repercussions.
• Joe Fucking Biden calling Latin American presidents, telling them they only *think* they know what a motherfucking asshole America can be, so remember your fucking place.
• Design as virus #16.
• A road I drive on nearly every day.
• BRT!
• The history of English in ten minutes.
• Bleggalgazing.
• Easy.
• Ohio River. This is true: The Ohio is the bigger river when it merges with the Mississippi, it should be the Ohio River that flows through New Orleans.
• Why we abandom books.
• Notes on Auden.
• When uniforms go wrong.
• Return of one of the dullest debates ever.
• The Transparent Man.
• Why we abandon blogs. In the works.
• Simic interview.
• Woke up this morning with This Heat in my head:

UPPER WORLD

Rae Armantrout

If sadness
is akin to patience

                            we're back!


Pattern recognition
was our first response

to loneliness.

Here and there were like
one place.

But we need to triangulate
for someone to show.


*

There's a jolt, quasi-electric,
when one of our myths
reverts to abstraction.

Now we all know
every name's Eurydice,
briefly returned
from blankness

and the way back
won't bear scrutiny.

High voices
over rapid-pulsing synthesizers
inton, "without you"---

which is soothing.

We prefer meta-significance:

the way the clouds exchange
white scraps
in glory.

No more wishes.

No more bungalows
behind car-washes
painted the color of
swimming pools.

Tula, These Folks Come for the Festival. Your Daddy Can Put Them Up, Can't He?

No, it's the day after tomorrow, but the celebrant asked a good question yesterday, I paraphrase: when do we officially stop paying for season tickets to United. I responded: 232 - if ownership keeps trending in current direction - isn't in dire danger of disappearing yet, though I see dire direction on the horizon. (And I know it's a perfect metaphor for my self-absorption's ability to extrapolate universal symbolism out of personal inconvenience, but the 7:00 start time pisses me of so fucking thoroughly beyond everything else Thorir Fuckstick is doing....). Four quick things: it took me a second to think 232? Second, what did that just signify? Third, what if I am wrong about the motives of Levein Thorir (or is it Thorir Levein, I'm pretty sure it's Levein Thorir), that they are not fielding the cheapest team they can until they either get a new stadium in DC or a new stadium elsewhere, what if they are going understandably lean but not starving for starving's sake, trying to build a core of young players whose contracts United controls. Fourth, who the fuck wrote the previous sentence? The same guy who four sentences ago forgot, after a decade plus, for a second, what 232 signified, that's who. So my soccer hasn't caught up to my politics in that lamest of gags, or it's passed my politics in that lamest of gags, or, most likely, they still peg. Working on it. Forever.
  
 

• Mr Alarum reminded me of Antarctica about ten minutes ago.
• Hey, help Arthur.
• Pincus humiliated for his toolitude, must mean Greenwald's an attention slut. 
• Tula, toolitude, see what I did there?
• Speaking of tools, I was delighted to find I did not dance a jig of joy - well, I did jig a dance of joy, but is was jig of joy that I did not dance a jig of joy at news of the Park Police bust of the asshole Adam Koresh. Strangest fucking days of my life.
• What is he missing in the Snowden Affair? 
• ObamaCare train wreck on twitter.
• Neoliberalism and production.
• Photography is not a crime.
• Good for DC.
• Playing the Card card. 
• Today in motherfucking blooger, this is now appearing all over the html for this post: <span id="bc_0_5b+seedSf8rD" kind="d">
• Reading (in) the electronic wasteland.
• Inexhaustibility.
• Squaring the circle.
• Jim has a playlist for you. 

 




I

Michael Ryan

When did I learn the word “I”?
What a mistake. For some,
    it may be a placeholder,
    for me it’s a contagion.
For some, it’s a thin line, a bare wisp,
    just enough to be somewhere
    among the gorgeous troublesome you’s.
For me, it’s a thorn, a spike, its slimness
    a deceit, camouflaged like a stick insect:
    touch it and it becomes what it is:
ravenous slit, vertical cut, little boy
    standing upright in his white
    communion suit and black secret.

Like a Length of Coiled Rope Which Does Not Disguise in the Final Twists of Its Lengths Its Endings

Found that in files, shot three, four years ago, had forgotten about it. So, Never Let Me Go isn't working. It is my least favorite Ishiguro, so it was desperate stab. Ed's sheer delight in reading Pynchon's Against the Day makes me happy and envious, so after an anniversary dinner at our (until 6:30 last night) favorite Indian restaurant we walked the block to a Barnes and Noble to spend Earthgirl's gift cards. I sent my copy of Against the Day to someone (I don't remember who) after I finished my second reading early in 2012, I thought, it's my favorite Pynchon (yes, more than Gravity's Rainbow), it's three years ahead of scheduled rereading but why not pick it up and see what happens. Not on shelf. What was on shelf was the novel photoed below, I remember the buzz when it came out, it was mentioned in The Millions favorably in the past week, so what the fuck, 40 pages in all good, but this is me I'm talking about so I'm betting against me until I lose a bet.

• I did find a copy of Pynchon's Mason & Dixon in a used bookstore this past weekend. Anyone want it?
• OK, back to the arrgh-mines. Yes, I know, the arrgh-mines are a primary reason I bet against myself enjoying a novel - finish a novel? I can still do that, joyously enjoy a novel I can't.
• The problem with Privacy Moderates.
• On the above.
• Walter Pincus writes error-strewn anti-Snowden column.
• Greenwald guts him.
• On-the-above.
• America against Democracy.
• What force feeding at GITMO looks like.
• Speaking of Villager fucksticks.
• Austerity and the politics of neoliberalism.
• His generation's greatest academic fraud (I say that mostly admiringly) on global protests.
• They are an abomination.
• Production values.
• Poverty in MOCO.
• The neighborhood I grew up in. One block from my parent's house.

• Mathematical proof United sucks.
• Dead reckoning.
• Rancière, for those of you who do.
• Of Pilgrims and Anarchists: on a new book of criticism on Pynchon's Against the Day.
• Inventing literature.
• A 90s' playlist.
• Peter Greenaway on Four American Composers. I dated a woman once who raved about Greenaway's movies, took me to a few, I don't remember a thing about them, whereas I rave about Cage and Glass and especially Monk.
• Earthgirl's favorite novelist in trouble over sequel to Earthgirl's favorite novel.
• Recalling The Raincoats.
• Great dose of monotonous techno.
• Another primary reason I'm failing novels is I'm not failing poetry. I found the collected Jack Spicer when working on bookshelves, have more Spicer today, it is easily the book I've read most since it was published in 2010. More stunning each time. You know the drill.
• I couldn't make The Evens this past Monday. Fuck me. Have some Ian MacKaye product.

A BOOK OF MUSIC

Jack Spicer

Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers.
Where Did it end? There is no telling. No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death. Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons. Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope.

Twenty-Five

And There Are Kites Caught on the Wires Up Above the Street Lamps and the Storm Drains Are All Choked with Dead Branches

New Future Bible Heroes. Gonna go see them with Planet and Ari on July 26 at Black Cat. Anyone else want to go? Hamster, I'm looking at you. OK OK OK, have some links while they're fresh and since you won't get any tomorrow, though take my threats based on previous follow-through on said threats. Josh Marshall, megaload, says Daniel Ellsberg is old and stupid so don't listen to what Ellsberg says about Snowden. No link, go find or avoid on you own. Daily motherfucking Obama. Begging, charity, who we are now. We all need shelter. The symbolism of technology. New Inquiry's Sunday links. Yeah, United played last night, tied Colorado in Colorado 0-0, watched twenty minutes, went to bed. Apple just sent me an email telling me the best way to celebrate five years of Apple aps is to buy more Apple aps. New Coover coming, a sequel to his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists. Another riff on Against the Day. Three Mary Ruefle poems. Ashbery interview from 1983 - High Egoslavian Holy Day later this month. Circleville Ohio. Ligeti at the 50-yard line. Um, here's the real point of this afternoon brazen blogwhoring and attention-sluttery post: I HAD NO FUCKING IDEA WIRE IS PLAYING BLACK CAT THIS SUNDAY NIGHT!  $20. Anyone? Here, this song is easily one of the five most posted on this shitty blog ever.


    




PSYCHOANALYSIS: AN ELEGY

Jack Spicer

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water. Shedding it
Down empty acres of oak and manzanita
Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana
Driving the hills crazy,
A fast wind with a bit of dust in it
Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.
Or down in the city where the peach trees
Are awkward as young horses,
And there are kites caught on the wires
Up above the street lamps,
And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer
As slow getting started
As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza
After a lot of unusual rain California seems long in the summer.
I would like to write a poem as long as California
And as slow as a summer.
Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow
As the very tip of summer.
As slow as the summer seems
On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside
Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road
Between Bakersfield and Hell
Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now? 

I’m thinking that she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways
Traveling up and down her skin
Long empty highways
With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them
On hot summer nights.
I am thinking that her body could be California
And I a rich Eastern tourist
Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas
Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California
That I have never seen.
Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,
Send them.
One of each breast photographed looking
Like curious national monuments,
One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway
Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging
In the world’s oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?

I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated. How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

Please Refrain from Talking During the Movie

No, not really, but taking a few days off from the noise. I'm working on something which is about the clusterfuck by not being about the clusterfuck and working on something else about the clusterfuck which is about the clusterfuck, how the value of Snowden's revelations isn't in the extent of the spying but in the reactions of people to the event of Snowden and the gut-punches of that never-ending, always craptacular, debate over less-shittiness, but the post's nowhere near ready and the yodel is old and I think I just posted enough so expect no more. Craptacularity. The regularity of craptacularity. The ubiquitous taint of craptacularity. The either/or claw of craptacularity. I'm as crippled as anyone. Anyway, I was working on both last night at the cost of not finding you reads today, sorry. Tomorrow is one of two days a year a post is not tagged My Complicity and I got a date tomorrow night, so nothing but songs and dance and poems the next few days. Fennesz cascade coming - thanks for requests, requests solicited - but not today, in which I didn't take the day off at all.





PLEASE REFRAIN FROM TALKING DURING THE MOVIE

Robert Polito

When I can’t make you understand I repeat myself

I repeat

If you don’t stop asking me all these questions how

Will I understand anything

Please refrain from talking during the movie

I need a life that isn’t just about needing

To escape my life

Please God please may Carrie please fall for me

I want to show off my hidden camera

I’m an informer but I have my limits

You hurt him once before now what

If she’s there I don’t know if I can go

Please refrain from talking during the movie

Leave a message if you can’t reach me

To exit press enter and don’t forget your receipt

When I think I read new things I want

A life where I read and think new things

Please refrain from talking during the movie

I want to know nothing

Again

Please God please may Carrie please fall for me

I repeat myself when I can’t

Make you understand I repeat

THE POEM OF THE LITTLE HOUSE AT THE CORNER OF MISAPPREHENSION AND MARVEL

Albert Goldbarth

During Napoleon iii’s coup d’état one of  his officers, Count de Saint-Arnaud, on being informed that a mob was approaching the Imperial Guard, coughed and exclaimed, with his hand across his throat, “Ma sacrée toux! (my damned cough).” But his lieutenant, understanding him to say “Massacrez tous! (massacre them all),” gave the order to fire, killing thousands—needlessly.
                   —Guy Murchie

“He was mortared to death.”

A pity, how we misspeak and mishear.

—Or “martyred”? Not that/coin-flip/either

makes a difference to the increasingly cooler

downtick of a corpse’s cells. “We heard the crazy mating joy

of the loon across the water.” Yes, but what

do we know, amateurs that we are? Loon, shmoon.

It might have been dying, announcing

its pain in those trilling pennants. It might

have been the girl who was lost in these woods last week

and never found by the volunteer searchers,

it might have been her ghost

with an admonishment. The truth is,

even among ourselves we often can’t distinguish pain

from pleasure, not in our beds, our hearts, the tone

of a poem on the final exam (a coin-toss). A pity, because

we know the urgency of some utterance;

and the intended goodwill of our listening; and

the marvelous basic mechanics of speech,

of lung: 300 million alveoli that, “if spread out flat,”

as my eighth-grade science teacher preened, “would come to

750 square feet, the entire floor space of an average house,”

and she added that tired magic about how atoms

of Julius Caesar and Napoleon and Beethoven did

their fleet anachronistic dance in every inhalation

of ours, although at thirteen I preferred to think

that the atoms of Cleopatra’s body—my Cleopatra,

inflating her see-through empresswear

with husky breaths—commingled with my blood, and also

realized in my own dim way it wasn’t only Einstein,

Shakespeare, Madame Curie populating my oxygen,

but also the smelly and scabby old man

from across the street who’d died last year

when the late-shift ward nurse heard (as she said in her testimony)

“med injection” instead of (as the outgoing

ward nurse told her) “bed inspection”—altogether

an unfortunate example of my theme . . . although

exempla abound, misapprehension

also dancing inside us at the atomic level.

Someone thought the gate was locked, she always locked

the gate in the late afternoon when the haze set down

and the sun for a moment seemed to carmelize the lake top,

so the gate was locked; except that it wasn’t,

and seven days into it nobody’s found the girl

or a scraggle of hair or a single ribbon. I tell you

we’re amateurs, we’re sometimes bungling amateurs,

of the minutiae of our own lives. When I heard the sounds

that gurgled from my chest as my wife was leaving

into the dense, conspiratorial Austin, Texas night,

I couldn’t have said if it was defeat

or relief. She couldn’t have said which one

she’d have been happiest to cause. We only knew

that I’d been wrong at times, and she’d been wrong at times,

and that our total errors, if spread out flat,

become the house we live in. They’re another system

inside us, along with the cardiac and the pulmonary,

they’re moving us toward the horizon line. And when

enough errors accumulate there, that’s what

we call the future. Even now, as you read this,

someone in that unknowable distance

is breathing you in. 

My Ears Begged for Camouflage and the Chance to Go to War

• Mr Charlie requested that song for Ringo's 73rd birthday today.
• When verifying date in Wikipedia I clicked on the Barbara Bach date (I was curious how old she was) and read that Ringo's brother-in-law is Joe Walsh. Today's fact you probably didn't know.
• Mencken on Snowden, Bradley, Assange, etc.... 
• Of course the NSA is listening to everyone in the world. 
• More people read The Guardian than the NYT.
• Why Google killed Google Reader. The latest change that pisses me off: I now have to title posts at DRGDKCLB or I cannot post new content. Then there's the issue I've been wisely advised to not detail here. Then there's motherfucking Google. Then there's the fact that I've asked people to migrate twice already, from blooger to typepad then back to blooger. Then there's the issue that a year or more ago the Update Template button on my blooger dashboard died and I can make no changes to color or fonts if I want to. Then there's the issue that motherfucking blooger is fucking useless at providing help when something breaks. Then there's the issue that Google killed Google Reader and I use bloogers (admittedly excellent) self-updating blogrolls as my bookmarks. Waah.
• I also think blooger has arbitrarily reduced the font size from Times New Roman 11 to Times New Roman 10, though that might just be a combination of illusion and old eyes.
• Though without a doubt blooger is getting skeevier.
• Anyway, if you, or anyone you trust, knows how to work blooger/Google at a far more sophisticated level than me and wants me to buy you (or the person you trust) the book of poetry or CD of your (or the person you trust's) choice in exchange for helping me sort various issues please let me know.
• Passions of the meritocracy.
• We are all John Derbyshire now.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Einstein's bathrobe.
• Self-portrait.
• Someone else like Fennesz.
• Mahler was born 153 years ago today. If I've lost some mwah for the symphonies my mwah for the Lieder has grown. Hamster, you sent me a playlist once? I'm trying to find it, if I do I'll post it.

THE EAR IS AN ORGAN MADE FOR LOVE

E. Ethelbert Miller

It was the language that left us first.
The Great Migration of words. When people
spoke they punched each other in the mouth.
There was no vocabulary for love. Women
became masculine and could no longer give
birth to warmth or a simple caress with their
lips. Tongues were overweight from profanity
and the taste of nastiness. It settled over cities
like fog smothering everything in sight. My
ears begged for camouflage and the chance
to go to war. Everywhere was the decay of
how we sound. Someone said it reminded
them of the time Sonny Rollins disappeared.
People spread stories of how the air would
never be the same or forgive. It was the end
of civilization and nowhere could one hear
the first notes of A Love Supreme. It was as
if John Coltrane had never been born.

Compliance Wins

First draft second draft last draft next draft...

Observant Scholar, Traveller, Or Uncouth Bearded Figure Squatting in a Cave

• Above Theme Song Friday 7/5/13 3:15 PM EDT which appeared in my head after conversation with acquaintance - no one who reads this blog, though of course your opinion is your own - in which I was told I'm fucking nuts.
• Two arrghless days. Made it two days. One more than the record.
• American piracy.
• Not sure how Snowden gets to Nicaragua or Venezuela. 
• The servility of the satellites.
• Villager Court Jester mocks Obama for becoming a Villager.
• Motherfucking Villagers. Forgive me, I've had multiple chances to run many of these fuckers down on Mass and Nebraska and Wisconsin Avenues and chose the unincarcerated life instead, selfish, hypocritical, and non-revolutionary bastard that I am.
• Fuckface Hiatt.
• A revealing episode in DC groupthink.
• The trials of Hannah Arendt.
• Joyce Carol Oates twoots a cowpie.
• How to destroy a community.
• On motherfucking blooger.
• City of garbage.
• The Confession of St Jim-Ralph.
• Cocteau, for those of you who do.
• Francis Bacon, for those of you who do.
• I've again turned to Ishiguro to save me. Pushed rereading of Never Let Me Go ahead by two years. Expect excerpts.
• It's been eight years since Never Let Me Go released. Anyone heard anything about Ishiguro in any newsworthy context, much less a new novel?
• Frank O'Hara.
• Excellent new ear candy below the poem, but first, I'm an

ROBINSON AT HOME

Weldon Kees

Curtains drawn back, the door ajar.

All winter long, it seemed, a darkening

Began. But now the moonlight and the odors of the street   

Conspire and combine toward one community.

These are the rooms of Robinson.

Bleached, wan, and colorless this light, as though   

All the blurred daybreaks of the spring

Found an asylum here, perhaps for Robinson alone,

Who sleeps. Were there more music sifted through the floors   

And moonlight of a different kind,

He might awake to hear the news at ten,

Which will be shocking, moderately.

This sleep is from exhaustion, but his old desire   

To die like this has known a lessening.

Now there is only this coldness that he has to wear.   

But not in sleep.—Observant scholar, traveller,

Or uncouth bearded figure squatting in a cave,   

A keen-eyed sniper on the barricades,

A heretic in catacombs, a famed roué,

A beggar on the streets, the confidant of Popes—

All these are Robinson in sleep, who mumbles as he turns,   

“There is something in this madhouse that I symbolize—

This city—nightmare—black—”            

                                                   He wakes in sweat   

To the terrible moonlight and what might be

Silence. It drones like wires far beyond the roofs,   

And the long curtains blow into the room.

The Callow Power of Preservation

• So. Standard aargh, not different format than ever but different than standard, at least for here.
• So. A friend makes a good point and offers a timely warning, so the details of this episode of fucking blooger/google is scrubbed.
• Greyhoos has a tumblr.
• Blogfriend Lisa has a new blog. 
• I have a tumblr too, remembered when I saw Greyhoos has a tumblr.
• More new places over in Newest Gag the Second.
• The day the world finally ended.
• Not linking to clusterfuckage, especially on a four-day holiday weekend shortens the link list.
• Pynchon on the European soul.
• Narrative clocks.
• The 25 most-hated novels.
• Silliman's always generous lit-links.
• Mistaken memories of medieval Manhattan.
• Sounding the body electric.
• Beckett chess pieces.
• Three hours of covers you may or not have heard in a long time if ever.
• Prunella goes to a The Evens concert.
• I fell into Mazzy Star last night. Must have been the Galazie 500 yesterday, that and the attempt at aarghlessness.

FEAR OF AN EMPTY LIFE

Jennifer Moxley

All the long imprint of a smooth utterance - a single adhesive
word slips away, snuggles beside the accusatory newborn
thought which, barking from lack of care, might trap in a moment
of serious sorrow me and my dirty heart, we twist the arm
of friendship 'til the ancient swing by the nonchalant body
is rewritten as a trembling, angry, grudge. Split along
the physique axis of wrested love and that human pulp
the wealthy mock, old need, a shuffle from the coffin lip
silences mind into fiddlehead body, bobbing in the fifty-fifty
sheets, weighty yet so pitiful it cannot coax solution - Darwin
was a fool, conductor of teeming masses, I see them now
in sedimentary patterns, crushed umber colors and a hint of green.

I am content when I do not think the disclosure of love is a
weakness, I imagine myself invincible like a bully who sees
in the fear he coerces from his weaker brother the only version of
truth he'll believe - satisfied sleep. I awake drenched, the sweat
between my breasts which are so small they cannot touch is slick
as mucous. The surface of beauty is awful and enormous to all of us
who are left behind and yet we seek our coordinates, willfully
follow them just the same as the moon might seem from certain
angles to willfully follow the earth. Choking pink ribbon of thought
fails the ferry crossing. Who cannot push life-sustaining rationalization
away without remembering, as though an error of judgment,
the callow power of preservation turned to resentment of the race.

It cannot, no matter, in verse, be real. Fucked up beauty
subtracts the awkward ugly plain ache of tripped-up memory stores
where I see you as a taut wing of fragile older skin whose pride
of effort flaps in an attempt to fly amidst its own disintegrating
structure, a sight so ridiculous that all but the buried are unable
to suppress their laughter and turn away. That's an image hovering
above me here where there is still in my imagination a cool carpet
underfoot, a flavor of drug's seductive distances, the expense of
early exits but no gun, never a gun. That weapon steals time for it
knows not what's in a minute. Tiny blindfold box of selfish stomach,
parasite life, the measure of a second is insufficient
to leave you behind, you and all your crippling indifference.

Dread Was His Nature, and He Hared Through Sunlight and Shade, Head Swiveling for the Copperhead He&#39;d Begun to Covet, the Ballyhooed Killer a Camouflaged Godhead on Which His Ingrained Faith Cohered, and Finally His Priesthood

WHO WANTS TO GO? B((arr(gh))ing a b((arr(gh))age of new kaboom I'm going to attempt to a(argh)void daily clusterfucka(argh)ge updates through the holiday weekend. I mean topical updates like here's why Obama particularly sucks today, none of those, PDFs of obscure French philosophers' theories of cultural signifiers and the subaltern and the like are OK. Spark to resolution? Last night I saw William Greider's praising review of the first months of Elizabeth Warren's term as Massachusetts senator, typed Greider writes Warren a love letter, linked. Rimshot noise. She may be who Greider and her fans think she is now, should she gain power and influence we'll see, my actuarial tables differ from theirs, mine set by and read by an evangelical apostate. Still, I can take four days off of easy rimshot trolling. Can't I? A farewell to blogging. I have entered negotiations on daily obligations - as in not having them - with my editor, publisher, publicist, and ghost-writer. neither the wish nor the power. Prunella reminded me both of The Evens concert and The Evens song. The Three O'Clock. I watched the first half - United sucks - but what needs saying is Eddie Johnson is a punkass fool. Goff gets snarky. OK, another soccer aargh: fucking Adidas ruins everything it touches. A Dog with Wings (I think it's unlocked, if not, email me, I'll send you a PDF). It took me a while to Simic, but I'm in. Wrist injury sidelines orchestra conductor! Les-rivieres-sont-des-chemins. Which reminds me there are a couple of new places over in Newest Gag the Second. So slender a basis for a lifetime friendship. For instance, this one. Knausgaard, for those of you who do. Obscure Sounds' Best of June, with sound. Obligatory link to this song and this song. X is fine, but HOLYFUCK! Galaxie 500. Holyfuck.






THE IMAGINED COPPERHEAD

Andrew Hudgins

The imagined copperhead
hid on the path ahead,
unseen on bronze leaves, unheard,
and a mortal likelihood
at every step. This was childhood,
mine, the woods' jihad
against a boy who'd
intruded among monkshood,
wasp, tick, and nettles haired
with needles. Scrub brush abhorred
him with a horde
of welts, bites, and stings, but he'd
never seen a copperhead,
though he'd looked hard,
taking, as he'd been ordered, heed.
The snake wasn't a falsehood,
though, to him. Dread
was his nature, and he hared
through sunlight and shade, head
swiveling for the copperhead
he'd begun to covet, the ballyhooed
killer a camouflaged godhead
on which his ingrained faith cohered,
and finally his priesthood.

Excavations Under the Carpet Turn Up Nothing

The reactions of Corporate to Snowden's leaks are more valuable insights into power than the information in the leaks themselves, I tweeted last night having only just digested the news of the humiliation and subjugation of a democratically elected president of a sovereign country forced out of the air. Please don't tell me the plane wasn't forced out of the air. So. If everything Snowden reveals sensible people should have assumed all along - let's say that's true for the sake of argument - why would the United States threaten, endanger, and humiliate the president of a democratically elected president of a sovereign country? Please don't tell me this is about terrorism. Yesterday at the Hiatt Fuckface. Cause nothing says trust the US on a plea deal and that Snowden would be safer in US than in "unfree country" like humiliating, endangering, and no doubt shooting down if necessary an airplane carrying the President of a sovereign country.

• Network.
• My second thought was the United States was also humiliating it's client states, but that assumes France and Portugal and Spain did this against their will, and that's just silly.
• Loyalty is no a virtue.
• Argument from a friend yesterday: Greenwald and Snowden's motives aren't pure so the state secrets they reveal in their service of self-aggrandizement and martyrdom neuter any immoral currency of what the state secrets reveal. And everyone knew anyway, so self-aggrandizement and martyrdom infinity. Neener.
• Snowden has, inadvertently or not, not that his motives matter one fucking fart, accelerated Corporate roll out of FUCK YOU PEASANTS timeline.
• Fuckface Hiatt trots out Villager court jester to state Snowden's a pussy so neener.
• On the meanings of dishonor and hack.
• Chris Hayes says be sure the person you're hounding is on the plane before forcing it to land because if the person isn't it's soooooo embarrassing.
• A good question.
• Edward Snowden and barbarism.

• Crisis in capitalism.
• What the hot summer day hissed in his ear.
• Coetzee, for those of you who do. I asked Anthony yesterday what would be a good novel to start - I read Michael and Barbarians decades ago - and he suggest Age of Iron.
• A pianist's A-V.
• Mary Ruefle interview.
• There were fucking angels all over my fucking house.
• Heavy summer rain.
• Tonight at nine wfmu.org the Return of Berger!
• Another excerpt from Against the Day.
• Another Roxy fan.
• I knew it was Szymborska's birthday yesterday but it didn't fit with yesterday's post, was going to note it today but events yesterday evening required a post then. Click on Szymborska tag for more poems. You're not going to, I know.
• I was asked about Poles and poetry. This is the theory of a friend, a linguistic professor and a Pole: R theorizes that languages which are especially complex - Polish, Korean, for example - are complex on purpose, they evolved such complexity so that native speakers can, within two sentences, identify whether someone speaking the language fluently is in fact a native speaker, so often over the centuries have these ethno-linguistic groups been invaded and subjugated by, in Korea's case, Japan then China then Japan then China, in Poland's by Russians then Germans then Russians then Germans. The combination of complex language and centuries of invasion and subjugation make for great poetry. I buy it.

CAT IN AN EMPTY APARTMENT

Wislawa Szymborska

Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Die—you can’t do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here
but nothing is the same.
Nothing’s been moved
but there’s more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,
but they’re new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.

Something doesn’t start
at its usual time.
Something doesn’t happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Every closet’s been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken:
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.

Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.