Born Two-Hundred and Two Years Ago Today

*

We Have Come to Terms with Our Self Like a Marmoset Getting Out of Her Great Ape Suit

I for one want more Gwendolyn the Goat. She's four months old, she's the size of a terrier. Blue eyes are rare in (whatever breed Gwendolyn is) goat, said her handler, a Columbus Crew fan. He laughed at my DC United sweatshirt. We talked MLS, USMNT, why United sucks, will Olsen keep his job. I didn't tell him of my United apostasies and anger over new ownership and the pricing for next season that plainly indicates LOUD SIDE's eventual banishment to an endzone in a new stadium and my lack of damn and self-extortionist's angst over next season's season tickets: that's just for you, loyal readers. I know two people, goat-wise, a wife and daughter, they'd own goats in our backyard the day after MOCO legalizes goat-ownership in tract-housing neighborhoods. OK.

We rent a car when we visit Planet at college in Ohio. We end up, going back and forth and the drives in between, easily clocking 1200 miles, most times more, and rental rates are as cheap or cheaper than the wear-and-tear on our cars if we used them trip after trip. It's fun to drive something different, to plow up the mountain to Frostburg from the Potomac in Cumberland at 80 MPH on someone else's engine. Rentalcarco gives us two sets of keys on one metal cord. The cord is welded into a rivet that makes both ends undetachable from the other. I always figured we got two sets of keys so they could be separated so if one was lost a trip could continue (while paying replacement price one of my dozen initials on contract surely made me liable for). I'd always wondered why the welding, but because I misplaced the keys for two scary minutes this trip the question stayed in my head. We returned the car Monday evening. I asked the salesperson about the keys, how do you separate the two sets. You don't, he said. I asked, what's the point of giving me two sets of keys if I can't separate them so that if I lose one I lose both. He said, we want them together so that if you drop off a car at a different location than this one they're still together. I said, you all don't allow cars to be dropped off at a different location than the one where the car was picked up, I talked with you (as in the same salesperson) last January when we wanted to rent a car one way (for reasons I reminded him and he acknowledged but whose details aren't important to this post) and you thanked me for my loyalty but fuck me, you said politely, we don't rent one way. Alright, he said, it's because we sell the cars after a set period (depending on make/model (as opposed to remake/remodel I add here, didn't add then, though thought it)) and we get less of a price for only one set of keys, minimal though it be, headquarters is insistent the two sets stay together. A manager walked in, saw me shaking my head in amusement, asked if all was OK. This is Mr Popovich, said the salesperson, he was just returning his keys. Are you related to Gregg? he asked. I said, everyone here asks me that, fine metaphors abound. What? he said. I said, I said I am such a goat. Huh? he said.

• Lordy, I feel like I should be drinking a Pliny the Elder in Southern California.
• So yes, all that for a KITH and Roxy gag. Again.
• Baseline predictions for  the next 60 years.
• You may think you have nothing to hide.
• Are we puppets in a wired world?
• One hundred years alive, ten years dead.
• UPDATE! Mr Abonilox returns to Blegsylvania, writes on Obamacare, anarchism, libertarianism....
• a figure caught in language.
• Ceravolo, for those of you who do.
• UPDATE! Fwoan too returns to Blegsylvania.
• FirstWave (not Second Wave as I called it yesterday) on Sirius also played a Roxy Music/Bryan Ferry song every second hour, but only late Roxy, which I found interesting for vaguely irritating taxonomic reasons related to how I used to sort baseball cards.
• UPDATE! Mr Alarum's band's new single! Of if not a single, the song they made available.
• Prunella's latest playlist.

YOU HAVE HARNESSED YOURSELF RIDICULOUSLY TO THIS WORLD

Lucie Brock-Broido

Tell the truth I told me                                When I couldn’t speak.

Sorrow’s a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship                Or a child

Who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer

In the 1930s                                       Toward the iron lung of polio.

According to the census I am unmarried                And unchurched.

                                    The woman in the field dressed only in the sun.

Too far gone to halt the Arctic Cap’s catastrophe, big beautiful

Blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of  ice.

I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible.

For whom left am I first?

                                                          We have come to terms with our Self

Like a marmoset getting out of  her Great Ape suit.

Huffs Some Perfunctory Warmth on His Stiffening Hands then Bends Again to His Goat's-Horn of Ink

• That's Gwendolyn, who was joined by a sheep, a llama, two chickens, three rabbits, at North Campus Fall Petting Zoo yesterday.
• Crusoe in England.
• The car we've rented this trip has Sirius radio. When we got in it was already tuned to what Sirius calls SecondWave, a greatest hits of the New Wave 80s. U2, Police, Elvis Costello dominate, but the band that, after a dozen self-scourging hours of listening over three days, is played the most is Depeche Mode. A Depeche Mode song every hour. I neither like nor dislike Depeche Mode (compared to disliking Elvis Costello and hating U2 and despising Gordon Fucking Sumner), I'm just surprised that, in an admittedly small sample size, it's Depeche Mode every hour, I don't recall anyone I know owning or listening to Depeche Mode.
• UPDATE! Mr Alarum tweets that he owns lots of Depeche Mode, so I know one person (whose musical taste I thoroughly value and trust). I'm not anti-Depeche Mode, just surprised it gets the most air-time. 
• UPDATE! SeatSix, who I love like a brother, tells me he owns many Depeche Mode albums and that Depeche Mode was ubiquitous when he was in college and after.
• Lachesism.
• A late history.
• Does anyone else get the pink banner of error on every single composition page on motherfucking blooger? Damn my free blogging platform. 
• Carpe Demon.
• Bleak House. 
• An army of altruists.
• { feuilleton }'s Weekly Links.
• DC Day Two.
• Muriel Spark, for those of you who do. 
• Sasha recommends!
• Flann O'Brien, for those of you who do.
• Creature.
• Elliott Smith, for those of you who do.
• No, I'm not going to post any Depeche Mode.

IMPS

Albert Goldbarth

Fire isn’t allowed, for the sake of the books.

The lean monk-copyist who scribes the books is slate-blue at his fingertips

this steely late-November day in the year 1000. Brother Ambrosio

huffs some perfunctory warmth on his stiffening hands,

then bends again to his goat’s-horn of ink. For every line,

he believes, he’s forgiven a sin. And now he’s at his heavy

uncial letters, and will be for nine hours more,

until a slab of bread and a beet relieve his transcriptual ardor.

What he copies?—psalter, missal, hagiography:

the predetermined and sanctioned community passions

of a religious culture. Nothing like the twentieth century’s

prevalent kneejerk “self-expression.” Nothing like the priest,

excuse me: former priest, and former nun, on daytime talk TV,

who live, she tells us, in a “trinity of love” with the former

creator-of-tourist-ashtrays-out-of-catfish-heads. This is,

she insists, the final and jubilant stage of a lifelong “quest

to feel belongingness” initiated thirty years before

by parents skittering cross-country with the military: they

were wholly rootless, and so she grew up “unable to commit.” The following day,

a man confesses to pedophilia because of a lesbian aunt.

A woman says she robbed the Sack-N-Save of $13.42

“because of what they’re dumping in the water supply, it makes me

go all freaky.” Steve was bounced out from The Chicken Shack

“because I’m Scandinavian.” The culture

of blame is so completely exterior in its search for cause,

some days I wake to think I’ll find most people laboring

under the weight of sci-fi-style mind parasites, like fleshy turbans

spewing in, and feeding off, their brain blood. This (by “this”

I mean of course a recognition of the magic of objective correlative

boppin’ about in the spotlight) is, to some length,

understandable: you can’t beat the miniscule carry-along

convenience of a silicon chip invisibly set in something,

BUT for sheer persuasive visual power, that can’t touch

a 1940s generating plant, its giant Alcatrazian shape

against the sky, and the enormous wrestling electrical crackles

snaking its rooftop pylon. In the scriptorium, even

—such an isolated unit of human endeavor, its limited range

of reactions surely is pure—when Brother Ambrosio

nods off, sleepy in his long day’s long eighth hour

of thickly nibbed and careful letters, he knows

it’s imps in league with Satan that keep pulling down his eyelids.

If in scratching his flea-measled thigh he spills

a hand’s-expanse of ink across the vellum page, the fleas

are tiny devils on a guerilla mission from Hell.

And once a devilkin took lodging in his belly, and there

created “rumbling noises like a toad, and which, for hours,

spoiled the concentration of all of the other Brothers.”

We find parchment scraps with appropriate exorcisms:

“Away! you flaming sow, you poisoned udder,

you arse of the arch-fiend, shit-fly, stinking he-goat,

out out out, away, back into thine infernal kitchen,

you bestial puke!” We also find

those charming marginal doodles (sprigs in flower,

unicorns, seemingly every songbird in Creation): such

diminutive external bodies given to the longings of these

cooped-up men. And when they came to drag my friend Jess

screaming to the ward, because he was beating his head

on the lawyer’s steps, it was clear to us all that the chemicals

in his mind had turned against him. It was clear to Jess

that he was being hunted like prey by hounds from the moon.

Bellville to Fredericktown to Mt Vernon to Gambier to Mt Vernon to Howard to Danville to Greer to Nashville to Shreve to Wooster to West Salem to LaGrange to Oberlin to Wellington to Polk to Perrysville to Butler to Bellville to Fredericktown to Mt Vernon to Gambier to Mt Vernon to Fredericktown to Bellville

Or: Ohio 97 to Ohio 13 to US 36 to Ohio 308 to US 36 to Howard-Dansville Road to US 62 to Ohio 514 to Ohio 226 to Ohio 3 to Market St to Ohio 83 to Britton Road to US 42 to Ohio 301 to Ohio 303 to Ohio 58 to West College Street to North Professor St to Union Street to Woodland Street to West College Street to Ohio 58 to Ohio 89 to Ohio 95 to Ohio 97 to Ohio 13 to US 36 to Ohio 308 to US 36 to Ohio 13 to Ohio 97.

• Thanks Lambert for the bump at Naked Capitalism. For those of you unfamiliar with the above latest in a four year series, we are visiting our daughter at college in Ohio, we take long drives together to get off campus, Earthgirl takes hundreds of photos hoping for a few she wants to paint, I provide a slideshow. All songs posted listened to on drive.
• The History of Fear, part five.
• Continuing on a theme started elsewhere: the neutering of the NSA archives.
• I both said I would try to go clusterfuck-free this weekend and expressed doubt that I could.
• Book of Lamentations, or: DSM-5 as dystopic novel.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• Moby Dicks.
• Cultosaurus Erectus.
• :-p in DC, Day One.
• Aliens, cats, consciousness.
• I am a quarter through Handke's Repetition, it's working, I'm resisting, it's working, I'm resisting a fraction less, it's working, I'm resisting a fraction less.....
• Aphex Twin, for those of you who do.
• Regulars can vouch I don't wait for these trips to Ohio to listen to Guided by Voices.

FATHER IN DRAWER

Lucie Brock-Broido

Mouthful of earth, hair half a century silvering, who buried him.

With what. Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it.

                                                             Also directives from our  DNA.

The nature of  his wound was the clock-cicada winding down.

                                                            He wound down.

July, vapid, humid: sails of sailboats swelled, yellow boxes

Of   cigars from Cuba plumped. Ring fingers fattened for a spell.

                                                            Barges of coal bloomed in heat.

It was when the catfish were the only fish left living

                                                            In the Monongahela River.

Though there were (they swore) no angels left, one was stillbound in

The very drawer of salt and ache and rendering, its wings wrapped-in

                                                            By the slink from the strap

Of his second-wife’s pearl-satin slip, shimmering and still

                  As one herring left face-up in its brine and tin.

The nature of  his wound was muscadine and terminal; he was easy

                 To take down as a porgy off the cold Atlantic coast.

                 In the old city of   Brod, most of the few Jews left

Living may have been still at supper while he died.

That same July, his daughters’ scales came off in every brittle

                                                            Tinsel color, washing

To the next slow-yellowed river and the next, toward west,

                                                            Ohio-bound.

                This is the extent of that. I still have plenty heart.

Born Sixty-Eight Years Ago Today

Divine was born sixty-eight years ago today. I was twenty-two when Polyester was released. No doubt I'm romanticizing significance, but these movies were buzzworthy once for margins they crossed, or so it seemed to us at the midnight showings. That self-aggrandizing assertion offered to justify my iconography of Glenn Milstead. We also enjoyed playing Where the fuck is that in Baltimore? when watching the movies. Plus they remind me of a distinct segment of my life when I was Bawlmer-centric. Plus: nostalgia for what was one outrageous, now old.

Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Sideling Hill to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling to Zanesville to Gambier Plus Serendipity Is Great Even When Delivering Sadness

• As I mentioned last night, saw someone yesterday who looked uncannily like Montag on Sideling Hill. You can see him again in some of Earthgirl's photos in slideshow.
• Today is Hungarian omelet rolls in Wooster then visit to Oberlin and dinner in Vermillion.
• So this is how I turned into a dog. 
• One dang: :-p of Airport Through the Trees is visiting DC this weekend, we've talked of drinks, I always chose, choose, will choose Planet first, but dang. Next time. Any travelog he posts I'll link to.
• The book of old sundials. 
• So this is the aftermath.
• Dear L, thank you. Not at Undamnastan yet, but at least can see it on the horizon. Much love.
• Lots on and by Catherine Wagner, one of my next big projects.
• We listen to at least one Lambchop album on the way out and the way back each and every trip. Have I ever mentioned I love Lambchop? Yesterday the album was Is a Woman, this morning I learn of the passing of Marc Trovillion. Serendipity is awesome even when it's awful.

WORDS TO THAT EFFECT

John Ashbery

The drive down was smooth
but after we arrived things started to go haywire,
first one thing and then another. The days
scudded past like tumbleweed, slow then fast,
then slow again. The sky was sweet and plain.
You remember how still it was then,
a season putting its arms into a coat and staying unwrapped
for a long, a little time.

It was during the week we talked about deforestation.
How sad that everything has to change,
yet what a relief, too! Otherwise we’d only have
looking forward to look forward to.
The moment would be a bud
that never filled, only persevered
in a static trance, before it came to be no more.

We’d walked a little way in our shoes.
I was sure you’d remember how it had been
the other time, before the messenger came to your door
and seemed to want to peer in and size up the place.
So each evening became a forbidden morning
of thunder and curdled milk, though the invoices
got forwarded and birds settled on the periphery.

Harris Glenn Milstead's Birthday Eve

Tomorrow is a High Egoslavian Holy Day. Also, on the drive to Ohio today I saw old blogbud Montag at the Sideling Hill rest stop in the future state of Augusta on I-68 today. Thought about Blegsylvania history almost all the way to Morgantown. Hope you and yours are well, Fellowjeff.

Rope of My Dead Grandmother's Unreproducible Sausage, Curing for Weeks on the Front Porch

Biblioklept put Destroyer in my head. When I think of Destroyer I think of our trip to San Francisco and Northern California in 2008: I was in a Destroyer fix and fortunately neither Earthgirl or Planet minded. Earthgirl and I are driving to Ohio today to spend a long weekend with Planet. Saul to Beach to Rockville Pike to I-270 to I-70 to I-68 to I-79 to I-70 to Exit 154 in Zanesville, State Street, to Ohio 146 to Ohio 586 to US 62 to Grove Church Road to Beckholt Road to Jacobs Road to Big Run Road to Ohio 229 to Duff Street to East Brooklyn Road to Planet. Reverse on Monday. Expect playlists and Earthgirl slideshows. It's still summer here in DC, I'm guessing won't be as orange over the mountains as usual these October trips, expect Earthgirl slideshows nonetheless. The scheduled long drive for Saturday is up through Oberlin for dinner in Vermillion so while there might be roads I've driven on before when I drove on them before Earthgirl hadn't started slideshowing. There might be birthdays to honor over the weekend, I don't look until the night before - today is not an Egoslavian Holy Day I discovered only last night, for instance. I've Frank Bidart's Metaphysical Dog - I posted the eponymous poem yesterday - and Krasznahorkai's Seiobo in backpack. I hope to have little time to read on the trip but when I do I hope to read them, though I've no illusions I won't be online. If links - and of course there will be some links - hopefully they will be clusterfuck-free barring kaboom, probably impossible for me, gonna try.







GLUTTON

Frank Bidart

Rope of my dead
grandmother's unreproducible

sausage, curing for weeks

on the front porch. My mother,
thoroughly

Americanized, found them

vaguely shameful.
Now though I

taste and taste

I can't find that
taste I so loved as a kid.

Each thing generates the Idea

of itself, the perfect thing that it
is, of course, not -

once, a pear so breathtakingly

succinct I couldn't
breathe. I take back that

"of course."

It's got to be out there again, -
... I have tasted it.

Held Up to a Mirror, He Writhed

    

• Was going to delete last night's KITH post (which I couldn't resist posting when I thought of it, it made me giggle multiplied by my attention sluttery) and post the two skits in this post, but Landru commented this morning so you get two extra Julie Doiron songs, why Doiron today explained below.
• I'm fascinated by the greenwald effect, the visceral reactions any mention of Glenn Greenwald provoke and provoke from 360 degrees. I confess, beyond my own pleasurable scratching of my own faux dissidence regarding transference of tribal jones first onto a totem and then hysterically off that totem, it's fun to whack a wasp nest (which is the second point of this bullet): while the first was my primary intent, the second I knew would entertain me. Greenwald has become - by whose design, by what dynamics, your theories are your theories, your ratios your ratios - a political lightning rod himself of which one must have an opinion and be judged - most times harshly, regardless of respective position on the greenwald spectrum, both vitriolic hate towards and vehement defensive love for. He's black licorice. Nobody seems neutral (at least in the Stringtowns I hang out in). Greenwald, regardless of the importance of what his work has or hasn't revealed and may or not still reveal, is a hotter button than any scandal of whatever he has or hasn't enabled. This isn't to damn anyone for any opinion they have on Greenwald or suggest it isn't held in good faith for valid reasons. I just find the phenomenon interesting.
• UPDATE: Fucked, baby.
• One thing this kabuki achieved is the thorough demonizing of the Tea Party, so thorough that when the attacks come on the safety net by Obama/Dems those of us who will protest and make noises about primarying DINOs will be relentlessly compared to the thoroughly demonized Tea Party. Obama will urged to abandon his far left base and heavily praised unto his legacy when he does.
• Oh my, Zizek says what I said day before yesterday: What is the ongoing U.S. government shutdown really about? In the middle of April 2009, I was taking a rest in a hotel room in Syracuse, N.Y. and jumping between two channels: a PBS documentary on Pete Seeger, the great American country singer of the Left, and a Fox News report on a country singer of the anti-tax “Tea Party,” who was performing a populist, anti-Obama song full of complaints about how Washington is taxing the hard-working ordinary people to finance the rich Wall Street financiers. There was the weird similarity between the two singers. Formulating an anti-establishment populist complaint against both the exploitative rich and the government, they called for radical measures, including civil disobedience. It was another painful reminder that today’s radical-populist Right strangely reminds us of the old radical-populist Left. Are today’s Christian survivalist-fundamentalist groups, with their half-illegal status, seeing the main threat to their freedom in the oppressive state apparatus, not similar to the Black Panthers back in the 1960s? He then goes Thomas Frank and asks What's the Matter with Kansas?
• Of course the NSA is involved with the Drone Wars. Who didn't think so?

• King's Farm. That's technically Rockville, is really Gaithersburg.
• I did not know Selby's closed in Poolesville. The same family used to run the IGA on Diamond in Olde Towne.
• What your cat sees when it stares into space.
• On cat behavior. Re: ferals and the straight tail and meowing - all three of our ferals straight tail us, Napoleon runs to us meowing, he talks more and more all the time.
• An experiment in shell manipulation.
• The psychology of book abandonment.
• Uncollected Barthelme.
• New Ruefle poem! w/bonus Brad.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• I've still a crush on Julie Doiron that reminds me of being seventeen with a crush, the more ridiculously pangful the better, so happy to wake up this morning with this Julie Doiron song in my head:

METAPHYSICAL DOG

Frank Bidart

Belafont, who reproduced what we did
not as an act of supine

imitation, but in defiance -

butt on couch and front legs straddling
space to rest on an ottoman, barking till

his masters clean his teeth with dental floss.

How dare being
give him this body.

Held up to a mirror, he writhed.

We're Safe, but for How Long? Two KITHs to Fine Metaphor Abound Clusterfuck's End and Eternal Return

 *

Fifty-Three Today

One of only two (Westerberg the other) who are younger than me who get a Holy Day in Egoslavia. Was at the show below in Philly in 1983, one of dozens of one of the five best nights of my life.



       
*


           
*


 
*

Now There's a Courtyard with an Abject Knight Yodeling His Head Off for the Hell of It

On slowness. The above is my lack of slowness' theme song. Yes, this gag again. A different sort of hell: a 24 page drawing of the Battle of the Somme. Salon has been waving Confederate flags in threes and fours daily the past week. Every day there's an article on Ted Cruz, Ron Paul, their shameless pandering to old white Republicans angry their privilege is expiring. Pandering, man that Salon is against pandering. One man's 4AD Top Ten. Live Julia Holter. Here is Seth Ackerman in Jacobin reproducing a faithful Liberal history of the hard Conservative strain in American politics since whenever. I've had no apostasies about the hard core fans of the hard Conservative strain in American politics and the fulfillment of martyr's scripture they're enjoying, the if I can't you can't either that the American Left has lost and in losing is fearful of any others' martyr's scripture. Satie piano pieces played by Poulenc and Fervier on the invaluable UbuWeb. So yes, we're being played; so envious of the powerfully emoted powerlessness, we fear powerfully emoted powerlessness. So maybe retro culture is the reinvestment of surplus capital. Oh, the Greenwald comment from a few days ago: here's Arthur, here's more Tarzie (specifically on the next link) - am I glad revelations were made, yes. Does it matter that Greenwald's motives aren't pure? I don't know. Is it reflective of fanboys' and fangirls' (e.g. me) willingness to justify motives and behaviors in sham heroes if the immediate effect is to penalize the other side by code of one's own side's martyr's scripture (which is the same subclausy bullshitty subclause as the other side)? Is it part experiment, part theater? Isn't everything? Does it matter if our heroes capitalize in capitalism? I don't know - I spent an hour yesterday screaming at an Apple employee because Apple's latest software has totally fucked up my iPhone. Berryman/Eminem mash-up. What you can buy me for Giftmas, the Incredible Sestina Anthology. On drones and the global war on tribal Islam. Hey, a Zombie rising! Dear god, librarians show of their tattoos. So, on slowness: I don't know how. Dan played this last night, I haven't Seefeeled in a few months, it's still in my head this morning:







AMOUR HONESTUS

Edward Hirsch

The nights were long and cold and bittersweet,
And he made a song for the hell of it.

She stood by the window, a heavenly light
Who created havoc for the hell of it.

He used to fondle every skirt in sight,
Then he fell in love--that's the hell of it.

Now there's a courtyard with an abject knight
Yodeling his head off for the hell of it.

O poor me, my Lady, my hopeless plight!
She married a prince for the hell of it.

Honorable, unsatisfied, illicit--
Why bring it up? Just for the hell of it.

The fever spread from poet to poet
Who burned in the high-minded hell of it.

But the Untouchable had him by the throat,
And he stopped singing for the hell of it.

Love is a tower, a trance, a medieval pit.
When I lost you, I knew the hell of it.

as freedom is a breakfastfood

• Yves says the shutdown was kabuki, now is hissy fit. It can be, and is, both and both-squared, of course. 
• Everything is a pissing contest: That helps one perhaps to appreciate what a personal culture it all was, in Vienna: it really wasn’t about work at all (that would have been sober and German), it was more about who said what behind whose back, who appeared in whose company, who greeted or failed to greet whom. It was a jockeying for position, a battle over authority, vulgarly a pissing contest.
• Envy, scorn, and shutdown.
• How much surveillance can democracy stand?
• I am stunned to learn that Maryland's Democratic Attorney General and candidate for Governor Doug Gansler is a gaping asshole.
• The history of fear, part four.
• Virtual sheriff.
• Four wars.
• Your assignment is to find a GIF of Kirk screaming KHAN! and photoshop in Obama's head and then dub over KHAN! so the Obama screams ASSANGE! cause that would be a lot funnier than this sentence has been.
• Borg complex alert. 
• Who the fuck uses sillyass Star Trek allusions?

• Sixteen tales of information technology in education, 1993-2013.
• Why no directors? 
• Yes, public schools should be closed for Eid al-Adha. Or open for Christmas. 
• Oh, fuck the local helmetball team.
• New Inquiry's Sunday Links.
• does not really exist.
• Krasznahorkai, for those of you who do and those of you who should. Seiobo There Below is next, as soon as I finish the Coover.
• This is your brain on poetry.
• Boatload of E.E. Cummings poems for his 119th birthday.
• Woke up with the below Red Crayola song in my head, which in combination with the above Western Hysteria song made me think of the 39 Clocks song below the Cummings poem.

[as freedom is a breakfastfood]

E.E. Cummings

as freedom is a breakfastfood

or truth can live with right and wrong

or molehills are from mountains made

—long enough and just so long

will being pay the rent of seem

and genius please the talentgang

and water most encourage flame

as hatracks into peachtrees grow

or hopes dance best on bald men’s hair

and every finger is a toe

and any courage is a fear

—long enough and just so long

will the impure think all things pure

and hornets wail by children stung

or as the seeing are the blind

and robins never welcome spring

nor flatfolk prove their world is round

nor dingsters die at break of dong

and common’s rare and millstones float

—long enough and just so long

tomorrow will not be too late

worms are the words but joy’s the voice

down shall go which and up come who

breasts will be breasts thighs will be thighs

deeds cannot dream what dreams can do

—time is a tree(this life one leaf)

but love is the sky and i am for you

just so long and long enough

Born One-Hundred Nineteen Years Ago Today

[a connotation of infinity]

E.E.Cummings

a connotation of infinity
sharpens the temporal splendor of this night

when souls which have forgot frivolity
in lowliness,noting the fatal flight
of worlds whereto this earth’s a hurled dream

down eager avenues of lifelessness

consider for how much themselves shall gleam,
in the poised radiance of perpetualness.
When what’s in velvet beyond doomed thought

is like a woman amorous to be known;
and man,whose here is alway worse than naught,
feels the tremendous yonder for his own—

on such a night the sea through her blind miles

of crumbling silence seriously smiles

*

[let's live suddenly without thinking]

let’s live suddenly without thinking

under honest trees,
                        a stream
does.the brain of cleverly-crinkling
-water pursues the angry dream
of the shore. By midnight,
                                a moon
scratches the skin of the organised hills

an edged nothing begins to prune

let’s live like the light that kills
and let’s as silence,
                            because Whirl’s after all:
(after me)love,and after you.
I occasionally feel vague how
vague idon’t know tenuous Now-
spears and The Then-arrows making do
our mouths something red,something tall

*

[when life is quite through with]

when life is quite through with
and leaves say alas,
much is to do
for the swallow,that closes
a flight in the blue;

when love’s had his tears out,
perhaps shall pass
a million years
(while a bee dozes
on the poppies, the dears;

when all’s done and said,and
under the grass
lies her head
by oaks and roses
deliberated.)

*

[my sonnet is a light goes on in]

my sonnet is a light goes on in
the toiletwindow,that’s straightacross from
my window,night air bothered with a rustling din

sort of sublimated tom-tom
which quite outdoes the mandolin-

man’s tiny racket.  The horses sleep upstairs.
And you can see their ears.  Ears win-

k, funny stable.  In the morning they go out in pairs:
amazingly,one pair is white
(but you know that)they look at each other.  Nudge.

(if they love each other,who cares?)
They pull the morning out of the night.

I am living with a mouse who shares

my meals with him,which is fair as i judge.

& if that's not enough (he says to himself in the voice of a black-and-white actor whose name is a moth that keeps avoiding the tip of his flaming tongue) to bring you home, well, there it is again, already exhausted by your efforts to make it comfortable enough to stay

• Caught last night and tweeted out. What's worse, that subhead, that Alexander says it aware of the irony, that he says it unaware of the irony?
• My apologies, but I've re-enabled the spam-blocker in comments. What was funny at a couple of dozen a day has now turned into hundreds a day - Friday and Saturday past over three hundred - and fuck that. Thanks to everyone for their comments, I understand if between the word verification to stop spambots and mediation to stop trolls you say fuckit.
• Shutdownkabuki in three paragraphs.
• Some impromptu thoughts on Left unity.
• All of you who've questioned Greenwald's motives, for what it's worth, I'm feeling you.
• A heat vampire in search of a movie deal.
• Hey, Susan's back from her hiatus!
• Was going to post three photos of Confederate flags currently leading three different articles on Salon as of 8:00 AM EDT Sunday 10/13/13 and write something about it, but fuck that every single day but especially on a Sunday of a three day weekend when nobody reads this blog, so have links, songs, a poem, and a photo of my cats:

• Purple Line!
• Maggie's weekend links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekend links.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• I bought Evan Dara's Last Scrapbook when it came out in 1995 and - this is true  - Katie ate it, gnawed a corner of print off, slobbered all over the rest, and I forgot about it.
• Ungaretti: Sunset.
• An open letter to The Poetry Foundation, a resource I, in full disclosure, use constantly, consider invaluable. I hate research, think I have to here.
• A confession of love for alt-country.
• Alt-country? Thanks! for programming Sunday's music. LOTS of great alt-country can be found on Meredith Ochs' playlists!

JUST ANOTHER PARADIGM SHIFT

Paul Grant

Just a shadow. Hardly that. But audible.

Coming out of the woods, whispering

Happily Ever After.

                          Even in that light—

stars with the skeletons of animals

and old friends—

                       visible

to the eye behind the one always

left open on the east side of the house,

downhill. Where the coffee trees

and hemp and the graves of old dogs lie,

buried themselves in leaves and left

to the sputtering wind of memory.

& if that's not enough (he says

to himself in the voice of a black-and-white

actor whose name is a moth that keeps

avoiding the tip of his flaming tongue)

to bring you home, well, there

it is again,

              already exhausted

by your efforts to make it

comfortable

enough to stay. Impatient,

                                   already headed

back down into the woods, whispering

Once Upon A Time . . .

Born One-Hundred Forty-One Years Ago Today, with Special Guest Appearance by Richard Thompson as Henry the Human Fly

*

*

Fifty-Eight Today

High Egoslavian Holy Day! Jane Siberry is fifty-eight today, her music is inextricably woven into my memories of my first years with Earthgirl, the concerts, especially ones at Goucher College in Towson and in Gaston Hall (Hamster was there) one hundred yards from my cubicle at Georgetown (when she sang an ethereal Calling All Angels even though she'd shifted by then into her one album incarnation as a jazz chanteuse at that stage, before the one album incarnation into a kid's song writer, before decided she didn't want to be Jane Siberry anymore and reinvented herself as Issa, whose music and art I respect but don't love). When we visit the marina in Deale, the first place we shared, my brain's radio plays Jane Siberry, when I drive by the house in Glen Echo that was next my brain's radio plays Jane Siberry.




  
*
     



*





*




*

Not Just Me Being Here Again, Old Needer, Looking for Someone to Need

While I was on K's macbook last night at Thursday Night Pints - we discussed Apple's recent upgrade to a new operating system and how it fucked up our iPads and iPhones and I mentioned that earlier in the day Windows Update informed me it wanted to fuck my laptop for an hour, go away, come back after, and how it all sucks sooooo much and then drank to what complicit privileged fucks we are - I read out loud eight of the most recent of dozens of spam comments I get every day, they amuse me, I said. Talk of course turned to Clusterkabukifuck, stories of friends and family fucked and fucked more exponentially daily, we live in DC, we know people fucked and more fucked each compounding-interest fucked day:

• Me: Eѕѕentіally whеn the аir passаgеs cоntгaсt and grow to be narrow, stаndarԁ breathing іѕ hampeгeԁ. Thе іnhаlatiοn resultss in air рasѕing through narrow cоnѕtricted aiгways anԁ vіbгаtes thе lοose tіѕsue inѕіԁe the throat regiоn top toωаrds the ѕnores. The aіrωays grow too bе constrictеd becаusе of variouѕ motives including: Here is my site: Snoring Watch.
• K: Thanks, I have just been searching for information approximately this subject for ages and yours is the greatest I have found out till now. However, what about the conclusion? Are you sure concerning the supply? Take a look at my site: ABNEHBEN
• L: Since the time of that time, I never seen the two kinds of shoes at a long time. Set your garbage disposal, microwave on the normal cycle but be sure to turn off the warmth dry cycle. It then definitely guarantees a method for everyone. Additionally, you do not want to fine-tune that perfect form and mess this your moves. My site MORESAKI.JP.COM
• Me: You actually make it appear so easy along with your presentation however I find this topic to be actually something which I believe I might by no means understand. It sort of feels too complex and extremely wide for me. I am taking a look ahead in your next submit, I'll try to get the hang of it! Here is my web page: get contextual backlinks.
• K: I think this is among the most important information for me. And i am glad reading your article. But want to remark on few general things, The site style is ideal, the articles is really great : D. Good job, cheers. Also visit my homepage: best time to buy a lawn tractor.
• L: China makers fit great effort and want to buy this brand s product from an online auction site. That is a aaron hernandez patriots jerseys"," created" :" CHICAGO, IL - JANUARY 16: Linebacker Brian Urlacher #54 of the aaron hernandez patriots jerseys smiles late in the first place. My website: Authentic Justin Tuck Jerseys. 
• K: - Other news reports on drug cartels and Mexico in 2010 included a raid in South America where a totally submersible submarine, to be used for drug smuggling, was found under construction in the jungle, the murder of a U. Any reputable online business puts their shopping cart on a secure server.
  But for some kids, certain behaviors can be extreme and disruptive,. And the foreign operators have become very adept at skirting U. Look into my weblog UK Viagra Online. 
• Me: Infants and young children will typically have their blood drawn using a lancet. Generic drugs manufacturer has to remember that generic drugs appearance should not be same like the branded drug, so that customer can easily distinguish between them. Taking drugs without any physical check up can be harmful to your health and may even cause death. The consumers which are widely spread in USA purchase medicines from online medicals in Canada, UK and other nations and receive the instant orders. Look into my weblog UK Viagra Online.
• L: Why do you buy your Viagra from the UK?

Rubes talking past each other, said K. Same news every day, said L. Fucking helmetball, I said, the people at the table next to us, three tailored-suited white guys of apparent influence, cursing all liberal pussies who think the name Redskins is racist and want the local helmetball team to change its name.

• To be truthful, the preceding three sentences were spoken, the gag was promised but not actually acted out. 
• Above Monk requests via Pere Lebrun, who used to blog.
• Excellent chaw for the three day weekend. It reminds me that you can't spell revolution without revolution.
• How Sam missed a flight because of Slavoj Žižek.
• Linky Friday.
• The story of the tramp.
• Dan's review of Bleeding Edge - I've finished it, he nails it: Bleeding Edge is a book worth reading simply because it’s by Thomas Pynchon, although anyone contemplating it as an introduction to Pynchon’s work should instead go immediately to V or Gravity’s Rainbow or even The Crying of Lot 49, which, although now apparently somewhat disdained by Pynchon, has long served as a more accessibly condensed example of Pynchon’s literary strategies and worldview. Ultimately, however, Bleeding Edge is not so much “minor” Pynchon as it is a kind of synthetic replica of a Thomas Pynchon novel, all the more disappointing because it was written by Pynchon himself. 
• Twelve free online Alice Munro stories. 
• Munro links.
• Munro links.
• I don't like reading short stories for reasons for multiple reasons I'll spare you in this post from hearing. Short stories are the boarding schools of novelists, mostly, but Alice Munro made it clear it was the tenement in which she lived and I've no complaint at all about her Nobel Prize, her books on shelves about my house.
• Sun Ra.
• I missed Lennon's birthday on the 9th. More noteworthy than sad. Strangest days of my life.

ACCIDENTS OF BIRTH

William Meredith

Je vois les effroyables espaces de l’Univers qui m’enferment, et je me trouve attaché à un coin de cette vaste étendue, sans savoir pourquoi je suis plutôt en ce lieu qu’en un autre, ni pourquoi ce peu de temps qui m’est donné à vivre m’est assigné à ce point plutôt qu'à un autre de toute l’éternité qui m’a précédé, et de toute qui me suit.

—Pascal, Pensées sur la religion


The approach of a man’s life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive. The endless wonder of this meeting is what causes the mind, in its inward liberty of a frozen morning, to turn back and question and remember. The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here?

—Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

Spared by a car or airplane crash or

cured of malignancy, people look

around with new eyes at a newly

praiseworthy world, blinking eyes like these.

For I’ve been brought back again from the

fine silt, the mud where our atoms lie

down for long naps. And I’ve also been

pardoned miraculously for years

by the lava of chance which runs down

the world’s gullies, silting us back.

Here I am, brought back, set up, not yet

happened away.

                     But it’s not this random

life only, throwing its sensual

astonishments upside down on

the bloody membranes behind my eyeballs,

not just me being here again, old

needer, looking for someone to need,

but you, up from the clay yourself,

as luck would have it, and inching

over the same little segment of earth-

ball, in the same little eon, to

meet in a room, alive in our skins,

and the whole galaxy gaping there

and the centuries whining like gnats—

you, to teach me to see it, to see

it with you, and to offer somebody

uncomprehending, impudent thanks.

Born Fifty-Four Years Ago Today, Sixty-Six Today

So who else's birthday is it, asks K as we just sit down for a very welcome Thursday Night Pints ten minutes ago. Kirsty MacColl and John Prine, I said. L said, I love John Prine, K said, I love Kirsty MacColl. Sweet, I said to K, I like both but don't love enough to birthday but loves of loved ones I'll publish as long as I don't hate, give me that MacBook in your bag, tell me your favorite songs and I'll post both in ten minutes if you buy me a pint. Not only do I get free pints, I don't have to buy their thimbles of ridiculously priced single malt Nyquil.

UPDATE! SeatSix reminds me that MacColl died in a boating accident in 2000. Post title has been fixed. He also requested a song, will post sometime over the weekend.

Born 96 Years Ago Today

Paging Hamster for a playlist, have this in meantime. If you want a particular piece, let me know.






*

Protected by the Dog. Protected by Foghorns, Frog Honks, Cricket Circles on the Brown Hills

So, Sebald's Austerlitz. I'm reading fiction better than recent past though I still don't trust that I'm reading competently enough by what I remember of my reading skills to definitively rule up or down on a novel like I did for over three decades. I acknowledge the self-service when I say that's not entirely a bad side-effect and self-service when I claim my reading slump is yet another side-effect of my damn-adjustments across the dashboard of most of my religions. I find it difficult to turn down volume one place while maintaining volume in others when I always thought of all as a single whole. I want to care less about what I can't control but which was still inextricably part of the whole that comprises my damn. Music and poetry have intensified, I am listening and hearing music and poetry better than anytime in my life, I've known since eighteen it would be music and poetry, at last novels are coming back to me too. I don't trust me yet, but it's nice again to hear novels.

• Yes, predicatably, reading Sebald made me think of Kubisch.
• Oh, the novel. I don't do book reviews here. Have you noticed how as you've gotten older many new people you meet for the first time remind you strikingly, uncannily - maybe physically, maybe the inflections of the speaking voice, a tilt of the head? - of someone you know or knew? Anyway, Ishiguro, this was the most Ishiguro-ish novel I've read, for MANY! reasons. Here are two:
• The repetition of the variations of the phrase, So Vera described them to me, said Austerlitz, during Austerlitz's telling of Vera's telling of Austerlitz's childhood he has but vague memories, has the same - to me - hypnotic quietude as Ryder's I should hasten to says and as matter of facts in all his novels but especially The Unconsoled.
• Have you ever looked at the word many until it doesn't make sense any more? That sensation is a major part - I attest, self-servingly - of both Sebald and Ishiguro's projects.
• Now look at project. Try different pronunciations, switching from noun to verb.
• Austerlitz tells of a visit to the spa at Marienbad. When he arrives there is an old, bent porter who, with old man pain and old man dignity, carries Austerlitz's bags to his room. I say that porter is the porter of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (published 1995, Austerlitz 2001), but then it's self-serving to think so.
• So yes, it reminded me of Ishiguro in general and The Unconsoled in particular, but then everything does, which is why I can't trust my novel reading.
• OH! a third thing: both Ishiguro (in all his novels) and Sebald in this one novel of his I've read, share a love of making the uncanny seem utterly normal, the impossibly serendipitous mundane. Love love love.
• Is also reminded me of Stanley Elkin because of constant mania for list-making, long sentences if documenting object after object and then the inevitable physical collapse of the list-maker into weariness and - sometimes - both mental and physical debilitation.
• I bet a pint Sebald read Ishiguro. It's just silly to think he read Elkin, but everything reminds me of something.

• So yes, a clusterfuckless link day.
• Adding, as I said in a post a while ago, bark bark bark bark bark bark bark bark barking here doesn't help with the novel reading. So I dream of barking less or if not less less often. This is tied to of course the divorce I'm attempting from certain of my religions. Since I've promised I won't >>deleted bleggalgaze<< anymore, details will follow either outloud or in silence. 
• If I like you and you ask nicely I will visit used bookstores and when I find a copy buy and send you a copy of The Unconsoled. Those of you who got one last time are ineligible for this drawing.
• So yes, I enjoyed Austerlitz, will read a bunch of other authors before reading another Sebald, but I will read another Sebald.
• Nobel Prize betting odds one day before announcement.
• Another review of Bleeding Edge. I will try to finish it before I either finish Coover's Brunist or start someone new. Friends have been urging me to read Thomas Bernhard, I put out a request on twooter yesterday, had The Loser and The Old Masters and Gargoyles recommended to me by Kind people, good thing I have access to a university library's stacks. But I need to finish the Pynchon, especially now that while I don't trust myself I trust novels more than I did a week ago.
• University library books: I retrieved a copy of Sebald's Emigrants, completely underlined and highlighted, fuck that. I retrieved a copy of Handke's Repetition, completely underlined and highlighted, fuck that.
• Mr Alarum's has a new story up!
• On Mary Ruefle and songbirds.
• Steve Reich looks at a cake.
• Hejinian interview!

A NAME TRIMMED WITH COLORED RIBBONS

Lyn Hejinian

A name trimmed               They    are   seated   in    the   shadows
with colored                     husking   corn, shelling   peas. Houses
ribbons                              of wood set in the   ground.   I try to
                                            find the spot at which the pattern on               
                                            the   floor   repeats.   Pink,   and rosy,
                                            quartz. They   wade   in brackish water.
                                            The    leaves    outside    the window
tricked the eye, demanding that one see them, focus on them,
making it impossible to   look   past   them, and though holes
were opened through the foliage, they were as useless as port-  
holes underwater looking into a dark sea, which only reflects
the room one seeks to look out from. Sometimes into
benevolent and other times into ghastly shapes. It speaks of a
few of the rather terrible blind. I grew stubborn until blue as
the eyes overlooking the bay from the bridge scattered over
its bowls through a fading light and backed by the protest of
the bright breathless West. Each bit of jello had been molded
in tiny doll dishes, each trembling orange bit a different
shape, but all otherwise the same. I am urged out rummaging
into the sunshine, and the depths increase of blue above. A
paper hat afloat on a cone of water. The orange and gray
bugs were linked from their mating but faced in opposite
directions, and their scrambling amounted to nothing. This
simply means that the imagination is more restless than the
body. But, already, words. Can there be laughter without
comparisons. The tongue lisps in its hilarious panic. If, for ex-
ample, you say, “I always prefer being by myself,”   and, then,
one afternoon, you want to telephone a friend, maybe you
feel you have betrayed your ideals. We have poured into the
sink the stale water in which the iris died. Life is hopelessly
frayed, all loose ends. A pansy suddenly, a web, a trail
remarkably’s a snail’s. It was an enormous egg, sitting in the
vineyard—an enormous rock-shaped egg. On that still day
my grandmother raked up the leaves beside a particular
pelargonium. With a name like that there is a lot you can do.
Children are not always inclined to choose such paths. You
can tell by the eucalyptus tree, its shaggy branches scatter
buttons. In the afternoons, when the shades were pulled for
my nap, the light coming through was of a dark yellow, near-
ly orange, melancholy, as heavy as honey, and it made me
thirsty. That doesn’t say it all, nor even a greater part. Yet it
seems even more incomplete when we were there in person.
Half the day in half the room. The wool makes one itch and
the scratching makes one warm. But herself that she obeyed
she dressed. It talks. The baby is scrubbed everywhere, he is
an apple. They are true kitchen stalwarts. The smell of
breathing fish and breathing shells seems sad, a mystery, rap-
turous, then dead. A self-centered being, in this different
world. A urinating doll, half-buried in sand. She is lying on
her stomach with one eye closed, driving a toy truck along
the road she has cleared with her fingers. I mean untroubled
by the distortions. That was the fashion when she was a
young woman and famed for her beauty, surrounded by
beaux. Once it was circular and that shape can still be seen
from the air. Protected by the dog. Protected by foghorns,
frog honks, cricket circles on the brown hills. It was a
message of happiness by which we were called into the room,
as if to receive a birthday present given early, because it was
too large to hide, or alive, a pony perhaps, his mane trimmed
with colored ribbons.