The Burning, the Loving, the Speaking, the Opening

• My second favorite radio three hours of the week is Jeffrey Davidson's Saturday sunrise show. It's quite astonishing how deeply some of songs he plays slay me. All songs today taken from yesterday's show.
• Was gonna remake/remodel last night's United kit post for today's post - I couldn't wait to post it - but since Charlie commented it's a stand-alone and today you get bleggalgazing.
• 31% more meaningless!
• Futile Sunday in the Middle of a Three Day Weekend Bleggalgazing: The threatened updating of the blogrolls has happened. All blogs that hadn't updated in at least three months have been moved to Moribund. All blogs that killed themselves and no longer provide a feed have been removed. I think the latter are the ones that contribute to this blog's slow-loading, it's loading much faster now. There are a few new sites for your eyes. As always, if you are Kinding me and me not you please let me know. If you've migrated to a new address in the past six months please let me know. If there's someone you think I should be/would enjoy reading, please let me know.

• Angel Olsen is playing Rock & Roll Hotel May 15th. Not sure when we're picking up Planet from college, but if I'm in town May 15th I'm going.
• Why twitter elites can't speak for minorities. (h/t Giovanni via twitter)
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• The gentrification of the imagination.
• Anne Carson, for those of you who do.
• Crooked Rain turns twenty.  Wasn't love, was some good nights of drunken mutual groping.
• More on next Swans.
• Prunella's lastest playlist.
• People have liked the Rukeyser poems posted lately. Have another below.
• I have always been a fool for female singer-songwriters.

AKIBA

Muriel Rukeyser

The night is covered with signs. The body and face of man,

with signs, and his journeys.     Where the rock is split

and speaks to the water;     the flame speaks to the cloud;

the red splatter, abstraction, on the door

speaks to the angel and the constellations.

The grains of sand on the sea-floor speak at last to the noon.

And the loud hammering of the land behind

speaks ringing up the bones of our thighs, the hoofs,

we hear the hoofs over the seethe of the sea.

All night down the centuries, have heard, music of passage.

Music of one child carried into the desert;

firstborn forbidden by law of the pyramid.

Drawn through the water with the water-drawn people

led by the water-drawn man to the smoke mountain.

The voice of the world speaking, the world covered by signs,

the burning, the loving, the speaking, the opening.

Strong throat of sound from the smoking mountain.

Still flame, the spoken singing of a young child.

The meaning beginning to move, which is the song.

Music of those who have walked out of slavery.

Into that journey where all things speak to all things

refusing to accept the curse, and taking

for signs the signs of all things, the world, the body

which is part of the soul, and speaks to the world,

all creation being created in one image, creation.

This is not the past walking into the future,

the walk is painful, into the present, the dance

not visible as dance until much later.

These dancers are discoverers of God.

We knew we had all crossed over when we heard the song.

Out of a life of building lack on lack:

the slaves refusing slavery, escaping into faith:

an army who came to the ocean: the walkers

who walked through the opposites, from I to opened Thou,

city and cleave of the sea. Those at flaming Nauvoo,

the ice on the great river: the escaping Negroes,

swamp and wild city: the shivering children of Paris

and the glass black hearses; those on the Long March:

all those who together are the frontier, forehead of man.

Where the wilderness enters, the world, the song of the world.

Akiba rescued, secretly, in the clothes of death

by his disciples carried from Jerusalem

in blackness journeying to find his journey

to whatever he was loving with his life.

The wilderness journey through which we move

under the whirlwind truth into the new,

the only accurate. A cluster of lights at night:

faces before the pillar of fire. A child watching

while the sea breaks open. This night. The way in.

Barbarian music, a new song.

Acknowledging opened water, possibility:

open like a woman to this meaning.

In a time of building statues of the stars,

valuing certain partial ferocious skills

while past us the chill and immense wilderness

spreads its one-color wings until we know

rock, water, flame, cloud, or the floor of the sea,

the world is a sign, a way of speaking. To find.

What shall we find? Energies, rhythms, journey.

Ways to discover. The song of the way in.

United's 2014 Home Kit Revealed!

That's United's new home kit. Imagine my surprise when I won the bidding for the season at $19.99, but wait, I got a second season of shirt sponsorship for only the cost of shipping and handling for both. I'm not crazy about the font, but fuck, it should be good for a few extra pings over the course of the eight month season.

The Alphabet and the Cello Can Represent Horses but I Can Only Pretend to Be a Dog Slurping Pudding

Bryce played Felix Kubin yesterday. Bryce's show is my favorite three hours of radio each week. Yes, an unintended though fortunate tradition has arisen here: what interests me most from Bryce's show is often played here Saturday. I seek out Friday evening what Bryce played Friday afternoon to hear more, learn more, hope to discover new things via ricochet and tangents. Sometimes I own some of the music, most often not, as was the case with Kubin, who I know of but don't know much. I go to WFMU and in the search box on the left column I type the name of the musician and/or band and then look at the songs in the all the playlists the music appears then find the music if possible. Sometimes, depending of when and how WFMU archived their shows there are convenient pop-ups, but WFMU only began providing the pop-up format a couple of years ago, most of the time I need find the songs on youtube or elsewhere. I did this for Kubin last night. Turns out I don't find Kubin that interesting (I'll take the blame), though in looking at playlists I was reminded of Laurie Spiegel whose Expanding Universe is one of my favorite albums. Spent last night with it, in fact.







More Spiegel later, but here, a hastily shot video from my dining room yesterday morning, a 30 second clip of  (extraordinary bad quality) robins, mad with hunger, in a holly bush.





    

• Earthgirl was with me, she can vouch: There must have been five, six dozen. They stripped that holly of berries in ten minutes. The ferals watched from the back porch (judging, I anthropomorphize, eight inches of heavy melting snow made for poor hunting), the insides watched from the dining table.
• I am so dope I think if I find something interesting all others, not just some others (much less no one) will find it interesting too (though a friend did tweet that he liked the Spiegel I tweeted last night). Fine metaphors abounding, life in general, this blog in particular. The same dope mechanism works for repeating gags I find funny.
• Wiki says a Spiegel piece was used for the "cornucopia scene" in the movie version of The Hunger Games. Forgive me if I don't draw the same gratuitous moral outrage at this as I did at motherfucking Eric Clapton's motherfucking Michelob commercial thirty-five years ago. I'm older, hope I'm smarter about how stupid I am for gratuitous moral outrage, save it for grander stupider things. Plus Clapton sucked long before the Michelob commercial and even longer after.
• This blog had a fuckload more readers when I indulged my gratuitous moral outrage on a large daily basis.
• The vile mood, lifted. I was asked last night by a dear friend why I've changed (and changed for the better, she claims). I said I haven't changed. She cited examples, gave me a chance to consider before I'd deny and she could call me a liar. I conceded. It's too much work, I said, to think everyone of bad faith even if the faith they have is bad in my bad faith opinion. 
• This post did not start out to be intentionally relatively link free - it did set out to be a lazyass weekend post - but check the blogrolls, people by and large are (sensibly) hibernating. 
• Re: the above - bleggalgazing.
• The above method for finding the benefits of ricochets and tangents in music works for poetry too! Find a favorite poem and type what you think is a keyword into the search box of Poetry Foundation, for instance, and see what poets you had forgot, hadn't thought about it years, never heard of, pop up, then read them.

*



[A STRAIGHT RAIN IS RARE]

Lyn Hejinian

A straight rain is rare and doors have suspicions

and I hold that names begin histories

and that the last century was a cruel one. I am pretending

to be a truck in Mexico. I am a woman with a long neck and a good burden

and I waddle efficiently. Activity never sleeps and no tale of crumbling cliffs

can be a short one. I have to shift weight favorably. Happiness

can’t be settled. I brush my left knee twice, my right once,

my left twice again and in that way advance. The alphabet

and the cello can represent horses but I can only pretend

to be a dog slurping pudding. After the 55 minutes it takes to finish

my legs tremble. All is forgiven. Yesterday is going the way of tomorrow

indirectly and the heat of the sun is inadequate at this depth. I see

the moon. The verbs ought and can lack infinity and somewhere

between 1957 when the heat of the dry sun naughtily struck me

and now when my secrets combine in the new order of cold rains

and night winds a lot has happened. Long phrases

are made up of short phrases that bear everything “in vain” or “all

in fun” “for your sake” and “step by step” precisely. I too can spring.

Sand and Snow-Capped Waves

Indulge the aargh and motherfucking vile mood by deploying this in multiple guises or lazyass blogging with lazyass snow theme. Best lazyass blogging and lazyass snow theme. Aargh and motherfucking vile mood later, or not, and probably not here but there. No, the poem will not be Stevens' Snowman, I know you think you know how I think, this sentence proves you're only part right. Click tags Beefheart, Kees, Galaxie 500 for more of each.

Also too, activating the Momcat Alert System. We haven't seen her since the storm.

UPDATE! Drove Earthgirl's car to shop for service, restocked at Safeway, just got home, deactivating the Momcat Alert System, it's uncanny and spooky how it works, it's a good thing.

UPDATE! That reduces some of the aargh, as does getting the car to shop, but can't concentrate to read either Deronda or Miss MacIntosh or more Kees, so have last night's and now's linkages:

• Computer-based sound poetry.
• That helped the aargh. A lot. 
• Against likeability. Some of the day's aargh is related.
• Last RIP call for Stuart Hall.  
• It's not our fault if it's a perfect storm. 
• We are trained to be in constant fear. 
• Neoliberalism's war on higher education. Some of the day's aargh is related - a bunch, actually - but must not write about employer, Complicit Bastard's Rule Number One.
• Josipovici and Delany, for those of you who do one or the other or both.
• Someone else read Maqroll this year. I've one extra copy left.
• Prunella's latest playlist.

LAND'S END

Weldon Kees

A day all blue and white, and we

Came out of woods to sand

And snow-capped waves. The sea

Rose with us as we walked, the land

Built dunes, a lighthouse, and a sky of gulls.

Here where I built my life ten years ago,

The day breaks gray and cold;

And brown surf, muddying the shore,

Deposits fish-heads, sewage, rusted tin.

Children and men break bottles on the stones.

Beyond the lighthouse, black against the sky,

Two gulls are circling where the woods begin.

Our Interior Cavities Brimming with Snow

When I paid off my DC United season tickets Monday I was encouraged to please attend the annual Winter Season Ticket Holder Event, this year this Saturday from 2PM-5PM at the new hipster bowling alley Pinstripes in Georgetown. It's not my kind of thing, I said (I've had season tickets for more than a dozen years, I've never attended a single Season Ticket Holder event though I have used the lounge at RFK only season ticket holders can use). I then asked, Is there any news about a new shirt sponsor? (VW didn't renew its contract.) There's a big kit announcement at the event, an unveiling, a big deal. So they do have a new sponsor, I asked. I'm not sure about that, he said, but I think there's a new kit with a new template. Here's a photo of a leaked tease - I can't save it to post it - I sure hope that's on the pants and not the crest on the shirt, cause if yes, the fuckity.

I used to post a recap after every DCU game. Not gonna happen this year, don't worry, there may be some, it certainly won't be all. I used to post a lot more about soccer than I do now. Don't worry, it will not ever be again as much as once. I can't imagine my attempts to rekindle my affair with soccer will succeed but if I get halfway there I'll be happy. Hey! Peter Gabriel is 64 today!

• Last year I wrote that Gabriel's music had stalled for me, but this year the love is back. See the tie-in with the soccer, hmm, hmm? Here is My Standard Sentence for Gabriel's birthday: I say this every February 13, the November 14, 1982 Peter Gabriel concert at the Warner Theater, holyfuck, one of the best nights of my life. I passed him forward on his wave back to the stage.
• It needs saying: Fuck snow. Though fortunately I have a wife who likes shoveling snow, all I need do is make her breakfast, an excellent deal.
• Let's keep talking about Stuart Hall. 
• Who cares about history?
• Onto-cartographical hope springs eternal!
• Wittgenstein's happy world. Tom's latest.
• Someone's favorite Dickinson poem. Despite honest efforts, this has not turned into the year I read Dickinson, at least not yet.
• Last night's post of new Sun Kil Moon songs (in case you're linking in to this post not the main page).
• Poetry's complex pleasure principle.
• Yes, for me, my Gabriel are the great first four solo albums, Car, Melt, Scratch, Security. Richard (who recommends this) made a case for So last night on twitter, there are great songs on So (and some truly awful songs), the below, his homage to Anne Sexton, is one of my favorite Gabriel songs.

*



ILL-ADVISED LOVE POEM

John Lau

Come live with me

And we will sit

Upon the rocks

By shallow rivers

Come live with me

And we will plant acorns

In each other's mouth

It would be our way

Of greeting the earth

Before it shoves us

Back into the snow

Our interior cavities

Brimming with

Disagreeable substances

Come live with me

Before winter stops

To use the only pillow

The sky ever sleeps on

Our interior cavities

Brimming with snow

Come live with me

Before spring

Swallows the air

And birds sing

Richard Ramirez Died of Natural Causes I Watched the Film The Song Remains the Same I Can't Live Without My Mother's Love

  
New Sun Kil Moon. Have I ever mentioned I love Sun Kil Moon? Click tag for more.





*

You Know the Murmurs

• Scott Williams played the above near the end of his Monday show, it had been years since I'd heard Scrotum Poles, IT STUCK!
• This is a lazy post with a purpose: no song to song connection as per usual, I need to get these good songs stuck in my head out of my head to make room for more. It didn't start out a lazy post, the non-lazy stuff is gone, there's that tag again in footer.
• Agamben (for those of you who do): A theory of destituent power: While the state of exception was originally conceived as a provisional measure, which was meant to cope with an immediate danger in order to restore the normal situation, the security reasons constitute today a pemanent technology of government. For the record, I don't think the measure was ever "provisional."
• How Iowa flattened literature. The CIA connection. Almost - almost - as horrific as motherfucking Raymond Carver's influence over a generation of American fiction writers.
• Food links.
• NEBEL STREET IS IN ROCKVILLE! THERE IS NO NORTH BETHESDA. BETHESDA STOPS AT THE BELTWAY! Motherfucking corporate developers.
• Lately.
• Riddled's readers get a higher class of spam.
• Bachelard, for those of you who do.
• Bending the shtick: a review of Žižek's Jokes.
• Deleuze (on Hume), for those of you who do.
• Stevie Smith, for those of you who do.
• The fourth sonnet has been added, if you care you know where.
• Prunella's Bad Brains cascade. I was young once too.
• Today's Rukeyser poem via Mark, who notes she died 34 years ago today.
• Remember how I said a few days ago how I hate hearing about concerts I wish I'd known about? Julianna Barwick was in DC two nights ago. Fuck me.
• Infatuation (Holyfuck!) on schedule:

[MURMURS FROM THE EARTH OF THIS LAND]

Muriel Rukeyser

Murmurs from the earth of this land, from the caves and craters,
      from the bowl of darkness. Down watercourses of our
      dragon childhood, where we ran barefoot.
We stand as growing women and men. Murmurs come down
      where water has not run for sixty years.
Murmurs from the tulip tree and the catalpa, from the ax of
      the stars, from the house on fire, ringing of glass; from
      the abandoned iron-black mill.
Stars with voices crying like mountain lions over forgotten
      colors.
Blue directions and a horizon, milky around the cities where the
      murmurs are deep enough to penetrate deep rock.
Trapping the lightning-bird, trapping the red central roots.
You know the murmurs. They come from your own throat.
You are the bridges to the city and the blazing food-plant green;
The sun of plants speaks in your voice, and the infinite shells of
      accretions
A beach of dream before the smoking mirror.
You are close to that surf, and the leaves heated by noon, and
      the star-ax, the miner’s glitter walls. The crests of the sea
Are the same strength you wake with, the darkness is the eyes
      of children forming for a blaze of sight and soon, soon,
Everywhere, you own silence, who drink from the crater, the
      nebula, one another, the changes of the soul.

The Dog at the Center of My Life Recognizes You've Come to Visit

   
          
High Egoslavian Holy Day, so the traditional post. Leslie Nielsen was born eighty-eight years ago today. While the above makes me laugh every time, here, proof that I am still twelve years old, my favorite gag of all time since the last until the next.





           

Tina Louise was born eighty years ago today. Let me repeat that: Tina Louise was born eighty years ago. We pimply boys played a ubiquitous and sexist game of who would you rather do in my junior and senior high school years, Ginger or Marianne, I always thought those who chose Marianne were either lying and/or dopes and/or chose her because she'd cook their dinner and do their laundry too.

• A review of The Intercept.
• Of course I'll read The Intercept. I'm not encouraging you to boycott The Intercept. I do not think Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill are fully bought and paid for stooges to their billionaire sponsor. I think they are far more compromised than they are conscious of being, and I only ask you keep that in mind - and what that signifies - when you read them, as well as consider how Greenwald/Poitras/Scahill's adversarial dissidence accrues to the billionaire's benefit.
• RIP Stuart Hall.
• More market than ever: are you an aspiring novelist in need of a soul-crunching trend?
• Bleggalgazing!
• Now there are two main blegheaders, the one above and Momcat.
• Washington Grove!
• Laytonsville coywolf!
• United on the radio? I paid off my season tickets yesterday in full. I
• Once again, RIP Maxine Kumin.
• Kumin's Sonnets Uncorseted.
• I posted her Nurture a few years ago, it remains one of my most googled pings on the line about pillowcases, which is what I entitled that post.
• Two James Wright poems!
• Harold Budd, for those of you who do.
• Bodeh played Circle last night, fell asleep listening to, woke up with....

HOW IT IS

Maxine Kumin

Shall I say how it is in your clothes?

A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.   

The dog at the center of my life recognizes   

you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic.

In the left pocket, a hole.

In the right, a parking ticket

delivered up last August on Bay State Road.   

In my heart, a scatter like milkweed,

a flinging from the pods of the soul.

My skin presses your old outline.

It is hot and dry inside.

I think of the last day of your life,

old friend, how I would unwind it, paste   

it together in a different collage,

back from the death car idling in the garage,   

back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced,   

reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish   

into a ceremony of sandwich,

running the home movie backward to a space   

we could be easy in, a kitchen place

with vodka and ice, our words like living meat.

Dear friend, you have excited crowds

with your example. They swell

like wine bags, straining at your seams.   

I will be years gathering up our words,   

fishing out letters, snapshots, stains,

leaning my ribs against this durable cloth

to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.

Birdsong, Face It, Some Male Machine Gone Addled - Repeat, Repeat - the Damage Keeps Doing, the World Ending Then Starting, the First Word, the Last, Etc.

• Birdsong today and then I'll keep Messiaen to myself until next time I don't.
• Prunella sends a clarification: she didn't receive the email, a colleague did. My apologies. The story has gone national, read more here.
• What's the point if we can't have fun? Is it meaningful to say an electron “chooses” to jump the way it does? Obviously, there’s no way to prove it. The only evidence we could have (that we can’t predict what it’s going to do), we do have. But it’s hardly decisive. Still, if one wants a consistently materialist explanation of the world—that is, if one does not wish to treat the mind as some supernatural entity imposed on the material world, but rather as simply a more complex organization of processes that are already going on, at every level of material reality—then it makes sense that something at least a little like intentionality, something at least a little like experience, something at least a little like freedom, would have to exist on every level of physical reality as well.
• Synecdochly embedded seppuku.
• You take the low road and I'll take the low road.
• RIP, Stuart Hall.
• Two Stuart Hall essays on neoliberalism.
• UPDATE! Lots more on Hall and lots of links.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• The New Inquiry's Sunday readings.

• Bleggalgazing. I don't think the Kate Bush allusion was intended (I hope I'm wrong) that has put Hounds of Love - the album, not just the song alluded to - on permanent replay today in my head. It's a good thing.
• Bleggalgazing - over the next few days I'm going to move more blogs that haven't updated in at least two months to Moribund: if and when the owner does blog again I want to be sure to see it, something easier to notice in Moribund than in the more active blogrolls. As always, unless the owner has killed the blog itself, no one is purged.
• Beatallica.
• People still care. Tom Clark's latest.
• [I] [Lied]. I'm surprised you're promoting it, said L last night at Sunday Night Pints, though I approve. Thank you, I said. I like what you sent me, said K. Thank you, I said. Are you going to point out what you're doing, L asked. Nope, I said. And that's today's Sunday Night Pints monologue, I love you, but much of what we talked about is none of your business.
• UPDATE! [I] [Lied] dead. [I] [Lied] [Dog] lives.
• The thousand somethings of someone.
• RIP, Maxine Kumin.
• More.
• Something that stutters sincerely: In the work of Hart, Lin, and others, I will argue, this deliberate embrace of failure is worked out through an explicit departure from an allegedly exhausted aesthetic and a movement toward a renewed emphasis on emotion. This ends up looking like a testing of the grounds between, on the one hand, the sincere or expressive, and on the other, the ironic or unemotional. The form this relation takes, though, depends upon thinking about postmodernism as representative of modes of discourse which thrive on techniques like parody and pastiche, on aesthetic distance and heightened self-consciousness through a variety of methods (recycling of old forms, appropriation, collage). hough postmodern art is obviously far more complex and diverse than the above characterization acknowledges, poets like Hart and Lin seem to see postmodernist poetics as having reached its limit, and are now in a position to critique its methods through (ironically) oscillating between an embrace and rejection of such techniques.

BIRDSONG, FACE IT, SOME MALE MACHINE

Marianne Boruch

Birdsong, face it, some male machine   

gone addled—repeat, repeat—the damage

keeps doing, the world ending then starting,

the first word the last, etc. It's that   

etcetera. How to love. Is a wire   

just loose? Build an ear for that. Fewer, they say.   

So many fewer, by far. He's showing off   

to call her back. Or claiming the tree.   

Or a complaint—the food around here,   

the ants, the moths, the berries. She's making   

the nest, or both are. In feathers, in hair or twigs,   

in rootlets and tin foil. Shiny bits seen

from a distance, a mistake. But fate   

has reasons to dress up. Stupid   

and dazzling have a place, a place, a place   

though never. She can't sing it.

Postscript to Last Night

Spent last night with Messiaen, spending tonight with Messiaen, here, have this if you want....

From Out at the Edge of the Key- and Fingerboards

,


I'm just short of a third through Richard Power's new novel Orfeo. I ordered a Kindle copy after opening Dalkey's first package with the wrong volume of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling and started reading before Dalkey made good on fixing its mistake, air-freighting the right volume. I've read every novel Powers has written to varying degrees of like to love. I haven't - so far, and so far it keeps getting better - been this engaged in a Power's novel since 1998's Gain (and I very much liked 2003's Plowing the Dark* and thought - think - 2006's The Echo Maker the best novel about immediate post-911 America I've read (or tried to read)).**

Disclosure: the main character of Orfeo is a composer of 20th C Classical music, the novel is full of 20th C Classical music and music theory in general and it's catnip to me, I mean Berio and Ligeti and Shostakovich and.... Olivier Messiean. Power's writes  a long, sweet, brutal twelve page love song (the post's title comes from it) to Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, describing the conditions under which he wrote Q4ET (Messiaen was a French POW in WW2 in a prison camp in Silesia, wrote the piece there) but also the musical structure (or the revolutionary lack of structure***) of Q4ET. Anyway, I'm listening to it two or three times tonight, it's in my head it can be in yours, maybe some might season their night with it.

__

* I miss John Leonard's book reviews. 
** All three are to reviews in NYRB and may be subscription only. I can get them to you via other means if you have no access and want one or other.
*** One of the book's major themes is the immediate obsolescence of revolution in art.

Onomatomaniac

In college radio drama, Prunella got a letter:

Blank and Bland are writing once again to ask you not to play any more noise wall during your show. We have discussed the situation with the executive staff, and the consensus reached was that though noise wall does not violate FCC policy, that does not mean that it is appropriate for airplay on WWWW. Our primary purpose is to provide eclectic programming that reflects the interests of the students and the WWWW community. It is up to the program director and general manager to decide what programming best satisfies this purpose. Because noise wall can be misinterpreted as WWWW being off the air, we have decided that playing it does not align with our primary purpose. Additionally, WWWW is owned and operated by the Man, and we are responsible to them for our programming. WWWW is not an appropriate platform for this genre. The executive staff has backed us on this decision. 

Additionally, you asked me why I was taking the side of a listener over the side of a programmer. Please be mindful of the fact that over 50% of our operating costs are provided by the generous donations of our listeners. Without them, WWWW would not be what it is. We program for the listener. 

We appreciate all of the subbing you do for the station, which is why we respectfully ask that you refrain from playing noise wall on your show. If you continue to play it, we will need to give the slot to another programmer. If you decide you would no longer like to do the slot, please let Bland and Blank know so the slot can be filled.

To which she responded:

To: Bland & Bland

i will NOT be censored for programming that does NOT violate fcc policy.

find a programmer that agrees to be censored, for your no-longer("absurdly")-eclectic station.

sincerely,

medium d

Another reason to cherish and support WFMU.

Prunella's playlists are always welcome and uncensored here, proof of my non-censorship policy evidenced by the fact I've linked to some of her playlists that have had Alice in Chains and/or Soundgarden songs.







Within twenty-four hours of purchasing tickets to a March 14 Xiu Xiu show in DC and within four hours of posting about purchasing tickets to a March 14 Xiu Xiu show in DC the following appeared in my email box:

The Xiu Xiu show at Rock & Roll Hotel on Friday, March 14, 2014 has been canceled.

From the band:

"I am disappointed and very sorry to say that Xiu Xiu will have to postpone our upcoming tour. I have been having increasing  trouble with my throat for years, and this week my doctor advised me not to sing for at least two months, or risk losing it permanently. Hopefully, as soon as possible, we will be able reschedule these dates. Thank you to our fans for continuing to support us. We love you all and look forward to seeing you all soon."

Oh well. If and when Xiu Xiu comes around again perhaps I'll know enough about them and like their music enough to change that oh well to oh fuck.

• The Fall of the USSR: The advantage of capitalism v. central planning, is that information is sent through prices, supply and demand.  This information feedback, however, is still gameable by power blocs.  The exact strategies are different than in a command economy, but the end result is the same.  The West and America are currently undergoing this exact problem.  The entire financial crisis was about inaccurate feedback, and broken feedback loops: it was about the financial and housing industries deliberately damaging the feedback system.  Then, when it finally went off a cliff, they destroyed the capitalistic feedback system, which when properly operating, makes companies go bankrupt, by obtaining bailouts due to owning western governments.
• Bleggalgazing, not mine.
• Bleggalgazing, mine: This was going to be tomorrow's monologue but tomorrow, if there is a post, and who am I kidding, of course there's going to be a post, will be, barring KABOOM!, music (music is CRUSHING me these days, and I mean CRUSHING me in a deliciously overwhelming and vaguely scary - a good vaguely scary - way) and poetry (not mine, don't worry). Earthgirl has hired the boyfriend of Planet's bestfriend to help her set up her website for her artwork: it's hard to get shows and sell product without one. (The link will be added to me and mine when the site is done.) He was at our house late afternoon yesterday. I had mentioned to Earthgirl a couple of weeks ago that I wondered if guy could help me with two projects I've long thought about here, the first rotating blog-headers, say a dozen, that rotate each time a person accesses the blog, the second rotating music, say a dozen, that play automatically each time a person accesses the blog. She must have mentioned it to the guy, because he said he could do both for me. I said no thanks.
• Hate sinks: This complex tension—between voice and civility, eyeballs and deliberation—is one that future-of-news enthusiasts are good at waving away, but that comment moderators must bear. Within representative democracy, we can think of moderators’ bodies as being like that element of an electronic circuit that dissipates excess energy and allows it to function. They absorb the excess affects in a period of political dysfunction, and allow institutions to appear stable and unchallenged. They maintain the semblance of civility after older infrastructures have fallen into disrepair. They suck up discursive heat so that political communications systems can keep flowing according to their archaic fantasies of civil, public discourse. If computers have such heat sinks, moderators are hate sinks.
• This week in water.
• SeatSix gives you a theremin.
• Potentially my next flash obsession. 
• UPDATE! Hamster emails to say we say Angel Olsen open for Bonnie Prince Billy at Birchmere a couple of years ago, I've no recollection. I confess, I've probably never given opening acts the attention they deserve, will work to fix in future.
• UPDATE! Hamster emails to say Angel Olsen sang in Bonnie Prince Billy's band that night, didn't open. Also that she's coming to R&R Hotel in May - depending on when and whether I'm around I'll go, but not going to buy tickets for a least a couple of months.
• Fifteen word sonnets.
• Beckett and animals.

ONOMATOMANIA

Thomas Lux

the word for the inability to find the right word,
leads me to self-diagnose: onomatomaniac. It's not
the 20 volume OED I need
not Dr. Roget's book, which offers
equals only, never discovery.
I accept the fallibility of language,
its spastic elasticity,
its jake-leg, as well as prima ballerina, dances.
I accept that language
can be manipulated towards deceit
(ex.: The Mahatmapropaganda, i.e., Goebbels);
I accept, and mourn, though not a lot,
he loss of the dash/semi-colon pair.
It's the sound of a pause unlike no other pause.
And when the words are tedious
and tedious also their order - sew me up
in a rug and toss me in the sea!
Language is dying, the novel is dying, poetry
is a corpse colder than the Ice man,
they've all been dying for thousands of years,
yet people still write, people still read,
and everyone knows that nothing is really real
until it is written.
Until it is written!
Even those who cannot read
know that.

The Dog Who Moaned, Hearing the Violins in Concert

After I re-posted a few days ago the Pere Ubu video of this blog's Theme Song Two from last September's Pere Ubu concert at Rock and Roll Hotel on H St I went to look at upcoming shows at Rock and Roll Hotel. I'm not aching to go to a show, I like going to shows, but mostly I hate hearing afterward of shows I would have gone to had I known. The only band on Rock and Roll Hotel's current calendar that piqued my interest was Shearwater, a band I don't think I've played here - I'll fix that soon, though not today - and I recognized a few bands including Xiu Xiu, a band I've one of those odd relationships: I know of, I don't know about; I like them when I hear them, could hear a song but not know it's them. Two morning's ago Mr Alarum asked me if I'd heard the new Xiu Xiu, it's streaming live, said it's good, it's dark and goth like he likes his Xiu Xiu dark and goth. I said, they're coming to town.







Mr Alarum bought his tickets Wednesday, I bought me and Earthgirl and Planet (who'll be home on Spring Break the night of the show) tickets yesterday. Mr Alarum provided all the songs here but the above, Xiu Xiu's excellent cover of one of probably my most dozen air guitar songs ever. I don't know - I suspect not - that Xiu Xiu/Jamie Stewart will reach the third innermost circle of bands that rotate for one of two open spots on My Sillyass Deserted Island Game, but they are certainly going to get a fair hearing over the next month.

Show's at Rock & Roll Hotel on H between 13th and 14th NE on Friday March 14, dinner and beverages before, location suspected though details TBD. Any Mocomofos, Bawlmers, DCers, and Novas welcome to join us, tickets are General Admission, just buy one, and bring a loved one! if you want. And, please, I welcome suggestions of Xiu Xiu/Jamie Stewart songs, albums, you think worth hearing.

• Bob Crow descends on London: Every new building project in London now comes with its own cutesy nickname. The Gherkin, the Shard of Glass, the Cheesegrater, the Helter-Skelter. The point isn’t just to endear the new ziggurats of finance capital to the city’s population: all these fanciful geometries exist to hammer in the point that London isn’t really a city any more. It’s a playground. London has more multi-millionaires than any other city on the planet, with well over four thousand individuals worth over $30m. London property is increasingly being used as a global reserve currency; more value is accrued by the average residence than by the average resident. London is an enormous concierge service for the super-rich. There are those that serve the oligarchs directly: the construction workers that raise their speculative investments, the service workers that bring them their meals, the sex workers that soothe their anxieties at the end of the day. There are those workers that help reproduce the labour of these first-order servants from behind the tills at fast food outlets and behind the desks of tube stations. There are cops that keep the streets clear and technicians that keep the water flowing. As it spreads out from the centre of the city its operation becomes ever more abstracted, but the rule is the same: everywhere the fruits of your labour must flow upwards.
• Geographers and maps: a relationship in trouble.
• Above found at ::wood s lot:: who's back from his bleggal break (and who you should bookmark and check-in daily).
• A reminder to please consider throwing the coins in your pocket at Arthur Silber. 
• A gorgeously happy nine-line Wallace Stevens poem.
• In defense of unnecessary words. 
• Richard Power's Orfeo reviewed: Throughout his three decade career, with a rare courage and relentlessness, Powers has searched for the right form to tell his characters’ stories while dramatizing the forces of history pressing against them, striving to incorporate essay-like commentary without breaking the fictional dream. While there seems to be near universal acclaim for Powers’s genius, his talent for writing emotionally palpable characters is often questioned: a recent New York Times review even gives a name to his alleged Achilles’s heel, “The Powers’s Problem.” Justified or not, this rap has caused Powers to be pigeonholed as too cerebral, as if his fiction is too smart for its own good. Yes, that's the standard complaint, now a cliche.
• Koch's Bel Canto.
• untouchable: you want to read books without this gruesome stuff. books where you don't have to split yourself in the appreciating intellect that abstractly acknowledges the verbal outcome, the so-called artistic achievement and the rest of you that is just plain horrified by the pervasive gruesomeness of it all; a horrifyingness that is aggravated by having to alienate yourself from your feelings in order to be accepted as a thinking person or, the reverse, to acknowledge your feelings and in addition experience apprehension in pointing those things out and also the expectation/fear of some kind of social repercussion because to insist on your right to your very own interpretation against a certain status quo has as consequence social exclusion. this is very clear, your blogular history is full of examples of this [although not recent ones, it seemed to have become somewhat easier to say those sort of things, but is still feels very uncomfortable for you to point out (you feel you can't ignore it either) this stuff and maybe is uncomfortable for readers as well].

DOGS ARE SHAKESPEAREAN, CHILDREN ARE STRANGERS

Delmore Schwartz

Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers.

Let Freud and Wordsworth discuss the child,

Angels and Platonists shall judge the dog,

The running dog, who paused, distending nostrils,

Then barked and wailed; the boy who pinched his sister,   

The little girl who sang the song from Twelfth Night,   

As if she understood the wind and rain,

The dog who moaned, hearing the violins in concert.   

—O I am sad when I see dogs or children!

For they are strangers, they are Shakespearean.

Tell us, Freud, can it be that lovely children   

Have merely ugly dreams of natural functions?   

And you, too, Wordsworth, are children truly   

Clouded with glory, learned in dark Nature?   

The dog in humble inquiry along the ground,   

The child who credits dreams and fears the dark,   

Know more and less than you: they know full well   

Nor dream nor childhood answer questions well:   

You too are strangers, children are Shakespearean.

Regard the child, regard the animal,   

Welcome strangers, but study daily things,   

Knowing that heaven and hell surround us,   

But this, this which we say before we’re sorry,   

This which we live behind our unseen faces,   

Is neither dream, nor childhood, neither   

Myth, nor landscape, final, nor finished,   

For we are incomplete and know no future,   

And we are howling or dancing out our souls   

In beating syllables before the curtain:   

We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.

Write Down that I Can No Longer State a Model Is at Work

As mentioned here twice, I ordered Miss MacIntosh, My Darling from Dalkey Archives. Here's the email I received:

We've received your order at Dalkey Archive Press. Unfortunately, one of the books you've requested MISS MACINTOSH MY DARLING v. 2 is out of stock both here and at our supplier's warehouse. If you'd like, I can substitute a book for equal or lesser value, I can refund that portion of your order, or I can refund the order in its entirety. Just let me know how you'd like to proceed.

I wrote back:

Is it something you anticipate receiving in near future or is it out for a good long time?

And received back:

I don't think it's scheduled foreseeable future, unfortunately.

I wrote back:

That's not surprising, actually, I'm probably the first person in a while to request Miss McIntosh. Can I get a copy of Elkin's Franchiser instead please?

And received back:

Sure!

So I ordered volume 2 from Amazon, it's been on my bookshelf since Tuesday. I didn't see the Dalkey package on the piano until this morning as I was walking out the door, stuff it in my backpack, get to work, rip it open - I've been thinking about reading this novel for more than a week now, I finished up another of the Maqroll novellas, finished up a Lispector novella, finished Sebald's Emigrants, cleared the fiction deck for this novel - I rip it open and find:

So like, fuck. I had woke up in a dark mood (it was due, I've had an unusual run of good moods lately), when I saw the package I thought it a good omen, my mood was brightening, so like, fuck. This remarkably self-important and self-indulgent post even by my standards of self-importance and self-indulgence intended to disperse and/or inflame a worse mood. Hope it works. Hope it doesn't. Links tomorrow.

UPDATE! Dalkey responds to my email of this morning:

Wow. My apologies for the mistake. Here's what we can do (if this is agreeable to you): If you can return the unwanted copy of vol. 2, we actually have one copy left of Miss MacIntosh 1 that I was able to find in the office. I can overnight in to you in exchange for the troubles, no extra charge. Let me know.

Good enough. I've got other aarghs that can keep the bad mood flowering.

COMMAND FILTER WITH NEGATIVE ENTAILMENT

Steve McCaffery

A bridge is a passage between two banks. On Saturdays both banks are closed. A well is located in a wall of sound. But space is not the stake and suddenly both travellers fall in. Now draw a line between some water and their eyes. Express it as the border of a reservoir. The term ears stands ready to attack. Attach it then repeat the phrase my body lives inside a closed shed. The nose with this noise invents a scale. The cottage is attempts and tries to break at random or at noon a forest hidden by a single tree. Narrative dilates sporadic or clairvoyant in a place where bed becomes the meaning of the rest. Now say embrace me. Motors trivialize. Eighty-six windows show the noun to be a house. The heart is now a hole in space that falls across and leaves a certain number. Forget the thirds in this and the silhouettes change place. You can no longer have a choice. You start at zero by the church called word in the forest by a beach beyond the sea between a fingernail at the moment logic begins. Basic liquids add a soup. Now change it. Write down I can no longer state a model is at work. Then make filters for each body. Draw all the composition off. Forbid readers to leave. This sea as a mixture and the sand relating questions to the horizontal movements of a prebiotic plan. You are now discovering that concrete form involves both circulation and the clinamen. Start to weave and you’ll connect this space. Now try to say the eye is paradoxical so that all future lines repeat a plate. Nothing is narrative. Now alter it. The equator drops and float upstream. A pluralist sidewalk remains. Go back to the start. The Saturdays stay close to a catastrophic separation. The bridge is now a son who kills the father at a crossroad. In the well of the week drops the son’s name. Add wings to it. Now set out all the other links to constitute a set of probable ideas. The crevice of the lip connects a writing that’s as still as ink. This final switch is exactly what’s happening. The constant factor in a cloud.
  

There Is No Time Like Now That Is Not Like Now

That behemoth was on a new book truck last week. I hadn't thought of Robert Duncan in years. I read some poems in my 20s at friends' recommendations; I liked what I read when it was handed to me or I stumbled upon it in a magazine or journal, and while it didn't sing to me enough to stay in my head it didn't screech at me enough to discourage me from picking up that behemoth off the new book truck last week. I opened it at random and this is the first poem I read:


STRAINS OF SIGHT

Robert Duncan

1

He brought a light so she could see
Adam move nakedly in the lighted room.
It was a window in the tree.
It was a shelter where there was none.

She saw his naked back and thigh
and heard the notes of a melody
where Adam out of his nature came
into four walls, roof, and floor.

He turnd on the light and turnd back,
moving with grace to catch her eye.
She saw his naked loneliness.

Now I shall never rest, she sighd,
until he strips his heart for me.
The body flashes such thoughts of death
so that time leaps up, and a man's hand

seen naked catches upon my breath
the risk we took in Paradise.
The serpent thought before the tomb
laid naked, naked, naked before the eyes,

reflects upon itself in a bare room.


2

In the questioning phrase the voice
-- he raises his eyes from the page --
follows towards some last
curve of the air, suspended above

its sign, that point, that  .
And asks, Who am I then?
Where am I going? There is no time
like now that is not like now.

Who?      turns upon some body where
the hand striving to tune
curves of the first lute whose strings are nerves
sees in the touch the phrase will

rise    .    break
as the voice does? above some moving obscurity

ripples out in the disturbd pool,
shadows and showings where we would read
-- raising his eyes from the body's lure --

what the question is,
where the heart reflects.



So, I know more of what I'll be reading this year. And praise, of course, to Serendipity. Yesterday, reading through Silliman's lastest lit-links, I found Robert Duncan and Jess, and Their Wonderland of Art. I did know that Jack Spicer was Duncan's "rivalrous frenemy," though I confess, rereading Spicer as much as I do it didn't occur to me to pick up Duncan. I did not know that "Duncan’s parents had been committed Theosophists who told him he was a spiritually chosen being, a former citizen of Atlantis, no less."

• I know I'm repeating myself, but this has been and is the weirdest Winter of snot I can remember.
• The DUH! you knew was there.
• Please consider throwing Arthur Silber the coins in your pocket.
• Agamben, for those of you who do: The materialization in space of this zone of indifference is the video surveillance of the streets and the squares of our cities. Here again an apparatus that had been conceived for the prisons  has been extended to public places. But it is evident that a video recorded place is no more an agora and becomes a hybrid of public and private, a zone of indifference between the prison and the forum. This transformation of the political space is certainly a complex phenomenon, that involves a multiplicity of causes, and among them the birth of biopower holds a special place. The primacy of the biological identity over the political identity is certainly linked to the politicization of bare life in modern states. But one should never forget that the leveling of social identity on body identity begun with the attempt to identify the recidivist criminals. We should not be astonished if today the normal relationship between the state and its citizens is defined by suspicion, police filing and control. The unspoken principle which rules our society can be stated like that: every citizen is a potential terrorist. But what is a State which is ruled by such a principle? Can we still define it as democratic State? Can we even consider it as being something political? In which kind of State do we live today?
• Life, satisfaction, help, comfort....
• Being About Aboutness: On the radio this morning, I heard an interview with a novelist. This interview went as interviews with novelists in popular media typically go—there was a little talk about the characters she had created and a very little talk about the way the book had been written, and a great deal of talk about the book’s “subject,” which, in this case, happened to be Zen Buddhism (there was more to it, but the point is, I really don’t care what the book was about). This author was only too happy to talk about Buddhism, since she was—whaddyaknow—a practicing Buddhist! She was all too happy to throw over her novel as a topic for discussion so that she could talk about the research that had preceded the writing of it (she may as well have talked about the Cuban missile crisis, or Care Bears, or Watergate). I mean, really, why talk about fiction when one can talk about Zen Buddhism? Not even a novelist wants to talk about the novel when she can talk about Buddhism.
• Speaking of Serendipity: yesterday I typed in a Matthea Harvey poem, this morning I find this: 

• A word about Hollowtide because three have asked: yes, this is where I write these, they are never finished but abandoned and not necessarily forever. I suspect this may be a passing experiment but as of right now I find the process of editing live in a published medium fascinating. Once a poem has been edited the previous version is not archived. For instance, the latest changed last night. The version from yesterday morning is gone. Sometimes tis is stupid - I've deleted stuff I wish I had back. But no cheating. Not writing lines in tablet. What the fuck is a tablet? Ink? It only matters to me, and I'm the only person I consciously cheat. I reserve the right to reuse any deleted lines in future posts. I'm thinking of...  I'm having fun, forgive me.
• It's making me manic, perhaps you can tell. I like it, forgive me.
• For example, I tweeted. in my manic happiness, a bleggal overlord a link I thought he would like, what a dope I am.
• That won't cause boom fall down, though for each up there's a boom fall down.
• Timeless.
• Food links, anyone?
• Yes yes yes, it occurs to me posting Bastien pieces the day after finding my wife, my father (who I've apparently trained to sing Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights), and my brother mocked my musical taste strikes me as sweetly bwahaha, again, it's a happy unintended consequence....
• Yes, I've posted the below piece within the past six months, I like it, forgive me.

CHILDHOOD'S RETREAT

Robert Duncan

It’s in the perilous boughs of the tree   

out of blue sky    the wind   

sings loudest surrounding me.

And solitude,   a wild solitude

’s reveald,   fearfully,   high     I’d climb   

into the shaking uncertainties,

part out of longing,   part     daring my self,

part to see that

widening of the world,   part

to find my own, my secret

hiding sense and place, where from afar   

all voices and scenes come back

—the barking of a dog,   autumnal burnings,

far calls,   close calls—   the boy I was

calls out to me

here the man where I am   “Look!

I’ve been where you

most fear to be.”

Never Mind That We Could Only Grow Gray Things

Nobody claimed the Elkin when it was offered a few days ago, but Dalkey Press sent me an email yesterday saying it had shipped both Part One and Part Two of Marguerite Young's Miss McIntosh, My Darling after an representative emailed me last week saying Dalkey was out of Part Two, was unlikely to get more, did I want another title, and  I asked for a Stanley Elkin The Franchiser with the intention - hence the offer - of giving it away here. (And I ordered, and already received, Part Two through an evil motherfucker's company, I've never denied here my complicity.) So if I get The Franchiser it's still available to claim, if I get Part Two of Miss McIntosh, My Darling, it's yours if you want, why would you want Part Two of a novel I've no idea, I'll no doubt own two until I next bag up books and give to local public library to sell when I'm clearing out shelf space for more books.

UPDATE! Dalkey just sent me a $1.20 refund on my purchase, the exact difference between Elkin's The Franchiser and Part Two of Miss McIntosh, so I assume I'm getting the Elkin, which Jim claimed this morning in comments.

• Chris Watson interview.
• Look who's alive!
• I'd written about the Coke ad during the Helmet Bowl where America the Beautiful was sang in different languages by different ethnic groups and my knee-jerk reaction that it was a transparently bathetic appeal to gross patriotism and others knee-jerk reaction that singing America the Beautiful in any language other than English is a traitorous sin, but I've abbreviated it to this sentence which ends with the two words fuck it.
• It comes back to where it comes back.
• How to begin from the beginning, by his generation's greatest academic fraud, and I say that admiringly.
• Been a while since I did that gag, but then it's been a while since I've seen anything new from Žižek.
• On the Dylan Chrysler ads.
• Map of Georgetown 2028.
• White Oak!
• 2100 words on why DCU should play a diamond 4-4-2.
• I cannot wait until this summer when The Special One quits Chel$ki to take over for The Beloved But Fired Saint Benny. The Special One makes me root for Chel$ki, I cannot emphasize how big a feat that is.
• On reactive football.

• I'm told my father and brother and wife were mocking my music this past Saturday. Finding the Chris Watson interview an hour ago is why there are field recordings here today. The mocking is just a side benefit.

• Silliman's always generous lit-links.
• Joyce's birthday was last Sunday.
• Two days late too, New Inquiry's Sunday Readings.
• Handke, for those of you who do.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.

• I don't begrudge The Cure for continuing to make a living being The Cure, but meh.
• Something I missed three days ago: Destination:Out is closing up shop.
• Why Bach moves us? Not all of us, though I don't think you nuts if he moves you though many I've met in life think I'm crazy I'm not of the body too.
• Morton Feldman, for those of you who do. Those of you who don't should. I don't think I'd heard that piece before. Yes, this will shorten the time between my last Feldman fix and the next, but it's not today, click on the label for more.
• Prunella's latest playlist, for those of you who do. Those of you who don't should.

THE FUTURE OF TERROR/1

Matthea Harvey

The generalissimo’s glands directed him

to and fro. Geronimo! said the über-goon

we called God, and we were off to the races.

Never mind that we could only grow

gray things, that inspecting the horses’ gums

in the gymnasium predicted a jagged

road ahead. We were tired of hard news—

it helped to turn down our hearing aids.

We could already all do impeccable imitations

of the idiot, his insistent incisors working on

a steak as he said there’s an intimacy to invasion.

That much was true. When we got jaded

about joyrides, we could always play games

in the kitchen garden with the prisoners.

Jump the Gun, Fine Kettle of Fish and Kick

the Kidney were our favorites. The laws

the linguists thought up were particularly

lissome, full of magical loopholes that

spit out medals. We had made the big time,

but night still nipped at our heels.   

The navigator’s needle swung strangely,

oscillating between the oilwells

and ask again later. We tried to pull ourselves

together by practicing quarterback sneaks

along the pylons, but the race to the ravine

was starting to feel as real as the R.I.P.’s

and roses carved into rock. Suddenly the sight

of a schoolbag could send us scrambling.