As Soon as I Speak, I Speaks

Apparently Major League Soccer's subscription livestream service auto-renews because I was able to watch United lose another game in precisely the manner they've lost countless games since the dumb-luck run to the Eastern Conference final in 2012 without having to submit a credit card number. United losing: True, it's only two games and true, Toronto seems a much improved team, though when I say Toronto went out and signed Jermaine Defoe from the starting line-up of Spurs and Michael Bradley off the bench of Roma and United signed three defenders in wheelchairs cut by their teams and a striker everyone expects to be a major malcontent by July this is not to criticize United's front office and ownership. Or wait, yes it is.

>>Deleted additional bitching about United's front office and ownership<< I'll leave it as this: short-sighted cheap-ass motherfuckers across all levels from product on the field to treatment of season ticket holders. Instead of details have a weekend's worth of links.

• A prediction of intentionally-spawned scandal for Rand Paul.
• New David Harvey: But what is so striking about crises is not so much the wholesale reconfiguration of physical landscapes, but dramatic changes in ways of thought and understanding, of institutions and dominant ideologies, of political allegiances and processes, of political subjectivities, of technologies and organisational forms, of social relations, of the cultural customs and tastes that inform daily life. Crises shake our mental conceptions of the world and of our place in it to the very core. And we, as restless participants and inhabitants of this new emerging world, have to adapt, through coercion of consent, to the new state of things, even as we, by virtue of what we do and how we think and behave, add our two cents’ worth to the messy qualities of this world.
• Some motherfuckers, etc: Now, I do like this - all this death and destruction is your fault because your government, wholly independently of your opinion on the matter, refuses to drop high explosives on Damascus. There's something bracingly bullshitty about entirely accepting that "there is no appetite for putting military pressure on Assad" in the UK or the US, and then laying the blame for this on "kneejerk peaceniks" who have, as has been repeatedly and graphically demonstrated, no influence whatsoever on foreign policy. Whether the Brit stole this from Ghoul Kristol or Ghoul Kristol just gave the American version, who cares.

• Rat's Alley: The "Global War on Terror" may have been semantically erased by the propagandists of the Obama Administration, but on the ground, it is still going on -- and still spawning a multititude of malevolent consequences, as Patrick Cockburn details in a powerful series of articles. Cockburn's look at the historical record doesn't begin with 9/11, of course; the fatal alliance between Washington and the most retrograde and repressive forms of Islam -- which gave rise to the Terror War and its present reality -- go back several decades. [The first three parts of the series are here, here and here.]
• In defense of Fred Phelps.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• New Inquiry's Sunday links.
• The Dream's Navel.
• Yes, at least a dozen dozen times.
• My guarantee to you: blog a post named after a Guided by Voices song and post that song and I will link to it.
• The Creeley poem below put this Laurie Anderson song in my head. This is true: I really didn't know she was married to Lou Reed. I confess it still creeps me out.
• Guess what I was listening to last night (after enduring DS9 Season 1, Episode 11, featuring an aged Ferenghi's cackling orgasms - yo, this show sucks; friends keep telling me it's going to get better - Mr Alarum just reminded me that seasons 1 & 2 of Next Gen sucked too - but....).

THE PATTERN

Robert Creeley

As soon as   

I speak, I   

speaks. It

wants to   

be free but   

impassive lies

in the direction   

of its

words. Let

x equal x, x   

also

equals x. I

speak to   

hear myself   

speak? I

had not thought   

that some-

thing had such

undone. It   

was an idea   

of mine.

New Swans! or: A Sensible Egoslavian Futile Weekend Blogging Post

New Swans (LOUD! please) makes this the Best Egoslavian Futile Weekend Blogging post ever since the last until the next. Saving links for a Monday makes this the most sensible Egoslavian Fuitle Weekend Blogging post since this post until the next. Click tag for more Swans.

OH! you friends who've been urging me to revisit Deep Space Nine: I watched the tenth episode of the first year last night, Move Along Home. Stupidest, lamest 45 minutes of television I've ever seen, not just in all the Star Trek franchises, any television. I feel like a amnesiac who just recovered his memory: I remember now why Deep Space Nine never worked for me. Won't give up - yet - but bless me Lord Shatner, that was craptacularly awful.

Also too: sometime this afternoon this iteration of this shitty blog will have it's 500,000 ping since it opened in October 2010. I recognize a significant percentage of those pings are from spambots and another significant percentage by random googling of words I've used and poems I've posted, but thank you very much those of you who regularly tune in, especially my long-timers. As always, if you are Kinding me and me not you, please let me know.

But on Saturday Evening

  
Requested by anne. Thanks much. Sweet to hear from you.

And If My Style Was Too Nostalgic and Where Were You When I Was Burning Alive, Nightingale?

Friend davidly gets mail:

We are contacting you as you are eligible to participate in the fan pre-sale for the "Before the Dawn" concerts in August & September 2014 at Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith 48 hours ahead of the general ticket sale on 28th March 2014.

Please visit www.eventim.co.uk at 9.30am on 26th March 2014, locate the show you’d like to attend, select the fan pre-sale from the drop-down menu and enter the unique access code below for your chance to purchase tickets to one of the shows:

Access code: xxxxxxxx

**ACCESS CODES ARE STRICTLY ONE USE ONLY AND SHOULD BE ENTERED AS DISPLAYED ABOVE IN LOWER CASE.  IF YOU LEAVE THE PAGE AND TRY TO USE THE CODE AGAIN IT WILL BE INVALID.**

**THE ACCESS CODE WILL BE INVALID IF YOU HAVE NOT RECEIVED THIS EMAIL DIRECTLY FROM KATEBUSH.COM**

**ALL NEW SIGNEES TO THE KATEBUSH.COM MAILING LIST FROM 00:00AM ON 1ST MARCH 2014 WILL NOT BE ELIGIBLE FOR PRE-SALE TICKETS**

This event is for fans only and the following rules are in place to ensure that tickets do not get sold on and fans do not pay a higher price for their tickets.

• Ticket purchases are limited to a maximum of 4 per order.  For example, you can try to purchase up to 4 tickets for just 1 of the 15 concerts, or 1 ticket for 4 separate shows.  All tickets MUST be purchased in the same transaction in order for the access code to remain valid.
• The name of the lead booker will be printed on each ticket. The name cannot be changed once the booking has been made.
• The lead booker will be asked to present ID to gain entry into the venue. Failure to adhere to the terms and conditions may result in the customer's order being void. There are no exceptions to this rule.
• If you are booking more than one ticket your guests must arrive at the concert at the same time as you. Failure to do so will result in the guests being turned away.
• Tickets cannot be resold or transferred under any circumstances. If the promoter reasonably believes this to be the case the barcode on the ticket will be voided, prohibiting entry to the concert.
• Age Restriction: 14+ (ALL UNDER 16's MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY AN ADULT)

As the number of tickets reserved is limited they will be allocated on a first-come first-served basis.  Sadly this means that not everyone receiving this offer has a guarantee of securing a ticket during the pre-sale, but anyone who doesn’t manage to get one will still be able to try again when general ticketsgo on sale at 9.30am 28th March 2014.Before The Dawn at London's Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith:

August:

Tuesday, 26th August
Wednesday, 27th August
Friday, 29th August
Saturday, 30th August

September:

Tuesday, 2nd September
Wednesday, 3rd September
Friday, 5th September
Saturday, 6th September
Tuesday, 9th September
Wednesday, 10th September
Friday, 12th September
Saturday, 13th September
Tuesday, 16th September
Wednesday, 17th September
Friday, 19th September

We hope to see you there.

Kindest regards,
The Fish People

• From The Guardian: Kate Bush will play her first series of shows since 1979, performing August and September in the UK. Bush will play 15 shows at London’s Eventim Apollo starting 26 August as part of her Before the Dawn series of shows. Announcing the news on her website on Friday, the singer said: “I hope you will be able to join us and I look forward to seeing you there.” Famously, Bush has only toured once before, during a six-week jaunt around Britain and mainland Europe. “By the end,” she subsequently recalled, “I felt a terrific need to retreat as a person, because I felt that my sexuality – which in a way I hadn’t really had a chance to explore myself – was being given to the world in a way which I found impersonal.” Theories to explain her absence from the tour circuit have included a fear of flying, perfectionism and the death of her lighting director, Bill Duffield, who was killed in an accident during her 2 April 1979 concert at Poole Arts Centre. In an interview with Mojo magazine in 2011, Bush said she’d also endured extreme exhaustion as a result of the tour. “It was enormously enjoyable. But physically it was absolutely exhausting.” “I still don’t give up hope completely that I’ll be able to do some live work,” she added, “but it’s certainly not in the picture at the moment because I just don’t quite know how that would work with how my life is now.”
• Not that we can afford to fly to London to see Kate Bush, but even if we could afford to fly to London to see Kate Bush the show dates coincide with (a) taking Planet back for the start of her senior year in college and (b) the start of the academic year for Earthgirl at her elementary school and (c) the three hardest weeks of my job at Hilltop. Fun to daydream though.
• davidly says he's gonna try for a ticket.
• Hopefully this all means a new album. Hopefully she enjoys this experience so she considers touring more. I doubt she'd ever tour Murka. Yurp yes, Murka no.

• Have I ever mentioned I love Kate Bush?
• Somebody posted a Kate Bush song yesterday I post here all the time, most recently for David Gilmour's birthday.
• Please consider throwing Arthur the coins in your pocket.
• Meanwhile at Hilltop. Not quite as dramatic as the discovery of a meth lab in the freshmen dorm a couple of years ago.
• Scenes from the Inhumanity Museum. From Gass' Middle C, which I am just now beginning, my first attempt thwarted a year ago by what was - Baal be taunted - a currently dormant reading slump.
• This is my favorite lazyass aarghfree post since the last until the next.
• Yes, the guy in the middle of the header is 83 today.
• Party animals.
• Adventures in time and space.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• It's probably Martha & the Muffins most known song. Not my favorite, not my least.

BOLERO

Gerald Stern

So one day when the azalea bush was firing

away and the Japanese maple was roaring I

came into the kitchen full of daylight and

turned on my son’s Sony sliding over the

lacquered floor in my stocking feet for it was

time to rattle the canisters and see what

sugar and barley have come to and how Bolero

sounds after all these years and if I’m loyal

still and when did I have a waist that thin?

And if my style was too nostalgic and where

were you when I was burning alive, nightingale?   

21

Holiest Day of Egoslavia. Happy Birthday, Sweetie.

Also too, a birthday card from the first human not me or Earthgirl or a nurse or a doctor to hold Planet.

Oh, below the song, have three dozen of my favorite three Planet photos of Fleabus:







THE WRITER

Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

How Strange They Arrive at All, Nights on Planet Earth

• Tomorrow is the Holiest Day of Egoslavia, so links today (friends have stirred) and then not again until the weekend at the earliest, though I'll add through the afternoon as good ones are found. Speaking of the Holiest Day of Egoslavia, the above is my favorite of many favorites of Planet photos of Fleabus.
• Between popular Democratic uprising and Fascist putsch.
• Game theory and the Ukraine debacle.
• Here's Frances' post on the legal problems of a friend. It was taken down for a few hours yesterday, amended slightly to please the friend's lawyer.
• The fundamental problem with US News college rankings.
• There are two kinds of novelists?
• Bleggalgazing note: it's quite a competition between a spambot my stat-program says is in Tel Aviv and a spambot in Novosibirsk to generate thousands of pings in the past 24 hours AND countless comments that make it through the squiggles meant to deter them. 
• It's gonna be weird when the late 90s are cool again.
• Mimesis and The Lego Movie.
• The Charles Pierce column you would expect on the William Kristol column you would expect.
• Mimesis.
• The Boy with Spyrograph Eyes, now on sale! Dave, the paypal link isn't working! (and it works on other sites for me).
• Lispector and Ruefle!
• Tu Fu watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake.

A LITTLE TOOTH

Thomas Lux

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and
rue nothing. You did, you loved, your
feet are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.







NIGHTS ON PLANET EARTH

Campbell McGrath

Heaven was originally precisely that: the starry sky, dating back to the earliest Egyptian texts, which include magic spells that enable the soul to be sewn in the body of the great mother, Nut, literally "night," like the seed of a plant, which is also a jewel and a star. The Greek Elysian fields derive from the same celestial topography: the Egyptian "Field of Rushes," the eastern stars at dawn where the soul goes to be purified. That there is another, mirror world, a world of light, and that this world is simply the sky—and a step further, the breath of the sky, the weather, the very air—is a formative belief of great antiquity that has continued to the present day with the godhead becoming brightness itself: dios/theos (Greek); deus/divine/diana (Latin); devas (Sanskrit); daha (Arabic); day (English).

—Susan Brind Morrow, Wolves and Honey

1

Gravel paths on hillsides amid moon-drawn vineyards,

click of pearls upon a polished nightstand

soft as rainwater, self-minded stars, oboe music

distant as the grinding of icebergs against the hull

of the self and the soul in the darkness

chanting to the ecstatic chance of existence.

Deep is the water and long is the moonlight

inscribing addresses in quicksilver ink,

building the staircase a lover forever pauses upon.

Deep is the darkness and long is the night,

solid the water and liquid the light. How strange

that they arrive at all, nights on planet earth.

2

Sometimes, not often but repeatedly, the past invades my dreams in the form of a familiar neighborhood I can no longer locate,

a warren of streets lined with dark cafés and unforgettable bars, a place where I can sing by heart every song on every jukebox,

a city that feels the way the skin of an octopus looks pulse-changing from color to color, laminar and fluid and electric,

a city of shadow-draped churches, of busses on dim avenues, or riverlights, or canyonlands, but always a city, and wonderful, and lost.

Sometimes it resembles Amsterdam, students from the ballet school like fanciful gazelles shooting pool in pink tights and soft, shapeless sweaters,

or Madrid at 4AM, arguing the 18th Brumaire with angry Marxists, or Manhattan when the snowfall crowns every trash-can king of its Bowery stoop,

or Chicago, or Dublin, or some ideal city of the imagination, as in a movie you can neither remember entirely nor completely forget,

barracuda-faced men drinking sake like yakuza in a Harukami novel, women sipping champagne or arrack, the rattle of beaded curtains in the back,

the necklaces of Christmas lights reflected in raindrops on windows, the taste of peanuts and their shells crushed to powder underfoot,

always real, always elusive, always a city, and wonderful, and lost. All night I wander alone, searching in vain for the irretrievable.

3

In the night I will drink from a cup of ashes and yellow paint.

In the night I will gossip with the clouds and grow strong.

In the night I will cross rooftops to watch the sea tremble in a dream.

In the night I will assemble my army of golden carpenter ants.

In the night I will walk the towpath among satellites and cosmic dust.

In the night I will cry to the roots of potted plants in empty offices.

In the night I will gather the feathers of pigeons in a honey jar.

In the night I will become an infant before your flag.

Disdaining Age, Ignoring Pain, Avoiding Mirrors

 
What never got mentioned at Tuesday Night Pints: Democrats, Republicans, Barack Obama, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, the Midterm Elections; Hillary Clinton and Hillarian Inevitability, Joe Biden, Martin O'Malley, Elizabeth Warren, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, POTUS 16; Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Dianne Feinstein, the NSA, the panopticon state, the police state, the surveillance state; Glenn Greenwald, people who love Greenwald, people who hate Greenwald, people who loved Greenwald but now hate Greenwald, people who hated Greenwald but now love Greenwald, Greenwald as avatar of zeitgeist; the Koch Brothers, Pierre Omidyar, Ken Langone, Bill Gates, or any other oligarch; Vladimir Putin, Ukraine, Crimea; Hilltop, Hilltop politics, Hilltop president, Hilltop provost, Hilltop English Department, the plan to add a PhD to Hilltop English Department, professors in English Department, English Department chair; blegging, bleggal theory, bleggal compulsion, bleggal interventions, bleggal hiatus, furious and futile blegging in a dying Blegsylvania, dying Blegsylvania. None of these were mentioned, not by design but by natural flow of conversation. They never came up. It was only driving home that I thought about it. I've theories what it signifies, some positive, some negative: my nagging sense of responsibility for bitching about what I can't change is both alarmed and relieved. I'm giving up, I'm smartening up. A good time was had.

• Number Six was born eighty-six years ago today.
• Finding new ways to hide in plain sight: It’s strange, then, that after decades of moving toward an ever more conspicuous readability of the self, to mark out in dress and style and dialect who we are, that we’re witnessing a turn to obfuscation as a mode of individualism; this is the very trend lying behind the much-discussed idea of normcore. Outlined in a clever, insightful essay by Fiona Duncan in New York Magazine, normcore is ostensibly a shift in fashion toward a kind of deliberate blankness, one that recognizes either the increasing impossibility of true uniqueness, or that one might not be read by others at all. No ostentatious individualism for the normcore faithful, but, rather, a decided shift toward the camouflage of appearing to be ordinary.
• The gravest threat of totalitarianism.
• Bringing light. A friend writes about a friend.
• UPDATE! Frances had to pull the above on the advice of her friend's lawyer. She hopes it will be live again soon.
• Derelict ship on an asphalt sea.
• Three days late, New Inquiry's Sunday Reads.
• Food links.
• Ranciere, for those of you who do: Returning to so many early influences has again reminded me to thrive in partiality. Like a good mentor, I have been prompted not to be a vampire, to not be a tourist, to make the first maneuver toward originality by looping back around and returning to where I departed, reexamining the point of origin and all the detritus that litters and hides it from me. Not to relearn what has been forgotten, but to forget what has been learned. To search deteriorated notions and oppressed positions. These microscopic transgressions form the phenomenal ground of varied arts that help me live. The message has been a relief: adhere to the indeterminate in all of us. Go small, go slow, go weird and unknown, and you won’t have to worry about being interesting.
• Two words.
• Brad reads Ammons, as in out loud (as all poetry should be read).
• Listen to Ashbery read one of his poems.
• Jason Molina died a year ago. Have some songs.
• Prunella has Husker Du (Hart songs) and Lush for you.

PARENT'S PANTOUM

Carolyn Kizer

Where did these enormous children come from,
More ladylike than we have ever been?
Some of ours look older than we feel.
How did they appear in their long dresses

More ladylike than we have ever been?
But they moan about their aging more than we do,
In their fragile heels and long black dresses.
They say they admire our youthful spontaneity.

They moan about their aging more than we do,
A somber group--why don't they brighten up?
Though they say they admire our youthful spontaneity
They beg us to be dignified like them

As they ignore our pleas to brighten up.
Someday perhaps we'll capture their attention
Then we won't try to be dignified like them
Nor they to be so gently patronizing.

Someday perhaps we'll capture their attention.
Don't they know that we're supposed to be the stars?
Instead they are so gently patronizing.
It makes us feel like children--second-childish?

Perhaps we're too accustomed to be stars.
The famous flowers glowing in the garden,
So now we pout like children. Second-childish?
Quaint fragments of forgotten history?

Our daughters stroll together in the garden,
Chatting of news we've chosen to ignore,
Pausing to toss us morsels of their history,
Not questions to which only we know answers.

Eyes closed to news we've chosen to ignore,
We'd rather excavate old memories,
Disdaining age, ignoring pain, avoiding mirrors.
Why do they never listen to our stories?

Because they hate to excavate old memories
They don't believe our stories have an end.
They don't ask questions because they dread the answers.
They don't see that we've become their mirrors,

We offspring of our enormous children.

Dearest I Cannot Loiter Here in Lather Like a Polar Bear

• New from Earthgirl. That's Stanley (named after Elkin) on the left, Rosie (named after Tremain) on the right. You can see more of her work here. Mocomofos, she has a show this coming April. Details TBA.
• Tremain, as opposed to Trelane.
• Who the hell does sillyass Star Trek jokes and allusions?
• See blog header.
• Language of resistance: Such slander campaigns could make the secret police in totalitarian regimes look like literary workshops. For what they do is create characters; they make people up and release them into the world. When, years after the collapse of communism, Müller gained access to her secret police file, she discovered that in the archives she was not one, but two distinct people. “One is called Cristina, an enemy of the state, who must be taken on.” Except for the name, this character looked familiar to Müller, a version of herself as reconstructed by the regime’s spies and scribes. The second character was pure fiction. To compromise the real one, the secret police created a fake Müller, Cristina’s “double.” This literary product had all “the ingredients that would be most damaging to me—hardened Communist, ruthless agent, party member.” Working for the Party—or for its “Shield and Sword,” as the secret police was endearingly called—was often seen as a dirty job, something that could rob you of social respectability. Apparently the inner Party knew this better than anyone else.
• Easy Make Totalitarian Salads!
• Today's healthy dose of duh.
• Bartleby, the president.
• LitCrit Wars, via Melville.
• [He Lived - Childhood Summers]
• Short films of Diana Rigg?
• Bleggalgazing and a request for blogs. Glad to see I'm not the only one.
• The Librarian.
• Bleggalgazing: yes, I'm over myself, at least for today, thanks.
• Lordy, downloaded this album last night, holyfuck:

HOME AFTER THREE MONTHS AWAY

Robert Lowell

Gone now the baby's nurse,
a lioness who ruled the roost
and made the Mother cry.
She used to tie
gobbets of porkrind in bowknots of gauze--
three months they hung like soggy toast
on our eight foot magnolia tree,
and helped the English sparrows
weather a Boston winter.

Three months, three months!
Is Richard now himself again?
Dimpled with exaltation,
my daughter holds her levee in the tub.
Our noses rub,
each of us pats a stringy lock of hair--
they tell me nothing's gone.
Though I am forty-one,
not forty now, the time I put away
was child's play. After thirteen weeks
my child still dabs her cheeks
to start me shaving. When
we dress her in her sky-blue corduroy,
she changes to a boy,
and floats my shaving brush
and washcloth in the flush. . . .
Dearest I cannot loiter here
in lather like a polar bear.

Recuperating, I neither spin nor toil.
Three stories down below,
a choreman tends our coffin's length of soil,
and seven horizontal tulips blow.
Just twelve months ago,
these flowers were pedigreed
imported Dutchmen; no no one need
distinguish them from weed.
Bushed by the late spring snow,
they cannot meet
another year's snowballing enervation.

I keep no rank nor station.
Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.

Theme Song March 2014

Is Door to the Forum, Is Cutter of Keys

• Was reminded by Storck an hour ago of Loud Animal Group.
• Capitalism's growing problem with anxiety: Consider the panic of losing a mobile phone, of having no access at all to the internet, to one’s games, movies, photos, or common nodes of social interaction that we call our friends or followers. A power-cut, a burglary… would it be wrong to call them addictions? Yet we have neither selected this basis of social organisation, nor should we guiltily consider ourselves lucky first-worlders gorging gluttonously on the backs of the deprived billions. Whilst digitised technologies have abstracted and placed many cultural forms on a single homogeneous platform, personal technologies have the worker connected and potentially labouring at all hours in ways that operate, at minute level, the exchanges and processes that neoliberal capitalism requires to function. Against such a backdrop, our politicians, the public face of neoliberal capitalism, cajole us through fear and envy to keep up our duty as citizens: spend, borrow, buy, 24/7, 365 days a year, be it Christmas, Valentine’s or whatever, one must never shirk in one’s duty to service the economy.
• The zombification of the West.
• Privatizing science.

• The only two Louder Animal Group songs I could find. 
• We just put Planet on an airplane. Egoslavia's Holiest Day is five days away. See tag Planet Poems.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• There are new additions to the blogrolls, please check them out as they float to the top. Recommendations for new things for me to read solicited. Later today those blogs that haven't updated in three months will be moved to Moribund. No one will be purged except those blogs that suicided. If you are Kinding me and me not you please let me know.
• Brad's serialized short story, part the last.
• riverrun.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Creeley, for those of you who do.
• Chris M just reminded me of Current 93.

BETWEEN

Marie Ponsot

(for my daughter)

Composed in a shine of laughing, Monique brings in sacks

of groceries, unloads them, straightens, and stretches her back.

The child was a girl, the girl is a woman; the shift   

is subtle and absolute, worn like a gift.

The woman, once girl once child, now is deft in her ease,   

is door to the forum, is cutter of keys.

In space that her torque and lift have prefigured and set free   

between her mother and her child the woman stands   

having emptied her hands.

Stop &amp; Shiver in It

Compulsive and futile weekend blogging: As promised, Theme Song March 2014. That song has been Theme Song of Month more than any other. No, I can't say how many times, that would be too compulsive even for me.

Two friends, one analog, one digital, have been urging me to give Star Trek: Deep Space Nine another chance. DS9 was my least favorite of the four shows for reasons I forget (I don't count Enterprise, which I've never seen and had and have no desire to see), though I remember thinking moving Worf to the show seemed a particularly desperate Hail Mary. But I trust the judgment of my friends and will give DS9 a new viewing. I watched the premier last night, things I had forgot: Sisco's wife was killed by Locutus; his son is motherfucking irritating; Dax is a trill; cameras will fixate on Kira's tits; the doctor is motherfucking irritating; Sisco will never call anyone Rockfish.

• Eight pronunciation errors that make English what it is today.
• Did Roger Ailes win POTUS 12 for Obama?
• The tyranny of money.
• Of being numerous: In that image—where a desire for insurrectionary freedom is paired with advanced technocapitalism’s ­surveillance-control apparatus—our current problem is crystallized. The devices we rely upon to communicate and gather information and build the solidarity necessary for contemporary protests also offer us up as ripe for constant surveillance. The surveillance state could not be upheld without its always already trackable denizens. To sidestep our tacit complicity in this would be to fail to recognize how deep it runs—it’s how we live. As my Salon colleague Andrew Leonard noted, “In 2013, the negative consequences of our contemporary lifestyles were impossible to ignore.”
• The nyancatcentipedes really tie the post together.
• Brad's serialized short story, part five.
• Brad's serialized short story, part six.
• Thomas Hardy's afterwards. 
• Heart's Needle. 
• Two new tags.

  
GYMNODPÉDIES NO. 3

Adrian Matejka

This sunlight on snow.

This decrescendo

of covered stumps & brush —

stop for it.

Stop before the sled end-

             over-ends down

             the chin of the hill —

the way it always will

at the rock ⅔ of the way down.

Stop & shiver in it: the ring

             of snow inside gloves,

             the cusp of red forehead

like a sun just waiting to top

the hill. Every ill-built

             snowball waiting to be thrown,

             every bell-shaped angel

stamped over the brown leaves.

When my daughter ranges

             in winter, she works

every dazzling angle —

             the crestfallen pinecones,

             the grizzled beards

of bushes in the morning,

a furnace’s windup huffing

             in this throat-

             clearing of snow.

She Sleeps Upstairs Like Mystery in a Story

Yes, today's the 14th, the 15th songs a day early. Dinner and excellent family time last night with Planet and Earthgirl and Hamster and Landru and absolutely no digital surfing after, so no links today. Did want to say that we are one week away from the Holiest Day in Egoslavia, hence the next week of poems. Oh, there's a Wire cascade in your future too, fell asleep last night listening to Pink Flag, it's love all over again. One of their songs has been Theme Song of the Month at this shitty blog more than any other, and will be again tomorrow.






 
DAUGHTER

James P Lenfestey

A daughter is not a passing cloud, but permanent,   

holding earth and sky together with her shadow.   

She sleeps upstairs like mystery in a story,   

blowing leaves down the stairs, then cold air, then warm.   

We who at sixty should know everything, know nothing.   

We become dull and disoriented by uncertain weather.   

We kneel, palms together, before this blossoming altar.

)

Color of Time Lost in Sparks, of Space Lost Inside Dance

• Michael Gira on the new Swans album: "Imagine a huge growth on the face of a beautiful child, and it’s kind of glowing. Then cut that growth off and flush it down the toilet. Well, that’s what it sounds like…"
• Return of >>Deleted Bleggalgazing<< Wasn't of the forlorn sort. The Fuck It is strong.
• Though I don't know how I unintentionally disabled the hover over links. Some of you have told me you use the hover before deciding whether to click through. If anyone has an idea of what I did and how to fix it please let me know. In meantime I will try harder to provide more info on what a link goes to if the link title isn't clear enough.
• On the 12-Point Platform: Primary Colors is all about the meta. And the meta is the wrong metric. There is only thing that matters: policy. Only policy brings concrete material benefits for voters, along with any structural reforms needed to bring those benefits into being. And a series of litmus tests -- a checklist -- like the 12 Point Platform provides a simple and proven metric to hold politicians accountable for policy. "More and better Democrats" doesn't mean squat if nobody knows what "better" means!
• Why isn't Dianne Feinstein called a traitor and whistleblower?
• Culture as straitjacket: For as much as Ruth Marcus detests the choice Belle Knox has made, her ignorance of the context of that choice emerges from a worldview that Ruth has internalized which defines sexuality as inherently offensive and holds that women must be effectively sexless to be “respectable”, the act only considered in hushed tones, behind closed doors, and only for the fulfillment of men. That erasing the agency of women is not seen as an insult while women reclaiming said agency is frowned upon is a sign of just how far we have to go as a society, regardless of how enlightened we claim to be. In trying to point at what she calls sign of a cultural abyss, Ruth Marcus effectively points at herself.
• Inferior musicians giving comfort to themselves: First we will deny you permission; then we won’t permit you to leave. This is why people find it so hard to believe that people of faith desire only to be left alone, to be allowed to run their adoption agencies, parochial schools, and sacramental marriage ceremonies without outside interference; live and let live;  à chacun son goût; il faut cultiver notre jardin; um, etc. The plea to be allowed to be particular pairs poorly with an evangelical universalism; the desire to be granted liberty frequently shades into a wish to become its grantor; you shall have no other gods beside me, or before me, becomes rather more ominously, there shall be no other gods.
• First as funny, then as die: five points on the Obama/Galifianakis show.

)

• How much meat is too much meat?
• History made queasy: Taylor’s passing inspired a good deal of speculation. Some claimed typhoid carried the chief executive off; others, arsenic. Investigations failed to clear up the matter, and consensus eventually settled on run of the mill food poisoning as cause. Cucumbers, cherries, unpasteurized milk, green apples — anything Taylor had eaten that Independence Day could have been the culprit. Even the water he drank attracted suspicion, the capital’s sewage system then in a deplorable state. Whatever the fatal food, it lent truth to the observation made by Paracelsus some three centuries before: “Poison is in everything, and nothing is without poison.”
• Bleggalgazing and a call for Kindness.
• Brad's serial short story, part four.
• On Elbow and Elbow's new album. I really disliked Seldom Seen Kid after really liking what proceeded it. Will give the new one a fair audition.
• Opera from the other side: on the history of stage production.
• Yes, the keyboardist's schtick gets old fast, but the music, I cannot urge the new collected Sparks on you enough. They'd completely fallen of my radar, what a dope.

)



MARS BEING RED

Marvin Bell

Being red is the color of a white sun where it lingers
on an arm. Color of time lost in sparks, of space lost
inside dance. Red of walks by the railroad in the flush
of youth, while our steps released the squeaks
of shoots reaching for the light. Scarlet of sin, crimson
of fresh blood, ruby and garnet of the jewel bed,
early sunshine, vestiges of the late sun as it turns
green and disappears. Be calm. Do not give in
to the rabid red throat of age. In a red world, imprint
the valentine and blush of romance for the dark.
It has come. You will not be this quick-to-redden
forever. You will be green again, again and again.



)

Give Me, Forgive Me, the Writers Who Have Already or Want to Write Bestsellers in This Country

)



Work with me: substitute Dianne Feinstein for Queen Elizabeth, Lanky Pete for the CIA, all other fine metaphors abounding are yours to choose.



)

*

)



Also too, 99 is 81 today:



)

• The state as Ouroboros?
• How the FBI has been working hard to deport the friends of the guy they killed during interview about Boston bombing.
• Ionization.
• This week's Food Links.
• White Flint fire station? 
• 31 poems using the word NAIL.
• Holy Dying, part three.
• Library Rules from Gass' Middle C.
• Three hours of Professor Dum Dum! from early this morning.
• Great weirdass pop songs?

)



THE TRAGIC CONDITION OF THE STATUE OF LIBERTY

Bernadette Mayer

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Give me your gentrificatees of the Lower East Side including all the well-heeled young Europeans who’ll take apartments without leases

Give me your landlords, give me your cooperators

Give me the guys who sell the food and the computers to the public schools in District One

Give me the IRS-FBI-CIA men who don’t take election day off

Give me the certain members of the school board & give me the district superintendent

Give me all the greedy members of both american & foreign capitalist religious sects

Give me the parents of the punk people

Give me the guy who puts those stickers in the Rice Krispies

Give me the doctor who thinks his time is more valuable than mine and my daughter’s & the time of all the other non-doctors in this world

Give me the mayor, his mansion, and the president & his white house

Give me the cops who laugh and sneer at meetings where they demonstrate the new uses of mace and robots instead of the old murder against people who are being evicted

Give me the landlord’s sleazy lawyers and the deal-making judges in housing court & give me the landlord’s arsonist

Give me the known & unknown big important rich guys who now bank on our quaint neighborhood

Give me, forgive me, the writers who have already or want to write bestsellers in this country

Together we will go to restore Ellis Island, ravaged for years by wind, weather and vandals

I was surprised and saddened when I heard that the Statue of Liberty was in such a serious state of disrepair & I want to help

This is the most generous contribution I can afford.

)

The Wind-Proof Arc of Flame Sparks Inside the Speeding Buick

)

• Well, (a) today's links will be stale tomorrow (though I was going to save them until tomorrow) and (b) Sparks was just put in my head, this song in particular, be in yours, and, most importantly, (c) once a think of a gag that make me laugh I'm incapable of not posting it immediately.
• Passing Chomsky on the way out, part three.
• The Crimean "crisis" and Western bias.
• CAP and White House: a reminder.
• Self-controlled crows.
• Surveillance by Barbed Wire.
• Purple Line! Bhattman is an asshole.
• No, I did not remove the blogroll titles, blooger did it this morning after I removed the WFMU Marathon widget, weird.
• It also appears to have disappeared the hover over for link ID functionality, I've no idea what I did.
• On a Hill, part one.
• On a Hill, part two.
• Happy Birthday, Nina Hagen. 
• Prunella's latest playlist.
• Three hours of Sparks.
• There's a new Sparks double-album greatest hits, and like, fuck yeah.
• Easily one of the five most posted songs ever at this shitty blog, this is this shitty blog's Mission Statement:

)



INTERSTATE SONNET

Carl Marcum

A cigarette kiss in the desert. The wind-proof arc

of flame sparks inside the speeding Buick. Menthol:

a break from the monotony of highway nicotine—

most intimate of drugs. Make this mean sorrow

or thermodynamics, whatever small gesture

there is time for. Light another one, the vainglorious

interstate dusk and ash—the long, silver tooth.

This shirtless abandon, this ninety-mile-an-hour

electric laugh. The edges of windshield, haphazard

chatter. The clatter of the hubcap and the thunderclap:

the white-hot retinal memory of your life as a Joshua tree.

Permanence in the passenger seat. This long haul,

this first drag—nothing like cinnamon, nothing

like the iron taste on the back of your mortal tongue.

)

chơ ăn đa gá ăn sôi

BODY EATS

Linh Dinh

The word minh, body, has wide application in Vietnamese. It is sometimes used as a first person pronoun, as in “body has lived here for a long time,” or “body does not know him.” Body is I. It is also we or us. As in: “Body eat rice; they eat bread.” Body is also used to address one’s spouse. As in: “Body, what would you like to eat today?”

A spouse can also be referred to as “my house.” As in: “My house is not home at the moment. Please call back later.” To be married is to live in a new house, to be engulfed in another body.

The core of the Vietnamese body is not the heart but the stomach. Instead of saying “I don’t know what’s in his heart,” a Vietnamese would say, “I don’t know what’s in his stomach.” To be in contentment is to have a happy stomach, vui long. To be in grief is to have a rotting stomach, thui ruôt. To be in extreme anguish is to have one’s stomach chopped into pieces, dut ruôt.

Eating is the body’s primary function. Whatever else the body does, it must an, must eat. To dress is to an mac, eat and dress. To talk is to an noi, eat and talk. To have sex is to an nam, eat and lie down with somebody. To be married is to an o, eat and live with somebody.

To win at anything, a bet, a soccer match, is simply to an, to eat, an echo back to the days when to win is to swallow one’s opponent whole, perhaps. To dominate or decisively defeat someone is to an song, eat raw.

To indulge in pleasures is to eat and play, an choi. To celebrate is to eat with happiness,an mung. To go to a party is to eat at a party, an tiec. One doesn’t celebrate the New Year, one eats during the New Year, an Tet.

To look for work is to look for something to eat, kiem an. To work is to make and eat, lam an. A good business prospect is described as having something easy to eat, de an. To do well in business is to eat customers, an khach.

To spend money is to eat and digest, an tieu. To take a bribe is to eat money, an tien. To work an illicit job, thievery, prostitution, is to eat dew, an suong. To steal is to eat in secret, an trom.

Eating, and how one eats, becomes a metaphor for nearly everything, as these proverbs testify:

A magpie, starved, eats banyan fruit. A phoenix, starved, eats chicken shit.

Fish eat ants, ants eat fish.

Have vegetable, eat vegetable. Have rice gruel, eat rice gruel.

The smart eat men, the stupid are eaten.

Tailors eat rags, artists eat paints.

Father eats salty food, son's thirsty.

Eating new rice, telling old stories.

Eat in front, swim behind.

Eat for real, fake work.

Arrive late, gnaw on a bone.

Ate rice gruel, pissed in the bowl.

A bowl of sweat for a bowl of rice.

A piece of meat is a piece of shame.

Selling ass to feed mouth.

Two hands, two eyes are just enough to feed one stomach.

Better to die sated than to live hungry.

To be homeless is to eat the wind and lie with the dew, an gio nam suong. This phase used to refer to the hardships of a long journey, a concept similar to the English “travel,” a variation on travail, from the French travailler, to work.

To inherit property is to eat fragrance and fire, an huong hoa, which refer to the incense and oil lamp on the ancestral altar present in most Vietnamese homes.

A remote place is described as where “dogs eat rocks, chickens eat pebbles,” chơ ăn đa gá ăn sôi.

To be primitive is to eat fur while living in a hole, an long o lo.

To die is to eat dirt,an dat.

A common Vietnamese greeting is, “Have you eaten yet?”

One should always answer: “After eating dew all night, I’m more than ready to eat and to lie down.”

As I Sit Looking Out of a Window of the Building I Wish I Did Not Have to Write the Instruction Manual on the Uses of a New Metal

Woke up with Van der Graaf Generator in my head. Posted before looking to when Peter Hammill's birthday is though I've a vague memory it's in the Fall. I am completely unsurprised I woke up with Van der Graaf Generator in my head, I know what plays in my head when certain moods strike. Also too, as per tradition, when I think of Van der Graaf Generator I think things I've lost, things I will lose, I think of my lost friend Bavid Degosian, if you see him tell him I say hi.

• It's not a bad mood. It is a sad mood. I enjoy it too much.
• The curious case of responsible NSA revelations.
• The New Inquiry's Sunday Reading.
• The blue static is far more popular than the grey static, and folk like the Kirk. I think I'm done dicking around with the template until I start dicking with it again.
• Thomas Bernhard, for those of you who do.
• "Literary fiction" is genre fiction.
• On transgressing genre boundaries.
• William Gass once.
• William Gass twice.
• I may have posted The Secret Auden already, worth reading.
• Vowel Movements.
• More on Robert Ashley (h/t).
• This mood also make Ashbery necessary.

THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL

John Ashbery

As I sit looking out of a window of the building

I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.

I look down into the street and see people, each walking with an inner peace,   

And envy them—they are so far away from me!

Not one of them has to worry about getting out this manual on schedule.   

And, as my way is, I begin to dream, resting my elbows on the desk and leaning out of the window a little,

Of dim Guadalajara! City of rose-colored flowers!

City I wanted most to see, and most did not see, in Mexico!

But I fancy I see, under the press of having to write the instruction manual,   

Your public square, city, with its elaborate little bandstand!

The band is playing Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov.

Around stand the flower girls, handing out rose- and lemon-colored flowers,   

Each attractive in her rose-and-blue striped dress (Oh! such shades of rose and blue),

And nearby is the little white booth where women in green serve you green and yellow fruit.

The couples are parading; everyone is in a holiday mood.

First, leading the parade, is a dapper fellow

Clothed in deep blue. On his head sits a white hat

And he wears a mustache, which has been trimmed for the occasion.

His dear one, his wife, is young and pretty; her shawl is rose, pink, and white.   

Her slippers are patent leather, in the American fashion,

And she carries a fan, for she is modest, and does not want the crowd to see her face too often.

But everybody is so busy with his wife or loved one

I doubt they would notice the mustachioed man’s wife.

Here come the boys! They are skipping and throwing little things on the sidewalk

Which is made of gray tile. One of them, a little older, has a toothpick in his teeth.

He is silenter than the rest, and affects not to notice the pretty young girls in white.

But his friends notice them, and shout their jeers at the laughing girls.   

Yet soon all this will cease, with the deepening of their years,

And love bring each to the parade grounds for another reason.

But I have lost sight of the young fellow with the toothpick.

Wait—there he is—on the other side of the bandstand,

Secluded from his friends, in earnest talk with a young girl

Of fourteen or fifteen. I try to hear what they are saying

But it seems they are just mumbling something—shy words of love, probably.

She is slightly taller than he, and looks quietly down into his sincere eyes.   

She is wearing white. The breeze ruffles her long fine black hair against her olive cheek.

Obviously she is in love. The boy, the young boy with the toothpick, he is in love too;

His eyes show it. Turning from this couple,

I see there is an intermission in the concert.

The paraders are resting and sipping drinks through straws

(The drinks are dispensed from a large glass crock by a lady in dark blue),   

And the musicians mingle among them, in their creamy white uniforms, and talk

About the weather, perhaps, or how their kids are doing at school.

Let us take this opportunity to tiptoe into one of the side streets.   

Here you may see one of those white houses with green trim   

That are so popular here. Look—I told you!

It is cool and dim inside, but the patio is sunny.

An old woman in gray sits there, fanning herself with a palm leaf fan.   

She welcomes us to her patio, and offers us a cooling drink.   

“My son is in Mexico City,” she says. “He would welcome you too   

If he were here. But his job is with a bank there.

Look, here is a photograph of him.”

And a dark-skinned lad with pearly teeth grins out at us from the worn leather frame.

We thank her for her hospitality, for it is getting late

And we must catch a view of the city, before we leave, from a good high place.

That church tower will do—the faded pink one, there against the fierce blue of the sky. Slowly we enter.

The caretaker, an old man dressed in brown and gray, asks us how long we have been in the city, and how we like it here.

His daughter is scrubbing the steps—she nods to us as we pass into the tower.

Soon we have reached the top, and the whole network of the city extends before us.

There is the rich quarter, with its houses of pink and white, and its crumbling, leafy terraces.

There is the poorer quarter, its homes a deep blue.

There is the market, where men are selling hats and swatting flies

And there is the public library, painted several shades of pale green and beige.

Look! There is the square we just came from, with the promenaders.   

There are fewer of them, now that the heat of the day has increased,   

But the young boy and girl still lurk in the shadows of the bandstand.   

And there is the home of the little old lady—

She is still sitting in the patio, fanning herself.

How limited, but how complete withal, has been our experience of Guadalajara!

We have seen young love, married love, and the love of an aged mother for her son.

We have heard the music, tasted the drinks, and looked at colored houses.   

What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do.

And as a last breeze freshens the top of the weathered old tower, I turn my

gaze

Back to the instruction manual which has made me dream of Guadalajara.