I Like Ping-Gong and Bobcats, Shatterproof Drinking Glasses, the Smell of Kerosene, the Crunch of Carrots

First thought on Donovan's (not ↑ Donovan) exclusion from USMNT WC14 team? That song, which begins playing anytime I think Landon Donovan, won't be in my head all June.

Second thought? Klinsmann building towards 2016 Copa America, better chance go deep there than in WC14 Group of Death. Donovan would not have been on USMNT in 2016, he's 87 in soccer years.

Third thought, and I'd bet the right thought: Donovan is an asshole, Klinsmann is an asshole, Klinsmann has the hammer.

Fourth thought, I am very curious for WC14 for reasons more than just soccer - as in, the potential clusterfuck - but I'm also curious to see where my soccer damn is, cause when it comes to DC United it pretty much has disappeared.

Fifth thought, I always like Steve Hillage's cover better than the original:

• The journalistic styling of Glenn Greenwald referenced to Starland Vocal Bands' Afternoon Delight.
• But then Greenwald is savaged by the despicable turd called Kinsley. Ranking turds for turdiness has lost the allure it once had for me.
• Leaking leaks and the leakers that leak them.
• Portraits in Courage by Democratic senators: Notably missing among the 50 Democrats in the U.S. Senate who urged the NFL to reconsider the Redskins name this week this week: Tim Kaine and Mark Warner. Those two Senators, of course, represent Virginia, where the Redskins are based, and where the team practices and holds its training camp. Easy, cheap shot here, I know, but fine metaphors abound. And the Racist Slurs' name controversy WILL NEVER BE OVER.
• Not all men.
• Debating the death of Twitter: On one side are those nodding their heads in agreement with the recent eulogy for Twitter in The Atlantic. On the other are those claiming that for countless communities, it’s a bustling town square and home for like minds—a platform that excels in giving voice to those who previously didn’t have one.
• The midfield engine that could.
• Gaithersburg, the town I grew up in, is the 8th fastest growing city in America.
• When my parents moved us to Gaithersburg in 1965 the population was 3500.
• Memorial Day Weekend - it starts today - is the slowest four days of the year in Blegsylvania except for only Thanksgiving. We're hiking Saturday, we're hiking Sunday, we're hiking Monday. There may be blogging here, but barring kaboom it will be lazyass and futile. Well, it would be futile even with kaboom.
• How to Head in a Jar Prank.
• Walter Benjamin, for those of you who do.
• Thomas Bernhard, for those of you who do.
• Deleuze, for those of you who do.
• Foucault, for those of you who do.
• Mary Ruefle interview!
• And thinking of Hillage makes me think of Gong. These are complete albums of the trilogy, skip ahead to your favorite songs of each of you haven't three hours of so.

THE MOTORCYCLISTS

James Tate

My cuticles are a mess. Oh honey, by the way,

did you like my new negligee? It’s a replica

of one Kim Novak wore in some movie or other.

I wish I had a foot-long chili dog right now.

Do you like fireworks, I mean not just on the 4th of July,

but fireworks any time? There are people

like that, you know. They’re like people who like

orchestra music, listen to it any time of day.

Lopsided people, that’s what my father calls them.

Me, I’m easy to please. I like ping-gong and bobcats,

shatterproof drinking glasses, the smell of kerosene,

the crunch of carrots. I like caterpillars and

whirlpools, too. What I hate most is being the first

one at the scene of a bad accident.

Do I smell like garlic? Are we still in Kansas?

I once had a chiropractor make a pass at me,

did I ever tell you that? He said that your spine

is happiest when you’re snuggling. Sounds kind

of sweet now when I tell you, but he was a creep.

Do you know that I have never understood what they meant

by “grassy knoll.” It sounds so idyllic, a place to go

to dream your life away, not kill somebody. They

should have called it something like “the grudging notch.”

But I guess that’s life. What is it they always say?

“It’s always the sweetest ones that break your heart.”

You getting hungry yet, hon? I am. When I was seven

I sat in our field and ate an entire eggplant

right off the vine. Dad loves to tell that story,

but I still can’t eat eggplant. He says I’ll be the first

woman President, it’d be a waste since I talk so much.

Which do you think the fixtures are in the bathroom

at the White House, gold or brass? It’d be okay with me

if they were just brass. Honey, can we stop soon?

I really hate to say it but I need a lady’s room.

Born One Hundred Years Ago Today

Here's UbuWeb's Sun Ra page.

Here's a boatload from a Bryce 2008 playlist.

Here's a boatload from an Irwin 2013 playlist.

Sun Ra Archives remastered for iTunes.

Thanks to @ShaharOzeri for requesting the below!

I Would Arrange to Stand By Your Side During This Most Desperate Time of Your Roar - but I Have a Crib to Assemble in the Morning and My Screws Need to Soak in Sweat

It's Lazyass Weekday Blogging in the early Blog Days of Summer in dying and Dead Blegsylvania. It's not Lazyass Weekday Blogging in the early Blog Days of Summer in dying and Dead Blegsylvania.

Re: new Swans. I vouch. Every night since it's May 13th release, including tonight and tomorrow night and Saturday night too. Buy the album. Play it LOUD! or don't play it at all. Is so good.








SORRY, I DON'T TALK POETRY

Edwin Torres

don't want fixing

to happen just yet

don't want to lose such fragile heat

mere is mirror's ass scent
sorry I have a crib to assemble in the morning
just one wish, close eyes and breathe
altogether
no war is the chant
dear man
I would help you
and all your awakefulness at hypocrisy
and how the yang has been shifting without provocation
and how the ice cap is melting the wireless
and how language cuts chase by half
and how mirror spells faith inside out
I would arrange to stand by your side
during this most desperate time of your roar -
but I have a crib to assemble in the morning
and my screws need to soak in sweat

Awful, Dull, Brutally Inconsequential

• NEW PERE UBU! Best opening monologue ever since the last until the next. See previous post for this blog's required Pere Ubu chorus. Yes, the song at the very bottom is certainly one of the five most posted songs on this shitty blog.
  
• Voting is magic! Electoral representation in the post-ideological age has far more in common with apotropy than politics. Very few people vote to choose their leaders; instead they vote to prevent the other guy from winning. The genealogy of voting follows a very different path from that of democracy. In classical Athens, which is to a greater or lesser extent to blame for both practices, governmental positions were usually determined by lots, to counteract the advantages enjoyed by rich citizens and great orators. If, as a fifth-century Athenian citizen, you were actually voting for a politician, chances are you were casting an ostrakon: voting for them to be exiled from the city and its civic life. Voting is an apotropaic act. Little has changed. In this week’s European elections, millions of people will vote for the individuals they want to be torn from their homes and families and sent away to the godforsaken marshy swamplands of Brussels.
• The Dark Flows of Capital: Capital is that lack, it infiltrates the dead body-without-organs, the hollow body like a dark god animating it with illusionary desires, producing that which entices us, allures us toward our enslavement. “The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim  to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the productions of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy.”
• Catipal.
• Compete to win a free copy of Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life! 
• Actually, today's monologue and bleggalgaze in post title.
• Without Compunction: Herein lies the Pun-Off’s ontological dilemma. In real life, the best puns tend to be spontaneous: many are funny in the moment but fail to rise to the higher standard to which we hold jokes that are given time to grow and improve in the course of being committed to paper. And yet the sustained, absolute spontaneity that comes of scraping out pun after pun onstage quickly pulls every contestant down to the bottom of the barrel—a low stratum I think of as “[blank]er, I barely know her” territory. People who know me can vouch for the punishment I've inflicted.
• A self-referential reading of self-reference.
• Robert Creeley was born eighty-eight years ago today (lots of Creeley here):

SELF-PORTRAIT

Robert Creeley

He wants to be

a brutal old man,

an aggressive old man,

as dull, as brutal

as the emptiness around him,

He doesn’t want compromise,   

nor to be ever nice

to anyone. Just mean,

and final in his brutal,

his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,   

the gentle, the “oh,

let’s hold hands together”

and it was awful,

dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he’ll stand on

his own dwindling legs.   

His arms, his skin,   

shrink daily. And

he loves, but hates equally.

This is the best way to do things. This is the very best way to do things. This is the very best way to do things exactly right right now and these are the right people doing the right things and these are the right people doing the right things at the right time and these are the right people doing the right things at the right time in the right places and these are the right people doing the right things to the right things at the right places and these are the people that are exactly right and these exactly right people are doing their thing which is right and this is the right thing to do at the right time which is right now and right now everything is exactly right now where it is.

Any excuse to post Pere Ubu. Wanna hear three demos of new songs for a new album, Carnival of Souls, coming this September? Maybe there will be a tour, like last September. the above video, shot by me, this shitty blog's Theme Song Two (it always has been since day one, look directly left when this post is at the top), at Rock and Roll Hotel on H Street, Earthgirl and Hamster and Mr Alarum and Richard were there! They opened with a kickass

• Holyfuck - and those of you who know this chorus can sing along - Did you know Pere Ubu/David Thomas projects have one of three permanent seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game?
• Privacy v Surveillance: a Debate.
• In ten years we will have zero privacy?
• European Democracy is roadkill?
• Has Capitalism seen its day?
• Five Liberal tendencies that plagued Occupy?
• Everything is broken?
• Photography is not a crime.
• I haven't seen his name or thought about Mencius Moldbug in ages.
• Lordy, Moldbug's acolytes and imitators.

• The secret language of dog play.
• Purple Line! Chevy Chase millionaires will be damned - DAMNED! - if they'll give up property value to ease the east-west MOCO transportation nightmares of their minimum wage maids and gardeners!
• Purple Line! Chevy Chase millionaires will be damned - DAMNED! - if they'll give up property value to ease the east-west MOCO transportation nightmares of their minimum wage maids and gardeners!
• Verily, Ajay Bhatt: Asshole. They are all assholes, but Ajay Bhatt is King.
• Reed shredding.
• I disagree with the premise - many of these bands had more than one hit - but here, 80 one hit bands from the 80s.
• Last night on his show, during the first mic-break after a set that included new Swans, Dan Bodah talked about the rave reviews coming in for the new album from unlikely corners, that the band might finally make it big. Of all the bands I never thought I'd have to fight the my favorite band was great until they made it big and now they suck, I liked them before it was cool to like them, Swans is up there with Pere Ubu. I actually don't have to worry about either, even if they make it big.
• Bevis Frond reissued.
• Some Bevis Frond songs.

RIGHT POEM

Lisa Jarnot

This is the best way to do things. This is the very best way to do things. This is the very best way to do things exactly right right now and these are the right people doing the right things and these are the right people doing the right things at the right time and these are the right people doing the right things at the right time in the right places and these are the right people doing the right things to the right things at the right places and these are the people that are exactly right and these exactly right people are doing their thing which is right and this is the right thing to do at the right time which is right now and right now everything is exactly right now where it is.

maintain household bear

• Here you go, it's all I got today, songs, a poem, a weekend's worth of links before they go stale.
• Well, that and a long >>deleted bleggalgaze<< and thanks for the few of you with Kind words for the Appalachian Trail bridge story.
• David Harvey reviews Piketty's Capital: There is, however, a central difficulty with Piketty’s argument. It rests on a mistaken definition of capital. Capital is a process not a thing. It is a process of circulation in which money is used to make more money often, but not exclusively through the exploitation of labor power.
• What are the humanities good for?
• A Sulz on women.
• Found satire: grifters, NSA, google.
• Moving towards muteness. A bleggalgaze of a sort.
• Land of dust and plenty.
• The great white luxury shop in the sky.
• BroadSnark's things you might have missed.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• New Inquiry's Sunday reads.

• DCU new stadium: as Fuck-Me-Jig moves closer to reality, will I still be giving enough of a damn in 2017 to jig?
• Household Names: Responding to the latest iteration of the perennial argument that "the novel is dead," David Ulin appropriately dismisses the notion that the "literary novel," now in its death throes, was still culturally healthy as recently as the 1980s. (Maybe I just missed that while I was otherwise diverting myself in graduate school.) But Ulin just redates literary fiction's last period of cultural relevance: "for me, you have to go back to 1950s, or even earlier--Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the 1920s and 1930s, not only novelists but also household names." This is a myth. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were not household names, although Hemingway did because of his extra-literary activities manage to become better known than almost any other serious American writer of the 20th century. Hemingway was an outlier, however. Fitzgerald's first book was popular, but his subsequent books were much less so, and by the time of his death he was almost forgotten. (The Great Gatsby was a commercial failure and was by no means universally praised by critics.) Our romanticizing of "Paris in the 20s" obscures the fact that at the time, American culture at large was indifferent to the whole thing.
• So when I saw Daniel's post's title I of course thought of the band Household Names. I highly recommend their album Great American Public. Could only find three of their songs but thankfully I knew there was the Stereolab song called Household Names.
• Which begs the oft-asked question: why the hell isn't there more Stereolab on this shitty blog?
• Today is Joey Ramone's and Pete Townsend's birthday. Somewhere, buried beneath boxes, are Ramones and Who albums, unlistened to for more than a decade at the very least.
• Prunella's latest playlist.

[accumulation of land]

Myung Mi Kim

accumulation of land              maintain household bear      labor of house child

cooking reserve line               belonging to                        elaborate isolation

familias implements               enemies captured in war      bearing child rearing

production heirs number         and rear household             family contains

counting herds possessions     fellow feeling crude             isolate care

family contains in germ          bearing rearing                   accumulation of land

implements of production       cooking reserve line of        the number belonging

counting possessions              heirs                                  the captured

isolated                                 household bear                  rear heirs

feeling crude                         belonging to                       fellow feeling crude

the lane the streak the lining the hour

That video shot yesterday, we're walking across the Appalachian Trail footbridge over I-70 on South Mountain in Maryland, downhill left towards Frederick, downhill right towards Hagerstown. We parked on 40 and climbed over Knob Hill to the cliffs at Annapolis and Black Rocks, seven good hard miles to and from. My legs are rounding, my knees are rounding, my hips, lungs, and heart are rounding into hiking shape, my fucking ankles, they are fragile motherfucking castanets. Which reminds me of a song:







This is true (and my apologies to those who've heard this before, but Serendipity demands): forty years ago this Spring (in Spring 1974 I would have been fourteen, I didn't do the math until last night, this isn't a planned gag; or rather, it was a planned gag once I saw the bridge, I did the video with this gag in mind though I didn't start the hike with this gag in mind) I and seven other members of Troop 1097's Senior Patrol were on a training hike for a summer trip to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. In Spring 1974 the hottest craze was Roger Miller's The Streak. Five of eight of us did, back and forth, across the AT footbridge over 70. Three split before we streaked, asking for ten minutes to get across the bridge before we streaked so they weren't implicated, we gave it to them, they waahed back to camp. In the video, when the camera nods up and down, that's where we stopped to wave to honking cars. One car didn't honk, a State Trooper, he bloop-blooped his siren, sped south to next exit. We made it almost back to camp thinking we'd won, dopes, but up the trail walks the Trooper and the Scout leaders. The three ratted us. I'll not pig latin their names: Mark Albright and Marshall Dobbins and Richard Bachmann, I hope you did not have the life of hell I wished upon you then, you collaborating motherfucking cowardly leader-worshiping future Fascist future Eagle Scouts, you.

I was going to quit after Philmont anyway. When asked to apologize for disgracing the Scout uniform, I said, how was I disgracing the Scout uniform by streaking?







FLAME

C.D. Wright

the breath               the trees               the bridge

the road                  the rain                the sheen

the breath               the line                  the skin

the vineyard            the fences             the leg

the water                the breath             the shift

the hair                  the wheels             the shoulder

the breath               the lane                the streak

the lining                the hour                the reasons

the name                the distance          the breath

the scent                the dogs                the blear

the lungs                the breath             the glove

the signal               the turn                  the need

the steps                the lights               the door

the mouth               the tongue             the eyes

the burn                  the burned            the burning

Born Eighty-Five Years Ago Yesterday

        
  
BALLADE OF THE POVERTIES

Adrienne Rich

There’s the poverty of the cockroach kingdom and the rusted toilet bowl
The poverty of to steal food for the first time
The poverty of to mouth a penis for a paycheck
The poverty of sweet charity ladling
Soup for the poor who must always be there for that
There’s the poverty of theory poverty of the swollen belly shamed
Poverty of the diploma mill the ballot that goes nowhere
Princes of predation let me tell you
There are poverties and there are poverties

There’s the poverty of cheap luggage bursted open at immigration
The poverty of the turned head, the averted eyes
The poverty of bored sex of tormented sex
The poverty of the bounced check the poverty of the dumpster dive
The poverty of the pawned horn the poverty of the smashed reading glasses
The poverty pushing the sheeted gurney the poverty cleaning up the puke
The poverty of the pavement artist the poverty passed-out on pavement
Princes of finance you who have not lain there
There are poverties and there are poverties

There is the poverty of hand-to-mouth and door-to-door
And the poverty of stories patched-up to sell there
There’s the poverty of the child thumbing the Interstate
And the poverty of the bride enlisting for war
There’s the poverty of prescriptions who can afford
And the poverty of how would you ever end it
There is the poverty of stones fisted in pocket
And the poverty of the village bulldozed to rubble
Princes of weaponry who have not ever tasted war
There are poverties and there are poverties

There’s the poverty of wages wired for the funeral you
Can’t get to the poverty of the salary cut
There’s the poverty of human labor offered silently on the curb
The poverty of the no-contact prison visit
There’s the poverty of yard sale scrapings spread
And rejected the poverty of eviction, wedding bed out on street
Prince let me tell you who will never learn through words
There are poverties and there are poverties

You who travel by private jet like a housefly
Buzzing with the other flies of plundered poverties
Princes and courtiers who will never learn through words
Here’s a mirror you can look into: take it: it’s yours.

The Moon Is My Alibi. My Tenders Throw Hissy Fits

My Fripp story, posted every Fripp birthday, today being his 68th: Fripp had a touring workshop called Guitar Craft and a performing ensemble, The League of Crafty Guitarists. A bunch of us (Elric, you were there, yes?) got in Phavid Dillips lime-green VW van and drove to an old yellow mansion in West Virginia, not far, past Harpers Ferry, up near Shepardstown. Phavid, who we thought an excellent guitarist - or at least the best guitarist we smoked dope with regularly - had been invited to sit in a circle of other guitarists with Robert Fripp leading the workshop. Incredibly cool actually. Guests were invited to sit in the circle; guess who refused. Afterward, going out for a smoke, I ran into Fripp on a porch and apologized. He asked me why I didn't sit in the circle. I said I didn't want to. He said, then you've nothing to apologize for, and shook my hand.

• Here are all 32 countries' home and away kits for next month's World Cup in Brazil, which this guy says won't happen. I'm sure Brazil's Triskelions have planned, are planning, and will continue to plan to make sure as brutally as is necessary the peasants don't ruin the Triskelions' games .
• When I go back to look at past birthday posts in May, I said at a drive-by one-drink everyone-busy Thursday Night Pints, I am reminded that I have Bleggal Seasonal Disorder, brought on by the Blog Days of Summer in Dead Blegsylvania, cause I yodel the same woes and gags every May. L said, maybe you should get new gags. I love L. So what are you going to do tomorrow, K asked. I said, after the traditional Fripp birthday paragraph I think I'll use the lameass Triskelion Star Trek allusion to describe not only the assholes who run Brazil but the evil motherfuckers that run FIFA, post a link to 32 of the lamest home and away kits imaginable (the USA road kit is a Dominos delivery shirt) to show demonstrate yet again my addiction to uniforms, and assume all my readers get that I'm gently chiding myself for my complicity in all matters big and small in a grossly cynical and self-congratulatory fashion. Believe me, said L, assuming I get the gag is better than explaining the joke to me. Three weeks of ridiculously over-priced thimbles of amber Nyquil for L!
• America's Triskelions are planning and planning for the day America is Brazil.
• Family values in American foreign policy.
• Property of the state.
• Speak to me in many voices.
• It is no one's fault but my own that I didn't realize what a motherfucking grifter Greenwald is until the past year.
• What Piketty's neoliberal critics get wrong.
• Bleggalgazing.
• So no, I'm not contemplating bleggalcide, though I do announce I reserve the right to days off. Now I need convince myself to do it.
• Jacob (IOZ) interviewed.
• :::wood s lot::: has more Bill Knott poems (+ other good stuff).
• City without a name.
• Gray wolf reappears.
• Prunella's latest playlist has Nirvana - I'm sorry, just skip past it - but is otherwise excellent.
• Yes, the title to the poem below is an allusion to Jack Spicer.
• Biblioklept requested the below:

I DID THIS TO MY VOCABULARY

Michael Robbins

The moon is my alibi. My tenders throw hissy fits.

My scalp’s at the foot of the precipice.

My lume is spento, there’s a creep in my cellar.

You can stand under my umbrella, Ella.

Who put pubic hair on my headphones?

Who put the ram in Ramallah?

I’m just sitting here spinning my spinning wheels—

where are the snow tires of tomorrow?

The llama is burning! My heart is an ovary!

Let’s chase dawn’s tail across state lines,

sing “Crimson and Clover” over and overy,

till wonders are taken for road signs.

My fish, fast and loose, shoot fish in a kettle.

The boys like the girls who like heavy metal.

On Sabbath, on Slayer, on Maiden and Venom,

on Motörhead, Leppard, and Zeppelin, and Mayhem . . .

Évekkel Ezelőtt Született Sixty-Six Ma

Brian Eno volt ma született 66 évvel ezelőtt. Azt hiszem ez tetszett Eno ambient zenét nagy négy dolgot. A BLCKDGRD, bizonyos vagyok benne, hogy mothefucking POTUS 16 vagy több köze van bleggal szorongást, bármi. Nem tudom, mit kell tennie, hogy elkerülje a zaj nem okoz nagyobb zaj.

Nem, nem beszélni magyar. Bárcsak én is. Anyukája megtiltotta a lányok beszélni magyar. Igen, ez is csak egy másik BLCKDGRD sillyass.

UPDATE! Nem kapcsolódik Eno születésnapja, de válaszul az általános kétségbeesés kombinálva bleggal hiábavalóságát plusz három órát, hogy a munka a tervezett napot:

Who Cannot Count His Change. Who Wake Up and Punch the Air

The sound system in the rental I'm driving this trip to and from Ohio takes my iPod and sorts then plays all the songs by alphabetical order. That's a more than satisfactory shuffling. Unfortunately, when I turn the car off to buy gas or stop to hug Planet and load her stuff into the rental to haul home and then we take a wonderful three hour drive together just the two of us on rural Ohio backroads, it will be a day I remember the rest of my life, the sound system goes back to the start of the sequence. I'm sure I could figure it out and fix, but I've only seven more hours in the car, I've over 1700 songs, I can forward or back from the start a couple hundred songs and never get the same song twice. Once I went backwards. Talking Heads' live version of "What a Day It Was" from Stop Making Sense came on. I've always thought it one of Talking Heads' lamer songs, it lasted three bars before being skipped, though I thought to myself, Jeebus, Talking Heads has soured on me (or me them) this past couple of years. Last night I did my birthdays check, discovered today is David Byrne's birthday. David Byrne's birthday has always been an Egoslavian Holy Day, bedecked with Talking Heads songs. Can I say it's still an Egoslavian Holy Day, skip the Talking Heads songs today?







Eno and Fripp have birthdays soon. Both Egoslavian Holy Days, both usually bedecked in songs. Both probably will be again, I've listened to both in the past months (unlike Talking Heads), though this whole post is of course not about Egoslavian Holy Days but solely about bleggalgazing. As is the absence of links. Consider this fair warning of potential bleggalgazing and hiatus bluffs to come, because Fuck This bulges of a sudden with increasing intervals of incidents. Because I love you, though, because I still cannot stop myself, here, songs from the back and front of the alphabet on my iPod heard yesterday while Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling to Zanesville to Bamgier (by myself) to Howard to Danville to Jelloway to Bunker Hill to Butler to Ankenytown to Fredericktown to Sparta to Green Valley to Mt Vernon to Gambier (with Planet).








AMERICAN INCOGNITO

David Gewanter

But to whatever animal we ascribe these remains, it is certain such a one has existed in America, and that it has been the largest of all terrestrial beings. It should have sufficed to have rescued the earth it inhabited, and the atmosphere it breathed, from the imputation of impotence. . . .

—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

 

 

I called for armour, rose, and did not reel.

But when I thought . . .

                                      I could feel

My wound open wide.

—Thom Gunn, “The Wound”

 

 

 

THE STATES

 

For he can creep.

 

Whose doctor said his bipolar was pre-existing.

Smacked in the head by a steel cargo door,

hinges tied with a hamburger bag.

The day he blew up: a sucking silence, mouth of tar,

     story told over and over.

 

bump and rattle, caissons rolling.

The blacked-out school bus window is

scratched to read GHOST RECON. Street signs flash by,

“This here is Georgia. Now I see New Hampshire,

     and here’s Colorado.” What country is this city?

 

Gorked on pain-relief cocktails, Iraq to Landstuhl Med

to Andrews Air Force, wheelchair bus to Walter Reed.

Wounded when burning poppies, now afloat

on morphine. “As a state,” he once emailed,

     “Afghanistan is next to Mars.”

 

The navigator slides along a wall:

“Sir, can you show me north?”

Where the gazebo is a tank. Where the manhole covers a bomb.

Who apologize for shaving cuts. Skull plate,

     40-lb. gain from meds, big ox baby.

 

“Fall in,” the heart-attack sergeant tells

the legless man. “At ease,” he tells the psychotics.

They limp by drug dealers for their scoop

of Baskin-Robbins. Are told,

     “Suck it up, get used to the outside world.”

 

Who are saved, but die in dreams,

salute with a mechanical arm.

 

 

CONSTITUTION AVE, CAPITALSAURUS DAY

 

Beneath the marble, beneath the paper laws;

the paved boglands and legs-up taverns,

the slave-built steps of the Capitol. Winter 1898,

a sewer-man digs up a dinosaur spine,

      a nomen nudum, naked & unnamed fossil

 

tombed later at the Smithsonian

near Jefferson’s Mammoth tooth

that rattled his pocket, cherished knuckle-bone

and proof against the French naturalist

      who with powdered hands

 

wrote that New World dampness and cold

had stunted flora, animals, and Man:

the American Degeneracy. 

Jefferson ordered Lewis & Clark to find

      a living Mammoth,

 

the “animal de l’Ohio”

grazing somewhere west

of Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, and—

lest a species wither, or Nation grow small—

      brought Mammoth bones to Monticello.

 

“WHEREAS, the remains of a large carnivorous dinosaur,

which may be an ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus rex,

were found at First and ‘F’ Streets, SE,

 

NOW, THEREFORE, I, MAYOR OF THE DISTRICT

OF COLUMBIA, do hereby proclaim January 28, 2001,

as ‘CAPITALSAURUS DAY.’”

 

Anthony A. Williams

 

 

DISCOVERY IN SIBERIA

 

Reindeer of the herdsman Jarkov nuzzle

a tusk frozen 20,000 years. Soon,

French naturalists arrive. Radar shows

the Holy Grail of Mammoth hunters,

      a frigid bulk, twice an elephant’s size—

 

Timber saws cut the block. Hoisted by

military helicopter to Stalin’s

gulag caves, frozen labs for scientist-prisoners,

now re-opened. Waving hair-dryers

      to sublimate the ice, so that Discovery

 

can film them planting clone eggs

inside an elephant, hatching a Mammoth

American defender to split the ramparts,

show scheduled for release in 2001

      —the year, in the sci-fi film,

 

the monkeys learn to talk;

when Mayor Williams greets      

the Capitalsaurus and the new President Bush;

when Mohammed Atta decides he

      cannot date a waitress.

 

 

SECURITAS

 

Weary headlands roll through zones of night,

red lights flash the muted streets,

crotch-of-moss draining a blue spark dawn—

We sleep, staring. Tree-shapes and stars prod us,

      the belt of Orion is a martyr’s bomb.

 

And the king, our godsbody, lies abed

groaning, chill spirit belaboring the flesh—

His spit and sperm are tallied; his temperature,

a weather report told by doctors. Until

      lady Securitas peers from a cloud—

 

her bloodlined hands, the blank, bureaucratic face!

We pray with our bodies: cold sweat, a hymn

of twitches, heart racing, shrieking dreams . . .

But fragrant Securitas has only

       come for him—

 

To compass him about.

Lifting out her breast.

Stoppers his mouth with a thick nipple.

Squeezing till the ichor throbs from his eyes,

      milk to make us thirsty—

 

 

IRAQ & TEXAS: DJINN ROADS

 

Helicopters park at Forward Base EXXON;

only the sand is flying today, and it breaks

the speed limits, 50 miles an hour. Visibility zero;

the air is hot as blood, the sky is burnt amber.

      Lord keep still our hands.

 

In Texas, teens patrol the roads by night,

burning the body’s fuel—State Troopers pull them over.

George, fishtailing dauphin, a graceful

falldown drunk, clouds the breathalyzer:

      FELONY DUI. Daddy’s name sinks the report—

 

Election night, heaven staring, and Laura’s

yellowcake Chevy mows down her boyfriend:

VEHICULAR HOMICIDE: the car found guilty.

“I know this as an adult, it was crushing,”

      she recalls. Her scented, unmarked body

 

sweats beneath foundation garments and paste.

His unmarked body, and fructifying breath,

his stone squint chasing snakes from the sun—

They walk, O my darling, the hill of light;

      the bite of remorse teaches them to bite.

 

Then it rains. What falls from the sky is not water

but mud, raindrops pulling clouds of sand

into large wet globs. “It was biblical,” says

Col. Gibbs. Lights a cigarette, his back to the storm:

      “You’ve got to embrace the suck.”

 

 

HOTEL AFTERMATH

 

From the dust, the limbs jerk up alive, stagger home

to camp. Martian: neck gators for the nose, goggles

seal off the eyes, baby wipes. WHAT DID YOU FIND THERE?

A slipper, an ear, some wire. A chemical suit.

      A map of water.

           ——

 

From Stalin’s cave, just bits of gristle—unreadable,

no Frankenstein DNA. They rewrite the Mammoth show.

 

From Walter Reed, “an aggressive campaign

to deal with the mice infestation.”

      Recovery rooms, “spit-polish clean.”

 

Whose mother swallows all the soldier medicine.

 

Who wheels himself in to play Texas Hold ‘Em.

 

Whose father says, “It was OK for my son

to give his body. They try in their power,

      but it reverses itself.”

 

Jefferson’s American Incognito

is ground up for fertilizer—

the maid said it was cow bones. Sweet heartland,

Governor Meriwether Lewis

      of Louisiana, depression pre-existing,

 

shoots himself in the chest and head.

 

Who sit by the apples and wingback chairs.

“If I had two hands, I’d order two vodkas”—

 

Who cannot count his change.

      Who wake up and punch the air.

There Might Be a Planet

That Lloyd Cole pop goodness put in my head yesterday afternoon by Scott Williams on his WFMU show and it's stayed in my head since, be in yours.

Thirty minutes after this is posted I will be Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling to Zanesville to Bamgier to help Planet pack, take her out to dinner, and come home Wednesday for the summer. I must break the news to the one of me who watches the slideshows, there will be no slideshows, Earthgirl needs to work. She's promised us an artichoke lasagna when we get home. I can promise a soundtrack of the drive Wednesday morning as I get to play everything on the iPod Earthgirl never lets me play when I Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling to Zanesville to Bamgier. For instance, perhaps this Daniel Menche:

• Must. Keep. Eye. On. Speedometer. When. Listening. To. Daniel. Menche.
• A reminder of how Democratic Party mid-term disasters are interpreted by Democratic Party loyalists.
• On bagging: But it is not this performance or these particular pretensions that I want to talk about, but the absolute difference between bailing out of a book, a movie, and a theatrical performance. When you head for the exit in the cinema, something I do fairly often, you possibly bother the person next to you for a few seconds, but you can’t upset what’s happening on the screen or change the mood of the evening. However bad or good, the film is done and dusted. As for a book, when you’re not impressed by what you’re reading, your only resistance to putting it aside is the money spent and the time already invested. No one will be disturbed or offended when you send it off with the old newspapers for recycling. The theater is quite different, especially the small, intimate stages where experimental material first gets an airing. In this particular case, for example, our only exit from torment was via a door to the left of the stage. Leaving thus meant not only upsetting the people sitting either side of us, who might well themselves be struggling to get into the spirit of the piece, but likewise alerting the actors to our negative verdict, perhaps with disastrous consequences. Maybe the cast would lose what confidence they had. Perhaps others seeing us leave would get up and follow. So no sooner had my friend and I whispered to each other our desire to escape than I began to feel guilty. Give them a chance, I thought. Another ten minutes. No, another twenty.
• Here's the big news: when I got home last night Earthgirl had just front-to-backed Mary Ruefle's latest book of poems, Trances of the Blast, she says to me, Now I get what you've been yammering about for years. I gave her some Hejinian, wonder how that will work.
• For the two of you who might, new stuff at Hollowtide.
• Back to books.
• The page endures.
• Prunella's latest playlist.
• Tonight I will download the new Swans album, out today. Planet cannot leave Bamgier until noon tomorrow, it is highly unlikely I will be able to make the Swans show tomorrow night at Black Cat, if anyone wants a free ticket - you, Mr Alarum? - let me know, I can email it to you.
• There will be Peter Jefferies and Guided by Voices (have I ever mentioned the Robert Pollard products have one of three permanent seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Game?)!

D_____ L_____'s

Albert Goldbarth

Fathers are invariably great nuisances on the stage, and always have to give the hero or heroine a long explanation of what was done before the curtain rose, usually commencing with “It is now nineteen years, my dear child, since ...” etc., etc.
—Charles Dickens

There might be a planet. Before that,

though, there would have been a gas that coalesced   

into a planet . . . as, before that, there were dots of flux   

and energy that hadn’t yet declared themselves

in concert. There’s always “before”: there's more

each minute, more each person, yes and every one

of its smallest, irreducible subparticles—which I name   

the “beforeon”—is exerting force on us

that’s surely time’s own version of gravity: its purpose

is to tug, and to remind us. In the house of second marriages,

it causes the man to do what he and the woman had promised   

they never would: one night while she’s asleep, he snoops   

her bureau for telltale relics of the mysterious Mr.   

Number One. And why, or even what

he hopes to find, he couldn’t clearly say: a letter? photo?   

sex toy?—something, some objectified gossip, a fossil   

of bygone love. Essentially, we make of our own psyches   

a bureau and pay a shrink to snoop; as for the moment   

when our neural linkage first began to form,

as for the flavor of the fluids in the womb. . . we’re all

amnesiacs: and our earliest self, just like the universe’s   

earliest being, is a “phantom limb” with the faintest   

mnemonic of starbursts in an otherwise chill void. I have   

a friend D____ L____ (this poem is hers) who, orphaned   

as a newborn, is devoted to learning her origin

as doggedly as any cosmologist tracks light to its source, although   

her search (when not pure Internet) is more a matter

of tape-recording the beer-sour stories in sailor bars,

of sifting ashy memories in nursing homes,

one backwards inch of plotline at a time. And yet somebody

else is waking up this morning with the need   

to be detached from any history,

to stand here like a person in a play who enters   

onstage from a pool of perfect blankness. Then,

of course, he can start over, minute-zero-of-year-zero,   

unbesmirched. We could have told him that he’d be this   

anguished—sneaking in her drawer, below those folded   

pastel lozenges of lingerie, uncovering the one thing   

that could ruin them. Now he wants only to float (who   

doesn't, sometimes?) in an anti-world: appealing, but

illusory. We can’t unmoor ourselves from linearity,   

no more than any one of us can be a human being   

unconnected to a genome—and in fact, no more   

than Mama-All-of-Time-and-Space-Herself (I mean   

the cosmos) can unwrap her vasty body from its own   

twelve million years of Big Bang “background radiation”   

so it wafts—a tossed off, filmy scarf—far elsewhere.   

No; there isn’t any “elsewhere.” When we sleep   

or simply deepen into quietude enough, the voices   

come—the rhythmic, grave, ancestral murmur,

a woman bearing a ritual clamshell bowl . . .

a man with a done-deal sales contract . . . whispers,

knuckle-rap, cleared throats. . . . Her great-grandfather,   

D____ L____ has uncovered, was a lector—a reader they used   

to relieve the tedium of the leaf rollers’ shifts   

in cigar manufactories. Shakespeare, Dickens,   

union tracts, love letters, family diaries . . . . He’s   

walking through the tobacco aroma; he’s setting his text   

on his easel; and the story—the only story we know,   

the story of Before—is recited.

[My Goal Is to Be]

My goal is to be

a too creepily wiry

seventy year old

healthy unto death

like the twenty-five year old

I pretend I am

Galaxy of Minds Bent Upon Him

• I've got your fucking sunny day: my timeline (via DC sports, I'm a closet Nats fan, and then there is United, which won it's fourth league game, one more than last season, Saturday) filled last night with the scariest word combination imaginable for my motherfucking eternity: Obinray Ickerfay.
• This is true: I want to believe that Obinray Ickerfay is not only consciously aware he is an ironic-cubed performance artist, I would pretend to believe him if he said he was. But he's not.
• It's a mocomofo thing, the ick called Obinray Ickerfay, though it's a universal thing too, you've had, have, will have a Obinray Ickerfay too. 
• If ever there was a reason to Pig Latin someone's name at this shitty blog, it's Obinray Ickerfay.
• We kill people based on metadata.
• The New York Times, Tim Geithner, and the Three Card Monte Model of Propaganda.
• Piketty is singing to our choir.
• Territorial rights for languages?
• The New Inquiry's Sunday reads.
• Maggie's weekly links.

• HIKING UPDATE! or Earthgirl and I are getting our fat asses in shape doing what we love to do: Friday after work four mile circuit in Little Bennett, only one small circuit and we would have done it all; Saturday, seven mile circuit, Sugarloaf, Blue to Purple to Blue to Northern Peaks; Sunday, four mile circuit to the above, Blockhouse Train off River Road to the above cliffs above the Potomac, just ten miles from the DC line.
• How to tell a loved one her favorite book sucks.
• Circe and Charlie will get an Elkin novel, I'm ordering today at lunch, get requests in by one today.
• Sergio Chejfec (the anti-Escher?), for those of you who do. I saw his name and thought I should investigate and promptly forgot.
• Hilda Hilst?
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Samuel Delaney, for those of you who do.
• Zombie update (with Sun Kil Moon soundtrack).
• C.A.K.E. Dave's new project.
• It's hard to believe that after all these years Dean Wareham is putting out his first solo album.

FIGURE

Josephine Mills

A poem I keep forgetting to write

Is about the stars,

How I see them in their order

Even without the chair and bear and the sisters,

In their astronomic presence of great space,

And how beyond and behind my eyes they are moving,

Exploding to spirals under extremest pressure.

Having not mathematics, my head

Bursts with anguish of not understanding.

The poem I forget to write is bursting fragments

Of a tortured victim, far from me

In his galaxy of minds bent upon him,

In the oblivion of his headline status

Crumpled and exploding as incomparable

As a star, yet present in its light.

I forget to write.

Born Eighty-Four Years Ago Today

Stanley Elkin, one of my Deserted Island Five even though I don't play Deserted Island Five with novelists and poets. These are the two excerpts I always use for his birthday, the first capturing one of Elkins's great themes, the second simply the most beautiful, heartbreaking paragraph, as stand alone but especially within the context of the novel, I've ever read:

Ben, everything there is is against your being here! Think of get-togethers, family stuff, golden anniversaries in rented halls, fire regulation celebrated more in the breach than the observance, the baked Alaska up in flames, everybody wiped out - all the cousins in from coasts, wiped out. Rare, yes - who says not - certainly rare, but it could happen, has happened. And once is enough if you've been invited. All the people picked off by plagues and folks eaten by earthquakes and drowned in the tidal waves, all the people already dead that you might have been or who might have begat the girl who married the guy who fathered the fellow who might have been your ancestor - all the showers of sperm that dried on his Kleenex or spilled on his sheets or fell on the ground or dirtied his hands when he jerked off or came in his p.j.'s or no, maybe he was actually screwing and the spermatozoon had your number written on it and it was lost at sea because that's what happens, you see - there's low motility and torn tails - that's what happens to all but a handful out of all the googols and gallons of come, more sperm finally than even the grains of sand I was talking about, more even than the degrees. Well - am I making the picture for you? Am I connecting the dots? Ben, Ben, Nick the Greek wouldn't lay a fart against a trillion bucks that you'd ever make it to this planet!

   
- The Franchiser

And it was wondrous in the negligible humidity how they gawked across the perfect air, how, stunned by the helices and all the parabolas of grace, they gasped, they sighed, these short-timers who even at their age could not buy insurance at any price, not even if the premiums were paid in the rare rich elements, in pearls clustered as grapes, in buckets of bullion, in trellises of diamonds, how, glad to be alive, they stared at each other and caught their breath.

 - Magic Kingdom 


Here's an interview from 1976. I reread Dick Gibson Show and the triptych novellas Searches and Seizures between last year's birthday and this year's. I wrote a Masters thesis on Elkin in 1996-97, going back to the novels since, while still an exhilarating and unique again experience, felt like chapters were due to D in the morning - quick, scan novels for highlights, my margin scrawls, scavenge my notebooks a seventh time before pounding out paragraphs before the morning. But this year I read Searches and Seizures, my favorite Elkin triptych of his three triptychs of novellas (and he loved novellas best), after D died this past Fall, D who loved Elkin too but loved "The Bailbondsman," the first of the three in Searches and Seizures, best. Reading Elkin last December didn't feel like research. Thursday Night Pints started when D was Head Signature on my Masters thesis on Stanley Elkin. Rest in Peace, D. Scheduled for the next year, Mrs Ted Bliss and Van Gogh's Room at Arles, respectively Elkin's last novel and last triptych of novellas.

Let me know if I can turn you on.

Ruddy Liturgically Sacrificial Hue

• Lazyass and Futile Weekend Blogging for the Blog Days of Summer in Dead Blegsylvania. 
• Going outside today and tomorrow though tomorrow is one of the Holiest Days in Egoslavia. 
• Hint: one of our rescue Maine Coons is named after the birthday celebrant.
• The Selfish Individual. On Sontag essays.
• Desert theory, rehashed.
• The compartmentalization of injustice.
• Three plateaus on noise aesthetics.
• America as Ahab though speaking as Ishmail.
• Did a major tune-up on blogrolls, purged bleggicides, migrated hibernating blogs to Moribund, added some new joints, please check them out when they float to the top. Only bleggicides were purged; if you are not where you were and you haven't posted in at least three months you've been moved to Moribund so that when you wake up I can see the pleasant surprise.
• Prunella's latest playlist.
• Guess what I fell asleep to, woke up with in head. Cause yes, it occurred to me this past Wednesday to open this post for Lazyass and Futile Weekend Blogging for the Blog Days of Summer in Dead Blegsylvania with the song at the top.

SUNT LEONES

Stevie Smith

The lions who ate the Christians on the sands of the arena

By indulging native appetites played what has now been seen a   

Not entirely negligible part

In consolidating at the very start

The position of the Early Christian Church.

Initiatory rites are always bloody

And the lions, it appears

From contemporary art, made a study

Of dyeing Coliseum sands a ruddy

Liturgically sacrificial hue

And if the Christians felt a little blue—

Well people being eaten often do.

Theirs was the death, and theirs the crown undying,

A state of things which must be satisfying.

My point which up to this has been obscured

is that it was the lions who procured

By chewing up blood gristle flesh and bone

The martyrdoms on which the Church has grown.

I only write this poem because I thought it rather looked   

As if the part the lions played was being overlooked.

By lions’ jaws great benefits and blessings were begotten   

And so our debt to Lionhood must never be forgotten.

So He Smelled the Underside of His Own Arm

The NFL Draft was on all the television sets in the bar last night at Thursday Night Pints. Patrons were rapt, screaming at the sets. It's a fucking national holiday, K said. Johnny Football? L asked. I said, he won the Heisman as a freshman, from what I understand he's too small to play professionally but too talented to miss, or something. We were only there for the first hour, six or seven picks, but after every pick the cameras spent as much time on Johnny Football's face as on the person actually picked. Ritual humiliation? asked L. Wait, there's a trade! screamed some buffoon on ESPN, Cleveland has moved up! Another buffoon, one with a ridiculous haircut for a grown man, screamed, I've been screaming about Johnny Football since the first pick, surely Cleveland moved up to take Johnny Football, it's Johnny Football's time! It wasn't Johnny Football's time. ESPN kept the camera trained on Johnny Football's crestfallen face. Fucking national holiday, said K.

• Tim Geithner's side of the story. No surprise in his perspective, but it is an interesting read on his perspective. What's making all the noise, however, is this: [Geithner] cheerfully relayed a story that also appears in his book about the time he sought advice from Bill Clinton on how to pursue a more populist strategy: “You could take Lloyd Blankfein into a dark alley,” Clinton said, “and slit his throat, and it would satisfy them for about two days. Then the blood lust would rise again.”
• Oh my, I'm faint.
• The Dictionary of Untranslatables: Postmodern winks aside, The Dictionary of Untranslatables is a mad, encyclopedic tribute in the grand tradition of bizarre translation projects, with the official funding to match: Eurothink at its academic best. Why else would the culture czars of Paris and Brussels who’ve brought you the yearly European Culture Capitals (Umeå, anyone?) and Quaero (the mysterious, amply funded Franco-German search engine) pay theory buffs the big euros, if not to pedal soft power? The first translation of all this ­untranslatability, conspiracy theorists will remark, was into Ukrainian.
• Is The Intercept some kind of roach motel?
• Evil.
• The commodification of creativity.
• Identity politics.
• Mother's Day Lament.
• The beginning of the end of Eddie Johnson at DC United.
• East Moco, for those of you who pass through that Hell.
• The Aerosol Grey Machine.
• Colson Whitehead and poker: “I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside.”
• Lionize.
• The biography of the novel, or: Josipovici, for those of you who do.
• Woke up with Radio Birdman in my head.

LITTLE ETERNITIES

Mary Ruefle

When are we happiest? he asked her.
Not one of them could get the seats
to go back, not one of them really knew
what was in the glove box, though
everything there was theirs.

When they got to where they were going,
a park, a gray squirrel came jumping along.
Childhood! It was in one of the houses nearby.
Money! Every day it seemed to loose itself
from its lurking-place and drift away.

So he smelled the underside
of his own arm. And the squirrel
paused, one of those little eternities
never mentioned again.