A Thread A Reed A Wrack A Ruin

Updates below.

Meh, I'll say this one more time about that: every person bleg-screaming is bleg-screaming in service of the status quo.

The more our screams are broadcast the easier monitored, dispelled, dispersed, ignored. Granting thralls self-propaganda is the easiest cage. Overlords who fuss about blegs and facebeek and tweeter and the digital rabble aren't the overlords who overlord.

The threat to power isn't anarchy, it's atrophy and entropy and apathy (which is a disease, someone once said famously in a very small world) that threatens the ideal overlords' equilibrium between abused and appeased thralls, and what better way to prove thralls powerless than addicting them to the latest megaphone that grants them the illusion of a subversive autonomy.

(And what better way to retrain and reinforce proper power hierarchies amongst the thralls than the cut-throat free marketry of unregulated Blegsylvanian power economics?)

The more evidence from Electronica that electronica both atomizes and bonds those atoms the more I both post more and indulge in chastising myself for blegging, using self-scouring of my roobity as arch pose. Blegging is akin to all you can eat buffets, obesity as sign of defiant victory. Rwank.

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• The Long View.
• Goldman and Palin in the Zeitgeist.
• The limits to liberalism.
• A liberal's endorsement of Sotomayor. (more)
• Zizek on Berlusconi in Tehran.
• On obesity in America.
• UPDATE! Christians and Feral Cats. I've got fun new story on mine, probably tomorrow.
• Purple Line.
• Purple Line.
• UPDATE! Condo glut in South Rocketville!

UPDATE!

Tomorrow's Mocostan:

A densely packed "science city" near Gaithersburg, clusters of 25-story high-rises in White Flint along Rockville Pike and new developments with minimal parking are among the sweeping changes approved today by the Montgomery County Planning Board...

They lay the groundwork for Johns Hopkins University to build its proposed high-density scientific community west of Interstate 270 near Gaithersburg, meshing research centers with urban lifestyles; allow developers to transform the aging and car-centric White Flint area into a high-rise mini-city that could be larger than Tysons Corner with street life to rival the District and Bethesda; and enable developers to build housing and offices with little parking, provided they are close to Metro stations and other public transit....

Planning Board Chairman Royce Hanson has predicted that the next wave of newcomers in Montgomery will be urbanists ready to give up the detached house, two cars and a gleaming front lawn, and instead embrace city living in the suburbs. The plans approved today, he said, are a major step toward creating a new type of suburb where it is easy for residents and workers to walk, bike or rely on public transportation. His hope, he said, is to produce "great urban centers." 

• More Charles Wright.
• William Gass on Kinds of Killing.
• UPDATE! Collected Spicer reviewed.
• Five Ways of Looking at a Richard Powers Novel.
• On pseudonyms.

UPDATE!

It's a herd of feral hamsters, a major herd, thundering across the yellow plains of the southern reaches of the Great Concavity in what used to be Vermont, raising dust that forms a uremic-hued cloud with somatic shapes interpretable from as far away as Boston and Montreal. The herd is descended from two domestic hamsters set free by a Watertown NY boy at the beginning of the Experialist migration in the subsidized Year of the Whopper. The boy now attends college in Champaign IL and has forgotten that his hamsters were named Ward and June.

The noise of the herd is tornadic, locomotival. The expression on the hamsters' whiskered faces is businesslike and implacable - it's that implacable-herd expression. They thunder eastward across pedalferrous terrain that today is fallow, denuded. To the east, dimmed by the fulvous cloud the hamsters send up, is the vivid verdant ragged outline of the annularly overfertilized forests of what used to be Maine.

With respect to a herd of this size, please exercise the sort of common sense that come to think of it would keep your thinking man out of the southwest Concavity anyway. Feral hamsters are not pets. They mean business. Wide berth advised. Carry nothing even remotely vegatablish if the path of a feral herd. If in the path of such a herd, move quickly and calmly in a direction perpendicular to their own.

Don't know if I'll do this, but am, this the third time, agog at the novel.

• Flood and Orbit.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! Goodness.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! Huey Lewis on trial.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

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[DARLING CAN YOU KILL ME:
WITH YOUR MICKEYMOUSE PILLOWS]

D.A. Powell

darling you can kill me:    with your mickeymouse pillows
when I'm your meager man.    with your exhaust pipe and hose

could you put me out:    when I'm a mite a splinter a grain
a tatter a snip a sliver a whit a tittle.    habited by pain

would you bop me on the noggin:    with a two by four
the trifle of me pissing myself.    slobbering infantile: or

wheezing in an oxygen tent.    won't you shut off the tank
mightn't you disconnect the plug: give the cord a proper yank

when I lose the feeling in my legs.    when my hands won't grip
and I'm a thread a reed a wrack a ruin:    of clap and flux and grippe

with your smack connections could you dose me.    as I start my decline
would you put a bullet through me.    angel: no light left that is mine.

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Ian Curtis was born 53 years ago yesterday: