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December 01, 2009

Fireless and Vacant as Any Hat

Neg2
Updates below.

Perrin writes: I think Obama has already cemented his legacy, and those who believe he'll dramatically shift direction and do "what's in his heart" are beyond help at this point. Those who grumble in liblog threads about ditching Obama and the Dems in 2012 are also blowing steam, for the system is self-correcting, and once the vampirish Repub candidates start baring their fangs, stray libs will be frightened back into the fold, hoping that the next four years will somehow be different.

True that. I'm not betting against that being me, though I'm gonna try to lose that bet.

Sullivan says what I've been saying forever: If (Obama) ramps up Afghanistan and delays Iraq withdrawal, he will lose his base. If he does the full metal neocon as he is being urged to, he should not be deluded in believing the GOP will in any way support him. They will oppose him every step of every initiative. They will call him incompetent if Afghanistan deteriorates, they will call him a terrorist-lover if he withdraws, they will call him a traitor if he does not do everything they want, and they will eventually turn on him and demand withdrawal, just as they did in the Balkans with Clinton. Obama's middle way, I fear, is deeper and deeper into a trap, and the abandonment of a historic opportunity to get out.

True that. I've said over and over Obama could roast Muslims alive on a spit, gouging out their livers with a poker while screaming Fuck You, Allah, and pigs will call him pussy.

Zizek at Birkbeck College. Consider this: Today's lecture, dramatically entitled 'Apocalypse Today' (a promise or a threat, I wonder), kicks off with Zizek identifying the three modern horsemen of the apocalypse: the techno-digital, the New Age, and the Christian fundamentalist, of which the last of the three is both the most dangerous, the most ridiculous, and also the closest to any kind of desirable emancipatory politics.

True that. If you're American power, who do you fear more, Beckian cranks and Christers or fat and complicit fucks like me? The strategy is to make me more afraid of Beckian cranks and Christers than I am disgusted with the oligarchy, that I hold my nose and tolerate them rather than hold my nose and work with the cranks and Christers to challenge the status quo.

Polny pizdets. To challenge the oligarchy's power, there's more likelihood for success if America's Leftists work with America's christiest, crackerist Right than waiting for help from the Democrats (and more likelihood for success if America's christiest, crackerist Right work with the looniest, most marxist Left than wait for help from the Republicans)?

Maury

True that. I voted for X-Boxes for Giftmas and instead got shittier reality shows for the Spring season, bitches! I can get the same shittier reality shows without voting, yo.

Neg

  • UPDATE! A deadly liar and manipulator.
  • UPDATE! Dead Parrot.
  • A reasoned response to the question, What's Gone Wrong w/Obama? Fuck reasoned responses: what's gone wrong is he had his chance brand himself as new - regardless of whether or not he actually wanted to enact new - and he chose to brand himself old.
  • UPDATE! True this: The fact that Obama is following in Bush’s footsteps – talking to an audience of captive individuals who would be ruined for life by a single catcall – is a sign of how archaic hope for change and reform has become.
  • UPDATE!
Obama-facebook
Kirkphallus

Neg

Pappys

This past Sunday night we had dinner with Elric's parents at that restaurant in Baithersgurgle, a restaurant that iterations and years ago was once Pappy's Pizza where, during a summer break in 1978(?) between his freshman and sophomore years(?) at Kenyon, someone exceptionally dear to me (and familiar to regulars), to the everlasting and glorious head-exploding of his father, John the Daftist, while working in the kitchen fell in love with a waitress and dropped out of school and has had a full and (give or take two ex-wives and a Sinister Bitch of Doom) happy life. xoxo.

Pappys2

Neg

Neg

THE DRUNK IN THE FURNACE

W.S. Merwin

                For a good decade
The furnace stood in the naked gully, fireless
And vacant as any hat. Then when it was
No more to them than a hulking black fossil
To erode unnoticed with the rest of the junk-hill
By the poisonous creek, and rapidly to be added
                To their ignorance

                The were afterwards astonished
To confirm, one morning, a twist of smoke like a pale
Resurrection, staggering out of it chewed hole,
And to remark then other tokens that someone,
Cosily bolted behind the eye-holed iron
Door of the drafty burner, had there established
                His bad castle.

                Where he gets his spirits
It's a mystery. But the stuff keeps him musical:
Hammer-and-anvilling with poker and bottle
To his jugged bellowings, till the last groaning clang
As he collapses onto the rioting
Springs of a litter of car-seats ranged on the grates,
                To sleep like an iron pig.

                In their tar-paper church
On a text about stoke-holes that are sated never
Their Reverend lingers. They nod and hate trespassers.
When the furnace wakes, though, all afternnon
Their witless offspring flock like piped rats to its siren
Crescendo, and agape on the crumbling ridge
                Stand in a row and learn.

Neg 

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

Posted at 12:24 PM in aargocalyptic, Ask Fleabus, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, DCU/Soccer, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Poke, Project Goad, Shoot Me Now, We Are the Enemy | | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

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November 29, 2009

So Much for More Experience. What Can Grow Has Grown; What's Small Now Stays Small. No Portion Waits for Those Who Deserve More.

Flbssept

The last bleggalgaze of this, the bleggalgazeworthiest week of the year:

I caught myself writing paragraphs in notebook what I usually say in sentences. I caught myself, after successive days of not-blegging but reading, not just fiction and poetry, reading theory and mirrormirror theory and mirrormirrormirror theory, and then I caught myself writing lectures about theory, and, truly and thusly, fuck that.

So, in a sentence: Humans in general (and Americans in particular) will always be divided between those believing Freedom need be followed with a to and those believing Freedom need be followed with a from, and what guarantees the eternal clusterfuck is that those who worship the to when it comes to economics worship the from when it comes to personal liberties, and visa versa.

I link to others teasing out the duh because they want to tease out the duh. I've done my academic poking around in duh's stomach and intestines.* Once it was fun, up through grad school, it's.... been losing enjoyment since I quit that particular game. I enjoy reading it now - the reason I link to it - but the rigor of writing it is no fun now even if I had the time and was in shape: it's a youngsters' game. Besides, I think I've earned the right to encrypt my deciphered duh as I please, and you ping back or don't.

Which makes me a pussy when I get pissy people chose not to ping back. Proving, like every blogger, like you and you and you - like anyone who pushes a submit button in any format or media - I think there's something I know I think it vital you know, though I don't pity you for not reading me, I pity me for your not reading me. Just like you and you and you do.

*I was going to use Ozzy Froats in the context of this post, but after revisions it didn't fit. Still, a pint of beer to the first of you who, sans google, names that allusion.

Construction 007

UPDATE! This seems appropriate today:

Pink-flamingosl
  • It does occur to me - and you too, yes? - that if Obama did do want what we want him to (and he doesn't, yo), to succeed he'd have to increase more of the presidential power accumulated under Bush we bitch he hasn't ceded yet.
  • It's almost as if he doesn't want to win reelection. Still, consider this sentence from that Fucking Washington Post article: The revised plan, which faces a war-weary and increasingly skeptical American public, is expected to call for 30,000-35,000 new troops in a phased deployment over the next 12 to 18 months. Can you imagine that sentence being written if John McCain was president?
  • Greenwald's Daily Duh. Jeebus, it's easy to see why professional Republicans hold professional Democrats in such contempt.
  • On the silliness of The Nation.
  • Milking every anti-Obama talking point as if the udders were full of benedictine.
  • Take a look at this map about % of people receiving food stamps and draw your own conclusions about the South.
  • Consider that some South Carolina crackers consider Lindsey Graham a liberal.
  • Your Fucking Washington Post reminds you that christers are moral idiots regardless the hue of the christer.
  • James and Marisacat on bleg-hiatus. Lot of that going around.
  • Contracts versus Tenure: Heh!
  • A decision I'll be making in the next six months.
  • This will seem mean, and I've don't know the parents and don't know if the name has familial significance, and maybe they did it on purpose, and perhaps no one younger that 45 gets the allusion, but people named their new daughter Hannah Barbara?
Yogibear1

  • I don't think this is the Druid Hill Park Cemetery behind and to the right and out-of-bounds of Holes One and Two at the disc golf course, but it might be.
  • Possible pig to challenge O'Malley looks like a pig.
  • My future hell.
  • Humpback endangered! Oh, and please enjoy this paragraph, MOCO property-tax payers: Three months after Montgomery County finished its $450,000 restoration of the East Deer Park Bridge over railroad tracks between Gaithersburg and Washington Grove, the CSX Corporation is mulling whether to raise or raze the historic structure to make room for double-decker freight cars. Heh.
Humpbackz062409_rgbb
  • I like to imagine Randy Hardy is driving that red van.
  • Fentyville!
  • Crisis in Bethesda! "This will take money out of taxpayers' hands and turn it into a path that leads to nowhere," said Tiffany Audas, whose property abuts the proposed project. "This is going to bump right up to our fence." Hmmm. I wonder which of the two is Tiffany's true concern.
  • Clarksburg!
  • Clusterfuck!
Humpbackz062409_rgbb

Construction 007

CHARITY

Carl Dennis

Time to believe that the thin disguise
On the face of the blessing in disguise
Will never be pulled off,

That the truth that's still in hiding
Will stay there, far in the dark.
All that can be revealed is revealed.

All that can be learned from the burning house
Was learned the first time, when the smoke
Blackened the walls in every room.

So much for more experience. What can grow
Has grown; what's small now stays small.
No portion waits for those who deserve more.

The flowers in the yard of the blind and deaf girl
Will never smell any sweeter to her
Than they smell now to any of her visitors.

The music she imagines will never compare to ours.
Her best day will brighten with no joy
That hasn't brightened our day more.

Time to admit that her steady cheer
Is the burden she assumes to keep us here
Touching her fingers for a while.

Construction 007 

New Paul Weller?

Posted at 08:24 AM in Ask Fleabus, Autoblogography, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, Disc, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Poke, Project Goad, Shoot Me Now, We Are the Enemy | | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

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November 25, 2009

You Might Have Been a Vowel on a Typewriter or a Number on a Telephone Dial or a Consonant in Books. You Could Have Been a Dot on a Die in a Child's Monopoly Set

Keyboard 

Julius Finsberg, on his death bed, tells his godson Ben Flesh:

It's incredible really. Amazing. Who could believe it? You weren't aborted, you didn't end up in a scum bag. You survived the infant mortality stuff. You made it past measles, polio, mumps. You outwitted whooping cough, typhoid, VD. God bless you, boy, you're a testament to the impossible! And not just that, but you aren't broken or damaged, there are no birth defects; you've your full complement of fingers, your fair share of toes. You're literate, you do sums. The Dean's List at Wharton. I know, I know. And even without parents you've got clothes, shelter, sex, what to eat - you know, the drives , the hydramatics of being, four on the floor and more where that came from. Yes, and you get the point of jokes and have a favorite movie and maybe even the room where you stay is done up in your favorite color. My God, lad, you're a fucking celebration...

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!

- Stanley Elkin, The Franchiser.

UPDATE! My favorite paragraph ever.

Fleaneg

Signone 

Got home Monday night and saw this sign in my front yard, got an email Tuesday morning from a good friend re: bleggalgazing, thus this, a post I will spend more time on and invest more mmwah in than any other post since the last and until the next, deliberately posted for the two slowest bleg days of the year.

This bleg is where I spend whatever creative mmwah I have in the time I have to mmwah. There's a reason I want this bleg to be different than the blegs I read, not to be better but different. I'll not deny I'm competitive, that I want to be recognized as smart by people I think are smart - and I am, thank you - and I'll not deny there are bleggers who (and this isn't aimed at anyone who'd be reading this) are almost as smart as they think they are, who appropriate others' work and call it their own and....

Meh. It's Thanksgiving, the one civic holiday I genuinely like (that whole celebration of the successful genocide of the aboriginal population of North America aside), so, Kind.

I could be the Number Two stenciled on a pencil, says Julius Finsberg. I'm lucky to be a blegging Ben Flesh.

Signtwo

Fleaneg
Siren

UPDATE! Meet Julia.

Julia

Fleaneg

  • One can't have lived in DC area for forty-five years and not note the passing of Abe Pollin. I find the NBA unwatchable and don't give a sliver of fuck about the hockey team (which he sold x-years ago), but for his part in revitalizing downtown, he did good. See Sasha for more. And lordy, the concerts at this place:
Usairarena

Fleaneg

Fleaneg 

FROM THE MANIFESTO OF THE SELFISH

Stephen Dunn

Because altruists are the least sexy
    people on earth, unable
to say "I Want" without embarrassment,

we need to take from them everything
    they give,
then ask for more,

this is how to excite them, and because
    it's exciting
to see them the least bit excited

once again we'll be doing something
    for ourselves,
who have no problem taking pleasure,

always desirous and so pleased to be
    pleased, we who above all
can be trusted to keep the balance.

Fleaneg

Posted at 07:48 AM in Ask Fleabus, Autoblogography, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, DCU/Soccer, DCU10, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Poke, Project Goad, Shoot Me Now, We Are the Enemy | | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

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November 19, 2009

But It Wasn't a Poem, or at Least Said It Wasn't. For Who Would Want to Be a Thing So Small? It Wanted to Be a Novel, and Who Doesn't?

Fleabus30
Updates below

Definitive proof of my congenital and incurable roobitus: beyond the daily pigfarts and Democratic sniffing of pigfarts, beyond the children killed by American ordinance in senseless wars, the fucking crackers, the media's giddy coronation of the Grifter Queen, beyond the daily etc, nothing has pissed me off more in months than this:

Henry3

I'm a roob? Read this:

In the act of controlling the ball before providing Gallas with a perfect cross, France's captain had handled it. Not once, but twice. The first time might have been almost inadvertent, a pardonable reflex action as it was about to go out of play. The second, in which he scooped the ball with his left hand, redirecting it to drop nicely on to his right foot, was clearly intentional.

Even there, it could be argued that an element of reflex was involved. But in the few seconds that followed, Henry had two options. He could pretend that he had not broken the most basic law of outfield play. Or he could take the opportunity to neutralise the effect of his reflexes. To erase an error. To right a wrong. To be a man.

We all know which way Henry decided to go. With a broad, exultant beam on his face, he raced away from the scene of the crime to join Gallas and their team-mates in celebration of a goal that all knew was likely to be decisive in the battle for a place in next summer's World Cup finals.

For this was no ordinary piece of cheating. National pride and tens of millions of euros were at stake. So much greater, then, would have been the admiration of a decision to own up. Instead Henry chose to go down a path which exposed not just his own human frailty but the paranoid fear of failure running through a French squad (and their manager) haunted by comparisons with the glories of the recent past.

I had no interest in Ireland advancing other than France not, because handball aside, where is the outrage that FIFA changed the rules of the world's most important sporting event IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TOURNAMENT, fearing that Portugal and France (and at the time the decision was made, perhaps Germany) might need to advance through play-ins and might get matched against each other, allowing a Bosnia or Ireland to advance instead?

Robbie Keane was correct when he said Sepp Blattner and Michael Platini would be "probably clapping hands, Platini sitting up there on the phone to Sepp Blatter, probably texting each other, delighted with the result."

Let me get this straight: a powerful multinational conglomerate too big to be held accountable changes the rules in the middle of a competition to guarantee itself maximum profit by rewarding its biggest money-makers at the expense of the weak and powerless and then approvingly winks when one of its preeminent show-ponies blatantly cheats to get through, and I'm surprised, shocked, and morally outraged?

Wolf13

What a fucking roob. No one asks me anymore how I separate my politics and soccer.

Wolf13

Wolf13
  • Elric's contempt for Kornheiser ratified! I didn't know that Beatrice story.
  • UPDATE! I do remember when Beatrice was disgraced - it was a big story in DC. I don't remember Kornheiser's part or his personal delight in taking Beatrice down, though.
  • !Heh! Thievery Henry.
  • Goff speculates on United's protected list. More later as the draft gets closer. Or not.
  • UPDATE! Benny: D.C. United midfielder Ben Olsen, the heart and soul of the club who has endured numerous ankle operations and medical setbacks during a standout career spanning 11 years, is mulling retirement, the Insider has learned. A decision is expected within a week. First, Benny is making the decision before United puts out its expansion protection list. Second, speculating, I wonder if this means United is leaning towards Richie Williams as head coach and Benny assistant under Williams.
  • Speaking of United, Fullback's doing autopsies on the season.
  • NASL kits!
  • Only three Euro-qualifiers for WC10 from old Iron Curtain countries.
Wolf13

UPDATE! Woke up with this in my head:

Wolf13

NO PEGASUS

Ronald Wallace

It looked a lot like a poem; it had lines
that preached enjambment; it had rhymes, or sorts,
both approximate and exact. It stopped on dimes.
It started up again. It had cohorts -

metaphor and imagery and such -
and like to keep time by beating on its
chest, though some might have said it walked with a crutch
and took more liberties than most of its fellow sonnets.

But it wasn't a poem, or at least said it wasn't.
For who would want to be a thing so small?
It wanted to be a novel, and who doesn't?

It hid its horsy face, it's tail, it's wing,
under a cloak of prose. It stopped prancing.
But try as it might, it could not not sing.

Wolf13

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever, and a designated Theme Song Unto Perpetuity:

Posted at 02:05 PM in Ask Fleabus, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, DCU/Soccer, DCU10, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Poke, Project Goad, Shoot Me Now, We Are the Enemy | | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

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November 18, 2009

Tomorrow Was Yesterday

Tongue

Tpwrtz, I can't escape the noise because I don't want to escape the noise. I love the noise, I'm sick of pretending to pretend I don't, and now, now that the pigs are piggying faster than even Democratic wussying can keep up, the noise will be splatastic!

Holyfuck, Democrats can't suck more at being professional counter-fuckwads. I understand why professional Republicans loathe them. My contempt glows hot red meh.

Consider this another attempted molting out of my .06% less-shitty roobiskin.

*
Metro
  • Herndon, not Kensington, is the most obscene city in America.
  • CCT! A 14-mile light rail line between the Shady Grove Metro station and the Clarksburg area is estimated to cost $999 million, and a busway is estimated to cost $533 million, according to a state analysis. Heh, not $1B, $999M. Marketing! suckers.
  • ICC! Move to allow upscale Toyotas on road advances.
  • My future hell.
  • Elric's father, when head of the math dept at Churchill years ago, argued for this.

Police-siren-animated

UPDATE! (Via Bromark) On next season's United kit:

I'm not allowed to share anything that you probably really want to know yet, but, I can say that we will have both a new home & away kit in 2010. Our home kit will remain primarily black, with away being white. There will also be no third kit in 2010. From what I've seen our kit doesn't use the exact same silhouette as any of the adidas World Cup kits or any of the other new MLS kits. Some design elements are shared here and there but overall ours will be unique. We actually just did a photo & video shoot of the new home kit today that I won't be able to share until 2010, but I think they turned out well.

Can't vouch for any of this - I've no idea who DCU Merchandise is, though Bromark says he works in the team store at RFK - but, from a marketing and sales POV, why wouldn't you release at least images before Giftmas?

Usa-world-cup-shirt
*

HUM

Ann Lauterbach

The days are beautiful.
The days are beautiful.

I know what days are.
The other is weather.

I know what weather is.
The days are beautiful.

Things are incidental.
Someone is weeping.

I weep for the incidental.
The days are beautiful.

Where is tomorrow?
Everyone will weep.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
The days are beautiful.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
Today is weather.

The sound of weather
Is everyone weeping.

Everyone is incidental.
Everyone weeps.

The tears of today
Will put out tomorrow.

The rain is ashes.
The days are beautiful.

The rain falls down.
The sound is falling.

The sky is a cloud.
The days are beautiful.

The sky is dust.
The weather is yesterday.

The weather is yesterday.
The sound is weeping.

What is this dust?
The weather is nothing.

The days are beautiful.
The towers are yesterday.

The towers are incidental.
What are these ashes?

Here is the hat
That does not travel

Here is the robe
that smells of the night

Here are the words
Retired to their books

Here are the stones
Loosed from their settings

Here is the bridge
Over the water

Here is the place
Where the sun came up

Here is a season
Dry in the fireplace.

Here are the ashes.
The days are beautiful.

*

Yes, again:

Posted at 07:33 AM in aargocalyptic, Ask Fleabus, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, DCU/Soccer, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Poke, Shoot Me Now, We Are the Enemy | | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

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November 16, 2009

I Would Have You Know That All Is Not Well with a Man Dead Set to Ignore the Endless Repetitions of His Own Murmurous Blood

Zert

Garry Wills, polishing the roob, pleads to and for Obama in latest NYRB:

I am told by people I respect that Barack Obama cannot pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan without becoming a one-term president. I think that may be true. The charges from various quarters would be toxic—that he was weak, unpatriotic, sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, betraying our dead, throwing away all former investments in lives and treasure. All that would indeed be brought against him, and he could have little defense in the quarters where such charges would originate.

America's dickheads and assholes would call Obama weak and unpatriotic, call him guilty of sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, of betraying the service dead, of appeasing the enemy, if Obama decreed tomorrow that every Muslim on the planet must die and started lobbing nukes on Tehran and Damascus and that mosque in Potomac.

I love the NYRB, have been a subscriber for thirty years, it's arguably the preeminent journal of America's Left intelligentisia (or of the New York and Ivy League Left intelligentsia), but Wills pathetic plea is embarrassing: Wills assumes that either Obama can't leave Afghanistan because of pressure from the Right or won't because of concern for his reelection when it's simply a matter that Obama doesn't want to: he believes in the mission.

*
Fatfuck
  • Moron and fatfuck Shales, reviewing the new Prisoners remake: Strikingly photographed in starkest black and white, the '67 "Prisoner" was a curious and rather tantalizing melange of counterculture imagery, traditional paranoid fantasy and even a bit of Cold War spy thriller, with the spy stuff mostly expunged from what AMC calls its "reinterpretation" of the story.
  • It's a couple of days late, but Trisketdekaphobia.
  • More Elric in Nigeria. Since he's there, he might be interested in this.
  • UPDATE! Even more Elric in Nigeria.
  • The ad Typepad is running on its dashboard:

VIP-ads340x100-Serious-Pro

Clowns

  • An pox forever on Little Danny Helmetball, though wearing colors at home is a surprise and a plus:
Betts_celebrate
*

A LETTER

Anthony Hecht

                I have been wondering
    What you are thinking about, and by now suppose
                It is certainly not me.
    But the crocus is up, and the lark, and the blundering
                Blood knows what it knows.
It talks to itself all night, like a sliding, moonlit sea.

                Of course, it is talking of you.
    At dawn, when the ocean has netted its catch of lights,
                The sun plants one lithe foot
    On that spill of mirrors, but the blood goes worming through
                Its warm Arabian nights
Naming your pounding name again in the dark heartroot.

                Who shall, of course, be nameless.
    Anyway, I should want you to know I have done my best,
                As I'm sure you have, too.
    Others are bound to us, the gentle and blameless
                Whose names are not confessed
In the ceaseless palaver. My dearest, the clear and bottomless
    blue

                Of those depths is all but blinding.
    You may remember that once you bought my boys
                Two little woolly birds.
    Yesterday the older one asked for you upon finding
                Your thrush among his toys.
And tides welled about me, and I could find no words.

                There is not much else to tell.
    One tries one's best to continue as before,
                Doing some little good.
    But I would have you know that all is not well
                With a man dead set to ignore
The endless repetitions of his own murmurous blood.

*

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever, in hopes of changing my mood:

Posted at 10:17 AM in aargocalyptic, Ask Fleabus, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, DCU/Soccer, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Poke, Shoot Me Now, We Are the Enemy | | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

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November 11, 2009

"Hreapha," Her Dog Will Say

Harington

Donald Harington died this past Saturday. Longtimers have heard me yodel about Harington for years (the latest is here - use the lijit search function down on the right to see more).

I had planned, knowing that Harington was dying and that Enduring would be the last Stay More novel, to reread all the novels in Harington's Stay More universe, because all the novels are themselves chapters in a much larger project, and Enduring is the final chapter: when Harington's echo-bombs POP! and the universe expands even further into the Kind because a POP! set six novels ago POPS! in Enduring, I want the full and joyous POP!

Because I'm loud, I always think of the infinite in terms of bigger bigger. Harington is interested in the smaller smaller, an entire system as small as the infinite, transparent not opaque, magical, showing the gears, with a generous and uncanny and FUNNY! disdain for deliberate obscurity for complexity's sake: it's not Pynchon, Barth, or Elkin who finally convinced me I wasn't a novelist. And it was Harington that taught me about faith based on Kind.

There's a scene in With when Robin's animals - led by Hreapha the dog (one of the greatest, truest characters ever) - steal bottles of Jack Daniels to... 

That's the obit. I'm starting Architecture, the central cedar pole of the Stay More universe, as soon as I finish what I'm in, and go. When I finish Enduring, I'll yodel. Or not.

*

Flbs 

Well, that was interesting. Thanks for comments and emails.

I can't make any promises about what comes out of my mouth when Cuauhtemoc Blanco dives and rolls around in fake agony right in front of me, and I will never fucking promise to fucking stop cursing, but I understand people I like and respect have suggested and/or asked me to stop using that word, and because I like and respect them I will.

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Ballantine
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THE SILKEN TENT

Robert Frost

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

*

Fifty-six today:

Posted at 07:57 AM in Ask Fleabus, Autoblogography, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Poke, Shoot Me Now | | Comments (15) | TrackBack (0)

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November 07, 2009

Once I Peeked Through Your Mail Slot and Caught a Glimpse of Your Quiet Individual Self-formed Taste

Fleabusminus

I still think it a significant difference that when people like me on the American Left protest a war we believe immoral we hold up horrific photographs of maimed and dead children bombed by our country in that current war, and when people on the American Right protest a health care bill meant to make life marginally better for America's worst off, they hold up images of Dachau.

Useful idiots and yadda. Basing a moral roobrix on being a smarter-than-pigstoopid idiot is as vital a vector in affecting change in late-capital America as winning that senior year Homecoming football game X-decades ago.

*

Fleabusminus

*
YOU SMELL OF DIVES WHERE A PRICK LIKE YOU IS HATED

Cal Bedient

Once I peeked through your mail slot and caught a glimpse
of your quiet individual self-formed taste, the thousand pegs and
    pins

I must have wanted you dead to see you like that.

You should always speak the little fires are in you.
I am not diseased with the remark. Love cares to see the blackened
    tongues.

You twitch with a gathering head stir. Yes, free the little speeds are in
    you.
You're a real person when you go crazy like that.

Their felt legs rolled up for carrying, your people stare from your
    pockets.
Stump round and round the world with them, they are your darlings,

they are not sparrows, they are not sparrows running like rats on the
    cloud sleeves.
Open your works-in-progress to them: let them choose their
    mausoleum.

The horses I could eat, if I still hungered for you.
Backcountry beauties farting lush grass.

*

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

Posted at 08:01 AM in aargocalyptic, Ask Fleabus, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Poke, Shoot Me Now, We Are the Enemy | | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

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November 03, 2009

I'm Raising My Child to Know that the Cobras that Shiver in the Sky at Night Are Mistakes and Not Responsible for Us

Fleabusnov1

When I was sixteen and a first semester junior in Aviday Ampsellesay's English class at Gaithersburg High School, it was two years out from Nixon's resignation and one year out from the fall of Saigon and Moscow was on the march and Jimmy Carter had just been kinged. Holyfuck, the number one song in America was Rod Stewart's fucking Tonight's the Night: how's that for perspective on toxic futures.

I had a blast my junior year in high school, couldn't give a shit about shit as long as Rod Goddamn Stewart wasn't on the stereo. I've survived all End Times since to bring you my daily End Times predictions.

I teach my sixteen year old too little cynicism, too little selfishness, too little self-interest, I teach her nothing beyond what she concludes herself about the nature and motives of others, I teach her to be nicer, more understanding and forgiving, to be Kinder than me.

Despite me, it's working. All Fleabus photos by Planet.

*
Work2

UPDATE! Soehn "resigns". Post later. Or not.
Here's DCU Curmudgeon. Here's Fullback.

  • Excellent HATING! on Little Danny Helmetball: "He looks like a cross between Mitt Romney and a male nurse, with a spray-helmeted cube of black mannequin hair atop the pinched, entitled face of a guy [complaining to] a Howard Johnson's waitress about his curly fries not being curly enough."
  • Berbatov is.... The Continental.
  • Barra Barra.
  • Worst sports kits!
  • Vote for the Worst Uniform Ever!
  • Work:
Healy
  • Who would purposely distance themselves from the fiction he's reading? ME! who opened up the daily random Moby Dick to a horrifically brutal (and beautifully written) scene of whales in agony, so I've called a time out on both daily random readings much less front to back for now, which isn't the distance meant at the link. Which is why I need read the novel again.
  • Another review of the new Pamuk, which I will be reading, just when I'm not sure - I'm in Mexico City in 1976 chasing visceral realists right now.
  • I'm not sure why the New York Review of Books feels a need to review each and every new William Trevor novel, nor why each review of each new William Trevor isn't required to use the JCO/Updike required word "prolific." (sub rqrd)
  • Andrew addresses my Lessing problem.
  • Oofdah: a takedown of Ashbery.
  • New Ashbery.
  • Remembering Conrad Aiken, whose poetry one girlfriend adored and one mentor despised.
  • Wait until Ilse and Sasha see who's number one.
  • Above three links courtesy Silliman's always generous blog.
  • I'm not sure why there's a need for a new "selected" Wallace Stevens. (sub rqrd)
  • Not why I'm not, but the point is to make you.
  • Work
Work

*

SONG OF AMERICA

Rob Cook

I'm raising my child to become the end of rotting,
        and to expose the lushness of the cemetery moth.
I'm raising my child to know the difference between the two sunsets:
        one purple with thermonuclear iodine,
        the other the charred insides of rain.
I'm raising my child to find the stones his brothers fed each other.
I'm raising my child to fall behind the apricot blossoms
        and to trust only others who've fallen behind.
I'm raising my child to listen: there is so much noise
        only silence will be remembered.
I'm raising my child to fill in the spaces between wars
        and the spaces between people
        where everything grows even after the last space is gone.
I'm raising my child to bring into the world books that suffer
        with words detention-kids make over and over.
I'm raising my child to follow the scatter of flesh across the sky,
        birds and their wingprint trails to Alaska.
I'm raising my child to predict the sicknesses left of summer
        by the number of shadows he sweats.
I'm raising my child to plant pennies where he'll find rest
        and good fingerpaint for one night.
I'm raising my child to chop down the televisions of peasants
        and their machine that picks thunderstorms from a leaf.
I'm raising my child to write a treaty for his own smells,
        the ones that hurt the self and the ones that hurt others,
        and a treaty for the poison sumac whose only emotion is hunger.
I'm raising my child to dress like a long line of near-humans
        if he wants to be recognized
        and to show kindness to the roadkill that sneaks into his bed.
I'm raising my child to know which part of a hamburger is still afraid.
I'm raising my child to be captain of the abandoned mail trucks
        and to lead the grasses across the Midwestern sleep.
I'm raising my child to leave New York.
I'm raising my child to add letters and numbers to his name
        and chameleons and hellbenders behind his name.
I'm raising my child to drown and to drop dead and to carry buildings on his back.
I'm raising my child to listen to his face breaking when it's cold.
I'm raising my child to seduce only photographs of women.
I'm raising my child to know that the cobras that shiver
        in the sky at night are mistakes and not responsible for us.
I'm raising my child to leave bread for the voices that come after dark.
I'm raising my child to keep his eyes closed.
I'm raising my child to tell the truth by having no sound at all.

*

So what I posted this before?

Posted at 08:14 AM in aargocalyptic, Ask Fleabus, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, DCU/Soccer, DCU10, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Project Goad, Shoot Me Now, We Are the Enemy | | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

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November 01, 2009

Looking for the Transparent, the Colorless Essential, the Unbeginning and Unending of Consommé

Backporch

Maybe you remember that tomorrow is a year since Barack Obama stomped Sarah Palin to win POTUS, and what good has he done beyond not being President Sarah Palin?

Obama drives the shittiest batshittier. That's all I really asked. See me urge Obama to bait crackers November 3 last year. He's succeeded.

Obama needs drive the shittiest batshittier faster if you ask me, but I never take a long view when a spastic view is funner, and I still bet pints Obama (if alive) will stomp The Whomeverpig in 2012 (and yes, by moving to the shittier as the shittiest get shittier, which is the plan, yo).

Mefleabus

Oldsters here can vouch: I never bet on Obama the man, I bet on Obama the gamesplayer.

And while he's not as good a gamesplayer I thought he'd be, that's more a reflection on what I want him to be as a man, so all obamapostasies are roobish and mine alone.

*
  • True Heh.
  • I'm not saying Obama doesn't serve me bankster's shit and call it nourishment.
  • But he's still a better gamesplayer than anyone on the other side.
  • Your Fucking Washington Post's next Shit-for-Brains! ten columnist nominees! Ezra Klein had nominated blegfriend Henley, and since Jim didn't make the cut, so much for Ezra Klein's schway.
  • Cole sums up the ten columns: They’re about what you’d expect: three full-tilt concern trollings, a couple MoDo/Double X style gender pieces, a pointless piece about that college kid who’s hiring a personal assistant, a snoozer about good government (which does make a good point), a predictable rant about cable news, and one thoughtful piece about health care.
  • Your Fucking Washington Post.
  • Good opportunity to dust off a classic.
  • Poop in the Water.
  • prOnstache offer Obama advice.
  • Dear Anonymous Shaker.
  • 400,000 on The List!
  • Thoughts on The List!
  • Hoarding.
  • Artist-Critic. This paragraph:  Under market capitalism, critics and producers are engaged in a curious dance. Each is basically addressing the other at all times and acting as big Other for the other, whilst constantly pretending otherwise. The artist claims to be working for some reified and mystified entity called the Audience, secretly aware that it is the critics' judgment that will more decisively shape their future, and the critic claims to speak for the consumer, the man on the street (this obscure beast, the Audience again), but really longs for recognition by practitioners and prays that their barbed comments will strike the artist to their very marrow, perhaps even encourage them to work differently. For some reason, however, full assumption of this dance - for the dancers to actually look each other in the eye, perhaps even kiss - is strictly taboo, has multiple applications.
Nov1
  • Rave review of Mantel's Wolf Hall in NYTBR.
  • I love House of Leaves, feel wussy I can't crack Only Revolutions, as beautiful an object to hold in my hands, if not more, than House of Leaves. It's on my bookstand - I tried - true this - again two weeks ago.
  • New Pamuk reviewed, which is good news, but what it better news is that it's reviewed by Maureen Howard, and bioblurb says Maureen Howard’s new book, “The Rags of Time,” will be published this month, completing her cycle of novels based on the four seasons,  which means I've got more rereading to do.
  • Pamuk's Museum.
  • Bleg Hiatus.
  • List time suckitude.
  • Shoot me now.
  • Remembering The Connells.
  • The Foghorns.
  • Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.
  • Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.
  • Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.
  • UPDATE! Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
  • Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.
  • Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.
  • Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.

*

ANXIETY'S PROSODY

A.R. Ammons

Anxiety clears meat chunks out of the stew, carrots, takes
the skimmer to floats of greasy globules and with cheesecloth

filters the broth, looking for the transparent, the colorless
essential, the unbeginning and unending of consommé: the

open anxiety breezes through high conceits, surface congestions
(it likes metaphors deep-lying, out of sight, their airs misting

up into, lighting up consciousness, unidentifiable presences),
it distills consonance and assonance, glottal thickets, brush

clusters, it thins the rhythms, rushing into longish gaits, more
distance in less material time: it hates clots, its stump-fires

level fields: patience and calm define borders and boundaries,
hedgerows, and sharp whirls: anxiety burns instrumentation

matterless, assimilates music into motion, sketches the high
suasive turnings, mild natures tangled still in knotted clumps.

*

The Connells?

Posted at 09:31 AM in Ask Fleabus, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, Ferals, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poke, Project Goad, Shoot Me Now, We Are the Enemy | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

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