BLCKDGRD

Theme Song November 2009

Flies Would Love to Leap Between His Eyes and Hum Away the Space Between the Ears, the Hollow Where a Hare Could Hide

I have this romantic belief that because a particular post is exceptionally important to me, by glow of my radioactive AWOO! it will compel hundreds of strangers to ping me, and when they don't I gnaw.

But I've got a new cellphone, I needed a qwerty, and this phone's camera is easy to play with, so I get to admire my photos here while you, loyal reader, suffer through it.

*

• America.
• Fucking Democrats. Pragmatism, shmagmatism, Democrats have the women vote, the black and hispanic vote, the youth vote, the rooby pwoggle and dumbass rote Democrat vote, they have the vote of every constituency except the bitter whites and crazy christers and the fucking Confederacy, fucking RAM POLICY DOWN THE BITTER WHITES' AND FUCKING CHRISTERS' AND THE FUCKING CONFEDERACY'S THROAT!
• Fucking Democrats. My roobity: if an elected Democrat is as cravenly power hungry and corrupt as his Republican opposite, and if the electoral battle isn't about policy differences but is solely over who controls the spigots, why is the Democrats only move after getting spigot control to act like the fucking Republicans they just defeated?
• I am a fucking roob, that's why.
• Blood money, black gold.
• All about a pipeline.
• Capitalism.
• Zizek on Post-Wall: they weren't asking for American capitalism.
• John Gray on human psychology, the economy, global capitalism.
• Determined to be dumb.
• American Insurgents.
• World's Shittiest Human lives up to billing. UPDATE!
• Bobo gets a chubby.
• From shit to crap.
• While it's entertaining to hear Joe Klein slap a wannabe neo-con fuckwit, I don't think Klein's contempt is limited only to wannabe neo-con fuckwits who disagree with him.
• Blitzerfuckwit.
• How's Dobbwad as a term?
• The future of Dobbwad?
• On boners.
• Catholic Church threatens to starve children if DC allows gay marriage.
• Broken Man.
• I'd forgot about Bouphonia.
• Work:

• New Market child has tick removed from eye.
• I've personally heard a MOCO teacher say this.
• Fillmore Silver Spring.
• ICC!
• Crisis in Kensington!
• Little Danny Helmetball's henchman.
• Work:

• Harington's NYT obit. They use the word "surrealist," a term I deliberately choose not to use. I also don't use the term "magical realism" to describe his art, though I'd argue it's the closer of the two terms.
• Dalkey Press has a 10 books for $65 sale through Nov 22.
• Kalashnikov wanted to be a poet.
• I could care less about Tyler and Aerosmith, I just mentioned the story as an excuse to post a KITH bit.
• There's irony in Gordon Sumner questioning anyone's talent. I need a new term to describe Gordon Sumner.
• I don't post enough Bjork here. And HAPPIES! to whomever!
• UPDATE! Not only another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever, this matches my mood.
• UPDATE! Though this matches my mood too.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Neil Young was 64 yesterday.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• We float.
• UPDATE! Stuart Staples, which reminds me it's been a few months since I posted any Tindersticks.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Don't go on the patio.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Is there a heaven? I'd like to think so.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• You want my reply? What was the question?
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• It's running down, there's much you missed, working on that graveyard shift.

*

ON THE SKELETON OF A HOUND

James Wright

Nightfall, that saw the morning-glories float
Tendril and string against the crumbling wall,
Nurses him now, his skeleton for grief,
His locks for comfort curled among the leaf.
Shuttles of moonlight weave his shadow tall,
Milkweed and dew flow upward to his throat.
Now catbird feathers plume the apple mound,
And starlings drowse to winter up the ground.
Thickened away from speech by fear, I move
Around the body.  Over his forepaws, steep
Declivities darken down the moonlight now,
And the long throat that bayed a year ago
Declines from summer.  Flies would love to leap
Between his eyes and hum away the space
Between the ears, the hollow where a hare
Could hide; another jealous dog would tumble
The bones apart, angry, the shining crumble
Of a great body gleaming in the air;
Quivering pigeons foul his broken face.
I can imagine men who search the earth
For handy resurrections, overturn
The body of a beetle in its grave;
Whispering men digging for gods might delve
A pocket for these bones, then slowly burn
Twigs in the leaves, pray for another birth.
But I will turn my face away from this
Ruin of summer, collapse of fur and bone.
For once a white hare huddled up the grass,
The sparrows flocked away to see the race.
I stood on darkness, clinging to a stone,
I saw the two leaping alive on ice,
On earth, on leaf, humus and withered vine:
The rabbit splendid in a shroud of shade,
The dog carved on the sunlight, on the air,
Fierce and magnificent his rippled hair,
The cockleburs shaking around his head.
Then, suddenly, the hare leaped beyond pain
Out of the open meadow, and the hound
Followed the voiceless dancer to the moon,
To dark, to death, to other meadows where
Singing young women dance around a fire,
Where love reveres the living.

                              I alone
Scatter this hulk about the dampened ground;
And while the moon rises beyond me, throw
The ribs and spine out of their perfect shape.
For a last charm to the dead, I lift the skull
And toss it over the maples like a ball.
Strewn to the woods, now may that spirit sleep
That flamed over the ground a year ago.
I know the mole will heave a shinbone over,
The earthworm snuggle for a nap on paws,
The honest bees build honey in the head;
The earth knows how to handle the great dead
Who lived the body out, and broke its laws,
Knocked down a fence, tore up a field of clover.

*

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

"Hreapha," Her Dog Will Say

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.

*

 

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.

*

• I do solicit a new one-word term for Ramesh Ponnuru.
• Veteran's Day.
• Gitmo gets worse?
• David Brooks, fuckwit.
• David Brooks, fuckwitted plagiarist.
• The symbiosis between fuckwits and fuckwads.
• What Obama won't investigate next.
• Empire fools.
• Graveyard of Empires.
• Shitwit.
• We can agree Dickarmey is a shitpig, but what do we call Democrats who don't call Dickarmey on his shitpiggery?
• UPDATE! Blue Dogs.
• UPDATE! Something for Kucinich admirers to consider.
• Hirsute abyss of God's little oven, or: the difference between a Conservative and a Republican.
• What's the Frequency, Kravchenko?
• Right there, right then.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Your photoshop of the day.
• Can't have lived in MOCO in 2002 and not note this. One of the first shootings was at the Shell in Kensington half-a-mile from my house. We were scared shitless. I remember crouching behind my car during the spree when I absolutely had to put gas in my car. I do not support Muhammad's execution - there's a reason he was sentenced in Virginia.
• Tim Kaine, murderer.
• UPDATE! Potomac River = TOXIC STEW!
• Future MOCO.
• Future MOCO.
• UPDATE! Riggooofdah!
• Carl Ballantine, RIP.

• Bolaño Inc.
• New Millhauser story.
• Two new Lauterbach poems.
• Britain's Borders.
• Who should replace Steven Tyler in Aerosmith?
• Bruce McCulloch!
• Because you can't kill rock and roll.
• KEXP's generous MP3s of this week's releases.
• They're never happy less they got a war.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Please to bend down to the one called the Green Man.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• She's a little lighthouse.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Some star sneezed, now they're paging you in Reception.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• There may be no golden fleece, but human riches I'll release.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• But he made too many enemies of the people who would keep us on our knees.

*

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:

Offering the Desk Puppy Biscuits

Meaning I'm stymied. Meaning it's a reading-slump, and reading-stumps are either a symptom of autoblogography or autoblogography a symptom of reading-slumps.

I've a reading-slump and a blegissue: How many more ways to duh Duh are there? Meaning there are zillions if I ever embraced by half the what-the-fuck of a half-darer.

Meaning I'm antsy, meaning I'm not sure how to route the antsy, meaning there may or not be more or less of this or that, but I need entertain myself if not tongue-fuck the what-the-fuck.

Meaning nothing more than thanks as always for the Kind.

• I chide Greenwald for stating the obvious (though the obvious often needs stating): assholes unite out of fear of assholes.
• The Seduction of Proximity to Power.
• American Exceptionalism: Epidemic Edition.
• Hofstadter revisited.
• Zizek (in NYT?) on the 20 years since collapse of Berlin Wall.
• On Zizek envy.
• On the 20 years since collapse of Berlin Wall.
• Maintaining Masculinity. I'm guilty of flagrant (and joyful!) use of the word "pussy," and while I do not deny its misogynist connotations, and I solicit suggestions for an alternative, gender-neutral term, I do not know of another word in English that more succinctly captures the essence of grandiose cowardice and whinging self-pity and exaggerated self-importance than "pussy," as in, John Boehner is such a pussy.
• Speaking of: Obama.
• Bravest Guy in the House.
• Af-Pak gak.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• 1000 Monkeys, Typewriters, One Friedman Column.
• Six months behind me on the calender, a year in front of me in ageangst.
• Think about this next time you step on Metro.
• Berbatov is.... The Continental.
• The Further Adventures of Little Danny Helmetball.
• Lessing continued. My two: I always liked and deeply admired the Lessing I read. I don't remember ever loving it.
• How to Write a Novel.
• I'm mildly optimistic my ritual of closing my eyes and reaching onto a bookshelf and starting whichever book I grab might work: the first fifty pages of this have got me going. If you haven't read Thomson's Divided Kingdom, do yourself a favor.
• Grateful Dead archivist job opening.
• Roll away the dew.
• Johnny Cash, protest singer.
• Obscure Sound's October MP3 Wrap-Up.
• Boston Spaceships is pollardized.
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Elliott Carter.
• See the Leaves.
• Dominos.
• Sun Kill Moon.
• Sun Kill Moon.
• Sun Kill Moon.
• Sun Kill Moon.

Born eighty-one years ago today:

THE ROOM OF MY LIFE

Anne Sexton

Here,
in the room of my life
the objects keep changing.
Ashtrays to cry into,
the suffering brother of the wood walls,
the forty-eight keys of the typewriter
each an eyeball that is never shut,
the books, each a contestant in a beauty contest,
the black chair, a dog coffin made of Naugahyde,
the sockets on the wall
waiting like a cave of bees,
the gold rug
a conversation of heels and toes,
the fireplace
a knife waiting for someone to pick it up,
the sofa, exhausted with the exertion of a whore,
the phone
two flowers taking root in its crotch,
the doors
opening and closing like sea clams,
the lights
poking at me,
lighting up both the soil and the laugh.
The windows,
the starving windows
that drive the trees like nails into my heart.
Each day I feed the world out there
although birds explode
right and left.
I feed the world in here too,
offering the desk puppy biscuits.
However, nothing is just what it seems to be.
My objects dream and wear new costumes,
compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands
and the sea that bangs in my throat.

 

 

 

(Oh Not to Join the Happy Ones, Until Some Tasks Are Done)

It's Declaration Week in Blegsylvania! (It's always Declaration Week in Blegsylvania, just some more than others.) Tiny Revolution's The Just and the Good by Bernard is the latest I've seen. (I've linked this week to multiple others.) (Oopsy - just saw this one.)

MANIFESTOITUS! A pandemic! I've got it!

Old Dirty Bastard zings me good about this:

Nice "duh" moment you had there! You should have been here when I found the Old Fool lecturing the 20-something Game Stop manager about the dangers of Liberalism/Communism/Homoism, etc. I called him an idiot. It felt good. Huzzah!

I do see these fuckwits all the time as a nature of where I work and where I stop to and from work, but I never thought (until ODB's comment) that that might be a subconscious motive in my not calling the fuckwit a fuckwit (I stood there, it occurs to me, in an institution-identifying sweatshirt), and I do know some fuckwits who know they've seen me in some vague serf role and could figure out who I was if I pissed them off enough to want to, and who'd win that fight?

Manifesto: I'm ridiculously complicit. Me and mine's self-interest? American hegemony, baby. I think it's more maintainable by policies of less assholity, but I've no illusions about assholity and assholity's trajectory.

I fighting for the privileges I already have and agitating for more, which, because of my relative comfort, necessitates I indulge in tenth-hearted but fully self-congratulatory advocacy for those who have less than me.

Many should be so lucky. Tell me I'm different than all but the holy fools.

*

• The Iron Cheer of Empire.
• Your country.
• Your country.
• Desperately seeking peacenik pot-smoking hippies.
• Excellent summation.
• Look! A Shiny Balloon!
• Fair or not, if there are mass deaths, this will be Obama's Katrina.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Has the rightwing shitfit over this started yet?
• How about about this?
• UPDATE! Ding!
• Not that this will change policy for the better.
• Just routine business.
• The politics of health care explained.
• Fucking economists.
• Bobo smacked once, twice.
• Flying Pig is funny, but taints the KITH skit forever.
• Domestic extremists.
• UPDATE! A solicitation. I suggest Bleggleb.
• ICC!
• MOCO's skateboader wars (includes photo of Kensington!).
• My current and future hell.
• CCT!
• Wearing white at home is lame.
• Wearing black when your color is red is lame.
• BLEG ADVICE SOUGHT! Last night I saw BLCKDGRD in IE and WTF? why does it look so compressed and shrunken? Why don't the youtubes escape the middle column like it does in firefox? Any suggestions on how to make it look in IE like it does in Firefox? Cause it looks crappy in IE. (I have no idea how it looks on a Mac.) (Lordy, if it's a typepad thing, o fuck and well.)
• Hilary Mantel on nine kinds of hypochondria: I once knew a man, a Jamaican, who when he first came to England always answered truthfully when asked ‘How are you?’ A bit sniffly, he might reply; or he would describe his indigestion, or the twinge in his left knee. One day a woman lost patience: ‘Look,’ she snapped, ‘there’s something you must understand; in England, the answer to “How are you?” is “I’m fine, how are you?”’ So he’d been told, and he didn’t need telling twice: for all the English care, you can die and stiffen on the street.
• New Ashbery.
• Two new Heather McHugh poems.
• Updike not a Pynchon fan (does like Barth). No word on what Pynchon thinks of Updike.
• On writing about bad writing.
• Don Carpenter? Lucky I have access to library stacks:

• Say, who's tacked to the wall behind the books? KABONG! goes my pitchfork.
• Halloween in Japan, plus Halloween mix.
• Halloween?
• Jeebus, radio is playing Fleet Foxes, and I just don't get the fuss, cause they suck unto suck's suck.
• DIY.
• Yes.
• Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.
• Jeebusfuck, now new Vampire Weekend, who suck just less than Fleet Foxes.
• Inside you the time moves and she don't fade.
• Guilty pleasure.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

*

THE HAPPY MAJORITY

Thomas Lux

    ..... before I join the great and, I believe, the happy majority
                                                                    - P.T. Barnum

Before I join the happy majority (though I doubt one member
    happy
or unhappy) I have some plans: to discover several new species
of beetle; to jump from a 100-foot platform
into a pile - big enough
to break my fall - of multicolored lingerie;
to build a little heater
(oh not to join the happy ones,
until some tasks are done)
beside each tulip bulb to speed its bloom;
to read 42,007 books (list available
on request); to learn Sanskrit, petroglyphs,
and English; to catch a bigot
(oh not to join the happy ones,
until some tasks are done)
by the toe; to kiss
the clavicle of (name available
on request); to pay my respects, again,
at the grave of John Keats; to abrogate
my position in God's nihilistic
(oh not to join the happy ones,
until some tasks are done)
dream; to hold my mother's hand as she leaves this world;
to lay my hand upon my father's heart as he does likewise;
and for my daughter to be glad I was her father as I exit, also
(in a hundred years or so), from the conscious to the un-.

*

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

This Was Before The Internet Made These Sad and Surreptitious Purchases Unnecessary

Welcome to 2025's premise is the end of American economic and military pre-eminence has long been predicted by America's staunchest and most professional hawks but wasn't supposed to occur for another fifteen years.

I can't stop thinking about the major fuckwit at the deli, not my not confronting him, in imagining what he'd say if I had. Saaay, you're right, I do advocate for a status quo that's brought me fame and fortune and a life style you'd swap with me in a nanosecond, you fucking peasant, I should stop and re-examine my conscience.

The people in charge - not the fuckwits but the fuckwads - know the clock is ticking, and the goal isn't saving America, it's wringing the most out of America before America's worth shit, and they know the deadline's rushing forward exponentially faster than even the fuckwadyish of fuckwads presumed. As for the fuckwits, the fuckwads throw them coin and access and stroke the fuckwits' insecure chinlessness in exchange for beneficial propaganda.

I admit, turning fifty has been more reverberative than all the other big tens combined and multiplied by X. When I turned forty, Planet was six, when I turned thirty, I'd only been married two years, when I turned twenty I was having too much fun, and at none of these milestones did I stop to examine my assumptions that (a) I wasn't going to die and (b) my belief in progress is roobish, a belief that a majority of humans would come to a tacit understanding that cooperation trumps coercion through an increasingly integrated world that made cooperation, rather than coercion, the self-interested choice.

What a fucking roob. Nobody shares more than they have to, and everything's negotiation. Here's truth: black-and-white TV shows, black-and-white movies, black-and-white news footage, KABONG! my pitchfork. The reason I'm sure I'm a weathervane: I came of awareness right when the world toggled from black-and-white to color for their daily spectacle.

I just turned fifty, I can see the future, in black-and-white footage, narrated by Laurence Olivier.

What a fucking roob, polishing my cranky old bastard's apocalyptic prophecies, forgetting again that humans are too resiliently shitty to properly exterminate themselves.

*

• 2025.
• Renouncing Libertarianism, part one.
• Renouncing Libertarianism, part two.
• UPDATE! Subsistence Politics.
• Least Surprising Headline of the Day!
• Unless Obamalame IS goading Fox (and I don't think they are, the fuckwits), this is the best argument that launching a war against Fox is counterproductive.
• OK, Obamalame comes out and says, calling something bullshit isn't banning the bullshit, and I'll never ban bullshit as long as I'm president, how isn't that a win/win?
• Fox is not news: a proof.
• OMFG! No president has ever done this before! Summoning Sean Inanity!
• UPDATE! Second Least Surprising Headline of the Day!
• Heh, it'd been driving me nuts, but I finally figured out who Valerie Jarrett reminds me of: Worf's student.
• David Brooks fearlessly defends the filthiest rich.
• Today's Person I'd Most Like to Brain w/a Shovel.
• The filthiest rich, Russian edition.
• YFWP.
• Police State.
• Atlas Sucked. Great political novels? Aren't all novels political novels?
• Con-Air.
• Look.
• Manhattan Street Corners. (h/t)
• Stop spitting.
• The False Nine.
• There are some new links on the blegrell over in New Toys and Reads. Check them out. Consider this a minor threat regarding the rearrangement of the blegrell to make my browsing easier that can be ignored.
• Needless Difficulty uses Mantel's Wolf Hall to make a broader point, prompted by Roth's comment in an interview in WSJ on writers v entertainers.
• Stoner. Sigh, another reread I may or may not get to.
• Which reminds me of Wolf Solent (which you can read right here), another reread I may or may not get to.
• I was born with a missing Millhauser gene because I know Millhauser is doing interesting stuff that just eludes me.
• Oldest Debate.
• Moby Dick to be rewritten in emoticons.
• New Tom Sleigh poem.
• On Cal Bedient's "Days of Unwilling," my favorite book of poetry this year.
• Disturbance at the heron house?
• Guilty pleasure.
• Listen.
• Guilty pleasure.
• Guilty pleasure.
• GOODNESS! Listen to all these new releases (including new Echo and the Bunnymen?).
• Guilty pleasure.
• Belong.
• Guilty pleasure.
• UPDATE! Already wondering what to buy me for Giftmas?
• Again: the cover. The original.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! Houses in Motion.
• These Are Foolish Things.
• UPDATE! Guilty pleasure.
• Yim Yames beautifully covers George Harrison. It's time for a new MMJ, yes?

*

Clean, Clean, Clean

Linh Dinh

Belonging to the lower class, you’re expected
To cater to the upper class’ lower bodily functions,
Not to engage their minds but to wipe their asses,
Kiss their cunts on demand, suck cocks for tips,
Unless, of course, you’re an artist, in which case,
You’re an aristocrat of the servant class, to quote
That grand maestro among slaves, Jasper Johns.

I used to clean apartments and houses.
Showing up for a new job, I was greeted
By the mistress, “I have the most respect
For new immigrants. You work so hard!”
Down low, you’ll get a disproportionate
Low down on all things funky and nasty,
Nothing unusual, really, just shit and stuff.
I cleaned toilets and fridges, folded panties,
Got on all fours, dipped into the suspicious.
A young woman confided, “I moved to Philly
Because California women were so beautiful.”
She was usually home when I came. The spine
Of her soft porn book turned to the wall. They all
Had some smut in the house. This was before
The Internet made these sad and surreptitious
Purchases unnecessary. I found a teen-aged
Madonna in a closet, so I knelt and sighed.

A fat one lived alone, but once she said, “Sorry,
The house is so messy today. I had company
Last night,” and her face brightened angelically.

*

MMJ

To Hope They're Not as Stranded in What They Are as the Blue Flowers in the Yard at the Corner Which Seem to Be Shouting Only One Name

So I was getting a sandwich at Wagshals Saturday, and standing next to me waiting for his sandwich was a major Villager fuckwit, holding a phone to his head with his left hand while scrolling a blackberry with his right.

Apparently I was staring contemptously, imagining what I should say - Are you really a fuckwit or just play one for pay, and could you explain the moral distinction? Do you believe what you say or are you just a fucking monkey reciting your lines, and do you believe they are one and the same? I realize the mortgages on the mansion in Foxhall and the multiple vacation homes need paying, but how do you sleep? - when he turned away from me with annoyance, saying into his cell, I can't decide between the black Mercedes E-Class and the silver Lexus ISF.

I see these fuckwits all the time and never say a word. Despite this bleg's fucking language, I'm civil and polite in society, believe in respecting people's personal space: I daydream (and bleg) my insults.

And what would it serve but to confirm the justness of societal order in the Villagers' fuckwit minds to be challenged to defend their morality by a fucking peasant in a delicatessen? I'm going to change their minds? Long live the revolution.

*

• Clarity of American Strategic Thought, 2009.
• Strategic priorities, via Your Fucking Washington Post.
• The Empty Establishment.
• Next time someone speaks well of David Frum (O! he's such a reasonable conservative), remember this.
• It's only appropriate that on the same day Friedman the Fatuous writes this, Baghdad kabooms.
• Games.
• Frank Rich embraces the spectacle.
• George Will gets a petite chubby.
• Your Fucking Washington Post stands proudly with the insurance companies.
• Twice. (And the second fuckwit w/prOnstache in this post.)
• UPDATE! Your Fucking Washington Post's Fuckface Hiatt.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Good news about Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Your Fucking British Press.
• Christer Fuckwit. UPDATE! Heh.
• The answer is No.
• The GOP Speaks, and So Does the Unconscious.
• Obamapostasy. He really does believe his own bullshit.
• Obamillard Fillmore.
• Fredneckian Party!
• Untaxed revenue.
• *!hEh!*
• Berbatov is...... The Continental.
• Awesome Leona's awesome Children's Literature course's syllabus was heavy with Norma Fox (as she was known then).
• Denise Levertov.
• Wait until you're 40 to read Moby Dick?
• Sometimes Percival Everett works for me, sometimes he doesn't.
• Should I? This is true: I put the link to that review in this post around 7AM Sunday morning. Later that morning, in the White Flint Borders, waiting for a jewelry store to open to get my watch battery changed, I held the Lethem in my hand, read the first three pages, found them fine enough, and meh. I also held in my hands Best American Poetry of 2009 (chosen by David Wagoner? David Wagoner is still alive?), the latest Mary Jo Bang, and Against the Day and Vineland, and I'm utterly at sea in slump. Jeebus, I'm going to have to read it, even as Beyond Black is wonderful but isn't being remagical.
• What was serendipitous was after getting my watch battery changed I did a quick grocery run to the new Harris Teeter off Nebel, where I ran into Sasha. We both agreed this guy and this guy need call a dinner and feed us. Maybe a night when we can "unleash" the Red. (Hockey fans are lame.)
• All Hardcore Fiends Will Die By...
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.

*

INFIDEL

Carl Dennis

If I chew these sesame seed slowly,
As the book advises, and do my rhythmic breathing,
I may end up the year comparing myself to Buddha,
Thinking of myself as his companion.

No more wasting my energy on my will,
The will afraid if it ever stopped wanting
I'd disappear. Head forward,
Shoulders stopped under its sack of ambitions,
It butts its way through the crowd.
It halts in clearings to count its losses.

Now I can turn to meditation and vision
If I chew theses sesame seeds slowly,
Walking behind myself at a saving distance,
Glancing around at a world not seen before.

Soon I'll be free to play, to leave my projects behind
And wonder what it's like to be a stone,
Or a tree, or the dog asleep by the lawn chair,
Or the woman in the chair, gray-haired and frail,
Knitting a sweater for her daughter's baby.

To be them, and then to leave them.
To hope they're not as stranded in what they are
As the blue flowers in the yard at the corner
Which seem to be shouting only one name,
Blue Flower, Blue Flower.

Just a mouthful of sesame seeds and salt
To neutralize the acidity of the blood
And maybe in a week or two the fretful yin child
Will be a contemplative, joyful yang.

And if I can change, my friends can follow
If they're willing to be more flexible
And don't insist, as they have till now,
On their own vivid, unchastened perspectives.

Strange to love those who resist me,
Who block the sidewalk when I go exploring
And won't give ground, who force me
To step aside with my ears ringing,
My eyes watering, and move on

Under the awnings that flap their colors
As awnings do, under lindens
Shaking their leaves as lindens will
When they want to refresh themselves
In gusts from the mountains, gusts from the sea.

*

In response to my begging for a Queequeg and Starbuck to go die in a whale hunt with me, Ilse wrote "Hrm. Would I be getting paid to read _The Dick?_ Otherwise, why bother? I already know I like penises. (Yes, I'm an English teacher. So?):

Thanks, Frederick! for the (I don't flatter myself it was intentional) serendipity!

And Your Name, Curled Flame, Licks the Matchbook of the Cause, Like a Voice Whose Rome Pisses through Every Little Animal.

Yapped Thursday with good blegfriend Richard, happy funny bleggy stuff to start, then on to novels like we always do.

I got past halfway, maybe 4/7ths the way through Powers' Generosity, and megamehfulness. I just don't give a damn, about the plot, the characters, the authorial voice, the bioethical quandary Powers' poses this time. I admit in email the meh may be as much my fault as Powers, and I mean that to a point, but, c'mon, I don't roll that way: it has to be because the novel sucks. (What's interesting is my favorite Powers' novel is one of Richard's least, and visa versa, but that's another post. Or not.)

I'm rereading Beyond Black, partly and certainly because Richard told me he'd give it a try after all my squawking about it, but primarily because once I started to think about rereading it, I had no way to stop thinking about rereading it except to reread it.

Then there was that MOCO post, the one I'd rewritten countless times in the moleskin, that I needed to post just to be rid of it. Then there was the Redskin post, which I had to post just to be rid of it.

Holy fuck, you know what I'm going to reread next because it's been ten years and I can't stop thinking about rereading it?

Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under the water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

GAH! Anyone want to join me?

Someone's writing the novel that needs writing right row about right now (poetry is ahead of fiction right now about right now), and I privilege this right now as the most important right now since the last and until the next, and though it bores with my self-servingness to hear me say it again, I am a weathervane, and as people discover that in their digital powerlessness they have never been freer to contribute to the spectacle, there's never been a greater wave of WTFness now that voyeurism is peak and product can't keep up.

Which is to say I'm officially monitoring this bleg's increasing levels of possibly self-destroying WTFness. I'm trying to stop monitoring this bleg's levels of self-destroying WTFness.

*

• Fatlazyfucker fears Obama is threatening the fatlazyfucker's freedom to be a fatlazyfucker.
• The word Greenwald is looking for is pussies.
• You don't give money to NPR do you (or do you need to be mocked)?
• Rattling the roobcages on both ends is a win for the middle.
• It never occurs to Pastor Fatuous that one way to ease Islamic extremism is to stop bombing wedding parties with predator drones.
• Another reason to hate the rich (or if Islamic extremist, to hate America).
• Your Fucking Washington Post features World's Shittiest Human every Friday.
• Frank Gaffney would like to challenge World's Shittiest Human for that title.
• Shut your piehole.
• Stupid peasants.
• Montag (via JRB) on Warring Wages.
• Capitalism.
• It's the end of the world as we know it.
• Bullet prOn, cont....
• Heh.
• Wet Leaves on Windows.
• Fentyville!
• My future hell. The issue, at least in my neighborhood, is that many people bought in this neighborhood to be in the Walter Johnson High School cluster. We did. Planet will long have graduated by the time redistricting would occur, so it wouldn't affect us, but I understand the concerns of parents with much younger children.
• Kensington's imperialistic ambitions!
• Nice bridge.
• UPDATE! Who the hell blegs about their favorite black-clad football team?
  
• Bleg Anniversary's (of a sort) here and here. Congrats.
• Hilltop! Thank Ba'al Planet doesn't want to go there.
• BLCKDGRD translated into Portuguese. Who is doing this?
• Soupy Sales, RIP.
• At Stirred, Straight Up, With a Twist it's always 1962. Fits the tone around here lately, yes?
• UPDATE! Two new Mary Jo Bang poems.
• Rise of the Neuronovel?
• UPDATE! Twenty, twenty-five, thirty years ago, I went through a huge Iris Murdoch phase. Reread The Sea, The Sea a few years ago and The Book and the Brotherhood a year or two ago, and while the thrill is gone, I remembered why I had the thrill when I was young.
• Kakutani HATES! the new Ishiguro, which means the new Ishiguro must necessarily be GREAT!
• UPDATE! Simic on Seidel.
• Another one of dozens of my favorite five songs ever.
• Don't forget counterstream.
• Another one of dozens of my favorite five songs ever.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Another one of dozens of my favorite five songs ever.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Leonard Cohen fix?
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! This too. This too.
• We party so hard, the planet broke.

*

A THREE-RAVEN FIELD TALKING DIRTY APPLE BLOSSOMS

Cal Bedient

And your name, Blue, crouches like a wrestler's head,

Or a voice whose window dismembers the beetle moon.

And your name, Insatiable, stokes a sunflower bonfire

With a voice whose sea is inside out at feeding time.

And your name, Chemical, has no sweet fold et cetera

Nor a voice whose cliffs are anybody's heart.

And your name, Leaves a Light on in the Void,

Clicks in the all-night stapler of your theater.

And your name, They Had Doubt, slews in a Cloud Magellan

With a voice whose Mary is two blues from origin.

And your name, Halfer, ignora la otra mitad,

Whose voice piles weapons in the pick-up beds of exile.

And your name, Curled Flame, licks the matchbook of the cause,

Like a voice whose Rome pisses through every little animal.

*

New Yo La Tengo?

Automocoblogography

is the spine of MOCO and the defining highway of my MOCO experience, having grown up in Gaithersburg a quarter mile off 355, now owning a house a half mile from 355 but

is my favorite state road in MOCO, but only west of

where they intersect near Casa Satanica in the Quince Orchard section of Gaithersburg (called by realtors "North Potomac"), but 124 has always been a odd, disjointed route, long before the Mid-County Highway was built and 124 re-routed to it through Montgomery Village (in theory, 124 once ran along Diamond Avenue through Gaithersburg long before there was a Montgomery Village, though there was never any signage as such through Gaithersburg, but there was a shield where the road curved left past Washington Grove and the humpback bridge) and doesn't really start proper until it interects

near the MOCO Airpark. 115 runs east from 124 as Muncaster Mill Road all the way to

in Norbeck (which is the same 28 but not the same 28 that I love), 300 yards from

in a different country than it started. Anyway

runs north to Damascus as Woodfield Road, past Goshen, home of prebilics and bryds and vetters and Audrey of My Heart's house and terminates at

which is in itself worthy of a future post, a wildly S-shaped route, which from Damascus heads due south and then sharply east to intersect

in the Dismal Empire of Olney (about three miles north of Norbeck), a town know solely for the traffic jam caused each rush hour by that junction, but what's really odd about

is in Etchison, when it turns due south,

branches off to the east to run for seven drop-dead gorgeous miles to intersect

afterwhich it runs five more drop-dead gorgeous miles to intersect

again, this time in Ashton, where it continues south as New Hampshire Ave. The section between Ashton and Colesville is renowned (locally at least) for its dozens of churches and temples of many different religions and their denominations, and then

continues south through White Oak and then Hillandale, which is as far in my imagination from Dickerson, where my favorite MOCO road

finally reaches the Frederick County line after heading west from

and Casa Satanica, then goes past

which goes west from Darnestown to Seneca Aqueduct and McKee-Beshers Wildlife Reserve, then

which goes north to the horror that is Germantown, then

which goes west from Dawsonville to the foreign country of Poolesville (imagine Burtonsville, imagine Poolesville, figure out the faster route to get from one to the other), then

which isn't 121 anymore, the state giving the section between 28 and Boyds to MOCO to maintain (Boyds home to the now underwater Ten Mile Creek Road, where Willy Bayne in a cocaine and whiskey-fueled fury ran down the cat), then

which runs east to Boyds, then all the way back to Gaithersburg, from Boyds to Gaithersburg called Clopper, then

north from Beallsville to the charmingly otherworldly Barnesville then Comus then Hyattstown where it dead ends at the spine that is

From Beallsville

is downhill all the way to Dickerson, where after you go under the railroad bridge to the stop sign, you make a right on Mt Ephraim and go four miles to the base of Sugarloaf Mountain, which is my Olympus.

Here's Alton Brown with my (O, I wish) blegging philosophy:

But you know, I never take fans into consideration when making Good Eats. Ever. I make it for me. I completely make Good Eats for me. I don’t care about them. I mean I care about them, I want people to watch the show and like the show, but I’m not going to allow their wishes and desires to change what I do. If I make it and they like it, great, but I’d say the same thing about Food Network. I don’t care if they like it either. I make it for me, and that’s how it stays pure. That’s how I’ve stayed on for 10 years, is that every single one is an artistic endeavor from one little sick, twisted, obsessed little guy, and that’s me. So knowing, for instance, if fans will accept this ingredient or that ingredient, I don’t care. I care about it not being a product that Food Network wouldn’t want to use because it wouldn’t rate well, because my main job is to make TV shows that rate well. And in that angle I do. But I’ve fought for certain ingredients and gotten them through. We did a parsnip show this year. Well, it’s taken me three years to get the okay to do a parsnip show because it hasn’t been mainstream enough. Or you know, how exciting can a parsnip be? But one of my things is to say, “Look, give it to me. I’ll make parsnips, you’ll line up for an evening of parsnips by the time I’m done.” I think every food story is interesting, there are no boring foods to me. So I come at it from the view [that] a food is not more exciting or less exciting because it’s obscure.

Tomorrow,

and it's two-named two miles between

and

that might as well be a hundred miles.

Or, now that I've got this out of my system - and here's truth: if I hadn't finally posted this after thinking about it for the past two years off and on and the past week intensely, this would have gnawed at me harder each day until I posted it - perhaps not.

It Is a Spar in a Far Mine

I suggest that HOLYFUCKINGFUCK! isn't tomorrow, that my placing posts about Planet's college visits next to posts proclaiming each day's tomorrow is HOLYFUCKINGFUCK! based on each day's yesterday's OMFG! is not only logically incoherent (though a proven if overplayed gambit to maintain if not increase pings), it demonstrates a level of calculated dishonesty by all of us digitally competing to be the bestest diagnostician of HOLYFUCKINGFUCK! ever. Asses.

This past Friday I sent in my deposits for next year's United full-season plan. I'll be back with another HOLYFUCKINGFUCK! post by Thursday at the latest. Click Fleabus, yo.

• More on this.
• Endless lies, endless sucker-plays.
• If Obama had turned down the Nobel as this fucking asshat says he should have, the same fucking asshat's column Monday would attack Obama for his narcissism in turning down Nobel.
• Here's a guy I used to read writing about the asshat in above link. Been blegpondering, remembered this guy, nothing more. Or there is, but meh.
• UPDATE! Vietnam and Afghanistan as Dada-ist Installations.
• The cost of Corporate Capitalism.
• UPDATE! Marx was an excellent diagnostician.
• What is/to be done.
• On Zombies. I'm paraphrasing (and perhaps misunderstanding), but insatiable but not hungry sounds right.
• When pressed, he acknowledged....
• In which Montag concern trolls confused Liberals.
• Confused Liberals.
• OBAMAVATAR!
• What I've been saying for years, said better.
• On that dumbass George Will column from last Sunday.
• UPDATE! Major blegpondering. Best of everything, Frieda.
• Your photoshop of the day, with extra gravy.
• Is Helmetball any different than dog-fighting?
• Sharpton and Jackson should STFU!
• Inside MOCO: when someone says North Potomac, they mean Rockville. (When someone says North Bethesda, they mean Rockville.) Fuckers.
• This post told me this bus route is the busiest in MOCO, but I've been thinking a lot about how MOCO is actually composed of dozens of distinct countries, and Veirs Mill Road, spelled Viers Mill Road on certain public street signs, between Wheaton and Rockville, is one of the oddest roads in MOCO. I'm blegpondering about writing about MOCO. I'll get over it, but nothing has made me more aware of how small is as infinite as large as thinking about MOCO.
• UPDATE! Veirs Mill goes by Aspen Hill.
• UPDATE! I support the ACLU even when they defend a fuck like Fucking Fobin Ricker.
• Thyraphobia, part thirteen.
• Reviewing a book of essays that advise aspiring fiction writers, Dan finds only two essays of special worth, one by poet D.A. Powell.
• State of American poetry. (h/t this and next link)
• My current favorite poetry anthology reviewed.
• UPDATE! Wowee! Ed's sitemeter's a-popping. (And who the hell posts clips of old KITH skits? Oh.)
• Acocella reviews Wolf Hall: But now the excellent novelist Hilary Mantel has joined the tournament, with “Wolf Hall,” a five-hundred-and-thirty-two-page novel portraying Cromwell as a wise minister and a decent man. Mantel is not new to revisionist projects. In her 1992 novel “A Place of Greater Safety,” about the French Revolution, she performed the amazing feat of making Robespierre a sympathetic man. Her interest is in the question of good and evil as it applies to people who wield great power. That means anguish, exultation, deals, spies, decapitations, and fabulous clothes. Mantel recently told an interviewer that she had long planned to write about the Tudors: “Almost all the stories you might want to tell are lurking behind the arras.” Some are quite bawdy, which, if we can judge from the Tudor playwright Shakespeare, is true to the period. A waiter at an inn advises Cromwell not to order the pottage: “It looks like what’s left when a whore’s washed her shift.” A Place of Greater Safety is terrific.
• This past Saturday was Monk's birthday.
• Born 54 years ago yesterday. Let me into your Temple.
• New Sea Wolf! (h/t)
• Mood Tuesday.
• UPDATE! This made me think about this.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! Boatload of new release MP3. You did give to KEXP, yes?
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• New FLAMING LIPS! I've always loved the Lips.

UPDATE!

• One of the new songs is called Silver Trembling Hands, which of course makes me think of Trembling Blue Stars.
  

democrac

D.A. Powell

does god discriminate, slashing some flags, amendments

ever farther about the chapels, pale heaven expires

morter the mosque means build not bomb - the moral center gives

only an honest fellow [please provide] might renounce

christ, this machinery of helmets, prosthetic limbs, human skin

refusing, louder than the drone above the disputed zones

all ages are difficult ages: flight, the bits of metal raining down

clarity never arrives, it is a spar in a far mine, it costs us dearly

Another one of dozens of my five favorites songs ever:

Know what? Theme Song October 2009