BLCKDGRD

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

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.

*

• Let's get the Dolchstosslegend going!
• UPDATE! American priorities.
• The Communist Manifesto in Cartoon (which I post as much as a flashback - cartoon-wise - for farts my age as any reason else).  (h/t)
• Defective Comics.
• Lacan and E-Mail.
• Comedy's Charcoal Age.
• Simplicity.
• American Democracy.
• I do hope Greenwald has bodyguards and never drinks from a glass he walks away from in company.
• Yup.
• Google pigoons and Atwood before reading today's Rich.
• The Palin Effect.
• Grifter.
• Conservative curve ball.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.

• 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:

• Think: if blegs were a professional soccer shirt, that statement would be true, and think how weird soccer shirts look when teams are forced to play minus the logo.
• Berbatov is.... The Continental.
• Viers v Veirs: the story.
• Political activism in Kensington!
• ICC side-effects.
• Joe's Record Paradise! in Post because Joe smokes pot. Joe's Record Paradise was the best headshop in MOCO when MOCO had headshops. Or so I'm told.
• UPDATE! Sex in Fredneck.
• The worse uniform ever contest declares a winner.
• Union's new home shirt.
• Clowns wear all-black when their colors are red and white:

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

• Barking Dog's Writer's Journal.
• More on the ascendancy of memoirs over fiction. You know, it's true on TV too.
• UPDATE! The review of but what interests me in UM's review of a book by Jonah Raskin is in the author photo, behind Raskin's left jowl, is M31 by Steven Wright.
• An American minimalist.
• Excellent bleggal-gazing: Sojourns in Meatspace.
• Here we are, stuck by this river.
• Beards per minute. UPDATE! More!
• Into you like a train.
• UPDATE! !wOOt! Plus Planet just called and said they're playing Lisner Auditorium on February 14, so Landru, Ilse, Hamster, Bromark, Elric, you want tickets, let me know, I might be able to take care of all my Giftmas shopping at once!
• Cartographic Study of Musical Incest.
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• Touch me, I'm going to scream.
• Spiral Cliff.
• It's not alright.
• UPDATE! It's not up to you.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• What's important.

*

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:

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.

 

 

 

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

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.

*

• Yup.
• Capitalism.
• Capitalism's exploitation of relentless positivism.
• America as stoned college conversation. (And thanks! for Kind.)
• Eric Cantor might as well give up his dreams of POTUS.
• He might as well dress like an ass and call himself Nancy.
• I give Michelle Bachmann credit for recognizing the Pig-Hottie vacuum and plugging it.
• Free-floating rage.
• The British Obama.
• Excellent Bobo evisceration.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Elric reports in from Nigeria.
• My high school (with video!). Look at those dopes in the marching band, listen to their crappy rendition of the Anthem.
• Yow!
• Purple Line!
• CCT!

• While all Fleabus photos are by Planet, not all photos of Fleabus photos are by Planet. Click, yo.
• Memoir's killed fiction!
• Memoir's killed fiction!
• UPDATE! Deep fried lard with ranch on the side.
• Memoir's killed fiction!
• Why does a new Stephen King novel get top billing in Sunday NYTBR, and why does every review of a new JCO novel legally require the reviewer to use the word "prolific" in the first sentence and a review of a Stephen King novel doesn't?
• Jim's got lit-links and thoughts (and thanks! for Kind).
• I would like a place I could call my own.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• I used to think the day would never come.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Pretending not to see his gun, I said let’s go out and have some fun.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• It seems like I've been here before.

*

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:

The Colorado Looks Up in Awe at the Grand Canyon It Has Made

*

• Saying yes to state violence.
• Concision and Chomsky.
• Merit Vomit.
• UPDATE! A pint to the first of you who finds a majorpigblegger saying Obama triggered the Muslim sleeper cell IN THE MILITARY! in order to divert attention from Michelle Bachmann's tribe  of dumbfucks!
• UPDATE! Holyfuck, PIGKABOOMPARADISE!, yo. Happiest days of their lives. A pint for the first link to a majorpigblegger who advocates immediately discharging all Arab-American and Muslim soldiers. (Typed 7:35 PM 11/5.)
• 50M Frenched Men Can't Be Wrong.
• Notes on the Philly Transit Strike.
• There are Rights, and Then There's What's Right.
• Triumph of the Progressives.
• Ayn Rand, whack.
• Beliefs? What beliefs?
• Kos' Drug of Choice.
• The Tired Party Line.
• Newt Gingrich, RINO.
• Armey. Dick.
• Idiots.
• The original woman who went rogue.
• Murderous America.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Fucking shoot me.
• Flesh of Your Flesh.
• Cat gets swine flu. 
• Elric's in Nigeria, where not only is he limited on where he can go but with slow internet: The Nigerians that I have met are really nice, intelligent people.  I would love to get out and see some stuff.  Maybe we can get out and explore on the weekends, but if we do we need an armed escort and an armored car.  We take a boat to work, and I have seen plenty of pollution, but only one dead body so far.  We pass under a bridge on the way to work, and people squat and try to hit us with crap for sport, but so far they have missed us.  The water in the lagoon smells like rotten fish and piss, and if you get splashed you need to get a tetanus shot.  If you get it in your mouth, you're fucked.

• MOCO clusterfuck! I always wonder how many stoplight intersections there are in MOCO (I think about getting a map and counting them off), and while this article says 750, that may be only those that are coordinated. I can't imagine the Beallsville light at 28 and 109 is beehived with lights in Bethesda.
• Weastful!
• Showdown in Kensington!
• Crisis in Garrett Park!
• ICC!
• Purple Line!

• The whale that wouldn't die.
• Intention and poetry.
• UPDATE! Sometime in the past month I wrote that poetry is ahead of fiction re: these days, but twenty-five years? And good question asked there too.
• Serendipity: looking for an online version of the Seidel poem below (to cut and paste rather than need type - and I had to type it) I find an old review of Seidel written by Cal Bedient, whose latest I've been yodeling about the past few weeks.

• Hilda Morley?
• Whole new way.
• Overgrown Path is wonderful. Hey, Pliable!
• Damage.
• More port-royal here.
• This is not a love song.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Good fortune.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Magnetic Fields cover Bowie.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• 150 seconds of pop pleasure.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.

*

POL POT

Frederick Seidel

Dawn. Leni Riefenstahl
And her cameras slowly inflate the immense Nuremberg Rally.
The Colorado looks up in awe at the Grand Canyon
It has made. Hitler.

European clouds. 1934. Empty
Thought-balloons high above Lascaux
Without a thought inside. The Führer
Is ice that's fire, physically small.

They all were. Stalin.
Trotsky's little glasses
Disappear behind a cloud
From which he won't emerge alive.

The small plane carrying
The Grail to Nuremberg got Wagnerian clouds
To fly through, enormous, enormous. Mine eyes have seen
    the glory, it
Taxis to a stop. The cabin door swings open.

Leni schussed from motion pictures
To still photography after the war. From the Aryan ideal, climbed out
In Africa to shoot the wild shy people of Kau,
Small heads, tall, the most beautiful animals in the world.

Artistically mounted them into ideal
Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl! Riefenstahl! Riefenstahl! Really,
From blonds in black-and-white to blacks in color.
Now Pol Pot came to power.

Now in London Sylvia Plath
Nailed one foot to the floor;
And with the other walked
And walked and walked through the terrible blood.

*

Reap What You Have Soehn

This pisses me off:

"Over the past three seasons, Tommy has faced greater challenges than any other MLS coach," United President Kevin Payne said, referring to a schedule that included annual international tournaments.

Wait a fucking minute. United doesn't want to be in annual international tournaments? Kevin Payne is saying he doesn't want United to face "greater challenges" than any other MLS team? What the fuck?

Good thing United sucked this past season then, yes? No trips this coming season to Mexico and Honduras and El Salvador, just home exhibitions against better league's B-Squads, thank fucking god.

By Payne's standard, Soehn succeeded! The next coach will have a pussy schedule by comparison. Well done!

Schedule! Waah! We're fucked by our success! By this logic, the goal of the new coach next season is to suck just enough to avoid fixture congestion in 2011.

Oh, and this by The Irreplaceable Man needs noting:

"I'm a little surprised. ... It's a difficult transition for the players when you bring in a new coach. You have to re-prove yourself. You're on trial in a way and you don't know whether you fit into the new coach's plans. I hope they don't try to break up this team."

Boofuckinghoo. Suddenly, Namoff seems replaceable to me.

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

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.

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• American Culture.
• America.
• Capitalism.
• Capitalism.
• America.
• American Yadda.
• Pussy Hatch.
• Obamapostasy.
• Obamapostasy.
• Something to think about.
• Your pwoggle spin on today's election results.
• Your asshole pig spin on today's election results.
• A fatuous referendum.
• Still the person I'd most like to brain w/a shovel.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Not American enough.
• Work:

• ICC's true purpose!
• No one could have predicted Smart Growth would lead to Clarksburgs.
• Clarksburg.
• On bleggal hiatusing.
• One aspect why black-and-white TV pings my pitchfork.
• The president of the University of Tulsa makes more than $1M per?
• Levi-Strauss has died. More.
• 24-Hours of Air Traffic.

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:

• 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

• This doesn't make my heart race, but I've friends that it will.
• Not only does Sting's music suck unto suck (I promise you you'll never suffer a crappy Police song on this bleg, I love you that much), Sting's a fracking asshole too. But you knew that.
• A Place to Bury Strangers.
• Witches want David Bowie's semen.
• You can't stay all day under the covers.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• We're made of blood and rust.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! Love for The Feelies!
• UPDATE! Does anyone remember The Softies?
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• The laws have changed.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• (I'm crazy for you) but not that crazy.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• The prettiest song you'll listen to today.

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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.

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So what I posted this before?

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

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).

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.

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• 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.

• 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.

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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.

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The Connells?