BLCKDGRD

There's Too Much Lime in the World and Not enough gin, they gasp. The Gentle are Curious, but the curious are not gentle*

I deal with copyright/intellectual property neurotics as part of my day job. They're correct to be neurotic as they are dealing with intellectual property owners who must know in their brain stems that they've lost but won't recognize in their frontal lobes they've lost. They're fighting with the litigious zeal of the desperate. Set aside their justified moral position - artists, writers, creators deserve the profit of their invention - they've lost. They've lost, and no other business model can be conceived until they recognize the one that's lost is obsolete.

America's declining. Argue amongst yourselves whether America as CEO and War-King was a good-bad or bad-good thing, but America as supreme decider is dying and terminal, no matter how many wars America's brave dick-swingers start, no matter how many shitty decades unapologetic militarism delays the body's death.

Lordy, I'm a doorstop, a grim triangular black hard-rubber doorstop wedged under a bedroom door in my grandmother's house in Fellsburg Pennsylvania to keep my cousins out so I can read in peace, that doesn't work.

*

• Permanent war.
• Permanent war.
• Permanent war.
• Surveillance state.
• O, Woe.
• If Obama loses.
• If Obama loses.
• Yes, but wake the fuck up to what?
• Five hilarious lies about Obama... that work! on who they're meant to work on.
• Fortunately, my time in PG is limited to the Beltway to the BW Parkway to RFK.

*

*Frank O'Hara, who's newly repackaged Selected Poems wondrously dropped free into my hands.

FOR GRACE, AFTER A PARTY

    You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't
interest
    me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
    and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
                                        writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn't there
        an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn't
                            you like the eggs a little
different today?
                            And when they arrive they
are just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.

*

In my head. Be in yours.

Hamster Advice!

*

Looking for om in August, Fleabus? Hamster advice!

August sucks. Damn August and everyone born in August. Especially bloggers born in August.

*

• Memo to HRC presupposes she's bigger than she wasn't.
• Tinfoiled?
• The indestructible core of my rubity is my inability to relax and enjoy the stupid.
• Maybe not, but probably so.
• Krugman: it's 1913 all over again.
• Who's just like Hitler today?
• So much for that trial balloon.
• (Right)Wingman, fuck-buddy.
• America as pedophile priest.
• Savage coward.
• God does play dice, or Elect the Pope: The Game.
• Slots. Meh.
• Kafka's Dick.
• Obama's top-ten list is cynical, McCain's is lame.
• 29 instrumentals by bands that sing, w/mp3!

Updates later. Or not.

*

Why should we look for comfort in poetry?

MARBLE-SIZED SONG

Albert Goldbarth

Does she love you? She says yes, but really
how do you know unless you undress that easy assertion,
undoing its petals and laminae, and going in
below all trace of consciousness, into the neuroelectrical
coffer where self-understanding is storaged away,
and then lifting its uttermost molecule out, to study
in its nakedness as it spins
in a clinical light?—the way
we all, in our various individual versions
of this common human urge, go in,
and in, and in, the physicist down
to the string-vibration underlying matter, and
the Appalachia fiddler getting so
(as she puts it) "into my music," sound becomes
a flesh for her to intimately ("in"-timately)
enter, "its thick and its sweetbreads."
Is he cheating on you? He says no, and feigns
that he's insulted, but for certainty
you'll need to delicately strip the bark away
and drill, and tweeze, until you can smear a microscope slide
of the pith and can augur the chitterlings
—the way the philosopher can't accept a surface
assumption of truth, but needs to peel back
the fatty sheen of the dermis, soak the cambium layer
into a blow-away foam, and then with pick
and lightbeam helmet, inch by inch begin
spelunking through those splayed-out caverns
under the crust, where gems of cogitation are buried
—the way the diver descends for the pearl,
the miner: in, the archaeologist: in, the therapist: down
the snakier roots of us and in, and in, the way
the lone, leg-pretzeled yogi makes
a glowing bathysphere of worldliness and sends it in,
and further in, tinier and heavier and ever in,
the way the man in the opium den is floating forever,
toward a horizon positioned in the center of the center
of his head.... If we could stand beyond the border
of our species and consider us objectively, it might seem
that our purpose in existing is to be a living agency
that balances, or maybe even slows, the universe's
irreversible expansion out, and out ... and each
of us, a contribution to that task.
My friend John's wife received the news: a "growth,"
a "mass," on her pituitary, marble-sized, mysterious.
And the primary-care physician said: Yes,
we must go in and in. That couldn't be the final word!
And the second-opinion physician said: Yes,
my sweet-and-shivering-one,
my fingerprint-and-irisprint-uniqueness,
someone's-dearest, you
who said the prayers at Juliette's grave, who drove
all night from Switzerland with your daughter, you
on this irreplaceable day in your irreplaceable skin
in the scumbled light as it crosses the bay in Corpus Christi,
yes in the shadows, yes in the radiance,
yes we must go in and in.

GOKE! and PODE!

Rube's Code requires I admit that POKE! and GOAD! is a fine strategy to use against me, which is unneeded proof I'm a rube with a rooting interest, and just how fracking ruby is that.

Obama can't call McCain's cracker-trolling cracker-trolling, and I'll pull my ethical hamstring and snit furiously about obamapostasy because he doesn't, which is, what's the word I'm looking for..... STUPID!

But... don't tell me America doesn't want slap-reality show politics, and it's only August 3 and OMFG! Handbags!

If this election is the most important election ever since the last most important election ever and until the next most important election ever, we'd better get down to poking raw nerves and goading from the gutter. Fracking Crackerstan.

OH! Anyone want to bet a pint that HRC won't be Obama's vpotus choice?

   *

• Maybe The Dark Knight is a fascist wetdream.
• Maybe The Dark Knight is a fascist wetdream.
• We need to pay fucking attention.
• Danzig USA.
• "Uppity's" synonyms, coming soon.
• War on the middle class, part one, part two.
• Happy Anniverary, Bitchez!
• Wal-Mart: Why They Suck.
• Mercenary country.
• Pigs, lesser-evil, yadda.
• Friday hope blogging.
• Kevin Drum chides Andrew Sullivan. We. Are. So. Fucked.

UPDATES!

• Debate Obama's debate strategy.
• McCain was never a straight-talker, an irony now that it's obvious he's a buffoon, though give professional media contortionists time and they'll embarrass themselves justifying their reinvented love-ooze.
• The answer to the question sub-head is YES!
• This Fellowjeff is writing about PERE UBU! with mp3 candy!
• This Fellowjeff is mourning the death of a summer voice, reminding me of Bob Prince.
• Dan reviews the new Wood.
• Saving Segundo!
• Meditation on Human Smoke.
• A new Ashbery uses the word "Oprah."
• Thoughts on The Booker. More, here.
• Oodles of lit-links.
• Savannah Cat? Not a cougar.
• Fabulously wealthy bemoan loss of ice cream store to corporate interests that make them fabulously wealthy!
  

   *

Food for thought:

Snarkremindersnark!

Unnoticed surveillance?

Use your Safeway card, they know what you eat. Use your Walgreen's card, they know your medications. Use your credit card, they know what you buy, how much you owe. Use your cell phone, they know where you are. Use your tomtom, they know where your drive.

Use your blog, they know what you think.

Make it easy for them, yo. You happily pay for the panopticon. Just a reminder before you hyperventilate.

  *

• Obamapostasy
• Herbert's obamapostasy.
• Obamapostasy: Neobamacon.
• Giant among midgets.
• If you have a military colossus, the colossus is used.
• Libertarian Party: Racism for Smart People?
• Speaking of Bob Barr.
• Another mcauliffister to Fox. Ur-mcauliffister campaigns for Obama. Questions?
• Red v Blue.
• Hoback has secret info on RNC's new convention plans.
• Remember The Fall.

   *

Hey, John Ashbery is 81 (81!) today.

STILL LIFE WITH STRANGER

Come on, Ulrich, the great octagon
of the sky is passing over us.
Soon the world will have moved on.
Your love affair, what is it
but a tempest in a teapot?

But such storms exude strange
resonance: the power of the Almighty
reduced to its infinitesimal root
hangs like the chant of bees,
the milky drooping leave of the birch
on a windless autumn day --

Call these phenomena or pinpoints,
remote as the glittering trash of heaven,
yet the monstrous frame remains,
filling up with regret, with straw,
or on another level with the quick grace
of the singing, falling snow.

You are good at persuading
them to sing with you.
Above you, horses graze forgettting
daylight inside the barn.

Creeper dangles against rock-face.
Pointed roofs bear witness.
The whole cast of characters is imaginary
now, but up ahead, in the shadow, the past awaits.

Harington

I can recommend, with love and astonishment

...

but only if you've read

...

and

...

and

...

and

...

because Harington is old and wounded by a car accident and is wrapping up all the Stay More threads, and Farther Along is rich by itself, but read with the familial knowledge of all that proceeded it, is extraordinary.

Consistently, the most astonishing reading experiences I've ever.

UPDATE:

You who asked about kayfabe? Let me loan you some books.

   *

• On the plight of neutral observers who fight back with bunnies.
• Roxy Music song title appropriated for Salon article title!
• On anonymity.
• Title your novel in three easy steps!
• My second favorite novelist on 30th anniversary of Virago Classics.
• Hype and hype's backlash.
• The space of literature once, twice, three times. I'll leave it to Richard because I never sound more ridiculous than when trying to write something I inhabit but cannot express, but that is why the best fiction ultimately leaves me hungrier than if I was empty.
• Oates reviews the new Rushdie, which I will be buying tomorrow night.
• Kleinzahler's new and collected reviewed.

UPDATE: Read this if you think you're dog old:

Afterward, a few students thanked me for the clips, even the stuff they hated, like Kaufman and the "Puttin' On The Ritz" segment from "Young Frankenstein," which I thought would kill, but died.

The kids don't get Kaufman? Fu'ck, my buoys are old.

   *

Kleinzahler?

THE STRANGE HOURS TRAVELLERS KEEP 

The markets never rest
Always they are somewhere in agitation
Pork bellies, titanium, winter wheat
Electromagnetic ether peppered with photons
Treasure spewing from Unisys A-15 mainframes
Across the firmament
Soundlessly among the thunderheads and passenger jets
As they make their nightlong journeys
Across the oceans and steppes 

Nebulae, incandescent frog spawn of information
Trembling in the claw of Scorpio
Not an instant, then shooting away
Like an enormous cloud of starlings 

Garbage scows move slowly down the estuary
The lights of the airport pulse in morning darkness
Food trucks, propane, tortured hearts
The reticent epistemological parks
Gets out, checks the curb, reparks
Thunder of jets
Peristalsis of great capitals 

How pretty in her tartan scarf
Her ruminative frown
Ambiguity and reason
Locked in a slow, ferocious tango
Of if not, why not

Inconceivable Capitulation

We egg-headed volvo-drivers assuaging our white guilt plus angry vengeful Negroes won't get to street rumble with elderly white jeebus-eaters and perma-pissed single mothers?

Now's when I feel my rubiness, manipulated again by flags and chants, herded again into a ridiculous barking circle.

A new friend asked, How do you keep the soccer and politics separate on the blog, and I said, Huh?

   *

UPDATE:

Though this Hey! Obamanigger! shit now raises the question, which is worse: race-baiting as campaign tactic or race-baiting as negotiation tactic?

Cause if she is negotiating with the lever "I'll shut up about the nigger if he pays off my debt," is that a different category of shittiness than "I'll shut up about the nigger after I'm elected?"

   *

• Perhaps Clorg is just stupid.
• Clorg campaign as mysticism where numbers don't count.
• Translated Clorg: I'm white!
• Another vaginal-American kingpin signals.
• Clorg as Cronus?
• Secret McCain memo leaked! (Do it.)
• They write letters about Yoo.
• Literary biography: the never designed to end debate.
• Billy Bragg-athon!

UPDATES

• Smartest thing you'll read today.
• Write something, even a suicide note.
• Gassed.
• Fatal Illuison of Opposition.
• True dat: PBR or IPA, either way Obama's a fraud.
• McCain's sugar-momma won't show no sugar.
• Regressing the error. Contains the line: "We have plunged deeply into this matter to clean things up, so that a redouche will not occur." In case folk doubted my maturity, I giggled for a minute.

   *

REPRESSION

C.K. Williams

More and more lately, as, not even minding the slippages yet,
the aches and sad softenings,
I settle into my other years, I notice how many of what I once
thought were evidences of repression,
sexual or otherwise, now seem, in other people anyway, to be
varieties of dignity, withholding, tact,
and even in myself, certain patiences I would have
once called lassitude, indifference,
now seem possibly to be if not the rewards then at least the
unsuspected, undreamed-of conclusions
to many of the even-then-preposterous self-evolved
disciplines, rigors, almost mortifications
I inflicted on myself in my starting-out days, improvement
days, days when the idea alone of psychic peace,
of intellectual, of emotional quiet, the merest hint, would
have meant inconceivable capitulation.

Complicitly Complicit

Sadly, this doesn't surprise you, nor does the seemingly true shock of men who can't possibly be so stupid as to be truly shocked, smart men who stupidly live for adjectives, or, since I live for adjectives too, who live for the same adjectives I do, just too much here, not enough there.

Those of us who were ignored then when we shouted what's revealed now are still obnoxious sinners in our tin-foil hats, while the credentialed who are dupes are still celebrated for their loyal dupeness. This is what qualifies for loving America first: dispute what your intelligence tells you to service your loyalty; despise appeals to your intelligence as assaults on your loyalty.

   *

• UPDATES below.
• Never good to be connected to the sentence, "it wasn't immediately clear what the rope was for," especially if it's in the New York Post. And no, it doesn't matter if the NY Post "exaggerates." And where the hell was Barack Hillary McCain when that rope was first tied?
• Tom Shales place on the Clinton enemies-list is reconfirmed.
• David Ignatius fears for his villager's status if Obama's elected.
• Frank Rich says everybody sucks, unintentionally proving everybody sucks.
• Fair game, just shut up about the shut up.
• Things that are younger than John McCain.
• One vital absence in American foreign policy soccer.
• Michael Pollan on why bother.
• Necessary but pedestrian prose.
• Boo-fucking-hoo. Adding, what this guy says.
• Meet your new overlords or, why FDL sucks. Adding, I love eschaton, but his mafia sucks. Adding, if some doctoral international affairs student focusing on game theory isn't writing a thesis on the consolidation of power in Leftblogsylvania, she should be.
• Obama was right about crackers.
• A restatement of principles.
• Bush torture, Obama, and the Boss.
• Photoshop of the day.
• Inside reference: bullet-point three - Steve Beaupre.

   *

Before I saudered United's season with this election cycle, I'd considered every possible ramification, including dismal, and taunted Ba'al.

Hereby, I will or won't piss ink on Ba'al's actuarial tables relative to the same smartass' instinct that's served my irresponsible speculation so loyally in the past.

Pomonomo

Digby's post's title posits McCain as pomo - the first pomo candidate - as if suddenly, like Lee Siegel, McCain is neener-neenering his post-media sophistication, employing the clever strategy of post-winking and post-nodding and pretending that post-posturing is post-sophistication.

And if it doesn't work for Siegel it may work for McCain simply because Joe Scarborough is three light beers after a round of golf into mwahaha-ing his revenge on the smarter people who dare know they are smarter people. Wink!

   *

• Why aren't more people suggesting The Hillary's campaign is in trouble because it's run by incompetent buffoons?
• Can I suggest this isn't helpful on multiple levels.
• The World's Shittiest Human asks, why hasn't someone cut Obama's nuts off yet?
• The Pastor sheds tears for rape victims in Zambia, which is a pig-american propagandist tactic to (a) say the plight of brown people in America is paradise by comparison and (b) giggle and blush in admiration of his decency. He's a wet fart, The Pastor.
• But....he's a maverick.
• Nobody's asking.
• I know it's a scratching a tired wound, but imagine if it'd been a Democratic congressman who'd said this.
• UPDATE: John Cole does the imagination for you.
• On disenfranchisement.
• Awesome pandering. Give me a chance: I will get to obamaloathing.
• McCain's Nader?
• What, you think your vagina belongs to you? Slut.
• Blogswarms and progblogs.
• MLK Jr's second death.
• If they were Klingons. Go on, do it.
• Yeager's 8th blogoscopy concerns your new overlords.
• A dissenting voice on new DC baseball stadium.
• New British coins are excellent, don't evoke Great Sky Daddy.
• Is your dog a werewolf? (h/t Cruelest Month)
• Against autobiography in fiction.
• Mixed reviews, but I'll try it. I mean, it can't be worse than Shalimar. Can it?
• Here's an ambitious project worth monitoring.
• Why do we read novels by assholes?
• Friday Hope Blogging.

   *

The important conversation on autism and autistic children and child-rearing over at this guy's place reminded me of Larkin's This Be the Verse, which just because you've read it and heard it a zillion times doesn't make it less true: 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
  By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
  And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
  It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
  And don't have any kids yourself.

   *

Right, Fleabus?

...

Brand Music

So, if the phone call comes at 3am and The Hillary need make a snap and public decision, while bombs explode in Midtown Manhattan, people die while The Hillary's make-up artists make her publicly presentable?

Even Kinsley, in his inane column on the unfairness of being The Hillary, admits at 3am it will make no difference that The Hillary looks like the 60 year old woman that she is - ordering the response jets into action takes no make-up - but the idea that The Hillary on the campaign trail is disadvantaged by her vanity in a vanity contest is as sexist as the sexism it purports to attack.

It's true: The Hillary, if photographed waking up, helmet hair tangled, wrinkled cheeks un-pancaked, would suffer unimaginable mockery as the photo pings around the world from pc to pc, and her candidacy as a 60 year old woman would crater like a pox mark on her face before foundation fills it in, and so the fuck what? She's not running as a Hillary, she's running as The Hillary, soulless, genderless, yellow-pantsuited emissary of CLINTON INC.

.

.

She's not Elton John. She's Elton John's "music."

   *

• On boycotting elections.
• The poverty of the presidential campaign.
• Last two paragraphs, Clinton INC's doctrine.
• Leahy and Casey, winking to super-delegates. Why doesn't someone go to Harry Reid and tell him, shut up, go back to obscurity, give the Majority Leader job to The Hillary? Oh.
• On David Brooks' mancrush.
• World's shittiest human is morally aghast that Democratic candidates use exaggeration and hyperbole.
• The Pastor flogs "compassionate conservatism," one more time. He's self-replicating guano, The Pastor.
• Veepstakes. Edwards is in Clinton's columns of choices, as is Obama.
• Though Edwards' donor prefer Obama. Profiles in courage, that John Edwards.
• Hillaryist says no to voting for McCain if Obama nominee. (Again, no snark intended. The author is worth reading - her adoring commenters are morons - but she's worth reading for perspective, wrong as it often is.)
• The threat to rich Democrats.
• Obama missed a tax-loophole: what's his game?
• Fat Albert, loser (h/t Cynics' Party too for the Elton John pic.)
• Metros 20 least-used stations. Morgan Blvd?
• What will bookstores do without a new Potter? (And, since that link is to The Millions, Happy 5th Birthday!)

   *

Time Literary Supplement reviews the new selected later poems of Ashbery, calls him a "poet for our times."

.

Just Walking Around

 

What name do I have for you?

Certainly there is not name for you

In the sense that the stars have names

That somehow fit them. Just walking around,

 

An object of curiosity to some,

But you are too preoccupied

By the secret smudge in the back of your soul

To say much and wander around,

 

Smiling to yourself and others.

It gets to be kind of lonely

But at the same time off-putting.

Counterproductive, as you realize once again

 

That the longest way is the most efficient way,

The one that looped among islands, and

You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.

And now that the end is near

 

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.

There is light in there and mystery and food.

Come see it.

Come not for me but it.

But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.

Three Poems

THE DOG 

Gerald Stern

What I was doing with my white teeth exposed
like that on the side of the road I don't know,
and I don't know why I lay beside the sewer
so that the lover of dead things could come back
with his pencil sharpened and his piece of white paper.
I was there for a good two hours whistling
dirges, shrieking a little, terrifying
hearts with my whimpering cries before I died
by pulling the one leg up and stiffening.
There is a look we have with the hair of the chin
curled in mid-air, there is a look with the belly
stopped in the midst of its greed. The lover of dead things
stoops to feel me, his hand is shaking. I know
his mouth is open and his glasses are slipping.
I think his pencil must be jerking and the terror
of smell—and sight—is overtaking him;
I know he has that terrified faraway look
that death brings—he is contemplating. I want him
to touch my forehead once again and rub my muzzle
before he lifts me up and throws me into
that little valley. I hope he doesn't use
his shoe for fear of touching me; I know,
or used to know, the grasses down there; I think
I knew a hundred smells. I hope the dog's way
doesn't overtake him, one quick push,
barely that, and the mind freed, something else,
some other, thing to take its place. Great heart,
great human heart, keep loving me as you lift me,
give me your tears, great loving stranger, remember,
the death of dogs, forgive the yapping, forgive
the shitting, let there be pity, give me your pity.
How could there be enough? I have given
my life for this, emotion has ruined me, oh lover,
I have exchanged my wildness—little tricks
with the mouth and feet, with the tail, my tongue is a parrots's,
I am a rampant horse, I am a lion,
I wait for the cookie, I snap my teeth—
as you have taught me, oh distant and brilliant and lonely.

.
HOMAGE TO PESSOA

Frederick Seidel

I once loved,
I thought I would be loved,
But I wasn't loved.
I wasn't loved for the only reason that matters -
It was not to be.
I unbuttoned my white gloves and stripped each off.
I set aside my gold-knobbed cane.
I picked up this pen....
And thought how many other men
Had smelled the rose n the bud vase
And lifted a fountain pen,
And lifted a mountain...
And put the shotgun in their mouth,
And noticed that their hunting dog was pointing.

.

HAMMERSMITH WINTER

Robin Robertson 

It is so cold tonight, too cold for snow
and yet it snows. Through the drawn curtain
shines the snowlight I remember as a boy,
sitting up at the window watching it fall.
But you're not here, now, to lead me back
to bed. None of you are. Look at the snow,
I said, to whoever might be near, I'm cold,
would you hold me. Hold me. Let me go.