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November 13, 2009

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

Autoblogography

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.

*
Work2

Work1

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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:

Posted at 08:32 AM in Autoblogography, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Poke, Project Goad, Shoot Me Now, We Are the Enemy | | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

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November 05, 2009

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

*

Cedarlane
Medcenter
  • 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.

Bedient

*

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.

*

Posted at 08:29 AM in aargocalyptic, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Poke, Project Goad, Shoot Me Now, We Are the Enemy | | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

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November 03, 2009

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

Fleabusnov1

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

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

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

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

*
Work2

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

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

*

SONG OF AMERICA

Rob Cook

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

*

So what I posted this before?

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

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November 01, 2009

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

Backporch

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

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

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

Mefleabus

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

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

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

*

ANXIETY'S PROSODY

A.R. Ammons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

The Connells?

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

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October 30, 2009

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

Fleabus feb 2

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.

*
103009

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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:

Posted at 07:40 AM in Ask Fleabus, Autoblogography, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Poke, Project Goad, Shoot Me Now, We Are the Enemy | | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

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October 28, 2009

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

Fleabusoct23

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.

*

*

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

Posted at 08:22 AM in aargocalyptic, Ask Fleabus, Autoblogography, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, DCU/Soccer, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Poke, Project Goad, Shoot Me Now, We Are the Enemy | | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

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October 26, 2009

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

Fleabus + Dandelion

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.

*

*

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!

Posted at 01:33 PM in aargocalyptic, Ask Fleabus, Autoblogography, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, DCU/Soccer, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Poke, Project Goad, Shoot Me Now, We Are the Enemy | | Comments (11) | TrackBack (0)

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October 23, 2009

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

Fleabusdec3

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?

1023090802

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.

*

*

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?

Posted at 08:12 AM in aargocalyptic, Ask Fleabus, Autoblogography, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Poke, Project Goad, Shoot Me Now, We Are the Enemy | | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

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October 21, 2009

Their Existence as an Awareness of Losing Their Sense of Existence

Fleabus13

I was driving last night and, confession, listening to the Redskin-owned local sports station, and I heard one of the co-hosts, a guy one year older than me who grew up five miles from me who now lives six miles from me and who broadcasts from a building three miles from me, emotionally and forcefully defend himself against a listener's accusations that he wasn't a "true fan" because of his abject and vitriolic and passionate disgust with the shittiness of the object of his faith's adoration.

(Confession: my first team love was the Washington Redskins. I remember Elric's parents driving us around the backroads of MOCO on Sunday afternoons in Elric's father's blue Pontiac convertible listening to Steve Gilmartin and Mel Campbell on WMAL, the only way to get live home games in the mid-to-late 1960s. Sonny Jurgensen and Chris Hanburger. That I'm delighting in the clusterfuck that is Little Danny Helmetball proves devotion can be dammed and redirected but never completely unbaptized.)

For all my bitchandmoan, I'm nowhere near abandoning Uonbiatmead, which doesn't boast an Peterangelostic Snydermonster to help me past my roobity (though Praayhnme is getting there), and my stoopidity as a negotiator - and everything is a negotiation - remains: I still always settle for a handjob called better-than-shittier.

Then bitchandmoaning and the defiant defense of bitchandmoaning, the highest, most privileged reward of the happily disappointed devout. Winning isn't the prize of faith.

*

Echoct091021

*

POORLY GROUNDED NATIONS

Keith Waldrop

And an inability to comprehend the
flow of time. We need only think of statements
by everybody. I cannot call my-
self myself. Up to this point, the dreamer
is dreaming, but now his dream
begins. Unities of recollection, separate
from one another. Thus is this present
world, there are different injuries.

I never hear them. The come
uninvited. Silver tissue. Garlands
between them. Any activity may produce
music. Aware of their existence as an
awareness of losing their sense of ex-
istence: vague, general, nameless, like
a nothing or the absolute. I am dead. I am
not alive, a music of exceeding shrillness.

May be pleasantly illustrated in the
following way. Light on the head. Felicitous,
contains some fabrication. I am
forced to shout out, trace failure to the stage
when plans are construed. I see a table
before me. I am reminded of another
table. I place table besides table. Separate
worlds. In what sense are we talking?

*

The original:

Posted at 10:45 AM in aargocalyptic, Ask Fleabus, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, DCU/Soccer, DCU09, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Poke, Project Goad, Shoot Me Now, We Are the Enemy | | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

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October 19, 2009

A Mistake Like All Pleas for Forgiveness, but He Persisted Blindly, Obstinately, Each Day, as though in the End It Would Relieve Her to Know the Particulars

DSCN0142

Why, yes I do think Obamalame is starting a nasty foodfight with Fox just to distract the base with such luxurious pig-loathing that his inevitable obamalame capitulation on the public option (and banksters, etc) goes not only unpunished, it generates a swell of contributions that will fund further capitulations.

Don't you?

*

Clief-stefanon

   

Lautenbach

   

Waldrop 

  • Lucky for me I've got access to a university library's stacks.
  • Vollmann reviews new Caputo, and likes because "the reason I enjoyed “Crossers” as much as I did, is that it hints at how difficult it can be to draw conclusions — about evil, about Ben and above all about the crossers themselves," a sentiment that isn't surprising to anyone who reads Vollmann.
  • Obscure Sound reviews (and digs) the new Flaming Lips, provides two songs. Will be buying next payday. Everything I've heard I've like.
  • How Pandora works. I never use it (not out of any bias, it just doesn't occur to me), but Earthgirl does all the time.
  • Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.

*

PLEA FOR FORGIVENESS

Rodney Jones

The old man William Carlos Williams, who had been famous
    for kindness
And for bringing to out poetry a mannerless speaking,

In the aftermath of a stroke was possessed by guilt
And began to construct for his wife the chronicle

Of his peccadillos, an unforgivable thing, a mistake
Like all pleas for forgiveness, but he persisted

Blindly, obstinately, each day, as though in the end
It would relieve her to know the particulars

Of affairs she must have guessed and tacitly permitted,
For she encouraged his Sunday drives across the river.

His poems suggest as much; anyone can see it.
The thread, the binding of the voice, is a single hair

Spliced from the different hairs of different lovers,
And it clings to his poems, blond and dark,

Tangled and straight, and runs on beyond the page.
I carry it with me, saying, "I have found it so."

It is a world of human blossoming, after all.
But the old woman, sitting there like rust -

For her there would be no more poems of stolen
Plums, of round and firm trunks of young trees,

Only the candor of the bedpan and fouled sheets,
When the could no longer have been any hope

That he would recover, when the thing she desired
Was not his health so much as his speechlessness.

*

Posted at 08:11 AM in Ask Fleabus, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, DCU/Soccer, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Project Goad, Shoot Me Now, We Are the Enemy | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

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