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November 16, 2009

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

Zert

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

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

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

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

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

VIP-ads340x100-Serious-Pro

Clowns

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

A LETTER

Anthony Hecht

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Posted at 10:17 AM in aargocalyptic, Ask Fleabus, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, DCU/Soccer, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Poke, Shoot Me Now, We Are the Enemy | | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

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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.

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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 11, 2009

"Hreapha," Her Dog Will Say

Harington

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

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

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

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

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

*

Flbs 

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

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

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Ballantine
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THE SILKEN TENT

Robert Frost

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

*

Fifty-six today:

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

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November 09, 2009

Offering the Desk Puppy Biscuits

One

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.

Two

Three

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.

 

Pens 

 

Posted at 10:43 AM in Autoblogography, Books, Current Affairs, Daggregator, DCU/Soccer, Mocomofo, Music, My Complicity, obamapology, obamapostasy, Poem, Poke, Shoot Me Now | | Comments (21) | TrackBack (0)

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November 07, 2009

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

Fleabusminus

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

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

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Fleabusminus

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YOU SMELL OF DIVES WHERE A PRICK LIKE YOU IS HATED

Cal Bedient

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

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

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November 05, 2009

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

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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.

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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

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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.

*

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.

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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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