BLCKDGRD

So, Mujo Goes To A Nudist Beach and Sees Everyone Talking On Cell Phones. He Crams Toilet Paper Up His Ass, Leaving a Tail, and Says, Look! I'm a Fax Machine!

Read this:

For the English alone, but more for the mordant and devastatingly witty depiction of the impotency of self in history and the writer's soul in purgatory. The best post-911 novel I've read since Powers' Echo Maker.

The ending is a cop-out, but all endings in novels are cop-outs by necessity. Now that I'm reading better (s'funny, the timing), I remember completely how ending a novel satisfactorily - for both author and reader - is the unsolvable problem.

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• But it is good politics.
• But it is good politics.
• True, though who wasn't prepared for the shit-eating?
• Bipartisanship is another word for complicity.
• This could be fun.
• Any doubt we'd be writing the same posts, if .06% truer, had McCain won?
• Your 2012 GOP Preznit nominee?
• The courageous foresight of assholes.
• The courageous compassion of assholes.
• Christers scare the bejeebus out of me.
• Your photoshop of the day.
• Obama's two constituencies.
• What if HRC signs on for State?
• What is the Real Moco?
• Sockpuppetry.
• Rules-lawyering.
• Extreme Beer. Two words: Brooklyn Pilsner.
• New Coover short story (sub rqrd, but you sub to Harpers, so no worries.)
• Meditation on Bond girls. It needs mentioning the two best Bond girls were Steed girls first.

Updates later. Or not.

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So I email good friend Dr Z, a big fan of Steely Dan, this, and he responds:

The other thing is that, besides being believable, and knowing Fagen possibly factual, it is equally funny or not funny whether you like or hate Steely Dan. It is a masterful inside joke.

Almost thirty years ago, while regularly visiting the frontal lobes with Park Mrebilic and Kark Mantarow, I listened to Steely Dan according to Park and Kark's obsessiveness, and it didn't suck.

Think of the classic Grateful Dead joke - what did the Deadheads say when the dope ran out? - and substitute Steely Dan, and true.

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Quick, get this in your head!

S'not Butter

I'm not going to write about this all over again, but remember when Clapton did Michelob and we screamed what a sold-out piece of shit he was? (h/t S,N!)

The fucking Decembrist's shittiest faux eastern-European song is selling XBox crappola. Johnny, take the money and run.

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I don't play tournaments because (a) I suck and (b) it's no fun playing with people who suck as much as I do but don't admit they suck as much as I do and rules-lawyer their suckitude, but if you want to see where I spend some of MY FAVORITE HOURS, the shots are from Seneca, me and Bromark's home course, from an A-tier tournament this past weekend.

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• Good Snort of the Day!
• Smartest thing you'll read today.
• Politely calling Deborah Howell a stupid sack of shit.
• Argument from the Left of the tug-of-war.
• Fothermucking Fobin Ricker.
• Yes, yes you are a corporate whore.
• Best John Lennon allusion of the day.
• More on Hyde.
• Do I need to read Malcolm Gladwell if for topical applications only?
• Victor Serge. I read The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and despite the blurb's comparison to Ernest Hemingway, it was a terrific novel.
• Hemon interviewed.

Updates later. Or not.

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Johnny Lydon?

Because There's Always a New Order Song in My Head

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• Read THIS, if only to remember what grad school was like.
• If you're gonna get smacked for your obamadore, get smacked good.
• Hint.
• Change.
• Myths?
• Reconciliation is another word for complicity.
• Reconciliation?

           OK, that was easy...   To. Make. Fun. Of.

• Disingenuous or stupid?
• Last gasp for whitey?
• Last gasp for whitey?
• This sounds promising.
• Bestpost o'week's always Friday Hope Blogging.
• Most depressing thing you'll read today. 
• Week for week, nothing sucks quite like WaPo Book World.
• Is it time I give Hughes another chance?
• My third favorite teacher's favorite novelist's new book.
• I liked Trickster Makes the World.
• I spent many mid-twenties' hours reading Iris Murdoch (go to bottom of the link to see a photo of a copy of a book a certain Blondie stole from me). (Anyone who can find me a video of Sam Kinison's "I Want My Records Back" wins a pint and eternal gratitude.)

Updates later. Or not.

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Because there's always a New Order song in my head.

gnarlmaze: the gnarling

Joe's a turncoat bastard and etc whose influence on the election was precisely zero despite his assholist best, but why would you, if you're Obama, make Joe Fucking Lieberman the first partisan fight (and it would be a partisan fight) of your pre-presidency?  UPDATE: Leahy!

Think about this:

"President-elect Barack Obama is pushing Congress this year to approve as much as $50 billion to save cash-starved U.S. automakers and appoint a czar or board to oversee the companies, a move that would require President George W. Bush's support, people familiar with the matter said."

That's the partisan fight you pick in your pre-presidency.

I keep confusing my disappointment in Obama, who's absolutely shitty as The Guy Who Does Exactly What Pleases Me, with my admiration for Obama, the best goddamn game-player I've ever seen. UPDATE: Best goddamn game-player I've ever seen.

If there was a better game, he'd be better at that too.

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• There isn't a better game, just a shit-sandwich.
• Babs to run again in 2010. When Van Hollen signed on for another gig with DCCC, it was clear, and this isn't official, but....
• Opostasy: endorsed by Blair.
• Told you: "The gravity of Fomalhaut b is the key reason that the vast dust belt surrounding Fomalhaut is cleanly sculpted into a ring and offset from the star," Kalas said.
• Sfunny, she don't sound Alaskan. Sullivan hyperventilates, but really, after eight years with Monkey Boy after 911 convinced him he was destined and smart, the Republicans would surely surround a March 2009 President Palin with honest puppeteers, bwa, ha, and ha.
• I've always liked Robert Reich.
• GOP blind spot.
• No, fuck you. Deeply.
• What you can buy me for Presentmas. I mean, I own them already, and so? UPDATE: More.
• 2666? If all goes as planned (it won't) I'll start Sunday evening. For the record, I really liked By Night in Chile and really liked Distant Star and really disliked (and abandoned, having given myself the moral licentiousness to quit novels I don't dig) Savage Detectives. Hope for 2666 though:  every novel, before starting, I open randomly and read one page so I can give myself a cheap feeling of deja vu when I come across it in sequence, and the page I randomly turned to, page 403, nabbed me. UPDATE: More.

UPDATES

• Two more responses to Zadie Smith's NYRB article, one from Richard, the other from Wyatt Mason.
• I don't get Auster (or haven't since Moon Palace), but then I don't think Dirda particularly perceptive either.
• I'm 3/4ths through Hemon's latest, and wow. Subscription required, but you subscribe to NYRB anyway so there's no problem. Review itself is interesting beyond the review.

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Why this is in my head I've no idea, but pull it out of your memory chambers.

Nap

That's Nap, and he's (we think he's a he) adopted us.

He's one of four ferals living under our shed: his mother, who's hopelessly feral and been living there for a couple of years, plus two sisters (we think, judging by how much bigger Nap is to the two, a gray and white tuxedo and a black and white tuxedo). 

The sisters trust me enough to run to within two feet of me when I come out with their food, but Nap, Nap desperately wants to be buddies, and he's funny and smart and affectionate and talkative and mega-purring. Great cat. All can live under and in our shed as long as they like, but Nap, I hope Nap stays for years. Great cat.

We're working with Metro Ferals to have mom's and kittens' reproductive organs snipped or scooped. They'll provide cages and help us trap them, and for $50 a cat they will spade or neuter them and then return them to our yard.

So, a plug: if you dig cats and wanna throw Metro Ferals (or a similar group where you live) a little $$$ for good work and/or are looking for a free kitten, do the good thing.

Nap photos will get better as soon as Planet starts taking them.

Itch, Scratch, Lose Bet w/Self

Whatever my preferred torture of Joe Lieberman, no practical political advantage is gained by the gleefully sloppy fulfillment of my daydream of a televised whipping of Lieberman's clown-jowls to ribbons with a sharpened fishing rod.

Michael Corleone, after discovering Fredo's betrayal, tells Fredo's bodyguard that nothing bad can happen to Fredo until after the death of the Corleone matriarch, and until Democrats control 61 Senate seats not counting Lieberman's, Obama can postpone Lieberman's last fishing trip. Keep dreaming, rubes.

Guantanamo's closing is the bone thrown us. In the scheme of facile symbolism, it's brilliant: appeal to our rubier sensibilities, thwarting our bwrtz against Lieberman in exchange for the nobler act of closing an embarrassing PR disaster.

Opening Guantanamo appeased the Right's rubes, closing Guantanamo appeases us. The difference may be only the competency of keeping the nastiness out of our consciousness, of stopping the pings in our conscience. Isn't that .06% less shitty? Leave the gun, take the cannolis.

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• Us too, different, better, less-shit flavored flavor, but same dogma, n?
  
• True, plus the whole smack at women, but proof that GOP does see POTUS as puppetry more than braintrust. Palin is less qualified now than W was then?
• Opostasy: Broder approves.
• McAuliffistering Virginia!
• Peggy Noonan took me to the movies.
• Sweet and tender hooligans.
• Can a one-eyed fat man be king?
• What geek uses Star Trek allusions?

Oh.

• Fellowjeff going into hiatus?
• This is causing good chaw.
• Good chaw. FWIW, I reject any scale but my own, and so do you.
• More chaw, same subject.
• More chaw, re: Smith in NYRB.

Updates later. Or not.

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In my head. Be in yours.

Gladden Me With Sinfulness

Adding, one week ago today I was dancing, you were dancing, with obamagasmic bwaha, one fucking week ago (feels now 27 years, yes?).

Adding, every print news organization, every cable media organization, no matter how halved and quartered and vacuumed I feel, they still have bullshit to shovel to people jonesing to consume bullshit.

Opostasy will suck, but not as much as eight years of Obamahologram Hal-ling you daily to buy a fucking t-shirt. Jeebusfuck, it'll be like living with that creepy doctor on Star Trek: Seven's Tits.

Still, until Obama does something substantial much less something substantially shitty, do like me and self-righteously pretend to not pay attention, almost convincing myself I've convinced myself I'm not paying attention while thinking about Anthony Hecht's

SESTINA d'INVERNO

Here in this bleak city of Rochester
where there are twenty-seven words for "snow,"
Not all of them polite, the wayward mind
Basks in some Yucatan of its own making,
Some coppery, sleek lagoon, or cinnamon island
Alive with lemon tints and burnished natives,

And O that we were there. But here the natives
Of this grey, sunless city of Rochester
Have sown whole mines of salt about their land
(Bare ruined Carthage that it is) while snow
Comes down as if The Flood were in the making.
Yet on that ocean Marvell called the mind

An ark sets forth which is itself the mind,
Bound for some pungent green, some shore whose natives
Blend coriander, cayenne, mint in making
Roasts that would gladden the Earl of Rochester
With sinfulness, and melt a polar snow.
It might be well to remember that an island

Was blessed heaven once, more than an island,
The grand, utopian dream of a noble mind.
In that kind climate the mere thought of snow
Was but a wedding cake; the youthful natives,
Unable to conceive of Rochester,
Made love, and were acrobatic in the making.

Dream as we may, there is far more to making
Do than some wistful reverie of an island,
Especially now when hope lies with the Rochester
Gas and Electric Co., which doesn't mind
Such profitable weather, while the natives
Sink, like Pompeians, under a world of snow.

The one thing indisputable here is snow,
The single verity of heaven's making,
Deeply indifferent to the dreams of the natives,
And the torn hoarding-posters of some island.
Under our igloo skies the frozen mind
Holds to one truth: it is grey, and called Rochester.

No island fantasy survives Rochester,
Where to the natives destiny is snow
That is neither to our mind nor of our making.

like I do every Fall that first time each Fall when, outside in early dark with wind ripping through leafless trees, cold reminds me it can kill me, which is only one reason I post this poem every Fall.

Better awe. Fake it while you can.

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• American Conservatism: An Autopsy.
• So, where does Obama go from here?
• Six questions.
• This is what I said yesterday about Limbaugh.
• More on Crackerstanis rearming.
• Purple Line, fwrtz.
• Move Cider Barrel?

 

That Germantown long dead. (h/t Gaithersblog)

• Ian McEwan, the world's most overrated novelist, please STFU.
• That link found in TEV's lit links.
• New lit aggregator.
• I am not alone.
• Novel 2.0.

UPDATES!

• McCain: The Fall.
  
• A limited (and correct) defense of Palin.
• Lomborg excoriated.
• Who devour widows' houses?
• American Fascists.
• How Humanitarianism Went to War.
• All the propaganda that's fit to print.
• Worse pop song ever?

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Better awe:

Cubicled toot delcibuc

Planet, Fleabus, United, Ashbery, and this Frost poem:

The Silken Tent...

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the 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.

I'm trying to remember what makes me happy other than being angry, but om before beauty does not come easily to me. I'm going to try to last another week before engaging in debates like these, and another week before scratching my obamapostastic itch.

Pint bet I can't, though I'll probably need to write about The Feral Kittens Living Under Our Shed

to make it through. (And I claim a KABOOM! Exemption in lieu of clearly kaboomable KABOOM!)

Click pictures, yo. (Oh, and that Fleabus is best wallpaper ever - let me know, I'll send you the jpg.)

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• Elric in Mahabalipuram.
• Why would Democrats want Rush Limbaugh et al to STFU?
• Castrated dogs sniffing each others' butts.
• The balllessest of all on sniffing each other's butts.
• Harrumph of the Month.
• Phallibertarians.
• Gipper Reborn.
• Not quite, or West of I-35?
• Bullet dodged, for now.
• UPDATE: Exactly right. 
• UPDATE: Exactly snort.
• New Liberalism?
• Posting a link to obamapostasy isn't the same as writing about it.
• Joe Lieberman = Larry Johnson.
• 2666 American release today. Do I buy it this evening?
• UPDATE: Yes.
  
• Meta-blogging.

Updates later. Or not.

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In my head. Be in yours.

Blogcrashblogsplatblog

Crash....

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• Fuckfully, I fucking never say fuck.
• Obama's gaffe-filled presser.
• Anne Applebaum: scolding moron or moronic scold?
• Robin Fucking Ficker.
• More on Obamakids private v public.
• Bold is another word for WTF, and I'm game.
• The obastard is delaying your apostasy!
• Bwahahahaha (check the URL).
• I'm not a celebrant, but Zappadan is coming.
• The Rise of Overparenting. True that. No names here of course, but I've been told by other parents that we let Planet make too many of her own decisions, and since she hasn't fucked one up yet and we plan to continue to give her as much autonomy as she feels comfortable with and handles responsibly, we are poor parents. Fuckfully, I fucking never say fuck.

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Splat....

Postobamagasmbliss

How's this for a start:

Transition advisers to President-elect Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team.

It's not building a gulag on the Bering Strait and sentencing Exxon-Mobil executives to ten years hard labor there building a canal to nowhere, but it's a start. UPDATE: Dissenting view. UPDATE TO UPDATE: ?

Obamapologetics: the art of negotiating my justification of Obamaco (trademark!) by Obamacoists (trademark!) versus WIBDI.

A starting preposition: Expect to be unreasonably disappointed in direct proportion to your unreasonable demands and expections. No one voted for a different empire, just a better empire.

Click Fleabus, yo.

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• Underwhelmed.
• A plea to Obama from a parent of DC public school kids.
• Rearming in America.
• I say give Fred Thompson another chance.
• I am not too small to post Rich Lowry's post-fireworks column and giggle.
• Chris Van Hollen getting some press, yo. Wonder if he'd run if Bab's doesn't in 2010. UPDATE: Monday's Fix in the Post.
• What, he's not a terrorist?
• Your photoshop (and read) of the day.

Updates later. Or not.

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Wasp Star (Apple Venus 2) is in permanent rotation (and this song is odds-on to be theme song, if not this month, someday):