BLCKDGRD

Purging the Glow

Saturday, the least read blogday, is now ipecac-day, the day I can purge a recurring thought so I can move on to my next obsessive thought, or in this case move on from obamawe to a more honest obamapostasy.

Consider the rise to power, how smartly, fluently, smoothly, easily - yes, easily - some black guy you never heard of before his keynote speech four years ago at the Democratic convention became the President-Elect of the United States. It's.... stunning.

What if airports and bridges and high schools and federal buildings are named after him, what if Obama's the fifth head carved into Rushmore, what if Obama's faced is minted on the dollar coin that finally kills the greenback?

Snortle, but we are watching the most innately talented politician of our lifetime, to come so far so fast so black, a political savant, a Glenn Gould or Lionel Messi or name your own prodigy. What have you seen in his rise to power that suggests he won't be as successful as president (and yes, defining "success" for an American president is the moral problem) as he was getting elected president?

2012 pint-betting window open now: Obama wins 2012 (provided he survives) by more electoral college votes than he did last Tuesday.

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• Newspaper covers.
• Read this for more obamawe.
• Read this. wooOOwooOOwoo. whaaWHAAwhaa (I know, wrong movie, but).
• Sasha's prediction post-mortem (she predicted well).
• The response from Pakistan.
• Irrelevant: the photo album.
• The Resistance: the photo album.
• Deborah Howell is profoundly stupid.
• As profoundly stupid as Robert Nowak?
• Obama destroys the Dems or the Dems destroy Obama?
• Dean v Obama.
• Reagan High Football Rules.
• The future.
• The shithouse of an Eastern Shore has elected a Democrat?
• What if Italy had won the war?
• Please, don't make a movie of Midnight's Children.
• Mason Wyatt on John Leonard, with links to three of Leonard's reviews for NYRB.
• Let the 2666 hype begin.
• A favorite poet reviews Merrill, a not favorite poet.

Updates later. Or not.

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I don't give a flying fuck about the Nats, but jeebus, those are some ugly new uniforms, especially this:

Softball Beer League.

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Your weekend song must be played LOUD:

Dang! or: Dang!

Plot charts?

Completion schemes?

Doh!

Top is Mailer's mapping of Harlot's Ghost, bottom is Barne's mapping of Flaubert's Parrot, both of which I read, neither of which I liked, but finished because once I held some silly-ass rule that if I started a novel I was morally compelled to finish it, no matter how shitty the book. What a fucking rube. (Click the images, yo.)

BIG H/T! to Elegant Variation for the reminding me of at least six of my most disorganized closets.

Soehnoes!

While you were obamadancing:

Tom Soehn will return for a third season as head coach of D.C. United in 2009, the Insider learned today.

Your assignment: go here, listen to Love the World.

Dance dammit. Like you had a choice.

UPDATE: St Stephen with a rose, Goff? is a Deadhead?

As I picked up my matches and was closing the door, I had one of those flashes I'd been there before, been there before.

PostPartum pre-threnody

Updated links below.

Folks didn't impulsively converge on city centers when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter or when Bill Clinton beat 41. Folks didn't converge on city centers when Bush beat Gore. Strangers didn't cry and hug crying strangers in the streets when W won re-election in 2004. I think it's impossible to over-estimate the emotional significance of this election.

Election over. Governance?

Fellow rubes, a competent, non-embarrassing, imperial manager will please the tribe of American ants just wOOt!ingly. He'll win the division or at least a wildcard berth most seasons, advance deep in the playoffs every couple of years, maybe win a Big Cup once or twice in eight years, and be celebrated as successful because he occasionally beats the jerk-teams that are out there, just as shitty as before but not as awesome as they were when they got to play home and home (w/away goals rules) versus W in knockout. Go Team!

What's exciting about an Obama presidency is that there are precious tiny odds he'll be better than we think and precious tiny odds he suck more than we think, doubling our chances to .12% his tenure won't feel like Lyme Disease.

I want that .12%, Mr LaForge.

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Read this. I saw it this morning. I wrote this in my notebook last night:

What those who love Obama adore, what those who hate Obama fear, is his ability to be whatever avatar that pleases that emotion, from black panther muslim marxist to shitty race-manipulator to confidence man worthy of Melville to (like me, like sartwell) competent manager of a slightly less shitty empire to fully divine obamajeebus. Obama reflects back what's projected on him.

Not exactly the same as what Critchley's saying, but along the same lines. (And the good doctor sort of says sort of the same thing, evoking Ziggy Stardust.)

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• Stepping off the cynicism train.
• Pig-predictions gone wrong.
• Sweet PSYCHE! if true.
• Africa isn't a country? Adding: SNORTLE!
• The Mighty Roar of Pwarriors!
• Every state but Oklahoma had at least one blue county.
• Puerile starts with P too.
• Gonad Joberg.
• Husker Du and creeping obama-dread.

UPDATES

• A Fellowjeff remembers Mudhoney.
• Apples and oranges, blowjobs and torture.
• Lifestyle capitalism.
• Say it loud.
• Kitten Tikka Masala.
• Left-Libertarian Coalition?
• John Leonard has died. His monthly book review column was the first thing I looked at when each new Harpers appeared in my mailbox. If he liked a novel, I tried it and, most times, liked it too.
• UPDATE: Harpers has unlocked their archives and made all Leonard's reviews available. Another reason why Harpers is the my favorite magazine.
• UPDATE: More about Leonard.
  

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Go Team?

Rubedang!

I want to think about this for a day, the maximum time rubes believe required to consider all variables within the continuum before pronouncing indisputable grand theories of astonishing insight.

I do feel safe in reasserting that less shitty is better than more shitty. And click on Fleabus, yo.

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• Obama won Moco by 22 points. (Maps for all here)
• Obama won Baltimore County (Baltimore County) by 13 points.
• McCain only won Fredneck County by 2 points. Dang. By a gazillion outside Fredneck City limits, but dang.
• Karroll Kounty Maryland is still KKKrackerstan.
• Fayette County PA, ancestral home of Dogred's, went McCain by only 602 out of 50K.
• Westmoreland County PA, ancestral home of my Mom's side went McCain by 17 points.

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• Read this. I'm a rube but I'm not alone.
  
• Sure, but anything that makes Glenn Beck's head explode cannot be completely bad.
• The most important thing, though the reluctance by both candidates to mention SCOTUS both (A) makes no sense and (B) makes all the sense in the world.
• I agree: watching Karl Rove as the voice of calm was creepy. (Admit it - you didn't look hoping for some sloppy schadenfreude?)
• Speaking of channel-surfing, CNN was utterly unwatchable AND filled with morons.
• Furnace of American Mythology: the view from Lenin in London.
• Talking Dog barks.
• Man. Date.
• Dewy defeats Grumpy: a view from Indiana.
• E Day confidential.
• I voted yes and feel icky for winning. (Self-interest, mofos: art gets cut first when school districts start shrinking, and me and Earthgirl's got a mortgage. The "why should West Virginia get Maryland's gambling degenerates' money" is kinda convincing too.)
• Hey, Rake's back.

Updates later, probably. Don't hold me to it.

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In my head. Be in yours. Rubes.

Obamagasm

I'll be damned.

I want my pints, mofos.

Waiting

Click, yo.

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• Read this. I am the joke: Did you hear about the dyslexic agnostic insomniac who stayed up all night worrying about the existence of Dog?
• Read this. All true, but again, the superfluousness of one vote aside, the fun of mocking right-wingers aside, there is a chance, a tiny, hopelessly wishful chance, he won't suck. (I'm guessing the latter is who's referenced in the former.)
• Read this. Who knew he had a blog?
  
• Read this. It makes sense, I think, in the precise ratio it doesn't.
• Read this, a new Rae Armantrout poem. READ IT!
• Read this. If you've forgotten who good John Cheever is, stop and remind yourself.
• Read this. I still find PHC trippy, but I'm old.
• Read this. I bailed on Netherland two months ago about page 80; I'm waiting till Wednesday to again attempt fiction, and Remainder is right behind Hemon's Lazurus Project, but Smith gets to points I've been chewing in my reading slump, though a mentor reminded me I once broke a slump with Ishiguro, suggesting I again try his most famous. Quiet, says George, is what I need.

More later. Or not.

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In my head. Be in yours.

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Updated, new links, below.

So I'm flipping channels and land on Texas v Texas Tech (the biggest game in Texas Tech history, Brent Musberger tells me). The cameras pan to an entire section of all white, identically haircut, uniformly red shirt tucked into black pants Texas Tech male students, all ringing cowbells. Each will be executed within the first hours of an Obamadministration in The New Obamamerica or I will throw an obamapostastic hissy-fit of obamoutrageous proportions.

Hah. I lose readership when I engage my cracker-bigotry. I talk about this all the time, driving more readership away. When fully strapped-in to my rooting interest, I remain loyally bullheaded less shitty is better than more shitty and harangue against more shitty. I enjoy it, mofos.

I don't question the integrity of ironists who abdicate their franchise, whether from jaded distrust or the more complicated contortion of arch indifference, though who's over-estimating whose insignificance? Truly, why am I reading you unless I think your full-of-shittiness more entertainingly self-reverential than mine?

(Psst - don't forget to click on Fleabus for full view.)

UPDATE

RE:Hits - Big stories, big kabooms, drive blog-readers to big blogs, away from secondary, tertiary, tangential blogs. Look at TPM's numbers for October:

Absolute Unique Visitors: 3.12 million
Visits: 15.29 million
Page Views: 30.99 million.

That's 30.99 million more page views than this shetty bleg got.

What's interesting to me is that big stories, big kabooms, drive many secondary, tertiary, tangential bloggers quiet. Blogs up and down my rolls have gone into under-drive if not stasis in the final two weeks before the election. 

Metablogging sucks, but I mention this only because it's a phenomenon I've noticed before. I find it fascinating to remember that blogs are different from all currencies of power exactly by nothing.

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• Get your fresh hot obamapostasy!
• Impending doom.
• Waah.
• Faux feminists and the Palin obsession.
• What "in play" means.
• Sasha predicts.
• Bang!
• I was going to slam Broder, but luckily, someone else has.
• Puh-leeze, fuck you. Because.
  
• Photoshop of the day.
• Cultures of violence on the soccer pitch.
• It's hard to be the perfect housewife.
• I'd forgotten about Friday Hope Blogging.
• Elric has pictures from Elephanta Island.
• Read this.
• Read this.
• The word you're looking for is p____.
• This Fucking Election.
• An Olandslide is Omandate for Opig agenda.
• One dishonest moron.
• What the fucking fuck?
• Your photoshop of the day.

Updates later. Or not.

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Adding, what I don't understand from Archdom is acknowledgment of the remarkable historical ping! that Obama's election would represent, even if he's another Demcorp whore.

I know I'm old, preachy, crotchedy, boring, but here's the thing: this is the last presidential campaign of my first half century, and regardless of Tuesday's outcome, I can't imagine ever being this engaged again. If Obama wins, a barrier I never thought I'd live to see breached will be.

I'm old; I'll be astonished.

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duh/om = aargh

Badge-kissing. Of course I'm a rube, demonstratively demonstrative.

This is how they think. We are the enemy. They believe this. We are the enemy.

I'll return to my regular obamapostasies Wednesday.

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• Eat Jim Crow.
• No, fuck you.
• Upscale crap is still crap.
• On Bishop and Lowell. On Bishop and Lowell (sub rqrd).
• Our complicity.

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Never quite got Lowell, but Bishop?

QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams 
hurry too rapidly down to the sea, 
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops 
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion, 
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes. 
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains, 
aren't waterfalls yet, 
in a quick age or so, as ages go here, 
they probably will be. 
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling, 
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, 
slime-hung and barnacled. 

Think of the long trip home. 
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? 
Where should we be today? 
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play 
in this strangest of theatres? 
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life 
in our bodies, we are determined to rush 
to see the sun the other way around? 
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world? 
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework, 
inexplicable and impenetrable, 
at any view, 
instantly seen and always, always delightful? 
Oh, must we dream our dreams 
and have them, too? 
And have we room 
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm? 

But surely it would have been a pity 
not to have seen the trees along this road, 
really exaggerated in their beauty, 
not to have seen them gesturing 
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink. 
--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard 
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune 
of disparate wooden clogs 
carelessly clacking over 
a grease-stained filling-station floor. 
(In another country the clogs would all be tested. 
Each pair there would have identical pitch.) 
--A pity not to have heard 
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird 
who sings above the broken gasoline pump 
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque: 
three towers, five silver crosses. 
--Yes, a pity not to have pondered, 
blurr'dly and inconclusively, 
on what connection can exist for centuries 
between the crudest wooden footwear 
and, careful and finicky, 
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear 
and, careful and finicky, 
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages. 
--Never to have studied history in 
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages. 
--And never to have had to listen to rain 
so much like politicians' speeches: 
two hours of unrelenting oratory 
and then a sudden golden silence 
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes: 

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come 
to imagined places, not just stay at home? 
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right 
about just sitting quietly in one's room? 

Continent, city, country, society: 
the choice is never wide and never free. 
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home, 
wherever that may be?"