My Inability to be quiet impairs my ability to shut up

Willam Gass, in the latest Harpers, in a long essay about Katherine Anne Porter entitled Go Forth and Falsify:

Whether unconsciously or by intent, the writer chooses subjects, adopts a tone, considers an order for the release of meaning, arrives at the rhythm, selects a series of appropriate sounds, determines the diction and measures the pace, turns the referents of certain words into symbols, establishes connections with companionable paragraphs, sizes up each sentence's intended significance, and, if granted good fortune because each decision might have been otherwise, achieves not just this or that bit of luminosity or suggestiveness but her own unique lines of language, lines that produce the desired restitution of the self.

Turning to my bookshelf, time to resuscitate this corpse

while considering this post's original headliner was a mockery not of Digby's BLARGING about the GOP's and media's gleeful and sloppy desperation to tie Blagojovich to Obama, but of me, who would, along with Digby et al, be gleefully and sloppily and desperately doing the equal and opposite had McCain won the election and had his own subsequent Blagojovich.

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• Boston Globe's fabulous photo's of the Greek riots. Look how happy everybody looks.
• Smart class/dumb class divisions exist by any name.
• In the foreseeable future.
• Fuck Harry Reid.
• Fuck Metro.
• I must admit, this is a persuasive argument.
• More real life background for 2666.
• Short Bolano short story. (How do you do tildes over Ns?)
• James Wood's top ten. Commence shrieking.
• Some pre-shrieking.
• New Richard Power's in October 2009!
• New Vollmann this July! All 1296 pages of it.
• A meditation of the nature of novels.
• The launching of the above.
• This is excellent news.
• I'm with Ian Brown: reunion's always suck.
• More downloads from Scott.
• Obscure Sound's fabulous top 50 has started - with generous mp3s. Here's 50-41. Here's 40-31. His #46 is my #4.  His #31 is my you'll have to wait and see.

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New Albert Goldbarth!

OCTOBER

Another poem struck into being by seeing
a vee of geese overhead, a wing-shape

that's composed of its several dozen element-wings
on loan to the greater body. This becomes an argument

(of isolation versus community) given immediate,
visible form; a stream is taking the mountain

away, but at a pace we'll never see—unlike
this sky-adorning passage timed

by mere coincidence to human comprehension.
And we learn, by the absorption of these single, scattered creatures

into one majestic pattern, how a proper use
of "beauty" is in service

to "beatitude"—the rising of a concept
into something more, some larger, further order

of existence. I suspect I'm not
the only one who's stood here with the groceries leaking

out of the paper bag, and the volts that bump in the heart
like small trapped minnows of longing, and our evanescence

burning in the way that a leaf is a green flame
on its ordained path to orange—here, defined

by "the futility of work in the face of destruction"
(the phrase is Rachel Cohen's)—and looked up

to imagine he belonged with them, but
was abandoned, missed the call

to gather and to lift as one, so now
can only stare at their increasing distance,

maybe in the way that, once, the Lost Tribes
looked to see the rest of Israel

continue warring and praying and sowing
and loving by starlight

into the future without them.

From Poetry Daily.

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My #4 (which I bought in Santa Cruz, which was in this calendar year though it seems seven years ago):