BLCKDGRD

Mehful

I can't stop thinking about this lunch, Jason's admonition.

Rubes once competed for status in a mythical battle to see who could influence the most change in a .06% less shitty world. Sheeyit, now the competition is for status in who can predict the shittiest shittiness of inescapable and apocalyptic clusterfuck. It's fiercer, rubier, sh-way too much more fun!

Meh. What's needed is a sillyass Star Trek allusion:

Fleabus, in the sun-window, stretching.

*

Went here last night, courtesy of This Guy, would bought PRIMO seats six rows up and directly behind the goal for me and Planet as an early birthday present for Planet. Only Planet and my second hockey game ever, first this close to the ice.

Unbelievably fast - the players, the shots. I never learned how to ice skate, so I can only begin to imagine the athleticism needed. Much fun, but Planet had much more fun than me - she brought her camera, took over 200 photos, which shows how much she enjoyed the new subject matter.

I'm hesitant to say too much in such a mehful mood, though I can't resist this one snark, which of course says more about my rubery than anything else: Halfway through the third period the Caps are about go on a power play and a TV timeout is called. To kill time during the play-stoppage, a montage of movie clips is played, scenes of glorification of teamwork and victory, followed by the PR announcer screaming exhortations for the fans to STAND! and MAKE NOISE! and all about the arena, Caps fans rise in their red shirts and stomp and bounce and scream, it's deafening, impressive, and then the puck is dropped and they all.... Sit their asses down and shut the fuck up?

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• White man absolves police of racism.
• Crackerstanis.
• Crackerstanis.
• Thoughts on Lakoff's "Obama Code."
• The shittiness of the World's Shittiest Human shouldn't surprise me (though it does).
• Pastor Gerson is a oozing chancre of pussiness.
• Why the economy is not as bad as you think.
• Snap!
• I've been here.
• The End of Poverty?
• Mediation on "real" writing.

*

A favorite, posted before:

I've Got a Jolly Roger, it's black and white and fast, So Get Out Your Skull and Cross-Bones and Run it up your mast

Had lunch with a favorite English professor, one of America's leading Miltonists. In class, discussing Comus or Samson Agonistes or Paradise Lost, he'd start reading from the book, would close his eyes, his hands would slowly lower the book to the table, he'd recite as if in a trance, smiling adoringly, whole sections of the poems... which isn't what makes him a good scholar, but which I found extraordinarily impressive, the love as much as his memory.

He's 67 years old, he's a klutzy whale, he's a strictly observant Orthodox Jew, he's - I mean this as respectfully as possible - ridiculously, guilelessly, happy and optimistic. He laughs in childish surprise at ideas he'd never considered, genuinely delights at your thoughts as a child at a new toy. He asks me what I've been reading, what I've been listening to, what I've been writing, what I've been thinking about, and he's honestly eager to listen to my answers.

All conversations these days must negotiate The Clusterfuck. He asks, I answer, he gawks, you think what will happen, 15% unemployment, the forfeiture of tens of millions' vested retirement benefits, civil disorder, domestic terrorism, revolution in second and third world countries, global war over dwindling resources and....

Jesus Fucking Christ, he says, I hope you're not pridefully invested in your prophesy. Like Milton, I joked. Milton died poor, blind, miserable, alone, he said, and every generation falls in love with its own apocalypse and fails to achieve it, if only barely and not for lack of trying.

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• This is related to any discussion about shame.
• This is related to any discussion about shame.
• This is related to any discussion about shame.
• The Obama Code.
• Dead Enders.
• Drum Machine.
• On the broken window fallacy of economic development.
• UK's Democrats suck too.
• Pastor Gerson is truly the most sanctimonious assclown on the planet.
• Happiest days of Pig-American lives.
• Happiest days of Pig-American lives.
• Bobby Jindal: America's Slumdog Millionaire.
• Moral degenerate.
• Briefly.
• Explain this.
• A question worth considering.
• The impoverishment of experience.
• Salvagepunk. Do.
• TEV reposts James Wood's list of best books since 1945, which I post solely to ask, when was the last time you even thought of Howard Nemerov or Amy Clampitt?

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Amy Clampitt?

THE KINGFISHER

In a year the nightingales were said to be so loud

they drowned out slumber, and peafowl strolled screaming

beside the ruined nunnery, through the long evening

of a dazzled pub crawl, the halcyon color, portholed

by those eye-spots’ stunning tapestry, unsettled

the pastoral nightfall with amazements opening.

Months later, intermission in a pub on Fifty-fifth Street

found one of them still breathless, the other quizzical,

acting the philistine, puncturing Stravinsky—“Tell

me, what was that racket in the orchestra about?”—

hauling down the Firebird, harum-scarum, like a kite,

a burnished, breathing wreck that didn’t hurt at all.

Among the Bronx Zoo’s exiled jungle fowl, they heard

through headphones of a separating panic, the bellbird

reiterate its single chong, a scream nobody answered.

When he mourned, “The poetry is gone,” she quailed,

seeing how his hands shook, sobered into feeling old.

By midnight, yet another fifth would have been killed.

A Sunday morning, the November of their cataclysm

(Dylan Thomas brought in in extremis to St. Vincent’s,

that same week, a symptomatic datum) found them

wandering a downtown churchyard. Among its headstones,

while from unruined choirs the noise of Christendom

poured over Wall Street, a benison in vestments,

a late thrush paused, in transit from some grizzled

spruce bog to the humid equatorial fireside: berry-

eyed, bark-brown above, with dark hints of trauma

in the stigmata of its underparts—or so, too bruised

just then to have invented anything so fancy,

later, re-embroidering a retrospect, she had supposed.

In gray England, years of muted recrimination (then

dead silence) later, she could not have said how many

spoiled takeoffs, how many entanglements gone sodden,

how many gaudy evenings made frantic by just one

insomniac nightingale, how many liaisons gone down

screaming in a stroll beside the ruined nunnery;

a kingfisher’s burnished plunge, the color

of felicity afire, came glancing like an arrow

through landscapes of untended memory: ardor

illuminating with its terrifying currency

now no mere glimpse, no porthole vista

but, down on down, the uninhabitable sorrow.

*

Born 66 years ago today

Sixty Today, His Shoes Cost More Than Your House

My 103 Degree Fever Broke, But...

Re: Obamagasm: The Gameplayer.

SOOEY! the pig-squeals tomorrow will awe.

My 103 Degree Fever

My 103 Degree Fever

Holy shit, I just fever-dreamed Frank O'Neill scored!

Adding, after the Cheap Trick finally stopped its endless loop this morning at four, jeebus, look what took its place

Adding, except for the throat-grack and nose-snerg, I don't mind high fevers - in doses, legal doses - at all.

My 103 Degree Fever

Complicity Shame Complicity

What if they threw a shame culture and nobody came? Look at those links to America's libertarian concern trolls (but be sure to read the Rittelmeyer - she's interested in much more than The Atlantic's assclowns are).

Suddenly, shame and it's lack is America's direst social dysfunction, coincident with the greatest clusterfuck facing America's elite in generations, a clusterfuck caused by the elite's shameless pursuit of greater power, the clusterfuck blamed on the white-trash girl knocked-up by the gang-banger and their shameful shamelessness at the global economy their fuck wrecked.

S'funnynot, humiliation TV and surveillance TV and creepy cop TV forensically celebrating deviancy and prime-time soap operas with their bip-booping music effervescently celebrating immoral mischief and 24-hour cable news frothing at what's most shamelessly exploitable, we've been eating shamelessness fed to us as entertainment by our overlords to distract us from our overlords' shamelessness.

Abu Ghraib? Watch I Wanna Be Paris Hilton's New Best Friend instead, luxuriating in the guilt.

UPDATE: Dear Leader goes here too.

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• Basic Capitalist Principles, adding everything is negotiation, especially the terms of the negotiation.
• Gassing up the ATV's.
• The Shittiest, Most Shameless, Human.
• Annals of assholery.
• More:

• Too weird to live, to rare to die.
• Friday Hope Blogging.
• Oscars for the Great Recession.
• Publishing Industry: A Thought Experiment.
• This year's Book Bracketology has Max as one judge. Here's a review of past tournaments for your betting advantage.
• Poetry and the Great(ness) Game. Beyond the inanity, any fool who cites Donald Hall as either a significant poet or significant critic is an asshat. (Disclosure: Hall is my brother-in-law's godfather, and I've dealt with the fraud - Hey Don! Write another fucking poem about Jane dying and your magnificently unique pain! - though it's been years. He's, what's the word I'm looking for.... shameless.)

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Luckily woke up with this in my head, I shamelessly put it in yours

Theme Song February 2009

!@!

I left the novel I'd packed for London on the airplane by accident. It was my first overnight flight; blurry, I put it in the netted pocket in front of me, walked off the plane without it. That night, in a Trafalgar Square bookstore, I bought The Unconsoled, the only Ishiguro I hadn't read, which I found accidentally because someone who'd been looking at it lazily stuck it in the Ms where I was looking to see if the new Hilary Mantel had been released in England.

Dislocation and coincidence/circumstance and the uncanny, major Ishiguro themes, uncannily the very themes I'd been thinking about. Serendipitously, the perfect novel for where my head's been lately.

Elkin and Barth and Harington and Ishiguro, hand me a page ripped from any of their books, I know who I'm reading, which probably doesn't explain why The Unconsoled's narrator Ryder reminded me constantly of Elkin's Bobbo Druff and Barth's Ebenezer Cooke. Or it does.