Me:Hamster will be using Marc's ticket. Hope you can work work to join us.
Landru:Yeah, I think I'm good.
Me:Excellent. There's a 10% chance we'll witness something remarkable in
the Train Wreck category, 100% chance we'll have a good time.
Landru:The train's already wrecked, dood. We're just watching the zombies stagger out of the flaming wreckage.
Me: Let me rephrase: there's a 10% chance we'll see the zombies turn on each other in an entertaining display.
Landru:I'd be much more confident in that happy possibility if the Angry
Underbite was between the pipes. I think our best shot is Szetela
choking out Pops.
Me:My bet is Gomez saying fuck it around 65, peel off the armband and throw it on the ground, and Benny kovalenkos him. Please please please please please.
Landru:Most excellent. No bet.
Wuss.
Meanwhile, here's Napoleon on my front steps this morning, begging me not to go to work, to stay home and play with him, all while diminishing the value of my home.
Varför detta bara flög i mitt huvud som vet, vara i din:
I first read Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans when released in 2000. Like all Ishiguro, once ten pages in I was hooked. It's uncanny - the first word I think of when thinking of Ishiguro - how it makes me feel color TV came first, black-and-white the innovation. The narrators write fresh nostalgia and call it history. Rereading it these past three days gave me the same effect: my new reading feels older than my first.
I neither begrudge nor deny the preoccupations I bring to my reading of
any novel, so if I didn't read WWWO the first time as primarily a diagnosis and prognosis of Western imperialism in
general and the decline of the British Empire in particular I can only
claim guilt that those concerns in 2000 were less on my mind than they
are today.
The word is uncanny, the existence of multiple worlds operating simultaneously and interactively within each other while oblivious without the others. There's a late scene: Banks, the narrator, quixotically pursuing a fool's mission, in a bunker in no-mans-land in Sino-Japanese War 1937 Shanghai, arguing with a Kuomintang captain who'd risked life to take Banks that far but will go no farther, that his, Banks', personal priorities as a distinguished and established Englishman trump the captain's oath as a Chinese officer's, while in a corner a tortured and unconscious Japanese soldier vomits blood in spasms.
The scene is uncannily dreadful and accurate and - aghast to find yourself smiling grimly in awe - comedic. How it gets to this point - how America and the West got to this point - is why you need read the novel.
UPDATE!*!wOOt!" COUP! I've been saying since forever, our spouted principles about civil liberties are going to be severely tested by crackerstani terrorists.
UPDATE! One thought I've been tonguing in my notebook is the growing awareness by the elites of the growing tension between their continued rule and just how jackassed they'll need be to keep it. The irony is, they're more frightened of the angry, post-GOP right than dirty fucking hippies like me, so to appease the crackerstanis they'll go after the DFHs. Jackasses.
And an email follow-up. I think I'm gonna put something between the Ishiguro and the new Atwood; some between dishes poetry sherbet or something. Same with the Powers, which should be on my doorstep Wednesday or Thursday.
Un alt unul din zeci de cinci cântecele mele preferate. Remarkable not only because corporate fucking rat bastards block embedding, they're now making you look at a fifteen second commercial.
UPDATE! Scott's MP3 generosity once, twice, three times.
*
THE SECRET WAR
James Tate
Adam didn't see the flashing lights at the train crossing, and drove right through it. The train smashed the tail end of his car, and it spun around rapidly like a top about ten times before coming to rest. Adam didn't even know what happened. The police and ambulance were there in no time. Over his protests, they insisted he go to the hospital. He had a few scratches on his forehead, but that was all they could find. Everybody said how lucky he was. There was a story about it in the local paper the next day, with a photograph of his car. When I went to visit him, he denied any accident. "But there were witnesses," I said. "People see what they want to see," he said. "I wasn't even in town. I was on my way back from the war." "The war?" I said. "I didn't even know we were at war." "It's a secret war. Nobodies supposed to know. I shouldn't even be telling you," he said. I found myself almost believing him. He looked like somebody who had just come back from a war, exhausted and drained of any joy he must have once known. I didn't know what to say. "Were you frightened? Did you kill anybody?" I said. His eyes had fire in them. "You don't want to know," he said. "Men, women, children, even dogs, nothing survived. We had a righteous cause, and we did what we had to." "What was the righteous cause?" I said. He stood up and began pacing around the room, rubbing his brow. "I'll never get those cries out of my head, the screaming for mercy, which we were ordered never to heed," he said. I was completely absorbed by his story. He was suffering the guilt of his murderous deeds. "Adam," I said, some orders don't deserve to be followed, I don't care who gives them." He shot me an alarming glance. "That's easy for you to say, Brian. You weren't there. You were out tending your garden, mixing your perfect cocktails, while we were being shot at from every direction. I hate to say it, but the commander called me a hero. I saved a lot of lives," he said. "I'm sorry," I said, "I guess I spoke out of line. Listen, I better go. You probably need some rest." "It was hell," he said. On the walk home I remembered what Adam had said: "People see what they want to see," and I thought, my god, Adam sees himself as a killer and a hero in a secret war, when, in reality, he's just a lucky guy who got nipped by a train. As my mother used to say, go figure, by which I think she meant - oh, forget it. She'd walk out onto the porch and stare at the stars, not sharing her thoughts with anyone, and that's the way I want it to be from now on.
*
Un alt unul din zeci de cinci cântecele mele preferate.
It'll be at least two years before there's another of those, and not then if the current power remains in power.
Soehn is a shitty coach and should be fired, but is it Soehn's fault United's no 10? Soehn didn't discard a beginning to decline but still effective Christian Gomez for a splashy Juan Sebastian Veron signing in a blitz to try and land a stadium. It wasn't Soehn who panicked and overpaid Marcello Gallardo when Veron turned United down. Soehn didn't bring back a washed-up Christian Gomez after Gallardo took the money and laughed his lazy-ass all the way back to Buenos Aires. Kevin Payne did.
Soehn didn't sign the checks for last year's Dos Gonzalos Experience, Soehn isn't the one who can't find better defenders than John and Jones and Burch. Maybe Soehn is responsible not reminding his rookie goalkeeper he can't pick up the ball on backpasses, but Soehn didn't sign the idiot goalkeeper. Fire Tom Soehn because he isn't a good head coach, but Tom Soehn didn't hire Tom Soehn as coach and keep him two years too long. Soehn is awful: he's not United's root problem.
Jaime Moreno, Ba'al bless, that was a gorgeous goal, but it's September 2009 and United's offense needs run through Jaime Moreno? It's five years after the last MLS championship, it's been downhill since. Fire Tom Soehn, then let the new general manager pick his new player personnel guy and new head coach.
In two years, when United's ready to win again, who on the field today would be on that team, and it's Pontius and Wallace (both who've regressed as their rookie bodies are failing them) and maybe Quaranta, who truly is a punkassbitch with his petulant displays of disgust at his teammates' failings.
Maybe Boyzz. I'll say it again: who'd have thought the watershed of the season would be Khumalo breaking his wrist in Germantown.
It wasn't Tom Soehn who hired the medical staff that told Boyzz the gangrene under his cast was sweat.
Shatz is disgusted. Curmudgeon is disgusted. Fullback is disgusted. Edits, updates, links, later. Or not.
I've not seriously weighed abandoning BLCKDGRD but I daydream about it: A sudden surprise announcement - Be back. Or not. - a single post, all previous content removed, comments for the post disabled, my email address disappeared, not because I want to imagine all my sevens of you wondering, worrying, what the? is he OK? (though since I can't help but imagine it I imagine it in buckets), but mostly to see how long I could go before compelled to post again. I bet a pint I couldn't last a week.
BLCKDGRD exists for the gl(wh)orification of me as affirmed by your pings, which apparently I need. That shit about Me and Mine and My Amusement is only true so far, or rather, is true in that accumulation of more Me and Mine and My Amusement isBLCKDGRD's goal, an establishment of a growing Kingdom of Kind with me as Kind King, a realm of Kind where everyone gets my silly-ass allusions
and praises me for my cleverness.
This is the first time I've autoblogographed when honest pings are going up. Random hits come fast or faster on all my google regulars (my recent posts about the uckingfay Adridmay amegays has alerted me to how many humans google "uckingfay amegays"), but returning Me and Mine count has modestly, steadily, risen. People I respect and read are reading me, blegfriends have emailed and posted Kind comments. And while I sorta hope someone dear to me is fucking with my head, it seems someone in Bucharest translates BLCKDGRD into Romanian, someone in Libya translates BLCKDRGD into Arabic.
I'm flattered. Thanks, all. Faceţi clic pe Fleabus, yo.
*
Or what? Quite a coincidence, yes, Star Wars pulled out of Poland ten days before this story breaks.
Un alt unul din zeci de cinci cântecele mele preferate.
Un alt unul din zeci de cinci cântecele mele preferate.
Un alt unul din zeci de cinci cântecele mele preferate.
*
ROSES COME AT ME BARKING LIKE LITTLE DOGS
Cal Bedient
I love all things straining at their leash of blood: poets, for instance, the barflies and crop-
haired barbies of the Rose. But not the eye, unable to tell
is that a painted canyon under a rough girl or a rough canyon under a painted girl.
(Not girls though it was girls,
don't resemble address, splashes anything.)
Nor the ear, that yellow tube waiting out front everday for The Missoulian
(can you hear the blind deer biting thunder, like an artichoke arrogantly aroused?)
Mouth, o mouth, we have to talk: my word! I couldn't my breath you taught me private...
Like the shadow of a king in the room, you amused yourself with me shamelessly.
And you, heart, rode to let: let's lick the faces on stamps, it will be so cat and irresponsible toward evening's ruby telephone. (God I'm not so good as. Can't possibly be well. How do I look?)
And I, I, I, the death vowel, come to me single thing,
not so much fugitive, okay? Snowing green alder leaves
on the river, and shipping, shipping inhabitants.
(Take a peek, they told me, handing me the key to the drawer.
We'll watch. Go on, they said, have a )
And you with you blow-up sex doll flying from your flag pole,
do you miss your home tonight, soldier boy? Don't listen to Rose. Practice your maneuvers.
Every nation's a murderer. But enough about me.
*
Un alt unul din zeci de cinci cântecele mele preferate:
I don't want to spend much time being churlishly realistic, and will simply point out that in the first half, before the effects of traveling from Honduras via Guatemala and arriving in DC less than 24 hours before game time finally caught up to Marathon in the second half, the score was 0-0 after 45 minutes and it felt like another game where United was slightly superior but would only earn a tie.
There, that's done. Here's Benny waving thanks to us:
Heh, I lied about being done being churlish. I forget what it's like to write about 3-0 victories. The games this season have been so frustratingly similar, the results the same, my instincts are honed for criticism, not praise. I believe this to be true: had this United played a fresh Marathon on a neutral field Marathon wins.
When I say, that was Julius James' best game for United, however true that might be how much is it worth? It was Avery John's best game too, and so what? If and when United's top class again, Avery John isn't going to be on the team.
Emilio's second half was as spectacular as his first was a awful. The captain of the team stoopidly reds himself out of the next game. The best defender comes in at 75 and promptly, with a three goal lead, yellows himself out of the next game. The head coach warms up and brings in an old man with two minutes left in the first half so the old man can cool down at half-time. The head coach still can't figure out how to make his most talented player most effective - Tino may have apologized for mouthing off about Soehn in public, but that doesn't mean what he said isn't true.
So I don't know how to celebrate a win graciously. If United gives me more practice at it, perhaps I'll get better.
Curmudgeon puts in much more effort on his post than I did on this one. Shatz rails against nobody. Fullback indulges in Bretos-bashing, as well as saying Jaime deserved the yellow for the elbow whether he actually landed it or not.
Most of my reading slumps hit after I've finished a novel that so in-habited me (Harington allusion) that I can stare at my bookshelves and wander aisles of new and used bookstores and not find anything I want to read. I'm sated but unsatisfied.
Then there's the slump spawned by abundance's too many too juicy choices. I just finished this
last Friday in anticipation of this, released Tuesday:
I picked this off my bookshelf Saturday
to reread until the new Atwood, but I'm resisting because this
will be on my doorstep soon, but I discovered this yesterday
From the start, Vollmann has had the ambition to tell vast tales. His first book of "short" fiction, The Rainbow Stories,
is a thunderous retort to the minimalism popular in the 1980s, when
Raymond Carver, abetted by the editorial influence of Gordon Lish in
using Hemingway's methods for creating stories whose key elements were
intentionally left unspoken, had created a vogue for terse,
stripped-down, and often rather vacant narratives. Into this climate The Rainbow Stories
exuberantly burst, at 560 pages, with many acrobatic authorial
intrusions. One 112-page story, "The Blue Yonder," presents a community
of homeless denizens of a San Francisco park, along with "The Zombie,"
a serial killer who stalks the homeless, and Vollmann himself, whose
interest in these people is less sinister but no less acute. Like Imperial, most of The Rainbow Stories have a documentary quality, though unlike Imperial
they are partially fictionalized, and in these stories Vollmann refined
his technique of introducing himself as a character in quasi-fictional
narratives...
In Vollmann's portrayals of his writing and behaving self there is
always a tension between the dense layers of worldly-wise cynicism he
has acquired over time and his persistent impulse to do and be good.
That impulse is a part of his nature which he always seeks to protect
and preserve and which he admires when he encounters it in
others—Steinbeck for example, in his social responsibility and deep
regard for truth in describing the characters he wrote about, or the
Flaubert who composed "A Simple Heart." More than anything else he has
published, Imperial and An Afghanistan Picture Show tend to reveal the origin of these elements in his work.
Also in my backpack is this
and this
I'm starving in plenty. Life is generous and large. I forget sometimes, and when I remember, I'm too paralyzed by all there is to do that I don't do anything. Click Fleabus, yo.
On progressivism and progress. Another reason I urge you to read Harington: his critique of mistaking technological advancement for human progress, in all the novels but especially through the character of the traveling salesman in Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks.
Rhetorical question. I was driving home from a United game a couple of weeks ago, and trying to find the postgame radio broadcast I stumbled on Frank Gaffney's radio show, and pwoot, what a pwooter.
Fish Fry. My professor friend, The Miltonist, considers Stanley Fish an unchallengeable genius in all things because of Fish's early scholarship on Milton. When my friend enthuses about Fish I nod and smile.
UPDATE! While yes the crime is horrific, what's interesting is that the Post reporter, in a story involving race in Farmville, makes no mention of the history of racial strife in Farmville.
Millions is doing something interesting. It's funny, I really liked Mating, I really hated Mortals, though I'm positive it was as much me being elsewhere as it being suck.
UPDATE! The reissued Carveris a big deal to a small and devout circle. I don't say this to snark, just to reiterate my bitch with Carver was never Carver but the fracking legends of imitators he spawned and the fracking MFA programs which stole their money.
57is a large number in this context, but what fascinates me is, does she remember all her kids - if I asked her a detailed question about Winterthur, could she? And if yes, what? And if no, what?
UPDATE! A friend asked that when I post new links on old posts would I please make them more eye-grabbing, so since she said please... She's also the friend that told me my colors were too loud a few months ago....
The dumb ants hack and gnaw it off grain by grain and haul it down to the chamber where they keep such things to feed their queen and young. The smart ants dig another entrance, wait for rain. Which melts the sugar, and through viaducts they direct it to their nurseries, the old ants' home, the unantennaed ward, and so on - the good little engineering ants! The dumb ants have to eat their sugar dry. Put your ear to a dumb ant's anthill's hole - mandibles on sandpaper is what you'll hear. The dumb ants pray it doesn't rain before they've done their task, or else they will drown - in sweetness, but drown, nonetheless.
*
Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs. Yes, again.
The Insider told you Monday that D.C. United right back Bryan Namoff continued
to experience headaches after receiving a blow to the head against
Kansas City two weeks ago. Today, the club said the veteran defender
has a concussion and has been listed as "out" on the official injury
report.
Namoff has started all 26 regular season matches and played 2,326 of
2,340 minutes -- by far the most on the roster. His four assists are
tied for second on the team.
Think long and hard about that last sentence. What is more damning, that on a team with Emilio, Moreno, Quaranta, Fred, Gomez, assorted strikers and midfielders, the player with the second most assists is a right back or that the player with the second most assists only has four?
ZZRT! Trick question. It's both.
If Namoff is done for the season, what tiny hopes I've had for a less than dismal end just dimmed a bit more. And here's hoping he's just eskied for a spell, not joshgrosed for life.
Hah, joke. Democrats would never permit it. There's a reason Washington
Democrats hate Howard Dean, it's the reason he's unelectable, the reason that I like him. UPDATE!Rimshot! Twooted yesterday, you'll have to trust that I just saw it now via Blegeverlard Atrios.
*!hEh!*another pint bet: I'll be campaigning for Dean in 2016 when he runs as a third party candidate against the incumbent Emperor Beck and the Democratic nominee, Whogives A. Flyingfuck.
To buy you pints in 2017 for my foolery would be sweet.
Stephen Walt again proves to neocons he's anti-American by again not putting Israel's interests first.
You know, if this had been made a big deal under W, we'd be accusing Rove of hyping fear for political reasons.
UPDATE! If this was a case of a Republican federal prosecutor going after a major Republican fundraiser with ties to a senator with the oomph of Chuck Schumer, we'd be gagagaga, yes?
The constraining mantle of post-apocalyptic genre is borne lightly by Atwood in Oryx and Crake,
but such cautionary fantasies have become so popular in recent decades
that revitalizing the form is a considerable challenge. Where there is
an apocalypse, there must be an apocalypse-catalyst, or causer: the
monomaniac Mad Scientist. Where there is such a villain, there must be
a foil: the sensitive witness, the survivor who, like Ishmael, lives to
tell the tale. There may even be a third person, a love object, for
whom the two contend, in this case the former prostitute Oryx, whom
Crake hires to educated the new breed of humans. She becomes for the
Children of Crake the truly female figure. How to humanly register,
still more feel any emotional involvement with characters like
Jimmy/Snowman and the elusive Oryx when, as the novel hopes to persuade
us, the earth's entire population, billions of men, women, children,
are dying? Such vast cataclysms leave us unmoved no matter how
skillfully rendered by so trenchant and committed a writer as Atwood,
though visual dramatizations, as in Steven Spielberg's recent remake of
The War of the Worlds, can rouse the viewer to a visceral horror
that might seem to substitute for an emotional engagement. With its
plethora of freaky forms, Oryx and Crake suggests one of those
unnerving Saul Steinberg drawings in which recognizable human figures
are surrounded by bizarre cartoon characters, human and animal and
geometrical, some of them here stick figures.
A Bolano syllabus. I stopped Savage Detectives when I picked up Inherent Vice because... I wanted to. It's scratching at the door to be let in. After the new Atwood, the new Powers, (UPDATE! after the update an inch lower) it will be.
I tried American Rust because my grandfather Frank worked in the steel mills of the Mon Valley, and I credit Athitakis, he gave it the novel twenty more pages than I did.
On point of view; I'd not seen Hemon and Ishiguro compared in the same sentence before, and hmmm.
!UPDATE!
There'd been no update at his website, Toby Press hadn't sent me any email, the last I heard the book was in suspension because of Harington's health, I'm walking past the New Book Shelves five minutes ago and !wOOt! the new novel by the Best American Novelist you've never read.
Just opening it up randomly, it's the third Latha novel, and a good solid knowledge of all the Stay More novels (which are all different parts of a MUCH larger project) will enhance the buzz. If I can badger just one of you to try Harington, start with Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks before reading any other.
I've said it often here, With is my favorite novel ever.
The above, the punishment, the mild but just punishment, symbolic, the great advancement our planet most needs. The procedure is painless, using methods currently available only in cartoons. Polls were taken, it was voted upon overwhelmingly in favor. The justness of it, known in the bone by each of our nation - is undeniable. Thus, it is proclaimed, on this day of anno domino, etc, I, the final arbiter and ultimate enforcer of such things (appointed by the king!), make official and binding, this: that the eyes shall be gouged out and replaced by hot coals in the head, the blockhead, of each countryman or woman who, upon reaching their majority, has yet to read Moby Dick, by Mr. Herman Melville (1819-1891), American novelist and poet.
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