Let us, by all means, have things in night light: partly visible. The rudeness that poetry often brings after decades of silence will help

American political discourse and the paradoxes of militant dysphoria and militant preciousness and the revolution will not be twittered.

We all agree we're fucked, yes? that progress can only be defined by capitalism's metrics and that the destruction of our species is progress's inevitable success, and since that success is inevitable, we typists are competing only for top Cassandra. Old news.

My nightmare is the success will be even slower, more incrementally debilitating, more apathy-inducing and esteem-reducing, than the shittiness I imagine it will be, making me a bogus romantic apocalyptic, like you've never postponed a dentist appointment. I'm only good at predicting the second dreariest worse.

Pardon me while I pay my mortgage and raise my kid and kiss my wife and read novels and poetry and scratch my scritch and throw my discs and scream at my shitty soccer team for the next four or five shitty decades.

*

• Tripping over facts while drinking your own koolaid.
• Democrats will never get another dime from me.
• Re: on the above, but more importantly, Thomas Frank writes for the WSJ?
• The word Krugman is looking for is "pussies."
• UPDATE! Heh.
• Virtual Outhouse.
  
• No laughing matter.
• You don't need emerge from nothing.
• Blegtrauma. It's result. I post this because I like Larval Subjects, but mostly because it reaffirms a choice I made x years ago, well before blegs.
• Rugby blegging!
• Berbatov is..... The Continental.
• Uncle Fivers says, "Man Utd say Ben Foster missed selection to England's World Cup qualifiers squad due to chest-hurt rather than ability-knack." You do subscribe to Fiver, yes?
• Thyraphobia, part ten eleven.
• Why would the editor of the NYTBR ask a lout like Christopher Hitchens to review Kazuo Ishiguro, who specializes in degrees of quiet?
• Whereas NYRB asked Claire Messud to review Ishiguro's Nocturnes. (sub rqrd) The first paragraph:

Kazuo Ishiguro is a writer unlike any other. This may seem a truism—what writer, after all, is not unlike others?—but Ishiguro's fiction is, in fact, very strange indeed. His celebrated gift lies in illuminating the hidden emotional complexities beneath a mundane surface—something canonically accomplished in The Remains of the Day, and again, more menacingly, in his last extraordinary novel, Never Let Me Go. But he is also the author of two deeply mysterious books, The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans, in which reality itself is called into question, and the fiction's only firm ground is Ishiguro's unerringly calm, even placid, prose. Perhaps what is strangest about Ishiguro's work is precisely that: the marriage of a narrative style of almost thrilling banality and a surreal, often dark imagination.

• Hilary Mantel reviews a new history of Early Modern England. (sub rqrd).
• Generosity reviewed.
• I read Stoner year's ago (and since it's been republished by NYRB recently I've seen and thought about going back and rereading), but never Augustus.
• American Tabloid was fun, Cold 6K not so much, I'd feel I'd have to go back and read both before reading Ellroy's new Blood's a Rover.
• Bat Segundo goes on hiatus.
• What will you do with that MFA in poetry?
• Maryland's poet laureate.
• Six poems by Anthony Hecht.
• FAVOR! I'd really really really like to move these bullet over to left margin, and all Typepad will tell me is to do it myself, and I'm a computer moran. Can someone type me up and shoot me some quick easy basic elementary CSS that I could paste into my coding. If it's more than three minutes work, please don't.
• Darkblack's Sunday jazz.
• Moka's got POP!
• S'funny, I was listening to Cocteau Twins Friday night.
• Don't forget counterstream.
• Pledge time @ KEXP, yo. Best t-shirt yet for $100.
• Obscure Sound's always generous MP3 compiliation of the previous month.
• UPDATE! 42 ten minute pop songs worth your time.
• UPDATE! My favorite of the bunch, though the Yes made me smile for my epodded youth.

*

ON THE EMPRESS'S MIND

John Ashbery

Let's make a bureaucracy.
First, we can have long lists of old things,
and new things repackaged as old ones.
We can have turrets, a guiding wall.
Soon the whole country will come to look at it.

Let us, by all means, have things in night light:
partly visible. The rudeness that poetry often brings
after decades of silence will help. Many
will be called to account. This means that laundries
in the age-old way will go on foundering. Is it any help
that motorbikes whiz up, to ask for directions
or colored jewelry, so that one can go about one's visit
a tad less troubled than before, lightly composed?

No one knows what it's about anymore.
Even in the beginning one had grave misgivings
but the enthusiasm of departure swept them away
in the green molestation of spring.
We were given false information on which
our lives were built, a pier
extending far out into a swollen river.
Now, even these straws are gone.

Tonight the party will be better than ever.
So many mystery guests. And the rain that sifts
through sobbing trees, that excited skiff...
Others have come and gone and wrought no damage.
Others have caught, or caused, darkness, a long vent
in the original catastrophe no one has seen.
They have argued. Tonight will be different. Is it better for
    you?

*

One of the above links put this in my head. Be in yours: