A Mistake Like All Pleas for Forgiveness, but He Persisted Blindly, Obstinately, Each Day, as though in the End It Would Relieve Her to Know the Particulars

Why, yes I do think Obamalame is starting a nasty foodfight with Fox just to distract the base with such luxurious pig-loathing that his inevitable obamalame capitulation on the public option (and banksters, etc) goes not only unpunished, it generates a swell of contributions that will fund further capitulations.

Don't you?

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• To call each thing by its right name.
• Zizek on Democracy, but really on calling each thing by its right name.
• Capitalism.
• Capitalism.
• Plutonomy.
• UPDATE! Zombies, con't.
• Daily Smack of Duh.
• Arguing about Afghanistan.
  
• Current British politics: a summary.
• Current British politics: Gov't of Rats in a Sack.
• Not current British politics, but something for my London blegfriends.
• What would John Brown do? (And why isn't Brown a crackerstani idol? Kidding. I know.) (BTW, Russell Banks Cloudsplitter is an excellent read, if you like historical fiction now and then.)
• Your fucking Washington Post.
• The idiots running your fucking Washington Post.
• What the NYT thinks is vitally important.
• On the communists who run the NFL.
• Crisis in Kensington!
• Chevy Chase Police want tasers!
• Hagerstown might as well quit now.
• Too much fun. You, um, do know that Little Danny and the Redskins is a metaphor for American empire, yes?
• Berbatov is..... The Continental.
• UPDATE! Blegadvice - there's someone or something from googlebot in Mountain View meticulously working its way backwards through all my posts. What's up with that? Automated spammer looking for a way in? The new updated Technorati catching up on all its old version didn't do when it should.
• UPDATE! Speaking of Technorati, I went from an authority (whatever that is) of 58 suddenly down to 8 then, when Technorati upgraded, shot up to 428. What's up with that?
• John Irving, Philip Roth, in the British papers.
• Silliman praises National Book Award poetry selections.

   

   

 

• Lucky for me I've got access to a university library's stacks.
• Vollmann reviews new Caputo, and likes because "the reason I enjoyed “Crossers” as much as I did, is that it hints at how difficult it can be to draw conclusions — about evil, about Ben and above all about the crossers themselves," a sentiment that isn't surprising to anyone who reads Vollmann.
• Obscure Sound reviews (and digs) the new Flaming Lips, provides two songs. Will be buying next payday. Everything I've heard I've like.
• How Pandora works. I never use it (not out of any bias, it just doesn't occur to me), but Earthgirl does all the time.
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.

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PLEA FOR FORGIVENESS

Rodney Jones

The old man William Carlos Williams, who had been famous
    for kindness
And for bringing to out poetry a mannerless speaking,

In the aftermath of a stroke was possessed by guilt
And began to construct for his wife the chronicle

Of his peccadillos, an unforgivable thing, a mistake
Like all pleas for forgiveness, but he persisted

Blindly, obstinately, each day, as though in the end
It would relieve her to know the particulars

Of affairs she must have guessed and tacitly permitted,
For she encouraged his Sunday drives across the river.

His poems suggest as much; anyone can see it.
The thread, the binding of the voice, is a single hair

Spliced from the different hairs of different lovers,
And it clings to his poems, blond and dark,

Tangled and straight, and runs on beyond the page.
I carry it with me, saying, "I have found it so."

It is a world of human blossoming, after all.
But the old woman, sitting there like rust -

For her there would be no more poems of stolen
Plums, of round and firm trunks of young trees,

Only the candor of the bedpan and fouled sheets,
When the could no longer have been any hope

That he would recover, when the thing she desired
Was not his health so much as his speechlessness.

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