And Your Name, Curled Flame, Licks the Matchbook of the Cause, Like a Voice Whose Rome Pisses through Every Little Animal.

Yapped Thursday with good blegfriend Richard, happy funny bleggy stuff to start, then on to novels like we always do.

I got past halfway, maybe 4/7ths the way through Powers' Generosity, and megamehfulness. I just don't give a damn, about the plot, the characters, the authorial voice, the bioethical quandary Powers' poses this time. I admit in email the meh may be as much my fault as Powers, and I mean that to a point, but, c'mon, I don't roll that way: it has to be because the novel sucks. (What's interesting is my favorite Powers' novel is one of Richard's least, and visa versa, but that's another post. Or not.)

I'm rereading Beyond Black, partly and certainly because Richard told me he'd give it a try after all my squawking about it, but primarily because once I started to think about rereading it, I had no way to stop thinking about rereading it except to reread it.

Then there was that MOCO post, the one I'd rewritten countless times in the moleskin, that I needed to post just to be rid of it. Then there was the Redskin post, which I had to post just to be rid of it.

Holy fuck, you know what I'm going to reread next because it's been ten years and I can't stop thinking about rereading it?

Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under the water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

GAH! Anyone want to join me?

Someone's writing the novel that needs writing right row about right now (poetry is ahead of fiction right now about right now), and I privilege this right now as the most important right now since the last and until the next, and though it bores with my self-servingness to hear me say it again, I am a weathervane, and as people discover that in their digital powerlessness they have never been freer to contribute to the spectacle, there's never been a greater wave of WTFness now that voyeurism is peak and product can't keep up.

Which is to say I'm officially monitoring this bleg's increasing levels of possibly self-destroying WTFness. I'm trying to stop monitoring this bleg's levels of self-destroying WTFness.

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• Fatlazyfucker fears Obama is threatening the fatlazyfucker's freedom to be a fatlazyfucker.
• The word Greenwald is looking for is pussies.
• You don't give money to NPR do you (or do you need to be mocked)?
• Rattling the roobcages on both ends is a win for the middle.
• It never occurs to Pastor Fatuous that one way to ease Islamic extremism is to stop bombing wedding parties with predator drones.
• Another reason to hate the rich (or if Islamic extremist, to hate America).
• Your Fucking Washington Post features World's Shittiest Human every Friday.
• Frank Gaffney would like to challenge World's Shittiest Human for that title.
• Shut your piehole.
• Stupid peasants.
• Montag (via JRB) on Warring Wages.
• Capitalism.
• It's the end of the world as we know it.
• Bullet prOn, cont....
• Heh.
• Wet Leaves on Windows.
• Fentyville!
• My future hell. The issue, at least in my neighborhood, is that many people bought in this neighborhood to be in the Walter Johnson High School cluster. We did. Planet will long have graduated by the time redistricting would occur, so it wouldn't affect us, but I understand the concerns of parents with much younger children.
• Kensington's imperialistic ambitions!
• Nice bridge.
• UPDATE! Who the hell blegs about their favorite black-clad football team?
  
• Bleg Anniversary's (of a sort) here and here. Congrats.
• Hilltop! Thank Ba'al Planet doesn't want to go there.
• BLCKDGRD translated into Portuguese. Who is doing this?
• Soupy Sales, RIP.
• At Stirred, Straight Up, With a Twist it's always 1962. Fits the tone around here lately, yes?
• UPDATE! Two new Mary Jo Bang poems.
• Rise of the Neuronovel?
• UPDATE! Twenty, twenty-five, thirty years ago, I went through a huge Iris Murdoch phase. Reread The Sea, The Sea a few years ago and The Book and the Brotherhood a year or two ago, and while the thrill is gone, I remembered why I had the thrill when I was young.
• Kakutani HATES! the new Ishiguro, which means the new Ishiguro must necessarily be GREAT!
• UPDATE! Simic on Seidel.
• Another one of dozens of my favorite five songs ever.
• Don't forget counterstream.
• Another one of dozens of my favorite five songs ever.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Another one of dozens of my favorite five songs ever.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Leonard Cohen fix?
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! This too. This too.
• We party so hard, the planet broke.

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A THREE-RAVEN FIELD TALKING DIRTY APPLE BLOSSOMS

Cal Bedient

And your name, Blue, crouches like a wrestler's head,

Or a voice whose window dismembers the beetle moon.

And your name, Insatiable, stokes a sunflower bonfire

With a voice whose sea is inside out at feeding time.

And your name, Chemical, has no sweet fold et cetera

Nor a voice whose cliffs are anybody's heart.

And your name, Leaves a Light on in the Void,

Clicks in the all-night stapler of your theater.

And your name, They Had Doubt, slews in a Cloud Magellan

With a voice whose Mary is two blues from origin.

And your name, Halfer, ignora la otra mitad,

Whose voice piles weapons in the pick-up beds of exile.

And your name, Curled Flame, licks the matchbook of the cause,

Like a voice whose Rome pisses through every little animal.

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New Yo La Tengo?