BLCKDGRD

Offering the Desk Puppy Biscuits

Meaning I'm stymied. Meaning it's a reading-slump, and reading-stumps are either a symptom of autoblogography or autoblogography a symptom of reading-slumps.

I've a reading-slump and a blegissue: How many more ways to duh Duh are there? Meaning there are zillions if I ever embraced by half the what-the-fuck of a half-darer.

Meaning I'm antsy, meaning I'm not sure how to route the antsy, meaning there may or not be more or less of this or that, but I need entertain myself if not tongue-fuck the what-the-fuck.

Meaning nothing more than thanks as always for the Kind.

• I chide Greenwald for stating the obvious (though the obvious often needs stating): assholes unite out of fear of assholes.
• The Seduction of Proximity to Power.
• American Exceptionalism: Epidemic Edition.
• Hofstadter revisited.
• Zizek (in NYT?) on the 20 years since collapse of Berlin Wall.
• On Zizek envy.
• On the 20 years since collapse of Berlin Wall.
• Maintaining Masculinity. I'm guilty of flagrant (and joyful!) use of the word "pussy," and while I do not deny its misogynist connotations, and I solicit suggestions for an alternative, gender-neutral term, I do not know of another word in English that more succinctly captures the essence of grandiose cowardice and whinging self-pity and exaggerated self-importance than "pussy," as in, John Boehner is such a pussy.
• Speaking of: Obama.
• Bravest Guy in the House.
• Af-Pak gak.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• 1000 Monkeys, Typewriters, One Friedman Column.
• Six months behind me on the calender, a year in front of me in ageangst.
• Think about this next time you step on Metro.
• Berbatov is.... The Continental.
• The Further Adventures of Little Danny Helmetball.
• Lessing continued. My two: I always liked and deeply admired the Lessing I read. I don't remember ever loving it.
• How to Write a Novel.
• I'm mildly optimistic my ritual of closing my eyes and reaching onto a bookshelf and starting whichever book I grab might work: the first fifty pages of this have got me going. If you haven't read Thomson's Divided Kingdom, do yourself a favor.
• Grateful Dead archivist job opening.
• Roll away the dew.
• Johnny Cash, protest singer.
• Obscure Sound's October MP3 Wrap-Up.
• Boston Spaceships is pollardized.
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Elliott Carter.
• See the Leaves.
• Dominos.
• Sun Kill Moon.
• Sun Kill Moon.
• Sun Kill Moon.
• Sun Kill Moon.

Born eighty-one years ago today:

THE ROOM OF MY LIFE

Anne Sexton

Here,
in the room of my life
the objects keep changing.
Ashtrays to cry into,
the suffering brother of the wood walls,
the forty-eight keys of the typewriter
each an eyeball that is never shut,
the books, each a contestant in a beauty contest,
the black chair, a dog coffin made of Naugahyde,
the sockets on the wall
waiting like a cave of bees,
the gold rug
a conversation of heels and toes,
the fireplace
a knife waiting for someone to pick it up,
the sofa, exhausted with the exertion of a whore,
the phone
two flowers taking root in its crotch,
the doors
opening and closing like sea clams,
the lights
poking at me,
lighting up both the soil and the laugh.
The windows,
the starving windows
that drive the trees like nails into my heart.
Each day I feed the world out there
although birds explode
right and left.
I feed the world in here too,
offering the desk puppy biscuits.
However, nothing is just what it seems to be.
My objects dream and wear new costumes,
compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands
and the sea that bangs in my throat.

 

 

 

Once I Peeked Through Your Mail Slot and Caught a Glimpse of Your Quiet Individual Self-formed Taste

I still think it a significant difference that when people like me on the American Left protest a war we believe immoral we hold up horrific photographs of maimed and dead children bombed by our country in that current war, and when people on the American Right protest a health care bill meant to make life marginally better for America's worst off, they hold up images of Dachau.

Useful idiots and yadda. Basing a moral roobrix on being a smarter-than-pigstoopid idiot is as vital a vector in affecting change in late-capital America as winning that senior year Homecoming football game X-decades ago.

*

• Yup.
• Capitalism.
• Capitalism's exploitation of relentless positivism.
• America as stoned college conversation. (And thanks! for Kind.)
• Eric Cantor might as well give up his dreams of POTUS.
• He might as well dress like an ass and call himself Nancy.
• I give Michelle Bachmann credit for recognizing the Pig-Hottie vacuum and plugging it.
• Free-floating rage.
• The British Obama.
• Excellent Bobo evisceration.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Elric reports in from Nigeria.
• My high school (with video!). Look at those dopes in the marching band, listen to their crappy rendition of the Anthem.
• Yow!
• Purple Line!
• CCT!

• While all Fleabus photos are by Planet, not all photos of Fleabus photos are by Planet. Click, yo.
• Memoir's killed fiction!
• Memoir's killed fiction!
• UPDATE! Deep fried lard with ranch on the side.
• Memoir's killed fiction!
• Why does a new Stephen King novel get top billing in Sunday NYTBR, and why does every review of a new JCO novel legally require the reviewer to use the word "prolific" in the first sentence and a review of a Stephen King novel doesn't?
• Jim's got lit-links and thoughts (and thanks! for Kind).
• I would like a place I could call my own.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• I used to think the day would never come.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Pretending not to see his gun, I said let’s go out and have some fun.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• It seems like I've been here before.

*

YOU SMELL OF DIVES WHERE A PRICK LIKE YOU IS HATED

Cal Bedient

Once I peeked through your mail slot and caught a glimpse
of your quiet individual self-formed taste, the thousand pegs and
    pins

I must have wanted you dead to see you like that.

You should always speak the little fires are in you.
I am not diseased with the remark. Love cares to see the blackened
    tongues.

You twitch with a gathering head stir. Yes, free the little speeds are in
    you.
You're a real person when you go crazy like that.

Their felt legs rolled up for carrying, your people stare from your
    pockets.
Stump round and round the world with them, they are your darlings,

they are not sparrows, they are not sparrows running like rats on the
    cloud sleeves.
Open your works-in-progress to them: let them choose their
    mausoleum.

The horses I could eat, if I still hungered for you.
Backcountry beauties farting lush grass.

*

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

The Colorado Looks Up in Awe at the Grand Canyon It Has Made

*

• Saying yes to state violence.
• Concision and Chomsky.
• Merit Vomit.
• UPDATE! A pint to the first of you who finds a majorpigblegger saying Obama triggered the Muslim sleeper cell IN THE MILITARY! in order to divert attention from Michelle Bachmann's tribe  of dumbfucks!
• UPDATE! Holyfuck, PIGKABOOMPARADISE!, yo. Happiest days of their lives. A pint for the first link to a majorpigblegger who advocates immediately discharging all Arab-American and Muslim soldiers. (Typed 7:35 PM 11/5.)
• 50M Frenched Men Can't Be Wrong.
• Notes on the Philly Transit Strike.
• There are Rights, and Then There's What's Right.
• Triumph of the Progressives.
• Ayn Rand, whack.
• Beliefs? What beliefs?
• Kos' Drug of Choice.
• The Tired Party Line.
• Newt Gingrich, RINO.
• Armey. Dick.
• Idiots.
• The original woman who went rogue.
• Murderous America.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Fucking shoot me.
• Flesh of Your Flesh.
• Cat gets swine flu. 
• Elric's in Nigeria, where not only is he limited on where he can go but with slow internet: The Nigerians that I have met are really nice, intelligent people.  I would love to get out and see some stuff.  Maybe we can get out and explore on the weekends, but if we do we need an armed escort and an armored car.  We take a boat to work, and I have seen plenty of pollution, but only one dead body so far.  We pass under a bridge on the way to work, and people squat and try to hit us with crap for sport, but so far they have missed us.  The water in the lagoon smells like rotten fish and piss, and if you get splashed you need to get a tetanus shot.  If you get it in your mouth, you're fucked.

• MOCO clusterfuck! I always wonder how many stoplight intersections there are in MOCO (I think about getting a map and counting them off), and while this article says 750, that may be only those that are coordinated. I can't imagine the Beallsville light at 28 and 109 is beehived with lights in Bethesda.
• Weastful!
• Showdown in Kensington!
• Crisis in Garrett Park!
• ICC!
• Purple Line!

• The whale that wouldn't die.
• Intention and poetry.
• UPDATE! Sometime in the past month I wrote that poetry is ahead of fiction re: these days, but twenty-five years? And good question asked there too.
• Serendipity: looking for an online version of the Seidel poem below (to cut and paste rather than need type - and I had to type it) I find an old review of Seidel written by Cal Bedient, whose latest I've been yodeling about the past few weeks.

• Hilda Morley?
• Whole new way.
• Overgrown Path is wonderful. Hey, Pliable!
• Damage.
• More port-royal here.
• This is not a love song.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Good fortune.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Magnetic Fields cover Bowie.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• 150 seconds of pop pleasure.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.

*

POL POT

Frederick Seidel

Dawn. Leni Riefenstahl
And her cameras slowly inflate the immense Nuremberg Rally.
The Colorado looks up in awe at the Grand Canyon
It has made. Hitler.

European clouds. 1934. Empty
Thought-balloons high above Lascaux
Without a thought inside. The Führer
Is ice that's fire, physically small.

They all were. Stalin.
Trotsky's little glasses
Disappear behind a cloud
From which he won't emerge alive.

The small plane carrying
The Grail to Nuremberg got Wagnerian clouds
To fly through, enormous, enormous. Mine eyes have seen
    the glory, it
Taxis to a stop. The cabin door swings open.

Leni schussed from motion pictures
To still photography after the war. From the Aryan ideal, climbed out
In Africa to shoot the wild shy people of Kau,
Small heads, tall, the most beautiful animals in the world.

Artistically mounted them into ideal
Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl! Riefenstahl! Riefenstahl! Really,
From blonds in black-and-white to blacks in color.
Now Pol Pot came to power.

Now in London Sylvia Plath
Nailed one foot to the floor;
And with the other walked
And walked and walked through the terrible blood.

*

Reap What You Have Soehn

This pisses me off:

"Over the past three seasons, Tommy has faced greater challenges than any other MLS coach," United President Kevin Payne said, referring to a schedule that included annual international tournaments.

Wait a fucking minute. United doesn't want to be in annual international tournaments? Kevin Payne is saying he doesn't want United to face "greater challenges" than any other MLS team? What the fuck?

Good thing United sucked this past season then, yes? No trips this coming season to Mexico and Honduras and El Salvador, just home exhibitions against better league's B-Squads, thank fucking god.

By Payne's standard, Soehn succeeded! The next coach will have a pussy schedule by comparison. Well done!

Schedule! Waah! We're fucked by our success! By this logic, the goal of the new coach next season is to suck just enough to avoid fixture congestion in 2011.

Oh, and this by The Irreplaceable Man needs noting:

"I'm a little surprised. ... It's a difficult transition for the players when you bring in a new coach. You have to re-prove yourself. You're on trial in a way and you don't know whether you fit into the new coach's plans. I hope they don't try to break up this team."

Boofuckinghoo. Suddenly, Namoff seems replaceable to me.

I'm Raising My Child to Know that the Cobras that Shiver in the Sky at Night Are Mistakes and Not Responsible for Us

When I was sixteen and a first semester junior in Aviday Ampsellesay's English class at Gaithersburg High School, it was two years out from Nixon's resignation and one year out from the fall of Saigon and Moscow was on the march and Jimmy Carter had just been kinged. Holyfuck, the number one song in America was Rod Stewart's fucking Tonight's the Night: how's that for perspective on toxic futures.

I had a blast my junior year in high school, couldn't give a shit about shit as long as Rod Goddamn Stewart wasn't on the stereo. I've survived all End Times since to bring you my daily End Times predictions.

I teach my sixteen year old too little cynicism, too little selfishness, too little self-interest, I teach her nothing beyond what she concludes herself about the nature and motives of others, I teach her to be nicer, more understanding and forgiving, to be Kinder than me.

Despite me, it's working. All Fleabus photos by Planet.

*

• American Culture.
• America.
• Capitalism.
• Capitalism.
• America.
• American Yadda.
• Pussy Hatch.
• Obamapostasy.
• Obamapostasy.
• Something to think about.
• Your pwoggle spin on today's election results.
• Your asshole pig spin on today's election results.
• A fatuous referendum.
• Still the person I'd most like to brain w/a shovel.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Not American enough.
• Work:

• ICC's true purpose!
• No one could have predicted Smart Growth would lead to Clarksburgs.
• Clarksburg.
• On bleggal hiatusing.
• One aspect why black-and-white TV pings my pitchfork.
• The president of the University of Tulsa makes more than $1M per?
• Levi-Strauss has died. More.
• 24-Hours of Air Traffic.

UPDATE! Soehn "resigns". Post later. Or not.
Here's DCU Curmudgeon. Here's Fullback.

• Excellent HATING! on Little Danny Helmetball: "He looks like a cross between Mitt Romney and a male nurse, with a spray-helmeted cube of black mannequin hair atop the pinched, entitled face of a guy [complaining to] a Howard Johnson's waitress about his curly fries not being curly enough."
• Berbatov is.... The Continental.
• Barra Barra.
• Worst sports kits!
• Vote for the Worst Uniform Ever!
• Work:

• Who would purposely distance themselves from the fiction he's reading? ME! who opened up the daily random Moby Dick to a horrifically brutal (and beautifully written) scene of whales in agony, so I've called a time out on both daily random readings much less front to back for now, which isn't the distance meant at the link. Which is why I need read the novel again.
• Another review of the new Pamuk, which I will be reading, just when I'm not sure - I'm in Mexico City in 1976 chasing visceral realists right now.
• I'm not sure why the New York Review of Books feels a need to review each and every new William Trevor novel, nor why each review of each new William Trevor isn't required to use the JCO/Updike required word "prolific." (sub rqrd)
• Andrew addresses my Lessing problem.
• Oofdah: a takedown of Ashbery.
• New Ashbery.
• Remembering Conrad Aiken, whose poetry one girlfriend adored and one mentor despised.
• Wait until Ilse and Sasha see who's number one.
• Above three links courtesy Silliman's always generous blog.
• I'm not sure why there's a need for a new "selected" Wallace Stevens. (sub rqrd)
• Not why I'm not, but the point is to make you.
• Work

• This doesn't make my heart race, but I've friends that it will.
• Not only does Sting's music suck unto suck (I promise you you'll never suffer a crappy Police song on this bleg, I love you that much), Sting's a fracking asshole too. But you knew that.
• A Place to Bury Strangers.
• Witches want David Bowie's semen.
• You can't stay all day under the covers.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• We're made of blood and rust.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! Love for The Feelies!
• UPDATE! Does anyone remember The Softies?
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• The laws have changed.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• (I'm crazy for you) but not that crazy.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• The prettiest song you'll listen to today.

*

SONG OF AMERICA

Rob Cook

I'm raising my child to become the end of rotting,
        and to expose the lushness of the cemetery moth.
I'm raising my child to know the difference between the two sunsets:
        one purple with thermonuclear iodine,
        the other the charred insides of rain.
I'm raising my child to find the stones his brothers fed each other.
I'm raising my child to fall behind the apricot blossoms
        and to trust only others who've fallen behind.
I'm raising my child to listen: there is so much noise
        only silence will be remembered.
I'm raising my child to fill in the spaces between wars
        and the spaces between people
        where everything grows even after the last space is gone.
I'm raising my child to bring into the world books that suffer
        with words detention-kids make over and over.
I'm raising my child to follow the scatter of flesh across the sky,
        birds and their wingprint trails to Alaska.
I'm raising my child to predict the sicknesses left of summer
        by the number of shadows he sweats.
I'm raising my child to plant pennies where he'll find rest
        and good fingerpaint for one night.
I'm raising my child to chop down the televisions of peasants
        and their machine that picks thunderstorms from a leaf.
I'm raising my child to write a treaty for his own smells,
        the ones that hurt the self and the ones that hurt others,
        and a treaty for the poison sumac whose only emotion is hunger.
I'm raising my child to dress like a long line of near-humans
        if he wants to be recognized
        and to show kindness to the roadkill that sneaks into his bed.
I'm raising my child to know which part of a hamburger is still afraid.
I'm raising my child to be captain of the abandoned mail trucks
        and to lead the grasses across the Midwestern sleep.
I'm raising my child to leave New York.
I'm raising my child to add letters and numbers to his name
        and chameleons and hellbenders behind his name.
I'm raising my child to drown and to drop dead and to carry buildings on his back.
I'm raising my child to listen to his face breaking when it's cold.
I'm raising my child to seduce only photographs of women.
I'm raising my child to know that the cobras that shiver
        in the sky at night are mistakes and not responsible for us.
I'm raising my child to leave bread for the voices that come after dark.
I'm raising my child to keep his eyes closed.
I'm raising my child to tell the truth by having no sound at all.

*

So what I posted this before?

Looking for the Transparent, the Colorless Essential, the Unbeginning and Unending of Consommé

Maybe you remember that tomorrow is a year since Barack Obama stomped Sarah Palin to win POTUS, and what good has he done beyond not being President Sarah Palin?

Obama drives the shittiest batshittier. That's all I really asked. See me urge Obama to bait crackers November 3 last year. He's succeeded.

Obama needs drive the shittiest batshittier faster if you ask me, but I never take a long view when a spastic view is funner, and I still bet pints Obama (if alive) will stomp The Whomeverpig in 2012 (and yes, by moving to the shittier as the shittiest get shittier, which is the plan, yo).

Oldsters here can vouch: I never bet on Obama the man, I bet on Obama the gamesplayer.

And while he's not as good a gamesplayer I thought he'd be, that's more a reflection on what I want him to be as a man, so all obamapostasies are roobish and mine alone.

*

• True Heh.
• I'm not saying Obama doesn't serve me bankster's shit and call it nourishment.
• But he's still a better gamesplayer than anyone on the other side.
• Your Fucking Washington Post's next Shit-for-Brains! ten columnist nominees! Ezra Klein had nominated blegfriend Henley, and since Jim didn't make the cut, so much for Ezra Klein's schway.
• Cole sums up the ten columns: They’re about what you’d expect: three full-tilt concern trollings, a couple MoDo/Double X style gender pieces, a pointless piece about that college kid who’s hiring a personal assistant, a snoozer about good government (which does make a good point), a predictable rant about cable news, and one thoughtful piece about health care.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Good opportunity to dust off a classic.
• Poop in the Water.
• prOnstache offer Obama advice.
• Dear Anonymous Shaker.
• 400,000 on The List!
• Thoughts on The List!
• Hoarding.
• Artist-Critic. This paragraph:  Under market capitalism, critics and producers are engaged in a curious dance. Each is basically addressing the other at all times and acting as big Other for the other, whilst constantly pretending otherwise. The artist claims to be working for some reified and mystified entity called the Audience, secretly aware that it is the critics' judgment that will more decisively shape their future, and the critic claims to speak for the consumer, the man on the street (this obscure beast, the Audience again), but really longs for recognition by practitioners and prays that their barbed comments will strike the artist to their very marrow, perhaps even encourage them to work differently. For some reason, however, full assumption of this dance - for the dancers to actually look each other in the eye, perhaps even kiss - is strictly taboo, has multiple applications.

• Rave review of Mantel's Wolf Hall in NYTBR.
• I love House of Leaves, feel wussy I can't crack Only Revolutions, as beautiful an object to hold in my hands, if not more, than House of Leaves. It's on my bookstand - I tried - true this - again two weeks ago.
• New Pamuk reviewed, which is good news, but what it better news is that it's reviewed by Maureen Howard, and bioblurb says Maureen Howard’s new book, “The Rags of Time,” will be published this month, completing her cycle of novels based on the four seasons,  which means I've got more rereading to do.
• Pamuk's Museum.
• Bleg Hiatus.
• List time suckitude.
• Shoot me now.
• Remembering The Connells.
• The Foghorns.
• Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.
• Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.
• Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.
• UPDATE! Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.
• Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.
• Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.

*

ANXIETY'S PROSODY

A.R. Ammons

Anxiety clears meat chunks out of the stew, carrots, takes
the skimmer to floats of greasy globules and with cheesecloth

filters the broth, looking for the transparent, the colorless
essential, the unbeginning and unending of consommé: the

open anxiety breezes through high conceits, surface congestions
(it likes metaphors deep-lying, out of sight, their airs misting

up into, lighting up consciousness, unidentifiable presences),
it distills consonance and assonance, glottal thickets, brush

clusters, it thins the rhythms, rushing into longish gaits, more
distance in less material time: it hates clots, its stump-fires

level fields: patience and calm define borders and boundaries,
hedgerows, and sharp whirls: anxiety burns instrumentation

matterless, assimilates music into motion, sketches the high
suasive turnings, mild natures tangled still in knotted clumps.

*

The Connells?