Where Bifocals Bulge in an Orange Garage of Daydreams, We Wait in Our Loose Attics for a New Season as if for an Ice-Cream Truck.

My favorite aunt gave me that Obama matryoskha doll for Giftmas, proclaiming proudly and often to all since well before Thanksgiving that she'd ordered the perfect gift from Russia just for me, perfect because each nested doll inside the last was the previous Democratic president, as if Republican presidents (and Republicans in general) don't exist. It was funny and generous and thoughtful.

It's only because of Republicans I know Democrats exist.

Gah, David Broder hates roobs like us for fucking up his Bipartisan Utopia, as if his Bipartisan Utopia was fucked by our nipping at well-heeled Democratic fuckers, though it is our duty to nip, and we'll take all credit we can.

• Reread Judt's essay, and consider: The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments. What if what's been obtained is as much as can be obtained and the fight now is to maintain what's been gained? I'm asking.
• UPDATE! Read this. (h/t)
• Everything is impossible now.
• That didn't take long.
• Move on, nothing to see here.
• Thinking like a state.
• UPDATE! Panty-Wetting.
• UPDATE! Panty-Wetting.
• UPDATE! More. Best pig Giftmas present of the year.
• UPDATE! Next!
• UPDATE! YFWP catapults the propaganda.
• UPDATE! NYT catapults the propaganda.
• UPDATE! Bobo, or: Yep.
• Your Photoshop of the Day.
• UPDATE!

• UPDATE! Year ago.
• UPDATE! Year ago.
• Pigs 2, People 0.
• Jane Hamsher, hero.
• Incentive to fail.
• UPDATE! Obamapology.
• On Republican piggery.
• 2009: The Year in LePew or Happy Hurladays!
• Axe attack on Beltway!
• UPDATE! Inside-Baseball. Hairy Giftmas.
• UPDATE! For my friends near Burlington, Vermont.
• BLCKDGRD translated into Hebrew.
• Worst soccer kits of the decade.
• What is the word I'm looking for to describe Arsene Wenger?

• New Coetzee reviewed. I promised a friend to try Coetzee again in 2010, though this sublede to the review on today's NYBR main page (In the third volume of his genre-bending autobiography, the Nobel-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee imagines himself as already dead and invents his own biographer) makes me want to jab a meat thermometer in my eye.
• Richard's year in books.
• Novels can be funny? UPDATE! Link fixed.
• UPDATE! Wags Revue sent me an email.
• The N-Word of the Narcissus?
• Biography of Led Zeppelin. I'm neither a lover or a hater, or rather, I am but it depends on the song. I think the majority suck (Elric? Care to comment?), with a few that I really dig ("Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" the most) and some that I hate unto hate ("Kashmir," "Whole Lotta Love," the unfortunately entitled "Black Dog," and that fucking anthem, of course). Still, they deserve a biography, because...
• UPDATE! I'm reminded in comments that I'd seen this at Frederick's yesterday, meant to post it exactly here in this post, the damn phone rang and...
• State of Electronica 2009!

UPDATE!

Look! I'm Hamster's dancing monkey!

THE WHEELCHAIR BUTTERFLY

James Tate

O sleepy city of reeling wheelchair
where a mouse can commit suicide if he can

concentrate long enough
on the history book of rodents
in this underground town

of electrical wheelchairs!
The girl who is always pregnant and bruised
like a pear

rides her many-stickered bicycle
backward up the staircase
of the abandoned trolleybarn.

Yesterday was warm. Today a butterfly froze
in midair; and was plucked like a grape
by a child who swore he could take care

of it. O confident city where
the seeds of poppies pass for carfare,

where the ordinary hornets in a human’s heart
may slumber and snore, where bifocals bulge

in an orange garage of daydreams,
we wait in our loose attics for a new season

as if for an ice-cream truck.
An Indian pony crosses the plains
whispering Sanskrit prayers to a crater of fleas.
Honeysuckle says: I thought I could swim.

The Mayor is urinating on the wrong side
of the street! A dandelion sends off sparks:
beware your hair is locked!

Beware the trumpet wants a glass of water!
Beware a velvet tabernacle!

Beware the Warden of Light has married
an old piece of string!