BLCKDGRD

Fifty Today

What Is a Snail's Fury?

I've avoided Decade of ____ and ____ of Decade bits. Suck comes to mind as too duh for both blanks; the knee-jerk blurt of suck is one reason I haven't.

America's christers and neocon warriors are air-guitaring street violence in Iran, air-guitaring protests against religious laws christers would impose on you and me, air-guitaring protests against a ruling clique who hold the same neocon good/evil world view as America's neocons, who rule with a defiant disregard for civil liberties in the face of dissent that America's neocons envy.

Sorry for repeating: Mine is a generation that can't offer its children the illusionary hope of advancing social and political progress - we can promise better toys, constant episodic diversions - progressive goals now a matter of barricading behind past gains before a reactionary assault of.... suck.

• Something's Not Right Here.
• The duhiest sublede ever: as I type this, on Salon, this Joan Walsh article's sublede is: President Bush took a week to talk about the 2001 shoe-bomber, and tried him in criminal court. Why savage Obama?
• Pussies.
• Pussies.
• Documenting the pussiness.
• All Muslims are evil.
• Republicans love terrorists.
• And murderous clowns.
• Country of bedwetters.
• Next war.
• Grading Obama.
• UPDATE! Obamapostasy.
• How Obama has let you down today.
• UPDATE! I have been deemed unworthy.
• Fucking Democrats.
• UPDATE! The answer to his question about standing up to lobbyists is no.
• The Great American Swindle.
• Ten Worse Things about the Bush Decade.
• UPDATE! Who the fuck was President when this happened? Politico story tomorrow!
• Perrin's History of the Decade, Part One, Part Two.
• Look who Fuckface Hiatt put on YFWP op-ed page!

• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Getting away with torture.
• Sarah and Her Tribe.
• Get a fucking grip you pantswetting douchewads.
• Something I find fascinating.
• Library fines.

• Duh.
• I will vote in the primaries so this fuck doesn't win.
• My house's value.
• Fire engine catches on fire.
• George Michael, whore.
• Baithersgurgle. Half a mile from Casa Satanica.
• Darnestown and Damascus only two voting districts in MOCO to vote McCain. McMansionists and crackers, yo.

• The Genius of Thom Gunn (sub rqrd).
• Asylum's 2009 reading list. I read Colony at his (and others') urging, wrote about it here somewhere, it was terrific, though it didn't in-habit me and hasn't haunted me.
• Wolf Hall reviewed.
• UPDATE! New Eels! Having posted "I Like Birds" recently, I can't help noticing how many of his own songs E is rif(p)t(p)ing off.
• Wowee! Ear Candy!
• Bob Fucking Seger had the #1 selling CD of the decade?
• Discussing Another Green World.

CONSIDERING THE SNAIL

Thom Gunn

The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth's dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail's fury? All
I think is that if later

I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.

Sixty-three today.

Onalfomofo

What would you have me say about Kurt Onalfo? He's gotta be less-shitty than Tom Soehn?

United will be better - if United's better - because United sucked so much last season they'll play no meaningful games this season outside of league and Cup: remember, before firing Tom Soehn, Kevin Payne told all of us United played too many important fixtures last season; that's why they sucked.

Ergo, one can't judge Onalfo a success by any Shield or Cups next season but by the results of the following season when - according to Payne's Law of Fixture Congestion - they will suck because they were too goddamn successful the previous year, and one can't judge Onalfo a failure if United sucks next season because he'll have successfully avoided the dreaded Fixture Congestion. 

Meh, motherfuckers. What a rinkydink organization, chasing a coach of a mid-major college and, when spurned by the coach of a mid-major college, hiring a Tom Soehn to replace a Tom Soehn.

Here's Curmudgeon, here's Shatz.

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!

 

As Slow as the Summer Seems On a Hot Day Drinking Beer Outside Riverside or Standing in the Middle of a White-Hot Road between Bakersfield and Hell Waiting for Santa Claus.

This, the second slowest week of the year in Blegsylvania, perhaps a breath-catching reevaluation of my coordinates might not help you, but it might me.

1. Maybe Obama and the Democratic congress, especially senators, are as progressive as American politics will allow at this moment, regardless of the complex and cynical reasons why.
2. My team sucks. That makes it more my team. I'm the kind of dope whose money for season-ticket renewal is coming due (and you know who you are) that my team has already spent on a left-footed El Salvadoran midfielder hopefully taller than Franco Niell. This entitles me to strong and kneejerk opinions whose ferocious anger at my own I've earned the right to profanely and hyperbolically shout.
3. Less-shitty does apply if #1 is true.
4. Shoot me: What if Obama has more moxie, ruthlessness, blind ambition and the skills to get it done than any politician currently striding the globe (and he hasn't, isn't, does but doesn't), how much could he get done in 2010 America?

The hoary truth: My team is less-shitty in the fraction it's less-shitty only because that fraction is our influence.

Well, this, the second slowest week of the year in Blegsylvania, I'm bored and when bored dream of tinkering - you can see I've moved a few things around already so that a project you may or not have noticed you can continue to notice or not, and I daydream about subtle color changes and reorganizing the blegrell so it makes honest sense, but I'm fairly certain I can talk myself out of those two.

Meanwhile, it's been a couple of months since I posted this, without doubt another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever, probably in my top ten actually:

You, um, do know to click the songs before starting reading the post, yes?

• This is exactly what I've been saying.
• I love Old Paleo Dirty 101 Bama (who got the hell out of Alabama), but the sooner Alabama and the other ex-Confederacy states break away to form the third world country of Crackerstan, the sooner more of my tax dollars can go to those who need it in the real America.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• UPDATE! World's Shittiest Human takes the opportunity on Giftmas to prove he is the World's Shittiest Human.
• UPDATE! The sublede of this article - Political turmoil has made it nearly impossible for anyone in Iran to support nuclear cooperation without being accused of capitulating to the West - proves Iran has its own World's Shittiest Human competitors.
• UPDATE! Pastor Sanctimonious, typing from his mansion, tells you the TRUE message of Giftmas is SHUT UP AND EMBRACE YOUR POVERTY, YOU FUCKING PEASANT!
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Pigpunditry! Palace sources say Patrick Stewart is about to be knighted by Queen Elizabeth. It turns out he is an avid supporter of Britain’s Labour party; his support must be especially welcome in this, one of Labour’s darker hours. Coincidentally, I have over the past couple of months been watching DVDs of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show I missed completely in its run of 1987 to 1994; and I confess myself amazed that so many conservatives are fond of it. Its messages are unabashedly liberal ones of the early post-Cold War era – peace, tolerance, due process, progress (as opposed to skepticism about human perfectibility).

• Star Trek and Moral Judgment.

UPDATE!

I finally remembered the episode of the Picard photo I luckily stumbled upon, and it's.... Ardra!

• UPDATE! Woman jumps Vatican barrier, knocks Pope to the ground, and an American Catholic from Texas grasps the event's significance: "I'm really mad because I had a perfect shot lined up," she said. "I'm still shaking."
• Why yes, there is a reason I don't read Reason.
• UPDATE! Irrational Exuberance.
• The Year in Crazy, part one.

• UPDATE! One can't be a lifelong Mocomofer and not note the death of George Michael. I understand his influence in the industry, his standing in Greater Districtville, but I never watched. Once Glenn Brenner - a comedic genius -died I stopped watching local news (or rather, I only watched local news to watch Brenner poke Gordon Peterson into losing it on set).
• My Future Hell.
• ICC!
• Bus route paralleling ICC to be cut!
• Georgia Avenue Greenway!
• Crisis in Cabin John!
• Crisis in Silver Spring!
• Taking back Alexandria!
• SoccerPlex!
• How will soccer tactics evolve in the next ten years?

• Poetry Best Sellers of 2009? is mostly suck.
• UPDATE! How poetry has changed in the past ten years. It's ahead of fiction in depicting now. It's not torturing epistemology for golf claps - THERE IS NOTHING MORE BORING THAN EPISTEMOLOGY FOR GOLF CLAPS! - it's rawer, it's better than it was ten years ago.
• UPDATE! Though Spicer's Collected generating such heat says more about current reading more than writing, I suppose....
• What writers at the New Yorker read - includes Maqroll!
• A review of what I think the Most Overrated Novel Ever.
• Vinyl v Digital.
• The 100 Jazz Albums that Shook the World.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

PSYCHOANALYSIS: AN ELEGY

Jack Spicer

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.

I am thinking of wet hills in the rain

Pouring water. Shedding it

Down empty acres of oak and manzanita

Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,

Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.

Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana

Driving the hills crazy,

A fast wind with a bit of dust in it

Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.

Or down in the city where the peach trees

Are awkward as young horses,

And there are kites caught on the wires

Up above the street lamps,

And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer

As slow getting started

As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza

After a lot of unusual rain

California seems long in the summer.

I would like to write a poem as long as California

And as slow as a summer.

Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow

As the very tip of summer.

As slow as the summer seems

On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside

Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road

Between Bakersfield and Hell

Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now?

I’m thinking that she is very much like California.

When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways

Traveling up and down her skin

Long empty highways

With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them

On hot summer nights.

I am thinking that her body could be California

And I a rich Eastern tourist

Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas

Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California

That I have never seen.

Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,

Send them.

One of each breast photographed looking

Like curious national monuments,

One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway

Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging

In the world’s oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?

I am thinking of how many times this poem

Will be repeated. How many summers

Will torture California

Until the damned maps burn

Until the mad cartographer

Falls to the ground and possesses

The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

Go Mad. Better People Than Either of Us Have Tried It. I Loved You Once But I Do Not Know the Future.

I hate snow, I hate Giftmas, I like having a 102 fever as long as no sore throat - what better time for obamapology?

Maybe Obama is the best America can do.

Proof? Yglesias ranks Your Fucking Washington Posts Top Ten Fuckwitted Everlards of the decade:

10. Michael Kelly
9. David Broder
8. Jim Hoagland
7. Robert Novak
6. Michael Gerson
5. Fred Hiatt
4. Robert Samuelson
3. George Will
2. Robert Kagan
1. Charles Krauthammer

Henley can't resist re-ranking:

10. EJ Dionne
9. Robert Kagan
8. Robert Samuelson
7. David Ignatius
6. George Will
5. Jim Hoagland
4. Richard Cohen
3. David Broder
2. Charles Krauthammer
1. Michael Gerson

Whee! That'll shame them!

Ranking the fuckwits and fuckwads: Every bit as empowering, every bit as satisfying, every bit as effective at nailing pussy as stuffing dollar bills into strippers' garter belts.

• When bleg everlards argue.
• HCR Ponies v Shit Sandwiches.
• National Mythology and Dog Whistles.
• Republican virtue and equality.
• Hots On for Ozone Baby.
• I'd meant to write about this past Sunday's Frank Rich column, but Crusader Axe already has. Though it again begs the thought: Maybe Obama is the best America can do, and insulting progressives is part of that plan.
• As much as I enjoy reading Crusader Axe, an added benefit is every time I see his name I think of Crusader Rabbit.
• UPDATE! What if Obama is the best America can do. And did you pray hard enough Senator?
• The Oral Tradition.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Ten of the world's most dangerous roads.
• The Solar System in Maine.
• World Cup diary.
• UPDATE! If you want, take your head to the left or right of your computer screen, and if it's like mine you'll see this bleg as olive, then a brilliant blue, then maroon down the center.

• Kensington Whine (via the town listserv): I just saw county plow on a small pick-up scraping the bare asphalt on Saul Rd. while bypassing Oldfield.  Our street has yet to see sanding or scraping - not surprising since we're essentially a one-block island. There have been past storms where a plow never showed up. But I'll hold off on complaining for now.
• Waah?

• On Modernization and Its Discontents.
• When we had dinner w/Hamster a couple of weeks ago, he asked me where I had abandoned The Kindly Ones - when Aue was wounded and evacuated from Stalingrad - and I've been thinking about the book ever since, and now Dan's excellent essay is going to make me think about it more, and fuck, I need to finish it, which means I probably need to restart it.
• Some holiday lit linkages.
• Lethem reviews new Highsmith bio.
• Best Music Books of 2009?
• High Zappadan.
• Shaggadelic Zappadan.
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• New Fruit Bats reviewed, w/MP3s.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! I was going to hold this until December 30 when I do her annual birthday post, but now I don't have to worry about remembering.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

Single of the Year:

Or is it this?

Or is it this?

A POEM WITHOUT A SINGLE BIRD IN IT

Jack Spicer

What can I say to you, darling,

When you ask me for help?

I do not even know the future

Or even what poetry

We are going to write.

Commit suicide. Go mad. Better people

Than either of us have tried it.

I loved you once but

I do not know the future.

I only know that I love strength in my friends

And greatness

And hate the way their bodies crack when they die

And are eaten by images.

The fun’s over. The picnic’s over.

Go mad. Commit suicide. There will be nothing left

After you die or go mad,

But the calmness of poetry.

More Spicer.

Sixty-one today:

What To Do with a 102 Degree Fever

UPDATE!

UPDATE! EELS!

Be Alive as if Comprehension Were Not to Blame

That guy heading the goal is United's new signing, Cristian Castillo, a left-footed midfielder, it's a good thing, but I posted the youtube - it's USMNT @ El Salvador WCQ - just because I want to scream like that again. About anything.

• Taking ideological differences seriously.
• Greenwald's riff on and expansion of the above.
• Corporatism.
• The Narcissist's Defense.
• Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition.
• When we do rebel, best to kill the fuckwits first, then the fuckwads.
• Fuckwits come in all flavors.
• The most dangerous man in America?
• White America's Existential Crisis.
• Daily Obamapostasy.
• Exercising triangulation.
• Your Fucking Washington Post's Bracketology of Shittiness.
• What Elin Woods will get in divorce v what you'll get with health care reform.
• Tiger Woods Mistress Generator! (h/t)

• Hilltop!
• Intentionally naked man convicted in Fairfax!
• Fuck snow.

Champion's League Draw:

Inter Milan vs. Chelsea
AC Milan vs. Manchester United
Lyon vs. Real Madrid
Bayern Munich vs. Fiorentina
Stuttgart vs. FC Barcelona
Olympiakos vs. Bordeaux
FC Porto vs. Arsenal
CSKA Moscow vs. Sevilla

Heh, no fishiness with the draw here, what with Mourinho returning to Stamford Bridge and Beckham returning to Old Trafford, I'm certain TV executives were distraught.

• Highsmith bio reviewed by Winterson.
• Ten Awful Truths about Publishing.
• Zappadan Day 15: Notes on Religion.
• Obscure Sound's Top Ten, with MP3. I cannot argue with one or two one bit.
• KEXP DJs Top Ten of the Decade. I must be one of four people on the planet that doesn't get Arcade Fire's Funeral.
• Scott brought tasty MP3s.
• Petroleum By-Product.

• They contribute to No Fun City.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

LEFT EYE

Brenda Hillman

There's a barrier before between

I think they were trying to write their names on it

The rubbed-looking light      a glare of the all along

Had inserted inself into the nerves' lining

Say you saw it                    Be alive
As if comprehension were not to blame

As if autonomy were not to blame
And to the you between us        there could be read
                (a        heap of dirt had been pushed up, outside)

In the numberless
Rumorless
Night        the flame narrative        the flame report.

Damn, I love this song:

Theme Song December 2009

You are the generation that bought more shoes and you get what you deserve.

We Fear He Will Never Return to the Dishevelment of His Ambiguity.

Who's to blame? Someone's to blame! Tell me!

The now-famous yearly Candlebrow Conferences, like the institution itself, were subsidized out of the vast fortune of of Mr Gideon Candlebrow of Grossdale, Illinois, who had made his bundle back during the great Lard Scandal of the 80s, in which, before Congress put an end to the practice, countless adulterated tons of that comestible were exported to Great Britain, compromising further an already debased national cuisine, giving rise throughout the island, for example, to a Christmas-pudding controversy over which to this day families remain divided, often violently so. In the consequent scramble to develop more legal sources of profit, one of Mr Candlebrow's labratory hands happened to invent "Smegmo," an artificial substitute for everything in the edible-fat category, including margarine, which many felt wasn't that real to begin with. An eminent Rabbi of world hog capital Cincinnati, Ohio, was moved to declare the product kosher, adding that, " the Hebrew people have been waiting four thousand years for this. Smegmo is the Messiah of kitchen fats." With astonishing rapidity, Smegmo had come to account for the majority of Candlebrow Ventures' annual profits.

Smegmo?

"Goes with everything!" advised a student at a nearby table. "Stir it in your soup, spread it on your bread, mash it into your turnips! My dorm-mates comb their hair with it! There's a million uses for Smegmo."

 - Pynchon, Against the Day

Smegmo, yo. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, your pudding.

• Lieberman is Obama's beard. Whether they are working in concert or Obama is riffing off Lieberman's petulant assholity, Lieberman is Obama's beard.
• UPDATE! Joe Lieberman in sixteen seconds!
• Obama, Smegmo salesman. Establishment Democrats ALWAYS hated Dean, especially after his electoral successes in 2008. After leading the Democrats to victories in states establishment Democrats ridiculed Dean for even putting into play, his marginalization was required.
• UPDATE! Smegmobama! Yes?
• Daily Obamapostasy.

UPDATE!

• Dean speaks!
• Villager fuckwit calls him crazy!
• Villager fuckwad throws fit!
• You're a tea-bagger, says Villager Milbank.
• The pragmatic counter-argument.
• I realize it's a sign of how small I am that even if Lieberman is Obama's beard, I'd still like to brain Joe Lieberman with a shovel. 
• Your America.
• UPDATE! Reconsider that donation to the ACLU?
• Here, let Richard Cohen explain human sexuality. I forget where it was, but someone wrote an ask the editor question to someone asking, Why does Tiger only date attractive blondes? and the editor answered, Because he can.
• All that is solid melts into air.
• Headline of the Day!
• Best Giftmas present ever.

• Purple Line!
• ICC! Lexus tolls to be approved!
• Weast War!
• Montrose Hell!
• UPDATE! Crisis in Kensington! Dig this opening paragraph: Residents of Kensington's Byeford neighborhood are petitioning against a T-Mobile cell phone tower the Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church is considering installing on its property, citing concerns of possible negative effects on public health and property values. I'm sure when they were furiously calling each other on their cell phones to complain about their property values they spent equal time discussing the health risks of cell phone towers.
• MOCO/PG divorce?
• UPDATE! Crisis in Darnestown!
• Deskunkification!
• UPDATE! Decision time for Clarksburg!
• Crisis is Laytonsville!
• Bethesda OMFG!

• 25 Best Books of Poetry of the Decade.
• Chaos in fourteen lines.
• Best American Poetry for and by old farts.
• All three of the above lifted from Silliman's always generous blog.
• I really liked Mating, but have tried and failed to get thirty pages into Mortals at least five times. I'm not sure if my tastes changed that dramatically of Rush got that much more dramatically sucky, but it fascinates me.
• Lots of, lots on, Muriel Rukeyser.

• Slow week of new releases.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Obscure Sounds' #50 - #41, with MP3. I was disappointed in this Camera Obscura, truth be told.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Obscure Sounds' #40 - #31, with MP3. I dig Atlas Sound and the xx.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Obscure Sounds #30 - #21, with MP3. YYYs, plus Royksopp, plus Cymbals Eat Guitars.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Obscure Sound's #20 - #11, with MP3. Fever Ray, yo.
• The Pitchforkening (h/t) Top 100 songs of year.
• Heh.
• UPDATE! KEXP DJs Top Tens. John's has the most I'd agree with, though I think that BlakRoc wildly overhyped and overrated (though not on a Jack White scale of overhyped and overrated), and I can live a full and happy life without hearing Bon Iver ever again.
• Heh.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

THE YELLOW LETTER

Cal Bedient

He was battered out from his stay in the infantry.
Ran his knife through the ear of a walkie-talkie, called it
"Getting the President's Attention." We fear he will never return

to the dishevelment of his ambiguity. It's like watching Ted Koppel's
mother combing his hair on Nightline. All the Iraqi
POWs wanted to talk about, someone said, was bananas.

We may never again be cracked up to be.
I'm so afraid to losing you, who don't give a shit no more.
I miss something to go crazy about. I wish I had

a bowl of sparrows to feed to. I wish I could speed
somebody's beauty around. The tush of George W.
Bush is singing from our cabana: he called this one

"Singing Full-Throated from the Oval Room."
And now for you my imitation of waving wands of corn
in the land you loved so well, back in the eventide

letting darkness down easy.

Still one of my favorite songs of 2009. Forgive me.