Head Strong. Sweet Spot. Gut Shot. Back Away. Meat Hooks.

A conversation with Agi plus Montag's bleggalgazing prompt me to bang out unfinished what I've been cudding for a week or two...

I've a friend, an academic, who's working on a paper about internet-swarming - facebook, myspace, youtube, blogs, and especially tumblr, the new craze, which he says rings bells in his head - not alarm bells, but there's something happening on tumblr (and soup too) that signals something new.

I'll take a shot: There's an e-tribe of young and prematurely disaffected people, young because it is (mostly) a generation behind mine, prematurely disaffected because that generation is skipping the step of disillusionment (unlike me and my friend's generation) and moving straight to disaffection, and that e-tribe cuts and flaunts their alienation and disaffection vis a vis the crappy choices power gives them. Power doesn't bother marketing hope any more.

Here's Badiou, in a Le Monde op-ed 2/13/10:

To make a period illegible is much more than to simply condemn it. One of the effects of illegibility is to make it impossible to find in the period in question the very principles capable of remedying its impasses. If the period is declared to be pathological, nothing can be extracted from it for the sake of orientation, and the conclusion, whose pernicious effects confront us every day, is that one must resign oneself to disorientation as a lesser evil.

Call it disorientation, but the rapidity and insistence with which power seamlessly delivers the technological appearance of resistance while simultaneously reminding us every keystroke is potential evidence against us (he punches on his laptop for this shetty bleg), is a contract of complicity if you type in content and push publish. The cutting is carnival.

Fuckyeahtattoos, of course I'm wildly oversimplifying in general and over-dramatically selling tumblr's KABOOM! in particular while gratuitously invoking Badiou for the sake of a point in this shetty blegpost, but there is a connection.

Tumblr will be wheelchaired in a nursing home by next February yesterday, which makes the question: If tumblr is a symptom of some significant paradigmatic change - a generation that presupposes that disorientation is the norm - what replaces tumblr when its carnival is obsolete?

• Disorder.
• Of course the internet is used to subject us.
• Permanent fear as choke collar.
• Fresh insights from the 19th Century.
• The complex.
• If Obama trusts Lindsey Graham to bargain in good faith, Obama is a supremely dumb motherfucker.
• Good luck with that.
• Democrats are such pussies.
• The word Dionne is looking for is pussies.
• So fucking what.
• Capitalism. (h/t)
• End results. Hmmm, who benefits if more people are denied access to books?
• A frothy mix of lube and fecal matter.
• UPDATE! Who's HOT! in piggery.
• UPDATE! The inanity's on Obama.
• Israel starts PR push. Perhaps Israel is treated unfairly. According to Misha Glenny in McMafia, the highest quality whores, imported from Eastern European hellholes by the Israeli mafia, can be bought for extremely reasonable prices in Tel Aviv.
• Torture them much?
• UPDATE! On a rope.
• I was going to comment on this, but now I don't have to.
• More on my correct decision to not pursue the PhD. (h/t)
• What PETA said is true, plus heh.
• UPDATE! More. And it needs mentioning that purebred rescues exist too for those who want a purebred AND save a dog's life. We're almost two months out from giftmas - shelters are full of rejected presents.
• UPDATE! French fur-trappers!

• MCPS budget.
• How many people in Virginia just voted to fuck up their kids' education system? Fucking crackers.
• Austerity.
• MOCO v PG throwdown.
• UM v UVA throwdown.
• UPDATE! Everyone choose sides.
• Poodlenapping in Silver Spring!
• Bob Ehrlich wants to friend you.
• Might as well hold off on getting your alignment fixed.
• STRIKE! or lockout, one or the other.

• Nuts!
• More.
• You can have Cristiano Ronaldo. I'll take Rooney.
• HEY! With the MLS reserve division a distant memory, D.C. United has arranged spring exhibitions to provide match experience for its secondary players. The opponents will be second-division Crystal Palace Baltimore (March 29, 11 a.m.), third-division Real Maryland (April 11, 11 a.m.) and the University of Maryland (April 14, 10 a.m.). The matches will be played at the RFK training grounds and are free to the public. Yes? to at least one?
• UPDATE! Kocic waived. No surprise, a favor of sorts: it gives him a chance to sign on with someone in some league during preseason. (Pint says he'll be keeper for some USL-2 team United sees in Cup, anyone?).

• How Stanley Elkin predicted Rush Limbaugh.
• Titling your story.
• Laura Moriarty? Unfortunately, though I work in a library, none here.
• Born between 1923 - 1933.
• This week's releases, w/MP3.
• To hell with good intentions.
• Birth, school, work, death.
• Bastards of young.
• Taste of blood.
• Kurious Oranj.
• Why the fuck is Devotchka on my radio?
• I don't know why I love you.
• Babooshka.
• World shut your mouth.
• Here's where the story ends.
• Flight test.
• When I dream.

GLASS JAW SONNET

Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Glass jaw, chicken neck, bag of bones, heart sick.
Knuckle head, bug eyes, lily-livered chump.
Sweet feet. Heavy handed, gutless, headstrong,
Weak-kneed, barrel-chested, hairless, loose-lipped,
Lion hearted redneck. Hair of the dog.
Brainiac, bow-legged, slack-jawed punk. Head
Strong. Sweet spot. Gut Shot. Back away. Meat hooks.
Lazy eye, on the chin, stink eye, reed thin.
Face only a mother could love. Back down.
Nerves of steel, limp wrist, square jaw. Thin skinned, green
Eyed monster, cauliflower ear. Knock-kneed,
Slim waisted, eye of the tiger. In God's
Arms. Thick neck. Ass backward. Harden my heart.

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever: