BLCKDGRD

Poke at Us and Glare and Speak of How We Slithered Up from Hell

Read this. I posted a link last August. (h/t) reminded me:

My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing....

(T)he primacy of anti-discrimination not only performs the economic function of making markets more efficient, it also performs the therapeutic function of making those of us who have benefited from those markets sleep better at night.

Yglesias posted that "something about mass transit drives conservatives batty." I post any article about the Purple Line I find, first because it's where I live, but more because the steely determination of Bethesda's richest, a majority of whom support gay marriage and anti-discrimination laws, a majority of whom vote Democrat, to make it as onerous as possible for their maids and gardeners to get to work fascinates me.

• Montag is hosting February's Carnival of the Liberals.
• A better world?
• First time as tragedy...
• Race in the South in the Age of Obama.
• Despicable: Ms. Davis traveled to black churches and colleges around the state, delivering the message that abortion is the primary tool in a decades-old conspiracy to kill off blacks.
• Race in the South in the Age of Obama. (h/t)
• George Wallace's GOP: The history of the modern GOP in one sentence: "Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller got into an argument and George Wallace won."
• Yes, they are pigs. Where's the Democrat of substance calling them pigs? Heh, I made a funny.
• Someone has trouble understanding the right-wing obsession with being condescended to? Really? Either he's stupid or making a condescending statement.
• He's called The Dickwhisperer for a reason.
• Krugman on the above two links.
• Liberalism, atheism in men linked to higher IQ.
• More on the above.
• Calling bullshit on the study.
• Christers can bite me.

• Bob Ehrlich is a pussy.
• Crisis in Poolesville!
• Metro surcharge.
• White Flint and farmers.

• Sorrentino's last novel reviewed. A friend gave me a copy - it's now #12 in pile.
• Grumpy poets.
• Tournament of Books is back.
• Dustjackets.
• Moka's Top Tracks, part 3.
• Shearwater.

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.
Today's Listening Assignment. Today's Listening Assignment.
Today's Listening Assignment. Today's Listening Assignment.

Happy Birthday, Elric

A WORD FROM THE FAT LADY

Gabrielle Calvocoressi

It isn’t how we look up close
so much as in dreams.

Our giant is not so tall,
our lizard boy merely flaunts

crusty skin- not his fault 
they keep him in a crate

and bathe him maybe once a week.
When folks scream or clutch their hair

and poke at us and glare and speak
of how we slithered up from Hell,

it is themselves they see:
the preacher with the farmer’s girls

(his bulging eyes, their chicken legs)
or the mother lurching towards the sink,

a baby quivering in her gnarled 
hands. Horror is the company

you keep when shades are drawn.
Evil does not reside in cages.

 

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

FCUK CHEL$KI

Heh, fuck Chelsea:

John Terry got us into this mess by eschewing a simple handshake and choosing instead to sate his grubby urges by irrevocably damaging the life of a perfectly decent human being and also a small child; as a consequence we now have the vaguely farcical scenario of a significant football match – Chelsea go four points clear if they win; City go fourth if they draw – being overshadowed by a handshake. A handshake. You know, the thing that is occasionally used to significant a vital political breakthrough, an initiation and the like. Oh, football....

From afar, Terry seems like a peculiarly English streak of odiousness; the sort who, despite being guilty of some palpably indefensible behaviour, is able to ignore all logic and manufacture their own grievance so that they can behave like they have been wronged. All very strange. All very English...

The death knell for a once proud country: Bridge gets his first touch and is roundly booed. As he goes to collect the ball for a throw-in, you can easily lipread one charming gentleman calling him a "fucking prick". I want none of this.

Don’t They Know That Things Always Get Brighter, at Least Until They Become Invisible

Thread one of three email threads with friends yesterday:

• I'd repressed thinking how piggish the bastards that own and broadcast soccer are, and yes, soccer's rituals produce piggy thugs - illustrated by Elric being told by State to stay away where Serbian soccer fans hang - and that's not an accident. O! My black United shirts, season coming, need washing.

Thread two: 

• I've been offered a free ride for a PhD in Liberal Studies starting Fall 2011 here at Hilltop but I need jump through the hoops and need start jumping soon and better lose the current attitude, they don't do Theory of Whatthefuckism and Culture of Grump here, chop-chop.

Thread three:

• Why the fuck do I bleg? Why do I sweat anything bleggy? Why does this particular dipshit's success bug me? Why can't I write a post about it I'm not too embarrassed to publish?

I've no overarching point other than (thanks for the emails) if I had to give up one of the three it wouldn't be the blegging or the soccer.

• Speaking of Elric, photos from Yerevan.
• Capitalism, Consumerism, and Feminism.
• Tortillas and the Corporate State.
• Capitalist Realism.
• Capitalism.
• UPDATE! Read this.
• Lawfare!
• Contemplate this.
• Because America isn't meddling. More.
• The Year of Beck.
• Gaffney once, Gaffney twice.
• Pig War on knowledge.
• Pigs.
• Our enlightened discourse.
• Sally Quinn taken out back and shot.
• True.
• Lexical cleansing.
• Tumblr heh.

• MOCO and the Pledge. Planet says kids refuse to stand at her school all the time. Earthgirl doesn't give a shit whether her kids stand or not.
• Maryland!
• Here in Warshington, who gives a fuck?
• Metro measured in deaths?
• Fredneckery.
• Assclownery.
• Oofdah! But the fact that ESPN has suddenly taken to punishing Kornheiser for being an oozing bag of pus and venom raises more questions about the network than it does about the employee.
• Proof Ives Galarcep is an idiot: The new U.S. national team jerseys were unveiled today by Nike (pictured above). You will be able to see them displayed in their full glory at Nikemedia.com later today. My early verdict: Not too bad at all. Idiot.
• Strike! Well, not officially yet.

• 2666.
• Unpopular answers to questions about poetry.
• The writing advice industry.
• In defense of dead trees.
• More reason to honor my promise to revisit Coetzee.
• Dr Jeykll and Ms Highsmith.
• Silliman's weekly generous linkopalooza.
• Rewriting textbooks?
• Crazy Town.
• Caribou.
• This week's new releases, w/MP3.
• Why the fuck is Soundgarden on my radio?
• Mark E Smith autobiography?
• NEW Broken Social Scene single is mmwah.

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.
Today's Listening Assignment. Today's Listening Assignment.

SEE YOU TOMORROW

Hayden Carruth

Twilight is what the tittycrested romanticists say,
Referring to old age, Twilight! Don’t they know
That things always get brighter, at least until
They become invisible. Look at the sky. Full
Of bright pains. And the earth, full of great
Flashing fears. Sparkling explosions are every-
Where. Highways run with the liquid fire
Of angst and hypochondria. Moonlight
On the cornfields mixes and flows like an
Immense sob. The next time you see a line
Of geezers shuffling toward the check-out
Remember they are entering the arcade of
Death. Flashing lights and crashing bells
Surround them, and the only darkness is
The space between the soles of their shoes
And the floor. Hup, atwo, athree, afour—
The slow march and the muffled drum. So
Never fear, they will get there in blinding
Dawn when the day of demolition has just
Begun. Whoop-de-do and tum-tum-tum,
Benighted night will never come.

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

Born Sixty-Seven Years Ago Today

Tao Lin Is Creating an iPhone App Titled "North American Hamsters"

Who wants to contribute to buy one and name it Hamlet?

Blithe Age

• UPDATE! Read this.
• UPDATE! Read this.

I blithely inserted those bullets into yesterday's post, but blithely decided they deserved their own blithe post.

Meanwhile, Ruth Marcus in Your Fucking Washington Post blithely advises Obama to stop being so fucking audacious, and the Pornstache blithely ponders whether Iraqis are too sandmonkey for "Democracy."

Blithe?

Who the fuck blithely uses fucking Star Trek allusions?

Meanwhile, since his 61st birthday is tomorrow, that's when I was going to blithely post this:

But news yesterday that he was attacked and sent to the hospital by his wife prompted me to blithely post it today.

Blithe, a favorite song:

You Current with No River in Sight. Current as Confetti after Parades

Q: What about ordering a village of resistants to be massacred? ... Is that a power that the president could legally--

Yoo: "Yeah. Although, let me say this. So, certainly, that would fall within the commander-in-chief's power over tactical decisions.

Q: To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?

Yoo: Sure.

!HEH! and then:

To summarize:  the NYT Op-Ed Page decided, for whatever reasons, that it wanted to find someone to urge more civilian deaths in Afghanistan.  The person it found to do that is someone about whom virtually nothing was known, yet works for one of the largest, most sprawling and influential defense firms in the nation, a virtual arm of the Pentagon, but they decided there was no reason to have its readers know that.

I'll suspend posting consecutive wails of roobish outrage until next time, but I'm asking: there's not one politician from the Left with any heft who'll demagogue the FUCK! out of what pisses off dumb motherfuckers like me for only craven political gain - more face time on cable, an increase in donations and, if there are as many dumb motherfuckers like me like I like to think there are, one thin wafer more power?

• Where are the high-profile Democrats calling bullshit?
• UPDATE! Read this.
• UPDATE! Read this.
• Don't blame Geithner, blame who hired, won't fire.
• Geithner refuses to come down from Capitol dome.
• Winning hearts.
• Do you really want to Newt me?
• Pining for Thermidor.
• Pigs truly are pussies.
• The ascendancy of Krugman.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Manipulated by menus.

• Bab's running:

• A pig-nobody running against her.
• Van Hollen posturing.
• Clarksburg Historical District is a stoplight.
• More crossbow hunting for Maryland!
• More money for worsening service!
• No one wants to run Metro.
• Yeah, I changed the color of the quotes, again by request for googlereaders.
• The Orioles could have had Jon Miller. Instead, they have Joe Angel.
• Dimitar Berbatov is.... The Continental.
• USMNT WC10 road kit:

• Meh. O! watched Everton v Man Utd Saturday morning, and (a) Man Utd just ain't that good and (b) if I was Landon Donovan I would be asking my agent to go to any lengths necessary to get out of my MLS (Must Leave Soon) contract.
• Will it be a strike or lockout?
• Goff writes Anschutz, reminds me that Anschultz is a MAJOR pig, reminds me that I watch soccer in America by way of pigs like Anschutz and on FOX Soccer Channel.
• Did you know United hasn't scored a goal in three games?

• Beckett is another promise I've made to try again.
• Calvocoressi interview. I'm smitten.
• Hillary Mantel leaves Saudi Arabia after four years.
• New Gerald Stern poem.
• On the critic in an age of overwhelming cultural production.
• DeLillo on Mad Men and writing.
• Inherent Vice considered.
• Hot for librarian?
• A guide to fiction online.
• On the rules.
• Truly horrible news.
• You just thought Gordon Sumner is an asshole.
• New Broken Social Scene coming in May!
• Shearwater covers Eno.

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.
Today's Listening Assignment. Today's Listening Assignment.
Today's Listening Assignment. Today's Listening Assignment.
Today's Listening Assignment. Today's Listening Assignment.

A LOVE SUPREME

Gabrielle Calvocoressi

You beautiful, broke-
back horse of my heart. Proud,
debonair, not quite there

in the head. You current
with no river in sight.
Current as confetti

after parades. You
small-town. Italian
ice shop next to brothels

beside the highway.
Sweet and sweaty. You high
as a kite coming

down. You suburban sprawled
on the bed. You dead? Not
nearly. Not yet.

 

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

To a Place Beneath the Chin I wish I Could Sing Of

I normally don't excerpt this much of an article, but read how the elites are preparing for the inevitable :

The story was in essence a twelve-minute Pentagon infomercial. What the “protesters” had come up against was the Active Denial System, a weapon, we were told, that “could change the rules of war and save huge numbers of lives in Iraq.” Active denial works like a giant, open-air microwave oven, using a beam of electromagnetic radiation to heat the skin of its targets to 130 degrees and force anyone in its path to flee in pain—but without injury, officials insist, making it one of the few weapons in military history to be promoted as harmless to its targets. The Pentagon claims that 11,000 tests on humans have resulted in but two cases of second-degree burns, a “safety” record that has put active denial at the forefront of an international arms-development effort involving an astonishing range of technologies: electrical weapons that shock and stun; laser weapons that cause dizziness or temporary blindness; acoustic weapons that deafen and nauseate; chemical weapons that irritate, incapacitate, or sedate; projectile weapons that knock down, bruise, and disable; and an assortment of nets, foams, and sprays that obstruct or immobilize. “Non-lethal” is the Pentagon’s approved term for these weapons, but their manufacturers also use the terms “soft kill,” “less-lethal,” “limited effects,” “low collateral damage,” and “compliance.” The weapons are intended primarily for use against unarmed or primitively armed civilians; they are designed to control crowds, clear buildings and streets, subdue and restrain individuals, and secure borders. The result is what appears to be the first arms race in which the opponent is the general population.

Not me, and not most if not all of you reading this shetty bleg, of course, who are not merely complicit but invested in the status-quo (though we root for underdogs on our blegs):

It is a need for discretion rooted in one of the oldest fears of the ruling class—the volatility of the mob—and speaks to rising anxieties about crowd control at a time when global capitalism begins to run up against long-predicted limits to growth. Each year, some 76 million people join our current 6.7 billion in a world of looming resource scarcities, ecological collapse, and glaring inequalities of wealth; and elites are preparing to defend their power and profits. In this new era of triage, as democratic institutions and social safety nets are increasingly considered dispensable luxuries, the task of governance will be to lower the political and economic expectations of the masses without inciting full-fledged revolt. Non-lethal weapons promise to enhance what military theorists call “the political utility of force,” allowing dissent to be suppressed inconspicuously.

What follows is a history of crowd-control and the lessons learned that make "soft-kill" weapons' research and development so eagerly funded. It's all about the marketing.

The next hurdle for non-lethality, as Colonel Hymes’s comments suggest, will be the introduction of so-called second-generation non-lethal weapons into everyday policing and crowd control. Although “first-generation” weapons like rubber bullets and pepper spray have gained a certain acceptance, despite their many drawbacks, exotic technologies like the Active Denial System invariably cause public alarm. Nevertheless, the trend is now away from chemical and “kinetic” weapons that rely on physical trauma and toward post-kinetic weapons that, as researchers put it, “induce behavioral modification” more discreetly. One indication that the public may come to accept these new weapons has been the successful introduction of the Taser—apparently, even the taboo on electroshock can be overcome given the proper political climate.

I take it back: yes, me, you. The clusterfuck is coming: my complicity now won't buy me dogfood then. They'll foreclose my ass with the corporate fuck you they foreclose on dogs now, and though they think me a rube and thus a coward, what's a few $B annually of our taxes spent R&Ding better choke collars for when they're needed?

• Spectacle.
• More.
• Anatomy of Liberal Outrage.
• Haig beats Hague.
• In case you forgot what an asshole Haig was.
• Giggle:

• Assholes.
• Crackers.
• The paranoid style.
• Exactly correct.
• Obamapostasy.
• Teach your children.
• The Dickwhisperer says only Rahm saves Obama from complete failure, so in love with Rahm for calling liberals fucking retarded is The Dickwhisperer.
• Obamalame.
• Your Fucking Washington Post. Please remember that when Obama condones John Yoo and orders more money spent on soft-kill weaponry, he is doing so at the behest of Sally Quinns.
• It's not in Your Fucking Washington Post (where her slop is spilt weekly), it's Your Fucking New York Review of Books that Applebaum writes: It is simply not possible to imagine any three prominent contemporary American public intellectuals—say, Malcolm Gladwell, Niall Ferguson, and David Brooks—indulging in a night on the town such as that one, let alone weeping over the human condition and threatening to throw themselves into the Seine at the end of it. Hollywood starlets and pseudo-celebrities behave that way in our culture, not serious people.
• Tiger Woods cheated on his wife?
• On newsstands now.
• Elric is in Yerevan.
• Soliciting submissions.
• Just because:

• 20 hours on Metro.
• Metro.
• No surprise this local asshole works at Cato.
• Crisis in Kensington!
• Frederick Gazette uses both "farmers" and "plethora" in headline!

• Ten rules for writing fiction, with advice from Atwood, Kennedy, Ford, and others.
• Ten rules for writing fiction, with advice from Mantel, Oates, Tremain, and others.
• On the above two links.
• Vollmann reviews a book about roads, but the big news is Vollmann has a new book out in April. Makes me wonder if he's abandoned the Seven Dreams project.
• Thoughts on late Coetzee reminds me I promised myself another attempt.

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.
Today's Listening Assignment. Today's Listening Assignment.
Today's Listening Assignment. Today's Listening Assignment.

NORTHERN PIKE

James Wright

All right. Try this,
Then. Every body
I know and care for,
And every body
Else is going
To die in a loneliness
I can't imagine and a pain
I don't know. We had
To go on living. We
Untangled the net, we slit
The body of this fish
Open from the hinge of the tail
To a place beneath the chin
I wish I could sing of.
I would just as soon we let
The living go on living.
An old poet whom we believe in
Said the same thing, and so
We paused among the dark cattails and prayed
For the muskrats,
For the ripples below their tails,
For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were 
    making under water,
For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman.
We prayed for the game warden's blindness.
We prayed for the road home.
We ate the fish.
There must be something very beautiful in my body,
I am so happy.

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

Sixty-Two Today

Billy Zoom.

Remember when X seemed urgent and important?

The reverence has evaporated; the music hasn't aged well.

Early 80s, Ontario Theater, the More Fun in the New World tour, I don't even remember who opened, X played for three fucking hours, tore the place down, one of the second five best nights of my life.

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: