BLCKDGRD

Theme Song February 2010

Now designated the Official Theme Song of BLCKDGRD:

The Sky with Its Macular Clouds

Did you know Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State? It's true!

Let's play: Say HRC Was POTUS!

I say the Republican's haven't had to open more than two, three cans of ugly, so pussy the Democrats, so tin-earred Obama, so dickwhispering the media.

I don't regret HRC losing because she'd have been less dismal than Obama. I regret HRC losing because she'd have made Republicans work harder to make her as dismal.

• How much does Bayh hate Obama for no VPOTUS?
• Rahm Rove.
• Rahmbama.
• Glee.
• Because America has never been me first.
• Because Republicans never politicized terrorism.
• Never a cruise missile attack when you need one.
• Big lie.
• Roots.
• The top of our game.
• UPDATE! Heh to the above.
• The UK isn't different.
• Moloch in Helmand.
• Torture him much?
• Some would say it'd be irresponsible not to.
• UPDATE! More.
• UPDATE! More.
• Capitalism.
• Modernization, not Neoliberalism.
• Nervous Nellies.
• A week's immersion in corporate America.
• Democrats: more stupid than pussy, more pussy than stupid? And if the Republicans take back the house this November, when they start investigations into EVERY FUCKING THING, when they start IMPEACHMENT HEARINGS, blame the fucking Democrats.
• It's the economy. Fuckity fuck, is Obama more stupid than beholden to his masters or more beholden to his masters than stupid?
• Yup.
• Clown and pussy.
• Ranking the sexiness of presidents.
• Sugar high.

• Silly Gaithersburg.
• My future hell.
• Idiocy from MCPS.
• Bitch set him up.
• UPDATE! Maybe Obama's secret death squads could make themselves useful and target Fobin Ricker.
• UPDATE! Let the loser melt.
• Valentine present.
• Yow. She lets her football team wear black. Fire her.
• Bet a pint Fred has some combination of assists/goals > 20.
• Onalfo interview hints at dreary soccer. Though it's true, when Gomez and Fred and Emilio were on the field, eight man defense, counting the keeper.
• Dimitar Berbatov is... The Continental. (And has a cousin named Timitar who lives in a shack and makes sock wine.)

• Why publish so many poems about writing poetry?
• Um, because all art is about art unless it's about me?
• Between novellas and novels.
• Litbleg angst!
• White Noise still fresh.
• Gabrielle Calvocoressi?

• Good thing  I work in a library.
• The Wolves of Illinois.
• Aesthetics v Ethics.
• Part Two, David Shields interview.
• Reality Hunger reviewed.
• Victory.
• Connection.
• Why the fuck is Arcade Fire on my radio?
• Show me Mary.
• Jesus Lizard.
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• Lodestar.
• New Tindersticks reviewed.
• One with the freaks.
• New Gabriel reviewed.
• Start.

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.

IN DEFENSE OF NOTHING

Peter Gizzi

I guess these trailers lined up in the lot off the highway will do.
I guess that crooked eucalyptus tree also.
I guess this highway will have to do and the cars
    and the people in them on their way.
The present is always coming up to us, surrounding us.
It's hard to imagine atoms, hard to imagine
    hydrogen & oxygen binding, it'll have to do.
The sky with its macular clouds also
    and that electric tower to the left, one line broken free.

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

And the Brickwork Back of The Lumbering Galapagos Tortoise They'd Set Me Astride at the "Petting Zoo"....

I didn't pursue the doctorate - which I don't regret for an instant - for numerous and varied reasons, most heavily weighted towards my family: I didn't start college until I was thirty-two, and working full-time at Hilltop while taking night classes, I didn't finish both my undergraduate and masters degrees until I was forty, and... enough.

But there was also this: the majority of my teachers in the English Department were not murderers, but almost all were miserable - miserable with tenure-track fighting for tenure, miserable with tenure wanting full-professorship, miserable with full-professorship at Hilltop but not an Ivy, miserable with teaching loads and publishing deadlines and, most viciously, office location. Don't make me cut you for that fourth floor office, motherfucker. Miserable.

Three-four years of classes and thesis writing it would have taken to finish the PhD, I would have been a mid-40s heterosexual white male entering a profession where being a mid-40s heterosexual white male is a distinct disadvantage (that's not a complaint, it's a complement), and then getting a tenure-track job at Northwest Nebraska State (and one starts this profession in Northwest Nebraska State and knife-fights one's way to Hilltops), seemed silly, but more unhappy.

• Elric's last report from Srbija.
• Seeing like a state.
• Seeing like a state.
• I can provide access to an e-version of the above book. Email me and I'll send you the address and necessary alias/password.
• Capitalism.
• Class composition in the age of classless struggle.
• Pwog pwofessions abuzz with indignation!
• Structuralism.
• Party of Palin.
• Dreck Girl.
• Frank Rich calls Democrats pussies. He's right.
• Pigs are .06% pussier.
• New Deal in reverse.
• Republican priorities.
• UPDATE! Sense: Iran.
• Christers scare the bejeebus out of me.
• O! yes they do.
• Bet she's a Christer.
• More slobber from The Dickwhisperer.
• A question about douchery.

• Crisis in Kensington.
• No.
• No.
• Youth revolt in Maryland politics?
• Insights from Fredneck.
• Snow abates, homicides return.
• Table games.
• Benny as coach.
• First United exhibition, 8th minute, McTavish own goal.
• UPDATE! Capitalism.

• Armantrout is to Ashbery as Who is to Who?
• The Transparent Man.
• Is the new global novel dull?
• Decade: a list.
• Stephin Merritt/Claudia Gonson interviewed last week before the show (which has taken deeper seed in my thoughts more than I thought it would).
• Hideous Gnosis. I don't get it; I'd like understand it more.
• Gabriel and Bush.

HOW SIMILE WORKS

Albert Goldbarth

The drizzle-slicked cobblestone alleys 
of some city; 
 and the brickwork back 
of the lumbering Galapagos tortoise 
they'd set me astride, at the "petting zoo"....

The taste of our squabble still in my mouth 
the next day; 
 and the brackish puddles sectioning 
the street one morning after a storm....

So poetry configures its comparisons. 

My wife and I have been arguing; now 
I'm telling her a childhood reminiscence, 
stroking her back, her naked back that was 
the particles in the heart of a star and will be 
again, and is hers, and is like nothing 
else, and is like the components of everything. 

 

Sixty Today

S'funny I mentioned him yesterday:

There are no accidents round here.

11/14/82, Warner, one of the five best nights of my life.

A Bead of Sweat That Slid from Your Armpit to Your Waist

A few blegfriends have emailed. They've googlereadered me, but said googlereader renders my blue maroon and rose white! and that the yellow I use for links is yellow on white and literally unreadable! I googlesubscribed myself to googlereader (ick) and it's true! BLCKDGRD looks like shit on googlereader! (How it looks on Google Buzz is probably the same, but there's something you should know about Google Buzz, yo.)

My four favorite colors are indigo and maroon and whatever this middle column color is called and school-bus yellow.

Since I use it least, if I'm tinkering, school-bus yellow will be sacrificed, so for this post: orange links. Tell me if it makes a decent difference; if yes, I'll consider it (and my soul).

• Collaborating Across the Divide. (h/t)
• Thursday in Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Friday in Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Friday in Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Takedown of the above.
• Friday in Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Friday in Your Fucking Washington Post.
• UPDATE! Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Friday in Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Old Man Boner lubes up for Palin!
• Smacking Old Man Boner.
• My theory is Palin provides easy columns and drives numbers.
• I agree: Axelrod isn't taking enough shit, though the rest of the column is obamapologia at its lamest.
• UPDATE! Surge politics.
• Obamapostasy.
• Obamapostasy.
• Labor Unions are fucking retarded too.
• Today in Exquisite Insults. There not so exquisite, actually, and if Ezra thinks he zinged this asshole Ezra's less than a junior clown-wannabe.
• Obstructionism + Nihilism + Wurlitzer.
• A follow-up.
• Why is Gerald Alexander such an asshole?
• Answered questions.
• Moronistan.
• Moronistan.
• I'd still brain this fucker with a shovel given a chance.
• Whores bill for whores.
• UPDATE! Bobo's wild years.
• He was a doofus when he was on Channel 4 where he played their Henry Tenenbaum.
• Fuck the Olympics!

• $50M? Really? Really?
• New Maryland constitution?
• UPDATE!  SNORT! Montgomery County, MD and its politicians seem determined to ignore and abandon us by providing NO PLOWING of side streets of Kensington-Parkwood during the Feb 2010 snowstorms. Deys outs to gits us, the foiking county.
• MyerEmco out of business.
• UPDATE! Assholish to open Fed-govt for business today.
• Joy of screamers.
• USMNT WC10 Home Kit.

• Meh.

• The 2110 Club. Yes to The Unconsoled. (h/t) (I bought, on the recommendation of a friend, It's All Right Now on my bookshelf; I've always meant to read it, never got to it.)
• More Wallace Stevens at this guy's place.
• Highsmith is now officially a 2010 project.
• We float.
• Why the fuck is Fleet Foxes on my radio?
• What I won't do for bleglove.
• Looking back at 69 Love Songs after ten years.
• Beach House's Norway is my favorite of 2010 so far.
• Near bottom of this post, two new Bettie Serveert songs!
• There's Genesis, and then there's a shitty band after Gabriel left. Serendipitously, I've been digging Car and Scratch and Melt and Security lately. Listen.
• On white people stealing black music.
• Moka's 200, part four.

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.
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.

• Bettie Serveert?

 

RENDER, RENDER

Thomas Lux

Boil it down: feet, skin, gristle,
bones, vertebrae, heart muscle, boil
it down, skim, and boil
again, dreams, history, add them and boil
again, boil and skim
in closed cauldrons, boil your horse, his hooves,
the runned-over dog you loved, the girl
by the pencil sharpener
who looked at you, looked away,
boil that for hours, render it
down, take more from the top as more settles to the bottom,
the heavier, the denser, throw in ache
and sperm, and a bead 
of sweat that slid from your armpit to your waist
as you sat stiff-backed before a test, turn up
the fire, boil and skim, boil
some more, add a fever
and the virus that blinded an eye, now's the time 
to add guilt and fear, throw
logs on the fire, coal, gasoline, throw
two goldfish in the pot (their swim bladders
used for "clearing"), boil and boil, render
it down and distill,
concentrate
that for which there is no
other use at all, boil it down, down, 
then stir it with rosewater, that 
which is now one dense, fatty, scented red essence
which you smear on your lips 
and go forth
to plant as many kisses upon the world
as the world can bear! 

You probably knewl the second you heard the voice, but Jonsi is the singer for Sigur Ros, and this is his new solo project:

How Did the Verb To Come (Our Childhood's Bright Infinitive) Become So Narrow a Necessity?

Holyfuck, either Obama is a genius operating in seven dimensions or he's a colossally dumb motherfucker:

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

Obama believes good politics is everyone hating him equally, that bipartisanship is an equilibrium halfway between Left hate and Right hate.

He's probably right. Which doesn't answer the question, is he operating in seven dimensions or one dumb motherfucker?

And in the tyranny of either/or, does it matter?

(And yes, I know Bloomberg is foicking Obama - how does that exonerate Obama?)

• Perma-temps: The structure and silence of the cognitariat.
• Obamanomics one year out.
• One response.
• Another response.
• Murtha and the rancid cake.
• Calling bullshit on Murtha hagiographers.
• Carp of Truth.
• Seeding torture.
• No.
• Either powerful Democrats are afraid to call bullshit or know they can be called on equal bullshit themselves. The tyranny of the either/or = absence of both.
• Regardless, Republicans are pussies.
• He's not called The Dickwhisperer for nothing.
• I was emailing a friend about soccer books, and he mentioned Foer's How Soccer Explains the World, which reminded me how much TNR perniciously sucks.
• I've trained myself to not buy non-fiction - I do work in a library, yo - and I've learned by expensive experience that for 90% of non-fiction, I can get all the gist I need from the introduction and conclusion, skipping the documentation of the thesis in the big fat middle. (h/t)

• I've never seen anything like this.
• Idiots!
• MOCO priorities.
• Montgomery College to open branch in Burtonsville?
• The evolution of Metro.
• Maryland AP scores best in nation.

• The Dull New Global Novel.
• David Shields interview (part one). Upbleg I said I don't buy non-fiction; I'll make an exception for Reality Hunger.
• The future of the image.
• Greatest Literary Hoax Ever?
• More on the toad hoaxed.
• Kleinzahler diary.
• Reading The Kindly Ones.
• Look at these.
• Look at these. (h/t)
• Look at these. (h/t)
• This week's releases, w/MP3.
• Moka's Top 200, part five.

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

INFLATION

Heather McHugh

Language wasn't any
funny money I was playing with,
no toy surprise, no watch or wooden
nickel, not
a nickel nickel either, twice
removed, sign of a sing.
I meant to make
so deep a song

it held no end of love.
But now I'm dumb
to frame the stream
of stills I feel,
stuck in the onrush without any
one that I was singing to,
without a you, and currents go on running up
a bill of silver senselessness - the seconds counted
in the hundreds, in the thousands, in the billions, till the till

is burst. Remember how enormous one
old swollen moment used to be?
Remember how we loved
position 99, the one where you
look forward? Man, as I look back, I wonder how

did numb get so comparative?
How did the verb to come
(our childhood's bright
infinitive) become
so narrow a necessity?

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

Full of Dead Bees

In my universe, one can taunt O(G)d(o)d(d)s for fifty years before O(G)d(o)d(d)s fucks you over. You youngsters, plan accordingly.

Hah! May there be eleventy more ratfucking snowstorms this winter, O(G)d(o)d(d)s, you ratfucker.

I, uh, took $200 out Monday when I ran to the grocery after paying $40 to get dug out so I could run to the grocery to get $200 against the next five digs.

• Obama isn't feckless, he's duplicitous and shitty at duplicity.
• Perhaps Obama isn't running his presidency.
• Another deficit of trust.
• But you know, Rahm always presented the fact that he's a colossal asshole as his greatest attribute.
• Why some dude is breaking up with Dems.
• Capitalism.
• A Greenwaldian response.
• Jobs.
• Talking with the enemy.
• Motherfucker.
• Your Fucking Washington Post solicited Alexander's turd.
• I approve the tag "dickwhisperer."
• Mayer on 9/11 trials.
• Commence neocon shitstorm...... now.

• Playing at war.
• When pussy-whipped, men buy Dodges?
• Madison Avenue Misogyny.
• I don't blame Cheap Trick for taking the money, but the Green Police commercial was just less stupid than the Dodge commercial.
• Please please please please please.
• We, um, are supposed to visit this town this coming Saturday so Planet can visit Wesleyan.
• Like we're flying to Hartford Friday.

• West MOCO/East MOCO Civil War!
• Good East MOCO news and whine found here daily.
• Here's the thing: why, when everyone on our street deliberately plans and executes parking on the same side of the street, does the FUCKING! plow-driver drive the snow INTO OUR CARS? instead of the fucking other side of the fucking street? I blame Doug Duncan.
• Doug Duncan wants to run Metro? Whee!
• Ehrlich jerklick.
• Clarksville beat Clarksburg.
• Take the last train.

• Bishop poems and more.
• Rabbit's Run.
• Carruth.
• In defense of the English Major!
• UPDATE! Wish Her Safe at Home? Stephen Benatar? 
• UPDATE! But two, of the many NYRB classics I've bought, I've been happy if not delighted with what I just read.
• Even by Silliman's standard generosity, this post is POW!
• Arcade Fire sells soul to NFL.com? They always sucked.
• Was the Superbowl an authentic consumer experience is worth reading on its own, but it does mention the fucking Arcade Fire's preemptive PR to explain their lame sell out.
• How to store and organize cats.
• Read Freida, listen to Furs.
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• The prettiest song you'll hear today.
• In shreds.
• Mr Marx's Table.
• Empire of the Senseless.
• Pepper.
• Anglepoise Lamp.
• Are you receiving?

A STORY ABOUT THE BODY

Robert Hass

The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity - like music - withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl - she must have swept them from the corners of her studio - was full of dead bees.

Haven't played this, another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever, in a few months:

How Much Meat Moves

Your Fucking Washington Post tells you "celebrities' snow days are as mundane as yours!" Who fucking knew?

"The kids watched more television today than the rest of their weekly allowance combined," said MSNBC news anchor Norah O'Donnell, who lives in Wesley Heights and spent the afternoon hiking to Chef Geoff's. Her husband, Geoff Tracy, owns the restaurant, which was lucky -- the couple's house was low on food. "We raided the kitchen," O'Donnell said. "Chicken, onions, pasta. . . . I went home and made chicken soup."

Norah O'Donnell? Your Fucking Washington Post editors thought, I know! Let's write a story about DC celebrities' travails during SNOMFG! then said, Quick! call Norah O'Donnell? And I call BULLSHIT! on the chicken soup.

Andrea Mitchell and Alan Greenspan spent the day glued to the television and a computer in their Northwest Washington home, working. The former Federal Reserve chairman was scheduled to appear on "Meet the Press" Sunday morning and hoped that he could get to the studio. "We are completely snowed in," Mitchell said. "Our street never gets plowed."

The horror! How will the servants get to the castle?

"Meet the Press" host David Gregory, who spent the morning shoveling out his house with his wife and kids, said he offered to give Greenspan a piggyback ride to the studio if it came to that. "I said, 'Hey Al, if things get a little hairy I'll just throw you on my back and we'll hike right in.' "

Which encapsulates - piggyback ride and hairy back and all - all one need know about your decadent, crumbling, empire.

• Liberals are condescending because morons like Gerald Alexander squirt turds like this, published in Your Fucking Washington Post. Adding, Liberals don't think they know it all, they think they know more than fucks like Alexander.
• Capitalism.
• Class is defined by power, not money.
• Annals of Liberation.
• Liking Obama.
• Jim wrote about Congo a few days ago, Kristof Sunday.
• Vote-counting as spectator sport.
• Bacevich on starting but not finishing wars.
• The World of Facebook.
• Howard Stern to replace Simon Cowell?

Thanks for Kind emails and comments re: this.

As I've thought about it, what bugs me isn't blegrelling (or rather, blegrelling for ping's sake, because blegrells don't produce many pings, yo), nor is it (much) mutual respect and courtesy (though I am stupid that way), nor even hypocrisy by those who proclaim their generosity but aren't (though I am stupid that way too), but those who read and then repeatedly steal and neither cite or blegrell (and you know who you are).

Still, what I should have said is, if you blegrell me and I'm not blegrelling you, send me an email with a link to your place.

Yes but no: what I need say is thanks to all for reading.

• Photos of Snomgasm.
• The first plow has come through, just a single lane to allow emergency vehicles through if necessary. There's no way I'm going to dig out now just to be plowed back in later.
• Purple Line!
• Purple Line!
• Your Fucking Gazette.

• DeLillo reviewed, with links to reviews.
• 2009 National Book Award poetry nominees read their poems.
• A question about Bowie.
• Moka's Top 200 part 6 is my favorite so far.
• Sharon Van Etten (and more).

MEAT

August Kleinzahler

How much meat moves
Into the city each night
The decks of its bridges tremble
In the liquefaction of sodium light
And the moon a chemical orange

Semitrailers strain their axles
Shivering as they take the long curve
Over warehouses and lofts
The wilderness of streets below
The mesh of it
With Joe on the front stoop smoking
And Louise on the phone with her mother

Out of the haze of industrial meadows
They arrive, numberless
Hauling tons of dead lamb
Bone and flesh and offal
Miles to the ports and channels
Of the city's shimmering membrane
A giant breathing cell
Exhaling its waste
From the stacks by the river
And feeding through the night

 

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

SNOMFG!

I could have lived a full and happy life without experiencing a once-in-a-century Maryland snowstorm.

Watch me jinx! We've still electricity, though the electric lines look like any minute they'll snap. We've dug a path between the shed and the back porch, but no sign of the ferals, though I'm sure they're a miserable though warm bundle in the shed. It's my shovel-turn next, after this latest band of snow downpour passes; I pity the people who are waiting for all the snow to fall to begin the dig.

No one is getting out of this neighborhood until Monday afternoon earliest, and only those like us who live on streets on first plow; one advantage of living across the street from an elementary school is we get first plow. There are streets here that won't get plowed until Wednesday, if then.

Watch my employer declare Liberal Leave in a paralyzed city; making us take a vacation day because we can't get to work is the same as blaming us for the snow.

For this guy and this guy and this guy and this guy:

He Wants to Be Boss of Bananas, Boss of White Bread.

Urban hipsters panic!

Whole Foods on P Street NW closed its doors at 9 p.m., which was 30 minutes earlier than its previously announced 9:30 p.m. closing. The early closing caused a near panic among some Dupont-Logan residents. One woman screamed, "Let me in, let me in. I don't have any coffee at home!"

Welcome to the Thunderdome!

We've been told that ten feet of snow is imminent, and if we don't die when our roofs collapse under tons of snow we'll freeze to death when the power goes out until April, and if we don't die from freezing to death we'll die, one by one, of hunger until the last of us has to kill and eat himself.

• Capitalism.
• The coming food fight.
• Finally, Obama shows some gumption.
• Why do black people incriminate themselves so often?
• Pussy or asshole? Fuck the either/or!
• Google and NSA.
• Crunkstitution.
• Galt's Gulch.
• He's "sorry" he said "retarded," not for the sentiment.
• Fucking Retarded.
• Hersh in Syria.
• Grifter's Tale.
• Media and Anarchists Violent Reputation.
• Wonder what's with the timing of this shit in YFWP.
• Dana Milbank mourns his lost crush.
• Reassessing tenure? One thing I've learned is that when a professor gets tenure, if it changes him, it always changes him for the worse.

• Hurt so good!
• Anger counselor charged with pulling gun!

• MacArthur Blvd daily duels.
• Bethesda Sex Parties!
• England's Brave John Terry.

• Woodcutter's Weekend.
• Armantrout interview.
• Ammons interview.
• Death of Fiction?
• The most obnoxious first sentence of a review I've read since the last most obnoxious first sentence I read.
• DeLillo profile. I've been thinking about what I've read, and the only two that left a good scar are Ratner's Star and White Noise, and the only one that left a bad scar was Underworld, which I remember mostly, as I struggled to finish it, as one of the groundbreaking works that led me to abandon the silly point of honor of needing to finish any novel I started no matter how dreadful.
• I love deckle edge. I love a well-made book.
• Crash, the book.
• Crash, the song.
• Moka's Top 200 of 2000s continues.
• WOWEE! Twice in a week, proof I'm not the only person who loves Kate Bush!
• Absolutely horrible news.
• Remembering Three of a Perfect Pair.
• This person opened for Mag Fields last night. She was fine, but there's only so much you can do with a kalimba.

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.

CONFESSION

Stephen Dobyns

The Nazi within me thinks it's time to take charge.
The world's a mess; people are crazy.
The Nazi within me wants windows shut tight,
new locks put on the doors. There's too much
fresh air, too much coming and going.
The Nazi within me wants more respect. He wants
the only TV camera, the only bank account,
the only really pretty girl. The Nazi within me
wants to be boss of traffic and traffic lights.
People drive too fast; they take up too much space.
The Nazi within me thinks people are getting away
with murder. He wants to be the boss of murder.
He wants to be boss of bananas, boss of white bread.
The Nazi within me wants uniforms for everyone.
He wants them to wash their hands, sit up straight,
pay strict attention. He wants to make certain
they say yes when he says yes, no when he says no.
He imagines everybody sitting in straight chairs,
people all over the world sitting in straight chairs.
Are you ready? he asks them.  They say they are ready.
Are you ready to be happy? he asks them. They say
they are ready to be happy.  The Nazi within me wants
everyone to be happy but not too happy and definitely
not noisy. No singing, no dancing, no carrying on.

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever: