When I Tell You That Cultural Ritual Is an Artifice Composed of Simultaneous Social-Dynamic Complexity Vectors Acting in Anthropometric Units, I’m Thinking of Sex

When I contend that the ruling elite doesn't know what it's doing while simultaneously doing what it doesn't know it's doing with callous and greedy miscalculation, I mean it's just like every relationship you and I have ever experienced.

When I tell you that cultural ritual is an artifice composed of simultaneous social-dynamic complexity vectors acting in anthropometric units, I'm talking about bleggalgazing, what every single post of each of our shitty blegs picks like a scab.

Some new New New Toys over on the left, three of four new links down in Reads, meaning I should reevaluate blegrell policies for all the twenty seconds it takes before I stop.

But these are the Blog Days of August in Blegsylvania, in America. Kind is established now; kind later is Kind too late.

• On Wikileaks (V) and (VI).
• Gomer Warhol.
• UPDATE! One family story, another family story.
• Nation of assholes.
• Addicted to hate. Tell you what - I'll get righteously angry at the Republicans campaigning on bigotry when Obama and prominent Democrats denounce them for it, OK?
• The new anti-Communism? Tell you what - I'll get righteously angry at the Republicans campaigning on bigotry when Obama and prominent Democrats denounce them for it, OK?
• UPDATE! Anarchism: 101.
• Like rats to the lifeboats, or, what I accused Greenspan of Friday.
• UPDATE! Straight from the top. I keep telling you, they're not going to negotiate this time, they're gonna soft kill (sorry, sub rqrd for whole article).
• Are we in a recession or not?
• UPDATE! My daughter's future. Also, read Hatherley's post that prompted Ranter.
• Why does David Harvey matter?
• UPDATE! Premier League = People's Republic of China. (h/t)
• Krugman's obamapostasy is going to be awesome.
• UPDATE! Obama at war. (h/t)
• Great expectations.
• UPDATE! The gates of bullshit swings open on schedule.
• Palin endorses MOCO pig!
• Metro!
• Pepco!
• Kensington!
• Serendipitously, yesterday I read a strong argument for the significance of early Smiths and Morrissey - strong in that I'll listen differently next time I hear it - thirty minutes after sending this youtube, which I remembered when looking for the last MST3K youtube, to a friend:

• Rethinking E.E. Cummings, part one, part two.
• What you can buy me for my birthday.
• I pay off a bet, ahead of deadline, cowardly using the Blog Days of August. Heh! xoxo.
• Why novelists don't like to be interviewed. The author, Tom LeClair, wrote good stuff about Elkin that was extremely useful when writing my thesis.
• Pynchon in Poland. (h/t)
• Beefheart's banned TV commercial!
• Black-hearted love.
• Terrapin Station.
• UPDATE! Why the fuck is Jack White on my radio?
• Two worlds collide.
• UPDATE! Straight to Hell (with soundtrack!).
• 1979. I own - or owned (I want my albums back, Blondie) - at least 60% of these.
• UPDATE! Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• Gotta cheer up.

IF WE WERE HONEST

Albert Goldbarth

When I tell you that cultural ritual is an artifice

composed of simultaneous social-dynamic complexity vectors acting in anthropometric units,

I’m thinking of sex. I mean it.

We all are. It isn’t just me. Or when I say

the war, or the god, or the list with the juice and the cereal...

sex. What is it the psycho-experts are claiming?—every ten seconds?

When I tell you that I’m thinking of sex,

I’m thinking of death. Its worm is always
in my eye, its sour and dirt-blown web is always
a catch in my throat. It was always a wen
releasing a small electrical jolt to the brain
of Napoleon, Alexander, Attila. It was funereally

in the black, black ink of the Brontes;

why should I be any different? Why can’t we

be honest?—every poem is “Sex.” (Or “Death.”)

If we were honest, half of our poems would be about

the making of poems, the conference on the making of poems,

the resume of poems successfully made...you know, the way
that half of the time is actually spent.
And did ten seconds pass just now? If so, then
sex. (If so, then death.) Not too long after

the Dolphin first made port in Tahiti, it was discovered
the crew were trading its nails
for dalliances with the pliant and welcoming
women of that island—“to such a great extent, the ship

was in danger of being pulled apart.”

Inside the cradling waves of moonlight
on those waters...smiling...consummating...human

nails into smooth, bamboo-brown human grain...

how did they know, how could they foresee, that
my mother would die from her own lungs

shaping hundreds of obstinate fists in her chest,

my father would die with his own blood turning

into a useless negative of itself?

And yet they must have known, they must have seen the lesson,

they were trying to deny it with the drive of such
combustive, zealous engines! This is my topic
tonight, and how the craft of poetry and the role

of the postmodern in a society of gender-defined relationship roles is yes a bare knee like a beacon,

like a skull beneath the face-skin, and a question
from the audience on a quasi-political sense is yes in my mind, yes in yours, yes

sex and death—the one thing.

Aoodom5fse: