It Has Taken Thirty-Five Years to Be This Confident of What Happens Between the Noun and the Verb

Serendipity abounds in clusterfucks: days after posting a photo of two corgis, a friend emails a link to the above just minutes after I felt the first pangs of one of those must-be-satisfied urges to bleggalgaze, the kind that will not go away until I do, and now I have.

• Kentucky isn't MOCO. I live in the anomaly.
• Yes, Terry Jones is exactly what America's professional Islam-baiters needed.
• Things not to say.
• Obama, anticolonial hegemonist?
• The great divergence?
• Filibuster myths.
• On video war-games.
• Photoshop of horrors.
• Beallsville!
• UPDATE! MOCO sign vigilantes.
• Purple Line!
• Walk the ICC!

• Positive review of C. It was the wrong book at the wrong time for me. I'll try again.
• Goofy review of Freedom: What has happened, I think, is that the public sphere is regarded here as a total loss, so that all the big problems are imagined as unsolvable. The result is a particular kind of despair, the sort that arises from rage with no outlet, the core emotion of a large proportion of educated readers during the George W. Bush administration. Corrupted by ruinous quantities of money and the cynical application of power, the public world depicted here seems incapable of saving anything of value. At every point where a citizen tries to enter that world, he encounters active lying and the operations of expedient logic, and, in the novel’s view, he becomes a collaborator. Franzen is not a conservative, but he is a conservationist, and his novel watches helplessly, ragingly, as cherished habitats, cherished beings, begin to disappear. OK, fine, but then the reviewer says: Freedom attempts to come to terms with the Bush years and is finally defeated by them. Having said that, I need to add that the book is often inspired and eloquent. Its ambitions are praiseworthy, as is its fury. Its heart is rather beautifully on its sleeve much of the time. The large audience for which Franzen’s novel is intended will no doubt find it written with consistent intelligence and energy. But it cannot solve the problems it regards as crucial, which is our loss and probably our fate. Or maybe that's the point. We're going out for dinner and then a bookstore tonight - let's see if I can resist buying and reading; I used to feel obligated to read a novel of this much hype.
• Positive review of Never Let Me Go, the movie. Not this boy. I don't watch many movies (no moral/ethical reason, I just don't), but I purposely don't watch movies of novels I've loved.
• You and what army?
• I've never owned a Bob Dylan album.
• UPDATE! Seb sent me the link of his xx post. THANKS!
• Happy home.
• Young hearts.
• UPDATE! Wanna stream the new Grinderman?
• UPDATE! How about the new Black Angels?
• UPDATE! The new Vaselines?
• Snowcones and puppies.
• Revelry.
• 10:1.

THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE

Rodney Jones

It has taken thirty-five years to be this confident
of what happens between the noun and the verb.

Eventually, love goes. The image. Then the thought.
No? Then you are still alive. Only a little. And then,

I do not mean to depress you. Men have to hear
before they see. Sacred vows. Dropped shirts.

Women do not speak to men. They are overheard.
Sadness mounts people. Around the burn-scar high

on one thigh, the body of the beloved will vanish.
And the come cries and salt hair-smells of lovemaking.

Secret fiction, holy matrimony, longest short story
the troth two lovers pledge to one another is none

of the president’s business, let him say what he wants.
He is no good with words. Ask any true lesbian.

He should take a poetry workshop with Adrienne Rich.
He should try using the world less and words more.

Haven't played this, a theme song for some month, in a while: