BLCKDGRD

Un-Summounded Sigh-Sound

I'm gonna disc then go to United then have dinner with a friend Saturday, I gonna write about United Sunday morning then disc again and spend every minute Sunday I can outside, so here, have some good links, which will either be stale or I'll forget about by Monday....

• May Day.
• True in 1997, truer now, and...
• Fucking Democrats. Take a 3-1 lead into a fifth game at home and choke away the series.
• Obamoron.
• Obamoron.
• I am denied credit again.
• Grifters.
• Infinite Thought has a new address.
• Bleggal naivete.
• Drunken Georgetown Students.
• Beckett-for-use, not Beckett-as-museum piece.
• There was a time, around the publication of Dream of Mind, that C.K.Williams was always in my backpack. Wait....

• Here it is just off my bookshelf where I abandoned it.
• New Vollmann reviewed. I'll read it, but this time I'll wait for the paperback.

I HATE

C.K. Williams

I hate how this unsummoned sigh-sound, sob-sound,

not sound really, feeling, sigh-feeling, sob-feeling,

keeps rising in me, rasping in me, not in its old disguise

as nostalgia, sweet crazed call of the blackbird;

not as remembrance, grief for so many gone,
nor either that other tangle of recall, regret   

for unredeemed wrongs, errors, omissions,

petrified roots too deep to ever excise;

a mingling rather, a melding, inextricable mesh   

of delight in astonishing being, of being in being,

with a fear of and fear for I can barely think what,
not non-existence, of self, loved ones, love;

not even war, fuck war, sighing for war,

sobbing for war, for no war, peace, surcease;

more than all that, some ground-sound, ground-note,   

sown in us now, that swells in us, all of us,   

echo of love we had, have, for world, for our world,
on which we seem finally mere swarm, mere deluge,
mere matter self-altered to tumult, to noise,
cacophonous blitz of destruction, despoilment,

din from which every emotion henceforth emerges,
and into which falters, slides, sinks, and subsides:

sigh-sound of lament, of remorse; sob-sound of rue,   

of, still, always, ever sadder and sadder sad joy.

Goddamn, I love Mazzy Star:

DOINK!

Holyfuck, my riffs on hate sure plopped. I hope it's there was a pang and wince of self-recognition - you are a hater too, O! yes you are - however much I defer to the simpler explanation that this bleg sucks.

ENOUGH! I've two tickets for tonight's USOC qualifying match between United and Dallas @ 730 @ RFK. Landru and Ilse aren't going: they're staying home to watch the Washington Capital's embellish their legacy as the gaggaggagiest dogs in NHL history, if not all of professional sport; I called Hamster, I emailed Elric, and Hamster's watching the game on TV and Elric GOT A FREE TICKET TO THE GAME! Heh.

I can PDF the ticket to you or I can meet you at the stadium/leave at will call, you get yourself to and from the game, you buy me a beer at halftime. I'll be around email until approx 130 then cell only after, so if you're not sure but might be email me 130 and I'll give you my cell: I was told to go throw discs, so I am: Patapsco again before ticks take over.

He’s Tunneled His Intricate Need

Know what Obama's announcement Off-Shore Drilling! Fuck Yeah! after his 2008 Off-Shore Drilling! Fuck No! means?

It means I double bet you a pint (and double current stakeholders) Obama wins reelection in 2012, because Obama has found his game: jab the Liberals, roundhouse the crackers, feed the triscallions.

• About that rain in New England.
• Hate everybody.
• Notice how much I link to Larison?
• Discretionary income.
• I feel no guilt at goading these fucks at all.
• Capitalism.
• Neoliberalism, reflexivity, biopolitics.
• Capitalism.
• Heh: Democrats tend to have more problems with harassment, staffers and underage girls while Republicans tend to have more problems with prostitutes, hypocrisy and underage boys.
• Pornography.
• Keeping the faith.
• Parameters of the Lost Ark.
• In praise of hoarding.
• I can vouch.

• Wheaton!
• Ehrlich! A fucker I can earnestly vote against!
• UPDATE!

• 75 degrees, empty course, 89 from the reds at Seneca.
• UPDATE! 28 (8), 31 (13, 14, 16, 17), 30 (19, 20, 21).
• 75 degrees, empty course, Patapsco tomorrow! !wOOt!
• Obamapostasy.
• The Death of Dirk Smiler.

Look what came via brown truck today:

I pre-ordered it when I heard about it two-three months ago, forgot about it, and, today, wonderfully !SHAZAM!

I'm in a dire reading slump, a deep, Ishiguro-induced reading slump, but I read the first four chapters of Voss yesterday and some dying mole stirred, so what do I do?

Here's truth for consideration: I don't read biographies, I don't like reading biographies, I haven't read a biography since required to by school.

Here's truth: I will feel obliged to read whatever novels are contemporaneous with whatever span of Elkin's life Dougherty is chronicling, meaning I'm committing myself to reading at least one of whichever respective span.

Here's truth: Reading Elkin, like Barth and Harington and Ishiguro, will send me into a deep reading slump.

Here's truth: I should continue with Voss but will start the Dougherty and read both half-assedly while bitching at myself deliciously for achieving yet another self-prophesied failure.

• Well, I don't know that I'll ever get it, but I'm slumped like a humpback, and anyone who writes "Is that a very hairless way of thinking of poetry?" I need to try again. (And by the way, clap-claps for typing that, people don't realize.)
• Robot Rilke.
• Some of David's Story.
• Literature.
• Two literatures.
• Why records DO all sound the same.
• Out of the blue.
• Virginia Plain.

MOLE

Wyatt Prunty

For weeks he’s tunneled his intricate need
Through the root-rich, fibrous, humoral dark,
Buckling up in zagged illegibles
The cuneiforms and cursives of a blind scribe. 
 
Sleeved by soft earth, a slow reach knuckling, 
Small tributaries open from his nudge—
Mild immigrant, bland isolationist,
Berm builder edging the runneling world.
 
But now the snow, and he’s gone quietly deep,
Nuzzling through a muzzy neighborhood
Of dead-end-street, abandoned cul-de-sac,
And boltrun from a dead-leaf, roundhouse burrow.
 
May he emerge four months from this as before,
Myopic master of the possible,
Wise one who understands prudential ground,
Revisionist of all things green;
 
So when he surfaces, lumplike, bashful,
Quizzical as the flashbulb blind who wait
For color to return, he’ll nose our green-
rich air with the imperative poise of now.

Roxy fix lately:

It's Morning. It's Night. It's Noon. It's This Year. It's Last Year.

Jeebusfuck, I'm bored. Bored with obamapologists and especially obamapostates, bored with shitty pigs and bored of hating shitty pigs. I'm bored by Zizekophiles hectoring me for my bourgeois comforts on their blackberries from their tenured offices. I'm bored with Libertarians, who are worse and, worse, far more boring. I've always been bored with Tiger Woods. I'm bored with Alton Brown. I'm bored with The Soup. I'm bored with the old, I'm bored with the young. I'm bored with work. I'm bored with bleg-everlards. I'm bored with bleggers who play zero-sum, I'm bored with bleggers who steal ideas, I'm bored with bleggers who won't acknowledge who their publisher is, their publishers' soft standards. I'm bored of chastising myself for looking at statcounter after promising myself I won't. I'm bored with sillyass Star Trek allusions:

I'm bored with novels, bored with poetry, bored with writing, bored with music. I'm bored with disc golf. I'd be bored of hiking if every weekend's weather didn't suck. I'm bored of sucky weather. I'm bored with United's off-season in anticipation of being bored this upcoming season. I'm bored with December, I'm fuckinfinity bored with Giftmas.

I'm not bored with Planet, who you can see in the top photo at the piano in a recital two hours ago this typing, but I am bored with the fucking recital when, umpteenth year in a row, a geeky ten-year-old shrieking his violin and a nine-year-old bug-torturer bludgeoning the piano render extra-suckfully Brahms' already megasuckful Hungarian Dance #5 yet again.

Everyone I meet reminds me of somebody I already know. Everything I read reminds me of something I've already read. Everything I watch reminds of something I've already seen. Every idea I hear is a reinterpretation of the already thought.

The root of my roob is I love betting against my wisdom. Nothing puts me in a vile mood faster than wisdom winning.

UPDATE! Sheeyit, that contest was over fast! Agi wins!

• So, what do you think of this?
• Old Man Broder glows himself some Obamalove.
• Thune: Gay-prOn for piGs?
• Taibbi: Dishonest Master-Ranter? Um, no.
• Last stand.
• UPDATE! On Ezra Klein's last few days at YFWP. Look, I'd like to take a shovel to Joe Lieberman's skull as much as the next guy, and I agree with much of Klein's take, but you can't say "(Lieberman) seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old political score," dude and survive. Had you used the phrase "ignore the deaths," you'd still be dead, but I'd have given you higher style credits.
• UPDATE! Not just an vindictive asshole, a stupid vindictive asshole.
• Zombie persistence.
• UPDATE! Hope!
• Populist rhetoric and symbolic action.
• UPDATE! Will Tony Blair eat gonads one day?
• The end of the world slouches closer.
• UPDATE! Best anti-Bobo rage ever.
• Three versions of conservatism.
• UPDATE! I'm too lazy to go find it, but sometime in the past two weeks I wondered on this bleg how long it'd be before the words Tiger Woods and Steroids would appear in the same sentence. This is close enough.
• Houston elects gay mayor?
• Remembering the Red Scare.
• Good blegfriend Jim's rcvd quite an honor.

• Hilltop.
• Dupont Circle Underground.
• Don't drink the MOCO water.

UPDATE! Work:

• UPDATE! Dave Foley interview.
• Can Ehrlich beat O'Malley, part one.
• UPDATE! Battle of Humpback Bridge!

• Screw U.
• Frederick's Most-Wanted.
• UPDATE! MOCO speed cameras report has this sentence: Ironically, he lives very close to Gaithersburg's newest speed cameras, which were installed this fall along Rockville Pike near Deer Park Avenue. It's a busy road his son travels often.

• When lit blew itself to bits. I've been hinting at, if not saying, novels be dying (though I have been saying poetry is ahead of fiction in describing now), though I've blamed myself rather for not finding the new and exciting rather than crediting the lack of new and exciting: I'd prefer it to be my lack rather than fiction's. And I've never read Oscar Wao. I suppose I should, yes? More. (h/t for both)
• The absence of literature.
• The aesthetics of stupidity.
• Flannery O'Connor, again.
• Jacob follows up on the above.
• UPDATE! Montag recommends a novel new to me, saying "it presents a misanthropy that you (read I) don’t have to be ashamed to embrace."  Good thing I've got access to Washington Regional Library Consortium collection.
• Stoner, again.
• Vendler reviews latest Ashbery.
• Another review of the latest Ashbery.
• Nick Cave, misogynist, continued, has this line: Cave's abjection was most powerful not when he took on the role of high Romantic Outsider or a swaggering Staggerlee, but when he came out as a pathetic fantasist, the anti-cool figure of fun (this persona, and Cave's whimpers and gibberings, owing a great deal to Pere Ubu's David Thomas; I'm tempted to venture the hypothesis that Cave's music weakens to the degree that the Thomas influence is exorcised. I hadn't thought of the connection, though it seems to me David Thomas is David Thomas and Nick Cave is playing a character named Nick Cave.
• Updated list of anticipated 2010 albums includes New Pornographers, Serena-Maneesh, The Wrens, and a new Gabriel album of covers.
• Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.
• Here's a Best of Year to spend a couple of hours listening to.
• Here's the always incredibly generous Largehearted Boys.
• The Wrens?
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.

UPDATE! Just put in my head, be in yours:

• Serena-Maneesh?
• Tom Waits never struck my tuning fork, but he has lots of folks, and if one of them is you, this will ping.
• Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.
• New Futureheads!
• New Shearwater! (h/t this and last)
• I suggest bookmarking this is offset.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Catherine Bowman

They don't want to stop. They can't stop.
    They've been going at it for days now,
for hours, for months, for years. He's on top
    of her. She's on top of him. He's licking
her between the legs. Her fingers
    are in his mouth. It's November.
It's March. It's July and there are palms.
    Palms and humidity. It's the same man.
It's a different man. It's August and slabs
    of heat waves wallow on tarred lots.
Tornadoes sprawl across open plains.
    Temperatures rise. Rains accumulate.
Somewhere a thunderstorm dies. Somewhere
    a snow falls, colored by the red dust
of a desert. She spreads her legs. His lips
    suck her nipples. She smells his neck.
It's morning. It's night. It's noon.
    It's this year. It's last year. It's 4 a.m.
It started when the city shifted growth
    to the north, over the underground
water supply. Now the back roads are gone
    where they would drive, the deer glaring into
the headlights, Wetmore and Thousand Oaks,
    and the ranch roads that led to the hill country
and to a trio of deep moving rivers.
    There were low water crossings. Flood gauges.
Signs for falling rock. There were deer blinds
    for sale. The was cedar in the air.
Here hands are on his hips. He's pushing
    her up and down. There are so many things
she's forgotten. The names of trees. Wars.
    Recipes. The trench graves filled with hundreds.
Was it Bolivia? Argentina? Chile?
    Was it white gladioli that decorated the altar
were wedding vows were said? There was
    a dance floor. Tejano classics.
A motel. A shattered mirror. Flies.
    A Sunbelt sixteen wheeler. Dairy Queens.
Gas stations. The smell of piss and cement.
    There was a field of corn, or was it cotton?
There were yellow trains and silver silos.
    They can't stop. They don't want to stop.
It's Spring, and five billion inhale
    and exhale across two hemispheres. Oceans
form currents and counter-currents.
    There was grassland. There was sugar cane.
There were oxen. Metallic ores.
    There was Timber. Fur-bearing animals.
Rice lands. Industry. Tundra. Winds
    cool the earth's surface. Thighs press
against thighs. Levels of water fluctuate.
    And yesterday a lightning bolt reached
a temperature hotter than the sun.

 

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever, stuck in my head by a certain name appearing in comments recently:

So Much for More Experience. What Can Grow Has Grown; What's Small Now Stays Small. No Portion Waits for Those Who Deserve More.

The last bleggalgaze of this, the bleggalgazeworthiest week of the year:

I caught myself writing paragraphs in notebook what I usually say in sentences. I caught myself, after successive days of not-blegging but reading, not just fiction and poetry, reading theory and mirrormirror theory and mirrormirrormirror theory, and then I caught myself writing lectures about theory, and, truly and thusly, fuck that.

So, in a sentence: Humans in general (and Americans in particular) will always be divided between those believing Freedom need be followed with a to and those believing Freedom need be followed with a from, and what guarantees the eternal clusterfuck is that those who worship the to when it comes to economics worship the from when it comes to personal liberties, and visa versa.

I link to others teasing out the duh because they want to tease out the duh. I've done my academic poking around in duh's stomach and intestines.* Once it was fun, up through grad school, it's.... been losing enjoyment since I quit that particular game. I enjoy reading it now - the reason I link to it - but the rigor of writing it is no fun now even if I had the time and was in shape: it's a youngsters' game. Besides, I think I've earned the right to encrypt my deciphered duh as I please, and you ping back or don't.

Which makes me a pussy when I get pissy people chose not to ping back. Proving, like every blogger, like you and you and you - like anyone who pushes a submit button in any format or media - I think there's something I know I think it vital you know, though I don't pity you for not reading me, I pity me for your not reading me. Just like you and you and you do.

*I was going to use Ozzy Froats in the context of this post, but after revisions it didn't fit. Still, a pint of beer to the first of you who, sans google, names that allusion.

• This actually is quite astonishing, not just because crackers are smacking their head at the missed opportunity, but because it shows if you have a film crew, you're granted passage.
• Of course they do.
• Exemplary pornstachery.
• UPDATE! That didn't take long.
• Neurocapitalism.
• Chomsky interviewed.

UPDATE! This seems appropriate today:

• EIASTTYAEMPIW!
• Vandals in Bow Ties.
• Espying a Dirty Rat.
• Duh.
• They don't make presidents like they used to.
• The coming slow-motion car-wreck.
• Dick Biden.
• Well, I for one won't give a penny to the Democratic machine and probably will only vote local issues, though in Maryland my vote doesn't matter much - Van Hollen will roll, so too NSA's own Babs Mikulski.

• It does occur to me - and you too, yes? - that if Obama did do want what we want him to (and he doesn't, yo), to succeed he'd have to increase more of the presidential power accumulated under Bush we bitch he hasn't ceded yet.
• It's almost as if he doesn't want to win reelection. Still, consider this sentence from that Fucking Washington Post article: The revised plan, which faces a war-weary and increasingly skeptical American public, is expected to call for 30,000-35,000 new troops in a phased deployment over the next 12 to 18 months. Can you imagine that sentence being written if John McCain was president?
• Greenwald's Daily Duh. Jeebus, it's easy to see why professional Republicans hold professional Democrats in such contempt.
• On the silliness of The Nation.
• Milking every anti-Obama talking point as if the udders were full of benedictine.
• Take a look at this map about % of people receiving food stamps and draw your own conclusions about the South.
• Consider that some South Carolina crackers consider Lindsey Graham a liberal.
• Your Fucking Washington Post reminds you that christers are moral idiots regardless the hue of the christer.
• James and Marisacat on bleg-hiatus. Lot of that going around.
• Contracts versus Tenure: Heh!
• A decision I'll be making in the next six months.
• This will seem mean, and I've don't know the parents and don't know if the name has familial significance, and maybe they did it on purpose, and perhaps no one younger that 45 gets the allusion, but people named their new daughter Hannah Barbara?

• I don't think this is the Druid Hill Park Cemetery behind and to the right and out-of-bounds of Holes One and Two at the disc golf course, but it might be.
• Possible pig to challenge O'Malley looks like a pig.
• My future hell.
• Humpback endangered! Oh, and please enjoy this paragraph, MOCO property-tax payers: Three months after Montgomery County finished its $450,000 restoration of the East Deer Park Bridge over railroad tracks between Gaithersburg and Washington Grove, the CSX Corporation is mulling whether to raise or raze the historic structure to make room for double-decker freight cars. Heh.

• I like to imagine Randy Hardy is driving that red van.
• Fentyville!
• Crisis in Bethesda! "This will take money out of taxpayers' hands and turn it into a path that leads to nowhere," said Tiffany Audas, whose property abuts the proposed project. "This is going to bump right up to our fence." Hmmm. I wonder which of the two is Tiffany's true concern.
• Clarksburg!
• Clusterfuck!

• Accidental Geography includes Asphalt Maine.
• The Sunday after Thanksgiving is when the NYTBR releases their Notable Books of the Year list.
• The Millions on the list.
• Another response to Smith's essay.
• Another response to Smith's essay.
• A response to the new DeLillo story, Midnight in Dostoyevsky, in New Yorker. I'm going to read it again today, and will comment on it. Or not. (And it's curious I haven't seen more yap about it in all the regular places, Thanksgiving week, granted.)
• UPDATE! Meh. Power of the narratives we create, how maintaining our narratives requires their truths go unexamined, standard yadda. Serendipitous on a day of Friedman's asinine and self-serving column and two days before Obama triples-down in Afghanistan, sure, but meh. Standard DeLillo tricks and tropes. I've always respected DeLillo more than I've enjoyed reading him.
• Is the short story female?
• Hilary Mantel says M.J. Hyland's This is How is her favorite novel of 2009 (luckily I have access to ILL), John Gray sings of Seidel, plus lots of authors on their 2009 favorites.
• The Guardian's Top Ten Albums of the decade is just stoopid unto stoopid. Especially number one, but also, Arctic Fucking Monkeys? What, no Franz Fucking Ferdinand or Kaiser Fucking Chiefs?
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• 25 most anticipated albums of 2010? I agree with most, though I'd rather saw off my left nut with a butter-knife than listen to Vampire Weekend.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Boatloads of Best of Decade lists....
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• What you can buy me for Giftmas.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Boatloads of Best of Year lists....
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Charlotte Hatherley.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Favorite Songs of the Decade....
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• I'm neither pro- or anti- The Strokes, but I know at least one of you who likes Julian Casablancas.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

CHARITY

Carl Dennis

Time to believe that the thin disguise
On the face of the blessing in disguise
Will never be pulled off,

That the truth that's still in hiding
Will stay there, far in the dark.
All that can be revealed is revealed.

All that can be learned from the burning house
Was learned the first time, when the smoke
Blackened the walls in every room.

So much for more experience. What can grow
Has grown; what's small now stays small.
No portion waits for those who deserve more.

The flowers in the yard of the blind and deaf girl
Will never smell any sweeter to her
Than they smell now to any of her visitors.

The music she imagines will never compare to ours.
Her best day will brighten with no joy
That hasn't brightened our day more.

Time to admit that her steady cheer
Is the burden she assumes to keep us here
Touching her fingers for a while.

 

New Paul Weller?

EEF!

Williams is only three miles from the Appalachian Trail, also offers a 4-1-4, and, unlike Middlebury, doesn't require a foreign language for a junior year abroad, which is a plus plus: Williams has a reciprocal arrangement with Oxford, yo.

Students, even freshmen, will never have more than a double dorm, and most students have singles by sophomore year if they want, though most, according to both the student tour guide and the admissions officer who made the presentation, choose to remain in doubles, as their cohort - they're called "entries" at Williams - has grown so tight, the singles distance from the group rooms is considered a negative.

Most importantly, the mascot is a purple cow:

and the students are known as Ephs, pronounced EEFS: the founder of Williams' first name was Ephraim.

DING! DING! DING! We have a new leader in the clubhouse.

Actually, what's most important is that Planet has been made aware that a significant upgrade in damn is required of her these next three semesters in high school if she hopes to even make a maybe pile in any of these schools' admissions offices. Which was the point, from a sneaky parental POV, of this trip in the first place.

Williamston was OK, the drive through the Berkshires pretty if on shitty Massachusetts roads (anyone who has driven on a Maryland state route over the Pennsylvania line onto a PA state route can imagine what driving from a Vermont state route onto a Massachusetts state route is like). I'm in Amherst MA as I type this, and we're gonna do Amherst College tomorrow, then do some touristy stuff (I may get to throw plastic at metal baskets!), spend tomorrow night here then head to Boston Saturday.

O! One last picture (via Planet) from Vermont!

Moo, motherfucker.

*

Maybe Obama and the Democrats aren't feckless dickweeds afraid to call bullshit on the Right's incitement to violence. Maybe Obama and the Democrats are counting on the violence to solidify and further their power. Maybe they're calculating that the horror and backlash, once a Malkinista starts throwing bullets and people are wounded and killed, will pay dividends the Democrats can cash for a generation.

Maybe Obama and Dem strategists know the rage isn't about health care, know that Obama could propose free government-subsidized ammunition and chewing tobacco and crackers would rebel, would reach for their weapons and load the free ammo, spitting chaw angrily.

Maybe Obama and Dem strategists knew a cracker catharsis was inevitable, that angry white crackers dependent on government dole would oppose government dole if the dole wasn't handed to them by one of their own.

This would not only make Obama and the Democrats cynical and complicit in the violence, it'd make them more cleverly and deviously evil than the Republicans who see inciting crackers as their route back to power. Who knew Dems had it in them?

Sheeyit: of course Obama and Democrats are feckless dickweeds. Which doesn't mean they aren't cynically complicit in whatever violence is coming.

*

• UPDATE! Re: above.
  
• Feckless Dickweeds.
• Hagerstown: Meth Capital of Maryland!
• Les Paul.
• More Gary Numan, Hamster.
• Today's Listening Assignment is quiet.

Updates later. Or not.

*

LOYALTY

James Tate

This is the hardest part:
When I came back to life
I was a good family dog
and not too friendly to strangers.
I got a thirty-five dollar raise
in salary, and through the pea-soup fogs
I drove the General, and introduced him
at rallies. I had a totalitarian approach
and was a massive boost to his popularity.
I did my best to reduce the number of people.
The local bourgeoisie did not exist.
One of them was a mystic
and walked right over me
as if I were a bed of hot coals.
This is par for the course-
I will be employing sundry golf metaphors
henceforth, because a dog, best friend
and chief advisor to the General, should.
While dining with the General I said,
"Let's play the back nine in a sacred rage.
Let's tee-off over the foredoomed community
and putt ourselves thunderously, touching bottom."
He drank it all in, rugged and dusky.
I think I know what he was thinking.
He held his automatic to my little head
and recited a poem about my many weaknesses,
for which I loved him so.

*

Via Hamster:

Bowdoin, Bates, Orr's Island

Spent a good four hours at Bowdoin, pretty campus, interesting academic programs. First campus (other than UNH, which doesn't count) Planet's seen, and that's where she now wants to go. She wants to be a Polar Bear.

Especially since

we then, after setting up base in a Brunswick Maine hotel, drove to Lewiston to see Bates. Every road surrounding the campus of Bates was being repaired, all the entrances to campus were blocked, so we didn't really see the campus much less get out and walk around, which saddened none of us: Lewiston was the most depressing city I've been in since I last drove through Brunswick Maryland. Dying, decaying, depressing.

 

Maine is weird. It's the most like western Pennsylvania of anyplace I've been outside western Pennsylvania in that it's either beautiful or hideous, often right around the corner from the other.

 

White Mountains, Mt Washington today.

*

Haven't been following the news much: Has Obama started killing grandmas yet?

 

Excellent!

O! Today's Google Tip!

Want to increase hits? Title a post, re: like the one proceeding this one, with the words Uckingfay and Amegay. Know what you get?

 

Exactly kaboom.

*

Just posted at MD-Discgolf board: This is me and Bromark's home course.

Um, that guy, assuming he's not cheating, shot at least twelve strokes under my best.

Haven't got out to play this trip, doubt I will.

Swans Have Been Feasting on the Tainted Snails. The Swans are Sick

Jeebusfuck, their unalienable rights to punish sluts for sluttishly fucking pigs endangered, pigs power up the ATVs and yadda, I've been singing this song longer than this shetty bleg but no less loud than singing my roobity, which exists to feed my pig hate.

I'm watching Obama's presser on health care, and know what? My knowledge of what's in any bill is zippo. I know I'll hate the Democrats for what they settle for knowing who they bargained against and love hating who they bargained against .06% more than I hate Democrats. I'm watching Obama's presser on health care: he feels like an 82 win regular season team winning the World Series.

Mofos, roobity is not accepting human's incremental movement from Total Assholes to Pretty Much Total Asshole is glacial, roobity is belief Pretty Much Total Asshole is remarkable achievement.

I could find leftwing echoes to above rightwing We the Peopling, which is to say midsummer meh is a Lyme Disease of will, aching, enervating, bulls-eyed. You disc golf you get ticks is as predictive as you root you get roobies, the symptoms an increase in my already aching meh and a psychic rash I can't help scratching.

*

• Elric's in Vienna, says he's got some Wien kit.*
• Serial War.
• Shoot to thrill, way to kill.
• Those who resist the end of racial profiling.
• UPDATE! Via a comment from Montag, Frog.
• What the media will focus on.
• UPDATE! Another take.
• UPDATE! While I've given up on Obama ever not siding w/entrenched interests, entrenched interests' requirement that Obama be a good Tom reminds me what Obama would face if he did truly challenge entrenched interests.
• UPDATE!

 

• UPDATE! Jim proves The Birther's theories true!
• UPDATE! *!hEh!*
• Yes.
• Here's Jess, our dumb and pathetically needy cat, who makes me feel fail I don't love her more:

• Look at these.
• Jacques Tati, who a favorite mentor always praises.
• Seidel reviewed yet again.
• Gabriel remembered.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! If this is in my head, be in yours.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! My head, your head.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Good and generous MP3s.

Updates later. Or not.

*

JEREMIAD

Norman Dubie

After a night of opium and alcohol, Edgar Poe
Walks out of a laundry into the harsh sunlight
Of an affluent Baltimore. From behind, as I see him,
He is not
Of experience, and he is without sin -
He waddles in the archetype of Charlie Chaplin
And crosses the street to the park
Where yesterday evening yellow swathes of poison
We dropped on the wind
To kill an unprecedented population
Of ground snails.

Now, Poe is reaching the great lawn of the park
Where swans have been feasting
On the tainted snails. The swans are sick.
Poe, drugged as he is,
Shatters with this vision of vomiting swans. He turns,

And running at him
In a line fifty yards long
Is a pack of stray dogs from everywhere
In Baltimore. They will eat the swans.

Edgar Allan Poe, who stood between them,
Made a judgment -

The hounds of hell were coming for him;
He climbed the statue of a stylish general
On a rearing horse.
He clung to the marble thigh of the stallion.
He watched, in horror, the field below him.
The torn swans were long sylabbles
Over the ground.
By the time he was able to climb down,
A crowd had formed. He told them, wide-eyed,

He told them what he saw - truth and beauty
Fornicating on the public lawn. Everyone frowned

As they sometimes will in Baltimore.

*

*UPDATE!

My scenic route from Hilltop to Soccerplex this past Tuesday:

Foxhall to Canal to Clara Barton to Cabin John to River to Partnership to White's Ferry Rd to West Willard to West Offutt to Edwards Ferry Road to River to Elmer School to White's Ferry Rd to Martinsburg to Dickerson Rd (Rt 28) to Park Mill to Bear Branch to Mt Ephraim to Comus to Sugarloaf Mountain (where I stopped for half an hour to sit on the stone bench at the lower circle where I wrote much of the first draft of my masters thesis, and would have a photo for you if the drunken lout hadn't knocked the camera out of my hand later that evening)

SUB-UPDATE! I fixed my camera: figuring WTF, I slammed the jammed telescopic lens against my desk, and Viola! where I wrote most of the first draft of my masters thesis (and have spent many magical days for over thirty years)

to Comus to Mt Ephraim to Harris to Barnesville to Clopper (Rt 117) to Germantown (Rt 118) to Germantown Park Rd to Soccerplex. Easy.

BONUS YAY! THE CAMERA WORKS UPDATE!

Just before halftime:

*

Hamster emailed and asked if I wanted to go to Neko Case next Tuesday in Bawlmer, but next Tuesday is FIRPODAY!

So no, but damn.

Mirror fear mirror fear mirror

The insult of the Iranian hostage crisis still bleeds and hurts so good when scratched by America's dick-swingers, their obsessive hate and fear and envy of Iran is in part rooted in their seeing and admiring in Iranian dick-swingers what they see and admire in themselves.

I'm a firm believer that anyone I feel an instinctive and electric hatred for needs studying as he overtly represents what I covertly hate about myself, which is what separates dick-swingers from me, who instinctively and electrically hates dick-swingers.

*

• On the Iranian elections.
• Why not the best?
• Apt pupils.
• Badiou babbles, hastening to say I can't understand a word of Badiou, but I enjoy reading and learning from (and occasionally giggling at) people who think they do. Like here.
• About which, the most excellent thing you'll read, look at, listen to, and think about all day.
• Though this might be the most important.
• UPDATE: Consider this.
• A reading of James von Brunn and readings of James von Brunn.
• Silence is traffic: watch this.
• An homage to World's Shittiest has best Goldfinger allusion since Alton Brown threatened a pear with a power drill.
• Committed to being the shittiest, now and forever.
• Duh.
• Stating the Obvious.
• Daily Obamapostasy.
• UPDATE: I've stopped reading Digby for her daily duh, and I hadn't written about the Palin/Letterman spat because of the duh, but a friend sent me this Digby post which nicely pulls the two duhs together.
• How to disappear.
• Why I've always feared having outdoor cats. The asshole should be buried up to his neck and have his head run over with a lawnmower. I volunteer.
• Hey! Mocomofos! A tribute!
• Gaithersbleh and cat permits?
• My future hell.
• UPDATE! Fire Bob Bradley NOW!
• UPDATE! Look, it's not Bradley's fault his players suck - and O! they suck, O! yes they do - but if the only way the USMNT can avoid going three and out this year in South Africa and three and out next year in South Africa is with smoke and mirrors, Bradley's not the man to do smoke and mirrors.
  
• East Moco boo-hoo.
• My summer vacation - yes, we do the Planet college tour this summer. Just how fucking old am I?
• Because you asked, another view of the Nut Sac:

• OK, so you didn't ask.
• I haven't read Patricia Highsmith in twenty years, but I remember liking what I read.
• Uniformity and blandness.
• Waggish's last thoughts on 2666.
• Snobbery on the Installment Plan (and a follow-up).
• How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll.
• Hugh Hopper, RIP.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

Updates later. Or not.

*

Poem

W.C. Williams

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

*

My head, your head (and love):

EEPGAH

Look, I don't think United's brain trust has decided to Major League United and deliberately alienate the fan-base into declining attendance to make abandonment less dishonor than smart business yet, but I ask: Has frustration unconsciously introduced a fatalistic and growing diminishment of damn at United? Today, probably no, but the question needs asking.

No one asks me anymore how I separate my soccer and politics. Want a case study in disenfranchised rump-party apocalyptic paranoia, read me write about United.

*

• You mean rump-party apocalyptic paranoids who were called delusional whackjobs when saying one major intent in illegal NSA eavesdropping would be to blackmail opponents of the Bush administration into giving cover for Bush administration crimes?
• The sterility of vanguardism.
• Drowned 183 times?
• Revealing the secrets in Room 101.
• Thankfully, the London cops didn't get to my camera.
• Ike Leggett needs four bodyguards at 90K per?
• White Flint Hell.
• Real Cooking v TV Cooking.
• Cool, look at these. (h/t)
• Rubber-wood rocs?
• Thinking of buying a netbook?
• Radio's Uncanny Origins.
• RIP J.G. Ballard. More. More.
• Pnin reconsidered.
• Lit links.
• New Chris Adrian story, and a reaction. I hated Children's Hospital so much I couldn't put it down.
• What's the word I'm looking for?

*

THE SAGA OF STUPIDITY AND WONDER

Albert Goldbarth

The history of the world could be written
in anything's history: native gourd; meteor rubble:
in capping machine at bottling plant number 7...
I'm convinced of this - how anything,
gripped right and studied long, contains the telescoped
story of everything, the way our protein coding holds
the germ of the lizard we once were. It's so

tempting to start the saga of stupidity and wide-eyed wonder with
us, in bed this morning, waking into another
day of our individual lives and our life together: but
any unit would do. Say... oh, say birds. In
1497, in Zurich, the citizens tried and
hanged for sorcery (truly) a rooster
accused of laying an egg. Or then

there's the tale Odoric of Pordenone brought back
from his travels "on the farther side of the sea.
I beheld," he tells us, a man who journeyed
with a faithful cloud of 4,000 partridges following him.
His journey was three days. When he slept, they
gathered like one solid object around him. When he walked,
they were his constant weather: the air was 8,000 wings.

*

My head, your head