BLCKDGRD

Only the Willing Are Fated to Receive Death as a Reward

Obama has won the most important fight of the first year of his presidency, convincing The Villagers he is One with Them.

Dana Milbank gleefully, smirkingly, dances on the crushed balls of Progressive's hope:

It was bound to happen eventually. Obama had become to his youthful supporters a vessel for all of their liberal hopes. They saw him as a transformational figure who would end war, save the Earth from global warming, restore the economy -- and still be home for dinner. They lashed out at anybody who dared to suggest that Obama was just another politician, subject to calculation, expediency and vanity like all the rest...

You'd think his supporters might applaud this sort of thoughtful, methodical leadership as a repudiation of the Bush style of government by political theory. Instead, they're using words such as "O'Bomber" to describe the president. MoveOn.org launched a petition drive against the policy. Code Pink, the group that heckled Bush officials for years, heckled Obama advisers on Capitol Hill last week. The liberal Web publisher Arianna Huffington told Charlie Rose that the policy "puts into question his whole leadership.

This is what happens when true believers mistake a mortal for a messiah.

• UPDATE! Poll-daddy sucks, yo. For the curiosity of the half-dozens that voted before I erased the script, asswipe, unsurprisingly, won unanimously.

Peter Baker, on the other hand, wants to be to Obama what Bernstein was for Bush:

On the afternoon he held the eighth meeting of his Afghanistan review, President Obama arrived in the White House Situation Room ruminating about war. He had come from Arlington National Cemetery, where he had wandered among the chalky white tombstones of those who had fallen in the rugged mountains of Central Asia....

How much their sacrifice weighed on him that Veterans Day last month, he did not say. But his advisers say he was haunted by the human toll as he wrestled with what to do about the eight-year-old war. Just a month earlier, he had mentioned to them his visits to wounded soldiers at the Army hospital in Washington. “I don’t want to be going to Walter Reed for another eight years,” he said then.

When the history of the Obama presidency is written, that day with the chart may prove to be a turning point, the moment a young commander in chief set in motion a high-stakes gamble to turn around a losing war. By moving the bell curve to the left, Mr. Obama decided to send 30,000 troops mostly in the next six months and then begin pulling them out a year after that, betting that a quick jolt of extra forces could knock the enemy back on its heels enough for the Afghans to take over the fight.

The three month review that led to the escalate-then exit strategy is a case-study in decision making in the Obama White House - intense, methodical, rigorous, earnest and at times deeply frustrating for nearly all involved. It was a virtual seminar on Afghanistan and Pakistan, led by a president described by one participant as something "between a college professor and a gentle cross-examiner."

Mr. Obama devoted so much time to the Afghan issue — nearly 11 hours on the day after Thanksgiving alone — that he joked, “I’ve got more deeply in the weeds than a president should, and now you guys need to solve this.” He invited competing voices to debate in front of him, while guarding his own thoughts. Even David Axelrod, arguably his closest adviser, did not know where Mr. Obama would come out until just before Thanksgiving.

Hagiographer-in-Waiting!

The Pornstache says: President Obama certainly showed leadership mettle in going against his own party’s base and ordering a troop surge into Afghanistan. He is going to have to be even more tough-minded, though, to make sure his policy is properly executed.(IOZ on the column.)

• UPDATE!

• Fresh Pornstachery!
• As for what he's saying in the above photo: Spoken like a proud slumlord, dick.

Frank Rich says: You can think the speech failed without questioning Obama’s motives. I don’t buy the criticism that he contrived a cynical political potpourri to pander to every side in the debate over the war.

(And if they needed extra reassurance: The Holder Justice Department’s brief can only be squared with prior DOJ arguments this way: foreign lawyers in foreign Justice Departments have no immunity and can be held accountable, but lawyers who work for us have absolute immunity from any meaningful form of accountability. The path to a renewal of the criminal misconduct of the Bush years is being prepared right now. And Obama Justice Department lawyers are doing the work.)

• UPDATE! Fuckface Hiatt takes this opportunity to nyah everyone who gave him grief for supporting Bush's surge. Thanks, Obama.

Thursday night my car battery died outside a deli on MacArthur Blvd when I stopped to buy a cup of coffee. While I waited for AAA to deliver a new battery, I sat in the deli, drinking my coffee, and for the first time in a couple of years listened to The Michael Savage Show, a favorite of the deli's owner.

Savage was away, so the hyper-reactionary Savage-wannabe substitute said:

• Either fight to win or don't fight. America firebombed Germany and firebombed then vaporized Japanese cities. Where is that American fighting spirit, dammit?
• This is Vietnam Redux: the government ships out blood and treasure to fight a noble war the government is too chickenshit to prosecute.
• It is sinful to send soldiers to die in a war you've no intention of winning.
• Nothing in Obama's decision was based on any calculation but his reelection.

He's not entirely wrong. He's not entirely wrong for despicable and barbarous reasons, but he's not entirely wrong.

(The host, after a caller identified himself as a Vietman vet, after the host raved for five minutes on how Liberals lost Vietnam, advocated sending in 150K troops, scrapping the "current rules of engagement," (meaning Fuck the Civilians), and telling the world We're not leaving in five years, we're not leaving in a hundred years.)

Heh, they're as stupid as us progressives wailing for peace. The economy collapses without war. Think how many trillion-trillions of dollars of American Monopoly money, all the way down to your shitty, complicitous IRA, are leveraged by war. Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke are inner-circle in Obama's war cabinet.

The Village collapses without war. The Villagers are One with Obama.

Duh, sure. But duh while sitting in a deli waiting for a new battery to be delivered to my dead car, listening to genocidal bedwetters make some retarded second-cousin of an argument I'd make is.... doubly duhful.

• Death Warrant for the Future.
• Black Hole of Bagram.
• Monty Python in Afghanistan.
• Obama is People.
• Um... Obama fucked up in Honduras too.
• Capitalism.
• Capitalist Realism.
• The compact of a consumer society.
• The Fuck You to Death Act.
• Reclusive Leftish.
• I never called bullshit on a Friday in December and his poll numbers dropping when the Bush administration released a surprisingly upbeat jobs number.
• Arendt. Do.
• UPDATE! Things like this fascinate me.
• Jay Paleo Old Arra Dirty 101 Bama sends this along. Heh.
• It's Zappadan again.
• Look, even Sarah Palin is keeping up with Zappadan!

• Twinbrook's future hell.
• Clarksburg! looks to Poolesville for inspiration!
• Silver Spring's future hell.
• Fare hikes, service cuts.
• Wheaton's future hell.
• Weast! parts three and four.
• Crime in Walnut Hill!

• BLCKDGRD translated into Chinese.
• Must be the Season of C.D. Wright.
• Poetry's Ginger v Marianne is in incredibly bad taste.
• UPDATE! A friend recommended this to me, and I meant to read it, I held a copy in my hands, and life shuffled me elsewhere. I'll try again.
• Vermin: A Notebook.
• Nick Cave as misogynist Monarch of Middlbrow.
• Airport through the Trees' 2009 in Music.
• New Beach House.
• Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Alex Ross' Top Ten Classical recordings of 2009.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• What you can buy me for Giftmas! Please!
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Grammy nominations, stupid as always, but Hall and Oates' Sara Smile is up for best duo? We're in fucking 1979? (And what is a Lady Gaga, a Taylor Swift, and a John Legend). MGMT, Silversun Pickups, and Ting Tings up for best new artist.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Serendipitously, 6th or 7th writes about Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga. I'm sure I've heard them somewhere in a public place, just wouldn't know (or care) it's them.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• Shearwater.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Still my favorite single of 2009. YYYs nominee for Best Alternative Rock Grammy v Byrne/Eno, the horribly shitty DCFC, Depeche Mode (???), and Phoenix (thou shalt spell Phoenix P-H-E-O-N-I-X, not P-H-O-E-N-I-X, no matter what the Oxford English Dictionary says).
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• I never got Depeche Mode, but I was aware they had a cult following.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! Everybody chooses sides.
• Alan is a cowboy killer.
• Ten great singers who can't sing.
• UPDATE! Look.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• múm
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.

HOTEL LAUTREAMONT

John Ashbery

  1.

Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society

working as a team. They didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork.

The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.

We see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well.”

Working as a team, they didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork.

The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds

we see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well,”

or, on a more modern note, in the finale of the Sibelius violin concerto.

The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds

the world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passé,

or in the finale of the Sibelius violin concerto.

Not to worry, many hands are making work light again.

The world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passé.

In any case the ruling was long overdue.

Not to worry, many hands are making work light again,

so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure.

   2.

In any case, the ruling was long overdue.

The people are beside themselves with rapture

so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure

and the solution problematic, at any rate far off in the future.

The people are beside themselves with rapture

yet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria,

and the solution: problematic, at any rate far off in the future.

The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained.

Yet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria.

In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel.

The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained,

and night like black swansdown settles on the city.

In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel.

Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward,

and night like black swansdown settles on the city.

If we tried to leave, would being naked help us?

   3.

Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward.

Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside.

If we tried to leave, would being naked help us?

And what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river?

Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside,

when all we think of is how much we can carry with us.

And what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river?

All the behemoths have filed through the maze of time.

When all we think of is how much we can carry with us

small wonder that those at home sit, nervous, by the unlit grate.

All the behemoths have filed through the maze of time.

It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality.

Small wonder that those at home sit nervous by the unlit grate.

It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination.

It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality

and in so doing deprive time of further hostages.

   4.

It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination.

Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open

and in so doing deprive time of further hostages,

to end the standoff that history long ago began.

Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open

but it is shrouded, veiled: We must have made some ghastly error.

To end the standoff that history long ago began

must we thrust ever onward, into perversity?

But it is shrouded, veiled: We must have made some ghastly error.

You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns.

Must we thrust ever onward, into perversity?

Only night knows for sure; the secret is safe with her.

You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns.

Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society;

only night knows for sure. The secret is safe with her:

The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.

At Closing Time, We Say Our Good-byes, and I Kiss Loretta, Just a Little Peck, Because I Know She Is Married to a Chicken, and I Respect That

I never expected Obama to turn decisively Left because he was progressive at heart and believed progressive ideas in the country's best interest. I expected him to turn decisively Left because it was in his political interest.

Or turn decisively Right. One or the other.

This dumb motherfucker believes his own bullshit, thinks bipartisanship entails alienating everyone equally. In a moment of schismatic national anxiety, he thinks splitting differences wisdom, half-measures strength? We want to be lead, you dumb motherfucker.

I'm not a roob because I thought Obama a progressive, I'm a roob because I thought Obama a smart, canny, gamesplayer.

I never imagined he'd deliberately brand himself a pussy.

He's a cow the size of a schnauzer. My apologies.

• Remember when Obama thought it cleverly symbolic to nominate this fuckwad to his cabinet?
• A well-earned I told you so.
• Garry Wills, whom I bashed for this a couple of weeks ago, obamapostasizes.
• Deciphering Bullshit: Nuance Edition.
• UPDATE! America: Mendacious or Heedless has the added benefit of commenting on the Berube v Proyect spat.
• Yay! Bernie, Yay! Al. Make more noise. And as a silly thought-experiment, it's Franken v Palin 2012. Go.
• UPDATE! Boofuckinghoo. Now, when Obama responds to his wealthiest donors wishes, Your Fucking Washington Post will run a story on how Obama is selling access.
• I wonder if anyone at Your Fucking Washington Post wishes they had kept Froomkin.
• This is true. How soon before the words Tiger and steroids begin appearing in the same sentence?

• Agitprop is shutting down. This was the second group blog I contributed to. I don't miss the first (which is still densely humorless and humorously dense), and I'll not much miss the second because we'd all pretty much stopped contributing to concentrate what time and effort each had to their respective personal blogs. Bookmark Pime (from whom I found that Maury photo from last post) and Stump Lane, yo.
• Quick Study has shuttered too.
• UPDATE! No, it's not. And, um, it's because Proyect has picked another fight.
• And it looks like Ellis is (at the very least) on hiatus.
• I curse a lot. I'm probably not going to stop.

• Crisis in Kensington!
• Germantown Future Hell!
• Crisis in Glen Echo! or: Fucking Villagers.

• Earthgirl grew up just up a two minute walk from Sycamore Store.
• Greivis Future.

• Modernism against Modernity.
• New York Times names it Top Ten Books of 2009, five fiction, five non-fiction. I don't read non-fiction much, I haven't read any of the fiction.
• This is the Book of the Year:

• Two new Gerald Stern poems.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• I could have gone but chose not to. I don't begrudge them. It's not so much me not wanting to see them up there doing back then, it's that I don't want to see me seeing them up there doing back then.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

WAYLON'S WOMAN

James Tate

    Loretta had a rooster that was so fierce
nobody could visit her anymore. Loretta loved
that rooster, and the rooster loved Loretta,
thought she was his wife. So the only time
we got to see Loretta was when she came to town.
We'd meet her at Mike's Westview Cafe and drink
beer with her all night. The rooster's name
was Waylon, and she'd talk about Waylon all
night, and if you didn't know better you'd think
she was talking about her husband. Well, I knew
better, and I still thought she was talking about
her husband. "Waylon wasn't feeling very good
this morning.""Waylon was real sweet to me
last night.""Waylon is so handsome, sometimes
I just can't take me eyes off him." She's still
fun to be with, and she seems completely normal
to me. At closing time, we say our good-byes,
and I kiss Loretta, just a little peck, because
I know she is married to a chicken, and I respect
that. Waylon has made her happy in ways I never
could. The starry sky, the police hiding in the
bushes, God, it's good to be alive, I think, and
pee behind my car in the darkness of my own private
darkness.

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

Fireless and Vacant as Any Hat

Updates below.

Perrin writes: I think Obama has already cemented his legacy, and those who believe he'll dramatically shift direction and do "what's in his heart" are beyond help at this point. Those who grumble in liblog threads about ditching Obama and the Dems in 2012 are also blowing steam, for the system is self-correcting, and once the vampirish Repub candidates start baring their fangs, stray libs will be frightened back into the fold, hoping that the next four years will somehow be different.

True that. I'm not betting against that being me, though I'm gonna try to lose that bet.

Sullivan says what I've been saying forever: If (Obama) ramps up Afghanistan and delays Iraq withdrawal, he will lose his base. If he does the full metal neocon as he is being urged to, he should not be deluded in believing the GOP will in any way support him. They will oppose him every step of every initiative. They will call him incompetent if Afghanistan deteriorates, they will call him a terrorist-lover if he withdraws, they will call him a traitor if he does not do everything they want, and they will eventually turn on him and demand withdrawal, just as they did in the Balkans with Clinton. Obama's middle way, I fear, is deeper and deeper into a trap, and the abandonment of a historic opportunity to get out.

True that. I've said over and over Obama could roast Muslims alive on a spit, gouging out their livers with a poker while screaming Fuck You, Allah, and pigs will call him pussy.

Zizek at Birkbeck College. Consider this: Today's lecture, dramatically entitled 'Apocalypse Today' (a promise or a threat, I wonder), kicks off with Zizek identifying the three modern horsemen of the apocalypse: the techno-digital, the New Age, and the Christian fundamentalist, of which the last of the three is both the most dangerous, the most ridiculous, and also the closest to any kind of desirable emancipatory politics.

True that. If you're American power, who do you fear more, Beckian cranks and Christers or fat and complicit fucks like me? The strategy is to make me more afraid of Beckian cranks and Christers than I am disgusted with the oligarchy, that I hold my nose and tolerate them rather than hold my nose and work with the cranks and Christers to challenge the status quo.

Polny pizdets. To challenge the oligarchy's power, there's more likelihood for success if America's Leftists work with America's christiest, crackerist Right than waiting for help from the Democrats (and more likelihood for success if America's christiest, crackerist Right work with the looniest, most marxist Left than wait for help from the Republicans)?

True that. I voted for X-Boxes for Giftmas and instead got shittier reality shows for the Spring season, bitches! I can get the same shittier reality shows without voting, yo.

• UPDATE! A deadly liar and manipulator.
• UPDATE! Dead Parrot.
• A reasoned response to the question, What's Gone Wrong w/Obama? Fuck reasoned responses: what's gone wrong is he had his chance brand himself as new - regardless of whether or not he actually wanted to enact new - and he chose to brand himself old.
• UPDATE! True this: The fact that Obama is following in Bush’s footsteps – talking to an audience of captive individuals who would be ruined for life by a single catcall – is a sign of how archaic hope for change and reform has become.
• UPDATE!

• Ameritocracy.
• Ameritocracy.
• UPDATE! Bankers take up arms in Class War.
• Waiting for the Political Moment.
• What is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracies. A response.
• UPDATE! Mike Huckabee is a gutless sophist!
• Slapping Berube once, twice.
• 100 proofs we are polny pizdets.
• Come on, Haji, let me keep it.
• The difference between Republicans and Democrats.
• UPDATE! Because Republicans don't think Obama means it like Republicans mean it when he kills civilian towelheads and sandmonkeys, which makes Obama a hypocrite posturing for reelection. Um.
• Palinism. When she's elected in 2012, we'll deserve it.
• Politico fuckwits.
• Politico fuckwits interview Darth Fuckwad.
• Politico fuckwits unwittingly reveal the midgets behind the curtain.
• White House fuckwits respond.
• Where fuckwads dine.
• Your Photoshop of the Day! Who uses Star Trek allusions?

• Oh.
• UPDATE! The Straight Cock Express!
• The problem is, even if 99% of humans are wired to be helpful, the 1% who are assholes will rule the world.

• Top Ten missed Metro stations. How about MOCOCOLLEGE in Rocketville?
• UPDATE! What's wrong with this sentence: Using federal stimulus money, the State Highway Administration has begun a $968,000 project to improve the Md. Route 28 and Veirs Mill Road intersection in Gaithersburg.
• ICC!
• Crisis in Potomac!
• UPDATE! Priest Fight!
• Weast! part one.
• Weast! part two.
• UPDATE! All that matters to Weast!

This past Sunday night we had dinner with Elric's parents at that restaurant in Baithersgurgle, a restaurant that iterations and years ago was once Pappy's Pizza where, during a summer break in 1978(?) between his freshman and sophomore years(?) at Kenyon, someone exceptionally dear to me (and familiar to regulars), to the everlasting and glorious head-exploding of his father, John the Daftist, while working in the kitchen fell in love with a waitress and dropped out of school and has had a full and (give or take two ex-wives and a Sinister Bitch of Doom) happy life. xoxo.

• Friedgen returning, which is as it should be, economically - you can't be buying out a $4M contract with state money while furloughing state workers.
• Berbatov is.... The Continental.
• Do formations have to be symmetrical?
• Thoughts on Friday's draw.
• More thoughts on Friday's draw. Make your predictions on who USMNT draws! Me: Argentina, England, Ivory Coast. Please please please please please England.
• UPDATE! FIFA gave both Argentina and England top seeds (also Germany, Spain, Holland, Brazil, Italy, and home side Bafana Bafana), so they can't be drawn together. USMNT will see one of these eight: France, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland, Greece, Serbia, Denmark, Slovakia and one of these eight: Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria, Algeria, Paraguay, Chile, Uruguay.

• I think I did this already, but Silliman marks 2.5M visits. His is one of the irreplaceable blogs.
• HEY! Esposito! decides who gets named, OK?
• Aleksandar Hemon, who edited Dalkey's 2010 European Fiction, interviewed.
• Five Branch Tree has been thinking about C.D. Wright. I confess, keeping up with all the right Wright's (because there are wrong Wright's out there) takes effort.
• New Merwin.
• Morton Feldman.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Animal Collective samples The Dead's Unbroken Chain!
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Bonny Billy sings Death to Everyone!
• KEXP's weekly MP3s of new releases.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment. Yes, again.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment. Yes, again.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment. Yes, again.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

THE DRUNK IN THE FURNACE

W.S. Merwin

                For a good decade
The furnace stood in the naked gully, fireless
And vacant as any hat. Then when it was
No more to them than a hulking black fossil
To erode unnoticed with the rest of the junk-hill
By the poisonous creek, and rapidly to be added
                To their ignorance

                The were afterwards astonished
To confirm, one morning, a twist of smoke like a pale
Resurrection, staggering out of it chewed hole,
And to remark then other tokens that someone,
Cosily bolted behind the eye-holed iron
Door of the drafty burner, had there established
                His bad castle.

                Where he gets his spirits
It's a mystery. But the stuff keeps him musical:
Hammer-and-anvilling with poker and bottle
To his jugged bellowings, till the last groaning clang
As he collapses onto the rioting
Springs of a litter of car-seats ranged on the grates,
                To sleep like an iron pig.

                In their tar-paper church
On a text about stoke-holes that are sated never
Their Reverend lingers. They nod and hate trespassers.
When the furnace wakes, though, all afternnon
Their witless offspring flock like piped rats to its siren
Crescendo, and agape on the crumbling ridge
                Stand in a row and learn.

 

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

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?

You Might Have Been a Vowel on a Typewriter or a Number on a Telephone Dial or a Consonant in Books. You Could Have Been a Dot on a Die in a Child's Monopoly Set

 

Julius Finsberg, on his death bed, tells his godson Ben Flesh:

It's incredible really. Amazing. Who could believe it? You weren't aborted, you didn't end up in a scum bag. You survived the infant mortality stuff. You made it past measles, polio, mumps. You outwitted whooping cough, typhoid, VD. God bless you, boy, you're a testament to the impossible! And not just that, but you aren't broken or damaged, there are no birth defects; you've your full complement of fingers, your fair share of toes. You're literate, you do sums. The Dean's List at Wharton. I know, I know. And even without parents you've got clothes, shelter, sex, what to eat - you know, the drives , the hydramatics of being, four on the floor and more where that came from. Yes, and you get the point of jokes and have a favorite movie and maybe even the room where you stay is done up in your favorite color. My God, lad, you're a fucking celebration...

Ben, everything there is is against your being here! Think of get-togethers, family stuff, golden anniversaries in rented halls, fire regulation celebrated more in the breach than the observance, the baked Alaska up in flames, everybody wiped out - all the cousins in from coasts, wiped out. Rare, yes - who says not - certainly rare, but it could happen, has happened. And once is enough if you've been invited. All the people picked off by plagues and folks eaten by earthquakes and drowned in the tidal waves, all the people already dead that you might have been or who might have begat the girl who married the guy who fathered the fellow who might have been your ancestor - all the showers of sperm that dried on his Kleenex or spilled on his sheets or fell on the ground or dirtied his hands when he jerked off or came in his p.j.'s or no, maybe he was actually screwing and the spermatozoon had your number written on it and it was lost at sea because that's what happens, you see - there's low motility and torn tails - that's what happens to all but a handful out of all the googols and gallons of come, more sperm finally than even the grains of sand I was talking about, more even than the degrees. Well - am I making the picture for you? Am I connecting the dots? Ben, Ben, Nick the Greek wouldn't lay a fart against a trillion bucks that you'd ever make it to this planet!

- Stanley Elkin, The Franchiser.

UPDATE! My favorite paragraph ever.

 

Got home Monday night and saw this sign in my front yard, got an email Tuesday morning from a good friend re: bleggalgazing, thus this, a post I will spend more time on and invest more mmwah in than any other post since the last and until the next, deliberately posted for the two slowest bleg days of the year.

This bleg is where I spend whatever creative mmwah I have in the time I have to mmwah. There's a reason I want this bleg to be different than the blegs I read, not to be better but different. I'll not deny I'm competitive, that I want to be recognized as smart by people I think are smart - and I am, thank you - and I'll not deny there are bleggers who (and this isn't aimed at anyone who'd be reading this) are almost as smart as they think they are, who appropriate others' work and call it their own and....

Meh. It's Thanksgiving, the one civic holiday I genuinely like (that whole celebration of the successful genocide of the aboriginal population of North America aside), so, Kind.

I could be the Number Two stenciled on a pencil, says Julius Finsberg. I'm lucky to be a blegging Ben Flesh.

• UPDATE! Elric sends Thanksgiving best wishes from a Sheraton in Frankfurt, Deutschland, along with last thoughts and pictures from Lagos, Nigeria. And while we too wish could join us in Kensington, we're actually gonna be at his parents' house in Gophershole because someone (the mother of my child) jammed up the garbage disposal with onions and green beans and we can't get a plumber out her until Friday. We're still doing all the cooking.
• Obamapostasy.
• It's almost as if the idiot doesn't want to be reelected.
• It's almost as if the idiot doesn't want to be reelected.
• It's almost as if the idiot doesn't want to be reelected.
• It's almost as if the idiot doesn't want to be reelected.
• UPDATE! The idiot doesn't want to be reelected.
• It's almost as if the idiot doesn't want to be reelected.
• It's almost as if the idiot doesn't want to be reelected.
• It's almost as if the idiot doesn't want to be reelected.
• UPDATE! The Moral Face of Our Country.
• UPDATE! Greenwald most excellently calls Bolton a pussy.
• Cole makes a funny: How about the liberals and Democrats who appear on CNN do something about it. Call (Castellano) him out every time you are on- make sure every chance you get you point out that CNN’s political commentator is an official GOP hack. Heh, Democrats calling out Republicans!
• Every man an anchor of the Goodship Palin.
• The Association of Rightwing Bedwetters.
• Please please please please please.
• Please please please please please.
• Like Hell I'm going to let some black President help me pay for my dialysis.
• Children of the grave.
• Jim (who made me think of the Elkin by sending me this) starts a hugely ambitious project on Western values by considering truth.
• Efficiencies of Death.
• Fucking Christers.
• UPDATE! In case someone insists you say grace on Thnxgvng.
• Giftmas shilling this year? Cheap and cheerful!

• CONGRATULATIONS, AGI! She's beautiful.

UPDATE! Meet Julia.

• One can't have lived in DC area for forty-five years and not note the passing of Abe Pollin. I find the NBA unwatchable and don't give a sliver of fuck about the hockey team (which he sold x-years ago), but for his part in revitalizing downtown, he did good. See Sasha for more. And lordy, the concerts at this place:

• The Tombs sucks. And what good is a gardenburger if it's fried in the grease of a beef-burger?
• Maryland, beets, molasses, and snow on roads.
• MOCO furloughs?
• My tax dollars to fire Ralph Fucking Friedgen? I think I've told this story already, but wtf: two years ago, my next door neighbor's kid was an All-Met offensive lineman at Good Council (the school Bromark was sent to after Elric's parents had had enough of him and me at Gophershole High). The kid was recruited by Maryland and others, and, long story short, the competing schools talked about what an overbearing asshole Friedgen is, and upon meeting Friedgen, the kid found out it was true.
• On Little Danny Helmetball's team's business decline.
• Tears of a Cheater. Quit the national team, then I'll believe you.
• The eleven protected: Defenders Marc Burch, Dejan Jakovic, Julius James and Bryan Namoff; midfielders Fred, Clyde Simms, Danny Szetela and Rodney Wallace; midfielder-forwards Chris Pontius and Santino Quaranta; and forward Jaime Moreno. No surprises except perhaps Fred, though I think United fears he'll go elsewhere and be all he was supposed to be here.
• UPDATE! Strike!
• Benny officially retired Tuesday UPDATE!:

• The didactic embodiment of the physical book.
• Woods reviews Auster. I don't remember precisely why I lost complete interest in Auster, though I never understood the buzz about the New York Trilogy, and come to think about it, only Moon Palace wowed me.
• The Onion's AV Club reviews the latest Auster.
• Poetry recommendations. I can vouch for the Linh Dinh (I've posted his poems here a few times).
• The End of Music. Is? Dumb.
• KEXP's generous MP3s of this week's releases.
• Don't forget counterstream, yo.
• Facts don't prove my point of view.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Check out Mr. Businessman.
• UPDATE! This argument is excellent cud, which is why I post it (and will comment on it further, or not), but what I really wanted to post from Poetix is this John Martyn, who I confess I hadn't thought about in a year or so.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• You can walk, you can talk just like me.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• She could hear the highway breathing.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Here we stand like an Adam and an Eve.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

 

FROM THE MANIFESTO OF THE SELFISH

Stephen Dunn

Because altruists are the least sexy
    people on earth, unable
to say "I Want" without embarrassment,

we need to take from them everything
    they give,
then ask for more,

this is how to excite them, and because
    it's exciting
to see them the least bit excited

once again we'll be doing something
    for ourselves,
who have no problem taking pleasure,

always desirous and so pleased to be
    pleased, we who above all
can be trusted to keep the balance.

But It Wasn't a Poem, or at Least Said It Wasn't. For Who Would Want to Be a Thing So Small? It Wanted to Be a Novel, and Who Doesn't?

Updates below

Definitive proof of my congenital and incurable roobitus: beyond the daily pigfarts and Democratic sniffing of pigfarts, beyond the children killed by American ordinance in senseless wars, the fucking crackers, the media's giddy coronation of the Grifter Queen, beyond the daily etc, nothing has pissed me off more in months than this:

I'm a roob? Read this:

In the act of controlling the ball before providing Gallas with a perfect cross, France's captain had handled it. Not once, but twice. The first time might have been almost inadvertent, a pardonable reflex action as it was about to go out of play. The second, in which he scooped the ball with his left hand, redirecting it to drop nicely on to his right foot, was clearly intentional.

Even there, it could be argued that an element of reflex was involved. But in the few seconds that followed, Henry had two options. He could pretend that he had not broken the most basic law of outfield play. Or he could take the opportunity to neutralise the effect of his reflexes. To erase an error. To right a wrong. To be a man.

We all know which way Henry decided to go. With a broad, exultant beam on his face, he raced away from the scene of the crime to join Gallas and their team-mates in celebration of a goal that all knew was likely to be decisive in the battle for a place in next summer's World Cup finals.

For this was no ordinary piece of cheating. National pride and tens of millions of euros were at stake. So much greater, then, would have been the admiration of a decision to own up. Instead Henry chose to go down a path which exposed not just his own human frailty but the paranoid fear of failure running through a French squad (and their manager) haunted by comparisons with the glories of the recent past.

I had no interest in Ireland advancing other than France not, because handball aside, where is the outrage that FIFA changed the rules of the world's most important sporting event IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TOURNAMENT, fearing that Portugal and France (and at the time the decision was made, perhaps Germany) might need to advance through play-ins and might get matched against each other, allowing a Bosnia or Ireland to advance instead?

Robbie Keane was correct when he said Sepp Blattner and Michael Platini would be "probably clapping hands, Platini sitting up there on the phone to Sepp Blatter, probably texting each other, delighted with the result."

Let me get this straight: a powerful multinational conglomerate too big to be held accountable changes the rules in the middle of a competition to guarantee itself maximum profit by rewarding its biggest money-makers at the expense of the weak and powerless and then approvingly winks when one of its preeminent show-ponies blatantly cheats to get through, and I'm surprised, shocked, and morally outraged?

What a fucking roob. No one asks me anymore how I separate my politics and soccer.

• Dishonest travesties v honest travesties. Which is what I was thinking about writing about next - Obamalame's half-assedness et al, which I will, sooner than later.
• UPDATE! World's Shittiest Human, still and always, but of particular note, this last sentence: Holder himself told The Post that the coming New York trial will be "the trial of the century." The last such was the trial of O.J. Simpson. This is at least the third time I've seen a pigoon compare this to the O.J. trial, and draw your own conclusions, yo.
• UPDATE! Grandpa Tool thinks of Palin, gazes at his lap, remembers when his crotch worked.
• UPDATE! On Palin Derangement Syndrome.
• No one has offered me a suitable replacement word to describe an acornholist like this.
• UPDATE! Going Vague.
• UPDATE! Speaking of Bobo.
• Babelfeeds sent me an invite. Babelfeeds?
• UPDATE! Spectacular Time.
• UPDATE! Train vs Tornado!
• State of Maryland Blogdom.
• UPDATE! Frederick reminds 'Peruvian redneck' of his homeland.
• UPDATE! Marbourg.
• UPDATE! Purple Line.
  

• Elric's contempt for Kornheiser ratified! I didn't know that Beatrice story.
• UPDATE! I do remember when Beatrice was disgraced - it was a big story in DC. I don't remember Kornheiser's part or his personal delight in taking Beatrice down, though.
• !Heh! Thievery Henry.
• Goff speculates on United's protected list. More later as the draft gets closer. Or not.
• UPDATE! Benny: D.C. United midfielder Ben Olsen, the heart and soul of the club who has endured numerous ankle operations and medical setbacks during a standout career spanning 11 years, is mulling retirement, the Insider has learned. A decision is expected within a week. First, Benny is making the decision before United puts out its expansion protection list. Second, speculating, I wonder if this means United is leaning towards Richie Williams as head coach and Benny assistant under Williams.
• Speaking of United, Fullback's doing autopsies on the season.
• NASL kits!
• Only three Euro-qualifiers for WC10 from old Iron Curtain countries.

• NYRB says Oopsy.
• Oates reviews Munro (sub rqrd).
• Cormac McCarthy interviewed: "I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing."
• UPDATE! I read his novel Zoli, didn't suck, wasn't wowed.
• Sixteen, fifteen, fourteen...
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• RC emailed me this review (the sixth down) for it's penultimate sentence: To put it another way: If Arcade Fire had lived up to ¼ of their INITIAL hype/promise, before anyone had actually heard the band, instead of becoming an excuse to over-intellectualize The Hooters, it might’ve hinted at the accomplishments found on Songbread/Another Ocean.
• Near wild heaven.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Execrable music?
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• What's Mandarin for "your band sucks."
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! AV's 50 Best of Decade, which strikes me as better than NME's (by better, I mean I agree with more), though AV's #1 I just adamantly disagree with.
• Today's Listening Assignment.

UPDATE! Woke up with this in my head:

NO PEGASUS

Ronald Wallace

It looked a lot like a poem; it had lines
that preached enjambment; it had rhymes, or sorts,
both approximate and exact. It stopped on dimes.
It started up again. It had cohorts -

metaphor and imagery and such -
and like to keep time by beating on its
chest, though some might have said it walked with a crutch
and took more liberties than most of its fellow sonnets.

But it wasn't a poem, or at least said it wasn't.
For who would want to be a thing so small?
It wanted to be a novel, and who doesn't?

It hid its horsy face, it's tail, it's wing,
under a cloak of prose. It stopped prancing.
But try as it might, it could not not sing.

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever, and a designated Theme Song Unto Perpetuity:

Tomorrow Was Yesterday

Tpwrtz, I can't escape the noise because I don't want to escape the noise. I love the noise, I'm sick of pretending to pretend I don't, and now, now that the pigs are piggying faster than even Democratic wussying can keep up, the noise will be splatastic!

Holyfuck, Democrats can't suck more at being professional counter-fuckwads. I understand why professional Republicans loathe them. My contempt glows hot red meh.

Consider this another attempted molting out of my .06% less-shitty roobiskin.

*

• Power in America.
• What I keep saying.
• Getting worse more slowly is still getting worse.
• Afghan scenarios for when, not if, we fail.
• Paying off the warlords.
• Sorry.
• Pastor Gerson envies dictators.
• It bears remembering that America's patriots on the Right envy the clergy in Iran their Basij street vigilantes, which is why the Right fears the clergy in Iran.
• They also envy Islamic terrorists, which is why they fear them.
• They fear The Constitution.
• UPDATE! Credit for saying it.
• Obama is deeply stoopid if he thinks killing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will shut pigs up.
• Obama lacks "blood impulse" for what America is about, presumably because Obama is not like Islamic terrorists (or at least not openly).
• Obama as Polanski.
• Barack Obama: Is He the Devil?
• Please please please please please!
• UPDATE! Please please please please please!
• Bow Mao.
• Cowardly fuckwit.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• You can't spell slaughter without laughter.
• Another reason to not watch helmetball.
• Directional Rider Flows on Metro.

• Herndon, not Kensington, is the most obscene city in America.
• CCT! A 14-mile light rail line between the Shady Grove Metro station and the Clarksburg area is estimated to cost $999 million, and a busway is estimated to cost $533 million, according to a state analysis. Heh, not $1B, $999M. Marketing! suckers.
• ICC! Move to allow upscale Toyotas on road advances.
• My future hell.
• Elric's father, when head of the math dept at Churchill years ago, argued for this.

UPDATE! (Via Bromark) On next season's United kit:

I'm not allowed to share anything that you probably really want to know yet, but, I can say that we will have both a new home & away kit in 2010. Our home kit will remain primarily black, with away being white. There will also be no third kit in 2010. From what I've seen our kit doesn't use the exact same silhouette as any of the adidas World Cup kits or any of the other new MLS kits. Some design elements are shared here and there but overall ours will be unique. We actually just did a photo & video shoot of the new home kit today that I won't be able to share until 2010, but I think they turned out well.

Can't vouch for any of this - I've no idea who DCU Merchandise is, though Bromark says he works in the team store at RFK - but, from a marketing and sales POV, why wouldn't you release at least images before Giftmas?

• Redesign the Redskins helmet?
• I can't summon the damn to say much about Garber's babble other than of course there's going to be a strike.
• Van Persie to treat hurt ankle with horse placenta!
• UPDATE! Fuck the French. This is true: Thierry Henry, when at Arsenal, was once one of my favorite players. Cheater. (And fuck FIFA for CHANGING RULES IN THE LATE STATE OF THE TOURNAMENT and rigging the draw to ensure there was no way for France to draw Portugal in the knock-off.) (So fuck Portugal too.)
• New USMNT WC10 shirt? Is? Ugly as sin. USMNT = United States Men's Nike Team.

• The publishing industry and the Bolaño myth.
• On the coming Bolaño Backlash.
• Bolaño's Distant Star.
• Hemon reviews Nabokov's Laura.
• Silliman's always generous lit-links.
• The spell against spelling. (h/t)
• Two new Marilyn Hacker poems.
• On Ashbery. (h/t)
• NME's Top 50 Albums of the Noughties. Now, for one thing, the Noughties don't end until 12/31/10 (a battle I'll never win and surrender to having made that statement). Second, The White Stripes? Seriously? Two albums in the top 19? I understand that I don't get Arcade Fire and don't begrudge them their two albums, but fucking Jack White, twice?
• Chuck Prophet!
• February 4, not 14. Who's in?
• Three-way.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• But you're in every song I know.
• KEXP's MP3s of this week's new releases.
• Shitfaced, they're all undressing.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• When we kiss it feels like a flying saucer landing.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• They breathe coke and have affairs.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• UPDATE! Well, this was just put in my head, be in yours.
• It makes you blind, it does you in.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Cause I got wheels and you want to go for a ride.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Come here baby and kiss me like you mean it.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Why do we keep shrieking when we mean soft things?
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• I've enjoyed making you miserable for years.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Some of it just transcendental, some of it is just really dumb.
• Serendipity: New TINDERSTICKS!
• I will stay if you let me stay.

*

HUM

Ann Lauterbach

The days are beautiful.
The days are beautiful.

I know what days are.
The other is weather.

I know what weather is.
The days are beautiful.

Things are incidental.
Someone is weeping.

I weep for the incidental.
The days are beautiful.

Where is tomorrow?
Everyone will weep.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
The days are beautiful.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
Today is weather.

The sound of weather
Is everyone weeping.

Everyone is incidental.
Everyone weeps.

The tears of today
Will put out tomorrow.

The rain is ashes.
The days are beautiful.

The rain falls down.
The sound is falling.

The sky is a cloud.
The days are beautiful.

The sky is dust.
The weather is yesterday.

The weather is yesterday.
The sound is weeping.

What is this dust?
The weather is nothing.

The days are beautiful.
The towers are yesterday.

The towers are incidental.
What are these ashes?

Here is the hat
That does not travel

Here is the robe
that smells of the night

Here are the words
Retired to their books

Here are the stones
Loosed from their settings

Here is the bridge
Over the water

Here is the place
Where the sun came up

Here is a season
Dry in the fireplace.

Here are the ashes.
The days are beautiful.

*

Yes, again:

I Would Have You Know That All Is Not Well with a Man Dead Set to Ignore the Endless Repetitions of His Own Murmurous Blood

Garry Wills, polishing the roob, pleads to and for Obama in latest NYRB:

I am told by people I respect that Barack Obama cannot pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan without becoming a one-term president. I think that may be true. The charges from various quarters would be toxic—that he was weak, unpatriotic, sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, betraying our dead, throwing away all former investments in lives and treasure. All that would indeed be brought against him, and he could have little defense in the quarters where such charges would originate.

America's dickheads and assholes would call Obama weak and unpatriotic, call him guilty of sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, of betraying the service dead, of appeasing the enemy, if Obama decreed tomorrow that every Muslim on the planet must die and started lobbing nukes on Tehran and Damascus and that mosque in Potomac.

I love the NYRB, have been a subscriber for thirty years, it's arguably the preeminent journal of America's Left intelligentisia (or of the New York and Ivy League Left intelligentsia), but Wills pathetic plea is embarrassing: Wills assumes that either Obama can't leave Afghanistan because of pressure from the Right or won't because of concern for his reelection when it's simply a matter that Obama doesn't want to: he believes in the mission.

*

• Let's get the Dolchstosslegend going!
• UPDATE! American priorities.
• The Communist Manifesto in Cartoon (which I post as much as a flashback - cartoon-wise - for farts my age as any reason else).  (h/t)
• Defective Comics.
• UPDATE! Nerd Boyfriend!
• Lacan and E-Mail.
• Comedy's Charcoal Age.
• Simplicity.
• American Democracy.
• I do hope Greenwald has bodyguards and never drinks from a glass he walks away from in company.
• Yup.
• Google pigoons and Atwood before reading today's Rich.
• The Palin Effect.
• Grifter.
• Conservative curve ball.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.

• Moron and fatfuck Shales, reviewing the new Prisoners remake: Strikingly photographed in starkest black and white, the '67 "Prisoner" was a curious and rather tantalizing melange of counterculture imagery, traditional paranoid fantasy and even a bit of Cold War spy thriller, with the spy stuff mostly expunged from what AMC calls its "reinterpretation" of the story.
• It's a couple of days late, but Trisketdekaphobia.
• More Elric in Nigeria. Since he's there, he might be interested in this.
• UPDATE! Even more Elric in Nigeria.
• The ad Typepad is running on its dashboard:

• Think: if blegs were a professional soccer shirt, that statement would be true, and think how weird soccer shirts look when teams are forced to play minus the logo.
• Berbatov is.... The Continental.
• Viers v Veirs: the story.
• Political activism in Kensington!
• ICC side-effects.
• Joe's Record Paradise! in Post because Joe smokes pot. Joe's Record Paradise was the best headshop in MOCO when MOCO had headshops. Or so I'm told.
• UPDATE! Sex in Fredneck.
• The worse uniform ever contest declares a winner.
• Union's new home shirt.
• Clowns wear all-black when their colors are red and white:

• An pox forever on Little Danny Helmetball, though wearing colors at home is a surprise and a plus:

• Barking Dog's Writer's Journal.
• More on the ascendancy of memoirs over fiction. You know, it's true on TV too.
• UPDATE! UM's review of a book by Jonah Raskin is good, but what interests me is in the author photo, behind Raskin's left jowl, is M31 by Steven Wright.
• An American minimalist.
• Excellent bleggal-gazing: Sojourns in Meatspace.
• Here we are, stuck by this river.
• Beards per minute. UPDATE! More!
• Into you like a train.
• UPDATE! !wOOt! Plus Planet just called and said they're playing Lisner Auditorium on February 14, so Landru, Ilse, Hamster, Bromark, Elric, you want tickets, let me know, I might be able to take care of all my Giftmas shopping at once!
• Cartographic Study of Musical Incest.
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• Touch me, I'm going to scream.
• Spiral Cliff.
• It's not alright.
• UPDATE! It's not up to you.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• What's important.

*

A LETTER

Anthony Hecht

                I have been wondering
    What you are thinking about, and by now suppose
                It is certainly not me.
    But the crocus is up, and the lark, and the blundering
                Blood knows what it knows.
It talks to itself all night, like a sliding, moonlit sea.

                Of course, it is talking of you.
    At dawn, when the ocean has netted its catch of lights,
                The sun plants one lithe foot
    On that spill of mirrors, but the blood goes worming through
                Its warm Arabian nights
Naming your pounding name again in the dark heartroot.

                Who shall, of course, be nameless.
    Anyway, I should want you to know I have done my best,
                As I'm sure you have, too.
    Others are bound to us, the gentle and blameless
                Whose names are not confessed
In the ceaseless palaver. My dearest, the clear and bottomless
    blue

                Of those depths is all but blinding.
    You may remember that once you bought my boys
                Two little woolly birds.
    Yesterday the older one asked for you upon finding
                Your thrush among his toys.
And tides welled about me, and I could find no words.

                There is not much else to tell.
    One tries one's best to continue as before,
                Doing some little good.
    But I would have you know that all is not well
                With a man dead set to ignore
The endless repetitions of his own murmurous blood.

*

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever, in hopes of changing my mood:

Flies Would Love to Leap Between His Eyes and Hum Away the Space Between the Ears, the Hollow Where a Hare Could Hide

I have this romantic belief that because a particular post is exceptionally important to me, by glow of my radioactive AWOO! it will compel hundreds of strangers to ping me, and when they don't I gnaw.

But I've got a new cellphone, I needed a qwerty, and this phone's camera is easy to play with, so I get to admire my photos here while you, loyal reader, suffer through it.

*

• America.
• Fucking Democrats. Pragmatism, shmagmatism, Democrats have the women vote, the black and hispanic vote, the youth vote, the rooby pwoggle and dumbass rote Democrat vote, they have the vote of every constituency except the bitter whites and crazy christers and the fucking Confederacy, fucking RAM POLICY DOWN THE BITTER WHITES' AND FUCKING CHRISTERS' AND THE FUCKING CONFEDERACY'S THROAT!
• Fucking Democrats. My roobity: if an elected Democrat is as cravenly power hungry and corrupt as his Republican opposite, and if the electoral battle isn't about policy differences but is solely over who controls the spigots, why is the Democrats only move after getting spigot control to act like the fucking Republicans they just defeated?
• I am a fucking roob, that's why.
• Blood money, black gold.
• All about a pipeline.
• Capitalism.
• Zizek on Post-Wall: they weren't asking for American capitalism.
• John Gray on human psychology, the economy, global capitalism.
• Determined to be dumb.
• American Insurgents.
• World's Shittiest Human lives up to billing. UPDATE!
• Bobo gets a chubby.
• From shit to crap.
• While it's entertaining to hear Joe Klein slap a wannabe neo-con fuckwit, I don't think Klein's contempt is limited only to wannabe neo-con fuckwits who disagree with him.
• Blitzerfuckwit.
• How's Dobbwad as a term?
• The future of Dobbwad?
• On boners.
• Catholic Church threatens to starve children if DC allows gay marriage.
• Broken Man.
• I'd forgot about Bouphonia.
• Work:

• New Market child has tick removed from eye.
• I've personally heard a MOCO teacher say this.
• Fillmore Silver Spring.
• ICC!
• Crisis in Kensington!
• Little Danny Helmetball's henchman.
• Work:

• Harington's NYT obit. They use the word "surrealist," a term I deliberately choose not to use. I also don't use the term "magical realism" to describe his art, though I'd argue it's the closer of the two terms.
• Dalkey Press has a 10 books for $65 sale through Nov 22.
• Kalashnikov wanted to be a poet.
• I could care less about Tyler and Aerosmith, I just mentioned the story as an excuse to post a KITH bit.
• There's irony in Gordon Sumner questioning anyone's talent. I need a new term to describe Gordon Sumner.
• I don't post enough Bjork here. And HAPPIES! to whomever!
• UPDATE! Not only another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever, this matches my mood.
• UPDATE! Though this matches my mood too.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Neil Young was 64 yesterday.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• We float.
• UPDATE! Stuart Staples, which reminds me it's been a few months since I posted any Tindersticks.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Don't go on the patio.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Is there a heaven? I'd like to think so.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• You want my reply? What was the question?
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• It's running down, there's much you missed, working on that graveyard shift.

*

ON THE SKELETON OF A HOUND

James Wright

Nightfall, that saw the morning-glories float
Tendril and string against the crumbling wall,
Nurses him now, his skeleton for grief,
His locks for comfort curled among the leaf.
Shuttles of moonlight weave his shadow tall,
Milkweed and dew flow upward to his throat.
Now catbird feathers plume the apple mound,
And starlings drowse to winter up the ground.
Thickened away from speech by fear, I move
Around the body.  Over his forepaws, steep
Declivities darken down the moonlight now,
And the long throat that bayed a year ago
Declines from summer.  Flies would love to leap
Between his eyes and hum away the space
Between the ears, the hollow where a hare
Could hide; another jealous dog would tumble
The bones apart, angry, the shining crumble
Of a great body gleaming in the air;
Quivering pigeons foul his broken face.
I can imagine men who search the earth
For handy resurrections, overturn
The body of a beetle in its grave;
Whispering men digging for gods might delve
A pocket for these bones, then slowly burn
Twigs in the leaves, pray for another birth.
But I will turn my face away from this
Ruin of summer, collapse of fur and bone.
For once a white hare huddled up the grass,
The sparrows flocked away to see the race.
I stood on darkness, clinging to a stone,
I saw the two leaping alive on ice,
On earth, on leaf, humus and withered vine:
The rabbit splendid in a shroud of shade,
The dog carved on the sunlight, on the air,
Fierce and magnificent his rippled hair,
The cockleburs shaking around his head.
Then, suddenly, the hare leaped beyond pain
Out of the open meadow, and the hound
Followed the voiceless dancer to the moon,
To dark, to death, to other meadows where
Singing young women dance around a fire,
Where love reveres the living.

                              I alone
Scatter this hulk about the dampened ground;
And while the moon rises beyond me, throw
The ribs and spine out of their perfect shape.
For a last charm to the dead, I lift the skull
And toss it over the maples like a ball.
Strewn to the woods, now may that spirit sleep
That flamed over the ground a year ago.
I know the mole will heave a shinbone over,
The earthworm snuggle for a nap on paws,
The honest bees build honey in the head;
The earth knows how to handle the great dead
Who lived the body out, and broke its laws,
Knocked down a fence, tore up a field of clover.

*

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

"Hreapha," Her Dog Will Say

Donald Harington died this past Saturday. Longtimers have heard me yodel about Harington for years (the latest is here - use the lijit search function down on the right to see more).

I had planned, knowing that Harington was dying and that Enduring would be the last Stay More novel, to reread all the novels in Harington's Stay More universe, because all the novels are themselves chapters in a much larger project, and Enduring is the final chapter: when Harington's echo-bombs POP! and the universe expands even further into the Kind because a POP! set six novels ago POPS! in Enduring, I want the full and joyous POP!

Because I'm loud, I always think of the infinite in terms of bigger bigger. Harington is interested in the smaller smaller, an entire system as small as the infinite, transparent not opaque, magical, showing the gears, with a generous and uncanny and FUNNY! disdain for deliberate obscurity for complexity's sake: it's not Pynchon, Barth, or Elkin who finally convinced me I wasn't a novelist. And it was Harington that taught me about faith based on Kind.

There's a scene in With when Robin's animals - led by Hreapha the dog (one of the greatest, truest characters ever) - steal bottles of Jack Daniels to... 

That's the obit. I'm starting Architecture, the central cedar pole of the Stay More universe, as soon as I finish what I'm in, and go. When I finish Enduring, I'll yodel. Or not.

*

 

Well, that was interesting. Thanks for comments and emails.

I can't make any promises about what comes out of my mouth when Cuauhtemoc Blanco dives and rolls around in fake agony right in front of me, and I will never fucking promise to fucking stop cursing, but I understand people I like and respect have suggested and/or asked me to stop using that word, and because I like and respect them I will.

*

• I do solicit a new one-word term for Ramesh Ponnuru.
• Veteran's Day.
• Gitmo gets worse?
• David Brooks, fuckwit.
• David Brooks, fuckwitted plagiarist.
• The symbiosis between fuckwits and fuckwads.
• What Obama won't investigate next.
• Empire fools.
• Graveyard of Empires.
• Shitwit.
• We can agree Dickarmey is a shitpig, but what do we call Democrats who don't call Dickarmey on his shitpiggery?
• UPDATE! Blue Dogs.
• UPDATE! Something for Kucinich admirers to consider.
• Hirsute abyss of God's little oven, or: the difference between a Conservative and a Republican.
• What's the Frequency, Kravchenko?
• Right there, right then.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Your photoshop of the day.
• Can't have lived in MOCO in 2002 and not note this. One of the first shootings was at the Shell in Kensington half-a-mile from my house. We were scared shitless. I remember crouching behind my car during the spree when I absolutely had to put gas in my car. I do not support Muhammad's execution - there's a reason he was sentenced in Virginia.
• Tim Kaine, murderer.
• UPDATE! Potomac River = TOXIC STEW!
• Future MOCO.
• Future MOCO.
• UPDATE! Riggooofdah!
• Carl Ballantine, RIP.

• Bolaño Inc.
• New Millhauser story.
• Two new Lauterbach poems.
• Britain's Borders.
• Who should replace Steven Tyler in Aerosmith?
• Bruce McCulloch!
• Because you can't kill rock and roll.
• KEXP's generous MP3s of this week's releases.
• They're never happy less they got a war.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Please to bend down to the one called the Green Man.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• She's a little lighthouse.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Some star sneezed, now they're paging you in Reception.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• There may be no golden fleece, but human riches I'll release.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• But he made too many enemies of the people who would keep us on our knees.

*

THE SILKEN TENT

Robert Frost

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

*

Fifty-six today: