BLCKDGRD

Soon Your Dear Ones Will Hide in a Closet When They Hear Your Heavy Step on the Porch and Then Your House Will Slide into Disrepair

Dear Cowardly Emailer clever enough to send an email without return address (not that I'd have emailed you; I remark only on your cowardice),

Why yes, this blog does suck, thank you. I've always said so. I don't know what I want this crappy blog to be, funny or serious, happy or angry, light or heavy, conciliatory or accusatory, open-minded or parochial, honest or disingenuous, coherent or incoherent, rude or ruder, loud or louder, self-aggrandizing or self-scourging, informative or white noise, etc.... but I do know that I don't want this blog to be either funny or serious, happy or angry, light or heavy, coherent or incoherent, conciliatory or accusatory, open-minded or parochial, honest or disingenuous, rude or ruder, loud or louder, self-aggrandizing or self-scourging, informative or white noise, etc... 

These are the funniest, most serious, happiest, angriest, lightest, heaviest, most in need of conciliation, most necessarily accusatory, most open-minded, most parochial, most honest, most disingenuous, most coherent, most incoherent, the rudest, loudest, most self-aggrandizing, most self-scourging, most informative, the most static-filled white-noised days of my life. I'm canary, I'm weathervane, I'm Cassandra, I'm Fool. That you took the trouble to tell me this crappy blog sucks is a sign this crappy blog is suc(K)ceeding at some level. My thanks are not either/or either.

• Mehgahfeh. That felt good. That felt shitty.
• UPDATE! Fuck, I'm bypassed again.
• Poll!
• Hated.
• Liars, every one of them.
• It's not Left v Right, it's You v Corporations.
• Welfare.
• More thoughts on the thought police.
• Education as indoctrination.
• Obama's hit squad.
• God's left hand.
• It's official!
• UPDATE! Bye, Rahm, and fuck you too.
• Stone walls and steel bars.
• Holyfuck.
• UPDATE! Holyfuck, part two.
• See you in hell.
• UPDATE! Marketing and capitalism. 
• White America has lost its mind?
• Company men.
• It's this simple.
• My job's best perk:

• What do we tip waiters for?
• Ambulance-fee back on ballot. If anyone blegs a passionate post detailing the reasons to vote against the fee, I'll link. Alternatively, if that person wants to find his passionate comment detailing the reasons to vote against the fee downblog, I'll link to that.
• Good luck w/that, Gaithersburg.
• Marylanders want gambling.
• Weirdest weather year of my life.
• Asshole endorses asshole.
• Size-driven rivalry.
• Allsopp 2011?

• Gahfehmeh.
• What are books good for? "My best answer is that books produce knowledge by encasing it. Books take ideas and set them down, transforming them through the limitations of space into thinking usable by others. In 1959, C.P. Snow threw down the challenge of "two cultures," the scientific and the humanistic, pursuing their separate, unconnected lives within developed societies. In the new-media ecology of the 21st century, we may not have closed that gap, but the two cultures of the contemporary world are the culture of data and the culture of narrative. Narrative is rarely collective. It isn't infinitely expandable. Narrative has a shape and a temporality, and it ends, just as our lives do. Books tell stories. Scholarly books tell scholarly stories."
• Against the Day. I've found myself thinking about it more than I thought I would when I finished my second read a couple of months ago, mostly about Cyprian Latewood, his entire story but especially his epiphany in Bulgaria. The more I think about it, for all the Vibes, Traverses, Rideouts, Chums, and Highcourts, Cyprian may be the key character.
• UPDATE! Heh! Damn, now Jim's pissed at the realities of the world. Those of you guitar players who read this shitty blog, can The Situation's CD release be far away?
• Lit links.
• New Carl Dennis!
• Buggles.
  
• That'll do for lunch.
• Beyond Fitz and the Tantrums, the youngsters are listening to Frankie Rose and the Outs. Again, it's perfectly fine listening, but new rock going retro, not forward.
• Guilty pleasure.
• I would have bet Feist would be famous by now.
• UPDATE! Ear-candy!
• Guilty pleasure.
• Woke up with this in my head, my favorite REM song.
• Which has since been replaced by this guilty pleasure.
• UPDATE! Yay! Now this is in my head.

A MAXIM

Carl Dennis

To live each day as if it might be the last
Is an injunction that Marcus Aurelius
Inscribes in his journal to remind himself
That he, too, however privileged, is mortal,
That whatever bounty is destined to reach him
Has reached him already, many times.
But if you take his maxim too literally
And devote your mornings to tinkering with your will,
Your afternoons and evenings to saying farewell
To friends and family, you’ll come to regret it.
Soon your lawyer won’t fit you into his schedule.
Soon your dear ones will hide in a closet
When they hear your heavy step on the porch.
And then your house will slide into disrepair.
If this is my last day, you’ll say to yourself,
Why waste time sealing drafts in the window frames
Or cleaning gutters or patching the driveway?
If you don’t want your heirs to curse the day
You first opened Marcus’s journals,
Take him simply to mean you should find an hour
Each day to pay a debt or forgive one,
Or write a letter of thanks or apology.
No shame in leaving behind some evidence
You were hoping to live beyond the moment.
No shame in a ticket to a concert seven months off,
Or, better yet, two tickets, as if you were hoping
To meet by then someone who’d love to join you,
Two seats near the front so you catch each note.
 

That the Nights Will Be Full Enough and My Heart Feral

Well then, this will be the next few days' bleg-chum:

One closing remark that I want to make: It is inexcusable for any Democrat or progressive right now to stand on the sidelines in this midterm election. There may be complaints about us not having gotten certain things done, not fast enough, making certain legislative compromises. But right now, we've got a choice between a Republican Party that has moved to the right of George Bush and is looking to lock in the same policies that got us into these disasters in the first place, versus an administration that, with some admitted warts, has been the most successful administration in a generation in moving progressive agendas forward.

Yesterday I got cornered and hectored separately by K and W and S and D who each asked first if I'd read the interview and second if I'm going to shut up and wise up and vote.

Greg Sargent categorized the three "strains" of Democratic/Progressive displeasure with Obama:

The first is the Dem base's lack of enthusiasm. This, obviously, concerns rank and file voters who, from the point of view of the White House, are not sufficiently happy with Obama's performance. This is what Biden was referring to when he urged Dems to "remind our base constituency to stop whining and get out there and look at the alternatives."

The second group on the left constitutes high-profile commentators, such as Rachel Maddow and Glenn Greenwald, who are mounting a detailed, substantive policy critique of the Obama administration on issues that are important to them. These folks see their role as advocates for a particular policy agenda, and they don't hesitate to whack the White House when it commits what they see as grave policy missteps. For them to hold their fire because the White House wants them to would be an unthinkable betrayal of the role they've carved out for themselves. This is the "professional left" Robert Gibbs sneeringly alluded to -- even though Obama himself has said he craves such criticism.

The third group constitutes operatives like Adam Green of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake, some labor operatives, and groups like MoveOn. These folks are making a largely political argument. They are not merely griping because the White House failed to be as left wing as they would have liked on the public option or the big banks. They are making the case that fighting harder for liberal priorities -- even if that battle is hopeless in some cases -- is better politics for Democrats overall, because it might leave Dems with an energized base heading into the midterms.

I'm two and three! Yay me!

"People need to shake off this lethargy. People need to buck up," Obama told Rolling Stone in an interview to be published Friday. The president told Democrats that making change happen is hard and "if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place." Change is hard? Obama seems to be having an easy time expanding and extending the scope of the state panopticon, his power to kill Americans whenever and wherever and for whatever reason he wants, to escalate robot-war. Obama had wrapped the lengthy Q-and-A session, according to the magazine, but then returned unprompted to make one more impassioned point and unleash on the enthusiasm gap. He portrayed a clear choice between an administration that despite some warts has helped advance its agenda, and a Republican Party that would offer disastrous policies for the economy and civil liberties. *!hEh!* He said "civil liberties."

(I'd also point out there's a fourth group, those of us who want nothing more than rightwing American heads to explode in impotent fury

and Obama's only delivered on the fury.)

K and W and S and D are snapping like schnauzers at bacon I still compulsively snap at when bacon is waved. -.06% less-shitty is a mighty powerful stimulant when the .06% more is Newt Gingrich. If Bob Ehrlich is elected governor of Maryland I think one of my loved ones has enough seniority to survive but another of my loved ones might be pig-budgeted out of a job. I've still never not voted when eligible, every even-number year since 1978, primary and general election. I will vote this November for the BoE apple ticket because loved ones say please. I'm curious to see if it's close enough in last day polls I'll vote against Ehrlich....but....

But is this true? Are K and W and S and D snapping that that could be worse, that that starvation level is the best that's achievable when their team is in power?

With Matt Lauer yesterday, Obama was asked about poverty, and he basically gave an answer that George W. Bush would have given. He said that increasing economic growth will help poverty. It will. I agree that job creation is the most important thing. But when the unemployment rate was a lot lower, there were still millions of Americans who needed these benefits.

I’ve been pulling my punches, and my progressive colleagues have been pulling their punches, because we’re rooting for this administration to succeed. But honestly, if George W. Bush did what they’re trying to do, we’d be camping out in front of the White House. Goodwill only goes so far when tens of thousands of children need food.

Either Obama can't or Obama can and won't, yes? Either Democrats can't or Democrats can and won't. I think it's can and won't, but why should I allow myself to be blackmailed into voting for either?

• More on the above.
• More on the above.
• More on the above.
• UPDATE! He's a negative Progressive, and he's stoned.
• False moderation.
• With Democrats like these....
• Get back in line.
• Liberal authoritarianism.
• Does the document contain the word "Palestine?"
• Cheating on the test of your rights.
• I know shit about Christianity, though I know more than most christers. The piece asks, straight-faced, "So why would an atheist know more about religion than a Christian?"
• Jeebus, yes, yes it is cannibalism.
• Being Glenn Beck.
• Acknowledging that Democrats are complicit shits doesn't mitigate the shittiness of neo-con assholes and the crackers they manipulate: Gaffney argued that Sharia -- that is, a system of laws defined by the Koran -- is a threat to the Constitution, and most mosque leaders preach Sharia. It's a common argument among necons and mosque opponents... Gaffney admitted, however, that he is no expert."I don't hold myself out as an expert on Sharia Law," he said. "But I have talked a lot about that as a threat."
• Conservative Jones' latest case!
• UPDATE! Tea and crackers.
• UPDATE! On the above.
• Mary Cheney can suck my dick? A debate.
• Ruth Marcus can write, without a scintilla of self-aware irony, "to be Stephen Colbert is to be immune from embarrassment."
• Techno-Darwinism.
• Coincidence!
• Bleggalgaze!
• O'Bama shills for O'Malley.
• It doesn't look like O'Malley will need my vote anyway.
• MOCO in hole.
• Since Obama's been in office.
• Credit (and blame) where due.
• Good news.
• DC's food-truck wars.
• Our ferals? Napoleon is a wonder cat.

• Blood Meridian once, twice (with delicious evisceration of James Wood).
• Blood Meridian illustrated (h/t the guy above). Planet has been assigned All My Pretty Ones, the first novel McCarthy wrote after Blood Meridian, and Yay! I suppose (as opposed to other options), but (I said this here before), Blood Meridian hit me like a hammer, and nothing McCarthy has written since that I've read (and I stopped reading after the Border Trilogy) can compare.
• Franzen and unfinished realism.
• Jack Gilbert interview (h/t Silliman's always generous Tuesday links):

INTERVIEWER

Which is most important to writing poetry, description or compression?

GILBERT

Neither. I would say presence, feeling, passion—not passion, but love. I usually say romantic love, but here I don’t mean being thrilled. I mean the huge experience of loving another person and being loved by another person. But it’s more than just liking someone or thinking they make you happy.

INTERVIEWER

In your poems, how important is the interplay between syntax and line breaks?

GILBERT

I don’t think that way. I work by instinct and intelligence. By being smart, emotional, probing. By being sly, stubborn. By being lucky. Being serious. By being quietly passionate. By something almost like magic.

• The band all the college kids at Hilltop are talking about stole their entire sound from Hall and Oates. I'm not saying it sucks - it doesn't - it's just fucking weird.
• Jon Langford.
• Play LOUD!
• Guilty pleasure.
• Austere.
• This week's new releases w/MP3 includes new Lloyd Cole, Neil Young, and The Posies.
• Everything is free.
• Shatner.

I IMAGINE THE GODS

Jack Gilbert

I imagine the gods saying, We will   
make it up to you. We will give you   

three wishes, they say. Let me see   

the squirrels again, I tell them. Let me eat some of the great hog
stuffed and roasted on its giant spit   

and put out, steaming, into the winter   

of my neighborhood when I was usually   
too broke to afford even the hundred grams   
I ate so happily walking up the cobbles,   
past the Street of the Moon

and the Street of the Birdcage-Makers,   

the Street of Silence and the Street   

of the Little Pissing. We can give you   

wisdom, they say in their rich voices.   

Let me go at last to Hugette, I say,

the Algerian student with her huge eyes   

who timidly invited me to her room   

when I was too young and bewildered   

that first year in Paris.

Let me at least fail at my life.

Think, they say patiently, we could   

make you famous again. Let me fall   

in love one last time, I beg them.   

Teach me mortality, frighten me   

into the present. Help me to find

the heft of these days. That the nights   

will be full enough and my heart feral.

*

Hear Old Triton Blow His Wreathèd Horn

Rahm Emanuel's competence test:

This performance is inexplicable in light of the enormous Democratic majority in the Senate, which at times has hit the 60 votes needed to preclude procedural measures against nominees. It reflects a dramatic failure of management by senate Democratic leaders like Patrick Leahy and Harry Reid, but it also points to a White House that is simply oblivious to the nominations process. On this measure, Rahm Emanuel is the worst performing White House chief of staff in recent memory.

Obamoron and Rahmoron, here is where I'm unable to molt a layer of roobity: if Obamoron and Rahmoron received their orders from Triskellion Castle to further wreck the economy, expand the scope of American military operations, to further erode civil liberties, Obamoron and Rahmoron would bumble to 4% unemployment, we'd be out of Afghanistan, and habeus would be restored to pre-911 assumptions.

If Democrats and Republicans are the Red Sox and Yankees; if the difference is solely a matter of which team gets the loudest booyehs in tribal contests of brand loyalty motherfuckered for maximum ugliness to distract the fucking roobs and keep them docile; and if the reward for the winning team is getting to feed first and whenever at the elite's (once thought) endless spigot; if there is no moral difference between Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich since both will enact whatever policies their puppeteers tell them to enact; this is the root of my roobity: I bet pints on Obama the gamester, not Obama the Black FDR, and sheeyit, do I look stoopid.

• Campaign season: Some powerful interests who had been dominating the agenda in Washington for a very long time, and they're not always happy with me," the president said. "They talk about me like a dog. That's not in my prepared remarks, but it's true. And it is true. And Obama barks when they say bark.
• Knee-slapper.
• UPDATE! Rumors swirling that Rahmoron is going to resign Chief of Staff to run for mayor of Chicago. Politico runs the possible replacements and defines an "outsider": If Obama wants an outsider who is well known to official Washington, he could look at someone like Tom Nides, chief operating office of Morgan Stanley and chairman of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, who is an eight-year veteran of Capitol Hill.
  
• The ultra-rich are assholes says ultra-rich asshole.
• Key vindicators.
• UPDATE! How not to criticize the two-party straitjacket.
• Pernicious myth of the free market.
• A Labor Day message.
• Latest Mr Fish is snort.
• BYOQ BBQQ.
• Periscope depths.
• Still awesome.
• Today in crackerosity. And for the record, book-burning is free speech.
• UPDATE! Breakfast Club, part three.
• Yup.
• Tomorrow.
• Tenure and teaching. There is a wave building against tenure for reasons good and bad.
• Good news about the Potomac. As well as I know the river upstream from DC, I don't know it at all downstream from DC, but I remember camping on the C&O canal around Paw Paw and the river was turquoise from the crap papermills in Luke and Westernport dumped into the water.
• Which soccer stadiums are closest to major roads?
• New album! (h/t)

• My KEXP t-shirt designed by Langford which serendipitously I was wearing when I discovered the above!

• Obscure Sound's August MP3s has Arcade Fire, but, fine.
• UPDATE! Though holyfuck unto holyfuck, Arcade Fire sucks.
• This week's new releases w/MP3 includes an excellent new Sam Prekop song. Bought! Listening as I type this sentence.
• Stream the new Superchunk for free? Yes, thank you.
• xx wins Mercury. Seb destroyed xx. Send me the link and I'll post it.
• The tribes of contemporary poetry.
• UPDATE! Jameson and Lukacs.
• Booker shortlist.
• UPDATE! Are fat novels back? When did they go away?
• Ten songs.
• UPDATE! Cotton Jones. Hamster, anyone else, Ottobar, October 8?
• Station to Station reissued.
• TVC15.
• Sweetest kill.
• Kimberly.

THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US

William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Vestiges of the Late Sun as it Turns Green and Disappears

I've started listening again to right-wing radio (not Limbaugh/Beck bullshit, real right-wing radio - and you need to listen to Savage. Seriously.). I used to all the time but stopped, but I've been prompted these last couple of months by friends and smarter people, and yes: every once, twice an hour, the host says something anti-globalism, anti-bankster, anti-corporation, that sounds like what a populist progressive might say. I never said there wasn't common ground regarding a economic populist push-back against the financial elite.

Yesterday I learned from this local DC asshole that patriotic Americans are sick of a corporate culture that destroys whole communities if there's profit in moving labor off-shore, that the terrorist at the Discovery Building is the logical end result of Al Gore, that Mexican immigrants are being directed by La Raza to behead as many Americans with machetes as possible, and that gays want to fuck your toddlers in the ass and give them AIDS and watch them die. How this jibes with motherfucking hippies' motherfucking call for motherfucking communist universal health care he didn't explain.

• True this: There’s nothing in the world more tired than a progressive blogger like me flipping out over the latest idiocies emanating from the Fox News crowd. But this summer’s media hate-fest is different than anything we’ve seen before. What we’re watching is a calculated campaign to demonize blacks, Mexicans, and gays and convince a plurality of economically-depressed white voters that they are under imminent legal and perhaps even physical attack by a conspiracy of leftist nonwhites. They’re telling these people that their government is illegitimate and criminal and unironically urging secession and revolution.
• O! One other thing I learned listening to that DC cracker radio host: by 2020 there will be no Republican party; it will be replaced by a true conservative party that will be willing to deal with the liberal scum ruining this country, deal with them by any an all means necessary to restore America to the greatest republic the world has ever seen.
• Uh-oh, Pastor Sanctimonious talks about tribalism.
• Clearly I am not the mediator for the job of uniting crackers and hippies against the financial elite, but say someone emerged, charismatic, eloquent, brilliant, passionate: neither party would endorse him (or her), the media would deride him as a lunatic, tribal dog-whistlers would have both crackers and hippies condemning him as a traitorous motherfucking CINO or HINO respectively, and if he still was succeeding, the elite would have him killed.
• Things which don't go away.
• Fucking Democrats.
• Pre-blaming progressives.
• Greenwald versus Goldberg.
• RX for straight white dudes.
• New myths again.
• Anarchist flowchart.
• One more Judt tribute.
• What ideas will drive the next decade? While it's a nice gimmick, asking Camille Paglia to contribute undermines the oomph of everyone else involved.
• Anti-Babs ad!

 

• What the fuck is a Wargotz? Oh, an Eastern Shore cracker.
• Leggett unchallenged.
• Sharks of the Potomac.
• It's been at least ten years since I visited the Phillips.
• More on Metro and teenagers as mosquitoes.
• Did you know Washington DC has a professional baseball team?
• Someone at Picador emailed me and offered me a free PB copy of this, which, funny, I'd just started re-reading:

• I'll mail it as soon as I get it to the first of you who email me your address.
• (Speaking of mailing, I couldn't get past page 50 of McCarthy's C - I'm sure it's my fault; wrong time/wrong book - so it's already on the way to Charm City - hope it works better for you.)
• Workshops! What are they good for?
• Mao, King Kong, and the Future of the Book.
• Stereogum's 40 Best New Bands of 2010 (with downloads).
• You couldn't pay me to stream the new Walkmans' for free, but I'll gladly stream the new Thermals and Film School for free.
• New Film School!
• Billy Two.
• Stay alive.
• True faith.
• He's my star.
• Regret.
• UPDATE! She weaves a tender trap.
• Moon rocks.
• Tally-ho.
• End.

MARS BEING RED

Marvin Bell

Being red is the color of a white sun where it lingers
on an arm. Color of time lost in sparks, of space lost
inside dance. Red of walks by the railroad in the flush
of youth, while our steps released the squeaks
of shoots reaching for the light. Scarlet of sin, crimson
of fresh blood, ruby and garnet of the jewel bed,
early sunshine, vestiges of the late sun as it turns
green and disappears. Be calm. Do not give in
to the rabid red throat of age. In a red world, imprint
the valentine and blush of romance for the dark.
It has come. You will not be this quick-to-redden
forever. You will be green again, again and again.

(h/t) I bought myself Hough's Chopin for my birthday. I am an excellent gift-giver.

Did You Know Washington DC Has a Professional Soccer Team?

And tonight is the migestlmigeutnmige.

I need three, wait.... four primal screams of joy, dammit.

(Becks/Bass beer vendor, 300 level directly behind north goal, halftime, come say hi. I'll be the guy in the black United t-shirt.

Hell, come find us in 232:

Look for the top of Landru's head.)

• A bit of clarification: I don't think our overlords have any intention (yet) of letting a tea-partier (Sarah Palin, e.g.) anywhere near the steering wheel.
• And while I would never discount the effect of the economy, many tea-partiers would still dress up like Williamsburg re-enactors and call Obama a Muslim even if Obama personally handed them each a $100 bill every day.
• UPDATE! Towards a populism of the working class.
• Glenn Beck is not the white Malcolm X.
• UPDATE! Siren call.
• A different perspective on the occupation.
• Weak speech, weak president. (I didn't watch it, btw.)
• Speech defect.
• Dipshit.
• Pastor Sanctimonious calls Obama a pussy.
• Is Obama a pussy if he was just following orders? (Krugman's obamapostasy is going to be awesome.)
• No one could have predicted.
• Coming soon to a civil disobedience near you.
• Asshole's priorities: "The irony (is) that the veterans who saved this country are now, in a way, not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess," said Simpson, an Army veteran who was once chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee.
• The blogosphere during the Middle Ages.
• Your MOCO voters guide. I'll vote for whomever two MCPS teachers who are special to me tell me how to vote, but other than that, thwrppppp.
• Metro!
• Execute this motherfucker.
• UPDATE! CONCACAF changing WC qualifying.
• Ugliest uniforms ever (stluueutnuue):

• Wear black at home all the time or never at all.
• Nominate a Not the Booker!
• How to stop worrying and love Frank O'Hara.
• How not to write a poem.
• An obligatory Franzen post.
• Another review of new Richard Thompson.
• Dog Day Listenings.
• To bring you my love.
• UPDATE! Summer babe.
• Goodbye.
• UPDATE! Blind my mind. Found Flunk CDs looking for something else last night. It's love again.

(ETYMOLOGICALLY) "WORK WORK"

Albert Goldbarth

        5. Fred: One

That summer (I was seventeen), the powers of Midwest
    Mercantile
(Roosevelt Road at Jefferson), seeing my reedy body was
    no use
shlepping delivery crates, assigned me to Accounting, where
my reedy mind was more disastrous yet: I doubt if
four consecutive numbers fit true. One day in the wake
of a contretemps (with tire jacks and a boot-knife)
at the loading dock, Koenig was canned. Would I
pitch in? - meant tussling one unbudgeable sumo
of a crate in the unbearable sun and stares out there,
and just as I was believing that death was preferable,
Fred Nelson (The Black Bull everyone called him) moped
on by, in one hand lifted my butt by my belt and
in the other the crate, then carried us both the length
    of the store
and set us like eggs on the top shelf in Wholesale Drapes.

Nick Drake was great for crashing too (and fuck ATT):

Hummed Itself Inside My Head Like an Abracadabra

Uh-oh, I'm accused of hosting a bleg with "legit comment box discourse." Time to lower the discourse (and publish this to get it out of my feedback loops):

I've admitted I'm a bigot. I wish I could dispassionately observe as a historical phenomenon the embittered and angry crackers pledging allegiance to an America circa Father Knows Best* that never was - that's the honor they want to restore, yo - but I can't. I'm intolerant, etc and yadda, and by the way, here's their imaginary friend, White Jesus, who tells them they're acting in his name. I'm small this way, etc and yadda.

I'm a tool, I'm a fool, etc and yadda, but please do not tell me these motherfucking crackers are honorable libertarians when they daydream of using the full weight of federal and state governments to roll back civil liberties and minority rights and women's rights and immigrants' rights and workers' rights and consumer rights, who cheer the expansion of all wars against brown and (coming soon!) yellow people, and who pray for Sharia law as long as it's White Jesus' instead of Mohammed's.

Just because they are tools and fools etc and yadda too doesn't mean I should dismiss as irrelevant how they would rule if our overlords decide Crackers will lead the puppet government.

• Cartoon by Mr Fish.
• *There's a reason that's been a BDR avatar for years.
• Ryan is a nicer guy than me, though I respectfully think the ratio of tribalism: economics is higher than he does.
• Glenn Beck is a... liar?
• Hankering for a daddy.
• Missing the dead bodies.
• What does Obama want?
• Made for Obama.
• They do hate Obama.
• Democrats are fucking lame.
• Paypal is the worst company in the world.
• Turning Trinidad around. I've a friend who lives near Gallaudet, says things are getting better.
• Flying into National? The name of the airport is "National."
• The neighborhood I grew up in.
• Fuck Fobin Ricker.
• Ehrlich in MOCO.
• Don't buy me dinner in Redland:

• Behold the man.
• Arguing for poetry during a recession.
• New Richard Thompson!

 

• Reviewed here: This is gloriously vicious, bitter, sad and bleak, even by Richard Thompson's standards. 
• Hear a new song here. I've eased off seeing him solo, but he's going on tour with the band. Tuesday 10/19 @ 930. I'm buying tickets Friday. Who's in?
• Chuck Prophet and Alejandro Escovedo!
• Want to download the new Sufjan Stevens for $5?

(ETYMOLOGICALLY) "WORK WORK"

Albert Goldbarth

        4 Easy Enough

In his book explaining quantum physics John Gribbin
writes, "It is easy enough for me to say 'Anderson measured
the curvature of the particle trails and found positrons':
it was much harder for him to do the work." All week
that mundane phrase has hummed itself inside my head
like an abracadabra, conjuring up my father, alive
again, and in the makeshift basement workroom
each night totaling those colossal rows of figures in his war
against an enemy alliance: Rent and Food and Clothes.
It's easy enough for me to wring the sweet rag of nostalgia,
now that he's cold dark particle trails himself.
It's easy enough to ennoble him down there: adding,
juggling, adding, with the same bit lip
his granddaughter later inherited. To do the work.

Sixty-five today:

There was a time in my life, twenty-five, thirty years ago, when, after the windowpane lifted-off, after the blurs and pops and peaks at parties, I was finally by myself for my favorite gliding home of the trip, I'd sit in my room and read poetry and listen to Van Morrison.

Caked into the Fester by Noon

Two takes on yesterday's Frank Rich column on the crackers and their billionaire puppeteers by people I read regularly: Cole says YAY!, IOZ says BOO!

Lookit, fuck the either/or. Just because I'm no longer a fool for Democrats doesn't mean I'm not still a fool for the bullshit Democrats fed me for breakfast. The crackers are angry they were fools for Republicans. Both are demands for better propaganda and more wins from their coaches. There's a reason the SEC is the preeminent conference in all of professional football.

Of course this is tribal (I think calling any committee that studies any possible change to Social Security a "Catfood Commission" is not nearly as hyperbolic as calling all inheritance taxes "Death Taxes", but...), and since no one - not pissed-off ex-Democrats, not pissed-off ex-Republicans, especially not happy as piss Tribes of Arch (the club I keep applying to) who mock the tribalism that gives them their identity - has any interest (we make it easy on our overlords) in stopping mocking the other tribes.

• Here is my disconnect: yes, Obama is serving his overlords, but he's not serving them fast enough. Obama doesn't see immediately dismantling the past 80 years of liberal gains as in the overlords' long-term interest. He is an incrementalist; he doesn't understand that his overlords want him to fuck the littles hard and fast and, most importantly, NOW!
• Status intoxication.
• The non-crazy Left.
• Science versus Religion.
• Beck is a mor(m)on.
• Money.
• Dionne offers me bullshit for breakfast: (Obama) and his party are often defensive when it comes to saying what they really believe: that government, well-executed, is a positive good; that too much economic inequality is both dysfunctional and unjust; that capitalism has never worked without regulation and a strong dose of social insurance. They no longer dare talk about public enterprise, a phrase my friend Chris Matthews reminded me of recently, visible in our great state universities, our best public schools, our road and transit systems, and in the research and development that government finances in areas where there is no immediate profit to be made.
• UPDATE! Please please please.
• Tipping point.
• Gentrification and the DC mayoral race. It'd be in DC United's interest for Fenty to lose, not because they'd necessarily be able to work with Gray but because they know they can't work with Fenty. Go Gray!
• Why Fenty is losing.
• Where I went for first grade (before lines were redrawn and I went to Washington Grove).
• Crisis in Burtonsville!
• Freedom, Art, and the Infernal Machine.
• Piri' Miri Muli'
• I gotta tell you, I'm struggling to get to page 20 in C. I'm assuming it's me.
• McCarthy interview.
• UPDATE! Why the fuck is Jack White on my radio?
• We do what we want to.
• UPDATE! OK, if this is going to be in my head it's going to be in yours.

(ETYMOLOGICALLY) "WORK WORK"

Albert Goldbarth

        3. Elementary

They weren't handed masks, no one knows why.
We're a pile of elements. No one knows why
they weren't handed masks: they were handed
their slop-poles, though. They were handed the poles
and ordered up the inside catwalk, three stories high.
We're a pile of dirt-cheap elements. They
we're ordered up the catwalk, they were told to skim
the floating layer of fester off the top of this
three-story drum of byproducts animal blood.
They weren't handed masks. The drum was 103 degrees.
And one was found face-up and one face-down,
caked into the fester by noon.
We're a pile of dirt-cheap elements, bought,
and toyed with, then tossed with the rest of the shit.

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

He's Polishing My Shahzutt as if It's the Milktooth of a Saint

When marveling at how political realities have so changed that Democrats no longer bother to pretend to represent their supposed constituencies, my current nostalgic kick be damned, I'm finding it harder and harder to remember when I did believe Democrats bothered to pretend to represent their supposed constituencies, or rather, I'm finding it harder and harder to remember when their supposed constituencies needed to be pretended to.

It's not that Democrats suck more than they used to - the capability was always there - it just wasn't in the elites' interest that Democrats suck this much in the past.

• UPDATE! Questions. Here's one: does perfection require authoritarianism?
• Barack Obama versus The World.
• Billionaires versus Obama.
• The World's Shittiest Human gloats.
• Repercussions.
• Repercussions.
• Repercussions.
• Repercussions.
• Repercussions.
• Crackerstan.
• UPDATE! Vote for the scariest candidate.
• For goodness' sake.
• Christian? Muslim? Whatever.
• Democrats will never get another dime, another vote.
• Ken Mehlman totally nude....
• Double-whammy.
• Excellent linkages.
• What Your Fucking Washington Post calls an act of defiance.
• America's 50 worse colleges?
• America's Top 50 MFA programs? Suckers.
• Some New New Toys over at the left. As always, if you've bluug-rulled me and me not you, send me an email.
• New MOCO speed camera sites.
• The local helmetball team will be wearing burgundy at home all season, might bring back the gold pants?
• ReadysetDC.
• Paul Weller.
• Read Seb on 90s music, making sure to click all the links.
• Including Top 50 Videos of 90s (number one is below).
• Vapour Trail.
• Feel it.
• We float.
• Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus.

(ETYMOLOGICALLY) "WORK WORK"

Albert Goldbarth

        2. SHAHZZUT & TYUPAT

Eno's fingers seem as fat as those Red Hot Mama sausages
suspended in brine in a gallon jar, but under my hood
they tweeze out various ailing gobs with the finicky quickness
of surgical pincers. He lifts some oily puzzle-piece into
    the equally
oily light of the shop, as if it might explain
gravity or antimatter. "Shahzzut," he explains to me, "tyupat,"
in the secret fraternal language of auto mechanics. He
sings to himself; no one has ever been so happy. He's
fixing my engine, he sings, he's polishing my shahzutt
as if it's the milktooth of a saint. "Man's work,
whatever its ostensible purpose, is, at any given time,
to sustain the universe." Tribals, "asked the reason
for ceremony X, say that if they missed one year,
cosmos, the world, would collapse." (Richard Grossinger)

The Trojan War Is Over Now; I Don't Recall Who Won It. The Greeks, No Doubt, for Only They Would Leave So Many Dead So Far from Their Own Homeland

Have contributions begun flowing again into DNC bank accounts in the two weeks orgy of islamobashing? What if this was Obama's strategy all along (before you laugh, I used to eat this theory) to provoke the motherfucking crackers, christers, grifters, and assholes into such a convulsion of crackerchristergrifterassholosity the motherfucking crackers, christers, grifters, and assholes will be rendered unto electoral insignificance forever and a day, amen? Laugh now.

Yes they are bigots (but so am I), and this mosque bullshit is both a reinforcement of the Red Ant v Black Ant family feud both ant sides love and a training and indoctrination session for the new paradigms of behavior our overlords are installing for the coming oil wars (China ain't getting that Mideast oil) and horrific economic cataclysms our overlords will impose on us so they survive ensconced and fatter.

I serve our overlords when hating the motherfucking crackers, christers, grifters, and assholes with all consuming passion. I'm playing motherfucking George C Scott playing George S Patton observing the dead on a battlefield and wistfully whispering, God, I love it so. Just as I'm supposed to.

• Shitting on political romanticism is fun!
• UPDATE! Too much is real.
• The conservative counter-revolution.
• Five reasons Obama is not like Reagan.
• UPDATE! Boom! I have never been happier to only have four years left on my mortgage, happier to know this is the house I'm going to die in.
• The argument against intellectual property.
• Winning hearts and minds.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• UPDATE! Heh! Atrios and Boehner agree!
• On Dr Laura or, Wallace Stevens allusion!
• 53 things to know, do or not do at a small Liberal Arts college.
• UPDATE! On housing and education.
• One dangerous and ambitious motherfucking pig.
• UPDATE! Hey, anyone interested to hear Jerry Weast is retiring?
• Ambulance-fee FAIL!
• UPDATE! Cracker tourist guide to DC!
  
• Circles and non-circles.
• UPDATE! What I've been saying.
• Horizon of the sentence.
• I hadn't thought about Jerzy Kosinski in fifteen years.
• Franzen review. I'm not planning on reading it, I'm not planning on not reading it.
• Picoult versus the patriarchy.
• Silliman's always generous weekly linkages post.
• Fillmore Silver Spring souring.
• UPDATE! Silver Rocket in my head, be in yours.
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• New Eno in October!

ODYSSEUS TO TELEMACHUS

Joseph Brodsky

My dear Telemachus,
 The Trojan War 
is over now; I don't recall who won it. 
The Greeks, no doubt, for only they would leave
so many dead so far from their own homeland. 
But still, my homeward way has proved too long. 
While we were wasting time there, old Poseidon, 
it almost seems, stretched and extended space.

I don't know where I am or what this place 
can be. It would appear some filthy island, 
with bushes, buildings, and great grunting pigs. 
A garden choked with weeds; some queen or other. 
Grass and huge stones . . . Telemachus, my son! 
To a wanderer the faces of all islands 
resemble one another. And the mind 
trips, numbering waves; eyes, sore from sea horizons, 
run; and the flesh of water stuffs the ears. 
I can't remember how the war came out; 
even how old you are--I can't remember.

Grow up, then, my Telemachus, grow strong. 
Only the gods know if we'll see each other 
again. You've long since ceased to be that babe 
before whom I reined in the plowing bullocks. 
Had it not been for Palamedes' trick 
we two would still be living in one household. 
But maybe he was right; away from me 
you are quite safe from all Oedipal passions, 
and your dreams, my Telemachus, are blameless.

Eno?

Take More from the Top as More Settles to the Bottom

Yesterday I wrote:

Of course Glenn Beck is an asshole - it's just as "inappropriate" for him to hold Cracker March on August 28 at the Lincoln Memorial as it is for a Muslim community center to be built two blocks from Ground Zero - but he's well within his "rights..."

I clanged this duh a second time because I can't stop thinking about the width and depth of duh I clanged the first time.

• What Fox News will be screaming about this weekend. Assuming the allegations are false (or even if they're true), fuck Obama.
• UPDATE! Of course they're not true. Fuckers. Speculate amongst yourselves.
• The Old Tool defends Robert Gibbs, but what's interesting is the bottom RIPs for two lying crooks and a sack of shit.
• UPDATE! Colossal Asshole.
• The sell is the tell.
• UPDATE! Long month.
• How things work.
• An anarchist's guide to relationships.
• Notes on a scandal.
• The Bible keeps you stupid.
• I confess I've never heard of Coleman Dowell. Good thing I have access to a university library's stacks. (Too bad I don't have more minutes in a day.)
• I dutifully read the New York Trilogy and every novel through Leviathan because I thought I was supposed to, then decided I really didn't need to read Auster ever again.
• Serendipitously, within a month of mentioning Kundera here, a review of Unbearable Lightness of Being.
• Best books to read in your twenties?
• UPDATE! Have a John Cale song. (h/t)

RENDER, RENDER

Thomas Lux

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