BLCKDGRD

Autoblogography

I am this close to stop pretending I'm gonna quit blegging no matter how dramatically my conviction swells that I lose a piece of my reboot-sole with every keystroke I strike knowing it's struck self-adoringly, which is each and every one. I'm even closer to stop pretending I can stop blegging about blegging.

I quit that place that got me started, I feel ten-fartillion quatloons of fatuity lighter. The details of the (mostly amicable) divorce are immaterial, but not worrying here about cross-posting there is surprisingly meh-less, or rather, pretending to not worry about cross-posting there was more meh-ful than I conceded.

Click on Fleabus, yo, remembering...

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• Republicans are still pigs, or: remember to depend on the .06% more shitty for moral compass when feeling used and ruby.
• Triumph of Derrierism.
• Glass cliff.
• Thoroughly modern McCarthyites.
• Pragmatism is an ideology.
• Solid swipe at Libertarians.
• McLemee on Negri.
• Use the vomit onomatopoeia of your choice.
• Sadly,No! experienced some bug, so a week's worth of funny has just been released. Re: above - thank goodness Sadly, No! saves me countless redundant and less-funny though still self-adoring keystrokes.
• Doesn't the article title define the problem?
• Welsh christers are idiots too.
• Mountains are more spiritual than beaches, I keep telling Earthgirl.
• Today's corpse:

• David Foster Wallace as philosopher.
• Alex Ross' best of the year. Wanna buy me something for Giftmas (in case you didn't get me the New Order and/or Olsen shirt? Get me the Feldman. Or this.
• I cannot emphasize how much I like the incredibly generous and eclectic music blog Motel de Moka.

Updates later. Or not.

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#2 album, #1 song:

The Stink of the Link

NYRB reviews blogs through a review of books about blogs:

Political blogs are among the trickiest to capture in a book because they tend to rely heavily on links and ephemeral information. But even blogs that have few or no links still show the imprint of the Web, its associative ethos, and its obsession with connection—the stink of the link. Blogs are porous to the world of texts and facts and opinions on line. (And this is probably as close as I can come to defining an essence of blog writing.)

Bloggers assume that if you're reading them, you're one of their friends, or at least in on the gossip, the joke, or the names they drop. They often begin their posts mid-thought or mid-rant—in medias craze. They don't care if they leave you in the dust. They're not responsible for your education. Bloggers, as Mark Liberman, one of the founders of the blog called Language Log, once noted, are like Plato. :-) The unspoken message is: Hey, I'm here talking with my buddies....

Buddies?

When the blog boom came, the tone of the blogosphere began to shift. A lot of the new blogs—though certainly not all of them—weren't so much filters for the Web as vents for opinion and self-revelation. Instead of figuring out ways to serve up good fresh finds, many of the new bloggers were fixated on getting found. So the very significance of linking began to change. The links that had once mattered were the ones you offered on your blog, the so-called outbound links pointing to other sites. Now the links that mattered most—and still do—are those on other blogs pointing toward your blog, the so-called inbound links. Those are the ones that blog-trackers like Technorati count. They are the measure of fame....

Finally, I think I get the superhero fixation. It's the flying. It's the suspension of punctuation and good manners and even identity. Bloggers at their computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains, and save the world. Anonymous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives, and it's like, "Dude, the ball."

Superheroes? Not me. I'm Scubadog!

You don't know the temptation this gives me to metablog, and I'm either a lazier fucker than I used to be or angrier than I used to be or.... wait for it.... an angrier lazier fucker than I used to be, but I.... must.... not..... metablog.....

Though this:

• I am here for me and mine (my "buddies") as my constant alienation of everyone interested in one of my obsessions but not the others attests.
• If I've blogrolled you I don't expect a blogroll back. I blogroll for bookmarks. If I had blogrolled you and your link has disappeared, it's not that I no longer like you, it's that I no longer read you.
• PSST! Blogs are dead.

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• Conason finds himself in the same dilemma I do.
• Is Bill to Hillary what Cheney is to Bush?
• End of hegemony?
• Free fall?
• More anti-Billaryland.
• More anti-Billaryland.
• Clinton fatigue.
• Friday Hope Blogging (make this a regular stop)
• Poorman's new book!
• Statistics? Dough!
• Yes, it would take a mighty effort, but it can be done.

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No FMF this week. Apologies, but my heart isn't in it. Have this:

A SIMPLE GIFT

Robin Robertson

She came to me in a dress
of true-love and blue rocket,
with fairy-thimbles of foxglove
at the neck and wrist,
in her hair she wore a garland
of cherry laurel, herb bennet,
dwayberries and yew-berries,
twined with stems of clematis,
and at her throat she'd threaded
twists of bryony stalk, seeds
of meadow saffron and laburnum,
linked simply in a necklace,
and she was holding out
a philtre of water lovage,
red chamomile and ladies' seal
in a cup, for me to drink.

(Would Have Been) Fifty-Nine Today!

A used q-tip? Oh, that is unhappy.

I just remembered why it felt something was missing at Thanksgiving.

What to do with the family?

Pragmatismmisitamgarp

Read this interview by Sean Wilentz on current American politics in general and Hillary Clinton in particular:

So it's a pragmatic argument? That she can get things done politically?
That's true, but it's beyond that. Pragmatism is an approach to power. It's not a philosophy. It's not just going for half a loaf or knowing when to compromise, although all that is important. Rather, it's an understanding of the provisional nature of all of our deeds--an understanding that the politics of hope, taken too far, can turn into the politics of dogma. Just as the politics of memory can turn into the politics of fear. Hillary actually reminds me more of what John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy were up to--more than anybody I've seen since. More than her husband.

My issues with Clinton aren't whether she'd be preferable to whomever the Republicans nominate - of course she'd be, if only to slow the decline of the empire - and if the matter was solely to get back to that mythological better country when Democrats held power I'd have relatively small problem with Clinton whatsoever.

My mother's father was a steelworker in the Mon Valley and my father's father a coal miner in Fayette County, and two generations later I'm a double college graduate who owns a nice house in suburban DC and have a comfortable life beyond what either of my grandfathers could have imagined, and if I hang onto the vestiges of Democratic mythology it's because that trajectory would have been impossible without progressive politics. (And Bromark has continued the progression further, moving into the executive class.)

Whatever else seven years of Bush have done, they've removed whatever deliberate blinders towards American empire and global hegemony many American self-called progressives have worn, and the regard we held this country, cynically naive and idealistic it might have been, will never be recaptured, or pretended to be recaptured again. We are complicit.

Returning America to the illusion that it's a slightly less gleeful torturer is what Hillary is best positioned and most competent to accomplish of the available options in the next election, as miserable as our choices are. That she'll won't be permitted to accomplish even that if elected is another issue.

This is not an endorsement, mind you, just the worse part of a doctor's appointment. Turn your head, cough, and ask yourself:

• If empire, what kind?
• If allies, what kind?
• If empire, what kind?
• If empire, what kind?

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Obamafication?

No. So no.

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• The problem with friendly dictators.
• State Department trolls Islamic web sites.
• Mocos, do remember to check this site out frequently.
• Seriously. More here.
• Why do Republicans deny their legacy?
• A question to ponder.
  
• Bestest site on web. Unless it's this one.
• While this is the most important. Really.
  

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I remember liking helmetball enough to know good helmetball when I see it, and watching New England run a two-minute drill to end the first half last night while humiliating Buffalo was fucking brilliant helmetball. Fucking brilliant.

it's like the turkeys mounted a counterattack

In response to Bailey, who, despite looking remarkably un-hot in the following, still wins my generation's Maryanne/Ginger debate over Jennifer:

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AND Herb Tarlek

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urges you to GO VOTE FOR DCENTERS!

Note to self

Don't post poems with the words "j...nese schoolg..ls." Jeebus, Teh Google.

Speaking of Blogrolls

Those guys over there to the top left, labeled kaboom, are must reads. I've been silent on my complicity lately, finally getting to the point where I don't feel a need to write an apologia for thinking Democrats just jerks instead of bwahaha-ing assholes in the pig trough like the pigs....

I'm still debating whether Democrats (or Britain's Liberals in the case of some of the kaboomers) are more cowardly than craven or more craven than cowardly (though NOT debating an either/or). Those guys under kaboom help. Read them all.

I also want to highly - HIGHLY! - recommend This Recording, a generous carnival of music and reads and whatever the hell they want to write about. Best new site I've discovered in months.

They also understand something about blog-rolling etiquette that makes me happy - besides having blog-rolled me, that is: it's a tangential part of a giggle in a long story, though they're not aware of the tangent.

Lastly, the bastards at viacom forced youtube to kill the "I don't know how to play the piano." So much for skills bloggers need.

No, this is lastly: those of you who have the secret dog email address get first dibs at two tickets for next Thursday's playoff game v Cheating Fuckers. Others can use the email on this page. Will meet you at stadium will-call. Hurry!

How to use a 103 degree fever

While at home with a truly trippy fever I remembered that BLCKDGRD exists to amuse me, so some redesigning.

I'm also going to be monkeying around with the blogrolls. Dead sites will disappear, new sites appear, and a new, more essential booms will be created.

I've always enjoyed a good fever.