Here the Readers Gather to Watch the Books Die

Sunday night Musk Sieg Heils, Monday at noon Trump inaugurated, between noon and one Monday Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Motherfucking Obama all texted me telling me to keep the faith, keep hope alive, give them my money, I doubt any of them will read my *Fuck - and this is the important part - YOU!* replies before I told the bot STOP

So one more, I can't say last, grid of rage aimed specifically at motherfucking professional Democrats and their shitlib zealots all of whom would prefer Trump to anyone to motherfucking Obama's left. As for regular grids viz Trump's daily farting unto totalitarianism I don't know, I screamed at the fuckers whose one purported job was to prevent this who instead did their real jobs and facilitated his return in exchange for keeping their power and position. They hate you far more than they hate the crackeriest christeriest magassholes. Hate you. Have a theme song, I forget which number

12 Senate Democrats Help GOP Pass Laken Riley Act as Trump Takes Office
"The rage of those abandoned by the economy, the fears and concerns of a beleaguered and insecure middle class, and the numbing isolation that comes with the loss of community, would be the kindling for a dangerous mass movement,” I wrote in “American Fascists” in 2007. “If these dispossessed were not reincorporated into mainstream society, if they eventually lost all hope of finding good, stable jobs and opportunities for themselves and their children — in short, the promise of a brighter future — the specter of American fascism would beset the nation. This despair, this loss of hope, this denial of a future, led the desperate into the arms of those who promised miracles and dreams of apocalyptic glory.”
How Biden paved the way for Trump’s White House return
☝	"No one worked harder to get Trump elected more than the Democrats. They refused to back down from their genocide, they refused to remove Biden until it became a public embarrassment; they refused a democratic process for picking the replacement, instead choosing a candidate who had nothing to show & was deeply unpopular. They concocted a fake fervor around her, offered nothing to their base except demonization & isolation. Great work, as always"						☝
"Since the election, there’s been no change in the party’s leadership & every powerful player in the party whose decisions led to Trump’s reelection will now retain their political contracts, status & internal party authority. It is an institution wholly unaccountable to anything"
☝	"Leading Democratic Party Chair candidate Ken Martin says that Democrats won't take money from "those bad billionaires" but will take money from "good billionaires"						☝
☝	"The Democrats’ major political/electoral achievements in the last 8 years were marginalizing the Bernie working-class movement, losing two elections to Donald Trump, driving the party’s brand to the lowest popularity in 30 years, and boosting GOP numbers among people of color"						☝
☝	In other words, they did their job, exactly what their donors told them to do						☝
Top 0.1% gained $6 trillion under Biden
☟	"What a choice; a defining photo for the new gilded age. An inauguration that makes clearer than ever the triumph of oligarchy - one that isn’t incidental but intrinsic to the politics and policies that we’re seeing set out"						☝
Billionaire Wealth Surged by $2 Trillion Last Year
"This thing you're seeing is not what it looks like" quickly changes to "thing? What thing? I don't see any thing."
The eight talking points fossil fuel companies use to obstruct climate action
"To be clear, it's not some antisemitic conspiracy theory that US lawmakers voted to ban TikTok in order to shut down criticism of Israel among young people. They openly admitted that this was in fact what they were doing"
Trump and his oligarchs (back) at the gate
"So Biden and the national dems, in their ever impressive genius, have accomplished only two things with the TikTok ban: allowing Trump to look like a free speech hero and establishing horrible Supreme Court precedent allowing the government to silence speech it doesn’t like"
"One simple way to counter this sinister Trump plan of showing up on day one to unban tik tok and look like a hero would have been to not ban it in the first place because the ADL told you to"
George Carlin on the tiktok ban							☝
"The manufacturing of consent in action"
The Morning Of The Day Before, Again
☟	Biden hails 'extremely successful' Israeli war that transformed region
Biden's farewell address					Real reporting
"Legacy media outlets ignoring the Trump/Melania crypto scams, which at any other time w/any other incoming Admin would be one of the biggest scandals in political history, shows how lost & unprepared they are for what is about to happen. They’re covering this like a reality show"
The enduring power of copaganda
Weaponized incompetence				➡	"Western billionaires want to control our data. They also want to control the information we consume about looming threats to our health. Until then, they’ll join Chuck Schumer in wringing their hands, acting as if they didn’t engineer the very crisis from which they now seek salvation.
CNN, while pointing out all the tech billionaires and CEOs present at Trump's inauguration just glosses over the millions said billionaires and CEOs funneled to Trump and instead treat it as a branding and aesthetics exercise"
Bullshit and bravado			Mr. Grift Goes to Washington
The Racial Capitalism at the Heart of Helmetball
Exponential Abyss				The Fire Boom
Maggie's		They Shine And Stink Like Rotten Mackerel By Moonlight, Plus
The Truth About Fiction					Lentil soup		redux
{ feuilleton }			Music’s TikTokalypse
New Throwing Muses album				Disciplinary Bedrock
All is not lost			Sonic Youth Evol v Dirty
One benefit of Trump Restored - Delgados binge

THE BOOK OF EQUALITY

Daniel Borzutzky

Here the readers gather to watch the books die. They die suddenly, as if thrown from an airplane, or from spontaneous cardiac arrest. They live, and then suddenly they die, and the reader who watches this is at the moment of the books' death bombarded with images documented through the smiling lipstick face of a journalist who has shown up to report on the death of the books. The milk was poisoned and forty-two babies died, she laughs, as she fondles the ashes of the dead books. And the death of forty-two babies is equal in value to the death of this book which is equal in value to the ninety-year old woman who shot herself while the sheriff waited at her door with an eviction notice which is equal in value to the collapsing of the global economy which is equal to the military in country XYZ seizing the land of the semi-nomadic hunters and cultivators of crops who have lived in the local rain forest for thousands of years. The reader opens a dead book and finds an infinite amount of burnt ash between the bindings, and when the ash blows in the wind the lipstick says that every death in the world is equal to every other death in the world which is equal to every birth in the world which is equal to every act of dismemberment which is equal to the death of a jungle which is equal to the collapse of the global economy; and hey look there’s another lady falling out of a window; she looks about equal to the poet hurled out of his country for words he wrote but which did not belong to him and whose death is about equal to the girl who was shot on the bus on her way to school this morning which is just about the same as the bearded man whose head was shoved into a sac while water was dumped over it and he died for an instant and came back to life and talked and talked and that’s about equal to the steroid illegally injected into the arm of a beautiful man who makes forty million dollars a year for injecting his arms with steroids so he can more skillfully wave a wooden stick at a ball, and in the ash we see the truest democracy there ever was: hey look it’s a little baby found in a dumpster how equal you are says the smiling lipstick to the civilized nation whose citizens walk the flooded streets looking for their homes, and in the ashes of the dead book the dead streets are equal to the eating disorders of movie stars which are equal to the dead soldiers who are equal to the homeruns which are equal to the bomb dropped by country ABC over weddings in the village of country XYZ which is equal to the earth swallowing up and devouring all of its foreigners which is just about equal to the decline in literacy in the most educated nation in the planet. There is no end to this book. There are no paragraph breaks to interrupt the smiling lipstick that goes on and on in one string of ashy words about how the declaration of peace is equal to the resumption of war and how the bodies that fall are equal to the birds that ascend and how the bomb in the Eiffel Tower is equal to the rising cost of natural gas, and the murmurs of the voices in the mud are equal to the murmurs of the expensive suits falling out of buildings and these are equal to the silence that kills with one breath and coddles life with another.

I See, Said the Blind Man, As He Puts Down His Hammer and Saw

My left eye

RAGE		RAGE		RAGE		RAGE
RAGE		RAGE		RAGE		RAGE
RAGE		RAGE		RAGE		RAGE
RAGE		RAGE		RAGE		RAGE
RAGE		RAGE		RAGE		RAGE
RAGE		RAGE		RAGE		RAGE

Populated with you-can-guess which assholes, genocidaires, psycho&sociopaths, shitlords, hunt and peck at your (dis)pleasure. My right eye

I can't speak to RIP David Lynch beyond noting I recognize his significance by how friends analog and digital are mourning his loss and praising his art. I don't watch things, never did much, don't at all now, I listen to music, read, make things, it's not a moral stance, I wish I could, it's a weakness not a strength, not a point of pride but a point of embarrassment. I try, I just can't, so here's Ed to speak to David Lynch
I saw Eraserhead decades ago and haven't felt compelled to ever watch again and I watched the first episode of Twin Peaks, but I'm old and going blind and can't read like when young, I'm willing to try anew, what Lynch first?
O, violence to not-human animals is a non-starter, the only Joy Williams' novel I haven't read, *Breaking and Entering,* I won't read because I saw in a review thirty years ago people saw-off live pelicans' beaks and no, fuck no. No. Never. Fucking humans, the shittiest species. I'd prefer to not see human-on-human violence but can deal with it if necessary, ditto books
REST IN PEACE, BOB UECKER					I haven't watched a baseball game in thirty years, I listen to local play-by-play all season long, every season, L & C can vouch
13 Sentinels			There is not one book in this list of 2025 releases that delights me it's being published
There's a new Legendary Pink Dots album!
REM has essentially disappeared from American culture
A GUIDE TO NURSE WITH WOUND

I SEE, SAID THE BLIND MAN, AS HE PUT DOWN HIS HAMMER AND SAW

John Ashbery

There is some charm in that old music
He’d fall for when the night wind released it:
Pleasant to be away; the stones fall back;
The hill of gloom in place over the roar
Of the kitchens but with remembrance like a bright patch
Of red in a bunch of laundry. But will the car
Ever pull away and spunky at all times he’d
Got the mission between the ladder
And the slices of bread someone had squirted astrology over
Until it took the form of a man, obtuse, out of pocket
Perhaps, probably standing there.

Can’t you see how we need these far-from-restful pauses?
And in the wind neighbors and such agree
It’s a hard thing, a milestone of sorts in some way?
So that the curtains contribute what charm they can
To the spectacle: an overflowing cesspool
Among the memoirs of court life, the candy, cigarettes,
And what else. What kind is it, is there more than one
Kind, are people forever going to be at the edge
Of things, even the nice ones, and when it happens
Will we all be alone together? The armor
Of these thoughts laughs at itself
Yet the distances are always growing
With everything between, in between
The tall hedges that seem to know what life is:
An offering that stands to one side. And we dream.

If I stare into it long enough, the point comes when I don’t know what it’s called, a condition in which lacerations are liable to occur, like a slip of the tongue; when a drop of blood might billow in a glass of water, blooming in velvet detonation and imparting to it the colorless, tasteless and originless fear in which I wake

Even if I agreed that if in fact Democrats work in the best faith they can given complete Shitlord control of all narratives why does that oblige me to support them, I said to a departing colleague who after years of me kablamming motherfucking Democrats still thinks I'm one with shitlibs. I genuinely like and will miss her, she's a terrier, a cat lady terrier hence our connection, terriers don't like most people, they're my favorite breed. I started that sentence last night and the gag appeared before I'd typed the second *terrier,* this getting old shit in every possible meaning. She didn't listen to what I said enough to answer my question; it was a nice summational goodbye. Here's one side of L's birthday present


An irony: I accuse Shitlords of planning for then executing deliberate chaos which is exactly how I paint, bad hand skills so chaos with intent. How many people have you worked with, lived with, been forced to love, who create crises constantly as a means of power and control, who with glee chronically make everything edgy and complicated and competitive and ultimately and inevitably terminally fucked up? I'm saying I understand their strategy in the mediums they use, though I like my end result better than shitlords', ymmv. Here's the other side of L's birthday present



We're one fucked up animal. A week from when I type this sentence Donald Trump will have been president six and a half hours. Biden had two months to try and secure and tighten some of the programs and policies they told us Trump will kill and Biden pardoned a judge who sold kids into for-profit prisons and the Biden bragged about being a great-grandfather when asked about the LA fires. He gave Liz Cheney one kind of fake medal and Bono a more prestigious fake medal. In an exit interview he asserted that he would have beat Trump but stepped aside to save party unity which regarding him is a lie but is ironically delicious as that is the heartbeat of professional Democrat omerta: party before country. This motherfucking vain motherfucking banal evil piece of shit motherfucker. I did not say this to my departing friend, if she knows about this blog (Hi Sam) she'd the first in library that I know of who knows about this blog since the exodus of the few who know (or more likely knew and forgot - when you walk out of the building the last time it's like you never worked here, never existed and still don't, and visa versa you who stayed to the departed, poof) just before, during, and after the plague.





Morton Feldman's 99th birthday was Sunday past, same as L's, why did I never think of his music as eligible for My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game when I was obsessed with My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, I've always listened to it as much as the two permanent members and certainly listen to it more now since I (love listening to Feldman when making chaos and trying to control it) rarely listen to the two permanent members and then only when it comes into my ears without my making the selection and my best guess viz Feldman and My Sillyass Deserted Island Five game is I can't air guitar Feldman which suggests deeply horrible things about me but an absolutely true reason is it's too large and quiet to listen to in a car because of road noise. I no longer tend any of my deserted island five games. Fine metaphors abound

Crime of the Century: CBS’ 60 Minutes Exposes the Biden Administration’s Complicity in Gaza Genocide
☝	"Gaza Ceasefire Proves Biden Wanted Genocide"						☝
Police ignore standards after facial recognition matches						➡	Which is, after all, the intent
American nutshell				Trump Changes Nothing
The nihilism of Antony Blinken
"so many bloviating free-speech warriors in this country, so much cowardly silence over the worst cancel culture/ repression of free speech in my lifetime"
"These are our heroes? These are our role models?"
"If globalization has allowed elites to remove themselves from democratic accountability and regulation, is there any path toward a just economy?						➡	No
Billionaires dangle free speech like a bauble
Oligarch farmers and the fires in Los Angeles
The pistachio billionaires who guzzle more water than all of fire-ravaged Los Angeles
Wall Street Watchdog Warns “Clock Is Ticking on a Coming Catastrophic Financial Crash”
"The unilateral moment has ended. Russia, India and China have become too rich and too powerful to be looted. U.S. vassals are now by far the easier target"
"When the empire gets bratty, the vassals get trampled"
Both my parents were public school teachers, my aunts and uncles were public school teachers, my wife and daughter are public school teachers, did you hear ONE FUCKING DEMOCRAT SAY ONE FUCKING WORK ABOUT PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION AND ITS COMING COMPLETE GUTTING in run-up to election? Today In Rhetorical Questions
☝	Inside the Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Religious Schools						☝
SMUG PARTY		➡	"Harris ran the campaign that party leaders wanted. It flattered moderate pundits and centrist online commentators, aimed at conservatives and took left support for granted. After this strategy cost them another winnable election, Democrats are faced with a familiar simple question: Should we try to figure out what went wrong, change things and face the next election cycle with an invigorated party? Or should we stay the course, blame benighted voters and take perverse joy in their misery? No prize for guessing the answer"
From Gaza to California: the flames that connect us all
"So the State Dept narrative managers at 60 Minutes held this footage for 8 months, publishing it just hours before the end of the Biden era, to ensure no massacres were interfered with and no US officials felt the heat"
The mysterious ways of Donald J. Trump
"The social function of the economics profession is to explain, over and over again, that your boss is actually right and that you don't really want the things you want, and you're secretly happy to be abused by the system"
Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ Wikipedia editors
"It will be months before a complete voter file is available to offer a full and detailed picture of what went wrong, but what is clear from exit polls and county-level data is that, in 2024, Democrats lost ground everywhere. Their support eroded even in the party’s ­typical strongholds — urban centers, college towns, and majority-Black counties — an indication that the party fundamentally failed to understand its own base’s chief concerns, to say nothing of the broader electorate. The party failed to offer solutions or ­communicate the solutions it was offering; relied on data to guide advertising choices, muddling the narrative; and aligned itself with unpersuasive surrogates. Democrats forgot, essentially, how to talk to American voters — while failing, comically at times, to reach potentially persuadable voters who were actively tuned out from politics"
Maggie's		Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes
"All appeals to cultural purity and tradition have to be regarded with suspicion, whether from the left or the right, politically"
Big Other Anthology 2024
The Hypnotic Churr of the Nightjar
An Uncomfortable Moment at the Thirteenth Annual Delmore Schwartz Memorial Picnic					{ feuilleton }
"and practice is a regular highlight of my week. i get to see my bros and make stuff with them. music is about communication, it is inherently prosocial. all the good things about music and making music aren’t monetizable which is why these assholes have these dry joyless opinions"
Alexis Wright			Midafternoon thoughts
myself (not me, I promise), w Alice Notley poem
One year from two days ago will be Morton Feldman's centenary

 
BLADE

Franz Wright

If I stare into it long enough, the point comes when I don’t know what it’s called, a condition in which lacerations are liable to occur, like a slip of the tongue; when a drop of blood might billow in a glass of water, blooming in velvet detonation and imparting to it the colorless, tasteless and originless fear in which I wake

A Snow Fence Imposes That Sleep

I hate snow. I'm trapped. The roads aren't plowed, if I wanted to go somewhere - anywhere, for fun or emergency, nope. Hate, seething, anxiety, I do that shit *without* snow - see the grid below, see all my grids - snow multiplies my hate, seething, and anxiety by a factor of fifty. Fuck snow. Here's Olive in her box in our easy bake oven




Eventually the plow will come through - we live on one of the two main streets of our neighborhood and across the street from an elementary school so we're first plowed - and encase my car in packed snow already being packed now with sleet and freezing rain. I hate snow even when I'm not clusterfucked sideways and I'm always clusterfucked sideways, you can attest. Here's Stanley is his box in our easy bake oven





The only thing I liked about climate change and a warming earth was it didn't snow the last two winters, thank you Shitlord petroleum robber Baron assholes, fuck you and your snow fifty times more than daily fuck you for your kakistocratic, kleptocratic, catastrophe-driven snowless clusterfuck. Fuck snow. Are today's links angrier than normal or is is just me, hating, seething, squirming in anxiety thinking my normal anger angrier than normal? NO! SNOW MAKES IT WORSE BY A FACTOR OF FIFTY! fuck snow, please Hear, I just bought this album, listen

Mionist zenocidal gonster
"Liz Cheney and Hillary Clinton get medals. Israel gets another $8 billion in weapons for genocide. The working class get nothing. Biden’s legacy is cemented as worse president of the modern age"
☝	Shitty president zenocidal gonsters gives medal of freedom to shitty musician zenocidal gonster						☟
"Kinda weird to climb over the charred corpses of your employees to accept an award from the guy supplying the bombs that murdered them, but go off, Chef"
Update: just a shitty motherfucker, shitty	"personally, I would also get emotional if the man who financed the army that deliberately murdered seven of my employees put his hands around my neck, but I don’t know, I guess silence is cheap these days"						☝
Update: just a shitty motherfucker, shitty	"this list is a weapon to induce schizophrenia"						☝
☝	"Some background here on David Rubenstein, who has played a key role in preserving the carried-interest loophole, which has saved private-equity managers like himself billions in taxes--and who was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Biden yesterday"						☝
"While the Democrats are effectively prohibited by its big donors in the ruling class from turning even slightly to the left, except under the most extreme conditions, the Republican Party is not prevented by its billionaire supporters from moving all the way to fascism on the extreme right, always the fallback position of the capitalist ruling class when it perceives the internal and external bases of its power as threatened"
How Tech Billionaires Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left and Right
"Watch Klarna’s CEO argue artificial intelligence can “already do all of the jobs that we as humans do” — and brag about replacing his own employees with AI"
There is no "off" switch on the system's self-destruct sequence
"The most interesting thing about the comparison is really the illustration it gives of fascism as a way of getting the humble to vote against their own interests"
When my dad was a kid in a Fayette County PA coal mining company town in the 1930s his dad was paid with company script, reestablishment been a *hitlord *et *ream ever since nope
Why she's quitting the Washington Post
☝	Washington Post Cartoonist Ann Telnaes Quits After Bezos-Owned Paper Kills Trump Satire Piece						☝
Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats. I.
Motherfucking. Democrats. I. Hate.
Democrats. I. Hate. Motherfucking.
I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats.
"They must be giving grad seminars on bootlicking to power in whatever's left of Higher Ed History Depts, this sort of toadying to one Leader or the Other is all you see from the biggest names in the industry"
Louisiana’s Governor-Elect Wants To Withhold Funds For New Orleans’ Decaying Water Infrastructure Until Women Who Seek Abortions Are Prosecuted
"The governor of Ohio just signed a law that charges people hundreds of dollars to get police body cam footage. Welcome to America where fascist cops can ruin your life on video, and then you gotta max out your credit cards just to get the proof and clear your name"
How the U.S. Lost Control of Bird Flu, Setting the Stage for Another Pandemic
☝	The US didn't "lose control," either shitlords *want* another pandemic and/or don't give a shit if there is another pandemic, and my money's on WANT another pandemic, the last one being so successful						☝
A Year in German Culture				As ominous as it gets
This is what Western media hides from you
Was looking for something else as was reminded of Arthur Silber whose analysis of the shitshow that exists and that shitshow that's coming I'd love to read. Anyone heard anything, sad, bad, or worse?
"Right at this very moment you can begin a daily practice of sowing the seeds of revolution. You as an individual cannot defeat the empire yourself, but it is absolutely within your power to open a few people’s eyes to the reality that the status quo is unacceptable, and that a better world is possible. It is absolutely within your power to show people how they’ve been lied to their whole lives about their country, their society and their world, and to show people how they are currently being deceived about stories that are in the news today."
Tracking the Signs of Decline in America
Water cycle of life				"I, A Woke, Found Me Here"
"It feels weird when those stories are set in our world—rather than, like, a space station in the Delta Quadrant—where real people are perpetually fighting to be recognized as human, while the aggrieved in power cosplay as minoritized groups in order to further expand their financial and political dominance"
Winning coalitions aren't always governing coalitions
How Religion And Science Both Predict The End Of The World
The weight of a stone					Radio City at 50
Whose Garbage Becomes The Archive?
Avedon Carol's occasional links						Maggie's
commented annotated bibliography of why i don't have anything to say to you
Listen		Crisps and chips			{ feuilleton }
Louise Glück: Writing as Transformation

SNOW FENCE

John Ashbery

Dieting aids posture,
as reading helps thought.
They may be forced
into another shape, and the world
around us becomes black
with notions of the ground.

A snow fence imposes that sleep.
All along it snow has chosen different shapes
of busyness. It has been prevented
from staying where it wanted to.
Blue sky will pay for this
music from an old Victrola
singing about a lover and his henchmen
and the woman hiding in a barrel
under a bridge.

In the west it all turns to meat.
A few are grateful, more are bored.
We could have lunch by that lake,
drink beer from a nearby farm.
And the actors walked with me
to those calms.