Justine called on Christmas day to say she was thinking of killing herself. I said, “We’re in the middle of opening presents, Justine. Could you possibly call back later, that is, if you’re still alive.”

Once I posted far more birthdays than I do now (for instance, today, December 30th, is both Patti Smith's and Michael Nesmith's birthday, Alex Chilton was born on the 28th, they once would each get songs if not stand alone posts though today they only get this parenthesis) but I still check each day for whose birthday it is as you who follow me at Bluesky can attest. I still do the biggies though occasionally not, not for any other reason than my current relationship with the birthday person, dead or alive, on that particular birthday when the post doesn't feel heartfelt but feels like filler to me. I'm still an attention slut, just not as avid and desperate as once (and/or just as, just more visual than verbal now)

I'd read and added to the grid below in the fifth row from the bottom two smart and debatable articles about the failure of what and whoever constitutes America's "literary elites" to confront Obama's betrayals that aid and abet to this day and tomorrow too Trump's monstrosity the night before Gaddis' birthday. I didn't know it was Gaddis' birthday until the next day, I check for birthdays on the same day. I had tried for months for a 2025 novel, new or old, that would if not break my reading slump at least open an extra sluice or two in my dam, and I'm two-thirds through my 4th or 5th reread of Pynchon's *Mason & Dixon* (why a reread necessary for a reading reboot and how long to find the right one annoys me): I actually think go get the book instead of making myself go get the book and reading it against my will, what a world. Next to my battered copy of *Mason & Dixon* when I went to find it my equally battered *The Recognitions,* the Penguin edition with the van der Goes on the cover, almost as good an object as it is a novel, I have to keep not starting it less I fuck up the Pynchon. *The Recognitions* next, reread number fuck me for counting. Hence Sunday past's Gaddis birthday filler post, my apologies. 


Strange days, both more to write about in direct proportion to how it gets more unnecessary to write it: kayfabe broken less fun to write about than kayfabe enabled and active. Everything feels like filler everywhere, everything new is born old, not just here. Paul Westerberg will be 66 tomorrow the 31st, he just gets this sentence. I may or not post George's New Years song on New Years Day. Hear, I've great new music at my Bandcamp, listen there once each album for free

The words the Bezos Post won't say are "concentration camp"
"Very convenient that the rich ruling class techbros solution to income and wealth inequality will be solved by letting them accumulate even more wealth"
Decline & Fall		Bare Blip		Man Who Bumped Tesla While Parallel Parking Sentenced To Death		What happens when disaster recovery becomes a luxury good?
They Spread Corruption And Call It Peace
"If your president bombs Nigeria on Christmas just to distract from his crimes, you live in a shithole country
Western elites fear a ‘globalised intifada’ because they are its targets, not Jews
"The IMF has told Botswana that if it buys its own diamond mines and thus gains control over its own resource production, it will stop funding Botswana. For the IMF to maintain a relationship with Botswana, the country must keep its resources in the hands of white people
DumbBrutes		Stochastic		Return of the weirdo
"American democracy has devolved into a humiliation ritual in which we are expected to pledge support for people who hate us so they can steal our property, molest our children, and punish us for talking about their crimes"
Politics Is Fandom; Fascism Is Fanfic
"If socialism didn’t work and wasn’t a threat to the capitalist order the U.S. would just let it fail on its own. The truth is socialism absolutely works, which is why the U.S. has to spend trillions of dollars on endless wars to constantly overthrow socialist nations
Bari Weiss Praised El Salvador’s Dictator Before Spiking '60 Minutes' Story on His Torture Prison
New Epstein jet!			"Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing a text, writing an email, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing since the dawn of time"
Kash Patel’s New Armored BMW
Shitlords await their Caesar					Grappling with AI Jesus
Varieties of White Nationalism
Trump’s Immigration Nightmare: It Is Happening Here
Starving the safety net				Gilded Navy for Imperialist Conflict
"Sabermetrics people need to own up to the damage they’ve done to society, on multiple axes"
➥	In some box in my basement my first edition copy of Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is molding, as well as his yearly rotisserie paperbacks from a time of Dogzilla Wafers dominance						⮨
"I can *100% assure you* that if this report found that trans people & "wokeness" tanked the Harris campaign, the DNC would release it in a heartbeat"
An Autopsy Report of the DNC’s Autopsy Report
"I cannot emphasize enough that Democrats were putting this man in charge of writing their version of Project 2025, their supposed north star for future policy priorities. And they did that *this year*"
LIBERAL DESPAIR				The End of Financial Regulation as We Knew It
"You can't write something predicated in the utterly ludicrous assumption that white men are being excluded from publishing unless you are racist"
Craftsmanship in the culture industry
Maggie		Avedon Carol		Animals who		The death of print dictionaries
How to make your old cats' and dogs' life easier and better
Pattiverse		The 20 Most Powerless People in the Art World: 2025 Edition		{ feuilleton }		Saul Bellow
I want to see this Frankenthaler show at MOMA
For the Denis Johnson lovers and haters out there (if paywalled I can get you a PDF - let me know)
The failures of the Trump novel				Speaking Reassurance to Power
A review, in 2025, of Stanley Elkin's *The Franchiser*
dc’s 9th annual xmas poetry scroll
Read a December 1985 interview with Minutemen
I don't know most of these but I promise to listen to all that I don't but I absolutely vouch for The Whimbrels

MAKING THE BEST OF THE HOLIDAYS

James Tate

Justine called on Christmas day to say she
was thinking of killing herself. I said, “We’re
in the middle of opening presents, Justine. Could
you possibly call back later, that is, if you’re
still alive.” She was furious with me and called
me all sorts of names which I refuse to dignify
by repeating them. I hung up on her and returned
to the joyful task of opening presents. Everyone
seemed delighted with what they got, and that
definitely included me. I placed a few more logs
on the fire, and then the phone rang again. This
time it was Hugh and he had just taken all of his
pills and washed them down with a quart of gin.
“Sleep it off, Hugh,” I said, “I can barely under-
stand you, you’re slurring so badly. Call me
tomorrow, Hugh, and Merry Christmas.” The roast
in the oven smelled delicious. The kids were playing
with their new toys. Loni was giving me a big
Christmas kiss when the phone rang again. It was
Debbie. “I hate you,” she said. “You’re the most
disgusting human being on the planet.” “You’re
absolutely right,” I said, “and I’ve always been
aware of this. Nonetheless, Merry Christmas, Debbie.”
Halfway through dinner the phone rang again, but
this time Loni answered it. When she came back
to the table she looked pale. “Who was it?” I
asked. “It was my mother,” she said. “And what
did she say?” I asked. “She said she wasn’t my
mother,” she said.

You're the Only Serious Person in the Room, Aren't You, the Only One Who *Understands,* and You Can Prove It by the Fact that You've Never Finished a Single Thing in Your Life

"Even though I should have known from The Recognitions that the world was not waiting breathlessly for my message, that it already knew, and was quite happy to live with all these false values, I’d always been intrigued by the charade of the so-called free market, so-called free enterprise system, the stock market conceived of as what was called a “people’s capitalism” where you “owned a part of the company” and so forth. All of which is true; you own shares in a company, so you literally do own part of the assets. But if you own a hundred shares out of six or sixty or six hundred million, you’re not going to influence things very much. Also, the fact that people buy securities—the very word in this context is comic—not because they are excited by the product—often you don’t know what the company makes—but simply for profit: The stock looks good and you buy it. The moment it looks bad you sell it. What had actually happened in the company is not your concern. In many ways I thought . . . the childishness of all this. Because JR himself, which is why he is eleven years old, is motivated only by good-natured greed. JR was, in other words, to be a commentary on this free enterprise system running out of control. Looking around us now with a two-trillion-dollar federal deficit and billions of private debt and the banks, the farms, basic industry all in serious trouble, it seems to have been rather prophetic."

William Gaddis, born 103 years ago today, in a 1986 interview. For boatloads of excerpts click the Gaddis tag.

Clearly from this and similar eloquent testimony certain members of the community have been subjected to annoyance and serious inconvenience in the pursuit of private errands of some urgency, however, recalling to mind that vain and desperate effort to prevent construction of a subway kiosk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, enshrined decades ago in the news headlines PRESIDENT LOWELL FIGHTS ERECTION IN HARVARD SQUARE, by definition the interests of the general public must not be confused with that of one or even several individuals (People v. Brooklyn & Queens Transit Corp., 258 App. Div. 753, 15 N.Y.S.2d 295, 1939, affirmed 283 N.Y. 484, 28 N.E.2d 925, 1940).

- Gaddis, Frolic of His Own

Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you're not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it's exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos...

- Gaddis, JR

I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room, aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal...spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have is a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard.

- Gaddis, Recognitions

one poem that had been over for centuries spelled wrong

Hey! remember when Rob Reiner's son murdered him and Trump sent out a deranged happy tweet celebrating Reiner's death and everybody was WOAH! Trump is such a repugnant turd! and a prominent NYT conservative columnist wrote a scathing anti-Trump screed calling him petty, hollow, and squalid, saying Trump "the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House", which surely had to be shitlord-approved? Decades ago

That's not why the headshot, this is in reaction to bloooooger changing its coding and fucking up the accretive process I use to make these shitty posts: this is the second of this one post (after multiple attempts to fix the now abandoned first). A digibud asked me a week or so ago whether I'd ever consider sabstucking and I answered no, I will never beg for money and regardless whether I have to beg for money to sabstuck or not moving to stacksub would imply a different kind of damn than I own, plus I have bloooooger tuned to work the way I post - adding daily, subtracting daily. Now that bloooooger fucked up the first draft of this post's coding (and future posts' coding), I'm still a hard no to stubsack, but fuck my free blooooooging platform. Being pushed, still won't jump. Fine metaphors abound. HEY! Bill Nelson is 78 years old today

Try to imagine this utterly intolerable, dystopian future
All the Dominant Models Are Collapsing
"It is a strange era to exist in when Candace Owens seems to be making some valid points"
If the Right Wins Absolutely, What Will They Do?
"Ever notice how you don’t hear about the Proud Boys or the Patriot Front or any of those other right wing fascist white supremacist groups anymore? Because all those Nazi fucks work for ICE now. ICE is a government-run terrorist organization"
Speaking of ICE: crackerchristers are weird
"MAGA’s lust for publicity may be its undoing"(?)
Full Court Palentir				ICE sprayed a one-year-old in the face with pepper spray
Inside Chicago’s Neighborhood ICE Resistance
"Noticing that Democrats are passing “right to die” laws before passing “right to housing” or “right to healthcare” laws"
Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State
"Liberal class politics is when one of the most powerful political players in Washington with an eight figure net worth calls teachers "elites"
AI billionaires' 2026 intimidation campaign is already working
"I think this is useful to read the whole way through to see just how Internet-poisoned right wing billionaires are. This guy is insane"
How Capitalism Replaced America					The FCC Just Admitted It's Not Independent Anymore
"Once in a century political opportunity here, if only there were a party to claim it"
On the coming geopolitics of the compute stack, or Our New Imperial Strategy
"For Schumer Dems, the overnight immiseration of tens of millions of Americans because Obamacare was deliberately structured to keep people on the precipice and at the mercy of GOP savagery, means one thing: a lucrative fundraising opportunity"
On the political economy of the Cloud and AI
Grown to believe that excessive wealth does something to your brain that is analogous to a serious head injury
The politics of affordability are explosive
What will the resistance look like in 2026?
"I don't want to attack people for belatedly doing the right thing, don't want to punish the behavior I want to see, but yeah it does frustrate me that people could accept genocide in Palestine and trans exterminationism but apparently draw the line at being mean to Rob Reiner"
800 Days of Genocide in Gaza
The True Infinite and the Republic of Virtue
Bleggalgaze		No more paperbacks				Maggie
On Thomas Pynchon’s Detective Fictions
{ feuilleton }			Limping into December
From The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer
He's getting weird			Strip tease		Pisstown Chaos

[WHATEVER MAKES IT] Clark Coolidge Whatever makes it up makes up for it as a poem the tunnel Lincoln was afraid to enter etc also please avoid pounding the poem itself there are dense poems and there are light poems lung poems lapse poems and even Webster's poems the tale of the crèche at the bottom of the lake
not a poem but an opening so to be wished
one poem that had been over for centuries
spelled wrong    misspoken    in arrest
nevertheless a poem to be worked in there
a land poem    a strain poem    a trained poem?
we established a relationship    that one and us
the way laid out in sweeping volumes in turn
in exchange    in alarm    in nothing but reverse form

The Sedate One Is This Month's Skittish One

Comforting in a way that if I stopped blogging today, stopped twooting today, stopped skybluing today, and deleted my accounts, it's already too late. I'm siloed in Shitlord data farms with enough content to set magagestapo (trademark, though feel free to use it for a five syllable haiku line (with accreditation, yo)) on me anytime they want, I don't have to worry about incriminating myself, I already have

If I stop incriminating myself - I've slowed down incriminating myself of late - it's not because I fear reprisal but because I can't be canary or weathervane or Cassandra (though still a fool) now that much of what I screamed for decades (people can vouch) would happen has and is and will continue. Have I told you three times we are being reprogrammed? Was true, is true, will be true

Besides, I'm old and nobody. I spent an hour yesterday in a private equity-owned orthopedic superstore while you who know me in real life can guess who saw the bone doc, old people, lots of old people, limping and wincing, limp stop wince, limp stop wince, old people groaning, one old woman screaming in pain, her just as old and almost as feeble husband unable to comfort her, old people with canes and wheelchairs and electric scooters and hired brown people fearing the magagestapo helping them limp stop wince, wheelchairing them. A line of in pain old people waiting to to be told to fuck off go talk to an AI bot about a bill they didn't expect and can't pay

This getting old shit. Who gets me first, the magagestapo when it finally reaches my tier of insignificance in the coming eradications or extermination by private equity-owned doctor stores and their MRI laundromats and AI denying insurance claims and shitlords cheating me on Medicare and stealing my social security. I know which I'd prefer, I know what I predict. When my daughter is my age it will be 2056, the Earth will be here, will the world? See? Same yodel

The waiting room played the shittiest of shitty giftmas songs and of course I was reminded to remind you that there is only one not-banned giftmas song in BLCKDGRDSTN. Revolution, fellowmofos

Pam Bondi is Coming for Domestic Terrorists. You Might Be One of Them
The Bezos Post Editorial Board applauds advancements in racism but demands more far-reaching racism in the future
SCOTUS poised to expand Trump’s power over independent agencies
"Gregg Phillips, a conspiracy theorist with no emergency management experience who helped produce the election-denying documentary ‘2000 Mules’ with Dinesh D’Souza and has faced numerous legal inquiries, has been named head of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery"
Your shitlords openly daydream of murdering you
➥	Palantir’s military-industrial plan for America
Just 0.001% hold three times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds
"Between this and previous rulings, U.S. corporations have effectively put a bullet in the head of labor protections, consumer protection, public safety, environmental law, and corporate oversight"
The shitlord billionaire family poised to rewire U.S. media in Israel’s favor
Neoliberalism and the Grift Society
The Derangement of the Conservative Mind (Cont'd)
"The State Department is instructing its staff to reject visa applications from people who worked on fact-checking, content moderation or other activities the Trump administration considers "censorship" of Americans' speech"
Sorry If This Is Antisemitic But I Think It's Wrong To Train Dogs To Rape Prisoners
"Ever notice how you don’t hear about the Proud Boys or the Patriot Front or any of those other right wing fascist white supremacist groups anymore? Because all those Nazi fucks work for ICE now. ICE is a government-run terrorist organization"
DoJ moves to eliminate sexual abuse protections for LGBTQ+ people in prisons
➥	"An unambiguously and unabashedly pro-rape administration"
Trump could call a female journalist on-camera a stupid skankwhore cunt and it'd blasted and tictokked (tictoked?) around the world and there would be zero repercussions
➥	"Not one reporter in the White House press pool chose not to be a sniveling coward and stand up to psychologically damaged, 80-year-old loathsome piece of shit after he attacked ABC's Rachel Scott. NOT FUCKING ONE"
Torture Techniques from CIA Black Sites Were Used at Alligator Alcatraz
Trump’s Enemies List Meets Media Blackout
"The system is built to prevent wages from rising too fast, to prevent workers from gaining leverage, to prevent any restoration of the purchasing power we’ve lost. When wages go up, the machine treats it like a malfunction and corrects. When corporations gouge, it’s just the market at work
"This is exactly what the bosses who put Trump into office were trying to achieve. Crushing the tight labor market from the early Biden years that gave workers - for the first time in my adult lifetime - leverage over their bosses"
"They told us there’d be breadlines and poverty under socialism yet under capitalism we have breadlines, poverty, endless war, and 3 billionaires who hoard more wealth than half of our nation. We need to shift the economy from production for profits to production for social needs"
Three Ways It's World War™ III						Morons march
50 words for snow			Twenty Japanese words for rain
Maggie		Star Death		Undoing Map		Tightrope
The dispersal of domestic cats from North Africa to Europe around 2000 years ago
{ feuilleton }			Henry James, for those of you who do
Krasznahorkai's Nobel Prize lecture, it's very László
Guitarists' Palette			The artist as Boris Badenov
Whole bunch of new music at my bandcamp, go listen, including the KABOOM! song below

LAST MONTH

John Ashbery

No changes of support—only

Patches of gray, here where sunlight fell.

The house seems heavier

Now that they have gone away.   

In fact it emptied in record time.   

When the flat table used to result

A match recedes, slowly, into the night.

The academy of the future is   

Opening its doors and willing

The fruitless sunlight streams into domes,   

The chairs piled high with books and papers.

The sedate one is this month’s skittish one   

Confirming the property that,

A timeless value, has changed hands.

And you could have a new automobile

Ping pong set and garage, but the thief   

Stole everything like a miracle.

In his book there was a picture of treason only   

And in the garden, cries and colors.