Smegmo Is the Messiah of Kitchen Fats

The traditional BLCKDGRD Bigass Holy Day Pynchon's Birthday post, he is 88 today: I wouldn't be me without his novels, especially Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and double especially Against the Day. Here, pages 606-608 Bantam mass market 1974 edition Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's main theme:

     But, if I'm riding through it, the Real Text, right now, if this is it... or if I passed it today somewhere in the devastation of Hamburg, breathing the ash-dust, missing it completely... if that the IG built on this site were not at all the final shape of it, but only an arrangement of fetishes, come-ons to call down special tools in the form of 8th AF bombers yes the "Allied" planes all would have been, ultimately, IG-built, by way of Director Krupp, through his English interlocks - the bombing was the exact industrial process of conversion, each release of energy placed exactly in space and time. each shockwave plotted in advance to bring precisely tonight's wreck into being thus decoding the Text, thus coding, recoding, decoding the holy Text.... If it is in working order, what is it meant to do? The engineers who built it never knew there were any further steps to be taken. Their design was "finalized," and they could forget it.
     It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theater, all just to keep the people distracted... secretly it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology... by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, "Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake," but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding, funding, ahh, more more.... The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms - it was only staged to look that way - but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are only understood by the ruling elite....
     Yes but technology only responds (how often this argument has been iterated, dogged and humorless as a Gaussian reduction, among the younger Schwarzkommando especially), "All very well to talk about having the tiger by the tail, but do you think we'd've had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn't wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology. deify it if it'll make you feel less responsible - but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harems of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are - "
     We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid... we have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function... zeroing in on what incalculable plot? Up here, on the surface, coaltars, hydrogeneration, synthesis were always phony, dummy functions to hide the real, the planetary mission yes perhaps centuries in the unrolling... this ruinous planet, waiting for it Kabbalists and new alchemists to discover the Key, teach the mysteries to others...

2018 Update: This is the year of the scheduled Against the Day reread, I didn't think it would happen, I don't think it will happen, but I can no longer say it won't happen.

2018 Update: Ed's Pynchon's birthday post.

2019 Update: In current rereads I am in the Casino Hermann Goering

2020 Update: Did finish 2019 reread of Gravity's Rainbow, taking this year off not because Pynchon but because me - my eyes seem able to read fiction only on a shitlord's paperwhite electronic reader, I don't want to read Pynchon on a shitlord's paperwhite electronic reader

2021 Update: I'm on voluntary vacation from rereading anything (and involuntary vacation from being able to read any novel), but when I do again voluntarily reread Pynchon again (I can't imagine there will be anything new but the dude still *is* breathing) it's Mason's and Dixon's turn

2023 Update: I am in the zone

2024 Update: post title of course from GV, I am now with the Counterforce. Ed's 2024 Pynchon bday post
2025 Update: as mentioned in the last post, I hope my novel aversion (rimshot), if it still exists in October this year, can be broken by a new Pynchon novel, Shadow Ticket, I'm certainly gonna try

Fuckton more below the fold. Fuckton

Men Duly Understand the River of Life, Misconstruing It

The strangest aspect of the clusterfuck for me is that the shittier & speedier & deeper it descends into the inevitable the bigger & stinkier the duh of typing about it becomes. Document, don't explain, all is serf-evident (sic). Compulsively grid it, me 





High Holy Day day-after-tomorrow here, will the guy still be alive in October when his new novel drops and will that be the first novel I attempt to read between then and now? cause I've stopped reading novels as in not even trying any more for reasons more spiritual than physical and I'm going blind. Yes, this is a bleggalgaze, seeing more of them of late around Blegsylvania. Three last Pere Ubu songs, I've listened to everything I own and I own almost everything, this death hurt

On "unleashing" the police
ICE Opens New Supermax Detention Center For Most Hardened Toddlers
"The corporate coup d'état and collapse of American democracy began long before Trump. He is simply snuffing out what remains"
Care and Carefulness in Today’s United States
⬆	"For example, I would suggest that you be careful about nostalgia for a democratic polity that never was. Be careful about activists and organizations appended to the Democratic Party. Be careful about the podcasters who built an audience by caping for Bernie Sanders. Be careful about celebrities who moderate support for Palestine under pressure. Be careful about genocide profiteers in the film and publishing industries. Be careful about the next shiny young politician who comes out of nowhere to save us. Be careful about anti-Zionists who ignore Palestinians. Be careful about anyone who prioritizes the settler’s existential angst. Be careful about anything that tries to make a place for oppression in this world"
"I really, really want people to stop saying Democratic leaders like Jeffries and Schumer are "weak" or "inadequate." They aren't weak; they are morally depraved. They are ACTIVELY colluding in Trump's murderous and evil nihilism.
STAGGERINGLY ENTITLED PIECES OF SHIT
"It really tells you everything you need to know about the Democratic Party that they can't go after Trump for the most blatant corruption scandal in the history of the presidency because some of them are in bed with the same corruption coin guys"
No Revolution without Counter-Revolution
"It would be easier to die in an airstrike than die of hunger"
The West Serves as Israel's Police
"Give me synonyms for 'Final Solution.'"
"The firing of national security advisor Mike Waltz appears to be part of the battle between the ultra pro-Israel and ultra-ultra pro-Israel wings of the Trump administration"
Nearly 290,000 Gaza children on ‘the brink of death’ amid Israeli blockade
"Israel's Backers Keep Whining That They're Losing Control Of The Narrative"
Israel prison authorities deliberately move sick detainees around to spread diseases in prisons
"Evasion acknowledges that the law exists and seeks to elude capture; defiance simply denies the force of law altogether"
Gaza, the US and China: the future of war and the end of civilisation
"Is there a single government agency or service left that hasn't fully embraced fascism?"
Immigration, Deportation, and the Rhetoric of Invasion
Throwing Chaos at the Wall: The American Dictator’s Playbook
"The Trump administration's slashing of academic research seems insane from outside their worldview. But what Christopher Rufo says here makes sense when you understand that they do genuinely see the entire concept of science as their deadly enemy"
What Donald Trump Learned from Ray Cohn
"These judges ruled against Trump. Then their families came under attack"
Trump Will Never Run Out of Ways to Humiliate the Firms That Caved to Him
"for sociological reasons the public messaging from Democratic insiders about abandoning lines of conflict always pretends to be about strategy but it's important to be clear eyed that a core faction of Democrats are *ideologically* opposed to anything vaguely progressive"
Last night the police at UCLA charged into students with batons in hand, arresting several, for attempting a public screening of “The Encampments” documentary on the one-year anniversary of the UCLA encampment
"lol the Zombiecrats are polling even lower than Trump, their "playing dead" strategy working as brilliantly as one would expect"
"Really baffled by Whitmer and Newsom. Forget morality and decency. It's dumb politically. Of all the times to make overtures to MAGA, you're doing it when Trump's polls are tanking, he's getting throttled in court, and weeks before the tariff pain hits?"
The socialisation of precarity and the future of social struggles
Neoliberalism and Neofascism
The Strange Death of Social Democratic Britain
As time draws near				Ostromizing democracy
Your Medium-Well Monday Big Existential Decision Point With Fries: a (not mine) bleggalgaze
Bob's list			Maggie's		xymphora
Lies They Tell Us to Sell Pro Sports Stadium Subsidies
Birds are rapidly vanishing from North America, with dramatic population losses in places that were once thought safe
The Quiet Terror of Keeping a Journal
Ishiguro on *Never Let Me Go* at 20			TRANSLATION & THE UNKNOWN
FIRE PAPER GUNS THE INTERNET and ALL WHO FOLLOWED AFTER					{ feuilleton }
673 words from Stephen Dixon’s 1991 novel Frog, followed by 469 words on Stephen Dixon’s 1991 novel Frog
The Future of the American Novel
I was and am indifferent to Pavement but some of yinz dig and apparently there's an inside-joke of a movie you might be interested in(?)
Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet’s Glorious Ordered Chaos
It's been thirty years since the first Stars of the Lid album

A POEM OF UNREST

John Ashbery

Men duly understand the river of life,
misconstruing it, as it widens and its cities grow
dark and denser, always farther away.

And of course that remote denseness suits
us, as lambs and clover might have
if things had been built to order differently.

But since I don’t understand myself, only segments
of myself that misunderstand each other, there’s no
reason for you to want to, no way you could

even if we both wanted it. Do those towers even exist?
We must look at it that way, along those lines
so the thought can erect itself, like plywood battlements.

Feeling Good Ain't Bein' Happy (No No No No No No No Yeah)

Also too!

Bamster from Heltsville, Happy Birthday! 

Sigh-sound of Lament, of Remorse, Sob-sound of Rue

Guess what I've been listening to since last Wednesday

First of two last attempts to rematerialize Hamster in our physical world, the second on Friday

David Thomas' death hurt more than any not George not only because of lost future music but because it reminded me of what I've neglected in what once paid a huge return on investment. The fuck is wrong with me. My left eye:

Monologue, like always, in the grid, the post a poem. I have not written one in a tablet in months, a year. As I type this White House officials are calling Jeff Bezos a CCP operative even as Amazon sprints to deny the story that sparked the White House shitfit




Fake news or not viz Bozos, shitlord buyer's remorse *is* kicking in, will not save us. It's not the march to authoritarianism the shitlord's regret it's its execution by the now demented and unreliable grievance-driven narcissistic shit-smelling sociopath, "unreliable" the key word. Trump dumped will not save us. My right eye:



Is this marsupial town? Is this arachnid town? When David Thomas and Richard Thompson played together:

The revolution will not be led by a Jeff
"We Are Trapped In A Dystopia That Is Ruled By Lunatics"
Virginia Giuffre 'Quieted'					There will be blood
"People used to say that when fascism came to America it would be wrapped in the flag, but nobody realized that it would also arrive in the name of free speech and fighting antisemitism"
I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats
Pritzker, yesterday: "It’s time to stop ignoring the hypocrisy in wearing a big gold cross while announcing the defunding of children’s cancer research… Autistic kids and adults who are loving contributors to our society don’t deserve to be stigmatized by a weird nepo baby who once stashed a dead bear in his car"
⬆	Yeah, watch motherschumering Democrats run away from it						⬇
"The reckoning is here. And now that this culture of timidity is on display, these same do-nothing Democrats want to blame our losses on the defense of Black people, trans kids, and immigrants, instead of on their own lack of guts and gumption"
⬆	I guarantee you motherschumering Democrats hate this fat boy more than the fat boy the claim to hate. Guarantee						⬆
⬆	I mean, the likelihood that this is grandstanding for 2028 and/or a test balloon rather than a genuine call for revolution is huge and massive, but even if it was OKed as an op by motherschumering Democrats I guarantee motherschumering Democrats hate Pritzker						⬆
⬆	Adding, I bet Pritzker didn't say a word about Democrats' full-throated full-walleted full bomb-giving support of the Gazan genocide and if asked would offer some version of "Israel has the right to defend itself"						⬆
Top Democrats Have Been Enabling Trump
"The Dem Party coverup of Biden's dementia should be one of the great political scandals of the 21st-c. They lied to their base about Biden for years, while running cover for his Gaza genocide, sealing Trump's victory. Rotten failures from top to bottom"
⬆	I agree with most of this, but they didn't fail - they still have their power and rank in their shitty party and reassured their donors of their sincere corrupt greed						⬇
"Periodic reminder that the media should stop treating the ADL like a legit civil rights organization or a group motivated by concerns of antisemitism. It quite clearly functions as an apologist for Israel and a purveyor of anti-Palestinian racism.
"AOC either flat out lied or was flat out lied to before the convention and if she expects any future in politics she needs to publicly state which was it. Either burn your sources or eat a big plate of shit, but she can’t just ignore this"
⬆	"If you think AOC is simply doing the best she can working within a rigged system, I think it's incumbent on you to consider what she, and by extension you, got in return for co-signing such a murderous lie at the DNC						⬆
I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats, but I *really* want to hit this corrupt complicit narcissitic and mega-icky shitsmear in the head with a garden shovel, once to off him, second time to celebrate
"You co-founded the group that invited Ben-Gvir to Yale"
Not Taking a Position on Gaza IS Taking a Position on Gaza
"They are having serious debates on Israeli TV as to whether newborn babies in Gaza are innocent or whether they should be killed"
"Yes, this is a heinous thing. But this EEOC investigation was actually started by Biden administration last summer, as one brief passage in the story makes clear. In this and so many other cases, Biden blazed a trail for Trump's turbo-charged weaponization of 'anti-semitism'"
"Agents' had no badges, refused to show warrant, then put him in unmarked van"
Sooner or later, dictators shut down the free press
"A president with a net worth of $4.1 billion employing an education secretary with a net worth of $3.2 billion to confiscate wages and social security from poor and working-class people for education debt is the epitome of America
The blinkered logic of Trumponomics
Everybody Doesn't Want To Rule The World
One of the great ironies of my life is that the greatest kindest smartest coolest awesomest animal on our Earth is the symbol of Asshole-Americans, who when rich enough pay money to kill them
The enshittification of tech jobs
What If They're Just Stupid?
Let’s talk about a civic uprising
Against the Tyranny of Opinionated Ignorance
Snatched from the Maw of the Orphan-Crushing Machine
The history of the hemisphere from south of the border
Vanishing animal map			To Whom am I Speaking?
Maggie's		Forgettery			Maggie's		How many?
A (not mine) bleggalgaze of bleggalrage
The Great Insect Apocalypse
"Earth is 4.6 billion years old. Let's scale that to 46 years. We have been here for 4 hours. Our industrial revolution began one minute ago. In that time, we have destroyed 50% of the world's forests. This is not sustainable"
The Sex Lives Of Common Vegetables
I divorced DC United after the 2014 season for multiple reasons one of which is that MLS is not a serious profession soccer league, doesn't want to be, never will be, but will always get stupider and sillier
Precarious Happiness			FATHERSTORY: THE INVERSIONS
The Great Hedge of India					{ feuilleton }
Callow		Substack and the American Novel
Michael Brodsky interview					B(l)eggalgaze
#1496 As in a Dream with No End
Tuning Out the Algorithm at WFMU
R. E. M. + X. T. C. - One Night in Athens, GA 1981-04-24
*Across a Crowded Room* is forty this month
Remembering David Thomas of Pere Ubu
Rocket From the Tombs Show on WMMS 101 FM on February 23, 1975

I HATE

C.K. Williams

I hate how this unsummoned sigh-sound, sob-sound,

not sound really, feeling, sigh-feeling, sob-feeling,

keeps rising in me, rasping in me, not in its old disguise

as nostalgia, sweet crazed call of the blackbird;

not as remembrance, grief for so many gone,

nor either that other tangle of recall, regret   

for unredeemed wrongs, errors, omissions,

petrified roots too deep to ever excise;

a mingling rather, a melding, inextricable mesh   

of delight in astonishing being, of being in being,

with a fear of and fear for I can barely think what,

not non-existence, of self, loved ones, love;

not even war, fuck war, sighing for war,

sobbing for war, for no war, peace, surcease;

more than all that, some ground-sound, ground-note,   

sown in us now, that swells in us, all of us,   

echo of love we had, have, for world, for our world,

on which we seem finally mere swarm, mere deluge,

mere matter self-altered to tumult, to noise,

cacophonous blitz of destruction, despoilment,

din from which every emotion henceforth emerges,

and into which falters, slides, sinks, and subsides:

sigh-sound of lament, of remorse; sob-sound of rue,   

of, still, always, ever sadder and sadder sad joy.

It's the kiss of the tears stinging and cold, the sum of the years, the story untold, in the heart of our hearts, the heart of the soul, at the heart of the hopes and the fears that we've known, know that we'll know, we were throwing time away, breathlessly throwing time away. Throwing time away, recklessly throwing time away: REST IN POWER, CROCUS BEHEMOTH, Owner of One of Two Permanent Seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game:

That's this shitty blog's Theme Song Two. There are two permanent seats in My Sillyass Desert Island Five Game, David Thomas' projects in general (and there are many - Two Pale Boys, notably) and of course Pere Ubu in particular sit in one of them. More later maybe, I'm hoping for not

My Personal Theme Song One, easily the Ubu song I've played on cassette, CD, digital, YouTube, in my head, and, wait, now the 16th time today, most, cause. Please play it loud