I'm disturbed I'm not more disturbed by my descent (or ascent) into the non-verbal, it's speeding up, both my descent (or ascent) and my being disturbed I'm not more disturbed. Life in a world without kayfabe where kayfabe is constantly broadcast, without winks, and constantly understood as breaking itself, it makes me write horrible sentences like the first two in this paragraph. Here, let me say it better:
This is a blog, of course, which exists to talk to itself, to me, and is worth no more than any vanity project, including art created in lieu of verbalizing the thought. I'm disturbed I'm not more disturbed by my dwindling interest in monologues here while quickly acknowledging that this joint still vitally assists me to process life in a dangerous and weirdass world without kayfabe where kayfabe is constantly broadcast, without winks, and constantly understood as breaking itself in the act of reestablishing itself, hence the sanity-salving side-effects of the grids, the (other people's) poems, the music, but barking as if there is kayfabe that needs breaking? Getting if not gotten old. What I mean to say is
This the the eleventh attempt at a monologue for this post, since I no longer write in my paper tablets, since I no longer type in my digital tablet, since I only type here and delete the proceeding draft when starting the next, what existed in the first ten attempts are archived in my increasingly non-verbal brain and may or not appear on this page in the future in their original form and may arise not from memory but as new thoughts, a good (or bad) thing: I'm disturbed I'm not more disturbed by such disorder and chaos and lack of damn about it. Here, last and bottom third of the self-portrait posted as alternative monologue to this post's typed monologue, you didn't go look at it when I posted a link to it in the last post
People I work with at both GW and American (especially) tell me trustworthy bosses up their chain of command are advising they look where to jump before the imminent push is delivered
Flem Snopes just married the pregnant-but-not-with-his-kid Eula Varner, the fuck am I doing in Yoknapatawpha County at the turn of the 20th century? I'd forgotten Faulkner can be laugh-out-loud funny. When I'm not there I'm in Acadian Canada in the mid-seventeenth century witnessing the genocide and ethnic cleansing of indigenous North Americans (though, in a typical if vital Vollmann digression, I just spent 50 pages with Iñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola in sixteenth century Spain before his beatification), the fuck am I doing there? and when I'm not there I'm in David Ohle's Pisstown, I know what I'm doing here. I'm grateful that I'm reading and reading well: I've failed a dozen novels, old and new, first reads and rereads, in the past six months, I blame me
Strangest days of my life. Reflexive tick: when my daughter is my age it will be 2059, the Earth will be here but will the world? The Faulkner, Vollmann, Ohle novels, the lust for power by assholes is a major theme, it occurs to me that humans would have destroyed the world already if they only had the means, and now that they have the means and the end seems unstoppably inevitable I don't want to read fiction about assholes set in today. Why this is reassuring to me - that humans are no worse than ever they just have the means to enact greater and greater assholosity - is, at best, a coping mechanism that offsets my compulsive documentation of said current assholosity. Too few people are freaking the fuck out, and whatever miniscule chance there is to stop our immiseration and extinction is evaporating exponentially faster by the second. How 'bout that hockey game, huh?
I actually wanted to bump the George birthday post from the top, fuck me. Music too, sounds I once loved unto never conceiving I'd not only not mind not hearing them for a very long time if not ever fucking again are increasing with clusterfuck's swelling and deepening. I listened to *All Things Must Pass* past Tuesday after posting the birthday, at first I vibrated like always but by "Wah Wah," gone; was horrified but unsurprised. I won't truly worry about my head until hiking with L and playing disc golf suck and being finally incapable of reading anything or listening to anything (I've long since stopped watching anything), but my head is changing, not all for the bad but most, and it's not just aging towards my skeleton days. Yes, I changed the name in the title of this post from the line in the Ashbery poem the title comes from. Ashbery still works for me
Éliane Radigue died this week. If you look at my bandcamp page you'd see some of her music and many artists I would not be listening to now if I hadn't discovered Radigue decades ago. My current immersion (to L's annoyance when she's in my car) in ambience and drone and noise directly related to Radigue's seminal music. I've been listening constantly since news of her death. Radigue's music still makes me vibrate and vibrate more resonantly than ever, I'm (almost more relieved than) delighted to report. Need some of the toeholds to my past, yinz
"Again, just a perfect example of Blue MAGA team-sport denialism. Feigned ignorance as a political policy. The "average Biden scandal" was funding a genocide he lied about knowing the severity of while his staff actively hid his obvious mental and cognitive decline for two entire years"
"In the past 24hrs the WaPo has run pieces arguing for (1) expanding NATO (2) regime change in Cuba (3) regime change in Iran (4) opposition to a ban on congressional stock trading (5) cutting “red tape” to expand AI energy capacity (6) getting rid of social security altogether"
As though founded by some weird religious sect
It is a paper disk, partially lit up from behind
With testaments to its cragginess, many of them
Illegible, covering most of its surface. In the hours
Between midnight and 4 AM it assumes a fitful
But calm sedentary existence, and it is then that
You may reach in and take out a name, any name,
And it will be your own, at least while
The walls of Bill’s villa resonate with the intermittent,
Migraine-like drone of motorized gondolas and the distant
Murmur of cats. To be treated, at times like these,
To free speech is an aspect of the dream and of Dreamland
In general that asserts an even larger
View of the universe pinned on the midnight-blue
Backcloth of the universe that can’t understand
Who all these people are, and about what
So much fuss is being made; it ignores its own entrails
And we love it even more for it until we too
Are parted like curtains across the empty stage of its memory.
The house was for living in,
So much was sure. But when the ways split
And we saw out over what was after all
Water and dawn, and prayed to the rocks
Overhead, and no answer was forthcoming,
It was then that the cosmic relaxer released us.
We were together on such a day. You, oddly
But becomingly dressed, pointed out that that
Day is today, the moral. All that.
Day after tomorrow is another personal holy day and I'd never forgive myself if I remembered and didn't post (and I didn't remember Auden's birthday and wouldn't have posted if I hadn't been reminded, fuck me). The last February 25 post will be the last February 25 this shitty blog is still alive. Here's a hint
Since I plan to leave it up top through the weekend (and may well fail) a grid below before the links go stale, plus this: Pash Katel celebrating in the US gold-winning ice-soccer team's dressing room (on your dime) as the overtime goal-scoring hero cracker-speechifies Stephen Miller's dream psyop hit. Dump is the idiot savant of lucky, though imagine how much fun it'd've been if Canada had won on a controversial goal in which America clearly was cheated, troops would be crossing the border as I type this. (On ice-soccer: I've been in Michigan motels when a state peewee ice-soccer tournament is a within 50 mile radius of the town, I guarantee you the ice-soccer dads are magafucks to a one, and their eagerly cracker-groomed kids the next generation). Here is my not-a-team's new crest
O, and Dump posted an AI video of *HIM* scoring the overtime goal, imagine how much more dumpmeltdown tomorrow night's SOTU would be if Canada had won, it still feels like a trainwreck a-coming, L wants me to watch it with her, I said yes. Reminder: Dump won with a US victory, he would have won more if if Canada had won on a controversial goal in which America clearly was cheated (and imagine if it was an African-Canadian who'd cheated America's white-to-a-man (do *not* underestimate how significant that is to too many American white men) ice-soccer team). The American Equation, sponsored by Shitlordco. Also too. There's new Hen Ogledd and it's gorgeous and angry and necessary:
"This same tactic to funnel outrage over intentional, lawless police violence into **more resources for police** was used in response to Bloody Sunday"
"Every one of these guys is stupid. Every one. We may look back w disdain on the culture of the 50s and 60s but at least those buzzcuts & long skirts got us to the fucking moon"
The braincase was loose and the rest saw pie melting
we'd have to come home to the lineaments of fire
a lot of squatting included with the sleeping
I imagine pennants with the clothing closing in
dimity fudge due to silence in the breccias
partial poinsettias they lived on Olive Street
inclined toward wicked pencils we stayed
us jamokes quite worn through and bundled
to blow things up beyond all proportion
and crow in wacky dingle a portion of cheek
dried in detonator the telemetry theater
now the cheese quarry its more than human wails
present time now added it's long past time
to get the gargoyles to descend a history of pokers
then someone up near the ceiling he turns and
silence in the Vanguard silence to bring things to
then someone blew it or is this the copper time?
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
The Traditional High Egoslavian Holy Day Auden's Birthday Post. Born 119 years ago today. I always post that photo, then Musee Des Beaux Arts (it still gets better with each rereading) and then some version of these paragraphs:
Some personal history: besides taking classes from Anthony Hecht, I did basic research grunt work for him on his final two books of criticism in exchange for his company, On the Laws of the Poetic Arts and The Hidden Law, a book specifically about Auden's poetry, which Hecht respected deeply. In the process of the research for and conversations with Hecht over years I must have read the majority of Auden's poems at least once, some countless times, some, like the above and below, literally dozens of dozens of times.
I've told some version of this story countless times: I was hired by Georgetown University mid-August, I sought Hecht out immediately and asked to audit his Fall semester grad poetry class, telling him not only was I only a Georgetown staffer but I hadn't an undergraduate degree and asking please let me audit the class. It focused on five main poets - Frost, Eliot, Auden, Bishop, and Wilbur - but we spent more than half the semester on Auden alone. I've probably spent more time with Auden than with any other poet, and if I only read him now on his birthday, I can pull up countless poems in my head whenever I want.
EPITAPH ON A TYRANT
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
THE FALL OF ROME
The piers are pummelled by the waves; In a lonely field the rain Lashes an abandoned train; Outlaws fill the mountain caves. Fantastic grow the evening gowns; Agents of the Fisc pursue Absconding tax-defaulters through The sewers of provincial towns. Private rites of magic send The temple prostitutes to sleep; All the literati keep An imaginary friend. Cerebrotonic Cato may Extol the Ancient Disciplines, But the muscle-bound Marines Mutiny for food and pay. Caesar's double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK On a pink official form. Unendowed with wealth or pity, Little birds with scarlet legs, Sitting on their speckled eggs, Eye each flu-infected city. Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast.
THE MORE LOVING ONE
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
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