Glimmering Brim Against Light Lifting There

As soon as I remembered Mark Rothko's birthday I knew I'd spend the next two days listening to Morton Feldman. I mentioned in the Shostakovich birthday post that I don't do my Sillyass Deserted Island Five game with non-rock composers but if I did Shostakovich would have one of the permanent spots. So would Morton Feldman.

• A quick FUCK YOU to google on its birthday.
• Oligarchs applaud Snowden.
• Chicken-shit US media.
• This past summer the North Pole melted.
• Playing with icons.
• Batch of links.
• Architectures of pedagogy.
• Contemporary research paradigms.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• Investigations into the essence of daily writing.
• Internal Tough-Lock.
• Another review of Pynchon's Bleeding Edge archived here to read after I've finished, which will be this weekend if all goes as planned. Which means if there is content here this weekend, it might be just songs and poems and birthdays (if there are any worth noting). 
• Looking for each of us.
• Click on the Feldman tag below for much more.
• When Feldman met Beckett. Unfortunately, I can't find the whole opera, if anyone can please send me the link(s).

LINE OF DESCENT

Forrest  Gander

Against the backdark, bright

                              riband flickers of heat lightning.    Nearer

                hills begin to show, to come clear

                                                             as a hard, detached

                                                                                            and glimmering brim

                                             against light lifting there.    And here, pitched over

the braided arroyo choked with debris,

                                                             a tent, its wan, cakey,

                                road-rur color.    On the front stake, two

                green dragonflies, riding each other, pause,

                                             Look! cries the boy, running, the father behind him

                                 running too—

                                                               and the canyon opening

                out in front of them its magisterial consequence, cramming

                               vertiginous air down its throat—

                                                                                           to snatch him

                                                                    from the scarp.

Who Has Slipped from the Ferry or Leaped from the Bridge

Bryan Ferry is sixty-fucking-eight years old today. Christ, we're all old. High Egoslavian Holy Day, his music, solo too (some of it) but of course primarily Roxy Music, is in the inner circle of acts that rotate in and out of the two non-permanent spots in my Sillyass Deserted Island Game. Here's some kayfabe - I look back in archives at these birthday's to see the songs I want to repeat; a year ago today I was creeped out that Ferry looked too much like Mitt Romney. It wasn't fear of a Romney presidency - long-timers can vouch I bet pints in January 2009 that Obama would be reelected (and none took the bet) - I hated that any flavor asshole put music I loved in my head. If Obama looked like Kate Bush that would ruin a bit of her music for me too.

• I survived, I got over it, I had forgot.
• The Return of ScubaDog. I'd do that here if I could. Yes, I know it looks much better on a wide screen than a square screen. Fuck it.
• Which way to heaven?
• Swarovski Kristallnacht.
• We like Ike, man.
• This week in water.
• BRT!
• Purple Line! Of course Columbia Country Club won. It's only twelve feet, but fuck the Columbia Country Club.
• I don't care.
• Laytonsville! One of my vivid memories as a six year old was news of the fire that burned down the Laytonsville fire house - I was the kid who played fireman, who would take empty shoe boxes and make fire stations out of them. There was a photo of it on the front page of the Washington Sun that I saved, and Elric's father would drive us out every weekend to look at the ruins which smoldered for two months.
• SeatSix, who wasn't born yet when Elric's father would drive us out to look at the smoldering ruins of the firehouse (and wouldn't be for another seven years), remembering Ligeti's metronome piece, posted here often, sends me metronomes.
• UPDATE! Gaddis, for those of you who do.
• On Nobel lit bettting.
• Dear _______.
• White out.

SOUNDS OF THE RESURRECTED DEAD MAN'S FOOTSTEPS, #17

Marvin Bell

1. At the Walking Dunes, Eastern Long Island
   

That a bent piece of straw made a circle in the sand.   

That it represents the true direction of the wind.

Beach grass, tousled phragmite.

Bone-white dishes, scoops and bowls, glaring without seeing.   

An accordion of creases on the downhill, sand drapery.   

The cranberry bushes biting down to survive.

And the wind’s needlework athwart the eyeless Atlantic.   

And the earless roaring in the shape of a sphere.

A baritone wind, tuned to the breath of the clouds.   

Pushing sand that made a hilly prison of time.

For wind and water both move inland.

Abrading scrub — the stunted, the dwarfed, the bantam.   

A fine sandpaper, an eraser as wide as the horizon.

Itself made of galaxies, billions against the grain.

Sand: the mortal infinitude of a single rock.

2. Walking in the Drowning Forest

Pitch pine, thirty-five-foot oaks to their necks in sand.   

That the ocean signals the lighthouse.

Gull feathers call to the fox that left them behind.   

Impressions of deer feet, dog feet and gull claws.   

The piping plover in seclusion.

Somewhere the blind owl to be healed at sunset.   

Here is artistry beyond self-flattery.

A rootworks wiser than the ball of yarn we call the brain.   

A mindless, eyeless, earless skin-sense.

To which the crab comes sideways.

With which the sunken ship shares its secrets.

From which no harness can protect one, nor anchor fix one.   

He knows, who has paddled an hour with one oar.   

He knows, who has worn the whitecaps.

Who has slipped from the ferry or leaped from the bridge.   

To be spoken of, though no one knows.

Born 116, 110 & 107 Years Ago Today

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by ten food steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant in the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.

William Faulker, Light in August.

Mark Rothko born 110 years ago today. And one more piece of Shostakovich, born 107 years ago today.

A Beautiful Cacaphony Flutters in the Brightness of the Dead Calm as True Objects Lost in the Politeness Fill the Grail of a New Primitive

• Dmitri Shastokovich was born 107 years ago today. High Egoslavian Holy Day. I don't play the Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game with composers, though if I did Shostakovich would have a permanent seat.
• You're stupid, therefore I'm smart, QED.
• I'm told an unprincipled elitish asshole is an ambitious hypocrite who cares only for his own political fortune, goddamn the health of the nation if necessary. Oh my.
• And now that bet is paid off, G.
• Robert Reich, Inequality's Intellectual Fraudster.
• Dear James Goodale: the culture of lying is a feature, not a bug.
• I am snubbed again.
• Deleuze, for those of you who do, or: Life and the writer again.
• Prunella's latest playlist.
• Alcohol + syndrome + painting.
• The argument over Coetzee.
• On hating Mumford & Sons. You could play me a mega-big Mumford & Sons song, I've no doubt heard it, I couldn't identify it. I have heard what the act is and have heard the hate.
• The dress code of Mumford & Sons.
• Mingus.
• Gaddis's letters. He's America's best unknown writer?

TRIPTYCH FOR BELIEVERS

Richard Tagett

I

Hung up on body parts in the particulate daylight, you step out of a Beckett play to find yourself in a memory resisting itself, as meat hits the fan so to speak against the white blanket of the grainy void. You never know where it’s going, the body, the boy swathed in bullets with those black eyes pissing a letter-opener in the desert mud near a disabled Mercedes. When things enter the room you think bazooka and check your hat. A puddle of warm ice-cream in anticipation. Here’s where Coney Island drops like a discarded napkin and you can’t go home again. Mucous brimming the banks, a cake of dust in the shape of a rocking chair ticking away. But soon it will snow as exquisite dogs languish from inside a sandwich tied to a parachute. No time for ballads, the table is set.

II

Light solidifies in cells, the keeper of lost keys. They don’t belong to anyone, the keys. Playing the game backwards reveals nothing a blind child could not guess by the hairs on his arm. The lips on old men are lockboxes in the terminal of no-knowing without gratitude for the despair of angels. You have to suffer, you have to fill up in order to implode, to be recognized for the necessities of commerce. They unhinge, finally, the doors you walk through into phantom stairwells in telephonic hum smelling of wet coal and doll’s hair. Precipitous adjectives gush from a cracked faucet in the chancellery restroom. Someone is stifling laughter from underneath a card table where an electric utility had fallen from his sleeve. They say that trussed birds derive no pleasure from the music of mangled wagons and that gas seeps like a well-kept secret imperiling dust mites in the spleens of hooded maidens locked away from the light. Everything is descending, even the scholarship of the ancient adverbs. Mouths twist into almonds and you wonder how the noise can drown itself out with nothing but nouns and dinner plates and gallows, with history a hiccup waiting to happen.

III

The music is an absence of colliding masses. You can cut your feet on the proverbial and be too close to hear it, the other music, the suffocation of things that can’t fly. A beautiful cacophony flutters in the brightness of dead calm as true objects lost in the politeness of daylight fill the grail of a new primitive. You choke on little candles and all through the night your legs cramp in the sweat of the moonlight. For no good reason a tenderness of geese is billowing in the curtains, as holes in the face open and close and paper scorches sky with futile encryption. Those armchairs foundering in the scum of the surf. Deafness craving disaster green in the spine, knowing the cocktail party’s over. Now it’s all red and your lips are trembling in believability, but it’s only a flickering image in the dark quadrant of your eye bending the light as they mow the daisies under the stars, for no good reason.

Speaker Holds Up the Talks Held Last

• Sonic Youth is no more, doesn't mean there's no new Kim Gordon music. Downloaded Body/Head yesterday, you should today.
• When the state floods the zone reform is dead.
• Metadata = surveillance.
• Cliff notes for a pile-on.
• Samantha Powers has a sad.
• The answer is no. What will save the university are bogus masters and certificate programs awarded for the students' checks clearing, or at least that what provosts are betting on. And yes, the provosts have a different definition of what saving the university is than you or me.
• How different is de Blasio?
• My future hell.
• Blimp hovers over Frederick!
• Silicon and surveillance. Another review of Pynchon's Bleeding Edge that I'm bookmarking here to read after I've finished the novel. Halfway, it's OK, I'd be lying if I said it was love.
• The Ideal English Major (h/t wood s lot)
• The boy with spirograph eyes.
• RIP Alvaro Mutis. I cannot recommend the novellas of Maqroll highly enough. I've two extra copies, who wants one?
• UPDATE! Here's on obit from The Guardian.
• Quick question.
• Love Song.
• Tomorrow is a High Egoslavian Holy Day. Get your Shostakovich request in soon. Or not.

THE COUNTRY AUTUMNS

Clark Coolidge

But it could not be brought to see what it

could be brought. And the leaves are

away again, teamed. A parent at the

last and a parent in the middle. And

as stones I thought it right.

Two plates, and on the other side all the

forest pieces. The clock says stay.

The books lower the earth, and in gardens

flat stones spin. The volume was of waiting.

Today is today, until the preposition taken up.

Next to the tree sways.

The sky in pieces the leaves part the

leaves piece together. To and from a hand

given all directions. The bark comes from

below. Takes from the books of the moves under

the sky. Speaker holds up the talks held last.

Motors the dust and the yellow syllables.

A slant on which was never here or

only partly.

Born 87 Years Ago Today, 107 Years Ago Wednesday, 68 Years Ago Thursday

This is to note I did not forget that John Coltrane was born 87 years ago today. What I did forget was to ask Hamster for his playlist more than 24 hours in advance; I gave him fifteen minutes after he'd already got to work, so my fault.

 





I should mention there are two Egoslavian Holy Days imminent, Shostakovich's birthday Wednesday, Bryan Ferry's Thursday, so if you've requests get them to me or, alternatively, not.

Watchable but Not Worth Watching

The Calico Cat Stretches Her Long Body Out Across the Top of My Computer Monitor, Yawning, Its Little Primitive Head a Cave of Possibility

• Nick Cave is 56 today, and that's this shitty blog's Theme Song Six and the Offical Bleggalgazing Anthem.
• Fourteen Nick Cave collaborations.
• Re: last nights post, for the record, I think the pattern of Napoleon's disappearing and the activation and success of the Napoleon Alert System is related to good weather, when there is a string of nice days for a cat, not hot, not cold, not wet, not scary, he roams. If the days string together we don't see him for days, after seven, six, five days I activate the alert, the changeability of weather running the about circuit. It was the thunderstorms and change in barometer that brought Napoleon home yesterday, not the Napoleon Alert System. I've not proof of the first nor proof against the second, mind.
• In defense of the humanities.
• Someone in the Washington Post said today what I said last Tuesday about the Navy Yard shootings (I'm not going to make you link back anymore, I know you don't link back, I said Navy Yard shootings, old news by Thursday except to those directly and secondarily affected, whose pain I in no means seek to minimalize).
• Dying for control: an exhausted culture, founded on psychological manipulation.
• What if the kleptocracy wants a default?
• Large predictions in history.
• Digestive apparatus of Babylon.
• Why is Canada so boring?
• Concrete Islands/Interstitial Sublime.
• New Inquiry's Sunday readings.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekend links.
• Hart Crane: general aims and theories.
• Peaches Shuttleworth has arrived!
• Dancing Kafka.
• How well does contemporary fiction address radical politics?

• SeatSix, who I love like a brother, is a big Concrete Blonde fan, today is Johnette Napolitano's birthday, SeatSix sends a playlist. I like most of the songs, really like a couple, really hate Joey.
• God is a Bullet.
• Take Me Home.
• Everybody Knows.
• Mexican Moon.
• Scene of a Perfect Crime.
• Someday.
• Someday (Letterman).
• When I Was a Fool.
• Dance Along the Edge.
• Joey, requested, would be here if I played Joey on this shitty blog, I won't play Joey here even for a brother.
• Lullaby.
• Darkening of the Light.
• Days and Days.
• Caroline.
• Tomorrow Wendy.
• As always, playlists are welcome whether for birthdays or any occasion. As always, feel free to Bartleby me.
• New Mazzy Star video! They are playing Silver Spring the Monday night before Thanksgiving, The Fillmore, $37.50, anyone? As always, feel free to Bartleby me.
• Live Ubu from 1980! Includes Thomas singing Oklahoma.

ZEN LIVING

Dick Allen

Birdsongs that sound like the steady determined tapping

of a shoemaker's hammer,

or of a sculptor making tiny ball-peen dents in a silver plate,

wake me this morning. Is it possible the world itself can be happy? The calico cat

stretches her long body out across the top of my computer monitor,

yawning, its little primitive head a cave of possibility.

And I'm ready again

to try and see accidents, the over and over patterns

of double-slit experiments a billionfold

repeated before me. If I had great patience,

I could try to count the poplar, birch and oak

leaves in their shifting welter outside my bedroom window

or the almost infinitesimal trails of thought that flash and flash

everywhere, as if decaying particles inside a bubble chamber,

windshield raindrops, lake ripples. However,

instead I go to fry some bacon, crack two eggs

into the cast-iron skillet that's even older than this house,

and on the calendar (each month another oriental fan

where the climbing solitary is dwarfed . . . or on dark blue oceans

minuscular fishing boats bob beneath gigantic waves)

X out the days, including those I've forgotten.