The Game Enforces Smirks; but We Have Seen the Moon in Lonely Alleys Make a Grail of Laughter of an Empty Ash Can, and Through All Sound of Gaiety and Quest Have Heard a Kitten in the Wilderness

• Napoleon update as promised: that's him half-an-hour ago. Vet came yesterday, Napoleon's infection is completely gone, he got his stitches out. I said to the vet I'm surprised Napoleon has been so unprotesting about his confinement, the vet said most cats are OK with it. And at two this morning the protesting began. He wants out.
• Civil disobedience for an age of total surveillance.
• Cor.
• Walter Benjamin, for those of you who do.
• William Carlos Williams, for those of you who do, who should.
• Read ten Gabriel García Márquez short stories. 
• Transylvanian Trilogy? Anyone?
• Listened to Sea and Cake yesterday, it'd been too long.

CHAPLINESQUE

Hart Crane

We make our meek adjustments,

Contented with such random consolations

As the wind deposits

In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find

A famished kitten on the step, and know

Recesses for it from the fury of the street,

Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk

Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb

That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,

Facing the dull squint with what innocence

And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies

More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;

Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.

We can evade you, and all else but the heart:

What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen

The moon in lonely alleys make

A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,

And through all sound of gaiety and quest

Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.