“Having done nothing to drain the Washington swamp, the President now luxuriates in its warm waters” [NYT]

Like Donald Trump before him, Moore is proof that there is no depravity so unforgivable, no behavior so immoral, that it assures a candidate will lose his party’s voters. What cannot be condoned will be denied. What cannot be denied will be ignored. What cannot be ignored has not yet been discovered...Klein

Last year’s discovery was that if I treated my seriously held thoughts as ridiculous jokes I wound up not just with good absurdist material but with a revealingly authentic portrayal of my thoughts (for my “seriously held thoughts” were in fact absurd poses); thus, what I have come to refer to in interior memos as “Mad Monologues”:

The Man with the Ladder, Fingercise (with the health bar), Butcher of The Present, To a cut

This year’s discovery was that perhaps the reason my fragments rarely amounted to wholes was simple imaginative lethargy on my part; that I was the sort of busy but lazy person of whom Thoreau was probably thinking when he said, “he who works much does not work hard” and so what was needed was to push myself to get on with it a little bit, which is what might have somewhat occurred with this short story in five posts: Achuches 1 2 3 4 5|.

Straight Comedy: The Laver Confronts Lord Fridge Corner, List of There Will Be Blood lines to recite throughout your workday

Poems: More traditional, less reactionary, most successful.

Continuing Series: Stream BED: (3) (2) (1) :: Plant: Freedom of Thought ; New Hole. UnTamed: Feels like a Poncho ; The Nature of The Ring, its Position and Cruelty. Billby etc.: Jeffers, Time to begin,Henry ASSUSS: (1) (2)

Promising Fragments: NEXT (i)

Sci-fi: (Egyptons and Helephemes, Italian Brain, Ice Machine*, Spaceless Area*, ) APPLES

Imitations: Dickinson, Whitman, Sorrentino.

Overwritten: nothing can be done to save this one but it reminds of a curious aspect of that kind of bad writing we call overwriting, which is this:

Often times, one reaches an impasse with a piece of writing and, after setting it aside for a while, the longer the better, a solution or new direction will present itself. But overwriting seems to destroy this very capacity for a piece to be seen in a different light over time. One sets it aside, returns to it much later, and it is still as unyieldingly unpleasant and defective as before, as if it and its badness has been stuck in time by your efforts over it. Its badness has become indestructible, laminated, precisely because you have worked so hard to improve it.

Complete list.

Concordances: “Hands” in Winesburg, Ohio (will probably do a cleaner, more involved version of this next year); Plants in Wasps

Quotations: Intelligence is simply a multiplier of stupidity (Proust) ; Two Darknesses (Baldwin); Pen is “torpedo to him” (Johnson) ; Palinurus (Cyril Connolly) ; “perhaps the sexes are more related than we think” (Rilke) ; “Clear as the air” ; Disembodied (Coetzee) ; “those who have an excess of fortune’s goods, strength, wealth, friends, and the like, are not willing to be governed and do not know how to be” (Aristotle) ; only in the world I fill up a place ; “IT” / On the Road

Notes: The “BEINGONAUGHT” ; Dreams are the exercise of biology ; Unprofitable Servants ; ideas ; The Future Of The Novel (something Dan Green said); Bookends of Ikuru ; Swann Rejoices ; Note on “Episode of Hands” ; Fossils, fossilized memories, and “Eternal Return” / Free speech possible without “dialectic”? Evolution of footnotes in fiction? how to explain the surreal as modernist? (Might have better answer to this now.) Ginsberg (as suggested by Today) present at Beckett’s filming of “Film”? brain qua voodoo doll Twain and Hejinian * (Schopenhauer, Proust and so on) ;

French Passages: Fanés (Proust); * ; “Ces savanes de Paris formées par des toit nivelés” “lapin” ; * ; Une Dentelle S’abolit ; “Peu de gens connaissent la mort”

Greek Passages: Strabo: moral excellence of poets ; Pindar, Olympian 7.43-47 “cloud of forgetfulness” ; Libation Bearers, 59-60 “more than god” ; Pindar, Olympian 7.52-53; Strabo 3.1.5 ; Pindar, Pythian 2.79-81 ; Job, II 9-10 ; Pausanias 10.22.3 ; Pindar, Pythia 1.22-24 ; Pindar, Pythia 4 17-18 ; The Libation Bearers, 61-65 ; Phaedo [91ξ–δ] Thucydides 1.2.2

English Vocab: Ferule ; Cosmolined Carborundum; Ticking (n.); Glacis ; Taupe ; Andaman Islands ; Inframince ; Stryper ;

Shapes: thoughts on shapes * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Other: Dream with Sienna Chicken ; I have just conjugated aprender, Shelley Duvall, Shelley Long , Level, Equal, Aqua, Water

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