Putin critic Alexei Navalny has died, Russia’s prison service says
Surprising absolutely no one. RIP.
📃
Daily(ish) poem → 00304 ◊ Walking Like a Robin ◊ Bernadette Mayer
Walking Like a Robin
take 3 or 4 steps then stop
look smell taste touch & hear
is there anything to eat?
oh look, there’s some caviar
it must be my birthday, thanks
i must be very old, like seventy
i guess i’m falling apart, i’ll just
sew myself back together but will it last?
please take a piece of me back home, each piece
is anti-war and don’t pay your rent, in fact
remember: property is robbery, give everybody
everything, other birds walk this way too
—Bernadette Mayer
—found in Works and Days (2016)
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00046 ¶ from The Sense of an Ending ¶ Julian Barnes
I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her. I shall live as people in novels live and have lived. Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance. However ... who said that thing about ‘the littleness of life that art exaggerates’? There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.
But time ... how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time ... give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
—Julian Barnes
—found in The Sense of an Ending (2011)
Daily(ish) poem → 00303 ◊ Dark Matter Ode ◊ Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Dark Matter Ode
You’ll say you can’t remember, you were too
Young—the idea wasn’t yours. Or, maybe
You’ll feel the need to feel misunderstood
And say, You don’t understand, You don’t
Understand, You don’t. But I was there
When the sky closed. I know that brief darkness
Feels good. That God works on no sleep as certain
As Br’er Sleep reclining in your lampshade,
Sweet Br’er Sleep who never knows sleep. His song
Swells in my wrists as they hang on your crib.
Leaning in, inspecting you like a crook,
I am the poet in his pillory.
I see you as free. I sing of the wood.
And I sing of the bars. I am the dunce
Of the stars who sings of the bars.
Poets know time is a dead man walking:
We are all the terrorist Tichborne—.
I love that you sleep so softly despite
The virus of my verbal flailings flowing
Through your veins. One day you will be facing
It, the reflective black immensity
Of it all, and you will seethe and set out
Into a world of science and anger
I can’t know or imagine. Today won’t
Matter to you because today to you
Won’t be today by then, which went like this:
There was the IMAX movie about Dark
Matter and the protests about how Black
Lives Matter, but then for you the same sleep
And then a million years from now someone
Will discover that something like this one
Moment could have happened, could have mattered,
That you asleep in your crib were a god
In the machine and that poem your father
Wrote you was a fucking living weapon.
—Rowan Ricardo Phillips
—found in Living Weapon (2020)
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00045 ¶ from The Blue Guitar ¶ John Banville
I hardly sleep, these days, these nights. Or, rather, I go to sleep, put under by jorums of drink and fistfuls of jumbo knock-out pills. Then at three or four in the morning my eyelids snap open like faulty window blinds and I find myself in a state of lucid alertness the equal of which I never seem to achieve in daytime. The darkness at that hour is of a special variety too, more than merely the absence of light but a medium to itself, a kind of motionless black glair in which I am held fast, a felled beast prowled about by the jackals of doubt and worry and mortal dread. Above me there is no ceiling, only a yielding, depthless void into which at any moment I might be pitched headlong. I listen to the muffled labourings of my heart and try in vain not to think of death, of failure, of the loss of all that is dear, the world with its things and creatures. The curtained window stands beside the bed like an indistinct dark giant, monitoring me with fixed, maniacal attention. At times the stillness in which I lie comes to seem a paralysis, and I’m compelled to get up and prowl in a state of jittery panic through the empty rooms, upstairs and down, not bothering to switch on the lights. The house around me hums faintly, so that I seem to be inside a large machine, a generator, say, on stand-by, or the engine of a steam train shunted into a siding for the night and still trembling with memories of the day’s fire and speed and noise. I will stop at a landing window and press my forehead to the glass and look out over the sleeping town and think what a Byronic figure I must cut, perched up here, solitary and tragic-seeming, no more to go a-roving. This is the way it is with me, always looking in or looking out, a chilly pane of glass between me and a remote and longed-for world.
—John Banville
—found in The Blue Guitar (2015)
Finally, Tuesday would have been the late writer David Foster Wallace’s 50th birthday. Although best known for his fiction and his personal essays, Wallace wrote a few incredible pieces of sportswriting. In “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart”, a meditation on how elite athletes operate, Wallace included these lines that occasionally come to mind whenever I see a Kobe Bryant or Derrick Rose at the line late in a ballgame: “The real secret behind top athletes' genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.”
Source: Hunter Felt in NBA: More Linsanity, Miami Heat thrive, and Greg Oden vs. Kevin Durant [archive]
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00044 ¶ from Crosstalk ¶ Connie Willis
Daily(ish) poem → 00301 ◊ Trapeze ◊ Dorothea Tanning
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00043 ¶ from The Lorax ¶ Dr. Seuss
The practice also has a whiff of the plot of Mel Brooks’s “The Producers”. The original idea of Brooks’ hustler protagonists Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom was to mount a play so awful that it would close immediately, and they can live off the unspent money they raised from bilking old ladies. When the show unexpectedly becomes a hit, they blow up the theater.
The biggest difference between the plot of “The Producers” and what happened to “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs Acme” is that in “The Producers,” the public got to see the play.
Truth.
I don’t know how to describe THIS IS HOW I MAKE BREAD, but you really should watch it. It feels like it comes with deep lore, but turns out no one knows the origin. And there’s a boffo soundtrack :). And bread.
The only thing worse than all the advertisements and repetitive commentary around the big US football game is the virtue signaling of those making sure we know they don’t care about it. I need to know less about what others don’t care about (and more about what they do).
Finished reading: The Humans: A Novel by Matt Haig 📚 – this story of an alien among, and observing, us is dark, delightful, funny, occasionally deeply sad, and ultimately (I hate to say it) sort of affirming? Broad comedy and deft, compact insight are both to be had. Highly recommended.
Daily(ish) poem → Quick Q&A II
Daily(ish) poem → 00300 ◊ February Augury ◊ Sarah Ghazal Ali
Finished reading: Topaz by Leon Uris 📚 – This one surprised me. In my mind, Uris wrote thrillers, but this is a good ol' Cold War espionage novel. You can tell this was written in the late 60s, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t old up well. Recommended if the era and genre are your things.
Daily(ish) poem → 00299 ◊ Mind ◊ Jorie Graham
Daily(ish) poem → 00298 ◊ Sonnet ◊ Graham Foust
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00042 ¶ from Offshore ¶ Penelope Fitzgerald