Is it time?
Could it be?
Yes -- Blog Roll Call!
You'll notice, the more astute of you, that I link to other blogs I enjoy and read. I've added a blog or two without fanfare, and I thought that it would be a nice time to introduce the other bloggers you'll find here . . .
Matt Elliott: What can I say about Matt Elliott that he has not said himself, written down, and posted to other blogs anonymously in order to increase his own popularity? In a word, nothing. He is one of the two finest worship leaders I have ever heard, a truly caring individual, with excellent taste in music, political allegiances, coffee, and books. He is, in short, much cooler than I am.
Jon Owen: The second of the greatest worship leaders I have ever heard is, of course, Kip Walker of the Crieve Hall church during his late 80's heyday . . . ok, that's overly cruel. No, indeed: Jon Owen is the other greatest worship leader I've been pleased to experience. Jon is the chaplain (and a Bible teacher) for Greater Atlanta Christian School, where I teach (not much longer, if the administration finds this blog, I'm sure) so I get to see him interact with kids almost daily. [SO AS NOT TO BE PERCIEVED AS JOKING, IRONY OFF] Jon wants everyone to have a personal relationship with Jesus; even more striking than that, he means it -- he really does -- and that's a wonderful thing to behold. [IRONY ON] He claps too much. But we love him anyway. Go Spartans!
Bev Dowdy: As blogs go, mine skulks about like the angry kid in the back of the class, trying desperately to hide yet yearning for attention so greatly I am willing to embarass myself totally just to be seen . . . yep, Bev's blog is the complete antithesis of mine. If you think that reasoned dialogue has gone the way of the Victrola only to be replaced by a loud tinny yelping, then I beg you to visit her blog. It's incredibly well done; it will make you think; it will make you (gulp) CHANGE your thinking. Bev teaches political science and government at GACS.
Mandy Richey: Mandy teaches civics, geography, and humanities at GACS. After graduation, she plans to attend the University of Tennessee at Martin and major in nursing . . . whoops! Got carried away, there; thought I was back announcing the homecoming court at a DHS football game . . . Mandy's great. Warning: she's very pious, sterile, and demure in her thinking, so it may be difficult to get an opinion on anything from her.
(Quick humor interlude: in order to include the DHS Golden Trojan football roster in the homecoming joke above, I actually had to track down my high school's website. Click here to see the best of what the web has to offer in West Tennessee! WARNING -- your head may actually explode with laughter when you see that "West TN Agriculture: The World View" is listed ABOVE the curriculum link . . . priorities, priorities!)
Matt Byars: Matt writes poetry, builds wooden furniture in the shop in his garage, teaches college English, plays a mean hand of Texas Hold'em, and isn't employed by GACS . . . what's that noise? Oh, it's everyone leaving my blog to read the cool guy's. Poop. I'm not even going to mention that he owns a plasma screen television. Hello? Is anyone left? Anyway, he's a great guy, with a great blog, and a perspective on life just skewed enough to be highly amusing. Read his blog!
I hope you have enjoyed this update . . . click and read on, my peeps! Word!
Monday, October 18, 2004
Found on www.handwritingwizard.com :
Analysis, Bs Denton:
Bs exaggerates about everything that has a physical nature. Although he may not intend to deceive or mislead, he blows things way out of proportion because that is the way he views them. He will be a good story teller. This exaggeration relates to all areas of his material world. Bs allows many people into his life because he is accepting and trusting. He is sometimes called gullible by his friends. That only really means that he trusts too many people. Bs has a vivid imagination.
Bs has a tendency to put things off, Bs procrastinates. He sometimes pretends to be busy, so he will not have to do whatever he is putting off. He is often late to appointments or deadlines. This usually leads to a great amount of effort at the last minute to meet the deadline. Procrastination is an important factor as it relates to his output on the job or at school. Remember, Bs will put it off until later. Procrastination is easily overcome through a simple stroke adjustment in the handwriting.
One way Bs punishes hisself is self directed sarcasm. He is a very sarcastic person. Often this sarcasm and "sharp tongued" behavior is directed at hisself.
Bs's true self-image is unreasonably low. Someone once told Bs that he wasn't a great and beautiful person, and he believed them. Bs also has a fear that he might fail if he takes large risks. Therefore he resists setting his goals too high, risking failure. He doesn't have the internal confidence that frees him to take risks and chance failure. Bs is capable of accomplishing much more than he is presently achieving. All this relates to his self-esteem. Bs's self-concept is artificially low. Bs will stay in a bad situation much too long... why? Because he is afraid that if he makes a change, it might get worse. It is hard for Bs to plan too far into the future. He kind of takes things on a day to day basis. He may tell you his dreams but he is living in today, with a fear of making a change. No matter how loud he speaks, look at his actions. This is perhaps the biggest single barrier to happiness people not believing in and loving themselves. Bs is an example of someone living with a low self-image, because their innate self-confidence was broken.
--------------------------------------------
I hate it when junk like this works.
A couple of things: one, would you trust analysis that included the word "hisself?"
Two, why, with all the positive comments, has this site not exploded with popularity? I can only wonder.
Analysis, Bs Denton:
Bs exaggerates about everything that has a physical nature. Although he may not intend to deceive or mislead, he blows things way out of proportion because that is the way he views them. He will be a good story teller. This exaggeration relates to all areas of his material world. Bs allows many people into his life because he is accepting and trusting. He is sometimes called gullible by his friends. That only really means that he trusts too many people. Bs has a vivid imagination.
Bs has a tendency to put things off, Bs procrastinates. He sometimes pretends to be busy, so he will not have to do whatever he is putting off. He is often late to appointments or deadlines. This usually leads to a great amount of effort at the last minute to meet the deadline. Procrastination is an important factor as it relates to his output on the job or at school. Remember, Bs will put it off until later. Procrastination is easily overcome through a simple stroke adjustment in the handwriting.
One way Bs punishes hisself is self directed sarcasm. He is a very sarcastic person. Often this sarcasm and "sharp tongued" behavior is directed at hisself.
Bs's true self-image is unreasonably low. Someone once told Bs that he wasn't a great and beautiful person, and he believed them. Bs also has a fear that he might fail if he takes large risks. Therefore he resists setting his goals too high, risking failure. He doesn't have the internal confidence that frees him to take risks and chance failure. Bs is capable of accomplishing much more than he is presently achieving. All this relates to his self-esteem. Bs's self-concept is artificially low. Bs will stay in a bad situation much too long... why? Because he is afraid that if he makes a change, it might get worse. It is hard for Bs to plan too far into the future. He kind of takes things on a day to day basis. He may tell you his dreams but he is living in today, with a fear of making a change. No matter how loud he speaks, look at his actions. This is perhaps the biggest single barrier to happiness people not believing in and loving themselves. Bs is an example of someone living with a low self-image, because their innate self-confidence was broken.
--------------------------------------------
I hate it when junk like this works.
A couple of things: one, would you trust analysis that included the word "hisself?"
Two, why, with all the positive comments, has this site not exploded with popularity? I can only wonder.
Monday, October 11, 2004
Overheard on xanga.com:
the_math_geek: i feel that a large portion of poetry (as well as modern art) is for the birds.
This is for you, Wes.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Transcript of an actual conversation from Winter Quarter 1998; Statesboro, GA, Seminar in Poetry Writing, Graduate, ENG 8809]
Professor: Good God, son! This is 1998! AND YOU'RE MOUTHING FORMALISM AT ME??!!! Are you Cleanth [expletive deleted] Brooks or something? Wake up and realize that you're not in [expletive deleted] Podunk, Tennessee, anymore!
BSD: Why are you yelling? All I said was that maybe . . .
Professor: You are a naive fool, that's all! Show some sense. SHOW SOME SENSE!
BSD (angrier): WHAT? What did I do?
Professor: New Criticism is dead!
BSD: I'm not a new critic! I 'm not Cleanth Brooks, or Robert Penn Warren, or Donald Davidson, or anybody else. I'm just not very, uh, very postmodern, I guess. I'm not a fan of deconstruction . . .
Professor (snorting): I'm sure Jacques Derrida's heartbroken. He's probably thinking of ways to convince your inimitable genius right now.
BSD (tearing up in frustration): LET ME FINISH! I just think that good poetry should mean something, that's all.
Professor (genuinely angry): WHAT ARE YOU? THREE YEARS OLD???!!! My God, my God. Poetry is dead! Nothing means anything, anymore! Poetry mean something? Modern poetry has no power to affect anyone or anything -- IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO!!!!
-------------------------------------------------------
A. Zolynas
The Man Who Had Singing Fits
He would begin unexpectedly anywhere,
bubbling into song at the Woolworth's cash register,
in the elevator, in the restaurant
as the waitress approached with coffee,
in board meetings.
The pale canary of his heart chirped
from its cage while all around him
we woke momentarily, startled
out of our cultural trance,
too amazed to be embarrassed.
His family and friends were used to these fits,
and we too became charmed
by his soft voice, the lilting, gentle song
that never quite made sense
but had something to do
with a quiet, confused love.
He would sing for a half minute,
and then he'd be back among us, no memory
of his departure or return, no memory
of the stream he'd dipped us all into,
that one running along just under
the surface of anything you and I
think we understand.
-------------------------------------------------------
Robert Lowell
For the Union Dead
"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."
The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.
My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.
Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,
shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.
Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die--
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.
On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.
The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .
Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."
The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.
Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.
---------------------------------------------------
William Butler Yeats
Sailing to Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
-------------------------------------------------------
Philip Larkin
Aubade
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare.
Not in remorse-- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused -- nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always.
Not to be here,
the_math_geek: i feel that a large portion of poetry (as well as modern art) is for the birds.
This is for you, Wes.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Transcript of an actual conversation from Winter Quarter 1998; Statesboro, GA, Seminar in Poetry Writing, Graduate, ENG 8809]
Professor: Good God, son! This is 1998! AND YOU'RE MOUTHING FORMALISM AT ME??!!! Are you Cleanth [expletive deleted] Brooks or something? Wake up and realize that you're not in [expletive deleted] Podunk, Tennessee, anymore!
BSD: Why are you yelling? All I said was that maybe . . .
Professor: You are a naive fool, that's all! Show some sense. SHOW SOME SENSE!
BSD (angrier): WHAT? What did I do?
Professor: New Criticism is dead!
BSD: I'm not a new critic! I 'm not Cleanth Brooks, or Robert Penn Warren, or Donald Davidson, or anybody else. I'm just not very, uh, very postmodern, I guess. I'm not a fan of deconstruction . . .
Professor (snorting): I'm sure Jacques Derrida's heartbroken. He's probably thinking of ways to convince your inimitable genius right now.
BSD (tearing up in frustration): LET ME FINISH! I just think that good poetry should mean something, that's all.
Professor (genuinely angry): WHAT ARE YOU? THREE YEARS OLD???!!! My God, my God. Poetry is dead! Nothing means anything, anymore! Poetry mean something? Modern poetry has no power to affect anyone or anything -- IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO!!!!
-------------------------------------------------------
A. Zolynas
The Man Who Had Singing Fits
He would begin unexpectedly anywhere,
bubbling into song at the Woolworth's cash register,
in the elevator, in the restaurant
as the waitress approached with coffee,
in board meetings.
The pale canary of his heart chirped
from its cage while all around him
we woke momentarily, startled
out of our cultural trance,
too amazed to be embarrassed.
His family and friends were used to these fits,
and we too became charmed
by his soft voice, the lilting, gentle song
that never quite made sense
but had something to do
with a quiet, confused love.
He would sing for a half minute,
and then he'd be back among us, no memory
of his departure or return, no memory
of the stream he'd dipped us all into,
that one running along just under
the surface of anything you and I
think we understand.
-------------------------------------------------------
Robert Lowell
For the Union Dead
"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."
The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.
My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.
Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,
shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.
Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die--
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.
On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.
The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .
Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."
The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.
Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.
---------------------------------------------------
William Butler Yeats
Sailing to Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
-------------------------------------------------------
Philip Larkin
Aubade
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare.
Not in remorse-- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused -- nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always.
Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels.
Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says
No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear -- no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink.
Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others.
Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Elizabeth Bishop
Casabianca
Love's the boy stood on the burning deck
trying to recite "The boy stood on
the burning deck." Love's the son
stood stammering elocution
while the poor ship in flames went down.
Love's the obstinate boy, the ship,
even the swimming sailors, who
would like a schoolroom platform, too,
or an excuse to stay
on deck. And love's the burning boy.
--------------------------------------------------
Elizabeth Bishop
Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore
From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
please come flying.
In a cloud of fiery pale chemicals,
please come flying,
to the rapid rolling of thousands of small blue drums
descending out of the mackerel sky
over the glittering grandstand of harbor-water,
please come flying.
Whistles, pennants and smoke are blowing. The ships
are signaling cordially with multitudes of flags
rising and falling like birds all over the harbor.
Enter: two rivers, gracefully bearing
countless little pellucid jellies
in cut-glass epergnes dragging with silver chains.
The flight is safe; the weather is all arranged.
The waves are running in verses this fine morning.
Please come flying.
Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe
trailing a sapphire highlight,
with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots,
with heaven knows how many angels all riding
on the broad black brim of your hat,
please come flying.
Bearing a musical inaudible abacus,
a slight censorious frown, and blue ribbons,
please come flying.
Facts and skyscrapers glint in the tide; Manhattan
is all awash with morals this fine morning,
so please come flying.
Mounting the sky with natural heroism,
above the accidents, above the malignant movies,
the taxicabs and injustices at large,
while horns are resounding in your beautiful ears
that simultaneously listen to
a soft uninvented music, fit for the musk deer,
please come flying.
For whom the grim museums will behave
like courteous male bower-birds,
for whom the agreeable lions lie in wait
on the steps of the Public Library,
eager to rise and follow through the doors
up into the reading rooms,
please come flying.
We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping,
or play at a game of constantly being wrong
with a priceless set of vocabularies,
or we can bravely deplore, but please
please come flying.
With dynasties of negative constructions
darkening and dying around you,
with grammar that suddenly turns and shines
like flocks of sandpipers flying,
please come flying.
Come like a light in the white mackerel sky,
come like a daytime comet
with a long unnebulous train of words,
from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
please come flying.
--------------------------------------------------
Gwendolyn Brooks
The Mother
Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?--
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.
-----------------------------------------------------------
No power to affect anyone or anything, my fat white butt.
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels.
Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says
No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear -- no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink.
Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others.
Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Elizabeth Bishop
Casabianca
Love's the boy stood on the burning deck
trying to recite "The boy stood on
the burning deck." Love's the son
stood stammering elocution
while the poor ship in flames went down.
Love's the obstinate boy, the ship,
even the swimming sailors, who
would like a schoolroom platform, too,
or an excuse to stay
on deck. And love's the burning boy.
--------------------------------------------------
Elizabeth Bishop
Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore
From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
please come flying.
In a cloud of fiery pale chemicals,
please come flying,
to the rapid rolling of thousands of small blue drums
descending out of the mackerel sky
over the glittering grandstand of harbor-water,
please come flying.
Whistles, pennants and smoke are blowing. The ships
are signaling cordially with multitudes of flags
rising and falling like birds all over the harbor.
Enter: two rivers, gracefully bearing
countless little pellucid jellies
in cut-glass epergnes dragging with silver chains.
The flight is safe; the weather is all arranged.
The waves are running in verses this fine morning.
Please come flying.
Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe
trailing a sapphire highlight,
with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots,
with heaven knows how many angels all riding
on the broad black brim of your hat,
please come flying.
Bearing a musical inaudible abacus,
a slight censorious frown, and blue ribbons,
please come flying.
Facts and skyscrapers glint in the tide; Manhattan
is all awash with morals this fine morning,
so please come flying.
Mounting the sky with natural heroism,
above the accidents, above the malignant movies,
the taxicabs and injustices at large,
while horns are resounding in your beautiful ears
that simultaneously listen to
a soft uninvented music, fit for the musk deer,
please come flying.
For whom the grim museums will behave
like courteous male bower-birds,
for whom the agreeable lions lie in wait
on the steps of the Public Library,
eager to rise and follow through the doors
up into the reading rooms,
please come flying.
We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping,
or play at a game of constantly being wrong
with a priceless set of vocabularies,
or we can bravely deplore, but please
please come flying.
With dynasties of negative constructions
darkening and dying around you,
with grammar that suddenly turns and shines
like flocks of sandpipers flying,
please come flying.
Come like a light in the white mackerel sky,
come like a daytime comet
with a long unnebulous train of words,
from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
please come flying.
--------------------------------------------------
Gwendolyn Brooks
The Mother
Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?--
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.
-----------------------------------------------------------
No power to affect anyone or anything, my fat white butt.
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
Random thoughts as I persue my dream of more caramel, caramel, CARAMEL!!!!
Sorry.
--------------------------------------------
It's election time, again -- or time to ask yourself, "No, really, these are the best you could come up with?"
Every year, it seems, I ask myself this question.
There are, according to the latest U.S. Census estimates, 290,809,777 people living in the United States. Wouldn't you hope, as I do, that our most rigorous methods for presidential candidate selection would give us the pinnacle of American thought and ability? That we would, somehow, sift and glean and carefully select from those 290 million people only the kindest, the strongest, the smartest, the most honest, the most moral, the . . . well, the best?
George Bush and John Kerry?
Really? These men are the best we can do?
Blaaaaaah. It's the same feeling I get from watching Army football. I know that specialization has killed the game, and the Army recruits students first, then athletes, but I always feel bad wondering if we should send the University of Connecticut to Iraq, 'cause our countries best athletes could not "do much against UConn's bigger, quicker defenders."
-----------------------------------------------
Been reading Borges again. This is what the Matrix franchise was trying to do all along, yet he's still done it better than anyone ever has. Will Durant in The Story of Philosophy bemoans the current fetish with epistemology (the science of knowing); I respect Durant as much as anyone, and agree up to a point -- epistemology is explained much better through story and fiction than it is thorough rigorous logical analysis. You do waste your time if you try simply to explain the process. Read "The Lottery in Babylon," "Funes, His Memory," "Labyrinths," or "The Library of Babel" if you want to stretch your mind around the problem of meta-knowledge, semiotics, or temporal analysis.
Warning: Borges + Closed or Tired Mind = Headache. Don't say I didn't warn you.
----------------------------------------------
Photobucket????!!!!! PHOTOBUCKET???!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What happened? ? ?
It accidentally ERASED 149 online albums?
AND MINE WAS ONE OF THEM????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ALL MY PICTURES GONE??????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Therefore, you may have noticed that my windblown, eighth-grade-Savannah-trip-photo has been replaced. Who is that, you may ask?
Someone you need to know, of course! Here for the answer.
------------------------------------------------------------
Bell rang; planning has ended; more later!
Sorry.
--------------------------------------------
It's election time, again -- or time to ask yourself, "No, really, these are the best you could come up with?"
Every year, it seems, I ask myself this question.
There are, according to the latest U.S. Census estimates, 290,809,777 people living in the United States. Wouldn't you hope, as I do, that our most rigorous methods for presidential candidate selection would give us the pinnacle of American thought and ability? That we would, somehow, sift and glean and carefully select from those 290 million people only the kindest, the strongest, the smartest, the most honest, the most moral, the . . . well, the best?
George Bush and John Kerry?
Really? These men are the best we can do?
Blaaaaaah. It's the same feeling I get from watching Army football. I know that specialization has killed the game, and the Army recruits students first, then athletes, but I always feel bad wondering if we should send the University of Connecticut to Iraq, 'cause our countries best athletes could not "do much against UConn's bigger, quicker defenders."
-----------------------------------------------
Been reading Borges again. This is what the Matrix franchise was trying to do all along, yet he's still done it better than anyone ever has. Will Durant in The Story of Philosophy bemoans the current fetish with epistemology (the science of knowing); I respect Durant as much as anyone, and agree up to a point -- epistemology is explained much better through story and fiction than it is thorough rigorous logical analysis. You do waste your time if you try simply to explain the process. Read "The Lottery in Babylon," "Funes, His Memory," "Labyrinths," or "The Library of Babel" if you want to stretch your mind around the problem of meta-knowledge, semiotics, or temporal analysis.
Warning: Borges + Closed or Tired Mind = Headache. Don't say I didn't warn you.
----------------------------------------------
Photobucket????!!!!! PHOTOBUCKET???!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What happened? ? ?
It accidentally ERASED 149 online albums?
AND MINE WAS ONE OF THEM????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ALL MY PICTURES GONE??????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Therefore, you may have noticed that my windblown, eighth-grade-Savannah-trip-photo has been replaced. Who is that, you may ask?
Someone you need to know, of course! Here for the answer.
------------------------------------------------------------
Bell rang; planning has ended; more later!
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