Drift

With this criminally incurious president, it is important to emphasize how curious & informed he is. We all know it’s a pornographic dumb show.
The spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, said the president is continuing to ask detailed questions of his advisers, many on operational details involving military considerations under review, and that the answers will not be [...]

Rilke in the Rain

I’ve been meaning to post a link to this lovely translation of Rilke’s “Loneliness” (written in Paris in September 1902) since I saw it last week on — where else? — Wood s Lot. I’ve been reading Rilke in translation for a quarter of a century, but had somehow missed this poem. I had also [...]

Marvin Minsky as Marduk

The Stanford computer scientist & artificial intelligence maven Marvin Minsky is interviewed (along with Daniel Dennet) by Wired Magazine about the nature of human consciousness & the prospects for machine intelligence. Asked why we need machine intelligence, Minsky opines:
I think there is a worldwide survival problem. As the population grows and people live longer, there [...]

Anne Winters: Making the Political Personal

I’ve been reading Anne Winters’ remarkable book, The Displaced of Capital. The title poem begins:
“A shift in the structure of experience . . .”
As I pass down Broadway this misty late-winter morning,
the city is ever-alluring, but thousands of miles to the south
the subsistence farms of chickens, yams and guava
are bought by transnationals, burst into miles
of [...]

Poem by Paula Tatarunis

Skipping around poetry blogs last night, I came across this poem by Paula Tatarunis, whose posts at Paula’s House of Toast often consist primarily of arresting photographs. And there is something photographic about this poem, startling & unnerving.
LAST ACT FIRST ACT
And, finally, an apocalypse.
Blood sky, bone wood,
unstrung harps, lights burnt out,
green a memory no mind [...]

What is the World?

“[W]hat do we think of as the world? Americans have been prone to think of ourselves as the world,” notes Adrienne Rich in this interview from the (London) Times. No American poet, over the last thirty years, has done more to disabuse Americans of that notion–that we are the world–than Adrienne Rich. Her poems are [...]

Heat

Last night at my department’s holiday dinner, Carole & I sat across the table from my colleague Chris Robinson, who is also a reader of this blog. Chris imagined, when I wrote the other day about Carole splitting wood, that we use the wood for aesthetic purposes. That we had the occasional bourgeois conflagration [...]

Cold

One degree this morning. We woke earlier than usual this morning. I’m getting over a cold & couldn’t go back to sleep, so I went downstairs & made coffee. Now, though the sun isn’t up yet, I can hear Carole out beside the house splitting wood for the stove. The maul clunks into the wood. [...]

When You Get Up to the City

Reading about this study of songbirds in European cities, a tune began niggling at my memory. Apparently, male great tits sing higher, quicker & louder in an urban setting than do their country cousins. Then I got it. I was thinking of Mose Allison’s lyric, “If You’re Goin’ Up to the City.” Mose sings from [...]

Beginning Again

This is the new blog, not the same as the old blog(s). At least I hope not. As I wrote in the last post on Reading & Writing, I had grown weary of the political echo chamber & the tone of voice it requires to be heard there. Not that I ever thought of myself [...]

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