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My month in paradise has come to an end & I have returned to . . . paradise. It is lovely to be home, though it’s going to take a while to get through the mail. I already feel a bit of nostalgia for BMC, but am also carrying forward certain consolidations in my work [...]
They Always Get My Name Wrong
But usually it’s my last name. The Washington Post got that right, but called me James in this piece by ombudsman Deboara Howell. Along with 1,700 other people, I wrote to protest the Post’s sleazy article on Barack Obama’s mortgage. Howell’s article is pretty wishy-washy, but ultimately agrees, I think, that the Post’s story left [...]
Buyer’s Remorse
I think I want my money back. The money I’ve sent to the Obama campaign & the DNC over the last few months, that is. First Obama sells out the 4th Amendment by supporting the wiretapping “compromise,” then yesterday he writes off my political generation by sneering at “the sixties” as if he were some [...]
George Carlin (1937 - 2008)
There are various uses for anger, one of them being humor. I found Lenny Bruce via George Carlin, who was criticized for being angry. Anger is one of the major fuels of art, especially the verbal arts of comedy & poetry. Iusually found him mostly sweet-natured & amazed at the absurdity of the world, though. [...]
Corrupter of Youth
I’m still in a May Day mood & so thought I’d pass this link along, about Allen Ginsberg in Prague, May 1st 1965. That’s when he was crowned King of the May & the authorities decided that the poet was corrupting the fine socialist youth of the city. [Via the New Poetry email list.]
“For a Coming Extinction” (W.S. Merwin)
For a Coming Extinction
Gray whale
Now that we are sinding you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing
I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were [...]
Who’s Gonna Build Your Wall? (Tom Russell)
Here’s another video via Scott McLemee. Seems appropriate since yesterday was May Day:
We got fundamentalist Muslims
We got fundamentalists Jews
We got fundamentalist Christians –
They’ll blow the whole thing up for you
But as I travel around this big old world
There’s one thing I most fear –
It’s a white man in a golf shirt
With a cell phone in [...]
May Day: “To Fan The Flames of Discontent”
Via Scott McLemee at Quick Study, with a further comment at Crooked Timber. And here is a link to the Little Red Songbook, “to fan the flames of discontent.” Back in the seventies I had the good fortune to meet a couple of old Wobblies who had worked the docks in Seattle and knew people [...]
Animal Cruelty
In a comment to the previous post, Chris Robinson makes reference to a poem from my book Magical Thinking. We bear a special responsibility, greater perhaps than the responsibility we bear toward each other, to care for animals. Whichever philosopher said that we reveal our character through our treatment of those weaker than ourselves was [...]
The Angels Want to Wear My Red Shoes
When the last pope first came to this country, I was in graduate school in Iowa. People that I actually knew — people I would never have suspected of such impulses — drove to Chicago to attend a mass presided over by John Paul II. Perhaps it was because John Paul & the poet Czeslaw [...]
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