Copied and Pasted.

This Side of Paradise

2011-08-28T18:59:00.000-07:00

"Deepest of all in her personality was the golden radiance that she diffused around her. As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet faces at its edges, so she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms that held her..."

"Well it all smells of Bohemian New York to me."

"Victorians, Victorians, who never learned to weep Who sowed the bitter harvest that your children go to reap--"

"You know," whispered Tom, "what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years."

"Sometimes I wish I'd been an Englishman; American life is so damned dumb and stupid and health."

"This crisis-inspired religion is rather valueless and fleeting at best. I think four men have discovered Paris to one that discovered God."

"She is quite unprincipled; her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others. She loves shocking stories: she has that coarse streak that usually goes with natures that are both fine and big. She ants people to like her, but if they do not it never worries her or changes her. She is by no means a model character."

"I'm a romantic--a sentimental person thinks that things will last--a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't. Sentiment is emotional."

Barack Obama's Commencement Speech at Knox College

2011-07-22T10:23:00.000-07:00

"Like so much of the American story, once again, we face a choice. Once again, there are those who believe that there isn't much we can do about this as a nation. That the best idea is to give everyone one big refund on their government—divvy it up by individual portions, in the form of tax breaks, hand it out, and encourage everyone to use their share to go buy their own health care, their own retirement plan, their own child care, their own education, and so on.

In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it—Social Darwinism—every man or woman for him or herself. It's a tempting idea, because it doesn't require much thought or ingenuity. It allows us to say that those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford—tough luck. It allows us to say to the Maytag workers who have lost their job—life isn't fair. It let's us say to the child who was born into poverty—pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And it is especially tempting because each of us believes we will always be the winner in life's lottery, that we're the one who will be the next Donald Trump, or at least we won't be the chump who Donald Trump says: "You're fired!"

But there is a problem. It won't work. It ignores our history. It ignores the fact that it's been government research and investment that made the railways possible and the internet possible. It's been the creation of a massive middle class, through decent wages and benefits and public schools that allowed us all to prosper. Our economic dependence depended on individual initiative. It depended on a belief in the free market; but it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we're all in it together and everybody's got a shot at opportunity. That's what's produced our unrivaled political stability."

Full text: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/barackobamaknoxcollege.htm

Art

2011-07-14T15:24:00.001-07:00

"Art, like religious faith in general and prayer in particular, has the power to help us transcend the fragmented society we inhabit... the intuitive language of the imagination is so vital. Reaching deep into our collective thoughts and memories, great art sneaks past our shallow prejudices and brittle opinions to remind us of the complexity and mystery of human existence. The imagination calls us to leave our personalities behind and to temporarily inhabit another's experience, looking at the world with new eyes. Art invites us to meet the Other-- whether that be our neighbor or the infinite otherness of God-- and to achieve a new wholeness of spirit."
--Gregory Wolfe, editor of Image journal

I said to My Soul, Be Still. --T.S. Eliot

2011-07-14T15:22:00.000-07:00

“I said to my soul be still, and wait without hope; for hope would be hope of the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith. But the faith, and the love, and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
T.S. Eliot

from "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" by William Carlos Williams

2011-07-14T10:24:00.002-07:00

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

The Genius of the Crowd by Charles Bukowski

2011-06-23T14:57:00.001-07:00

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect

like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock

their finest art

Letter of Recommendation from My Father to My Future Wife by Richard Jones

2011-06-23T14:48:00.001-07:00

Letter Of Recommendation From My Father To My Future Wife

During the war, I was in China.
Every night we blew the world to hell.
The sky was purple and yellow
like his favorite shirt.
I was in India once
on the Ganges in a tourist boat.
There were soldiers,
some women with parasols.
A dead body floated by
going in the opposite direction.
My son likes this story
and requests it each year at Thanksgiving.

When he was twelve,
there was an accident.
He almost went blind.
For three weeks he lay in the hospital,
his eyes bandaged.
He did not like visitors,
but if they came
he'd silently hold their hand as they talked.

Small attentions
are all he requires.
Tell him you never saw anyone
so adept
at parallel parking.

Still, your life will not be easy.
Just look in the drawer where he keeps his socks.
Nothing matches. And what's the turtle shell
doing there, or the map of the moon,
or the surgeon's plastic model of a take-apart heart?

You must understand --
he doesn't see the world clearly.
Once he screamed, "The woods are on fire!"
when it was only a blue cloud of insects
lifting from the trees.

But he's a good boy.
He likes to kiss
and be kissed.
I remember mornings
he would wake me, stroking my whiskers
and kissing my hand.

He'll tell you -- and it's true --
he prefers the green of your eyes
to all the green life
of heaven and earth

---Richard Jones

Under a Certain Little Star by Wislawa Szymborska

2011-06-15T10:11:00.000-07:00

Under a Certain Little Star
by Wislawa Szymborska (translated by Joanna Trzeciak)

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity in case I'm mistaken.
Don't be angry, happiness, that I take you for my own.
May the dead forgive me that their memory's but a flicker.
My apologies to time for the quantity of world overlooked per second.
My apologies to an old love for treating a new one as the first.
Forgive me, far-off wars, for carrying my flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the abyss.
M apologies to those in train stations for sleeping soundly at five in the morning.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing sometimes.
pardon me, deserts, for not rushing in with a spoonful of water.
And you, O Hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage,
staring, motionless, always at the same spot,
absolve me even if you happen to be stuffed.
My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs.
My apologies to large questions for small answers.
Truth, do not pay me too much attention.
Solemnity, be magnanimous toward me.
Bear with me, O mystery of being, for pulling threads from your veil.
Soul, don't blame me that I've got you so seldom.
My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere.
My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and woman.
I know that as long as I live nothing can excuse me,
since I am my own obstacle.
Do not hold it against me, O Speech, that I borrow weighty words,
and then labor to make them light.

The End and the Beginning

2009-03-24T15:41:00.000-07:00

by Wislawa Szymborska

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the sides of the road,
so the corpse-laden wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone must drag in a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone must glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

Again we'll need bridges
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls how it was.
Someone listens
and nods with unsevered head.
Yet others milling about
already find it dull.

From behind the bush
sometimes someone still unearths
rust-eaten arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must give way to
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass which has overgrown
reasons and causes,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

A "Thank You Note"- Wislawa Szymborska

2009-01-21T14:37:00.001-07:00

There is much I owe
to those I do not love.

The relief in accepting
they are closer to another.

Joy that I am not
the wolf to their sheep.

My peace be with them
for with them I am free,
and this, love can neither give,
nor know how to take.

I don't wait for them
from window to door.
Almost as patient
as a sun dial,
I understand
what love does not understand.
I forgive
what love would never have forgiven.

Between rendezvous and letter
no eternity passes,
only a few days or weeks.

My trips with them always turn out well.
Concerts are heard.
Cathedrals are toured.
Landscapes are distinct.

And when seven rivers and mountains
come between us,
they are rivers and mountains
well known from any map.

It is thanks to them
that I live in three dimensions,
in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,
with a shifting, thus real, horizon.

They don't even know
how much they carry in their empty hands.

"I don't owe them anything",
love would have said
on this open topic.

Reality Demands- Wislawa Szymborska

2009-01-21T14:34:00.000-07:00

Reality demands

Reality demands
we also state the following:
life goes on.
It does so near Cannae and Borodino,
at Kosovo Polje and Guernica.

There is a gas station
in a small plaza in Jericho,
and freshly painted
benches near Bila Hora.
Letters travel
between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,
a furniture truck passes
before the eyes of the lion of Cheronea,
and only an atmospheric front advances
towards the blossoming orchards near Verdun.

There is so much of Everything
that Nothing is quite well concealed.
Music flows
from yachts near Actium
and couples on board dance in the sunlight.

So much keeps happening,
that it must be happening everywhere.
Where stone is heaped on stone,
there is an ice cream truck
besieged by children.
Where Hiroshima had been,
Hiroshima is again
manufacturing products
for everyday use.

Not without its charms is this terrible world,
not without its mornings
worth our waking.

In the fields of Maciejowice
the grass is green
and on the grass is -- you know how grass is --
transparent dew.

Maybe there are no fields other than battlefields,
those still remembered,
and those long forgotten,
birch woods and cedar woods,
snows and sands, iridescent swamps,
and ravines of dark defeat
where today, in sudden need,
you squat behind a bush.

What moral flows from this? Maybe none.
But what really flows is quickly-drying blood,
and as always, some rivers and clouds.

On the tragic mountain passes
the wind blows hats off heads
and we cannot help--
but laugh.

--Wislawa Szymborska

The Boiling Water- Kenneth Koch

2009-01-18T22:48:00.001-07:00

A serious moment for the water is
when it boils
And though one usually regards it
merely as a convenience
To have the boiling water
available for bath or table
Occasionally there is someone
around who understands
The importance of this moment
for the water—maybe a saint,
Maybe a poet, maybe a crazy
man, or just someone
temporarily disturbed
With his mind "floating"in a
sense, away from his deepest
Personal concerns to more
"unreal" things...

A serious moment for the island
is when its trees
Begin to give it shade, and
another is when the ocean
washes
Big heavy things against its side.
One walks around and looks at
the island
But not really at it, at what is on
it, and one thinks,
It must be serious, even, to be this
island, at all, here.
Since it is lying here exposed to
the whole sea. All its
Moments might be serious. It is
serious, in such windy weather,
to be a sail
Or an open window, or a feather
flying in the street...

Seriousness, how often I have
thought of seriousness
And how little I have understood
it, except this: serious is urgent
And it has to do with change. You
say to the water,
It's not necessary to boil now,
and you turn it off. It stops
Fidgeting. And starts to cool. You
put your hand in it
And say, The water isn't serious
any more. It has the potential,
However—that urgency to give
off bubbles, to
Change itself to steam. And the
wind,
When it becomes part of a
hurricane, blowing up the
beach
And the sand dunes can't keep it
away.
Fainting is one sign of
seriousness, crying is another.
Shuddering all over is another
one.

A serious moment for the
telephone is when it rings.
And a person answers, it is
Angelica, or is it you.

A serious moment for the fly is
when its wings
Are moving, and a serious
moment for the duck
Is when it swims, when it first
touches water, then spreads
Its smile upon the water...

A serious moment for the match
is when it burst into flame...

Serious for me that I met you, and
serious for you
That you met me, and that we do
not know
If we will ever be close to anyone
again. Serious the recognition
of the probability
That we will, although time
stretches terribly in
between...

Author... ?

2009-01-18T22:35:00.003-07:00

We all have pieces shaped like yours,
and if you cry, cry into a cocktail of
all tears. Don't talk about misery;
Misery is commonplace. Crowds applaud
at a smile and carefree dance, because
it takes a great patch job for anyone
over the age of 7 to keep rolling. People
will want to know you -- you can introduce
them to your mechanic. (And maybe
he's beautiful.) Heartbreaks are easy,
and they birth the most universal
Poetry: everyone reads and recalls
their love lost, once-upon-a-time, as if
it was the only joy that ever cried.
Everyone's broken down after they've
been driven hard enough.
You realize that,
If your heartbreak was unique, poetry
Would mean nothing to you. So read this:
You broke your own heart. All of our
hearts break because we let them

Towards an Impure Poetry- Pablo Neruda

2009-01-18T22:35:00.001-07:00

"It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter's tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a test for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things—all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.

In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substances, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.

Let this be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.

A poetry as impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations an prophesies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beast, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes.

The holy canons of madrigal, the mandates of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, the passions for justice, sexual desire, the sea sounding—willfully rejecting and accepting nothing: the deep penetration of things in the transports of love, consummate poetry soiled by the pigeon's claw, ice marked and tooth-marked, bitten delicately with the sweatdrops and usage, perhaps. Till the instrument so restlessly played yields us the comfort of its surfaces, and the woods show the knottiest suavities shaped by the pride of the tool. Blossom and water and what kernel share one precious consistency: the sumptuous appeal of the tactile.

Let no one forget them. Melancholy, old mawkishness impure and unflawed, fruits of a fabulous species lost to the memory, cast away in frenzy's abandonment—moonlight, the swan in the gathering darkness, all hackneyed endearments: surely that is the poet's concern, essential and absolute.

Those who shun the bad taste of things will fall flat on their face in the snow."

--Pablo Neruda

Mayakovsky- Frank O'Hara

2009-01-18T22:34:00.001-07:00

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

Frank O'Hara

"Mayakovsky" from Meditations in an Emergency

Remorse for Intemperate Speech- Yeats

2009-01-18T22:33:00.002-07:00

Remorse for Intemperate Speech

I ranted the knave and fool,
But outgrew that school,
Would transform the part,
Fit audience found, but cannot rule
My fanatic heart.

I sought my betters: though in each
Fine manners, liberal speech,
Turn hatred into sport,
Nothing said or done can reach
My fanatic heart.

Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.
(August 28, 1931)
--William Butler Yeats

-Friedrich Nietzsche

2009-01-18T22:26:00.002-07:00

"All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."

Gloria Steinem

2009-01-18T22:26:00.001-07:00

"This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labour in which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism."
-Gloria Steinem

What is Broken is Blessed- Baca

2009-01-17T22:19:00.001-07:00

The lover's footprint in the sand
The ten-year-old kid's bare feet
in the mud picking chili for rich growers,
not those seeking cultural or ethnic roots,
but those whose roots
have been exposed, hacked, dug up, and burned,
and in those roots
do animals burrow for warmth;
what is broken is blessed,
not the knowledge and empty-shelled wisdom
paraphrased from textbooks,
not the mimicking nor plaques of distinction
nor the ribbons and medals
but after the privileged carriage has passed
the breeze blows traces of wheel ruts away
and on the dust will again be people's broken
footprints.

What is broken is what God blesses,
not the perfectly brick-on-brick prison
but the shattered wall
that announces freedom to the world,
proclaims the irascible spirit of the human
rebelling against lies, against betrayal,
against taking what is not deserved;
the human complaint is what God blesses,
out impoverished dirt roads filled with cripples,
what is broken is baptized,
the irreverent disbeliever,
the addict's arm seamed with needle marks
is a thread line of a blanket
frayed and bare from keeping the man warm.
We are all broken ornaments,
glinting in our worn-out work gloves,
foreclosed homes, ruined marriages,
from which shimmer our lives in their deepest truths,
blood from the wound,
broken ornaments--
when we lost our perfection and honored our imperfect sentiments,
we were blessed.
Broken are the ghettos, barrios, trailer parks where gangs duel
to death,
yet through the wretchedness a woman of sixty comes riding her
rusty bicycle,
we embrace
we bury in our hearts,
broken ornaments, accused, hunted, finding solace and refuge
we work, we worry, we love
but always with compassion
reflecting our blessings--
in our brokenness
thrives life, thrives light, thrives
the essence of our strength,
each of us a warm fragment,
broken off from the greater
ornament of the unseen,
then rejoined as dust,
to all this is.

Degrees of Gray In Philipsburg by Richard Hugo

2009-01-17T22:17:00.000-07:00

You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he's done.

The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte. One good
restaurant and bars can't wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs--
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won't fall finally down.

Isn't this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn't this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don't empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?

Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I'll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You're talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it's mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

Judith Butler Quote

2009-01-17T22:15:00.001-07:00

Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one's best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender as we do (and as we must) we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another or, indeed, by virtue of another. It does not suffice to say that I am promoting a relational view of the self over an autonomous one, or trying to redescribe autonomy in terms of relationality. The term 'relationality' sutures the rupture in the relation we seek to describe, a rupture that is constitutive of identity itself. This means that we will have to approach the problem of conceptualizing dispossession with circumspection. -Judith Butler

Jeremy Bentham Quote

2009-01-17T22:13:00.002-07:00

The punishment ought in no case to be more than what is necessary to bring it into conformity with the rules here given...an error on the maximum side...is that to which legislators and men in generally are naturally inclined: antipathy, or a want of compassion for individuals who are represented as dangerous and vile, pushes them onward to an undue severity. It is on this side, therefore, that we should take the most precautions, as on this side there has been shown the greatest disposition to err." --Jeremy Bentham

Shimmer- James Schuyler

2009-01-17T22:13:00.001-07:00

an update II
The pear tree that last year
was heavy laden this year
bears little fruit. Was
it that wet spring we had?
All the pear tree leaves
go shimmer, all at once. The
August sun blasts down
into the coolness from the
ocean. The New York Times
is on strike. My daily
fare! I'll starve! Not
quite. On my sill, balls
of twine wrapped up in
cellophane glitter. The
brown, the white, and one
I think you'd call écru.
The sunlight falls partly
in a cup: it has a blue
transfer of two boys, a
dog and a duck and says,
"Come Away Pompey." I
like that cup, half
full of sunlight. Today
you could take up the
tattered shadows off
the grass. Roll them
and stow them. And collect
the shimmerings in a
cup, like the coffee
here at my right hand.

- "Shimmer," James Schuyler

Clarice Lispector Quote

2009-01-17T22:11:00.000-07:00

"—What do you get when you're happy? her voice was as clear and sharp as an arrow. The teacher look at Joana. --Can you repeat the question? Silence. The teacher smiled, arranging her books. --Ask me once more Joana, I didn't hear you the first time. --I wanted to know: when you're happy, what happens? What comes afterwards? --the girl repeated stubbornly. The woman looked at her in surprise. --What an idea! I don't know what you're talking about, what an idea! Ask me the same question with different words… --To be happy is to get what? The teacher turned crimson—you could never tell why she turned crimson. She marked the register and dismissed the class for recreation. The porter came to summon the girl to the office. The teacher was waiting there: --Sit down…have you been playing? --Just a little. --What do you want to be when you grow up? --I don't know. --Well listen, I also have an idea—she reddened. --Take a piece of paper, write down the question you asked me today and hold on to it. When you grow up, read it again. –She looked at her.—Who knows? Perhaps one day, you yourself will be able to reply somehow…--She lost her serious expression, turned crimson. Or perhaps this isn't important and, at least you will enjoy yourself with… --No. --No what? –the teacher asked in surprise. --I don't like enjoying myself, Joana said proudly. The teacher turned crimson again: --Very well, off you go, and play. As Joana made a dash for the door the teacher called her back, by now, flushed to the neck, her eyes lowered, rummaging through the papers on her desk: --Don't you find it strange that…odd that I should ask you to write down a question and hold on to it? --No, she replied. And turned to the playground. "

"The Adventures of 78 Charles Street" by Phillip Schultz

2006-04-27T15:38:00.000-07:00

For thirty-two years Patricia Parmelee's yellow light
has burned all night
in her kitchen down the hall in 2E.
Patricia--I love to say her name--Par-me-lee!
knows where, across the street,
Hart Crane wrote "The Bridge,"
the attic Saul Bellow holed up in
furiously scribbling "The Adventures of Augie March,"
the rooftop Bing Crosby yodelled off,
dreaming of Broadway, the knotty,
epicene secrets of each born-again town house.
Indeed, we, Patrica and me, reminisce
about tiny Lizzie and Joe Pasquinnucci,
one deaf, the other near-blind,
waddling hand in hand down the hall,
up the stairs, in and out of doors,
remembering sweetening Sicilian peaches,
ever-blooming daylilies, a combined one hundred
and seventy years of fuming sentence fragments,
elastic stockings, living and outliving,
everyone on the south side of Charles Street.

How Millie Melterborne, a powerhouse
of contemptuous capillaries inflamed
with memories of rude awakenings,
wrapped herself in black chiffon
wher her knocked-up daughter Kate married a Mafia son
and screamed "Nixon, blow me!"
out her fifth-floor window,
then dropped dead face first
into her gin-spiked oatmeal.
How overnight Sharion in 4E
became a bell-rining Buddhist
explaining cat litter, America, pleurisy, multiple orgasms,
and why I couldn't love anyone who loved me.

And Arhcie McGee in 5W, one silver-cross earring,
a tidal wave of dyed black hair,
motorcycle boots jingling, Jesus boogying
on each enraged oiled bicep, screaming
four flights down at me for asking
the opera singer across the courtyard to pack it in,
"This is N.Y.C., shithead, where fat people sing while fucking!"
Archie, whom Millie attacked with the pliers
and Lizzie fell over, drunk on the stairs, angry
if you nodded or didn't, from whom, hearing his boots,
I hid shaking under the stairwell,
until I found him trembling outside my door,
"Scram, Zorro, I'll be peachy in the morning."
In a year three others were dead of AIDS,
everyone wearing black,
but in the West Village everyone did
every day anyway.

Patricia says, The Righteous Brothers and I
moved in Thanksgiving, 1977
and immediately began looking for
that ever-loving feeling, rejoicing
at being a citizen of the ever-clanging future,
all of us walking up Perry Street,
down West Tenth, around Bleecker,
along the Hudson, with dogs, girlfriends,
and hangovers, stoned and insanely sober,
arm in arm and solo, under the big skyline,
traffic whizzing by, through
indefatigable sunshine, snow, and rain,
listening to the Stones, Monk, Springsteen,and Beethoven,
one buoyant foot after the other, nodding hello
good morning happy birthday adieu adios auf wiedersehen!
before anyone went co-op, renovated,
thought about being sick or dying,
when we all had hair and writhed on the floor
because someone didn't love us anymore,
when nobody got up before noon, wore a suit,
or joined anything, before there was hygiene,
confetti, a salary, cholesterol,
a list of names to invite to a funeral...

Yes, the adventures of a street in a city of everlasting hubris,
and Patricia's yellow light
when I can't sleep and come to the kitchen
to watch its puny precious speck stretch
so quietly so full of reverence
into the enormous darkness,
and I, overcome with love for everything so quickly fading,
my head stuck out the window
breathing the intoxicating melody
of our shouldered-and-cemented little island,
here, now, in the tenement of this moment,
dear Patricia's light,
night after night,
burning with all the others,
on 78 Charles Street.

--Phillip Schultz
featured in The New Yorker, April 24, 2006

Environmentalism as per Penn & Teller

2006-04-24T18:28:00.000-07:00

"Basically they are using sensation, misinformation and scare tactics... The environmental movement was basically hijacked by political and social activists who came in and very cleverly learned how to use green-rhetoric or green language to cloak agendas that actually had more to do with anti-corporatism, anti-globalization, anti-business and very little to do with science or ecology and that's when I left. I realized that the movement I had started was being taken over by politicals basically and that they were using it for fund-raising purposes."

--Patrick Moore, founder & former president of Greenpeace in an interview on Penn & Teller's Bullshit

"My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist" by The Decemberists

2006-04-23T17:15:00.000-07:00

My mother was a Chinese trapeze artist
In pre-war Paris
Smuggling bombs for the underground
And she met my father
At a fete in Aix-en-Provence
He was disguised as a Russian cadet
In the employ of the Axis
And there in the half-light
Of the provincial midnight
To a lone concertina
They drank in cantinas
And toasted to Edith Piaf And the fall of the Reich
My sister was born in a hovel in Burgundy
And left for the cattle
But later was found by a communist
Who had deserted his ranks
To follow his dream
To start up a punk rock band in South Carolina
I get letters sometimes
They bought a plantation
She weeds the tobacco
He offends the nation
And they write,
"Don't be a stranger, y'hear Sincerely, your sister"
So my parents had me
To the disgust of the prostitues
On a bed in a brothel
Surprisingly raised with tender care
Until the money got tight
And they bet me away
To a blind brigadier in a game
Of high stakes canasta
But he made me a sailor
On his brigadier ship fleet
I know every yardarm
From main mast to jib sheet
But sometimes I long to be landlocked
And to work in a bakery

--from Five Songs

Demian by Herman Hesse

2006-04-19T08:47:00.000-07:00

"We talk too much," he said with unwonted seriousness. "Clever talk is absolutely worthless. All you do in the process is lose yourself. And to lose yourself is a sin. One has to be able to crawl completely inside oneself, like a tortoise."

-from Chapter 3, Among Thieves

"The Prairie Grass Dividing" by Walt Whitman

2006-04-18T15:25:00.000-07:00

The Prairie-Grass Dividing

The prairie-grass dividing, its special odor breathing,
I demand of it the spiritual corresponding,
Demand the most copious and close companionship of men,
Demand the blades to rise of words, acts, beings,
Those of the open atmosphere, coarse, sunlit, fresh, nutritious,
Those that go their own gait, erect, stepping with freedom and
command, leading not following,
Those with a never-quell'd audacity, those with sweet and lusty
flesh clear of taint,
Those that look carelessly in the faces of Presidents and governors,
as to say Who are you?
Those of earth-born passion, simple, never constrain'd, never
obedient, Those of inland America.

--Walt Whitman

Demian by Herman Hesse

2006-04-18T10:40:00.001-07:00

"Like most parents, mine were no help with the new problems of puberty, to which no reference was ever made. All they did was take endless trouble in supporting my hopeless attempts to deny reality and to continue dwelling in a childhood world that was becoming more and more unreal. I have no idea whether parents can be of help, and I do not blame mine. It was my own affair to come to terms with myself and find my own way, and like most well-brought-up children, I managed it badly.
Everyone goes through this crisis. For the average person this is the point when the demands of his own life come into the sharpest conflict with his environment, when the way forward has to be sought with the bitterest means at his command. Many people experience the dying and rebirth--which is our fate--only this once during their entire life. Their childhood becomes hollow and gradually collapses, everything they love abandons them and they suddenly feel surrounded by the loneliness and mortal cold of the universe. Very many are caught forever in this impasse, and for the rest of their lives cling painfully to an irrevocable past, the dream of the lost paradise--which is the worst and most ruthless of dreams."

--from Chapter 3, "Among Thieves"