Alice Miller weighs in with Sheer Unadulterated Sadism (via the wendell berry list)

long poems
why are people put off?
not the same question as
why are people intimidated?

i don't know... but it's a good question... i myself and personally like short poems because i have next to no concentration span and it's my own damn fault... so i myself and personally write really and/or moderately short poems... because i wouldn't have the nerve to read them back to myself if they were long... i wrote a long one once and probably never will again... no one should especially ever write long poems if they're kind of nonsensical... that's just too much... unles yr frank o'hara or someone of that breed... which is rare... but i myself and personally would never offer a long and somewhat nonsensical poem to the poetry reading crowd because it's just too much...

(and o...thanks for the appreciative mention, suzanne... i'm looking forward to yr thoughts on poems long short and otherwise)

o... go click on that passage below... you'll get a healthy dose of kurt vonnegut's bad attitude... which i've always enjoyed... immensely... wishing we lived a world where it just weren't necessary... but we don't... and it is...

By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

me too, kiddo...me too...

The world is so broken, fragmented all around me, and I wonder how we do it. How we get up, day after day, and face our lives, each other, ourselves. I wonder some days how I, how we, get out of bed in the morning, and why.

read this closely when i get the time... sometime next month probably...

hors d'oeuvres:

As a child of seven or eight, I used to experience an incredible thrill whenever I opened a Nancy Drew mystery to a page containing an italicized sentence. The sentence-something like "There, in the rafters of the abandoned barn, hung a satchel marked with the letters J. A. L."

What thrills, of course, in both Joan Mitchell and Carolyn Keene, is difference. Mere reception is not enough-discernment (of the italicized sentence lifting "out" of the romanized prose field, of the fuchsia spray lifting "out" of the olive ground) is the constitutive act. The frisson is the body's recognition of its own constituting. Two thoughts. One is a claim that the writing (text) is always the site of a spatial organization as much as it is one of a temporal duration. Lines mark the thrust of a poem's desire for stasis, atemporality, but the thrust is unstoppable, what is being enacted in the line (most handily, in the conventionally syntactical line) is a duration of meanings. Time and space in the poem interpenetrate, carouse, perform a different dance of difference-now immobile, now thrusting. John Latta

The Misunderestimated Man - How Bush chose stupidity. By Jacob Weisberg

If Bush isn't exactly the moron he sounds, his synaptic misfirings offer a plausible proxy for the idiocy of his presidency. (via fait accompli)... o... this is so mean-spirited... the man is such an easy target... i'd never say this... but i'm kind of happy someone did... and don't go calling me a knee-jerk bush-hater... i'm no hater of anyone... though i may be a knee-jerk... of sorts

bell just beeped... ending class for the class of '04... now we've got a week of final exams, graduation rehearsal... and the big event a week from sunday

David Byrne Lyrics

listening to... Charlie Musselwhite's Blues 'Sanctuary'... and loving it

but maybe Samuel Beckett would approve... happy birthday, old coot...

Poke The Bunny... pretty stupid

I believe in the American dream
but things are never quite what they seem
Everything is wrong... everything is wrong

lucinda williams on the fine album world without tears

Lesson Plan: Was Conrad a "Thorough-going" Racist?

Corn syrup linked to diabetes: Epidemic reflects rise in refined sugars.

The study shows that the amount of corn syrup people ate started rocketing at roughly the time the low-fat health message was being broadcast. 'Never before have people eaten so much highly refined carbohydrates and led such a sedentary lifestyle,' says Ludwig.

Many nutritionists now advocate a diet that avoids refined carbohydrates in favour of wholegrain alternatives. They also promote the choice of healthy fats, such as vegetable oils rather than animal fats, as well as fruits, vegetables and frequent exercise.

EDITORIAL: Politics, piety and the Catholic vote

The state of mind that most needs enlightenment is the one that sees human beings as needing to be guided or enlightened. The sin that most needs to be loved and forgiven is the state of mind that sees human beings as sinners. - Thaddeus Golas

not a good cartoon to read 47 minutes before a trip to the dentist... but pretty funny from an english teacher's p.o.v. (via language log... which offers some help with the old lie/lay quandry... now if we could just remember it)

ok i'm tired of sitting here with papers... i want my students back... i want some conversation... even though it's 26 to 3 and the day is done or nearly... we're all comatose by now... but i want my ap my worldlit back... i know they don't miss me as i miss them... i know they're not thinking of me at all... right now... but that's ok

waste some time... (via fait accompli)

ach... Blogger has changed their interface... some things i like some things i don't... o well...

have i mentioned lately how much i love ella fitzgerald?

a lot...

listening now to Best of the Songbooks: The Ballads... best is right... at the moment she's sliding through "do nothing till you hear from me"... and i was sitting here in my empty classroom reading student papers (today is senior ditch day)... and i was thumped on the brain by all this useful beauty...

(vulgar language at the link below... don't go there if yr a sensitive soul... don't complain to me if you do)
Humiliation and shame, it seems, are to pave the road to democracy. Who stands naked now?

(some vulgar language here too... how could there not be on this matter? avert your eyes...)
from Sympathy for Lynndie England at The Pinocchio Theory

... And now those pictures have been published, and you are the most infamous woman in the world; and they're going to throw the book at you, and basically you have no future and no hope. But of course somebody has to take the fall; and of course it will never be the people who imagined it, who organized it, who trained you in it, who told you to do it, and whose dreams of conquering and looting the world you were never really privy to. They can't be blamed, so it has to be somebody like you, who was poor and without prospects to begin with. No matter how deeply you felt that esprit de corps, you never were a member of that elite, and you never would be; you were expendable from the beginning, and your life is the price our rulers are happily willing to pay, as they pursue their program of conquest and domination.

Matt Reiter at SpiralBridge

While fishing for blues I caught a ling. What's
a ling? A ling is what you catch if you miss a
school of blues by ten feet. I caught a ling
while writing in the pentameter.