stormy night... boom... boom... rumble

The Progressive Interview | Tom Morello

Q: Tell me about growing up in Libertyville.

Morello: I integrated the town. It is an entirely white conservative northern suburb of Chicago and I was the first person of color to reside in the town. My mom and I moved there in 1965. She was applying to be a public high school teacher in communities around the northern suburbs. In more than one of them, they said, 'You can work here, but your family cannot live here.' They were explicit about it. I was a one-year-old half-Kenyan kid, and they told my mom, 'You're an interracial family so you can live in the ghetto in Waukegan or go to North Chicago or somewhere like that.' Libertyville was the first community that allowed us to court real estate agents to find an apartment.

I don't know if he really said it, but Yogi Berra, another philosopher, perfectly encapsulated everything I'm talking about here in one sentence: 'In theory there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.'

Salamun spent two years at Iowa on the International Writing Programme in the early 1970s and has lived on and off in the US since then. His natural interest in the absurd, the playful and the irreverent was greatly aroused by the study of poets such as Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, not to speak of Walt Whitman. But he remains a great postwar central European poet...

this from ed iglehart's site is taken from stanley lombardo's great earthy translation of hesiod... reminds me to finish reading it...

Neighbours, good and bad

I wish
I had nothing to do with this fifth generation
Wish I had died before or been born after,
Because this is the Iron Age.
Not a day goes by
A man doesn't have some kind of trouble.
Nights too, just wearing him down. I mean
The gods send us terrible pain and vexation.
Still, there'll be some good mixed in with the evil,
And then Zeus will destroy this generation too,
Soon as they start being born grey around the temples.
Then fathers won't get along with their kids anymore,
Nor guests with hosts, nor partner with partner,
And brothers won't be friends, the way they used to be.
Nobody'll honor their parents when they get old
But they'll curse them and give them a hard time,
Godless rascals, and never think about paying them back
For all the trouble it was to raise them.
They'll start taking justice into their own hands,
Sacking each other's cities, no respect at all
For the man who keeps his oaths, the good man,
The just man.

new journal posted

BlazeVOX 2k4 an online journal of voice

Asia Times - Highway 61 Revisited

The blues springs up from hardship. It's an instrument of survival, offering release and relief. The blues commands the present moment, demanding that you forget the woes of your past and deal with the trials ahead. But even at a crucial crossroads, confronted by the shifting specter of terrorism and an unwinnable war, the United States still can't take time off to sing the blues.

R.I.P. David Dellinger (1916-2004)
(via ron silliman)

Dave Dellinger: The Life of a Nonviolent Warrior

In his autobiography, From Yale to Jail, Dave recounted an incident at Yale that changed his life. It happened after a football game between Yale and Georgia. Tensions between the Yale students and "townies" were high. Imagine Dave and his friends taking home a section of the goal posts as a trophy of victory. In any case, they were set upon by some local toughs. In the ensuing fight, Dave decked one of them ­ and then experienced revulsion at what he'd done. Here's how he explains what happened:
 
"The lesson I learned was as simple, direct and unarguable as the lesson a child learns the first time it puts its hand on a red-hot stove: Don't ever do it again! But the pain I felt was a spiritual pain, as if I had suddenly emerged from a fit of anger and realized that I had pressed a child's hand onto the stove. I knew that I would never be able to strike another human being again."
 
That moment also showed him something else: how sadness and shame can lead to love and change. He stayed with the young man he had hit, apologized, and walked him home. As they parted, Dave felt what he called "the power of our unexpected and unusual bonding." The impact of the encounter stayed with him.

some sanity that just appeared on the wendell berry list... thanks, socra...

... I really want
to know how we, or more

importantly, how I can create a better
world. Therein lies the real

challenge for us. And I am sure that the
people who are doing the

most to make the world better, such as the
ones Ed listed a few

posts back, like the Amish, don't spend a
lot of time psycho-

analyzing George Bush from the comfort of
their barns.



So today, I decided, as an act of rebellion
against the radiation

eminating from George Bush AND MoveOn.org,
that I am going to follow

Wendell's advice. I am not going to buy
anything that is advertised

on t.v. In fact, I'm not going to own a
t.v. Then, when I buy, I

am going to buy the least commercial, most
direct from the producer

stuff I can find. I am going to do it with
cash, because I am not

going to use a credit card. In fact, I am
not going to use credit

at all, even for my housing (it can be done
- I did it!). And I am

going to spend all the money I save so that
I can do projects in

which I will have an actual part: literacy
for the kids down the

street, helping to restore that salmon
habitat, figuring out ways to

make photovoltaics financially accessible,
and a thousand other

things that I need to do. I am going to
walk instead of drive. I

am going to control my appetites and
maintain my health. And I am

going to be so busy doing the right things
with my life that I will

not have time to speculate on how it is
that George Bush came to

dominate the world.



And you can rest assured that I will sleep
very well to night,

knowing that Someone besides George Bush is
in charge of the world!

Book 'em Ken! Ken Sanders' incredible adventures in the rare-book trade.

Helen Vendler: The Poem Unfolded: An Appreciation by Henri Cole

sentence of the day... from Eeksy-Peeksy

The man selling books is very dirty and worn and he smells like everything in the world a week ago, but when I light his cigarette his hands cup mine and hold me for a second.

reading bits and pieces of henri nouwen... from Seeds of Hope... like these bits to seminary students...

Teachers can only be teachers when there are students who want to be students. Without a question, an answer is experienced as manipulation; without a struggle, help is considered interference; and without the desire to learn, the offer to teach is easily felt as oppression. Therefore, our first task is not to offer information, advice, or even guidance, but to allow others to come into touch with their own struggles, painis, doubts, and insecurities--in short, to affirm their life as quest.

...

When we put a heavy taboo on the great questions of life, we become servants of death.

...

Theological formation is the gradual and often painful discovery of God's incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.

this looks fine... and useful... WriteNet: Virtual Poetry Workshop

Allons enfants de la patrie... cute song from m. recchia's room next door...

Leonard Pitts Jr.

though in a garden
from small grrrrlhood
I have always enjoyed "weeding"

especially after a good rain
and we had several yesterday
when the roots release
their clutch of earth
and the plant slides up out of the earth

reminds me... all my weeds are mint this year... if i don't rip it out soon nothing else will grow... never seen anything quite so invasive... certain siblings and odors aside...

o... and listening to The Best of Miles Davis & John Coltrane (1955-1961)... just because... and today is mr. davis's birthday... fine sounds... if only miles, coltrane, and waldo emerson could've recorded together... think how the land would have shivered and jumped...

another day... same empty classroom... reading The Iceman Cometh for the first time... in prep for its use in next year's AP class... liking it very much right at the start (once you get past all this introductory description of characters as yet unmet... seems i know larry slade best from his own dialogue rather than through o'neill's details on his face & couture)... slade says stuff like

I saw men didn't want to be saved from themselves, for that would mean they'd have to give up greed, and they'll never pay that price for liberty. So, I said to the world, God bless all here, and may the best man win and die of gluttony!

yeah.. he's kinda preachy in his disillusion...

It's a great game, the pursuit of happiness.

When a man's soul isn't a sow's ear, it will be time enough to dream of silk purses.

having a semi-great and tiring time in my empty classroom listening ot dylan at this moment singing "cocaine"... and you aren't... are you?

... that whoever worked with Clark was completely unable to read post-avant writing & simply said "Whatever" when confronting the problematics of this work.

well... gee... i wonder what that is... that ability to read pist-avant wroting... could i read it cluelessly... i fear i have always.. as such are my problemantics

Introduction to Aesthetics (whose tiny print's so serious it chafes my aesthetic)

we know these are the truest conditions for meaningful learning... but that's life... this is SCHOOL...

more percy from Language Log

(1) an openness of the thing before one--instead of being an exercise to be learned according to an approved mode, it is a garden of delights which beckons to one; (2) a sovereignty of the knower--instead of being a consumer of a prepared experience, I am a sovereign wayfarer, a wanderer in the neighborhood of being who stumbles into the garden.

Walker Percy... found at Language Log (via bemsha swing)

To put it bluntly: A student who has the desire to get at a dogfish or a Shakespeare sonnet may have the greatest difficulty in salvaging the creature itself from the educational package in which it is presented. The great difficulty is that he is not aware that there is a difficulty; surely, he thinks, in such a fine classroom, with such a fine textbook, the sonnet must come across! What's wrong with me?

when yr standing at the window watching this cloud build and build... some kind of explosion in the sky... and you hear the sirens begin... part of yr brain says step away from the window, dummy... but the other part says too much beauty here... too much... and for me... in most cases... beauty wins... hands down, as they say (wonder where that expression comes from...hands down)

& happy birthday Joseph Brodsky... (via chris murray's tex files)

All my poems are more or less about the same thing ­ about Time. About what time does to Man. Joseph Brodsky

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BOB

Starry-eyed an' laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an' we watched with one last look
Spellbound an' swallowed 'til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse
An' for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.