passed a fine afternoon jogging for the first time in a long long long tiime... down the bike path since our track's out of commission for renovations... jogged and bounced my way out into the sun... came home refreshed and...

settled in to read chris murray's recently arrived chapbook... "Meme Me Up, Scotty!"... and liked it a lot... look at the way "River Six" begins:

Now shorter days & cottonwood root
grocery sack tangle blown-around, landing holey
to be plastic noise:
oil sludge underbelly,
river banks waiting
to be full of Walmart Car Dealership Barnes & Noble Taco Bell
Chicken Little Sky Fry
or new concrete overpass.

Crossing here Odysseus
we might chapter
11 ourselves narrow
if the river
laps shore
the way I.

this'll keep ya on yr readerly toes...

thanks very much, chris.

see what she's up to lately at tex files...

Post Road Magazine: News and Events

POST ROAD invites you to an ice cream social to celebrate the release of POST ROAD 8....(yesterday in Bennington VT)

o... here it comes...

o... go read...suzannagig jig... who lets the solstice have its way with her... and coupled with a recent big bloomsday makes everything wonderful... go read now (unless you are herself... in which case... just keep casting spells)

so disheartening to find certain heretofore pristine email addresses now being infiltrated by spam... don't know how well this works but... Fight Spam! Click Here! ... anything... to make their life more difficult

Big Brother, give us back our MERCUROCHROME!

Symbolism is the systematic use of symbols to represent or allude to something. In the most literal sense, all language is symbolic. In a narrower sense, symbolism is the use of iconic figures with particular conventional meanings.

Symbolism of the color red in antiquity

Web Page Design for Designers - Symbolism

Social History of the Pineapple... he could be a little less gregarious

to mangle a thought from st. therese... the little flower...

poetry is like god... better to speak to it than about it...

Victorian Bookbinding Exhibit... (via mosses...)

today is also... JUNETEENTH... "the oldest known celebration of the ending of slavery"

Salman Rushdie is 57 years old today.

Sometimes I have wished that I
could compose my poems completely
out of ellipses or blank space.
As soon as I think this I realize
that my 'poetry' consists as much in what
I have refused to say and do-
than in what I have actually done
or written.

... me too... me... too...

John Kinsella: Australian Poet...

Good poetry can defy and alter our expectations. 'I discover great new poems by not knowing what they're going to do,' Kinsella says. 'I like parataxis, when you juxtapose one mode of speech against another. I like disjunctions and shifts and changes. So much poetry is just strings of words with no sense of the texture.'

John Gardner from "An Invective against Mere Fiction":

"however useful relativism may be as a way of running daily life--keeping fascists out of power, keeping tea parties civilized--it has nothing to do with art. Relativism denies those finalities toward which man's spirit has always groped. To admit that there are no finalities is to put the spirit out of business; to say that finalities are a matter of personal assertion is to make the spirit's business insignificant."

(via the john gardner list)

note to self: think about this.

Subsidiarity

According to this principle, smaller, more local, or "lower" human associations have proper social functions which should not be assumed by larger or "higher" associations.  For ease of discussion, let us refer to this principle as it has been denominated by modern Catholic social thinkers, as "the principle of subsidiarity."

new journal... here

The Father of Modernism - The carnival of Bloomsday, and the death of the Western novel. By Jeffrey Eugenides and Jim Lewis

I take it that our task here is to examine what, from a novelist's perspective anyway, are the uses and abuses of literary modernism and its progeny, a hundred years on. The date is of course slightly arbitrary, but the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday seems as good a marker as any...

hey, mom... check out: Letterheads: Documentary spells out what goes through minds of Scrabble fanatics... (via poetry hut blog)

Guardian Unlimited | This won't hurt much

For some time now, I've been trying to find out where my son goes after choir practice. He simply refuses to tell me. He says it's no business of mine where he goes after choir practice and it's a free country...

o... hey... just back from a few unbloggerd days at mom's...

Political Compass... any guesses where i end up on this?