“If you lived in London, where the whole system is one of false good-fellowship, and you may know a man for twenty years without finding out that he hates you like poison, you would soon have your eyes opened. There we do unkind things in a kind way: we say bitter things in a sweet voice: we always give our friends chloroform when we tear them to pieces.”

 

 - George Bernard Shaw

 

---

 

 

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

 

In every cry of every man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

 

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

 

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

 

---

 

 

1. Cockfosters (Picadilly Line)

2. Burnt Oak (Northern Line)

3. Goldhawk Road (Hammersmith and City Line)

4. Ickenham (Picadilly Line)

5. Tooting Broadway (Northern Line)

 

Runner up: St. John’s Wood (Jubilee Line)

 

---

 

 

“There’s something about the beginning of Moby Dick that cheers me up every time. Thanks for sending it out today. On the matter of submarines my favorite has always been Alvin, the deep sea research vessel at Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institute

 

 

As a child growing up in Southeastern Mass, Wood’s Hole was kind of like Cape Canaveral in my mind, and Alvin was as cool as the space shuttle.”

 

---

 

 

London Derrière (1968)

 

---

 

 

“My first date with my wife was a movie, and I chose A Boy And His Dog. I still hear about it twenty-seven years later. Not a good date movie.”

 

---

 

 

 

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Top Five London Souvenirs:

 

1. London Underground Tea Towel
2. Union Jack underwear
3. Tower of London pencil sharpener
4. Mind the Gap t-shirt
5. Beefeater Bottle Opener

 

---

 

 

“On 19 September 1940, Roald Dahl was ordered to fly his Gladiator from Abu Suweir in Egypt, on to Amiriya to refuel, and again to Fouka in Libya for a second refueling. From there he would fly to 80 Squadron’s forward airstrip 30 miles south of Mersah Matruh. On the final leg, he could not find the airstrip and, running low on fuel and with night approaching, he was forced to attempt a landing in the desert. Unfortunately, the undercarriage hit a boulder and the plane crashed, fracturing his skull, smashing his nose in, and blinding him. He managed to drag himself away from the blazing wreckage and passed out. Later, he wrote about the crash for his first published work. It was found in a RAF inquiry into the crash that the location he had been told to fly to was completely wrong, and he had mistakenly been sent instead to the no man’s land between the British and Italian forces. His literary career was launched when he wrote a color piece for the Saturday Evening Post about being an RAF flyer. He wrote that shot-up, banged-up planes had been assailed by gremlins, menacing air sprites. The essay (’A Piece of Cake’) was wildly popular (in addition to recounting the crash, it was also about his British public school upbringing, suffused with the heroic literary and historical culture of Britannia). Americans loved it. This was well before the US entered the war, and fascination with such things was high.”

 

Take a look at the Gloster Gladiator:

 

 

 

“How about Nelson Rockefeller who died while ‘loving’ in bed?”

 

---

 

 

With a population of 7.3 million, London is the largest city in Europe. The average household size is 2.3 people.

 

In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf.

 

The only true home shared by all four Beatles was a flat (apartment) at 57 Green Street near Hyde Park, where they lived in the autumn of 1963.

 

The Millennium Dome in London can be seen from space. The shell is 1km in circumference.

 

Traffic lights with red and green gas lights were first introduced in London in 1868. Unfortunately, they exploded and killed a policeman. The first successful system was installed in Cleveland, Ohio in 1914.

 

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Recipe for Spotted Dick:

 

 

 

for Steak and Kidney Pudding:

 

 

 

for Bubble and Squeak:

 

 

 

for Yorkshire Pudding:

 

 

 

for Fish and Chips:

 

 

Recipe for Mushy Peas:

 

1 cup mushy peas
Four sticks of butter
Combine, heat, mash, add 24 tsps salt

 

---

 

Best alternate name for Bangers and Mash: “Zeppelins in the Fog.”

 

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THE ATLANTIC’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL LIST

 

1 Abraham Lincoln
2 George Washington
3 Thomas Jefferson
4 Franklin D. Roosevelt
5 Alexander Hamilton
6 Benjamin Franklin
7 John Marshall
8 Martin Luther King Jr.
9 Thomas Edison
10 Woodrow Wilson
11 John D. Rockefeller
12 Ulysses Grant
13 James Madison
14 Henry Ford
15 Theodore Roosevelt
16 Mark Twain
17 Ronald Reagan
18 Andrew Jackson
19 Thomas Paine
20 Andrew Carnegie
21 Harry Truman
22 Walt Whitman
23 Wright Brothers
24 Alexander Graham Bell
25 John Adams
26 Walt Disney
27 Eli Whitney
28 Dwight D. Eisenhower
29 Earl Warren
30 Elizabeth Cady Stanton
31 Henry Clay
32 Albert Einstein
33 Ralph Waldo Emerson
34 Jonas Salk
35 Jackie Robinson
36 William Jennings Bryan
37 J.P. Morgan
38 Susan B. Anthony
39 Rachel Carson
40 John Dewey
41 Harriet Beecher Stowe
42 Eleanor Roosevelt
43 W.E.B. DuBois
44 Lyndon Baines Johnson
45 Samuel F.B. Morse
46 William Lloyd Garrison
47 Frederick Douglass
48 Robert Oppenheimer
49 Frederick Law Olmsted
50 James K. Polk
51 Margaret Sanger
52 Joseph Smith
53 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
54 Bill Gates
55 John Quincy Adams
56 Horace Mann
57 Robert E. Lee
58 John C. Calhoun
59 Louis Sullivan
60 William Faulkner
61 Samuel Gompers
62 William James
63 George Marshall
64 Jane Addams
65 Henry David Thoreau
66 Elvis Presley
67 P.T. Barnum
68 James D. Watson
69 James Gordon Bennett
70 Lewis and Clark
71 Noah Webster
72 Sam Walton
73 Cyrus McCormick
74 Brigham Young
75 George Herman “Babe” Ruth
76 Frank Lloyd Wright
77 Betty Friedan
78 John Brown
79 Louis Armstrong
80 William Randolph Hearst
81 Margaret Mead
82 George Gallup
83 James Fenimore Cooper
84 Thurgood Marshall
85 Ernest Hemingway
86 Mary Baker Eddy
87 Benjamin Spock
88 Enrico Fermi
89 Walter Lippmann
90 Jonathan Edwards
91 Lyman Beecher
92 John Steinbeck
93 Nat Turner
94 George Eastman
95 Sam Goldwyn
96 Ralph Nader
97 Stephen Foster
98 Booker T. Washington
99 Richard Nixon
100 Herman Melville

 

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1. Dark Star, Haywards Heath, West Sussex  England                        
2. Crouch Vale, South Woodham Ferrers, Essex  England                        
3. J.W. Lees, Middleton Junction, Manchester  England                        
4. Harveys, 6 Cliffe High Street, Lewes, East Sussex  England                        
5. Hook Norton, Hook Norton, Oxfordshire  England          

 

---

Bonus London poem:

 

 

They have watered the street,

It shines in the glare of lamps,

Cold, white lamps,

And lies

Like a slow-moving river,

Barred with silver and black.

Cabs go down it,

One,

And then another,

Between them I hear the shuffling of feet.

Tramps doze on the window-ledges,

Night-walkers pass along the sidewalks.

The city is squalid and sinister,

With the silver-barred street in the midst,

Slow-moving,

A river leading nowhere.

Opposite my window,

The moon cuts,

Clear and round,

Through the plum-coloured night.

She cannot light the city:

It is too bright.

It has white lamps,

And glitters coldly.

I stand in the window and watch the

   moon.

She is thin and lustreless,

But I love her.

I know the moon,

And this is an alien city.

 

---

 

 

“The vast mass of London itself, fought street by street, could easily devour an entire hostile army; and we would rather see London laid in ruins and ashes than that it should be tamely and abjectly enslaved.”

 

 - Winston Churchill

 

---

 

 

Elephant And Castle (London)

 

---

 

 

“I always thought ‘I before E unless after C’ was pretty much a lock, until I saw in a comic strip last week that ’science’ for one doesn’t follow that rule. (Oops, sorry. Don’t even know the strip. In a paper I picked up on the train.) Any other exceptions?”

 

---

 

 

A velvet goldmine of swinging 60s Londoners.

 

---

 

“How could you forget Antoine de Saint-Exupery, shot down while flaying during the war, allegedly by a German soldier who had read his books.”

 

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“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs – commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme down-town is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there. Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall northward. What do you see? — Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.”

 

 - Herman Melville, Moby Dick

 

---

 

 

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of its mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
– the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly –
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
– It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
– if you could call it a lip –
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels – until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

 

---

 

1. The Nautilus (both Jules Verne’s and the U.S.S. Nautilus, the first nuclear sub)
2. Confederate States Submarine H.L. Hunley
3. Red October
4. The Turtle
5. Yellow

 

 

For more on the Hunley: http://www.thehunley.com/

 

More on the American Revolutionary submarine The Turtle: http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blsubmarine5.htm

 

---

 

Canary of the Ocean (1998)

 

Ocean Bruise (1964)

 

Ocean Buzz (2003)

 

---

 

 

 

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On the seven deadly sins topic from a few weeks back, a reader sends in “Get out of hell free” merchandise:

 

www.goohf.com/

 

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“A bookstore cat link without the mention of Fup the cat from Powells? Back when Powells was a bit more, shall we say, petite, Fup could be found sunbathing behind the registers and in the back room. If you were lucky, she might even look your way . . . but probably not. Read her newsletter entries/blog and see her recommend reads at:”

 

 

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Invaluable Facts of the Week:

 

If the ocean’s total salt content were dried, it would cover the continents to a depth of 5 feet.

 

The highest tides in the world are at the Bay of Fundy, which separates New Brunswick from Nova Scotia. At some times of the year the difference between high and low tide is 53 feet 6 inches, the equivalent of a three-story building.

 

The oceans cover 71 percent of the Earth’s surface and contain 97 percent of the Earth’s water. Less than 1 percent is fresh water, and 2-3 percent is contained in glaciers and ice caps.

 

---

 

 

[The podcast will feature a recording of his reading from this book. This ties into the water theme because he was inspired to write these poems by the discovery of water on Mars. - E]

 

---

 

 

 

Under the sea,
Under the sea,
There’ll be no accusations,
Just friendly crustaceans
Under the Seeeeeeeeeeeeea!

 

---

 

 

Cold Water, Mississippi

 

AND

 

Hot Water, Mississippi

 

---

Bonus poem

 

 

Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

 

---

 

 

http://www.p2hi.com/

 

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Visit the Ocean Conservancy:

 

 

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Bonus ocean list

 

 

1. Sigmund
2. Kraken
3. Scylla
4. Sirens
5. Selkies

 

For more on Selkies, visit: http://echoes.devin.com/selkie/selkie.html

 

More on sea monsters, real and imagined: http://www.cdli.ca/CITE/monsters_sea_monsters.htm

 

For more on the Kraken: http://www.monstrous.com/monsters/kraken.htm

 

Check out the video of Sigmund the Sea Monster: http://www.70slivekidvid.com/satsm.htm

 

 

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“We all know how the Christmas season ends – after the shopping, the commercials, the new credit card debt. So, why not start it off right at least with a Sarah Lentz Dickinson Christmas Show? Sarah Lentz Dickinson, singer, songwriter, pianist, is performing her 3rd Annual Christmas Concert on December 9th at 7 pm St. Paul’s Church in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 199 Carroll Street, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, NY 11231.”

 

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“What, no Maus, by Art Spiegelmen?”

 

 

 

“I think Psicharpax (Crumb-snatcher) from the ancient Greek mock-epic “Battle of the Frogs and the Mice” might have a better claim to the top five ranking than the anonymous (anonymouse?) City Mouse.”

 

---

 

 

 

1. Samuel Beckett (wrote in French, native English speaker)
2. Joseph Conrad (wrote in English, native Polish speaker)
3. Anne Frank (wrote in Dutch, native German speaker, though moved to the Netherlands when she was five)
4. Kazuo Ishiguro (writes in English, native Japanese speaker, though moved to England when he was six)
5. Vladimir Nabokov (wrote in English, native Russian speaker, though raised bilingual)

 

 

1. Galileo Galilei went hiking with some friends and they rested in a cave. Some kind of noxious gas was in the cave, and several of his companions died. He suffered intermittently from problems with his health thereafter.
2. Ernest Hemingway: among his many brushes with death, he was almost killed while an ambulance driver during WWI. Indeed, he was expected to die and they wanted to administer last rites but he refused. He did, however, consent to be baptised.
3. Paul Auster: was profoundly affected when, as a child, a camper right next to him was struck and killed by lightning.
4. J.R.R. Tolkien: survived trench warfare in WWI, while almost all of his friends were killed.
5. C.S. Lewis: also survived trench warfare in WWI, while almost all of his friends were killed.

 

 

5. Attila the Hun (Binging) Ate and drank so much on his wedding night he didn’t notice his nosebleed.
4. John Belushi (Drugs)
3. Dale Earnhart (Racing)
2. Jim Fixx (Jogging) Guru actually died just a few steps into his morning run at 52.
1. Steve Irwin (Teasing Animals)

 

 

1. Irreversible
2. Kill Bill: Part 1
3. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
4. A Clockwork Orange
5. Eraserhead

 

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“A peck of poets; a pen of poets; a pint of poets. A pox of poets? A plague of poets?”

 

 

 

“How about an assonance of poets? (or at least, poets often make an assonance of themselves . . .)”

 

---

E-Verse collective noun of the week:

 

A raft of sea otters.

 

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“I notice someone has mentioned poetic spam. I am receiving increasingly strange and random spam in my work email. This morning I received a spam email which said ’Call out Gouranga be happy / Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga! / That which brings the highest happiness’ . . . which is a nice way to start the day.”

 

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“I remember first reading About the House. I was a young poet then, soon to be headed for graduate school, and reading Auden’s poetry usually left me feeling like the young violinists who heard Jascha Heifetz were said to (they realized they either had to give up the violin entirely or practice a hell of a lot harder). I wondered if the giant had shrunk when I read those poems. A few years later, I lived two blocks below 77 St. Marks Place, where Auden had lived the thirty years up to his death, and walking up the street and simply knowing the building’s history strangely enthused me on my way to work at a Park Avenue accounting firm. Later, I worked on Wall Street, across the street from the New York Stock Exchange, and to save money I would walk the 2 miles home from work, and I memorized Marvell and Frost and ’Musee des Beaux-Arts’ on those autumn walks. But I’m not writing to you to reminisce about that — no, it’s to bring our collective attention to some of the most curious, remarkable but generally unremarked lines of poetry of our times: the closing stanzas of ’Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times (Phi Beta Kappa Poem, Harvard, 1946).’ True, the poem’s strange mash-up of college commentary and Greek pantheon has its bizarre energy (the WWII veterans returned to school with ’nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter / Are shot to pieces by the shorter /  Poems of Donne’). But as it runs on and on, the poem’s cleverness begins to pall and the language pales and you’re about to throw in the towel when, abruptly, it pulls away from its descriptive humors about the battle between Apollo and Hermes (beauty and truth) and closes with ten rollicking commandments for the academic:

 

Keep well the Hermetic Decalogue,
    Which runs as follows:–

 

Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases,
Thou shalt not write thy doctor’s thesis
    On education,
Thou shalt not worship projects nor
Shalt thou or thine bow down before
    Administration.

 

Thou shalt not answer questionnaires
Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,
    Nor with compliance
Take any test. Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
    A social science.

 

Thou shalt not be on friendly terms
With guys in advertising firms,
    Nor speak with such
As read the Bible for its prose,
Nor, above all, make love to those
    Who wash too much.

 

Thou shalt not live within thy means
Nor on plain water and raw greens.
    If thou must choose
Between the chances, choose the odd;
Read The New Yorker, trust in God;
    And take short views.

 

Actually I could never get ten out of this. I get, variously, eight or thirteen or sometimes twelve. Any help out there?”

 

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Three writers read from their recent novels: CLIFFORD CHASE, Winkie, CHRISTOPHER SORRENTINO, Trance, DANA SPIOTTA, Eat the Document

 

Tuesday, November 28
Educational Alliance of New York
197 East Broadway (F train to East Broadway, two blocks to Jefferson)
7PM, Free

 

Writers at the Alliance, the Educational Alliance’s reading series, brings together established and emerging novelists, poets and essayists whose work, in both form and content, reflects the energy, diversity, and history of dissent which have always characterized the Lower East Side. For more details, contact Liz Brown at browne@newschool.edu, call the Educational Alliance at (212) 780-2300, ext. 378., or visit http://www.killfee.net/alliance.

 

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“Throwing away the alarm clock my father always said, ‘early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.’ It was lights out at 8PM in our house and we were up at dawn to the smell of coffee, frying bacon, and scrambled eggs. My father followed this general routine for a lifetime and died young, broke, and, I think, not too wise. Taking note, I rejected his advice and it became, for me, late to bed and late to rise. Now, I’m not saying I’ve conquered the world but I’ve avoided numberless early traffic jams, bypassed some common pitfalls, and have met some strange, wonderful people, one of whom was myself, someone my father never knew.”

 

 - Charles Bukowski

 

---

 

 

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

 

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

 

---

 

 

1. Reepicheep (from C.S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Last Battle)
2. Stuart Little
3. Algernon
4. Mickey
5. City Mouse (Aesops’ Fables)

 

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Backyard Wrestling: Don’t Try This at Home (2003)

 

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“Let’s not forget, while we’re on the theme, Anthony Hecht’s ’The Seven Deadly Sins’ series — accompanied by Leonard Baskin engravings — in The Hard Hours (1967). My notes indicate the series was initially published by The Gehenna Press.”

 

[Baskin also did woodcuts to accompany the Hecht book Flight Among the Tombs, 1998. - E]

 

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The average American house size has more than doubled since the 1950s; it now stands at 2,349 square feet.

 

 

 

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And it wouldn’t be a house issue without Falling Water:

 

 

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Bonus midterm election fact:

 

The new senator from Rhode Island is named Sheldon Whitehouse.

 

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Fruityland, California

 

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Seated after breakfast
In this white-tiled cabin
Arabs call the House where
Everybody goes,
Even melancholics
Raise a cheer to Mrs.
Nature for the primal
Pleasure She bestows.

 

Sex is but a dream to
Seventy-and-over,
But a joy proposed un-
-til we start to shave:
Mouth-delight depends on
Virtue in the cook, but
This She guarantees from
Cradle unto grave.

 

Lifted off the potty,
Infants from their mothers
Hear their first impartial
Words of worldly praise:
Hence, to start the morning
With a satisfactory
Dump is a good omen
All our adult days.

 

Revelation came to
Luther in a privy
(Crosswords have been solved there)
Rodin was no fool
When he cast his Thinker,
Cogitating deeply,
Crouched in the position
Of a man at stool.

 

All the arts derive from
This ur-act of making,
Private to the artist:
Makers’ lives are spent
Striving in their chosen
Medium to produce a
De-narcissus-ized en-
During excrement.

 

Freud did not invent the
Constipated miser:
Banks have letter boxes
Built in their façade
Marked For Night Deposits,
Stocks are firm or liquid,
Currencies of nations
Either soft or hard.

 

Global Mother, keep our
Bowels of compassion
Open through our lifetime,
Purge our minds as well:
Grant us a king ending,
Not a second childhood,
Petulant, weak-sphinctered,
In a cheap hotel.

 

Keep us in our station:
When we get pound-notish,
When we seem about to
Take up Higher Thought,
Send us some deflating
Image like the pained ex-
-pression on a Major
Prophet taken short.

 

(Orthodoxy ought to
Bless our modern plumbing:
Swift and St. Augustine
Lived in centuries
When a stench of sewage
Made a strong debating
Point for Manichees.)

 

Mind and Body run on
Different timetables:
Not until our morning
Visit here can we
Leave the dead concerns of
Yesterday behind us,
Face with all our courage
What is now to be.

 

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www.photo.net/bboard/nw-fetch-msg?msg_id=008rBn&tag=

 

 

 

 

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 David Yezzi asks on the New Criterion blog:

 

“What’s the collective noun for a group of poets? Would one say a buffet of poets? An echo? A pride of poets? Hmm, yes, that’s getting pretty close.”

 

[How about an Annoyance of Poets? A Pretentious of Poets? A Poverty of Good Poets? - E]

 

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“From the book Sir Benjamin Stone’s Pictures: Records of National Life and History, 1906: ‘Many years ago somebody now unknown left to the then vicar a piece of land under novel conditions. ‘Every Easter Monday,’ he stipulated, ‘the vicar and his successors shall provide two hare pies, a quantity of ale, and two dozen penny loaves to be scrambled for on the rising ground called Hare Pie Bank.” Really, I don’t think I can add anything to that. At some point, they hurl the pies at each other until they are covered in grease: ‘Immediately a native secures a piece, he hurls it at someone else; the whole crowd, in fact, pelt one another until they are covered with grease from head to foot.’ Another quote from the book: ’Broken ribs and cracked heads are common, while minor casualties may be counted by scores.’ Another title for this section could be ‘just how batshit crazy are the English?’”

 

 

 

 

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November National Geographic, 2006. Worlds top beer consumers:

 

1. Czech Republic                                                
2. Ireland                                                                            
3. Germany                                                                            
4. Austria                                                                            
5. Belgium                                                                            
6. UK
7. Denmark                                                                            
8. Slovakia                                                                            
9. Australia                                                       
10. Venezuela
11. USA
12. Spain
13. Finland
14. Hungary
15. New Zealand

 

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A house of senators.

 

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“In today’s e-mail, I received the most poetic SPAM subject line I believe I have ever seen: ‘my chain in darkness O land among our ears and after the children of.’ Children of what? It’s killing me. SPAM begging to be completed . . .  It seems wrong. Do you think any ‘Versers out there with free time to kill would be willing to finish it for me?”

 

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“I am pleased to invite you to join me on November 18th, at the Elevator Repair Service benefit, 6-10pm, at M1-5, a lovely establishment just next door to the Soho Rep. (directions below). Your $50 gets you fed, liquored, and entertained - such a deal! All by the theater company that dared to read The Great Gatsby aloud onstage, from start to finish, to rave reviews from around the world. Hubris? Perhaps. Ballsy? Definitely. A rare and wonderful theater experience? Yes, yes, yes. Do come to the benefit and support art that takes real chances. And artists that know how to throw a party. Let me know if you’re planning to attend on Nov. 18th, so we can either meet up before or find each other there. If you want to give but not go, you can donate online at www.elevator.org. (If you feel like going higher than $50, I support that too.) Thanks for supporting ERS.”

 

ELEVATOR REPAIR SERVICE 15TH BIRTHDAY PARTY BENEFIT

 

Hosted by Vin Scelsa, New York Radio Personality (WFUV, Sirius) with special appearances by ERS, Ethan Lipton, a gang of Susie Sokol’s former St. Ann’s 2nd Graders, and DJ James Hannaham. Saturday 18 November 2006. 6PM, performances at 7:30, food, wine and vodka drinks until 10 at M1-5 52 Walker St. between Church and Broadway
TICKETS $50 in advance, $60 at the door
http://www.elevator.org or 718-783-1905
mailto:info@elevator.org

 

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“On spring break 1969, camping in a palm grove near the beach in Eluthera with a lovely Sarah Lawrence girl, I came across this Camus quote in his journals and memorized it. We were living off the land, eating coconuts and mangos and 5 cent loaves of bread from a bakery a couple of miles away. Still one of my favorite experiences and quotes: ‘Under the morning sun, a great happiness hangs in space. Here I understand what is meant by glory: the right to love boundlessly. Clasping a woman’s body is also to embrace that strange joy that extends downwards from the heaven towards the sea. The wind is brisk, the sky blue; I love this life without restraint and wish to speak of it boldly, it makes me proud of being a man. Yet people have often told me there is nothing to be proud of. But there is something. The sun, the sea, the sky; my body tasting of salt, my heart pulsing of youth in this vast arena in which tenderness and glory meet in yellow and in blue.’”

 

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FRANK O’HARA FESTIVAL
Cosponsored by Poets House, the Poetry Project and MoMA

 

Tuesday, November 28, 7:00pm
PASSWORDS: Bill Berkson on Frank O’Hara

 

Poet Bill Berkson will explore the life and work of O’Hara through the lens of the pivotal year of 1956, when O’Hara was preparing his first major collection, Meditations in an Emergency.

 

Poets House
72 Spring Street, 2nd Floor
$7, Free to Poets House & Poetry Project Members

 

 

Wednesday, November 29, 8:00pm
Frank O’Hara Reading

 

Bill Berkson, Ned Rorem, Maureen O’Hara, Tony Towle, Eileen Myles, Patricia Spears Jones, Anne Waldman, Taylor Mead, Olivier Brossard, Bob Holman, John Yau, Kimberly Lyons, Lytle Shaw, David Shapiro, Anselm Berrigan, Greg Fuchs, John Gruen, and Scott Murphree will read the work of the beloved New York School icon.

 

The Poetry Project, St. Mark’s Church
131 East 10th St .
$8, $7, Free to Poets House and Poetry Project Members

 

Thursday, November 30, 6:00pm
FRANK O’HARA AT MoMA

 

John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Michelle Elligott, Alfred Leslie & others will share their favorite anecdotes about Frank O’Hara and his MoMA heyday. Selected archival materials including correspondence and photographs will be on view in the MoMA Library and Archives Reading Room.

 

Bartos Theater and MoMA Archives Reading Rooms
The Museum of Modern Art
4 West 54th Street
$10, $8 for MoMA,  Poets House & Poetry Project Members.
Tickets available at the MoMA Lobby information desk, the Film & Media desk, or at www.moma.org/thinkmodern

 

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“If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”

 

 - Albert Camus

 

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Constancy

 

        Strict constancy’s an overrated virtue:
        A little flexibility can’t hurt you.

 

Generosity

 

        While greedy bastards grab bucks by the fistful,
        The generous grow poorer and look wistful.

 

Chastity

 

        Spurning forbidden fruit-peel, pulp, and juice –
        The chaste know peace, but rarely reproduce.

 

Good Cheer

 

        When grief and gloom are what you want, good cheer
        Is nothing but a big pain in the rear.

 

Modesty

 

        Though sometimes modesty’s worth emulation,
        It’s worse than useless during copulation.

 

Sobriety

 

        A certain charm inheres in strict sobriety
        Until one ventures forth into society.

 

Humility

 

        When talk is soft, there’s no harm in the humble
        Who, when shrill protest’s called for, merely mumble.

 

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A plugged-in E-Verser sends Top Seven Deadly Sins of Internet Use:
 
1. Sending an e-mail that’s supposed to have an attachment, but forgetting to attach it.

 

2. Using ”ur” for ”your” and ”u” for ”you.”

3. Surfing the web when you’re supposed to be working. Ahem.

4. Complaining about other people’s spelling.

5. Sending a snarky e-mail about someone to that person, when you had really meant to send it to someone else but put that person’s name on the “send” line instead of the “subject” line. Not that I’d know anything about this.

6. Sending chain e-mails to certain people in your address book because you know that those are the people who won’t complain that you’re sending them chain emails, thus taking advantage of their easygoing natures, not to mention inflicting them with 7 years of bad luck because they’re far too easygoing to forward the chain messages themselves.

7. When you’re on an e-mail list, and someone sends an irate message like “get me off this list!”, you send a message to the entire list saying “shut up!”, which causes other people to send messages saying “stop sending me these stupid messages!”, which begins a flame war of attrition amongst all of the rest of the members of the list.

 

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Favorite Deadly Sins (1995)

 

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/30/books/30fagl.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
 

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A galaxy of starlets

 

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According to Spiegel Online, about 8 percent of Germans consume 40 percent of all the alcohol sold in the country.

 

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An angry reader sends in “top five institutional and political sins:”

 

1. Genocide (murder in terms even Dante couldn’t quite belly up to)
2. The murder of meaning: through newspeak, the spin, the unfo, nonfo
3. The murder of entertainment: Reality T.V.
4. The murder of entertainment, Part II: T.V. news channels and programs — unreality tv?
5. The murder of accountability

 

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Bonus quote:

 

“Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.” - Joseph Epstein

 

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The Seven Deadly Sins (1917)

 

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Forbes gives us the Seven Deadly Sins Of Retirement Planning:

 

 

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A reader writes in:

 

“I was looking desperately a couple nights ago for ’Here lies a lady’ to quote it to my son (age 10), who was experiencing alternating periods of fevers and chills. And I couldn’t find any of the anthologies I have (had?) that include it, nor could I find it anywhere on the web. Extremely frustrating. Can you help?”

 

 

 

Here lies a lady of beauty and high degree.
Of chills and fever she died, of fever and chills,
The delight of her husband, her aunt, an infant of three,
And of medicos marveling sweetly on her ills.

 

For either she burned, and her confident eyes would blaze,
And her fingers fly in a manner to puzzle their heads –
What was she making? Why, nothing; she sat in a maze
Of old scraps of laces, snipped into curious shreds.

 

Or this would pass, and the light of her fire decline
Till she lay discouraged and cold, like a thin stalk white and blown,
And would not open her eyes, to kisses, to wine;
The sixth of these states was her last; the cold settled down.

 

Sweet ladies, long may ye bloom, and toughly I hope ye may thole,
But was she not lucky? In flowers and lace and mourning,
In love and great honor we bade God rest her soul
After six little spaces of chill, and six of burning.

 

[Special thanks to J.S. Renau for pulling that one off his shelf and sending it in for me. - E]

 

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Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.

- William Shatner

 

Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer?
- Eileen Gunn

 

Vacuum collision. Orbits diverge. Farewell, love.
- David Brin

 

Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.
- Joss Whedon

 

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www.superdickery.com/galleries.html

 

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The following theatre piece, directed by friend and former editor of The Cortland Review, Guy Shahar, is from the 2006 Independent Actor’s Showcase in New York.  It is an outtake from a scene in the film You Can Count on Me which was adapted for the stage, and stars Maria Gingrich and Don Puglisi.

 

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Top five films all currently in theaters about royalty:

 

1. Marie Antoinette (no explanation needed)
2. The Last King of Scotland (about Idi Amin, who claimed this title for himself)
3. A Night With the King (about King Ahashuerus and Queen Esther, the story of the Jewish holiday of Purim)
4. The Queen (about the British royal family in the wake of the death of Princess Diana)
5. The Illusionist (takes place in turn of the century Vienna, with Crown Prince Leopold as a character)

 

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“Recently I’ve noticed a disconcerting trend for publishers to tell literary critics exactly what they should be saying about a new book. Instead of letting reviewers get on with their job of reviewing, publishers are behaving like anxious children, pulling at the journalist’s sleeve and suggesting what should come next.”

 

 

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An E-Verser announces Contact Improv
Wednesday nights in November
6:45pm-9:10pm
Cathy Weis’ Studio
537 Broadway (between Spring and Prince)
N/R to Prince Street, 6 to Spring Street, F to Broadway-Lafayette
$13
No class November 22nd
www.movementresearch.org

 

In this class we will find ease and strength, release and power in the body’s anatomical systems. We will find mobility through the head-tail connection; support through efficient use of the skeleton; and fluidity through spirals. We will learn to use our whole bodies to listen, and tune our senses for instantaneous response to the dance. This class is appropriate for all levels, including first-timers and experienced dancers. The class is structured to allow participants to move at their own pace, with options for more and less challenging work.

 

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Match the sexy prose with the politico who penned it:

 

 

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“A question, and probably not one of sufficient interest to merit general E-Verse distribution: is ‘Where Once Poe Walked’ one of the ‘Fungi From Yuggoth’?”

 

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The prize is open to poets who have no more than one previous published collection of poems, and comes with a purse of $3,000 and publication by Waywiser in the US and the UK. Further information, guidelines and entry forms, are to be found at the following website address:
 
www.waywiser-press.com/hechtprize2006.html

 

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FRANK O’HARA FESTIVAL
Cosponsored by Poets House, the Poetry Project and MoMA

 

Tuesday, November 28, 7:00pm
PASSWORDS: Bill Berkson on Frank O’Hara

 

Poet Bill Berkson will explore the life and work of O’Hara through the lens of the pivotal year of 1956, when O’Hara was preparing his first major collection, Meditations in an Emergency.

 

Poets House
72 Spring Street, 2nd Floor
$7, Free to Poets House & Poetry Project Members

 

 

 

Wednesday, November 29, 8:00pm
Frank O’Hara Reading

 

Bill Berkson, Ned Rorem, Maureen O’Hara, Tony Towle, Eileen Myles, Patricia Spears Jones, Anne Waldman, Taylor Mead, Olivier Brossard, Bob Holman, John Yau, Kimberly Lyons, Lytle Shaw, David Shapiro, Anselm Berrigan, Greg Fuchs, John Gruen, and Scott Murphree will read the work of the beloved New York School icon.

 

The Poetry Project, St. Mark’s Church
131 East 10th St .
$8, $7, Free to Poets House and Poetry Project Members

 

Thursday, November 30, 6:00pm
FRANK O’HARA AT MoMA

 

John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Michelle Elligott, Alfred Leslie & others will share their favorite anecdotes about Frank O’Hara and his MoMA heyday. Selected archival materials including correspondence and photographs will be on view in the MoMA Library and Archives Reading Room.

 

Bartos Theater and MoMA Archives Reading Rooms
The Museum of Modern Art
4 West 54th Street
$10, $8 for MoMA,  Poets House & Poetry Project Members.
Tickets available at the MoMA Lobby information desk, the Film & Media desk, or at www.moma.org/thinkmodern

 

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www.collegehumor.com/video:1719034/

 

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