“It is my heart-warmed and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone.”

 

- Mark Twain, Christmas greeting, 1890

 

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When I lay down to sleep dream the Wishing Well
    it rings
“Have you a new play for the brokendown theater?”
When I write in my notebook poem it rings
“Buster Keaton is under the brooklyn bridge on
    Frankfurt and Pearl . . .”
When I unsheathe my skin extend my cock toward
    someone’s thighs fat or thin, boy or girl
Tingaling — “Please get him out of jail . . . the police are
    crashing down”
When I lift the soupspoon to my lips, the phone on the
    floor begins purring
“Hello it’s me — I’m in the park two broads from Iowa . . .
    nowhere to sleep last night . . . hit ‘em in the mouth”
When I muse at smoke crawling over the roof outside
    my street wisdom
purifying Eternity with my eye observation of grey
    vaporous columns in the sky
ring ring “Hello this is Esquire be a dear and finish
    your political commitment manifesto”
When I listen to radio presidents roaring on the
    convention floor
the phone also chimes in “rush up to Harlem with us
    and see the riots”
Always the telephone linked to all the hearts of the
    world beating at once
crying my husband’s gone my boyfriend’s busted
    forever my poetry was rejected
won’t you come over for money and please won’t you
    write me a piece of bullshit
How are you dear can you come out to Easthampton we’re
    all here bathing in the ocean we’re all so lonely
and I lay back on my pallet contemplating $50 phone
    bill, broke, drowsy, anxious, my heart fearful of
    the fingers dialing, the deaths, the singing of
    telephone bells
ringing at dawn ringing all afternoon ringing up
    midnight ringing now forever.
 

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1. “Telephone Line” by ELO
2. “Don’t Keep Me Hangin’ on the Telephone” by Blondie
3. “Jenny (867-5309)” by Tommy Tutone
4. “Telephone to Glory” by Blind Roosevelt Graves
5. “Telephone Boogie” by Johnny “Guitar” Watson

 

Runner up: “Trouble on the Line” by Kenn Kweder

 

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Don’t Answer the Phone! (1980)

Burn Your Phone (1996)

Phone a Clone (2005)

 

The Phone Ranger (2005)

Romancing the Phone (2005)

Sax-O-Phone (1966)

 

Learn to Phone Phony (2006)

 

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“Don’t forget what is perhaps my favorite industrial film ever: Habit Patterns (1954).”

 

 

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Top Five Phones in Poetry:

 

1. Sylvia Plath, “Daddy” — “The black telephone’s off at the root, / The voices just can’t worm through.”
2. Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” — “The last telephone slammed at the wall in reply”
3. David Yezzi, “The Call” — “The call comes and you’re out. When you retrieve / the message and return the call, you learn / that someone you knew distantly has died”
4. Robert Frost, “The Telephone” — “You spoke from that flower on the window sill”
5. Franz Wright, “Nocturne” — “I arrive / with my voice / of the telephone ringing / in an empty phone booth / on Main Street, after midnight / in the rain.”

 

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The invention of the word “hello” is credited to Thomas Edison, who created it specifically as a way to greet someone when answering the telephone; according to one source, it was due to his surprise with a misheard Hullo. Alexander Graham Bell initially used Ahoy (as used on ships) as a telephone greeting.

 

By 1889 central telephone exchange operators were known as “hello-girls” due to the association between the greeting and the telephone.

 

Touch-tone telephone keypads were originally planned to have buttons for Police and Fire Departments, but they were replaced with “and” when the project was cancelled in favor of developing the 911 system.

 

Cordless telephones, invented by Teri Pall in 1965, consist of a base unit that connects to the land-line system and also communicates with remote handsets by low power radio.

 

There is approximately 17 million feet of telephone wire servicing the Empire State Building.

 

Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, never phoned his wife or his mother. They were both deaf.

 

More than 50% of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call.

 

When French telephone companies introduced itemized billing, it revealed so much marital infidelity that male customers won a legal appeal to replace the last four numbers on a bill with asterisks.

 

The first car-phone was invented by Mr. Ericsson, who put a big metal pole on top of his car, so he could make calls by driving into telephone wires.

 

Wireless telephones are two-way radios. When you talk into a wireless telephone, it picks up your voice and converts the sound to radiofrequency energy (or radio waves). The radio waves travel through the air until they reach a receiver at a nearby base station. The base station then sends your call through the telephone network until it reaches the person you are calling.

 

When you receive a call on your wireless telephone, the message travels through the telephone network until it reaches a base station close to your wireless phone. Then the base station sends out radio waves that are detected by a receiver in your telephone, where the signals are changed back into the sound of a voice.

 

For more, read: Constant Touch: A Brief History of the Mobile Phone by Jon Agar

 

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“Middle age: When you’re sitting at home on Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn’t for you.” - Ogden Nash

 

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“Reminds me of a really beautiful song by Adam Guettel (from Myths and Hymns) called ’Migratory V,’ which a lot of people initially think is really called ’Migratory Five.’ Worth a listen.”

 

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Thought your readers might get a kick out of this ‘the machine is us’ piece on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

 

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“He may not make the top five list, but Matt Lauer of the Today Show is a notorious germophobe as well.”

 

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“Could you help me out, culturally? Remember we spoke about artists that had royal or aristocratic patrons (e.g. Virgil). It struck me that this might have a significant affect on tone and transduction of the human condition and thought of it as a Top Five – to contrast with anti-establishment writers. This issue has probably been discussed at length in the past, but the rhythm of its “knock on the closed door to the Dark Heart of Being” is a relatively new one to me. Could you help by completing a suitable list? Aristocratic patronage: Shakespeare, Virgil, Cervantes. Subversive: Dostoyevsky, Voltaire, Neruda.”

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http://youtube.com/watch?v=hut3VRL5XRE
 
Bonus Folly

http://youtube.com/watch?v=aFzFMiox9mM
 

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“On Tuesday, February 27, we will be having a rough-cut screening party in New York to raise finishing funds for the film HORRIBLE CHILD, written & directed by Lawrence Krauser, starring Mike Daisey, T. Ryder Smith, and Paul Willis. As the film is approximately 83 percent in verse, if nothing else we can guarantee the perfect chaser to Oscar Sunday. Our website is Under Construction, but the theme song, “Weapons Galore,” is audible at www.myspace.com/horriblechild  (TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 27 @ The Bijou Theatre, 82 East 4th Street, Manhattan, between Second & Third Avenues. Doors open 6:30 pm / Screening starts 7:15 pm / Admission $15, includes wine/beer.)”

 

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“The two Presidents who signed the Declaration of Independence were Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. George Washington was not a member of the Continental Congress in July 1776, he was the Commander in Chief, on campaign with his forces in New York.”

 

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A reader on Gerald Ford’s campaign slogan, “He’s Making Us Proud Again”:

 

“The presidential slogans were very interesting… GW’s standing out as particularly ironic… But it gives me a chance to possibly put to rest a slogan for Gerald Ford which I have never corroborated.  I was living in Nigeria in 1976, and somehow, through some means or other, we heard the slogan for Ford’s campaign was, or included among others, the following mind-twister: If We Had Known Him Better We Couldn’t Have Expected Less.  I have never seen this in print, and no one I ask remembers it.  Was it some inebriation of the Nigerian night sky, sitting as we did around our little campfire in the compound, swapping stories and mind teasers?  I wonder if anyone remembers this one?  If not I may have to chalk it up to an excess of palm oil in our food… or a side-effect of our malaria medicine…  As it is, if you repeat it (as we did, over and over), your mind kind of loses.”

 

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“The superstitious mother didn’t make up ’bread and butter’ though as a kid I said what must be a more recent version, ’peanut butter and jelly’ whenever something (mailbox, light pole, another person) came between myself and the person I was walking with.”

 

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Check out the band Spokane:

 

 

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1. Calling in “sick” several days in a row when you are nothing of the sort
2. Making extended (and loud) personal phone calls from the public service area
3. “Assisting” your co-workers by correcting them in front of customers
4.  Picking fights with all and sundry over imagined slights
5. Being consistently late to relieve co-workers at a public service point

 

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“Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes

 

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“Until I got to the bottom of your Bad Habits episode and saw the line about you scratching your crotch, I was going to thank you only for that gorgeous poem of yours about being sick. I was quite ill with the flu recently and your poem helped me to feel more deeply what I could not say about that kind of attention to the body for a protracted period of time. I was also going to say something about how you made me think of Yeats. My partner, Suzanne, and I have been reading his poems aloud to each other. More than anything these days, I am in awe of his diction. I cannot believe that not that long ago there were men and women who loved the language that much and could wrestle with it as he did, and as you do, too. I have a recording of Yeats reading and when we sit down to read him, we listen to that first. An eerie sound, his voice booming around our apartment with that constant beat and the words flying out of his mouth. Makes me think of a mouth full of watermelon seeds being released all at once. Anyway, as you must know, closing with the image of your bad habit was a reminder of the here and now. Thanks again for the poems, and wash your hands.”

 

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“For books about needing money: obvious, but pretty much everything by Dickens. Also, the Shopaholic series by Sophie Kinsella (I am ashamed to admit I loved them). The Good Earth. Money, by Martin Amis. Native Son. Sense and Sensibility (and most books by Jane Austen). Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Tom Sawyer. A Room of One’s Own (not a novel, but still). Breakfast at Tiffany’s? Anything by Henry James — Washington Square, especially. Vanity Fair.”

 

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“I’d rather sit down and write a letter than call someone up. I hate the telephone.” - Henry Miller

 

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Jefferson (who designed his own hook)

Van Buren (known as “Old Kinderhook”)

Garfield (when President Garfield was shot, Alexander Graham Bell attempted to locate the bullet with a crude metal detector of his own invention; instead, he discovered “a curved, metallic sharpness in the vicinity of the wrist’s end.” Historians agree: hook)

T. Roosevelt (first draft: “speak softly and pierce their eyes with a golden hook”)

F. Roosevelt (note: his hook was actually a wheelchair)

Nixon (many believe that the sight of his horrific hook lost him the first televised debate with Kennedy, who was hookless)

Bush I and II (however, Bush II replaced his hook with a chain saw in an effort to seem less privileged)

Edward “Thach” Teach, a.k.a. Blackbeard (although technically, President Blackbeard was only president of the pirates)

 

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1. Bigfoot
2. Bermuda Triangle
3. Amelia Earhart
4. Loch Ness Monster
5. UFOs
6. Leonard Nimoy’s Career

 

[Note, Nimoy narrated the television show In Search Of . . . - E] 

 

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Telephone, TX

 

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If you don’t trust one word to carry your meaning, try fourteen. From “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed”:

 

In the swamp, in secluded recesses, 
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song. 
 
Solitary, the thrush,  
The hermit, withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, 
Sings by himself a song. 
 
Song of the bleeding throat! 
Death’s outlet song of life-(for well, dear brother, I know
If thou wast not gifted to sing, thou would’st surely die.)  
 

General concept: deliberate isolation

 

noun

recesses, hermit

 

adjective

solitary, secluded, shy, hidden

 

phrase

withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, by himself

 

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“What, no Dave?”

 

 

 

“No AMERICATHON?”

 

 

 

“JFK? Come on. That movie drives me nuts. It’s not just an awful movie, it’s completely filled with hot air.”

 

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Top Five Dorothy Parker Quotes:

 

1. “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”

2. “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

3. “She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.”

4. “Look at him, a rhinestone in the rough.”

5. “Heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common.”

 

 

“It’s not the tragedies that kill us, it’s the messes.”
“You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.”
“Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, may be prolonged to that point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.”

 

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1. Olivanders Wands, by J.K. Rowling
2. Shottle Bop by Theodore Sturgeon
3. Bazaar of the Bizarre by Fritz Leiber
4. Psycho Shop by Alfred Bester & Roger Zelazny
5. Musical instrument shop in Terry Pratchett’s Soul Music

 

Honorable mention: Robert Chamber’s Repairer of Reputations, the living mall in another of Pratchett’s books with the sentient shopping carts.

 

[No Little Shop of Horrors, directed by Roger Corman, written by Charles Griffith? - E]

 

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Some one invented the telephone,
And interrupted a nation’s slumbers,
Ringing wrong but similar numbers.

 - Ogden Nash

 

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1. Ulysses by James Joyce (The Odyssey by Homer)
2. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte )
3. WAS Geoff Ryman (Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum)
4. Finn by Jon Clinch (Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain)
5. Ahab’s Wife: Or, The Star-gazer by Sena Jeter Naslund (Moby Dick by Herman Melville)

 

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A bank of phones.

 

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“You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” - Abraham Lincoln

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1.

 

When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d, 
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, 
I mourn’d — and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. 
 
O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring; 
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,         
And thought of him I love. 
 

 

2.

 

O powerful, western, fallen star! 
O shades of night! O moody, tearful night! 
O great star disappear’d! O the black murk that hides the star! 
O cruel hands that hold me powerless! O helpless soul of me!  
O harsh surrounding cloud, that will not free my soul! 
 

 

3.

 

In the door-yard fronting an old farm-house, near the white-wash’d palings, 
Stands the lilac bush, tall-growing, with heart-shaped leaves of rich green, 
With many a pointed blossom, rising, delicate, with the perfume strong I love, 
With every leaf a miracle . . . and from this bush in the door-yard,  
With delicate-color’d blossoms, and heart-shaped leaves of rich green, 
A sprig, with its flower, I break. 
 

 

4.

 

In the swamp, in secluded recesses, 
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song. 
 
Solitary, the thrush,  
The hermit, withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, 
Sings by himself a song. 
 
Song of the bleeding throat! 
Death’s outlet song of life-(for well, dear brother, I know
If thou wast not gifted to sing, thou would’st surely die.)  
 

 

5.

 

Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities, 
Amid lanes, and through old woods, (where lately the violets peep’d from the ground, spotting the gray debris;) 
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes — passing the endless grass; 
Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprising; 
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards;  
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave, 
Night and day journeys a coffin. 
 

 

6.

 

Coffin that passes through lanes and streets, 
Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land, 
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags, with the cities draped in black,  
With the show of the States themselves, as of crape-veil’d women, standing, 
With processions long and winding, and the flambeaus of the night, 
With the countless torches lit-with the silent sea of faces, and the unbared heads, 
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces, 
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn;  
With all the mournful voices of the dirges, pour’d around the coffin, 
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs –Where amid these you journey, 
With the tolling, tolling bells’ perpetual clang; 
Here! coffin that slowly passes, 
I give you my sprig of lilac.

 

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Check out the videocast of this Presidential episode, at www.everservideo.com

 

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“If you want to make enemies, try to change something.” - Woodrow Wilson

 

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Top Five Presidential Movies:

 

1. JFK (1991)
2. All the President’s Men (1976)
3. Bedtime for Bonzo (1951)
4. Dead Presidents (1995)
5. Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

 

Runner up: Point Break (1991)

 

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Official info about the US Presidents:

 

 

[No conspiracy stuff here, but a good introduction, particularly for those who can't name all presidents in order. - E]

 

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James A. Garfield (1831-1881) 20th
Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) 31st
Harry S. Truman (1884-1972) 33rd
Gerald Ford (1913-2006) 38th
Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) 40th
George H.W. Bush (1924-    ) 41st
Bill Clinton (1946-    ) 42nd
 

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“Only five presidents in U.S. history have had beards when they moved to the White House — none in the past century.” Facial hair and the American presidency:

 

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/02/13/beards.presidency/
 

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Linda Lovelace for President (1975)

 

Olive Oyl for President (1948)

 

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“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” - Ronald Reagan

 

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George Washington had to borrow money to go to his own inauguration.

 

Washington was the first President to appear on a postage stamp.

 

Washington was the only president elected unanimously, receiving all 69 of the electoral votes cast.

 

At his inauguration, Washington had only one tooth. At various times he wore dentures made of human or animal teeth, ivory, or lead — never wood.

 

Washington refused to wear a powdered wig, which was high fashion in the late 1700s. Instead, he powdered his red-brown hair and tied it in a short braid down his back.

 

Washington carried a portable sundial.

 

Washington’s inauguration speech was 183 words long and took 90 seconds to read. It was hard for him to read because of his false teeth.

 

Jefferson was one of two Presidents who signed the Declaration of Independence (the other was George Washington).

 

Jefferson’s library of approximately 6,000 books became the basis of the Library of Congress. His books were purchased from him for $23,950.

 

Bears brought back from Lewis and Clark’s famous expedition were displayed in cages on the White House lawn. For years the White House was sometimes referred to as the “president’s bear garden.”

 

Jefferson wrote his own epitaph without mentioning that he served as president of the United States.

 

Thomas Jefferson was once given a 1,235 pound hunk of cheese, giving us the term “the big cheese.”

 

Grover Cleveland was the only president to be elected to two nonconsecutive terms.

 

The Baby Ruth candy bar was named after Cleveland’s baby daughter, Ruth.

 

FDR was the first president to have a presidential aircraft.

 

FDR’s birthday is a legal holiday in the Virgin Islands.

 

Kennedy was the first president to hold a press conference on television.

 

Kennedy was the first president to also be a Boy Scout.

 

Kennedy was the first and only Roman Catholic president.

 

Reagan was the oldest president in history. He was 69 at his inauguration and 77 when he left office.

 

Reagan was the first president who had been divorced.

 

Reagan was the only president to be a head of a labor union.

 

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Bushisms
http://youtube.com/watch?v=7_6B6vwE83U

 

US Presidents Summary
http://youtube.com/watch?v=DdUUywIsIGI

 

Bush Impersonator
http://youtube.com/watch?v=gbB10X5egbY

 

Bonus Follie
Bush Sings Sunday Bloody Sunday
http://youtube.com/watch?v=4kKN92DASn0

 

Blast from the past
http://youtube.com/watch?v=y2YR80hTRmw

 

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“If it were not for the reporters, I would tell you the truth.” - Chester Arthur

 

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“I like the job I have, but if I had to live my life over again, I would like to have ended up a sports writer.” - Richard Nixon

 

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Jefferson City, Missouri, named after Thomas Jefferson.

 

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“My failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent.” - Ulysses S. Grant

 

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1. Bigfoot

2. Bermuda Triangle

3. Amelia Earhart

4. Loch Ness Monster

5. UFOs

 

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1. Florence Nightingale (but she certainly turned her phobia to positive use!)

2. Donald Trump

3. Eddie Murphy

4. Howard Hughes

5. Howard Stern

 

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A podium of presidents.

A chiefdom of presidents.

A command of presidents.

A crock of presidents.

 

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“A V of migratory birds.”

 

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Presidential Campaign Slogans

 

1840 William Henry Harrison  Tippecanoe and Tyler Too
1844 James K. Polk 54-40 or fight
1844 James K. Polk Reannexation of Texas and reoccupation of Oregon
1844 Henry Clay Who is James K. Polk?
1848 Zachary Taylor For President of the People
1856 John C. Fremont Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men, and Fremont
1860 Abraham Lincoln Vote Yourself a Farm
1864 Abraham Lincoln Don’t swap horses in the middle of the stream
1884 Grover Cleveland Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, The Continental Liar from the State of Maine
1884 James Blaine Ma, Ma, Where’s my Pa, Gone to the White House, Ha, Ha, Ha
1888 Benjamin Harrison Rejuvenated Republicanism
1896 William McKinley Patriotism, Protection, and Prosperity
1900 William McKinley A Full Dinner Pail
1916 Woodrow Wilson He kept us out of war
1920 Warren G. Harding Return to normalcy
1920 Warren G. Harding Cox and Cocktails
1924 Calvin Coolidge Keep cool with Coolidge
1928 Herbert Hoover A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage
1952 Dwight Eisenhower I Like Ike
1956 Dwight Eisenhower Peace and Prosperity
1960 Richard Nixon For the future
1964 Lyndon B. Johnson  The stakes are too high for you to stay at home
1964 Barry Goldwater In your heart you know he’s right
1968 Richard Nixon Nixon’s the One
1976 Gerald Ford He’s making us proud again
1976 Jimmy Carter Not Just Peanuts
1976 Jimmy Carter A Leader, For a Change
1980 Ronald Reagan  Are you better off than you were four years ago?
1984 Ronald Reagan  It’s morning again in America
1984 Walter Mondale America Needs a Change
1988 George Bush Kinder, Gentler Nation
1992 Bill Clinton Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow
1992 Bill Clinton Putting People First
1992 Ross Perot Ross for Boss
1996 Bill Clinton Building a bridge to the 21st century
1996 Bob Dole The Better Man for a Better America
2000 Al Gore Prosperity and progress
2000 Al Gore Prosperity for America’s families
2000 George W. Bush Compassionate conservatism
2000 George W. Bush Leave no child behind
2000 George W. Bush Real plans for real people
2000 George W. Bush Reformer with results
2000 Ralph Nader Government of, by, and for the people…not the monied interests
2004 John Kerry Let America be America Again
2004 George W. Bush Yes, America Can!

 

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1. Richard Nixon, 112.6

2. Franklin D. Roosevelt, 103.4

3. Ronald Reagan, 98.4

4. Bill Clinton, 90.5

5. George Bush, 87.0

 

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1. Franklin D. Roosevelt 1,876

2. Richard Nixon, 1,040

3. Ronald Reagan, 1,015

4. Dwight D. Eisenhower, 899

5. Bill Clinton, 749

 

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“The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones.” - Somerset Maugham

 

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Visit the website at www.everseradio.com and watch the televised version of this show at www.eversevideo.com

 

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He licks the last chocolate ice cream
from the scabbed corners of his mouth.
Sitting in the sun on a step
outside the laundromat,
mongoloid Don turns his crewcut head
and spies me coming down the street.
“Hi!” He says it with the mannered
enthusiasm of a fraternity brother.
“Take me cross the street!?” part
question part command. I hold
the sticky bunch of small fingers in mine
and we stumble across. They sell
peaches and pears over there,
the juice will dribble down your chin.
He turns before I leave him,
saying abruptly with the same
mixture of order and request
“Gimme a quarter!?” I
don’t give it, never have, not to him,
I wonder why not, and as I
walk on alone I realize
it’s because his unripened mind
never recognizes me, me
for myself, he only says hi
for what he can get, quarters to
buy sweet things, one after another,
he goes from store to store, from
candy store to ice cream store to
bakery to produce market, unending
quest for the palate’s pleasure. Then
out to panhandle again,
more quarters, more sweet things.

 

My errands are toothpaste,
vitamin pills and a book of stamps.
No self-indulgence there.
But who’s this coming up? It’s
John, no Chuck, how
could his name have slipped my mind.
Chuck gives a one-sided smile, he stands
as if fresh from a laundromat,
a scrubbed cowboy, Tom Sawyer
grown up, yet stylish, perhaps
even careful, his dark hair
slicked back in the latest manner.
When he shakes my hand I feel
a dry finger playfully bending inward
and touching my palm in secret.
“It’s a long time
since we got together,” says John.
Chuck, that is. The warm teasing
tickle in the cave of our handshake
took my mind off toothpaste,
snatched it off, indeed.
How handsome he is in
his lust and energy, in his
fine display of impulse.
Boldly “How about now?” I say
knowing the answer. My boy
I could eat you whole. In the long pause
I gaze at him up and down and
from his blue sneakers back to the redawning
one-sided smile. We know our charm.

 

We know delay makes pleasure great.
In our eyes, on our tongues,
we savour the approaching delight
of things we know yet are fresh always.
Sweet things. Sweet things.

 

 

[See below for my "In Memoriam" for Thom Gunn, reprinted from the Contemporary Poetry Review. - E]

 

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1. Picking nose and eating it at desk
2. Knuckle cracking
3. Sniffling loudly and repeatedly
4. Not washing hands after going to the bathroom
5. Sleeping with the boss / numerous coworkers

 

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Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993)

 

The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human (1999)

 

Bad Habits (2006)

Nasty Habits (1977)

 

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I’ll habits gather by unseen degrees –
As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.

 

 - John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, 1681

 

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Take a look at a sci-fi author’s new blog, The Endless Bookshelf:

 

endlessbookshelf.net

 

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EyeSmoking Guy:

 

 

 

Guinness Book of World Records smoking record:

 

 

 

Butt Scratch and Sniff:

 

 

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Excess weight wards-off unwanted attention from the opposite sex.

 

Alcohol and drugs provide a much-needed, short-term, and unrealistic solution to anxiety and worry.

 

Nail-biting and nose-picking are age-old ways to tend and groom oneself.

 

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Visit www.everseradio.com. You know you want to. And you can watch the video too, at www.eversevideo.com, great fun and a good way to while away a slow morning.

 

Or, if you just want to put the radio show of this episode on your iPod, visit www.everseradio.com/audio

 

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“Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.” - Mark Twain

 

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“The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett.”

 

 

 

“I haven’t read it yet, but Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas, reviewed in the New York Times Book Review for 2/4/07, is apparently exactly that sort of book. Of the novel’s hero, the review says, ‘Completely broke and temporarily residing in the bedroom of a friend’s child, he must come up with more than $12,000 in . . . four days.’”

 

 

“Caitlin Macy’s The Fundamentals of Play.”

 

 

“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, Memoirs from Antproof Case by Mark Helprin, and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.”

 

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“I nearly ran over a koala a year or so back. He ran across the road in front of our (1977 funky Bedford) van. Luckily, we stopped in time and he climbed up a tree about 2 meters from us and just sat there giving every perfect koala pose you could wish for, with the camera to prove it. If only I’d modernized by then and gone digital I’d show you, but alas, no. A big g’day to you.”

 

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“Every hour of every day, someone is diagnosed with MS. That’s why I registered for the MS Walk and that’s why I’m asking you to support my fund raising efforts with a tax-deductible donation. The National Multiple Sclerosis Society is dedicated to ending the devastating effects of MS but they can’t do it without our help. It’s faster and easier than ever to support this cause that’s so important to me. Simply click on the link at the bottom of this message. If you prefer, you can send your contribution to the address listed below. Any amount, great or small, helps to make a difference in the lives of people with MS. I appreciate your support and look forward to letting you know how I do. P.S. If you would like more information about the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, how proceeds from the MS Walk are used, or the other ways you can get involved in the fight against MS, please visit nationalmssociety.org.”

 

 

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“A friend of mine is showing some of his recent artwork in the NYC area, and I thought I would pass on the info. The show is entitled ‘34 paintings + 1 sculpture,’ at the Gallery at Starbucks, Lower Level, 167 Court Street, Cobble Hill-Brooklyn, NY 11201. He works with fluorescent gases (is that how you call it?) like neon etc. His website is www.rogerborg.com, if you’d like to see a preview. It’s up all February. Stop in and have a look.”

 

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“The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

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Hooker, Oklahoma

 

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“My dear and loving mother may be the world’s most superstitious person. The unfortunate thing is, despite my fundamental skepticism, I can’t help thinking — why take the chance? I give you my mother’s top five superstitions.”
 
1. Knock on wood for good luck (for a time she would wear a small twig next to her skin whenever she traveled by air, so she would constantly be touching wood).
 
2.  Touch a button when you see a hearse (has involved some wrenching of others’ arms to get them to comply)
 
3.  Find a penny, pick it up (has involved my normally germ-phobic mother picking up pennies with her bare hands off of trash-strewn Brooklyn streets and, I fear, subway platforms)
 
4.  No hat on the table (this seems to be a relatively new acquisition)
 
5.  Fear of black cats crossing one’s path (what if you are visiting someone who has a black cat for a pet?)
 
Honorable mention:  Say “bread and butter” if you are walking with someone and something or someone comes between you from the opposite direction (I think she made this one up)

 

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“Habit is a cable; we weave a thread each day, and at last we cannot break it.” - Horace Mann

 

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“Suggestion for 5th Australian novel – The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally, perhaps?”
 

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“As for superstitions, I like to turn a negative into a positive. It started many years ago when I put my school jumper on inside out and was told it was bad luck. It got me thinking, who made that up? Ever since I’ve decided it a good sign. Now I never have to debate whether a black cat crossing my path is good or bad luck! That said, I do always look for a second magpie, they tend to move in pairs and I don’t like the thought of a lonely one.”
 

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My poem “In Bed for a Week” is in the new issue of The New Criterion, Volume 25, Number 6, on newstands now:

 

 

It happens to us all, at least one time,
The black, caught knot of storm threatens, distant,
But buckling closer, waves capped and blown white.
Heavy tides, laden with fresh wreckage, climb,
Drop down the throat; life is a persistent
Ache of sunken vessels and squandered light.
Barrier islands and breakwaters lost,
The sea flails the darkness, its frayed currents,
Wind-flung sediment, shards like stones thrown,
Pooled mirrors blown to blur down the cold coast,
Leaving foam, crushed scum, marsh sun, a grim sense
Of many inherited contours gone.
But the dark flush in the heart will subside,
Drain slowly, slowly draw back as a tide.

 

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A twitch of bad habits
A bumble of bad habits
A hoard of bad habits
A Samsonite of bad habits

 

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“The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” - Samuel Johnson

 

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It will be frequently remarked elsewhere that the past year saw many fine poets cross the bar, but only one of them devoted huge energies to poems about young men crossing barroom floors. The Anglo-Californian Thom Gunn, who died this year at the age of 74, has been everywhere memorialized and for an expectedly diverse assortment of reasons, or causes, as they may be. In native quarters, he was beloved of his generation of English poets, an heir of Auden, a dashing young man who composed elegant poems about motorcycle gangs and smoky rooms in books like Fighting Terms  and The Sense of Movement. However, the height of his popularity in the United States came later, with his enormously popular book of elegies on the first major ravages of the AIDs epidemic in the 1980s, Man With the Night Sweats. What appeals to these two transatlantic groups of readers might be quite distant when seriously considered, but the quality in Gunn’s poetry that magnetized them both is an exquisite combination: English grace and American coarseness (for lack of finer terms in both cases). He set more poems in rough bars than probably any poet aside from Charles Bukowski, who specialized in tales from that boozy milieu.

 

The Times of London praised him as one of the past-half-century’s ”shrewdest moralists.” This is surprising given his unabashed openness about hard drug use (inspired by his friend Paul Bowles) and especially casual sex, but there is something to it. Once the alleged shock of his subject matter has worn off, Gunn may be remembered largely as a poet of relationships, or to be more specific, as a poet concerned with the great questions attending love and permanence of affection when these two ragged glories are rubbed up too often against fantasy and straightforward lust. The view from across the Atlantic is telling, as the Times goes on to relate that “his reputation wavered after his move to the United States,” just as his estimation stateside warmed up. It is impossible to know if this is due to stylistic changes or a sense of abandonment that must have begun to afflict the Sceptred Isle around this time. The previous generation of British readers grew noticeably less chummy with Auden after his decampment, though this had the tinge of patriotic justification given that Luftwaffe bombs were pounding holes in the dome of St. Paul’s while Auden took cocktails at his Greenwich Village local. It is likely that some of Gunn’s original readers migrated away due to his bald descriptions of sex rather than his choice of address, though one is inclined to believe that some small burr of betrayal stuck in the British lion’s paw. But then, who would prefer damp tweed and warm ale on a rainy afternoon to a new world where

 

        Birds whistled, all 
        Nature was doing something while 
        Leather Kid and Fleshly 
        lay on a bank and 
        gleamingly discoursed.

 

Gunn is also a poet of movement. Not a poet of travel, as such, but of constant change and the freedom tendered by refusal to set foot down firmly or cling to the past. There is freedom in movement, but it should be recalled that Gunn never had a steady family life in which he might stake an identity. His parents divorced when he was still young, and his mother committed suicide. He spent most of his student days at University College School living with friends and aunts. He grew to be at bitter odds with his father. The two men who finally exerted a lasting influence in his life were two giants of literary criticism: F. R. Leavis, while Gunn was at Trinity College Cambridge, and Yvor Winters at Stanford. A third figure, shadowy with historical distance, is John Donne, whose metaphysical intensity and wit lather many of Gunn’s better poems.

 

It is no revelation that Gunn’s early poems owe a debt to Auden. The tight-fisted and elusive diction of his first books never really disappears, even if the later poems tend to be more freely constructed and easier to comprehend on a first pass. This is a development in style that makes sense across both geography and time, in this case from Cambridge to San Francisco, from the buttoned 1950s to the bare-chested 1970s. Wolfgang Saxon wrote in the New York Times that in addition to writing primarily in inherited poetic forms, Gunn “experimented with free verse and syllabic stanzas. In doing so he evolved from British tradition and European existentialism to embrace the relaxed ways of the California counterculture.” This is true, but it also misses the point. He kept every inch of the British tradition while sunbathing on the deck with a daiquiri. Gunn’s dry formal style can be matched with that of his superior contemporary, Philip Larkin, but it is hard to imagine them sharing much else aside from an antipathy to the grand pronouncements of the high modernism that came before them. Unlike the perpetually disappointed and homely author of The Less Deceived, Gunn seems every stitch the charming, tanned beach boy, sometimes with bleached hair, sometimes as a robust, weathered brunette, as in the dazzling 1980 photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe. Richard Tillinghast placed his finger square in the critical knot that is so often pulled taut around Gunn when he remarked of the poet’s ability to bring “to demotic experience the classical clarity of his finely honed meter and incisive rhymes.” While it would be a mistake to assume that such a prolific poet can be summed only according to this formula, it is true that the larger share of his career can be snugly positioned this way.

 

While the second half of Gunn’s career was spent sometimes grappling homoerotic themes head-on, it is difficult to balance the image of him as a gay poet, strictly speaking. He is an Anglo-American poet, a post-war British poet, an experimental formalist, a poet who addressed the AIDS crisis and homosexual desire, but no single description works well by itself. This probably has a lot to do with the era in which he grew to prominence. He was well known as a poet on the jamb of greatness before he shouldered the closet door open. Also, he did not have to publish primarily in anthologies devoted to homosexual poetry in order to gain an audience. As a young poet today, he probably would. There is no question that homoerotic subjects stand out in his poems, but he is not entirely overwhelmed by these matters. The primary role of sex in his poems is to illuminate the ancient struggle between body and mind.

 

The bright young thing, the Oxbridge undergraduate is never cast entirely out of the garden party by the flaming sword of middle age experience. In the 1980s Gunn continued to publish poems of poise and nearly quaint allure, as in his invitation to his brother: “Dear welcomer, I think you must agree / It is your turn to visit me.” Like his countrymen Christopher Isherwood and David Hockney, Gunn was drawn to the sunburnt freedom of California, where cultural traditions were still young and malleable and class lines blurred beyond all distinction. While more conservative poets like Auden never got much past New York in their American pilgrimage, San Francisco seems more apt for Gunn’s generation. The Bay Area is as far as one can go, in many regards, before bouncing back the other way again or dropping nose-first into the Pacific. While he may seem comfortable writing on naturalist themes (”The Life of the Otter”) as on rough trade in the Castro district (too many to name), one should remember that his otter is behind glass at the Tucson Desert Museum. What this tells us about his relationship with his subjects is open to discussion, but one imagines that the objects of his closest attention were in no way distant from his embrace, if not his heart.

 

Peter Campion remembers Gunn as a poet “known for his daring subject matter,” though aside from his last book, Boss Cupid, which was released after his Collected Poems, Gunn’s selection of topics seems downright staid by today’s standards. In his first book, 1954’s Fighting Terms, he wrote in “Carnal Knowledge” of how “even in bed I pose,” and in “On the Move” of the motorcycles whose “hum / Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh.” These statements were perhaps remarkable in their day, when a knotty Robert Frost was the most famous living American poet and the rumpled Auden lorded it over his own factions, but they are almost timid when set alongside the fumes and related leaks of the Beats in the same decade, even if Gunn shares some of their shameless abandon, their adolescent excitement, hanging out at “another all-night party” hearing its “angelic messages.” He is also a better poet than any of the principal Beats, even if he is less an object of dreamy nostalgia for young hippies. Gunn does not incessantly attempt to frighten the squares for the sake of it, and he also bore his observations out to more mature conclusions: “I said our lives are improvisation and it sounded / un-rigid, liberal, in short a good idea. / But that kind of thing is hard to keep up.” You can’t see very far with a lampshade on your head. The party may never have to end, but we all have to drag ourselves home at some point.

 

The general loosening of Gunn’s style can be best viewed in two poems written on the same subject decades apart, both of them ruminative gazes at The King. “Elvis Presley,” from the 1957 collection The Sense of Movement, sees syntax wound tightly around the grille of iambic pentameter stanzas:

 

        Two minutes long it pitches through some bar: 
        unreeling from a corner box, the sigh 
        Of this one, in his gangling finery
        And crawling sideburns, wielding a guitar.

 

Compare this formal muscularity to the more droll buoyancy of “Painkillers,” from the 1982 collection The Passages of Joy:

 

        The King of rock ‘n’ roll
        Grown pudgy, almost matronly,
        Fatty in gold lame,
        mad King encircled
        by a court of guards, suffering
        delusions about assassination,
        obsessed by guns, fearing
        rivalry and revolt

 

        popping his skin
        with massive hits of painkiller

 

        dying at forty-two.

 

The second exercise is both more straightforward and much closer to the glitzy kitsch of Presley, but these poems also refract a smaller historical difference: the lithe, black leather clad Elvis was in many ways magnificently new and even threatening, while the late-career star was in serious decline and damned to forcibly parody his own golden beginnings right up to his own tragicomic ending. The second is also more interesting in that it casts Elvis in the role of a loopy King Ludwig II of Bavaria while also bitchily pointing up the stylistic grotesqueness that resulted when our homegrown King became as bloated and dull as any pre-Revolutionary courtier. The second is more fun to read, but it yields less. Perhaps part of Gunn’s point is that the deflated diction and metrics match the sequined Presley’s spongy waistband, but the poem seems less successful than the earlier, tight-fisted one that demanded so much and released so little of itself. The author of the first poem, the sullen punk, aping Brando, will not make eye contact and speaks in monosyllables, yet he exudes an allure of danger, even mystery. The elder man behind the second poem, chic, articulate, is more agreeable but does not exert quite as much of a hold on our imagination. Both styles have their merits, and neither one entirely represents a complete stage in Gunn’s career, but the shift is one that has larger implications for poetry over the past five decades. Happily, however, despite some free verse sorties such as “Painkillers,” Gunn continued writing in tight forms right up to the end of his career.

 

Of all poets who have recently passed, Gunn is among the most deserving of elegies, given his talent along these lines. His superb elegies include “To Isherwood Dying” and “To the Dead Owner of a Gym.” It is nearly impossible to be stylish when facing the terrifying reality of death. There are fewer and fewer choices to be made. Gunn was one of the last of his kind, the last of a post-war generation of English poets reeling from the Second World War and struggling to twist out from the shadows cast by Eliot, Pound, and Auden, and then revel in the dazzling liberties afforded by the 1960’s and 70’s. He was also one of the last significant poets to write convincingly in clear forms with whole rhymes, unconcerned with the peril of quaintness that these might suffer. He held an uninterrupted prosodic thread that extended all the way back to Chaucer, unlike the American New Formalists who, a few decades back, were compelled to scrabble together a new movement amid the savages, as they saw it. Right up to the end, as in “Death’s Door,” Gunn demonstrated a willingness to take real risks in employing traditional rhetorical flair:

 

        Of course the dead outnumber us 
        — How their recruiting armies grow! 
        My mother archaic now as Minos, 
        She who died forty years ago.

 

He dared to write Ogden Nash-like witticisms, as with the two line “Jamesian”: “Their relationship consisted / In discussing if it existed.” These chimes are no longer to be heard from such a confident and talented voice, and they will be missed. Gunn’s poem about J. V. Cunningham is a mirror that can easily be spun back to describe its author. It is also a fitting farewell:

 

        He concentrated, as he ought,
        On fitting language to his thought
        And getting all the rhymes correct,
        Thus exercising intellect
        In such a space, in such a fashion,
        He concentrated into passion.

 

From the Contemporary Poetry Review, December 2004. For the current issue, please visit www.cprw.com. Subscriptions to the archive, which features hundreds of reviews, articles, and interviews, like the one you just read, are only $6 for a month and $18 for a year.

 

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“I’m taking Fun Being Me back on the road with two stops in NYC! I know it’s cold and probably most of you are sick of my whiny, nasal tones but if you’re free I’d love to see you and share a glass! Here are the two events.”

 

Friday, 2/16/07
Cornelia Street Café
hosted by Jackie Sheeler
29 Cornelia St. New York
6:00pm
212-989-9319
$6.00 (includes one house drink)

 

Sunday, 2/25/07
The Bowery Poetry Club
Four Way Books hosts
I’m sharing the stage here with 3 other great poets;
Ellen Dore Watson, Alexandra Soiseth, and Adria Bernardi
308 Bowery
2:00pm
212-614-0505

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.”

- Alexis de Tocqueville

 

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The noble horse with courage in his eye,
clean in the bone, looks up at a shellburst:
away fly the images of the shires
but he puts the pipe back in his mouth.
Peter was unfortunately killed by an 88;
it took his leg away, he died in the ambulance.
I saw him crawling on the sand, he said
It’s most unfair, they’ve shot my foot off.

 

How can I live among this gentle
obsolescent breed of heroes, and not weep?
Unicorns, almost,
for they are fading into two legends
in which their stupidity and chivalry
are celebrated. Each, fool and hero, will be an immortal.
These plains were their cricket pitch
and in the mountains the tremendous drop fences
brought down some of the runners. Here then
under the stones and earth they dispose themselves,
I think with their famous unconcern.
It is not gunfire I hear, but a hunting horn.

 

 

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1. Archduke Francis Ferdinand assassinated
2. The Romanovs killed by the Bolsheviks
3. Princess Diana pursued unto death by frenzied media
4. Emperor Hirohito dies in his sleep, having seen Japan through most of the 20th century
5. Queen Victoria passes away after a record long reign

 

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David Yezzi, Karl Kirchwey, and Grace Schulman

 

Monday, February 12, 2007, 8:15pm

Unterberg Poetry Center

92nd Street Y

Lexington Avenue at 92nd Street

Buttenwieser Hall

 

Tickets: $18.00 / $10.00 Age 35 and Under

 

There will be a reception afterwards with lots of delicious food and drink. Hope to see you then!

 

Tickets can be purchased at: http://www.92y.org/shop/event_detail.asp?productid=T-TP5MS21&blog=yezzi

 

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King Kong Lives (1986)

 

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“Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.” - G. K. Chesterton

 

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Homer and Queen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeyM6ac6sIk

 

Catherine Tate - Queen Birthday performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2rRevNdC20

 

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Charles I wore two shirts to his execution as it was a cold day and he did not want anyone to think that he was shivering because he was afraid.

 

Charles II was always accompanied to the lavatory by two attendants – one to hold the candle and the other to hold the lavatory paper. He was also an amateur physician and enjoyed dissecting bodies of both men and women.

 

Queen Anne grew so fat that she had to be raised and lowered through trapdoors at Windsor Castle by means of ropes and pulleys.

 

George III stopped his carriage in Windsor Park one day with the hearty cry: ‘Ah, there he is!’ then alighted from the vehicle to cordially shake hands with the branches of an oak tree under the impression that it was the King of Prussia. For the next few minutes, he discussed continental politics with the tree. He also fancied that he could see Hanover through his telescope from England. He once talked for sixteen hours without stopping. On one occasion he told his barber to shave only half his face. During his madness, Shakespeare’s King Lear was not played on the English stage out of respect for his condition.  

 

Queen Victoria’s first action on returning to the palace after her coronation in 1837 was to wash the dog, Dash, a King Charles spaniel.

 

Edward VII was known as ‘Tum Tum to his intimate friends because of his rotundity, which was brought about by his love of ten-course meals. When king, he measured four feet around the waist. He spoke with a guttural German ‘r’. A fussy dresser, he often changed his clothes up to six times a day. The idiotic habit that some men have of always leaving the bottom button on their waistcoat undone because it’s ‘the done thing’ stemmed from a fashion set by Edward, who, after his large meals, was simply unable to fasten it

 

Queen Elizabeth II was once a car mechanic. When she enrolled as a subaltern in the Auxiliary Territorial Service during the war, she learned how to strip the engines of cars and lorries and was often to be seen crawling from under a vehicle with oily face and hands. She doesn’t have a passport. Once, when she was a little girl, she was spanked on the bottom. by a post office telephone engineer named Mr Albert Tippele for delving inquisitively into his bag of tools. She is known in her family as ‘Lilibet’ through her lisping attempts to pronounce her own name when a child. Among her all-time favourite television shows were Dad’s Army and Kojak.’

 

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“Well the idea is blindingly obvious, in hindsight. What you may be missing is the analogy to genes as well as viruses etc. The memetic competition is Darwinian, that is memes compete for a limited amount of human bandwidth and storage capacity. Some memes themselves are far better competitors than others, just like some genes are, in particular environments. For example many more people today would recognize the opening notes to an Elvis song than a Duane Eddy song, but in the 19th century neither might have out-competed a Stephen Foster tune. Various memetic features, not limited to rhyme, rhythm, harmony, meaning, and resonance, can give some the edge. Memetic theory, still very much under development can help explain such phenomenon as religion. Why did Christ overwhelm Mithras in the Roman empire? Why did Mohammed oust them both from the Levant and N. Africa? One possible explanation is memetic. Christianity was a better fit for the minds of Roman and Medieval European cultures. Islam fit in with the desert culture’s mindset. The advantage that memetic theory offers is that it allows us one more possible explanation for such phenomena. One that addresses the qualities of Ideas themselves, and examine their failures and successes in terms of a concept that we already understand (or do we?): Evolution by natural selection. It may in fact be pseudo-scientific. Ideas are at least partly epi-phenomenal, and difficult to scrutinize by a fully scientific method. The Darwinian/Memetic concept however can be a handy tool for understanding the rate of propagation of ideas both large and small. For more on Religions as Memes see Dan Dennett’s newest book Breaking the Spell, which is a far less hostile look at Religion then Dawkin’s.”

 

 

 

“I believe Dawkins see memes as possibly replacing genes as a primary unit of selection. Remember, he put forth the theory in the book The Selfish Gene, which was all about how genes, as opposed to specific organisms, are the fundamental unit of natural selection. He put in the seeming throwaway final chapter about memes in part to explain why people seemed to be doing things that would not maximize the propagation of their genes–it was because they focused on memes, instead. So while one might not have any children, one might live on through one’s memes.  I do find this model to be useful at times. For example, just as there are certain very hardy, virulent genes that spread throughout the world, you can see how certain meme are particularly powerful, and grow and spread even in the seeming absence of fuel to feed them. Hence you’ll find anti-semitism in places with no Jews. Memes of hatred seem most powerful and difficult to eradicate. In fact, you could perhaps look at memes as genes that have jumped from the biological to the philosophical, but that continue to support the propagation of one’s genes. The idea of eugenics is perhaps the most obvious example of this, but it works for all racism, really.”

 

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God save the queen
She ain’t no human being
There is no future
In England’s dreaming

 

Don’t be told what you want
Don’t be told what you need
There’s no future, no future,
No future for you

 

- Sex Pistols

 

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“Sorry, I’m sure you get quibblers and addenders all the time, but I’ve got to petition you to add John Hillcoat’s The Proposition to your Aussie film list (perhaps in place of the unextraordinary Rabbit Proof Fence?). It made a handful of year’s best lists last month and should certainly be a contender here. Ebert nails it – as he so often does - by likening it to Cormac McCarthy down under: brutal, awful (in all its senses), strangely beautiful. And I’ll start a list of great Aussie novels, though I might need some help finishing:

 

1. Richard Flannegan - Gould’s Book of Fish
2. Peter Carey - True History of the Kelly Gang
3. Julia Leigh - The Hunter
4. Patrick White - Voss

 

And can I get a critter shoutout for the Tasmanian Tiger?  See video and story here: http://www.naturalworlds..org/thylacine/“

 

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“As much as I hate to disagree with the facial-hair field-guide, based on experience at Universities the ‘Amish’ gets a 60/40 ’Amish’ vs ’Capt. Ahab’ in my case.”

 

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Tuesday, February 6, 7:00pm
BRANCHING OUT NYC: Robert Pinsky on Robert Frost & William Carlos Williams 

 

The former U.S. Poet Laureate explores the shared territory of two major 20 th century poets, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, whose distinct voices are unified by a common interest in the American idiom and the construction of the American memory.

 

Co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of America and the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. Funded by the New York Council for the Humanities.

 

@ Tribeca Performing Arts Center
Borough of Manhattan Community College
199 Chambers Street (1,2,3 to Chambers St. and walk west to BMCC)
$10, Half-price to Lower Manhattan residents
Free to students, Poets House & PSA Members

 

 

 

Brenda Iijima, Jill Magi, Sawako Nakayasu and Srikanth Reddy share work that resonates with the renowned Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) in the exquisite museum and rock garden dedicated to his art.

 

Co-sponsored by The Noguchi Museum.

 

@ The Noguchi Museum
9-01 33 rd Road at Vernon Blvd., Long Island City
(N to Broadway in Queens, walk west on Broadway to Vernon Blvd.
For information about shuttle buses to the Museum, visit www.noguchi.org)
$10, $5 for seniors and students, Free to Poets House & Noguchi Museum Members

 

 

Poets House  is a 45,000-volume poetry library and literary center that invites poets and the public to step into the living tradition of poetry. Poets House’s ever-expanding archive of books, journals, chapbooks, audiotapes, videos and electronic media is one of the most comprehensive open-access collections of poetry in the United States. The Reading Room is free and open to the public.

 

Poets House, 72 Spring Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10012
Reading Room Hours: Tuesday-Friday, 11:00 am-7:00 pm & Saturday, 1:00 pm-6:00 pm
Children’s Hours: Saturday, 11:00 am-1:00 pm
Phone: (212) 431-7920
Website: http://www.poetshouse.org

 

 

 

Unanswered Prayers by Penny Richards – ”Can anyone really feel romantic when framed by som