“Twenty-five years ago I got fired. I had been employed as a thrice-a-week afternoon babysitter for the two-year-old daughter of a prosperous young matron, who used the free time to run errands or nap. I never met the little girl’s father, but I talked to him regularly. At least once a week, usually more often than that, the phone would ring thirty minutes after my arrival, and he would give me a message for his wife: he was working late in the city and wouldn’t be home for dinner. I would duly report these facts — often as an afterthought, while the wife was fishing in her purse for my pay — and she would take the news stoically, heaving a brave little sigh and nodding. One day I showed up for work, gave the little girl a hug — we were fond of each other — and then settled the two of us down in the playroom. I made her a castle out of large cardboard blocks, and once she was happily playing inside it, I opened my French textbook and started to read. At no point did it cross my mind that by doing this I was in dereliction of duty. I was raised with my mother close by, but not hovering. Ditto my Saturday-night babysitters, whom I adored and who often did their homework as they sat beside me on the couch in the TV room. Anyway, while the little girl and I were enjoying the peaceful afternoon, the playroom door suddenly swung open — it was clearly a sting operation — and my boss glared at the scene as though she’d caught me in flagrante with the gardener while her child played with matches. I was sent home, and two hours later I was fired over the telephone. (’You were supposed to be playing with her, not studying,’ she told me — perfectly reasonable, but I hadn’t known that’s what she wanted.)”

 

 - Caitlin Flanagan

 

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A few minutes ago, I stepped onto the deck
of the house. From there I could see and hear the water,
and everything that’s happened to me all these years.
It was hot and still. The tide was out.
No birds sang. As I leaned against the railing
a cobweb touched my forehead.
It caught in my hair. No one can blame me that I turned
and went inside. There was no wind. The sea
was dead calm. I hung the cobweb from the lampshade.
Where I watch it shudder now and then when my breath
touches it. A fine thread. Intricate.
Before long, before anyone realizes,
I’ll be gone from here.

 

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1. It’s the 9th largest country in the world (in area. but population is only 15 million)

2. Most people are descended from Mongol nomads, so look more east Asian than, like Borat, western European

3. Far from being anti-Semitic, it has a Jewish population of about 30,000, largely due to Kazakhstan taking in Holocaust refugees, plus dissidents being sent there by Stalin. The country has good relations with Israel

4. Rather than being uneducated like the “villagers” from Borat’s village, Kazakh has a 98% literacy rate, far higher than the U.S.’s rate

5. Recently wealthy due to oil, gas, and mineral deposits, the government is building its capital almost from scratch, hiring famous architects from throughout the world to design whimsical, high-tech, eco-friendly buildings

 

Extra: ”The situation for women isn’t so bad as Borat depicted, with the current president grooming his daughter to replace him, so apparently a female dictator is just as acceptable as a male dictator. Let’s hear it for sisterhood! And women do hold a number of powerful positions throughout the country. Still, there’s a lot of sexism, and kidnap marriages were an old custom and sometimes do still occur, but ostensibly just for fun, as they’re illegal.”

 

Bonus: ”The USSR launched the Mir space station from Kazakhstan.”

 

And one more: ”In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Galapagos, virtually the entire human race is wiped out, and all humans afterwards are descended from 8 or so Kazakh girls.”

 

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Hollywood’s Private Personalized Plates (1991)

 

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Guglielmo Marconi was twenty-one years old when he invented the wireless radio.

 

It takes the interaction of 72 different muscles to produce human speech.

 

The entire length of all the eyelashes shed by a human in their life is over 98 feet (30 m).

 

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“School term papers may be going the way of the typewriters once used to write them. ‘It’s so easy to cheat and steal from the Internet that I don’t even assign papers anymore,’ said Bobbie Eisenstock, an assistant professor of journalism at Cal State Northridge. ‘I got tired of night after night checking for cheaters.’ Across the country, teachers and professors are abandoning the traditional academic chore of tidy margins and meticulous footnotes because the Internet offers a searchable online smorgasbord of ready-made papers.” - Terril Yue Jones

 

[Any thoughts on this from the teachers out there? - E]

 

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April 15-17, every year: US taxes are due
April 16, 2007: Virginia Tech Shooting Spree. 33 dead
April 20, 1999: Columbine Massacre. 15 dead
April 19, 1995: Oklahoma City Bombing, 168 dead
April 19, 1993: Branch Davidian Siege, 81 dead
April 19, 1989: Turret exploded on USS Iowa. 47 dead
April, 1989: Tiananmen square massacre begins; 3000-5000 dead
April 18, 1983: Suicide bomber destroys Lebanon embassy. 63 dead
April 16, 1947: Texas City fire. 600+ dead
April 14-15, 1914: Titanic sinks. Approximately 1500 dead
April 20, 1889: Adolph Hitler born. Approximately 50 million dead
April 17, 1492: Columbus receives his contract from Spain for his planned voyage–untold millions dead
April 16, 73. Masada falls to the Romans, mass suicide, major blow to Jewish revolt against Romans

 

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Undergone swamp ticket   relative

whist natural sweep   innate bicker

flight notion  reach out tinsel reckoning

bit  straddle  iniquitous ramble stung

 

Famous furniture instant paschal

passionate Runnymede licorice

feature departure   frequency gnash

lance    sweat lodge rampart crow

 

Neck Bedlam philosophaster rain drape

lack fragile limitation   bitartrate

fence lenghen tinge impinge  classed

Fenster   planetary knocked market

 

Glass killjoy vanity  infanta part song

king  cleanse vast chromium watch it

neat      intense yellow cholera

ornithology insistence     pantry

 

Torque normal fax center globe host

yammer ratchet     zinc memory

yield  texture  tenure   Penelope

reed liter   risible stashed incomprehension

 

- 11 February 1990, Kennedy Airport New York, en route to San Diego

 

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Guided walking tour: “Zora Neale Hurston’s Washington,” led by Kim Roberts and Judith Bauer. Presented as part of The Big Read, by the Humanities Council of Washington, April 28, Saturday, 10:30 AM

Free, but reservations required. Meet in front of the Founders Library, Howard University campus, Georgia Avenue at Howard Place NW, DC. (202) 387-8391

 

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National Poetry Month Celebration at the DC Public Library, with readings by Robert Pinsky, Kenneth Carroll, E. Ethelbert Miller, DJ Renegade, students from DC Public Schools, live jazz, and children’s activities.
Saturday, April 28, 11:00 AMto 4:00 PM
Free. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library, 901 G St. NW, Gallery Place neighborhood, DC. (202) 727-0321.

 

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1. Pierre and Marie Curie

2. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

3. Susan Sontag and Annie Leibovitz

4. Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo

5. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

 

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Toad Suck, Arkansas

 

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A ball will bounce; but less and less. It’s not

A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience.

Falling is what it loves, and the earth falls

So in our hearts from brilliance,

Settles and is forgot.

It takes a sky-blue juggler with five red balls

 

To shake our gravity up. Whee, in the air

The balls roll around, wheel on his wheeling hands,

Learning the ways of lightness, alter to spheres

Grazing his finger ends,

Cling to their courses there,

Swinging a small heaven about his ears.

 

But a heaven is easier made of nothing at all

Than the earth regained, and still and sole within

The spin of worlds, with a gesture sure and noble

He reels that heaven in,

Landing it ball by ball,

And trades it all for a broom, a plate, a table.

 

Oh, on his toe the table is turning, the broom’s

Balancing up on his nose, and the plate whirls

On the tip of the broom! Damn, what a show, we cry:

The boys stamp, and the girls

Shriek, and the drum booms

And all come down, and he bows and says good-bye.

 

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Burlesque Poetry Hour: Scott Glassman, Jordan Davis, Mairead Byrne, and Alison Stine
Monday, April 30, 8:00 PM
Free. Bar Rouge, Hotel Rouge, 1315 16th St. NW, DC. (202) 232-8000.

 

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A Hand of Bananas.

 

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1. Jane Austen, age 41 (tuberculosis/Addison’s disease)

2. Christopher Marlowe, age 29 (knife)

3. Percy B. Shelley, age 29 (drowned)

4. Emily Bronte, age 30 (tuberculosis); Charlotte Bronte, age 38 (tuberculosis)

5. John Keats, age 25 (tuberculosis)

 

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“‘Vibrate (My Phone’s On Vibrate For You)’ by Rufus Wainwright.”

 

 

 

“A good story, but not altogether true. I had learned that the name they marketed it under meant ’Taste good, feel good,’ which seems to be an acceptable translation. Snopes.com explains it best (http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tadpole.asp)”

 

 

 

“A singular Starbuck was a character played by Burt Lancaster in the Rainmaker, a film that co-starred Katherine Hepburn.”

 

 

 

“Hey, good list! In response, here’s my list of top five films that feature CG visual effects. It’s important to note that for most of these, quality of the movie itself isn’t really considered.”

 

1. War of the Worlds (the new one). The destruction of Brooklyn around Tom Cruise as he runs away is absolutely bone-chilling. Too bad the movie is such a stinker.

 

2. King Kong. I’ve never seen a creature with such an emotive face. Kong wasn’t a digital character. He was, first and foremost, a character.

 

3. The Lord of the Rings. Maybe it’s a cop-out to include all three films in this slot, but what can be said about any one that can’t be said about all three?

 

4. Batman Begins. An excellent example of using CG to augment a mood (the scarecrow scenes are terrifying) instead of trying to dazzle (or distract) us.

 

5. Jurassic Park. Almost 15 years later, these effects hold up better than many effects-driven movies that came out last year.

 

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“Truman Capote used to like to play a game he invented called International Daisy Chain, best attempted, he felt, when drunk. The chain was formed through the connection of people who had had affairs with people who then went on to have affairs with other people: He claimed to have been able to construct one such chain from Cab Calloway to Adolf Hitler.”

 

 - Joseph Epstein

 

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This much I know. Just as I’m about to make that right turn
off Province Line Road
I meet another beat-up Volvo
carrying a load

 

of hay. (More accurately, a bale of Lucerne
on the roof rack,
a bale of Lucerne or fescue or alfalfa.)
My hands are raw. I’m itching to cut the twine, to unpack

 

that hay-accordion, that hay-concertina.
It must be ten o’clock. There’s still enough light
(not least from the glow

 

of the bales themselves) for a body to ascertain
that when one bursts, as now, something takes flight
from those hot and heavy box-pleats. This much, at least, I know.

 

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1. The one from Moby Dick, from whence all others flow
2. Walter F. Starbuck, main character of Vonnegut’s novel Jailbird – an indicted co-conspirator
3. Katee Sackhoff in the new Battlestar Galactica.
4. Starbucks, a small Seattle coffeehouse named after the Moby Dick character
5. Dirk Benedict, cigar-smoking horndog in the original Battlestar Galactica.

 

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Neat But Not Clean (1973)

 

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80% of all galaxies are spiral shaped.

 

The number of seconds since the Big Bang is one followed by 17 zeros. Whilst the number of atoms in the Universe is one followed by 100 zeros.

 

When Coca-Cola was first sold in China, they used characters that would sound like “Coca-Cola” when spoken. Unfortunately, what they turned out to mean was “Bite the wax tadpole.” It did not sell well.

 

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1. Seventy-four years before National Poetry Month was invented, he began his best-known poem with the words “April is the cruelest month.”

 

2. First poet to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1901).

 

3. Ohio-born high-school dropout whose father invented candy Life-Savers.

 

4. She wrote that a poem “makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, . . . I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off.”

 

5. The last poet to win a Nobel Prize for Literature (1996), she wrote “in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.”

 

6. Singer-songwriter who is the current Poet Laureate of Texas.

 

7. Dublin-born and now Stanford-based, this poet’s work expands on the confessional tradition of Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich.

 

8. He said (to an annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association): “If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place to live.”

 

9. Irish poet who wrote, “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”

 

10. U.S. senator (R-Maine, 1979-97), Defense secretary (1997-2001), novelist and poet.

 

11. He described poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

 

12. In his elegy to Yeats, he wrote “poetry makes nothing happen.”

 

13. Her four titles in the top 10 have been on the poetry best-sellers list for a combined 180 weeks.

 

14. This San Francisco-born professional New Englander wrote, “Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.”

 

15. Physician-poet who wrote: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”

 

16. This Seattle-based poet-performer has won the National Poetry Slam individual title for the past two years.

 

17. Chilean Nobel Laureate who wrote “peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.”

 

18. The first woman and only American to win the Neustadt Prize for Literature, she split her time between Cambridge and Brazil and was described by James Merrill in a dedication as “our principal national treasure.”

 

19. The daughter of a Palestinian father and American mother, this San Antonio poet writes about the details of daily life, her experiences and perspective as an Arab-American, and the tragedy of the Middle East.

 

20. His poem “Trivia” (1716) advises about coping with the hazards of walking the mean streets of 18th century London.

 

Tom Mayo teaches “Law, Literature & Medicine” at SMU’s Dedman School of Law and at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas.

 

The answers: 1) T.S. Eliot; 2) Sully Prudhomme; 3 Hart Crane; 4) Emily Dickinson; 5) Wislawa Szymborska; 6) Red Steagall; 7) Eavan Boland; 8) John F. Kennedy; 9) William Butler Yeats; 10) William Cohen; 11) Percy Byshe Shelley; 12) W.H. Auden; 13) Mary Oliver; 14) Robert Frost; 15) William Carlos Williams; 16) Anis Mojgani; 17) Pablo Neruda; 18) Elizabeth Bishop; 19) Naomi Shihab Nye; 20) John Gay.

 

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John Milton, Trent Reznor, and the “Madness of Poets”:

 

 

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Destroyers Off Jutland
Reginald McIntosh Cleveland
 
“If lost hounds could speak when they cast up next day after an unchecked night among the wild life of the dark they would talk much as our destroyers do.” - Rudyard Kipling

 

They had hot scent across the spumy sea,
Gehenna and her sister, swift Shaitan,
That in the pack, with Goblin, Eblis ran
And many a couple more, full cry, foot-free.
The dog-fox and his brood were fain to flee,
But bare of fang and dangerous to the van
That pressed them close. So when the kill began
Some hounds were lame and some died splendidly.
But from the dusk along the Skagerack,
Until dawn loomed upon the Reef of Horn 
    And the last fox had slunk back to his earth,
They kept the great traditions of the pack,
Staunch-hearted through the hunt, as they were born, 
    These hounds that England suckled at the birth.

 

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“The New York Observer did a brief write-up about the event that you can read here.

 

 

 Follow the link, if for no other reason, than to see the awesome graphic they did for the article of a soldier furiously blogging amid a combat firestorm. I’ve never done a reading and I’ve never been part of a panel. Most the guys on the panel had something to so with the anthology Operation Homecoming and its accompanying documentary that aired on PBS. Watch the trailer for the doc here– it looks pretty cool. 

 

 

It includes Colby Buzzell, another blogger-author whose writing you may like if you like mine.”

 

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Is John Fago out there anywhere? Does anyone know how to find him? How about Steve Diamond?

 

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“Is Paris Hilton glamorous? She meets all the criteria. She’s young, shiny, obscenely rich and reckless. She does precisely as she likes. She’s an heiress. Old money! (Mature, anyway.) She is pure, uncompromised artifice. Noel Coward or Preston Sturges could have made her up - if it weren’t for the sex tape. And the hamburger ad. And the album. And her mother. What does it mean to be glamorous anymore? What did it mean in the first place? Is Jessica Simpson glamorous when she’s playing Daisy Duke? Is she glamorous as herself, eating tuna out of the can? Or is she glamorous only when she’s posing for InStyle, in-styled within an inch of her life?” - Carina Chocano

 

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“The concept of song has gone out of contemporary poetry for the time being, and has been out of contemporary poetry for a long while. And all those attributes, like rhyme, complexity, or rigidity of meter, have gone. If music goes out of language, then you are in bad trouble.” - Derek Walcott, The New Yorker, 9 February 2004

 

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E-Verse Radio town you really have to visit:

 

Lawyersville, New York

 

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The eager note on my door said “Call me,”
call when you get in!” so I quickly threw
a few tangerines into my overnight bag,
straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and

 

headed straight for the door.  It was autumn
by the time I got around the corner, oh all
unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but
the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk!

 

Funny, I thought, that the lights are on this late
and the hall door open; still up at this hour, a
champion jai-alai player like himself? Oh fie!
for shame!  What a host, so zealous!  And he was

 

there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that
ran down the stairs.  I did appreciate it.  There are few
hosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest
only casually invited, and that several months ago.

 

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A gang of hoodlums.

 

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“The works of self-taught artist Henry Darger are the definition of that slightly condescending critical category known as the ‘interesting.’ You look at his phantasmagoric paintings, of naked little girls running through violent, lurid landscapes, and you think, this is fascinating. You read extracts from his 15,000-page novel, In the Realms of the Unreal, and you think, how bizarre, how odd, how interesting. Darger, who worked in total obscurity his entire life, painting, writing, and noting in detail every facet of the weather in Chicago, has emerged since his death in 1973 as one of this country’s best-known ‘outsider’ artists. His paintings sell for prices that insider artists would envy. His life and work are subject to the flattering scrutiny of art historians, graduate students, and biographers. And yet if you put aside the story of Henry Darger’s life — the tragedy, the loneliness, the immense, secret productivity — and focus only on the work of Darger, all the adjectives that come to mind have a frustrating, slippery, elusive quality: It is curious, odd, creepy, bizarre. But does anyone find it moving?” - Philip Kennicott

 

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“And what about (the) Pearly Gates for a top position? Thinking about that I also recall Peter Sellers doing a very funny portrait of a  gangster called ’Pearly’ Gates in some old 60’s comedy…

 

 

 

“Another phone tune is Wilson Pickett’s B side of ‘Mustang Sally.’ I can’t recall the number.”

 

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More clip shows while Paul is in Australia.

 

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