May 2012
7 posts
“The theory of machinery is that it saves time, but Stanford himself noted of...”
– From Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows (via viafrank)
“Over the long course
Everything but hope lets you go, then
even that loosens...”
– From Raymond Carver’s “The Author of Her Misfortune”
“Growing up poor is growing up hungry—even if you’re well-fed.”
– Emily Moseley
Mrs. Midas
It was late September. I’d just poured a glass of wine, begun to unwind, while the vegetables cooked. The kitchen filled with the smell of itself, relaxed, its steamy breath gently blanching the windows. So I opened one, then with my fingers wiped the other’s glass like a brow. He was standing under the pear tree snapping a twig. Now the garden was long and the...
“In conclusion, what have we learned here? Nothing. Except this: the world is a dangerous place, and it will eat one’s soul without the slightest provocation, and we’re all battered and bruised, until we can barely see straight, and we’re all going down together, but also celebrating along the way, and remembering to notice and celebrate one another’s...
April 2012
7 posts
“…the feminist movement did call for, and then achieve, greater sexual...”
– Margaret Talbot, discussing women, sex, and options via HBO’s “Girls” in The New Yorker
John Updike, Easter and Who Knows?
This post is only going to resonate with those of you who currently view the world from a standpoint of Christian, Post-Christian, Anti-Christian, or Ante-(as in the game of Poker, and you know who you are) Christian. I spend a lot of time as an agnostic, some time as an atheist, and a sliver of time as a Hoper (i.e. one who is hopeful in regards—in my case, at least—to the Christian...
“It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty...”
– Clay Shirky
March 2012
4 posts
WatchTonight at 7:30pm is the Broke* screening in sunny, southern California. Tix are sold out, so I get to watch my former self struggle and cry and make some music with people I love and miss in a theater full o’ people who don’t know me from Eve…
February 2012
2 posts
“When hope is gone, the ultimate sanity is to grasp at straws.”
– Raymond Carver, from his journal
The Snark Also Rises
“This is what I think people should say to themselves if they were to give an honest assessment of their relationship with the Bible, ‘I mistook its ambiguity for depth.’”
—Garin Williams
January 2012
5 posts
Fin and Dr. Who
My nephew, Finean (he’s the one in the Red Sox hat on the left), is ten years-old and obsessed with Dr. Who (the new one, not the old). He sent out this summary of an episode via email recently. It’s fabulous. I hope you like it as much as I do. (I’ve changed not a one of his sweet spelling and punctuation anomalies.)
heres the summary of a doctor who episode to keep everyone...
“Upon further examination, everything crumbled.”
– Garin Williams
“Turns out the real reason for growing up
was to learn what to do with...”
– Tony Hoagland, from his poem Powers
December 2011
9 posts
Music Nite
Playing The Green Lantern (3rd and Jefferson in Lexington, KY) tonight with the good ‘uns in Small Batch. We go on first, The Swells headline. Promise there’ll be goooood songs and 3-part harmony. Some o’ the sweeties from The Swells will be joining us, also. Doors are at 9pm, but we pro’ly won’t hit ‘til 10pm or later…
(come out.)
Christmas, Last Night
Once, a long time ago (honestly, I can’t remember when), I sat too-late at a bar up in Boston (Atwood’s Tavern, I’m sure) after a show (pretty sure I was sidemanning it with Christian McNeil) and Duke Levine (a stellar guitarist) told how on Christmas Day, he and his sister (because they’re Jewish and didn’t celebrate that holiday) would go down the street to watch...
Christopher Hitchens, dead at 62 →
I disagreed with a lot of what he wrote, disliked tremendously the spirit in which he wrote it—the smugness, the certainty—and still, I cried when I learned that his light had gone out. So much of who we are depends on the joyful plurality of the voices willing to speak up, and Hitchens’s voice within that plurality was mighty. He will be missed even by those who wish he’d...
“An ad that pretends to be art is — at absolute best — like somebody who smiles...”
– David Foster Wallace
“I think there’s a God; I just don’t know if we invented him or not.”
– Arlyce, in full laughter
Paging Senator McCarthy
I hate to be a downer (although, it does seem to be one of my main skill sets), but sh*t just got a lot more Orwellian here in the good ol’ U.S.A.
Our sweetie-pies in the United States Senate just voted against a provision that would have kept our military from arresting and detaining U.S. citizens on American soil indefinitely and without charge so long as they are suspected of...
November 2011
9 posts
Salvage
The wreck
is a fact.
The worst
has happened.
The salvage trucks
back in and
the salvage men
begin to sort
and stack,
whistling as
they work.
Thanks be
to god—again
for extractable elements
which are not
carriers of pain,
for this periodic
table at which
the self-taught
salvagers disassemble
the unthinkable
to the unthought.
by Kay Ryan
Pepper-Spray Cop Gets Hisself Art Memed →
“The warmth of human contact with a manly whiff of violence.”
– Homer Simpson, on why he likes the fist bump.
Still Life On A Matchbox Lid
The heart is colder then the eye is. The watchers, the holy ones, know this, no shortcut to the sky, A single dog hair can split the wind. If you want great tranquility, it’s hard work and a long walk. Don’t brood on the past. The world is without appendages, no message, no name.
by Charles Wright
“This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: At the time, no...”
– Haruki Murakami
October 2011
5 posts
Bedtime Story The generator hums like a distant ding an sich. It’s early evening, and time, like the dog it is, is hungry for food, And will be fed, don’t doubt it, will be fed, my small one. The forest begins to gather its silences in. The meadow regroups and hunkers down ...
When Time Don't Fly
“To me, what is really, really alarming is this: a typical American male who works full time and still has a job is earning almost exactly the same now as his counterpart was back in 1972, when Richard Nixon was in the White House, O. J. Simpson rushed a thousand yards for the Buffalo Bills, and Don McLean topped the charts with “American Pie.”
The figures, which appear in Table A-5 at...
“Forgetting. Yes. I will forget it all. One after the other. The roads I crossed. The roads I did not. Everything that happened. And everything that did not.”
from Vahan Tekeyan’s “Forgetting” (quoted by Carolyn Forche in the May, 2011 edition of Poetry)
3 tags
Big Day.
I’m gonna be on the radio at the one and only WRFL, all the way to the left at 88.1 FM (internet listeners, go here) from 6pm-8pm during Jack Cofer’s slot with Catherine Edgerton of Harvey Sue. She and I are then hustling over to that North Lime Wonderland known as Al’s Bar. Show starts at 10pm. $3. 18+.
Me (Reva) + drums (Dave) + bass (Scott) + Catherine’s real...
September 2011
10 posts
“Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out for longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest...
Finally.
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is officially over today.
Now, if we could just end all these wars…