2011/05/27

we who are your closest friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting as a group to devise ways to keep you in perpetual uncertainty frustration discontent and torture by neither loving you as much as you want nor cutting you adrift

Was fun if subdued, Thursday Night Pints. Also, Siouxsie Sioux is fifty-four today.









  • I am fifty-one years old. That's at least the tenth time in eight years of blogging I've used that joke. I will use it an eleventh. Blerg!
  • John Barth is eighty-one today. If not one of my desert island five, certainly in my desert island ten, and Sot-Weed Factor is in permanent reading rotation (2012 next).
  • Ashbery.
  • Auden.
  • Name that novel
  • A Vida Avida.
  • Retromania!
  • Siouxie makes me think of HBV. I know one other person who loves this song. Once there, listen to the rest of the album, yes?
  • When I think of HBV I think of The Januaries. I do like this Thievery Corporation remix, though someday I'll learn how to take a CD I own, burn it to a PC, and post a song.
  • Pure
  • Bruce Cockburn is sixty-six today.




WE WHO ARE YOUR CLOSEST FRIENDS

Philip Lopate

we who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting
as a group
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift


your analyst is
in on it
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us


in announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves
but since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make
unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your
disastrous personality


then for the good of the collective