Special guest T at Thursday Night Pints, good friend of L, was telling us of the vicious curriculum revision fight in X Dept of X University, how the faculty were breaking into utterly predictable factions. The young tenure-track professors - and the young star dept head - want to expand the width of the department, the tenured and full insist what's in place is fine, what's needed is depth. Each side has a firebrand, subordinate but enforcer, making threatening noises against possible defectors. Depth, snorted L, is code for the fat fucks reinforcing their status - remember the fights here, she said, once a fierce Width firebrand and enforcer. The world is full of revolutionaries, said D, smiling at L, most of whom could lead the NKVD but not the people, winning a Fuck You and last night's round of ridiculously priced scotch.
- Obama will not be primaried.
- An analysis of the .06% less-shitty problem.
- He's got nothing.
- A bet on Perry.
- Perry as less-boring Pawlenty.
- Rick Perry's Army of Dog?
- Economic terrorism.
- Feral capitalism.
- Stolen context.
- Birth pangs.
- We showed them.
- Em em tee and me.
- Indignities of labor.
- Why we can't give up torture.
- On the British riots.
- British government: officially retarded.
- Three cheers for decline!
- Five reasons the American riots will be worst in world.
- Chaotic masters.
- The World's Shittiest Human says the system works.
- Bunchalinks.
- The guy in the seat behind you who won't shut the fuck up.
- Didn't get a chance to read yesterday, so no Daily Gaddis today.
- MOCO austerity. Fuck Ike Leggett.
- There will never be a new soccer stadium in DC.
- Freida's closing up shop. Please let me know when the new one opens.
- Thinking about closing shop.
- Overrated. Serendipitously, D mentioned Alexandra Quartet last night, wondering if anyone even remembered it anymore.
- Berryman.
- It's all too much.
- Sublime beauty of an unplayable song.
- Rain and shine at the Lotus Pond.
RAIN ON TIN
Rodney Jones
If I ever get over the bodies of women, I am going to think of the rain,
of waiting under the eaves of an old house
at that moment
when it takes a form like fog.
It makes the mountain vanish.
Then the smell of rain, which is the smell of the earth a plow turns up,
only condensed and refined.
Almost fifty years since thunder rolled
and the nerves woke like secret agents under the skin.
Brazil is where I wanted to live.
The border is not far from here.
Lonely and grateful would be my way to end,
and something for the pain please,
a little purity to sand the rough edges,
a slow downpour from the Dark Ages,
a drizzle from the Pleistocene.
As I dream of the rain’s long body,
I will eliminate from mind all the qualities that rain deletes
and then I will be primed to study rain’s power,
the first drops lightly hallowing,
but now and again a great gallop of the horse of rain
or an explosion of orange-green light.
A simple radiance, it requires no discipline.
Before I knew women, I knew the lonely pleasures of rain.
The mist and then the clearing.
I will listen where the lightning thrills the rooster up a willow,
and my whole life flowing
until I have no choice, only the rain,
and I step into it.
