RIP Dick Whittington, my step-father-in-law. He was a good guy. We weren't close, we were tangents, tertiaries by obligation, but he was a good guy. I hope he thought me a good guy, I'm told he did, but what else are people going to say. He made it to his wife's memorial service two months ago (he was on a train to see her before she died when she died), summoned lucidity out of his alzheimered mind, movement out of his atrophied legs, was as much his old self in handling the necessities and services as he had been in years. In between their deaths a composer and poet who are touchstones died. I created a tag Death, wish I hadn't need use it so much since Death's tag's birth.
- On the both-sides-suck dismissal.
- Motherfucking Obama.
- American diplomacy.
- Definitions and distinctions part one, part two.
- Kiss of death.
- Who's your daddy?
- Terry Fucking McAuliffe? Fucking Democratic Party zombies.
- A few minutes with Ben Olsen.
- A few minutes with Dave Kasper.
- A few minutes with Kevin Payne.
- UPDATE! Goodbye, Branko, we hardly knew you.
- I, for one, mourn the loss of Maryland's traditional rivalries with Syracuse and Pitt.
- Your Fucking Washington Post: Stupid or disingenuous? Let me rephrase that: more stupid than disingenuous or visa versa?
- Silliman's always awesome litlinks.
- Ross' music links.
- Ammons and Hass.
- UPDATE! My formative years.
- Houses of the Holy.
- The only two things missing in Bach are randomness and sex.
TEMPLATE
Jack Gilbert
Our slow crop is used up within an hour. So I live
effortlessly by the ocean, where the sun bestows
and bestows and I return nothing. Go cross-grain through
the fire and call my style lust. But the night forces me.
I get so quiet lying under the stars I can't regulate
the sound of owls altering me. In that dark in front
of the house, I often think of an old man at Sadler's Wells.
The only one left who had seen the famous dances.
When they did them again, despite the bad notation,
he would watch patiently, saying, No, no that's not the way
it was somehow. Until they got it right. But he died.
