Paul Weller is fifty-five today. Lordy, I love that Style Council song, shoot me, and I like most of his post-Jam, post-Style Council solo stuff, and if The Jam hasn't aged well for me, oh well, consider the blogger who posts on the Saturday of the second slowest weekend of the year in Blegsylvania.
Two things: first, my offer of Collected Milosz (whose poems will return here soon, today is Roethke's birthday) stands through the weekend - I'm ordering a couple of other things Monday, you have until then for me to include your copy. Second, Tom, thanks very much for the email. You are correct, I don't regret it at all and it will help me kick through some doors I haven't opened here, there, everywhere. I was going to respond more fully - and ask if I could quote from your email - and I will respond more fully, just not here, in this post directly, but over posts. Third - OK, three things - Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team? It's true! and they have a home game tonight at seven (instead of Sunday afternoon at five) so stanchion porn tomorrow! or not.
- The Ruling Class as full-time sadistic torturers.
- Of course Obama was laying the justification and groundwork for normalizing more war.
- Progressive fawning over Obama's speech: a contest.
- Obama's advisers.
- Villager court jester brings the duh.
- British raciology.
- Notes on the novel, genre, Woolwich.
- Anarchism is a fatalism.
- Proof Paul Krugman is an idiot.
- Five most horrifying things about Monsanto.
- Lordy, I love this song too:
- Blog bathroom stall graffiti.
- Dogs sniff out grammar.
- The three warning signs of merry minstrelsy.
- Motherfucking history of swearing.
- Fuck off and die.
- Theodore Roethke was born 105 years ago today.
- By request:
DOLOR
Theodore Roethke
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.
