As a small petty person who enjoys my feeble outrage at unimportant objects I must admit that Penguin packaging the Morrissey autobiography in the same format as Penguin classics ruins all the Penguin classics I own to the point that I will buy an alternative copy rather than ever reread a Penguin classic again. A reminder:
- As a small petty person who enjoys my feeble outrage at unimportant objects I must admit the utterly predictable clusterfuck that is the Washington Racial Slurs delights me. Take a fucker like Little Daemon Snyder and add a clenched-face asshole like Mike Shanahan and clusterfuck was guaranteed.
- Pity the distraught demoralized NSA employee.
- Dreaming of my own personal billionaire.
- Mandela: New Baas, Same and the Old Baas.
- True Christianity in action.
- I said I wasn't going to write about the wedding I attended this past Saturday here, and I'm not. I will mention I had not been down 95 from Springfield toward Richmond in years (and won't go down 95 from Springfield toward Richmond ever again if I can help it) so I had never seen the freakishly ugly and obscene Marine Corp Museum near Triangle before.
- Actually, I said I wasn't going to write about the wedding here. I haven't written about the wedding - and more specifically, my family, more specifically yet my father's generation, anywhere yet, though I reserve the right.
- { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
- New Inquiry's Sunday reads.
- Bridge.
- This bliss of ignorance is a fragile thing.
- What I'm reading (with mixed success, which is on me, not the novel).
- Below the poem, my next major crush.
- Would be next but I woke up with this in my head:
THE TRAGEDY OF HATS
Clarinda Harriss
is that you can never see the one you're wearing,
that no one believes the lies they tell,
that they grow to be more famous than you,
that you could die in one but you won't be buried in it.
That we use them to create dogs
in our own image. That the dogs
in their mortarboards and baseball caps and veils
crush our hubris with their unconcern.
That Norma Desmond's flirty cocktail hat flung aside
left a cowlick that doomed her. That two old ladies
catfighting in Hutzler's Better Dresses both wore flowered
straw. Of my grandmother the amateur hatmaker,
this legend: that the holdup man at the Mercantile
turned to say Madam I love your hat before
he shot the teller dead who'd giggled at her
homemade velvet roses. O happy tragedy of hats!
That they make us mimic classic gestures,
inspiring pleasure first, then pity and then fear.
See how we tip them, hold them prettily against the wind
or pull them off and mop our sweaty brows
like our beloved foolish dead in photographs.
Like farmers plowing under the ancient sun.
