High Egoslavian Holy Day, so the traditional post. Leslie Nielsen was born eighty-eight years ago today. While the above makes me laugh every time, here, proof that I am still twelve years old, my favorite gag of all time since the last until the next.
Tina Louise was born eighty years ago today. Let me repeat that: Tina Louise was born eighty years ago. We pimply boys played a ubiquitous and sexist game of who would you rather do in my junior and senior high school years, Ginger or Marianne, I always thought those who chose Marianne were either lying and/or dopes and/or chose her because she'd cook their dinner and do their laundry too.
- A review of The Intercept.
- Of course I'll read The Intercept. I'm not encouraging you to boycott The Intercept. I do not think Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill are fully bought and paid for stooges to their billionaire sponsor. I think they are far more compromised than they are conscious of being, and I only ask you keep that in mind - and what that signifies - when you read them, as well as consider how Greenwald/Poitras/Scahill's adversarial dissidence accrues to the billionaire's benefit.
- RIP Stuart Hall.
- More market than ever: are you an aspiring novelist in need of a soul-crunching trend?
- Bleggalgazing!
- Now there are two main blegheaders, the one above and Momcat.
- Washington Grove!
- Laytonsville coywolf!
- United on the radio? I paid off my season tickets yesterday in full. I
- Once again, RIP Maxine Kumin.
- Kumin's Sonnets Uncorseted.
- I posted her Nurture a few years ago, it remains one of my most googled pings on the line about pillowcases, which is what I entitled that post.
- Two James Wright poems!
- Harold Budd, for those of you who do.
- Bodeh played Circle last night, fell asleep listening to, woke up with....
HOW IT IS
Maxine Kumin
Shall I say how it is in your clothes?
A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.
The dog at the center of my life recognizes
you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic.
In the left pocket, a hole.
In the right, a parking ticket
delivered up last August on Bay State Road.
In my heart, a scatter like milkweed,
a flinging from the pods of the soul.
My skin presses your old outline.
It is hot and dry inside.
I think of the last day of your life,
old friend, how I would unwind it, paste
it together in a different collage,
back from the death car idling in the garage,
back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced,
reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish
into a ceremony of sandwich,
running the home movie backward to a space
we could be easy in, a kitchen place
with vodka and ice, our words like living meat.
Dear friend, you have excited crowds
with your example. They swell
like wine bags, straining at your seams.
I will be years gathering up our words,
fishing out letters, snapshots, stains,
leaning my ribs against this durable cloth
to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.
