- Exactly.
- I suppose there are updates on the latest intramural food fight on King of Anarchists.
- I would ask those happy-dancing the defeat of Eric Cantor (the ridiculous Joan Walsh, for instance) to consider...
- Today will be especially slow for us littles in Blegsylvania as people flock to Bleggal Overlords to read Brat-slamming, Brat-baiting, Brat-debate, Brat-analysis, be told what to Brat-think.
- Dear Overlord, of course Brat is a rightwing asshole.
- The true aims of the War on Terror: Now those who remember what the world was like before the Second World War -- the ugly, despairing poverty and inequality that Smith writes about so movingly -- are almost gone. Even those of us who remember when the idea of human betterment seemed a realistic possibility for society, a practical goal to be pursued despite many difficulties, not a pipe dream scorned by the "savvy," are fading away. There are now generations well into adulthood who have never known anything but the war principle and the neoliberal ascendancy as "normality," the natural state of things. Indeed, in a very few years, we'll see the first generation of adults who will have lived their entire lives under the reign of the Terror War. The relentless assault of the elites who have thrived under the war principle, increasing the unequal proportion of their wealth and power to unimaginable levels, have left these new generations very little to build upon. On so many fronts, so many levels, they will essentially have to start from scratch, re-discover old skills and insights that have been lost, re-fight old battles, and of course, create new ways of trying to go forward (like the Occupy movement).
- I live in Maryland's 8th Congressional District. Gerrymander much?
- I have not seen a single sign from a Democratic challenger to Chris Van Hollen in the upcoming primary in which I will not vote (except if Earthgirl asks me to vote for certain people for Board of Education, she being a MCPS teacher).
- World Cup opinions: Politics, geography and good old schadenfreude seem to play a strong role in rooting. A plurality of Mexican respondents named the United States as their least-favorite team. Brazilians chose Argentines, and vice versa. Greeks named their bankers: both Germany and the United States.
- Food links.
- Jeebus, blooger is extra-skeevy today.
- sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously....
- Houllebecq, for those of you who do.
- New thing elsewhere, for the few of you who do.
- Reading, the struggle: Now, on the contrary, every moment of serious reading has to be fought for, planned for. Already by the late 1990s, translating on computer with frequent connections (back then through a dial-up modem) to check email, I realized that I was doing most of my reading on my two or three weekly train commutes to Milan, two hours there, two hours back. Later, with better laptop batteries and the advent of mobile Internet connections, that space too was threatened. The mind, or at least my mind, is overwhelmingly inclined toward communication or, if that is too grand a word, to the back and forth of contact with others. It's true, beloveds, it's your fault I'm not finishing novels.
THE CLOSET
Bill Knott
(...after my Mother's death)
Here not long enough after the hospital happened
I find her closet lying empty and stop my play
And go in and crane up at three blackwire hangers
Which quiver, airy, released. They appear to enjoy
Their new distance, cognizance born of the absence
Of anything else. The closet has been cleaned out
Full-flush as surgeries where the hangers could be
Amiable scalpels though they just as well would be
Themselves, in basements, glovelessly scraping uteri
But, here, pure, transfigured heavenward, they’re
Birds, whose wingspans expand by excluding me. Their
Range is enlarged by loss. They’d leave buzzards
Measly as moths: and the hatshelf is even higher!—
As the sky over a prairie, an undotted desert where
Nothing can swoop sudden, crumple in secret. I’ve fled
At ambush, tag, age: six, must I face this, can
I have my hide-and-seek hole back now please, the
Clothes, the thicket of shoes, where is it? Only
The hangers are at home here. Come heir to this
Rare element, fluent, their skeletal grace sings
Of the ease with which they let go the dress, slip,
Housecoat or blouse, so absolvingly. Free, they fly
Trim, triangular, augurs leapt ahead from some geometric
God who soars stripped (of flesh, it is said): catnip
To a brat placated by model airplane kits kids
My size lack motorskills for, I wind up glue-scabbed,
Pawing goo-goo fingernails, glaze skins fun to peer in as
Frost-i-glass doors ... But the closet has no windows,
Opaque or sheer: I must shut my eyes, shrink within
To peep into this wall. Soliciting sleep I’ll dream
Mother spilled and cold, unpillowed, the operating-
Table cracked to goad delivery: its stirrups slack,
Its forceps closed: by it I’ll see mobs of obstetrical
Personnel kneel proud, congratulatory, cooing
And oohing and hold the dead infant up to the dead
Woman’s face as if for approval, the prompted
Beholding, tears, a zoomshot kiss. White-masked
Doctors and nurses patting each other on the back,
Which is how in the Old West a hangman, if
He was good, could gauge the heft of his intended ...
Awake, the hangers are sharper, knife-’n’-slice, I jump
Helplessly to catch them to twist them clear,
Mis-shape them whole, sail them across the small air
Space of the closet. I shall find room enough here
By excluding myself; by excluding myself, I’ll grow.
