So you didn’t like it?
I love it when reviewers of poetry books just go all out with the invective. This review of a Robert Hass book contains a wonderful response to a passage:
The second volume, Praise, now reads as a primer in late-seventies period style, the kind of laid-back beach koans that led people to believe Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear” was a good poem. There are more berries, more naming of flowers, more embarrassingly tin-eared warbling in the demotic:
It is different in kind from a man and the pale woman
he fucks in the ass underneath the stars
because it is summer and they are full of longing
and sick of birth. They burn coolly
like phosphorous, and the thing need be done
only once.
—From “Against Botticelli”Does ass fucking really require such a high-minded justification? Upon being told someone is fucking someone else in the ass, has anyone ever responded, “What! Why?” I regret to inform the reader that Hass goes on to compare this sex act to the sacking of Troy.
(Thanks, Rick S.)
quote out of context
“We deal with these guys all the time, especially the clergy. It’s amazing how many of the clergy are involved in those lies to build that flock up,” said retired SEAL Don Shipley. Shipley also speculated the waterboarding and kitchen details came from the action depicted in “Under Siege.”
Story Starts
I always hated getting under the house until then I didn’t.
_____
“I wish she would quit bringing that bean salad. It always reminds me of how Bud kept losing his shoes.”
_____
In the treehouse, above a sea of water hemlock, she said I could touch her if I wanted to. She said it didn’t matter. And so I did. And it didn’t.
Poem
Under Night
A fire cannot be built
without memory, or watched
for need but for
loss informing the hands.
So, always, the blaze
of twigs is a city,
and the faint hiss and splutter,
amid ash,
human voices brought
to fuel.
We warm ourselves by all
that fades; we put away
our tending
to step in.
A wonderful word
Cindy and I have been saying this word all day:
From the comments
I just sat there watching people eat fried frogs.
Cindy’s Easter Art from Pinky Diablo
Up With Jesus
“Pastor Jack, do we have a ladder that will reach the ceiling in the sanctuary? That Jason boy let go his balloon in there and it’s up at the peak over the pulpit.”
“What?”
“Do we have a ladder that will reach the ceiling in the sanctuary? That Jason boy let go his balloon in there and it’s up at the peak over the pulpit.”
“Balloon?”
“Yessir. One of those metal ones shape like a fat rocket.
“What color?”
“Well. Shiney.”
“Did you check with Dale?”
“About what?”
“About the ladder. He’s the one uses one to clean the windows.”
* * *
Pastor Jack looks up from his sermon book when Steve sticks his head in.
“Pastor Jack the ladders are locked up and Dale’s got the keys and he’s gone.”
“Well, we can’t have a balloon up there during Easter service.”
Steve prays for a moment, then looks up. “What about that pellet rifle you use for the squirrels?”
“In the sanctuary?”
“I bet two pumps’ll pop it and not hurt the varnish.”
* * *
“Good shot,” Steve says slowly as the punctured balloon motors around high above the pulpit. Exhausted, finally, it falls and hangs up on the crucifix, snagged by the crown of thorns.
“That’s not going to work,” Pastor Jack says. “Reckon we could twist some coat hangers together and get it?”
“No time for that. Service starts in a few minutes.”
The two men ponder the hooded Jesus.
Pastor Jack looks at Steve. “How tall are you and how much do you weigh?”
“I’m 6-2 and one thirty-five.”
“All right, get that chair over there so you can get up and stand on my shoulders.”
Steve blinks a few times and his adam’s apple moves up and down, but he fetches the chair.
“That’s it,” Pastor Jack says through gritted teeth as Steve gets his left foot up on a shoulder. He steadies himself by holding onto Jesus’s feet and stands. He’s reaching up when he hears Pastor Jack start to make a noise like a screen door opening.
And suddenly Pastor Jack is down and still, eyes staring, one hand clutching the black slacks he has pulled from Steve’s legs on the way down. “Pastor Jack?” Steve calls, clinging to the Redeemer’s knees. “Pastor Jack!”
* * *
Deacon Wayne runs through the gathered crowd to the double doors of the sanctuary and unlocks them. The congregation surges in. They all get situated on their pews and gaze up at the show—Pastor Jack sprawled in his camouflage windbreaker beside the pulpit and Brother Steve, pantless, praying into Jesus’s thighs. Mrs. Nash, in a front pew, fusses with her pearls and whispers to her husband. “I don’t see this in the program.” His nodding stops for a moment and then resumes. She leans in again. “This is a literal mystery.”
Quote out of context
A visitor to the exhibit had stuck a note next to the Gandhi quotation: “Reality check: He’s in hell.”
What Cindy said
If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s a deaf racist.
Stamen Shadows
My mother, 1932-2011
My mother always put the well-being of others ahead of her own interests. I learned gardening from her, and will think of her each time I brush against herbs and tend to things that grow.
A good place to write crap
Vijender Shekhawat’s big break came while visiting a shrine near the Amber Fort in Jaipur, as he glanced down at the pile of elephant dung he had just failed to avoid. A struggling maker of handmade paper, he noticed that the texture of the plant-eating animal’s manure was a lot like wood pulp.
Eureka! he thought. Pachyderm poop paper.
A Gift to Cindy from Pinky Diablo
Big Phil
Making Sentences First
Before the essay, make students learn to write a great sentence.
This brief article by Andy Selsberg, in today’s New York Times, presents a fine approach to writing instruction. I have done similar things in my classes, assigning micro essays that have a strict limit of 250 words. I like to push students to be concise. Many of them suffer from habits of writing short choppy sentences or rambling patchwork sentences filled with comma splices, mixed tenses, and thoughts that don’t make it to the end of the journey. The first order of business is to get them to see that there is a problem, and that concentration can transform a smear of words into a structure that seems to hold up a world. As Selsberg notes, this method allows a teacher to “give everyone serious individual attention.” I often find that my own editing suggestions and comments on such brief essays exceed the number of words produced by the student.
headline of the day
Pluto-Bound Probe Sprints Across Uranus’ Orbital Path
Flannery got me a new shirt
Where’s Timmy?
Super Flush Toilet Can Swallow Golf Balls
During testing, the team flushes objects with a range of consistencies, including napkins, sponges, miso paste, polyballs, saw dust and corn.
And with competition from other companies, American Standard has no problem demonstrating the punch of its products, even on smart phones.
Fifty-six chicken nuggets? No problem for these crappers. Water wigglers? You bet.
Throwing keys to a person
Is this ever done without status entering into it?
Hello, Gumbo?
Whole Foods–after work rush for prepared foods. Guy in a suit trying to talk on his phone and dip–dropped his phone in the seafood soup. Got it out with the ladle.
Looking at houses in Marfa
What Cindy said
Having just had our groceries rung up by a weathered, late-fifties, husky-voiced strawberry blonde with heavy eyeliner:
I don’t think Miss Kitty was much of a checker.
Quote out of context
That you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir.
Metro Diner Closing
DALLAS — Metro Diner, a 24-hour greasy spoon that’d been on Gaston Avenue for 47 years, will close at the end of March, confirmed an employee at the restaurant.
“Yes, we’re closing, but we’ll be here until the end of March,” she said, before recommending that fans visit the branch in Oak Cliff, also open 24 hours.
This is a great place, right across the street from Cindy’s library. I’m sorry to see it go. The waitresses there used to raise an eyebrow when I would ask for a Pattymelt without the meat (Swiss cheese and grilled onions), but they never said no. Great hash browns, too; they know how to burn them there like you are supposed to.
