…or still planning to?
If so, when you’re done drop a comment here, or over at Moonrat’s place. Let us know how it went, or just leave a link to a post at your own blog which does the same thing.
(My own account is here.)
Damned Radiograph
From the start of a recently deleted sp*m comment here at RAMH:
Whereas feelings are not viewed as ethical(that is, not judged to be good or bad), behaviors are . The radiograph will show you how many puppies she is having . Value your partner as your sexual friend and be an intimate team.
The hell with that, I say. If she’s having even a single puppy she’s got a lot of explaining to do… and you can safely strike the phrase “intimate team” from our implied contract, starting now.
This Business of Busyness
From whiskey river:
The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else — we are the busiest people in the world.
(Eric Hoffer)
Not from whiskey river:
Pray let us have no more bussiness, but busyness : the deuse take me if I know how to spell it, your wrong spelling, madam Stella, has put me out: it does not look right; let me see, bussiness, busyness, business, bisyness, bisness, bysness; faith, I know not which is right, I think the second; I believe I never writ the word in my life before ; yes, sure I must though; business, busyness, bisyness. I have perplexed myself, and can’t do it. Prithee ask Walls. Business, I fancy that’s right. Yes it is; I looked in my own pamphlet, and found it twice in ten lines, to convince you that I never writ it before. O, now I see it as plain as can be; so yours is only an s too much.
(Jonathan Swift, Dr. Swift’s Letters to Stella, Letter XXXV [source])
…and:
Bars on Every Corner
I worked for AT&T, late 1970s through sometime in the early 1990s (depending on where you want to place the marker). And I was a loyal customer, too. When less costly competing services came along, from MCI and Sprint, I never gave them a glance. I never considered buying a phone or answering machine that lacked the stylized bell logo (or later, the stripy globe). Even my first real home PC was an AT&T model.
In more recent years, the loyalty has faded. It’s pretty much just the brand name now which gets acquired by new corporate scalphunters. (For people I worked with back then who remain with the company, such as it is, working life must feel a little surreal.) My cell phone now comes from Finland. It operates on a cellular network belonging to one of those “inferior” competitors. I’ve moved on.
All of which is by way of saying (you were wondering, admit it): I don’t have any particular vested interest in recent AT&T cellular service ads on TV… except as a TV viewer.
And as a TV viewer, I’ve started to become obsessed with those ads. Those frigging ads…
Write Your A** Off
Important: Please read the update at the foot of this post. If you can’t read that, at least read the boldfaced parts of the post itself. Thanks for visiting!
The blogosphere — or maybe it’s just the corner I’ve been mostly visiting, the one with the writers and other assorted wordsmiths — seems to have been overtaken by despair recently. Or maybe it’s not despair, exactly. Maybe more like anomie, a sort of formless uncertainty about the whole enterprise of getting language onto paper or screen, into lyrics and scripts.
Many people mutter, darkly, about the prospect of ever getting published — traditionally, or even at all. Others just want to take a break. Go on hiatus. Explore other creative avenues. Bug out.
Hmm.
I think we could all use a shot in the arm. Maybe we need to take a page from the New York Writers Coalition, which has designated next Saturday, May 16th, as their 4th Annual Write Your A** Off Day (or, less in-your-face, the Write-a-Thon).
What We Miss When We Shutter Our Senses
[Above image, “Magic Eye” by Jennifer Love, first appeared on TrekEarth.]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
Beside the grand history of the glaciers and their own, the mountain streams sing the history of every avalanche or earthquake and of snow, all easily recognized by the human ear, and every word evoked by the falling leaf and drinking dear, beside a thousand other facts so small and spoken by the stream in so low a voice the human ear cannot hear them. The wing scars the sky, making a path inevitably as the deer in snow, and the winds all know it and tell it though we hear it not.
(John Muir, John of the Mountains [source])
Not from whiskey river:
When your eyes are functioning well you don’t see your eyes. If your eyes are imperfect you see spots in front of them. That means there are some lesions in the retina or wherever, and because your eyes aren’t working properly, you feel them. In the same way, you don’t hear your ears. If you have a ringing in your ears it means there’s something wrong with your ears. Therefore, if you do feel yourself, there must be something wrong with you. Whatever you have, the sensation of I is like spots in front of your eyes — it means something’s wrong with your functioning.
(Alan Watts, Ego)
…and:
The Road to Hell Is Paved with Hard Decisions…
…badly made.
Which is why, recently presented with these two books for review, I will probably start with the latter:
How S*x Works, by Dr. Sharon Moalem. From the publisher [typos supplied by JES intentionally, to ward off The Wrong Sort of Internet traffic]:
Why are women biologically driven to find Mr. Tall, Dark, and Handsome?
Can more s*x help ensure a safe pregnancy?
What effect does p0rn0gr@phy have on a man’s fert!l!ty?In this compelling follow-up to the New York Times bestseller Survival of the Sickest, Dr. Sharon Moalem takes us on a trip from prehistory to the forefront of cutting-edge medical research, and through a bedroom or two, to tell the story of how human s*xuality has developed over time. How S*x Works challenges common perceptions about our bodies and provides astonishing discoveries from the frontiers of science as it traces the transformation of s*x across species and through time to its current role in human societies…
Coop, by Michael Perry. From the publisher:
In over his head with two pigs, a dozen chickens, and a baby due any minute, the acclaimed author of Truck: A Love Story gives us a humorous, heartfelt memoir of a new life in the country.
Last seen sleeping off his wedding night in the back of a 1951 International Harvester pickup, Michael Perry is now living in a rickety Wisconsin farmhouse. Faced with thirty-seven acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home, Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood — his city-bred parents took in more than a hundred foster children while running a ramshackle dairy farm — for clues to how to proceed as a farmer, a husband, and a father…
Well, they also say that postponement toughens the soul. Something like that, anyhow. Don’t put off till tomorrow, so forth and so on. “They” –whoever they are — must be a barrel of laughs at a party.
P.S. Seriously? I’d more likely buy Coop anyway — even though I haven’t read either one yet. (And it’s got nothing to do with virtue, God knows.)
4 or 5 Crazee Guys*
Really — it’s been, like, Thou shalt not… and Stay thy hand… and all the rest of those Biblical-sounding injunctions. I’ve been strong. I’ve cared. Ultimately, alas, although I wrestled with the angel, s/he has overcome me. It was never easy.
And in the end, it was not even possible.
Yes. It’s time I mentioned The Firesign Theatre.
Collisions Between Poetry and… Other Stuff
[Artist’s rendering above depicts “planets colliding in a sun-like binary system about
300 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Aries.” Click image for more info.]
From whiskey river:
Poetry
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this
fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers
in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because ahigh-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something toeat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf
under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that
feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician —
nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents andschool-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result
is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination” — above
insolence and triviality and can presentfor inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” shall
we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
(Marianne Moore [source])
…and:
The wind blows hard among the pines
Toward the beginning
Of an endless past
Listen: you’ve heard everything.
(Shinkichi Takahashi [source])
Not from whiskey river:
It’s Gnawing at Me
[Click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — row of little vertical bars.]
[audio:threestooges.mp3|titles=Three Blind Mice|artists=(some orchestra)]
Help me out with something here: What, exactly — even approximately — is the deal with mice? meaning, specifically, mice as humans? (I do recognize there are many deals with mice.) And of course when you extend the question to the rest of order Rodentia, well, the mystery deepens: rats, beavers, chipmunks, groundhogs… There’s no end (so it seems) to the number and variety of normally furry, four-legged, big-incisored, nose-twitching creatures wearing little suits and dresses and hats.
Sometimes, indeed, people even become rodents — and rodents, people — as here:
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