the world a letter

Ok, so I'm late. YouTube is cool.





Does anybody enjoy being himself as much as David Byrne?

I know nothing.

"While it's difficult to predict an outcome, observers believe Ruth Bader Ginsburg will use her three-fifths of a vote to oppose."

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here she is (a month or so ago, i've only just figured how to transfer the pictures I took then). 

Jordan Davis asks "What is it with poets and terms of 19th century sociology? What vets books and poems titled with terms from Marx, Althusser-chic?" I've titled a few in those lines, so here goes:

With me, it's that my dad's a sociology prof. who studied at the New School in the late 60's/early 70's, with a bunch of folks who were, from what I understand, the inheritors of the heavy-duty high-thinking-exceptional strain of German sociology. This was (and is) a very important part of his personality. Him talking about Marx, and Weber, and Freud (and me reading them, a little later but still in the preadolescent ages), strangely enough, form a significant portion of my childhood experience, the concepts I apprehended or half-apprehended as much as the sensation of having absolutely no understanding of what I was being told/read. So I probably use it for different reasons than most poets. The shit's in my bones, and is more of an emotion/sensation for me than it is an intellectual experience. Not that the explicit use of those terms is a major strain of my poetry (though I think the undercurrent abovementioned is), but I do use it. So for example, that's why, in my chapbook, I put the poem "Means of Production . . ." near the Van Gogh/father poem--I don't think a reader would see the connection so straight, and I didn't intend it to be so, but they run nicely together, I thought, for the reasons discussed above. Now I know there’s probably a lot of ore in that rift to mine for a poetry which references both public and private in a powerful and personal way, but I’m not there yet; securitized debt’ll have to wait, I’m confident it’ll be there waiting whether I like it or not.

I can't represent for anyone but myself, but there it is.

"Take those things you believe, and don't," another gem from The Daily Show.


(warning: video, largish bandwidth needed)

This is funny, on so many levels. I don't know which is more absurd, the bizarre small-time manner in which Hussein 'ran' his country, or the fact that up until the very actual invasion, Hussein thought the U.S. would never *actually* invade because of how stupid that would be to actually do, or that even in the face of the invasion he was more concerned with the dangers of Shi'ite unrest. Though I think my favorite bit of absurdity is that one of Hussein's generals, having found out that there were, actually, no chemical or biological weapons to rely on for defense (Hussein only told his generals this in December of 2002!), was so "impressed" by Colin Powell's UN presentation, and the insistence of the Bush administration, that he began to suspect that maybe Hussein DID have wmds after all . . .

This farce is history, watch it happen; it's always been this way. Poor Iraq.


(I don't mean funny like haha funny, btw, I mean like crying.)

Again, I'm linking to Slate . . . check out this photo-essay/essay about the craft of costume design (& the Oscars, but that's not so interesting). Solid points, all. But the thing that impelled me to comment here was the frame of Travolta from Saturday Night Fever, that I wanted to point out that the costume works too well. By that I mean that it doesn't just subtly (beyond the fact that there's nothing subtle about that suit, I mean) clue us in to his social class, aspirations, etc--it gets us to participate. That is, it takes a real act of will on my part to see past the coolness of the suit (let alone the shoes), to see it as signifying Travolta's "oversized sense of himself"; my perception of the intended characterization regarding the other movies' costumes came quickly, seemed obvious without needing the essay's description to clue me in. The SNF frame, though, is too dynamic to leave the spectator truly a spectator. So close, can't see it. Too successful. That's good art.

(It's not just the suit, it's that whole subway-thing. Is there a space in the world like a subway for letting a person feel like they are being, in the eyes of a casual public, exactly who they want to be?)

I've been too bashful-shy to say anything before, but I've been meaning to thank those who've mentioned What Remains on their blogs (Josh, Jenni, Eduardo, Peter, Suzanne, Matthew, are those I've seen), long or short. Being read is nice; and being mentioned is nice, too. Thanks, all.

(And I also noticed, today, that the robot likes me. That's cool.)