Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
This dance they do
it turns them into holy caricatures
the clowns proclaim that up is down
& the end justifies the beans
everyone drinks until they see
two of everyone
& their arms shake
unable to choose which
delightful lie to lay
& hey
this year even us USians can imbibe
because Carnival reaches
its riotous climax
on Super Tuesday
I know Via Negativa is probably not the first place you go for breathless tips about blogs and blogging. But I just stumbled across a new feature in Google Reader (well, new to me, at any rate) that has literally revolutionized the way I read blogs!
Remember how it was back in the beginning, when you first discovered blogs that were fun to read — the excitement of clicking on your half-dozen bookmarked blogs and seeing what was new? Then do you remember your impatience at those bloggers who would go through phases where they would post multiple times a day, followed by weeks or months of silence, and how that and the growing number of blogs you followed led you to start using a feed reader, where you wouldn’t have to waste time clicking on anything that hadn’t been updated? Now, I’ve discovered, it’s possible to have the best of both worlds.
In the Settings section of Google Reader, click on the Goodies tab, and you’ll see a “Next” bookmarklet that you can drag into your Firefox bookmarks toolbar. If, like me, you subscribe to a certain number of feeds that you only skim once in a while, be sure to restrict it to whatever label you use for the feeds you never miss. Then go back into Google Reader, click on that label — making sure that the display is set to “new items” rather than “all items” — and click through to the first blog post that comes up. [Update: This turns out not to be necessary. Clicking on the Next bookmarklet from any page seems to take one directly to the top post in one’s queue.] Once there, you don’t have to return to the GR shell: simply click Next to go directly to the next-most-recent blog post (or other feed item) in your queue — and have each post removed from the tally of unread items in your reader as you land on it.
What this means, of course, is that you can get around the bother of having to click through to read the full posts of blogs with partial feeds, or to leave a comment; you’re already there! Best of all, for those of us who enjoy the aesthetic experience of reading unique texts, we’re no longer restricted to the dull uniformity of the feed reader. Bloggers who follow their stats will be pleased by the extra visits (though presumably puzzled by the new “came from” data failing to correspond with incoming links).
So now I can essentially surf my own blogroll without hitting the Back key. It almost reminds me of clicking the “Next Blog” button in WordPress.com’s top navigation bar (or Blogger’s back in 2004, before BlogSpot got taken over by spam blogs), except that I don’t have to go through 25 bad or mediocre blogs before finding something good.
NB: If you’re still using Bloglines, or another aggregator, and you want to try Google Reader out, importing all your feeds only takes a few minutes.
Today, I read, is Blue Monday. Psychologists have apparently calculated that it is the day of the year when depression reaches a peak among the population.
— Now’s the time
¿Qué voy a hacer, ordenar los paisajes?
¿Ordenar los amores que luego son fotografías,
que luego son pedazos de madera y bocanadas de sangre?
— Lorca, “New York (Oficina y Denuncia)”
She was clothed in a shift of worms and whispers.
I circled once & crept away, four-footed —
no hands for anything but the road.
That was one dream. And the night before,
a minor lord of the underworld saying,
Of course we take them down with us.
How else do you suppose they taste
eternal youth? Grinning like one of those
candied skulls from the Day of the Dead.
Such melodramatic dreams, I said,
& wrote one yellow word upon the snow.
__________
Don’t forget that the deadline for submissions to qarrtsiluni for the Hidden Messages issue is January 31.
Most Iraqi refugees resettled in the United States are being sent to Michigan, the state with the highest unemployment rate, according to an article (and accompanying video) by Tom A. Peter in the Christian Science Monitor. The presumption is that they would rather be with others of their own kind, and Lansing happens to have a large Arab population — just no jobs. And that’s a problem, because like the indentured servants of old, they have to reimburse the U.S. government for the cost of their plane tickets. All is not lost, however.
After almost two months in the US, Hydar Ali says he’s not considering returning to Iraq. He says he’ll do just about any job in Lansing. He recently applied to work as an Iraqi villager at a military training center in California that prepares US troops before they deploy to Iraq, by running them through mock Iraqi villages complete with authentic locals.
Nice work if you can get it, eh? Like African American refugees from the Jim Crow-era South getting gigs in show business playing plantation darkies, or Sitting Bull after the west was lost, playing himself for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show: that’s the American Dream, baby!
For myself, I only regret that Hee-Haw isn’t still being made. With all the military jets that roar over the mountain, though, I suppose I could do a pretty good job at playing a terrified villager if I were asked. Here’s a crappy video I shot of an A-10 Thunderbolt, A.K.A Warthog, from a pair that went over this morning.
My brother Steve commented once — and I have no reason to doubt him — that all of the Warthogs we see flying over the mountain have done combat duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, and thus can be presumed to have exterminated their share of villagers terrorists. Here’s a better video of one in action, from a National Guard ad. It’s defending freedom.
Subscribers must click through to see the videos, as usual. Sorry.
What swims under the ice of an ephemeral pond, watching the slow shadows from below? Nothing that can’t live half the year without water, suspended, provisional, like a word from a language that nobody speaks anymore. But some find ephemerality desirable, if it means the absence of predatory newts & fish. One rainy night in March the mole salamanders arrive by the hundreds, the males entering the water merely to sow their spermatophores across the bottom: so much moisture at once is not a thing they’ve learned to resist, living under the ground. The females then take what they need — choosing on who knows what basis — to make their masses of gelatinous eggs, like the compound eyes of an enormous insect.
But not here, not at this mountaintop pool, where the acidic soil provides no buffer against the nitric & sulphuric acids that arrive with every rain or snowfall. This pond has almost as little in it as a geode, sliced open so we can feast our eyes on the unrepeatable, inorganic growths.
Is the angler fish ever tempted
by its own bait? Does it ever stir
from whatever trance-like state
passes for sleep in the aphotic zone,
see the glowing decoy & think,
Ah — mine! & surge forward,
jaws agape, like the proverbial donkey
tempted by a carrot? Or does it get
snappish at its traveling companion,
persistent as a bad conscience,
haunting as the image of its own death?
__________
Written for the Read Write Poem prompt, “traveling companions.” Links to other poems for the prompt are here.
For a more overtly political poem, see SB’s I Have This to Say About That, at Watermark.
For anyone in the local area who may be able to attend, I’ll be giving my first-ever PowerPoint presentation tomorrow night (Tuesday, January 15) at 7:00 p.m. for my local Audubon chapter. It’s entitled “Finding (and Putting) Nature on the Web,” and I’ll be focusing primarily on nature blogs, photo-sharing sites, and online nature identification resources. Apparently, our meeting place, a chapel in a graveyard, doesn’t have wi-fi, so I’ll be relying exclusively on screen shots. It’s easy to find, right off an exit of I-99 — directions are here. Come for the free cookies if nothing else.
To sleep somewhere, to surrender our unconscious bodies to a strange bed or a spot on the ground while our minds go wandering — how is it that we feel we haven’t really visited a place until we’ve done this? It is not enough merely to have looked, to have listened, to have smelt and touched and tasted, though all these things matter too.
Perhaps we desire intimacy with the land on the same terms we seek it with a lover. I think it’s more than a euphemism to say of a couple that they’re sleeping together. The language recognizes that what’s important is not the endlessly variable act of lovemaking itself, which is a private matter and doesn’t really concern the larger community, but the quality of a relationship, whose power and potential longevity are clearly signalled by this most basic form of communion. At one level, obviously, it’s a demonstration of mutual trust. At another level, it suggests a shared habitation, even if the partners retain separate residences or rarely sleep in the same place twice.
These speculations are necessarily tenuous because the science of sleep is still in its infancy; researchers argue over the most basic questions about why we need to sleep and dream at all. It’s evidently part of our shared heritage with other animals, which, lacking symbolic language, may rely on dreaming to sort and archive their memories. Even in many pre-literate societies, the world of the past and the ancestors is assumed to remain accessible through dreaming, where hints about the world to come can also be gathered. Conceptions of these worlds vary widely from one culture to the next, so generalization is difficult, but in most cases there’s a direct link between time and distance, and the ability of the dreamer to travel very rapidly or instantaneously from one place to another is key to her clairvoyance. Why this link? Because life is envisioned as a journey, a route along a network of paths; to travel back in time is to travel in space as well.
We know from our own experience how memories are tied to the specific matrices in which they were born, and can be triggered by detailed cues such as odors — which even our inferior primate noses can distinguish by the hundreds — or the gestalt of a place. If I want to relive a memory, my first step is to recall in as much detail as possible the place where it occurred. The modern demotion of place to mere setting or environment simply doesn’t jibe with lived experience.
Maybe sleeping in a place adds to our feeling of truly inhabiting it because it symbolizes its inclusion in these worlds of memory and prescience. It solidifies its position in time and space by dissolving the horizon, which we cannot do away with as long as we are awake and our physical bodies and perceptions still impose strict limits. This in turn suggests why sleeping together is so basic to making love: after the relatively fleeting ecstasy of sex itself, sleep offers another, longer-lasting way to dissolve boundaries. And even as the sex (depending on the partners) may create a new person, the shared sleep creates a new place from the intersection of paths.
The world outside of the story made no sense whatsoever — that’s why, as soon as they learned about something, they worked it in as best they could.
The twelve crows flying over the cathedral became twelve crows flying over the cathedral, just like that.
There was a balloon hanging from a tree, thwarted in its efforts to return to the ground. No, wait — it was only a traffic sign in another language.
A little girl in the back seat watched her father handing money out the window to a policeman and marveled at the gentle treatment accorded those dirty scraps of paper.
The roadsides were decorated with empty beverage containers, empty take-out boxes, empty plastic shopping bags advertising Everyday Low Prices. “Garbage in, garbage out,” intoned the priests. Junk DNA was found to account for over 80 percent of the human genome.
People talked. You couldn’t meet a trucker alone at the end of a deserted road without somebody finding out about it.
Fishermen’s tales were not to be believed — especially after the one that got away didn’t come back, ever, and the fleet rusted in the harbor.
No matter what happened, there were children watching. People claimed to love them, won their trust, then did despicable things to them — and for some reason, people didn’t talk about that. Some things simply remained outside the story.
Balloons were released with notes attached. They often travelled for hundreds of miles before some mountaintop tree managed to snag them. I found a few myself, over the years.