Howl

Today, October 7th 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, Allen Ginsberg read his poem "Howl" for the first time. Jack Kerouac sat on the edge of the stage, cheering Ginsberg on as if he were at a jazz performance. When Ginsberg was done, the audience exploded in applause.

The following is from the Wikipedia entry on "Howl," concerning the 1957 obscenity trial...

Howl contains many references to illicit drugs and sexual practices, both heterosexual and homosexual. On the basis of one line in particular

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy

officials seized 520 copies of the poem on March 25, 1957.

A subsequent obscenity trial was brought against Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who ran City Lights Bookstore, the poem's publisher. Nine literary experts testified on the poem's behalf. Supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, Ferlinghetti won the case when Judge Clayton Horn decided that the poem was of 'redeeming social importance'. The case was widely publicised (articles appeared in both 'Time' and 'Life' magazines) ensuring the wide readership of Howl, which remains one of the most popular poems by an American author.

***

HOWL

For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished room emptied down to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of
time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
street!

III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful
typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the
abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-
lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're
free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Your moment of lobster zen

Johnny and Jack in Plymouth, MA. September `05

American Life in Poetry: Column 028

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Although this poem by North Carolina native Ron Rash may seem to be just about trout fishing, it is the first of several poems Rash has written about his cousin who died years ago. Indirectly, the poet gives us clues about this loss. By the end, we see that in passing from life to death, the fish's colors dull; so, too, may fade the memories of a cherished life long lost.


Speckled Trout

Water-flesh gleamed like mica:
orange fins, red flankspots, a char
shy as ginseng, found only
in spring-flow gaps, the thin clear
of faraway creeks no map
could name. My cousin showed me
those hidden places. I loved
how we found them, the way we
followed no trail, just stream-sound
tangled in rhododendron,
to where slow water opened
a hole to slip a line in
and lift as from a well bright
shadows of another world,
held in my hand, their color
already starting to fade.

First published in "Weber Studies," 1996, and reprinted from "Raising the Dead," Iris Press, 2002, by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 1996 by Ron Rash, a writer and professor of Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University, whose newest novel is "Saints at the River," Picador Press, 2005. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. For information on permissions and usage, or to download a PDF version of the column, visit www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.

Clan and kin

"I don't know why -- it's just that -- I don't know -- they're not kin."

Surprising word, I think to myself, never used it before. Not of kin -- sounds like hillbilly talk -- not of a kind -- same root -- kindness, too -- they can't have real kindness toward him, they're not his kin. That's exactly the feeling.

Old word, so ancient it's almost drowned out. What a change through the centuries. Now anybody can be "kind." And everybody's supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn't help. Now it's just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class. But what do they really know about kindness who are not kin? - Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorycle Maintenance.

***

Peg's cousin Charlie (seated in the center) was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago. For his birthday last month he asked for his family to get together, and we did at an outdoor party at Charlie and Ellen's home. It was a good turn-out, with a heavy concentration of Mayos, as there should be.

There are four generations in this photo, from Sadie at the far right, seated on her grandson, Robbie's knee, to Jordan at right center, Sadie's great-grandaughter being held by one of Charlie and Ellen's daughters, Katherine.

I was thinking after we received a copy of the photo from Ellen that large family group portraits are something that isn't done very much anymore, and more's the pity that it isn't.

Dylan 101

My friend Maudie once asked what Dylan compilation I'd recommend, which, as could be anticipated, sent me off on a digressive rant about the Royal Albert Hall concert. I later calmed down enough to give - and send - Maudie some essential Dylan recommendations.

Chris Nashawaty and Chris Willman in Entertainment Weekly wrote up a comprehensive guide to Dylan, recommendations for those new to Dylan as well as for the Compleat Fan, much better than mine. The article is replicated here. You'll need to scroll down from the McCartney article to find it.

I don't agree with their tossing "Masked and Anonymous" in the "For Absolutely No One" category. I think "M&A" is a funny, thoughtful take on America and what it's evolving into, even if it may only be tolerable to the total Dylan fanatic. But debate is what these sort of lists are for, of course.

A new addition to the house of El

Oscar-winning actor Nicolas Cage is a new father.

His wife, Alice Kim Cage, gave birth Monday to a boy, Kal-el Coppola Cage, in New York City, said Cage's Los Angeles-based publicist, Annett Wolf. No other details were available.

Get out your witch hats

via the Salem News Online (link will probably only work for a day or so from today's date):

No day will be more family-friendly than Thursday, when children from across Salem and beyond march in the opening night procession. The star of the parade will be Grand Marshal Erin Murphy, who played the young witch Tabitha on the 1960s sit-com "Bewitched." Murphy first visited Salem last spring for the dedication of the "Bewitched" statue in Lappin Park.

"We figured it would tie in right with the new 'Bewitched' statue," Rochna said. "It's something new, something unique."

When: 6 p.m.

Where: The parade route winds from Shetland Park, down Derby Street, up Washington Street, and around the corner onto Essex Street, ending at Salem Common.

Penile extenders and scrapbooking

fhb is beginning to pick up comment spam, whether as a sign of its growing popularity or of desperation on the part of the spammers, I don't know. The spam is obviously automated, as it's targeting key words in posts. Ironically, most of the hits have been directed to an unpublished article I wrote over a year ago on the origins of spam, which at last count had seven instances of comment spam, all now deleted. The latest one offered the reader information on penile extenders.

A piece of spam was also dropped over the weekend on a poker post where, as an aside, I had mentioned scrapbooking. The comment, assuring me that fhb was in its top three list of "must-read" blogs, also directed the reader to a "How to make big money from scrapbooking" site. It's gone now, too.

So far it's more of an annoyance than a problem. If needed, I can turn on "word verification," a feature recently added to Blogger, where commenters must read and replicate some random group of letters before their comments will be posted. That's a PIA, of course, and I won't do it unless I start spending an inordinate amount of time deleting comment spam. It'll be interesting to see how many instances this post picks up between the title and key words.

While we're on the subject of comments, Tracy Mark Lee, owner and operator of Electric Tiki Design dropped by over the weekend to respond to my rant about his Web site. He left a good-natured comment, which I appreciate (not least since he didn't take me to task for calling him "Terry" later in my post), given that I was probably more harsh than I needed to be. It's a good thing to be reminded at times that you're not operating in a vacuum when blogging; that you're writing about real people with feelings of their own. In any case, Electric Tiki is more than worth a look if you're interested in beautiful TV/comic-related statues. I mean, God, look at this.

It's still a terrible site to navigate through, though, and I wish Tracy would get someone to fix it. His work deserves a better venue in cyberspace.

SpaceShipOne headed for Smithsonian

This Wednesday, October 5, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum brings SpaceShipOne to its permanent residence at the"Milestones of Flight" gallery.

SSOne will reside next to my other favorite air/space craft there, the Spirit of St. Louis and the Bell X-1.

via BoingBoing

Super bargain

I'm hitting the old-fart age where everything seems over-priced, wincing at our grocery bills (I work at home, so I do our weekly "big" shop, as well as picking up dinner fixings every day), staring increduously at a $7.99 paperback ("I used to buy these for 60 cents," I think). We won't even talk about gasoline.

So it's nice to come across a bargain every now and then. Taking a page from Marvel's "Essential" series, DC is releasing a "Showcase" line of black-and-white reprints of their classic titles. First out the gate is "Superman: Volume 1," only $9.99 for 560 pages including some of the best Superman stories from the late `50s to early `60s.

"Best," should probably be qualified relative to whether you originally read these sometimes goofy comics in the late `50s and early `60s as I did. As with science fiction, the golden age of comic books is... 12, as the critic David Hartwell once wrote. But if you were a Superman fan then and now, you'll love this collection.

The volume includes the first appearances of Supergirl, Brainiac, the Fortess of Solitude and some genuinely weird stories such as the marriage of Clark Kent and Lois on a desert isle (later annulled), and Superman as Alfred E. Neuman.

Who could ask for more?

"You used to have a lot of old men come down to congregate"

"How's our Bewitched statue doing?" you ask fhb. "It's been a while since you blogged anything about it, Fred."

And that's because Sam seems to be settling in just fine. But controversy still swirls in the town of Salem, this time over park benches. Following replicated from the Salem News Online, as the paper does not archive their articles, and it will soon disappear into cyberspace....

Set a spell, but only a short one, in Lappin Park


By Tom Dalton
Staff writer

SALEM - The city unveiled a "Bewitched" statue in Lappin Park this summer to attract more people to the downtown. Now it wants to install park benches with no backs to make sure they - or, at least, the wrong people - don't stay too long.

At the urging of the Police Department, the city has requested a change in the design for Lappin Park, which called for five standard city benches in the small park at the corner of Washington and Essex streets.

The park has been a center of attention since June, when the cable channel TV Land erected a statue of Elizabeth Montgomery, the late star of "Bewitched," the 1960s TV series about a suburban witch. TV Land also is paying to have the park redone, a landscaping project that includes the benches.

The city still wants benches but without backs and with different seats that will discourage children from skateboarding, youths from hanging out and the homeless from sleeping on them - three problems that have plagued the park for years, officials said.

"We're always getting calls over there because of different problems," Lt. Conrad Prosniewski said. "Our guys can do a lot better things than sitting in the square and having to patrol" the park.

Police were glad to see the sitting wall come down in the old park and don't want to see the problems return with the benches, he said.

"You can put nice benches there," Prosniewski said. "You just don't have to put benches people are going to camp out in 24 hours a day."

Kate Sullivan, chief of staff to Mayor Stanley Usovicz, went before the Salem Redevelopment Authority last week to get approval to change the benches and add more lighting.

Downtown merchants complain about the element drawn to the area, she said, and say visitors are intimidated.

Installing different benches is not the solution to the problem, Sullivan said, but it addresses one of the issues and should help create a better environment.

"If we can encourage positive park use immediately while we're trying to solve the problems of homelessness or jobs for kids, what's wrong with that?" she asked.

Not everyone agrees that backless benches are the answer.

"You used to have a lot of old men come down to congregate," said Matthew Michetti, 37, of Salem, who was sitting on a standard city bench yesterday along Washington Street. "I don't see any problem with them sitting there for a few hours. If they do, they should be able to lean back."

The matter was referred to the SRA's design review board.

American Life in Poetry: Column 027

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

In this lovely poem by Angela Shaw, who lives in Pennsylvania, we hear a voice of wise counsel: Let the young go, let them do as they will, and admire their grace and beauty as they pass from us into the future.

Children in a Field

They don't wade in so much as they are taken.
Deep in the day, in the deep of the field,
every current in the grasses whispers hurry
hurry, every yellow spreads its perfume
like a rumor, impelling them further on.
It is the way of girls. It is the sway
of their dresses in the summer trance--
light, their bare calves already far-gone
in green. What songs will they follow?
Whatever the wood warbles, whatever storm
or harm the border promises, whatever
calm. Let them go. Let them go traceless
through the high grass and into the willow--
blur, traceless across the lean blue glint
of the river, to the long dark bodies
of the conifers, and over the welcoming
threshold of nightfall.

Reprinted from "Poetry," September, 2004, Vol. 184, No. 5, by permission of the author. Poem copyright (c) 2004 by Angela Shaw. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. For information on permissions and usage, or to download a PDF version of the column, visit www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.

Bees heat predators to death

I sometimes think I should either find or design a t-shirt that reads,

"Haldane was more right than he could suppose."

J.B.S. Haldane was the British biologist who came up with the famous law, "Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we CAN suppose." and I suspect would have been delighted with this report from Science News.

At least two species of honeybees [in China], the native Apis cerana and the introduced European honeybee, Apis mellifera, engulf a wasp in a living ball of defenders and heat the predator to death. A new study of heat balling has described a margin of safety for the defending bees, says Tan Ken of Yunnan Agricultural University in Kunming, China.

And people say I'm strange

A charming blog posting about about a man and his pet tortoise.

Department of incredibly bad taste

There's a convention for everything, including "horror splatter," a sub-genre never known for good taste. But the promoters of NecroComicon have succeeded in lowering the bar about as far as it can go...

... and you just gotta love the "personal message." (via "news from me")

This Shining Moment in the Now

A friend of mine talks about the constant, niggling little voice that all writers - perhaps everyone - seems to have on "Play" in their heads, commenting and editorializing about everything. It's so busy telling us what has happened or what it expects to happen next that we often miss what's going around us until after the fact.

It's Fall again, almost time for me to oil the chainsaw, start moving the cord of green wood to the plile and intermix them with the more seasoned logs, break up the last of the big pieces from the old tree that fell in the windstorm a year and more back.

The work shuts down the voice. And occasionally I'll reach that shining moment in the now that Budbill writes so eloquently about - fhb

This Shining Moment in the Now

When I work outdoors all day, every day, as I do now, in the fall,
getting ready for winter, tearing up the garden, digging potatoes,
gathering the squash, cutting firewood, making kindling, repairing
bridges over the brook, clearing trails in the woods, doing the last of
the fall mowing, pruning apple trees, taking down the screens,
putting up the storm windows, banking the house—all these things,
as preparation for the coming cold...

when I am every day all day all body and no mind, when I am
physically, wholly and completely, in this world with the birds,
the deer, the sky, the wind, the trees...

when day after day I think of nothing but what the next chore is,
when I go from clearing woods roads, to sharpening a chain saw,
to changing the oil in a mower, to stacking wood, when I am
all body and no mind...

when I am only here and now and nowhere else—then, and only
then, do I see the crippling power of mind, the curse of thought,
and I pause and wonder why I so seldom find
this shining moment in the now.

by David Budbill, from While We've Still Got Feet © Copper Canyon Press.

My secret garden

UPDATE: Photos now courtesy of Jill, she of the toilet-diving camera. Click on any of the photos for a larger version.

The southern branch of my family, who I adopted a few years back, were up in the neighborhood last week, as Jill's husband Mak attended an oral and maxillofacial surgery convention in Boston. I had sent Jill - who previously had never been further North than a quick stop in New York City on her way to Turkey - a "things to do while you're in New England" itinerary. Among other things, it included a drive up the Coast and since she was traveling with a five- and 18-month-year-old focused heavily on kid-friendly stuff, like a visit to the Children's Museum and a Lobster Boat outing in Plymouth. Both big hits I heard in later reports. If I ever meet her in person, I owe Channel 7's Chikage Windler a beer, as I got more than one trip idea from her "Great Escapes" series.

I played hookey from responsibilities on Wednesday with a semi-true story that I was seeing an oral surgeon about my TMJ problem, since I was going to be seeing an oral surgeon, and he did give me a freebie exam later that day in the hotel lobby. I met Jill and the kids in the late morning and we took a walk up Newbury Street to the Public Garden so Jill could window shop, Johnny could feed ducks and squirrels, and Jack could suck on his blankie while surveying the scene from the comfort of his stroller.

More than a few years ago I used to work in Boston as a copywriter and eventually as a creative director in the Liberty Mutual Insurance group's advertising and public relations department. On my first day there my new boss took me on a swan boat ride in the Garden, claiming it was the traditional thing to do, and I'd eventually end up taking many visitors on the same ride. Unfortunately, the boats had closed a week earlier - I suspect because the strong-thighed young pedal-paddlers had all gone back to school, so Jill and clan were out of luck. However, we did get to see Romeo and Juliet, the Garden's infamous gay swan couple, numerous ducks, and of course the "Make Way for Ducklings" sculpture of Mrs. Mallard and her eight ducklings. I was shocked to discover that Jill, nor Johnny or Jack, had read McCloskey's book - which is almost a New England mandatory requirement - but it's a situation that will be remedied by Uncle Fred soon.

We had lunch at the Rattlesnake Bar & Grille on the corner of Arlington and Boylston, as it was one of the few places I had eaten at previously that was still in business. Highlight of the lunch was probably the ride on the ancient 1920's-era elevator to the rooftop, chauffeured by Johnny Mak with finger on the up-'n-down buttons.

On the way back to the hotel, I took the crew to my second-most-favorite library in the world (The New York Public Library being the first). As Peggy says, if you want to find Fred on his first visit to anywhere, look in the main public library and in eclectic bookstores. I have a special fondness for the BPL, though, as quite by accident I discovered its portico garden one day and would spend a lot of quiet, pleasant afternoons there reading as I waited for my van pool to take me home. I was on flex-time - remember flex-time? - at Liberty Mutual, and would arrive so early because of the pool's schedule that I'd have filled my required hours by 3:30 p.m., with two hours free before the van would leave.

The BPL garden is a little jewel of a secret, not well-known even among Boston residents. You won't find any information about it at all on the library's site, and very little information about it on the Web at large. It took me a good half-hour of searching before I found the image I'm using above.

But maybe that's just as well. I only have a few secret places left.

American Life in Poetry: Column 026

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Descriptive poetry depends for its effects in part upon the vividness of details. Here the Virginia poet, Claudia Emerson, describes the type of old building all of us have seen but may not have stopped to look at carefully. And thoughtfully.

Stable

One rusty horseshoe hangs on a nail
above the door, still losing its luck,
and a work-collar swings, an empty
old noose. The silence waits, wild to be
broken by hoofbeat and heavy
harness slap, will founder but remain;
while, outside, above the stable,
eight, nine, now ten buzzards swing low
in lazy loops, a loose black warp
of patience, bearing the blank sky
like a pall of wind on mourning
wings. But the bones of this place are
long picked clean. Only the hayrake's
ribs still rise from the rampant grasses.

Poem copyright (c) 1997 by Claudia Emerson Andrews, a 2005 Witter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress. Reprinted from "Pharoah, Pharoah" (1997) by permission of the author, whose newest book, "Late Wife," will appear this fall; both collections are published by Louisiana State University's Southern Messenger Poets. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. For information on permissions and usage, or to download a PDF version of the column, visit www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.

Something Else

I know a woman who calls me
every week or so when she has something
on her mind and starts by saying,
"I have something to talk about
but let's start by talking about
something else." It helps her get it out.
So I ask her how she is and she says
okay and tells me about some poet
or politician she's met and how
he wasn't at all what she expected
or about the DC weather,
the traffic jams, the dirty Metro.
Sometimes she never gets around to her point
at all, but ends by saying,
"Now I don't want to talk about it
anymore." Last week I had a fever
for four days and the world
took on a kind of flickering darkness—
it seemed so thin, so insubstantial,
not the kind of place a person could live.
This guy who came to the card game
last night, he says he dreams
of a dead friend all the time,
this friend walks out of a black alley,
walks always in a kind of shadow.
I asked him what it's like to be dead,
the guy said, fumbling a face-down card,
and he said it's not a place, heaven,
it\'s a feeling, the feeling of knowing
everything you never knew. Then the friend
told him one of the numbers to play
this week in Megabucks. Sometimes, though,
she does get around to what's on her mind—
a sadness for her little sister, killed
in a wreck, or a fear that we
won\'t see each other again, won't ever
feel whatever that was we felt when we
were making love. I don\'t know if we will.
I don\'t know if she will ever see
her little sister again except in dreams,
which is somewhere, I guess.
The number was eight.

by Christian Barter, from The Singers I Prefer. © CavanKerry Press, Ltd.

Artists erect giant pink bunny on mountain

Headlines that speak for themselves, continued.

The Diva, the Supergirl and the Ministry of Truth

"People have a very personal relationship with us." - Katie Couric in a New Yorker interview.

Not all people, at least not young Charles Evans, late of New Orleans, LA, and current resident of Dallas, TX.

Charles, as you might know, is the young boy who Campbell Brown, NBC correspondent and nicknamed "Supergirl" in our household for her reporting during Katrina and its aftermath, interviewed at the New Orleans Convention Center. Charles is - is with some people at least - an articulate 9-year-old who put a very personal face on the suffering people were going through. It was obvious during the segment that he and Campbell had taken a genuine liking to each other, too.

In between preparing for the vapid sixth annual "Today Show Throws a Wedding;" a segment where couples get an all-expenses-paid wedding in return for having their private lives outed to the world, some Today Show producer had the stroke of genius that Katie should do a followup interview with Charles. If you follow the Today Show, you know these off-site interviews are always a crap shoot. The technology seems surprisingly failure-prone. Even professional interviewees like politicians often end up staring blankly into the camera, murmuring to the technicians that they can't hear anything. And with people not used to being bathed in white light and being told to look into a camera lens while a disembodied voice asks semi-intelligible questions through an ear bud feed, it can get quite uncomfortable to watch.

As it did with Charles and Katie last week. Charles, obviously up much earlier than he's used to, slumped in his chair, face full of suspicion, answering in monosyllables as Katie with increasing desperation unsuccessfully tried to draw something - anything - out of him.

"Are things better now?" Katie asked. Silence. "Yes?" she prompted. "Yes," Charles agreed, probably trying to figure out what this white lady's voice in his ear wanted.

"How are they better now?" Katie wheedled. Silence. "Charles?" "What she say?" Charles asked, turning to his grandmother for support.

At the non-interview's conclusion serious cracks were starting to appear in La Couric's façade: "Maybe you just don't like me, Charles," she said with a trace of bitterness, immediately following with a "just kidding" disclaimer.

But one wonders whether Katie was in on Weekend Today's decision to send Campbell to Texas and back to Charles ... or what Katie's reaction was if she hadn't been informed. Patently ignoring the Couric interview as if it had been excised from Today Show history in some sort of 1984ish Ministry of Truth move, the introduction to the Brown interview this Sunday used almost the same words that were used for Katie's attempt at an interview... "young man touched the hearts of America... many wondered what has become of him (ignoring Katie Couric, for one thing)... Campbell Brown now..."

...and Campbell Brown did, immediately establishing the same rapport with Charles ("You came all the way here to see me?" he says with friendly wonder), and producing a tearjerker to boot when we discover that Charle's great-aunt has died during the ordeal and he produced an obituary for her on his own. I don't want to sound as if I'm making light of this. It was a powerful, emotional segment, and about everything good you could find in network television news these days.

As opposed to Couric's, which was just about as bad and as embarrassing as anything you would never want to see. One can only imagine what it's like in the halls of 30 Rockefeller Plaza this week. Screaming? Icy silence except for the sound of heads rolling and laughter in the sky as Supergirl flies away?

It was a bad week for Katie's image altogether. While informing the Today Show Wedding lucky couple of the luxury destination that had been selected for their honeymoon, Katie kept dropping her notes onto a wind-swept Maryland beach. She studiously ignored them as they gathered around the bride's feet, as everyone else - including the groom - eyed the pile uneasily and looked as if they were considering the propriety of falling to their knees and gathering them up. But not Katie. Bending over was not an option.

Time for an fhb prediction. I think we'll hear that Katie Couric will be leaving The Today Show before the year is out. She looks gone, you know?

Happy Birthday, Sam!

On September 17, 1964 "Bewitched," starring Elizabeth Montgomery, made its debut on ABC...


... and I would never be the same.

"I don't know why people would want to have lunch with writers. I've eaten with writers. We have appalling table manners, and rarely say anything other than 'Pass the salt' or 'If you're not going to eat that, can I have it?'" - via Neil Gaiman

Porch Swing in September

Ted Kooser is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers. His "The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice For Beginning Poets," which I'm in the middle of reading right now, inspired me to start writing poetry again after nearly 40 years. Not good poetry, but poetry nevertheless.

On Kooser's advice, I try to read at least one poem each morning. As he says, it often does color the remainder of your day. Here's one of his from "Flying at Night," which reminded me of last night when I read it this morning, sitting on the porch with Peggy, drinking our evening martinis, smoking my nightly cigar, watching the September days dim more quickly each night.

Porch Swing in September

The porch swing hangs fixed in a morning sun
that bleaches its gray slats, its flowered cushion
whose flowers have faded, like those of summer,
and a small brown spider has hung out her web
on a line between porch post and chain
so that no one may swing without breaking it.
She is saying it's time that the swinging were done with,
time that the creaking and pinging and popping
that sang through the ceiling were past,
time now for the soft vibrations of moths,
the wasp tapping each board for an entrance,
the cool dewdrops to brush from her work
every morning, one world at a time.

American Life in Poetry: Column 025

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Emily Dickinson said that poems come at the truth at a slant. Here a birdbath and some overturned chairs on a nursing home lawn suggest the frailties of old age. Masterful poems choose the very best words and put them in the very best places, and Michigan poet Rodney Torreson has deftly chosen "ministers" for his first verb, an active verb that suggests the good work of the nursing home's chaplain.


The Bethlehem Nursing Home

A birdbath ministers
to the lawn chairs,
all toppled: a recliner
on its face, metal arms
trying to push it up;
an overturned rocker,
curvature of the spine.
Armchairs on their sides,
webbing unraveled.
One faces the flowers.
A director's chair
folded, as if prepared
to be taken up.

From "A Breathable Light," New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2002, and first published in "Cape Rock". Copyright (c) 2002 by Rodney Torreson; reprinted by permission of the author. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. For information on permissions and usage, or to download a PDF version of the column, visit www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.

"All shook up, I am"

via photos from velvet_hellvis

Katrina Tournaments on PokerStars

I played in the Wil Wheaton-sponsored Katrina Relief poker tournament last night - a $5 buy-in, where 2212 entered. The winner won $22.12, one penny for every entrant. The other $4.99 each from our entry fees was matched 100 percent by PokerStars, working out to a grand total of $22, 075.76 to be donated to the Red Cross.

I finished 336 in the field, a number probably a little better than my actual play reflects. A lot of people apparently signed up as a show of support, with no intention of playing, and for much of the 1st hour I was playing 3-handed No-Limit with two other players. In the second hour my King-high flush was cracked thus...

PokerStars Game #2562888800: Tournament #11976228, Hold'em No Limit - Level VI (100/200) - 2005/09/12 - 22:55:19 (ET)

Table '11976228 225' Seat #9 is the button
Seat 2: ricoM (4260 in chips)
Seat 3: capt_trip37 (1365 in chips)
Seat 4: NHTinPusher (49450 in chips)
Seat 5: JJules (3920 in chips)
Seat 6: udflyers86 (26950 in chips)
Seat 7: sanfran1283 (365 in chips) is sitting out
Seat 8: ashtar (325 in chips) is sitting out
Seat 9: Doak08 (6015 in chips)
ricoM: posts small blind 100
capt_trip37: posts big blind 200
*** HOLE CARDS ***

Dealt to ricoM [Jh Kh]
NHTinPusher said, "i really want that 22 bucks lol"
Doak08 said, "yep"
NHTinPusher: folds
JJules: folds
ricoM said, "can tell"
udflyers86: folds
sanfran1283: folds
ashtar: folds
cocmoney is connected
Doak08: raises 200 to 400
NHTinPusher said, "so rico...you play locally offline?"
ricoM: raises 200 to 600
capt_trip37: folds
Doak08: calls 200

*** FLOP *** [9s 7h 9d]
ricoM: checks
Doak08: checks
*** TURN *** [9s 7h 9d] [3h]
ricoM: checks
ricoM said, "Foxwoods now and again"
Doak08: bets 400
ricoM: calls 400
*** RIVER *** [9s 7h 9d 3h] [4h]
NHTinPusher said, "never the charity tourneys?"
ricoM: bets 2200
Doak08: raises 2200 to 4400
ricoM: calls 1060 and is all-in
Doak08 said, "wow..watch"
*** SHOW DOWN ***
Doak08: shows [9c 9h] (four of a kind, Nines)
ricoM: shows [Jh Kh] (a flush, King high)
Doak08 collected 8720 from pot
ricoM [observer] said, "Up in vnh"
udflyers86 said, "woooooooooow nh"
NHTinPusher said, "wow"
NHTinPusher said, "ouch"
ricoM [observer] said, "gg"

"Wow," and "ouch," pretty well sum it up, although with nuts quad 9s at the flop, Doak08 played me like a fish. At some point I'll realize that the board pairing is a danger signal to play slow. Four of anything is unusual, but there was a potential full house there too, which I ignored, only concerned that he had pulled the Ace flush. But, too many ways to lose in retrospect to be betting 2200 at the River.

I'm always a much better player after losing the hand.

It was a fun night in any case. The table was light on trash talk, and spiced by getting cheered on by one of my imaginary friends, as well as railbirding another. I fizzled out before I could get into the blogger ring game, but maybe another time.

PokerStars is hosting another tournament tomorrow, and I believe there's two more too. Some details here, and if you're a PokerStars player look under the tournament/special tabs to find them.

Why we do what we do

via Noah's Wish;

• Update: September 10, 2005 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time

Press Release

KATRINA SURVIVOR REUNITED WITH RESCUED CAT IN MISSISSIPPI HOSPITAL ROOM

(SLIDELL, LA) – September 10, 2005 – Volunteers from the animal rescue group Noah’s Wish and Slidell animal control officers reunited a 59-year-old Katrina survivor with his beloved cat “Miss Kitty” in a Mississippi hospital room yesterday.

Slidell resident Bill Harris was trapped in his home by rising floodwaters for three days. Harris stood on a chair in 5 feet of water with his beloved cat in one arm and a two-way radio in the other. For three days, Harris desperately called for help on the radio. When rescuers finally arrived, a distraught Harris, who suffers from chronic kidney failure and needed to be taken immediately to a hospital, was forced to leave the cat behind. An MSNBC crew covering the Katrina disaster learned of Harris’ ordeal and went to the animal rescue group Noah’s Wish for help. Noah’s Wish is working with Slidell Animal Control to rescue pets in the aftermath of Katrina. After several days of searching, a cat wearing a black collar and matching the description Harris gave was humanely trapped eight days after her owner had been evacuated.

Slidell animal control officer Horace Troullier and Donna Wackerbauer, a Noah's Wish volunteer from Canada drove over 70 miles from Slidell to Hattiesburg, Mississippi where Harris was admitted to Forest General Hospital on Monday. “I was holding Miss Kitty in my arms when I walked into Mr. Harris’ hospital room,” said Wackerbauer. “When she saw her owner, Miss Kitty jumped out of my arms, onto her owner and burrowed her head into him. It was like she was saying, “Yeah! I got my daddy back!’”

During the three-day ordeal, Harris said that Miss Kitty meowed to keep him awake as he began to drift in and out of consciousness.

“It was the most exciting rescue I have ever been a part of,” said Troullier “This is what it’s all about.” A 15-year veteran of Slidell Animal Control, Troullier’s house was completely flooded and he does not have insurance. The animal control officer has been working around the clock for two weeks straight.

Joe Bruncszk, a video producer from Washington DC, videotaped the reunion. Bruncszk traveled to Slidell mobile veterinary clinic that is working with Slidell Animal Control and Noah’s Wish. The videotape may be viewed at www.msnbc.com.

Harris was able to spend time with Miss Kitty before Troullier and Wackerbauer returned the cat to the Noah's Wish animal rescue center in Slidell, where she will be cared for until he is released from the hospital and able to relocate. According to the hospital, Harris is suffering from internal bleeding of the kidneys and stomach and will require surgery in the next few days.

Young in New Orleans

At the risk of sending my buddy, Jill, on another rant. :-)

by Charles Bukowski. Reprinted from The Last night on Earth Poems

Young in New Orleans

starving there, sitting around the bars,
and at night walking the streets for
hours,
the moonlight always seemed fake
to me, maybe it was,
and in the French Quarter I watched
the horses and buggies going by,
everybody sitting high in the open
carriages, the black driver, and in
back the man and the woman,
usually young and always white.
and I was always white.
and hardly charmed by the
world.
New Orleans was a place to
hide.
I could piss away my life,
unmolested.
except for the rats.
the rats in my dark small room
very much resented sharing it
with me.
they were large and fearless
and stared at me with eyes
that spoke
an unblinking
death.

women were beyond me.
they saw something
depraved.
there was one waitress
a little older than
I, she rather smiled,
lingered when she
brought my
coffee.

that was plenty for
me, that was
enough.

there was something about
that city, though
it didn't let me feel guilty
that I had no feeling for the
things so many others
needed.
it let me alone.

sitting up in my bed
the llights out,
hearing the outside
sounds,
lifting my cheap
bottle of wine,
letting the warmth of
the grape
enter
me
as I heard the rats
moving about the
room,
I preferred them
to
humans.


being lost,
being crazy maybe
is not so bad
if you can be
that way
undisturbed.

New Orleans gave me
that.
nobody ever called
my name.

no telephone,
no car,
no job,
no
anything.

me and the
rats
and my youth,
one time,
that time
I knew
even through the
nothingness,
it was a
celebration
of something not to
do
but only
know.

Nova Scotia

“So, why Nova Scotia?”
the question asked
by everyone we knew.

At the Seal Island Light Museum
the young guide, hair colored taffy and amber,
led us up three flights of replica building
to the original lantern,
telling us its story in a soft burr.

Both of us smiled when she said “aboot.”

Peggy asked if anyone stays on the island
now, with its light gone.
“Only a few sheep,” she answered. “I worry that no one shears them.”
“The firemen do every Winter,” a voice floated up the stairs.

“Well, there you are.” She smiled, thinking.

“Did you know
they found a sheep
on one of the islands
that
hadn’t been
sheared in years?

“The wool weighed over 70 pounds!
Just imagine.
70 pounds!
How happy it must have been
with that weight gone.”


More on the Seal Island Light Museum. And a few more of Peggy's photos.

Way cool stuff. Awful site.

A rant: Electric Tiki has my vote as possibly one of the worst eCommerce Web sites I've ever visited. Let us ignore the misspellings, even of the company name itself. But...

The home page is composed of images of the various products for sale, but does clicking on any image actually take you to the associated product? It does not. Clicking on anything takes you to a simply awful frameset. Can you find the products from this simply awful frameset? You can not. If you click on "Buy Stuff," you'll find a less-than-encouraging, albeit honest, word informing you that you're going to need lotsa patience to actually get anything you want.

But we're dealing with fan-boys (and perhaps the occasional [very]-odd fan-girl), here, so let's assume most of us keep on going into the order page, where many of the items are sold out; and some which supposedly are available have no product links; and a few, whether available or not, do. And if you click on those links, you'll finally see absolutely gorgeous miniature statues, such as this one of Underdog, which I have strong fanboy lust for (no "Sex Machine"-related jokes, please).

Interesting, Electric Tiki also produced the Bewitched Samantha Stephens Black & White Edition Maquette, of which there are supposedly a few left, but I wouldn't count on it.

And yep, I understand that Tracy Lee, owner of Electric Tiki Design, probably thinks of himself as an artiste, and not as a businessperson, - "I don't send order confirmations" - and obviously not as a Web site designer, but still, one can go to GoDaddy and build a site within minutes; or one, if one has zero confidence in his/her abilities to do so, one could go to any community college, or high school, or grammar school even, and find a kid who could whip you up a site overnight...

... or one could even hire me on a barter deal. For one Underdog and one Samantha, Terry Tracy, I'll do the job.

End of rant.

via news from me

Sometime the collective wisdom works

I think I remember reading this example Google Bomb back in January, but had forgotten it until a friend pointed it out. Enter "failure" or "miserable failure" into Google and try the "I'm feeling lucky" button.

Thanks, Patti!

poetry readings

by Charles Bukowski, from Bone Palace Ballet © Black Sparrow Press. (buy now)

poetry readings

poetry readings have to be some of the saddest
damned things ever,
the gathering of the clansmen and clanladies,
week after week, month after month, year
after year,
getting old together,
reading on to tiny gatherings,
still hoping their genius will be
discovered,
making tapes together, discs together,
sweating for applause
they read basically to and for
each other,
they can't find a New York publisher
or one
within miles,
but they read on and on
in the poetry holes of America,
never daunted,
never considering the possibility that
their talent might be
thin, almost invisible,
they read on and on
before their mothers, their sisters, their husbands,
their wives, their friends, the other poets
and the handful of idiots who have wandered
in
from nowhere.
I am ashamed for them,
I am ashamed that they have to bolster each other,
I am ashamed for their lisping egos,
their lack of guts.
if these are our creators,
please, please give me something else:
a drunken plumber at a bowling alley,
a prelim boy in a four rounder,
a jock guiding his horse through along the
rail,
a bartender on last call,
a waitress pouring me a coffee,
a drunk sleeping in a deserted doorway,
a dog munching a dry bone,
an elephant's fart in a circus tent,
a 6 p.m. freeway crush,
the mailman telling a dirty joke
anything
anything
but
these.

via "The Writer's Almanac"

Sex Machines blog and book

About a year ago, I blogged about “The Sex Machines – Photographs and Interviews from the New Mechanical Sexual Revolution” by photographer Timothy Archibald, a web site of photographs I found both fascinating and somehow weirdly touching...

a dildo mounted on what appears to be a converted weed whacker, posed in a driveway near a lawn mower… a couple comfortably entwined on the couch, settling in to an evening watching television, with a sex machine called “The Joyrider” in the foreground. Pets wandering into the shot of a sex machine as if the picture were being taken of the family car."

Tim and I exchanged emails after my review, and he mentioned at one point that he was looking for a print publisher. A year later, I'm happy to say that the book is due out in mid October. Tim also notes, "We are currently preparing for the exhibition 'Sex Machines: Photographs and Interviews; which will open at The Museum of Sex in New York City on November 10th."

Tim has put up The Sex Machine Diaries blog here, where you can see some of his photos and read excerpts from the book (as well as pre-order it from Amazon). Not work-place-safe at all of course, but well worth looking at in privacy.

And then these machines, I’m not into them. I like the real thing: squeezing, hugging, cuddling, just holding each other. It was hard enough for me to get comfortable selling someone a dildo, but after a while it’s just like everything else. - Kristy Van Thiel of Spindoll Manufacturing and Sales

One down. One to go.

Never underestimate the power of fhb. An hour and 1/2 after posting the Time story below...

FEMA's Brown Removed From Hurricane Katrina Recovery (Update1)

Sept. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was removed from on-scene oversight of the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort after lawmakers criticized his performance and qualifications.

Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, named Thad Allen, Coast Guard chief of staff, to replace Brown in overseeing the recovery from the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Allen was named Brown's deputy four days ago. Brown, 50, will return to Washington, Chertoff said.

``I have directed Mike Brown to return to administering FEMA nationally,'' Chertoff said at a press conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. ``Mike Brown has done everything he possibly could to coordinate'' the federal response to the hurricane, he said.

ABC News reported that Brown is also expected to leave FEMA soon, citing people it didn't identify.

Meet the head of FEMA

via Time Online:

Before joining FEMA, [ Michael Brown's] only previous stint in emergency management, according to his bio posted on FEMA's website, was "serving as an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight." The White House press release from 2001 stated that Brown worked for the city of Edmond, Okla., from 1975 to 1978 "overseeing the emergency services division." In fact, according to Claudia Deakins, head of public relations for the city of Edmond, Brown was an "assistant to the city manager" from 1977 to 1980, not a manager himself, and had no authority over other employees. "The assistant is more like an intern," she told TIME. "Department heads did not report to him." Brown did do a good job at his humble position, however, according to his boss. "Yes. Mike Brown worked for me. He was my administrative assistant. He was a student at Central State University," recalls former city manager Bill Dashner. "Mike used to handle a lot of details. Every now and again I'd ask him to write me a speech. He was very loyal. He was always on time. He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt."

Brown's lack of experience in emergency management isn't the only apparent bit of padding on his resume, which raises questions about how rigorously the White House vetted him before putting him in charge of FEMA. Under the "honors and awards" section of his profile at FindLaw.com — which is information on the legal website provided by lawyers or their offices—he lists "Outstanding Political Science Professor, Central State University". However, Brown "wasn't a professor here, he was only a student here," says Charles Johnson, News Bureau Director in the University Relations office at the University of Central Oklahoma (formerly named Central State University). "He may have been an adjunct instructor," says Johnson, but that title is very different from that of "professor." Carl Reherman, a former political science professor at the University through the '70s and '80s, says that Brown "was not on the faculty." As for the honor of "Outstanding Political Science Professor," Johnson says, "I spoke with the department chair yesterday and he's not aware of it." Johnson could not confirm that Brown made the Dean's list or was an "Outstanding Political Science Senior," as is stated on his online profile.

Under the heading of "Professional Associations and Memberships" on FindLaw, Brown states that from 1983 to the present he has been director of the Oklahoma Christian Home, a nursing home in Edmond. But an administrator with the Home told TIME that Brown is "not a person that anyone here is familiar with." She says there was a board of directors until a couple of years ago, but she couldn't find anyone who recalled him being on it. According to FEMA's Andrews, Brown said "he's never claimed to be the director of the home. He was on the board of directors, or governors of the nursing home." However, a veteran employee at the center since 1981 says Brown "was never director here, was never on the board of directors, was never executive director. He was never here in any capacity. I never heard his name mentioned here."

The FindLaw profile for Brown was amended on Thursday to remove a reference to his tenure at the International Arabian Horse Association, which has become a contested point.

American Life in Poetry: Column 024

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

In this poem by New York poet Martin Walls, a common insect is described and made vivid for us through a number of fresh and engaging comparisons. Thus an ordinary insect becomes something remarkable and memorable.


Cicadas at the End of Summer

Whine as though a pine tree is bowing a broken violin,
As though a bandsaw cleaves a thousand thin sheets of
titanium;
They chime like freight wheels on a Norfolk Southern
slowing into town.

But all you ever see is the silence.
Husks, glued to the underside of maple leaves.
With their nineteen fifties Bakelite lines they'd do
just as well hanging from the ceiling of a space
museum--

What cicadas leave behind is a kind of crystallized memory;
The stubborn detail of, the shape around a life turned

The color of forgotten things: a cold broth of tea & milk
in the bottom of a mug.
Or skin on an old tin of varnish you have to lift with
lineman's pliers.
A fly paper that hung thirty years in Bird Cooper's pantry
in Brighton.

Reprinted from "Small Human Detail in Care of National Trust," New Issues Press, Western Michigan University, 2000, by permission of the author. Poem copyright (c) by Martin Walls, a 2005 Wytter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress. His latest collection "Commonwealth" is available from March Street Press. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. For information on permissions and usage, or to download a PDF version of the column, visit www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.

"Are you getting a lot of that Mr. Vice President?"

One can only hope. A link to the video in QT and Windows Media formats.

The return of the game that wasn't there

...although this time it was Peggy and Fred who weren't there. Our rained out game was eventually played on Labor Day, and started just about the time we were leaving the Maine Turnpike to meander down Route 1.

Knowing we couldn't go, we passed up the opportunity to make a gazillion bucks on eBay and gave the tix to Peg's friend, co-worker, and even-more-rabid Sox fan, Jessika. And so fhb gets its first guest blogger, and I pass the microphone to Jess...

Andrew and I arrived at Fenway Park just before 11 to find the grounds crew preparing for the game. It was a beautiful day and we were filled with excitement, anxiously awaiting the start of our first game this year. At 12:05 Curt threw the first pitch and with no rain in sight we knew were finally on our way. Shortly there after, we were joined by Joe (now a brunette ?) and his Dad. He was just as cute as expected and warmed right up to us. By the 3rd inning, I was pitching him peanut shells to hit with his bottle of water. The game flew right by until the bottom of the 9th when the Sox began to rally, but it was over before we knew it and we were headed for the alley. With plenty of time to spare, we headed for the souvenir shop to purchase our first Sox game jerseys. As we headed out of the shop we saw a crowd over by D gate so we headed down to find the players leaving the park with their families. It was amazing to see the array of vehicles, from a stock red and white mini cooper (Nixon) to a brand new black Bentley (Renteria). All in all, even with the loss, it was a Wonderful day at Fenway Park! A little word of advice from Andrew: Do Not visit the souvenir shop after a few beers, you’ll end up leaving with only two shirts and $300 in the hole! ?

Thanks again for the tickets, we had a great time!!!

Photos courtesy of Jessika Copeland.

Mississippi Goddamn

via BoingBoing. Two photos taken on August 30th, 2005

Things fall apart, the center cannot hold

#1 in what I expect to be a series: "Frustrated: Fire crews to hand out fliers for FEMA"

I will note that if you read the full article - as you should - you'll see that the firefighters' superiors were told, FEMA claims, that their personnel were going to be used for community relations. But as one person noted, is that an appropriate use of resources?

Red tape. Red tape. "...a coordinating officer for FEMA, said sending out firefighters on community relations makes sense. They already have had background checks and meet the qualifications to be sworn as a federal employee...."

What has happened down here is the winds have changed

Lousiana 1927 by Randy Newman

American Life in Poetry: Column 023

One from my neck of the woods - fhb

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

In this fine poem about camping by Washington poet E. G. Burrows, vivid memories of the speaker's father, set down one after another, move gracefully toward speculation about how experiences cling to us despite any efforts to put them aside. And then, quite suddenly, the father is gone, forever. But life goes on, the coffee is hot, and the bird that opens the poem is still there at its close, singing for life.


Camping Out

I watched the nesting redstart
when we camped by Lake Winnepesaukee.
The tent pegs pulled out in soft soil.
Rain made pawprints on the canvas.

So much clings to the shoes,
the old shoes must be discarded,
but we're fools to think that does it:
burning the scraps.

I listened for the rain at Mt. Monadnock,
for the barred owl on a tent peak
among scrub pines in Michigan.
I can hear my father stir

and the cot creak. The flap opens.
He goes out and never returns
though the coffee steams on the grill
and the redstart sings in the alders.

Reprinted from "Passager," 2001, by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2001 by E. G. Burrows, whose most recent book is "Sailing As Before", Devil's Millhopper Press, 2001. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. For information on permissions and usage, or to download a PDF version of the column, visit www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.

American Life in Poetry: Column 022

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

In this short poem by Vermont writer Jean L. Connor, an older speaker challenges the perception that people her age have lost their vitality and purpose. Connor compares the life of such a person to an egret fishing. Though the bird stands completely still, it has learned how to live in the world, how to sustain itself, and is capable of quick action when the moment is right.


Of Some Renown

For some time now, I have
lived anonymously. No one
appears to think it odd.
They think the old are,
well, what they seem. Yet
see that great egret

at the marsh's edge, solitary,
still? Mere pretense
that stillness. His silence is
a lie. In his own pond he is
of some renown, a stalker,
a catcher of fish. Watch him.

Reprinted from "Passager," 2001 by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2001 by Jean L. Connor whose first book of poetry, "A Cartography of Peace," is published by Passager Books, Baltimore. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. For information on permissions and usage, or to download a PDF version of the column, visit www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.