Sometimes I want to write, but can't get anything to come to me.

I miss this on the radio most days, so I found I could receive it in email. I do love these bits of information.  Josephine Baker rocked.

View this message on the Web Tuesday Jun. 3, 2008   LISTEN     A Quiet Life by Baron Wormser When I have seen by time's fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried age, When sometime lofty towers I see down razed, And brass eternal slave to mortal rage, When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the watery main, Increasing store with loss, and loss with store, When I have seen such interchange of state, Or state itself confounded to decay, Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death, which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose. "Sonnet #64" by Shakespeare. Public domain. It's the birthday of Allen Ginsberg, (books by this author) born in Newark, New Jersey (1926). His father was a schoolteacher and occasional poet. His mother was a Russian immigrant and devoted Marxist. She was in and out of psychiatric institutions all through out his childhood and had to undergo electric shock treatments and a lobotomy. Ginsberg went to Columbia University on a small scholarship and there he began consorting with Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs. After college, he got a job in marketing research, wore a business suit everyday, and had on office on the 52nd floor of the Empire State Building. He says he started writing there, and that there he learned about careful manipulation of words. He moved to San Francisco and became friends with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published Ginsburg's first major work, Howl. By his 30s, he was prematurely bald with a ring of hair on the fringe of his head and thick long black beard streaked with gray. He wore black rimmed classes and his Buddha belly was one of his most distinguishing features. Ginsburg's reading of Howl was reputed to have "turned the 1950s into the 1960s overnight." It began: 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 machinery of the night. The death of his mother affected Ginsburg deeply and for a long time. He wrote his poem "Kaddish" for her, which began: Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph the rhythm the rhythm — and your memory in my head three years after — He once said, "There's no bar to us proclaiming our delight and that's the strength of poetry." It's the birthday of Josephine Baker, a dancer and singer who became one of the most popular music-hall entertainers in France. Time magazine wrote: "Mlle. Baker wore feathers on her rump, bananas dangling from her belt, nothing else. Parisians were raving overnight." Baker said: "I wasn't really naked. ... I simply didn't have any clothes on." It's the birthday of Larry McMurtry, (books by this author) born in Wichita Falls, Texas (1936). His early novels were set in the Southwest, on the frontier and in small towns. They included Horseman, Pass By (1961), and The Last Picture Show (1966), which were both made into movies. Then 1981, he wrote an essay in The Texas Observer in which he said that "the cowboy myth" had become "an inhibiting, rather than a creative, factor in our literary life," and that "there was really no more that needed to be said about it." The future of Texas literature was urban, he said: "Now what we need is a Balzac, a Dickens." But a few years later he published one of his best books, Lonesome Dove (1985), a historical novel about a cattle drive, and it won a Pulitzer Prize. sponsor The Poetry Foundation National broadcasts of The Writer's Almanac are supported by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of poetry magazine for over 90 years. The Writer's Almanac is produced by Prairie Home Productions and presented by American Public Media.     sponsor On the Radio Podcast Web Archive Support The Writer's Almanac and receive a mug featuring Garrison Keillor's signature sign off: Be Well, Do Good Work & Keep in Touch. Title Author Date Read highlighted interviews of poets heard on the show. Visit the bookshelf now You received this free e-mail newsletter because you previously subscribed or because it was sent to you by a friend. Unsubscribe | Contact Us | Forward to a friend © 2008 American Public Media 480 Cedar Street, Saint Paul, MN USA 55101

OH!

And also, light candles, dance naked, pray or do whatever you do to petition higher ups.  Brent has his interview for his supervisors position at 3:30 EDT.  

And if you dance naked? 

Send videos.  




Finally - my broken toe is swollen.  You can't really tell because it's kinda rotund anyway. But it is aggravating me, and starting to look bruised again.  *insert frownie face*

Cheney and West Virginia

Am I disloyal because I'm not offended by Cheney's smart-ass comment about having relatives with the same name on both sides of his family tree, yet not even being from West Virginia?

Maybe my sense of humor is merely more crude than most.  Maybe I take such snide remarks in the manner in which they are intended, as meaningless smarmy jokes. 

Or maybe it's because my cousins marry.   To which I offer a shrug.  

I still hate Mike Garrison and Joe Manchin. For what that's worth.  

In other news, I am wearing "Come To Me" by Black Phoenix Alchemy Laboratory.  It's nice, in a funeral home sorta way.  There were three itty bitty bottles (I believe imps is the correct term) that softlywhispered sent in my package a few months ago.  My biggest fret is that one broke open during shipping, and it was my favorite of all three.  But stupidly I threw away the little imp with it's label, so now I don't know what it was called.  Eh, such it is to be Mango such is my life. 

(no subject)

Scarlett took a shower while I cooked dinner.  

She sat at the table, hair washed and uncombed, and informed me "Oh by the way! Our chorus concert is tonight!"

"What?"

"Mom, I gave you the blue paper to sign the other day!"

"Um. No, you didn't."

"I didn't?"

"So what time is the concert?"

"Seven."

I look at the clock, it's 6:55. 

"Oh well."

"But it's a hundred points! My final grade!"

"That's too bad. Isn't it?"