Some interesting things coming forth on the page today. I'm happy actually with last two days of writing.
My youngest daughter us a cyclist. She loves the Tour de France. Once again she has engaged me in a fantasy racing team battle. I'm not in good graces with her as of today. I've beat her in points so far for three out of three stages. Her text messages are growing terse.
Love ya honey! :)
Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away - Carl Sandburg
Battered by wind and rain / by tides and Lunar laughter / choked on unforgivingly / the night is pressed into servitude
Listening to: Fairy Tales / Anita Bakers Mood: slightly melancholy
This week I've thought a lot about language as a social dynamic. I was writing in my journal the other day and I concluded the days post with a personal observation that language was the most social thing people do. The next day I picked up from that point the night before because it seemed like a heavy way to leave the day's entry. I thought to myself that I needed to defend that pronouncement.
Picking up on this point I continued the conversation with myself yet another day. I felt that I needed to define social for the sake of this argument and I did, assigning it this definition: actions or things people do in groups (group consisting of at least 2 or more). My quick list of social activities then looked like this:
In all these activities talking/communicating aka language is or can be a factor. Yes, I suppose you can have silent sex, but it is certainly possible, even likely that language will play a role. While two people don't have to be together for reading, it remains an interaction at minimum between an author and at least one other reader. And so I concluded my second day journal entry feeling I had justified my original elevation of the significance of language in society today. It most often can and will be the center point of any other social undertaking.
With the decline of language skill among many American students it is easy to envision trouble ahead in their lives when a core part of their social interactions are hindered by marginalized language capabilities. I'd like to believe that this trend is not permanent, but then I'd like to believe that poetry would also enjoy a renaissance. As the John Lennon song Imagine says, "you may say that I'm a dreamer."
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. ~Lionel Trilling
The latest issue of Poets and Writers is out. I was slightly disappointed as I was expecting this to be the issue in which they feature the breakout poets for the year. I always enjoy seeing it and often am familiar with at least one of them. Instead it's a first fiction annual.
I did enjoy the article FLARF POETS, they can't be serious. Can They? I about to read How the NEA is spending that $50 MILLION.
Just for grins I'm thinking I'll put up a poll on flarf for a couple of weeks.
The Saturday Night Special is defined by Wikipedia as pejorative slang used in the United States and Canada for any inexpensive handgun. Tonight pastor is Ken Pagano of the New Bethel Church in Louisville, Kentucky is having “Saturday night special” service for gun owners.
According to CSMonitor.com article, 'About 200 people took him up on the invitation. It wasn’t mandatory to have a gun to get in. In fact, according to the church website, you didn’t even have to believe in God. The only requirement was to be a supporter of the First and Second Amendments.'
Actually the Saturday Night Specials were the target of most of the early gun control legislation. They are not hunting sport weapons and really have only one purpose, a cheap weapon to use against another person.
I find the mixture of Church and cheap handguns to be a most interesting marriage. We do love our guns in this country. In fact the gun culture in America has within it a a cult base that harbors a fanatical fixation on guns. Some to almost a level of "gun worship." Perhaps Pastor Pagano is one such worshiper. I don't know him personally but what I do know is his works and I am suspect of any pastor who feels compelled to use church resources to advance and celebrate the cause of "Saturday Night Specials." These cheap handguns have victimized so many families, from accidental shootings (many of which are children) to suicides to passionate arguments that end in one or more shootings and last but not least armed criminal acts.
A recent spate of poetry-related material has driven poetry sales in the U.K., selling copies of books that had languished on national shelves.
The BBC's Poetry Season project appears to have motivated people to go to the buy poetry. Imagine that!
A multimedia series with interviews and other related poetry items is credited with generating a 92 % bump in the sales of Sylvia Plath's poetry works and a whooping 300 % increase in the sales of John Donne.
Friday - June 26 / 7:30pm
MUSIC, ART, AND POETRY @ THE NEON GALLERY 1921 Truman Road
Thomas Cobian’s art, River Cow Orchestra’s music, and local poets reading.
Friday - July 10 - 8:00 pm
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Poet Laureate of Kansas - Landed is her new collection of poetry, and The Sky Begins at Your Feet, the title of her forthcoming memoir. Her books include My Tree Called Life: Writing and Living Through Serious Illness and Lot’s Wife.
Anastacia (Stacey) Tolbert is a writer, playwright, and fifth grade teacher at Seattle Girls School, in Seattle, Washington. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have been published nationally, and she is writer, co-director, and co-producer of GOTBREAST (2007), a documentary on women’s views about breast and body image.
This item caught my attention today and I had a good laugh. I hope this makes Morning Joe on MSNBC. Would be a great story for Willie Geist who has the New You Can't Use segment that is generally humorous material. Click the link below to see a photo of the banner.
Filed Under:Republicans, Barack Obama, Gaffes, Humor, Immigration
Should English be the official language of the United States? That assertion was made over the weekend at a conference hosted by talk-show personality and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. Oddly, as the featured speakers delivered their remarks ridiculing Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor for her supposed lack of English proficiency while at Princeton University, and warning that the Obama administration is "going to gradually institute institutional bilingualism in the country," they did so beneath a large banner that contained a doozy of a typo
English-Only Group Can't Spell the Word 'Conference' -- Politics Daily
Kodak created Kodachrome in 1935 and by the mid-1970's it was so culturally ingrained into society no one gave it a second thought when Paul Simon immortalized the 
Like the typewriter (you remember that don't you?) the 35 mm film will soon be lost from the vocabulary of a generation who know nothing but digital photography. Momma won't even have have a chance to take your Kodachrome away.
My wine of choice is Chardonnay. Yesterday, I had a glass of "Hob Nob" while eating out. I tried it based upon the two choices available to me. Big mistake. I imagine it's what wood alcohol would taste like.
On a positive note, I saw the movie UP which was charming and very well suited for 3-D which is how we saw it. Don't let the animation fool you. It's a great movie for adults, especially couples.
Listening to Phil Collins - Take Me Home from No Jacket Required.
The week has been somewhat surreal. Very intense at work. The world beyond too has been intense. There is a very strange seriousness the permeates the air and it seems distant and yet not.
At my age, I've seen my share of graphic pictures and certainly at least since the Vietnam War era graphic media has encroached everyone's life to some degree. Even if it is only regular TV, the news and even much of the programing has perhaps softened us to some degree to the shock of visual brutality, pain, suffering.
I like to think of our nation as one in which dissent is highly regarded. It was largely the basis for the very formation of this nation, but dissent here has been remolded from those early days. We sometimes develop a hardened resistance to any public display of protest that runs counter to our own individual views. While people in this country on occasion are held in the personal contempt of others for expressing themselves on various topics, we don't often find ourselves in the same position those in 1989 were in who met with tanks in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square or as people have this week in the streets of Tehran.
Each day this week I've seen disturbing Tweets out of Tehran as well as video feeds of protesters meeting with not just resistance but the real likely prospect of physical harm and even death. How deep the opposition is to the government in Iran and the ruling Clerics is difficult to judge but it is clearly a significant voice if not a majority. The hope of a better life for the average person in Iran to many seems tied to the nation immerging from the isolation that it has been locked into as a result of the path that it has been on at the hands of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Clerics who have continued to support him against real concerns for credibility in the outcome of the recent Presidential election.
These past few days, what information has seeped through the information wall that the Iranian government has sought to impose shows a very real struggle that is being waged between a massive resistance and the government. A resistance so brutal that some dissenters are paying the price of their lives for the change they believe must come to their homeland. Such change would not come without a tremendous price. How much these people are willing to endure and how long they will continue to expose themselves to the high cost of their dissent will no doubt be a factor in if and when real change comes to Iran. No one, not even the Iranian government or the opposition can predict with any certainty the outcome. What is clear is that each of us is a witness to history in the making as each day passes. I am reminded of the calling of poets to be aware of the world around them. To be witnesses to that world.
Warning: Graphic Video
The Lede - Updating news of the disputed election in Iran
That is the question. Out late tonight and came home and worked on something for work tomorrow. Midnight and I haven't written - "sigh" and I guess I won't at this point. Closing down laptop... I think I'll read a couple poems and call it a night. Tomorrow comes early.
