great if coloraturacentric Opera mp3 site has links to YouTube videos &c, inc. the great Anna Moffo (above)...
 

enjoying Dutch songstress Rita Reys this am...
 

sharp Ange Mlinko on Altman, Keillor, and the Suicide Poet Girl

"Sure enough, as the story unfolds, Lola Johnson devolves into a series of incoherent stereotypes. She is not our sharp observer, just one of the ensemble. She isn't a rebel, she's Mama's little girl tearing up when someone else dies backstage and she's told the show must go on. There will be no critique of the Prairie Home Companion, or Keillor, or Meryl Streep's pink shawls. There is, instead, another cliche rearing its head: the cliche of the Interchangeable Starlet, who serves no earthly purpose in a film besides eye candy.

Reader, this is the part when I became the teenage suicide girl: contorting in my seat, drawing up my knees, playing with my hair, tilting my head, and sighing loudly, squashing my cheeks. I was bored out of my skull..."



 

many more examples of "Zoomorphic Calligraphy" at BibliOdyssey
 

Chinese Lanterns

In a poplar mist
a polar opposite

trumps intelligent design
through sheer forfeiture

anecdotally
like that guy in Mann's

Faustus--
the shells must

be saying something!
all those curlicued glyphs

and painted
bells!

let alone these
Boundary Bay fish coilers

we're erasing
underfoot...get

the luminol out
later, you're shedding

skin like
linear b here...a whiff

of red clay
and a transparency

is assumed then lost,
our faces

scanned as Cobbett would
scan a prospect from his mule,

(hay rots in the field--
thanks all night euchre/

Methodism,
it hardly matters)

and then a blunt assesment
bluntly deliver.

For you to touch the remote control
you have to touch

yourself first, but its
hardly a matter

of first causes,
tiny traces left are

not in themselves
an offense, and if

the endless and softening
imprint of appearance

avails thee not
what of it?

The ghosts
are knickers

in the trees,
sky pink

as an innocent
Christian ham...
 

Rags


Wilderness for welfare,
Athenians all in a little rank
we slipped out the back way

just glad to be of use, really
wiping up the unthinkable
with the untouchable--

a parachute of J-cloths,
linen liberated
for midsummer sneezes--

otherwise they'd be diving
under their desks! reaching
around for the comical

golden shred, the
big booty polish.
Cooking up Woolite

with Worcestershire
in hammocks of lint
the last stage in the life

of an honoured object,
soaked with sap and
strained through particle board

as the world of print
sulphurously beckons;
each thing eventually the receipt

of itself, each hanky
bearing a needlepoint letter
more easily felt than seen.
 

here's the first of the last three of the captions I wrote for Adam Harrison's photographs--


Condensation on Mirror

Kavanagh's "bright
shillings of March"
well spent for aince:

conker string,
a brand-new set of clackers,
a towel that becomes

a sleeping cat then disappears,
a camera that puts the silver
back into the lake, all those

pets and old uncles released
from whispering branches
and skins of chrome

to fistfuls of earth
and muscular sepia--
never to be recorded otherwise,

like the mound people,
sieved once through Toynbee's catbox
but never written down,

not even in steam
not even to spend a penny,
dredged up from a Murphy bed

into the coalsmoke
and cigarette smoke
and cabbage steam.



 

"Popular Science Joins the Hippies" from Modern Mechanix
 

The Shadow War

"I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

Goldilocks in reverse

"Three police officers who went to the home Thursday couldn't get the bear to budge, so authorities let the animal finish its (oat)meal.

"The bear didn't appear to be aggressive and wasn't destroying the house, so they just let it do what it was doing and eventually the bear decided to make its way out of the residence and down toward a forested gully," Skelton said. "It ended the best it could.""


 

watching and reading most of the reviews of the minor but sublime Nacho Libre made me realise how utterly out of sync I am with mainstream film criticism--watching Roger Ebert & the new guy Sunday night it was as if they couldn't wash their hands quickly enough--the same crew foisting ugly classist "adult" crap like "Crash" and "Million-Dollar Baby" on us...& I'll take "Mouse Hunt" over "Magnolia" anytime...
 

"Drawing of the Crab Nebula by William Parsons, the Third Earl of Rosse. This drawing gave rise to the name "Crab Nebula". It was created using the 36-inch reflector at Birr Castle about 1844." from Lord Rosse's Drawings of Messier Objects

(one of the usual galaxy of good links at Plep)
 

many Pictures from Old Books at this well-laid out site...
 

Why Conservatives Can't Govern

"But like all politicians, conservatives, once in office, find themselves under constant pressure from constituents to use government to improve their lives. This puts conservatives in the awkward position of managing government agencies whose missions--indeed, whose very existence--they believe to be illegitimate. Contemporary conservatism is a walking contradiction. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding. The end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government."

Meth plague? Never mind!

"Meth is among the least commonly used drugs.

Rates of methamphetamine use have remained stable since 1999.

Rates of methamphetamine use by high school students have declined since 1999.

Methamphetamine use remains a rare occurrence in most of the United States, but exhibits higher rates of use in selected areas.

Drug treatment has demonstrated to be effective in combating methamphetamine addiction.

Misleading media reports of a methamphetamine "epidemic" have hindered the development of a rational policy response to the problem."

The Harper government (with eager media & law-enforcement help)used the meth panic in the last election as one of the cornerstones of its "law and order" platform of mandatory minimum sentences and prison construction.

Anodyne's link to the Donald Fagen song of the same name yesterday sent me uneasonally back to John Greenleaf Whittier's splendid Snow-Bound (which I try and remember to read whenever actually snowbound, a rare occurence) which adopts its stop/start octosyllabics...Whittier's bicentennial is next year, must ask Ben F. if there's a conference planned...

"Unwarmed by any sunset light
The gray day darkened into night,
A night made hoary with the swarm
And whirl-dance of the blinding storm,
As zigzag, wavering to and fro,
Crossed and recrossed the winged snow:
And ere the early bedtime came
The white drift piled the window-frame,
And through the glass the clothes-line posts
Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts.
The old familiar sights of ours
Took marvellous shapes; strange domes and towers
Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood,
Or garden-wall, or belt of wood;
A smooth white mound the brush-pile showed,
A fenceless drift what once was road;
The bridle-post an old man sat
With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat;
The well-curb had a Chinese roof;
And even the long sweep, high aloof,
In its slant spendor, seemed to tell
Of Pisa's leaning miracle..."

 

Charlie visits our nation's capital! 

Terror Plot: Canada Stays Cool

"How serious was this threat? It seems clear that CSIS could have put a stop to it at any point since 2004 when they first discovered it, something they claim to have done with a dozen similar plots just by letting the terrorist wannabes know that they were on to them. Why didn't they? If the purpose of intelligence gathering was to stop the plots, why let this one go on for so long when a single meeting with the leading figures would have shut it down? Is it possible that this conspiracy was allowed to develop in order to "wake Canadians up" as the militarists and pro-Iraq-war pundits keep suggesting is necessary?

Certainly the high drama around the arrests and the court appearances seemed far beyond what was required and created an atmosphere of perceived danger unwarranted by the nature of those arrested and the evidence against them. It had all the atmosphere of a military operation, not a police action. Did the RCMP think that another band of unemployed teenagers was going to mount a rescue attempt? Many civil rights experts and lawyers questioned the actions and worried that they would undermine the possibility of a fair trial."
 

Alice Munro's Vancouver

"A narrow six- or seven-story hotel, once a fashionable place of residence, in the West End of Vancouver. Curtains of yellowed lace, high ceilings, perhaps an iron grill over part of the window, a fake balcony. Nothing actually dirty or disreputable, just an atmosphere of long accommodation of private woes and sins."

 

Fisk

"Angry young men are the tinderbox and Islamism is the match. The country will probably have better luck than most at “putting out the fire”, she adds. But who, I wonder, is really lighting the match? For a very unpleasant — albeit initially innocuous — phrase has now found its way into the papers. The accused 17 — and, indeed their families and sometimes the country’s entire Muslim community — are now referred to as “Canadian-born”. Well, yes, they are Canadian-born. But there’s a subtle difference between this and being described as a “Canadian” — as other citizens of this vast country are in every other context. And the implications are obvious; there are now two types of Canadian citizen: The Canadian-born variety (Muslims) and Canadians (the rest).

If this seems finicky, try the following sentence from the Globe and Mail’s front page on Tuesday, supposedly an eyewitness account of the police arrest operation: “Parked directly outside his ... office was a large, gray, cube-shaped truck and, on the ground nearby, he recognized one of the two brown-skinned young men who had taken possession of the next door rented unit...” Come again? Brown-skinned? What in God’s name is this outrageous piece of racism doing on the front page of a major Canadian daily? What is “brown-skinned” supposed to mean — if it is not just a revolting attempt to isolate Muslims as the “other” in Canada’s highly multicultural society? I notice, for example, that when the paper obsequiously refers to Toronto’s police chief and his reportedly brilliant cops, he is not referred to as “white-skinned” (which he most assuredly is). Amid this swamp, Canada’s journalists are managing to soften the realities of their country’s new military involvement in Afghanistan.

More than 2,000 troops are deployed around Kandahar in active military operations against Taleban insurgents. They are taking the place of US troops, who will be transferred to fight even more Muslims insurgents in Iraq.

Canada is thus now involved in the Afghan war — those who doubt this should note the country has already shelled out $1.8bn in “defense spending” in Afghanistan and only $500m in “additional expenditures”, including humanitarian assistance and democratic renewal (sic) — and, by extension, in Iraq. In other words, Canada has gone to war in the Middle East."