local trees

remembering poet Paul Hannigan

PEOPLE, BE GOOD

was Ruskin’s first sermon,
Carlyle preached silence
In forty volumes.

Libraries creek and groan,
The beds where monsters
Are bred. This is the
Bela Bartok Memorial Shopping Center

And this is a whole tongue
Brown and green from the
Dirt and grass it licked and ate.

And here’s a sheep’s head.
Baa. And there, the Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart Barbershop.

People, be good.
Just you try it.
How would you begin?

thanks Don Share

from Ben Friedlander--Gloucester Postcards - a set on Flickr

Pop Sensation examines old paperbacks...

Bookshelf Porn

documentary about Django Reinhardt

LP covers by Andy Warhol

review of Ten Walks/Two Talks by Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch

With a pulley-system someone dropped planks through an apartment window (no sound). With a tiny broom a custodian steered hissing water along the curb. Somebody else wrapped a deli display-case in blue plastic. Someone wiped the demonstration slicer he had whirring on the sidewalk. I wondered why everything in restaurant-supply stores looks dusty. A white truck double-turning (does that make sense?) stripped the fender off an old black woman's sedan. Pedestrians winced...

"An American Type": The end of Henry Roth

The fluorescents shone on the Hearst printing presses within the great square plate-glass windows of the Examiner Building, flooding the corner. He paused, the anguish within him seeking to cleave to anything,
whether purposive, fatuous, anything. Slowly, the great, black machines behind the plate-glass window started moving, reeling out a Sunday comic sheet ... Accelerating, they flew past, swifter still and swifter, until gone were Jiggs and Maggie, lost in a multihued ribbon of paper and a high-pitched hum. And banality was gone, triviality was gone, gone the strip's silly postures and problems. All had become a freshet of blended color, diving downward and leaping upward in strict angle, and again, as if the artist's palette had become a cataract...

nice close reading of Barney Miller, "Quarantine, Pts. 1 & 2"

There’s scarcely an episode of Barney Miller’s first three
seasons that doesn’t include multiple jokes about bathrooms and coffee. Still, those jokes are pretty smart. At one point, Nick brings hot coffee to the feverish Dupree because he’d read “on the back of a jar of coffee” that hot drinks cool people down. Later, Darryl instantly improves the station’s coffee when he scrubs all the mold and mildew off
the squad-room’s cups. (“I thought it was a pattern,” Nick mumbles.) And there are quirky touches to “Quarantine” too, as when Nick loans
Luger the toothbrush he uses to clean his typewriter. (“My breath smells like ink,” Luger complains. “Want to lick some stamps?” Nick replies.)

Happy Canada day!


Most think G20 police actions justified, poll finds

The Angus Reid poll, which surveyed 1,003 Canadians and 503 Torontonians, found that 73 per cent of Torontonians and two-thirds of Canadians believe police treatment of protesters was justified during the G20 summit.

BibliOdyssey: 1870s Caricatures

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71[W]
&
The
Paris Commune of 1871 [W]

lots of serious powered vehicles (amongst much else) at Roy Arden's blog...

YouTube - Stevie Wonder - Some Other Time

Gilbert Highet's wonderful book on the Latin poets Poets in a Landscape has been reprinted...(tho the old Pelican is easy to find)

“I have endeavored to recall some of the greatest Roman poets by describing the places where they lived, recreating their characters and evoking the essence of their work.”

Obama's original sin on Afghanistan

But, just like all the Democrats who buckled in 2002, he wasn't interested in being the antiwar candidate. Instead of challenging misguided popular sentiments about the wisdom of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, Obama chose to cater to them. This right war/wrong war distinction made for great politics in 2008. But as policy in 2010, it just doesn't work. The question is whether it will be too late before he admits it...

 

my favorite director Anthony Mann's Men
in War on TCM today

There is no cross-section of American culture on display here, no roll call of familiar G.I. types, no patriotic speeches or political justifications for the war. The dialogue is stripped down yet evocative and the characters simply but effectively sketched without resorting to sentimental stories of life back home or dreams of the future after the war is over. As Ryan explains to his men: "Regiment doesn't exist. Battalion doesn't exist. The U.S.A. doesn't exist. We're the only ones left to fight this war." He might as well have said that past and future don't exist. They are focused on surviving now...

the film of JR Ackerley's My Dog Tulip looks promising...

farewell to the great Canadian contralto Maureen Forrester

Robert Creeley at Isola di Rifiuti

"A bird that gets to be a champion is a show bird; it’s a very
careful vocabulary. But then you have what are called stock birds
and stock birds are the birds that are used, frankly, in breeding show
birds. Stock birds may have overemphasized characteristics. Then you do
get into genetics. But a stock bird is a very distinct bird in that it
is used in breeding the qualification, the qualities you want to have in
breeding a bird that will then be used for show. But a show bird is
oftentimes of no use as a breeder at all. I mean, he’s just a moment in
time. I remember one instance of pigeons I was given as a kid—I had an
interest early—a pair of fantails, a very common bird around New
England. Once you got past icehouse pigeons, the pigeons you could get
by climbing up into icehouses or whatever they nest in, and taking the
young two or three week old birds out of the nests, getting young squeakers
as they call them—once you get past that you then went to homing
pigeons, homers we used to call them, or fantails—these were
very common varieties. Well, this one pair of fantails I was given
suddenly bred a fantastically good fantail. But I was a kid; I didn’t
know anything about banding, and you can’t show birds without having
them banded; that’s part of the etiquette in the show scene. This bird
was what we call a sport; he was suddenly a lucky strike in the genetic
situation. But I mean that taught me to pay attention to a lot of
things. I’m surprised now; I haven’t been engaged with pigeons for
almost fifteen or more years—almost twenty years now—and yet the habits
of that attention as we’re now talking is so precise, that they give me
the vocabulary immediately. I mean, I couldn’t tell you the same kind of
detail about the method of scanning a line of poetry or various systems
of metric that are involved with descriptions of poetry. Now I found
that one information was useful and felt right in my environment; not
that I wanted to be only a pigeon man but I mean that kind of
information taught me a lot. It taught me how to pay attention to an
awful lot of things..."

Michail Bulgakov. The heart of a dog

Why bother to learn to read when you can smell meat a mile away? If you live in Moscow, though, and if you've got an ounce of brain in your head you can't help learning to read -and without going to night-school either. There are forty-thousand dogs in Moscow and I'll bet there's not one of them so stupid he can't spell out the word 'sausage'...

local trees & c.

Ben Friedlander: Animals in the Maximus Poems A-E

Dog, dog, dogs, dog's: 89, 107, 151, 179, 188, 206, 223, 257, 293, 347, 348, 402, 403, 405, 414, 416, 420, 427, 429, 489, 507, 583, 602, 618 [see also "Dogtown, Dogtown's"]
Dog Bar, dogbar: 492, 624
dog days, Dog-day: 346, 618
dog-rocks: 420
dog-licenses: 258
Dogtown, Dogtown's: 25, 34, 172, 173, 174, 175, 179, 180, 181, 186, 187, 188, 195, 212, 213, 226, 296, 315, 317, 318, 319, 320, 322, 330, 331, 332, 370, 383, 384, 391, 425, 463, 465, 480, 508, 518, 551, 591...