did you say dance ?

rhetoric

Obama speaking about Lincoln and government and the common good

eloquence and humor

Lincoln: "[you got me elected?] ... I forgive you"
Obama: "to those of you who brought me here ... we're takin' names"

this made me laugh the way I laughed the other day when Michelle Obama, told by a young girl that she wanted to grow up and be First Lady, replied "It doesn't pay very well"

also: the strange synchronicity of Lincoln and Darwin born on the same day 1809 ... Shakespeare and Cervantes dying on the same day 1616 ...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Land of Lincoln

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Stanley Fish on Obama's Prose style -- parataxis, incantation

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The poet judges ...

Walt Whitman

The poet judges
not as a judge
judges
but as the sun
falling around
a helpless thing.

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Life is what happens ...

John Lennon, November 1980, Double Fantasy
last album
he was shot December 8



Close your eyes, have no fear,
the monster's gone, he's on the run and your daddy's here,
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy.

Before you go to sleep, say a little prayer:
every day in every way, it's getting better and better --
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy.

Out on the ocean, sailing away,
I can hardly wait to see you to come of age,
but I guess we'll both just have to be patient.
Cuz it's a long way to go, a hard row to hoe,
yes it's a long way to go, but in the meantime:

Before you cross the street, take my hand.
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans --
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy.

Before you go to sleep, say a little prayer:
every day in every way, it's getting better and better --
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy --
darling, darling, darling, darling Sean.

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poems are like dreams...

Adrienne Rich, When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision

"... poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know."

Jiminy Cricket

Pinocchio's conscience, a gift from The Fairy with Turquoise Hair











Sara Fanelli, cover for Pinocchio (author Carlo Collodi), London, Walker Books, 2003

technology and violence

Thomas Paine
William Blake
Shelley
Suffrage
Lincoln
Whitman
Douglass
The Molly McGuires 1870s
Haymarket 1880s
Wounded Knee 1890, 1973
Sacco and Vanzetti 1920s
Gandhi 1930s
Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State 1940s
Rosenbergs 1950s
Simone de Beauvoir
Beat
Blacklist
The Atomic Cafe (1982)
COINTELPRO 1960s
SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
Opposition to the Vietnam War
Black Panthers
Chicago 8
Camden 28
The Weather Underground
The Murder of Fred Hampton
American Indian Movement
Waking the Dead (2000)
USA PATRIOT Act 2001
Opposition to the Iraq War
(so many invaluable works available -- biography, novel, history, painting, music, film, documentary and otherwise -- some on Netflix Instant) -- do your research!!!! :)

E. L. Doctorow:

• The Book of Daniel (1971)
• Bush: The Unfeeling President (September 9, 2004)

The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul.

... He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president [George W Bush]?

He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

Toni Morrison, from her Nobel Lecture, 1993:

... For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas. ...

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retrospect

aggravated by some rather vacuous responses to the Inaugural poem, which I liked, a lot

Ian McMillan said, prior to the event: It has to be a poem from an oral tradition and not from a written one.

the poem stands on its own, whether you agree w/ McMillan or not ...

"... words to consider, reconsider."



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Charlie Rose: An appreciation of John Updike with Judith Jones (his editor for 40 years)


Arts & Letters Daily: John Updike, novelist, man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce, and life’s adventures, is dead... AP ... NYT ... Telegraph ... Guardian ... NYT ... London Times ... WP ... New Yorker ... LA Times ... Guardian ... TPM ... Boston Globe ... London Times ... National Post ... WSJ ... LA Times ... Guardian ... Forbes ... SF Chron ... Slate ... Guardian ... Philly Inq ... TLS ... Independent ... Weekly Standard ... New Republic ... Guardian

BookTV: 2006 BookExpo America with John Updike, Barack Obama, Amy Sedaris, and Marie Arana

Housekeeping

from Marilynne Robinson's extraordinary novel Housekeeping, p. 194:

There is remembrance, and communion, altogether human and unhallowed. For families will not be broken. Curse them and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit on porches and sing them on mild evenings. Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number, and all the same.

Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.


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Inaugural poet

Elizabeth Alexander the inaugural poet -- the fourth in history

UK Independent: Obama's Inauguration Day poem

"It must rank as the grandest poetry gig on earth, with a potential audience of billions. It may also terrify the lucky – or unlucky – author into terminal blandness or toe-curling bombast. In spite of her window of worldwide exposure, few fellow-poets will envy the task that faces Elizabeth Alexander ... after musicians such as Yo-Yo Ma and singers such as Aretha Franklin have done their turns.

... Among the poets she's been reading for guidance are Auden, Hughes, Heaney – and Virgil.

... What kind of poem might best fill that vast inaugural stage? ... Ian McMillan, perhaps the best-loved of British public bards today, says: 'An inauguration poem can't be small in any way. It can incorporate intimate moments, domestic images, fleeting memories, but it has to be like a political speech in that it must be based on rhythm, on repetition, on phrases that can be manipulated and spoken again and again. It has to be a poem from an oral tradition and not from a written one.'

... Picked to speak the words that will lead America from one age to another, Elizabeth Alexander, wisely gave little away beforehand. She dutifully noted that her 'joy' at landing this job from the president-elect stems from 'my deep respect for him as a man of meaningful, powerful words that move us forward' ... 'poetry is not meant to cheer; rather, poetry challenges, and moves us towards transformation' ... and 'I won't carry on at length.' "

a sense of humor! :)




Praise Song for the Day

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.


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Obama

from the Poetry Foundation
Obamapoetics: Elizabeth Alexander on how the Derek Walcott-toting, June Jordan-quoting president will affect poets and poetry.

Conductor Noel Powell guides Obama onto the train in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Melina Mara, Washington Post

Ray Charles: America the Beautiful

John Mortimer

NY Times: John Mortimer, Barrister and Writer Who Created Rumpole, Dies at 85

BBC: Rumpole's creator Mortimer dies

Guardian UK: How Rumpole helped John Mortimer change the world

Mortimer (left, w/ Leo McKern who played Rumpole) was a wonderful, hilarious, writer ... and a passionate defender of free speech and civil liberty ...