“Quel Giorno Più Non Vi Leggemmo Avante.”

                          —Inferno V.138

We lean above the book and fateful page
    And lean into its words. You speak. I hear
    The husked seeds split, and they bleed down the page:
You tuck a strand of hair behind your ear
    And strings that knit the constellations twinge
    Like mandolins beneath the earth —so near
Commingled shade and soil to unhinge
    The grave; yet far as moonlight in a pond
    That blinks with nightjars rippled on the wing.
Though grassy spring now shimmers green with frond
    And shoot within your eyes, your beauty stares
    From violet shadow, Cimmerian, beyond
The swallowed source of bowered light that flares
    Within your eyes. They tear my heart away
    With a single glance. Eurydice wears
Your smile — anticipating hope, yet fey
    As autumn apples dropping from their limbs
    Will roll, gather into gullies, and lay
In wait: a sudden winter rain floods and brims
    The world in multiples of fallen time,
    The same that fuel in sullen throb the hymns
Of Orpheus, hemorrhaging grief in rhyme.
    But different tunes ignite our desire’s root –
    Their trace, emerging vines that merge and climb
The walls within the halls of Hades. Mute
    And vanished as night, yet here you remain
    A muse that breathes her fire upon a flute:
The pomegranate and its crimson stain
    Upon your lips, at dawn, upon my lips —
    Yet I am sure of nothing but the train
Of Venus, gown of ebony which strips
    This morning’s meaning, held out as a gift.
    My tongue takes these words as one, but trips
Upon your name. I hear each quench and sift
    It murmurs, blown upon the wind, and us
    With it, now bound by cords, now set adrift,
Regret our only landfall, tremulous
    Desire our only compass – this final page,
    The desperate map that charts us in our loss.
You arch your back and lean into the page
    Again, again I dare to lean as near —
    And further — but no farther than this page,
The compass needle driving through the air.

Status report

So much for Alphonse. First time as tragedy, second time as farce.

So. What’s everybody working on?

And…we’re out.

(Apologies for language in video.)

Well, it looks like someone went and made Alphonse into a movie.

Wow.

I almost think the opening scene of Nocturnal Animals is there to scare the moralists away via aesthetic assault. (It also serves a narrative/thematic function, sure, but…) Because after that, it plays out with the blunt trauma moral force of a Flannery O’Connor story, only without the promise of grace. Maybe it was the tequila watching, but I liked it a lot.

The Ordeal of Hannah Horvath?

untitledLena Dunham on line one, Mr. Pinfold…

IRL she’s a generation’s gutsy, ambitious voice, author, showrunner, and star of the HBO hit Girls. But on TV and the web she becomes “a girl who careens between wisdom and ignorance,” a girl whose delusions have brought her here, to the shadowy realm of Decreased Stigma

Live-blogging the Brisket: Hour 9

We come now to that part in the show where we flip the script…

Ready?

1

Set.

2

GO!

3

Then a final mopping…

4

And 30 minutes from lift-off…

5

The Profit

swift justice

When children kill we wring our hands and cry –
“The kingdom’s here and now and Christ is not
The crucified!” Confused, we butterfly
Our judgment, dissect humanity, gut
The soul and pick apart the truth. We love
Our sins so much we give them tongue to speak….
So heaven’s here and cold as stone above –
While hell’s beneath us. Spatchcock
The conscience, too, o modern primitive!
The temple’s vatic whisper will indict
Though pills become our lusty palliative
And love of death becomes our civil right.
We pay our tongues to serve the talk of peace –
We kill our kids so they can take our place.

Speaking of short poems about things…

Yep, this seems right…

Kennedy’s majority decision:

Hark! Love is love, and
love is love is love is love.
It is so ordered.

Yes, THAT Ricki Lake…

Franz Wright: RIP

16wright-2-obit-blog427

A loss to the world – and the world of Catholic letters…

Parting Word

As for me
I have no mind
to lose anymore, I am through
with all that–
the sky is my mind
today. (And

it always is
and always was
today.) Blue,
                 her color
sorrowing over us…

Does it flow out of or into us, seeing?

Unseen rays of perception the face beams
at things, or
face on which things shine!

I am so glad
that I no longer know,
no longer
care.

And one more thing:

the future?
Never

been there.

             -Franz Wright

Three Very Short Poems about Genital Mutilation

A Wife with a Knife
By far the most woeful and despised gobbet
Was the far-flung penis of John Wayne Bobbit.

Miracles of Modern Medicine, Case No. 358
Some kind of help was needed to intumesce,
but the Chinese pills made it phosphoresce.

On Whether or Not to Go to the Nude Beach
I’d rather my cock got caught in a faulty zipper
than have it bit by a gallinipper.

From Korrektiv’s Hirsute Hits of Haustralia Kollektion

This one goes out to all the Jonathan Potters of the world – Wear your grow and wear it proud!

H/T Number One Niece from Down Under Beth G.

Alphonse the Pumpkin

sdqtpics48“This pumpkin is my creation, and people often call their creation their baby,” said Second Son before he unveiled his handiwork. Then he showed it to me: “But it’s also your baby.”

From Korrektiv’s Little-known Fact Dept.

bab's tf telegram

Flannery O’Connor is the Toothe Faerie.

I have proof here in this tooth-a-gram to my third youngest daughter.

Why the NRA reminds me of Planned Parenthood and Vice Versa

Kirsten Powers, writing for The Daily Beast, says it well:

“The abortion clinic of alleged killer Kermit Gosnell was not illegal. But any talk of more government regulation unleashes an NRA-style assault from the abortion rights contingent.”

More here: Abortion Rights Community Has Become the NRA of the Left

Ms. Powers’ double-edged approach here reminds me of our man Walker Percy’s NYT piece back in the day: “A View of Abortion with Something to Offend Everybody.”

Are you offended?

The rest is silence

My man in Monmouth speaks out for the voiceless: (sourced from here: http://chrissmith.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=328605)

“Mr. Speaker, will the decades-long major national news media cover-up of the brutality—and violence—of abortion methods ever end?

“Will Americans ever be told the horrifying details as to how—and how often—abortionists dismember, decapitate, and chemically poison innocent babies?

“Will Americans ever be informed by a conscientious, unbiased news media that in the past 40 years, over 55 million child victims have been brutally killed by abortion—a staggering loss of children’s lives that equates to the entire population in England? And that many women have been hurt physically, emotionally, psychologically—and according to the Center for Disease Control over 400 women have actually died from legal abortions.

“Will Americans ever be told that of the 55 million children, Planned Parenthood alone claims responsibility for destroying over 6 million babies and that just two weeks ago a Planned Parenthood leader in Florida testified at a legislative hearing on a state initiative to protect born alive infants that even when a child survives an abortion, the decision to assist or kill the born alive infant should be “up to the woman, her family and her physician.” In other words, even if a child intended to be aborted survives the assault, the choice to kill remains—so called after birth abortion. Isn’t that extreme child abuse?

“Murdering newborns in the abortion clinic, it seems to me, is indistinguishable from any other child predator wielding a knife or a gun. Why isn’t that that child seen as a patient in need of medical care, warmth, nutrition and dare I say—love?

“Now another national media cover up! In this case, even when a Jeffrey Dahmer-like murder trial of an abortionist named Kermit Gosnell, who ran the benign-sounding Women’s Medical Society, unfolds in a Philadelphia Courtroom replete with shocking testimony of beheadings, unfathomable abuse, death, and body parts in jars. To this day, the national news media remains uninterested, indifferent—AWOL. Why the censorship? Gosnell’s “house of horrors” trial fails to attract any serious and meaningful national news reporting.

“Dr. Kermit Gosnell is on trial for eight counts of murder. One count is for the death of a woman who died during an abortion at his clinic. Seven counts are for babies who survived their abortion and were born alive but then killed by severing their spinal cords with a pair of scissors.

“In the words of the Grand Jury report: “Gosnell had a simple solution for unwanted babies: he killed them. He didn’t call it that. He called it ‘ensuring fetal demise.’ The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors in the back of the baby’s neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that ‘snipping.’ Over the years there were hundreds of ‘snippings.’

“Indeed, the national news media has not only taken a pass and looked the other way, but their stunning indifference has done a grave disservice to Gosnell’s victims—the woman killed, other women injured and children slaughtered by Gosnell. Because of the national media’s indefensible silence—because of their failure to report—other women and children at other abortion mills might be at risk.

“Indeed, the Gosnell Grand Jury Report in January 2011 powerfully noted that an absence of press coverage—and gross negligence by health department personnel in Pennsylvania—enabled Gosnell to show a “contemptuous disregard for the health, safety, and dignity of his patients that continued for 40 years.”

“Some media commenters, however, are beginning to take note of the national news media bias and blackout in the case.

“Yesterday an editorial in the Investors Business Daily titled Newtown In The Clinic: Media Ignore The Gosnell Trial said
‘Media Bias: A basketball coach who shoves and curses at his players merits constant coverage by a media also transfixed by Newtown. But a Philadelphia doctor on trial for murdering a woman and seven babies? It’s ignored.

Those who get their news from the three major networks have probably not heard of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, now on trial in Philadelphia, charged with seven counts of first-degree murder and one count of third-degree murder for killing seven babies who survived abortions and a woman who died after a botched pain-killer injection…

According to the Media Research Center, in one week Rice received 41 minutes, 26 seconds of air time on ABC, CBS and NBC in 36 separate news stories. Gosnell received zero coverage…

If Dr. Gosnell had walked into a nursery and shot seven infants with an AR-15, it would be national news and the subject of presidential hand-wringing.’

“In today’s edition of USA Today, columnist Kirsten Powers writes:

‘Infant beheadings. Severed baby feet in jars. A child screaming after it was delivered alive during an abortion procedure. Haven’t heard about these sickening accusations?

It’s not your fault. Since the murder trial of Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell began March 18, there has been precious little coverage of the case that should be on every news show and front page.’

“She goes on to point out:” ‘A Lexis-Nexis search shows none of the news shows on the three major national television networks has mentioned the Gosnell trial in the last three months. The exception is when Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan hijacked a segment on Meet the Press.’

“In a letter sent by Media Research Center President Brent Bozell and 20 prominent leaders call on the broadcast networks to stop censoring coverage of the trial, pointing out that as of April 4th, since the trial began ABC, CBS and NBC have given the story zero coverage in their morning and evening news shows.

“Again I ask. When will the media blackout stop? Will America ever be told about the brutality of abortion and the violence that is commonplace inside the abortion industry? Or will the media continue to censor this trial of the century, because it exposes an all too inconvenient truth that not only are unborn children destroyed in these killing centers, but that even babies who survive the abortion can’t escape the deadly hand of the child predator.”

UPDATE: At least one reporter either backpedals into honesty or honestly backpedals:

[Daily Beast reporter Meghan] McArdle discusses a reply from Washington Post reporter Sarah Kliff when she was questioned for not covering the trial by Mollie Hemingway of the GetReligion blog. On Twitter, Kliff said: “I cover policy for the Washington Post, not local crime.”

“I could also offer Kliff’s defense, that this is a local crime,” writes McArdle. “But George Tiller’s murder was also a local crime. There was no ‘national policy issue’ involved: murder is a matter for state law…Nonetheless, lots of national journalists — including Sarah Kliff, for Newsweek — covered the killing and discussed what it meant for abortion provision nationwide.”

Complete story here: http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/pro-choice-reporter-apologizes-for-not-covering-gosnell-calls-it-trial-of-t/

When Beavers Attack: Part III

This time it’s arterial…

http://news.sky.com/story/1076746/beaver-bites-man-to-death-in-belarus-attack

JOB

Located: The Selfish Gene

toure

“It was a thrill to watch that boy grow inside her, but I must admit during that second trimester as we watched him move around on 3-D sonograms I saw how human they were and my life long belief in abortion rights was – let’s say – jostled. It was life colliding with belief system. I had to rethink my position, but in the end I remain committed to being pro-choice because I cannot imagine arguing against a woman’s right to control her body – and thus – her life.”

I think I prefer the glass of whisky, fire on the hearth, roses and sexy talk when I’m seduced into buying a bill of goods… But, oh well.

Film at eleven.