Your turn of that page
has opened a drawer.
My home. I am his underwear.

He’ll always show you
the contents of his drawers
but never what he’s wearing.

He’s that kind of fellow.
But I’ll give you a clue:
I am his only pair of boxers.

To put it briefly,
he suffers a shortage.
Why only one of me?

Why only one day
of freedom per week
when he could have seven?

That is the question
I once heard
his girlfriend ask.

He replied like Robert Frost
that a little freedom
is almost too much

and went home and
put on briefs.
Short changed.

Possibly the greatest Twilight Zone episode ever.

It’s the birthday of novelist Muriel Spark (books by this author), born in Edinburgh, Scotland (1918). When she was growing up, she wrote love letters to herself, signed them with men’s names, and hid them in the sofa cushions in the hope of shocking her mother.

She was a prolific novelist. She’s best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). Her last novel, The Finishing School (2004), was published when she was 86 years old. She died in 2006.

Mr. YGLESIAS: Right. I mean, it is true that if you come from a family of writers, you understand that there is always an assassin in the family.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. YGLESIAS: I don’t really know any other way of doing the writing. So I didn’t feel I had any choice. And there were times when I considered just not publishing the book or not showing it to anyone. But I also knew that I felt that so acutely, that it was so dangerous, was also a sign that I was writing it correctly.

GROSS: Had your parents, in their novels, written characters that you knew were based on you that you found troubling?

Mr. YGLESIAS: Actually, even when someone writes you in a novel flatteringly, the truth is it’s always troubling because it’s odd to be a minor character in someone else’s life since we’re always the major character in our own lives.

GROSS: Oh that’s so interesting, the way you put it.

Mr. YGLESIAS: It’s always disturbing.

GROSS: So was that upsetting to see that in your parents’ work you were a minor character?

Mr. YGLESIAS: It was very strange, always disturbing. And I believe, although people will say otherwise, that it’s always disturbing to people to appear in someone’s book. It’s just – it offends the natural narcissism of every individual.

From a 2009 episode of “Fresh Air,” in which Terry Gross interviews Rafael Yglesias about his novel based on his marriage – A Happy Marriage: A Novel.

Take it away, Father Rutler!

Snow is falling hard on Calendar Square.
It’s nearly February; phoebes sing
At embarrassing distances among
The whitened trees of dusk, reminding March
It’s got its work to do. The buildings cast
Dull blue shadows across white yawning spaces.
Now that winter’s had its way with time, time
Deletes the solace of annus novus,
While evidence lingers, central conceits
Of presence ravel out the absences
That wrinkle parking lots and alleyways
With tire tracks; that spill the rock salt that’s mixed
In bitter mercy with birdfeed on a stoop;
That winnow storefront windows down and out
To their basics; that make the needful things
Become madly dependent on luxuries
To help restore their meaning. People move
Among their footprints, shadows among shades,
With hungry looks, grinning cold misereres
And scouring the ground before them for some
Reconstructed comfort. No other face
Or posture touches on what’s wanted most –
What’s least at hand. The entire city sounds
An anthology of reveries, morose
In muffled cadence, bruised as ruptured bassoons,
A rich quavering sadness wildly refrained
From deep beneath the river’s strain and flow:
It groans with ice and curves its banks around
The city, lover held by elbow’s crook –
Its daily traffic is measured and cramps
Each fitful instance. After twilight pulled
The stray ribbons and stays of sunlight loose,
The evening’s flowing locks tumbled free
With snow. (The weather’s been asking for it
For days.) Each flake an inculcation of
The equinox, the storm compiles in facts
And whispered dividends; its quiet smoothes
Sepulchral parks into ashen fields; it haunts
The solstice, dreaming phoebes into spring.

Dad: … oh, Americana.

Picture source.

(Image: Detail of painting behind main altar at St. James the Less Church, La Crosse, Wis.)

“Λίθον ὃν ἀπεδοκίμασαν οἱ οἰκοδομοῦντες
οὗτος ἐγενήθη εἰς κεφαλὴν γωνίας•”

The moment’s gravity is apogee
Of death and judgment, here where sun and moon
Are beam and pillar of the balance pan
That tips the temple’s peak. But clarity’s
Displaced the weight of time with charity’s
Alacrity: Jerusalem is done
With me. The distant Mediterranean
Ignites in sliver holocaust. I see
Such realms that stretch before me reach for me.
So men have bound my hands, dismantled stone,
And thrown me down. The clumsy club’s “Amen”
Has queered my corners irrevocably;
But square and spirit level resurrect
The equilibrium of the architect.

BIDEN IS TOTALLY TEXTING UNDER THE TABLE IN THIS PICTURE.

Travis Naught asked me to write a blurb for his fine collection of poetry, The Virgin Journals, and I was glad to oblige.

Dad likes Dad Rock.

If I say to you the cage of my heart is
broken and bleeding birds into the sky,
a moth is dazzled by the blinding sky,
an airplane tears the silence of the sky,
you may empty my words like pebbles
from your shoes and walk away.
Squint at the horizon through a scratched window—
there are moments to exchange for days, for years.
Close your eyes and open doors
and falling in the rain will come my name.

If someone asks you if you have seen
the something she lost, you could say
you could make a wish through the window.
There are instruments and experiments
and many words for many things—
a moth dusting her wings on a windowpane,
a bird on a wire, a man on a telephone
listening for a voice to speak his name.
There is a stepping aside, a turning around,
a name withheld like a caged bird.

At the end of the day the sun is in my boots
and I walk across a dismal craving.
The sky is a seamless puzzle I cannot solve
and it hurts my eyes to try to.
In mirrors made of windows your image grieves.
You drop your name like a stone,
a sparrow falling, a moth wounded by light.

The other night I saw the Seattle Opera performance of Verdi’s Attila, in which John Ralyea (as Attila) and Ana Lucrecia García (as Odabella) were especially good. This is one of Verdi’s earlier operas, and I rather enjoyed those moments that seemed more reminiscent of Rossini’s bel canto than the fiery romanticism that abounds in Verdi’s later works. Although there’s plenty of that on display here as well.

You might also enjoy Dame Joan Sutherland’s performance in a video that nicely includes the score so you can read along as Sutherland runs up and down the staff as if she were tossing off the easiest aria in the repertoire. While I think Chiara captures the heroic force of Odabella in a more dramatically powerful performance, Sutherland’s perfectly balanced coloratura through all these runs is simply astonishing—flawless, to my untrained ear.

From msnbc.com: ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — A 12-year-old girl who was abducted and beaten by men trying to force her into a marriage was found being guarded by three lions who apparently had chased off her captors, a policeman said Tuesday.

This article from 2005 just came across my radar. It relates some horrible statistics about the practice of marriage by kidnap and rape in Ethiopia and, against the backdrop of those statistics, the amazing tale of a 12-year-old girl who was saved from the cruel practice by some lions in the road. In the combox, of course, is where things get interesting. Were the lions actually just setting a table (so to speak) and preparing to have the girl as the main course when the police arrived and broke up the dinner preparations? Did God send the lions to save the girl? And if so, then why would God perform such an extraordinary act while doing nothing about the continuing horrifying practice and the alarming statistics thereof? The debate rages on.

My favorite comment (although I confess I didn’t make it through them all) came from someone named kohny:

Leave it to someone to twist the fact that GOD sent these Lions to protect this girl.

He shut the mouths of the Lions in the den with Daniel, He did the same here.

Keep this behaviour up in ethiopia and this will be your fate…The LIONS WILL BE SENT TO EAT YOU MEN

We really thought we had a hit with this one, but it didn’t make the final cut because we realized that the explicit use of tabacco products might offend gentle hearts and timid souls…

H.G. Wells’ involvement in the early development of the Fabian Society is a continuing theme of the book, particularly the fact that it afforded Wells manifold opportunities for fraternization with free-thinking young women. There’s some mention of the enthusiasm for eugenics shared by many of the progressives at the time, as mentioned in Wells’ own Anticipations:

‘The nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its People of the Abyss; the nation that succeeds most subtly in checking gambling and the moral decay of women and homes that gambling inevitably entails; the nation that by wise interventions, death duties and the like, contrives to expropriate and extinguish incompetent rich families while leaving individual ambitions free; the nation, in a word, that turns the greatest proportion of its irresponsible adiposity into social muscle, will certainly be the most powerful or dominant nation before the year 2000.’

There really is nothing new under the sun. The magnanimous masturbator seeking to direct his “donor-sexual” energies towards the greater good isn’t that different from the impotent sexologist who surely would have approved of this means of improving upon the gene pool.

From A Man of Parts:

Later that day, before dinner, he (H.G.) went for a stroll with Edith (Bland, who wrote under the pen name E. Nesbit.). They passed beyond the confines of the moat and wandered through the overgrown and largely untended grounds until they came to an old summerhouse, and sat down on an ancient wicker sofa, where a most interesting conversation took place.

‘Why didn’t you like A Modern Utopia the first time you read it?’ he asked her.

‘I didn’t like the idea that married men could have affairs but their wives couldn’t.’

‘You think married women should be able to have affairs too?’

‘No. I don’t think either of them should,’ she said. He was surprised by this answer, which did not accord with what he knew about the history of her marriage, but he could hardly say so. Noting his silence, she said: ‘I mean I know they do, the flesh is weak, the heart is susceptible . . . I won’t claim that Hubert and I have been entirely . . . But I don’t think it should be publicly approved, taken for granted, as it is in your Utopia. I think we must uphold the traditional principle that sexual intercourse should be restricted to married couples.’

‘Even though we know it isn’t?’

‘Yes. If you had daughters like Rosamund you would agree with me. Young girls like her know everything and fear nothing. They don’t believe in religion, they read any books they like, Darwin, Marx, French novels, Havelock Ellis, I wouldn’t be surprised, because we’ve brought them up—I mean liberal progressive people like us have brought our children up—in complete intellectual freedom. It makes them terribly vulnerable.

“I’ve committed 100 percent of my sexual energy for producing sperm for childless couples to have babies. So I don’t have other activity outside of that,” he said.

Arsenault, who calls himself a “donor-sexual,” doesn’t charge couples for his sperm, but his unconventional methods have caused the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to issue a cease-and-desist order, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

You know what I don’t get? His website has a whole list of articles about the perspective of sperm-donor children, many of them negative.

Posted without comment.

“Ἐκ Ναζαρὲτ δύναταί τι ἀγαθὸν εἶναι;”

So Philip stops me at my plow, out of breath.
His eyes are bright and dark, and good with news –
“There’s men this world denies that others choose.
Who’d guess such good could come from Nazareth?”

With acres left to share, the shade beneath
A fig extends its branches. “What’s your news?”
(As coulter slices, so the mouldboard chews…)
“What is this good that comes from Nazareth?”

With furrowed brow, I hear – and watch the death
Of day proclaim the sun with darker news
That shares its share alike for pagans, Jews –
“Can anything of good come from Nazareth?”
In answer, light and shadow carve a path
Through fields and moments greater than the plow’s.

While trying to get the lowdown on Fair Use laws, I came across this old gem from the Hoosier Hot Shots. As is typical of the music videos genre, there’s a fair amount of debauchery in this epic of Otto Zilch. So consider yourself warned.

From the Indies to the Andes, What a mission! / Stopping only now and then to do some fishin’ / And he went without a copyright permission / Was a very daring thing to do