Baby-Love

Visiting the Local Animal Shelter

I am off (in spite of Dan's vigerous protests) to visit the Alexandria Animal Shelter in order to check out Kady the Jack Russell/Pug and Peaches, the Senegal Parrot. They are both approximately one year old and I think either one (or both) would make a good addition to our little "family."






Don't you agree?

FREE RICE

Very fun word game here - and it feeds people. It doesn't get any better than this, does it?

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Why It's Sometimes Good to Be A Woman in America

Someone is beating and raping women in my immediate neighborhood. The first three assaults took place right outside my front door. There are warning notices plastered all over the inside of my condo building and the same print-outs are prominantly displayed on the walls of my office building down the street. The police are becoming more and more visable, especially early in the day when I leave for work. The word is out there and the entire community is rightously and rightfully outraged at these attacks on it's female citizens.

Springfield, Alexandria Masked Assaults Analyzed

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A woman walking in the Springfield area of Fairfax County was sexually assaulted early Wednesday, and police are investigating whether the attack is linked to three recent similar incidents in Alexandria.

All four episodes occurred before dawn by a man with the same general description, Fairfax Officer Eddy J. Azcarate said. In Springfield, an 18-year-old woman walking in the 6900 block of Industrial Road about 5:45 a.m. was approached from behind, forced to a remote area and assaulted by a man in a black ski mask, police said.

In Alexandria, women walking alone between 5 and 6 a.m. were dragged off sidewalks and assaulted Aug. 31, Nov. 5 and Nov. 9. Detectives from Fairfax and Alexandria met yesterday to compare the cases, Azcarate said. The assailant in the most recent incident was described as being 5-foot-7 to 5-foot-10, with an average build, wearing a black ski mask, a black nylon jacket and bluejeans. The assailant in the second and third Alexandria attacks also wore a ski mask, Alexandria police said.

Quite a different scene than this one that's playing out in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Court Ups Punishment for Gang-Rape Victim

(CNN) -- A court in Saudi Arabia increased the punishment for a gang-rape victim after her lawyer won an appeal of the sentence for the rapists, the lawyer told CNN.

The 19-year-old victim was sentenced last year to 90 lashes for meeting with an unrelated male, a former friend from whom she was retrieving photographs. The seven rapists, who abducted the pair, received sentences ranging from 10 months to five years in prison.

The victim's attorney, Abdulrahman al-Lahim, contested the rapists' sentence, contending there is a fatwa, or edict under Islamic law, that considers such crimes Hiraba (sinful violent crime) and the punishment should be death.

"After a year, the preliminary court changed the punishment and made it two to nine years for the defendants," al-Lahim said of the new decision handed down Wednesday. "However, we were shocked that they also changed the victim's sentence to be six months in prison and 200 lashes."

The judges more than doubled the punishment for the victim because of "her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media," according to a source quoted by Arab News, an English-language Middle Eastern daily newspaper.


As if that weren't enough punishment meted out - her lawyer's had his license to practice law revoked for even taking her case in the first place.


Don't worry, though, The United States is on top of things - or are they?

Read the article and you'll understand why we, as a country, really ought to be a lot more careful about whom we get into bed with.

HATE TO WAIT??

This is marvelously helpful for those of you who hate wasting valuable time and cell phone minutes trying to get past the goddam automated telephone prompts and talk to a real live breathing thinking human being.

www.gethuman.com

God bless whoever had the time and patience to put this all together in one handy-dandy easy to navigate website.

Literary-Cat

So, does anyone know how to spell "tuna?"

Search Words

Ok.....someone found this blog using the search words "Chinese Tufu Recipes With Cat" and someone else found it looking for "Spiders Named Lindsey."

You've got to love Google.

Really.

Mass. Rules!!!

HURRAY FOR THE


AND THE NEW ENGLAND

Carol Frost - Poetry Magazine - Go There Now

Call me a formalistic heretic but this free verse poem is absolutely, without doubt, one of the best things I have read in eons.

Really.

Read it and weep.

Literally.

So, T.O.

Would ya like a recap with your

Dare I say - Patriots???

By God, I think the







just might pull this one off!!!

edited to add after the start of the second half:

Or not.

Poets, Pundits and Anti-Semitism

I'm not quite sure which one is more pathetic.

Anne Coulter

or

Leo Yankevich

One does it in the name of Christianity and the other does it - well, I'm not quite sure why he does it - because he can, I suppose.

Problem is, they both seem to think they're going to win friends and influence people with their cleverness and their ingenuousness. Someone ought to tell them just how unattractive, unimaginative and unbelievable they are.

Ugly combination, fear and ignorance, hey what?

Retraction

Last week I said this: Judging a person's character is different than judging that person's poetry. One should have no bearing on the other.

Today, after meeting poetic racism up-close and personal, I'm printing a public retraction.

I was wrong. It should have a bearing. We are morally responsible for what we write, for what we print, for what we publish, for where we publish, for who we publish and we are morally responsible for making the reasons for our choices known.

If we print the poetry of a known Nazi-sympathizer, if we print the poetry of a Holocaust denier, of a racist, of a bigot, if we give these people praise or even acknowledgement, if we give them even an inch of publicity - we give them a platform and we give them power. By publishing them, by bestowing awards on them, we give the rest of the world a chance to meet them and to embrace them. By virtue of our open-mindedness and our appreciation of art and by our own "acceptance" we make them acceptable.

By admitting them into our magazines and our publishing houses, we send the message to the rest of the world that we approve, not only of their poetry, but also of their beliefs - because, in the eyes of the world, it is damn near impossible to separate the heart of a poet from the heart of his poem.

If we do not speak up and tell the world what we feel we share responsibility for what happens as a result of our silence.

For anyone who thinks editors are not morally (and sometimes legally) responsible for what happens as a result of what they publish, I'd suggest reading up on Julius Streicher.

Someone's Playing Stupid on Wikipedia

Within the last 48 hours there was a crudely worded reference on a rather disgusting blog to a wonderfully talented female poet having twice won The Nemerov Sonnet award by virtue of possessing talents other than poetic.

Within the last 24 hours there was a post on the same blog which referred to another well-respected woman poet as a "poetasteress and hybrid human-cow" and which requested her to get off of her "bovine ass."

Knowing both of these ladies as well as I do, and knowing that virtually no one finds the obscure blog in question interesting enough to read very often, I tend to find this all rather amusing. For some reason, the farther from the truth one gets the funnier I find it. Maybe I'm just weird that way, but I think most people would agree with me. Lies and accusations are not humorous when there's a even a kernel of truth in them - but when they're totally outrageous they just can't be taken too damn seriously.

So that kind of childish stuff is just funny. The Internet's full of childish stupidity - the Law of Averages says some of it's got to be funny.

The flip side of the same law, however, says that some of the information which can be found, even on the same subject, will fall into the "not quite so humorous" catagory.

Something like this, for instance.

For one thing, Wikipedia is not some obscure blog. Rightly or wrongly, people from all walks of life use Wikipedia as a kind of Internet-Encyclopedia and they trust it. The fact that anyone would choose to deliberately include dishonest and/or misleading information is utterly unconscionable. The fact that it's gone unchallenged since last July is just ice on the disgusting cake.

For another thing, The Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award established in 1994, has always been one of the more prestegious and sought-after awards for formalist poets and The Formalist first published in 1990, was, from the first issue to the last, a first-rate and highly respected publication, as is the current benefactor/administrator of The Nemerov Sonnet Prize, Measure. To see any of them portrayed in any light other than favorable is just painful.

To further clarify things, neither publication is related (or akin) to the imaginary "It's Talon Time" or the very real "Highlights For Children" Nor was there an award given for "It's Talon Time, Bitch" by a fictitious Michael Plittman in 1993. The Nemerov, as stated above, was not even established until a year later - in 1994.

And just in case you didn't already know it - the judges for The Nemerov Award are now and have always been well-known and well-respected poets - not some secret tribunal committee composed of horse doctors.

I hate to ruin someone's childish fun, but I'm gonna notify both Wikipedia and Measure and hopefully this:

Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award was established in 1978 by The Formalist. The winner, usually selected from about 3,000 entrants, receives $1,000 and publication. Beginning in 2006 the winner will appear in It's Talon Time!, a successor publication akin to Highlights for Children also published in Evansville, Indiana.

The award is administered by a secret board of veterinarians.

will be gone soon.

It's my good deed for the day.

Besides that, I really do enjoy stomping the annoying little buzz of idiots. I'm such a taloning-telling little bitch that way.

Leaving the Live Poets Behind For a Moment -

Robert Graves may have been something of a fruitcake - what with his multi-colored goddesses and his strange affair with Laura Riding (who literally moved in with him and his first wife, Nancy and their family. A bizarre bit of threesome which eventually drove Laura into a failed suicide attempt before the first wife bowed out and Laura and Robert packed up and moved to Majorca. ) Still in all, as with countless other dead poets - he shines every bit as brightly today as he did all those long years ago.

However, knowing the history of Robert, Laura and Wife #1 - it kind of puts the following poem in a whole new (and somewhat creepy) light, doesn't it?

The Cool Web


Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose's cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

Robert Graves

Resignations and Accusations Reign

at The Poetry Society of America. Are we or are we not entering a period of McCarthyism and rampant unrepentant conservatism?

Not only that but just who in the hell is John Hollander and why haven't I heard of him before today?

Whoever-he-is, he apparently has made some remarks over the years which some voting board members considered to be racist. Other board members said they felt that such comments were not characteristic of Mr. Hollander’s views or had been misinterpreted. Mr. Louis-Dreyfus said that even if the comments were representative, they were irrelevant criteria for judging the Frost Medal, just as he would argue that Ezra Pound’s anti-Semitism should not detract from the literary appreciation of his work.

Mr. Louis-Dreyfus (whom I've also never heard of) runs an international commodities trading and shipping firm and dabbles (how the hell does one "dabble" anyhow? Either you do something or you don't) in writing poetry, said he resigned partly to protest what he regarded as an “exercise of gross reactionary thinking” among the other board members who left in the wake of the award to Mr. Hollander, a retired English professor at Yale.

Regardless of all that, I'm miffed because I thought I knew all the damn suspected and/or well-known bigots in the poetry world.

The point is - Mr. Louis-Dreyfus is right. Judging a person's character is different than judging that person's poetry. One should have no bearing on the other.

Be that as it may, I probably wouldn't buy a book of Mr. Hollander's poems for the same reason I wouldn't buy a portrait of a clown from John Wayne Gacy or stand in line at the book store to buy the latest copy of O. J. Simpson's new book (regardless of the fact that he won't ever collect any royalities from it) or wear a pair of Michael Vick running shoes or (although Dan disagrees with me) go stylishly jogging while sporting a light gray hoodie bearing the name of Bill Belichick or pay good money to listen to Don Imus on the newest pay-for-listen radio show - simply because there are too many other damn good clown portraits, novels, radio shows, running shoes, jogging hoodies and poetry books out there to choose from.

The way I figure it - why encourage stupidity when it's so simple (and so much cheaper) to avoid it?

If You Think There's Honor In Poetry

read what Seth Abramson and Quincy Lehr have taken the time to write about Heather McHugh and Joesph Salemi. Then tell them both "Thank you." What a heart-breaking, myth-busting, gut-sickening confirmation of everything you've already suspected about the poetry world!!

Seth Abramson

and

Quincy Lehr

When you're done reading, ask me why I no longer care to submit poetry to anywhere or anyone.

Tell me if you're still comfortable doing it yourself.

Why do we tolerate this sort of crap in poetry? Would sports fans turn a blind eye if Bill Belichick suddenly pulled Tom Brady out of the QB position and stuck his recently-graduated-from-high-school nephew in the Super Bowl? Would we tolerate a member of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee awarding himself the prize? When President Bush consistantly appoints no one but his best friends and highest campaign contributors to high places, tell me, honestly, what is it that even his die-hard supporters understand explicitly?

I'll tell you what I think - I think that President Bush and his Republican cronies have nothing on The Live Poet's Society. Nothing at all.

When Truth Outweighs Fiction

Interesting article from CNN on the real-time lives of several famous writers - including the fact that Thomas Hardy's heart might very well have been eaten by his housekeeper's cat and a pig's heart buried in its stead.

What Hemingway, cummings, Hammett and Stein Have in Common

This is quite interesting. I have no idea what it means, but it's interesting.

I've got some thoughts, of course, but nothing's really formed enough for words as of yet.

My biggest wonder is this - what comes first? The fascination with death/chaos or the proximity to it? Do certain people end up writing about it after they've inadvertently seen too much of it or do they deliberately seek it out beforehand?