"The sanded & disjeweled." Bam!

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“Help”

It’s Salmagundi Sunday, where I share the “best of the rest”—great links that didn’t make the cut for last week’s newsletters…and a few pithy quotes. Back to regular programming tomorrow!

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“The Easement”

& I don’t want the words for desire to fuse to a life of what presents a weed now here, now alone, scored with a yarn for longing, one lifting her skirt up slowly, slower where the world’s tilted, blustery, incapable & how to refuse us each to a one.

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“Failure”

New guidelines from the US Copyright office explicitly refuse copyright for the infamous monkey-selfie or elephant murals (and by extension, faces in tortillas, mermaids in driftwood and most of Kenny Goldsmith’s oeuvre). Oh, and divine or supernatural beings need not apply.

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“A Book of Music”

Coming at an end, the lovers Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where Did it end? There is no telling. No love is Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves’ boundaries From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye Like death. Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length Of coiled rope Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths Its endings. But, you will say, we loved And some parts of us loved And the rest of us will remain Two persons. Yes, Poetry ends like a rope.

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Fatigue is one of the most interesting things in the world to think about. It’s like jealousy, or lying, or fear. It’s like one of those impure things that you keep well hidden. Like all those things, it makes you touch the ground. The first tired face you see in life is your mother’s, a face exhausted by solitude. Children in their early years bring dreams, laughter, and especially fatigue, fatigue before anything else. Nights stripped bare, overwhelming happiness. From the very start, fatigue knocks on two sacred doors in life: love and sleep. It wears love down like water over a stone; it floods sleep like water upon water. Fatigue is sleep’s barbaric intrusion into love, the flame of sleep over acres of love. Fatigue is like a bad mother, one who no longer gets up in the night to comfort and delight us with her voice or give us our share of joy in her arms. And you can tell tired people. You can tell them by the way they incessantly do things. The way they make it impossible for any restfulness to reach them, or any silence of love. Tired people are good at business, they build houses, pursue careers. To flee their fatigue they do all these things, and in fleeing they submit to fatigue. Their time is lacking in time. Everything they do more and more of, they do less and less of. Their lives are lacking in life. There is a glass window between one self and the other. They walk alongside that window incessantly. You can see the fatigue in their features, in their hands, and behind their words. Fatigue is in them like nostalgia, like an impossible desire.

The last day of vacation is too often preceded by sad dreams.

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It’s Salmagundi Sunday, where I share the “best of the rest”—great links that didn’t make the cut for last week’s newsletters. Back to regular programming tomorrow!

LINKS

Occasional serendipities are our lucky glimpses at the deep connective tissue of the world, moments when our eyes are opened wide enough to see the clasps and couplings amongst and between. Today I’ll be in Rochester, Minnesota, a place I didn’t realize/remember lay on my way to the wedding for which I’d already planned to use this poem months ago.

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“A Blessing”

Today, the poem that came immediately to mind when I looked upon “Pud,” the 900-pound behemoth that won the state fair’s “Biggest Boar” contest (and who is svelte, apparently, compared to the 1335-pound record holder). Not a poem that sits easy, nor is it meant to.

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“Animals are Passing From Our Lives”

A themed edition because today I have my own ticket to the fair or, as I like to call it, foods-on-sticks-ville. Oh the humanity!

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A late poem by Auden written in response to the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the ending of the “Prague Spring,” a turn shorter than most of even that most quicksilver season.

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“August 1968”

A brief bit today from one of the best autobiographies ever.

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Today’s edition brought to you by $20 of GoGo (should be called CrawlCrawl) in-flight internet, the red-eye out of Alaska and bad burned coffee. These are the times that try my commitment to not be one of those people Louis C.K. was talking about when he observed that “everything is amazing and nobody’s happy.”.

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It’s Salmagundi Sunday, where I share the “best of the rest”—great links that didn’t make the cut for last week’s newsletters…and a few pithy quotes. Back to regular programming tomorrow!

LINKS

Today the opening page of a fun novel described as a “nerdy, dystopic, sportively Hegelian, thriller.” As if that didn’t push enough buttons, the plot involves the death of print, a word-flu, secret societies and musings on technology and reading. It’s not Borges, but it ain’t bad. The excerpt’s a bit longer than usual, but it’s Saturday. And you can always scroll, baby, scroll.

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On a very cold and lonely Friday last November, my father disappeared from the Dictionary. And not only from the big glass building on Broadway where its offices were housed. On that night my father, Douglas Samuel Johnson, Chief Editor of the , slipped from the actual artifact he’d helped compose.

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…It is a small, khaki-colored handbook of Vietnamese phrases which was published by the Department of the Army in 1962 for issue to U.S. personnel in South Vietnam. At the time the Vietnamese involvement was still being described as a “counterinsurgency operation” … Here are several phrases drawn from the first section, on “initial encounters with locals”:

It’s impossible to read today’s poem without thinking of one of James Wright’s most famous poems. But it’s also impossible for me not to think of the raven I encountered a few days ago in the grocery store parking lot, his beak anointed with the grease of the discarded burger he pecked at as shamelessly as he’d pick at my flesh given the chance.

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There are a lot of people sharing things about depression right now. Some good, some—well—not so good. William Styron’s 1990 memoir Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness remains one of the best first person accounts of living with depression and a version is available free from the Internet Archive as text, PDF, ebook, etc.