Here’s something for my buddy Erik, whose taste in books is impeccable.  It’s an article from Time about trashy summer reading.  

Me?   I’m going to heave up from the desk and amble off to bed with a little Bill Faulkner. 

I’m posting this tonight for Joe. 

Lament for My Brother on a Hayrake

Cool with the touch of autumn, waters break

Out of the pump at dawn to clear my eyes;

I leave the house, to face the sacrifice

Of hay, the drag and death.

By day, by moon, I have seen my younger brother wipe his face

And heave his arm on steel. He need not pass

Under the blade to waste his life and break;

The hunching of the body is enough

To violate his bones. That bright machine

Strips the revolving earth of more than grass;

Powered by the fire of summer, bundles fall

Folded to die beside a burlap shroud;

And so my broken brother may lie mown

Out of the wasted fallows, winds return,

Corn-yellow tassels of his hair blow down,

The summer bear him sideways in a bale

Of darkness to October’s mow of cloud. 

 

                 — James Wright

Hey, this is cool.  Blogger’s new editor has all sorts of new features, e.g., fonts, colors and keyboard shortcuts for publishing functions.  Sweet.

I don’t feel like goin’ to school today. How ’bout you, Spanky? Let’s just blow ourselves up instead, and become martyrs!

“It’s not suicide, it’s martyrdom. I would become a martyr and go to my God. It’s better than being a singer or a footballer. It’s better than anything.”

I didn’t always like going to school. I was a good student, not great. It was sometimes tedious, stressful, shameful. Also often fun and interesting. I had mixed feelings; on the whole, vacation was better. But I must say there were few days when I would have preferred being blown to shredded chunks.

We need to find the psychos who are spewing this twisted vision of “martyrdom,” and help them with an attitude adjustment. A martyr may be called on to die for his people, but he’d much rather live for them. He lays down his life as a last resort, not as a pitiful, useless, misbegotten waste.

Link – BBC

You’re not going to believe these aren’t photos.

Spotted at Twists and Turns blog.

Looks like the bulls are raking up a good score in Pamplona this year. At the risk of being tactless, I always root for the bulls. Hemingway notwithstanding, this is a stupid, anachronistic and cruel practice.

Here’s an interesting article by Michael Kanellos, CNET News.com. He says that writing of handwritten letters is making a comeback in the business world.

I used to write letters all the time. Before I became surgically attached to this Dell, I had good handwriting. In my desk, I still have boxes of fine stationary – some custom made – and an elegant box of nice fountain pens. If you received a one page, handwritten letter from me, back in those days, you can bet I spent two hours on it. And I had the time to do so.

Now I fume over the two minutes it takes me to delete the approximately 100 pieces of spam I receive each day. And if your e-mail takes me five minutes to read, God help you. This evening, I sent three “letters” by computer to old friends in the 15 minutes before dinner.

If letter writing comes back, I’ll be ready. Maybe. If my bottled ink hasn’t all dried up.

Getting a writing idea is like someone handing you a dandelion in a high wind. Better make wine quickly.

I can’t imagine better advice to our fractious, agitated world than that from the Pope today.

Slow Down and Think

And as a Russian Orthodox Christian, I’m please to see the Mother of God of Kazan is going home.

It’s hard to live in the moment. In the moment, the glare of the screen hurts the eyes, and the sunlight bouncing from the wall as well. The edge of the chair hurts in the back of the legs, the belly hangs tight over the waistband, and the lower back aches as the body slouches into the computer.

I think it would be nice if people quit telling me to live in the moment. The occasional pleasure I take in life tends to derive from a tangential impression that a span of time has proven to be benign. A stretch of rough road may have a beautiful view; the path through thorny weeds may be freshly paved. There’s pleasure in either, over a few miles. As for true happiness, we tickle it with our metaphysics.

— my writing journal, 4/1/03

I’ve been staying up pretty late in the last few weeks. My internal clock is all out of what. So I’ve been watching Northern Exposure on the Hallmark channel, weeknights at 1am. I loved that show.

After watching tonight, I googled Peg Phillips, who played Ruth Anne Miller on the show. I learned that she died in November 2002, in Seattle. That’s sad. I hope she’s found peace.

Oh, this is just great. I have always loved telling people what time it is. In recent years, it’s become sort of an existential metaphor, like “I’m gonna eat your lunch for you.” But even as a kid, I liked setting clocks and letting people know when things were off kilter.

One time, at my older old job, we were having a meeting. The supervisor was chewing us out for being late in the morning — most of us had to be there by 7am, I shit you not. She said that we were consistently coming in two or three minutes late. I pointed out that the clocks in our department were almost ten minutes fast, and I’d been coming in by the big clock in the lobby at the one in Administration, which were right.

She took my head clean off. Just reached over, removed it, and handed it to me. In front of everybody. OK, that was a stupid move.

But if you want to know what time it is — like time to get somebody else in the White House — I’m here to tell you. There’s a clock right here on my blog. Tick tock, George. Heh heh.