poetry

Last item read in 2009/the Aughts:

• "The key to the tower" (2009) by Laura Kasischke, poem.

First item read in 2010/The Teens:

• "The Hypersurface of this Decade" (2010) by Bruce Sterling, short story.

See also:

• New Year's reading (2009)
• New Decade's listening
• New Decade's watching

Google is teetering towards being On Notice, if not Dead to Me yet.

/. "Google CEO Says Privacy Worries Are For Wrongdoers"

In a surprising statement to CNBC, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told reporter Maria Bartiromo, 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.'

Yeah, and you shouldn't mind getting arbitrarily pulled over and searched by the cops for no reason if you don't have anything to hide.

The key, apparently, is to drink coffee with friends.

Drinking coffee could help to cut the risk of advanced prostate cancer, a US study suggests.

and

Fresh evidence adds weight to suggestions that loneliness makes cancer both more likely and deadly.

BBC: "Hubble sees most distant galaxies"

Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has captured its deepest view of the Universe, producing images of galaxies that have never been seen before.

As Bad Astronomer Phil Plait says,

I haven’t heard much from the Hubble Space Telescope folks since it was refurbished earlier in the year. Maybe that’s because they’ve been busily working on putting together an incredible image, the deepest ever taken in the near infrared. Feast upon this:

LA Times -- "Expo Line project costs and delays are ballooning"

The rail line from downtown L.A. to Culver City is $220 million over budget and a year behind schedule. Officials hope to open part of the route next year.

I gotta get one or both of these T-shirts from zero per gallon:

ComputerWorld: "High-Energy Linux: Linux & the Large Hadron Collider"

The biggest, most powerful atom smasher the world has ever seen, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), with its 17-mile underground loop and TeVs (Teraelectronvolts) of proton beams, is finally up and running, with Linux in control.

Beware the Atom-Smashing Penguin! ;)

The New Yorker: "I Dreamed I Met William Burroughs", poem by Franz Wright.

I met William Burroughs in a dream.
It was some sort of bohemian farmhouse,
and he was enthroned, small and skeletal,
in a truly gigantic red armchair.

Continue...

LA Times -- "Santa Muerte in L.A.: a gentler vision of 'Holy Death'

The sect is linked to narcotics trafficking in Mexico. As it moves north, it takes on the benign glow of virtue.

The prayer in Spanish sounded like one from an ordinary Catholic Mass. But the man who led it wore a coyote-skin headdress and called himself the last of 13 generations of brujosbrujos -- witch doctors -- in his family.

The name the worshipers invoked was not that of the Virgin Mary but of Santa Muerte, or "Holy Death," a Mexican folk saint linked to narcotics trafficking, a kind of female grim reaper with a skull for a face.

About two dozen devotees recited a rosary and stood and sat on cue to offer praise to this unconventional icon one Sunday at a storefront shrine near MacArthur Park.

"Angel created by faith," they chanted, "allow the power in me to be released."

Santa Muerte is not a Catholic saint, and in recent decades her popularity in Mexico, especially among the poor and criminal classes, has led to clashes with church officials and government authorities. Her first adherents included Mexican prisoners, drug dealers and prostitutes, and those in legitimate but dangerous nighttime work, such as security guards and taxi drivers.

"It's sort of like the Virgin for people on the edge," said Patrick A. Polk, a folklorist and curator at UCLA's Fowler Museum.

Last year's selection of Spooky stories for Halloween was great fun, so we're back this year with more.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is one of the creepiest short stories I've read, with parts that remind me of those disturbing modern Japanese horror flicks. Absolutely one of my favorite short stories ever, much less favorite scary stories.

It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.

A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate!

Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.

Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?

John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.

John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.

John is a physician, and PERHAPS—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—PERHAPS that is one reason I do not get well faster.

You see he does not believe I am sick!

That it is from 1892 makes it even more remarkable, but it is also semi-autobiographical. After reading the story, check out this article by the author from 1913, "Why I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper".

You can't go wrong with Edgar Allan Poe on Halloween, and how about a quick triptych of terror, courtesy of Project Gutenberg?

Head over to the "First Project Gutenberg Collection of Edgar Allan Poe". It includes the sublime stories "The Cast of Amontillado" and "The Masque of the Red Death", as well as the classic poem "The Raven." Guaranteed to put you in the mood for All Hallows' Eve.

The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.

A Stable for Nightmares is a collection of stories by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Sir Charles Young, et al. The following is from the first story in the book, "Dickon the Devil":

The peat and furze were pretty soon left behind; we were again in the wooded scenery that I enjoyed so much, so entirely natural and pretty, and so little disturbed by traffic of any kind. I was looking from the chaise-window, and soon detected the object of which, for some time, my eye had been in search. Barwyke Hall was a large, quaint house, of that cage-work fashion known as “black-and-white,” in which the bars and angles of an oak framework contrast, black as ebony, with the white plaster that overspreads the masonry built into its interstices. This steep-roofed Elizabethan house stood in the midst of park-like grounds of no great extent, but rendered imposing by the noble stature of the old trees that now cast their lengthening shadows eastward over the sward, from the declining sun.

The park-wall was gray with age, and in many places laden with ivy. In deep gray shadow, that contrasted with the dim fires of evening reflected on the foliage above it, in a gentle hollow, stretched a lake that looked cold and black, and seemed, as it were, to skulk from observation with a guilty knowledge.

Games for Hallow-e'en by Mary E. Blain is a 1912 treatise on how to throw an awesome Halloween party.

Hallow-e'en or Hallow-Even is the last night of October, being the eve or vigil of All-Hallow's or All Saint's Day, and no holiday in all the year is so informal or so marked by fun both for grown-ups as well as children as this one. On this night there should be nothing but laughter, fun and mystery. It is the night when Fairies dance, Ghosts, Witches, Devils and mischief-making Elves wander around. It is the night when all sorts of charms and spells are invoked for prying into the future by all young folks and sometimes by folks who are not young.

In getting up a Hallow-e'en Party everything should be made as secret as possible, and each guest bound to secrecy concerning the invitations.

Any of the following forms of invitations might be used.

Witches and Choice Spirits of Darkness
will hold High Carnival at my house,
..............Wednesday, October 31st,
at eight o'clock. Come prepared to test
your fate.
Costume, Witches, Ghosts, etc.

Last year's stories, still as good as ever:

• Edith Wharton’s “The Eyes” can be found in Tales of Men and Ghosts.
• Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” is available in Curious, if True: Strange Tales.
• “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” from Washington Irving.
• "The Raven" with illustrations by Gustave Doré.

Related Wikipedia articles:

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Madame De Treymes (1907) by Edith Wharton (short story).

She spoke quite easily and naturally, as if it were the most commonplace thing in the world for them to be straying afoot together over Paris; but even his vague knowledge of the world she lived in--a knowledge mainly acquired through the perusal of yellow-backed fiction--gave a thrilling significance to her naturalness. Durham, indeed, was beginning to find that one of the charms of a sophisticated society is that it lends point and perspective to the slightest contact between the sexes. If, in the old unrestricted New York days, Fanny Frisbee, from a brown stone door-step, had proposed that they should take a walk in the Park, the idea would have presented itself to her companion as agreeable but unimportant; whereas Fanny de Malrive's suggestion that they should stroll across the Tuileries was obviously fraught with unspecified possibilities.

Artemis to Actaeon, and Other Verses (1909) by Edith Wharton (poetry collection).

I quivered in the reed-bed with my kind,
Rooted in Lethe-bank, when at the dawn
There came a groping shape of mystery
Moving among us, that with random stroke
Severed, and rapt me from my silent tribe,
Pierced, fashioned, lipped me, sounding for a voice,
Laughing on Lethe-bank--and in my throat
I felt the wing-beat of the fledgeling notes,
The bubble of godlike laughter in my throat.

A Wodehouse Miscellany (2003) by PG Wodehouse (collection of articles, poems, and stories; public domain texts compiled by Gutenberg).

To the thinking man there are few things more disturbing than the realization that we are becoming a nation of minor poets. In the good old days poets were for the most part confined to garrets, which they left only for the purpose of being ejected from the offices of magazines and papers to which they attempted to sell their wares. Nobody ever thought of reading a book of poems unless accompanied by a guarantee from the publisher that the author had been dead at least a hundred years. Poetry, like wine, certain brands of cheese, and public buildings, was rightly considered to improve with age; and no connoisseur could have dreamed of filling himself with raw, indigestible verse, warm from the maker.

Today is Bloomsday!

Bloomsday is a commemoration observed annually on 16 June in Dublin, Ireland, and elsewhere to celebrate the life of Irish writer James Joyce and relive the events in his novel Ulysses, all of which took place on the same day in Dublin in 1904. The name derives from Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses. 16 June was the date of Joyce's first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, when they walked to the Dublin village of Ringsend.

The daily poem from Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac today is an excerpt from Ulysses:

"O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the
figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue
and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and
cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put
the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how
he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and
then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to
say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him
down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like
mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

"The Helpful Robots" (1957) by Robert J. Shea

"Our people will be arriving to visit us today," the robot said.

"Shut up!" snapped Rod Rankin. He jumped, wiry and quick, out of the chair on his verandah and stared at a cloud of dust in the distance.

"Our people—" the ten-foot, cylinder-bodied robot grated, when Rod Rankin interrupted him.

"I don't care about your fool people," said Rankin. He squinted at the cloud of dust getting bigger and closer beyond the wall of kesh trees that surrounded the rolling acres of his plantation. "That damned new neighbor of mine is coming over here again."

"It's a Small Solar System" (1957) by Allan Howard

Frederik Pohl wrote recently about the time, when he was young, when he spent more time in Barsoom than in Brooklyn. Allan Howard, Director of the Eastern Science Fiction Association in Newark, takes us back to those nostalgic days in this vignette of man's first hours on Mars.

"The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost'" (1896) by Thomas Nathaniel Orchard

It is remarkable how largely astronomy enters into the composition of ‘Paradise Lost,’ and we doubt if any author could have written such a poem without possessing a knowledge of the heavens and of the celestial orbs such as can only be attained by a proficient and intimate acquaintance with this science.

"The Dark Star" (1917) by Robert W. Chambers

Not the dark companion of Sirius, brightest of all stars—not our own chill and spectral planet rushing toward Vega in the constellation of Lyra—presided at the birth of millions born to corroborate a bloody horoscope.

But a Dark Star, speeding unseen through space, known to the ancients, by them called Erlik, after the Prince of Darkness, ruled at the birth of those myriad souls destined to be engulfed in the earthquake of the ages, or flung by it out of the ordered pathway of their lives into strange byways, stranger highways—into deeps and deserts never dreamed of.

"I Like Martian Music" (1957) by Charles E. Fritch

Longtree sat before his hole in the ground and gazed thoughtfully among the sandy red hills that surrounded him. His skin at that moment was a medium yellow, a shade between pride and happiness at having his brief symphony almost completed, with just a faint tinge of red to denote that uncertain, cautious approach to the last note which had eluded him thus far.

He sat there unmoving for a while, and then he picked up his blowstring and fitted the mouthpiece between his thin lips. He blew into it softly and at the same time gently strummed the three strings stretching the length of the instrument. The note was a firm clear one which would have made any other musician proud.

"Flight Through Tomorrow" (1947) by Stanton Arthur Coblentz

It has long been my theory that there is in man a psychic entity which can exist for at least brief periods apart from the body, and have perceptions which are not those of the physical senses. In accordance with these views, I had been developing various drugs, compounded of morphine and adrenalin, whose object was to shock the psychic entity loose for limited periods and so to widen the range and powers of the personality. I shall not go into the details of my researches, nor tell by what accident I succeeded better than I had hoped; the all-important fact—a fact so overwhelming that I shudder and gasp and marvel even as I tell of it—is that I did obtain a minute quantity of a drug which, by putting the body virtually in a state of suspended animation, could release the mind to travel almost at will across time and space.

DJ Ruby Rhod:

What was that honey? It was BAD! It had no fire, no energy, no nothing! So tomorrow from 5 to 7 will you PLEASE act like you have more than a two word vocabulary. It must be green.

Happy St. Patrick's Day to one and all. Here are a few related Celsius1414 posts of yesteryear:

"Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig oraibh!"

You might surmise from the surname, and you’d be correct, that today is a special day for yours truly. As fellow Irishman Vin Scully said prior to this morning’s first televised Dodger spring training game, “Happy St. Patrick’s Day to you all, especially if it applies.” :)

"Irish and Jewish cuisine exchanges?"

Naomi over at Will Tell Stories For Food posted earlier today on a curious culinary coincidence, “Ethnic Food”, prompted by the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day.

The story starts out with the odd corned beef tradition on the holiday, which apparently started in the States, a dish which the Irish didn’t have back in Ireland. A cuisine that does have corned beef (or brined brisket at least) is Jewish.[...]

The plot thickens, too. Guess who likes lox.

"Guinness good for you. And the Pope is Catholic."

Drink a Guinness for your health! The BBC is reporting on a study that shows a Guinness a day keeps the heart doctor away.[...]

Since I always feel better after having a pint of Guinness, this seems to confirm my findings. ;)

"Bearded drinkers lose out"

Almost £500,000 worth of Ireland’s world famous stout is lost each year in the moustaches and beards of imbibers of the creamy headed black stuff.

Research carried out in the UK by Guinness reveals that an estimated 92,370 moustachioed drinkers of the Irish brew lose up to 162,719 pints each year.

And from Grown Diaries over the weekend, "Ode to the Potato"

Being of Irish and German extraction, I am, as you might expect, enamored of the humble potato.[...]

It is thus with great pleasure that I point to today's poetry entry from the ongoing and endlessly entertaining Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor, "Ode to the Potato" by Barbara Hamby:

"They eat a lot of French fries here," my mother
   announces after a week in Paris, and she's right,
not only about les pommes frites but the celestial tuber
   in all its forms: rotie, purée, not to mention
au gratin or boiled and oiled in la salade niçoise.[...]

Continue...