The Bridge

Every couple of weeks, some unhappy soul kills himself by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. I walked down the middle of the bridge nearly twenty years ago unscathed: the bridge was closed to car traffic in celebration of its fiftieth anniversary. But I've never found walking across the bridge much fun. It's very windy and the noise of cars is unpleasant. One can't say much for the view, which has nothing on that from the Marin headlands. But it's the most photographed structure in America and I've gotten a fair amount of use out of it. After seeing a documentary on Saturday that shows a half dozen men and women plunge to their death from the bridge, I'm in favor of erecting tall barriers all along the pedestrian (east) side of the bridge. Why wasn't this done long ago? I don't mind if people kill themselves but what if those jumpers hit a seal or a grouper?

Fatwa #1

Colds are to last no longer than seventy-two hours.

Me?

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Those who spurn god together stay together

Religion % have been divorced
Jews 30%
Born-again Christians 27%
Other Christians 24%
Atheists, Agnostics 21%

I did not write this

There is often a contradiction between the meaning of our actions toward a person and what we say we feel toward that person in a journal. But this does not mean that what we do is shallow, and only what we confess to ourselves is deep. Confessions, I mean sincere confessions of course, can be more shallow than actions. I am thinking now of what I read today in H's journal about me - that curt, unfair, uncharitable assessment of me which concludes by her saying that she really doesn't like me but my passion for her is acceptable and opportune. God knows it hurts, and I feel indignant and humiliated. We rarely do know what people think of us (or, rather, think they think of us) . . . Do I feel guilty about reading what was not intended for my eyes? No. One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents + lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal.

Banned words and phrases

on the same page
down time
merely
alas
terrorist
sea change
welter
all good
I'm confused
graced us with his presence
notwithstanding the fact that
a phyletic vestige with no current adaptive value

History and Politicians

Rumsfeld claimed yesterday that the lesson learned from World War Two is that appeasement does not work. He's such an ignoramus. There is no such thing as a lesson learned from a single historical event. Appeasement worked extraordinarily well for imperial China over many centuries, as emperors routinely bought off aggressive neighbors by showering them with hugely valuable gifts. Liberals use Vietnam in the same way: the lesson of that quagmire is don't pour lots of troops into conflicts with guerrillas. This is stupid too. Why have we allowed the political discourse in this country to become so historiographically impoverished?

Farallon, part 2

Time exists on the slack hypotenuse
Strung between sky and gutflutter,
Each peak and valley of pulsing wet
Taking us further from our footing

From what it feels like to lean, to stand
Without being threatened, without the surround
Speaking, without splashing. Sea lions applaud
The lurching circus of lenses and the odd wince.

Farallon, part 1

We ride upon the thin edge of the water
Casting our image on it, withdrawing from
The fatiguing guesswork we had about wet
About what it's like to look up from deep down.

The thing supporting us, keeping us from
Slipping deep into the softly rolling water
Is part of a whale, its image of us as a film
Infecting its dark eye, itching its attention.

Other things ride around the slick of oily us
Barking, fluttering, wanting to be less wet
And less adhesive. Water claims them thickly.
Us it salts, rolls, moves about on its tongue.

We meet the wanderers out here where land fails
Slipping suddenly into utter dimness. Water
Draws a sort of penitential piss from the boat
Which burps and moves utterly nowhere.

Roger Clay's Proposal

I may be oversusceptible to news
But what I see in the papers leaves me numb.
The bomb. The ultimatum. Wires hum—
Adult impersonators giving interviews,

As if that helped. What would? I've thought of it.
With all due ceremony—flags unfurled,
Choirs, priests—the leaders of a sobered world
Should meet, kneel down, and, joining hands, submit

To execution: say in Rome or Nice—
Towns whose economy depends on crowds.
Ah, but those boys, their heads aren't in the clouds.
They would find reasons not to die for peace.

Damn them. I'd give my life. Each day I meet
Men like me, young, indignant. We're not cranks.
Will some of them step up? That's plenty. Thanks.
Now let's move before we get cold feet.

Music we'll need, and short, clear speeches given
Days of maximum coverage in the press.
We'll emphasize disinterestedness,
Drive the point home that someone could be driven

To do this. Where to go? Why not Japan,
Land of the honorable suicide.
And will the world change heart? Until we've tried,
No one can say it will not. No one can.


by James Merrill

Nuts

Feeling distinctly preverbal today. Want to do nothing but eat macadamia nuts, drink apple juice, and stare out the window.

Hiroshima Day on August 6

On August 6 1945, at a quarter after eight in the morning, Hiroshima was destroyed by the United States and a nuclear bomb named Little Boy. By December 140,000 human beings had died. The American attack on Nagasaki, on August 9, killed 74,000 more. Never forget.

Hello

This is just to say hello to Howard.

rats

www.ratlife.org

I learned about this from an article on research on rodents that appeared in the recent issue of AV Magazine.

Quid pro quid

If I slap a man and he kills my mother and father as retribution, are their deaths justified?

Easily the most irritating poem I've read this century

Irish Poetry
by Billy Collins

That morning under a pale hood of sky
I heard the unambiguous scrape of spackling
against the side of our wickered, penitential house.

The day mirled and clabbered
in the thick, stony light,
and the rooks’ feathered narling
astounded the salt waves, the plush coast.

I lugged a bucket past the forked
coercion of a tree, up toward
the pious and nictitating preeminence of a school,
hunkered there in its gully of learning.

Only later, by the galvanized washstand,
while gaunt, phosphorescent heifers
swam beyond the windows,
did the whorled and sparky gib of the indefinite
wobble me into knowledge.

Then, I heard the ghost-clink of milk bottle
on the rough threshold
and understood the meadow-bells
that trembled over a nimbus of ragwort—
the whole afternoon lambent, corrugated, puddle-mad.

http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazine/0706/poem_178394.html

synonymology

What's another word for thesaurus?

Van Gogh bullshit

All that hooey about van Gogh never selling a painting, or selling only a single painting for the equivalent of eighty dollars, is crap. He sold lots of sketches and small paintings in Paris, as Gauguin pointed out in "Avant et aprés." See the van Gogh volume in the Time-Life Library of Art, pp. 75–76. See also the tale of van Gogh's lost works, on p. 71. Lots of these were sold too, it happens.

Fascinating

http://tinyurl.com/ea75e

Byronic kisses

Byron makes a date with a young Greek woman for midnight at the Parthenon. Lady Elgin has a rendezvous there at the same time. Chekhovian confusion and a kiss.