One word meme

One Word Meme
spotted at Fructus Ventris

1. Where is your cell phone? None.
2. Your significant other? Ditto.
3. Your hair? Unkempt.
4. Your mother? Nearby.
5. Your father? Chelsea?
6. Your favorite thing? Beer.
7. Your dream last night? Forget.
8. Your favorite drink? Beer.
9. Your dream/goal? Private.
10. The room you're in? Den.
11. Your church? Catholic.
12. Your fear? Hell.
13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? Alive!
14. Where were you last night? Asleep.
15. What you're not? Slender.
16. Muffins? English.
17. One of your wish list items? [?]
18. Where you grew up? Boston.
19. The last thing you did? Edit.
20. What are you wearing? Casual.
21. Your TV? Nearby.
22. Your pets? None.
23. Your computer? Old.
24. Your life? Dull.
25. Your mood? Average.
26. Missing someone? Yes.
27. Your car? None.
28. Something you're not wearing? Tie.
29. Favorite store? Books.
30. Your summer? Thundery!
31. Like (love) someone? Indeed.
32. Your favorite color? Blue.
33. Last time you laughed? Recently.
34. Last time you cried? Sunday?
35. Who will re-post this? Nobody!

Cummings

Cummings

seeming's enough for slaves of space and time
--ours is the now and here of freedom. Come

Saints preserve us!

Saints preserve us!

The Dream

The Dream
by Theodore Roethke (1908-63)

1

I met her as a blossom on a stem
Before she ever breathed, and in that dream
The mind remembers from a deeper sleep:
Eye learned from eye, cold lip from sensual lip.
My dream divided on a point of fire;
Light hardened on the water where we were;
A bird sang low; the moonlight sifted in;
The water rippled, and she rippled on.

2

She came toward me in the flowing air,
A shape of change, encircled by its fire.
I watched her there, between me and the moon;
The bushes and the stones danced on and on;
I touched her shadow when the light delayed;
I turned my face away, and yet she stayed.
A bird sang from the center of a tree;
She loved the wind because the wind loved me.

3

Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
She slowed to sigh, in that long interval.
A small bird flew in circles where we stood;
The deer came down, out of the dappled wood.
All who remember, doubt. Who calls that strange?
I tossed a stone, and listened to its plunge.
She knew the grammar of least motion, she
Lent me one virtue, and I live thereby.

4

She held her body steady in the wind;
Our shadows met, and slowly swung around;
She turned the field into a glittering sea;
I played in flame and water like a boy
And I swayed out beyond the white seafoam;
Like a wet log, I sang within a flame.
In that last while, eternity's confine,
I came to love, I came within my own.

Szymborska

Am not the biggest Szymborska fan

but I do like this one.

Marché aux fleurs

flowermarket

Definition

Definition

Pedestrian: noun. One who would begrudge
A pirouette for not being a trudge.

1991

Blogger glitch?

Can't get onto various blogs
including Video meliora, Catholic and Enjoying It, Curt Jester, Andrew Sullivan, Irish Elk, Enchiridion, Touchstone's Mere Comments and several others

What happens : A grey rectangle pops up saying Internet Explorer cannot open the site. Operation aborted.

Anyone else having this problem?

Addendum : I wasn't having this problem yesterday.

Addendum # 2, Saturday afternoon : Everything seems okay now, and I haven't switched to Firefox. Yet!

Dylan Thomas

I was walking, one afternoon in August, along a riverbank, thinking the same thoughts that I always think when I walk along a riverbank in August. As I was walking I was thinking -- now it is August, and I am walking along a riverbank. I do not think I was thinking of anything else. I should have been thinking of what I should have been doing, but I was thinking only of what I was doing then, and it was all right.

Dylan Thomas, from "The Crumbs of One Man's Year"

Nemo dat

Nemo dat quod non habet.

No one gives what he does not have.

A serious man

Seriously

I was dining at a restaurant recently, with family -- a micro-step above casual food -- and had a fine meal of chicken with pasta in an asiago cheese sauce. After dinner came the dessert menus, and everyone got dessert except me.

The waitress asked, "Did nothing catch your eye?"

I said, "Well, I was tempted by the Decadent Chocolate Cake, but I think I'll pass."

The waitress, displaying wonderful tact, replied, "It is a serious dessert, but you look like a serious man."

Indeed!

Sullivan

He can be infuriating, at times, but

Andrew Sullivan's blog without Andrew Sullivan reminds me of something David Letterman once said about decaf coffee.

"It's like non-alcoholic Scotch. What is the point?"

The Angry Man

The Angry Man
by Phyllis McGinley (1905-78)

The other day I chanced to meet
An angry man upon the street --
A man of wrath, a man of war,
A man who truculently bore
Over his shoulder, like a lance,
A banner labeled “Tolerance.”

And when I asked him why he strode
Thus scowling down the human road,
Scowling, he answered, “I am he
Who champions total liberty --
Intolerance being, ma’am, a state
No tolerant man can tolerate.

“When I meet rogues,” he cried, “who choose
To cherish oppositional views,
Lady, like this, and in this manner,
I lay about me with my banner
Till they cry mercy, ma’am.” His blows
Rained proudly on prospective foes.

Fearful, I turned and left him there
Still muttering, as he thrashed the air,
“Let the Intolerant beware!”

Autism test

Autism quotient test

Here. I scored 31 out of 50. Wasn't too surprised.

Found here.

Overrated?

Five things I think are overrated
(not that anyone asked me! -- but I have a blog, and will opine)

1. yogurt

2. Meryl Streep (sorry!)

3. baked beans (although pinto beans are tolerable)

4. Philip Larkin (again, sorry!)

5. any kind of "salad" (chicken, egg, etc.) that is not green and leafy

::

Anyone else who wishes to contribute to this embryonic meme can do so in the combox, or at his or her own blog!

Bishop Kallistos Ware

In the Creed we do not say, "I believe that there is a God"; we say, "I believe in one God." Between belief that and belief in, there is a crucial distinction. It is possible for me to believe that someone or something exists, and yet for this belief to have no practical effect upon my life. I can open the telephone directory for Wigan and scan the names recorded on its pages; and, as I read, I am prepared to believe that some (or even most) of these people actually exist. But I know none of them personally, I have never even visited Wigan, and so my belief that they exist makes no particular difference to me. When, on the other hand, I say to a much-loved friend, "I believe in you", I am doing far more than expressing a belief that this person exists. "I believe in you" means: I turn to you, I rely upon you, I put my full trust in you and I hope in you. And that is what we are saying to God in the Creed.

Bishop Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995), pp. 15-16

Groucho Marx on a bad day

"Groucho Marx on a bad day"

How the photographer Marion Morehouse described Dylan Thomas. As quoted in this article about a walking tour of Dylan Thomas's haunts in New York City.

Timothy Steele

More Timothy Steele

His page at the Poetry Foundation, with links in the right margin to seven of his poems (not including, alas, the sonnet about summer).

An "ordination"

An "ordination"
in as many scare-quotes as possible

Yes, up here in Boston's Back Bay the organization known as "Roman Catholic Womenpriests" added three "priests" and one "deacon" to their number yesterday.

The most amusing part of this folderol was listening to one of our local television reporters attempt to pronounce "diaconate."

Timothy Steele

Prosody for 21st-century poets

An essay by Timothy Steele at the poets.org website. Steele, often categorized as a formalist, with good reason, takes on Ezra Pound and his denigration of the pentameter. He also has many things to say about the verse of our moment, and about the popular view of meter as a "straitjacket."

National homework

Our latest national homework

I'll pass.

Wilde

You should get married. A misanthrope I can understand -- a womanthrope, never!

Miss Prism to Dr Chasuble in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest

Kay Ryan

Newly named US poet laureate

Kay Ryan, 62, of Northern California. Here is her Poetry Foundation page, with twenty-one poems and one review (of the notebooks of Robert Frost).

An NYT article announcing the laureateship, and containing praise for Ryan from the perhaps-unexpected source of Dana Gioia.

And a San Francisco Chronicle article, which confuses poets laureate with Librarians of Congress. (I don't believe Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Louise Bogan, etc., were ever "poets laureate." The post of laureate is relatively new -- 1986 or so -- and the first poet to be honored with the title was an octogenarian Robert Penn Warren. IIRC.)

Update, Saturday : Prior to 1986, the "poet laureate" was known as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

Eve in Dappled Things

And speaking of ...

Eve has a poem in prose in the latest issue of Dappled Things!

Asphyxia

Laughed nearly to the point of asphyxia

when I read the second label to this post at Eve's.

Quirks

Six of my quirks
a meme spotted chez TSO

1. I talk to myself in "gibberish German." (I talk to myself.)

2. I make surrealistic lists of "random thots" and send them to friends in lieu of more conventional emails.

3. I shave every other day. Sometimes every third day. I hate shaving, but like being clean-shaven.

4. I notice odd things. I notice that STATE is almost a palindrome because STATE backwards is ETATS, the plural of STATE in French. (There is a STATE subway station on the Blue Line here in Boston and, apparently, I've stared at the sign for far too many hours in my life.)

5. There's something I can't do, physically, unless I simultaneously count upwards by seventeens to about 187.

6. I say "circa" and then follow it with some ridiculously exact number. (And yes, "circa" instead of "around" qualifies as a sub-quirk. If I listed all my quirks pertaining to "wordage," this list would be about 100 items long!)

Phos Hilaron

Phos Hilaron

has been updated.

Guillerand

He himself is the great Source from whom everything flows. We know nothing truly, we comprehend nothing, unless we know him. He is the true Light that lightens and explains everything.

Dom Augustin Guillerand, O. Cart. (+1945), via the July 2008 Magnificat

D. G. Rossetti

The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, via Wikipedia

Hobsonism

Hobsonism

"If I begin to die, please take this off my head. This is not how I wish to be remembered."

William Blake

"Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau"
by William Blake (1757-1827)

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, mock on, 'tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.

And every sand becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
But still in Israel's paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton's Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.

Lament

I was nineteen in 1988;
Vigorous? young? athletic? I suppose.
I'm almost forty now -- a sorry state;
The bloom (to coin a phrase) has left the rose.
The muse, like clement weather, comes and goes;
But mostly I drink, eat, read, sleep, complain:
And what the future holds, nobody knows --
One thing's for sure: I won't be young again.

And what is left for me to celebrate?
The cerebellum shrinks, the belly grows.
(Try running windsprints when you're overweight,
When years of health are drawing to a close.)
The heavy limbs that trudge through winter snows,
The graying hair that's soaked by summer rain,
The litany of ills and psychic woes --
One thing's for sure: I won't be young again.

The blunted wit that fails me in debate,
The memory recalling pangs and throes,
The mind conspires to humiliate
By what it blots out and by what it shows:
The weakening soul that seeks a sweet repose
Suffers from merciless recurring pain
Dealt by those thoughts which are its fiercest foes --
One thing's for sure: I won't be young again.

Virgin most venerable, Mystical Rose,
Through your most gracious prayers may I regain
Some strength, some hope; for time's great river flows --
One thing's for sure: I won't be young again.

D. G. Rossetti

Sonnet XXVI: Mid-Rapture
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82)

Thou lovely and beloved, thou my love;
      Whose kiss seems still the first; whose summoning eyes,
      Even now, as for our love-world's new sunrise,
Shed very dawn; whose voice, attuned above
All modulation of the deep-bowered dove,
      Is like a hand laid softly on the soul;
      Whose hand is like a sweet voice to control
Those worn tired brows it hath the keeping of:--

What word can answer to thy word;--what gaze
      To thine, which now absorbs within its sphere
      My worshipping face, till I am mirrored there
Light-circled in a heaven of deep-drawn rays?
What clasp, what kiss mine inmost heart can prove,
O lovely and beloved, O my love?