northrop_fried

Got this in my e-mail today.
Would you really want to encourage your students access to this anonymous complaint service? I'm not certain.

( auto-complain )

I saw two red-tailed hawks copulating atop a Romanesque weathervane on the downtown campus today.  Lot's of ruffling and squawking.

Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher

To force the pace and never to be still
Is not the way of those who study birds
Or women. The best poets wait for words.
The hunt is not an exercise of will
But patient love relaxing on a hill
To note the movement of a timid wing;
Until the one who knows that she is loved
No longer waits but risks surrendering -
In this the poet finds his moral proved
Who never spoke before his spirit moved.

The slow movement seems, somehow, to say much more.
To watch the rarer birds, you have to go
Along deserted lanes and where the rivers flow
In silence near the source, or by a shore
Remote and thorny like the heart's dark floor.
And there the women slowly turn around,
Not only flesh and bone but myths of light
With darkness at the core, and sense is found
But poets lost in crooked, restless flight,
The deaf can hear, the blind recover sight.

--Nissim Ezekiel

Hot water bottle, where have you been all my life?

I never heard of "comfort food" until I moved to Toronto.  Before, that most of my friends my whole life were Jews and Italians.  We just call it "food."

GIANT GROUND SLOTH

Pac-Man is about Shamanic initiation.  Initiate eats sacred meal, "devours" ghosts by absorbing them into himself, wanders through an underworld maze of darkness until he transcends it, getting, as it were, to the "next level."   Pac-Man overcomes gender, reborn as "Ms. Pac-Man," whose courtship with Pac-Man is psychic reintegration-- the alchemical wedding of mail and female cosmic principles-- and whose ingestion of fruit represents the acquisition of wisdom in the service of the tribe.

Man. 

Happy New Year.  Only three to go until Time Machine Go.

(x-posted to grantmorrison)

Welcome the Swedish pop renaissance; who knows the funk so lived so close to Lapland? Global warming?



And then there's the permastoned summer vibe of Dungen that outdoes the Neutral Milk Hotel-type people at tokiness:



Finally, The Knife, which is a bit like Siouxsie, if Siouxsie fans won't take offense. Plus, more skateboarders!

In my lifetime, I have never been so proud of my country.

I've restrained myself from posting too much about politics this election; I don't have that much time and I don't have much to say that somebody else hasn't said.

So I will say this once. I endorse the Democratic party for everything from President to 11th circuit appeals judge to county clean-water commissioner to you-name-it. I want the presidency for the Democrats so much I dare not hope.

I like Obama enough; he is not an ignorant authoritarian but a person who seems to cultivate prudence.

But I don't like him as much as I revile the present-day Republican party. I have voted for Republicans for particular posts; I have my sympathies with old-fashioned Yankee Republicanism: muscular but sober foreign policy, fiscal restraint tempered by patrician decency. For such Republicans, to govern was to be a steward rather than a demagogue or engineer.

This was all some time ago. This was the party of Taft and Eisenhower, not yet the party of Richard M. Nixon, the fearmonger, hypocrite, racist, that hunched and despicable machiavel who harnessed into a ruling majority the fears and resentments of people bewildered and threatened by change and destroyed the American people's faith in its own government.

Like Nixon, Reagan viewed the presidency rather than the American people as sovereign. All his sunniness was trade in a radical nostalgia echoed by the emerging right-wing commentariat that saw America as corrupted and endangered by the identity politics of the 60s and 70s, the specific demands of women, blacks, Native Americans, gays, and so forth, all of whom rudely and without provocation attacked the machines of privilege in a supposedly classless society.

The Republicans became what they beheld. Sarah Palin is nothing but identity politics.
She is the Al Sharpton of right-wing identity politics, but worse, Sharpton wouldn't obliquely suggest that only urban liberationist-Christian blacks are real Americans, while Palin (and other McCain trained monkeys like that "plumber") does suggest, more than obliquely, that only white rual born-again Christians are real Americans.

And what of Republican principles? Palin's record as governor-- her cronyism, intimidation, and oil giveouts to curry popular favor make her the Hugo Chavez of the arctic circle. I'm tired of Bush's banana republic antics-- tee-ball on the White House lawn indeed. The Obamas would restore dignity and honor to the presidency-- the promise that got Bush elected in 2000, but which was betrayed by corruption and lies on a staggering scale

Nixon. Reagan. Palin. Tom Delay. George Bush. Amoral power-worshippers to the last, whatever bullshit comes out of their misbegotten mouths. McCain and Leiberman have both become farces, prostituting themselves to this horrorshow for their own love of power.

I'm uncomfortable with Obama's ease with the mass rally, the politics of let's-all-chant-in-unison. But his intelligence and grit have convinced me that this is not all he is. And even if it was, the Republicans still deserved to have their asses handed to them on a plate.

That is all I have to say. Vote Democrat.

It's been a long time since I've engaged in drunken late-night Livejournaling, but it's kind of satisfying.

Punctum, sorry I was a bit of dick Saturday, but you were, like, harshin' my buzz, dude. Let's gt soon.

Busy sending off applications. All the schools are in the states. Whoever wins the election, I will be able to say I spent the entirety of the Bush years in Canada. Living the dream, you know?

I'll miss Canada if I leave. I find its people very winning with their soft-spoken passive aggression, the odd combination of dry and broad humo(u)r, the fits of earnestness. I've spent most of my adult life here. I think I might have gone native.

If leave, I shall miss ketchup chips, October flurries, ridiculous hockey obsession (I saw a hockey game on a TV over a bar in a goth club), muted and sensible politics, CBC documentaries about female ship-owners in nineteenth-century Newfoundland, the ubiquity of eggs benedict, and the "look...point" crosswalks.

I look forward to being able to get a decent sandwich again, however.

Welcome to immortality, Joe.

I made borscht today.

Do you think those McCain hecklers are real? Or are they props to make those who oppose him look like scary radical protest-puppet wielders?

10:30: As a resident of Canada, I can avow that no bureaucrat has ever stood between me and a doctor.

spilled red wine on my keyboard8792qKOy shift keys have have been acting funny ever since KO:

Does anybody else ever read the wanted ads in the Economist and think "Hmmm... Burkina Faso needs an executive assistant to the Minister for Natural Resources. I could do that."?

<td>

---

</td><td> 70%</td>
</tr><tr><td>Spider-Man</td>
<td>

---

</td><td> 70%</td>
</tr><tr><td>Catwoman</td>
<td>

---

</td><td> 60%</td>
</tr><tr><td>Hulk</td>
<td>

---

</td><td> 60%</td>
</tr><tr><td>Wonder Woman</td>
<td>

---

</td><td> 55%</td>
</tr><tr><td>Supergirl</td>
<td>

---

</td><td> 55%</td>
</tr><tr><td>Green Lantern</td>
<td>

---

</td><td> 55%</td>
</tr><tr><td>Batman</td>
<td>

---

</td><td> 50%</td>
</tr><tr><td>Robin</td>
<td>

---

</td><td> 47%</td>
</tr><tr><td>The Flash</td>
<td>

---

</td><td> 45%</td>
</tr></table></td>
<td>Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

</td>
</tr></table>
Click here to take the "Which Superhero am I?" quiz...

Beginning Chase and Phillips today.