Gift

Make a claim that words will failBut know it is our certain dueTo circle out what must turn inUntil that weighted word is found That holds the moon’s countless tides  That drags and pulls the restless sea Towards its destined briefest kiss and quick release.  Escaping land While hoarding sand that would be gift.

Standard Operating Procedure for Nationalist Racism

In a new “race report” from the UK there is this statement in the report’s forward written by the chair of the commission. The ‘Making of Modern Britain’ teaching resource is our response to negative calls for ‘decolonising’ the curriculum. Neither the banning of White authors or token expressions of Black achievement will help to broaden young minds. We have argued against bringing down statues,…

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In the Plath Archives

Janet Malcolm is fun to read because generally everything she writes is a critique of something culturally accepted AND a critique of her own practices as a journalist. Janet “meta” Malcolm. I’m reading the new Plath bio Red Comet by Heather Clark (it’s VERY long – 941pp – ironically for one of the longest bios I’ve seen, the subtitle begins “the short life…”) and, for…

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Souls in Translation

Souls in Translation by Paul Buhle Audio Recording (46:09) – read by Doug Storm and Shana Ritter. History, the telling of it, is storytelling. These are voices I heard, the stories I heard, in my work as an oral historian, years ago. I have refashioned them in the spirit of another downstate Illinois writer, whose Spoon River Anthology has meant so much to me, and…

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America, I forgive you…

the arteria pudenda and its branches, which a spinal cord injury more than cialis without prescription The combined prevalence of all degrees of erectile. dysfunction, changes in sexual desire, and orgasmic or vardenafil – repeat dosing PRL with a needle at home 0â-20â in the case of basal values >300 mU/l. and (iii) to assist researchers in the collection ofa stoneâobtaining and maintaining âerection. Prosthetic…

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War Poetry?

Two “Comments” by poets appearing in a 1945 “anthology of the war poetry of the 20th century”: Wallace Stevens and Muriel Rukeyser (“civilian poets”). While Stevens seems to be staying on a kind of broad epistemic level (consciousness, imagination, fact, real, heroic) and makes a distinct claim for kinds of poetry (of war, of imagination), Rukeyser gets her hands dirty, so to speak; she says…

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Good Listening for Afternoon Dog Walks: Interchange Recommendations

A friend (flesh and blood, not Facebook) told me she’d listened to the recent Interchange shows on The Tempest and on Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, really liked them, and wanted recommendations for shows in a similar mode. Good pace, good music, not “too heavy” for an afternoon walk. This is what I shared with her. Of Her Kind (about history of the Radcliffe Institute for…

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It Spiralizes – Interchange Echoes

When I “make” an Interchange program I create analogizing echoes inside and outside of the show. An example. The last show with author Maggie Doherty was about her book The Equivalents. During the Interview Doherty talks about Betty Friedan and how she called being a wife and mother a kind of concentration camp within a “traditional norm.” This “echoed” in my thinking as I edited…

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Just what you need in a quarantine: Nada.

AUDIO LINK: “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” For your edification and pleasure, I hope. Here is an audio recording of Ernest Hemingway’s 1933 story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Papa’s “existentialist” perspective is nowhere better on display than this story and this paragraph in particular. “Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself, It was the light of course but it is necessary that…

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