A Kind of Tantric Doom
Tony R. comments that noted editor Howard Junker has a blog:
ZYZZYVASPEAKS. Another frigate in the armada of
speaks-blogs.
CDY links us to the Poetry Foundation's
list
of poetry bestsellers. Seeing BC's books multiple times is no surprise.
I knew that Mary Oliver was popular, but am amazed to see nine of her books in
the top 50, of which four are in the top 10. Roughly 20% of the poets are
dead.
Harper's has some good work this month. The article Dead End
details with unemotional precision all the reasons we should get out of Iraq
— and why we shouldn't have embarked on this murderous lark in the first place.
Each of Edward Luttwak's points are obvious to non-NeoCon who has read history.
The only way to combat insurgency is to be more brutal than they. The
Nazis, the Romans and the Ottoman Empire serve as excellent examples of regimes
that kept large populations docile by dealing out quick and deadly retaliation
to any town that permitted its inhabitants to commit acts of defiance (which
includes most of Europe during WWII, contrary to Hollywood's portrayal of
various resistance movements). Liberal democracies are happily populated
with citizens who won't tolerate such abuses, so we are stuck with a problem
with no solution. From Findings: Livestock (sheep, pigs,
sheep, cattle) are among the three top environmental threats in terms of
pollution, threats to biodiversity, and production of greenhouse gasses;
ocean warming is causing a persistent decline in phytoplankton, which account
for half of the photosynthesis on earth; left-handed people are more adept
at multi-tasking. From Harper's Index: Percentage of
Baghdad's Shiites who believe that the U.S. should reduce its force level "as
the security situation improves": zero; chances that an American worker
experienced a 50% drop in income: 1 in 14 for 1970, 1 in 6 today; total
oil revenues into Nigeria since 1974: $728 billion; percentage of
Nigerians living on less than one dollar a day: 32% in 1985, 71% today;
amount of World War I live ordnance dug up in Belgium last year: 300 tons;
consecutive years in which the U.N. has cited Norway as the best country to live
in: 6.
This from Rebecca's Radish King, Through Dragon's Gate: The
butcher's wife waits / for the flayed pig's head to speak, / washes her face
with milk, / her daughter billowing / against the window. / Plucked chickens
hang / by their neck, shark fin, squid, / gingerroot knuckles in a box / at the
door.
This from my
poem in Verse, O the Crippled Government of Love.
This
take on Manguso's The Rider.
This from Barbara Hamby's A Birdman to You, Baby, in the recent Verse:
An acrobat in the circus — he was a teenager, a trapeze whiz / zig-zagging
across the bigtop in a skin-tight lavalava. / Burt Lancaster, a real star, from
The Killers to 1900 to Atlantic City, / yearning for a
beautiful broad. He's sometimes big and dumb, / conned by Ava Gardner, but
what man could withstand her hex, / X-rated decolleté, siren song in a black
dress, a kind of tantric / doom in the form a mobster's moll, hear like a piece
of hollow / wood."
See you tomorrow.