Anecdote

Story told me:

An older Jewish lawyer, walking to temple on Yom Kippur, falls in conversation with an even older Jew, walking to a different, orthodox temple. The conversation turns to the election:


Orthodox Man:

I'm voting for McCain.

Lawyer:

Ehh. Ok. Why are you for McCain?

Orthodox Man:

I couldn't vote for that Obama. He's Muslim, and I couldn't support a Muslim.

Lawyer:

That's ridiculous. He's not a Muslim. He was raised by his white Christian mother and by his white Christian grandmother.

Orthodox Man:

His father was a Muslim.

Lawyer:

He didn't meet his father until he was 20. What's so whacky about this is that Obama is getting all this heat because of what his pastor said, at the church he's been a member of for 20 years.

Orthodox Man (triumphant):

That too!

Ongoing series choosing representative books for each of the United States (the number to be chosen for each state to equal number of electoral votes the state has):


http://www.omnivoracious.com/books_of_the_states/index.html

Sometimes you hear a xylophone
deep in the forest and you know
that things are just not right.

The opening lines to the poem You Don't Know Me, by James Tate.
Later in the poem the narrator gets into a colloquy with a song, which ends this way:

There's a hole in my head, I said,
I was hoping you would help me fill.
What do you take me for, skillet biscuits?
Perhaps. But you are also the forest song
which is long and deep and clear.
I exist but I have no purpose, the song said,
but I'll pour some cool water over you
that you will not soon forget.

Songs of the Day

On the digital turntable:

Bob Dylan, esp. Tell Tale Signs:

Samantha Brown lived in my house for about four or five months
Samantha Brown lived in my house for about four or five months
Don't know how it looked to other people
I never slept with her even once

Lonesome Day Blues

and his version of Jimmie Rodgers' Miss The Mississippi:

Roaming the wide world over
Always alone and so blue
I am sad and weary, longing to go home
Miss the Mississippi and you

Michelle de Kretser, in The Lost Dog:

describing a character:

A glass-fronted cabinet held a harlequin, a corsair, a ballerina, a drummer boy, a Bo Peep with a crook wreathed in flowers and a lilac dress bunched up over a sprigged underskirt. Once a week Audrey murmured of love to small porcelain people while holding them facedown in soapy water.

describing a failed separation:

To the ache of raw solitude he applied his usual balm of work: marking essays, reading, typing words onto a screen late into the night. The dog would leave his basket to settle on a rug in the study, first turning around thrice, an apprentice sorcerer. Later he would go out into the yard. When he returned, his fur carried the mineral scent of earth into the room.

Tom went to the cinema; out to dinner with colleagues. Then, at the end of a blunt winter's day, in the act of transferring a packet of buckwheat noodles from a shelf to a supermarket cart, he froze. Pride, which had seemed insurmountable, lay in ruins: toppled, like that, and the view a sparkling clarity.

The Sun Sets On The Dodgers

What happened to Laura?

Baseball fans on an escalator:


Fan A: You know, you've probably turned down better tail than that.

Fan O: I've had tail.

A: Oh I know, I'm saying you've turned down better tail than that.

O: Oh, oh yeah.

A: Yeah.

O: Laura -- Laura was juicy.

A: Ah.

O: Laura was juicy. Laura was way juicier than that chick. She was juicy -- she was messed up, but juicy. She wasn't functional, but.

A: Okay.

O: Laura got fat.

A: No kidding. She got real fat.

O: Why do chicks always get fat after I fuck them?

Father picking up Daughter from party at house of Sarah Foster:

F: What do her parents do? The Fosters.

D: I don't know.

F: Though I suppose they may not be her real parents. [pause] They may be foster parents.

D [with more than a hint of sarcasm]: Didn't see that one coming.

Dream Quiz

Question from a quiz given in my dream:

Which President of Croatia played Hamlet twice?


My dream grades:

C+

A/A-

though as posted it was not stated for which courses I got these grades, nor for how many of my courses I received the former, and how many the latter.

Just because she's Rosanne Cash

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081027/cash

Dickens, replying to a request for a humorous piece or two:

"I really can't promise to be comic. As to two comic articles, or two of any sort of articles out of me, that's the intensest extreme of nogoism."

Rejected Titles for Bleak House

Tom-Alone's: The Ruined House
Bleak House Academy
The East Wind
Tom-all-Alone's: The Solitary House where the Grass Grew
Tom-all-Alone's: The Solitary House that was Always Shut Up and Never Lighted
Tom-all-Alone's: The Solitary House where the Wind howled
Tom-all-Alone's: The Ruined House that Got into Chancery and Never Got Out
Bleak House and the East Wind: How They Both Got into Chancery and Never Got Out

Not Up To Phil Rizzuto's Standards

But close . . .

Poetry of Sarah Palin

"You Can't Blink"

You can't blink.
You have to be wired
In a way of being
So committed to the mission,

The mission that we're on,
Reform of this country,
And victory in the war,
You can't blink.

So I didn't blink.

(To C. Gibson, ABC News, Sept. 11, 2008)

"Befoulers of the Verbiage"


It was an unfair attack on the verbiage
That Senator McCain chose to use,
Because the fundamentals,
As he was having to explain afterwards,
He means our workforce.
He means the ingenuity of the American.
And of course that is strong,
And that is the foundation of our economy.
So that was an unfair attack there,
Again based on verbiage.

(To S. Hannity, Fox News, Sept. 18, 2008)


"Outside"

I am a Washington outsider.
I mean,
Look at where you are.
I'm a Washington outsider.

I do not have those allegiances
To the power brokers,
To the lobbyists.
We need someone like that.

(To C. Gibson, ABC News, Sept. 11, 2008)

From Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2201342