Poem, recommended by The Anthologist

"A Small Hotel"

Selima Hill

My nipples tick

like little bombs of blood.

Someone is walking

in the yard outside.

I don’t know why

Our Lord was crucified.

A really good fuck

makes me feel like custard.

http://everseradio.com/a-small-hotel-by-selima-hill/

Extra Points for Auden, for internal rhymes.

quoted in a review of the work of Edward Lear, by Brad Leithauser in NYRB


There was a Young Lady of Norway,
Who casually sat in a doorway;
When the door squeezed her flat,
She exclaimed, "What of that?"
This courageous Young Lady of Norway.

Edward Lear


There was an Archdeacon who said:
"May I take off my gaiters in bed?"
But the Bishop said "No,
Wherever you go
You must wear them until you are dead."

Anonymous


The Bishop elect of Hong Kong
Had a dong that was twelve inches long.
He thought the spectators
Were admiring his gaiters
When he went to the gents. He was wrong.

W.H. Auden

Dream

On the sidewalk I ran into, literally, my old friend the now notorious felon. He was running along and crossed the street and we saw each other and he ran up to me, and I ended up catching the back of my heels on the curb as he came up to embrace me, and I fell back on the ground. He was carrying a large water gun, as part of whatever it was he was doing that required him to be running around the streets of the city.

Soupy Sales

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/2009/10/22/2009-10-22_soupy_sales_famed_comedian_from_the_golden_age_of_television_dead_at_83.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdUD4giJPOk&feature=player_embedded#

Be true to your teeth, and they’ll never be false to you.

Stuff from Alasdair Gray

Gray:

It has to do with what money you have and what freedom you have to, you know, get on. My first wife was Danish. She comes through very badly in Rodge’s biography because my friends think she behaved very badly to me, and she did, she tended to have affairs with my friends, though not with my closest friends. Her basic attitude was that she didn’t enjoy sex with me and she had to do it with somebody. And I’m afraid I couldn’t take the line of, you will have sex with nobody but me! I thought, well, it’s not your fault. Just don’t tell me who it’s with, I don’t want to meet them socially.

And

Rumpus: Did you get to know the renters?

Gray:

Oh, yes. Most of them became friends. Taught you a lot about life. Somebody once introduced me to a young artist or a young writer, I forget which, it didn’t matter which, and asked if I had advise to give. I said, try and get a house with more rooms than you need and then sublet. It will be a small income, and you’ll find that a lot of people who you trust most don’t pay you, and many people who you don’t find to be particularly trustworthy pay you quite regularly. Of course, they thought I was making fun of them, but it was the only piece of advice I could give to anybody. If someone tries to show you their writing and says, do you think I should stick to this, do you think I could become a real writer? Say to them, If you have to ask that question, no, you can’t.

from The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/2009/10/the-rumpus-interview-with-alasdair-gray/

See also Gray on the biography written by his secretary: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/biography1

Song of the day

Somewhere on my body if you look real close,
you'll find you.

You

I'm calling you

--- from the song of the day, "You" by X.

How a guy named Marshall will eventually become Prez

"I too fear that Obama is the last President we’ll see for a generation. Like others before him, Obama will use some national crisis, manufactured or otherwise, to declare the the country is in dire straits and, to save the country, he has no choice but to suspend the Constitution, institute Marshall Law, and make him President-For-Life… like his many personal heroes around the globe have done before him. And we know that the crisis will never be officially over so there’ll be no need to hold elections."

from Wallace Stevens

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence
Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.



from "The Creations of Sound" by Wallace Stevens (cited by Denis Donahue in a review in Harper's)

On the streets of Portland, OR, 1947.

He was legally a fugitive from the orphanage, and in that sense "wanted." He did not feel "wanted" -- he felt very unwanted. He had desires, and nobody was going to drop out of the sky to satisfy them. He tried to milk a little self-pity out of this thought, but it did not work: he had to recognize that he preferred his singularity, his freedom. All right. He knew what he wanted. He wanted some money. He wanted a piece of ass. He wanted a big dinner, with all the trimmings. He wanted a bottle of whiskey. He wanted a car, in which he could drive a hundred miles an hour (he had only recently learned how to drive, and he loved the feelings of speed and control, the sharpness of the danger). He wanted some new clothes and thirty-dollar shoes. He wanted a .45 automatic. He wanted a record player in the big hotel room he wanted, so he could lie in bed with the whiskey and the piece of ass and listen to "How High the Moon" and "Artistry Jumps." That was what he wanted. So it was up to him to get these things. Already he felt better, just making a list of his desires. . . .
He was in a really good humor when he got to the poolhall . . . .

from Hard Rain Falling, by Don Carpenter

Overheard at the baseball game

The woman behind me, talking with her two friends:

"At first it's scary and it hurts, but after that it is so amazing."

[Not said ironically or with a wink, and not, I think, about sex. Never figured out what it referred to.]

1. Already dancing; 2. Hexagonal; 3. Not compendium but playground

Corrections and Clarifications from The Guardian Oct 3, 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2009/oct/03/corrections-clarifications


• In a collection of photographs, an extended caption accompanied a 1956 picture of Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire. It said that Hepburn took ballet lessons to be able to dance with Astaire in Funny Face. In fact she had trained as a ballet dancer in Amsterdam and London before changing tack into acting (Willy Rizzo's best shots, 1 October, page 22, G2).

• Archeological excavations were described at the ancient artificial harbour of Portus, near Rome. The harbour is not octagonal as we said, but a hexagon. We meant to compare the capacity of an amphitheatre that once stood on the site with capacity at the Pantheon, not the Colosseum (When near Rome, 2 October, page 12, G2).

• Writing from memory in a piece defending his work against critics – Why my book is not sexist, 21 September, page 21, G2 – Stephen Bayley said that he had been accused by the presenter of BBC Woman's Hour of producing a "coffee-table compendium of filth for perverts". Jenni Murray has objected that she would never use the word compendium (the same goes for filth). The correct wording of the question she posed in the 9 September programme was: "Has he reclaimed images of the female body or produced a coffee-table playground for perverts?"

Bay City

Nathaniel Rich interviewed James Ellroy for The Paris Review. In the introduction Rich described some of Ellroy's activities during the week Rich spent in Los Angeles for the interview. The behavior included:

He talked to women -- on the phone, in restaurants, in his apartment. Late one night he drove to the house of his girlfriend. The lights were on: the woman, her husband, and their children were inside. Ellroy opened the window of his car and proceeded to bay like a dog. He drove around the block and howled again. The he did it a third time. The girlfriend called him the next day, laughing. Apparently he bayed at her several times a month. They had a unique arrangement.