Self Portrait

Overheard at a museum shop

Young girl looking at doll: Who is this Mommy?

Mother: She's an artist.

Girl: Why is her face like that?

Mother: That's what her face looks like.

Girl: That's a BAD face.

Roger Angell sighting

On Tim Lincecum.

Wait for that mound-eating stride of his: he’s a January commuter arching over six feet of slush. No, no—look at the tilt, the twist and torque, the flying arms, the balance lost and regained, the skinny bod, the high-school hair: he’s an X Games skateboarder headed for the Olympics. Nobody has ever pitched like this before.

Roger Angell cite:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2010/10/lincecum.html

note to self

unpublished dream quarter remembered

Nice scene from show biz

 Bob Newhart backstage in Vegas, psyching self up and finding bearings, by listening to a different Richard Pryor bit each time

before going on stage.

Found Poem Overheard

"Wine, bread, butter and cheese. Wine, bread, butter and cheese. Wine, bread, butter and cheese and sex."

"Just because this plan is never going to work is no reason to be negative."

from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The lyrics dour, the music energetic

. . . his real home, the one he never named anymore, was the dark and sooty chamber in his heart that contained his sister and brother and, because it was an accomodating kind of space, the entire filthy history of the industrial revolution. It was amazing how much dark matter you could crush inside the black hole of the heart."

from "When Will There Be Good News?" by Kate Atkinson

Celebrity Sighting

Overheard at a restaurant in Hollywood:

Man #1:   That's Steve Earle!

Man #2:  I don't know. I don't think so.

Man #1:  Oh, no, that totally is.  That's absolutely Steve Earle.

Self

"Your self is not about you"


Lewis Hyde, commenting on the lesson of Bob Dylan's statement that listening obsessively to Woody Guthrie records when a teenager made him feel like himself for the first time (or words to that effect).

Sept 1 -- Eros and Dust, uncertain and afraid

http://blog.loa.org/2010/09/w-h-auden-j-liebling-september-1.html

http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15545

The anniversary & the unceasing low dishonest decade.

Heartwarming Tale

Bob and Ray reunite a brother and sister after 66 or 70 years:

https://www.box.net/shared/8vgpopd2og

The World Gives You Lemonade . . . .

Frank Kermode R.I.P.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/18/sir-frank-kermode-obituary

On reading Updike's "Couples"

Updike is vaunted as a realist par excellence, a careful chronicler of our suburban mores, but what I found in these pages seemed pretty fantastical to me. Certainly it bore no resemblance to the suburbia I knew. His characters talked about Bertrand Russell, bristled at undercooked lamb, and screwed each other senseless at every possible interval. It called my own world into question.

Dan Piepenbring, at The Paris Review website:  http://blog.theparisreview.org/2010/08/10/couples/