Lake Tai

BEIJING - Fast-spreading, foul-smelling blue-green algae smothered a lake in eastern China, contaminating the drinking water for millions of people and sparking panic-buying of bottled water, state media said Thursday.

The algae bloom in Lake Tai, a famous but long-polluted tourist attraction in Jiangsu province, formed because water levels are at their lowest in 50 years, leading to excess nutrients in the water, Xinhua said.

Officials in Wuxi, a city along the banks of the lake, called an emergency meeting Wednesday to discuss measures to deal with the situation and allay public fears, said a posting on the local government's Web site.

"The government calls for the residents facing the natural disaster to help each other to deal with the difficulties," the notice said, advising people to boil the water before drinking it.

"The situation has lasted three days already. It's so inconvenient," said Qin Yingxian, 53, a video store owner in Wuxi. "The smell of our tap water is just so awful. If you use the water to shower, the smell will stay on your body."

Residents swarmed stores in Wuxi, a city of 5 million, to buy bottled water Wednesday and prices skyrocketed from $1 to $6.50 for a two-gallon bottle, Xinhua said.

The city has placed a ban on price hikes and threatened hefty fines to violators, the report said. A Wal-Mart store imposed rations of 24 bottles per person, Xinhua said.

"Now we depend on bottled water for all our daily uses," Qin said. "People form long queues in the supermarkets for bottled water. Nobody expected something like this to happen. We aren't prepared."

State TV showed a yellowish trickle coming from taps and a restaurant worker said customers refused to eat there until they were assured that the water used was safe.

The Wuxi government said it was not authorized to give out information and referred all questions to provincial officials. A man who answered the telephone at the Jiangsu government office said authorities were "looking into the matter" and could not give any details.

Xinhua said the Wuxi government is planning to artificially induce rain in the next two days to dilute the lake water, and the provincial government has agreed to divert more water from the Yangtze River to the lake.

The local government is also using active carbon to filter the lake water and is importing bottled water from surrounding cities, China Central Television reported.

Lake Tai, famed for centuries for its beauty, is notoriously polluted from industries in the fast-developing region 80 miles west of Shanghai.

Blue-green algae often looks like green paint spilled on top of the water's surface. It is caused by factors such as run-off and excess nutrients in the water.

The algae, which scientists say are actually plantlike bacteria, are common in fresh water the world over. Some types can produce dangerous toxins.

Drinking toxin-tainted water can cause vomiting, diarrhea, headache, muscle pain, paralysis, respiratory failure and, on rare occasions, even death. Pets and livestock are especially vulnerable.

The incident is the latest to hit China's troubled waterways, which are dangerously polluted after decades of rapid economic growth and the widespread flouting of environmental regulations. Millions of people lacking access to clean drinking water.

In 2005, an accident caused a Chinese chemical plant to spew tons of toxic nitrobenzene and other chemicals into the north China's Songhua River, forcing authorities to cut water to millions of residents.

Blue Moon

Blue Moon
You saw me standing alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own
Blue Moon
You know just what I was there for
You heard me saying a prayer for
Someone I really could care for

And then there suddenly appeared before me
The only one my arms will hold
I heard somebody whisper please adore me
And when I looked to the Moon it turned to gold

Blue Moon
Now I'm no longer alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own

And then there suddenly appeared before me
The only one my arms will ever hold
I heard somebody whisper please adore me
And when I looked the Moon had turned to gold

Blue moon
Now I'm no longer alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own

Blue moon
Now I'm no longer alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own

-- Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart

Women in Art

Love

To be
The first to come.

-- Rene Char

The monstrous vanity of wishes

The monstrous vanity of wishes is revealed for instance in my wish to fill a nice notebook with writing as soon as possible. I get nothing from this; it's not that I wish it because, say, it will be evidence of my productivity; it is simply a longing to rid myself of something familiar as soon as I can; although of course, as soon as I am rid of it, I must start a fresh one & the whole business will have to be repeated.

-- L. Wittgenstein

Heraclitus says

Heraclitus says that the waking share one common world, but when asleep each man turns away to a private one.

-- Plutarch

Socrates who always

Socrates who always reduces the Sophist to silence -- does he reduce him to silence rightfully? -- It's true, the Sophist does not know what he thinks he knows; but that is no triumph for Socrates. It can neither be a case of "You see! You don't know it!" -- nor, triumphantly, "So none of us knows anything!"

Because I don't want to think just to convict myself, or even someone else, of unclarity I am not trying to understand something, simply in order to see that I still do not understand it.

-- L. Wittgenstein

My Thinking

My thinking, like everyone's, has sticking to it the shrivelled husks of my earlier (withered) thoughts.

-- L. Wittgenstein

Baghdad -- Fallujah

America

"Let us be lovers we'll marry our fortunes together"
"I've got some real estate here in my bag"
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies
And we walked off to look for America

"Kathy," I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I've gone to look for America

Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said "Be careful his bowtie is really a camera"

"Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat"
"We smoked the last one an hour ago"
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field

"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all gone to look for America
All gone to look for America
All gone to look for America

-- Simon & Garfunkel

Give the Iraqis a Break

Washington empties out every August as members of Congress and administration officials leave for their annual summer vacations. So why isn't this American political tradition good enough for Iraqi officials in Baghdad?

President Bush and Vice President Cheney have both now urged Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to discourage Iraqi lawmakers from taking a two-month summer break. The issue has become symbolic of the sad truth of the surge in particular and the war in general: We cannot make Iraq the country we would like it to be, and we cannot force Iraqis to act when we want them to.

Cheney met with Maliki in Baghdad yesterday to communicate the administration's sense of the gravity of the situation: The Iraqi government needs to make progress on security and move forward on reconciliation and governance far more quickly.

The vice president also pressed the prime minister to discourage the Iraqi parliament from taking its two-month summer recess. Bush appealed to Maliki on Monday not to let the lawmakers go on vacation.

"We believe it's very important to move on the issues before us in a timely fashion and that any undue delay would be difficult to explain," Cheney told reporters in Baghdad yesterday. He is not alone in his view.

"For the Iraqi parliament to take a two-month vacation in the middle of summer is impossible to understand," U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates also said that he pressed for the recess to be canceled. Sen. John Warner (R-VA) said a two-month recess is "not acceptable."

It's not just the prospect of U.S. troops dying while Iraqi parliamentarians vacation that bothers American officials. They also argue that the Iraqis should continue to work to resolve issues associated with oil revenue sharing and the status of former Baathists from Saddam's government, two outstanding questions that might held to strengthen Shia and Sunni unity.

Maliki signaled to Cheney that he was sympathetic to the American complaint. But some Iraqi legislators reacted angrily, including Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, who said members of Parliament were "busy with our own calamities."

One of those calamities is attendance: the security situation is so bad that many parliamentarians can't even make it to the sessions. Sometimes lawmakers show up, only to be turned away by bomb scares, lack of electricity or other impediments. Boycotts are also common.

Another problem is that when the parliament meets, it is often chaotic. With tens of "parties" representing not just Shia, Sunni and Kurd but also factions within each community, there is an absence of any party discipline or legislative coherence. Thus there is no reason to believe that even if the Iraqi parliament toils all summer, it will make any difference.

In fact, if it stays in session, capitulating to American pressure, it may well demonstrate to Iraqis that their elected representatives cannot even make their own schedule. And from an American political standpoint, canceling the Iraqi summer recess will also be unhelpful, allowing more pretending here in Washington that "progress" is being made and forestalling tough decisions.

So I say, let them go.

-- William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security
Washington Post

For My Brothers and Sisters

How long can one man's lifetime last?
In the end we return to formlessness.
I think of you waiting to die.
A thousand things cause me distress -

Your kind old mother's still alive.
Your only daughter's only ten.
In the vast chilly wilderness
I hear the sounds of weeping men.

Clouds float into a great expanse.
Birds fly but do not sing in flight.
How lonely are the travellers.
Even the sun shines cold and white.

Alas, when you still lived, and asked
To study non-rebirth with me,
My exhortations were delayed-
And so the end came, fruitlessly.

All your old friends have brought you gifts
But for your life these too are late.
I've failed you in more ways than one.
Weeping, I walk back to my gate.

-- Wang Wei

tr.by Vikram Seth

Nora

Why George Bush is Insane

Earlier this year I had a major operation for cancer. The operation and its after-effects were something of a nightmare. I felt I was a man unable to swim bobbing about under water in a deep dark endless ocean. But I did not drown and I am very glad to be alive.

However, I found that to emerge from a personal nightmare was to enter an infinitely more pervasive public nightmare - the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence; the most powerful nation the world has ever known effectively waging war against the rest of the world. "If you are not with us you are against us" President Bush has said. He has also said "We will not allow the world's worst weapons to remain in the hands of the world's worst leaders". Quite right. Look in the mirror chum. That's you.

The US is at this moment developing advanced systems of "weapons of mass destruction" and it prepared to use them where it sees fit. It has more of them than the rest of the world put together. It has walked away from international agreements on biological and chemical weapons, refusing to allow inspection of its own factories. The hypocrisy behind its public declarations and its own actions is almost a joke.

The United States believes that the three thousand deaths in New York are the only deaths that count, the only deaths that matter. They are American deaths. Other deaths are unreal, abstract, of no consequence.

The three thousand deaths in Afghanistan are never referred to.

The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dead through US and British sanctions which have deprived them of essential medicines are never referred to.

The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the Gulf War, is never referred to. Radiation levels in Iraq are appallingly high. Babies are born with no brain, no eyes, no genitals. Where they do have ears, mouths or rectums, all that issues from these orifices is blood.

The two hundred thousand deaths in East Timor in 1975 brought about by the Indonesian government but inspired and supported by the United States are never referred to.

The half a million deaths in Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Argentina and Haiti, in actions supported and subsidised by the United States are never referred to.

The millions of deaths in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are no longer referred to.

The desperate plight of the Palestinian people, the central factor in world unrest, is hardly referred to.

But what a misjudgement of the present and what a misreading of history this is.

People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not only don't forget. They strike back.

The atrocity in New York was predictable and inevitable. It was an act of retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations of state terrorism on the part of the United States over many years, in all parts of the world.

In Britain the public is now being warned to be "vigilant" in preparation for potential terrorist acts. The language is in itself preposterous.

How will - or can - public vigilance be embodied? Wearing a scarf over your mouth to keep out poison gas? However, terrorist attacks are quite likely, the inevitable result of our Prime Minister's contemptible and shameful subservience to the United States. Apparently, a terrorist poison gas attack on the London Underground system was recently prevented. But such an act may indeed take place. Thousands of school children travel on the London Underground every day. If there is a poison gas attack from which they die, the responsibility will rest entirely on the shoulders of our Prime Minister. Needless to say, the Prime Minister does not travel on the underground himself.

The planned war against Iraq is in fact a plan for premeditated murder of thousands of civilians in order, apparently, to rescue them from their dictator.

The United States and Britain are pursuing a course which can lead only to an escalation of violence throughout the world and finally to catastrophe.

It is obvious, however, that the United States is bursting at the seams to attack Iraq. I believe that it will do this - not just to take control of Iraqi oil - but because the US administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government but seem to be helpless.

Unless Europe finds the solidarity, intelligence, courage and will to challenge and resist US power Europe itself will deserve Alexander Herzen's definition (as quoted in the Guardian newspaper in London recently) "We are not the doctors. We are the disease".

-- Harold Pinter

U.S. brings a wall to Baghdad

MEANWHILE, back in Baghdad, we're building a wall. Actually, quite a few walls.

While we were absorbed with the terrible tragedy at Virginia Tech -- and before that the Don Imus affair and the Alberto Gonzales tragicomedy -- the war in Iraq was pushed below the newspaper's page-one fold. While we weren't looking, the U.S. military started building high walls in parts of the Iraqi capital to separate Sunnis from Shiites.

Basically, we're turning Baghdad into Belfast.

This is supposed to be a temporary expedient, a way to tamp down Iraq's sectarian civil war -- in the capital, at least, which is the ostensible goal of President Bush's fraudulent "surge" policy -- by making it harder for the antagonists to get at each other's throats. The so-called "peace lines" in Belfast, separating Protestants from Catholics, were supposed to be temporary, too. That network of walls was begun in the 1970s.

The construction of barriers and checkpoints that turn Baghdad neighborhoods into what U.S. officers sardonically call "gated communities" is another sign -- as if more evidence were needed -- that Bush's "surge" is nothing more than a maneuver intended to buy time. His open-ended commitment for U.S. forces to patrol those barriers and guard those checkpoints will become the next president's problem.

The walls that have been built so far didn't prevent the car bombings in Baghdad last week, including at the Sadriya market, that killed nearly 200 people. Even the heavy fortifications surrounding the Green Zone, where the American presence and the Iraqi "unity" government are headquartered, couldn't keep a suicide bomber from detonating his explosives in the cafeteria of the Iraqi parliament.

But let's assume that if U.S. forces build enough walls and make it hard enough for Iraqis to move around their own capital, the violence in Baghdad may decline somewhat. In that event, the Shiite death squads and Sunni suicide bombers will simply do their killing elsewhere in Iraq. There's considerable evidence that this already is happening.

Both the president and his many critics say that the real problem in Iraq is political -- that there will be no genuine prospects for peace until Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his Shiite-dominated government reach a negotiated accommodation with the Sunni insurgency. The barriers going up right now -- the Washington Post reported that at least 10 Baghdad neighborhoods will be isolated behind walls -- likely will make Sunni-Shiite reconciliation a more distant goal. If anything, walls will accelerate the sectarian cleansing that has been purifying formerly mixed neighborhoods.

Walls divide; they do not unite. Walls give concrete expression to hatreds and prejudices, establishing them as artifacts not of the mind but of the landscape. When I was the Post's London correspondent in the early 1990s, I covered the Northern Ireland conflict. The first thing I went to see in Belfast was the notorious "peace line" between the Falls Road, a Catholic stronghold, and Shankill Road, a Protestant redoubt. Everything looked the same on both sides -- the houses, the shops, the people -- yet it was as if they were two different countries. Animosities had been passed down through generations. Even now, 15 years later, a civil exchange between two of the leading antagonists -- Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams -- is big news.

How many years will it take to get to that point in Baghdad?

Bush has enmeshed the United States in a civil conflict that will take years, probably decades, to resolve. The building of walls mocks the administration's happy-talk rhetoric about how much political progress the Iraqis are making. If the Iraqi government really is the exercise in inclusive democracy that Bush claims, walls would be coming down. Putting up new walls only makes sense if the White House foresees a substantial U.S. military presence in Iraq for many years to come.

Clearly, the Iraqi government is not ready to do the job of policing the enclaves that are being created. The government doesn't even want to do the job. Maliki complained Sunday about a new wall in Adhamiyah, a Sunni neighborhood, saying it "reminds us of other walls that we reject." Maybe he was thinking of Belfast, or maybe of Berlin, or maybe of the wall that the Israelis have built between themselves and the Palestinians.

Or maybe he is beginning to realize how easy it is to build walls and how hard to tear them down.

-- Eugene Robinson, Washington Post Writers Group

Bush asserts progress in Iraq war

News Bulletin

Evening clouds, the cathedral clock lit up,
dishevelled trees, cold, trash. You could still hear
shooting up in the hills. A little later
George arrived on a bicycle. He set down a guitar
that had broken strings. "We've carried the dead bodies," he said,
"down to the warehouse. No anthems or flags.
Hide this list at least, so that tomorrow we remember
their names, their ages -- I've even noted the size of their feet.
The three marble cutters were killed too. The only thing left
is that marble angel, headless -- you can put any head you want on it."
That's what he said, then went off. He didn't take the guitar.

-- Yannos Ritsos
written during the 1967--1974 Greek Dictatorship

City Life

Aftermath of a Baghdad bombing: a reporter's view

One day after a bombing killed 135 people in Baghdad's predominantly Shiite Sadriya market, correspondent Sam Dagher visited the market.

The most striking image, for me, was the old lady. She was wrapped in a black abaya, wandering through the wreckage of charred buses and mangled vehicles. She kept repeating: "This is doomsday. God is greatest."

I also saw utter anger and disbelief among the residents and shopkeepers. Government officials I had reached by telephone and heard on state television earlier in the day insisted that the capital's security plan was still on track, despite suffering the biggest breach since it was launched in mid-February.

The US and Iraqi forces may have reduced sectarian street fighting. But Al Qaeda is making its presence felt with major bombings. And the Iraqi government's comments only served to highlight the widening disconnect between the government based inside the well-guarded Green Zone and its people in what is commonly referred to by Westerners as the Red Zone.

At the open-air food market, I saw Iraqis desperately clutching to shreds of normalcy.

I entered Sadriya with my Iraqi colleagues through a pedestrian-only section that had been barricaded on both ends after a bombing on Feb. 3 that killed 137 people. The hustle and bustle resembled similar working-class markets I've seen in Amman, Cairo, or Damascus.

Vendors were hawking fresh lettuce, radishes, and tomatoes heaped up on wooden carts. Inside the arcades on both sides of the street, raw meat hung in the windows of butcher shops, pastry shops displayed enormous trays of syrup-drenched sweets, and the smell of grilled kabobs wafted from the many restaurants.

I saw defiant banners signed by the local branch office of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Construction laborers were back working Thursday, rebuilding shops destroyed in February's bombing.

In one shop, Abu Ali was busy preparing round meat balls known as kubbah.

"What happened yesterday was a catastrophe. The security plan is working in some areas of the city, but not here," he told me. "But I must work to feed my children; we have no other source of income."

His business partner Abu Jassim nodded in agreement. He had been through this once already. He pulled his shirt back, displaying wounds on his shoulder sustained in the February bombing.

At the end of the street and beyond white-painted barricades, I stepped into a panorama of destruction.

The entire square was covered in soot, and hundreds of people were gathered around a crater. Behind them, there was an outer ring of burned car and bus skeletons. Revered Shiite leaders, Imam Hussein and the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, stared down from giant posters on the walls.

Most of those killed Wednesday were laborers working in the market, pushing carts and running errands. They had boarded buses that were going to transport them home after a hard day's work. Most were going back to Jameela, a neighborhood within the Sadr City slum. They earned on average 10,000 dinars ($8) a day.

I walked past the crater crowd and into one of the destroyed shops on one side of the square, known to most as Al Nahda.

Jaber Saleh, an elderly bespectacled man, sobbed as he sat amid the ruins of his hardware store. His door was reduced to a surreal sculpture of twisted metal. Emptied boxes of nails and dented gallon paint cans were scattered on the floor.

"We were strangled by Saddam and now this," said Mr. Saleh as tears rolled down his wrinkled cheeks. He put his hands around his neck to make the point.

His helper, Aqeel Shouli, told him to calm down.

"All the leaders are stealing, no one is clean, and we are dying," resumed Saleh.

He claimed that he'd seen policemen at checkpoints near the market were sometimes bribed to let through pickup trucks filled with heaps of vegetables or boxes without checking them.

He then pointed to the other side of the square.

"That road leads to Al-Fadhil. The Americans were there two hours before the blast and arrested people, but still they come from there to kill us," said Salih referring to a predominantly Sunni Arab area adjacent to Sadriya that is the scene of frequent clashes.

Mr. Shouli interrupts him to say, "the security plan is a failure, full stop."

Back in the square Amna Sadeq a Shiite Kurd curses Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his government and parliament speaker Mahmoud al-Mashahdani, using words that are not fit to print.

"They have done nothing for us. They should make way for more competent people," she shouts.

At a bakery shop on another end of the square, Zaki Hashim, sits behind the counter. His face is bandaged.

"I was just handing bread out the window to a customer when a flame hit my face," he said.

He and all the other bakery shop workers are from the southern city of Nasariyah. They work in Baghdad and go back to their families once a month. They tell me they will remain in Baghdad despite the bombing and despite losing their friend three days ago to sectarian murder.

The dead man's photo is pinned to a giant poster of Imam Hussein behind the counter. Hussein ibn Ali is revered as the third Imam by Shiites, the grandson of Muhammad.

"The security forces are infiltrated and they even bombed the parliament, what do you expect," Mr. Hashim told me.

We had to wait in bakery shop until a funeral procession made its way through square. And faithful to Iraqi custom, some of those in the entourage were firing shots in the air.

Later, a trusted Interior Ministry adviser that often talks to me, without any of the official spin, agreed with the baker's assessment.

He said Iraqi forces are nearly helpless in the face of car bombs and suicide bombs. Their job was doubly made difficult by the fact that their ranks were infiltrated by insurgents, militias, and militants.

He nonetheless said the government needed to give the appearance it was making headway and winning through the media. "We have had some success in controlling roadside bombs and sectarian murders, so that's good and we need to say that loudly. It's a media war. The other side wants to grab the headlines with the mayhem its unleashing," he said.

Indeed, a report of the Sadriya bombing on state-owned Iraqiya television Wednesday night was followed by a statement from the spokesman of the Defense Ministry Mohammed al-Askari saying; "there may be bombs here and there, but the security plan is working."

After we left the Sadriya market, we saw municipal workers painting idyllic scenes of rolling pastures and galloping horses on a row of blast walls on Saadoun Street in the heart of Baghdad.

-- Sam Dagher - Christian Science Monitor

Insane: McCain's Public Behavior

As president, making such a joke of war could make an already tense situation with Iran even worse. There's no doubt that the Iranians would use the tape of McCain to rile up anti-American sentiments, and terror networks around the world would gleefully use it as a recruiting tool.

The fact that McCain didn't hesitate to act so stupidly shows just how dangerous he could be as president to our own security.



Secondly, it shows complete disregard for our troops in harm's way, thousands of whom would be killed and wounded if we did take military action against Iran. As you can view on the video blogs VoteVets.org did with Wes Clark at www.stopiranwar.com, there's ample reason to believe that even air strikes against Iran would result in massive attacks on troops in Iraq. That McCain finds that scenario is worth yukking it up over demonstrates how far removed from reality - indeed dangerous - he has become.

I actually, surprisingly, agree with Secretary Gates on this one. Earlier in the week, he said in a press conference, "I stressed my view that it was important to deal with the Iranian nuclear problem through a diplomacy which appears to be working... With respect to the Iranian nuclear program and the diplomatic effort, I think first of all it's important that there have been two United Nations Resolutions, and that the international community is united in telling Iran what it needs to do with respect to its nuclear program. These things don't work overnight, but it seems to me clearly the preferable course to keep our focus on diplomatic initiatives and particularly because of the united front of the international community at this point."

The big questions are whether the president is listening to Gates, and whether John McCain even begins to grasp at how utterly stupid and dangerous his antics would be as president

-- Jon Soltz

g n o s t i c i s m v

". . . what the little word after means . . ."
—I. Kant, Inaugural Dissertation, 2.399.4-6

Stuffed September night, the hot leaves bump
on swollen breezes and a fat
black moonlessness.
I got up (3 am)

to clean the house, there was
so much pressure on it forcing the butt end down.
I scrubbed counters and mopped floors.
I didn’t turn the lights on.
Cleaning

in the dark makes a surprise for later. By then
I will have
slept, woke, come striding back
from infuriated interiors—ah
now

recall
I dreamed Of Wordsworth—his little vials,
Wordsworth collected little vials,
had hundreds of them, his sister stored them on shelves
in the pantry—
and yes

to inspire me is why
I put in a bit of Wordsworth but then the page is over,
he weighs it to the
ground,
the autumn of him soaking my mop purple in the dyes of
what's falling
breathless under its own
senses.

-- Ann Carson

Car bombs kill 170 in Baghdad after PM's pledge

Video

By Dean Yates and Paul Tait

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Car bombs killed more than 170 people in Baghdad on Wednesday in the deadliest attacks in the city since U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a security crackdown aimed at halting the country's slide into civil war.

One car bomb alone in the mainly Shi'ite Sadriya neighbourhood killed 122 people and wounded 155, police said.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, speaking in Tel Aviv on a visit to the region, called the bombings "horrifying" and indicated Sunni Islamist al Qaeda was to blame.

The apparently coordinated attacks -- there were four within a short space of time -- occurred hours after Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said Iraq would take security control of the whole country from foreign forces by the end of the year.

Maliki is under growing pressure to say when foreign soldiers will leave, but the attacks in mainly Shi'ite areas of Baghdad underscored the huge challenges for Iraq's security forces in taking charge of overall security from more than 150,000 U.S. and British troops.

The bombings wounded more than 200 people.

"I saw dozens of dead bodies. Some people were burned alive inside minibuses. Nobody could reach them after the explosion," said a witness at Sadriya, describing scenes of mayhem at an intersection where the bomb exploded near a market.

"Women were screaming and shouting for their loved ones who died," said the witness who did not wish to be identified, adding many of the dead were women and children.

One man waving his arms in the air screamed hysterically: "Where's Maliki? Let him come and see what is happening here."

U.S. and Iraqi forces began deploying thousands more troops onto Baghdad's streets in February.

Sectarian death squad killings have declined, but car bombs are much harder to stop, U.S. military officials say.

The bombings could inflame sectarian passions in Baghdad, especially among the Mehdi Army militia of anti-American Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which has kept a low profile so far during the two-month-old Baghdad security offensive.

Al Qaeda is blamed for most of the major bombings targeting Shi'ites in Iraq and there are fears the Mehdi Army may take to the streets to retaliate.

The attacks came several hours after Maliki again appealed for reconciliation between majority Shi'ites and once-dominant minority Sunni Arabs who form the backbone of the insurgency.

"There is no magic solution to put out the fire of sectarian sedition that some are trying to set up, especially al Qaeda," Maliki said in a speech made on his behalf before the attacks.

EPICENTRE OF VIOLENCE

Among the other attacks on Wednesday, police said a suicide car bomber killed 35 people at a checkpoint in Sadr City, stronghold of the firebrand cleric Sadr.

At Sadriya, a thick, dark plume of smoke rose at the scene of the bombing. Fire fighters rushed to put out flames on burning bodies, while rescue workers tried to retrieve bodies from the blackened hulks of cars.

The Sadriya bombing was the highest death toll in a single attack in Baghdad since a truck bomb killed 135 people in the same area on Feb. 3.

Wednesday's attacks follow a suicide bombing in parliament last week that killed one lawmaker and also a truck bomb blast that destroyed one of Baghdad's most famous bridges.

In a speech at a ceremony marking the handover of southern Maysan province from British to Iraqi control, Maliki said three provinces in the autonomous Kurdistan region would be next, followed by Kerbala and Wasit provinces.

"Then it would be province by province until a full transfer had been completed by the end of the year," Maliki said in the speech, read by National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie.

Maysan is the fourth of Iraq's 18 provinces to be handed to Iraqi security forces, joining Muthanna, Najaf and Dhi Qar, all predominantly Shi'ite and relatively calm regions in the south.

Maliki says Iraq's security forces will only take back control from foreign forces when ready.

(With additional reporting by Ross Colvin in Amara, Aseel Kami, Ibon Villelabeitia, Yara Bayoumy and Waleed Ibrahim in Baghdad, and Kristin Roberts in Washington)

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

BAGHDAD — Cars, minibuses and roadside bombs exploded in Shiite Muslim enclaves across the city Sunday, killing at least 45 people in sectarian violence that defied the Baghdad security crackdown, while a radical anti-U.S. cleric raised a new threat to Iraq’s government.

Two officials close to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said his followers would quit their six Cabinet posts Monday — a move that could leave Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s already weak administration without enough support to stay in power.

And in a rare gesture of dissent from America’s partners in Baghdad, dozens of Iraqi policemen demonstrated in front of their station, accusing U.S. troops of treating them like “animals” and “slaves.”

The U.S. military command announced the combat deaths of three more Americans. Two British service members died when their helicopters crashed in midair north of Baghdad, and hours later a U.S. helicopter was hit by ground fire near Mosul but landed safely with no injuries.

Six powerful bombs, gunfire and artillery blasts enveloped Baghdad in a near-constant din that seemed a setback for the nine-week-old U.S.-Iraqi military campaign to pacify the capital.

U.S. commanders previously cited a slight decrease in violence since the crackdown began Feb. 14, but urged patience for what they warned would be a long, tough fight.

“Although we’re making steady progress ... we have a long way to go,” Rear Adm. Mark Fox, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, told reporters Sunday. “We will continue to face attacks from those who attempt to tear down what the Iraqi people have worked so hard to build.”

The crackdown is believed to have driven many insurgents from Baghdad, and violence has soared in areas outside the capital, such as the bombing in the Shiite holy city of Karbala that killed 47 people and wounded 224 Saturday.

But violence has spiked upward again in Baghdad, with Sunday’s six bombings coming just three days after a suicide bomber blew himself up inside parliament and killed a lawmaker.

“This week has been difficult for the Iraqi people,” Fox acknowledged.

The carnage caused some to voice doubts about the Baghdad crackdown.

-------------------------



Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-- WB Yeats

Catch a Fire

I arrive home to cyclones,
to trees broken like the heat
hasn't yet. Autumn
nowhere in sight except

a few leaves starting
their fall fire. Driving without
eyes for wreckage,
I don't notice right away—

Otis Redding sings A Change
Is Gonna Come and I sob
one last time you’re gone.
High up, the BILLIONS

SOLD sign mangled,
once golden arches turned
almost an ampersand—
a few miles along it dawns

what storms I've missed.
Signs ripped down.
Roofs made only of tarp.
Pink tongues of insulation

pulled from the mouths
of houses now silent.
Looking for a sign
from God?

one billboard asks—
This is it.
What's left
of the Hillview Motel

no longer needs say
VACANCY.
Only the hill
still here. The corn

brown and shorn.
In a few weeks who can tell
what's being built
and what torn down—

flattened, the fields
all look the same. For now
this charcoal smell
fluttering past the hill—

It's been too hard living

And I’m afraid to die—
the thick smoke billowing
from burning
what's still green

but can't be saved.

-- Kevin Young

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007)

On pages 9 and 10 of his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Poems in Dialogue

"They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me Seek"

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle tame and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with continual change.

Thank'd be fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she caught me in her arms long and small,
Therewith all sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
But all is turned from my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also to use new-fangleness.
But since that I so kindely am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved.

-- Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42)


-------------------------------



Before Time

On one or two occasions
It was different: she lingered

At the window, turned—I was
Desirable because for a moment

I was anybody. The distance
Seemed to disappear without us
Moving but more than what followed

I remember the open window.
Taxis idling by the park.
Streetlights shining

Through the hemlock and the usual sounds
Of traffic, shouts—all of it
Starkly present and at the same time

Incomplete; as if a space I'd never
Wanted had been filled

At the moment
I wanted it: branches

Swirling at the window as
Her clothing dropped
To the floor. If I have chance

To thank for this moment
I'd like to know what she deserved.

-- James Longenbach (1959–)

3 Generals Spurn the Position of War 'Czar'

Bush Seeks Overseer For Iraq, Afghanistan

The White House wants to appoint a high-powered czar to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies, but it has had trouble finding anyone able and willing to take the job, according to people close to the situation.

At least three retired four-star generals approached by the White House in recent weeks have declined to be considered for the position, the sources said, underscoring the administration's difficulty in enlisting its top recruits to join the team after five years of warfare that have taxed the United States and its military.

"The very fundamental issue is, they don't know where the hell they're going," said retired Marine Gen. John J. "Jack" Sheehan, a former top NATO commander who was among those rejecting the job. Sheehan said he believes that Vice President Cheney and his hawkish allies remain more powerful within the administration than pragmatists looking for a way out of Iraq. "So rather than go over there, develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, 'No, thanks,' " he said.

The White House has not publicly disclosed its interest in creating the position, hoping to find someone President Bush can anoint and announce for the post all at once. Officials said they are still considering options for how to reorganize the White House's management of the two conflicts. If they cannot find a person suited for the sort of specially empowered office they envision, they said, they may have to retain the current structure.

The administration's interest in the idea stems from long-standing concern over the coordination of civilian and military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan by different parts of the U.S. government. The Defense and State departments have long struggled over their roles and responsibilities in Iraq, with the White House often forced to referee.

The highest-ranking White House official responsible exclusively for the wars is deputy national security adviser Meghan O'Sullivan, who reports to national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and does not have power to issue orders to agencies. O'Sullivan plans to step down soon, giving the White House the opportunity to rethink how it organizes the war effort.

Unlike O'Sullivan, the new czar would report directly to Bush and to Hadley and would have the title of assistant to the president, just as Hadley and the other highest-ranking White House officials have, the sources said. The new czar would also have "tasking authority," or the power to issue directions, over other agencies, they said.

To fill such a role, the White House is searching for someone with enough stature and confidence to deal directly with heavyweight administration figures such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. Besides Sheehan, sources said, the White House or intermediaries have sounded out retired Army Gen. Jack Keane and retired Air Force Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, who also said they are not interested. Ralston declined to comment; Keane confirmed he declined the offer, adding: "It was discussed weeks ago."

Kurt Campbell, a Clinton administration Pentagon official who heads the Center for a New American Security, said the difficulty in finding someone to take the job shows that Bush has exhausted his ability to sign up top people to help salvage a disastrous war. "Who's sitting on the bench?" he asked. "Who is there to turn to? And who would want to take the job?"

All three generals who declined the job have been to varying degrees administration insiders. Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff, was one of the primary proponents of sending more troops to Iraq and presented Bush with his plan for a major force increase during an Oval Office meeting in December. The president adopted the concept in January, although he did not dispatch as many troops as Keane proposed.

Ralston, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was named by Rice last August to serve as her special envoy for countering the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, a group designated a terrorist organization by the United States.

Sheehan, a 35-year Marine, served on the Defense Policy Board advising the Pentagon early in the Bush administration and at one point was reportedly considered by then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He now works as an executive at Bechtel Corp. developing oil projects in the Middle East.

In an interview yesterday, Sheehan said that Hadley contacted him and they discussed the job for two weeks but that he was dubious from the start. "I've never agreed on the basis of the war, and I'm still skeptical," Sheehan said. "Not only did we not plan properly for the war, we grossly underestimated the effect of sanctions and Saddam Hussein on the Iraqi people."

In the course of the discussions, Sheehan said, he called around to get a better feel for the administration landscape.

"There's the residue of the Cheney view -- 'We're going to win, al-Qaeda's there' -- that justifies anything we did," he said. "And then there's the pragmatist view -- how the hell do we get out of Dodge and survive? Unfortunately, the people with the former view are still in the positions of most influence." Sheehan said he wrote a note March 27 declining interest.

Gordon Johndroe, a National Security Council spokesman, would not discuss contacts with candidates but confirmed that officials are considering a newly empowered czar.

"The White House is looking at a number of options on how to structure the Iraq and Afghanistan office in light of Meghan O'Sullivan's departure and the completion of both the Iraq and Afghanistan strategic reviews," he said. He added that "No decisions have been made" and "a list of candidates has not been narrowed down."

The idea of someone overseeing the wars has been promoted to the White House by several outside advisers. "It would be definitely a good idea," said Frederick W. Kagan, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "Hope they do it, and hope they do it soon. And I hope they pick the right guy. It's a real problem that we don't have a single individual back here who is really capable of coordinating the effort."

Other variations are under consideration. House Democrats have put a provision in their version of a war spending bill that would designate a coordinator to oversee all assistance to Iraq. That person, who would report directly to the president, would require Senate confirmation; the White House said it opposes the proposal because Rice already has an aid coordinator.

Some administration critics said the ideas miss the point. "An individual can't fix a failed policy," said Carlos Pascual, former State Department coordinator of Iraq reconstruction, who is now a vice president at the Brookings Institution. "So the key thing is to figure out where the policy is wrong."

By Peter Baker and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Study of Two Pears

I
Opusculum paedagogum.
The pears are not viols,
Nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.


II
They are yellow forms
Composed of curves
Bulging toward the base.
They are touched red.



III
They are not flat surfaces
Having curved outlines.
They are round
Tapering toward the top.

-- Wallace Stevens

Psalm and Lament

Hialeah, Florida
in memory of my mother (1897–1974)

The clocks are sorry, the clocks are very sad.
One stops, one goes on striking the wrong hours.

And the grass burns terribly in the sun,
The grass turns yellow secretly at the roots.

Now suddenly the yard chairs look empty, the sky looks empty,
The sky looks vast and empty.

Out on Red Road the traffic continues; everything continues.
Nor does memory sleep; it goes on.

Out spring the butterflies of recollection,
And I think that for the first time I understand

The beautiful ordinary light of this patio
And even perhaps the dark rich earth of a heart.

(The bedclothes, they say, had been pulled down.
I will not describe it. I do not want to describe it.

No, but the sheets were drenched and twisted.
They were the very handkerchiefs of grief.)

Let summer come now with its schoolboy trumpets and fountains.
But the years are gone, the years are finally over.

And there is only
This long desolation of flower-bordered sidewalks

That runs to the corner, turns, and goes on,
That disappears and goes on

Into the black oblivion of a neighborhood and a world
Without billboards or yesterdays.

Sometimes a sad moon comes and waters the roof tiles.
But the years are gone. There are no more years.

-- Donald Justice

Tal Afar

Chris Hondros Photos (previous event)

Bomb attacks killed 77 people in Iraq on Tuesday, including 50 who died in twin truck bombings in the northwestern town of Tal Afar, police said.

Among other attacks, suspected al Qaeda militants killed 21 people in bombings targeting police and Sunni Arab tribes who have formed an alliance against the militants, officials said.

The attacks follow an upsurge in violence in Baghdad and outside the capital in recent days. U.S. and Iraqi security forces have deployed thousands more soldiers in Baghdad to try to stem a sectarian war threatening to tear the country apart.

Outgoing U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said on Monday al Qaeda was trying to undermine efforts by the Iraqi government and U.S. commanders to court tribal leaders and some insurgent groups to collaborate against the militant network.

One of the blasts in Tal Afar, a mixed town of Shi'ites, Sunni Arabs and Turkmen near the Syrian border, was detonated by a suicide bomber near a Shi'ite mosque, police said.

Police Brigadier Karim Khalaf al-Jubouri said the bomber lured victims to buy wheat loaded on his truck. A second truck bomb exploded in a used car lot. The attacks wounded 120 people.

"There was a huge bomb in the street," said one resident, Akram Ali, 27, referring to the attack near the mosque.

"More than 20 shops and houses were destroyed and some are still burning. Firemen are pulling bodies from the rubble."

In 2006, U.S. President George W. Bush held up Tal Afar as an example of progress being made in Iraq after U.S.-led forces freed it from al Qaeda in an offensive the previous year.

Near Ramadi, in western Anbar province, a suicide bomber exploded a car outside a restaurant on a main road, killing 17 people and wounding 32, a hospital source said.

The restaurant was frequented by police in an area where local tribes have joined the tribal alliance against al Qaeda in Anbar. Many police were among the casualties, the hospital source said.

INSURGENT LEADER KILLED

Earlier four people were killed in two blasts in Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad. One of the dead was a military leader of one of Iraq's biggest Sunni Arab insurgent groups, the 1920 Revolution Brigades, the group said in an Internet statement.

The group identified the leader as Harith al-Dari, who is also the son of an anti-al Qaeda tribal leader.

The Brigades is believed to have given its tacit backing to Sunni Arab tribes who have formed the alliance against al Qaeda.

Relatives blamed al Qaeda for the attack. Al Qaeda has come into conflict with some tribes because of its adherence to a radical form of Sunni Islam and indiscriminate killings.

Dari's father is tribal leader Sheikh Thahir al-Dari, who is head of the al-Zobaie tribe, to which Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zobaie belongs. The deputy prime minister was the target of an assassination bid last week.

The Brigades is made up of mostly former military officers and is believed to mainly target U.S. soldiers.

Khalilzad, who left his post as ambassador to Iraq on Monday, said U.S. and Iraqi officials had held contacts with Sunni Arab insurgent-linked groups and were continuing to engage them to bring them into the political process.

In a move to address Sunni Arab concerns, Iraq's president and prime minister on Monday approved amendments to ease rules under which former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party were banned from jobs in government and the security forces.

A U.S. combat post was also attacked by two suicide truck bombs and about 30 gunmen west of Baghdad on Monday, but American soldiers repelled them and killed 15, the U.S. military said on Tuesday.

The attack on the post in the Garma area was unusual given insurgents do not typically launch such large-scale assaults. Eight U.S. soldiers were wounded.

Singalong

You watch in street clothes. Why not
accept the easy way, the one
that's offered? The kind one?
Because it isn't easy or kind enough.
It has to be hard
to have brought us this far.

Any time soon
we'll manage to build barns,
paint, lock the padlocks, waive anything
dire. That way, we think it will keep
for us and for a while. Other
than that we sleep, nod
like reeds at the edge of a pond.
Those places left unplanted will be cultivated
by another, by others. Looking back it
will seem good. The majestic verandah.
All the ships numbered.
The hedges grazed
like autumn, or a blight,
like fruit.

-- John Ashbery

Shortbus

In his aim to make an honest film about sex, John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) has taken a somewhat documentary approach to Shortbus, a film describing various New Yorkers' sexual pathos. Framed by shots roving a homemade diorama of the city, Shortbus is comprised of vignettes featuring actors who helped craft this story of people's disconnect in sexual endeavors. Jamie (PJ DeBoy) and James (Paul Dawson), a gay couple experiencing a lull in their relationship, visit Sophia (Sook-Yin Lee), a sex therapist whose inability to orgasm results in her clients inviting her to a sex club after which the film is titled. Sophia's husband, Rob (Raphael Barker), is also willing to experiment, so the two independently embark on adventures in self-pleasure. Dominatrix Severin (Lindsay Beamish) plays a crucial role in Sophia and Rob's lives, as her search for real humanity overlaps with their desire for passion. As each character's plot complicates, the viewer sees a similar melancholy bulldozing its way into these seemingly disparate lives. The depression is repeatedly used in comedic scenes, such as when James is asked on a date while still hospitalized for his attempted suicide. Yo La Tengo's score, which includes Animal Collective among others, lends this film a graceful ambience. Unlike porn, Shortbus has a resonance that encourages the viewer to consider one's own sex life as an important aspect of happiness. --Trinie Dalton

Shortbus

from : Girls on the Run

VII

The thread ended up on the floor,
where all threads go.
It became a permanent thing, like silver:
Every time you polish it, a little goes away.
Then the ducks arrived, it was raining.
Such a lot of going around and doing!
Sometimes they were in sordid sexual situations;
at others, a smidgen of fun would intrude on our day
which is there to be intruded on, anyway.
Its value, to us, is incommensurate
with, let's say, the concept of duration, which kills,
as surely as a serpent hiding behind a stump.
Our phrase books began to feel useless‹for once
you have learned a language, what is there to do but forget it?
Each illustration changes us.

These were cloistered. They stayed
with us that winter, then went on a little while.
Soon they were back. It was partially time to go out in the opening.
Some enjoyed it.
Then, if they were true,
the blue rabbit heaped bones upon them. There was no going back,
now, though, some did go back. Those who did
didn't get very far. The others came out a little ahead,
I think. . . I don't know.

Look, this is what I am, what I was made of.
Am I therefore to usurp the rose
that blows on time's pediment, wrapping all wisps in a kind of bundle
of awe? But the sundial smiled in the rain, the stile
beckoned, the sign said it was three miles. In the lane the parson's
ambulance pestered gold pigtails, who were in for a shock
of course when the fox returned smiling, fanning his great tail in the corset
of the lighthouses the sausages were so concerned about.
Did the game of stealing please many? Here, on the other side, they were in sync,
their bowls of muesli crooning to the sidelong bats of evening, and then they were let out
to smoke a cigarette in the meadow. No one knew how many
tried to escape, or how many were successful. You had to read it
in the evening's news, and by then sea-cows were weary.
They taxed themselves out of existence. Our raft capsized
and they opined the day was bright with promise, though shut off
from what really happened. It was time for golf.

This was that day's learning.

Finally when Angela could retrieve her moorings they sent the tide out,
but it came back next day, increasingly bizarre.
Bunny and Philip weren't sure they wanted to see more. "But you must,"
Angela urged, breathing a little faster. Then they all wanted to know why it goes on
all the time, and the preacher answered it was due to bats. In the silos. Oh,
I thought you wanted to know, Philip said. We do, but other than you there are two
pails formally, and no one can figure out what is inside. Indeed? Well I'll
take the plunge Philip volunteered. He was always a brave little kid.
Now it was this side of sunset again. Nobody knew which was in error: the stove, or its waistband.
After which the elm buds chanced a summer intrusion
and all the nifty year was almost gone. Well isn't that a catastrophe, Aunt Clara gurgled,
or are some of you please going to take it outside? Aw, but it's raining, someone grumbled,
Why can't we stay inside and have school?
Yes but the quitter must go far out into the bogs. It's time for the badgers to nest
and who is that coming over the hill this time? It's
Spider, Angela suggested.

But as for leaving you all without a tale to tell, I would be daft,
nay derelict, not to insist on where the others have gone. Isn't there a place
to stop, that we'll all know about when we come to it?
Yes there is, she said, we'll just all have to back down
into the gloom, and bait our hooks with peanut butter
which is what they did
and so they left home that day.

-- John Ashbery

So Long, Santa

You were good to us,
but we’ve got to think these things
out for ourselves, check in with you
later – why did I say that?
Not everything has to be
as big and full as earth.

After he found a million dollars in a slot
the boy persisted, dying without uncovering a lot.
It’s good to be painful
because it will come round again
and we won’t be ready:
Barbara Allen’s cruelty, the night wind
biting at scarves, pedestrians hurrying along.

And if I so longed for you as
to make the original millennial blush go away,
us back to our pets, things we had
to learn at school,
I’d be ashamed of my distance
from you, for being indispensable
at times and cures –
just getting the right thing right, for once.

After finishing everything up
I pay a formal call to the broker.
Sherry is drunk
and it will soon be time to think of the next set of circumstances.
Oh hell everything is that way,
this way, that way, twisted in the sun
of endurance –
the back way in then,
the assertion of formality without
a celebration next time.
That’s all any of us gets,
why I am happy with you, alone, just us.

-- John Ashbery

472 Clipper Street San Francisco 1976

I come from a rich family of grief, criers & sexual & emotional failure.
There isn't a better lover on the block: sexually dynamite, his moustache.
One evening at home we three roomates watched midnight t.v.
This was San Francisco, 1976. Memory was very real and present.
Every year after 1977, in August, on the 19th we would celebrate Brad.
When the telephone rang you never knew what would be the next catastrophe.

Men, women, boys & girls; puppy dogs kittens and cats loved this catastrophe.
Of the three of us, Sally was perhaps the only one who was not a failure.
Geof would often remind himself that love had everything to do about Brad.
He was involved: involved with the sacred geometry of Brad's moustache.
Roxie Music on the turntable. Failure, happiness, harmony were not present
In our lives. We struggled to remember we had purpose: a role in a movie or on t.v.

"I don't care what you want, I want you out of the house" screams the t.v.
"We've a lesson to learn". We've a few good crys before real catastrophe
hits us with the truth: Brad wasn't who he said he was. He was never present
long enough to share even the simplest of moments. a real Failure
a jerk, a blockhead a fuckin angel dust direlect with a brunette smile & moustache.

we went on loving him, loving him for years loving him loving Brad.

bryan ferry has the voice of a magician of a saint of a god said Brad.
living on Clipper Street in 1976 and 1977 was like being in a show on t.v.
it isn't so much remembering the wetness of his tongue and nibbling his moustache
as it is trying to imagine all the others eating away at him: shadowy catastrophes
lurking in the near future: dead bodies, dust, muggings, & the great failure
of love and loving. gnawing away at my memories today in the present.

Sally escaped intact. When the stabilizing element was no longer present
the entire Jules & Jim lifestyle in reverse crumbled. prevented from loving Brad
by the memories of having known him: does the past always come off as a failure?
Single-minded. careless. giddy and hermetic: that's the kind of t.v.
I'd like to see. Brad in some starring role of Love in the Age of Catastrophe.
Sally collaging photographs and scanning images of brunette moustaches.

I pretend to my memories. Stay home. Grow my hair long. gray moustache.
Cocteau's beauty & the beast continues to speak in the present.
there is no better lover than justice. what better lover be catastrophe
just to see you still with long stories to tell all written with Brad.
t.v.
failure.

the impossibility of words. the pleasure to be rich with failure.
deadbeats poets artists and singers. moustache.
smiles and leaves me to me. his favorite catastrophe.
t.v.

-- Jeff Wietor
(thanks Michael Kretz for the restoration & Brad Bell for starring in the role of a lifetime)

Ukase

And as you were indulging in the thesaurus,
or, more precisely, being indulged,
the word-rabbits came hippity-hopping along.
Soon it was dusk. The weary river passed
to ask you the same song over again; the birds
(who knew it all by now) were silent;
and it was time to mold the analytical
to the time-sensitive. That is,
to say that it had happened and we were
no worse for it. Indeed, the sky
and nearby barns seemed about to chime
as we were getting our stuff together, ready
to leave, as always, though no quite decided
what tributes to accept, if night should bring any.

What a chump! Excuse me . . .
It is to the wind and the wildflowers I address these
afterthoughts, if they can be dignified
as such. And I digress, too,
in the gloaming where all can be finessed
as we are incurably, undeniably aging,
only I can't tell what that feels like --
It's so true! Not when, but if.
But we'll know it before it happens -- we'll
recognize us from the way we look at each other,
not from any urgent movement forward
or anything like that.

-- John Ashbery

DaxFlame Show : 6 7 8 9 & 10

Daxflame

DaxFlame Show : 5

DaxFlame Show : 1 2 3 & 4

Les Mistons - François Truffaut (1957)