November 2011
15 posts
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a poem i like
NO MATTER HOW BIG YOU MAKE A TOY, a child will find a way to put it in his mouth. There is scarcely a piece of playground equipment that has not been inside a child’s mouth. However, the object responsible for the greatest number of choking deaths, for adults as well as children, is the red balloon. Last year alone, every American choked to death on a red balloon.
Ben Lerner - Angle of...
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Song to Woody - Bob Dylan
On the inside of an old...
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It's a light week
-It snowed two days ago, a foretaste of the long Minnesota plunge into February’s dead-of-winter blues.
-People are leaving Minneapolis for a week due to Thanksgiving. I stay in town, because plane seats are $$$. I will make sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving with friends at a friend’s house for friend times. As always, she will play one of the badass soul mixes that she has in...
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Gangsters & Pranksters - Pavement
Some days,...
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Bulldog Skin - Guided By Voices
Sunday work song.
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I have an important question about the history of...
Did the word zoinks (used as an expression of abject terror) exist before Shaggy on Scooby-Doo?
Also: as a result of the Google searching I just did, I know now that it is zoinks, not zoiks, which is what I thought it was my entire life. Frankly, I don’t feel like I really learned anything just now.
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Last night, I met a smart, well-regarded scholar who writes about ________ and _______, and he dispensed some advice—apologizing, as advice-givers usually do, for slipping into advice mode (is giving advice always something you have to be in a “mode” for, like you’re that away of your programming and it’s the same as everyone else’s? yes?)—to the graduate...
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the ending of a poem I like
I like that poem by David Berman that ends with a goofy bit of dialogue:
All: O Dougs, where are you?
Dougs: In the wild hotels of the sea.
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thenotes:
Driving in the rain, I see a crumpled brown thing ahead in the middle of the road. I think it is an animal. I feel sadness for it and for all the animals I have been seeing in the road and by the edge of the road. When I come closer, I find that it is not an animal but a paper bag. Then there is a moment when my sadness from before is still there along with the paper bag, so that I...
