Sweet and tender hooligan

I must be the only person who wakes up thinking of people in the news who haven't been in the news in a quarter-century.


Mathias Rust, the German fellow who flew a single-passenger aircraft into Moscow's Red Square during the tail-end of the Soviet Communist days.  They charged him with something that in the English translation sounded almost comic to me: "rank hooliganism," or words to that effect.  Maybe "malicious hooliganism" or "hooliganism aforethought"!


Well, my thoughts elided from Herr Rust to this marvelous anthem by the Smiths, presented here for the delectation of those who are inclined to be ... delectated?

Just like the white-winged dove

I must have said this before, but listening to Stevie Nicks sing is a sensation not unlike that of kissing a Brillo pad.

Ban the Commedia?

Someone proposes banning Dante's magnum opus because, well, it's racistsexisthomophobicmisogynistic.  And viciousmeanspiritedintolerantinsensitive.


I prefer the Vita Nuova to the Comedy, but still -- this is rather absurd.

As kingfishers catch fire

Desert Wisdom

From Desert Wisdom: Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. and illus. by Yushi Nomura, intro. and afterword by Henri Nouwen (Orbis Books, 2001):


Amma Synclectica said: It is good not to get angry.  But if it should happen, do not allow your day to go by affected by it.  For it is said: Do not let the sun go down.  Otherwise, the rest of your life may be affected by it. Why hate a person who hurts you, for it is not that person who is unjust, but the devil.  Hate the sickness, but not the sick person. [p 84]


Once some people came to an old man in Thebaid, bringing a person possessed by a demon, hoping that he might be cured by the old man.  Being asked persistently for quite some time, the old man finally said to the demon: Go out of God's creation.  And the demon replied: I will go out, but let me ask you just one thing.  Tell me, who are the goats and who are the sheep?  Then the old man said: A goat is someone such as I am, but as for the sheep, well, God only knows.  Hearing this, the demon cried out in a loud voice: Look, because of your humility I am going out!  And he went away that very moment. [pp 80-81]

Pentameter

‎"I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier." ~ Howard Nemerov


The poet Nemerov would walk the streets
And speak to friends in phrases of five beats.
I wonder, Did he do this all the time?
And did his dialogic verses rhyme?

The woman from college

I miss her toes.  A definite revelation of the glory of God.


And it has been more than twenty years.


(Addendum/postscript, 11 am:  I miss everything else about her, I should say.  Her illimitably profound eyes, her divinely sweet voice, her unfailingly kind heart, her supremely luminous soul.  But as I was writing earlier this morning, I was especially missing her toes.)

Contributor's note

T----- D-------- was graduated from the Boston Latin School in 1987. Since then, he has consumed countless slices of pizza, en route to becoming the man of Chestertonian girth that he is today. In the early 1990s, he published some Ashberyan verse in a magazine called Mudfish. From May 2003 to September 2006, he wrote absolutely nothing. Currently, he considers himself "pro-life, pro-peace, and pro-ravioli except when they're stuffed with pumpkin."

Yea Though I Walk, modernized

Courtesy of my girl D:


"O, I'm walking through icky stuff and I think God is close-by."

Observation

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that God is a black woman with irritating politics and eyes that could melt the most adamantine heart.

Vigils

Good morning, dear readers!


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Last night, I thought I would order the film The Broken Tower, in which James Franco plays poet Hart Crane, "on demand."  I changed my mind, and read the poetry of Hart Crane instead!  I don't regret my decision.  "March," "Old Song," and "Atlantis."  I will edit this post later to incorporate quotations from one, or from all, of these poems.


From "Old Song":



The burden of the rose will fade
    Sped in the spectrum's kiss.
But here the thorn in sharpened shade
    Weathers all loneliness.



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I am trying to write at 3.48 in the morning without the assistance of coffee.  We'll see how it goes!


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Lately I've had something of an unrestrained untamed ungracious id, if I'm using that Freudian term correctly, which surfaces whenever the subject turns to progressive politics.  I had a post up here for about 24 hours in which I felt compelled to growl about the Limbaugh/Fluke matter.  Why?  Beats me.  I didn't like the tenor of the post, and found it impossible to "moderate" because the whole point of the post was to bitch about progressivism.  So I took it down.


And lately I've wondered whether I should be engaged in public blogging at all, apart from matters pertaining to poetry.


Even Twitter.  I deactivated my relatively new Twitter account, because I do tire of the sound of my own virtual "voice" -- even in 140-character snippets!  (I have just now reactivated the account.  Decisive soul, I am.)


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Four o'clock, and I'm still writing without coffee.  It's going fairly well. I typed "waiting" instead of "writing" at a first go.


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I voted in yesterday's Republican presidential primary here in Massachusetts.  My candidate didn't win.


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The coffee is now brewing.  Isn't coffee wonderful?


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Today at 3.30 I go in for an MRI on my heel spur and Achilles tendon(s).  I've been walking with a slight hitch in my step for about 4 months.  Finally they took an X-ray, and discovered the bone spur in the left foot.  But both tendons are also troublesome.  Sigh.


The weight doesn't help.  I am, to paraphrase Monty Python's line about Cardinal Richelieu, nineteen stone of pure man.


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Watched the Rosary on Boston's CatholicTV at 3 this morning.  It was one of the old ones with the late Msgr Frank McFarland (d. 2001), who was immensely lovable.


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That's all for now, dear friends.  Until soon!