Poetry Thursday: Matthea Harvey

Introduction to the World
by Matthea Harvey


For the time being
call me Home.

All the ingénues do.

Units are the engines
I understand best.

One betrayal, two.
Merrily, merrily, merrily.

Define hope. Machine.
Define machine. Nope.

Like thoughts,
the geniuses race through.

If you're lucky

after a number of
revolutions, you'll

feel something catch.



From Sad Little Breathing Machine by Matthea Harvey. Copyright © 2004 by Matthea Harvey and printed here under the Fair Use Provisions of the U.S. Copyright Act. Published by Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota. All rights reserved.

Image: Kneeling Sailor, 2001. Oil on canvas. By Greg Decker.

[via Poets.org and the Poets in Their Thirties Archive]

Fiction Mid-Week: Madison Smartt Bell

Here I initiate a new weekly feature: Fiction Mid-Week. We begin with one of my all-time favorite writers, Madison Smartt Bell. His remarkable early novel The Year of Silence remains a model for my work, and his aptly titled short story "Small Blue Thing" hits several tributes at once in my life: black birds in John's honor, small blue things in Rebecca's.

To say nothing of Poe fans, far and near.

Enjoy.

[image via finucane.org]

ewww...feedback please

Guess what? The same view that looks so splendid at home looks sort of...blank....here on my new laptop. One has to scroll wayyyyyyyyyy far down to get to today's entry.

Readers, please take a minute and let me know if the site looks okay to you today. Thanks.

The Grooviest Motel in Wisconsin, and Other Unlikely Stories

Click, and click again...

...to see the gob-stopping


























Gobbler Motel and Restaurant in all its dubious glory.

Plus a whole lot of other resurrected Americana the likes of which will take your morning away.



[Image via Smithsonian Institution. Info via James Lileks and The Institute of Official Cheer. More on the Gobbler Motel in particular--if you are that into it--may be gotten here.]

Come to Dada

On a field trip to the National Gallery of Art* last week, my students and I stumbled across the Dada exhibit currently in residence there. A thoroughly appropriate stumble, for reasons too complex to bother with at this hour.

If you live within a 2-hour radius of me, this exhibit is not to be missed. If you're me, and you live even beyond that radius, it is a must-see.

Of course, if you're me, you live right here, and you have no idea the exhibit has opened even though Modernism is your specialty and Dada and Surrealism your psychic homes, because you yourself are Dada through and through.

Da·da or da·da ( P ) Pronunciation Key (dädä) n. A European artistic and literary movement (1916-1923) that flouted conventional aesthetic and cultural values by producing works marked by nonsense, travesty, and incongruity. (French dada, hobbyhorse, Dada, of baby-talk origin.)
* The National Gallery of Art is no relation to the Smithsonian, for those of us who've always assumed so.

[image: Objet Indestructible by Man Ray, my iconic hero. Via The Newark Museum]

house warm

This housewarming gift from Shawn finally gets its due. I actually kept the information, for a change--how very Shawnly of me:

Freeform bud vase by Mississippi ceramicist Gail Pittman. White yarrow from my garden (unretouched centerfold pictures to come later this season).

Don't trust my camera or the skill of its operator: The bud vase is a delicious foam green, reminiscent of the Fiesta and Harlequinware I love.

And while we are on the subject of solipsistic tributes the likes of which TTA hasn't seen in a while, who can forget this dismal view?



Four months and many thousands of dollars and arguments later, voilà.

Ahem: Voilà! Voilà.!

I know they weren't your thousands or your arguments, but do me this one little favor and look anyway, okay?

Turns Out the Truth Is Savage, Too

Ya know, I'm not a huge fan of his advice column, but I did some reading around Dan Savage, and the man does indeed rock the house.

Among other reasons: his diligent attention to politics, which, like santorum, are only to be closely examined by the strong of stomach.

Thanks, Anonymous (tta!).

Poetry Thursday: Surreal

Today is the birthday of Spanish painter Joan Miró, in whose honor I direct you to this link here.












[image: Bathing Woman, Joan Miró. 1925. Oil on canvas. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. Via Cyrano's Blog]

You know what I really, really, reeeeaaaally like about the Internet?

No, not that. I stopped doing that a while ago.

I like getting up at 4 bleeping o'a.m. with insomnia and worries and clicking on the Angry Alien site to watch War of the Worlds, enacted by bunnies (in 30 seconds).

Right here.

[image via War of the Worlds Invasion: A Historical Perspective]

hot button issue

What? We have been friends all this time and I have never taken you to the Official Red Button Appreciation Page?

Shame on me.









[via the strange world of Cliff Pickover]

Peep Dis

Is nothing sacred anymore?

(Please don't answer that.)

You know how the old song goes:
Peeps, Peeps, the magical treat,
the more you see, the less you'll eat.
The less you eat, the more you buy.
So peep dese links and
then on some other unsuspecting cyberfriend them ply.

A versatile subject and practitioner of scientific Peep research (here and here); focus of medical marvels and psychological breakthroughs; extremely resilient--not to say plastic and elastic--art form (here, here, and here), Peeps is...well, still around after all these years.

Possibly the very same Peeps you saw in the store some twenty-odd years ago with me, in fact. Like, as in the very same ones. But let's not get Twinkie about this, shall we?

Oh, and, Peeps go epic here.

[image of jebus peep via various undisclosed cybersources]

Alan in Paradise

It seems that one's good deeds might actually get one admitted to a brief heaven of sorts. Later this month, when the Society of American Archaeology meets in sunny Puerto Rico, Symposium 97 on April 27 will focus on the sea-changing agreements and necessary compromises that my brother Alan pioneered (ooh, maybe a bad connotation) on behalf of the cultural resources community, Native American nations, and the U.S. military National Guard during his 10+ year career there.

"Mission Possible!: Cultural Resource Preservation Across the Army National Guard: Papers in Honor of Alan J. Wormser," will be moderated by Alan's longtime co-worker in the C.R. trenches, Shellie Sullo.

Many thanks to Kristin Wenzel and Jake Fruhliger for organizing this session in Alan's memory.

Lara is planning to attend. Debbie and I wish we could also be there. We are so glad Lara can go. She has landed pretty admirably on her feet here in the DC area, is reconnecting with friends, and adopted Alan's "kitty-with-issues" Nutmeg a couple months ago.

[image: Totem Pole beside front gate of Camp Mabry, where Alan worked throughout the 1990s; copyright 1997 Jim Tankard, Texas Roadside Icons]

Poetry Thursday: Four Questions

Four Questions

by Shuli Lamden
from Another Desert: Jewish Poetry of New Mexico

Now that I am grown, now

that my brother presides over Seder in his own home,

now that my seven-year-old nephew has outgrown the asking

and coaches his little sister in the questions, word by word—

Why is tonight different from all other nights?
How is this meal different from all other meals?

—only now do I know

not simply answers, but the ways

that our questions are answered,

with still more questions:

How is tonight the same as all other nights like this?
How is this meal the same as all other meals like this?

Dad explains to his grandson

how over and over we sit down to this meal,

how his own grandfather once asked the questions,

then heard them asked.

We begin with memory, tell stories, and sing

of our ancestors and of God who redeems us.

We are always enslaved,

and we are always being liberated.

While the sun burns its way from night to night,

the Red Sea touches shore, then recedes.

[via Sherman Asher Publishing. Image via Miriam's Cup]

24 Questions

There are two sides to every question.
Protagoras

There are two sides to every question: my side and the wrong side. Oscar Levant





The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
C. S. Lewis

This question about Iraq has gotten personal.
Gerhard Schroder

The power to question is the basis of all human progress.
Indira Gandhi

The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.
Ayn Rand

What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?
Gertrude Stein

I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist?
Kathy Acker

If you can do it then why do it?
Gertrude Stein

Why talk when you can paint?
Milton Avery

To be or not to be. That's not really a question.
Jean-Luc Godard

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don't be.
Golda Meir

I ask, who was first to blame?
Chief Joseph

Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?
Simone Weil

Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.
Mark Twain

The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'
Alice Walker

Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.
Woody Allen

The more potent, unasked question is how society at large reacts to eager, voluntary violence by females, and to the growing evidence that women can be just as aggressive as men.
Katherine Dunn

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?
Virginia Woolf

The greatest gift is not being afraid to question.
Ruby Dee

We are prophetic interrogators. Why are so many people hungry? Why are so many people and families in our shelters? Why do we have one of six of our children poor, and one of three of these are children of color? 'Why?' is the prophetic question.
Jim Wallis

What is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What's the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?
Buddha

If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?
Lily Tomlin

To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question.
Eric Hoffer

[Virtually all quotes via BrainyQuote. Image: Oscar Levant, 1972, by Richard Avedon]

"visto dallo spazio della carne"

That's "view from meat space" in Italiano, eh? And that spells kewl in any lengua.

So it happened again. A distant reader chose to bring my blog over the language barrier, at least briefly enough to dismiss its contents with a Latin wave of the hand. It does seem that tth looks really splendid in the Romance languages.

as in, da Sengai Gibon,

and, suggerimenti da heloise,

and, Bloggers Ebreo.






[zen art via Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan. Meatball image...an abiding mystery]

[Wednesday update: I woke up to this in my email: Whole Foods's Natural Meat Survey. I have nothing to say about that, and I am saying it.]

words read and reread

"...since why is too difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how."

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Poetry Thursday: Robert Creeley

Water Music by Robert Creeley

The words are a beautiful music.
The words bounce like in water.

Water music,
loud in the clearing

off the boats,
birds, leaves.

They look for a place
to sit and eat--

no meaning,
no point.

From The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975. Copyright © 1983 by The Regents of the University of California. Reprinted here for personal use and education only. Originally published in Words (Scribner, 1967).

[via Poets.org]