Books I am reading right now...

'The Cold War' by John Lewis Gaddis
President Truman = underrated!

'The Rebel Sell: How the Counter Culture Became Consumer Culture' by Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter
How the so-called 'counter-culture', far from subverting 'the system', in fact underpins 'competative consumption', in which the need for hipsters to differentiate themselves from 'the masses' is in fact a fundamental driving force in modern capitalism. Lots of fun analogies to arms races, which ties it in to the book above. :-)

'Story' by Robert McKee
Yes, I am writing a screenplay. Yes, the Robert McKee as played by Brian Cox in 'Adaptation'. Cross your fingers for me!

The Thought-Fox

by Ted Hughes

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Rumi

Some untitled poems, by Rumi

*
Drunks fear the police,
but the police are drunks too.
People in this town love them both
like different chess pieces.'


*
In the middle of the night
I cried out,
"Who lives in this love
I have?"
You said, "I do, but I'm not here
alone. Why are these other images
with me?"


*
There's a strange frenzy in my head,
of birds flying,
each particle circulating on its own.
Is the one I love everywhere?


*
You are in love with me, I shall make you perplexed.

Do not build much, for I intend to have you in ruins. If you build two hundred houses in a manner that the bees do; I shall make you as homeless as a fly. If you are the mount Qaf in stability. I shall make you whirl like a millstone.

The Nature Of Electricity

The Nature Of Electricity
by John Shade

The dead, the gentle dead - who knows? -
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table glows
Another man's departed bride.

And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,
And Shelley's incandescent soul
Lures pale moths of starless nights.

Streetlamps are numbered, and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine.

And when above the livid plain
Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants down in hell.

This blog...

...will return in DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER.

In the Forest.

"My known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest."
- D.H. Lawrence.


Edward Hopper - 'Cape Cod Morning' (1950)

"I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in." - John Muir

Girls' Names

Ada
Amber
Aphra
Louisa/Louise
Sophia

Today I am sufficiently bored to start naming unconceived daughters.
(Louise would also be named after my cousin.)

An Immense Spinning Sphere of Methane and Ammonia.

"People often say to me, ‘I understand what you are talking about intellectually, but I don’t really feel it, I don’t realize it,’ and I am apt to reply, ‘I wonder whether you do understand it intellectually, because if you did you would also feel it.’" - Alan Watts

"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars— mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere'. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination— stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern— of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent." - Richard P. Feynman, Footnote in The Feynman Lectures on Physics

Two Poems

Beasts
by Pablo Neruda (more of his poems here).

It was the nightfall of the iguana 
from his rainbow-colored crest 
his tongue like a dart 
sank into the greenery 
The monastic ant colony stepped 
with musical feet through the jungle. 
The wild llama, as delicate as oxygen 
in the wide brown high country 
went walking in his golden boots 
while the tame llama opened 
his candid eyes onto the daintiness 
of a world filled with dew. 
The monkeys braided 
an endless erotic thread 
along the shores of daybreak 
bringing down walls of pollen 
and frightening the violet flight 
of butterflies on the river. 
It was the night of the alligators 
the pure, pulsing night 
of snouts sticking out of slime 
and from the drowsy swamps 
the dull noise of scale armor 
goes back to the origin of the earth. 
The jaguar touched the leaves 
with his glowing absence. 
The puma runs through the thicket 
like a devouring fire 
while in him are burning 
the alcoholic eyes of the jungle. 
Badgers are scrabbling the banks 
of the river, sniffing at a nest 
full of living delicacies 
which they will attack with red teeth. 
And in the depth of the great water 
like the circle of the earth 
is the giant anaconda 
covered with ceremonial paint, 
devouring and religious.

Goodtime Jesus
by James Tate (his 'Never Again The Same' is also good...)

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual.  He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head.  What was it?  A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off.  But he wasn't afraid of that.  It was a beautiful day.  How 'bout some coffee?  Don't mind if I do.  Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey.  Hell, I love everybody.

No Cycling

From funkypancake.com...

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