hunger

In the slum of Cité Soleil, Haiti,
a woman squats with mudstained arms
grey like elephant trunks.
She opens a bundle and lays out cookies
the size of your palm, yellowish and hard.
They are made of dirt.

Rather clay, shortening and salt,
and edible, in a way.
Two cups of rice are sixty cents,
far too much for the poor to afford,
(the better-off among them live on two dollars a day)

So they eat these cookies.
They trick the stomach into believing
it has been fed.
Fed, but not nourished.

Toxins and parasites live in the soil,
but it’s better than nothing,
when you’re starving.

Port-au-Prince, Manila, Cairo, Nairobi, Mexico City,
São Paulo, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro—Detroit?

Incomprehensible. Undeniable.

Quoted for truth

"Go read a book you illiterate son of a bitch and step up yo' vocab." -- Bun B from Jay-Z's "Big Pimpin."

new poem for poem a day (more like poem every few days? poem-a-week?)

Overeducation Blues

The relentless evisceration of texts has got me down.
the combing and picking and teasing out occult meaning,
the contexualizing and histori-izing and criticizing.
I’m a demoralized dessicated ossified scholar
With inkstained fingertips and eraser smut on my lap,
a wonky wandering eye, twitching wrists, and a crookback.

What happened to curling up with a old book in a
warm bethrowrugged nook? A mug of tea and time?
What happened to the pure joy of reading for reading’s sake?
I want to read something, anything sans highlighter in my hand
and pen clenched twixt teeth—sticky flags, post-it notes,
cf’s and nota bene’s, the scrawled taint of marginalia.

I want it back—the plunge into the multiplicity
of universes manifest in the dripping rivulets of whitespace,
the possibility of flight despite the justified typography
(though better than flush left and ragged right)
The simple luxury of the slowly fingered page, flip,
flipping at leisure verso, recto, verso, recto.

Damned! The delight has been dammed,
held back, now stagnant pulp muck.
Graduate school, you whoreson dog!
You’ve drained the river to a trickle, trained me,
pickled my brain. Even a menu must be deconstructed!
Restaurant scansion, counting syllables in appetizers, I’m lost.

Can I be saved? Perhaps there’s a quiet place
I can sit and rehabilitate with a copy of something light
like À la recherche du temps perdu. Dunking cookies in tea,
I’ll stretch out and swim into the whitespace rivers, the
flowing cataracts of thought uninterrupted by editorial,
simply text and text. Verso, recto. Verso, recto.

found poetry (warning: email SPAM, may not be for those with delicate sensibilities)

The conversation has been moved to the Trash

Women need more and more these days
but the problem is that you have small one.

Human growth does not stop at puberty. - Feel the power of your new tool.
after suffering for so many years as 5 inches is amazing

Those locker room stares will be for the right reason.
Performance in bed is set to soar.

Your manhood is set to GROW!
Feel like a brand new man with this.

here's how you can upsize: Huge, thick and amazingly long all this can be yours.
Begin a sex hero

Get a new social life once you have this
12 sweet pills for free- hot special offer-4 or 12 mega pills for free.

Now you can penetrate hardly.
Even James Bond uses these pils to pleasure his girls.

Be the man she always wanted. Boost your confidence with your new-found instrument.
Fire your gun at full blast.

Get a rocking new lease of life with your new tool.
Give them this!

Fill your bedroom with fire once and for all!
Be a superlover!

Contact your doctor or seek emergency medical attention for any
erection that lasts longer than 4 hours.

Filter messages like these.

Now: Light Rain and Freezing Rain and 32°F

says my blinking forecast. Sounds about right.
These past weeks are icestormy, pogonip nights
dropping tinkling crystalline dust on every surface,
sugared walks, latticelike doilies and then frozen water,
leaving crackling shellacked branches
raining icemelt in the morning warmth, quiet cracking clock-
faces in still pools, lucent medallions, ice-cakes floating into
gray days and white nights and diffuse moons, road salt and
sand walks and the plow-scrape scarring parking lots.
Hot coffee and doughnuts in the mornings before class,
I pass the rising cloud breath of crowds, looking for safe footing.
Under all this, it’s still green, anticipating the shortening shadows
marking the inching arc of the sun by day, the clasped buds
tight and pensive, motionless, waiting.

Manhattan Night Skyline, as seen from Blvd. E in Weehawken, NJ tonight.

note Empire State Bldg. is blue in honor of the NY Giants.

My neighbor likes to play a game with me
when I get into the shower.
It’s called “freeze and scald.”
I wash, as he tries to kill me.
Soap and nylon puff smush together,
black bits sit suspended in the lather,
little poppyseeds from an artisanal bar.
The water rains down, and for a while it’s bliss.
I am coated in foam like a melting snowman.
Then, light footsteps upstairs—
the pressure drops oh-so-slightly
and I sidestep.
The few fat droplets that make it onto
my unprotected skin are slivers of ice,
summoning goosepimples.
Then, the pressure changes. I sense it before it happens,
a finely-tuned survival response.
The spray could boil a chicken.
I adjust the dial, normalize the temperature
—but only for a moment, as my
passive-
aggressive
nemesis responds in kind.
This is the game we play.
I’m not sure if he’s simply unaware or
if this is all by design,
but I’ve developed a complex about it—
It occurs with a frightening regularity.
The heat returns to my original setting,
and I rinse, turn off the tap, and grab a towel.
Instantly, I hear the water turn on above me, full blast.
The towel goes round my waist and I step to the sink.
It’s fun to run the water and knock the tap back and forth.
He may be on to something.

Seems like a little mouth screaming
the clouds make all the sadness.
I had misread the tone. It is exactly right.
I'll worry.
there is plenty of stuff every day,
virtually all of it discourages you from applying it in the world.
Try to inhale at one or two removes from the ground. None of it is real.
"you have a ruptured disc at C4-5 and osteophytes impinging everywhere, stenosis . . ."
Pain, always in the third person.

Breathe (not real).

Last Sunset of 2007

Last sunset of 2007, and a link from Harper's.

Harper's Yearly Review

Congratulations Mal!

"Outstanding Graduate" award, photo-op with SUNY New Paltz President Steven Poskanzer.

random pics taken in the past few days. eye, christmas lights, don't walk!, the fog on the ridge this morning before administering the comp. final.

What's wrong with this picture?

Mal got this sample in the mail. Somebody lost their job over this, or received a strong reprimand for photoshop incompetence.

End-of-semester wrapup part 1

the classroom. where the magic happens.














trying to organize class materials.











one anonymous student's "feedback."












how I dressed for the first several weeks of the semester before opting for a more casual look. I'll probably go back to this, but it was nice to be able to choose to dress down when I wanted.

ReadMe -- Book Related AskMe

ReadMe - Mefi Wiki

Book related Ask MetaFilter questions cobbled together from user shothotbot.

A Poorly-Composed Pseudo-Abcedarian Mnemonic Poem of Prosodic and Literary Terminology for Your Education and Pleasure

An Anacoluthon is—what is Ananym for?

Boustrophedon in write could I or

a Chiasmus—the music of syntax.

Finger-joint Dactyls cut off by an axe.

Epanaleptic repetition where repetition is the norm—

this poem is not in Free Verse nor is it a Fixed Form.

Not really Gnomic, avoiding much judgment,

a Hapax Legomenon—“noncelet” or “nudgement.”

I can add an Ictus to show you the stress

or Jameswords || runningtogethera || Joyceanmess.

A Chorus of Kenemes: and, the, at, thus

messing with text in (Lunulæ): a Logodaedalus.

I could have used Litotes, a sort of Meiosis

or a Neologism, a Nonce-word: “Noöpoesis.”

Eviscerated with Onomatopoetic Obeli ,† † †,

with a ZIP and a SPLASH I open, sacrificed to Prosody.

Not “Quotation Marks,” but Inverted Commas, on

the Recto, the Verso, wait—this ain’t a Roman!

Ain’t is a Solecism, see also Syncope:

a Contraction, Elision, redundant Tautology.

Unvoiced Alveolar Lateral Fricative, the IPA’s curse,

Metrical writing with Stanzas are Verse.

Wit is from Witan: “to know” what is clever,

Xenophanic means witty, but this poem? whatever.

Yoking a phrase with Zeugma to end it,

the poem ends in wisdom—and the last couplet.

ice storm; click pix for detail

Blogs in Cultural Studies, Theory, Literature, and Rhetoric

Culture, Theory, Literature - AcademicBlogs

ouch. medicine is expensive.

1 IVS 0.9 NS 1L 20.00
4 ALBUTEROL S04 0.5% 5MG/ML 148.00
1 TERBUTALINE 1MG INJ 31.00
1 METHYLPREDNISOLON SU 125 MG 26.00
1 USE OF OXYGEN 0-12 LITERS 60.00
1 NEBULIZER- DISPOSABLE 19.00
1 VENTIMASK-S 29.00
1 02 WITH MASK / CANNULA-S .00
1 PEAKFLOW METER-S 45.00
1 DRESSING TRANSPARENT-S 16.00
1 IV SET PIGGY PRIMARY 23.00
1 PULMONARY TX PR I 77 66.00
1 ER-MOD NURSING CARE & PROC 305.00
1 PROCEDURE PULSE OXIMETRY 96.00
1 IV/SALINE LOCK-S 44.00
NYS SURCHARGE 49.67

TOTAL 974.67


(plus the take home Rx ran about 150.00)

expatriate

Why I Left America: The Rise Of Elitism And The Death Of American Democracy
(via)

filthy

2007 Jones Soda Holiday Pack