Kitchen Sink Omelet

 

I sometimes feel like the English language is some exclusive boys club, with the sig posted, "No Girlz Allowed!!!" And the design specs of the English language seem to be drafted to favor a portion of our population who are white-skinned, prefer to mate with the opposite gender, and for that purpose have a dangling proboscis that seems to serve as the nexus of this language's design. Imagine language as an automobile, and I'm lifting up the hood to find it's not an engine of syntax and tenses, but instead a 12-year old boy is glaring up at me, and he's angry that I'm interrupting his enjoyment of a porn magazine.   One thing I learned in college is language can be so much more than a male fraternity pledge hazing: with language we can both explore our world, and also create one at the same time.

SPELL TO BE SAID AGAINST HATRED by Jane Hirshfield via brainpickings Until each breath refuses  they, those, them . Until the  Dramatis Personae  of the book’s first page says, “Each one is you.” Until hope bows to its hopelessness only as one self bows to another. Until cruelty bends to its work and sees suddenly:  I . Until anger and insult know themselves burnable legs of a useless table. Until the unsurprised unbidden knees find themselves bending. Until fear bows to its object as a bird’s shadow bows to its bird. Until the ache of the solitude inside the hands, the ribs, the ankles. Until the sound the mouse makes inside the mouth of the cat. Until the inaudible acids bathing the coral. Until what feels no one’s weighing is no longer weightless. Until what feels no one’s earning is no longer taken. Until grief, pity, confusion, laughter, longing know themselves mirrors. Until by  we  we mean I, them, you, the muskrat, the tiger, the hunger. Until by...

I had to turn on the heat pump last night. [Marshals crane backing up while hoisting Summer] "Okay, back a little more ... little more.... Right there! Okay, set 'er down easy--" BATHUMP. "Awesome; there's Summer right it belongs, just after Spring." Thank the gods: can we now kindly drive a wooden stake through the heart of Game of Thrones as an act of mercy? Why do we keep thinking bad fiction makes for good media? Think GoT is good fiction ? Read Mark Twain's Seventeen Rules for Writing . Made biscuits today since I'm not paying $$$ for a loaf of bread. I like how Trump is multi-tasking all the different levels of Dante's Inferno  Trump will occupy after he dies. Satan will need to install a light rail system just to shuttle Trump around to meet his just punishments. At least Trump will improve Hell's infrastructure.... Mock Paper Scissors : Little Kremlin-on-the-Potomac: tengrain: ' And then   Fox News had a nutty...

We somehow seem to expect our children in school to be smart and stupid at the same time. Smart enough to pass all the merit-based testing, yet stupid enough not to notice our dead-end economy. What are our students learning?  They are learning that for every problem, there is an ineffective solution. These ineffective solutions are based on the (ancient) idea that less money will solve everything. How do you motivate students to learn?  Give them a future. Our students are not stupid. They can look ahead and see what our economic injustice--all of our money flowing upwards and never coming back down--will do to them. And yet the solution seems to be learning cursive writing? Seriously?

YOU CAN’T HAVE IT ALL by Barbara Ras But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back. You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August, you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love, though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys until you realize foam’s twin is blood. You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs, so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind, glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness, never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you all roads narrow at the border. You can speak a foreign language, sometimes, and it can mean something...

We entered a house, portal ornate and measured with simple lines, filled with corridors strange, yet somehow comforting, and rooms that turned upside down as we walked into them, while doors appeared without warning and opened as if to invite us further inward. What would we find, ever deeper, ever further inwards? The mathematical precision of the floorplans belied a feeling of artless improvisation, chaos twined around and about the wallpapers and the wainscoting, highlighted the trim and sank deep into the foundations. Yet this wildness was not rot, nor corruption--no more than that of any life lived in a morass of a world perhaps denied. Stairs upward instead led us inward, strophes between floors, between layers, kindness of the hostess melded with the casual dismissal of the hermetic, the withdrawn, the soul become it’s own shell, gritty sense of self an irritant to form the lustrous pearl. A moment’s pause to cast eyes about, our breath fog, wondering what had led to this, lea...