2:28: Sweet potato fries and Dr. Pepper on ice.
I am happy to see that my old friend Catherine Meng has two poems in the new issue of Fence (winter 2008-2009). Here is a link to one of them. In a perfect world, Catherine Meng would read every Friday at 7 in a nearby location.
Fence, IN STOCK. $10.
“Sure a lot of books in the world.”
From “Making Changes,” by Leonard Michaels:
The hall was clogged with bodies; none of them hers, but who could be sure? The light was bad, there was too much noise, too much movement. Too many people had been invited. More kept arriving. I liked it, but it was hard to get from one room to another. Conversation was impossible. People had to lean close and shriek. It killed the effect of wit, looking into nostrils, shrieking, “What? What?” But it was a New York scene. I liked it. Except she was missing; virtually torn out of my hands. Cecily. I would have asked people if they had seen her, but I was ashamed to admit I had lost her. I was afraid she was someone’s date or inextricably into something. I was afraid she was copulating. She had been dressed, but it was a New York scene. Minutes had passed. I shoved through the hall — hot, dark, squealing with bodies — and looked for her. I shoved into the kitchen and saw just one couple, a lady in a brown tweed suit talking to a short dapper man in spats. She was stout, fiftyish, had fierce eyes. Flat, black as nailheads. Her voice flew around like pots and pans. The man glanced at me, then down as if embarrassed. The lady ignored me. I ignored her and busied around the wet, sloppy counter looking for an unused glass and a bottle of something, as if I wanted a drink. The lady was saying, slam, clang:
“Sexual enlightenment, the keystone of modernity, I dare say, can hardly be considered an atavistic intellectual debauch, Cosmo.”
– The Collected Stories (FSG; $15) IN STOCK
And suddenly there it is, on page 96 of Laurie Colwin’s Another Marvelous Thing (1986), the only instance I can find — have ever found — in literature of the use of the word unflapped.
Billy went about her business outwardly unflapped.
[p.18] Takayuki Kanda and his team at ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories in Kyoto recognize the importance of finding common ground between humans and robots in order to establish relationships and to build them over time, just as normal human-human relationships evolve with time, and they have identified various goals in robotics research that will need to be achieved in order to enable robots to exhibit sufficiently humanlike behavior patterns to engender human empathy. One of these goals is for robots to recognize individuals: “It is vital that two parties recognize each other for their relationship to develop…. Although person identification is an essential requirement for a partner robot, current visual and auditory sensing technologies cannot reliably support it. Therefore an unfortunate consequence is that a robot may behave the same with everyone…. Misidentification can ruin a relationship. For example, a person my be hurt or offended if the robot were to call the person by someone else’s name.”
Read more about the robotic evolution from humans’ mechanical slaves to our loving companions in David Levy’s Love + Sex with Robots, (Harper Perennial, $14.95). IN STOCK!
Elaine Scarry, writing in the Boston Review:
… let us suppose what is fair to suppose, that Barack Obama and John McCain continue in good health, are as wedded to the law as they appear, that one of the two is elected fairly and honestly, and that the country begins its mighty pivot back to its gravitational center in the rule of law. It will be almost like a miracle cure, an overnight release from our eight-year-long affliction.
Or will it? What will this shift over to the rule of law mean? It will mean that when we are led by a person who does not believe in the rule of law, we will not as a country follow the rule of law; and when we are led by a person who does believe in the rule of law, we will follow the rule of law. If that is the case, the United States will continue to be what it has been during the last eight years: a country governed by the rule of men (their beliefs, their preferences, their choices), not by the rule of law (where beliefs, preferences, and choices are constrained by invariable and nonnegotiable prohibitions on cruelty and fraud). Just as one might in the past have said, “this president was short whereas the next president was tall” or “this president was isolationist whereas as the next president was internationalist,” so now one might shrug and say, “this president believed it was his prerogative to torture whereas the next president believed it was not.” The incalculable damage left by Bush and Cheney’s day-in-and-day-out contempt for national and international law includes the power to sweep forward in time and trivialize into a matter of personal preference any future president’s adherence to the law. Will we become a country in which the rule of law is just another policy preference? Do we really think that the rule of law is to be left in the hands of our leaders?
– “Presidential Crimes” Sept/Oct 2008
“Gravy is the simplest, tastiest, most memory-laden dish I know how to make: a little flour, salt and pepper, crispy bits of whatever meat anchored the meal, a couple of cups of water or milk and slow stirring to break up lumps. It smells of home, the door locked against the night and a stillness made safe by the sound of a spoon going round in a pan. It is anticipation, the last thing prepared before the meal comes to the table, the bowl in Mama’s hand closing the day out peacefully, no matter what came before.”
-from Dorothy Allison’s “Crossing to Safety,” in Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table, edited by Amanda Hesser, IN STOCK
Forty-four years ago, on November 3, 1964, Roger Miller recorded “King of the Road” and “You Can’t Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd.”
If you don’t end up needing to take to the streets after Tuesday’s election, might I suggest you keep your political brain entertained and oiled by reading The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation? Written by Jonathan Hennessey and illustrated by Aaron McConnell, this new publication works its way through the beginning of our history as a united people and the background and meaning of the documents that continue to unite us still after the 2008 elections. After Tuesday, we all might need a gentle reminder!
The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation. Jonathon Hennessey and Aaron McConnell, (Hill and Wang, $16.95), IN STOCK
