Friday, April 4, 2008

All Men Are Liars - Nick Lowe



All Men, All Men are liars their words ain’t worth no more than worn out tires.
Hey Girls, bring rusty pliers to pull this tooth, all men are liars and that’s the truth.

Do you remember Rick Astley?
He had a big fat hit that was ghastly.
He said I’m never gonna give you up or let you down.
Well I’m here to tell ya that Dick’s a clown
Though he was just a boy when he made that vow.
I’d bet it all that he knows by now.

Chorus

Among god’s creatures man must be.
The most slimy and slippery now.
There stands the naked ape in a monkey suite.
Behind a little mustache he grew, the shifty brute.
All the ones not choking on the words they ate are
Sweating on getting their stories straight

transpcript of the charming Nick Lowe's statements at the end of the video (which is the best part)

"I'm going to be 41 next March...it's now January...I'm 41...yes..and I still feel kind of naughty (laughs)...you know...I'm not a wild enough guy to be real horrible, you know...but I think there's ways of getting your point across...you know...without alienating everybody...and I certainly didn't think I'd still be doing it at 40...no, indeed...bu this thing is, you see...that now I really think that I'm just starting to get good...I think I'll be real great when I'm 60...I'm going to look fantastic when I'm 60"

________________________________________

Please, a little less love and a little more common decency.
Kurt Vonnegut

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Protect Our Troops and Constitution Act (H.R. 5626)

I don't usually post from work but I checked my email during lunch today and there was this, from American Friends For Federal Legislation, which I wanted to get it out quickly. I know we are mostly all aware of what Bush and his band of thugs are up to but this provided me with an easy way to act. I hope this is helpful.

Peace,
Pagan

Keep the Door Open


The Bush administration is trying to lock the U.S. into a long-term military presence in Iraq. Preventing this from happening depends on your action now.
In the next week, your representative can act to prevent the Bush administration from taking this step by cosponsoring the Protect Our Troops and Constitution Act (H.R. 5626). But you need to act fast before the House takes up a spending bill to authorize more money for the U.S. war in Iraq.
The administration is negotiating a long-term security agreement with the Iraqi government. This agreement could could tie the hands of the next president and Congress, who could be impeded from negotiating a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
You can help keep the door open for making good on the U.S. promise to leave Iraq. Help build support for the Protect Our Troops and Constitution Act (H.R. 5626). This legislation would require the administration to consult Congress before entering into a long-term security agreement with Iraq and prevent any money going to establish permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq.

As of this morning, April 3, this legislation only has two cosponsors, Reps. William Delahunt (MA) and Rosa DeLauro (CT). If you can help FCNL add cosponsors to this legislation in the next week, FCNL's lobbyists believe the House could attach these conditions to the spending bill for the war in Iraq. (While we oppose the spending and ask members to vote against it, we acknowledge that it is likely to pass and should be used to curb the U.S. occupation.)
Take ActionUrge your representative to act within the next week to cosponsor the "Protect Our Troops and Constitution Act" (H.R. 5626). The more cosponsors this bill gains, the greater chance the House will consider it.
Find Out More
Read FCNL lobbyist Jim Fine's analysis "Administration Plans New Authorization for War and Military Bases".
Find out more about the Protect Our Troops and Constitution Act (H.R. 5626)

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

National Poetry Month


1928-1974






I first discovered the poetry of Anne Sexton when I was in college,, five years after her death. When I mentioned my attraction to her poetry to an English professor I had at the time, he scoffed and rattled off suggested names of "real poets". I never allowed his opinion to cloud my passion for the work of Anne Sexton. All of these years I have kept my tattered copies of To Bedlam And Partway Back, Live or Die and The Awful Rowing Toward God. I think she's an amazing poet; brutally honest and a person whose humanity was both flinching and accessible.

I'll provide an informal bio based on what I know about her. She was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1928 to affluent parents. Married at nineteen, she was diagnosed with postpartum depression after the birth of her first child. While raising her children, Sexton suffered many mental breakdowns and was hospitalized on several occasions, experiences she wrote about in several poems.

On the advice of her psychiatrist, Sexton began to write poetry as therapy. She was a poetry workshop student of Robert Lowell and became a close friend of the poet Maxine Kumin but otherwise had no academic training as a writer or poet. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her collection of poems Live or Die and enjoyed several other poetry awards. Despite achieving these successes as a poet, Anne Sexton committed suicide in 1974, at the age of 46.

Despite her troubled life, Sexton was known as irreverent and funny. She struggled with marriage and parenting and had many extramarital affairs. During her career she fronted a chamber rock band called Anne Sexton And Her Kind, who played musical backdrops to Sexton's poems. She also wrote a play called 45 Mercy Street.

Anne Sexton's poetic themes often centered around womanhood and touched upon topics that were considered controversial in her time: masturbation, abortion, infidelity and, of course, mental illness and death. Her style of self-revelatory poetry was often referred to as confessional and lumped into the category of feminist poetry, though Sexton was not a self-described feminist. About her work, Sexton stated, I hold back nothing.

In 1992, Diane Middlebrook published a controversial biography of Anne Sexton that included transcripts of over three hundred taped therapy sessions released by Sexton's psychotherapist. The Sexton estate claims that Anne Sexton would have wanted the tapes released but critics have pointed to the lack of ethics both of the psychotherapist and the biographer.



Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.



I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

Anne Sexton

Tuesday, April 1, 2008












Dearest W.P.


The answer is yes I do. I know this Frida is your favorite so this one's for you.

And this, by e.e. cummings


yes is a pleasant country:
if's wintry(my lovely)
let's open the year
both is the very weather
(not either)
my treasure.
when violets appear
love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
(and april's where we're)

Monday, March 31, 2008

Recommendations

Newton (1795) © Tate

Hello, Friends

My favorite blogging time is right after school when there is nothing pressing to do and I can relax with a glass of wine and perhaps also play some music or read; before dinner preperations or before going out for a bite. It's quiet. It's just the two of us. Actually, tonight until late Wednesday, I am a free woman.
I like to pretend I live alone. Get this: there has never been a time in my entire life when I lived alone. So when W.P. travels and he does so extensively, I love it. It's only hard when he goes some place really good like France or Amsterdam. Right now he's in Las Vegas and he actually has to do a little work for a change (rolling eyes) as he is presenting at a conference, so it's okay.

I'm content. W.P. and I are great friends and great roomies; we live well together. We have some things in common and in other things we usually overlap. I am baffled by at least a couple of his interests and habits but nothing I can't live with.
I've really digressed here.

What I really wanted to post about is some good stuff going on at other people's blogs today. I went to a new blog, Caliban's Dream, and there came across this great live video of Natalie Merchant, with a good band, performing the song Wonder. It is infectiously positive.

More good music can be had at Mad Priest's site, where you can listen to a sampling of new wave music from The Undertones (love them), Eddie And The Hot Rods and, my own personal favorite, a Massachusetts dude - Jonathan Richman (& The Modern Lovers), among others.

At singing bear's blog tiz yer tiz , he's posted an original poem that I really like. I've been visiting there for several weeks now and enjoying singing bear's peotry but this particular one stood out for me. It's beautiful.


Lastly, I'm fascinated by William Blake now more than ever. If you care to, click on the image, a painting of Newton by Blake and explore the Tate's feature on his art. Great stuff!

You kids have a lot of get up and go for a dreary Monday! Thank you!

All smiles,
Pagan

Sunday, March 30, 2008


The Path Down to Lake Pleasant in Winter
Montague, Massachusetts





















Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.

Albert Einstein

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