The New York Metropolitan Opera

I'm off to New York til Monday. I'll leave you all with some very sweet words from Mr. Artie Gold (Montreal poet, for those of you not in the know). Oh Artie, will you ever read again and will I be present to soak it up? Hope so.

the illegal swimmer

Not realizing the night,
accepting the cold the water's arrogance

breaking into the water; intruding
in an element with no love
so men are fooled and drowned.

mercury it will slide,
rush up our bodies;
and we are returned to earth.

my foot feels the water
slide never embracing it
steps aside.

we might sooner cherish silver.



This is my dress for the Met. I have to hem it tonight. It's already 10:30. Oh my.

Miller on the New York Public Library, the working class

Miller with model
A man by the name of Andrew Carnegie funded the libraries of New York around 1900. Henry Miller, in his collection "Colossus of Maroussi", sounds off on what the library did for the working class,

"He's dead now, and he left us a chain of libraries which makes the working people more intelligent, more cultured, more informed; in short, more miserable and unhappy then they ever were."

Listen yourself.

Ambition, Integrity,... Rhetoric

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest -
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men -
Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

Murder in the Dark

"It's hard to have a sense of humour in a cloak, in a high wind, on a moor."

from "Women's Novels", Margaret Atwood

Apparently, despair is a sin.

But I wonder, when has God ever had a (romantic) relationship.

To despair is to reject God.

Then why provide humankind with the damn feeling in the first place.

Rejuvenated old poem

how love is found out

where windows open      abandoned once
or not thought of

when others, a speech of everlasting,
skirted the avenues in search of

insects or birds, mentioned or read about,
there is an afternoon, and how to spend it

torn up or cut up, I sit,
scratch a surface into

make a cure for that, the sunken part

here, vegetation
takes a mountain walk to disturb

an apple dissected or
broken for the trip

deluge of nature, how love is found out;
to be overrun by amount

faculty in netting or small game
hyphenated compliments tied      a ball around a pole

afflicts an audience to participate, slow down
or disappear

fold away
the need to be caressed

such small spaces occupy the heart