New Pets!

Fundamental
RHINO

"Celebrating 20 years since the release of their debut LP, Please, the Pet Shop Boys’ ninth album musically references the ’80s while addressing contemporary concerns. It’s at once essential Pet Shop Boys and a contemplation of a world where fundamentalism shapes wars and threatens personal freedom. Trevor Horn—the quintessential ’80s producer who helped fuse hi-NRG dance beats and new-wave rock for Frankie Goes to Hollywood—shapes the Pets’ effusive orchestrations, which contrast smartly with Neil Tennant’s understated vocal ache and arch lyrics. “I’m With Stupid” characterizes Tony Blair and George Bush as lovers with peculiar chemistry, while “Luna Park” paints America as a theme park where fear generates thrills. The album’s most explicit ’80s flashback, “The Sodom and Gomorrah Show,” celebrates the personal salvation in what zealots would consider sin, and does so with the aural equivalent of a Busby Berkeley extravaganza. Mixing ambitious art with dance floor entertainment, Tennant and musical partner Chris Lowe venture beyond their trademark synth-pop while retaining its playfulness."
— Barry Walters, for Out Magazine

When I came home from work this afternoon, look what I found in the back yard.

  

Salon 4

Thursday, 13 July 2006 @ 7pm

Rafael Campo
Poet / Physician
Evan Adams
Actor / Physician

Adams, star of the films Smoke Signals and The Business of Fancy Dancing, and Campo, who uses poetry in his teaching at Harvard Medical School, discuss the synergies of artistic endeavor and medical practice. Audience dialogue strongly encouraged.

Wessel & Lieberman Booksellers
208 First Ave S. | Seattle, WA

All tickets are just $10!
Ticket information: (206) 282 · 2677
contact@counterbalancearts.org
website www.counterbalancearts.org

Syd Barret RIP

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom, blown on the steel breeze.
. . .

Nobody knows where you are, how near or how far.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Pile on many more layers and I'll be joining you there.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
And we'll bask in the shadow of yesterday's triumph, and sail on the steel breeze.

Come on you boy child, you winner and loser,
come on you miner for truth and delusion, and shine!

31 Groundbreaking Books

From the Acadamy of American Poets website, where you can read more about each book, including a nifty essay. Have you read every one of them? (I am only 18 out of 31, and some of those incompletely). Are there some books you would have added to this list? I am thinking perhaps Gluck's The Wild Iris or Forche's The Country Between Us, or Graham's The Dream of the Unified Field or Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover or Hejinian's My Life.

Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman
"One critic noted in an 1855, 'If Walt Whitman's premises are true, then there is a subtler range of poetry than that of the grandeur of Homer or Shakespeare.'"


The Complete Poems
by Emily Dickinson
"Only eight of her poems were published during her lifetime, primarily submitted by family and friends without her permission."


North of Boston
by Robert Frost
"The poems are marked by modern themes and concerns, dark impressions of early twentieth-century rural life, and the nature of tragedy."


Tender Buttons
by Gertrude Stein
"Simultaneously considered to be a masterpiece of verbal Cubism, a modernist triumph, a spectacular failure, a collection of confusing gibberish, and an intentional hoax."


Harmonium
by Wallace Stevens
"An unusual first book, partially because it didn’t appear until Stevens was 44 years old, representing the cumulative poetic works of his life up until that point."


Spring and All
by William Carlos Williams
"Created a new kind of American lyric, with attention toward natural, idiomatic language, sharply observed images, unusual syntax, and abbreviated, carefully wrought lines."


The Cantos
by Ezra Pound
"He privileged poetry as song, proclaiming that meaning is all tied up with sound and that beauty is difficult."


The Weary Blues
by Langston Hughes
"The poems progress at a self-assured and lyrical pace—partly because Hughes expected them to be performed with musical accompaniment in the famous Harlem clubs of that era."


The Bridge
by Hart Crane
"Physically removed from the city, Crane relied on his memory and imagination to render the numerous awesome and grotesque nuances of New York."


Selected Poems
by Marianne Moore
"While most poets either employ established meters or write free verse, Moore’s poems are built from lines of counted syllables, in patterns that she devised herself."


Collected Sonnets
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
"Millay gave her most-famous attention to the most archetypal of human concerns: love and death."


Four Quartets
by T. S. Eliot
"Eliot considered these four long poems to be his finest achievement and the pinnacle of his career."


Trilogy 1944-1946
by H. D.
"Written while she lived in London during World War II, it is considered one of the best examples of civilian war poetry."


The Waking
by Theodore Roethke
"The collection’s intimate, personal quality—"my secrets cry aloud" and "my heart keeps open house"—heavily influenced later Confessional poets."


Howl and Other Poems
by Allen Ginsberg
"The 29-year-old Ginsberg unveiled an early version of his poem, Howl, to a mesmerized audience whose relentless cheers of "Go! Go! Go!" brought him to tears by the end of the performance."


Life Studies
by Robert Lowell
"Inspired by his battle with mental illness, his marital problems, and the Vietnam War, it demonstrates a dramatic turn toward deeply personal work."


The Bean Eaters
by Gwendolyn Brooks
"Written during the early years of the Civil Rights movement, during which the Brooks's interest in social issues deepened and found expression in her work."


The Maximus Poems
by Charles Olson
"Taking up local issues such as preserving the wetlands and documenting the history of fishermen, Olson's poems are widely read as political, but they also contain deeply lyrical and personal passages."


A Ballad of Remembrance
by Robert Hayden
"The poems demonstrate the narrative ease and compelling character development that mark Hayden's best work."


For Love
by Robert Creeley
"The breath-determined lines, unusual syntax, and rhythm of Creeley’s plainspoken minimalist lyrics were a remarkable break from the poetic landscape."


The Branch Will Not Break
by James Wright
"A startling mix of careful detail and surprising leaps of thought and structure in loose and open verses."


77 Dream Songs
by John Berryman
"Many of the poems are narrated by Henry, Berryman’s alter ego, who speaks as if from dream world, among uninterpretable, but strangely familiar dream symbols and situations."


Lunch Poems
by Frank O'Hara
"his easy and conversational tone camouflaged an attention to formal detail, present beneath the pop-culture references, melodramatic declarations, and quick successions of perfect images."


Ariel
by Sylvia Plath
"The darkly lyric poems address motherhood, sexuality, marriage, and her own experiences with depression."


Live or Die
by Anne Sexton
"Encouraged by her doctor to pursue her interest in writing, Sexton enrolled in a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education in the fall of 1957."


Bending the Bow
by Robert Duncan
"Duncan set off for New York where he became involved with the vibrant downtown literary coterie that followed the works of the Abstract Expressionists."


Of Being Numerous
by George Oppen
"The title poem, widely considered his masterpiece, is a sequence of forty sections that examines questions of singularity within a diverse and crowded world."


Diving into the Wreck
by Adrienne Rich
"These poems speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs."


The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir
by Richard Hugo
"Hugo encourages younger poets to recognize their true subject matter beneath the surface, but above all, to ignore advice about writing and find their own way."


Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror
by John Ashbery
"I tried each thing," begins this inimitable volume, "only some were immortal and free."


Geography III
by Elizabeth Bishop
"She focused her precise and carefully crafted lines on subtle impressions of the physical world."

I Know the Answer: Do You?

From Word a Day:

"What's common among the five words (scintillescent, vetitive, rapparee, bilabial, froufrou) featured here this week? If you know the answer, send it to wordsATwordsmith.org (replace AT with @). The first person to identify it wins an autographed copy of the book "Another Word A Day".

-Anu Garg (gargATwordsmith.org)"


Hint: think of Noah's Ark

Yay Amelie!

 

Mauresmo wins Wimbledon over Henin-Hardenne 2-6 6-3 6-4.
I am so happy for her, I am skipping inside.

 

Strangers With Candy

We are going to see Strangers With Candy opening at the Varsity Theater tonight. I can hardly wait to hear Amy Sedaris' character, Jerri, referring to her naughty bits, say: "I'm moist as a snack cake down there."

Alphabet Meme

From Pamela:


Accent: none, they say Pacific Northwesterners have "no accent" (except that we say "Warsh-ing-ton.")

Booze: vodka, cointreau, lime, a little fruit juice, shaken with ice, poured up in a chilled glass.

Chore I hate: ironing

Dogs/cats: nada

Essential electronics: PDA with Scrabble

Favorite perfume/cologne: None please, I like a man to be a natural man

Gold/silver: matching gold wedding bands

Hometown: Seattle, WA

Insomnia: Nope

Job title: Family Practice Doc, Community Clinic

Kids: nada

Living arrangements: 1904 little box of a house, the first house built in our neighborhood.

Most admired trait: silliness/sensibleness

Number of sexual partners: I lost count (was I supposed to keep count!)

Overnight hospital stays: hernia operation age 5, chest pain GI scare 2004

Phobia: roller coasters

Quote: "Dreams lost to waking, days undone by sleep."

Relationship, longest: 20 years this December, with Dean. My oh my.

Siblings: 4 brothers, 4 sisters, one sister who is deceased (age 5, diabetes).

Time I usually wake up: 6:00, 6:15, 6:30 at the latest, 6:45 at the very latest, 7:00 at the very *very* latest (Dean is dying laughing right now)

Unusual talent: anagrams and crosswords

Vegetable I refuse to eat: sweet potatoes (is that a vegetable?)

Worst habit: Perfectionist

X-rays: rapid CT of my chest last year: no heart plaque!

Yummy foods I make: I am the King of Risotto.

Zodiac sign: Cancer

  

Ken Lay, the Enron thief and former close buddy of the President, dies of a heart attack. Yeah, right. What a coincidence. Poor guy. I bet it was Bush and his cronies who offed him, so that his jail sentence and other falderal wouldn't look bad on the "family."

It's the Fourth of July and like clockwork the clouds and the rain and the THUNDER have blown in to Seattle. It is NEVER sunny on the Fourth of July here. Oh well, at least those little bottle rockets the kids next door are lighting won't catch our roof on fire this year.

Dean and I sat out back and ate ribeye steaks for dinner, with grilled baby bok choy, garlic and portabello mushrooms, as it rained. We were protected by the table umbrella, and it was actually kind of delightful, to watch the rain coming down, yet not be wetted by it. NPR was playing on our hand-cranked emergency radio. A red-breasted finch was sitting on the telephone wire, watching us, and flapping his little feathers.

Congratulations to Annette Spaulding-Convy, winner of this year's Floating Bridge Press Poetry Chapbook Award. In the Convent We Become Clouds is hot off the presses, and includes a gorgeous letterpress cover designed by Jules Remedios Faye. Read more about Annette and her chapbook here.


THERE WERE NO RULES ABOUT UNDERWEAR

My friend, the Carmelite, could only wear white
non-bikini panties, laceless bras,

but my Order was progressive — red satin, cut
to show some hip, a midnight-blue Wonderbra

hidden under my habit. The fathers were perceptive, not priest
fathers, but men who flirted with me

while their daughters lit Virgin
of Guadalupe candles in the chapel alcove,

men like the firefighter, who ran into my bedroom
the summer night I slept nude, flames

in the cloister attic. I pulled the sheet around my body
as he looked at black lace on the floor —

I need to feel your walls to see if they're hot.

On This Day In History

1937: Aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific while attempting to make the first around-the-world flight at the equator.


"We must be on you, but we cannot see you. Fuel is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet."

"We are running north and south."

Dean and I went out for dinner at Ray's Boathouse last night. We sat in a window seat and watched the boats putt-putting through the ship canal and out to Puget Sound, probably heading out to the San Juans for the 4th of July weekend. It must be fun to have a boat, especially this time of year, or to be able to "summer" in the San Juan Islands. We will never be rich enough to have a summer house, so I guess the best we can hope for is friends with summer houses (*wink*).

After dinner we drove out to Golden Gardens. The beach was packed! Families having picnics, kids playing volleyball, kids being drunk and disorderly, lovers holding hands and walking the beach. The sun was setting still well past 9pm (or so it seemed) and the light was glorious. We walked up to the railroad tracks and watched a train go by through the canopy of forest, then drove back home through Ballard, which has really changed a lot in the past 5-10 years: a brand new high school building, numerous low-rise condos, lots of new shops and restaurants. We want to try this new Spanish tapas place called Matador, decorated with a bullfight theme (it sounds hokey, but it's really cool), and wrought iron railings and candles and outdoor seating close to the street.

This morning we put in several hours on the yard. We pruned wisteria, trimmed back tomato leaves to get air to the fruit, dug up nasturtiums that were crowding the Walla Walla onions, staked up the huge and leaning towers of crocosmia lucifer, filled the stone bird bath, watered and weeded. It's hot enough for sunstroke! Looking forward to having some friends over for dinner tonight, one of the docs I work with and his wife. We're gonna grill something and eat outside. Fun fun!