Sherry Chandler

Green towel, Goldbarth

Photograph by TR Williams

from The Leave-Taking

. . .

I’m going to the hills for a while, I hear
you can spear down game there with a toothpick,
and if you leave the door unlatched, your only skulking in
will be the night air’s, not a chill air, it curls
on your chest like a kitten. . . .

— Albert Goldbarth, Comings Back (Doubleday, 1976)

By the way, Poetry Daily this week features Why All This Music?

Wherein Goldbarth, Badgered by The Georgia Review into Conducting a Version of an Interview, Sighs and Accepts a Few Queries from Poets in the Audience, on the Condition that These Questions Come from the Bodies of Their Poems, and the Answers (Such as They Are) Come from the Bodies of Goldbarth’s Poems (with a little verbal glue in non-poem form in italics)

Black cat on Friday the 13

Stuff

Via Ron K. Jeffries, 12-year-old cat commutes by bus in England

Update: And this one: Florida man blames cat for downloading child pornography

You can generate your own Kenyan birth certificate at this link. And you can watch Bill Maher ridicule the birthers at this link. Thanks to The Sideshow.

Also via The Sideshow, A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush, in which James A. Haught describes how George W. Bush told Jacques Chirac that Gog and Magog were at work in Iraq and that’s why we had to invade.

Malcolm Gladwell deconstructs To Kill A Mockingbird in The Courthouse Ring.

Via Corrente, The Health Insurers Have Already Won or How UnitedHealth and rival carriers, maneuvering behind the scenes in Washington, shaped health-care reform for their own benefit Meanwhile, via Hippy Steve, DN! Nine Arrested in Iowa Single-Payer Protest. And lies Republicans tell here and here.

From tinydoctor, it was Russia killed Twitter. Or was it Georgia? Update: More on this story.

And this may be my favorite headline of the day: Ky. jailer resigns after rape conviction

Some views of Peanut

Peanut has appeared on the pages of this blog many times. Here are a few of my favorite shots revisited.

Cat with Barnyard Revolution

The two horses had just lain down when a brood of ducklings, which had lost their mother, filed into the barn, cheeping feebly and wandering from side to side to find some place where they would not be trodden on. Clover made a sort of wall round them with her great foreleg, and the ducklings nestled down inside it and promptly fell asleep. At the last moment Mollie, the foolish, pretty white mare who drew Mr. Jones’s trap, came mincing daintily in, chewing at a lump of sugar. She took a place near the front and began flirting her white mane, hoping to draw attention to the red ribbons it was plaited with. Last of all came the cat, who looked round, as usual, for the warmest place, and finally squeezed herself in between Boxer and Clover; there she purred contentedly throughout Major’s speech without listening to a word of what he was saying.

— George Orwell, Animal Farm

Cat with cityscape, cat with bunny rabbit

from Insignificant Needs

The houses huddled one on top of the other,
or face to face without seeing each other. The elbows
of the chimneys knock against each other in the dark. The light in the bakery
is a sigh that allows a tiny little passageway on the street.
A cat looked behind her. It vanished. . . .

— Yannis Ritsos, from The Fourth Dimension: Selected Poems of Yannish Ritsos, trans. Rae Dalven (David R. Godine, 1977)

__________
This photograph is from the spring of 1984, a time when we still tried to save baby rabbits from cat predation. The cat is Gremlin, who would live another five years or so. They are on top of our refrigerator, a place we put the bunny to keep him out of cat’s way. Gremlin, who was about 12, seems to have fallen asleep at her post.

Cat with mayors and sparrows

From Project Gutenberg’s The Spectator via and redacted by Heraclitean Fire:

As I was walking [in] the Streets about a Fortnight ago, I saw an ordinary Fellow carrying a Cage full of little Birds upon his Shoulder; and as I was wondering with my self what Use he would put them to, he was met very luckily by an Acquaintance, who had the same Curiosity. Upon his asking him what he had upon his Shoulder, he told him, that he had been buying Sparrows for the Opera. Sparrows for the Opera, says his Friend, licking his lips, what are they to be roasted? No, no, says the other, they are to enter towards the end of the first Act, and to fly about the Stage.

[ long passage snipped ]

But to return to the Sparrows; there have been so many Flights of them let loose in this Opera, that it is feared the House will never get rid of them; and that in other Plays, they may make their Entrance in very wrong and improper Scenes, so as to be seen flying in a Lady�s Bed-Chamber, or perching upon a King�s Throne; besides the Inconveniences which the Heads of the Audience may sometimes suffer from them. I am credibly informed, that there was once a Design of casting into an Opera the Story of Whittington and his Cat, and that in order to it, there had been got together a great Quantity of Mice; but Mr. Rich, the Proprietor of the Play-House, very prudently considered that it would be impossible for the Cat to kill them all, and that consequently the Princes of his Stage might be as much infested with Mice, as the Prince of the Island was before the Cat�s arrival upon it; for which Reason he would not permit it to be Acted in his House.

In case you’ve forgotten your Survey of Brit Lit, here is wikipedia:

The Spectator was a daily publication of 1711�12, founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in England after they met at Charterhouse School. Eustace Budgell, a cousin of Addison’s, also contributed. Each ‘paper’, or ‘number’, was approximately 2,500 words long, and the original run consisted of 555 numbers. These were collected into seven volumes. The paper was revived without the involvement of Steele in 1714, appearing thrice weekly for six months, and these papers when collected formed the eighth volume.