freddy fabris | renaissance master mechanics

luci shaw | while reading the new yorker

A word flies off the page,
and through an open window in
my imagination, a bird
that got in and cannot leave,
batting wings against
my walls and bookcases, uttering
piteous vowels of sound.

Frenzied, she aims at the light.
It is window glass and it knocks her out.
Seconds later she comes to life
again, still frantic for exit.

I move away quietly, closing
the door of my mind behind me
to lessen the anxiety in the room,
leaving the window wide
open. Later, after sh has
found her freedom
a winged presence remains,
and a feather on the floor.

Next month, maybe other
words will fly in and I'll let them stay
and make their nests and lay
little literary eggs

by Luci Shaw

*

About 13 years ago, Luci Shaw became part of a writers group that I started back in 1992 with Tim Anderson, Karen Cooper, Mike Mason, and Greg McKitrick. In the last while I've started a New Years tradition of bringing in assemblages of words and phrases that caught my attention while reading that year's issues of the New Yorker magazine. A couple months ago Luci brought in this new poem - she invariably has half a dozen or ten new ones every month. So now I think of those magpie poems of mine as nests filled with eggs from a lot of different birds. An index to my found poems from the New Yorker is here. I've done the ones for 2018, but not posted them yet.

darkened cities (“villes enteintes” ) | thierry cohen

hong kong

los angeles

new york

paris

rio

san francisco

sao paulo

shanghai

shanghai

tokyo

"Since 2010, Cohen has devoted himself to a single project - depicting the major cities of the world as they would appear at night without light pollution, or how they would look if we could see the stars. he photographs the world’s major cities, seeking out views that resonate for him and noting the precise time, angle, and latitude and longitude of his exposure. As the world rotates around its axis the stars that would have been visible above a particular city move to deserts, plains, and other places free of light pollution.By noting the precise latitude and angle of his cityscape, Cohen is able to track the earth’s rotation to places of atmospheric clarity like the Mojave, the Sahara, and the Atacama desert. There he sets up his camera to record what is lost to modern urban dwellers. Compositing the two images, Cohen creates a single new image full of resonance and nuance."
twisted sifter

donald trump, poet | aleksandar hemon

JENNIFER

I can’t do that to you,
Jennifer. That’s my Jennifer.
You know how much I liked
her when I first met her.
Then she started to kill me.

But that’s actually not—
wasn’t your fault.
It was somebody
that you were
dealing with that
wasn’t so good.
Right?

I never blamed you for that.
I know the good.
But this one you like,
right, Jennifer?


POCKETS

You’re going to always have
pockets of something.
What—
you’re going to have people,
like the one-armed man
who blew up a restaurant.
You’re going to have pockets.


TREMENDOUS NUMBERS

1
And we have
tremendous—we have
tremendous
numbers to come,
because these are real—
this isn’t like in the old days,
when you had a lot of
numbers that didn’t mean
anything. You have
tremendous potential,
tremendous numbers
to come.

2
Now we’re going to start
bringing numbers down.
We also have tremendous numbers
with regard to hurricanes and fires
and the tremendous forest fires
all over. We had very big numbers,
unexpectedly big numbers.

California does a horrible job
maintaining their forests.
They’re going to have to start doing
a better job or we’re not going
to be paying them. They are doing
a horrible job of maintaining
what they have.

And we had big numbers on
tremendous numbers
with the forest fires

and obviously the hurricane.


THEM

We called
them and let
them know.
They were able to nab
this very vicious gang
of terrorists. They got
them. I assume
they’re someplace right
now
that maybe you
don’t even want to know
about. I don’t know what
they did with
them. O.K.? And
I don’t care.


CHANGE

So no, I have—
I don’t think I have
to do anything. I have a
—you know, I have
—I have had a good—
now, that can
always change,
but I have had
a good relationship
with Kim Jong
Un, and I’m not
saying it won’t
change. It could
change. The whole
situation could
change.


the new yorker | april 27, 2019 | daily shouts

typos, misread, overheard and dreamed #1 | found poem

My mind self muddles:
back shadow,
bone broth blanket,
knee braces made of feathers
with a metal file on her head.

No, gargoyles are not real.
Everybody wants to learn to knit socks.

They call me Quintessential Tommy,
Malcolm Muggleridge,
a calamity of errors.

How many bugs are there?
How needless on all the trees?

Nobody likes hitting whales.
Strangers will sneeze on you.

He quibbles about monikers.
He can’t swallow, either. And when he swallows, birds get in.


by Ron Reed

two watercolours | john ruskin

study of spray of dead oak leaves (1879)

santa maria della spina, pisa; east end (1846/47)

papergirl | jill lepore

The wood-panelled tailgate of the 1972 Oldsmobile station wagon dangled open like a broken jaw, making a wobbly bench on which four kids could sit, eight legs swinging. Every Sunday morning, long before dawn, we’d get yanked out of bed to stuff the car’s way-back with stacks of twine-tied newspapers, clamber onto the tailgate, cut the twine with my mother’s sewing scissors, and ride around town, bouncing along on that bench, while my father shouted out orders from the driver’s seat. “Watch out for the dog!” he’d holler between draws on his pipe. “Inside the screen door!” “Mailbox!” As the car crept along, never stopping, we’d each grab a paper and dash in the dark across icy driveways or dew-drunk grass, crashing, seasonally, into unexpected snowmen. “Back porch!” “Money under the mat!” He kept a list, scrawled on the back of an envelope, taped to the dashboard: the Accounts. “They owe three weeks!” He didn’t need to remind us. We knew each Doberman and every debt. We’d deliver our papers — Worcester Sunday Telegrams — and then run back to the car and scramble onto the tailgate, dropping the coins we’d collected into empty Briggs tobacco tins as we bumped along to the next turn, the newspaper route our Sabbath.

After we’d shoved the last, fat Worcester Sunday Telegram inside the last, unlatched screen door, we’d head home, my father taking turns a little too fast, so that we’d have to clutch at one another and at the lip of the tailgate, to keep from falling off. “Dad, slow down!” we’d squeal, not meaning it. Then he’d make breakfast, hot chocolate with marshmallows in the winter, orange juice from a can of frozen concentrate in the summer, and on my plate I’d make wedges of cantaloupe into Viking ships sailing across a sea of maple syrup from the Coast of Bacon to Pancake Island. After breakfast, we’d dump the money from the tobacco tins onto the kitchen table and count coins, stacking quarters and nickels and dimes into wrappers from the Worcester County Institution for Savings, while my father updated the Accounts, and made the Collection List.

Going collecting was a drag. You had to knock on people’s doors and ask your neighbors for money — “Telegram! Collecting!” — and it was embarrassing, and, half the time, they’d ask you in, and before you knew it you’d be helping out, and it would take all day. “So long as you’re here, could you hold the baby while I take a quick shower?” “Honey, after this, could you bring my mail down to the post office on that cute little bike of yours?” I came to understand that the people who didn’t leave the money under the mat hadn’t forgotten to. They just liked having a kid visit on Sunday afternoon.

The death of a newspaper is sometimes like other deaths. The Mrs. and the Miss, a very, very old woman and her very old daughter, lived in a crooked green house on top of a rise and wore matching housecoats and slippers. The Miss followed the Mrs. around like a puppy, and, if you found them in the parlor reading the paper, the Mrs. would be poring over the opinion pages while the Miss cut pictures out of the funnies. “The Miss can’t think straight,” my father said. “Her head’s scrambled. So be gentle with her. Nothing to be afraid of. Be sure to help them out.” Once when I biked over there, the Miss was standing, keening, noise without words, sound without sense. The Mrs. wasn’t moving, and she wasn’t ever going to move again. I called for help and held the Miss’s hand, waiting for the wail of sirens. I didn’t know what else to do.


excerpted from "Does Journalism Have A Future" by Jill Lepore
The New Yorker, January 28, 2019

althea warren | read

"Read as a drunkard drinks or as a bird sings or a cat sleeps or a dog responds to an invitation to go walking, not from conscience or training, but because they'd rather do it than anything else in the world."

Althea Warren, Library Association speech, 1935

*

"The night you promised to go to dinner with the best friend of your foster aunt, just telephone that you have such a bad cold you're afraid she'll catch it. Stay at home instead and gobble Lucy Gayheart in one gulp like a boa constrictor."

Althea's Ways to Achieve Reading

*

from The Library Book, by Susan Orlean

mihaly csikszentmihalyi | picking lice

Baboons who live in the African plains spend about one-third of their life sleeping, and when awake they divide their time between traveling, finding and eating food, and free leisure time - which basically consists in interacting, or grooming each other's fur to pick out lice. As the historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has shown, in thirteenth century French villages the most common leisure pursuit was still that of picking lice out of each other's hair. Now, of course, we have television.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

doc savage | complete control of his mind

 

george bernard shaw | a splendid torch

This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

George Bernard Shaw

found poem 2018 in progress | assembled from the pages of the new yorker

I'm probably going to be a mad scientist,
and make the original recipe for creating life on earth:
the genealogies of English kings,
the birth names of all five Marx brothers,
the Köchel numbers of the major works of Mozart,
the batting averages of the top-ten all-time hitters in both leagues,
the differing effects on Superman of the various colors of Kryptonite.

What are you doing?
I don't mean what are you doing with your life,
or in general,
but what are you doing right now?

I’m reading right now a novel of dragons, know what I’m saying?

All I could think of was underwear, pens, eye drops,
the endangered Japanese night heron and the threatened lakeside daisy,
the prairies lost,
the wetlands lost
the glaciers lost,
the species lost,
the diminishing and despoiling of entire ecosystems,
dump truck,
dump truck in rain.
A very sad list.

I felt relieved to be in a restaurant that wasn't trying too hard to seem like it wasn't trying too hard.
I was hanging out with people who'd say,
"We're having a wine auction!"
Ornery pigeons, opinionated drunk people,
car alarm set off by other car alarm
upstairs neighbors watching "Hellboy II."
Maybe it was during one of those evenings
that he first devised his plan to become a hermit.
I don't blame him.
He had to do it.
He was too nice to people.
They would have eaten him alive if he'd stayed in a well-populated area.

"Oh, Rose, we're sliding!" I called out,
sounding apologetic,
because it appeared that I'd killed us.

Overwintering stink-bugs navigate like nine-year-olds in bumper cars,
making as much noise as possible and banging into everything in sight.

I had never seen color until I saw it in those Skittles.
Their everyday perfection was somehow dumbfounding.

Barker might as well have made a documentary about the upkeep of the Empire State Building
in the months preceding the arrival of King Kong.

The twin brothers in the garden
are savvy scenesters earning punk yuks.

Wonderments consort with clunkers

Writing, like dying,
is one of those things that should be done alone
or not at all.

Jerry Springer--
it's a stretch to call him a host;
how do you host a brawl?
He lies to slander and seduce,
he lies to profit,
and he sometimes lies, it seems,
just because.

The Faroe Islands, an austere, mountainous archipelago marooned in the North Atlantic two hundred miles nort of Scotland, has a landmass of only five hundred and forty square miles, and is sparsely populated with fifty thousand people and seventy thousand sheep. But, looked at another way, the country
It's a slasher-flick variation on the sex lives of ordinary teens,
during a stage when people often take risks because they don't know what they want,
other than for something major to happen.
It's very hard to predict how history will proceed after someone is shot in the head.

photos | greg girard | under vancouver

order book

tyee interview

kyoto village ad

paolo + gian lorenzo bernini | the christ child playing with a nail

ball players | mark 'the bird' fydrych

irish history

IRISH HISTORY

The Catholic Relief Act 1829, allowed British and Irish Catholics to sit in the Parliament. Daniel O'Connell became the first Catholic M.P. to be seated since 1689. As head of the Repeal Association, O'Connell mounted an unsuccessful campaign for the repeal of the Act of Union and the restoration of Irish self-government. O'Connell's tactics were largely peaceful, using mass rallies to show the popular support for his campaign. While O'Connell failed to gain repeal of the union, his efforts led to reforms in matters such as local government, and the Poor Laws.

A radical young Protestant landowner, Charles Stewart Parnell, turned the home rule movement (the Irish Parliamentary Party, IPP) into a major political force. It came to dominate Irish politics, to the exclusion of the previous Liberal, Conservative and Unionist parties that had existed there. The party's growing electoral strength was first shown in the 1880 general election, when it won 63 seats. Parnell's movement also campaigned for the right of Ireland to govern herself as a region within the United Kingdom, in contrast to O'Connell who had wanted a complete repeal of the Act of Union. A significant minority of Unionists (largely based in Ulster), but principally the revived radical Orange Order opposed home rule, fearing that a Dublin parliament dominated by Catholics and nationalists would discriminate against them and would impose tariffs on trade with Great Britain. (Whilst most of Ireland was primarily agricultural, north-east Ulster was the location of almost all the island's heavy industry and would have been affected by any tariff barriers imposed.) Intense rioting broke out in Belfast in 1886, as the first Home Rule Bill was being debated. In 1889, the scandal surrounding Parnell's divorce proceedings split the Irish party.

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man - Stephen attends school at Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College, where the apprehensive, intellectually gifted boy suffers the ridicule of his classmates while he learns the schoolboy codes of behaviour. While he cannot grasp their significance, at a Christmas dinner he is witness to the social, political, and religious tensions in Ireland involving Charles Steward Parnell that drives bitter wedges between members of his family, leaving Stephen with doubts over which social institutions he can place his faith in.

The last obstacle to achieving Home Rule was removed with the Parliament Act 1911, when the House of Lords lost its power to veto legislation and could only delay a bill for two years. In 1912, with the Irish Parliamentary Party at its zenith, a new third Home Rule Bill was introduced by Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, passing its first reading in the Imperial House of Commons but again defeated in the House of Lords (as with the bill of 1893). During the following two years in which the bill was delayed, debates in the Commons were largely dominated by questions surrounding Home Rule and Ulster Unionist's determined resistance to it. By 1914 the situation had escalated into militancy on both sides, first unionists then nationalists arming and drilling openly, bringing about a Home Rule crisis.

In September 1914, just as the First World War broke out, the UK Parliament finally passed the Third Home Rule Act to establish self-government for Ireland, condemned by the dissident nationalists' All-for-Ireland League party as a "partition deal." The Act was suspended for the duration of the war. In order to ensure the implementation of Home Rule after the war, nationalist leaders and the Irish Parliamentary Party under Redmond supported Ireland's participation with the British war effort and Allied cause. The 10th (Irish) Division, the 16th (Irish) Division and the 36th (Ulster) Division suffered crippling losses in the trenches on the Western Front, in Gallipoli and the Middle East. Between 35,000 and 50,000 Irishmen (in all armies) are believed to have died in the War. Each side believed that, after the war, Great Britain would favour their respective goals of remaining fully part of the United Kingdom or becoming a self-governing United Ireland within the union with the United Kingdom. Before the war ended, Britain made two concerted efforts to implement Home Rule, one in May 1916 after the Easter Rising and again during 1917–1918, but during the Irish Convention the Irish sides (Nationalist, Unionist) were unable to agree on terms for the temporary or permanent exclusion of Ulster from its provisions. However, the combination of postponement of Home Rule and the involvement of Ireland with Great Britain in the war ("England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity" as an old Republican saying went) provoked some on the radical fringes of Irish nationalism to resort to physical force. It was from the former Irish Volunteer ranks that the Irish Republican Brotherhood organised an armed rebellion in 1916.

At Easter 1916, a small band of 1500 republican rebels (Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army) staged a rebellion, called the Easter Rising in Dublin, under Padraig Pearse and James Connolly. The Rising was put down after a week's fighting. Initially their acts were widely condemned by nationalists. However the government's handling of the aftermath, and the execution of rebels and others in stages, ultimately led to widespread public sympathy for the rebels. The government and the Irish media wrongly blamed Sinn Fein for the rebellion, then a small monarchist political party with little popular support - even though in reality it had not been involved. Nonetheless Rising survivors joined the party in great numbers, radicalised its programme and took control of its leadership. The scales were finally tipped in Sinn Féin's favour when as a result of the German Spring Offensive the government, although it had already received large numbers of volunteer soldiers from Ireland, intended to impose conscription on the island linked with implementing Home Rule. An infuriated public turned against Britain during the Conscription Crisis of 1918.
Sinn Fein won the December 1918 general election. Its new MPs refused to sit in the British House of Commons. Instead on 21 January 1919 twenty-seven assembled in the Mansion House in Dublin and established Dail Eireann (a revolutionary Irish parliament) and proclaimed an Irish Republic.
The nationalist leader John Redmond pledged support for the British war effort and many Irishmen served in the British Army, but the war and the frustration of nationalist ambitions regarding Home Rule led to a radicalisation of Irish nationalism. In 1916, a group of IRB activists within the Irish Volunteers led an insurrection aimed at Irish independence in Dublin, known as the Easter Rising. The rebellion did not have popular support and was put down within a week, but the execution of its leaders, and the subsequent wholesale arrest of radical nationalist activists proved very unpopular with the nationalist public. Coming directly after the Rising, a further attempt was made at the Irish Convention to resolve the impasse over Home Rule, but without success. Finally, the British proposal to extend conscription for the war to Ireland provoked widespread resistance, (see Conscription Crisis of 1918) and discredited the Irish Parliamentary Party who had supported the British war effort.[11]
All of these factors led to a swing towards support for Sinn Fein – the party which was led by veterans of the Easter Rising and which stood for an independent Irish Republic. In the Irish general election, 1918, Sinn Féin won the vast majority of seats, many of which were uncontested. Sinn Féin's elected candidates refused to attend the UK Parliament at Westminster and instead assembled in Dublin as a new revolutionary parliament called "Dáil Éireann". They declared the existence of a new state called the "Irish Republic" and established a system of government to rival the institutions of the United Kingdom.
The first meeting of the Dáil coincided with an unauthorised shooting of two RIC men in Tipperary, now regarded as the outbreak of the Irish War of Independence. From 1919 to 1921 the Irish Volunteers (now renamed as the Irish Republican Army, being deemed by the Dáil to be the army of the new Irish Republic) engaged in guerrilla warfare against the British army, the RIC and paramilitary police units known as the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries. The violence started out slowly, with only 19 deaths in 1919, but escalated sharply from the second half of 1920 and in the first six months of 1921 alone there were 1,000 deaths on all sides.[12] The principle political leader of the republican movement was Éamon de Valera – the President of the Republic. However he spent much of the conflict in the United States, raising money and support for the Irish cause. In his absence, two young men, Michael Collins and Richard Mulcahy rose to prominence as the clandestine leaders of the IRA – respectively Director of Intelligence and Chief of Staff of the guerrilla organisation.

The War of Independence or the Anglo-Irish War: 1919 to 1921, acting largely on its own authority and independently of the Dáil assembly, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the army of the Irish Republic, engaged in guerrilla warfare against the British army and paramilitary police units known as the Black and Tans and the Auxiliary Division. Both sides engaged in brutal acts; the Black and Tans deliberately burned entire towns and tortured civilians. The IRA killed many civilians it believed to be aiding or giving information to the British (particularly in Munster) and burned historic homes in retaliation for the government policy of destroying the homes of republicans, suspected or actual.
Britain enacted a new Fourth Home Rule Act in 1920, primarily in the interest of Ulster Unionists, granting separate Home Rule to two new institutions, Northern Ireland (the northeastern-most six counties of Ulster) and Southern Ireland (the remaining twenty-six counties), partitioning Ireland into two semi-autonomous regions. The institutions of Southern Ireland, however, were boycotted by nationalists and so never became functional.
In July 1921, a cease-fire was agreed and negotiations between delegations of the Irish and British sides produced the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Under the treaty, southern and western Ireland was to be given a form of dominion status, modelled on the Dominion of Canada. The Second Dáil narrowly passed the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921. Under the leadership of Michael Collins and W. T. Cosgrave, it set about establishing the Irish Free State, with the pro-Treaty IRA becoming part of a fully re-organised new National Army and a new police force, the Civic Guard (quickly renamed as the Garda Síochána), replacing one of Ireland's two police forces, the Royal Irish Constabulary.
However a strong republican minority group led by Éamon de Valera [11] opposed the treaty. De Valera led his supporters out of the Dáil and, after a lapse of six months in which the IRA also split, a bloody civil war between pro- and anti-treaty sides followed, only coming to an end in 1923 accompanied by multiple executions.
The Irish state came into being in 1922 as the Irish Free State, a dominion of the British Commonwealth, having seceded from the United Kingdom under the Anglo-Irish Treaty. It comprises 26 of the island of Ireland's 32 counties. The 1937 constitution renamed the state Ireland. In 1949 it explicitly became a republic, definitively ending its tenuous membership of the British Commonwealth.
From its foundation, the Irish Free State was embroiled in a civil war between nationalists supporting the Treaty and opponents who supported a republic. The pro-Treaty side, organised as Cumann na nGaedheal emerged victorious from the conflict and won subsequent elections. They formed the government of the state until 1932, when they peacefully handed over power to the anti-Treaty faction in Fianna Fáil, who defeated them in an election. From 1937 to 1998, the Irish constitution included a claim on Northern Ireland as a part of the national territory. However, the state also opposed and used its security forces against those armed groups – principally the Provisional Irish Republican Army, who tried to unite Ireland by force. This occurred in the 1950s, throughout the 1970s and 1980s and has continued on a reduced scale.
After further failed talks in December 1920, the guerrilla conflict was brought to an end in July 1921, with a truce agreed between the IRA and the British. Talks were then formally begun in pursuit of a peace settlement.[15]

The Wind That Shakes the Barley is a 2006 British-Irish war drama film directed by Ken Loach, set during the Irish War of Independence (1919–1922) and the Irish Civil War (1922–1923). two County Cork brothers, Damien (doctor, becomes socialist) and Teddy O'Donovan (first to join IRA) join the Irish Republican Army to fight for Irish independence from the United Kingdom. ... News comes of a formal ceasefire between Britain and the IRA. But after the Anglo-Irish Treaty is signed, the brigade learns that a partitioned Ireland will only be granted Dominion status within the British Empire. As a result, the brigade divides over the terms. Later, the Irish Free State replaces British rule and Teddy and his allies begin patrolling in Irish Army uniforms. Meanwhile, Damien and his allies join the Anti-Treaty IRA. When the civil war begins, the Anti-Treaty column commences guerrilla tactics against the Free State. Damien is captured during a raid for arms on a Free State barracks commanded by Teddy and sentenced to death. Teddy pleads with Damien to reveal where the IRA is hiding the stolen rifles. Damien, unwilling to betray the IRA, refuses, choosing instead to be executed.

Juno And The Paycock (first production: Abbey Theatre, 3 March 1924. Hitchcock directed 1930 film version) is set in the working class tenements of Dublin in the early 1920s, during the Irish Civil War period.... Johnny betrayed Tancred, a neighbour and fellow comrade in the IRA, who was subsequently killed by Free State supporters; Johnny is afraid that he will be executed as punishment.... In the third act, Mrs Boyle learns that her son, Johnny, has been killed by the Republican IRA.

photos | stephanie gengotti | cirque

from the national geographic

Sunday morning church at little St. Columba's here in Tofino. Just before she launches into the singing of Psalm 130, the no-nonsense organist tells us that it's set to the tune "MacPherson's Farewell," and there's a very interesting story behind it but she won't tell us now. "You can just go home and google it up on your internet."

So I did. "While under sentence of death in the jail, during the week between his trial and his execution, MacPherson is said to have composed the tune and the song now known as MacPherson's Lament or MacPherson's Rant. Sir Walter Scott says that MacPherson played it under the gallows, and, after playing the tune, he then offered his fiddle to anyone in his clan who would play it at his wake. When no one came forward to take the fiddle, he broke it – either across his knee or over the executioner's head – and then threw it into the crowd with the remark, "No one else shall play Jamie MacPherson's fiddle". The broken fiddle now lies in the MacPherson Clan museum near Newtonmore, Inverness-shire. He then was hanged or, according to some accounts, threw himself from the ladder, to hang by his own will."