May 2012
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1. No longer possible to die tragically young, with promise unfulfilled. Well, actually, promise can still be unfulfilled, but not because of early death. 2. No longer any need to fuss with contraceptives. 3. Read an entire magazine article while urinating.
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The most widely-known as well as the most notorious poem of the second half of the twentieth century is Philip Larkin's "This Be the Verse." For those of you who don't know the poem by heart, here it is in its brief and startling entirety. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They…
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I've been reading about the peculiar metamorphosis of the starfish, Luidia sarsi, which eats shellfish and dwells in the muddy sediment of seashores from Norway to the Mediterranean. Its diaphanous larvae are bilaterally symmetrical; the adult form, with its five arms, is radially symmetrical, a most irregular circumstance. Moreover, the adult emerges from the larva…
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When rich people betray that they don't have the least clue how ordinary people live, they might coin a "tumbrilism." The perfect tumbrilism is callous, contemptuous, supercilious, insulting, and grotesquely ignorant. The word "tumbrilism" seems to derive from tumbril, the cart that carried victims to the guillotine during the French Revolution. The mother of all…
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I imagine that the writers of Cowboys and Aliens had a grand old time inserting into their screenplay as many as possible of both Westerns and sci-fi/horror cliches. They did very well: there's a loner cowboy with cigarillo and fists of steel, a domineering cattleman and his feckless son, a timid barkeep, a posse on…
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As a rule, I'm as fickle as the legendary varying flag, but just now I have made a firm unwavering commitment. My absolutely most favorite line of poetry — are you ready now, readers — is (drumroll)l: "If you really want my peaches, gotta shake my tree." Is that poetry or what? It's teasingly inexplicit…
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In my daughter's basement I found a dried-up, stained, pages-hanging-out 1959 paperback edition of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. On the cover: "Copyright 1954." "Over 4,450,000 copies in print." "Sixty-second impression." "Now Available For Students And Teachers: the Casebook Edition containing the full text of the novel, critical essays, notes, and bibliography." Lord of…
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Knowing little of the finny tribe, I borrowed the Bradford Public Library's copy of Langdon's introductory Fishes of Vermont (2006). It's an excellent, informative, helpful guide. With Langdon's help, I can now declare that it's undeniably the brown bullhead, a species of catfish, that has been multiplying in our pond. The bullhead, a villainous omnivore,…
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I was talking on the telephone with a fan of the Washington Nationals and for some reason neither of us could recall the name of the lanky, scraggly-bearded shaggy-haired high-salaried power-hitting right fielder who once played for the Phillies and had a hard time last season but seemed to be starting out well this year,…
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I've been reading about the early colonization of New York city, a subject that I've not approached since my days in elementary school in the 1950s, where, in retrospect, it seemed that we went over the ground quite regularly — Henry Hudson, the purchase of Manhattan Island, New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, and the English acquisition…