At Audible, you can listen to a 10 minute sample of any of its books, magazines, newspapers and radio shows. The beauty of this is that 10 minutes is more than enough time to listen to all of any of these Dr. Seuss Classics. My favorite is Yertle The Turtle. I pulled my copy off the shelf so that I could read along as I listened. What’s your favorite?

Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?
Dr. Seuss’s ABC
Fox in Socks
Green Eggs and Ham
Hop on Pop
I Can Read With My Eyes Shut
I’m Not Going to Get Up Today
Oh Say Can You Say?
Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!
One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
The Cat in the Hat
The Cat in the Hat Comes Back
Yertle the Turtle

Sigh, Horton Hears A Who! is 16 minutes long.

My Soundtrack: Make Sure They Hear by Mark Eitzel on WOXY.

My dad alerted me to Peggy Noonan’s column — Stop Spinning: Contrarian thoughts on Hillary, flag-burning, the Times and “The View” in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. Noonan and I have different mental zip codes, but I can read this column and nod my head. The following resonated, but take the time to read the whole column.

The flag burning amendment is a bad idea, and will not prove, in the end, politically wise or fruitful to any significant degree. Three reasons. One is that the American people can sense, whether they support a constitutional ban or not, that they’re being manipulated. They know supporters are playing with their essential patriotism for political profit. They know opponents are, by and large, taking their stand for equally political reasons. They can sense when everyone’s posturing. It’s not good, in the long term, when people sense you’re playing with their deepest emotions, such as their love of country.

Second, nobody thinks America is overrun with people burning flags, so the amendment does not seem even to be an exotic response to a real problem. There are a lot of pressing issues before the Congress, and no one thinks this is one of them. Voters know it’s hard to do a risky thing like define marriage as a legal entity that can take place only between an adult human male and an adult human female. That actually would take some guts. It’s easy — almost embarrassingly so — to make speeches about how much you love the flag.

Third, Americans don’t always say this or even notice it, but they love their Constitution. They revere it. They don’t want it used as a plaything. They want the Constitution treated as a hallowed document that is amended rarely, and only for deep reasons of societal or governmental need. A flag burning amendment is too small bore for such a big thing. I don’t think it will come up as a big issue every even numbered year. I think it’s going to go away. There’s too much else that’s really needed.

Well said Ms. Noonan.

My Soundtrack: Level by The Raconteurs on WOXY.

Jeff Jarvis links to a post by Cory Bergman that seeks to kick up a little debate by tagging Craig’s list as a community news site: the ultimate citizen journalism site. Jarvis isn’t too sure that most people go there to share or find news, but I found this comment from Buzz Machine reader Matt Terenzio to be on target.

I”d probably agree with you, Jeff, except that the editor of my newspaper told me last week that he doesn”t want us posting photos taken by average citizens and calling it news.

Meanwhile, I consider most of the news I get to come from bloggers and users even if they are pointing often to traditional sources. In the least we can all agree that the definition of news is changing.

Like all other things these days, the definition will come from the users, not the other way around. Try as that editor may, he has no say of what the public calls news.

News is what you would like to know but don’t. How do we finese that further?

My Soundtrack: Pull Shapes by The Pipettes on WOXY.

Everything changed after 11 September 2001. Right? Well, no. Everything didn’t change after 11 September. Some of it changed before the terrorists attacked the United States and then conveniently got linked to the War On Terror. Piddling little things like domestic spying, for instance, on American citizens.

It appears that President George Bush’s Bitch, or is it the other way around, AT&T set up the now infamous call monitoring site only two months after the President took office.

From Bloomberg:

The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.

The allegation is part of a court filing adding AT&T, the nation’s largest telephone company, as a defendant in a breach of privacy case filed earlier this month on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. customers. The suit alleges that the three carriers, the NSA and President George W. Bush violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the U.S. Constitution, and seeks money damages.

“The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11,” plaintiff’s lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. “This undermines that assertion.”

Yah think?

Are we even close to surpassing the crime of oral sex yet?

My Soundtrack: Rear View Mirror by Grandaddy on WOXY.

This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow.

I laughed myself silly watching the video of Stephen Colbert at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. A lot of people didn’t get it and at first I thought it was because they were offended. Now I discover that I was being unkind. He didn’t offend them. They’re brain damaged. It makes perfect sense now.

From the Scripps Howard News Service:

Sarcasm is lost on many people, in some cases more than others, because they may be missing part of a complex set of cognitive skills based in specific parts of the brain.

A new study by Israeli psychologists, using patients with damage to different parts of their brains, details an “anatomy of sarcasm” to explain how the mind puts sharp-edged words into context.

The psychologists write in the May issue of the journal Neuropsychology that for sarcasm to register, the listener must grasp the speaker’s intentions in the context of the situation. This calls for both sophisticated social thinking and appreciating a “theory of mind,” that different people think different thoughts.

“To detect sarcasm, irony and jokes, and to better understand what people mean when they talk, we must have empathy,” said researcher Simone Shamay-Tsoory of the University of Haifa and lead author of the study.

Empathy, yeah, that’s the ticket. Empathiness. Got to be an empathier.

My Soundtrack: So Far We Are by French Kicks on WOXY.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Seducing The Demon by Erica Jong.
I know a writer who writes two books a year, drives a Rolls, has several yachts and planes and houses and lives like a WASP rajah.
How do you write so fast? I ask him.
By lowering my standards. You could write faster if you lowered your standards too. p. 141

My Soundtrack: The Darkest One by The Tragically Hip on WOXY.

Before there were blogs there were Zines. Sure, they’re different, but I think the same publishing urge fuels them both. This Thursday, 6 July, Mac’s Backs hosts The Underground Literary Alliance Reading And Zine Fest. Other events include a reading by Elizabeth Cunningham, author of The Passion of Mary Magdalen.

A big part of me wants to believe this is total bullshit. The only way an analysis of blogs could provide information about terrorists would be if terrorists were using blogs, no matter how covertly. But by issuing a press release — no need for the New York Times to get involved here — the Air Force guarantees one thing.

No terrorist will come with in a mile of anything blog related. And maybe that the purpose.

From The Air Force Office of Scientific Research:

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research recently began funding a new research area that includes a study of blogs. Blog research may provide information analysts and warfighters with invaluable help in fighting the war on terrorism.

Dr. Brian E. Ulicny, senior scientist, and Dr. Mieczyslaw M. Kokar, president, Versatile Information Systems Inc., Framingham, Mass., will receive approximately $450,000 in funding for the 3-year project entitled “Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information.”

One of the main reasons I’m calling bullshit on the project is the funding. $450,000? For three years? That’s only $150,000 per year. For that you might get a couple of analysts at maybe $45,000 per year and a couple of assistants at $30,000 year. And that doesn’t include any equipment or a place to put it. This has Homeland Security pork written all over it.

Sou EEE! Sou EEE! Pig, pig pig!

[Update — 1728, 3 July — Both George Nemeth and Jeff Jarvis have taken notice.]

My Soundtrack: Calling Thermatico by Centro-Matic on WOXY.

Words are the bricks with which I build my fantasies. Here’s one I discovered this morning in The Prayer by Richard Jackson. Fictive (1612): 1 : not genuine : FEIGNED2 : of, relating to, or capable of imaginative creation3 : of, relating to, or having the characteristics of fiction : FICTIONAL- fictively adverb- fictiveness noun.

I’m a writer who aspires to join the rarified realm of poets. On its most basic level, poetry is what the poet says it is. But this is true of all art. And the chasm between art and Art is filled with the broken souls of those who leapt and fallen. So I read and learn from those who have crossed over to struggle with barriers I cannot imagine.

One of these is what Poet Sherry Chandler has come to call a pornography of atrocity.

Here is the core of Chandler’s exploration:

Still, what struck me in the piece was this passage:

There was no doubt in my mind that most of the poems I read were about the poets” real lives, offered up as performances, hoping to win a prize for the quality of their suffering, like the candidates on the old “Queen for a Day” show, who told their troubles to the genial host, and audience applause determined who would get the Amana Radar Range and the weekend at Lake Tahoe.

I wanted to sit the poets down in a classroom and lecture them: self-expression is not the point of it, people! We are not here on paper in order to retail our injuries. For one thing, it is unfair to bore someone who doesn”t have the opportunity to bore you right back, and for another, we have better things to do – to defend the hopeless and the down and out, to find humor in dreadful circumstances, to satirize the pompous and pretentious, to make deer appear suddenly in the driveway.

Writing is a blessed life, no matter how hard it may be at times, and a person is lucky to be a writer.

After my previous bloviating about Keillor, I”m embarrassed to find myself essentially in agreement with this statement. It cuts to the heart of a problem I”ve struggled with for a while.

How does one differentiate between what you might call a poetry of witness or even confessional poetry – how does one differentiate poetry from a sort of pornography of suffering. Americans have always loved their “Queen for a Day” type of schmaltz, but as Rochelle Gurstein says in her essay Mourning in America, “Being reduced to tears does not constitute an aesthetic experience.”

This question may reflect a sort of selfishness on my part. I”ve sat through many a poetry roundtable in which we were all reduced to tears several times. The experience evokes in me great sympathy but also a sort of despair. And, I blush to say, a little bit of boredom. As though my CD collection contained only Mahler.

When is it OK to say to the poet: “Get over yourself?”

My Soundtrack: Honeythief by Halou on WOXY.

Via She Who Writes Like She Talks comes this: MTVU, along with the The Reebok Human Rights Foundation and the International Crisis Group, has launched Darfur Is Dying, a narrative-based simulation that puts the player in the role of a Darfurian. It is easy to dismiss a game based on the genocide in Darfur, but this is no Pac Man.

From DarfurThesis:

Implementing what we term multiplayer online game activism, we hope to facilitate an immediate call to action — a way to engage a wide spectrum of young people and students to take notice of the crisis in Darfur, the first time in history that the United States government has declared an on-going crime as genocide.

Creating gameplay that informs as well as motivates effective and swift real-world action is a grand and elusive goal. The process of discerning appropriate representational aesthetics as well as appropriate interactive mechanics and metaphors has proven to be very difficult. We are aware of the stakes of such an endeavor — purporting to faithfully convey the real suffering of the Darfuri people — and as such, we do not feel that we have reached a solution, rather that we are immersed in a rigorous work-in-progress.

It beats the feck out of playing solitare or Quake 3.

My Soundtrack: Don’t Let Your Man Know by Graham Coxon on WOXY.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Seducing The Demon by Erica Jong.

In my dreams, often I am writing what Henry Miller, in his Paris Review interview, called cadenzas.

The passages I refer to are tumultuous, the words fall over one another. I could go on indefinitely. Of course I think that is the way one should write all the time. You see here the whole difference, the great difference, between Western and Eastern thinking and behavior and discipline.

If, say a Zen artist is going to do something, he”s had a long preparation of discipline and meditation, deep quiet thought about it and then no thought, silence, emptiness and son on – it might be for months, it might be for years. The, when he begins, it”s like lightning, just what he wants – it”s perfect.

Well, this is the way all art should be done. But who does it? We all lead lives that are contrary to our profession.

So I live with a ravine between my wishes and reality. Most days I sit at the machine or the yellow pad, doodling and feeling like an abject failure. Ecstasy eludes me. Even clarity and simplicity elude me. Then one day the cadenzas come. But they only come because of the days of doodling. p. 141

My Soundtrack: Rosemarie by Starlight Mints on WOXY.

Phoenix Coffee and Que Tal and Grum’s and Tevas and Toyota and Trek and Knob Creek and Stone Oven and James Lee Burke and Marge Piercy and Wendell Berry and Don Pedro and Mac’s Backs and Lynyrd Skynyrd and Janis Joplin and Cat Stevens and that’s enough. Now, where’s my check?

Those who cast the votes decide nothing.
Those who count the votes decide everything. — Josef Stalin.
I’m willing to accept that Josef Stalin never said the above, but from my formal undergraduate studies of the Soviet Union, it is the kind of thing Uncle Karl Joe might have said. And regardless of the veracity of the quote’s attribution, it is a Truth. Democracy demands confidence in the system. Take that away and you are left with facism.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Seducing The Demon by Erica Jong.

Of course, the muse or demon lover is an aspect of self. I know damn well that when I am summoning this creature, I am really trying to connect with the part of myself that is free, imaginative and able to fly. p. 137

My Soundtrack: Music For A Nurse by Oceansize on WOXY.

Which mystery blogger refuses to be ignored?

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Seducing The Demon by Erica Jong.

Better than the elixir is ritual and routine. Sometimes I start the day writing nonsense until it turns into sense. I scribble, never lifting the pen from the page and never giving in to self-criticism. I knock my mother and my grandmother off my shoulder. p. 136

My Soundtrack: Heal It/Feel It by Eagle*Seagull on WOXY.

If you have posted a comment to Have Coffee Will Write in the last week or so and it didn’t show up, please accept my apology. I discovered yesterday that Akismet was sucking up some of my regulars as Spam. I’m not sure why, but I went through and white-listed several comments. But I’m afraid a lot may have been deleted. My bad. Don’t hate me.

For the last couple of days the very annoying message above has popped up every time I’ve logged into Yahoo Instant Messenger. I couldn’t find anyway to say No, I don’t want to upgrade, go away. So this morning I clicked on OK and went through the installation process making sure to uncheck all the boxes that would make my lap top Yahoo-dominated.

But only after everything was done do I get the information that all of this was driven by The Bitch, aka AT&T. I spent a few minutes looking for a way to disable The Bitch’s intrusion and, finding none, I did a system restore and wiped the whole installation. A big part of my concern was the ambiguity of Yahoo’s privacy statement. It reads:

This policy does not apply to the practices of companies that Yahoo! does not own or control, or to people that Yahoo! does not employ or manage. In addition, certain Yahoo! associated companies such as Inktomi, Overture, and Altavista have their own privacy statements which can be viewed by clicking on the links.

So what about companies that, like AT&T, own Yahoo? The Bitch is getting way to full of herself and I think it’s time to kick her back down again. Now all we need is member of Congress or two that have a spine.

Maybe after November.

I think I need to return to ICQ as a way of avoiding the whole Yahoo connection.

My Soundtrack: A Small Demand by International Noise Conspiracy on WOXY.