In My Backpack… Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books by Azar Nafisi; In My Car… Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; On My Nightstand… In The Box Called Pleasure by Kim Addonizio; On My Computer… The sun has burst in the sky by Jenny Joseph; On My Screen… Impromptu (**) directed by James Lapine, written by Sarah Kernochan.

My Soundtrack: Foreigner by Cat Stevens.

Instructions:

Click on the espresso machine on the left…
Insert the coin in the slot…
Select your beverage…
Click on the filled cup…
Finally, click on apri.

Thanks Dad, I love you.

My Soundtrack: Catch Bull At Four by Cat Stevens.

If it were not for the Spam that fills my box when I’m a good netizen and fill out those free registration forms from newspapers like the Orlando Sentinal, I wouldn’t do this. But I see it as self defense. This is using bugmenot.com. Here’s how it works. Any time you come up against one of those free registrations, you copy the URL and paste it into the box on Bug Me Not and it gives you a generic login and password for that site. You get in and no Spam comes back to you.

But you say, if the marketing types don’t get their information they’ll take away the free registration. Well fuck’m. As George notes this morning, newspapaer circulation continues to bleed out and the solution is not going to be charging for Internet access.

Thanks to Christine – whose new picture shatters her librarian image – at Really Bad Cleveland Accent for the tip about bugmenot.com

My Soundtrack: Buddha And The Chocolate Box by Cat Stevens.

From Baghdad Burning: These last few days have been explosive – quite literally. It started about 4 days ago and it hasn’t let up since. They say there were around 14 car bombs in Baghdad alone a couple of days ago- although we only heard 6 from our area. Cars are making me very nervous lately. All cars look suspicious – small ones and large ones. Old cars and new cars. Cars with drivers and cars parked in front of restaurants and shops. They all have a sinister look to them these days.

How would I blog, hell, how would I live under those conditions?

My Soundtrack: Steppenwolf by Steppenwolf.

In My Backpack… Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books by Azar Nafisi; In My Car… Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; On My Nightstand… In The Box Called Pleasure by Kim Addonizio; On My Computer… By Her Aunt’s Grave by Thomas Hardy; On My Screen… Impromptu (**) directed by James Lapine, written by Sarah Kernochan.

My Soundtrack: The Second by Steppenwolf.

If I had to choose between poetry and God I’d be an atheist. Terry over at I See Invisible People turned me on to a new poet: Kim Addonizio. This morning I finished reading Tell Me, her third collection of poems published in 2000. My favorite contemporary, hell, all-time poet is Marge Piercy. Addonizio strikes me as Piercy’s polar opposite. There is rage and pain and knife-slashing-blindly panic in Addonizio’s poems. Not that Piercy’s poetry is sweetness and light, far from it, but there is something else thrashing away at you in Addonizio’s words.

Take, for instance, this excerpt from The Divorcée and Gin:

… God, I love
what you do to me at night when we”re alone,
how you wait for me to take you into me
until I”m so confused with you I can”t
stand up anymore. I know you want me
helpless, each cell whimpering, and I give
you that, letting you have me just the way
you like it. And when you”re finished
you turn your face to the wall while I curl
around you again, and enter another morning
with aspirin and the useless ache
that comes from loving too well,
those who, under the guise of pleasure,
destroy everything they touch.

Or consider her, Beginning With His Body And Ending In A Small Town:

It’s true I can’t forget any part of him,
not the long vein rising up along the underside of his cock,
or the brushy hair around his balls, dank star of the asshole,
high arches of his feet, strawberry mole on his left cheek-
imperfection that made his face exquisite-
and the freckles scattered over his back,
white insides of his wrists, I remember those too,
and the scar on his belly oh I’m kissing it now,
he belongs to me so purely now he’s left me,
he’ll never come back, his face as he lets go inside of me,
I’ll never see it again, I stand dripping
in the shower where I once knelt
before him to drink whatever came
out of him, sometimes he would watch
me as I walked naked around the room,
here I am, it’s the same room, I’m still
seeing his face the night it closed
to me forever like a failed business, iron grillwork
across the door, dirty windows, trash scattered
over the floor and the fixtures taken out, I turned
away and stumbled down the street, the one bar
was open, the saddest bar in the world, filled
with painted clowns and a few drunks, the owner had passed out
in a booth, covered by his coat, his girlfriend was working
and said The usual, right? and I couldn’t say a word
except Please, and I took a stool and drank
what she served and served and served.

And at last, the final words of Addonizio’s Getting Older:

Sometimes it”s enough just to say
their names like a rosary, ordinary names
linked by nothing but the fact
that they belong to men who loved you. And finally
you depend on that, you pray it”s enough
to last, if it has to, the rest of your life.

My Soundtrack: Greatest Hits by Bruce Springsteen.

The good Garrison Keillor reminds me this morning that it is the 92nd anniversary of the birth of May Sarton. I discovered her journals three or four years ago after I read Alexandra Johnson’s The Hidden Writer: Diaries And Creative Life. I began reading her with Sarton’s 1973 Journal Of A Solitude. What struck me the most as I read her memoir was how comfortable she was with herself. It was not until a couple years later that I began to realize that this was an important and beneficial trait among writers.

Keillor quotes from Sarton’s 1965 novel, Mrs. Stevens Hears The Mermaids Singing:

There were moments … when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart.

When I read sentances such as this I feel I could live better and more honorably by devoting my life to the digging of ditches rather than trying to craft words in any hope of realizing such beauty.

My Soundtrack: Real Live At The Parkview by Real Life.

In My Backpack… Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books by Azar Nafisi; In My Car… Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; On My Nightstand… My First European by Edmund White; On My Computer… An Observation by May Sarton; On My Screen… Impromptu (**) directed by James Lapine, written by Sarah Kernochan.

My Soundtrack: Greatest Hits by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel

I got a welcomed email this evening from a NEO voice with which I was unfamiliar. Jim Morana is a painter, writer, musician and poet who, naturally enough, also keeps The Daily Blog. Be sure to scroll down to past Saturday. Jim has caputred the way I think a lot of us feel about the month just passed.

Welcome Jim. I hope to see you at the next Blogger’s Meet-up.

My Soundtrack: Still Crazy After All These Years by Paul Simon.

My back log of Time magazines has been growing so I finally got to the 18 April issue this evening. I flipped through it really quickly and realized that I didn’t recognize half the names I was seeing on the magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. So I decided to play a game with myself. I found a site that listed all of the honorees so that I wouldn’t have to type in all the names, sorted them alphabetically by their first names and then went down the list.

If I knew a person and could say something about them, I put the name in bold. If I recognized a name but could only say something general about it, I put the name in italics.

Then I counted up the ones I’d marked and gave myself one point for each bolded name and half-a-point for each italicized name. My score was a miserable 35.5 out of 100.

Now, those of you who know me know that I don’t own a television, so I’m only exposed to TV when I’m visiting someone. But still, scoring as low as I did, I’m feeling pretty ignorant right now.

Feel free to copy the list below and take the test yourself. Does this constitute starting a meme?

1. Abdolkarim Soroush
2. Abu Mousab Al-Zarqawi
3. Ali Husaini Sistani
4. Alice Munro
5. Alicia Keys
6. Amy Domini
7. Andrew Weil
8. Ann Coulter
9. Anne Lauvergeon
10. Ariel Sharon
11. Art Spiegelman
12. Ayaan Hirsi Ali
13. Barack Obama
14. Bill Clinton
15. Bill Frist
16. Bill Gates
17. Bram Cohen
18. Brian Atwater
19. Burt Rutan
20. Cardinal Ratzinger
21. Chen Shui-Bian
22. Clint Eastwood
23. Condoleezza Rice
24. Cornelia Funke
25. Craig Newmark
26. Dalai Lama
27. Dan Brown
28. Dave Eggers
29. Dina Astita
30. Donald Rumsfeld
31. Eliot Spitzer
32. Ellen Macarthur
33. George W. Bush
34. Gordon Brown
35. H. Lee Scott
36. Hania Mufti
37. Hayao Miyazaki
38. Hilary Swank
39. Howard Stringer
40. Hu Jintao
41. Hugo Chavez
42. Jamie Foxx
43. Javier Solana
44. Jay-Z
45. Jeffrey Sachs
46. John Bond
47. John Elderfield
48. John Howard
49. John Stott
50. Johnny Depp
51. Jon Stewart
52. Juanes
53. Kanye West
54. Karl Rove
55. Katsuaki Watanabe
56. Kim Jong II
57. Larry Page and Sergey Brin
58. Larry Summers
59. Lebron James
60. Lee Kuan Yew
61. Lee Kun Hee
62. Lubna Olayan
63. Mahmoud Abbas
64. Malcolm Gladwell
65. Manmohan Singh
66. Marc Cherry
67. Marc Newson
68. Marcus Lehto, Jason Jones and Charlie Gough
69. Mark Malloch Brown
70. Martha Stewart
71. Martin Sorrell
72. Mary Robinson
73. Meg Whitman
74. Melissa Etheridge
75. Michael Moore
76. Michael Schumacher
77. Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie
78. Mitchell Baker
79. Miuccia Prada
80. Natan Sharansky
81. Nelson Mandela
82. Noel Forgeard
83. Oprah Winfrey
84. Peter Singer
85. Quentin Tarantino
86. Reed Hastings
87. Ren Zhengfei
88. Richard Pound
89. Rick Warren
90. Robert Klein
91. Roman Abramovich
92. Rupert Murdoch
93. Santiago Calatrava
94. Stephen Lewis
95. Steve Jobs
96. Thabo Mbeki
97. Timothy Garton
98. Viktor Yushchenko
99. Wangari Maathai
00. Ziyi Zhang

My Soundtrack: Graceland by Paul Simon.

Yee Haw! The Kinkster has done it! Kinky Friedman has formally thrown his black Stetson into the ring for the Texas governor’s race in ’06. Why is he running? The career politicians are keeping the elevator at the penthouse floor and not sending it down for the rest of us.

What does Kinky stand for? Here’s a sampling:

On the state of politics in Texas: Today, Texans have no choice for their leadership except paper or plastic. Political parties are for sale to the highest bidder, and lobbyists control the Texas Legislative agenda. “A fool and his money are soon elected. ”

On educational reform: The young people of Texas are our future, and we must treat them as such. They are our number one resource for that future. The current government seems to prefer band-aids over solid planning for the next generations of Texas. A Texas revolution is needed in our school systems. “No teacher left behind.”

On a Texas Peace Corps: Kinky will create an in-state volunteer agency, modeled after the Peace Corps, in which he served, to promote the arts and life skills in Texas schools. Musicians and artists, along with retired teachers, business executives, and police, will join us in teaching our kids how to act, play music, paint, write a check, keep accounts, and stay out of trouble. Kinky will ask his friends, including Laura Bush, Willie Nelson, Richard ‘Racehorse” Haynes, and former UT Coach Darrell Royal, to lead this effort. “Never say **** in front of a c-h-i-l-d.”

On criminal justice reform: Kinky is not anti-death penalty, just opposed to executing the wrong person! DNA has released dozens of improperly convicted people from death rows all over America. We”ve learned that juries and testimony are not infallible. There are cases in which the death penalty is warranted, but there is no disputing the obvious: Texas executes people who may be innocent. Taking a life is a grave responsibility – no pun intended. Two thousand years ago an innocent man named Jesus Christ, was executed; Kinky”s question is: “What have we learned in two thousand years?”

On energy: For decades, Texas was #1 in US oil and gas exploration. It once even led the world! Texas can reclaim its role as world leader in new energy production with alternative solutions. Kinky is our ‘energizer” candidate.

On political correctness: Political correctness must be abolished. Texans need to be told the truth. Texans do not need opaque, carefully scripted press releases. “A man oughtta be able to light his cigar once in a while.”

On de-wussification: Our icons are being demeaned. Cowboys are no longer heroes for our children, but subject to derision. We are being laughed at instead of respected in the rest of the country. What has happened to our glorious heritage? This is the great state of Texas! We are not wusses, we are Texans. “We will beat back the wussification of Texas if we have to do it one wuss at a time.”

I have signed up with Kinky Friedman’s campaign for Texas governor at www.kinkyfriedman.com because we need to do something about the sad state of Texas’ affairs. Please join me in becoming part of Kinky’s killer bee team, a growing and mighty force.

Join me on the pirate ship at www.kinkyfriedman.com.

[Full disclosure note, the above in italics is boilerplate from Kinky. But damn, it was so good I just didn’t have the heart to change it.]

My Soundtrack: They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore by Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys.

Is it just me or has it has become plainly obvious that Ohio’s legislators are simply powerless to address the very real issues that face their constituents? Well, at least I’m not totally alone in this quandary. Back on Saturday, George Nemeth posted (and I completely missed, my bad) Who Are They Representing? which points readers over to the Ohio For Blackwell website. That our legislators must feel impotent, it seems to me, must be the sole reason for their continuing focus on legislation as pointless as the proverbial rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Perhaps it’s time to reconsider salary levels or better yet, electorally retire the lot since they seem incapable of addressing real issues.

Stephanie alerted me to yet another bit of legislative thumb twirling in the form of Ohio House Bill 228. According to the lawyerly blogger, if passed into law this bill would:

Make it illegal to perform any abortion in Ohio;

Make it a felony to transport a woman across state lines to obtain an abortion.

Lest any readers who favor the the criminalization of abortion jump too hard, consider this. House Bill 228 is clearly unconstitutional. If signed into law by Governor Taft, it would immediately be put on hold until a challenge on constitutional grounds could wend it’s way through the court system.

Yes, if Roe v. Wade is to be overturned, there must be a case for the justices of the United States Supreme Court to rule upon. And maybe the constitutionality of Ohio House Bill 228 could be that test case: when pigs fly.

No. This is really about a bread-and-circuses tactic by Neo- and Theocons in the Ohio legislature trying desperately to show their base that they are really, really trying very hard to vanquish the evil forces of godless liberalism.

How pathetic.

My Soundtrack: Symphony No. 9, In C by Franz Schubet; Takuo Yuasa conducting the BBC Scottish Symhony Orchestra.

In My Backpack… Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books by Azar Nafisi; In My Car… Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; On My Nightstand… My First European by Edmund White; On My Computer… John, Tom, and James & Jack by Charles Henry Ross; On My Screen… Impromptu (**) directed by James Lapine, written by Sarah Kernochan.

My Soundtrack: Le Chayim, To Life! by Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.

…start with a definite idea, but if I start with a pond that’s being drained because of a diesel fuel leak and a cow named Hortense and some blackbirds flying over and a woman in the distance waving, then I might get somewhere. I pulled this Bobby Ann Mason quote from Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac this morning. I’m sure I’m about to catch hell from my friends in Kentucky, but until this morning I had no idea who she was. OK, guys, I promise to go to the library. Where should I start? At least one other Keillor fan has picked up the quote for her blog at The Shelia Variations.

(And yes, the cow’s name is Hortense. Click on her to discover more.)

My Soundtrack: Savage Garden by Savage Garden.

In My Backpack… Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books by Azar Nafisi; In My Car… Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; On My Nightstand… God’s Country by Luc Sante; On My Computer… Couple at Coney Island by Charles Simic; On My Screen… Horatio Hornblower – The New Adventures: Duty (**) directed by Andrew Grieve, written by C.S. Forester.

My Soundtrack: Shaman by Carlos Santana.