Old Milwaukee

I love this beer.

Mead

Reading Julie Carr's "Mead: An Epithalamion."

I enjoy this heavy-handedness, from "Hair: A Metaphor":


A tree can be full of flowers. Differently, a cup can be full of tea.

Elsewise, the human, full of only itself,
feels empty.

Gonzo

I just watched "Gonzo," a documentary on the life of Hunter S. Thompson. I thoroughly enjoyed it and strongly recommend viewing it. It's an instant-view on NetFlix, if you have those means. But it's also completely worth paying to rent it.

My new favorite?

Taco Bell's cheesy bean & rice burrito.

Just saying.

Thanks, Trey

because he pointed me to these:

1. Get Tube, with which you can (surprise!) extract audio (as .mp3 or .mp4) from videos on The YouTube. The implications of this? I can now listen on iTunes to all the live versions of songs that I love on YouTube! Neat.

2. LaLa, where you can listen to tons of music, whole albums and discographies and things. Also neat.

And, in other news, I really like this picture by Betsy.

And here is my house in relation to St. Louis and the Mississippi River:


View Larger Map

In a dream last night

I am running around a campus, what looks like a very nice, respectable university campus. I am in a group of other running people. We are all wearing black SWAT attire. We all have guns. I do not know if we are running away from something, or chasing something. We run to the El stop, which is a strange leap in location. We have to sneak our guns onto the train without other armed people noticing. These must be guards. We sit quietly to avoid attracting attention to our uniformed, armored selves. I feel stressed and worried but I do not know why. This only makes me stress and worry more. Luckily, Henry kicks me in the face as he rolls over and stretches, and I forget the dream until now.

To recap:
1)



2)


3)


4)


The End.

Jill Barber

I stumbled upon Jill Barber on Last.fm, which describes her style as "drawing on influences from old-time jazz standards, folk balladry and traditional country." So naturally I had to listen. She's been somewhat difficult to find on LimeWire, but there are videos on the YouTube and full tracks on Last.fm.

Here's the video for "Oh My My" off her most recent album, "Chances." And below that, a wicked fun live version.





Cheers.

Come Grammy time,

Taylor Swift better go home with Album of the Year.



I'm just saying.

I am in St Louis

and I can't find anyplace that sells the NYT. At least the West County community seems fine sticking to the Post-Dispatch, which I recently discovered is very much a small-town paper, despite representing a city with a metropolitan population of almost 3 million. Small-town as in, the majority of cover stories are feel-good local reports, reminding me very much of the Sun Journal in Lewiston, Maine, where many a day reported on ski mountains and local fishing accomplishments.

Also, I will unfortunately be back in Alabama by January 23rd, and will miss this fantastic Burning Chair reading. (Adam Clay and MC Hyland are in the most recent issue of 751.)

All who will still be around the St Louis parts should attend:
***January 23rd, 8pm***
featuring Stephanie Anderson, Tom Andes, Adam Clay, Julie Dill, M.C. Hyland, Alison Palmer, Nate Slawson, Joseph Wood
(more info here)

And now that classes have finished, I've had more time to read through "12X12", the collection of interviews/essays compiled by Christina Mengert and Joshua Marie Wilkinson.

This particular passage struck me especially (from the conversation between Sabrina Orah Mark and Claudia Rankine):

SOM: "...The Jewish Messianic idea of creation relies on that same kind of paradoxical topography the carriage/coffin [from Nabokov's Speak, Memory] sets up: the Kabbalists understood that there were these "vessels" or garbs that once held a divine light that the creator had to exile himself out of in order to effect creation. I am currently buried under the Kabbalistic concept called Tsim Tsum (or that creation cannot happen without the creator's departure from the creator's creation). It calls the poetics of responsibility back home for a closer look, does it not? At the end (or more accurately, at the beginning) the vessels can't hold the light, burst, and light is scattered everywhere. We then spend the rest of our lives gathering up the shards that claim at their center decay and transcience, ruin and repair." (48).

Onward.

2ND ISSUE of 751

The 2ND ISSUE of 751 is LIVE!

Go read it. Love it. Cuddle it. Share it.

Serena Ryder

(wish I coulda stopped you before you left
it was a lesson that you left behind instead)

***

the studio version (with accompaniment) is also stellar.