DJotD 20240318
Speaking of driving… What has 10 letters and starts with G-A-S?
An A-U-T-O-M-O-B-I-L-E
DJotD 20240317
In honor of St. Patrick’s Day I told the barista my best dad joke and she was Dublin over in laughter…
DJotD 20240316
Why did the accountant get gold teeth?
To put their money where their mouth is.
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00336 ◊ The Best of It ◊ Kay Ryan
The Best of It
However carved up
or pared down we get,
we keep on making
the best of it as though
it doesn’t matter that
our acre’s down to
a square foot. As
though our garden
could be one bean
and we’d rejoice if
it flourishes, as
though one bean
could nourish us.
—Kay Ryan
—found in The Niagara River (2005)
I post for myself, for internal, ineffable reasons. I don’t expect anyone to be interested now, and very few after I’m gone. I’m old and past worrying about curating or cluttering my timeline. It is, in the immortal words of some intellectual giant of yore, what it is.
Making the word game rounds.
Connections
Puzzle #281
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I’ve had worse. And better.
Wordle 1,003 4/6*
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📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00335 ◊ Dream Song 4 ◊ John Berryman
4
Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken páprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her
or falling at her little feet and crying
‘You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry’s dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance.’ I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni. —Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.
—Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes
downcast … The slob beside her feasts … What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
—Mr. Bones: there is.
—John Berryman
—found in 77 Dream Songs (2014; originally published 1964)
I decided on my next band name: Melancholy Squeezebox. I’ll provide the melancholy.
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00334 ◊ Höfn ◊ Seamus Heaney
Höfn
The three-tongued glacier has begun to melt.
What will we do, they ask, when boulder-milt
Comes wallowing across the delta flats
And the miles-deep shag-ice makes its move?
I saw it, ridged and rock-set, from above,
Undead grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff,
And feared its coldness that still seemed enough
To iceblock the plane window dimmed with breath,
Deepfreeze the seep of adamantine tilth
And every warm, mouthwatering word of mouth.
—Seamus Heaney
—found in District and Circle (2006)
Read in 2024: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch 📚 — Brutal and amazing. Sadly relevant to these times…I hope it isn’t prophetic about the United States. I noted so many rich passages that would have been special for their style alone. Be prepared for an unrelenting, indelible tragedy.
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00065 ¶ Tell the Wolves I'm Home ¶ Carol Rifka Brunt
It doesn’t matter that Toby forgave me. That he really truly left this world with not a single bad feeling for me. That we ended as the sweetest of friends. None of that changed anything. There are dark black buttons tattooed on my heart. I’ll carry them for the rest of my days.
But there is another place in my heart that knows that I finally kept my promise. I was the one who took care of Toby right up to the very end, who stayed with him so he wouldn’t be alone. Just like Finn would have wanted. And sometimes, when I don’t want to be sad anymore, I think that makes it almost even.
One thing I do know is that my superpower is gone. My heart is broken and soft, and I am plain again. I have no friends in the city. Not a single one. I used to think maybe I wanted to become a falconer, and now I’m sure of it, because I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.
—Carol Rifka Brunt
—found in Tell the Wolves I’m Home (2012)
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00333 ◊ Hotline ◊ Brian Barker
Hotline
The calls came in around the clock. A nunnery in Nova Scotia with a broken clavichord. Smitten soldiers looking for prostitutes they slept with years ago during some war. Orphans writing school reports on osmosis or the mating habits of the praying mantis. Minor poets searching for obscure rhymes. Prisoners eager to debate Nietzsche’s will to power or their theories of transcendentalism in American advertising. I quit my job, stayed home waiting beside the telephone. I consulted tattered repair manuals, outdated phonebooks, defunct encyclopedias, old gossip tabloids. The dead were, of course, the most difficult, always calling from pay phones in the middle of night, emptying their despair in foreign tongues. I’d try to keep them talking, but always they’d drop the receiver and vanish. I’d wait in vain for their return, fall asleep listening to the crackle of fog on the other end, wind whistling guy wires, the long hollow calls of tugboats over black water. Or once, the patter of rain on giant jungle leaves, monkeys squealing from the canopy, the sad songs of brightly colored birds that I could not name.
—Brian Barker
—found in Plume (March 2024; Issue 51)
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00064 ¶ from The Savage Detectives ¶ Roberto Bolaño
One day I asked him where he’d been. He told me that he’d traveled along a river that connects Mexico and Central America. As far as I know, there is no such river. But he told me he’d traveled along this river and that now he could say he knew its twists and tributaries. A river of trees or a river of sand or a river of trees that in certain stretches became a river of sand. A constant flow of people without work, of the poor and starving, drugs and suffering. A river of clouds he’d sailed on for twelve months, where he’d found countless islands and outposts, although not all the islands were settled, and sometimes he thought he’d stay and live on one of them forever or that he’d die there.
Of all the islands he’d visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another.
—Roberto Bolaño (translated by Natasha Wimmer)
—found in The Savage Detectives (1998 as Los Detectives Salvajes; this translation 2007)
I had no idea the Rumpole of the Bailey books came after the television series (and did a bit of retconning apparently)! Great show and reading (not to mention the audio series with Benedict Cumberbatch and then Julian Rhind-Tutt playing the old Bailey hack.
Better today!
Wordle 1,000 🎉 4/6*
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My favourite fact about Canada is that the Canadian city of Regina used to have the slogan “the city that rhymes with fun.”
—Via Girl on the Net