What follows is an open letter to the author of this poem.BR>
Don't know if I mentioned this yet, but I really like 'split at your sight'. It makes me think of spitting in eyes, and 50's teenagers sliding across the hoods of their cars.
I feel you may be worried by skitter and scatter; don't be, I didn't notice the similarity consciously until the 3rd sitting.
I understand the 3rd stanza as a transition, from you to the world, but I can't do much else with it. The sound in my mind is an involuntary whimper or sob, because you're worried that the world could devour you at will, if it noticed you.
I can't decide if the trees are pious or not, whether they're doing the work of God or not. At first I thought they were, but on second thought I've decided that they are living, and sinful and tormented, while it is the inanimate stuff that is holy. I continue to be fond of the idea of the holiness of desolation.
I'm under the impression that the ice both keeps us, the dirty leaves and such, from the water, and also amplifies the sound.
The hypen in clean-white gives me pause; before I noticed it, I was reading it with a comma, the hypen makes me think of laundry ads.
Are you sure it's one poem? I can see how it could be, cleanliness and filth tie it together.
The last stanza sets the time frame explicitly as early spring, which goes nicely with the trees and the barefoot god. Bright one can be the sun, in which case the white foot is a sunbeam, but the sky is gray. hmm.
'my silence' worries me, it sounds tranquil, when you were skittering a moment before. I just realized what it is, it has major Simon & Garfunkel undertones. If I worked at it, I might be able to make peace between this poem and "Sounds of Silence", but I don't want to try, it feels wrong.
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(1)
08:41:12 AM,
Tuesday 15 April 2003
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You are lucky! Full moon tonight.
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(1)
07:32:07 AM,
Tuesday 15 April 2003
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To report a death, please contact us. We will be pleased to record the death.
Morbid much?
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(1)
07:46:34 PM,
Monday 14 April 2003
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Ha. It arrived along with the local NPR begging for money. That would be a really neat gimmick, NPR begging letters which superficially resemble collection agency letters. News that compliments my intelligence, forsooth.
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07:36:44 PM,
Monday 14 April 2003
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Well, there goes buying a house in the near future. I just got a polite note from a debt collection agency regarding a payment for an auto insurance that I had thought I had paid through my agent / landlord. This is for the insurance where the amount charged was twice the quote they gave me, so I then cancelled, and have been fighting about how much I owe them ever since. I thought this had all been resolved weeks ago. I think I'll spend the evening practicing being irate and indignent to see if I can get the very nice but utterly useless people who work in the office to refund what I just paid the collection agency.
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07:33:31 PM,
Monday 14 April 2003
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Yick yick yick. People are selling the PDF file with pictures of the Iraqi leadership cards on eBay. A few look like they might be selling the actual cards, but none of them have photos, just photoshopped portions of the PDF. I like consumer protection laws.
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05:51:51 PM,
Monday 14 April 2003
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Sales of the mayor's own marinara sauce are up 47% over last year, the local radio station reports. The sauce features Buddy Cianci Jr. on the label, the former mayor who was imprisoned on federal rackateering charges in December. He looks very friendly. It is allegedly a secret family recipe brought over from Italy on the Mayflower or some such. I broke down and bought some today. It appears to be a smooth sauce. I will report back shortly.
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(1)
05:46:24 PM,
Sunday 13 April 2003
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When our cat sees a bird, he opens his mouth and makes this wierd "ah, ah" noise, while twitching his jaw. It seems like he might be trying to imitate the birds. He sounds a little like the devouring thing in Spirited Away.
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07:36:57 AM,
Saturday 12 April 2003
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I have to leave now if I want to be completely confident that I won't be stuck at South Station until 8:10 pm. But, the script isn't finished yet; and if I don't finish running it today, I have to come in on Monday. I can't even use it as an excuse to take the Acela, because it leaves the same time as the commuter train which I'm going to miss.
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(1)
05:46:11 PM,
Friday 11 April 2003
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Covet. How long until they turn up on eBay?
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(2)
04:07:00 PM,
Friday 11 April 2003
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*blink*
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03:48:32 PM,
Friday 11 April 2003
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I'm battling the temptation to title an email to my superiors 'Bored Now'. I don't think they'd get the reference, and I'm fighting to keep my reputation for cynicism and frivolity in check. It was bad enough when I ended an email with 'We apologize for the inconvenience' and had to explain who we referred to.
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(1)
02:28:19 PM,
Friday 11 April 2003
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Get Your War On fills me with misery and a hatred of humanity. This worried me at first, because I don't like to think of myself unable to appreciate things for ideological reasons, but now I think it may be related to my love of Bob Newhart and dislike of Adam Sandler and George Carlin. When I tried to think of angry comedy I liked, the only thing I could come up with was Fawlty Towers, but that's really self-loathing comedy about an angry person. The audience isn't supposed to think "Yeah!" when Basil goes off the deep end. I hate it when people try to get me to say "Yeah!" Righteous anger posing as humour depresses me even when I agree with it; at least, I hope it does.
I understand wanting to think everyone I disagree with is either stupid or evil, but they aren't, and it is an ugly and lazy way of thinking about the world.
To conclude, grumble and grouch.
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(2)
08:47:54 PM,
Thursday 10 April 2003
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The military sort on the radio saying "very very wary" made me chuckle.
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04:44:36 PM,
Thursday 10 April 2003
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Come to think of it, Iraq suspecting that some of the volunteer human shields were CIA agents was entirely reasonable.
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04:20:08 PM,
Thursday 10 April 2003
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1 727463 Alaric-Kni-Hum-Mal-Law was poisoned in Gehennom on level 32. Poisoned by Juiblex. 123 [123]
Had an AC of -23, every resistance imaginable, and more luck than I knew what to do with. I killed Juiblex, thought the unicorn horn had dealt with the illness, but then dropped dead. Still, a Knight in Gehennom! Was riding a Black Dragon at one point, until it stepped on a polymorph trap and became a water nymph.
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09:15:45 AM,
Thursday 10 April 2003
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A quick guide to how much electricity various household devices consume. I had a very bad sense of this. I will now have to adjust the relative amounts of guilt I feel for leaving various electical devices running.
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(1)
06:27:30 PM,
Wednesday 9 April 2003
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The news is making me happy. I like giant statues toppling. Is that all right? Am I allowed to be happy? I'm not comfortable about being so happy about it, but I am happy nonetheless. I am intellectually capable of still being worried and cynical, and could probably think myself into being depressed and fatalistic again, but I don't want to.
In particular, the people climbing on the tank, and the people holding up the Iraqi flag, and the trust in those actions, after the statue fell both struck a emotional chord with me. If they feel they can trust the US military, I feel as though I should as well. I'm being careful to avoid turning on the sound, in case TV commentators are saying stupid things which would make me feel guilty for sharing happiness with them.
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(1)
11:40:12 AM,
Wednesday 9 April 2003
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I have just been informed that linguists don't, in general, create giant databases of human speech and writing and attempt to extract sense out of them. As someone who fiddles about with giant databases for a living, this shocks me to the core.
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(3)
08:56:04 AM,
Wednesday 9 April 2003
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Bah. I think I burn more calories searching for lost remote controls than I would operating the TV directly.
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06:21:50 PM,
Tuesday 8 April 2003
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Was anyone else brought up to say "White Rabbits, White Rabbits, White Rabbits" first thing on the first of the month?
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(2)
05:01:09 PM,
Tuesday 8 April 2003
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He toppled slowly, like a regime.
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12:56:25 PM,
Sunday 6 April 2003
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"I was introducing a sentence that I hadn't finished starting yet."
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12:56:10 PM,
Sunday 6 April 2003
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We bombed BBC superstar and liberator of Kabul,John Simpson.
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11:18:01 AM,
Sunday 6 April 2003
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"To Scotland came the Viking.
He found it to his liking."
The beginning of an unfinished epic history of Scotland, as heard on John Peel's Radio 4 show, Home Truths
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07:51:27 PM,
Saturday 5 April 2003
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I was going to comment on how I am irrationally irritated by Perl, but than I realized, it's not Perl, it's Larry Wall. He exemplifies why I will never be a full-fledged geek, and why I wen't to St. Johns rather than RPI or some such place. I hate the obsession with mastering arcane lore, and then using that mastery to impress and intimidate your friends and neighbors. I like computers because they are clean and elegant. People like him try to make then difficult and cryptic when they don't need to be. For instance, he advocates using the default variable, so you can do things such as:
while(<FILE>){print if /http:/;}
This is ugly and evil.
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(5)
06:13:03 PM,
Thursday 3 April 2003
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You keep lyin', when you oughtta be truthin'
And you keep on losin', when you oughtta not bet.
You keep samin', when you oughtta be changin'
Now what's right is right, and you ain't been right yet.
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02:24:05 PM,
Thursday 3 April 2003
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Shakira is good.
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(4)
11:33:51 AM,
Thursday 3 April 2003
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Happenings
You're going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don't happen.
It doesn't seem to bother people, they don't—
It's printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.
Everyone's so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story's there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven't happened.
All I can tell you is,
It hasn't happened.
It's going to happen.
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(2)
01:30:44 PM,
Wednesday 2 April 2003
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Colossal Squid
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(3)
11:54:03 AM,
Wednesday 2 April 2003
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The New Hampshire motto, "Live Free or Die", is actually a quite succinct summation of our current foriegn policy.
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09:49:13 AM,
Wednesday 2 April 2003
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Most people I work with treat the computer as a tool, which they use to complete their tasks. I treat mine as a slave. As a result, when circumstances force me to do the field work myself, I become sullen, inefficient and prone to websurfing. I'm much happier hopping from task to task, leaving a trail of automata toiling in my wake.
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07:49:31 PM,
Tuesday 1 April 2003
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Not the new episode!
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(1)
07:26:32 PM,
Tuesday 1 April 2003
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Off I go to Concord, NH to do the equivalent of plugging someone's monitor in for them. Makes me wonder how John, Wally and all are doing.
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09:40:51 AM,
Tuesday 1 April 2003
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Eve of Destruction by the Byrds is my favorite anti-war song, because it isn't angry or smug or self-righteous, just worried. It also doesn't scan, which makes it charmingly awkward. When Johnny Comes Marching Home is my favorite war song, for completely non-lyrical reasons.
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(1)
09:40:06 AM,
Monday 31 March 2003
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The place I see the wonder of creation most clearly is while cooking; in particular, the fact that stirring works so quickly, thoroughly and irreversably. Also the miracle that is the egg.
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(7)
09:30:26 AM,
Monday 31 March 2003
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