* On Favorite Authors

Teaching the ENGL capstone course for the first time, I'm also getting to teach some favorites I haven't taught in a long time--including William Wordsworth. As enthusiastic as I've been re Lyrical Ballads, however, I still have to interject my rather irreverent attitude/teaching style into my presentation of the Sage of Grasmere. And some students don't know how to handle this. Which led me to a new aphorism, a new "quot.-of-the-day" from yours truly:

If you can't laugh at your favorite authors . . . you haven't read them long enough.

* "Beat Me, Daddy-O"

It beats me how public television can consider itself educational sometimes. So I'm surfing by this "educational" show set in a bookstore—and stop because the bookstore person is talking about the fact that the Beat writers used to frequent the place. When the interviewer asks what "Beat" means, our literary expert explains, "It was called Beat poetry because it had a rhythm to it"!?!? (Yeh, sure; hit that bongo, man.) Jack Kerouac, that beatific hipster, must be rolling in his grave.

* RADIO RANT: Michael Savage on Ecofeminism

Thanks, Mr. Savage—you've given me a better title for my ENGL 945 course. Last night (9/5), you made reference to "wackjob moron feminist treehuggers." What an interesting appellation! Henceforth, then, I think I should call my Native Ecofeminist class "Wackjob Moron Feminist Treehugger Squaws." Okay, maybe squaw isn't a word you'd be brazen enough to utter on the radio, but I assume it's an epithet that swims around comfortably in your consciousness.

* Shakespeare = Culture

A colleague just turned me on to an editorial in the Omaha World Herald a few months back (23 June 2007 [7B]), by a professor at the University of Nebraska-Kearney who has set himself up as another Apostle of Culture, as one more Savior of High Literature. Doctor Thomas Martin laments the fact that students at the U of Nebraska-Lincoln don't even have to take a course in Shakespeare to acquire a major in English. I, too, lament the fact that English students (graduate students, more crucially) aren't exposed to all the major eras & figures of British and American literature. But I also think that they should have to read some Continental literature in translation (Dostoevski, Goethe, and the like); and maybe a course in Spanish(-American) lit., from Cervantes through García Márquez?; and some American Indigenous lit. would be a good idea, too. Ay, there's the rub: where should one stop, given the economic pressures that English departments currently face? In fact, Martin asserts that majoring in English sans Shakespeare is "comparable to a medical doctor who did not take a course in anatomy." This analogy is, first of all, completely absurd on the level of logical categories. But it also ignores the fact that Shakespeare himself, as literary historians remind us, was never the Great-Be-All-and-End-All of the English canon until well into the nineteenth century, and that the canon of "essential works" of which Martin speaks is itself a historically constituted body. This lack of historicity is Martin's main problem. For him, "literature" still has an "essential quality"; it is still "timeless," and its theme is an unchanging "human nature." (And someone play "God Save the Queen," while we're at it.) But literature, in reality, is always situated in place, and time, and ideology: there's never anything disinterestedly "eternal" about it. And yet he complains that English departments have turned "into sociology departments, emphasizing the topical literature of race, gender, class and ethnicity over the traditional works of literature." Huh? Shakespeare's corpus, too, we recognize, is a "topical" one, utterly involved in "race, gender, class and ethnicity." This recent turn of events—our "sociological" or political focus—is merely evidence that we are now conscious how all texts are inescapably complicit in such politics. Professor Martin also claims that the "faculty in most modern institutions of higher learning lack respect for their ancestors," who are —as is clear later in the editorial—the good ol' dead white English males. But ancestors is a strange word, when mine happen to include the non-white and non-European. Can't I be true to mine? (And all of them?!: what fun to teach Black Elk, and James Joyce, and Albert Camus in the same course!) Martin's entire argument, in sum, is quite an ethno/Eurocentric one. Other once-upon-a-time word choices that Martin tosses around include "liberal education," "spirit," "conscience," and "reasoned"—all of which smack of Matthew Arnold and other self-anointed Apostles of Culture—and all these all-too-humans have had their own self-interested, political reasons for appealing to such values! Our latest apostle here is finally so bold as to speak of the "moral in a classical work" as something of great use in one's Socratic "self-examination." Ah—for indeed, Martin finally admits—his "discipline is philosophy," after all, and his castigation of the English discipline arises from someone no doubt deeply immersed in a much higher calling than mere "literature," all mere shadows, sophistry, and illusion compared to his calling. We must thank him, then, for descending, if only momentarily, from the Clouds (. . . of Aristophanes).

* RADIO RANT: Birds as Symbols

I only caught snippets of Michael Savage last night (8/29), but his discussion (or rather, rant, as usual) about the Senator Craig affair had somehow wandered to the bird calling in the background of the Senator's "I am not gay" press conference. Yes, it was a Red-winged Blackbird (its "cong-er-ee" call), as a caller or two told him; but Savage's immediate reaction was so typically Western, and by the way, so typically traditional-lit-crit: he asked, "What does the blackbird symbolize in literature?!" Yikes! The very subject, really, of my book-manuscript-at-the-press. I couldn't handle the ideational pain and fled to sports talk radio.

I suppose that at least one caller fed Savage the standard freshman-in-college answer—"the blackbird stands for death"—and that our good Doctor applied it "cleverly" to the Senator's doomed career. But again, how symptomatic of mainstream anthropocentric culture to see other species as "all about us," as if God had put other species here to remind humans of our own mortality. (Geez, was there ever a real, honest-to-goodness snake in the Garden of Eden?) There was a real, individual Red-winged Blackbird calling there, with as much "reason" and worth to do so as the human fellow frantically trying to save his political ass. A deconstructive reversal of foreground & background might be instructive here: "What's that stupid primate sputtering about while Mr. Blackbird sings his wonderful tune?"

Finally, the old "death" equation hardly works with the red-wing, anyway. The "black birds" traditionally demonized in Western folklore are the crow and raven, not even loosely related to the red-wing. Closer, ornithologically, are Wallace Steven's grackles, sometimes read by critics as symbols of death (though symbols of sheer mundanity, of "reality" itself, works better for me in the context of Stevens' corpus). In contrast, though—if I HAVE to talk "symbolism"—the red-wing has always suggested to me the jouissance of the new spring, a powerfully ebullient paean to (and epitome of) nature's general rejuvenation. But as a poem I wrote as a much younger fellow reminds me, even this is sheer homocentric projection:

        AFTER LORCA   (c. 1986; rev. 1992)

the red-winged blackbird
sings, but not to call his pied-brown mate
or a cattail congerie--
he sings to be singing: he sings

the red-winged blackbird
sings, but not for the ever-returning spring,
or other springs, gone by--
he sings to be singing: he sings

the red-winged blackbird
sings, not to recall in us some preter-
natural nature of things:
he sings

* RADIO RANT: Shakespeare Savaged

Michael Savage brought out his bag of literary learnèdness again last night (8/15/07), quoting—sort of—Shylock's famous speech beginning "Hath not a Jew eyes . . . ?" (MofV 3.1). But, sputtering on the quotation, he ended with the following edifying advice: "Read your Shakespeare, and you'll get the rest of that particular couplet." Couplet? It's a speech in prose, man; read your prosody handbook, and you'll get why "couplet" in no way applies here. A forgivable error, maybe, if you weren't such a poseur in pedantry. (I think that's called "illiteration"!)

* RADIO RANT: Women's Rights vs. Animal Rights?

Paul Zeise, a beat writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, has created a new round of controversy in the Michael Vick saga by uttering the following on a Pittsburg talk show: "It's really a sad day in this country when . . . Michael Vick would have been better off raping a woman [rather than running a vicious dog-fighting racket] . . . . Had he done that, he probably would have been suspended for [only] four games [rather than a year] and he'd be back on the field." To me, the meat of this new controversy is that several national sports commentators have come to Zeise's defense (e.g., John Fricke), via at least the implication that the current atmosphere of "political correctness" has led to a privileging of wild animals over our own women.

On one important level, these people are right, of course: Kobe Bryant and the legion of athletes charged with rape and spousal abuse have been getting mere hand-slaps from their leagues & teams, as the patriarchal game of wink-wink continues. They should be getting much more severe penalties. However, this issue is really independent of the Michael Vick episode; and the stance above, in its ostensible attempt to be anti-sexist, reveals once again an utter anthropocentrism: i.e., a human (woman) is more important than another animal. I, for one, believe that being instrumental in the violent deaths of many individuals of another species is a greater crime than the sexual abuse of any single member of our one species (whatever the gender). There, I've said it. Zeise, Fricke, et al. are wrong; it is hardly a "sad day," but a positive evolution in the general consciousness, in my mind. What is sad is that this debate seems to force one to pick & choose between women's rights and animal rights. But again, they're separate issues.

Of course I'm completely wrong in the "separate issue" thing, but this twist of an admission takes the argument to entirely different level. A major tenet of ecofeminism is that what the patriarchy does to women and "animals" (and to Natives and the environment) comes from the same source, an imperialist White male need to identify and ostracize an Other, including a propensity to commit violence against "her"—to maintain at last a master/slave, Self/Other, civilization/nature hierarchal binary, to reassure the Self of its superior status. What is truly surprising, then, is that these commentators are speaking of the two crimes as if they were fundamentally different things!

* HSN: "Sheer Cover with Leeza Gibbons"

I channel-surf too much. I jut saw a before and after pair of pictures, of a woman's eyes, and I thought the "before" looked so much more alive and attractive. What are these cosmetic people thinking? I recall French feminist Hélène's Cixous's assertion that make-up is a way that women "kill" themselves ("ghastly" appearance-wise), under the pressure of a gynocidal patriarchy. But her comment only became real to me now, listening to this discourse that seems from another planet.

For instance: oh, this product gives one those much-cherished "pouty" lips, which "we all" want. All women do?! And what, exactly, are you all pouting about, besides the fact that capitalism has rendered you visual OBJECTS stuck with a bogus aesthetics? (More words I'm hearing right now: "concealer"; "cover up"; "spots"; "punch-up"; "larger pores"; "eraser." It's as if one were ashamed of being a corporeal being, a real animal.)

* RADIO RANT: Imaginary Worlds Made More So

Michael Savage flashed his erudition once again last night (8/3/07), imparting an anecdote in which he felt like being in [Jonathan Swift's] Brobdignag. As usual, when making such learned literary allusions, he immediately said something to the effect that his audience probably had no clue regarding the reference. Well, I MUST admit to feeling a bit befuddled, because he actually called Gulliver's imaginary land "Brobingdang"—at least twice. Oh, strange imaginary world, a place to which Gulliver himself never ventured.

* RADIO RANT: Dog Eat Dog; Rich Wear Fur

The outrage by the talking heads on sports talk radio and cable news regarding the Michael Vick dog-fighting scandal was understandably vehement—but so self-righteous. That is, all these people can be "right," but for the wrong reasons. "How inhumane! I'm a dog lover! All Americans love dogs!" But when the occasional "nut" called in suggesting that shooting deer and pheasants is no less barbaric, such discourse was dismissed as beyond the pale. Worst has been the pompous&supercilious attitude of ESPN Radio's Colin Cowherd, whose elitist/urbanite biases distinguished themselves: pit-bull fighting is a despicable sport practiced especially by the poor, the rural, and the Southern (and the—shshshsh—black). You're so right, Colin. You city folk are immune to such first-hand visceral cruelty, with enough money to distance yourself from the inhumane (such an ironic term) factory farming that provides you with your veal parmesan and chicken Kiev, while your pasty-skinned lazy Euro-jet-trash-of-a-wife can't decide whether to wear a dead fox or mink, to cover her pastiness.

All this outrage is also completely anthropocentric: that is, it's all about us humans—including "man's best friend." There would certainly have been less outrage if Vick had been involved in cockfighting. Or how about terrapin matches? (Yeh, probably very lengthy affairs.) Or cricket bouts, to the death?! My point is that, if humankind has an innate biophilia (love of all life), it's still quite mammalo-centric: we love the animals that remind us most of us, that have fur, and cuddly babies . . . and maybe milk that we can feed to our own babies. And so, following my niece & nephew around the zoo gift shop last week, I wasn't surprised to see that nearly all of the stuffed animals were mammals. The few birds seemed unnatural and stiff and "distant"; the reptiles and insects were intentionally rubbery and "alien."

In fact, though my book-in-manuscript spends pages on end explaining the poets' age-old obsession with birds, I'm still rather surprised when people actually grow attached to them as pets. (I refuse to do so, being against caged birds in general.) But my wife, for one, treats her budgie as her best friend, though it shits on her shoulder all the time and bites the hell out of me when I show up. (Well, at least we and birds are both vertebrates: so, yeh, birds still kick ass on locusts as pets.) But I wonder if the average human mourns as much when his/her lovebird flies out the window in the middle of winter and never returns, compared to when old Fido gets run over by the neighbor's car. Birds, I guess, are somewhere between our mammal-compatriot dogs and cats—and that goldfish whose tombstone is the toilet-bowl lid. ("Mom! Where's Jimmy? He's not in his bowl!")

I've wandered far from Michael Vick to illustrate how problematic "animal rights" is. I don't even like that term ("rights" is a human legal construct, after all), preferring Lawrence Buell's phrase, "nonanthropocentric ethics." But that won't fit into a talking point or on a bumper sticker.

[Added same night:] Wow: it's pretty fascinating to learn, then, that Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank's reaction to his quarterback's legal problems has been belated because the fellow has been on vacation. In Africa. On safari.

*RADIO RANT: Dryden True

Michael Savage defended his hate-laced, race-baiting demagoguery last night (6/25/07) by appealing (once again) to some bon mot by Dryden on satire. (In other words: what I do isn't hate! It's in the grand tradition of Dryden & Pope & Swift!) Well, he got Swift's first name right, but he referred to Dryden—twice—as "Robert Dryden," reaffirming my suspicion in a previous blog entry [4/13/07] that Savage, our foremost man of les belles lettres, is really no great aficionado of the English writer . . . JOHN Dryden. Savage even said that he put the quot. from this "Robert" Dryden at the beginning of his latest book; but again, it's obviously straight from a quotation dictionary (or another 2ndary source), then, not from Savage's deep excursion into the annals of British Neoclassical lit & wit.

* RADIO RANT: Sopranos End on Low Note?

I've never seen The Sopranos. (No HBO.) But from the shock & outrage on the morning talk shows (including sports talk shows, where everyone apparently feels qualified to don the hat of "Culture Critic" at will), there seems to be a great disconnect between the mainstream "philistine" and the postmodern in art. "There was no closure! Bah! Wah! Nothing freaking happened." Again, I didn't see it, but these reactions gave me a feeling of déjà vu: these were exactly my Intro to Lit students' reactions to short stories by, say, Donald Barthelme (and even Chekhov and Joyce, for that matter). "I missed the point, Tom. What happened?!" Well, stuff happens in these texts, on a more subtle level than in a Harlequin romance or detective potboiler—but no, there isn't some salient climax & denouement tying it up all nicely with a bow. There are many mannerisms of postmodern aesthetics that I'm none too fond of; but I do appreciate the implicit philosophy that there is no ending to life & nature—and therefore art & story; to expect/require one is only the imposition of a psyche & culture conditioned to do so. (Kinda like finding a gargoyle's face in a tree stump [see next blog], eh?)

* RADIO RANT: "fair & balanced," stupid & wrong

Never mind that their top-of-the-hour radio news already offers the least content of any radio network, FOX News has now added these minute-or-so "human interest" segments at the end of (some of) their news feeds, apparently to placate or anaesthetize those who can barely stand more than a minute or two of world-news reality. Each one ends with—"from the audio archives of Fox News Talk," but they sound more like new segments made expressly for this purpose, as epilogue to their news. (For one thing, none of the voices are recognizable as known talk-radio people. [And, for better or worse, I should know!])

Well, the only two of these segments I've heard are just plain "stupid & wrong." #1: a fluff interview of Serena Williams, in which the interviewer begins, "You're probably the favorite at Wimbleton this year . . . ." Well, sentimental favorite, maybe, and perhaps the only woman tennis player the person-on-the-street knows, but I doubt if she'll even be seeded in the top four this year, unless she kicks ass at the French. Or—IF this is truly a dated archive from, say, two years ago, no such context is provided, and so the interview/story remains problematically misleading in its ostensible timeliness.

If #1 was a mere quibble, perhaps, witness #2. "Archive from the past" or not, in this segment, FOX truly shines: it's another fluff piece, this time on Ernest Hemingway, in which the speaker "ernest-ly" tells us that the famous American novelist and big-game hunter won the "Nobel Peace Prize" in 1954. (I have heard this segment at least three times, so I'm not mistaken.) Hmmm. No, his Nobel was for Literature. His major efforts at "peace" seemed to have consisted mainly in displacing his own internal battles into an external war upon other species.

[Added 6/6/07:] I've now heard several other of these segments, including a hard-hitting exposé (NOT) on the 1960's cartoon, The Banana Splits.

* Eco-Boring

As I sit here writing a book review of Native poet Kimberly Blaeser, and as my mind wanders, thinking of cool questions for Lawrence Buell's visit to my class this fall, a metaphor (gasp—no, not another one!) for ecocritical studies in general comes to mind. Ecocriticism—as a humanities enterprise—is still a fine front lawn, of Kentucky bluegrass, or whatever; but there are still a few "weeds" or "varmints" (often Native American) cavorting on said lawn, saying, "Geez, this is boring. Give someone else a chance." (Or—we can analyze the tree imagery in Tennyson once again. . . .)

* RADIO RANT: "The man that hath no music"

Michael Savage was harping on the 60's hippies movement again last night (5/22/07), as the major impetus of contemporary liberalism—itself the ruination of the nation. As a true conservative, Savage even asserted that Plato was right in kicking all the poets and musicians out his his ideal Republic. (An overgeneralization: music of certain less "emotional," more "rational," modes [scales] would still be allowed, if I recall. But no doubt the modern "blues" scale would be verboten.) Plato was "on to something," Savage continued, because artists (read: liberal artists) have always been dangerous to "family" values and social order.

But if you've read Plato's Republic, it's pretty clear that this conservative utopia borders on a police state, run by philosopher-kings whose claim to a greater rationalism is only rivaled by certain contemporary radio-talk-show hosts; social order would be maintained by a military class (the "brawn" to the elite rulers' "brains"), who would keep the workers in line, since this third class could only be mindless bundles of emotions & appetencies (cf. the "lower animals" in Orwell's allegory).

Yes, by God, I'd keep Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix out of the ears of such masses, so easily turned by metaphor and melody. Let them only read (if allowed to do so) lame treatises in support of the party line: this is Savage's true calling, after all, to provide the propagandistic accoutrements for a latter-day politbureau; and as in Stalin's day, such soporifics would be officially dubbed the only "good"—because "true"—art.

Finally, it was rather strange that Savage put forth—uh—Joan Baez?? as the epitome of 60's aesthetic radicalism. The bourgeois coffee-house drivel that was much "folk-rock" of that day was already smug co-optation, the kind of the stuff Savage himself probably enjoyed at one time. I prefer(red) "hippie" music that employed a distortion pedal, at least; but that, too, was quickly co-opted, as "Purple Haze" became a bumper tune for Rush Limbaugh—and (later) Metallica, a musical segue for the Savage-meister himself {1}.  [Impromptu Quot. of the Day: "You know you're gettin' old when your favorite teen-age-rebellious rock anthems start showin' up as background music to car & ketchup commercials." --TCG]  So, really—NOT TO WORRY, Mr. Savage: the radical artists that you fear have damned little chance to "corrupt the morals of the youth" when the youth are corrupted from the crib already, interpellated into the Law of the Father from day one. . . . Quot. of the Day:

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
    --Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice 5.1)

{1} In fact, one wonders why all that speed/goth/death-metal bumper music is allowed in the great "Republic" that is the "Savage Nation"—a rabid, visceral, arational subtext that rather deconstructs the message of this man who dons a mask of reason.

* God's "Lesser Creatures"

So there I was, listening to CNN today, as two Christian theologians fought it out: an ultra-conservative evangelist combatting a "progressive" pastor who believed in global warming, etc. Kudos to the latter. However, the latter's seemingly positive phrase, [in defense of] "our lesser creatures," is so totally Biblically hierarchal & demeaning that it makes one wonder if any brand of Christianity can ever be truly eco-egalitarian. . . . (Ditto you, Mr. Coleridge, and your damned "Mariner" poem, with its moralizing conflation of—yet still implicit distinction between—"all creatures great and small.")

* RADIO RANT: Conservative Literary Criticism

Kipling's "If" is not a "great poem": it is wretched didacticism, a series of bromides & anodynes set to verse.
I see that I have been truant in my role as chief tormentor of Michael Savage. (Well, I'm sure that plenty of others wear the same mantle, so I don't worry unduly in this regard.) But last night (5/18/07), "Doctor Savage" raised my hackles once again, in praising Rudyard Kipling's "If" as a "great poem." "If" is not a great poem: it is wretched didacticism; "If" isn't even poetry, really (in the post-Coleridgean sense of the word): it's a series of prosaic bromides and anodynes set to verse. (Frankly, I would think that even most college freshmen today have more "taste" than to put up the poster-art of such verbal schmaltz in their dorm room.) Savage's judgment is no doubt colored by his fond childhood memory of having memorized this doggerel in school; it certainly isn't based on any accepted criteria of literary criticism. (The criterion that a fine work of art should have a "good, moral message" went out of fashion a century ago. But this was probably due to the onslaughts of amoral liberalism, Savage would no doubt claim.) The good Doctor did acknowledge that Kipling was ultimately criticized as a blithe spokesperson for British imperialism, but Savage couldn't fathom how being such a spokesperson is an—uhm—bad thing. (Rather, he ironically goes on to boast about how he's imparting "greater knowledge" to his listeners, about poems and such.)

To go beyond Savage to better objections to my objection—yes, recent critical theories of alterity (e.g., postcolonial theory, feminism, queer theory, and ecocriticism) ARE political/ethical stances in their own right, liberal & idealistic defenses of the "underdog." As a poco/eco-critic, I am inordinately conscious of my own ideology, as but one aspect of a multitude of contemporary discourses—NOT as the norm that sets itself up as a theo-philosophical "Word" for the rest of the world, as Savage's nostalgia about (and deification of) his smugly-content-because-blindly-monolithic Euro-American classroom & neighborhood of a half century ago does. (Boy, that was one god-awful sentence I just wrote.) "IF" only, Mr. Savage: "IF" only you could look at the "Other" and be more able to better see yourself. . . .

* Bad Bird Bandits

I had the great pleasure of an afternoon/evening at Fran K.'s last Sunday, a wonderful antidote to my utterly mundane urban existence, a place outside of town that reminded me of childhood summers at my grandma's in the small town of Ft. Pierre, SoDak, Grandma Mollie's old house a mere block away from a deliciously "uncivilized" slough and three blocks away from the Missouri River (sans tourist traps).

The human conversations were entertaining as well. But at one point, my wife told the story of Blue Jays robbing a House Finch nest on her front porch. And I felt half-brained & incomplete, in not being able to quote Robert Francis's moving retort of a poem, called "Blue Jay." So here it is [Quot. of the Day]:

So bandit-eyed, so undovelike a bird
to be my pastoral father's favorite—
skulker and blusterer
whose every arrival is a raid.

Love made the bird no gentler
nor him who loved less gentle.
Still, still the wild blue feather
brings my mild father.
    --Robert Francis

The subsequent conversation involved rationalizations regarding "nature's way," etc. (I even referred to Darwin myself, if I recall.) But I was too tongue-tied/brain-dead to bring up "intuition's way," my own identification with the vultures & corvids, etc., of our ecosphere. And so this poem.

* RADIO RANT: Metaphors Are a "Rush"

Readers of this blog (BOTH of you, and both related by blood or marriage, I'm sure) may be surprised that a certain R. Limbaugh has hardly come up in my frequent "Radio Rants." Well, he's been on the radio so long that his shtick has lost all its shock value; moreover, he's so obviously a shill & "water carrier" for the Republican party line that he seems passé to even some other conservative talk-show hosts. (Savage, for instance, irreverently calls him "Lush Limbo," or something of the sort.)

But, busy on the computer the other day, I endured his opening for a few minutes before changing the station. And I was taken back to the late '80's, when I first heard him, and when I first wondered, "How can people who are fairly articulate actually think this way?" But his shtick hasn't changed a bit, as he still rehearses his formulaic intros: here I am, the Great Limbaugh, with "talent on loan from God"; and—by God, I can stick it to you godless liberals with "half my brain tied behind my back." Now, I admit that the refrain "talent on loan from God" is semi-tongue-in-cheek hyperbole, as is the in-your-face egoism of the "half my brain" phrase. And I won't even rail, for once, against the current "Sea of Faith" that, to my deep chagrin, inundates my daily consciousness. But I will get to my point, then: "half my brain tied behind my back" is an utterly ridiculous, botched figure of speech that reminds me of Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" poem, and Cleanth Brooks' marvelous critique of its awful series of mixed metaphors. The point of a metaphor is to make more "real" & concrete & sensual a more abstract concept. But just try to visualize half your brain bound behind your back. Rush, you better get that other half of your brain back in your "head"—the right half, I assume, which more righteously handles analogous thinking—and start using it, rather than letting it remain an idle appendage dangling somewhere down your backside. . . . (Maybe then you can feel some empathy for others who aren't cigar-chomping white male capitalists.)

* Literature = "Lies"; The Shortest Epic Ever

Quot. of the Day:

All literature: the left brain's lame attempt to verbalize (and so botch) the right brain's non-verbal truths.
    --TCG [based on a February 2004 journal entry]

. . . And so I appreciate all the more the following poem—the shortest "epic" ever written (quoted entire):

         EPIC

Book I: Oh, Goddess[,] help me sing of Nothing.

Books II-XI:

Book XII: Thanks a lot.

    --[(20th-c.) anonymous poet]