Bow your head. Beg for your life. Death without burial.And there–as ifInside a moonlit sandstorm God allowedThe columns of Palmyra speech–The Greeks encouraging their host:“I am here. I will help.Stand still and fight. At any moment they will break.”Though they do not.—All Day Permanent Red Read more

WEAR YOUR INSIDES OUT: Remember how I promised you a post about how God’s like a killer mutant cat? This is that post! I can’t now find the post at Secular Right which triggered this response, but I recall it as an ingenue, even a gamine, in which the author asked why theists so often assumed that the atheist worldview was bleak or depressing: How can we feel bereft when there is Mozart and springtime? And yeah, I’m really sympathetic... Read more

THE PLAYMOBIL WINE BAR. You’re welcome. Read more

Think of a raked sky-wide Venetian blind.Add the receding traction of its slatsOf its slats of its slats as a hand draws it up.Hear the Greek army getting to its feet. Then of a stadium when many boards are raisedAnd many faces change to one vast face.So, where there were so many masks,Now one Greek mask glittered from strip to ridge.—All Day Permanent Red Read more

POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: I haven’t written anything about the recent gay-marriage decisions. I really didn’t think I had anything to say that I hadn’t said already. But apparently I do… because I have too many friends? This post was prompted by an ad from the National Organization for Marriage, which a friend of mine described as “Orwellian”; in his view, the ad said that love is hate. So here are three thoughts about the ad [EDITED: It’s that... Read more

“’When I make a word do a lot of work like that,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘I always pay it extra.'”: And now I come to the thing I care about most: songs. For it seems to me that there is one way in which the gay-marriage movement deserves the adjective “Orwellian.” It is designed to make any sense of the uniqueness of heterosexual eros unspeakable, and ultimately unthinkable. There are boring practical reasons to have a separate and specific language... Read more

To the sigh of the string, see Pandar’s shot float off;To the slap of the string on the stave, float onOver the strip for a beat, a beat, and thenCarry a tunnel the width of a lipstick through Quist’s neck.–Christopher Logue, All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer’s Iliad Rewritten Read more

AND A BELATED HOLY THURSDAY GREETING TO YOU, TOO. Worth checking every day. Read more

BREAK FAST: KITCHEN ADVENTURES. Some stuff I tried, to celebrate Easter. Lemon-roasted Cornish hen: I used: a lemon, a small yellow onion, a small Cornish hen, some fresh rosemary, s & p, lots of butter. Set oven to 425, 450, or thereabouts. Peel the onion. Cut a wedge of lemon and a wedge of onion–these two together get stuffed into the hen, so you want pieces which will fit. Then wash the hen and pat dry. Take out the giblets... Read more

FLOWERS IN THE DUSTBIN: Green and beautiful low-income housing? This sounds like an oxymoron. The usual standard for housing for the poor has been cheap and functional. But only this year came Intervale Green, a low-income apartment building in the South Bronx that might just be a model for developers. … Welcome to Intervale Green Apartments. Quietly but clearly it engages in a dialogue with the old psychology and social policies that say the poor don’t need beauty–just basics. But... Read more