Really?

Are all Southern congressmen trying to one up each other in terms of being despicable? Good job, Tennessee: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110520/ap_on_re_us/us_xgr_tennessee_schools_sexuality

the death of the killer

Picture: Puzzle piece of Harm

The Death of the Killer

There is a symbol and it generally agreed upon who it represents.

But, there was a bar fight once over if the batter is a righty or southpaw.

A southpaw is a lefty, this is a baseball poem, keep up. It's all so silly,

really, because it depends on what dug out you're in. Dug out is my favorite

baseball word (my second favorite is ducksnort (tragedy)) because it makes

baseball seem like it sprang from the earth. Zeus threw some thunder

bolts into a forest and made a grassy knoll. Groundhogs unearthed

the dugouts. I don't know how the bases got there. Tree stump remains?

Dug outs look like trenches, home plate looks like a house and left field looks

like shame. The first inning of my first varsity game freshman year, my knees chattered

in shallow left. The lead off hitter singled and it went through my legs. I turned around 

and dashed after the ball. He tried to take second, but I threw him out. That is my life.

An embarrassment, followed by some luck and a smidgen of skill. My father 

came to every game. He is sitting across from me now, watching the news. Harmon Killebrew

has died today. He was my father's favorite ball player growing up. There is a red chair atop

a wall in the Mall of America. It is 520 feet from home plate, not 439 feet. A physicist was 

brought in to find out the real distance traveled. A Killebrew home run hit that chair. Killebrew

just sounds like a baseball name. There are last names that just sound like ball players. Mine doesn't. 

But, I will always be in left field, knees chattering, picturing the diamond 10,000 years ago.  

Aubrey Plaza, marry me?

Parks and Rec. keeps on getting better and better. April likes Neutral Milk Hotel. Andy says they are "sad, depressing and weird. And art should be happy and fun." Andy is right about the former, but not the latter. Has there ever been a moment in mainstream television where two characters fight over an indie band, and the deeper question, what should art do? This is why Parks and Rec. is so great; it slips this in. Of course it doesn't come back to it, because it turns to jokes about why government matters (it doesn't, Ron Swanson explains to a little girl). Nevertheless, this is one of many reasons why Parks and Rec. is currently the best comedy on television.

Names that are not names?

In my advanced fiction class a woman, who I so admire for writing in genre, wrote a supernatural western piece that contained dopplegangers, the four horsemen of the apocalypse and non stop action. The main character's names was Lourdes. One of our peers, who had to give a little presentation/summary on her piece pre workshop, had never heard of the name Lourdes. He, a white poorly mutton chopped male thought it was pronounced Lords. Somehow he wasn't the only one. A handful of students nodded in agreement, as did our professor (who I love, but grew up on a farm, and had a pony). The author had to pronounce Lourdes. The people who had never heard of the name Lourdes  awed in unison. They tried to say name. They tried to dramatically roll their Rs. I wanted to bang my head against the table. I couldn't see the author from where I was sitting, but I wondered how far her eyes can rolled back.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was: everyone comes from different backgrounds that they can't control, and it's Depaul (where the total diversity it self promotes is only in its brochures). I guess I am too close to the name Lourdes. Lourdes was the first woman I....

I have been thinking about if there are any other names that don't sound like names. Ichabod, Kesha, Jensen, Kanye, Blaine, Mort, Biff, etc.Anyway, Elisa Gabbert has an interesting blog post about the names of the Kentucky Derby horses and how they sound like varieties of tomatoes. Here it is:  http://thefrenchexit.blogspot.com/2011/05/kentucky-derby-horse-or-variety-of.html

i want to meet a girl with a color printer and a heavy duty stapler: http://www.featherproof.com/Mambo/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=4&id=17&Itemid=41

Likes/ DIslikes for March(Late) and April

Likes: Kate Middleton,Florida, Justified, whiskey from my folks basement that is older than me, Neverwhere, seeing Neil Gaiman speak at the Harold Wash., M Burger, Five Guys, Daisy Cutters, workshops, Hemingway (everything, but especially Indian Camp& the Battler), watching Phone Booth in class, listening to Edith Piaf in class, Chablis by Don Barthelme, Michael Scott proposing to Holly on the Office, Mandarin mango shampoo, writing a story's ending first, Border's closing and clearance sales, T.S. Elliot's collected poems for 20 cents (at a thrift store), new okkervil river album, new fleet foxes album, new explosions in the sky album, Friday Night Lights coming back on, girls picking up tabs, professor suggesting magazine to submit to and looking over possible submission,  ideas for revisionist history short story that could be expanded later into a novel, volunteering at a community greenhouse, getting free sage and parsley, Archer, first 14 minutes of Game of Thrones


Dislikes: coming back from Florida to 40 degree temps, Shin splints!, my z key sticking, Jane Lynch, bank fees, The Left Hand of Darkness, the nbc comedies being on weird spring hiatus, people in class cracking their backs, Friday Night Lights ending, Robin Hood (with R. Crowe), Tyler Hansbrough, Canucks, Prince William (horse faced)

Meh: 127 Hours

Ken Burn's Baseball

The Ninth Inning

by Donald Hall

1.  My dog and I drive five miles every
morning to get the newspaper. How
else do I find out, when the Sox trade
Smoky Joe Wood for Elizabeth Bishop?
He needs persistent demonstration
of love and approval. He cocks his
head making earnest pathetic sounds.
Although I praise his nobility
of soul, he is inconsolable

2.  when I lift my hand from his ear to
shift: Even so, after the reading,
the stranger nods, simpers, and offers
to share his poems with me. Dean Gratt
confided, at the annual Death
and Retirement Gala: “Professor
McCormick has not changed: A Volvo
is just a Subaru with tenure.”
Catchers grow old catching, which is strange

3.  because they squat so much. “The barn is
burning, O, the barn is burning on
the hill; the cattle low and blunder
in their stalls; the horses scream and hurl
their burning manes.” Jennifer remains
melancholic. Do you start to feel,
Kurt, as if you’re getting it? I mean
baseball, as in the generations
of old players hanging on, the young

4.  coming up from Triple A the first
of September, sitting on the bench
or pinch-running, ready for winter’s
snow-plowing and cement-mixing, while
older fellows work out in their gyms
or cellars, like George “Shotgun’’ Shuba
who swung a bat against a tethered
ball one thousand times a day, line-drives
underneath his suburban ranchhouse.

5.  By 2028, when K. C.
turned one-hundred, eighty-three percent
of American undergraduates
majored in creative writing, more
folks had MFA’s than VCR’s,
and poetry had passed acrylic
in the GNP. The NEA
offered fellowships for destroying
manuscripts and agreeing: “Never

6.  to publish anything jagged on
the right side of the page, or ever
described as ‘prose poems.’” Guerillas
armed with Word Perfect holed in abstract
redoubts. Chief-of-Staff Vendler mustered
security forces (say: Death Squads)
while she issued comforting reports
nightly on lyric television.
Hideous shepherds sing to their flocks

7.  under howling houses of the dog.
At the Temple Medical Center
in New Haven I wait. My mother
at eighty-six goes through the Upper
and Lower GI again. My mind
jangles, thinking of my sick son in
New York and his sick one-year-old girl.
This afternoon, if the X-rays go
all right, I drive back to New Hampshire.

8.  In New Hampshire, late August, the leaves
turn slowly, like someone working to
order—protesting, outraged—and fall
as they must do. The pond water stays
warm but the campers have departed.
By the railroad goldenrod stiffens;
asters begin a late pennant drive
in front of the barn; pink hollyhocks
wilt and sag like teams out of the race.

9.  No Red Sox tonight, but on Friday
a double-header with the Detroit
Tigers, my terrible old team, worse
than the Red Sox who beat the Yankees
last night while my mother and I watched
—the way we listened, fifty years back—
sprightly ghosts playing in heavy snow
on VHS 30 from Hartford,
and the pitcher stared at the batter