It happened one summer

I have long carried the memory of being awakened by this song on my clock-radio and having it running through my head all day at school.

First Known Use of the Word Was in 1880

Crematorium:

Where laurel hedges hide the coal and coke
   Our lawn-surrounded crematorium lies;
And every half-an-hour a puff of smoke
   Shows what we loved dissolving in the skies—
   Dear hands, dear feet, dear laughter-lighted eyes
And smiling lips which waited for a joke.

Now no one seems to know quite what to say:
   Friends are so altered by the passing years—
Well anyhow it’s not so cold today
   And thus we try to dissipate our fears.
I am the Resurrection and the Life!
Strong, sly, and painful, doubt inserts its knife.

John Betjeman.

Wanting things the way they used to be

You don't know what that can do to me.

Doomed to Repeat It

Learning from History:

They said, my saints, my slogan-sayers sang,   

Be good, my child, in spite of all alarm.

They stood, my fathers, tall in a row and said,   

Be good, be brave, you shall not come to harm.

I heard them in my sleep and muttering dream,   

And murmuring cried, How shall I wake to this?

They said, my poets, singers of my song,   

We cannot tell, since all we tell you is

But history, we speak but of the dead.   

And of the dead they said such history

(Their beards were blazing with the truth of it)   

As made of much of me a mystery.

David Ferry. 

#throwbackthursday

Mex and Kayla.  (2011)

Mex and Lola.  (2011)

I see you shiver with antici...

This will always be Tim's biggest role in my mind, but let's not lose sight of his turn as patriotic Dr Petrov in Hunt for Red October.

PS - ...pation.

quod amavi, illud iam non amo

On a Line by Petrarch:

What I once loved I now love less.
September leaves us shadows
but no light. I watch you undress, 

your body edged in darkness.
Miles on the stereo, those notes
that I once loved, and now love less—

the glint of anger they suppress
turns a kind of airless blue,
admits no light. I watch you undress 

your gestures of significance,
and leave me at a loss to know
what I once loved. I now love less 

than fluently, am forced to guess
at curve of neck and arch of brow.
But not at light. I watch you without redress 

to sound or sense. The needle lifts
at last from the refrain, its echo:
What I once loved I now love less.
But no; not light; not watching you, undressed. 

Eleanor Stanford.

Jesus Fucking Christ

Not Tim Curry, too?!  The world is just fucking crumbling every goddamned where I look.

Sometimes I'm right and I can be wrong

But Dolly was always right.

Inconceivable

Coming to That:

“If it comes to that,” he said, “there’ll be no

preventing it.”

He uttered it as I listened. Had I got it right,

hearing him?

“If it comes to that,” is what he said, and,

as if talking

to himself, went on about how there’d be no

preventing it.

He came to that conclusion, saying it in a

slow way of

coming to that, whatever that was it might

come to before

not being prevented—and as if such a thing

were for him

the unthinkable, and would prevail, if it

came to that.

 

And while listening more closely now to

what he said,

I realized if no one paid him heed, it would

be as if he

hadn’t said it—if it came to that—and would

then not be

prevented from falling to forces known to

care little for

what he said, even if they heard it, their

being wily

and forceful enough to make sure it would

come to that.

Dorothea Tanning.

She’s Back with Her Man

There was a long spell when Jolene was little Sammy's favorite song.  Rest in peace, Dolly, with Carl back at your side.

I'll be alone, dancing, you know it, baby

Anthem of my generation.

We’re Floating in the Moonlit Sky

The Streets of Air:

All night waiting, in an empty house
under dry electric moons, they cast
no shadow, a man striding impatiently
sucking a dry pipe, waiting
an empty sacrificial vessel waiting
without patience to be filled with God. 

He said,
                —There was a scratching at my door
the noise of some one fingering the latch
once, but I opened and only found the night
empty of sound, empty—
                                            The images of drouth
in a parched land growing, acacias in the sand
with thorns and thornlike leaves that cast no shadow,
dry leaves silently moving in the sun. 

A wall rose there, of hewn enormous stones
laid without mortar and a gateway, barred
and skies closed in.
                                  But you shall hear the thunder
of bursting walls, the gates of night swing wide,
and journeys will be set toward the thunder. 

Your path shall be the empty streets of air. 

Malcolm Cowley.

You Might Get What You’re After

Ah, The Burning of Washington:

Following the defeat of American forces at the Battle of Bladensburg on August 24, 1814, a British army led by Major-General Robert Ross marched on Washington, D.C. That evening, British soldiers and sailors set fire to multiple public buildings, including the Presidential Mansion (White House), United States Capitol, and Washington Navy Yard.

Here's a before and after picture of the White House:

Damn the bastards to Hell who did this.

<exits singing, I'm an ordinary guy...>