On tolerance

Tolerance does not imply approval, and tolerance must be reciprocal. To tolerate the intolerant is to embrace the rapist, to bare the throat to the murderer.

Crap (Weiner)

It works for the Icelanders. There's no one on the island telling them they're not good enough, so they just go ahead and sing and paint and write. One result of this freewheeling attitude is that Icelandic artists produce a lot of crap. They're the first to admit it. But crap plays an important role in the art world. In fact, it plays exactly the same role as it does in the farming world. It's fertilizer. The crap allows the good stuff to grow. You can't have one without the other. Now, to be sure, you don't want to see crap framed at an art gallery, any more than you want to see a pound of fertilizer sitting in the produce section of your local grocery store. But still, crap is important.

Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss

The strangeness (Hilton)

There came a time, he realized, when the strangeness of everything made it increasingly difficult to realize the strangeness of anything.

James Hilton, Lost Horizon

Lie down with dogs...

When you choose to identify with a group that has extremist elements, you legitimize suspicions concerning your own extremism.

Mom's birthday cake

I still am not much of a baker.

Skillet-roasted chicken

Last night I tried Cook's Illustrated's technique for skillet-roasted chicken. It is a good method, and the lemon-herb sauce is very tasty.

Your goal

If happiness is your goal, ask how; if wisdom, ask why.

Apple skillet pie

I made this apple skillet pie yesterday from the recipe in Cook's Illustrated magazine. It is a definite keeper.

A convalescence (Hummer)

I will confess that for the past eight years I have felt as if there were a dark force field at the center of my psyche; I have interpreted it variously, and am even medicated in response to it. When I woke up this morning, having witnessed Obama’s masterful victory, it was gone. My body, embedded in the larger body of humanity, was responding to an illness of massive proportion. Today, a convalescence has begun. But it has only begun. It is still nascent, still fragile, still uncertain.

T.R. Hummer

Post-election feeling (Hardy)

O sweet To-morrow! —
   After to-day
   There will away
This sense of sorrow.
Then let us borrow
Hope, for a gleaming
Soon will be streaming,
   Dimmed by no gray —
   No gray!

Thomas Hardy from "Song of Hope"

Glens Falls Post-Star article

I'm quoted in an article in today's Post-Star. They sent a reporter and photographer to the last poetry reading at the bookstore in Glen Falls. Sadly, they didn't print my poem with the others.

Poet Michael Rush unfolded the paper containing poems he had printed out to present.

His work included lines like "to know a thing diminishes it" and "If I could be anyone, I would be everyone."

The writer said his work often loses meaning when read aloud.

"I look for something that can be conveyed verbally," Rush said of his choices for the session. "A lot of my stuff is written for the page."

Too late

Best comment of the day re: the election:

Change comes to America, four years too late.

Obama wins big!

The atheist says: HALLELUJAH!!!

Last chance

LAST CHANCE for those of you who believe there's still time to save the United States of America. Go vote.

Back in the desert

And so, the completion of another productive summer in upstate New York. I got out just ahead of the snow, so my cunning plan to follow the good weather in maintaining this "bicoastal" lifestyle continues to work well.

I received my copy of Literary House Review 2008 in the mail yesterday.  My poems are on pages 90 and 112.  It's a nice-looking publication!  Now I'll have to read it and see what I think of the other stuff in it.