I have her book, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems 1954-1962. It was one of many things given to me by my grandmother — long before she passed. The copy she left me (a collectible) was not read but boxed away for when I finished college and lived a more solitary existence. I picked up an old paperback version of the book somewhere in New York when I lived there. I felt less guilty turning the pages of an old paperback. It is a great book of poetry. I’ve no idea where the paperback is now. The collectors hardback is on a shelf — unread and without an advocate. I recommend it to you now.

Death wistfully calls attention to its own inevitability while apologizing with the reminder of forgotten poetry.

An excerpt from North American Time by Adrienne Rich

I am thinking this in a country
where words are stolen out of mouths
as bread is stolen out of mouths
where poets don’t go to jail
for being poets, but for being
dark-skinned, female, poor.
I am writing this in a time
when anything we write
can be used against those we love
where the context is never given
though we try to explain, over and over
For the sake of poetry at least
I need to know these things

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I rank plane chat down there with American sitcoms, and this one sided conversation qualified for an even lower authority, right down there with my recent discovery that an admired colleague (a doctor of all things shiny, and intellectual) is syntactically and lexiconically challenged. Something exhibited by his incessant use of the word “douche” or “douchey” to describe everybody/everything to which he is disinclined.

Good fortune was at my side in the case of the bureaucrat babble however, as my swami taught me well and I was able to induce a trance like state in which I traveled to another place while pretending to listen. I was able to contemplate songs about domestic violence (it being domestic violence month) for my, what now appears to be, monthly blog post.

Alas, the playlist on domestic violence, child abuse, incest or a combination, was way to long. Too many unbelievably sad and telling songs. How could this be? From The Crystal’s He Hit Me(and it felt like a kiss), Alice Cooper’s Only Women Bleed, and Sublime’s Date Rape, to Janis Ian’s His Hands and Tracy Chapman’s Behind the Wall, the list is lengthy, spanning decades. It was exhausting contemplating such a list, never-mind the reasons such a list exists. Such sadness summoned, such despair. A lengthy government career saga started to resemble a delightful fairytale.

NCADV
Violence Against Women Organizations
The Domestic Violence Awareness Project
Women’s Law
1 800 799 (SAFE) 7233 National Domestic Abuse Hotline

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Find out how you can help in your community.

Peace

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Professor Warren, in her capacity as a specialist in bankruptcy law, uses actual facts & statistics to back up her Cassandra predictions. Despite the Burkean vapors of Brooks & Doubthat, she pins the decline of the American middle class not to our moral decay and piggish consumerist lusts, but to the “rational” decisions of powerful industries (and the governments that served those industries) to shove an ever-increasing percentage of public-utility social costs like health care and education onto individuals and families.

If you haven’t got the time or strength to watch the whole lecture, I recommend listening, starting at about 47:30, to what she has to say about bankruptcies in America, even before the Great ‘maybe if we insist it’s only a recession it won’t hurt so much’ Collapse of 2008. Why do I suspect that 85% of middle-class bankrupts are no longer able/willing to hide the “stigma” from even their closest friends and family members?

Airports are good for something.

Peace

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