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“There is that poem about the nightingale singing that humankind cannot stand too much reality. But how much unreality can it stand? Do you follow? You understand me?”

“Me unnastand, sah.”

“I fired that question right back at the nightingale. So what if reality may be terrible? It’s better than what we’ve got.”

“Kay, sah. Okay.”

“All right, I let you out of it. It’s better than what I’ve got. But every man feels from his soul that he has got to carry his life to a certain depth. Well, I have got to go on because I haven’t reached that depth yet. You get it?”

“Yes, sah.”

— Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

Now hollow fires burn out to black,
  And lights are guttering low:
Square your shoulders, lift your pack,
  And leave your friends and go.

Oh never fear, man, nought’s to dread,
  Look not to left nor right:
In all the endless road you tread
  There’s nothing but the night.

— A. E. Housman, “A Shropshire Lad”

people are strange: they are constantly angered by
trivial things,
but on a major matter
like
totally wasting their lives,
they hardly seem to
notice . . .

— Charles Bukowski, “wandering in the cage”

Already with thee! tender is the night . . .
. . . But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

— John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale’”

(well, it might be that people see so many movies
that when they finally see one not
so bad as the others, they think it’s
great. an Academy Award means that you don’t stink
quite as much as your cousin.)

— Charles Bukowski, “in and out of the dark”

There are 10 nominees now for Best Picture?! I had no idea.

The best movie of the year was Up. The other nine I didn’t see. If any of them were better than Up, then why didn’t I see them? Answer that one for me.

of one hundred movies there’s one that’s fair, one that’s good
and ninety-eight that are very bad. . . .

. . . millions of dollars spent to create
something more terrible than the actual lives of
most living things; one should never have to pay an
admission to hell.

— Charles Bukowski, “in and out of the dark”

Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a longtime fixture on the House subcommittee that oversees Pentagon spending, died after complications from gallbladder surgery, according to his office. He was 77.

The Democratic congressman recently underwent scheduled laparoscopic surgery at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, to remove his gallbladder. The procedure was “routine minimally invasive surgery,” but doctors “hit his intestines,” a source close to the late congressman told CNN.

— CNN.com

OMG I HAD THAT SAME OPERATION I COULD HAVE DIED!!!

On a lighter note, how ironic is it that the president loses a pro-ObamaCare vote due to medical error in a government-run hospital?

• RT @capricecrane: T.S. Eliot: "The world ends not with a bang, but a whimper."
  Sadly, so do most of my dates. #

• For nothing in the white hotel but love / Is offered at a price we can afford — D.M. Thomas #
• RT @HiltonHB Waterfront – Come decked out in USC gear & colors this Sat. to watch the game at Shades Lounge and get 10%off your bill #

Master of his days,
Could Sisyphus be happy?
Camus says he is.

Northwood wins 3-2
IHF Finals next week
May the best team win

Grammatically incorrect — “best” should be “better” — but it’s okay because I’ve got a poetic license!

It’s right here in my wallet . . .

Outside my window
Somewhere in the big pine tree
A bird is singing.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

— Walt Whitman

My son has an assignment to read this poem and answer some questions about what Whitman was trying to say.

The academic answer is that he was exploring the tension between romanticism and science in the late 19th century, and acknowledging sadly, based on “much applause in the lecture-room,” that the romantic worldview was dying out.

But just between you and me, he was also saying that overanalyzing things like stars and poems makes them boring . . .

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!”

— Thomas Parke D’Invilliers

This is the epigraph to The Great Gatsby, which my son is reading for school. So beautiful, so sad . . .

(Thomas Parke D’Invilliers is a character in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, used by him here as a nom de plume.)

I’m looking at these last few posts where I’ve strung together W.H. Auden, John Dewey, Meat Loaf and Franz Kafka, not with any sense of purpose, just things I’ve read or listened to on my winter break.

What a renaissance man I am!

Why, if you were here, we could talk about poetry, education, philosophy, sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll, existentialism . . . and we’d have a good time too, considering we’re all going to die . . .

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

— W.H. Auden, “Lullaby”

Outside the window, snow,
A woman in a hot bath
Overflowing.

— Nobuku Katsura

See the river flow
In a long unbroken line
On the field of snow.

– Boncho

Confined within doors
A priest is warming himself
Burning a Buddha statue.

— Natsume Soseki

Through snow,
Lights of homes
That slammed their gates on me.

— Buson

Originally uploaded by ahp_ibanez

On a withered bough
A crow alone is perching,
Autumn evening now.

— Basho

The wild geese take flight
Low along the railroad tracks
In the moonlit night.

— Shiki

On love, on grief, on every human thing,
Time sprinkles Lethe’s water with his wing.

— Walter Savage Landor

[Lethe is the river of forgetfulness. — Ed.]