Jonathan Franzen has a worshipful, humble, and emotionally genuine piece on Alice Munro in the NYTimes. It's a writer's perspective.
I'm a reader.
Alice Munro as an author is someone I trust without reservation - there's never been one jarring wrong move in any of the books and stories of hers I've read, never anything that even hinted of a rejecting judgement, of a moral line drawn with her on one side and someone else on the other. And she has consistently, with an economy of poetic grace and narrative craft, revealed the world as it is beneath the veil and film of subjectivity, always with an unwavering and unfaltering humanity that's feminine, but in the way maternal presence is feminine; there's a completeness, a fullness that's more than individual.
That's the magic part, that's the mystery and truth of human experience part. That the woman's view is really ours, all of us - mothered by it, sheltered within it, fed by it. Not a woman's view as in an individual woman's life, but woman as center of the human experience - there at the beginning in a way the male view however powerful and knowing can't be.
It's a calm presence in the midst of everything - even the most chaotic storms of disintegration and emotional violence. It's a reach beyond anything immediate, and it's inclusive, an understanding beyond anything like sympathy, an acceptance of whatever's really there as it is.
Most renditions of God, of Godlike perspective, miniaturize the human in order to fit it into the all-seeing eye, but that's false - it's a child's version of male seeing and it's incomplete because of that; the real version illuminates the details without diminishing the whole, accepts with a kind of holding that isn't withdrawal, but patience.
Munro's eye is the missing half of the patriarchal deity, written from within the union, not from outside of it.
The apotheoisis and epiphany are there the way they are in Pissarro's landscapes, in Chekhov's stories that hers are rightly placed with - it's the informed light that comes to us from somewhere we think of as outside the system, beyond our world, although it isn't. It only seems like that because our vision is so partial and our understanding so incomplete.
Which all sounds so ponderous that I'm embarrassed to reread it, but it's a genuine effort to explain how I feel about Munro's work. Her story "Miles City, Montana", in the New Yorker some time in the mid-80's, was a religious experience for me - that's where the tone of this writing is coming from.
It has a parallel in the way the regard for the simplest necessities of living resolves in people who have finally seen how really fragile they are - sacred, humble things profaned by the acts of our living, but still sacred, viewed with an honesty that's rigorous and disciplined, and inspired.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved...

In Flanders Fields
John McCrae

Mozilla Odo

A short history of The Stone of Scone
at Wikipedia
The Free Encyclopedia

"Thank You"


...The balloon is released. The leash slips away
As soon as real desire passes by. Gratitude

Is the arc of a branch above the unpicked fruit.
The tomb's gaping mouth. Our ancestors tumbling back
To their tawny womb, dried apricots, figs, and dates

Fastened to their textiled wrists. Cherried earth. Spiraling fruit.
Magnificent bird...


Michelle Detorie
Verse Daily
03.Nov.04

Give Me Back My Wig mp3
Hound Dog Taylor
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Unlike the otherwise impeccably responsible Ray Davis, we here at db are making this mp3 available for a limited time, and actually doing so.
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updated to reflect the more than responsible willingness of Mr. Ray vis. the issue of db's firewall settings vis. this issue. Solved and resolved.

todd hido
zing magazine 17
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two suicides
lisa kereszi
zing magazine 6
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lisa kereszi at Pierogi
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portrait
lisa kereszi at anderson hopkins

Hip Hopto(detail)
shadow
Thomas Mathey

An Overrated Virtue

...The exposed eyes
staring out of that wood startled me.
In the hot sun, my father
painted those eyes shut—paint
streaking out from under the brush—drying
in the August heat. It took several coats
to cover the gaze. To shield us from
what I now knew was always there.
Meanwhile, each blade of grass...


Michelle Detorie
Verse Daily
02.Nov.04

Tupelo
Pops Staples
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blues.ru

The Na'ima al-Misriyya Project
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link Al-Ahram 28 October - 3 November 2004

Mosh video
Eminem

Music:

He War mp3
Cat Power
insound

better propaganda

John Peel
________________________________________________________________

Dr. Rudolf Lonauer with his family
The 'T4 Project'
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Dr. Alfred Hackel, director of the Labour Institution for Asocial Women and Girls "Am Steinhof" until early 1943
'Gemeinschaftsfremd': Nazi persecution of deviant behaviour
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The obligatory label Ost was only one of numerous discriminatory and humiliating measures which [women forced-labourers] from the Soviet Union were subject to.
Eugenic measures against Fremdvölkische and their children
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Memorial Steinhof: The War against the 'Inferior':
On the History of Nazi Medicine in Vienna
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Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance

Tribe

My tribe came from struggling labor
Depression South Eastern Illinois
Just before the southern hills start
To roll toward the coal country
Where the east/west morainal ridges
Of Wisconsin trash pile up
At the bottom of the prairie, socially
A far midwest recrudescence of Appalachia...


Edward Dorn
26.Oct.04
Poetry Daily

women salvage workers listen to a radio broadcast
near what was "Spooners Corner"todetail

The Blitz Photos of Lady Nancy Astor

Me and APOD

Sea Glass


...wave-like, ever on itself —
true is the saying that in common lives this time,
it's not like that. The body is not an allegory — it
can't help that it looks like one, any more than
it can avoid not being able to stay. All along,
it was true: timing really
the poet dies and the man survives is everything. I've

loved this life. If it's one thing to have missed
the constellations for the stars themselves,
it's another, entirely,
to have never looked up.
Some mistakes, given time, don't seem...


Carl Phillips
Poetry Daily
24.Oct.04