Sunday Afternoon

Gorgeous day. Heat finally subsided. 75F and a light breeze. Sun is not too hot. Chasing tigers in red weather.

*

Harrassed by ECE girls about my television viewing habits. It's hard to write poems when you're watching The Surreal Life.

*

The lyrics of Stephen Patrick Morrissey are often sexually ambiguous. Careful use of pronouns.

*

In Hebrew, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to be sexually ambiguous.

*

What's the danger (if any) of a straight man writing sexually ambiguous poems? Is this allowed?

*

Read Joe Massey's Minima St. today and loved it. Then I read Eureka Slough again and the forthcoming Bramble. I tried to write a blurb for the last.

*

Have been revisiting some of my older pre-millenium poems, my Tony Juvenalia, if you will. Sent a few to Joe. Some of it's not as bad as I remember. Some is definitely as bad as I remember.

*

Spent last Thursday and Friday in the woods, in the foothills of the Cascades, in the small (nearly ghost-) town that my parents call home. I golfed, met the frog you see below, walked through the woods with my dad and looked at the wildlife. I took photographs of my folks' FIVE refrigerators.

*

Feeling lonely lately, but not sad, not discontent really. It's a strange feeling, it's not a sadness, not a darkness.

*

I want to lose another 30 lbs. That would put me at the weight I was when I was discharged from the Navy, eleven years ago. I was 22 years old and in love with a girl who broke my heart. Now she's married and lives in San Francisco.

*

Sharing space on my nearest bookshelf:

Sexual Personae (Camille Paglia)
Holler If You Hear Me (Michael Eric Dyson)
The Odyssey (Trans. Fagles & Knox)
The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry (Ed. Paul Hoover)
The New Rhetoric (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca)
Truth and Method (Hans-Georg Gadamer)
The Realm of Rhetoric (Chaim Perelman)
Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (Wayne Booth)
On Violence (Hannah Arendt)
The Human Condition (Hannah Arendt)
The Philosophy of Rhetoric (I.A. Richards)