April is the cruelest month...
I am listening to the rain outside my window. At first its steady torrent is one sound, sizzling, like applause. Closing my eyes I begin to hear a difference between where the water falls on wood and stone or upon other water. Eventually I begin to hear individual drops of rain in syncopation and synchronicity with the other droplets, the voices within other voices. Down the street the doleful tones of a neighbor’s wind chimes pass over and through the flowing water like vapor. The music of all this rises and falls; it is a spontaneous composition that is ever changing, eternal, always new, and, yet, has always been. I am the listener as I am the sound as I am the water as I am the stone upon which it falls as I am the reverberating and dissipating sound of the chime as it moves through space. Wet wheels on pavement move past like a sigh as I read
Blast hits funeral north of Baghdad, killing 50
BAGHDAD - A suicide bomber struck the funeral of two anti-al-Qaida Sunni tribesmen in a town north of Baghdad on Thursday, killing at least 50 people and wounding dozens, police said.
The blast was the latest this week to break a period of relative calm in Sunni areas, raising concerns that Sunni insurgents are reorganizing.
Thursday: 144 Iraqis Killed, 122 Wounded
At least 144 Iraqis were killed and another 122 were wounded during the latest attacks, which included a significant suicide bombing in a small village. A large mass grave was found in Baghdad as well. No Coalition deaths were reported. Meanwhile, a border clash left several Turkish soldiers killed or injured.
Near Tuz Khormato in the village of al-Bu Mohammed, at least 50 people were killed and 55 more were wounded when a suicide bomber blew up his explosives at a funeral for two Awakening Council (Sahwa) members killed a day earlier. The older bomber was dressed in traditional garb and allowed to enter the funeral freely.
An unmanned U.S. drone plane killed two men carrying AK-47s in Sadr City. U.S. forces killed at least three other suspects during clashes. Meanwhile, hospital officials reported receiving nine bodies and treating 36 wounded after air strikes. Also, three Iraqi soldiers were killed when a gunman lobbed a grenade at their position. And, the U.S. is erecting a security wall across part of the city.
My daily routine includes dropping my wife off for work in the afternoon to save the exorbitant fees of the parking garage; a daily parting moment that always feels wrong. I then drive home along a well-worn, circuitous route that happens to take me past the train station. Yesterday, about a hundred yards past the station, one of the greatest performances of the air guitar I have ever seen was in full swing, with the State House as a backdrop. This cat was fully planted, knees slightly bent, feet spread wide, a black watch cap pulled down to meet his black Wayfarers, about six inches of hair poking out of the hat where his ears would be, iPod attached, clad in a black Gortex coat and pants, black sneakers, and arms fully extended in, technically, a bass guitar stance, head snapping back and forth, torso lilting up and down, while accenting the air with the neck of the instrument-fully rocking out; absolutely amazing, although definitely a had-to-be-there kind of thing.
I turned right and descended into a series of turns and hills, down then up. On the CD player was a remix of Beautiful by Mos Def, Mary J. Blige, and India Arie, gently swaying yet determinately guiding the Acura along its rote, serpentine route. It caused me to wonder what the guitar dude was groovin’ to. If he were indeed "playing" bass, would it be something classic like John Paul Jones on a Rickenbacher driving Good Times Bad Times, or something contemporary like Mike Frantantuno on L.G.I.Started? If I had to guess, I’d go with a Les Claypool rock-out on a fretless Carl Thompson "Rainbow" 6-string to, perhaps, My Name is Mud. I guess there is an outside chance that he was "airing" to a Michael Henderson groove on Miles’ Live Evil, but he was definitely not doing a Steve Swallow or Dave Holland. On the other hand, he looked like one of the Muppets, so maybe it was very old John Entwistle. My CD kicked into a remix of Erykha Badu’s Danger with Slim Thug, a viscous groove that obliterated all but the present, including air man, until I turned into my driveway and started thinking about what I’d read earlier; Crude May Rise to $120 in Six Months, Taqa CEO Says
I think to myself that 6 months will be more like 6 weeks or 6 days. Perhaps someone desires that we panic, revolt, and riot so they can make Posse Comitatus as extinct as habeas corpus.
Gaza combat kills 20 Palestinians, including news cameraman; 3 Israeli soldiers die in ambush
Several civilians were among the dead — including five children and a Reuters cameraman killed while covering the conflict, according to Palestinian officials.
The surge in violence came after a relatively quiet month and threatened to unravel an Egyptian effort to mediate a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.
Wednesday's death toll was the highest since a broad Israeli military offensive in early March killed more than 120 Gazans, including dozens of civilians. Since then, Israel and Hamas appeared to be honoring an informal truce, though punctuated with Palestinian rocket attacks, some Israeli airstrikes and minor border skirmishes.
Am I dreaming? I am driving on a dark, narrow road that winds through a stand of tall pines, which seem to rise up on either side of the road steeply into a black sky. The headlights catch a white, wooden guardrail ahead and a bend in the road reveals a reservoir in a sudden expanse of black and pearl. An oblique moon, like a glint in someone’s night eye separates my thoughts from their objects. The flag pin on my lapel is made in China. The snows of Kilimanjaro are disappearing. Kenneth Pollack says it alright that John McCain conflates al Qaeda in Mesopotamia with the myriad insurgencies, tribes, families, criminals, Sunni, Shia, the <italics>real</italics> al Qaeda, and asylum inmates that are attacking one another, our troops, and civilians young and old because it’s easier for the public to understand that way. Is that David Brooks on NPR? He’s talking about the debate:
"I understand the complaints, but I thought the questions were excellent. The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that. The candidates each looked foolish at times, but that’s their own fault.
We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. It’s legitimate to see how the candidates will respond to these sorts of symbolic issues."
God he’s brilliant. If only it were possible for him to have a child with Kenneth Pollack. Now <italics>there’s</italics> a president.
What’s this?
High school drop-out rate in major US cities at nearly 50 percent
A report released Tuesday by an educational advocacy group founded by retired general and former Bush administration Secretary of State Colin Powell finds that almost half of all public high school students in the US’ fifty largest cities fail to graduate.
The report states that only 52 percent of public high school students in these cities graduate after four years, while the national average is 70 percent. Some 1.2 million public high school students drop out every year, according to researchers.
The report finds that, overall, 17 of the public school systems in 50 major cities have graduation rates of 50 percent or lower, and the average graduation rate of all 50 systems is 58 percent.
Breakfast. Arthur lectures from behind his newspaper, which sits neatly folded upon a wire stand just to the left of his coffee cup. Michael is half listening, half keeping at bay the dread of going out into the heat of the day to paint, to mow another plateau of lawn, to do whatever endless "long neglected" chore Arthur could discover, instruct upon, and fumble with like an antique set of precision tools in the hands of a tinker. Except for a brief fascination with the emerging Rauschenberg-like pattern of puissant yellow yoke bleeding into the black and white design of his plate, Michael silently, in his imaginary viewfinder, is framing Arthur’s hands. He pictures a narrow, rectangular print in stark monochrome. But then, he thinks, he’d be losing the odd discoloration of those gnarled fingernails, chicken yellow like lucent amber globs of hardened mucilage. Often Arthur would rest one of those hands upon Michael’s shoulders as he espoused some theory behind the landscape design of his estate, or while he explained the intricacies of the Locke mower, the carburetor of which he would be adjusting constantly, "the Rolls-Royce of mowers," he called it, until the machine would no longer start, and Michael would fear that one more pull of the starter pulley would cause Arthur’s collapse.
Lunch. Arthur discourses endlessly, continuing where he left off at breakfast.
"Mr. Nixon created a legacy of unconscionable ethical vacuity in the American political arena, beginning with his ruthless campaign against Mrs. Gahagen-Douglas. The SOB was a card cheat back when he was in the Navy."
It is the summer of the Watergate hearings, and Arthur Ellis watches the televised proceedings day by day, hanging on every word of testimony like a tainted juror. Michael stares into his bowl of black bean soup and the slices of hardboiled egg floating in it. He thinks of daisies suspended in quicksand.
"Watergate is merely evidence of his ineptitude," Arthur continues, all the while punctuating his sentences with slurps of soup, his face but a spoon’s length from the bowl.
Michael pushes his shoulders back against his chair and feels through his shirt that he has gotten sunburned. All morning he had been painting what Arthur calls the "dental work", the ornate brick arch around the entrance to this French provincial cottage that Arthur built in his youth in exact replication of a French country house to the last detail, including the brass fixtures on all the windows and doors, which, of course, opened inward, and the beautiful slate roof. He had built this house for Anita, his beautiful young bride. She became the editor of new teen magazine that achieved immediate success. A year later, on a trip to the West coast, she met and fell in love with an attorney from San Francisco, and Arthur would never see her again, though he saved the letter she sent typed on Seventeen stationery, and signed in her florid script.
Many years later. An empty white porcelain vase sits on the top of a whitewashed wrought iron table on the terrace of a perfect French provincial cottage, where a man is looking at his reflection in the glass doors leading from the terrace to the living room. The terrace is strewn with dead branches and birch leaves, empty clay pots, and outdoor furniture in desuetude. Michael has just come from the burial of the man who lived more than half his life in this house, and he can’t imagine anyone but Arthur tending so meticulously to its care, the way one nurtures a lifelong hatred, the way the tongue seeks out the sharp tooth despite its own rawness.
The sun is hot on his back, like a huge wet hand, and Michael peers past his reflection into the room where in the evenings he would sit with Arthur and Margaret, whose odd relationship seemed illicit in an anachronistic way, like the secrets older relatives always seem to have; locked metal boxes, a cache of letters in the back of a drawer. He is picturing the two of them sitting there, Margaret on the floral sofa, her face flushed and adipose from the sun and alcohol, poking a fat finger at the ice cubes in her glass of scotch, while Arthur would be lecturing the day’s summation. Suddenly, perhaps because of the September heat on the back of his neck, Michael pictures himself and Molly fucking against the glass doors, her perfect ass in his hands; Molly, the latest co-conspirator in his dangling concupiscence, of which he is certain Melissa, is absolutely unaware. His duplicity is a diamond.
All of Michael’s recent photographs are reflecting; more precisely they are photographs of reflections. He has been reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics as a pre-birthday resolution ("The same thing...is capable of both being and not being."), and more and more he is less and less certain of anything: his face looking through the glass, the reflecting past, the image of that same white vase a dream’s shadow of one summer past.
Civil War Breaks Out Among Iraq Sunnis
"God is Great," screamed a man seconds before he blew himself up, killing 10 people in a restaurant in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province in western Iraq. A series of suicide bombings have shown over the past week that al-Qa'ida in Iraq, though battered by defections over the past year, is striking back remorselessly at Sunni Arab leaders who ally themselves to the US.
In another attack in the village of Albu Mohammed, south of Kirkuk, an elderly man thought by guards to be too old to be a bomber, walked unsearched into a tent filled with mourners attending the funeral of two Sunni tribesmen who had been killed after they joined al-Sahwa, the Awakening Council, as the pro-US Sunni group is called. The man detonated the explosives hidden under his long Arab robes, killing at least 50 people.
A vicious civil war is now being fought within Iraq's Sunni Arab community between al-Qa'ida in Iraq and al-Sahwa while other groups continue to attack American forces. In Baghdad on a single day the head of al-Sahwa in the southern district of Dora was killed in his car by gunmen and seven others died by bombs and bullets in al-Adhamiya district.
US spokesmen speak of a "spike" in violence in recent weeks but in reality security in Sunni and Shia parts of Iraq has been deteriorating since January. The official daily death toll of civilians reached a low of 20 killed a day in that month and has since more than doubled to 41 a day in March. The US and the Iraqi government are now facing a war on two fronts.
http://www.last.fm/...
when you get there, just hit the Play button...
It is one of those hot summers where each smell is as distinct as its Latinate etymology.
The neighbors are all out in their yards in yellows and whites, and the chiaroscuro is
slightly overexposed.
A man is throwing darts at a circular target mounted upon the wooden door that leads to the cellar stairs; the musky cool air, pungent with the dark fumes of the oil furnace is kept at bay. Each dart makes a thud as it enters the cork board or a ping if it hits one of the
metal ringed striations.
The man is shirtless in baggy chinos. He has the compact body of a pugilist, of a welterweight, with a Chesterfield between his lips as he concentrates on the target. The smoke is both sweet and acerbic as it curls and dissipates.
He is lost in battle against himself; a place he seems content, and for once, not angry.
The skill and luck combine in mathematical destinies of infinite variation.
This is leisure time. The televisions are black and white in wooden cabinets. The cars
are huge and zaftig with shiny chrome and white wall tires. This is his leisure time; a respite from the woodshop and the factory.
Each throw of the dart is a yearning to succeed, to overcome the odds.
As one gets closer to the board, where the darts are retrieved over and over, it becomes evident that each piercing, each separating of the cork, even though the material contracts, leaves a slight hole, a pock mark, a scar.
The black and yellow circle, with its numbers from one to twenty, and its concentric metal wires diminishing to a tight bull’s-eye provides a center to an expanding universe,
irrepressible modernity, and memories too horrible to suppress.
He will throw his darts, over and over, for several more years, never really noticing the
thousands of tiny holes that will never close.
Merrill Posts Loss on Mortgage Writedowns, Cuts Jobs
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water