Poetics and Ruminations

The Picture of Donald Sterling

 

Does this remind anyone of the picture of Dorian Gray?

 

Donald /sterling at age 55

 

Donald Sterling at age 80

 

 

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Superbowl Boycott

Tom Fallon <[email protected]> wrote:

Boycott the Superbowl! But, if you do boycott the Superbowl, what literary event will you attend next Sunday? 

 

Tom Fallon / Webmaster

Rumford Falls, Maine

[email protected]

http://www.maineliterature.org

http://calendar.yahoo.com/aopoetry

http://home.gwi.net/tomfallon

 

Tom,

Why the f#*k should anybody boycott the Superbowl?

Lew

 

Lew,

What do you think about men playing a kids' game - with such ferocity?  What do you think about the Babbitts who have changed the game from what it is supposed to be? Mammon be damned!

Tom

 

Tom,

I grew up a Baptist minister's son. As a result, I abominate sermons and people who are holier-than-me. Who do you think you are? Your recent blog-type pronouncements from your artist's pulpit are at best annoying and at worst reprehensible. If you wish to push your own poetry, good enough; if you wish to proselytize for the arts, that's fine, but if you intend to attack other people's pleasures and penchants for no other reason than that you think everybody ought to think and act the way you do, that makes you a demagogue.

Maine is a hockey state. I dislike hockey because I can't follow the puck, but I love football because I played it in school as a kid and I enjoy ritual combat. Do I use my blog to tell everyone they ought to boycott the Stanley Cup game and watch the Superbowl instead? I don't. I watch the Superbowl one Sunday a year, and the rest of the year I labor in the vineyards of literature because that's what I've done my whole life.

You need to get your roles straight. If you're a poet, be one; if you're a popularizer of the arts, okay. But if you think you're a censor, join the Religious Right and continue to speak ex cathedra to the rest of the intolerant jerks in an otherwise free country.

Lew

Lew - 
 
I wasn't politically correct, eh? Now that makes me 

happy!

Tom

No, you weren't tolerant of other people; i.e., those

bourgeois "Babbitts" you mentioned. (I haven't 

heard that word in a long time. I made a pun about

Victor Mature to a young person a while back. All

I got in return was a blank stare. We've gotten old, 

Tom.)

Lew

Lew, 
        It would shock many of my friends to hear it but I agree with your objection to Mr. Fallon's request to boycott the Superbowl. There are more grounds on which to object than just censorship, however, and I pity the learned man who cannot see in sports the beauty and erudition to be gleaned. 

        Once a civilization gets past providing the basic needs of nourishment, shelter and clothing, arts and play are the rewards we reap, and they are on a par. If you want to argue about which one is more important, you're splitting very fine hairs from the same head. If you want to boycott sports and do something better, join the Peace Corps, and teach Africans better farming. But try to ignore the fact that at the end of the day some of them will just as soon  kick a ball around as sit round a fire and tell stories. 

        If Earth has music for those who listen, it can be found as much in sports as in the arts. I see beauty in a flawlessly executed forward pass, the tenacity and concentration of a pitcher executing a shutout, or the endurance of a marathon runner just as I do in verse, cinema, fiction - and my heart yearns for that achievement equally, longs for such satisfaction and attainment. If great literature ancient and contemporary can teach us morals by proxy, then so can the many characters and stories in the sports world. I empathize with the vicissitudes of various sportsmen as much as I do for characters in the greatest stories ever told - and perhaps more so because these people are real and in my time. 

        I owe much to my wife - a rabid Steelers fan - for teaching me these things, and I warn anyone to spar cautiously with her on this or any topic, including the arts. 

Paul Austin

ATHEISTS ALERT!

Dresden Mills, Maine, 1 September 2008, Special to the Dresden Mills Gazette. Attention atheists and agnostics! There may be a God after all, according to Clerics Anonymous of St. Paul, MN.

After a flawless and spectacular Democratic National Convention John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for the highest office in the land on Saturday, August 30, reached out into left field and chose as his running mate someone no one, excepting former congressman Newt Gingrich, had ever heard of: forty-four year old Sarah Palin, first term governor of the State of Alaska.

       Governor Palin has been in office for twenty months, thus having more executive experience, according to Republican sources, than the Democratic nominee Barack Obama. Fox News savants point out the fact that she also has more foreign policy experience because it is just a few miles from the last island of her state to Siberia. And she has more military experience because she is head of the Alaska National Guard, a menacing troop of around 4000 men and women (less than a full brigade of 5000 members, generally commanded by a colonel) drawn from the state’s population of 670,053 of whom, according to the Bureau of the Census, 83,220 or more than 12% are disabled, including her youngest child who has Down syndrome.

       Ms. Palin has many other attributes that make her the best possible pick to be McCain’s veep: she is a member of the N.R.A. and she loves outdoor sports including fishing and hunting moose in her back yard. She was point guard, captain and prayer leader of her Wasilla High School basketball team where she won the sobriquet, “Sarah Barracuda” for her ball-hawking skills.

       No slouch as a competitor in other venues, Ms. Palin won the Miss Wasilla beauty contest where, for her talent performance, she played the flute and won “Miss Congeniality,” finishing in second place in the subsequent Miss Alaska pageant, thus winning a college scholarship to Hawaii Pacific College in Hilo, Hawaii, where she majored in Business Administration for one semester before transferring to the elite North Idaho College in 1983, where she majored in Communications-Journalism, thus qualifying her to be McCain’s Director of Communications as well as Vice President, and minored in Political Science, taking her B.S. degree in 1987.

       Gov. Palin began her political career in 1992 when she ran for the Wasilla city council on the theme, “A safer, more progressive Wasilla.” She won her seat, serving two terms and supported a new sales tax for the town. Ms. Palin ran for Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, a town of 6,715 residents, in 1996. Her win propelled her to the lofty office she now holds.

       After many and sundry vicissitudes, Ms. Palin ran for governor and succeeded in 2006, becoming the youngest chief executive of the state at the age of forty-two. She is a right-to-lifer, which is a very good thing, because it turns out that her seventeen-year-old-daughter is unmarried and pregnant.

Gov. Palin made plain in her first appearance with John McCain that she fully expects all former Hillary Rodham Clinton supporters to switch to her party and support McCain because they are female and so is she. "Together we can smash that glass ceiling that Hillary put millions of cracks in."

       When asked to comment, Senator Barack Obama replied, “I have nothing to say except that I am a Christian and I believe that God is good.”

       ______________________________________________________

COMMENTS:

Uh ... wait, don't tell me - I think I got it 

... you don't think much of her. Hey listen, 

who knows ... maybe she'll surprise everyone 

and pull it off - you have to admit, she pro-

bably appeals to a lot of moms out there-you 

know, "gee she's just like us" kinda' thing 

- not that that qualifies her to have the 

biggest job in the world, but listen, nothing

shocks me anymore. I'm so shell shocked with 

governors, senators and presidents with all 

their dalliances - that by today's standards

 a Veep with a daughter having a baby out of

 wedlock is chump change. Let's give her a 

chance - maybe when she gets into office, 

she'll head the Planned Parenthood Chapter

in Washington!!!  

Ann

Thanks, Lew! 
I read your "Atheists Alert" just now. What a hopeless,
 clueless bunch this GOP is, and McCain in particular! 
But I think Obama is right to turn aside commentary 
on this pitiful situation: we don't want to risk arousing 
sympathy for the Alaskans, as that could make them 
seem "beleaguered" and garner more Republican 
votes, God forbid. (Ooops! Forgot: He doesn't exist.)
Rhina
Lew,
This is pretty good...
http://www.funnyordie.com:80/videos/ea0b05d406
Jerry
It would seem that by Ann's standards we should let just anyone have a chance at being VP.

Paul

Actually, Paul, I think that just anyone could have done a better job than Dubbya and Cheney.

Lew