The Poet and the Poker Table

A pretty good illustration of why I don't play poker anymore (from a profile of Joel Dias-Porter, a performance poet turned Atlantic City grinder):

“What’s the joy you get from poker?”

“The same as I get from chess or Scrabble—that you outsmarted your opponent.”

Intelligence not in the service of love is useless at best, and at worst destructive.

Active Love

After years of procrastination, I am finally getting around to reading The Brother's Karamazov. A gem near the beginning:

"Above all, avoid lies, all lies, especially the lie to yourself. Keep watch on your own lie and examine it every hour, every minute. And avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself: what seems bad to you in yourself is purified by the very fact that you have noticed it in yourself. And avoid fear, though fear is simply the consequence of every lie. Never be frightened by your own faint-heartedness in attaining love, and meanwhile do not be very frightened by your own bad acts. I am sorry that I cannot say anything more comforting, for active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching...Whereas active love is labor and perseverance..."

Announcing: The Language of Grief

"When we think about grief, it is this type of grief that usually comes to mind: the pain that follows the loss of a loved one to death. As these poems testify, however, feelings of loss and grief are much more mundane than that. They occur in all kinds of situations. We can feel grief when we abandon one living situation for another or when a longtime partner leaves us. We can even feel it when we begin a new relationship (grief for our loss of solitude). We can feel grief when we enter a new, clearly delineated life phase, such as when our career path changes or our values blatantly shift (thought in some cultures to occur every seven years, the frequency with which a snake changes its skin or the length of time it took to write this book). But we can also feel it more subtly, such as when our routines are disrupted or our ideals are undermined by the cruelties of experience. We can feel it when something happens in the collective political consciousness, such as after a presidential election, the declaration of a war, or the onset of a recession. On a smaller but no less powerful scale, we can feel it when we are humiliated at work (grief for own lost dignity), when we enter a shopping mall (grief for the commodification of our objects), or after we eat a cheap and nutritionless meal (grief for the poverty of our food). In the America I know, grief is omnipresent."

From the preface to The Language of Grief

Contribute to the Kickstarter here.

Why Amazon is "Dangerous"

"For years, America's upper-middle classes--of all political leanings--have tended to gaze on our political economy with a certain smug self-confidence. Even as our new masters [corporate monopolies like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and others] imposed their rule over the market once run by our farmers and small shopkeepers, and smashed the unions that empowered industrial workers and flight attendants to bargain as equals with their bosses, we turned away."

Read an excerpt of the article ["Killing the Competition: How the new monopolies are destroying open markets," by Barry C. Lynn] from Harper's magazine here. It is a fascinating and unflinching depiction of the farce that is economic life in America today. It gives one pause. As it should.

Poem for One Day

"Honor to those who in their lives
demarcate and guard a Thermopylae.
Never swerving from duty,
just and upright in all their acts,
but compassionate and sad nevertheless;
generous when they are rich, when poor 
generous again in small ways,
again rushing to help as much as they can;
always speaking truth
but with no hatred for liars."

From Thermopylae by the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy.

The Jeremy Lin Show

My goodness, this kid can play:

Valediction for Tony Judt

"The result [of three decades of uncomplicated market worship] is a politics of fear: fear of the stranger, fear of falling into the ranks of losers in a dog-eat-dog culture, fear of the future. Which in turn leads to the kind of paralysis that characterizes our national government today...It's decadent to embrace vast spending on the maintenance of a warfare state in order to, among other things, drain off resources that might otherwise be available to a welfare state."

From an excellent article in the LA Review of Books on the late, postwar historian Tony Judt.