Hidden charms . . .

HAVE YOU EVER READ "The Works of the Earls of Rochester and Roscommon"? Me neither. It's an obscure volume of poetry from the 18th century — that was in-print continuously for a century. The secret of its, um, staying power, came to light with the discovery by Oxford University researcher, Dr Claudine van Hensbergen, of a series of erotic poems hidden in the back of the book.

Dr van Hensbergen said: ‘I had just finished entering details of poems typical of miscellanies of the period- satires, imitations and amatory verse, when at the end of the second volume a new title page announced the start of ‘The Cabinet of Love’.

‘To my surprise, ‘The Cabinet’ turned out to be a collection of pornographic verse about dildos. The poems include ‘Dildoides’, a poem attributed to Samuel Butler about the public burning of French-imported dildos, ‘The Delights of Venus’, a poem in which a married woman gives her younger friend an explicit account of the joys of sex, and ‘The Discovery’, a poem about a man watching a woman in bed while hiding under a table.

‘In later years, a celebratory poem about condoms was added, as well as several obscene botanically themed verses attributed to ‘a Member of a Society of Gardeners’ in which male genitalia is described as the ‘tree of life’.’

Happy Bloomsday

105 years ago today.....

"STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned..."

Wiki has a decent capsule study of the whole thing.

Tune into Radio Woodshed starting a noon EDT to hear the whole novel read aloud, unabridged, all 27+ hours of it.

And if you think Ulysses was hard to read or listen to, imagine writing a 265,000-word novel with a vocabulary of about 30,000 words that all takes place in a single day - it only took

Joyce seven years to write it, but has taken most people much more time to read and develop an understanding of it. It is said by many to encompass the whole of human experience in a single days stream-of-consciousness.

Culture, beeyoches, come get some!

Reasonable Al Gore . . . .

Our local library here in conservative-repuglican-land is becoming more Progressive-friendly thanks to our efforts. To counter the ann coulter, sean hannity and robert novak books in abundance, we have successfully gotten them to order "The One Percent Doctrine" by Ron Suskind, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" by Rajiv Chandrasekaran and most recently "The Assault on Reason" by Al Gore. All have been great additions to our local literary options.

I checked out Al Gore's latest the other day and am about half-way through it. I found the following excerpt in the chapter entitled "Convenient Untruths" particularly good. He is describing how the bushco administration operates in regards to disseminating information to the US public. These paragraphs pertain to their one-time Iraqi point man Ahmed Chalabi:


Yet in spite of those analyses, President Bush chose to suppress those warnings and conceal that information, and instead he went right on conveying to the American people the absurdly Pollyannaish view of highly questionable and obviously biased sources like Ahmed Chalabi, a convicted felon and known swindler.

The Bush administration put Chalabi on its payroll and gave him a seat adjacent to First Lady Laura Bush at the State of the Union address. They then flew him into Baghdad on a military jet with a private security force. However, the following year the administration decided he was actually a spy for Iran who had been hoodwinking the president all along with phony facts and false predictions. Now Chalabi is a top official of the new government in Baghdad.

It has become common for President Bush to rely on special interests, like the one represented by Chalabi, for basic information about the policies important to these interests. ExxonMobil, for example, has apparently been his most trusted source of information about the climate crisis. Chemical companies are his most trusted sources on whether or not particular chemicals are hazardous to the environment. The major pharmaceutical companies are his most trusted advisers on the health risks of new drugs. Insurance companies are considered the most reliable source of data on any policy that affects them. And so forth.

And then, amazingly, the president seems to trust what these special interests tell him over and above objective information prepared for him by independent analysts who are charged with protecting the public interest. Since his ideology teaches him contempt for the very notion of "the public interest," he actually prefers to rely on biased information prepared by sources of questionable reliability - like Chalabi - who have a private interest in a particular policy outcome. The president has, in effect, outsourced the truth. (Emphasis mine.)


Once again, you've got to ask yourself: If ordinary folks like us can see stuff like this and be concerned about it, why didn't our elected "representatives" see it and apply their Constitutional responsibility of oversight over this crowd? Could it be they were protecting their cushy jobs and perks to the detriment of what was right?

A pox on all their houses . . . .

(Cross-posted from Moving to Vancouver)

Author! Author!

Visualize this: You're in a high-school play. The performance is an adaptation of a classic novel. (Aren't all school plays adaptations of a classic?) But, it's not just an ordinary classic. (Can a classic be ordinary?) This novel won the 1961 Pulitzer prize for fiction. In 1999 it received a distinction as the best novel of the 20th Century.

So, imagine, you are performing in a high-school play as one of the characters in To Kill A Mockingbird, and sitting there in the audience is Harper Lee - the author.

A high school play based on Harper Lee's classic "To Kill a Mockingbird" brought together black and white high school students to tell the classic story of racial injustice — and even drew out the novel's reclusive author.