Saturday, April 8, 2017

Belligerent Cat That Won't Let Go




UPDATE!
  1. Here, farmed tonight, Sunday April 9, before stale.
  2. Incognificance updated.
  3. It's the stupidity, stupid.
  4. 2020 Dem POTUS scorecard on Syria bombing.
  5. Ward tells Wally and The Beaver to work it out.
  6. Meat is for assholes. Read the comments too. Posted for thought, it's shit I'm thinking about.
  7. Maggie's weekly links.
  8. { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
  9. Rain Parade.
  10. Important music is growing in the Killing Fields.
  11. Rain Parade?




 
  • Euclidian Necrology, or: Trump is who he seems to be.
  • I'd add: and so are we all.
  • Re: my rereading Dying Grass and jinxing that rereading above - in the past months I have failed rereadings of Against the Day, 2666, Never Let Me Go, Sot-Weed Factor, Moby Dick, Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, Life and Fate, and while I contend I haven't abandoned The Tunnel I confess I've stopped digging.
  • It's a side-effect, not a direct result, of Life in the Assholoscene. My eyes - I've simply lost endurance, I can't read in bed, I can't read for hours any more - are as much, if not more, to blame.
  • But I wake up this morning, and everyone but people on the Left like me and people on the Right that I despise (and who despise me) is giddy with war, with relief at Trump's belligerent normalcy.
  • I'm off to play Seneca, lose my Burnt Orange Wedge in the briars.







HOW THINGS WORK

Gary Soto

Today it’s going to cost us twenty dollars
To live. Five for a softball. Four for a book,
A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls,
Bus fare, rosin for your mother’s violin.
We’re completing our task. The tip I left
For the waitress filters down
Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child
Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won’t let go
Of a balled sock until there’s chicken to eat.
As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:
You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples
From a fruit stand, and what coins
Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,
Tickets to a movie in which laughter
Is thrown into their faces.
If we buy a goldfish, someone tries on a hat.
If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.
A tip, a small purchase here and there,
And things just keep going. I guess.


1 comment:

  1. The Cat's Meow
    Gary Soto (1997)

    Review

    for Grades 2-4

    Third grader Graciela is shocked when her white cat, Pip, starts speaking to her in Spanish. She has to deal with the situation by herself since her parents are seriously strange (maybe "because they're parents") and a friend from school thinks she's loca. So Graciela asks Pip to tell her her story and this feline does-in Spanish, which is translated in footnotes at the bottom of each page. It seems that Pip was befriended by an eccentric kindly neighbor who taught her Spanish (and several other languages). The details (perhaps involving earphones) remain a secret between Senor Medina and Pip, but Graciela enjoys her new talking cat and her new friend. Unfortunately, a gossipy neighbor alerts the media and Senor Medina is hounded into moving away with Pip. Graciela is devastated until her pet returns, now black and speaking French. On one level, this is a charming animal fantasy that is engaging and entertaining, with a sprinkling of Spanish words and a believable heroine. However, readers are sure to be distracted by concern for Graciela's parents, who repeatedly act irrationally, misunderstand what she says, and speak in non sequiturs. Soto's intended effect isn't clear (is it an attempt at humor? a child's perspective of how parents act?), and compromises the success of the book.

    Anne Connor, Los Angeles Public Library
    School Library Journal

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