The Man and Camel Ceased to Sing

We saw Connecticut College (home of the Camels) in bright daylight, not dismal downpour like the first time last Spring. It's a beautiful, compact campus. Planet has a friend who's a freshman, so she took a student's eye tour with him while Earthgirl and I walked the paths of the college's arboretum. Apparently New England's summer was a drought and the leaves are dull versus the usual New England fabulous, but the arboretum was still beautiful, and if I was a Conn College student, I know where I'd be studying whenever the weather is warm.

Bowdoin, not as pretty as Conn College in sunlight much less in a downpour like Friday, Planet interviewing for more than an hour with an actual admissions officer, or Conn College in brilliant sunshine on a perfect fall day, Planet interviewing for twenty awkward minutes with some ditzy senior?

Bowdoin, which can choose any student it wants, goes to greater effort in making prospective students (and their parents) feel wanted than Conn College, which makes its profit on the kids Bowdoin rejects. Of all the ways I find metaphors to celebrate my complicity, and I find them everywhere, including this paragraph, this is the best stinger since the last one, until the next one.

• What is the Left to do? 
• Confounding fathers. On the ramp off 95 into Mystic, where we stayed Friday night, there were eight, ten, old people on the grass at the stoplight, waiving American flags and signs saying shit like "No Socialism in America." I was about to roll down my window and ask one if he was returning, uncashed, his social security check every month, but was screamed at by my car's passengers not to.
• Guilty until proven innocent. Trying to get to our hotel in Boston late afternoon yesterday, there was a huge traffic back-up on US 1 south into Saugus. Took an hour to go two miles. While flipping radio stations, I came upon Obamalame exhorting the crowd, I'm not shitting you, "Yes we can!" Turns out Obama was reprising his Yes we can! bullshit in Boston, and traffic was jammed because of Secret Service blockades. 
• On cynicism.
• The magic of framing.
• Images of modern feminism.
• Humans imitating robots imitating humans.
• No Nobel for western dissidents?
• David Broder has a new crush.
• Witches, whores, wrestlers.
• Seize the meme. 
• Blegsylania be dead, yo, and I'm not just saying this because I believe I've succeeded at pissing off pretty much everyone sufficiently that neither place is being read - Blegsylvania be moribund in many places. Still, if you've adjusted your bookmarks, blogrolls, and/or readers to the new place, thanks very much.
• More on this blog sucking. 
• BTW, yes! I am learning the ways blooger is skeevy.
• The high cost of free parking in Bethesda.
• Chicago 0, United 0: Didn't see it - was driving from New London back to Boston. From what I've read, from what two friends emailed, Chicago v United was a horribly uninspired game fully worthy of two one-proud but now shitty teams playing their next-to-last games of entirely disappointing seasons. Jaime's good-bye is this coming Saturday night, then darkness until next April. The prospect of five months without a home game once drove me nuts. Now? Not so much, which sucks more.
• Josipovici, for those of you who do.
• A pretty good list despite naming The National number one.
    

MAN AND CAMEL

Mark Strand

On the eve of my fortieth birthday
I sat on the porch having a smoke
when out of the blue a man and a camel
happened by. Neither uttered a sound
at first, but as they drifted up the street
and out of town the two of them began to sing.
Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me—
the words were indistinct and the tune
too ornamental to recall. Into the desert
they went and as they went their voices
rose as one above the sifting sound
of windblown sand. The wonder of their singing,
its elusive blend of man and camel, seemed
an ideal image for all uncommon couples.
Was this the night that I had waited for
so long? I wanted to believe it was,
but just as they were vanishing, the man
and camel ceased to sing, and galloped
back to town. They stood before my porch,
staring up at me with beady eyes, and said:
"You ruined it. You ruined it forever."

Another band in the CD racks found in my basement after Elric moved his stuff: