The Kin of Charity Is Whore

Two paragraphs that capture America 7/31/11 on multiple levels:

Maybe it is the spiraling cost of food in a tough economy or the logical next step in the movement to eat locally. Whatever the reason, New Yorkers are increasingly fanning out across the city’s parks to hunt and gather edible wild plants, like mushrooms, American ginger and elderberries.

Now parks officials want them to stop. New York’s public lands are not a communal pantry, they say. In recent months, the city has stepped up training of park rangers and enforcement-patrol officers, directing them to keep an eye out for foragers and chase them off.

Daily Gaddis:

 - Taste changes, he went on in an irritating monotone. - Most forgeries last only a few generations, because they're so carefully done in the taste of the period, a forged Rembrandt, for instance, confirms everything that that period sees in Rembrandt. Taste and style change, and the forgery is painfully obvious, dated, because the new period has discovered Rembrandt all over again, and of course discovered him to be quite different..

Also, in The Recognitions, I'd forgotten the phrase "inherent vice" is an art term, particularly relevant to forgers, that refers to the inevitable degradation of a paint, said degradation used as a method of detecting forgeries, when I read this in a couple of years ago, whose author surely was aware of the meaning when naming his novel, and which I'll remember when I reread the novel in two or three years.

• Thought experiment: If Obama truly believes in his mission to transcend bipartisanship, that his mission in noble in intent and honorable in execution, what does a 40% approval rating say about America today?
• War and the true tragedy of the commons.
• Cost of war. War is the only thing keeping the economy from collapsing. 
• The war on you.
• This is about breaking the crackers.
• Grumbling. That'll learn him.
• Why voters tune out Democrats.
• It's people like the Second Shittiest Human in the World that keep me returning to the salt lick of .06% less shitty (and daydreaming of applying a shovel to her head).
• Your Fucking Washington Post's motherfucking ombudsman motherfucking defends the motherfucking Second Shittiest Human in the World.
• Faith in the system.
• The market and class power.
• Reality as failed state.
• The ongoing chemistry experiment.
• I'll tell you what it means: nobody likes a pussy, and think, nature or nurture?
• Krugman's obamapostasy will never be ready.
• Scrutinize Fox?
• Motherfucking cracker.
• In defense of cultural marxism.
• What passes for a method. 
• Chapter Six. For the record, I've never been to New Zealand.
• Poetry and politics: Poetry and politics share at least two uses of comparison: one serves an expansionary vision of the world, the other, retrenchment. Both understand the limits of comparison, but the first treats these deferentially, as part of a strategy to bring to mind differences among forms of experience. The second develops self-consciously false, totalizing comparisons among dissimilar things, even as it decries inappropriate comparisons when employed by antagonists. Ironically, both the U.S. political right and some leftist poets at times employ the second strategy, although for opposite goals. The Tea Party’s success in claiming the national midterm debate relied in part on this world-obliterating rhetoric. But it might be the first that better supports action by the left, not because it is tentative but because it imagines that readers may set down the poem and see.
• On the above.
• I flatter myself the role of poet is canary, weathervane, Cassandra, fool.
• Gaddis interview.

ETYMOLOGICAL DIRGE

Heather McHugh

Calm comes from burning.
Tall comes from fast.
Comely doesn't come from come.
Person comes from mask.

The kin of charity is whore,
the root of charity is dear.
Incentive has its source in song
and winning in the sufferer.

Afford yourself what you can carry out.
A coward and a coda share a word.
We get our ugliness from fear.
We get our danger from the lord.