He Runs a Pet Shop and the Parrot Is His Trademark

• Yes. 
• If you think there's been a boatload of Ligeti played here this year, wait for 2013.
• A rage for life.
• The greatest academic fraud of his generation (I say this admiringly) on how the Left lost the argument.
• On organizing, post-election.
• The Obama narrative on the Obama narrative.
• Ladies and gentlemen, your first trial balloon of Obamatoo.
• I trademark Obamatoo.
• Yes, that's this post's monologue. All this to set up a pun based on a line from a Stephen Dobyns' poem I wanted to use as post's title.
• >>Deleted bleggalgazing<<
• The son of Milo Minderbinder.
• Heat-vampire liberals.
• Rearguarding.
• Indulging the schadenfreude.
• Motherfucking crackers.
• Honor the soldier, scorn the chickenhawk.
• Management theory and the Chicago school.
• Carbon democracy.
• Zero votes in 59 precincts. Commence minor shitstorm.
• An unboring history of the United States.
• Police state.
• The past isn't dead. And LOL, bye Alabama! 

 

• Forgive me, I am small.
• Narrative as collection.
• The semiautobiographers.
• Coming to belief, part three.
• never so invisible as when.... 
• Sugarland Road!
• The waste carpet.
• Prunella's Neil Young playlist. Unfortunately, someone hacked into her site and posted a Jack Fucking White song. Hey Jack, write the same fucking song again. Oh, you wrote six yesterday, three more already today? OK. 
• Blogwhoring at it's most honest.
• The problems of Bartleby. Don't know what parts of this were written before or after the author's fifth glass of wine (which he admitted to last night on twuuter).
• Holyfuck, listen to this. Found here, Holyfuck, three hours of 2012 singles you won't hear on for-profit radio. Edward Ka-Spel? Will listen to more. Please throw the coins in your pocket to WFMU, they're desperate. Do it for me.
• From that list: yes.
• Probably not in the first ten on the most times played here since 2004, but certainly in the second ten:

YELLOW BEAK

Stephen Dobyns

A man owns a green parrot with a yellow beak

that he carries on his shoulder each day to work.

He runs a pet shop and the parrot is his trademark.

Each morning the man winds his way from his bus

through the square, four or five blocks. There goes

the parrot, people say. Then at night, he comes back.

The man himself is nondescript—a little overweight,

thinning hair of no color at all. It's like the parrot owns

the man, not the reverse. Then one day the man dies.

He was old. It was bound to happen. At first people

feel mildly upset. The butcher thinks he has forgotten

a customer who owes him money. The baker thinks

he's catching a cold. Soon they get it right—the parrot

is gone. Time seems out of sorts, but sets itself straight

as people forget. Then years later the fellow who ran

the diner wakes from a dream where he saw the parrot

flying along all by itself, flapping by in the morning

and cruising back home at night. Those were the years

of the man's marriage, the start of his family, the years

when the muddle of his life began to work itself out;

and it's as if the parrot were at the root of it all, linking

the days like pearls on a string. Foolish of course, but

do you see how it might happen? We wake at night

and recall an event that seems to define a fixed period

of time, perhaps the memory of a beat-up bike we had

as a kid, or a particular chair where we sat and laughed

with friends; a house, a book, a piece of music, even

a green parrot winding its way through city streets.

And do you see that bubble of air balanced at the tip

of its yellow beak? That's the time in which we lived.