In That Kind Climate the Mere Thought of Snow Was but a Wedding Cake

• Stuck at home in the snow? Play Philosophy Bingo! Or, if you suck at object subject subject object subject like me, play the center square, declare stalemate, quit.
• Stuck at home in the snow? Rai and Jiri at Lungha. Rai of Lowani. Lowani under two moons. Jiri of Ubaya. Ubaya of crossroads, at Lungha. Lungha, her sky gray, one of the best TNGs, is on right now. 
• Just saw a commercial for Chrysler, the conceit is great things have begun in garages, Wright Brothers, Disney, Hewlitt Packard, began in garages as did the Ramones, whose Rock and Roll Radio is the bed music.
• Academic cowards and why she doesn't post anonymously.
• Virtual identity and the control society.
• William Gass reading from Middle C.
• Time-travelling verb tenses must will have existed. 
• I saved the Hecht poem below on his birthday last week for a day like today.
• Woke up with Primitive Calculators in my head.

  
SESTINA d'INVERNO

Anthony Hecht

Here in this bleak city of Rochester,
Where there are twenty-seven words for “snow,”
Not all of them polite, the wayward mind
Basks in some Yucatan of its own making,
Some coppery, sleek lagoon, or cinnamon island
Alive with lemon tints and burnished natives,

And O that we were there. But here the natives
Of this grey, sunless city of Rochester
Have sown whole mines of salt about their land
(Bare ruined Carthage that it is) while snow
Comes down as if The Flood were in the making.
Yet on that ocean Marvell called the mind

An ark sets forth which is itself the mind,
Bound for some pungent green, some shore whose natives
Blend coriander, cayenne, mint in making
Roasts that would gladden the Earl of Rochester
With sinfulness, and melt a polar snow.
It might be well to remember that an island

Was blessed heaven once, more than an island,
The grand, utopian dream of a noble mind.
In that kind climate the mere thought of snow
Was but a wedding cake; the youthful natives,
Unable to conceive of Rochester,
Made love, and were acrobatic in the making.

Dream as we may, there is far more to making
Do than some wistful reverie of an island,
Especially now when hope lies with the Rochester
Gas and Electric Co., which doesn’t mind
Such profitable weather, while the natives
Sink, like Pompeians, under a world of snow.

The one thing indisputable here is snow,
The single verity of heaven’s making,
Deeply indifferent to the dreams of the natives,
And the torn hoarding-posters of some island.
Under our igloo skies the frozen mind
Holds to one truth: it is grey, and called Rochester.

No island fantasy survives Rochester,
Where to the natives destiny is snow
That is neither to our mind nor of our making.