- read four pages of the stump, now I'm back on the marcel
- When it comes not comprehending or retaining anything I read I now only like not comprehending and retaining Proust
- My abandonment of McElroy for Marcel after cutting McElroy had I not cut the book fine
- metaphors abound, I can't read on the bus to and from Manhattan anyway
- The banality of empathy
- Whiteshift: on motherfucking white people
- My toolishly self-indulgent but genuine seething contempt towards white motherfuckers of course feature not bug
- The argument for Sanders
- I have contempt for white motherfuckers, but I hate motherfucking Democrats.
- Rest in Peace, Katherine Helmond.
- Paisley Underground.
- Chopin born 209 years ago yesterday, Wilbur born 98 years ago yesterday
ADVICE TO A PROPHET
Richard Wilbur
When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,
Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.
Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?—
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?
Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,
If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip
On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,
These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken
In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.
Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.
