You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2008.
For once, I’m satisfied with a silly online test score:
Your Score: the Wit
(57% dark, 23% spontaneous, 21% vulgar)
your humor style:
CLEAN | COMPLEX | DARK – You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you’re probably an intellectual, but don’t take that to mean pretentious. You realize ‘dumb’ can be witty–after all isn’t that the Simpsons’ philosophy?–but rudeness for its own sake, ‘gross-out’ humor and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat.
I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer.
Your sense of humor takes the most thought to appreciate, but it’s also the best, in my opinion.
PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart – Woody Allen – Ricky Gervais
I’ve been working (slowly…) on a couple papers for classes, one of which led me on a brief and surprising goose chase through my bookshelf. Along with the article I was originally looking for, I also found a collection of poems I translated for a poetry class back in the dark ages of 2003. Reading back over them today, I was surprised that these were the poems I had chosen, and I wonder what exactly they meant to me then, compared to what they mean to me now:
| Der Phönix – Gotthold Lessing Nach vielen Jahrhunderten gefiel es dem Phönix, sich wieder einmal Bald aber verwandten die besten und geselligsten mitleidsvoll ihre |
The Phoenix by Gotthold Lessing (tr. Sara Q. Thompson) After several centuries in repose, But soon, those most sympathetic and compassionate |
and this one, from one of my favorite poets:
| Soneto XLIV
– Pablo Neruda Sabrás que no te amo y que te amo Yo te amo para comenzar a amarte, Te amo y no te amo como si tuviera Mi amor tiene dos vidas para armarte. |
Sonnet 44
by Pablo Neruda (tr. Sara Q. Thompson) Know that I do not love you and that I love you, I love you in order to begin loving you, I love and don’t love you as though I’m holding My love has two lives just to love you. |
from the Writer’s Almanac of May 17th:
SF
SF stood for Sigmund Freud, or serious folly,
for science fiction in San Francisco, or fear
in the south of France. The system failed.
The siblings fought. So far, such fury,
as if a funereal sequence of sharps and flats
set free a flamboyant signature, sinful, fanatic,
the fire sermon of a secular fundamentalist,
a singular fellow’s Symphonie Fantastique.Students forget the state’s favorite son’s face.
Sorry, friends, for the screws of fate.
Stage fright seduces the faithful for the subway fare
as slobs fake sobs, suckers flee, salesmen fade.
Sad the fops. Sudden the flip side of fame.
So find the segue. Finish the speculative frame.
“SF” by David Lehman from When a Woman Loves a Man © Scribner, 2005.
I’ve never seen anything like this posted on campus before, but there it was – on the bulletin board of the Undergrad Library tunnel. Do you think it’s a joke? I thought so at first, but now I wonder if maybe it’s serious. I feel sorry for the kid, so I’m spreading the word. If you have a penchant for massages and grapes, here’s your chance. Me, I’m just not that into grapes. But I wish him the very best of luck.
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One last outing before my flight back to THAT place.
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What would a trip to Boston be without a visit to a cemetery? We walked through, comparing the skull & crossbone tombstones to the angel tombstones. Ah, history.
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Geri and I took a ride on her bike. Weatherman called for rain but we’re having a beautiful grey day. Ha! Gotta get me a leather jacket like this.
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As I listen to these four musicians, I realize what a great illustration this serves for my last couple days. They smile at each other, wait for each other,respond to each other, as though having a wonderful talk together after dinner. Instead of wine glasses they find themselves holding 3 violins and a cello. And thus continues their conversation. I’ve had a week full of very good talks with good people,and I am so grateful.
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We’re in Boston’s South Station, and happened to walk into a chamber concert. I love cities.
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We’re in the foyer of the Harvard Library. The noon bells are ringing outside and we’re heading for the lawn. 
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I’m getting ahead of myself.
I still have a couple papers to finish up for the term, but I’m already fantasizing about the books I’ll read this summer. (If you didn’t know I was geeky by now, you haven’t been paying attention.)
I was all set to start my summer with The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner, but over the past week I’ve been thinking about Thoreau’s Walden — which, of course, we all read in high school, right?
Well, sure, I did, but I don’t remember anything from high school.
I do remember the line “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.” I conjure that up every day. It’s been especially strong this week after hearing a quote on Writer’s Almanac that made me long to strike out on some mountain hiking trail and lose myself in the woods for a while, even if that is impractical and unreasonable:
“Personally I believe that man’s fascination for art lies in our unsatisfied desire for identity. I believe that our unarticulated longing for freedom, our painful and impractical and completely unreasonable longing for freedom derives simply from the fact that we are shut up inside that system of apparent necessities which is called our personality…”
– Johan Borgen (Words Through the Years, 1966)
