The blues poems I would often make up in my head and sing on the way to work. (Except that I could never carry a tune. But when I sing to myself, I think I am singing.) One evening, I was crossing Rock Creek Bridge, singing a blues I was trying to get right before I put it down on paper. A man passing on the opposite side of the bridge stopped, looked at me, then turned around and cut across the roadway.
He said: "Son, what's the matter? Are you ill?"
"No," I said. "Just singing."
"I thought you were groaning," he commented. "Sorry!" And then he went on his way.
So after that I never sang my verses aloud in the street anymore.
-- Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Hill & Wang, 1940), p. 217
Sorry for another hiatus, friends. You set yourself to mock the law, critique the policy, and take a modest stab at satire. You find to your dismay that what the kids in you know call "A Shite State of Affairs" leaves you in a funk: That days, then weeks, then a summer and a main era slip past when all you can say is, It's the same crap, same crap, the same.
The plain fact is, T.P.S.M. is not and never will be anybody's "daily look" at anything. I'll try to post faithfully every Friday afternoon. I'm grateful for my friends, life, and the universe, and angry about the rest of it. Welcome to the weekly Pagan Science Monitor.
Oh, and in honor of Bush at the UN this morning, a re-post of my fave QDJ.
The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.
About a subjugated plain,
Among it's desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.
--W.H. Auden, "August, 1968"
Update: There's one QDJ I like better than that one. It's here.
Tags: politics, poetry, blues, Langston Hughes, politics and poetry, music and politics, Trainspotting, Iraq, Bush, Quotation du Jour, QDJ, W.H. Auden.
...which is what Denis (duh-KNEE) likes to say. That's the QDJ.
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