Thursday, December 14th, 2000

Just Right
"Show some pithy, do some ironing."
Ken Metzler, Email

Big
"At the window she gazed out toward the river, seeing nothing but fog. A hand touched her spine, exactly in that spot every man she ever knew had been able to find, sooner or later. She straightened up, squeezing her shoulder blades together, moving her breasts taut and suddenly visible toward the window. She could see his reflection watching their reflection. She turned. He was blushing. Crew cut, suit, Harris tweed. "Say, you are new," she smiled. I am Esther."

He blushed and was cute. "Brad," he said. "I'm sorry I made you jump."

She knew instinctively: he will be fine as the fraternity boy just out of an Ivy League school who knows he will never stop being a fraternity boy as long as he lives. But who still feels he is missing something, and so hangs at the edges of the Whole Sick Crew. If he is going into management, he writes. If he is an engineer or architect, why he paints or sculpts. He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there should ever have been a line, or even if there is a line at all. He will learn how to be a twinned man and will go on at the game, straddling until he splits up the crotch and in half from the prolonged tension, and then he will be destroyed. She assumed ballet fourth position, moved her breasts at a 45 degree angle to his line-of-sight, pointed her nose at his heart, looked up at him through her eyelashes."

Thomas Pynchon, V

Bonus Poem...
TO THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES, ENTERING ITS THIRD CENTURY because reverence has never been america's thing, this verse in your honor will not begin "o thou." but the great respect our country has to give may you all continue to deserve and have. here at the fulcrum of us all, the feather of truth against the soul is weighed, and had better be found to balance lest our enterprise collapse in silence. for here the million varying wills get melted down, get hammered out until the movie's reduced to stills that tell us what the law's about. conflict's endemic in the mind: your job's to hear it in the wind and compass it in opposites, and bring the antagonists by your wits to being one, and that the law thenceforth, until you change your minds against and with the shifting winds that this and that way blow the straw. so it's a republic, as Franklin said, if you can keep it; and we did thus far, and hope to keep our quarrel funny and just, though with this moral:- praise without end for the go-ahead zeal of whoever it was invented the wheel; but never a word for the poor soul's sake that thought ahead, and invented the brake.

Howard Nemerov, 1989

Wednesday, December 13th