(emphasis my own) - You could try seeing which ones appeal to you, says loads abt e person, in my opinion.

No, I Would Not Leave You If You Suddenly Found God
by Jennifer Michael Hecht
from The Next Ancient World

Praise wild dancing in the kitchen.
Praise sitting and talking to the doctor.
Praise phone calls from my sister.
Praise phone calls from you, a little drunk, leaning toward me.
Praise old lovers who show up when they are needed.
Praise our mothers, safe in another state.
Praise my apartment with its three wide rooms.
Praise the blue sky above the brick buildings.
Praise my back windows: trees, fire escapes, cafe lights.
Praise coffee (it destroys sadness).
Praise encyclopedias.
Praise you calling crying.
Praise ibuprofen.
Praise painting on wood.
Praise all the days in the photographs.
Praise the press of my breasts against the inside of my winter coat.
Praise the name of my winter coat: Big Black.
Praise this feeling of trying to write about the truth.
Praise the Byzantine Empire.
Praise the salt in sweat. We are not alone. Praise making you laugh.
Praise making you proud.
Praise the second cup of coffee.
Praise having a party to go to tonight.
Praise my halting therapist.
Praise mixed baby lettuce.
Praise my confidence.
Praise my talent.
Praise bravery in the face of fear.
Praise my fearlessness.
Praise my fear.
Praise pickled herring with onions.
Praise the Arctic Circle.
Praise the Mighty Tonka truck.
Praise the forklift; praise the crane.
Praise theater tickets.
Praise the repetition of names.
Praise the Virgin.
Praise the Magdalene.
Praise Magellan.
Praise Central Park.
Praise your uneven teeth.
Praise blood-stained sheets.
Praise the land, and what I know about its bedrock.
Praise David, dancing wild around the ark of his Lord.
Praise the job of work of truth.
Praise the phrase "job of work."
Praise your faith in me.
Praise your courage.
Praise my faithfulness.
Praise my dedication.
Praise that you sleep with one eye open because a dog bit your face.
Praise your extra nipple.
Praise that we are not lovers.
Praise that we touch each other like lovers.
Praise that you figure out the movie before me.
Praise my desperation.
Praise my terrible fear.
Praise Jones Beach.
Praise the boys in long pants selling frozen Snickers at the sea shore.
Praise death.
Praise the memory of being tiny and tumbled under the ocean, close
to death. Praise arch support.
Praise chewing on a steak bone.
Praise other people's poems.
Praise the Empire State Building.
Praise swimming out so far, I forget the fact of land.
Praise eating chicken-cutlet sandwiches with my brother at the beach.
Praise doing the puzzle with my mother.
Praise my father explaining the universe.
Praise that after visiting Great-Grandma Bertha's,
we went to Coney Island.
Praise three of us fitting in one seat on the Cyclone.
Praise the weird little town where you were raised.
Praise that you were born here where I was born.
Praise the ex-lovers we have in common; praise chocolate.
Praise living at the millennium.
Praise the rotary phone.
Praise broccoli rabe with garlic and olive oil.
Praise total abandon.
Praise bringing out the harpies.
Praise using every muscle.
Praise thirst and water.
Praise the landing on the moon.
Praise singing loud and hard.
Praise going to bed exhausted.
Praise your poems.
Praise my poems.
Praise that we drink too much.
Praise you promising me that you will stop smoking.
Praise how I moon over you.
Praise how you love me.
Praise your strong husband.
Praise dancing to swing.
Praise dancing to the blues.
Praise the borscht at Veselka.
Praise my first gray hairs.
Praise acetaminophen.
Praise Australopithecus.
Praise speaking the truth.
Praise knowing that life is an endeavor of truth.
Praise knowing that life is the becoming towards truth.
Praise the authentic moments of working with someone towards truth.
Praise desire.
Praise stupefying desire.
Praise north and south.
Praise the yellow sun on the red brick buildings outside my windows.
Praise knowing that it is midnight out the back window
because the cafe lights go off.
Praise oranges.
Praise midnight out the front windows and the Empire State Building
goes dark.
Praise Cezanne's apples and oranges.
Praise men from their callused feet to their beautiful thinning hair.
Praise women from Sappho biting her lip
through the first hip-swagger of the new millennium.
Praise the shark giving birth to live young.
Praise the bird.
Praise the words "decapitated" and "disembodied."
Praise rhyme.
Praise meter.
Praise certainty.
Praise indivisibility.
Praise the movies; praise writing songs.
Praise asking each other when we are supposed to bleed.
Praise talking to myself alone in the dark.
Praise my endless pleasure in the godless solitude of my private mind.
Praise the giraffe and the porcupine.
Praise sloth.
Praise gluttony.
Praise a man's hand pressing the small of my back.
Praise your tiny feet.
Praise travel.
Praise the refusal of travel.
Praise your blue eyes.
Praise kissing men: desert of whiskers, oasis of lips.
Praise kissing women and the effort not to bite.
Praise the lips and the tongues and the grease.
Praise the feast.
Praise agony.
Praise defeat.
Praise that we used to dance in public and that now we dance at home.
Praise faith.
Praise glory.
Praise praise.
Praise your brilliant heart.
Praise the mystical abundance of your horrifying heart.
No, I will not leave you if you want to worship God.

The lyrics Ben Gibbard write are so so good.
They are poetry.

<-----

***

Prelims over. So screwy.
Oh well.
(must stop posting such mundane stuff)

"Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does." - Allen Ginsberg, American poet

(lengthy lit stuff - a well-elaborated explanation of the dichotomy between Apollonian and Dionysian. Saw delle use it in her 'model' lit essay on MITC. Figured this might be useful. Got this off a review of Webster's plays from jstor, which can be assessed through nlb online acc.)


The Apollonian is that in us that feels a need for
clarity and design and that recognizes the value,
and indeed necessity, of restraint and self-control,
while the Dionysian is that in us that holds selfexpression,
freedom, and the right to live as we
wish as the highest values and finds in mystery,
in the undefined and formless, hints of truths infinitely
more profound than any accessible to
reason. The Apollonian in us acknowledges the
high priority of social concerns and responsibilities,
recognizes the need for law and the necessity
for all kinds of limitations if men are to live together
on this planet; the Dionysian impulse
rebels against the restrictions of law and puts the
assertion of the individual will above docility to social demands. It is the Apollonian instinct that
is the foundation of all morality; and while the
Dionysian impulse is essentially amoral, from the
Apollonian perspective it looks like immorality.
The Apollonian is the party of duty and conscience,
of institutions and traditions, and all that
gives order to human life; and it is the Dionysian
in us that despises duty, finds traditions stultifying,
embraces disorder, and as soon as institutions and
laws are established begins to search out ways to
evade or undermine or defy them. By Apollonian
values the Dionysian is rebel, criminal, anarchic,
hedonistic, and by Dionysian the Apollonian is
sterile, petrified, mechanistic, inhuman. And to
each the other appears profoundly immoral.
Nietzsche, who wanted to think of himself as
primarily Diunysian, tried to assign relative moral
values to the two impulses; but the attempt was
necessarily partisan and inadequate. The fact of
the matter is that every son of Adam and daughter
of Eve from the beginning of time has, in varying
balance, been composed of a mixture of both impulses.
The works of one impulse or the other are
"good" or "bad," depending on the perspective
from which one is operating at the moment. This
is the most elemental contradiction and paradox
of human nature-and it can be seen, depending
on where one is located, as comic or tragic.
If the dichotomy and contradiction of Apollonian
and Dionysian is as basic as has been suggested,
it would appear to provide the stuff, par
excellence, of which drama is made. In point of
fact, I suspect that an awareness of this particular
level of conflict does enter into our responses to
many plays; but I think it should be made articulate
in dramatic criticism.

I cannot guess what we'll discover
We turn the dirt with our palms cupped like shovels
But I know our filthy hands can wash one another’s
And not one speck will remain
- Soul Meets Body, Death Cab for Cutie

It was one of those moments I wish I could extract, make it material so I can revisit it countless times, even at the expense of the present. (uh-oh good thing I'm not Faust)

Ask me how the concert was and all I can render is "Wow" with my eyes widened and shining with unusual brightness. It's like playing their music so loud (er I tried, my mp3 player's loudest is nowhere close) it's everything you're experiencing (as is what happens in a concert, yeah). I figured since they moved in roughly the same way I could afford to close my eyes, and that did help in the appreciation. While doing that for I will possess your heart, in that very long (4 mins?) intro I actually saw shapes and lines at the back of my eyelid.

And I heard a REALLY good live version of Brand New Colony. I need all the sustenance I can get, until the next time they come. (1 day down, how many more days to go)

If you happen to be curious about Death Cab for Cutie, it'll be good to start with their album Plans. Let it grow on you, let the meaning of the lyrics sink in. Other than that classic, can't-believe-it's-a-human-creation-cos-it's-so-right song (yes fangirl gushing) "I will follow you into the dark", I wasn't drawn to the other songs at all. At first, that is. The songs stagnated in my comp for a few months before bam they hit me, and things were never the same again for me.

I find it blandly sad how I can't get people around me to see their appeal too, cos they so deserve to be appreciated. To each his own, I know but I could always try until I succeed. :)

***

Why is the word "I" capitalized? (fr kottke.org)

The generally accepted linguistic explanation for the capital “I” is that it could not stand alone, uncapitalized, as a single letter, which allows for the possibility that early manuscripts and typography played a major role in shaping the national character of English-speaking countries.

“Graphically, single letters are a problem,” says Charles Bigelow, a type historian and a designer of the Lucida and Wingdings font families. “They look like they broke off from a word or got lost or had some other accident.” When “I” shrunk to a single letter, Bigelow explains, “one little letter had to represent an important word, but it was too wimpy, graphically speaking, to carry the semantic burden, so the scribes made it bigger, which means taller, which means equivalent to a capital.”

- NYT article

***

(my god what am i thinking. 6 days fr prelim and still this)

"In a weird way, if you want to generalize my general outlook on life, it's a sense of romanticism filtered through this pessimistic realism, having a hard time enjoying something when you know there's an end to it," Gibbard says.

Call out to me with your weary eyes.
I'll sing a song for you,
That's what I'm here to do,
To sing for you.
- Ben Gibbard's cover of Donovan Leitch's To sing for you

Oh Jack you see, I felt like your mirror with the wind whipping through my hair.
- Couches in alleys, Ben Gibbard

***

The willingness of trolling “victims” to be hurt by words, he argued, makes them complicit, and trolling will end as soon as we all get over it.

An article i found interesting about a trend of internet-users 'provoking strangers online'...bullying.

Within hours, the aggrieved trolls hit the phones, bombarding her apartment with taxis, pizzas, escorts and threats of rape and violent death.

Just a few days ago I was wondering about the possibility of such pranks (pizzas etc) but I just assumed that no one would do such a thing. Guess I'm very wrong.

***

Make eye contact. Nothing says sincere like a willingness to plumb the depths of your acquaintance's soul.

Break eye contact. Sometimes things get so astounding you just need to stare at the table for a minute to reevaluate your place in the universe. - How to feign sincerity