Reading

To say that Deborah Landau is a poet of the body is to risk obscuring the fact that she is a poet of the urban body, the urbane, the human being alive in the twenty-first-century city. Hers is New York. “Soon we were enthralled, engaged, en route to / Kleinfeld’s, it was hard to find a dress, submit, …” But it’s not the pallor of a wedding dress that lingers here, but the whiteness of bone. Landau’s latest book, Skeletons, is composed of untitled acrostics (s-k-e-l-e-t-o-n-s spelled down the page like ladders of bone) interrupted every so often by poems called “Flesh,” which begin with lines like “To be afraid of every edge, the falling off of it. / Walking at night. Walking under the scaffolding …” Bone and flesh, the inner structure and the outer matter—and so it is a book about death (an “incessant / klepto”), and sex (“red life animal press”), and the persistence of form. And it’s a book of poems that mostly start with the letter “S”—has that ever been done? It makes for a powerful and compelling mixture of repetition—the setting up of an expectation—and variation, a leaping, humming, often anxious weather generated in the unfolding of each poem. The book begins:

Recently, there has been a lot of finger-pointing about who may or may not have sold some poison to a teenager, particularly Romeo Montague—whose life has been cut tragically short. Many of you have named me as the culprit, but I can neither confirm nor deny it as I am bound by doctor-patient confidentiality. It would violate the oath I took as an apothecary to divulge such information.

Sure, I was seen with Romeo the night of his death, but that could have been for anything—some horehound for a cold or perhaps frankincense for early-onset arthritis. I cannot say, because I am bound by law not to disclose what I prescribe for a patient. Why, many of you in this very room have come to me under the cloak of night to buy drams that you hope to keep a secret from your wives and neighbors. Suppose I were to open up about one of my patients, who is to say what other secrets I may spill?

- by Peter Leyland

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Democrats back Biden on Ukraine while dissent spreads within the GOP.

The post Virtue Signaling as a War Policy appeared first on The Intercept.

- by Carrie Ditzel

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Η γενικευμένη λιτότητα επιβλήθηκε στην Ευρώπη, όχι από τους Χριστιανοδημοκράτες-Συντηρητικούς αλλά, από τo SPD – τους Γερμανούς σοσιαλδημοκράτες. Την αρχή έκανε τo 2002 ο Καγκελάριος Σρέντερ με σκληρές επιθέσεις εναντίον των γερμανών εργαζόμενων εκατομμύρια των οποίων καταδικάστηκαν στην επισφαλή, κακοπληρωμένη, μερικής απασχόλησης εργασία (μέσω των «μεταρρυθμίσεων» Hartz 4 που σχεδίασε ο τότε διευθύνων σύμβουλος της […]

The post ΜέΡΑ25: Δεν ξεχνάμε πως την Λιτότητα την εισήγαγαν οι Γερμανοί σοσιαλδημοκράτες – το SPD, στο οποίο κάποιοι «προοδευτικοί» σήμερα καταθέτουν διαπιστευτήρια appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

This is a story as old, and probably older, than civilization and isn’t unique to elites.

It is the question of group interest versus individual interest; or national interest versus internal group interest.

National advantages have to be sustained. If you have a technological lead, you don’t give that lead to another nation which is a competitor. If you have a production lead, you don’t help a competitor improve its production anywhere near close to yours. You may give them something from the prior tech generation, maybe, but never the current one.

This is unfortunate, a better world could be created with more sharing, but that would require a world in which nations and elites don’t compete with each other in devastating ways.

Here I go again - visiting the home of my first 20 years, Cornwall.
I went this time last year as soon as the flights had resumed after all that covid bullshit. I flew home and caught covid at the Blue Anchor. I had never been as sick …

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