Christopher Hitchens

One of the reasons that women are at a disadvantage when it comes to being funny, according to Hitchens, is that much of humor is obscene and filthy and most unladylike.

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The plain fact is that the physical structure of the human being is a joke in itself: a flat, crude, unanswerable disproof of any nonsense about “intelligent design.” The reproductive and eliminating functions (the closeness of which is the origin of all obscenity) were obviously wired together in hell by some subcommittee that was giggling cruelly as it went about its work. (“Think they’d wear this? Well, they’re gonna have to.”) The resulting confusion is the source of perhaps 50 percent of all humor. Filth. That’s what the customers want, as we occasional stand-up performers all know. Filth, and plenty of it. Filth in lavish, heaping quantities.

-- Christopher Hitchens, “Why Women Aren’t Funny” in Arguably

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Tumblr girls

I can hardly believe that I spent my whole morning on Tumblr girls. But it's eleven-thirty. So I guess I did. It's too bad that I didn't knock out a wank in the process, but Pop is here and the opportunity was not. So, I'll probably still need to take care of that this afternoon. What a day, what a life!

Cats

Is Coco pretty smart, after all? I am leaving the cats outside, even though, like yesterday, the temperature is going to be hovering around the 100-degree mark. The happy surprise is that Coco has come inside to doze. Now this is a cat that understands comfort.

Ash almost came in, but she puts on such a distrustful face and turns away at the door. Ash actually saddens me a little. Despite my stronger passion for Coco, I always figured that Ash and I would have a tight bond. Remember, she was always the more nurturing and smarter one of the cats, going back to her kittenhood days, when she would lick the shut eyes of the other kittens to open them, and the way she mothered Coco and Sammy through the spring storms, keeping them warm beneath her as she braved the brunt of the foul weather. But I see on her face the alienated marks of the feral Mother Grey, the cat that started it all, turning us into a cat family. It's like she must have suffered a head injury sometime and lost ten IQ points, leaving her more tetchy and estranged, rather than warm and sharing and loving. She seems different. She is certainly colder than she was, oh, a year ago.

Sammy, of course, is Sammy, his own cat, and no pet of anyone's.

But I love them all.

Sylvia

This is from an interview with Ted Hughes, a poet and the husband of Sylvia Plath.

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INTERVIEWER

Do you know how Sylvia used her journals? Were they diaries or notebooks for her poetry and fiction?

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Of Stanley Fish

A hard, solid hit on Stanley Fish. It is such a developed, well-structured argument, I don't know how to make one of my little, cutesy posts out of it. There is no one ringing quote. Yet I don't really want to copy and paste the entire thing. Naturally I don't have the wit to reformulate the argument myself. And I spent the better part of my afternoon on reading it too. Considering how I wasted the morning on porn, it has been a totally shot day. Funny, I cannot feel too bad, for the truth is I rather enjoyed it: a real lazy Saturday just messing around.

{New Republic}

The Poet Impersonator

In a movie I was watching tonight, there was a riff on being an Elvis impersonator. I recalled my whimsical flirtation with the idea of being an Elvis impersonator myself, if only I could carry a tune. But then my thinking took off and soared, and I saw and felt a whole new strategy to my writing and reading, the way I live my life.

I would be a poet impersonator. That would be my new line of journaling/blogging too. I can spew out crappy 'poems'. I would also read books about poetry, for learning purposes, and, as you might expect, this new line of journal entries would include excerpts from this reading.

I feel so tempted to do it. Even if I went so far as to cut off all of the books that I am book-blogging now, freeing myself to really go for it full blast, why not? Do I have an audience to please? Nope.

The main thing that holds me back is the thought of what I would end up with if I pursued this direction. Would it be better than my book-blogging? With what I am doing now, I at least give myself some good reading material. With this poetry routine, I mostly likely would have crap that even I could not bear to look through.

But I don't know. It still feels like a fun idea. Is it possible just to moderate my passions here, and to just do this poetry bit as a sideline to my regular routine. I could slip some poetry books into my reading life.

I have stopped working on the Two Journal, which opens up some ready space for this project, as this can become the Two Journal.