Poetry Tuesday!: "The Pobble Who Has No Toes" by Edward Lear
"The Pobble who has no toes / Had once as many as we; / When they said 'Some day you may lose them all;' / He replied 'Fish, fiddle-de-dee!'..."
Literature
AMC, Amazon Offer Up Television Adaptations of Two Hot Books
Too Close and The Underground Railroad provide wildly different experiences.
Poetry Tuesday!: "Листья" ("Leaves") by Fyodor Tyutchev
"О буйные ветры, / Скорее, скорей! / Скорей нас сорвите / С докучных ветвей! / Сорвите, умчите, / Мы ждать не хотим, / Летите, летите! / Мы с вами летим!.."
Poetry Monday!: "anyone lived in a pretty how town" by e.e. cummings
only the snow can begin to explain how children are apt to forget to remember with up so floating many bells down...
Poetry Monday!: "The Four Friends" by A.A. Milne
"Ernest was an elephant, a great big fellow, / Leonard was a lion with a six-foot tail, / George was a goat, and his beard was yellow, / And James was a very small snail...."
SPECIAL Poetry Monday!: "Romance de la luna, luna" by Federico García Lorca (Spanish)
"La luna vino a la fragua / con su polisón de nardos. / El niño la mira, mira. / El niño la está mirando...."
SPECIAL Poetry Tuesday!: "Herbst" ("Autumn") by Rainer Maria Rilke (German)
Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt. Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen.
The Overly Examined Life of Henry David Thoreau
Cartoonist Peter Bagge looks at Henry David Thoreau's life at Walden and beyond
SPECIAL Poetry Tuesday!: "Mednyi vsadnik" ("The Bronze Horseman") by Aleksandr Pushkin
"From here, we'll show the Swede our saber; / We'll build a city on the sea, / To better spite our haughty neighbor. / Our destiny is manifest -- / To cut a window to the West..."
SPECIAL Poetry Monday!: "La chambre double" by Charles Baudelaire
« Et hue donc ! bourrique ! Sue donc, esclave ! Vis donc, damné ! »
SPECIAL Poetry Monday!: "The Epic (Including the Morte d'Arthur)" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
In honor of my 100 YouTube subscribers, a special reading of a lovely Arthurian poem.
Poetry Monday!: "So That's Who I Remind Me Of" by Ogden Nash
"When I consider men of golden talents, / I'm delighted, in my introverted way, / To discover, as I'm drawing up the balance, / How much we have in common, I and they...."
Poetry Monday!: "Vers dorés" by Gérard de Nerval
"Homme, libre penseur ! te crois-tu seul pensant / Dans ce monde où la vie éclate en toute chose ? / Des forces que tu tiens ta liberté dispose, / Mais de tous tes conseils l'univers est absent...."
Why Dr. Seuss Is Worth Defending
Banishing him from library shelves is a slippery slope.
The iocane powder trick with the Vizzini meta-twist
Where does this variation on Mithridatism come from?
Poetry Monday!: "Rules and Regulations" by Lewis Carroll
Written at age 13 for his younger brother and sister: "A short direction / To avoid dejection, / By variations / In occupations, / And prolongation / Of relaxation, / And combinations / Of recreations..."
Poetry Monday!: "Dane-geld" by Rudyard Kipling
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld, / No matter how trifling the cost; / For the end of that game is oppression and shame, / And the nation that pays it is lost!"
Poetry Tuesday!: "Ia mechtoiu lovil ukhodiashchie teni" ("With my dreams I caught the departing shadows") by Konstantin Balmont
"Я мечтою ловил уходящие тени, / Уходящие тени погасавшего дня..."
Poetry Monday: "My Three Loves" by Henry S. Leigh
"I knew not which to make my pet, — my pipe, cigar, or cigarette..."
Poetry Monday!: "love is more thicker than forget" by e.e. cummings
"love is more thicker than forget / more thinner than recall / more seldom than a wave is wet / more frequent than to fail..."
Poetry Monday!: "Chanson d'automne" by Oscar Milosz
"Écoutez la voix du vent dans la nuit..."
Poetry Monday!: "Evolution" by Langdon Smith
"When you were a tadpole and I was a fish in the Paleozoic time..."
Poetry Monday: "Would I Be Shrived?" by John D. Swain
A second member of the small genre of poems pretending to be by the French poet François Villon.
Poetry Tuesday!: "The reticent volcano keeps…" by Emily Dickinson
In this age of Internet and social media, Emily Dickinson tells us to be as quiet as a volcano.
Should We Stop Streaming Gone With the Wind?
No, we should interrogate its persistent popularity and our relationship to it as forcefully as possible.
Understanding Ellison
In a new collection of letters, the great Invisible Man author is further revealed.
The Autobiography of an Ex-Black Man: Thomas Chatterton Williams
The new memoir Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race is a powerful personal statement and national call to arms.
Booker Prize Winner Bernardine Evaristo: 'This Whole Idea of Cultural Appropriation Is Ridiculous'
"I refuse to construct some kind of character who is going to appease everybody."
West Virginia Inmates Will Be Charged by the Minute to Read E-Books on Tablets
The tablets aren't supposed to replace regular books, but similar policies have led to restrictions on book donations and price-gouging in other states.
