Not Just Lame, Lamé

Every now and then there seem to be a couple of weeks when I skip out. Sometimes on account of travel (as was the case this time around), sometimes for no reason I can figure out (I did have a week between the two travellin' Fridays). Thanks, and thanks for continuing to read while I was gone. That was nice of you. Now that I'm having a relaxing Saturday evening all to myself, I can at least make my first efforts at catching up.

Because I still don't have the energy to say much that's worthwhile, but am working on a post about songs and visceral reaction, I'm going to do one of those old RMPN posts, wherein I share a list that my dorm-mates and I, including Mxzzy, Chloegoth and DC, made during my second year of college, of "Covers That Should Happen." Some of them lack a certain subtlety, and some of them were much funnier in 2001, but I still have a particular soft spot for the list, and for numbers 12 and 23 in particular.

Covers That Should Happen

1) Britney Spears singing "White Trash"
2) Type O Negative singing "Good Ship Lollipop"
3) Stephen Hawking singing "Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
4) Andrea Boccelli singing "A Sweet Little Bullet from a Pretty Blue Gun"
5) 'N Sync singing "My Boyfriend's Back"
6) The Rolling Stones singing "Don't Fear the Reaper"
7) Vanilla Ice singing "I'm Black and I'm Proud"
8) Donny Osmond singing "Papa Don't Preach"
9) David Bowie singing "Gin and Juice"
10) Christina Aguilera singing "Too Legit"
11) RuPaul singing "Just Like a Woman"
12) Johnny Cash singing "Bohemian Rhapsody"
13) Larry Flynt singing "Walk This Way"
14) Robert Downey Jr. singing "Jailhouse Rock"
15) Bush the Elder and Bush the Younger singing "I Got You Babe"
16) Paul Reubens singing "Can't Touch This"
17) Aqua singing "Du Hast"
18) The Backstreet Boys singing "White Rabbit"
19) Ozzy Osborne singing "Sixteen Going on Seventeen"
20) Mariah Carey singing "Insane in the Brain"
21) Lee Ann Rimes singing "Big Pimpin'"
22) John Paul II singing "Losing My Religion"
23) Phillip Glass covering "Crimson and Clover"
24) Don King singing "Devil's Haircut"
25) Mike Tyson singing "Do You Hear What I Hear?"
26) Arnold Schwarzenegger singing "Act Naturally"
27) Metallica singing "Heard It Through the Grapevine"
28) Ronald Reagan singing "End of the World (As We Know It)"

Friday Poetry: Robert Bringhurst

This was provided to me by one fabulous Moxiesocks a coupla weeks ago. There are small formatting errors; forgive me, and teach me how to indent in HTML.

Robert Bringhurst
These poems she said

These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
who would leave his wife and child because
they made noise in his study. These are the poems
of a man who would murder his mother to claim
the inheritance. These are the poems of a man
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not
comprehend but which nevertheless
offended me. These are the poems of a man
who would rather sleep with himself than with women,
she said. These are the poems of a man
with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket's
hands, woven of water and logic
and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These
poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant
as elm leaves, which if they love love only
the wide blue sky and the air and the idea
of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.
These poems, she said. . . .
You are, he said,
beautiful.
That is not love, she said rightly.