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I don’t go to poetry readings if I can help it. Usually I become violent and imagine ripping out the poet’s larynx so he can never defile the atmosphere with his pretentiousness again. Or I burst out laughing, which is rude and I try not to be rude. Musical accompaniment dulls the pain, though not by much. But I do read poetry, I like some of it, and I have a few verses stored in my memory. Sometimes when something happens to me, a line from a poem I thought I’d forgotten will pop unbidden into my head, and suddenly the experience makes more sense to me. I figure that’s what poetry is for, at least in my case.

Before he died this year, the philosopher Richard Rorty wrote: “. . .I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human — farther removed from the beasts — than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses.”

“We went up to the second floor where the shelves, sofas, tables and lamps are all arrayed into tasteful little room settings — rooms, but with mysterious tags hanging everywhere. Immediately I thought it was like entering a videogame world. Who lives here? What do they do? Why is that book on the table? Is that significant? Could it be some kind of clue to the occupant’s identity?

“Why does everything have weird names? Every container, shelf, cabinet or appliance had some odd name, as if people from Planet Sweden anthropomorphized these objects, naming each one they encountered as best they could. . .” Walk-in videogame in the David Byrne Journal.

Richard Dawkins reviews God Is Not Great in the Times Literary Supplement.

“There is much fluttering in the dovecots of the deluded, and Christopher Hitchens is one of those responsible. Another is the philosopher A. C. Grayling. I recently shared a platform with both. We were to debate against a trio of, as it turned out, rather half-hearted religious apologists (”Of course I don’t believe in a God with a long white beard, but…”). I hadn’t met Hitchens before, but I got an idea of what to expect when Grayling emailed me to discuss tactics. After proposing a couple of lines for himself and
me, he concluded, “and Hitch will spray AK47 ammo at the enemy in characteristic style”…

Elsewhere: Incroyable! England storms into Rugby World Cup final on Jonny Wilkinson’s boot. And Stephen Colbert writes Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times.

In the course of my friend’s quest we sought out a psychic who’d been recommended by a columnist. This manghuhula used regular playing cards to read the future. We sat at a table—I was the designated note-taker—and he shuffled the cards. He asked my friend to cut the deck, then he lay the cards on the table. “You used to live in Makati,” he told my friend, looking her straight in the eye. In a sort of trance, he described the house she’d grown up in, including its color, the color of the gate, and the stones leading up to the front door. Then, in similar detail, he described my friend’s mother.

“Wow,” my friend said, “You can see all that in the cards?”

“No,” the manghuhula replied, “Don’t you remember me? I was your houseboy in 1973!”

Emotional Weather Report, today in the Philippine Star.

Too big a deal is being made of today’s eclipse. I watch for signs of the apocalypse, and I don’t think it is one. It’s not extraordinary enough. There are five, six eclipses every year, and the red moon stuff sounds like fear-mongering—it makes people think of war and Old Testament plagues. (I hate to break this to you but the world is already at war, there’s always been a war going on in some corner of the world, and war is big business.) In many ways we’re still the ancient tribesmen beating the drums to keep the moon from swallowing the sun.

My druid kept getting text messages from people asking about the effect of this eclipse upon their personal destinies. Her answer: Probably none. We were at a bookstore and two kids asked the staff for a book called Eclipse. We thought they wanted a science book, but it turned out to be a young adult novel with a vampire protagonist. So we started riffing on eclipses: that movie about Rimbaud’s affair
with Verlaine starring Leonardo DiCaprio, that horrible Bonnie Tyler karaoke staple that makes me want to rip people’s throats out through their noses, and the Antonioni movie with Alain Delon and Monica Vitti in which they arrange to meet but neither one shows up and for about ten minutes the camera shows the empty street corner, lampposts, random pedestrians, and you figure something has to happen, and then it’s The End. My friend came up with a great idea for a costume party with an Eclipse theme. Half the guests show up as the sun, the other half as the moon, and they take turns covering each other. On the way home I noticed an Eclipse gym. What profound insights am I trying to impart? None. Absolutely none.

One of my favorite cosmic coincidence sites is Goro Adachi’s Etemenanki. (Etemenanki is one of the towers of Babel.) This post connects the showing of a Battlestar Galactica episode about radiation poisoning, solar flares, a Discovery launch, the opening of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, the end of the Mayan calendar, the Transit of Venus, the “passing of the torch” from Ronald Reagan to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Deep Impact, the octagonal floor plan of the Dome of the Rock, the Russian spy Litvinenko who died of radiation poisoning, Comet McNaught, Nostradamus, Pink Floyd, the death of Gerald Ford, the execution of Saddam Hussein, 2001: A Space Odyssey and two must-haves of any good conspiracy theory: the Knights Templar and the Book of Revelations.

Mind-boggling entertainment, the start of a migraine, or your signal to drop everything and head for the hills to await the apocalypse?

So if you’re planning on writing the next Da Vinci Code-type bestseller, you know where to rip off your plot.

Has it occurred to you that Transformers has a premise similar to that of 2001: A Space Odyssey, only it’s much less static?