berries in my heart bread

"if they be two, they are two so
as stiff twin compasses are two,
thy soul the fixt foot, makes no show
to move, but doth, if the other do."

/john donne, a valediction forbidding mourning
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more vladimir kush
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the holy moment, waking life


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these three songs have been chasséing betwixt my ears lately:

lyrics for transatlantique and tikwid
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nyctaper has a butt-kicking recording of animal collective's january 21st performance at the bowery ballroom in new york:

If Tuesday night was a celebration of history, Wednesday night at Bowery Ballroom, Animal Collective exhibited why they deserve the accolades. In the most intimate venue they may ever play, AC performed a ninety minute set of near perfection — an impressive balance of energy and proficiency.

what would i want sky


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this study guide for the love song of j. alfred prufrock is very good. it's concise, moderately insightful, and has full appendices for references and contexts. if the pedagogy of every literature class in high school were along the guidelines of this document, i might have been motivated to read more often. also, what do fifteen-year-olds know about dudes like j. alfred prufrock and john donne, anyway? what kid that age can truly empathize with this kind of crap:

for god sake hold your tongue, and let me love.
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love's mysteries in souls do grow,
but yet the body is his book.
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who ever loves, if he do not propose
the right true end of love, he's one that goes
to sea for nothing but to make him sick.
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dull sublunary lovers' love
—whose soul is sense—cannot admit
of absence, 'cause it doth remove
the thing which elemented it.

you can't legalize teaching the deepest meanings of john donne's poetry without unleashing some seriously novel and lascivious ideas on the students that might as well be prefaced by a forty-five minute x-tube session and an e-stroll through condomdepot.com, because that guy strings words together whose harmonies enforce such attention as to pull pairs of eyes and ears toward them, into the bedroom where they reside. it's that anthropomorphic, and anthropomorphism, like after-shave, is best used sparingly.

i think i can hear mice porking in the space between my walls.