Category: diatribes
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Mr. Bright Side
Sometimes I get annoyed about men’s fashion. Men’s work clothes are so bland and uninteresting–pants, shirts, ties, jackets. Period. Khakis. Whoo hoo! Dangerous. I used to get irritated that the women in my offices could wear things that were basically more casual and comfortable (say, by not having a bolt of silk knotted at their […]
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Brr!
Yes, Virginia, you do wear wool winter coats in Arizona: Current temperaturee at 9 am: 41 degrees.When it was totally black outside, it was so early: 39 That’s almost freezing! If we had water here, it would freeze. It scares me.
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Dumbledore, we hardly–ah, never mind.
So along comes Rowling with Dumbledore—a human being, a wizard even, an indisputable hero and one of the most beloved figures in children’s literature. Shouldn’t I be happy to learn he’s gay? Yes, except: Why couldn’t he tell us himself? The Potter books add up to more than 800,000 words before Dumbledore dies in Harry […]
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The boy with the empty plate at the poetry buffet.
It’s happening again. I’m forgetting what poetry is. This happens a lot. I forget how to write poems. I don’t know what they are anymore, I don’t understand them, and I feel frustrated. I become a very picky reader. I don’t like anything I hear or read. I think everything’s been done already and there’s […]
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Wait…are you saying literature isn’t dead?
I think one of my biggest minor annoyances in life is talking to people about literature. Books. When I meet people, I generally don’t offer up that I write, although it is frequently a question that follows once people have asked what I do for a living, since it seems a natural extension of the […]
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Effigy Poetics
Thanks to all who linked to the TIME magazine article about why poetry sucks and doesn’t meet anyone’s needs. After reading it, I feel like I am now a part of a very hoity-toity circle of airbags—like the Marketing Department in Dilbert but with bigger vocabularies. Blaming poets for poetry sucking seems like the right […]
Charles Jensen | Writer 