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	February 28, 2003

ANTI-WAR POETRY BY KIM ADDONISIO I was flattered and pleased that my anti-war poem led off last week's special edition of Virtual Occoquan. But this week on Wood's Lot I found what I think is the best anti-war poem of recent times. Here is Kim Addonizio 's poem The Numbers: How many nights have I lain here like this, feverish with plans, with fears, with the last sentence someone spoke, still trying to finish a conversation already over? How many nights were wasted in not sleeping, how many in sleep?I don't know how many hungers there are, how much radiance or salt, how many times the world breaks apart, disintegrates to nothing and starts up again in the course of an ordinary hour. I don't know how God can bear seeing everything at once: the falling bodies, the monuments and burnings, the lovers pacing the floors of how many locked hearts. I want to close my eyes and find a quiet field in fog, a few sheep moving toward a fence. I want to count them, I want them to end. I don't want to wonder how many people are sitting in restaurants about to close down, which of them will wander the sidewalks all night while the pies revolve in the refrigerated dark. How many days are left of my life, how much does it matter if I manage to say one true thing about it?how often have I tried, how often failed and fallen into depression? The field is wet, each grassblade gleaming with its own particularity, even here, so that I can't help asking again, the white sky filling with footprints, bricks, with mutterings over rosaries, with hands that pass over flames before covering the eyes. I'm tired, I want to rest now. I want to kiss the body of my lover, the one mouth, the simple name without a shadow. Let me go. How many prayers are there tonight, how many of us must stay awake and listen? 4:37:56 PM  trackback []  comment []

SLUMMING THROUGH THE BLOGOSPHERE After a month in the small, safe world of Salon blogs, my curiosity got the better of me. I had already discovered some excellent non-Salon blogs, thanks to the posts and blogrolls of fellow Sloggers: K. at Different Strings , Charly Z at Driver 8 , Mark at Fried Green , xian at RFB/Salonika , the inimitable Raven , pomo Rayne , Blasphemous Jan, Emphatic Rob, Scott Rosenberg , Tom Tomorrow and eloquant essayist Toby . Sloggers Raven and Tom were prolific enough to keep me busy, but once I added non-Sloggers Alas , Kos and Atrios to my daily reading I felt I would never be able to keep up. Now I'm up to 36 blogs and 20 e-zines, most of which listed are in my blogroll. I wade through them all almost every evening. I had some unanswered questions: Why could I find no other Canadian bloggers of note? Were there any eloquent right-wingers (other than Volokh) in the blogosphere? Why was my blogroll predominently male writers when I'd read that the majority of bloggers were female? When I discovered some tools to search for blogs by subject, I decided to dig for some answers. Over the past week I've read or at least scanned over 300 blogs. This is what I learned: There are many visually stunning blogs, enough to make my Userland template look unseemingly staid, linear and unimaginative. Take a look at this one for example. Blogs by women, and by younger writers, generally seem to be more artistic in design. Alas, there seems to be something of an inverse correlation between physical attractiveness and quality of content (One very notable exception is Jeff Gates' Life Outtacontext blog). Many, many pretty blogs contain sentences like: omigod i am sooooo not wanting to be studying for next week's history test. These blogs generally seem to be written by bloggers with names like [See Note Below]. Capital letters, punctuation and spell-checkers are all used sparingly in this part of the blogosphere. This negative correlation turns out to be something of a blessing in disguise, because much of the more inane content is, I swear, written in four-point type on a textured background. See the link in point 1 above for example. Clearly meant to be undecipherable and unintelligible to anyone over 17. The tone of many blogs is so self-effacing and negative that I am convinced that blogging is now, next to Prozac, the leading therapy for people with moderate to severe depression. Initially I found this darkly amusing, but now I find it very disturbing. There are many people, young and old, quietly and desperately screaming into cyberspace. The vast majority of blogs of all political stripes evidence a complete lack of critical thinking. Most commentary is superficial, unoriginal and uninformed. Two remarkable exceptions are the erudite and prolific Wood's Lot (at last! a great Canadian blog, and one with a huge hit count per Blogdex, but which strangely appears on few blogrolls, though his blogroll is massive ) and the melancholy but perceptive Texting . Wood has a lovely quote from Heidegger on his who? page and a thread that some of my fellow Sloggers (you know who you are) should read, suggesting that the Web is now infected with thought viruses - memes that could destroy the blogosphere. To the extent my modest grasp of French allows, in my sample of Canadian blogs I read a few that were penned by Quebecois, but discerned no significant cultural differences from English language blogs. There is even a French counterpart to Friday Five called Sept Instants. In other words, the blogosphere outside our cloistered Salon world is a microcosm of the world it articulates. It is all interesting to those that have the energy and the voyeuristic streak needed to explore it, and who are not too jaundiced by the naivete, frivolity and noise that consumes most of blog space, just as it consumes most of the bandwidth of human discourse. But I'm glad to be home. AFTERWORD: I had originally listed some blog names where it says "[See Note Below]" above. Turns out these were quite eloquent blogs with whimsical names. I apologize to the owners of these blogs. I should have known you can't judge a blog by its name. 4:35:02 PM  trackback []  comment []

PICKING A FUEL-EFFICIENT HYBRID CAR UCS has a thorough new report on how to select from the new breed of fuel-efficient hybrid cars .  Excerpt: Using new research into the cost and performance of hybrid technology, this report provides a comprehensive assessment of the technology, the fuel economy, and the costs associated with a fleet of passenger cars and trucks that rely on hybrid technology to more than double the fuel economy commonly available today. If they are designed well, these hybrids can equal or better the utility, comfort, performance, and safety we've come to expect, while saving us thousands of dollars at the gas pump. You can also download a consumer's guide to buying a greener vehicle. 8:57:26 AM  trackback []  comment []

KIESLING'S RESIGNATION Wood's Lot links to the full NYT text of life-long diplomat John Brady Kiesling's scathing letter of resignation.  Excerpt: The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security. 8:40:37 AM  trackback []  comment []

IRAQ RIGHT AND LEFT: USE CHEMICAL WEAPONS NOW, REBUILD LATER Znet carries the story by Stephen Kerr on Rumsfeld's plan to circumvent and subvert the Chemical Weapons Convention to allow "crowd control" during the upcoming Iraq War by using the very WMD that are allegedly causing the war in the first place. Excerpt: On Wednesday February 5th while testifying before the House Armed Services Committee, Donald Rumsfeld revealed just how the Pentagon plans to deal with a hostile and armed Iraqi population, of "between one and seven million civilians with semi-automatic rifles, rocket launchers and other military weapons....The United States military has been busy transforming powerful synthetic opiates such as Fentanyl into an aerosol chemical weapon that knocks troublesome civilians unconscious...a chemical weapon similar to that which killed 20% of those who were exposed to it at the Palace of Culture Theatre in Moscow . Nicholas Penniman argues in TomPaine.com that for strategic and humanitarian reasons the left must start now to dominate the dialogue on rebuilding Iraq after the war. Excerpt: [We should be] saying that $100 million in humanitarian aid to post-war Iraq is not enough...[We need] to focus [debate] on improving the social conditions in Iraq, promoting true democracy, blocking foreign monopolization of the oil, bolstering health care and education, and establishing media... The rebuilding will be high-profile and expensive. If done right, it won't be another Kuwait or Afghanistan. It will be a victory for the great tradition of liberalism, a beginning of a democratized Middle East, and a scrubbing of America's tarnished integrity. If left solely to the corporations and the hawks, it will likely be just another black mark on our history -- another conservative attempt to provide a "superior moral justification for selfishness." 8:25:48 AM  trackback []  comment []

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