Wicked good bloggings this week

Lime Tree's analysis of poems. These are great. They're giving me an understanding of the other side in another way. Almost a fan's view, rather than some theoretical explanation that requires me to read a dozen other analytical books that each require me to read another dozen analytical books and so on. Not to mention I just love Ted Baxter.

But one of the things I find most brilliant about the poem’s “joke” (and it is essentially structured as a joke) is the way it springs the punchline on you without fully working out the allegory it insinuates. In fact, if you even start to try to work through the logic—like, OK, Ted is Bush, but how does Lou figure in then, and who are we, and why would we want to make commercials in the first place and what if anything does that represent—it quickly becomes clear that there isn’t really much logic here. The end of the poem is a shock (or a pleasure, or both) because it brings home an irrational, emotional truth, and it makes it seem, absurdly, as though the best possible vehicle for the figural expression of this truth is an old episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show. However tenuously, it makes the conceit seem necessary rather than arbitrary.

Neal Pollack's take on Bush's new version of an old prayer:

Heavenly Father, give me the power to try to change what I cannot, and to not change what I can. Give me the strength to believe what is obviously false. And grant me the lack of wisdom not to know the difference.

This isn't from a blog post but several people have been blogging about a conversation on the avant garde in Boston Comment. The discussion is beyond my understanding at this point, but the resume of one of the participants, Joe Amato is an absolute hoot:

Joe Amato's many failures include two tenure denials; a Fortune 500 pink slip; a nonunion construction boot off the job site (provoked); and failing his first road test.

This quote from Maud Newton's Blog taken from an article she read about a "copy editor/ghostwriter/ad designer for a series of gay porn magazines and three straight porn publications aimed at a more mature audience."

There was the flamboyant gay editor who could barely speak English—let alone use grammar correctly; the standard office whore; and a bitter old copy editor who had been with the company for decades. His office doubled as the storeroom, and every time he saw me he screamed, "I hope you know The Chicago Manual of Style! We don't use that pussy New York one!"