I've Got a Jolly Roger, it's black and white and fast, So Get Out Your Skull and Cross-Bones and Run it up your mast

Had lunch with a favorite English professor, one of America's leading Miltonists. In class, discussing Comus or Samson Agonistes or Paradise Lost, he'd start reading from the book, would close his eyes, his hands would slowly lower the book to the table, he'd recite as if in a trance, smiling adoringly, whole sections of the poems... which isn't what makes him a good scholar, but which I found extraordinarily impressive, the love as much as his memory.

He's 67 years old, he's a klutzy whale, he's a strictly observant Orthodox Jew, he's - I mean this as respectfully as possible - ridiculously, guilelessly, happy and optimistic. He laughs in childish surprise at ideas he'd never considered, genuinely delights at your thoughts as a child at a new toy. He asks me what I've been reading, what I've been listening to, what I've been writing, what I've been thinking about, and he's honestly eager to listen to my answers.

All conversations these days must negotiate The Clusterfuck. He asks, I answer, he gawks, you think what will happen, 15% unemployment, the forfeiture of tens of millions' vested retirement benefits, civil disorder, domestic terrorism, revolution in second and third world countries, global war over dwindling resources and....

Jesus Fucking Christ, he says, I hope you're not pridefully invested in your prophesy. Like Milton, I joked. Milton died poor, blind, miserable, alone, he said, and every generation falls in love with its own apocalypse and fails to achieve it, if only barely and not for lack of trying.

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• This is related to any discussion about shame.
• This is related to any discussion about shame.
• This is related to any discussion about shame.
• The Obama Code.
• Dead Enders.
• Drum Machine.
• On the broken window fallacy of economic development.
• UK's Democrats suck too.
• Pastor Gerson is truly the most sanctimonious assclown on the planet.
• Happiest days of Pig-American lives.
• Happiest days of Pig-American lives.
• Bobby Jindal: America's Slumdog Millionaire.
• Moral degenerate.
• Briefly.
• Explain this.
• A question worth considering.
• The impoverishment of experience.
• Salvagepunk. Do.
• TEV reposts James Wood's list of best books since 1945, which I post solely to ask, when was the last time you even thought of Howard Nemerov or Amy Clampitt?

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Amy Clampitt?

THE KINGFISHER

In a year the nightingales were said to be so loud

they drowned out slumber, and peafowl strolled screaming

beside the ruined nunnery, through the long evening

of a dazzled pub crawl, the halcyon color, portholed

by those eye-spots’ stunning tapestry, unsettled

the pastoral nightfall with amazements opening.

Months later, intermission in a pub on Fifty-fifth Street

found one of them still breathless, the other quizzical,

acting the philistine, puncturing Stravinsky—“Tell

me, what was that racket in the orchestra about?”—

hauling down the Firebird, harum-scarum, like a kite,

a burnished, breathing wreck that didn’t hurt at all.

Among the Bronx Zoo’s exiled jungle fowl, they heard

through headphones of a separating panic, the bellbird

reiterate its single chong, a scream nobody answered.

When he mourned, “The poetry is gone,” she quailed,

seeing how his hands shook, sobered into feeling old.

By midnight, yet another fifth would have been killed.

A Sunday morning, the November of their cataclysm

(Dylan Thomas brought in in extremis to St. Vincent’s,

that same week, a symptomatic datum) found them

wandering a downtown churchyard. Among its headstones,

while from unruined choirs the noise of Christendom

poured over Wall Street, a benison in vestments,

a late thrush paused, in transit from some grizzled

spruce bog to the humid equatorial fireside: berry-

eyed, bark-brown above, with dark hints of trauma

in the stigmata of its underparts—or so, too bruised

just then to have invented anything so fancy,

later, re-embroidering a retrospect, she had supposed.

In gray England, years of muted recrimination (then

dead silence) later, she could not have said how many

spoiled takeoffs, how many entanglements gone sodden,

how many gaudy evenings made frantic by just one

insomniac nightingale, how many liaisons gone down

screaming in a stroll beside the ruined nunnery;

a kingfisher’s burnished plunge, the color

of felicity afire, came glancing like an arrow

through landscapes of untended memory: ardor

illuminating with its terrifying currency

now no mere glimpse, no porthole vista

but, down on down, the uninhabitable sorrow.

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Born 66 years ago today