I am looking quite a lot like Thomas Jefferson these days...

I am looking quite a lot like Thomas Jefferson these days. My hair is a long knot behind my back. There is a red blemish on my left cheek. It looks distinguished there so I leave it. I rearrange the photos of my mother atop my grandmother's old piano, the photos of her as a child, a teenager. Here she stands between her two brothers, her hair red and huge about her. Here she is dressed as a child in a catholic school uniform, my mother, she wears a tie. At home she is wearing eyeglasses, thick black pointed rims. I've heard her recall them so many times. In the photography rooms she can see without them, she can smile half-way. Then beside and in front of her, I've placed a new favorite. I call her the nun. She is a nun. I never knew this woman, this nun of my family. I thank her, I love her for that. She was not a cheerful woman, said my mother. But she is such a wonderful photo, sitting on the right in a white and wooden chair, the most joyfully spectacled woman beside her. Another woman I do not know sits beside her. She is holding a baby in her lap. She is wearing a pink or a faded red dress and sitting with this nun on someone's lawn. A tree fills the whole frame behind her. She is so lovely in her pink, with her baby and her nun. And I don't give a damn who she is.

anne sexton- 45 mercy street

45 Mercy Street


In my dream,
drilling into the marrow
of my entire bone,
my real dream,
I'm walking up and down Beacon Hill
searching for a street sign -
namely MERCY STREET.
Not there.

I try the Back Bay.
Not there.
Not there.
And yet I know the number.
45 Mercy Street.
I know the stained-glass window
of the foyer,
the three flights of the house
with its parquet floors.
I know the furniture and
mother, grandmother, great-grandmother,
the servants.
I know the cupboard of Spode
the boat of ice, solid silver,
where the butter sits in neat squares
like strange giant's teeth
on the big mahogany table.
I know it well.
Not there.

Where did you go?
45 Mercy Street,
with great-grandmother
kneeling in her whale-bone corset
and praying gently but fiercely
to the wash basin,
at five A.M.
at noon
dozing in her wiggy rocker,
grandfather taking a nap in the pantry,
grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid,
and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower
on her forehead to cover the curl
of when she was good and when she was...
And where she was begat
and in a generation
the third she will beget,
me,
with the stranger's seed blooming
into the flower called Horrid.

I walk in a yellow dress
and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,
enough pills, my wallet, my keys,
and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?
I walk. I walk.
I hold matches at street signs
for it is dark,
as dark as the leathery dead
and I have lost my green Ford,
my house in the suburbs,
two little kids
sucked up like pollen by the bee in me
and a husband
who has wiped off his eyes
in order not to see my inside out
and I am walking and looking
and this is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime.

Pull the shades down -
I don't care!
Bolt the door, mercy,
erase the number,
rip down the street sign,
what can it matter,
what can it matter to this cheapskate
who wants to own the past
that went out on a dead ship
and left me only with paper?

Not there.

I open my pocketbook,
as women do,
and fish swim back and forth
between the dollars and the lipstick.
I pick them out,
one by one
and throw them at the street signs,
and shoot my pocketbook
into the Charles River.
Next I pull the dream off
and slam into the cement wall
of the clumsy calendar
I live in,
my life,
and its hauled up
notebooks.

For Shits & Sweeteners

Well, yes!, I say to the ice cube tray,
who spills three solids on the hardwood
floor. Yes, you once-were,
you once were water,
weren't you? You frigid bitch!
Now you're frozen and hard
as a brick, you old hag-
I can't drink you like that! No, I can't,
and I won't! I will dip you
in coffee (not-cold-enough coffee) and bathe you
in milk (not some poor old cow's milk),
let the cows eat hay! I'll soak you in soy!
And sugar, why sugar,
you just sit right there, sugar,
on the shelf, there, sugar,
in the pantry, there
sugar.

note from will granberry

just woke up from a nap
you were in the dream
in a pool in los angeles i said "im gonna get room service alllll week"
then i went to the bathroom and realized i had a vagina
and my bellybutton was falling apart
it was awful

from stop me if you heard this by jim holt

Schmulowitz: "Liberty, Laughter, and the Law" he spoke ringingly of how jokes have "detected and exposed the imposter and have saved man from the impression of false leaders."

Voltaire: "Those who know why this kind of joy that kindles laughter should draw the zygo-matic muscle back toward the ears are knowing indeed."

Alfred North Whitehead: "The total absence of humor from the bible is one of the most singular things in all literature."


"Of the three theories of humor, it is the incongruity theory that is taken most seriously by philosophers today. It too, however, is open to objections. Why should incongruity be a source of pleasure? Shouldn't the asymmetrical, the disorderly, and the absurd cause bewilderment and anxiety in rational creatures like ourselves, not merriment? The nineteenth-century philosopher Alexander Bain observed:

There are many incongruities that may produce anything but a laugh. A decrepit man under a heavy burden, five loaves and two fishes among a multitude, and all unfitness and gross disproportion; an instrument out of tune, a fly in ointment, snow in May, Archimedes studying geometry in a siege, and all discordant things; a wolf in sheep's clothing, a breach of bargain, and falsehood in general; the multitude taking the law into their own hands, and everything of the nature of disorder; a corpse at a feast, parental cruelty, filial ingratitude, and whatever is unnatural; the enitre catalogue of vanities given by Solomon-are all incongruous, but they cause feelings of pain, anger, sadness, loathing, rather than mirth.

(Bain was a dour Victorian Scotsman, with little capacity for the darker forms of humor; but one sees what he is getting at.) Some forms of incongruity, moreover, have aesthetic value without being the least bit funny: the ironies of Oedipus Rex, for example, or the dissonances in Mozart's String Quartet in C major.

Even if not all incongruities are funny, nearly everything that is funny does seem to contain an incongruity of one sort or another. For Kant the incongruity in a joke was between the "something" of the setup and the anticlimatic "nothing" of the punch line; the ludicrous effect arises "from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing." (In the Critique of Judgment, Kant illustrates the point with a story: An Indian who is dining with an Englishman looks astonished when a bottle of ale is opened and the contents come gushing out in a wave of froth. "Well, what is so wonderful in that?" asks the Englishman. "Oh, I'm not suprised at its getting out," replies the Indian, "but at how you ever managed to get it all in.") Schopenhauer thought that at the core of every joke was a sophistical syllogism. But some jokes simply defy syllogistic analysis. (Lily Tomlin: "When I was young I always wanted to be somebody. Now I wish I had been more specific.")"

from ellen degneres' "the funny thing is..."

It's terrible when you forget what you're going to say after two words, but what's worse than that, really, is forgetting what you're going to say when you've been talking for a while. You know, like when you're at a dinner party and a whole group of people are talking, discussing some heavy subject matter, and you don't really have an opinion on it. Then suddenly you think you do, so you jump right in there to share your opinion, and you realize you've actually got a pretty good opinion to share! When your friends hear this opinion, they're going to be blown away by how smart you are. They had no idea that you were so smart, and they will be shocked and impressed that you would come up with such an interesting point of view. And you start congradulating yourself, and suddenly, since you're feeling so good and you're celebrating too soon, you completely forget the point you were going to make. And you're still talking. And they're looking at you like you don't know what you're talking about, and you don't, but you can't let them know that. So you just keep talking, praying that the point will come back to you. And not only does the point not come back, but now you've completely forgotten the subject everybody else was talking about. You really start sweating. You loosen your tie-- if you're a man or Diane Keaton or Avril Lavigne-- and then you try to jump out of it by saying any sort of generic statement that comes to mind. "Well, six of one, half dozen of the other. It's a slippery slope, my friend. Teach a man to fish. And you know, there's no 'I' in team...Is there any more Merlot?

its absolutely criminal. the way they throw the word around these days. genius. artist. everyone's an artist now. t didn't used to be that way. there was some kind of level of division. there was competition. there was me a small child and you a young man and there was love so big between us, perhaps. there was a glimmer of hope. there was a short and endless lifetime which i missed by going to highschool and getting fucked up on public beaches. there was an atanomy class taught by a gym teacher. this was a joke, i had often thought.