It's kinda like she's Joan Bennett in Suspiria!

The town that made Margaret Thatcher.

Strange, though, that the policies she pursued, consciously or not, destroyed nearly everything her father held dear: the established order, stability, community. Can you see evidence of that destructive energy from the corner of North Parade? The longer you stand there the more you can convince yourself that you can. There was once a pub over the road and a Catholic church. The pub has gone now (though there is another, desperate-looking one a few yards along - the Nobody Inn). The view now takes in a vast Asda and a Lidl. There is not a family-owned shop in sight. In the absence of society, things can fall apart. Along the high street from the Methodist chapel in Grantham, every shop window these days carries a police notice: "Warning, handbag thieves operate in this area."

The End of the World

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb---
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing --- nothing at all.

:: Archibald MacLeish

Obviously it is the beginning of National Poetry Month. Should be pretty obvious why I started off with this one...

In the street

Helen Levitt is dead at 95. Such a long, strange and secretive life, and her greatest work still yanks our heads around six decades later. As many of you know, I'm pretty cynical about photography as an "art". Levitt's one of the handful I've encountered who knew how to do it right -- simultaneously capturing and composing the sublime as it chalked the sidewalk or dandled menacingly off the porch. Her only peers as shutter geniuses are (were) Berenice Abbott and Diane Arbus, which suggests that women always have the jump on men in this medium.

Strib reader comment of the day

"i'm not angry. i'm much too progressive, tolerant, and diverse to be angry. now if you'll excuse me, i have to go back to working, at my job, where i do things, that i get paid for, and then i use that money to pay taxes, which in turn pay for a senator, that i vote for every 6 years and would like to be represented by."

As far as I can tell, everyone in the world but me is closing ranks against Roger Cohen

"I think it's partly my name. The 'self-hating Jew' things can come to the surface in some of the responses."
Jewish writer raises a storm in America with his report from a "tolerant" Iran

Even Rabbi David Wolpe of the Huffington Post is feeling a little daffy about it all.

Smell

For reasons I can't quite figure out (though I like to blame my new Facebook account), I haven't posted here in, like, weeks. Maybe I'll start again, esp. with National Poetry Month starting next week. In the meantime, dig this article about Hollywood's smelliest actors (yes, literally).

Get pumped for the SUPER BOWL!!!!!!!!!!!

[via Eyeteeth]