Wallace Stevens: The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Marianne Moore: Voracities and Verities Sometimes are Interacting

___I don't like diamonds;
the emerald's "grass-lamp glow" is better;
_____and unobtrusiveness is dazzling,
_______upon occasion.
_____Some kinds of gratitude are trying.

___Poets, don't make a fuss;
the elephant's "crooked trumpet" "doth write";
_____and to a tiger-book I am reading -
_______I think you know the one -
_____I am under obligation.

_______One may be pardoned, yes I know
_______one may, for love undying.

Moore's footnote:  Tiger-book:  Major James Corbett's 
Man-Eaters of Kumaon

Quote of the Day

"The thing is to see the vision and not deny it; to care and admit that we do"

Marianne Moore, The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, p. 426

More Words Gathered

legerdemain
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French leger de main light of hand
Date: 15th century
1 : SLEIGHT OF HAND
2 : a display of skill or adroitness

With startling legerdemain she presses the reader toward the truth, as Costello has suggested,
and just for a moment we glimpse the genuine, in this case the fact that
Marianne Moore is playing with the word "imagine" and we see an entirely
opposite meaning in the passage.

au courant
Function: adjective
Etymology: French, literally, in the current
Date: 1762
1 a : fully informed : UP-TO-DATE b : FASHIONABLE, STYLISH
2 : fully familiar : CONVERSANT

As different as she was from the fashionably au courant, she was encouraged by her friends' romantic but common insistence on the right to be oneself, while at the same time she was given to distrusting the self.

gallimaufry
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -fries
Etymology: Middle French galimafree stew
Date: circa 1556
: HODGEPODGE

One Laptop Per Child

Check out this video report by New York Time's David Pouge:

http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=6ffd976ed367bacae4171dd4999d36431c84b0f5

Robert Frost: Unharvested

UNHARVESTED

A scent of ripeness from over a wall.
And come to leave the routine road
And look for what has made me stall,
There sure enough was an apple tree
That had eased itself of its summer load,
And of all but its trivial foliage free,
Now breathed as light as a lady’s fan.
For there had been an apple fall
As complete as the apple had given man.
The ground was one circle of solid red.

May something go always unharvested!
May much stay out of our stated plan,
Apples or something forgotten and left,
So smelling their sweetness would be no theft.

New Online Novel Contests

New York Times
October 1, 2007
Publishers Seek Talent Online
By MOTOKO RICH

Joining the growing list of publishers that use public votes to decide what to publish, Penguin Group is teaming with Amazon.com and Hewlett Packard for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. From today through Nov. 5, contestants from 20 countries can submit unpublished manuscripts of English-language novels to Amazon, which will assign a small group of its top-rated online reviewers to evaluate 5,000-word excerpts and narrow the field to 1,000.

The full manuscripts of those semifinalists will be submitted to Publishers Weekly, which will assign reviewers to each. Amazon will post the reviews, along with excerpts, online, where customers can make comments. Using those comments and the magazine’s reviews, Penguin will winnow the field to 100 finalists who will get two readings by Penguin editors. When a final 10 manuscripts are selected, a panel including Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the current nonfiction paperback best seller “Eat, Pray, Love,” and John Freeman, the president of the National Book Critics Circle, will read and post comments on the novels at Amazon. Readers can then vote on the winner, who will receive a publishing contract and a $25,000 advance from Penguin.

Separately, Borders Group, the bookstore chain, is teaming with Gather.com, the social networking site, and Court TV to solicit unpublished manuscripts from mystery or crime writers. A panel of judges that includes the writers Harlan Coben and Sandra Brown will crown the winner from a pool of finalists selected by voters on Gather.com. The winner will receive a $5,000 advance and will be published by Borders itself.

Link to New York Times Article