I have gone out, a possessed witch,haunting the black air, braver at night;dreaming evil, I have done my hitchover the plain houses, light by light:lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.A woman like that is not a woman, quite.I have been her kind.I have found the warm caves in the woods,filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,closets, silks, innumerable goods;fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:whining, rearranging the disaligned.A woman like that is misunderstood.I have been her kind.I have ridden in your cart, driver,waved my nude arms at villages going by,learning the last bright routes, survivorwhere your flames still bite my thighand my ribs crack where your wheels wind.A woman like that is not ashamed to die.I have been her kind.Audio Clip from Anne Sexton Reads Caedmon, from poets.org

We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.~ Anais Nin

An amazing animated tribute to Canadian animator Ryan Larkin by Chris Landreth: Ryan. Thirty years ago, Ryan was a pioneer of animation and produced some of the most influential animated films of his time. Today, Ryan lives on welfare and panhandles for spare change in downtown Montreal, having beaten his drug addiction, but not his crippling demons.

Too much analysis can confuse people about how they really feel. There are severe limits to what we can discover through self-reflection, and trying to explain the unexplainable does not lead to a sudden parting of the seas with our hidden thoughts and feelings revealed like flopping fish. 

That’s psychologist, professor and author Timothy Wilson’s conclusion in Don’t Think Twice, it’s Alright (New York Times, December 29).  I especially like the following reference:

Self-contemplation is a curse / That makes an old confusion worse.~ Theodore Roethke

At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest. 

Child-raping bears aside, there’s so much more: copulation with a downed-deer, creative urination… Can you bear to read more … ? [Shakespeare's Sister is all over it].Wouldn’t you so much rather be reading NASA’s new potboiler about the risks of sex in space? Or as the Guardian warns:

A spot of high jinks in orbit is likely to fuse most remote sensors - and confuse mission control. In space, everyone can hear you moan. 

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;One need not be a house;The brain has corridors surpassingMaterial place.~ Emily Dickinson 

Darkness Falls Across The LandThe Midnite Hour Is Close At HandCreatures Crawl In Search Of BloodTo Terrorize Y’all’s NeighbourhoodAnd Whosoever Shall Be FoundWithout The Soul For Getting DownMust Stand And Face The Hounds Of HellAnd Rot Inside A Corpse’s ShellThe Foulest Stench Is In The AirThe Funk Of Forty Thousand YearsAnd Grizzy Ghouls From Every TombAre Closing In To Seal Your DoomAnd Though You Fight To Stay AliveYour Body Starts To ShiverFor No Mere Mortal Can ResistThe Evil Of The Thriller~Vincent Price / Michael Jackson from Thriller

The Lord of the Rings (1954) by J.R.R. Tolkien”The book is not readable because of the overuse of adverbs.“1984 (1948) by George Orwell”… This book isn’t as good as Harry Potter in MY opinion, and no one can refute me.“The Sound and the Fury (1929) by William Faulkner”This book is like an ungrateful girlfriend. You do your best to understand her and get nothing back in return.“

[via Bitch Ph.D. and Apostropher]

. . .I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:Every minute dies a man, And one and a sixteenth is bornThe actual number is much longer but I believe 1-1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.

Tennyson changed the line to read: “Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born.”See Katie Melua’s Bad Science for a very funny take on fact checking popular lyrics.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;Conspiring with him how to load and blessWith fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shellsWith a sweet kernel; to set budding more,And still more, later flowers for the bees,Until they think warm days will never cease;For Summer has o’erbrimm’d their clammy cells.Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may findThee sitting careless on a granary floor,Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hookSpares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers:And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keepSteady thy laden head across a brook;Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,:While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying dayAnd touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mournAmong the river-sallows, borne aloftOr sinking as the light wind lives or dies;And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble softThe redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.~ Keats’ Ode to Autumn