An Improvised Bra Boy Life on the Maiden Day of February

"We live in a culture where everything is selling. I watch TV and I don't see events, I see people selling me events. The newscasters are not reporting the news, they are dramatizing it, selling it, selling themselves as good reporters. They're making the news 'interesting.' They pretend they're looking at us when in fact they're watching words on a teleprompter, acting as if they're intimately involved with the stories they're reporting, emoting like crazy, performing as though they were actually feeling what they were reading, trying to look as if they were anywhere but in the studio."

~ Alan Arkin, An Improvised Life

Jozef, yes, you know the beat.
Wystan Auden’s metric feet
Marched to it, unstressed and stressed,
Laying William Yeats to rest.

Therefore, Jozef, on this day,
Yeats’s anniversary,
(Double-crossed and death-marched date,
January twenty-eight)

The day of his death was a dark cold day. “He disappeared in the dead of winter,” Auden wrote when Yeats died – lines that would forever link Auden to Yeats, but also to Brodsky, Eliot, Walcott, and Heaney... The brooks and rivers were frozen

Robert Frost loathed arty pretension, but he was no folksy rustic. His poems are wonders of sophisticated construction. Clive James explains... The sound of sense

For Thoreau, the quarry was Walden Pond; for Faulkner, Yoknapatawpha County; for Benjamin, Berlin. Oh, The pleasures ofliterary cartography... Map of High Tatra

"What I didn't understand at the time was that there is nothing special whatsoever in the craft of acting. Acting can be anything one wants it to be, from the most crass, dead, ego-driven activity, used as a way of earning an easy living or finding women, on the one end, to something sublime, magical, and transforming on the other. And the difference, the only difference, is the investment made by the person who's engaged in the process."

~ Alan Arkin, An Improvised Life