slamming my poetry book shut

My goodness whatever do they teach in those Lutheran schools?  Apparently the only thing that Old Dog can quote is doggerel.  Didn't they have a stern. dare I say stark, Mrs Stark to make them memorize their Shakespeare?  I had just transferred from a year in an all boy's school and suddenly half the seats were occupied by girls. pretty nice, so I may not have noticed Mrs Stark at the time.

Silent Spring had come out the year before and Mrs Stark was a big fan.  I was still in my conservative phase and I was not impressed.  So some egg shells were too thin and birds were likely to go extinct, hey it happens all the time. I was all for progress.  I read that little item in the comics about how things would be in the bright new future.  Flying cars, I just couldn't wait.

Who would have thought in the late fifties that sixty years hence there would be a google machine with which, after a couple finely honed searches, one could recover the name of that feature which was Closer than We Think.  And here is a link to some of the articles: http://gizmodo.com/tag/closer-than-we-think  Oh I can barely continue this post for desire to consume all the articles, beautifully illustrated and brimming with optimism.

I was still a conservative when I got into Ms Arvin's history class in my junior year.  She was a big fan of FDR, and half because I was still a conservative and half because I like to argue I would disagree with everything she said.  Oh I wish I could go back to those teachers and tell them that despite my earlier leanings I have become a proud liberal.  Where was Beagles in all this?  I don't remember him piping up very often in class.  Perhaps I was still distracted by the presence of girls, or perhaps he was turned off from any response by the Blue Jeans Incident, or maybe he was already dreaming of going north to Alaska, north to Russia's own, with that music of hunger, and night, and stars.  I wonder if any stanzas of memorized Shakespeare still ring in his head.

So no takers on those other Yeats poems, or on Gerard Manly Hopkins?  As Ms Stark did at the ring of the bell, I look upon those assembled, sigh, and close my book.


Back to the mundane.  Did anybody else see Madman Miller at the press conference?  Holy shitski, shades of Da Mooch.  In retrospect Spicer was a well bred gentleman.  Then there was all that other shit, the wild immigration bill, the phone calls that never were, Trump blasted from Fox to MSNBC, his head surely exploding as he watched every show, can Kelly reign him in?  I don't think so,

But you know I watched the big girl baiting him like a bear at the debates and my heart soared because surely that bombast would sink him.  And we all know how that turned out.