From One Book Lover

From the NPR website: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took this close-up of the red planet Mars in 2007, when it was just 55 million miles away. Got a haiku? Send it to Mars! NPR is holding a contest, and the winning haiku is sent to Mars. The only rules are: You must be a resident of Planet Earth. You must be 18 years old to create a login profile at NPR to submit. (So kids, get help from your parents or teachers.) Want to know more? Read the article on NPR ! But hurry: the deadline is July 1.

This isn't really a scary poem, but spiders have a rep to uphold. Therefore, I will glorify spiders and E.B. White today on this, the sixtieth year since Charlotte's Web was published ( listen t o th e NPR radio story about it ) . Happy Halloween. The Spider’s Web (A Natural History) The spider, dropping down from twig, Unfolds a plan of her devising, A thin premeditated rig To use in rising. And all that journey down through space, In cool descent and loyal hearted, She spins a ladder to the place From where she started. Thus I, gone forth as spiders do In spider’s web a truth discerning, Attach one silken thread to you For my returning. by E.B. White with thanks to Gregory Maguire , for reminding me about this gem

The Day Disco Died It is 12:15 in Washington D.C., a Monday, the day after an earthquake in Italy, and I'm listening to "I Feel Love," the song Bryan Ferry said would change music for good. In Afghanistan a Marine sergeant tweets about boredom and generators from a gritty keyboard in Combat Outpost Marjah. I conjure up the unrelenting sand he describes in 140 characters while a new Barnard BA strategizes her type of rekindling and a poli-sci grad at Liberty types up an op/ed on Romney and values, and stories get made this way, then taken down. Just as quickly, the imprint of one a ghost in the other, the way Harvard links two opponents, the way a fracture is also a seam. Songs about rivers inflect an Italian art revolution against austerity, or we're forces multiplied both in the streets of Chicago or in the alliances of nations. Or we once listened to a soundtrack in falsetto that sounded like the end of the past and also the future as...