We spent the week at my pal John Powell's house. We were best friends in high school from about 9th through 12th grade. He now lives in an enormous haunted house outside Philadelphia in one of the highest-income zipcodes in the country. It's a neighborhood packed with mansions costing millions. But there are still tiny rural public swimming pools where you can have a picnic with pizza that's brought in from Tony's Pizzeria, and you can watch the goldfinches land on the feeder, while talking about Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Catholic worldview versus the Lutheran. John, or Jake, is an Irish Catholic. His heritage definitely has a strong relationship to the art world. Lutheran surrealists are trying to catch up.

Some things we saw: the Philadelphia Art Museum. I showed my daughter Lola who's seven the Duchamp room and the infamous toilet signed by R. Mutt. Her jaw dropped.

"Why doesn't he just leave a poop? It's the same thing." She was contemptuous of Duchamp's work, and considered it a waste.

Pierre Manzoni with his cans of merde d'artiste probably realized that, too, and cashed in forty years ago on the joke of waste as value.

Across from Philly in the wreck of Camden NJ sits the Campbell's factory now abandoned. Warhol's soup can is also an extension of Duchamp, bringing the detritus of popular culture directly into a fine arts context with zero degrees of separation. I tried to explain these things to Lola, who preferred to go swimming.

Julian bounced on Jake's lap and told him the story of his life.

"I'm three and my birthday is October 2."

Fortunately, Julian's lifestory is not yet too long. Jake really liked Julian. When we left, Julian cried, "We aren't ever going to come back here." He cried again twice in the car and repeated his belief.

My son Tristan fought with Jake's son Luke with plastic swords out in the front yard. They clattered back and forth and ceremoniously surrendered their necks when the rules of whatever game they were playing required. They would then pretend to lop off the other's head.

We went to Camden to a place called The Children's Garden. It was a hundred degrees at 10 am, and the humidity was nearly that high, too. The kids loved the place. They had Lewis Carroll teacups that twirled the kids around, and a butterfly garden with many butterflies that would land on your fingertips. They had a train that took them around a figure 8. They were delighted. We were the only visitors except for one younger man who came there with a small child.

"This is the only place in Camden that is safe enough to visit," he said, when we asked him if there was anything else in Camden to see. "If you call the cops they don't even bother. This place is supported by the city, or else it too would go under."

We went back to bustling Philadelphia to see City Hall and looked up at the statue of William Penn.

We went to Reading Market and saw the Amish women serving Shoo Fly pie next to the Convention Center. They pretend to be spiritual, but the place was a tourist trap, depending on local color. But even the pretense of spirituality is better than its absence. It must be a question of ratios that determines whether some cities hop, and some cities flop.

I saw pictures of myself in my high school yearbook back when I weighed 118 pounds and was an all-league soccer player, and could run for three hours at a time.

I also visited 815 Pelham Ave. in the suburb of Warminster where I lived from 1st through sixth grade. The pine trees in the front yard that my dad planted as saplings were now four feet in diameter and sixty feet high.

Driving back, Riikka said, "I've been thinking about a word in English that's very normal, but is very weird. It has seven consonants, and only one vowel. Can you guess it?"

I thought for ten minutes, and said, "No, I can't. The closest I can come is 'schlongs,' but that's not an ordinary word."

"Do you give up, then?"

"Yes," I said, as I followed 476 up through the turnpike entrance and took a ticket for the two-hour length of the turnpike.

"Strength," she said. "Isn't that weird? We'd never have such a word in Finnish."

Strength is a strange word and yet it's normal. I thought about it as we drove. The only other word I can think of that ends with -ength in English, is 'length.'

Are there others? The -ngth ending has four consonants that add up quick. With the Str- prefix you have seven consonants and only one vowel.

It is odd that we do have a number of words with one vowel and many consonants. Finnish has more vowels. One per syllable? Finnish is the best living language for opera.

Here are some English words with one vowel and lots of consonants:

Phlegm.
Sphinx.
Springs.
Splotch.
Scratch.
Prisms.
Strings.

But there is only one word that I can think of that has more consonants than 'strength,' and still has only one vowel. That word is:

"Strengths."

"Cheating!" my wife laughed.

But I can't do any better. Driving up through Pennsylvania and thinking of my old friend John Powell and our soccer days, I thought of how things have changed and how they've stayed the same. How a friendship can orient a person. An unturning point in a world of changes. We're both now more Christian (another unturning point of orientation that can keep one sane), and we're both married, with four kids. We both read but he likes Cormac McCarthy, and Cormac is too dark for me. I prefer P.G. The length of a friendship is partially determinative of its strength, or is the strength of a friendship determinative of its length?

Or is friendship just a surrealistic anomaly?

In the realm of Apocalypto that we watched Tuesday night, friendship didn't seem to exist at all. Is it a recent invention?

What IS strength, and how is it linked to friendship?

Foreign Policy published this map of failed states.

They argued that failed states threaten not only their internal residents but threaten other countries around the world.

Failed states are caused by:

1. Predatory elites

2. Rampant corruption

3. An absence of the rule of law

The green states are stable and prosperous. One quickly sees that all the Protestant majority states are within that color scheme. Elites, corruption, and absence of law would be the opposite of Protestantism.

As you look around the world you can easily see how other ideologies often lead to failure. The brown states are the ones that are the most worrisome. Communist North Korea with its predatory elite, its rampant corruption, and its total absence of impartial law, is one example.

There used to be a map on the internet entitled The Misery Index, but it disappeared. Its criteria including lifespan, etc., in terms of how a state led to an individually good life, and that map substantially corroborated this one. This map instead is about the collapse of states as structures. But a few states are doing well and are more stable than I would have thought: Mongolia, for example, or the United Arab Emirates. These anomalies, often an oasis surrounded by endless miles of failure, are the most curious features of the map.

One thing I like about the map is that it blames failure on the locals. Communism blames the failure of Africa for instance on western exploitation, and derives the oddball conclusion that the stability of the west is also due to the same. This map puts the blame where it belongs: on the local conditions: predatory elites, rampant corruption, and absence of the rule of law.

I meant to throw out or sell about 60 books that I've collected over the last couple of years. In taking them to the bookstore, one fell off the stack. It was Barbarian in the Garden by Zbigniew Herbert, a Polish poet who died in 1998 (age 74).

I decided I would read one paragraph and see if I wanted to keep the book. If the paragraph was fascinating I would keep it.

Here's the paragraph:

"The beauty of classical architecture can be expressed in numerical proportion. Greek temples live under the golden sun of geometry. Mathematical precision transports these works like ships over the fluctuations of time and taste. With a slight twist of Kant's view of geometry, one could say that Greek art is apodictic, an imperative of our consciousness" (27).

I am now on p. 83 of the 170 page text, which purports to be an account of Herbert's travels in the year 1960. This book delves into theories of proportion and perspective, bringing mathematics back into aesthetics, and aesthetics back into religion.

In the description above he shows us a very regular temple, to Hera, goddess of marriage. Marriage is about the creation of a structure of regularity, and symmetry. Herbert argues that the Greeks maintained geometry in their buildings.

"The word 'ruin' does not apply to a Greek temple. Even the most decayed are not assemblages of crippled fragments, a confused heap of stones. Even the half-buried drum of a column or a separated capital maintain the completeness of their art" (27).

Arts and sciences are not so separate as our culture war (two cultures) would have us believe. The two must come back together so that beauty and quantification can be seen as identical twins. The Greeks wanted to know the proportions of beauty and so they measured the feet of men. One's foot is about one-sixth of one's height. The foot of a Doric column equals approximately one-sixth of its column's height.

Herbert reveals many aesthetic decrees as he goes.

"the Synod of Rome in 692 demanded that Christ's face should show no pain..." (71).

Herbert denounced the Communist party and had to work at menial jobs for much of his youth. After his death Poland offered a prize to his widow but she declined to accept.

I'm experimenting with fonts, and in general giving my blog a facelift. My wife is showing me how to add photos, and so on.

Does anyone prefer this new look?

I would probably have gone on with the old look but she's sick of it. I have heard that many people like photographs and that it adds a dimension to a blog. Personally I believe that the Word is worth a thousand pictures.

Also, for some reason the comments box has disappeared, but perhaps they will return. They get stressed out.

At any rate, if the comments box reappears, let me know if you like the changes, or if you preferred the old look of pure text. Riikka believes that the old look was a colossal bore and not even vaguely cheerful.

I wouldn't know. I have five blank gray t-shirts and wash them and wear them, one after the other, completely charmed by their uniformity. Meanwhile, I'm fascinated by all the different depictions of Jesus. This one has a tiny bump on the upper nose. What does it signify?

Father's Day

I woke up and the kids gave me hand-made gifts. I got a drawing of a soccer game from Tristan, and from Lola, a thing to hang over the door-knob which says, Caution, Daddy's Reading.

Julian gave me a kiss on the cheek and said, "You're the bestest Dad!"

Riikka made a very elegant but simple pie:

You take a Graham Cracker crust and dump into it a combination of two six-ounce Yoplait yogurts (vanilla) and one pint of Whipped Topping that has been whipped together. A few chocolate sprinkles, and wham. It's dessert.

"We ate your whole Father's Day, dad!" Julian remarked a few minutes later.

It was my best Father's Day ever.

Models strutting down the catwalk often appear to be a pair of long-handled scissors, especially if they keep their legs superstraight, and put their fists on their hips. The kind of old-fashioned scissors with smaller holes for the thumb and forefinger only (there's a newer orange handle that allows three fingers inside for maximum crunch, but I mean the older kind for which there's probably a name).

Now if I was a true blogger I'd cut and paste a photo of just what I mean, but I'd rather rely on words alone to draft the image.

The summer's been strange. I have a new allergy, or maybe an old one that is more intense than ever before. I wake up sneezing, and go to bed coughing. In between I manage the allergy with generic Chlorpheniramine Maleate tablets of about 4 mg each. If I take just a little too much I'm drowsy, and if not enough, then I sneeze and cough even worse. Right now I'm drowsy. Meanwhile, I've gotten a prescription for Zantac. It takes five days for the Zantac to work. So tomorrow's the magic day. If it works, then I'm home free. If it doesn't, I'll have to try something else.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to work on a variety of things. I'm reading a slew of textbooks. One is called Humanities Through the Arts, from McGraw Hill. It's over 100 dollars but offers an actual aesthetics-based education to students. Dance, architecture, poetry and many other arts are covered. I like it, and am thinking of adopting it, but wonder if my students will be able to afford to drop 100 dollars to get it.

I'm also reading Classical Rhetoric for Contemporary Students, from Cambridge. It looks very good, but is perhaps a little too tough. These are freshman comp students. My outcome for the course is to teach them how to write B papers in any kind of college class. This outcome is a little utopian since many of them are construction workers in the making and have always hated writing. Some of these students have confessed to me that they have never read an entire book. How can you write if you don't read? Probably to be a good writer you have to love reading, no?

I'm concerned also with personality theory. I've been reading the Enneagram books. This is a 9-pointed system that comes through the Sufi tradition, but was channeled in its present form through a megagalactic entity called Metatron in the 1970s by a Bolivian shrink named Ichazo. Despite its rather farfetched origins, it seems to work quite well for me in helping me to understand others. I'm probably the point 5, but sometimes feel that I could be the point 4 (artist) or the point 7 (the entertainer).

I also took a typological questionnaire called DISC. This is a four type system under copyright from some big company based on the ideas of a William Moulton Marston who published a book on personality theory in the 1920s. They let me take it for free because I might want to use it for my freshman comp students. I want to help them find themselves. I'm well-aware that writing isn't for everyone. There are some people who are quite concrete, and just want to spend their lives pouring concrete. They don't necessarily need or want to fiddle with ideas. But they still have to take the class to be certified to pour concrete. On this test I came out as an I, which is an Influencer. It seems that I enjoy persuading people or something.

There's also a system called MBTI. This one gives you four letters, and you end up as a sequence like INTJ or ENTP. The first letter determines whether you are introverted or extroverted. The second determines whether you are concrete or intuitive. The third determines whether you're a feeler or a thinker. The fourth determines whether you like things spontaneous or planned.The only one I'm sure of out of these four is intuitive. I can test for instance INTJ or INTP or INFP or even ENTP, depending on my mood. the second letter N stands for intuitive. Personality tests even at their most advanced are not empirically provable because you are dependent on the feedback of a highly unreliable individual: yourself. But I still think they might be valuable in helping young people to discover the potential in themselves, and to find out what they should do as a career.

As a young person, I really didn't know, and this is why I ended up temping for fifteen years. Of course this did become the subject of my first novel, and is probably interesting after the fact that someone could have done this for 15 years. I just didn't realize what else I could have done. Besides, Temping was fun. I had some weird jobs, just as I describe them in my novel. I was a basketball sparring partner for years. I worked in an office overlooking Puget Sound for a year and my only job was to pick up the phone. It didn't ring for a year and a half.

Ultimately, however, most of us aim at something permanent. Out of all the possible careers that one can have, how does one know what one should do? And what if you know but can't do it? What if you want to be a boxer but are puny? What if you want to be a race car driver, but hate great speeds or don't have any sense of the distance between yourself and the brick wall?? What if you want to be a writer, but are lacking in imagination and taste? What if you want to be a dancer, but are a quadroplegic? What if you wish to be a businessman, but are softhearted, and can't make good deals and you continually go bankrupt?

What then? You bang along like most of us, doing as well as you can like a duck with a broken beak, and a sneeze.

The problem with communist art is that it is judged not by whether it opens a new perspective.

Rather, communist art is judged by how closely it sticks to a pre-established party line. I'll give an example. I read a lengthy poem by Susan Howe called The Defenestration of Prague, in a book called The Europe of Trusts. Was that the name? It's been almost 20 years. The book was extremely complex on the surface, but underneath was a very simple repetitive refrain. The idea was that Jonathan Swift had a common-law wife or maid whose life is all but forgotten while Swift is a major figure of study. The maid's name began with an E. Like the silent E at the end of Howe's name, how now, Brown Cow, she had been forgotten. But was she a major artist? how many people are capable of integrating fascinating forms with piercing conceptualization? Less than 1% of the population, I'm sure. Susan Howe's work was a very long turgid plea for the silent E's inclusion. Her own inclusion, ultimately. I thought it was a boring Maoist concept. To take the dregs at the margins and push them into Beijing.

The kind of art I'm interested in is art that establishes new criteria in the process of being written, and which doesn't seek to provide a political example through adherence. Instead of seeking to dominate the center it takes up a marginal position and defends the margins as worthy of inhabitation.

"News that stays news," was Pound's dictum. Good art must become a classic while remaining new. But Pound was a jerk. It's very difficult to get past his lack of humanity in backing Mussolini. His own centrist ambitions were simply evil at its most extreme, even though he was himself a striking poet at least in terms of readability.

But ultimately I read him only because I have to. What fascinates me are the oddball humorists at the corners of the empire who have no apparent interest in canonization.

Charles Willeford's book The Burnt Orange Heresy, is one of the few novels that I think manages to achieve this pddball status in American letters. It is itself an aesthetic interrogation of corruption of many different kinds in the art world as various critics and artists attempt to attain centrifugal canonical force, but it hints at a very deep and timeless perspective that brings aesthetics and ethics together in a new but perpetual convulsion of utter alienating oddness. And the novel takes place in the swamps of Florida and is about how the center can be everywhere now that everything is peripheral. Nothing else by Willeford comes close to this masterwork, but this theme dominates even in his weirdest pieces such as Sideswipe, about the aesthetics of painting car stripes on the sides of convertibles, it is again about the philosophy of art. I've never read anything else in the mystery genre that comes close to Willeford, but he remains an odd taste, a novelist's novelist, a philosophical mystery writer's mystery writer. Willem Van der Wetering and some others along those lines still read him. Coming in at a distant second is Soupault's Last Nights of Paris, which is mysterious, and has serial killers and prostitutes going about their marginal lives at the center of Paris, far from the canonical world of art. And yet in some way they are central to the survival of Paris, to its ongoing status as the capital of the art world. Exactly how is never fully stated.

Willeford's book is almost entirely forgotten. Soupault is almost entirely forgotten. But I can't forget them.

The rationale for Lutheran Surrealism explained.

Surrealism didn't have an ethics. It looked to Marxism early on for this. This failed, since the Marxists basically tried to snuff surrealism's play instinct. Then they looked to the occult. There is no ethics in the occult. Then they looked to anarchism, which basically means in Greek, without principles of any kind. Then Breton died, having made his way through a succession of bizarre outliers such as Sade and Fourier.

Luther on the other hand had principles and stood for them. Lutheran communities are lawful and rather pleasant by comparison to surrealist communities. In addition, art is not outlawed, and is not encouraged. Art lies in the realm of adiaphora. It is not required for salvation and isn't of enormous interest either yeah or nay.

Communists want art to illustrate (propagandize). Anyone who doesn't follow the blueprint is put in the Gulag.

Surrealism disagreed with this. The play instinct was freed to the extent that the ID was totally liberated.

Can we bring back in the superego but have it be a good definition this time of a decent and loving Father rather than that of a totalitarian government? If so, what would be better than the Lutheran notion?

We want play but are not willing to surrender ethics. Somewhat like the attempt to square the circle, Lutheran surrealism is an attempt to get ethics and aesthetics to play together and to play nice.

I think we understand surrealism. Christianity however is very difficult. I had a conversation with the poet Paul Hoover about the moment when Christ is resurrected when he runs into Mary. Mary wants to touch him. Christ says, "Noli me tangere," in the Latin translation. Paul Hoover thought this was some kind of sexual reference. He wanted to translate the picture into one of the ID being squelched by the SUPEREGO, which is a common enough framework for the so-called avant-garde. I asked my pastor and he said that in the original Greek Christ says, "You can touch me, but don't hold on to me," and the implication is that the process is not finished yet. Christ has to do things yet according to the schematic that has been foreordained.

What exactly does the whole resurrection mean? It seems to always remain just out of reach like one of those amazing math problems that no one can quite solve. Whatever it is, it is about the mathematics of infinity, and of the infinite nature of God's love. Perhaps to look directly at it would cause the mind to disintegrate in its purity. So we have Christ to look at on the cross. Instead. It is a sign that points in a direction but is not itself infinity.

Why was I born again? Lutheran surrealism asks that question. Its answer is a math problem that requires faith rather than reason to solve.

What's Wrong with Slavery?

This question seems simple until you try to articulate an answer. If you come out of a completely materialist position I don't think there is an answer. If you argue that humans and animals are the same thing, then I think you either have to give up eating animals, or else you realize that humans are keeping animals as slaves. Pigs that you intend to eat are slaves. Kant argued that treating others as "ends in themselves" constitutes the moral law based in Christianity. However, if we only keep pigs in order to ultimately eat them, then we see the pig as entirely a means to an end, and hence, a slave.

Once you posit the notion of a soul that is eternal and created by God, the notion of slavery goes out the window. I think this is what threatened imperial Rome about Christianity. Once you posit a soul, the notion of slavery becomes barbaric. This threatened to undermine the entire basis of Rome's hierarchy in which some were lords and masters, and others could be used in any abominable combination that whimsy could articulate. Is slavery unthinkable today, as I can already hear the multicultural left mindlessly screech?

I read in this morning's paper about an Indonesian couple by the name of Varsha Mahender Sabhani, 35, and her husband, Mahender Murlidhar Sabhani, residents of Long Island. They are " a couple accused of keeping two Indonesian women as slaves in their mansion."

In the south before the Civil War some slave owners justified their ownership of slaves by citing the case of Ham in the Old Testament who was to be trod upon along with his genetic offspring for having committed some crime. I can't remember what it was. Since he was "darker," this justified the holding of black slaves. If we grant that the Sabhani couple did indulge in slavery, then how did they justify it? What problematic multicultural notion did they possess in their noggins?

I've read that most of the great slaveowners in the American south were Episcopalians. 1000 Episcopalian plantation owners constituted the real power base of the Confederacy. How exactly did they justify it? Was it all based on Ham?

If Ham is the basis of slavery, should we argue that anyone who isn't for slavery is a pig? That is, perhaps not wanting Ham to be the basis of slavery would indicate that one is a pig, because it would be mostly pigs who would be against the exploitation of Ham.

Are we more than flesh? I think that unless you are willing to argue that we are more than Ham, then we are all just pigs.

One could go another route and claim that pigs should also have human rights. But then you have to extend human rights to the entire animal kingdom. First, the great apes, then pigs, and finally, well, where do you stop? Do you stop with mammals, or do you go further and cite birds, and then, perhaps, insects? Do you have the right to slap at mosquitoes? To step on ants? Or would this be an assault? And if you say it is, then what about viruses? Do viruses then have the right to go unmolested by science?

The fabulous idiot Daniel Dennett argues at the end of his simple-minded tome Consciousness Explained that all of life should be considered sacred. Once you posit that, I think you posit that mosquitoes and ants have the same rights as pigs and humans. What, then, are we supposed to eat? Because eating is pure exploitation. If ants invade your kitchen, do you have to throw open your cabinets, so that they are welcome to eat on the same basis as members of your own family?

If we claim that all beings are pure material, and rights belong to the strongest, on the other hand, then you allow Cyclops to eat men. And from that, you can easily justify slavery.

This is why the Lutheran Surrealist discourse aligns itself with the Christian position. The notion that all human beings are sacred, but that no other creatures should be considered sacred, makes sense in law, and in ordinary discourse. Every other position leads to nonsense and ultimately, to Chaos.

The communist position would on the other hand make all hiring of other people into a sacrilege. Because you are in a sense, using them as a means to an end. But this is where Two Kingdoms steps in. In this realm law allows us to hire other men and women for specific ends. I can hire a friend and have him build a floor, and so long as we agree on the price and I pay him, it's legal. In heaven, of course, there will not be capitalism. But this isn't heaven. This is a legal realm where although each person is an end in themselves, they can also be seen as a means to an end, but it has to be an end that is overseen by the protections of the laws of the land.

At this point, slavery isn't justified. Tinker too much with the basis of American law, however, and soon it will be justified again. We could all easily become the slaves of the state as were the Jews in Nazi Germany (justified by raw power politics as evinced by Nietzsche) or easily become the slaves of the state as were the working class in the Soviet Union (justified by seeing each person as merely the means to the ends of the party position) or easily become the slaves of the animals if the animal rights people argue that people should be kept in order to feed to pigs, as payback for millenia of the reverse.

The Christian legacy is worth fighting to understand and protect. It's more sane than many of the multiculturalist birdbrains realize. Just outside of our narrow shelf in the Christian west lies the road to slavery and desperation in almost every other direction. The road to life is narrow.

Summer Fun in the Catskills

I've lived here now six years. Slowly I am trying to get used to the bizarre profusion of wildlife. One sees skunk, fox, opossum, coyotes, ladybugs, all kinds of flowers, birds, etc. But the profusion is so rich and deep that Linnaeus might not have gotten around to classifying it all. I've seen Eastern Hog Snakes in the lot adjacent to my yard.

And a couple days ago while mowing the lawn I spotted a pale blue butterfly that jumped up out of the low-lying flowers that are spread over the distant back arid portion of my yard. What are the names of those flowers? What was the name of the butterfly? I looked up "butterflies of the Catskills" in google, and bang, I got three full pages with color photos and extensive descriptions. The butterfly is an Eastern Tailed Blue (cupido comyntas) which is widespread over the East Coast, and drinks from flowers close to the ground through its short feeding tube, and is usually after sweet white clover in disturbed habitats.

The butterfly was first charted by someone named Godart in 1824.

I'll put this link in my comments box since my links don't usually come through in the posts for some reason.

http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/species?l=1589&chosen_state=36*New%20York

TAXONOMIES

Ron Silliman divides American poets into two camps: quietist and post-avant.

Quietists look to England. They want a settled aesthetic, and something safe that they can comfortably redo.

Post-avants are about risk. They are nativists.

Such a taxonomy makes me think about taxonomies in general. Carl Linnaeus was not the first to organize botany into orders but his system was the first to be accepted until the rise of Jussieu in the late 1800s. Darwin hadn't come along yet so that no one knew about evolution. Linnaeus thought that the difference in the stamen of different plants was enough to organize them.

"He grouped flowers into twenty-four classes based on the number and position of their stamens. He divided the classes into orders based on their pistils. The orders were divided into genera (the plural of genus) by the form of the fruit. Linnaeus was only twenty three, but he had taken a giant step toward reorganizing the entire plant kingdom" (39).

Carl Linnaeus: Father of Classification, by Margaret J. Anderson. (Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 1997).

It turns out that DNA has discombobulated all the prior botanical systems that were based on appearance. Sometimes plants and animals that look quite different are very close on the genetic tree, and this has led to a complete changeover in the classification of birds, animals, and plants. Nomenclature remains based on Latin, but many creatures have had to be completely reclassified.

Where you are dealing with cultural taxonomies this is a much more difficult thing to pin down because it's largely a matter of opinion and can't be backed up by the microscope.

Silliman's system works for him, and helps him to sort out his priorities and his animus.

For the longest time I classified poets into two categories: funny and maudlin. I preferred the funny.

I avoided serious poetry, but the funny poetry was also often not very good as poetry. That is, it wasn't lyrical...

Somehow Silliman's blog has helped me get going again in poetry. I can't stand to actually know poets because they are such self-absorbed suicidal nutcases. I don't know why anyone would write poetry in the first place, but it often seems to me that they lose their sense that God exists, and makes poetry into a relatively light adiaphorous entity (not related to salvation).

Sometimes with poets you get the sense that they think that poetry is a matter of life or death.

To me it is no more important than a game of cards, or a basketball game. My true life is elsewhere.

In my true life I am already living in the Nude Jerusalem in a beautiful apartment in a somber high-rise. The afterlife is pure velvet, and I am already rolling all my dice on that velvet in anticipation of winning Pascal's Wager.

And so I suppose I don't care to make a war on some other kind of poet. They just don't interest me that much. I like the beauty of poetry -- whether it's that of Pound, or that of Catullus, or that of Billy Collins or Sappho. I don't care who writes it. I am grateful for it, but no more grateful than I am for chocolate mint ice cream (made by Breyer's) and no more grateful than I am for a blue butterfly popping up out of the grass as I'm mowing as it flits off in the sunlight.

On the other hand, Marxists really upset me, because they take this kingdom as the only one, and try to shut off the other one. They try to kill not only poets, but also religious people. They are completely confused as to the nature of this world, and try to make it into the Nude Jerusalem. In the process they sow the seeds of hell.

Part of the job of Lutheran Surrealism is to continually remind my Marxist idealist friends that heaven already exists, but it is elsewhere. To attempt to set it up here is blasphemy and will yield nothing but hell on earth.