Thursday, March 17, 2016

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

DUDLEY LAUFMAN ~

DUDLEY LAUFMAN

New and available now from Longhouse 2016 ~

Bull & More Bull

136 pages, perfectbound softcover

$18

Shipping $3.95 ~ U.S. orders with Paypal
Buy now through easy-to-use Paypal, US Orders, $21.95

International orders ~ complete $38 with Paypal payment

L O N G H O U S E

PO Box 2454
West Brattleboro
Vermont 05303

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Public’s Disgust With the Democratic Party Propels Sanders

Thomas Frank is the author of "Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?" and "What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America."

Updated March 14, 2016, 3:22 AM

Bernie Sanders is a fine politician, but that is not why he has emerged from obscurity to win so many Democratic primaries. The real story here is the breakdown of the ideology pursued for decades by the Democratic Party’s dominant faction.

The party gave up its historic mission to serve working people years ago and chose instead to represent the New Economy’s winners.

The Great Recession started in 2007, and for millions of average Americans no recovery has come. For most of the years since then, there has been a Democrat in the White House, and those Americans have a right to wonder why the eloquent hero they voted for has done so little to improve their situation. They see that banks, health insurance companies and Silicon Valley are doing extremely well; why, then, don’t their wages grow?

The answer, and the key to Sanders’s success, is staring us in the face: Because the Democratic Party gave up years ago on its historic mission of serving working people and chose instead to make itself into the party of professionals, of the New Economy’s winners, of a group they love to flatter with phrases like “symbolic analysts,” “wired workers” and the “creative class.”

This shifting allegiance is the fundamental reason that Democrats began to identify with Wall Street back in the 1990s (and then with Silicon Valley) but what makes this story so aggravating is the way Democrats keep choosing professionals over workers again and again. One class of Americans they reward with subsidies and forgiveness; the rest of us get discipline. The 1994 crime bill and the end of welfare were all brought to you, remember, by the same Democratic administration that rolled back the rules for banks and telecoms. The North American Free Trade Agreement and its many successors have brought, well, freedom to those who employ but anxiety and diminished lives to those who work. The present Democratic administration has hounded individuals who lied on mortgage applications, but it seems to find top bankers incapable of wrongdoing. And in these years of galloping industrial concentration and power grabs by Silicon Valley, antitrust enforcement has dropped off the agenda.

Democrats habitually brush off economic despair with references to “globalization” and “technology,” as though their complicated free-trade deals were the unknowable doings of the Invisible Hand Itself. The problem is not changing the economic system, they say, it is adjusting ourselves to the changes sweeping the world. When they look at inequality, they see not economic failure but individual failure, usually having to do with education, a subject of pious reverence for the professional class. You’re falling because you didn’t study hard enough or you didn’t go to a good school or you majored in the wrong subject.

What Bernie Sanders represents is the public’s growing disgust with this kind of liberalism and, hopefully, its final repudiation.

ALSO BERNIE

the ny times

ME BOSS ~

THE TV AD MADE FOR THESE TIMES, TRUMP TIMES

THE NATURAL PHENOMENON ACTOR IS PATRICK WARBURTON

PALM IT ~

Someone kind sent me this book the other day through the mail.

Wasn't that nice!

Don't you love books that fit in the palm of your hand? I do.

This one is published in 100 numbers by Scram Press

(with that name they sound like they're having fun)

in 2014. Only 100 copies. Catch it while you can.

They're based in Northampton-Tuxedo Park.

The whole of it, I guess, was first published in the Massachusetts Review.

Illustrations are by Charlie Schmidt from his 1935 book Radio Patrol.

More fun.

James Haug hits the mark on each one with a one line poem, caption,

what have you. It works.

I've been banned from the living room.

Monday, March 14, 2016

AH, REPUBLICANS! ~

George Bush and Hillary Clinton recently shared a hug

at the Nancy Reagan funeral

The photo was posted on Twitter by David Chalian, CNN’s political director. Photograph: Twitter

TERRA ~

Terra

There is evidence of spring everywhere

A pair of geese, into a headwind / point north

The shed door shuts easier now

Rain water comes to the meadows

Planks are thrown down

Passing

It is Spring

Already you relax in a cotton skirt

Passing through mountains is a strong feeling

Fields plowed, new wood split, a hawk floating

Puffs of softwood in the gray hills

A river runs with snow melting

A small bridge neatly built to get by

There is pleasure in such places

An old woman and her huge straw hat

Raking the far corner of a hayfield

____________________________________

Bob Arnold

Where Rivers Meet

Mad River Press

Sunday, March 13, 2016

NAKED IF I WANT TO ~

THE EDGE OF THE WORLD ~

"[what we used to casually call the 'dark ages']

We've seen how plague became the reason,

just like terrorism today, for social regulation, for saying how children must behave,

for taking away a worker's right to choose what work he wanted,

for deciding which of the poor are worthy of help and which are just wastrels.

Plague enforced frontiers that were otherwise wonderfully insecure,

and made our movements and travels conditional.

It helped make the state a physical reality, and give it ambitions."

_______________________

from The Edge of the World

Pegasus Books

2014

KEITH EMERSON ~

K E I T H E M E R S O N

(2 November 1944 – 10 March 2016)

Saturday, March 12, 2016

BELL HOOKS SPEAKS HILLARY CLINTON ~

DUKE'S PLACE ~

BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS ~

Just a little word here on books —

I'm showing on this page a sample of what I picked up recently from my local library visit,

perhaps a lucky day. Yes, I read through all the books, in fact I adore and desire this. Always

have since I was about fifteen years old and really took off as a reader. Each and every book I post

on the Birdhouse has no strings attached, including the books I design and publish. I seek out

all these authors personally. I don't have the slightest marketing push to make any book anything more than it is, so I try to choose wisely on the author and the book that it won't be a whiner, a flaming ego, the hottest topic in the hot land of poetry, but rather a great read. Something I think you may want to read and want to own. Same with every book I am reading at the moment and I post onto the Birdhouse: no strings, just a great read. Try it.

H E Y ! E L I T I S T ~

T H O M A S F R A N K : D O N A L D T R U M P

Friday, March 11, 2016

CLIFFORD BURKE ~

C L I F F O R D B U R K E

Out of Nowhere

Nineteen Tiny Poems

with Woodcuts from

Ten Thousand Square Ideas

Desert Rose Press

2003

From the master craftsman's hand of the letterpress and binding ~

Thank you, Clifford, for sending a copy this way!

Thursday, March 10, 2016

TIME FOR SOME GOOD NEWS ~

Dindim the penguin makes a 5,000-mile journey from Argentina to a small island near Rio de Janeiro every year to be reunited with a man who saved his life after finding him covered in oil and struggling to survive. João Pereira de Souza, 71, a retired bricklayer, found the South American magellanic penguin in 2011 and nursed him back to health

The Guardian / U.K.