Webgoing Notes

Oh, surfers -- is that still a word? -- sufferers -- who visit Ana Verse searching for Swedish folksongs: "Rida, Rida Ranka" & "Ode to Coffee" & "Varan Prost" have brought it to the top of the google list, yet the punctuation -- so lazy on my part -- is unofficial. Umlauts & the little circle dot over the "a," I guess you'd say, are missing. I was once very careful about such things but have grown lax; there is no translation in Spanish for the found poem in "Lesson 38." Again, lazy.

Million-dollar ideas: Here's one for Oisseau, my name for an occupational visitors' program to schools, similar to writers-in-the-schools, based on Studs Terkel's Working. Parents & community members visit schools & give presentations on their occupations throughout the school year.

Another one: WPA -- federal Writers' Project (from the 1930s) -- revisited, this time to systemetize the self-help book industry. I picture thousands of editors & writers reading self-help books & articles, in print & on the internet, selecting, critiquing, and reviewing those books and shortlisting them for the masses. Included would be books in use, even if out-of-print, with the best of those going into reprintings. Writers recommend novels, short stories, poetry, & plays that help lives & why.

Do you like Hillary Clinton? I hear from my correspondents & colleagues that she is too like the Republicans for their liking, yet I think she's the best candidate for fighting the terrorism that is the Reagan-Bush era. We cannot afford to have a Doe for president, next. I hear that she "is scary" and that John Edwards might be a new FDR. I revered John Kerry and believe he would have made an excellent administrative president. Hillary makes me feel proud to be a woman. That is not "neither here nor there." Is porn a genocide? No news on that subject. Who stakes bare her clam?

Jimmy Carter, they said, had too little sex; Jesse Jackson too weird diction. I don't even have a heart, except in quiet breathing moments with odd women; I've certainly never lusted in it -- a fete in sin. We miss their diplomacy, the once-tame economy, the affordability of life, and reduced crime.

Louise DeSalvo's book, Writing As A Way of Healing (Beacon Press Books, 1999), is excellent and a help to teachers whose students have endured traumas. She outlines safe procedures for writing through difficult passes & lists similar difficulties of many favored authors.

Heard on my walks: Tighty whitey!

Inchworm ...

Out.