It’s a tough call, but my vote for the greatest erotic line(s) of poetry is the close of Neruda’s “Every Day You Play,” the fourteenth poem in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair:

I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

The whole last stanza is amazing, with each line even greater than the one that came before it, stair-stepping to a perfect, beautiful penultimate line that leads to that greatest line of all.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

[Translated from the Spanish by W.S. Merwin.]

—————

OK, this is weird. I Googled the final line of the poem to see what might pop up. On his blog Crafty Odysseus, Tim Leach has posted the entire poem, mentioning in his intro that it’s “notable for including possibly the sexiest final line of a poem ever written….” Taking this synchronicty to unbearable limits, he posted this just two days ago. Clutching my skull, I shriek, “Tim, get out of my heeeeeeaaaaaad!”

At the Smart Set, Jessa Crispin of Bookslut has a review of two books that examine ways that modern living is completely, violently at odds with our actual natures as they’ve evolved through 6.5 million years of hominid existence.

Usually when someone starts talking about how our inner cavemen chafes against our modern lifestyles, it’s a man justifying his cheating on his wife: “I am not built for monogamy — I am programmed to spread my seed!” Our sex lives are not the only part of us that goes against “nature.” From our diets to our urban surroundings to our parenting, modern life occasionally goes so against our evolutionary impulses that we become sick. With depression and obesity on the rise, and our recent exiting from the most violent century in the history of mankind, the warning signs that we are living wrong keep showing up.

Humans, however, are built to be raised by many different people. Human babies do best when they have at least three secure “alloparents,” or, as the title says, “mothers and others.” The alloparents could be the mother, grandmother, and father, or, as a recent article by Emily Bazelon about a group of single mothers who help raise each other’s children suggests, the mother and a bunch of her friends. If a mother feels unsupported, whether she’s a !Kung widow or a 15-year-old girl giving birth in the high school bathroom, she might abandon her baby altogether.

This clash between the natural/evolutionary and the modern is something I think about more and more lately, because when you start noticing these collisions, you’ll see more and more of them. What, when, and how much we eat. How we give birth. Even how we defecate, for God’s sake. The recent phenomenon of staring into light boxes (i.e. TVs and monitors) messes with us. One of the theories about why sleep disturbances are so widespread says that gazing at a brightly lit television screen for hours after dark destroys your body’s notion of what time it is. You turn off the idiot box, then hop into bed, but your pineal gland thinks it’s still daytime and therefore isn’t releasing melatonin.

Shitty times in the book biz mean bargains for readers as publishers slash prices to get some desperately needed cash flow.

AK Press & Distribution has discounted everything 20% - not only their titles but everything that they carry. (Sale through Feb 18.)

Chelsea Green has discounted over 30 titles, most by 50% to 80%.

Library of America has an overstock sale with discounts from 44% to 75%.

Any other sales going on? Let me know.

Mark Twain was utterly convinced that the works of Shakespeare were not written by the man named William Shakespeare. In his biography of Twain, Albert Bigelow Paine wrote:

Mark Twain had the fullest conviction as to the Bacon authorship of the Shakespeare plays. One evening, with Mr. Edward Loomis we attended a fine performance of “Romeo and Juliet” given by Sothern and Marlowe. At the close of one splendid scene he said quite earnestly, “That is about the best play that Lord Bacon ever wrote.”

Twain’s long essay “Is Shakespeare Dead?” doesn’t so much argue for Bacon’s authorship as it blasts the idea that “the Stratford rustic” wrote the works.

In this 45-minute video, playwright and stage actor Keir Cutler, as Mark Twain, performs, interprets, and expands on the essay in this live performance. It really is devastating.

{Via The Scientific Indian}