Wacky Robinson Crusoe hypocrisy of the day (from chapter four, detailing the days just after the shipwreck):

I have been now thirteen days on shore, and had been eleven times on board the ship [....] But preparing the twelfth time to go on board, I found the wind begin to rise. However, at low water I went on board, and though I thought I had rummaged the cabin so effectually as that nothing more could be found, yet I discovered a locker with drawers in it, in one of which I found two or three razors, and one pair of large scissors, with some ten or a dozen of good knives and forks; in another, I found some thirty–six pounds value in money, some European coin, some Brazil, some pieces of eight, some gold, some silver.

I smiled to myself at the sight of this money. “O drug!” said I aloud, “what art thou good for? Thou art not worth to me, no, not the taking off of the ground; one of those knives is worth all this heap. I have no manner of use for thee; even remain where thou art, and go to the bottom as a creature whose life is not worth saving.” However, upon second thoughts, I took it away[....]

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Today's poem ("Liar" by Alison Luterman) is the last from the happily poem-heavy June 2007 issue of The Sun. It begins:

I'm a liar,
he offered on our first date,
as we trudged hand in hand
through sliding sand on Alameda Beach.
Naked toddlers squatted
over half-dug holes,
wielding plastic shovels.
Teenagers played frisbee
and wrote their true loves' names
in wet sepia with a stick.
Easily done, easily erased. (29)

and ends with the deeply disturbing image of "his eager, silky penis / which, in its own way, was always honest." "Eager" and "silky" conjure up nothing so much as a fabulously inbred toy dog at the Westminster Kennel Club Show.

Isn't it odd that so many of the poems I have read so far in my daily poetry project have featured the poet/speaker on a beach or looking out of a body of water? Ah, Matthew Arnold, will your image-tyranny never abate? Luterman's poem, about the refusal to believe a liar's one statement of truth (that he is a liar), seems a direct response to the cry for intimate fidelity of "Dover Beach":

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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So, as you have probably gathered, I am still plowing my way through Robinson Crusoe, and make a slow start on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (unsettling racist stereotypes abound in both, but in the Ken Kesey novel they seem to be part of a larger satirical strategy of extreme representation, if that makes it any better - and it might not). My two ARCs, one from a very kind fellow blogger and one from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, persist in NOT ARRIVING, despite the fact that I spend every day crouched by the window, looking mournfully at the path down which the postal worker does not come. Sigh. The torments of the book-expecter.

I am also becoming a bit alarmed by the state of fullness to which I have brought D's TiVo. It is one thing to fill up your own (two) household TiVos to the point of explosion and/or hard-drive failure, and quite another to fatten up someone else's until it begins deleting old programs. I may have to address some of the movies I have been recording. But how can I do that when the remaining three hours of The Ten Commandments are glaring at me with a Biblical scowl??