The ten most recent threads posted on the Democratic Underground Discussion Forums.

The ten most recommended threads posted on the Democratic Underground Discussion Forums in the last 24 hours.

Democratic Underground forums and groups from my "My Forums" list.

I just started The Spirit Catches you and You Fall Down" by Anne Fadiman, an analysis of the clash of cultures between Hmong parents of a child with a severe zeizure disorder who have a very different view of the world and how to interpret and treat medical problems and the western medical establishment.

This book was picked for a book club I recently joined ( although I am a voracious reader, I have never belonged to a book club!) and initially I was reluctant, since I have spent a good deal of my career dealing with children's emotional problems and I was once also a CPS worker after I got my Master's degree. But I have a lot of friends who are anthropologists and it never hurts to look at the world through the eyes of another culture.

I also just finished a new book by Reginald Hill. Hill lives in England and typically writes very witty police procedurals with a very wordy and, at times, academic, twist, with two intriguing protagonists, one a quite cerebral university -educated dad married to a feminist academic, and the other a wily, scaly and brusque head of police from Cornwall who has a crude, but amusing and a quite perceptive grasp of human nature, and how to foil bureacracy. I love their interplay. The latest book by Hill is more of a historically couched mystery regarding two individuals drawn to a small Cornish town to investigate the fate of their ancestors exposed to the history of the torture of Roman Catholics by Elizabeth the First and her ministers. With an overview of British responses to the Queen Mary and the schism between Roman Catholicism and the Church of England brought about by Henry the Eighth and his lascivious habits.

There are also a few other of my favorite mystery writers who have new novels out and I'll likely ramble on about them when I have some time.

I play drums and love all types of music, but I am quite interested lately in jazz drummers. In my fantasy world I would be a jazz drummer!

I love this site with all the great pictures of drummers, but especially the jazz greats. Currenlty my desktop has a pic of Famadou Don Moye from the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

http://www.drummerworld.com/drummers/Don_M...

In my previous life before work and parenthood took up most of my time, I was a drummer in a few punk/post punk bands. This was before new wave when punk did not mean you had a mohawk and shopped at Hot Topic.

That being said, I love these guys, a good example of more recent ( at least to me) punk done right.
http://re2.mm-c1.yimg.com/image/1325417804

Here are some bands I loved when I lived in the clubs and played out.

http://re2.mm-b1.yimg.com/image/534154079

Here's a pic of Marcy Mays from Scrawl. Although they weren't a "punk" band I really appreciated their playing, songs and style. I love her guitar playing and singing and they were one of my favorite all female bands.

http://re2.mm-c1.yimg.com/image/1183746024

I really have been inspired by Retrolounge's daily poetry threads. I have a BA in English Lit. and I really like poetry. I'll try to post some poetry that I like as soon as I drag some of my books off the shelf and have some time to put some here. Some poets I have always liked include Marge Piercy ( her books are great, too), Margaret Atwood, Lorca, Emily Dickinson, pretty much all of the Beat writers (Diane di Prima is great), Frank O'Hara and Anna Akhmatova. I also like haiku, Yeats and Nikki Giovanni. I have pretty eclectic taste.

http://boppin.com/lorca /





http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/164


We are in the middle of a bloody, heartrending
revolution Called America, called the Protestant
reformation, called
Western man,
Called individual consciousness, meaning I need a
refrigerator and a car
And milk and meat for the kids so I can discover
that I don't need a car
Or a refrigerator, or meat, or even milk, just rice
and a place with no wind to sleep next to someone
Two someones keeping warm in the winter
learning to weave To pot and to putter, learning to
steal honey from bees,
wearing the bedclothes by day, sleeping under (or
in) them at night; hoarding bits of glass, colored
stones,
and stringing beads
How long before we come to that blessed
definable state known as buddhahood, primitive
man, people in a landscape together like trees, the
second childhood of man

I don't know if I will make it somehow nearer by
saying all this out loud, for christs sake, that
Stevenson was killed, that
Shastri was killed
both having dined with Marietta Tree the wife of a
higher-up in the CIA
both out of their own countries mysteriously dead,
as how many others

as Marilyn Monroe, wept over in so many tabloids
done in for sleepingwith Jack Kennedy-this isn't a poem-
full of cold prosaic fact
thirteen done in in the Oswald plot: Jack Ruby's cancer that
disappeared in autopsy
the last of a long line-and they're waiting to get Tim Leary
Bob Dylan
Allen Ginsberg
LeRoi Jones-as, who killed Malcolm X? They give themselves
away
with TV programs on the Third Reich, and I wonder if I'll
live to sit in Peking or Hanoi
see TV programs of LBJ's Reich: our great SS analysed, our money
exposed, the plot to keep Africa
genocide in Southeast Asia now in progress Laos Vietnam
Thailand Cambodia 0 soft-spoken Sukarno
O great stone Buddhas with sad negroid lips torn down by us by the red
guard all one force
one leveling mad mechanism, grinding it down to earth and
swamp to sea to powder

till Mozart is something a few men can whistle
or play on a homemade flute and we bow to each other
telling old tales half remembered
gathering shells learning again "all beings are from the very beginning Buddhas
or glowing and dying radiation and plague we come to that
final great love illumination
"FROM THE VERY FIRST, NOTHING IS."

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