sinister ".",','.,,,,,,,,,,,!""'"" hm. the things we do/looking for life's answers in the minutiae: get hair cut. save a dog from getting hit by cars. eat a lot of couscous. see 'star wars: attack of the clones'. and also 'reign of fire' (say 'whoo hoo!' and giggle both freely and behind hand during both.) go to a party where the cops come and *blow their whistles more than thrice* to make everyone leave. cook and eat some sausages (be glad that smoke detector does not go off this time.) grammar can kiss my aaaaasssss: since sinister seems to be *full* of grammarians, i'd like to spend a moment on a subject i love like the sister i don't have. ah, grammar. i can love it one minute, hate it the next, but know that i'll have to live with it until the day it dies. alas, grammar is an immortal beast, much like the sister i don't have (but unlike the dragons in 'reign of fire'), and therefore i will have to live with it until the day *i* die. with that being the reality, i will accept grammar, but by no means will i respect it. i will tease it mercilessly, i will make jokes to its face, but when all is said and done, i will obey its rules if it means i'm going to make some copyediting cash. but i've come to understand that the world won't end if 'ralphs video' has never heard of a fuckin' apostrophe. when one nitpicks all day as i do at work, all one wants to do at the end of it is fuck shit up. in fact, the other day i was talking to a friend about this and i sort of ended the conversation with 'fuck fuck fuck grammar! fuck it! aaagh!' sometimes it's good to let it all out. otherwise, madness. but after that little tirade, i begged grammar to have me back - i would be good to it, i would sit down with it and work out our problems, i would love it forever and ever, especially the semicolon. that said, i read Michael's rules on quotation marks and punctuation with great interest and hurrahed b/c i agree. but there are *so many* styles out there and everyone agrees with a different style. i don't believe in holy grammar wars. i say, let's agree to fuck shit up, shall we? yaaay! or whatever! penislessness: yes, bus stoppers, the penis spam* is bizarre (*um, that just sounds gross. i'd go on about why, but you've probably already got a hundred visuals running through your smutty heads.) i keep getting one entitled "RFadden! Enlarge your penis safely and naturally!" and, while i am intrigued by this whole 'safe and natural' approach, i am also a little worried b/c i *don't have a penis to enlarge*. ho hum. (the use of capital letters in my email name irks me too though.) even the onion (http://www.theonion.com) makes fun of penis spam. sadlessness: have you seen this? http://www.morrisseyringtones.com/ oh, man, is this good or is this bad? oh, but it's funny. i'm sure if i had a mobile phone, i'd be all over 'there is a light that never goes out' though. i'd like a mobile phone though, if only to have one more bit of technology in my possession. tech-no-logy! you know how the inevitable always happens?: sunny saturday afternoons should be about going outside and doing stuff (alliteration! with the dreaded 's'!). but instead, something sinister inspired me to pull the dfw off the shelf again, which always seems to happen on sunny weekend afternoons. so i read me some 'infinite jest' and wondered what kinds of drugs i was hard-wired for (whether to add an edge or take it off? or simply hallucinate?). also was re-inspired to not be a militant grammarian. the boy g says mr. wallace is writing a new one and it's supposed to be out in 2004. and i say it's going to be 3000 pages long, with 500 pages of footnotes and 200 pages of footnotes to the footnotes. whoa. but watch it be a novella. metatastic. speaking of books (and yaay for them): i just read such a fantastic book! it's called "the prowler" and it's by a poet called Kristjana Gunnars. it's beautiful. the author is originally from iceland and then moved to the states and then to canada in the late 60s (and the book was published in *saskatchewan*). and the book seems semi-autobiographical. read it if you can get your hands on it, you especially, archel, i think. the po'try parrot: every time i go into a movie theatre (especially alone), i always think of this Stephen Dunn poem: This Late in the Century I walk the streets always a gesture away from contact, ungiven gifts, first words it would seem foolish to say. And then I forget about it all and go about my half-desired lonliness back to the body's asylum way back here where the movie of the world is playing and all of us are watching one seat apart. Sometimes even after I return home the stranger I am will find those pockets of collapsed air where not even kisses can find him. Other times I watch any two of us form the modern we out of separate lives; I bring my distances, say, to yours, you bring yours to mine, and with such safety the first words, the lovely intimate incompete sentence. god, the man is brilliant. he even won the pulitzer prize for poetry last year. http://www.nortonpoets.com/dunns.htm and, appropriately, i love these lines from a poem about, well, living/dying: "I'm in the mood to punctuate only with that maker of promises, the colon: next, next, next, it says, God bless it." yeah. anyway, the poetry parrot is a free spirit and never goes where i send him. so if you call him, he'll probably fly to your windowsill. from the absurd to the sublime, robyn! p.s. fantastic subject header courtesy of www.catandgirl.com! ===== I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything. ~Steven Wright ~~~ Robyn Fadden rfadden@yahoo.com Vancouver, BC __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! 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