You guessed it: another list neophyte posting just because I can. I was hoping I'd be a little interesting, but I think that's more than you or I can hope for. It has been bothering me for some weeks now that I don't look like David Bowie. I was surprised and excited to hear that someone else came to discover B&S via the Old97s. I found 'em via a six-degrees-of-amazon.com sort of thing, beginning at Too Far To Care and ending at Tigermilk. (mmmm... tigermilk) All of this talk about autumn and winter and cold has got me missing the cold. I haven't been cold in a year, and it's really bothering me. Incidentally, the trouble with Texas (aside from just being to damned warm) is that it's full of Texans. I am awash in a sea of y'all. I don't like Austin much at all. Though, to be fair, I should say that I miss my native pacific northwest terribly and I probably haven't give Austin a fighting chance. Imagine my surprise when I noticed that there is already a Will and already a Porter on this list. I feel so insignificant. I don't remember who, but someone mentioned Adam's Curse, which is a mighty mighty good poem--one of the only poems I ever memorized just because I liked it and wanted to be able to think about it anytime I felt so inclined. The other one is 'Meditation at Lagunitas' by Robert Hass, which I'm going to tack onto the end of this hyah message (gotta make my first intrusion into your inbox count for something). Do you ever find yourself listening to TBWTAS and thinking about how most of the songs on that album sound like a whole different band than the one that made Tigermilk and IYFS? I'm going to see GBV this weekend, and I'm excited beacuse I've never seen them before and lots of people say that they're incredible live. Ooh, I have a question (I nearly forgot). Any American expatriates out there? Particularly in the UK, I'm wondering how hard it is to get work, what hoops you have to jump through, etc. I'm curious because a lot of the time, I don't like Americans very much, but I'm a little afraid to live abroad, because if I discover that I don't like anybody, that might just mean something about me. Any thoughts? uhm, bye Will Porter PS: The poem I promised you: Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of <i>blackberry</i> corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: <i>justice, pine, hair, woman, you</i>, and <i>I</i>. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called <i>pumpkinseed</i>. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. I must have been the same to her. But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying <i>blackberry</i>, <i>blackberry</i>, <i>blackberry</i>. +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the reborn Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail "sinister@majordomo.net". To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to "majordomo@majordomo.net". WWW: http://www.majordomo.net/sinister +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "tech-heads and students" +-+ +-+ "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list" +-+ +-+ "jelly-filled danishes" +-+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+