At Uni I got an Aegrotat   because I had a sick sense of humour
When I got married my husband didn’t even know my name.Neither did I.
I worked in a male order firm in the summer holidays.Then at Xmas, I  delivered the male myself.We only had one in stock.
I also worked in a care home for older people.One died.But soon we got another.
I have a problem.I sing like a boiling kettle.So people expect to be in hot water.
I got another Aegrotat.I was mentally sick.I didn’t like to pick up books.I was  unable to make distinctions like pens and ink….Freud said it is  copulation, you see.That’s why children have to type on computers.One day they will type on paper and then we’ll see. Meanwhile they have real sex as soon as it’s legal.Is sex legal?
Did Freud really understand the Unconscious?

When I attained puberty I kept drumming my fingers on the sideboard and the table.I couldn’t stop until the Devil came out and asked me for my instructions.
What does he think I am, a Catholic priest?

I’ve been sorting out my books.None are horror stories except Peter Pan.

I never read maths books unless I couldn’t solve the problems.

I love Aegrotats, Thermostats and Acrobats.And cats on mats

Digital art by Katherine

How infinitely good . . . providence is, which has provided in its government of mankind such narrow bounds to his sight and knowledge of things; and though he walks in the midst of so many thousand dangers, the sight of which, if discovered to him, would distract his mind and sink his spirits, he is kept serene and calm, by having the events of things hid from his eyes, and knowing nothing of the dangers which surround him. (Defoe, p. 163)

Q: What happened after an explosion at a French cheese factory? A: All that was left was de brie.

source: http://www.jokes4us.com/miscellaneousjokes/foodjokes/cheesejokes.html

Photo from Mike Flemming’s blog.Will post link later

Personally.I hoard hordes of admirers’ letters by my bed in a big box to read when bored by what I see on the blackboard in my head.That’s the fate of beautiful maths teachers.So many admirers, but so few understood my love of pi.Actually, nobody  did. I think I was abnormal but never mind. 

Usually, I hoarded my pocket money but when Mum said that hordes of barbarians were coming to the football match.I decided to spend it all before they arrived Never did chocolate taste so good.Then I felt sickened by my greed.Then I must have died as I can’t recall anything else.

When hordes of men walked to the town hall, the Mayor took all his hoarded goodies and fled.East I think.

When I am bored I write poems on a  board.

Have you anything to declare? Yes, God is Light
How did you weigh him?
You can’t weigh light waves,
How about particles?
They move so fast!

It says
Barclays Auto reply:This mailbox is not monitored.Press the following link to get to Barclays

It is in Kansas

“Their second full day in Singapore saw the Royal couple meet hoards of admirers in the   nearby covered market of Tiong Bahru, where they surprised morning shoppers buying fruit and vegetables, fish and household goods.”

A lion must kill, be savage with its jaws
But only other humans desire  souls
A tiger  has no sense but  natural laws

A lion will sleep replete, his head on paws
Jews were buried live with bodies whole
A lion must kill, devour beasts with its jaws

Why do we do evil; what’s  our cause?
The earth was heaving live, what can we know?
Thee tiger  senses merely natural laws

In a strange dilemma, we are caught
How did we make murder a shared goal?
A lion must kill and eat its prey still raw

The few live Jews came home and home they sought
Yet were  murdered,  flung alive down holes
Lions and tigers pitied the distraught.

Now the bones of Jews  mingle with  coal
Where are they dwelling now, who raised their souls?
A lion must kill to eat with   its own jaws
A tiger  has no sense but nature’s laws

Will you got to Heaven and share with all?
The Warsaw Jews,  the European trolls
How the Ten Commandments  still annoy
The men of greed, the bankers, souls forlorn

Europe died when Europe made Great Wars
Europe did not live by any law
Staggering on, we do not know we died
When we killed the Jews, the Lord’s allies.

Dear Katherine
Your blog is very rude.After I got to the bottom of the page and by the way that was no easy task with all the stuff you write, what did I see but “Older Pests press here”
Well,I am mortally wounded.I know we disagree on much but I thought I was doing you a favour visiting you instead of preying like I used to do.
I can’t believe you have changed so much in the last five years and I am puzzled about how I ever loved you.Well, to be honest, that was a  lie.It’s  just a rapid way of getting someone to open up without spending years getting to know them in the usual way
Yet I did think you loved me true though I never deserved your patience and gentleness.To prove it I hit you with a brick and a bit if brac as well but does that mean you may demean me and call me an  Older Pest? Just  Pest is cruel enough, why add Older? We are all older but so I keep mentioning it
Did I ever give you any child maintenance? I think I forgot but as you seem fairly intelligent I imagine you have made money one way or another.There’s nothing wrong with  being a harlot as long as you keep it secret.And with your IQ I imagine you did.Now he’s at school maybe I will visit you and give you a  piece of my mind
On second thoughts,I confess I am scared of you as you might wish to castrate me like mother tried to do.What is it with women?You hug them, kiss them and then they want a new kitchen!Well I shan’t do that again
Is a Pest always a sexual Pest?From your papers I see you have lots of them/.Maybe it is to them you refer and not to me.If so,I never apologise but I did not mean to offend you for more than a year or so.
I’m in a Care Home now.They care and I moan.Just like being married really.God knows why women still love men
Lots of hate and a dash of admiration
Peter Pesky Ph.D { Oxen}
Professor Superfluous [ fired from 6  Universities ]

Peter

“Perhaps this is the absurd lesson of Job: that our choice is either to accept loss and make it meaningful or to protest it in  absurdity, which costs us our ability to mean. If we choose the former, it need not be because we are satisfied that there is a universal order or great warum that justifies our losses, but because our meaning-making power is all we have to trade, and to give it up is to sacrifice our ability to act meaningfully in the world. On the other hand, if we are to follow the example of Camus’ 1958) vaunted “fastidious assassins” who demanded self-sacrifice as the only just compensation for performing acts of terrorism, then when confronted with extraordinary inhumanity or injustice, perhaps only the sacrifice of our ability to mean is meaningful.”

http://home.btconnect.com/mike.flemming/birds.htm

Apparently standing up straight does more for you than going to Cambridge
Looking slim is better than 5 A*’s at A level.What are women for?
Being beautiful is great for career acceleration into the lap of some mad  dominating mogul.Carry some tailors’  pins and practice elbowing men in the groin with a rubber male doll.Try to look menacing now and then
Making eye contact is an error as men thin you are coming on to them but if you don’t they will say you are autistic.If you are autistic it’s big advantage should you wish to become a mathematician.We are nearly all autistic… just mildly, of course.Getting obsessed with Fermat’s Last theorem is more fun than gambling  or getting drunk
Getting obsessed with yourself is not so good.Get obsessed about infinity and the fact there are different orders of infinity,Make sure you tell your lover  about aleph null and aleph one while they are caressing you on the sofa while you watch Henning Mankel’s latest TV film.Who wants to watch TV
Carry a tennis racket to “accidentally” hit men  or omen who violate your boundaries.Or a heavy handbag full of pens and keys is often useful.
Tell  men you don’t remove your tampon so they can suck your blood.Why don’t they do it like vampires? God,I’ve never heard of such absolutely dreadful things until Weinstein got into trouble.What next? I don’t want to got there
Do men want to suck our blood because they are anaemic? Have you ever heard such things before?
I think I might be a lesbian now.I  am a lapsed heterosexual.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3016689/10-paradoxical-traits-of-creative-people

10. CREATIVE PEOPLE’S OPENNESS AND SENSITIVITY OFTEN EXPOSES THEM TO SUFFERING AND PAIN, YET ALSO TO A GREAT DEAL OF ENJOYMENT.

“Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable.”

Paradoxical or not, what I have learned most is that there is no formula for individual creation. As Mihay says, “creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals.” So, more than anything else, what it takes to be creative is resourcefulness and the courage not to give up.

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4112/george-seferis-the-art-of-poetry-no-13-george-seferis

INTERVIEWER

Do you think there’s an advantage—as I think Cavafy would probably have thought—to being in dialogue with historians? In other words, do you feel that history has something particular to say to the poet?

SEFERIS

If you remember, Cavafy was proud of having a sense of history. He used to say: “I am a man of history”—something like that, I don’t remember the exact quotation. I am not that way; but still, I feel the pressure of history. In another way, perhaps: more mythological, more abstract, or more concrete . . . I don’t know.

INTERVIEWER

How about the relation of the Greek poet to his particular historical tradition? You once said that there is no ancient Greece in Greece. What did you mean by that exactly?

SEFERIS

I meant Greece is a continuous process. In English the expression “ancient Greece” includes the meaning of “finished,” whereas for us Greece goes on living, for better or for worse; it is in life, has not expired yet. That is a fact. One can make the same argument when one discusses the pronunciation of ancient Greek. Your scholars in America or in England or in France may be quite right in adopting the Erasmic pronunciation: for them Greek is a dead language; but for us it is another story. The fact is, you consider that ancient Greek has terminated its function at a certain point, and this enables you to pronounce it—with my regrets—in an arbitrary way.

INTERVIEWER

Then you obviously see the Greek tradition in language, as well as in other things, as a continuous process. That is not the belief of some classical and Byzantine scholars in this country—and, I suppose, elsewhere.

SEFERIS

You know why that happens? Because the subject, the history, of Greece is so large that each scholar limits himself to a certain period or branch, and nothing exists outside of it. For example, Gibbon considered that a thousand years of life were a decline. How can a people be in decline for a thousand years? After all, between the Homeric poems and the birth of Christ eight hundred years elapsed—or something like that—and then presumably there were a thousand years of decline.

INTERVIEWER

On the question of the Greek poet’s relation to his tradition, it has always seemed to me that the Greek poet has an advantage over his Anglo-Saxon counterpart who makes use of Greek mythology and sometimes even of Greek landscape. I remember years ago when I was writing a thesis on what I thought were English influences in the poetry of Cavafy and Seferis, I asked you about certain images that crop up in your landscape, for example, the symbolic meaning of the statues that appear in your work. You turned to me and said: “But those are real statues. They existed in a landscape I had seen.” What I think you were saying is that you always start with the fact of a living, actual setting and move from there to any universal meaning that might be contained in it.

SEFERIS

An illustration of that from someone who is a specialist in classical statues came the other day from an English scholar who was lecturing about the statuary of the Parthenon. I went up to congratulate him after his lecture, and he said to me, as I remember: “But you have a line which expresses something of what I meant when you say ‘the statues are not the ruins—we are the ruins.’” I mean I was astonished that a scholar of his caliber was using a line from me to illustrate a point.

INTERVIEWER

The imagery that a poet gets from his childhood is something we’ve discussed before. You once distinguished yourself from the average Englishman by suggesting that donkeys probably did for you what footballs and cars might do for them. I remember you also talked about the sea and the sailors of your native village near Smyrna.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/06/can-modern-poetry-be-saved/314001/

The sun came out as yellow in the sky
Golden like a giant lemon pie
I feel so happy, I will not ask  why

Do we need a season’s alibi
Glinting sun will calculate no pi
The sun came out as yellow in the sky

The acers burn and  they are never dyed
Golden sun has made me see allies
I feel so happy, I don’t know quite why

Logic and its rules do not apply.
Golden sun has reason to defy!
The sun came out as yellow in the sky

If we live, it follows we will die
There was never pi in any sky
I feel so happy, I don’t wonder why

Sometimes the whole world seems set awry
Especially if you are a trapped house fly
The sun came out as yellow in the sky
I feel so happy, I’m a living guy.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day

Oh Swedish dramas fill the screens again
Furniture of birch  where murder hides
The end of summer and the evening sun

Men and women blond and equal stand
No gap at all and yet it is too wide
Those Swedish dramas fill the screens again

A mournful saxophone and heap of stones
When shall we see once more the bartered bride?
The end of summer and the evening sun.

As from the tomb, the murder victim rose………
Jesus Christ! His hands were open wide
Those myths and dreams will fill the screens  of man

Soon the epic Europe scheme disclosed
As the visions and the words elide
The end of summer and the evening’s done

Why was love not love but hate disguised?
Infernos red now burn the Nazis’ eyes
Yes, Europe’s dramas fill the screens again
The end  is nearer  than the evening sun

T.S. Eliot > Quotes

old man,bending over,
arched like a fallen moon
in a dark lilac November sky.
joy and pain wrestle my heart across the emptiness
and toss it up like a damp rocket
to fall in a hidden corner where mice live.
would that not be a good ending, to be dust
to these little creatures nesting
in my chewed green twine and my tartan basket?
They have eyes and shiver in my hand when I rescue them
from the cat…
as any heart might.
now night falls on the newspaper basket
where the damp Times and the Guardian mix into glue
and tomorrow the sun will rise
and it will just be  garbage
with no poetic undertones nor deathly hushes.
in the heather lit by silver light
you stand on a hilltop like a god
looking over his domain.
strong and now weak
it’s the human condition
everlasting life is too dangerous for  mankind.
silent, motionless, home of beetles
bit by bit we fall away
into the mother soil
with cracked jugs and dropped coins
for a future academic to dig into.
a transparent hand touches me.
who are you?

Life and death opposed,
Drawn to and by this prolific genius.
Pictures fell from his eyes,
Like tears.
Children given life.
Creating as he could,
An England richer by his gifts.
Where else might he have given so much?
The work became the man.
Portraits rising from the canvas
To meet in a new space
That he discovered.
And after loss, the gift.

When Mary was coming downstairs  she realised she had lost weight.Her skirt was slipping down
.Oh,dear, she said to Emile, I hope it  is not unwearable.
Don’t worry,said Emile.You can put a  pin into it

She replied tactfully,yes I will when I get to the bottom of the stairs but before Mary. got to the bottom her skirt fallen off completely and she was only wearing a brown silk petticoats and a pair of teal coloured tights.
You look nice Emile said. Maybe you don’t need to wear a skirt you  can wear  a  petticoat instead,
Thank you very much, said Mary but the weather is very cold and a silk petticoat is not warm enough for going into the town although I suppose I could put a very warm long coat over the top. Suppose I went into a restaurant and felt too hot then I would have to take off my coat and then everybody would see my petticoat.
Life is made up of Conundrums like this and the secret is not to start thinking this way in the first place; once you do this is very hard to stop.
Some of Mary’s friends say to her. Are you sleeping alright or how are you sleeping?
Mary never answers because she knows that if you start thinking about that this a lot it’s not good for you as you can spend all day worrying about whether you are going to be able to sleep that night.
We have no control over our sleep, she pondered, but we can’t afford to ruminate  as it causes mental illness .Rumination cuts people off from the world as they are always looking inside themselves.
Similarly being a perfectionist is very bad for you because again you’re not thinking about the work that you’re producing and  enjoying it you are always wondering is this good enough or shall I start again oh I am so stupid etc
It is possible ,Mary has found,  to control what you allow yourself to think about.You can cut you thought off before it gets going.
Anything that makes you keep thinking about yourself all the time will create a wall around you.Other people can detect this wall; it makes them avoid you.
In general, we should have a few  walls as possible both internal and external
Just then the doorbell rang. it was  Annie the ex-mistress of Mary ‘s husband Stan.
Hello she cried, how do you like my new coat
Don’t tell me you’ve got another one, Mary  sighed
I didn’t buy it Annie murmured. That  sweet lady who lives opposite told me that she has put on a lot of weight and she can’t wear this  anymore; she asked me if I would like it
But you have already got about 20  Mary said, but I like this one.It’s a lovely colour; is it what we call teal or is it Kingfisher Blue?
I don’t know but it seems to match my other clothes and you know I do like a change.You prefer just to have one coat and wear it all the time unless you are going out to your special functions, hen you might wear your  best coat, which is the brown one isn’t it which Stan used to like because he said it hung well
Yes, he did like that very much and I was wearing it only yesterday as it is very warm. I would like to have more clothes like you do but I seem to be too busy to go shopping
Annie gazed up with her large round eyes upon which she was wearing turquoise and magenta eyeshadow and bright blue mascara which clashed with her purple lipstick from East Saint Lawless.
That purple lipstick  does not match your coat nor your eyeshadow Mary told her
Well , I think that a perfect costume puts men off.So it’s better to do something wrong and anyway, a lot of men are colour blind so they won’t know that it’s the wrong shade of lipstick. I think that coral would look better and I shall buy some next time I go into the term because teal and coral look very nice together.Purple is good with blues
Actually, Mary said , purple makes you look as if you’ve got heart disease or anaemia.
Thanks a lot, shouted Annie. What kind of friend are you
I am an honest friend ,Mary replied in a warm voice.I think that I don’t often say things which distress you but sometimes knowing that you would like to meet another man I  feel impelled to give you my point of view.
That’s very kind of you said Annie but I think now I am too old to find a man who wants a mistress because a younger man could get a younger mistress and an older man maybe past bothering about mistresses and love and such things.And where can I find one, anyway.
I don’t agree, said Mary I think if you look very nice a man may be very proud to take you out and have you hanging from his arm like a trophy even if he is not able to proceed very far with bodily love. After all, everybody likes someone to talk to and  some companionship; someone to help them out when they are feeling unwell
As long as that is it is mutual I don’t see anything wrong with it.
The two women stared out of the window and saw a wood pigeon on the shed.Maybe it’s better to be a bird, Mary thought aimlessly before she put  on the kettle for a lovely cup of tea and some chocolate fingers
Tea is the best drink in the afternoon.
And so say all of us.

• 

  Chill the Fuck Out and Color: An Adult Coloring Book with Swear Words

  22 Oct 2016

  by 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/poetryandplaybookreviews/9020436/How-poetry-can-change-lives.html

Human beings have the capacity to learn to want almost any conceivable material object. Given, then, the emergence of a modern industrial culture capable of producing almost anything, the time is ripe for opening the storehouse of infinite need!… It is the modern Pandora’s box, and its plagues are loose upon the world.