No Donnie Darko jokes in the comment section, plz.

"Scooter commercials don't count, right?"

Delmore Schwartz had Lou Reed as one of his students at Syracuse University and reportedly told Reed at one point:

"You can write—and if you ever sell out and there's a Heaven from which you can be haunted, I'll haunt you."

Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day, by Delmore Schwartz

Calmly we walk through this April's day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(...that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn...)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(...that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

Wolf Wagner!

The New York Times finally covers the Open Flames Are The New Bowls Of Rocks beat:

The Fire Comes To The Table (thanks Adam!)

Upon invitation to reflect on the notion of transparency...

Superficial, by Michel de Broin. (thanks, Ben)

I won't mention the missing hyphen or the misplaced comma...

I found this picture over at Chris Dahlen's Save The Robot, and before I even read his excellent post I was totally intrigued. Intrigued, yes, but as it turned out I had basically no idea what was going on:

1. I didn't get the pun about "flat busted," and removing the boob joke makes the shirt quite a bit more poignant. I just read it like "I may be poor, but at least I have a little money to have a good time on Saturday night."

2. I didn't realize that the picture was from the past. Look at it: it looks like an American Apparel ad, or the first shot in a Richard Kern spread.

3. I didn't realize it was Sarah Palin.

So...pretty much a miss all around. Speaking of Ms. Palin:

Miss Manners on chastity rings

"Polite society does not recognize such a thing as a chastity ring. It is so polite that it presumes that a lady is chaste unless publicly proven otherwise.”