Full Moon Tonight

What a better time than tonight to debut my full moon banner, although technically this is a picture taken of a New Moon, and technically it was also part of an earlier post, "Experimenting With Banners" and it was not taken recently.

Hey, what do you want? It's the weekend, and it's a well known fact that there's no news on the weekend, at least not since Britney shaved her head.

The whole week has been weird, and now I know why. The last week she waxes is the same week as my manstrual cycle (ah yes, the elusive and little discussed male period). This explains everything.

Plus, there was an eclipse today, not that I could see it, as it is overcast heree in Vancouver, but also because I don't believe it was to be visible in North Ameroca at all. Still, the moon is a lovely thing to see with or without celestial phenomena.

Stephen Colbert: Man of the Year

So says the Aspen Comedy Festival, and I couldn't agree more.

I loved him in "Strangers With Candy" and then on "The Daily Show".

From a brilliant turn at last year's Correspondent's Dinner to the kind of pop culture accolade that accrues when you become an ice cream, the longer Stephen Colbert's cultural moment is, the better it gets.

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Poet. Queer. Spy?

I first "met" Auden, in the pop sense, when one of the first gay books I ever bought was about his relationship with Chester Kallman. Called "Auden in Love", and written by Dorothy J. Farnum, the book made an indelible impression on me of the man himself.

His was quite a scandalous life, although he seemed to take the being gay part of it pretty well in stride, which for those days was a considerable feat indeed. Together with his childhood friend Christopher Isherwood, he seemed to defy the limitations society imposed upon him as a despised minority by being totally blase about the one thing most people hated him for, and instead of letting that destroy him he turned it into art. His life meanders through postwar Anglo-American letters like a silver thread, and his occasional guest appearances in my daily work (such as this one) help keep me connected to the idealistic young queer poet spy I used to want to be.

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Or to find out more about W. H. Auden...