Month: december 2017

Math
Dear Miru, Your calculating is improving and you actually like it. We play with numbers together. Two times ten is twenty. Six plus five is eleven. Ten minus 2 equals eight. It is all very playful. You learn how to figure out calculations by making drawings of dots, lines, squares on the whiteboard. You don't ...
Reading: Anthem for doomed youth by Wilfred Owen
English war poetry from the trenches. After Sassoon I read a poem from the pen of remarkable Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), one great poor soul from the culled generation of World War I: Anthem for doomed youth What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? ____Only the monstrous anger of the guns. ____Only the stuttering rifles' ...
Reading: Résumé by Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) has lead a tempestuous life with several marriages, some suicides attempt and employment by Vanity Fair. One of her collections is called 'enough rope' and I can't supress a sinister feeling. However, she stayed alive and became a productive screenwriter and poet. I sample a very short piece here, because short verse ...
Reading: Taking off Emily Dickinson’s clothes by Billy Collins
Billy Collins (b. 1941) is 'the most popular poet of America' according to some. He was poet laureate of the US several times and won a prize or something for the America's funniest home poetry - he manages to tell a good joke without destroying the poetic wager. I fell in love with this poet, ...
Reading: A motel in the hotel of time by Dale Houstman
Dale Houstman is an extraordinary poet from America and I am his friend on the Internet. Today, I want to read a poem from his collection 'A dangerous vacation'. There is a lot of extraordinary stuff but I stick to a not so long poem that has an enigmatic metaphor as a title: A motel ...
Be Farecul When You Ross The Croad
You learn very fast now. Lately, we have been playing "lettertjes omdraaien", exchange letters in words. Even though you don't really get the concept of spelling yet and how several letters make up a word (it is interesting that this mental apparatus is apparently rather complicated; letters are an abstraction, the unit of our language ...
Reading: After Love by Sara Teasdale
Today I discover a short gem written by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), who wrote a lot of love poetry and committed suicide at the age of 48. I came across this timeless poem about passion:
Reading: My Madonna by Robert W. Service
Robert W. Service (1874-1958) was known as the bard of Yukon, because a lot of his poetry was inspired by his time as a cowboy in Canada. He is also a war poet, having been a reporter of the Balkan war of 1912-13 and an ambulance driver during World War One. I read a funny ...
Blackfacepalm
Nog even over Zw. Piet, de donkere slavendrijver die het Nederlandsche volk rond Sinterklaas opzweept tot een ieder jaar groteskere dans om een racistisch stereotype, een festijn dat anno domini 2017 in het Friese Dokkum plaatsvindt, waar in 754 de ijverige gristelijke missionaris Bonifatius op 80-jarige leeftijd werd vermoord, omdat de Friesen hun Germaanse traditie ...