U.S. Conducting Secret Missions inside Iran:

One former high-level intelligence official told The New Yorker, “This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign.”

&

U.S. planning for possible attack on Iran:

Hersh said Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld view Bush’s re-election as “a mandate to continue the war on terrorism,” despite problems with the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

poem for 1/17/05:

Still I Rise

by Maya Angelou

Slip it In (an excerpt)

by Myfanwy Collins

We are going to wait for two strangers to scratch at our nighty-night windows. Wait for their white faces to show up in our dark rooms. Wait for them to poke their fingery eyes at us.

To repeat: Strangers will come and watch and poke—their eyes like salt, like fire. And there will be a knife behind the big one’s back when he knocks at the door, but we won’t see it. Won’t even know that it’s there.

But this fear is not a living thing, not a breathing thing. It is only us and these strangers who live and who breathe. That is it. That is all.

read this piece in its entirety Smokelong Quarterly

There is a brand-spanking new FRiGG online, featuring some of my favorite writers: Bob Arter, Randall Brown and Jeff Landon and many more.

Britney Spears does 1,000 abdomen crunches. Every day. It’s true. I saw it on one of those shows. She said one thousand crunches a day. Or almost every day. She thinks she might sometimes miss a day or two. Imagine if she wrote 1,000 words a day instead? Better yet, imagine if I wrote 1,000 words a day?

Well, I do actually–often more, much more. It’s just that not all of them are on paper. The majority of the words I write stay somewhere else–in between thought and fingers and keyboard, waiting for a chance to be spewed onto the page.

For me, it is something like speaking. There are times when I don’t speak because I’m writing what I want to say in my head instead (or worse, I think I’ve said something and only thought it). Typically, it sounds much better in my head than it does coming out of my mouth anyway. Same for writing, better in my head than on the page–much.

It’s all about anticipation of the reaction–will there be fame or shame?

Say you are in a classroom. The instructor has asked a question. You know the answer. You alone—you’re sure of it. No one else could possibly know this answer and when you say it, when you WOW them all with your brilliance, it is going to be great. The teacher will be impressed with you, the other classmates will hate you and yet you hesitate. The time is not right for you to speak, maybe the instructor is still speaking (and you wish he would shut up so you could say what you have to say. Just shut the fuck up would you? Let me speak! I know the answer!) and the pressure builds and your face gets hot.

Or maybe it’s your fear, your doubt. Do you really know the answer? You? Come on! Don’t be so stupid. You are going to open your mouth and the words will come out and everyone will laugh because you are such a fool. They will all know that you never should have been allowed in the class anyway. It’s a fluke. You are way out of your league.

But the words are pushing to get out and yet for whatever reason you are mute. You can’t open your mouth. Your mouth will not open. You are waiting for just the right time. The right moment when everything comes together and your answer or statement is thrown out to the rest of the class and relief. And satisfaction or humiliation.

So you speak and your answer is the right one and the teacher winks at you and your classmates hate your guts for knowing what they did not know and you sit back all smug and satisfied and feel for once in your life that you might be on the right track.

Or you speak and it comes out all wrong and hackneyed and stupid and all of that hope you put into your answer plops to the ground under your desk. Everyone can see it. Some people might even laugh at it—maybe even laugh behind your back, later, which would be worse. The teacher seems embarrassed for you and quickly changes the subject. You can no longer make eye contact. You may never speak again and think that becoming a cloistered monk doesn’t sound so bad after all.

Or you just never say anything and wonder for the rest of your life what would have happened if you’d spoken. The others might have lifted you up on their shoulders and carried you around the room. You might have won a car. A Nobel Peace Prize was not outside of the realm of possibility. If only you had said something.

Or you are Britney and you do your crunches regardless. You grunt them out, day after day until they are like breathing. And you do it because you want killer abs. You want abs you could bounce a nickel off of.

In Wear It, Bitch Annalee Newitz rants (brilliantly) about the recent 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling making it legal for an employer to fire a female employee who refuses to wear makeup:

Think this through slowly and carefully, girls: if you live in the 9th Circuit (which covers California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Idaho and Montana), you could be fired tomorrow if your boss decides your “uniform” for work includes makeup. Supposedly this ruling doesn’t run afoul of discrimination law because it doesn’t impose an “unequal burden” on women. Do you want to know why, ladies and germs? Because a rule for women enforcing face paint is “equal” to a rule forbidding men from wearing it. Now there’s some real smart logic. Presence is the same as absence! War is peace! Yup, it’s the kind of analysis that’s gotten very popular in the United States recently.

Read the whole story here.

The Million Writers Award for Fiction is now officially open for nominations of stories of 1,000+ published in online lit journals, online magazines and ezines in the year of 2004. There are hundreds upon hundreds of worthy stories to choose from. Nominating a story is an easy process.

you must read: Evangelic, by Joseph Young

Maile Meloy’s Liars and Saints snuck up on me. It’s not a brash book. It does not force you to love it. It sits quietly with its hands folded in contemplation and waits for you to find what it is within it that moves you. And when you are moved by this book,you are most certainly moved.

Told in three parts (Part I about temptation–both resisting and giving in to it, Part II about an attempt at redemption through service or sacrifice and Part III about homecoming), Liars and Saints follows the Santerre family through several generations–each of them liars and saints, keeping secrets, making sacrifices, acting out of love. It is not a book that rests on plot but more on moments–little epiphanies that each of the characters experience, revealing to each his special purpose or understanding, providing grace.

In the beginning we see this with fighter-pilot Teddy revealing his understanding in that moment before he is launched:

But there was always that moment before the impact, a moment of absolute stillness and blue sky above, when the shock was imminent. The catapult crew was set up and ready below, and that long second was perfectly still. It was how Teddy imagined death: the waiting moment, the blue sky, something surprising and expected about to come.

The moments are few–as they are in life–but when they come they bring clarity to the reader as well. There is Yvette’s out of body experience, Clarissa’s fear that God is calling her to be a nun after she weans her baby, Abby’s decision to keep the baby even though it will kill her to do so:

She told the doctor she wanted to sleep on it, and she went home and lay in bed, in her old blue room in her mother’s house, imagining the baby growing in her belly and the cancer growing in her jaw. The baby moved, and her mouth ached. She had seen him yawning on the ultrasound, with all his bones and ribs, and the four-chambered heart beating, and the little bladder already full. He was part of her. If she lost him at five months for her own sake, she would bleed to death out of sorrow.

In the end, we have a family, torn apart and cobbled back together, revealing the truth, seeking, once again, redemption and compassion from the only people who matter, each other.

Here is what I will say:

Turn your cheek to me and I will paint the walls navy blue, representing the sky or the cold fires of that place.

Turn it and I will make the windows a kaleidoscope with my paintbrush, the room becoming your own glass cage. It will mimic the movement of light on color and present you with a ceiling of gems so precious.

Turn it and I will climb into your ear and tell you what the angel told me: that the lady ate a poisoned apple and that you, yourself, are an angel sent to help me speak.

Don’t turn it and I will know that it is time to rid myself of ownership. I will sit on the floor in the middle of the empty room and draw a circle in which all points radiate from my one true center.

Keep that cheek still, impassive, unmoved and I will know that while my apotheosis is inevitable, it is unknown to you. I will know that your thoughts are not mine.

If the cheek does not turn, it is time to leave all those who would offer the apple. Time to take to the streets with a child in bunting and spread the word of the poisoned few who did not rise. (I will be deaf to the child’s cries for he is soon to be exalted at my right hand.)

With no cheek turned, my ascension is imminent. Do not expect that I will rise gently as a saint floats to the firmament. My leap will be swift and brutal, a birth reversal, leaving behind a smudge that might have been me but is really my last breath.

And that is my word.

at the bird feeder this morning:

• two blue jays: they are always the first to arrive in the morning, in the grey light before the sun is up.
• five or six chickadees and nuthatches
• one bird of indeterminite origin–I can’t make it out.
• the red squirrel: he thinks it belongs to him.
• one mourning dove: she likes to eat the seed underneath the feeder–sort of like a chicken.
• the cardinal: there is one gorgeous cardinal that hangs out in the backyard and waits for everyone to go. Then he eats the seed underneath. I’ve read that cardinals prefer to eat from more of flat surface than an elevated bird feeder.

Missing are the deer who have eaten most of the food. We have started putting just a bit in each day as since the deer have discovered it, they have cleaned it out at night. We have yet to catch them in the act but I must so I can get a photo.

Another reason to avoid bologna (in case you need one other than the fact that it is disgusting):

Those who ate a piece of bologna five days a week or a similar amount of other processed meat were 50 percent more likely to develop colon cancer. The cancer risk may stem from fat in meat, nitrates in processed meat, and carcinogens produced by cooking at high temperatures.

Read the whole story.