Robert Creeley: Great Poet or One-Eyed Interspecies Plagiarist?

Here are two pieces of twentieth-century verse. One has been called “…the most often quoted, even the most widely known, short poem” of the 1960s; the other is from a long-forgotten collection of comic newspaper verse. One was written in 1954, the other almost four decades earlier. (more…)

“It is not their love for us but their lack of faith that prevents today’s Christians from burning us.”
—Nietzsche

For sheer gloating pleasure, you can’t beat the lunkheads on Free Republic trying to deal with the news that Palin’s daughter not only isn’t going to marry Levi, but is breaking up with him.

It’s what they call the whole spectrum of human emotion, or primate anyway. They’re so stunned they wander for a while through digressions like whether the sperm donor in question was named after a pair of pants or not.

One loyalist with the wonderful moniker “Solid Wood” insists it can’t be true, must be a liberal media lie, until someone sends the two-word death sentence: “Fox confirms.” Then he settles for calling everyone who mentions the story a leftwing troll. (more…)

That was how he died, Professor Robert Beloof, my first mentor: crushed by a hippie van.

In Portland, yet. It was a ridiculous way to die, and Beloof was, let’s face it, a ridiculous man. But it was also a very uncanny, fey manner of death for a Berkeley professor made and broken by the hippie era. You almost want to say something pompous, like “We were all run over by that VW van,” carve that on the headstone of the whole place. (more…)

Reviewed: “A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity” by Bill O’ Reilly (Broadway, 2008).

In this slight, self-indulgent memoir, Bill O’Reilly tells us how he got so “bold” and “fresh.” A humble man, he attributes his success to his own innate greatness, with honorable mention going to his solidly rock-headed upbringing in Levittown, N.Y. For all his generous praise of Levittown, O’Reilly is very clear that most of the credit should go to himself: “Looking back, the reason I have succeeded in life is that I relied on myself.”

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Now that services have ended at the First National Church of Crawford, Texas, it’s clear America needs a new religion. Not to nitpick, but it could be argued that rule by the most loudly born-again or, as scholars call it, Screechocracy, was not a success.

That’s not to say we can hope for an improvement by veering leftward, into one or another version of softcore Buddhism, as recovering Christians tend to do. Let’s face it: Buddhism has some nice statues and incense, but it’s no fun at all. Indeed, adopting that most dismally mature of religions means giving up forever on the idea of getting any fun out of existence. That’s the whole message of Buddhism.

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Send in your own questions, concerns and worries to ask@exiledonline.com. Team eXiled is here to help.

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Dear eXiled: Why do birds sing?

Hamish

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How do you cope with defeat when your whole creed is “You can’t argue with success”? In the wake of Obama’s victory, American conservatives have some of the best minds to come out of Regent University working on this problem. Little wires are sparking in those Yugo-primate crania, tiny tendrils of smoke are pouring from their hairy ears.

In our new feature, Obama Crawl, The eXiled will introduce you to some of America’s Funniest Lame Rationalizations, featuring yesterday’s apex predators squeaking like confused Scandinavian lemmings as they try to bluff, lie, flirt and betray their way to survival. (more…)