Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Monday, May 24, 2010

Timely Poem by Jim Culleny

By John Ballard



Poetic Form: Ghazal


The ghazal is composed of a minimum of five couplets--and typically no more than fifteen--that are structurally, thematically, and emotionally autonomous. Each line of the poem must be of the same length, though meter is not imposed in English. The first couplet introduces a scheme, made up of a rhyme followed by a refrain. Subsequent couplets pick up the same scheme in the second line only, repeating the refrain and rhyming the second line with both lines of the first stanza. The final couplet usually includes the poet's signature, referring to the author in the first or third person, and frequently including the poet's own name or a derivation of its meaning.


Much more about this form of poetry at the link.


�



Jim Culleny is 3Quarks Poet Laureate. This is what he penned yesterday. (The color I found for the BP quote is called "dirt.")



"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and
dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume."


The Mean Density of a Corporate Brain Ghazal


One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,

Shakespeare said �and not just in dreams if truth be told.


Devils on TV and on the radio �even in the street

ordinary demons walk among us terrors to behold.


Just yesterday someone I know remarked that we may be indiscreet

and inconsiderate of the earth; adding smugly: We may be bold.


We may have our wonton way with her without repercussion

even if we leave her desiccated �as God�s my witness, it�s foretold.


The earth�s ours to be consumed; to be sucked utterly to death.

We have the right, he said �being the prime plums in god�s fold.


So what if the earth bleeds into the sea? The sea�s huge enough

to handle whatever comes: run-off nitrogen, sludge, black gold.


As long as skulls are stuffed with want and hearts trussed in bottom lines

it�s just routine to deal in death and decimate the earth which rolls & rolls.


If we�re dumb as Gump, blind as Lear and demonic as a corporate brain

we�ll, tout de suite, smother and annihilate even our dreams if truth be told.


by Jim Culleny, 5/23/10


Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)