Monthly Archives: May 2008

Mary Jo Salter

Christopher Lydon is almost always interesting, surprising, enlightening. Today’s wonder is an encounter with a poet, Mary Jo Salter. What first caught my eye was the text of Salter’s “Young Girl Peeling Apples” and I predict you’ll enjoy it too. Here’s the 34-minute interview, and it’s quite worthwhile. Me, I don’t usually buy poetry, but I’m making an exception by ordering her Phone Call to the Future. The UPS Man will deliver it in a couple of days.

Disnification on the Tigris

This in today’s Guardian:

Picture, if you will, a tree-lined plaza in Baghdad’s International Village, flanked by fashion boutiques, swanky cafes, and shiny glass office towers. Nearby a golf course nestles agreeably, where a chip over the water to the final green is but a prelude to cocktails in the club house and a soothing massage in a luxury hotel, which would not look out of place in Sydney harbour. Then, as twilight falls, a pre-prandial stroll, perhaps, amid the cool of the Tigris Riverfront Park, where the peace is broken only by the soulful cries of egrets fishing.

Improbable though it all may seem, this is how some imaginative types in the US military are envisaging the future of Baghdad’s Green Zone, the much-pummelled redoubt of the Iraqi capital where a bunker shot has until now had very different connotations.

It goes on, if you have the stomach. “Tigris Woods Golf and Country Club” indeed…