Cow-human hybrids...

So cows have finally been merged with man. Whoa! And these cow-man embryos lived for three days!

The article states:

The embryos survived for three days and are intended to provide a limitless supply of stem cells to develop therapies for diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and spinal cord injuries, overcoming a worldwide shortfall in human embryos.

This is really incredible and I am impressed and grateful. The Catholic Church may cry "monstrous" but dying from Alzheimer's is monstrous, too, and so is not exploring a potential development that could alleviate or cure its worst effects (Alzheimer's, not Catholicicsm's).

With this news, though, I cannot help but recall a lovely poetic fable I read years ago:

"The Sheep Child"
By James Dickey

Farm boys wild to couple
With anything with soft-wooded trees
With mounds of earth mounds
Of pine straw will keep themselves off
Animals by legends of their own:
In the hay-tunnel dark
And dung of barns, they will
Say I have heard tell

That in a museum in Atlanta
Way back in a corner somewhere
There's this thing that's only half
Sheep like a woolly baby
Pickled in alcohol because
Those things can't live his eyes
Are open but you can't stand to look
I heard from somebody who ...

But this is now almost all
Gone. The boys have taken
Their own true wives in the city,
The sheep are safe in the west hill
Pasture but we who were born there
Still are not sure. Are we,
Because we remember, remembered
In the terrible dust of museums?
Merely with his eyes, the sheep-child may
Be saying saying

I am here, in my father's house.
I who am half of your world, came deeply
To my mother in the long grass
Of the west pasture, where she stood like moonlight
Listening for foxes. It was something like love
From another world that seized her
From behind, and she gave, not Iifting her head
Out of dew, without ever looking, her best
Self to that great need. Turned loose, she dipped her face
Farther into the chill of the earth, and in a sound
Of sobbing of something stumbling
Away, began, as she must do,
To carry me. I woke, dying,

In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes
Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment
The great grassy world from both sides,
Man and beast in the round of their need,
And the hill wind stirred in my wool,
My hoof and my hand clasped each other,
I ate my one meal
Of milk, and died
Staring. From dark grass I came straight

To my father's house, whose dust
Whirls up in the halls for no reason
When no one comes piling deep in a hellish mild corner,
And, through my immortal waters,
I meet the sun's grains eye
To eye, and they fail at my closet of glass.
Dead, I am most surely living
In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives
Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf
And from the chaste ewe in the wind.
They go into woods into bean fields they go
Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me,
They groan they wait they suffer
Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.

Poetry Tonight!

So...I'll be reading poems tonight with some friends!

Poetry at Book Zoo

Back Room Live
Release Party
Fri. 4/25 7PM

Trevor Calvert
Challen Clarke
Zach Demby
Eleanor Johnson
Blake Ellington Larson
Sarah Garrigan

Book Zoo is located at:
6395 Telegraph Ave
(between Alcatraz Ave & North St)
Oakland, CA 94609
(510) 654-2665

For a sample of what you may hear, check out a recording of one of my poems at www.weirddeer.com

Fashion and Illustration

So I was over at saudade's blog and I read her fantastic post about fashion and superheroes. Later, I opened up a copy of Juxtapoz and what advert did I see? James Jean doing work for Prada.



Check out the NYT article, or read more on NotCot.



http://www.jamesjean.com/

Pretty and awesome (check out the illustrated bags--they're terrific).