Also, I think there should be a moratorium on how many different months of awareness or recognition or declaration one little month can be. Are these months randomly chosen? Is there squinting at calendars and comparison? Do the people who decide which month they're going to attempt to change into their cause celebre month look at the other causes celebre already month-squatting and decide they can live with them?

(I suggest you click on the title and go read this at poetry daily, because the formatting isn't quite right on here though the line breaks are...)

Ross Bagdasarian

In Rosemary Clooney’s obituary
there is a reference to her big hit Come-on-a-My-House
which is put forth as an example of the terrible shit she had
to sing before she broke through to quality stuff, but
I don’t remember it as such a bad song. When I was a kid,
I was impressed that the lyrics were written by William
Saroyan and his cousin Ross Bagdasarian but I didn’t know
then that I would remember the name Ross Bagdasarian for
40 years or so even though I never heard it again until I saw it
in Rosemary Clooney’s obituary and also learned that he changed
his name to David Seville and founded the Chipmunks, so maybe
even he forgot the name Ross Bagdasarian. And when I was a teenager
I never expected to have any connection with William Saroyan but now
Aram Saroyan occasionally e-mails political jokes to me
and I remember reading once that he was up
for the part that Dustin Hoffman got in The Graduate,
which was the first movie I ever saw in an airplane, flying from Seattle
to New York. The movie opens on a tight close-up of Benjamin. You can’t
tell he’s on an airplane, so when you hear the captain’s voice saying that they’re
approaching Los Angeles, it’s very confusing because you don’t know
it’s the movie captain, you think it’s the real captain and you wonder why
the hell the plane has been diverted and why they didn’t think to mention
it until now and who do I know in Los Angeles and how long will I be there.
A whole new life may beckon, a life of glamour and music, hanging out with
Rosie and Ross and various singing rodents (Are chipmunks rodents? Look that up. Somebody.)
It would beat two days in Seattle, driving around in the drizzle
with a superstitious cold canvasser testing a sales talk I wrote. Stop the car! he’d shout,
yellow house. I can always make a sale in a yellow house. And Cooper, he could sell anyone
named Cooper. How about Hooper, I asked. Yeah, yeah, Hooper’s pretty
good, too, but Cooper is a lock. It was a two-syllable world. Come-on-a-my-house
my house, I’m gonna give-a you Easter eggs.

- Robert Hershon

worm: "Cotton," The Mountain Goats

today's fave post: Chicha on The Swan

namecheck: Alan "Go Read the Latest "Home of the" Installments Right Now" DeNiro