10 quotes on verbs, and other syntactical structures

1. Pork is not a verb. -- Bart Simpson
2. Life is a verb. -- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
3. Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place. -- Martha Graham
4. Love is a verb. -- Clare Boothe Luce
5. Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail. -- Clive James
6. God, to me, it seems, is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper. -- R. Buckminster Fuller
7. The whole of nature, as has been said, is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive. -- W.R. Inge
8. If there were a verb meaning 'to believe falsely,' it would not have any significant first person, present indicative. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein
9. Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place. -- William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
10. I've always loved the flirtatious tango of consonants and vowels, the sturdy dependability of nouns and capricious whimsy of verbs, the strutting pageantry of the adjective and the flitting evanescence of the adverb, all kept safe and orderly by those reliable little policemen, punctuation marks. -- Dennis Miller
    

20 answers

"The answer is in the question." -- Zen Saying.

Zen Calendar notation for September 28, 2010.

1. green
2. red
3. sometimes
4. half of infinity
5. the other half of infinity
6. sententiousness
7. serial comma
8. tabloid
9. aural
10. Kazakhs cordially courting Cossacks
11. perch
12. el Greco
13. Picasso but not Kierkegaard
    
14. Dali
15. a grid of intersecting boulevards masquerading as haiku prayer wheels
16. pious pies of colorful pi
17. patrician accents with square jaws on Sutton Place, Manhattan
18. soberiquets
19. anonononymity
20. silencio
    

lobal warming

not much firing in the cerebral spheres

cool to the touch

of words

lapses in the synapses

hungering for syllables

warming up

for all that jazz

annoying me at Freedom

honey locusts swaying

not too much

on my pate

orchard

to walk amid the aisles
cathedral crispness
a ladder
branches with baubles
red and reddening
green and yellowing
beckoning bites
to reach up Edenward
Macouns Cortlands
Honey Crisps Macintoshes
Galas of Galas
sampling the goods
bursting with appleness
stepping amid rot
mushy decadence
ripe for the picking
how can this be
reach even
overreach
arch
blessed fruit
of the womb of this golden Saturday
the miracle of the moment
now is the time
see
grab
bite
taste
chew
swallow
smile
sigh
amid the boughs

LL SAINTS

Sign on Tipp Hill:

LL SAINTS

on the building of All Saints School.

Which prompts these musings and queries:

Is the missing A scarlet?

Is [nothing] sacred?

Is it symbolic of the imperfection in ALL of us, including saints?

Is it a backward, wry comment on corporate influences, just shy of being an LLC?

Does it refer to the Little League?

Or a new hip-hop group, with LL standing as a shortened form of L'il, itself an abbreviation of "little"?

Or is the blank space before "LL" a meditation on emptiness and spiritual surrender?

beyond

the bedroom wall [Beyond the Bedroom Wall, by Larry Woiwode; great title; great book]

the pale

hunger

tired

the beyond

the blue horizon

the grave

words

where have I been?

Where have I been, in thought, word, or deed?

I've been to:

• Brantingham, New York
• Lowville, New York
• Ava
• ignoring Facebook
  
• viewing Giants games
• commenting at the Giants blog (OneFlapDown77)
• visiting Len Assante at the Delavan Center
• watching artists' paint dry on the rail overpass on West Fayette Street, Syracuse, New York
• admiring Brantley Carroll's powerful photos of African-American fathers and sons
• drinking coffee at Freedom of Espresso, at Franklin Square
• finishing Martin Amis
• loving poetry by Bob Hicok
• Skyping with my brother Jack
• Skyping with Warren
• moving Evelyn to Philadelphia
• moving around the streets of Philly with Yann and Evelyn
• making vegetable soup with Beth
• sleeping
• waking
• walking
• writing gerunds
• not attending the Glenn Beck rally (no brownshirts available in the closet from the 1930s)
  
• editing a doctoral dissertation on the history of the Cayman Islands
• revising webpages for an international environmental and infrastructure firm
• watching webpage get little red dots under it alleging a misspelling
• getting ripped off at Santillo's at the Great New York State Fair when I could've ad Gianelli's sausage
• picking up Adri after she sprained her ankle
• going to the Blarney Stone with her at a fund raiser for coach Lutwin's kid and hs wife whose home burned on Tipperary Hill
• lost in space
• sweating
• cutting hedges
• mowing the knee-high lawn, which sounds vaguely Chinese
• asked Ethan about his birthday
• taking Beth to the ER, which they cal the ED, after she got conked on the head with a soccer ball; she's okay
• seeing Jenny, down in the Crouse basement
  
• cooling off
• Eucharist at an Episcopal Church
• haiku syncopations
• lurid dreams
  
• delighting in the miracle of the late-growing sunflowers of surprise, the God of Surprises
• in the dream of the night's rain, the rhythm of raindrops