RAINING MOOCHO

Last night it was extremely bitter cold & pouring out. Today it's warm & pouring out. A lot of the Carmelites are going to Middletown, N.Y. this morning for a day of recollection. Somehow I didn't end up going. I went to the St. Jude novena last night in spite of the miserable weather. The pews were jam packed. That area's still a little tricky for me to have to drive through, even under the very best of circumstances. I finally finished the Emily Dickinson book. Now I can finally move on to something else. The author claims that Dickinson & Walt Whitman were the nineteenth century's greatest poets. Whitman's always struck me as a boorish, self_obsessed narcissist feeb. "When Lilacs Last in the Door_yard Bloom'd" is really good, though, especially for Lincoln fans. "Leaves of Grass" bored the hell out of me. Robert Browning is about my favorite of the poets of that era. His characters & imagery have always struck me as quite impressive. A few years ago I even read Maisie Ward's biography of him. I have all sorts of collections, anthologies, etc. of poetry. Hey, the Beatles mooched literary references from Shakespeare & Thomas Dekker to Lewis Carroll & Edward Lear. I don't bother to watch current TV shows but I found out that "The Office", which is set in Scranton, is having a convention over there pretty soon. That should give our area at least a certain amount of much_needed hep. I suppose it will have to be cancelled because of the miserable weather, but the big football game is supposed to be today.