tallisker

Last Sunday I wrote to you with a dusting of late snow on the ground; Today I've just snuck back inside from the sunbaked tar roof where I was lying half-naked until the last salmony light slipped down below the buildings and trees. The streets are lined with Doug Firs and Sicamores, Green Maples, Dogwoods, Cherry and Plum, Spring flowers dripping onto sidewalks and beginning to rot now, crushed and brown and sickeningly sweet.
I woke up late again today after a long and drunken night, involving another fight with the lovely boy, out of which we crashed into sleep mid-sentence. This morning he awoke still mad, not at anything really, but just because we hadn't resolved anything, and his anger took on a sexual energy and...well that solved everything. Talk is useless after a point. Sex fixes a lot.

So does writing papers. I've decided in my latest research that the New Deal of the 1930s was not the ideological revolution in viewing the poor its often touted to be. Roosevelt still clung to much of the "rhetoric of perversity" of the 19th century, which described the poor as indolent and immoral. Poverty was seen as a personal failure. The New Deal provided relief on a federal level for the first time, and had no choice but to see that such widespread poverty was caused by economic, not individual, failings. Still, the legislation can't quite free itself from the old assumptions. It's not until the War on Poverty in the 60s that the government finds a more benevolent view of poverty and provides extensive programs to alleviate it which do Not revolve around moral reform.

Springtime dancing! I'm on the right, floating in a shimmery cloud.