The painfully fascinating DS and I visited an exhibit at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco this weekend, the occasion being the hundredth anniversary of Gertrude Stein's meeting Alice B. Toklas.
This, the celebration of a private milestone for a public poet, might strike you as suspect. It struck me that way anyway. As I learned working on my Bellow thesis, it's generally in the work of poetasters and artistic bottomfeeders that we witness the failure to distinguish between the poet's body of work and her lived life. But well, my friends, we've come all this way. The ocean floor has all sorts of good bits. And now that we've invaded the personal life of the ladies, what the hell, let's mill around for a bit, shall we?
First things first: I do wish there were more happy photos of Alice. Take a look at the one I've got here. I can earnestly say that that's one of the more flattering shots. Hayzeus! Most of the others are more of the same, painted portaits included, Gertrude looking very much the satisfied rooster and poor Alice to her side and slipped a bit back, as if an apron-string kid, always the dour sulker. If pictures are to be trusted (which, unless maybe taken by Arbus or Sherman, they are not!), Alice haunted around looking perennially bummed out--always with the same long limbs, pulled face, heavy cloche, shadowy mustache, and the eyes--ugh. The very eyes of contrition. Buck up, Alice. Look at the company you keep, for god's sake!
Anyway, we walked exactly two short hallways with a total of five display cases and maybe a dozen of said less-than-charitable portraits and photographs. All in all, it was a very good tourlet. It's a rare occasion, indeed, that I find myself trading Gertrude Stein recordings. DS even has a fantastic McAlly speaker doodad and so we sat on a wide birch bench and ate chocolate malt balls and listened together to our iPods (DS's black, mine an angelic white) giving poetry reading by proxy for our very own Gertie.
Syllable by arch syllable, she introduced "She Bowed to Her Brother" with a review of the importance of the period in the piece. I don't know why I'm so much less interested in Gertrude's perspective on the period than I am, as DS pointed out, the em dash in Dickinson. I just think Dickinson's dashes made a difference. Stein's readings seemed to be so very much about performance. Then again, so were Parker's. So were Millay's. And I have lots that I love about each of them. And it's not Stein's haughtiness that bugs me. If that were the case, "Daddy" would not be one of my more frequently played tracks in my lists. (And what do you know? DS played me a great excerpt of Plath. She can be heard tightly decrying the personal's unjustified place in the poetical; she made the important caveat that the personal must first be managed and manipulated and shoved around until it can be kept in its written corner. "Now stay, bad personal experience worth recounting; stay, I said!") I mean, if Plath wasn't arrogant enough in her standards and style to give Stein a run, then I don't know who was. And I, by the by, revel in Plath's punishing poems.
So. It's all, along with the sudden hole brutally torn in my own literary universe, naturally got me thinking about posterity. And I suppose that whatever aspect of a subject's life is being recognized, remembered, memorialized, at the very least I expect the items to be the authentic artifact.
To my great surprise, as I stood with my nose practically pressed up to the glass before the typewriter Toklas used to type Stein's weird poems and prose, DS read from the little placard that it was, in fact, "something just like" the Smith Premier of the Parisian lovebirds, NOT actually the McCoy. Outrageous.
I am going to start my own museum in which I will have papier-mâché Blackwing pencils, credible holographic replicas of the Moleskine notebooks, maybe a foam-mounted art.com poster of the Olivetto giclée that hung over Sontag's worktable. I will even make my own brownies and say my creation bears a striking resemblance to Alice's recipe. I'll call the show my Depressed Ladies' Literary Bakesale. It will be brilliant. You're invited. Bring your iPods.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Friday, August 17, 2007
he's right about the abandonment
Those of us who revolved at a remote distance from Liam—I never knew him well; we'd talked no more than ten times at most, emailed even less—are now swift in the eddy. Late into the night, toss, turn, toss, turn, I dizzied mostly in the terror of whatever his consequences may be (see 8/16 post), but I was also saddened by the what-ifs, fixated on the outlandish alternatives. I, all windows open to the waking echo of confusing strife, looked back at the let-downs we all may have been to him and, likewise—now or before—he to us.
Several friends have written saying they're angry. Or they're disappointed. I can't say I feel either of these things. There's almost a blank acceptance where these feelings ought to be. Who can presume to understand the suffering of another? We can write to ape it, build art in deference to it, probe it ruthlessly for some sort of statistical relief. We can get grand about the comprehension and capture of these things, but psychic pain, pain of the body—these, along with death, are of a province that remains impassive, solitary. And they always will be. Despite that, I miss Liam in a way that isn't justified since I was never really in his world in a complete way, not even secondarily.
I know it's indulgent to insert thoughts into the space Liam occupied among us, but I do imagine he'd lack patience, perhaps, with whatever personalized responses I might be tempted to have. Liam prepared me--and anyone else who has been paying attention to his poetry--for this eventuality. The poem that follows suggests only that we face it. That's a very different statement than suggesting we need to deal with it and move on. One never moves on in such situations, however remotely she stands from the sadness. She can only move in. Face that abandonment, after Eliot, and now after Rector.
The Remarkable Objectivity of Your Old Friends
by Liam Rector
We did right by your death and went out,
Right away, to a public place to drink,
To be with each other, to face it.
We called other friends - the ones
Your mother hadn't called - and told them
What you had decided, and some said
What you did was right; it was the thing
You wanted and we'd just have to live
With that, that your life had been one
Long misery and they could see why you
Had chosen that, no matter what any of us
Thought about it, and anyway, one said,
Most of us abandoned each other a long
Time ago and we'd have to face that
If we had any hope of getting it right.
Several friends have written saying they're angry. Or they're disappointed. I can't say I feel either of these things. There's almost a blank acceptance where these feelings ought to be. Who can presume to understand the suffering of another? We can write to ape it, build art in deference to it, probe it ruthlessly for some sort of statistical relief. We can get grand about the comprehension and capture of these things, but psychic pain, pain of the body—these, along with death, are of a province that remains impassive, solitary. And they always will be. Despite that, I miss Liam in a way that isn't justified since I was never really in his world in a complete way, not even secondarily.
I know it's indulgent to insert thoughts into the space Liam occupied among us, but I do imagine he'd lack patience, perhaps, with whatever personalized responses I might be tempted to have. Liam prepared me--and anyone else who has been paying attention to his poetry--for this eventuality. The poem that follows suggests only that we face it. That's a very different statement than suggesting we need to deal with it and move on. One never moves on in such situations, however remotely she stands from the sadness. She can only move in. Face that abandonment, after Eliot, and now after Rector.
The Remarkable Objectivity of Your Old Friends
by Liam Rector
We did right by your death and went out,
Right away, to a public place to drink,
To be with each other, to face it.
We called other friends - the ones
Your mother hadn't called - and told them
What you had decided, and some said
What you did was right; it was the thing
You wanted and we'd just have to live
With that, that your life had been one
Long misery and they could see why you
Had chosen that, no matter what any of us
Thought about it, and anyway, one said,
Most of us abandoned each other a long
Time ago and we'd have to face that
If we had any hope of getting it right.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Liam Rector, 1949-2007
I just received the following email from Victoria Clausi of the Bennington Writing Seminars, where I took my MFA & built close community.
----------------------------
“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;”
--T.S. Eliot
It is with unbearable sorrow that I write to tell you that our beloved founder and director, Liam Rector, killed himself yesterday morning.
“Fare forward O voyager.”
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that any donations be made to the Liam Rector Scholarship Fund at The Writing Seminars of Bennington College, to organizations in support of Free Speech, or to The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).
Liam is survived by his wife, Tree Swenson, and his daughter, Virginia Rector.
----------------------------
I'm not sure what to say, except that I feel an achy need to get down close to the ground, to hold onto the planet, and dig my fingernails into the dirt while I'm on the surface. I cannot imagine making the choice Liam did. Sad's a weak word.
----------------------------
“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;”
--T.S. Eliot
It is with unbearable sorrow that I write to tell you that our beloved founder and director, Liam Rector, killed himself yesterday morning.
“Fare forward O voyager.”
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that any donations be made to the Liam Rector Scholarship Fund at The Writing Seminars of Bennington College, to organizations in support of Free Speech, or to The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).
Liam is survived by his wife, Tree Swenson, and his daughter, Virginia Rector.
----------------------------
I'm not sure what to say, except that I feel an achy need to get down close to the ground, to hold onto the planet, and dig my fingernails into the dirt while I'm on the surface. I cannot imagine making the choice Liam did. Sad's a weak word.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
beautiful
from Poetry magazine
One Afternoon
by Joanie V. Mackowski
A woman stepped outside, crumbled
into a loose particulate, and, as the breeze
blew up from the east, she scattered: her handful
of heart, volcanic ash, spiraled the highway,
and five of her teeth slipped between
her neighbor's breasts; her neighbor
unbuttoned her blouse to scratch
at her suddenly red and luminous skin.
Days passed. Each day the sun distractedly
drifted from chair to chair; each night the stars,
old scatterbrains, they commiserated.
It didn't rain. Strange, the granular woman
thought to herself: although I encompass
so much, I accomplish so little.
Her car sparkled with her hair and bones;
her garden thrived. She tried to think:
why did this happen? what had I eaten?
why was I bothered?—those old hours,
spotted and exotic lizards, darted
the gravel, flicking through their colors
of skin as one flicks channels on a tv.
She couldn't catch a one. Then, as a flock
of sparrows converging for the skull
of an oak, all her twittering dust,
her brain, bone, and the dangerous shreds
of her fingers clawed for the sky;
what an interesting cloud someone said.
At first I'd included the Q&A, but ultimately decided the blah blah about Ovid and the supposed inspired madness of all poets undermined the grace of the poem and its movement. So here it is, naked. Go back and reread! Aloud.
One Afternoon
by Joanie V. Mackowski
A woman stepped outside, crumbled
into a loose particulate, and, as the breeze
blew up from the east, she scattered: her handful
of heart, volcanic ash, spiraled the highway,
and five of her teeth slipped between
her neighbor's breasts; her neighbor
unbuttoned her blouse to scratch
at her suddenly red and luminous skin.
Days passed. Each day the sun distractedly
drifted from chair to chair; each night the stars,
old scatterbrains, they commiserated.
It didn't rain. Strange, the granular woman
thought to herself: although I encompass
so much, I accomplish so little.
Her car sparkled with her hair and bones;
her garden thrived. She tried to think:
why did this happen? what had I eaten?
why was I bothered?—those old hours,
spotted and exotic lizards, darted
the gravel, flicking through their colors
of skin as one flicks channels on a tv.
She couldn't catch a one. Then, as a flock
of sparrows converging for the skull
of an oak, all her twittering dust,
her brain, bone, and the dangerous shreds
of her fingers clawed for the sky;
what an interesting cloud someone said.
At first I'd included the Q&A, but ultimately decided the blah blah about Ovid and the supposed inspired madness of all poets undermined the grace of the poem and its movement. So here it is, naked. Go back and reread! Aloud.
Monday, August 13, 2007
godspeed, yone
So my best case scenario for sticking around on the planet, if we're using Yone Minagawa as a life-yardstick of sorts, is eighty-one more years. That remainder I've got is longer than anyone's even lived in my family, but why quibble?
Don't wake me from the dream! With that many years left, I've got time to master this effing fiddle, paint well, build a warehouse full of shadow boxes, settle firmly into fluency in Italian AND Japanese, tour Iceland, read my entire booklist (if I don't add anything else to it), send the letters I owe, review some stuff, run Boston, run Boston better, learn to build stuff, find a place with views and quiet, build a green home with views and quiet, learn to ride a motorcycle, buy a motorcycle, ride said motorcycle some faraway place, have important road trip realizations like Che (in a minor chord), act on insights, achieve enlightenment (snap!), and of course, finish two novels (yes, just two; can't be too lofty), the stories, the screenplay, even the epitaph.
So thank you, Yone! You (and the hope that, if I take my vitamins, drink lots of water, and exercise like Oprah tells me to, I might break your record) have reduced the anxious insistence I always feel to get all of the above done tonight. I think instead, it is a nice night to walk the dog to the ice cream parlor and get myself some coffee ice cream with extra fudge. And then I'll sit in the dark on the old-fashioned parlor seat with the cracked, striped covering, watch Bling (see 8/9) eat her Frosty Paws, and take in the magical example the beasts set in enjoying what's right before one's snout.
(And no, you are incorrect, mon cynical frere! Ice cream will make me live longer, not shorter. Silly health freaks. Oh, I'm sure of it. Ask me over ice cream when I am one hundred fifteen.)
Don't wake me from the dream! With that many years left, I've got time to master this effing fiddle, paint well, build a warehouse full of shadow boxes, settle firmly into fluency in Italian AND Japanese, tour Iceland, read my entire booklist (if I don't add anything else to it), send the letters I owe, review some stuff, run Boston, run Boston better, learn to build stuff, find a place with views and quiet, build a green home with views and quiet, learn to ride a motorcycle, buy a motorcycle, ride said motorcycle some faraway place, have important road trip realizations like Che (in a minor chord), act on insights, achieve enlightenment (snap!), and of course, finish two novels (yes, just two; can't be too lofty), the stories, the screenplay, even the epitaph.
So thank you, Yone! You (and the hope that, if I take my vitamins, drink lots of water, and exercise like Oprah tells me to, I might break your record) have reduced the anxious insistence I always feel to get all of the above done tonight. I think instead, it is a nice night to walk the dog to the ice cream parlor and get myself some coffee ice cream with extra fudge. And then I'll sit in the dark on the old-fashioned parlor seat with the cracked, striped covering, watch Bling (see 8/9) eat her Frosty Paws, and take in the magical example the beasts set in enjoying what's right before one's snout.
(And no, you are incorrect, mon cynical frere! Ice cream will make me live longer, not shorter. Silly health freaks. Oh, I'm sure of it. Ask me over ice cream when I am one hundred fifteen.)
paste
P likes to open a Word document and press ctrl+v anytime he uses a public computer or any friend's computer. What would he see if he did that on yours?
Thursday, August 09, 2007
the sorrows of light rotation
When I was teaching a writing workshop to kindergartners, this one kid Harrison, who insisted on wearing the same delightful uniform of cowboy boots and a fringe jacket every day, came in and told stories that remain to this day among my fondest storytelling memories, right up there with my grandfather's wild Irish yarns. It's not that they were sophisticated or even particularly original, but while he talked in class I could watch him just making things up on the fly, a natural-born bulltosser. He could deliver a story with such deadpan confidence that his classmates believed unflinchingly that he'd hosted a jaguar in his Alameda Victorian. Pressed for details by teachers wanting to depose the bard, he never flagged. He could invent under pressure. He just had a capacity to wonder that could not be undermined.
I remember him when I settle into my more indulgent drifts of pointless imagination. I had this great run with an idea all night last night. I sat on the Persian rug playing tug with the nutty pup I'm dogsitting (the adorable little monkey Betty Bling, for those familiar) and we watched the original Star Wars together. And I got to wondering what Star Wars would look like if it was retold as a series of episodic raves. Bjork plays Darth, Tilda Swinton Luke, Rachel Weisz Princess Leia, and I of course would get to be Han Solo. (I spent my youth planning to grow up as either Bo Duke, Han Solo, or a Solid Gold Dancer. Sadly, I'm kind of the perfect blend of all three.)
Anyway, it would be part traditional straight-ahead narrative whenever it had to be, part Weapon-of-Choice-variety breakout choreographed routine after the fashion of Dancer in the Dark, only without the terrible gun scene and with razzle dazzle lightsabers/glow sticks. You know that underground very ravey-looking scene in--what was it, the third?--Matrix? That ridiculous stuff? Imagine crowds of extras like that: tribal, futuristic, strobe lights, percussion, smoke, silly makeup, time-elapse, and did I mention smoke? Jawas were born to be choreographed. Likewise Imperial Stormtroopers. Sorry, it's true. And the Death Star, the droids and their pop & lock movements, wooly Chewie slung with crossbow ammo, Obi Wan the sage--all well suited to my & Betty's enlightened reinterpretation.
And so after the movie, I was exceptionally awake (unlike now ... zzz ...) and took the little Bling for a late-night sit to watch the waves break on Treasure Island. And as we drove back home on my three good tires and the slow-leak fourth, we heard this song on 92.7 (the local dance station that pretty much plays the same six electronicky songs over and over and over). I just know I heard that same song at a warehouse rave in Baltimore roundabout 1994. I didn't know the name then and I don't know it now. But as it played, I could just see little Bjork and earnest Tilda battling it out with that in the background. The spectacle would shatter glass, a Phantom of the Opera kind of orchestral stretch. Hair-raising!
But what am I to do? Be a weenie and call the radio station? There are NO lyrics, unless you count exclamatory monosyllables. So what would I do--just call and say, "You know? That one that goes la dee ahhh ahh ahhHHAHAHHHHHH and sounds vaguely German at parts?"
You know what this means. Endless loops of the six tracks in heavy rotation to get back to that one other song, if they even repeat it. And even then, the damn DJ may not say the name. So off I go, skipping the blues in my iPod for the same sponsored songs on the radio: Rihanna, JT, Hilary Duff, that ancient Daft Punk song, Dirty Vegas, and Beyonce yet again. Oh, the things I endure to populate my mental wunderkammers. At least I know Harrison would approve.
I remember him when I settle into my more indulgent drifts of pointless imagination. I had this great run with an idea all night last night. I sat on the Persian rug playing tug with the nutty pup I'm dogsitting (the adorable little monkey Betty Bling, for those familiar) and we watched the original Star Wars together. And I got to wondering what Star Wars would look like if it was retold as a series of episodic raves. Bjork plays Darth, Tilda Swinton Luke, Rachel Weisz Princess Leia, and I of course would get to be Han Solo. (I spent my youth planning to grow up as either Bo Duke, Han Solo, or a Solid Gold Dancer. Sadly, I'm kind of the perfect blend of all three.)
Anyway, it would be part traditional straight-ahead narrative whenever it had to be, part Weapon-of-Choice-variety breakout choreographed routine after the fashion of Dancer in the Dark, only without the terrible gun scene and with razzle dazzle lightsabers/glow sticks. You know that underground very ravey-looking scene in--what was it, the third?--Matrix? That ridiculous stuff? Imagine crowds of extras like that: tribal, futuristic, strobe lights, percussion, smoke, silly makeup, time-elapse, and did I mention smoke? Jawas were born to be choreographed. Likewise Imperial Stormtroopers. Sorry, it's true. And the Death Star, the droids and their pop & lock movements, wooly Chewie slung with crossbow ammo, Obi Wan the sage--all well suited to my & Betty's enlightened reinterpretation.
And so after the movie, I was exceptionally awake (unlike now ... zzz ...) and took the little Bling for a late-night sit to watch the waves break on Treasure Island. And as we drove back home on my three good tires and the slow-leak fourth, we heard this song on 92.7 (the local dance station that pretty much plays the same six electronicky songs over and over and over). I just know I heard that same song at a warehouse rave in Baltimore roundabout 1994. I didn't know the name then and I don't know it now. But as it played, I could just see little Bjork and earnest Tilda battling it out with that in the background. The spectacle would shatter glass, a Phantom of the Opera kind of orchestral stretch. Hair-raising!
But what am I to do? Be a weenie and call the radio station? There are NO lyrics, unless you count exclamatory monosyllables. So what would I do--just call and say, "You know? That one that goes la dee ahhh ahh ahhHHAHAHHHHHH and sounds vaguely German at parts?"
You know what this means. Endless loops of the six tracks in heavy rotation to get back to that one other song, if they even repeat it. And even then, the damn DJ may not say the name. So off I go, skipping the blues in my iPod for the same sponsored songs on the radio: Rihanna, JT, Hilary Duff, that ancient Daft Punk song, Dirty Vegas, and Beyonce yet again. Oh, the things I endure to populate my mental wunderkammers. At least I know Harrison would approve.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
hugh in mind
Being in the company of talented people in their artistic element is great. Being related to those folks, on the other hand, is sublime. Cousin Katie took this picture.
When I was a little girl (late single digits), I tried ardently to mother Katie all around her Brooklyn brownstone; she, ever the more sensible child, shuffled into corners away from me to read the book I remember she always had in her hands. I have always come on too strong and she was one of the first to educate me in that regard. She, as best evidenced in this composition, has much to teach about the value of space.
Katie’s leaving Seattle before I’ve arranged to visit. I should have visited. Back to Brooklyn goes KT. Sigh. Wherever she goes, though, I know she will invent beautifully and I’ll be her eager attendant. I am reading her play now and have attached my favorite of her photographs so far.
Look, see how the tree branch resembles a cord powering the streetlamp? On the blanket, that’s her. And a fellow named Craig who I thought was named Hugh. Sleeping in Seattle with a green Hugh.
I can feel the mood of this picture in my skin. It’s as if I was there.
When I was a little girl (late single digits), I tried ardently to mother Katie all around her Brooklyn brownstone; she, ever the more sensible child, shuffled into corners away from me to read the book I remember she always had in her hands. I have always come on too strong and she was one of the first to educate me in that regard. She, as best evidenced in this composition, has much to teach about the value of space.
Katie’s leaving Seattle before I’ve arranged to visit. I should have visited. Back to Brooklyn goes KT. Sigh. Wherever she goes, though, I know she will invent beautifully and I’ll be her eager attendant. I am reading her play now and have attached my favorite of her photographs so far.
Look, see how the tree branch resembles a cord powering the streetlamp? On the blanket, that’s her. And a fellow named Craig who I thought was named Hugh. Sleeping in Seattle with a green Hugh.
I can feel the mood of this picture in my skin. It’s as if I was there.
Monday, August 06, 2007
the cave electric
Have I been in
But here’s the simplest crazy beauty. It’s always been one or the other in my life: writing or cooking. If I’m writing, I order pizza. If I’m cheffing it up, I skip the laptop. To my amazement, the benefit of being cracked-dirt poor (unexpected emergency vet bills flit and nip at my head like paper-cranes-gone-bad), I now have no choice but to cook. And people, necessity has rendered me a tricksy good cook. The frayed-thread-from-my-old-shoestring budget is, as it happens, the mother of all invention. My fridge resembles that of the Alpha Kappa Beta Abercrombie boys up at
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
silly gato
Three posts in one day is excessive, but my cat Maude has been on my mind all day today and this picture E. sent has made me laugh so hard every time I've looked at it, well I just have to put it up.
see you next week
Going to see Rufus Wainwright this weekend in Saratoga. I'll leave you with a songlist that needs reordering. What sequence would you put it in?
I Was Made to Love Magic Nick Drake
Love Will Tear Us Apart Nouvelle Vague
Do You Realize? The Flaming Lips
Measuring Cups Andrew Bird
Hesitating Beauty Billy Bragg
If I Could Tell You W. H. Auden
Lover I Don't Have to Love Bright Eyes
Ship Caught in the Bay Frames
Poncho's Lament Tom Waits
Sleep Imogen Heap
Bruno's Theme Ben Charest
One Perfect Rose Dorothy Parker
Photocorners The Lovely Feathers
Closer Melissa Ferrick
Jackson Johnny & June Carter Cash
No Children Mountain Goats (God, I love that song)
Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk Rufus Wainwright
New Slang The Shins
Wild Horses The Sundays
Little Chief Xavier Rudd
Outro Yonderboi
I Was Made to Love Magic Nick Drake
Love Will Tear Us Apart Nouvelle Vague
Do You Realize? The Flaming Lips
Measuring Cups Andrew Bird
Hesitating Beauty Billy Bragg
If I Could Tell You W. H. Auden
Lover I Don't Have to Love Bright Eyes
Ship Caught in the Bay Frames
Poncho's Lament Tom Waits
Sleep Imogen Heap
Bruno's Theme Ben Charest
One Perfect Rose Dorothy Parker
Photocorners The Lovely Feathers
Closer Melissa Ferrick
Jackson Johnny & June Carter Cash
No Children Mountain Goats (God, I love that song)
Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk Rufus Wainwright
New Slang The Shins
Wild Horses The Sundays
Little Chief Xavier Rudd
Outro Yonderboi
you have ZERO friends
I accept an invitation to the latest dubious community widget, this one called Goodreads.com. I arrive on the site and, as D. points out to me upon his subsequent receipt of my invitation, it tells me "You Have ZERO Friends." Wow. Okay, I take this deficit seriously, I suppose, because this is, after all, a book club. Even better, it is a book club in which one gets all the wine and cheese to herself and can pop off about what a punk Norman Mailer is anytime she wants, off the grid of the calendar. No one even need be in the room. But, the notion goes, if they're a member of the community, they'll hear you on their own time. Well then, yes, yes, sign me up and get me my dog-eared copy of The Executioner's Song!
So. Like any good grade school chain-letter slave, I immediately blast off invitations to a few readerly friends. Several were already members, some with dozens of books, a few time-sinkers with hundreds. When I hear back from A., he informs me we need no such net below us to talk about titles. Well, no. We don't. I could just as easily write or call him (or you, for that matter) directly, e vero. But I've got lots of excuses: I need nicer quills, some good stationary. Phone's not set up at my new place, low minutes on the cell. I'm out of cheese ... and gads, I need more time. But if I can post on boards, can't I email? Indeed, if I can blog, can't I write letters? Or what about an actual date at L'Amyx?
I very recently visited the marble-and-wood, paper-piled offices of a most talented poet, Steven Rood. He plays classical violin, writes proper letters, lives and breathes poetry to the extent that two weeks is a desperate dry spell. I admire him for it. Last night as I was working on a story involving a harried couple and their encounters with the cats at the Hemingway estate, the couple stopped talking to me and I drifted away from them. I thought of Steven's devotion to his work and I fished out (from the boxes of my recent move) my tattered little motto and taped it up on the wall: "There are those who do and those who wouldacouldashoulda." Indeed. But what it do, as the kids say, is the question.
Is recreational blogging such a waste of time after all? We all need to stretch for the races. And the truth is I do find blogging easier than playing the fiddle. Or developing my fiction. Or, especially that be-all, end-all, most sacred act of my life: writing reviews--the real reviews, the ruminations, those deep carbonic excavations. For me, the process of critiquing is scintillatingly comparable to Maggie Gyllenhaal's work with her little blades in Secretary. Feels unbelievably good to strike something below the skin and to see (and feel) all that flows, brighter and richer than the mundane, everyday agonies, yes. But there is only so much that can be cut in a go. And when I contrast formal writing with the lesser efforts, I can't help but return to those chain letters of my elementary school years and defend their utility. For kids, freeplay is an accepted, if frowned-upon, diversion (I'm talking about my own preambles to blogging--chain letters, horoscopes, passed notes, locker graffiti, and what my brother and I used to call "chit chat" when we stayed up past curfew as young kids to make up stories and giggle ourselves to sleep). Light conversation is a necessary counterpoint to our highest form of masochism, the concerted, highly personal derivation of meaning. I dunno. Besides all that, there's a sort of vanity to all these online monkeyshines, as well. Like looking in the mirror before the big date.
But why hang the laundry online? Is that what this blogging around is all about, a matter of opting first for visibility, well above clarity? What is it about hanging a shingle on the web that's so satisfying? Is it a stamped proof of existence? Not really for me, no. That puts too fine a point to it. And even I have my standards in that regard. Take the quicksands of myspace, friendster, hi5, for example.
Myspace is an analog to the experiences I frequently have on holiday. I visit these breathtaking countries (the humbling spectacles, twinkling cornflower-colored cities after sunset, the awe-inspiring views, the mythical woods, the people and their body languages, the histories haunting street corners, all that wonderment at what's foreign). And in every place, it's the same: pods of humans trot to the brink of their photo opportunity, grin with great plasticity, snap the shots, look around appreciatively, and move along. Move along. Move along. That's all myspace is, proof that you've come, you've conquered, and you've moved the hell along, somehow compensated and enriched by (the exhibition of) shared experience. And hayzeus, go to those sites. The comments are an embarrassment to our kind ("I fucking love you, man; that beerbust was the bomb!"), the worst kind of frathouse asshattery. But mayhaps it's just not my venue.
Muriel Ruykeyser suggested that "if there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger." When I read S.'s lament for the future of literary criticism as corrupted by bloggers and I return once again to these fundamental concerns about the passage (and expenditure) of my own time, I do feel the old worries about productivity arise. But I find now that I can only really fall back on Ruykeyser's words as a rationale for all this rambling. We hunger not only for the sustenance of our mainstays, but for a few empty calories between meals, too. And regardless of what notes I pass on any given day, wherever the pleasures of chit chat may take me, whether I like it or not, I know for certain that it all brings me back to the same hard work with the same damn motto sitting there in front of me like a timeworn provocation. I know down to the bone, even if I entertain the doubts presented by those I admire most, that a masochist works for life.
So. Like any good grade school chain-letter slave, I immediately blast off invitations to a few readerly friends. Several were already members, some with dozens of books, a few time-sinkers with hundreds. When I hear back from A., he informs me we need no such net below us to talk about titles. Well, no. We don't. I could just as easily write or call him (or you, for that matter) directly, e vero. But I've got lots of excuses: I need nicer quills, some good stationary. Phone's not set up at my new place, low minutes on the cell. I'm out of cheese ... and gads, I need more time. But if I can post on boards, can't I email? Indeed, if I can blog, can't I write letters? Or what about an actual date at L'Amyx?
I very recently visited the marble-and-wood, paper-piled offices of a most talented poet, Steven Rood. He plays classical violin, writes proper letters, lives and breathes poetry to the extent that two weeks is a desperate dry spell. I admire him for it. Last night as I was working on a story involving a harried couple and their encounters with the cats at the Hemingway estate, the couple stopped talking to me and I drifted away from them. I thought of Steven's devotion to his work and I fished out (from the boxes of my recent move) my tattered little motto and taped it up on the wall: "There are those who do and those who wouldacouldashoulda." Indeed. But what it do, as the kids say, is the question.
Is recreational blogging such a waste of time after all? We all need to stretch for the races. And the truth is I do find blogging easier than playing the fiddle. Or developing my fiction. Or, especially that be-all, end-all, most sacred act of my life: writing reviews--the real reviews, the ruminations, those deep carbonic excavations. For me, the process of critiquing is scintillatingly comparable to Maggie Gyllenhaal's work with her little blades in Secretary. Feels unbelievably good to strike something below the skin and to see (and feel) all that flows, brighter and richer than the mundane, everyday agonies, yes. But there is only so much that can be cut in a go. And when I contrast formal writing with the lesser efforts, I can't help but return to those chain letters of my elementary school years and defend their utility. For kids, freeplay is an accepted, if frowned-upon, diversion (I'm talking about my own preambles to blogging--chain letters, horoscopes, passed notes, locker graffiti, and what my brother and I used to call "chit chat" when we stayed up past curfew as young kids to make up stories and giggle ourselves to sleep). Light conversation is a necessary counterpoint to our highest form of masochism, the concerted, highly personal derivation of meaning. I dunno. Besides all that, there's a sort of vanity to all these online monkeyshines, as well. Like looking in the mirror before the big date.
But why hang the laundry online? Is that what this blogging around is all about, a matter of opting first for visibility, well above clarity? What is it about hanging a shingle on the web that's so satisfying? Is it a stamped proof of existence? Not really for me, no. That puts too fine a point to it. And even I have my standards in that regard. Take the quicksands of myspace, friendster, hi5, for example.
Myspace is an analog to the experiences I frequently have on holiday. I visit these breathtaking countries (the humbling spectacles, twinkling cornflower-colored cities after sunset, the awe-inspiring views, the mythical woods, the people and their body languages, the histories haunting street corners, all that wonderment at what's foreign). And in every place, it's the same: pods of humans trot to the brink of their photo opportunity, grin with great plasticity, snap the shots, look around appreciatively, and move along. Move along. Move along. That's all myspace is, proof that you've come, you've conquered, and you've moved the hell along, somehow compensated and enriched by (the exhibition of) shared experience. And hayzeus, go to those sites. The comments are an embarrassment to our kind ("I fucking love you, man; that beerbust was the bomb!"), the worst kind of frathouse asshattery. But mayhaps it's just not my venue.
Muriel Ruykeyser suggested that "if there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger." When I read S.'s lament for the future of literary criticism as corrupted by bloggers and I return once again to these fundamental concerns about the passage (and expenditure) of my own time, I do feel the old worries about productivity arise. But I find now that I can only really fall back on Ruykeyser's words as a rationale for all this rambling. We hunger not only for the sustenance of our mainstays, but for a few empty calories between meals, too. And regardless of what notes I pass on any given day, wherever the pleasures of chit chat may take me, whether I like it or not, I know for certain that it all brings me back to the same hard work with the same damn motto sitting there in front of me like a timeworn provocation. I know down to the bone, even if I entertain the doubts presented by those I admire most, that a masochist works for life.
Monday, July 30, 2007
happy mondays
A welcome gift to start my week:
What is important cannot be seen.
It’s the same as with the flower.
If you love a flower that lives on a star,
it is sweet to look up at the night sky.
All the stars are in bloom.
It’s the same as with the water.
What you gave me to drink was a kind of music...
At night, when you look up at the sky,
since I shall be living on a star,
and since I shall be laughing on a star,
for you it will be as if all the stars are laughing.
You alone will have stars that can laugh!
And when you have got over your loss
(for we always do),
you’ll be happy to have known me.
You will always be my friend.
You will want to laugh with me.
—The Little Prince
What is important cannot be seen.
It’s the same as with the flower.
If you love a flower that lives on a star,
it is sweet to look up at the night sky.
All the stars are in bloom.
It’s the same as with the water.
What you gave me to drink was a kind of music...
At night, when you look up at the sky,
since I shall be living on a star,
and since I shall be laughing on a star,
for you it will be as if all the stars are laughing.
You alone will have stars that can laugh!
And when you have got over your loss
(for we always do),
you’ll be happy to have known me.
You will always be my friend.
You will want to laugh with me.
—The Little Prince
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
secret passage, hidden treasure
The night before I came to visit, the artists at Diving Swallow Tattoo opened their space up for a showing of Tibetan thangkas. One particularly rich, dark thangka was hung up toward the front of the gallery space, on the wall adjacent to the dragon-handled door and the neon flowers lighting the front window. And while Marie Wadman was busy mixing custom inks and prepping her station, I stood magnetized to the painting. Avalokiteshvara was the bodhisattva’s name. I knew just enough about Tibetan Buddhism to have passed my Problem of God and assorted world religion classes at Georgetown, but beyond that could be considered your typical Berkeley dabbler, a spiritual tire-kicker with—at best—an intellectual, recreational interest (though I happened to be midway through a simple, helpful book called Change of Heart at the time).
In the thrall of endorphins that lasted the next few hours, I sat propped on the pillows slung over a pub chair as Marie worked on my back. And I thought about the thangka, about this thousand-armed icon, about the place of spirituality in the world, in my world, the use of it. And I started to turn over and over the outside hope that maybe Avalokiteshvara arrived for a reason, as if he revealed a passage sliding open just as I set eyes on it.
Working at a place like North Atlantic, I walk within so many different communities—martial arts, healing & health, literary, and of course spiritual. The result of having spent my days supporting the work of these folks, so many of them with decades of experience refining their practices, is, in this case, instant, intimate access to the full story of the Bodhisattva of Compassion.
Avalokiteshvara, so disturbed by the depthless sadness of the world, committed to freeing all sentient beings from the suffering of our world. Looking around himself at all the sorrow that persisted despite his best efforts, he fell into despair. In form with the fantastic narrative turns of so many parables, Avalokiteshvara’s head then split into thousands of pieces. When Amitabha Buddha restored him, he gave him eleven heads with which he could hear the cries of souls in samsara. Avalokiteshvara tried to reach out to them all, but his two arms shattered, inspiring Amitabha Buddha to give him a thousand arms, with an eye on each palm, to reach out to those suffering in the world.
I am going today to pick up my thangka of Avalokiteshvara. I am impossibly excited about it, about setting up an honorable little place in my new home for him. My relationship to him, as well as my increasing awareness of respect, compassion, detachment, feels like a smooth rock in my pocket, a treasure for the moment and for the ages. I’m a lucky kid!
In the thrall of endorphins that lasted the next few hours, I sat propped on the pillows slung over a pub chair as Marie worked on my back. And I thought about the thangka, about this thousand-armed icon, about the place of spirituality in the world, in my world, the use of it. And I started to turn over and over the outside hope that maybe Avalokiteshvara arrived for a reason, as if he revealed a passage sliding open just as I set eyes on it.
Working at a place like North Atlantic, I walk within so many different communities—martial arts, healing & health, literary, and of course spiritual. The result of having spent my days supporting the work of these folks, so many of them with decades of experience refining their practices, is, in this case, instant, intimate access to the full story of the Bodhisattva of Compassion.
Avalokiteshvara, so disturbed by the depthless sadness of the world, committed to freeing all sentient beings from the suffering of our world. Looking around himself at all the sorrow that persisted despite his best efforts, he fell into despair. In form with the fantastic narrative turns of so many parables, Avalokiteshvara’s head then split into thousands of pieces. When Amitabha Buddha restored him, he gave him eleven heads with which he could hear the cries of souls in samsara. Avalokiteshvara tried to reach out to them all, but his two arms shattered, inspiring Amitabha Buddha to give him a thousand arms, with an eye on each palm, to reach out to those suffering in the world.
I am going today to pick up my thangka of Avalokiteshvara. I am impossibly excited about it, about setting up an honorable little place in my new home for him. My relationship to him, as well as my increasing awareness of respect, compassion, detachment, feels like a smooth rock in my pocket, a treasure for the moment and for the ages. I’m a lucky kid!
Sunday, July 22, 2007
notes (of oak and cassis) from underground
“The Grim Eater” in Pixar’s Ratatouille, in my view, begins the movie as a symbol of all that needs to change in culinary criticism—snobbery, ego (indeed, Ego is the critic’s surname), stringency, and, most of all, isolation. If he is not alone in his funereal office writing damning reviews of doomed restaurants, he is dining alone with palpable disdain.
Look, by contrast, at the critics of Top Chef. If you’re unfamiliar with the show, here’s BRAVO’s description: “A group of twelve aspiring chefs, both professionally trained and self-taught, will compete in a series of culinary challenges. Each week, one contestant will be eliminated by a group of well-known judges. The winning chef will receive…”—yes, yes, yes, they receive lots of prizes. But what’s left unsaid there is the most welcome development that America’s socially anemic foodie culture has seen since Julia. Huge groups of folks are shown coming together, eating together, talking together.
We need only note that Top Chef’s ridiculously sharp and sexy Padma Lakshmi jilted Salman Rushdie shortly after heartthrob gadabout Tony Bourdain guest-judged an episode alongside her to understand that food is, in fact, the music of love. Sharing it is a binding human ritual. Feels as if we folks in the U.S. today are alone in our oblivion to this primal need. Even on a recent trip to ancient Roman ruins of the San Sebastiani catacombs (Peter and Paul—Bible, not band—were buried there), I visited a huge subterranean room in which Christians are said to have held intimate feasts for their beloved dead. After they finished eating, they etched benedictions into the wall. They broke bread. Life had meaning worth recognizing and recording together.
The good news: underground dinner parties are, if you will, on the rise. Never heard of them? Stay tuned for a forthcoming article I’ve written on this phenomenon. I recently attended one such event hosted in a gorgeous live-work space in SF’s Mission district. I don’t think I overstate it when I hope that these parties may bring Americans the closest we’ve come yet to a legitimately Italian piazza experience.
I’ll distinguish the eating experience this way. Saturday night: I’m at Bar Bambino, where, engaged solely with the fabulous company I kept at my private table, I ignored every other soul in the room. Come Sunday, on the other hand, I’m awash in the open energy of forty souls gathered to enjoy an inventive seven-course meal of fresh, organic food all together and to scratch out some new cross-hatches in their already live social networks. More coming on this soon. In the meantime, here’s what I ate:
Poblano pepper taquito
Roasted poblano, avocado, crooknecks, coconut meat with a sauce of cilantro, lime, tamarind, seeds (pumpkin, sunflower, flax)
Tres gazpachos
Ginger tofu skewers with drunken morels
Ginger-tekka-sichimi tofu, ume-shiso kanten, sea palm, and morel
Tahini porcini rapini greens
Composed salad
Cipolline onion, haricort vert, chiogga beets, Bermuda Triangle chevre, filberts, cresses with a kumquat, tarragon, and fennel confit
Jeweled baby basmati
Basmati with barberry, mulberry, tonka bean, saffron, orange blossoms, pistachio
Stonefruit ten ways
Plum: raw, frozen, thyme
White peach: hot and cold gelee with coconut water
Poached yellow peach tart with apricot ice cream
White nectarine: raw, frozen, rose geranium
Yellow nectarine: raw, confit with candied kumquat
(That last one—stonefruit ten ways—sent me scrambling back to the Wallace Stevens poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Even the jilted literati have to admit: there is a certain inimitable pleasure to a menu—look at those noble accents and lucid, inescapable rhythms. It can only be poetry.)
Look, by contrast, at the critics of Top Chef. If you’re unfamiliar with the show, here’s BRAVO’s description: “A group of twelve aspiring chefs, both professionally trained and self-taught, will compete in a series of culinary challenges. Each week, one contestant will be eliminated by a group of well-known judges. The winning chef will receive…”—yes, yes, yes, they receive lots of prizes. But what’s left unsaid there is the most welcome development that America’s socially anemic foodie culture has seen since Julia. Huge groups of folks are shown coming together, eating together, talking together.
We need only note that Top Chef’s ridiculously sharp and sexy Padma Lakshmi jilted Salman Rushdie shortly after heartthrob gadabout Tony Bourdain guest-judged an episode alongside her to understand that food is, in fact, the music of love. Sharing it is a binding human ritual. Feels as if we folks in the U.S. today are alone in our oblivion to this primal need. Even on a recent trip to ancient Roman ruins of the San Sebastiani catacombs (Peter and Paul—Bible, not band—were buried there), I visited a huge subterranean room in which Christians are said to have held intimate feasts for their beloved dead. After they finished eating, they etched benedictions into the wall. They broke bread. Life had meaning worth recognizing and recording together.
The good news: underground dinner parties are, if you will, on the rise. Never heard of them? Stay tuned for a forthcoming article I’ve written on this phenomenon. I recently attended one such event hosted in a gorgeous live-work space in SF’s Mission district. I don’t think I overstate it when I hope that these parties may bring Americans the closest we’ve come yet to a legitimately Italian piazza experience.
I’ll distinguish the eating experience this way. Saturday night: I’m at Bar Bambino, where, engaged solely with the fabulous company I kept at my private table, I ignored every other soul in the room. Come Sunday, on the other hand, I’m awash in the open energy of forty souls gathered to enjoy an inventive seven-course meal of fresh, organic food all together and to scratch out some new cross-hatches in their already live social networks. More coming on this soon. In the meantime, here’s what I ate:
Poblano pepper taquito
Roasted poblano, avocado, crooknecks, coconut meat with a sauce of cilantro, lime, tamarind, seeds (pumpkin, sunflower, flax)
Tres gazpachos
Ginger tofu skewers with drunken morels
Ginger-tekka-sichimi tofu, ume-shiso kanten, sea palm, and morel
Tahini porcini rapini greens
Composed salad
Cipolline onion, haricort vert, chiogga beets, Bermuda Triangle chevre, filberts, cresses with a kumquat, tarragon, and fennel confit
Jeweled baby basmati
Basmati with barberry, mulberry, tonka bean, saffron, orange blossoms, pistachio
Stonefruit ten ways
Plum: raw, frozen, thyme
White peach: hot and cold gelee with coconut water
Poached yellow peach tart with apricot ice cream
White nectarine: raw, frozen, rose geranium
Yellow nectarine: raw, confit with candied kumquat
(That last one—stonefruit ten ways—sent me scrambling back to the Wallace Stevens poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Even the jilted literati have to admit: there is a certain inimitable pleasure to a menu—look at those noble accents and lucid, inescapable rhythms. It can only be poetry.)
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
so jealous
I stand here cooking. The sage and prosciutto crisp up and the two tilapia fillets are just done. Her white zin poured, my Ariel chilled. We’re about ready and Miss Liz Hille circles the kitchen, hungry hawk. I have known her for a few years now—we wrote fiction and set our first darts of literary criticism sailing together at Bennington Writing Seminars—and I have stepped wordlessly out of her life multiple times to etch out runes in the soot of my solitary cave. Again this time, she’s there, easy, when I emerge. I dish up fish, potatoes. I listen as she recounts climbing toward meaning after having had her students read Hills Like White Elephant and I realize what I’m feeling: jealousy. However many light-years apart our preferences in style may be (her Bukowski to my Coetzee, her Gaitskill to my Austen), I envy the students who get to work with a reader like her.
It’s not that I lack literary outlets. I can—and do—lob titles with whip-quick bibliophiles every day. In fact, I realize I spend the greater part of most days devoted to books in one way or another—reading, editing, rereading, writing, throwing, weeping into, studying, browsing, copying, promoting, reveling, reimagining—and so I necessarily talk to and work with lots of like-minded humans, all communing around this momentary art. Liz, however, has some simple witchcraft in her way of reading. We should all be so free of pretensions, but engaged to the depths. I toast genuine curiosity, the possession of fierce opinions without a single cutting edge, and most of all, shameless rapacity. But I can’t help but worry her kitchen might get crowded. Can you blame me?
Here’s an excerpt of Liz’s latest.
It’s not that I lack literary outlets. I can—and do—lob titles with whip-quick bibliophiles every day. In fact, I realize I spend the greater part of most days devoted to books in one way or another—reading, editing, rereading, writing, throwing, weeping into, studying, browsing, copying, promoting, reveling, reimagining—and so I necessarily talk to and work with lots of like-minded humans, all communing around this momentary art. Liz, however, has some simple witchcraft in her way of reading. We should all be so free of pretensions, but engaged to the depths. I toast genuine curiosity, the possession of fierce opinions without a single cutting edge, and most of all, shameless rapacity. But I can’t help but worry her kitchen might get crowded. Can you blame me?
Here’s an excerpt of Liz’s latest.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
those who can't do
for Library Journal
Kohl, Herbert. Painting Chinese: A Lifelong Teacher Gains the Wisdom of Youth. Aug. 2007. Bloomsbury
Wilder, Robert. Tales from the Teacher’s Lounge. Aug. 2007. Delacorte Press. 309 p. ISBN-13: 978-0-385-33927-8; ISBN-10: 0-385-33927-5. $23.00.
Robert Wilder, having left behind an advertising career to work as a teacher, presents classroom tales so tall that they function less as reliable memoir than dramatic parody of classroom-as-asylum, with much of the (laugh-out-loud) humor derived at the expense of young students’ attitudes, actions, and disabilities. Each of the four thematic parts (teacher training, student days, family and education, and a final selection loosely bound by the idea of a teaching community) depicts more stammering, twitching, swearing, and screaming than the average school could abide without being shut down. So while the essays in Tales from the Teacher’s Lounge exhibit the author’s knack for hyperbole and well-timed, outrageous hilarity, that entertainment value is boldly derived from disturbing classroom scenarios.
Worlds apart stylistically and thematically, Painting Chinese shows Herbert Kohl as he retires after forty-seven years as a professor and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and Social Justice at
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
let them eat cake (fire?)
Okay, one more thing before I go. In a recent article in the NYRB, Max Rodenbeck leads into an exploration of Lebanon & its discontents with a quote from an unnamed Hezbollah spokesperson. It is as follows: "This country is like a cake. On the top it is cream. Underneath it is fire."
Meh? A journalist should be able to distinguish quotable wheat from compostable chaff. True enough, Rodenbeck is good enough to note that the metaphor is "clumsy," but then he goes on to unpack it anyway, pondering that while "Lebanon whets appetites with its gorgeous landscapes, clement weather, energetic people, and wonderful food, trying to consume too much of it tends to bring on heartburn" and that the "country's infernally complex ingredients seem chemically incapable of melding into a digestible dish."
Oy. Hyperextended metaphors taste like supermarket ice cream cake with that gel icing and filling made of capsaicin and wasabi peas.
An escape to gelato never sounded better! See you in July.
Meh? A journalist should be able to distinguish quotable wheat from compostable chaff. True enough, Rodenbeck is good enough to note that the metaphor is "clumsy," but then he goes on to unpack it anyway, pondering that while "Lebanon whets appetites with its gorgeous landscapes, clement weather, energetic people, and wonderful food, trying to consume too much of it tends to bring on heartburn" and that the "country's infernally complex ingredients seem chemically incapable of melding into a digestible dish."
Oy. Hyperextended metaphors taste like supermarket ice cream cake with that gel icing and filling made of capsaicin and wasabi peas.
An escape to gelato never sounded better! See you in July.
all the gelato i can eat
I've finished revising a short story just in time to fly off the continent and spend a spell riding horses in Sardinia. It will be like Chariots of Fire, only a better soundtrack and clearer water:
Here's my illustration of what I'll be doing, aside from ambling with ponies:
Well, I will be more relaxed than that. I can't use anything but that spraycan in Photoshop. It's my very own airbrush. Very classy, very Atlantic-City-meets-Sardinian-rock-formation.
And one more thing: I just rec'd an email from one of my authors. She asked whether a given photo would work for her author photo. She described it as the read-my-book-or-I'll-spank-you picture. How can an editor say no to such a photo? Love the people I work with.
Still, the horses are whinnying. Ciao, ragazzi.
Here's my illustration of what I'll be doing, aside from ambling with ponies:
Well, I will be more relaxed than that. I can't use anything but that spraycan in Photoshop. It's my very own airbrush. Very classy, very Atlantic-City-meets-Sardinian-rock-formation.
And one more thing: I just rec'd an email from one of my authors. She asked whether a given photo would work for her author photo. She described it as the read-my-book-or-I'll-spank-you picture. How can an editor say no to such a photo? Love the people I work with.
Still, the horses are whinnying. Ciao, ragazzi.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
the originals
On my way to represent BADRAP in the SF Pride Parade and it reminded me--I never posted this review.
for Library Journal
Gallo, Marcia M. Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement. Nov. 2006. Avalon Publishing. 320 p. bibliog. appendix of interviews. endnotes. ISBN-13: 978-0-78671-634-0; ISBN-10: 0-7867-1634-7. $26.95.
Friday, May 11, 2007
speaking of silence ...
Paretsky, Sara. Writing in an Age of Silence. May 2007. Verso. 158 p. endnotes. ISBN 978-1-84467-122-9. $22.95
for Library Journal
Writing in an Age of Silence, catalogued as an autobiographical essay collection, develops as a conscientious objection to the new American McCarthyism. Not that Sara Paretsky, bestselling author of a dozen novels, lets die-hard mystery fans down. She shares her development process for V.I. Warshawski, her famous protagonist and South Side Chicago private eye, and compares Warshawski with male counterparts Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. Paretsky offers a feminist interpretation of the loner hero’s code of justice and an analysis of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett’s influence on her work. Still, the final—and most political—chapter resonates most. A volunteer in Gage Park during Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1966 summer march and a feminist since the second wave crested, Paretsky renounces contemporary U.S. policies in a gutsy inventory of the civil rights infringements that threaten her livelihood, including unlawful search and seizure and arrest & detainment without habeas corpus. Paretsky’s vocational purpose finds its best expression in her apt Tennyson epigraph: ‘though much is taken, much abides.’ Highly recommended for public and academic libraries.-—Elizabeth Kennedy, Oakland, CA
for Library Journal
Writing in an Age of Silence, catalogued as an autobiographical essay collection, develops as a conscientious objection to the new American McCarthyism. Not that Sara Paretsky, bestselling author of a dozen novels, lets die-hard mystery fans down. She shares her development process for V.I. Warshawski, her famous protagonist and South Side Chicago private eye, and compares Warshawski with male counterparts Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. Paretsky offers a feminist interpretation of the loner hero’s code of justice and an analysis of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett’s influence on her work. Still, the final—and most political—chapter resonates most. A volunteer in Gage Park during Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1966 summer march and a feminist since the second wave crested, Paretsky renounces contemporary U.S. policies in a gutsy inventory of the civil rights infringements that threaten her livelihood, including unlawful search and seizure and arrest & detainment without habeas corpus. Paretsky’s vocational purpose finds its best expression in her apt Tennyson epigraph: ‘though much is taken, much abides.’ Highly recommended for public and academic libraries.-—Elizabeth Kennedy, Oakland, CA
Friday, May 05, 2006
totally bitchin'
Jervis, Lisa and Andi Zeisler, eds. bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine. Aug. 2006. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 256p. resource list. ISBN-10: 0-374-11343-2. ISBN-13: 978-0-374-11343-8. $15.
for Library Journal
bitchfest represents an alternating mix of the most hilarious, alarming, and unexpected essays from Bitch Magazine's ten-year tenure. Over three-quarters of the works fall into the decade's latter half and, with the exception of an approving pre-scandal profile of Martha Stewart, all retain complete cultural currency. About-Face founder Kathy Bruin journals on the eve of her celebrated Don't Feed the Models postering campaign. Keely Savoie presents a brilliant journalistic brief on the 400+ animal species documented in homosexual relationships. Shauna Swartz turns out an indelible account of the severe life of reality porn actresses. bitchfest writers, a mix of thought leaders and unknown activists, share a talent for asking thorny questions: how can Westerners distinguish between American cosmetic labiaplasty and African genital mutilation? Why the preponderance of articles positioning housework as the exercise au courant? Why can't female Cosmo readers admit they're attracted to, rather than jealous of, waifs on the glossy covers? Readers new to the feminist quarterly will find the articles, almost without exception, original, intelligent, and well written. This compilation has staying power. Highly recommended for all libraries.-Elizabeth Kennedy, Oakland, CA
for Library Journal
bitchfest represents an alternating mix of the most hilarious, alarming, and unexpected essays from Bitch Magazine's ten-year tenure. Over three-quarters of the works fall into the decade's latter half and, with the exception of an approving pre-scandal profile of Martha Stewart, all retain complete cultural currency. About-Face founder Kathy Bruin journals on the eve of her celebrated Don't Feed the Models postering campaign. Keely Savoie presents a brilliant journalistic brief on the 400+ animal species documented in homosexual relationships. Shauna Swartz turns out an indelible account of the severe life of reality porn actresses. bitchfest writers, a mix of thought leaders and unknown activists, share a talent for asking thorny questions: how can Westerners distinguish between American cosmetic labiaplasty and African genital mutilation? Why the preponderance of articles positioning housework as the exercise au courant? Why can't female Cosmo readers admit they're attracted to, rather than jealous of, waifs on the glossy covers? Readers new to the feminist quarterly will find the articles, almost without exception, original, intelligent, and well written. This compilation has staying power. Highly recommended for all libraries.-Elizabeth Kennedy, Oakland, CA
Friday, April 07, 2006
such as i was, such as i was
I previously mentioned Ionesco. It's always a pleasure to return to this poem. I found the translation from the French in an old Iowa Review on my shelves--the poem possesses that rereadability that Bloom (or was it Frost?) suggested determines a poem's worth.
Souvenir
At my wits' ends,
in a haze.
So out of it, I stuck
my right foot in a pot,
neither alert: so I stepped
out with my left.
I have been traipsing, though,
light as air, through the clouds.
If the stars should make me stumble
I would pick them up like apples.
I loved myself, such as
I was; such as I was.
Souvenir
At my wits' ends,
in a haze.
So out of it, I stuck
my right foot in a pot,
neither alert: so I stepped
out with my left.
I have been traipsing, though,
light as air, through the clouds.
If the stars should make me stumble
I would pick them up like apples.
I loved myself, such as
I was; such as I was.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
heaney & joel
Heaney's an elegant alternative to that Billy Joel song Just the Way You Are: "You always have my unspoken passion, though I might not seem to care." (Yes, I've used that.)
Scaffolding
Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;
Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.
And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.
So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me
Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.
Scaffolding
Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;
Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.
And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.
So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me
Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
foodstuffs
My old refrigerator & I have parted ways. Oh the memories of my roomy magic box of icy air. I kept this poem in there. Now that I've got a halfling fridge, I keep the poem over the sink. Unlike the poem next to it, this one lacks lamination. Alas, it's taken a beating. Yet there it remains.
Eating Poetry
by Mark Strand
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man,
I snarl at her and bark,
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
Eating Poetry
by Mark Strand
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man,
I snarl at her and bark,
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
wm stafford, as promised
Please find your way to the audio of Stafford reading this. His voice is shot through with this present, stoic resignation. Unforgettable.
Traveling Through the Dark
Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.
My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.
The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.
Traveling Through the Dark
Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.
My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.
The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.
Monday, April 03, 2006
pro wrestler, orr, elizabeth
I keep telling myself that very soon I will stop reading The New York Times Book Review.
And I think if David Orr hadn't redeemed the rag with an ardent paean to one of my heroes, Elizabeth Bishop, I'd have canceled last week when the editors decided to celebrate Thomas Hackett's Slaphappy, a "commendable" treatise on...professional wrestling.
Whew. Okay....at least there's Bishop. A good poem rides on its own melting, right? Yes, yes. This, especially in her most famous and accessible poem, The Fish, is an ideal metaphor for Elizabeth Bishop's work.
And the swell that follows, at least for Orr, is tremendous; he begins his long song (this is a review of one of those dodgy collections of bits and scraps the poet never wanted published) with this: "You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop. Granted, our culture owes its shape to plenty of other forces — Hollywood, Microsoft, Rachael Ray — but nothing matches the impact of a great artist, and in the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop (1911-79)." Oh my. Microsoft, Rachael Ray,--and Elizabeth Bishop?
But Elizabeth is what matters here. (Isn't that always the case?) From what I've heard recorded, Elizabeth Bishop had a complete lack of charisma reading her work. And this is a real shame because her words are so clarified, so intelligent, so sensory, and the significance deepens by virtue of allusion, figurative hints, shape, color. I tend to like theatrical readers -- Yeats, Millay, Auden, Sandburg. Then again, I cried when I first heard the very understated William Stafford read his Traveling Through the Dark so subtlely. So maybe the challenge here is to do what Borges insisted -- not read in a low voice. Not read silently. Read this aloud. Loud. Better than Bishop would.
The Moose
by Elizabeth Bishop
For Grace Bulmer Bowers
From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,
where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;
where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats'
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;
on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches,
through late afternoon
a bus journeys west,
the windshield flashing pink,
pink glancing off of metal,
brushing the dented flank
of blue, beat-up enamel;
down hollows, up rises,
and waits, patient, while
a lone traveller gives
kisses and embraces
to seven relatives
and a collie supervises.
Goodbye to the elms,
to the farm, to the dog.
The bus starts. The light
grows richer; the fog,
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.
Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hens' feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage roses
and lupins like apostles;
the sweet peas cling
to their wet white string
on the whitewashed fences;
bumblebees creep
inside the foxgloves,
and evening commences.
One stop at Bass River.
Then the Economies
Lower, Middle, Upper;
Five Islands, Five Houses,
where a woman shakes a tablecloth
out after supper.
A pale flickering. Gone.
The Tantramar marshes
and the smell of salt hay.
An iron bridge trembles
and a loose plank rattles
but doesn't give way.
On the left, a red light
swims through the dark:
a ship's port lantern.
Two rubber boots show,
illuminated, solemn.
A dog gives one bark.
A woman climbs in
with two market bags,
brisk, freckled, elderly.
"A grand night. Yes, sir,
all the way to Boston."
She regards us amicably.
Moonlight as we enter
the New Brunswick woods,
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb's wool
on bushes in a pasture.
The passengers lie back.
Snores. Some long sighs.
A dreamy divagation
begins in the night,
a gentle, auditory,
slow hallucination. . . .
In the creakings and noises,
an old conversation
--not concerning us,
but recognizable, somewhere,
back in the bus:
Grandparents' voices
uninterruptedly
talking, in Eternity:
names being mentioned,
things cleared up finally;
what he said, what she said,
who got pensioned;
deaths, deaths and sicknesses;
the year he remarried;
the year (something) happened.
She died in childbirth.
That was the son lost
when the schooner foundered.
He took to drink. Yes.
She went to the bad.
When Amos began to pray
even in the store and
finally the family had
to put him away.
"Yes . . ." that peculiar
affirmative. "Yes . . ."
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means "Life's like that.
We know it (also death)."
Talking the way they talked
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on,
dim lamplight in the hall,
down in the kitchen, the dog
tucked in her shawl.
Now, it's all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
--Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.
A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.
Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man's voice assures us
"Perfectly harmless. . . ."
Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
"Sure are big creatures."
"It's awful plain."
"Look! It's a she!"
Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?
"Curious creatures,"
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r's.
"Look at that, would you."
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,
by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there's a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.
And I think if David Orr hadn't redeemed the rag with an ardent paean to one of my heroes, Elizabeth Bishop, I'd have canceled last week when the editors decided to celebrate Thomas Hackett's Slaphappy, a "commendable" treatise on...professional wrestling.
Whew. Okay....at least there's Bishop. A good poem rides on its own melting, right? Yes, yes. This, especially in her most famous and accessible poem, The Fish, is an ideal metaphor for Elizabeth Bishop's work.
And the swell that follows, at least for Orr, is tremendous; he begins his long song (this is a review of one of those dodgy collections of bits and scraps the poet never wanted published) with this: "You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop. Granted, our culture owes its shape to plenty of other forces — Hollywood, Microsoft, Rachael Ray — but nothing matches the impact of a great artist, and in the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop (1911-79)." Oh my. Microsoft, Rachael Ray,--and Elizabeth Bishop?
But Elizabeth is what matters here. (Isn't that always the case?) From what I've heard recorded, Elizabeth Bishop had a complete lack of charisma reading her work. And this is a real shame because her words are so clarified, so intelligent, so sensory, and the significance deepens by virtue of allusion, figurative hints, shape, color. I tend to like theatrical readers -- Yeats, Millay, Auden, Sandburg. Then again, I cried when I first heard the very understated William Stafford read his Traveling Through the Dark so subtlely. So maybe the challenge here is to do what Borges insisted -- not read in a low voice. Not read silently. Read this aloud. Loud. Better than Bishop would.
The Moose
by Elizabeth Bishop
For Grace Bulmer Bowers
From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,
where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;
where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats'
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;
on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches,
through late afternoon
a bus journeys west,
the windshield flashing pink,
pink glancing off of metal,
brushing the dented flank
of blue, beat-up enamel;
down hollows, up rises,
and waits, patient, while
a lone traveller gives
kisses and embraces
to seven relatives
and a collie supervises.
Goodbye to the elms,
to the farm, to the dog.
The bus starts. The light
grows richer; the fog,
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.
Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hens' feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage roses
and lupins like apostles;
the sweet peas cling
to their wet white string
on the whitewashed fences;
bumblebees creep
inside the foxgloves,
and evening commences.
One stop at Bass River.
Then the Economies
Lower, Middle, Upper;
Five Islands, Five Houses,
where a woman shakes a tablecloth
out after supper.
A pale flickering. Gone.
The Tantramar marshes
and the smell of salt hay.
An iron bridge trembles
and a loose plank rattles
but doesn't give way.
On the left, a red light
swims through the dark:
a ship's port lantern.
Two rubber boots show,
illuminated, solemn.
A dog gives one bark.
A woman climbs in
with two market bags,
brisk, freckled, elderly.
"A grand night. Yes, sir,
all the way to Boston."
She regards us amicably.
Moonlight as we enter
the New Brunswick woods,
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb's wool
on bushes in a pasture.
The passengers lie back.
Snores. Some long sighs.
A dreamy divagation
begins in the night,
a gentle, auditory,
slow hallucination. . . .
In the creakings and noises,
an old conversation
--not concerning us,
but recognizable, somewhere,
back in the bus:
Grandparents' voices
uninterruptedly
talking, in Eternity:
names being mentioned,
things cleared up finally;
what he said, what she said,
who got pensioned;
deaths, deaths and sicknesses;
the year he remarried;
the year (something) happened.
She died in childbirth.
That was the son lost
when the schooner foundered.
He took to drink. Yes.
She went to the bad.
When Amos began to pray
even in the store and
finally the family had
to put him away.
"Yes . . ." that peculiar
affirmative. "Yes . . ."
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means "Life's like that.
We know it (also death)."
Talking the way they talked
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on,
dim lamplight in the hall,
down in the kitchen, the dog
tucked in her shawl.
Now, it's all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
--Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.
A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.
Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man's voice assures us
"Perfectly harmless. . . ."
Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
"Sure are big creatures."
"It's awful plain."
"Look! It's a she!"
Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?
"Curious creatures,"
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r's.
"Look at that, would you."
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,
by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there's a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
wise and otherwise
donald hall & i talked here and there at bennington, but i was too shy ever to engage him in person with anything but either quick-solve poetic puzzlements -- so i wrote him a letter instead.
even his letters are suffused with the strong hall personality -- rascally, suspect, farmy, funny.
i think it was PBS that ran a documentary on the life interrupted with his wife jane kenyon, who died too too early (not that there's an on-time or too late). he has written so much abt her and their life. elegiac stuff is so often hard for me to swallow, but i was in this auditorium early in my grad school career with all these strangers and as i watched the documentary, i just cried and cried and cried. i had to leave.
Otherwise
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birchwood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
-- Jane Kenyon
even his letters are suffused with the strong hall personality -- rascally, suspect, farmy, funny.
i think it was PBS that ran a documentary on the life interrupted with his wife jane kenyon, who died too too early (not that there's an on-time or too late). he has written so much abt her and their life. elegiac stuff is so often hard for me to swallow, but i was in this auditorium early in my grad school career with all these strangers and as i watched the documentary, i just cried and cried and cried. i had to leave.
Otherwise
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birchwood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
-- Jane Kenyon
Saturday, April 01, 2006
lost in translation
Two translations of Wislawa Szymborska's poetry. These two were my awakening as to what a difference a translator makes. First the version I prefer ... translated by the omnipresent Clare Cavanagh (and Stanislaw Baranczak). I think I mucked up the the line breaks--sorry abt that.
The Terrorist, He's Watching
The bomb in the bar will explode at thirteen twenty
Now it's just thirteen sixteen.
There's still time for some to go in,
And some to come out.
The terrorist has already crossed the street.
The distance keeps him out of danger,
And what a view--just like the movies.
A woman in a yellow jacket, she's going in.
A man in dark glasses, he's coming out.
Teen-agers in jeans, they're talking.
Thirteen seventeen and four seconds.
The short one, he's lucky, he's getting on a scooter,
But the tall one, he's going in.
Thirteen seventeen and forty seconds.
That girl, she's walking along with a green ribbon in her hair.
But then a bus suddenly pulls in front of her.
Thirteen eighteen. The girl's gone.
Was she that dumb, did she go in or not,
We'll see when they carry them out.
Thirteen nineteen. Somehow no one's going in.
Another guy, fat, bald, is leaving, though.
Wait a second, looks like he's looking
For something in his pockets and
At thirteen twenty minus ten seconds
He goes back in for his crummy gloves.
Thirteen twenty exactly. This waiting, it's taking forever.
Any second now.
No, not yet.
Yes, now. The bomb, it explodes.
Then here's the one that I found by Dennis O'Driscoll...almost as if they're two entirely different poems with only the subject matter in common.
The One Twenty Pub
The bomb is primed to go off at one twenty.
A time-check: one sixteen.
There's still a chance for some to join
the pub's ranks, for others to drop out.
The terrorist watches from across the street.
Distance will shield him
from the impact of what he sees:
A woman, turquoise jacket on her shoulder,
enters; a man with sunglasses departs.
Youths in tee-shirts loiter without intent.
One seventeen and four seconds.
The scrawny motorcyclist, revving up
to leave, won't believe his luck;
but the tall man steps straight in.
One seventeen and forty seconds.
That girl, over there with the walkman
... now the bus has cut her off.
One eighteen exactly.
Was she stupid enough to head inside?
Or wasn't she? We'll know before long,
when the dead are carried out.
It's one nineteen.
Nothing much to report
until a muddled barfly hesitates,
fumbles with his pockets, and, like
a blasted fool, stumbles back
at one nineteen and forty seconds
to retrieve his goddamn cap.
One twenty
How time drags when ...
Any moment now.
Not yet.
Yes.
Yes,
there
it
goes.
The Terrorist, He's Watching
The bomb in the bar will explode at thirteen twenty
Now it's just thirteen sixteen.
There's still time for some to go in,
And some to come out.
The terrorist has already crossed the street.
The distance keeps him out of danger,
And what a view--just like the movies.
A woman in a yellow jacket, she's going in.
A man in dark glasses, he's coming out.
Teen-agers in jeans, they're talking.
Thirteen seventeen and four seconds.
The short one, he's lucky, he's getting on a scooter,
But the tall one, he's going in.
Thirteen seventeen and forty seconds.
That girl, she's walking along with a green ribbon in her hair.
But then a bus suddenly pulls in front of her.
Thirteen eighteen. The girl's gone.
Was she that dumb, did she go in or not,
We'll see when they carry them out.
Thirteen nineteen. Somehow no one's going in.
Another guy, fat, bald, is leaving, though.
Wait a second, looks like he's looking
For something in his pockets and
At thirteen twenty minus ten seconds
He goes back in for his crummy gloves.
Thirteen twenty exactly. This waiting, it's taking forever.
Any second now.
No, not yet.
Yes, now. The bomb, it explodes.
Then here's the one that I found by Dennis O'Driscoll...almost as if they're two entirely different poems with only the subject matter in common.
The One Twenty Pub
The bomb is primed to go off at one twenty.
A time-check: one sixteen.
There's still a chance for some to join
the pub's ranks, for others to drop out.
The terrorist watches from across the street.
Distance will shield him
from the impact of what he sees:
A woman, turquoise jacket on her shoulder,
enters; a man with sunglasses departs.
Youths in tee-shirts loiter without intent.
One seventeen and four seconds.
The scrawny motorcyclist, revving up
to leave, won't believe his luck;
but the tall man steps straight in.
One seventeen and forty seconds.
That girl, over there with the walkman
... now the bus has cut her off.
One eighteen exactly.
Was she stupid enough to head inside?
Or wasn't she? We'll know before long,
when the dead are carried out.
It's one nineteen.
Nothing much to report
until a muddled barfly hesitates,
fumbles with his pockets, and, like
a blasted fool, stumbles back
at one nineteen and forty seconds
to retrieve his goddamn cap.
One twenty
How time drags when ...
Any moment now.
Not yet.
Yes.
Yes,
there
it
goes.
Friday, March 31, 2006
poetry, slam
news:
Grolier Bookstore, which has been around for 51 years, was for many years the only bookstore in America devoted solely to poetry. Oy, hard not to get depressed reading the announcement:
"As many of you know, the lease of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, Inc. ends on March 31st. Harvard Real Estate offered me a very generous subsidy on the rent and a two-year lease with an option to renew. Unfortunately, the amount was beyond my means. HRE suggested that I sell the lease when I found a buyer. The buyer has been found, accepted the terms, and is now the owner. As he is out of town at the moment, I have agreed to maintain the shop until whatever date in March is decided upon.
... I finally realize that my stewardship of the Grolier had come to a natural end. After fifty-one years of involvement (my ownership being thirty-one), I have relinquished it."
Grolier Bookstore, which has been around for 51 years, was for many years the only bookstore in America devoted solely to poetry. Oy, hard not to get depressed reading the announcement:
"As many of you know, the lease of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, Inc. ends on March 31st. Harvard Real Estate offered me a very generous subsidy on the rent and a two-year lease with an option to renew. Unfortunately, the amount was beyond my means. HRE suggested that I sell the lease when I found a buyer. The buyer has been found, accepted the terms, and is now the owner. As he is out of town at the moment, I have agreed to maintain the shop until whatever date in March is decided upon.
... I finally realize that my stewardship of the Grolier had come to a natural end. After fifty-one years of involvement (my ownership being thirty-one), I have relinquished it."
Thursday, March 02, 2006
riotgrrrls, alphabetically
Heywood, Leslie L., Ed. The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism, Vols I & II. Nov. 2005. Greenwood
The second volume of Leslie Heywood’s feminist encyclopedia set, The Women’s Movement Today, is twice as useful as the first. While the first provides quite a limited listing of third-wave entries, the second is more informative: 515 pages culled directly from luminaries’ landmark books and magazine articles.
These selections resonate with a message common in most variations on third-wave themes: contemporary feminism thrives as polemics in praxis. Within Heywood’s second volume, frontrunners Rebecca Walker, Jennifer Baumgardner, Amy Richards, Ariel Gore, and most other leading third-wave feminists debate the agenda: cultural, legislative, and electoral activism; racial politics, globalization, and emergent technologies; motherhood; the wage gap and social justice; and the fallacy of the dominant male jock.
Noted editors, authors, and activists such as Lisa Jervis and Anita Harris refine the very definition of third-wave feminism and its distinction from the ostensible postfeminist age—recalibrating social, sexual, racial, chronological, technological, and economic variables to strike a new balance in feminist objectives.
The weaker of the two volumes, the first, an encyclopedia of names, issues, and events, buckles under its organizational irregularities, including categories too general for practical use (education, media, sports, visual art) and omitting from the list of entries several topics well worth inclusion: ecofeminism, erotica, International Women’s Day, lesbianism, the Nineteenth Amendment, and Title IX, for example. Categorization flaws notwithstanding, the two volumes still dovetail exceptionally well as a sound response to the common quandary over where to start one’s feminist education.
Berkeley , CA
for Library Journal
The second volume of Leslie Heywood’s feminist encyclopedia set, The Women’s Movement Today, is twice as useful as the first. While the first provides quite a limited listing of third-wave entries, the second is more informative: 515 pages culled directly from luminaries’ landmark books and magazine articles.
These selections resonate with a message common in most variations on third-wave themes: contemporary feminism thrives as polemics in praxis. Within Heywood’s second volume, frontrunners Rebecca Walker, Jennifer Baumgardner, Amy Richards, Ariel Gore, and most other leading third-wave feminists debate the agenda: cultural, legislative, and electoral activism; racial politics, globalization, and emergent technologies; motherhood; the wage gap and social justice; and the fallacy of the dominant male jock.
Noted editors, authors, and activists such as Lisa Jervis and Anita Harris refine the very definition of third-wave feminism and its distinction from the ostensible postfeminist age—recalibrating social, sexual, racial, chronological, technological, and economic variables to strike a new balance in feminist objectives.
These thinkers write aggressively, addressing issues of women, race, and class, as when Michelle Tea dismisses Barbara Ehrenreich’s undercover working-class reportage as intellectual noblesse oblige. We find Susan Bordo critiquing the cult of youth & beauty as she pulls apart the empire of images and the Guerilla Girls comically protesting women’s marginalization in their “Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art.”
The weaker of the two volumes, the first, an encyclopedia of names, issues, and events, buckles under its organizational irregularities, including categories too general for practical use (education, media, sports, visual art) and omitting from the list of entries several topics well worth inclusion: ecofeminism, erotica, International Women’s Day, lesbianism, the Nineteenth Amendment, and Title IX, for example. Categorization flaws notwithstanding, the two volumes still dovetail exceptionally well as a sound response to the common quandary over where to start one’s feminist education.
Friday, February 03, 2006
habits: waiting, more waiting
Why wait when not absolutely forced to do so?
Here is Marilyn Hacker's poem. Feels like an indictment. And I think I'm pretty glad about that.
Ghazal: Waiting
What follows when imagination’s not inspired by waiting,
body and spirit rendered sick and tired by waiting?
Wrinkles, stock market losses, abcessed teeth, rejection slips:
some of the benefits acquired by waiting.
Taught from childhood that patience is a virtue,
she thought that she could get what she desired by waiting.
History, a child at the chapter’s cusp
can only find out what transpired by waiting.
Does anyone escape alienated labor’s
cycle of being hired, exploited, made redundant, fired, by waiting?
He rolls a pen like a chess-piece between thumb and forefinger:
he won’t emerge from the morass in which he’s mired by waiting.
If poetry’s imagination’s daughter,
didn’t someone say that she was sired by waiting?
She raised her children, wrote at dawn, ignored the factions,
arrived at being read, remembered and admired by waiting.
Once a pair of lovers downed shots in a Chelsea bar.
their nerves and fantasies hot-wired by waiting.
Sweating, shackled and blindfolded in a basement,
will I get out, the hostage (of whom) inquired, by waiting?
Here is Marilyn Hacker's poem. Feels like an indictment. And I think I'm pretty glad about that.
Ghazal: Waiting
What follows when imagination’s not inspired by waiting,
body and spirit rendered sick and tired by waiting?
Wrinkles, stock market losses, abcessed teeth, rejection slips:
some of the benefits acquired by waiting.
Taught from childhood that patience is a virtue,
she thought that she could get what she desired by waiting.
History, a child at the chapter’s cusp
can only find out what transpired by waiting.
Does anyone escape alienated labor’s
cycle of being hired, exploited, made redundant, fired, by waiting?
He rolls a pen like a chess-piece between thumb and forefinger:
he won’t emerge from the morass in which he’s mired by waiting.
If poetry’s imagination’s daughter,
didn’t someone say that she was sired by waiting?
She raised her children, wrote at dawn, ignored the factions,
arrived at being read, remembered and admired by waiting.
Once a pair of lovers downed shots in a Chelsea bar.
their nerves and fantasies hot-wired by waiting.
Sweating, shackled and blindfolded in a basement,
will I get out, the hostage (of whom) inquired, by waiting?
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
my someday au revoir
so yes, yes, i've got a new home with all the attendant nesting pleasures ... i suppose i should be settling into it. but the american empire is crumbling. the time has come to get while the getting's ... still possible.
where will you go? as for me, i am thinking paris would be a nice outpost. very rose is a rose/is a rose is/a rose.
luckily i do not have to have picasso and hemingway over for dinner, but i do have alice's cookbook. so come see me. we will eat crepes and drink table wine and watch the american sun slimly set.
where will you go? as for me, i am thinking paris would be a nice outpost. very rose is a rose/is a rose is/a rose.
luckily i do not have to have picasso and hemingway over for dinner, but i do have alice's cookbook. so come see me. we will eat crepes and drink table wine and watch the american sun slimly set.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
patriot act: do you reauthorize it?
making this call takes no more time than the gossipy conversation you could be having in the staff lounge. and the person you're talking to isn't trustworthy anyway. she wants your job. so you may as well make this call. make the call. make the call!
from pen america:
As you probably already know, House and Senate negotiators reached an agreement on the USA PATRIOT Act's extension last week. The agreement would extend for four years Section 215, which permits secret warrants for books, records, and other items from businesses, hospitals, and organizations such as libraries. No changes were made to the standards for obtaining these orders, nor for those for obtaining National Security Letters (NSLs). Section 505 of the PATRIOT Act, authorizing NSLs, still has no sunset.
While we do appreciate that the conference report now sunsets Section 215 in four years instead of seven, this change is not sufficient to protect the privacy of library users from fishing expeditions by the FBI.
As the reauthorization approaches its 12/31 deadline, the White House is pressuring Congress to pass the inadequate "compromise" reauthorization bill. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has stated his support for a bipartisan filibuster in the Senate.
NOW is the time to call your senators! Please call your senators' Washington offices to ask them to:
1) Vote NO on cloture and SUPPORT a filibuster.
2) Vote YES for a three-month continuing resolution.
3) Vote NO on the conference report (if it comes to a vote).
We are particularly eager to generate calls to the following senators who have not indicated how they will vote:
Alaska: Ted Stevens (202) 224-3004
Arkansas: Blanche Lincoln (202) 224-4843 and Mark Pryor (202) 224-2353
Connecticut: Joseph Lieberman (202) 224-4041
Delaware: Thomas Carper (202) 224-2441
Florida: Bill Nelson (202) 224-5274
Idaho: Mike Crapo (202) 224-6142
Indiana: Evan Bayh (202) 224-5623 and Richard Lugar (202) 224-4814
Kansas: Sam Brownback (202) 224-6521
Louisiana: Mary Landrieu (202) 224-5824
Maine: Susan Collins (202) 224-2523 and Olympia Snowe (202) 224-5344
Montana: Conrad Burns (202) 224-2644 and Max Baucus (202) 224-2651
North Dakota: Kent Conrad (202) 224-2043 and Byron Dorgan (202) 224-2551
Nebraska: Ben Nelson (202) 224-6551 and Chuck Hagel (202) 224-4224
New York: Charles Schumer (202) 224-6542 and Hillary Clinton (202) 224-4451
Ohio: Michael DeWine (202) 224-2315 and George Voinovich (202) 224-3353
Oklahoma: Tom Coburn (202) 224-5754
Oregon: Gordon Smith (202) 224-3753
Rhode Island: Lincoln Chafee (202) 224-2921
South Dakota: Tim Johnson (202) 224-5842
Virginia: George Allen (202) 224-4024
West Virginia: Robert Byrd (202) 224-3954
Please also call the following senators to thank them for leading the fight against conference report:
Alaska: Lisa Murkowski (202) 224-6665
Colorado: Ken Salazar (202) 224-5852
Florida: Mel Martinez (202) 224-3041
Idaho: Larry Craig (202) 224-2752
Illinois: Dick Durbin (202) 224-2152
Massachusetts: Edward Kennedy (202) 224-4543
Michigan: Carl Levin (202) 224-6221
Nevada: Harry Reid (202) 224-3542
New Hampshire: John Sununu (202) 224-2841
Vermont: Patrick Leahy (202) 224-4242
West Virginia: Jay Rockefeller (202) 224-6472
Wisconsin: Russ Feingold (202) 224-5323
Thank you for your support!
from pen america:
As you probably already know, House and Senate negotiators reached an agreement on the USA PATRIOT Act's extension last week. The agreement would extend for four years Section 215, which permits secret warrants for books, records, and other items from businesses, hospitals, and organizations such as libraries. No changes were made to the standards for obtaining these orders, nor for those for obtaining National Security Letters (NSLs). Section 505 of the PATRIOT Act, authorizing NSLs, still has no sunset.
While we do appreciate that the conference report now sunsets Section 215 in four years instead of seven, this change is not sufficient to protect the privacy of library users from fishing expeditions by the FBI.
As the reauthorization approaches its 12/31 deadline, the White House is pressuring Congress to pass the inadequate "compromise" reauthorization bill. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has stated his support for a bipartisan filibuster in the Senate.
NOW is the time to call your senators! Please call your senators' Washington offices to ask them to:
1) Vote NO on cloture and SUPPORT a filibuster.
2) Vote YES for a three-month continuing resolution.
3) Vote NO on the conference report (if it comes to a vote).
We are particularly eager to generate calls to the following senators who have not indicated how they will vote:
Alaska: Ted Stevens (202) 224-3004
Arkansas: Blanche Lincoln (202) 224-4843 and Mark Pryor (202) 224-2353
Connecticut: Joseph Lieberman (202) 224-4041
Delaware: Thomas Carper (202) 224-2441
Florida: Bill Nelson (202) 224-5274
Idaho: Mike Crapo (202) 224-6142
Indiana: Evan Bayh (202) 224-5623 and Richard Lugar (202) 224-4814
Kansas: Sam Brownback (202) 224-6521
Louisiana: Mary Landrieu (202) 224-5824
Maine: Susan Collins (202) 224-2523 and Olympia Snowe (202) 224-5344
Montana: Conrad Burns (202) 224-2644 and Max Baucus (202) 224-2651
North Dakota: Kent Conrad (202) 224-2043 and Byron Dorgan (202) 224-2551
Nebraska: Ben Nelson (202) 224-6551 and Chuck Hagel (202) 224-4224
New York: Charles Schumer (202) 224-6542 and Hillary Clinton (202) 224-4451
Ohio: Michael DeWine (202) 224-2315 and George Voinovich (202) 224-3353
Oklahoma: Tom Coburn (202) 224-5754
Oregon: Gordon Smith (202) 224-3753
Rhode Island: Lincoln Chafee (202) 224-2921
South Dakota: Tim Johnson (202) 224-5842
Virginia: George Allen (202) 224-4024
West Virginia: Robert Byrd (202) 224-3954
Please also call the following senators to thank them for leading the fight against conference report:
Alaska: Lisa Murkowski (202) 224-6665
Colorado: Ken Salazar (202) 224-5852
Florida: Mel Martinez (202) 224-3041
Idaho: Larry Craig (202) 224-2752
Illinois: Dick Durbin (202) 224-2152
Massachusetts: Edward Kennedy (202) 224-4543
Michigan: Carl Levin (202) 224-6221
Nevada: Harry Reid (202) 224-3542
New Hampshire: John Sununu (202) 224-2841
Vermont: Patrick Leahy (202) 224-4242
West Virginia: Jay Rockefeller (202) 224-6472
Wisconsin: Russ Feingold (202) 224-5323
Thank you for your support!
Monday, November 28, 2005
Sunday, November 20, 2005
chess: new gloss without the brilliancies
Levens, David. Basic Chess. Jan. 2006. Sterling Publishing. c192p. color illus. glossary. index. ISBN 0-600-60804-2. $7.95.
for Library Journal
David Levens’ latest book delivers exactly what it advertises: basic chess. Suitable only for novices, the work presents the fundamentals in the trademark bright tones that characterize the booming instructional book market. While his work proves somewhat thin on tactical practice opportunities, Levens lays out the game and its basic principles, moving into essential knowledge such as standard openings; piece strengths, weaknesses, and movement; pins, forks, and skewers; or common mating patterns. The surface gloss of chessic history, including the obligatory hat tip to famous players (Dickens, Nabakov, Duchamp, Amis, et al), adds little to the text. The pages would have been better allotted to more exercises, the key to improving any beginner’s games. Advanced beginners hoping for a new collection of tough puzzles or reviews of sophisticated lines of play would be better served by standbys like the lively Pandolfini’s Ultimate Guide to Chess or the lesser-known 303 Perplexing Chess Puzzles by Fred Wilson and Bruce Albertson. Additionally, nearly all the information in this book is available on the Internet. Not recommended.—Elizabeth Kennedy, Oakland, CA
for Library Journal
David Levens’ latest book delivers exactly what it advertises: basic chess. Suitable only for novices, the work presents the fundamentals in the trademark bright tones that characterize the booming instructional book market. While his work proves somewhat thin on tactical practice opportunities, Levens lays out the game and its basic principles, moving into essential knowledge such as standard openings; piece strengths, weaknesses, and movement; pins, forks, and skewers; or common mating patterns. The surface gloss of chessic history, including the obligatory hat tip to famous players (Dickens, Nabakov, Duchamp, Amis, et al), adds little to the text. The pages would have been better allotted to more exercises, the key to improving any beginner’s games. Advanced beginners hoping for a new collection of tough puzzles or reviews of sophisticated lines of play would be better served by standbys like the lively Pandolfini’s Ultimate Guide to Chess or the lesser-known 303 Perplexing Chess Puzzles by Fred Wilson and Bruce Albertson. Additionally, nearly all the information in this book is available on the Internet. Not recommended.—Elizabeth Kennedy, Oakland, CA
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
look into my crystal ball: see before you the valley of ashes
i sit at work.
i am given pictures.
i write 'catchy' phrases.
these pix generally depict sporty spice in various degrees of impractical fauxthleticism.
example one: crunchy gal in yummy fern-hued vest strolling toward big moody mountains. i write: storm warming.
example two: studly strongwoman wearing bright orange eye-assaulting shirt and playing ball with dog riverside. i write: fetching tops.
example three: holiday product shot of two fuzzy pullovers with scarves flung over them all carefree-like. i write: give fleece a chance.
and so on.
and all i really want to write -- all i really ever want to say these days -- to everyone who crosses my path all day long is: you are fucking doomed. the planet is self-destructing. and not only china. that's just easier to report than the fuck-all we're annihilating.
and it's your fault for buying that take-out ...
or yours -- see on your desk, that little plastic buddha? producing that required we release all sorts hideous VOCs into the air and leachate into the earth your very buddha sat his ass on ...
or yours for doing your nails in that ridiculous pink color and killing all the fish with the runoff going from the mississippi straight into the ocean and choking off all other flora with red algae and starving the fish and driving sharks inland to eat us ...
doomed. i mean you.
i am given pictures.
i write 'catchy' phrases.
these pix generally depict sporty spice in various degrees of impractical fauxthleticism.
example one: crunchy gal in yummy fern-hued vest strolling toward big moody mountains. i write: storm warming.
example two: studly strongwoman wearing bright orange eye-assaulting shirt and playing ball with dog riverside. i write: fetching tops.
example three: holiday product shot of two fuzzy pullovers with scarves flung over them all carefree-like. i write: give fleece a chance.
and so on.
and all i really want to write -- all i really ever want to say these days -- to everyone who crosses my path all day long is: you are fucking doomed. the planet is self-destructing. and not only china. that's just easier to report than the fuck-all we're annihilating.
and it's your fault for buying that take-out ...
or yours -- see on your desk, that little plastic buddha? producing that required we release all sorts hideous VOCs into the air and leachate into the earth your very buddha sat his ass on ...
or yours for doing your nails in that ridiculous pink color and killing all the fish with the runoff going from the mississippi straight into the ocean and choking off all other flora with red algae and starving the fish and driving sharks inland to eat us ...
doomed. i mean you.
left alone
up on the wall, readable while i brush my teeth:
To Waiting
by W. S. Merwin
You spend so much of your time
expecting to become
someone else
always someone
who will be different
someone to whom a moment
whatever moment it may be
at last has come
and who has been
met and transformed
into no longer being you
and so has forgotten you
meanwhile in your life
you hardly notice
the world around you
lights changing
sirens dying along the buildings
your eyes intent
on a sight you do not see yet
not yet there
as long as you
are only yourself
with whom as you
recall you were
never happy
to be left along for long
To Waiting
by W. S. Merwin
You spend so much of your time
expecting to become
someone else
always someone
who will be different
someone to whom a moment
whatever moment it may be
at last has come
and who has been
met and transformed
into no longer being you
and so has forgotten you
meanwhile in your life
you hardly notice
the world around you
lights changing
sirens dying along the buildings
your eyes intent
on a sight you do not see yet
not yet there
as long as you
are only yourself
with whom as you
recall you were
never happy
to be left along for long
Friday, October 28, 2005
bush @ eleven counts and counting
The 2005 International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration of the United States convened on Oct 21st & 22nd. Not sure what will come of it, but Not in Our Name sponsored the commission and members include Sam Hamill, Marcus Raskin, Ann Wright, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael Ratner, Barbara Olshanksy, Howard Zinn, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Gore Vidal, Cornel West, and on and on and on ...
Read the indictments here.
Read the indictments here.
Monday, October 24, 2005
all we are is left behind
We have more in common with Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout than we realize. Add that to the short title list of Mary Buchinger's What Tolstoy and Paleopathologists Have in Common.
Sunday, October 23, 2005
good night, good luck, good man
George Clooney is my new celebrity boyfriend. Just went and saw Good Night, And Good Luck. So refreshing to watch a movie with an earnest, intelligent screenplay that perfectly telegraphs the tone of an era we remember as an hysterical American anomaly when really it bears a remarkable resemblance to our current state of affairs.
Saturday, October 01, 2005
hollow howl holiday
1955. poet before his time.
A Supermarket in California
Allen Ginsberg
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
A Supermarket in California
Allen Ginsberg
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
fat's the new fit
President's Council on Fitness members include:
Coca Cola
Burger King
General Mills
Pepsico
from the Nation 8/29:
Less than a month after Cadbury Schweppes, the candy and soda company, gave a multimillion dollar grant to the American Diabetes Association, the association’s chief medical and scientific officer claimed that sugar has nothing to do with diabetes, or with weight.
Coca Cola
Burger King
General Mills
Pepsico
from the Nation 8/29:
Less than a month after Cadbury Schweppes, the candy and soda company, gave a multimillion dollar grant to the American Diabetes Association, the association’s chief medical and scientific officer claimed that sugar has nothing to do with diabetes, or with weight.
Thursday, September 29, 2005
when we pretend, our power lacks limits!
Know someone who drives an SUV? Tried to talk them into a hybrid or a newfangled Schwinn? Here's your chance to teach em a lesson with some quick, painless shock therapy! Enjoy. After all, how often do you get your anonymous domination on? Write them up. On the windshield, just like the evil meter stewards do it.
Thanks, Adbusters!
Thanks, Adbusters!
Friday, September 23, 2005
against futile melancholy
A woman I know went through a stage of deriding her husband for saving up his words. Her theory went: he'd been alotted a limited quantity to last a lifetime and was afraid of running out. Seems the man was onto a good thing. People should say less. And we should write even less than that. Or maybe I just struggle with what seems so obvious: we should think something through and write from a point of view, rather than reacting to any and all stimuli to come up with the chimera of meaning.
I recently read a blog that suggested the best thing we can do in response to Katrina & Rita is keep living our happy lives. Really, is that the best thing we can do? I don't know. How about reducing the amount of gadgets we buy, so we contribute less to the oceanic warming that spurred the tropical storms in the first place? Volunteering to rescue the survivors among 90,000 animals left behind? Determining to live with more grace, mindfulness, and action? We are mistaken to shrug shoulders at this natural disaster (made in the USA) and say, ‘Ah, the show must go on’ with a bittersweet glaze over our eyes.
I recently read a blog that suggested the best thing we can do in response to Katrina & Rita is keep living our happy lives. Really, is that the best thing we can do? I don't know. How about reducing the amount of gadgets we buy, so we contribute less to the oceanic warming that spurred the tropical storms in the first place? Volunteering to rescue the survivors among 90,000 animals left behind? Determining to live with more grace, mindfulness, and action? We are mistaken to shrug shoulders at this natural disaster (made in the USA) and say, ‘Ah, the show must go on’ with a bittersweet glaze over our eyes.
Friday, September 16, 2005
gilbert's venue
Gilbert, Jack. Refusing Heaven. March 2005. Knopf. 200 p. ISBN-13: 978-1-40004-3-651. $25.95
for Prairie Schooner
By Wittgenstein’s watch, our eldest poets circle back to the theme of homecoming as inevitably as they age. Artists, the old fools, can only retire into the cult of yesteryear. The theory would have us believe what Philip Larkin wrote: those who dwell in memory’s "lighted rooms" must be hoping to screen out signs of the blank last "days of thin, continuous dreaming." Jack Gilbert, often retrospective in his slim fifth book Refusing Heaven (Knopf, 2005), may play into this proposition, but the work remains—provocatively—just beyond its ambit.
A master among us at seventy nine years old, Gilbert locates much of his new work in old haunts—Italy, the Greek islands, the lost hotels of Paris. With that in mind, we scan the subject matter—bridges made by memory, gazes held and broken, lives lived, loves lost, the incantatory effect of hard-won solitude—as just the airy nostalgia that might have raised the philosopher’s hackles. "But it’s the having / not the keeping that is the treasure," counters Gilbert. The close attention Gilbert lavishes on his slow, simple life resets the pace at which most of us might otherwise read, in effect doubling our return on his remembrance. Memory and the present state of mind work inextricably, the poems insist. Gilbert is chary of underestimating this link; he takes pain to trace it strictly, as if pressed to run live wire through dry brush. Having the Having begins with the principal metaphor for remembering, knots in string, but moves immediately into a catalog of what the knots cannot quite connote:
I tie knots in the strings of my spirit
to remember. They are not pictures
of what was. Not accounts of dusk
amid the olive trees and that odor.
Memories are not the pictures, not the trees, not the indeterminate odor. Gilbert continues: memories are not a woman’s body, not her memorable mouth, but at least they provide the imperfect means to it all:
They cannot describe, but they
can prevent remembering it wrong.
Where another poet might strain a single metaphor to bear a stock of memories (Jarold Ramsey’s The Tally Stick: "I have carved our lives in secret on this stick / of mountain mahogany the length of your arms"), Gilbert applies no such pressure, fires no false glaze to bond what Ramsey calls a life’s "lengthening runes." Gilbert’s figures for memory—knots, pictures, paths, blazons, bells—change over the course of the poem, an admission of the trouble we have tagging and retrieving what has mattered to us. We can’t help but strip memories with the sands of time. The final lines mimic the touch-and-go flux of the mind, returning to the metaphor with which the poem began:
Two more knots
This end of the line—three stressed syllables— is a small rhythmic swell. Then the simple fragment of held memory slides out of consciousness, felt in the words themselves as the slip of triple consonance falls loose below the last knot—at the end of just and then at the beginning of straight and string:
and then just straight string.
Burning (Andante Non Troppo) begins as elegantly as Having the Having ends. The title sets the pace, with the heat generated by burning tempered by the Italian andante non troppo, a participial phrase for moderate musical tempo. Gilbert scrambles haptic and auditory cues to slow us down; the poet writes against rapidity. To ignore Gilbert’s parenthetical counsel is to burn through the work and pillage for profundity. Trained as mercenaries after meaning, we still fall prey. Most reviews of Refusing Heaven to date carve out the same powerful passage, significance come by easily: "It is the pace of our living / that makes the world available."
Pulled from the poem, each neat phrase tastes good, keeps its own octosyllabic time, perhaps by design. Restored to their context, however, the complete lines vary, eleven and twelve syllables each, and fulfill a greater purpose—transitioning from brief abstraction into slightly longer lines that continue figuratively:
Regardless of
the body’s lion-wrath or forest waiting,
it is always brash self-sabotage that holds off "what the mystery of us knows," always "our gait of being that decides / how much is seen." Our drives and desires can obscure insight, as Gilbert emphasizes in an unexpected contrast between the architecture of old Italian churches and that of modern buildings:
The grand Italian churches are
covered with detail which is visible at the pace
people walk by. The great modern buildings are
blank because there is no time to see from the car.
The passive verbs in this passage lay us bare, demonstrate our complicity to development, our disregard for what we work so hard to build. Slowing down, Gilbert suggests, is an evolutionary precept antedating us by millennia, as old as the river rocks of Kyoto:
A thousand years ago when they built the gardens
of Kyoto, the stones were set in the stream askew.
Whoever went quickly would fall in.
Gilbert has a way of chiding us for forgetting: it is called a leisurely pace for a reason. The pleasure of pacing shapes the poem itself, with stacks of fricatives kept close together—stones, set, stream, askew—but the poet shuffles them mischievously, only hinting at an alliterative pattern (st-vowel, s-vowel-t, st-consonant, vowel-sk-vowel). He sets sounds as close and crooked as the rocks themselves.
Gilbert makes this kind of merry in his poems alone. His meditations draw their strength from the solitary surroundings, remote provinces from which stars can be spied, where nuthatches, finches, and chickadees constitute good company, and thoughts have room to be met and mastered. Wherever it is situated, each poem resounds with the "quiet that is the music of that place, / which is the difference between silence and windlessness." In such stillness, the poet does equal justice to both lost companions and the soul in solitude, but rarely addresses the living. We imagine Gilbert read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet early on, that he may have marked up the passage, "If you can bear it so, be dead among the dead. The dead are occupied." Gilbert, in fact, responded to Rilke ninety three years after the fact in a poem called "Guilty" from his 1996 collection, The Great Fires: "I’m already one of the dead among the dead."
What results from such a stance is a collection that, even when doing the work of tender elegy for beloved dead, carries a sense of striking isolation. Gilbert’s linguistic restraint startles our social sensibilities, starkness magnified when we compare his work to that of his contemporaries. Here is the second stanza from Seamus Heaney’s Personal Helicon, in which the poet remembers peering into a favorite well:
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of the rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
While the well’s depth initially fails to reflect back what the poet hopes to see, we still feel the lush satisfaction in the child’s play. Elsewhere, Heaney alludes to anonymous elders who would keep him from the wells; he fringes the sites with ferns and foxgloves, waterweed, fungus, even a rat that slaps across his reflection; he slides in time to differentiate the young boy from the mild adult author he has become. Heaney populates his five stanzas to achieve a happy chaos against which we can fully see the "big-eyed Narcissus," the spell of his own image. Gilbert’s poem shares no such fascination with the self. It is five lines long, not five stanzas. It telescopes neither forward nor backward in time, but hovers over one well in a silent, isolated moment. A bucket is lowered, but we get none of the rich and rackety plummeting Heaney recalls. The Abandoned Valley asks only that we appreciate the desperation for contact that we must assume will be made:
Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?
Gilbert’s collection echoes with this relentless spirit of inquiry. In the title poem, Gilbert goes so far as to contest mortality if it means we must surrender all we have lived. The narrator chooses "against the Lord. He will not abandon his life." He remembers the mills "where he became a young man as he worked" and regrets:
The mills are eaten away, and eaten
again by the sun and its rusting. He needs them
even though they are gone, to measure against.
If we must submit to death, we will at least pack our memories with us. Such loyalty to this life seems only sensible, yet by Gilbert’s design the logic quickly fails. The poet measures his life against structures twice worn away, mills long gone. The narrator collapses into abstraction:
He is like an old ferry dragged on to the shore,
a home in its smashed grandeur, with the giant beams
and joists ...
From these figures of destroyed glory and retired utility, Gilbert veers into some of his most spectacular language, images that sink brightly into the surreal. After dedicating much of the book to the treasures of having, the sacred remembered, the lost recalled, Refusing Heaven draws the eye to the illusion of thought and the unreliability of all we romanticize with our meager memorials. We cannot stop time. We cannot live in the now. We cannot refuse heaven, nor can we embrace life. The man’s interests in this poem are as impossible and absurd as:
… a wooden ocean out of control.
A beached heart. A cauldron of cooling melt.
Here is where the poem ends. Yet, if we return to the first piece in the collection, A Brief for the Defense, we remember what Gilbert said to begin with. We might be forgiven for permitting ourselves the brave little luxury of hope:
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.
Delight in the midst of hell on earth, despite fading memories, over rocky ground—Gilbert does not shy from the clichés that furnish memory’s rooms. It is the acoustics he alters in the rooms that, as Pound urged they must, make it new. Love, longing, loneliness—Gilbert’s is a common vernacular. But the poet arranges the mental venue to access what, after we have heard it, seems the only sustainable song, the "music despite everything."
for Prairie Schooner
By Wittgenstein’s watch, our eldest poets circle back to the theme of homecoming as inevitably as they age. Artists, the old fools, can only retire into the cult of yesteryear. The theory would have us believe what Philip Larkin wrote: those who dwell in memory’s "lighted rooms" must be hoping to screen out signs of the blank last "days of thin, continuous dreaming." Jack Gilbert, often retrospective in his slim fifth book Refusing Heaven (Knopf, 2005), may play into this proposition, but the work remains—provocatively—just beyond its ambit.
A master among us at seventy nine years old, Gilbert locates much of his new work in old haunts—Italy, the Greek islands, the lost hotels of Paris. With that in mind, we scan the subject matter—bridges made by memory, gazes held and broken, lives lived, loves lost, the incantatory effect of hard-won solitude—as just the airy nostalgia that might have raised the philosopher’s hackles. "But it’s the having / not the keeping that is the treasure," counters Gilbert. The close attention Gilbert lavishes on his slow, simple life resets the pace at which most of us might otherwise read, in effect doubling our return on his remembrance. Memory and the present state of mind work inextricably, the poems insist. Gilbert is chary of underestimating this link; he takes pain to trace it strictly, as if pressed to run live wire through dry brush. Having the Having begins with the principal metaphor for remembering, knots in string, but moves immediately into a catalog of what the knots cannot quite connote:
I tie knots in the strings of my spirit
to remember. They are not pictures
of what was. Not accounts of dusk
amid the olive trees and that odor.
Memories are not the pictures, not the trees, not the indeterminate odor. Gilbert continues: memories are not a woman’s body, not her memorable mouth, but at least they provide the imperfect means to it all:
They cannot describe, but they
can prevent remembering it wrong.
Where another poet might strain a single metaphor to bear a stock of memories (Jarold Ramsey’s The Tally Stick: "I have carved our lives in secret on this stick / of mountain mahogany the length of your arms"), Gilbert applies no such pressure, fires no false glaze to bond what Ramsey calls a life’s "lengthening runes." Gilbert’s figures for memory—knots, pictures, paths, blazons, bells—change over the course of the poem, an admission of the trouble we have tagging and retrieving what has mattered to us. We can’t help but strip memories with the sands of time. The final lines mimic the touch-and-go flux of the mind, returning to the metaphor with which the poem began:
Two more knots
This end of the line—three stressed syllables— is a small rhythmic swell. Then the simple fragment of held memory slides out of consciousness, felt in the words themselves as the slip of triple consonance falls loose below the last knot—at the end of just and then at the beginning of straight and string:
and then just straight string.
Burning (Andante Non Troppo) begins as elegantly as Having the Having ends. The title sets the pace, with the heat generated by burning tempered by the Italian andante non troppo, a participial phrase for moderate musical tempo. Gilbert scrambles haptic and auditory cues to slow us down; the poet writes against rapidity. To ignore Gilbert’s parenthetical counsel is to burn through the work and pillage for profundity. Trained as mercenaries after meaning, we still fall prey. Most reviews of Refusing Heaven to date carve out the same powerful passage, significance come by easily: "It is the pace of our living / that makes the world available."
Pulled from the poem, each neat phrase tastes good, keeps its own octosyllabic time, perhaps by design. Restored to their context, however, the complete lines vary, eleven and twelve syllables each, and fulfill a greater purpose—transitioning from brief abstraction into slightly longer lines that continue figuratively:
Regardless of
the body’s lion-wrath or forest waiting,
it is always brash self-sabotage that holds off "what the mystery of us knows," always "our gait of being that decides / how much is seen." Our drives and desires can obscure insight, as Gilbert emphasizes in an unexpected contrast between the architecture of old Italian churches and that of modern buildings:
The grand Italian churches are
covered with detail which is visible at the pace
people walk by. The great modern buildings are
blank because there is no time to see from the car.
The passive verbs in this passage lay us bare, demonstrate our complicity to development, our disregard for what we work so hard to build. Slowing down, Gilbert suggests, is an evolutionary precept antedating us by millennia, as old as the river rocks of Kyoto:
A thousand years ago when they built the gardens
of Kyoto, the stones were set in the stream askew.
Whoever went quickly would fall in.
Gilbert has a way of chiding us for forgetting: it is called a leisurely pace for a reason. The pleasure of pacing shapes the poem itself, with stacks of fricatives kept close together—stones, set, stream, askew—but the poet shuffles them mischievously, only hinting at an alliterative pattern (st-vowel, s-vowel-t, st-consonant, vowel-sk-vowel). He sets sounds as close and crooked as the rocks themselves.
Gilbert makes this kind of merry in his poems alone. His meditations draw their strength from the solitary surroundings, remote provinces from which stars can be spied, where nuthatches, finches, and chickadees constitute good company, and thoughts have room to be met and mastered. Wherever it is situated, each poem resounds with the "quiet that is the music of that place, / which is the difference between silence and windlessness." In such stillness, the poet does equal justice to both lost companions and the soul in solitude, but rarely addresses the living. We imagine Gilbert read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet early on, that he may have marked up the passage, "If you can bear it so, be dead among the dead. The dead are occupied." Gilbert, in fact, responded to Rilke ninety three years after the fact in a poem called "Guilty" from his 1996 collection, The Great Fires: "I’m already one of the dead among the dead."
What results from such a stance is a collection that, even when doing the work of tender elegy for beloved dead, carries a sense of striking isolation. Gilbert’s linguistic restraint startles our social sensibilities, starkness magnified when we compare his work to that of his contemporaries. Here is the second stanza from Seamus Heaney’s Personal Helicon, in which the poet remembers peering into a favorite well:
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of the rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
While the well’s depth initially fails to reflect back what the poet hopes to see, we still feel the lush satisfaction in the child’s play. Elsewhere, Heaney alludes to anonymous elders who would keep him from the wells; he fringes the sites with ferns and foxgloves, waterweed, fungus, even a rat that slaps across his reflection; he slides in time to differentiate the young boy from the mild adult author he has become. Heaney populates his five stanzas to achieve a happy chaos against which we can fully see the "big-eyed Narcissus," the spell of his own image. Gilbert’s poem shares no such fascination with the self. It is five lines long, not five stanzas. It telescopes neither forward nor backward in time, but hovers over one well in a silent, isolated moment. A bucket is lowered, but we get none of the rich and rackety plummeting Heaney recalls. The Abandoned Valley asks only that we appreciate the desperation for contact that we must assume will be made:
Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?
Gilbert’s collection echoes with this relentless spirit of inquiry. In the title poem, Gilbert goes so far as to contest mortality if it means we must surrender all we have lived. The narrator chooses "against the Lord. He will not abandon his life." He remembers the mills "where he became a young man as he worked" and regrets:
The mills are eaten away, and eaten
again by the sun and its rusting. He needs them
even though they are gone, to measure against.
If we must submit to death, we will at least pack our memories with us. Such loyalty to this life seems only sensible, yet by Gilbert’s design the logic quickly fails. The poet measures his life against structures twice worn away, mills long gone. The narrator collapses into abstraction:
He is like an old ferry dragged on to the shore,
a home in its smashed grandeur, with the giant beams
and joists ...
From these figures of destroyed glory and retired utility, Gilbert veers into some of his most spectacular language, images that sink brightly into the surreal. After dedicating much of the book to the treasures of having, the sacred remembered, the lost recalled, Refusing Heaven draws the eye to the illusion of thought and the unreliability of all we romanticize with our meager memorials. We cannot stop time. We cannot live in the now. We cannot refuse heaven, nor can we embrace life. The man’s interests in this poem are as impossible and absurd as:
… a wooden ocean out of control.
A beached heart. A cauldron of cooling melt.
Here is where the poem ends. Yet, if we return to the first piece in the collection, A Brief for the Defense, we remember what Gilbert said to begin with. We might be forgiven for permitting ourselves the brave little luxury of hope:
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.
Delight in the midst of hell on earth, despite fading memories, over rocky ground—Gilbert does not shy from the clichés that furnish memory’s rooms. It is the acoustics he alters in the rooms that, as Pound urged they must, make it new. Love, longing, loneliness—Gilbert’s is a common vernacular. But the poet arranges the mental venue to access what, after we have heard it, seems the only sustainable song, the "music despite everything."
Friday, September 02, 2005
ignoring the fema report: déjà vu
Shame, shame, shame ... why so much talk of shame?
Katrina coverage reminds me of the Keep America Beautiful campaign, when we spent millions guilting individuals into putting litter “in its place” rather than allocating that money to proper industry reform we knew we needed. Journalists today buy into this slogan of individual shame and syndicate that meme without reflecting on the implications. It is like antimuckraking, papering over an era of institutional negligence that led up to the catastrophe in the first place. Is it too complicated, too much legislative tedium to cover?
At least not for Paul Krugman. His op-ed trains the focus back where it should be, on George W. Bush—not during the crisis, but long before, when he unmanned the floodgates of an avertable, imminent disaster. Don’t we recall from September 11th that FEMA gave Conde a list? We knew from this list that the three most likely catastrophes threatening our country were a terrorist attack on New York, another major earthquake in San Francisco, and the third--and most deadly--a hurricane in New Orleans. So what did Bush do? He absorbed FEMA into HSA and reappropriated the budget (meant to repair the now broken levees) to general counterterrorism initiatives. Sometimes I wonder if he really cannot read. This is the only explanation for such blatant strategic ineptitude.
So, yeah there's crushing shame to be borne in our complicity, but the legitimate cause for shame is having elected Bush in the first place. He has now proven beyond a reasonable doubt that is ill-equipped for the job.
Katrina coverage reminds me of the Keep America Beautiful campaign, when we spent millions guilting individuals into putting litter “in its place” rather than allocating that money to proper industry reform we knew we needed. Journalists today buy into this slogan of individual shame and syndicate that meme without reflecting on the implications. It is like antimuckraking, papering over an era of institutional negligence that led up to the catastrophe in the first place. Is it too complicated, too much legislative tedium to cover?
At least not for Paul Krugman. His op-ed trains the focus back where it should be, on George W. Bush—not during the crisis, but long before, when he unmanned the floodgates of an avertable, imminent disaster. Don’t we recall from September 11th that FEMA gave Conde a list? We knew from this list that the three most likely catastrophes threatening our country were a terrorist attack on New York, another major earthquake in San Francisco, and the third--and most deadly--a hurricane in New Orleans. So what did Bush do? He absorbed FEMA into HSA and reappropriated the budget (meant to repair the now broken levees) to general counterterrorism initiatives. Sometimes I wonder if he really cannot read. This is the only explanation for such blatant strategic ineptitude.
So, yeah there's crushing shame to be borne in our complicity, but the legitimate cause for shame is having elected Bush in the first place. He has now proven beyond a reasonable doubt that is ill-equipped for the job.
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