top or bottom?

“A white child born into the upper-income quintile was five times more likely to stay there than fall to the bottom. A black child born into the upper-income quintile was as likely to fall to the bottom as to remain rich.”

The federal government collects a lot of information, what Michael Lewis calls, “big pools of raw facts.” In his book on the career civil service, Lewis profiles people who rarely get any publicity, who aren’t paid a whole lot, but who regularly tackle incredibly difficult problems, people who sometimes get amazing things done. During the Obama administration DJ Patil was tasked with making that “big pool of raw facts” available to the public, especially “people who could make new sense of it.” 

As one example Lewis talks about what was learned concerning the distribution of wealth in this country. “A team of researchers at Stanford … used newly accessible data from the Internal Revenue Service … to study Americans across generations and the census data [let them] compare [Americans] by race, gender, or whichever trait [the researchers] wished to isolate.” The data showed that younger generations aren’t improving their lives the way older generations did. “Every year, the economic future of an American child was a bit less bright. And the big reason was not lower rates of economic growth but the increasingly unequal distribution of money.” The rich were getting richer — and that trend only seems to be getting faster. 

Sounds familiar, mostly. The lines about race that I quote at the top of this post surprised me, however. Yes, I knew advantages are disproportionately distributed — that is, white people get more of them. But a rich family has advantages, whatever the family’s skin color. Money gives you opportunities, connections, education, a cushion in emergencies. Whether or not that’s the same across all races, it can’t be so very different, right? Money is money. That any rich kid could be as likely to become poor (“fall to the bottom”) as to remain rich strikes me as hard to believe. There are quintiles in between rich and poor, after all. Wouldn’t a rich kid — even a rich black kid — be more likely to drop a quintile or two or three rather than drop all the way to the bottom fifth? I mean, dropping from the top to the bottom — that’s a long way to fall. Still, the data sounds alarming — such a dramatic difference in lived experience for blacks versus whites, even among the wealthiest.  

source:

The Fifth Risk

by Michael Lewis

2018. W. W. Norton & Co., New York

fires

“How do we comprehend the stars? In our system, you know, our galaxy — and the next galaxy? But all over there are things happening, not just here on our little planet. I think it’s really useful to think about it, because then if a fire wipes out these paintings, it’s not such a huge, big deal; it’s not so big.”

That’s Jan Wurm, a painter, in conversation with Richard Whittaker. 

A fire is wiping out swathes of Los Angeles as I write. According to a Forbes breaking news update, “At least 2,000 homes, businesses and other buildings have been destroyed … so far.”

A friend, a painter, tells me that he burned one hundred paintings. He says his friends were horrified. “Give them to us,” they told him. He shakes his head. “You know, the paintings weren’t really good. I looked at them. I decided they weren’t good. Once I’d burned them I felt relieved. I think it was the right thing.”

It was the covid shutdown that prompted him to do this, he says. He had time to look over his archive and burning presented a way to clear things out. 

I confess I was a bit stunned. I am not a burner. I have friends who have burned diaries — one tells me she regrets that now. I have a friend who burns the drafts of her poems. Read biographies and you come across people who’ve burned their correspondence. The burning of diaries and correspondence is motivated at least partly by shame or the fear that secrets will be made public, burning a permanent hiding. 

Was there anything of that in my painter friend’s choice to burn his works? He paints frequently so he has many paintings. He did not burn everything. Does he still have hundreds of unburnt paintings? 

Much is being lost in Los Angeles. All that loss is involuntary. I look at my shelves of diaries and working notebooks, magazines in which my poems appear, and I know it’s possible that a fire could tear through Berkeley and turn them all to ash. I think about building a fire proof vault. I think about scanning everything, save it digitally — in the cloud? It’s a big job. It’s the sort of mindless job somebody could be hired to do. But then they’d be privy to all my secrets! 

When I go through Kent’s things I put aside his writings. Little of it is art. It’s primarily employment law educational materials, newsletters, memos. Some of it is clever, even witty, with Kent trying to make the subject matter fun enough to keep people awake. 

What to do with this stuff? 

The purging of fire can relieve one of the responsibility of dealing with it all. If it’s all gone, there’s nothing more to worry about. Fire or no, one could just walk away, let fate take it. Usually that means some stranger carting it all to the dump. In a galaxy in which stars explode and planets are shredded by black holes, what’s a few paintings, a few poems? 

Jan Wurm says, “One of the reasons I love drawing so much is that it is inherently impermanent. It’s on a piece of paper that’s going to fall apart, and that’s the end of it. It’s very liberating because, in a sense, what you’re doing doesn’t really matter. So you can do anything.”

source:

“The Social Contract — a conversation with Jan Wurm”

Works & Conversations, n.43

(a magazine)

Richard Whittaker, editor 

Best Poems of 2024

I write poetry. I read a lot of poetry, too. If you glanced over yesterday’s post, the list of titles read last year, you saw many poetry titles, maybe even a poet or two you’ve heard of. I finished a collection by Walt Whitman, for instance. I plucked it from Kent’s bookshelf and started reading it in 2023. I read slowly and I read several books at once, so it often takes me a long time to get to the end of a heavier book. No Whitman poems appear in the list I am posting today — not because I have chosen against declaring any of them “best.” Rather, I haven’t spent enough time with individual poems yet. Likely some will show up among the 2025 “Best Poems.” We’ll see. In any case, that’s my method. When reading a book of poems I keep handy a stack of placemarks. If I want to reread a poem, I slide in a placemark. I come back to the poem, read it again and again. If I decide it’s something I don’t want to leave behind I hand copy it and save it in a three-ring binder. I have tried to figure out what my criteria are, without much success. I like sounds. I like transformations. I like double meanings. I like humor. I like surprise. I dislike poem-as-wisdom. Given the same sources, a different reader would choose different favorites. A “best” list by you, would not be mine. 

Tim Długos   …..   Incredible Risks

Tim Dlugos   …..   Nerves

Tim Dlugos   …..   To Clear Things Up, Scott

Tim Dlugos   …..   Wall Street Sauna

Federico Garcia Lorca   …..   Landscape of the Vomiting Multitude

Hsin Ch’i-chu   …..   En Route to Po-shan

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz   …..   Divine Laura, my life was always yours

Jacqueline Kudler   …..   January 2007

Lu Chi   …..   from Rhymeprose on Literature 

Oktay Rifat   …..   In the Street

Titles Read in 2024

January 

Modern Turkish Poetry

edited & translated by Feyyaz Kayacan Fergar

Fluent Forever: how to learn any language fast and never forget it

Gabriel Wyner

The Empress Is a Man: stories from the life of Jose Sarria 

Michael Robert Gorman

Running the Amazon

Joe Kane

Evening Street Review

#37, spring 2023

February

Songs from a Mountain

Amanda Nadelberg

The Rest of It: hustlers, cocaine, depression, and then some, 1976-1988

Martin Duberman

Ms. Marvel, vol. 1: No Normal

G. Willow Wilson, writer; Adrian Alphona, artist

The Gay & Lesbian Review

Nov-Dec 2023, v.30 n.6

The Rainbow People

Laurence Yep; illustrated by David Wiesner

Lives of Great Men 

Chike Frankie Edozien

Selected Poems

Edna St. Vincent Millay

March

Berkeley Poetry Review, #52: When the world moves on

[contains two of my poems]

Pidgin Eye

Joe Balaz

The Book of J

translated from the Hebrew by David Rosenberg; interpreted by Harold Bloom

Hint

Deborah Fruchey

Mei Yao-chien and the Development of Early Sung Poetry

Jonathan Chaves

Mr. Know-It-All: the tarnished wisdom of a filth elder

John Waters

Love Wins: the lovers and lawyers who fought the landmark case for marriage equality 

Debbie Cenziper & Jim Obergefell

April

Uncle Tungsten: memories of a chemical boyhood

Oliver Sacks

Waiting for the Barbarians: essays from the classics to pop culture

Daniel Mendelsohn

This Arab Is Queer: an anthology of LGBTQ+ Arab writers

edited by Elias Jahshan

Poetry

v.222 n.2, May 2023

The Nib: Drugs

#8

Ms. Marvel, vol. 2: Generation Why

G. Willow Wilson, writer; Jacob Wyatt, Adrian Alphona, artists

West Branch

n.56, sp/su 2005

Stupid?

mini comic by Harry S. Robins

The Best American Poetry 2023

Elaine Equi, guest editor; David Lehman, series editor

Whetu Moana: contemporary Polynesian poems in English

edited by Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri, and Robert Sullivan

Berkeley Poetry Review

#41, 2010

Ten-Word Tiny Tales to Inspire and Unsettle

Joseph Coelho

The Nib, n.1: Death

Day for Night

Valerie Sopher

May

Alta

issue #25

The Last Word

Hanif Kureishi

Wow

Bill Manhire

Restless

Joseph Kai

El Golpe Chileno

Julien Poirier

Art and Fear: observations on the perils (and rewards) of artmaking

David Bayles & Ted Orland

The Gay & Lesbian Review

v. 31 n.3, May-June 2024

June

Lifespan, v.8: Achievement

July 2023, edited by Matt Potter; contains my poem “Building a House”

City Poet: the life and times of Frank O’Hara

Brad Gooch

Mauri Ola: contemporary Polynesian poems in English (Whetu Moana II)

edited by Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri, and Robert Sullivan

The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion

Talisman: a journal of contemporary poetry and poetics

#16, fall 1996

Edward Foster, editor

The Passion of Gengorah Tagame: master of gay erotic manga, vol. 2

Anne Ishii, Chip Kidd, Graham Holbeins, editors; Vincent W. J. Van Gergen Dei, translator

July

20,000 Steps Around the World: great hikes, walks, route and rambles

Stuart Butler and Mary Capteron Morton

Gaytheist: coming out of my Orthodox childhood

Lonnie Mann, writer; Lonnie Mann & Ryan Gatts, art

The Complete Kake Comics 

Tom of Finland; edited by Dian Hanson

Looking for Transwonderland: travels in Nigeria

Noo Saro-wiwa

The Gay & Lesbian Review

v.31 n.4, July/Aug 2024

Already Home: a topography of spirit and place

Barbara Gates

Fire Island: a century in the life of an American paradise

Jack Parlett

August

Queer as All Get Out: 10 people who’ve inspired me

Shelby Criswell

The Old Gays Guide to the Good Life

The Old Gays of TikTok

Normal: transsexual CEOs, crossdressing cops, and hermaphrodites with attitude

Amy Bloom

The Widow’s Handbook: poetic reflections on grief and survival

edited by Jacqueline Lapidus and Lise Mean

Gutted

Justin Chin

King-Cat Comics & Stories

#83, May 2024

John Porcellino

September

Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: living and writing in the West

Wallace Stegner

The Book on the Book Shelf

Henry Petroski

Moms

Yeong-shin Ma, translated by Janet Hong

The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature

Victor Mair, editor

Undetectable

a play by Tom Wright

October

The Gay & Lesbian Review

v.31 n.5, Sept-Oct 2024

Our Deep Gossip: conversations with gay writers on poetry and desire

Christopher Hennessy

Pylon

box set of 4 CDs and an LP-sized book with an essay by Stephen Eisner

Transient and Strange: notes on the science of life

Nell Greenfieldboyce

The Land Between Two Rivers: writing in an age of refugees

Tom Sleigh

The New York Review of Books

May 2024, v.71 n.8

A Fast Life: the collected poems of Tim Dlugos

edited by David Trinidad

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: short stories, prose, and diary excerpts

Sylvia Plath

Grief

Andrew Holleran

Poetry

Sept 2024, v.224 n.5

The Wandering State: poems from alta, vol. 1: San Francisco

edited by Kim Shuck

Sor Juana’s Love Poems

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz; translations by Jaime Manrique and Joan Larkin

Cheshire Crossing

Andy Weir and Sarah Andersen

My Body: new & selected poems 

Joan Larkin

December

Impossible People: a completely average recovery story

Julia Wertz

The Gay & Lesbian Review

v.31 n.6, Nov-Dec 2024

Mexican Poetry: 20/20 voices, a bilingual anthology

Brandel France de Bravo, editor

Complete Poetry and Selected Prose

Walt Whitman; edited by James E. Miller, Jr.

Surrealist Poetry: an anthology

edited & translated by Willard Bohn

The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry: expanded edition

Robert K. Martin

Raven Understands: a happy memoir

Marvin K. Hiemstra

Have You Seen This Man?: the Castro poems of Karl Tierney

edited by Jim Cory

Writing on Empty: a guide to finding your voice

Natalie Goldberg

The Fifth Risk

Michael Lewis

*****

This list encompasses all books I finished reading in 2024, no matter when I happened to start them. It includes a few magazines, ones I’ve read from cover to cover, but not necessarily all of those. The list does not include anything I’ve read on the web. I have read a lot on the web, but it’s too hard to keep track of.