word of the day: tiercel

word: tiercel

context:

winter sun 

in the eye of her tiercel 

returns to her glove

— Harvey Hess

definition (Merriam-Webster): a male hawk; especially : a male peregrine falcon

This haiku was opaque until I looked up “tiercel.” Suddenly, it was evocative. 

source: Haiku World: an international poetry almanac

edited by William J. Higginson

1996. Kodansha International, New York

what won’t surprise a poet

“It is the gift of all poets to find the commonplace astonishing, and the astonishing quite natural.” — Margery Sharp

The mice of the Prisoners’ Aid Society, who have been sent to rescue a poet from the dungeon of the Black Castle, at last meet the prisoner and he is not surprised to hear them speak. 

I rather like Sharp’s description of the poet’s perspective. Oddly, however, not once does Margery Sharp quote a line of the young man’s poetry. 

Nor do we ever learn what led to his imprisonment. One might assume it had something to do with the poetry, but Sharp never really tells us. 

source:

The Rescuers

by Margery Sharp

1959. A Yearling Book / Dell Publishing, New York

word of the day: adjure

word: adjure

context:

[A] cruel black paw pinned [the two mice] to the ground! … ‘Whatever you do, lie still!’ adjured the glance of Miss Bianca.

definition (Merriam-Webster): to command solemnly under or as if under oath or penalty of a curse

One of the complications for the intrepid mice of the Prisoners’ Aid Society is the prison cat. Up to now Miss Bianca has figured out ways to placate — or, at least, distract — the monstrous mouser, but now her dear friends and colleagues, Nils and Bernard, are under the cat’s power. Can she outwit the cat this time?

source:

The Rescuers

by Margery Sharp

1959. A Yearling Book / Dell Publishing, New York

words of the day: strawfoot and hayfoot

words: strawfoot and hayfoot

context:

”Hear that, Amelia? The lady says we never learnt no manners! Hands up all who goes to dancing class! Hands up all who know strawfoot from hayfoot! My word, she should see some of our barn dances!”

definition: the strawfoot is the right foot, the hayfoot the left. According to an American Heritage article, during the US Civil War “the drill sergeants repeatedly found that among the raw recruits there were men so abysmally untaught that they did not know left from right, and hence could not step off on the left foot as all soldiers should. To teach these lads how to march, the sergeants would tie a wisp of hay to the left foot and a wisp of straw to the right; then, setting the men to march, they would chant, ‘Hay-foot, straw-foot, hay-foot, straw-foot’—and so on, until everybody had caught on. A common name for a green recruit in those days was “strawfoot.”

The mouse rescuers of the Prisoners’ Aid Society are on their way to the Black Castle to save an imprisoned poet. They’ve stowed away on a supply caravan. The journey lasts several days, so the carriage drivers must camp along the way. At night, local, country mice clamber up to check out the provisions and socialize with Miss Bianca, Nils, and Bernard. Miss Bianca whispers about the lack of refinement of the country mice, but they have sharp ears. 

source:

The Rescuers

by Margery Sharp

1959. A Yearling Book / Dell Publishing, New York

word of the day: postilion

word: postilion

context:

[The intrepid rescuers] received all last instructions in the committee room [which was] an old carriage lamp … tossed down into the wine cellar by a long-ago postilion.

definition (Merriam-Webster): one who rides as a guide on the near horse of one of the pairs attached to a coach or post chaise especially without a coachman

Miss Bianca, Nils, and Bernard have been recruited by the Prisoners’ Aid Society to rescue a poet from the dungeon of The Black Castle. The Prisoners’ Aid Society consists entirely of mice. As you know, mice are intimately familiar with the unfortunate situation of prisoners, and, it seems, they have organized to help them. 

source:

The Rescuers

by Margery Sharp

1959. A Yearling Book / Dell Publishing, New York

I will love you forever, more or less

An American is talking translation with a Japanese who lived in Korea for more than 20 years. 

[A translator] must keep his readers’ sensibilities in mind. [The Japanese] cites a common Korean expression of fondness that he had trouble translating in a novel. ‘A Korean who loves someone might say, “I’ll wait for you for ten years, for a hundred years, for a thousand years!” And to a Korean reader this would be absolutely normal.’ But translating the phrase literally would perplex the Japanese reader. ‘“A hundred years?” he’d wonder. “But I’ll be dead by then!”’

source:

The Invitation-Only Zone: the true story of North Korea’s abduction project

by Robert S. Boynton

2016. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York

Title to Indian land, part one

Back around the turn of the 20th century the US government divided up Indian lands into individually-owned parcels. Naturally, they didn’t ask the Indians if they liked the idea. But what could be more American than private property? And the US government wanted the Indians to be as American as possible. The policy was called “allotment.” As Peter Nabokov, editor of Native American Testimony, puts it: “[T]he parcels soon became so diced up among descendants that no single heir could possibly sustain a family [on their small piece]. … A non-Indian with enough money and know-how could lease adjoining squares from Indians to create a big, promising cattle operation — a practice on many reservations today.” 

Nabokov then quotes from Indians are People, Too (1944) by Ruth Muskrat Bronson: 

The usual way a white family handles [inheritance] is for the family member who wants to keep the farm to mortgage the land for enough to buy out the other heirs. [Indians] can’t do this for this land cannot be sold because [they are] ward[s]. … In a country ill adapted to agriculture, [even] thirty-five acres are not worth much money, so the land will probably not be partitioned. Instead, the government will go on leasing the land, dividing the lease money among the heirs down through the generations.  

There are pieces of land on the books of the Indian Office so divided among heirs that the annual lease income therefrom to any one heir is less than one cent. Yet the annual cost to the government to administer the estate is estimated at approximately fifty times as much as the annual lease the heir receives.

Indians were considered wards of the state. They did not, in other words, have full US citizenship and the rights that come with it. They lived in a separate nation, sort of, though not a nation allowed to make its own decisions. (The South African government took inspiration from the US system when setting up its own sovereign-in-name-only “homelands” for black South Africans.) 

Growing up I was told I had Indian heritage through my father. Sioux, he said. I didn’t have any more information than that until well into adulthood when I learned that some Ingersoll cousins were registered as heirs to property on the Standing Rock Reservation, which straddles the border between North & South Dakota. My blood siblings and I registered as heirs, too. I don’t think Dad knew we could do that. Not that registering came with much benefit. I’m not a member of the Sioux Nation, a Lakota, not officially. I did start receiving lease income statements. Which was cool. Except that, as Ruth Bronson says, the money earned was eaten up by administrative costs. Pretty easy, as the amount earned was less than the postage spent on the envelope. Yup, I found myself looking at statements recording income of less than fifty cents.  

This seemed silly. But, like I said, here was evidence to back up the family story. I liked having that evidence. That it meant nothing as far as money was concerned didn’t bother me. If there had been money, I thought, better it go to the people on the reservation than me. Seems to me they ought to have it. 

source: 

Native American Testimony: a chronicle of Indian-White relations from prophecy to the present, 1492 - 2000

by Peter Nabokov

1999. Penguin Books, New York

Lyn Lifshin, Virgil Suarez way out in front

In a sidebar to a directory of literary magazines published in 2003, the directory compiler presents the results of a sort of popularity contest. He has totted up the number of times a poet’s been named by literary magazine editors as exemplary of the kind of poet the magazines have published — and that they hope to publish in the future. These were the poets named most frequently (number of literary magazines naming that poet appears in the parentheses):

Lyn Lifshin …… (47)

Virgil Suarez …… (40)

Simon Perchik …… (22)

Walter MacDonald …… (22)

John Grey …… (21)

Richard Kostelanetz …… (20)

Robert Cooperman …… (17)

B. Z. Niditch …… (16)

Gerald Locklin …… (14)

Marge Piercy …… (14)

W. S. Merwin …… (13)

James Tate …… (13)

Albert Goldbarth …… (12)

Seamus Heaney …… (12)

Errol Miller …… (12)

David Ray …… (12)

Sherman Alexie …… (12)

Editors want to name poets others will have heard of, so a contributor (or purchaser) will get a sense of the magazine’s tastes. So there’s a bias in reportage toward frequently-seen names. But I suspect this ranking reflects pretty closely those most-published in fact as well as perception at the turn of the 21st century. 

These poets are also among the most prolific poets of the era. They wrote a lot. They sent their work out a lot. 

I wonder what names would top the rankings in today’s internet.

source:

Directory of Poetry Publishers, 2002 - 03

edited by Len Fulton

Dustbooks, Paradise, CA

what people wrote in my jr high yearbook, 1978

In the late 70s I attended Brook Haven Junior High (6th - 8th grades) in Sebastopol. I hated it. Yet at the end of 7th grade I bought the yearbook. Not sure why. To salvage the experience somehow? I loved books and something about seeing myself and the people I knew in a book? I was disappointed I only appeared in one photo, the individual portrait lined up in the gallery of classmates. Looking through the yearbook, I find I remember a greater percentage of the kids than in my high school yearbooks. But then Brook Haven was a smaller school. 

When I got the yearbook I had to buck up my courage to ask people to sign it. I watched other kids eagerly exchanging theirs, and once again felt left out. Then there was the disappointment of getting it back when I had found someone to sign it and having to read the emptiness of “have a great summer” over and over. I knew I wouldn’t be seeing any of these people in the summer. It felt like a taunt. Or, at least, boring. I have no examples of what I wrote in anyone else’s yearbook, but I do remember resolving never to write “have a great summer.” I did not buy the 1979 edition.

I have faithfully reproduced all misspellings.

in a corner of the front cover:

Glen,

It’s been cool knowin ya, stay cool

Jeff

inside front cover:

Glenn, It’s been nice knowing you and have fun next year.

Louise

To Glenn,

I have learned a lot from you. Have a super summer and keep on reading your favorite books.

from 

Kim Strange

Glenn, 

Hope you have a great summer & 8th grade year!

your friend

Cindy Well

Pity your not in the 8th you could have come to camp and I really could have bugged you! But your a good kid, even if you are in 7th grade!

Ninnah

Glenn,

Have a good summer (so original). Drama was the highlight of the year. I’ll see you when you get to Analy (if you graduate)!

Good luck,

Greg Victor

To a real nice friend

have a nice summer and good luck next year

Christine Masaoka

from the faculty pages:

Best of luck. See you next year.

Dave Graves [vice principal]

To a real sweet and cute guy,

Have a fun summer and I’ll see you next year.

love, Mrs [Joanne] Myers [girls P. E.]

Onward and upward as an eighth-grader — much success!

Mr. [Dennis] C[hristiansen] [boys’ P.E.]

Glenn, 

Best wishes

M[arilyn] Neff [Arts & Crafts]

teacher signatures without notes:

James Pascoe, principal

Karen Nahmens, history

Oran Sapp, music

Harley Parmenter, science

Autographs page:

Hi — Glenn

Fritz Friday [I can’t read the signature so this is a total guess]

Hi, I know your brother — so have a good summer

Kathy Spillane

Have fun this summer

Kelly Strong (Kyle)

Have a great summer

Chris

Best wishes glenn

Mark Henson

Have a cool summer

Mike

Bill, give me your pistol!

Davy Figaro

[no message]

Doran Reynolds

Have a great summer

Rich H.

Have a great summer

Rich H.

[yes, he wrote it twice]

Hope to see you next year

Kenny Anderson

Hi 

George Herring

Have a good one

Jocko Parkinson

Hi Glenn

Have a nice summer

Stuart

Boatswain,

It was fun having you in drama

and doing the play!

Diane

Glenn

I hope you have a great summer

I hope to see you next year

Adrienne Sklavos

Hi 

from Kenny P.

Have a good summer 

hope to see you next year

Jon D. 

Glen, 

Have a nice summer and have a good school year and good luck

Danny Lindstrom

In Graduating Class Favorites next to her picture for “Teacher’s Pet”:

Glenn —

I wish you were an 8th grader.

You dance so well.

Karen [Elvy]

inside back cover:

Glenn,

Have a nice summer and stay out of trouble with everyone. Hope to see you next year.

your friend, 

Larry

Glenn,

have fun in 8th grade

John Knox

Have a nice summer

Russ

Glenn,

to a really nice & cute guy.

have a great summer see you next year. 

good luck always

love,

Stacie * 

Start doing push-ups over the summer. Then as an 8th grader you may get rowdy which every well-rounded person must do once. Never Quit.

Luck

Chris

Glenn,

Don’t beat up to many 7th graders next year. See ya when ya get to Analy. 

love,

Jackie Beat 

***

There are two references above to our junior high production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore. I had the role of Boatswain, which we pronounced Boat’s wane, rather than Bosun. I got two lines? Ralph (which our teacher had us pronounce “Rafe”) Rackstraw asks me for my gun, and I say something like, “Here it is!” I don’t remember what the other line would have been.

I just looked up the script for H.M.S. Pinafore and Boatswain got a lot more than two lines! I knew Mr Sapp had abridged the play — or used an already abridged version — but, boy, did I get ripped off. Of course, there’s only so much sitting on cold metal bleachers you can expect of supportive parents. All the meaty parts went to 8th graders, and I’m sure those were greatly abbreviated as well. 

I got a big part myself the next year, the lead gangster in Mrs. McThing. I remember H.M.S. Pinafore going pretty well. Mrs McThing, sadly, did not. A story for another day.

White

“White” is a tricky word.  As a descriptor for a human grouping it seems, on the surface to be obvious — people with pale (white-like) skin. 

White as a power category also appears uncomplicated. Those who look white are included in the group socialized and legally constituted to have a superior power position in America to those who don’t. You don’t get to choose your whiteness — or reject it. You are granted it automatically because the power structure needs an easy-to-police dividing line. 

When I say “white” gets tricky, I mean when you try to pin down the definition in regards to each individual, you start to realize you are deciding who exactly gets to be included in the power category. Somebody has to be not-white, if white is to remain a power category.

Who do you want to allow to be white? Who do you force not to be? What quantity of melanin is too much? What family ancestry qualifies or disqualifies? The obviousness of the division crumbles. 

When I did a semester in London years ago, I stayed with a family where the mother was a brown-skinned American latina and the father was a pale-skinned Brit. They had two children, one a blonde, pale-skinned girl, the other a boy darker than his mother with black hair. If you were sorting purely by a glance, the daughter would be white and the son wouldn’t. That doesn’t seem fair. But, of course, none of this is fair. 

In an essay about multiculturalism Jack Foley remembers a family discussion:

My son Sean came home from school recently and told me that he had seen some T-shirts which had the equivalent of the phrase ‘Black Is Beautiful’ on them. (I believe the phrase was in fact ‘Black By Popular Demand.’) He complained that he couldn’t wear a shirt saying, ‘White Is Beautiful” or ‘White By Popular Demand.’ I said, ‘That’s true, but you could wear a shirt saying, “Irish Is Beautiful” or, “Italian Is Beautiful” or, “Jewish Is Beautiful.”’ The point is that white is not an ethnic group. [italics in original]  [W]hat is it? 

I think the answer is that … ‘White’ … is always an indication of power … In [a text I quoted] from 1726 … the opposite of ‘Whites’ is not ‘Blacks’ but ‘Slaves.’

“White” is not an innocent category, one we can take for granted. White and other so-called racial categories are not clear natural sortings with no more social significance than those who can curl their tongues and those who can’t. Rather, these are power categories, with white being the dominant power. Wearing a “White Power” t-shirt you declare yourself a member of the superior power category — and one who is willing to make sure that category remains exclusive and that you will police the borders of the category to keep others out (and out of power). 

Any other declaration, even “Black Power,” is, at most, aspirational. Everybody knows where the power lies. 

source:

“Multiculturalism and the Media”

an essay by Jack Foley

Multi-America: essays on cultural wars and cultural peace

1998. Penguin Books, New York

“the extinction of the native race”

19th century Peruvian novelist Clorinda Matto de Turner deplored the treatment of the Indians. After describing a particularly horrendous usury trap which peasants got forced into, Matto de Turner, despairingly cries out:

Would that God, in the exercise of His goodness, might one day ordain the extinction of the native race, which, resplendent once in imperial greatness, now drinks the fetid cup of degradation! God grant it extinction, since it can never recover its dignity or exercise its rights!

This language sounded familiar to me. L. Frank Baum, a decade before he wrote The Wizard of Oz, published a weekly newspaper in Aberdeen, South Dakota. Upon the death of Sioux Chief Sitting Bull, Baum wrote an 1890 editorial in which he speaks admiringly of Sitting Bull, and angrily of “his conquerors [who] were marked in their dealings with his people by selfishness, falsehood and treachery.” Yet Baum also writes contemptuously of the Sioux still alive:

With [Sitting Bull’s] fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. … Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are. History would forget these latter despicable beings, and speak, in later ages of the glory of these grand Kings of forest and plain that Cooper loved to heroism.

Like Matto de Turner, Baum contrasted Indian days of glory with their present degraded state, and thought that the degraded remnant would best be put out of their misery. The writings are virtually simultaneous. Matto de Turner’s novel, Torn from the Nest, was published in 1889, Baum’s editorial just one year later. The writers were talking about Indians on different continents, but they were observing a similar fate. 

Baum’s call for the extinction of the Sioux went a step further than Matto de Turner, unfortunately. Matto de Turner left extinction to God. Baum invited the U.S. military to do the job. In an editorial of 1891 Baum says: 

The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.

Presumably, Baum felt personally threatened by the living Indians in a way Matto de Turner did not. His is a mixed message, it’s clear to say. Baum decries the injustices visited upon the Indians, yet calls for more “wrong” to be done. Rather than seek humane solutions to an intractable problem, Baum invokes Final-Solution-like rhetoric. 

I’ve never read anything about Frank Baum personally visiting violence upon anybody, or offering any kind of material support to killing. His children’s fantasies are notable for their tolerance and acceptance of the “queer” and the disenfranchised. I am saddened he so compromised his compassion and sense of justice in these editorials. He knew better.

sources:

Torn from the Nest

by Clorinda Matto de Turner

translated from the Spanish by John H. R. Polt

edited by Antonio Cornejo Polar

1998. Oxford University Press, New York

The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer editorials by L. Frank Baum are reproduced by the University of Warwick, Coventry UK here:

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/second/en213/term1/l_frank_baum.pdf

What kind of grocer did you say?

In an essay about the Indian leader we know by the single word Gandhi, Salman Rushdie offers this: 

His full name, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, was memorably — and literally — translated into English by the novelist G. V. Desani as ‘Action-Slave Fascination-Moon Grocer.’

Do you know enough about your name to live up to all its meanings?

source:

Step Across This Line: collected nonfiction, 1992 - 2002

by Salman Rushdie

2002. Random House, New York

“showering the parchments”

Having recently read the testimony of a contemporary Christian writer that you can’t have real faith without doubt (to think otherwise is “simplistic”), I was struck by the uncompromising nature of Dante’s profession of faith when asked about it by one of the blessed in Paradise:

“‘… The bountiful

     rain of the Holy Spirit showering

     the parchments, Old and New, is to my mind

unquestionable certainty of Faith,

     so accurate that any other proof

     compared to it would sound most unconvincing.’

I heard: ‘These premises, the Old and New,

     which you believe to be conclusive proof,

     how do you know they are God’s holy word?’

And I: ‘The proof that what I read is true 

     is in the works that followed: Nature’s hand

     could never heat or forge that kind of iron.’

Then the reply: ‘Tell me, how do you know

     that these works ever were? You use as proof,

     and nothing more, what still needs to be proved.’”

What is Dante’s trump card? Christ performed miracles! If Christ hadn’t performed miracles, nobody would have paid attention to him, or, at least, an unassailable empire of holiness would not have been built upon his teachings. And, presumably, Dante himself would doubt, rather than have a faith of “unquestionable certainty.” 

I have little doubt that Dante, a well-read man of the thirteenth century, was aware of other traditions of miracles, some as believably described as those of the Bible — Old and New parts. 

On the other hand, another Christian writer of our time wrote to the effect that the miracles Jesus performs are described with a unique realism, and have great power as evidence for being so. I’m sure he wants that to be true. Maybe Dante thought so too. I don’t recall the contemporary writer providing pages of documentation of miracleworkers (Jesus contemporaries) whose miracles were described in a manner so totally unlike Jesus’ that it was obvious how much Jesus’ stood out. The fragmentary nature of the historical record — both from the wear and tear of centuries and out of intentional purging — leaves one with only a certain amount to go on … an uncertain amount, I should say?

But back to Dante’s Paradiso. Dante’s logic is essentially circular. He has unshakable belief in his sources because he finds them believable. The parchments smell like God. Plus there were miracles. 

Oh, and, it’s not enough, according to the blessed interrogator in Heaven, but there is that part about Nature being unable to “forge that kind of iron.” What that means exactly, I’m not sure. But I’m going to guess it’s the idea that there must be a God because, look around, no way could this have all just happened. 

Which takes us back to — why is it the Bible that has the right answer to how everything came to be? Which takes us back to — because we believe it does. 

And around we go.

source:

The Portable Dante

edited & translated by Mark Musa

1995. Penguin Books, New York