deodars

word of the day: deodar

context: “The woman … looked at him with frightened eyes through a screen door of bright new aluminum that contrasted with the weathered shingle siding of the house. The house crouched under gloomy deodars behind a shingle-sided church.”

definition: a Himalayan cedar with dark blue-green leaves and drooping branches, that is highly valued as a timber tree in India. Latin name: Cedrus deodara -- MS Word Dictionary

source: The Little Dog Laughed: a Dave Brandstetter mystery, by Joseph Hansen

sprechstimme

word of the day: sprechstimme

context: “’Foundations’ … begins with a crackling solo piano figure, expands into the sound of a full band, and barrels into a chorus in which [Kate] Nash abandons her habitual sprechstimme for clearly melodic singing.”

definitions: the voice used to sing; see also sprechgesang -- MS Word dictionary
Sprechgesang and Sprechstimme (German for spoken-song and spoken-voice) are musical terms used to refer to an expressionist vocal technique that falls between singing and speaking. -- Wikipedia
A form of dramatic declamation between singing and speaking, in which the speaker uses lilt and rhythm but not precise pitches. -- American Heritage Dictionary online

source: The New Yorker, January 14, 2008 issue

each of the state’s 550,043 lucky residents

I was born in Alaska. Though my parents divorced and my mother brought me and my brother with her to California (her home state), her love affair with Alaska continued. Mom had a whole kit of Alaska materials (walrus tusks, Eskimo crafts, postcards) that she would take with her on teaching jobs. By the time I was paying attention to politics Alaska seemed to be deeply Republican. I assumed it had always been so. Sure, my family is liberal – even the ones still up there – but isn’t that stereotype about rural people being Republican true enough? Most of Alaska is decidedly rural.

Chuck Thompson was born in Juneau (he has quite an attitude about my native Anchorage), and in his book Smile When You’re Lying: confessions of a rogue travel writer Thompson pinpoints the Republicanizing of Alaska:

“1982, with Alaska dripping in crude, the first Permanent Fund Dividend checks were issued by the state government to all Alaskans -- $1,000 given away to each of the state’s 550,043 lucky residents, every penny based on investments made with oil revenues. A pittance for corporate oil even then, but a $6,000 payout for families with four kids, like mine, was big money. Some call the Permanent Fund Dividends pseudosocialism, but the truth is less complex: they’re a bribe. Alaska’s once-liberal voters haven’t sent a non-Republican to Washington since the day that first check was issued. Alaska today isn’t so much a GOP stronghold as it is an oil fiefdom.”

The Republicanized Alaska proudly ties on his ideological mask – “self-sufficiency and rugged individualism” – but behind the mask those squishy individuals glue their lips to the tit of the state. Thompson, wryly, concludes, “The importance of independence myths is inversely proportional to the degree to which any society has surrendered its sovereignty.”

outright lovers

I’d heard that there was a gay element to the close friendship between Gilgamesh the king and Enkidu the wildman. But when I read translations I didn’t come across much evidence. Sure, they were buddies, but we’re all familiar with the ultra-het buddy flick, right?

David Damrosch gives some backup to the homoerotic rumors:

“[Gilgamesh’s mother, the goddess] Ninsun [predicts] that Gilgamesh will ‘caress and embrace’ Enkidu like a wife, using the same verbs that described Enkidu’s lovemaking with Shamhat.” Shamhat was the (female) temple prostitute sent to tame the wildman who was running around the forest freaking everybody out. She was quite good at her job. “Ninsun’s language suggests that Gilgamesh and Enkidu have [an] intimate relationship, and [Ninsun’s interpretations of Gilgamesh’s dreams] slyly insinuate that they may be outright lovers. This hint is given by the choice of objects that Gilgamesh starts to love and caress in his dreams: the words for ‘meteor’ and ‘ax,’ kisru and hassinnu, strongly suggest two sexually loaded terms: kezru, a male prostitute, and assinnu, a eunuch who would take the female role in sexual rituals at Ishtar’s temple.”

source: The Buried Book: the loss and rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh, by David Damrosch

chasing his laughing partner through the house at dawn

Though he occasionally apologizes for it, sheepishly confessing to a paucity of wisdom, Edmund White, even when writing nonfiction, often makes use of the tools of fiction. In the passage below he employs a narrator’s omniscience to peel back the façade:

“Today I saw two men walking along Eighth Avenue in New York, holding hands absentmindedly. They were both in their forties, one badly scarred from an ancient case of acne, both a bit Neanderthalish from their hours at the gym. Their eyes scanned their path like minesweepers. The one on the right had the overly male, deeply unpopular look of a double-X chromosome – I’m sure he had anger management ‘issues.’ The other one seemed happy to have a lover-friend all in one person. He didn’t seem proud or possessive but just relieved. He was no beauty. And yet I could never imagine them flirting with each other or the double-X chasing his laughing partner through the house at dawn. Maybe flirtation would have made them snicker with evil embarrassment like Beavis and Butt-head. Maybe they were too unevolved from their primitive masculinity to live with women.”

It sounds like he knows them. He doesn’t. White doesn’t get the genetics right, for one thing (does he mean double-Y? the extra masculine man? an XXY is not known for looking “overly male” but rather for feminine characteristics, like breast development). The idea that one could have “a lover-friend all in one person” seems foreign to White. Really? White casts his speculations in a maybe or two, but he speaks with authorial authority – the sort of authority I readily grant a fictional narrator but one of which I am deeply suspicious in writing presented as non-imaginary.

Early on in my gay reading life I took a dislike to Edmund White because he has the habit of pronouncement. He tells us what gay men are like, what gay men do. As my feelings often ran counter to the White-ian ur gay, I stopped reading him. These days his testimony doesn’t bother me so much, partly because there are plenty of other gay perspectives available, partly because I don’t need him to tell me anything, and partly because his prose style is finely crafted and interesting whatever the substance of the remarks.

source: My Lives: an autobiography, by Edmund White

What do Ashurbanipal, Hadrian, Queen Elizabeth I, and Mao have in common?

Ashurbanipal was the ancient king in whose library was discovered the Epic of Gilagamesh. The king was literate, a rarity for the time, even for kings, who didn’t need to read, after all, they had scribes to do that. But as a literate man Ashurbanipal liked to have books around him and collected what was probably the greatest library of the age. Plus he wrote poems. You know he did!

In The Buried Book David Damrosch quotes a few lines attributed to Ashurbanipal:

Often I go up to the roof in order to plunge down,
but my life is too precious, it turns me back.
I would hearten myself, but what heart do I have to give?
I would make up my mind, but what mind do I have to make up?
O Nabu, where is your forgiveness,
O son of Bel, where is your guidance?

Unusual exposure of self-doubt & vulnerability for a king. Glorifying was more the order of the day in kingly lit. Even when it were self-glorifying.

Damrosch lines Ashurbanipal up with his peers: “Ashurbanipal’s poems can be compared to the verses of the Roman emperor Hadrian or, much later, England’s Queen Elizabeth I and China’s Chairman Mao, all of whom wrote some excellent stanzas and a larger output of lesser quality. All four leaders can best be described as talented amateurs, and more specifically as talented amateurs whose audience was not going to risk offering much in the way of constructive criticism.”

EXIT GISTUBAR!

David Damrosch’s The Buried Book is a lively account of the early archaeological triumphs and shenanigans in and about Iraq & the British Museum, particularly in regards the rediscovery of the “Great Epic of Gilgamesh.”

In a section talking about the decoding of the cuneiform in which the poem was written Damrosch says, A “major complication in the process … was that cuneiform had originally been developed in southern Mesopotamia by people who spoke Sumerian, an ancient language completely unrelated to any other known language. The script had then been taken over by speakers of Akkadian, which became the most commonly written language for much of Mesopotamian history. Yet the Akkadian scribes continued to learn Sumerian as they mastered the script, and they often employed Sumerian loan words amid their Akkadian texts. It is as though, in reading an English text we would often have to pause and determine whether pain meant ‘suffering,’ as in English, or ‘bread,’ as in French.

“Conversely, a sign might have the same meaning in Akkadian as in Sumerian but a completely different sound: when used to mean ‘sky,’ the star symbol is pronounced an in Sumerian, but shamu in Akkadian. Names in particular could be tricky, for Assyrian names often included Sumerian elements, along with Akkadian symbols. This would lead George Smith [a self-taught linguist responsible for the first translation of Gilgamesh], for example, to misread the name Gilgamesh as ‘Izdubar’; he didn’t realize that what looked like two Akkadian characters, iz and du, were actually Sumerian signs pronounced ‘giz-ga’ or ‘gil-ga.’ He then guessed incorrectly on the final syllable, which was Akkadian as he assumed, but which can be pronounced either ‘bar’ or ‘mesh.’ … The reading of ‘Gilgamesh’ was finally established twenty-five years later by Smith’s friend and successor Theophilus G. Pinches, in an article triumphantly entitled ‘EXIT GISTUBAR!’”

the only way to divert criminal desire

The usual theory of parent/teenager conflict has it that the teenager is testing boundaries, seeking autonomy, differentiating from the family unit, full of hormones, acting out. It’s the teenager who has changed.

That’s obvious. The child is changing into an adult. Both parent and child are new at this.

In his My Lives Edmund White puts more of the onus on the parents:

“Through friends my age I have noticed that as teenage boys and girls become more and more beautiful their parents are reduced to continual spluttering rages against them. It’s enough for a slim-waisted, broad-shouldered lad to come skateboarding up to the curb with a flick of his full black hair and two dark red roses surfacing in his white cheeks to make his balding, stooped father yelp with hate-heavy vituperation. I suppose hate is the only way to divert criminal desire – or an equally disagreeable acknowledgment of envy and spite.”

“I don’t want that slimy shit on me.”

Deep Survival, Laurence Gonzalez’s investigation into what leads people in extreme situations to an outcome other than death, includes a number of dramatic survival stories. In one a sailboat founders. The crew manages to inflate a life raft, but the sea is rough, and the wind chilling.

“At last, Kiley hit on the idea that they could cover themselves with seaweed for warmth. An inventive approach to using the materials at hand is a hallmark of survivor thinking. Although it was a good idea and eventually worked, Mark’s initial response was, ‘I don’t want that slimy shit on me.’ You can often tell early on who is going to make it and who is not. If Kiley’s story had been a Hollywood movie, everyone in the audience would know by now that Mark was going to die.”

Partly cuz, you know, it wasn’t the first clue.

pile of reading

My Song Is the Light: the California Poets in the Schools Statewide Anthology 2007, edited by Mary Lee Gowland
… We had four poets who teach under CPITS auspices read for Poetry & Pizza last Friday. It was a good reading, a little long, what with four poets each getting feature treatment. I told Susan Herron Sibbet that I’d had a poem in the CPITS state anthology back in … 1982? Maureen Hurley and Zara Altair had taught an after school CPITS class at my high school and it opened my world to poetry. Poetry as freedom, rather than restriction. Invention rather than convention. Excitement rather than moderation. The other poets at P&P were Cathy Barber, Tobey Kaplan, and Emmanuel Williams.

Circus World, by Barry B. Longyear … Back in 1978 and ’79 I was buying every new issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. I would read Isaac Asimov’s introductory essay, and typically read other nonfiction, like book reviews, but I wasn’t reading many of the stories. I remember seeing Longyear’s Circus World stories. The only Longyear story I actually recall reading, however, was “Enemy Mine”, a novella which, coincidentally, had a dual-sex alien, thus might be said to be of gay interest. Some years later I saw a paperback of Circus World selling for cheap so picked it up, thinking it a novel sequel to the stories. When clearing out the house after my mother died I threw all the old IAsfms into the recycle bin. But I brought back to Berkeley boxes of paperbacks. Circus World, the book, is not a novel but a collection of the short stories that appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (Barry Longyear calls it, “a series of stories that … constitute an episodic novel”). I’ve now read my first Circus World story. Not bad. Well, now I’ll know what I was missing all those years ago.

Tender Is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald … I started reading this Fitzgerald novel before going on our last trip but I didn’t take it with me. I haven’t gotten back into it. I prefer to read only one novel at a time (Proust excepted), but I’ve lately been reading short stories, and I started Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting at Hill House as my breaktime book, so the space for fiction is crowded. I note that I began reading this because I feel like I ought to read Fitzgerald again and, perhaps oddly, because I like “Tender Is the Night”, the song by Jackson Browne.

Otherhood, by Reginald Shepherd … I summoned this book of poems from another of Berkeley’s branch libraries after I read Reginald Shepherd’s account of a recent hospitalization. In comments I said, “I understand when somebody's reading a poem strength flows to the poet. So I'll go get one of your books and sit down and read.”

The New Yorker, February 5, 2007 issue … At my library we have a box where people can drop off (& pick up) recent magazines. Issues of The New Yorker appear there frequently and earlier this year a fairly complete run of 2007 enticed me. The last piece I read was a rather discouraging account of the damage inflicted on Sublette County, Wyoming via increased natural gas drilling there. The more development the greater the damage to the environment, yes, but it seems violence and drug abuse increase hand in glove with the drilling, too.

Crashing the Gate: netroots, grassroots, and the rise of people-powered politics, by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga … Jerome Armstrong founded and still runs the Democratic activist blog MyDD. Markos is the “Kos” of DailyKos, the Big political blog, which I discovered when it wasn’t nearly so big about five years ago. I was interested in reading their Crashing the Gate, so when the Friends of the Library got a copy I snapped it up. “Those of us who became energized ever since Bush and his circle of fiends took over in 2000 … must now act to take back our party and our country.” Fiends! Aw. I like this book already.

The Ten Cent Plague: the great comic-book scare and how it changed America, by David Hajdu … I like the cover illustration by Charles Burns. Hajdu starts the book with a sympathetic portrait of an artist, Janice Valleau, whose career was cut short (destroyed?) by the anti-comics hysteria of the 50s. In an appendix Hajdu lists 15 pages of “artists, writers, and others” whose careers were hurt in this particular subwar of the greater War on Culture in the United States.

Welcome to the Monkey House, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr … Perhaps it was Vonnegut’s recent death that made me decide to reread old Vonneguts. I decided to start with this collection of short stories, partly because it contains some of Vonnegut’s earliest fiction. (I don’t think I will reread Vonnegut’s first novel, however. I did not like Player Piano.)

Ploughshares, Spring 2002, edited by Cornelius Eady … I added this to the browsing paperbacks collection at Claremont. After two years spinning on the rack (and 3 check-outs) it was time for it to retire. So I brought it home.

Fence, Spring/Summer 2004, edited by Rebecca Wolff … Remember a few days ago I said, “When I look through a long list of a literary magazine’s contributors, it surprises me that after 25 years of regular poetry reading so few are names I recognize. It is true that I’ve been delighted by a poem then discovered that the poet who wrote it had work in other magazines or anthologies that I’ve read. Suddenly the name sticks out.” That was when I was talking about Sorry for Snake, remember? Well, glancing at the editorial staff of Fence a name suddenly sticks out. One of the Sorry for Snake poets I quoted is Poetry Editor of Fence. Funny.

Tristes Tropiques, by Claude Levi-Strauss … I was assigned a section of this book in an Amazonia class in college. I read that section but kept the book figuring one day I would read it through. Last night I was charmed by the opening: “I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions.”

The Buried book: the loss and rediscovery of the great Epic of Gilgamesh, by David Damrosch … In his introductio Damrosch describes some of his research, including this trip to the British Museum’s misleadingly named Central Archive: “I made my way to the Central Archive, which is reached, oddly, through an unmarked door at the back of the British Museum gift shop. Once through that door, I walked through a series of darkened, echoing rooms filled with empty bookshelves (the books having been transferred to the recently constructed British Library), then came to a warren of small offices, among which is the Central Archive. Of the seven days of the week, it is open to the public for five hours on Tuesdays.”

you gotta have hope

More and more over the years I’ve come to recognize that “hope” is another one of those words that actually means a buncha things, maybe some not quite compatible. When I was struggling, miserable and feeling trapped, I kept hoping things would somehow get better. My hopes would stand in the square and everybody would give them space, a lot of space, as though my poor little hopes standing out there pressed together for comfort, were at best embarrassing, at worst a bit revolting. Unmet, they would stand there till the evening gathered and brought the indifferent darkness. I grew to loathe them myself.

Finally, desperately, I rejected them. A relief! Truly. A relief. My hopes had taken so much energy. It was better not to have any. Just do whatever, what needed to be done now. Hungry? Eat until the emptiness doesn’t hurt. Don’t feel like getting out of bed? Lie there.

“One of the toughest steps a survivor has to take is to discard the hope of rescue … There is no other way for his brain to settle down.”

That’s a quote from Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzalez.

He continues: “Dougal Robertson, who was cast away at sea for thirty-eight days, advised thinking of it this way: ‘Rescue will come as a welcome interruption of … the suvival voyage.’” [ellipsis in orig.]

I generalize from “hope of rescue” to “hope of change” or “hope of something better.”

For some time I kept a button affixed to my backpack that said, “I feel so much better since I have given up hope.” But I tired of it catching on things. So I took it off.

Lately I’ve been wondering if there might be a sweeter form of hope, a non-virulent strain. Perhaps if mild enough it might be good for you, like an inoculation. Or might be a stimulant, like strychnine.

play

I’m always reading several books at once. I like to have one of them be a naturalist’s account of watching animals.

In a chapter on hyenas in her Innocent Killers Jane Goodall describes a play session between two pups:

“Master Beige … was full grown, whilst Brindle was still only about three months old. The game began when Brindle pounced on a rather large and very smooth roundish stone. Opening his mouth as wide as it would go, he struggled to pick it up, but it was just too big and his teeth kept slipping. Just as it seemed that he had, at last, managed to get a grip, Master Beige ambled up, seized hold of his small sibling’s ear, and pulled. Brindle sprawled on the ground, but in a flash he was up and again trying to pick up his stone. But Master Beige, by worrying the scruff of Brindle’s neck, yanking at his ears and pulling at his cheek hairs, made it impossible for Brindle to get a grip on his plaything.

“Suddenly, Brindle left the stone and darted to seize his tormentor by the tail, hanging on tight with his sturdy legs braced as Master Beige turned to bite at him. Gradually they moved farther back, Brindle still gripping his brother’s tail. And then, as fast as his short legs would go, Brindle ran back to the unguarded stone. But Master Beige was too quick for him and grabbed the toy himself, running off in the moonlight with his head turned back over his shoulder, inviting pursuit. Brindle lumbered along behind. Master Beige slowed his gait until his sibling could bite at the stone in his mouth, and then he dropped it on the ground. Brindle once more tried to get a grip on it, but always, if it seemed he might actually pick it up, Master Beige pounced, picked up the stone himself and loped off with it for a few yards. Brindle followed, Master Beige dropped the stone again, and so it went on.

“After a while Brindle, it seemed, gave up. He wandered away until he reached a thorny plant and pulled on a twig until it broke off. Master Beige watched him. Brindle shook his twig, dropped it and pounced on it. Master Beige could resist no longer. He loped across to join his sibling in a tug-of-war. But the moment one end of the twig was firmly in Master Beige’s mouth, Brindle dropped his end and raced back to the stone. Still, of course, he could not pick it up, but this time, as his big brother bounced back to grab the toy, Brindle firmly sat on it.”

my hero

Toward the back of a generally favorable chronicle of Madonna’s life and work Lucy O’Brien covers some pages with “celebrity moments.” Bad diva.

This one is my favorite:

“Madonna went with Sean Penn to Helena’s, an exclusive club in Los Angeles. Sean didn’t dance, so she brought her choreographer along just in case she wanted to hit the floor. The only snag was, he had to leave his gay lover outside. Witness to this event was Dennis Fanning, a no-nonsense policeman who was helping Sean with research for his role as a cop in Colors. Fanning went to the door and pulled the man in, telling security he was with Madonna’s party. ‘I sit his ass down next to his boyfriend, turn to [Madonna], and go, “C’mon, you want to dance with him? Dance. But why should his boyfriend be outside on New Year’s Eve? The fuck is that all about?” She’s looking at me like she hasn’t been talked to like that in years.’”

My hero! Butch police officer stands up to diva over her mistreatment of little gay boy. Now dance.

source: Madonna: Like an Icon, by Lucy O’Brien

the heterosexual assumption

One thing that has noticeably degraded in my lifetime is the hetersexual assumption. It’s nice. Sure, most people most of the time figure if you have a sweetie she’s a girl, if you’re a boy, and vice versa. But once in awhile comes the realization that there is another option. Boy could be with boy?

Usually when I hear someone refer to her “partner” I figure she’s referring to a same-sex partner. But aware straights have picked up the term, too. I like the ambiguity. When Lucy O’Brien in her Madonna: Like an Icon recounts how she came around to appreciation of the pop star as artist she says: “We are from the same generation. Like her, I was a lapsed Catholic girl fired up by feminism. I played in an all-girl band and knew the thrill of performing. Like her, I was drawn to punk and the underground club scene. Like her, I focused on my career until I met and married my partner later in life. Like her, I had two children (a boy and a girl) after I turned forty.”

Married. Partner. Is this partner male or female? As O’Brien uses the word “married” I suspected the partner is male as gay people don’t yet get to toss off that word so easily. There are places where we can marry, however, and some claim the word even when the marriage is not state-recognized. Further explanation is typically forthcoming in such cases. As “husband” could easily be switched out with “partner” the easiest guess is that is what O’Brien means. But from what she’s said so far you can’t know. I like that.

Sorry for Snake

I found issue #3 of Sorry for Snake, a digest-sized, saddle-staple lit zine, on the poetry shelf at Pegasus. The editors are Sara Mumolo and Jack Morgan, both former members of the Trainwreck Union. My post about the Trainwreck Union still has the DIR record for number of responses – not to mention kerfuffle! Not long after the Union fissioned, it seems.

Jack Morgan has gone on using the Trainwreck blog, though it’s his personal blog now. He started a press, Stormy Petrel, and it’s under that aegis he’s produced Sorry for Snake. I’m guessing all the work is solicited as no “writers guidelines” appear in the magazine or on the Stormy Petrel site. But it looks like it’s gonna come out pretty regular, as Jack’s now offering subscriptions.

There are 9 poets in the issue: Matthew Rohrer, Feliz Molina, Jared White, Mark Cunningham, Trevor Calvert, Gillian Hamel, K. Silem Mohammad, Juliet Cook, and Erika Staiti. Only K. Silem Mohammad is a name familiar to me. When I look through a long list of a literary magazine’s contributors, it surprises me that after 25 years of regular poetry reading so few are names I recognize. It is true that I’ve been delighted by a poem then discovered that the poet who wrote it had work in other magazines or anthologies that I’ve read. Suddenly the name sticks out. When the poem was just one of many that made only a glancing impression its author remained unseen. Of course I become familiar with names for reasons other than delight – could be that they just appear over & over such that even the tired eye begins to see. Or the poet is also an essayist or publisher or vigorous self-promoter.

K. Silem Mohammad is one of the flarf poets. Flarf, if I understand it right, is a method of composition wherein the poet generates text using Google. Not sure if there are rules other than that.

Here are some lines from Mohammad’s “Heavy Horses”:

Matthew Broderick breaks his collarbone after falling off
this unknown German No-Wave project with no foundation
he states that it is obvious how humans reproduce
this oblique reference to screwing is an attempt
to protest about the type of horse he used to fix the lightbulb

*

I found a performance on youtube that Mohammad gave at a 2006 Flarf Festival. He has good timing.

And in the interest of future remembering here are some random lines by other Sorry for Snake poets:

Matthew Rohrer: “Don’t let them / turn me into a song / ok? I only drip / like the rain.”

Jared White: “But eventually everything becomes community service and / Abstentions. I have a habit of getting big when I feel small / And pulling muscles in the legs. My liver doesn’t ever strain // But the eyes do.”

Gillian Hamel: “there is a figure skatingness about the overbright lights and slick / surfaces, / half of you changed colour due to rain.”

underminedetermined

Miekal And and Maria Damon coin some words in a poem, “Inbetween Detritus”, that appears in the second issue of UR*VOX:

underminedetermined

trashisions

eclecstatic

ontolopportunity

genilimnital

Emily Dickinson’s God

Those -- dying then,
Knew where they went --
They went to God's Right Hand --
That Hand is amputated now
And God cannot be found.

The abdication of Belief
Makes the Behavior small --
Better an ignis fatuus
Than no illume at all.

This one, numbered 1551 by editor Johnson in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, struck me for a few reasons. It’s easy to parse -- I didn’t know what an “ignis fatuus” was but got the sense of it from context (it’s a will-o’-the-wisp, the ghostly light that seems to flicker over a bog at night). It’s fierce. God is not just missing – his hand’s been amputated! Not sure what “Behavior” it is that “abdication of Belief” makes “small”, but considering the way the poem starts, “Those – dying then”, one may presume the “Behavior” has something to do with dying, whether something done by the dying one herself or by those who remain alive. Better a flicker over the bog than the pure darkness of unbelief? It’s hard to credit this. Is Dickinson being a mite ironic?

Jay Laden in an essay originally published in Cross Currents, describes the reaction his class had during a discussion of selected Dickinson poems about God. Laden says his students were Orthodox Jews. Rather than suggesting that God does not exist, Laden’s students insisted, this poem is proof that Dickinson takes God’s existence for granted: “Dickinson's poetry evinced a passionate engagement with God, an engagement that affirmed God's existence and importance even as it fretted or raged over God's inaccessibility.”

1775

I finished. Years I’ve been reading The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Today I came to the last poem. I read the last poem, #1775 per editor T.H. Johnson’s system, which appears on the 716th page.

aesthetically detrimental

In a New Yorker profile of Tiki Barber, the pro football player discusses his injuries, some of which, I got the idea, have resulted in chronic pain (certainly true of many another pro baller).

”I have this huge scar on my hip that’s just starting to heal,’ [Barber] said. “It’s under my pants. I take my pants off after the game and I have this laceration on my hips, and I’m, like, how the fuck did that happen, you know? But that’s just football. It’s aesthetically detrimental.”

I like that phrase, “aesthetically detrimental.”

Of course, considering the beefcake shot that illustrates the article one’s curiosity is piqued. Show me your scars, Tiki.

source: The New Yorker, January 29, 2007

The Best Poetry in the Whole World!

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz in her new history of the New York slam scene, Words in Your Face, quotes Guy LeCharles Gonzalez:

“I’ve got a marketing background, so I know: whatever you do, it’s the best. From the beginning, [the fliers I made for louderARTS] said, ‘The Best Open Mic in New York City.’ Suddenly, this is an issue [for people] … The fliers I made for the Open Room also said, ‘Best Open Mic in New York City.’”

There are some who find upsetting the anthologies that claim to be collecting The Best. Is it unfair, even unethical, to represent yourself as The Best?

Does declaring your poetry The Best imply that other poems are inferior? If you have a venue (a stage & a mic, a press) and you say you only choose The Best, what does that say about you? That yours are the unimpeachable Besting criteria?

Anyone who says he publishes only The Best is lying. Anyone who believes he is the best judge of The Best is deluding himself.

At this point I have a certain affection for the outlandish claim. There is no Best Cup of Coffee in the World because there is no single Best. There are bitters and bigs and darks and jolts, grinds and ages. The Best Sonnet ever written! The Greatest Villanelle Ever Held!

You’ll never read a better haiku than my ‘ku!

Sexton and Madonna

Madonna read Sexton, says Lucy O’Brien in her new Madonna: Like an Icon:

In her teenage years Madonna read Anne Sexton, and discussed with her sisters how much the Pultizer Prize-winning poet looked like Madonna Sr.

[Yes, Madonna was named after her mother. The elder Madonna died of cancer when her daughter was five.]

[Sexton’s] work was highly personal, often autobiographical, and laced at times with gallows humor. Sexton committed suicide in 1974, after publishing eight collections of poetry that combined beat style with high-art Romanticism and a graphic sense of the emerging feminism.

[Madonna was born in 1958 so was 16 when Sexton died.]

[Sexton’s] economy of language and unflinching look at death in poems such as “Madonna,” which was about the death of Sexton’s mother from cancer, would surface later as an influence ... But in the early 1970s, to a teenage girl missing her mother and looking for answers, Sexton’s poetry just offered a strange kind of solace.

DIR at DailyKos

I’ve long been a regular visitor to DailyKos, the website for the activist Democrat, chock-full of analysis & news & carping & so on, but I haven’t left comments on any of the articles in ages – years? I checked to see if my registration was still active -- a little surprised to find it was.

Then I thought, well, since I hang out there so much and DailyKos gets a zillion visitors and people can post their own “diaries” about nearly anything why don’t I repost a thing or two I’ve written for DIR? I say things about stuff. I use a bit of substance in the making. They’d hold up to a Sunday morning skim.

In the last few days I’ve posted two diaries. Each got a few comments. If you’re curious, check out my LuvSet diaries.

sex in “Boundaries” by D.L. Emblen

“I saw the new lands / through the opening between those legs.”

Need I say more?

There’s also a transgender aspect, you know. Antlers are a sex-linked characteristic. Male deer are the ones with antlers. The “opening between [human] legs” needn’t be vaginal, of course. Human legs aren’t fused, besides which there’s the anal opening.

Iowa. Starts with that big I so maybe it’s a stand-in for the ego. Has a very nice visual rhyme with “I know”. I know Iowa. Remove the consonants from “I know that Iowa” and you get “I ow a Iowa”. No wonder they get first shot at the president.

“very square”? The poem snatches back the human aspects of the legs. “mahogany” could be referring to the color rather than the substance, but after “very square” you’re not thinking mahogany hottie, are you?

Do cars have gunnels? A gunnel is the “rail around the edge of a boat”. The poet is being poetic we know. He just means “filled to the brim” … although one suspects packages were tied to the roof, a vision which overspills the metaphor. Don’t pay too much attention.

If you take a spindly little stand on an issue, I suppose your resistance is not difficult to overwhelm. Especially if it’s tied upside down, eh?

Is the top of the telephone stand round? Then it could be wheel-like and help transport us to the steering wheel the poet was leaning over, the one that guided his turns across the continent to the great West. Fuck Iowa. California is the place you wanna be. Go West! Life is peaceful there! Go West! In the open air!

Back to antlers and sex a mo’, that being tied to the bonnet does double duty, don’t it? Hunter? Seducer?

If a boat is loaded to the gunnels, isn’t it in danger of foundering?

In mythology the sky is often male. Mother Earth’s opposite.

What did I miss?

“Boundaries” by D.L. Emblen

Boundaries


The old telephone stand in the corner
takes me away, behind the wheel again:
all the way across the continent
when we came West,
the car loaded to the gunnels
and the spindly little stand
tied upsidedown on the front bumper,
its turned legs sticking up like antlers.
Day after day, I saw the new lands
through the opening between those legs.
Even now, I know that Iowa is very square,
bounded on the north and south by mahogany
and open to the sky.


-- D.L. Emblen


#

Don’s books have only ever been small editions. And he rarely has poems in magazines. I wanted there to be a Don Emblen poem on the web somewhere. Just so someone could see one who might want to.

“Boundaries” is from Notes from Travels.

all the suffering in the universe

Amory Lovins, author of Winning the Oil Endgame which prophesies various ways we will escape dependence on Big Oil, is an optimist.

”Sometimes after I give a talk, some folks get irked that I talk only about solutions and not about problems,” [Lovins told The New Yorker] “And typically someone will get up and give a long riff about all the bad things happening and all the suffering in the universe, which is basically true.”

How does Lovins respond?

He asks, How’s that workin’ for you? “As gently as [he] can [he asks] whether feeling that way makes them more effective.”

What, dwelling on the suffering of the world doesn’t goose you toward solutions? Everybody tells me how much better I’ll feel when I consider how much worse off others are.

source: The New Yorker, January 22, 2007

man vs. ‘beest

In Innocent Killers, a book Jane Goodall wrote with her then-husband, the nature photographer Hugo van Lawick, Jane engages in a little activism via grammar:

“It may seem strange, to some, that I write wildebeests, using the plural. Most people will talk about a herd of wildebeest, or zebra, a pride of lion, and so forth. But to us [meaning herself and Hugo], this use of the singular suggests that the individuality of each animal in the group is being ignored. It implies, to us, that every lion is just a lion. After all, who would dream of talking about a boatload of Italian, a classroom of German, or even a gathering of man?”

My brow crinkled up. I flipped back three pages. There I found a paragraph in which Jane discusses possible lifeways of early humans:

“Let us consider early man in the role of a scavenger. He may have been a reasonably fast runner, although, as he had not long adopted an upright posture, we cannot be sure. Undoubtedly he … his ears were much sharper than those of man today, at least of ‘civilized’ man … Early man … If he … he might have been able to … his weapons …”

Considering that I’ve never heard anyone say “pride of lion” Jane’s grammatical line in the sand must’ve stopped that particular travesty from crossing to my American ears. I haven’t read her most recent book, Reason for Hope -- do you know if she’s taken her own advice when referring to her home species?

notes toward an autobiography by others, part 7

source: Too Much Coffee Man: How to Be Happy, by Shannon Wheeler

although I found the gif at TMCM.com

notes toward an autobiography by others, part 6

source: Too Much Coffee Man: How to Be Happy, by Shannon Wheeler

although I found the gif at TMCM.com

the mistake will not be repeated

Kyoko Mori was born and raised in Japan but she has lived her adult life in America. On her first return to Japan she visits the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima. She wonders, are the horrors in the pictures of the atomic bomb aftermath really making an anti-war argument?

Mori thinks about her stepmother. “To her, the war was like some natural disaster that inconvenienced her family; it had no other implications.”

No one in the stepmother’s family lived in Hiroshima but, Mori says, “In a way, the displays in the museum are no different, however noble their intention. The atomic bomb is still portrayed as a cosmic disaster that befell an innocent people, burning them and destroying their homes. Even the inscription outside, on the memorial stone, is too vague: ‘Please rest in peace. The mistake will not be repeated.’ What mistake? Does the word refer only to the bomb, or the Second World War, or all war? And why does the inscription use the passive voice, ‘will not be repeated,’ as though we had no control over the outcome? Exactly who or what is accountable for the ‘mistake’ that ended up in the tragedy of Hiroshima?”

Mori wonders about the character of the Japanese. “Maybe this exhibit shows a typically Japanese attempt to save face all around, a desire to be polite: by treating the bomb as a cosmic disaster, we eliminate human responsibility – it’s as if the bomb caused itself to be dropped.”

How is war like a natural disaster? How is it unlike a natural disaster?

source: The Dream of Water: a memoir, by Kyoko Mori

a senryu by Alan Bern

the dogs bark louder
as someone passes by
we fuck faster


*


A haiku is about nature. The “plastic letters” haiku I quoted took place in nature (despite its focus on a human artifact) so I figured I might as well call it haiku. Senryu is about human beings and is frequently humorous. So I’ll call “the dogs bark louder” a senryu. Both forms have the same three line, syllable-counting characteristics.

Offering up a reading for “the dogs bark louder” seems superfluous. So let’s look at something not there – the punctuation.

How is the reading affected if you place a period after “louder”? Put the period after “by” instead? I think the second reads most naturally. But the line break (and reading that first line as a complete sentence, full stop) makes more independent the barking of the dogs; one doesn’t hear them as responding to the person passing. Rather, the dogs are merely background noise. Not that the beat can’t affect the motion.

source: “Secondi Passi” in Waterwalking in Berkeley, by Alan Bern

another haiku by Alan Bern

another haiku by Alan Bern

plastic letters
left on the hard dirt
spelling baby sounds


*


This one’s so clever it’s a bit cute. Yet I find a lot of charm in the small space of it. The toy plastic letters trying to make words, trying out combos that remain meaningless. Fun metaphor for the infant’s experiments in speech. The “hard” dirt … this language work is hard! The letters were abandoned – like many a toy – the additional metaphorical work of being abandoned projects, noises that refused to achieve meaning so were left behind. These letters, not just toys, but tools, but treated with the carelessness of the easily replaced, the quickly passed beyond. And they are outside, not scattered on the carpet, but in some yard or park, out of context of the particular child, almost natural, as though they are not language, but just random sounds.

source: “First Steps” in Waterwalking in Berkeley, by Alan Bern

Zombie Language, part 3

“Native American languages spoken north of Mexico constituted at the very least two dozen families, with a range of variation across the continent as broad as that on the entire Eurasian landmass, taking in Indo-European, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and others.”

Few of those Native American languages survive, and fewer yet will make it another hundred years. “Generally, the last generation of fluent speakers has learned it only partly, never truly living in the language, using it only in the corners of their lives. As a result the language is slightly pidginized.” By pidginized, John McWhorter means simplified. The more complicated aspects of the language, especially those most dissimilar to the replacing language, are forgotten or disregarded. Vocabulary, too, falls away.

So even if there are people alive who know how to speak a language the language may be a shadow of itself, may more truly thought of as dead or, at least, undead, a shambling, half-alive creature that can be pushed to the stage to perform (poorly) on ceremonial occasions.

source: The Power of Babel: a natural history of language, by John McWhorter

Julia Vinograd’s God

In “God’s Violin” Julia Vinograd imagines reality as a tune God plays on his violin.

Good and evil are only high and low
on one string of god’s violin.
There are other strings being played
stretching from our guts to the end of the world.

Like Annie Dillard Vinograd involves God in the business of silence. Unlike Dillard we are the ones whose silence is part of the music, not everything non-us.

Our silences wail under god’s fingers.

We don’t hear the song God’s playing, Vinograd says, being as we’re part of the song. Except sometimes. The mystic’s sudden apprehension of an extra reality –

sometimes … / an echo sweeps us up like a tidal wave / scattering everything we clutch and fight for / out of our hands like spilled popcorn / and we stand in the ruins and laugh. / Afterwards we don’t remember …

Then, and this was my favorite part of the poem, Vinograd admits her metaphor (or perhaps the existence of God?) is irrelevant.

God’s violin doesn’t help anything,
the world’s wounds are part of the music
and anyway, it’s too big.

She concludes the poem by saying the music is for us.

God’s violin is for us

We are such an inseparable ingredient in the tune that we can’t hear it? Except once in a crazy while when everything falls apart? When the tune is at its most dissonant? Then we hear – what? The symphony crashing down on our heads?

I find this sort of God more appealing than most, the God of paradox. Because God just doesn’t make sense. God is not capable of making sense. He is powerless before it. I’m okay with crazy God. But nobody much wants you to open your heart to crazy God and let him be your savior. He doesn’t seem to be in the saving business.

source: Cannibal Casserole: new & selected poems, 1996-2006, by Julia Vinograd

poem or New Yorker poem?

Last year I read a New Yorker article about the troubled public schools of Boston (the Oct 18, 2004 issue). One of the students profiled also wrote poetry and lines were included in the article. (I quote them myself here.)

Katherine Boo, the same person who wrote that troubled schools article, has written another, this time about Denver for the January 15, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, and, whattayano, she found another high schooler poet.

Go home be ashamed
foodstamps to medicaid
poor slang hustlas
we are all each other customers
boys go from apple jacks to weed sacks
fast

The lines are by Julissa Torrez. Whether one might say this is hip hop without the beat box – lyrics, in other words – the piece certainly strongly suggests rap. Occasionally I’ve come across rap lyrics and these are tighter than most. Interesting that not one of the couplets is a natural rhyme. ashamed/medicaid, hustlas/customers, sacks/fast – all are slant rhymes. If “rapped” (rather than read) the voice will typically force the rhyme – you’ll really hear that A in the final syllable of ashamed/medicaid. It’s also interesting to me that Torrez chose such varying line lengths – 5 sylllables, 6, 4, 9, 9, 1. This is no metronome, the sort of formalist poem that puts one to sleep with its tedious regularity, its drowsy pulse. Yet it’s obviously crafted for sound, and for that end rhyme, however balky (one could make an argument for it being intentionally balky – this is not a song about harmony). It’s adventurous writing. I can see why it caught Boo’s eye. It might be interesting to see this sort of thing featured in The New Yorker as a poem rather than a piece of testimony.

He liked us so much that he killed anyone who didn’t like us

This is the opening of Shalom Auslander’s personal essay “Playoffs”:

When I was a child, my parents and teachers told me about a man who was very strong. They told me that he could part the sea. They told me that it was important to keep this man happy; when we obeyed what the man had commanded, he liked us. He liked us so much that he killed anyone who didn’t like us. But when we didn’t obey what he commanded the man didn’t like us at all. He hated us. Some days he hated us so much that he killed us; other days he let other people kill us. We call these days “holidays.” On Purim, we remember how the Persians tried to kill us. On Passover, we remember how the Egyptians tried to kill us. On Hanukkah, we remember how the Greeks tried to kill us.

“Blessed is He,” we prayed.

As bad as these punishments could be, they were as nothing compared with the vengeance the man himself meted out: plagues, famines, floods. Hitler may have killed the Jews, but this man drowned the world.

Good ol’ God, that monstrosity.

I’ve posted a few times just lately on God and evangelists, haven’t I? I’m vaguely interested in the topic, partly because, being gay, I am a target of the god-infected, those who hope to hurt my life in order to something their own, that something being, I don’t know, distract themselves from? Distract themselves from their own awful sinning? I don’t know, frankly. The power they claim they claim to take from faith, as though, having no idea how one comes to do something, one claims power trimphantly from not knowing how the doing came to be. I find this puzzling, usually, and appalling, sometimes.

Faith and God are two terms that can be used in non-noxious, non-invasive, non-violent ways. Probably you could say that they most typically are used that way, just as one could say poisons are most typically used in ways that don’t hurt anyone. One may say our medicines are poisons used judiciously. So it may be with ol’ God, that monstrosity. Like holding a carefully diluted dose of evil under the tongue. Maybe it inoculates you against the worst. I hold that out there. It’s something.

no one reads poetry, right?

In revisiting the life of Thomas Hardy, Adam Hirsch quotes Hardy thus, “If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have left him alone.”

The suggestion is, I suppose, since no one reads poetry (or takes it seriously, or, maybe, having let the eyes roam the text, actually gets it), the consequences of expressing dangerous thoughts in poetry are few. Judging by Hardy’s lionization upon his death by people whose beliefs Hardy largely disdained (or savaged) in his verse, Hirsch considers the point proved.

source: The New Yorker, January 15, 2007

How to Speak to an Evangelist, by Paul Theroux, another

On a train in Africa Paul Theroux finds a “white woman … She greeted me in so friendly a way that I paused and chitchatted until the swaying of the train on the curves swung me and had me grasping seat backs to keep my balance. That sudden motion was helpful, for it seemed natural for me to avoid it by sitting down across the aisle from this sweet-looking woman.”

Susanna is a missionary, from Ohio, here to bring the sinners to God. After some more chitchat Theroux is warmed up:

“’What about homosexuals? Do you have any views on them?’

“’Homosexuality is an abomination. It says so in Leviticus.’”

What else to do, bored on the Limpopo Line in Mozambique? Theroux asks himself and carries on.

“’The Mosaic law is full of weird prejudices. Chapter fifteen is all about a woman being an unclean abomination when she’s menstruating and how she has to sleep alone then. I wonder how many Christians obey that one? Chapter eleven says fish without fins and scales, like shark and eel, are an abomination.’”

As with the typical idiot Christian Susanna abandons her first support, evidently unwilling to stand up for abominating eel or insisting that rabbits really really do chew their cud, cuz the Bible tells her so, and runs over to Paul. He says it’s a sin!

“’The Bible says that women are forbidden to wear men’s clothes.’

“’Sometimes you have to interpret scripture,’ Susanna said.”

This means she gets to wear trousers and not endanger her soul thereby. “’I don’t hate homosexuals, but they’re committing a sin.’”

“’And if you eat shrimp and wear men’s clothes, you are committing a sin, too, aren’t you?’

“’I know I’m a sinner,’ she said cheerfully. ‘We’re all sinners saved by grace.’”

When unable to marshal its resources for an effective defense the missionary blithely uses the Bible as a doorstop – that is blocking anyone from opening it. “’I believe in the Bible,’” Joanna contradicts herself. “’It’s in the Bible.’”

When they get to her stop Susanna says, “’I’m going to pray for you. For your happiness and health, your family, and your safe travels.’

“’I’m going to pray you stop using the word “abomination” for gay people,’ I said.” Then he adds, of Africans, “’I’m going to pray … that you stop calling these poor people sinners. As if they haven’t got enough to worry about.’”

source: Dark Star Safari, by Paul Theroux

notes toward an autobiography by others, part 5

“You are young, you are on your way up, when you cannot imagine how you will save yourself from death by boredom until dinner, until bed, until the next day arrives to be outwaited, and then, slow slap, the next. You read in despair all the titles of the books on the bookshelf; you play with your fingers; you revolve in your upholstered chair, slide out of the chair upside down onto your head, hope you will somehow damage your heart by waiting for dinner in that position, and think that life by its mere appalling length is a feat of endurance for which you haven’t the strength.”

This sounds familiar. Boredom that was painful. The life to be lived had yet to come, the life when one was someone, could do something.

Never had an upholstered chair that would revolve. Though I would spin in upholstered chairs I found in other houses, sometimes bored to tears there.

I haven’t this awful of a boredom as an adult. Time seems to go faster. Even staring off into space the space between now and dinner has contracted. Even standing in line at the grocery store or for the amusement park ride that is “momentarily” out of order, waits aren’t the endless they used to be.

Maybe part of it is the agency. I don’t have to wait. I can walk away. I can fix myself a snack; I make my dinner myself. I’m not waiting for some other life to begin, at last. I am what I’m going to be when I grow up.

source of quote: Teaching a Stone to Talk, by Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard’s theology, part 3: the victim apologizes

In the last post I quoted a passage wherein Annie Dillard put a few words in God’s mouth. Today she meets up with him.

Dillard remembers as a child a supposedly kindly neighbor once “showed me a magnifying glass. It was a large, strong hand lens. She lifted my hand and, holding it very still, focused a dab of sunshine on my palm.” SHE DID WHAT? Let’s read that again. “She lifted my hand and, holding it very still, focused a dab of sunshine on my palm. The glowing crescent wobbled, spread, and finally contracted to a point.” I bet it did. “It burned.” Yeah? “I was burned; I ripped my hand away and ran home crying.” Did you now? “Miss White called after me, sorry, explaining …” Here, see this shiny needle? Now I jab you with it! Wait, don’t run away, I just meant to show you the pretty bead of blood!

Dillard, now all grown up, says she wonders: “If I meet God, will he take and hold my bare hand in his, and focus his eye on my palm and kindle that spot and let me burn?” Then she apologizes to the sweet, kindly neighbor lady who knew exactly what she was doing, burning the skin of a child who had no idea this nice lady who gave her cookies and lemonade was about to burn her flesh. “I am sorry I ran from you,” Dillard gushes. “I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain.” Then she invokes Jesus: “Once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.”

I’m sorry, is there anything about this metaphor that works for you?

source: Teaching a Stone to Talk, by Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard’s theology, part 2: silence & loneliness

“We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need.” Annie Dillard has been talking in the essay, “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” about what she calls “silence.” Listen to the world and what you hear is “things …. being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum … This is it: this hum is the silence. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it, they all don’t do it. … The silence is … all there is.”

“We can stage our own act on the planet – build our cities on its plains, dam its rivers, plant its topsoils – but our meaningful activity scarcely covers the terrain. We do not use the songbirds, for instance. … We can only witness them. … If we were not here, material events like the passage of seasons would lack even the meager meanings we are able to muster for them.”

In another essay Dillard describes standing in a field. “There were flies buzzing over the dirt by the henhouse, moving in circles and buzzing, black dreams in chips off the one long dream, the dream of the regular world. But the silent fields were the real world, eternity’s outpost in time.” She listens, frozen, listening for something, a “music ringing the air like a stone bell”? Or is that silence again? “The notes [of a woman whistling as passes pushing a wheelbarrow] spread into the general air and became the weightier part of silence … It was as if God had said, ‘I am here, but not as you have known me. This is the look of silence, and of loneliness unendurable; it too has always been mine, and now will be yours.’” She later refers to this epiphany as a presence of angels.

source: Teaching a Stone to Talk, by Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard’s theology, part 1: ridiculous

In the essay on the captive deer (the one supposedly making itself tastier through its fear fraught struggles) Annie Dillard compares the suffering of the deer (destined for the cooking pot!) with a man in a burn ward. This is the man’s second stay in the burn ward. “’Why does God hate me?’ [the man] asked from his hospital bed. … He had been burned … thirteen years previously, by flaming gasoline. For years he had been having his body restored and his face remade in dozens of operations. … This time a bowl of gunpowder had exploded … ‘I was burning. I rolled to put the fire out and I thought, “Oh God, not again.”’”

“Will someone please explain to [him] … what is going on?” Dillard says. “And mail me the carbon.” She reflects back on the little deer, exhausted and doomed. As she left the village where it was tied up she said, “’Pobrecito -- ‘poor little thing.’ But I was trying out Spanish. I knew at the time it was a ridiculous thing to say.”

In the DIR post of Feb 23 I quoted Dillard, “If you were to glance out one day and see a row of mushroom clouds rising on the horizon, you would know at once that what you were seeing, remarkable as it was, was intrinsically not worth remarking. No use running to tell anyone. Significant as it was, it did not matter a whit. For what is significance? It is significance for people. No people, no significance.”

In that post I puzzled over what she meant. No significance? And in the above quote about sympathy for the deer, what was ridiculous?

source: Teaching a Stone to Talk, by Annie Dillard

something was wrong with that whale

In the last post I quoted Susan Casey on the stinkiness of whale spout. From personal testimony I can tell you whale spout has no or only faint smell. Casey says it was a young whale and she never saw a mother. I suspect the calf had been separated from its mother (orphaned?) and was sick or starving. You know how your breath gets foul when you're sick ... hopefully you don't know how your breath smells when you're starving but I've read those undergoing extended fasts manifest a stinky exhale.

I wonder if the whale was hanging out beside Casey's boat because it had positive experience with boats, perhaps back in the nursery of San Ignacio Lagoon where whale mothers present their babies to the tourist-filled pangas for oohing, ahing and pats & strokes. One could, theoretically, take an orphaned seal pup to a marine mammal rescue center where it would be fostered. With a whale calf, however, is there any practical way? How would you mount a rescue for an animal so large?

more encouragement

While hanging out at the Farallones Susan Casey is visited by a “baby gray whale who seemed to materialize every time I stood on deck. Its prehistoric-looking, knuckled back arched above the surface; her elegant barnacled tail waved playfully. Occasionally we made eye contact. …

“My whale, as I had come to think of her, was clearly interested in the sailboat. Maybe it had to do with the smell.” The sailboat, Casey says, was getting stinky. But the little whale didn’t mind? Or liked it? “One little known fact: The water that spouts out of a whale’s blowhole in such a picturesque way reeks like the most toxic fart imaginable.”

Hm. I’ve read that it’s not unusual for a whale at San Ignacio Lagoon to wait till a visitor is leaning out of her boat to give a tickle – and whoosh – give back a big blow, right in the face. Something to look forward to, eh?

source: The Devil’s Teeth, by Susan Casey

How to Speak to an Evangelist, by Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard has gone for a ramble. She is crossing a field when she sees a “little boy … He looked to be about eight, thin, wearing a brown corduroy jacket … and a matching beaked corduroy cap with big earflaps … The boy and I talked over the barbed wire.” They talked about the boy’s dogs, the horses (one had a new foal). “Then he paused. He looked miserably at his shoetops, and I looked at his brown corduroy cap. Suddenly the cap lifted, and the little face said in a rush, ‘Do you know the Lord as your personal savior?’

“’Not only that,’ I said, ‘I know your mother.’ … She had asked me the same question.”

Dillard remembers stopping at the front of the house to ask permission to walk across the field. “That was a year ago. … The driveway made a circle in front of the house, and in the circle stood an eight-foot aluminum cross with a sign underneath it reading CHRIST THE LORD IS OUR SALVATION. Spotlights in the circle’s honeysuckle were trained up at the cross and the sign. I rang the bell.

“The woman was very nervous. She was dark, pretty, hard, with the same trembling lashes as the boy. She wore a black dress and one brush roller in the front of her hair. She did not ask me in.” At first she seemed confused by Dillard’s request, then granted it, but “she was worried about something else. She worked her hands … ‘Do you know the Lord as your personal savior?’

“My heart went out to her. … She must have to ask this of everyone, absolutely everyone, she meets. That is Christian witness. It makes sense, given its premises. I wanted to make her as happy as possible, reward her courage, and run.

“She was stunned that I knew the Lord, and clearly uncertain whether we were referring to the same third party.”

I have the same uncertainty. Dillard’s version of God, despite her suggestion that it’s the Christian one, strikes me as a good deal odder and colder than the one “the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s congregation” would feel cozy with. “She drove, I inferred, 120 miles round trip to go to church.” Despite her doubts about Dillard, the perpetual evangelist relaxed on assurance of the safety of another soul, Dillard says. Of course she had to press into Dillard’s hands a few educational pamphlets. Dillard claims to believe, “the one on the Holy Spirit … was good.”

source: “On a Hill Far Away” in Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk

earth pig born

In The Devil’s Teeth, her book about great white sharks, Susan Casey describes approaching the “North Farallones[,] a knife-edged set of spires that … erupted out of nowhere, five sheer rock pinnacles ranging in a tight circle like a clawed hand. Fierce surge channels poured between them. Seals and sea lions had scaled their steep sides and they sat lodged in the gloom, barking like a Cerebus choir.”

I wasn’t aware aardvarks barked, although maybe Cerebus put together an atonal choir when he was Pope.

How to Speak to an Evangelist, by Paul Theroux

Riding a bus in Zimbabwe Paul Theroux is confronted by his seatmate: “’Are you a Christian?’ he asked.

“This impertinence I found to be a frequent inquiry in Africa.

“’Let’s say I have a lot of questions.’

“’I was like you once,’ he said.

“Where do people learn to talk like this? … The African man next to me was smiling the triumphant patronizing smile of the true believer.

“’What sort of questions?’ he asked.

“’Like, do you eat crows?’ I said, and I quoted Deuteronomy, chapter and verse, and added a few more inedible abominations of the Mosaic law that most people in Zimbabwe would have been delighted to eat in a stew with their evening sadza porridge.

“The man equivocated.

“I said, ‘How do you interpret chapter ten in the Acts of the Apostles, when Peter has the vision of the unclean animals in the house of Cornelius?’

“’I asked you a simple question and you are asking me ones that are not simple.’”

After some discussion of indigenous Zimbabwean customs the evangelist brushes all aside with: “’If you trust in the Almighty God you will be saved.’

“’And if Almighty God had been an immense duck capable of emitting an eternal quack, we would all have been born web-footed, each as infallible as the pope. And we would have never had to learn to swim.’”

How do you respond to that? Theroux says it was a conversation ender.

source: Dark Star Safari, Theroux’s journal of African travel

Alan Bern

Alan Bern is a librarian at Berkeley Public Library. He’s also been coming to my house for the past year to participate in a poetry group. I have both his books of poetry, No no the saddest and Waterwalking in Berkeley (waterwalking is a form of swimming pool aerobics).

I’m finally reading Waterwalking in Berkeley. Like it.

Perhaps because haiku is so very short Alan collects sets of them under a single title. “First Steps”, a batch of ten haiku, concludes with this one:


only the sound
of creekwater
rising


#


When I said to Kent I thought it a good Northern California drought poem, Kent wrinkled up his brow. A lot to read into six words? And so little context! If I didn’t know Alan lived in NorCal? I don’t know, but it’s a reading that feels right to me. Every winter we wonder, will the rains come? If they don’t the creeks dwindle away and many disappear altogether. Thus the creek visitor hears the creek and, fully aware that there have been no recent rains, peers into the creekbed yet is still disappointed to see the winter creek not rising. Before getting a good look he hears the creek and imagines it more vigorous than it turns out to be. It is only the sound that rises, the water level fading, silence, perhaps, not weeks away.

Zombie Language, part 2

John McWhorter devotes one of the chapters of The Power of Babel to language extinction.

“[I]n the past languages have usually gone extinct when one group conquers another or when a group opts for a language that it perceives as affording it greater access to resources it perceives as necessary to survival. Typically, a generation of speakers of a language becomes bilingual in one spoken by a group that is politically dominant or endowed with valuable goods or access to same. … Usually, through time new generations come to associate the outside language with status and upward mobility and indigenous one with ‘backwardness.’ …

“A point arrives when one generation speaks the outside language better than the indigenous language, largely using the latter to speak with older relatives and in ritual functions. As such, these people do not speak the indigenous language much better than many Americans might speak French or Spanish after a few years of lessons in high school. One is unlikely to speak to one’s child in a language one is not fully comfortable in and does not consider an expression of oneself. It is here that a language dies, because a language can only be passed on intact as a mother tongue to children.”

But a language can be saved if it is written down, can’t it? No, says McWhorter. “Most of us can attest to this from our exposure to Latin – no matter how good you may have gotten at those declensions, conjugations, and ablative absolutes, even this was a long way from speaking the language fluently … Languages die when others take their place – we don’t need Latin or any dead language, because we’ve got languages of our own. As often as not, a revived language hovers in the realm of the ‘undead’ – part of the revivification effort entails gamely making space for the language in lives already quite full without it and sometimes even vaguely discomfitted by its return.”

rocks v. tortillas

The name a people choose for themselves would, ideally, be the one by which they are known. Such is often not the case. The American Indian tribe known as the Sioux, for instance, call themselves, mainly, Lakota (though there are other names for “Sioux” tribelets). Sioux is a corruption of a name given the tribe by people to their east – who were encountered first by the Europeans traveling west; Sioux in its first form basically meant “enemy.” (“What do you call the next tribe over?” “The bad guys.”)

In Miguel Leon-Portilla’s collection of early native testimony on the arrival of the Spaniards in Mexico there’s an explanatory footnote about the origin of the word Tlaxcala. Tlaxcala was a city state near Mexico City (or Tenochtitlan); they were no friends of the Aztecs and allied with Cortez. The footnote goes: “The Aztecs explained the origin of the word Tlaxcala [as from] Texcala, ‘where there are many rocks’ [whereas] to the Tlaxcaltecas it means ‘where there are corn tortillas.’”

Hm. I wonder who had that right?

source: The Broken Spears: the Aztec account of the conquest of Mexico edited by Miguel Leon-Portilla

bite me

In a book about great white sharks the author says, Remember “the impressive truth that sharks are so old they predate trees[!]”

Which is not to say they are tree predators.

source: The Devil’s Teeth: a true story of obsession and survival among America’s great white sharks by Susan Casey

mourning dress

As Mexico’s Copper Canyon is Tarahumara territory, when a book on the Tarahumara crossed the desk at work I brought it home. We’re going to miss the Easter celebrations – the highlight of the Tarahumara event calendar – but all the guidebooks say there will be Tarahumara craftspeople offering baskets and blankets for sale at rail stops. Why not read a bit about them?

In a description of funerary rites the author says there are differences depending on the gender of the deceased. You should know that the best way to get around the canyons is on foot; the Tarahumara are famed for their tireless running (& races typically bring hot betting action).

“Three weeks after the death of [a] man, a large fiesta is given. … If the deceased had been a runner, there might also be a ceremonial race held in his honor. If the deceased had been a woman who had also been a runner, the ceremonial race will involve men dressed as women. In some places, men wear women’s clothing as a regular part of the observances at a woman’s death fiesta.”

Men cross-dress as a way to honor women. There’s a cultural difference, eh?

source: Tarahumara: where night is the day of the moon by Bernard L. Fontana

the homos organized

Yesterday the homos stopped turning tricks and organized for prison reform. By noon an asshole bandit – as aggressive homo-chasers are called – who was turned down by a prison queen, was knifed by a scared-eyed boy who was protecting his manhood from assault. And two guards were K.O.’d when a pussy hungry weightlifter took their night sticks and went berserk.

The warden, panicked by the sudden violence, agreed on first request to allow TVs in the cells and other reforms if the queens would call off their strike and de-organize. Within an hour the prison was back to “normal” and the warden walked easy.

His only other alternative was to drop his pants and stop the violence himself.

There are a few references to homosexuality in Jerome Washington’s Iron House: stories from the yard. The above passage is the one that made me most curious about the stories Washington doesn’t tell. In his afterword ex-con Washington says, “Although homosexuality and drug abuse are realities in prison, neither appealed to me.” He does describe instances of rape and there are a couple other stories where gay men stand up for themselves but Washinton seems to view gay men from a distance (rather than actively dislike them). The story about the “queens” organizing piqued my interest. We all know the don’t-drop-the-soap joke – that prison sex is mainly rape or, conversely, that it’s paradise for the girlish gay, the boys who, yeah we know, really want to be chicks. I’d like to learn more about gay men. What is prison like for them?

a reading list for South Africa

On the last leg of his trip from Cairo to Cape Town Paul Theroux stops to visit South African novelist Nadine Gordimer at her house in Johannesburg. Making dinner conversation Theroux asks, “’What should I read to understand South Africa better?’”

Nadine and dinner guests Raks Seakhoa, a poet, and Maureen Isaacson, literary editor of the local newspaper “suggested, among others, The Peasants’ Revolt by Govan Mbeki, Hugh Lewin’s Bandiet, Ways of Dying by Zakes Mda, The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter by Albie Sachs, and poems by Don Mattera and Jeremy Cronin.”

source: Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux

terror tenderizes?

When I came across “The Deer at Providencia” reading Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk I remembered it immediately. I don’t know where I first read it. For a class? I don’t think so; no memory of having to write about it. Maybe it was some anthology.

[H]igh levels of lactic acid, which builds up in muscle tissues during exertion, tenderizes.

The assertion stuck with me. Basically, Annie Dillard describes a situation in an Indian village (Ecuadorian Amazon) wherein a tiny deer has been captured alive (having been hunted down by dogs) and is tethered to a tree at the edge of the village. The deer struggles to escape, the strap wearing a wound around its neck. But it hasn’t the strength to free itself so in the exhaustion of its fear and effort, ends up tangled in the tether, gasping on the ground. Torture improves the taste of the meat, Dillard suggests.

Describing the stew made from a deer that had been slaughtered the day before Dillard says, “It was good. I was surprised at its tenderness.” This is when she lets drop the lactic acid as tenderizer idea.

I don’t know whether she’s right. I recently read a book by Temple Grandin, the high-functioning autistic who has designed a large number of modern slaughterhouses. She does her best to design the killing system so the animal enters it without fear. At one point she describes a kosher slaughterhouse where the animal is restrained via a pneumatic device that holds it firmly (& comfortably) while the Rabbi nicks the vein in the animal’s neck and it peacefully bleeds out. Tough steak?

Zombie Language, part 1

“’Ah wee-e-bee, we-e bit,’ she said quietly. ‘Fac-ma, fa-a-kepkin. Aquichin wa mit.’ The words of the old ways rolled on for several minutes, and as they came, Kelsey fixed her gaze on the ground.”

Last September SFGate featured an article on Loretta Kelsey, the “only living Elem Pomo speaker.” The dialect, says the article, is “8,000 years old … Kelsey, a quiet, almost demure woman with a steely gaze, is doing everything she can to make sure the ancient words do not die with her.” She is trying to pass on what she knows.

Speaking the native tongue only got in the way of trying to fit in, the thinking went.

"’It's a difficult language, and my dad never taught it to us because he didn't want the white kids to make fun of us,’ said Elem Pomo Tribal Chairman Ray Brown. ‘It's a real shame, now that we all look back on it, because you don't really learn it unless you grow up with it.’”

Leanne Hinton was one of my professors at Cal (though the class itself, a course in the variety of language experience in the U.S., had its bad points as well as its good), and it was to her that Elem Pomo revivalists turned.

“Remembering that UC Berkeley linguistic students had recorded tribal members speaking Elem Pomo between the 1940s and '60s …
[t]hey wound up with one of the nation's pre-eminent Pomo language researchers, Professor Emeritus Leanne Hinton.

“Together, Hinton and Kelsey dug into the campus archives and found recordings in Elem Pomo on old reel-to-reel tapes - and they included Kelsey's father telling stories, and Ray Brown's father singing.

"’California's tribes have been so fractured over the years that it's very hard to tell how many languages are still alive,’ said Hinton, who co-founded the statewide Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival. "What Loretta is doing is special. And for the last speaker of a language, she's amazingly young.’"

Ironically (or, perhaps, appropriately, considering the history of the assimilationist program), “The Elem Pomo, like many tribes around California, is also reassessing its tribal enrollment lists, and many members - including Kelsey - are being considered for disenrollment based on historical family records.”

Is Loretta Kelsey’s a zombie language, effectively dead, though it retains a twilight existence? Is it revivable? Can the light of life flicker back into its fixed & dilated eyes? Is dezombification possible before Elem Pomo dies away entirely, before all that remains of it be a mysterious residue in an archive like Berkeley’s?

City Walks

I do have a chapbook. I said yesterday, if I had a chapbook I would send it to writers I admire. I have a chapbook and I haven’t sent it to writers I admire. I don’t have copies sitting around but I have the pdf created by Broken Boulder Press, the guys who put the thing out in the first place. You can even download it yourself, if you’re of the mind. Follow the Broken Boulder link.

So why haven’t I followed my own advice? Why haven’t I sent it out to writers I admire? Part of it is that I don’t have physical copies – although that could be fixed with a trip to the copy shop, couldn’t it? I’ll have to review the pdf and see how easy it would be to have it printed. Part of it is a variant on what David said in Comments yesterday. He said, “The trouble with mailing out [Misspent Youths] now is that it's not representative of me now. I'm quite proud of it for what it was. I'm happy to give it to anyone who might like it.” City Walks is a particular project and I’d prefer to mail off a book that contains a greater variety, so if the reader doesn’t like one poem, there’s another chance with the next. Yet I’m not ashamed of City Walks; I think it’s good. I suppose part of that is just the feeling that I’m afraid my heroes won’t like anything I write. Then there’s the idea that I will write some amazing fan letter that has to go with whatever I send. Such obstacles I find hulking before me, monsters mainly vaporous.

So it goes. Sending the work out to people you like – it’s such a good idea that David has already done it. Someday maybe me.

Large circulation is pleasant

from “Early History of a Writer” by Charles Reznikoff:

“[T]he impulse to write …
would be, perhaps would have to be, stimulated
by regular publication.
…
[S]ince I did not hope for a publisher
to print my verse soon at his own risk
and I did not have the money to pay for a publisher’s imprint –
nor did I relish the pretence –
why, I thought, I should print privately,
that is, pay the printer and make no pretence of having a publisher at all.
There was little notice to be had that way, I knew,
among the crowd of new books;
but, besides the stimulation to write and revise,
I would clear my head and heart
for new work. Yes, the work was the thing.
Large circulation is pleasant, of course,
but I did not find it necessary:
if one has seen something exciting in the street
he must tell it –
perhaps because man is communicative –
but, after he has told his vision
once or twice,
handed on his knowledge to two or three,
he is free to go about his other business.”

So here I am, self-publishing. It doesn’t cost you anything. It doesn’t cost me anything. People around the world could be reading. I still hope to get my poems in other people’s books & magazines (this past Saturday I got a rejection from Slipstream) so I hold back from posting poem after poem on my blog(s). A magazine wants to be a poem’s first publisher!

If you see a poem posted on a blog, do you skip over it? I tend to, I’ll have to admit. So that would be one reason I refrain from posting my own. I sit down with magazines and fat anthologies and read page after page of poems, but something about the computer screen reduces my patience?

I’ve thought when reflecting on the price of postage that I’m buying an audience for my poems one editor at a time. Even if they choose not to publish it – somebody’s read it!

It seems to me a chapbook, a little book of my poems, would be a good thing to give away. I could send a copy to every poet whose poems I’ve liked! Some would even read it. Especially the ones who’ve never gotten a fan letter in their lives. But maybe I’d get an occasional thank you from the famous ones, too. My brother has boxes of a comic which his publisher passed back to him. (The first issue of Misspent Youths is available online; you can buy copies of the next four issues, too.) He hasn’t sold any in a long time, I think he said. I wonder if he’s filled up envelopes and mailed them off to the writers & artists he admires? If you do it over the course of years it wouldn’t be a big expense. It seems like a good idea. It seems like something I should do. If I only had a little chapbook, I say to myself.

source of poem: Another World: a second anthology of work from the St Mark’s poetry project, edited by Anne Waldman

lo!

Some lines by Jonathan Kundra remind me of the Tony Towle piece I posted a couple days ago:

a man comes out of nowhere and causes great joy and sorrow. He becomes too big to behold. To be held.
In the end, he is all alone again.

The lines may be ending a poem called “California,” or they may be a separate untitled work. They are divided from “California” by a bullet in the middle of the page. I love the word play of “too big to behold. To be held.” The poet makes a tiny change in the physical nature of the words and a major change in the perspective. One is looking out on the godlike being – behold! – and the viewer recognizes that distance makes the being untouchable. Yet the man who came “out of nowhere” is a man, has human needs, needs to be held; his great feats have made him alone – and small, as one person alone, lonesome, is small.

source of poem: Another World: a second anthology of work from the St Mark’s poetry project, edited by Anne Waldman

a nice beat you can dance to

Yesterday I was talking about criticism, I guess. In that issue of The New Yorker I’ve been reading (Dec 25, 2006) there’s an article about rap and cocaine. Cocaine, it seems, is back. But you know how yesterday I said the critic I prefer is the one who gives examples? Well, here’s Sasha Frere-Jones:

“If you were teaching a high-school English class and looking for examples of metaphor and simile, ‘Go Crazy’ [a song by Young Jeezy] would do nicely. The act of processing uncut cocaine inspires a riff on O-shaped objects: ‘Like Krispy Kremes, I was cookin’ them o’s. Like horseshoes, I was tossin’ them o’s.’”

Krispy Kremes are O-shaped. Mostly. But an O-shaped horseshoe? To be fair, Young Jeezy isn’t explicitly saying a horseshoe is O-shaped but that he is “tossin’” his cocaine like horseshoes. It’s Frere-Jones who set me up to think I was going to be reading “a riff on O-shaped objects”. Were I an English teacher I wouldn’t be offerin’ up these tired metaphors though either. Please. Think O-shape and all you can come up with is a Krispy Kreme donut? And unless ol’ Young Jeezy was tossing his coke twenty feet or so I doubt he was tossing them like horseshoes. This is weak writing and having the critic offer it up as exemplary (and for classroom use!) leads me to a low opinion of his tastes.

I’m remembering reading the liner notes for the Bob Marley collection Legend. The notes extoll Marley five ways from Sunday, as you would expect, but I had to guffaw when the writer pointed at a Marley lyric with that-really-says-it awe – Marley was praising his girl, she makes him feel so good, “like a sweepstakes winner.” Like a sweepstakes winner? That’s not a lyric you highlight. That’s a lyric you hide. Hide it in a nice beat you can dance to. And sing it in a Jamaican patois. I’ve sung along with plenty of dumb lyrics as though they were good because, although the song would have been better if they were good, it can be a fun song anyway.

life has forced me

Here’s another piece I like; it’s by Tony Towle:


POEM

I am the friend of South America,
I grew to like it enormously;
and then reached out across the oceans
to the rest of the continents,
getting to know many more places and people.

I had the best sense of humor in South America,
but life has forced me with its disappointments
into bitterness and idiocy.


#


Do you like it, too?

Why would one like it?

Do you ask yourself that question much? It brings to mind the standard American Bandstand answer to the rate-a-record question (you’ve just heard snippets of two songs, and you announce which one you prefer, then comes Dick Clark asking, Why do you like that one?): “It’s got a nice beat. You can dance to it.”

I sympathize with the speaker’s journey in this poem – from optimism to bitterness. I like the simple abbreviation of a life’s experience, a few lines. I like the absurdity of the personification of continents, the reduction of their people to an epithet (not in the insulting sense). It feels like testimony and like a goof on testimony, a memoir full of heartache but circumspect on the details.

Are there other works with similar characteristics, yet which I would dislike? I suspect so. This is one of the things about criticism -- when you say, “Ah! This is good work!” – you think it’s good because you like it. That’s fine, isn’t it? The notion that there are objective criteria by which any random piece of art could be judged and found great or inadequate is an unfortunate one. Yet we don’t want to just say, “I like it.” Because that isn’t very interesting either. A good critic talks about the work in a manner interesting independent of whether you agree with his opinion. Can you respect a critic whose writing you enjoy but whose opinions you find ridiculous? I doubt it. Some agreement must be necessary. I like it best when a critic presents samples – first the praise (or condemnation) then the excerpt with which the critic has engaged. A convincing argument – followed by the proof.

That, there, isn’t that wonderful? Um. Tell me again why you think so?

source of poem: Another World: a second anthology of work from the St Mark’s poetry project, edited by Anne Waldman

the crucial point of impatience

I’ve been reading Another World: a second anthology of work from the St Mark’s poetry project, edited by Anne Waldman. The book was published in 1971, thiry-seven years ago. What appears in it first appeared in print, of course, in the years preceding that. Many of the names are familiar to me: Tom Clark, Robert Creeley, Kenneth Koch, Peter Schjeldahl, John Ashbery, Diane Di Prima.

I don’t recall having read Lorenzo Thomas before. There’s a page of info about him at the Electronic Poetry Center. The play below, I’d probably not attend. But it’s a good script for the page.

A One-Act Play by Lorenzo Thomas:

INTOLERANCE

The audience, once seated in the theatre, will become impatient. They will “want something to happen.” When the director is of the opinion that the audience is at the crucial point of impatience, that point where the decision is made either to leave or remain, he will begin the play. An actor enters and announces that the performance will be delayed for a specific period of time. His lines are improvised, but the delay he announces must not be either too great or too minor: in the first case, audience anticipation would be destroyed; in the latter, unease and dissatisfaction would find an outlet. The actor exits and five minutes later, regardless of the delay he has announced, one thousand men enter and physically assault the audience.


#

The play has a sequel of sorts, called FRENCH REVOLUTION. It is much the same except for costuming.

language change – paper v. mouth

Another excerpt from John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel: a natural history of language:

“The prestige of writing as the vehicle of education and its physical constancy in contrast with the ephermality of, as the late Anthony Burgess put it, a mouthful of air mean that we tend to conceive of written language as the prototype of ‘language’ itself, as how language ‘should’ be. … The existence of a language in writing tends to lead its speakers, if most of them are literate, to reconceive spoken language as a kind of pale, sloppy reflection of the ‘real’ language on the page. Changes in the spoken language are regarded as a kind of shaggy entropy, a defacement of something considered set, eternal, the alteration of which constitutes destruction. This is our tacit sense of what ‘English’ is, for example. [Speakers of languages that haven’t been regularized on the page] neither mentally ‘see’ their languages … nor process what comes out of their mouths as a ‘version’ of something ‘best’ expressed by scratches on paper.”

There is a “seductive power [to] having been there first,” McWhorter says. Although we learn language first in the homey environs of the family, the written exerts an authority by seeming to have a greater age, by seeming to predate the language learned from Mom and from Billy and LaVonda on play dates. And what is written is older in this sense: it retains features speakers are beginning to (or have already) discarded. The language as spoke is always morphing, is always becoming new. The language as writ, much less so.

“The dialect and time slice of a language chosen to write in feels … anointed [because] it just happened to be the one to get immortalized on the page.” It’s pure happenstance what moment in time a language learned to lie down on a sheet of paper. The language that lies there represents the vital immediate language of its first paper training but time goes by, the spoken language renews itself, and the written language clings to its old self. Yes, gradually the written word changes to catch up with the language living in people’s mouths and hearts. After all, older versions of written English look strange to us. Presumably Shakespeare was writing the way people spoke at the time (or, at least, more like). Eventually older written Englishes will be as incomprehensible as books written in Old English or Latin. In purely oral languages the change happens much quicker.

notes toward an autobiography by others, part 4

Another World: a second anthology of work from the St Mark’s poetry project, edited by Anne Waldman includes a week’s worth of Joe Brainard diary. For “Wednesday” he writes out late night thoughts:

“Here I am again. Not so drunk tonight. But feeling just as lonely and dramatic. … I don’t really know ‘how’ to pick somebody up. And I’m afraid of being rejected. And it’s five minutes after twelve and I’m going to get sleepy very soon. I hope. I wish I was in the middle of a good book. But I finished [the last one I was reading] and I’m not up to getting into a new one right now. I want to live a very wild and exciting life. Why don’t I? I guess I must be chicken. I can’t think of any other reason for not living the way I want to. Unless, perhaps, to protect myself. I wish that nothing mattered to me except having fun. I wish that I wasn’t afraid of being a fool. I wish that I was a stud. I wish that days wouldn’t just evaporate. I hope that I don’t grow old before I realize how terrific I am. I hope that tomorrow won’t make this sound too corny. Tho I know that it will. That it is. And that, actually, I don’t care. That’s what this special diary is all about.”

Yes, I edited out what I couldn’t own myself. That the diary is being written in Greenwich Village, that the book just read was by Genet, and that, “One good thing about me is that I never feel sorry for myself.” Never? Can’t say that!