where to put the preposition

Linguist John McWhorter has noticed that English-speakers are insecure about the correctness of their English. Speakers of other languages, he says, aren’t so self-conscious. Why do English-speakers have the sense that what they say “is somehow full of errors”?

McWhorter traces the source of our insecurity to 18th century grammarians, particularly Robert Lowth and Lindley Murray. McWhorter calls Murray’s “more influential” prescriptive grammar a “knock-off of Lowth’s.”

“[N]either of these men were exactly experts in language … at the time nobody was. Linguistics science as we know it did not exist. … Lowth and Murray labored under the common illusions that a language ought to be a static, unchanging system; that language change can only be decay …” These basic misunderstandings about language make the Lowth and Murray grammars “historical curio[s], rather like an ancient map with blobby, approximate renderings of the continents and sea serpents bobbing in the oceans. …”

“Lowth’s and Murray’s books were founded on the idea that Latin and Ancient Greek had been inherently ideal languages, that the ‘best’ English should follow their grammar, and that to the extent that it did not, it was ‘straying’ from a somehow divinely anointed template. …”

“The problem here is that English is not Latin and did not even develop from Latin; as a Germanic language, its ancestor was a now-lost language similar to Gothic.” Lowth & Murray “are the source of two of the most famous grammar ‘rules.’ The first is that we should not end sentences with a preposition, i.e., that I don’t know what to do it with is linguistic slumming, and that the ‘real, ‘best’ way of putting it would be I don’t know with what to do it.”

McWhorter’s example is a little difficult to parse. I don’t know what to do it with?

I’d like you to sweep the porch, Mother says to Child.

There are a broom, a mop, and a shovel leaning against the wall.

I don’t know what to do it with, says the perplexed Child.

OK. I guess that works.

Anway, to get back to McWhorter: “Latin did not place prepositions at the end of its sentences. … In a supreme irony, Lowth himself breaks the rule in explaining it, complaining, ‘This is an idiom, which our language is strongly inclined to’! The fact that English-speakers are so ‘inclined to’ putting prepositions at the end of a sentence is because, quite simply, it is an English rule. … The very naming of little words of position and relationship prepositions is based on Latin structure.”

Tomorrow, the second “of the most famous grammar ‘rules’”: the split infinitive!

source: Word on the Street: debunking the myth of a ‘pure’ standard English by John McWhorter

word of the day: fractionation

context: In a description of the towers at an oil refinery, the author says, “[Some] are fractionating towers, in which crude oil is heated from the bottom to distill it. The various hydrocarbons in crude, ranging from tar to gasoline to natural gas, have different boiling points; as they’re heated, they separate, arranging themselves in the column with the lightest ones on top. … Looming overhead are 20 fractionation towers and 20 more exhaust stacks.”

source: The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman

ground ground nuts

In her book 84, Charing Cross Road Helene Hanff responds to a friend who is visiting England:

“I fail to see why you did not understand the groceryman, he did not call it ‘ground ground nuts,’ he called it ‘ground ground-nuts’ which is the only really SENSible thing to call it. Peanuts grow in the GROUND and are therefore GROUNDnuts, and after you take them out of the ground you grind them up and you have ground ground-nuts, which is a much more accurate name than peanut butter, you just don’t understand English.”

84, Charing Cross Road is a surprisingly affecting collection of correspondence between Hanff and an English bookseller, Frank Doel, and a few others. The correspondence got its start in 1949 when the British government was still imposing rationing, a legacy of the war. Besides sending a little money to buy books, Helene makes friends by shipping tinned goods, like ham and tongue. The back and forth between the effusive New Yorker and the reserved Londoner provides contrast yet Doel seems to get Hanff’s sometimes sarcastic wit.

The paragraph I quote above is outside the main thread of the book but fun anyway.

the relative powers of elegance and aesthetics

“In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behavior, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it!”

source: The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I don’t run to catch trains.

Except in those instances when not running to catch a train upsets the person with whom I am traveling. Elegance and aesthetics get wiped away pretty quick when you’re sitting next to somebody seething.

don’t fear contradicting yourself

“If you know that the stock market can crash, as it did in 1987, then such an event is not a Black Swan.”

This contradicts other things Taleb has said. But Taleb doesn’t seem to fear contradicting himself.

A Black Swan in Taleb’s metaphor is an event (or thing) that cannot be predicted from the existing data set. It is an “unknown unknown” (apparently former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld isn’t the only one who likes this phrase). Europeans had only ever seen white swans. “White” was one of the definitions of “swan.” Then black swans turned up in Australia. Nobody could have predicted!

An unanticipated market crash then would be more a “gray swan”? “A gray swan concerns modelable extreme events.” You don’t know when it’s going to happen but, as it’s happened in the past, it’s within the realm of possibility and you can take steps to protect yourself (or take advantage).

source: The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

dwarf the Himalayas

“Our planet looks smooth to an observer from space, but this is because it is too small. If it were a bigger planet, then it would have mountains that would dwarf the Himalayas, and it would require observation from a greater distance to look smooth.”

source: The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Taleb makes this observation in a discussion of fractals. He follows to its logical conclusion the idea that organization is the same from the tiny to the gigantic. The rock is the mountain, more or less. But in following his logic Taleb makes one of those mistakes he often warns about – reality is not a logic game. Presumably a mountain on a Jupiter-sized planet would dwarf the largest mountain on earth the way Jupiter dwarfs earth, if not for gravity. Gravity is pulling at the Himalayas themselves.

Is a Jupiter-sized rocky planet even possible? If it did exist it would probably be quite smooth, as the planet’s gravity would be so great that the smallest nub would be squeezed down to nothingness.

The largest mountains are not on the largest planets. Olympus Mons is supposed to be the tallest mountain in the solar system (three times the height or Everest?), and it grew up on Mars, a planet much smaller than Earth. Venus, which has 90% of Earth’s gravity, also boasts mountains taller than any on Earth.

a poetry book that sold 7,000 copies would be a Black Swan

“If I told you that two authors sold a total of a million copies of their books, the most likely combination is 993,000 copies sold for one and 7,000 for the other. This is far more likely than that the books each sold 500,000 copies.”

source: The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The quote is from a discussion of averaging. Few books sell well, let alone in the seven figures (or the six or even the five). The bestselling authors are easy to see and easy to name. Their great shadows hide the many thousands who’ve written perfectly decent books who struggle to get a book published and out to their relative handful of fans. The bestseller is a Black Swan. By looking at the mass of evidence it could not be predicted. We know the occasional outlandish success will appear because we have seen it before. But predictors, Taleb asserts, are usually wrong about where that success will come.

it’s lonely being right

“It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.”

source: The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Curious, that. If the “wrong direction” is “more profitable”, what makes “the right one” right?

Christmas dinner

“The same past data can confirm a theory and also its exact opposite[.] If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) you are closer to death.”

source: The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Taleb notes the quite-reasonable assumptions of a turkey being fattened for Christmas dinner. Every day presents another tasty handout. Things are going great. Turkey’s got shelter from predators, plenty of food, company of other turkeys - what a deal! The optimist would say tomorrow will be just like today, just as yesterday was and the day before that. Let’s say the pessimistic turkey has a rather darker view of tomorrow. What should his strategy be? Escape to hunger and the chase?

Be that as it may, who knows whose future includes Christmas dinner?

Anchoring

“[A]nchoring … lower[s] your anxiety about uncertainty by producing a number, then you ‘anchor’ on it, like an object to hold on to in the middle of a vacuum [or a storm]. [An] anchoring mechanism was discovered by the fathers of the psychology of uncertainty, Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky … [They] had [test] subjects spin a wheel of fortune. The subjects first looked at the number on the wheel, which they knew was random, then they were asked to estimate the number of African countries in the United Nations [the true quantity being one of which they were completely ignorant, presumably]. Those who had a low number on the wheel estimated a low number of African nations; those with a high number produced a higher estimate.”

If you want a bargain start with a ridiculously low number? This “reference point in [the] head [will] start building beliefs around [it]. … The discussion will be determined by that initial level.”

source: The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It rings true to me that the mind in a state of uncertainty is happy to cling to an idea, or gasp with relief at a suggestion, or huddle in the inadequate shade of the merest of hints, whether or not idea, suggestion or hint has a real world source. These mental landmarks feel real, thus provide comfort before the threatening panic of being lost and helpless.

How comics are like Hitler

In his Ten-Cent Plague David Hajdu reviews various campaigns against comic books. In 1944 (while we were actively at war with Germany) a Catholic group decried comics for their “vigilante spirit … Fictitious ‘junior commando’ groups bear a strong resemblance to the bands of child militarists in Nazi Germany.”

About ten years later in a new campaign against comics the psychologist Fredric Wertham testified before Congress. “’I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry. … They get the children much younger. They teach them race hatred at the age of four, before they can read.’”

So comics, like Hitler, foment race hatred. And comics, like fascists, suggest children band together to enforce … something … community standards, maybe? Naturally Hadju’s book is rife with book burnings and community groups banding together to drive out the Other, with comics representing the Other.

But we know comics are bad because, you know, they are like Hitler. No need to say more, really.

a perishable brand

“The Phoenician invention of the alphabet [supposedly] served the purpose of commercial record keeping rather than the more noble purpose of literary production. (I remember finding on the shelves of a country house I once rented a mildewed history book by Will and Ariel Durant describing the Phoenicians as the ‘merchant race.’ I was tempted to throw it in the fireplace.) Well, it now seems that the Phoenicians wrote [literature], but using a perishable brand of papyrus that did not stand the biodegradative assaults of time.”

source: The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Taleb uses the example to argue that we can’t use lack of evidence for something as evidence that it didn’t exist. We don’t find Phoenician poems? They must not have had them! Or maybe they wrote their poems on scrolls that were handier to carry around, relegating financial records to clay tablets because nobody needed to whisper that sort of thing by moonlight beside a bower while the brook tinkled over stones?

I’m amused by the dig at the Durants. They are responsible for The Story of Civilization, a Euro-centric series of hefty histories that purport to survey human time. The tatty volumes on the shelf at Claremont were deleted last week. Some volumes hadn’t been checked out in more than ten years. We didn’t have them all anyway. (The Central branch still has copies!) The anonymous author at Wikipedia is more forgiving than Taleb: “Given the massive undertaking in creating these 11 volumes over 50 years, errors and incompleteness have occurred; yet for an attempt as large in breadth of time and scope as this, there are no similar works to compare.” The series weighs in at more than two million words and nearly 10,000 pages.

Duh?

“People do not fall in love with works of art only for their own sake, but also in order to feel that they belong to a community.”

source: The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This is one of those insights so profound as to be banal.

And the sun rises in the East?

considering the fuzziness

“Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.”

source: The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This is why racism (or sexism or heterosexism …) becomes a problem. It’s not that sorting people into broad categories according to obvious characteristics is inherently bad, it’s the clinging to the category as though the general were more important than the specific even when you are dealing directly with the specific. When you are speaking about people you can broadly generalize and be right, frequently right. Individuals, however, will surprise you. The racist denies the reality of the individual, refusing to see a difference between the general and the specific, using, in fact, the general as a weapon against the specific. (Oddly, people seem to be able to see the specific and be blind to its implications – “You’re one of the good ones.”)

anti-resume

“People don’t walk around with anti-resumes telling you what they have not studied or experienced.”

source: The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The problem comes in when you are presented with the resume showing what the person has studied and experienced.

One of the contestants on America’s Next Top Model, for instance, said she’d majored in American Lit at Harvard, but when show host Tyra Banks fired a series of famous American authors at her the contestant looked bewildered, as though she had never read any Jack London or Herman Melville, had barely even heard of them. It could just have been stage fright, of course. But it could have been something else. What did “American Lit” consist of for her?

Zombie Language, part 4

Can a dying language be revived? John McWhorter mentions “Hebrew, which by the late 1800s had essentially been used only in writing and for liturgical purposes for more than two thousand years … The movement to make it the official language of Israel was so successful that today it is spoken natively by a nation of six million people.” That happy story of reviving the undead has given heart to speakers (& wannabe speakers) of many other dwindling languages. There are serious efforts to bring back to dinner table chitchat such languages as Irish Gaelic, Breton, Occitan, Maori, Hawaiian, and (noted previously) Pomo.

When you’re talking about “a language”, however, you are actually talking about a cluster of dialects, more and less intelligible to each other. When there are so few speakers that this diversity is no longer sustainable the language that is being revived is a language that never really existed. What is taught as the language is a compromise among dialects, an invented standard. Invented languages don’t feel real. You can produce the words for school but when relaxing around the dinnertable they don’t just pop out. Is a language you don’t live in truly alive even if it retains a decipherable existence?

“Because it is harder for adults to learn new languages well than it is for children,” McWhorter continues, “when adults are forced to learn a new language quickly, the result is often various forms of pidginization, utilizing just the bare bones of a language. This becomes a problem in revival efforts because, even when adults of a given nationality desire strongly to have their ethnic language restored to them, the mundane realities of a busy life can make it difficult to get beyond pidgin-level competence in the language.”

Minority languages are some of the most complex on the planet. English is relatively simple. You can say English is in a constant state of pidginization - because learning it is important to non-native speakers English does not have opportunity to become isolated (and thus gather what McWhorter calls “baubles”). “[L]iving languages are developed far beyond the the strict necessities of communication and … incomplete learning guarantees that some of these baubles will be stripped away.” Even children, if the language learning is school-based, “typically speak a rather simplified variety”, particularly if it is a minority language and the language most used outside class is entirely other. Elder native speakers may disdain the improper language of the young, “sometimes putting a damper on enthusiasm for the revival itself.”

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

see also Zombie Language part I, part II, and part III.

“observation of mind”

Leslie Scalapino: “One’s observation of mind is like an experiment to see what you are going to come up with. There is not going to be any objective observation of something. There is only going to be more mind stuff …”

source: Primary Trouble: an anthology of contemporary poetry, edited by Leonard Schwartz, Joseph Donahue, and Edward Foster

notes toward an autobiography by others, part 8

“I had horrible fever dreams about math and trying to figure out the same confusing situations over and over and over. Every time I figured anything out, I would wake up and write down the solution. But it was all in the dream. Then I would actually wake up, with nothing written down, and no solution.” – Aaron Cometbus

Besides the aches & sleep disturbance this is one of the major annoyances of a fever for me. In seemingly endless connected dreams I race to find the solution to some problem – usually not involving math but a problem for which there is a solution, my fevered mind is convinced, a solution that I will figure out, it’s just out of reach, no, I’ve got it in hand – but no matter how tight the fist the solution leaks out between my fingers.

source of quote: Signs of Life: channel-surfing through 90s culture, edited by Jennifer Joseph and Lisa Taplin (1994) Manic D Press, San Francisco.

beautiful bitterness

Sam Kashner, reviewing his decision to give up poetry (by now many years old), says:

“Poetry was turning out to be a mug’s game after all. Whoever said that – I think it was T.S. Eliot, the most successful poet of the century – was right. You wait around for your SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) to come back, your poems rejected from The New Yorker in your own handwriting. You see the fiction writers getting all the attention.”

There is something about that SASE, fat with rejection, looking up at you in your own handwriting …

There’s something about that that requires the ellipsis.

…

source: When I Was Cool: my life at the Jack Kerouac School by Sam Kashner. HarperCollins, New York. 2004.

“The most sensitive poets seemed capable of cruelty.”

Talking about a poet whose name has long been familiar to me (and one I often see coupled with big praise) Sam Kashner, a memoirist who claims he has given up poetry, drops in this aside:

He is “a well-known poet, for what that’s worth in America, which means he still must feel pretty lonely.”

Then Kashner goes on (apropos the Trinidad I’ve been quoting): “[P]oets can be a pretty resentful bunch, possessors of bad attitudes. ‘Heap Big Jackasses,’ Billy [Burroughs] Jr had said about the poets who came and went through the Jack Kerouac School. The most sensitive poets seemed capable of cruelty. Just like anybody else.”

source: When I Was Cool: my life at the Jack Kerouac School by Sam Kashner. HarperCollins, New York. 2004.

“I hate feeling stupid”

Sam Kashner was the first student of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He studied with Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso, among others. In his recent memoir of that time (mid-70s) he writes about Ginsberg’s difficulty with a non-Beat poet:

Allen Ginsberg “took out Rivers and Mountains by John Ashbery. He turned to a longish poem called ‘The Skaters.’

“’Now tell me,’ Allen asked, almost pleading at his desk. ‘What does this mean? I can’t understand it. I want to know what it means, what is happening in this poem. Why does he have to be so mysterious about everything?’”

Added Ginsberg, “’I hate feeling stupid, I hate not getting the idea.’”

At this point Kashner was not only the first but the only student of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. (Not long after Ginsberg fussed about not getting Ashbery, Anne Waldman recommended ‘The Skaters’ to Kashner; a great poem, she said.)

source: When I Was Cool: my life at the Jack Kerouac School by Sam Kashner. HarperCollins, New York. 2004.

“I thought you were conceited.”

more lines from “A Poem Under the Influence” by David Trinidad

… The things I’ve missed / in life, lost in my own head. I don’t know how many times I’ve learned (after the fact) / that people have felt I slighted them, when in actuality I simply wasn’t present, fully, / but absorbed in my own (usually grim) imaginings. “I thought you were conceited.” / “No, just cripplingly shy.” Once, when a certain individual (a publisher of gay and / lesbian poetry) treated me rudely, I asked a mutual friend why he disliked me. / Friend later reported: “He says you snubbed him at an AA meeting five years ago.”

source: The Late Show by David Trinidad. Turtle Point Press, New York. 2007.

“So many poets”

lines from “A Poem Under the Influence” by David Trinidad:

So many poets, so few kind ones …

Once, when Ira and I arrived at an Upper West Side party for Wayne Koestenbaum, / the hostess (a Knopf poet with whom I’d been anthologized) barreled past us to greet an / obviously more important guest. She slammed into my shoulder, then gave me an angry look, / as if her foyer were a rush-hour subway. I still cringe whenever I happen upon her name.

source: The Late Show (2007) David Trinidad. Turtle Point Press, New York.

gasps, thrills, fleshes

from the diary, 12/9/88: “In one of the textbooks this semester a poem is introduced and the editor gasps when he compares the poem to the version of the incident as it is recorded in the poet’s journal. The editor thrills at the way the poet actually remembers more than he wrote in his journal, fleshes the incident out in full detail [as compared to] a sketchy report in the diary.

“Hmf. Are there actually people this stupid? I have never been able to record an incident in full detail in one of my journals and sometimes I wonder why I bother keeping it because it is so inadequate, so often dull. I don’t have time, for one thing, to say everything; another is that when something has just happened I don’t have much perspective on it.”

She escaped the flood only to be …

In an interview in the new “Music” issue of The Believer, Irma “The Soul Queen of New Orleans” Thomas answers the following question: “How’d you learn that you were ‘missing’ after [Hurricane] Katrina?”

Irma Thomas first explains she was performing that night in Texas. They woke and turned on the news to find that “the levees had breeched, and there was water in the city. So later that day we’re checking CNN, and they’re saying, ‘We’re concerned where two of New Orleans’ legends are located, we haven’t been able to find them – Fats Domino and Irma Thomas.’ And I said, ‘I know where I am!’”

She wasn’t able to get through to anybody for awhile. Eventually she heard from her record company. “As soon as they caught up with me, the interviews started up. I was inundated.”

the diary, 10/10/88 – 12/9/88

I last wrote about my diaries in September. Since it’s been almost a year I don’t expect DIR readers to remember where I left off. It was my semester in London. I’ve already worked through the diary for the books mentioned in it, and I copied out some anecdotes. This post goes back through the diary to check out my comments on movies, music and live theatre.

I made an effort to get conversant with the London’s small club music scene. Others could afford to do big concerts, not me.

Also searched for small theater (especially gay theater).

I tried to take advantage of the big city amenities – art galleries, ethnic restaurants, foreign cinema.

Beginning of November I started a volunteer DJ gig at the Imperial College radio station.

movies:

Pathfinder, “the first motion picture made entirely in the Lap language and filmed amidst the snow & rocks of Lapland”

Drowning By Numbers, It was my birthday “so I dragged Chris to Drowning By Numbers -- even paid for it as the poor dear has spent away all her money. … Afterward Chris teased me about moaning, ‘Oh, no. Oh, no,’ during the movie. OK, I got into it. Good flicker. Great for Halloween. Lovely weird little black comedy.”

Law of Desire, “Good movie! … very poignant and the gayness of the characters is not a theme but rather themes are duplicity and love and unrequited love and obsession and passion and so on.”

Alice, a stop-motion animation version of Alice in Wonderland, “unusual, weird, rather more slowmoving than I’d have wished, fairly faithful to the book. I wouldn’t give it a wild recommendation but if you’re in the mood—“

The Fruit Machine, “okay, if somewhat muddled”

The Curse of the Cat People, watched it on TV

Yeelen, an African movie, “very well made, a lot of lovely scenery and interesting faces in closeup; although I could follow the motion of the plot, could make out its bone structure, yet the details were not always clear. Couldn’t catch all the symbolism. Left me feeling oddly depressed.”


music (these were 7” singles I bought in used record stores):

“Running All Over the World” by Staus Quo – “the theme song for Sport Aid … Chris tells me she read in the news that Sport Aid went bankrupt”

“No Clause 28” by Boy George – a political protest song! Clause 28 was Maggie Thatcher’s no-teachee-the-gay legislation to swat school teachers.

Pop Will Eat Itself – “sorta like The Ramones, only not as good”
Living Colour – “hard rock – blecch”
Cocteau Twins – “good”

from one live show in Camden Town:

Law of Fives (live) – “bearable … they got irritable after awhile over the audience’s lukewarm reception.”

The Horseflies (live) – “from America … rockified traditional American fiddle & banjo music”

Rodney Allen (live) – “Cute little teenager … pleasant rock … in the mode of Bryan Adams”

The Jack Rubies (live) – “very good … I have two of their songs on records I bought at the used record shop”

The Blue Aeroplanes (live) – “[they] construct a wall of sound and push it over on you”

my Imperial College radio show:

“Glad to Be Gay” by Tom Robinson – a song on the Imperial College playlist that I included in my first show

“Changes” by David Bowie and “The First Atheist Tabernacle Choir” by the British satiric puppet theater Spitting Image – another student DJ was in the booth talking to me and “I couldn’t keep track of my songs and came into David Bowie’s ‘Changes’ midvoice. Very annoying.”

“Boom Boom Boom (Come Back to My Room)” by Paul Lekakis, a request I played for Dana, a girl who’d barged into the booth with the 7” demanding I play it right away. I put it on after a song by the Cocteau Twins. I found “Boom Boom Boom” appalling: “Boom boom boom / Let's go back to my room / So we can do it all night / And you can make me feel right” … Ugh. A female singer came out with an answer song: “Bam Bam Bam (I Think I’ll Stay Where I Am)”. The search I just ran didn’t produce any hits for the song, unfortunately, so I don’t know who she was.

live theater:

Venetian Heat, “Italy, WWII, farmer & wife hide 2 army deserters after the Italian army disintegrates. One [soldier] falls in love with the wife, one with the husband. The nazis (one, anyway) show up and make things nasty. The wife’s lover gets shot, dies. The other soldier [escapes] to join the partisans. Wife & husband under arrest.”

The Public, by Federico Garcia Lorca, “very strange, yet exciting, lyrical play. Filled with odd and wonderful imagery – the set design nearly matching the words. And, when the words made no sense, certainly surpassing them. I loved the horses – men with big horse heads, dressed in leotards, carrying trumpets, Juliet with a false bare chest pushing apart her negligee, a naked man hanging from a cross who is attended by a male nurse, a man dressed in bells, another in grape leaves. Rain falling between audience and stage. A huge painted eye. A giant leaf. A soft-sculpture moon. It was not really long. An hour and a half, yet so full it seemed much longer, and confusing so that the minutes stretched out as we tried to peer into them.” This was supposedly the play’s first British production.

The Bacchae “okay, but I didn’t find myself caring much about what happened to the characters except at the very end when [SPOILER ALERT] the mother of the king of Thebes discovers she has been carrying around her son’s head – felt for her, poor dear. The women of the chorus did a number of gross things to themselves during the course of the play – splashing themselves with water, painting themselves with lipstick & eyebrow pencil, wallowing in red wine and oatmeal. Simulated pagan rituals, I suppose.”

Look Back in Anger “I should call it Look At in Anger … The play was written back in the 50s and rather shows it … I thought all the characters were big dips …” I found the abusive main character a real downer, and the women who loved him were total masochists.

other:

Jack the Ripper Walking Tour – “fun but long”

“I went with Julie, Janet, Chris, Tanya, and Shawn to the BBC studios to see a radio show being recorded -- The Law Game. ‘A light-hearted look at points of law. Amusing, yet informative, with Shaw Taylor in charge of the legal quibbles, squabbles, and giggles. With special celebrity guests Alan Titch Marsh, Susan Rae, and Denise Coffey.’ Of course, we’d never heard of the celebrity guests … It was kinda fun.”

thagomizer

“Cartoonist Gary Larson once drew a Far Side cartoon showing a bunch of cavemen being warned about the danger of stegosaurs, and he called their tail weapon a ‘thagomizer’. Denver paleontologist Ken Carpenter thought that ‘thagomizer’ was a good name, so he used it in his 1993 scientific presentation of the most complete Stegosaurus ever found. That name stuck, and now it is accepted scientific nomenclature to say that stegosaurs are characterized by having a thagomizer.”

source: Dinosaurs, by Thomas Holtz

Stegosaurus v. Tyrannosaurus?

photo: Disney’s Fantasia

“Stegosaurus lived about 150 million years ago, in the Late Jurassic, while Tyrannosaurus lived only 65.5 million years ago, at the end of the Late Cretaceous. In fact, if you do the math, you see that Tyrannosaurus lived closer in time to us humans than it did to Stegosaurus. So in terms of geologic time, a picture showing Tyrannosaurus running down the street where you live is actually more realistic than one showing Tyrannosaurus fighting Stegosaurus!”

If it makes you feel better, you should know that Stegosaurus, though free from the hassle of Tyrannosaurus, did have ol’ Allosaurus to contend with.

source: Dinosaurs, by Thomas Holtz

Did dinosaurs have brains in their butts?

No, says Thomas Holtz in his new book, Dinosaurs. There’s a “space inside the hip vertebrae of Stegosaurus (and some other dinosaurs) where the spinal cord was contained [that] was very big. Some paleontologists … sugggested that this large space held an extra-large bundle of nerves. All vertebrates – including us – have these bundles, called ganglia, which help control the reflexes of the limbs and workings of the organs.

“In the 1990s, American paleontologist Emily Buchholtz examined the hips of living relatives of Stegosaurus (birds and crocodilians) and found that they also have an enlarged space in their vertebrae. But these animals don’t have an extra-large ganglion there. Instead, that space is filled with fatty tissue.”

Even if the extra-large ganglia had been there, Holtz says, it wouldn’t have been a brain equivalent.

Although perhaps the fatty tissue could be considered a brain equivalent in some.

Is there a dinosaur called Chungkingosaurus?

Yes, it’s a kind of Stegosaur.

source: Dinosaurs, by Thomas Holtz

I was lonely

“I was lonely, but that was fine. It seems now that back then I was intent on gathering together all the forms of loneliness that I could.”

-- Haruki Murakami
translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen

source: an appreciation of Thelonious Monk, The Believer, v.6, n.5, July/August 2008

gay marriage in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden

At the beginning of Chapter 10 the brothers Charles & Adam Trask are trying to make a go of the farm. Father and mother are now dead and it’s the brothers’ legacy.

The boys have been at odds since they were children. Once Charles tried to kill Adam with an axe. So it’s not like cooperating comes naturally to them. Yet Steinbeck frames the project this way: “When two men live together they usually maintain a kind of shabby neatness out of incipient rage at each other. Two men alone are constantly on the verge of fighting, and they know it.”

“When two men live together …” A generalization, as though this were the way two men would be, nevermind their history, that they’re related, for instance, or that they both grew up full of buried rage because of an abusive father and mother who played favorites. “Two men alone are constantly on the verge of fighting …” Alone? Meaning, without the mediation of a woman?

I’m seeing Steinbeck put this down as the base, the “usual” thing, the natural thing. This is what one would expect of two men living together.

Fast forward fifteen or twenty years. Adam has moved to California and married, but his wife abandoned him and their two sons. A Chinese servant, Lee, essentially has become mother to the boys, or rather, both mother and father since Adam goes through a long period nursing his broken heart and neglecting every other human relationship. When Adam at last surfaces from the depths of his self-absorption (with the help of a thumping from a Salinas Valley neighbor) he realizes he’s got a real gem in Lee – not just a servant, but an intellectual peer, a man Friday … a wife?

In this scene Adam is soliciting advice from the grown son of the helpful neighbor. Will is a successful businessman, a banker. And he warns Adam away from a risky scheme. Changing the subject “Adam turned slowly to Lee. ‘Have we got any more of that lemon pie we had for supper?’ he asked.

“’I don’t think so,’ said Lee. ‘I thought I heard some mice in the kitchen. I’m afraid there will be white of egg on the boys’ pillows. You’ve got half a quart of whisky.’”

How domestic. Cozy. It doesn’t sound at all like they are “constantly on the verge of fighting.” Is it because Lee is feminized? Doing the cooking, the cleaning, tending the children?

Steinbeck makes this pretty literal when a visitor looks over the house: “flowered chintz, lace curtains, white drawn-work table cover, cushions on the couch covered in a bright and impudent print. It was a feminine room in a house where only men lived. [The visitor] thought of his own sitting room. [His wife] had chosen, bought, cleaned, every single thing in it except a pipestand. Come to think of it, she had bought the pipestand for him. There was a woman’s room too. But this was a fake. It was too feminine – a woman’s room designed by a man – and overdone, too feminine. That would be Lee.”

The sitting room is a room in drag!

The father-son anger thing is plenty evident in Adam’s house just as it was when Adam was the boy. Adam’s son, Cal, is torn. He is a young man when he and Lee finally talk about long hidden family history. Cal confesses, his “shoulders … shaking a little, like a muscle too long held under a strain”:

“’I love him,’ Cal said.” He means Adam, his father. He loves his father.

“’I love him too,’ said Lee. ‘I guess I couldn’t have stayed around so long if I hadn’t. He is not smart in a worldly sense but he’s a good man. Maybe the best man I have ever known.’”

It’s a marriage, all right. A loving marriage. Sure, Lee gets a wage but only sort of notionally. It all goes into the family pot.

Is it a “gay marriage”? That is, do Adam and Lee have sex? Considering that there’s many a sexless (even loveless) two-sex marriage, does a lack of sex disqualify? Maybe it’s a same-sex marriage, but not a gay one. Anyway, just cuz Steinbeck doesn’t put them in bed together -- well, remember that helpful neighbor?, he and his wife have lots of kids, but not once does Steinbeck describe their sex life.

nouriture

word of the day: nouriture

context: “The Ballad of a Lost House”, a poem by Leonora Speyer, appearing in Prize Poems, 1913-1929, an anthology edited by Charles A. Warner.

The poet is addressing her “Hungry Heart”, telling it to get out of the house –

“… weep not, get you gone –
Better the stones to rest upon,

The wind and rain for a roof secure,
Hyssop and tares for your nouriture!”

definition: nurture – as Spenser spelled it.
from dictionary.com

Hyssop and tares are wild plants.

Among other things in this poem the poet’s veins turn to ice, she listens to an “ancient ardent melody”, wonders “when a smile will strike”, addresses the morning as “O anguished morn”, is “loved with a hundred hates”, observes “a wraith content that contented goes”, and diagnoses “a house that has lost its soul.” Heady stuff.

princox

word of the day: princox

context: “Banal Sojourn”, a poem by Wallace Stevens, appearing in Prize Poems, 1913-1929, an anthology edited by Charles A. Warner.

“… who can care at the wigs despoiling the Satan ear?
And who does not seek the sky unfuzzed, soaring to the princox?”

definition: a self-confident young fellow
from dictionary.com

This would be one of the reasons I don’t rush to a dictionary when coming upon unfamiliar words in poems such as Stevens’. What does it add to know that a “princox” is a “self-confident young fellow”? Not much. In fact, it’s rather a disappointment.

pardie

word of the day: pardie

context: “Banal Sojourn”, a poem by Wallace Stevens, appearing in Prize Poems, 1913-1929, an anthology edited by Charles A. Warner.

“Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom.
Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew …”

definition: pardi (also pardie, pardy, perdie) – adverb, interjection, Archaic.
verily; indeed.
from dictionary.com

carcharodontosaurids, rebbachisaurids, saltasaurids

I’m reading Dinosaurs, a new overview by Thomas Holtz. It’s pitched to younger readers but it incorporates lots of recent research. I skim some of the more familiar stuff – like the plate tectonics discussion. The book incorporates dynamic new illustrations by Luis Rey. Sometimes, however, I come upon paragraphs thick with dinosaur names and reel a little. I don’t always bother to sound them out, but I often do, just to see if I can. It makes me feel like a kid again – uncertain, insecure, like I’m learning a magic incantation. Check out this paragraph as example:

Making the point that the carcharodontosaurids (that’s one of the hardest words right there) preyed upon those big brontosaurapatosaur-like long-necked plant-eaters Holtz says, “Big carcharodontosaurids are … typically found with some of the biggest of all sauropods: Acrocanthosaurus with the brachiosaurid Sauroposeidon; Carcharodontosaurus with the titanosaur Paralititan; Giganotosaurus with the rebbachisaurid Limaysaurus and the titanosaur Argentinosaurus and an unnamed rebbachisaurid; and an unnamed Argentine carcharodontosaurid with the saltasaurids Antarctosaurus, Neuquensaurus, and Saltasaurus. It seems likely that these giant carnosaurs were specialists in eating the largest of all herbivores.”

The French in Tropic of Cancer

I read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer last year. The book is set in France, mostly Paris. And, unsurprisingly, the text is frequently punctuated with French words, phrases, or more. I’ve never studied French. I’ve been exposed to it, yes, as here. But there’s plenty I don’t know, even basics. My usual strategy is to get what I can from context and what similarities to English exist. (Somewhat less helpful is trying to relate French to the Spanish & Portuguese I have studied.) Anyway, remembering that the web now has made simple translation available, I flipped back through Tropic of Cancer and typed up all the French I could find. I typed up some German too, I think, and maybe a thing or two else, who knows. Here’s the list:


les voies urinaires
avec des choses inouies
Comme un oeuf dansant sur un jet d’eau
comme d’habitude
Amer Picon
ascenseur
sans vin
dejeuner intime
Es war’ so shon gewesen
Zut alors!
Par ici, Madame. N’oubliez pas que les places numerotees sont reservees aux mutiles de la guerre.
vin de choix
voila quelque chose de beau
Tres lesbienne ici
idee fixe
Un acte gratuit pour vous, cher monsieur si bien coupe en tranches!
la belle boulangere
l’orfevre
Le bel aujourd’hui!
midinettes
Charmant poeme d’amour
angoisse
tristesse
Chez nous, c’est pour les chiens, les Quaker Oats. Ici pour le gentleman. Ca va.
le petit frere
femme de chambre
C’est moi … c’est moi, madame!
Il est mechant, celui-la.
Non, il n’est pas mechant, il est tres gentil.
Je le connais bien, ce type.
Tout compris.
Comme ca tout est regle …
Il ne faut jamais desesperer.
strapontin
Defendez-vous contre la syphilis!
Ca y est maintenant! Ausgespielt!
coupe
Ecoute, cheri … sois raisonnable!
quand il n’y aura plus de temps
Vite, cheri! Oh, c’est bon!
Mais faites comme chez vous, cheri. Je reviens tout de suite.
armoire
epicerie
gouttes
Tout Va Bien
J’ai vu des arbres que ne retrouverait aucun botaniste, des animaux que Cuvier n’a jamais soupconnes et des hommes que vous seul avez pu creer.
Fay ce que vouldras! … fay ce que vouldras!
Salut au monde!
pions
les surveillants
a partir de jeudi je ne parlerai plus de femmes
veilleur de nuit
Faites comme chez vous, cheri.
Mon Dieu, ne dites pas ca! Ne dites pas ca!
bal musette
Faut faire des economies!
carrefours


I entered all that in Google Translate and got back this:

the urinary tract
with things unheard
As an egg dancing on a jet of water
as usual
Amer Picon
lift
without wine
LUNCH intimate
Es war 'so shon gewesen
Zut alors!
Here, Madam. Remember that numbered seats are reserved maimed by the war.
wine of choice
voila something beautiful
Tres lesbian here
idee fixes
An act free for you, dear sir so cut into slices!
the beautiful baking
goldsmith
The beautiful today!
midinettes
Charming love poem
anguish
sorrow
For us, this is for dogs, Quaker Oats. Here for the gentleman. Ca va.
the little brother
maid
That's me… c'est moi, madame!
It is wicked, one.
No, it is not bad, it is very nice.
I know well, this kind.
All inclusive.
So everything is rule…
We must never despair.
seat
Defendez you against syphilis!
That's it now! Ausgespielt!
Cup
Look, cheri… be reasonable!
when there will be more time
Quick, Cheri! Oh, it's good!
But make yourself at home, cheri. I come back right away.
cabinet
Grocery
drops
Any Va Bien
I saw that trees not found any botanist, animals that Cuvier never suspected and men that you only have been created.
Fay what vouldras! … Fay what vouldras!
Hi the World!
pions
supervisors
From Thursday I will speak more women
night watchman
Make yourself at home, cheri.
My God, do not say ca! Do not say ca!
bal musette
Should make savings!
Paths


*

I haven’t much faith in computer translation. Note the many words Google Translate just ignored. But what was almost opaque becomes a cracked window through which I can get a bit more of the scene.

I separated out one song Miller quotes:


L’autre soir l’idee m’est venue
Cre nom de Zeus d’enculer un pendu;
Le vent se leve sur la potence,
Voila mon pendu qui se balance,
J’ai du l’enculer en sautant,
Cre nom de Zeus, on est jamais content.

Baiser dans un con trop petit,
Cre nom de Zeus, on s’ecorche le vit;
Baiser dans un con trop large,
On ne sait pas ou l’on decharge;
Se branler etant bien emmerdant,
Cre nom de Zeus, on est jamais content.


Unfortunately the results are a mess:

The other night I got the idea
Cre name of Zeus enculer a hanged;
The wind gets up on the gallows,
This is my balance to be hanged,
I have the enculer jumping,
Cre name of Zeus, one is never content.

Kiss in a con too small,
Cre name of Zeus, the s'ecorche lives;
Kiss in a con too large,
It is not known or being unloaded;
With branler being well emmerdant,
Cre name of Zeus, one is never content.

The Congressional Medal of Honor

In every naturalist’s book, after pages of beautiful pictures and chapters full of incident in which animals show off their fascinating personalities, the chapter comes, usually the final chapter, in which the naturalist, in ominous, regretful or worried tones, tells the reader that the natural world about which they have read so much, empathized with, thrilled to, is being destroyed. It won’t last the decade, the century, maybe not the month. And it’s because of People Like You, Dear Reader – Humans are bringing the world to the brink. Soon our impoverished, crippled, human-crowded world will wobble its lonesome big brain around a star indifferent to the cesspool its third planet has become. And then we, too, will destroy ourselves.

I always read that dang last chapter. I should just skip it.

In pop science books there’s typically a point at which the author declares Only Man Is Capable Of … you know, Only Man Can Cry, Only Man Can Sympathize, Only Man Can Laugh, Only Man Makes Tools, Only Man Prays to God, etc, & so on.

In an essay in In Search of Nature E.O. Wilson offers up one of the most qualified Only Man statements that I’ve seen:

“I doubt if any higher animal, such as a hawk or a baboon, has ever deserved a Congressional Medal of Honor according to the ennobling criteria used in our society.”

The Congressional Medal of Honor bit refers to the suicidal altruism of, say, the men who “threw themselves on top of grenades to shield comrades.” Now, it doesn’t seem likely that a baboon has ever thrown itself on a grenade for the benefit of anybody else, does it?

Considering how few people have thrown themselves on grenades for any reason – benefit of others, lark, loss of balance – one might suspect that the typical observer of human behavior wouldn’t be witness to that event either. Sure, we read about this sort of heroism in our newspapers (suicide bombers are not so dissimilar or that guy who throws himself into frigid water to save a drowning kid), but have you ever actually seen it?

Wilson’s assertion depends on generalizing from the observations of baboons (& hawks) we’ve been privileged to make ourselves (or read about). But observers, even trained ones, don’t always understand what they are seeing, so what they note may not be what’s really happening. And they leave shit out – there’s ample evidence for homosexual behavior (& other nonprocreative sex) among nonhuman animals but until recently you left it out of your paper, otherwise you threatened your career (only gays saw gay sex in the wild and gays didn’t get tenure).

But reading Wilson’s statement immediately brought to mind an instance of Congressional Medal of Honor worthy behavior by a baboon. Robert Sapolsky writes about it in his A Primate’s Memoir. Sapolsky was a naturalist who watched baboons in Africa. One day he saw something thrilling – it was, he emphasized, very unbaboonlike behavior. A lion caught the baboon troop with its guard down. Everybody bolted – every baboon for itself. Mamas, of course, grabbed their babies, but that was about it in the altruism department. Or that would be what Sapolsky usually saw. This time two youngsters too young to climb on their own were trapped at the foot of a tree while the lion closed in. All the adult baboons screamed from their perches. Then one adult male baboon, who, so far as Sapolsky knew, was not closely related to either of the babies, leapt in front of the lion, roaring, puffing himself up, throwing up dust, making himself as big and fierce-looking as he could. No match for a grown lion, but it did give the lion pause. Maybe, after all, the lion wasn’t that hungry. A nice snack of baboon baby, sure, but … something worth fighting over?

Everybody survived that encounter. But it’s probably not something you’re going to see again. Not because it will never happen again. But because nobody’s going to be watching.

Or because we’ll have wiped out all the baboons, I suppose. And the lions. Not to mention the hawks.

By the way, in the essay E.O. Wilson goes on to describe frequently observed suicidal altruism in colony insects (ants, bees). Maybe we’re more like ants than like baboons, anyway.

joss

word of the day: joss

context: Our narrator is visiting “friend Chang [in] San Francisco …

He lit a joss-stick long and black.
Then the proud gray joss in the corner stirred …

The great gray joss on the rustic shelf,
Rakish and shrewd, with his collar awry,
Sang impolitely, as though by himself …
‘Back through a hundred, hundred years
Hear the waves as they climb the piers,
Hear the howl of the silver seas,
Hear the thunder!
Hear the gongs of holy China …’”

definitions: “an image or statue representing a Chinese deity” – MS Word dictionary

“In the European view of Chinese mythology, Joss is a household deity and his cult image, which the Portuguese and other Europeans called an ‘idol’. Joss is not Chinese, but originates from the Portuguese word deos ‘god’.” -- Wikipedia

joss stick “incense in the form of a stick of dried paste” – MS Word dictionary

source: Vachel Lindsay’s “The Chinese Nightingale”, Prize Poems, 1913-1929 (1930) edited by Charles A. Wagner; Bonibooks

“AFTERNOON”, by Emma Rossi

AFTERNOON

Once an imaginary friend lied to me.
We were drinking tea with skim milk.
I don’t know.
The opal fog, a harp.
I was trying to tell imaginary right
from imaginary wrong.
It took more than a quote on a keepsake pillow.
I’m really opening up here.
She said she didn’t care.
The sun deceived me too,
gave me a throbbing headache
and a funny idea.
I lay down for a nap
knowing it would last until morning.
Way to go.

-- Emma Rossi

I discovered this one in the new issue of 6X6. Why do I like it so much? I like drinking tea in poems. And headaches. So it’s got that going for it. I like the odd proposition: “Once an imaginary friend lied to me.” The poem’s images are almost all domestic – tea, keepsake pillow, nap. Even “opal fog, a harp” have a flipped-open-book-on-coffee-table feel about them, the book next to the tea tray maybe. There’s that faux naif feel to the poem. Unlike the poem(s) by children I’ve lately quoted the speaker offers up her propositions without authority. “I don’t know” … “The sun deceived me too, / gave me … a funny idea.” “I was trying to …” The speaker sounds oppressed, weary, but plonks down a phrase from a pep talk (“Way to go”; “I’m really opening up here”) as though to ward off the fixer, the advice-giver, the one who would poke a nose in with an unwelcome: “Snap out of it!” No, says the poem. Talk to the pillow.

source: 6X6, issue 15, Spring 2008

gay machete sex

“For the single male traveler, homosexual come-ons are, like delays at JFK and overpriced hotel food, a part of the process to which one grows accustomed. I’ve been pick-up quarry in the United States, Japan, Palau, and several other ports of call. In Lecois, Brazil, a chatty American tourist sitting next to me at a hotel bar broached the subject by saying, ‘Well, I guess you know why I’ve taken such an interest in talking with you.’ I told him I didn’t, he explained, I said there had been some sort of misunderstanding, he apologized, bought me a beer, and we ended up talking for another hour.”

Chuck Thompson gives us this paragraph after a few pages recounting an experience he had in the Philippines. He is riding in a bus deep into the countryside. Night. The bus stops. The busdriver says, You have to get off here. You transfer to another bus. Chuck squints out at the unlit roadside. Reluctantly he steps out into the middle of nowhere and watches the bus disappear down the highway.

Standing there, not sure where he is or when or if another bus will come, Chuck hears a rustling in the roadside bushes. Young men emerge, a couple of them carrying machetes. Machetes, Chuck assures us, are standard equipment for Filipino farmers. But, not similarly equipped and with no option but to wait and find out what happens next, Chuck is, needless to say, a mite nervous.

They surround him. “’You shouldn’t travel alone at night,’ [the one Thompson calls] Rivera told me. ‘Foreigners are often kidnapped in these mountains.’”

Not the sort of statement that would put one at ease, Chuck thinks.

Rivera invites Chuck back to his place. “’I don’t think the bus will be come soon.’ Rivera brushed my forearm with his fingertips.”

Indeed, the bus seems in no hurry to get there.

“’Chuck, tell me something,’ he said. ‘Have you ever had sex with a gay man?’”

Oh. That’s what it is. This is an atmosphere charged with eros, not … uh … fear.

Chuck handles his brush with “gay machete sex” about as well as can be expected, I guess. Not interested! Thanks anyway! Great country you got here! That bus will be along any minute! Any minute, yessir!

Chuck Thompson’s perspective reminds me of that of the single female traveler. The come-on is “part of the process.” The single male’s experience as “pick-up quarry” for men is going to be a tenth that of a single female’s, yet, though he doesn’t explicitly compare the two perspectives, Thompson seems to have picked up a skill essential to the single female traveler: how to say no. Gracefully even?

source: Smile When You’re Lying: confessions of a rogue travel writer, by Chuck Thompson

“CRAB”, by Abilash Munnangi

CRAB

The dead crab lies still
limp on the dry sand All
strength to crawl Gone
from his hard shell
But he keeps a shape
of old anger
Curved along his claws

-- Abilash Munnangi

Abilash Munnangi was in third grade, Parkmont Elementary, Alameda County when the poem was written.

It’s a fine piece of work. I even like the idiosyncratic capitals. The description is plain but precise. And that ending! “old anger / Curved along his claws” … Though the poem is ostensibly about a crab, it’s really about us, our old angers, the ones that become hardened into shell. Hollow inside? Empty of what originally made them grow? What old angers outlive us?

source: My Song Is the Light: California Poets in the Schools Statewide Anthology 2007, edited by Mary Lee Gowland

UPDATE: Figuring “Abilash Munnangi” would not return many hits I ran the name in Google. “Abilash Munnangi” returned precisely one hit. Dare I Read. But Google asks, “Do you mean Abhilash Munnangi”? I doublechecked the spelling in the CPITS anthology and the way I wrote it is the way it is written in the anthology, but seeing if I really meant “Abhilash Munnangi” I let Google tell me that there is an Abhilash who is a student at Parkmont Elementary. He placed in the California Classic Scholastic Championships: K-3.

Somewhat disturbingly -- to me at least – I ran the search again just now and found that Dare I Read does not appear among the search results. Is DIR suddenly invisible to Google? That would be too bad.

… Uh-oh. I just found something new to disturb me. Curious how invisible DIR is to Google I ran a search for lines from “Crab.” Again DIR does not appear. However, the poem does. Follow that link to Miss Maggie's and you'll find "Crab" attributed to Valerie Worth. Apparently it was published in Worth's All the Small Poems and Fourteen More. How unfortunate for the young master Munnangi. A plagiarist?

This is the poem as it appears at Miss Maggie’s:


crab


The dead crab
Lies still,
limp on the dry sand,


All strength to crawl
Gone from his
Hard shell-


But he keeps a shape
Of old anger
Curved along his claws.

*

So much for the “idiosyncratic capitals”, eh? Should I tell someone? Or just let it go? It’s not like Abhilash got any money out of it. Still, it grinds me that he got a place in the statewide anthology that could have gone to someone who actually wrote her own poem.

I like Valerie Worth’s original, though it loses a bit of its naïve charm when I know it was written by an adult. I see through a bit of research that Worth died in 1994.

Well. Hm.

“Deep Eyes”, by Darlyn Avina

Deep Eyes

Eyes are like a hole,
a hole with a sparkle that shines.
Once you’re cursed with it in your life
there is no way out of that curse of a hole.
It feels so bad that you think your eyes
are falling into the moisture in your head.
Once that hole shines again it’s made into a shape.
Its background is white with a color in the middle.
Remember that curse you will see with for the rest of your life.
But after all that pain you will see everything.

-- Darlyn Avina

Last month at Poetry & Pizza we had a crew of poet teachers from California Poets in the Schools. I got from them last year’s CPITS anthology and started reading it on the BART ride home.

Children’s poetry. You know, I find I can like it as well as poetry by grown-ups.

Darlyn Avina was in second grade (Millview Elementary School, Madera County) when “Deep Eyes” was written.

The poem reminds me of certain translations; I’m thinking of ones I’ve read from Eastern Europe, or early French surrealists or dadaists. Also some primitive poetry – shaman songs. When I say the poem seems translated, I mean that it seems to carry over a strangeness from another language, a way of speaking that is taken for granted in that other language but which in English seems nonnative. I suspect English is Alvina’s native tongue.

The poem proposes things you probably hadn’t considered – your eyes are a curse? – but which, once suggested, seem peculiarly reasonable. Well, yeah, the eyes can be a curse sometimes. Eyes are holes? Holes. Windows is the usual metaphor, but, you know, I can grok holes. The poet speaks with authority, no hesitation about it, no I think maybe.

“But after all that pain you will see everything.” And that’s … a good thing?

source: My Song Is the Light: California Poets in the Schools Statewide Anthology 2007, edited by Mary Lee Gowland

exposed to the outside world

I’ve heard before that the sense of smell, unlike other senses -- vision, hearing, etc. -- is a sense operated directly by the brain. Not that I understood what that meant. Says Lewis Thomas in The Youngest Sciences: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher: “The olfactory receptor cells were known to be bona fide brain cells, the only proper neurones in the brain that are exposed to the outside world and act as their own receptors of information from the environment. … [T]he olfactory neurones [are always] replicating and replacing themselves in their positions at the surface of the olfactory mucosa, high up in the back of the nose. No other brain neurones have the property of multiplying or regenerating; once in place the neurones of the rest of the brain are there for the duration of life, and those which age and die off are not replaced.”

More recent research suggests this is not as uniformly true as Lewis makes out, that is, some other brain cells do regenerate.

“Another peculiarity … is that despite their exposure to the outside, and their location in a region of the air passages which is especially rich in bacteria and viruses of all sorts, the tissues in which they reside do not become infected. … It is now believed that the cells are somehow protected by the antimicrobial property of the mucus which is always present as a thin layer covering the cells.”

Didn’t the Egyptian embalmers pull the brain out through the nose? Maybe they knew it was already kinda sticking out there.

a profoundly ignorant occupation

In his memoir The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher, Lewis Thomas talks about training to be a medical doctor in 1933:

“It gradually dawned on us that we didn’t know much that was really useful, that we could do nothing to change the course of the great majority of the diseases we were so busy analyzing, that medicine, for all its façade as a learned profession, was in real life a profoundly ignorant occupation.”

Years of increasing success “in diagnosis and prognosis were regarded as the triumph of medical science, and so they were. It had taken long decades of careful, painstaking observation of many patients; the publication of countless papers describing the detailed aspects of one clinical syndrome after another … By the 1930s we thought we knew as much as could ever be known about the dominant clinical problems of the time: syphilis, tuberculosis, lobar pneumonia, typhoid, rheumatic fever …” Except, that is, how to “change the course of the great majority”; cure was up to patient’s immune system.

“The treatment of disease was the most minor part of the curiculum, almost left out altogether.” Sure, they were taught about “the mode of action of a handful of everyday drugs: aspirin, morphine, various cathartics, bromides, barbituates, digitalis, a few others.” But these primarily treated symptoms. They weren’t curatives.

Mostly what doctors did, Thomas says, at least when we’re talking patient care, was listen, hold your hand and act as though they were responsible for you. They were living breathing walking authoritative placebos – not much different from shamans.

Patients these days miss that kind of doctor, the handholder, the man with the bedside manner. But, says Thomas, though he understands and sympathizes, he wouldn’t trade the many actual cures we now have for a kindly smile.

cotta

word of the day: cotta

context: Dave “had visited this very church, St. Matthias, as a chorister. He had owned a clear, sweet soprano voice in those days and, in a red cassock and starchy white lace-trimmed cotta, with his blond hair he’d looked angelic. He hadn’t been angelic, but that was another story.”

definition: a short surplice reaching to just above the waist, worn by clergy, acolytes and choristers, in the Roman Catholic Church and in some Anglican and Lutheran churches -- MS Word Dictionary

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

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.”