Dustin Heron

It’s January 2011? OK. Time to offer up this link I threw in my DIR doc three years ago. Write about it sometime, I told myself. I’ve been cleaning out a few of those today. One was on whether it’s becoming normal journalistic practice to mention the same-sex partner of a prominent figure being featured in a magazine profile. So far as that one went, I couldn’t figure out anything to say, really. It’s long been the practice of journalists to treat a gay relationship like a secret, a shameful one, perhaps, or one that they fear will lead to reader complaints (or editorial suspicion) or something. Best just not to mention it, even if the interview subject is fully forthright and proud. I had written some paragraphs trying to say something. I did not succeed. I’ve deleted that at last. I’ve now said at least as much as I previously said at length. Another potential post was on how Anne Sexton depicted God – Jesus in this case – in a poem. Uh. Just not up for that, you know.

So what have I decided to share?

Because I'm bored at work, I'm being drunk. I'm being drunk by the Ogre from H.R. His hands are enormous … He squeezes me in his hand and snaps the top of my head back like a soda can. I make an effervescent sound. My skull is filled with carbonation. Carbonation and porn. Porn begins to jump from my skull and run all over the office.

That’s by Dustin Heron. I discovered Heron in an issue of Watchword and asked him if he would read for Poetry & Pizza, the series I was coordinating (with Clive Matson & Katharine Harer) in San Francisco.

His blog, Because I’m Bored at Work, from which I snagged the above quote, seems to be on hiatus. There’s been no update since January 2008. Before that there had been no update since Jan ’07. I think my praising the blog and his Watchword story goosed Heron to write a couple entries.

But to make it a regular thing you need more motivation than a few nice words and one pizza parlor gig, I guess. Anyway. Still fun writing there to be encountered.

I bought his book, Paradise Stories, but haven’t read it yet. It’s got lots of stars at Good Reads.

Poetry & Pizza is also, by the way, on hiatus, permanent maybe. Had a good run.

pile of reading

My last pile of reading post was August 1st. At the time I was reading Worse Than War: genocide, eliminationism, and the ongoing assault on humanity, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. I finished the damn thing yesterday. Yes, the author says many valuable things. He offers ideas for preventing genocide, for instance, (or, as he has decided to rename it, “war against humanity”), ideas which include giving every new leader a handbook describing the likely punishments for engaging in eliminationism (the term Goldhagen prefers to genocide). The topic is so important that any book that tries out new thinking on it is important. I just wish I could recommend this one. I’m not telling anybody not to read it. I don’t have a better one to recommend.

I keep trying to offer up a critcism of Worse Than War and erasing what I write because, like I said, it’s such an important topic that I don’t want to do anything but recommend people spend time thinking and working on it, but the book …

Stuff I’m reading now:

Faster Than the Speed of Hope poems by Donna M. Lane
My favorites are the portraits of people Lane knows, friends, lovers, exes.

Crow Planet: essential wisdom from the urban wilderness by Lyanda Lynn Haupt
Having observed urban wildlife awhile (particularly crows), Haupt offers up a primer on how to be a naturalist in the city. More crow anecdotes please.

I Am Secretly an Important Man by Steven Jesse Bernstein
A collection of short prose published posthumously. I discovered Bernstein in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, which I finished reading last week. I wasn’t able to find a collection of Bernstein’s poems in the library, but did come across this. In “Murdered in the Middle of the Dance,” the poem in The Outlaw Bible, Bernstein engages in a magical realism that is both humorous and grotesque – the speaker of the poem cuts off his head then wanders about a party bleeding. I haven’t read anything so striking in Secretly yet, but I’m only a few pages in.

Sorry We’re Close poems by J. Tarin Towers
Enjoying the way Towers makes connections, leaps, a friend calls them. “I stop / caring about myself to try to fix the world for you. / No one can fix the world, but I show up with my tool kit: / … what can I do for you? / Nothing? Oh, well, I’m sorry I came. / I’ll go home and fix my broken bathtub if you don’t need me then. / Oh! Of course I’ll stay on so you can drown your boyfriend.”

The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris
Just started. Haven’t yet got past the Introduction. I am reading a lot of poetry lately. Big fat anthologies and slim volumes by individual poets.

Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life by Bryan Lee O’Malley
I loved the movie made from this series of graphic novels, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and a library colleague likes the graphic novels better so I’m giving them a shot. So far this first graphic novel and the movie so closely parallel that it feels a bit like I’m reading the movie’s story boards.

Two Lines: a journal of translation, volume 13, 2006
I like the opportunity to read work from languages other than English. Haven’t read anything I love in this yet.

Kundalini: the evolutionary energy in man by Gopi Krishna
In my yoga practice lately I’ve been going through periods I’ve felt lightheaded, if not enlightened. The book is a memoir by a yogi who inadvertently accessed kundalini energy – and it came close to wrecking his life. Not quite a pageturner, tho.

The Complete Adventures of the Borrowers by Mary Norton
Four books under one cover. A fifth Borrowers book was published a few years later making the title no longer accurate. A copy of the first, titled simply The Borrowers, occupied a place on our bookshelf most of my childhood. I know my brother read it. But I could never get past more than a few pages. I admire Norton’s prose style in a way now that I would not have as a child and I find the gossiping of the mother mildly amusing, something that I’m sure bored me as a child, especially considering the emphasis Mrs Clock (one of the mouse-sized human “Borrowers” that live under the floor boards in English houses) places on class and propriety, things that would have puzzled me as a child.

Voices Within the Ark: the modern Jewish poets edited by Howard Schwartz and Anthony Rudolf
Another fat fat anthology. The writing is consistently good. Much allusion is made to the Torah (the Old Testament, more or less), and to the same old stories …

egg on your face

Feb ’09 I was writing about Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia, and noted with contempt the writer’s notion that only human beings have a sense of rhythm. As I said at the time, “all it takes is one ‘single report’ and you got egg on your face.”

That spring I came across
an NPR story about animals groovin’. As I speculated in my February post, if any animal should have a sense of rhythm wouldn’t it be one that sings, maybe a bird? And now I see that researchers have found birds who dance. 14 species of parrots, at least. And, contra the expert Sacks quotes in his book, some elephants. They found these dancers, how? Through watching youtube videos!

Interestingly , Aniruddh Patel, the very scientist Sacks quotes categorically denying any animal the ability to shimmy to the beat, is quoted in the NPR story. “’ This is potentially scientifically very important,’” Patel says.

Follow the link and watch some birds shakin’ tail. It’s cute. And less than three minutes.

you can have an opinion on a topic, without having much information about it

Studies of political literacy among children “upholds the basic conclusion that kids tend to have little genuine awareness of political figures, political parties, or the political process.

“But how much more ignorant are kids than the general population? Not much, it turns out. … ‘[T]here is no evidence to suggest that an enfranchised adult population actually knows more than … teenager[s] …’ National political moods, it seems, happen without national political awareness.” Just because people don’t know the details about a subject, Ryan Grim says, it doesn’t mean they don’t have an opinion about it.

source: This Is Your Country on Drugs: the secret history of getting high in America by Ryan Grim

treatment over incarceration

“In 2000, California voters approved a program to provide drug treatment, rather than prison time, for nonviolent drug-possession offenders. A study of the law found that it saved the state $1.3 billion over its first six years, and that for every tax dollar invested, California saved $7 thanks to reductions in crime and health-care costs.”

I remember voting for that proposition. I’ve wondered how it’s worked out.

source: This Is Your Country on Drugs: the secret history of getting high in America by Ryan Grim

out of the bars, into the dens

“In 1827, the first year the federal government began tabulating opium imports, almost none was brought into the United States. Five years later, the number had climbed to around fifty thousand pounds. In several years during the 1830s and early 1840s, importation peaked at more than seventy thousand pounds. If a dose is less than half a gram – and it can often be much less – then seventy thousand pounds would be enough for more than thirty million opium highs in a nation with an 1840 population of roughly seventeen million. Importation statistics suggest that use continued to rise throughout the 1840s and 1850s.”

Ryan Grim notes that opium use tracked the success of the temperance movement – as people drank less they turned to another high to fill the need. But the bit about 30 million highs in a nation of 17 million seemed kind of, well, high. Looking at it again, two(ish) highs a year per person doesn’t seem all that dramatic. This is not a nation of junkies. Still, it’s quite a bump from “almost none.” A relatively small number of heavy users could account for a large fraction of that 30 million. That’s typically the case, isn’t it?

source: This Is Your Country on Drugs: the secret history of getting high in America by Ryan Grim

Vengeful Cruelty

“A striking feature of eliminationist assaults is that the perpetrators and the social groups they come from, represent, and in whose name they act regularly conceive themselves as reacting rather than acting. Believing that the victims have already perpetrated or intend to perpetrate great injury upon them, they understand their assault as essentially defensive, necessary to forestall further harm, rather than as offensive against an unthreatening party. Perpetrators’ and their supporters’ ease in convincing themselves they are justly giving the victims what the victims had inflicted or would inflict upon them, when it is overwhelmingly evident that this is wrong, demonstrates human beings’ great vulnerability to prejudices and ideologies positing that a disparaged, hated, or alien group poses a dire threat. This sense of victimhood, the rage it induces and the perpetrators’ self-righteousness in administering hard justice combine to produce an appetite for vengeance and pleasure in meting it out …”

The passage continues with examples from the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, and the Soviets in their push against the retreating Germans in World War II (where vengeance rape against German women was an approved tactic).

The description of what author Daniel Goldhagen calls “Vengeful Cruelty” sounds to me an awful lot like the rhetoric of the contemporary Christian right wing in this country. The Christians bleat that they are victims. Victims! Beleagered and on the run in their own country – and threatened around the world – a vision of the world so at odds with the reality as to be truly frightening. If someone can believe something so clearly absurd, what monstrous acts do they think will be justified, will be necessary, now, while they have weapons and numbers to their advantage?

source: Worse Than War: genocide, eliminationism, and the ongoing assault on humanity by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

“cosmological principle”

“If a person innocently surveyed the Germans’ treatment of Jews … he might … conclude … that the Germans kept the Jews alive … to satisfy some unknown cosmological principle requiring Jews’ suffering akin to the Aztecs’ belief that daily human sacrifice was necessary to make the sun rise.”

source: Worse Than War: genocide, eliminationism, and the ongoing assault on humanity by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

Victory Cabbage

I remember the pique over the French government’s resistance to the U.S. invasion of Iraq led a member of Congress to propose renaming French Fries – Freedom Fries.

Back in World War One “sauerkraut was renamed Victory Cabbage.”

The guy for tweaking the French (like they cared?) musta knowed his histry.

source: This Is Your Country on Drugs: the secret history of getting high in America by Ryan Grim

scattering the ashes, part 2

Having posted one account of scattering ashes, I thought I’d follow up with another. Lynn Schooler is scattering the ashes of his father in an Alaskan stream:

“The ashes hissed as they entered the water, the heavier bits sinking immediately to the bottom beneath the salmon, settling into the gravel amid clusters of freshly spawned eggs; the lighter, powdery material clung to the surface, drifting in ribbons and patches through rafts of golden leaves. A trace of fine dust rose from the empty bag like smoke, twisted on the breeze, and dispersed.”

source: The Blue Bear by Lynn Schooler

“cause of death”

When I came upon Lynn Schooler’s description of the internment camp for Aleuts in Funter Bay, I was surprised, not remembering having heard of it before.

“On June 7, 1942, a special task force of the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Kiska Island, one of the westernmost islands in the Aleutian chain. … [I]n the turmoil that followed, U.S. troops evacuated more than 880 Aleuts from their treeless, windswept home and forced them into internment camps a thousand miles away in Funter Bay. While German POWs housed in well-built bunkhouses twenty miles west in Excusion Inlet organized orchestras and tried on warm woolen coats (courtesy of the Red Cross), the Aleut Americans were huddling in the dank, leaky remains of the abandoned cannery, dying of depression and medical neglect while trying to subsist on a meager diet of rice. The records of the sole harried doctor assigned to care for the declining Aleuts sometimes listed the cause of death as simply ‘pain.’ …

“During the summer of 1943, in spite of the fact that they had ostensibly been evacuated to protect them from the invading Japanese, most of the able-bodied men interned at Funter Bay were transported back to the Pribilof Islands to conduct an annual harvest of fur seals under the auspices of the federal government, leaving the women and children to fend for themselves. … When some … men expressed their dissatisfaction, they were labeled as mutineers, and the cook received orders not to feed them. … [E]pidemics of disease ravaged the [Funter Bay] camps … dystentery, influenza … measles …”

Ah, the Good War. The Greatest Generation. The golden days of yore.

source: The Blue Bear by Lynn Schooler

“crackles and snaps”

When you’re sitting on top of the water far from the surf and the air is calm the ocean seems to be a quiet place. If you were to dip your ear into the water, as Lynn Schooler does with a hydrophone off the Alaskan coast, hoping to locate the schools of herring that draw the hungry humpbacks to feed, you would hear a lot:

“I listened for the light, hissing static that can signal the presence of herring. The clicks and pops emitted by millions of tiny gills create a distinct underwater ‘signature’ that can sometimes be heard for miles and – if we were lucky – might be accompanied by the baritone rumbles and high-pitched squeals of hunting whales.

“The hydrophone chortled and whispered in the myriad voices of the ocean: a ratcheting whir – the voice of a porpoise using echo-location to feel its way through the depths; the hiss of strong currents stirring sand along the bottom; the innumerable tiny crackles and snaps that rise from hordes of crab, shrimp, bivalves, and unnameable bottom-crawling creatures; odd, indecipherable sounds that added to the depth of mystery in the black world beneath the Swift’s keel.”

source: The Blue Bear by Lynn Schooler

word of the day: hootch

“’Hootchenoo’ was as close as the first whites in Alaska could come to a proper pronunciation of Hutsnuwu – a village famous for its home brew and stills. Corrupted, the name of the village was shortened to ‘Hootch,’ and a new word signaling powerful, poor-quality liquor was introduced into American slang by traders and sailors returning home from the Inside Passage.”

source: The Blue Bear by Lynn Schooler

obey freely

After railing at the notion that ordinary killers in a genocide are forced into it, that they act against their will, it being inconceivable that your average person would so easily throw aside the belief that murder was wrong and grab a machete, Daniel Goldhagen quotes one of the Rwandan Hutu who did just that. Goldhagen says, these are “words that could serve as a motto for our age’s willing executioners, whether ordinary Germans, ordinary Serbs, or ordinary Hutu, ‘you obey freely.’”

Whole societies buy into the idea that some class of persons needs to be eliminated in order to avoid disaster (or to make way for some wondrous transformation). In societies that have perpetrated mass slaughter it is not difficult to find people who have killed their neighbors, even the children of their neighbors, and taunted and tortured them while doing it. These killers are often protected from legal retribution (if such becomes likely) because even those who did not actively wield a murder weapon agree something had to be done, something permanent, because things just couldn’t go on the way they were.

Is it easy to create the kind of animosity that explodes, when the circumstances are right, into an orgy of bloodletting? Probably not. It probably takes years of effort and persuasion, peer pressure, repetition. But that sort of effort and persuasion, that sort of mindnumbing repetition of irrational blaming, is not hard to find, even today, and probably in your neighborhood.

source: Worse Than War: genocide, eliminationism, and the ongoing assault on humanity by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

scattering the ashes

“The sun was shining and the sky was blue with a few white clouds as I paddled closer toward the center of the lake. … Suddenly, out of nowhere, the sky got dark and big gusts of wind were blowing. … What I thought would be a touching ceremony between me and my mother turned into a hurried, workmanlike task as I pulled the plastic bag out of the box, opened it, and poured the contents into the lake, the wind blowing much of the ashes back in my face.”

Mark Oliver Everett was scattering his mother’s ashes in a lake that held fond memories of family outings. I’ve read a number of accounts of the scattering of ashes; when the ashes are spread upon the waters there often seem to be mischievous breezes lurking nearby. Everett’s is only the latest I’ve read in which a wind pops up and hurls the cremains irreverently back into mourners’ faces.

Should I find myself tasked with scattering I will know what to expect.

source: Things the Grandchildren Should Know by Mark Oliver Everett

you should pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, darn it!

“I was getting used to just pulling up my bootstraps (whatever that means) and taking care of the task at hand …”

A friend at work asked me about idioms. It reminded me of the other workmate who asked me what slang was. In neither case was I able to offer a great definition. For idiom I like this from Wikipedia, “an expression, word, or phrase whose sense means something different from what the words literally imply.” Although I would change that “imply” to “describe.” The point of saying you should “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” isn’t to say anything about boots or literally getting up off the floor by tugging on them but (as phrases.org has it) “to exemplify the achievement in getting out of a difficult situation by [your] own efforts.” Nobody needed to give me a hand up, I was able to get off the floor completely through my own efforts!

Is it possible to get yourself up off the floor by pulling at your bootstraps, shoelaces, nose, penis, or hair? Well. Maybe. One of the origins of the metaphor, I suspect, was the respect it gave to the inherent difficulty. If you could do it, you were due a lot of credit. But metaphors are pernicious. Unlike pulling yourself up by bootstraps metaphors are easy. You can throw them at people, cover up reasoned arguments with them, and create seductive irrelevancies. Too often we argue about the metaphor rather than the problem. This redounds to the benefit of the dishonest debater.

The quote that heads my post is ripped from Mark Oliver Everett’s memoir Things the Grandchildren Should Know. Everett is the creative force behind EELS, a rock band. He’s no dummy but it’s weird he doesn’t even get the idiom right. In this age of easy internet research – I googled “bootstraps” and found the phrases.org explanation in under five seconds – getting shit wrong should be harder.

what passes for reason

In 2006 the New York State Court of Appeals “rejected the view that the ban against same-sex marriage [in that state] was irrational and arbitrary and therefore unconstitutional.”

The Court, desperately trying to cobble together a rationale that wasn’t purely arbitrary, came up with this drug fantasy: “The court reasoned that … same-sex couples can only have children … through careful planning. In contrast … [because] different-sex couples can ‘become parents [by] accident’ … heterosexual couples … are more likely to be unstable … [T]he court concluded that it was rational for the legislature to provide protection to the more unstable … relationships while denying protection to the more stable …” In other words, heterosexual relationships are likelier to be more “’casual and temporary’” than gay ones.

How excluding same-sex couples from protection was supportive to the casual and temporary straights was left unexplained. Legal protections destabilize the steady at the same time they help out the casual? I guess allowing people to marry who are less likely to divorce would put divorce court judges out of work!

That’s what passes for reason in homophobic judges!

We can have a cynical laugh, I suppose, at the turning on its head of one of the most deeply held traditional prejudices against gay relationships -- if such laughter doesn’t hurt your gut more than just drinking.

source: From the Closet to the Courtroom: five LGBT rights lawsuits that have changed our nation by Carlos A. Ball

stuff I got at the SF Zine Fest

Labor Day Weekend saw another SF Zine Fest.

What I got:

John Porcellino’s King-Cat Comics & Stories #71 – and a King-Cat Tshirt!

into the grid a tiny zine about being a librarian

We’ll Never Have Paris Spring 2010 – a zine on the theme “things never meant to be” – when I saw the come-on on the cover “NOW WITH POETRY!” I asked the editor if that had killed sales. She said, “I didn’t use to publish poetry.”

Cliterally Speaking mini-comics by April Thompson and Quintessa Malranga, mostly

Notes on Conflict mini-comics by Susie Cagle – a trip to Israel

The Frog Prince a full-size comic by Lauren Skinner

Kent bought some stuff, too.

“Ease awes.”

“Ease awes,” says Ron Silliman in his essay “Of Theory, To Practice.”

What the hell is he talking about?*

Here’s the context: “Once reading strategies catch up to those of writing, a lot of complexity is going to dissolve. Ease awes. For good reason.”

He’s been talking about the “difficult or obscure” nature of much modern poetry and says once readers “catch up to” the writers that difficulty will “dissolve” into “ease.” Ease? And ease awes! It does? I mean, when someone says, “You make it look easy,” they’re typically talking to a person doing something the speaker has already discovered is NOT easy. So there’s awe in that, awe in appreciating a performance of a difficult act in a manner that makes it look easy.

But once one has achieved a facility in something such that it feels easy, one ceases to be awed by it. It becomes matter-of-fact, just something you can do. So is Ron talking about others who haven’t yet got it? Readers who haven’t yet achieved an ease with the (only apparently) obscure will be awed by readers who have? That sounds unlikely, both as a reading of what Ron means to say, and as something that might happen.

Whatever.

I didn’t quote the sentence to hassle Ron about it. I quote the sentence because it is just so gawdam fun.

“Ease awes.”

Ease awes!

Say it eight times fast. Ease-awes-ease-awes-ease-awes-eez-oz-ee-zaws-ees-ahs-

See-saws!

Esau’s!

‘E’s Oz!

source: Postmodern American Poetry, edited by Paul Hoover

from John Cage’s "Themes & Variations"

Activity, not communication.

Process instead of object.

Boredom plus attention = becoming interested.

Music is permanent; only listening is intermittent (Thoreau).

source: Postmodern American Poetry, edited by Paul Hoover