Fogbank, for example

Things decay. Just sitting around unused things decay. Even if protected from active agents of entropy like sun and wind and rain. Things by themselves, alone and untended, go through changes.

Knowledge gets lost. It’s hard to imagine in an era where information is supposedly expanding at an exponential rate, but some stuff we learned how to do once we no longer have the know-how for. Maybe the processes didn’t get written down comprehensively, or the instructions were misplaced. Maybe the people who had the skills dropped dead.

I confess I hadn’t considered the possibility of America’s nuclear arsenal being a victim of these two truths. Nuclear bombs just sitting around lose their effectiveness over time; internal chemical reactions make them unstable – and dangerous. Being a nuclear power requires maintenance of the stockpiles. But sometimes we don’t quite know how to do that, it seems.

Rachel Maddow discusses the difficulties in her book, Drift: the unmooring of American military power:

These … fixes … require[] real, hard-won technical nuclear expertise … Fuzes, for example, were failing, and there was nobody around who could fix them: ‘Initial attempts to refurbish Mk21 fuzes were unsuccessful,’ admitted an Air Force general, ‘in large part due to their level of sophistication and complexity.’ The fuze that previous generations of American engineers had invented to trigger a nuclear explosion (or to prevent one) were apparently too complicated for today’s generation of American engineers. …

Then there was the W76 problem. W76s were nuclear bombs based mostly on the Navy’s Trident submarines. By refurbishing them, we thought we might get another twenty or thirty years out of them before they needed replacing. The problem with refurbishing the W76s – with taking them apart, gussying them up, and putting them back together – is that we had forgotten how to make those things anymore. One part of the bomb had the code name ‘Fogbank.’ Fogbank’s job was to ensure that the hydrogen in the bomb reached a high enough energy level to explode on cue. But no one could remember how to make Fogbank. … [N]o one today remembers the exact formula …

It took more than a year just to rebuild the long-dismantled Fogbank manufacturing plant at the Oak Ridge nuclear lab … But even after years of trying, even after the Fogbank production program went to ‘Code Blue’ high priority, the technicians were never able to reproduce a single cauldron of Fogbank possessed of its former potency.

“You’re not supposed to look like popcorn!”

Retired as a principal dancer for the New York City Ballet, Jock Soto filled the dance need in his life with teaching. I like some of the metaphors he uses with his students:

[W]hen you take a ballerina by the wrists it shouldn’t look like you are riding a motorcycle.

Never paddle a ballerina in a turn. Stir her discreetly with your finger in finger turns, not like you have a spoon and she is a pot of soup.

I can’t quite picture what paddling a ballerina would look like. But that probably just indicates how ignorant I am of the art. Plus maybe I like imagining a ballerina as a canoe?

Soto says he finds himself using cooking metaphors while he teaches. I imagine Soto quietly giving the advice above, then shouting when the boys are on the floor.

”Don’t stir her like a pot of soup! She is not a pot of soup!”

“Don’t stand there like a frozen fish stick!”

When an ensemble exercise with eighteen boys was horribly executed I stopped them and scolded: “You’re not supposed to look like popcorn!”

source: Every Step You Take: a memoir by Jock Soto

word of the day: tyro

word in context: “[O]nly a tyro asks what a poem ‘means’; the only thing that matters is what effect it has.”

definition: a beginner in learning : novice

source: An Introduction to Haiku: an anthology of poems and poets from Basho to Shiki by Harold G. Henderson

“a death of fabricated personhood”

For Laci Lee Adams being called to ministry and coming out as bisexual are intertwined stories. In one of her sermons she uses death as a metaphor in a way that is exciting, transformative, and kind of creepy:

There can be no new life without a death of an old life. Coming out is a death. It is a death of an old way of living! It is a death of a life of lies! It is a death of unhealthy expectations! It is a death of fabricated personhood! And let me tell you, death is difficult! And we need to be able to sit with death because when we can really embrace death, we can more fully appreciate resurrection.

Lies do not die a quiet death.

I can imagine being stirred as this sermon is delivered. But there’s something about the metaphor that disturbs me. We do not die every day. We do not die, only to be reborn every year like a crop of barley. “When we … embrace death,” Adams says, “we … appreciate resurrection.” Are we really talking about death here? Death is permanent. Except when negated by resurrection. In which case death is not death. For death is permanent. Death-with-resurrection is death-as-temporary-thing. “What happened to you?” “Oh, I died.” “You died!” “Yeah, but I got better.”

The paragraph quoted is from “A Quietly Queer Revolution” by Laci Lee Adams in the anthology The Full Spectrum: a new generation of writing about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and other identities edited by David Levithan and Billy Merrell

words of wisdom from the Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Travis Stanton remembers a life-changing encounter:

I had the good fortune to hear Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak to an arena full of students and faculty at my small private liberal arts college in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Toward the end of the presentation, Tutu allowed for a brief question-and-answer period. One student stood up and addressed the archbishop. She noted the work he had done in his own country of South Africa to address the issue of gay and lesbian equality, and asked, “Isn’t that contradictory to what the Bible has to say about homosexuality?”

The archbishop paused for what seemed like an eternity. I remember naively thinking that his answer would change the world – either opening up the hearts and minds of the audience members, or forever slamming the door on my neatly appointed closet. Then he started to laugh. “The Bible says a lot of things I hope you don’t believe,” he chuckled.

quoted from “A Fairy’s Tale” by Travis Stanton in the anthology The Full Spectrum: a new generation of writing about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and other identities edited by David Levithan and Billy Merrell

“So, you think you might be gay?”

Here’s a striking image from a coming out story:

I checked out every book the library had on queer youth, fiction and non-fiction. They had seventy-six. I spread the books over the house, stacked on the kitchen counter, balanced on the arms of the couch, perched by [the] desk chairs, piled on the coffee table, and liberally scattered around my bedroom. A few days later one of [my parents] said in passing, “So, you think you might be gay?” and I said, “Yes.”

quoted from “Queer: Five Letters” by Kat Wilson in the anthology The Full Spectrum: a new generation of writing about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and other identities edited by David Levithan and Billy Merrell

The Most Famous Song Moldova Ever Produced

"[T]he minibus blasted a song I heard in every Eastern European country in 2004: O-Zone's tune 'Dragostea din tei,' which most of the world knows as 'Numa Numa.' It hit number one on the charts throughout Europe and was number three in the UK. YouTube amateur lip-synching video versions of the song have gotten over one billion views. ... Eastern Europeans consistently told me that they were a Romanian pop group. However, they originated out of Moldova. Sadly, Moldova rarely gets credit for the most famous song it ever produced."

source of quote: The Hidden Europe: what Eastern Europeans can teach us by Francis Tapon

That's the nice thing about the internet, it can provide the audio-visual dimension to what otherwise is flat text.

As long as I'm posting one goofy overplayed pop song, why not one more? Kent and I finally caught up with "Gangnam Style" by PSY, the most popular South Korean pop song ever:



Oh, why stop with two? Let's go on to Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe." Could it be the most popular Canadian pop song ever? We'll see.

giant artificial manhood

“The women are voluptuous and curvy, with enormous strap-on dildos that look like authentic if colossally oversized penises. The site is full of scenes of attractive, busty women stroking their giant artificial manhood until geysers of fake semen spray across the room.”

quoted from A Billion Wicked Thoughts: what the world’s largest experiment reveals about human desire by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

Ogas and Gaddam are describing a website devoted to futanari porn. It's big in Japan, it seems.

Puts me in mind of Steely Dan III in Burroughs' Naked Lunch - "Mary is strapping on a rubber penis. 'Steely Dan III from Yokohama,' she says, caressing the shaft. Milk spurts across the room."

I've posted about Steely Dan before.

"almost anything homosexual"

“During the 1992 Tokyo Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, an estimated 80 percent of the audience were straight women who wanted to watch men have sex. As journalist Richard McGregor writes, ‘In Japan, almost anything homosexual can attract an all-female audience.’ … [W]henever a Japanese animated television series or male-targeted manga series becomes extremely popular, the producers almost always issue a boy-love version, where the male characters have sex with each other. ‘It’s widely understood that the audience for these boy-love stories is women.’”

quoted from A Billion Wicked Thoughts: what the world’s largest experiment reveals about human desire by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

fathered by a man other than

“In an analysis of about twenty-four thousand children across nine mostly Anglo-Saxon countries, about 3 percent were found to have been fathered by a man other than the presumed father. That means that about one out of thirty men was unknowingly raising someone else’s child …”

quoted from A Billion Wicked Thoughts: what the world’s largest experiment reveals about human desire by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

Six generations back every one of us has 32 great grandfathers. If you draw your family tree past the sixth generation, chances are you’re beginning to or already are running down the pasts of men not related to you.

Does this statistic include the artificial inseminations? I guess sperm banks don’t go far back. But there’s always been adoption. And it’s not always been something people have talked about.

straight but not thick – or long

“The average length of the gay penis is 6.32 inches. The average length of the straight penis is 5.99 inches. … When it comes to the prime organ of masculinity, [gay men] have been endowed with nearly an extra half inch.”

Authors Ogas and Gaddam even speculate that the fayest of the gays have the meatiest of the cocks. A study waiting to be undertaken?

From the notes in the back of the book: “Gay men are thicker too: straights have a penis circumference of 4.80 inches, while gay men have 4.95 inches.”

source: A Billion Wicked Thoughts: what the world’s largest experiment reveals about human desire by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

40% chance

“According to recent DNA analysis, through the history of the human race about 80 percent of the women reproduced, but only 40 percent of men reproduced.”

quoted from A Billion Wicked Thoughts: what the world’s largest experiment reveals about human desire by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

I remember a primate researcher saying that human sexual dimorphism (in regard to the relative sizes of men and women) is consistent with our being the descendants of families of one father and two mothers. In a species that is primarily monogamous the males and females are much the same size and weight. Gibbons, an example. On the other extreme would be gorillas – big big male, several much smaller females.

the single most popular

“[W]hat is the single most popular search term users enter into the PornHub search engine?

“Mom”

quoted from A Billion Wicked Thoughts: what the world’s largest experiment reveals about human desire by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

Glenn Ingersoll in silhouette at 2012 Berkeley Poetry Festival

This was in May of this year. The sound is fairly good. Crank it up!

update: When I first watched this I couldn't see my face, but it looks like the contrast has been improved quite a bit. Thanks, litseen!

More Berkeley Poetry Festivals vids at the litseen youtube channel.

How’s your cultural literacy?

Delving my pile of reading one night I passed from Heaney to Meeker:

from “In the Attic” by Seamus Heaney

Like Jim Hawkins aloft in the crosstrees
Of Hispaniola, nothing underneath him
But still green water and clean bottom sand,

The ship aground, the canted mast far out
Above a seafloor where striped fish pass in shoals –
And when they’ve passed, the face of Israel Hands

That rose in the shrouds before Jim shot him dead
Appears to rise again … “But he was dead enough,”
the story says, “being both shot and drowned.”

source: The New Yorker February 9 & 16, 2009

The dunes rose steeply at the back of the cottage with their endless waves of white sand; the paths twisted and climbed through the stunted sprawling pines, half buried in sand – pines that could be climbed, and that, if you sort of squinted your eyes, became very like the crow’s nest of a sailing ship such as the one Jim Hawkins had sailed on. He could imagine his tormenters, in gay pirate costumes (but none so gay as his), toppling one after the other into the sea after some particularly deadly encounter with his trusty blade.

source: Better Angel a novel by Richard Meeker

The Meeker novel was originally published in 1933. I was reading an Alyson Publications paperback reissue. According to the introduction “Better Angel is possibly the first novel published in America to show male homosexuality in a positive light …” The excerpt above is from when the hero was a boy.

I didn’t remember who Jim Hawkins was until I got to the second passage. Oh yeah. Him.

Sambo unexpectedly in the pile of reading

When I was a kid for a treat my mother would take our family to Sambo’s, a diner not unlike Lyon’s or Denny’s. I remember the art on the walls, menus, and placemats told the Sambo story, not quite so I understood it, but colorfully enough that I was fascinated by particular scenes – the boy in the turban, the tigers. At some point I heard the Sambo story was considered racist. Why? The boy seemed clever and resourceful and won out over scary tigers. Was it mainly the illustrations in the original storybook, The Story of Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman, that created the problem? Bannerman was British and may have intended the story to be about dark-skinned South Asians; tigers live in Indian, not Africa, after all. David Pilgrim in an essay about “The Picaninny Caricature” says Bannerman’s Sambo “is very dark, has a broad nose, and the stereotypical exaggerated red lips and rolling eyes found in black caricatures,” which he sees as a clearly African rather than South Asian lampoon. Besides the illustrations, the names Bannerman chose for her characters suggest racist stereotypes. “At the time that the book was originally published Sambo was an established anti-black epithet, a generic degrading reference.” And there’s nothing flattering about Sambo’s parents’ names – Mumbo and Jumbo.

Pilgrim doesn’t think Helen Bannerman meant to be malicious. But her work was much pirated and imitated – and itself subject to lampoon and caricature – and non-Bannerman versions took the Sambo story into clearly ugly territory, reinforcing hateful attitudes about African Americans. Says David Pilgrim, “By the 1960s the book was seen as a remnant of a racist past.”

The Sambo’s restaurant chain is no more. At its height in the 70s, according to Wikipedia, there were 1200 Sambo’s restaurants. Controversy over the name as well as some sort of “corporate level decisions … led to Sambo's … demise.” The first Sambo’s still exists in Santa Barbara, California.

Sambo popped his head up one night recently. I was reading a little of this and a little of that, as I do. In his book on the Moon’s origins, The Big Splat, Dana Mackenzie says back in the early days of the solar system the Moon and the Earth orbited quite close to each other, they spun a lot quicker, and they hadn’t yet cooled into hard globes. They were, in other words, “whirling around each other like the tigers in an Indian folktale who chased each other around a tree until they melted into butter.” Oh, I said to myself, Mackenzie’s talking about the Sambo story.

In Ellen Conroy Kennedy’s The Negritude Poets the Sambo story comes up in a very different context. Kennedy says two women were getting to know each other “at the Dakar Festival, in April 1966.” Both women were American. One woman had a son, “a beautiful child of about five or six, [who] had been playing tiger, and growling, ‘Watch out! Watch out! I’m going to eat you up!’ [The white woman said] in surprise, ‘Hey, that’s what the tiger said to Sambo! And he said, “Oh, please, Mister Tiger, don’t eat me up, and I’ll give you my fine green umbrella! …”’ [ellipsis in original] Suddenly the boy’s mother, who was black, turned on the other woman and gave her a furious tongue-lashing. Hearing the word ‘Sambo,’ she thought the stranger had meant to insult her child.” The white woman, shocked at this reaction, reports the incident to her friend, the poet Edouart J. Maunick. “[S]he burst into uncontrollable sobs trying to explain what had happened. Maunick was much moved.”

Edouard Maunick wrote a poem in response, “Letter to Ellen Conroy Kennedy.” Yes, the white woman was the editor/translator herself. Maunick offers solace and a philosophical shake of the head at the legacy of painful words. “The byword is despair / sign and symbol of / a terrible divide / the war of words / the war of roots and branches / lies heavy in a stranger’s mouth / despite her uncontrary mind …”

a found poem by Kent Mannis

can a profit business
use voluntaries
people from a non profit organization
for a set price
for each voluntaries,
in other word a profit business
for stadium stand
using voluntaries people thought
a non profit organization
an classify them
as non employees.

….

No, Kent did not write the above. He works for an internet company that provides employment law compliance information to employers. So he gets questions, some straightforward (“Do I have to pay my employees overtime on a federal holiday?”), some less so … The one above – Kent broke it into lines – has, as one of Kent’s colleagues said, “a certain beauty.”

Even if I didn’t hear stories nearly every day from Kent about this or that employment law topic he’s had to confront, I think I’d find this one funny. It has that flavor of language that ought to resolve into meaning, that you feel is surely about to, that if you only held it on your tongue a bit longer you’d be able to name, and yet …

a senryu by Kent Mannis

bumper to bumper
rolling a joint on College
such concentration

word of the day: plantigrade

[S]aid Snuffer gruffly, “but let me tell you one thing, never cross a bear. A crossed bear is a cross bear and beware of him.” Paying no attention to the mirth of the outlaws, Snuffer went calmly on with his recital. “I am as you have probably noticed, a plantigrade, carnivorous animal, though I much prefer fruit, vegetables, fish and honey.”

definition: walking on the whole sole of the foot, as humans, and bears.

source: Ojo in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson

I am reading through Ruth Plumly Thompson’s contributions to the Oz series for the first time in chronological order. On the whole I’m enjoying the experience. In Ojo in Oz Thompson gives Ojo his biggest role since his first appearance in Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz.

Notes toward an autobiography by others, part 11

Reading Daniel Allex Cox’s Shuck, a novel about a rentboy in New York City who wants to be a writer, I came across a couple quotes that read like I could’ve said them:

“I spent hours in Barnes and Noble, nosing out which magazines felt empty without my writing.”

“I’m doing my best to stay positive, but I have to tell you that trying to get published … feels like buying raffle tickets for a prize that’s already been given out by a church that’s already burned down.”

I used to flip through piles of literary magazines in the bookstore trying to figure out which wanted me. Editors often complain that the poetry they receive is nothing like anything they’ve published before, thus surely the poet has not read an issue of their magazine. If they got an amazing poem that was nothing like anything they’d published before it would be an automatic discard? Because what you want to publish is what you’ve already published?

I give editors the benefit of the doubt – maybe what they really mean is they get a lot of poetry they can’t stand and if the poets would only read their amazing magazine the poets would know not to send them that crap! Yeah? What this means is you send them poems that sound as much like what they’ve published as you can find in your oeuvre … or you send them what you’ve got that’s ready and hope they find a place for that amazing poem that isn’t exactly what they’ve already published. Usually I fail to meet their needs. Which are mysterious, anyway.

As to the second quote, that there is no prize, not really. It’s all smoking ruins. Well. I don’t know. When a poem does land somewhere, it’s sweet. It’s ephemeral. Does anybody read it? The rewards of publication don’t quite match the effort. I’m not compiling a resume, don’t intend to teach, so have no need to publish to get and keep my professorship. Part of what tempts me about self-publication is the feedback. If you sell a copy you know right away. If you give a copy away you know who you handed it to or you write the letter to the stranger you admire and include your book and hope they read it. If there’s any response at all you don’t have to rely on some far off publisher to let you know.

Sadly, I am no better at being a publisher than I am at battering down the doors of the magazines. I did a couple chapbooks fifteen or twenty years ago and sold them to friends and co-workers. Haven’t tried that in ages, though.

My poetry career creeps along. But I continue to write. And I continue to find value in my writing. And there the rewards are.

Last few years I’ve only managed to get work out a few times. I sent to two places this month. One has rejected me. The other always takes a long time to reply.