phrase of the day: politically correct

I first encountered the phrase “politically correct” (and “politically incorrect”) when I began to socialize with lesbians. Back in the mid-80s I took classes at Santa Rosa Junior College, and I joined the Gay & Lesbian Student Union (GLSU). I was lonely and fragile, desperate for community, but fired with a sense of justice and eager to do something to help people escape from oppression, evangelical, you might say. I had an idea that I proposed to a meeting. Gay visibility was an important part of acceptance; that seemed logical. If you see gay people and topics just as a regular part of your environment, the foreignness goes away, and the fear. How about a poster series? I asked, offering a few design ideas. I got dressed down by a lesbian for my first design idea which read as sexist to her. I was being un-PC. 

Although I was hurt by the criticism, I think the concept of political-correct-ness is useful. It gives one tools of analysis. What is or is not politically correct?

In a history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, Lillian Faderman introduces the subject:

The women’s [music] festivals … always had political overtones. Workshops were held that attempted to raise and solve lesbian-feminist problems; movement literature and paraphernalia were widely available; and the organizers attempted to be sensitive to all the issues: they provided day care, easy access for the disabled, vegetarian meals, sign interpreters for the deaf, ‘chemical free’ areas for women who disapproved of substance use, sliding scale fees so that the poor would not be excluded. Nothing was allowed at the festivals that was not ‘politically correct,’ a label that was to become a benchmark of all judgments in the community, even judgments passed on lesbian-feminist entertainers.

Those musical artists who got on stage and acted coolly professional, “too much like stars,” were seen as on an “‘essentially male performing trip.’ To be in any way like a male professional was to be politically incorrect.”

The politically correct ideal was utopian. Sooner or later utopias fail their own principles, disillusionment sets in, people fight, things fall apart. Olivia Records tried to run their business in a politically correct fashion, but somebody was always ready to be offended. “When Olivia sponsored women-only events, they were attacked by some for excluding male children; when they opened their concerts to everyone, they were attacked for offending lesbian separatists. [Said one of the founders,] ‘We couldn’t win.’”

Lilian Faderman continues, “[Such] hard lessons … were repeated often in the lesbian-feminist community and caused a blurring of the community’s utopian vision.”

Faderman expands on the pernicious effects of policing of political-correct-ness:

[T]he desire for a Lesbian Nation was founded on so intense an idealism and required such heroic measures that fanaticism became all but inevitable. … [D]espite the movement rhetoric about love for all women, those who, by some infraction of the code, were judged ‘politically incorrect’ were given cold treatment by the community. Being politically correct (‘p. c.’) mean that one adhered to the various dogmas regarding dress; money; sexual behavior; language usage; class, race, food, and ecology consciousness; political activity; and so forth.

When idealism ossifies into dogma, justice goes out the window along with compassion and harmony. Idealism is good, but, unless your fantasy of how the world should be ordered is more important than the world, best to allow for adjustments and compromises, in action if not principle. 

In my poster series example above, I should have been more accommodating. But I was pursuing a vision, man! Plus I knew I’d be doing all the work … 

source:

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: a history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America

by Lillian Faderman

1991. Penguin, New York

when the poor are rich and the rich are poor

I’ve written some posts on religion lately. One on faith, one on the fruitlessness of arguing about religion, one on science and God. Now we move over to intraparty fights. A priest and a torturer are both Christians, and they each have a reading of scripture. Who’s right? Alberto Manguel takes us to the scene: 

In 1967, when I was in my fifth year of high school, a military coup took place in Argentina … What followed was a wave of human-rights abuses such as the country had never seen … Among the thousands kidnapped and tortured was a priest, Father Orland Virgilio Yorio. One day, Father Yorio’s interrogator told him that his reading of the Gospel was false. ‘You interpreted Christ’s doctrine in too literal a way,’ said the man. ‘Christ spoke of the poor , but when he spoke of the poor he spoke of the poor in spirit and you interpreted this in a literal way and went to live, literally, with poor people. In Argentina those who are poor in spirit are the rich and in the future you must spend your time helping the rich, who are those really in need of spiritual help.’

Before encountering the torturer’s gloss, I’d heard it before from American evangelicals, the sort of people who surround the rich and uncaring Donald Trump in the oval office and lay their approving hands on him. Is Donald Trump a Christian? He is if he says he is. Has he ever said he is? 

source:

A History of Reading

by Alberto Manguel

1996. Penguin Books, New York

word of the day: twink

In my 2013 word of the day post for “twinky” I said the book I was reading at the time provided the first instance I’d read of “twink” being used in a non-gay context. Not true; I’d forgotten Naked Came the Manatee:

Joe Sereno caught the Odyssey night clerk as he was going off: prissy guy, had his lunch box under his arm. … Joe said, … ‘You hear the shots? You must’ve.’ 

‘I was in the office,’ the night guy said.

Joe wondered how this twink knew he was in the office at the exact time the shots were fired.

Naked Came the Manatee is a round robin or serial novel. A different author writes each chapter. It originally appeared in The Miami Herald Tropic in 1995, and was later collected as a paperback from Fawcett. My “twink” excerpt comes from the Elmore Leonard chapter. Leonard uses the word clumsily, referring to the motel’s “night guy” as “prissy,” saying he “rolled his eyes,” “had different poses,” “walked with his knees together.” It comes across pejoratively rather than affectionately (or leeringingly), as though Leonard were just switching out a non-PC word like “faggot” but was still relying on the old stereotypes. 

Maybe that’s why I didn’t think of it as the first time I’d come across “twink” in a non-gay context. Leonard doesn’t use it the way a gay person would. Twinks are sexy, not prissy. In the 2013 DIR post I quoted a straight author comparing the twinks of the Twilight series to “naked girl vampires and sexually depraved demons” created for the gratification of straight men. That gets it right.  

In a 2018 essay self-proclaimed twink Connor Franta says the word has gotten popular among the straights: “The word popped up on recent episodes of mainstream shows like Veep and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”

source:

Naked Came the Manatee

a novel by Carl Hiaasen, Paul Levine, Dave Barry, Brian Antoni, Elmore Leonard, Tananarive Due, Edna Buchanan, John Dufresne, James W. Hall, Vicki Hendricks, Les Standiford, Carolina Hospital, Evelyn Mayerson

1995/1998. Fawcett Books / Random House, New York

“thinking about other things”

In an essay in Poetry Matthew Bevis says:

[John] Ashbery once suggested that his poetry would be doing its job only if its audience was intermittently aware of it while thinking about other things at the same time.

Ashbery has certainly designed his poems to be hard to follow, impossible to follow, actually, that being one of his goals. Ashbery loves the slippery pronoun, especially “it.” To what is a particular “it” referring? It’s often impossible to know!

I’ve written poems, inspired by Ashbery among many another, that meander around, going in and out of narrative, go in and out of sense. I’ve even stood up before an audience at a reading and let them know that, as far as I’m concerned, it’s okay if their minds wander. “Tune in and out. You will still hear interesting things.”

source:

“In Search of Distraction”

by Matthew Bevis

Poetry

edited by Don Share

November 2017, vol. 211 no. 2

Chicago, IL

A dozen Dorothys

It’s 1970. Lesbians are just beginning to distinguish themselves as lesbians within the women’s rights movement. Judy Grahn writes about standing up to authority: 

[A] group of us attended a lecture by a well-known, thoroughly published psychiatrist, an ‘expert’ in female homosexuality. From the audience, we questioned him, what was his authority based in? What real reasons did he have for pathologizing our lives? For emphasis, we stood up, scattered throughout the audience. There were at least a dozen of us, perhaps more. We didn’t yell or threaten, just stood. At our standing up, declaring our sanity to him, he gathered his papers and fled the room. We felt like Dorothy discovering the Wizard as a tiny man behind a curtain of false authority.

The emperor has no curtain. 

source:

A Simple Revolution: the making of an activist poet

by Judy Grahn
2012. Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco CA

#feminism

Adrienne Rich is trying to pursue ambitions other than motherhood. She realizes that continuing to have children will foreclose everything else. 

Before my third child was born I decided to have no more children, to be sterilized. … My husband, although he supported my decision, asked whether I was sure it would not leave me feeling less ‘feminine.’ In order to have the operation at all, I had to present a letter, counter-signed by my husband, assuring the committee of physicians who approved such operations that I had already produced three children, and stating my reason for having no more. … [M]y own judgment would not have been acceptable. When I awoke from the operation, twenty-four hours after my child’s birth, a young nurse looked at my chart and remarked coldly: ‘Had yourself spayed, did you?’

WTF.

source:

Of Woman Born: motherhood as experience and institution

by Adrienne Rich

1976. W. W. Norton & Co., New York

it’s nice to have a force field

John S. Lewis was so concerned about the threat from the skies that he wrote a book about it. Not nuclear weapons, no, the big threat, the threat of the Earth getting hit by a giant meteor. We all know about the one that took out the dinosaurs, right? But that only happens every several millions years. Though it’s probably kind of random. In any case, the Earth — or, rather, the Earth’s atmosphere — is being smacked into by pretty good-sized rocks on a regular basis. The atom bomb that decimated Hiroshima was 15 kilotons; Nagasaki was 20. If a meteor hit the surface of the planet with that force, it would be intense. 

The Defense Support Program (DSP-647) satellites, which operate in geosynchronous orbit thirty-five thousand kilometers above the equator, carry infrared telescopes with sensitive imaging detectors designed to detect and track the heat from the engines of military ballistic missiles. … DSP satellites find that there are about a dozen ten- to twenty-kiloton explosions in the atmosphere per year … Between 1975 and 1992, the DSP system observed 136 large fireball entries [i.e., meteors], not one of which reached the surface of Earth intact. … 

[A]nother American program for monitoring nuclear weapons tests has deployed ultrasensitive air-pressure sensors called microbarographs on the roofs of numerous American embassies and consulates around the world to detect the pressure waves of nuclear explosions. … [T]his network observed a major event on August 3, 1963, over the ocean between South Africa and Antarctica. This explosion, which reportedly had a yield of at least five hundred kilotons of TNT, was initially misidentified as a secret nuclear weapons test by South Africa or Israel; however, no radioactivity was deteced after the blast, and the nuclear explanation is clearly wrong.

And you thought atmospheres were just good for breathing — turns out one makes a damn good force field. 

source:

Rain of Iron and Ice: the very real threat of comet and asteroid bombardment

by John S. Lewis

1996. Helix Books / Perseus Publishing

word of the day: ropable

word: ropable

context:

PC [Farias, the political campaign treasurer of Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Mello] called himself the president’s best friend. Sometimes, after a few bottles of French champagne in the evening, he said, I give Fernando his orders. This got into the papers and Fernando was ropable. For the first and last time he threatened to break with PC.

definition (Merriam-Webster): in a bad temper

source:

A Death in Brazil: a book of omissions

by Peter Robb

2004. A John McRae Book / Henry Holt & Co., New York

word of the day: inanition

word: inanition

context:

Brazil[’s] consultate in Naples … occupied a vast and gloomy suite with high ceilings and the finest veil of dust in a distinguished Umbertine palazzo two blocks in from the Bay of Naples. … A hundred years earlier, hundreds of thousands of southern Italian peasants had sailed steerage for Brazil from Naples. Now a third of Brazilians were of Italian descent, and some of the richest among them. The rich came to Italy to spend and poor Brazilians, if they could, would come to Italy to make their fortune. … The Naples consulate was dying of inanition.

definition (Merriam-Webster): emptiness; exhaustion; the absence or loss of social, moral, or intellectual vitality or vigor

source:

A Death in Brazil: a book of omissions

by Peter Robb

2004. A John McRae Book / Henry Holt & Co., New York

“a strange sort of sparring”

Ben Fong Torres had a paper route in Oakland in the 60s. His experience and mine were similar. I like his little collecting for the bill scene. 

After school, Barry and I worked together delivering the Oakland Tribune around the neighborhood. …  

[O]nce a month … we had to collect. Most of the subscribers paid promptly, but there were always procrastinators and a few who played hide-and-seek with our $3.50 a month, of which I would get fifty cents.  

With them, it was a strange sort of sparring; a kid, not yet a teenager, trying to get a grownup to pay for a month of papers they’d had delivered to their front steps daily. 

‘I don’t have it.’ 

‘Oh.’ A downward look. ‘Tomorrow?’ 

‘How about Friday?’ 

‘Think you could have it Wednesday? I need to pay up.’ 

‘All right.’ Reluctantly. ‘We’ll see.’ 

That meant they wouldn’t even be home Wednesday. … 

For all the grief, there was nothing like counting up the month’s take — before the Tribune got its majority share.

I don’t remember how much the monthly subscription fee for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat was. But $3.50 doesn’t sound far off the mark. And I was a paper carrier this and that side of 1980. Huh. Was The Press Democrat so much cheaper than the Trib? Or were all newspapers still that low cost? 

I do remember covering the dining table with cash at the end of the month. It sure looked like a lot of money! 

Like Ben, my brother and I shared a paper route. Eventually it was officially divided between us. We didn’t deliver from bikes. We walked our routes after school. I kept working my route after David quit his.

Mostly customers were nice — I got some great tips at Christmas. At least, they seemed huge to me. $2! $3! 

Yes, there were a few who would tell me to come back another time. I’m sure I was making well under minimum wage. I don’t remember what arrangement there was for the deadbeats. I think at first we were on the hook, but maybe our mother protested? 

source: The Rice Room: growing up Chinese in America, from number two son to rock ’n’ roll

by Ben Fong Torres

1994. Hyperion, New York

“the Elder Brother of the Earth coincided with the sign of the Dog”

In one of the appendices of the Penguin edition of the 10th century Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon editor/translator Ivan Morris limns how the Japanese of the time kept their calendar. It seems the “day was divided into twelve watches … Time was specified by the Zodiacal signs. The watch of the Horse, for instance, started at noon …” Morris is able to tell us pretty precisely when a late winter pile of snow disappointed Sei Shonagon:

The fourth quarter of the watch of the Tiger on the fifteenth day of the Sprouting (First) Month in the Fourth Year of the Chotoku year-period, in which the Elder Brother of the Earth coincided with the sign of the Dog, corresponded to about 6 a.m. on 15 February A.D. 998. And it was at this moment in history that a maid announced to Sei Shonagon … that her precious snow mountain had disappeared.

If that were your mundane way of telling time, it wouldn’t be of note, would it? But isolated like that it reads like poetry.

source: The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon

translated and edited by Ivan Morris

1967. Penguin Books, New York

“An accomplishment in a teacup”

John Oliver Simon wrote a book dealing with his daddy issues. We all have them! In Neither of Us Can Break the Other’s Hold John includes letters from his father. Dad isn’t in favor of the poetry thing. He wants his son to have a better life than that. Dad wants John to be ambitious, materially, at least. That’s what success is, right? 

When I was a teen and into my early 20s I was Depressed. I remember visiting my mother’s old friends, Jean and Lee. Lee was trying to figure me out. I said something about just wanting to be happy. Exasperated by this response, Lee said, “Any skid row bum can be happy!” They can? You mean, the key to happiness is to be a skid row bum? I couldn’t imagine that being the way to happiness, and suggesting that happiness was something anybody could get easily, even when they were barely getting by, seemed … contrary to my experience.

What does make a life? What makes a life worth living? In this excerpt from one of the letters, John’s father seems to have a Lee-like attitude toward happiness. It’s not enough! 

Your mother once said she’d be satisfied if you became a truck driver or any other sort of blue collar man, so long as you were happy, at peace with yourself. But I couldn’t agree then, or now. You have taken steps upward over me — Phi Beta Kappa, an athlete’s letter in college. And I gather you have some standing among the poetry followers of the Bay Area. Good.

But that reminds me unhappily of Rena Eisenkramer. Rena was a housewife in Pine Bluff, a friend and contemporary of my mother’s. But she was beset by the devils of ambition beyond her capacities. She wanted to be a song-writer — popular songs rhyming moon and June. Nobody would publish her songs so she got printed by a vanity publisher and the ladies of the Jewish congregation of Pine Bluff ooh’d and ah’d over her songs very politely. She persuaded my father, then owner of the town’s major movie house with occasional live acts, to persuade a singer … to sing her songs in public, and the local paper had a story about Mrs. Eisenkramer’s prowess as a song-writer. An accomplishment in a teacup.

The story about Rena Eisenkramer is clearly meant as a cautionary tale — the moral of the story is not to … what? Not to do everything you can think of to honor your commitment to your art, certainly not if that means paying for the printing of it yourself or calling in favors from the local theater owner and the town weekly? In the face of rejection from the establishment industry you should just nod and accept their wise judgment? Yeah, that’s the idea. Letting your ambitions exceed your capabilities is crazy! You should leave music to the professionals. You should leave painting and dancing and poetry to the professionals — people who know how to do it, people who know how it’s really to be done. Which is … ?

source: Neither of Us Can Break the Other’s Hold: poems for my father

by John Oliver Simon

1981. Shameless Hussy Press, Berkeley CA

word of the day: embrangle

word: embrangle

context:

[Benjamin] Franklin emerged from the crisis to find himself embrangled in another.

definition (per Merriam-Webster): embroil

definition of brangle (M-W): squabble, wrangle

Benjamin Franklin is in France during the American Revolutionary War. Lots of issues he has to deal with. During the time author Stacy Schiff is writing about, Franklin has been dealing with a shipment of supplies that was supposed to go to America, but has been repeatedly delayed. No sooner does the ship set sail than he has to deal with John Adams, Adams having come to France to run his own American diplomacy, a situation ripe for confusion, especially in the middle of a war. 

source: A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the birth of America

by Stacy Schiff

2005. Owl Books / Henry Holt & Co., New York

Dorothy Gale

The Nonbinary Review devotes each issue to an existing work. The poems and stories in the issue are in tribute to the chosen work. In the issue devoted to The Wizard of Oz, the prose poem, “Dorothy Gale” by Lorraine Schein, has as epigraph a snippet from a May 27, 2013 New York Times article, which claims that L. Frank Baum took the name for his protagonist from a news report about a real Kansas tornado. Says the New York Times (as quoted by Schein): “The name of one of the victims, who had been found buried face down in a mud puddle, was Dorothy Gale.”

In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy is not given a last name. She only reveals a last name in a sequel. Before Baum wrote any sequels, he adapted the story for the stage. It is in the playscript that she is introduced as Dorothy Gale, “of the Kansas Gales.”

Wikipedia: “The last name of Gale was originally mentioned in Baum's script for the 1902 Broadway stage version of The Wizard of Oz, in which it was originally a setup for a punning joke. (DOROTHY: ‘I am Dorothy, and I am one of the Kansas Gales.’ SCARECROW: ‘That accounts for your breezy manner.’)”

Baum had collaborators for the playscript and it went through many revisions. Gale might not even have originated with Baum. Baum, however, did have a niece named Dorothy Gage, who died a baby. Gage and Gale are pretty close, so it wouldn’t have been a stretch for one to lead to the other. 

The Wikipedia article mentions the New York Times, but attributes the naming claim to Lee Sandlin. If you hunt up the NYT article, you find Michael Pollak writing a review of Lee Sandlin’s book, Storm Kings: the untold history of America’s first tornado chasers. 

There was the double tornado that cut through Irving, Kan., in May 1879. Sgt. John P. Finley of the Army Signal Corps, who would push himself to a nervous breakdown by 1882 while recording Midwestern tornadoes, made his first detailed field report on the Irving destruction; it serves as the endpapers of Mr. Sandlin’s book. Two decades later, he writes, a struggling entrepreneur named Lyman Baum, who was working on a children’s book, came upon a grim detail in a newspaper account of the Irving disaster: ‘The name of one of the victims, who had been found buried face down in a mud puddle, was Dorothy Gale’ — a name the author, writing as L. Frank Baum, would soon immortalize in ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.’

 

I don’t recall any other source offering up this origin for Dorothy’s last name. But Baum was a newspaperman before he was a novelist; he published a weekly in South Dakota in 1890, so it’s not outlandish to think he could come across John Finley’s account. Tornado, Kansas, Dorothy Gale. Quite a coincidence, if not. 

source: Nonbinary Review: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

alphanumeric number three, 2016

edited by Allie Marini and Lise Quintana

Zoetic Press, Santa Cruz CA

phrase of the day: as much good as giving a corpse an enema

phrase: does as much good as giving a corpse an enema

context:

’I’ve helped, and I still help, Jews to come to America. … The things we Jews have to do — rather than curse Hitler, which does as much good as giving a corpse an enema —is to bring over all those we can. Not everyone wants to come here. There are such fools who still think Hitler is bluffing.’

This is from a conversation taking place in New York City before Germany invades Poland. 

The phrase immediately reminded me of one I blogged about before: Zee helft ihm vee toyten. That phrase was about “cupping” a corpse, which is another medicinal intervention on a corpse, also pointless because corpse. 

I suppose the therapy in the phrase could easily be switched with any other. 

Does as much good as an appendectomy on a corpse! Does as much good as acupuncture on a corpse! Does as much good as a penile implant on a corpse!

source: Lost in America

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

paintings and drawings by Raphael Soyer

1981. Doubleday & Co. Inc., Garden City, New York

do you dream in black & white?

I remember as a kid people talking about dreaming in black & white. I thought that was crazy. Black and white didn’t exist until photography came along, then movies and TV. How could the mind have evolved to dream in black and white? Do I remember the colors of things in my dreams? Not exactly. But I sure would remember the weirdness of their being in black and white. In a New Yorker article about dreams Margaret Talbot quotes “a philosopher at the University of California, Riverside”:

[Eric] Schwitzgebel’s team speculated that … ‘dreams may be neither colored nor black and white, leaving the colors of most of their objects unspecified, as novels do. Perhaps it takes time and energy to fill in all the colors in a richly detailed scene, with the result that most of our dream imagery is fairly sketchy, even if that sketchiness is not recognized by the dreamer.’

This sounds right to me. Dreams are sketchy — we’re constantly having to interpret them as they are happening. I don’t mean sussing out the symbolism, I mean deciding that you’re in a classroom even though it looks like a meadow, or that that’s your brother giving you advice even though he’s taller than your brother, older, darker-skinned, and balancing on a spinning globe.

source: 
“Nightmare Scenario: can we learn to rewrite our bad dreams?”

by Margaret Talbot

The New Yorker, November 16, 2009, v. 85 n. 37

word of the day: pope’s nose

context:

Miss Amelia … attended to a few details in the kitchen and entered the cafe with the pope’s nose of a hen between her fingers, as that was her favorite piece.

definition for pope’s nose:

the part of a bird that corresponds to the tail of a mammal and forms a broad flattened lobe bearing the tail feathers and usually a dorsal uropygial gland

per Merriam-Webster

I’ve never heard the tail of a chicken being called a “pope’s nose.” When I came across this passage I went, “The what?” I wasn’t even sure what the elements were — was it “the pope’s nose,” or the “pope’s nose of a hen”? Apparently it’s also known as the parson’s nose and the sultan’s nose. 

My husband Kent is familiar with the term. I didn’t ask if it was coveted at his family's table, as it supposedly is in Britain. 

source: The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and other stories

by Carson McCullers

1951/1969. Bantam Books, New York

David Trinidad dishes on my teachers

I had three poet-teachers at UC Berkeley back in the early 90s: Robert Hass, Lyn Hejinian, and John Ash. David Trinidad in his Notes on a Past Life works through a lot of grief and resentment over his life in New York City. He names names and exposes his feelings: sometimes overwhelmed, sometimes jealous, wounded, hopeful, shy, ambitious, proud. Among the names who get unfriendly mentions are two of my Cal teachers. 

From “Lost Illusions”:

“John Ash (who Tim [Dlugos] detests),

… is so plastered

he falls out of his chair

onto the floor, spilling his drink

on himself. Unfazed, he keeps

talking, cigarette hand 

waving in my direction.”

From “Susan takes me to the Academy of American Poets”:

“I remember it as a series

of flashes, each more grim

than the last. …

… John Ash. I smile

expecting recognition (we’ve

met on several occasions),

but he just glowers at me.”

John Ash was the visiting Holloway Lecturer in 1993 when I was a student at Cal. Do I remember him drinking? I guess I do. We had a class get-together off campus and I do remember John getting rather sloshed. He was hardly the only drinker I knew. I enjoyed having him as a teacher. I loved his poetry, and, as a young gay man, it was pretty cool having a gay poet as a mentor.

In researching this blog post I discovered that John Ash died in December. Oh! Six months ago. That set me back. 

From “Joe”:

“… when Eileen [Myles] was directing

the Poetry Project, she paired me

with Lyn Hejinian (something

perverse there). That was a tough

reading. …

My usually crowd-pleasing Supremes

poem was met with stony indifference.”

Lyn Hejinian was the Holloway Lecturer the year before John Ash. I liked her, too! While I wish I had kept some connection with John, I have managed a friendly, if infrequent, acquaintance with Lyn. It helps that Lyn lives in Berkeley — a mere block away from the Berkeley Public Library’s Claremont Branch, where I work. In my experience Lyn is generous and open, even if she does have definite opinions. I find her work sharp and engaging. I would have been thrilled to attend that Poetry Project reading. 

What can you say?   

source: Notes on a Past Life

by David Trinidad

2016. BlazeVOX Books, Buffalo NY

Oz in poems

I briefly published an Oz fanzine way back in the 80s. It featured a column, “Oz in Unusual Places,” that cataloged mentions of Oz elements in newspapers and books and, well, wherever I came across them. The zine could have been just that, frankly.

When I read the two poems by Stephen Danos in a 2012 issue of Court Green I flagged them with that old column in mind. Both poems use Oz, the MGM Oz anyway. Both “Place No Likelier Than Home” and “Tourist Trap” cast the speaker as a version of Dorothy. 

In “Place” the Dorothy persona sounds doomed: “I get a hernia from lifting the gray ruins off the witch. The tornado cuts my throat …”

In “Tourist Trap” the Dorothy persona is a bit more empowered. Glinda tells her “my task is to do evil     to evildoers.     Raise hell, turn acidic narratives / into musicals fit for family night.”

source: Court Green

#9, 2012 

a literary magazine edited by David Trinidad and Tony Trigilio

Columbia College, Chicago IL

betting on the future

Taking marriage equality to the US Supreme Court was not something many gay rights advocates wanted to do, not until it was a sure thing, or as close to it as they could imagine, with perhaps the majority of the population already having marriage equality via success in individual states. Despite the huge expense and the stress and hate it would stir up, there were many who thought a new ballot measure in California was a better bet, for instance. 

Margaret Talbot reported to that effect in The New Yorker in early 2010:

Plenty of gay-marriage supporters agreed that it was smarter to wait until the movement had been successful in more states — and, possibly, the composition of the Supreme Court had shifted. (During the last year of a second Obama term, Scalia would be eighty-one.)

Talbot says advocates were haunted by the sodomy law decision back in 1986. The upholding of the constitutionality of sodomy laws had impeded legal progress for LGBT equality until it was struck down in 2003, a 17-year span no one thought we could afford to endure. 

Part of the bet involved Scalia. He was old, and, boy, did he look unhealthy. If he dropped dead while Obama was in office, we’d have a 5-4 Democrat-appointed majority. Hallelujah! 

Indeed, come 2018, God looked down and saw the time had come to remove that hateful man from our Supreme Court and provide President Obama the opportunity to bend the arc of history toward justice a little bit more. Sadly, the Devil had the stronger avatar on earth, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to seat Obama’s mild-mannered, uncontroversial pick (a pick who’d been approved by Utah’s Orrin Hatch!). Thus we got two Trump picks. 

Marriage equality did go before the Supreme Court before it was a sure thing — and we won it — in 2015, a too-close 5-4 vote. Scalia still alive and hating. Waiting would have taken us into the Trump era, and likely not worked out well. 

source: “A Risky Proposal: is it too soon to petition the Supreme Court on gay marriage?” 

by Margaret Talbot

The New Yorker, January 18, 2010, vol. 85 no. 45