Third Rail Themes

Reflecting Back

2009-01-06T22:40:00.002-06:00

As I come close to departing for Ghana, I am, as I should be, thinking a lot about what I'm doing. Teaching theater, as a Western theater practicioner, in a West African country, what the hell is that? Why should I be teaching art? I've gone back to a journal entry I wrote a year ago September, an edited version of which I want to have up here.

I just finished Six Feet Under. Yes, all of it. There are about twenty-eight gazillion things I have learned and loved and gained from it, but the one that’s sticking to my ribs at the moment is, Art can do that.

Art has done that. I have cried my eyes out over this show in the last two weeks, I have felt real pain over it, but it’s worth it, beyond worth it. Augusto Boal is wrong, or at least he’s deeply limited. Sometimes we do need catharsis. Sometimes catharsis is not releasing as in letting go and forgetting about something forever, sometimes it is releasing as in opening floodgates, bursting a dam, storming a fortress. Art can do that.

I can do that. I think I have done it, a few times in my life, and I can, and I want to, and I need to. The question is not why, and whatever my political agonizing I think I have always known that. I know why. It would be awesome to be able to explain it someday, but I know it. The question is how, and that is my work, discovering and honing and really using the way or ways in which I can best do that.

I don’t fucking care what “that” is. Again, it would be great if I could explain it one day, but I know it, and people who have been present when good art changed the air in a room, however many others were or were not present (and whether or not it was actually a room), know it. I’m not dismissing the things you can deepen from defining shit you know, but you have got to GOT to fucking know it and know you know it. When I say I need to know what my work is, I need to know it in every sense of the word “work.”

I have exploded out of my chest. We live with mortality, we live in it. Yes, and? Mortals, as a species, as individuals, we have built a world, we are always building it, even when the world we’re building is a damaged one. We still fucking well inhabit it. I’m not sure art is a basic need, not sure it is really your path in the darkness, but it is certainly light.

I am okay with light. I can provide light. If my students teach me anything, it is that no matter what, if you’re still around, you find a path. I want to provide light.

I can provide light. Not revolution, but Six Feet Under isn’t revolution, it’s just fucking good. And there are qualities, but there is also quality. Some things are just fucking good. It happened to move me, as it might not move everyone, but it is good. And it doesn’t turn your world over, it turns into your world, structural ambiguity entirely intended. I can do that. I can’t do it alone, but obviously no one person on that show did it alone either. I want to do that.

God, I want to rip the screen and the sky and go through, and I could. There will be a million steps along the way that will weaken me, but that happens, and right now I want to go to sleep but I could do anything, and I know the things I have chosen to do, and I know why. And I have lived in and shared a fictional world, with fictional people and fictional relationships that just shook down my universe.

And on that note, I am going on hiatus. There may occasionally be a Friday Poetry up here when I feel like it, just to keep you on your toes, but for the most part Third Rail Themes will be down until June, when we will reevaluate its presence and purposes and all that. I'll miss you!

Friday Poetry: Kenneth Koch

2009-01-02T10:53:00.003-06:00

Happy New Year! In a week I'm going on hiatus when I go to Ghana, though I'll try to get a few notes in in the meantime. But here's a poem I like!

Kenneth Koch
Permanently

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up and created the Sentence.

Each Sentence says one thing—for example, "Although it was a dark rainy day when the Adjective walked by, I shall remember the pure and sweet expression on her face until the day I perish from the green, effective earth."
Or, "Will you please close the window, Andrew?"
Or, for example, "Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on the windowsill has changed color recently to a light yellow due to the heat from the boiler factory which exists nearby."

In the sprintime the Sentences and the Nouns lay quietly on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, "And! But!"
But the Adjective did not emerge.

As the Adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose and throat—
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.

Interlude of Awesome

2008-12-30T07:12:00.002-06:00

As we hurtle towards hiatus, eight days from today, I wanted to take a moment to note that my friend is awesome.

Read the profile, and you'll agree!

Friday Poetry: Linda Gregg

2008-12-26T15:44:00.003-06:00

Merry belated Christmas! Chappy continuing Chanukkah! Happy continuing holidays! I'm in Miami now, but have some poetry.

Linda Gregg
Winter Love

I would like to decorate this silence,
but my house grows only cleaner
and more plain. The glass chimes I hung
over the register ring a little
when the heat goes on.
I waited too long to drink my tea.
It was not hot. It was only warm.

City Sidewalks to Tropical Christmas

2008-12-24T08:27:00.002-06:00

I'm going to Miami today to see my entire extended family (and I very nearly mean my *entire* extended family, though not quite). I'll be there until Monday. I scheduled a Friday Poetry 'cause I'm magic, but other than that there will be no postings, not even about the craziness that is Bernard Madoff.

Happy Holidays, everybody!!!!!

Wherein We're Slightly Less Wary

2008-12-23T18:28:00.003-06:00

Hmmm. Melissa Etheridge made friends with Rick Warren.

Huh.

I guess this snap judgement problem is just going to be omnipresent right now. I'm going to remain skeptical of Rick Warren, because I still don't have enough information. But apparently I didn't have enough information the first time I assessed him, either.

Curiouser and curiouser.

(Read the post. Seriously. It intrigues me.)

In Competence We Trust

2008-12-23T15:41:00.000-06:00

The last year of my life has gotten me thinking about competence, in particular the relationships between competence and talent.

I grew up talented. By that, I mean that I was recognized from a very early age as being very good at something I also loved to do, namely writing. Because I loved both the activity and the praise I inevitably received, I continued my work, and turned out to be unusually disciplined in it—I have no idea how that came about, though I'm sure growing up among theater artists must have had something to do with it—which made me interested in learning more about craft, interested in improving. Because I attended a small school where we all knew more about one another than we might necessarily have cared to, my reputation as a writer preceded me, and even when I was an unpopular, devastatingly socially anxious adolescent much more involved in writing the story of her life than living the reality of it, I didn't have the depths of social rejection that some of my friends managed. Of course, I wasn't exactly aware of that at the time, but I wasn't entirely unaware of it either. In a period of my life where I was questioning everything else (okay, that period never actually ended), I never had occasion to question my talent.

I am learning, slowly, about what talent can and cannot do, for myself as well as for others.

We are accustomed, I think, to the notion that talent clusters—in Hollywood, or in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, or the Iowa Writer's Workshop, or wherever the current (and sometimes local) romantic imagination has placed it. To myself I have finally had to admit that hipster neighborhoods like Wicker Park or the East Village of ten years ago, in spite of my voiced and partially felt contempt, still hold a magical allure for me, and it has to do with exactly this over-advertised, romanticized, somewhat obnoxious notion: talented people go here and do this; going here and doing this is how I prove my talent and how I best use it. To be fair, it is kind of true: it is often useful to talented people to be around other talented people. And yet, there are many talented people who do not cluster in these enclaves. And the talented people who do cluster are not necessarily displaying their talents to the best of their abilities, and that is sometimes due to the cluster, to the allure of its social comfort. There are other factors there too, though.

An incredible number of people are talented; there is far more talent than we ever see. This lack of opportunity to see the talent is often due to a lack of competence on the part of the talented.

This is something I have seen over and over, within and without my family. Talent has nothing to do with whether you can live off of your talent (or off of anything else); talent has nothing to do with whether you are capable of sharing your talent with the world in a productive way, or even at all; it has nothing to do with any actions that don't relate to the actual art or science or work at which you are talented.

I am willing to accept the notion that talent clusters to a certain degree, though I also posit that in romanticized artsy neighborhoods the number of poseurs at least equals the number of actual talented people.

What is talent? I guess that's an important question here. And I am not positive I can provide more than a Potter Stewart answer. But the closest I can come in considering it is that talent is what extends beyond the everyday. Talent is what you put into the world with the expectation that it will last beyond yourself in some way; competence is what takes you from day today as yourself (I'm assuming your immediate dependents/loved ones as part of "yourself" here).

There exists, for that matter, a talent at competence, when you can bring that kind of solid ability to bear on the world, which not everybody competent can.

And there exists much more pretense to talent, even as talent sometimes clusters, than actual talent.

Then again, it's rare for us to see competence either. But that's because most of the time it's tremendously difficult to notice.

What does all this mean? I've been working on this post for months and I really haven't found a thesis, beyond the somewhat obvious things I've mentioned above. I don't trust talented people to be anything but talented; perhaps I over time have come to trust the competent more than I trust the talented. But the allure of talent—other people's, never mind my own—isn't gone for me. Which may be why talented idiots, as a matter of general principle, get away with so much.

Parable of Contrition

2008-12-22T15:45:00.000-06:00

About a year and a half ago, visiting family, I met a woman around my age who was dating a wealthy man twenty-five years her senior. She looked to me as if she had a fake tan, she worked as a pharmaceuticals representative, she wore very low-cut and tight clothes and made a lot of margaritas. Though she came across as a nice person, my snap judgment was negative and dismissive. Her values seemed far from mine, and easy to belittle, and I didn't see much else to recommend.

But I got to know this woman over the next year, at first because it was necessary, then because I enjoyed my time with her and wanted to. Before she worked for the pharmaceuticals industry, she got a master's degree in epidemiology, which involved travelling to Thailand, and worked in publicity for a women's health organization, requiring travel all over the country. She is a skilled and financially stable businesswoman in her own right, left the Big Pharma job to start a completely different company of her own soon after we met, and aside from all the practical stuff that clearly demonstrates my brand of snobbiness, she is straightforward, generous, thoughtful, and a really terrific conversationalist.

And the fake tan? Yeah, her father is black.

That's my parable. The wonderful thing about parables is they apply in any number of situations. For example, this one applies in the story I am about to relate.

I recently wrote a post about a conversation I had in April. It was a conversation whose content I was unhappy about, and I was very harsh towards my partner in that conversation. A few days ago she read my blog.

Such is the internet. But she was kind enough to send me a really thoughtful message, saying she agreed with the content of the post if not the tone, all the more so because she's now studying arts education in grad school and developing an ever-clearer sense of what she wants to do, what's important to her. The content of the program I lambasted, along with its description, was given to her by its coordinators with neither guidance nor real freedom, and she was far more frustrated by her circumstances there than I could ever have been by one twenty-minute conversation.

After I responded to her message, hoping to show as much rationality and thoughtfulness as she had, we chatted about arts education and grad school on facebook for a couple of hours, and it became one of the more compelling conversations I've had in the last six months. The kind I hope I can continue having over time.

All this goes to say, I should calm the fuck down on my snap judgements. Not on judgements in general, mind you; I'm still all in favor of those. But I'm in favor of them being rational and considered and, well, right. My judgements should be right, at least. To make them right, I have to have an appropriate amount of information to assess them. And that takes time, and it takes thoroughness. (Something else a good legal system knows that I still hadn't quite figgered out.)

So, in other words, I was wrong. Not in content, but in form. Without knowing the full story, there was no reason to make my attack on the ideas as personal as I made it.

Retracted, and plans for improvement noted here.

Friday Poetry: Elizabeth Alexander

2008-12-19T09:52:00.001-06:00

Speaking of the inauguration, she'll be there too. This is the part I like.

Elizabeth Alexander
Apollo

We pull off
to a road shack
in Massachusetts
to watch men walk

on the moon. We did
the same thing
for three two one
blast off, and now

we watch the same men
bounce in and out
of craters. I want
a Coke and a hamburger.

Because the men
are walking on the moon
which is now irrefutably
not green, not cheese,

not a shiny dime floating
in a cold blue,
the way I'd thought,
the road shack people don't

notice we are a black
family not from there,
the way it mostly goes.
This talking through

static, bounces in space-
boots, tethered
to cords is much
stranger, stranger

even than we are.

Wherein We're Wary of Warren

2008-12-18T23:29:00.003-06:00

Rick Warren will offer a prayer at Obama's inauguration.

This is not okay.

We may have just hit upon the first move by the Obama administration that I really, vociferously object to. To the point that I believe it immoral. I have questions about some of his Cabinet appointments (I'm cautious about Hillary Clinton in a position of power over foreign policy, not necessarily her strong point; I'm not always wild about Arne Duncan's educational choices), but I can write those off to, well, Obama's more of a centrist than I am, I always knew that. And I do understand that he cannot bring Jeremiah Wright to the plate again.

Plus, my friend makes a compelling argument that we should trust Obama to do the whole reaching-out thing that has made him such a unifying figure. It's that style that got an actual intellectual elected to office, after all. (Say that last sentence ten times fast, please.)

But I can't condone, or trust, this choice.

In the wake of the Prop. 8 travesty, after a campaign in which Obama and Biden at least claimed they supported equal partnership rights for same-sex couples even as they waffled on the use of the term "marriage," this is unacceptable. Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether there should *be* "religious leadership in the White House," the first act of religious leadership in the Obama White House will be conducted by a man who believes the formal, legal recognition of consensual, loving relationships between same-sex couples is equivalent to the formal, legal recognition incest or pedophilia.

Not okay. Not okay at all.

Friday Poetry: Anthony Madrid

2008-12-12T08:24:00.000-06:00

At Poetry Circle at Lawrence's on Sunday, Lawrence read this poem. I am into it.

Anthony Madrid
Of the Many Hymns to the Goddess Kali

Of the many hymns to the goddess Kali, only one is worthy of a poet's respect.
I mean the one wherein her ankles are hung with severed arms;—

I mean the one wherein her face is lit up with cruel pelasure, and she has a beard of sweat
As she has rear-entry intercourse with Vishnu.

The germ of the 580 couplets has passed through a fabulous network of tubes.
Strange, to think that mind and language can rise from a plate of meat!

My tutor lashed it into me, with a switch that had my name on it,
That every schoolboy is beside himself with envy for his teacher.

But better than "grisly revenge," or any other form of playing to the crowd,
Would have been to destroy the boy slowly and privately, by means of misapplied pleasure.

Whoever reads more than a dozen ghazals at a time will be overstimulated.
After a certain number of hits, one is simply wasting a precious drug.

You should have been a pretty girl, Madrid. The world might have been spared
All this body-resenting satire in the form of a parting shot.

Relatively Speaking, Part the Second

2008-12-11T13:01:00.000-06:00

Off of what I said last night, I would like to add simpler terms.

If the only way we can deal with monstrosity is to dehumanize it, we're fucked.

That's why I have such vociferous objections to the views voiced by Manohla Dargis and Anthony Lane. They seem to have a paralyzing fear that if we view a Nazi as human, we'll forget she's a Nazi, and then where O where will we be? The same problem has sneaked in to Dexter over the last season and change: first it was a show that explored a monster as a human being—a sociopathic human being, but a human being—but slowly it has devolved into dismissing every serial murderer besides Dexter (Lila, say, or Miguel, people who started as deeply compelling characters) as an irretrievable monster, and as soon as we recognize *their* monstrosity we're not supposed to be invested anymore. It's a stupid annoying double standard, and beyond that it's counterproductive.

Why counterproductive? Because monstrosity *is* among us, every day, and those of us capable of love—still the majority—like as not will have some loving relationship with monstrosity. Good art should be willing to look that in the face. In fact, I'd go so far as to say art about monstrosity, and honestly art about Nazis in particular, has a *responsibility* not to dehumanize monstrosity, because we go in with the assumption that monstrosity isn't human, and good art needs to be challenging that assumption. So does good thought, for that matter; that's what Hannah Arendt was talking about in Eichmann in Jerusalem. The "banality of evil" is that monstrosity *is* human, and that's really what's scariest about it. It's too easy when we can dismiss it as some horrific outlier to humanity.

We accepted with relative ease the "few bad apples" idea of Abu Ghraib because we couldn't stand to think that that kind of behavior was endorsed by those who supposedly represented us. In The Last King of Scotland, Nicholas couldn't think he was attached to violence and monstrosity until one act was made to confront him personally, and then he had to acknowledge both monstrosities: that he had been interacting with, and that he had become.

Lucas mentioned last night that Foucault names a similar process "speciation": the notion that the criminal, and the murderer in particular, is a separate species from the rest of us. It's a notion that Les Miserables debunks over and over, this concept that "he's a convict, what else do you need to know?"

I'm not willing to go as far as Sufjan Stevens and say that all secret lives are really morally equivalent—that's where I reject relativism—but I think that separation is foolish. That's a postulate assumption, though. As I said in the previous post, it's why I am not a moralist.

We should, we must, explore all the components of evil acts and people, even those components that aren't evil. If we can only deal with monstrosity by dehumanizing it, monstrosity will continue to come upon us in alarming doses, because we'll never be able to see or admit its connection to our lives. You cannot contest or fight what you do are unwilling to know, because then it will always have tricks up its sleeve to which you cannot nor will not have any access. No matter how you define evil, as an artist or an activist or a politician or whatever the hell you are, it is an egregious mistake not to take a comprehensive look.

I'm glad Kate Winslet, the love of my imaginary alternative life, played a Nazi. I am particularly glad she played a Nazi who loved and was loved by someone else, someone real and well-thought-out. The movie was not quite good enough to accomodate this conflict and contradiction, but it was good enough to get me obsessed with this line of thought.

It is not shameful or unethical to condemn evil, or even wrongdoing, but it is fucking dangerous to dismiss it. And to say that you should not try to see all sides of something *is* to dismiss it.

Relatively Speaking

2008-12-11T00:16:00.002-06:00

Am I a moralist?

I often feel like I am more willing to go into absolutes than other people I know, sometimes more than I care to be. I strive to understand everything, and have done so since I was very young, even things I find repugnant, but I believe firmly that some things are just completely fucking wrong no matter how you look at it. That is a consideration of morals, certainly; whether it is moralism is something I want to explore.

Tonight my mother and I saw The Reader, an imperfect but deeply moving and fascinating movie. (Beware of spoilers.) The film, with the always-awkward conceit of being set in Germany among Germans but being written and spoken in English with slight German accents, is an intense, beautiful exploration of morality, sex and literacy.

In 1958 fifteen-year-old Michael spends several months having a passionate affair with much-older tram conductor, Hanna (played by my favorite actor ever, Kate Winslet)—during which, at her request, he reads to her at least as much as they make love. Eight years later, when Michael is in law school, his legal ethics seminar travels to a trial of concentration camp guards, and Hanna is among the accused. Michael figures out that she has always been illiterate; after she has been in prison for many years of her life sentence, he sends her tapes of himself reading, from which she teaches herself to read. And she was still a Nazi, and even after she learns to read she does not regret her crimes.

I wept during the sequence where Hanna was learning to read. I am a once and probably future instructor of adult literacy, so it may mean more to me than to most people, but I cried.

There are things in the movie that have nothing to do with morality, passionate love or literacy, but they're poorly done (everyone's raving about a scene with Lena Olin at the end, but I could do without it) and irrelevant. (Except Kate Winslet's naked body, which is *always* relevant. That isn't the reason she's my favorite actor ever, but it's certainly a bonus.) Those things all kind of annoyed me, and distracted me from what I think was the central but somewhat poorly executed point that literacy does not bear any relationship to morality, even though we wish it did. I was frustrated with the mistakes it made (casting Ralph Fiennes as the older Michael was a big one—too bloody patrician, in spite of his best efforts), but deeply moved by its central relationship.

Then I read an Anthony Lane review in The New Yorker, wherein he panned the movie basically because he doesn't think we should care, or be asked to care, about an "unrepentant Nazi" becoming literate. He dismissed the movie based on that sentiment.

I was more furious at that than I am at the movie's failings. And I believe my first verbalized thought was something like, "What a smarmy moralist fuck."

Therefore, I am not a moralist.

But nor am I a moral relativist. This consideration made me realize how much control moralists tend to have in defining the world.

A moralist, I now believe, is someone who not only believes in absolutes of right and wrong, but also believes that those absolutes of right and wrong are unique and paramount in defining the world, that no other standards should be used. A moralist believes that the polarity of right and wrong trumps everything else in the world we live in—that when it comes down to it, the world is not defined by any factors other than morals.

I believe that there are absolutes of right and wrong. This can make me unpalatable to some genres of liberals (or make those genres of liberals unpalatable to me). I try to be pluralist and inclusive, which makes me unpalatable to some genres of moralists or conservatives, but the truth is I am always secretly happy when I can reduce things to moral polarities. But I also believe that there are things that have a controlling interest in the way we live and behave, and the way we should live and behave, that have absolutely nothing to do with morality.

Moralists would have me believe—and on occasion *have* had me believe—that this perspective makes me a moral relativist, somebody who thinks nothing is genuinely good or bad without a thorough deconstruction of the surrounding circumstances. Moralists would have you believe that being a moral relativist is the only way you can, say, care about a murderer, or be invested in a character who's a Nazi. Both Anthony Lane and the constantly, needlessly snotty Manohla Dargis take this position when considering The Reader: if a movie asks us to empathize with, care about, a character who believes in things that are inescapably morally wrong, and if it succeeds and we do so, then both we and the movie are inescapably morally wrong.

This is bullshit.

Why is this bullshit? Because love is separate from morality. Because understanding is separate from morality. Because literacy is separate from morality. The three things I just mentioned, among many others, are tremendous factors in the world. As such, they need to be considered with as much weight as morals if we are to live in the world we do live in, as opposed to one that would be neat to live in. I have as my Email signature the Camus quote, "Unless we choose to ignore reality, we must find our values in it." This is exactly what he was talking about.

Some things will always be wrong, and nevertheless we will always have to live with them. We are better served in living with them by being able to see what else we live with.

Is letting three hundred people under your control burn to death inescapably morally wrong? I would say so. Can you still be in love with someone who did something so inescapably morally wrong? Fuck yeah. Does that give you a role in that inescapably morally wrong thing? I don't know, and that's a question I could write about for the rest of my life, and *want* to write about for the rest of my life, and that I don't think good writers, or even mixed-quality writers like Reader screenwriter David Hare, should dismiss or shut down because you can attach the trigger word for inescapable moral wrongness, "Nazi," to a character's name.

The revelation of The Reader as it stands isn't that morality and literacy are not the same thing, but if the film had in fact hit what it was aiming for, it would be. If they'd done the last scene with Hanna and Michael right I would have been fucking weeping in devastation, and it would have been because of that. The movie made me realize that I taught a murderer. I never thought about it in those words; he was who he was. I knew of his crimes and history, and I knew him in the classroom, and those were two different people. For me to keep those elements of the same man completely separate was unfair; for me to not appreciate his considerable talents as a writer or a student because he was a murderer would be equally unfair; for me not to acknowledge the horrific thing he had done was equally unethical. Had I been braver and better-considered, I might have tried to learn more from him about what makes a murderer. I was neither of those things. Yet my teacher-student relationship with this man existed and mattered. Whether it existed "independent of his being a murderer" is a matter for deeper consideration than I am capable of at this hour, but both the fact of its existence and the fact that the man committed murder are unimpeachable. Hanna's horrific acts and the controlling love and passion she and Michael shared are, similarly, both unimpeachably true in the world of the film.

We gain little by saying one piece of knowledge trumps all others, and that is the central argument of moralists. If you know Hanna was a Nazi, say Manohla Dargis and Anthony Lane, why develop her character? If you know right from wrong, goes the moralist credo, you don't *really* need to know anything else.

And that is the kind of bullshit that makes me furious, whether you're talking about my student, this movie, or anything else.

Coming to a Close

2008-12-09T19:56:00.000-06:00

This is the Year-Ending Meme. I know we're not quite at the end of the year yet, but we're close, and I always like the summarizey feel it offers. Plus, I've just made and written a good twenty-five Christmas cards and I need a break. (If you know me and want a card, send me your address. They're pretty.)

So, the first and last sentences of every month in the year 2008 on the blog Third Rail Themes are below. Not including the first or last lines of poems, only lines that I wrote.

January
First: I coulda chosen a more uplifting poem for my first post of 2008, I suppose.
Last: I love the poem because that doesn't matter.

February
First: A couple of months ago, among many other strange experiences, I had the strange experience of listening to the Indigo Girls' "This Train Revised" for the fifteenth time and realizing for the first time that it was a Holocaust song.
Last: I like it when poetry uses exclamation points.

March
First: Now you can actually hear me.
Last: Please come see me read!

April
First: It's National Poetry Month!
Last: By the way, they all live together in the Sharking Shack.

May
First: I'll get back to the thing where I post with substance in between Friday Poetries soon, I promise.
Last: I didn't end up liking the book very much, but I must say that I do like thinking about the poem.

June
First: Okay, the knowledge that I now have a driver's license perhaps does not particularly serve the public, but it is nevertheless being announced.
Last: I've never loved him, but I guess I need to do this as I move out of Chicago.

July
First: This is one of those state-of-the-blog blog posts.
Last: All my love with A and her family.

August
First: Hard to believe I've never posted the man before, but this poem came into my life yesterday and was one of the socked-in-the-stomach moments.
Last: Why do we forget this so easily?

September
First: Some interesting comments were made on my previous post that you should read.
Last: That's all I know until I teach myself more.

October
First: This one he actually did create, and I like it.
Last: In the meantime, I'll liveblog if I can; if not, VOTE, ferfuckssake!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

November
First: I've just returned from five days knocking on doors in New Mexico.
Last: Thanks.

December
First: 2008 has come to feel to me like the Year of Mortality.
Last: … who knows …

Friday Poetry: Bob Hicok

2008-12-05T08:29:00.002-06:00

I went to visit my high school poetry class this week. Still going strong, same as ever, and I am grateful for its constancy. The teacher, who taught me poetry from kindergarten through twelfth grade and is himself still going strong, handed out this poem.

Bob Hicok
For three whose reflex was yes

Nobody I know is a god. A mother and son
fall into the river's million hands, the river's
smash and grab. They go under, climb the ropeless
water up, wave, open their mouths and scream
wet silences as they slide back under.
A man jumps in to save them, leaves the edge
as a needle into the river's muddy sinews, a woman
jumps in to save his vanishing and the mother
and son and is stripped by the flood, her pants
drowning right beside her, another man jumps in
to save them all and a woman jumps in after him
to save them all plus one, cars arrive and people
get out and leap into the river, the river's being filled
with whatever's in their pockets and their hands
and their eyes, with nickels and dollar bills
and bibles and sunsets, the beautiful brush strokes
of this beautifully dying day, people pile
like a river inside the river, they keep coming
and divingin, they keep feeding their breath
to the water, which is less, which is thinned,
until the mother and son rise on a mound
of strangers and dead, the sun warming them, blessing
their faces slowly dry.

Educational Interlude the Second: What It's Really About

2008-12-04T12:13:00.003-06:00

This morning on my way to work, I came up with the right answer to something that was bugging me eight months ago, so I thought I'd share.

I worked on a theater piece with a woman who was just beginning to do arts education, working with eighth-graders on a civics and theater project at a school where I knew many of the students. She explained to me that the project was about presidential elections and figuring out the importance of politics, "but really, it's about giving the kids a voice, you know?"

Though I didn't say anything at the time—see, I'm learning!—I was disgusted and a little offended by that last statement. I couldn't say why at the time. But now I can!

There are two reasons.

First, the kids already HAVE a voice. Or, to be more accurate, many voices. To say otherwise is banking education—to imagine the kids as empty vaults until you came along and Gave Them a Voice! Aren't you just a savior! If you want to say you're giving them tools for USING that voice, if you're teaching them powerful WAYS to use that voice, you have my blessing. But to say that you are the one giving the kids that voice creates a relationship in which you want them to be wholly dependent on you. Not to mention that the notion of giving the kids "a voice" implies that you're expecting a certain kind of uniformity, that they will all speak with this one voice that they've so generously been given.

That isn't just semantics. If it is indeed semantics, it is an example of why we shouldn't say "just" semantics. Semantics matters. It effects how we perceive things. Including our own work.

Second: TEACH WHAT IT'S REALLY ABOUT. Seriously. If it's not really about that thing—say, civics and theater—then why is that what you're teaching? It is possible to give people a voice, or even better, to give people the tools to use and maximize the power of their preexisting voices, without using theater or civics, much less combining the two. Why are you choosing theater and civics? How do those subjects effect what use you make of your voice? It may be that in a general, very abstracted sense one subject is as good as another, but that doesn't make for uniformity; it doesn't mean that because all things can teach you good ways to use your voice, all things teach you to do so in the same way or with the same power or to the same ends. If you're choosing to do civics and theater, make it real, make it specific, look at the ways that these specific subjects matter in the world along with their application to some vague abstract goal like "having a voice."

Especially if you're a theater artist going into arts education, have enough respect for your subject, for the work you do, to make that what you're actually teaching to kids. Otherwise, why are you even doing it yourself, much less passing it on?

Rant out.

Mortal Coils

2008-12-04T12:07:00.000-06:00

2008 has come to feel to me like the Year of Mortality.

People have, if you want to get technical, been dying all my life. People close to me and people close to the people I love. Last year that somehow jumped to the forefront: I experienced my first Death in the Family as an adult (I lost two grandparents when I was in middle school and my beloved great-aunt while I was in college), friends of several of my close friends died while others experienced devastating illness in their families, romantic relationships among my friends and family collapsed, an elementary and high school classmate died suddenly, and I watched and felt the full impact of Six Feet Under.

And this year it's happened again. This year two beloved friends have lost parent or parents. My grandmother's fear of her own death has become all-consuming enough to exacerbate her illnesses; my friend's grandmother, who had been in a similar situation for a long time, succumbed. My student's brother was shot in the head; another student was shot in a drive-by. I have been diagnosed with a chronic illness—not at all life-threatening, certainly not until I'm substantially older, but somewhat life-compromising. A friend's friend, my own age, has been diagnosed with two kinds of cancer. Another high school classmate died earlier in the year; a teacher from my high school (never my teacher, but well-known) died yesterday morning. Today a father I know has had a piece of his liver cut off in one hospital to be placed inside his six-month-old son in another hospital, while their family members wait.

This is the year I am compelled to understand that this is not, in fact, unusual. This is the year I am realizing how and why Six Feet Under is right: that it's always going to be like this. This is always a world where people come (a high school classmate just had a baby; my cousin A is pregnant, and the birth in February will mark the beginning of a new generation in our family) and go, and because of that the questions we ask and devote ourselves to answering cannot be about that alone.

None of which makes any individual story any easier to endure. This is the year I feel wrapped in mortality, feel the loop of each of the stories I mentioned above. This is the year of mortal coils. Each one matters, each one puts pressure in a different place; this is the year I know they're all part of the same snake.

This is surely the year of mixed metaphors.

I am thinking today of the amazing courage it takes to survive the things that could happen to anyone, but don't. Which is a strange realization, that for the most part it takes astounding courage just to live life, live life in the form that this year has made me realize it comes in. I applaud everyone I love for living their lives at this constant risk, with this constant knowledge, especially those who have been pressed up more closely against this reality than I have.

I am also thinking: Okay, Universe, I get the message. I think everyone I love has gotten the message. So we're ready for you to relent a little. I think a successful transplant would be just the ticket. Just as a gesture of good faith.

It's good information for me, I can't deny it. I need to know about mortality; I need to know that I live in a world where it is a constant, and as such all I can do is choose when and how to use it as part of my definitions. When I have the luxury of choice, that is. But like all information that comes to me, and most stubborn smart people, I want to use it only on my own terms. This may, too, be the year I learn where that is not an option.

Or perhaps that last will be for next year. I'll have to see.

In Your Thoughts

2008-11-30T14:05:00.002-06:00

It seems that a lot of my posts are about things both rather personal and bleak lately. I'm going to write a post about *that* soon, but first, a request.

J, the six-month-old baby of a family I know in Chicago, is seriously ill, ill to the point that he requires a liver transplant as soon as possible. If a donor liver does not become available in the next several days, J's father will be donating a piece of his own liver to his son, making two major surgeries in the family in one day, never mind the challenge this has already been for J's parents, J's three-year-old sister, and J himself.

Because I can't do anything concrete, and few of us can, I'm asking for everyone's positive thoughts.

If you pray, please do that for J and his family. If you happen to work at any kind of religious school where kids pray for other people, please ask them for that.

If you send positive thoughts and/or love into the world on a more abstract level, as I do, please do that.

If you know other people in a similar situation — comparable in any way — please give them all the support you can.

If you know the family I'm talking about personally, please hug them all for me.

I believe in all of this. I believe in the power of thought, and the power of belief— in anything—and the power of love. Each of those phrases is more sentimental than the last, but it's true. So: I'm asking everyone who's reading this to believe in it too. Or at least to suspend disbelief long enough to send positive thoughts for baby J.

Thanks.

Friday Poetry: Ogden Nash

2008-11-27T07:00:00.000-06:00

Ogden Nash
The Poultry

Let's think of eggs.
They have no legs.
Chickens come from eggs,
But they have legs.
The plot thickens:
Eggs come from chickens
But have no legs under 'em.
What a conundurum!

Thanks

2008-11-24T22:22:00.001-06:00

I have always been a sucker for Thanksgiving. I recognize all the political problems associated with its history, but I cannot hate it, and I most certainly cannot celebrate "Day of Mourning." It is one of the things that's most American about me. The telling of the holiday's history has been corrupted and sanitized, but most history has, and unlike some other things whose history has been corrupted and sanitized, I value the present incarnation of Thanksgiving.

Personally, I have never a negative Thanksgiving experience; the worst I can ever recall was when I was seven years old, ate too much, and threw up on the way home. I always feel I belong to something, some kind of community, that matters on Thanksgiving: a family, an apartment, a collection of friends, past winners of the "Drunk Uncle" competition. Probably it is fairly common for people to spend Thanksgiving alone, but in my experience it's rare for someone to go without an invitation. It's a time when people decide to be with people, to celebrate those connections. And it's a time when people celebrate what they have.

You can politically deconstruct that all you want, but I don't feel like it.

I'm hitting the road with several members of my family tomorrow—sister, father, cousin—to join other members of our family in downstate Illinois. (First time I've hit the state since I moved away from it.) I may or may not be able to post, though I might schedule the posting of a Friday Poetry since I just figured out how to do that. In either case, I want to post a few things I'm thankful for. Ten, to be exact. Feel free to add.

1. I am thankful that I can rely on my family's love. It doesn't always come in the forms I want or expect, but, well, love doesn't. I am tremendously fortunate that it's always there.

2. I am thankful that Obama was elected, and almost equally thankful that he's already flip-flopping and doing things I find sketch and politically unpleasant. The next four years would be really boring otherwise.

3. I am thankful for vegetables. I am realizing ever more how amazing they are. I can't wait to eat even more of them than I usually do on Thursday.

4. I am thankful for the ways in which my new chronic disease can be managed; I am thankful that there's more than one way, and that I can and have learned a great deal about them already, and that not all of them are created by pharmaceutical conglomerates.

5. I am thankful for pie.

6. I am thankful for my friends and their amazing, amazing brains. I have complained about being lonely in New York, and I am, but such is my lot at the moment; it remains my good fortune to love so many people who challenge me so well and so deeply, and conversations with whom always change me.

7. I am particularly thankful for Tyromaven a week ago Friday.

8. I am thankful for the poetry of Stephen Dunn. It's a li'l redundant to say that on this blog, but it's one of the pillars of my scaffold.

9. I am thankful for my father's car. Flying on Thanksgiving is purgatorial.

10. I am thankful that, even sometimes, I have gotten to do work I love.

Friday Poetry: A.E. Housman

2008-11-21T14:56:00.002-06:00

For some stupid kneejerk liberal reason, I always feel self-conscious posting "classic" poetry—not classical, but the sort you spent time with in school. Not that the vast majority of poems I've posted here, "classic" or otherwise, were not poems or poets I encountered before college, but I'm self-conscious nonetheless. So I want to tell a story about this particular poem.

I'm currently working as a substitute teacher at my alma mater, the school I attended from kindergarten through twelfth grade. I had many wonderful teachers there, one of whom, Mr. M, I had for sixth-grade Ancient History and twelfth-grade American Constitutional Law. He has an amazing, amazing mind, was a very shy man outside of the classroom and a very bold, fast, sharp speaker in it. He had a stroke recently, and I just saw him for the first time since. He's still teaching, apparently as well as he used to, but he can barely talk anymore. His distinctive speech patterns were a huge part of my memory of him, so the encounter was hard for me, though I'm happy he's still around and still working. One of my sharpest memories is of him reading this poem when I was in sixth grade—beginning to read with barely an introduction, as was his wont. The memory is of him looking sharply up at all of us when he read the words "Smart lad," waiting for our surprise.

So, I love this poem.

A.E. Housman
To an Athlete Dying Young

The time you won your town the race,
We chaired you through the market-place.
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home
And set you at the threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows,
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran,
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on that sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

It's All a Conspiracy

2008-11-17T21:28:00.002-06:00

I'm thinking about all the things about which I was so concerned before the election, regarding NSPD-51 and the still-current administration's erasure of democratic process and the like.

Obviously, Obama has not yet been inaugurated and the whole thing is, technically, still possible. But it seems a lot less possible than it did before the election. Mainly because it has become abundantly clear how fucking tired George Bush is of being president. He cannot wait to get out of there. It's been obvious since his congratulatory speech on the morning of November 5, and possibly, had I been paying attention, even earlier.

Yes, if you wanna get technical it's still possible that the Conspiratorial Forces That Be could assassinate *him* instead, leaving us, as I suggested before, with a military-industrial dictatorship under the auspices of Cheney and Chertoff. But I don't think that's going to happen. For one thing, Bush's assassination would not inspire serious passion or fear; for another, the outcry honestly would be too great for Cheney and Chertoff to swing it by means of anything but the greatest oppression, repression and serious violence, far beyond what I would have thought it would take even eight months ago. And for another, I just don't think they have the clout anymore.

I don't mean in any way to belittle the racist threats against Barack Obama, nor to underestimate the general schism of values still central to the United States. It is, however, clear that Naomi Wolf and many others, including myself, saw a greater danger than is likely to come to pass.

Is this because we were paranoid?

I really don't think so. I think there was a force in the Bush administration working towards military-industrial dictatorship, as evidenced by the outrageousness of much of its regulation and legislation. I think that force has lost clout.

There was probably some behind-the-scenes compromise about which you and I will never know; the Obama administration will probably make far more compromises, even with regards to civil liberties, than I or any progressive will be comfortable with. But the bottom line, I think, is that the New American Century folks behind Bush were not subtle; they picked a front man not strong enough to withstand the onslaught of challenges; they have lost.

I'm relieved that they've lost, that the coup I hypothesized and feared no longer seems an immediate danger. But I remain cautious. Obama is a rational, considered intellectual and an excellent leader, capable of amassing an equally rational executive branch. But he's coming into a position that the Cheney camp filled with ludicrous, overweening, tempting power. Here's to his being strong enough to resist that allure.

Friday Poetry: Sylvia Plath

2008-11-14T10:00:00.000-06:00

Sylvia Plath
Mad Girl's Love Song

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade,
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grew old and I forgot your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

In Memory

2008-11-13T16:39:00.003-06:00

My friend Lawrence's mother passed away quite suddenly this week. I knew her, though not well, for most of my life, and I had the privilege of singing with them and for her the other day.

Never know what to say in these posts, and always feel I would be remiss if I didn't post them. I am and will be thinking of Lawrence and his brother.

Where the Truth Lies

2008-11-13T16:36:00.000-06:00

Hey, guys, this post isn't about the election!

Once again, in thinking about Dexter (yes, I already said I was obsessed), I am falling into the murder-as-metaphor trap. I have said it before and I'll say it again: murder, like rape, cannot exist solely as a metaphor.

Yet it's also true that if something isn't also a metaphor, or at least symbolic, why make art about it? Writing down every single thing that happens to you every single day is not good art. Reaching out using things that happen to you every day, making connections between things, *is* one version of art. Murder does happen every day; it may even be true that murders committed by serial killers happen every day (though I'm not sure about that one). As long as you also take in the emotional reality of murder—which Dexter mostly does, particularly with the character of Miguel Prado this season—murder is kind of required to also be a metaphor, or symbolic, to be part of good art.

And an interesting twist with Dexter is that, while murder is in some ways the center of its reality, and it definitely makes murder something real—our protagonist is a serial killer, the bulk of the show takes place at the Homicide division of the Miami Metro Police Department, where most of our other favorite characters work—it's not precisely a show about murder. For the most part, it's about the conflict between Dexter, for whom not just the existence of murder but the act of committing murder is a constant reality, and the other people in his world, Deb and Rita and Angel and Masuka, for whom it is not. It is about the tension of trying to be something you aren't, and how that effort may actually be able to make you what you thought you weren't, and how people can have genuine, moving, life-altering interactions with something that isn't real.

Dexter is about fiction.

The episode All in the Family began to explore this concept, but for me it didn't get at all aspects. It got at it for Dexter, the character, as an actor (not Michael C. Hall, but Dexter himself acting)—the notion that he tries so hard to feel, pretends so skilfully to feel, that for all intents and purposes it happens. Silvana once cited to me an interview with a leading actor in August: Osage County, who explained that doing such a play was exhausting because "your body doesn't know you're lying." On the show, Dexter is reaching that point. He doesn't know what's true about his relationship with Rita and her children; he doesn't know if what he's doing with Angel and Masuka has, in fact, been friendship. He knows they believe it to be, and as a (somewhat unconventional) sociopath he'd prefer on some level to think he's smarter than they, but nevertheless they continue to have a relationship, an engagement with one another; Dexter has to put on the performance so constantly that the performance is an integral component of who he is.

(Which is another point where murder is not simply a metaphor. We are taught as a society that to take another person's life effectively ends yours, prevents you from being defined as a human being. Procedural dramas like Law and Order examine motivations at a mechanical level, but have neither the time nor the real inclination to delve into the fact that murderers have lives, before and often after they kill people; because the procedural show is simply about courts and justice, murderers are ultimately defined by being murderers alone. While certainly one cannot make the argument that Dexter is not A TV Show About a Serial Killer—particularly in light of Showtime's fucking heinous advertising campaign—you can't show weeks and weeks of murders, murders, nothing but murders. You need a life. You need context. Dexter figures that out for himself as much as the audience does.)

Dexter goes beyond even that, though, in the depth at which it develops its other characters. At the beginning of Season 2 Dexter's sister Deb, recovering from a relationship with a man very similar to Dexter (though she doesn't know about Dexter), says to Rita, formerly a victim of abuse, that "what he [the boyfriend or Rita's husband] had to offer wasn't real. But the way he made you feel about yourself? That was real." (I'm quoting that from memory; might not be exact.) I'm in love with Deb, but even if I weren't this would apply to the whole show.

Rita is honestly in love with Dexter; Deb honestly loves and counts on her brother for support, life-saving, all that good stuff. For both of them, that is the truth of their world. Because my take on the show tends to be very Deb-centric, I can think about how deeply destroyed Deb would be (wow, that sounds Dextertastic) if she found out the truth about her brother, and she would be, which is one of the stunning dramatic tensions of the show. But it's also not the only truth. That relationship is there. There's a lot Deb doesn't know about Dexter and as such she doesn't have the exclusive right to define what the relationship is, but nor does Dexter. Dexter is a sociopath and a serial killer with or without her, but who he is with her, whatever is hidden, is something too. And it doesn't matter whether he is fictional—whether he is a fictional character on a TV show, or whether the Dexter that Deb knows is "real" or not.

Fiction changes people's lives. To use a meta-example, I as a human being have a relationship with Dexter, the show, at the moment. It has an effect on what I think, how I feel. The show is a work of fiction. That relationship is not any less substantive because the show is fiction; it is in fact one of the more substantive relationships in my New York life at the moment. I consent that at one level that's pathetic; however, it's only pathetic viewed from the outside. Something real is changing in me because of the way I think about and react to this show. Something real changes in Deb because of who Dexter is in her life.

Dexter is about why we have good novels, good movies, good plays, good TV shows. Dexter is about acting, writing fiction, directing to create imaginary worlds. It goes back to the quote from Russell Banks I cited a long time ago: "Knowledge of the facts of [the character]'s life and death changes nothing in the world. Our celebrating his life and grieving over his death, however, will. Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives—no, especially wholly invented lives—deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself." The book can change the world, whether or not it matters to the book.

And Dexter can change the world, whether or not it matters to Dexter. He is even more ambiguous, being, although sociopathic, human, and as such with the possibility of things effecting and changing him, too. I've never heard that sociopaths were stagnant, just that they have no conscience (though all psychiatric experts are free to correct me if I'm wrong). Either way, Dexter's not a traditional sociopath. He's doing what I've always claimed is essential in actors and writers: committing to know, one way and another, what he doesn't know. Sometimes it works.

So to me, Dexter is not only about murder and social ethics (I'm not one who by nature condones or wishes for vigilantism, though time spent on Television Without Pity shows me that many are the Dexter viewers who do), it is about exactly why and how fiction is true. To reference and argue with Atwood's Oryx and Crake again, not real cannot only tell us about real, it can become real. It can be real. Dexter is my favorite show currently on television because it addresses, really addresses, the nuances of that possibility.

Friday Poetry: Stephen Dunn

2008-11-07T08:00:00.001-06:00

I love him a lot. And Tyromaven and I were discussing this poem last night.

Stephen Dunn
Because We Are Not Taken Seriously

Some nights I wish they'd come
to my door, the government men,
looking for the poem of simple truths
recited and whispered among the people.
And when all I give them is silence
and my children are exiled
to the mountains, my wife forced
to renounce me in public,
I'll be the American poet
whose loneliness, finally, is relevant,
whose slightest movement
ripples cross-country.

And when the revolution frees me,
its leaders wanting me to become
"Poet of the Revolution," I'll refuse
and keep a list of their terrible reprisals
and all the dark things I love
which they will abolish.
With the ghost of Mandelstam
on one shoulder, Lorca on the other,
I'll write the next poem, the one
that will ask only to be believed
once it's in the air, singing.

My Guy

2008-11-06T19:57:00.000-06:00

I remain bone-weary from five days of nine-hour walks around a southern New Mexico town. While I was there I was not supposed to blog about it, not that I would have had time anyway, and it may be that some restrictions still apply. I am not going to say much about the management of the campaign, except to say that its firm but generous structure impressed me and honestly reminded me of nothing so much as the University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt.

But I did have personal experiences, personal stories, in canvassing, and those I am allowed to tell. So I will tell one in particular, the story of "my guy." By the end of our canvassing experience, my friend M and I had each found "our guy," the one experience and story that, to us, made the five days worth it, made us absolutely confident we had done something real, even when we didn't know the outcome. So I will tell mine.

I was looking for a woman on my canvassing list, Josefina (name has been changed). Upon reaching the house, I found a gentleman in the garage, probably in his late forties or early fifties, Latino, shirt off, doing something with tools I couldn't quite see. Decked out in all my Obama finery (wearing pins, carrying lawn signs), I asked if Josefina was home. The man said he would go get her. I stared at the McCain sign on the lawn next door; it was not uncommon, I had discovered, for next-door neighbors to have opposing political views.

The man returned. "She doesn't want to come out," he said.

"Okay," I said, in my ineffably perky canvassing persona. "Would you mind giving her these?" I handed him several brochures regarding Obama's positions on economic security, health care, and John McCain.

"Sure." He took them. "She's kind of in between right now. I'm not voting," he added.

"I'm sorry to hear that. May I ask why not?"

He explained that he liked Obama, but he had two hesitations about him. The first involved his Reverend. I braced myself for another stupid rant about how Obama could trust someone like that, but this man said almost the opposite: how could Obama so easily break off a relationship with his pastor of twenty years, saying "You mean nothing to me?" His second concern was "the pro-life issue." But McCain was just going to be more Bush, he said, which he wasn't wild about either. He admitted that he had voted for Bush in 2000, but had since realized his mistake.

I addressed "the pro-life issue" first, since I had actually prepared for the prospect of hearing that one. "I don't think anyone's really 'anti-life,'" I said, and explained the ways in which Obama would work to prevent unwanted pregnancies: by increasing education, by increasing insurance coverage for women (I hinted only vaguely at contraception at first, but the man soon responded that in spite of his Catholic upbringing he considered that "a private issue," and so I addressed it more directly). The man seemed very receptive, saying "that's true," and I felt hopeful. However, he was sure Obama was going to win anyway, so his vote didn't really matter.

"Oh no," I said. "I'm from New York, and I've been living in Illinois, so *my* vote doesn't matter. But in the last election, John Kerry lost New Mexico by 314 votes. In the entire state. You are definitely one of those 314. Your vote matters."

He took that in.

"But I just can't understand with the pastor. After twenty years, how could he say 'I want nothing to do with you'?"

First of all, I said, I think he kind of backed Obama into a corner. My guy agreed with me, but remained uncertain, reminiscing on the influence of ministers in his youth, how he could remember and name each. I told him I didn't personally have much religion in my life, and conflated a few stories involving people leaving their church (my father's girlfriend and many members of his community) with much regret and the presence of female pastors (my friend's mother in high school). (Who says I can't improvise?) I felt I was flailing, but we then moved into a discussion about privacy, about the fact that you really couldn't know what Reverend Wright and Obama, who did indeed have this relationship of twenty years, had discussed before Obama made this announcement.

"Still," said the guy, "after twenty years, how can he just say, 'I want nothing to do with you, you mean nothing to me'?"

"I don't think he said that," I said quickly. "I mean, I've broken up with people, and it didn't mean you mean nothing to me, it meant I couldn't be with you anymore."

He stopped and stared at me. "That's a really good way to put it," he said. "I wish Obama had said that."

"Thank you," I said, startled. "I don't know if you can have that kind of subtlety in public presidential campaigns. But again, we don't know what went on when they spoke to each other." I looked at him; the conversation seemed to be ending. "Sir, you seem like a really thoughtful, informed, interesting person, so can I just ask you to—reconsider your decision?"

"Well," he said, "I have three more days to figure it out, right? And I will read these." He shook the brochures I'd given him for his wife. "Thank you."

"Thank you," I said. We shook hands, although mine was covered in blue ink from the freshly printed lawn signs, and I went on my way.

And, Pointless Milestone the Ninth

2008-11-06T07:56:00.003-06:00

This blog is now officially four years old. :>D

Wow.

2008-11-05T21:29:00.002-06:00

I've just returned from five days knocking on doors in New Mexico. Which was apparently very successful. As I haven't seen the county-by-county breakdown of New Mexico yet, I have no idea if my work actually made a difference in seeing the man get elected. It doesn't matter. I have never screamed like that in my life, and I have done some serious screaming. That was amazing. That was a mandate. That was a stunning, stunning night.

I will write some stories, some thoughts, and some notes for the future in the coming days. But for now brief notes. I know everyone has been saying they're "proud to be an American for the first time in eight years." That's not quite true of me. It's come to me in flashes even in the face of the bleak political landscape—my Constitutional Law and American History teachers in high school were just too damn good. But this is the first time in at least four years, and possibly even seven or eight, that I have *faith* in America. It is the first time I feel like my adulthood could take place in an America, a contemporary version of America, that I could truly love.

HOPE is not a campaign slogan. Last night I was ebullient with it; today and tonight, travelling back from the beloved swing state, wearing my "Moose for Obama" T-shirt for the second day in a row, I feel simply suffused with it. Yes, Silvana, there's work to be done, but now it's work people actually want to do. It's work defined in the positive. Not just because Obama is a Democrat do I feel this way; I would not have been happy had John Kerry won four years ago, for instance. I would have been relieved, but not happy. I am happy because we have a man of integrity.

And because the Obama girls are getting a puppy. I wonder what the criteria are to become the White House nanny.

Slightly North of the Border, Down Mexico Way

2008-10-29T08:47:00.003-05:00

This afternoon I'm bound for Austin, Texas, meeting my dear friend M, thence to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where I'll be campaigning for Obama until the election.

This may mean no Friday Poetry, as I'm not sure what my internet access will be like with my lovely host family. It may, in fact, mean no blogging until after the election, because I don't feel like dragging my computer with me. If so:

This blog formally endorses Barack Obama. We believe that his centeredness and dedication to his vision of America, as well as his spirited, clearly not-programmed daughters, are what we need in the White House if we're to clean up even the slightest bit of this mess in the next four years. We believe that his experience in community organizing and in constitutional law, along with his work as a legislator on both the state and national level, qualify him for the office of the President far beyond any particular executive experience. Executive protocol can be taught; professionalism, focus and leadership cannot. Barack Obama has exhibited graceful leadership in the manner in which he has run his campaign, in his organized thought (as exemplified by an interview with his running mate in Newsweek three weeks ago), and in his consistent efforts to keep the campaign to the facts and the pragmatics. Barack Obama exhibits skills, talents and personality traits that we desperately need in the executive branch right now.

Just so it's official. In the meantime, I'll liveblog if I can; if not, VOTE, ferfuckssake!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Flip-Flopping

2008-10-27T16:14:00.002-05:00

I do believe I'm changing my mind.

I previously stated that this blog would retire after Election Day 2008. But right now I'm having too much fun, and I really am not going to feel secure until Obama's inauguration, either way. I won't feel the era is over.

So I am, at the very least, extending the blog's retirement date until January 20, 2009. At which point I'll be in Ghana, so it will at least go on hiatus. But we'll revisit the topic then.

In the meantime, look forward to two more months of parsley-covered text than you were expecting!

Friday Poetry: Mark Strand

2008-10-24T07:28:00.000-05:00

Mark Strand
Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Educational Interlude

2008-10-22T21:12:00.002-05:00

I wrote the following to the lovely 20-year-old woman who runs the organization for which I will be working in Ghana. We were having some semantic communication problems as we both attended a Theater of the Oppressed workshop. I have trouble with Theater of the Oppressed, for reasons I've already chronicled in this blog and other reasons I'm sure I will chronicle. My boss wished to be sure that I would nevertheless base my theater curriculum in critical pedagogy and dialogue, and this was my response.

I like it, and because it sounds more confident than I feel right now, I want it up here to reassure me about my upcoming journey and my own abilities.

I am a complete and unapologetic Freirean, which is to say, I think any and all good pedagogy is critical pedagogy. A curriculum that doesn't encourage critical thinking is, to me, anti-humanist, something to which I could never be committed, and which I would most certainly never create. Critical thinking has to be a goal of all my educational work, and I am thrilled that it's the goal of the organization as well. So I hope that I have at no point implied that I am in conflict with such a goal.

Nor am I expecting any of these kids to be the next Wole Soyinka. Most art created by kids, by any "objective" standard of quality, comes out looking pretty silly, and I don't think this program will be the magical exception. Some exciting and dynamic work will be created, if I do my job right, but nothing that's going to revolutionize the world or the arts, at least not yet.

All I mean when I say "I want the kids to create good art" (or whatever I've said along those lines) is that if we want a critical thinking curriculum, to that end alone, we can create that. I think your program's Girls' Club has created that already. It is incredibly valuable, as is a person's ability to recognize her own oppression (and, for that matter, when she is acting as an oppressor). Both of those things are elements of theater, and theater is also about something else, and I want to be sure that I am teaching that other skill set, as well. In pedagogies like "theater for critical thinking" or Theater of the Oppressed, that skill set often falls by the wayside, or is dismissed as unimportant. It is important; it is the difference between theater and academics, theater and self-worth, theater and therapy. Academics should be taught and valued, self-worth should be taught and valued, therapy should be taught and valued. I am a theater teacher.

I believe, deeply, in the value of dialogue and conversations. I believe, further, that good theater by its nature creates dialogue and conversations. If I teach good theater, and particularly if I teach it with knowledge of critical pedagogy, dialogue, conversation and (at least some) intellectual independence *will* follow. I know it's going to be a hard road, and likely a harder road than I can imagine at the moment, and that I will have to make a lot of alterations as I come to understand the culture more and more. But if anything I believe about people and how they work is correct, then both of us will be more than satisfied with how this pans out.

Darlin' Companion: a mini-rant

2008-10-21T20:29:00.002-05:00

I've been doing a lot more of these brief posts lately. It makes me feel more like a Blogger, with a capital B, but I also have a lot more time on my hands. I'm working on a few dense essays as well, but I'm not positive anyone but me misses them. :>D

Anyway.

Let me admit up front that I am a little bit in love with Rachel Maddow, the delightful host of The Rachel Maddow Show, a new liberally slanted news show on MSNBC. I became aware of her because my mother is obsessed with Keith Olbermann, host of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, which is followed by Maddow's much more compelling show. (I love Olbermann's "special comments," overly articulate, intense bursts of righteous indignation, but they're rare these days and his smugness in the face of Obama's likely victory has started to really piss me off.) Rachel Maddow is incredibly intelligent, incredibly articulate, a mere 35 years of age, and boosting ratings at a startling level for MSNBC, as the New York Times discussed in this article today.

The article doesn't mention that Maddow is an out lesbian, the first lesbian anchor of a major news program (as opposed to, say, host of a talk show). That would be fine with me for the most part; her news program is not about her sexual orientation, and she mentions it only occasionally and in passing, like any old-school anchor might make reference to his perspective or his wife. But at the end of the article Stelter mentions that Maddow has finally purchased a television so that "her companion can watch her program."

Um, "girlfriend" and "partner" are both options here. "Companion" could as easily refer to a seeing-eye dog as a cohabitating girlfriend—it's a ridiculously vague and condescending term, thrown in at the end of the article as if we were expected to miss it. The sentence seems a throwback to the 1950s, or to be generous the 1980s, when you might be aware that a public figure was a homosexual but you nevertheless felt it was decorous or polite to hide it. But this is 2008, and it's fucking ridiculous. Maddow has made no secret of her sexual orientation, Brian Stelter; why do you feel the need to obfuscate it? Who are you trying to protect?

Palin(g) in Comparison, Part the Fourth

2008-10-21T17:06:00.001-05:00

Milligan posted this.

Sometimes things just speak for themselves.

So What If He Is?

2008-10-20T09:47:00.002-05:00

I am supremely impressed with Colin Powell.

Not simply for the endorsement, although it's much-appreciated in and of itself. But for being the first public figure to say "He is obviously not a Muslim—but so what if he were?" The Obama campaign has not managed to say that yet. In calling Dearborn, Michigan for the campaign, I have spoken to a lot of American Muslims who support Mr. Obama wholeheartedly, and it would have been nice to see him really rise to the defense of that community while simultaneously fighting the smears.

Now Mr. Powell has done exactly that. So high praise and kudos to Mr. Powell.

It almost makes up for his capitulations under the Bush administration.

To Your Health

2008-10-18T21:21:00.003-05:00

In switching my health insurance from Illinois to New York, my quarterly premiums have quintupled.

Yes, you heard me. QUINTUPLED.

(Actually, I'm not sure that's the word you use for multiplication, but fuck it.)

I would like to inform John McCain that that totals way, way, WAAAAAAY more than $5000 annually. As do the premiums—never mind appointments and drugs and the like—for any health plan one can possibly get when based in New York City.

So? says John McCain. You can get any policy you want in any state you want! Don't you understand?

Mr. McCain, do you honestly think that insurance companies in small, cheap states are equipped to handle the influx of New York City residents? Or is it that you think they won't adjust their premiums accordingly?

Make no mistake, team: the McCain/Palin "health plan" would be the death rattle for health care in the United States. I would not say this about all of McCain and Palin's views, but anyone who thinks otherwise is just plain deluded.

Optimiasmobama

2008-10-17T10:20:00.003-05:00

This election makes me feel optimistic in spite of my best efforts (and you know how good my best efforts are). This may be the best skill of both Barack Obama and the Obamabots.

Barack Obama is going to have trouble being President. He's inheriting a merciless disaster in the White House and even more financial drama throughout the nation. He's going to be more threatened with assassination than any other president in American history, and some of those threats could come from within. He has a deeply distrustful percentage of the electorate to contend with. He is not speaking the complete truth about all his plans: I believe him on taxes, but foreign policy is definitely going to be worse on all of us than he's giving it credit for, and I sincerely doubt he's gonna get us out of Iraq within that first term. And he's got two kids under the age of twelve.

And he still makes me feel good. Not good because he's avoiding the questions and I don't want to think about the questions, but because he's got it under control, as much under control as it can possibly be. He knows his shit, and the concept of knowing his shit is very important to him, and he manages both to keep it accessible and to be precise. He's thoughtful without being obscure, a politician while genuinely being politic.

I like him. His political presence in the world makes me feel good. And in a climate like this, that seems like what I should be asking for.

Friday Poetry: Robert Herrick

2008-10-17T10:10:00.003-05:00

Robert Herrick
Upon Love, By Way of Question and Answer

I bring ye love, Quest. What will love do?
Ans. Like, and dislike ye;
I bring ye love, Quest. What will love do?
Ans. Stroke ye to strike ye;
I bring ye love, Quest. What will love do?
Ans. Love will befool ye;
I bring ye love, Quest. What will love do?
Ans. Heat ye to cool ye;
I bring ye love, Quest. What will love do?
Ans. Love gifts will send ye;
I bring ye love, Quest. What will love do?
Ans. Stock ye to spend ye;
I bring ye love, Quest. What will love do?
Ans. Love will fulfill thee;
I bring ye love, Quest. What will love do?
Ans. Kiss ye to kill ye.

Fanning the Flames

2008-10-10T16:12:00.000-05:00

This is really unpleasant.

Questions:

• Did this teacher make up his very nasty acronym for CHANGE (read the article; let's just leave it at N stands for the proverbial "N-word"), or was it something he found on the interwebs?

• Why is the school system construing the teacher's transfer to the Adult Education program as a punishment? For whom, exactly? As a former Adult Ed teacher, those students have suffered enough and are in a position already insanely vulnerable without bringing a racist fuckwad in to instruct them, thankyouverymuch. Your school system failed these people already—I've got a great idea, why don't you send the dregs of your faculty in to fail and betray them again? ASSHOLES.

• What the hell is going on here?

Connor talked about this a couple of days ago, the climate of hatred springing up at McCain/Palin/McCain and Palin rallies. Perhaps a number of McCain/Palin supporters have always been that vociferously racist and nasty—in fact, I'm almost sure that's true—but it does seem clear that recently Palin in particular seems to be fanning the flames. It doesn't scare me so much that "Terrorist!" and "Kill him!" have been shouted as that McCain and Palin seem to have no interest in denouncing such comments, even as it's already clear that these tactics are gaining them no ground.

I mean, for fuck's sake, *Indiana* is a full-scale swing state. It went to Bush by more than 15% in the last two elections, and those who have lived in Illinois with me know how insane it is to imagine that Obama could win Indiana. But he could; McCain is only up by about three percentage points. Obama is up ten points in New Hampshire and five in Virginia. Right now I think he's going to win. As those who have been reading this blog for the last couple of months know, that feeling could change on a dime, but I think he's going to win.

What scares me is that I don't feel like McCain and Palin are trying anymore. These Ayers smear tactics are not working with anyone but their base, and they know it. Nor will a rerun of the Wright ridiculousness do anything productive with swing voters. They are not trying to win right now. They are trying to incite hatred. Serious, vociferous hatred.

I don't think I'm going to feel safe until Obama is inaugurated.

Friday Poetry: Wilfred Owen

2008-10-10T15:13:00.003-05:00

First read this in ninth grade history, but when I came upon it again a few months ago I found it startlingly wonderful and resonant. Worth thinking about in an election like this, too …

Wilfred Owen
Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime …
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Get Me a Beer, Bitch!

2008-10-09T13:24:00.001-05:00

I received this article from my friend M, with whom I'll be travelling to New Mexico for the election, this morning. In it, Thomas Friedman takes Sarah Palin to task on her debate statement that paying higher taxes is not patriotic.

Good for Thomas Friedman. Everybody should be doing that.

On an ideological level, the fuss over taxes has puzzled me for some time. You live in America. American businesses are paying you money. American towns, cities, lands are your place(s) of residence. American armies are (hypothetically) fighting to protect your interests. You drive on highways the federal and state government built, you fly in air the federal government controls. You're obviously gettin' something out of this, and it makes sense that you should have to put something back into it. Yes, I favor tax protest as a form of political speech, but only when it is done very precisely, to represent that you dislike about the government's actions—that is, if you know exactly which taxes go where and refuse to pay only the taxes that support those programs to the existence of which you object. But if you're using the resources of the nation to gain your means, you should be putting some of those means back into the nation. To me the default, and we have reached the point at which John McCain and I diverge, is that the more money you're getting paid by American businesses, the more American land you own, the more American places whose resources you use, the more you owe to all those places, and therefore the more means you should be putting back into America. At the very least I favor a flat rate for income tax, at the most something more like what Mr. Obama is talking about.

But Sarah Palin, and this middle class she ostensibly represents, move(s) far beyond not agreeing with me. To Sarah Palin, paying taxes is unpatriotic. Let me say it again: UNPATRIOTIC.

I've proposed very complex definitions for "patriotism" and "patriotic" elsewhere on this blog. Let's put them aside for now. Let's assume that the definition of patriotism is the one more simply used. Like let's say "patriotic" means "loving your country."

Putting more money into the care and feeding of your country, according to the logic of the woman who currently has an 8% chance of being the President of the United States**, means you don't love your country.

The "bitch" in this post's title does not refer to Palin, although I would comfortably use that word to refer to her. It actually refers to America, and the relationship that Palin and her supporter-compatriots seem to think that we as residents and citizens of America should have with America. By Palin's measure, the way in which we should demonstrate our love for our country is by taking as much from it as possible.

Allow me to suspect that the First Dude puts up with an awful lot of bullshit.

My extremely ignorant opinion of the bailout is not terrific. It seems to me that the argument is the bigger you get, the more inherently dependent the government is upon you, and the more the government therefore needs to support you although you have felt no need to support the government. That seems icky to me, particularly when there are few provisions to ensure that the exact same thing will not happen again. As I said, I know little; I have no understanding of what would happen without the bailout. But the notion that we should lead big businesses to assume they can rely on bailouts at this scale without asking them to put in enough to support this possibility for all of *their* compatriots feels insane.

Sarah Palin is saying that an ideal relationship between country and citizen is an abusive relationship. She asks for a relationship in which the nation, and by extension the nation's poorest/neediest/least visible citizens (this is to say, those who have the least means not intimately linked to the means of the country) gives all to the citizens and expects nothing, no support, no response to its own needs. Instead, the country should be satisfied that we love it, because we *say* we love it. After all, don't we talk all the time about how much we love it? Don't we wave flags to symbolize our love? Don't we talk about how no other country can compare to it? Isn't that enough, America? Of course I love you! You should know that by now! Now get me a bailout!

**I'm assuming here that the McCain/Palin ticket has about a 50% chance of winning. Multiply that by John McCain's approximate one in six chance—around 16%—of dying in office.

Friday Poetry: Gertrude Stein

2008-10-03T07:24:00.002-05:00

I'm finding this one interesting. She always feels a little obscure to me, but it's hard to stop thinking about pieces of her writing sometimes.

Anyway.

Gertrude Stein
Scenes from the Door

The Ford
It is earnest.
Aunt Pauline is earnest.
We are earnest.
We are united.
Then we see.

Red Faces
Red flags the reason for pretty flags.
And ribbons.
Ribbons of flags
And wearing material
Reason for wearing material.
Give pleasure.
Can you give me the regions.
The regions and the land.
The regions and wheels.
All wheels are perfect.
Enthusiasm.

What Is This
You can't say it's war.
I love conversation.

Do you like it printed.
I like it descriptive.
Not very descriptive.
Not very descriptive.
I like it to come easily
Naturally
And then.
Crystal and cross.
Does not lie on moss.
The three ships.
You mean washing the ships.
One was a lady.
A nun.
She begged meat
Two were husband and wife.
They had a rich father-in-law to the husband.
he did dry cleaning.
And the third one.
A woman.
She washed.
Clothes.
Then this is the way we were helped.
Not interested
We are very much interested.

Daughter
Why is the world at peace.
This may astonish you a little but when you realise how easily Mrs. Charles Bianco sells the work of American painters to American millionaires you will recognise that authorities are constrained to be relieved. Let me tell you a story. A painter loved a woman. A musician did not sing. A South African loved books. An American was a woman and needed help. Are Americans the same as incubators. But this is the rest of the story. He became an authority.

A Radical Expert
Can you please by asking what is expert. And then we met one another. I do not think it right. Marksman. Expert. Loaf. Potato bread. Sugar Card. Leaf. And mortar. What is the meaning of white wash. The upper wall.
That sounds well.
And then we sinned.
A great many jews say so.

America
Once in English they said America. Was it English to them.
Once they said Belgian.
We like a fog.
Do you for weather.
Are we brave.
Are we true.
Have we the national colour.
Can we stand ditches.
Can we mean well.
Do we talk together.
Have we red cross.
A great many people speak of feet.
And socks.

To Thine Own Self

2008-10-02T15:56:00.001-05:00

Attempting to take all emotion out of this, using logic and only logic: is there a logical argument by which one person's sexual orientation—in and of itself, behavior nonwithstanding—could cause genuine harm to another person?

Racking my brains, I don't think it could. But when I was visiting Memphis about six months ago, my writing partner and I, in another one of our strange debates about sex and sexual orientation in which neither of us has any real illusion of bringing the other about to his or her side, discussed the Protestant notion of good works, the evangelical idea that you really do have to do your best work to bring the world to God.

Oddly enough, this jives with Hannah Arendt. In a way that freaks me out a little, so I want to think it through.

Contemporary American society is incredibly contradictory on the topic of individualism and self-determination (as evidenced by the bailout controversy, among other things). On the one hand we're encouraged to be the freewheelin', frontier-blazin' capitalist that any red-blooded American or American wannabe should, you know, wanna be, but on the other hand we're held in thrall to a moral system that remains, in spite of everything, a culture of sexy Puritanism. And on the other other hand, a constant social mantra that has run through the last ten years of my life, taking over from its predecessor "no offense," is, "No judgment." We can blaze our own trails, and we can do what we want, as long as we're absolutely sure God thinks it's the right thing, but if someone else is doing what they want and we know God doesn't think it's the right thing, well, it's for God to judge, just make sure those people know that God thinks it's wrong and they'll get their comeuppance in the afterlife. But no judgment.

Makes one's head spin, no?

I recognize that the Jerry Falwell and Fred Phelps crowds are not exactly preaching "no judgment," but I have learned from my self-declared no-longer-gay-never-really-gay-just-damaged writing partner that the movement against homosexuality in the Christian community has much deeper and more complex roots than such rabble-rousers, most of which roots are, indeed, based on this principle of "no judgment," that what they consider love through God is the only solution to such problems as homosexuality. Noteworthy, too, is that the contradiction is present for everyone, on all sides. Liberalism is pretty much based on this "no judgment" principle, and in that light the right wing has a leg to stand on about "the liberal media": twenty-four-hour news networks are for the most part, and almost have to be, networks of "no judgment," of heads talking at each other and sharing their polarized views until everything is neutralized.

Enter Hannah Arendt (okay, she entered sixty years ago, but still), who says, "FUCK YEAH judgment!" By avoiding judgment, she argues persuasively in Eichmann in Jerusalem, we end up condoning Nazism. "Judge not lest ye be judged," biblically or in day-to-day life, itself neutralizes, assumes that none of us is, in reality, better than another. And I am comfortable saying I am a better person than, say, Adolf Eichmann. It doesn't mean that I shouldn't endeavor to understand Adolf Eichmann, to know what brought him to that point, and that I shouldn't know what Arendt calls the "banality of evil," that we're not just talking about Hitler but the thousands upon thousands who brought him to power and supported him thereafter, that *those* people, rather than the one crazy demagogical dictator, are what's required to make evil work, but it does mean that I can, acceptably, judge him, if I have assessed him honestly and myself equally honestly and have a clear notion of what separates me from him.

The real problems I have, then, are problems of hypocrisy. Not simply the dramatic and typical Mark Foley genre of hypocrisy, but the sort of everyday hypocrisy that "judge not lest ye be judged" intends (I believe) to counter. The problems are people who speak against divorce while on their third marriage, those who speak against gay adoption without addressing social ills that lead to abandoned children or what makes people good or bad parents (less the classist or heterosexist definitions often forced upon those ideas), those who preach "judge not lest ye be judged" in the manner that a seventh-grader might hastily add "no judgment" after asking a classmate if she needed a hairbrush or some dental floss. That means that if James Dobson wants to hate gays, James Dobson can fuckin' well go ahead and hate gays. His call. Some people do. You can't please everyone. But James Dobson fuckin' well better be paying the rest of the Bible attention as intricate as he pays Leviticus 18:22, and he better be willing to offer his virgin daughters to every gay man he meets. (Objection sustained. The jury will disregard that statement.) He better be putting "adulterers" on an exact par with "homosexual offenders." He better be following everything else to the letter (and decontextualizing every other Bible verse he encounters). If he could possibly be doing all of that, which of course he couldn't, I would not have a problem with his judgment.

I guess my problems are also problems of origination. Which is to say, I am perfectly comfortable hating Nazis or their contemporary equivalent, but I feel better considering my hatred reactionary. Then again, I suppose if Dobson and his cohorts genuinely believe queers are trying to convert the entire world to homosexuality (which obviously makes perfect sense in every way), they might think they have a similar leg to stand on.

But they don't. Why? Where does being queer fit into all of this, then? If you really, genuinely believe that all homosexuals are out to convert the entire world, then the sin, as you call it, is your business. But there is a lot of concrete evidence to argue against that notion, whatever else you believe about homosexuality; even if you're basing yourself on Sodom & Gomorrah it's shaky. Next question: do the sins of everyone else reflect upon you? Even if the sins are not about to be inflicted on every person in the world, even if homosexuals are not on a conversion mission, if "homosexual behavior" (as distinct from "homosexuality" in the New Christian Ethic school) is indeed sinful, are you a worse person if you don't do your damnedest to stop other people from committing this sin?

In general, I am startled to find that I believe the answer is yes, though obviously I believe different things to be "sins" than the Dobson crowd does. I therefore to a certain degree believe that "if you're not with us, you're against us." How the hell can one believe that "to a certain degree"? Well, because it depends on what your definition of "with us" is. I am, for example, against terrorism. Which ought to satisfy the Bush definition of "with us," and yet does not. Curious.

So back to queer people and James Dobson. *If* you are the non-hypocrite I posited above, and *if* you genuinely believe that homosexuality is a sin rather than just something you're uncomfortable with in yourself, *if* you believe it is your duty to do all you can towards creating a sin-free world, and *if* you are not committing other sins (like, say, murder) in your desire to purge one sin, I think I would really be okay with your behavior.

I'd judge it, and I'd hate it, but I'd be okay with its existence.

I've seen nothing in my experience of anti-gay rhetoric or organizations so far that truly fit with the above criteria, but hey. It's probably not impossible.

Also, at the bottom, judgment and hatred are not equivalent. Judgment can be made on a practical level—which is to say, I can, indeed, judge someone's actions without hating the person. And honestly, I think I can hate a person without judging her, though that one's a little more complicated. Hatred is much more difficult to control, and also, unfortunately, much more destructive. I hate very rarely. I judge —well, not "constantly," but often enough. And I don't mind that either.

In Which We Call Attention to Connor's Brilliance, Part the Second

2008-10-01T07:46:00.002-05:00

This one he actually did create, and I like it.

Yes, expedient action is necessary. But we've all seen where executive-generated super-expedient legislative action has gotten us in the last eight years, and I think we could do without that in the future. I would rather the 110th Congress, and the 43rd administration, not use its last hours to render the Obama administration virtually ineffectual.

Unless, of course, this is a … no, I'm not going to go into conspiracy theory here. I am not going to think about conspiracies in a way that takes time away from my thinking about anything else, because *that* makes them more likely to happen. And right now I am thinking about something else.

A "bailout" needs to include real oversight, real fiscal thoughtfulness, and real penalties for those who—if not deliberately then certainly knowingly—sank the ship. It needs to be bailing out the nation itself, not Wall Street, and it needs to take real steps to prevent this from happening again. I appreciate the balls shown by the holdouts in this vote, whatever party they belong to, because it demonstrates that the blind panic Bush was able to stir up in the first term-and-a-half of his presidency is no longer a driving force for either party. I hope the Senate can craft useful bailout legislation, and in the meantime I'm going to adapt and send Connor's letter to my elected representatives in Illinois and New York.

In Which We Call Attention to Connor's Brilliance

2008-09-29T16:22:00.003-05:00

Because this is rather earthshatteringly awesome.

I don't have much to say about the bailout, though I do wish I'd become more dedicated to my autodidactic economics course earlier, rather than struggling to get back on it now. For the most part, it's simply the blatant hypocrisy that gets to me. And it says alarming things about a society that the American economy could, even if it's just in the minds of many, be entirely dependent on the collapse or artificial shoring up of a few big companies.

That's all I know until I teach myself more.

Friday Poetry: Margaret Atwood

2008-09-26T09:10:00.001-05:00

Margaret Atwood
Siren Song

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:

the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see the beached skulls

the song nobody knows
because anyone who has heard it
is dead, and the others can't remember.

Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?

I don't enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical

with these two feathery maniacs,
I don't enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique

at last. Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time.

How's It Going to End?

2008-09-25T15:49:00.005-05:00

Be afraid.

Be very afraid.

In the second article, a member of the InfraGard discusses a meeting of business owners that he attended. “Then they said when—not if—martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn’t be prosecuted."

I do have to keep reminding myself of this: that no matter how involved or invested or even just interested I am in electoral politics, there is a really good, reasonable chance that there will be no election.

To break it down logically, to not be a conspiracy theorist, I want to break this down again.

First, the Military Commissions Act, passed in 2006 and supported fully by one Mr. McCain (among others, obviously), allows the executive branch full discretion over the treatment of enemy combatants, suspends the right of habeas corpus completely for enemy combatants, and allows the president to decide, without supervision, oversight, or checks, who is and who is not an enemy combatant. In other words, a United States citizen may be declared an enemy combatant at any time, and thus be imprisoned indefinitely, be refused access to an attorney, be unable to notify her family, and be subjected to all the abuses committed at Abu Ghraib. This is not in any way exaggeration or hyperbole, to both of which I recognize I am prone. This is simple legal fact. It could happen right now, to anyone. Nothing in the law calls for the President to justify his actions.

The USA-PATRIOT Act II allows for warrantless federal wiretapping of any citizen. You know, those citizens I mentioned above, who could, at any time, be declared enemy combatants and indefinitely imprisoned. Also not exaggeration.

National Security Presidential Directive 51 provides that in the case of a "catastrophic emergency," defined as "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions," which event the executive branch has the power to identify on its own, the executive branch may declare a state of emergency and a "continuity of government," meaning that the current government will remain undisrupted, unchanged, in such a situation. Meaning the current President stays in office. Nowhere in the declassified part of the document does the Directive provide a time limit for this state of emergency ("a period up to 30 days or until normal operations can be resumed"; italics mine); nowhere does it mention who can declare the end of it.

What is clear to me, and I hope is clear to everyone else, is that there exists a substantive faction within the government that seeks to make the United States into what I would call a "military-industrial dictatorship," a nation of great military and industrial power and minimal civil liberties, through which a few groups could gain even greater wealth and power than is already available to them.

What is not clear to me, and I doubt it's clear to much of anyone outside of the government, is exactly how far this has gotten. Yes, the MCA has been in place, but we have no idea if and/or how many people have actually been arrested and detained under it. Yes, there are a lot of very suspicious connections (awfully convenient to have a stateside military force and business leaders trained to kill when the President could, legally, declare martial law at any time, don't you think?), but we have no idea who, in the government, is fighting against these laws, what other lawsuits or committees or provisions have been created to keep this force in check.

It is reasonable to say that there is a chance this election will be legally prevented from happening. It is foolish to think otherwise. Let's have that out there. Mr. McCain's "suspension of his campaign" could well be a precursor to such a move. My next post, after Friday Poetry, will be about concrete ideas for what to do should that occur.

It is also possible that a John McCain administration would keep all the above-listed policies of a Bush administration, and that several of these disasters would occur under him, all the more so should he perish and Ms. Palin take the helm. Given that McCain was an advocate of the Military Commissions Act, we have no reason to think otherwise.

There's at least an equal chance that the election will take place as scheduled, and that these breaches of the system of checks and balances will be simply a one-hit wonder. We do not know. We, as civilians, have know way of knowing. But we ought to be prepared and educated, or as prepared and educated as we can be, for either situation.

Question for the Ages

2008-09-22T14:56:00.002-05:00

I'm sure many of you have seen the Email that's going around, suggesting that you send a $10 donation to Planned Parenthood in Sarah Palin's name. I've been excited about it, but today got into an interesting debate with my mother. A friend of hers had responded, saying that it's wise to keep the "abortion issue" out of the limelight until the election—"if we can just focus on the economy we have a chance," and the priority is just to get Obama elected.

However much I like the Planned Parenthood idea, I wouldn't be deeply disturbed or upset to lose the opportunity. However, something is rubbing me very much the wrong way about the above argument, and I am finding it very difficult to articulate.

Little help?

Oh, It Amazes Me

2008-09-20T21:23:00.002-05:00

I had a lovely, lovely week seeing my lovely, lovely friends and family in Los Angeles. As I was leaving the aeroport with my suitcase, it occurred to me that it would be very, very easy for someone to just walk in from the arrivals area, pick up a suitcase—say, mine—before I saw it, leave with said suitcase, and there's nothing that the aeroport staff, myself, or really anyone could do. I have, however, never once heard of this happening. I'm sure it has a couple of times, but I've spent a calculable percentage of my life in planes and the resulting aeroports, and I've never even heard such a story.

About a month and a half ago I took a train to Boston. It occurred to me then that it would be very easy for pretty much anyone to set up a bomb on a train, or bring a gun onto a train and hold every passenger up. I have heard of only two train bombings in my lifetime, and while I wish in no way to minimize the suffering of those who endured them, via personal experience or simply in their city, it's kind of stunning that, in the dangerous world I have long been taught exists, this hasn't happened on a fairly constant basis.

I don't think the world really is like we (at least, I) have been taught to think it is.

I know that many, from Lenore at Free-Range Kids to Barry Glassner, have considered this idea long before myself, and I don't really intend to treat it in-depth now. But I have been thinking lately about how foolish a credo is "never talk to strangers," how many errors we make in teaching that to children. "Don't go anywhere with a stranger" is perfectly reasonable, but if the flower girl at the wedding is asked a question by one of the bridesmaids at the wedding and feels the need to turn around and say, "Mommy, can I talk to her?" before answering, how can she possibly ask for help in a(n extremely statistically rare) dangerous situation? I don't like that we're building a culture (not to mention several elections) out of a lack of trust in the world. I've never loved a murder victim or a murderer, have never personally been a victim of, or even threatened with, serious physical and/or sexual violence, have rarely (to my knowledge) been in the presence of a loaded gun, have been robbed only twice in my life. In other words, I do understand that it's easy for me to say. But I would prefer to live in the world where I completely trust my beloved acroyogi friend to fly me and each of my family members and friends in turn, never wavering for a second in her strength, focus or joy. I would rather live in the world where the two days I spent hiking with two college friends, hearkening back to the days we spent hiking five years ago in South Africa except that we're all much more complex, compelling people now and have a much deeper history to our friendship, are fuckin' well worth twisting my ankle for.

There are horrible things in the world. I have no interest in denying that. There are also glorious, transcendent things and simply fascinating things. If we among the privileged (generally the folks reading blogs, certainly mine) could find it in ourselves to structure our lives more around the glorious, transcendent things and the fascinating things than the horrible things, even while acknowledging that all are present, I think it would have an impact on what the world is, and how it works. Beyond some vague definitions of karma, I don't know how yet, but I intend to keep thinking about it, and either way I am confident that it's true. Not to make this a campaign post, because it really isn't, but HOPE is not too shabby a message. Or promise.

In fact, I kind of feel like making that promise now. I promise to hope. There will be several incredibly politically negative posts forthcoming in the next six weeks. What with the near-constant barrage of news, there will be near-constant anxieties and frustrations and confusions and tons of unforeseen personal crises in my life and, by extension, the lives of my loved ones. That's how we roll. But I promise to hope, because I want to. That's the way I'd rather live my life; in fact, I think it's the only way I can, sustainably and completely, live my life.

Friday Poetry: Osip Mandelstam

2008-09-19T11:58:00.002-05:00

A post in which she keeps her word, but not in exactly the way she intended.

Anyway, here's a poem.

Osip Mandelstam
Whoever Finds a Horseshoe

We see a forest and say:
There's a sea-going wood,
rose-colored pines free of
shaggy burdens right to their tops—they ought to
be creaking in a storm, their
lonely umbrella tips
in a white rage of treeless air. But fitted
square to the deck, they'd stand the salt wind's heel.

And sailors
Unconquerably hungry for space,
dragging delicate chronometers over damp ruts,
measure the earth's pull against
the seas' rough face.

And breathing the fragrance
of resinous tears, oozing from a ship's planks,
feasting our eyes on riveted
boards shaped into bulkheads,
not by the Bethlehem carpenter, but the other one
(Father of voyages, and the sailor's friend),
we say:
They stood on the uncomfortable ground
too, as on a donkey's spine,
their tips forgetting their roots,
stood on famous mountains,
rustled under sweet rainwater,
forever offering heaven, which never accepts,
their noble load for a pinch of salt.

How to begin, with what?
Everything chirps and rocks.
The air quivers with comparisons.
No word is better than another word,
the earth honks with metaphor,
and light carts
of bright bird flocks, straining, thick,
break apart,
like snorting circus horses.

Whoever sets names in a song is triple-blessed;
songs decorated with names
live the longest—
marked off by a headband
that cures frenzy, a stupefying scent,
strong, too strong, perhaps a man's presence,
perhaps some powerful animal's fur,
or only the breath of mint, rubbed between palms.
The air can be dark like water, and everything swims like fish,
pushing fins against the dense, resilient sphere,
faintly heated, shaking the crystal
where wheels and horses spin,
and the damp black soil of Neyera, plowed every night
with pitchforks, tridents, hoes, and plows.
Air kneaded thick as earth—
you can't leave it, and it's hard to get in.
A rustle runs through the trees, like a child's ball;
children play knucklebones with dead animals' spines.
Our time's brittle chronology runs out.
Thank you for what we have had:
I was wrong, I lost the way, my count went bad.
Our time rang like a golden globe, cast
hollow, held by no one,
and answering, to any touch, "Yes," and "No."
The way a child answers:
"I'll give you the apple," or "I won't give you the apple."
And as he speaks his face perfectly mirrors his voice.

The sound's still ringing, though what made it has gone.
A horse in the dust, snorting a lather,
but the steep bend of his neck
remembers running with legs flung out—
not just four of them,
but as many as the stones in the road,
all renewed in four shifts
in proportion as hot hooves pushed off the ground.

So
whoever finds a horseshoe
blows off the dust
and rubs it with wool, and it shines,
and then
he hangs it over his door
to rest,
never again to strike sparks out of flint.

Human lips with nothing left to say
keep the shape of the last word spoken,
and arms keep the feeling of weight
though the jug splashed half empty, carrying it home.

What I'm saying, now, is not being said by me,
it's dug from the ground, like grains of petrified wheat.

Some
coins show lions,
some
show a head;
flat cakes of copper, gold, bronze,
lie in the ground, all equal.
Their time tried to bite them through, here are the teeth-marks.

Time cuts me down like a clipped coin
and I'm no longer sufficient unto myself.

Tr. Burton Raffel & Alla Burago

We've Got Issues

2008-09-12T12:19:00.002-05:00

Don Hall has a good post about prejudging and its discontents, and a very specific candidate-to-candidate view comparison broken down by issue. I think you should read it. A lot of us are falling for this personality contest, myself not discluded, and the specifics here are worth thinking about.

I promise, I promise, I PROMISE that my next post will not be about the presidential election. There will be lots of them (clearly—have I *ever* had this many posts between Friday Poetries?), but I need to make sure I'm using my brain as I want to.

Either way, I'm in Los Angeles and going camping this weekend, so until Monday there will not be any posts at all.

Friday Poetry: W.S. Merwin

2008-09-12T00:03:00.000-05:00

W.S. Merwin
Burning the Cat

In the spring, by the big shuck-pile
Between the bramble-choked brook where the copperheads
Curled in the first sun, and the mud road,
All at once it could no longer be ignored.
The season steamed with an odor for which
There has never been a name, but it shouted above all.
When I went near, the wood-lice were in its eyes
And a nest of beetles in the white fur of its armpit.
I built a fire there by the shuck-pile
But it did no more than pop the beetles
And singe the damp fur, raising a stench
Of burning hair that bit through the sweet day-smell.
Then thinking how time leches after indecency,
Since both grief is indecent and the lack of it,
I went away and fetched newspaper,
And wrapped it in kerosene and put it in
With the garbage on a heaped nest of sticks:
It was harder to burn than the peels of oranges,
Bubbling and spitting, and the reek was like
Rank cooking that drifted with the smoke out
Through the budding woods and clouded the shining dogwood.
But I became stubborn: I would consume it
Though the pyre should take me a day to build
And the flames rise over the house. And hours I fed
That burning, till I was black and streaked with sweat;
And poked it out then, with charred meat still clustering
Thick around the bones. And buried it so
As I should have done in the first place, for
The earth is slow, but deep, and good for hiding;
I would have used it if I had understood
How nine lives can vanish in one flash of a dog's jaws,
A car or a copperhead, and yet how one small
Death, however reckoned, is hard to dispose of.

Oh Michigan Michigan State.

2008-09-11T20:41:00.006-05:00

Courtesy of HelsBells:

You've got to be fucking kidding me.

You will be unable to VOTE in this county in Michigan State if your home has been foreclosed? Excuse me?

I have to say, I've taken the allegations of voter fraud in the last two elections with a pinch of salt. I mean, I know that some fucked-up shit went on in Ohio, particularly now that I've heard it firsthand from an Ohio acquaintance, and obviously the hanging chads were what they were, but I have generally believed that the allegations of fraud came from those of us who would simply be too pained to believe that 51% of their fellowcountrymen actually wanted Bush in office.

Now, I'm not so sure.

Mind distributing the above link really widely? And keeping those cards and letters comin' to the state of Michigan? Thanks. I appreciate it.

EDIT, one day later:

Detroit Free Press says the above link may have been a lie.

What do we think? I don't know what I think.

Except that I think we ought to be doing some reeeeeeal careful poll-watching in Michigan, one way and another. I might consider making that a priority.

Both Sides Now

2008-09-10T10:25:00.000-05:00

My father just sent me this, an open letter from a Wasilla resident about Ms. Palin, and the flurry of responses that followed.

The letter is interesting and appreciated. Not terrifically enlightening, at this point, but I'm very glad it happened.

It's the responses that intrigue me. First of all, there are a couple of people who casually, easily refer to Mr. Obama as "Hussain" [sic], and one who says "Osama—oops, Obama!" I mean, yes, these are angry people, but I had no idea that had become so common. Which just goes to show, I guess, exactly how much influence Rush Limbaugh has. Then there's the vociferous belief that Obama wants us to be dependent on foreign oil.

There are plenty of leftist, pro-Obama, anti-Palin (have we noticed that anti-McCain, as a concept, has been kind of eclipsed in the last two weeks?) responses as well, of course, but I already knew what they said. Except the mommy ones, I suppose—the "I can't support Sarah Palin because I'M A MOM and a REAL mom would NEVER do what she's doing!" complexes. Which I can't say I am any more behind.

I forget, in spite of my best efforts to the contrary, that I have lived in liberal enclaves ALL MY LIFE. New York City. Chicago. Very brief interludes in Vermont and western Massachusetts. Three months in South Africa, whose majority leadership at that point in time (2003) was substantially further left on a classically defined political spectrum than McCain/Palin (though, to be fair, probably more so than Obama/Biden as well). I know nothing.

To suggest that the media was silent on the Obama-Rezko affair, and to consider Bill Ayers more of a terrorist than, say, Blackwater, seems ludicrous to me. And most likely to all sixteen of my readers. But IT'S NOT LIKE THAT.

The time, I believe, has come for me to really volunteer in swing states. I'm looking on the Obama website for trips I can take. The whole liberal urban elites argument holds some water, and I'll be much better off if I can admit that. But it's certainly not all there is to it. At least I don't believe it is. But it's time I tried to prove it.

Hey, By the Way

2008-09-10T10:23:00.002-05:00

Did I tell you I'm going to Ghana in January?

'Cause I am.

For six months.

I'll be starting a theater program for Ghanaian students north of Accra through a literacy organization.

Just wanted to share that information!

Marshmallow Murders

2008-09-07T20:23:00.000-05:00

I need a break from posting about the election. Time for a silly list. This was conceived and begun by Connor, Jess and myself, and then received other contributions from Mikey, Silvana, and Leah.

Marshmallow Murders

1) Marshmallows down your windpipe
2) Boiled to death in hot fluff
3) The Human S'more
4) Lowered into a vat of liquid marshmallows that cools around you—buried inside giant marshmallow
5) Crushed to death by a GIANT marshmallow
6) Fed marshmallows until your system crashes
7) Pour marshmallow fluff off an overpass to cause a car wreck
8) Stuck in marshmallows far from other food source until you starve to death
9) Surgery replaces vital organs with marshmallows
10) Poisoned marshmallows in Lucky Charms
11) Marshmallow fluff IV drip/deep-vein marshmallow thrombosis
12) Decapitation using a discus-shaped marshmallow
13) Kill someone in a non-marshmallow-related gory way … while dressed as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man!
14) Fill shoes with marshmallows and throw overboard. Marshmallows will float, so as soon as the thrashing victim tires s/he will be suspended head down in the water
15) A hand grenade in a bag of marshmallows
16) Stuff marshmallows up the nose, Egyptian-style, until brains ooze out the ears
17) Distribute a large quantity of marshmallows about a private golf course. Then leave an empty bag of marshmallows among the belongings of the person you wish to be killed. The resultant frustration of the other ball-seeking golfers will make tyhem pummel the target into a ruddy, bloody pudding.
18) Fly a marshmallow into a crowded building.
19) Use marshmallows to lure carnivorous insects
20) Fluffing and Feathering
21) Give marshmallow to killer baby, then try to take it away
22) Convince Parker Bros. to create a new Clue weapon

Palin(g) in Comparison, Part the Third

2008-09-06T10:01:00.002-05:00

This post written by guest blogger Jon Stewart.

Friday Poetry: E.E. Cummings

2008-09-05T09:27:00.001-05:00

E.E. Cummings

l(a

le
af
fa

ll

s)
one
l

iness

Memoriam

2008-09-04T12:10:00.004-05:00

Last week my friend Lawrence's father passed away after a brief illness. I wanted to take a moment to commemorate him.

I wish there were some way to make death easier for myself or for people in my life. I don't think there is. But my thoughts are with his family.

Palin(g) in Comparison, Part the Second

2008-09-04T09:20:00.000-05:00

Some interesting comments were made on my previous post that you should read. You should also read this post.

Last night at Sarah's, I watched Giuliani and Palin speak. (Before that we had been watching Freaks and Geeks, which I liked much better.) I realized as we turned to it that I have never watched the RNC or, indeed, the bulk of Republican events. As a political thinker who wishes to be fair and balanced and thoughtful and educated in her assessments, that seems a glaring absence on my part.

I will continue to do it when I can. But if last night was anything to go by, it's going to be really, really hard.

First off, Rudy Giuliani is a really nasty man. (The last two links are last night's speech.) I have tried for many years to respect his meager contributions to my mental health and that of many others post-September 11, so far did it surpass George Bush's, that I forgot that I had real reason to loathe him as I did during his mayoral administration, when I was in high school. Sure, I was quoted in New York Newsday saying he was a fascist when I was seventeen, and that might have been a little rhetorically extreme, but it's got nothing on him. First of all, Giuliani started a huge Republican joke about "community organizers." I have never heard the term spoken with greater contempt than I did last night. It was alarming. Naturally, as a man with executive experience, Giuliani would have a great deal of disdain for those he governed, and he was certainly known to run roughshod over all community interests during his mayoral administration, but to take potshots at any non-governmental leadership experience and then claim that John McCain has outsider status by means of being a "maverick" is a little confusing. His attack on the U.N. was unpleasant (and tonal—don't rely on the text of the speech for most of what I'm saying here, but please do watch the speech if your stomach can take it). Trying to construe Palin as a representative of a new generation of politician while putting down Obama was equally complicated. And I'm not sure what he meant by "the party that believes in giving workers the right to work."

For the most part, though, the problem was not in transcribable content so much as the nasty, nasty pleasure he took at delivering insults, at making people laugh at other people. Giuliani is by nature a school bully. I know that sounds like an abstract, fuzzywuzzy liberal thing today, but Giuliani fundamentally comes into politics with a contempt for others. This is not a man you want being your leader or endorsing your leaders.

My first memory of a campaign commercial is the commercials that the David Dinkins campaign ran during Giuliani's first, unsuccessful mayoral run. I was about five, and I can't remember any of the images or ideas associated with the commercial. However, it ended with text appearing on the screen, text I could read even as it was also read aloud by a calm male voice. "Why are people afraid of Rudy Giuliani?" it asked, and the words dissolved into the answer: "Because they should be."

Yes. Yes, they should.

But Giuliani was only there to introduce, and my concerns about him pale in comparison to my concerns about the Republican veep nominee.

The scariest thing for me about Palin's speech last night was her constant endorsement of the erosion of legislative power. "To use the power of veto in defense of public interest—and as a chief executive, I can tell you it works." More signing statements, here we come. This on top of Giuliani's efforts to tout her executive experience (and why, exactly, does McCain's military leadership count as "executive experience" where Obama's community leadership does not?) makes me realize more about why Palin was chosen, and the pandering to female voters was just for bonus points.

This woman is a social conservative in the truest sense of the word. She's charismatic (yeah, the voice is annoying, but not nearly so annoying as people have been saying), and/but she is not a politician is the manner of McCain—or even, in a certain way, Obama. She's a zealot politically, but she's a zealot with charisma and accessibility, accessibility that, yes, comes in part from her gender. She has staying power and a record of putting her money where her mouth is with regards to her views (I'm not just talking about her baby and her daughter's soon-to-be baby—I think I need to do a separate Bristol Palin post anyway—but also about her working-class story, her "hockey mom" views, and the fine line she walked about touting her own fiscal abilities without trashing Bush).

Simultaneously trying to paint Obama as a member of the Washington élite and too inexperienced for the job is a little bit confusing. And of course, the elitist thing is coded racism: again, nobody minds that McCain is also a "Washington insider," and Hillary, now that she's lost, is not a worthy target.

Make no mistake: a McCain-Palin administration would continue all the worst policies of the Bush-Cheney administration. And should McCain die, which with five cases of melanoma behind him is not an abstract threat, conservative Christian interests will really, genuinely, fully control the White House. Even if he doesn't die, we are looking at the continued and fully accepted erosion of the balance of powers. That really was the scariest thing for me: the full realization that it's not just the Bush administration that feels this way, it really is the party. When Palin said of Obama, "Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America ... he's worried that someone won't read them their rights?" the crowd cheered. For quite a while. Given that John McCain wrote and sponsored a bill in 2006 that allows the government to declare any American citizen an enemy combatant with no need for justification, and George Bush signed that bill into law, those cheers may well be the scariest real-time things I have heard in my lifetime.

All her statements about Obama's tax plan were totally deceitful. She made it sound as though he would do for all Americans what he has explicitly stated he plans to do only for the wealthiest 5%. He has promised not increased Congressional spending but redistribution of the budget. And on victory in Iraq: didn't Bush declare that several years ago? Did I miss something?

I think Dickerson articulates well both why we should worry and where she might fail in this article; a few days ago the same publication shared interesting thoughts about why the Palins can be blue-collar when their income is probably five to six times that of the average American family.

Out of fairness and out of general interest: Piper Palin is nearly as cute as Sasha Obama. Several of the points Giuliani made about Obama's changing positions—on wiretapping, on public financing for the campaign—were fair, but like anybody who supports McCain has a leg to stand on with "flip-flopping" anymore. (You know, for that matter, what really bugs me is not politicians changing their positions, but the it-does-not-exist-it-never-existed manner in which those changes are consistently made. Why can't they address it directly?)

And on the catty front: between Giuliani and McCain (and Dubya, for that matter), I'm going to make an official declaration that Republican men over the age of fifty should not smile. It's creepy as FUCK when they do.

This whole blogging the conventions thing is new to me, and I keep worrying that I am responding purely out of panic. I think I'm fairly rational, though, in spite of the deep visceral fear that came in last night. The one thing it was good for is that I have ceased, for the moment, to worry about the convergence of the two parties. I'm still not wild about the limitations inherent to the two-party system, but stop me if I ever come close to referring to the Republicrats or anything of the kind. I am not a Democrat by default, I am a Democrat because Republicans espouse some politics and worldviews that I do not, or cannot, get behind, and the Democratic party supports some things I really believe in.

Last night Sarah (my friend, not Palin) also told me that McCain opposed the GI Bill expansion, because he was concerned that it would encourage people to leave the military. You know, after their tour of duty. I was shocked to find myself crying, actually weeping, at that knowledge.

As far as I'm concerned, the GI Bill is one of the rare class equalizers in America. For McCain to wish its demise, for any reason, belies any street cred he's gained with Palin as a military mom or working-class. The level of hypocrisy inherent to this stance stuns and scares me.

Palin(g) in Comparison

2008-08-29T14:17:00.002-05:00

Holy shit.

The stupid part of me is glad I had it on record that I thought fearfully of this prospect several days ago, but I'd've been so much happier to be wrong.

I know bubkas about Ms. Palin except what's written in the above-linked article, so I'll have to learn some more. Chances are she's not even that bad. I will probably be killed by many friends for saying this, but I'm not even positive that abortion views are a make-or-break for me. I do support the existence of abortion rights, but on a level I believe to be somewhat more pragmatic than visceral—that is to say, there is something that has always, in spite of everything, felt hollow to me about the "my body, my choice" rhetoric and concept, but I don't believe that we are a society that can function well without women having the right to safe abortions. However, I don't think we're functioning all that well now, either. Nor does Ralph Reed's public endorsement of any individual make me feel hopeful about him *or* her.

I imagine, honestly, that if I do more research on Gov. Palin I will grow to like her. As I liked Mr. McCain eight years ago. Which clearly is exactly what the McCain campaign intended. Nothing against Mr. Biden, of course, but many on the fence, many who were turned off by the vociferousness of the Democratic primary and/or can't forgive Obama's triumph in that primary despite his former opponent's Tuesday night entreaty, will brake for a congenial female politician.

I know that many who share my general political views will be inclined to dismiss Sarah Palin's womanhood because she's conservative and anti-abortion—to say, as many say of Phyllis Schafly or some other such figure, that she's not a real woman, that she's anti-woman. That, in spite of my intense anger and fear, I want to preemptively disown. Sarah Palin is a woman; she is a real woman, although she does not support abortion rights, and probably a good woman, although she supports a huge natural gas pipeline in the North Slope and will quickly prove tremendously destructive to (Mother) Earth. Though I know it's in large part cheap political pandering that pushed Mr. McCain to this point, I have to appreciate the historicity of this election, and Sarah Palin's position as the Republican vice-presidential candidate contributes to that. The fact that a woman whose views are diametrically opposed to those of many who call themselves feminists is, perversely, a triumph of the feminist movement. Just as Barack Obama disagrees vociferously with, say, Clarence Thomas and Colin Powell. There have been enough inroads made in race and gender relations, inroads I am perfectly willing to attribute entirely to the left, that women and people of color can now campaign as individuals with individual views, not only as representatives of their race. It is a triumph, however perverse, to have Ralph Reed wholeheartedly support the ascension of a female politician. You've got to appreciate it. You've got to have the perspective to appreciate it. In part because that distance may come to be the only way to stay sane, but you do.

Last night, watching Barack Obama speak at the DNC, I got it, for the first time. For the first time, I really, viscerally wanted Obama to be president, not because I wanted him to beat McCain or because I wanted the Republicans out of office or because I appreciated how deeply he inspired people and I wanted that inspiration to have genuine power in the country or because I wanted Sasha and Malia Obama in the White House because they would be the coolest First Daughters EVER. I wanted, and still want, all those things, but I want Barack Obama to be president because I felt like it was possible that he could make this nation, for the first time in my adult life, a place whose present I was genuinely proud to be linked to. (I was still annoyed that his stance against the Iraq War in 2003 was touted, given that he was in the Illinois State Senate at the time and so his views didn't MATTER, but that's a small quibble.) Sarah Palin might turn out to be a wonderful individual and I might be very glad she is the governor of Alaska (although her desire for certain natural-gas pipelines as well as her anti-abortion views at least partially suggest otherwise), but I cannot delude myself into believing a McCain administration, whosoe'er his running mate may be, could create, change or foster a national atmosphere I want. Come 2009, the odds are good that I will have an even harder time being an American than I already do.

This post is somewhat incoherent because I am busy paling in terror at the prospect of a McCain administration, a prospect realer than it has been for months.

Our enemies are SMART. Anyone who is powerful enough to become our enemy rather than just an annoyance or eyesore is always SMART. Why do we forget this so easily?

Friday Poetry: Susan Musgrave

2008-08-29T13:17:00.000-05:00

Susan Musgrave
I Am Not a Conspiracy
Everything Is Not Paranoid
The Drug Enforcement Administration Is Not Everywhere

Paul comes from Toronto on Sunday
to photograph me here in my
new image. We drive to a cornfield
where I stand looking uncomfortable.
The corn-god has an Irish accent—
I can hear him whispering, "Whiskey!"

And the cows. They, too, are in the
corn, entranced like figures in effigy.
Last summer in Mexico I saw purses at the
market made from unborn calfskin—
I've been wondering where they came from
ever since, the soft skins I ran my hands
down over, that made me feel like shuddering.

I was wrong. The corn-god is whispering
"Cocaine!" He is not Irish, after all,
but D.E.A. wanting to do business. He
demands to know the names of all my friends,
wants me to tell him who's dealing.

I confess I'm growing restless as the
camera goes on clicking, standing naked in the
high-heel shoes I bought last summer in Mexico.
"We want names," say the cows, who suddenly
look malevolent. They are tearing the ears
off the innocent corn. They call it an
investigation.

Paul calls to them, "Come here, cows!"
though I don't even want them in the picture.
What Paul sees is something different from
me; my skin feels like shuddering when those
cows run their eyes down over me.

"But didn't you smuggle this poem into Canada?"
asks the cow with the mirrored sunglasses.
"As far as we can tell, this is not a
Canadian poem. Didn't you write it
in Mexico?"

Random Moment of DNC Irritation

2008-08-25T18:25:00.002-05:00

As I was watching the coverage of the DNC on MSNBC, a gentleman said that the Obamas have to walk a fine line about resentment—that is, about being resented—because "it's not so much about race as is is about ordinary Americans saying—how did they get there when I didn't? How did they get an education at Harvard and Princeton when I can't afford college for my own kids?" And so on and so forth, with other similar questions.

Of COURSE that's about race and racism, ASSHOLE. You didn't hear anyone asking that about the Bushes or the Kerrys or the Clintons, did you? No, these "ordinary Americans" just assumed that those people/families were entitled to what they had. These "ordinary Americans," including you, dude who's speaking (I forget who it was; he was not particularly famous), refuse to make that assumption about a black family. What do you think that's about other than racism, exactly?

Just sayin'.

Randomly musing on the Hillary holdouts, it suddenly crossed my mind exactly how royally fucked we as Obama supporters are should McCain choose a female running mate. Do we think there's any chance he's going to do that?

And by the by, I want Sasha Obama to be president. She's already got the public speaking thing *down*.

Clean and Articulate

2008-08-24T12:49:00.002-05:00

I like Joe Biden.

I like all the things David Brooks said about him in this article, the day before the pick was announced. David Brooks never ceases to intrigue me; the Times articles that have made me most politically furious have all been by him, but on the other hand, unlike either Kristol or Kristof, you cannot count upon his conforming to an established political orthodoxy. You have to appreciate that.

The one hesitation I have about Biden in relationship to Obama is that I have to wonder where the "clean and articulate" bit went. I would have appreciated it if Obama, in announcing the choice, had said that one reason he picked Biden was because he was clean and articulate, or something along those lines. That would have restored the balance, and established that the choice was personable as well as political. I assume it is anyway—how often does one get to pick one's co-workers at that level, really?—but it's hard to say, and discussing the prospect of Biden with an old friend last night made me realize that neither of us has really let go of that comment, and many others may not have done so either.

He's got the foreign relations street cred (as opposed to the foreign relations LURV; doesn't anybody who's hesitating about Obama's lack of foreign policy experience realize how absolutely adored the man is abroad?) He's got a different religion (I'll be simultaneously amused and terrified if McCain picks his own renegade Joe, Mr. Lieberman), different class background, different racial background (I am very, very sorry that that's important to Obama's electability, but I sadly think it is), and, in spite of the constant foot-in-mouth disease of which "clean and articulate" is evidence, he also seems to me to be trenchant and funny. Being a deep-set Giuliani-hater meself, I was very into Biden's comment that the only sentences Giuliani ever spoke were "a noun, a verb, and 9/11." (I also liked Jon Stewart's response, speaking as the Giuliani campaign: "Joe Biden sucks 9/11." [EDIT: I discovered that this was actually SNL's Weekend Update, not The Daily Show. I regret the error. -Ed.])

And for the most part, I like the sound of his legislative background. I'm not going to claim I love everything, but as someone commenting on Bilal's journal pointed out a while back, the only candidate you're going to love and agree with 100% is yourself, and sadly, you are not running for president. (I'm pretty confident that neither McCain, nor Obama, nor Ralph Nader reads my blog.) Few in the Democratic Party are radical enough for me, but there are many things I like. I like that Mr. Biden was one of the major driving forces behind the Violence Against Women Act. I like that he's helpful with loans and financial aid for college education.

I don't like the way he voted about the war, but I don't like how much of anyone did that. Barbara Boxer was most certainly not on the short-list of veep nominees. So I am going to have to suck it up.

So, I appreciate that Barack Obama has chosen a clean, articulate guy with some wild-cardish tendencies in public speaking. Even though one of those thoroughly obnoxious gaffes was once directed at Mr. Obama himself, I like that Obama is not going a fail-safe route, because it makes the campaign more human. Here's waiting to see who McCain's got in the wings, and hoping Obama's risk pays off.

Friday Poetry: W.D. Snodgrass

2008-08-22T16:48:00.002-05:00

W.D. Snodgrass
Leaving the Motel

Outside, the last kids holler
Near the pool: they'll stay the night.
Pick up the towels; fold your collar
Out of sight.

Check: is the second bed
Unrumpled, as agreed?
Landlords have to think ahead
In case of need,

Too. Keep things straight: don't take
The matches, the wrong keyrings—
We've nowhere we could keep a keepsake—
Ashtrays, combs, things

That sooner or later others
Would accidentally find.
Check: take nothing of one another's
And leave behind

Your license number only,
Which they won't care to trace;
We've paid. Still, should such things get lonely,
Leave in their vase

An aspirin to preserve
Our lilacs, the wayside flowers
We've gathered and must leave to serve
A few more hours;

That's all. We can't tell when
We'll come back, can't press claims,
We would no doubt have other rooms then,
Or other names.

Psycho Killers—Qu'est-ce que c'est?

2008-08-21T10:38:00.000-05:00

Since March, I have had an ebbing and flowing, but constantly existing, obsession with the musical Sweeney Todd. Staying with my mother, a proud owner of Showtime on Demand, I have developed a fixation with Showtime's compelling series Dexter. (Spoilers obviously abound.)

For a peace-lovin' woman, these are kind of curious.

I'm not totally clear on how either one came about.

For Sweeney Todd, it certainly wasn't just seeing the Tim Burton film, though it was perhaps a catalyst. The first time I saw it, when I was relatively unfamiliar with the musical, I enjoyed myself, thought Helena Bonham Carter lent the piece some needed gravitas that it would otherwise lack, and was a little disappointed with Mr. Depp's one-note performance. The second time around (when I saw it with the ever-more-disappointing Edward Scissorhands in a double feature at the Brew'n'View) I felt all the same things a little more strongly, and somehow was hooked enough to compare the three different cast albums (original cast, 2005 revival cast, movie) on iTunes and choose to purchase the revival cast. From that point, I listened to it frequently and started thinking seriously about how it could best be produced, came to believe that everything centered on "A Little Priest" and purchased all the versions of that particular song on iTunes, and discussed my new theories with most of my musical-theatre-knowledgable friends.

WTF, mate?

The best analysis I've come up with, after intense consideration, is that Sweeney Todd, when done well, is about the decision not to move forward/move on. Since I am in the (slightly but not terribly) conflicted process of doing both those things (hopefully the former, definitely the latter), it makes sense that it would have weird echoes for me.

The central relationship of the piece is between Mrs. Lovett, a widowed, struggling pie shop owner past her prime who has long pined for her former tenant, a barber arrested and transported for life (sent to Australia back when Australia was a Brit penal colony) fifteen years before, and Sweeney Todd, that very neighbor under a different name, who was so transported so that the presiding judge could rape his wife without obstacles. When Mrs. Lovett tells Todd this story, including that his wife subsequently poisoned herself and his then-baby daughter became the ward of the same judge, Todd vows revenge, reconstructing his old barber practice to ensnare and murder the judge. Mrs. Lovett, madly in love with him, does all she can to support him. Things don't go as planned, and when the judge escapes from beneath Todd's razor, he snaps and swears revenge on the entire world because "we all deserve to die." Mrs. Lovett then has her own epiphany, realizing that the bodies of Todd's victims should not be disposed of or buried, but rather made into meat pies, allowing her to circumvent the price of meat that has been putting her out of business.

So both a passionate partnership and doom are born. To celebrate, they sing the Act I finale "A Little Priest," in which they imagine cooking and eating men of various professions. (All Todd's victims are men, as only men come in for a shave. Dexter, of course, has no such limitations.)

I have been arguing for the last several months, and continue to argue, that "A Little Priest" is one of the best musical theatre love songs of the last three decades. And it's on the song being played as a love song rather than an artificially comic number, though it is hysterically funny, that the validity/watchability of the piece turns. They're falling in love with each other. Todd is seeing Mrs. Lovett for the first time, finding someone who enters into his darkness willingly; Mrs. Lovett has found a way to connect to Todd, feeling his real attention on her rather than razors and revenge for the first time, and is also enjoying the support for her own sickness, which she has rarely had the chance to reveal.

When I directed Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood in college, a key discovery I made in the middle of the process was that the two "Voices," narrator figures, had to have a passion for each other, creating the other characters and scenarios in the play as part of the fruit of their love. So it is with "A Little Priest." Yes, in this case you have to be disgusted by these people in order to handle the end of the piece, but you have to honestly love their love. You have to be rooting for them, and the way to root for them is (I think I say this about a lot of pieces) to make their relationship, to a certain degree, the protagonist. More than either individual, it is the relationship that is destroyed by the ending—both Todd and Mrs. Lovett are pretty much destroyed from the get-go. The relationship, however, is doomed by Todd's decision to commit to the past, to attach himself permanently to it, and destroy himself and others in the process; taken that way it is that, and not just murderousness, that they have passed on to Toby and destroyed him with. He has not just been confronted with serial murder, he has also had his image of the beloved Mrs. Lovett brutally destroyed, an image on which he depended.

As it's often performed, Sweeney Todd runs into the serious problem of murder as a metaphor. In my personal assessment of artistic ethics, murder is not allowed to be a metaphor alone (the same applies to rape), and I think things that try to make it so tend to wind up at best, lazy; at worst, incredibly offensive. Tim Burton's Goth aesthetic always has an element of romanticizing death/murderousness (and fearing sex), and the musical, particularly in the many incarnations of "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd," falls into the trap of justifying the killings by means of saying that we are all hypocrites, that false righteousness can somehow be deflated by means of killing people. And I guesssss if you wanna get technical that's true, but sort of annoying. Neither money nor sanctimoniousness will save you from death, it's true, but this isn't a particularly useful way to prove it. But I would say that having a real relationship at the center, rather than just some weird funny-looking people singing a funny song about killing other people, grounds it. If there is something real at the center of the piece, it precludes murder being a metaphor, and lends some gravitas, rather than just straight horror-movie goriness, to the ending.

To take the love seriously and the relationship as a protagonist, I would add as a side note, also makes Mrs. Lovett Sondheim's strongest, most complex female character. (At least in my experience; there's a few Sondheims, including Follies and Sunday in the Park with George, with which I am not familiar.) A shame about Sondheim, but it does.

As to Dexter, I think what intrigues me about it is its ability to approach what makes relationships compelling besides emotions.

This sounds bizarre, I know. Dexter, at age three, witnessed his mother being brutally chainsaw-massacred by drug runners (you don't find that out until late in the first season), following which he was adopted by a police officer. This officer, Harry Morgan, soon recognized that the boy was, or had become, irretrievably sociopathic. He loved the kid, but he would be a killer and there was nothing Harry could do to stop that. So instead Harry decided to control it: he taught Dexter how to survive and not be caught—go into forensics so you have inside information, work on your sleeper hold and your eye so you'll never be caught, and, most importantly, only kill people whom you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt are murderers themselves. Many of them slip through the system; without a need for warrants you'll be able to tell who they are. In essence, Harry made Dexter a sociopathic vigilante.

And Dexter took it and lived by it, even though he could not, technically, love Harry. If you're a sociopath, how could your connection to someone else possibly matter? That's what the show is exploring. I just watched all of it recently—rather quickly yes, but because of that it hasn't yet had the absorption time of Sweeney Todd. I'd say, though, that it's emphasizing that serial murder is not a desire for anarchy, it's a compulsion to kill, all the time. Harry Morgan saw what he considered a way to find order in that compulsion, and Dexter respected it. The show constantly brings us up short at the ethically squirmy moments where we discover that we kind of do too.

To a certain degree, both Dexter and Sweeney Todd get away with what they do because they manage to convince you that you, the Average Viewer, are not and could not possibly be among this man's potential victims. Sweeney Todd does it to a certain degree by being a musical, by using the genre's formality to distance itself from its viewers. Sweeney Todd doesn't threaten you. Dexter, of course, simply assumes that you are not a murderer (which naturally makes me wonder if murderers watch it and makes me slightly, perversely disappointed to realize that I will never know if a real serial killer considers it a psychologically accurate portrayal). Pitting Dexter against another serial killer, we have to go with Dexter because the other serial killer threatens another couple of characters to whom we feel intimately connected, whom we feel we could actually be. That makes me squeamish about both shows, in spite of my love for both. (I have a problem of being more squeamish about concepts than blood. Though I was considering the fact that even psychologically realistic serial-killer shows and films that don't have to "theatricalize" the murders tend to leave out a lot of gruesome aspects that I'm sure are present.) The fact is that when your protagonist is a murderer, you have to agree to justify murder, or at least try to.

So what's the sociocultural appeal of serial killers anyway? My mother argues that it's about the fact that we feel we could never do it ourselves—we could imagine committing murder under some circumstances, but we who are not sociopaths have a hard time imagining multiple, systematic murders, and good artists feel compelled to explore things they don't understand. I buy that for the above two pieces, pretty much (I'm sure Sondheim also enjoyed the contradiction of writing a musical, so maligned as an unnecessarily happy-go-lucky genre, about serial murder). The appeal of imagining, and being drawn into, stories far beyond the realm of possibility of my own experience is kind of what art is all about. I'd say good art is also about recognizing yourself in places that make you uncomfortable—that what *makes* Sweeney Todd good art is that you have to take Mrs. Lovett's passion for Todd seriously, not just be able to dismiss it as sickness, which is a huge responsibility on the part of the actor playing her (a challenge, I would add, to which one Helena Bonham Carter rose admirably); that what hooks you in Dexter is that with a lot of good acting you end up taking at least one of the characters who loves Dexter seriously (in my case that character is Debra Morgan, Harry's biological daughter and Dexter's sister, but you can pick someone else if you want), seriously enough that you can't just dismiss them as being stupid or naïve for not knowing/"getting it" about Dexter. The appeal of these psycho killers, for me, is what interactions with them, not them as ideas in isolation, can say/pull/demand about human relationships. Which, for better or for worse, is what I believe good art has to be about.

Friday Poetry: Sylvia Plath

2008-08-15T11:40:00.003-05:00

Without regular internet access in Vermont and Cape Cod for the last week and a half, hence the missed Friday Poetry. Certainly this poem fans the worst flames of the suicide-worshipping Sylvia Plath myth, but I also think it's incredibly well-done and have always admired it. Plus I'm working on a post about artist worship of serial killers. So, without further ado.

Sylvia Plath
Lady Lazarus

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
0 my enemy.
Do I terrify?—

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

Friday Poetry: Bertolt Brecht

2008-08-01T07:37:00.001-05:00

Hard to believe I've never posted the man before, but this poem came into my life yesterday and was one of the socked-in-the-stomach moments.

Bertolt Brecht
Motto

In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.

Commemoration

2008-07-29T21:02:00.002-05:00

Honoring, also, my friend A's father, who passed away last Friday. He waited, in spite of his body's best efforts, to hear that his elder son (who had been ill last year) had returned from the doctor with a clean bill of health; he could only let go when he had that reassurance. That kind of love is amazing.

All my love with A and her family.

Pointless Retrospective Milestone the Eighth

2008-07-29T17:16:00.001-05:00

And by the by, that panda post was the 300th post published on Third Rail Themes!

Woohoo!

And They Liked It

2008-07-29T17:07:00.000-05:00

So Lindsay Lohan and Sam Ronson are together.

I could put up a lot more links to that, but I won't yet. And yes, I really am going to talk about this.

Even in my moving-away-from-Chicago-and-watching-only-TV-on-DVD state, I had managed to become peripherally aware of Sam Ronson, in the "ooh-Lindsay-Lohan-is-spending-a-lot-of-time-with-her" way. Somehow that was news—TMZ sort of news, but news nonetheless. Then I heard nothing until my fourteen-year-old French friend, Max, pointed the photograph of them out to me in OK! Magazine. The fanfare's been minimal, all things considered.

There are two ways of looking at that. The first is, of course, the indisputable fact that same-sex relationships have gained much more mainstream acceptance even in the last five years. As my friend Silvana points out, one of the most important aspects of the fight for gay rights is that as more and more people come out, exponentially more therefore know someone who is gay and have a personal stake in the debate, whereas in earlier incarnations of the fight (say, Stonewall's aftermath) much of it remained very abstracted for the mainstream. Since we fear the different, the ability to recognize gay as something we know ("we" here being "the mainstream") will make a huge political difference. It already is. Say what you will about same-sex marriage, which for obvious reasons I'm a proponent of—in the world of human rights, it is a battle that requires the assumption of the comfort of the Western lifestyle. For marriage rights to be a debate at all, you need to have the idea of the people who could marry in the mainstream.

And one thing you can say for Ms. Lohan is, girl is MAINSTREAM. She kicks the ass of any other possible figure, from Lance Bass to Ellen DeGeneres, on the mainstream front.

But then there's the other side, namely that many of Ms. Lohan's most interested devotees have also propelled Katy Perry to the Billboard No. 1 slot. And we could have a few more problems under the influence of "I Kissed a Girl."

This was never the way I planned
Not my intention
I got so brave, drink in hand
Lost my discretion
It's not what I'm used to
Just wanna try you on
I'm curious for you
Caught my attention

I kissed a girl and I liked it
The taste of her cherry chapstick
I kissed a girl just to try it
I hope my boyfriend don't mind it
It felt so wrong
It felt so right
Don't mean I'm in love tonight
I kissed a girl and I liked it
I liked it

No, I don't even know your name
It doesn't matter
You're my experimental game
Just human nature
It's not what good girls do
Not how they should behave
My head gets so confused
Hard to obey

I kissed a girl and I liked it
The taste of her cherry chapstick
I kissed a girl just to try it
I hope my boyfriend don't mind it
It felt so wrong
It felt so right
Don't mean I'm in love tonight
I kissed a girl and I liked it
I liked it

Us girls we are so magical
Soft skin, red lips, so kissable
Hard to resist so touchable
Too good to deny it
Ain't no big deal, it's innocent

I kissed a girl and I liked it
The taste of her cherry chapstick
I kissed a girl just to try it
I hope my boyfriend don't mind it
It felt so wrong
It felt so right
Don't mean I'm in love tonight
I kissed a girl and I liked it
I liked it

My friend V and I have come to know this as "the Party Lesbian Song."

Apparently a few right-wing Christian mothers are concerned about Ms. Perry's work. Christian mothers, you do not have anything to worry about. Young lesbians, however, do.

Obviously I'm by no means the first person to say this, but Katy Perry is certainly making things ever more uncomfortable for young lesbians or bisexuals—an adolescent audience particularly—who might actually want to kiss girls for reasons other than "experimental games." Yes, to a certain degree everything sexual you do in high school is "experimental" bla bla bla bla, but only on the level that, as my wise friend Maddy once said and which I have never forgotten, "everything in your life is practice for everything else." But to have a straight-identified girl (a safe jump from the boyfriend in combination with the quick "don't mean I'm in love tonight" and the notion that it "ain't no big deal, it's innocent") say to another girl "You're my experimental game" is getting into dangerous territory. A straight girl with a boyfriend is free to use another girl, a girl about whom the song tells us nothing, for anything she likes. It's not something you have to take seriously; it certainly doesn't mean you're gay or anything.

(Not to claim that every girl who kisses a girl is gay, or that I frown on teenage experimentation. I'd be one ass of a bisexual woman if I meant that. But I am uncomfortable with the pains Perry's song takes to clarify that its speaker is, indeed, straight, and that this kiss should not be taken as meaningful, it's just that girls are so pretty.)

Yes, I'm glad that Sam Ronson and Lindsay Lohan can be (fairly) comfortably out as a couple. Yes, I am glad that content including two girls kissing does not keep a song from becoming a #1 hit. But the reason that so little real notice was taken of Lohan and Ronson earlier, and the reason that a song that treats the interaction as casually as Katy Perry's does can go so far, is that we live in a society still incapable of taking female sexuality seriously. Two teenage boys holding hands and kissing a little, one a celebrity (of any level of notoriety), would not have been taken nearly so casually. That is not because lesbians are more accepted, but because romantic love between two women does not *matter* to the mainstream. There's no reason Katy Perry's narrator shouldn't kiss a girl, because what does it matter? It don't mean she's in love tonight.

I emphasize, again, that I don't mind casual hookups among any combination of sexes, and I don't mind songs about them. But I think the culture of Party Lesbians and public bi-curious hookups, of which Katy Perry's song is certainly a product, have led to a culture of hiding lesbians and actual bisexuals in plain sight. It's not the direct homophobia we've grown accustomed to protesting and fighting, and yet it seems to me even more insidious. We can't hide it anymore, so quick! Say it doesn't even matter. And it feels to me like an awful lot of people are listening when you say that. Teenagers interested in the same gender, and girls in particular, can feel that their feelings, and by extension they themselves, are not real. On that I speak from experience. It doesn't help much if the general public is taught not to think you're real either.

Perhaps, though, the bottom line really is simple sometimes—that Lindsay Lohan and Sam Ronson kissed a girl, and they liked it, and therefore posted it on MySpace. More power to 'em, then, I guess. I certainly wish them the best.

Friday Poetry: Philip Levine

2008-07-25T20:16:00.001-05:00

Philip Levine
They Feed They Lion

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of the creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.
Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,
They Lion Grow.
Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
"Come home, Come home!" From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.
From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
They grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.
From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.

Embrace the Silly

2008-07-24T08:43:00.003-05:00

I know this isn't usually a lolcats type of blog . . . but I think this is BRILLIANT.

Seriously, I don't think I've stopped laughing about this for two days.

Okay, done with the rockin' now.

In and Out and About

2008-07-19T07:59:00.002-05:00

This is one of those state-of-the-blog blog posts.

I've just returned from a week and a half of vacationing in Spain after moving from Chicago, which would be the reason for the not blogging or Friday Poetry-ing or anything of the kind. For the next few weeks I expect to have at least a bit more leisure time.

I've also decided that the retirement date of this blog will be after Election Day in 2008. I don't intend to be in the country for that election, but I do hope to continue blogging (really, probably not any more sporadically than now). But since I started this blog as a response to the 2004 election, it seems reasonable, in a literary fashion, to stop it after the 2008.

Even if it should turn out that after the election there's some sort of attack or event that "merits" the implementation of NSPD-51, thereby indefinitely deferring the inauguration of Barack Obama and allowing Messrs. Bush, Cheney and Chertoff absolute and legally interminable control over the nation.

Just sayin' it's possible.

Either way, Third Rail Themes will officially retire on November 4, 2008. But expect some deliciously juicy posts in the interim.

Friday Poetry: Carl Sandburg

2008-06-27T18:13:00.001-05:00

I've never loved him, but I guess I need to do this as I move out of Chicago.

Carl Sandburg
Chicago

HOG Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it
is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to
kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the
faces of women and children I have seen the marks
of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who
sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer
and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing
so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on
job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the
little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning
as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with
white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young
man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has
never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse.
and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of
Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog
Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with
Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

What's In Store

2008-06-24T13:14:00.003-05:00

Today, I went to a storage company with whom I'd made a tentative reservation, only to learn that before renting to me (but after they'd had me sign a couple of the preliminary papers) they would need my fingerprints. The storage company's manager said that they would keep them secure, but wanted to have them available for the Department of Homeland Security, since, after all, we are so close to the Sears Tower, and all the terrorist attacks started with things like rented storage units. The woman in question snuck it into the conversation casually, so casually that I questioned my own hesitation. I left the office to call my parents and my roommate; my roommate had never heard of such a thing, and nor had her co-workers. At which point I apologized for taking up the woman's time, requested a return of my $10 deposit, the copy of my driver's license, and the two preliminary papers I had thus far signed, all of which were given calmly and politely. I left, lugging the two boxes that I, without a car, had optimistically brought with me, and remain slightly concerned about what she'd managed to enter into the computer, and what she kept. Compared to her behavior earlier, she was just a little bit too polite.

Not that the information she had isn't easily accessible to the government or other intrusive agencies anyway, even without the Patriot Act. But something about having it all in the hands of a private company that feels fingerprinting its customers is its right makes me nervous.

Upon arriving home with my two heavy boxes weighing on the thumb I injured last night (I had the good fortune of having a serious conspiracy-theorist cab driver on the way back up, making my own alarm feel not nearly so ridiculous), I began to look for other storage companies in the area, and my friend M called. I told her how frustrated I was by this occurrence and this renewed search. She pretty much laughed at my outrage, saying that if I was going to be that specific, I was going to have to accept that it took more time. "Would you give a private storage company your fingerprints?" I asked. She responded that there was no reason to have a problem with it if she wasn't doing anything illegal. I said that it was a short step from believing that about a storage company to believing it about government surveillance. Which she then said she pretty much did. She thought that as long as she wasn't breaking any laws, there was no real reason to be concerned. She recognized the potential for abuse, yes, but she didn't think it was that big a deal.

"I wish you the best," I said.

I come to this point with this particular friend a lot, where we assume we share politics until it comes down to the specifics, or nitty-gritty, or whatever. But we also get to the fortunate point where we ask each other why. At this point, she did. So I had to answer.

Once again recognizing that the fact that something is logical does not make it right, the argument/feeling she presented was perfectly logical with a given postulate. And that postulate is that what is law is right. If everybody who was doing something illegal was automatically doing something wrong, and conversely, everybody who was doing everything legally was doing nothing wrong, there would be no reason to be concerned about surveillance. But the amazing thing about laws is they're made by humans (even if you believe that law comes directly from the word of God, they're certainly enforced first by humans), and we prefer some humans over others, sometimes in individuals, sometimes in races or genders or beliefs or types, and as such law that comes from humans has to be somewhat slanted. Constant surveillance, or the constant possibility of surveillance, therefore always has tremendous potential for abuse. Should we make decisions in our lives based on the potential for abuse? Generally, no, or at least we should try to weigh the options based on genuine facts rather than sensationalist fear (I've been pretty interested in Free-Range Kids for this discussion lately), but when you know you mistrust many of the people making the laws—which my friend certainly does—you want to approach with caution anything that could voluntarily give them more ammunition to make laws that come from a perspective you mistrust. If you have an inherent mistrust of corporations as a social force, which I do, and even greater mistrust of that force in combination with a government that you also mistrust, you want to take such requests/requirements as were presented to me at this storage company with a full shaker of salt.

You also might want to make your sentences less convoluted than I just did.

But my point still stands. The question on the table is whether you think "I'm not doing anything wrong" is the same thing as "I'm not doing anything illegal." If you consider those two equivalent, and I guess you're within your rights to do so, go ahead and give the storage facility your fingerprints. And you're right, in all likelihood nothing bad *will* happen to you as a result. But if you've any doubt about whether "wrong" and "illegal" are in fact synonymous, please join me in finding another storage company.

I Swear to God It's Still Friday Poetry: Stephen Dunn

2008-06-21T00:07:00.002-05:00

I've been packing all day. And watching movies, like The Holiday and Idiocracy. Focus is not my thang. But the last two lines of this poem have been almost constantly in my head nowadays. (Angelique, if perchance you're reading this, could you share it with Louise? I mentioned it to her . . .)

Anyway.

Stephen Dunn
A Primer for Swimming at Black Point

The bottom drops off quickly
and you're in over your head
among the crosscurrents,
the floating sea plants.
This is where to swim, though,
if you can, the water cold enough
to stir in you what's sleeping,
the fir trees on the other side
grand and achievable.
Just think of your fear
as alertness, and be happy for it.
Without fear it's often tempting
to believe the water cares
about you; in its movement
your mother's voice.
Consider getting out then.
It will never tell you
this intimacy cannot go on.
And when you get out
there'll be no evidence
you were ever in, just a
tingling, an aliveness
that hints insurrection
in the deepest parts of you,
and it too will pass.
Don't expect to know more
than your body has absorbed.

Friday Poetry: Rita Dove

2008-06-13T21:39:00.002-05:00

Rita Dove
Adolescence—II

Although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting.
Sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert.
Venetian blinds slice up the moon; the tiles quiver in pale strips.

Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round
As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines.
They bring the scent of licorice. One sits in the washbowl,

One on the bathtub edge; one leans against the door.
"Can you feel it yet?" they whisper.
I don't know what to say, again. They chuckle,

Patting their sleek bodies with their hands.
"Well, maybe next time." And they rise,
Glittering like pools of ink under moonlight,

And vanish. I clutch at the ragged holes
They leave behind, here at the edge of darkness.
Night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue.

And Just for the Heck of It, A Few More Sharks

2008-06-06T09:22:00.000-05:00

These include the contributions of many people. Feel free to add your own. If you want one, you should go shopping at Sharksmart; once you get it, you could move together to Mansfield Shark and go shopping at a sharkuterie. But if you think I'm crazy for getting so into this, you're probably right. I need electroshark therapy.

Sharkus Aurelius
Sharko Polo
Deepak Sharkra
Shark Twain
Sharc Anthony
Alexander the Great White
Sharkus Garvey
George Sand Shark
George Bernard Shark
Barry Great White
Hermione Graner Shark
Charles Sharkley
Harpo, Groucho, Chico and Zeppo Sharx
Senator Tom Sharkin
Karl Sharx
Sharklotte's Web
Joan of Sharc
Sharquille O'Neill
Def Leppard Shark
Sharknia Twain
Donnie Sharko
Reverend Al Sharkton

Friday Poetry: Paul Muldoon

2008-06-06T09:14:00.002-05:00

Paul Muldoon
Hedgehog

The snail moves like a
Hovercraft, held up by a
Rubber cushion of itself,
Sharing its secret

With the hedgehog. The hedgehog
Shares its secret with no one.
We say, Hedgehog, come out
Of yourself and we will love you.

We mean no harm. We want
Only to listen to what
You have to say. We want
Your answers to our questions.

The hedgehog gives nothing
Away, keeping itself to itself.
We wonder what a hedgehog
Has to hide, why it so distrusts.

We forget the god
Under this crown of thorns.
We forget that never again
Will a god trust in the world.

Your New Bicycle

2008-06-06T08:40:00.003-05:00

I am pretty pleased about Barack Obama.

I don't really have much to say about him or the fascinating forthcoming race just yet, but because this blog started with the disappointing results of the last presidential election I ought to at least track some thoughts.

Firstly, I think the man deserves it. From what friends who have canvassed for him, he runs an excellent campaign, pays people fairly, has strong volunteer support. In public, he's confident without ever being smeary, he's a good and thoughtful speaker, he's got strong policy ideas, and he inspires others. That sounds like just about what we need.

From what I know now, I can very easily imagine Barack Obama beating John McCain. First of all, I think worrying about race/racist voters is silly, because there is not a strong bloc of racist voters who wouldn't have chosen to vote otherwise, but will come out to vote against Obama. On the other hand, there is likely a very strong bloc of African-American voters both young and old, and a decent one of formerly disaffected college students of many races, who would not otherwise have voted but will come out specifically *to* vote for Obama. In spite of the ludicrous
"Hussein" debacle, on the macrocosmic national level I'm pretty sure race can only work in his favor, if it does anything one way or the other.

This isn't to say, of course, that campaigns against him won't contain a lot of subtler racism, the way they, you know, have already. Relatively speaking, Obama really *is* a Washington outsider—not a political outsider, but a Washington one—and we've already seen Clinton use that in combination with his race in a pretty tricky and creepy way. Mr. McCain, however respectful he was regarding all the "Hussein" crap, is not going to stay that way forever; in fact, he's likely to be quite sneakily two-faced about it, given his record on things like torture. (Read the full text of the Military Commissions Act, then talk to me about John McCain.) No form of public, blatant racism is at all accepted in the mainstream media (whereas I would argue that you can still get away with certain forms of blatant, public sexism, several of which we saw used on the Clinton campaign), but I imagine there will be some underhanded manipulations. I just don't think that they'll work very well.

And on the other hand, I generally find both gentlemen quite respectful in their personal interactions, and I've seen no evidence that either has ever been a smear campaigner. Both the Obamabots and the Hillarybots are ridiculously hostile (two notes to this: A1, that my frustration with using the male candidate's last name and the female candidate's first does not apply when I'm talking about "-bots," and B2, that "-bots" does not refer to every supporter of either—I believe I offended a friend with my casual use of the term "Obamabot" a couple of weeks ago), but only in Clinton's campaign did it seem to extend to the candidate herself, and even then not as much as everyone said it did. So it's going to be pretty interesting to see them try to take one another down respectfully, and whether it works.

I can't say I'm *excited* yet about the notion of Barack Obama as president; I wish I could, and probably with some closer engagement with the man and his work I'll be able to. A McCain presidency would be an extension of the Bush presidency with better public speaking and slightly higher-quality diplomacy, but I'd rather not vote against someone again. I don't need Barack Obama to be my new bicycle, and I chafe against people who try to tell me that he should be, with the result that I just plain don't know enough—I've become an observer of style and social trends surrounding the man, rather than the man himself. Fortunately, I have five months to change that. (Anybody have any particularly good sources for learning about him, aside from his own books?)

But I am excited about the campaign. Whether or not a Barack Obama presidency would be a radical change for America, he is unprecedented in my lifetime, both as a black candidate and a genuine political inspiration to a younger generation. We're going to see a lot of polarities at play in this campaign, and I imagine it's going to be, and stay, genuinely exciting. That's pretty bloody awesome, and historical, and I'm happy to be around and awake for it.

Public Service Announcement

2008-06-04T12:55:00.001-05:00

Okay, the knowledge that I now have a driver's license perhaps does not particularly serve the public, but it is nevertheless being announced.

Ahem.

I HAVE A DRIVER'S LICENSE.

!

!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously. I do.

Friday Poetry: W.H. Auden

2008-05-30T08:29:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I was reading a book one of the analyses in which was based around this poem. I didn't end up liking the book very much, but I must say that I do like thinking about the poem.

W.H. Auden
Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Do Gooder Better

2008-05-29T22:09:00.001-05:00

Off a lot of conversations and thoughts recently (the conversations mostly with Tyromaven, the thoughts pretty much everywhere), I want it known and understood that I am not now, nor will never be again, a do-gooder.

This is not to deny that I have been. I have. When I was first teaching theater, in college, I don't think I knew what else to be. I was deeply beholden to students' every expressed whim and desire; I let feeling sorry for people, rather than feeling for/with people, guide my actions. I needed to do that, and I learned from it, and I'm doing all I can never to do it again.

A couple of years ago I posted on the concept of alfalsism, which drew rankled reactions from several of my readers. I understand why people got so prickly; while I still stand by the basic opinions, especially as I clarified them in the comments, it was an incredibly negative and hostile post, and manner of approaching it.

So here I am.

The definition of a do-gooder, as I see it, is someone who approaches work completely from the outside, and dispenses Band-Aids on the battlefield. This, again, is not to deny that Band-Aids are sometimes necessary. But in terms of social services, which in one way or another are almost all the organizations I've worked for in the last four years, do-gooders are almost omnipresent and not terrifically useful. A do-gooder is a person who sees terrible problems in the world that result in some sadness, and feels that the most important work to be done is addressing the sadness.

Again, this is not to say that the sadness does not need to be addressed. However, without addressing the source of the sadness people are just going to keep being sad. (I am simplifying by using the term "sadness," but I'm hoping you understand what I mean.) But a do-gooder pats herself on the back for her minimal work on mildly alleviating sadness, believing her work is genuinely changing the world of those she is ostensibly serving. A do-gooder can't view the changes she's making in scale, nor can she really take in that the problems she sees could possibly be systemic.

What are the alternatives to being a do-gooder? For a while, with Tyromaven, I was poking at "world-changer," but honestly I'm more and more convinced that teacher, in and of itself, is an alternative. To teach without assuming you know its results, without believing your contribution complete but still acknowledging its substance, to know where it fits into a larger picture—this is an alternative to do-gooding. World-changer is an ambition, and I'm willing to hold it as such, but for now I'm going to go with teacher.

I don't have the energy to write much more than this, but I hope it's clear enough.

Friday Poetry: Stanley Kunitz

2008-05-23T23:09:00.003-05:00

Yes, I have skipped a couple of Fridays. For at least the remaining five that I live in Chicago, I promise devotion.

Stanley Kunitz
Touch Me

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it's done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

The Most Personal Post I Have Ever Written on This Entire Blog

2008-05-13T20:45:00.002-05:00

I've been absent for a while, because the last week and a half have been among the most emotionally intense of my entire life. This post isn't so personal that I'm going to tell you all about that, but I am going to spend a bit of time on one aspect of it.

As some of you know and some of you don't, at the end of June I am planning to leave Chicago, where I have lived for the last eight years, and move to I honestly have no idea where. I want to spend the summer travelling within the United States, the subsequent year living and working outside of the United States, and the year after that begin grad school, also probably in the United States, though I'm not positive about that one. In April of 2007, I picked June of 2008 as my departure date, knowing that I had to fix one or I'd never leave, without a realistic notion of the fact that June of 2008 would, in fact, someday arrive. Now that it's just around the corner, I'm faced with the realities of both the preparations I have managed to make and the ones I haven't.

One of the ones I have managed to make is that I gave notice at my job, and the next two days are, in fact, my last two days of work—my last two days as an employed person living in the city of Chicago. The program in which I teach is broken down into seven-week sessions with one interstitial week, during which new students take their pre-tests and participate in a Life Skills course. This my last week is that week. Today I was asked to help two new low- to no-literacy students with their math tests.

As I spoke to these women, I was overcome with the desire to stay at my job.

I fucking *ached* to be their teacher. Because I know I could. I had a deep, clear sense of who and how each of them would be in my Level 1 Reading and Writing class, how they would fit in and interact with the returning students I already know, what I could teach them, how I could teach them, how bloody fascinating their stories must be (it's hard to imagine reaching the age of seventy without having *ever* attended school—what is behind that?) and what those stories, both of these women being senior citizens, would mean in a group that contains a lot of young recovering addicts and extremely young mothers. This afternoon there was nothing in the world I wanted more than to have that class, the class that will be this coming session, the first session at my workplace in more than a year that I will not be present for.

I have made the decision to leave, both my workplace and Chicago, and I am fairly confident that I even know why I made it and still believe it to be the right thing for me. Even if I weren't leaving Chicago, I'd have to make some changes in how I approached this job; I teach part-time and my emotional commitment is full-time, and working in a community where last Tuesday alone I learned that one of my former students had been killed in a drive-by and another sexually assaulted at work, that is no mean emotional commitment. Adult students are, in my general experience of part-time teaching, a lot more draining than child students, because with adults you really have to dig for the hope, both theirs and your own. And you have to love people or teaching doesn't work, and even if you are, as I consider myself to be, an overall loving person, loving is really fucking hard work too.

But in the last year especially I have gotten to become a teacher, become comfortable saying that was who I am, and today, suddenly, that was *all* I was, and I liked it. I wanted to stay forever talking to my co-worker about the probable social dynamics of the new Level 1 classes. I wanted to be around next week when the results of LT's GED exam come in, and I want to help RD study for hers, be around to break down algebra problems and see her cheer for herself when she remembers how pi works. I wanted to be the person with whom the women I was talking to learned to multiply and read poetry and wrote full sentences for the first time. I wanted that more than I wanted to spend time out of this country, or throw myself for a loop in a real and meaningful way, or even start a youth theater company in five years. I wanted nothing, nothing, nothing but to teach these people, to know myself as their teacher.

It's kind of hard to believe I won't.

Friday Poetry: James Tate

2008-05-02T13:34:00.002-05:00

I'll get back to the thing where I post with substance in between Friday Poetries soon, I promise. But I'm en route to NYC, about to leave work for the aeroport, so this is not primo posting time.

James Tate
Little Poem with Argyle Socks

Behind every great man,
there sits a rat.
And behind every great rat,
there's a flea.
Beside the flea there is an encyclopedia.
Every now and then the flea sneezes, looks up,
and flies into action, reorganizing history.
The rat says, "God, I hate irony."
To which the great man replies:
"Now now now, darling, drink your tea."

Friday Poetry: Michael Ondaatje

2008-04-25T13:27:00.001-05:00

Michael Ondaatje
Bearhug

Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight
I yell ok. Finish something I'm doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son's room.
He is standing arms outstretched
waiting fir a bearhug. Grinning.

Why do I give my emotion an animal's name,
give it that dark squeeze of death?
This is the hug which collects
all his small bones and his warm neck against me.
The thin tough body under the pyjamas
locks me like a magnet of blood.

How long was he standing there
like that, before I came?

University of Sharkago

2008-04-23T22:21:00.002-05:00

Connor, Jess and I have spent the evening making a list. Below are its contents. Please join us in this form of entertainment.

By the way, they all live together in the Sharking Shack.

Names for Sharks

Sharklemagne
Charlie Sharker
Sharker Posey
Peter Sharker
Sharklotte Brontë
MC Hammerhead
Shark Jackson
Sharky Shark and the Donkey Bunch
Sharka Khan
James Whale Shark
Leopold Sharkovsky
Charles Graner Shark
Sharklize Theron
Jonathan Sharker and Sharkula
Sharkenstein
Sharkleberry Fin
Clarice Sharkling
Neville Bottomfeeder
George Sharkenopoulos
Mako Malfoy
Tiger Shark Woods
Jordin Sharks
Ellen Sharkin
Sharkolomew Cubbins
William Sharkspeare
Anton Sharkov
Rebecca Nurse Shark
Stingray Charles
Arnold Sharkskinegger
Nicolas Sharkozy

A Survey

2008-04-22T15:14:00.001-05:00

MAN DOES NOT LIVE BY ___________ ALONE.

Please fill in the blank as you see fit and leave it in the comments. Bearing in mind that "bread" is already taken. My current list contains "honesty" and "talent," and I would like to expand it.

Saturday Poetry: Sarah Arvio

2008-04-19T08:35:00.002-05:00

And then she got too overwhelmed yesterday to post. But at least she admits it.

Sarah Arvio
Shadows

I saw some shadows moving on the wall
and heard a shuffle, as of wings or thoughts.
I rolled back the sheets and looked at the day,

a raw, blown day, white papers in the street.
Sheets were flapping in the sky of my mind,
I smelled the wet sheets, I tasted a day

in sheets hanging in the damp of a day.
White pages flapping: my life had been so new
when I didn't yet know how old it was.

I couldn't see the vistas on those sheets,
the dreamscapes sleeping deeply in those sheets;
I hadn't yet seen my shadow vita

or learned which host would trick me or treat me,
which of my hosts would give me something sweet,
some good counsel and a soft place to sleep,

or what was the name of my ghostwriter.
Who ghosted my life, whose dream would I ghost,
who wrote my name and date across these sheets,

and which sheets would be the wings of my thoughts,
and which would hold the words of my angels.
A host, and did I know I’d have a host;

no, a line of sheets is never a bed,
a gaggle of hosts is never a love,
a host is never as good as a home,

a ghost as good as a dog or a god.
But I had my heart, always had my heart
for god and a home as much as it hurt.

And Still, There Is Loss.

2008-04-17T21:59:00.002-05:00

The seventeen-year-old younger brother of one of my students was shot and killed this Tuesday night.

I don't know what to say. Or think. I wish I did. Or I might know too many things to think, but not which ones are genuinely helpful or useful.

I guess maybe I should be glad that I'm not so jaded yet that I can't be horrified by this. Especially by the fact that in the city of Chicago, the cougar has gotten a great deal more media attention. Because the shooting death of a wandering cougar is far more unusual, far more of a hook, and somehow thereby more newsworthy, than the shooting death of an African American teenager.

My thoughts are with my student and his family. Please, send thoughts, or prayers, or whatever immaterial thing you choose to send.

Friday Poetry: Julia Hartwig

2008-04-11T18:59:00.001-05:00

Sorry, I hate doing two Friday Poetry posts in a row, with nothing in between. But this week was biz-zay. And right now I'm in Memphis, having a weekend writing retreat with my writing partner, and taking a quick break from the script for Sense and Sensibility, the musical.

This one is, again from the National Poetry Month emails. They knows their stuff.

Julia Hartwig
Tell Me Why This Hurry

The lindens are blossoming the lindens have lost their blossoms
and this flowery procession moves without any restraint
Where are you hurrying lilies of the valley jasmines
petunias lilacs irises roses and peonies
Mondays and Tuesdays Wednesdays and Fridays
nasturtiums and gladioli zinnias and lobelias
yarrow dill goldenrod and grasses
flowery Mays and Junes and Julys and Augusts
lakes of flowers seas of flowers meadows
holy fires of fern one-day grails
Tell me why this hurry where are you rushing
in a cherry blizzard a deluge of greenness
all with the wind racing in one direction only
crowns proud yesterday today fallen into sand
eternal desires passions mistresses of destruction

Friday Poetry: Franz Wright

2008-04-04T23:25:00.002-05:00

It's National Poetry Month! Happy National Poetry Month! During National Poetry Month, I get Emails every day that have poems in them! Here's one of those poems!

(And p.s., I've been home all day with a cold and didn't post until now, when Friday's just this side of over. What are you gonna do.)

Franz Wright
Publication Date

One of the few pleasures of writing
is the thought of one's book in the hands of a kindhearted
intelligent person somewhere. I can't remember what the others are right now.
I just noticed that it is my own private

National I Hate Myself and Want to Die Day
(which means the next day I will love my life
and want to live forever). The forecast calls
for a cold night in Boston all morning

and all afternoon. They say
tomorrow will be just like today,
only different. I'm in the cemetery now
at the edge of town, how did I get here?

A sparrow limps past on its little bone crutch saying
I am Federico García Lorca
risen from the dead—
literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry.

I Read Things a Lot

2008-03-28T17:59:00.002-05:00

Just seems to be the season. This coming Tuesday I'm going to be reading in Tuesday Funk, a reading series created by Gothic Funk.

Tuesday, April 1
7:00 pm
Ennui Cafe, 6981 N. Sheridan Road, Chicago
(corner of Sheridan and Lunt)

I'm deciding between two stories to read right now, but either way it's going to be fun. As soon as I know the names of the other two people who will be reading with me (Connor, can you provide them?), I'll amend this post to include them as well.

Awesome. Please come see me read!

Friday Poetry: Sarah Nooter

2008-03-28T08:20:00.002-05:00

This poem comes from a high school classmate, when she was still in high school. So if she's googling herself and comes across this and is no longer connected to this poem, I apologize for perpetuating it. But it's been in my head a lot lately, it is published (i.e. I'm not just sneaking it out of my high school poetry class), and it stands right now, I think, as a particular shout-out to Tyromaven.

Sarah Nooter
Pears of the World

We, the pears of the world,
would like for you to eat us
whole. We want you to peel us,
to boil us, to poach us. Smother
us in the milk of raspberries. Singe
us with molten chocolate.

Grow us, pick us,
wash and slice us,
chew us,
tell us when we're too ripe
and too dry.
No, really.

Maybe We're the Problem, Musical Theater Edition

2008-03-27T17:54:00.000-05:00

I just watched Mr. Burton's adaptation of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd for the second time, and Court Theatre will soon be opening a revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel. (Spoilers, obviously, follow.) Both pieces (actually, it's more Sondheim's general oeuvre than Sweeney Todd in particular, but this was the viewing where I started thinking about it in the context of his oeuvre) put me in mind of their sexism, and if it's possible to work with that today in a productive way, allowing it simply to overact with, rather than overshadow, the other amazing elements of the pieces.

I've heard any number of complaints about Carousel in the last several years from feminists I respect, who consider it "the wife-beating musical." And it is true, and undeniable, that the piece contains the following exchange of dialogue between
daughter and mother, after daughter has been visited by father's ghost: "Is it possible for someone to hit you that hard and have it not hurt at all?" "Yes, darling, it is possible for someone to hit you that hard and have it not hurt at all." (That is probably not a *precisely* verbatim quote, but most of those words are included in that order.) I'm not going to claim that's easy to swallow from where we live today; it's pretty disappointing to me that it was swallowed in 1945. And yet I have a lot of trouble reducing the work to that.

The opening scenes of Carousel, set at the end of the nineteenth century, follow three characters: a New England mill worker named Julie Jordan, her friend and co-worker Carrie Pipperidge, and a carousel barker named Billy Bigelow. Carrie and Julie have been riding the carousel on their day off; the carousel owner forbids Julie from returning because Billy put his arm around her while she was riding. Carrie tries to tease Julie about it, but ends talking about how distant Julie's been at the mill, and then opens the door to talk about her own much more conventional romantic interest. When Billy comes to talk to Julie and Carrie departs, the "bench scene" begins.

The bench scene is honestly one of the best love scenes I know, in musical theater, non-musical theater, film, anything. Two misfits meet and experience the most intense attraction they've ever known, which neither quite has the vocabulary to talk about. This is expressed in song, an exchange of beautiful, awkward recitatives and then the exchange of the song "If I Loved You," in which each explains to the other, using the same words, how they'd feel if what is in fact happening to them were happening to them. By the end of it, their first real kiss, they're clearly and deeply bound to one another, clearly so isolated in the worlds they've been living in and needing one another so much they seem to have been waiting for one another all along.

Of course, when the musical flashes forward into its next scene a couple of months later, Billy and Julie's marriage has turned abusive and Billy has proved himself a ne'er-do-well who associates with ne'er-do-well seafaring friends (Jigger, the supporting character who fits that description, was one of my main fictional crushes for several years). Learning that Julie is pregnant makes Billy desperate to get money to support his child, leading him to commit a robbery with Jigger that leads to his death, though of course it's more complicated than that. He ascends to heaven, where time passes faster, and is allowed to go back to Earth, where his daughter Louise is now fifteen, to redeem himself. Observing her misery, all of which is caused by him, is difficult for him, and when he in his earthly manifestation actually speaks to her, he becomes quickly frustrated and slaps her. And yet—Julie arrives, and the notoriously creepy lines of dialogue are spoken. An invisible, insubstantial Billy whispers to Julie that he loves her, truly, and at Louise's graduation whispers to her to have confidence in herself. They invisibly, insubstantially hear him and as such he is allowed into heaven.

Summarized in any way, the musical's problematic; I can't fight it. And yet the bench scene honestly is one of the best love scenes out there. My question is, why does Carousel have to become "the wife-beating musical," rather than a musical about two fucked-up, lonely, desperate people who find each other and figure out, in fucked-up, desperate ways, that finding each other isn't always enough, but is always deeply valuable?

As Silvana pointed out in a conversation about this, when the play is onstage much of the ability to portray what I outlined above depends on the portrayal of the rest of the townspeople. This New England fishing village, a small industrial center, is a very cohesive community where everyone has clambakes together, and it's an ethos to which both Billy and Julie are outsiders, even with a close friend like Carrie. However, they are too bound to and by love to be entirely outside of the confines of this society, like Jigger is—they have something to care about. Both Billy and Julie are trapped, and would simply have been more trapped if they hadn't found each other. If Julie's happy she found Billy in spite of his clear and acknowledged shortcomings, why do we have to cast her as a victim?

Okay, if I'm going to make a fair argument around this I do have to look at the lyrics of Julie's love song, which she sings to convince Carrie to stay with her obnoxious fiancé Enoch, who threatens to leave her when Jigger hits on her.

Somethin'
Made him the way that he is
Whether he's false or true,
And somethin'
Gave him the things that are his,
One of those things is you,
So when he wants your kisses
You will give them to the lad
And anywhere he leads you you will walk
And anytime he needs you
You'll go runnin' there like mad,
You're his girl and he's your feller
And all the rest is 'talk'!

Obnoxious. Dated. Makes my skin crawl just a little, as it has since I first heard it—or at least listened to the lyrics closely—in high school. And yet, can't it be in part of its time and in part a truth about the character and the relationship? They are desperate, and lost outside the margins of their society, and they truly love each other.

The long and short of it, to me, is that relegating Carousel to the position of "the wife-beating musical" is to limit your faith in its character development. Julie is in some ways a product of her time, in other ways an exception to it, and she's stuck. And she loves him, and must we place so little faith in her as to say the love isn't actually real? Billy is a fucked-up guy who does terrible things, and the power of theater, of art, is that people don't have to be limited to that. I don't think Carousel in any way endorses Billy's abuse; it says he both hit Julie and loved her. This is possible. It means he was terrible at loving her in action, but the show acknowledges this.

It says that good intentions are enough to get you into heaven, and if I believed in heaven I'm not sure I would want that. I can see this show being slightly more offensive to the liberal religious. But the heart of the show is two differently fucked-up people who love each other desperately, and that love does not stop them from being fucked up.

This, too, is what should be at the heart of Wheeler and Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, to make it accessible and successful, although the people in question are much less realistic and much more fucked up than those in Carousel. But Sweeney Todd should, at heart, be a deeply disturbing love story.

I wouldn't admit it for quite some time, but Mr. Sondheim, in addition to being something of a general misanthrope, is really rather misogynistic in his work overall. (Yes, he has collaborators, but as this is a common thread to his musicals with various collaborators, I feel safe assuming it has something to do with him.) I've yet to get to the point where I think this devalues the work for the most part (although my fondness for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum has certainly tapered off over the years, especially when I recall our rather offensive attempts to perform it at my single-sex summer camp), but he ain't so good with making female characters anything other than objects determined by men.

Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd, however, can get beyond that. She has her own motivations, some of which have to do with love and some of which do not; she's not purely a device in the piece, her desires aren't mocked by the script and music (though they often are by bad productions), and it's her decisions and changes of heart on which the show hinges.

Once Mrs. Lovett is limited to a broad comedic device, of course, she's useless and emotional connection to the show is lost. Sweeney Todd, whatever his ostensible motives, is psychotic, and his transition from wanting to kill only the Judge to wanting to kill absolutely everyone is not an easy one to hook into. Mrs. Lovett's unrequited love, however, can take you there. Yes, she's as mentally ill as Todd is, but slightly more hooked into reality, practical, in a way that grounds us with her. If we have no one to follow the musical falls apart; Todd is too insane, Anthony and Johanna too boring. Mrs. Lovett, however weird, is our hook, and we have to see her sickness as born of a desperation we have access to in "The Worst Pies in London." This isn't to say that she shouldn't be funny, but that if you play her honestly she's going to be hilarious, and if you do play her honestly she can also be a story.

It's likely, then, that I would have hated the original production of Sweeney Todd. From what I've heard of the recording, Angela Lansbury played Mrs. Lovett for broad comedy rather than the relationship, in which case I really don't know why I'd be watching the thing rather than listening to it, and even that doesn't sound like that much fun. I could be wrong, of course—Ms. Lansbury has declared it the most important role of her theatrical career, and of course I didn't see it—but the point I intend to make is that the piece's ability to be something other than good songs relies almost entirely on that character.

I also postulate that "A Little Priest," if done correctly, is one of Sondheim's best love songs. Again, it's easy to play for broad comedy and so much is lost when you do. But what's really happening in the song is that these two people, these two deeply fucked-up people, are creating a powerful idea together out of love. That's what that song is if you play it from the inside, and playing it from the inside, in addition to just being better acting, makes it all the more scary for the audience. (See Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, for instance.) Todd, in this song, sees Mrs. Lovett for the first time, sees that she thinks as he does and he wants and values that connection, that he no longer has to be alone and isolated with his insanity but has a true partner. Mrs. Lovett, for her part, has trying to get through to Todd from the first moment, and her joy in finally doing so, in finally finding the point at which they meet. The joy in the song is the joy of two lovers creating something together. We as an audience can and should be repulsed by what they share and what they're planning to create, but the song is about what's between the two of them, and for the first time, what's between them is indeed love.

The film doesn't quite succeed in creating the love story, but it comes fairly close. Tim Burton, I've finally realized, is grievously afraid of sex, always creating (or adapting) a story that casts favor on those shy, sexually hesitant and/or chaste, and if adapting placing more emphasis on the distinction between those characters and their more brazen counterparts. (Corpse Bride, anybody?) Fortunately, his wife and favorite leading man have no such hang-ups, which allowed for a workable amount of sexy in their scenes, but couldn't quite salvage the force of romantic joy that "A Little Priest," done correctly, could have.

In other words, both of these shows could be sexist; neither has to be. Whether they are inherently is a question as delicate as the question surrounding Taming of the Shrew. They have sexist elements—in Carousel I'd say mainly the product of its time, in Sweeney Todd mainly the product of its author—but they develop the characters strongly enough for good productions to ... not transcend the sexism, per se, but allow the pieces to turn on another axis.

This is totally one of those pieces no one's going to read, but I needed to write it anyway. I am so okay with that.

Friday Poetry: William Carlos Williams

2008-03-21T10:23:00.001-05:00

I'm currently visiting my friend E in Michigan. Though she's only 20 minutes outside of Detroit, on an arts and educational campus, it's the most non-urban setting I've entered in a long time, which makes this poem slightly more appropriate than it already was. Huzzah.

William Carlos Williams
Spring and All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

Not to Mention 3.14!

2008-03-14T13:56:00.002-05:00

In addition to being National Reluctant Optimism Day, it's also Pi Day!

Happy Pi Day! Please go out and eat pie, because I think I'm going to do the same thing right now, or as soon as I apply for one more out-of-United-States job. And even if I eat pie physically alone, I don't want to do it spiritually alone. It's almost time for strawberry-rhubarb pie!