Radiohead "Drunken Punchup at a Wedding"

Watching The Secret Life of Words

Ducks are very smart.  My mother had a pair of white Peking ducks when I was in my late teens/early twenties.  I would visit her when in town from LA or NY.  The ducks would be in the kitchen following her around, quacking between the pair of Maine Coon cats and Heidi, my parents' miniature poodle.  The ducks bathed in the claw foot tub off the music room.  They sat on my lap in the keeping room, tucking their heads under my palm, telling me to keep stroking them.  My stepfather built a little pond off the living room and a little house for the ducks to sleep in.  Frick and Frack were their names.  We all loved them, but my mother loved them most.  She had a special gift with animals, in the choosing of them.  All of her pets were unusually smart with intriguing personalities.  One evening, my parents suddenly heard Frack scream and went out to investigate.  A raccoon had Frick by the neck and was climbing up a branch in a pine tree that grew on the edge of the little pond.  Blood was seeping down his neck and on his beautiful white chest.  My mother screamed and the raccoon dropped Frick right at her feet.  Poor Frack was devastated.

I think I pull focus to the lightness of the duck because I cannot write about what in the film triggered my ptsd.  It doesn't help that, recently, one of the men who hurt me most popped up in my "find friends" link on facebook. He iis a  criminal who hit me, choked me, called me names; he stole my credit cards, my car, my checks  which he then forged my signature on in order to use/cash - he should be in jail. But instead, his wealthy family told the police that I was to blame and sent him to a kibbutz in Israel and then to Newport Beach where they banked rolled a drug rehab center in his name for him to own.  This man should be in jail; instead, he is out among the people, a ticking time bomb waiting to go off.    

I wish I could work a job that was small and quiet.  Near people, but not with people, and even all alone somewhere.  I could write in my free time and I wouldn't have to make small talk, listen to gossip, get labelled and categorized...I could just be.  

             

Forty-Somethings: Perhaps the Most Acutely Technology-Affected Generation

Dear Reader:


Right now, on NPR, Faith Middleton is hosting a show about manners and etiquette.  The topic reminds me of how luckless, or lucky, depending on how you look at it, Generation X'ers are.  Being one, I nostalgically grieve for the pre-internet world, having spent 3/4th of my life communicating face-to-face, voice-to-voice on the phone, scent-to-scent, energy-to-energy... with friends and strangers.  Now, it is mostly strangers that I share such intimacy with, in the form of service-workers, public-workers, and my fellow grocery shoppers and dog walkers.  


My family is quite small.  I have a mother and a sort of stepfather (he isn't the marrying type I've decided after 42 years of co-habitation with my mother, and his being 81) in Connecticut, one aunt and a half-brother; both live in Michigan and are not in contact with each other.  My husband is an orphan.  Our two daughters (I am remarried to their stepfather since 2000) are our whole world - our youngest is a senior this year and soon will be off to college.            


Gen-Xers like myself remember manners and etiquette because we were socialized on it. Today, I am appalled at the disregard, disrespect and often pure social-hostility of many people under 40.  I remember when movies made you think and news was not spoon-fed in little, sensational bytes.  I also appreciate the internet and how blogging has spurred my writing and made a somewhat permanent record of my existence.  Well, my anonymous existence anyway.  Blogging has also afforded me connections to people, based on common interests; I will never meet these people, but knowing that I am of a sort of tribe, however minuscule, is fascinating to me.       


More later...    

Mixed Feelings Reading Beryl Markham's West with the Night - 11/27/11

After reading the first book of Markham's memoir, I was captivated by her observations and writing style.  However, I am a passionate supporter of bringing stalkers and all other murderers of elephants to swift and unmistakable justice.  I have been a supporter of The David Sheldrick Wildlife Fund, financially, when I am able, and in getting their important message out to as many as possible.  I was a foster parent of Kudup, an orphaned baby elephant that changed my life and continues to influence my life today.  Tragically, Kudup passed away on the 10th of May 2011.  What I'm about to write, no one will ever believe. It happened to me, my husband witnessed it, and I will never forget it as long as I live. Nor will I ever doubt the bond 2 beings (me, unable, financially to travel far, and Kudup, a little orphaned elephant living in Kenya) can share - through some metaphysical force, despite having never physically met.    

I had been aware that Kudup was ill for some time before she died. Yet, I had not sent any monetary support since a donation in July of 2010.  Unable to send money, I tried to get the message out to as many people as I had contact information for, as well as on Facebook.  The guilt I felt was enormous.  I found a little elephant statue on Cape Cod, right in the hometown of my family's summer cottage. I named the statue Kudup, and placed her next to my bed.  Every night I would say a prayer and touch my little statue of Kudup and try to feel her across the miles; to tune in my love-energy toward her, and to feel what I wanted to believe was her love-energy, alive, happy and about.  Roughly 2 nights after Kudup passed - as I found out about her passing on the 19th of May when I received a beautifully written personal email from the Trust - I was awoken in the middle of the night, well that's not exactly accurate.  In my sleep, I was lifted, somewhat forcibly, out of my bed.  My whole body was seized, lifted and then dropped, as if I were too heavy to bear.  Being groggy, I thought I was having a bad dream.  It happened, where I was completely lifted off of my bed, as if something very large were picking me up and trying to take me up through the ceiling, approximately 7 or 8 times.  I groggily recall being a little frightened, and clinging to my husband, who was asleep.  My husband said it felt as if my whole body was convulsing up off the bed.  I never thought to attune what was happening to Kudup's illness and possible death.  I am sure it was Kudup coming to shake me from my complacency, ignorance, insensitive lack of support...

I have never felt that type and depth of attachment to another living thing except for my children.  I believe.

So, what does this have to do with West with the Night?  As I began to read Book II, I was struck with terrible pains - like childbirth, and I had to stop reading.  Book II talks about elephant hunting.  I haven't been able to pick it up since.  I don't know if I will ever finish it.

Below is what I wrote before realizing what Book II was partly about: 


A memoir written with the originality and sophisticated economy more often found in a Chekhovian or Joyce short story, or among the more modern Carver or Beattie.  Tons of allusion.  Very sparse, yet achingly savory.  Puts all other memoirs to shame with its tight and quick recollections.  Will make me a better writer, I hope - a more discerning reader, for sure.

Some especially satisfying turns:

from   Men with Blackwater Die 

"'You don't mind being here, I hope,' he said.  It's been four years since I left Nairobi, and there haven't been many letters.'  He ran the tip of his tongue over his lips and attempted a smile.  'People forget,' he added.  'It's easy for a whole group of people to forget just one, but if you're very long in a place like this, you remember everybody you every met.  You even worry about people you never liked; you get nostalgic about your enemies.  It's all something to think about and it all helps.'"
 

This entire chapter, as a matter of fact, is memoir perfected.  The end note - well, I wanted to reach for a drink with her.

From The Stamp of Wilderness:

"Balmy's challenge, clearly well spiced with insult, brought the old dam up on her heels and there ensued a battle of tongues that, in volume of sound and intensity of fury, would have put to shame all the aroused fishwives of literature."

From Message from Nungwe:

"Night flying over charted country by the aid of instruments and radio guidance can still be a lonely business, but to fly in unbroken darkness without even the cold companionship of a pair of ear-phones or the knowledge that somewhere ahead are lights and life and a well-marked airport is something more than just lonely.  It is at times unreal to the point where the existence of other people seems not even a reasonable probability.  The hills, the forests, the rocks, and the plains are one with the darkness, and the darkness is infinite.  The earth is no more your planet than a distant star -- if a star is shining; the plane is your planet and you are its sole inhabitant."

and  from Why Do We Fly?:

"There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing.  There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city.  There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same.  There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt.  There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work.  This kind of silence can speak.  Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay.  Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows.  It is a soundless echo."

That's all I've read.  On to Book Two.

 

"In Particular" by Elena Karina Byrne

Recognition in the body

moves like a swarm of bees: you know all

over at once.  Your place

in history has not been betrayed

as you find what you really feel follows

no language: wild stir

of insects, flurry of birds, one bone

of the earth shows through night root

tightened within its ground.

Can we be hypnotized by the primitive?

I heard a tick, tick, tick

once, turned and stared with the light

thinking about nothing.

But I noticed a fine grain of sink wood

like waves, weaving, the real bending

of trees against wind, over-- how beautiful it was.

This is

what it is like before sudden disaster, before

the inhospitable truth:

our other brain, the one

which cannot speak, the one who sleeps incipient

on the job, walks the dog, erasure,

and gives in, hears

the tick, tick, tick, turns

toward it with the light

and makes us look--  whether for the first

or last time, we look. 

Copied from Poetry Daily, December 5

originally from The Flammable Bird

Drafts, Design and Technology

So, I'm sitting in Starbucks waiting for my students and playing with my blog design, or trying to.  With the new user template, I am able to change the color and font of the text, but not the background color, so all my posts have this horribly bright, white background that drowns my text.  So, I changed the color of my text to a dark blue, but it only applied the change to recent posts, which might mean that I have to go back and change each of the nearly 600 post's text color in order to use the new Dynamic designs.  To make matters more complicated, there is no "Design" link on the new user profile edit page - at least none that I can find.  

Slept 12 hours last night, still exhausted.  Woke up with a migraine, again.

Working with syncopated meter and hard consonants in a poem I'm drafting. Approaching it from a completely different angle.  If I can create the effect I'm working toward, it should free my work from its static pin head of an area. I'm hoping anyway.          

Obama's address to Congress

So articulate, and intelligent, and rational, and analytical...
As I observe our president, and I see the Republicans sitting there, with their fat wallets, and their fat bellies, and their smug smiles, my pulse races.

America is becoming a paper tiger. An American education is a joke, health care is an oxymoron, and all the younger generations care about are materialism, sex and vanity (and many from other generations, too), and many of these loath, or at the very least, 'can do without,' their elders. Too many teens today are mean spirited, shallow, and lazy. I have never observed a population with such a false sense of entitlement and egocentrism.

And we just sit there and watch the country turn to shambles, numbed by the panacea of the Internet, iPods, cell phones, and reality TV. Lulled into a false sense of togetherness and belonging, made possible by the virtual world they deceive themselves into thinking they LIVE in. Kindness and consideration has become a commodity used to get what one wants, rather than fundamental, common brotherhood.

nuff said.

I Am An INFP "The Healer"

This is the book of me.

"As our bloods separate" by David Constantine

Riviere Briton's The Long Sleep

As our bloods separate the clock resumes,

I hear the wind again as our hearts quieten.

We were a ring: the clock ticked round us

For that time and the wind was deflected.

The clock pecks everything to bone.

The wind enters through the broken eyes

Of houses and through their wide mouths

And scatters the ashes from the hearth.

Sleep.  Do not let go my hand.

Dear President Obama

Dear Mr. President,

Very proud to be a Democrat tonight; your speech made me very hopeful, less afraid, and very proud.  The GOP has clearly sold their souls and lost all integrity.  We do not live in a free market economy!!  If we don't have you standing up for the working classes in this climate of perverted, corrupted capitalism, we will all be serving our lives and the lives of our great grand children for the benefit of a very small minority.

When we have big corporations, with big lobbyist and big lawyers buying politicians to keep drilling, keep profiting at nauseatingly vulgar percentages, compared to the other 90%, who work just as hard if not harder just to out food on the table, you and the brave among our party become the only hope of the poor and overworked.

Regulated capitalism can work, but the lobbyist of certain industries tilt the law to favour certain industries through tax breaks and subsidies and sweetheart deals.  Therefore, the practice of pure capitalism is unrealistic.  For this reason, we should count on our government to protect us from exploitation of our economic system.  But even this is corrupt, as politicians who determine policy are often bought by large corporations.

Keep it up, Mr. President!

Your faithful servant,

DT

Dear President Obama

Dear Mr. President,

Tonight is a watershed moment in American socio-economics.  If the Tea Party/GOP strong arm the Democrats into doormats by stripping the poor and working classes of what is left of a fleeting glimpse of some barely recognizable shred of humane quality of life; a pittance of rainy day savings, heat, food, medical bills, school supplies...by using Planned Parenthood as a cowardly, right-wing, misogynistic, terrifyingly ignorant, greed-obsessed decoy to cut huge portions of federal aid to social programs, tax breaks for the working classes, and needed living wage adjustments - in order to keep the millionaires and billionaires making break-neck profits on the back of we teachers, nurses, social workers...and, by allowing them to pay almost no taxes - in Exxon's case ZERO taxes!  This country will either sink into civil war between working class liberals, and right-wing Tea Party fundamentalist soldiers brainwashed into fighting for the fat cat wall street bunch safe in their private and protected oligarchies, or, die destitute and beaten down.

If you give in; if the Democrats give in tonight and tomorrow, in order to avoid a government shutdown, it will be anarchy and bread lines in no time.  Your are the president.  You cannot let this happen. Reinforce your will, your spine, and your courage.  This could be the most important use of your conciderable power as Commander in Chief.  Don't let them oppress us, please.  There will be millions of families who will become hollow Grapes of Wrath souls withering in the numbing anxiety of poverty.  Yet, we have educations and gumption and will not simply move along.  The population is at critical mass for an all out civil war.  We must start producing more at home.

Please, Mr. President.  Muster your courage with your intellect and conviction.  Don't let the rich finish us working classes by allowing them to use the federal spending as the villain; and by manipulating the right wing poor, fear-based and uneducated to do their bidding.

Your faithful servant,

DT

"Twilight" by Henri Cole

                                          "Goose Creek Bear" by John Lofgreen


There's a black bear
in the apple tree
and he won't come down.
I can hear him panting,
Like an athlete.
I can smell the stink
of his body.

Come down, black bear.
Can you hear me?

The mind is the most interesting thing to me;
like the sudden death of the sun,
it seems implausable that darkness will swallow it
or that anything is lost forever there,
like a black bear in a fruit tree,
gulping up sour apples
with dry sucking sounds,

or like us at the pier, sombre and tired,
making food from sunlight,
you saying a word, me saying a word, trying hard,
though things were disintegrating.

Still, I wanted you,
your lips and neck,
your postmodern sexuality.
Forlorn and anonymous:
I didn't want to be that. I could hear
the great barking monsters of the lower waters
calling me forward.

You see, my mind takes me far,
but my heart dreams of return.

Black bear,
with pale pink tongue
at the center of his face,
is turning his head,
like the face of Christ from life.
Shaking the apple boughs,
he is stronger than I am
and seems so free of passion--
no fear, no pain, no tenderness. I want to be that.

Come down, black bear,
I want to learn the faith of the indifferent.

Published in The New Yorker 17 October 2005

Chloe - Every Tribe Needs a Sacrifice, I guess.

One film for the permanent collection.  What a beautiful film...my heart broke at the core, identifying... with each devastated realization expressed on Chloe's face.  I get her death.  I get her life.  Disappearing is high art.  

Aqualung - Strange & Beautiful (Live)

I've been watching your world from afar,
I've been trying to be where you are,
And I've been secretly falling apart,
unseen.
To me, you're strange and you're beautiful,
You'd be so perfect with me but you just can't see,
You turn every head but you don't see me.

I'll put a spell on you,
You'll fall asleep and I'll put a spell on you.
And when I wake you,
I'll be the first thing you see,
And you'll realize that you love me.

Yeah...
Yeah...

Sometimes, the last thing you want comes in first,
Sometimes, the first thing you want never comes,
And I know, the waiting is all you can do,
Sometimes...

I'll put a spell on you,
You'll fall asleep,
I'll put a spell on you,
And when I wake you,
I'll be the first thing you see,
And you'll realize that you love me.

I'll put a spell on you,
You'll fall asleep 'cos I'll put a spell on you,
And when I wake you,
I'll be the first thing you see,
And you'll realize that you love me, yeah...



>

This little flower blooms in the deep, deep dark, on the side of a seamount.
No light ever reaches it. If this delicate flower can bloom in the deep and dark, so can I.











This little flower blooms in the deep, deep dark, on the side of a seamount.
No light ever reaches it. If this delicate flower can bloom in the deep and dark, so can I.

Dear President Obama

Dear Mr. President:

You are a great man.  You need to remember who you are and what makes your fires burn.  When you walk into Congress next, remember why you took this job.  Remember what you are capable of. Most importantly, remember that half the country is depending on you to uphold and enforce the ideas and ideals that got you elected.  Put on your mental boxing gloves, your samurai verbal skills, and your divine resolve.  Do not let the Insane and Inane Spell, which has taken over almost half of this country's logic and reasoning, like some terrifying Greek tragedy, deter or sway your resolve one bit.  There are dark forces at work now.  Hate is in the Devil's court, and he has more dancing to his tune than at any time in history.  You are the leader of light.  Rise and become your destiny.  I am counting on you.

Your faithful servant,
D.T. 

Michael Robbins in Poetry, December 2010

So, my husband gave me a copy of Poetry for Christmas, and it immediately provided dividends of thought and conversation.

In particular, Michael Robbins' poem "Confessional Poem" is inspiring. At first, it pissed me off, but then I reread it, again and again, and I was a little less ticked. Reading his interview provided further illumination. I'll end up quoting the whole thing if I'm not careful, but these are the highlights you will need to go down the mental road I went down:


Confessional Poem

You had a woodchuck and an opium ball.
The one ate through the furniture,
the other sat in its cage depressing me.
Now the woodchuck sheds its skin.
I have a cow behind the dollar bin.

You shouldn't drink diarrhea
unless you bring enough for everybody.
Turn it into a teaching moment.
Asian-American Students for Christ
have the room until 2:30.

Rume says no donkey is a virgin,
no, nor any beast that bites the grass.
Maybe it sounds better in Persian.
An unseen force propels the carts
across Whole Foods parking lot.

The woodchuck hasn't been born yet
I'd rather keep than you as a pet.
You'll sleep on wood shavings, I'll comb your pelt.
That animal loved you, his captor,
whom he hated. I know just how he felt.


So, this poem pissed me off for several reasons. At first, I thought it was waay too personal for anyone other than the N and the S to understand. Then, I suspected that I was being petulant, so I read it again. I was startled to see another poet write about the Whole Foods culture; I thought I was the only poet interested in the subculture of health food stores, grocery stores...and the women who stalk them....

Then, as I began to read his interview, he started talking my language. Here are the highlights, as I understand them:

M. R. Responded to a question by musing on the existence of confessional poetry as a genre. Said Plath, Lowell, Berryman and Rich demand to be read with care, because they are some of the most self-aware poets of the twentieth century.

When asked about the woodchuck, he spoke of people whom he has hated:

"Now we get to it. Except for, say, Dick Cheney, I wouldn't want to name any of those whom I have hated: their name is legion. But they all nibble at my poems -in many ways, I'm writing for them. I think hate can be a healthy emotion in literary contexts--the brash exhilarating hatred if Nietzsche or Céline or Geoffrey Hill...they must be good haters if they are to be good lovers--is true of poets too...Speaking more generally, I write from a deep hatred of liberalism, its pieties of individual choice and self-correcting markets. Fredric Jameson writes that we must

persuade ourselves---that we are inside the culture of the culture of the market and that the inner dynamic of the culture of consumption is an infernal machine from which one does not escape by the taking of thought (or moralizing positions), an infinite propagation and replication of "desire" that feeds on itself and has no outside and no fulfillment.

The liberal, on the other hand, believes that the system

is not really total in that sense, that we can ameliorate it, reorganize it, and regulate it in such a way that it becomes tolerable and we thereby have the "best of both worlds.

I know perfectly sane, quite intelligent people who insist it is sheer fantasy to imagine that there will ever be any alternative to the capitalist order. My poems try, in their modest way, to expose the ridiculous logic of this way of thinking (some more than others, obviously), even as they recognize its seductions, its inescapable."

What I took from this is that, (we) think the system is okay because we can change it to work for us, but the system is busted.  We need to scrape the whole system.  Self-correcting markets don't take into account social and environmental issues.  The negative effect is, while it may take into account supply and demand, it only looks at the former after the damage has been done.

But what made me go back and read this poem - and the part that really pissed me off underneath it all, was the freakin' rhymes - they sing.  They make the whole poem chug (along with the shock- moments).  The way Robbins rhymes speaks to me because it teases formal schemes, but it doesn't crush you, with the full weight of its craft, until the last stanza, where it makes its point with visceral anger. 


His next poem in the article:

We Have the Technology

By the sparklet of certain ciliates cesium
   practices its cricket song.

Am I supposed to be impressed?  My smoothie
   comes with GPS.


Take a left at that crustacean.  You--- yes, you,
    with the crisis Isis eyes.

By Odin's beard, this is snowier than usual.  We can
     always burn the first folio.

Go bug the dandelion.  You'll have
   the elephant of surprise




So, besides all the common themes Mr. Robbins and I write about, I got to talking with my husband, and we discussed the poems and Robbins interview.  This prompted this interpretation, which we agree with: You can't buy a book on the Dalai Lama and call yourself a Buddhist; you can't drive a Prius and call yourself an environmentalist.  It takes deeper action that that.

Our system doesn't work.  But, our people want to pretend it works so they give themselves fake badges to prove it works: buying organic, a Prius...

Tired, more later