Random Notes from a Crank

Watching Northern Exposure with all its Red Hook beer advertising reminds me of one of my favorite breweries. I drank my fair share of Red Hook ESBs and Long Hammer IPAs. Strangely enough, I drank lots of Red Hook, a beer made in Seattle, when I lived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I've never seen it around these parts, unfortunately. And now they have all kinds of interesting IPAs that I can't get my hands on.

I searched for it on Binny's website, and all I got was squat.

I had forgotten how much I enjoyed that show, Northern Exposure. It has to be my favorite TV series of all time. I'm so glad Amazon made it available on Prime.

Because of a possible "wintry mix," the schools around here did not have have classes. All it did was rain. The silliness of people who aren't used to snow...

I've seen a trend recently of mid-size cities or larger cities making people their area's poet laureate. When did this move of laureating poets in places like Mobile and Mufreesboro start to happen? 

I'm not against it or anything. In fact, I like it because it supports the artistic community, but I'm just wondering when this trend started. 

Who started the laureating fire? And where else will it spread to? 

NPR has an interesting article out about the "Nones," who are apparently the largest group in the US in regard to religion. I fit into that group because I'm a highly skeptical agnostic.

The article is "Religious 'Nones' Are Now the Largest Single Group in the U.S." 

The good news to me is that this group is growing and they are likely to be liberal.  In addition, apparently Evangelicals is a group that's shrinking. More good news. 

Random Notes from a Crank

Last weekend, as usual, we spent a small fortune on school supplies for my kids. 

On Sunday I took my daughter to the last day of the county fair. She found a few of her friends, so I just sat on a bench and people watched. County fairs are prime targets for people watching. Here a few of my observations:

• I don't get some articles of clothing that people wear. 
• People who wear hi-tops for regular walking-around shoes probably aren't that good at basketball. 
• Corn dogs and fruit shake-ups are hard to resist.
• Either there many Cubs fans in my area of Illinois (there are more Cardinals fans), or a number of people have jumped on the Cubs bandwagon.
• I'm not about fat-shaming people, but Americans need to get in better shape, myself included. 

Check out Greg Fuchs' poem, "Make America Again," from Brooklyn Rail. 

Random Notes from a Crank

If you care about poetry, I suggest checking out Mark Edmundson's "Poetry Slam: Or, The Decline of American Verse" in the July issue of Harper's. While I find the article to be an academic version of a lit professor saying, "Back in the old days..." with occasional whining and pontificating, he does have some good points. Take these two examples: 

• "What happens when poets at the height of ambition somehow feel the need to be programmatically obscure? The obvious result is that they shut out the common reader. But they also give critics far too much room to determine poetic meanings--and this may be why some critics so love Graham and Muldoon and Carson and Ashbery. Their poems are so underdetermined in their sense that the critic gets to collaborate on the verses, in effect becoming a co-creator. This is a boon to critics, but readers rightly look to poets to make sense of the world, even if it is a difficult sense--and not to pass half the job off to Ph.D.s"
• "It is they [big-name poets] whom younger writers are to look up to, they who set the standard--and the standard is all for inwardness and evasion, hermeticism and self-regard: beautiful, accomplished, abstract poetry that refuses to be the poetry of our climate."

I wonder if the good Dr. Edmundson has read Sullivan's Every Seed of the Pomegranate, Vanderberg's The Alphabet Not Unlike the World, or Williams' The Road to Happiness? I also wonder if Edmundson writes his own poetry. 

Recently I became a subscriber to GoComics.com. I don't know why it's taken me so long to do something like this. First, it's free, so that appeals to my frugal nature. Second, daily I get old strips and current ones. Every day I'm reading Doonsebury, Get Fuzzy, Pearls Before Swine, F Minus, Candorville, Off the Mark, and Strange Brew along with editorial cartoons from Tom Toles, Mike Luckovich, and Michael Ramirez. Also, I'm getting recycled strips of Bloom County and Calvin & Hobbes. Those are my top two comic strips of all time, and I read them when I was a kid.

Coincidentily, I looked at Utne's nominees for the its Media Awards, checked them out, and subscribed to various Web-based magazines like TomDispatch, Grist, and OnEarth. I'm also getting updates from The American Conservative for some variety in my political reading diet, and there's an article about Calvin & Hobbes by Gracy Howard that's worth a quick read: "Imagination and the Artistic Value of Calvin & Hobbes." I look forward to watching the documentary she writes about. The strips below showcase Watterson's artistry. 

Sorry for the bleeding into the right bar, but the only way to see them well is making them extra large. 

Last night Mrs. Nasty and I went out to supper and then watched The Wolverine, the latest Hollywood offering from the Marvel universe. As comic book-based movies go, it's a good one. From my perspective, Jackman seems to get the character of Logan/Wolverine, and this movie provides a good character study. I remember reading the Wolverine four-part series in the early 80s when he went to Japan, which I think the screenplay chose parts to use in the film. I remember the comic book differently though. The love interest angle was a bigger theme, and I vaguely remember him training as a samurai, but I could be wrong. Because I enjoyed that short series back then (1982), I bought the book (below) that collects the issues. I'm looking forward to this rediscovery. 

Stay Positive: Every Seed of the Pomegranate by David Allen Sullivan

I was introduced to the collection of poetry above via Sandy Longhorn's blog Myself the Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty. 

Every Seed of the Pomegranate by David Allen Sullivan is a book of poems I've revisited over the past couple of months because the verse is powerful stuff. 

Sullivan chose to write all of the poems with the haiku form functioning as the poems' stanzas. The book is about the Iraq War.

As noted in the final paragraph of the preface, Sullivan gives the impetus for the collection: "I wrote these poems to help myself see beyond the simplistic labels of PTSD and jihadism, xenophobia and patriotism, and to imagine looking through others' eyes. I hope they become part of the ongoing dialogue that is the only way to begin healing the wounds--physical, psychological, social, and cultural--we suffer from in both countries. Poetry can create opportunities for empathy and understanding; it is one way to re-see ourselves, and the ones we too often see as the other." 

Below are some snippets from selected poems to pique your interest. The ones with an omniscient narrator or from an American are left-justified. The ones from an Iraqi are right-justified.

Released

The day the prisons
opened all over Iraq
the eyes of the dead

rolled back. The living
massed at the gates...


Kurdish House on Fire

No tears mark these days.
After Saddam's soldiers left
she burned the bedsheets.

Ahmed Abu All, Shopkeeper

The imam and I

clasped hands and advanced. He said

We must speak with these

misled Americans.

As we stepped close, the turrets

and guns turned on us.

Born on the Fourth of July, in Honduras

He remembered that boy
he'd been, as he dove into
the swimming pool where

Saddam's portrait grinned,
chipped mosaic rippling.
He was American

now, proud to join up...


Lieutenant Colby Buzzel, Sniper, Stryker Brigade

... I felt nothin' but glad
when I stood over

his body, crumpled
like he was hugging his rifle.
Take a picture, dick.

Omar Yousef Hussein, Historian

We unspooled the wire,

filled in the thin ditch, 

waited for the Americans.

It took half the day.

Afternoon was done

when someone spied the Humvee--

back then they didn't

travel in packs but

alone. When the wires touched...

Time Stands Still

For a Casio
that set the Marines jabbering;
it was the first thing

confiscated, first
reason suspicions were raised.
It remains, plastic wrapped,

labeled evidence,
in a Guantanamo desk,
while Kabir hunkers

in detention's night,


Baggage Claim

Today we can't stomach
what we made others do
to others we know less. 

Stay Positive: The Road to Happiness by Johnathon Williams

The other week I read "Weekly Update: The Road to Happiness, The Museum of Americana, and a Shout Out" over on Myself the only Kangaroo Among the Beauty, which is blog written by my friend and poet Sandy Longhorn, who I went to high school with (Wahawks, Class of '89!, and all that stuff).

She persuaded me to purchase The Road to Happiness because she's an excellent poet, and it sounded like Williams' poetry might be similar to hers. Her description of the book sucked me in: 
This is a book that tells the truth about the speaker's life growing up a country boy near Mena, AR, always on the edge of poverty and never far from the reach of religion.  These are poems so firmly rooted in place that there is no question about their authenticity.  We follow the speaker as he reaches adulthood, marries as is expected, and buries his father, all the while questioning his life and yearning for something more, something bigger.

In particular, "poems so firmly rooted in place" struck a chord with me. 

As I know I've related before, I've always enjoyed reading poetry, but I get tired of poetry that obfuscates for the sake of pretension. As much as I like T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," his and others' poetry turned the poesy game into an academic scavenger hunt, verse only for the enlightened, where if you want to try to figure out what the hell's going on or what the persona is trying to say in a poem, you're going to have to prepare yourself by packing a divining rod, a fifth of Maker's Mark, an Encyclopedia of World Religions, an Orphan Annie decoder ring, a first-aid kit, and some marijuana brownies.

I mean, really, why do some poets have to make their verse so damn hard to figure out? Why can't plain language be put in the best words in the best order with the right kind of flourishes? 

But I'm digressing. The point of Stay Positive posts is that I'm supposed to say something positive. So here goes. 

The positive I have to say is that The Road to Happiness is wonderful collection of poems. I got the book today. I read the first poem and was hooked. 

I read the book straight through. I think the only book of poetry I've ever done that with was Hayden Carruth's Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey. Or maybe also Things That Happened Once by Rodney Jones. 

Here are some snippets of verse that worth sharing:

from "Mena, AR"
the minister and his fat, sweaty hands,
the men filled with the Spirit, shaking
in the aisles, the women washed in the blood, 
gibbering from the pews...

from "The Road to Happiness"
They're men
who don't mind stained shirts
or rings in the toilet bowl,
who went out one night for diapers
and never came home.

from "Letter to Ash from Fayetteville"
June Cleaver is the most despicable
character in the history of television.
I could punch that bitch in the face. This has gone on
too long....

from "Pentecostal Girls"
they hold out their cups, so you sneak them
out of Jesus camp, float downriver to the dam, 
the black water a roll of witch bones,
a glyphic  fortune written in unfamiliar stars.


I look forward to taking more time with poems on the second read. 

This book should be on stands in checkout counters. And no, I'm not saying that to somehow demean the book because we all know the crap you find at checkout counters, but I say that because this a collection that people should be exposed to because they can relate to it in contrast to the verse of the willfully obtuse. 

At one time in our history, in the 19th century, people put pictures of poets on the walls of their living rooms, of folks like Longfellow, Whittier, and Bryant (my favorite). 

I doubt Johnathon Williams will have his portrait on any family's walls, but the collection reminds me of when poetry connected intimately to people's lives and perspectives. 

Random Notes from a Crank

I've read a lot of literature over the years. One lesson I've learned from various stories written by American authors from the 20th century is that if there's a married man and woman who have kids, it's not a good idea for the husband to take the babysitter home. I talking about you, John Cheever, Robert Coover, and John Updike. 

Another lesson I learned was "White folks crazy."

NPR had a story up recently about bias within a survey about young adult novels: "When A Popular List of 100 'Best-Ever' Teen Books Is the 'Whitest Ever.'" 

Sherman Alexie has some things to say in "Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood." 

Recently I rediscovered a poem I really like, so I'm sharing it:

The Loon on Forrester's Pond
By Hayden Carruth

Summer wilderness, a blue light
twinkling in the trees and water, but even
wilderness is deprived now. "What's that?
What is that sound?" Then it came to me, 
this insane song, wavering music
like the cry of the genie inside the lamp,
it came from inside the long wilderness
of my life, a loon's song, and there he was
swimming on the pond, guarding
his mate's nest by the shore,
diving and staying under
unbelievable minutes and coming up
where no one was looking. My friend
told how once in his boyhood
he had seen a loon swimming beneath his boat,
a shape dark and powerful
down in that silent mysterious world, and how
it had ejected a plume of white excrement
curving behind. "It was beautiful,"
he said.

The loon
broke the stillness over the water
again and again,
broke the wilderness
with his song, truly
a vestige, the laugh that transcends
first all mirth
and then all sorrow
and finally all knowledge, dying
into the gentlest quavering timeless
woe. It seemed
the only real and only sanity to me.  

Music Friday: "Big Rock Candy Mountain"

I featured a Springsteen song in a Music Friday post a while back that my daughter really likes. "American Land" is one of the bonus tracks on the Wrecking Ball album, which I have in my car right now. My daughter wants me to play the song all the time, which is fine because I like the song, and it's a political statement about immigration. 

Two stanzas from the lyrics stand out to me, especially since I recently looked at the idealistic rhetoric happening in state mottoes. Here are the lines I've latched onto:

Over there all the women wear silk and satin to their knees.

And children, dear, the sweets, I head, are growing on the trees. 

Gold comes rushing out the rivers straight into your hands

When you make your home in the American land.

There's diamonds in the sidewalk, the gutters lined in song.

Dear, I hear that beer flows through the faucets all night long. 

There's treasure for the taking, for any hard working man

Who'll make his home in the American land.

It's poetic hyperbole for a purpose, but it strikes me as reminiscent of the song "Big Rock Candy Mountain" made popular by the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. 

See the lyrics of that song below: 

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
By Harry McClintock

One evening as the sun went down
And the jungle fires were burning,
Down the track came a hobo hiking,
And he said, "Boys, I'm not turning,
I'm headed for a land that's far away
Besides the crystal fountains.
So come with me, we'll go and see
The Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
There's a land that's fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night.
Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
And the birds and the bees
And the cigarette trees
The lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs
The farmers' trees are full of fruit
And the barns are full of hay
Oh I'm bound to go
Where there ain't no snow
Where the rain don't fall
The winds don't blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come trickling down the rocks
The brakemen have to tip their hats
And the railway bulls are blind
There's a lake of stew
And of whiskey too
You can paddle all around it
In a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
The jails are made of tin.
And you can walk right out again,
As soon as you are in.
There ain't no short-handled shovels,
No axes, saws nor picks,
I'm bound to stay
Where you sleep all day,
Where they hung the jerk
That invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

I'll see you all this coming fall
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

So what am I getting at here, you might thinkin'. The song by Springsteen presents how the US was and, to a degree, still is presented as a land to opportunity, a place of unbounded wealth, a state of beneficent grace. 

As Springsteen tersely relates in two of the latter stanzas of his song, here's the upshot:

The McNicholas, the Posalskis, the Smiths, Zerillis too
The Blacks, the Irish, Italians, the Germans and the Jews
They come across the water a thousand miles from home
With nothing in their bellies but the fire down below.

They died building the railroads, they worked to bones and skin.
They died in the fields and factories, names scattered in the wind.
They died to get here a hundred years ago, they're still dying now
Their hands that built the country we're always trying to keep out. (italics mine)

Though not about America as a whole, McClintock's song, as far as I can tell, is depicting the  idealization of the West (see California's "Eureka") via a hobo's dream. 

In fact, Wallace Stegner reportedly got the title of his novel from the song. It's the same novel Wendell Berry uses as a launching point to discuss the "Boomer" and "Sticker" mindsets of American culture in one of his fine essays I read years ago, and it's one that has stuck with me. 

Berry also presented these competing mindsets in his Jefferson Lecture, which is one of the nation's highest prizes for "distinguished intellectual and public achievement in the humanities" awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

The essay/lecture is titled "It All Turns on Affection." 

It is recommended reading. 

But getting back to the song for today, a song that hit #1 on the country music charts in 1939, I think it's my favorite on the O Brother soundtrack, and I suspect it was a big if not a singular influence on Springsteen's song even though the Boss wraps his composition in Irish-Gaelic musical stylings. 

As for me, I'm dreaming of lemonade springs, bluebirds singing, lakes full of Maker's Mark, and sleeping all day. 

I want to find that place. 

Oh, and here's the song.

Random Notes from a Crank

Listening to radio on the way back from our trip to Iowa today, I surfed through a few classic rock stations. That moniker is getting stretched mighty thin. In the wake of a thirty minutes, I listened to a smattering of tunes from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and early 90s. I get why the stations are including songs from the 80s and 90s, but after a while, the pseudo-genre of classic rock is going to bust. I just don't think it's elastic enough to afford The Cult's "Fire Woman,""Ohio," Foreigner's "Juke Box Hero," and Beatles' tunes. Aside from the work of Foreigner, I like all three of those groups, but it seems to me that considering the demographics, lovers of music from the 80s and 90s might not want stuff from the 60s and 70s mixed in. Thus, the niche stations of satellite radio.

One radio station that has gotten it right though is KFMW Rock 108, the station that started exclusively purveying in hard rock/metal when I was in high school. 

I have finally started reading Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention by Stanislas Dehaene, a book written by a cognitive neuroscientist that I bought over a year ago. It's damn interesting stuff. One tidbit that I thought I'd share goes out to the poets. In the chapter titled "The Brain's Letterbox," there's this nugget that might be pertinent to writing verse. It relates to the fixation which, for purposes here, would be the center of the page. Dehaene provides these points to ponder: "Letters that appear on the right side of our gaze are at a clear advantage: they go straight into the left hemisphere [where the "brain's letterbox" resides] and do not have to travel any distance to reach the letterbox area [where reading initially happens in the brain]. Letters that appear on the left, however, first reach the right hemisphere and must then move across the two hemispheres through several centimeters of callosal cable. As a result, even in normal readers, reading is always a bit slower and more error-prone when words appear on the left side of fixation rather than on the right. The increased length of transfer and, perhaps most crucially, the reduced flow of information transmitted through the corpus callosum are costly for word recognition. Thus, in the human brain, positional invariance is incomplete: not all zones of the retina are equally efficient at reading, and, like AC [a person used as an example], we all see [comprehend, understand] words somewhat better on our right." Now, I'm no poet, but I've dabbled in writing verse some and read a bit about the craft of poetry through blogs and two books mainly -- A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver and Best Words, Best Order by Stephen Dobyns -- but the research provided here coheres with half of the advice I've gotten about writing poetry: the advice that the start and the end of the lines are the most important parts of the lines. But what I think people might need to consider is that the end of the line may have the most impact if what Dehaene relates is true, and it seems to be with the bevy of neuroscience he has backing him up. The neuroscience research might also seem to advise poets to use easier images/words to grasp at the start of the line and then employ the more complex/difficult poetical diction at the end of the lines because the brain apparently has a better chance of "getting it" if the gaze is turned toward rightward. 

And by the way, I heard one song on Rock 108 today that could compete with Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" for the rock song with the most cliches. That was some bad, bad poetry. Just horrible. 

Random Notes from a Crank

We're down here in Florida for spring break. On Monday we were at Disney. We took in Hollywood Studios and a bit of the alleged Magic Kingdom. The highlight of that day was my son and daughter being part of the Padawan training associated with the Star Wars part of Hollywood Studios park. They got trained to be Jedi warriors and then took on Darth Vader.

My daughter was up first. She did the moves as instructed. My son, on the other hand, "freestyled" as his trainer described it.  He must really hate Darth. He went after him. 

After about three hours into our time at the Magic Kingdom, the kids were tired. So were we. They wanted to go back to the condo and swim instead of deal with all those people at Disney during spring break. I concurred. Concur I did. Verily.

I'm worried about my garden. On Friday I planted two rows of shallots (one from seed, the other from sets), a row of spinach, a row buttercrunch lettuce, and a row or red Romaine. From what I gather from the InterWebTube, it's been unseasonably warm in central IL. That wouldn't be a big deal, but I'm not there to keep the newly planted seeds moist. Sure hope there's been rain. 

This season I tested whether I could keep my flat leaf parsley in the ground and have it come back in the spring just like my chives do. The parsley did fine. I could go pick some now if I were there. 

I have a hunger for raw oysters. I will satiate it soon.

After finishing Kevin Young's Ardency a while back, I started into Sherman Alexie's old collection, The Business of Fancydancing, but didn't bring it with me, unfortunately. But I've got plenty of other stuff I need to read anyway.

I'm gearing up for my fantasy baseball draft next Saturday. Projected WHIP, K rates, OBP, homeruns, and RBI along with last year's BABIP, these are on my mind every once in a while. 

Maybe I'll do another Fantasy Red Herrings post for the schmohawks out there.

Random Notes from a Crank

I'm sure this has been proposed before, but in order to make meetings more concise and to keep myself in shape, I propose that all meetings will no longer have chairs and tables. Instead, meetings will take place with the participants arranged in circles as they use treadmills, stairmasters, and eleptical machines.

I just finished reading a really interesting collection of poetry, Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels by Kevin Young. Young writes from multiple personas but mainly from the perspectives of the slaves of the Amistad who won their freedom and then went back to Africa. If you like poetry and history, this collection is for you. For me, poetry + history = win. 

I'd rather have someone disagree with me than ignore me. At least there's communication happening. 

Next week I leave for a conference in Florida, specifically in Orlando. The conference is being held at one of the many Disney Resorts. I don't care for Disney in general, which is challenging because I have two kids. My co-presenter at the conference also dislikes Disney. We should officially call our trip "The Curmudgeons Go to Disney."

All I'm asking for is some Saturday and Sunday mornings where the whole Nasty family sleeps in late, say to 8:30 a.m. Is that so wrong? Is that asking so much?

A couple of weeks ago the supermarket had a sale on frozen pies. Because I perceived the pies to be a deal, I bought a peach pie to do some culinary recon since I haven't had a store-bought, frozen pie in years. Result: It's not very good. But I keep eating it. It's pie after all. I dislike it, but I keep eating it. I keep eating it even though I dislike it. And now it's gone. Peach pie, it dead.

A Bastardized Haiku of Verbal Fluff

--And things of that nature
plus what not of said
such and such etcetera.

Missing George Carlin

@Me @You

We’re positioned to rethink, revive, recalibrate, revise, recapture, and 

rebrand our mission statements.

We’re looking for a catch-phrase, a cliché, a sports metaphor, a war metaphor that we can implement, diversify, and outsource—tactics,

strategies that work

while we rightsize and offload the peripherals of circumstance

to remain vibrant and accentuate

our competitive advantage, our emerging capacities.

But a maxim will work to

steamline our efficiencies while we expand our market.

Just make sure it’s 4G.

Btw, I'm 8G,

country strong,

and more supple than a Twitter feed.

Read it on my status, my feed, or my blog.

@Me @You

The marketing plan is to cross-pollinate.

and we will

at will,

willfully.

Or synchronize while we download, upload, feed, and friend

for synergy and diversity and opportunity

or hokum cultivated

to deploy and marshall resources in order

to meet objectives necessary to attain our goals.

Whatever you do, don’t think inside of it--the box that is.

And push that envelope.

Get that objective on a growth trajectory to meet the

needs of the 21^st century.

See, omelets, well they need eggs broken

just as long as we don’t reinvent wheels.

And the work, it needs to be smart to increase productivity.

See, I’m talking

@You @Me

I didn’t see the forest or the trees, and I didn’t hear a tree fall.

I just saw a bog of me and you,

unknown knowns, and known unknowns.

Anapanasati

The steady inhale
of your breath, of consciousness,
of attention to
focus of attention--then
the exhale and back again.

Capstone

Tuscaloosa is

wood smoke

                   billowing                                        direction;

                             out                       northeasterly

                                of                    in a

                                  barbeque joint

                                                           

houndstooth applied indiscriminately;

ruins;

our upstairs law student neighbor moaning and whining in pleasure

                                                            as her and her boyfriend with

                                                            the “Yes, yes, right there!”

                                                            the “ooohs”

                                                            it stops,

                                                            the quick footsteps to the bathroom;

intact;

the brick envelope of stale beer,

                                          the graffiti that reads, “The Paranoids are after me”;

debris;

sweat, metal bleachers, shakers,

                                                and fascination;

four seasons—not the regular variety: a spring, a concise Minnesota summer, a summer of oppression, and autumn;

a drive, a stadium, a dorm, a high school, a conference center—all Bryant;

a Baptist hangover;

magnolia lotus-like;

white pillars;

race and religion;

bourbon-coated eyes;

a professor explaining that if you’re going to study Aristotle, then you have to read Nichomachean Ethics—all stated in an accent New Orleanian;

two Shaggies in a 4 Runner sharing a Bob Marley joint at a stoplight and listening to 

Widespread

Panic;

Roll Tide as a general affirmation;

the safety of bathtubs and closets;

pine straw;

fun as sex on Sunday morning;

vowels that extend for a good while;

home.

The Last Patrol

One of the benefits of undertaking air travel alone is that you get to read in solitude.

On my trip to Baltimore today, I took advantage of this and read some good stuff.

One article I read in The Atlantic was pretty darn powerful, at least to me. "The Last Patrol" by Brian Mockenhaupt recounts the final patrol of Charlie Company, which was a combined mission with a new artillery unit. The author, Brian Mockenhaupt, is described as "a former infantryman," who "is a writer in Detroit." And the story he tells is one hell of a piece of nonfiction, and I want to read more of his stuff. Click HERE if you're interested in reading his work in the November issue.

The article made me think about many things. But one point that rattled in my brain later is the paucity of strong non-fiction or literature that has been written about either of our excursions into Iraq of Afghanistan. I've read Here, Bullet by Brian Turner, which is a collection of poems based on Turner's experiences in Iraq, and that book has its moments. Other than that though, I don't know of a lot of non-fiction or fiction that is delving into the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Maybe it's too early for that. I don't know.

I just find it odd that there hasn't been a lot of strong writing about these wars besides maybe the screenplays to the Generation Kill HBO miniseries, which is based on the experiences the First Recon Battalion of the Marines.

Broadsided

In the recent issue of Utne, there's an article about the literary press called Broadsided. What they do each month seems like a lot of fun.

While I thought the October Broadside, which is a piece of flash fiction, was okay, I have the September Broadside on my office door, and I look forward to the November edition.

Click HERE to read "Open-Air Publishing" from Utne.

And by clicking HERE you can go directly to Broadsided.

Music Friday: "Stuck Between Stations"

When I first listened to this song closely, I thought to myself, "Is he talking about John Berryman, the poet?" And, what do you know, the lead singer of The Hold Steady, Craig Finn, is talking about that icon of Confessional poetry known for The Dream Songs.

But it's not just a song that's about Berryman. It's more a smattering of different themes that the album, Boys and Girls in America, plays with, such as relationships, alcoholism, self destructive behavior, and alienation.

The first stanza of the song works with general detail of how "boys and girls in America have such a sad time together, the second stanza relates a specific couple from the male's perspective, the third and fourth stanzas work in Berryman's suicide ("The devil and John Berryman took a walk together. They ended up on Washington [Ave. bridge] talking to the river"), and the finals three stanzas make general statements about humans in an almost "Ozymandias"-like fashion:

These Twin City kisses

Sound like clicks and hisses,

And we all come down and drown in the Mississippi River.

We drink.

We dry up.

We crumble into dust.

We get wet.

We corrode.

We get covered in rust.

Click HERE for The Hold Steady playing the tune on Letterman.

The Willfully Obtuse

I've gotten back into reading poetry recently, and part of my interest was catalyzed by reconnecting with one of my friends from high school who is an accomplished poet. In fact, she wrote a solid collection of poetry titled Blood Almanac. If you're interested, you can buy it by clicking HERE.

Anyway, I recently purchased a chapbook that was recommended to me, and it jogged my memory of why I quit reading a lot of poetry.

The poetry is just willfully obtuse.

I understand playing with language, but when a poet goes on a symbolic space walk, he or she needs to stay tethered to something, some form of clarity, some form of words that congeal together to create meaning. I don't mind working for the meaning, but I don't want to be too taxed.

Maybe I'm just old fashioned and like "easier" verse.

While I do appreciate poets who can be difficult to unpack (take Eliot's "Wasteland" that requires an Encyclopedia of World Religions, the Bhadavad Gita, an Orphan Annie decoder ring, and a divining rod to help you read it), I gravitate to folks who keep it simple and play with the beauty, challenges, and memories of everyday existence--folks like Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Stephen Dobyns, William Stafford, Galway Kinnell, Hayden Carruth, W.S. Merwin, Sherman Alexie, Rodney Jones. Hell, I like also Sandberg and William Cullen Bryant.

For those readers out there looking down on Bryant, go ahead try to write some righteous blank verse, his best form. I dare ya. Go ahead.

The willfully obtuse make poetry a unhappy book report, an exercise in cognitive dissonance.

If I had my way, books of poetry would be sold at supermarket checkouts. But some of that stuff is just inaccessible to us, the hoi polloi.

Brief Tracks

I received a postcard in the mail today from Truman State University where I got both my Bachelor's and Master's degrees.

I was sad to see that one of my former professors passed away this year. Jim Thomas was a Professor of English at Truman for over thirty years, and students knew him well as a kick-ass raconteur and poet. On December 3rd, there will be a poetry reading in honor of him in the 'ville, and Truman State University Press has published a selection of his poems from his lifetime collection called Brief Tracks.

Thomas had a wicked sense of humor, and he loved to read his poetry in class. I took him for three classes: creative writing, American Realism & Naturalism, and a special topics course where we read the novels by John Updike and Toni Morrison (an odd pairing). One of my favorite short quips of his was that one of Dreiser's lesser known but great novels was A Canadian Tragedy. He turned me on to Updike, which led me to write my Master's thesis on Updike's four novels about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom.

If you're interested in checking out Brief Tracks, click HERE.

Diving In

High-schoolers diving

Into a campus dumpster,

It's graduation.

One of the trio surfaces 

Triumphant with a beer bong.