Resentful Dreams
Posted on May 13, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | 3 Comments
Funny how dreams lag behind events. Folk wisdom says that dreams predict the future, but my experience is that they predict the past. Over the last couple of nights I have dreamed, just before waking, about crappy things my colleagues have done to me. The events in the dreams are fictional, but related to things that have actually happened to me. The dreams allowed me to be outraged — in one I punched a former dean in the nose. The best part was that I punched him in the nose after telling him I was going to punch him in the nose. In the other dream I was slighted by another administrator & I gave him a thorough (& public) tongue-lashing. Very satisfying. The weird thing is that I’ve been feeling fairly good about my teaching life lately, though a couple of months ago I went through a period of resentment. Each dream worked like a little poem: specific details carrying a strong emotion. Also, a process of encapsulation: giving the feeling a form results in an ability to control the emotion. There is another sort of dream (& another sort of poem) that break open new realms of feeling & those are much more dangerous & more beautiful.
Summer
Posted on May 13, 2008
Filed Under Personal, River Notes | 1 Comment
I’m used to feeling a major relaxation at the end of Spring Semester each year, but this year the relaxation has only been partial. Partly, this is because I’m going to be teaching a summer course online, which begins next week, but the course won’t really take that much time since almost everything is already online from last summer, the first time it was offered. Also, I’m going to be spending a month at the Blue Mountain Center up in the Adirondacks. That’s obviously not a hardship — quite the opposite, it’s an luxury to be able to spend a month doing nothing but writing, reading & hiking around one of the most beautiful lakes in the country. It does, however, reduce the amount of time available to complete several projects around the house & yard. To say nothing of golf & bike riding. I just took my bike in for a tuneup this morning & I’ve already been to the driving range a couple of times, where I hit the ball better than I had any reason to expect.
I guess I should be grateful that I’m not going to Vietnam this summer, as I had hoped earlier in the year. I did not get the NEH summer stipend I applied for, though it was always a long shot. (They funded around 70 of 800 proposals.) I wanted to do a series of interviews with Vietnamese poets as the foundation of a sort of poetic ecology of the country. Actually, I was very disappointed when I got turned down for the grant, though the proposal I submitted got some decent comments from the reviewers. It turns out they wanted me to provide a much more detailed schedule of activities while in Vietnam — hard to believe any of them have actually worked there! (Otherwise, they’d understand the difficulty of predicting what will happen when.) My plan now is to resubmit the proposal for the summer following my sabbatical next spring. I should be in a better position to carry out my plans then, honestly.
So it’s going to be a compressed summer in anticipation of a compressed academic year, since I’m only teaching during Fall Semester, with a sabbatical in the spring. I want to use the summer to get a running start on my sabbatical — don’t want to have to waste any time “warming up” in the spring. To that end, I have been pulling disparate pieces of manuscripts together & trying to finish the things that are finishable in order to clear the deck for things that are going to take more extended & focused work.
Corrupter of Youth
Posted on May 8, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy, Poetry, Politics, Reading | Leave a Comment
I’m still in a May Day mood & so thought I’d pass this link along, about Allen Ginsberg in Prague, May 1st 1965. That’s when he was crowned King of the May & the authorities decided that the poet was corrupting the fine socialist youth of the city. [Via the New Poetry email list.]
“For a Coming Extinction” (W.S. Merwin)
Posted on May 2, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy, Poetry, Politics, Reading, Science | 2 Comments
For a Coming Extinction
Gray whale
Now that we are sinding you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing
I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day
The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours
When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices
Join your work to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important
[W.S. Merwin]
See also: This imminent extinction. More: Right whales written off. “It is we who are important.
Who’s Gonna Build Your Wall? (Tom Russell)
Posted on May 2, 2008
Filed Under Music, Politics | Leave a Comment
Here’s another video via Scott McLemee. Seems appropriate since yesterday was May Day:
We got fundamentalist Muslims
We got fundamentalists Jews
We got fundamentalist Christians –
They’ll blow the whole thing up for you
But as I travel around this big old world
There’s one thing I most fear –
It’s a white man in a golf shirt
With a cell phone in his ear.
May Day: “To Fan The Flames of Discontent”
Posted on May 1, 2008
Filed Under Music, Politics, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Via Scott McLemee at Quick Study, with a further comment at Crooked Timber. And here is a link to the Little Red Songbook, “to fan the flames of discontent.” Back in the seventies I had the good fortune to meet a couple of old Wobblies who had worked the docks in Seattle and knew people who had survived the Everett Massacre. Back then I had a friend named Blake, a hell of a guitar player who knew all the songs. Happy May Day, Blake!
Bonus Track: Shawntay Henry, a high school student from the US Virgin Islands, reads Robert Hayden’s poem “Frederick Douglass.” Henry won the Poetry Out Loud competition yesterday.
Second Bonus Track: A Mayday story from 3QD.
Animal Cruelty
Posted on April 28, 2008
Filed Under Dogs, Philosophy, Poetry, Politics | 4 Comments
In a comment to the previous post, Chris Robinson makes reference to a poem from my book Magical Thinking. We bear a special responsibility, greater perhaps than the responsibility we bear toward each other, to care for animals. Whichever philosopher said that we reveal our character through our treatment of those weaker than ourselves was right, I think. Here is the poem.
Abandoned Bluetick Bitch
Numbed with self-loathing,
we abandon the emissaries
of grace. Chained to a tree
beside the empty rental
she hollowed out a den
for herself & her young.
By the time we found her
the water they’d left her
was a couple of days gone.
When the water was gone
she would have slept, not dreaming,
letting the pups nurse
her sparse milk & when
the smallest died she ate it to keep
her strength & cleanse the den,
depriving coy dogs & foxes
an expedient scent.
It’s likely there were two more
before we found her.
Ribs covered by a tissue of dry skin,
she was nothing-a shadow
on the dirt & was just able
to raise her head & take
a little water from my hand
before turning to nose
her three live pups awake.
Reader, it is true, there is
horror everywhere worse
than this & cruelty that beggars
imagination, but this
is local & particular; these were
my neighbors did this,
who, without even the excuse
of psychosis, committed this wrong.
Who live in this same light
& shadow I live in.
Let us kill one another
with heedless abandon-we deserve it-
but not these poor relations
whose lives are without malice
& whose motives are transparent.
Let us kill one another.
Guillermo Vargas Habacuc
Posted on April 27, 2008
Filed Under Dogs, Personal, Seeing | 13 Comments
I’m not going to link to the photos / video of artist Habacuc’s work. If you want to see a dog starving to death as an art installation, you can search on the name.
Proposal for funding: An art installation: Guillermo Vargas Habacuc comes to my house & we tie him to a tree out back without food or water. My dogs & I watch from the deck as he starves to death. They bark at him & I jeer, but soon we grow bored & he dies in loneliness & terror. Certainly the authorities would have no objections since this would be an art installation.
Note: Looking around a bit more, I see that the artist has issued a series of statements defending his work. It’s hard to know what to make of them, but even the most recent in which he says he is trying to call attention to the plight of stray dogs makes no logical, aesthetic, or moral sense. Why not a street urchin with AIDS? Why not a torture victim? You want to call attention to the plight of stray dogs in Costa Rica? Go rescue one, provide veterinary care, and if it is “going to die anyway,” comfort it as you have it put down. Photograph & videotape tape the process & show that work in the gallery. Any real art — even the ugliest & most painful — must spring from some source of compassion; otherwise, it is merely egotism, voyeurism, exploitation, sensationalism, stupidity in various mixtures & combinations. “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1).
Leafing Out
Posted on April 24, 2008
Filed Under Language, River Notes | 4 Comments
There ought to be a name for the day, in temperate climates, that the trees leaf out. (It would not be the same date each year & it would come earlier the further south one went.) Here in St. Lawrence County, that day was yesterday. The world went from shades of gray & brown to shades of green. The birches are & willows are an intense yellow-green, the maples a kind of dusky green, except for the species that leafs out first bright red, then goes green as chlorophyll pumps into the leaves. The roadsides have gone from dust & plow gravel to grass overnight. As I say, there ought to be a name for this particular day of each year.
The Angels Want to Wear My Red Shoes
Posted on April 17, 2008
Filed Under Language, Politics | 5 Comments
When the last pope first came to this country, I was in graduate school in Iowa. People that I actually knew — people I would never have suspected of such impulses — drove to Chicago to attend a mass presided over by John Paul II. Perhaps it was because John Paul & the poet Czeslaw Milosz had been boyhood friends & we were poets in wanting, after all. But I’m not sure my friends even knew enough to know about the pope’s connection to the poet. I only learned about it later. But I stood mystified. Even then, I would have been reluctant to subject myself to a stadium-sized crowd to see, say, the Rolling Stones. (Maybe Dylan.) But the pope? The man who stood for a politics I couldn’t imagine subscribing to? It was the ceremony, they told me. And the personality. I’ll grant that John Paul had personality, that he was a sort of intellectual, though of a distinctly medieval sort. But Benedict the whatever? The man sounds like Peter Sellers doing a prissy German accent. The gushing coverage on NPR as I was driving to work was simply too much. I turned off the radio & listened to my rotten muffler. I have a protestant detestation of ceremony that extends even into my academic life. I got drafted last year to go as my department’s representative to the university’s awards event. The fucking thing is three hours of endless high-minded blather & made-up tradition. I think it was the most boring three hours of my life. The Catholic Church, despite its liberals & liberationists, stands for a politics of prejudice. Sure there are sincere Catholics who believe in social justice. Good for them. But what the hell would Jesus say? Jesus who hung out with hookers & queers & the poor, for God’s sake! Did you know that the pope wears $600 shoes? Sell all that you have & give it to the poor. Commercial spiritual gush. Advertising. Power. The rhetoric of peace without the least sense of responsibility. The rhetoric of compassion riding in a white Mercedes. American Catholics themselves have doubts about the “rigorous” religious faith this pope demands of the faithful. The oppression of women & the exclusion of gay persons, that’s rigor. And yet the secular media falls all over itself to be respectful. It is a measure of our own depravity that we do not hoot this man from the stage, that we do not ignore him as the dangerous anachronism that he is. And, sure, this is an anti-Catholic rant. I was raised among right-wing protestant fundamentalists they’re even worse. Coming soon: why the hardcore “rationalist” atheists are just as stupid.
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