Mandarin
Posted on September 22, 2008
Filed Under Bonsai, Politics, River Notes | 2 Comments
As the institutions of the empire crumbled, I spent a glorious fall morning in the northern provinces tending my bonsai. The smaller of the two pommegranits has survived a bout with fungus & is doing well. I have trimmed the rosmarys’ summer growth to reveal the sinuous structure of their branches. The ficus & the plum sit in a sunny southern window ready for the long cold months. The effects of the crisis will reach us, of course; even in the provinces of the empire we cannot escape the coming chaos. This week, though, we are to have sunny days & cool nights.
Mixed Blessings
Posted on September 18, 2008
Filed Under Reading, River Notes, Teaching, Writing | 3 Comments
So I’m sitting around at home this morning looking out on the kind of beautiful fall morning that would usually pull me outdoors. My favorite yard chores are autumn yard chores. But I’m sitting inside because I picked up a head cold & sore throat at school. Colleges are viral breeding grounds. I just don’t have the oomph to get out & transplant perennials. Despite the cold, it has been a good semester so far — across the board, my students seem pretty engaged, though I remain amazed at their meager abilities as readers. And by that I mean, just the ability to get the basic prose meaning of a literary text. “That’s weird,” they say immediately in response to a poem they don’t understand (Stephen Dunn’s “Men Talk,” hardly a difficult text), dismissing it before they have even tried to suss out the meaning of all its words and images. Reading poetry, they tend to not read sentences, even when there are perfectly clear sentences. I guess they are reading lines as fragments. Perhaps it is just a very weak sense of grammar. And by grammar, I don’t mean knowledge of the names of different grammatical entities, but a sense of the way the parts of a sentence relate to each other to create a meaning. I also found out yesterday that I was one of four members of my department who had been nominated to replace our outgoing department chair, though I immediately took myself out of the running. Five years ago I wanted the job & didn’t get it, but I don’t want it now. I’ve passed that particular fork in the road. All my ambitions are literary & pedagogical these days. Inspired by Stuart O’Nan’s visit to campus, I have begun working on a short story — my first attempt in 20 years — & I’m still struggling with my long poem, pieces of which are lying around on my desk, in my notebooks, and on my hard drive like flotsam on the beach after a storm.
Sarah Palin & Censorship
Posted on September 14, 2008
Filed Under Politics, Reading | 6 Comments
Perhaps the list I posted below is a hoax, but as I said in my correction, Palin’s ideology is just fine with banning books. I grew up among Palin’s people, I know them. They are intolerant, aggrived, and deeply anti-intellectual. And homophobic. Now it appers that, while the particular list may have been made up, Palin did attempt to get books taken off the Wasilla Public Library’s selves because she found them personally offensive.
Reginal Shepherd: 1963 - 2008
Posted on September 12, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments
The poet Reginal Shepherd has died after a heroic battal against cnacer during which he continued to write poems and weblong entries. I only met him once. Both on the page & in person, his commitment to honesty, clarity, & beauty are what I will remember. He was, truly, one of the makers. [See also this, from people who knew him well.]
Fred Clark on John McCain, Friend of NAMBLA
Posted on September 12, 2008
Filed Under Politics | Comments Off
John McCain is a friend of child molesters. He wants to make it harder for parents and the police to protect children from sexual predators.
Kevin Drum on John McCain
Posted on September 11, 2008
Filed Under Politics | Comments Off
What does a McCain presidency hold in store? Kevin Drum has a vision of the future & it isn’t pretty. Here’s the middle of his post, but you should read the rest:
John McCain has obviously decided that he can’t win a straight-up fight, so he’s decided instead to wage a battle of character assassination, relentless lies, and culture war Armageddon. So what happens on November 5th?
If McCain wins, he’ll face a Democratic congress that’s beyond furious. Losing is one thing, but after eight years of George Bush and Karl Rove, losing a vicious campaign like this one will cause Dems to go berserk. They won’t even return McCain’s phone calls, let alone work with him on legislation. It’ll be four years of all-out war.
And what if Obama wins? The last time a Democrat won after a resurgence of the culture war right, we got eight years of madness, climaxing in an impeachment spectacle unlike anything we’d seen in a century. If it happens again, with the lunatic brigade newly empowered and shrieking for blood, Obama will be another Clinton and we’ll be in for another eight years of near psychotic dementia.
My only problem with this analysis is that the Democratic Congress has shown no signs of fury in the face of recent outrages so it’s hard to imagine them “beyond furious” at any future outrages. I think a McCain victory should be the catalyst for rank & file Dems to throw the double-dealing bastards out & bring in some elected officials from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party. Primary challenges for all the leadership. Or maybe we should just all go tend our gardens in the worst of all possible worlds.
Josh Marshall on McCain / Palin
Posted on September 10, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy, Politics | 4 Comments
Most people who come by this space probably also read Josh Marshall’s TPM, but if you don’t, then please read this post about John McCain. I wonder if Nancy Pelosi will “take impeachment off the table” when it turns out that Vice President Palin has lied to the grand jury investigating Troopergate, as she inevitably will.
I’m not saying that Obama will not win, but as Marshall notes, it is clearly possible that John McCain will be our next president, as lying, race-baiting, & morally unfit a president as we will have had since Nixon. And if McCain is our next president, speaking personally, I will simply have to give up the last shreds of my liberal American idealism & admit to myself that I live among a jingoistic, shallow, racist, selfish, & stupid citizenry. So, yeah, I’m an elitist — I believe in trying to find the truth, however provisional — while my salt-of-the-earth fellow Americans — at least half of them, those ordinary folk Mrs. Palin is supposed to appeal to — have become the sort of radical moral relativists so long denounced by the culture warriors of the hard right, a deeply ironic turn of events the right itself seems completely unaware of. Allan Bloom & William Bennett where art thou?
Books Sarah Palin Wanted Banned
Posted on September 10, 2008
Filed Under Politics, Reading | 2 Comments
Update & Correction: See Mary’s comment below, which links to this Snopes debunking of the story about Palin. This list, though, remains representative of the sort of cultural limits that the radical right would like to enforce; insofar as the vice presidential nominee is a radical Christianist, she subscribes to an ideology that is in favor of banning books like the ones listed below, all of which have come under attack in the past by would-be censors. So, perhaps a reporter of debate moderator will ask, “Mrs. Palin, which books did you have in mind when you enquired of Mary Ellen Emmons, the town librarian of Wasilla, whether it might be possible to remove certain titles?”
According to someone posting a comment to Maureen Dowd’s column at the New York Times, this is the list of books that Sarah Palin tried to have removed from the Wasilla Public Library. The commenter says the list comes from the official minutes of the Library Board and that when Palin was unsuccessful at having these books banned, she tried to have the librarian fired. The list:
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Blubber by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Christine by Stephen King
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cujo by Stephen King
Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Decameron by Boccaccio
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Forever by Judy Blume
Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Have to Go by Robert Munsch
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
It’s Okay if You Don’t Love Me by Norma Klein
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and ChristopherCollier
My House by Nikki Giovanni
My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara
Night Chills by Dean Koontz
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women’s Health Collective
Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil’s Alternative by Frederick F
Several things are worth noting about this list, the first being that while some of the titles are clearly included because they are thought by Christianists to be “inappropriate for children,” this is not a school library we’re talking about but the town’s public library. Sarah Palin, then, would like to erase Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, John Knowles, Alice Walker, and Arthur Miller from American literature. It would be interesting if some reporter could ask Mrs. Palin what, specifically, she objects to in these texts; because I’d bet she hasn’t read them, that they come off some fundamentalist master list. There’s another category of books on the list — typified by the J.K. Rowling titles — that indicate the way in which Christianists are offended by any form of magic other than their own kind of magic. Some of the picks are just bizarre: “Mrs. Palin,” one would like to hear the debate moderator ask, “What is it about One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn that you find offensive? or One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez?” Of course it will never happen. Later: Reading the list over again just now, it’s also pretty clear that Palin is frightened of adolescence & would like to be able to ban the introspection & sexual energy of young people. Her desire to take J.D. Salinger & John Knowles off the shelves is really just an extension of the “abstinence only” sex-ed policies she favors for school children & that have served her family so well.
Fall
Posted on September 9, 2008
Filed Under Birds, Bonsai, River Notes | 1 Comment
The days have been fairly warm, but the nights cooling. The leaves on some of the maples have just begun to shift toward yellow. Cassiopeia rises in the northeast at the end of our road in the gap where the tall trees open on the riverbank. There are still coneflowers & black-eyed-susans in the flowerbeds, but not much else. In the ditches the late blooming asters & fleabane proliferate; the milkweed is setting its alien-looking seedpods. The sounds of geese gathering on the river. Last week the flycatchers along the river seemed to be doing twice as much hunting, gathering strength for their migration; this week, most of them are gone. Now that they have stopped growing, I’ve been trimming back excessive summer growth on some of my bonsai, especially the rosemary, but also the pomegranates & natal plum. Waves of hard rain this morning.
Students’ Reading
Posted on September 9, 2008
Filed Under Poetry, Reading, Teaching | 2 Comments
When my students read a poem or story, they invariably create suppositions about the characters / plot to flatten out ambiguities. They are very uncomfortable with ambiguities. I was using the Lucinda Williams song “Changed the Locks” yesterday in creative writing to demonstrate parallel syntax & repetition. (I’ll get to Whitman, traditionalists need not hyperventilate.) The song’s third verse is:
I changed the kind of car I drive
so you can’t see me when I go by
And you can’t chase me up the street
and you can’t knock me off of my feet.
I changed the kind of car I drive.
This comes after veerses in the same structure with the lines, “I changed the locks on my front door” & “I changed the number on my phone.” Most students in the class were reluctant to see the combination of violence & eroticism in the pharse “knock me off my feet,” erasing it in favor of a purely sentimental reading. And when pushed, they would begin to make up stories that have no warrent in the text of the song: “Well, maybe she . . .” I have found this response almost universal among my creative writing & literature students.
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