DAWords

Starving the Beast

2011-11-22T21:26:00.000-05:00

It’s called ‘starving the beast’: the theory that a constant, consistent reduction in taxes will result in smaller government. A government that has a reduced income stream will, out of necessity, reduce its expenditures and inevitably shrink in size.

The starving process can take many forms. Reduction in income tax rates, particularly at the higher income levels. A reduction in the number of income tax rates, i.e., eliminating the progressivity of the tax rates, thus reducing the volume of dollars coming into the government coffers. Tax caps on government, such as the recent 2% cap imposed on local governments in New York State. Creative tax breaks that favor certain segments of the economy, which has the two-fold impact of reducing tax revenues and reducing supposedly ‘onerous’ regulatory burdens on the market.

Each of these methods has been used in the past 30 years, the result of the ‘Reagan revolution’ of conservative government. We can all argue about whether it has really reduced the size of government; most of the numbers demonstrate that it has not, primarily because governments find creative ways around them.

Such tactics have had disastrous affects at the state and local government level, where government is obligated to balance its budget annually -- unlike the federal government, they can't print money. California's education system is frequently held up as an example: once the leader in the nation, that state's education system suffers from poor school performance and failing infrastructure, as the tax investment has dwindled due to 'proposition 2 1/2', which placed a limit on property taxes. Over the past 30 years, the State has not filled the gap.

A mandated squeeze on taxes forces governments at all levels to make choices, to prioritize where the revenues are spent. And the impact is not always pretty – because the decisions tend to favor those with money and power. Health care, education, food assistance, unemployment programs are targets for cuts, while tax abatement and business investment loan programs are funded.

Meanwhile, those at the top of the income pyramid get to keep an ever-increasing percentage of their money. Reagan and his disciples – the Grover Norquists of the world -- believe that such a system permits the dollars to ‘trickle down’ to those in lower income brackets, as those with money would invest in the market, expanding opportunities for all.

It hasn’t happened.

Education Disparity

2011-11-06T16:37:00.000-05:00

David Brooks weighed in on the income disparity issue on October 31. He did not deny the movement of wealth to a smaller percentage at the top; as with so many apologists, he downplayed the significance and magnitude. He also identified the other disparity, which he names the Red Inequility:

Then there is what you might call Red Inequality. This is the kind experienced in Scranton, Des Moines, Naperville, Macon, Fresno, and almost everywhere else. In these places, the crucial inequality is not between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent. It’s between those with a college degree and those without. Over the past several decades, the economic benefits of education have steadily risen. In 1979, the average college graduate made 38 percent more than the average high school graduate, according to the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke. Now the average college graduate makes more than 75 percent more.

He believes this Red Inequality is much more important, and has a longer-term negative impact on our country. He states that what we actually need is to close the opportunity gap by improving our capacity to get more people through higher levels of education.

He is right. But if we were to ask him whether we, as a society, should pony up more dollars to get more people through college, he would probably hesitate.

And there, he would be wrong. Because money – and the heavy financial burden necessary for students to complete college and beyond – is one of the greatest roadblocks to that educational opportunity he so eloquently defends.

A roadblock the 1% never has to worry about.

Occupy Albany

2011-10-30T20:15:00.001-04:00

Occupy Wall Street may not come up with solutions, but at least it is asking the right questions in a nonviolent setting. I don’t believe that love can be forced, but I believe it can be provoked. I don’t believe that generosity can be forced, but it can be provoked. Occupy Wall Street is provoking generosity.

Shane Claiborne, co-founder, Simple Way, in Christian Century, 10-20-2011

The Occupy Albany folks are camped out in the park outside my office window. I can’t actually see them thru the trees; the western part of the park, which I overlook, is the responsibility of the State, while the eastern section is managed by the City. The occupants choose to test the City’s resolve on the 11PM curfew, rather than the State.

The Occupy movement has taken lots of hits over its perceived lack of focus. The themes appear to be corporate greed, banks, and the financial structures of society. The rallying numbers are 1% and 99%, the former representing the percentage of the population that owns over 40% of the wealth in the country. The media also seems to pick up on a leadership issue: there is no one organization that commences, manages, and stimulates the urban-based occupations, and no specific individuals that make the speeches in front of the camera – the usual ‘official spokesman.’

In the end, that may be a positive paradigm. The ultimate democracy: the group is the power and the power is derived from collective decision-making. A romantic notion, certainly, but it gives the group the ability to fend off singular ad hominem attacks. Push on one part of the balloon, and another part expands.

The group’s argument is appropriate – wealth is distributed inequitably in this country, and major American corporations have been a primary driver. But the focus of the protest is misplaced.

In our system of capitalism, the purpose of a corporate entity is to earn profits for its shareholders – a system that applies to the small corner store owner as much as it does to a multi-national. Corporations are going to act in their best interests to maximize profits and reduce costs through every means available: closing plants and offices or cutting staff; seeking property tax cuts from local governments; lobbying for a lower capital gains tax; pitting one town against another and one state against another for gimmies like free ‘shovel-ready’ property, tax abatements, or interest-free grants; threatening to leave town unless taxes are reduced or waived; pushing for reduced regulations, higher tariffs on foreign goods, or tax advantages for foreign investment. Major companies have successfully argued for bailouts from the federal government to stave off failure – thus privatizing profits (it’s mine, I earned it, I’m not sharing) and socializing risk (durn, we failed, everybody must kick in to save us, the shareholders can’t do it alone).

Corporate America can’t be blamed for working that system – no matter how questionable or ethical the tactics.

We are to blame for letting it happen.

We have a structure in place for countering these activities. That’s what government is for. This is the role of government, the people we select to set policies in the form of law and regulation, and the agencies created to implement and enforce them.

That role has been distorted for the past 30 years, as we have tilted the balance of our assets, our income, and our wealth through regressive tax policies, poorly-conceived investments, and lax regulatory enforcement.

Somehow, government is now viewed as a bad thing. And we are worse for that image.

We're all Connected

2011-04-18T21:05:00.000-04:00

“There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don’t think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.”

President Obama, April 2011

George Packer in The New Yorker:

Republicans are once again trying to privatize Medicare, gut Medicaid (by turning it into block grants), cut education spending and regulations that protect the environment, and give yet another round of tax cuts to the rich. They continue to insist – despite years of evidence to the contrary – that market forces will lower health-care costs and that tax cuts will create economic growth and lift all incomes. “Ideology makes it unnecessary for people to confront individual issues on their individual merits,” the late Daniel Bell wrote. “One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulae.” Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked.

There are still plenty of people who believe the pap that our country still thrives solely because of individual initiative, the ‘pull yourself up by your own bootstraps’ nostalgia that built the cabin in the Kentucky woods. The problem with this theory is that it ignores the power of a society to ostracize and dispense with those individuals that do not have the opportunity to succeed, or have been slapped down by economic/social conditions of their own environment.

Our economic system is based upon accumulation of wealth by shareholders: the business exists to bring profits to those who fund or manage the business. This is not an intrinsically bad system, as long as we, as a society, create other vehicles and methods to create some equity in society. That’s what government is for. Obama referred to this last week when he spoke of the positive role of government: “a belief that we’re all connected, and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation…We’re a better country because of these commitments. I’ll go further. We would not be a great country without those commitments.”

Published

2011-04-10T21:30:00.000-04:00

I'm a published poet.

The latest edition of "Spitball -- the Literary Baseball Magazine" arrived in the mail on Friday. My poem "Row 747, Upper Deck" is one of five poems interspersed with short fiction and an article about the 2010 Hall of Fame inductees. The cover is a black and white representation of Andre Dawson taking a long look to left, his home run swing completed, the Montreal Expos ensignia across his jersey. I attended a few games in that city, a lost franchise. Maybe it is fitting that my first published poem was about baseball.

It is incredibly flattering to have your work recognized. When I opened to page 20 and read it again, I wanted to re-write it, of course. Always room for improvement.

So, my thanks to Mike Shannon and William McGill, the Editor and Poetry Editor for 'Spitball'. You can see other poems they have selected at their website .

Two Speeches

2011-01-24T21:16:00.000-05:00

“Now let me suggest…that if we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation, and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world. Now the judgment of God is upon us and we must learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.”

Martin Luther King, "Christmas Sermon on Peace", December 24, 1967

“[we must] use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together…I believe that we can be better. Those who died here, those who saved life here—they help me believe. We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us.”

President Barack Obama, Tucson Memorial Service, January 13, 2011

Weapons of Mass Destruction

2011-01-10T20:14:00.000-05:00

A 22-year-old mixes with a crowd at a public gathering with the local congressional representative. The true picture of democracy: an elected official asks her constituents for opinions and conversation. The young man pulls out a 9-millimeter pistol with a 30-bullet clip, capable of firing multiple bullets in seconds. In less time than it takes to pull a pin from a hand grenade, six people are dead, 14 injured.

And the discourse over the past two days is about the 'atmosphere of vitriol'.

We should be asking why anyone should legally carry a weapon that can kill six people in a few seconds. Clearly, rational people would not argue that a hand grenade is a reasonable weapon to carry in public. Why should an automatic weapon be an exception to that rule?

The first State of the State

2011-01-08T16:11:00.000-05:00

From George Washington's first speech to Congress, January 8, 1790:

"The welfare of our country is the great object to which our cares and efforts ought to be directed, and I shall derive great satisfaction from a cooperation with you in the pleasing though arduous task of insuring to our fellow citizens the blessings which they have a right to expect from a free, efficient, and equal government.”

Young country with no defined self-image of unity quite yet. But the new (old) leader already knows that unity in vision from elected officials is the best way to succeed.

The old days, and the old ways, were not purer in cooperation, nor more efficient in governance, than today. Those Congressmen and Senators were still preoccupied with self-interest, and prochial (sic, and i don't feel like looking it up!) interests of their own states. They were still hesitant to assume large-scale powers that would override states' rights. The House is having the same argument this month as they attempt to alter 2010's health care act.

George did say that their task was to insure 'to our fellow citizens.' Was he including women in that statement, even while speaking to a roomful of men?

He probably opened with a prayer. He should have opened with poetry.

Stuck in the Middle

2011-01-04T20:48:00.001-05:00

Gerry Rafferty is an asterisk on the music compendium of the early 1970s.

Yet, Dave and I had our memories triggered on the way home from work today. NPR's 'All Things Considered' did a short story about Rafferty, who died at 63 today.

First semester, freshman year, Lycoming College, fall 1972. The corner of Washington Boulevard and Franklin Street, Williamsport. Late night trips to the small sub shop. The jukebox inevitably playing "Stuck in the Middle with You" -- mainly because one of the football lineman, who frequented the place at the same time, loved that song. Infectious song, one of those that took over the music memory socket in your head and did not let go -- like his other songs, "Baker Street", "Get It Right Next Time".

A producer on 'ATC' probably had memories triggered upon the news of Rafferty's death. So Gerry gets a few more minutes of fame, and another few thousand minds are humming along.

I believe a sub shop still occupies that corner. I may go find out; I got a note today from my history professor at Lycoming, inviting me to speak to a seminar class.

A song hook, a sub shop, and Dr. Larson, all within a few hours. Threads link so many things in life, in the shortest of timespans.

Lost analog memories

2011-01-02T14:30:00.002-05:00

My brother Dennis still had the tape recorder.

Our famiily gathered for Christmas in Cooperstown last week. Dennis brought the old Grants tape deck, a small portable player/recorder with three settings: play, rewind, record. He and I had used it to record the Christmas Eve broadcast from Apollo 8 in 1968. We both think it also contains other music and commentary that we recorded during our early teen years.

The brown tape ran on two reels about three inches in diameter, and looked to be in fairly good shape; the box, which measures about 11 inches across and eight inches wide, came with a cover. We bought fresh batteries -- two C's and a 9volt -- and inserted them; the positive/negatives both faced the same direction, something rare in devices today.

Dennis hit the play button, and the motor dragged the tape at less than optimum speed. It emitted a low sound at various points, as if a voice were speaking in very slow motion from the bottom of a well. The reels turned in fits and starts, and he turned it off.

The tape still contains memories. The 40-year box just is not the device to bring them to reality. Oh well, thank goodness for new technology -- we can see the whole thing thanks to digital archiving and the internet.

[Incidentally, I highly recommend the White House Inn if you ever visit Cooperstown -- a very welcoming and comfortable B&B. Ed, Margie, Pattie and Mary are excellent hosts, and it is a fine gathering place.]

Christmas Eve 1968

2010-12-24T14:33:00.001-05:00

Wired Science online has a brief article and the full video of the Apollo 8 Christmas Eve broadcast. This is one of those life-mark events for me: I distinctly remember watching the television broadcast as the three men circled the moon, the first humans to do so. They stuck a camera in the little window and described the view of the moonscape, and the contrast with the green and blue earth in the vast distance. They read the first chapter of Genesis as their closing.

I remember being very struck by that view, their description, and the words of Genesis as the stark landscape of the moon turned under the small window. I recorded it on a little reel-to-reel tape recorder -- a tape which is long gone.

So much has changed in 42 years. But the words of 'the beginning', and the celebration of a birthday on December 25, still ring out.

Merry Christmas.

The Economic Oligarchy

2010-11-27T20:31:00.003-05:00

Recent data:

National unemployment rate: 9.6%

Unemployment rate for those with bachelors degree: 4.7%

Unemployment rate for those with less than high school: 15%

Headline from New York Times on Tuesday:

“Corporate Profits Were the Highest on Record Last Quarter”

Two lessons emerge from this information.

First, when the recession got rough, the financial sector convinced our government to spread their pain among the taxpayers rather than just their shareholders -- the former being a larger base of help than the reluctant latter, of course. So we bailed out the financial sector and a couple of manufacturing companies that made cars people weren't buying.

How does the private sector repay us when the economy climbs off the bottom of the hole? Admittedly, some of them repay the government. But as the economy improves, most corporations pour the benefits into profits rather than spread the wealth by hiring. And then the primary corporate decision-makers hide behind the curtain created by the Supreme Court, and fund candidates who promise to suppress tax rates for the highest earners.

Second lesson: stay in school. If you are not ready for a job that requires higher skills, you will be left behind, living on the fringe of the income stream. Those with bachelors degrees are employed. Those who dropped out of high school might as well be living in 1933.

The Giants Win the World Series

2010-11-01T22:47:00.005-04:00

I was only a year old when the Giants last won the World Series in 1954, an important win to the biggest Giants fan I knew -- my Dad.

Since then, the Giants have made the Series four times, and they beat the Texas Rangers tonight for their first championship since that win over Cleveland 56 years ago. This was the most unlikely of teams, compared to the stars on the teams in 1962, 1989, and 2002.

Which makes this World Series win tonight the best of all. And what makes baseball the best of all sports.

I can now stop trying to write the perpetual angst poem about the Giants.

All Saints Day

2010-11-01T19:48:00.003-04:00

What does it mean to be human?

Yesterday was All Saints Sunday. Our church sanctuary has 280 paper cranes hanging from the ceiling. Each crane carries the name of someone remembered, a saint. Over the past month, people were invited to inscribe a name of someone who has passed away, but whose life left an indelible mark on the individual. The fine-paper squares were transformed into many-colored cranes.

A key foundation of Christianity is that the risen Christ proves that death is not to be feared. The physical death of the corporal body is a transition, not an end. Death is another marker in our existence. As Craig said, death is a conquered enemy – a comma, not a period.

We can classify our death as a switch, like a light switch on the wall. Whether it is thrown violently, or pushed softly down, our minds cannot comprehend what occurs at the terminal point of that switch.

Death itself is no longer the literal end-all, the big mystery to our physical human life. Now the mystery is the other side of this transition.

Christianity does not hold a monopoly on faith in a post-human existence. Most religions and cultures have upheld a major life-force, or forces, that governs our life and opens the door to life after death. We just do not carry the tools to describe that image.

So, what does it mean to be human? Dunno yet. The cranes might help, though.

Each of the cranes carries a message. The message is carried in a different song, a different word, a different picture. We each hear it, see it, feel it in a different way. If we try to frame the message or give it boundaries, we constrict instead of liberate our lives. Each of the people written on the cranes was human and left footprints, or we would not be naming them. My Dad, Pam’s Mom, Don Troost, Michael Cheslosky are not just black ink that I scratched on rectangles of fine paper. They live. We carry them. They fly. And we try to fly with them.

Click here to read a poem by Morton Marcus.

Every book in the world, in over 20 volumes

2010-10-31T16:10:00.004-04:00

I recently finished an intriguing book: Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, by Ammon Shea. Shea’s day job was as a furniture mover; he dated a lexicographer with a dictionary publisher; and he has a lifelong fascination with dictionaries. His apartment is lined with homemade bookshelves laden with dictionaries; he derives most of his pleasure in life from pulling one down from the shelf and opening it to any page to read. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the monster of all dictionaries.

Each chapter of this book was named after a letter of the alphabet. Each chapter has a short essay, usually humorous, followed by a few chosen words that start with that letter. Generally, I skipped the words and definitions (this was a filler book, between other choices), but I marked a number of interesting entries:

Kakistocracy: government by the worst citizens. Worthy of an essay all by itself, since Tuesday is election day and the vitriol seems so ramped up this year.

Misandry: hatred of men. As Shea notes, its partner, ‘misogyny’, seems to have much more currency.

Vocabularian: one who pays too much attention to words. Shea should volunteer to have a snapshot on that page.

Wine-knight: a person who drinks valiantly. “As entries occasionally are in the OED, this is wonderfully unclear. How exactly does one drink valiantly? Draw your own conclusions.”

Wonderclout: a thing that is showy but worthless. “Surgically augmented breasts and a large vocabulary are two things that come to mind…”

Yepsen: the amount that can be held in two hands cupped together; also, the two cupped hands themselves.

Scringe: to shrug the back or shoulders from cold. Finally, a word that describes Nelson’s story about what northeastern winters force us all to do, almost involuntarily. I had to tell him last night when we got together for dinner.

Shea does identify one word not listed in the OED: ‘adoxography’, meaning good writing on a trivial subject. To many readers, Shea’s book would appear adoxographic at first glance. But I found it a very entertaining description of one man’s love of reading that turns into an obsession. In the last chapter, he admits that he is going to read the OED cover-to-cover again.

Stressing with the HomeTeam

2010-10-29T22:43:00.001-04:00

I can watch a baseball game dispassionately if the Giants are not one of the teams on the field. That makes this year’s World Series a risky venture for my nervous system.

Certainly counter-intuitive, huh? My favorite baseball team is the San Francisco Giants, something inherited from my father, who traced his love of the team back to Mel Ott and the Polo Grounds. I go back to Mays, Marichal, McCovey, and lived thru Jack Clark, Will Clark, Jeff Leonard, Bud Black, Jeff Kent, the social debacle that was Barry Bonds. So as a fan, I should be able to translate that sense into the enjoyment that comes from watching those uniforms on television.

Not so. I assume they will eventually lose -- some reliever will enter in the eighth inning, walk the first batter, give up a single, then watch the next guy put one over his shoulder into the center field stands. I still see Russ Ortiz walking off the mound in Game6 of the 2002 Series, the Giants seven outs from the championship -- and the wheels fell off in Anaheim Stadium. Game 7 was an afterthought.

Brian calls me the pessimist fan. I did survive the one-run agonies of the LDS, but the first feeling i manifested was relief when Ryan Howard watched the last strike of that series fall off at his knees.

I managed to enter both of the first two Series games when the Giants were ahead. Makes it easier to watch. No pacing.
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The commercials are silly, boring, even disturbing. You see the same ones each night during the three hours that is a baseball game. Two of them are particularly strange.

Direct TV touts their ability to have a movie available a month before Netflix. The commercial depicts the projection room of a movie theater. An intruder enters and attacks the teen projectionist with a blowdart. The first one misses when the kid leans over; he stares over his shoulder, wide-eyed, at the dart stuck in the wall. The second blowdart hits him in the neck, and he keels over. The intruder then scoops the movie reels into his sack and runs off.

The second is an Old Navy commercial that uses plastic mannequins. In this one, the mannequin family is watching their 10 year old play soccer. A boy shoots the ball near the goal, and it hits the stationary plastic boy in head, which breaks off at the neck.

Rather jarring methods to sell product.

Losing Coffee Ground

2010-10-06T20:01:00.000-04:00

The coffee shop in my village will close in December. There’s already a sign on the door with a new schedule; it is only open from noon to early evening from now until it closes.

This saddens me. This shop has been open a little over a year. I have not been the most regular of customers, occasionally stopping for a coffee and a muffin on my way to work. The food business is a low-margin affair, it’s tough to make much money on coffee, juices, muffins and cookies. The baked goods were made on premises, and they kept their volume low. They sold trays of muffins or cookies for events and gatherings, but they didn’t seem to publicize that very widely.

Danielle, one of the owners, is expecting their first child any day now. She was the perfect greeter and hostess – big smile, positive personality, always asked how you were doing.

They had music on many nights, even had a CD release party for a local artist. They held Open Mic a couple times a month; Danielle would encourage me to come read because it might bring in a ‘different crowd’. I assume she was referring to the number of 20-30-somethings that generally attended their music events.

Espresso Therapy becomes another mark on the loss side of the village ledger: the unique, singular purveyor that provides not just coffee and muffins, but a place to gather – a place to be a community. Those young adults had a place to come together, to support each other, to enjoy music, to celebrate success, to share experiences.

Such places get subsumed by the commoditization of our retail stores. A Dunkin Donuts is two blocks in one direction down the street, capturing any cars that enter or exit the village at the bridge. Another DD is two miles in the other direction, sitting at the end of the interstate that loops around the village. The prices are not much different from the coffee shop; but it is tough to compete with mass advertising and blunt familiarity brought about by ubiquity.

Every population center in this country begins to look the same. Home Depot and Loews build multiple stores within a few miles of each other. WalMart parking lots, if strung together, would easily be a 51^st state. CostCo, Sam’s Club, Dick’s, Sears can all be found on the edge of any town in nearly every state. The mall outside Denver looks just like the mall outside Albany.

We lose our community identity, the unique elements of place that provides subtle differences in our culture and society, when our physical community starts to look the same as our neighbor’s.

This is not to say that all our suburban or village singularities are gone. My village still has a small downtown diner. We have a single-screen theatre that shows movies for a reasonable ticket, just before they hit the Netflix circuit. There are three downtown restaurants that are not part of any franchise, have no exact replica anywhere else.

I don’t intend to over-romanticize the theme. We have been told for the past dozen years that we consumers are the driver of the economy – and the major retailers are perfectly happy to provide familiar, comfortable territory in which to spend our money. We asked for this convenience.

Espresso Therapy got lost in the process.

Poetry in the Catskills

2010-09-26T21:34:00.003-04:00

Pam and I traveled to Greene County today to participate in the All Arts Matter Poetry Read-In. I placed third in their poetry contest in the spring, and this was the opportunity for the winners – and others – to read their work.

All Arts Matter is an arts center located in a former church in Greenville, NY. The center has existed for 11 years, and holds art exhibitions, classical concerts, readings, and theatre. This was the first time that I have actually received monetary compensation for my poetry, so this arts group in the middle of the Catskills will always be special for Pam and I. My thanks to Tony DiVito and his group for their very warm welcome on a nice fall afternoon in the mountains.

Season change day

2010-09-04T09:50:00.002-04:00

Each year, a day arrives that signals the change in season -- regardless of the calendar. Today is that day.

We had four straight days of humidity and 90 degree temps. Last night, a western front ventured across our valleys and raced to collide with Hurricane Earl, which had lost steam as he came up the coast. The front cleansed the air. A veil was lifted, and small signs of the next season are visible. Scattered yellow and orange leaves have become stark, announcing the arrival that actually happened a week ago out our den window. We ignored them in the heat, when we foolishly believed summer was still ours.

Ah, well.

The President's Ringed Rug

2010-09-02T21:02:00.003-04:00

The Oval Office in the White House has been redecorated. One decorator dubbed it ‘the audacity of taupe’, due to the preponderance of browns and subdued yellow in the walls and the furniture. The look is low-key, missing in any primary reds or blues – but calming, nonetheless.

The center rug is ringed with quotes selected by the President. One wag called such a decorative touch something a fifth grader would think of doing. But the selections are indicative of Obama’s view of government, and role that a chief executive of the citizenry should play:

Government of the people, by the people and for the people (Lincoln).
No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. (Kennedy)
The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally on the welfare of all of us.(Teddy Roosevelt)
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. (Martin Luther King)
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. (FDRoosevelt)

These are words selected by someone who believes government is a positive force for society – who views government not as an institution separate from society, but as an integral part of society. Government is us, not them.

This is the core difference between the philosophy of the current President, and the philosophy of someone like Sarah Palin. Palin believes that government should be a minimalist institution that only provides groundwork or framework for society – a set of common rules and limits, primarily – and then lets the other institutions operate, whether the consequences be positive or negative.

As a country, we can do better than that. As a society, we can write the strength of Obama’s selective quotes into poetry:

No problem of human destiny

is beyond us; together we can shoulder

the welfare of the many.

The arc of the moral universe is long

and bends toward justice;

all we have to fear

is the loss of its direction.

We hold the brush, we decide the colors,

We paint the canvass.

Marrying Figaro off by the Lake

2010-08-02T19:55:00.004-04:00

Pam and I checked 'opera' off our list last Friday.

We had spent the day in town with my brother and his wife, celebrating his birthday. They headed home in early evening, so Pam and I ventured up the west side of the lake and stopped at the Glimmerglass Opera House. We did not know what was playing, but the trolley driver had said that generally tickets are available for evening performances.

The opera that evening was Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro”. We decided to stay, ordered fruit and cheese from the concession stand, and sat in on a preview talk by the Opera’s Music Director. The latter was well worth it, as he contrasted ‘Figaro’ with other operas, talked about the flow of the music with the performance on the stage, played one of the primary aria’s and discussed its role in the play.

Available tickets ranged from $126 to $86; I caught my breath, turned down the $24 ‘obstructed view’ seats, and bought tickets in the back row on the first level. The theater is wonderful, and our seats were centered nicely. A small screen above the stage gave brief English translations of the primary theme for each song.

The problem was that it took Mozart over three hours to marry Figaro and Susanna, and far too many hijinks and mistaken identities had to be carried out first. We bolted at the first clap of the final curtain.

It was a gorgeous night, at least. The intermission happened at about 10PM, and we stood outside under the black sky littered with stars. We needed wraps and sweaters, in a mid-summer sort of way.

Junk Cruising, 4:00AM

2010-08-01T20:20:00.003-04:00

I was awakened at 4:00AM Thursday morning by the sound of an open car door signal – that incessant ‘ding-ding’ that occurs if you leave your door open with the keys still in the ignition. A large sedan was parked in the middle of the street with two doors and the trunk open. The headlights were still on, pointing askew into our neighbor’s yard. A guy was holding a flashlight above his head, shining it on the trunk where he appeared to be tinkering with something. I could not figure out what he was doing. My mind kept rolling back to a friend's description of cars being robbed in their neighborhood last week.

Then I noticed that the old gas grill was not sitting on the side of the street, where I had left it. I put my glasses on to clarify the view through my open window. The guy had crammed the grill, standing up, in his trunk. He was tying the trunk lid to something so it didn’t bounce around.

Junk cruising at 4:00AM. He didn’t care about the dinging door, or the headlights, or the clanking of an old grill. He did care to beat the garbage truck.

Not in our nature
to know what
is journey and what
arrival.
Even if we knew
we would not admit.

From Erica Jong's poem, "You Are There".

Winter Games

2010-02-18T20:30:00.001-05:00

I get hooked on the Winter Olympics every four years. I am not sure why this is; some of it harks back to childhood. Winter was an important element as a kid, and my memories are full of winter activities –

Ice skating on the river overflow, a canal that formed along the perimeter of the railroad bed. All four of us kids started as pre-schoolers on two-runner skates. We had a bench and a burn barrel next to a pond that was about 10 yards-by-20 yards, and narrowed to a long canal that traveled about a mile down the valley behind our house. If we wanted to be adventurous, we walked a few blocks over and skated on a larger overflow pond. It seemed to collect many more kids.

Sledding in the open field next to the cemetery. We would hold our own mini-Olympics that included a jump over a knoll to see who could land the furthest out. It included a bump at the bottom of the jump that jolted the rider before heading down the rest of the hill. Dad used to take us even higher with the toboggan, building up speed down a chute that opened up into the wider hill.

Skiing at Penguin Peak, a cooperative hill built and maintained by members. Parents cut trails in the summer months, and installed a small rope tow. Eventually, our school offered a ski club, and all of us traveled to ‘the big hills’ near Cortland – lessons mandatory.

Another reason for this Olympic affinity was the year I spent in Finland (sorry, bad alliteration), where winter dominates the landscape for six months. I have vivid memories of ice ball games with one of my host families – hockey without the skates, using a tennis ball. We also attended a World Cup ski jump competition in Lahti, which included fireworks under a winter starlit sky, reflecting off the stark white snow cover.

Naturally, I silently root for the Finnish hockey teams, no matter who they play. And I cringe when some announcer calls them ‘the Suomi’s’, as if the name emblazoned on their jerseys refers to some animal they use as their team name.

Speaking of the Olympics, and hockey, and the Finns, here’s a novel proposal for a medal sport. Note the flags worn by some of the athletes.

Winter, Halfway

2010-02-16T22:29:00.000-05:00

Snow falls this morning. The prognosticators predict from 3-6 inches by late tonight, which would be the first significant snowcover since mid-December. Winter has passed the halfway point. Its only contribution has been steady cold weather from an arctic high that took up residence. It pushed all the nor’easter storms out to sea by the time they reached the Hudson River, trailing their 50 inches of white from North Carolina through Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, the sky fills with light starting when I rise each morning at about 6:50. The light is still pale when we drive home at 5:30PM. The sun is stretching its arms in our part of the world, and regardless of these large lazy flakes of white, spring is still scheduled at the usual date.

Content and Delivery

2010-02-10T21:16:00.001-05:00

Google has announced plans to go into the broadband delivery business. They already laid fiber in their own California community, and claim that they will bring fiber-delivered ultra-highspeed broadband as demonstrations of the poor capacity of current broadband providers.

Another reason, of course, is that broadband pipes are a good revenue generator. Content may be king, but the pipelayers get the monthly payment receipts.

Think of that. The creators of information, of content – book authors, journalists, essayists, poets, writers of all ilk, filmmakers, musicians – are getting an ever-smaller piece of the pie. Digital music is the best example of this transformation. When a song becomes digital, it is easily transmitted and copied, limiting its business value as a unique item to be sold in hardened form such as tape or plastic CD. Its value is reduced. Apple, Amazon, Rhaposody can sell it over and over. iTunes becomes the delivery mechanism, and broadband providers become the transmitter. The artist is squeezed. I pay for access to that song through my monthly bill to TimeWarner, and I purchase it by giving Apple my credit card number.

At the same time, I read the New York Times for free. Thirty years ago, I bought the paper at the corner store. Today I pay TimeWarner to bring it to my screen. Netflix not only gets me to pay a monthly fee to have movies come to my mailbox, but I can have them delivered directly over my internet connection – some for free.

As long as I pay for the pipeline.

Another example of the devaluation of content: Demand Media, one of the largest producers of content on the internet. They have produced five times as many videos on YouTube than any other source, and millions of their articles are available from many sources electronically – many of them ‘how-to’ and ‘gosh-isn’t-this-neat’ articles and videos on how to lose weight, get a job, take care of a cat. Demand Media signs up nearly anyone who raises their hand to write or edit copy, at incredibly cheap rates – the ultimate work-at-home job. Outfits such as this have taken advantage of the new business model, where it is much easier to convert anything to electronic form and push it out over the pipeline, where millions of people will fill their search fields and find this content.

Of course, I am another example with this blog. Anyone can create content for free, and throw it into the electronic traffic lanes. We don’t need a million readers to gain satisfaction from the work. Just a few friends, and maybe a few strangers that strayed in this direction.

And they all paid somebody for the pipeline to their screen.

Five Months

2010-02-09T21:51:00.002-05:00

A Gap in Time

According to some readers,
I am a broken link, or
at least, a stale one.
Click on my name, and
old words and pictures appear,
framing a story from last summer
as if it were the last stellar event,
important as it was to me at the time.

I suppose my history becomes inadequate
when five minutes ago is old news, untold.
But the totality of these posts still
frame a picture of me in a certain
unbordered chunk of time:
these pages are only broken based upon
a date and time stamp on your screen.

Robert Pinsky, David Chin, and me

2009-09-21T20:18:00.012-04:00

I certainly do not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath with the other two poets. But for a few days in July, I did share a place with them.

For two consecutive summers, the Chautauqua Institution has been part of the summer for Pam and me. It is a unique place, a combination New England historic village, educational salon, lakeside resort, and religious haven. For me, each session has been an affirmation in poetry.

We had no concept of the broad array of classes and seminars available each week. Last year, I attended a poetry reading on the first Sunday and learned that the poet-in-residence, Susan Grimm, held a daily seminar. Pam convinced me to go. This year I registered early, and it proved to be an interesting week with David Chin, a poet who has childhood roots in the same upstate valleys from whence we came. He asked me to read one of my poems as a prelude to a lecture he gave on poetry and the paintings of Edward Hopper; I read my own ekphrastic poem, Hudson River School From the Train, 5:00AM, which can be found here; David Chin is in the middle of the seminar attendees in the pic above.

But that wasn’t the most unique part of this year’s session.

Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate of the United States in the late 1990s, attended Chautauqua for two days during the week we were there. His project for the past 10 years has been the Favorite Poem Project, in which he asks people to read a favorite poem and describe its significance to their lives. The project has resulted in three anthologies, all in hardcover, and a website. The Chautauqua Literary & Scientific Circle, and the Writer’s Center, solicited submissions for a public reading on that Thursday afternoon in the outdoor Hall of Philosophy; a dozen submissions were to be accepted. I was picked.

Pinsky was very clear in his directions to us that afternoon: we were to bring no notes (‘if you do, I will chase you off the podium!’), describe why this poem is important to us, and then read the poem. I read Ann Sexton’s poem, Snow.

An account of the poetry reading, and a few pictures, can be found in The Chautauquan Daily of July 25, 2009, which is archived here. I am very grateful to the Writer’s Center, CLSC, and David Chin for the wonderful week of poetry.

Building

2009-09-03T21:53:00.003-04:00

Tick Tock

So many lines of thought lost,
the discipline of words, failed.
I did not pick up the pen,
scratch paper,
grab the journal
and pour it out,
even in fragments.

The color and image fades
unadorned, turned to gray.
The picture may have been
a cartoon, may have been deep
with rising shape. But
I never tried.

We bring coffee to Andrea whenever we get a haircut or style. Well, Pam gets the latter; Andrea just cuts mine. It’s part of the tradition. Andrea just laughs and says that Pam has us all well trained. I had an 8:30AM appointment last Saturday, so instead of the usual Stewart’s coffee, I got the gift cup at the coffee shop on the front corner of Andrea’s building. The young woman at the counter gave me a frequent coffee card, and I mentioned that I would be back for my own coffee after my appointment.

I came back 30 minutes later and got a coffee and a blueberry muffin. I can’t just sit and stare out the window. Generally, I read the paper or magazine. Lacking that, I found a magnetic poetry board and began building. I don’t remember the result, but I was happy with it. And I was also very content, unrushed, in no hurry to move on.

Clearly for me, there is achievement and accomplishment in building something with words. Construction, using different tools: a mental dictionary that translates images, pen on paper, keyboard to screen. Translating images into new buildings, moving words into lines and lines into taller verses, even laying out an incongruous structure with tilted frame or sloping roof. A viewer needs to decipher or rebuild the structure to their own mental image, using their own language through eyes, lips, even ears.

Some will see what I saw. Some will see a different image. Some will tear down and build to their liking. Others will just shrug and keep on walking by.

Not every building draws attention. And as the poem above illustrates, not every building gets beyond the thinking stage.

The camera films a different time signature

2009-05-19T22:27:00.004-04:00

A recent WIRED magazine article describes new high-speed cameras that can stretch incredibly fast action into minutes. This results in footage that slows action down to the smallest of elements. The entire article can be found online here.

The most amazing view is of a hummingbird as it feeds. The discovery, apparently, is the way the bird stores the water in its outstretched throat. But the most fascinating part of the film is the the hummingbird's flight: watch the wings. Incredible grace; they almost flow with every beat. The human eye only sees a mad blur of wing. The camera demonstrates how fluid and powerful the wings' ballet truly is.

The Musical Box

2009-05-10T20:04:00.003-04:00

Pam and I worked at Proctors Theatre on Friday night. The event was “The Musical Box”, a Genesis tribute band – although the participants would blanche at that description. This group has done this show since 1993, and pride themselves on meticulously recreating the sound and staging of Genesis tours. They duplicate the clothes, the projected slide show, the exact play list, even the nuances of the guitar and voice lines in each song. They have accumulated a library of film clips and play lists for as many Genesis shows as possible, and even copy the patter between songs. Each player on stage takes the persona of a member of Genesis at the time of the concert.

They view themselves as a stage show. This iteration is a recreation of Genesis’ “Trick of the Tail” concert tour in 1976. Peter Gabriel, the leader of the group for nearly a decade, had just left the band, taking with him the more dramatic and operatic bent of their music. Phil Collins was taking over most of the vocals. Within two to three years, Collins would alter their sound and they would put together a huge string of radio hits. They became darlings of the FM music crowd deep into the 1980s.

But that’s not who the crowd came to see this past Friday. These were progressive rock devotees, groupies that shared a devotion to Yes; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Asia; Rush; and all the iterations of the niche that Genesis filled along with those groups.

And they were male, at a ratio of about 3-to-1.

I’ve been to nine Yes concerts in my life, and I have noted this same phenomenon – albeit only when I bothered to look at the demographics around me in the last ten years. The louder and ‘heavier’ the rock group, the more it appeals to the male of the species. I could conjecture on the reasons for this, but they would be guesses. Power and volume; guitars that dominate all other aspects of the music; obscure, obtuse, or sci-fi lyrics that are unintelligible because they are totally drowned out by the driving bass beat and layered guitars. Rarely pretty, in the musical sense.

These are generalizations. And there are women at these concerts, just as there were on Friday. Some were there with their husbands, to be sure; but I bet it was the husband that did all the hooting and hollering. It’s a 30-60 crowd, of course, because Genesis’ pinnacle ended in the late 1980s.

After our bartending chores were over, Pam and I stayed for about 30 minutes of the show. The group is impeccable, and I was taken away by the music -- they did a great version of “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.” But our ears hurt.

And, to be honest, I wanted a beer.

Marking Spring

2009-04-19T21:40:00.009-04:00

There are three primary events that mark spring in our upstate New York town. The first is the day the ice breaks from the Mohawk River. The ice jam starts in a couple of narrow parts of the River, or against a the abutments of a particular bridge, and creates a one-to-two mile jam of ice floes piled against each other, some reaching to the sky on their edges. Some years, this is a calamitous event which leads to widespread flooding in parts of Schenectady, including the historic Stockade area. This year the icy traffic jam only lasted a few days, and broke through after a few sunny days in the 40s. No need to invoke the flood evac plans.

The second event is opening day at Jumpin’ Jacks. Jacks is the classic burger, hot dog, and fries concession stand , with an ice cream store right next door. The owner opens on the third or fourth Thursday each year (figuring he would get the weekend customers anyway, regardless of the novelty of opening day). The TV crews always show up, cars jockey for the few parking spots, the outdoor line snakes through the switchback barriers to the windows, and plenty of cheeseburgers are absorbed by people shivering at the riverside picnic tables.

Finally, there is my favorite opening day: the first day of the baseball season. I’m still hoping that this becomes a national holiday. But as long as March Madness dribbles into April, I’m not optimistic.

Those three calendar markers have passed this year. None of them occurred, of course, in warm spring weather in upstate New York. We only get teased during the transition seasons; a sunny 55 degree day will spring up in late March, only to revert the next three days to spitting sleet and biting 30 degree winds. We are now in the third week of April, and 50 degree sun is finally the norm rather than the exception. Tulips are just starting to show their colors, and the forsythia is starting to burst.

So what are all these pics?

These marvelous pictures are from Charleston, South Carolina, a month ago. Pam and I traveled to find spring in mid-March, which is when our calendars actually identify it. Charleston is a unique place to watch spring arrive. We shed our winter skins on warm 60-75 degree days, toured gardens in the historic district, took a carriage ride through the narrow streets, and visited the largest romantic garden in the country. Pam has an eye for the colorful flowering world, besides being an inveterate gardener. She took a great collection of pictures.

This trip was a Valentine gift, and was accompanied by this poem:

Valentine

We can find spring
when petals rise and
waters warm,
where sun starts early
and rays strike later.

We can see colors
other than white
when the day marks
the solstice,
and we shed the heavy
quilt of winter.

We can touch
our ungloved hands
at the same time our hearts
remind us that we are one.

Some never fly south....

2009-01-25T19:32:00.003-05:00

Hey, Robin, got news for ya. We gain two additional minutes of daylight today. All we need is a January thaw, and you can have more than this meager watering trough.

Winter arrived early this year. We got our first major snow in early December. Even more dramatic, it has not taken a hiatus for any period of time since it showed up in its white dress. It has coated us in ice, dumped a few 6-10 inch snowfalls, and mixed in some sleet. We have witnessed the thermometer in the minus range a few mornings, and hunched our shoulders against daytime winds that drove us inside. Whenever the sun shows up against the stark blue sky, it fails to provide any warmth.

We have not heard water dripping from a mid-winter thaw that would ease the ice burden in our gutters. The papers have run their annual articles about cabin fever, but we are quickly running out of antidote.

Pam took this picture last weekend. We had received 3-6 inches of snow for two out of three of the previous days, which created the fluffy pillows covering the two-foot foundation already there. A collection of cardinals and robins were watering at this break in a neighborhood creek path.

Governor Paterson's Opportunity

2009-01-18T17:46:00.004-05:00

Governor Paterson gave his State of the State address on January 7. The speech did not hold the anticipatory drama that usually accompanies a Governor’s opening speech, because Paterson had already released his budget proposal for the year. The budget is the true policy document and lays out the executive’s priorities and direction, so the pundits did not expect any large surprises in the speech.

Paterson noted the economic condition of the state early , calling it ‘perilous.’ I did not hear the full speech, but when I read this line so early in the text, I felt let down. A leader needs to raise the hopes of the populace during difficult times, and by leading off with such a negative adverb, he takes us down into a hole.

Granted, he did follow by exhorting us to rally our resources, to marshal the skills and determination of our citizens, to demonstrate that we are truly the great State of New York. He waved the flag of hope, shared sacrifice, and better days ahead.

But every newspaper headline, radio and television soundbite, news website, and the ever-growing blogosphere led off with the word ‘perilous.’

All of this ignores the most important part of his speech, the part that was not in his prepared text: Governor Paterson recited a poem. And his poem represented everything his speech could, or should, have: the passion of the leader, the soldier who grasps the fallen sword and forges on in the face of difficult challenges, the risen warrior who rallies his citizens to push on.

Paterson made more than one major symbolic statement by reciting his poem. Being blind, Paterson memorizes his remarks before he speaks. He memorized this poem as a student in elementary school, harking back to a time when reciting poetry was a frequent learning exercise. Being blind, Paterson has overcome his own barriers and risen to prominence – but he does not view his blindness as an impediment to his abilities to do what he is capable of doing. He rises above us all.

He makes another statement that may not have been intended. In tight fiscal times, there will be a great deal of pressure to cut funding for the arts. Granted, poets are not a money-making employment category in any time period; but poetry is an art, and is deserving of our attention in education, in literature, in publishing, and in funding by society through our government. Paterson highlighted the power of poetry by reciting his poem at the outset of his most important annual speech as Governor.

I occasionally open a meeting at work by reading a poem. It calms me down before I go into a long, or potentially contentious, meeting. But it also creates a tone at the beginning of the meeting: people are quietly attentive and generally focus on the poem, whether it is the recitation or the power of the words themselves.Governor Paterson did the same thing. It was an impressive statement.

The poem was "Opportunity", by Edward Rowland Sill; you can find it here.

SAMETIME 7:15

2009-01-03T09:36:00.003-05:00

Every day has its routine. How much do our routines change over time?

I now live in my fourth apartment or house since I left Oxford. I am in my fifth job during that same time period, which now spans 31 years. We have had two kids born into those homes; one has already left and lived in five places of her own. My own daily routine has been defined by those factors – the time schedules, the locations and distance from work, the schedules of everyone else in the house, the events and activities in which we all participate.

I know what my daily routine is today. But I wish I could reconstruct what it was like ten years ago, or 20, or thirty.

Sometimes I mark the passage of time by how many times I have made the bed. These days, I groan when I bend over to pick up the pillows off the floor and arrange them appropriately at the bedstead. I get irritated if I have to stoop over multiple times because I have dropped one, or because a couple of the decorative pillows made their way underneath the bed on the other side.

I don’t remember thinking this way twenty years ago. Pam was commuting to teach about 25 miles away, and was out of the house long before me. I would get our daughter ready for elementary school. I remember doing her hair every morning, and how inadequate I felt at doing pigtails or braids. We were usually in a rush. Even now her elementary school pictures make me cringe because I see the poor results of my hairdressing.

But what was the morning sequence then? What time did I get up in the morning? What time did I shut the door behind me and head to work? I’m sure it had its own repeated choreography that covered the bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, and out the door – getting dressed, making the bed, pushing the kid along, getting breakfast, checking the backpack one more time.

This is life, the regular dance and pace of it all. We assume the script, the steps, the daily timetable. But we shouldn’t belittle it. We are the sum of our actions, whether large or small, whether they make the front page of the business or entertainment sections or just result in a hug from a little girl before she gets on the bus.

This was triggered by a story I heard on NPR earlier this week. A college student and his professor did a year-long project in which a small group of people took a picture every night at 7:15PM and loaded it to a website. The time was chosen deliberately; it was generally after dinner, but before people got settled into their evening routine. The result is a collection of pictures of people in their routine, creating their daily lives – a picture journal that covers one year. Taken as individual items, each picture could be rather mundane; taken as a collection, it is a fascinating record.

The kind of camera I wish I had in my head twenty years ago.

Seasonal Loss

2009-01-02T09:09:00.000-05:00

We began to de-Christmas the house yesterday. I get a sense of sadness in my gut as we do this – putting away the holiday towels, taking the candle lights out of the windows, gathering all the little snowmen and holiday dolls scattered about the house. It’s a feeling of nostalgia, maybe of loss, I haven’t really pegged it. Both kids are in their 20s, and I wonder how long the Christmas excitement lasts – as if we will never have this again. An irrational feeling, certainly. I hear from others who have grandkids and they describe the fun of watching little kids at Christmas morning, or they talk about what the kids want for Christmas. Such things sound like re-generation.

Advent is the season of waiting. Now that the event has occurred – a celebration of life and hope – how do we treat our lives? Maybe the best way is to invoke Wendell Berry again: give ourselves away.

We are taking down the tree today. It may be some time before I can retrieve the outside lights, as they are frozen under a significant mantle of snow and ice. But that’s fine, they represent the last vestige of Advent during the dark hours of winter.

Lost Gifts

2008-12-29T21:37:00.001-05:00

The caption at the top of my blog is a quote from Wendell Berry: Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away. I placed it there so long ago, that I have forgotten its source.

Now I know why.

Justin gave me a Berry’s A Timbered Choir as a Christmas gift. This is a collection of Berry’s poems from 1979 thru 1997. He calls them his “Sabbath Poems” as most of them were written while he took Sunday morning walks about his Kentucky lands – his weekly walking meditation, observing the world through his poetry. One of his poems from 1993 ponders life’s ebb tide, clearly told from the perspective of someone who has many years behind him, but still knows there is much more ahead:

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.

The poem ends with the lines at the top of the blog, words of grace and spiritual giving: we have less and less reason not to give ourselves away, to ‘be generous toward each day that comes.’

I relate this with some embarrassment, as I have received this gift once before. Kent Busman gave me a copy of A Timbered Choir as a thank you for working with the Camp Fowler Capital Campaign Committee a couple of years ago. He put an inscription on the inside cover. It was my introduction to the simple power of Berry’s words. I cannot find that book, and it saddens me because it came from someone who personifies the grace of giving one’s self to others.

Sorry, Kent. And thanks, Justin.

Ice Storm

2008-12-14T07:37:00.002-05:00

The regular Saturday cleaning could wait. There was nothing normal about the day. The gallery was open outside and demanded attention. Sunlight poured out of crisp blue, and the trees were wrapped in diamonds.

The temperature stayed below freezing, so nature’s canvas did not melt. A slight breeze pushed heavy tree branches into gentle swirls. The highest and most brittle limbs became baby rattles, their blanket of ice creating a rustle that faded like a wave into the distance. It was a visual and auditory picture. Ice chips broke off and scattered across the roof and on the driveway, providing a crunchy pathway for my boots.

Pam took a mid-morning drive with her camera. She picked up Marge and headed into the hills around town. Their view changed, depending upon how high the road climbed. Sometimes the layers of paint were just the opaque ice covering each brown limb. In other places, snow added a blanket of dust to the trees.

Everywhere, the sun made the picture glisten. The bright rays reflected and bounced against the icy forest, scattering the light and adding another element of motion to the picture.

Normally, a mid-December day would warm gradually by noon. The sun will get high enough in the sky and thin layers of ice will begin to drip. But today was different. The storm had started on Thursday, and the temperature went down with the sun that evening. The rain turned to sleet, freezing rain, and snow , spreading across a wide swath of our corner of upstate New York. It stopped by about noon on Friday, but by then, over 200,000 homes had no power in our area.

The full moon provided the only light that night, and it showed us what the storm had left behind: an incredible layer of ice on every surface. At dawn, the light show really started.

Recognition

2008-10-05T20:52:00.005-04:00

Most poetry is a personal thing. Much of my poetry has been written for Pam, since it is the format that I find most comfortable to express emotions that defy rational, declarative sentences. Thus, I 'publish' my poetry for her in cards and letters, intended for her as an audience of one.

I have discovered that poetry is also a very selfish thing. I write it because I need to. The creative impulses are driving the act of writing, and they are only satisfied when I complete the poem. As one poet said (durned if I can remember who), you be true to the words first, to yourself second, and the reader third. Words develop into lines intended to express an image, and sometimes that image or thought is very inward and personal. That's why much poetry seems incomprehensible and difficult -- the only one who could explain it is the author. Makes one wonder why it is published for general reading!

I have published poems on this blog, and I do enjoy that. Most of them are words, lines, images that I feel I could share, and might mean something to someone else. Some of my readers have replied and reacted to them, which is fun. Other times, I'm sure, my poem does not connect. That's fine, too.

None of this diminishes my desire, like many writers, to be recognized and to be published. So I am very excited, and flattered, that one of my poetry submissions has been recognized! I submitted three poems to the Hauser Poetry Competition at the Chautauqua Institution (a wonderful place, maybe more on that later), and got a letter last week informing me that one of the poems had gotten 'Honorable Mention' -- one of six poems selected in the contest. Here's the link to the announcement:

http://web.mac.com/chautauqua.rdrswrtrs/CRandW_website/October_08_News.html

Yup, I get a sentence. And nope, I don't think they are publishing the poem anywhere. But that's OK -- I will always be thankful to the Writer's Center at Chautauqua, particularly to the poet Susan Grimm, who led the poetry seminar that I attended there. And to Pam, who pushed me to sign up for the seminar. And to Jan, who never stops challenging me to write more. So here it is.

Violent Mortality

Terror arrives in the soul
when death moves from a distant probability
to an immediate potential act,
especially when accompanied by violence
with its likelihood of pain:
the noise and scream of battle,
the screech of highway tires and metal,
the roar of searing heat and flame.

You have the fleeting thought that
you are not yet done with life,
but the book has suddenly finished
without a tidy sentence or summary chapter;
your fork still hangs in mid-air
replete with untouched dessert.

Your mind looks for an escape
that you believe is just outside the door,
or through that window,
or beyond that river bank.
The soul searches for peace that transcends sheer quiet.

If this were a movie, and your lovers watched,
the screen would only display sterile color pictures
that leave out the invisible darkness
carrying your life away.

Poetry Thursday, June Edition

2008-06-04T21:34:00.000-04:00

Hudson River School from the Train, 5:00AM

A stillness at dawn
as the earth turns its face to the sun.
The river wakes,
its surface ripples and murmurs,
breaking the first reflection of the forest
that colored the wet canvass.

The treetops wave in slow motion,
as if stretching their fingers to make sure
they can grip the sky for another day.
Spring buds whisper the faintest of green,
hanging on for dear life
at the very fringe of the breeze.

Mist dances on the river deck,
breaking into pillars that twirl and lean,
white dervishes that barely speak
as they emaciate before dissipating upstream,
their supporting role in this scene
finished for another morning.

Far shadows rise at the light
as low mountains appear on the skyline,
no longer just black hills drowning in the darkness.
The curves and plunges of the highest line
define them as something more
than just a wall reaching for the clouds.

This scene unfolds before me,
scrolling through glass on a railed frame.
I find no gilt surrounding the picture,
just a slow conversion from absence of all light,
brushed through a sepia transition
into the lighted grace of God’s ungated gallery.

Rising above Malaise

2008-05-04T15:06:00.003-04:00

I realize that this borders on editorial plagiarism, and just by copying an article I could be chased by a major publisher. But I just read Tom Friedman's column in today's New York Times, and I urge you to read it.

Friedman points out the true irony of American economic and political policies today, and our total disconnect with expectations and direction. Our country (and you can place the blame wherever you wish, altho it's clear to me where it lies) has mortgaged so much of our assets to others, in order to fund the wrong priorities, that true investment in the future has been squandered. He uses our transportation hubs as an example, but his point is much broader: our transportation, power, digital, communication, education, research, and even some of our social support structures are under-funded and limping. We are losing our capacity to invest in 'tomorrow people.' And our leaders lie to us.

In discussing the primary candidates for president, he concludes:

Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

I don’t know if Barack Obama can lead that, but the notion that the idealism he has inspired in so many young people doesn’t matter is dead wrong. “Of course, hope alone is not enough,” says Tim Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics, “but it’s not trivial. It’s not trivial to inspire people to want to get up and do something with someone else.”

It is especially not trivial now, because millions of Americans are dying to be enlisted — enlisted to fix education, enlisted to research renewable energy, enlisted to repair our infrastructure, enlisted to help others. Look at the kids lining up to join Teach for America. They want our country to matter again. They want it to be about building wealth and dignity — big profits and big purposes. When we just do one, we are less than the sum of our parts. When we do both, said Shriver, “no one can touch us.”

We have dramatic choices for our next president. A woman. An African-American. A man who spent years as a prisoner of war. McCain, Clinton, and Obama all come from different backgrounds, and speak a different theme. We need someone who can bring us out of the current malaise. We need a theme of hope and positive action. That kind of language is powerful. There is true power in words, well-chosen and inspired.

I believe two of them can speak that language. Two of them can look forward rather than back.

Poetry Slam

2008-04-28T21:10:00.002-04:00

A few words about the poem I scratched out at the Fish House, Calvin College’s coffee house. This was the last event of the Festival of Faith and Writing last week. I attended the Poetry Slam as a spectator because I knew little about it. Got caught up in the energy and started writing. The moderator – Patricia Johnson, past winner of National Poetry Slam competitions -- kept looking at me and saying, ‘You’re gonna finish that, you’re gonna finish that, you’re gonna be in this…”

As written poetry, it needs work. But here is the rough draft, as written and performed that night at the Fish House. I pointed to a round analog clock on the wall next to the stage, and started in an angry chopped tone:

Night Watch

I don’t want to see a clock.
Cover that damn white face and hands,
shut up that tick, tick, tic,
it penetrates my tapping foot
tapping to a metronome I refuse to meet
When I really want to run these feet
where my 2AM terrors don’t last till dawn.

Cover that damn white face and hands.
I can still run this five decade carcass
up any mountain peak I want
on the rocky range of my life.

Cover this damn white face and hands and hair.

Festival Slam

2008-04-19T23:41:00.002-04:00

I no idea how a Poetry Slam worked. I sat in on a session with Patricia Johnson, a past winner of National Poetry Slam competitions, and a devout Christian. She currently works as the PIO for the Sheriff Department in Roanoake, VA. She read some of her poetry, but she primarily discussed the emotion behind belief, faith, and poetry. She was sincere, real, and dynamic -- even, and especially, in prayer.

She was hosting a Slam at the Calvin College coffee house tonight. I was tired after a full day of sessions and presentations, but my goal has been to absorb as much about poetry, and poetry presentations, as I could. So i went to the Fish House to watch.

I heard some of the best poetry all week. Where were these folks on open mic night the past two nights??!! And there was true diversity here; plenty of pain, emotion, excitement, and wonderful use of words and cadence. Rap and hip-hop without the music -- altho some of the presenters did sing part of their poetry. Each reader has three minutes at the microphone, and Patricia had three tables of judges on hand to do the scoring, on a 1-10 scale.

I didn't sign up initially, so I did not bring my poetry. But i was fascinated by the quality of the material, and the fun that people had on stage. So I started writing, and under prodding by Patricia, I finished enough lines to read. I was the last of about 12-13 readers -- and I came in 5th! The top 5 do another round, but I had no more words left.

So I was exposed to another facet of poetry, one that fosters incredible emotion, lyricism, and fun. That's what words are for.

Festival of Faith and Writing, Day 3

2008-04-18T23:47:00.004-04:00

My goal is to focus on the poets at the conference. To listen. To learn. Rod Jellema is a teacher of poetry, and he is a very giving person -- he even handed out a worksheet with his cell phone listed. He is an open, encouraging, and clearly loves his craft. He did not take up poetry himself until age 40, long after he had settled into his career as a college professor. It was my first poetry lesson.

I have a long way to go.

There is a difference between a message, and the means with which that message is delivered. Prose, poetry, essays, novels, are all delivery methods. The message at this Festival is clear: faith, prayer, the discernment of the word.

Why would I expect differently?

How long is the way?

Oh, yeah, and Yann Martel's recommendation on how to interpret his Life of Pi? Read Part I and Part III. The link is between those two sections. The middle is just a shipwreck story.

Festival, Day 1

2008-04-17T23:15:00.003-04:00

How to describe this Festival, its participants, the attendees.? This is an energizing place on two fronts -- religious and literary. I admit that I am here more for the latter, but the religious themes are paramount here at Calvin.

Many people here are devoted to Christianity and dedicate their skills and work to it, give of themselves totally and willingly. Poet Luci Shaw describes it as giving one's self over to a massage from the hands of God -- just turning yourself over to his hands. She believes that it is her calling to write about the beauty of the world as brought to us by the Creator: "Beauty is grace embodied -- something extra given that we don't deserve." She believes that we fail the Creator if we do not celebrate beauty, particularly if we celebrate things that man created instead. "The natural world is where I find the transcendent."

Contrast this belief foundation and background with that of Mary Karr ("The Liars Club"), a tough, up-front, unreserved fireplug who grew up in a hard-scrabble Texas home with abusive and addictive parents, who fought for everything, with everybody; who abused drugs and alcohol as a young adult. She began using prayer to help guide her life decisions, did it reluctantly and with little faith that it will work -- and has discovered that the power is in letting go: "I surrendered. The solution to my problems is a spiritual solution." She began to see life connections when she prayed. She started her presentation with a prayer, which included, "God, I know you have a lesson here for each of us today, please guide us and show us what the hell it is."

Not your classic liturgical methodology. She has become a Catholic, and uses Jesuit prayer guides to help her through life.

The final startling highlight was at the poetry open mic tonight. One of the presenters was a young man who did performance poetry -- rap, without the music. He stepped away from the microphone, bounced with the words, pointed and waved his arms, shouted, whispered. This, amid some of the more traditional poems read by the rest of us...

Creativity comes in all forms.

Travelin' to Grand Rapids

2008-04-16T22:09:00.003-04:00

The wonders of the American transportation system.

At 7:30 this morning, I drove less than 2 miles to connect with Interstate90 in upstate New York. Eleven hours and 646 miles later, I arrived in Grand Rapids, Michigan -- never leaving a four-lane highway. Crossed the Niagara River, drove by three of the Great Lakes, went from the rolling hills of the Mohawk Valley to the flatlands of Ontario and Michigan.

Four generations back, an American might have gotten to the next county in one day of travel. Today, I went a quarter of the way across the country...Well, two countries, since the most direct route took me through Canada.

The interstate system is Eisenhower's legacy, the federal government's major foray into the road construction business. Ike used the government's security and defense rationale for building one of the largest road networks in the world, a ribbon of red four-lanes across 48 states. We can all use our four-wheeler engines to go anywhere we want on the American map.

There are consequences to this, some of them negative. Our reliance on highways for such a high proportion of our transportion keeps a huge auto industry in business. We are pretty lonely in these cars, as far too many of us commute to work by ourselves. All these cars have helped deplete our supply of fossil fuels. We haven't done much to improve the efficiency of the internal combustion engine for over a hundred years, and apparently these things aren't friendly to the atmosphere.

I contributed to the problem today. Drove by myself. Probably got 32 miles to the gallon, but still burned plenty of gasoline. Coulda slowed down and saved gas. Might have found someone else to go with me.

So what is in Grand Rapids? The Festival of Faith and Writing, a biannual conference on writing and spirituality held at Calvin College. An impressive roster of novelists, poets, essayists, screenwriters, graphic artists for three days of lectures, workshops, conversations, interviews. I wandered the campus tonight (always been intrigued by college campuses), found the conference center and was able to pick up my registration materials early. Spent an hour trying to select the sessions that I will attend over the next three days -- not an easy task! For instance, here's the description of a session with author Kathleen Norris:

Acedia...Again: Few people today have encountered the word 'acedia', which literally means not-caring, of being unable to care -- or even being unable to care that you don't care. In some ways, though, acedia defines today's culture, expressing itself as willful indifference, restless boredom, or even frantic busyiness. Norris discusses both acedia and its opposite -- the zeal that draws on faith, hope and love.

Yikes! Wanta hear that one, but it competes with another poet at the same time. The whole weekend is like this!

Music, Language, and Math

2008-02-16T15:35:00.002-05:00

We attended a concert by the State Symphony of Mexico last night. It was a Proctor’s event, and they had not sold many tickets. In order to have some semblence of a crowd, Proctor’s puts out notice to employees and volunteers, announcing that free tickets will be available a few minutes before the show. Anyone can walk up to the ticket window and ask for tickets to the show, and give the password ‘Ole.’

So we got two ole tickets in Row FF near the front. We had a view of the grand piano keyboard for Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto #3. The pianist was a Cuban who was very deft with his fingers for a long period of time. Concert pianists have such skills, they amaze me: they can play 20-25 minutes with no music.

Music is a language – or, more succinctly, a set of languages – and a conversant player can speak the language without a script. Each musical key is a dialect of that language. A good player will know the emotion, the words, and the tempo of the piece, and can make the music speak. If they are reading something written by someone else – another composer – then they memorize the words. A good player will know the words so well that he can apply the proper emotion and tell the story in his own way.

That is art.

Of course, the other theory is that music is actually closer to math. A piece of music is another form of mathematical expression. Rhythm is a collection of beats, or counting. The key signature defines the mathematical equation for the piece, and the musician does the calculation with his or her instrument. Apparently, many musicians are also very good at math and numbers. Both use the same side of the brain, apparently.

Music, language, math. Each, and all together, elements of creativity.

Poetry from the Hudson train

2008-01-28T21:45:00.000-05:00

Suspension Bridge

A string of light outlines a bridge
against the empty blackness of night
I have no proof the structure really exists
as I look out the darkened window of this train;
I see no road, no massive legs, no railing,
Not even the shine of water rushing underneath,
reflecting the suspended incandescence.

For all I know, a random celestial elf
hung that string around the stars
just to announce a party.
She will supply the music and games,
while we bring food and drinks.
Only then will the singular bulbs explode in light
And break the bounds of our own thirsty souls.

Foreboding, Hope, and Peace

2007-12-29T19:45:00.000-05:00

I have a powerful sense of foreboding today. The first contributing factor was last night's dream. I dreamt of leaky roofs and water running down our interior house walls, probably because it rained rather hard at one point during the night. Pam was marching around the house, hollering that we needed to do something, while I just looked at the walls and shrugged as if to say, do what? I can’t control these things.

The other factor was Andrew (always the kids). He drove to Long Island yesterday. We had lunch at Mike’s Hot Dogs and he left from there at about 1 in the afternoon. By 5:30 we had no phone call; naturally, I was mentally pacing by that time. I dialed him and got his voicemail. He called soon after 6; traffic from the northern suburbs and across the ThrogsNeck bridge had been heavy, slow going, but he made it with little problem. I shouldn't worry, he's a responsible and careful person; but it's instinctive for parents, I guess.

So it’s not the rain and a leaky roof. And Drew is no longer driving all over metroNewYork, and will be in good hands with his girlfriend and her family through New Year’s. The first isn't reality, and the second is just parental fears.

The final factor is Bhutto. Her assassination is startling to me. It could be foreseen: attempts on her life were made the day she re-entered her native Pakistan in October. She was under constant guard, and she choose to lift her head through the sunroof of her protected vehicle. She now becomes a martyr, but with a different style: female, beautiful, Harvard-educated, the political daughter of a former prime minister who hugged her father before he was hanged for political reasons years ago. I do not know the social, political, and familial dynamics of that country, but she seems to represent a social order that is the current antithesis of the religious intransigience from Al-Queda and the Taliban.

The Jewish/Islamic middle east has five fuses: Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. They have been smoldering for decades, and a few of them have exploded at various junctures. Bhutto’s death might signal another explosion, and it could be the most dangerous of all.

We just celebrated Christmas, a holiday that represents the essence of hope and peace. Hope for Peace.

Within a Forest Dark

2007-12-08T15:48:00.000-05:00

A friend of ours, Michael Virtanen, has published a book. Within a Forest Dark is the story of Jack Kirkland, an insurance adjuster in Saratoga Springs whose life is unraveling – his wife has left him, his secretary calls him a jerk, and his boss is cutting him out of the business. The core of the story revolves around a life insurance case he is investigating in which the widow may have had a hand in the death. Jack falls in love with the woman and has to deal with his own conflicted feelings as he digs into the details of the case.

As they say, those are the facts of the case. But the book is more than just a detective whodunit. Since Michael is a member of our book group, and we have selected his book to discuss at our next meeting, I can't express more than this.

I can say this: buy the book. You won't be disappointed.

Within a Forest Dark: An Adirondack Tale of Love and Suspicion, by Michael Virtanen. Lost Pond Press, Saranac Lake, NY. www.lostpondpress.com .

Jethro Tull

2007-12-02T22:42:00.000-05:00

Andrew and I attended a rock concert on Thursday night, where a flute and string recital broke out.

Jethro Tull has existed for nearly forty years. They started as a blues band and migrated through heavy rock, pop, extended soft-rock operas, and Celtic-influenced folk music. Ian Anderson, the leader of the group, is a rakish fellow from Scotland with a devil complex. His signature instrument is the flute, which he plays while hopping around the stage or standing on one leg, the other doing its own little back-and-forth exercise like a flamingo.

The first number in the concert was Anderson and his guitarist, Martin Barre, doing a short blues song in a single centered spotlight. Anderson played a harmonica between phrases, Barre throwing in the typical blues riffs in response. That was the end of the R&B portion of the night.

In fact, the rock groupies in the crowd were likely disappointed by the whole evening. Jethro Tull’s signature album was 1970’s Aqualung, a loud dark collection of true heavy rock. Because classic rock radio has kept that flag flying for four decades by playing songs such as the title track, Cross-Eyed Mary, and Locomotive Breath, all but diehard fans associate Jethro Tull with these guitar-driven rock songs.

But that is not what Ian Anderson creates today, nor where the group even shines. Some of the change is due to musical maturation. Some is simple age and health – Anderson’s voice no longer has the strength or range to holler all those lyrics over the decibels of big guitars and drums. The weakest number all night was Thick as a Brick, a long piece whose thin construction was exposed ; Anderson is no longer capable of holding a note past a couple of beats, and he had to take a break while the band did an instrumental.

And so, the flute takes the lead. A string quartet consisting of four young women from Boston joined the group on stage for about half their numbers. Their first foray was with a medley of songs from War Child and Songs From the Wood. Anderson would throw in a flute line, and then run off stage, only to return a few bars later to toss another flute solo over the warm strings. This was all done over strong understated percussion played by the drummer on bongos and the bass player on hand tympani.

Anderson joked between every song, usually telling some cute story about the next number. He introduced Aqualung by saying that the next song would feature a way to insert his flute into the classic “Stairway to ….[pause] Aqualung.” The strings started the number, and Anderson played the opening vocal parts on his flute. The song had a totally different life, one with shifting tempos and patterns; only once did Martin Barre step to stage front fringe and rip off the signature riff at full volume.

And so the night went: familiar tunes were toned to a different level, as the group clearly demonstrated its Celtic roots over any other influence. And it worked. The flute has center stage, and Anderson takes the lead. He creates his own language with the instrument by grunting, groaning, or talking through it while still producing raucous or lilting runs. He rarely stands still.

They ended the show with Nothing is Easy, and they made it sound easy. It could have been lifted right off their greatest hits collection. The crowd stood, cigarette lighters mixed with cell phone screens in the dark theater. The encore started with one spotlight on the keyboard player, and the rest of the band kicked into Locomotive Breath.

They ripped and tore right through that one. Rock lived.

Belated Humility

2007-11-14T19:33:00.000-05:00

I rarely go back and read my previous blog material, mainly because I have to resist the urge to edit or rewrite the stuff, or I find it unreadable. Today I checked back to see how long ago I did my first post and I was reviewing some of the first postings in December 2004.

On Christmas Eve that year, I quoted from a story called “Jacob the Baker” by Noah BenShea. A friend had shared this rather famous story, and it was my first exposure to BenShea and his series. I was very touched by the story, and I quoted extensively from it. At the bottom of the post, however, I discovered something new:

Noah BenShea had left a comment on my blog.

It took me three years to read it. Today, my blog will notify me if I get comments. But back then, I was a neophyte on my first journey into blogdom, and unless I deliberately went back to re-read a post, I didn’t read comments left on my blog.

Noah said he was honored by my quote. Three years later, I am flattered and humbled that he would read my material. And rather nonplussed that I am only now acknowledging it!

Thanks, Noah.

A building falls in the neighborhood

2007-11-13T21:08:00.000-05:00

Jeesh.

You leave town for a few months, and things change. The neighborhood doesn’t look the same. Some of the buildings have fallen down. A few of the houses have a faded look to them. People have drifted away. Stray papers blow in the wind, down empty streets.

But that is the ephemeral nature of the internet. I discovered this when I revisited the Poetry Thursday site today.

I used to contribute to the website called Poetry Thursday. I had read about it over a year ago, in a column by a Philadelphia newspaper quoted in the poetry page on About.com. Two women, Liz and Dana, had begun a blog about poetry, and were soliciting contributors to write a poem every Thursday. You would post a poem on your own blog and link it to their site. The two bloggers would even suggest a subject for the weekly submission, and encourage – but not require – that the poems relate to that subject. It was a fun way to publish a poem in a quiet little corner of the world, get some feedback, and converse with a few other authors.

Because I have been AWOL from my own digital publication since July, I haven’t checked back with Poetry Thursday in a few months. Today I clicked to the site and discovered that the two women had closed up shop after 18 months. Each of them is moving on to other outlets and new educational adventures. They had solicited their last poems at the end of August, and promised to keep the site up as an archived web site into 2008.

Liz and Dana are two more people that I met electronically through these new communications and communities, but will probably never meet in person. For all I know, they could be two guys named Gus and Bill, but I doubt it. I do know that they provided a nice little service to a bunch of disparate (desperate?) poets around the world. Go read some of the creativity that they fostered, before it disappears.

Norman Mailer

2007-11-11T15:01:00.000-05:00

Norman Mailer died yesterday.

Mailer spoke at the New York State Writer’s Institute this past May. He was physically rather weak; he used a cane in each hand as he gingerly approached a table on stage and sat behind it. But his voice was still strong, deep and resonant, as if it was coming from the deepest part of the bass clef. There were a few hints of the old braggadacio in his presentation, and I remember him challenging some of the questioners from the audience.

As is usually the case at these author forums, someone asked Mailer what advice he would give an aspiring writer. He responded by saying that there had to be some mental element that would punish an author who did not write. Every evening, an author has to schedule a certain number of hours that he or she will write the next day. You need to end the day by saying, I will write for three hours, or five hours, or some rational target, the next day. If that schedule is not kept, you will fail – you will never develop the necessary discipline to succeed at the craft, no matter how skilled you are at using the language. To Mailer, writing was a discipline triggered by guilt. You need the internal nag.

I have someone who acts as my nag. She consistently reminds me of the gaps in my writing. She recently pointed out that I might be writing, but if I’m not posting it, she can’t read what I am writing.

We all need champions, someone who identifies our particular skill and encourages us to use them. We need an angel to bring the message. The true incentive, however, has to come from our own mind, our own soul, our own hearts. It has to be an internal need – an itch to be scratched, an ache to be soothed, a craving that requires fulfillment.

From there, comes the discipline to succeed. The angel can remind and push us, but the true desire comes from inside.

Norman Mailer may not be the best of models. Much of his life was loud, impetuous, audacious, and deliberately confrontational. He was much older before he confronted his own stability and the satisfaction he gained solely from his written creations.

But his writing will certainly outlive him. His admonition – to listen to our internal nag -- is one for all writers to heed.

Independence Day

2007-07-03T21:53:00.000-04:00

On a noontime walk, I visited the Cathedral of All Saints in Albany, an Episcopal Cathedral built in the 1880s. Massive stone interior chancel and nave, smaller chapels in the side corridors, perpendicular to the main sanctuary. A plaque is mounted on the side wall of the eastern chapel with the words of George Ashton Oldham, the 3d Bishop of Albany (b1877 – d1963). Entitled "America First", the words on this plaque were from a sermon delivered in Washington, DC in 1924.

I know nothing of Mr. Oldham. The "America First" movement was a rabid isolationist initiative, a social and political belief that we should stay away from all foreign encounters. I do not believe Oldham espoused those same views. His message was a more compassionate one, a call to transform ourselves into a nation that is first in 'things of spirit', rather than 'treading again the old, worn, bloody pathway which ends inevitably in chaos and disaster.'

We celebrate the Fourth of July as a day to mark our country’s independence, to celebrate the freedom that our country supposedly represents. Oldham puts this freedom, and our role as its beacon, in a Christian context – a message that runs counter to our current actions in Iraq. Oldham's words ring just as true now as they did in 1924. But we have much to learn as a country and as a mentor for human behavior in the world.

What Not to Wear, in Verse

2007-05-31T21:41:00.000-04:00

Incongruous

Jane commented on my socks.
I saw them as black,
she said one was gray
and other was black,
and that made them wrong.
I only saw the alternate toe design,
one with a white grid, the other without,
so I suppose that made them different.

But when I put my sneakers on and stood,
none of this mattered.
Just a small strip of black between
the top of my shoes and
the bottom of my jeans.
By then, Jane forgot about
my sartorial inelegance

as I slipped my plaid tweed jacket
over a striped shirt
and we walked out into the July sun.

Baseball from 4000 feet

2007-05-17T21:34:00.000-04:00

My flight from Dallas to Philadelphia ended in a holding pattern over Philly, as the plane took three circles around northern Delaware and southern Pennsylvania, each one tighter than the other. The pilot even made a joke about it, calling it 'The Philly Factor".

We were fairly low, so I gazed out the window and took in the sights in the setting sun. This still feels incomplete...

Row 747, Upper Deck

At four thousand feet,
I search for baseball fields.
They will appear stamped into the landscape --
sometimes a pair at angles to each other
in a green neighborhood square,
sometimes a collection of brown diamonds
and connected green outfields
symmetrically placed near a building,
probably the school,
sprawled on the fringe of town.

But what I wish for
is that random trampled ground
marked out with four uneven scars for bases
and pitcher’s dirt torn in the middle of unmanicured grass --
where a flock of kids chase a white dot
while one boy tosses aside his toothpick of a bat
as he streaks down the thin brown path
and lands safely on first,
wheels down, far below.

Poetry Thursday -- on Saturday

2007-05-12T09:06:00.000-04:00

Spring Explodes

As the bird sings,
the flower shivers;
and I ask if spring
would always arrive
as a blue-sky storm.

Poetry Thursday

2007-05-03T21:39:00.000-04:00

I haven't checked out the Poetry Thursday site for this week's theme -- or any theme for a few weeks. But it is Thursday, so let's publish.

On the train to NYC, 7:30AM

The spring river reflects an early morning sky,
the calm air keeps the mirror clean;
a thin streak of white cloud
floats quietly from shore to shore.
The pale blue background is broken
only by ripples from a duck
painting her way across the wet canvass.
Bare trees create a row of inverted wet brushes
dipping their stiff bristles into the picture,
the roots of unblossomed lilies.

I throw a rock.

Angry voices?

2007-02-22T20:51:00.000-05:00

Where are the angry voices?

Over 3000 Americans have been killed in a country on the other side of the world. The President started the war using faulty reasons, based upon inaccurate and contrived information from his own advisors. He probably lied in order to cover the true reasons for invasion.

And not only are there few angry voices. But we elected the same guy to a second term as President.

Over forty years ago, another pointless war was launched with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. We now know that was a lie.

Déjà vu. There are so many things wrong with this picture. We were attacked, but it was not the act of a specific country – so it was harder to identify a boundary to cross, a capital city to capture, an army to defeat. We picked Afghanistan because we believed their management was of the same ilk as our attackers. Or, at a minimum, they were harboring the enemies that planned the attack.

Our military made quick work toppling that government. We never found our quarry, but few people seemed to mind. We gained some amount of vengeance.

It apparently was not enough for our own leaders. We flexed our muscle across another border, toppled another sectarian autocratic government – and set off a firestorm that has killed thousands, displaced more thousands, and created geographic chaos in an area that can ill afford more instability.

To what end? I see none. I see no end, because a weak man such as George Bush cannot back down. I see no end, because Iraq is torn into at least three pieces and American soldiers are the only buffer. I see no end, because our political and economic leaders fear losing access to a large pool of oil.

Vengeance, money, power, and oil. For this to accrue to the few, many must die.

Where are the angry voices?

Achievement

2007-01-28T20:27:00.000-05:00

Achievement

This is not just
the rung on a ladder,
or a long climb
up some steep hill,
For life is neither.
This is your heart
telling your soul
that it knows your path,
that you have the will to walk it,
And the sun is now yours.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Written for our daughter, who was recently sworn in as a new attorney in New York State. We should all celebrate our achievements, and this is all hers.

Do not shy away from the mark you make. Cherish it. And then use it.

Fuzzy Memory and the death penalty

2006-11-20T21:20:00.000-05:00

Years ago, I read a short citation about judicial decisions concerning the death penalty. It appeared an American history textbook – those ‘review questions’ that were always printed at the end of each chapter, to see if you were paying attention when you read your homework. It included a quote from a Supreme Court justice. I filed the quote away, and occasionally it rises out of my memory banks when I read about the death penalty. The quote was something like, “The death penalty is our way of saying to someone, you messed up your life here, go take your chances elsewhere.”

The Justice’s context, supposedly, was that such a statement was empty. The death penalty was not a human or humane way to treat another individual, no matter how heinous the crime.

I decided to search for that quote, and typed variations into the Google search bar. Either my memory, or that textbook, was fuzzier than I expected. Probably both.

The case was Furman v Georgia, the seminal 1972 case in which the Supreme Court determined that the death penalty was cruel and inhuman punishment and was contrary to the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. Justice William Brennan, in his concurring opinion, quoted a line from an 1864 tract written in favor of the death penalty, in which that phrase “take your chance elsewhere” was used. Judge Brennan did not use the phrase directly to support his own argument.

But much of his written opinion is brilliant, nonetheless. The citation is from the Cornell University web site of US Supreme Court decisions ( http://www.law.cornell.edu/supt-cgi/ ):

Death is truly an awesome punishment. The calculated killing of a human being by the State involves, by its very nature, a denial of the executed person's humanity. The contrast with the plight of a person punished by imprisonment is evident. An individual in prison does not lose "the right to have rights." A prisoner retains, for example, the constitutional rights to the free exercise of religion, to be free of cruel and unusual punishments, and to treatment as a "person" for purposes of due process of law and the equal protection of the laws. A prisoner remains a member of the human family. Moreover, he retains the right of access to the courts. His punishment is not irrevocable. Apart from the common charge, grounded upon the recognition of human fallibility, that the punishment of death must inevitably be inflicted upon innocent men, we know that death has been the lot of men whose convictions were unconstitutionally secured in view of later, retroactively applied, holdings of this Court. The punishment itself may have been unconstitutionally inflicted, see Witherspoon v. Illinois, 391 U.S. 510 (1968), yet the finality of death precludes relief. An executed person has indeed "lost the right to have rights." As one 19th century proponent of punishing criminals by death declared,

When a man is hung, there is an end of our relations with him. His execution is a way of saying, "You are not fit for this world, take your chance elsewhere." [n39] [p291]

39. Stephen, Capital Punishments, 69 Fraser's Magazine 753, 763 (1864).

Poetry Thursday, Late

2006-11-18T16:45:00.000-05:00

November in the Park

Oak leaves are the last to fall.

They skitter up and down the sidewalk,

clutter the dormant fountains,

fly updrafts past dull statues

that reflect pale sunlight filtered through thin clouds;

they climb the roof to a bell tower

streaked with green patina across once-shining copper clothing.

The maples and birch and ash long ago dropped their color,

their leaves swept away,

leaving the field to these boorish brown intruders.

The oak stays loaded with more volleys,

ready to drop another round that gets underfoot.

Soon the white carpet will arrive

and bury these drab epilogues to autumn.

Entitled to Stuff

2006-11-12T16:02:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine is in her first year of teaching English at a liberal arts college. She is only one year removed from finishing her doctorate, and there is very little age gap between her and her students. I asked her how her first year is going, and what one thing about her classes has surprised her the most. She replied that she is taken aback by the sense of entitlement that most college students have – this notion that the teacher, the school, and society in general should be giving them their kudos and guaranteeing their success.

The same day that we had this conversation, I attended a meeting of my college alumni board. We heard a presentation from our Director of Admissions, and he discussed the challenges that the college faced in communicating with today’s prospective college students. Prominent on the list of challenges in his powerpoint: students’ sense of entitlement.

What have we wrought? I am part of the boomer generation that has raised these kids. It makes me wonder whether we have been overly-generous with our children while they lived under our umbrella.

These issues came to mind again when I read an excerpt from Wendell Berry’s collection of essays, The Way of Ignorance. Berry writes of our desire for more and more stuff:

"[we] seem to be living now with the single expectation that there should and will always be more of everything, including 'life expectancy.' This insatiable desire for more is the result of an overwhelming sense of incompleteness, which is the result of the insatiable desire for more. This is the wheel of death.”

Somehow, many of us believe we need more and more things. Worse, we think we deserve them. But we still end up cleaning out our parents’ homes when they move on – whether to a smaller living quarters or to the final calling – and most of this stuff ends up on a dumpster.

Our memories, our relationships, are much stronger than all our physical possessions. We should teach our children before we need our own dumpsters.

Poetry Thursday -- a day early

2006-09-20T21:39:00.000-04:00

September Breaks

The day opens with summer:
the sun teases morning mist out of the grass,
the sky hues to a darker blue as it warms towards mid-day.
But the seasons are fleeting
and they tread on each other’s feet;
dark clouds rumble in
and bring the colors of fall.
Some of us look up and sigh,
resigned to the downslide of cold skies and snow
Others will ride the exploding colors
that brighten the crisper northeastern days.

Better words than mine

2006-09-12T21:44:00.000-04:00

Eight men hijack airplanes and turn them into weapons. They kill themselves and a few thousand Americans.

We invade a country and topple their government, because the perpetrators of the airplane attack were financed, protected, and sent from that country. Then we invade a neighboring country under the same war flag, labeled ‘war on terror.’

Others have written much better than I on this subject, and with much more information and background. I do not need to elaborate on the strength of these arguments from "Foreign Affairs".

Or this from columnist John Tierney in today’s New York Times:

….Instead of declaring victory against terrorists after routing the Taliban and sending bin Laden into hiding, [America] invaded Iraq, reinvigorating Al Qaeda with a new tool for recruiting. Instead of putting the terrorist risk in perspective, Bush (with the full cooperation of Democrats and the press) set an impossible standard for making America safe.
“We’re on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront,” Bush said last week, “and we’ll accept nothing less than complete victory.”
When you define victory that way, when you treat one attack from a disorganized band of fanatics as a menace to civilization, you’ve doomed yourself to defeat and caused more damage than they could. You can’t completely stop terrorism, but you can scare people into giving up liberties, wasting huge sums of money and sacrificing more lives than would be lost in a terrorist attack.

Poetry Thursday: Blue?

2006-09-07T21:58:00.000-04:00

30 Years On

A man opens his trunk,

takes tentative backward steps as the lid slides open,

careful of the wheelchair slightly opened at his side.

He moves slowly,

lifts the metal chair awkwardly

over the lip of the trunk.

It is probably not his;

he brings a companion to today’s appointment,

a trip that will fill most of the day

until they return home

to the silent soundtrack of slow waiting.

I am just a passing driver on the road,

pulling out of the store with fresh coffee

and a donut, happening upon this scene as

I rush out into the sunshine and pleasant summer day,

having already slammed the lid on my trunk

after tossing in the golf clubs and shoes.

I have a different appointment on my calendar,

oblivious to the pace of this man

who lives a different day.

I hope he was me at one time,

and I know my future contains his day.

Katie Couric

2006-09-06T21:34:00.000-04:00

How relevant is Katie Couric’s presence on CBS News? About as relevant as CBS News itself. In other words, not very.

In 1965, we all got our news in the early evening. First the local station for 30 minutes. Then the three networks brought national and international news. Cronkite, Huntley/Brinkley, and…and…who was on ABC back then?…fought it out for viewer eyeballs. These men were icons of the news, and they claimed a certain level of credibility by the sheer weight of their ratings.

That monopoly – and fight for advertising dollars – no longer exists. We now have a much broader choice of alphabet soup from CNN, Fox, MSNBC, PBS and their various segmentations. The major networks no longer have the volume of viewers, nor do their news operations have the same cachet they did forty years ago.

Katie may sit in Walter’s chair, but she doesn’t sit on the same pedestal.

And it has nothing to do with gender. The cable stations have had numerous female anchors, even going solo in front of the teleprompter. As one columnist noted today, when Katie Couric signed a $15million-a-year contract, she was the first female anchor to get a major promotion. But she was no Jackie Robinson:

Actually, the minute Katie Couric was given a $15 million paycheck to read from a teleprompter for 15 or 20 minutes a night, women won. Women have been doing that at the BBC and on American cable stations for years, and for a lot less dough. Jackie Robinson represented a revolution; Katie Couric represented a promotion.

The sad truth is, women only get to the top of places like the network evening news and Hollywood after those places are devalued. (Maureen Dowd, New York Times, 9-6-2006)

This is not War

2006-09-05T21:46:00.000-04:00

We do not understand this conflict. A group of men lived in our midst for months and then, acting upon orders from a religious leader the other side of the world, flew four airplanes on destructive missions. Another group of people, again dressed as our neighbors, strapped explosives to their bodies and set them off in the London subways. A Spanish train is blown up, supposedly by more compatriots of the same Islamic group.

None of these people wore military uniforms. They are not part of an organized national army. They claim no allegiance to a nation-state. We cannot see them through our night goggles, call in the coordinates, and destroy their army.

But our own leadership invokes World War II, Nazi Germany, and the cold war politics of the Soviet Union and communist China. They have no understanding of our attackers. Yes, they are evil and dangerous. But our response has been all wrong.

This is not war. This is a cultural and ethnic conflict, fought with any available improvised explosive device.

We have the wrong people in charge, and they will continue to make matters worse until we nullify them with a more powerful opposition in Congress, or vote them out.

Long live summer

2006-09-01T18:51:00.000-04:00

Summer is over. Long live summer.

The steady summer warmth fades away by late August in upstate New York. Swimming pools are no longer useful because the evenings reduce the water temperature, and the sun cannot bring it back. Our tans begin to fade by Labor Day. We still wear shorts and shortsleeve shirts, but sweatshirts and fleece get pulled out of the closet after dinner. We will swap wardrobes within a week, and darker heavier clothes will fill our dresser drawers.

There will be brief reprieves in September. The temperature will break 75 for a short stretch of days, and we will stare wistfully at the blue skies and wish the sun would peak longer.

Then the colors will change. The green peels away and is overwhelmed by reds, golds, and brown. The sky takes on a paler blue for a canopy. We use the lawn mower less, until it sits idle in the garage with rakes leaning against it.

This is an annual transition, and we selfishly think it only happens to us. Only we New Englanders get to watch nature explode into colors as the sun wanes and the days grow shorter. Only we get to turn in circles and see the full canvas of fall painted on the hills that surround our lives. Only we can hop in our cars and drive two-lane back roads through the woods, stopping at farm stands that sell squash, gourds and pumpkins. Not true, of course – but all those Norman Rockwell paintings have created a certain level of ownership here in New England.

Count me as one who enjoys nature’s colorful show as it unfolds.

But I resent fall’s incursion into August every year. I will still wish for summer.

Writing on a word

2006-06-22T22:32:00.000-04:00

The suggestion for Poetry Thursday was to write about a word that we like, or a word we dislike. I started working around a word that my wife's Mother hated: succulent. I started wrapping a concept or set of thoughts around that one, but couldn't get it done in time to post -- it's a work in progress, another time.

Instead, I got political. It's not a good word.

War

Glory does not come in the red flash
of an improvised explosive device
or in dusty streets sliced by bullets
from a dispersed crowd.
There are no orchestral crescendos
in the soundtrack,
or technicolor battleflags
ready to drape shattered flesh
after the deafening noise and searing fire.

This is war;
a short word hollered in nationalist fervor
after we stopped caring enough to share
all the other words;
a word that can take a long time to finish
as the R echoes in our throats
and rumbles across the unseen battlefield.

Marriage protection disconnect

2006-06-17T09:36:00.000-04:00

"We're not going to stop until marriage between a man and a woman is protected," said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.

Last week, the U.S. Senate failed to pass a constitutional amendment that would have defined marriage as being a union only between a man and a woman. The vote was 49-48.

Such a charade. Most of the arguments in favor of this amendment were simply a cover for prejudice against people who have different sexual preferences. Or, based upon sentiments such as Brownback's, they represent an actual fear of gays.

I fail to see how my marriage is threatened by two men, or two women, living together in a loving relationship. What is Brownback protecting me from?

This week's poetry assignment

2006-06-15T21:56:00.000-04:00

It's Thursday, and we write something about our connection to poetry. I'm not publishing verse, but will share a few thoughts about my own experience with it.

I trace my re-entry into the poetry world back to Billy Collins and 9/11, of all things.

I heard an interview with Collins on that day (or the day after, memory is fuzzy). He was the Library of Congress Poet Laureate at the time, and someone asked him what poetry would be appropriate to read in the wake of the national trauma that we had just experienced. He replied that we couldn’t do much better than read some of the Psalms.

He seemed such a thoughtful, common-sense sort of person that day, very soft-spoken but heartfelt. He pointed to the Psalms, full of passages both spiritual and poetic. So I determined to read his material.

I liked it. He writes of everyday life, his lines are direct and friendly. Most important, he brings humor into his poetry – something rarely seen in the dense, sometimes obtuse poetry written by many major Western poets over the last three centuries.

He also speaks about the role of poetry. It shouldn’t be so difficult. We work too hard at analyzing it. Poems are wonderful forms of communication, a way to tell a story or reflect on images and ideas; but they don’t have to be over-wrought. My favorite is one of his shortest poems, Introduction to Poetry:

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/001.html

I try to take his lesson to heart in my own material; I don’t always succeed. But we all keep writing.

Voices on PoetryThursday

2006-06-08T21:42:00.000-04:00

This is the first week that I join with a few others who publish or write something relating to poetry every Thursday (Poetry Thursday). And just like a first-time student, I didn't get the assignment exactly right...The theme this week was to walk around for a day and listen to people talking -- and build a theme around the snippets of conversation that you hear.

I started writing a poem about neighborhood voices when I was a kid. The poem had a mind of its own and took off in a different direction. It still speaks of voices, but from a different viewpoint: hearing the voices of those around you before they become faint voices of the past.

Neighborhood Voices

I grew up next to a cemetery --
played baseball in an empty field
with headstones a distant home run to right;
rode sleds down a snow-covered hill
yet to be occupied by the dead

We were a neighborhood full of kids --
we feared the voices that might come
from the shadows of stones in moonlight,
but were daring enough to shelter ourselves
in sleeping bags near pitcher’s mound

We could read history in those acres --
a timeline running uphill in reverse order
spanning nearly ten generations of lives;
the voices began their story with hard facts
marking a calendar with birth and death

Some of the older pages had more to say --
verse scrolled along the bottom or
a carved picture framing the top,
epitaphs to give color to their lives
before the drab cold stone crumbled and forgot

My father’s grave stands in full view
of the house where my mother no longer lives,
but his voice has little to do with that place,
and so much more to do with who I am
even as the distance of place and time grows deeper.

I search the voices of those who surround me
listening to the essence and beauty of their story;
I do not want to wait until dates and numbers
are etched upon a stone planted in distant hills,
waiting for the feet of a wary child chasing a ball.

Poetry Thursday

2006-06-04T21:11:00.000-04:00

Since November 2004, I have posted a poem on the last day of every month. It seemed like a good habit.

Turns out, others are doing it better. I did some searching last week (Ask.com debuted a new search service that scans blogs), and found a community of bloggers who focus on some aspect of poetry every Thursday. Called "Poetry Thursday", it is spearheaded by a couple of poetry lovers who have a blog by that name (I added it to my index list).

It's a great community...I'm not sure I can keep that kind of timetable! But it is another great example of the links that can be generated through the internet.

The Poetry community

2006-06-01T22:32:00.000-04:00

The online poetry community is huge.

And no, I take no credit for it just because I have posted a poem on the last day of every month. But a recent column in the Philadelphia Inquirer points out the volume of poetry being written and posted on the internet. As with so many other facets of society, the internet is the new town square and everyone can gather. The technology can eliminate the phony walls put up by income, education, ethnicity....

A million flowers bloom. So many colors, scents, and sounds.

May's Poem of the month

2006-05-31T21:51:00.000-04:00

A Note from Wilma Hopkins

It sits at the top of my email in-basket,
a note from Wilma Hopkins
with the enticing subject line
‘Do you love me or not?’

I have never known a Wilma,
excepting the one that Fred Flintstone
bellows for in cartoon Technicolor,
but I don’t think she took on another surname.

And I doubt that this is truly a Hopkins,
or even a woman,
begging me to learn more about
her long-lost desire for fulfillment,

particularly since I don’t even know
what or who I would be fulfilling.

Every fearful synapse in my brain
says to ignore and delete such mail from strangers
since they usually have more devious intent
like spreading electron worms that eat my words.

But how do I resist such an inquiry,
carrying, as I do,
the usual male ego that craves attention
even from ghosts beyond the screen?

To click, or not to click,
that is the impulse,
whether tis nobler
to grasp at a dream of fantasy lust,
or to send Wilma and her erotic spam
to the recycle bin of email ether.

To answer your question, Wilma,
I need to know more, but that becomes the conundrum:
I cannot know more without opening the envelope,
which would then unleash your true identity
and render my answer meaningless –
which is to say, I love you not.

National Poetry Month

2006-05-01T21:14:00.000-04:00

April was National Poetry Month. And I missed posting a poem on the last day, as has been my habit since November 2004. Well, to be honest, I posted one and pulled it. So one day late...

Illusion of Snowfall

There is no evidence that the snow has fallen.
I see white flakes randomly careening
across the neighborhood façade,
some of them running sideways with the wind,
the larger ones falling straight down
and creating their own right of way,
ignoring the roller coaster ride of the rest.
White lines are drawn across grey granite and red brick,
cut by cars and trucks that blow through the cold smokescreen,
all in an early April motif out my office window.

But nothing hits the ground.
The oblivious grass shows only the pale green of spring,
and no slick white covers the brown cold sidewalk.
Miles of sky is filled with clouds and wind
dropping its frozen cargo in a last ditch effort of winter
to derail nature’s return to brighter colors.
I can wait it out as the sky swirls with snow,
knowing that for all its effort,
the cold will only be a vestige of the cloud’s illusion
that it can block out the growing sun.

More Coffin

2006-04-20T08:58:00.000-04:00

Another excerpt from Letters to a Young Doubter, William Sloan Coffin:

…a sentimentalized Christmas is so much worse than a commercialized one.
The obvious answer is that the latter never pretends to be anything else. Sentimentality, however, does not arise from the truth; it’s what’s poured on top, blurring and distorting the truth…
Now consider the Christmas crèche. The baby lies in the manger because no one in the inn would make room for a pregnant woman. The ox and the ass are not picturesque guests who just had to come and see; this is their home. The Christmas truth is that he who was to be the bread of life for human beings is laid in the feed box of animals.
At the beginning as at the end of Christ’s life, God comes off wonderfully. We do not. The inhumanity, as we used to say, “of man to man” is exceeded only by man’s inhumanity to God. That’s why I think God is not too hard to believe in, just too good to believe in, we being strangers to such goodness.

Steve Howe

2006-04-18T22:51:00.000-04:00

Steve Howe @ Northern Lights, Clifton Park, NY

Andrew, Alex and I traveled to Northern Lights after the Maunday Thursday service. We got there in the middle of his first set. Northern Lights is a large bar with a corner stage, a few tables scattered around the front. We stood at the back of the crowd for the first set, the clatter of pool tables behind us, the bar to our right. After intermission, we wandered to the fringe of the tables and had a clear view of the stage for the second set.

Howe is 59, rather scrawny and gaunt with brownish blonde hair that is seriously thinning and pushed back over his balding pate. His glasses and thin face make him look rather professorial. When he sits, he leans over his instrument as if trying to see its bottom half, and his right foot taps alternately between his heel and toes to keep a pulse. He chatted frequently between songs, although the sound system unfortunately blurred his words. He succumbed to techno backup only once, using a recorded acoustic strumming to back his singing and steel guitar on “Soon.” It didn’t seem intrusive.

He is still a nimble player. Most of his purely acoustic numbers could be combined into one long song and most people wouldn’t know the difference. The tone, cadence, and use of alternating strumming and glissandos sound much the same on songs like “Clap,” “Mood for a Day”, and “Masquerade”. This is not to take away from his technique; both Andrew and Alex said that Howe was a great technician and player, and I’ll take their word for it, since Andrew has played a little and Alex is a trained musician. Howe has always been considered one of the best guitarists in progressive music circles…

The highlights of the show were many. Some of them were in smaller moments, like his explanation of the nuances of a new electric guitar; it made sounds Howe had never heard before, just because he turned a dial the wrong way. He did an abridged rendering of “To Be Over” on a 12-string acoustic guitar that was both subtle and powerful. His steel guitar filled the venue with incredible piercing sounds, which segued into a wonderful version of “Soon.”

The crowd brought him back for an encore, and he invited us to sing along to a song he was sure we knew. Usually, I cringe when Yes uses “Your Move” as an encore, because they can do it in their sleep and it can lack energy after so many years. But Steve broke the song into its simplest components – a strumming guitar and melodic words, even throwing in the counterpart “All we are saying is give peace a chance” to go along with the audience’s chorus.

And of course, he ended with “Clap.” Nearly all the audience did just that.

William Sloane Coffin

2006-04-17T08:43:00.000-04:00

William Sloane Coffin died last week. The former Yale chaplain and pastor at Riverside Church in New York City was a leader in two major social movements during the 1960s, the fight for civil rights by African-Americans, and the anti-Vietnam War actions later in the same decade.

Certainly, he was more than just a man who translated belief into social action. He was also a theologian who encouraged his followers to discuss their beliefs, to study and ask questions about faith, to treat it as a journey, not a set of inflexible dogma.

Here’s an excerpt from Letters to a Young Doubter, one of his last books, published in 2005:

I think self-righteousness is the bane of human relations, of all of them – interpersonal, international, and interfaith. I’m sure it was self-righteousness that prompted Pascal to say, “Human beings never do evil so cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Self-righteousness blocks out our capacity for self-criticism, destroys humility, and undermines the sense of oneness that should bind us all.
Self-righteousness inspired the Christian Crusades against Muslims and, centuries later, the Easter pogroms of Eastern Europe, the sermon-induced slaughter of Jews after the morning celebration of the resurrected rabbi. Today this same self-righteousness encourages some American Christians to cheer President Bush’s messianic militarism, a divinely ordained form of cleansing violence, and all in the name of a Jesus Christ who is the mirror opposite of the Jesus of the four Gospels.
Self-righteousness makes believers of all faiths doctrinaire, dogmatic, and mindlessly militant.

Abe Lincoln on Good Friday

2006-04-14T15:31:00.000-04:00

Good Friday. Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre on Good Friday. Lincoln had told his wife that he considered that day the end of the War Between the States, although Robert E. Lee had surrendered a few days before. Lincoln’s nightmare had ended, but for some reason, his role on this earth ended with it.

Do we need to know why such events are connected? We barely know how these events occur. Historians argue over the causes of the Civil War. Generals debate the reasons for success and failure in five years of military battles. Sociologists theorize on the clash between social and economic classes before, during, and after the war that shaped the future of this country. There are even variations to the story of the actual assassination that night: how Booth escaped, what he said to the audience when he jumped to the stage, where he went, how he was caught.

When we try to identify the why, we are probably crossing the line from history into spirituality, religion, and faith. A much longer discussion.

April 14, 1865 was just another day on the Julian calendar. Centuries ago, someone picked it to commemorate the death of a Savior for a large community of Christians. John Wilkes Booth picked it to end the life of the country’s leader.

Gospel of Judas

2006-04-12T07:39:00.000-04:00

A copy of the Gospel of Judas has been translated and released. The Gnostic text claims that in the week prior to his crucifixion, Jesus told Judas that he was the only disciple who understood the true nature of Christ, and asked him to betray him to the authorities. Thus, in this week before Easter, Christians face a new interpretation of the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the potential rehabilitation of a loathed figure in history.

The document dates from about 180-250AD. No one knows for sure if that is when the actual ‘gospel’ was first written, or who wrote it. One observer noted that, if those dates are original, it is as if someone wrote an eye-witness account of George Washington’s inaugural in 1940 and passed it off as history.

But no matter. This gospel, when combined with other texts discovered in the last 50 years, add to the historical record of the time period, skimpy as it is. These documents bring real people to life. They describe conversations and daily life that separates them from the tainted versions we have created in movies or television. That is the most fascinating part of this discovery: history, the recorded actions and words of real people, explained in the written word. From this history, we have derived a religious faith in something that cannot always be explained through the written word: God, Yahwe, the word that cannot be spoken because it cannot be fully comprehended in human terms.

Poetic lessons

2006-03-31T19:05:00.000-05:00

Locked Up at the Start

I wait to act or
put pen to paper until
all mistakes are purged from the field and
I can walk without obstacles that
could have blocked my mission or
cause my failure, which I assume from the start.

====================================================

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
William Carlos Williams
from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

Barry Bonds

2006-03-12T21:51:00.000-05:00

Every athlete looks for an edge. Something that shaves two-hundredths of a second off a miler’s personal best. Something that gives a speedskater a faster stride around the oval. Something that takes off one more ounce of fat and adds another ounce of muscle for the defensive lineman.

There are many ways to gain that edge. One more hour of training in a day. Better nutrition. Additional weight on the benchpress. Daily workouts during the off-season. Visioning, spiritual study, hypnosis.

There is a fine line between very good and excellent. The former may get a baseball player sent back to TripleA. The latter gets him a starting job at third base.

Major league baseball players have bent the rules to gain that edge for decades. Corking the bat. Vaseline or saliva on the breaking ball. Razor blades in the pitcher’s glove thumb. Sharpening cleats to a knife-edge for sliding into second base.

Barry Bonds, in his drive to be the best hitter of this and any other age, took his quest to extremes. He saw others get the attention and simply did not like it. Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire were being called the saviors of baseball. Their home run derby was the biggest chart on the front page of every sports section for a whole summer. McGuire's batting practice was a spectator sport, even in Barry’s home park. Couldn’t be. Sosa and McGuire weren’t in the same class as Barry Bonds, didn’t have the family heritage, the right to claim such heights -- according to Barry.

We all run into people in our lives who rub us the wrong way. They announce themselves with their egos, they have to be the center of all attention. They put others down simply to demonstrate their own superiority. Their narcissm cannot be contained or changed.

I have learned to avoid these people. They rarely do any good for those around them, they poison any environment with their selfishness and boorishness. They add no value to life.

Barry Bonds has demonstrated that he fits in that class. He would have been considered a great ballplayer, between the white lines at least, without slavishly and deliberately using strength- and performance-enhancing substances. But his ego, his need to be the unquestioned best, had to be fed – regardless of the consequences to him, his family, his friends, his team, or baseball.

Last Day of the Month = Poetry

2006-02-28T21:49:00.000-05:00

Pace

A peaceful ride at 5:30 in the dark morning,
it feels plenty fast enough at 60 miles per hour.
Snow-wrapped trees appear and disappear mutely
through our side windows;
no other cars share the four lane highway,
our world is void of all other motion.

A tanker truck barrels by on the right,
breaking the silent darkness
like a gleaming silver missile, intent on its target,
relegating me to the status of a bug in its path,
the afterburner of his taillights quickly becoming a speck
over the next knoll of blacktop.

The night has now been pierced,
and silence no longer envelops our short trip.
Now I feel we must get there, be done,
finish the job, join the multitude
that only finds meaning at an inhuman pace,
and my right foot races the engine past 75.

Baseball Hall breaks another barrier

2006-02-27T20:53:00.000-05:00

The Hall of Fame in Cooperstown became significantly more diverse today.

The first woman selected for the baseball Hall of Fame is Effa Manley, an African-American. Effa Manley was owner of the Brooklyn/Newark Bears of the Negro Leagues into the 1950’s, a woman who loved baseball and was not afraid to challenge the established white major league owners who wanted to raid her team.

In one swift move, the Hall of Fame broke down all kinds of barriers, just like Effa did.

Once again, a member of the local baseball community had a hand in this. Jim Overmyer of Pittsfield, Massachussets published a major study of Manley and her team, Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles. Jim toils for a New York State agency in Albany, and was a member of the local Society of American Baseball Research chapter – the same chapter that championed George Davis of Cohoes, New York for the Hall in 1998.

Nice goin’, Jim!

Every Four Years in the snow

2006-02-26T16:28:00.000-05:00

The Winter Olympics happen every four years. Once again, I swore that I would not watch hours of Olympic events every night. The television coverage is America-centric, the events happen hours before they are broadcast in eastern standard time, and then there are the constant commercials….It runs counter to my intent to reduce the time used up in front of a television.

But then that theme starts playing. The screen is filled with white snow, sharp skies, and all those colorful skiers slashing across the mountains. And I watch.

I even become a hockey fan every four years. Not because of the American team. They play the usual brand of dump-and-run hockey that predominates in the NHL: all the action happens along the boards between bodies smashing against each other, skates and sticks poking an an inert rubber puck. The European teams are more adept at stickhandling, passing, and strategic play. Much more fun to watch.

Add to that, the Finnish team was having a great run through the Torino Olympics. They allowed only two goals during the preliminary round and were undefeated. They out-skated the Czech team and beat the Canadians. Their key players led the Olympics in scoring and assists. The Finnish Lions became the darling team of the tournament.

So I flew the flag. I tracked the games on the internet. They knocked the American team out in the first round of the medal competition, 4-3. They then shut out the Russians, who had become a favorite for the gold. The final was an all-Scandinavian affair when the Swedes eliminated the Czech team. As the Helsinki Sanomat proclaimed, it doesn’t get any better than this. Nine million people in Sweden, five million in Finland, and nary a television set tuned in to anything else.

At 8AM this morning, my television set joins them for the gold medal hockey game. I could only watch the first two periods, and the score was 2-2 before I had to go off to church. The Swedish team snatched a quick goal in the first 10 seconds of the third period – and it was over, save for mad rushes by the Finns at the Swedish goalie over the final few minutes. To no avail.

All those beautiful winter pictures in the mountains. Skiiers slashing through fog and blizzard down the slalom; downhill racers going 75 miles an hour over the icy snow, and catching an edge; cross-country skiers poling down a track with sweat poring off their faces; distance skaters bent at the waste, one pulsing arm pulling them around a turn in the oval; ski jumpers pushing off the end of the ramp, leaning out over the hill, framed against the blue sky. Plenty of contrasts and sharp lines between glorious color.

Too bad it’s nearly over.

How I write

2006-02-06T20:56:00.000-05:00

W.H. Auden: “At any given time, I have two things on my mind: a theme that interests me and a problem of verbal form, meter, diction, etc. The theme looks for the right form; the form looks for the right theme. When the two come together, I am able to start writing.”

Winter Street at Night

2006-01-31T19:37:00.000-05:00

The dark look of winter fashion
tries to mute the color of the street:
too many overwrought coats of black
and brown and subdued burgundy,
all dull shades that pretend to carry
the warmth of their fabric.

But they cannot smother
the white of the snow,
the red that snaps from the flags,
the bright wet rainbow of passing cars,
or the shimmer from low streetlights
that rises from your eyes.

More blackboard poetry

2006-01-23T20:44:00.000-05:00

There is probably a web site somewhere that collects refrigerator poetry. I have the subset of that, with far fewer words and letters, with the 2006 magnetic poetry calendar. So here's the challenge: those that have this poem generator need to start collecting and sharing. You must only use the words and letters available with the calendar -- that means no caps, no punctuation marks. Here's my entry for the day:

collect blooms which shine
and another season can fall
with gray snow
but the flowers will melt morning storms

Here's the Wikipedia entry for Magnetic Poetry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_Poetry

Music formats affect their creator's themes

2006-01-21T08:17:00.000-05:00

A friend posted a comment on my last short blog, noting some of the downsides of music formats over the past 20 years. So, to continue the conversation...

Albums, tapes, and CDs had two other benefits that are more difficult to get in today's world of individual songs:

*Artists could tie the music together in some way: a theme, an opera, a style, a particular message.

*Artists would create musical (or even spoken) seques between songs. There are some great seques in rock: parts of the Beatle's 'Abbey Road', particularly going into "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window"; Santana's "Black Magic Woman"; Led Zeppelin and 'Living Loving Maid'; Springsteen on "The Wild, the Innocent, and the EStreet Shuffle".

Can't do those things with single songs, randomized. I've tried to recreate them by making sure certain songs play consecutively; but my MP3 player still has a distinctive gap, and sometimes an annoying electronic beep as the digital code kicks on and off...

What are some of your favorite album seques?

Convergence equals quality?

2006-01-19T21:39:00.000-05:00

We have gone from a full house to a kid-less house, at least for one night. Pam took Andrew down I88 today and returned him to Onondaga Dorm at Binghamton U this afternoon.
Erin, meanwhile, has learned that many social and networking events for Law School occur on Thursday night. So she has remained in Albany, had dinner, and gone out. So for now, I fill up a playlist on MusicMatch Jukebox and crank up the computer speakers….Such a change from 20 years ago. Then, I would have put an album on the turntable and tried to write in a paper journal. That could last the length of one album side, or about 20 minutes. A turntable, with a needle, connected to a 20-watt-per-channel Technics receiver, and an Onkyo cassette tape deck. The receiver still serves, tied to a 5-CD Panasonic changer we got as a Christmas present, 1989. I get the turntable out every couple of years just to play an album that doesn't seem to exist beyond vinyl; the cassette player gave up its mechanical parts long ago.

I wonder if the music recording has degraded in any way through all this electronic transference?

Marcia's funeral

2006-01-17T22:21:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was Marcia’s funeral. The thermometer read two below zero when I got up at 7:30. Bright, sharp sunshine. The church echoed with sunlight through the windows and off the soft walls, bright columns, and warm slate floor. Brass rehearsed the two pieces, Andrew replacing me for the benediction piece since I was a pallbearer.

The church parking lot and sidewalks were covered with a thin layer of crunchy snow, mixed with ice chunks and salt. Drivers crawled carefully up the driveway into parking spots. Over 200 people filled the pews by 11 – townspeople all, each of them known to Nelson through one of a number of relationships. Rotary, town clerk, choir and church member, village board. At some point, we all got mail from the Town Clerk. Two police departments stood quietly in honor.

Marcia was his eyes. He cried for his eyes as we stood by the gravesite, our backs hunched over against the cold and the sorrow.

A dinner conversation

2006-01-16T20:01:00.000-05:00

A friend described his job with a lending company early in his career. The company worked with car dealers to offer loans. Many customers were unaware of the financial arrangements that the dealers were making. One frequent dealer tactic was to arrange a car loan for a buyer, and then send them to the lending company to get the downpayment for the car. Frequently, the customer was unaware that the downpayment was also a loan, on top of the car loan…He also had a fellow worker who would stand outside the local bars on payday and corner people who owed money as they walked out…My friend expressed considerable consternation at how individuals can be bilked out of money by questionable methods.

Another friend replied, well, yes…But I have a hard time coming up with too much sympathy for individuals who put themselves in those situations. They have some responsibility for their choices, and need to be aware of what they are signing or agreeing to. They don’t have to buy that car, or enter into that contract – they signed it, they are accountable for it.

Contrasting viewpoints. And a basic conflict that government faces: how can we protect people from themselves? We live in a capitalist society where our individual livelihood depends upon performing some function that gains us money. A company lends money to individuals who pay it back with interest – thus gaining a profit. What is the responsibility of that company to educate the individual about the contract or agreement and make sure the person knows the fiscal risks, or his own ability to pay?

We, as a society, could determine that we need to protect individuals from hurting themselves by making poor decisions. What is the cost of that protection? Using the above example, what if we wanted to do something that restricts a lending company from certain tactics. There is a cost to writing the laws, setting the rules, printing and filing contracts, and creating a team of people who oversee and enforce that protection (a government agency, the courts, enforcement means such as police, etc.). What is the return to that investment? When is it too much?

How far do we as a society go to keep individuals from failing?

That First Blackboard verse

2006-01-08T22:20:00.000-05:00

It has a limited vocabulary, but the 'magnetic poetry' calendar does include enough words to create something. My first creation, for what it's worth:

easy melts that storm,
the sun shines
another love season blooms:
collect blue sky and believe

Blackboard Poetry

2006-01-07T15:24:00.000-05:00

I received a calendar for Christmas that includes a magnetic poetry board as an appendage. The words were all connected together in a single sheet, and I need to tear them apart. Right now some of the words are flying solo, black letters on a white rectangle, all scattered across the square black background. They drift askew as if they are floating by on the tide, tipping one way or the other. Other words are still in strips, slapped in a row in the bottom corner. The strips make interesting vertical lists:

make want when light snow;
which would spring winter while sizzle shiver.

So far, I haven’t created enough room on the board to put together a cogent verse. It would be more fun if I could shake the board to randomly rearrange all the words, as if it were a Boggle game. The results might be better than my own attempts at poetry.

Making God Laugh

2006-01-03T22:37:00.000-05:00

You hear words or phrases repeated within a short period of time. Things you have never heard before, but are not new or unique. Does it mean something? Are there messages in these connections?

Pam recently gave me a recording of Billy Collins reading his poetry. It was recorded last spring in New York. During some of his banter between poems, he quotes a friend who had told him the following line: How do you make God laugh? Make a plan.

I asked a pastor friend if he had ever heard that joke. He smiled and said that he has it on a plaque in his office: Make God laugh. Make a plan.

I am reading Semaphore by G.W. Hawkes (a plug for Lycoming here: he heads the creative writing program at the College). Last night, I read this passage:

“…but time had taught him that Time decides. His father had said it once: Man plans; God laughs.”

Why would I run across this line twice within a week? A line, or joke, or phrase, that I have never heard before? It clearly is an old chestnut, probably spoken from pulpits worldwide for eons. There are plenty of pithy, interesting phrases that I have never heard or for which I am not familiar. But why this one, now?

Far too deterministic. But I no longer discount this type of connection….

The Role of Journalists

2006-01-02T10:37:00.000-05:00

The media is full of their ‘end-of-the-year’ lists and summaries. Much of the material is about the natural disasters during 2005: the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the Asian earthquake, New Orleans floods.

Some months ago, I wrote briefly about the disconnect frequently felt by people when hearing of major catastrophes. The impact of these events feels overwhelming, numbing, and we don’t know how to react as individuals. How can we possibly help so many people? We have different levels of empathy that is inversely proportional to the scale of the event.

A columnist from the Helsinki newspaper had an interesting perspective on the role of the media in this. The above title is a link to the full article, but here is an excerpt:

Physical or psychological closeness is an important criterion of news. Journalists do not make news items simply of what is large and important, but also about matters that touch them and touch their audience or readers. In the case of the tsunami, the dreadful fate of the Finns naturally left nobody unmoved.

And yet responsible journalism demands something more. The task of foreign correspondents and reporters is to help the readers to see the world in a broader context. To provide an opportunity to feel strongly about matters that are more distant and less familiar.

The writer, the journalist, the broadcaster are not just purveyors and repeaters of the news. The media should bring more to the story than just the facts: the truth can be told in other ways, in other images, using different words, even if the truth has different definitions for different people. There is a difference between fact and truth.

The Vacant Month, and Celebrating a Life

2005-12-31T17:17:00.000-05:00

A friend sent me a note asking, “What, no thoughts in December?” She had checked my blog sight, which has no entries for this month. Not for a dearth of thoughts. Our world – both my immediate environment and the one brought through the windows of newspapers and television – are reeling with activity. All of it cries out for comment, analysis, action. I have failed to conjure up the emotional energy to pursue. Focus.

Pam and I did attend a life celebration today. A friend's wife passed away on Christmas Day after a long tussle with Alzheimer's. The family and a large community of friends gathered in First Church Albany for a memorial service this morning. Very moving, very uplifting, full of song, story, verse and life. So I will end the year with my last-day-of-the-month poem about today. In memory and celebration of Janice Luben.

So We Sing

We sang to celebrate a life today,
the voices of family and friends raising
praise for a girl, a woman, a wife, a person, a soul
whose footprints will travel in our own shadow
while we walk our own journey,
striving for faith and grace.

She was among us in the simplest of form:
a plain jar sitting in a small woven basket,
blanketed and nestled with pine boughs;
earthly things we can touch,
carrying the message that,
while the beauties of life are absorbed in our own senses,
the height of grace is brought by faith outside our flesh.

So we sing,
voices, trumpets, piano, organ,
in verse, story, prayer, poem, toccata --
And the music reached the rafters.

That Last-Day Poem Habit....

2005-11-30T21:09:00.000-05:00

Abandoned Wardrobe

Half a generation ago, in another household,
I wore hand-me-ups from my youngest brother,
taller with much more stature than I.
Today our son is living the first year of college
the entire length of a highway
and two hours away.
And now I wear the clothes he left behind
in his closet, unwanted,
another set of hand-me-ups.

No wonder I get their names mixed up,
and slip into calling my son,
my brother.