Tony Hoagland, a new (to me) poet, is described on the book jacket thusly: “It’s hard to imagine any aspect of contemporary American life that couldn’t make its way into the writing of Tony Hoagland or a word in common or formal usage he would shy away from. He is a poet of risk; he risks wild laughter in poems that are totallyheartfelt, poems you want to read out loud to anyone who needs to know the score and even more so to those who think they know the score. The framework of his writing is immense, almost as large as the tarnished nation he wandered into under the star of poetry.” And as a writer whose work is “Funny, combative, intimate, and public, these poems advocate that we must fight for clarity, reinvent our affections, and remain, as best we can, unincorporated.” From his new book of poems, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty.
Sentimental Education
And when we were eight, or nine,
our father took us back into the Alabama woods,
found a rotten log, and with his hunting knife
pried off a slab of bark
to show the hundred kinds of bugs and grubs
that we would have to eat in time of war.
“The ones who will survive,” he told us,
looking at us hard,
“are the ones who are willing to do anything.”
Then he popped one of those pale slugs
into his mouth and started chewing.
And that was Lesson Number 4
in The Green Beret Book of Childrearing.
I looked at my pale, scrawny, knock-kneed, bug-eyed brother,
who was identical to me,
and saw that, in a world that ate the weak,
we didn’t have a prayer,
and next thing I remember, I’m working for a living
at a boring job
that I’m afraid of losing,
with a wife whose lack of love for me
is like a lack of oxygen,
and this dead thing in my chest
that used to be my heart.
Oh, if he were alive, I would tell him, “Dad,
you were right! I ate a lot of stuff
far worse than bugs.”
And I was eaten, I was eaten,
I was picked up
and chewed
and swallowed
down into the belly of the world.
Sunday, August 08, 2010
Saturday, August 07, 2010
Yup, That's How It's Done Here In Chinatown
Poor Ms. Sherrod isn't the only person to be the victim of Officials Acting Badly Without Complete Facts. See Ron Crawford's post, "How the Water Quality Control Board "Sherroded" 45 Los Osos Property Owners," at http://www.sewerwatch.blogspot.com/.
Yup, that's how it's done. Bankrupt and/or bury the victims, then walk away.
Yup, that's how it's done. Bankrupt and/or bury the victims, then walk away.
Friday, August 06, 2010
Just Asking
So Senator Lindsey Graham has now joined with others to propose changing the 14th Amendment so somebody born in the U.S won't automatically be a citizen unless his parents are citizens, which caused Screaming "Hardball" Chris Mathews to holler at the bill's co-sponsor, "SO HOW WOULD THAT WORK? LET'S SAY AN AMERICAN WOMAN WHO'S A CITIZEN GETS PREGNANT BY AN ILLEGAL ALIEN, IS HER BABY A CITIZEN??" To which the co-sponsor could only mumble things about having to work out the details, mumble, mumble, mumble.
Our citizenship rules haven't kept up to 21st century realities and through the years, by fits and starts, were changed and modified depending on the prejudice du jour ( No Irish! No Catholics! No Italians! No Chinese! No Mexicans!) and our tolerance of "illegal aliens" also depends on our (wink-nudge) economic benefit from their cheap labor, but this muddle does create problems from time to time, especially during econcomic downturns.
So a serious (stop the faux outrage and wink-nudges, please) discussion is in order and we, as a nation, need to take a serious look at our demographics, our national (real) business policies and practices, and our economic and social realities, then decide on a sane, fair, practical immigration policy, then enforce it.
But changing the 14th amendment? Now? That only begs a question: Would Lindsey Graham be proposing such a radical measure if the illegal aliens in question were white, English speaking, blond, blue-eyed Evangelical DANES?
No, I thought not.
Well, Never Mind
Happily, there's no use worrying about any of this stuff since the nation is finished anyway, totally doomed, done, kaput, run out of string, over, dead. A federal judge has ruled that (No Gay Marriage) Prop 8 is unconstitutional since it denies equal protection to gay people by denying them a fundamental right to marry and by doing so sets up a second-class citizenship status for a certain group of people based on no rational, compelling state reason for doing so.
So, it's pointless to worry about immigration since all straight married people will now be so busy getting divorces (remember, gay marriage will destroy straight marriage), their families all in turmoil, children weeping, wives and husbands turned out on the street, bereft, divorced, their marriages destroyed because that gay couple down the street may now have a chance to get married.
Can Armageddon be far behind? No, I thought not. Unless, wait, maybe the courts can declare gay people Illegal Aliens, deny them citizenship and either boot them out of the country or put them to work picking carrots for $8.00 and hour with NO OVERTIME PAY until they've worked a 10 hour day.
And a final question:
Can we stop being stupid and get our addled wits about us? There's so much to do and so little time to do it in we really can't waste time mired in fear and bigotry and indulging in irrational, fraidy-cat hissy-fits, with too many of us stuck in the Sad Slough of The Dim Bulb Dumb. Pluuueeeeze. Snap out of it, America.
Our citizenship rules haven't kept up to 21st century realities and through the years, by fits and starts, were changed and modified depending on the prejudice du jour ( No Irish! No Catholics! No Italians! No Chinese! No Mexicans!) and our tolerance of "illegal aliens" also depends on our (wink-nudge) economic benefit from their cheap labor, but this muddle does create problems from time to time, especially during econcomic downturns.
So a serious (stop the faux outrage and wink-nudges, please) discussion is in order and we, as a nation, need to take a serious look at our demographics, our national (real) business policies and practices, and our economic and social realities, then decide on a sane, fair, practical immigration policy, then enforce it.
But changing the 14th amendment? Now? That only begs a question: Would Lindsey Graham be proposing such a radical measure if the illegal aliens in question were white, English speaking, blond, blue-eyed Evangelical DANES?
No, I thought not.
Well, Never Mind
Happily, there's no use worrying about any of this stuff since the nation is finished anyway, totally doomed, done, kaput, run out of string, over, dead. A federal judge has ruled that (No Gay Marriage) Prop 8 is unconstitutional since it denies equal protection to gay people by denying them a fundamental right to marry and by doing so sets up a second-class citizenship status for a certain group of people based on no rational, compelling state reason for doing so.
So, it's pointless to worry about immigration since all straight married people will now be so busy getting divorces (remember, gay marriage will destroy straight marriage), their families all in turmoil, children weeping, wives and husbands turned out on the street, bereft, divorced, their marriages destroyed because that gay couple down the street may now have a chance to get married.
Can Armageddon be far behind? No, I thought not. Unless, wait, maybe the courts can declare gay people Illegal Aliens, deny them citizenship and either boot them out of the country or put them to work picking carrots for $8.00 and hour with NO OVERTIME PAY until they've worked a 10 hour day.
And a final question:
Can we stop being stupid and get our addled wits about us? There's so much to do and so little time to do it in we really can't waste time mired in fear and bigotry and indulging in irrational, fraidy-cat hissy-fits, with too many of us stuck in the Sad Slough of The Dim Bulb Dumb. Pluuueeeeze. Snap out of it, America.
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Read This Book!
If you’re looking for something more substantial than just a “summer read,” but something so well written and so compelling you can’t put it down? Try, “Empire of the Summer Moon; Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History,” by S.C. Gwynne.
Sounds like a snoozer, you say? Not a bit of it. The writing is superb and the story is compellingly, masterfully told, in part because Mr. Gwynne doesn’t fall into the “Dances with Wolves” trap of sentimentality. Comanches were a savage, brutal warrior culture that lived on the buffalo and lived for the joy of raiding and killing neighboring tribes and stealing their horses (Comanche wealth and tribal status depended on the number of horses one had, not to mention the number of scalps taken.) They enjoyed killing and took great delight in torturing their victims. They often captured and kept their opponent’s young children to raise as their own (or later marry) or kept them as slaves. They gave no quarter to anyone and expected none for themselves. They were the finest horsemen the world has ever seen.
And that extraordinary skill, plus the remarkable western mustang, gave them the ability to strike deep into enemy territory then disappear back into the trackless plains. As a result, they were absolute rulers of the southern buffalo plains from Kansas down through the high plains of the west Texas Llano Estacado, to the fertile hill country near Austin, and down into New Mexico and northern Mexico. The Comancheria was their domain, nobody entered it without deadly risk, and anybody foolish enough to live near its border (and own cows and horses) was always at risk. The term “Comanche Moon” was no romantic Hollywood notion. Their war parties covered vast distances at night and on the frontier a full moon was not a time for romance and wonder; it was a time for sick dread, bolted doors and nightmare fear. And by such tactics, they stopped the westward movement of Americans in a bloody 40-year-old guerilla war.
They also loved their families, went to extraordinary lengths to protect them when attacked, and grieved terribly when they were killed. And killed they were, meeting often equally brutal settlers, savage Texas Rangers, and revenge-fueled Army units. Both sides in this brutal war of attrition were equally duplicitous, often equally savage and equally uncomprehending of the other’s reality.
Then came the buffalo hunters, who for both economic reasons and with support of Washington Policy that understood that a buffalo culture couldn’t survive without the buffalo, wiped the plains clean of the great beasts. And then sealed their fate as a culture at the hands of Captain Ranald Slidell Mackenzie (who Gwyne refers to as “the anti-Custer”) under orders to take the fight to the heart of the Comancheria to carry out the policy of pacification that was, in effect, the final solution.
Into this history, in the last dying years, came Cynthia Ann Parker, captured as a child, raised by and later married to Chief Peta Nocona, she gave birth to three children, one of them, Quanah Parker, who would later become famous as a leader of the last battles of the dying Comanche nation. Cynthia, re-captured as an adult and returned to her white family, spent many of her last years trying to escape and return to the plains. In her was to be found the American trope of the “White Squaw,” a theme of miscegenation, “savage” sexuality, and titillating incomprehension layered over with romantic nonsense. Add in her “half-breed” son, a tall, handsome, skilled warrior and you have the stuff of American legend.
Like all stories of the meeting of indigenous cultures with more technically advanced ones, this one is ultimately a tragedy. But, in the case of the Comanches, one with a terrible irony: Being a brutal raiding warrior culture resulted in making blood enemies among the surrounding tribes. When the whites came, there was no end of equally skilled Indians to serve as trackers and scouts and guides for the Army. The movies have often portrayed these Indians as “traitors” to their own kind. It was nothing of the sort. It was payback. And it ultimately proved to be permanently lethal.
And ultimately elegiac: “Who was she, in the end? A white woman by birth, yes, but also a relic of old Comancheria, of the fading empire of high grass and fat summer moons and buffalo herds that blackened the horizon. She had seen all of that death and glory. She had been a chief’s wife. She had lived free on the high infinite plains as her adopted race had in the very last place in the North American continent where anyone would ever live or run free. She had died in deep pine woods where there was no horizon, where you could see nothing at all. The woods were just a prison. As far as we know, she died without the slightest comprehension of what larger forces had conspired to take her away from her old life
“One thinks of Cynthia Ann on the immensity of the plains, a small figure in buckskin bending to her chores by a diamond-clear stream. It is late autumn, the end of warring and buffalo hunting. Above her looms a single cottonwood tree, gone bright yellow in the season, its leaves and branches framing a deep blue sky. Maybe she lifts her head to see the children and dogs playing in the prairie grass and, beyond them, the coils of smoke rising into a gathering twilight from a hundred lodge fires. And maybe she thinks, just for a moment, that all is right in the world.”
Sounds like a snoozer, you say? Not a bit of it. The writing is superb and the story is compellingly, masterfully told, in part because Mr. Gwynne doesn’t fall into the “Dances with Wolves” trap of sentimentality. Comanches were a savage, brutal warrior culture that lived on the buffalo and lived for the joy of raiding and killing neighboring tribes and stealing their horses (Comanche wealth and tribal status depended on the number of horses one had, not to mention the number of scalps taken.) They enjoyed killing and took great delight in torturing their victims. They often captured and kept their opponent’s young children to raise as their own (or later marry) or kept them as slaves. They gave no quarter to anyone and expected none for themselves. They were the finest horsemen the world has ever seen.
And that extraordinary skill, plus the remarkable western mustang, gave them the ability to strike deep into enemy territory then disappear back into the trackless plains. As a result, they were absolute rulers of the southern buffalo plains from Kansas down through the high plains of the west Texas Llano Estacado, to the fertile hill country near Austin, and down into New Mexico and northern Mexico. The Comancheria was their domain, nobody entered it without deadly risk, and anybody foolish enough to live near its border (and own cows and horses) was always at risk. The term “Comanche Moon” was no romantic Hollywood notion. Their war parties covered vast distances at night and on the frontier a full moon was not a time for romance and wonder; it was a time for sick dread, bolted doors and nightmare fear. And by such tactics, they stopped the westward movement of Americans in a bloody 40-year-old guerilla war.
They also loved their families, went to extraordinary lengths to protect them when attacked, and grieved terribly when they were killed. And killed they were, meeting often equally brutal settlers, savage Texas Rangers, and revenge-fueled Army units. Both sides in this brutal war of attrition were equally duplicitous, often equally savage and equally uncomprehending of the other’s reality.
Then came the buffalo hunters, who for both economic reasons and with support of Washington Policy that understood that a buffalo culture couldn’t survive without the buffalo, wiped the plains clean of the great beasts. And then sealed their fate as a culture at the hands of Captain Ranald Slidell Mackenzie (who Gwyne refers to as “the anti-Custer”) under orders to take the fight to the heart of the Comancheria to carry out the policy of pacification that was, in effect, the final solution.
Into this history, in the last dying years, came Cynthia Ann Parker, captured as a child, raised by and later married to Chief Peta Nocona, she gave birth to three children, one of them, Quanah Parker, who would later become famous as a leader of the last battles of the dying Comanche nation. Cynthia, re-captured as an adult and returned to her white family, spent many of her last years trying to escape and return to the plains. In her was to be found the American trope of the “White Squaw,” a theme of miscegenation, “savage” sexuality, and titillating incomprehension layered over with romantic nonsense. Add in her “half-breed” son, a tall, handsome, skilled warrior and you have the stuff of American legend.
Like all stories of the meeting of indigenous cultures with more technically advanced ones, this one is ultimately a tragedy. But, in the case of the Comanches, one with a terrible irony: Being a brutal raiding warrior culture resulted in making blood enemies among the surrounding tribes. When the whites came, there was no end of equally skilled Indians to serve as trackers and scouts and guides for the Army. The movies have often portrayed these Indians as “traitors” to their own kind. It was nothing of the sort. It was payback. And it ultimately proved to be permanently lethal.
And ultimately elegiac: “Who was she, in the end? A white woman by birth, yes, but also a relic of old Comancheria, of the fading empire of high grass and fat summer moons and buffalo herds that blackened the horizon. She had seen all of that death and glory. She had been a chief’s wife. She had lived free on the high infinite plains as her adopted race had in the very last place in the North American continent where anyone would ever live or run free. She had died in deep pine woods where there was no horizon, where you could see nothing at all. The woods were just a prison. As far as we know, she died without the slightest comprehension of what larger forces had conspired to take her away from her old life
“One thinks of Cynthia Ann on the immensity of the plains, a small figure in buckskin bending to her chores by a diamond-clear stream. It is late autumn, the end of warring and buffalo hunting. Above her looms a single cottonwood tree, gone bright yellow in the season, its leaves and branches framing a deep blue sky. Maybe she lifts her head to see the children and dogs playing in the prairie grass and, beyond them, the coils of smoke rising into a gathering twilight from a hundred lodge fires. And maybe she thinks, just for a moment, that all is right in the world.”
Sunday, August 01, 2010
Sunday Movie Alert
If you’re heading off with a few bucks in your pocket to see Steve Carell’s new movie, “Dinner With Schmucks” because the clips you saw of it on TV or the movie review you read made it look like a laff-a-minute “Dumb & Dumber,” you might want to rethink your plans.
Like so many comedies, the filmmakers seemed to have gone off the mark. Or, perhaps the movie was hijacked right out from under their noses by Steve Carell. The film dragged endlesly through the set-up, had a few chuckles during the final dinner-of-the-title sequence (which, instead of building with unrelentless comic mayhem, remained unfocused, often becalmed and flat, whhich was a singular failure of direction considering the amount of goofy talent that was in the scene), then just dribbled off into the typical boy-helps-boy-get-girl schmaltz.
And I suspect all of that happened because the writers and director thought they were dealing with Jerry Lewis in full crazy-meltdown mode. They weren’t. They were dealing with Inspector Clouseau, who never played a schmuck or a fool or an idiot. Instead, he was deadpan serious, which is what made him so funny.
Ditto Steve Carell’s character in this movie. He’s not a schmuck to be laughed at but a true “innocent” naïf-- Dr. Plangloss with stuffed mice-- who inadvertently causes chaos all around him but who has enough moral sense to constantly try to fix the things he’s ruined, thereby making them again all snowball into a much, much worse state.
While the premise of the film, a remake of a French film, was intended to be cruel (rich amoral Wall-Street types compete to see who can bring the biggest idiots to dinner so they can all laugh at them), Carell hijacked the whole premise by making his character so likeable (hard to hate puppies and small babies who make messes) and so well-intentioned that you didn’t laugh at him so much as laugh at his bumbling, then held your breath, then cheered him on as he attempted to set things right. Plus, as played, he was heroic – a genuinely nice guy in a hard world who still dreams his wonderful dreams and triumphs in the end. (Think of the comic possibilities if Carell had had the courage to make his character so disagreeable that the audience would pray for somebody to toss him out a window. ) Meanwhile the Wall Street Mean Guys were so unfunny they weren’t really even mean. Just annoying.
Thus the mismatch. I think the filmmakers thought they were serving satiric hot chili, which the movie ad boys mistakenly peddled as comic mayhem, while their star Steve Carell switched the menu on them and served up a deliciously sweet piece of pie completely at odds with the stated menu.
Well, that happens when you don’t keep a sharp eye on the cook or the soup.
Heading for L.A.?
Check out www.youtube.com/group/urbanlight (look for LACMA at night or LACMA light forrest clips) for a gander at Chris Burden’s art installation piece in front of the L.A. County Museum of Art on Wilshire Blvd. The piece is accessible from the street all night long and it’s absolutely beautiful. A giant piece of “sculpture” that invites a childlike interaction with your body within the space. Come dance! Come dance! It’s too cool. And is now on my "to do" list.
Speaking of which . . .
El Chorro Dog Park (at El Chorro Regional Park off Hwy 1 across from Cuesta College, at the back of the park, past the beautiful new Botanical Gardens) now has a new entryway. Made possible by a donation from Chris Boyle in memory of her Aunt, Lee Boyle, it was constructed by Richard Barrett, R.J. Barrett Construction, with help from dog park volunteers. There’s still some detailing to be done and the dog park sign to be finished, but grab your pooch and come check it out. Like Burden’s “Urban Light” installation, the gateway just feels good to walk through and under.
The dog park will be having its annual fund-raising party Sunday, Oct 3 for the formal ribbon cutting, but meantime, bring your dog out for a visit and a walk though the new gateway.
Finally, here’s Your Sunday Dog Poem
This poem by Karen Shepard from “Doggerel; Poems about Dogs” Everyman’s Library Pocket Poems, Alfred A. Knopf, 2003
BIRCH
You gonna eat that?
You gonna eat that?
You gonna eat that?
I’ll eat that.
Like so many comedies, the filmmakers seemed to have gone off the mark. Or, perhaps the movie was hijacked right out from under their noses by Steve Carell. The film dragged endlesly through the set-up, had a few chuckles during the final dinner-of-the-title sequence (which, instead of building with unrelentless comic mayhem, remained unfocused, often becalmed and flat, whhich was a singular failure of direction considering the amount of goofy talent that was in the scene), then just dribbled off into the typical boy-helps-boy-get-girl schmaltz.
And I suspect all of that happened because the writers and director thought they were dealing with Jerry Lewis in full crazy-meltdown mode. They weren’t. They were dealing with Inspector Clouseau, who never played a schmuck or a fool or an idiot. Instead, he was deadpan serious, which is what made him so funny.
Ditto Steve Carell’s character in this movie. He’s not a schmuck to be laughed at but a true “innocent” naïf-- Dr. Plangloss with stuffed mice-- who inadvertently causes chaos all around him but who has enough moral sense to constantly try to fix the things he’s ruined, thereby making them again all snowball into a much, much worse state.
While the premise of the film, a remake of a French film, was intended to be cruel (rich amoral Wall-Street types compete to see who can bring the biggest idiots to dinner so they can all laugh at them), Carell hijacked the whole premise by making his character so likeable (hard to hate puppies and small babies who make messes) and so well-intentioned that you didn’t laugh at him so much as laugh at his bumbling, then held your breath, then cheered him on as he attempted to set things right. Plus, as played, he was heroic – a genuinely nice guy in a hard world who still dreams his wonderful dreams and triumphs in the end. (Think of the comic possibilities if Carell had had the courage to make his character so disagreeable that the audience would pray for somebody to toss him out a window. ) Meanwhile the Wall Street Mean Guys were so unfunny they weren’t really even mean. Just annoying.
Thus the mismatch. I think the filmmakers thought they were serving satiric hot chili, which the movie ad boys mistakenly peddled as comic mayhem, while their star Steve Carell switched the menu on them and served up a deliciously sweet piece of pie completely at odds with the stated menu.
Well, that happens when you don’t keep a sharp eye on the cook or the soup.
Heading for L.A.?
Check out www.youtube.com/group/urbanlight (look for LACMA at night or LACMA light forrest clips) for a gander at Chris Burden’s art installation piece in front of the L.A. County Museum of Art on Wilshire Blvd. The piece is accessible from the street all night long and it’s absolutely beautiful. A giant piece of “sculpture” that invites a childlike interaction with your body within the space. Come dance! Come dance! It’s too cool. And is now on my "to do" list.
El Chorro Dog Park (at El Chorro Regional Park off Hwy 1 across from Cuesta College, at the back of the park, past the beautiful new Botanical Gardens) now has a new entryway. Made possible by a donation from Chris Boyle in memory of her Aunt, Lee Boyle, it was constructed by Richard Barrett, R.J. Barrett Construction, with help from dog park volunteers. There’s still some detailing to be done and the dog park sign to be finished, but grab your pooch and come check it out. Like Burden’s “Urban Light” installation, the gateway just feels good to walk through and under.
The dog park will be having its annual fund-raising party Sunday, Oct 3 for the formal ribbon cutting, but meantime, bring your dog out for a visit and a walk though the new gateway.
Finally, here’s Your Sunday Dog Poem
This poem by Karen Shepard from “Doggerel; Poems about Dogs” Everyman’s Library Pocket Poems, Alfred A. Knopf, 2003
BIRCH
You gonna eat that?
You gonna eat that?
You gonna eat that?
I’ll eat that.
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