A Circus in Germany

A small Roma circus drags Evolution
to Bretzenheim, tacks up posters,
circles battered vans and trailers,
lets animals and children out to stretch.

A llama and two camels with flaccid humps
stand beneath a canopy, munching nothing,
about them the air of wisdom and dung.

A child rides a hippopotamus onto grass.
She looks like a wart on a planet.
The hippo becomes a gray boulder
upholstered in leather. Its teeth are
as big as my fist, its legs as long
as my fingers. How many million
years ago was it a slender fish?

Villagers cut through the park
to peer at the bestiary. a stinking
goat, smirking camels, and stunted
ponies. Children under the tiny
plastic Big Top can be heard
to scream with glee. In there
creatures and people jump through hoops.

hans ostrom
1981/20019

The Semicolon in Modern Thought

The Semicolon in Modern Thought

Scholars disagree; they are disagreeable.

According to Jeb Nolocimis, Distinguished

Three-Legged Chair in Social Podiatry at

Bandsaw University, a hallucinating German

printer presided over the marriage of Period

and Comma in his shop, located in

Mainz-am-Rhein, circa 1498. However,

Dr. Lola Doirep of the Toots Institute

rejects Nolocimis's account as "surreal

historicism." She argues periodically

that the semicolon should be interpreted

semiotically first as inhabiting a liminal

zone vexed by indecision (stop or continue?)

and second as the right and left eyes

of an iconic emoticon, which more deeply

represents "winking post-modernity"

and "the rise of Cyber-cute." Meanwhile,

Argentinian-American poet Rexi Vivaldo,

in his long poem, "Stubby's Quest,"

alludes to the semicolon as "a sad

period's single tear, frozen in time

and space--a lament

for the mortality of clauses . . . ;"

Copyright 2008/2017 Hans Ostrom

"Mainz, April"

 in memory of Karl Dietz

(1981)

Around the train station, all is order
and bewilderment, punctuality and haste.
The drivers pilot their hinged busses into the crowd
of stout German women and nervous U.S. soldiers.

It is April, and the sunlight is without warmth.
To account for the chill, one invents
a theory of weather, in which the wind
always blows from Berlin, from Poland, from Russia.
It is a short walk from this tense station
to the red sandstone cathedral
and the place where Gutenberg set up shop.

The buildings along the way are
unassuming, neither old nor new. They were built
when history paused for a moment,
as if history could do that.

You may notice a solitary, jagged wall--
a shard from an Allied bombing raid.
Schiller's statue faces a sparkling jewelry store.
The stone streets in the Altstadt
and the shoulders of the great cathedral
are a relief to uneasy visitors
and troubled Mainzers alike.
Or I imagine so.

Lore mumbles that the Allies preserved
Wiesbaden, across the river,
for Eisenhower’s headquarters.
In a frivolous moment, therefore, one might
think of the casino, the spas, the architecture,
and Brahms--and say, "The nineteenth century is over there."
Not true, obviously. There are only more flowers,
more parks, a less dogged procession of soldiers,
clerks, and managers. There is a big-hearted
colleague named Karl and his family.

Having a coffee indoors as the afternoon dies
too quickly, one thinks hard about the Cathedral,
Gutenberg's printing, the French fort, the river,
the bombing missions in which an uncle
may have taken part, the people bombed,
the people shipped to camps and ovens,
the people like me who were born afterward,
the people who will think of 1981
as a long time ago.

But nearly everyone seems to clutch
at this day in 1981, at every today, anxiously;
we are all in a rush to be on time--to
make the 17:25 bus, not the 17:52.
Punctuality becomes an end in itself.

Me, I seem anxious to get back to
the white stucco apartment
in Bretzenheim or to an office
in the glass-and-steel building
at Gutenberg University, where I teach
writing in English, American government,
and my own behavior, which
the German students mark.

A person is urged to think about
history, to have thoughts about
history, to opine. The truth is
I'm weary of trying to think
profound thoughts about
what happens, what happened.


copyright Hans Ostrom 1981/2014

Of Thin Books, Mainz, Gutenberg, and Gooseflesh, etc.

Among the innumerable privileges I enjoy is a personal library, or a close facsimile thereof: three walls of custom-made bookshelves, with a mission-style oak desk roughly equidistant from each wall. Surrounded by books. It took a while, but I finally was able, and was lucky enough, to achieve this modest goal, which for others I live with bears the additional fruit of much less clutter. A place for every book, and every book in its place: well, that's the theory anyway. In practice, some clutter still breaks out.

I was glancing at one of the shelves today when I spotted that most irresistible object: the spine of a thin book. I'm not sure why, but thin books--especially cloth-bound, but also paperbacks--have always entranced me. In fact I do judge such books by their covers, at least at first.

What made this re-discovery sweeter and more symbolic was that the book is about Johannes Gutenberg, conventionally thought to be the first printer/publisher of books in the modern sense; that is, he used movable type. It had been used before in Asia, but Gutenberg used it in a way that led to, well, that led to the Gutenberg Revolution, or what Raymond Williams calls The Long Revolution--that of printing, mass production of books, and increased literacy, all of which led to or was connected to many other revolutions.

The book is called The Gutenberg Bible, and indeed it does print images of pages from various extant copies of that famous Bible, printed by Herr. G. in Mainz in the mid-1400s, although some additional handwork on the Bible(s) was done in other cities. Martin Davies wrote the book, which was published by the British Library in 1996. As usual, I can't remember where I picked it up, but it may have been on a recent trip to Berlin, or it may have been on a recent trip to a used bookstore in Tacoma.

The thin book is mis-titled, to some degree, because its content is really a pithy overview of Gutenberg's life, discussion of the interaction between guilds and the aristocracy, and description of Mainz, a city of immense historical importance, and one that sits squarely in the midst of the Rhineland, or Rheinland.

It will not come as a surprise to anyone associated with printing, publishing, and writing that Gutenberg seemed to be in financial trouble virtually his whole adult life. In fact, many biographical details spring from records of law-suits related to these difficulties.

Another privilege I've enjoyed was teaching at Gutenberg University in Mainz for a year when I was an A.B.D. ("all but dissertation), thanks to an exchange set up by an Americna professor named James Woodress and a German professor named Hans Galinsky. I still correspond with a good friend from those days who still teaches in the American Studies Department, or Amerikanistik Abteilung.

Coincidentally, I'd just talked a day or so ago with a colleague who has also spent time in Germany. We discussed one of the innumerable grim facts of World War II: that, owing to the strategy of the "Allies," some German cities were leveled by bombing, while others were left almost completely intact. Thus about 80-90 per cent of Mainz was destroyed by bombs, whereas its sister-city, just across the river, Wiesbaden, was not bombed. The lore I have heard is that Wiesbaden was spared in part because at one point the Allies thought Eisenhower's headquarters might be there, if indeed the war went a certain way. I do not know the actual historical facts about the bombing, however. Mere lore.

In any event, the architecture in Mainz looks extremely modern, whereas in Wiesbaden, numerous "layers" of different architectures are preserved. The red sandstone cathedral in Mainz was not destroyed, and a few other buildings made it through.

Anyway, all of this and more sprang to mind when I happened, by accident, to glance at one of my shelves, saw the thin book, and read it again. I've been back to Mainz once since I taught there, and I'm hoping to get back there again soon. Among other things, wine and history, including the history of publishing, converge in Mainz; that's quite a convergence. And there's a Gutenberg Museum there, too, as one might expect.

Incidentally, the book asserts that Gutenberg's full name is Johann Gensfleisch zum Gutenberg--John Gooseflesh of the Good Mountain. That's one heck of a name. You just don't hear names like that anymore. That's a product of some serious naming practices.

The Semicolon in Modern Thought

Now there's an enticing topic--the semicolon in modern thought.

There are two kinds of writers; one kind thinks there are two kinds of everything in the world; the other kind doesn't.

Actually, what I meant to say was that one kind likes semicolons and the other doesn't.

For example, poet Richard Hugo, In The Triggering Town, calls the semicolon "ugly." He refused to use it in his poetry. Maybe he used it in his technical writing at Boeing, but I doubt it. Whenever we get to that part of the book in class, at least one student says, "But I love the semicolon," and I always agree with the student. The semicolon possesses its own awkward beauty, as far as punctuation-marks goes; in fact, the semicolon refuses to punctuate; it semi-punctuate; it ends something but not really.

But there are so many problems with the semicolon. By U.S. rules, you are not supposed to use it unless there is an independent clause on both sides of it; moreover, the very fact that one has to start talking about clauses puts people to sleep--as does further discussion of coordinating conjunctions versus sentence-adverbs. One may also use the semicolon to separate items in a series that are so large they include commas. In England, as far as I know, the rules for using the semicolon are different, just as there is no "comma splice" in German. After all, these are printers' marks, these periods, commas, dashes, and semicolons--based on venerable handwriting marks. It's not like they existed in the deep grammar of our brains.

Of course, the main problem is that a semicolon is a period on top of a comma. The semiotics of this situation suggest indecision or error.

Anyway . . .: a poem concerning the semicolon:


The Semicolon in Modern Thought

Scholars disagree; they are disagreeable.
According to Jeb Nolocimis, Distinguished
Three-Legged Chair in Social Podiatry at
Bandsaw University, a hallucinating German
printer presided over the marriage of Period
and Comma in his shop, located in
Mainz-am-Rhein, circa 1498. However,
Dr. Lola Doirep of the Toots Institute
rejects Nolocimis's account as "surreal
historicism." She argues periodically
that the semicolon should be interpreted
semiotically first as inhabiting a liminal
zone vexed by indecision (stop or continue?)
and second as the right and left eyes
of an iconic emoticon, which more deeply
represents "winking post-modernity"
and "the rise of Cyber-cute." Meanwhile,
Argentinian-American poet Rexi Vivaldo,
in his long poem, "Stubby's Quest,"
alludes to the semicolon as "a sad
period's single tear, frozen in time
and space--a lament
for the mortality of clauses . . . ;"


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom