"Bookstore on Maui"

If you'd prefer to paw
through and gaze at used books
when you're on Maui, drive
or cycle past the smoke-stacks
of the sugar-plant between
cane-fields. On a wire

above a frail, dignified
wooden church, a night heron
in daylight may be studying
the water in the irrigation ditch.

Further on down the road,
in an old house belonging to
the Maui Friends of the Library,
you'll meet a modest, musty
buffet of books, 25 cents
a piece. Yes, there was a
church, without a steeple,
and here are the books.
Where are the people?

They're working, of course.
That sugar-factory, e.g.
Others are on beaches
and in bars, in shops and
cars. They're in the swelling,
lengthening anacondominiums,
eaters of capital, another
invasive species. And

people are also home in studio
apartments and tired bungalows,
recovering from double-shifts
in which, in some capacity,
they served touristic whims.

The books are on vacation,
away from the people. The shelves
are a residential hotel for words.
You stop by to say hello.


Hans Ostrom 2015

"Jesus and the Condominium," by Hans Ostrom

Somewhere in the United States, someone
is trying to sell Jesus a share
in a condominium-scheme. Christ
is told He may vacation anywhere
in the world using a complicated
point-system. First He must pay
a lot of money to participate
in the point-system. Did

a counterpart to the verb, "to vacation,"
exist in Aramaic? Jesus is trying
to remember. He thinks it's a miracle
that people fall
for such scams. Christ notes

that sales-eyes are not on the sparrow,
and sales-affections lie not
with the poor. After he says

"No" the seventh time, he adds,
"I live in Heaven for free
and come here to Hell only
on business.Therefore this package
is not for me."


hans ostrom 2014

Net Worth?

So, if things continue to move apace (what a wonderfully vague contingency), we'll move into a condominium in March or April. Separately, we lived in dorm-rooms, rooms, and apartments of various kinds before we met, then we lived briefly in an apartment, but otherwise we've only lived in houses--aside from relatively brief stints in NYC and Sweden. This condominium-thing, then, will be new to us. "It" is in a refurbished old (by West Coast North American standards) building, built like a battleship, if battleships were built of brick and concrete. The floors are composed of concrete, ten inches thick, for example. The interior walls are concrete, too. The builders also recycled lava-rock taken from ships, in which the rock was apparently used as ballast; some of the lava-rock is situated between layers of concrete, for insulation. I like Old School improvisations like that. (Assuming the ballast-story is true, I wonder if the ships in question came from Hawaii.)

Condominium is a good gray Latin word, and when it got absorbed into English, it meant something like "joint ownership" or "joint sovereignty," according to the OED online, anyway:

a1714 BURNET Own Time (1823) IV. VI. 412 The duke of Holstein began to build some new forts..this, the Danes said, was contrary..to the condominium, which that king and the duke have in that duchy.

1882 Sat. Rev. 16 Sept. 361 The establishment of a new condominium with all Europe.

So, in the example from around 1714, the king and the duke have joint control--or condominium--over that "duchy." Co-dominion might be an improvised cognate, yes?

Not until around 1962--and in North America, probably the U.S. first--did "condominium" get used to refer to joint ownership of a building combined with individual ownership of spaces therein. One example from the OED online is taken from the Economist, a British magazine, which was reporting on this new concept (and a new denotation of an old word) from the U.S. However, I don't know how new the concept was, really, as I assume apartments had been "owned" in various countries around the globe for a long time before 1962. But, apparently, the word "condominium," applied to the concept, was new in '62.

Of course, unless one has the capacity to pay "cash on the barrel-head," as my father used to say, one must secure a loan, and to do that, one has to (or two have to) estimate "net worth." When I think of this concept, I sometimes think literally of a net. "What is your net worth?" "Not very much, but I have caught some fish with it, if that interests you." At other times, I imagine a scene in which someone arrives in Heaven and, wanting to impress an angel, scribbles something on a piece of paper and says, "This was my net worth on Earth!" Thunderous laughter then rocks the Afterlife.

--A poem, then, not about a condominium, but about wealth and worth. I don't remember which came first, the experiment with blank tetrameter verse or the topic; a confluence of the two might have occurred. Anyway, . . . :

Wealth and Worth

He is a nervous, wealthy man.
He fidgets, squirms, and giggles; counts,
Divides, and multiplies. He rubs
His face. And when he comes into
A room, he seems determined to
Invest himself in it and get
Its interest in him as return.
He wants and gets. He plans and plots,
Accrues. He is confused because
The more he gets, the more he gets,
And yet and still and nonetheless
He seems to him to be just he,
A discontented “I,” a sphere
Of fear and calculation and
A worry-furnace. He’s a rich,
A nervous, wanting, getting man,
So oddly sad, despite his wealth,
Because despite net-worth, he can’t
Account for feeling worthless.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom