Books on the Bed

I've kept books on the bed for as long as I can remember, at least since grade school. To those who co-inhabit interior spaces with me, the habit is often and understandably annoying. Why can't I just keep books on shelves and a nightstand (now there's a good word, nightstand) like everyone else? I do. It's just that I like books on the bed, too. Before I go to sleep, I like to have a wee heap of books to paw through. If the heap's not there, I get a little panicky. Sometimes I'll pick up one book, read a page or so, become dis-satisfied--it might be a good book, just not right for that moment--drop it, and reach for another. This behavior is less impulsive, if not less compulsive, than that of Samuel Johnson, who, upon becoming dissatisfied with a book, immediately stopped reading it and hurled it across the room.

Of course, I quickly accumulate too many books on the bed and am induced, by myself or someone else, to thin them out. Sometimes they fall off in the night, like sailors going over the side, into the ocean, their ship tossed by the tossing and turning. Sometimes a book will end up in the bed. I don't quite know how this happens, but it does. If this were the Sixties or the Seventies, and I had a lot of money and time, and I lived in New York, I'd probably have an "analyst"--a Freudian psychiatrist--and I'd talk to him or her about the books on my bed. Nothing would come of the analysis except a larger bank-account for the analyst, who would spend summers at Martha's Vineyard, in a cottage, where he or she would keep books on the bed.

Currently, the bed-library (it changes all the time) includes the following: There Is Confusion [how apt] a novel by Jessie Redmon Fauset; On Dialogue, a light philosophical book about communication, by David Bohm--quite intriguing, actually (Bohm liked to have people sit in a circle and talk--about no particular subject, at first--as way for them to observe how they communicated, unveil their prejudices, stances, poses, and habits; Waiting For God, a book of essays and letters by Simone Weil; the Poems of Edward Thomas (a World War I era poet, killed in the war); Classic Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by William L. Andrews; The Hollow, a Hercule Poirot novel by Agatha Christie; God's Trombones, by James Weldon Johnson--a book of poems based on sermons; if more people had read this book, they wouldn't have been so shocked by what the Reverend Wright has to say; Political Ideologies: Their Origins and Impact, by Leon Baradat; The Seven Dials Mystery, by Agatha Christie; and an Oxford hardback edition of the King James Bible. Plus a notebook and a few pens. Occasionally a Russian-blue cat (the color is actually gray), who is unamused by most books but will deign to sniff one or two sometimes. What could possibly be in a book that a cat doesn't already know, with great and final certainty?

Neither Christie novel has grabbed me so far. I've read a bunch of the stuff in the HR anthology already. Baradat's book is okay. I've read God's Trombones, but I want to read it again. Same with Edward Thomas. I like to dip into Weil's book. If I go with the KJB, I'll probably look at some psalms. Who knows? Maybe I'll write in the notebook. Or go to sleep. Or see what the other person is reading. I might replace this heap of books with a new heap tomorrow. Right now, that sounds like a brilliant idea. Okay, Bohm it is--On Dialogue. We'll see how it goes. Bedside reading is one thing; bed-top reading is quite another. The latter is the mark of a true bibliophile.

How To Write A Poem: A Poem

How To Write A Poem

First, clear the area of critics.
Next, grab an image or a supple
length of language and get going.
It’s all you now. Mumble, sing,
murmur, rage, rumble, mock,
quote, mimic, denounce, tell,
tease. Recall, refuse, regret,
reject. Dive, if you dare, into
psychic murk. Down there grab
the slick tail of something quick.
Hold it if you can. Meanwhile,
bellow, bellyache,
cry, or call, for all I care. I care.
Invent like the conning, conniving
poet you are, you lying spitter
of literature, you. Make it for
yourself and fit it to you. You
might as well. Readers, editors,
teachers, preachers, and publishers
aren’t your friends. Other poets
are busy with their own poems
and other problems. Famous poets
are off being remarkable geniuses,
eccentric visionaries, sunken wrecks,
dead, dead-drunk, or pains in the ass.
Say what you see, see what you say,
write it for love and for free. Own what
you write and give it away. Language
will always love you back, so lay
a wet kiss on the words, and when and if
in doubt, remember: what you want
to be is to be writing.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Technology and I

I've been invited to present at many a panel-discussion in academe, but I think the most surprising invitation so far came about two weeks ago, when someone invited me to speak about how I use technology as a professor. The invitation seemed as counterintuitive as inviting a hermit to speak about social etiquette.

One of the presenters, a professor of political science, really is gung-ho about technology and pedagogy. He revises a student-centered departmental blog with bunches of links every day. He uses Moodle and wikis and facebook. He's 15-20 years younger than I and brings a certain comfort-level to this stuff that I probably don't. He's enthralled by the possibilities. It was fun seeing him unveil some of what he's doing.

--Not that I'm uncomfortable with technology. Just slow. And occasionally skeptical. I never liked overhead projectors, for example: more trouble than they're worth. The same goes for Blackboard.

But I think a professorial web-page (on which one can post, for example, syllabi), facebook (on which one may create academic-related groups), wikis (group-writing-projects in cyberspace), and podcasting all have huge potential, so I'm slowly getting involved in these. Of course, email has been a godsend for teaching and scholarship.

In 1984, I attended one of the first "computers and composition" conferences in the U.S.--near Salt Lake City. What we thought would happen with computers and composition really didn't happen--the totally wired writing-classroom, in which the PC would be a kind of textbook. But of course computers have affected contemporary rhetoric, and the teaching thereof, in innumerable other ways.

Interestingly, two of the most skeptical colleagues at the presentation were far younger than I--humanists who, I suspect, both think all this technology is merely decorative. Instead of seeing possibilities, I think they see wasted time--or something. Another colleague just seemed confused or wearied by all the possible combinations--a blog linked to LibraryThing, youtube, and facebook--wikis on Moodle, gravy on noodles--help!! She had that too-much-information look.

I rather like just rummaging around the technology-dump, like a bear, picking things up to see if they're "edible" (useful). I'm not an enthusiast, per se, but I love the possibilities the technologies sometimes suggest.

Writing a blog has been a very nice surprise, and as I told the group, watching students write blogs and reading the blogs have been a fulfillment of something composition-studies has been interested in for 30+ years: trying to create "real" rhetorical situations (as opposed to the artificial 5-paragraph "theme" that only the prof reads) for students. Writing a blog is a great way for students or anyone else to work on writing, no matter what else the blog achieves. I think writing a blog can also help students take their academics more seriously, for they may start sharing their viewpoints with the world, may craft points of view, get responses, and evolve as thinkers.

There's a certain percentage of faculty, staff, and students that is way ahead of me on technology-and-academics, and it will only widen the lead. But I'm surprised by how relatively interested, curious, and engaged I am--especially compared with some younger folk.

And I do have to put in my usual defense of Luddites, who were not so much opposed to technology as they were in favor of keeping their jobs. When the van backs up and robots start unloading Robo-Profs to teach English, I'll probably already be out in the virtual pasture, blogging or podcasting.

A Wave in San Diego

A Wave in San Diego

A wave begins as a shrug
in the Pacific. Its shape is
the form beginning takes
just before becoming dissolves
into not-any-more. A lovely
curve of water lifts itself and
is carved by its own foamy,
bladed edge. You can't say
for sure the sudsy bubbles
frothing sand a minute later
were ever that wave, nor can
you prove they weren't of
that wave. You can believe
you remember the wave,
but that belief dissolves. You
can take a picture, or several,
but you will have a picture, or
several, not the wave. Perception
rolls through mind like a wave,
breaks on a shore of forgetting,
and more waves are always coming
until mind ends. Waves of perception
start with a wrinkle in reality,
take and give shape simultaneously,
as when for example you stand looking
at a wave in San Diego.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Reporters Without Borders

The annual report on the U.S. (2007) from Reporters Without Borders (interesting reading):


http://www.rsf.org/country-47.php3?id_mot=246&Valider=OK

Moratorium on Advertising

Basically, the only thing I've ever understood about economics is this: in this culture, you'd better have some cash. I first earned cash by pulling weeds. I moved on to cutting back sweet-pea vines that had overtaken yards. Thence to other endeavors. If you run out of money, you're screwed--unless you're someone like Donald Trump, who can declare bankruptcy as a tactic; or something like a sovereign state, which apparently can owe money and not pay it back, ever.

Out of my supreme economic innocence, then, comes this suggestion: One day a year, the U.S. ought to have an advertising moratorium. I think this would allow us to catch our figurative breaths, and I think it would be a useful experiment. Are all these advertising dollars worth it? What if there was no dip in spending on the moratorium day? Would the advertising industry be thrown into chaos, exposed at last as unnecessary? (I would make an exception for small businesses and local advertising, by the way. It's not really advertising. It's keeping in touch. "Hello, this is Bob from Bob's Diner on Fern Street. I just wanted to let you know that we'll be open, as usual, on Saturday. What we cook is as edible as what you cook, so come on by.")

The marvelous culinary writer M.F.K. Fisher was perpetually puzzled by the existence of food-advertising. She asked, not rhetorically, "Why do we need to be told what and when to eat?" A splendid example is the phrase "part of a complete breakfast." The idea of "a complete breakfast" was invented by advertisers--to sell orange juice from an unexpected excess of oranges. It was emergency advertising. Once they created the phrase, the culture absorbed it, and suddenly orange juice (and eggs, bacon, sausage, bread, margarine, pop-tarts, etc., and so forth) got loaded onto trucks and shipped to gaping mouths in suburbia, where a complete breakfast was accepted as some kind of fact.

Can you imagine Native Americans--in California, say, pre-Columbian--coming upon a billboard, in their language, which urged them to eat acorn meal, berries, fish, fowl, and game? In their own language, they would have said, I am sure, "WTF?"

At some point in the near future, I expect there to be a commercial advertising the need to breathe, accompanied by some kind of oxygen-product--you know, like a box of air. (But wait! There's more!.)

Bill Cosby, in his early days, had a great bit about college, specifically about taking a philosophy class at Temple. He said one of the key questions seemed to be, "Why is there air?"

My question is, "Why is there advertising?" I mean, I know the basic answers, but they seem to be circular (so to speak). There's advertising because you can't sell stuff without creating a need, and we need marketing, because without marketing, we can't sell stuff, and we need to sell stuff to make money and keep the economy going and keep the marketing going. Otherwise . . . .

Okay, fine. But why is there advertising? I would also like to know what the earliest recorded advertising-artifact is. So I guess I need to find an economic anthropologist, or an anthropological economist. Maybe I'll look in the Yellow Pages.

Crushing Fate

Over the years, I've encountered quite a few people who imagine themselves to be masters (a word which we'll deploy as non-gendered in this instance) of their fate. I reckon we're all more or less ego-centric, and ego-centricism can lead to a belief in the ability to control fate; also, different modes of society encourage us to make the most of ourselves, to persist, to "perfect" ourselves, to achieve, to oppose slings and arrows of outrageous--or perhaps just annoying--fortune with our wills. (My mother's favorite phrase, arguably, was "mind over matter.")

I've almost always withdrawn from the notion that one can control one's own fate, and I react especially bad to people who actually advise other people to go one-on-one with fate. Will these advisors be around should fate have an especially good day and some pieces need picking up? A long time ago, a fellow who perceived himself as a rugged individualist encouraged me to "run to my fate and crush it in my arms." I recoiled from the advice then, and a recall it now in a poem:

Crushing Fate

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.”

--James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

Somebody once advised me to run to my fate
and crush it in my arms. He may have been confused
about what fate is, who’s the crusher, and who’s
the crushee. Anyway, he confused me, so I
crushed him in my arms. I told him, “I’m practicing.”
He found my behavior unpleasant, the bear-hug
inappropriate. As fate had it, we didn’t become friends.

Even if I were to run to my fate, odds are I’d take off
in the wrong direction. Anyway, you just can’t
go around pretending it’s possible to crush fate
with your arms or even with rented fate-crushing
equipment. Some days, I have trouble making it
to work on time. I’m in no position to fantasize
about crushing fate or to give fate-related advice.

If you’re in a better situation, then I say this:
more fate-crushing power to you. If you’ve located
your fate and are running toward it now, I give you
no advice, but I wish you good luck, Godspeed,
and above all, strong arms.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Torture

In a discussion-group recently, we read Poems From Guantanamo, edited by Marc Falkoff. As you might guess from the title, the poems were written by prisoners at Guantanamo and later translated into English. Some of the poems are extraordinarily moving--as are the brief narratives about each writer. Some of the men have been released--but only after years of imprisonment and torture; in many cases they were imprisoned and tortured simply because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time in Afghanistan--and that is all. Imprisoned indefinitely, psychologically and physically tortured, by Americans. Erik Saar, a former interrogator, has written a book about some of what has gone on there. Inside the Wire, it's called.

But what if some of the prisoners really were terrorists? A legitimate question. An answer: If you (the American government) have evidence of this terrorism, then present it to a judge and provide the defendant with an attorney. Go to trial. If you have "the goods," then prove it. Ah, but the men aren't subject to our laws. They're "enemy combatants" at "Guantanamo." So? If we indeed believe in inalienable rights, then we should be able to demonstrate enough consistency not to a) torture, b) imprison somebody indefinitely, without habeas corpus and without trial or some other legitimate judicial review. But they're POWs. Nonsense. Even Orwellian Bush won't go that far. He calls them "detainees." Rights are either inalienable or they're not.

What made Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld believe torture is not only acceptable but should be routine? What makes them believe they have the right to imprison people arbitrarily and indefinitely? What makes them believe it's all right to tap phone-wires without a warrant? Bush is close to having absolute power, and we know the quotation about that.

Why aren't Clinton, McCain, and Obama talking about torture and Guantanamo and the war in Iraq and eroded civil liberties every day? Why aren't they asked questions about these topics--every day? Why is torture, especially, "under the radar"?

One student in the discussion group speculated that great numbers of Americans were essentially (and figuratively) paralyzed--waiting out the Bush years, hoping for a change, but feeling powerless in the meantime. She wasn't offering this as an excuse, merely as a diagnosis.

It's not a discussion-group in which we all agree. We often agree to disagree about the war and whether/when to get out of there. But after reading and discussing the Guantanamo poems, no one seemed to want to argue, and a different kind of silence settled on us. It wasn't the silence of not knowing what to say, or the silence of being afraid to start (another) argument, or the silence of boredom or weariness. It was the silence of being deeply moved by the condition of strangers in a prison built by the U.S. And no, it wasn't the silence of the naive. Pick a robust percentage of men at Guantanamo whom you think are truly guilt of something terrible. Let's say 50 per cent, for the sake of argument. Now that we've picked the percentage, I have to say: It doesn't matter. If the U.S. has evidence of these terrible things, then bring the men to trial, soon and fairly, and in the meantime, don't torture them. Don't torture. If there's no evidence, let them go. "It's not that simple." Really?

In fact, it's not that simple, as Falkoff, who represents Yemeni men, whom the evidence suggests are guilty of nothing, suggests. He says that if the men were brought to trial, much of the "evidence" might well be thrown out because it was "gathered" via torture. That is, because of another of Bush's follies, it's "not that simple" now for the U.S.

I'm extremely reticent to use the word "evil" seriously. It's a powerful word. But I look at things in Iraq and Guantanamo for which Bush is responsible, and I believe it's legitimate to ask whether he, Cheney, Gonzalez, and Rumsfeld, and the torturers, are evil. Did something evil happen on 9/11, too? Of course. What happened demanded many kinds of responses. Among the responses should have been this one: Let's not justify whatever ends we think we want in reaction to 9/11 by practicing means we know are wrong.

I wrote to my senator, again, about Guantanamo. No answer yet. I joined Amnesty International, strictly because of Guantanamo, but then someone told me there is a similar agency that was arguably more effective that AI. I talk and write to others about the topic. But mostly I feel the paralysis the student astutely diagnosed. The U.S. has lost its way in a variety of areas: education, the deficit, the economy, education, veterans' affairs, the environment. It's also lost its way badly at Guantanamo, and I don't understand why journalists and politicians don't make each other, indirectly, talk about it all the time.

One shard of good news, from a colleague who works with the ACLU: the ACLU is organizing a group of experience attorneys in the event the "detainees" get to trial--in military court (that's the bad news), where hearsay evidence is admissible. Of course, some will place the ACLU on the left-wing fringe for such action. That's right, the fringe: out there with habeas corpus, search warrants, the Geneva convention, and not making unprovoked war--out where water-boarding is what it is, torture. Out where the U.S. had some self-respect. Something more is being "detained" at Guantanamo than men from the Middle East. Bush's, and thus the U.S.'s, basic sense of right and wrong is being detained there, too, day after day.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/04/rove-stress-pos.html

What Is the Cruelest Month?

English professors still love to quote The Waste Land, "April is the cruelest month," especially professors who teach on a semester-system that ends in early-to-mid-May. Another year of academia is ending, another semester is ending, acute senioritis has set in (and the rest of the students are antsy, too), and just when everyone on campus thinks her or she can't do one more thing, five more things get scheduled. So if you hear an English professor mutter this phrase, he or she is doing so not merely to sound pretentious.

In the upside-down world of The Waste Land, regeneration can be a bad thing, so that's one reason one voice in the poem asserts that April is the cruelest. In other parts of the poem, voices express yearning for regeneration that refuses to arrive.

But what, in fact, is the cruelest month?

When I was in grammar school, I probably felt as if November was the cruelest month because the days were dark and cold in the Sierra Nevada, playing outside was a brutal affair, and the 12-mile (one-way) bus-ride to school seemed awfully dreary.

When I was in late grammar-school, September was the cruelest month because summer was still pretty much one long holiday, and I could only just bear the thought of going back to school.

I rather enjoyed most of high school--the academic part was okay, I played sports, I had some good friends, and what wasn't to like about the young women? Also, I'd begun to work full time during the summer as a laborer, first at a gravel-plant, then as a carpenter's helper/hod-carrier, so June became the cruelest month; gone were the sunny afternoons after class when I could just hang out with friends when classes were done. (I gave up baseball after my sophomore year, so after basketball season was done, I didn't have a practice to go to.)

Once I got to college, I don't think any one month was the cruelest. I seem to remember liking the summer-work as a laborer (I'd become more skilled, and I liked making that cash), and after I turned 21, I could work 8 hours during the day and either go fly-fishing in the evening or go to one or both bars in town, and I do remember feeling some dread in early September, knowing I'd have to head back to college, hit the books in a Ph.D. program (which did not seem to be pointing directly at employment; almost every job advertised by the MLA, anywhere in the country, drew 200+ applications), and teach one freshmen-writing class per quarter. I knew I didn't want to be a laborer the rest of my life (labor is a young person's game), but it was hard to beat working outside in the Sierra Nevada, living near trout-streams, and being able to drink in funky rural bars).

Now, I think November is back at number one on the Cruel chart. Gloom descends on the Pacific Northwest, and rain settles in. In our first year in the Pacific Northwest, it rained every day that November (we know because we counted), and it seemed to get dark at 2:00 p.m. Also, the flu virus for which we are unsuccessfully vaccinated each year (they must just shoot sugar-water in our veins) seems to get busy in November.

Pacific Northwesterners tend to loathe June because it can behave very badly and be cloudy and cold--at a time when everyone feels entitled to summer. July, August, September, and even a big hunk of October can he heavenly up here, however.

I think any time you're out of work makes for a bad month. I tend not to say "April is the cruelest month" because I feel lucky to have a good job, especially when the price of gasoline (a price that must devastate most working folk) and food are rising so fast.

I've never been a big fan of March, and I don't ever remember disliking January. "March," I think, is a dumb name for a month, whereas "January" sounds pretty good. Sure, it's cold in January, in the Northern hemisphere, in most places, but at the same time, January never lied to anyone and said, "I promise to be warm and sunny." January just goes about its business, which is to be cold and icy but to start lengthening the days. Back in the day, I remember wanting the professional golfer Don January to win a tournament because I thought his name was cool.

May the month of May treat you well.

Poemhunter's Top 25

Poemhunter is an online site featuring the poems of venerable poets as well as those of anyone who wants to post his or her poems on there. It's a great place to visit--a vast arena of poetry that all sorts of people visit. Of course, as a pedantic scholar, I must caution that the versions of poems you find there may not be accurate, so if you want to insure that you have the more or less correct edition of a poem, you need to go to "the standard edition." Apparently, the top 25 poets--based on how often the poet's "page" and his or her individual poems are "hit" or clicked on--are as follows:

1. Langston Hughes
2. Pablo Neruda
3. Maya Angelou
4. Shel Silverstein
5. William Shakespeare
6. Joe Fazio
7. Robert Frost
8. Charles Bukowski
9. Emily Dickinson
10.Edgar Allan Poe
11.Sylvia Plath
12.Walt Whitman
13.Jack Prelutsky
14.Gwendolyn Brooks
15.Dylan Thomas
16.William Blake
17.Elizabeth Bishop
18.ee cummings
19.Allen Ginsberg
20.Roald Dahl
21.Ogden Nash
22.Billy Collins
23.Dorothy Parker
24.Ted Hughes
25.Philip Larkin

How about that? Langston Hughes, #1. That's all right by me. He never pretended to be the poet of the people, but he also never tried not to be a poet of the people. I expected Neruda, Frost, Shakespeare, and Angelou to be up there. Silverstein isn't a complete surprise. I don't know the work of Joe Fazio, so I'd best look into that. Same goes for the work of Jack Prelutsky. Roald Dahl is a surprise, only because I think of him as a prose writer. Nash and Parker are a bit of a surprise, only because I might have assumed their work was getting dated, but I guess amusing light verse does and should have staying power. I love the eclectic mix of poets in the top 25; probably the list tells us, among other things, that it would be difficult to define the "demographic" of those who visit the site. I've posted some poems on there, and far and away the poem that gets the most hits is the one on Langston Hughes. This surprised me because most people who aren't poets or academics don't like poems on poets, but then I realized that because Hughes is the number one poet on the site, my poem was likely to get some echo-traffic from his site. Poemhunter may be the biggest "anthology" of poetry in history. It seems to have some ancillary sites--such as Poemsabout, a site that seems to link directly to Poemhunter but that has its own domain. I wish I knew more about sites that are kind of pilot-fish for larger sites. Wikipedia, for example, seems to be followed by lots of pilot-sites these days.

Anyway, go post a poem on poemhunter, or look up that favorite poet of yours, or search by topic. I rather like the warehouse, wholesale feel of the site.

When Poetry Dies

Poetry dies at sea in sight
of Guantanamo's prison.
Poetry dies in taxes
that pay for the horror
in Guantanamo's prison,
in Bagram's prison.
Poetry dies in the waiting
for the waking nightmare
of an evil regime to end,
in the waiting for sawdust-
speeches to end and for
language, for law, to begin again.
Poetry dies as it looks up
to see tax-forms dropped
like leaflets on the grounds
of Guantanamo's prison,
of Bagram's prison.
Poetry dies a dry death
at sea, dies when morality
disintegrates more thoroughly
than depleted uranium
inhaled by Iraqi children.
Poetry dies while we're
watching the news. Poetry
dies when we know
Guantanamo's prison is ours/
Bagram's prison is ours/
/our responsibility/our money/
our Federal Bureau of
Investigation/whose agents
went to Guantanamo and saw
what they knew to be wrong/
and came back/and said
nothing/ and what's
wrong goes on, and on past the sea's
horizon, goes on all day, all
night at Guantanamo, at
Bagram. Poetry dies when
our president/our congress/
ourselves observe due process
replaced by indefinite
imprisonment and torture,
by rendering, by euphemism.
Poetry dies as it pleases, and
as it stands by. Guantanamo's
prison says please stand by
for these messages, which
will be right back to distract
you, pay no attention to the
president who stands behind
the podium and torture. Poetry
dies when we stand in wet sand
by the sea in sight of what is wrong
and cannot move, and can do nothing,
and cannot stop horror done.
Prisoners die in Guananamo's
and Bagram's prisons. Minds and
consciences die there as well.
Poetry dies in paralysis of complicity.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

http://www.democracynow.org/2006/2/27/worse_
than_guantanamo_u_s_expands

Bad Supreme Analogy

From an article in April 23rd's USA Today (p. 4A), by Joan Biskupic ("Justices Split Over Campaign Financing"), I learned that Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Alito "were the most critical of the provision" that limits what House-of-Representatives candidates may contribute to their campaigns from their personal piles of money. Apparently the provision is about to kick in--unless the Supremes kick it out.

I have a friend and colleague whose chief research- and teaching-field is Constitutional law, but I see no reason to consult him or anyone else before offering my own analysis and thereby exposing how little I know on the subject. That would be too easy. I find it's better to blog first and seek information later. Call it lazy, call it crazy, call it ill-advised, or call it post-modern--it's still the bad way I intend to proceed today.

According to Biskupic, "Scalia derided the idea that government should level the field in any way: 'What if one candidate is more eloquent than the other one? You make him talk with pebbles in his mouth or what?'"

Ah, the speech of scholars. I feel safer with such minds sitting on the Court, or with such a Court sitting on its minds.

Scalia's analogy is between money spent to buy television-advertisements, the main weapon in modern political campaigns, and pebbles in "his" (a candidate's) mouth. I enjoy Scalia's assumption that the candidate will be male.

I hope the lawyer he was deriding asked Scalia, "But what if the more eloquent candidate is out-spent by the less eloquent but vastly more wealthy candidate to such a degree that she or he cannot get the eloquent message out to citizens?" In other words, I believe Scalia's analogy is faulty in its comparison of something that might personally stifle a candidate (pebbles in the mouth) and the one external, impersonal thing that buys candidates' access to a crucial mass medium (television): money.

"Leveling the field," to use the worn analogy that appears in the article, would indeed insure that such capacities as eloquence, intelligence, and experience are visible to interested citizens, with regard to all candidates. Moreover, if one candidate is able grossly to out-spend the other, then the outspending has become the equivalent of pebbles in the other candidate's mouth. For example, if I were a candidate and were able to buy 100 TV ads to my opponent's 1, then in what sense would my personal pile of money not be a silencing, "chilling," or pebbling factor in the campaign?

Social Darwinists might argue that if candidate A earned his or her pile of money fair and square, then he or she was obviously and naturally selected in this "free-market" economy and deserves the fruits of such social adaptation. This argument places the money-making "trait" at the top of a list of priorities. But should it be at the top of a list of priorities for someone running for Congress? Also, what if the money is merely inherited? From a social-Darwinian perpsective, the person with the money that he or she did not earn is being "privileged," then, not because of personal strength or adaptability but solely because of the luck of the draw. If most Congressional races were between candidates with inherited wealth, would that be a good thing? I suspect some Republicans and Democrats would argue, "Yes." I think some members of both parties favor an oligarchic form of government.

But what do I know? I have pebbles in my blog.

Want to Write a Ten-Line Poem for Tuesday?

Following is a "prompt" for a ten-line poem. Of course, such prompts in and of themselves still strike many writers and readers as counterintuitive if not absurd or insulting, a prevailing assumption being that poems spring from poets naturally and need not and cannot be elicited by anything as formulaic as a prompt--an assignment. I

In The Triggering Town, however, Richard Hugo--arguably as intuitive a poet as there ever was--praised assignments given to him and others by their teacher, Theodore Roethke. Hugo describes one such assignment in the book, and the assignment is brutal in its requirements. Hugo maintains that as one part of the mind focuses on the artificial limits of the assignment, another part goes in unpredictable but productive directions, and you come up with material you probably would not have discovered otherwise. Of course, all prompts and assignments come with a codicil or two: one always has the right to rewrite the draft so drastically that traces of the prompt may disappear altogether; one has the right to take just one line, image, or idea from the draft and go off in a completely different direction; and so on. So this really isn't like paint-by-numbers because you can paint over the canvas as much and as often as you like.

In fashioning the prompt, I borrowed some other notions from the Triggering Town, including Hugo's suggestion that poets should let themselves be led on--to the next word or the next line, for instance--more because of sound or arbitrary decisions than because of a more linear or single-minded desire to pursue a message, as one does, for example, in an essay. Also, Hugo disliked "connective" or "transition" words such as "but," "however," and "although." He also suggests that if a poet asks a question in a poem, he or she should not then answer the question; otherwise, he argues, the question wasn't worth asking (from a poetic point of view). I'm just paraphrasing what he wrote, so don't kill the messenger.

If indeed you're tempted to be prompted, take pleasure in the writing, and probably everything will work out just fine. And we're making a poem here--a first draft, at that--not performing emergency heart-surgery. So there's that. You'll notice that the topic and "sense" of the poem are left entirely up to you. The prompt:

A ten-line, free-verse poem. Start by writing a first line. Then follow steps 1 through 11.

1. Rewrite the first line, rearranging the syntax:

Example:

The blue lake still resembles slate.
The still lake is slated to resemble blue.

2. Write a second line in which, at some point, you repeat a sound from the first.

3. If the second line did not end in a one-syllable word, make sure, now, that it does.

4. Phrase line three has a question.

5. In line five, do NOT answer the question in line four but do include a word that includes the letter “u," and make doubly sure this line contains an image.

6. Line six should be either a very short line or a very long line—in relation to previous lines.

7. Take a break and review lines one through six. Cross out any connecting words like and, but, while, although, so, or then.

8. Line 7 should include words of one syllable each. You are allowed one exception.

9. To start line 8, write a last word of that line. Now finish line 8 by working backwards, moving to the next-to-last word, and so on, until you write the first word of the line.

10. In line 9, write anything you like but make the sound and rhythm similar to those in line 8.

11. Do whatever you want in line 10.