Picking Blackberries

On one of my urban-hike routes, there are blackberry bushes, hence blackberries. It is August, and humid; therefore, the blackberries are ripening.

I happen to be a veteran blackberry-picker, having picked berries in my youth in the Sierra Nevada, where the blackberries ripen rather late, as late as September, just barely ahead of the frost and the snow.

Poets like to write poems about blackberries, for some reason. For some reason, I've never gotten a poem I like out of the blackberry subject. But that's okay. Blackberries are enough.

Picking blackberries is most satisfying to the single-minded, persons vaguely driven, determined, perhaps a wee bit compulsive. One must ignore how lonely the first berry looks in the container. One must be ready to experience minor thorn-damage on one hand. (one must never wear gloves.) The technique I prefer is to load up one hand with several berries, retrieve the hand, and dump the harvest in the container. But it's not good to get too greedy with one handful.

The more one picks, the more one sees additional ripe berries. It's some kind of Zen thing, I think.

One mustn't eat any berries until late in the game. It's not professional. Also: delayed gratification.

Not-quite-ripe berries don't want to come loose, but you can use them to pull the vine closer to you.

Soon the container is heavy and full, black and gleaming. The image of a pie, or simply berries in cream, materializes.

Blackberries are enough.

Exonerate the Snake?

Some blank verse for Friday, then:

Exonerate the Snake?

The Bible and John Milton blame the Fall

On Slim--the slender slitherer alleged

To have approached Ms. Eve and sold her on

The idea of the Fruit. With deference

And all respect that's due and duly orthodox,

I have my doubts. The snake? A pea-brained length

Of skinny tubing lying in the grass?

A narrow fellow, as Ms. Emily said?

Okay: I know a boa can enwrap

A human or a cow and swallow whole.

Sure, cobras, vipers, rattler, and mocassins

And such can strike and kill. But please. Hold on.

Be serious. If we insist on saying snakes

Must take the fall for loss of Paradise,

It seems we run the risk of looking low--

Yes, lower than the snake. We chose to cast

Off innocence for worldliness, and God

Said, "Fine. I call it sin, and I say it's wrong.

What's more, I think it's dumb. Your lease is up.

Get out of Eden." What happened then, it seems

Was something between God and human kind.

To blame a lowly flicker of the tongue,

A crawler with cold blood and clammy hide,

Seems more than just a bit convenient.

Let's take the rap. The fault was ours, not Snake's.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Ricked!

Thanks to someone vastly more attuned than I to the nuances of Internet culture, I have learned of the practice known as "Rickrolling." In the 1980s, a British singer named Rick Astley recorded what became a popular tune, one that I'd put in the disco category. Astley has a rather impressive baritone voice, which seems incongruous in relation to his physical appearance: He seems to be of relatively small physical stature, with red hair, not that red hair runs counter to baritone-status; anyway, it's one of those cases in which the person in possession of the voice is a bit of a surprise.

His big hit was "Never Gonna Give You Up," and, music-videos having been in their infancy back then, his video is nerdy and dorky, to use technical terms. Basically it's just Rick singing and doing some basic moves. Not quite explicably, he sometimes appears in a trench coat. Sometimes the alleged scene is a club--but the club is empty, and it's daytime. A female dancer or two materialize, and the bartender becomes a dancer at some point. There is not a "plot" to the video, and I say thank God to that. Who wants a plot in a music video? Indeed, who wants a music video? A few have been interesting, but basically, it's a moronic, corporate genre.

The video is so bad that it's good, and the song blends a great, trained voice with a fairly dumb disco song. All the elements are there, in other words, for camp, and I gather that things campy in this day and age can be turned into Internet pranks of the harmless variety. So people apparently trick their friends into viewing the Astley video on youtube, and allegedly hilarity ensues.

Nerdy and dorky, I am both amused by and sympathetic to Mr. Astley. Chiefly, he seems to have been working the job (my agent got me into this?) and in no way seems to take the video seriously. More nerdy than Rick, I find the lyrics interesting because they exemplify iambic tetrameter. In fact, one could substitute "Tyger, Tyger, burning bright/In the forest of the night," and have a splendidly surreal combination, a fearful symmetry, of Rick Astley and William Blake. "Tyger, tyger BURN-ing bright, in the forest OF THE NIGHT!" Blake is never gonna give up that tyger.

In the lyrics, there's also an interesting bit about the persona of the song offering "total commitment," which other fellows do not offer the beloved, it is argued. Perhaps he's threatening to have his lover committed to an insane asylum, OR he's offering to commit himself voluntarily to such a facility. "I'm never going to give you up, but at the same time, I'll be safely behind bars, getting treatment!" Of course, there's a chance that commitment refers to something else.


For a very good, frivolous time, check out the Astley video, rick-roll yourself, and have a grin or two in these dour times. Join the people who've been ricked!

A link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu_moia-oVI

And thanks to Mr. Astley and his most impressive baritone.

The Centers Hold

"Things fall apart," Yeats famously wrote, "the center cannot hold." I always found "things fall apart" to be a refreshingly imprecise bit of phrasing.

Yeats's poem came to mind yesterday as I passed a business-sign for Neovita, which describes itself as a "Foot Comfort Center." I'm not sure what they do in there, but I had visions of all feet being treated like Roman emperors, bathed, massaged, entertained, read to. Maybe there are foot-therapists on duty to whom the feet can talk about their problems--nightmares about blisters, that traumatic hang-nail in childhood, impossible expectations placed on the feet by the parental Body.

"Center" is a great all-purpose moniker. Think-tanks and thinly veiled political shops, which seem to have proliferated in the last 20 years, like the term. The Center for Strategic This and That, the Center for Family Something, etc.

I had a part in establishing two Writing Centers, or Centers for Writing Across the Curriculum. One basic idea behind them is that since writing happens in almost all disciplines, it should be taught in all disciplines and not seen merely as an "English" subject. The first one I worked at was in a temporary building on one edge of campus, so it really wasn't in the center of much. The other one, however, is pretty much centrally located on campus.

I hope Periphery catches on at some point. The Periphery for Strategic Studies, The Periphery for American Family Values. These might be interesting think tanks, featuring people who are on the outside looking in and therefore in possession of valuable perspective. In Yeats's terms, they'd be falcons who couldn't hear the falconer, but maybe they could hear other important stuff, and who says falconers know everything? The falcon does all the work, after all. Just ask the Center, I mean the Periphery, for International Falcon Studies.

What, Conservatives Worry?

When conservatives worry about McCain, then I get even more worried about McCain. Hawk-faced Pat Buchanan, noted isolationist and perfecter of the chop-motion while talking and giving speeches, said [on CNN] President McCain would make Cheney look like Ghandi--not physically, I assume, but by comparison. (Buchanan did not seem to intend the comparison as a compliment; with Buchanan, one feels one has to add that information.) Andrew Sullivan, one of those seemingly very bright people who nonetheless swallowed Bush's bait about WMD's and tried to cough it up long after the hook had been set, has posted quite an interesting anti-McCain video on his blog. Here is the link:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/08/taking-back-t-5.html

Probably the most compelling speaker on the video is Scott Ritter, one of innumerable people who seemed to know what they were talking about during the "run-up" to the war and who was therefore ignored, dismissed, and attacked by Bush and the Surrogates.

A mere poet, I do wonder what the military and the intelligence agencies think of Bush and what I deduce to be his compulsive recklessness and lifetime of being unaccountable. He has been reckless in going to war, in conducting the war and the occupation, in the unprecedented use of contractors, in the breaking (John Murtha's word) of the army and Marines, in forging documents (see Suskind's book, and apparently Suskind has the audio tapes to back up the findings), and in betraying spies. Mustn't even the professionals regard Bush as reckless and incompetent? I don't know.

A mere poet, I wouldn't mind if Obama and McCain would agree to read Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est" out loud and then comment briefly on it.

A mere poet, I wonder if Putin and McCain are some kind of international marriage made in Hell.

A mere poet, I do wonder what a mere citizen can do to prevent President Bush, President McCain, perhaps even President Obama, from attacking Iran.

Too Sad, Darling

Too Sad, Darling

(in memory of Esther Wagner)

We go from no
memories and all
experience to combinations
of experiences and memories to
no experiences and all
memories. Life

at first opens up all
around our minds and us. Then
the thing known as Later
abandons the mind to its own
paltry self, its wee storehouse
of snapshots, shreds of dialogue,
and remember that time?

"Too sad, darling," is what
the grand woman said,
with a laugh,
"but fix yourself something
to drink and one for me.
Sit down and we'll talk,
reminisce, just us,
about experience."

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Bollocks

Owing to a chance interchange at Starbucks, we have found ourselves considering the Britishism, "Bob's your uncle," which has netted us a poem, among other things.

Another Britishism that intrigues me is "bollocks." A bollock is a testicle, so bollocks are multiple testicles, but according the OED online, one may "bollocks" something, as in mess it up; there is a verbal form, in other words. If you're tempted to suggest "that makes no sense," simply consider how often Americans think or say "he sure effed that up." Think about it. When I was in Sweden, a Swede, mystified by the amount and variety of American cursing, said, "You know, we really have no curse words based on sexual activity." He didn't sound as if he regarded this as something lacking in Swedish.

I think every Hugh Grant movie I've ever seen has had "bollocks" in the script. Maybe the situation is similar to Christopher Walken movies, wherein Christopher is allowed to dance--in some fashion. (My favorite Walken quotation: "I'm not sure what the worst movie of all time is, but I'm sure I acted in it.")

Sometimes I think the British simply say "balls" in place of "bollocks." Is that right? Of course, it's impossible to try seriously to trace the "logic" of such cursing. I suppose you could try to make a case for "bullshit" being more "logical" than "bollocks," inasmuch as bullshit is waste material and therefore ostensibly worthless, except as fertilizer, but on the other hand, "bollocks" is more absurd. "What a load of bollocks!"

According the OED online, the etymology of bollocks goes back to a noun referring to a sacrificial knife. Ouch.

The OED also includes a quotation from one of my favorite English poets, Philip Larkin. If you haven't read his poem, "This Be the Verse," you really must.

1940 P. LARKIN Let. 9 Dec. in Sel. Lett. (1992) 4, I suppose my writing is terrible. Sod & bollocks, anyway. Not to mention cunt and fuck.

What I like about this quotation is that it qualifies as scholarly because the OED uses it, and that it seems as if Larkin, in his letter, catches himself cursing and then, like a naughty boy, finds cursing so pleasurable that he curses some more. And like many of us writers, he's unamused by his own writing.

At any rate, Bob is your uncle, the one who says "bollocks," not to mention--well, anyway.

Bob Is Your Uncle, The Sequel

Someone from our nation's heartland read the previous post and produced a fine poem in response to the prompt concerning "Bob's Your Uncle." So in case you want to read the poem (I submit that you should want to read it) and don't want to go through the comments, here it is:

Bob Is Your Uncle

I’m not sure you understand
what I’m trying to tell you.

That man in the armchair,
feet up, snoring softly,
the one you call your dad,

his name is Robert, so we
all call him Bob. It suits him.

Bob has three brothers.
The two you know, the two
who take you hunting and
tease you about your cowlick,
and one you don’t.

The one you don’t know
left town a while ago. Twelve
years and six months, but
who’s counting? Not me.

Anyway, it’s time you know,
time for you to know, whether
you want to know or not.

That man, Bob, is your uncle.
There. You have it.

Submitted by Lars, August 8, 2008 8:52 AM, all rights reserved

Bob's Your Uncle

So I went to my local chapter of Starbucks today. I realize I'm supposed to be unamused by the corporate giant, but I like the people who work at the local chapter, which happens to be a destination point on my urban hikes. At any rate, one of the workers there was expecting me to order my usual espresso macchiato, doppio, an Old School drink, but then I said I wanted a tall green iced tea with one splendid splenda, and then I said, you know, that cup looks like it's short to me, not tall (not complaining, just observing), and she said, "Well, we don't have short cold-beverage cups," and I thought but didn't say that this, then, was a categorical problem, or maybe an aesthetic one: my sense of short does not dovetail with Starbucks', but instead I said, "Well, there you go," and she said, "Bob's your uncle, as my grandmother used to say." And I asked, "Is your grandmother British?" ["Bob's your uncle is, of course, a Britishism], and she said, "She aspired to be." And we laughed.

Isn't that marvelous? "She aspired to be British." I think some Americans still aspire to be British, especially those with vague upper-crust leanings. I've even known a few American academics who try, with horrific results, to adopt some kind of British accent. And of course, T.S. Eliot and Hank James turned themselves "British." Naturally, trying to turn yourself British is a quintessentially American thing to do. In the world of poker, it's known as a "tell."

Anyway, I like those toss-away phrases like "Bob's your uncle." They're not really cliches. They're just sort of generic pieces of language we stick in there from time to time. My father and his cohorts often said, in response to mildly surprising news, "Well, I'll be a sonofabitch." They meant "Bob's your uncle," which is to say, they meant nothing remotely connected with bitches and sons (although I recognize the misogyny lurking in the phrase). They didn't view themselves as vulgar, unless they were around women and children they didn't know. They didn't believe themselves to be sons of bitches anymore than people think Bob is their uncle, unless of course Bob is their uncle, in which case they may not use the expression, even in England.

It might be kind of fun to write some poems that take such expressions literally. What kind of poem might one write with a title, "Bob Is Your Uncle"? Ah, the possibilities.

Sonnet Play-By-PLay

So I write sonnets more or less as aerobic poetic exercises and only rarely expect them to turn out as successful poems, and then from that very limited set, I might try to publish one. I think the main thing with sonnets and other traditional forms is knowing why you're writing them. Also, it's good, I think, to see yourself as participating in a long genre-tradition and exploring the tension between adhering to conventions and disrupting them, perfecting your engagement with a mode and improvising upon the mode.

With the following sonnet, a mere exercise, I decided to provide a play by play, line by line, just to show what sort of difficulty the form puts a poet it.

Sonnet: Hometown Paper

[the title/subject: so this is a fairly conventional Modernist move--take the love-poem form of the sonnet and use it to talk about something unrelated to love and otherwise unlyrical]

And shall it disappear, the local paper--

[The "And" is there to jump-start the iambic with an unstressed syllable, and I've presented myself a problem by asking a question; also, I've chose a two-syllable end-word and what's called a feminine rhyme; I've chosen to go with iambic pentameter, the conventional meter]

The hometown's daily, weekly digested

[More hot water--another two-syllable end word, meaning I have to think of rhymes now for both paper and digested]

Familiar fare of nearby news and safer

[So I went with a half-rhyme with paper--which I think worked out okay, but then I caused more problems by introducing a conceit--the newspaper or news as food--hard to continue, and likely to tempt me into a mixed metaphor]

Palatable small snacks, time-tested,

[I love putting multisyllabic words in an iambic line; it really speeds things up. "Time-tested" is a cliche--so I had to pay the price for "digested"; I'm depending on a pronunciation of palatable that stresses the second syllable]

Reliable desserts of gossip, sports,

[So now I'm stuck in that food-conceit, but at least I'm hanging with the subject]

Cooked up by ones who know the local fears?

[Still wearing out that conceit, making the editors cooks--I do like "local fears," however, and it may let me out of the conceit--we'll see; and I've finally sewed up the question--started in line 1!]

Already, so it seems, rags of all sorts

[Sports/sorts: basic rhyme; a shift of subject--papers going out of business--but by using "rags," I may have attached myself to another conceit]

Have been attached to quilts (one hears)

[So I decided to take "rags" literally; as rags are made into quilts, "rags" (newspapers) are attached to figurative quilts of . . . what?]

That make up media conglomerates,

[Conglomerates are quilts. Hmmm. But what will rhyme with conglomerates?! Oy.]

While others simply went, were buried with

[Still stuck on the rag-conceit, now treating rags more as clothes]

Their owner-editors. Moreover, what's

[So I rhymed "moreover, what's" with "conglomerate"--that's fun; some small newspapers perish when their old editors die]

The fate of reading? Yes, like Faith and Myth,]

[I rhymed Myth with With--amusing; more importantly, I'm experiencing what many sonnet-writers experience--the sudden, panicky realization that the poem's about to end; one gets lost in the meter, rhyming, conceits, and so on. Then: OMG! Only 14 lines, and I've written a dozen already--and I need to end with a couplet--and finish the poem! I mean, it's not cliff-diving, but it does create a virtual adrenaline rush, for nerds]

Our Literacy is ultra-local now--

[Now I leap to a Big Point--linking local papers to larger issues of literacy; the couplet is an opportunity to do this; I've played it safe in terms of rhyming by using "now"--lots of options]

Locked to a screen mere inches from the brow.

[Like the Shakemeister General, except not really, I've gone for a wicked little irony. In the age of the Internet, we feel we're superior to printed local, hickish papers, but then here we are peering at our various little personal screens, which in one sense are more insular, even solipcistic, than the local rag, or so I argue.

So there you have it--a not very good sonnet, but a great aerobic poetic workout, getting some work on rhyme, meter, conceits, getting out of trouble, having fun. And play by play, just like sports! Such a deal. Or, as John Madden would say, "And, boom, he finishes the couplet!" Maybe Madden will make a Sonnet Video Game. Uh, maybe not.

Sandburg Gets Morbid

Carl Sandburg, early 20th century American poet, is best known for the fog poem, with its cat-analogy, and the Chicago poem. He took over the long free-verse line from Whitman, made it more laconic, much less ecstatic, and made it work. His poetry is pleasing in ways similar to those in which Jeffers's poetry is. Among the poets he influenced was Langston Hughes, who liked Sandburg's focus on working folks and his unpretentiousness.

Sandburg takes a morbid turn in the following poem, but I don't think it's a gratuitous turn, as one sometimes finds in Poe's verse, for example.

Cool Tombs

By Carl Sandburg

WHEN Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin ... in the dust, in the cool tombs.
And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes ... in the dust, in the cool tombs.
Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember?... in the dust, in the cool tombs?
Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns ... tell me if the lovers are losers ... tell me if any get more than the lovers ... in the dust ... in the cool tombs.

The decision to treat the iconic, even sacred, Lincoln roughly in the first line fascinates me, and I think it takes the poem in a successful, if risky, direction. Then there's a shift to Grant, feckless as a president, victim of corruption. The shift to Pocahontas makes sense; after Lincoln and Grant, we need a feminine icon, and we need a person who represents grace. As plain as the last stanza is, I think it's inspired--especially the choice to interrogate the reader. This not so well known poem is one I admire.

Molecular Sonnet for Sunday

Whether you take some kind of Creationist point of view or some kind of Evolutionary one--or are skeptical of both, as a friend of mine is--it's nonetheless amazing that mere matter, of which we are composed, can have concepts and produce complicated emotions. If we ask how in the heck single-cell organisms evolved into organisms complex enough to think of love, time-share condos, philosophy, chess, and combustion-engines, the Creationist point of few is certainly easier to grasp: God made it so. The Evolutionary point of view, ironically, seems more miraculous. What are the odds that organism A would have eventually evolved into organism Z--a human? A key variable, I think, is time. The Biblical calendar is pretty brief. The Evolutionary one allows for millions and millions of years during which lots of accidents and false starts can happen--eventually leading to organisms called human golfing, cheating on taxes, and singing ballads in cafes. The Evolutionist's retort to God made it so seems, in part, to be Evolution takes its own sweet time, of which there is an infinite amount.

As may be immediately apparent, I did not take millions of years to write the following sonnet, which has something to do with molecules and love.

Molecular Mood: A Sonnet

Molecular in nature were the two,
For they were human, and therefore made
Of carbon, protein, fat--the usual stew
Of which stuff in this matter, fact, is said
By scientists to be composed. But how
Does one molecular composite reach
The point at which it loves, the point called Now
Wherein one body-mind, by means of speech,
Decides and then declares this thing called Love,
A concept generated by uncounted other
Molecular composites, the stuff of
Which Civilization's made? Whatever.
The she loves him; the he loves her. Their cells
Conspire to cast reciprocating spells.

Hans Ostrom/Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

I'm inordinately fond of the made/said partial rhyme in the first quatrain, and of the partial rhyming of other/Whatever. The couplet pleases me, for some reason.

Songbooks Exhumed

Among the items paroled from storage have been songbooks, many of which feature ballads from the 30s, 40s, and 50s. By accident, I started playing these ballads as I was teaching myself to play piano, using the quick-and-dirty "chord" method. So there I was, age 16, playing songs like "Two Sleepy People." Two things interested me about the songs--the complicated chords, never just a D minor, but always a D minor seventh or something like that, clusters of notes; and the lyrics, which were often sentimental, true, but just as likely to be whimsical, wry, and ironic. They were way over my head, of course, written by "sophisticated" and rich lyricists in New York or Palm Springs.

So it's been great playing the songs and reading the lyrics again. There's probably a book to be written out there about American ballads being an important window on American culture, and on the complicated "icons" that sang the ballads, like Sinatra, who in one sense was a hack and a thug but in another sense was a very puzzling amalgamation of traditional American manhood, celebrity, androgyny, money, poverty, East Coast values, and West Coast values. He was also an Old School liberal, who, of course, became a conservative, as almost all Old School liberals did and do. Scratch a Northern White liberal, and you almost always find a redneck, as James Baldwin articulated. Thus has it always been so.

Ah, but the lyrics are so smart, especially those written by Johnny Mercer (not a pleasant person, alas: read Skylark, the recent biography), Dorothy Fields, Billie Holliday, Cole Porter, Jules Styne, the Gershwins, Harry Warren, et alia.

Some will say the wry, ironic, whimsical poetry has disappeared from American popular music, and to some extent that's true. Most popular songs are about as subtle as an avalanche. But you will still find a great deal of subtlety and wit even in some Hip Hop music, such as that by the Fugees (one example). Nonetheless, the Great Age of the Ballad has passed. Hence the importance of exhumed songbooks.

Not that you asked, but my all-time favorite Sinatra "album" is the one recorded live in Las Vegas with Count Basie's orchestra and Quincy Jones's arrangements. There's an edge to the swing that you don't find in the Nelson Riddle arrangements, and you sense that Basie, Jones, and Sinatra are engaged in a healthy competition. Sinatra is 50, I think, so the voice is down an octave or two, but the schtick is finely tuned. When Basie's orchestra is about to take off on an instrumental raid, Sinatra warns, "Run fuh covah; run and hide!" If you like Sinatra, you'll love (and probably already know well) this CD. If you don't know much about Sinatra or are skeptical, give a song or two a listen on this one. A fascinating artifact.