I Liked Those Days

[pictured: a potato bug]

Good Ground

I liked those days when I kept my gaze

close to the ground, although I'm sorry

about that sound I repeated in line one.

I saw black beetles, which gave off an

awful stench, and I saw potato-bugs,

large, delicate, decorated, slow--

almost like Art Deco. Yes, I saw

salamanders, those wee amphibians,

amost too gentle for Earth, connoisseurs

of shadow. Sight of scorpions and

black-widow spiders injected me

with terrible lore and jolts of adrenalin.

I saw ants hauling dead moths like

stiff canvas sails, and I watched ant-lions

waiting for prey to slip down the side

of the terrible sandy funnel. I read

Earth closely. It's the best book ever,

after all, especially when you're a kid,

even if you're a kid who likes to read.

I sneaked up on the frog pond and watched

frogs copulate, all of them at once, and

what a cacaphony! Later I saw the

tadpoles, which grew legs--freakier

than any horror movie Hollywood

had to offer the National Broadcasting

Company. I learned to stand tall and notice

humans almost exclusively. This is known

as "joining society" or "growing up" or

whatever term you prefer. It's one of

those necessary things. Life may be

better spent with one's nose close to

soil and stone, eyeballing bugs and

all that stuff. No, I don't mean becoming

a "naturalist." That would ruin everything.

This isn't nostalgia. It's just preference.

Spiders, insects, worms, amphibians,

reptiles, and birds delivered the goods

curiosity sent for from the mail-order

catalogue, is all I'm saying. These

creatures did some weird, interesting

shit, just as a part of their ordinary

day, okay? I'm an adult now, no

major complaints today, but I do

wish for children that they may live

near interesting ground and be

allowed to read it if they want to.

Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Highly Recommended Documentary

I highly recommend the new documentary video by Hyperborean, whose blog appears on my list of blogs and sites I follow. The documentary concerns organized protests at the DNC and RNC nominating conventions and has some extraordinary "footage" (an old film-term, I realize) of plainly excessive police-over-reaction, among other things, but you can judge that issue for yourself, of course.

A link:

http://aeconomics.blogspot.com/2008/10/our-documentary-is-done-watch-it-here.html

Well done, Joe.

Capitolism

Capitolism

He was a capitolist. He believed

everyone should live and work

in dome-capped buildings, however

modest such structures might be.

He believed conveyances should

be built with small transparent

domes attached. He himself

wore a bowler hat.

Domes, he believed, shaped

human will, calmed spirits,

made people look and think

up, aspire. He opposed

commonism in its several

architectural forms--flat

utility, corporate boxiness,

and most especially predictable

decorative tricks. He extolled

capitolism, its mysteries of

circle and hemisphere, curve

and line, boldness and modesty.

He deemed domes essential,

regarded Karl Marx and Adam

Smith as having trudged down

blind corridors of economics, when

they should have been looking. Up.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Clothing

In the house we lived in the longest in the Sierra Nevada, the main living quarters were on the second floor, which also had a porch. My father attached one large pulley to one of the porch-posts and another to a pine tree a hundred feet away. Then he threaded a cable through the pulley-wheels, and my mother used this to dry clothes on. It remains the longest clothesline I've encountered, and of course my father had not calculated how much strength was required to push the loaded line out and pull it back, so some strength was required of my mother and us. Children of the Great Depression, my parents owned an electric dryer but almost never used it.


I have not done so yet, but I'd like to track down the biochemical and olfactory-biological reasons why clothes dried outside by breeze and sunshine universally smell so appealing to people. I would hazard that cotton thusly dried may smell especially good. With regard to the odor of the dried cloth, what do the sun and the breeze do that a machine-dryer doesn't?

This has all been a circuitious introduction to a poem about clothing, except the poem has almost nothing (but at least something) to do with this drying business I've been discussing. --So it goes with poems, introductions, clothing, and blogs.



The Clothing


Laundry in a basket still wore
some of sun's expenditure
and breeze's perfume.

Eventually, we put on these
washed things. They led us
back out into sunlight, into
lakes of air. We wear

the repetitions of our days,
dress our bodies with our ways,
fold clothes of our woven

consciousness, put them
in closets of memory, hang
them in dreams, where they
re-costume themselves
in carnivals of synaptic light.

People from an old civilization
called Time sit beside a slow
river, rubbing wet cloth with
stones, paying no attention to
the gods who splash and cavort
nearby, who rise from the river,
and cloth themselves in sky.


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Weather Forecasts That Are More Than Unpleasant

Before I launch into the subject at hand, I must mention a new blog I like, Poefrika:

http://poefrika.blogspot.com/

Some nice postings there, and the person has multiple blogs. He just posted a very witty short poem by Amiri Baraka.

....In less exciting news, I've always been attracted to the patter and rhetoric of weather-persons, especially in the Pacific Northwest, where the weather-persons on TV often have to invent weather-variety where there is none. They also often use the term "sun-breaks." In California, the same phenomenon is called "cloudy."

I played around with slightly more sinister forecasts:

Tomorrow calls for rain, followed by urine in the afternoon. (This is probably too unpleasant to be funny. Or just unfunny.)

Thursday looks like patchy morning fog, followed by a rash over your entire body in the evening hours.

By this time tomorrow, we can expect Hell to be cooler than Earth.

Partly cloudy in the afternoon, with absolutely no chance of meeting that special person with whom you might like to spend the rest of your life.

Snow in the higher elevations, turning into psychosis in the foothills.

A slight chance of rain, but no chance that your roommate will bathe within the next 10 days.
********

This morning, a colleague reminded me that Abe Lincoln, self-deprecatingly, once said, "By the time you're 35, you've earned the face you have."

This is a roundabout way of saying that I hope tomorrow brings you weather you enjoy, whether (nyuk, nyuk) you think you've earned it, or your face, or not.

Who's Crazier, Who's Funnier?

Apparently there are two new cinematic satires out there, Bill Maher's funny (Maher hopes) nonfiction take on religion and some guy's feature-length "comedy," "American Carol," in which documentary-maker Michael Moore (a character based on him, that is) is given a Scrooge-like tour of what would have happened had the U.S. not fought in certain wars. The tour sounds more like the one George takes in It's A Wonderful Life, but oh well.

I won't see either of these movies because I'm boycotting Hollywood films. Just imagine how terrified Hollywood moguls must be of my boycott.

I don't think I'll even watch these films when they percolate down the electronic strata and end up on cable or "free" TV.

I think they'll be bad satire; that's the main problem. Long ago and far away, I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on satire, and I almost remember some of what I wrote.

The satire of Moore will be (is) bad because he's not a worthy object of satire, which ridicules vice and/or folly. As satire ridicules, however, it implicitly asks to be judged by the worthiness, the heft, of its target. For example, Jonathan Swift took on all of England, if not all of humanity.
In the cinematic realm, Mel Brooks took on the entire hallowed genre of the Western, as well as taking on the issue of race in the U.S., in Blazing Saddles.

Let's assume you don't like Moore's documentaries or you don't think they're very good. Fine. They and he still aren't vicious and foolish enough to fuel funny, worthy satire. Also, Moore never argued against all U.S. wars, just the ones lots of people have doubts about. Also, even if he's misguided, he's not mean, at least not in the way Scrooge is. Moore's a successful film-maker, a big moose of a guy, and a person with opinions, most of which are about social class, not war. Maybe you could squeeze out a three-minute SNL sketch on him--something about Michael Moore's Hollywood entourage, or Michael Moore in Cannes. There are some humorous possibilities there. Or Michael Moore dating Paris Hilton? That might be funny. For a moment.

But for a feature-film-length satire, you need to think big. Think Dr. Strangelove. The guy who got the financial backing for "American Carol" must have leveraged some moguls who simply don't like Moore and think he's too lefty. Maybe some of them thought the scene he did with Charleton Heston (when Heston was already clearly a bit befuddled) was gratuitous. Who knows? But satirizing Michael Moore is like satirizing Bruce Springsteen. If you hate the documentaries or the music or are bugged by the success or something, just say so, in an email, a blog post, or a review. Not in a full-fledged satire, for heaven's sake. The genre doesn't work that way.

Maher's satire will fail for similar reasons. Religion is indeed big enough to satirize (many have done it well, including James Hogg), but Maher's gone after small targets like a Jesus impersonator and some village (in Ireland?) that still pays homage to some kind of figure of legend. In the one clip from the movie I've seen, the Jesus impersonator says to Maher, calmly, "What if you're wrong [about God]?" (Maher is an atheist, of course). Maher responds, "What if YOU'RE wrong?" I had exchanges like this with my brothers when we were adolescents. The exchanges were not the stuff of world-class satire.

Maher also apparently presents such revelations that some people of faith use their religion as an excuse to commit violence and even atrocities, and that some religious people are hypocritical. Next, I suppose, he will reveal that some politicians are insincere.

Apparently, Maher has a "theory" that (all?) people who believe in a religion or even in God have a mental disorder. If that's the case, he'd better hope there's a God. Also, who's crazier (and sadder)? Someone who goes to church once a week, finds some fellowship and contemplation, and then goes out for pancakes, or a middle-aged stand-up comic running around with a camera crew making fun of Jesus impersonators or arguing with people about religion?

In the realm of the religious, the ones that seem foolish and vicious enough to satirize are the extraordinarily wealthy pastors of mega-churches who literally preach "the gospel of wealth." Just imagine what Jesus would think of these clowns, or how Jonathan Swift (or Mel Brooks) would satirize them.

I'd rather see videos of Maher talking to smart people who write about religion, people like Garry Wills, Marcus Borg, Karen Armstrong, and so on. They all have sense of humor, and they know a massive amount about religion. Wills even wrote a book on the very religious and very funny G.K. Chesterton, devoutly Catholic, satirical in a most British way, inventive--really a kind of grandfather to the Monty Python folk, artistically speaking.

Maher attended Cornell, if memory serves, and he seems quite confident in his intellect and his sharp social criticism. He's a smart, hip guy. He'd probably have fun arguing with someone like Garry Wills, and it would probably be funnier than "Religuous," his movie, with a title that's not funny.

A better satiric target for Maher (not that he cares about, needs, or wants my advice) would be ABC and its parent company--the ones who fired him for saying that it took more courage to drive a car-bomb than to bomb a city from 30,000 feet (I'm paraphrasing). They fired him from a show called Politically Incorrect for making a comment that was politically incorrect not in the sense that reactionaries take the term (as something that would offend feminists or liberals), but that was politically incorrect because some advertisers pulled their money from his show. Media conglomerates. Corporations that fund TV shows. Now, there are some targets worthy of first-rate satire. (But I guess it would be hard to get backing for such a film in Hollywood. )

But everyday, ordinary religious people? Michael Moore? Whatever you think of them, they're just not vicious, foolish, and powerful enough to sustain satire. It's a genre-thing.

Full disclosure: I'm Catholic, having converted from a spiritual stew of atheism, agnosticism, and Zen about 8 years ago. I attend a progressive Jesuit parish. I've met several parishioners and Jesuits who seem funnier than Bill Maher, but that's not his fault. My parish just happens to have some humorous, ironic people in it. The parish does insane things like distribute large amounts of food to families in economic difficulties (the religion, or not, of the families is not relevant to their getting food. There isn't even a means test, so Bill Maher is welcome to a bag of groceries). Yes, of course there are 3 masses per weekend in which the parishioners believe bread and wine are inspirited. If you think that's irrational, you're right. Hence the term faith. No, the parishioners don't think God is an old man with a white beard who sits on a cloud and directs traffic (one of Maher's favorite jokes). Incidentally, of the best naturally talented satirists I know is a product of Jesuit education. Hmmmm.

But it's not a religion-thing. It's a genre-thing. Satirists need worthy targets.

Our Verbal Progress

I overheard a conversation between two students today. One was talking about how her cat was misbehaving, and the other was complaining about how much her dog licked her. The cat-person said, "I don't like dog-tongues. In fact, I find all tongues disgusting." I thought this was a remarkable statement, bold and fascinating.

I'm still pondering what to do with the statement, poetically or otherwise.

In the meantime, I've been thinking of "tongue" in the sense of language ("she speaks several tongues"), and that isn't a bad if old-fashioned synecdoche (if that's what it is; I often conflate metonymy and synecdoche), for although much more than the tongue is involved in speaking, the tongue is pretty crucial.


Our Verbal Progress

Before we were born,
we lived theoretically in the infinitive,
to live. Once incarnated,
we were conjugated, about
nine months after a conjugal
interaction. Conjugated:
I live, you live, he, she, it lives.

After we lived for a while,
we "used to go," "were thinking
of falling in love," "had been planning
to travel to Athens," "had once been
a highly regarded cello player,"
and so on.

Too soon we shall have used up
all occasions for needing the future
tense and shall rely on the past
tenses almost exclusively. Soon
thereafter, we will, being dead,
not require verbs, nor even pre-
positions. The infinitive to die
will house us foreover in our
re-unconjugated state, where
words spoken by tongues
shall not reach us, where we shall
exist in a state of supreme listening.


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008

Proverb Ambulance

Richard Brautigan (pictured) wrote a very funny poem called "Haiku Ambulance," and once I stole the title-concept from it and him and wrote a poem called "Zen Ambulance," which plays around with that infamous tree falling in the forest, etc.

For the second time, I'm pilfering Brautigan's concept, this time in connection to proverbs.


Proverb Ambulance

Don't put all of your baskets
on top of one egg, unless the year
is 1929, say, and you're in Vaudeville,
in need of money, playing the Pantages,
and have a basket-act. Look:
before you leap, ask yourself or
someone you trust, "Do I really
need to leap?" Haste makes waste,
but not as much of it as cruise-ships,
which sail slowly and stuff people
with food: you do the biology. Unless
someone asks you, "Incidentally,
was Rome built in 24 hours?" don't
say, "Rome wasn't built in a day."
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool
me twice, and I advise you to sleep
with one eye closed." You dig?


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008

A T-Town Sonnet

Sonnet: Tacoma


Tacoma's tough. That's what you need to know
To start to get to know the town that is
A city which is reticent to show
The world a worldly face. Indeed, fact is,
Tacoma tells you to your face, "I'm me.
I'm trains and cranes and barges by the Sound.
I'm labor, boss, protester, cop, army."
To find a city anxious to be crowned,
Take I-5 north to where Seatttle's fed
To bursting with paté of pride. It needs
To feel the pat of status on its head.
Seattle thinks that T-Town's in the weeds.
Seattle may day-dream that it's Par-ee.
"Take it or leave it," says T-Town. "I'm me."


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008

What Jake Said

What Jake Said

I waited so long for my big break
to come along, I got used to doing
without one. Who needs
a bolt of recognition, thunderous
good fortune, or some timely
assistance anyway? I belong

to a loose group of toilers
and grinders, some mildly
befuddled never-minders
who work the job and show
up when Up says to show.
For all I know (not very much),

my big break drove by
in a long dark car and waved,
and I didn't notice because
I was bent to some task
and didn't even know to
ask if I might take a minute
and look up. Oh, well.

Like I care. My big break,
if it had come, might have
broken me anyway. Fuck it:
I'm here today and alive--
that's plenty. It's a break.


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Concerning Joy

Poet Hayden Carruth died last week. I did not read and have not read a lot of his work, but what I did read was good, in my opinion. Also, he did seem to have one of those names that seemed manufactured just for a poet. He's considered an important American poet.

My most specific memory regarding him goes back to an evening maybe two decades ago when I was having dinner with three other poets, Lee Bassett, Sam Hamill (best or most recently known for the Poets Against the War project, but also a fine poet, translator, and publisher), and Madeline DeFrees. This was not long after Richard Hugo had died, and Madeline was angry about a bad review Carruth had written about Hugo--maybe it was about his collected poems. I don't know. I never tracked down the review. I just remember that Madeline, not the type to anger easily, was pretty miffed at Carruth's review, especially where it (according to her) had observed that Hugo "had no hear"--for poetry, that is. Hugo's poetry is deliberately clipped and sometimes purposely monotonous and/or staccato, but he had a great sense of language. My own view is that he was writing in the way he'd heard language when he was growing up, working class, Pacific Northwest. And he just leaned more toward the Anglo Saxon side of the language as opposed to the Latin side. Carruth probably just didn't get what Hugo was doing, but Hugo had studied with Roethke, after all, and Roethke was all about sound. If you've read Hugo's The Triggering Town, you know Hugo was almost all about sound, too.

To digress from the digression, the NY Times obituary (which I think I found online) of Carruth mentioned his once saying that he wrote a lot about loss, a statement that made me giggle because, well, don't we all write about loss, even people who don't write? Then I scolded myself for a) giggling and b) writing about loss too much myself. So I made one of those precipitous resolutions. I resolved to write about joy more. I don't know precisely why I chose joy as the opposite of loss when gain, possession, interest-accrued, or permanence would probably have been more reasonable choices as opposites to loss. Fulfilling the resolution hasn't gone all that well, but here's one poem, at least, allegedly on joy--with one of my classic, numbingly obvious titles, which Carruth probably would have hated, along with my poetry, although I doubt if he ever read even one by me, unless maybe one I had in Ploughshares. (Anyway, Mr. Carruth, I'm sorry you're dead.)


Concerning Joy


When an infant laughs,
especially at nothing,
joy has scrawled a note
for anyone to read
and get a giggle.

When people see someone
they love receive what's right,
joy juices a corpuscle of time.

When you sense that thing
move through you, the one
that feels as if your bones
just told a joke to your nerves,
which then told your feet
to dance (knowing full well
your feet ache) joy just might
have been nearby. Mercurial,

needed, and nimble,
as small as a thimble
and as big as a moon,
joy is, I'm telling you,
welcome most any time,
including midnight,
noon, and soon. I'm

saying something about
joy, okay? I'm not trying
to reproduce it, so don't
get all joyless on me. If
joy comes to you, let it.
If it doesn't, ask around.
See what you can find out.
Somebody has to know something.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Oh, Nonsense

Some relatively serious cold rain hit the Pacific Northwest today, one of those firmly stated storms that bring undeniable closure to summer and summerish Fall. Not a bad day for some nonsense-verse, in my opinion, with a wee tip of the cap to Edward Lear (pictured here, an image of Hunt's portrait of him):

Why Oh My

How will they what,
And when will they how?
Who will they why,
And can they where now?

Why are they who?
And how can they when?
When are they there,
And what will you then?

I cannot why now.
Time wheres me so fast.
Who whats, and then some.
Why, this cannot last!


Lear-like wordplay is one sensible approach to nonsense verse. Another, I think, is to play around with a genre. Rather early in my life, I began hearing ballads and other kinds of story-songs that sometimes had dialogue--two characters "in" the song, that is. Burl Ives sang some of these, I remember. In some ways, Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" riffs on that kind of song, as it asks questions and answers them; it's almost as if two kinds of people are speaking. Anyway, I decided to play around with that form.


Oh Ballad, Dear Ballad

"Oh father, dear father,
where did you go?"
"I got drunk and drove
the Ford into snow."

"Oh mother, dear mother
why do you cry?"
"'Cause I'm stuck at home
caring for you, that's why."

"Oh grannie, dear grannie
why are you so wise?"
"It's just a schtick, kiddo,
like rolling your eyes."

"Oh, God, greatest God,
do you listen to me?"
"You and six billion others,
omnisciently."

"Oh life, dear life,
what should I expect?"
"In good years, a job.
On good days, a check."



That's quite enough of this nonsense.


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Sarah Palin, Cubist Painting

As Murray Edelman has asserted, politics is largely a matter of spectacle in the U.S. It is often optimally viewed as a performance of one kind or another, and the alleged differences between candidates or parties are often contrived or exaggerated for the sake of the performance, not for the sake of, say, people or problems or "solutions."

Oddly enough, I caught a glimpse of what Edelman means way back when I was 16 and attending something called Boys' State, a kind of mock-governmental conference sponsored by the American Legion. One male per high school in California would converge on Sacramento and play politics, annually, in the summer. We were all juniors in high school.

Ronald Reagan spoke to us assembled high-school junior males (who had just elected, as our "governor" and "lieutenant governor" two African Americans--that says something about the 1970s, but that's another story).

We sat in the auditorium and listened to a warm-up act, and then Reagan arrived: BAM! Photographic lamps went on, TV cameras materialized, he entered the auditorium, surrounded by an efficient entourage, shook hands, smiled, worked the crowed, smiling, smiling, got up on stage, said nothing but said it well, got off the stage, shook hands, worked the crowd, everything being filmed, BAM! out the door. It was a schtick. Of course, I was mightily impressed. He was our governor! But something in the back of my mind told me: I just saw a schtick.

I thought of this when I watched the "debate" between Biden and Palin last night. It was the oddest political spectacle I've seen in a long time, and I think Biden thought the same thing. He looked at Palin sometimes as if she were from the moon, and it has almost nothing to do with politics (in the sense of policy or beliefs or what to do next or yadda yadda). It has to do with spectacle, and it has to do with gender, and something has gone terribly wrong.

I hate pretending as if I know anything about Sarah Palin because I don't know anything about her, really. I do think McCain made a reckless choice when he chose her (that's not her fault). I think it is evidence of an impulsive side he can't control.

But as I watched her last night, I saw an amalgamation of traits, affects, effects, gestures, gimmicks, and tricks that don't add up. Or rather, they add up to a kind of robot badly assembled, or a Cubist painting.

The parts include the following: cute--but a bit too old to be cute (mutton pretending to be lamb); "beauty-contestant"; anti-intellectualism (having knowledge about issues is a symptom of being "elite; when talking to your audience, drop the g from ing in words); put your head down and get through this awful event (she had loaded her rhetorical gun with statements, and she was going to shoot them regardless of what questions were asked); something vaguely corporate ( the suit, the glasses, the coiffure); cheap tricks or worn-out jokes ("There you go again": Reagan's line TWENTY EIGHT YEARS AGO; the "white flag of surrender": that is meaningless); the winking at the camera; the lame folksy reference to extra credit in third grade.

Sarah Palin is whoever she is. I don't know who she is. I'm sure she is someone with a unified personality. But Sarah Palin as political spectacle is a symptom of our political system, and something is terribly wrong. The amalgamation of traits she attempted to hold together with glue and tape during the debate is freakish and bizarre, and it says not all that much about her but volumes about how conflicted and fragmented our society is, particularly around issues of femininity and power. I think she's trying to do some kind of job she's been given, and she doesn't exactly know what the job is, except . . . get out there, make noise, be cute.

Reagan made the schtick work. Countless other politicians have, too. Clinton, Roosevelt, Nixon (until he disintegrated), Carter, Bush I, Bush II, take your pick. It has nothing to do with ideology, beliefs, or policy. It is a performance of a show named "Democracy": whatever.

Biden and Obama make the schtick work. The Clintons, too. The parts seem to cohere. They are at least plausibly familiar or familiarly plausible. McCain, too--except for his strange impulsive side.

In the spectacle of Sarah Palin, the schtick has come undone. I was fascinated by the spectacle of her last night because it suggested how badly politics can go wrong and in how many complex ways it can do so, and once again, I have to say it has little or nothing to do with ideology (I think in many ways Hillary Clinton has had to assemble herself into a Cubist painting, too). Sarah Palin the concocted, "prepped," inappropriately chosen, impulsively selected, hastily assembled political entity is a monstrosity. Who Sarah Palin the actual person is, I have almost no clue. Sarah Palin, candidate? A bizarre assemblage. A reflection of her society.