Charity In Vancouver

Handouts in Vancouver, B.C.

A homeless alcoholic missing
half a smile asked me for money.
I gave him some. He said,
"Thank you. God bless you."
Moments later, we found
ourselves to be customers
in the same cafe. His use
of money to buy bread
and coffee surprised me.
I'd assumed he'd spend it
on booze to quiet tremors.

The one giving the handout
feels superior, perched to judge;
makes assumptions; and settles
into self-satisfaction. I wonder
what, if anything, he assumed
about me. I wonder if he gave me
the handout of a second thought.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

White Beard

Study: Man With White Beard

The old man's beard grew so big
it became a white cloud below
his face. Wee thunderstorms
occurred in there. Sometimes
a silver airplane from 1948
emerged, banked, and landed
on a nearby table. Behind

the beard lay the face
of a shy man whom no one
knew anymore. With the beard,
the man had grown garrulous
and querelous. He'd been
barking opinions for years.

Sometimes his family takes him
to lunch and tries to listen. They
look at the white cloud of whiskers,
which quiver when he talks. The
cloud hypnotizes them. They
don't hear the opinions coming
from the mouth behind the cloud.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Bach to Basics

Watching Bach Played


I saw a string-ensemble play
Bach's music. Each musician
leaned, turned, and swayed
in chairs differently as
they played. The women's
backs looked strong in gowns.
The men's feet in black shoes
stayed fixed to the floor.

Sometimes violin-bows poked
straight up as if probing unseen
clouds just above the players'
heads. Portly cellos had to be
held up like friendly drunks.
They mumbled low genial
gratitude. One man stood

above the players, waving
his arms and a stick as if
to try to get someone's
attention. The violinists
may have glanced at him,
I don't know, but mostly
they cuddled their polished
wooden instruments, and
let their bodies feel the music.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Taxes Make Cats Sick

As everyone except those who don't pay taxes knows, it's tax-season in the U.S. By "those who don't pay taxes," I mean those wily global capitalists. If you can run a company into the dirt, threaten nations' economies, AND get a bonus for doing all that great work, there's no way you're going to mess with anything as trivial as taxes.

Before I get to taxes and cats, I should mention that hotel-owner Leona Helmsley famously said, "Taxes? We don't pay taxes. Taxes are for the little people." Unfortunately, the government convicted her of tax-evasion, and she had to go to prison. There wasn't an immense amount to like about Leona. She was overbearing, and, a self-proclaimed perfectionist, she treated her employees terribly, humiliating them instead of interacting with them as professional employees.

Nonetheless, I had some sympathy left over for her after she got out of prison, lived as a recluse, died, and left all her money to a dog. Leaving it to a worthy non-profit would have been better, but leaving it to the dog showed just how isolated and probably almost mad she was. Apparently the dog doesn't need that much to live on (it is still alive), so I think some of the money does go to charity. "Can't buy me love . . ." does seem to apply in this case.

Anyway, we're getting ready to have our taxes "done"--quite an expression. The process requires as much work as if we figured out the taxes ourselves. The only difference is that, by having a professional fill out the forms, they're filled out correctly. That's a substantial difference.

We begin the process by scattering forms and such on the floor. We like to call this stage of the process "chaos."

The cat threw up on one of the papers. We're working on several hypotheses to explain this occurrence. 1) The cat objects to income tax. Cat's do operate in the world as if they're entitled to everything, after all. 2) The cat found an arithmetical error in the form, or it read the form and believed we'd paid too much for something--or that we should have spent the money on something cat-related. 3) The paper in question had been handled by a dog working as a cashier. 4) The cat had a hairball stuck. Most of the evidence supports 1, 2, and 3, but we haven't ruled out #4 entirely.

The upshot is that one of the supporting documents we're sending to our accountant will have a stain on it.

After we scatter the forms and other records, we fill out a booklet our accountant has given us. It's loaded with questions. Many of them seem strange to me, so strange they induced--as opposed to inspired--a poem of sorts.


Tax-Form Questions

Did you sell a medieval castle last year? If so, then go
to line 25C and wait.

Did an imaginary friend live with you more than
50% of the time last year? Did the friend pay
imaginary rent?

Did a marauding band of unfettered global
capitalists steal your retirement-fund? If so,
join the crowd, and weep in the streets.

Has anyone ever actually asked you what you'd
like your taxes to support? We thought not.

Add the total on line 36A to the total on line
1,401, 263C and divide by the total on line
6F. Then multiply by eleven. Light incense and
chant. Count on your fingers. You are ready.
Welcome to Taxland, Pilgrim.


Copyright 2009 by Hans Ostrom

Honestly!

Uh-oh: now I'm trouble. A blogging colleague and fellow poetry-enthusiast from Africa (he writes the wonderful Poefrika blog), Rethabile, has invited me to take the honesty-challenge. He writes,


"Honesty is the best policy. Yeah, right. Tell that to... too many names pop up at this. Never mind it, though. Let's play at being honest. 100% honest, this very Saturday. What with it being the first day of Spring and all.

I will be celebrating Norouz that day with family, eating Adas Pollo and drinking a nice red. Why not Australian Shiraz? But never mind that.

For Saturday, 21 March, place the Honesty badge in a post on your honest blog. By so doing, you will be inviting your honest readers to ask you an honest question each. And you swear by the skies of thunder that you will reply honestly.

Your fans are honest and good and knowledgeable enough not to ask unanswerable questions, of course. I will certainly place the badge in a post on Poéfrika, so come by and ask away. The askee has two "passes" ("no comments" in bloglese). If you can badge up a post before Saturday, by all means do so. That way we can all dream questions up, ha ha ha!"

Wow, only two passes. These are some stringent rules. Nonetheless, I'm going for it. Ask questions if you like, and I'll try to answer them honestly. Notice "try." Also notice "unanswerable questions," above.

And may Rethabile enjoy the Australian shiraz and the Adas Pollo. I just saw BOTTLE SHOCK, finally, and the Brit. who ran the famous contest in '76 (Paris) predicted that, once an American wine "beat" a French wine, all bets were off, and wine would be produced successfully around the globe--including (he predicted) Australia and South America. He also predicated Africa. I don't think I've every tasted an African wine, but I'm ready.

"Honestly!" used to be a favorite expression of my mother's--except it didn't have anything to do with honest; a rough translation might be "Good grief!" That is, she (and others of her generation) used it as an expression of frustration. I wonder how that got started. She's passed on, so I can't ask her--directly, anyway. Even if she were still here and I asked her, she might give me the cold blue stare, as if to say, "What do you mean, 'How did it get started?' It just did."

Words Effective In Poems, Experts Say

(image courtesy of International PEN organization)








Make Poems Out of Words

If in doubt, make your poems with words.
It's awfully conventional, and individual
results will vary, but usually things work
out fine. Which words? Excellent question.

Let me suggest some possibilities: hail,
moist, ax, electron, pollen, choice, chew,
choke-cherry, Tanzania,, sweat, sweet,
sulphur, gluttony, knuckle, tongue, balk,
rip, Thunder Bay, and, the, when, hence,
fennel,Lesotho, slag, Uppsala, velvet,
and torque. Spread the words out
and place additional words among so
as to create meaning and pleasure.

Stop and take a look at what you've
arranged so far. Then rearrange
the words, as necessary. Rely
on instincts. If you need more words,
remember that English contains
between half a million and a million
words, that there are hundreds of
other languages, and that you may
create your own words. I myself
invented the word "consumocracy"
not long ago. This is just an example,
and I'm sure you can do better.
The number of poems
to be made of words is infinite, so
welcome to the big project.

Copyright 2009

Poems From Africa

The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry arrived, and of course I immediately dived in.

Certainly, the editors must have felt dispirited at times (as they imply) because their task was to represent poetry from writers in nations and homelands across a whole immense continent in a wide variety of languages--all in one volume.

Some well known writers are represented, as one might expect; these include Ben Okri, Tchicaya U Tam'si, and Wole Soyinka.

One of my favorite poems so far is "Sometimes When It Rains," by Gcina Mhlophe, a poet from South Africa. Unfortunately, no other biographical information about her appears in the back of the book. "Sometimes when it rains" is a first-line refrain in five-line, free-verse stanzas, of which there are ten. The images, experiences, memories, and/or scenes depicted in each stanza get increasingly more complex, weighty, and intense, and there's also a general movement from childhood to adulthood--and toward what might be called political awareness. A poem with this design can easily become a static list-poem, but Mhlophe escapes that outcome easily. The voice is authorative, and one never gets the feeling the poem or poet is trying to do too much, so (almost paradoxically) the poem's able to achieve a lot. I think I'm going to use this poem in classes. There's so much to admire in it.

It's hard to beat a new, interesting anthology of poetry on an unseasonably cold day in the Pacific Northwest. And I'm just getting started reading it.

Tell Us How We're Doing

We went to a restaurant the other evening, and with the check, also known as a bill, came a pre-printed card on which was printed a survey about the restaurant and the server.

I almost never fill out such surveys because I don't know what the management is going to do with them, if anything. I might have mentioned that some of the lettuce in the salad was frozen, but I'd already mentioned this fact to the server, not so much to complain or whine as to alert her to a possible refrigeration-problem. Of course, my social-scientist friends would probably critique the validity of the survey itself. Usually surveys like this are titled something along the lines of "Tell Us How We're Doing."


Tell Us How We're Doing

When our global corporation defrauded
everyone, did a representative greet you
with a smile? When we built another
nuclear missile, was it delivered in a
timely fashion? After we dumped
poison into a river without warning
anyone, did you receive a Christmas
card from us? When we took away
your rights, were we dressed properly?

We value the opinions not only of
our clients but also of our victims.
Please take a few moments and let
us know how we're doing. After
you fill out the survey, present it
to the uniformed guard who is
staring at you. Thanks!


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

In The TV

I know it's eccentric of me, but I wish a lot of television-shows, even current ones, were in black-and-white. I also wish the "test-pattern" would appear now and then--the one that used to appear when they ran out of programming. Now when they run out of programming, they run program-length commercials, which aren't as fascinating as that test-pattern, which looked like an elaborate, cryptic target. I also miss all those glass tubes you could look at when someone took the back of the TV off. Televisions now are essentially computer-monitors, aren't they? Oh, well. They seem to work pretty well.

Inside the Television

Sometimes he kept the television off
so he might imagine what was in there:
a movie in which books are characters
who talk; a news-program that reports
on only one significant story per week
in unrelenting, exacting detail, commercial-
free; a series in which celebrities interview
ordinary working people and listen; the
Saw Channel; a nest of new-born birds;
a cake; shadows folded neatly like black
linen; a collection of some excellent TV-
moments from childhood; unimagined
wonders.

Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Those Who Can, Learned How To

(image: cover of book about Jaime Escalante, renowned teacher

of high-school math)

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I've been glancing at some quotations about teachers; my text is the Webster's New Explorer Dictionary of Quotations (Massachusetts: Merriam Webster, 2000), pp. 408-409.
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Probably the most famous quotation about teachers is from George Bernard Shaw's play, Man and Superman: "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches." The quotation often appears in the plural nowadays: "Those who can . . . ." The quotation has endured because it's well phrased, reflect the great appeal that "making it" entirely on one's own has, and it gives voice to bad feelings toward and memories of schooling and teachers we might harbor.

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Apparently Shaw harbored quite a few of these about the schools he attended: Wesleyan Connexional School and the Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School. The trouble with these schools may have begun with their names, and it continued with such lovely practices as corporal punishment.

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Later Shaw married an heiress; they were both members of the socialist Fabian Society. I don't think the heiress gave up her inheritance. Those who have the capital tend to keep it. Ironically, Shaw helped found the London School of Economics, where at least a few of the teachers, apparently, can teach, do teach, and can practice economics. I think Mick Jagger went there. He certainly seems to have learned something about amassing capital--and about dancing in a very silly way.

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A few more quotations about teaching:

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"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." --Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams. I assume the quotation applies to women teachers, too, and I might add that teachers can never tell where the influence starts. It's a mystery.
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"Who dares to teach must never cease to learn." --John Cotton Dana, motto composed for Kean College, New Jersey. Amen, brother Dana. You have to keep current in the subject you teach, but as importantly, you have to maintain a certain delight in learning. And the next class-session is the none you have to do well in, regardless of how well or poorly the last session went. I don't know if Kean College still exists. I'm going to check.

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Of course, all of us learn from and teach each other all the time. That's pretty much how society and culture work. If you don't know, you ask; if you see someone struggling to figure something out, and you know something about it, you offer to show them how the thing works. If you can, and if you have the opportunity, teach someone who can't, provided they appear to be open to the idea of learning. Random acts of instruction, and all that.

Air Voltaire

(image: Voltaire)








Before Air Jordan (the U.S. basketball player, not the airline), there was Air Voltaire, although I'm not sure he actually went by that nickname.

However, in the image above, he certainly is styling, even if he doesn't seem to be leaping, sinking jump-shots, playing suffocating defense, or making lots of commercials. Voltaire was in favor of so-called "free trade," so if he were alive today, he might do American Express adverts or maybe ones for travel in France.

Actually, "Voltaire" itself is a nickname, or at least a pseudonym--for François Marie Arouet, born 1694, died 1778, and most famous, of course, for having written Candide. In his own lifetime, he was more famous for pamphlets and encyclopedia-articles (in an age when encyclopedia-articles were more sexy than they are now).

Voltaire was essentially a satirist in the tradition of Swift, whose writing he admired. He wasn't an atheist or a revolutionary but was rather a deist and a reformer. In the town he ultimately settled in, for example, he used his capital to create what we might call small business, and he built housing, which he offered to people on extremely reasonable terms.

At the same time, Candide is a hilarious, scalpel-like attack on optimism (especially that suggested by Leibniz), on religiosity, on fanaticism of any kind, and on humans' capacity for getting almost everything wrong. After Pangloss, the hopelessly optimistic philosopher, yet again expresses his view that "all was for the very best," a character named James replies, "Men," he said, "must have corrupted nature a little, because they weren't born wolves, yet they've become wolves: God didn't give them twenty-four-pounders [cannons; we might substitute "nuclear missiles"] or bayonets, but they've made themselves bayonets and cannons with which to destroy each other. I might also mention bankruptcies, and the law which takes over a bankrupt's property to defraud his creditors of it." (end of chapter three)

Imagined how amused and unsurprised Voltaire would be by the current global-captial implosion, which seems to spring directly from greed, corruption, and "de-regulation," also known as white-collar lawlessness.

Circuitously and incorrectly, Voltaire often gets blamed or credited, depending on your viewpoint, with the French Revolution, but, as Andre Maurois points out in a nice introduction to the Bantam Classic edition, Voltaire was a monarchist, a deist, and a scientist. He was Monsieur Mainstream Enlightenment, in other words, as well as being Air Voltaire. His view, as expressed in Candide, was that one needed to tend one's own garden--tend to business, that is; concentrate; practice moderation; be sensible; follow the data.

Maurois calls this a "bourgeois" worldview, as well as a scientific (in the sense of Englightenment) one, and he's probably right. Voltaire was no revolutionary. It's just that his views were so anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian at the time that people reacted as if he were a revolutionary. He often faced censorship. My own less-than-educated guess is that he managed to be a monarchist and a reformer/deist at the same time chiefly because he liked sensible order and seemed to be getting it from the system. He seems to have been a monarchist in the sense most Brits are monarchists now--liberal (in the 19th century sense, not as in U.S. Democrats), republican (small "r"), and tolerant of tradition, as long as it didn't go crazy.

Best of all, Candide is a very quick, funny book--still. Air Voltaire is in the house.

After Next

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Next

What happens next? Next happens
next. You go to a funeral, a hard
summing-up, and you feel as if
something's been sealed. Not long
thereafter you're standing in a
grocery store, buying celery,
or you're at home pawing through
mail distractedly.
*
Tides of ordinary
life roll in, unchecked by what we
deem momentous, even cataclysmic.
In the midst of broadcast
disaster, when time seems like
it should be seized, people
need to go to the bathroom,
put clothes in a closet, feed
farm-animals or a pet. Our
own parts in the flow end, yes.
The flow, no, never ends.
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Announcer

(image: George Fenneman, Groucho Marx's announcer, with Groucho)










I suspect I was thinking first of the late Don LaFontaine when I wrote this poem. He was a professional announcer or voice-over specialist, famous for describing movies by starting, "In a world where . . .". He also did a very funny send-up of himself on a Geiko commercial, second only to the appearance of Little Richard (who transforms every form in which he works, even a commercial). But more broadly the poem is about all those radio and TV announcers with those resonating, cultivated voices. "Announcing" is one of those niche-careers that materialized because of the rise of electronic mass-media. Arguably, the announcer with the toughest job was George Fenneman, who had to work with the acerbic, unpredictable Groucho Marx on a game-show called You Bet Your Life. I saw it only a few times, but even when I was a kid, I sensed that Fenneman was managing Groucho, smoothing over the rough spots.

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Announcer
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For decades he told contestants
what they'd won, he introduced
the host, and he said other words
to help create The Show. He could
make his voice resonate the way
microphones like it and make it
dive down, rise up, purr in
between, but most
importantly sound optimistic
and happy for people came home
from work and watched TV or
watched TV while they cleaned
house. The Show was to make
people happy so they would
watch The Show and maybe buy
the products advertised.

Small man. Big voice. Calm
spirit. Talking through a
microphone was his work
and made as much sense
and money as anything else,
more or less. His voice won
the bread. A family, sure. He
got sick and died. People do.
Anyway the great age of
radio and TV announcers
had come and gone. Gone!
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom