Dabbling in Philosophy

I'm an amateur philosopher--at best. Dabbler is more like it. Like almost every other person who has earned degrees in English, I dipped into philosophy as important background to and context of literature, and I took a two-semester "History of Philosophy" course--but philosophers tend not to like such courses because (so the argument goes) they are more of a tour of ideas than a course in "doing" philosophy. Getting ready for written doctoral exams in 18th & 19th century British literature and Modern British & American poetry, I also read some philosophy, but mostly in connection with specific literary works, poets, and novelists, and not all that systematically.

Having established the absence of preparation and credentials, then, I shall proceed to provide details that will further liquefy, if not atomize, my status in this regard.

My favorite philosopher is Spinoza. I've been reading him (his work) ever since I took that history of philosophy course, and I plunged into Ethics again about a year ago. --Not exactly light reading. But the line of argument is elegant, and the thinking is cool, as in chilly. God is the substance, goes one part of the argument, and everything else (pieces of reality large and small) comprises attributes of God. Evil springs from human misguidedness and mis-perception, not from Satan.

The poet in me likes the fact that Spinoza earned his living as a lens-grinder in the Netherlands, where his Jewish community excommunicated him. Later, a colleague encouraged him to become a Catholic. Unfortunately, the colleague's argument (I take great liberties with the paraphrasing here) was something like "all the popular people in Europe are converting to Catholicism!" Spinoza politely told the fellow that when he (the friend) came to his senses, he would know how ridiculous the invitation and the argument were.

Stuart Hampshire's work on Spinoza has been quite good at getting me as close to understanding Spinoza as I'll ever get. Spinoza has tended to get mis-used quite a bit. The 19th century, for example, wanted to turn him into a mystical pantheist, but that wasn't his argument at all. ("That is not it at all," to quote Eliot.)

Aristotle's my second favorite philosopher, although I know his non-philosophical work better: his writing on poetics (especially on tragedy, of course) and the timeless On Rhetoric. As long as I can remember, I've always preferred his work to Plato's. If Ari were alive today, he'd probably be a scientist or a social scientist, for he was the great empiricist. He seems to have been interested in everything and capable of taking apart everything and having a look. The world was data; data were the world. Even the guesses he made that turned out all wrong were very good hypotheses, even the crystal-sphere stuff.

Hume I love, too. He seems to have taken great joy in disrupting arguments and explaining how the logical connections people thought they were making were neither logical nor connections. --A latter-day Zeno, in my opinion.

I have to give Descartes his props. He came up with the greatest "hook" in philosophy, after all--and kept it to three words. And his thinking certainly swept Europe by storm.

Wittgenstein is fascinating, especially his evolution--going from mocking any "philosophy" that wasn't essentially phrased mathematically to embracing (or at least this is how I misinterpret it) something akin to rhetoric, wherein premises and definitions can function even as we acknowledge that they're contingent or constructed. The book about the famous (and famously mis-remembered or multiply remembered) "poker" episode with Popper, Ludwig, and Bertie Russell is entertaining.

I wish I liked Plato more, but I don't feel quite so bad after having read a biography of A.E. Housman (classical scholar), who read Plato as an undergraduate, decided what Plato had to say was a useless way of explaining the world, and never changed his mind.

I always found it ironic that Plato wanted to expel poets from his utopian kingdom because I see him primarily as a dramatist, a writer of little plays in which Socrates is the hero and, like professional wrestling champions, always "wins" the rigged contests. And the parable of the caves is lovely poetry. I enjoyed I.F. Stone's book on Socrates, especially how Stone criticizes Socrates without defending the death-sentence given him, even if Socrates had the choice of leaving the city rather than facing death.

And how cool is it that Aristotle and Plato just had one name--just like some celebrities nowadays? "The Philosopher formerly known as 'Plato.'"

Among the legion of philosophers whose work I never "got" are Leibniz and Kant. Or maybe I did "get" part of Kant and just didn't think it went anywhere. He seems to want to deny reality--but not really. He seems to waffle (a technical term in philosophy). Without a doubt, I grossly oversimplify when I remark that "the categorical imperative" seems like a very ornate version of the golden rule. When I got to the "monads" in Leibniz, I started laughing, and I apologize--for that for thinking that Berkeley is Plato Redux.

It's hard to overestimate Hegel's revolutionary (so to speak) ideas about history, but damn, his work is often impenetrable (to me, a mere poet, critic, and dabbler).

I could never quite connect with Nietzsche's work, either. I probably just needed a better philosophy professor--a better or more systematic introduction to his work. Or maybe I just imbibed too much of Aristotle-on-hubris to be anything other than suspicious about what appears to be the glorification of the will. What we think of as "the will" seems like something useful selected by evolution; it provides persistence and focus, among other things. But does it provide a worthy basis for understanding the world fully, for doing well and doing good? I don't know. But then Nietzsche wanted to move past good and evil--so there's that. I need to give Nietzsche at least one more try. This time maybe I'll confer with a Nietzsche-expert who happens to work on the same corridor as I.

I reckon the stuff I've read on Zen Buddhism doesn't really qualify as philosophy--or does it? Zen Buddhism seems to me to have anticipated almost all of Existentialism, but I'd wager there are some strong counter-arguments to that position. Anyway, my favorite Zen writer is Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.

Certainly St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas are more properly classified as theologians than as philosophers, but it is fascinating to watch their minds work as they reason on behalf of God and Christianity. When I read them, I feel as if I'm wandering around in a forest, not lost, by any means, but also not going in a straight line, the way one does with Descartes, say.

If he were alive, Spinoza wouldn't care that I became a Catholic several years ago because he wouldn't know or care who I was--I, a trivial micro-attribute. How to reconcile my great interest in Baruch's work with my Catholicism is an interesting problem--but also above my pay-grade.

Now that I have defamed several philosophers, my work is done here. Goodnight Baruch, wherever you are; by definition, you are with God--or is it of--God?

African American Books Slightly Under the Radar

I'm staying in the Black History Month (officially it started today) groove.

African American literature has become central to American literature, so the names Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin have the same literary heft as Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, and Ernest Hemingway.

At the edges of the limelight, however, are some fine books; they're not so well known, and maybe the same is true of their authors. In no particular order . . .:

The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem, by Rudolph Fisher. If you like detective fiction, you may already know this book, but if you somehow missed it, give it a read. Its plot is wonderfully structured, it mixes realism, comedy, and a bit of the gothic well, it has two (arguably, three) great detectives, and it present a memorable picture of Harlem in the 1930s. In addition to being a fine writer, Fisher was a physician. Unfortunately, he was a pioneer in X-ray technology, experimented on himself when the effects were still unknown, and contracted cancer, dying before he was thirty. Otherwise, a series would have developed from this novel. I've recommended the book on LibraryThing in several venues, and I may have noted it on the blog before, but another recommendation can't hurt. If you're a mystery-reader, are in one of those phases where you can't find "a good one" to read, and haven't read this one: go for it. A nice treat in Winter.

From the same era, Plum Bun, by Jessie Redmon Fauset. It's one of the better novels on the theme of passing, in my opinion, and its dissection of social class, desire, ambition, and romance (as well as racism) is worthy of Jane Austen; the book is that strong.

The poetry of Countee Cullen, also from the Harlem Renaissance. "Yet Do I Marvel" used to get taught in high schools, but I'm not sure it does anymore.

If Beale Street Could Talk, by James Baldwin. I think it's fair to say this is one of his least well known novels and books in general, but its quality is as good as that of Giovanni's Room and Another Country. He takes a chance by using a young woman as both protagonist and first-person narrator, but he just nails the narrative voice.

Black Ice, by Lorene Cary. An autobiography, much of which concerns her experience at an almost-all-white, extremely exclusive East Coast prep-school, at which she had earned a scholarship. The book's about 15 years old now, I think, but it is--among other things--highly pertinent to current presidential politics, where ethnicity, gender, and class are mixing it up in fascinating ways.

Harlem Redux, by Persia Walker. This is regarded as more of a popular novel than a literary one (whatever that distinction may mean). It came out around 2000, maybe a wee bit earlier, but it's set in the 1920s in Harlem, so it's an historical detective novel, with rich social texture. It may not be heavy enough for a reader fresh from a Morrison novel, but it's well written, smart, and immensely entertaining. Still available in paperback as far as I know.

Poem by William Stanley Braithwaite

Here is a poem by African American writer William Stanely Braithwaite (1878-1962) that I like:

Sic Vita

by William Stanley Braithwaite

Heart free, hand free,
Blue above, brown under
All the world to me
Is a place of wonder.
Sun shine, moon shine,
Stars, and winds a-blowing,
All into this heart of mine
Flowing, flowing, flowing!

Mind free, step free,
Days to follow after,
Joys of life sold to me
For the price of laughter.
Girl's love, man's love,
Love of work and duty,
Just a will of God's to prove
Beauty, beauty, beauty!

(first published 1908)

The rhetoric and language of Braithwaite's poetry are rarely this deliberately spare, stripped down. The poem reminds me of deliberately simplified paintings; for some reason, Chagall's work comes to mind, but I don't know how apt that comparison is.

Normally, the repetition of "beauty" followed by an exclamation point in a poem would make me nervous, but i think it works all right here. The poem seems to answer an unspoken question: "What are the basics of life, of human experience?" The poem seems both rhetorically and philosophically pithy, and althought the perspective is certainly adult, the landscape evoked by the poem reminds me of a children's book: blue above, brown below, keep it simple.

I did not see "Love of work and duty" coming, but I was glad to see it. Depending, of course, on the nature of the work and the duty, love of work and duty may be of basic importance to a good life, I'd argue. What does "Just a will of God's to prove" mean? It might mean that one has to live in order to live out or demonstrate whatever God's will is for one's life (and the poem assumes one believes in God). Or the line might be using "prove" as in "try" or "test." That is, "the exception that proves the rule" used to mean "the exception that tests the rule," not "the already accepted exception that we'll agree to ignore as we continue to abide by the rule." Anyway, I like the fact that the line seems as simple as the other lines but introduces some complexity there at the end.

It would be going way too far to suggest that there is something essentially "American" about the poem, but I do think there is a kind of American impulse to "get down to business," and Braithwaite may have had the impulse to list the basics of this life. I imagine I hear an American voice in the poem brusquely asking, "Okay, when we're talking about life, what are we really talking about, huh?"

I suppose Max Weber would perceive something quite Protestant in "Love of work and duty."

A final musing: Braithwaite's being born in the year after Reconstruction ended and having died after one major chapter in the Civil Rights Movement had occurred probably mean that he was astonished by some changes and dispirited by a lot of circumstances that remained the same. I wonder if he ever saw Jackie Robinson and/or Willie Mays play baseball--trivial in one sense, miraculous in another. Likewise (and not so likewise), I've always wondered if T.S. Eliot, who died in 1965 (if memory serves), listened to the Beatles, and if he did, what he thought about that. I assume he would have been unamused by the Beatles, but on the other hand, Tse Tse (as Ezra Pound called him) was the source of Broadway's Cats, so who knows? Maybe one of his biographers does. I'll have to check the index.

African American Writers: Some Favorites

Today a student asked me when I first became interested in African American literature. I told her, "When I was 16." I was hanging around high school after class--and not practicing a sport that day, for some reason--and I found James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time at the back of a classroom. I began reading it, and I couldn't believe how powerfully the writing confronted America's perpetual problem with race. I couldn't believe how good the writing was, even though I didn't have the terminology to describe what made it so good.

Oddly enough, I attended a suburban high school that was ethnically diverse. Mexican-Americans had been living in the town/small city (not far from Sacramento) for generations, many of them working for the railroad. Some of their families were the most venerable ones in town. Also, several African American students were in my graduating class, most of them from military families who lived at a nearby base. My lab-mate in "physical science" was one of them, we played football together, and we've kept in touch down through the years. He used to tease the hell out of me, and he still does at reunions.

The high school wasn't racism-free, of course, and I know I was especially oblivious to much of what the Black students must have had to endure, but social commerce among ethnicities was the rule, not the exception. So-called brown, white, and black students not only took classes together but were friends and were on teams and in clubs. Comparatively, at least, the high school seemed like an oasis in a nation deeply afflicted by racism and its effects, and in our freshman year, Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered.

I'd always been drawn more to rhythm & blues and "soul" music than to much of the rock and pop on the airwaves. When I first heard Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools," I could hardly believe my ears; it was just better and more interesting than any pop song I'd ever heard. I loved Motown records, too--and still recall that purple label on the vinyl. "Ain't that peculiar?"--as Marvin Gaye sang. I think the music enhanced my interest in African American literature.

Although I studied chiefly British literature in graduate school and wrote a dissertation on British poets from the 19th century, I kept up my reading of African American literature over the years, and eventually I wrote a book on Langston Hughes, and then another, and that led to work on The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature, which I edited with David Macey. It was a massive project--5 volumes--and much more work than we envisaged--but what an honor to be invited to edit it. Now that the volumes have been in print for a couple of years, thoughts of the constant work, deadline-missers, and endless details fade, and the fortune of having been asked to edit the thing shines brighter.

Among my favorite African American writers, in addition to the prolific, multifaceted, well known, but still under-rated Hughes, are Baldwin, of course--one of the greatest essayists in the English language, and no slouch at novels (Giovanni's Room and Another Country are my favorites, but If Beale Street Could Talk is a real sleeper); Rudolph Fisher (The Conjure Man Dies is a splendid detective novel--Denzel, if you're listening, turn it into a film); Rita Dove (she uses all the tools in the poet's toolbox); Sonya Sanchez (home-girls and hand-grenades is a fine book, with some extraordinarily inventive haiku, of all things); Countee Cullen (some of his lyric poems are perfect, including the perfect sonnet, "Yet Do I Marvel"); June Jordan (poet and essayist); and Elizabeth Keckley, once a slave, then a professional seamstress in D.C. who worked for the Lincolns and became very close to Mrs. Lincoln; Keckley's autobiography Behind The Scenes is fascinating, even as it was forced to adhere to some literary conventions of the era. I like some of Baraka's poetry and his essays on the blues and jazz.

Of course, there's no arguing with Ralph Ellison's monumental achievement in fiction, Invisible Man, one of the finest novels the U.S. has produced. Alice Walker's The Color Purple is terrific, and Morrison has joined the pantheon of great world writers. My favorite of hers is Solomon's Song.

One of numerous blessings that came from working on the encyclopedia was the chance to spend time with the work of writers who haven't been in the limelight. Lewis Alexander wrote some superb lyric poems, Ann Petry and Dorothy West some fine fiction, Chester Himes some great crime fiction, August Wilson's drama, and on and on. . . . Today in class we read compelling poetry by Angelina Weld Grimke and Anne Spencer. . . . . But this is merely to glance at a massive reservoir of literature--so much autobiography, drama, poetry, and fiction that even with 5 volumes available to us, we couldn't include all the writers and topics we wanted to include. I know they call February Black History Month, but secretly, I think of it as African American Literature Month because I'm selfish and "litero-centric," to coin a bad term, and it all started with the serendipity of finding Baldwin's book on a shelf at the back of a classroom. I'm sure glad I wasn't running wind-sprints for basketball or colliding with someone in the outfield that day.

Living and Writing

Arna Bontemps, great friend of Langston Hughes, novelist (he wrote Black Thunder, a fine historical novel), and poet, edited The Book of American Negro Poetry in 1963, and it became a highly regarded, oft-issued anthology, which he revised in 1973. It's still in print, in paperback, from Hill and Wang, and it contains many treasures, including this poem by Georgia Douglas Johnson:

The Poet Speaks

How much living have you done?
From it the patterns that you weave
Are imaged:
Your own life is your totem pole,
Your yard of cloth,
Your living.

How much loving have you done?
How full and free your giving?
For living is but loving
And loving only giving.

Beginning as it does with that question, we might think the poem will advance a customary view --namely, that in order to be a writer, you have to live first, and by "to live" is usually meant adventure, hard times, knocking about--perhaps heavy drinking, boxing, and watching bull-fights, a la Hemingway.

Instead the poem takes a different path and seems to suggest that what kind of living you do is entirely up to you, but that your life will be the material out of which your figurative weaving will be made. Richard Hugo, in The Triggering Town, expresses a similar view, cautioning writers not to take too seriously the alleged line between "the real world" and college. Hugo can speak with authority because he served in World War II, in a Flying Fortress Crew, and he worked for many years in "the real world" of the Boeing plant near Seattle. He urged writers to write not so much about their lives as from their lives, whatever and wherever those lives might be. He happened to find small obscure towns in the American west an important part of his life--towns that triggered his imagination.

The second stanza of Johnson's poem offers another great surprise; she shift to the topic of loving, which seems to be even more important than life. In other words, she asks, "How generous have you been?'' You don't see people linking generosity and art that often. More often, you see them making excuses for artists. If they're rotten people, it's okay, as long as the art is good.

Then Johnson demystifies loving. It's "only giving," she tells us. Wonderful. Yes, we can all imagine other attributes we might ascribe to loving, but it's hard to quibble with her fundamental definition. Put another way, if you take "giving" from "loving," does "loving" still exist? Does it hold on to its integrity?

We often look to anthologies as books that collect the famous poems and hit the high spots, but they may be more valuable for the not-so-famous poems they include, the overlooked gems, the surprises.

Toward Black History Month

As we head toward Black History Month, let's break out some determined optimism and envisage this century as the one in which the U.S. finally gets--in the parlance of the 1960s--its shit together with regard to race in general and, at long last, full African American citizenship in particular, not to mention poverty, health-care, education, and a foreign policy that looks vaguely sane. Let's also hope the horrors of war, famine, and displacement in some parts of the African continent will vanish soon.

One of James Baldwin's favorite words to describe the American dilemma of "race" was "conundrum": a kind of insoluble riddle. I think he might have looked at the events surrounding the Jena Six, juxtaposed against the candidacy of Barack Obama (and his primary-victory in S.C., with 25% of the white Democratic vote), as a conundrum. Is there progress or not? That is and always has been the question; yes and no have always been the answer.

I'm a spectator on a listserv (that word bugs me) on which "progressives" chat, and a while back several of the participants allowed as how they'd given up hope on the U.S. I decided to respond, and I wrote that if African Americans haven't given up, why should any of us? Who's had it worse than they? An African American colleague wrote an email (outside the list) to me and thanked me for making that point. I appreciated the thanks, but let's be real: the point was--or should have been--painfully obvious. White progressives, and white conservatives, for that matter, get a bit whiny. "Nobody knows the trouble they've seen": yeah, right.

And as we head--one hopes with optimism--into another Black History Month, let's appreciate some mighty fine literature, including Lerone Bennett's history, Before the Mayflower; James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, which includes some of the best extended American essays ever written; the well known but still under-valued poetry, prose, drama (etc.) of Langston Hughes; the masterpieces in fiction of James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison; and more recent poetry by Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Sonya Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Amiri and Ras Baraka, Robert Hayden, Lucille Clifton, Gil Scott Heron, Natasha Trethewey--and so many more.

And since, in the words of Langston Hughes, we're "still here," let's use our time wisely (my first-grade teacher liked that phrase) and do some good. It couldn't hurt. Optimism is foolish, but it's the right kind of foolishness. In first grade, I received an "S," as opposed to a "U," next to "uses time wisely," so I have some history going for me. Peace be with you.

Look For the Union Label

I don't think I've ever seen a union label, per se, although I know I've consumed food harvested by unionized workers and driven cars made by members of an auto-workers' union. It's difficult to pinpoint when labor-unions first arose because they were preceded by guilds, but in England a kind of union arose in 1838 with an organization, in London, of "Working Men." Its primary focus was voting-reform, I gather. Not until 1833 had child-labor in factories been made illegal.

The OED online includes these early published references to "labor unions":

1866 in Documentary Hist. Amer. Industr. Society (1910) IX. 133 Each member belonging to the National *Labor Union.

1884 J. HAY Bread-Winners xi. 183 The labor unions have ordered a general strike.

I think I have unions on my mind because Senator Obama was a labor-organizer, and Senator Clinton's having sat on the Wal-Mart Board (apparently she was a thorn in the Board's side) has become an issue. Meanwhile, the Republicans seem content to leave "the union vote" (whatever that may mean) to the Democrats, and in my profession, college-teachers who aren't in tenure-line positions have been joining unions.

Also, we've been watching a BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens' Hard Times, in which the factory-owner and fabricator of a rugged childhood, Josiah Bounderby, opposes unions. As usual, Dickens tends to shy away from broader structural or political issues and makes everything exceedingly personal, so that one of the characters is sympathetic to the union, speaks forcefully against Bounderby and on the plight of workers, but doesn't join the union because he promised someone once that he wouldn't (and is therefore shunned by his "brothers"). The man's personal code of honor trumps his sense of solidarity. Bounderby fires him anyway, so the man takes off across the countryside to look for work--and falls into coal-mining pit camouflaged by rotten wood and weeds. He dies, but not right away. Dickens loves to squeeze the melodramatic juice out of his plots. The production is a bit long in the tooth; the late Alan Bates plays Bounderby and does a nice job. Published in the same year as Origin of Species (1859), Hard Times is Dickens' send-up of utilitarian education, phony "self-made" tycoons, and the savagery of industrialized England. Tom Gradgrind is the schoolmaster-turned-politician.

Does England have a screen-actors' guild? I assume so, but I need to look for the union label on the DVD-case.

An Image Almost Too Good For Its Own Poem

I ran across a poem by D.H. Lawrence I hadn't read before: "People." When I saw the title, I thought of the song that Streisand made famous, but Lawrence's poem goes in a different direction, to put it mildly.

People

by D.H. Lawrence

THE great gold apples of light
Hang from the street's long bough
Dripping their light
On the faces that drift below,
On the faces that drift and blow
Down the night-time, out of sight
In the wind's sad sough.

The ripeness of these apples of night
Distilling over me
Makes sickening the white
Ghost-flux of faces that hie
Them endlessly, endlessly by
Without meaning or reason why
They ever should be.

(Some of the lines are supposed to be indented, but alas, the blog-machinery is single-minded when it comes to the left margin.)

I think of this lyric as Lawrence's counterpart to Eliot's The Waste Land, and especially to one of Eliot's recurring images: the crowd flowing over London Bridge. Although the intensity of Lawrence's and Eliot's dissatisfaction with modern civilization was about the same, their reasons differed. Lawrence believed people had become worn down, domesticated, and enervated by modern existence. He wanted people to be more earthy and spontaneous, and although he hated how lethal labor could be (he grew up in coal-mining country), he never thought himself above the working class into which he was born. Eliot, on the other hand, believed modern society had cut itself off from nourishing roots of faith, tradition, and order. Working-class folk seemed to repulse him, and middle-class folk were a target of his satire. Eventually, he'd proclaim himself a royalist, an Anglican, and a literary conservative.

The image of the streetlight-as-apple is so surprisingly good, however, that it almost displaces the rest of the poem. I almost don't want to hear about those people on the street who don't know why they're alive and whose faces are made ghastly and ghostly by the gaslight. It's a sly image, too, because it likely induces many readers to think of the Edenic apple.

When I think of this poem later, I'll think of that apple-image, and--taking nothing away from Eliot's masterpiece--I'll smile at how efficiently Lawrence's lyric evokes its own kind of waste land. And I may even remember the title (which has nothing to do with that captivating image), and thus hear Barbra's voice.

What's The Matter With God?

I was reading a fine blog I've added to my list--it's called the Hyperborean--in which the author was discussing agnosticism, more specifically agnostic materialism, which might be defined as a state of accepting what science tells us about reality (a.k.a. matter) and of not believing much else, except that we have to keep on keeping on (breakfast, job, sleep, blogging, philosophy, golf, video poker, scratching itches, etc.) The blog included a nice paraphrase of an observation by Lyotard (French writers get all the great names, those bastards--emphasis on the second syllable):

"As Lyotard wrote in The Postmodern Condition, even the story we tell ourselves about the progress of science to deliver mankind from veils of ignorance has failed to foster the confidence that we really know what we're talking about when we try to explain what matter is made out of."

Put another way, it's amusing to observe Science coming up with new explanations that not only replace old explanations but also sometimes replace the premises of old explanations. "Did I say the visual model of the atom was 'planetary'? I'm sorry. I meant to say that it wasn't planetary; also, trying to draw a model of an atom is folly. There. Now we can proceed!"

Since I'm self-centered and a poet (was that a redundancy I just heard go off?), the Lyotard/Hyperborean idea made me think of a short poem I've posted here before:

Units: An Introduction

Everything is made
of little units, which
are made of even smaller
units. The smallest units,
undetectable by us, are
reality. All units larger
than these are rearrangement,
illusion, phony structure.
They constitute a kind
of molecular cinema
watched by us and
understood by God,
who is exempt from
the unit-arrangement.

--Hans Ostrom

And then I thought of the "agnostic" context of Hyperborean's blog, so I recalled a self-interview poem (I refer the reader to the comment concerning "self-centered" above):

Self-Interview on the Subject of God

Have I seen evidence of God?
I think so. Have I seen
God? I don’t know. Will
I see God? I think so. How
will I know? Oh, I’ll know.
What does God have to do
with anything? Well, God
has to do with everything, so
anything must be no trouble
for God. Do I have doubts?
Yes. Are my doubts a threat
to God? Be serious. On what
basis do I believe in God? Yes.

--Hans Ostrom

When asked, I describe myself as a Catholic because I became one in 2000, but because I arrived late to the Judeo/Greco/Roman/Jesuit party, and also for temperamental reasons, I'm a Catholic of the Keep It Simple, Stupid variety (my name for it, not the Pope's, in case you hadn't guessed): Apostle's Creed, Mass, the Lord's Prayer and what else Jesus had to say (he wasn't meek; remember: he was a threat to all established power in sight), social justice, and keep a close, unamused eye on your self-importance (especially, but not exclusively, if you're a self-centered poet). That's it. Nothing fancy. If the Vatican writes my parish and orders that something in the Mass should be done this way and not that way, my parish and I make the adjustment and move on.

My parish is a Jesuit one, therefore suspect, socially minded, and quirky. A person who moved to another parish in Tacoma was once quoted as saying, "I'm sick of St. Leo Parish--all they do is talk about helping poor people!" The Parish did not take the remark personally but had a good collective belly-laugh at the ironic truth. A colleague told me that some 25 years ago, he went to Mass at St. Leo, and a person from the Puyallup Nation "processed" (walked) into the Mass with the priest, in full head-dress, etc. The colleague found this outlandish, distasteful, risible, and wrong and apparently hasn't been back to St. Leo since. I don't quibble with his choice, and I'd only observe that the parish no doubt simply had invited the man to be a guest that day. I doubt if anyone in attendance except my colleague saw anything remarkable, disruptive, or radical about the guest's presence; that is, it would not have been seen as a protest an act of heresy or a quasi-political performance. Mass would have proceeded apace.

I spend almost no energy on the disputes that often seem to fracture and distract the Church, and I leave the serious Judging up to God (including who is in God's favor and who isn't; for instance, I would never assume that anyone who is not a Christian or a Catholic wouldn't be in God's favor; to do so would be mightily presumptuous, obviously, as would assuming that Christians/Catholics are in God's favor). I have to confess--no, not that kind of confession, which Catholics don't do much any more, by the way; they reconcile--that I'm also influenced by the writings of Baruch Spinoza (who amused neither the official Catholics or the traditional Jews of his era, and maybe not of this day, either), Dorothy Day (the Catholic Worker Movement; she was decidedly un-meek [wink], too); Henry J. M. Nouwen; The Cloud of Unkowing; and Jack Miles, who wrote God: A Biography, one thesis of which is that the arrival, appearance, work, life, and death of Jesus represented "a crisis in the life of God." I'll let Jack explain that one.

Keep It Simple, Stupid. Today I'll need to get help to construct the Latin for that. It will make a nice pairing with Rene's (I told you they got all the great names) Cogito, ergo sum.

God works in mysterious ways, for at least two reasons. First, why on Earth (so to speak) wouldn't God's ways be mysterious to us? Second, look what God has to work with. Just ask Lyotard.

By the way, to any poets, self-centered and otherwise, out there who derive pleasure from writing poems based on prompts or "challenges" given to them: a self-interview poem, on almost any topic and certainly in any form, comes highly recommended.

(poems from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006).

Politics and Language

At the beginning of my teaching career, I taught George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" every semester. It had been an iconic essay for a long time by then, and it may well have been at the peak of its popularity among teachers of writing. It is still well known, of course, but I don't know how widely it's used now. I haven't read it in years, but if memory serves, one of Orwell's main theses is that politicians and bureaucrats degrade language so that they may cover up mistakes, wrongdoing, corrupt motives, and/or evil, that consumers of such language (not just readers but listeners and now viewers) swallow the deceptive language and maybe regurgitate it themselves, and that a cycle of language-degradation ensues.

It's both amusing and depressing to examine political language through the Orwell lens from time to time, especially if you're a poet or otherwise work closely with words. Or if you just get sick of politicians.

For example, if John McCain were truly on the "Straight Talk Express," wouldn't he use straight talk and refer to the vehicle as a "bus"? Only someone on the Crooked Talk Express would refer to the bus as the Straight Talk Express, according to Orwell's thinking.

Every candidate invokes "the American people." Which ones? It's ludicrous to speak of the American people as a single unit.

"Sanctity of life." This seems to be uttered most often by people who favor capital punishment and oppose abortion, so it seems to refer to sanctity of the life of my choice (I choose an unborn baby over a murderer), but I thought they were against choice? I wish Huckabee or someone like him would come out against capital punishment because I would enjoy the reactions to such consistency.

The Dems seem to prefer "progressive" to "liberal" now. I guess 20 years of getting beaten over the head with "liberal" by Newt Gangrene will do that. But what does "progressive" mean? Aren't we all moving forward (chronologically) whether we like it or not? One of them should claim to be a "freeze-frame" Democrat, just for grins. Ron Paul seems to be "regressive" (no offense intended), in the sense that he wants to go back to the gold standard and such. I love the way his competitors just shake their heads when he speaks instead of taking on his arguments. They're so condescending. I have no idea if he's right or wrong most of the issues, but how can he be wrong when he says we can't afford to go to war? The ledger seems to prove him right. I just wish they'd argue with him straight up. He's no more loony than the others.

"Health care." This is Orwellian. Don't we want doctors to care for our illnesses, or for us as we have illnesses? When I'm healthy, I don't need care that much--how about you? "Managed care" is even worse. When I was growing up, we visited a general practitioner in a town 70 miles away. You sat in his office until it was your turn to see him. He greeted everybody pleasantly and took on whatever affliction arrived that day. His nurse "managed" the office by telling people when they could go in. That non-managed care seemed to work better than the labyrinths we enter now, but I hasten to add that the advances in medicine have been astonishing, so we must give scientists, docs, and especially those savvy nurses their due. But anyway, I liked "going to the doctor" as opposed to "seeking health care." The former is so concrete.

"Surge." Please. Classic Orwell. Just say "more soldiers and more tours for current soldiers." "Surge" makes it sound all dramatic and wave-like, and it assumes success. More troops means more troops will get killed. During the Viet Nam War, "escalation" was one similar buzzword. "Cut and run." A hideous phrase. It refers, I believe, to men and women in battle who retreat in a hurry, chiefly because they have deduced the battle is hopeless. Sounds like good sense to me. It sounded that way to Lincoln, too. He had to sign every execution-order for deserters, and he confessed that, for him, the most difficult cases (some of whom he didn't have killed, which is less Orwellian that "execute") were what he called "the leg men": men who ran away from slaughter. Lincoln assumed he might do the same thing. "Cut and run" seems to be used most often by people who haven't served in the military. In fact, I don't know that I've heard McCain use the phrase, even though he supported sending more troops--and he does sink to using Bush's word, "Surge." I would never presume to use the phrase except to quote it because I've never been in battle.

"Compassionate conservative." As opposed to the mainstream conservatives, who are--one infers--cruel? If you have to add that adjective, then there's trouble to begin with. Same goes for Dems who use "fiscal conservative." One would hope (and be insane to do so) that all of Congress would be fiscally conservative, just like everyone on a budget in the U.S. But of course, no one in Congress is a fiscal conservative (even Ron Paul) because the system absolutely depends on getting money for one's district--fast, because the term is only two years. It really is an insane system. Every other term for every congressperson should be declared a "pork-free" term when s/he is prevented from advocating for pork. If s/he's not re-elected to that term, the new person has to be pork free for her/his first term; no one escapes the pork-free two years. By the way, how did the poor pigs get associated with this practice? They work hard for living, snorting mud and eating all manner of slop--cheerfully! (They sound like us citizens.) Again, if you have to use the adjective "fiscal," you're suspect.

The "war on the middle class." Lou Dobbs likes this as much as he hates what he calls "illegal aliens," which I assume are beings from outer space whose saucers fly across the Mexican or Canadian borders and break the saucer speed-limit. Yes, I know it's hard being middle-class, raising a family, paying rent or a mortgage, and so on. But, by definition, it's even harder to be working class or in poverty. So it's really a war on the poor, a fierce skirmish with the middle class, and a dinner-date with the ruling class, which really does rule, when you think about. Bullshit talks and money walks, as they say.

A tip of the cap, then, to John Edwards, even though he doesn't have a prayer and is as much a politician as the next person. At least he's clear-eyed enough to see that, of course, those who are poor and those who are underpaid are the ones in real trouble, and he argues that the government needs to help them first and most. This seems incontrovertible. What exactly he would do to get them help, I'm not sure, but his plan for paying for "health care" seems in danger of adding up. But he's not getting near the White House, unless someone appoints him to the cabinet.

What about Huckabee and his assertion that we need to adjust the Constitution to God's view? That presumes we can know for sure what God's view is, so I'm wary of that. I mean, I know we have lots of religious texts, but nonetheless, it's humans interpreting the texts. And which texts are we supposed to use? Only the Bible? Only the New Testament? Or a wide array of revealed texts?

Also, if we agree with Huck, why not just can the Constitution (Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes have all taken a shot at it--Clinton, too, I guess) and use the Bible? Thomas Jefferson must be rolling over underneath his slave-dependent plantation; wasn't he terrified of linking government with any religion too strongly? But give Huckabee credit. He was apparently saying what he meant. He wasn't on the Eric Blair Express. Or was he?

"Trickle-down" economics. There's a blast from the past. Believe it or not, people accepted the phrase as describing a good thing! Right--so if I'm a working stiff in Reagan's America, I can count on drops of wealth trickling on me, like dirty water from a plumbing leak in the ceiling? Gee, that sounds great! People bought it. I'm afraid Orwell was right.

Publishing Is Strange

Today's desultory miscellany concerns publishing. Now that we have "the internets," anything can get published any time, if we take "published" to mean simply "made public." --Well, perhaps I should say anything but important information about what the federal government is up to. Much of that never seems to see the light of cyber-day.

At the same time, publishing in printed form is not that easy. It's a wonder anything gets published in that form. Writers chase agents who chase publishers who chase profits. Many want to write, many want to make a profit from publishing, but how many really want to read, when there are so many other things to do? (One lovely aspect of LibraryThing is that it is a cyber-place where die-hard readers hang out.) Publishing companies have become micro-units of immense corporations, so that which is published is an economic afterthought.

Around the turn of the century, I was working on a college textbook with two colleagues. In the course of about a year, as we wrote the textbook, the company that had given us the contract was purchased twice, and one consequence was that we kept getting different--and less experienced--editors. Somehow the book still got published. If I remember correctly, Rupert Murdoch bought the company that owned the college division, but allegedly he either wasn't interested in college publishing or didn't think it was profitable enough (even though it is profitable), so he sold the college "wing" to another corporation.

Agents seem more accessible now because of the internet, but in fact they may be less accessible to Joe and Jane Writer. It used to be relatively easy for writers at least to get an agent to consider a query and look at pages of a manuscript, but I think there are too many manuscripts, too few agents, and too few markets for most kinds of writing now. Romance novels, mystery novels, and a variety of nonfiction dominate the market; just look at the layout of Borders and Barnes and Noble, and you can see what the store thinks will sell. Literary fiction is getting squeezed out; poetry has all but disappeared, except for small magazines, small, independent publishers, and a few recycled greats like Shakespeare, Eliot, Frost, and Yeats. How many ordinary citizens know who won the most recent Pulitzer Prize in poetry?

Publishing in academia has always been a vexed subject. There is the "publish or perish" adage, but there are also lots of practices, conventions, and quirks beneath the surface of the adage. One must publish articles in "refereed" journals; one must publish books with certain kinds of publishers; it is still preferable in some fields for one to work alone and not collaborate on a book; it is preferable to write a book as opposed to editing one; it is preferable to publish with this university press but not that one; and so on.

Who actually reads academic writing? In theory, academics, but I do wonder how many people in a given field actually read article x in journal y, all the way through. I wonder how often the number doesn't break double digits.

Poets, bless our hearts, have long been accustomed to a rotten publishing market. We know that those who read and write poetry are part of an underground culture. We know we'll never make money and will, if you add up the postage, probably lose money. We know about Dickinson, who published one or two poems in her lifetime and was essentially wary of publishing. We know that almost all of Hopkins' work appeared posthumously and that Blake (among others) self-published. It is probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that poets write because, at some level, they must, and whether their work finds an audience is a separate matter. Fiction-writers and playwrights may be more focused on audiences, from the beginning of the process, than are poets--but I hesitate to generalize beyond poetry.

I'm shocked I've published so much. But then I remember that a curriculum vitae is a bit like a stalagmite. The publications accumulate slowly, steadily, drip, drip, and after a decade or two, the list of publications starts to look substantial. But then if you divide publications by years, the list doesn't look so impressive. Moreover, I'm a horizontal publisher, in the sense that I've always been interested in writing in many different genres, whereas some writers stick to one and only one genre: and more power to them (also in the sense that sometimes I write lying down, so if it's fiction, I lie lying down [wink]).

Probably some writers actually enjoy the process of, the business of, publishing, but it's astonishing how many famous, well published writers dread working with agents, editors, and publishers, and if you're not well published and famous, you'll have even less leverage and control, and so the process is more likely to be painful, one way or another. I treat the sending out of manuscripts, the querying of agents and publishers, and the working with editors as jobs, as duties. But that part of writing is, to exhume an old piece of slang, a drag. I think it may have bee Peter Vierek (but I'm not sure) who said, "I like writing; it's the paperwork I can't stand." Writers like to write, editors like to edit, publishers like to make money. The three are forced to work together; it's been that way since Gutenberg started this madness. But all three are from different worlds. Like most writers, I just like to write; the rest is a bit tedious, cumbersome, and even absurd. Nonetheless, to get readers, one does need to engage in publishing, and publishing is strange.

Ipoding and Memories of Mox Stark

Somebody gave me an Ipod, one of the small ones, about six months ago, and the gizmo has won me over.

I went through almost all of our CDs and skimmed off the cream, although in some cases I've loaded on whole albums. I've purchased some songs from the Ipod store, too. But it's taken me all this time to get up to 338 "songs"; some of these are recorded poems, most from a Harlem Renaissance collection on which Ice-T reads "If We Must Die" and Quincy Jones reads, "I've Known Rivers, and on which are some great recordings of blues and jazz from the 1920s. My son probably filled up his first Ipod in a week.

My list is dominated by jazz, blues, and rhythm & blues. There's some rock & roll, a handful of pop songs, some gospel, and some classical. My selections in the latter category are frightfully predictable, I fear: mostly Chopin, Bach, and Mozart. The jazz is old school: Ellington, Hawkins, Coltrane, Davis, Brubeck, Tatum, for example.

I have a few selected tunes by Elvis, and one album by Sinatra--with Count Basie at the Sands, recorded live in the mid-sixties. I like his voice from that period, and Basie's band swings with a harder edge than Nelson Riddle's orchestra. Before an instrumental interlude in "I've Got You Under My Skin," Sinatra warns the audience: "Run and hide. Run for cover." Actually, he says, " Run fuh covah," with some New Jersey mustard.

There are lots of odds and ends, including Edwin Starr's song, "War," and "18 With a Bullet," which was revived by "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels." I also have Son House's version of the old slave song, "John the Revelator." The song and his performance transfix me every time. Pure delta blues.

There's a bit of country, but it's mostly Johnny Cash, old and young (Sun Records and Rick Rubin). Astonishingly, I have no Beatles and no Stones. However, I included a whole album by Hank Penny, known as the master of country be-bop. His music mixes country, country swing, and jazz, and he has a sense of humor, to say close to the least, so some of the songs come close to novelty, but he played with some terrific musicians. The band includes a clarinet and an accordion, as well as a fiddle. I first heard his "Bloodshot Eyes" on a 78 rpm my father played. The lyrics are gritty, poetic, and hilarious. They include the following:

Don't expect me to dress you up in satin and in silk.
Your eyes look like two cherries in a glass of buttermilk.

When I heard those lines at age 7 or 8, I absolutely adored the image conveyed by the simile, which still seems perfect to me.

More lines:

Your eyes look like a road map, and I'm afraid to smell your breath.
You better shut your peepers before you bleed to death.

And

It seems our little romance has finally simmered down.
You ought to join the circus. You'd make a real good clown.

My dad liked this song and Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues," because, I suspect, they struck him as authentic--and they sounded new. His good friend Mox Stark--a hard man--had done time for shooting a man. The man had shot at him first, but Mox got sent up for manslaughter nonetheless. Apparently Mox came to see the guy about money, got up to the door, and was shot at. Mox walked to his car, got his gun, came back to the house, and killed the guy--not just "to watch him die," certainly, but nonetheless: cold and hard. He probably could have driven away, but he made a different choice--and went to prison for several years. Mox visited us once every summer, unannounced. For some reason, he really liked my dad.

Mox had a strong sense of justice. Once he told me that he'd worked on a big dam--it might have been Hoover Dam or Grand Coulee Dam--with pick and shovel and wheelbarrow. Mox reported than one of the foremen was a tyrant, and the foreman struck an older worker. Mox beat up the foreman and told him he'd kill him if he touched the older man again--at least that's what Mox told me. I believed him. Mox had only one good eye--the other one may have gotten damaged in prison. The bad eye perpetually wept--leaked, if you will--and Mox dabbed at it with his handkerchief, but the affliction didn't seem to cramp his style. He seemed to drive all over the western states during the summer.

I was listening to my Ipod in a cafe, and I saw a co-worker, and she asked, "Are you Ipoding?" I love American English. It absorbs new things immediately and manufactures new verbs, in this case the present progressive phrased as an interrogative. Back to Ipoding I go.

The Comedy of Dining

So we went out to dinner in T-Town, to one of the "districts." Tacoma's quite good with districts--several blocks of shops, restaurants, and cafes in a distinct neighborhood, a good alternative to strip-mall syndrome.

We went to a genuINE (as they used to say in the west) bistro, run by a native of Italy who sings arias as he cooks. The host is Italian, too, and we got there so early that there was no wait-staff, so the host waited table. 'Trouble is, the CD player went nuts, so every CD he played skipped. When it first occurred, the chef/owner/aria-singer shouted, "He fell offa the stage!"--referring to the recorded performer. ("The 'offa' was not feigned; he really talks that way.)

The host is a linear thinker, not a multi-tasker, so he forgot about our drinks while he toiled on the CD player. At a nearby table sat two people who had left their enormous, mellow (and yellow, as it happens) dog outside. The dog stared at them and us, for we were all seated near the window. They had given him some food from the restaurant in a little box, it looked like. Everything was fine until the dog threw up on the sidewalk--really gooey white vomit, which he barfed patiently in puddles that made a wide arc. Two at our table couldn't watch, but for some reason, I was fascinated. One of the dog's owners said, "Oh, my," but did not otherwise show concern, go outside to check on the dog, or offer to clean up the barf. There may be an emblematic difference here between dog-owners and cat-owners. Cat-owners are often ashamed of their cat's behavior, and the cat is almost always ashamed of his or her owners' behavior. Also, I have yet to meet a cat who would wait on the sidewalk while his or her owners dined. The cat would be long gone--or would make such a scene that he or she would be admitted into the restaurant, look at the menu, and sniff disappointment.

Finally we got the host's attention and mentioned the drinks. Mortified, he cried, "I so sorry!" The absence of a verb was charming. The chef yelled at him to turn off the skipping CD player. The host then disappeared behind a curtain in back and appeared to text-message someone--no doubt a waiter or waitress who was late to work. Finally our drinks arrived, and the food was great--I had halibut in a white wine/lemon/caper sauce, on top of fresh, sauteed spinach.

Outside, the dog lay down, his shiny coat just inches from the vomit-arc. Children walking by were, like me, fascinated by the barf. Their parents were alarmed. The dog's owners finally got up and left and took the dog away.

Our check came, and two of us had an extended, confused, farcical "argument" about which credit card to use--like Lucy and Ricky, or is it Rickey? The third in our party looked at us in mildly embarrassed amazement.

As we left, the wine-vendor backed into the place with a hand-truck full of wine-cases, and one of us almost got run over. At that moment, the waiter showed up, squeezing through the doorway. The host and chef yelled their good-byes to us, laughing.

--Dinner out, in T-Town. There's a poem or two in there, no doubt.