VPOTUS CHENEY's (untitled)

VPOTUS CHENEY’s (untitled)
memoirs (due out in 2011)
of his fed.gov years under
POTUSes Ford & Bush2
contain “a lot of interesting
stories that ought to be told;

I want my grandkids,
20 or 30 years from now
to be able to read it &
understand what I did,
& why I did it.”

A duplicitous grandad,
CHENEY just wants
to double-damn Dubya
& the Democrats. [QED]

(28 DEC 09, Santa Clara CA)v3; (quotes verbatim.)

"Nine"

The day after Xmas, I went with Ginny Zeitman & Ivo Adam, an Italian friend of ours who was a teenager in Milano in 1965, to see the new film "Nine" based on a newish play based on Fellini's film "8 1/2" (1965): Daniel Day-Lewis plays an anguished, imaginatively burnt-out Fellini @ 50 wonderfully; semi-clown Fellini would have envied looking as craggily anguished as Day-Lewis does. Ivo noted there are none of the usual Fellini clowns in it (unless, of course, you insist on considering Day-Lewis as a tragic clown.)

Here's Ivo's Italo-historico take on the film:

Bill, I think the reason "pundits - experts" fail to appreciate NINE is that they are looking at it as a musical without considering its Italian character.. For a (non-Italian) critic, this movie is a musical which could be set in the South Pacific...or Chicago... (but) it's Italian Teatro Del'Arte. When one sees Fellini, one sees a modern Goldoni, Servitore di due Padroni...rather than a "West Side Story"...I am glad we went...

Ivo Adam
455E Charleston Road Apt A321 Palo Alto CA 94306 (408) 627-3333

Just Buckyballs

Clearing horny nails
of invisible microdots
with a nanodigital file,
our new cyberczar
claims it can be done
safely & securely. We’re
bemused when he says
it’s all just Buckyb@lls!

(22 DEC 09, Santa Clara CA)v6

GO-slow Party

No longer obfuscating
things done under Dubya,
radical Republicans play
GO-slow Party, saying:

“Let’s do...Nothing!”
about global warming,
about health-care
costing anything.

The less they do now,
the more they block;
the more they block,
the worse things get.


(10 DEC 09, Santa Clara CA)v4

Life Goes

If allowed to, Life goes on.
Where it goes depends on
much I haven't thot of
but also much I have.
While living my Life, I think
it lives inside & around me.
When I die, I'll find out
if & how my Life goes on...
if my Life goes...where I go...


(06 DEC 09, Santa Clara CA)v7

Looking for No (now take a deep breath, exhaling) Trouble

A friend of mine has just come back home to S.F. after a stressful year+ of working in the federal appeals court system in Louisville KY, and is now doing zen meditation & Pilates/cardio. Over 70, she's been told by the instructor she already looks 65. Why? Stress-reduction. I think I, too, can finally see the virtuous stress-vanishing point of zen&yoga (as carolin used to say) - "Don't go looking for trouble" but rather instead: Go looking for No (now take a deep-breath, exhaling) Trouble. For the last few years I've written heart-stressing poetry (against the Bad Guys, esp. Cheney&Co.), so maybe it's finally time for me to also learn how to write some heart-healing poetry (for myself, as one of the Good Guys.) My heart & I deserve this life-saving break. "2 stents" (below, post of Thurs Nov. 26 ) is my 1st poem of this type. My therapist has just asked my permission to use it in his practice; I'm glad to hear that I've written a 'healing' poem! Perhaps I can use it to help heal myself!

Short-poem version of above:

Carolin often warned me
not to "go looking for trouble"
& I almost never listened to her;

now, after my heart-attack,
I'm finally looking for No More
(now take a deep breath, exhaling)

Trouble.

(05 DEC 09, Santa Clara CA) 

hunning

When my children Maya & Alex (both now 45) were in grammar-school (in the '70s) in Brookline MA, an upscale town next to Boston, they often used the slang word ‘hunning’ to mean overdoing anything physically: visualize Arnold Schwarzenegger playing the role of Conan the Barbarian, presumably a Dark Age Hunnic tribesman. I finally realize (at 67) that I’ve been mentally & physically 'hunning' since 17; my recent angioplasty & stents have brought me to a sober realization that I can't 'hun' anymore with impunity. I've been told by the cardiologist that did the angioplasty not to overexert myself, & not to lift over 10 lbs (which my Maine 'coon cat' Reggie probably weighs by now). That's a dynamic restriction I never expected to have to observe, so it finally makes me cautious about my long-ingrained habit of 'hunning' as truly dangerous to my heart & life. This may seem banal to some of you reading this, but this serious realization has come late in my life, at an age my father didn't live to see (he died at 64.5 in 1976, of a cerebral haemorrage caused by high BP he had never bothered to have diagosed & treated.) I, however, have been treated for high BP since the '70s (beginning at Harvard Vanguard HMO in Wellesley MA) & I'm still alive to say so. Now my 'hunning' must be confronted & eliminated...in all the usual ways, but this time, by me.

Thanksgiving biochemistry

Turkey’s L-tryptophan
travels in our bloodstream
from our digestive system
to our brain, changing
into serotonin,
calming us down,
helping us sleep.
It only makes us snooze
if eaten w/out amino acids;
but turkey-protein contains
amino acids, so why
do we snooze so?

(01 DEC 09, Santa Clara CA)v2

2 stents

With 2 stents slid
in2 my heart, my body's
micro-tune's changed:

its tone's different: lay
your head on my chest
& listen...

(27 NOV 09, Thanksgiving Day, Santa Clara CA)v4
"Lay...chest" thanks to Norcal poet Karl Kadie.

cUPPa COCOA

Sipping hot cocoa
after waking in Fall
in lightly chilly Norcal,

all my memories of
New England's chill
evaporate mercifully

abovea cUPPa cocoa.

(19 NOV 09, Santa Clara CA)v7

BRUS SELS

BRUS
SELS
or
A DAY w/O INTERNET (11 NOV 09, Armistice Day)


On Armistice Day, stymied w/o internet access from home, I wondered how I would manage.

Watching DW-TV (Deutsche Welle) I saw that the report from Brussels was backgrounded with a large

BRUS
SELS

making me wonder whether the origins of the city were an ancient Roman salt-spring, producing Selter(s)wasser, that is, soda-water. Or was DW-TV just indulging in a typographical spass (joke) by breaking Brussels in half - as Belgium is, culturally & linguistically.

Unlikely, but w/out access to Google, I felt stymied here in my apt., so I consulted my reference books at hand:

My little 1-vol NEW MODERN ENCYCLOPEDIA (Wm. H. Wise, NYC, 1943) doesn’t mention Brussels’ linguistic origins. Neither did the Compact OED (readable only by magnifying-glass.) Nor did Harrap’s MODERN COLLEGE FRENCH-ENGLISH DICTIONARY, nor THE NEW CASSEL’S GERMAN DICTIONARY. For now, I gave up.

Finally, a week later, with my access to the internet restored, I googled Brussels, immediately clicking on Wikipedia:

The most common theory for the etymology of Brussels is that it derives from the Old Dutch Broeksel or other spelling variants, which means marsh (broek) and home (sel) or "home in the marsh".

So much for sel as salt-spring. Ah, wonderful Wikipedia, once reached.

POPPIN' JOHNNY

George Wallace: POPPIN' JOHNNY (104pp, 6"x9"; Three Rooms Press, www.threeroomspress.blogspot.com; New York, USA; paperback, cover & interior design by Kat Georges, www.katgeorges.com; USD$15.)

Subtitled "New American Poems", George Wallace's latest collection of 73 poems ends (not begins) with the title poem, "Poppin' Johnny" spoken by (it appears) an American hillbilly on a high:

i am on my way
i shoot through clouds
thay are better than your jesus
heaven ain't just any heaven
it's my heaven and yes
i soar over apartments
i spit on your factories
they are irrelevant to me
i live up here, above wheat fields
and the pinetop mountain
i sparkle like the fourth of july
i am not like you
with your indecent necklaces
i am not like the others
with their home improvement lives
i fly the straight beeline
i do the big loop-di-loop
that's right i take to the sky
call me poppin' johnny.
i got wings like prairies
i got tail like barracudee
if you want to see me
go look up at the air
if you want to see me
go look where the birds go
and the sweet angels migratimng
i have got no schoolbooks
no home by seven
and no patrticular woman
who calls herself mine
heaven is not my enemy
stars do not undo my eyes
as for this blasted earth of yours
it will never drag me down.

Is he high on OxyContin? Why does this poem conclude (not begin) this book? Because there are 72 other poems preceding it. The usually hostile critical Q is: How derivative are they? Well, George admits to 2 poetic models:

p. 20 "The Next Big Train Going West" after Carl Sandberg
pp. 27-8 "This Redhead of my Sudden Acquaintance" after Neal Cassady

3 poets are subjects of a poem:

p. 73 "Walt Whitman Makes Love to his Wheelbarrow"
p. 91 "Like Charles Reznikoff in the Rain"
pp. 96-7 "Stuck on the BQE Thinking about Jimmy Schuyler"

Where does this naming get us? As far as their names = subject-matter. (Robert Lowell did this in IMITATIONS, Richard Howard, in UNTITLED SUBJECTS.)

Instead, I rather like a poem that might have been itali-tagged after Charles Bukowski, but isn't:

"How Men Drink" (pp.44-5.) Here's its 1st-stanza + 2 lines:

my father was a bartender and i have been a drinking
man so i know some things about drinking and let me
tell you son some men drink like a busted fire hydrant
some men drink like a rag doll in the pouring rain some
men drink like a river that refuses to remain a river
and some like a fire truck that wants to put out a fire

some men drink like they are mad to live and others like
they insist on dying others like they are afraid to.

[28 more lines like these follow in 7 variable-length stanzas.]

Personal observation & invention? As someone currently prohibited from drinking alcohol (post-op; contraindicated with hydrocodone), I can admit it's possible to have stopped drinking & still read this poem calmly, even tho line 28:

some men drink like a crack in a porcelain cup

= me, after my teenage son Alex shocked me into stopping drinking uncontrollably by saying "If you keep drinking like that, you'll die." Now, 30 yrs later, I only drink Ocean Spray Cranberry-Pomegranate juice, cut with Santa Clara county (Livingston reservoir) tap-water.

How would you describe your drinking? Read Wallace's whole poem for apt similies to choose from.

Glenn Beck (for my GB readers)

Glenn Beck's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Beck) media career began in AM/MW-radio, & now includes cable-TV, 6 best-selling books, as he strives to replace Rush Limbaugh as Mr. Media Conservative. To draw that large an audience, he has to be especially outrageous. His style of American 'shock'-TV isn't TV-news, just talk-radio opinion/commentary. A country with a constitutional (1st) Amendment allowing freedom of speech allows 'talking heads' like Beck to claim TV-normality while acting talk-radio-naughty. Commentator Beck charges the White House with 'discriminating' against FOX News (his current TV-employer) at White House press conferences by the president's refusing to respond to FOX News reporters' questions. But that's the president's prerogative: when a reporter asks an outrageous question, the president may deftly say "Next question please," quickly calling on some other news organization's reporter in the room. Beck twistedly calls that ignoring...attacking.

Now, for PRI-NPR-listeners, a poem w/instructional footnote (Ifn):

FOX News flo@ts

Hearing NYT's David Carr
thrashing on PRI-NPR’s
“Talk of the Nation” call-in,
chastising the White House
for “taking on FOX News”
advising “punching upwards”
as the better strategy, I offer
an even better one; whisper:
"FOX News? Shh.It flo@ts.”
{FOX News, R U list'nin' ?}

(21 OCT 09, Santa Clara CA)v9

Ifn: Elide "Shh.It flo@ts." for what FOX News is & does.

Generals' Tale

Generals’ Tale

In the off-limits tea-houses
the story-tellers are adding
mythicized names to the tall-tale
of invaders of Afghanistan:

from Sikandar (Alexander) to
Macnaughten, Elphinstone,
Pavlovski, Nawroz, as

McChrystal, their latest addition,
stands at the tail-end of history,
his tall-tale barely beginning.

(19 OCT 09, Santa Clara CA) v2

Next Polish Generation

My Polish-speaking uncle
Stanislaw, a star athlete at
Salem MA h.s., was recruited
by the O.S.S. to ‘work with’
the Polish government in exile
in London, dropped by glider
into Nazi-occupied Poland,
to assasinate people he was
sworn never to name, but did
show my father what he did.
After the war, he woke up
in his bedroom in his parents'
home, tearing it up. Days,
he split hides in a tannery
with his father, Jan Kulik.

(06 OCT 09, Santa Clara CA)v7

2 Polish-diaspora Images

{for Raymond Stovich}

My Polish grandfather Jan,
grinding horseradish roots
in a Salem MA kitchen, tears
streaming down his face;

over his shoulder, my Polish
grandmother Stefania, proudly
tending an ‘African’ violet set
on the sunniest windowsill.

(02 OCT 09, Santa Clara CA)v2

Poets nform us

How we find a poet can matter as much as that we found them. I found Robinson Jeffers in no school curriculum or course reading list, just an old junkshop paperback; scandalous, blasphemous voluntary exile George Gordon, (Noel, 6th Baron Byron), dares us to read him wherever he is (most h.s. & college anthologies.) Later, when I had to read John Donne in college, I learned how to un/pack a poem's bit-stream. What's Heather McHugh nform us of? Ocean as bounding metaphor for our Existence. (So does Walt Whitman.) Poets nform us of poetic possibilities. (B!G, small, mundane, otherwise.)

MAHLER'S 1st (etc.)

Yest., in S.F., Dr.Ginny & I saw MTT conduct Mahler's 1st (symphony) that freaked Weiners out in 1901. A contemporary review-cartoon in the program shows Mahler sweatily conducting above 2 dogs barking & beside a cannon firing. Presumably the usual Weiner concert fare had no Moravian birdsong or cannon effects. I said to a guy who'd sat below us in a temp. box P assignment (due to my R-knee) "Mahler showed the most the Austrians could muster then; in 15 yrs it wouldn't be enuf as the Serbs whipt them in WW1 w/Russian help (orthodox vs R.C.) He wondered: "Was Mahler (yet) a Christian then?"

MAHLER & RELIGION; Forced to Be Christian
Letter to the NYT; Sunday, August 22, 1999
A pronounced theme repeated from his early masterworks like the ''Songs of a Wayfarer'' and the Symphony No. 1 to the final ''Das Lied von der Erde'' -- the theme of homeless wandering -- is the earmark of the Diaspora Jews and the foundation for the modern Zionism of Mahler's great Viennese Jewish contemporary, Theodor Herzl. Mahler himself frequently compared himself to Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, often tormented by his vision in terrifying nightmares. It is particularly poor salesmanship for Ms. Raabe to cite Mahler's supposed ''conversion'' from Judaism to Catholicism. In both law and common understanding, a choice made under duress is discounted as lacking in free will. Mahler converted as a mere formality under compulsion of a bigoted law that barred Jews from directorship of the Vienna Hofoper.Mahler himself joked about the conversion with his Jewish friends, and, no doubt, would view with bitter amusement the obtuseness of Ms. Raabe's understanding of the cruel choice forced on him: either convert to Christianity or forfeit the professional post for which you are supremely destined. When Mahler was asked why he never composed a Mass, he answered bluntly that he could never, with any degree of artistic or spiritual integrity, voice the Credo. He was a confirmed agnostic, a doubter and seeker, never a soul at rest or at peace. - JOEL MARTEL New York

A Western rattlesnake encounter

While on the path that led to the parking lot
I stopped to look at the ground-squirrel nest:
6 newly born babies were moving about.

I heard a rattle,
looked down,
noticed a rattlesnake
crawling over my boots.

A ranger in back of me said:
"Stand still; let it go over your boots."
I did.

The snake's interest was in catching & eating
one or more of the baby ground-squirrels.

The mother ground-squirrel became aware of the snake.
She began kicking dirt to cover her babies;
she also kicked dirt at the snake.
The snake made one plunge,
missed, & crawled away...


- Ginny Zeitman
(Santa Clara CA)
vzeitman@earthlink.net

Statuatorily Speaking

A weary, stony Abe Lincoln slumps as he reads a newspaper, slowly speaking over his shoulder towards the statue of Liberty.

Abe: “Libby, will you please wash those boys’ mouths out with some good American soap?”

Fatboys in shorts crowd around her, spewing truly deranged slogans:

Fatboys: “Don’t listen to Father Abe! - Obama's a Communist!, Obama's Hitler!”; “Gov’mint wants to kill the soldiers”; “Gov’mint wants to kill the old”; “Abortion leads to euthanasia.”

Liberty quickly fills an enormous tin-tub with boiling water, foaming up pink liquid soap. Raving Fatboys suddenly scatter fast.

(09 SEP 09, Santa Clara CA)v4

bell, ball, visual

the bell of a b@ll
rings true,
visu@lly.

(02 SEP 09)

apocopation

txtmsgn (cutn vwls) makes spoken slang seen slang = cn slng.

Unending Immigration

UNENDING IMMIGRATION

{For Dr. Worku Negash, VP}

A Pilipina visiting nurse interviews me
for intake to VNA treatment, pricks
her finger on a syringe I’d used & is
immediately sent off to Emergency
by her Chinese boss, who sends in a
Russian substitute who’d attended
Carolin over 3 yrs ago. Seeing my knee,
he asks who my orthopedic surgeon was?
I explain: “I picked him because his name
was like my mother’s, a Belarusian Pole;
he’s from Tadjikistan, but isn’t a Tadjik.”
He explains, “In Soviet Times they spread
people out.”...“But he really was born
in Tadjikistan…”(etc.) Wed.eves., an
Ethiopian local community college VP
teaches an adult-ed.class on immigration
to people from across the USA w/deep
European roots resunk here in Norcal: .
"Jeg svensk pojke" autopoints a 94yr old;
"Jeg svenska flicka" copoints a 90yr old.

(01 SEP 09, Santa Clara CA)v6

visiting nurses

I've had 2 Visiting Nurses today - Gaia Tan (orig. Phillipines) & Roman Braverman (orig. Moscow) but no Physical Therapist yet. Roman had come to see Carolin during her brief recovery period between her jaw operation & her radiation therapy; we recognized each other instantly. Drawing my blood was the expanding matter today, my back-of-hand veins being hard to stick, etc; Roman also drew a coumadin blood sample to (hopefully) spare my going in tomorrow to the hospital lab where I'm due. I also have an MRI appt. on Thurs at 1:15.

early recovery

My R-knee replacement op was rescheduled for 7:30am on Fri. 28 AUG; post-op doc & nurses saw me as rapidly recovering (vs last year's L-knee op.) so I was discharged from the Kaiser Hospital on Sun 30 AUG at 2pm.

I'm back in my apt. w/Reggie; phone me there at 1-408-247-1943; e-mailing's better: billcostley@yahoo.com

I'm chipper, alert & can even proofread this only 3 days post-op. Once I've taken my 1st Percocets of the day, R-knee pain gradually shuts off while I take my scheduled post-op pills. I'm expecting a Visiting Physical Therapist tomorow.

HAWTHORNY THOTS

Just wrote & sent this2 NPR/S.F./KQED-FM "Perspective" (2min.) audio-feature heard often daily. (update: next day) Hi Bill Thanks for your interest in Perspectives.Unfortunately, I'll have to respectfully decline the submission. Mark Trautwein Editor, Perspectives

HAWTHORNY THOTS

by Bill Costley (Jr.)

As Fall approaches, tho I now live at the bottom of San Francisco Bay, my thots drift back to Massachusetts Bay, & where I was born: Salem. You can’t be from Salem & never encounter Hawthorny thots.

Guilty from birth for John Hathorne, who’d tried & condemned the innocents of the Great Witchcraft Hysteria of 1692, he changed his family name to Hawthorne by deftly inserting a w, but long-inherited shame continued to obsess him.

Centuries later, my Glasgow-born father would hide his physical shame – ‘the heartbreak of psoriasis’ – from people by only swimming at the U.S. Naval Air station beach hidden behind the Salem Willows amusement park, assuring me “It’s not because of dissipation.” (Whatever that was, I wondered as a boy.)

Decades later, I was complicatedly miserable in Salem at 43, having broken up with a young New England Conservatory-trained pianist to return to Scotland (& she to Switzerland.) Returning to Salem, I sat in the noonday sun on the naval jetty a few yards from the Custom House where Hawthorne had once worked, a few yards from the House of Seven Gables Settlement House where my Polish-speaking mother had been taught to speak Yankified American-English.

I watched something moving & wrote about it:


"Wet Dreams" speedboat cuts a wake btw us
as I cast pebbles @ nrby lobster-buoy 3278J,
its one red star-on-white bobbing as
I cast my thoughts towards you,
like handfuls of pebbles,
none touching you @ all.
I think of you on Lac Neuchatel
w/ its palisades, spinnakers, utterly unlike
sober Salem's as my heart treads water, like
a heavy black bird, rising to 1',
skimming out of the innah hahbah.

[from my neosonnet series "Hammered Silver" written in Scotland, England & New England, 1985.]

(26 AUG 09)

Brekkers

I arise to soak TJ's
mini-shredded-wheats
in Nestle's Nesquick,
(chocolate-flavored),
contemplative cocoa
suffusing mini-fiber.

(23 AUG 09, Santa Clara CA)v2

No-Cost Health Care

Remote Areas Medical Foundation (RAMF) http://www.ramusa.org/, "Pioneers of No-Cost Health Care" is an all-volunteer non-profit medical group (based in TN) who serve remote underpopulated areas of the USA. This time they have set up massive free clinics in major cities (like L.A. & DC) to show that major urban USA is as badly off as Appalachia, a brilliant political stroke by some dramatic genius high up in RAMF who apparently realized they had the means to produce this great public drama at this time & did it to shame the American Heartland. A doctor went to one of these RAMF clinics 50 miles from where he grew up & was ashamed to find people just like those he grew up with desperately standing in long lines for dental work & a wide range of medical procedures, & was interviewed on national TV about what it did to him to see this; generally, Americans can't bear being ashamed; he was.

Sound nite'S Sleep

A sound nite's sleep is either the
cheapest or least affordable cure
for what ails us here in the USA.

Health Care here is no longer truly
affordable in any sane sense, though
desperately needed by everyone, &
the only certain employer nowadays.

Thank you, Remote Area Medical
Foundation for rescuing us alive.

(22 AUG 09, Santa Clara CA)v2

Battle over Health Care

The conservative
health care plan:
undermine any
Democrat plan
for all Americans
to have affordable
health care,

then scare
older people
by making it
be imagined that
older Americans
will be euthanized
when they become
sick & disabled.


- Ginny Beecher Zeitman
(20 AUG 09, Santa Clara CA)

Fearing Any Fear

Kenneth Fearing
feared denunciation.
Fearing fear, we fear
anything fearable.

We fear taxes, fearing
we’ll never be able
to afford them now
Obama’s spending
trillions, forgetting
Dubya did for years.

Republicans want you
to forget all that; they
want you to fear any
spending: fear Any.

(19 AUG 09, Santa Clara CA)v2

"Wooden You?"

“Wooden You”

{a wooden dialog, after Carlo (Lorenzini) Collodi, 1883}


Geppetto: Pinocchio, my dear wooden Son,
you need fixin’ but my hands hurt too much.

Pinocchio: Soak them in clear water, Father.

Geppetto: I have, my wooden Son, I have,
but they still hurt, I cannot grip my knife.

Pinocchio: Who else can fix me, Father?
Who else can carve me as well as you can?

Geppetto: Any, who have knives & skill.
There are many skillful wood-doctors.

Pinocchio: Well, where are they, Father?
Bring me to them, or bring them to me.

Geppetto: It is not so simple my wooden Son.
Wooden insurance is needed to make it work.

Pinocchio: Then say those words, my Father,
& They will do it. You are their master, Father.

Geppetto: I wish I was, my one wooden Son;
I must choose among them & I am confused.
What does 'Public Option' mean? 'Single Payer'?
At the Coperativa, there is no wood-doctor.

Pinocchio: Father, somebody can explain
each of them to you so you will understand.

Geppetto: Who? I have no telephone. Besides,
Parlo solo Toscano, no capicce Talianno.

Pinocchio: How do I speak to you, my Father?

Geppetto: I do not know, my one wooden Son.
We just say what we have to say, somehow.

Pinocchio: Then think wooden Thoughts, Father.
Think wooden Thoughts & They well hear you.

Geppetto: I am thinking them, my dear Son.
I cannot fix you all by myself. I need help.
Please help me, o, skillful wooden-doctors.

Wooden Doctors: We are listening to you,
Geppetto, we hear your wooden thoughts.

Geppetto: Thank you, listening wooden doctors.
I need your skills to repair my wooden son.

Wooden Doctors: Are you covered, Geppetto?
What kind of wooden coverage do you have?

Geppetto: I have clothing of cloth & leather;
my wooden covering is my wooden roof.

Wooden Doctors: You do not undertand us,
Geppetto. Covering is wooden insurance.

Geppetto: I only need wooden insurance for
Pinnochio, my only wooden son, not myself.

Wooden Doctors: You both need wooden
insurance for us 2help you, Geppetto:
for us 2talk2 you & for us 2fix your son.

Geppetto: How do I get wooden insurance?
What do I do? Where do I go? Who do I see?

Wooden Doctors: You are doing it now, but
you alone must choose the type of coverage.

Geppetto: I do not understand this coverage.
What does it cover? My head? My hands?

Wooden Doctors: Your hands, because you
are a self-employed wood-carver, Geppetto.
Just your hands. They are what hurt you now.

Geppetto: Yes, they hurt me so much I cannot carve.

Wooden Doctors: Do you have Workmen’s Comp?

Geppetto: No, I work alone, I have no workmen.

Wooden Doctors: Then we cannot help you. We
cannot fix your hands to fix your wooden son.
That would make you a wooden doctor like us.

Geppetto: But you are skillful wooden doctors!
Wooden Doctors: Yes, we are, but we follow
the rules set by whatever coverage you have.
You have no coverage, so we follow no rules.

Geppetto: All men follow rules. I have a Rule
there on my workbench & I follow it carefully.

Wooden Doctors: We follow rules of practice,
If we do not, we could be sued for malpractice.

Geppetto: But you practiced for many years!
Questa mala fortuna has now befallen you?

Wooden Doctors: Health care reform, with
many new options, will soon re-regulate us.
We fear what it may do to our wooden skills.
(We should not be talking to you about this.)

Geppetto: Wait, please, skillful wooden doctors;
Do not fear talking to me; I try to understand.
I do not cause your mala fortuna malpractice.
I am a humble woodcarver. My hands hurt. My son…

Wooden Doctors: We do not want to hear any more
about your wooden son until you choose a health plan.
A wooden health plan for him, not you. Yours must
be a human flesh & blood health plan. For your hands.

Geppetto: [weeping] My hands are my only skill.
My hands have made my wooden son. My hands
are my only hope! [raising them towards the ceiling.]

[End of Scene 1. Wooden curtain descends.]

(18 AUG 09, Santa Clara CA)v5

Pissing Blood

Pissing blood in rage,
a GOP-agitated citizen slips
on his blood pooling up
on the hardwood floor
of a high-school gymnasium
in the flyover-heartland while
standing to rave at a D-politician.

His face reddens, his eyes
bloodshoot, bloodpressure
skyrockets; his GOP script:
‘Abortion leads to euthanasia
under diabolical Public Option.’
falls to the floor; he stammers:

“The gub-mint wants to kill us!”
soaking in his own blood; an
ambulance 911’d from a local
VA hospital takes him away...

(13 AUG 09, Santa Clara CA)v3

CHENEY stingz Dubya

Vexed by his having flexed for Dubya
while VPOTUS, CHENEY’s memoirs
sting Dubya as ‘an ordinary politician’
for having ignored CHENEY’S advice;
blind-sided by a late-changing Dubya,
CHENEY, freed now to speak on then,
stingz Dubya as unworthy of CHENEY’S
piercing perceptionz, steel-jacketed in-
iatives, steely rezolve, abzolute goalz.

(13 AUG 08, Santa Clara CA)v3

So Much More

to & for Carolin Combs

While I’m still on this Earth,
& what's left of you is, too,
we’re still engaged in its
activities & significations,
my actions on your behalf
weigh heavily on me: I
have so much more to do
for you, your name, work;
so much more, out of love,
so much more in gratitude.


(12 AUG 09, Santa Clara CA)v2
(Carolin was born on 22 AUG 56;
she died on 26 JAN 07.)

Golijov, davening

Slowly davening
while his music’s being
rehearsed, Golijov reverts
to his embodied
Jewish music.

Off any horse,
off any motorcycle,
far below any bird floating above,
his wholly human heart beats
as mine does as I watch him daven.


(12 AUG 09, Santa Clara CA)v4

Quail & Bunnies

During the Spring
many small baby quail are born.
Parent quail are very protective,
very alert to danger,
warning their babies of any
person or thing approaching.

When a high-pitched signal is given,
the babies run quickly
to the bushes for cover,
Except:
When there are bunnies about
who share fallen grain with them:
then the babies run to them.


Ginny Beecher Zeitman
(10 AUG 09, Santa Clara CA)

Cabrillo 2009: Golijov

Last week from Wed. to Sat. a.m., I was down in Santa Cruz for Cabrillo 2009 with Ginny Beecher Zeitman who has been going there since the late '60s & is now a sponsor.

The most stunning piece we heard last Fri (opening) nite was "Azul" by (Argentinian-Jewish) Osvaldo Goiljov, inspired by his trip to Macchu Picchu: a cello concerto with 2 native-instrument percussionists & a hyper-accordionist, backed up by "a lot of other people" (he Cabrillo Festival Orchestra); Golijov historicized: "In the 19th c., music(al rhythm) was (based on) horses, in the 20th, motorcycles, now birds floating on air-(currents)." What about the embedded rhythm of the resting normal human heart? (1ce/sec.) Ginny (who was medical staff on the Stanford heart-transfer program) thinks we may have longago (primitively) adopted it as a musical meter. Is it a setting of the std. metronome?

bring me up (a rising round)

{round, rising from the bottom UP}

to where we ARE!
to where we ARE,
& where we WERE

to where we were

bring me UP
bring me uP
bring me up


{round, rising from the bottom, up}

(04 AUG 09 Santa Clara CA)
for the San Jose Peace Chorale

Letter to BBC on Bottled-Water, ctd.

In the week after I sent a 2nd letter to the BBC (see below: Sunday, July 26, 2009 CA: bottled-vs-tap water)

the NYT broke into print with "Ad assault on bottled water industry." by Stephanie Clifford, reprinted here in the San Jose MERCURY-NEWS, 02 AUG 09, Sunday Business section, p. E2, bottom left.

Lede sentence: "Can an ad campaign turn bottled water into the new tobacco?"

Subseq. par.: "Taking a cue from anti-tobacco campaigns, Tappening, a group opposed to bottled water on environmental grounds, has introduced a campaign called 'Lying in Advertizing' that positions bottled water companies as spreading corporate untruths.' ..."The 'lies' in question here are about the source of the bottled water. Eric Yaverbaum, a co-founder of Tappening, charged that some beverage companies did not list the source of their water -- and were using only municipal water." (ctd.)

The Farm

A big day today!

The pig gave birth
to ten little piglets,
all pushing each other
to get to her udders.

The fence around the pen
is crowded with hikers
oohing, aahing
& commenting.

-Ginny Zeitman
(01 AUG '09, Santa Clara CA)
vzeitman@earthlink.net

Merce Cunningham (1919-2009)

Summaries of Cunningham's life & work connect his companionship with John Cage & @le@toricismo. Not needing any music 2dance2 separates his rapt silence from previous dance.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/arts/dance/28cunningham.html?_r=1&em

CA: bottled-vs-tap water

To: "BBC World Business Programme"
Date: 26 JULY 09

Thank you for reading my previous letter to you about "butterfly...bee" business-practice. Here's another:

CA bottled-water

Here in CA, as the state economy sinks, local water districts (cf. mine, here in Santa Clara County,) are advertizing on local-TV trying to persuade habitual bottled-water drinkers to return to tap-water, using environmental arguments: bottled-water’s not better, but worse; tap-water costs less, reduces plastic landfill waste. Tap-water's as much a consumer-product as anything else, so they need to sell more of it at whatever price(s) they can, within deliverable limits (e.g., they're also simultaneously encouraging more efficient lawn-watering, suggesting it be done automatically at 5am.) Grand Object: reduce & eliminate bottled-water (like eliminating cigarettes.) (Poem follows:)

"Calivaporating…"

Californians are easily spotted
by bottled-water they carry,
but are being encouraged
to drink tap-water by local
water districts’ finally proving
bottled-water’s not better, but
worse; tap-water also costs less,
reduces plastic landfill waste.
Adios, chica bottled-agua;
you're Calivaporating…

(13 JULY 09, Santa Clara CA) v5
~ Bill Costley, former high-tech marketing writer; lifelong published poet

"Don't float like a butterfly, don't sting like a bee."

Last week, I heard an op-ed on BBC radio (via KQED, S.F.) that proposed a reversion to a less vicious business environment, ending in a negative restatement of the (in)famous Muhammad Ali quote: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." So I popped up, walked to my keyboard in the next room, wrote the following, & e-mailed it to the BBC World Business programme. Tho the BBC didn't reply, Ann Wainwright in Billingham, Teeside, northern England heard from her friend Brian who'd heard it read over that programme @ 3am GMT the next day.

Bottom-line: I'm glad I can still easily do what I used to do (for a tiny PR-shop in Wellesley MA): plink a distant, passing media window of biz.PR-op., but this time, on behalf of myself & social sanity.


RE: the last words: "butterfly...bee."

Monday, July 20, 2009 10:13 PM
From: "Bill Costley"
To: world.business@bbc.co.uk
Here in Silicon Valley CA, I've just been listening to the BBC overnite business programme that ended with the anti-quote: "Don't float like a butterfly, don't sting like a bee" (Muhammad Ali, reversed) That is, act & talk no jive. If that had been the Golden Rule for the past 25+ years, the USA economy might possibly be solvent, or something almost like it. But it sounds nice to hear as I lay me down to sleep in Silicon Valley.


~ Bill Costley, ex high-tech marketing writer
Santa Clara CA 95050 usa

Remembering Harvard Sq. (Camb MA)

I 1st-visited Harvard Sq. in '58 to buy both a hard-&paper-back copy of William Empson's THE 7 TYPES OF AMBIGUITY for my sr. yr. RC prep-school English teacher, Bro. Kyrin Powers, who'd suggested we read it.

I had my 1st English (Mackeson's London) stout there (at the Wursthaus) with Jeff Gutcheon, Maria Muldaur's pianist, during the Summer of '62 while I was at Harvard Summer School, taking Chaucer's minor poems, still being given by the legendary B.J. Whiting.

Joan & Maya & Alex & I lived in Cambridge (in Central Sq.,) from '64-72, & were, of course, often in Harvard Sq. during what I call The Years of Flame (=the High-'60s)

I was last in Harvard Sq. in '03; while Carolin & I reduced the contents of the Wellesley Sq. apt. to move to CA, I kept bringing all my extraneous poetry books to donate them to the Houghton Library's Woodbury Poetry Room because it was now too poor to buy more (its early-20th c. bequest had become pitifully inadequate by the early-21st c.) Things had changed, even inside Harvard, between 1958-2003.

Once charming Harvard Sq. is now dense with traffic & the MBTA subway goes all the way to Porter Sq. Do people still busk at night in the former COOP (now Barnes & Noble's) 's portico? Sure; I'm told they now even sit begging 24/7.

Around & about word-order & rhyme

Sample of current exchange on word-order & rhyme with Bob Graham & the Roses (Norman & Sierra) in Santa Rosa:

--- On Sun, 7/19/09, Norman Rose
wrote:

From: Norman Rose
Subject: language sequence
To: "Sierra Rose"
grabob@sonic.net
Date: Sunday, July 19, 2009, 7:42 PM

Rhyme's not artificial,
And any spoon or even dish'll
Tell you so before they jump the big bright moon.

But Subjects, Verbs, and Objects
Can't always follow who's next

Because the moon won't jump a dish
or
a

spoon.

(With apologies to the cow, who really knew how....)

Or maybe this poem is enough reason that rhyme is considered obsolete
--Norman


From: Bill Costley billcostley@yahoo.com
To: grabob@sonic.net
Sun 07/19/09 00:12AM
Subject: language sequence

Bob, Rhyme's hardly used at all anymore in English poetry; since rhyme's really no longer necessary, poetic word order has reverted to normal spoken order. I wouldn't have it any other way, as my poems plainly show. Grammatical artificiality is simply obsolete. - Bill

From: sierrakrose@sbcglobal.net
Subject: language sequence
To: "Norman Rose", grabob@sonic.net, billcostley@yahoo.com
Date: Monday, July 20, 2009, 7:15 AM

One of my favorite features of English is that word order is an actual dimension unlike other languages. For instance, in French, you can say the boy throws the ball or the ball throws the boy because the spelling tells you who is the subject and object of the sentence and the word order isn't what tells you who is doing the action. In English you get very different meanings by changing the word order. The boy throws the ball means something very different from the ball throws the boy.

This doesn't mean you can't ever rearrange the word order, but you have to be careful. When I write rhyme (yes I still write a lot of rhyme), I often must resort to prepositions to show relationships like: the ball is thrown by the boy to bring a rhyming word to the position I want.

An aside: my other favorite feature of English is that you can change any noun into a verb or adjective or anything you want... we house people for example. He was a house boy. This is because English grew out of a vernacular... which (like pigeon/pidgin English) adopt many sounds and nuances without regard to strict grammar. When I was a kid I spoke pidgin in Hawaii and loved it. Oh let's keep discussing language forever OK? (My favorite subject).

Bob & Norman & Sierra, For me, rhyme sometimes just happens, & then has to be acknowledged as intentional/not: it fascinates me to see words that rhyme (vs rhyme that words) just happening in just a few lines of a poem. When it does, I just leave it there, postmodernly telling myself: Why not? I meant those words, didn't I? So what if they appear to rhyme? They still mean what I meant. Rhyme-schemes aren't framing my thoughts, but rather the reverse, to whatever degree can be seen; but so are alliterative patterns, the dominant mode in Anglo-Saxon verse. Poetic memnonics vary in degree of stringency & complexity, perhaps peaking during the European Renaissance. (We appear to have forgotten the Persian/Arabic ones, but that may yet change due to present political circumstances. I gather Chinese verse is like playing 3D+ chess.) Sierra: I may be loose, but I do find I judge grammatical skill (in English) by use of the correct pronoun & even moreso, correct preposition. Studying Latin, French & Russian taught me to watch out for & attend to them. ~ Bill Costley

Wildcat Canyon Trail

Wildcat Trail follows
a winding brook
lined with tall trees
down a steep canyon
that ends at the farm.

Many birds are seen
& their songs
are heard;
few animals are seen
during the day.


(July 18, 09)v2

- Ginny Beecher Zeitman
Santa Clara CA
vzeitman@earthlink.net

Congressional coin-flipping

Flip a perfectly symbolic coin
in a Congressional hearing:

One side’s a wheedling,
grey-haired cracker lawyer;

One’s a careful black-haired
Puertoriqena NYC-judge.

Watch it spin & fall;
watch it fall & spin.

What you’re hearing speaks
volumes, legal & political;

what you’re seeing thins
the GOP down to the ghost
of a Confederate qu@rter.


(18 JUL 09, Santa Clara CA)v2

An early morning hike in the foothills

We start our hike at the meadow;
as we cross it, we become aware
of the activity in the meadow:

deer eating the grass,
egrets looking for food,
birds diving for insects & bees
that are flying around the wildflowers;
a rabbit digging up roots;
wild turkeys flown down
from their roosting trees on the ridge
looking for food;
a bobcat crossing the meadow
heading towards the creek
to catch a swimming fish.

After we cross the meadow,
we climb the steep PG&E trail,
the best way to get to the foothills.
When we arrive at the ridge,
we decide which trail to take:

Our choices: take
the 10-mile Vista Point trail,
the Farm trail,
or continue on the PG&E trail
to the Wildcat Canyon turn-off trail.

Today, we take the PG&E
Wildcat Canyon turn-off trail.

(July 2009, Santa Clara CA)

- Ginny Beecher Zeitman
vzeitman@earthlink.net

Calivaporating!

Californians are easily spotted
by bottled-water they carry,
but are being encouraged
to drink tap-water by local
water districts’ finally proving
bottled-water’s not better, but
worse; tap-water also costs less,
reduces plastic landfill waste.
Adios, chica bottled-agua;
you're Calivaporating…

(13 JULY 09, Santa Clara CA) v5

Sarahtude!

She's so got it! Look @
any colorfoto of her:

teeth & skin & hair
2 absolutely die 4!

All she has 2 do is say:
"I'm so...just available!"

Like, I'm not kidding!
It's so...totally obvious.

Go, Sarah; Go-Go. Go.

(08 JULY 09, Santa Clara CA)v3

"Allons gai, gai.*.."

Alex William Costley Ph.D
(anthropology, Columbia)

flies off to Paris today
for the 3rd-time; saying
"It’s all work..." longing
"for a real vacation..."

asking me if I want
"something from Paris?"

"Just a stone, scuffed
by Parisian traffic, or
from a garden," I say,
"If you're in one."

(04 JUL 09, Santa Clara CA)v6

footnote:

On his 1st trip, he also visited Evreux, Eure (old Haute Normandie), where Guillaume Costeley (ca.1532-1606), court composer 3mos/yr. to Henri III & then Charles IX Valois, retired as a royal tax-collector.

"*Allons gai, gai" ("Let's go gaily, gay shepherds...") begins & refrains Costeley's frenchly-famous Christmas carol.

Deconstruction:

A Costeley descendant flies back to Paris 503 yrs later, for the 3rd time, not as a tourist, but a busy academic booked into a conference, wishing this were a vacation. Collectable Paris is reduced to a small stone. Costeley only served the French court 3 months per year, retiring to Normandy to collect taxes, never got a title based on property, so was not de Costeley; his house is now a discount clothing store on the banks of the small stream that runs thru Evreux, a regional city where a small music school's named after him. Only famous in France, he wrote 100 micro-tonal chansons & some keyboard pieces.

Apricots

As I type this, apricots
ripen on the trees, growing
tart, deeply-orange,
faintly-fibrous puds inside
my favorite orange fruit.

(28 JUN 09, Santa Clara CA)v2
[food poem 5]

Mary Matalin's booking

Mary Matalin’s booking
Cheney Family memoirs
for Scribners’ new rightwing
Threshold imprint she runs:

Dick Cheney’s nightstand
awaits his hand-written
cheniad he's sure everyone
wants & needs to read

for rightwing perspective
& inspiration during today's
Republican party decline...
or so Mary Matalin imagines

moved far below the Beltway,
down to N’O’leans w/hubby
Ragin' Cajun James [D] Carville.

(26 JUN 09, Santa Clara CA)v9

Reggie, out&in-doors

Carolin's & my Maine Coon cat Reggie (~ 7) is still really an outdoor cat, so I feel guilty if I don't take him out every day for an hour here in the retirement community I now live in whose lease insists all pets must be on 'leashes' when outdoors, so on his 30' yellow nylon tie-out, Reggie does his daily-routine: daringly climbing a small tree, jumping down, disappearing into the bushes surrounding the large courtyard, looking for small animals & birds (that he never finds); when taken out as late as 8:30pm, he territorially prowls to drive off 2 feral cats that come by for dry food that Lois Overman in the next bldg. leaves out for them every eve. All this is much more exciting for Reggie than being confined to my 4th-floor 2rm apt. despite upholstered cat-towers in each room; he's snoozing in the tall tower (right behind me) as I type this. I apologize to him when I take my 10-speed bike out without him, but the one time we did, he was terrified of riding with me (in a webbed nylon cat-carrier on my back) fearing anything metallic-sounding/looking (bike, battery-powered go-cart, dumpster-on-wheels, traffic...) & moaned & groaned the entire bike-ride...

"What happens next?"

“You may well wonder…”
is redundant as an opener,
poetic or otherwise,

when everyone’s wondering
“what happens next?”
worldwide.

Get on the Internet; its
worldwide web reaches millions,
willing & otherwise.

(20 JUN 09, Santa Clara CA)v5

Utterance

Each poet works out something by writing poetry. For me, it's is also a means of self-therapy, within a self formed by culture, language, nation, family, education, experience, sex, body, organs, genes. It's dynamic. Writing out my thoughts (as I'm doing now) turns on some semi-dormant circuits in me so that I feel more alive; it's an energizing process, internal & then external, as are speaking, singing, dancing, painting, photography, filming, etc., all human animation, which I usually call: utterance.

Baking goła,bki

I'm back with my
Polish mother baking goła,bki
(go-womb-ki = pidgeons),
multi-meat & rice burgers
stuffed inside smaller & smaller
boiled cabbage-leaves, stacked
in a turkey-baker, in our gas oven.
(not just Polish, they're common
to Eastern Europe.)

(10 JUN 09, Santa Clara CA)v11
[food poem 4]

Sun-toast

In the coming energy scarcity,
bread will rise & bake as quickly
as the blazing sun can bake it.

Smiling people will co-toast
each other w/sun-toast slices.

California will come out with
California Sun-toast against
Texas-toast, twice as thick as
California's Best-toast.

California will remarket with
Baja-Toast, stymieing Texas,
'cuz nobody ever beats Baja!

(10 JUN 09, Santa Clara CA)v7
[food poem 3]

Baking

Baking for 1 hr. in the oven
will become an extravagance
no one can afford in a world
of desperate energy scarcity.
Comfort foods will become
raw, crunchy, preferably
grown in your own garden
as an energy-saving eco-plot...

(10 JUN 09, Santa Clara CA)v9
[food poem 2]

Something poetical

Last nite, I listened
to my fellow poets,

hoping for uplift & found it
among their poetical words.

This morning, I’m writing.
That’s how it works, I think:

something’s happening
in my head that wasn’t.

Something poetical.


(10 SUN 09, Santa Clara CA)v3

Dichtung u. Warheit

I've always felt, unlike Goethe, that poetry is truth, which means I write about things that are true & are thus poetic; I don't fabricate poetically. Too much poetry has been escapist, avoidant, & self-indulgent verbalizing for effect. Believing what we are expected to believe is poetry is anti-poetic. This makes for a fairly dry style, I admit.

Occasionally I do write something that's not strictly true. In my most recent poem "Wh@t coloss@l b@lls" (against Dick Cheney) that appears below & on The New Verse News edited by James Penha (a NYC-expat) in Jakarta, Java, Indonesia (really!) the 3 @-signs in the first line imply Cheney has 3-b@lls. He acts as tho he does, so I say so. Is that poetic truth? If so, Cheney provoked it.

Which Poets?

Yesterday, Anita Schiffman Holzberg, originally from Rutherford NJ (Bergen County) where W. C. Williams practiced medicine as a GP, & I went about an hour north of Santa Clara to the City of Menlo Park’s library for The Gathering of the Poetry Groups, Poets, Musicians, & Artists - an arts festival.

It was introduced & hosted by Phil Hackett, formerly of Boston, (a lesser Jack Powers), who has since migrated to San Francisco. I could hardly recognize the Hackett I once knew; he didn’t recognize me. The poems he read were the same post-Beat ones he had sent me a few years ago. .

Anita was very disappointed - she’s a more inventive poet than Hackett is - so I told her that for festival purposes post-Beats offer a well-known, bookable quantity, demonstrably loyal to each other: Neal Cassady’s son John Allen sat in as a guitarist for poetess 'Violet Fire', giving Beat poetry news & Cassady family updates. Post-Beats can, will & do come as a package.

Anita finally had enuf, so we left early. As she drove me back down to Santa Clara, I said to her: "If, 50 yrs ago, you wondered which school of American poetry would last beyond 2000, you might well have said Black Mountain College (Olson, Creeley, Levertov, Duncan, et. al., all dead now) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mountain_poets but actually it’s proven to be the Beats; post-Beats persistently function at the street-level." The general public can easily grasp their unacademic popular style, so post-Beat street-poets have become the model for poets - for unacademic audiences. This year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe even features a Charles Bukowski do-alike, 'Henry Chinaski' (Bukowski's personal pseudonym in his novels.)

But there's also a growing phenom. of appointed poets-laureate on all levels selected by varying sponsoring orgs to serve regional (national, state, county, sub-regional, city, island, town, village) constituencies with varying terms (one year to rest of life.) Here, in upper Santa Clara County, genial, accomodating, retired San Jose State prof. Nils Peterson (originally from NJ) is now serving a 2 year term as the 1st poet laureate of Silicon Valley, surely having earned it by decades of continuingly-varied public-poetic activities. (It pays USD$4K/yr.)

Wh@t coloss@l b@lls
CHENEY must have 2
announce he’s all for
gay-marriage as a matter
of states'-rights; can't
you see him smirking,
just waiting for Rush
2 denounce him as
as a closet liber@l?

(06 JUN 09, Santa Clara CA)v4

SFO: Dawn->twilight w/MTT
Schubert's Unfinished B-minor (D. 759, 1822)
paired with Berg's 3 Pieces for Orchestra (Op. 6, 1913-1929)


Atonal music gets precious little play by major American orchestras; here in S.F., MTT (Michael Tilson Thomas) is trying his best to shoehorn it in historically as a by-product of war. Think: how better to explain John Cage, Philip Glass, John Adams? The Cold War, Vietnam, Iraq/Afghanistan.

For the first time, I'm going down to Santa Cruz to the Cabrillo Festival in early Aug. to hear even newer music. I already listen mostly to Petris Vasks (1946-, a Latvian Baptist minister's son educated in Lithuania) who describes himself as a 'sad optimist' directly influenced by Poles Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Gorecki, American George Crumb (Sibelius, Messaien their relative common background) & James MacMillan (an R.C. Scot.) btw, I'm no longer a relentlessly progressive optimist (since my wife Carolin Combs died on 27 JAN 07.)

Schoenberg once (amazingly) said: "Someday the workingman will whistle my tunes." For most of us, atonalism's been an intellectually purgatory exercize. Art-wise, Larry Rivers' multi-panel collages are comparable to Berg's 3 Pieces for Orchestra; Harry Partch, Lou Harrison track well with Claes Oldenbourg's comical sculptures (see 2 in an internal/external courtyard of the Cantor Museum on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto CA)..

Lifetime guarantee

Like Rip Van Winkle, the whole
BabyBoomer generation awakens
to plenty reduced to the spare change
any grizzled guy on any streetcorner
hawking the STREET NEWS stems for;
last Wed. nite, opposite the S.F.Opera,
he said “God Bless You” as I hobbled by
on my segmented folding metal cane,
being rebuilt knee-by-knee (@ 67)
with a rest-of-lifetime guarantee
by Kaiser-Permanente..

(01 JUN 09 Santa Clara CA)v4

Finally neoCHENEY

Look upon him, ye who would-be
mighty & repair to the District’s suites
where he was once walled, reveered.
Finally neoCHENEY we’ve had enuf of;
haven't we seen B&W TV's McCarthy
exuding filamentary power with lies
rewoven by pretension, unravelling
week by disturbing week? Only his
pre-convinced enjoy his rearguing
unvarnished semi-truths, his wooden
image semi-cybernetic, half-alive
among us, automatically speaking
his message, grimly us rehectoring...

(31 MAY 09, Santa Clara CA)v6

Bswaf

Wordlocked

After shopping @Target
for a Wordlock ™ lock
for each of my old ‘70s
Shogun 10-speeds, I pick
my Polish nick-name
for my combo. No more
sets of keys for these,
I think, Who’d ever think
of Bswaf as my combo?

( 03 JUN 09, Santa Clara CA)v4

CHENEY shuffles

CHENEY shuffles his worn,
marked deck of face-cards
of himself, thinking aloud:
My next administration
will be totally trustworthy,
like Scooter, loyal to me
& me alone; first, I’ll issue
a $100 stamp with my face
on it & then a $100,000-bill,
with my face on it, & then
an invisible CHENEY tank.

(23 MAY 09, Santa Clara CA)v4

Other White Meat

As massive as Mussolini,
Rush dresses al Duce,

anOther White Meat,

aggrandizing power
by the pound.


(15 MAY 09, Santa Clara CA)v7

recalling Atlantis

a true story

Lives later, she recalls
Atlantis executing her,
6 arrows piercing her
at noon against a wall.

(14 MAY 09, Santa Clara CA)v6

D.C. TOUR

"They removed
Pursuit of Happiness
from their currency,
replacing it with
In God We Trust,"
observed our guide
to the ruins of D.C.,
"their Despoiled City,
useful for instruction,"
without elucidation.

(14 MAY 09, Santa Clara CA)v2

Our Stalin, CHENEY

Our Stalin, CHENEY
preaches loyalty to anyone
loyal to him, proving steel's
stainless despite defeat, if
VPOTUS is engraved on it.

(12 MAY 09, Santa Clara CA)v2

Why isn’t Obama?

Whenever I explain my life to my European friends, I say: I fought in no war, but against war & lies & deceptions; they nod, instantly realizing: Yes, we’re all anti-American (wondering:) But why isn’t Obama?

Living/dying lit.

(For Carolin Combs)

[Note: Interrupting my reading of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004) by seeing a film made from The Dying Animal* (2001) makes me write this; Anita got it from Netflix.]

Presumably a roman a clef (isn't it always about Roth himself?) a prominent (presumably NYC**-based, English) academic suffers erotic anguish for the 1st-time in his mid-50s when an ex-Cuban grad-student (25) of his in an MFA program has breast cancer & has a breast removed, possibly implying death. He’s slept with a long line of grad-students, but she breaks that bright daisy-chain: his academic & erotic career (wife, divorce; longtime married lover) suffered no shattering drama until this. As a prominent hibrow interpreter of 'great' literature, he becomes a real-life lead-player in a drama even he would admit is major-litty, but nothing can insulate him from really living it; her last words (in the film), spoken in a hospital bed, are (ambiguously) “I’ll remember you.” Is she dying?

*3rd in the series of 'David Kepesh' novels: The Breast (1972), The Professor of Desire (1977), & The Dying Animal (2001.) **The 2008 film was shot in Vancouver BC.

DECATTATION

“Cat out of bag.”

John Yoo sweats
casuistical bullets
formulating it:

If a bag collapses
& the cat gets out,
the bag

(he legalizes it:)

suffers de-cattation
& the cat’s deprived
of its bag, the bag, its cat.

(he codifies it:)

No such deprivation may occur.
The cat may retain its bag
without impunity.


(04 MAY 09, Santa Clara CA)v2

awakening

Each day I aw@ken
feeling less bold & anxious
that I've lived past 65.

(03 MAY 09, Santa Clara CA)

Brassily

[circa Arlen Specter]


After Dubya’s
smirk flees from
Obama's smile,

Specter crosses
the aisle while

Republibozos
brassily beep:

Opportunist!
No! No! No!

(29 APR 09, Santa Clara CA)v12

Mailing myself in

Sun. eve, friends tried to persuade me to attend my 50th (class of ’59) reunion at St. John's Prep., Danvers MA (25 mi. n. of Boston, 3152 mi. from Santa Clara), but anxious over swine flu circulating in subways, trains, & planes (as Joe Biden warns), I'm mailing myself in by USPS letter, e-mail & website post, as I usually do.

less about less

a Tweet saves space in minimalist, multi-tasked times: short-attention-span messages shorten. As the economy slows down, this'll flip: we'll say more about less (cf., watchbands, below.)

Seeking watchband

Whatever happened to that grosgrain black nylon USD$2 watchband I used to get every few years at Meijers’Thrifty Acres in Ann Arbor MI? Mine's badly worn-out now.

I’ve just spent a few hours on the phone & on-line, trying to track down a black grosgrain nylon watchband for a wristwatch I’d thought I had lost, but suddenly found again.

Most dept. stores no longer sell watchbands alone; watch shops that do, don't seem to grasp what a grosgrain watchband is like anymore (Asians may be expecting me to call it a watch-strap.) Rubber, yes, nylon, no; velcro yes, grosgrain, no. It seems to be mainly USN SEAL gear nowadays.

Military suppliers do have it (in 16-20-22mm Kevlar), but won't sell to the public; so-called army & navy suppliers do, but only in lots of 3; Chinese manufacturers, in lots of 100. I may just have to get a D-ring style band custom-made in NC for USD$8.95; I expect to hear back from them tomorrow if I can get it in black. (I can't.)

Fortunately, I got a tip to look at Long's (soon CVS) where I found a TIMEX black nylon 18mm watch band for USD$4.95; Made in China. (I'd forgotten that drugstores sell watchbands.) Slid into my Armitron wristwatch, it's a tad tight, but functional.

Batter uP!

Obama offers the World
the USA's mature hand,
while its global footprint's
politically & materially
overwhelming: still time
to try to save the planet.
Step up to the plate, O!

(21 APR 09, Santa Clara CA)v4

Matchbook Traveler

As a GE factory kid on MA Bay
I fantasy-travelled by collecting
empty matchbooks discarded
by brakemen on the lay-by tracks
across the street, advertizing
hotels, restaurants, diners & bars
far away from coastal Lynn MA.
Now I’m writing from fabulous
Silicon Valley in fabulouser CA,
where I've recently retired; O,
where did my matchbooks go?

(17 APR 09, Santa Clara CA)v4

Bullet-tr@ining

"This is not some fanciful,
pie-in-the-sky vision of the future.
It's happening now. The problem is,
it's happening elsewhere."- Obama


I fantasize myself hopping
an intercity bullet-train &
popping to S.F. in 10min.
Just now it’s 67min/48mi.
Cutting it to 10min would be
just enuf time for me to pop
my current reading & plow
thru 10 pp. (I read slowly);
the peninsular 'baby' bullet-train
takes 57min. to make 5 stops,
but none of them in my city.


(16 APR 09, Santa Clara CA)v4

Taxing jitters

I’ve been up since daybreak, trying to control my rising anxiety as I approach tax-filing day (tomorrow, April 15th) here in the USA; later this morning I’ll visit a volunteer tax-preparer for senior citizens (I’m now 66) who will review my notes & initial attempt at filling out a 1040-A form. What confuses me is that since I hadn’t worked for pay & so earned anything in 2008, I owe no taxes, or so it appears (tho I did collect Social Security monthly.) I could be described as 'living on a fixed income' now, but because I have usually worked for pay & paid some taxes each year, it just doesn’t seem quite real to me. Most people would be be glad to pay no taxes, but all this bewilders me; I must not be alone. UPDATE: It was confirmed that I owe no taxes for 2008. A sympathetic AARP volunteer (I'm a member) reviewed my documents & e-filed my 2008 return, telling me to expect a $250 check as part of the economic stimulus pkg. After sitting a while in the pine-paneled library of the senior center, browsing thru Elisabeth Kostova's novel THE HISTORIAN (2005, set in Romania, about Vlad the Impaler), I rode my black bike back against a strong headwind & soon fell asleep at my keyboard. I woke to finish writing this.

Existential BOOKITUDE (footnote)

As a teen, I read used books with a sharp Staedler 3H drafting pencil in hand, lightly marking in the margin those sentences that were most meaningful to me. The only book that I found entirely meaningful, so that I could only mark its entirety, was Erich Maria Remarque’s ARCH OF TRIUMPH (D. Appleton Century, NYC, 1945 ) I fell into it like an open window.

I identified entirely with its protagonist, German-exile Ravic (Croatian pseud.) trapped in Paris during the Nazi occupation, working as a ghost surgeon for incompetent French society doctors. Why? You'll have to read the book to understand.

Or see the 1948 film (with Charles Boyer as Ravic, Ingrid Bergman as Joan Madou.) There's a 1985 made-for-TV remake (with Anthony Hopkins, Leslie Ann Down, Donald Pleasance), but I haven't yet seen it. It's been available on VHS at public libraries/Blockbuster, & now it's probably on DVD, too. Hopkins would make a good Ravic. Some people are "Casablanca" (original script-title "Rick's Place") addicts, but I'm an "Arch of Triumph" one.

Remarque wrote many of his novels based on people's actual lives, starting with his own. I've never been the same since I read ARCH OF TRIUMPH; I feel it has & continues to project a life analgous to mine, decade after decade. My (political) hatreds are Ravic's, my losses are also his (Carolin Combs' death, the latest.) My life is still mine.

BOOKITUDE

BOOKITUDE IN MARIN

The Art of the Book
4th Annual Exhibition of Handmade & Altered Artist Books
Donna Seager Gallery, 851 4th St., San Rafael, CA 94901
www.donnaseagergallery.com

April 2 - May 31
Reception for the Artists: Friday, April 10, 6 to 8pm

My poet friend Karl Kadie & his wife Carol Korsow drove me up to an art gallery in wealthy Marin County (on the north side of S.F. Bay) for the opening of an annual show of books & book-like objects, packed to the walls with people who have money to spend. Sitting on one of few chairs available, I spoke to a local who was amazed that I'd come all the way up from Santa Clara (63.7 mi.)

It was all Karl’s idea. He wanted to see a book (made in an accordion-format) containing a few burning house poems because he’s writing a series of them. One’s about the personal experience of Pico Iyer – which he’s sent to Iyer (via his publisher.)

I keep telling Karl he’s writing the hottest literary subject I know of: burning houses in a time when, due to real estate madness, house values have suddenly plummeted. People are actually burning their now unaffordable houses, or abandoning them to the bank that actually owns them. The increasingly deranged housing bubble has finally burst. Reality (as they'd imagined it) is going up in smoke.

But back to books. A range of real-, semi- & quasi-books attracted quite a crowd, proving that despite Amazon’s Kindle or Sony's eBook readers, people are enamored of paper books or objects that look like them. Why? A lifetime’s conditioning. Who hasn’t happily read at least one book in their lifetime? Thus, replicating a book has virtue, striking a deep chord in the mind, bringing people out to stark-white art-gallery on a Friday nite, where I was handed a pair of transparent plastic gloves to turn the pages of an ironical book of Aesop’s Fables that I was reading bare-handedly because I’d forgotten what I was reading was also an art-object! This is at the opposite end of the utility spectrum from buying books by the linear foot to fill a bookcase for purely decorative purposes. Yes, some visibly pretentious Americans do this to look literate, displaying books they have no intention of reading.

Books have come from being incunabula to wallpaper, but this exhibition proves some people still treasure them, or something resembling them. Books as art objets is a retro-trend. Some are real, some not. Some are fine books, some not. Some are decks of cards. All demonstrate high-, middle-, or low-bookitude. (cf. Susan Sontag’s “Notes on camp” in her AGAINST INTERPRETATION & Other essays, 1963.)

Is there any one book I personally treasure? Yes; a hardbound of Erich Maria Remarque’s ARCH OF TRIUMPH (D. Appleton Century, NYC, 1945 ) I've had a copy in the original dust-jacket, with a Book of the Month Club pamphlet in it, since my teens. Its meaning to me increases with each decade I live; it began my early existential bookitude.

TALKING TURKIE

Ivo details all the reasons why
Turkie has been & is hated in Europe,
forgetting its wars with Russia:

Russo-Turkish War (1568–1570)
Russo-Crimean War (1571)
Russo-Turkish War (1676–1681)
Russo-Turkish War (1686–1700)
Russo-Turkish War (1710–1711)
Russo-Turkish War (1735–1739)
Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774)
Russo-Turkish War (1787–1792)
Russo-Turkish War (1806–1812)
Russo-Turkish War (1828–1829)
Russo-Turkish War (1853–1856) (Crimean War)
Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878)
Russo-Turkish War (1914–1918) (World War I)

Concluding: “Who doesn’t hate Turkie?”
Armenians, Austrians, Greeks, Hungarians,
Kurds, Poles, Russians; British, Anzacs do;
the ECU has no reason to invite Turkie in.

What in hell is Obama thinking?

(08 APR 09, Santa Clara CA)v3

Reggie & music

Reggie, Carolin's-chosen Maine Coon cat often sleeps during the day in a 3-storey carpeted cat-tower behind me as I type at my computer keyboard. A few minutes ago he was listening intently (with his eyes closed) to Dimitri Klebanov's viola concerto (ca. 1990) played by Mela Tenenbaum & the Philharmonia Virtuosi under Richard Kapp (Ess.a.y CD 1052, 1997 ) coming from the old Criterion W4 speakers nearest him.

Conlon Nancarrow?

An Abraham Lincoln brigader who subsequently chose Mexico over anti-Communist USA, Nancarrow (27 OCT 12 – 10 AUG 97) was a thoroughly experimental composer. (from Wikipedia) The complete contents of his studio, including his player piano rolls, instruments, libraries, documents & other objects are now in the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. Germans Jurgen Hocker & Wolfgang Heisig are the current live-performers of Nancarrow's player-rolls using similar acoustical instruments. Other performers of his works (often in arrangement for live musicians) include Thomas Ades, Alarm Will Sound & Netherlands ensemble Calefax who also recorded his Studies for player piano, already named 'Best CD of 2009' by Dutch newspaper Het Parool.

Seeking, but not asking,

It’s a typically cloudless sunny Sunday morning, here at the bottom of San Francisco Bay. I’ve just had strips of burnt wheat toast dipped in yogurt with dill-seeds & pre-cooked rice (having finally run out of margarine.)

As I type this, I’m listening to Peter Benoit’s massive “Hoogmis” (21 JUL 1861; Pt. 2 of his ‘Religious Tetrology); with the BRTN Phil. Orch, & Phil. Choir, Brussels, under Alexander Rahbari, (Discover DICD 920178)

Currently I’m reading Jane Redmont’s WHEN IN DOUBT, SING Prayer in Daily Life (paperback edition, 2008; Sorin Books, Notre Dame IN www.sorinbooks.com) loaned to me by her cousin Nancy (Rothenberg) Tepperman who sings in the alto section of the San Jose Peace Chorale, sitting directly in front of me in the bass section.

Until today, I've been trying to ignore Jane’s autobiographical chapters’ insistence on the social context of prayer. I long ago (ca. 1962) abandoned it with Roman Catholicism, & did & do not want to reacquire it now that I’ve long been an Episcopalian with Carolin Combs, who’s now dead these past 2 years, & I’ve returned to the radical loneliness of my solitary late-teens.

But a paragraph of Jane’s (p.17, par 1) stopped me a few minutes ago & I began to think of writing about thoughts that ensued. It was: “Our context is not just our social world. We pray also as inhabitants of planet Earth and participants in nature. The mountain ranges, the corn, the grass pushing up between the cracks of an urban sidewalk – they are part of our community.” (attributed to Elena Stone.)

This thought isn’t exceptional, but it forces me to see myself as somehow praying as I ride one of my ’70s Shogun 10-speeds here in flat urban Santa Clara. Praying is something I’d long studiously avoided. For me it had always been intentional, if not petitional. Seeking, but not asking, not receiving. Until Carolin died (26 JAN 07); since then I’ve frequently asked my Guardian Angel for help. Any help. I assume I’m getting it, somehow, whether I can recognize it or not. I do need that help.

Ades, happening

Last (Fri.) nite (03 APR 09) at the S.F. Symphony, I heard Thomas Ades' [so far, 1st] Violin Concerto "Concentric Paths" (played by Leila Josefowitz); at the donors' reception after, I suggested to him he ought to write 2 more, claiming all 3 need to be heard together to be understood. "Musicologists thrive on this", I told him; it's been done+ before: by Vivaldi in his Op. 8, Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione (contest between harmony & invention, 1725); its 1st 4 of 12 are Le quattro stagioni (4 seasons); but violin concerti have come a long way since 1725. Maybe all 3 could be played together? I mused; maybe even by 3 violinists? Promoters thrive on such bravura; meanwhile, all-Ades festivals are already happening (2007: London, Paris, Helsinki...) PS: Ades' fave USA composers are Ives & Nancarrow.

What U drive

In the ‘50s, I puzzled over
Canadian Mercurys as Meteors.
Since 1984, NUMMI,
New United Motor Mfg. Inc.,
has built Pontiacs & Toyotas
in a GM plant in Fremont CA,

so what you drive may not
be what you think: soon

small Chryslers may be Fiats.

(31 MAR 09, Santa Clara CA)v12

SF Bay: CoG?

As the daily SF CHRONICLE (called The Chron, here), currently owned by Hearst Corp., is currently halving staff & may well disappear; back East in NYC, the NYT claims it's because "SF Bay has no real center of gravity." Actually, SF Bay has multiple centers of (media) gravity, which may prove 2B the wave of the future. e.g.:

Aristide Maupin, once a Chron columnist, became a bestselling gay novelist, TV-script-writer etc., & is now its emeritus gay media-star; murdered gay supervisor Harvey Milk is back (as portrayed by Sean Penn), thanks to Hollywood. Super-photogenic mayor Gavin Newsom is making (inter)national news (cf. gay marriages, etc.) To the major media, SF is America's gay-capital.

Last nite I was watching Will Smith in "The Pursuit of Happyness" (on DVD) realizing it all took place in SF & I knew every landmark in it, proving even I've become visually familiar with SF in only a few years (thanks to my indulgent friends, the National Writers' Union, & having interviewed for PR-jobs in downtown), while living 50 miles south at the bottom of SF Bay in Silicon Valley, whose 'capital' is San Jose, daily is The San Jose Mercury-News, once the premier Knight-Ridder paper, but now a McClatchy. Across in the East Bay, the Media News Group-owned Oakland TRIB, & McClatchy-owned Sacramento BEE papers are micro-regional.

Meanwhile, the NYT & WSJ sell down here at the bottom of the Bay because many people (like me) are East Coast transplants, so the NYT connects many with where they grew up or were schooled, etc. (Not me; tho a Boston-area resident until 62, I read the Guardian Unlimited on-line; I began reading it in hardcopy while living most of 1985 in Scotland with Carolin Combs.)

[aside] Back-East, Boston is notably ethnic (Irish) & architecturally historic (Revolutionary-era); the liberal daily Boston GLOBE (partially owned by the NYT) is losing millions a month, while its competitor, the rightwing daily Boston HERALD (a fat tabloid) ex-Hearst, now independent, also owns many of the region's weeklies; in my mid-20s, I began there; decades later, before Harte-Hanks pulled out of the region, I wrote for a suburban daily & a suburban weekly. In the nearest major city, 40 miles due west, the Worcester TELEGRAM is also partially owned by the NYT; 50 miles due south, the independent Providence JOURNAL serves RI; slightly southwest, the independent Hartford COURANT serves CT, but the NYT has local editions (pages) for both, so someday it all may end up totally NYT-ish.

Meanwhile, small-tab newspapers can, will & do supply micro-local news to every town, no matter how small. But What's news reportage (vs opinion), Who gets paid to write any of it, & Who reads it, & Why? I've done both, on both coasts, & am doing it now, on-line, as you read this. Soon after I arrived here in SF Bay, I wrote for the on-line reincarnation of the once-subfamous SFCall (www.sfcall.com) that Mark Twain wrote for; now even that on-line Call is defunct.

veggie ombudsman

G.H.W. Bush disliked broccoli;
Obama dislikes beets. I like both.
Where R U, veggie ombudsman?

(21 MAR 09, Santa Clara CA)v3

AIOU (INTERPLANETARY)

[for F. Pohl & C. Kornbluth]

AIG's is now insuring everything
on our Earth + Moon; ditto, Mars,

changing its name to AIOU Holdings,
(Interplanet@ry) & its slogan to: No
stone unturned, no rock un-insured;

so when you lift one, better bend
your knees: it's heavily insured.

(20 MAR 09, Santa Clara CA)v9

Big Blue may soon eat Sun

Big Blue (IBM, fund. 1894 ) was once big; then it shrank; now it will grow again if it eats Sun Microsystems, (fund. 1982) This matters here in 'Silicon Valley' CA, because Sun’s an offshoot of Stanford University in Palo Alto (fund. 1885.) In 1975, Carolin & I met while working for Light Blue (Digital Equipment Corporation a/k/a DEC, fund.1957) Does any of this matter to you? If all you know about computers is what Microsoft (fund. 1975) sells you, none of this may matter to you, but it should, because many other companies & countries & people got us to where we are right now, on the internet where you're now reading what I’ve written here for you to read. Think (IBM's slogan) of what this really means. Maybe only those of us brought up on sci-fi mags & novels really can; I was & do. (flashback:) Reading Frederik Pohl & Cyril Kornbluth’s radical sci-fi novel "The Space Merchants" (1953) changed my early adolescent mind & life thereafter. Kingsley Amis wrote (in 1960) it “has many claims to being the best science-fiction novel so far." [Ex.] It previewed the contraceptive Pill (1956) as Preg-Not; so did Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" (1953.)

AIG - Interplanetary?

Noise about corporate bailouts being ‘socialist’ has dwindled as rage against AIG (American International Group) retention incentive bonuses has peaked with U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) suggesting that AIG executives go wholly Japanese. "Obviously, maybe they ought to be removed. But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they'd follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I'm sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide." (by seppuku) What’s next? AIG relocate its corporate HQ to the moon & rename itself Interplanetary? (Not while the U.S.gov(ernment) owns 80% of it!)

My Paddy Day

On St Paddy's Day, I spent from 6pm to past midnite in a nearby HMO-hospital ER where I had blood tests, an EKG, & 2 CT-scans, just to get 3 stitches put into my eyebrow so that I can now see easily out of my R eye. They asked me why I came in so many hours after my unusual accident around noon: tripping on my cat's tie-out rope, falling & slamming my face into a green wooden park-bench; my excuse was a St. Paddy's Day dinner I had to go to first. They (my Chinese docs) were bemused, once I told them I was from (incurably Irish) Boston.

My Green-Eyed Dagh

As a child, growing up just 11 miles north of Boston, when I dressed for early morning mass on St Patrick’s Day, my Polish-speaking mother would straighten a flimsy little wire & thread shamrock on my lapel as I went off. As I got older, I liked wearing it less, finally protesting “Look, my eyes are green, aren’t they enough?” (Hers were green, too, but she was wholly Polish.) But no exemptions from overt Irishness were to be had in 'greater' Boston. My father, born in Glasgow, was (perhaps) partly Irish, his father being named Francis and an R.C. but I never pled to being Boston-Irish & won’t start now on the West Coast; San Francisco does Paddy-up, nowhere equal to Boston, New York or Chicago, with their large Irish-American communities. Here's an infra-NYC joke: "What's 5 miles long & has an asshole at both ends?" (The St. Paddy's Day parade!)

Focus: Money

The economy grinds to a halt;
the halt grinds a powder;
the powder grinds a lens;
the lens focuses on money;
whose? Even yours, now.

(13 MAR 09, Santa Clara CA)

RUSHing

RUSH sniffs the tips of his manicured fingers, stealthily reinserting them deep into the well of his inspiration, craving a bubbly high-colonic to purify his thinking: “My load’s much greater than the masses know,” he whispers, afraid it might be heard beyond the neo-hard castle of EIB (Excellence in Broadcasting) where {{reson@nce}} validates all. Caught by a wide-angle lens, expanding full-width in fascistic black, faking hipoidal pump-action, he is pitifully, transparently condemned 2B a radiobe@st.

Countdown

"How will you explain Daylight Savings Time to your cat?" asks Ivo, saying Congress may pass a law that it only apples to states with names of more than 2-syllables. I explain: "Reggie's time-agnostic. He can really only distinguish analog day from analog night."

Last night, packed into NASA Ames Immersion Center (Mt.View), Ivo & I watched the Kepler liftoff at Canaveral, surrounded by scientific graybeards & multi-ethnic families with teenagers, witnesses to galactic history...beside me, Dr. Ginny Zeitman (NASA), joined the hand-clapping countdown as I sat on my hands...

CHENEY raves alone

CHENEY raves alone
on the porcelain throne,
damning Obama’s blood
as lacking real manhood:

“Real men can disagree
about what's tortury,
but only communists
cancel war-contracts!”

CHENEY will retire
to Dubai to the heart
of Haliburton corporat,
protected by Black-
water Men in Black.

“I am who I was & am;
I am the realer Man!”
CHENEY boasts alone.


(05 MAR 09, Santa Clara CA)v5

People no longer

People no longer
ask me about Carolin
as tho they’ve just heard she’d died.

Those who need to know, now know;
the rest of the world will have to be told
in every way I am capable of:

On You Tube: Chef Carolin
crafts a Crème Marie Louise
as I sweatily sous chef her,
for as long as You Tube exists:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkDKecx2ZKI

Material irony: Carolin
really didn’t like chocolate
& only chose it out of sheer bravada
because chocolate impresses people,
always has & always will.


(06 MAR 09, Santa Clara CA)v5

Ri$ing Expectation$

A child bends over to pick up a penny,
an adolescent, a Benjamin,
a banker, a billion, expectations
just about equal: Where’s the next?


(05 MAR 09, Santa Clara CA)

Pennies into Dollars

Pitching pennies into a penny-jar
on your way out the front door
teaches your children

how to save pennies indoors;
rolling them up in paper tubes
teaches their paper value to banks.

What teaches us the reification of
millions, billions, trillions of dollars?

(04 MAR 09, Santa Clara CA) v8

A Libertarian

Once a Libertarian I carpooled with tried to talk me into mortgages as rock-solid investments: “My mortgage is my bank account!” he chortled, smiling. “But the bank actually owns your house,” I argued, “If you lose your job, the bank will take your bank-account-house. What will you have left then?” In his scenario, it could never happen. In a while, the computer company we both worked for was taken over twice. I wonder if he still works in high-tech, & still has his same suburban house?

Walk, off

After e-mailing Ivo that
light rain's cancelling our walk
to the posh mall a mile away.

I hold out my R-fingers
to my cat Reggie who sniffs
them, growling appreciatively.


(01 MAR 09, Santa Clara CA)v4

Where the mind repairs

While watching my Maine Coon cat Reggie at the end of his tether at twilight, I’ve just read a back of the book (mag-end) piece by Eric Hanson about celebrity encounters in which Swoosie Kurtz is the sightette.

I think all writers should be required to write fluff-pieces like this forcing them to reveal who they think is (or was) a celeb, leaving us a voluntary dig into their (if not our) time. Just how fluffy were they? The names they drop will reveal all.

Example: I could begin with Somebody we all know & admire (John ‘Kenneth’ Galbraith) & work my way down to an as-yet-not Somebody who I know & admire (poet Karl Kadie) sparing you their specifics, directing you instead to Google for proof of their relative existence on The Web.

Which is where the mind now repairs, right?

Crypto-rosary

In 1952, @ 10, I read a sci-fi pulpmag story in which a far-future monk secretly uses his tunic buttons as a crypto-rosary. I'm now told it's "The Quest for Saint Aquin," (1951) by William Anthony Parker White, (pseud.) Anthony Boucher. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Boucher www.mysterynet.com/books/testimony/boucher.shtml
variety-sf.blogspot.com/2008/05/anthony-boucher-quest-for-saint-aquin.html

Weighty matters

Weighty matters weigh heavily as the Taurus
carbon observatory falls to Earth & sinks.

Mardi Gras offers one last day’s distraction.

Obama gets even seriouser with Congress;
Bernanke says the recession will lift this year.

Anybody still running on hope is wondering:

What in hell are the Republicans thinking?
Can’t they see we see right through them?


(24 FEB 09, Santa Clara CA)v2

Speculative poem

I’m thinking of writing a sci-fi poem. You’d think - having grown up on sci-fi, it’d be easy, but it isn’t; I just don’t know where to begin. BEMs (bug-eyed monsters) are just not my thing, nor are rocket-ships. Dimensions are more like it, but which?

Das Leben der Anderen (2005-6)

Yesterday Anita & I watched a Netflix DVD: "The Lives of Others" (2005-6), in German, w/subtitles. Here is a par. from the New Yorker review by Anthony Lane (12 FEB 2007).

It is a tribute to the richness of the film that one cannot say for sure who the hero is. The most prominent figure is Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), yet if you passed him on the street you wouldn’t give him a 2nd glance, or even a 1st. He would spot you, however, & file you away in a drawer at the back of his mind. Wiesler, based in East Berlin, is a captain in the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, better known as the Stasi—the state security service, which, by the mid-1980s, employed more than 90K personnel. In addition, a modest 170K East Germans became unofficial employees, called upon to snoop & snitch for the honor—or, in practical terms, the survival—of the state. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” Jesus said. The German Democratic Republic offered its own version: Watch thy neighbor, then pick up thy phone. The movie begins, fittingly, in 1984...

neoCreative Acccounting

How many Republican governors
does it take to flummox a stimulus?
Just as many as are running in 2012.
This isn’t the New Math, it’s the old,
based on campaign contributions;
their fingers are already stuck
in corporate pies: whenever
the pies pop open, they sing
about neo-creative accounting,
chirping ‘less’ but taking more.
Sheer duplicity accounts for it.

(22 FEB 09, Santa Clara CA)v3

Poetic Endorphins

For years now, I’ve realized that writing poetry releases endorphins in my brain; no matter how anxious or despairing I am, writing or editing a poem acts as a temporary anodyne, restoring my self-confidence. What makes me a poet evidently seems to keep me going.

Drought Rain

(AP) What could be the largest storm of the season is bringing heavy rain & snow to sections of CC with winter storm warnings for the Sierra Nevada & flood advisories from SF Bay south to L.A.

Here on SF Bay, during "The Rainy Season" (=Winter), it's pouring much needed rain during what they say is a drought: reservoirs are low, streams down to a trickle, etc. People are rain-shy here, but say "we need the rain..." as they go out into it. Today is Presidents' Day & the Santa Clara Sr Citz pool is closed; I fear getting wet, having grown up on MA Bay where I often had bronchitis, later, pneumonia. Deep inside me a sick little boy lies abed, watching a Vicks Vaporizer bubbling away....

NorCal pours, while its
weathercasters warn of
drought & reservoirs rise
from 49-52% of normal.
Californians airily say:
“We need all this rain”
& testily step out into it.
As a MA Bay transplant,
torrential rain, hurricanes,
coastal floods, all seem
normal to me as I watch
all this from 4 floors up
in Silicon Valley.

(18 FEB 09, Santa Clara CA)v7

Kiss my B&W

“Kiss my B&W ass” says Obama
asked how he intends to enlist more
Republicans in his stimulus bill. “If you
think nothing but tax-breaks work,
join Dubya in Dallas, getting wasted.
We have serious work to do.” No more
Mr. Nice Guy, Obama unsmiles; hardass
Republicans know their bluff's called;
McCain stiffly folds his one bluff hand.
Palin waves hers from way up in AK.

(10 FEB 09, Santa Clara CA)v9

"The Reader/Der Vorleser" (2008)

Last nite, at what Ivo called a 'civilized' hour (7pm), we went to West San Jose's Santana Row CineArts theater & saw "The Reader" (2008) starring Ralph Fiennes & Kate Winslett playing a Nazi-era working-class German whose 'moral idiocy' led her take job as an Auschwitz guard after one at a Siemens plant. Her tragic flaw is that on trial, she is too simple-minded to not admit that it was a voluntary choice (thus condemning herself) & to disguise that she was illiterate then (finally only learning to read in prison.) The more I tell you about her will only complicate your sympathy for her, but I believe that the only commensurate (forget just) penalty for her & her cohort of 6 female guards is death (for having 'selected' women & children for gassing), yet that isn't the sentence pronounced. Instead, she gets life (serving only 20 yrs) & the others 4.5 years each because they claim "she was in charge" (she wasn't, but doesn't dare admit her illiteracy - which could easily prove it.) Calling her life a tragedy only diminishes the tragic deaths of her victims, so what are we left with? Are we ready to be responsible for all the crimes we committed on our jobs? Or do we believe we’re trapped in History’s web? Did we perform our jobs just to live or only just to survive? If we finally realize our guilt, when & what type of justice do we administer to ourselves as both victims & victimizers? Which wrist do we slash first?

(08-9 FEB 09, Santa Clara CA)