Naming the Sun (december version)

Naming the Sun

I wish I had a thousand
words for sunshine
in December

Flakes of flickering eyelids
Quartz specks sparkling in the gravel
Simmering sweat under long sleeves
_____Damn, that dried mud really hides the rust on my pickup

The dogs have buried some bones in the garden
and almost desperately scatter the topsoil

An empty birdhouse sags from the maple tree
where it’s been half-heartedly nailed

I cut and split a long-dead locust
and stacked it against the house,
a mountain
beneath a faded blue tarp

Last night’s frost dripping like perspiration
Air bubbles trapped in soft ice
Puddles shrinking
Deck boards slick with slimy black moss
A solitary blackbird perched on the gate
sunning herself

A Love Song for the Fall

Fledgling words
they darkly rise and fall

An autumn wind
like short quick breaths
upon a glowing ember
fuels the soul
and then recedes

Lacking constancy
a wayward heart sings songs
that can't be heard
except in silence

Whew...

I just ?correctly? cited 32 sources that I plan to use for my master's thesis in rhetoric...a tedious rhetorical act in itself...glad to have that out of the way...

Night

Sometimes I get inspired late at night. I guess it means I get less sleep. But sometimes the space that presents itself just calls out to be filled.

Snippets from Ezra Pound's Cantos

in short shall we look for a deeper or is this the
bottom?

what whiteness will you add to this whiteness,
what candor?

and the greatest is charity
to be found among those who have not observed
regulations
not of course that we advocate--
and yet petty larceny
in a regime based on grand larceny

I don't know how humanity stands it
with a painted paradise at the end of it
without a painted paradise at the end of it
the dwarf morning-glory twines round the grass blade
magna NUX animae with Barabbas and 2 thieves beside me

nothing matters but the quality
of the affection--
in the end--that has carved the trace in the mind

What thou lov'st well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
or is it of none?

Pixelated Blues

There’s something about the academic life
that makes Fall start in August
and days-off nonexistent.

Sometimes Steve Earle on itunes
and a jelly jar full of whiskey
redeems an entire day
spent typing and backspacing
and chewing tops off pens.

But then I look around me
at the potted plants and dogs sleeping
on the floor and wonder
if there’s something lazy about the whole thing.

9/11 and the blues

Outkast video...referenced in previous post

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4vVL51V4q4

Slam Poetry

Almost Fall

Got a lot of fall semester plans/ideas in the pipeline...trying to organize my first ever ENGL 101 syllabus, prepare for my own classes that are about to start, and study for my rhetoric comps that are coming up way too soon. As all of this bubbles below the surface of August, I can't help but want to give some love to the (overgrown but prospering) garden and run around in the woods with Tiger. In the Winter, writing, planning, and thinking things through to (some semblance of) a conclusion seem to come quite naturally...but the Summer brain is so hard to tame. And I must admit that it is awfully hot for trying to spend hours of every day immersed in words/ideas. This is where true discipline really needs to take over...right when it's strongest oppositional forces are flourishing.

Blogging about the police = crime

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/09/AR2009080902126.html?referrer=digg

Learning How To Live For A Living

So, I just encountered the best student paper I have seen in my illustrious 6-week teaching career. It was titled 'Learning how to Live for a Living,' and began with this awesome quote from Charlie Chaplin:

"Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost."

I won't quote the paper itself without permission, but it was really sharp...

Made my night.

Remember the American dude picked up in Afghanistan after 9/11...what ever happened to him?

This is Horrible...but Addictive in a Weird Way

Glenn Beck on Why Obama is a Racist...I'm never really sure if this guy is serious or just clowning around.

The Role of Corporate Executives in Healthcare Reform: Questions of Transparency

Obama on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates

Sarah Palin's resignation speech...copy-edited and fact-checked...this could be fun to present to my students as a composition & rhetoric exercise.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/07/palin-speech-edit-200907?printable=true&currentPage=all

Town Hall Meeting with Deleware Congressman...this is fucked up.

Damn. This was said on the House floor...Obama's mom would have aborted him if she had gotten funding for it...

Aesop Rock

Motion & Possibility

Isn't it motion that allows us to expand the horizon of what is possible...or what we perceive to be possible? And don't possibilities, by nature, precipitate motion? We might imagine (at least momentarily) that stillness can become a possibility in/of itself...like in meditation or something. But just think how infinite possibilities erupt (against our will, perhaps) from the desire to remain still. And motion continues.

The Real Subject [Whir] by Keith Waldrop

Do not alarm yourself, I could not rest content with moral lectures and continual repetition like the solar system, I could not hold my head up, made endlessly to glow destined for grand ceremonies, I was much affected by finding myself so thin and so worn down (we use theory to mean it is possible to choose, e.g., why I am just the size I am) a million million, a cool and mortifying manner — what governs motions

Cooling out at the July party

Getting warmed up at the July party

Zizek & Belief

Slavoj Zizek (one of my favorite contemporary thinkers/writers) claims that only an atheist can truly believe. To attempt to do justice to the subtlty and complexity of Zizek's account of belief, I would have to delve far deeper into the abyss of modern/postmodern philosophy than I am prepared to do in this context. What I would like to do is skate around this idea of the atheist as the true believer and muse about how this relates to contemporary intellectual life and, in particular, what it means to be 'progressive' when it comes to political thought and social action.

According to Zizek, the most critical moment for Christianity is when Jesus cries out from the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The disconnection between humanity and the divine is something that people struggled with long before the dawn of Christianity; so, if Jesus was just a man (perhaps a devoted, ethical, or even holy man, but nonetheless still human), then feeling forsaken by God simply functions as a reiteration of something that the Jewish people had already been experiencing and documenting for centuries. The will of the divine being other, its logic transcends (or at least opperates on a different level than) human logic. And encountering this dissonance, along with the necessary suffering it entails, is simply part of the religious life. However, if Jesus actually is God, then God undergoes and embodies a truly atheistic moment--as the experience of feeling forsaken by the divine becomes woven into the fabric of the divine itself, which paints a picture of God as a being (or idea) who forsakes even himself. Most Christian theologians would endeavor to preserve the unity or purported purity of their deity, even through this mysterious schizophrenic moment, but it may be the very incorporation of atheism into the nature of Christianity that makes its mythology so interesting, or even (dare I say) revolutionary. What if (to use Kantian terms) the Thing-in-Itself, the kernel of absolute reality out of which all manner of illusion and partial-truth are born, came to question its own status as such? Does nihilism inevitably ensue if we fail to cultivate some degree of faith in a perfect, though unseen, unifying factor that reigns (intentionally or against its own will) over everything else? Or, as Zizek suggests, perhaps an authentic, heartfelt denial of such a power underlies all potential creativity and forms one (possibly the only) distinct foundation on which actual belief can be founded.

Zizek tells a story that I find helpful (and amusing): There is a crazy man who believes that he is a kernel of corn. He checks himself into a mental hospital, where doctors work with him day after day--attempting to convince their patient that he is actually a man and not a kernel of corn. Finally, he seems to come around and everyone decides that he is stable enough to return to normal life outside of the institution. However, within minutes of checking out, the patient encounters a chicken on the side of the road and then runs screaming back to the hospital. The doctors meet him at the door and say, "Come on. We've been over this. You have absolutely nothing to be afraid of. You know that you're a man and not a kernel of corn." The patient replies, "Of course I know that. But does the chicken know it?"

There is probably some appropriate parallel with intellectuals and atheism: "We've been over this. You know that God isn't real, that God is just an idea that people have created to make themselves feel better about life...perhaps interesting anthropologically or something, but not real." The progressive intellectual might reply: "Yes, of course I know that. But does God know it?" Anyway, the point is that there is a vast difference between really believing something and simply acting like we believe. Religious dogmatists might be particularly easy to pick on, since it's
impossible to judge oneself (by arbitrary moral standards) as stringently as one applies judgment to others; it's hard to keep the evil within at bay, with so much effort put toward exposing the evil embodied by everyone else. To be fair, I think that most liberal intellectuals are just as guilty of acting like they believe certain things--attempting to cover up the truly conflicted nature of their inner lives. So-called political correctness (acting like everyone is equal) easily replaces any revolutionary attempt to enact true equality. Environmentalism (acting like we give a shit) can function in the same way, as we ignore the actual effects of our way of life on the natural world by labeling certain consumer choices as 'green.' The list could go on and on. Generally, I'm interested in how much energy we (yes, i mean all of) spend acting like we believe certain things, compared to the amount of energy it would actually take to uncover or develop authentic belief. Maybe, from a religious perspective, acting like we believe in God is enough to warrant being saved--a 'fake it til you make it' kind of mentality that acknowledges doubt as an intrinsic aspect of any faithful gesture. However, what would it be like to act like we don't believe in anything? Wouldn't that kind of acting be equally justified? A 'fake it til you make it' brand of atheism perhaps, which actually seems to dominate entire circles of postmodern academics.

What is all this about? Maybe I'm working on some sort of account of how true patriotism requires dissent or how true creativity requires nothingness. But it's really not quite so parallel as that. For now, maybe the questions remain: What would a true believer look like? And how could their belief be spoken of without being stained or cheapened or, at the very least, misrepresented? What Zizek puts forth about belief and atheism strikes me as far more radical than the familiar Socratic call to question everything we believe, which will hopefully precipitate deeper understanding by expanding the horizons of what is possible, and so on. Maybe the thesis/antithesis of belief, rather than working itself out in a final (enlightened) synthesis, actually comes to life through its very lack of resolution. Or perhaps the lack of resolution becomes the impetus for the emergence of a whole new set of terms that could describe what real belief actaully is.

Famous Actors Read The Declaration of Independence

The Best Nose-Picker Ever!

Jerry/Bobby on Letterman

Workshop (by Billy Collins)

I might as well begin by saying how much I like the title. It gets me right away because I’m in a workshop now so immediately the poem has my attention, like the Ancient Mariner grabbing me by the sleeve. And I like the first couple of stanzas, the way they establish this mode of self-pointing that runs through the whole poem and tells us that words are food thrown down on the ground for other words to eat. I can almost taste the tail of the snake in its own mouth, if you know what I mean. But what I’m not sure about is the voice, which sounds in places very casual, very blue jeans, but other times seems standoffish, professorial in the worst sense of the word like the poem is blowing pipe smoke in my face. But maybe that’s just what it wants to do. What I did find engaging were the middle stanzas, especially the fourth one. I like the image of clouds flying like lozenges which gives me a very clear picture. And I really like how this drawbridge operator just appears out of the blue with his feet up on the iron railing and his fishing pole jigging—I like jigging— a hook in the slow industrial canal below. I love slow industrial canal below. All those l’s. Maybe it’s just me, but the next stanza is where I start to have a problem. I mean how can the evening bump into the stars? And what’s an obbligato of snow? Also, I roam the decaffeinated streets. At that point I’m lost. I need help. The other thing that throws me off, and maybe this is just me, is the way the scene keeps shifting around. First, we’re in this big aerodrome and the speaker is inspecting a row of dirigibles, which makes me think this could be a dream. Then he takes us into his garden, the part with the dahlias and the coiling hose, though that’s nice, the coiling hose, but then I’m not sure where we’re supposed to be. The rain and the mint green light, that makes it feel outdoors, but what about this wallpaper? Or is it a kind of indoor cemetery? There’s something about death going on here. In fact, I start to wonder if what we have here is really two poems, or three, or four, or possibly none. But then there’s that last stanza, my favorite. This is where the poem wins me back, especially the lines spoken in the voice of the mouse. I mean we’ve all seen these images in cartoons before, but I still love the details he uses when he’s describing where he lives. The perfect little arch of an entrance in the baseboard, the bed made out of a curled-back sardine can, the spool of thread for a table. I start thinking about how hard the mouse had to work night after night collecting all these things while the people in the house were fast asleep, and that gives me a very strong feeling, a very powerful sense of something. But I don’t know if anyone else was feeling that. Maybe that was just me. Maybe that’s just the way I read it.

Bonnie Prince Billy

ACLU & Ron Paul supporters team up against airport cops

http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/06/18/aclu-ron-pauls-campaign-for-liberty-sue-tsa-over-illegal-detention/

Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Sonnets to Orpheus

A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.

Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright
unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests;
and it was not from any dullness, not
from fear, that they were so quiet in themselves,

but from simply listening. Bellow, roar, shriek
seemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been
just a makeshift hut to receive the music,

a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing,
with an entryway that shuddered in the wind--
you built a temple deep inside their hearing.

The ?Value? of Stability

I often think of my relationship to politics in the following way: I have radical (perhaps revolutionary) ideals about what successful human interaction actually is. Like a good socialist, I think that everyone should have equal access to resources and maintain relatively equal shares of power. When the few control the resources (wealth) and the many exert themselves desperately and disparately--grasping for a pittance--the structures of power have clearly become imbalanced. And they must be either changed, or destroyed. Like a good libertarian, I think that individuals must choose how to organize themselves as part of a group. Taxation, laws governing social behavior (promoted or punishable), as well as pro-war (and other types of sectarian) propaganda look a lot like coercion. A centralized group-think about who is right/wrong, who deserves to be killed or locked up, and what causes are un(worthy) of support, by threatening the integrity of human will/volition, ultimately engenders (rather than squelches) the revolutionary spirit--which may (seem to) have no alternative to violence in its eruption. What real solidarity we have with one another must be freely chosen. That is, each person must choose to see it in order to choose what to do about it. But in the light we can see shadows.

We in the US experience a more/less stable political environment, despite the shifts between our two major parties and between the ideals that those parties espouse. In Nepal, city-wide and country-wide protests freeze commerce and eliminate the possibility of safely traveling from place to place. Elected officials exert relatively limited control over social institutions and lack sufficient resources to address basic infrastructure requirements. Two different armies (the Nationalist army and the Maoist army) maintain posts in larger cities and along major roads. Thankfully, (at least for now) they have stopped fighting one another. On one hand, the Nepali democracy, with the energy of youth, bubbles with possibilities. Perhaps the people have a chance to create their own future, to make it distinctly Nepali--diverse and welcoming and beautiful. On the other hand, for many (if not most) citizens, political instability appears to inhibit rather than empower them in their daily lives, to limit what is possible rather than expanding its horizons.

Even in times of purported change, the US political system evolves slowly and often in a circular fashion. This relative stability provides a level of comfort for many US citizens, while simultaneously fostering a sense of hope in those citizens whose lives are not comfortable or whose interests are not represented by the centralized power. Knowing that change does happen, that new opportunities do arise, that creativity and ingenuity do actually generate tangible results from time to time channels individuals with revolutionary leanings into roles as activists, intellectuals, or artists. So, the revolution may have a non-violent outlet after all...or so we think, for better or for worse.

Links

So, here's a basic overview of Nepal's political history from the BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/country_profiles/1166502.stm

Although a lot of the context is left unexplained, more detailed/current/interesting articles on the political scene in Nepal can be found here:

http://www.nepalnews.com/archive/main.htm

Nepal

I just got back from Nepal, where I was visiting my sister, Elizabeth. She's been working as a volunteer (doing social work) in a Nepali village since November. And I got to go meet her people and travel around the country a little bit. We spent a lot of time on buses, traveling from town to town, visiting folks or executing various adventures. These rides were long and hot and curvy and crowded, but completely perfect at the same time. For a reduced rate, the bus driver will let you ride on top of the bus on the luggage rack. This can be pretty exciting, especially when the bus passes through towns and you have to duck to avoid powerlines, or when fifteen farm workers (with tools) help prove that just as many folks can ride on top of a bus as inside.

One day we visited the supposed birthplace of the Buddha. Said a little prayer at the stone on which the Buddha fell when his mother gave birth to him standing up. Of course, the baby Buddha made an imprint on the stone, which is how it can be identified as the proper one. Anyway, temple after temple have been built around this spot for 2500 years or so. A place that has been considered holy for some time now. It's hard to tell how much human will actually imprints on a place...maybe quite a bit, especially over time...and how much expecting to feel something strong and special can really produce anticipated (or not) results.

Thinking a lot about economics. After being in one of the poorest countries in the world, the way I view the ebb and flood of capital in the US is changing. What do we label as crisis? And what would a real crisis actually look like? Also, having less money doesn't necessarily mean having less happiness or having less life. Of course everyone knows this intellectually...but losing money (especially lots of money) still constitutes a crisis from a particular point of view. But if the only things we could ever hope for were enough food to survive and other people to share our life with, then the only crises would be starvation or solitude. I haven't quite figured out what I want to say about this...

Meeting Nepali people and going to their homes and not being able to speak to them really, but feeling welcome and smiling a lot...these were some of the most amazing times for me...drank a lot of sweet milky tea and thought a lot about how interesting it is that people like me can up and travel to the other side of the planet and sit with people who have never left their village and seem really curious 1) how and why i came to be there, and 2) why on earth i wouldn't want to make arrangements to stay there permanently.

Pictures from Nepal

Well...

So, I guess I'm going to try out this blogging thing. Not sure what's going to come of it...perhaps little, perhaps much...we'll just have to see.