Saturday, May 30, 2009

We All Live On The Same Block

An assertion of knowledge, or position, comes at us like a body moving. An approach may be friendly, it may be threatening. It may seem to be one, yet be the other.

None of this here is intended to 'out-understand' anyone. This is engagement for the sympatico, and where challenge arises, its aim is to strengthen all parties, not defeat any.

Constant 'defeat', constant 'failure' is wrong perception. It's constant 'growth'.

Friday, May 29, 2009

Howiez Bak (Never Really Gone)


Under the weather for a short time recently, one fine Seattle blogger, http://howieinseattle.blogspot.com/, is back to his truth-telling, laptop in hand -- or, in lap.

My religious candles have been burning for you, H! Keep holding their feet to the fire.




Monday, May 25, 2009

Escape From Ikea



The kitchen clock stopped. On my way to a bakery across the valley was Ikea. People were filing in, but not in huge numbers. I entered, in order to see their clock collection. It was half-an-hour till opening. Couldn't look.
They were serving free breakfasts. I left.

On the way back from the bakery, maybe 10 minutes to the opening hour, I pulled into the lot again, but had to park way, way back. I walked a long way into the entrance and queued up with scores of people. I practiced a zen alertness, never looking at my timepiece, never feeling impatience. Just looking at the size of the crowd, the size of the people, and listening to the bland chatter, the squall of a nearby toddler.

When the rope was loosed and entry was allowed, the bottleneck was uncomfortable and close, inviting every and all exchange of virus.

Ducking through a mock apartment display, I made it to the clocks. They were outsized or very plastic and cheap.

I followed the blue exit line, finding myself disgorged into the parking warehouse (#1), and got to the rear of parking warehouse (#2) where my car sat next to a young couple trying to wedge some load of disassembled home furnishing into their hatchback.

Out above the street I flew like a zen bird.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Marginal Utility



Talk about underused productive capacity!

This guy's a pistol-totin', straight-shootin', ropin', ridin' buckaroo; the whole enchilada; the complete package -- clotted-knot of cultural capital 'on the hoof'!

(Wasted on chit chat and commercial howdy-do's!)


Friday, May 22, 2009

Crouching Wordsmith, Hidden Nectar

Part of nature, I part with nature

If upshooting from the earth, enfructifying tree boughs,

Also I am lighter than the wind, less seen than the man in the room with no men.

If one could conceive of me, there would be no words on this page.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Three Moments



Fat red rhododendrons

Nuzzle and snuggle

Snivel and grovel

Sizzle and shovel




Saturday, May 16, 2009

Media



Broadcasters have one responsibility only: audience share.

That's the one reliable truth they deliver.

'No Hay Banda'




Teaching 'Theory' as such, in higher education, as a 'meta-perspective', is very much a thing derived from frustrations of the political Left loaded with envy and an angry, unfinished -- indeed, rarely-tried -- agenda.

Before you rage my way, it's not the Left against whom I am aiming. This country has no real 'Left'. The bias in America, at least since FDR, is clearly conservative-Right, a reflexively-entrenched group whose most recent Trinity is Adam Smith-cum-Charleton Heston-cum-any preacher-down-the-road. This is what's claimed to be the face of 'Americanism'.

The Left here, is (pace California), like wine and cheese, French.

For intellectual America, there are no clean hands.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Soul Mint




How deep is a scripture coming from a shallow mouth?

Chapter and verse through carious teeth under rheumy eyes?

Word in need of breath mints?

Drive On!



When you get outstripped on your left by a bus, you know there's something wrong with your lane.

Stalinismo



Consensus from the top, so that somebody present concludes:

We've all had our say.

Pick-Me-Up




To the Starbucks barista:

By God! I love those beans!

Stand-Up



So far out of power, you could sell my house and use it to tip the waitress.

Flight-Heavy




Love should have wings

Then we see it has weight

Tale Teller



Crackpot and sour stories -- that is to say: human interest.

Love the people, hate the lives.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Solid Food, Poor Pho Place




I bought a ban. Tough, chewy.

I feared squirrel meat.

Yes, Operator -- Stalin, With An 'S'



1) The more oversight is asked, the more fault is expected to be found and removed.

2) The more oversight is applied, the more 'fault' is found.

3) The more oversight, the more urgent the erasure of 'fault', the more 'zero' the tolerance.

4) The more oversight, the more goals are 'reached', even 'surpassed'.

5) The more oversight, the more someone, anyone, must become an obstructionist, a perpetrator, an enemy.

6) The more oversight, the more any system becomes oversight.

Words For Swingin' Readers



It's important to me that I my voice pitches in the same key as Sinatra (did), even though I don't know which key that is. As something of a musical illiterate, then, let me sing this for you. [ ].

Couldn't hear it, could you?

Well, what if I couldn't write?

Would that be entirely of no importance to you, or can you admit to yourself just how devilishly beguiling is the moment you reach this place (or anywhere else I may have written)?

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Trauma Drama



B dreams of her ship leaving port and Phoebe jumping from the dock to reach her.

That night, Phoebe's urn in the room on the other side of the wall where B's headboard abuts.

Pitching A Project




Mine? The life of Freud, choreographed by Bob Fosse?

Poet's Epitaph



Die first

Gain notice later

Saturday, May 9, 2009

The Damnable Ambiguity At The Heart Of Things

The Reader. Put this off for a while, not least because of Charlie Rose's conversation with the New York Critic guys at the time of the Oscars. Knew it had something to do with the Holocaust, grew to know she was an H campguard (Nein! Keep your hands off the lambies! Don't touch! Make nice!). When I thought too much about that 'mix', I got to be a kind of 'sour' guy, grousing about how a postmodern treatment of the H would dwarf the brute reality of it by deconstructing 'facts'. You know: hopping over time, through viewpoints, introducing differing forms of vision, undermining preconceived allegiances in the interest of a sliding notion of (non-)truth (small 't'), yak, yak.

B didn't finish it. I felt ashamed to admit that any chick who attaches nylons to her garter belt has a place at my table -- even if she's a 300-pounder, 70 years old, and tells me to 'wipe it up' (perhaps especially then). I went back on my own the next day and did the last half-hour or so.

This morning, weeks later, it hit me that perhaps the story was meant to show the even a C-campguard during the H held a deep love inside her just like the Hertzschmerz we see warping the young guy and the older Rafe (spelling deliberate to simulate Anglicized pronunciation). And then the graveyard years later by the Kirche where she listened to the nuns sing Dominique, Dominique in 1958 -- graveyard visit to explain to the alienated daughter why he -- Rafe -- had been warped. By love. By nylons hooked into a garter belt. Just, zo!

By some subconscious set of acts, and with the help of Netflix, I've watched within a period of two months Judgment At Nuremberg, Nuremberg, The Pianist, and The Reader. By far The Pianist captures most convincingly the random brutality and the sheer chanciness of rare survival, the desperate nature of living in a war zone, the meaning of a whole people being singled out for annihilation. Even Polanski had to base his film on a 'true story', but I cut him slack -- that pianist likely still resides in his memory, as Polish Jew survivor of the ghetto and as man whose world finds explanation in art, not necessarily in fulfillment with those around him. That pianist is also his own prototype: he himself.

Listen Up!




If I made this class easy . . . would you respect me in the morning?

Juris? Prudence!

Thinking outside the box

In law?

In law,

No box but that can't be repackaged.