Sellers: A Warning / Triggered

A Warning
Author: Anonymous
Publisher: Twelve Books
272p

Triggered
Author: Donald Trump Jr.
Publisher: Center Street
304p

1. Two Books

These two books sit at #1 and #2 as we start the last month of 2019 and that feels exactly right.

We have an innate desire to know what goes on behind closed doors. Especially the closed doors of the "important" and "famous". Look at the popularity of celebrity Instagrams. Of Jennifer Garner's pretend Facebook cooking show.

We want to not only see what these people are doing, we want to know the details of how.

This goes double when it comes to how our country is being run.

Even if you are "not political" you probably find the possibility of knowing more about the behind-the-scenes interesting. I don't know how else to explain the success of entertainment like Jack Ryan or 24. I don't know how else to explain the bumper stickers.

I don't know how else to explain these two books.

America is supposedly divided. Very divided. I don't buy it. I think that media is divided. Manipulative. Is actually currently creating multiple realities. We can debate the reality of "truth" but there are things that are real and things that are unreal.

One of these books is about a more real real than the other.

Sidenote: How the fuck are you not political because all things are politics and your very existence depends on the politics of where and who you are.


2. Public v. Private

That there is even a discussion about whether the person who sits in America's White House at the moment is actually fit for the job is perhaps a shocking thing. That this person won an election at all is perhaps shocking.

If you haven't been paying attention to the growing divide in media representation in America over the last 30 years, you would naturally be shocked. Naturally.

That one of these books sits at #2 mainly because political money was used to bulk purchase it feels even more 2019.

That in private Republicans actually seem to have morals that they refuse to express in public...is actually the more shocking thing to me. See, I assume that all of this is a con to gain power money power clout legacy money etc. But I also assume that to be that bald in your ambitions, you would have to be a pretty terrible person.

But a person still.

There are divides. And then there are fences walls purpose built. These two books represent the latter.


Sellers is my attempt to examine what books are topping the best-seller list and why. To talk about and understand the trends in popular writing.

Poem-A-Day #336 : [Yesterday - there was]

[Yesterday - there was]

Yesterday -

there was a Constitutional crisis -

a glitch - it
                    skipped   & caught   & tore
                    in alltheplaces.

It is hard
to ask paper
to hold ideas
for this long
without burning.

Poem-A-Day #334 : New Shoes

New Shoes

The website is selling shoes - highlights thinness of the sole
color of variety - daily dance in neon for $60

Imagine toes into them - tightness of new a swaddle across arch
that leather fresh rubber - moment of paper in toe

Putting the shoes on - sock of ground beneath - sudden support

Safety is - a broken pair - foam cracked burned
rounded into parody of a clown

How aches the back in those things - how creeps the body
for $60 made in Americas you too can walk the streets in glowing style

Thinness and feeling renewed - the opening of eyes -

Classic Wasp Trainer - Gola

Poem-A-Day #331 : Letter of Discovery (after Columbus)

Letter of Discovery (after Columbus)

you - will be pleased - you
will learn how

I found very many - have taken

I gave the name - in honor
gave a new name

so extensive and nothing of importance

Poem-A-Day #292 : Refusal

Refusal

I hear that you don't want the flag to burn
that you believe we are divided
and our hands are hurting for lack of holding

Across the table I see your eyes
they are reflecting and moving like fish in a bowl
'darting' is a word that one would use to describe them

I must confess that I am tired of kumbaya
and have little interest in comforting anyone
this is perhaps a broken part of my soul

Your words bounce around the white space
they say things like 'politics is boring' and
'we must move beyond' and 'color isn't real'

I want to throw water in your face
slam your head into the wall until everything cracks
I want there to be blood when I am done

There is the sound of winter from the doorway
a sort of whisper death come to sit at the table

The flag will burn and your hands will grow cold
is what it seems to be saying

Again
this could be a fracture in myself

The idea that nothing is politics is a refusal
a turn from the world from ourselves

Politics is just a fancy word for feelings
which you seem deeply concerned with

Poem-A-Day #104 : Open Letter, Ongoing

Open Letter, Ongoing

America - I don't know why I'm even doing this - you won't listen and it won't make me feel better - the itch inside my skin is way passed the point of terminal but here we are -

You are a deadbeat - a slumlord - you slap price tags on everything and then refuse my credit - you would gladly pay me tomorrow for a cheeseburger today -

The sound of you congratulating yourself on your continued inactions is deafening - I can't breathe through all this noise - you sit on my chest - you laugh like a deranged bird - I try to focus to ease myself into rhythm and yet I cannot -

Your prayers are dim and boring - they would resonate more if you were whipping yourself while lazily tossing them from your mouth but you'd probably get off on the irony - if you could even see it staring you in that Manifest Destiny of a face - that lipstick sure looks nice on you -

America - tell me how safe your house is - how structurally sound - is the foundation free from cracks - does it have curb appeal - how are your servants - how much money for one of your faggots - how about 50 - or for the black ones over there - the brown ones - I bet you get a good penny for those maybe you can get them to clean your house before you sell them - and they're women too - even better -

I want to talk about how you are still those frightened Puritans standing on Plymouth Rock staring into the darkness of the continent and praying that you can find the cockles to dominate the whole shebang but I'm beginning to think that you don't have the cockles - you deal in snake oil - this is why you lash out - are you feeling fragile - do you need a time out - a nap or diaper change - you are so very full of shit -

I hate that you demand this address and that I am happy to give this address - you are a rapist who claims to have been destroyed by the act and can't handle prison - you demand internet access while in prison - and while in prison you brag about your offenses while publicly demanding a retrial - you are fleeing in a car to Mexico the first chance you get and you are building a wall behind you -

America - you are a motherfucker who refuses to get the mother off - a loaded gun that manages to find itself center stage and cannot help itself - you are hollow and false and act only on bad faith -

This is what we're talking about - faith - you like to throw it around until the word means nothing - you are so faithful you have faith there is hope in your faith faith will get us through - faith fuels your terror you drone on and on about your faith and the righteousness of it the impenetrability of it - you are so very impenetrable - your ass is clenched and your eyes are closed -

How many not white not straight not cis men died in America today - how many will die before the week is done - and how many could you have held to your breast and rocked to sleep - how many of your children have you ignored - how many have had to run away before you locked them in the basement and tried to reprogram them to deify you -

America - you are violent and stupid - you watch babies bleed on YouTube for fun you hold anyone you can to the ground and wait for them to die under your knees - you are phobic - you fear the mirror being held to your darker corners and even the lighter ones do not please you the way they once did - why are you so afraid of yourself -

America - every one of your children grows up knowing that you have to get out and keep running -

Review : The Boss

The Boss

Author: Victoria Chang

Publisher: McSweeney's

Date: 7/2013

64p

When the world breaks apart beneath you there are only a few choices available – to pick it up and carry it with you – or to throw it away, abandoning the mess. That mess exists either way. The question is about who and when it gets dealt with.

Victoria Chang’s new book dredges the rubble of both kinds. That of family. And that of society. The family plays out in an examination of her father, suffering from dementia. In the study of her own life in terms of who is boss and who is not. Her actual boss at work, herself vs. her daughter, her father.

Society enters in the form of 9/11. In strange, subtle ways, the event creeps in. The experience of an emigrant in America. Of a family integrating into the culture.

The poems begin in a place of thought. A cascading train that opens quickly into nature, aging, and death. The progression is one of language to senses. The words drill down the page. A sort of cultural tunnel-making. They start from a sense of now and dig quickly into pasts personal and public as they work down the page.

The form is ballad-like. The strong sense of meter and internal slant-rhyme drives the words quickly. There is little time to think, to absorb. The drive to go from start to finish is almost oppressive. Chang is the boss here. The control is astounding.

The healing power of voicing a broken history is important. One of reconciling the past and present. Talking seems central to the process.

my four-year-old daughter still listens to me I am the boss and I like it I see why the boss likes it

Conversations with an ailing father. Where he confuses her for her sister. The forgetting of time. Thinking he is still working. The conversation as her boss comes back to work after having a baby. Each moment seems to be a way into a wound. A filling.

When 9/11 first shows up it is sudden, it is a question to be answered. But the answer is never given. We watch as it happens. We see pilots merging with bosses on the 54th floor. We ponder children being too young to save parents.

Chang uses acrostic poems built around Edward Hopper’s paintings of offices and urban streets to discuss the ambiguities of human interaction. To point out the many interpretations of a frozen scene. The ambiguities in every day life. Here the question of boss melts, each time a different person is given the title. Americana is reinterpreted as the immigrant experience.

The Boss concludes with a recount of the Tōhoku earthquake on March 11, 2011. We are left at the mercy of a higher boss. Nature. And the concerns of man seem to dwindle. The problem of an ailing father is left in that space. Nature does as it will. The concerns of the office and who is in charge when are abandoned finally. The earth cracks open and water rises. People fade, people rise. They lead, then everyone, everywhere falls.

A final unavoidable breaking.

The Worst Hard Time

In 1933 at the height of the Dust Bowl the US government decided to put their faith in a man named Hugh Bennett. They invented the Soil Conservation Service (now Natural Resources Conservation Service) and made Bennett the director. His view was that man was causing massive erosion, that it was one of the main environmental problems facing the planet.

Hugh Hammond Bennett

Bennett was right about erosion and the Dust Bowl. By the end of the 1930s around 75% of the topsoil in 5 states (Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, and Kansas) had simply blown away. 100,000,000 acres were affected

In May of 1934 a large dust storm took soil from this area and dropped it on Chicago, New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. Dust had to be swept from Congressional offices. 12 million pounds of soil fell on Chicago and that winter red snow fell in parts of New England.

The problem was bad enough that by 1935 the Resettlement Administration was started. The main goal of the RA was to take people from failing cities and rural areas and place them in government built 'greenbelt' communities. The idea was to 'jump start' life for those most ruined by the Depression.

There was also a media wing of the RA. Roy Stryker's Photography Project, Film Projects by Pare Lorentz and Virgil Thomson, and Sidney Robertson Cowell's folk song recordings were all funded through the RA.

Below is Lorentz' 1936 film The Plow That Broke the Plains in its entirety. It's 25 minutes, but worth your time:

Lorentz' other film The River is also worth a look. It focuses on the Mississippi River and the environmental destruction from over farming and building on its banks.

I've been reading Timothy Egan's great book The Worst Hard Time. Published in 2006, the book formed the basis for Ken Burns recent PBS documentary The Dust Bowl.

Egan's book focuses on a few families and follows them from settlement, through the wet prosperous year and then into the 1930s and the great environmental catastrophe. One of his main 'characters' is Bam White, a half Cherokee/Apache ranch hand who tries his hand at farming. He is the featured plow man in The Plow That Broke the Plains.

The Ogallala Aquifer

Bennett implemented his ideas late in the 30s. 11.3 million acres were bought by the government in an attempt to heal the broken plains. Though there is much land still barren, three national grasslands dot the area, the largest is Comanche National Grassland at 600,000 acres.

The people that do still live in the area have tapped the Ogallala Aquifer. It provides 30% of the irrigation in the entire US. 82% of the people who live in the area of the aquifer rely on it for their drinking water. 1.1 million acre-feet a day are drained. This is eight times as fast as the Ogallala refills. Current projections give the aquifer 100 years until it goes dry.

The overwhelming lesson from the film and the book and the 70 years between the two is that we have not learned a thing. We have pushed the land to the point of no return, healed a small portion of it, and then have redug, replanted, and repushed it back to the brink once again. Now we're taking the underground water with us.

Living in the southwest it is hard not to be frightened of a lack of water. Of a new Dust Bowl. Animals, families, towns died from the dust. We invented new meteorology around the giant dust blizzards. Doctors had to come up with new terms for the dust pneumonia that some estimates say killed 7000 people.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother 1936

2.5 million homeless. Many of whom were prodded to buy the land in the first place by low prices and promise of 'wheat wealth'. The US government pushed this land as the last 'frontier' it pushed the wheat producers in war time to plow the land. Then the government watched as it blew across the White House lawn.

The Depression and Dust Bowl are having a bit of a resurgence. It is the economic times we live in, the environmental crisis we feel lies just over the horizon.

Read Egan's book. Watch Burns' TV show. Take a look at Dorothea Lange's RA photos. (Marisa Silver has a novel called Mary Coin coming out in March based on Lange's incredibly famous Migrant Mother).

If there is a real lesson to learn, aside from how awe-inspiring the fragility of all of this is, the lesson should be this: Be aware.