Poem-A-Day #360 : When I look up and try to speak the shifting world wakes me

When I look up and try to speak the shifting world wakes me

At the table - in a field
no
a parking lot - two tables
one crowded

I tessellate leaves
alone
as they discuss - climbing
Mt. Everest

At least one - a man
I wanted something of

Desperately -

The second - the one
about airports - I help
a woman
alone with a stroller

That I dream in fragments
and that they connect
across seasons -

Dreamt the first half
a year ago - the part
where
I run off with the man

He sings to me as we go

And at the airport - I am
detained - trapped
on the escalator
by a woman with a stroller

It is hard to know where
the table fits
in the narrative - or where
Everest aligns

I fix my car and drive from them
when was the car broken
hovers - a future question

Poem-A-Day #257 : November

November

Burnt skin          is tight across fingers
the prints are shallow          there is whiteness everywhere

At some point your self was erased and why didn't you notice it

The red in the wagon was a warning          you could sit in it
pretend that you could steer it downhill          how does chin feel on pavement

One morning you woke up and the birds wheeling in the sky didn't recognize the land

The two children hit each other with rebar          it is November
the land is in the midst of its throes          the mountain snows in

There are ravens in New Mexico they croak in the treetops they are alarm bells

John J. Audubon - Birds of America (1827-1838)

Poem-A-Day #224 : Path

Path

Paths don't know where they go
          they lay themselves down over and over and they end up
     where they do

They take us in the night          they are kidnappers and thieves

          One can find themselves in the garden of judgement
when they thought they were out for a stroll in the country
          the gates of hell
                    fling themselves open at the merest whisper

The rotting corpse of a child will throw a ball to a rotting dog
both          will smile up into the face of their guest
and will take their hand and never let go -


And the path that led there will not even notice what it has done
                                                  it will just keep sending travelers
                                                  into the grinder

Sellers : The Rainbow Comes and Goes

The Rainbow Comes and Goes
Author: Anderson Cooper, Gloria Vanderbilt
Publisher: HarperCollins (4/5/16)
304p

Thoughts on Anderson Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt?

This is the type of saccharine book that you give to people when they are seriously ill or they are retiring.

But that's not what I want to talk about.

The basic premise of this book, where a mother and son talk frankly about their lives, is one that can be fraught culturally. Throw in that that son is also gay and there's probably some negative stereotypes already on the tip of your tongue.

Sigmund Freud coined the 'clinical' term for the negative trope - Oedipus Complex. In Freud's hyper-sexualized (and frankly broken) world-view a man who loves his mother beyond childhood is viewed as removed from a healthy mental state. Here is a man who can never actualize himself. He will never find, most importantly, heterosexual love. He will be stunted. A eunuch. Stripped of his 'he-ness'. You might as well chop off his dick, it would be less embarrassing.

Oedipus & The Sphinx (1864) - Gustave Moreau

Think about Norman Bates and his cross-dressing. The trope of the gay man who wanted to wear his mother's clothes instead of date a woman. These things lead to a stigma placed upon any man who dares to love his mother. These are the dark things lurking behind Freud'd legacy.

This view has wormed its way into society as a whole to the point of being nearly universal. Think of all the boys told not to hug or kiss their mothers. The fathers who tell their sons to not cry. To not show emotion.

And it has deformed society.

From men who view women as objects of desire/ownership to cultural limits placed on 'acceptable' forms of masculine affection, the damage is very real and ongoing. I would argue that it is the root of many real-world issues that surround sex, sexuality, and gender.

The shame placed on the very idea of the 'mama's boy' is one that needs to be broken. Healthy, loving relationships between parents of all genders and their children are not only ok, they are desirable. And while this book isn't a revelation on the subject (it isn't even about this topic) it is making a dent in the idea that a grown son cannot have a close relationship to his mother.

And the work subtly acknowledges this. From the description:

Though Anderson Cooper has always considered himself close to his mother, his intensely busy career as a journalist for CNN and CBS affords him little time to spend with her. After she suffers a brief but serious illness at the age of ninety-one, they resolve to change their relationship by beginning a year-long conversation unlike any they had ever had before. The result is a correspondence of surprising honesty and depth in which they discuss their lives, the things that matter to them, and what they still want to learn about each other.

Hidden in there is the small detail of them making the decision to change their relationship. To become closer and to reveal themselves to each other. A sort of grown-ass conversation that everyone should have with anyone who cares.

Now, some don't have this access to their parents. And it is certainly worth noting that this kind of clarity is not necessarily important to parent/child relationships. But the idea that this closeness is undesired is one that needs to be broken down and rethought.


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 #70 : Cryptarchy

Cryptarchy

And the government knows these things
all the things and the knowing is a thing
that is known and unknown

Here the aliens break open and reveal their inner cat pilots
in their little helmets and suits they are feline Power Rangers
in a rainbow of colors

I want to be bigger on the inside
to twist in the wind like an airfield sock
all phallic and flappy in the tall grass

There could be a sort of fight between the cats and myself
we would be like children playing war
the men in black watching us smiling plotting

Or the government is mute on all things - a broken edifice
limping in its tower - either way I catnip and I plant mines

Poem-A-Day #35 : Stairwell

Stairwell

Around the corner          the sound of a child          counting the steps

          I turn and the family                magazine perfect

Handsome and new                and counting steps                together

                They smell good                I sort of want this

Even though I don't                that smell                in a bottle on my shelf

          I could open it every morning          find the number of steps

Fighting for Life

If you walk around a city, any city, avoiding the tourist spots and purposefully heading down small back streets you will eventually become aware of how close together everything is. How on top of each other the spaces are.

Today you can look at these spaces, especially on the nights when trash is piled and rats are hovering, and easily think of them as hotbeds of illness and crime.

Lower East Side today

You will not be surprised that at one time these spaces were deathtraps.

In the 1890s the Lower East Side was the most densely populated square mile on earth. 1/3 of children in the area died before they were 5. Typhus, smallpox, and diarrhea were rampant enough that many wrote off the entire area and the people living there.

Of course this part of the city and those tenement buildings are pretty fashionable these days. But in 1908 the area was still referred to as 'the suicide ward'. That same year S. Josephine Baker became the first director of New York's Bureau of Child Hygiene. By 1911 she had more than halved the death rate of children.

New York tenements 1910

Which is amazing.

And she did it with simple education. Teaching mother's how to properly make formula. How to keep babies protected from the sweltering summers and freezing winters. Basic things, like clothing, and checking in with health professionals.

And it was all a public work. All for free to the woman and children.

In America.

Baker's memoir of that time, Fighting for Life, is a fascinating glimpse into the very recent history of our country. And of the very recent problem of health and living conditions in our cities.

And the whole thing has the air of relevance today.

I couldn't help while reading this to be overcome with a sense that Baker's fight to get poor, immigrant mothers the help they needed with child rearing is akin to the fight over health care today.

It is expensive, unwieldy, and clearly taken for granted by a lot of the country.

The implementation of the Affordable Care Act has been rocky. But no more so than any other government program going into effect. In the end it will help a lot of us to be healthier. It will aid our future generations in the same way social security has.

In the same way Baker was able to lower the death rate of children, the ACA will eventually make us healthier people.

The fact that we seem to not see the benefit of this is shortsighted and depressing. But unsurprising. As a country we react to things, we do not pro-act. And we tend to be shortsighted. It is rare that we gaze generations ahead and attempt to set ourselves up to succeed long term.

The New Deal was one of the times we attempted to reach into the future and fix it before we got there. The space program was another. The ACA is yet another.

We just need to not get in our own way.

My Baby Has Two Twitter Accounts A Facebook And A Tumblr

Recently I got into a minor Facebook scuffle over my honest discomfort with people sharing their children's photos on the social network.

My issue is not that people want to share their children, their love, etc. with people that should get to see these pictures.

My issue is that I also get to see these pictures. That these pictures are on Facebook, Instagram, whatever, servers. Most likely for a long time (forever). My issue is that putting these photos on these sites allows your life, your property, your children to have parts of themselves controlled by large corporations.

What happens when Instagram shuts off its servers? What if Facebook decides to utilize the weird parts of its user policy that states they own your content? What happens when that baby is a teenager, an adult looking for work, or a parent themselves ans these photos are still floating around?

People got upset with me and told me to just ignore the posts. To 'silence' them on my feed. But that wasn't the point of my post. I was genuinely asking why we decide to place ourselves and then our children out there like this.

Some said that the privacy setting means only friends can see the photos. But why do I get to see baby photos of people I don't know? Is it because they didn't understand the privacy settings? Is it because they aren't really private? I'm not a creeper, but there certainly are people out there who are. If I can see the photo without wanting to, I'm sure others can too.

Some said it was easier than e-mail. Which...just...no. It isn't. Yes, you can post 100 photos of your week old on Facebook and tell everyone to go look. But we don't need 100 photos. Put a few good ones in an e-mail and hit send to the handful that should see them. When we had cameras and film, we didn't send 100 photos to grandma. We sent the best we could take.

I am in no way an anti internet presence type person. I have Twitter, Facebook, I blog regularly, and I write online reviews. I am firmly online.

I believe we all should get to make that choice though. And I also think we should be protecting our children better. Why do we allow babies to have internet footprints but don't allow children to trick-or-treat in neighborhoods any more? I understand that the two have little to do with each other but I bet the answer is that trick-or-treating is 'not safe'.

Yet internet footprints are...

I'm genuinely not sold on the arguments on the pro side of this.

I know this has zero to do with writing, publishing, or anything like that. But it's been bothering me lately. So there it is.

THIS! 9/14/12

THIS! on September 14th, 2012

1) Murp

2) The Donkey Sanctuary

This is a great organization that rescues abused and elderly donkeys. They give them a place to rest and recover from their lives. They have an amazing store where you can buy cute donkey things or give money towards improving working conditions for these animals.


3) Farren's Dream Dog

Farren is a special lady. She is a talented writer/editor and an amazing person. Earlier this summer she lost her cat very suddenly. Her dog was diagnosed with a terminal illness almost at the same time. She's finishing grad school and facing bills bills bills and no one should do that alone. Give a dollar or two to help her get a French Bulldog!


4) Ampullae of Lorenzini

Sharks and a few other marine animals have gel-filled spots on their noses that allow them to sense electric fields. This is awesome.

Re-Read : Lord of the Flies

First Edition 1954

Lord of the Flies
Author: William Golding
Publisher: Faber and Faber (1954)
248 pages

A pig's head impaled on a stick delivers a sermon, flies tumbling from its mouth, to a young boy.

A pair of cracked glasses held to the light of the sun.

A bleached white conch shell trumpeting through the remote island forests.

The images in Golding's book are burned into my memory. The island, the insanity that follows. The sudden interruption of rescue at the end that tacitly implies that the world as a whole is just like those boys. Loose, falling apart, afraid.

Penguin cover 1980

What I forgot, or more accurately, what I didn't see the first time I read was the clear homo-eroticism of the boys. Simon clearly loves Ralph. There are numerous scenes of arm caressing and longing looks. Ralph and Jack clearly have a love/hate relationship. They even argue like an old married couple. Piggy looks to all of them for affection and only receives abuse. They are all nearly naked or actually naked at various points and each boy is described in longing, Whitman-esque terms.

Golding's writing holds up fairly well. It is a book set in the 40s and there are certainly a lot of references that date the story, but that only made the re-read more interesting for me. The thought that these were events in the past only made it harder to detach. I had to contend with these kids going home and shaping the world we now live in.

Which is scary, but explains EVERYTHING.

If you haven't seen it, take a moment to watch the great 1963 Peter Brook film. The whole thing is on YouTube. Below is the trailer.





Re-Read is a sometime article where I go back and read a book from my childhood over and examine the threads that I find in my current adult life.

Re-Read : The Witches

The Witches
Author: Roald Dahl
Publisher: Jonathan Cape (1983)
208 pages

I was 9 when The Witches was turned into a movie by Nicolas Roeg and Jim Henson. It was 1990. It was Jim Henson's last film. If you've never seen this film, you should. Angelica Huston is great in it. And, talking mice!

Talking about Jim Henson makes me all misty-eyed and sad. It's like a very real and raw wound. At the age of 9, Jim Henson dying was like a family member dying. It was an odd first real moment of dealing with death.

The Witches is not particularly sad, but it is definitely dark and it for real touches on death more than once.

What I remember loving about Dahl is that he never once takes children for not understanding complicated concepts, like death. He assumes they understand. He expects them to. Reading Dahl is being taken seriously for the first time.

For those who've never read this book here is a quick run down. A boy is orphaned while on vacation in Norway and goes to live with his grandmother there. She tells him about witches. The parents' will requests the boy be raised in England because which is what he is used to. The grandmother and he move. Once there she becomes ill and her doctor recommends a vacation tot he seaside. Once there they uncover a plot to kill all the children in England by turning them into mice. The boy is transformed and must save the day while a rodent.

At the end the boy is a mouse and he and his grandmother decide to spend their remaining years alive fighting the witches of the world.

That ending is what I have always remembered about the book. The boy and his grandmother have a very frank discussion about her being old and probably near death. He asks how long mice live and a really sad talk about a few years follows. Both are upbeat though, because neither wants to go on without the other.

Sad and beautiful.

It gets me misty-eyed the same way talking about Jim Henson does. If I had to pick two people, who are not relatives, who shaped my world-view they would be Henson and Dahl. Henson taught me about kindness, education and love. Dahl said that was all well and good but there are dark things out there so be ready to kick their asses.

Re-reading The Witches reminded me of the simplicity of the work. And how good a writer Dahl really was. He manages to take a very basic story of children taking on the world and infuse them with a magical sense of realness. Close to what the world feels and looks like to a child. Scary and amazing.

And that's what we lose as we get older. The amazing is replaced with more scary. I think we all would do good for ourselves to remind us of the amazing. Everyone go pick up a Dahl book. Read it. It will take you only a few hours. Then go watch an episode of Sesame Street or The Muppet Movie. Then watch the video below. It will make your day better. I promise.

Re-Read is a sometime article where I go back and read a book from my childhood over and examine the threads that I find in my current adult life.

Re-Read : A Wrinkle In Time

First Edition 1962.

A Wrinkle In Time
Author: Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007)
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1962)
238 pages

There is a moment as a kid when your mind expands. When you suddenly are aware that the world stretches beyond your home and family. That the universe is expansive, science is weird, space is amazing.

For one shining moment everything is possible.

This book was a huge part of that for me. I have a love of knowledge, science, the beauty of imagination. I can trace these to moments in Madeleine L'Engle's amazing 50 year old book.

And after all that time there is still a lot to love here. There is the absolute love of science, intelligence, and learning. L'Engle infuses her characters with a profound smartness without apology and without cliche nerdiness.

80s kids know this version.

There are the imaginative characters of Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, Mrs Which, and Aunt Beast. The Murry children are all well defined. Charles Wallace alone is amazing if for nothing else his clear aspergers representing.

The settings are epic. Camazotz and its strange bureaucratic nightmare office buildings is something out of Orwell. Even the evil of The Black Thing and IT are ominous in a classic vague/scary way that calls to mind the best of allegorical writing and Lord of the Rings.

The beauty is still there. The sense of wonder. All intact.

Coming back to it as an adult I was amazed at a huge part of the book I completely missed as a kid.

Here is what I mean. When Meg heads off to defeat the IT at the the end of the book the Mrs Ws give her 3 gifts:

1. Mrs Whatsit - her love
2. Mrs Who - A Bible quote about the foolish confounding the wise and the weak confounding the strong
3. Mrs Which - she tells Meg she has something IT does not

All reasonable gifts that are - whataminute!? - Bible quote?

As a child reading A Wrinkle In Time the book was about being a kid, having an imagination, space travel, and science. It was kids kicking bad guy butt and saving the world. The book is about those things but it is also about religion.

I would not classify this a 'religious' book. The moments mentioning the Bible are really meant as allegory, as story-telling, and they don't really change the actual story. They could be left out and little would be damaged. Which I guess is my point. They don't serve a purpose beyond being Bible references tossed out to the world to show religion has a place. We are told that Jesus fought IT along side Ghandi and the Buddha and all are considered equally good. But the Bible is the only thing quoted from.

L'Engle says that science, art, and religion have a place together which is great. The book does little to connect any of these things. While that may be a huge undertaking for a 'kids' book, I would point you to His Dark Materials as a series that deals with religion, science, etc. in a very frank, albeit different, way.

The main evil L'Engle gives us is a giant brain. Pure thought is the 'evil' presented in this book. What is the takeaway? That thinking is only good if it is infused with religion, specifically Christianity.

I don't think that L'Engle was being malicious. The book is a clear product of its time and place. 1960s America was a strange blend of anti-Communist sentiment, cold war crazies, and general conformity mixed with hyper-patriotism and religion. It was not a place for anyone to question anything openly. Which is probably why even this book has been banned many times throughout its 50 years despite being firmly 'safe' in all of these regards.

My biggest problem with the book is a problem I see across the genre. Why are children's books full of characters who lack agency? Why does Harry Potter do absolutely nothing the whole of 7 books while others pull strings and die for the cause? He doesn't even kill Voldemort at the end. The wand Voldemort uses reflects the spell back at the villain. Why does Katniss have to remain above the frey in Hunger Games? She drops wasps, she mercy kills the already dying, she kills one who just killed a very young child. I guess I should be happy she at least participates in some way.

I'm not asking for bloodthirsty lead characters, but if you set up a world where Harry is going to have to fight a war against Voldemort then have him basically sit there while every one else does that thing...you have failed at story-telling. If your world is children conscripted into killing each other and your main character wins that contest by mainly sitting in a tree and surviving off of berries while others brutally kill you have not shown the horrors of said world.

Similarly. If your premise is that a father has been kidnapped by ultimate evil and your brother is controlled by a giant disembodied brain...I don't expect machetes and blood letting. I do expect something more than a deus ex machina and a pat love is good coda.

I know the book is meant to be allegory. But still, even in allegory the center would still have to hold. The story would adhere to its world.

Newest cover from 2007.

I find it troubling that we tell our children stories where they are asked to move heaven and earth but given no agency to do so. You do not solve problems with love alone. It is a false premise. It sets up children for a moment after the one I opened with. A moment where they look at the world and it shrinks. Where they lose the magic they were promised. The love they have proves useless against 'evil'. They loose hope. They settle. Why be an astronaut when you can work for an insurance company?

I think we should trust ourselves more. If we can stomach a world with evil, we can stomach a world where we fight that evil and do so without remaining above the dirt and shit of that battle. We can have the magic and wonder and the reality. All of it.


Re-Read is a sometime article where I go back and read a book from my childhood over and examine the threads that I find in my current adult life.

Miss Baker If You're Nasty

Josephine Baker is amazing.

So is THIS essay about nannies and caring for children in the US.