Reading in Brookline

Reading with January Gill O’Neil
Brookline Booksmith
Brookline, Mass.
Tuesday, March 2
7pm


I hope the snow stops by Monday so I can fly to Boston (and back). I am so looking forward to meeting and reading with the amazing January Gill O'Neil.

All of us collect fortunes when we are children--a fortune of colors, of lights and darkness, of movements, of tensions. Some of us have the fantastic chance to go back to this fortune when grown up.

Ingmar Bergman quoted in Time December, 1980

Sometimes, at the end of a long day of writing, I feel so tired and so achy, and yet so lucky. Lucky to have had a long day of writing with few interruptions. Lucky, lucky, lucky to be able to say, I was there in the middle of so much of what Bergman calls my fortunes that I have collected and recollected so many times.

Stories to Read

I've become addicted to short stories lately. This morning I was blown away by two stories, "The Thing Around Your Neck," by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. And "How to Date a Brown Girl, Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie" by Junot Diaz.

Snow Deer

It's been snowing nonstop. Just outside our porch two deer have made a nest in the snow. I can just see their heads over the two plus feet of snow. When the dogs go out, they turn and stare at us sleepily, as if to say, Please don't bother us. We're comfortable here.

The Lottery

This morning I was listening to a New Yorker podcast of Shirley Jackson's famous story, "The Lottery." What I didn't know was that this story angered many subscribers to the magazine. Many readers cancelled their subscriptions and wrote angry letters.

Funny, I can't imagine a story causing so much excitement today.

Not So High On Arrival

Out of the blue, this book came in the mail from Amazon. High on Arrival by Mackenzie Phillips. I didn’t order it, and I don’t want it. I'm not high on its arrival. I contacted Amazon and was told me the book’s arrival in my box was a mistake, but they don’t want it back.

So now I own this book. I heard it reviewed on NPR but only remember that Mackenzie had sex with her father. Which reminded me of that book The Kiss by Katheryn Harrison, a memoir of incest. The Kiss was both revolting and engrossing. Katheryn Harrison was like a voyeur, standing outside her own doorway, luxuriating in her own demise. The memoir was beautifully written, but I don’t ever want to read about incest again.

I wondered, after reading the book, if incest is more common than I think. I remembered how when I was a girl, there was this one girl in my class, Resa (not her real name), who was beyond mean. She was one of those beautiful little girls who would torture the uglies in the class, or rather, she would inspire others to torture the uglies.

Funny, how I never noticed the boys picking on each other in that way. Instead they held magnifying glasses over flies and watched their wings burn. Maybe that’s what the mean girls did in their own ways.

I was never friends with Resa, but one year, she did invite me to her birthday party. We were in fifth grade. All I remember about the party was that her father gave her tons of boxes of skimpy lingerie and sexy nighties. All of the nighties were lime green. She slipped into one and flitted around the living room, looking like a lunar moth as she waved her skinny arms in the air.

Corporatocracy?

A few years ago, I read this book by John Perkins that said that our country was turning into a corporatocracy. His book, though a great read, read like a piece of conspiracy theory. But it was an easy and fun read, and the logic of the book stuck with me. In short, he said the US is run by corporate greed, and its corporations abuse 3rd world countries in unspeakable ways. Not a new theory, but the book was interesting and extreme. Of course, of course, I know others have said this in other ways, but Perkins' book made this theory into a thrilling novel (yep, an economic thriller).

Ever since then, I have seen evidence of all that he said and more.

But one thing I didn't realize until reading the article below (I'll excerpt it and give a link) is that our new Supreme Court ruling has invited a kind of global corporate influence into our elections. In other words we could feel the impact of Chinese corporations or Saudi or . . .

Please check it out.


www.gregpalast.com/supreme-court-to-ok-al-qaeda-donation-for-sarah-palin/

"The Court's decision is far, far more dangerous to U.S. democracy. Think: Manchurian candidates.

I'm losing sleep over the millions — or billions — of dollars that could flood into our elections from ARAMCO, the Saudi Oil corporation's U.S. unit; or from the maker of "New Order" fashions, the Chinese People's Liberation Army. Or from Bin Laden Construction corporation. Or Bin Laden Destruction Corporation.

Right now, corporations can give loads of loot through PACs. While this money stinks (Barack Obama took none of it), anyone can go through a PAC's federal disclosure filing and see the name of every individual who put money into it. And every contributor must be a citizen of the USA.

But under today's Supreme Court ruling that corporations can support candidates without limit, there is nothing that stops, say, a Delaware-incorporated handmaiden of the Burmese junta from picking a Congressman or two with a cache of loot masked by a corporate alias.

Candidate Barack Obama was one sharp speaker, but he would not have been heard, and certainly would not have won, without the astonishing outpouring of donations from two million Americans. It was an unprecedented uprising-by-PayPal, overwhelming the old fat-cat sources of funding.

Well, kiss that small-donor revolution goodbye. Under the Court's new rules, progressive list serves won't stand a chance against the resources of new "citizens" such as CNOOC, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. Maybe UBS (United Bank of Switzerland), which faces U.S. criminal prosecution and a billion-dollar fine for fraud, might be tempted to invest in a few Senate seats. As would XYZ Corporation, whose owners remain hidden by "street names."

Unbelievable

Supreme Court Rejects Campaign Spending Limits



The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations may spend
freely to support or oppose candidates for president and
Congress, easing decades-old limits on their participation in
federal campaigns.

The court on Thursday overturned a 20-year-old ruling that
said corporations can be prohibited from using money from
their general treasuries to pay for campaign ads. The
decision almost certainly will also allow labor unions to
participate more freely in campaigns and threatens similar
limits imposed by 24 states.

The justices also struck down part of the landmark
McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill that barred union- and
corporate-paid issue ads in the closing days of election
campaigns.

Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/21/us/AP-US-Supreme-Court-Campaign-Finance.html?emc=na

Symptoms

Today I noticed there is yet another beef recall.
Just a little more E. coli.

I was getting my hair cut,
and the stylist asked me
exactly what does E. coli do to you.
Besides maybe kill you? I asked.
Yeah, she said. Besides that.
What are the other symptoms?

My Dream of Oprah

I had a dream that Oprah decided to start a news channel
That would go up against Fox.
I woke up wishing it were so.
I woke up thinking
Only Oprah can save us now.
Jim said I should write her.
I've been thinking about it.
Dear Oprah,
I had a dream.
You were the queen of TV.
You owned your own newsroom.
And all of the good people were regulars on your show.
Nelson Mandela, Wangari Maathai, Paul Farmer . . .


And at the opening of each episode,
Someone would say
To the beef companies:
I will not ever
Eat that shit.
(Okay, so they'd say it eloquently.)
And everyone would stop eating it.
Just like that.

Haiti and U.S. Aid

A few days ago I was listening to the news as I flipped channels, and I heard one reporter ask if our US policies (in the past) were somewhat responsible for the poverty in Haiti. What policy would that be? The phone rang, and I turned off the news. Below --a really good article that answers that question.

What a sad proverb . . . When you are poor, everything can be blamed on you.

readersupportednews.org/opinion/180-natural-disaster-/770-james-ridgeway-exporting-misery-to-haiti

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=2480

The Dangerous Kiss

I've been reworking my entry from ages ago about the dangerous kiss. I think I'm getting closer to it now. Maybe.

I will enter it again. See how it works, and if. I already published it in Gargoyle, but I'm still not quite happy with it. Not sure about the ending, I guess.

The Dangerous Kiss

Strange things have been happening lately. How can I explain? I don't know if I want to admit this, but I am beginning to fear my Gmail. Gmail has this sidebar, and whatever information I type into a letter, Gmail replicates in the form of ads. Or that's what it used to do. Lately it has taken up replicating what I haven't typed. It has been replicating the contents of my innermost psyche. I am beginning to think it is reading my mind.

Today, for example, it says: Dangerous Kissing Tip-make him wish for more. I haven't been writing about kissing at all. Have I been thinking of it? I don't know, but I am now. Such kisses, too! How can I not want to know the dangerous kissing tip? Can Gmail give me the tip?

As soon as I click on the link to the dangerous kissing tip, I read the lines: Is he losing interest? Learn the secret psychology of getting a man hooked for good. Is he losing interest? Now I am worried. But then I read that I can learn how to understand men at last. And how to beat them at their own games!

I feel better, even if I don't know how to win. Victory is assured. I envision men kneeling before me. But I still want to know about that dangerous kissing tip. What happened to it? I hate to admit this, but I have a kissing fetish. I want to learn all about the dangerous kisses that wander freely in the world.

I do a search for the dangerous tip, but it doesn't surface. I find a site that displays all the types of kisses one can master, from the never-forget-me kiss to the tell-all kiss to the kiss-that-can-kill. I'm not a fan of vampires. But a never-forget-me kiss sounds nice. I click on it and the site asks for my SSN, my birth date, and the secret ingredients of my life. No, I tell myself. No. I can't tell the computer any more than it already knows, no matter how much I want to learn of the various kisses.

Already the computer knows me better than I know myself. It knows what is missing in my life. And how much I need it, with or without a kiss. But then I pause and think, I would really like a few kissing tips. I bet there is a dangerous kissing tip somewhere on this site. Maybe if I searched just a little longer. This is a secure site, after all. I can see by the icon at the bottom. No one will know what I decide. Or only he will know.

Genetically Modified Food

I have an obsession with the health news. I know that others have obsessions with the sports page, the headlines, the entertainment. I think I'm the only one I know who reads the health news with any regularity. It's always changing. One day eggs are good for you, and the next they will kill you. One day salt is bad, and the next it is good for a select few. And on and on.

But there are ongoing issues. And I do find them interesting.

Big on the news lately (or the news that I read anyhow) is the role of GM foods. How safe are they? Will they save the world? Or just make Monsanto own every seed in the world? I get asked this by friends who know I read up on this stuff. And the answer is always, the GM foods aren't tested. Why not? Well . . .

www.actionbioscience.org/biotech/pusztai.html

www.connectotel.com/gmfood/soyarefs.html

Monsanto has always had so much bad press. Lately, there are suits over it's patenting of seeds. Creepy and interesting . . .

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0115-04.htm

I guess I first became aware of Monsanto when the U.S. started allowing the company to sell bovine hormones in this country. Of course, Canada and Europe didn't buy the Monsanto line that the bovine hormones were not only fine for you, but beneficial. My mother didn't buy it either, so I heard a lot about it. So, is our conventional milk bad for us? And if you buy organic milk, what about the rest of the dairy you eat?

www.preventcancer.com/consumers/general/milk.htm

Then there's the yucky Monsanto product, aspartame. (At least aspartame was a Monsanto product. I'm not sure if it still is.) Whenever I see someone drinking a diet soda, I want to say, STOP! So odd to think that Donald Rumsfeld was a part of the party of men who helped get apartame approved. But the stuff has really bad news attached to it. Plus a lot of studies say it makes you fat ( or rather, increases your appetite), so if you drink it to stay thin, well . . .

www.mercola.com/article/aspartame/dangers.htm
www.naturodoc.com/library/nutrition/aspartame.htm
www.holisticmed.com/aspartame/
www.321recipes.com/aspartame.html

Of course Monsanto likes to claim that their GM foods will save the world by producing drought or pest-resistant crops. Miracle crops. But I'm not sure the evidence is in their favor. There are a lot of studies that suggest conventional ag. techniques are, in the end, the best for everyone. And there are some sad cases. The cotton farmers in India, for example

www.scidev.net/en/features/gm-in-india-the-battle-over-bt-cotton.html

And what about the risk of these genetically modified seeds mixing with the native seeds?


www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1130-03.htm

And then Monsanto did argue that Agent Orange, or dioxin, wasn't harmful. Didn't they?

www.organicconsumers.org/dioxcov.html

But then, you can always think you don't eat GM food. But are you sure? Even your vitamins contain GM food, as do so many other items you might not think of . . . And remember, they aren't labeled as such because the corporations don't want to alert you to what you might be buying, I guess. You have to scroll down on the entry below to get to a list. Or you can lookat the pdf for a more complete shopping guide.

www.disabled-world.com/fitness/gm-foods.php

truefoodnow.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/web_new-ge-booklet.pdf

Motherhood

Motherhood. I guess that's what you call it. A kind of constant alert in my system, a low-grade alarm waiting to go off.

My daughter is in the Dominican Republic doing research for the week. So yesterday I'm driving around doing my errands, and I hear on NPR that there's been a huge earthquake in Haiti, that the quake was felt in the DR and beyond. And there's a tsunami watch in effect for the Dominican Republic and . . .

Maybe you'd think I'd start praying or doing what my friend, Ann, calls--sending good thoughts. Instead my mind goes into one long list of swear words and doesn't stop for the next few hours. Not when I'm standing in line at the Giant Eagle, waiting for a script to be filled, not when I'm smiling and talking to the librarian, not when I'm picking up the dry cleaning. I have this awful feeling that I need to puke . . . the feeling I get when fear sits right at the bottom of the gut and rises.

I think about those CDs I listened to once by Pema Chodron who said--when you are afraid-- to think of all the people who are in the same place you are. So I think of all those mothers out there fearing and worrying for their daughters or sons. Pema said: think how they feel just as you do.

I think of them. I think of them feeling like they want to puke.

And I remember how my sister and I once "translated" that Emily D. poem about I'm nobody. We had a version that went something like. I think I wanna puke. Do you?/ Then there's two of us/ But we don't want to bother you nice folks here./ We don't want to disturb you lunch./ Don't mind us. We'll just go out back and throw up.

Oh yeah. Kid humor, I guess you call it. A little too true sometimes.

A Nice Review

shelf-life.ew.com/2010/01/02/nin-andrews-southern-comfort/

Good Thinking

My daughter was cleaning her room and came across an old issue of a literary magazine that she and my son put together when they were in elementary school as a gift to me. They called the magazine Good Thinking. The opening page of one of the issues of the magazine reads as follows:

Good Thinking is published whenever the editors decide to publish it. Sometimes they are too busy to publish anything. This is the third issue of Good Thinking. The editors welcome contributions from anyone who is a child. Work contributed will not be returned and might be lost. The editors apologize in advance for your lost work. The editors would love to hear from you. The editors sometimes republish poems from past issues. They do not ask for your permission to republish your poems. Sometimes the editors discover typos in Good Thinking. The editors apologize for typos but do not correct them. Please send your poems and stories and artwork to Good Thinking at the address below.

How Many Wives?

I've been traveling way too much lately. I come back from cool places, and I remember the silliest details. What the cab driver said. Or what the stranger who ate lunch at the same airport deli was saying to his wife about the meaning of life. Take the cab driver in Providence. He was young, maybe in his twenties, from South Africa. He said he grew up in Paris and was writing a memoir about his life. He was going to tell about all the countries he lived in. He also wanted to tell the world how limited Americans are. How they don't travel, for example. They don't even go to Europe. They only speak English. What do you know about Africa? he asked. I admitted I didn't know very much, but that I had recently watched a film about Swaziland. I said that the king of Swaziland took a new wife every year.

What's wrong with that? the cab driver asked me. Africans do that in many countries, not just Swaziland. And why not? At least king is honest. At least his wives know where he is and with whom. In your country men take lovers. Think about Bill Clinton. He could have married Monica and his other women too. But Americans don't accept that. It's very silly.

How many wives do you think you will take? I asked. Oh, he laughed. It all depends of course. I'm not a king.

Reading in New York City

Sunday, December 6, 2009
5 pm

Nin Andrews
Miranda Field
Rachel Zucker

CAKESHOP
152 Ludlow (between Stanton & Rivington)

Ad for the day

cw-x.com/ExploreProducts.aspx?product=tights&by=activity&gender=mens&gclid=CL_tjOugpp4CFchn5QodJ2l0pg

So now I know, it's my tights that are my problem! All I need is new tights, not a new body . . .
Do you think these tights squeeze your ass or something? Hold you in like a liquid corset from the waist down?

A little good news

This article made me happy. It's always nice to find some good news in the mix. Monsanto down, way down? Yeah!!

www.grist.org/article/2009-11-20-ecological-farms-feed-world/

Poetry International link

http://pionline.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/fall-guest-writers-series-1/

Blog Fears and Facebook

I've been a lousy blogger for months now. I've been hesitant to write anything at all. Even a little afraid.

I think my fear began months ago when my friend, K., said a blog is too exposing. I was way too exposed on my blog. People can know things about me. Isn't that a little scary?

Verdad.

Maybe I don't want them to know so much.

I suddenly felt as if there were naked pics of me . I suddenly felt as if there were something I should hide.

K. said Facebook was better. Much less personal. And so much more popular.

Facebook was a better place to be.

So I joined Facebook. And I lost interest in both the blog and Facebook.

The fact is, I don't "get" Facebook.

Almost overnight I had so many friends I'd never met.

(The word, friend, must have been redefined while I was blogging.)

When I check in on Facebook, I see all kinds of posts from so many new friends. I've never had so many friends in my life!

And some are friends I actually know! It's so exciting when I see a post from someone whose name I recognize.

What confuses me, though, are all the games. Or quizes. Or what are they? And who has time?

Someone posts that they have taken a quiz that reveals they have the soul of Bob Dylan and the Mona Lisa, all wrapped into one. Someone else posts he is King Arthur. Someone else posts they had grits for breakfast. Someone else says it's windy. Did anyone else notice the wind?

On special days an electronic friend sends me an electronic plant. I am invited to send my electronic friend an electronic plant back.

How romantic!

I am thinking this must be how you have unexposed friendships.

And roses too.

I love Vallejo

Have You Anything to Say In Your Defense?

by César Vallejo

Well, on the day I was born,
God was sick.
They all know that I'm alive,
that I'm vicious; and they don't know
the December that follows from that January.
Well, on the day I was born,
God was sick.

There is an empty place
in my metaphysical shape
that no one can reach:
a cloister of silence
that spoke with the fire of its voice muffled.

On the day I was born,
God was sick.

Brother, listen to me, Listen . . .
Oh, all right. Don't worry, I won't leave
without taking my Decembers along,
without leaving my Januaries behind.
Well, on the day I was born,
God was sick.

They all know that I'm alive,
that I chew my food . . . and they don't know
why harsh winds whistle in my poems,
the narrow uneasiness of a coffin,
winds untangled from the Sphinx
who holds the desert for routine questioning.

Yes, they all know . . . Well, they don't know
that the light gets skinny
and the darkness gets bloated . . .
and they don't know that the Mystery joins things together . . .
that he is the hunchback
musical and sad who stands a little way off and foretells
the dazzling progression from the limits to the Limits.

On the day I was born,
God was sick,
gravely.

Kindled!!!

www.amazon.com/Sleeping-Houdini-American-Continuum-ebook/dp/B002SQKMES/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text&qid=1255706811&sr=1-1

What a Week

Strange, sad, and good things happening:


Rick Bursky's wonderful book was accepted for publication. Rick and Claire Bateman, two of my favorite poets, will have books next year . . . I can't wait.

Barrack Obama won the Peace Prize. I keep thinking how Hillary Clinton and Anne Marie Slaughter won it, too.

A professor from the Ohio State Ag School asked me what I would do if I could do one thing to change the ag policy in the state. I said I'd request more public funding for agricultural research so that the universities were not depending on corporations for funding. Two days later Tom Vilsack asked for more public funding for universities for agricultural research. Verdad!

Herb Thomas asked me if I'd be interested in participating in the Spoken Word event in January in Cleveland.

NASA bombed the moon in order to find out if there's water.

We saw Traficant at dinner on Friday night. He came over to our table and greeted our friends. Rumor has it he might run for election against Wilson.

The great poet, Morton Marcus, is dying. His new book is forthcoming from White Pine Press, and from what I've seen of it, it might well be his best.

How to Poop

I don't know, but this made my day today . . . an article in the Daily Intel on Alicia Silverstone.

Alicia Silverstone Will Teach You How to Poop

Alicia Silverstone has been a vegan for ten years, and with her new book, The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight and Saving the Planet, she hopes to convert the rest of us. "The truth is, there is a list of foods that will make you fat and make you sick and hurt you and make you older and tired and slowly deteriorate," she told us at last night's launch party at Candle Cafe. Like milk, for instance. "Remember, dairy was designed to make little baby calves turn into 400-pound cows, so that's what it does to you," she told us.

I'd like to point out that cows weigh a lot more than 400 lbs. And it's the corn, I think, not the milk that makes an animal fat.

Yep, same goes for people I'd guess. Vegan or otherwise.

My Fear of Brain Jello

I'm always amazed by the ability of people to fear -- and not to fear. The logic of fear in general.

President Reagan had that slogan, "There is a bear in the woods," to inspire fear of the Soviets. Wouldn't you rather know there isn't a bear in the woods? I think that was the implication of the ad. Or I guess we were supposed to become stronger than the bear and pour money into the defense industry.

And of course Dick Cheney and Brother Bush were all about fear. And they were elected because, I assume, we felt safer with Big Brother in office.

At the same time people are not afraid of various entities in their food. They tend to think, I assume, in terms of statistics, that they will be fine. And they are probably right. I guess.

Mad cow is a case in point. Some scientists says it's not a big risk. Others see it as a sleeping epidemic, something that will get inside a person and make his brain turn to jello in say--15 years. Sometimes sooner. Sometimes later. Who knows when your brain will turn into brain soup? Or jello, depending how long it lasts.

And so the US meat industry doesn't worry much about checking for Mad Cow Disease.

But the Europeans are more concerned. And so is McDonald's.

As long ago as 2001, McDonald's started to enforce stricter standards than the average grocery store. (And it wouldn't be hard because the standards are really weak. In fact the USDA has fought the organic beef co., Creekstone, that has wanted to test ALL its cows for Mad Cow.)

Me? Let's just say I'm a lot more afraid of what's on my plate than what's in my woods. I know I'm in the minority, but I am so grossed out by BSE. Brain jello.

Below are excerpts from two old articles on the topic.

Monday, March 27, 2006 LA Times
Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, an organic meatpacking company based in Arkansas City, Kansas, filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for what the company claims is threats by the USDA that it would face prosecution if it proceeds with plans to test nearly 100% of its beef for Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease or BSE.
The USDA position is that allowing any meatpacking company to test every cow would undermine the agency's official position, . . .. .
The USDA currently tests about 1% of cattle slaughtered in the U.S. The USDA's objection is believed to be the result of pressure from larger meatpacking operations.


March, 2001
WASHINGTON -- McDonald's Corp. is starting on its own to enforce widely disregarded federal regulations aimed at keeping the nation's beef supply free of mad cow disease.
The fast-food giant has given packers until April 1 to document that the cattle they buy have been fed in accordance with the federal rules.

The Food and Drug Administration reported recently that hundreds of feed makers had failed to comply with its feed regulations, which are designed to keep the brain-wasting disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, from spreading if it ever reaches this country.

Europe's cattle industry suffered severe losses after consumers began shunning beef because of fears that humans can contract a similar brain disease from eating meat infected with BSE.

A beef about beef

There was a great article in the New York Times today on the beef industry. I think I should take it with me to poetry readings whenever I'm going to read my farm poems because I so often get asked if I would eat a burger today. When I say, Nope. I don't trust the meat sold in the grocery stores in this country, people tend to think I am a bit nuts. Which I am, of course, but if you read the article, well, maybe you'll be nuts too.

The article talked in particular about the risk of E. coli contamination and our lax or total lack of adequate testing and inspections . . .

Here are two excerpts . . .

"Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. These cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the pathogen."

"Yet . . . the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria."

Add to this the fact that we test only 1% of all food imports,
that our food industry is in bed with our politicians
and as a result food is increasingly deregulated . . .

Yeah, okay, so it's not just beef I worry about. Sigh. But given a choice between beef and some nice GMO vegies . . . Hmm.

92

Fall Readings

I will be reading . . .

Oct. 7

at 7:00
1925 Coventry Rd
Cleveland Hts., Ohio



Oct. 19
New School's Poetry Forum
on 6:30 PM
Room 510 of 66 West 12 Street, NYC 10011

Oct. 31
I will be lecturing on book contests
and the literary lottery
at YSU at 3:00
Details TBA

Nov. 11
I will be reading with Kazim Ali
at Mac's Backs ~ Books on Coventry
at 7:00
1820 Coventry Rd.
Cleveland Heights, Ohio 44118
216-321-2665

Nov. 19
Providence College
at 7:30
Details TBA

Dec. 6
I will be reading
at the CakeShop
on the Lower East Side at 5 pm
Details TBA

Dec. 16
7 PM
at the Bela Dubby Art Gallery & Beer Cafe
13332 Madison Avenue
Lakewood, Ohio

Jan. 16
The Wordsmith Book Shoppe
near Erie, PA
Details TBA

Middlesex

I just finished the book, Middlesex. I think it's the best book I've read since I don't know when. I feel so sad to be finished. Maybe I'll start over again . . .

The Secret Red Book

I read in the Times yesterday that they are finally releasing Jung's Red Book. The Red Book was a carefully guarded book that his family kept in a safe, promising never to release it . . .

I love the idea of this secret book. Red, no less. Something not meant for anyone else to see.

Now I am sure it will be nothing but an embarrassment. A major disappointment.

I wonder why they didn't just destroy it.

from Delancey Place . . . Writers

In today's excerpt - famous writers and their odd ways of writing:

"Dame Edith Sitwell used to lie in an open coffin for a while before she began her day's writing. When I mentioned this macabre bit of gossip to a poet friend, he said acidly, 'If only someone had thought to shut it.' ...

"Sitwell's coffin trick may sound like a prank, unless you look at how other writers have gone about courting their muses. ... For example, the poet Schiller used to keep rotten apples under the lid of his desk and inhale their pungent bouquet when he needed to find the right word. Then he would close the drawer, but the fragrance remained in his head. ...

"Amy Lowell, like George Sand, liked to smoke cigars while writing, and went so far in 1915 as to buy 10,000 of her favorite Manila stogies to make sure she could keep her creative fires kindled. ... Balzac drank more than 50 cups of coffee a day, and actually died from caffeine poisoning, although colossal amounts of caffeine don't seem to have bothered W. H. Auden or Dr. Johnson, who was reported to have drunk 25 cups of tea at one sitting. Victor Hugo, Benjamin Franklin and many others felt that they did their best work if they wrote while they were nude. ...

"Colette used to begin her day's writing by first picking fleas from her cat, and it's not hard to imagine how the methodical stroking and probing into fur might have focused such a voluptuary's mind. After all, this was a woman who could never travel light, but insisted on taking a hamper of such essentials as chocolate, cheese, meats, flowers and a baguette whenever she made even brief sorties. ...

"Alfred de Musset, George Sand's lover, confided that it piqued him when she went directly from lovemaking to her writing desk, as she often did. But surely that was not so direct as Voltaire's actually using his lover's naked back as a writing desk. Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain and Truman Capote all used to lie down when they wrote, with Capote going so far as to declare himself 'a completely horizontal writer.' ...

"Benjamin Franklin, Edmond Rostand and others wrote while soaking in a bathtub. In fact, Franklin brought the first bathtub to the United States in the 1780's, and he loved a good, long, thoughtful submersion. In water and ideas, I mean. ...

"The Romantics, of course, were fond of opium, and Coleridge freely admitted to indulging in two grains of it before working. The list of writers triggered to inspirational highs by alcohol would occupy a small, damp book. T. S. Eliot's tonic was viral - he preferred writing when he had a head cold. The rustling of his head, as if full of petticoats, shattered the usual logical links between things and allowed his mind to roam."

Health Care???

I've been so out of it lately. I didn't read the news in Maine, and now I keep thinking I'll catch up and understand what's happening. But I'm not sure anymore. The health care debate, for example. People actually like our system as it is? Are they nuts? An article in the New Yorker said that when Obama was running, most Americans said the system was terrible. But now that the govt. is thinking of changing it, most say it's fine.

So it's fear of change, the article claims. Wow. Hasn't it changed a lot already?

I remember in college when I broke my arm. It was $167. An ER visit. A cast . . .

As a kid, my sister almost chopped her finger off. The doctor came to our house and sewed it back on in our playroom. No ER trip. No wait or delayed bills coming months later . . .

Then I think how I had so many eye appointments and operations as a child. My mom paid the doctor every year with a Christmas ham. And I wrote the doctor letters, and he wrote me back! I called him up when I could finally hit the ball in softball and tennis. He was very excited. I felt as if we were working together for a common goal. He was like a coach. He visited our home and showed me all the pictures of my progress, from childhood to my teens . . .

Of course, that was unusual, but the doctors did seem more caring.

Back then the doctors were just as nice as vets who came to the farm and knew the animals and enlisted our help with the treatments.

Even now the vet calls me to ask how my pups are doing when they've had a sore ear or a bad tummy.

Cold Music

I love this early fall weather! But it isn't so great for playing music in the park! Yesterday Brady's Leap performed in the wind and cold. Brrrr! But it was fun all the same.

So why should I move?

UCS in Maine

One of the highlight of our time in Maine this summer was having Kevin Knobloch from the Union of Concerned Scientists visit and give a talk on climate change at the College of the Atlantic. Here he's talking to my sister from the top of Schoodic Mountain.

Summer in Maine

It's nonstop rain up here, but I love it anyhow. Something about the open spaces, the fog, the meadows, the salty sea smells, the scruffy mountains, the ice cold water . . . . Even the rain. Maine-it's one place on earth I really love.

Grand Master

It's been a blog-less summer so far. I can't quite keep up with things these days, I guess. And speaking of keeping up, I ran a race with my daughter on July 4, and I didn't stick around for the results. I'm not exactly the speedster on the block anymore, and I ran a pretty flat 7 minute pace. But today my daughter came home with a plaque for me . . . "Hey, Mom! You won the Grand Master prize!" Okay, there were 800 plus people in the race, but I doubt there were any women in my age group. Sigh.

So yeah. Now I get to be Grand Master.

I love these lines . . .

from one of my favorite poems.


The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

July 4 in Poland, Ohio

You never know when July 4th will happen here. Except you can be sure that it won't take place on July 4th. This year it happened on June 26th -- and came with the added pleasure of a Civil War re-enactment. I'm not exactly sure why this brigade of middle aged men and women moved into town, pretending to be Civil War folks. But they camped out in white tents on the town square for two nights, talked on their cell phones a lot, drank Cokes, and planted a line of porta-potties next to their tents. They marched up and down the streets at various times during their stay, sweating profusely and waving at the cars driving by. I made the mistake of asking one of the Civil Warriors what July 4 had to do with the Civil War. He just blinked a few times, took a bite of a hotdog, and said people like to learn about history.

The Price of Poetry

I started 3 new poems this week, and I feel completely wiped out by them. I find it so strange that writing a silly poem or two takes so much out of me. I can run ten miles with greater ease and less physical pain than composing half a poem. That said, I still think the hardest job is farming. So many of my writer friends talk of my childhood on a farm as somehow merely bucolic. They seem to picture the act of farming as watching the alfalfa grow. What I remember was the feeling that the work would never be done. And unlike a poem, you can't just abandon the farm . . . And there was not much profit involved.

Maybe as a result, I tend to look up the news about the American dairy farmer. The independent small farmer, not the CAFOs. The news is never good. (It might be worse than trying to make a living as a poet.) The more we rely on CAFOs of course, the greater the environmental damage. I can't imagine why anyone would want to operate a factory farm. Ah well. Here's the latest:

"According to the USDA, the average cost of production for milk is $24.08 per hundredweight (cwt or 100 pounds), while the price dairy farmers were paid for their milk in April sunk to $10.78 cwt.

This means that dairy farmers are earning less than half of what it costs to produce their milk. Imagine having your salary cut in half and still trying to cover the same monthly bills. Even worse, feed and fuel prices are starting to go up in the past few months. For farmers, most of whom work too long of hours and are paid too little money, this is the perfect formula for a final liquidation of one of the last remaining independent segments of ag production. For years, small and medium-sized farms have relied on their dairy cows to stay relatively free from domination by factory farms and corporate agribusiness. But no longer. " (from Grist)

Of course, there aren't any reports on the average production costs for poets and writers. How much per weight in pages. And whether it costs more to produce than to write. Evidently if we could eat or drink poetry, it probably wouldn't help much--unless we could churn them out . . . and not worry about the quality. Who would know the difference? we might reason. One poem is as good as another. The more, the faster, the better. Sometimes when I have a glass of milk these days, I have to remind myself that this is milk I'm drinking. Not some cold white drink with a flavor of liquid white noise. No, this milk from a carton is nothing like the milk I drank as a child, the fresh milk with a taste of sunlight and grass and TLC.

The Font for the Most Readers

I actually found an article in the bookstore last night on different fonts! Who would have thought! The article (from a marketing text) explained why one should use Times New Roman. It said that the choice of typeface can affect a reader's comprehension. Roman letters are preferred by most readers because they are the most comprehended, and can be understood 92% if the time. A close second is sans serif at 90%. The least comprehended --anything close to cursive or script. Such letters are only understood between 37% and 26% if the time.

I just love statistics.

Myth: The Cost of Climate Legislation Is Too High

This is really nice entry from Grist. Esp. relevant for folks in Ohio and other coal states. I have heard from several friends who say that their representatives are whining that it will hurt our economy if we institute climate change legislation. I find it so upsetting that politicians think only of the short-term. But this article is a really good response.

And please oh please (if you haven't already, I mean) write your congressmen today and tell them to support the Waxman Markey bill! It's only takes a few minutes to write a note.

"Legislators from dirty-energy producing states, energy-intensive business lobbies, and conservative think tanks struggle to outdo one another with apocalyptic predictions about the effects of mandatory greenhouse gas emission reductions. See, for example, the Chamber of Commerce’s video showing children shivering in the cold (really). As climate legislation evolves this year, the rhetoric is ramping up again, led by the Wall Street Journal editorial page and doomsayers-for-hire at the Heritage Institute and the Chamber of Commerce.

The mainstream media passes along this kind of Chicken Littleism in gutless he-said she-said fashion, so the public rarely hears the truth: mainstream economists pretty well agree that the impact of a carbon pricing system on the economy will be modest.

Last year EDF did an analysis (PDF) of six separate forecasts of the economic impact of a cap-and-trade, from leading nonpartisan academic and government agency sources. The median prediction was a hit to GDP growth of between 0.5 and 1 percent by 2030. Instead of doubling by January 2030, U.S. GDP would, in the most pessimistic scenarios, double by ... July 2030. (Doooomed!)

Some analysts are even more optimistic, projecting climate targets will be met at net-zero cost or even with a boost to GDP. Perhaps they recall that economists wildly overestimated the cost of the last U.S. cap-and-trade program; the sulfur dioxide trading regime, designed to fight acid rain, came in about 90 percent cheaper than official projections.

Here’s a short list of things that will damage the economy far worse than tackling climate change: the current mortgage/banking/credit crisis, rising fossil fuel prices, competitive disadvantage in burgeoning global clean energy markets, and, oh yeah, climate change itself. Compared to the alternatives, reducing climate emissions looks like a spectacular bargain. (For more on this economic consensus, see Eric Pooley.)"

One Thing I Hate about Summer

The one thing I hate about summer is lawn care. I know. I should have better things to think about. But I am always offending my neighbors by going natural. My yard is like the girl who refuses to wear a bra or shave her pits and legs, I sometimes think, remembering the 60s and 70s. But now, not many ladies go natural. And Chem Lawn owns most of the yards in these parts. Some of my friends keep telling me that the chemical fertilizers are actually natural. I won't go into that . . . But I will post an excerpt below from a New Yorker article that I find helpful.

(I know, I should be talking about poems, not lawns. But for many it seems their lawns and gardens are their poems . . . )

"The greener, purer lawns that the chemical treatments made possible were, as monocultures, more vulnerable to pests, and when grubs attacked the resulting brown spot showed up like lipstick on a collar. The answer to this chemically induced problem was to apply more chemicals. As Paul Robbins reports in “Lawn People” (2007), the first pesticide popularly spread on lawns was lead arsenate, which tended to leave behind both lead and arsenic contamination. Next in line were DDT and chlordane. Once they were shown to be toxic, pesticides like diazinon and chlorpyrifos—both of which affect the nervous system—took their place. Diazinon and chlorpyrifos, too, were eventually revealed to be hazardous. (Diazinon came under scrutiny after birds started dropping dead around a recently sprayed golf course.) The insecticide carbaryl, which is marketed under the trade name Sevin, is still broadly applied to lawns. A likely human carcinogen, it has been shown to cause developmental damage in lab animals, and is toxic to—among many other organisms—tadpoles, salamanders, and honeybees. In “American Green” (2006), Ted Steinberg, a professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, compares the lawn to “a nationwide chemical experiment with homeowners as the guinea pigs.”

Meanwhile, the risks of the chemical lawn are not confined to the people who own the lawns, or to the creatures that try to live in them. Rain and irrigation carry synthetic fertilizers into streams and lakes, where the excess nutrients contribute to algae blooms that, in turn, produce aquatic “dead zones.” Manhattanites may not keep lawns, but they drink the chemicals that run off them. A 2002 report found traces of thirty-seven pesticides in streams feeding into the Croton River Watershed. A few years ago, Toronto banned the use of virtually all lawn pesticides and herbicides, including 2,4-D and carbaryl, on the ground that they pose a health risk, especially to children."

Simon Says

I love my new book of poems, Broken World, by Joseph Lease. So much of the book is a surprise. He really has a different muse . . . with lines like the following from "Prayer, Broken Off":

Simon says, put your hands on your head, Simon says, put your finger up your nose, Simon says you don't have enough, Simon says you don't care enough, Simon says, you can't stop caring--

I love Al Gore

I was going to write something about writing, about my recent trip to Maine, about the incredible beauty of that state, especially at this time of year when the tourists aren't there yet, but then I saw this video of Al Gore. It's about a half hour long--sort of an updated, short version on An Inconvenient Truth. (It also takes a while to load, so if you want to watch it, be patient. )

www.aaas.org/meetings/2009/program/lectures/media/20090213gore_autoplay.swf