Charlton Heston, 84; actor, Oscar winner, played grand figures

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Tuesday, May 05, 2009

My son the poet

the following is from my son's 2nd grade homework; all the words are his - I only arranged them

Escape: the Angry Robot!

           Protect: the rabbit

     I
           WILL
                          BE
                                   BACK
Confuse the stampede of turkeys!
                So that
                              I can
SHOOT THEM
                                                 (for Thanksgiving)

11:50 PM

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Monday, February 23, 2009

My father loved...

MY FATHER LOVED OZYMANDIAS

Loved to recite, over-the-top but emotionally true

But it was really about me,

And my brothers to some extent

And I didn’t realize, or comprehend what Dad was trying to teach me,

Until my tears fell on the papers, found among the things that my mother, newly deceased, and long a widow, kept in anticipation of no one ever seeing or using.

His love poems to her, ineptly rendered mimicry of Donne and Clair.

I didn’t know he loved her.

I didn’t know he saw Ozymandias’ sneer on my face, and was trying to tell me that

I was building my own monument of resentment and arrogance; he knew it and was trying to tell me

before the lone and level sands stretched too far between us again.

7:49 AM

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Monday, February 09, 2009

the obaminator's disappointing escalation...Why are we:

3 February 2009
Norman Solomon: Why Are We Still at War?

by NS

The United States began its war in Afghanistan 88 months ago. “The war on terror” has no sunset clause. As a perpetual emotion machine, it offers to avenge what can never heal and to fix grief that is irreparable.
For the crimes against humanity committed on Sept. 11, 2001, countless others are to follow, with huge conceits about technological “sophistication” and moral superiority. But if we scrape away the concrete of media truisms, we may reach substrata where some poets have dug.

“Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”

W.H. Auden: “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”
Stanley Kunitz: “In a murderous time / the heart breaks and breaks / and lives by breaking.”
And from 1965, when another faraway war got its jolt of righteous escalation from Washington’s certainty, Richard Farina wrote: “And death will be our darling and fear will be our name.” Then as now came the lessons that taught with unfathomable violence once and for all that unauthorized violence must be crushed by superior violence.
The U.S. war effort in Afghanistan owes itself to the enduring “war on terrorism,” chasing a holy grail of victory that can never be.
Early into the second year of the Afghanistan war, in November 2002, a retired U.S. Army general, William Odom, appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” program and told viewers: “Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It’s a tactic. It’s about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we’re going to win that war. We’re not going to win the war on terrorism.”
But the “war on terrorism” rubric -- increasingly shortened to the even vaguer “war on terror” -- kept holding enormous promise for a warfare state of mind. Early on, the writer Joan Didion saw the blotting of the horizon and said so: “We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of Sept. 11 to justify the reconception of America’s correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war.”
There, in one sentence, an essayist and novelist had captured the essence of a historical moment that vast numbers of journalists had refused to recognize -- or, at least, had refused to publicly acknowledge. Didion put to shame the array of self-important and widely lauded journalists at the likes of the New York Times, the Washington Post, PBS and National Public Radio.
The new U.S. “war on terror” was rhetorically bent on dismissing the concept of peacetime as a fatuous mirage.
Now, in early 2009, we’re entering what could be called Endless War 2.0, while the new president’s escalation of warfare in Afghanistan makes the rounds of the media trade shows, preening the newest applications of technological might and domestic political acquiescence.
And now, although repression of open debate has greatly dissipated since the first months after 9/11, the narrow range of political discourse on Afghanistan is essential to the Obama administration’s reported plan to double U.S. troop deployments in that country within a year.

"we will never know just what we are fighting for. It is not enough to say we are against terrorism. Of course we are. In America, who is not? But terrorism compared to more conventional kinds of war is formless, and it is hard to feel righteous when in combat with a void...”

“This war, if it proliferates over the next decade, could prove worse in one respect than any conflict we have yet experienced,” Norman Mailer wrote in his book “Why Are We at War?” six years ago. “It is that we will never know just what we are fighting for. It is not enough to say we are against terrorism. Of course we are. In America, who is not? But terrorism compared to more conventional kinds of war is formless, and it is hard to feel righteous when in combat with a void...”
Anticipating futility and destruction that would be enormous and endless, Mailer told an interviewer in late 2002: “This war is so unbalanced in so many ways, so much power on one side, so much true hatred on the other, so much technology for us, so much potential terrorism on the other, that the damages cannot be estimated. It is bad to enter a war that offers no clear avenue to conclusion. ... There will always be someone left to act as a terrorist.”
And there will always be plenty of rationales for continuing to send out the patrols and launch the missiles and drop the bombs in Afghanistan, just as there have been in Iraq, just has there were in Vietnam and Laos. Those countries, with very different histories, had the misfortune to share a singular enemy, the most powerful military force on the planet.
It may be profoundly true that we are not red states and blue states, that we are the United States of America -- but what that really means is still very much up for grabs. Even the greatest rhetoric is just that. And while the clock ticks, the deployment orders are going through channels.
For anyone who believes that the war in Afghanistan makes sense, I recommend the Jan. 30 discussion on “Bill Moyers Journal” with historian Marilyn Young and former Pentagon official Pierre Sprey. A chilling antidote to illusions that fuel the war can be found in the transcript.
Now, on Capitol Hill and at the White House, convenience masquerades as realism about “the war on terror.” Too big to fail. A beast too awesome and immortal not to feed.
And death will be our darling. And fear will be our name.
_______________________

Norman Solomon is the author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” which has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. For recent TV and radio interviews with him about President Obama and war policies, go to: www.normansolomon.com
Copyright 2009 Norman Solomon

5:00 AM

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Tuesday, December 30, 2008

The Brightest Night Ever (The Opposite of Icarus) Pt. 1
Category: Writing and Poetry

The Brightest Night Ever (The Opposite of Icarus)

"It's the brightest night ever.", she said.
"What do you mean?"
"That's what they said. The moon is the closest it has ever been. Which makes it the brightest night."

As they drove on he contemplated the implications, wondering about the untold millions of creatures that have tides as a fact of life.

He resolved to get into that brightest night for a time, wash his soul in the astringent winter light.

Later, after the others were asleep, after being satiated on the blue light of the screen, he was alone. He welcomed it.

He looked out at the deep snow, blessed by the light that, according to her had never been as close, then made him self ready, then set out. He savored the silence, and felt irreverent for breaking it in his process. He sought the right moment, on the highest, and therefore closest place he could achieve. He wanted To Be There, in the thin, cold air, on The Brightest Night Ever. He shook off the notion of bringing his deer rifle to put in place the Purest action of his life, the final decision. It seemed so right and easily accomplished, in the pure light and the cold, thin air. He quickly banished the surprisingly persistent, yet oddly pleasant notion with the thought of the horror imposed on his family by the discovery of that thing in the woods, especially after the probable discovery first by the family dogs.

He first stumbled a rabbit's stride from the house. He laughed before bringing up the spasm necessary for hoisting one's self from a deep bottomed seat in northern snow. "Glad I got that over with." He was thinking of the Inevitable Fall almost a certainty even after decades of snowshoeing, a lifetime for some.

He entered the forest on a barely perceptible rise, which quickly became an ascent acutely apparent to his thighs, too long without exercise. Was the snow really deeper here? He decided that it was, but also operative were the angle of the slope - making it difficult to lift his snowshoes and feet high enough and the additional exertion from his efforts against the rise.

A seemingly insubstantial twig caught on his shoe and more or less caused the next fall.

He didn't get up right away. He could never again recall how long he stayed there, semi reclined in the deep. He may have even dozed, but came again to alertness enthralled by the silence. This being winter, he realized that winter silence is like no other, as pure as a science can be. He tried to silence the noises his body was making to distraction; his breath huffing from him, the mildly disturbing yammering in his chest

Then, his devotion to the silence was rewarded by hearing an owl in the near distance. He thought of the swift, pure death that was almost certainly being visited upon a small woodland beast, sustaining the owl that came with death's wings, almost invisible in this, the brightest of nights.

As he thought of the death coming from the night sky, he thought it might be a rather pleasant, honorable method of passing. And he thought of Icarus, falling, and proclaimed in an obscenely loud voice, "I am the opposite of Icarus!!"

6:48 AM

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Friday, December 12, 2008

songs without music

a taste of what I like in a fine song - the words can stand alone without the music - or as in the case of Cohen's "Democracy" BETTER without the music.

"It's coming through a hole in the air...

From those nights in Tienamen Square

From those wars against disorder

From the sirens night and day

Democracy is coming to the USA"

Hartford's "Gentle on My Mind"

Though the wheatfields and the clotheslines

And the junkyards and the highways come between us

When I walk along some lonely track and find

That you're movin on the backroads

By the rivers of my memory

And for hours you're just gentle on my mind"

and Jones' Running from Mercy

Running from mercy

Hidden and coy

swim in our sleep

down oceans of joy

die in the arms of natural life

wake in our happiness

drowning in light

and, well I wasn't going to, but -

The moon just went behind the clouds

to hide is face and cry

of course it's Williams: I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry

10:04 AM

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Monday, December 01, 2008

Poetry is good for....?

What is poetry for you?

In looking over my collection of favorite poems the constants are that the poems were selected simply because they represent an arrangement of words pleasing and/or meaningful for me at one time...and continue to be so...

'THE POET'S JOB is to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, in such a beautiful way that people cannot live without it; to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name. The poet's job is to find a name for everything; to be a fearless finder of the names of things; to be an advocate for the beauty of language, the subtleties of language.'
JANE KENYON, poet, A Hundred White Daffodils (Graywolf)

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant— Emily Dickinson

I like the spirit of Kenyon evident here despite the fact it is beautiful nonsense. Of course many, many people live without poetry, every day and quite well...

"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail... The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail." -

William Faulkner's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950

and your thoughts?

12:26 PM

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Tuesday, April 08, 2008

R.I.P.

Charlton Heston, 84; actor, Oscar winner, played grand figures

Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

GREAT MEN: In a 1995 interview covering his film career and political activism, Charlton Heston said: "The egalitarian world view now considered politically correct makes us uneasy with the idea that one individual is better than the rest of us. But having played several great men, I can tell you that they are better than we are ...."

The Oscar winner played Moses and Michelangelo, then later became a darling of conservatism.

(I wonder how long it took for them to pry the gun loose from his cold, dead hands?)

3:19 AM

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Monday, March 24, 2008

Two for spring...
Category: Writing and Poetry

When March goes on forever,
And April’s twice as long,
Who gives a damn if spring has come,
As long as winter’s gone.
R. L. Ruzicka

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

..TR> ..TABLE>

Come, all you who are not satisfied
as ruler in a lone, wallpapered room
full of mute birds, and flowers that falsely bloom,
and closets choked with dreams that long ago died!

Come, let us sweep the old streets--like a bride;
sweep out dead leaves with a relentless broom;
prepare for Spring, as though he were our groom
for whose light footstep eagerly we bide.

We’ll sweep out shadows, where the rats long fed;
sweep out our shame--and in its place we’ll make
a bower for love, a splendid marriage-bed
fragrant with flowers aquiver for the Spring.
And when he comes, our murdered dreams shall wake;
and when he comes, all the mute birds shall sing.

..TR> ..TR> ..DIV> ..DIV>

3:08 PM

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"Prothalamium" opens Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, Prodigal Summer (HarperCollins). The poem, which appeared in 1948 in Kramer’s collection The Thunder of the Grass, was set to music by Michael Sahl and performed by Judy Collins on her 1970 recording "Whales and Nightingales." My late cousin Martha loved the setting by Sahl and Collins’ superb recording of it.

Friday, March 07, 2008

more GYWO
Category: News and Politics

If these people were in "The Office" it would be MUCH more interesting...

..> ..> ..>..>

1:41 PM

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