Well, It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

She's been cranky recently. I didn't know why for a couple of days.

I'd been meaning to ask her to tell me about "the Tiananmen Event," as she calls it, for some time. I'd always wanted to know from her what it was like to be there. We've talked about it once or twice; I think that she was bitterly disappointed that from Chicago, we saw them as a bunch of poor, brave sods, quixotically marching off to their doom. In the here and now, she's a heroine - she doesn't understand the vast amount of currency she has with people we know, the immense respect that blossoms as soon as they hear about it. I don't know how to explain it to her, or how she would react. I don't know that she'd like it. I suspect she wouldn't.

Now, with the anniversary of the Event looming, she's been feeling sad and isolated. There are other people from China here. Some that she's known since Junior High School, but none that were with her during Tiananmen. Those people are all somewhere else. Those that survived. She told me of saying good-bye to one of her friends. When she next saw him, 12 hours later, he'd bled to death. Once, when she went back to China to visit her family, her cab was nearly run off the road. Another friend told her that it was the dead man's ghost, trying to kill her. He'd loved her, you see, and wanted her to be with him forever. Ghost stories, I can related to. Having good friends killed, and finding out later they loved me, I can't.

Tomorrow, she'll be miserable. She'll come and talk to me, and I, unable to soothe her misery, will share it, instead. This I will hide from her. She may guess, she may not. She wants to talk to someone who will understand so badly. The fact that I'm the best she can do crushes my soul. She called her parents the other day. The connection was poor. They were cut off a couple of times. It's not usually like that. She suspects that the government is monitoring her parent's phone, so she didn't mention it.

I haven't participated in any of the social movements that have gone on in the United States recently. And all of the really great ones were before my time. So I am forced to read about them in newspaper web archives or watch old news clips. There will be nothing about Tiananmen in the Chinese media. Many of those who were prominent, and on the side of the students, have been un-personed. They now exist only in the memories of those who knew them, and in the press of foreign lands.

When I go to bed this evening, and when I wake up tomorrow morning, I won't be able to tell you what I was doing, exactly twenty years ago. I don't know if that leaves me worse off than her, or better.

What They Don't Know...

Let me see if I understand this properly. American troops have abused prisoners in their custody. That much we know. There are photographs of the abuse. That we also know. But to release the photographs would "'further inflame anti-American opinion' and endanger U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan." We know that, too? Really?

So we're supposed to understand that people in the Muslim world, while they are upset about the abuse, will only get REALLY mad if they can see the pictures? That might very well be true, but it seems nonsensical to me, given the fact that in absence of the of the pictures, people can create whatever stories they like about what happened, and "further inflame anti-American opinion" that way. I suppose that your could make the point that the photographs show abuse so heinous that nobody's imagination, no matter how fertile, could possibly come up with a worse scenario, but to borrow a line from Star Wars, "I can imagine quite a lot."

And of course, this raises another point. If the prisoner abuse was so bad that letting people find out what really happened, "could reasonably be expected to endanger some unspecified member of a group so vast as to encompass all United States troops, coalition forces, and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan," we had better be doing everything in our power to make sure that it doesn't happen again. But if, as we all know, secrecy breeds abuses, aren't we still creating a breeding ground? Come, Mister President. You promised us better than that.

"The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears."
President Barack Obama, Memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act, 21 January, 2009.

A new poem

Say Nothing of Your Money

Say nothing of your money
earned in wet trenches

picking up the stones
tossed at you from the gallery above

when the bell rings one sharp report
and the retort is all get-out-the-way

or follow what's already
passed you,

you see when you look up
from the streaming stats

underscoring the rise and decline
of green and red arrows

that it's your jacket , pants and shoes|
you notice passing you in a huff
holding a fist full of notes,

someone found your closet
and all your phone numbers

and learned your script
better than you ever recited it
as if in concert, hitting the high notes
pure and shrill,

Asia declines
and oil bubbles slowly,

pork and precious metals
stall at dockside

and bankers
have given all the credit to God
who is not giving any of it back,

you trade in your car
for an old bike
with a dented bell

that rattles like a marble
in the bottom of an empty can.

The Poor get patronized, Baseball gets punked

Lucas Howell couldn't cram enough conditional observations into this over-alert lyric; the poet, seemingly a sympathetic lyric writer by nature (or conceit) wanted to get to the core of the bleak reality of the coal miner's as they emerge from the mines. It's an inelegant pile-on of elegant phrase making where we are, in effect, instructed not to miss the point that these men have extraordinarily hard lives the likes of which we can read about in poems like this.

Out of the broad, open land they come.
Out of a coal seam's
hundred-thousand tons
of overburden, out of shit-reek barns
and shearing pens,
or down from the powder blue
derrick platforms of howling Cyclone rigs
they rung by rung descend.

This isn't bad writing as it goes, but very little of this kind of tone goes a long , long way to the point he wants to make, which seems less about the lives of the workers than it is , perversely, the bragging rights Howell claims as being the witness to both and consequently imagine them in language that makes their lives more vivid, hence more real. Had he moved on from his set up in the first stanza we could have done something different with this poet's acute sense of detail, but the second stanza brings us the example of a writer who isn't sure he'd closed the deal with the reader; Howell tips his hand and lays bare the set up he's arranging with gratuitous of qualitative pronouncements, as in the rather unremarkable and trite observance of

They come bearing the weight
of lives and labor on their boot heels,
a week of night shifts,
or the prairie sun's relentless arc.

We're to shed tears, on cue with the faux-folk music of dulcimer , guitar and fiddle , as we are given over to archetypes culled from Walker Evans' famed portraits of working poor whites. Crushing weight, long work shifts, a punishing heat, life here is presented as it might seem to the casual witness, bleak and hard and beset with no relief. But there's more coming, a conspicuous twist that you sense coming ; one set of detailed if cliched images emphasising a community's unglamorous obligation to go into the earth cannot pass without an equivalent arrangement emerging at the half way mark. It surely does, and Howell lays out all the cards he's been holding--the innate dignity of the human spirit cannot be crushed by the far off requirements of corporate interest, no sir, these men , tired and calloused as they are, reaffirm their dignity and their love of community with game of baseball. The game is not just the national pass time, it is the miracle elixir, the magic bullet for physical pains and complaints of alienated labor. One half way waits for a Liberal Guilt siren to sound; the aim of the poem is solely to create a comfort zone with which those made uncomfortable with unadorned facts might wrap themselves, give a nod, and then walk away.

But here, beneath the lights of Bicentennial Park,
these men work the stiffness
from their shoulders,
crow-hop and sling the ball sharply
around the horn. No matter
who they've become
in the years since boyhood, the game's
muscular beauty remains.

Transformation and transcendence and resurrection are the themes here, and the power of play is the device through which these workers cease , for the time being, being stooped shouldered and regain the elan vital that was plentiful in their youth. It's not that the therapeutic benefits of sports are false--life without games, play, physical recreation wouldn't worth sticking around for--but rather that Howell reduces what he's been witness to a convenient narrative structure that reports the hardship and then no so subtly, gracefully, nor convincingly turns around and provides a homily to convince himself, if not the reader, that something beautiful flourishes, thrives even in the midst of pulverizing ly hard and repetitive work. The last stanza is dreadful and spiked with the shards of truism platitude, and disingenuousness.

And the small victories
sustain them—a well-timed swing, or dusty
headfirst-dive for home—
as they disband,
again, into the world from which
they take their living.

This is a pompous and false dichotomy, that the laborers relish their game and find the "small victories" to be a satisfactory compensation for their dangerous work and poor pay, and it strongly implies that this is the way it needs to be. It's awful enough that Lucas Howell doesn't trust his own skill a writer to make his points and inferences without sticking instructional billboards along the trail of his thinking, but he adds an insult to injury with the banality of his insight. This man is the least interesting poet I've read in years.

Blogging So You Think You Can Dance

So You Think You Can Dance (or SYTYCD for those in the know) is the best thing on summer TV. The one and only problem with the show is it's not the sort of show people bother to give a chance. That is to say, at first blush the idea--American Idol light, only with dancing instead of singing--doesn't seem like such a good idea at all. Unless, that is, you're already into dance.

But here's the thing. The reality-competition format works better for a dance competition than it does a singing competition precisely because the world of dance is so foreign to most of us. And SYTYCD works so well because despite being on TV, it remains about dance. To put it another way, people become singers and go into the music business to become rich, famous, stars. Dancing is a bit different. Sure, if you want to be a star it helps if you can dance, but for those whom dancing is their main gig, their true talent, superstardom isn't even an option. So who bothers with dance? People who live and breath dance. Quirky, eccentric, artsy, passionate people who have devoted their lives to dance, not because they wanted to become rich and famous, but because they love dance.

So SYTYCD succeeds where AI doesn't because there's nothing strategic about devoting your life to dance, making those who have achieved success in the dance world the truly talented in their field as opposed to the famous personalities that have maneuvered their way to stardom in television, music, movies. When you watch SYTYCD, you quickly realize it's not made for TV, and that's because the people making it never planned on being stars of TV. So instead they do the best they can, which is simply opening a window to their world, the dance world. And what a delight it is to discover a subculture filled with passionate, talented, hard working, brilliant people.  Take it from me, a non-dance type person, SYTYCD will surprise and impress you.

Join us at So You Think You Can Dance Season 5 Social for the season premiere, Thursday May 21, 2009 at 8:00/7:00c on FOX.

Humbert/Angstrom

When John Updike died, I read him for the first time. The New Yorker ran a selection of prose that snared me, particularly a piece about a man joining a pick-up basketball game.

Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he's twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up.

I later learned this gorgeous passage was from the beginning of Rabbit, Run. Hard times have reduced the book budget, but I convinced mrs. august to support purchase of the paperback.

I should have gone to the library. Somehow I missed that Updike's quartet of novels feature a first degree schmuck, Harry Angstrom, the "rabbit" of the title who is too timid to make a decision and simply drifts around hoping for a redemptive moment, or at least the passing exhilaration of a good golf swing.

I do not require protagonists to be good. I love Humbert Humbert, who is klutzily evil and is all too gloriously aware of both his demons and his incompetence. In Rabbit, Run, the figure who bothers me is not Rabbit, but Updike.

My sympathy for Humbert comes in spite of my revulsion, but Updike wants to make the revolting sympathetic. Pauline Kael once wrote a review of Clockwork Orange in which she took Stanley Kubrick to task for making the audience cheer on the main character:

Stanley Kubrick's Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is not so much an expression of how this society has lost its soul as he is a force pitted against the society, and by making the victims of the thugs more repulsive and contemptible than the thugs Kubrick has learned to love the punk sadist. The end is no longer the ironic triumph of a mechanized punk but a real triumph. Alex is the only likable person we see -- his cynical bravado suggests a broad-nosed, working-class Olivier -- more alive than anybody else in the movie...

So too with Rabbit Angstrom. He is the only complete character in the novel, and I am meant to see his quest as noble. I'm supposed to feel his pain, to want to leave an alcoholic wife and fart about town in search of sex acts amenable to purple prose. We only meet his abandoned wife for a few pages, the only time the omniscient, present-tense narration enters her mind, just in time for her to drown her baby. Do not commit adultery, but if you do, take the kids

I can see the argument that Humbert is just as bad, that you can't love Lolita without loving Lolita. But in fact you can, and part of what makes Humbert so morosely depressing is the gulf between his reveries and the truth of teenagers. Humbert also anticipated the oversexualized world of now. We should all be so self-hating.

Both Humbert and Angstrom are literary creations that germinated language and allowed new angles on post-war America. The problem is that I don't find Updike's lens to be all that interesting. Maybe it was more revolutionary in 1960 to note that young men can be dissatisfied in their marriages, unable to express their feelings, and self-absorbed. Rabbit is too bland to be incisive, and Updike offers no other opening into the novel's world. I feel no better equipped to make sense of Rabbit and his habitat at the end of the novel, and by then I don't care.

Music For Cash Registers

I could sing all night
if the lights never changed
and if the radio played this song
again and again,
it’s a riff that rubs me
the right way in traffic
it’s a chorus making downtown
a party of long ribbons
and faired tap shoes,
the motor purrs and growls
with each keyboard grunt
and grunting guitar,
this car just rocks
when there’s no one I have to
return it to.

This is the curse of
owning things
that merely own you in exchange,

Cars, toasters, hand guns and
and magazines hug your
face with a deep kiss of need,

What I receive is nameless
and elusive, some music, some smoke,
dry ice vapors and a wallet that
floats away,
that’s how light it’s gotten,

Money is air, invisible but potent,

I owe money I’ve never seen
to people I’ve never met,

Like you, shuffling your debit cards
and saying prayers that don’t seem
to soar as high as interest rates
or blood pressure,
you should be dancing
for all the coin we owe,

This moment , right now,
on the street that vibrates
with orders on how to drive
when to cross and what to smoke
the thirty yards from the public entrance,
the world can stop and we perk our ears to
listen to an imagined needle scratching
the surface of percussive vinyl,

The bass line and the grunts of soul singers
are all the advice we need; they called decades ago
when we started to toss our cash out from
Wall Street Windows,

They advised

Do the jerk, baby,
Do the jerk now!