June 2004 Archives

I mentioned in a blog entry some months ago that I had re-read The Iliad after a 25-year hiatus and found it mighty bloody, and also with plenty of application to certain current events in the Middle East and Washington, D.C. A reader commented on the translation I had used (Robert Fagles'), stating a preference for E.V. Rieu's prose translation. I can't argue with that--not only because the reader takes a much more professional approach to the text than I, but also because I'm a sucker for the line, which I enjoy more than any other kind of writing in American English.

Little did I know at the time that Hollywood was in the last stages of editing the Epic Film Starring Brad Pitt (and a Cast Whose Names Are Destined to Go Unremembered). Damn, I missed it. Now, I have to wait for the DVD.

Recently, I overheard two women discussing film. The film's Helen, in their opinion, didn't have the face to launch a thousand ships, but the men sure did! Can't you see it? A Queer Eye for the Warrior Guy production!

It must not take much of a green thumb to grow tomatoes. I've never grown a thing but the tomatoes I planted in mid May are running riot. The plants are chest high and sending vines just about everywhere. Three of the four plants actually have tomatoes!

Planting these tomatoes was my first step to making 2Rio Salsa. That's something else I've never done. This morning I've been looking for directions and found these, a starting point, perhaps--looks like a lot of chopping is required--but I also need to learn how to preserve the salsa. I think it would be pretty neat to send 2River contributors a jar of 2Rio Salsa. Who wants money for their labor? Send salsa!

So this year I'm growing tomatoes. There's a Mexican Grocery Store nearby where I can buy the other ingredients, at least the peppers. Next year I'll try growing those, too, unless tomatoes prove disastrous.

Odd how at times a song lifts you over hurdles. I was running yesterday, with the mini iPod shuffling songs. I'm just now back into marathon training, the longer runs are still difficult, so at mile 8 I was running out of gas and thinking this is for the birds. Then Jackson Browne's "Before the Deluge" started playing. I'm not religious, but some gospel music is special. Its beat and message are uplifting, often without any overt persuasion in its spirituality. It can change the moment. "Before the Deluge" has that beat and message, and as the song played my fatigue became less noticeable and the hills were less difficult. Then the song's refrain:

Let the music keep our spirits high,
Let the buildings keep our children dry.
Let creation reveal its secrets by and by
When the light that's lost within us reaches the sky.

Those are beautiful lines, ones I wish I had written, and hearing them at that particular moment yesterday while running on a remarkably early autumn-like summer day in St. Louis, at a moment when I was ready to give up, ready to stop and walk the rest of the way to the gym--well, I was back into a runner's high, not running fast by any means, but still running and having fun.

Here's a similar kind of commentary by Jimmy Guterman.

That blog thread on TechRhet has led to some interesting blogging about the value of blogs in the writing classroom. Here's a description of a class blog on Dr. B.'s Blog. I'm not sure, however, if the class blog is really no more than a discussion board, which could just as easily be done using good, open access discussion board scripts; phpBB, for example. In other words, I don't think everything created by blogging software is in fact a blog. I don't think a space where students write their thoughts or comment on others' thoughts is a blog. Seems to me that blogging software has been used to create a discussion board. That's fine. Maybe it's easier to use blogware to set up a discussion board. But a blog, whatever it is, is not a discussion board.

I just finished reading at TechRhet an overly long thread about blogs. My reaction to the thread is nicely summed up by Jenny Edbauer in this post of hers. There's a crowd at TechRhet who push blogs as the next big thing that will make everyone a great writer. Maybe that's not what they're saying but that blogs will make writing more enjoyable. Or maybe they're saying a combination of the two. In any case there's a bunch of meta talk about blogs, just as there was with the emergence of personal computers, graphic user interfaces, word processors, listservs, networked writing environments, the WWW, Dreamweaver, MOOs, MUDs, blogs, just about every new technology except Instant Messaging, and most of what I've read there says IM is the next big evil influence on writing. Go figure.

With little else to do on a beautiful Saturday morning in St. Louis, I was poking around the 2River referral logs and accidently clicked the link to Yahoo! Directory Poetry Magazines, where I saw that 2River--along with powerhouses such as Poetry, Fence, Mudlark, and Big Bridge--is listed among the ten most popular poetry magazines. The cappacino is delicious, indeed.

The last time I saw the Olympic torch was eight years ago when it was passing through Buffalo on its cross country trip to Atlanta. That was the summer Olympics of the knapsack bomb, but the torch as it came into Buffalo's Niagara Square was a beautiful site. An early summer evening with a cool breeze blowing off Lake Erie. The next morning was even more beautiful. Lone runners bearing the torch through the country side of Western New York, I think on its way toward Rochester and Syracuse, roughly following the Erie Canal.

For the 2004 Athens Olympics, St. Louis is one of four cities in the United States that the torch will pass through. Yesterday the torch was in Los Angeles. Early this morning the torch flew aboard Zeus to here, starting its route through St. Louis at the Arch, then winding through the suburbs toward Washington University and Forest Park, where the Olympics were held a hundred years ago. I saw the torch as it ran through Clayton, directly in front of St. Louis Bread Company and directly across the street from Starbucks. The crowd was less than a hundred, but we all cheered and waved our flags while drinking the new C2 Coke.

It's funny how we'll wait to see something when the actual sight is much shorter than the wait. We'll wait at a curb to see a hearse pass bearing someone famous; we'll wait at a corner to see a torch pass. What makes the wait worth the sight is not the sight of a torch passing but the contemplation of what the sight means, what it signifies. The torch is the vehicle of what we hope will be a good game, of the myth that we willing accept: that the world can set aside arms for sport. It's an idea worth celebrating.

I don't live far from Forest Park. The torch must be there now. I can't see the fireworks, too many trees, but I can hear the cracks and pops and booms.

Well, I missed it. Ronald Reagan's death, embalming, lying in state, feet-first parade up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, arsenal of salutes, all happened while I was away from town. My wife and I were in North Carolina visiting a friend whose terminally ill condition hits far closer to home.

The precision, the planning, the speed (with a pregnant moment or two for casket touching), the well-mediated solmenity had all the depth of a Miss America Pageant. Hard to believe that a nation can get a revered president in the ground, so to speak, with so much pomp and so much alacrity and not miss a beat, stub a toe, make a wrong turn, overlook a plaudit, expose a wart.

The televised media made hay with the Reagan hagiography. CNN and Fox had great days recounting how Ronald Reagan won the Cold War (Gorbachev, of course, was the outwitted, outgunned, out-charmed other half of the terminating equation). What a narrative those news execs weave! The Great Communicator. The Smiling Pragmatist. The Savvy Somnabulator.

By the time we returned last weekend to the Capital area, the whole thing had blown out of town, westward ho. The t-shirt vendors' racks of Reagan-wear already were looking wilted. The covers of Time and Newsweek already bore whiskers. Now it's Bill Clinton's official portrait, and George Bush squirming, having to praise the guy in a White House installation ceremony.

How to connect this stuff to poetry? Oh, I know. I recall Anne Sexton once describing a finished poem as "last season's bad cold." So with the "news" in Washington, D.C.

Two deaths this week. One is accomplished: that of Rondald Reagan, who passed on last Saturday at 93 years. Alzheimer's was the topic of discussion, at least through Monday morning. How ironic that a president and former movie star, whose life has been so thoroughly documented, has for ten years remained universally accessible to all but him. What must it be like to lose all knowledge of oneself except the immediate present? I am glad that the private journal I keep is filled with clues and signs that one day may help me recognize who I was, that is, direct addresses to my future self.

An aside: how quickly the Alzheimer's issue gave way to the reverant creation of the Reagan hagiography. At least by the network and cable TV media. How bankrupt these media are today! The Times, at least, plays back the more balanced picture of a man who made government the enemy of the people and presided over the largest transfer of wealth in U.S. history, from the poor and middle classes to the wealthy. That is, the largest until W. and his crowd came to town.

The other death is one that has yet to happen. My wife and I were visiting a friend in North Carolina this past week whose breast cancer has metasticized to her spine and, now, brain. Nothing could be more apparent to me than the losing fight for life she wages, or her realization that the battle is lost. The woman I sat with this past week is a ghost compared to the woman I knew eighteen months ago. Of course, this is a time when one acknowledges (seeks out) stories of miraculously "willed" recoveries.

And now I've found a thread: two deaths, two narratives. Ways of living in the world.

One of the most striking images for me during this on-going week of mythologizing Reagan is that of the boots in the styrups of Sgt. York. I admit to being a sucker for military pomp and ceremony. My father served in the Marines for 30 years, retiring as Sgt. Major. Marine precision, dress blues, sharp drills, flag ceremonies, reveille and taps--all are images that make me nostalgic for those days at Camp Lejune when we'd be driving through the base to go to the doctor or to buy groceries at the commissary. With political independence came a distance from my father, eventually resentment for most of what he represented, but several years ago in a psychological reconciliation I ran two marathons to honor my father: the Marine Corps and the Camp Lejune, the latter of which should have been called The Sir. Ask a question of a young marine and you'll get an answer with at least a dozen sirs.

So there's Sgt. York with Reagan's boots in the styrups, facing backwards, symbolically at troops he'll never commander again, but also, which hasn't been said, at his legacy of good and ill. I suppose the image also is an opportunity for us to look back. It's all so personal, backwards but inward. There's my father coming in the door at night, taking off his boots. My chore is to get the kiwi polish, the old rag, a tin of water, and to spit shine the boots until my father's face reflects in the toes. Those boots. Tyranny. Honor.

I guess we all handle national moments in different ways. The day after Ronald Reagan's death, I googled these terms--Ronald Reagan Poetry Blog--looking for poems about the man. Not much there, but this chat that J-Walk had with the A.L.I.C.E. was interesting. The bot knew Reagan was a president but didn't know his wife's name is Nancy.

I was hoping to find, however, poems about Reagan. I wrote one about him when he first became president. I had read he liked jelly beans so much he kept a jar of them on his desk in the Oval Office. I didn't care much about Reagan's politics, but I did share his taste for jelly beans, so in a jelly belly way I felt connected to him. Thus I wrote "The Lover of Jelly Beans," sealed the poem in an envelope, addressed it to President Ronald Reagan, The White House, USA, and dropped it in the mailbox. I suppose something is done with the mail addressed to the President of the United States. I never got a reply, but maybe the poem is in an archive somewhere. Maybe the poem is in my FBI file, if I have one.

I don't recall much about the poem. A copy isn't at hand. Don't even know if there's a copy in a basement box.