Mi chupacabra es su chubacabra

All I really have to say is that this is a great Monday morning. I've finally finished my stressful fall class -- I just returned a bagful of books to the library -- and I'm taking the next term off. By that point, I'll be off the Selectboard. Life is on the way to being less busy for a little while.

And there are lots of things I'm excited to be doing instead. Our chicken pen wants a few small repairs, I can't wait to stack the rest of my firewood, and I get to spend more quality time time with kaph. A couple kids in our church just discovered role-playing, so I'm going to run an adventure for them this Friday -- for which I have more than a little preparation to do, but it's pure fun. Heck, I live for designing games! Writing papers, not so much.

On the other hand, there's nothing like meeting a topic on one's morning blog-rounds that is tied to a paper you have finished hours, not days, ago. And why not put my education to use?

I'm so happy to have my life back.

I pretty much knew I'd be stressed and under-rested this month, but I didn't anticipate a diagnosis of kidney damage and request for a kidney biopsy (next Tuesday). It's not as bad as it may sound, considering that we usually associate biopsy with cancer, which isn't the issue here. They just stick a needle in me, and then they'll take a close look at what they get to make sure that the damage is not ongoing.

It's funny; it's not the same as flipping a car, or awaking to guns firing outside in the night. The circumstances of your own body give you time to reflect, and they must be embraced -- they are not external forces I can react to, for better or worse, and then leave behind.

I also noticed yesterday that I am definitely balding. I'd suspected as much for a while, and I always knew the genetics made it about a 50/50 chance for all of my brothers. I can always hope I'll end up looking something like Billy Collins, I suppose.

On the upside, Kaph finished knitting me a hat. It's a lovely light mossy green.

With all the pundity sorts chattering about yesterday's elections (NJ and VA governor, and the wacko special for Congress in upstate NY) this morning, I can't help wanting to give my take on it, because oddly I haven't heard anyone else say this: the most important message is not for Obama -- it's for Republicans.

I know, everyone whose job is to fill their time slot with chatter wants it to be a referendum on Obama.  And yes, he made an effort to help out in NJ -- less so in VA, where the Democrat (Deeds) didn't want his help in the summer when the shine was coming off, then really really did want his help once Deeds started to flail.  And yesirree, Republicans won both races.  As the party out of the White House typically has done in these states; Dems won them while Bush was around, and so on going back at least to Reagan.

National trends aside, from what I saw of the Dems in these races they were poor campaigners (esp.  Deeds).  That shouldn't negate, however, the fact that the Republicans won big in VA in all sorts of races besides the top one, and that they won the top job in a blue state like NJ even though the opposition to the weak incumbent was slightly fragmented. 

Why?  Well, elections express the choice not of everyone, but of everyone who shows up.  And it's pretty clear that Democratic enthusiasm, and therefore turnout, was way down.  Voters under 30 were a powerful Democratic force last year, for instance, but this year went from around 20% of the voters to 10% or less.  If there's a message for Democrats to consider for next year, it's that truism that they've got to deliver on what their voters were hoping for last year.  If not, they stand lose that big chunk of "swing voters" from their base who can swing between caring enough to vote, and not caring enough.

But the message I mentioned for Republicans?  It's the choice in front of them.  In NY-23, a third-party right-winger got the celebrity treatment (read: Sarah Palin et al) and funding (read: $1 million from the Club for Growth) and managed to use it to clobber a socially liberal Republican (of the sort that used to be common in the Northeast) into actually dropping out of the race even though she had the "official" party backing.  As a consequence, a Democrat managed to win a Congressional district that Republicans have held continuously since the 19th century.

Yet more moderate Republicans won -- narrowly in bluish NJ, and decisively in purplish VA -- by playing down their socially conservative views and focusing on nuts and bolts sorts of practical issues.  You'd think a party looking for the way to win back some real power in next year's mid-terms would seize on this sort of moderation and focus on getting something done as the key, rather than catering to the uncompromisingly far right party-purity faction.

But honestly, alas, I wouldn't count on it.

Dear Interwebs,

I have always held a small grudge against you for depriving me, by your conquest of bookstores and library catalogs, of much of the joy and serendipity of browsing through shelves, and unexpected discoveries this has brought into my life.

I am moved to confess this chiefly because I have noticed of late that you have now become a sort of expansive library yourself, full of the profound and trivial and organized by as many different systems as you have contributors.  Now, any foray away from my routine path of email, news, and blog aggregates feels as chaotic a jaunt as I could ever have had filling my arms with books pulled at random from the shelves of a quality used bookstore.

In a single day, for instance, my regular news addiction can bring me video of an artist's rendering of viral replication and the immune response; a quick detour through Paul Krugman's blog will remind me to go read up on this year's Ig Nobel Awards; and following a trail of hyperlinks educating me on Rick Warren's misogyny might lead me to the funniest music video I have ever seen (whose topic is almost, but not quite, entirely unrelated to Rick Warren).

So all in all, Tubes, I forgive you.

Bruorton

Between some personal experience and family history, I've gotten pretty good at detecting my early warning signs of depression.  I've learned to stop self-assessing when I'm over-tired, to re-evaluate what patterns I've fallen into recently, to take some positive action to change things while I still feel able to, and look at what I need for self-care.  It's crucial, since I know that it's far harder to even want to get out of it, let alone see how, once the downward slide starts in earnest.

That's all preface of course to saying that I've felt this a number of times in recent weeks.  As always, part of depression is situational: in this case, a fairly humdrum office job, and too little time and energy left over from it and my other commitments (school, selesctboard) to do all the other things I feel need doing at home -- gardening, painting, firewood, and such things that more immediately feel good to accomplish.  Part of it is just not having that time and energy from day to day.  And part of it is incidental: getting my evaluation from my summer writing prof (what I expected from someone who didn't really try to engage my work), reading this article series about our nation's continuing progress toward a fascist society, or simply the lack of a story or game I'm working on.  (It feels funny to recognize, as I honestly must, how large a role the creation and sharing of stories and games has in my emotional health.)

So what to do?  Well, I've stayed afloat thanks to a safe and loving spouse, and here and there a fortuitous visit from friends.  Kaph and I are about to go on our first actual vacation since our honeymoon, and I plan to a) get fully rested, b) try to do some writing, and c) not obsess about everything I haven't done or will need to do back home.  That should do a bit to restore me for a return to work, town budget writing season, and what promises to be a rigorous fall class.

Long term, I've got 6 months left in office, and I plan to take a term off from school early next year as well.  Those two should give me goals on the calendar to survive towards, and a sense that current patterns aren't permanent.  At work, when I finish the current project I have been working on this summer, I'm going to make inquiries as to why I haven't received the supposedly automatic promotion promised when I was hired two years ago.  (Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful to have a job at all, but with other people in my office getting promotions it's time to politely ask.)  And at home, every week I'll try to do at least a little of that real-life work that lets me see what I've done with my own hands.

And I'll continue to keep watch, guarding my borders against that presence always slouching about in the darkness beyond, looking for openings.

Michael Pollan has a new article in National Geographic on orchids with the ultimate in pollination strategies: their flowers mimic female bees and wasps to get male bees to "pseudo-copulate" with them.    If you prefer a written abstract or an audio version, he was also interviewed on NPR over the weekend (leading him to opine on the male advantages of having sex with anything that moves), and the Geographic has kindly put online the entire gorgeous (and apparently erotic) photo gallery for the story.

Good news this week.  Mathematical research developed from pandemic models now indicates that humans would survive and overcome a zombie outbreak.  Many kudos to Prof. Smith? and his team.

Too Many Nature Films Lately

I am the calf, separated from the herd,
the wolves closing in.  I am the kit fox
caught in the open.  I am the penguin
father who has kept my chick alive
through the brutal cold, and I’ve given it
my last meal, waiting for my mate to come.
She will not come.  I am the bear gone
too long and too far without food
lying down for the last time.  It was
a desperate gambit I tried in the end
and I lost.  I’ve nothing else left.

I wiped out this week.  I didn't even sense it coming.  Got home last night, and just sort of folded up on our couch.  First Kaph asked if I needed a nap, then observed that my answer was totally irrational.  She got me (bless her) to call the other board members to say I wasn't well and wouldn't be there, and once she'd won that battle there was no further resistance.  I went straight to bed.

This was probably before 5:30.

I woke up around 3 hours later, and bless her again, kaph had taken care of all the birds for the night, and made us a delicious salad.  Usually if I wake up from a "nap" like that so late in the day, I'm all jet lagged and can't go back to sleep.  But nope.  Up about an hour, ate, went back to bed.

Clearly, I need to be taking a little more care of myself.  I'm lucky I didn't get totally sick.  I'm still feeling wiped out, but a 3-day weekend should help somewhat.

To an Archaeologist 400 Years In the Future
Exploring My House, Which Was Perfectly
Preserved in Volcanic Ash

Please, come in.  With your small hammer
and soft brush, come in.  You will find
everything in order, more or less,
though I wish I’d had more time to clean.
As you chip your way carefully into the kitchen

you’ll find the glasses in the cabinet above the sink.
Please help yourself, though I have no idea
what you might prefer to drink.
Considering the circumstances
I don’t recommend opening the fridge.

I’m trying to reassure myself that you won’t mind
all the papers and books strewn about
on the coffee table, the ottoman,
pretty much everywhere really, now I think of it.
If you don’t get stuck on figuring out

some pattern to why they are arranged this way
I’m sure they will assist your research
into how we lived, and what
was front-page news four hundred years
and one week ago.

There is more enjoyable reading in the bedroom,
and personal documents, you’ll be interested to know,
are in the locked filing cabinet in the study.
And under the TV is a real artifact, an old
Atari game system which even has a game

where you can play a tiny pixilated
archaeologist who dashes through Egyptian tombs
nabbing ancient treasures, until he succumbs
to the attacks of sacred snakes, lions, and bats. 
Don’t worry, there’s nothing so dangerous in here

unless I have left my shoes out for you
to trip over again.
And somewhere around the house—
cross-legged on the couch, lying on the bed, perhaps
hunched over a bowl of cereal at the breakfast table—

will be my absence, a me-shaped hole
in the ashy rock.
I am sorry I missed you; I’m sure
you’re a fascinating person to talk to, and after all
we both have so many questions.

Story Fragment from Middle Kingdom Egypt

When the herdsman saw the goddess by a lake
he was terrified.  Something in her appearance
made his limbs tremble, his hair stand on end.

We know these signs, perhaps cliché even then.
What he saw in her that so moved him remains
unsaid.  A mystery.  Which leaves us wondering

what will happen when he sees her again, this time
naked, seductive.  Why the erotic turn?
Is he still afraid?  Will he go to her?  Will he die?

But here the fragment ends.  Nothing more to tell us
the outcome, and whether or not there is a moral. 
It is not like any story to have the herdsman

just turn away to his cattle, but we will never know.
So they will go on grazing in their marsh, and we
are left only with the trembling; the nakedness.

Courtesy of our friends to the north -- or more specifically their business news, and one economist in particular, Jeff Rubin -- is a short article I'd recommend from the Globe and Mail, a sort-of review of a  book I'll be sure to pick up.

I gave myself a sort of recreational break this week, trying some light verse after the style of Ogden Nash.  I understand one of my subjects has a new movie coming out; wrong one, though, more's the pity.


On Scholarship in Historical Fiction

On comparisons between Umberto Eco and Dan Brown
I frown;

For while I do frequently have trouble understanding the former when his characters use un-translated bits of dead languages in their chatter,
I simply have trouble understanding the latter.

For example, when it comes to the basis for his stories’ theological mischief,
It seems that Mr. Brown is unacquainted with the practice of putting faith in a reader’s ability to suspend disbelief,

But instead he parades about in the national spotlight boldly asserting to the general public that everything between the covers is demonstrable fact,
While any art student could tell you that demonstrability is the main thing it lacked.

When reading Eco, by contrast, though you will never imagine for a moment that what you are reading is literally true, the setting and its history are so rich that you can accept it as utterly real within the parameters of the story, because every bit of it is self-consistent and factually detailed,
Even if it is only a side-note on why an obscure 12th century heretic was impaled.

Which is why I respect Umberto Eco more for requesting belief only within his story itself,
And would rather strongly suggest that Dan Brown be left on the shelf.

This was my poem for this week's class--a little convoluted, but at least that's sort of to its advantage.  However, it is starting to feel tough to maintain this kind of output for several more weeks.  (Of any quality, that is...)


Plan B

Veterinary assistant
was just something that came along
at the right time to pay the bills

while she was going back to school.
Her boyfriend at the time told her
about it because his ex had worked there

before her mom got sick
and she had to move back to Boulder
because her dad was still in Ankara

teaching economics at the university
and hoping he might still get
his novel published.

It was a book about a geneticist
working in the produce section
of a Miami supermarket

who meets the sort of woman he had always
thought he would marry,
but knows that his wife waiting in Guyana

was left pregnant at 17
by the first great love of her life
and he cannot bear to repeat such cruelty.

And she, working as a typist
to supplement what he can send home
once a week walks to the city park

in the evening with the child
that she never meant to have
where they watch for the first stars

and like a ritual, as they walk home,
she always tells her darling
you can be anything you dream.

I can hardly believe it.  Governor John Baldacci, of Maine, just signed the second legislative establishment of marriage equality.  It seems likely that there will be some sort of challenge at the ballot box, but we'll just have to see.

In the meantime--what's going on, New Hampshire?  After all, your legislature passed out a bill over a week ago now... Gov. Lynch, I'm looking at you. 

This is the poem I wrote for last week's class, a found poem -- sort of the poetic version of a collage.  This is all stuff that I really heard at a Dartmouth panel about 2 weeks ago.


Advice for Writers
    lines heard at a faculty panel on creativity

For 26 years I was a shark.
I was a writing machine, like a shark is a killing machine.
And I lost friends, I lost family,
and I learned to write a really good script.

Nobody told me in high school that Hemingway sucked
before he was good. 
I wrote 28 drafts before I even started to like it.

If you have a problem, say it out loud before you go to sleep.
Your mind will keep working on it—
how to get her from the couch to the kitchen—
while you’re asleep.
They used to call that elves, the little people,
what you do in your sleep.

Legal pad, pen, and a couch.
And I have all these shirts that will attest
that I’m a great believer in naps,
with all of their ink stains.

I go running.  A hot bath.
You have to move your body,
you have to be relaxed.
If you have a job worth writing home about,
you won’t have enough time to be a writer.

I once lost a job as a waiter at the faculty club,
trying to be creative with how many goblets I could carry
at once.

And we found it was the econ majors who were most willing to take risks.
The ones who split it 50-50, who stuck to fair play,
were the ones who had read at least one Greek tragedy.
That was the year my daughter learned to do handstands

and she came home and did handstand,
handstand,
handstand,
handstand.

Happy birthday, kaph !

Here's the poem I wrote for last week's class; it's a pantoum, a form that repeats lines in a cyclical pattern.  Incidentally, as some of you know, the details here really do describe the place kaph and I live. 


The Barn-House

I was worried that I had misplaced my keys
when I started to dream about the crows.
There’s no escaping ghosts like these.
At night, the roof whimpers when the wind blows.

When I started to dream about the crows
I already knew of the signs they brought.
At night the roof whimpers when the wind blows;
in the bathroom’s a beam that a horse once gnawed.

I already knew of the signs they brought.
The shadows of animals in their stalls:
in the bathroom’s a beam that a horse once gnawed
and ancient hay sifts from the walls.

The shadows of animals in their stalls
eroded like the side of the hill.
And ancient hay sifts from the walls;
the chinks let in the winter chill.

Eroded like the side of the hill
my sleep turns restless in the pre-dawn light.
The chinks let in the winter chill;
I tug on blankets that are already tight.

My sleep turns restless in the pre-dawn light.
I’m worried that I have misplaced my keys.
I tug on blankets that are already tight.
There’s no escaping ghosts like these.

I don't believe I've said much here about going back to school, which is odd.  For now I'll summarize by saying that since I work at an Ivy League school, I was already thinking of auditing some classes or something when I discovered that not only is there a policy allowing staff to take one course a term for free, but that there is a great degree program here, one that is almost completely customized by the students. 

So I got myself into it, and started in January, combining creative writing classes with studies of how cultural stories form (or are formed by) attitudes toward the natural world.  My first class was on the history of human interaction with nature in America, viewed through a broad swath of American literature.  This term is a poetry workshop with Sydney Lea; I hope to take further classes on writing, mythology, and cultural anthropology.

Anyway, i figured since I was writing or revising a poem a week these days, I might as well post it here as well.  Feel free to offer any feedback or critiques, small or large -- it's what I'm writing these for after all.  Or just enjoy them; that's why I'm writing them, too.  Anyway, here's the one I wrote for this last week's class.


Sonnet Noir: Angel of Death

On 6th and C, J. waits, with no place left
to hide.  His watch’s second-hand unwinds
toward night.  The money was not worth this theft
of hope.
                  Just after dark, a woman finds
him loitering and takes him for a trick.
“My place?”  Seductive smile’s rehearsed—but hers
as good as any.  
                                It’s all over quick
enough; his mind’s elsewhere.  After, she stirs
some coffee, black, and listens while he talks.
He’s bought 3 hours.  She sees he’s killing time.
She asks.  The usual: stole from his boss.

At 10, men on the stairs.   He knows the sign:
they’ve come for him.  Gets up to go, not right
to get her hurt, but she tells him to stay.
(The guy’s got cash; they don’t expect a fight.)
She steps out in the hall, and fires away.
Comes back, slides pistol back into her gown.
“You got enough for us to leave this town?”

I'm not a huge fan of the Silver Bullet Theory of crisis solution -- for example, that a single technology will save us from global warming.  There are too many structural things that need to be changed for us to actually live within our means, habitat-wise; I also think that much of our structure itself needs to become decentralized, with everyone depending more on the food, energy, and community in the places they live.

That said, as far as large-scale power generation goes, concentrated solar power is the only thing I'd feel particularly inclined to support.  I only happen to mention this because over lunch today I read an article describing the history and theory of CSP which included the amusing revelation that "Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks contain many designs for solar concentrators, including some for industrial purposes, because he worried about the destruction of the earth's vast forests in humanity's search for fuel."  Gotta love that guy.  550 years old, and he still knows how to keep with the times.

That article, on the other hand, is a bit out of date.  It was a link in an article today about the challenges to actually building these plants, one of which appears to be either Sen. Dianne Feinstein, or conservationists' concerns about building power plants in the fragile desert ecosystem... depending on how you look at it.  Anyway, I really only bring this up to suggest (if reading about climate change issues appeals to you) to check out this blog in general.  Joe Romm is one of those people who likes silver bullets, and wants to find ways for us to keep living more or less the way we do now, but nonetheless knows what's going on in the world of climate science, politics, and economics.

He's also the one who came up with my favorite line so far on the whole thing (I'm paraphrasing): "We're all Bernie Madoffs...  we have constructed the grandest of Ponzi schemes, whereby current generations have figured out how to live off the wealth of future generations." 

Now that's what I call staying on the rhetorical cutting edge.