Why I Stay at the SF

My wife is out of town this weekend, and yesterday my diet consisted of corn dogs, chocolate chip cookies and Jack Daniels whiskey, a combination that is more or less the nutritional equivalent of a drive-by shooting.

I miss my wife. Symbiosis has become fusion. You've heard about how a body may miss an amputated limb, painfully aware of its absence.

Imagine how the limb feels.

Still, I was able to keep busy. Spent the early afternoon at the USF-Pepperdine baseball game, which would have propelled my beautiful Dons into the NCAA post-season had the Dons won. We were trounced 11-0, but it is a three-game set, and since mbD had won the first game, if we win today on on on we go, one step closer to Omaha and the College World Series.

Making the NCAAs would be a cross-promotional platform for the university, so I am all for it. Athletics are not the tail wagging the dog at USF -- not yet and not even close to it. We can live with a little athletic success. (If you remember the 19th Century cult of muscular Christianity, raise your hand.)

The university has a pretty little ballfield on the east edge of campus. Left field backs up to Golden Gate avenue, and during the third inning a fire department hook and ladder pulled up. The firemen climbed up on the truck and watched the game for a while. Also, we have some kind of small-needle evergreens in foul territory, pretty big guys going a hundred feet, and occasionally a foul ball would go splashing through the branches.

College baseball uses aluminum bats, of course. They produce a hateful sound, a kind of clink that sounds like empty bottles jostling together. I haven't watched enough college ball to develop an ear for the sound bat makes on ball as the preamble to a long home run. Maybe that would build a more positive association.

I wanted to taunt Pepperdine for its association with Ken Starr, who tormented Bill Clinton to so little purpose, and is now dean down there at Pepperdine's law school to the mutual disgrace of all parties involved. But there was no bad sportsmanship -- no gibes, quips or taunts. Indeed, the cheering was rather bloodless, some of the crowd cheering numbers -- "Go get 'em 44" -- rather than names, as if the fans lacked confidence in their powers of pronunciation.

But I'm glad I didn't get personal. After the game, I wandered back of home plate at the same time the Pepperdine team came off the field after the Pepperdine coach had gathered them around out on the edge of the outfield grass either to praise, advise or give them each a dinner coupon for Jack in the Box.

The Pepperdine starting pitcher came through the gate and immediately gave a woman who looked like his mom a big hug, and then an older man, a real working-class looking guy with some shine on his hair and a little bit of a stomach, came over.

I had been told earlier this guy was the pitcher's dad.

The pitcher didn't hug him. He just cocked his head to the side and said not very loud, "How are you feeling?"

And the older guy said not very loud, "That was the best medicine."

So either there's a story there or it isn't. I take that back. There is always a story, young people.

Then my friend who was doing the game on Fox Sports TV came down from the press box, and we went for a few drinks at Liverpool Lil's next to the Presidio, the old army base that looks more like a gated community, where George Lucas has created a "campus" I believe the developers call it.

We talked about his being a sports broadcaster. (He also teaches in our MA program in Sports Management. Damn, we are a wise educational investment.)

The part about his job that always interests me -- because between conversations I forget it -- is that his producer in the truck is always whispering in his ear, like a conscience or a friendly ghost. I don't know why no one has marketed that idea as a personal service. Just mike people up so people who are good at such things as winning arguments or asking for raises can listen in from the van parked in the alley when you are talking with the dean or arguing curriculum in department meetings. Me, I am always alternating between silence and intemperance in situations like that. I could use a murmur in my ear tweaking my judgment.

And after those lovely drinks -- carefully spaced for maximum sobriety -- home for more corn dogs and cookies and then back to the city to listen to Charlie Haden and Quartet West as part of the San Francisco Film Noir Festival, jazz being the hydraulic fluid of film noir.

Magnificent set. Like Sam Spade said, "This is the stuff dreams are made of."

In this case, sweet dreams. It was one of those nights that cause you to flatter yourself for living here. Moving north on Van Ness avenue, you had the symphony playing at symphony hall, across the street a hundred feet away the opera performing at the opera and another couple hundred feet along you had Herbst Theater inside one of the War Memorial Buildings where Charlie Haden and his aging jazzmen were playing. A block away in front of City Hall the opera was being televised on a big screen, and an audience of a thousand or so sat on the grass and watched and listened for free.

As I walked back to BART -- "the subway" for those of you playing at home -- with the opera echoing off the buildings around City Hall's plaza, a bum stumbled past muttering something, though whether he was cursing or reprising an aria I could not say.

Monday addendum: The Dons lost yesterday but are going to the NCAAs anyway. The team will play Miami in the Urban Climate Bowl. What you will have weather-wise is a big-city team from a steamy tropical paradise against a big-city team from a foggy Mediterrean paradise. The game will be in Lincoln, Nebraska. It will be tough. Miami will have the plus on dealing with heat and humidity. When it comes to culture shock, it's a push.

The Word is Abstruse. Hrumph.

From the New York Times:

Judge Lake commended and thanked the jurors for sitting through often obtuse and conflicting testimony. During the trial, they were shown thousands of pages of corporate documents and spreadsheets; they took 27 boxes worth of evidence with them into the jury room where they deliberated.

Textbook Examples

Every reporting textbook with which I am personally acquainted has a section on the so-called News Values, usually seven or eight in number, including things like timeliness (did it just happen?) and impact (does it matter?).

As I tell my students, these news values are descriptive, not prescriptive. They tell us what is out there in the news media, not what should be out there. If you don't like stories that feature conflict, don't put stories that feature conflict in your particular medium. Slap your audience sharply across the knuckles: No ice cream for you!

Of the items on the usual list of news values, the most elusive is currency, which does NOT mean the same as timeliness. Rather, it is something "in the air" that the reporter becomes aware of and calls to the public's attention, the grateful public responding with a hearty, "Yeah. I was thinking about that."

Two recent stories that illustrate this idea:

The first is today's front-page centerpiece in the SF Chronicle on the black community's reaction to Barry Bonds' suggestion that his blackness is a factor in the response to his overtaking of His Royal Whiteness Mr. Babe Ruth.

The second is the New York Times story from several days ago exploring the Hillary-Bill marriage, complete with an accounting of how many days -- and nights -- the two have spent together in recent months.

Some of my favorite progressive bloggers have raged against this story, suggesting its subtext is how often Bill is boinking Hillary -- or to put it another way how often Hillary is hauling Bill's ashes. (The "revenue neutral" characterization: How often are they knocking boots?)

Simple me did not get that implication when I read the story. But even if it is there -- "there" in the sense that many readers find it there intended or not -- I have no problem with such an implication and such a story. I could go into a long discussion of how the Clintons' relationship in all its nuances is an example of an "impact" story and how it will become an issue in the next Presidential campaign, news gatekeepers be damned.

But I won't. The story -- just like the Bonds story -- is an example of currency. On that basis alone, it is justified. People are interested. That makes it news. Better to pull these things out of the shadows of our semi-conscious into the light, so we can think about them more and feel about them less.

LOL? Yeah.

I open my New Yorker today, and methodically I check the table of contents. I note that Anthony Lane has a review of the "Da Vinci Code," and I begin to smile because it is reasonable -- it is probable; it is a matter subject to prediction and thus I predict -- that I will somewhere in the course of the review

Laugh Out Loud.

I am not disappointed. At once Lane writes of the movie's opening scene that:

A dead Frenchman is found laid out on the floor of the Louvre. His final act was to carve a number of bloody markings into his own flesh, indicating, to the expert eye, that he was preparing to roll in fresh herbs and sear himself in olive oil for three minutes on each side.

I do not think that Anthony Lane is a superior movie critic. I am not sure that he is a good movie critic. Perhaps, he is not even a movie critic. He is an essayist who writes about movies, among other things.

He is superbly funny, I write, falling back on the adverb.

Lane does not use many adverbs, which is a clue right there, and a lesson, too.

Reading him reminds me I have no clear idea of what a good movie critic is, no more than I have a clear idea of what a "great newspaper" is. (More about that later.) I suppose a good movie critic knows a lot about the bottom of the iceberg of movie making, the 90 percent of the thing that you can't see. He knows about editing, narrative flow, the peripheral image, all the technique and the history of technique, all kinds of things the critic can call out to my attention that I would not otherwise have noticed.

Over time, I learn from such a critic.

Or I think I do. Or I think I might.

Lane, humorist that he is, sees the crevice in which he can wedge the joke, which means he misses a lot or at least ignores a lot. As must be, he is better with movies he dislikes than with those he admires, but that is pretty much true of most kinds of criticism other than the esoteric, that is, the kind of criticism you get when you know a lot and I know a lot, and aren't we special?
No no no. He is simply a fine comic writer and anyway I probably wouldn't know a good movie critic if I read one. (Obscurity fools me every time.)

Back to what makes a great newspaper, where my thoughts wandered as I geared up for this blog entry.

My whole professional life I have tried to talk knowledgeably about what makes a great newspaper. Generally, what I mean when I talk about it is that it's a newspaper that has more rather than less international news. It has some good feature writers, who can manage a good description and create a scene. Its copy editors don't allow that many egregious errors, particularly in grammar, to slip through.

Now and again its writers use words like egregious.

Hmm. I just glanced over the first page of Lane's review, and I did not spot a word as Latinate, as pompous, as tinny as egregious.

Memo to self in future prose: Walk. Carry a stick. People can tell if it's done softly. People will notice if the stick is big.

Some International All Stars

William Wordsworth in CF: They called him The Natural but he never could adjust to Astroturf.

Lord Byron. DH, purely station to station on the bases. A switch hitter. Maybe the greatest. Still has all the records for number and variety of groupies.

John Keats. What a talent. A couple of great seasons. Died young.

Percy Shelley. Also died young and a real talent, too. But Keats threw the complete games while Shelley wasted too many pitches.

William Blake. For one inning nobody better. But sometimes you really needed to take the ball away from him.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He could have been somebody. He could have been a contender. The difference between Coleridge and Barry Bonds is the difference between being juiced and being just juiced enough.

Pabst's Hall of Fame

Comments: OK, here's my literary line-up card:
1-Philip Roth, SS (likely to get on base, never misses a ground ball)
2-Maxine Hong Kingston, RF (always moves the runner along)
3-Tennesee Williams, LF (power threat, deceptively quick on the bases)
4-Ernest Hemingway, CF (clean up - but strikes out as often as he homers)
5-Homer, 3B (name says it all)
6-Guy DeMaupissant, 2B (so ahead of the game he uses an aluminum bat, turns the DP with grace)
6-Karl Marx, 1B (Lefty with power, slow, but original)
8-John Kennedy Toole, C (calls a great game; Mom is his agent)
9-Will Shakespeare, Starting P (knows where to put his fingers on the stitches)

John Milton, Relief P (knows where the stitches should be)

Mgr: John Donne (fair former Minor Leaguer; great student of the game)
Hitting Coach: James Joyce
Spitting Coach: Ambrose Bierce
Pitching Coach: Dorothy Parker

Broadcast Team:
Play by play - Joseph Campbell (can imagine every possibility before it happens)
Color - Dante (knows when win=loss.
Broadcast Engineer: EM Forster

On the bench:
Joyce Carol Oates (good in a fight)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (not good in a fight)
Truman Capote
Herman Melville
Emily Dickenson (just kidding)
All the Brontes (not kidding)
George McDonald Fraser (look it up)
RM Koster (ditto)
Li Po
Laura Esquival
Anton Chekov

Team publicist: James Baldwin

Inside the Mascot Suit: Thomas Pynchon

# posted by G Pabst : 10:14 PM

Welcome to EBay

Oakland Athletics tickets have a bar code at the right end. That means that entrance to the ballpark is gained not by the mutilation of the ticket or by the confiscation of the ticket but by its being read by a handheld device.

That means that my ticket for today's game for seat five in row 13 of section 209 in the second level -- a seat well toward right field, which means it offered a panoramic view of Barry Bonds 714th home run -- is intact and available for purchase.

And here's some texture to give you a sense of what was happening in row 13, section 209.
As Bonds rounded the bases, first I booed and then I chanted "Babe Ruth, Babe Ruth," and when he came out for a curtain call I waved my ticket over my head and said, "EBay, Ebay!"

The ticket is also worth five dollars off a full-size Round Table pizza (single topping) if redeemed during the next seven days, but I think I can do better than that. All bids should be accompanied by a certified check for ten percent of your total bid as well as a 250-word essay explaining why you should be chosen in the case identical bids are submitted.

I would grade the condition of the ticket as Very Good to Fine. All decisions of the judges are final. Offered not valid in South Dakota, the District of Columbia or the Western Provinces of Canada.

Willy (Say Hey) Shakespeare

If famous writers were famous baseball players, what positions would they play? Theodore Dreiser would be a DH: great writer, terrible stylist. William Faulker would be a knuckleball pitcher, I think, though I'm willing to argue that one.

These thoughts come because I am thinking about an earlier comment I made on the power of statisics to deepen one's pleasure in baseball. That made me think of Faulkner because what he said (I think) of Southerners and their history: "The past is not dead. It's not even past."

Same for baseball.

I Boo, Therefore I Am

Unless Barry Bonds hits two home runs tonight, tomorrow I will have the opportunity to see a small piece of baseball history. That is, at worst I will have the opportunity to see Bonds surpass Babe Ruth's career mark of 714 home runs.

Shut him down tonight, my beautiful Oakland A's, and I might see him tie and break.

And I have a ticket for Sunday, too.

If either of those long-ball milestones is in play, at the conclusion of a Bonds at bat that results in an out, I will cheer. At the conclusion of an at bat that results in some small success short of a home run, I will sit on my hands. If Bonds hits a home run I will boo lustily. Though Saturday's and Sunday's games will be in Oakland, thousands of Giants fans will attend, so if Bonds hit a historic home run, cheers and boos will mix.

Some will cheer the man (for some sniff the jock as others sniff the cocaine). Some will cheer the talent, understanding that hitting a baseball is among the hardest athletic feats. Some will cheer the team and its history because so many of us confuse where we are with who we are. Some will cheer the moment, thankful to be a part of a Big Number in a sport in which the accumulation of numbers glues the game together.

And some of will boo for all sorts of reason, from the partisan to the ethical. I will boo for the animal joy of making a sound at a moment of physiological and psychology intensity. The boo is a tribute, I concede. You would have me feign indifference, kind of a "turn the other cheek," you suggest.

Can't do. For did not Lord Byron say?

And if I boo at any mortal thing,

'T is that I may not weep; and if I weep,

'T is that our nature cannot always bring

Itself to apathy.

Actually, he said "laugh," but you get the point.

(Time 8:03. Bonds is oh for one. I like my chances. I like my chances.)

The Force is Strong in This Classroom

That is to say that I am administering my final exam in basic reporting and have just discovered that the USF wireless network is available on the second floor of Cowell Hall so I can read email, post, behave as if I am in a coffee shop killing time instead of doing work.

Actually, that is too self critical. For the next two hours it is my job to be *available* to the students, in what one might call the street corner, not the coffee shop mode.

The students all look gratifyingly intent. Occasionally, they come up to the desk with questions, mostly to confirm a sound conclusion about some "nuance" in the drill -- for example, some little dirty trick of mine designed to catch them out such as multiple spellings of a name in the "cop notes." I encourage them to ask ask ask up to the point of irritating the person they are asking -- not me; I don't do irritation -- but then to continue in spite of that irritation.

Knowing how not to irritate, or at least to delay the onset of irritation, is a fine reportorial tool.

But better to irritate than not to ask. Perhaps, with a different set of students, in the matter of asking one would teach the art of it and the simple fact of doing it with equal emphasis. But our students are very very nice. When that gets in the way of persistence in asking questions then it's not so nice.

One example: This semester many in class were coming back with stories in which their sources were ageless; that is, they thought that was a very rude question to ask someone who was not visibly and transcendently young.

Not so, I said, gladly telling them my age.

At which point their sharp intake of breath created a vacuum in the room.

Long Day's Journey into Night

I have finished grading a set of papers, plus some miscellaneous late work from the Journalism Ethics class. They were the third essay -- a discussion of the ethical problem in a movie in which the journalist's life is prominently featured.

Capote. His Girl Friday. Absence of Malice. Shattered Glass.

The papers were good. They were very good. As one student put it -- the movie was Almost Famous, the Cameron Crowe semi-autobiography about the fine line between fandom and music journalism -- because he loved the movie, he loved doing work on the movie.

All of the papers were that way. The students were comfortable with the medium, and they had fun. The ideas came easy because what could be easier than talking about a movie?

It was a late start on the day's work, but it turned out all right. But that's just one set of papers from one class. TK as they say down at the newspaper: More to come.

You don't have to have...

one or more advanced degrees in psychology

....to understand that...

I'm fooling around with my blog

...so that I don't have to ...

start grading.

To All of You Who Read the Post Below and Said: "What Was *That*?"

Blogging is like newspaper headline writing. There are certain puns and little jokes you have been waiting years to use. When you first start in the business, you need to burn through 'em -- or so I tell my copy editing students.

I am reading that the San Antonio Express-News recently banned puns in heds.

These, I read, are some of the puns that vexed the editor:

"Old well ends well: River Walk threat wiped out"

"Mumps outbreak swells"

"Border violence killing tourism"

"Bell's name doesn't have a familiar ring for many voters"

"(Pope) Benedict names a flock of new cardinals"

The point isn't that these headlines should not have been written. The point is that some older wiser editor needed to groan -- a loud appreciative groan -- and then use the red pencil.

Wisdom -- talent, even -- consists of being your own editor, of giving up the easy joke, the lazy joke.

Not there yet.

The Hard Choices

Two subsets of spam artists seem to be winning the battle against my university's nutwall. The first of these offers amazing opportunities in unfamiliar stocks; the second features exuberant promises about erectile enhancement.

I know how common this variety of solicitation is. My wife was in a bit of a panic last year when her work computer was blitzed by so many messages of this kind that she felt it necessary to tell her employer's net administrator that she had done nothing to encourage these messages. (She figured her employer was monitoring her email. But that's another story.)

Of course, she was reassured that everyone else on the system had the same problem.

I know that calling these messages -- this detritus, this commonality, this pocket change of the internet -- to your attention is like suggesting to an editor, as I once did, that what the feature section needed was a story on My Saturday at Traffic School. My editor said such a story was a kind of a Coming of Age in Samoa thing. Everyone knows that story, knows it so well, in fact, that it is a very boring story and no one wants to hear it again.

But but but. In the case of these pestilent sex emails, I suddenly realized that they are a powerful argument in favor of AP style; that is, in certain areas of life we want consistency, deference to precedent. An excess of innovation, of freethinking, in spelling or in grammar or syntax or capitalization does not bolster confidence. It is not that we do not get the message. It is that if the message lacks a certain respect for conventional wisdom in areas that are admittedly unrelated to the question under discussion we do not trust the message.

A case in point. As I was erasing emails this morning, the following popped in the preview screen:


-S'ensationall revoolution in m'edicine!


-E'n'l'a'r'g'e your p''enis up to 10 cm or up to 4 inches!


And I thought:

Tut tut. I think not. This email has "offshore medical school" written all over it.

But I also had to admit: what a learning tool for educating us about the metric system!

Addendum: And I realize what I have written. My headline for this should have been The Learning Tool.

Ouch.

...and, finally, I wasn't wearing any pants

In my American Journalism Ethics class, we finished up the semester with a discussion of blog ethics in the context of Citizen Journalism, that noble notion that just as every star grants a wish every blogger is a journalist.

As Ernest Hemingway said in another context (and Hemingway really was a journalist except for all the times he wasn't): "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

It is pretty. It's very pretty.

Anyway, in class I have a very nice Powerpoint presentation of Rebecca Blood's six rules for ethical blogging.


(Full disclosure: I have no idea who Rebecca Blood is and thus no reason to embrace her rules other than their inherent wisdom. But what a cool name. If, indeed, it is hers in the sense of being born to it other than simply liking its looks and moving in.)

Back to anyway. Here is Rule Three.


3. Publicly correct any misinformation.


If you find that you have linked to a story that was untrue, make a note of it and link to a more accurate report. If one of your own statements proves to be inaccurate, note your misstatement and the truth. Ideally, these corrections would appear in the most current version of your weblog and as an added note to the original entry. (Remember that search engines will pull up entries without regard to when they were posted; once an entry exists in your archives, it may continue to spread an untruth even if you corrected the information a few days later.) If you aren't willing to add a correction to previous entries, at least note it in a later post.

Yesterday I wrote that John Updike and Philip Roth were octogenarians. Later in the day I looked it up. They aren't. Each is in his early seventies. At that point I changed the entry. According to Rebecca Blood, to make that change after the fact and not to note that change is unethical.

Of course, as is so often true, the "why" of the mistake is more interesting than the "what." Updike and Roth are writers I admired when I was 20 years old. By definition, they are of the pantheon. They were the gods of my youth. That they are only ten years older, that if you saw the three of us across a crowded room -- yes; we are striking men; you would feel impelled to fly to our side -- you would conclude we were a matched set....

I feel somehow diminished. In a just universe they would both be dead.

And nicely bronzed.

Road Warrior? How About Dawn of the Dead?

Unless I'm very wrong -- unconscionably wrong -- I'm guessing that my many readers, including those in the armed forces who are accessing this by satellite or NSA wiretap, would love to know what I am doing this beautiful Sunday morning.

(Writers are just so damn intriguing. I mean wouldn't you like to know who John Updike is doing this morning? Take a breath. That's right: Who. And that's not a slip. It's an ancillary income stream for this blog; that is, for a small fee I am willing to imply virility in the case of septuagenarian middle-brow writers who need some secondary sources for upcoming autobiographies. "Edith! Was that a roll of Sacajawea dollars in his pocket or was Philip Roth just glad to see you?" But enough of that. The check hasn't cleared.)

What we are doing is sitting on our two sofas in our one living room and reading the Sunday NYTimes/SFChronicle/Oakland Tribune and drinking Road Warrior coffee, which is available in quantity from Peerless Coffee, an old and respected Oakland firm.

The A's-Yankees game flickers at the periphery of my vision. A's up 3-1. Volume at oh I'd say 35 decibels. Edith reads snippets of interest from the Times, those with political content uniformly depressing.

Now, at this point I'm looking for a kicker, some line of wisdom to capture the sweetness of the moment beginning "Life is what happens..."

Personally, I'm thinking along the lines of something like "Life is what happens while you read the classified ads or better yet watch your wife in her bathrobe read the classified ads her legs stretched out along the red sofa the sun coming in her chin lifted as she reads her reading glasses slid down her nose" -- which is not bad but which is not something John Updike (the Hugh Hefner of middle class angst) would write.

So I Google and I get to my surprise:

"Life is what happens while you're making other plans." -- John Lennon.

Not on Sunday morning. Sunday morning is the plan.

Popcorn 1986-2006

She has been "mentioned in dispatches" since the founding of this blog. Her lesson was that you do not need to be ingratiating or obliging to be an object of affection. She was like a constitutional monarch. She was frequently "not amused." Her life was one long state visit, with us rearranging our own lives to keep things orderly and predictable and thus to make her life comfortable though she never indicated she found it much more than tolerable. You may approach the throne, she said occasionally.

God save our gracious Popcorn.

boomboomboomboomboomboomboom

boomboomboomboomboomboomboom

boomboomboomboomboomboomboom

Je Regrette Beaucoup

David Letterman is fine, but I like my Bush critique the way I like my Bourbon whiskey. (Forgive the Shakespearean redundance.) I like it undiluted and on the rocks. That is to say (forgive the Shakespearean excess) I want it strong, cool, a sip at a time.

That's why I like Atrios/Eschaton, who links to more profuse criticism of the latest Bush -- or Bush-related -- travesty with simple disdainful phrases. For instance, he writes:


Glenn Reynolds

Was dumb as a stone when I started blogging, is dumb as a stone now.

Of course, this is inside baseball since you need to know Reynolds is Instapundit, who is pretty much a Bush cuddler and in love with Iraq the way a pig loves slop but who also is a very popular blogger.

But all us political junkies know this stuff. And all us Bush haters get red with anger every day like some poor lobster damned to an eternity in the boiling water. So all us Bush haters need a gatekeeper who with the utmost efficiency points us to the shame of the moment, either in the mainstream press or, more likely, something from the mainstream press filtered through a blog.

For me the key is efficiency. I do not want to wallow in the anti-Bush vituperation. A little more than a little is by much too much (forgive the outright stealing from Shakespeare) because even though it is at first encouraging to find those who share one's disdain, if you spend too much time wading through it you quite rightly draw back from that state of mind in which (like Lord Hamlet; forgive etc.) you conclude that "prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell (I) must like a whore unpack my heart with words and fall a-cursing like a very drab."

That's why I like Atrios. He gets on with it.

Political community on the Net?

Super dooper. Super dooper. But let us not turn it into a circle jerk.

Forsooth.

Here is the Trophy for Which My Fantasy Baseball League Competes

The Magnificent Balco Cup Itself

Details of the Magnificent Balco Cup

Springtime for Boa (And Germany)

Thanks to the marvelous Net, no random thought need lie fallow. Woke up this morning yammering to "the wife" about the soon-to-be-in-wide-release probably six-or-seven-million-screen-big-first-weekend-damn-the-reviews movie "Snakes on a Plane."

And I thought (not "to myself," which is redundant) that if I knew the theme song I would sing snatches of it.

The convenience of Google does take the wonder out of things. I searched theme song "snakes on a plane" and was appalled.

Youth of America! You should be studying needed inventions.

I Smiled at His Words. I Laughed at the Response.

If it weren't at night, I would go out to the book shed, perched on the sloped and ready-to-slide verge of our wedge of the Oakland Bumps -- for we are not high enough to merit the appellation (French pronunciation, please) of hill -- and dig out one of my old grad-school textbooks that describes the psychology and philosophy of humor. Bereft of my underpinnings, I can only say that I can't quite figure out what those who thought Stephen Colbert was rude and/or unfunny as he twitted the president and his court wanted him to do.

He was there defending his brand, which is Bush knocking, both rude and transparently unkind though heretofore done at a distance. He was certainly less ironic, more sarcastic, less *hungry* for laughs. Did they expect him to damage his career by softening his brand by cozying up to Bush and the attendant journalists?

Champagne bubbles and diarrhea pools in the gutter. A thing must be itself or what is it? (Okay, by no stretch of the metaphor is Colbert either Champagne or excrement. He's more like really good French toast. But we are blogging here, people. Not nobody shouting, "Rewrite!")

That he changed minds is unlikely. That he wounded his listeners is even less so. That he satisfied the expectations of the majority of those who watch his show regularly -- the howl of the wind sweeping across the Bloggerian Steppes speaks for itself. I know this is a small point but still. Colbert's business is his *business.* He took care of it. He preserved his brand.

Bush's brand is Iraq. No one expects him to dilute it. More fool they if they do.

Smoke Gets in My Eyes. Which Helps.

For a long time -- decades if you are into geological time -- I smoked pipes and an occasional cigar. I smoked to keep my hands busy, one of those admissions that can substitute for a joke among those of low wit. (People of low wit are the wallpaper of my life. No brag, just fact.) I smoked because, even with pipes and cigars and no inhaling, it is mildly addictive. And then I quit smoking for five years or so for health reasons.

Then, Lawdy, I started up again ina small way because I am getting older and my nerves aren't what they were , and *it is so damn hard to grade at the end of the semester* without a bit of aerosol tar rolling around inside my mouth. I crave a mild buzz when I grade because -- here are the two ways you can look at it -- either my students are terrible or I am terrible as a teacher.

Now you could curl up for most of the next ice age under that blanket statement, but anyone who has ever taught any sort of writing course knows the feeling. Some students just can't make sense. It is not clear what they had in mind. Let's step back: You hesitate to posit a mind. And you did try you called them in for conferences and gave them checklists and did everything but suggest their smart friends do a ruthless and extensive final edit.

In fact, that is what you suggested, hoping that their smart friend would not shrug, cough and just write the damn thing for them. You thought you knew how to teach them to get better, but it did not get done, if I may retreat into the passive sense and thus shed blame.

I don't like to grade, and a nice cigar eases the pain, so last week I ordered up a bundle of Don Diego shorts, having bid for them at the JR Cigar cigar online cigar auction. Look here from the JR Cigar website.


DON DIEGO - BABIES
$40.75
$40.75
$40.75
18

Successful bid was $40.75, and there were 18 bids. Look how I fought it out with mapmaker.


Bidder
Bid Amount
Date of Bid
1.
soylentgray
$ 40.75
05/05/06 - 07:38:17 PM EST
2.
mapmaker
$ 40.50
05/05/06 - 07:37:18 PM EST
3.
soylentgray
$ 40.25
05/05/06 - 07:36:38 PM EST
4.
mcostigan
$ 40.00
05/05/06 - 07:35:52 PM EST
5.
mapmaker
$ 39.75
05/05/06 - 07:35:52 PM EST
6.
mcostigan
$ 38.00
05/05/06 - 07:35:45 PM EST
7.
soylentgray
$ 37.75
05/05/06 - 07:35:45 PM EST
8.
mcostigan
$ 37.50
05/05/06 - 07:17:46 PM EST
9.
mapmaker
$ 37.25
05/05/06 - 07:17:46 PM EST
10.
mapmaker
$ 35.00
05/05/06 - 05:12:53 PM EST

Place Your Bid
Thank you for participating in our auction. This auction has ended and was won by soylentgray.

I could have bought the damn cigars straight up for $45, but -- as the fisher kills the fish and the hunter kills the blameless bird, squirrel or Texas corporate lawyer -- so much satisfaction in the process. And now I have written about it and filled up a fraction of the time I must spend waiting for the cigars to arrive so that I can finally....

Grade.

Ugh.

a minor mot

A friend sent me a link to a post complaining about how left wing college campuses are, and I replied:

And yet the indoctrination doesn’t seem to be working even though I hand out inflatable Hillary dolls to the students who best vomit out what I stick down their throats with all the violent love of a mother bird. I need to call a meeting of the conspiracy *right now.*

I mean, we have trouble teaching them to walk upright, and you think we are going to be able to teach them to revolt?

But During the Commercials Time Seemed to Stand Still

Just out of curiosity and since it's a holiday weekend and meant for laziness, intellectual and otherwise, I watched the first installment of the current season of '24,' which must be a success; otherwise, it wouldn't be having a current season.

I have read in the comments of many critics -- or many times in the criticism of the Chronicle's Tim Goodman -- that the artificiality of the "real time" gimmick is irritating. Apparently, Goodman often, or many other critics at least once, find their enjoyment spoiled because if you pull out your stop watch and your yellow legal pad and draw on your Bayesian sense of the nature of reality, then you just can't keep from thinking how the time frame falls short of verisimilitude: Too many events stuffed into an unelastic 60 minutes and how, as a result, we fret.

Pretty stupid criticism -- though an easy one and god knows anyone who writes for newspapers is dry-mouthed and thus in danger of losing focus as the minutes drag on before that first martini -- because in a universe where violent and hectic events of the kind apparently featured in '24' go on, my disbelief better already be dangling a hundred feet up and hoisting it up another six inches to encompass the time frame is no effort at all.

Also, you know, this approach to narrative has a pedigree. I do not recall this of all detective novels I have read, or even most, but I certainly do recall of some detective novels that moving the detective from clue to hectic clue over a space of 24 to 36 hours is part of the charm. The detective only lies down to rest if he's beaten up.

If I were to go out to our storage shed and pull down all those water-stained Ross McDonald novels that gave me so much pleasure 30 years ago, I could find an example or two of the "momentum moment" where the detective starts running after the solution, sometimes showing up just in time to find a warm body, which discovery sends him on on on with a growing sense of urgency to more places and more clues.

I don't recall a novel in which that characterizes the entire novel, but why not? In those episodes where the story gets moving I don't recall ever pulling out a LA street map and trying to calculate if you can get from Tarzana to Pasadena that quickly. I am not thinking that I will continue with '24' because I have work to do and I need to save my TV time for the NFL and NCAA basketball, but if I had the time in my own 24 hours, accepting the happy fiction of so much happening in so little time is a worthwhile sacrifice if it enables us to get on with the story.

Goodman says it worries him that he never sees Jack Bauer urinate. The show''s POV is not confined to Jack. So I assume he has a strong bladder and/or an innate modesty. That's backstory, right? in a show that, I concede, might need some.

Mama? Where's Mama?

Sharing thoughts on being 60 with a similarly inconvenienced friend, it occured to me that even though 60 is the new 50 and 70 is the new 60, 75 is the new 18 months -- staggering rather than walking, slobbering while eating and wandering out into the backyard and crying out in loss and confusion.

Kind of a Movable Feast, You Know?

Saudi officials say 345 killed in stampede at Mecca.

So the Running of the Mullahs succeeds the Running of the Bullahs.

Smith, Johnson, Williams...

Robertson is the 147th most common surname in the United States, right between Rice and Hunt. It does not seem to be the imprimatur of greatness for which I blame the dourness of the original Scots, the poverty of the Scotch-Irish who managed to be thrown out of two countries and the beauty of the Appalachian mountains where so many Scotch-Irish settled. Those green mountains, noble without being monumental, are a diversion from the urge to greatness, that and the fact if you stay deep back up in the hollows the prospect of marrying your first cousin is always at hand, somewhere between a temptation and a family tradition.

When I was a teenager, friends tried to insult me by suggesting the great basketball player Oscar Robertson was a blood relative to which I would answer I hope so. Of course, for some years now, given my accent and my big round face, some people have assumed that I must be related to Pat Robertson, the television evangelist.

I'm not. But whenever he suggests God is punishing or about to punish something or somebody -- Dover, Pennsylvania, for not embracing Biblical literalism in its biology classes; Ariel Sharon for refusing to expel the Palestinians and satisfy some nuance of Biblical prophecy -- I cringe.

My dad used to say that he had no interest in genealogy because the word around the family was that somewhere around 1900 there was an outbreak of illegitimacy in the male line back there in the piney woods.

I take comfort in that penumbra of bastardy. Better to be related to a rogue than a fool.

All the Best Ones Have Been Semites

We have Sirius satellite radio in the car because we couldn't get the color and the side airbags without taking the radio so we took the radio. I did not subscribe to the service for over a year because we have two NPR stations here in the Bay Area, and those two were keeping me quite happy during my commute -- which is only three days a week, four tops -- so why pay for what seemed to be 80 channels of music I dislike?

(I wish I liked at least some contemporary music. But if it wasn't written by dead people, particularly dead black Americans or dead white Europeans, I really have very little interest, very little.)

But my sister and her husband were coming to town and more or less to show off I subscribed and discovered it is worth $13 a month. A good jazz station. A couple good classical stations. Four NPR stations, plus 24 hours of BBC news. I judge it cost effective.

I did not subscribe because Howard Stern was on his way. Yesterday he arrived. I was in the car in the middle of the afternoon, and -- as a student of the culture might -- tuned to Howard 100. A group of what I guessed were acolytes were doing a roundtable on Howard's first show, rehashing it, spreading the kudos, taking phone calls from fans who found it all rather and pretty generally awesome.

And I thought. If it's a few hours of Howard and many more hours of studying the sacred texts, though in general simply regurgitating the sacred texts for they resist both paraphrase and exegesis, I think what we are experiencing here is an L. Ron Hubbard moment.

At some point down the road will they hide the body or will there be a resurrection, which should be quite possible as we move into a future of virtual everything.

In the beginning were the words, and the words were Howard and Howard was the words. And I was there.

Almost. If not at the beginning at least at the roundtable.

The Laziness of the Long-Distance Blogger

This 15-minute limitation I have placed on myself is a burden because I like to tweak what I write, minutes or even hours afterward. I think I like the process as much as I like the result, though that may also be a definition of masturbation.

Anyway, that propensity for retouching violates the limits I have place on this blog -- and it is not in the spirit of the blogosphere where Often Wrong But Never in Doubt and Never Repent and Seldom Correct seems to be what brings in the customers.

So I did the big lazy of posting a photograph. No need to come back to it and tweak. And now I do the bigger lazy of suggesting that my two readers -- three if you count the NSA data spider -- participate in a caption contest for Mr. Daugherty.

Here's my caption:

Nude Offending a Staircase.

Our Friend Patrick Daugherty is a Good Sport

The game is called charades. The thing to be guessed was the novel and movie Scaramouche. If you thought In the Belly of the Beast you were wrong.

You Didn't? You Did? (And Why am I Smiling?)

It seems to me that one of the useful things about ritual is the degree to which we are aware it is devoid of content.

(I have never understood what's so bad about the idea of "running on empty." Now stopping on empty -- that's different. But running on empty is a consumation devoutly to be wished. Right. Right? Unless you don't think so.)

Nothing seals our indifference to the thing ritualized more than understanding the empty motions of the ritual even as we enact it. That's why I suppose New Year's resolutions are so popular. No one makes the mistake of thinking we mean them. New Year's resolutions are a joke at the expense of a genuine belief in the possibility of change, so of course I make them. I make them ironically since my friends will understand them ironically no matter how I intend them.

Having said that and maybe I have should have led up to this in a different way, I feel like making a more or less serious resolution. I would obviously prefer not to make it at the present time, but it is the circumstance of the holiday season that causes it to arise in my thoughts so finally whateryagonna do: Wait for warm weather? I mean really no one will take me any more seriously then actually which I'm glad you mentioned not so much mentioned but looked at me, well, knowingly, so I will make the resolution now.

How did I ever get started on this? (I know what it means when you look away.)

Oh, I'm just making small talk.

That's my resolution by the way, to pay closer attention to people who make good small talk so that I can learn how to make better small talk. It's not just how I sometimes bore people that I want to learn how to remedy. It's that when I get intimidated by the failure of the small talking it makes me feel ....

Small.

I mean, when you start to agree with things you more or less don't believe in or disagree with things you more or less do believe in just because the conversation has started to veer, and you want to be one of those people who is able to move gracefully out of one conversation and into another but to feel that you will be welcome back in the original conversation later on.

Smooth, you know. Sequential.

And I mean smooth making small talk with people whose guts I hate -- one glance and I am ready to pound their heads though not you obviously. I want to be able to talk to loathsome strangers for periods of three-to-five minutes under the influence of one-to-three glasses of wine -- or vice versa -- in a spirit of hypocritical cordiality. I want to be able to listen with feigned interest and respond in ways so deftly ironic that the people who I want to get it get it and the people I don't want to get it are somewhat baffled but unaroused.

In short, I want to be able to talk about Brokeback Mountain in a way that is both crushingly ironic and wittily, even brittily, dismissive but also deeply sympathetic and evolved because it gets cold at night and look at the Greeks.

If you had just heard me say this, you would say, "That is some crappy small talk, mister."

So I guess I have my work cut out for me.

What do you think?

Really.

Woof! He Explained

The black dog has crept behind the house and fallen asleep, if I may borrow from Winston Churchill.

I mean I have been just a little depressed the last several weeks, and I am now discovering the damage was entirely self-inflicted. I had delayed grading the final exams and the final stories from my basic reporting class because the grades aren't due until January third, and I was so damn sure that these stories would be miserable, not in the essential sense of expressing the students' inherent mediocrity, for they are not that, but existentially mediocre by which I mean I was pretty certain I had failed to find the students where they were and move them forward.

My bad. My bad. Excrement does not fall far from the sphincter, as the acorn does not fall far from the tree.

But I have started grading, and the finals are pretty good, and the final stories are pretty good, too. Particularly for the final story, for what I call the big story, some of them figured out what I wanted them to do: That is, they talked to more than three people; they picked a topic that someone might give a damn about and they created knots on the reader's head by prompting, coaxing and facilitating those who serve as the story's source to explain and explain and explain again why the reader should give a damn.

And be skeptical about what the sources have to say, I said. And ask why. And please tell me who told you what unless you saw it or the whole world knows it already. And please put a sentence at or very near the top of the story that explains what the story is all about.

It's quite a lot to learn in a beginning reporting class into which most of the students have more or less wandered because when you are in college occasionally you do have to be somewhere of a more or less educational nature more's the pity.

I think I was pretty much hysterical near the end of the semester, threatening them with mad copy editors who would pretty much slash their story in half without reading it. I am, in short, teaching them to write the kind of stories that I didn't much like writing when I was a reporter and was vain enough to think that if my nut graf -- so despicable a term but widely used and therefore useful -- wasn't postponed until after the jump and if I didn't have at least one big flourish of style per one-sentence paragraph I was shortchanging my talent and my many fans.

So I dare them to be dull.

And I whisper to some of them, "For a good time, meet me later in feature writing," where thank god the gloves come off and we let the dog howl.

And a Particular Christmas Blessing for Mrs. Santa's Sister

Three favorite Christmas movies now:

1) The Alistair Sim "A Christmas Carol" because Sim's face squirms with greed, then it squirms with fear, then it squirms with self-loathing, then it squirms with self-knowledge and then it squirms with pleasure and post-redemption shame. Grim Scrooges fail to convince post-redemption because they still seem too grim. Think George C. Scott. These stone Scrooges seem to have recovered from a case of indigestion. That don't have that sense of fluttery joy appropriate in a case of salvation from moral dessication. Sim is positively antic in his joy, a little bipolar even, the way they get when they forget their meds.

2) Jean Shepherd's "A Christmas Story," with the rasp of Darrin McGavin as the Old Man and the slightlier fruitier rasp of Jean Shepherd in the extensive voiceover. I love voiceover because I am not a person whose visual cortex is easily stimulated, and I would rather worry about what the words mean than what the pictures mean. "A Christmas Story" is word-work, a parable of probabilities. I mean when you get down to it Jesus probably isn't the Christ, and if you get a BB gun you probably won't shoot your eye out. Hmmm. That wasn't in the voiceover, so maybe my visual cortex is capable of stimulation after all.

3) But now a third favorite: "Bad Santa." What I like about Billy Bob Thornton in any role is that his physiognomy limits him to characters who are morally degenerate. Maybe they act on that degeneracy, maybe they fight ineffectually against it, maybe they have surpressed it for the moment. But they are bad people, and we better get used to it and figure out how that it figures in the plot. (The only exception to this is maybe "The Man Who Wasn't There," in which Thornton appears lobotomized, the only acting choice he had because anything more would have expressed some form of degeneracy, either active or about to pop.)

Anyway, Thornton is just wonderful as a criminal department store Santa, filthy in word and deed. (Wounded past? Sure. Who believes it? I mean, this is Billy Bob Thornton.)

Yes, he is redeemed at the very last minute because of Fat Blond Tiny Tim, who looks like an outtake from a Renaissance painting. But Thornton's redemption is expressed only in voiceover. That's rye-ut. We do not SEE the wiser and better man. We only hear him talk it up.

Because if we saw his face -- I mean, Thornton's mouth just hangs on the front of his face, as if his body is about to reject it -- we would know he was still a degenerate and Mrs. Santa's sister and Fat Blond Tiny Tim are in for it as soon as Thornton gets out of the hospital. (Shot down by the cops with a pink elephant in his outstretched hand because... But anyone who reads this blog has certainly seen the movie.)

Seeing Billy Bob Thornton's face struggling to express redemption would be a little heavy, even for a holiday movie. There's fantasy and there's fantasy.

Popcorn's Stairway to Heaven or in this case the sofa

Old Popcorn, she of the 20 winters and the 19.5 years, has been mentioned and even pictured in these dispatches before. The constraints of time reduce us to bullet points:

* ancient
* crippled
* addled
* incontinent

To which you then say Death Death Death to the old kitty, convenience trumping sentiment.

Well, to heck with you. I concede if we had a son or daughter he or she would be some kind of over-indulged crack-sodden player of Loud Music, and we would deserve our long walk through the Valley of Pain. My God what fools these parents be.

But I digress.

Point is that stretching out this old cat's life is self-indulgent and over-indulgent, but it does not reach outside our household and mar the big world. We aren't breeding a Hitler here or a George Bush either.

But I digress.

What I am getting at is that since the poor crippled old cat can't jump up on the sofa anymore -- and even though she might die any minute and I waste valuable seconds to prod her even as I write -- I have just ordered her what they call Doggy Stairs, the three-step version, which are about a foot high and may or may not help her get on the sofa. Right now she staggers around the room with a perceptible list until I pick her up and put her on the sofa. Is this not an affront to her dignity?

Well, no. Return to the bullet points. She has got about as much dignity as Gerald Ford.

But I digress.

I ordered the Doggy Stairs rather than the Kitty Stairs because there is apparently a premium for ordering what seem to be the same stairs if you order them under the rubric of Kitty Stairs. This is like dry cleaners charging more for women's clothes and so on and so on.

Also, I ordered them through a website that says they only look at the orders once a week or so -- I kid you not -- so we are in a kind of race with death here. A more loving cat owner would have ordered the Kitty Stairs, delivery guaranteed by Christmas Day.

I'm stuck here for a kicker, but my 15 minutes are up.

I suppose I could say

but I digress.

Tick Tock

I am on the clock. Ten minutes to write and then five to edit.

One of the things that has always embarrassed me about my blog is all the names I have run through, in the spirit of the garage band. It's not the music. It's the name. (Time for a joke: I have changed the name of this blog more often than Gerald Ford changes his Depends.)

This latest renaming is shall we say eponymous?

I will now be the 15 minute man. I will do the thing the name promises.

I just checked the Polder Digitial Clock Timer. Four minutes to go until editing!

Anywho, my Lady Wife and I just celebrated our 40th. In fact, we didn't celebrate it. We *noted* it by spending a weekend in San Francisco, a journey of about 30 minutes. Afterwards, I did not so much mention as was overheard saying that we were at 4-0 and a friend decided there should be an event. Using his own personal and eccentric list of those he considered our friends -- a list from which he had eliminated all those with whom he had recently had loud and bitter fights and these were quite a few -- he got about 15 people around a big square table at a Chinese restaurant in Berkeley.

And among those 15 people were some we hadn't seen in years since, as I said, it was his own personal and eccentric list.

I liked it. There was a free meal involved, plus some gifts. But Eydie and I were...uncertain. Should being married that long be a cause for public celebration?

Ah, the chime sounds and it's time to edit. Let me make my point bald and simple. Simply being married for 40 years is not in itself a cause for acclaim. We have friends who have been through many happy divorces and are happy in their current relationship, which is merely the last of many. We know one or two long-married couples that could use some divorcing. Or so it seems to us.

Personally, I think we should keep the celebrating to ourselves, since we are the only ones with any sense of whether or not it should be a celebration.

Oh, I'm almost over the limit. Time to edit and to link to the party pictures. Which is okay for me to do. Anyone who reads this far must be at least mildly curious and the pictures themselves are...

...mildly curious.

Wordplay, my friends, wordplay, though I don't have time to look up the exact rhetorical technique.

Go Ahead and Say It: "Eb-oh-nee and Eye-vuh-ree..."

Kitty yinyang.

An Instant Classic? Well, the Bible Didn't Really Get Going Until the Middle of Leviticus. So Give it Time

Last year's Thanksgiving post was a very beautiful thing.

Why Should You Not Share My Joy?

I am always modest about my successes in this papier mache rite of male passage.


And here are the banquet pictures. One or two aspects may require explanation, a quality shared with all the great coming of age myths and tales of redemption, so I'll not bother.

So Sorry, My Friend Lowell Says

It's a common name, and my nom de vivre starts with a J. and there's no "T" in there anywhere, but still....

Vain Bastard

Of course, I know better than to open attachments from someone you don't know, but the following seems designed to hook preening profs. But it looks as if my virus protection saved me. Because I did try to unzip.

Close one.


Hello,

We have been thinking of including you in the new campus magazine in an article headed "Campus Life". Can you approve the photo and article for us before we go to printing please.

If any details are wrong then we can amend before printing on Friday the 28th of October so please get back to us as soon as possible.

Many Thanks & Best Regards,
J Chuang
Editor

*******************************************************************************
Please respond before Wednesday to ensure we have time to edit!
********************************************************************
***********

Postscript:

But the damn message resent a second time, so without trying to unzip the attachment, I replied: "Touch up photo to make me look younger," a comment that would be apt in any context, whether treacherous or sincere.

And back the answer came:


A message (from ) was received at 13 Oct 2005 18:37:56 +0000.
The following addresses had delivery problems:

Permanent Failure: 550_:_Recipient_address_rejected:_No_such_user
\
Now break my heart.

It's Like the Golden Rule: Do Under Others in the Spirit of the Degree to Which They Are Interested in Doing You

It's a sudden brilliant insight. I have always treated gay women and straight women just the same because I have always assumed that neither group wants to have sex with me.

One exception, of course, but it's always the exception that proves the rule, in'it?

I'm Assuming the Shoemaker's Elves Have All Gotten Associate Degrees at DeVry

It's magical thinking, but it's my magical thinking and I clasp it to my bosom as one might an ugly child.

I have no doubt that our burglar alarm system has glitches designed into it; that is, every year or so something is designed to go wrong so that technicians must be summoned. In the case of our system, it's installing new batteries in the motion detector. It screws up the wireless transmitter. On the phone I joust for awhile with the inhouse tech who works for the company that both installed and monitors our system . I punch in codes, remove alarms covers, reinstall batteries. Nothing works. The poor tech IS OH SO PUZZLED. And there is nothing to do but summon the $65 an hour crew to figure it out on site.

But not today. My wife is exasperated at my delay. I'll make the appointment on Monday because the alarm gnomes deserve the chance to climb down the silver staircase in the dark of night and make the bad electrons play nice.

We are have our gods. Mine are small, highly specialized and ineffectual.

In that last particular very like yours, I wager, and I don't have to tithe.

Got a Poetry Salon Coming Up...

.... and I love the emails I write trying to stir up interest in these things. I write one of these things and I think, "Jesus is satisfied with me."

Salonistas

Harder is gearing up by winding down. He’s getting this creative tension going. His mojo is working but only to shop rules. No overtime. Pressman comes out of Esalen on Sunday tanned, fit and rested, tanned indeed over rather a greater expanse of his body than seems decent in these times, but that’s neither here nor there. Actually, it’s here. It was there, but now it’s here.

Remember: *George Bush is the most brilliant man Harriet Miers has ever known.* It’s like her brain was under permanent house arrest.

I have arranged for Mr. Dr. John Higgins to give us a quick tutorial on digital storytelling and I don’t mean using your fingers to make shadows against the wall. I have got one of my yada yada tales of domestic horror. Wieder says the gloves are coming off. What was he doing. Building a snowman? So far everyone else is keeping their hands close to their vests, and their vests are being moved from one undisclosed location to another, never sleeping in the same place for two nights in a row. I think Matt and Lyle will do the spaghetti eating scene from Lady and the Tramp if they can obtain the rights. Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. I don’t know what Harder is going to do. Velcro poems? Not as precise but nuthin gets pinched? I don’t know: He said.

The rest of you: Tell me now or tell me later. What’s going to be up?

Hate the Stupidity But Love the Stupids

Went out to dinner tonight with the very great Michael Tola at a hole-in-the-wall Berkeley restaurant called Olivia's, which Tola said was named after the owner's dog.

Splendid food. Just another Bay Area wonder chef who has found a hillock on which to plant his flag. And you ask why we dare the earthquakes? It turns out Tola is having an occasional din-din with a friend of ours -- she's great: a woman his own age with a bank account; the world should be standing in line -- but he has not dined with her at Olivia's because "it's too romantic."

Some things just break your heart. Like this Bush nomination of a nice Catholic girl who turned into an Evangelical Christian, which means she wants to get the news hot and direct from God but then joins a church where some preacher with a comb-over tells her what she should think.

Miss Edith and I spent our teenage years dealing with the fact that Evangelical Christianity m akes no sense and is at best an exercise in mystery: You must posit the ultimate reconciliation of bits of nonsense into a sublime hole. That sense of mystery should make one modest and oh so very hesitant to be certain, to reduce life to a set of cruel and simple rules. The creed is mysterious to the point of incoherence. And then we dare to be certain about the minutiae of human conduct.

Poor us. The Evangelicals are right. Miss Harriet checked her higher brain functions at the door, and the damage is about to begin.

To the Sky I Said Ouch! And The Rest...

A friend whose doggy had to be put to sleep, i.e., humanely put to death, and then whose kitty had a seizure and expired and now who has to have back surgery -- outpatient, sure, but they are doing heart transplants on an outpatient basis now next please -- and the best I could say to him after saying I was sorry was that he would be in my prayers if I had any.

How do you express condolence if you have nothing in particular with which to condole?

Food? Well when it comes to the comforting power of food when it is offered to a friend in pain:

Jews do it.
Southern Baptists do it.
Even famous actors practicing eccentric fringe religions like Tom
Cruise do it.
Let's do it,
Let's meet for lunch my treat.

The rest really is silence

Don't Do What I Say, Do What I Do (Hahahahahahahahahaha)

If it's from Reporters without Borders, it's got to be good.

Inch wise, foot foolish

Of course, I've stolen this from Atrios, but the headline is mine.

Click here.

Sad But Pretty Damn True

I had recently had lunch in the Mission with two outstanding USF grads whose intent from the moment they walked on campus some years ago was to join the great fraternity -- well, in one case, sorority -- of print journalists. And so they did. I think this people are going to be lifers. We talked of many things, but the point they both made was that about 90 percent of their problems at work involved dealing with incompetent supervisors.

I mean top editors. I mean bosses.

The problems weren't subtle ethical issues. The problems weren't fierce debates about content or editorial direction. The problems were matters of basic competence and honesty.

In other words, the Peter Prinicple is alive and well. You may not need to become a master of workplace politics to survive and thrive, but you must understand it if you are going to keep yourself off the horns of the bull.

Am I right or am I right?

Almost Betrayed

I've always been amused by the old convention of men being betrayed by lipstick smudges, but I see that in the 21st Century it may have new life.

Today I was almost betrayed by a chocolate smudge on my cheek. We're on a modified Atkins diet, you see. It wasn't even a very good chocolate doughnut. That's part of the older convention, too: "I didn't love her. She was a floozy."

Indeed, that was one floozy of a doughnut, with all that that implies.

Bush Takes the Over, Muttering, "I'm Getting *Something* Out of This."

I suppose I should be encouraged that my Google search for the existence of the opportunity to place an over/under bet on the number of NO dead resulted in no hits.

That was shame-facedly done. Still, there was a point there. It wasn't just a manifestation of professional callousness, the kind you are supposed to affect if you are a journalist. Though let's be honest: In this tragedy, some of the best moments came when the "objective" facade of reporters on the scene cracked and fell away and they showed the pain they felt. Their lapses would have meant nothing if their default setting had not been dispassion and distance.

But I do think it is reasonable to note that initial predictions of the number of dead do trend high, as I am far from the first to say. I recall the famous SF Chronicle headline after the '89 earthquake -- 'Hundreds of Dead' or words to that effect. It's all a form of butt covering of course. The immediate desire to minimize culpability drives the low estimate. On the other end, revulsion at the apologists, plus the natural hyperbole of those plunged, perhaps for the first time in their lives, into catastrophe plus the simple fact in an odd way underestimating the scale of a disaster suggests disrespect for those who suffer -- all contribute to the issuing of predictions most dire.

In the end, I think the long-term political damage comes most probably from seeming to underestimate the death toll. All that said the over/under is 4,500. But I'm making a point. I'm not covering any bets.

Addendum: And here's Jimmy Wolcott getting all smart and stuff about the numbers game. And, goddess please forgive me, my friend Deep Iron -- for he is the deepest in irony I know and it's difficult to pin him down to what he really thinks so hard, so icy, so clever, so cynical is his heart -- is confident no more than 500 died in New Orleans. I had to take the over.

Those Wascally Chwistians

An old friend dropped a link on me to a magazine article the thrust of which is that before the hurricane New Orleans was a jewel box wrapped in a hellhole of poverty and corruption, the underclass of which survived on the scraps that fell from the table of hedonistic tourism. It was dysfunctional and hopeless, a rotten piece of fruit that may have needed a mighty wind to bring it down today but would have fallen of its own weight tomorrow. Logic and self-interest dictate the federal government should back away and let it die. (The point at which "it" devolves into "them" was carefully obscured.)

And so my little joke, which is certainly not a new one: all those Christians who are creationists on Sunday and social Darwinists the rest of the week.

Slow Down a Little and It Will Look Like a Slow-Motion Super Bowl Highlight, A Real Roman Numeral Moment

One does not rush into the fire of a new semester like the newly dead running toward the light. No, one eases in a day or two before classes start, in the case of USF with back to back speeches from The President and The Dean. They do a nice job. I come to praise Caesar, not to bury him.

Really nice, guys. Good job.

But I was able to give a couple untenured friends who were sitting nearby a useful tip or two. For instance, when you applaud at the end of the remarks hold those hands high so the speaker can see those hands hammering one another till your cuticles are oozing blood.Obvious, I know, but the youth wrongly think sincerity is enough and forget that even the honest heart must embrace the tactical side.

Long Dry Afternoon Pondering as I Clean Up My Computer Desktop

An analogy: Arguing with someone face to face, if things degenerate, is like hand-to-hand combat. Of course, it's vicious, but one is forced to acknowledge the "thereness" of the opponent. It is personal; it is "bespoke"; that is, if we are any good at it, we design the argument to the opponent.

But not everyone is good at face to face, which is why many of us bite our tongues and feel somewhat pushed around.

Blogging, however, is like dropping bombs on faceless enemies from very high altitudes. There is a sense in which our opponents are not quite real, and I think it is much easier to drop our rhetorical bombs on them. And it is easier -- indeed, it is almost an aesthetic choice -- to amp up the explosive force of our arguments to increase the kill distance as much as possible. From a distance, violence can be quite beautiful if it is large enough.

I also think sometimes we are particularly surprised, and thus grow even angrier, when our targets shoot back, spoiling the sweet afterglow of having written, marring the perfection of our satisfaction with our argument, which flowed so easily with no thought of a possible response forthcoming. Indeed, we rather imagined our opponents to be quite smashed flat. Yet here the bastards are, clawing up at us from the pit. Oh, there's a lesson here. Perhaps we should cultivate a more modest anger?

Do not take this reverie to mean I do not loathe certain corpulent distant faceless Republicans as one hates hell, all Montagues, etc.

But I don't hate Robert (Bob) Silverberg, who is just the loveliest plutocrat you could imagine. He's really more of a Libertarian than a Republican. Someday he and I will go hunting together, driving the "bad" Republicans before us with whips and clubs.

If the weather is good. If the weather is good.

And so back to my crowded desktop, where all the things I should know but don't -- carefully copied, carefully linked to -- go to die.

Recycled Humor: Very Quaint

In the course of cleaning up my computer desktop, I stumbled across this. Never did get it published. There are some *funny lines* in this.

News item: To aid in his apprehension, the US continues to distribute pictures of Osama Bin Laden altered so that he appears without a beard.

Scene: A High School auditorium somewhere in America.

First, I want to thank all of you for coming out on a school night -- and on a night Tom Selleck is making a guest appearance on Friends! (Pause for laughter.) I also want to thank the Republican National Committee, who – in response to the President’s call for a new voluntarism – has helped to put together tonight’s slide show of pictures of what Osama Bin Laden may now look like. You live in a key, swing and hotly contested Congressional District, where to my enormous surprise I have just learned a special election is taking place next week! This is just the sort of place where a fanatic terrorist might “go to ground” as our allies the British would say. So thank you again Republican National Committee for making this evening possible!

(Pause for applause.)

And, of course, thanks to the Republican candidate in your upcoming election, who has agreed to work the slide projector tonight. Thank you, Mr. Texas! Mr. C. Les Texas, everyone! (Long pause for applause.) Push the big button.

And now the first slide.

(Click)

Okay, here Bin Laden is without a beard wearing jeans and penny loafers. Those are French centime coins, not pennies, in his shoes. We have very good humintel from France, where the food is excellent.

(Click)

Bin Laden without a beard in a turtleneck sweater and an anorak from a recent Land’s End catalog. The sweater has been discontinued. The anorak is available on back order.

(Click)

Here Bin Laden is without a beard on an ocean liner wearing Groucho glasses and a shoe polish mustache, smoking a cigar and making rude comments to Margaret Dumont, who is wearing a burka.

(Click)

Here Bin Laden is without a beard wearing a burka that’s much too short. Notice his legs.

(Click)

A close-up of his legs, unshaved.

(Click)

And the same legs shaved. Very shapely, very evil legs.

(Click)

And in an evening gown with his very shapely, very evil legs covered but still wearing the penny loafers, this time with two of the new Euro coins, the signature currency of the New World Order.

(Click)

Here Bin Laden is without a beard in thong underwear delivering pizza to Bill Clinton.

(Click)

Here he is again without a beard. The guy with the beard – and the thong -- is Al Gore.

(Click)

Okay, here Bin Laden is without a beard at the beach wearing a Speedo rubbing cocoa butter on Hillary Clinton’s back. You will notice that this time she is the one wearing the thong. And in the background Al D'Amato sneaking up with a net.

(Pause for sexist laughter.)

(Click)

Okay, here Bin Laden is without a beard in a chemist’s smock giving anthrax spores to Tom Daschle so Daschle can plant them in his own office mail.

(Click)

And here Bin Laden is without a beard at the 2004 Democratic Convention publicly intoxicated while placing the name of Tom Daschle in nomination for the presidency of the United States.

(Click)

Oops. That thumb in front of the camera belongs to Jim Jeffords, who used to be a Republican.

(Click)

Okay, here’s Jeffords in front of the camera -- Bin Laden took the picture without a beard.

(Click)

And here Bin Laden is without a beard at the beach in a Speedo rubbing cocoa butter on Jim Jeffords’ back while Janet Reno makes the drinks. You will notice that they are all wearing thongs except for Tom Daschle who is in the cabana putting on a thong.

(Click)

And here Bin Laden is without a beard on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills shopping for thong underwear with California Governor Gray Davis. Hey, what happened to the lights? Could it be a blackout? You say someone flipped the switch? No, I’m sure Mr. Texas is still right there next to the slide projector – with his finger on the button! (Pause for prolonged applause.)

Reformulated Juvenilia

That is to say, the Rightwads say to certain folk to their left "Oh such a bad idea when Bush critics say, 'Come home from Iraq right now.'" And if we let them slice it like that I agree. But that's not the way to slice it.

I say to Bush, "Put out or get out." I say that because if, as it seems, we continue as we are, then some expensive years down the road we will end up with a tragic Iraq -- a medieval theocracy at best, a civil war riven killing ground at worst. (I say nothing of the shape we will be in having bled lives, money, international influence, international credibility.) So Bush needs to put out by which I mean he needs to understand that the price of getting Iraq into the dream state he has long described is a nice tax hike, a draft, many more boots on the ground, many more dollars poured into Iraq, every penny better targeted and better monitored.

Now it may be a majority of Americans won't want to pay that price. But we won't know that until the question is asked. And if Bush won't step up, think it through, get real and, yes, "put out" what the situation actually requires:

Second part of the sentence: Get out.

Back to Work

I have a friend who -- I guess the word is -- teases me about teaching college kids. He says it's not that much of a job, since the world is getting worse every year top to bottom, and as a member of the educational elite "you have much to answer for," he says. Whatever I'm telling them is probably crap he says of which they have enough already. But I'm talking about reworking some lectures, freshening up my approach, in short acting on the notion that my sabbatical will somehow make me a better teacher. I'll have more energy. I'll have stepped back and gotten new ideas about what I've been doing in the classroom out of plain old habit, out of inertia, out of that tendency to scramble through the day like Fran Tarkenton. (And how can anyone who remembers Fran Tarkenton have anything of relevance to say to college students?) And it is true that much of teaching is driven by the iron law of: Don't just stand there. Do something.

But my friend says oh come on you'll just do whatever you have to do to make your students like you.

Well not all of them like me I answer.

And he says that would kill you you need to have them like you.

What the hell do you mean? I say. Who needs to be liked? I don't need to have you like me you asshole you cynical hurtful puke.

Well I really didn't say that. What I said was I try to teach the children but I don't hang my heart on them.

That was good. I had to write it down. I think it's true even though anything expressed alliteratively smacks more of opportunism than of truth doesn't it?

I Bet It Works for Women, Too. You Couldn't Sell It if It Didn't Work for Everybody. (I Read My Mail Today, Ohboy....)

Finally, a school that really gives you your money's worth. *It turns you into a white man.* And not just a white man, a young handsome white man!

Viola da Gamba Was Not Vasco da Gama's Spinster Sister

The theme of last Saturday’s Patrick Finley Memorial Poetry Salon was exile, which some salonistas misadvisedly chose to embrace through the act of absence, i.e., exiling themselves from the salon. Hah on you people who did not come, for I tell you now that saloning well is the best revenge. And that is what we did.

Now to the salon itself, to the “playlist” as I believe you young people of 40 and 45 would call it.

May I say in pungent summary that it was yet another snowflake in the great salon art-storm. That is to say *it was unique.* (No, it didn’t melt, run into the gutter and turn into a kind of nasty what-do-you-mean-they-call-it-Potterville? slush. Work with me, people.) What I am saying is how often are you *privileged* to hear the music of the Spanish Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 played on instruments of the period. This is a music never written down but passed on orally, which means its performance is a kind of reconstruction, far more than regurgitation, as terrific as regurgitation can be.

Oh break your heart if you were not there to hear the Lyle York Project, aka The Sephardic Tower of Power, plucking, blowing, banging on their antique instruments with poignant plaintive passion – not to mention a beat you could shake your deracinated booty to. I must say the strength and beauty of their performance made *this* observer wish that Lyle and the Family York had NOT engaged in a one-off exercise, but that last Saturday had in fact been the first of 50 or a hundred performances, the beginning of a world tour periodically characterized by episodes in which the Yorkies (Woof!) more than once as the great ones do -- rosehipped to the gills on some righteous herb tea -- trashed, or at least seriously discommoded, a series of Motel Six continental breakfast buffets….

Isn’t it pretty to think so? Once was not nearly enough. They found their animal and set it free.

Lylathon 2000 began the salon in what Ms. York described as a form appropriate to the mode, the players just sitting on down, noodling and tuning up and then easing into performance without introduction as an abashed audience wiped the crumbs from their faces and slunk away from the buffet.

It was … satisfactory. (The music. Though I don’t mean to slight the buffet.)

Then up sprang I with a bit of nonsense about Rupert Murdoch having agreed to subsidize the evening in return for my reading the fall schedule of Bard TV, the brand-new 24/7 Shakespeare Cable Network, an exercise so witty that it took the audience’s utmost concentration to keep from bursting into wakefulness. Then Gayle Feyrer read some Mary Oliver, the patron saint of these salons. Then Robert (Bob) Wieder clicked the tumblers on the vault that holds his bulging oeuvre (but enough of the fashion side of the salon) and shared his meditation on “Carhops: The Last American Cowgirls.”

I’m serious about the vault. The piece was originally written for Penthouse as a respite between the pictures of preening strumpets.

There was a great deal of vulgar laughter of the kind I was very careful not to excite. Then Barbara Dietrich read the lyrics to a Sweet Honey in the Rock song, following which she “played” – as you and I play, by pushing the button on the CD player – the group’s actual performance. They work a capella. Just gorgeous. Then David Reinke took American sports teams to the woodshed on account of their use and misuse of team names and mascots that disrespect Native Americans. Then yours truly again thrust himself forward and read a translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of Ovid’s words from exile. Then Brother Dan Harder ….

Here I must pause. Of course, BD did zipper poems concerning his days in, oh, for thematic purposes let us call self-exile in France when he was a boy-lad. And these were pretty damn dazzling zipper poems – read poem on left side of page; read poem on right side of same page; then read right straight across the page: two into one will grow making three! Fine. Great stuff. All once and future salon newcomers are advised to note in your commonplace book that on this date and this hour your first heard BD aka the Big Zipper, and:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

(And if at this point you think, “Darien? Will Farrell is good, but he’s no Dick York….” Well, horseman pass on by.)

Anyway during the salon countdown – apologies to the Kasey Kasem estate -- I mentioned the presence of the Sephardic music to BD, and he allowed as how he might as well bring his drums. And he did. He brought these whacking big what I would call conga drums, though I believe he calls them Sasquatch and Nessie. So he hits a few musical licks, with musical explanations at which the musicians nodded but which I will not repeat because even if I got them right it would be the parrot apeing or the ape parroting. This I do understand. He laid his two hands on his two drums, and each finger did something different. One beat out 4/4 and one beat out 3/4 and one beat out 9/8 and one beat out 19.99 plus tax and one beat out 3.1416 and one I think was doing Morse code and the rest pecked at the drum skins like sparrows for all I know signaling the mother ship.

My word.

Then we “broke” for cookies, cakes, cheeses, assorted treats and plenty of wine from Matt’s own cellar. (Coal cellar? Fruit cellar? Storm cellar? Certainly, I think, not his *wine* cellar.)

And at some point the second half of the salon intervened. It began with Gayle Feyrer reading the escape scene from Dumas’ – “Dumas Pear,” so called because of his distinctive shape – I say the escape scene from his “Count of Monte Cristo.” Every salon has a lesson or two, and this was one of them: Gee, a brief passage skillfully written and read, its purpose no more or less than creating narrative suspense is just so darn much fun even when you know what is going to happen. It’s a familiar story but he’s in the water sewed up in a sack with cannonballs or something tied to his legs! Please keep reading until he’s safe!

She didn’t, though. It was like Easter without a resurrection.

Ah, and now came A Moment. Robert (Bob) Wieder returned to the stage to read his lively comic account of where might now be certain late lamented persons of note had they not taken the pipe or caught the bullet. Now, this is a funny premise in the hands of a master, and RBW is a master. But he is also, uh, somewhat acidulous, kind of a /what does not destroy us makes us strong/ kind of guy. So the bit is rolling along, a real acid bath. He’s not killing, but he’s wounding but then then then he introduces the notion of what ML King, RKennedy and the big enchilada himself JFK would be doing had they not been struck down by the assassin’s hand.

It was all whores and barbecue. That Bob. He so mean.

And some laughed aloud, braced by the tonic fury of it all, and others got these little pinched-up faces and look furtively toward the nearest exit…. What it was was the entertainment acquired a real multi-level quality and that’s always the best kind, don’t you think? I mean you there you with the stars in your eyes fun never made a fool of you not until now you used to be too wise….

I believe I have wandered off the point. Which Bob did not, but took that point that spike and pounded it into our temples….

Well, I enjoyed it. But then again by that time I was pretty much drunk.

And then Jon McKenney read – oh recited more like – an original poem much I thought in the tart (yet pastoral) spirit of RB Wieder. Most delicious, fierce and wonderful. I took the liberty of asking Jon for a copy, which I shall attach at the end of this. (Your word for today is lagniappe.)

And then the Lovin’ Yorkfull came back and finished the evening. Now, I had been told earlier that at some point the music would grow quite lively indeed and that at that point we should all get up and dance like gypsies. But if there was a hand signal, I missed it and so the music ended with our bottoms glued to our seats. And so up I rose into the yawning silence, and I said Play it Again, Samantha, and dance we will. And they did, and we did.

The rest really is silence, blindness, a white space in which nothing is seen or heard. Recherche all you want. This is a point in temps that is better perdu.

P.S. Sylvia Rubin didn’t show up at the Salon (she said) because she tried to break up a street fight and was knocked to the ground, receiving cuts and a concussion. She deserves a bright gold medal and a good spanking.




IN A DIMMING GLADE

“…be thou me, impetuous one!”
Shelley, Ode to the West Wind

“…Bethou, bethou, bethou me in thy glade.”
Wallace Stevens, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction

The blank, receding seasons, and the rose,
A slimsy hand catching tatters by the toes,
The jog-trot hours in the washed-out run of days,
The mirror that reflects an empty gaze,
A solitary bed, a hollow heart,
An actor who forgot his part,
Those sodden fictions from the sky
That vanish in a blinking eye:
In this blue, gold, green glow of the glade
Where all things vanish and all visions fade,
The night descending, you conceived,
Relentlessly burgeoning, the bright rose
Under whose seal you furtively compose
Recollections of a life deceived.

You cut across your dusty bones,
Gray in gloom, in the dying light, in the dead season,
Over the brawling brook and its mucid stones,
Longing to untangle from the weeds your reason.

You had your wedding days with waxen women
Who melted in the summer sun,
Whose limbs were chilly tallow on a winter night,
Whose faces turned aslant in speckled light
Whenever in that light you turned your outside in—
Turning that mask you likened to a face—
Turning its lacquered glance into a space
Dingy and swagging over the fictive heather—
So empty, endless, free of any weather.

Will you believe your wisdom, or your own eyes
Looking into the bleary skies
At fat clouds stuffed with glittering gray,
The substance of your godhood for the day?

How do you find those phrases that lie
Under the wisdom of that smoky sky?
When you sit and listen in the changing light
Upon some temperamental height—
And you’re breathing in the yellow broom
Brilliant in the afternoon,
And hear the idle phrase
Of all the days
You lost in dreaming glory—
And tried to get them back in rime and story
In a room full of shadows and shelves—
(The dream-room of our altered, errant selves
Where all the creatures gather, mutter, gape)
Crammed with books of every shape,
Each shape the shape of the life contained within
While each life straining slowly out
Flutters in the heat that snuffs it out.

This book the bottle, Sybil hanging by her heels within;
That book, an angel by a whisker on his chin;
And there an ark of soggy beasts
Bleating for the insubstantial feasts
Where God, relenting, sets his creatures free
To frolic in their new-found deviltry.

And here’s a book of quipping cats,
And there a book of buggy bats
Eating out two tons of bearded gnats;
And then a book of garbled gardens
With stony saints remitting sins
And crumbled kings conferring pardons,
And aging goddesses with crenulated chins.

And now a book about the noble rot that sweetens sour fruits—
About the blight that makes them bitter—and the roots
That blandish empty bellies—
And all about the sweetmeats, cakes and jellies.
So what green sauce is this, and what the red?
How shall the mother of our food be fed?
A lavish lot, these books that handsomely array
Ten thousand banquets brought upon one tray.

And finally, golden in the grubby room,
A book that told of its own author’s doom
Averred the bioluminescence of the soul,
Mythic and unquenchable and whole;
A civil purpose hiding in his hat—
Snagged in crabbed weather on the way
To a wrangle of reason—he blew to bits
All the brabblers and the scantling wits,
And living to a great old age he died
So sweetly that his golden book belied
The horrors that the living lump decried.

Your book’s your world, and there the glade grows glum—
Your bright breath bleeds into the frosty night
While the night wind sulks in the moon-white willows—
And is your book not like the leaves
Hissing in the watery breeze,
Its phrases falling like a dying pun,
To shift and shuffle in tomorrow’s rising sun?

7-26-05

Bad Apple Spoils It For the Rest of Us. Make That, Dumb Apple

This from Romanesko:

Woman drops j-class after learning about Gee's "hot" remark
Boston Magazine
You'll recall that former Boston Herald sportswriter Michael Gee lost his parttime teaching job at Boston University after posting on his blog that one student in his class of six was so "incredibly hot" that "it was all I could do to remember the other five students." That student, Natalie Zfat, has dropped the class. "As a student, I think you're entitled to feel safe and comfortable knowing that your professor is a professional, not a pervert," she says.