10,000 More

Incredibly, another 10,000 Americans died this week from Covid19. And, bizarrely, the overmatched narcissist tacitly in charge decided that a new three-pronged strategy should be deployed. 

Prong One: stop the damn testing! When we test, we find people who have the disease. If we don't test we won't find people with the disease.

Prong Two: stop counting all those who have died from the disease! That tens of thousands have died makes the President look bad. A lower number will make the President look good?

Prong Three: start opening up the country! Sure, the scientists who warned that hundreds of thousands of Americans could die if we didn't adequately implement controls to stem the disease think that this is suicidal. But, a desperate man is willing to gamble the lives of even more Americans in the naive hope that the economy will magically revive. 

The economy will not magically revive. And, in all likelihood, the economy will not survive another round of the coronavirus running rampant and unmanaged across the nation. 

All of this is insane. And exhausting. 

We are not rising to meet this existential challenge as well as we might. Talk about an understatement. No country has done worse in acting to staunch the virus. It's appalling, and tragic. 

I feel so lucky that no one I know or love has been stricken. But, I have a growing fear that this is all borrowed time. I have a new supply of disposable masks to help ensure that I don't infect anyone. I only hope my fellow citizens will take the same simple action. 

There were more stories from around the country this week, with photographs, documenting that an alarming subset of citizens won't act to help one another stay uninfected. It's a level of hubris that's hard to fathom. 

This Week in Neo-Medievalia

This is the week that the anti-scientific community, the naive, the societally selfish and the defiantly ignorant apparently decided to ramp up their protests against trying to staunch the spread of the coronavirus around the world. 

We had a few hundred gather in front of the statehouse in Boston to rail against the injustice of it all. I think it was this week, too, that, in Michigan, a woman who took umbrage at being told she must wear a mask to enter a Dollar Store, huffed off and then brought back her gun-toting father, who shot dead the security person who tried to enforce the mask requirement. 

Meanwhile the sad and incompetent charlatan tacitly in charge of our federal government is decrying the need for any vaccine and is back to asserting that the virus will just go away. That is indisputably true, if one takes the decadal-long view. In the interim, how many more people will die? We're cruising past 80,000 in the US now. 

Most of us are still doing our best to hunker down, to try to limit the chance that we will contract and/or spread Covid19. This is not to minimize that doing this has come at great collateral cost. Most significantly, in the loss of 30 million people's jobs. 

Of course, while America has the financial ability to see our fellow citizens through the pandemic's corresponding economic disaster, we won't. While peer countries are paying citizens with lost incomes an ongoing stipend, we have thrown trillions out into the wind---meaning that those of us who still have jobs have received the same one-time $1,200 cash payment as those who are unemployed. And, large corporations have raked in millions from the funds designated to help small businesses survive and pay their employees. 

It's maddening and embarrassing that our country's leadership is so inept during this crisis. Thus far, I've not been touched personally by the tragedy that is being abetted by our federal government. Though I worry that my number must come up, in this perverse lottery of survival that re-opening the country for business without adequate testing or plans for response to future recurrences of viral outbreaks will exacerbate. 

We're going with a strategy of luck, indifference, and acceptance that many thousands more must die. Maybe enough of us will refuse to play the role of "warriors" and will stay the course to limit the carnage. If we use the tools available in the twenty-first century, perhaps we can avoid the worst of this contagion's potential medieval miseries. Perhaps. 

For Some Sickening Perspective in the Era of Covid-19

Many of us have a sense that our economic priorities and, more specifically, our national budgetary allocations are disproportionately skewed toward addressing military threats. 

Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN from 2013 to 2017, quantifies this in an essay in Time, April 27/May4: 

"Since 2010, the U.S. has been spending an average of $180 billion annually on counterterrorism efforts---compared with less than $2 billion on pandemic and emerging infectious-disease programs. In a reflection of how skewed the U.S. national-security budget is toward the military over other tools in the national-security toolbox, Congress appropriated $685 billion in 2019 for the Pentagon, compared with around $7 billion for the CDC."

A Voice of Sanity

We would do well to heed Mikhail Gorbachev's exhortation (from his essay in Time, April27/May4):

"I'll never tire of repeating: we need to demilitarize world affairs, international politics and political thinking. 

. . . I call upon them (world leaders) to cut military spending by 10% to 15%. This is the least we should do now, as a first step toward a new consciousness, a new civilization."

Spoiler alert: we won't. 

But that doesn't change the simple and compelling fact that we should. 

Covid-19, or When the Whole World Was Hit By a Truck

It's May. After the first April in recorded weather history in Boston when the temperature never made it to 65F, this first weekend of the third month of the Coronavirus shutdown in the US is beautiful in southern New England---warm, with summery cumulus drifting past my window and being reflected in the blue glass of the Hancock. Another siren in the distance. 

In reality, we haven't even reached two months since the shutdown began in mid-March. Nearly 70,000 Americans have died. Though these tragedies are not widespread enough to stop a proportion of us from whining about the horrific inconvenience of having to practice social distancing to staunch the spread of the virus. This was the week when a subset of troglodytes showed up with assault weapons at the state capitol building in Michigan and threw a fit. 

Everyone in Massachusetts is now supposed to wear a mask when venturing out. I'm using a pair of bandanas that I used to use for wiping sweat away while hiking in the mountains. Though I am not going out much. When I do and when I return, I wash my bandana in the bathroom sink with lots of hot, soapy water and then, after rinsing, hang my "mask" on the hook on the back of my bathroom door to dry. 

I am truly one of the lucky members of society. I have work that I can do from home for which I get paid; thirty million of us don't have any work now, and our systems for getting these people money to live on is haphazard at best. We can take care of one another financially through this, but will we? Those who have to still work outside the house---all of the medical staff treating so many ill patients, the grocery store workers helping to keep us fed, etc.---are at risk in ways that the rest of us only vaguely and inadequately appreciate. 

This was the week, too, when video was posted on social media of at least a hundred unmasked people crossing an intersection at a traffic light in Atlanta. Are these time travelers from 2015? Willful naïveté and, as many have commented, a culture of entitled selfishness are ugly characteristics of today's American society. 

Many brilliant people are working to find treatments to mitigate the virus, including development of vaccines to prevent it. But, we are not there yet. Having already endured the economic calamity caused by responding to the virus, it seems a simple concept to grasp that we risk compounding the impact by pretending the danger has passed. 

And, yet here we are, in various states, like Texas, as an example, where unmasked, overweight customers are photographed at a table ordering food from a waitperson with only a paper mask on for protection. That more people will die because some people insist that they have a right to go eat a slab of ribs at a restaurant is surreal, embarrassing, unconscionable.

I've always been amazed by people who suffer some sudden, catastrophic injury---say quadriplegia from an auto accident---or being struck down by a debilitating illness---perhaps Parkinson's. Their lives are never the same afterwards. I have often thought that the mental torment of remembering how life used to be must be especially hard to manage. And, yet, these people have no choice. They adapt and move forward. We are all those people now in a sense. Our lives before Covid-19 are gone. But, if we're lucky enough to stay healthy, the adjustment to our post-Covid-19 lives,  while challenging, is imminently manageable. Stay home whenever you can, wear a mask when you go out, and accept the reality of needing to adapt.

Quote from "Destiny of the Republic" by Candace Millard

"They must not be knocked down with bludgeons. They must have their throats cut with a feather." James G. Blaine, Senator from Maine, on dealing with the Stalwarts.

A Year Since Donald Trump Won the Election (Allegedly)

Well, the world is still here (for now). Though it does feel like watching a film where all the plot strands are inexorably linking into a collective noose for our species.

That Russia's authoritarian leadership worked to assist Trump (our would-be autocrat) to win the presidency is clear. Indictments of Trump campaign personnel have been unsealed (Manafort, Gates, Papadopoulos). The Republican Party appears compromised, by also aligning with the Russians and/or condoning their attacks on our election(s).

The GOP continues to allow our citizens to be slaughtered by deranged gunmen, chooses to abdicate action to address climate change, and wants to deliver a substantial tax cut for the wealthiest Americans by, in part, denying health care coverage for millions of less financially fortunate Americans.

Trump's sole motivations apparently are to be loved and to further enrich himself. While mulishly determined, he seems pathetically inept. Through his clumsy efforts to assert economic nationalism as a means to American greatness, the rest of the world (and particularly the Chinese) senses a vacuum in global leadership.

Much has been written about the precipitous decline in American Exceptionalism. One has to wonder if Trump is the catalyst or just an inevitable symptom. The latter seems more likely, and, therefore, more pernicious. Fortunately, Trump has also served as a catalyst to action.

Many citizens (myself included) are paying more attention, and an increasing number are taking steps to stand against Trumpism. The effort is focused on the ballot box, and Democrats recently were elected to the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia. Can we maintain our democracy? We shall see.

And Now for Something Completely Different . . . and Unexpected, and Scary, etc.

Dear Diary, the most incredible thing happened! Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. You cannot imagine how surreal that statement seems at this moment . . . which is, just for the record, 3:36 AM on Wednesday, November 9, 2016. 

About a million more voters in our country believed that Mr. Trump is the right person for the job rather than Ms. Clinton. That means almost 56 million of my fellow citizens are sharing in some version of the angst and stunned disbelief that I'm experiencing. 

I sincerely hope that in a few years I will read this and chuckle to myself that I was so concerned that the 45th president of our country might, at best, not "drain the swamp" but rather drive us collectively deeper into realms of swampiness we could never have imagined, or, at worst, manage to initiate a human race-ending armageddon. Haha . . . it's not funny; nor meant to be hyperbolic. I really, sincerely worry that Mr. Trump might blow us all up. 

Oh, Mr. Trump, will you censor the press? Will you define disagreement and dissent as disrespect worthy of punishment? It seems impossible that this might come to pass, but then your election seemed impossible also. If I reread Eugenia Ginzburg's Journey Into the Whirlwind will it seem a cautionary tale of what may become of America? Please do not be another iteration of Stalin, or Hitler, or any other demagogue. 

You've done so little to convince us (even many who voted for you) that you have the ability to do the job of president. Maybe all the things you said as a candidate were just showbiz riffs? Maybe you will throw off the charlatan's robe now and be revealed as an enlightened, intelligent, magnanimous leader. Please let that dream be the reality . . . and not this nightmare that I'm enduring while wide awake in the middle of this long and truly dark night. 

Notes While Reading "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning"

It's Christmas. My son has given me a copy of Chris Hedges' book. A book whose premise is that, as a species, we don't sincerely desire peace on earth. That's boring.

In fact, Hedges cites a calculation by the historian Will Durant ". . . that there have only been twenty-nine years in all of human history during which a war was not underway somewhere." While I cannot cite an academic to verify it, I would wager that almost every human who has lived and not experienced war is thankful to have been spared.

Though, as Hedges contends, most of us are susceptible to the allure of the concept of war as a unifying mission. What I don't see explicitly identified in the opening Introduction is the idea that our susceptibility arises from the basic desire to belong in order to defend ourselves. We are vulnerable individual beings who find our odds of survival enhanced through banding together. Once bound together, we view other groups as threats to our group . . . and they are.

However, it's usually a very few people within any group that instigate fear and action (e.g. war) in response to that threat. These individuals have a myriad of reasons for doing so,  from ego satisfaction, economic gratification, or simply garden variety sociopathic lunacy. Hedges identifies this fact in his opening chapter, when he observes that our era's wars " . . . are manufactured . . . (and) run by gangsters, who rise up from the bottom of their own societies and terrorize all, including those they purport to protect."

Sixfold Poems

I was fortunate to have my group of four poems included in the Fall issue of a new publication called Sixfold. It's a cool concept . . . the writers who submit vote on and determine what will be published.

For what it's worth, I also recorded myself reading the poems . . . maybe it will be interesting to listen to these a few decades down the line, to recall how I sounded at this point in the journey.

Here they are:

Surliness in the Green Mountains

Meditation Waiting for the Orange Line

Blowing the Third Eye

Under the Influence

Russia Blog

I feel the need to blog more . . . there are so many things that I'm forgetting!

I promise myself to start soon, but for now I want to link to my Russia blog from last December.

To Russia With Anticipation

So, having typed a couple paragraphs, what I'd written vanished. Why? Cosmic editing of fuzzy writing is the only plausible explanation. Though, this is in keeping with how preparations for this trip have unfolded. Akin to the vanishing airline reservation specifically. I had my confirmation . . . I even had a seat assignment on Delta . . . and then when I called Alitalia to request a seat assignment, I suddenly didn't have a ticket, nor a reservation. Thank you Alitalia for not having online seat request capability. Otherwise, I'd be showing up at Logan this morning with my bags and a smile, and no chance of getting on a flight to Moscow.

As it turns out, I'm now on a train to NY, to get to JFK, to get on a flight to Moscow. It all worked out. As long as this unexpected loss of power and forward movement in New London proves temporary.

Appropriately, it was snowing this morning as I walked over to Back Bay Station. Just enough to whiten the ground, but I appreciated the gesture. It appears that the weather has finally turned wintery in Yaroslavl, too. This makes me happy. It wouldn't have been quite the genuine winter welcome I was hoping for without snow around.

My 46 Pimsleur Russian lessons now seem wholly inadequate. I just now got to, "How's the weather?" And, I had to look up snow on my own: снег. Pronounced: Snerg. You can see in this small example one of the principal challenges in trying to tackle Russian as a second language. The alphabet is on one hand familiar, but full of amusing misdirections. с = s; н = n; г = g. And, then there are the extra letters that are more hieroglyphic in nature: жфю. I am glad that Cross Cultural Solutions will have a translator nearby at all times!

Thinking of all I don't know how to say, and even more how limited my ability to comprehend anything said in Russian, I feel compelled to return to Lesson 1 and try to reinforce the most basic and essential components: "Do you speak English?" "I don't understand." "Please help me."

Adding to the Really Baffling . . . Let's Mutate Bird Flu to Make it Airborne

The logic apparently is that by manipulating H5N1 to become transmissible between ferrets (which are, appropriately, nature's closest stand-in biologically for human scientists), we can ferret out (too irresistible to not have a little pun with these creatures while we kill them) how the bird flu virus might mutate in the non-laborotory world.

Not that we can do anything about the resulting pandemic should it occur. Though presumably we could establish a vaccine protocol that might be effective in impeding the virus's ability to infect.

So, developing a way to make H5N1 transmissible to and between humans will enhance our ability to warn anyone who hasn't already seen the videos of folks succumbing to bird flu that a killer virus is loose?

Of course, now we'll never know if we loosed the killer virus on ourselves or if it was a result of nature doing what nature does.

But at least we can be certain that many ferrets are going to suffer and die, and how can one argue that this is not a good thing?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/science/scientists-to-pause-research-on-deadly-strain-of-bird-flu.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha23

Method for Enhancement of Surface Plasmon Polaritons to Initiate & Susta...

This would be revolutionary . . . I wonder why it won't be?

Industrial Beauty (or Two Pilgrims Watching the Sun Set)

Physicists and Theologians Unite!

Here's an interesting update on the latest crisis facing physicists. To make sense of the fact that our particular universe is attuned to the precise conditions that have made life (as we perceive it) possible, an increasing number of physicists are guessing that we must be citizens of one of a countless number of universes.

If the number of potential universes is infinite, then one of them would have the conditions we find ourselves existing within. That we most likely can never test this hypothesis is a concern, of course. We're being asked to take it on faith that this must be the logical explanation for why things are as they are . . . and why, consequently, we are.

God (or whatever) works in mysterious ways!

Momentary Celebrity (Sort Of)

Ambushed by the local Fox News station, I stammer through a series of probing questions about the proposed hike in fares to ride the subway and/or bus in Boston. Oddly, I almost always walk to and from work . . . partly because I am cheap, but mostly so that I get some exercise. And, besides, I am lucky that my "commute" entails walking through Boston's Public Garden and across the Common, past the State House on Beacon Hill, and down past King's Chapel (a diminutive, stone edifice from the 18th century), before arriving at the late 20th century granite, steel, marble, and glass high-rise where I do what I do to pass the days and make a living.

MBTA riders face fare hikes as high as 43 percent: MyFoxBOSTON.com

Wisdom for Writers

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

Thomas Mann

Showing Off For an Itchy-Assed Pal!

Tosh.0	Tosh Tuesdays 8pm / 7c
M. Night Shyamalan Twist Ending of the Week - The Weightlifter
www.comedycentral.com
Tosh.0 Videos Daniel Tosh Web Redemption

Mark Twain Commentary on Idiots and Congress

100 years after his death, Twain remains a relevant commentator on our current state of affairs:

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."

Shelby Foote's Advice to Writers (Paris Review Interview 1999)

INTERVIEWER

What kind of advice would you give young writers?

FOOTE

To read, and above all to reread. When you read, you get the great pleasure of discovering what happened. When you reread, you get the great pleasure of knowing where the author’s going and seeing how he goes about getting there—and that’s learning creative writing. I would tell a young writer that. Of course I would tell him: work, work, work, sit at that desk and sweat. You don’t have to have a plot, you don’t have to have anything. Describe someone crossing a room, and try to do it in a way that won’t perish. Put it down on paper. Keep at it. Then when you finally figure out how to handle words pretty well, try to tell a story. It won’t be worth a damn; you’ll have to tear it up and throw it away. But then try to do it again, do it again, and then keep doing it, until you can do it. You may never be able to do it. That’s the gamble. You not only may not be able to make a living, you may not be able to do it at all. But that’s what you put on the line. Every artist has that. He doesn’t deserve a whole lot of credit for it. He didn’t choose it. It was visited upon him. Somebody asks, When did you decide you wanted to be a writer? I never decided I wanted to be a writer. I simply woke up a writer one morning.

What in the Sun Causes Radioactive Decay Fluctuations?

From an article on EurekAlert:

The strange case of solar flares and radioactive elements

Intrigue at the speed of light (almost)

But there's one rather large question left unanswered. No one knows how neutrinos could interact with radioactive materials to change their rate of decay.

"It doesn't make sense according to conventional ideas," Fischbach said. Jenkins whimsically added, "What we're suggesting is that something that doesn't really interact with anything is changing something that can't be changed."

"It's an effect that no one yet understands," agreed Sturrock. "Theorists are starting to say, 'What's going on?' But that's what the evidence points to. It's a challenge for the physicists and a challenge for the solar people too."

If the mystery particle is not a neutrino, "It would have to be something we don't know about, an unknown particle that is also emitted by the sun and has this effect, and that would be even more remarkable," Sturrock said.

Hello Beta

How many strolls along the surf line have I taken in my life? Hundreds and hundreds. And how many shipwrecks have I come upon? None . . . until this Labor Day . . . when the remains of the British schooner Beta appeared in the waves. The ship foundered in April 1886, while en route to Boston from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Three lives were lost, including two young sisters, ages 8 months and 3 years, who "were torn by the sea from the arms of their mother and drowned."

Golf Gods

Last summer, after too long a hiatus, I began regularly tormenting myself on the golf course again. The only good thing about my game was the company I kept while watching my ball fly off course (literally, sometimes): two actuaries and my son. We've had a lot of fun chasing par over the past two summers. Unfortunately, good things do apparently have to end. Rob (one of my favorite actuaries of all time!) is moving to Atlanta this fall. The game will simply not be the same without him. The group portrait above was taken at the conclusion of our final round together: September 5, 2009. A bittersweet day indeed. Sanjay, Drew, and I will miss you, man.

Observations on the Parade Outside the BPL

Sitting on the granite steps outside the Boston Public Library, after being evicted from the blessedly air conditioned Bates Reading Room at 5 PM, I am appreciative of the slight breeze and the parade of people passing through Copley Square this late afternoon . . . the intricacy of detail on Trinity Church across the way.

Apocalypse seems quite remote . . . though a woman with an African accent and a baby in a stroller continues to wander back and forth in front of me proclaiming that God loves and that Christ can provide a better night's sleep and safety upon waking. It's easy to fabricate some horrific past for this woman, in a country where death and torment are more overtly present.

It's easier yet to observe the reactions of those who pass her as she makes her rounds. I particularly appreciated the neanderthal dude who turned and yelled at her, "What the hell are you yelling about?" . . . and, in doing so, lost control of the unlit cigarette dangling from his yap. It fell directly and irretrievably into a crevice between the walkway's granite slabs. God works in humorous ways at times!

Just now, a little fellow with the most gigantic curly mane and a white button-up shirt and a terrific smile has found the statue near where I am sitting fascinating and worth the effort to climb the steps to be near. The exuberant inquisitiveness of childhood is infectious. He really likes this statue! I have no idea what he is saying as he comments on this public work of art, but he is enthusiastic in his assessment.

So many iterations of our human carnival available for perusing. I've been working on revising my long poem "These Days Appear Particular" this afternoon, and sitting here just makes it clearer how particular each of our experiences truly is . . . familiar, similar, yet particular in its details. Billions of story lines all wavering and weaving their way on this small blue marble.

What the Brain Can Do

It's always interesting when our assumptions about what (and how) we understand are challenged. I came across the book "My Stroke of Insight" in an airport bookstore recently. Imagine being a brain scientist and getting to experience your brain's reaction to a severe stroke. Imagine if the stroke damaged the side of your brain with which you do all of your thinking and understanding of yourself and the world. Imagine having only the side of the brain that can allow you to connect with and perceive yourself as an energetic being intertwined with the universe and its teeming life force still functioning. This happened to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, and she's never been the same since . . . but in an unexpectedly positive way.

Instant Expert: Quantum World - New Scientist

I do believe that one of the things about the quantum that fascinates is that it represents so many possibilities. For the imaginative, inquisitive person this is not unlike a cosmic kaleidoscope on the one hand . . . any number of combinations could delight. But the quantum goes further, into the undefinable. And, for the mathematically incompetent (like me), it allows for interpreting and theorizing from a foundation of nothing more substantive than one's imagination. How cool is that? 

Instant Expert: Quantum World - physics-math - 04 September 2006 - New Scientist

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Exit the King

I'm not a fan of traveling for business (at least domestically). I've done it for too long, and any novelty long ago vanished. The two exceptions to this rule are New York and San Francisco. Both are still quasi-wonderlands to me. I try to plan alone time whenever I visit either. Time for exploring, wandering, observing.

When I stay in Midtown, I like to get to a play. I am a novice theater aficionado, but I enthusiastically seek to be transported. I got on a lucky bus last night, when I went to see Geoffrey Rush in his translation/interpretation of Eugene Ionesco's "Exit the King" on Broadway.

I knew nothing about Ionesco (beyond recognizing his name) or this particular piece. I was excited to see the stars (Rush, Susan Sarandon, Lauren Ambrose) perform in a well-reviewed play, and to get away from the business-of-business that had dominated my day.

And then the lights went down . . . and poetry began to resonate all the way to the last row of the Barrymore Theater where I was seated. I was engaged from the first lines to the good king's inevitable death, two-plus hours later.

The play considers the narcissism which sustains all humans and particularizes it to a sovereign who would see every fellow human gone, if it meant he could survive. Ionesco was a master of the theater of the absurd, according to the biographical sketch in my Playbill.

The absurd in this work is the absurdity with which we squander life and covet it, unrelentingly, when we sense its impending departure. And it's about so much more.

"Exit the King" has all the great attributes that I admire in effective poems. The language is layered, original . . . the words are somehow cajoled into performing acts of reflection and illumination that spark the audience's consciousness toward some new vantage point.

The world may not seem much clearer from where this play takes one, but it surely seems more multi-faceted and magnificent to behold . . . like diamonds scattered across a field, with the sun burning through the overcast of the quotidian.

Celebrity Sighting Update

Earlier this evening, I saw Adam Sandler on Newbury Street as I was walking to Trident (a local, independent bookstore cafe). He was with two little girls, who I mistakenly thought were his own (as was pointed out to me by the guy sitting next to me at Trident, who had also seen Sandler, when Adam apparently borrowed these two tykes from their parents and began dancing with them on the sidewalk of the aforementioned Newbury Street . . . too bad I missed that!). Then, not two hours later, on my way home from Trident, I happened to glance over at the outside tables at a Newbury Street dining establishment called Piatini and made eye contact with . . . Adam Sandler. He quickly looked away, understandably . . . for I would've definitely gone over and tried to get a fist bump from him otherwise!

Vegas, Baby!

I am back from my 22 hour visit to Las Vegas, America's Gomorrah. It was a little like Scrooge being visited by the ghosts of American Culture Kitsch. 

A hotel with its entire facade emblazoned with an image of Donny and Marie Osmond; the ubiquitous non-English speaking "girls direct to your room in 7 minutes" card dealers who have colonized every street corner; the ever-expanding invasion by Cirque du Soleil; taxis with ads for machine gun shops on their tops. 

It's good to be back in New England.

Revision and Reading

I've been working on revisions in earnest today. I am in the midst of drafting a ten-part poem, in conjunction with a ten-week workshop I signed on to participate in this spring. So it's helpful to counterbalance the new with the familiar.

Also, trying to read even more . . . lately I've been drawn to Charles Harper Webb (someone I don't know) and back to Reginald Shepherd (someone I have read over the years). There are so many poets whose work I only glancingly know.

Jason Shinder's Pending Posthumous Collection

On his blog, Mark Doty offered up a poem from Shinder's last collection.

I am particularly partial to another of Shinder's late poems, which I feel is filled the power and energy that we spend a lifetime tamping down. We all would do well to let it rip, while we are able. 

This Blog Needs More Photos!

From the reflecting pool at the Mother Church in Boston.

On Returning to the Blog

So much time since my last entry. Typical, in a way. I tend to go through spells where my writing lies fallow. Though I have been working on revisions to many poems . . . some from nearly a decade ago. Such a lot of effort over so long a period, to produce little that seems appealing to any reader beyond myself. 

Well, it's a labor that demands and, in many personal ways, rewards all the effort. I went with a friend last night to see Natalie Goldberg read and discuss her book on writing memoir. When asked about the practice of writing, she offered the same advice that I heard Grace Paley once give: If you need to write, write . . . if you don't, don't . . . there's lots of other stuff to do in this world. 

I guess I really need to write.

We'll see if I recommit to doing some of that writing on this blog.

On Poetic Greatness - D. Orr in NY Times

Want to start a row amongst a bunch of word nerds? This piece by David Orr in the NY Times could be your catalyst.

That the parameters for greatness in poetry are more subjective than in many other endeavors is (perhaps) the one thing we can all agree on.

Orr contrasts Robert Lowell, who he cites as a less-talented but more ambitious poet, with Elizabeth Bishop, who wrote relatively few poems but labored over each meticulously.  And he declares that Bishop is now considered closer to greatness. 

Let Round One begin.

I like Orr's jab at the tendency to swoon over the amazingness of poets from beyond the U.S.A.'s borders. I can think of one young female poet who seems a current manifestation.

Ultimately, what any poet or artist can do is to write, to paint, to compose, to sing, etc. What's great about anything that results from these efforts will sort itself out (and probably change with time and new generations). 

Challenging ourselves as poets to write well . . . to not fall into repetitiveness or tediousness . . . is the crucial element for creating a body of work that might seem great to someone someday.