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"Truckee Hard and Heavy Water" on Abridged 0-67 Nyx 

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Will there be rallies?

They won't just be Trump rallies anymore. They'll be  patriotic rallies with the full backing of the executive branch of government.

The Way I see it

I've witnessed a lot of presidential politics in my 61 years, and I know that if anyone reads this it will probably be somebody who already agrees with me, but still, I have to go on record. I have to encourage people to vote. I have to encourage people to take a stand and go on record. In 61 years I have not felt our country and what it stands for to be in as much jeopardy as it is now.

If Donald Trump is elected president I will not move. I will continue to call him out on his lies and his mean-spirited ugly rhetoric, and I will laugh at the comedians who make fun of him.

But now is not the time for jokes. Now is the time for asking ourselves: Do we want a president who, despite the evidence of 8 years of appearances on TV denigrating President Obama and questioning the legitimacy of his birth certificate, now brazenly claims that Clinton started it, and he Trump ended it?

Do we really want someone who makes veiled threats with threatening gestures one day then claims we're deliberately misinterpreting him the next?

Do we really want someone who thinks he can fabricate reality? Can we actually trust anything he says?

For a while this summer it appeared that CNN was doing a good job calling him out, but now, they seem caught up in the fact that Clinton has low numbers with millennials and married women, and whose health records are least transparent, and how people just don't trust Hillary.

Listen, you only have to be a little better than the other guy to have the moral high ground. Even if Clinton were as guilty as Trump claims --I'm with her. The good news is I know she's not.

The Unbearable Lightness and Progressive Politics

Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being is hauntingly beautiful and rings true on so many levels. I love this book and feel lucky to have read it. But its politics, while I can see where it's coming from, I cannot abide. I can understand how Soviet socialism rendered people unwilling or unable to believe in the possibility of human progress, but it's a political stance I cannot take. For one thing, I have not suffered the demoralizing effects of anything as cynical and brutal as the Sovietization of Prague in 1968. I've been lucky. The challenge for progressives: How best to keep the luck going, how to spread it around and make it grow.

Two New Books

Mark My Word and the New World Order --The Pedestrian Press, J de Salvo, Editor.
The new world order, it's a different kind of future, not what the Illuminati --or their detractors --think.

and

Restaurant in Walking Distance and Everything --Cawing Crow Press, Craig Grossman, Editor.
Growing up in the seventies. Some of us survived. Some of us didn't. This one's for all of us.

Evolution for the Hell of It

Thanks, Red Dashboard Press!

Looking the Part

Prosecutor: the person who stares you down as he lets you know you are guilty --like it or not --you're going to pay.

True Believer: Protector and defender of the nation's integrity. The kind of moral inflexibility that keeps a country strong in the face of its enemies.

Clear eyed, wide eyed, blue eyed, unblinking Trey Gowdy.

I'll take Hillary over Trey any old day.

What is Amazing, by Heather Christle

A review I wrote a few summers ago:

What is Amazing, by Heather Christle

Wesleyan University Press, 2012

Reviewed by Gerald Yelle

Recently released in paperback, What is Amazing is a book of poetry put together like a good record album: Enough solid consistency to make its weak tracks forgivable, even interesting as points of contrast with its strengths. This is a book that hooks the reader with its quirky high-energy obsessions. It functions not so much by rubbing words up against one another as by bringing ideas together in ways that reveal character--the work of a mind struggling to come to terms with what it means to be alone, or in society, or in nature, or some combination of all three; in other words, what it means to be alive. It does so without being self-consciously or patronizingly psychological, confessional or poetical. This ease of voice makes it highly readable, and at 64 pages, it’s the kind of book you can read in a day.      

Accessibility may be a key feature, but that doesn’t mean it steers clear of the opaque and mysterious. The opening poem, “The Seaside!” presents us with “a wall of great intensity and furious.” The speaker wants to know: “Why / is all the beauty in the wall and not / in me Captain,” It’s as if, in beginning to write, Christle immediately collides with an immovable object: the overwhelming reality of nature, the sea, Walt Whitman, the immensity of literary culture that could easily live without one more voice. This only makes her more determined. “I can tell you things I’m not a piece of foam” (3), she says at the end of the poem, and the book is under way.

The first section concerns itself primarily with gardens, with the flowers, mosses and animals that inhabit them, and with the elemental materials such as fire and water, that both compose and threaten them. The best, “Self-Portrait with Fire” and “People Are a Living Structure Like a Coral Reef,” flow with seemingly effortless energy. “The people Obviously they loved me were warm and pink,” Christle says in the former. It’s the extremity, the urgency, the repetition and self correction that gives this eleven line poem its irresistible charm.

They asked me if I was on fire and I said No no no no

no no no I did not want to make trouble I was lying I was

on fire on my legs and on my hands I was ashamed I tried

to hide my legs by kneeling I set the grass on fire (4).

The latter poem, a free verse sonnet of sorts, sings of love and windows and seeing people in windows, ending with “Oh people You have to love / people They are so much like ourselves” (7).

While a celebratory tone outweighs even the most painful moments of the book’s first section, the second is characterized by anger, defiance, isolation and despair. The title of the opening poem, “We Are Not Getting Anywhere,” states the case clearly enough, before slipping into its deceptively simple narrative.

The shark was calling to express his feelings

on his ugliness and his mortality

The two seemed related but the message was choppy

Where was he calling from

The shark said to call back      He was dying

He regretted that he would die soon

I did not want the message to happen

but it was too late I’d already heard it.

While the speaker’s relationship with the shark may not be getting anywhere, and while it’s clear that she doesn’t particularly want it to, the fact that she listens to his message seems to require some effort on her part: “Perhaps I could go rent a boat” (23). The title poem, “What is Amazing,” comes at the end of the second section, and with it a return to the obsession with animals. With it also comes a very effective deflating of the positive associations the title brought to the first section. Here, “What is amazing is how / the animals won’t stop sleeping” (42), as if anything could sleep with all the death and destruction going on. The poems are not uniformly negative in this section, but they are uniformly well crafted. Note the humor in “A Very Remarkable Story:”

It is shameful for a girl of my size

to be so cowed by horticulture

so I slap myself on the rump

and now every time I open my mouth

a daisy chain crawls out (37).

What is Amazing is composed of three sections, the first two of which are more engaging than the third. Maybe it’s just that the third gets off to a slower start. Its first five poems continue to work themes of absence and loss on materials such as light, sky, people and birds, but the speaker is less active, more evocative and contemplative. Consider the last lines of “Happy and Glorious:”

What I can say represents what I cannot

Grey snow filling in the driveway

Flown away bird to split the noon (46).

With “I Will Know You by Your Red Carnation,” however, the quirky energy is back. Speaking of a lost “box probably full of live animals / or other animals,” and of “blown out” stars, Christle marvels that we are able, “To have lost as we have so greatly / And to discover we still hold abundance” (50).

So how does this abundance of parts fit together as a whole? If the first section suggests that despite its challenges the world is an amazing place, and the second suggests that it’s amazing that anything survives in such a chaotic war zone, the third seems to suggest that chaos itself, as represented by the ocean, is the source of all amazing things: “A cruller comes from there / and also once some beauty” (64); it’s pretty amazing in itself, and it’s the source to which we’ll return.

        

Gerald Yelle teaches High School English.   He is a member of the Florence (MA) Poets Society.   

Gerald Yelle

91 Blackberry Lane

Amherst, MA 01002

g.yelle@comcast.net

Forces are at work in the world

Conflicting forces. Some good may come of it, but there will likely be pain.

A great poem by Alan Albert, courtesy of masspoetry.org

"Essay on a Son" by Alan Albert

Thank You Amherst Live and The Valley Advocate

Thanks to Oliver Broudy and Karen Skolfield of Amherst Live, producer/director Lucinda Kidder, and my wife Jenny, my poem received a dramatic recitation in front of an audience of about 300 and appears on the Amherst Live website. Thanks to James Heflin, winner of the Amherst Live poetry contest and managing editor of The Valley Advocate, my poem appears alongside his in the January 29th issue of The Advocate.

Einstein's Dreams

Alan Leitman writes Einstein’s Dreams as a series dreamed from mid-April to the end of June 1905. In each dream time works in some mysterious way in and around the neighborhoods of Berne and Fribourg. On June 2, the dream is of a world in which time moves backwards. We see the body of an old woman gradually come alive and gain vitality. She slowly forms relationships and grows younger. One day the body of her husband is brought in and they live together and everything is proceeding apace until the reader stumbles upon the following: “She sees her husband for the first time in the library of the university.”

   It seems to me she is seeing her husband for the last time. She sees him for the first time when his near-dead body is brought in from the hospital. Similarly Leitman shows an old man throwing dirt into a friend’s grave, looking forward to their many happy days of friendship ahead. I think I understand what Leitman is doing: showing people living life backward, but still experiencing life in ways people (readers) living in normal time can relate to.

   I know there’s no way of avoiding absurdities when doing this sort of thing, and Lietman walks a fine line, keeping it wistful and evocative. But he makes me want to conduct my own little thought experiment with this one.

   If time runs backwards people spontaneously gather at a graveside to witness an exhumation. Religious rites are conducted, the body is taken to a mortuary and given transfusions of body fluids. Eventually the corpse comes to life. Depending upon its initial conditions, in a matter of days, weeks, months or years the person attains a degree of health and intelligence. People grow “younger,” forget their knowledge, shrink, are one day forced into the womb of a young woman, and are never seen again.

Augusten Burroughs' "This Is How"

I didn't feel like I needed a self-help book, but I loved other books I read or listened to by Burroughs: Running with Scissors, Possible Side Effects, Magical Thinking, and even A Wolf at the Table. I could see how experiences written about in those earlier books could lend themselves to this sort of project, and I expected it might lack the humor I especially enjoyed in Possible Side Effects and Magical Thinking, unless he found a way to work it in. I was curious enough to want to find out, so I gave it a shot --and I'm glad I did. The part about ending your live as opposed to committing suicide is riveting, as is the part about caring for a loved-one coping with disease. I find that he and I share similar beliefs about the difference between actual suffering and imagined or anticipated suffering. His discussion of alcoholism and how he dealt with it is also well worth looking into.

Long Live Gertrude Berg

Growing up in the 60's and 70's I never heard of Gertrude Berg. Her show was probably off the air before I was born. But thanks to JLTV and a CPTV documentary she and her stories live on.

Thoughts on Flem and Uriah after Reading Klosterman and Hearing Ward

An idea for an Essay:

I saw Jesmyn Ward on Book TV reading from Men We Reaped.  She was reading toward the end of the book, about the temptation to slash her wrists and the fear of doing it. Then she conceived a preventive measure: She tattooed her brother’s signature on each wrist because she’d never be able to cut through her brother’s writing. I didn’t think I ever heard of her before and thought I should have, so I Googled her up and read the New York Times review of her memoir.

There was a paragraph in it to the effect that her stories make clear how and why young black men in the South turn to drugs, alcohol, promiscuity and suicide, abusing their women because young black men are powerless everywhere but in the home –and I don’t like this kind of generalization, but the situation probably wasn’t much different for many of the young white men I grew up with: a sense of powerlessness, an inability to imagine a positive future. Hasn’t that always been the young man’s plight, to feel powerless? Maybe it’s the need to feel empowered at any cost before it’s time that’s the root of certain social ills. And that got me to thinking about some of the unhappy young men I’ve encountered in literature and the way their authors treat them, and the way I as a reader, and presumably other readers, have come to regard them.

I can almost understand why Uriah Heep does what he does in David Copperfield, why he feels powerless: He looks like some hideous alien life form. At least most young men, black or white, have friends. All Heep has is his mother. He’s in a situation that time isn’t likely to heal unless he resigns himself to the company of others like himself. But he’s in love with the boss’s daughter. Not a very promising mindset. He could numb his pain with drugs, alcohol or self-abuse, but he chooses theft instead. He feigns humility, inveigles his way into the trust of his alcoholic boss, and proceeds to embezzle the old man dry. From what I can see, Dickens has no more regard for Heep’s dreams of love, friendship and respectability than the cast of characters who find him out and bring him to bay. Copperfield himself repeatedly refers to Heep’s love for Agnes in terms that reveal it as something disgusting and inappropriate. Maybe it’s because Scrooge and Fagan are old sexless villains that we’re afforded at least a modicum of sympathy, but even Bill Sykes is allowed to help put out a fire and so earn a sliver of sympathy before falling to his death.

By the middle of the 20^th Century, things have not changed all that much. I wrote a paper in grad school arguing that Faulkner quietly subverts the reader into feeling sympathetic toward Flem Snopes in The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion. I argued that Faulkner does this by showing Flem through everybody’s eyes but his own.  All the good citizens of Frenchman’s Bend, Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County have nothing but contempt for anything Snopes. And even Snopeses, the lowest of the low, are disdainful of their cousin Flem. Much of it might be jealousy. Flem achieves a level of financial success they can only dream about. Uriah Heep would be writhing in envy.

To the extent that I stand by my thesis with respect to Flem, I do so based on Faulkner’s presenting the Snopeses as part of a post-Civil War phenomena whereby white trash sharecroppers see the erstwhile superior middle class and Southern aristocracy brought down to a level where they can economically and socially rub elbows with them.  And isn’t it just too bad that Flem Snopes turns out to be a better businessman than any of them, shrewdly selling the loquacious Ratliff and all the yeoman yokels –who should certainly know better, horses they can’t even catch, let alone tame. And wouldn’t you know it, weep Uriah Heep, Flem actually marries the boss’s daughter, the Helen of Troy of the South.

I can just hear Dickens rolling over in his grave. Flem doesn’t love her, she's pregnant with someone else's kid, and Flem is nothing to Eula. He’s not revoltingly ugly like Uriah, but a plain-looking loner with zero libido, while she’s this doomed tragic goddess. At any rate it isn’t long before Flem’s running the county. Heep’s dream come true. But guess what: Flem’s as isolated as ever. Asocial and asexual, he sits alone in his mansion waiting for his crazy cousin to come end the monotony.

 So how different are Flem and Uriah? Phlegmatic Flem is never fawning.  He has no need of humbling himself before his betters; to him the only thing that makes them better is money. Bloodline and social grace are irrelevant, like the old plantation system.  But this doesn’t give him an advantage. The only advantage he has is that he does it all himself. Heep’s big mistake is thinking he can hire someone to do his dirty work: the luckless Micawber, who turns him in. I recollect no such hireling in the Snopes trilogy. And yet one comes away from these novels with the distinct sense that one reason Snopes succeeds is that Faulkner wants him to. This is the story Faulkner wants to tell. And while he may not be interested in garnering sympathy for this devil, he does grant him a certain amount of personal dignity. He leaves the door open for readers who are so inclined to see Flem as universally maligned, not for being criminal, but for being socially isolated, inept and indifferent, for playing by the regulations of free market capital and nothing else. There may not be much going on in Flem’s mind beyond financial calculation, but he’s harmless as a villain. His victims are mostly victims of their own greed.  

So what does this have to do with social ills fostered by the socio-economic impotence of youth? Maybe this is something Chuck Klosterman can sort out in some future edition of I Wear the Black Hat. He does an interesting job in that book exploring how and why we see some malefactors as evil and others as folk heroes. Neither Flem nor Uriah drinks or beats women and children. Still, suck-ups and loners make us uncomfortable. We might say we understand what motivates them, but not as much as we understand what drives young people to abuse themselves and their spouses, because these latter behaviors are the crimes and bad habits of passion, driven by frustrated blood and emotion, the sort of behaviors so many of us, though we may be happy to forget it, engaged in back in the good old days when we ourselves were young. 

On the Road

I remember feeling impatient and disappointed reading the book many years ago. It didn't seem to live up to its reputation. Last week I rented the recent film version, which played in our local art-movie house for about a week. It seemed a bit slow in spots, but the acting, cinematography and music were excellent. A great story about crazy friendship and being young. Made me want to revisit the book.

Arguably by Christopher Hitchens

A collection of essays of uncompromising intellectual clarity and honesty. I listened to the audio, then bought myself a hard copy --it was so good I couldn't believe my ears.

The Fight for Abundance

I recently had an invigorating vision of the future. This came as a result of my encounter with Abundance by Peter Diamandis and Steven Cotler. By rights I should be too old at 57 for wide eyed optimism, but the authors have marshaled their arguments so convincingly, from the broad outlines of global infrastructures to the nanoscopic gadgets that will soon rebuild broken body parts, that one is as much compelled to jump on the bandwagon as to look for ways to break the spell. In no time I was showing high school students You Tube clips of people printing wrenches and building their own drones, recommending the book to friends and colleagues, haranguing my wife with all I’d just learned of the singularity that would transform the world in the next twenty years.

I knew I had to be careful: There’s not much value in being easily impressed. Abundance prints an invigorating picture, but some problems lie beyond the scope of its discussion. For example, the work that needs to be done requires engineering skills many humans have no interest in acquiring. What happens when the unemployed billion can’t find anything to do with all the leisure abundance will afford?  What’s to keep us from winding up like Star Trek’s Borg –a real possibility when people have internet access implanted in their brains, an eventuality the authors wholeheartedly embrace? How long before we become the human batteries powering the matrix? And won’t considerations such as these inspire anti-evolutionary fundamentalist conservatives to even greater acts of rage and sabotage?    

Well, there’s a lot to be done. This is a fight where if we win we win big and if we lose we lose it all. Diamandis and Cotler say it’s a fight we can win. Sticking with the amygdale-serving negativity of assault rifles, government gridlock, incarceration nation, zombie Apocalypse, CNN and fiscal austerity is more than a little like paying attention to the wrong kind of news and not having the faintest clue as to what’s needed to solve problems.

I’m going to continue monitoring our progress toward the singularity because the very idea of it excites me. It flies in the face of Biblical warnings about the Tower of Babel, the acceptance of suffering, and the poor will always be with us. For that reason alone I think it’s pretty damned daring. I’ll bring it to the students in my classes and scatter it here and there on the internet. I’ll take care of myself so I can be around to see it through.