While I'm at it...

I'm up late due to a surfeit of sleep today. Besides rising late I took a long nap after lunch. This morning I took Frieda to the beach with my coworker, Lisa, and her friends John and Yosh. The dogs had a great time, though I think Frieda overdid it, her hip is sore and being a crybaby, she's acting incredibly put out about it. Me, I feel gritty - there's easily a pound of sand down my shirt.

This last week was busy. Summer is usually slow around university campuses, but I've got some ongoing projects to slog through. Adding insult to injury, I was also hormonal as hell and that tends to suck my energy away. And make me weep uncontrollably. Nonetheless, I had a productive week, poetically speaking, as I entered out an assload of poems into some contests. (Assload: that would be more than "a fucking lot," though considerably less than "goddamn horrifically vast.")

I'm a little disappointed that we don't have any summer vacation plans - all of our travel is happening this fall. Pairing that with my heavy workload makes me feel a little overwhelmed. I'm also bummed that the solstice is behind us - now we start losing daylight. I realize this happens incrementally, but I mourn the loss of sunlight anyway.

We were watching the first of Frontline's two-part series Bush's War tonight. You know, some light, weekend entertainment. It's both impressive and angering at the same time - the horrible march toward war where almost every player in the administration bowed to the whims of fucking Cheney. It's a finely crafted outline with amazing photos and moving interviews. One realizes, watching CIA and Pentagon officials sit and spill their guts out, that these people were burned badly enough to participate in this documentary. These aren't people who would generally run to the media and let loose - they're truly appalled enough by the adminstration's actions to come out 7 years later and tell their stories. Part two begins with the first attack on Baghdad, the actual start of the aggression. As Navin Johnson said in The Jerk: "Roll the ugliness."

Wouldn't Navin be a great name for a cat? I think it would.

Sean's stepdad has been scanning Sean's baby pictures this week (a fucking lot of them) and many of them are unspeakably cute. This is my favorite:

Self-Indulgence

I'm working on this new poem - this is my first draft, after several rough drafts. My process is to write it out long-hand several times over, modifying it until I feel it is "done" enough to bother typing. How do I know when it's ready? I don't mind reading it. I worry that this poem is a bit inaccessible. I showed it to my friend Brian and he seemed to feel it was a bit hard to enter. I don't mind this - it's a hard balance for me to strike, saying what I want to say, how I want to say it, but also allowing some of it to get through to the reader. I don't want to play to an audience, but it would be nice if they caught my general gist.

I think it needs to be expanded outward. There's more to say, although I'm tempted to let it be for a while.

Letterhead

Should we call me a cat’s toy or
tired mouse? That’s not quite
it – a double-breasted bauble
a mailbox slit rammed with
letters, outgoing notes unread. We
won’t extend one finger,
unfurl a knuckle inside the crease
split a jagged line – not for old
time’s sake or even a bubble of gas,
a laugh. We, flurry of loose’d pages
a sigh, leaves that never hit
the ground. We boats sink
paper melts from our mouth.
We are the page, slicing
each pad of the fingers I own.
I the whole hand, cup
at the sea, open.

Best. Snowglobes. Ever.

From the brilliant minds of Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz

More reasons to hate rampant hormones

Number 683: They make you weep all morning, listening to NPR's merciless procession of maudlin story after maudlin story - people losing everything in the midwest flooding, the joy of same-sex weddings in California, a human interest piece on a blogger with a cancerous brain tumors, 1,000 wildfires in Northern Cali, anything Bush says about anything, rednecks complaining that Obama is Muslim and therefore un-voteworthy, and squealing robot baby seals employed to cheer up nursing home residents.

Machiavelli good, bunny cookies better

That to use the term "Machiavellian" is a bit of a misnomer. Machiavelli himself was not a bad guy, he just wrote a book about tactics employed by other bad guys (namely the rulers of his time, such as the Medici family) - it was reportage, not a personal dogma. According to Rushdie, Machiavelli was the life of the party in Florence and when he was exiled was sorely missed. As a playwright, he wrote the biggest comedy of the Medieval period, The Mandrake, a satire that dramatizes principles from The Prince.

So, if anyone refers to you as Machiavellian, say grazie.

Another cool bit of Italian history (as reported by Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love) is that the Italian language as we know is based on the dialect used by the poet Dante Alighieri. Back in the day, Italians used disparate, local dialects until a committee of sorts, decided that the country needed to be unified, in part to keep the country from ripping apart due to feudal scrimmages. They wisely settled on Dante's version of Italian because, well, his poetry made a successful case for the beauty and ease of it's particular language.

Anyway, all is well here. Sean is home, happily setting up our shiny new iMac and hopefully shifting our files over safely from our poor, overwrought Vaio laptop. I'm feeling bloated and crappy, but I think the Midol is kicking in (three cheers for multi-symptom medication!).

Last night my wonderful friend and colleague, Lisa, invited me over for homemade vegetable soup, which was a very appealing alternative to hanging around the office until 9:00 for Sean to get out of class. We played with her dogs and her husband, Ted, went out and bought us soft-served ice cream with organic graham bunny cookies to sprinkle on top. Rather fortuitously, Sean's web design class turned out to be a bust - he has already learned what the syllabus has planned for the last week of class, so our Tuesday nights are once again free and clear.

This good news in: just heard from Derick, my thesis advisor, among other roles, that he is going to visiting us in November, as part of his book tour for his new poetry tome Never Night - which you are going to run right out and buy, right? Can't fucking wait to see him.


Derick, reading poetries

The Cunning Linguist: Remembering George Carlin's Literary Genuis by Marty Beckerman

Every obituary for George Carlin will cite his "Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV" routine in the first paragraph, if not the first sentence. The monologue led to Carlin's arrest and a 1978 Supreme Court obscenity case. (Carlin admitted that he was "perversely...proud of" the federal legal drama that his dirty words caused.)

But Carlin's comedy was not simply about dirty words; it was about the English language, and our collective fear of it. He used more expletives than Howard Stern, but his obsession was linguistics, not lasciviousness. As Carlin told CNN in 2004, "[I]f I hadn't chosen the career of being a performer, I think linguistics would have been a natural area that I'd have loved-to teach it, probably...Language has always fascinated me."

He was especially fascinated with the blunting of language for comfort's sake. Carlin ridiculed our watering-down of sexual descriptions and ethnic categories, not to mention our mourning clichés, all of which he believed were the real-life manifestations of George Orwell's "Newspeak," utilized to obscure reality, numb the mind, and discourage criticism. As much as Carlin loathed theology, war, greed, and hypersensitivity, he was most disgusted when religous puritans, the military, corporations, and P.C. "classroom liberals" mangled the language for the purpose of soothing the masses. When I saw Carlin perform in the ‘90s, the biggest laugh of the night came from his observation that "the unlikely event of a water landing," discussed in every preflight safety lecture, sounds suspiciously like "crashing into the fucking ocean."

In fact, Carlin was disgusted with the mangling of English for any reason. He hated anyone who pronounced forte as "for-tay," insisted that "no comment is a comment," and advised us that "unique needs no modifier; very unique, quite unique, more unique, real unique, fairly unique, and extremely unique are wrong and they mark you as dumb, although certainly not unique." For all of his lifelong ranting against conservatism, Carlin was a diehard traditionalist when it came to grammar and vocabulary.

This mastery of the language allowed Carlin to craft his puns ("Soft rock music isn't rock, and it ain't music...it's just soft," "I thought it would be nice to get a job at a duty-free shop, but it doesn't sound like there's a whole lot to do in a place like that"), but also gave him the ability to see how we pad our existences with pleasant lies. In Carlin's mind, language should not be safe, and neither should life. Children, he argued in his final HBO special, this year's It's Bad for Ya, should play with sticks, not have "play dates" under the ever-watchful eyes of overprotective, micro-managing parents. (He had previously complained, with his trademark growl, "We've taken all the fun out of childhood just in the interest of saving a few lives.")

Near the end of his career, Carlin was more bitter than funny—It's Bad for Ya is a righteous tirade that provokes more nods than laughs—but he never lost his unparalleled ability to play with words. He deconstructed the phrases that we use absentmindedly, exposing our hypocrisies—and our human condition—in the process. He was a comic genius because he was a linguistic master. As Carlin said in his most famous routine: "I thank you for hearing my words... They're my work, they're my play, they're my passion. Words are all we have, really."

Marty Beckerman is the author of Dumbocracy, which will be released this September. His website is www.MartyBeckerman.com

Burn baby, burn - Brisbane Inferno

Last night our mountain was on fire. We live on a slope of Mount San Bruno, which lies just south of San Francisco, and the area above us burned like crazy last night. It didn't even come close to threatening our house, but it was pretty smoky and noisy, what with all the sirens and helicopters. An eventful in night in what is normally a pretty quiet redneck town. When Sean took Frieda out for a walk this morning he had to endure several conversations about it from our thoroughly freaked out neighbors. It's contained now, and no homes were destroyed.

Here's some cool pictures

The first one is the view of the smoke from what looks like the other side of the bay and the second is taken from across town. Pretty dramatic.

In other exciting news, Sean and I are gearing up to buy a fancy new iMac. His laptop, as lovely as it is, is dying. The fan runs continuously and about every 6 months or so it eats part of our iTunes library. We can get a discontinued model and with educational discount at Stanford's bookstore, so tomorrow we're taking the plunge. I'm never happy to plunk down a grand on much of anything, and I could probably get a hand-me-down iMac from work, but we have the cash to cover it and Sean's been looking forward to one for years.