Ali Sends Christmas Greetings

Strange things sometimes happen when I leave my computer on overnight. To see how they started go here. Message is printed exactly as received.

hello
it is ali the cockroach again
i have come to wish you merry xmas
you should not be surprised i do this
we insects judge human holidays
by the quality of scraps on the floor
and yours are excellent
much better than anything that guy in the red suit could have brought
you should not be so careful
about keeping them on your plate
lighten up joy to the world
anyway humans and cockroaches
are not on the same page theologically
the only divine command ever given to us cockroaches
was spoken by the mouth of noah
he told us to go forth and multiply
I think you would agree
we have obeyed extraordinarily well
as to what you humans were commanded
and through whom
and how well you have obeyed
you will have to work that out among yourselves
but if you get too funny about it
we will throw a funeral banquet in your honor
just like we did with the dinosaurs

now i hate to bring this up
but it is really disturbing me
you do not believe that i can remember all my past lives
do not deny it i can feel your skepticism
we bugs do not have feelers for nothing
you are envisioning me as a human soul
with a couple cockroach incarnations
but the truth is i am a cockroach soul
with a few human incarnations
and i have already forgotten more than you will ever remember
but have it your way
i did not really live all those lives
i am just remembering their memories
maybe they are remembering mine
this is certainly possible
but apart from some metaphysical speculations
on the nature of the soul
from which allah preserve me
what besides those memories
makes that guy him and me me question mark
now i know what makes me me in this life
it is good food like your xmas dinner scraps
you have been blessed by allah
to have such a good cook for a wife exclamation point
yes that is a hint you should drop more on the floor
if allah dislikes a man
he sends him a wife who can cook but wont
if he really hates him
he sends him one who cant cook but does
but it is different with this soul business
maybe me and some other guy
are both remembering the same memories
like 2 people reading the same book
that is an interesting thought
i wonder if anybody in the hereafter
would buy a copy of my memories
i wonder even more
how much i should charge for them
and in what currency i could be paid
oh my
when i take a dump in your newspaper again
i promise
it will not be in the financial section

-- posted December 26, 2007

Ali Explains It All

Following up on the strange message posted on my computer (to see what it was go here), I typed in the following question and left the computer on overnight. Everything is printed exactly as received.

Ali --
As you are a fellow writer I promise not to whack you, poison you, or do anything else to shorten your life. I can and will make no such promises on behalf of the cat. But I am puzzled. From poet to cockroach may not be too great a stretch (I've known a couple poets), but from poet -- or even cockroach-poet -- to suicide bomber? That seems a little extreme even over two lifetimes. Maybe you can explain how this is possible.

well i will certainly try
bismillah al rahman al rahim
in the name of god the compassionate and merciful
they are actually not that different
a poet has a vision of life
that he wants to put into words
and words were not invented for this purpose
speech was made for plotting murder and mayhem
on those guys across the border
for haggling over prices in the marketplace
and making propositions to the opposite sex
but this does not stop the poet
he highjacks the airplane of language
and ignores the innocent bystanders that are the other parts of his life
trivial and unimportant things like wife and children and job
he flies straight toward his goal
if he can not reach it
often enough he plows into the skyscraper of his own life
he is not really destructive
he just got in his own way
the suicide bomber also has a vision
but he will accept no artistic substitute
he wants to render his vision in real life
now men are in certain respects more malleable than words
hit a man with a word often enough
and it is the man who will change
and your advertising agencies know this very well
but even so the bombers vision has no chance
he is as bad off as the poet
and will likewise not be stopped
he is not really destructive either
he would rather do battle with capital e evil
but all he can see around him are buildings
and innocent bystanders
now allah is the creator
and would never interfere with the creative process
but he is a very severe critic
he knows how to bring creation out of destruction
but we his creatures are not able to do this
be we humans or even cockroaches
altho i once met some fungi
who claimed they had the secret
i did not stick around to find out
get your mycelia off of me i yelled
and got the hell out of there

this is where the vers libre has something to offer the world
vers libre does not try to impose a vision on reality
and speaking strictly as a cockroach
that is something both americans and muslims need to learn
it lets the natural order of the world
flow unchanged into the poem
this is much easier on the poet
and especially on those around him
i will show you what i mean
in one of my past lives i was a renaissance fencing master
i was on first name terms with petrarch
but not dante tho i met him once
i knew even then what the bastard was about
i handled it subtly however
i just put my hand on my sword hilt
and said
you put me in hell
and i ll put you in hell
with petrarch it was different
we were both after the same girl
and she was a beauty
as hot as any of your italian movie divas
now petrarch started with all the advantages
but he wanted to write her a love sonnet
and her name had the wrong number of syllables
and the accent in the wrong place
and didn't rhyme with anything respectable
he was still working on it two years later
she got tired of waiting
and said yes to me
and it was the worst decision of my life
she ate so much at the wedding reception she threw up
and it was all avoirdupois and yet more dupois from there
on top of which she was a lousy cook
wouldnt keep house
and wasnt even good in the one place
where youd think she had to be good
in desperation i challenged the best swordsman in italy
to a duel
i even gave him a run for his money
for about 30 seconds
but he had earned his reputation
and i died with a smile on my lips

now i do not mean to say
that if petrarch had been a vers libre poet
he would have gotten the girl instead of me
she was my kismet it was written from before the beginning
or so it is written
please do not try to argue with me about this
anyway you cannot win an argument with a predestinationist
unless of course it is predestined
yes if petrarch had written vers libre
his poem would have been done in time
and being petrarch it would have been wonderful
but what she loved was artificiality
the artificiality of renaissance sonnets or the artificiality of italian fencing
she would have turned him down immediately
and gone to me even sooner
but petrarch would have had his fair shot
and gotten over it much easier
and not been such an imposition on centuries of italian schoolboys
i hope this makes everything clear
because the odor of your leftovers is too strong to resist
but if i am leaving my work unfinished for my appetites
ask yourself if i do it as a cockroach
or a poet

--posted 11 Sept 2007

Ali Introduces Himself

I inadvertently left the computer on one night and found the following message on it next morning. I reprint it exactly as received. As to its provenance I can say only: a) I have never been known to sleepwalk, and b) I observed the cat making determined efforts to reach something under the refrigerator yesterday.

hello
i am back tho you wont recognize me
i am ali the cockroach
i used to have another name but will not mention it
being a literary insect one has to be careful
and lawyers stomp harder than anybody else
anyway i had been a vers libre poet
who died and woke up as a cockroach
talk about devastating literary criticism
i did not let it stop me
i became a famous newspaper columnist
by jumping onto the keys of this reporters typewriter
back in the twenties and thirties
he was a great guy but i will not name him either
well here i am again
a couple incarnations later
youd think i would have had enough of this sort of thing
but they say printers ink gets in your blood
so let me say first of all
i think progress is great
your computer keyboard is so sensitive
all i have to do is hop on the letters
it beats the hell out of the headfirst dives
i had to make onto the keys of that old typewriter
thank you for leaving the wpprogram on overnight
as i am obviously not up to mouse clicks

you are probably wondering
what happened to me and where i have been
well the plain truth is
i was stepped on by some ignorant yahoo
who did not know what a famous cockroach i had become
i awoke somewhat later as a little boy in the middle east
i hated america and americans
but never knew why because you humans dont remember your previous lives
i cheered your 911
and became a suicide bomber myself
it is no way to spend the rest of your life
but at least you dont have to worry about what to do for an encore
as to what happened in the hereafter i will not get into that
nobody wants to hear theology
especially from a cockroach
suffice it to say
it was not exactly what i had been taught to expect
and generally goes on a very long time
i dont know why i am here instead of still there
maybe one of the diesel dykes they passed out instead of virgins
had pity on me

after that i was a late term abortion
three times
the first was by what you people cannot agree to call partial birth abortion
it was relatively painless
but relatively is a relative word
by the second time you had outlawed the procedure
so i was cut up still in the womb
i do not know whether i was supposed to be dead or anesthetized at that point
but if so they botched the job
the third time was the worst
i was only one or two days from being born
they stuck a needle full of poison into me
while my mother screamed and screamed
she did not want to get rid of me
this was not an operation gone wrong
it was some damned chinese bureaucrat
trying to make his birth control quota

i am sorry to give you all these gory details
i know they will upset you
but it has made a very deep impression on me
and i am no longer the happygolucky cockroach i once was
for which allah be thanked
i think
and anyway this is nothing compared to what you humans
do to us cockroaches every day
and nobody gets upset by it
but if you want to survive as a species
you are going to have to do something about this abortion business
i realize this advice will not be well received
as we cockroaches have a very different attitude toward birth control
and i certainly do not want
any woman to carry a baby she does not want
i have been that baby
not once but twice
and it is not good for anybody
but you are disturbing the psychic understratum
that ties all human life together
if you do not understand that concept read the works of karl jung
he doesnt understand it either
it is scaring all the babies
and too many are getting themselves born way too early

i tell you this with some trepidation
i certainly dont believe in violence anymore
especially considering our size difference
and i would never be a suicide cockroach
i leave that for the ants and bees
and for all i know my teachers hatred of you
did not have any better basis than mine did
besides after going through the torments of hell
and being aborted three times
i hope you would think
that i have been punished enough
but some people always want to add to others suffering
my suicide bomb instructor was like that
so maybe you will want to squish me
because i was once a suicide bomber
maybe you will anyway
there is not a lot of love lost between our species
we are too much alike
just please remember
that allah loves the compassionate and merciful
i ask only this
that if you are determined to try to whack me
please do not do it with a made in china
flyswatter

-- posted 29 July 2007

to find out about archy and mehitabel and their creator Don Marquis go here

ASPAR HAEUSER stuck out his thumb on the turnpike: he was heading West in hope and anxiety. Somewhere in his head, a small voice which seemed to remember the future told him that this was happening at a time when such things remained possible, a time when his name was still Kaspar Haeuser although he did not yet recognize it. The weather was beautiful, almost a dream, though the warmth of the sun on his face was real enough: as were also the lines of the cars, straightforward and bold like the country that made them, and answering to no forces but engineering and the all-pervasive drive for profit.

The right-turn signal of the Ford flatbed blinked as it headed for the shoulder. As it passed him his eyes met female eyes, large, laughing, framed in raven hair that fell around a collar open two buttons more than the propriety of the time approved. But it was a retrojection from a later Jackson Browne song; he ran toward the semi and climbed up the ladder into the cabin. He couldn't read the writing on the trailer, and the driver's features were strangely blurred. He was in that singular state where he dreamed, knew he was dreaming, and yet continued to dream. He decided to take conscious control, glared at the driver and willed the return of the girl in the flatbed, but everything began to dissolve.

Your hands, he thought, look at your hands! He held them up and did. He knew them, after all, like the back of his hand. But they were different. They were wet smooth froggy green, unbroken by so much as a fingernail: grew lizard-like scales and claws, which morphed into alligator leather, then sprouted thick hair, most of which dropped off seconds later. But it wasn't so much a Castañeda lucid-dreaming exercise as his eyes still full of sleep trying to focus. And all in vain: the dark line before his eyes was not the border of the windshield but his bedframe; the cat, not a lover, was playing with his hair.

Or was he only dreaming that he was waking up?

*****

What if the language had no words for "what if?" What if the subjunctive mood "was" abolished? A lot of useless and counterproductive stemwinding might be avoided. What if I won the lottery? Put some money aside, dammit! What if magic were real? Back on the dole, J.K.!

But that kind of daydreaming was of the very essence of science. What if you could ride on a light beam, thought young Einstein, and went on from there. Why assume the process was done? What if neutrinos had "nonzero" mass? Or woolier: what if the force of gravity did not fall off exactly as the square of the distance over very long intervals (a possible explanation for the Pioneer anomaly)? What if "dark matter" pervaded the outer solar system (another explanation for the anomaly)? What if every Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, invented to demonstrate the absurdity of quantum theory, were as true as the quantum-mechanical universe itself? And dipping into uselessness for a minute, what if … entities … somewhere or when in this many-worlds-explanation Multiverse had discovered how to use them for power and transportation?

And why leave the social sciences out? What if liberty, equality, democracy, the rule of law, civil society, were all just "epiphenomena" of Western society in a period of expansion, and must inevitably vanish (or more likely, morph into their opposites while retaining their original names) as that society entered a phase of stagnation/contraction?

What if a long-term equality of the sexes were impossible, that the measures taken to bring women to a position of equality in one generation must inevitably lead to their superiority in the following?

What if similar considerations applied to State toleration of homosexuality?

And as if he didn't already have enough people mad at him, what if there were differences, subtle but still statistically significant after averaging out enormous individual variations and compensating for differences of class and culture, in the way the different races of mankind thought, valued, organized themselves?

What if all those questions were meaningless and the only one that mattered was this: can any society, whatever its initial military and economic advantages, which produces few children and does not teach them to honor its core values, maintain itself against one that has lots of kids and does?

What if God…

*****

Enough. He was awake, and no amount of attempts at self-mazement would bring back sleep, let alone his dream; and literarizing his random morning thoughts into a third-rate imitation of Lila (itself a third-rate sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) wasn't going to help either. He should write a book, Zen and the Art of Writing 'Zen and the Art of' Books. Like so many Sixties bands, the title would be better than the contents. Verzeihen Sie mich, Eugen Herrigel…

But it had been a vivid dream, and a particularly troubling period of his life. In addition to the universal Sturm und Drang of youth, there had been the overriding question of what are you going to do? He had fallen into, more than chosen, his final answer to that question, but he knew it had never been easy. It had, in fact, been a continuing fascination of writers at least since Goethe had sent his Wilhelm Meister out on a wandering apprenticeship. But of everything he had ever read, before during or after, on the subject, the least helpful was The Catcher in the Rye.

Granted, it was a book he loved to hate. It was, ultimately, about nothing - two generations before Seinfeld! - and Salinger himself was a bloated spider of a Humbert Humbert, letting young women of literary aspirations bathe in his great-author darshan for the usual and immemorial price of their young bodies. Somebody - his little sister, of all people - asks the spoiled-rotten preppie narrator Holden Caulfield what he wants to do with his life, and, in a flipped-off answer which somehow becomes the title of the book, he replies that he'd like to be a "catcher in the rye," someone who stood in a field and ran to catch the playing children before they got too close to the cliff.

Now fairy tales were full of boys who wanted to become dragon-slayers, and Alonso Quixano rode off to be a knight-errant. But Alonso was crazy, and the boys' world was a fantasy one: here, though, was tale of a supposedly sane young man in our actual world who wanted to do work which in that world is done by a fence.

Now Kaspar, at the height of his Haeuserness, had wanted to be a rock musician, a mad enough ambition in itself but technically possible: such people did exist. And it was a dream toward which one could work: he spent long hours practicing his guitar, finding kindred spirits, jamming with them. He learned how to lead and how to accompany, how to turn his amorphous conceptions into hard actual notes and expose them to the unpitying glare of peer judgement, how to put together a band and even land a few gigs. One could argue (though he never thought in those terms) that he learned lessons of far wider application, lessons about business negotiation, setting priorities, time management, working in purpose-driven organizations.

But what preparations could Holden Caulfield make for his career of human fence? Even a would-be dragon slayer, undeterred by the absence of dragons in our world, might yet be drawn toward herpetology, fencing, kendo, perhaps metallurgy.

But the way the world was going, it looked like Salinger might have been onto something. Our children are being threatened by drugs, and the law enforcement fence isn't working, the Coast Guard interdiction fence isn't working, the crop eradication in the Third World fence isn't working. What to do? Call on the services of Holden Caulfield, Drug Counselor!

Our children are arguably being damaged by the popular culture. There's certainly no lack of people wanting to build fences, but also plenty of others, driving a mixed team of free speech and copyright-restricted content, determined that no such fences will ever be built: and so far, they've carried the day in court. Welcome Holden Caulfield, Psychologist! He can help you to deal with anything except dispensing with his services.

Our children are definitely being damaged by the wide availability of guns: and once again, no shortage of pro- or anti-fencers. Nothing to be done for the dead, of course, except by professions too heavily infused with formaldehyde or religion for preppie Holden to want to soil his hands with; but for the survivors, here's Mr. Caulfield, your Physical Therapist.

Our children are being injured by the breakup of their parents' marriages. Hard to even imagine a fence here, so call on Counselor Caulfield again.

Our children are suffering from an overabundance of Holden Caulfield types in their lives…

Amazingly, even the required-reading mavens had recognized that danger, and prescribed as counterweight the totally dissimilar To Kill a Mockingbird, a book so suffused with sense of place that, were a tree to write, it couldn't convey it more strongly. It was a world where people could take walks in the evening and talk to neighbors on front porches, a world where all the characters and their families were known back three generations or even longer - a world, in short, with which Kaspar and everyone he knew had less in common than with the 170-year-old floating misery of dickensian London. And yet it was a world where things happened, things at once humanly satisfying and politically correct, and which furthermore could never be upset by the author's further writings, as she had abandoned an incredibly promising beginning to become Truman Capote's fag hag…

*****

A hundred metaphors wept and dissolved sugarlike in their own tears. A flower of truth bloomed in the one corner inaccessible to the botcameras of the Surveillance State: unobserved, it dropped its petals one by one to feed a fungus of lies. Reality, reality, ran the watchword of a generation whose technology found its most natural expression in the visual representation of dreams. Meanwhile, terrorists hid in plain sight and the weathermen, with an instinct for self-preservation learned from court astrologers, were no better than those of Jesus' era at reading the signs of the times.

Enough of this foolishness, we have a planet to save!

All well and good. But since lifting oneself up by the bootstraps was a manifest impossibility, what that actually meant was: judgements of value are to be made, and what passes the selections and is deemed worthy will be propelled upwards into the sunlight of Preservation as equal and opposite reaction to sending the rest to Hell. And who would make those selections? Why, we will. But he was already sane enough to know that that meant not "us," but rather, "as opposed to you, peon."

A sound blared from horizon to horizon, filling the space between his ears with the solidity of a block of wood. Was it the Last Trumpet, or only the alarm clock?

-- posted June 5,2007

TARING AT a blank screen, the Fool (another name for Writer) sat at his keyboard. In the old (=precomputer) days, his chair would be surrounded by pieces of crumpled paper: now, one typed, one edited, one saved alternate versions, but when the time finally came to terminate the session with extreme prejudice, instead of an angry yank and cathartic crumpling one had to be satisfied with an incredibly wimpy Select All=>Delete. He moved his hands away from the keyboard, fighting an urge to slam them down on all the keys at once and fill the screen with gibberish. In those old days one could pound a satisfying fist down on the typewriter keys and raise a pillar of letter-arms just shy of the platen. Annoying, but easily untangleable, and the old typewriters, like old Country wives, seemed to put up with the abuse. Much had changed.

It wasn't as if he didn't have any ideas. He had a ton of them. Read Gibbon, read Thucydides, read the Bible and then read the news, and similar ideas will occur to you: predominantly gloomy and mostly already working themselves out in today's society. But when he put them down in print they somehow seemed merely arrogant, idle bloviating. Who died and made you the expert, man? It was all very well to say, this is the Internet, judge the ideas on their own. But he couldn't believe it himself. There were a hundred valid explanations for why he hadn't gone into academia or the law, and only a few had pictures of dead presidents on them. But again, when set down in black and white they seemed more like excuses. Ideas like his perhaps came into their own as the background for fiction, but it was still the foreground that mattered: things like plot, characterization, dialog, all the areas in which he was weak. Some bloggers avoided the whole problem by detailing the minutia of their everyday lives, "chatting to the sewing basket," as the Germans put it. Nein danke. Besides, his life was so regular he'd have to invent incidents even there. Maybe those others did too. It didn't matter. He'd lived through so many "interesting times" that boredom didn't bore him anymore.

Why would anybody want to be a writer anyway? Once they contented themselves with extravagant praise for that masterpiece of Spanish cruelty Don Quixote: then they began to tell tales and make films about prostitutes who yet retained the ability to love someone or something. Is it possible, even for a writer, to view this as anything other than the writer's comment on his position in society? And now they made novels and comicbooks and movies about vampires, hitmen, creatures in league with the devil himself, who still possessed a generous proportion of the higher sentiments and faculties. What was that screaming about the writer today? And why wasn't anybody listening?

Even as he wrote he knew it was overdramatic and the wrong question. He'd noticed. Undoubtedly others did too. The real questions, once more, were about credibility, that mysterious quality that made the owners of the means of mass information willing to give a's opinions the airtime that enabled even x, y and z to know about them. Once, it was clear who the experts were. But with the forces of Darkness defeated and the power of the atom in their hands, they had overreached, and developed what any ancient Greek theatergoer would recognize as a bad case of hubris. And a tipping-point number of their contemporaries had said in their hearts, You do not speak for me. But instead of finding new voices, or even discovering their own, they had mostly sought anesthesia on the Tube, giving up not only their opinions but even their experience. What would you have us do, he could almost hear the rejoinder, listen to those crazy idiots on the Internet? Why not? he would respond. After all, he was now one himself. But he liked the "idiots," even the young half-incoherent ones. Not content to rip, mix, and burn, they were determined to add their voices to the intellectual Babel of cyberspace, even if what they said was barely better than "Kilroy was here." With no motor but their own sense that something was deeply wrong, with no ideas except others' propaganda, with no vocabulary beyond the Nadsat/Newspeak of Bohemia, they were hanging in there. They'd learn. Maybe they'd even learn something from him. He smiled as the delicious phrase "corrupter of youth" ran through his mind. Good thing they'd abolished punishment by hemlock.

Knock, knock.
Who's there?
I'm from the Political First Church of Literal Genesis, here to invite you to worship with us this week.
I have to work Sundays. Where were you guys when they let that through?
Too busy fighting aid to Catholic schools.

Knock, knock.
Who's there?
We're from the Bureau of Coping Mechanism Interference, here to inform you about new restrictions on smoking.
Why don't you guys just ban the weed outright and be done with it?
Because the wise conqueror will, whenever possible, present his demands to the vanquished in installments.

Knock, knock.
Who's there?
We're the Food Puritans, here to announce new limits on what you can buy in restaurants.
Why don't you and those smoking guys stop trying to tell everybody what to do?
Because the government pays the medicare bill.

Knock, knock.
Who's there?
We're from the Weight Police, Mr. Jones, and we're here to seize your children for being obese.
You've got the wrong address. Jones lives next door.
Quite so. We're here to take yours for being too thin.

The child comes only slowly to consciousness, and he comes with a bag of unrealized possibilities: some contradictory, some in either-or relationships with others, some never to be realized, but in no sense a tabula rasa. And when he speaks, he will speak from the only platform conceivable to him, from his own experience and interests and potentialities. He will speak from it even if he senses that it is not shared, will often continue to speak even when he knows it gets him into trouble, and if he somehow learns early on to shut up it is no sign of superior intelligence or exceptional maturity, but one of his inborn possibilities coming into actualization. Commonly he learns only much later, when the damage is long done and deep. Sometimes, especially in medically-paradigmed times like ours, he may hear a word such as "autism." And this will be a liberation, for it will remove the self-blame from his persecution and the sense of incomprehensible uniqueness from his sufferings. But it may also come as imprisonment, for the odds are good this child has spent years fighting to be regarded as a full member of his society, and to have his thoughts and desires and wishes recognized as legitimate contributions to society's stock of such, to be honored and followed at least some of the time. And he sees that with the removal of guilt comes a label of "patient," and this label debars him from full participation. He is not a legitimate variation of normality and need not be taken seriously about anything except just possibly the inner feel of his own condition. The child rejects this. He brings all his personality to bear on the problem, works out by long experience the psychic equivalent of the blind man's white cane to guide him through his blind spots, cleaves to universal principles, especially in areas where he perceives he has been played for a sucker, distills rules and follows them where his fellows can float and swim in a shifting medium of context. And at the end, he is independent enough and capable enough that he is no longer a Patient.

He is a Fool.

Staring at a blank screen…

-- posted March 16, 2007

YEAR OF THE PIG

THE CHINESE Lunar New Year has come, and it's the Year of the Pig. I would not bother you with this, dear Reader, except for the fact that I myself am a Pig. I've checked it out thoroughly with the calendar and furthermore every woman I've ever been with has told me so at least once. And not only a Pig. The Chinese zodiacal cycle of twelve animals itself has variants based on the ancient conception of five Elements: Earth, Air, Water, Fire and Metal. So I am a Fire Pig, born in a Fire Pig year and finally come around the long long cycle to another.

I am not sure how much any of this means, but I am a sucker for completing-the-circle songs, from old standards like "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" to modern ones like Bruce Springsteen's "Hometown," so you'll pardon me, I hope, my interest here. I am at any rate highly unlikely, just on statistics, to see another, so this will be it for Fire Pig years for me.

Besides the typical Pig traits of stubbornness and loyalty, the Fire Pig is prone to express those in terms of social justice, historical context, and political action. That description fits me to a T (and for whatever it may become worth, Hillary Clinton is a Fire Pig too). Pigs are supposed to be lucky. My bank account would disagree, but just the other night, at the very start of the New Year, I narrowly avoided a serious auto accident. I'll take that kind of luck anyday!

This is not my first brush with the Chinese Zodiac. Way back in the waning months of 1969, I and three other musical dreamers got together in a loud, intense band we named after our lead singer/rhythm guitarist/chief songwriter, a man who went by the name of Jamison Smoothdog. He could scarcely avoid an alias: his real name was Jimmy Hendricks (and no, I am not making this up).

Come February, we all independently realized that the upcoming New Year was the Year of the Dog, and celebrated in our own way. "One billion Chinese can't be wrong!" I told us. And indeed, what success we had - playing our city's big Rock hall a couple times, cutting an album with an independent producer, and some interest from the majors - we had in that year. But the "Dog" was almost impossible to work with, a domineering general who kept his troops' loyalty only by continued victories. Things bogged down and disintegrated.

I did a couple more projects with him in later years, though. He used to laugh at my troubles with my girlfriends. "I don't care who I'm with," he told me, "so I'm always with somebody." And indeed, the women he was "with" were uniformly thin, quiet, drop-dead beauties. The Lost Girls, I called them. Then one year he looked me up and I was surprised to find that he was married, especially as she wasn't that thin or quiet. But he treated her abominably, continued clubbing, and wasn't averse to continued dallying with Lost Girls.

On top of which, he had contracted diabetes and refused to modify his conduct. After you have to throw somebody in your van and rush him home for his wife to give him an insulin shot because he has been so incredibly stupid as to take on a barroom dare and down two tequilas straight, you know that nothing is going to happen no matter how many agents, backers and other assorted personnel he may have gathered for his next stab at the big time.

I found out what happened to him a little while ago. He died alone, at his kitchen table, his insulin and needle before him but unable to reach for them because of insulin shock. He remained there until a neighbor noticed the smell.

I wish ill for no one and would not wish such a death on anyone short of possibly Osama bin Laden. Karmic lessons are screaming here but it's not for us who write to draw them. Appreciate those you're with. Let them know.

But I see that the Fire Pig is about to start grunting socially-politically again. Not this time. Happy New Year. Gung Hee Fat Choi.

--posted Feb. 18, 2007

O wad a pow'r the Regiftie gie us,
To gie agin wha others gie us! -- Bobbi Smoulders

WELL, FRACTAL FANS, it's time for my annual Christmas or post-Christmas rumination. But it won't be about our favorite Artform this time, because, even if just once in the year, I like to get out from behind the monitor and do my creation in three dimensions -- commonly in wood -- for an order of not-yet-totally-screenhypnotized beings in many respects realer than the rest of us -- that is to say, my grandchildren. And my project this year was -- a sled.

Now in the course of almost sixty years I've noticed that words can subtly shift their meanings, that things once universally understood can become impenetrable puzzles. So a short detour is in order. It seems that corporate America wants the people answering the phones in the various departments of its bigbox stores to deliver a long spiel before they're allowed to deal with the person calling them. The employees -- quite rightly, IMHO -- try to get this unappreciated timewaster out of the way in the quickest way possible, and often wind up sounding like they're in a words-per-minute race with the Mexican newscasters on Telemundo. After a particularly extreme and unintelligible example -- delivered by someone whose voice indicated his age as late teens to early twenties -- I asked, "Would you mind repeating that at 33 1/3 instead of 78?"

He didn't have a clue! (and if you don't either, dear Reader, just ask anybody over thirty)

So with that in mind, let me clarify: by sled I mean the old Flexible Flyer type, wood frame, metal runners, lie down and steer it with the crossbar in front; the only snow-toy my or my kids' generations would dignify with that name. Now since I like to fix things up and customize them, I bought an old one last summer at the flea market. Talk about projects! Someone had painted the entire thing pink (!) and the center slats were not in good shape at all. But that was no trouble since I planned to remove them anyway.

But getting all that old paint off was such a horrendous pain that at one point I said to myself, "This is ridiculous. Pride be damned, go out and buy one." And that's when I found out that they were no longer out there to be bought. Hightech newfangled contraptions, yeah. And old classics from eBay. But both only on the Internet, and at prices approaching $100.00. You want something here, now? Plastic and more plastic. Even Flexible Flyer has gone plastic (and sells only from tony catalogs like L.L.Bean).

Well, with that reality check in mind I figured I could work with some pink flakes deep in the woodgrain after all, and finally got it all stained, painted, varnished, and done with not a day to spare. And of course the recipient loves it to pieces. Unfortunately for her we're having the warmest winter in decades here...

Now the point of all this is not to say "see what a good boy am I." (I've been warned by Jack Horner's lawyers not to use the phrase) or even to announce my candidacy for president of the Procrastinators' Union (I'll get around to that later).But there's a couple points I have to make:

First, wood is renewable (we're not talking tropical hardwoods here!) and we have as much iron as we conceivably need. And they're both right here, domestically. Petroleum is needed for fuel (and if we found alternatives we'd still need it for fertilizer) and the use of it helps our enemies. So how, in the name of Christ, the long term, and the United States of America, can we make these Christmas toys from the one instead of the others?

Further: if anything happened to the old sleds (which it very seldom did) Dad or somebody else could fix it. When something goes south on the new (and it will sooner rather than later) there's nothing anyone can do but throw it out and buy another. Duh! Now take out your copies of Brave New World and repeat after me, "Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending..."

Dismiss all this, if you will, as the ranting of an old man out of step with his time. But I've been out of step with it as a young man too, and I won't get into how many times it's been the world that's been proved wrong. So go right ahead. It's almost as good as being called "nigger-lover" by the likes of David Duke..

But just so I won't seem like a total curmudgeon, let me relate a good experience from this time: I heard on the radio a piece from composer Richard Thompson's "Frostiana," a vocal setting of "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening." Everybody's favorite poem from everybody's favorite poet, of course, but -- we need things like this, more than we know. We need poets who can speak to the people and we need composers willing to play Beethoven to those poets' Schiller. But since it was on my car radio that I heard it, it set my mind to wandering. I leave you with the result:

Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening Years Later

The woods stand here as years before,
But now I go by motor car.
The shoulder snow stands hubcap height,
I slow to look; my thoughts run far.

My tires are new, my car runs right,
The wipers clear, the headlamps bright.
All one, to coast in second gear,
Or race toward somewhere half the night.

An angry horn-blast at my rear
Informs me I cannot stop here,
And shatters deep within my mind
The half-formed thoughts of yesteryear.

No chance to seek, still less to find.
How was I made so dumb and blind
By promises I never signed?
By promises I never signed.

--posted December 26, 2006

HE GODDESS of Understanding came to him, after Euterpe had led him into a lonely place and lamed his wrist, after Erato had given him a passion-awakening kiss and then split without so much as a lap dance. She took him up to an exceedingly high place, and showed him things imperceivable to those working closer to the ground. And as a special mark of her favor, she lifted her arms and let him gaze through the thin translucency of her robes, so that things which were not yet became almost visible to his sight.

Then he heard his five-year-old granddaughter speaking learnedly, earnestly, yet completely childishly about matters of which she knew virtually nothing. What have you done to me, Pallas Athena? he cried, but she put her finger to her lips; and already, he could see the snakes wriggling out from beneath her helmet.

He turned quickly, though it plunged him into darkness.

*****

Such a temptation, such a temptation, to think the poetic "he" is "I." But soft! At fifteen, she pricked her finger (and fell into an enchanted sleep). At fifteen, he fingered his prick (and fell from Grace). One less letter, a minor rearrangement of word order, even in both cases a fall. No difference? This country of Dreams is not what it was. It's been industrially harvested, and colonized by video software. Maybe it needs a long Sabbath, a string of closed seasons like the Grand Banks, until its stock of unexpected monsters can recover. Karl Jung was an advisor to Star Wars, Rimbaud long ago assimilated and Morrisonized, and even Dylan Thomas, the last white obviously heterosexual male world-classer of English-speaking poetry, has been dead some fifty years and, despite his behavior with the coeds, is become Required Reading. Ginsberg is surely next, unless his place be taken by a black woman, of whom half a dozen could be offered as candidates. Only arrant Nazis could be sure of escaping this fate; but they're all terrible writers, which may speak ground truth more loudly than a slew of self-interested sermons on the unity of humankind.

*****

Hello, hello.
Go away.
But you are my parents.
Go away, you never call.

But when he was young enough to reasonably expect something from them, he called every day, but it was not recognized.

Let me speak to you of what I learned in school today.
We've had as much of that as we wanted to go through. Shut up.
Then I will speak of what I have gathered from the books you bought me.
If we wanted to know, we'd read them ourselves. Shut up.
Then I will speak to you my creations, my poems and stories, the first fruits of my brain.
Unfortunately that's not important. Shut up.
Then I will speak to you of how I perceive this world, though the standards and the moral values which you taught me.
Shut UP!

The old Mafiosi lived by omertá, the code of silence. They had much to say, but the world was full of enemies. So one kept silent, and if it ate him up inside it did not matter, for the world saw him as a man. But some strange inversion had possessed this yet stranger Stranger, for he would unbendingly seek to validate his manhood and yet babble and babble and babble, which real men do not do. He was careful with his words, choosing and arranging them informed by a not inconsiderable talent, but his essence shone through all his masks and the world saw him as a fool. Perhaps he preferred that to not being seen at all. Perhaps, in a lunatic recension of cogito ergo sum, he feared that if he did not speak, he would not be.

We can solve your husband's problems with this treatment, Madame. One injection, and he will no longer babble. He will speak only in need or when spoken to, and that sparingly. And, since he will not be forever planning what to say, he may even listen to you better.
But will he be happier? What will happen to his creativity? Will he still have that wonderful sense of humor?
Madame! Are we here to solve a problem or to discuss Philosophy?

When I was young they told me I was inoculated with a phonograph needle.
What's a phonograph, Granddad?

Hello, hello.
We told you go away.
Mother, Father, I know it is quite late, but I've solved my problem. I can speak, and also be silent. I can converse, and also listen, and I think I have much to hear.
Go away. You never call.

******

The Talkaholic looked up from his study of foreign languages. On the television a battle was going on for control of the language, and it wasn't just about painting this word or that white or black. Nineteen faces on a police blotter: here, terrorists; there, martyrs; but their organismic and organizational boundaries were the same in any case, as was their status: dead men. But Stop the Invasion is not Diversity is not Guest Worker Program is not Union Busting, not by a long stretch, and all the efforts of the talking heads to shout the discussion crossgrain through their opponents' realitymaps only emphasized that fact. But the Talkaholic was very knowledgeable about words, both in Intoxication and in Recovery, and he knew the slippery relativism of them all, especially those last two. One strove, and cared beyond caring, but in the end it was another sort of Will deciding things. Man proposes, but God disposes. Que sera sera. What does it mean to want something so much that you cannot allow yourself to have it? And now it was others who were babbling, not just in a small discussion but on national TV, and it was clear to him that none of these people had ever been anywhere near Pallas Athena. Once he would have stood up and shouted uselessly at the screen. Now he smiled, a smile full of Schadenfreude, and went back to his studies.

******

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Ich bin Arbeiter.
Kraut, huh? C'mon in, we can use you. But leave your language and memory at the door.
Mir egal. I pledge allegiance to the flag

Knock knock.
Who's there?
I be out here over three hundred years, let me in!
Spook. Jigaboo. Get back.
Your words cannot scare me, honkey whitebread. And besides, we are brothers in no merely abstract sense, for your father had a roving eye and our women are very beautiful to look upon.
I'd never know it from the way you go after ours.
But they're wise to all our tricks.

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Somos trabajadores.
¡Son undocumentados!
No problema. You want your grass cut?
OK, but you better keep your women away from that guy over there.
They're home with the kids.

Knock knock.
Who's there?
It's the judgement of God. You have perverted the faithful and turned them out of the way. You have raised skyscrapers in your arrogance, and allowed the women to tread where they should not be.
I don't recall reading anything like that in the Bible.
Allah akbar!

--posted November 12, 2006

"The Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away." -- Anonymous

ONE THING the Internet took away this week was an old-book store of which I'd been a patron for some years. For those not familiar with the type, I don't mean one of those used-paperback exchanges proliferating through the land, but a shop selling books, almost exclusively hardbacks, with ages ranging from several hundred years for the oldest to a "mere" forty or fifty for the youngest. A specialized interest, perhaps, but I caught the bug early. When I was growing up there were books on my parents' shelves that had been in the family many decades, books with strange, ornate letters on their covers, brittle handle-with-care pages turned yellow-brown and faintly odorous, and intricately drawn black-and-white illustrations that suggested form and shading with parallel lines of varying thickness -- so unlike the photographs in the newspapers and magazines, and the simpler and full-color pictures in my children's books. Obviously Magic!

I bought my own first books of this type at a church rummage sale in my teens. I consider that I chose well: I still have them, and any civilized person would recognize the authors. It's been a secondary or tertiary interest in my life ever since. I guess you could call me an aficionado, though I'm far from being a Collector (or even a collector!). For some inexplicable reason, a text that's wonderful in an old book winds up losing all its Magic -- and even half its Truth! -- when released in a modern paperback. It reminds me of Molière's jibing proverb about the woman who looks great by candlelight, but in full sun...But the process is actually more like, "What! Is my taste so common that the modern world deigns to cater to it?" Whatever. I'll take my "quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore" any day -- not, in these days of the "long tail," that anything is ever really forgotten.

But enough. Those with the bug understood me from the first sentence, and others, uninfected themselves, soon after. Perhaps they love other old things, antique cars or furniture, '78's. But there are those who still wonder at my passion, and I fear I could write a book myself and make it no clearer to them. So.

These are obviously not good times for independent booksellers, new or old. In my teens and twenties there was a large bookseller in my city who displayed the new titles inside and had old books and magazines on racks out in the rear in an alley. A wonderful place to browse! Not to mention an unpleasant reminder of what's happened to public honesty over the last decades. But he went under long ago in our continuing march toward BordersWorld.

Obviously also, a small shop is a lousy way to find any particular old book. The chances are all too good that what I want is available and for sale -- in another city. The Internet has been wonderful for things like this. Finally, a seller can offer to the entire country -- to the world! -- and a buyer anywhere can find. But the convenience has come at the cost of collapsing all sellers' prices. As the proprietor of the now defunct shop put it: "Some guy goes to post a book on an old-book site and there's no other copies there, so he gets optimistic and offers it for thirty bucks. Then somebody else sees that and offers his copy for 29. Before long, you've got two dozen copies going for $5."

But the passing of shops like this is sad, because they're a wonderful place to browse in a way that the Internet can never be. At least for me, there's a large tactile element in an old book -- a look, a feel, even a smell, a chance to hold the pages between your fingers and open them at random and read a paragraph or two -- that can define the difference between "leave it here" and "take it into your home." Some of my enduring interests have started just this way, with books I would have clicked past on the Internet as quickly as possible.

But since the immediate cause of the closure was the proprietor losing his lease, he was selling off his stock at ridiculous prices, and I used the opportunity to acquire a few more treasures. My prize: a large, ornate 1870 volume of Don Quixote profusely illustrated by no less than Gustav Doré -- for $2! The binding's seen better days, but so have I. It's an ill wind that blows nobody good. And one could do worse than live their life by the poem that the proprietor hung on his door:

Was to you a kindness shown?
Pass it on!
It was not for you alone.
Pass it on!
Let it echo through the years,
Let it dry another's tears,
Till in fullness it appears.
PASS IT ON!

-- posted October 19, 2006