They Were Babies

I have been silent lately, busy with the end of semester.  But what happened in Newtown, CT today can't go unacknowledged.  I know no more and perhaps less than you do.  I don't want more details because those that have been revealed have been terrible enough.  This I do know:  most of those who died were babies.  Babies.  Square-headed, pouched-bellied, knee-hugging babies.

Only one event has taken me back to church for solace since I left 40+ years ago.  One was 9/11; this may be the other.

I leave you Charlie Pierce.

A Gift of Thanksgiving

Truth be told the bar is getting lower.  As far as my math course goes, I just want to finish all the while learning what I can.  Knowing that it is superficial and prone to being washed away the moment I stop attempting proofs in a particular section.  All of this is now a rehearsal to take this class again.  Getting back on the horse.  Hair of the dog.  yadda yadda yadda.  So far I haven't looked at my midterm grade because it will contribute to my disappointment, it will do nothing to make it any easier for me to work one problem at a time.  A post or so before, I likened this experience to pregnancy.  Now extending the metaphor, a stillbirth.  It will have a name and it will leave its traces and if you look closely you will see evidence of having had the experience.  But not the one I expected and hoped for.

So, a gift to me and to us all is Krista Tippett's interview with Brené Brown. 

I Am One Fit Short of A Psych Admission

No poetry, no nothing these days.  Having bad dreams about losing math tests, although losing them may be better than handing them in blank.  Anyway, a link to something so funny I had to stop.  It was starting to hurt and I stopped breathing.  Now, this is some good satire .... Laugh alone, they break out the syringe.  Laugh with others, the staff of life.

Enjoy.

Studying Math is Like Being Nine Months Pregnant

It's not really, but I have to same feeling of just wanting this to be the hell over with.  Each week this goes on I define success downward.  Today I feel finishing the class without withdrawing or taking an imcomplete is almost valorous.  Eeeeh.  Not much to report because it's all-math-all-the-time, but I found this succinct criticism about Libertarianism.  A movement, a politicaly philosophy I've not studied and yet have an instinctive aversion towards.  What follows is as good a response as any of what I see as some of the inherent contradictions of it all.  It's in reply to a Eunomia (Daniel Larison) blog post, Does the GOP Have a “Libertarian Problem”? Not Really: 

 
Sad Paul Ryan says: November 17, 2012 at 10:41 am

As Ken_L and mercurino suggest, the GOP does have a libertarian problem. More correctly, they have a LIBERTARIAN FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS PROBLEM. The Republican base feels that they are prospering in spite of the government that seeks to create dependency among “others”. That is to say, if the government would just get out of the way and leave them alone (economically), they would have even more money to spend as they please.
What’s wrong with this picture? Well, if the most ardent base supporters are really the Tea Party old white people with an aversion to a black president who is confiscating their assets to pay for “Obama phones” and the like, then you can’t be a bold truth-teller and serious policy wonk who solves the deficit by ignoring the fact that most federal government spending goes to old people. It comes FROM the young and rich, Republican and Democrat alike, but it goes to maintain the standard of living of the elderly, who are disproportionately white, Republican, and possessed of crotchety policy views. Get your government hands off of my Medicare people.
This is a problem that Republicans will continue to have, even as the Tea Party rump slowly dies off. There will always be people pushing for a more authentic libertarianism, whether that be in Ron Paul’s memory or not. However, there’s a reason that libertarianism does not a governing coalition make. If you want to live the Randian life, go and build your mansion, private roads, and private wells amid the squalor in developing countries where the government is so small and weak that it couldn’t harm or tax you if it tried.  (emphasis mine)  In these United States, however, if the Republican Party becomes the libertarian party, it will never be heard from again.

And now back to my regularly scheduled, "Truth or Dare! Use the PMI to prove that for all natural numbers, 8 divides 5²ⁿ – 1."

What Happened

Too weary to think, so cuttin' n' pasting from post election analysis.  I've been reading quite a lot of it -- after all, when math isn't going well for you, why not wallow in schadenfreude, eh?  (I'll stop mañana, because The Boot That Is Headed for My Teeth is never far away, and dag, I was in Ohio in 2004.  I know how it feels.)  Anyway, the story that's emerging (and damn if my NYT didn't go missing this morning) is that the election results as they rolled in were a complete and utter shock to the Romney campaign, much less the prospective celebrants in Boston.  There are few things worse than losing, but thinking you're winning only to be losing is one of them.  The evidence was there and had been there in abundance.  The Romney campaign chose to ignore it.  I'll allow voters or partisans that delusion, but a battle-hardened campaign staff, a person who's run for high office before and top-drawer political Svengali's?  That's pretty astonishing.  I can't wait for the book, and rest assured it won't be written by Mark Halperin.

Anyway, much fascinating commentary to glean. Got this comment from Eunomia:

CitizenE says: November 10, 2012 at 11:03 am

Romney presented himself as the ultimate politician. A weather vane in other words, a hologram, an etch a sketch. Even among his supporters, those to the far right presupposed he would kowtow, as he did through the greater part of the campaign, even in his selection of running mate and his endorsement of Senate candidate Mourdock, to their interests if elected. Those more moderate would tell themselves in an act of self-mesmerization, he only did all those things because that is what all politicians have to do, and his truer perspective, a moderate one, would win the day once elected to govern. He presented nothing actual or concrete in terms of policy proposals, so no one could pin him down about anything, and to the degree he did discuss policy, on one day of the week he would say one thing, the very next day, the exact opposite. And he managed to insult a majority of the voting electorate with a political tourettes, nowhere better exemplified than out of the country, when he assured the city of London, a city that famously rebuilt itself after being bombed to smithereens, that they were of course likely to screw up the Olympics somehow (of course, this was, and here’s the kicker, based on his own experience–the ironies abound). Romney was a horrible candidate, that won one round out of the fifteen, the first debate when he caught the President napping by basically aggressively arguing for things he had heretofore opposed.
If our economy were not foundering, and if Barack Obama were white, Mitt Romney would have lost the election by double digits. He overperformed at the polls, not underperformed.

This Country Belongs to Everybody

As a Close Contemporary and Associate who shares the same DNA (and still owes me money from junior high) so eloquently put it in response to my e-mail where I said I put my This-Shit-Is-Gonna-Stop-To-Day gameface on and marched to my polling station:

I was far more into it this time around as well. These arrogant muthafuckas don’t understand. This country belongs to everybody. Not just their plastic asses. Fuck them. First person who says something slick gets roasted. God bless Obama. Black people better step the fuck up.

 What he said.

It's snowing and blowing and I have tons of proofs to do (or be done in by).  But I am still both jubilant and mad.

2:11 am Nov. 7th Obama 303

The future has won.  As it always will.

That is all.

Apres Mardi

La Deluge ....

Obama was right:  Voting is the best revenge.  I've had an Obama bumper sticker, (perhaps even two) for almost a year.  Never fastened it to anything but kept it nevertheless.  It wasn't until I was talking to a Close Contemporary and Associate who shares the same DNA (and still owes me money from junior high) the other day and we both said, despite the fact that between us we haven't got 1 good knee that if Obama doesn't get the second term he deserves, we will be rioting in the streets.  Enough is enough.  I am so angry at all the 19th century, misogynistic, social darwinistic, smug, complacent, nativist worshippers of St. Reagan who have convinced themselves that Mitt Romney would be a good president because ... well because He's White!!!!™.  These people have lost they mother-effin' minds.  It's the 21st century all over the planet, bitchez.  Deal with it.

Once of the biggest lessons Husband No. 1 taught me:  You're in a bar.  Two guys are getting into it.  When they stop making noise, that's when the knives come out and the chairs start flying.  If they're still talking shit, finish your beer.

Well, I've stopped talking shit about this election.

Peter Coyote's The Progressive Case for Obama

Bing.  Go.

Read.

Pink Bush

Thanks to Cuthbert, here's the Pink Bush:

 

A Tragedy's Anniversary Without Press Coverage

On the 4th Tuesday of every month I attend the general meeting our our neighborhood's community association.  It's something we've done since arriving in New Haven and finding out about the group.  My ties to West River have grown and deepened, and the neighborhood's initiatives toward community building have done the same.  That particular night, my friend, Ellen, Lilli and I were walking home the block and a half from Barnard School and we were overtaken by a swarm of teenagers.  They quickly parted around us on foot and on bikes and we could see that they were heading towards my house.

Four houses down we met A, who had been at the meeting, too.  He is by temperament both cautious and suspicious.  Perhaps for good reason; and perhaps he is this way as only people who have given others reason in the past to be cautious and suspicious can be.  He was getting ready to call the police.  I told him wait, I saw my neighbor, Eric, in the crowd, talking to kids, keeping an eye on things.  We went down the street and a hunch I'd had since the first teenagers overtook us was confirmed.  It was a year ago that Marquell Banks was murdered in the house 2 doors down from ours. These kids, some who knew him, some who did not, collected to grieve, and to discharge an inchoate, unspecific anger towards the house's tenants.  I'm sure if Eric hadn't been there some kid would have tried to get inside the house.  (The tenants coming home saw the crowd forming and left to sleep elsewhere.)

It is that palpable anger that made A want to call the police immediately.  Even a wise cop can only ameliorates it briefly.  And wise cops are rare.  But, it's a year later now and these kids are still angry, still looking for the answer to the problem of one of their own killing another of their own.  Marquell's family is traumatized.  The tenants, who have young children of their own, are traumatized and stigmatized.  (This is not conjecture on my part.  This comes from conversation and witness.)  The teenagers who came to mourn are traumatized.

We, the adults of this street in particular, and this community in general, need to reclaim the obligation that we've assigned to the police.  We've demanded, in the name of public safety, that they also fix what's broken in the social fabric and by doing so wash our hands of responsibility to each other.  As a community we've made great strides in that direction when the issues address a material lack, we fall short when it involves matters that are made more difficult by a lack of trust and no belief in agape love.  When those events happen we resort to calling the cops and deluding ourselves that the problem's been solved.  It hasn't, and I expect to see some of those same kids back again next year.

Le Petit Morte

Which according to the French, or more specifically the male cultural and linguistic superstructure, is a description of orgasm.  But I claim it as the point at which we lose electrical power when Sandy does its damage.  So, blog while the blogging is possible, I say.

I missed posting Saturday, a combination of study, grappling with the post that follows this one, and simply being outside to register all the various colors of fall here in the Elm City.  In the backyard where I can see them are a few Burning Bushes, an inconspicuous evergreen that peacocks in the fall and produces gold, red, almost sienna-like leaves.  This year, in this fall so mild that the heat is off more than it is on, our burning bush has produced hot pink leaves.  (This is where a savvy blogger would insert a picture.  The picture of our hot pink deck chairs alongside the bushes.  Yep, that's what a savvy blogger would do.  This blogger says Hey! Use your imagination!!)

Fall:  meals full of roasts, root vegetables, heavier wines and elegaic music.  Friday we went to SCSU's Garner Auditorium for Music Haven's fall student concert and potluck.  There is something magical when a child falls in love with an instrument as I did when I fell in love with the violin at 9.  The stage was decorated with tiny cellos, violins and violas (violi?), and basses that begged for the tallest kid with the longest fingers to play.  And all the gifts that come from the effort -- the love of music, the self-discipline, the reward (applause and admiration) for monumental effort, the poise that comes from performing, and the entree into new worlds -- all those gifts were on display.

The university is closed today and tomorrow (as it was when Irene happened).  It is an example of unearned grace since I'd be taking a quiz this afternoon if the university was open.  So, Sandy has bought me more time to study, to write, to do what I can while I still have juice.

Saturday Poetry: What She Saw

Her eyes are in a bored frenzy,

whirring cherries in a slot machine.

The question stalks her

and all her friends with their

advanced degrees

who decided to stay home:

what will I do?

They fasten onto

her daughter, so she can

watch and watch again

as Ruby goes

down

                the

                                slide

for an eternity.

She reminds herself

between trips, that it is her task

to be in this moment, then the next,

even though at first she

didn't want to stay home.

But childcare took too much

of her salary,

and now studies say that

it's better, it truly is better

for her to be here.

But, it was an old woman,

the Ah Ma, who woggled --

their word for Ruby's

bowlegged, sashaying walk --

over to the slide to

reprimand her satin-capped

grandson trying to pry

Ruby's fingers off the bar

and force her

                down

                                                now

before she was ready.

That's what she's screaming:

I'm not ready.

Not ready, not ready.

No.

And the woman, in that instant

of infinitesimal distraction,

framed the grandmother,

who she would very much

like to draw, if she

Could convince the old

woman that she means no harm.

She didn't hear Ruby's

cascading scream

in time to halt her jettisoning

from the banked chute

into the bitter dust

beneath.

What did arrest her gaze

was the nimbus of brown

radiating over to where she stood

as she realized

that her child needed

attention, despite her own grief.

Gettin' My Geek On

Cuthbert found this t-shirt and I actually thought it was hilarious.  The screw has turned:

 

No Baby Einstein, Moi

I know.  I know.  It's been 2 weeks to the day.  You've kept up your end of the bargain by reading, and I have not.  But, even if Reading is Fundamental™ Math is Hard, yo.  And I had a mid-term and last week was the culmination of months of work towards the Congo in Harlem film series, and Cuthbert has returned from Ye Olde Sod and math is still hard.  Even my beloved niece, who attends St. Whozit, and who laid her mother and uncle on the floor as in ROFLMAO when she announced that they make the 1st graders study Math and other terrible things at her school, even she offered to help me with my homework.  I did not refuse her.

As some of you may know, we have been doing proofs.  As in prove that:

3√2 – 7 is irrational

   5  

Now, I've been called irrational and have been presented with sufficient evidence that proves it, but this is an altogether other matter and one that takes time.  I offer this in demi-apology for not writing while studying for the midterm.  I did okay, iff the professor grades on a curve.  The range of test scores out of a possible 100 were 7 to 93.  But, two months into this class my expectations are tumbling faster than Felix Baumgartner.  I'm just tryin' to get out of this one alive.  Have mercy ...

I have also discovered (not for the first time) that math makes you stupid.  That is, the more higher mathematics you study the more arithmetic you forget.  (One common complaint on these tests are the oh no you din'it! algebraic errors one makes that Cost Points.  I mean I had the definition of the negation of a limit dead to rights and then wrote:  |‌‌x-a| ≥ ∂, etc. ‌‌instead of |x-a| < ∂.  Oh, the shame.  But even stupider than that is what I did at dinner last night.  It's raining.  It's Friday.  Cuthbert and I have already eaten the low-hanging fruit -- the crackers, the cheese, the peanuts, and truth-be-told, neither of us wanted to cook dinner.  (Heh, heh as I pretend I'm ever willing to cook dinner.)  So, we decide to go out and he finds a new place close by, The New Haven Meatball House.  We go there, and have a meal served by a friendly young man with ear plugs which I always associate with the Maasai and other East African people, and the young man suggested we try some beers and when I said I liked 'em dark and stout (self-portrait as a glass of beer?) he started talking about beers like sommeliers talk about wine and brought me something fruity and dark called the Vampireslayer, and yeah buddy (as they say in Louisiana) it was good.  Great meal -- 2 main dishes, 4 exquisite beers, dessert and coffee -- great service all while Cuthbert and I discuss Christopher Hitchens, Niall Ferguson and Mitt Romney.  We get the check.  I calculate the tip, do the addition, sign off and we leave.

Just before we pulled into the driveway I realized that I'd made a mistake.  When we get in the house I start harassing Cuthbert -- get me the phone number! google the restaurant! don't you know he has to enter in the amount I signed and hurry up hurry up hurry up!!!.  When he wasn't fast enough I remembered I had the receipt and poured out my purse to find it and breathlessly, boozily called the restaurant and said:  Oh, no!  I just ate at your place and I added wrong and the total should actually be ...  Turns out the person I talked to was the person, Juan, who served us and he had my receipt and he was probably cursing out the sociopathic cheapskate who just up and left him a $5 tip.  And I made right by him and we signed off as BFF and damnit, math is hard.

Saturday Poetry: Famine (a pantoum)

I eye my Irish husband.

He sneers at me in derision.

It’s our tattooed 17 year-old son:

he who has gotten obese.

He sneers at me in derision.

The boy’s buttonholes fly across his chest.

He who has gotten obese.

My Irish husband pats his corduroy vest

the boy’s buttonholes fly across his chest.

Reminds me of the times, he tells me.

My Irish husband pats his corduroy vest

Do I want to hear it again?

Reminds me of the times, he tells me,

his father would heat the poker.

Do I want to hear it again?

I must close my eyes to my husband’s glee.

His father would heat the poker

swinging it round and round his head.

I must close my eyes to my husband’s glee:

His father staggering home singing bollix tiss and fookin tat

swinging it round and round his head,

his memory conjures a white-haired gabna

His father staggering home singing bollix tiss and fookin tat

sick to death of snotty beggars huddling in their corner.

His memory conjures a white-haired gabna

that sent the eldest running across his father’s acres

sick to death of snotty beggars huddling in their corner

his final sight of them, petrified,

that sent the eldest running across his father’s acres.

And in his telling he stowed away on the last boat leaving,

his final sight of them petrified.

He brooded over the moment when the crew found him.

And in his telling he stowed away on the last boat leaving.

Not one thought for his sisters and brothers

He brooded over the moment when the crew found him

he told them he was an only child, an orphan, prob’ly.

Not one thought for his sisters and brothers.

The year our son met his father’s siblings

he told them he was an only child, an orphan, prob’ly

and they my son, filling his hands full of shillings, pounds.

The year our son met his father’s siblings

they told each other how he was so like their brother

and they my son, filling his hands full of shillings, pounds.

But, the boy declined the morsels of their faith.

They told each other how he was so like their brother

A boy they never forgot.

But, the boy declined the morsels of their faith,

a sin the family never forgave.

A boy they never forgot

is the sullen boy before us now

a sin the family never forgave

shared with a father more agnostic than most.

Is the sullen boy before us now

aware of what he has

shared with a father more agnostic than most?

Hence the tattoos obscuring the fatty rings around his neck.

Aware of what he has

he genuflects before the refrigerator

hence the tattoos obscuring the fatty rings around his neck

I dare not come between my child and his God.

He genuflects before the refrigerator,

he sneers at me in derision.

I dare not come between my child and his God:

he who has gotten obese.

Garbo Cooks

Yes.  I surprise myself in this soon to end month of Bachelorettehood.  I have cooked, and eaten the results.  But, more important than that I have actually devoted mental energy into figuring out how to cook what I cook better.  This is all so new for me, I blush.  It helps that it's fall and there are great vegetables nearby.  I am agnostic about what I prepare.  Yesterday, I was making spaghetti sauce and almost sauteed a spider who lived in one of our iron skillets.  (Makes me look bad, if not a liar, no?)  I said almost.

Anyway, I plan to keep this up.  Hell, I need a win.  Ye Olde Math Class is giving me, if not quite nightmares, anxious dreams.  It is phenomenally beautiful and unusually warm these days, but I am in a permanent state of crankiness and misanthropy.  And, why, you may ask?  Okay, help me with this:

Prove or disprove the following statement:

There exist rational numbers a and b such that a^b is irrational.

 If you can't, leave me alone.  I'm off to look up some fish recipes.  I hear fish helps.




 

Saturday Poetry (on Sunday): Don't Go to Bed With Frank

from Turn Left at the Dead Dog:  there was (at this point 20 years on, I'm sure "was" is the correct tense) a Bernie Marinello.  One of those old school Italian-American Brooklyn geniuses.  A poem like this is an elegy for postwar Brooklyn, a world long gone except for men like him.

Bernie Marinello

was discharged from the Air Force

in 1946 and came home to Brooklyn.

Met his two children, both born

before he could remember why

he married their mother.

Leaving, out of the question.

Bernie was a good guy

and did what he could.

And now, white-haired old man

he’s in love.

We work together in the big room that

used to hold enough desks for burly men

who never sat down.

There was much to do back then

but the Shipyard is dying

and now it’s us three:

Bernie, Frank, me.

We work in silence.

Bernie looks up

after Frank leaves for the day.

Honey, Frank’s not very good in bed.

I look up after saving my file.

Don’t worry, Bernie,

I don’t plan to find out.

Ain't That Don Draper?

It's Friday.  It's been raining and raining and raining.  Husband's out of town so the roof leaks ruining for the third time since we bought this house a bathroom wall.  (That the bathroom is the size of an orgone box is probably a blessing, but I so do not want to paint it again).  Test on Monday.  I have been monomaniacal.  Not much to report.  But .....

I have spent some time reading the pre-mortems about the presidential race.  There is, for the writers and me, the reader, a whistling past the graveyard air to all of it.  Better to read it as diversion, not fact.  Then I came across this picture.  I would no more want this man leading the republic than I would want Al Sharpton to do my hair.

That is all.

Black Earth

Longtime colleague and friend, artist Julie Patton, has a piece in About Place Journal 
about Cleveland's very own Salon des Refuse'/Let it Bee Garden.  Also check out the piece by Grace Lee Boggs (with Scott Kurashige).  If you don't know Julie and you don't know Grace Lee Boggs, you should.

Check out what Detroit's urban farmers are doing.  Poetry, too. 

Saturday Poetry: Bait (from East River Soliloquies)

I pulled it out.

By then it scarcely hurt.

I winced just a little as I tore

sickly arteries apart.

I would not use it anymore.

Had no need for this one with

its thrumming dance,

no more space for its pathetic concuss,

that ushered a red serenade

through its chambers.

Why did Venus do this?

I'll feed it to the fish, I thought.

They'll eat it before it hits bottom,

before she finds it.

I can't be bothered with the thing, I said,

flexing my arm, testing until I was satisfied

it could bear the weight.

Sensing the end,

my heart surged unforgivably hot.

It leaped and pounded, gurgled and ran

so badly that I silenced it with my sopping shirt,

hastily dropped it in a plastic bag,

setting out heedless

to the fact that

I could be seen through,

laughed at,

humiliated all over again.

This Is What Being slightly < 60 Look Like

This is what getting older is like: Turns out I have sciatica.  I can pinpoint when it would have started over 20 years ago.  A 3 mile stroll down Flatbush Avenue on a blistering August day with 9 year old chatting me up and a suitcase on my back.  (Another day, another dispatch.)  Undiagnosed, ignored, I'm now certain it is the cause of the burning, rubber-banded, hey-did-I-step-on-a-bottle-cap? feeling I often have in my right leg.  But you know what?  I'm so bored by all the maladies large and small that visit me at this age, I haven't even bothered to google it.  Meh.  I'll see my internist soon enough.  "Doctor, will I ever be able to dance the Running Man again?"  Ha, ha cuz I couldn't dance it before .....  (Snares, please!  Rimshot!)

So, quiz #1 is over.  I barely got half the problems right.  I could have done better were it not for a stupid stupid mistake on a truth table.  Forewarned, as they say, is forearmed.  But, what really blows my whistle is that there isn't a person in that class of that thinks I should be there.  Here's what I've learned in 3 semesters:  that the higher you go in mathematics the whiter and more male it gets.

Don't these boys know I grew up in I-O-W-A where underestimating and denigrating negroes is and always has been a sport and a pasttime?  And don't these boys knows that they've wakened the competitiveness in Aunt Jemina?

It's on, ya'll ...

Never Stop

Picture this:  After math class where I raise the mean age of the students to 25, rush hour driving down the heart of black New Haven, Dixwell Ave., in a bigass banged up Nissan truck that gets 1 mile to the gallon while blasting Dylan and Marvin Gaye on my way home before going to my first Rosh Hashanah dinner.  Thinking about my beloved 6 year old niece, who goes to St. Whozit School of the Exculpatory Distraction and tells me 2 weeks into 1st grade that 2 girls said she's weird.

To which I say, never stop.  Stay weird.

Just Me, the Books and the Spiders

Blogging has been sporadic as fall and school descend.  Another September, another mind-boggling math course.  This time, Foundations of Mathematics, which seemed innocuous enough until the professor said that "it is the bridge between lower mathematics, e.g., Calculus (I kid you not) and higher mathematics".  I think I blacked out for a minute.  So, you ask why I'm doing this when my life could be so much more comfortable?

This is why:  a Mother Jones piece, “Everything You’ve Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong,” by Kristina Rizga.  As a supplement you can listen to her terrific interview on Bob Edwards Weekend.

That's it for now.  I am temporarily living alone for the first time in 31 years.  Husband No. 1 is with his family, Beloved Niece and her mother moved out and I share the house with dying spiders and wasps.  It's great and I sometimes wonder if I'll croak like a frog when I do use my voice because other than a phone call or a meeting I don't talk much.  (At school I'm so old I'm virtually radioactive so no one engages me.)  This interlude reminds me that I'm an introvert with good social skills; this precious time allows me to be more of myself.  I hope to make the most of it.  Ciao, I'm off to Harlem for a meeting.

Saturday Poetry: Gorgeous Puddin'

In my next life

(if I get one)

I’m coming back as

Gorgeous Puddin’.

I’m coming back

to sing

scatting blue notes

through the pillars

that are my teeth.

They’ll hesitate

blue notes will,

quavering in their need

honeyed on the vulva

that is my mouth.

One note, a whole note

will tumble and slide

across the lounge, catching

(like a bb frenzied)

one the rim

of my next man’s ear

where it will tickle him

and unsettle him and

make his hands to stumble

(his fingers to splay).

They’ll flutter and sigh

and long to send me

one finger.

For me, one haloed digit,

upstage, at my piano.

Here where I lay playing

with tongue heavy

and lips ready

for his love.

Bumper Sticker I'd Like to See

Paul Ryan .... the Lance Amstrong of VP candidates

Mitt Romney, the GOP and Contemporary Political Operations

I follow the American political scene.  I just don't write about it much.  There are others more consistently tuned in and far better.  I leave it to them while I post poems in my dotage.  What follows is a brilliant "exegesis" about Romney, the convention, and his relationship to party mandarins and operatives.  (If I knew how to do a specific permalink I'd do it.  Instead this is a cut and paste from nancynall.com, 8/31/12.):

baldheadeddork said on August 31, 2012 at 5:59 pm

Long weekend, long post. 

This probably won’t be taken seriously by people who don’t already agree with me, but I think there is one serious point to take away from the convention dog-and-pony show. 

As noted by many others, a presidential nominee only has full control over two events in the entire election: Who he chooses as his running mate and his convention. Everything else he believes or wants to do might have to be massaged, ignored or even changed to get votes and money from one group or another. But choosing (and announcing) the nominee and running the convention are all his. 

I think there is a lot of evidence that in these moments a nominee gives a pretty good glimpse into how he’ll govern and lead if he wins. Look back to Obama for just one example. Watching Obama in the late primaries through the convention four years ago was nearly identical to how he’s operated as president for better and worse. (On the better side, a really smart staff with the lowest collective ego quotient I’ve ever seen in a campaign or administration. For worse, despite being really good at politics they hate to dirty their hands with it.) Bush 43 also showed a lot of his biggest strengths and flaws in the way he handled those decisions in 2000, as did Clinton in 1992.

So, with that in mind, it’s time to address something that people haven’t wanted to point out from the beginning of the campaign. Mitt Romney and his team are fucking awful at running for president. They’re barely competent on a good day and they make so many awful unforced errors.

This convention was a disaster. They invited a lot of unnecessary damage to the GOP in this election and beyond by bum rushing the Paul delegates. That’s the closest thing the GOP has to a viable youth movement and the Romney team threw them out because they played the game too well. The nominee always has final approval on the speeches given by the defeated candidates, but Romney’s team asserted no control and allowed everyone to talk about themselves for twenty minutes before mentioning Romney as a literal afterthought. There was no control of messaging at any point, and no control of the behavior of the delegates coming down from the top. What do you think Karl Rove would have done if the peanut incident happened at a convention he was running? It wouldn’t have just been the offenders thrown out. Whoever was responsible for that delegation would have been turned into a greasy stain on the convention floor – and every state leader would have known it before they landed in Tampa.

And then, at ten pm EST last night when the networks picked up the convention and the audience tripled, Mitt Romney began his introduction to the American people with an Oscar-caliber performance of Clint Eastwood impersonating Grandpa Effing Simpson. Then came Marco Rubio to talk about himself for twenty minutes, and finally Romney himself.
Probably only one person in four who was watching Romney’s acceptance speech was watching on the cable news channels or PBS before ten to see Romney’s introduction video. That is political malpractice on par with the Florida freak who injected cement into people’s asses and called it plastic surgery. Every candidate since Reagan in 1984 has used these meticulously crafted videos as the real introduction of the nominee. Know why? It fucking works. People like watching movies more than seeing someone give a speech and the campaign can use all of the soft focus and takes it needs to get the message right. Video, then – maybe – a brief introduction by someone who won’t outshine the candidate, then the acceptance speech. This is so simple and obvious, yet Romney and his team screwed it up beyond all recognition.
It’s not just that the Romney campaign team is in over its head. They are, and so deeply they can’t even see the top of the ocean. But the bigger problem is that despite months of miscues and mistakes no one has lost their job. And even despite a lot of experience people in GOP politics saying they’ve got major problems with the candidate and the people running the campaign, Romney continues to run the same way he ran in February and even in 2008, and with all of the same top people.
There is a strong correlation between how Romney is running his campaign and the way a bad CEO runs a company. You don’t have to follow business very long to find a company that gets into serious trouble because the CEO had bad staff and either didn’t have the vision to see what was really happening or a deep knowledge about the company or business. Draw your own connections between, say, Dan Ackerson’s travails at GM and Romney’s campaign problems.

But there’s a political precedent that deserves more attention. Romney has captured control of the Republican party this year, but he’s always run as an outsider to it. He’s never seriously tried to win over the party bosses and the conservative movement leaders. He’s come in with the conceit that if anyone wants to ride, they need to get on board with him. This isn’t a merger to Romney, it’s a takeover.

And in this way, the candidate of my lifetime that reminds me most of Mitt Romney is…Jimmy Carter. Carter had to run a brutal contest against the Democratic establishment to win the nomination in 1976 and his team was almost entirely composed of people who had not worked on other federal campaigns. Carter also had Romney-esque arrogance towards his party’s leaders after winning the nomination. The rift never healed and worse, Carter went into office really believing that the Democratic-controlled Congress should act like subsidiaries of his White House. It ruined any chance he had at a successful presidency.

The ideology is 180 degrees different, but I see a lot of the same method and personality in Mitt Romney. If he beats Obama the only common thread holding Romney, the GOP and the conservative movement together now will be gone. They will turn on each other and the fight between Romney’s WH, Eric Cantor’s Congress, and Dick Armey’s K-Street operations for who is really in charge will be on.

 

Saturday Poetry: Eight Post Meridiem

It's spring

yet Winter’s resentful of its diminution and

comes back to haunt us today.

We who have them, unearth the

scarves and mittens and caps that

flew into the laundry basket

for washing and putting away.

Finished with homework she consents

to walk to the co-op for food.

I was girded to resort to censure:

I'm not the only one who eats in this house, y'know...

I've work all week and I’m tired.

She soothes me, the gift of her company.

We walk together, minutes into

the bracing cold

gossiping to keep ourselves warm.

She tells me that she is through with her posse.

She is not hanging out

with them any more.

She tells me where they were supposed to meet, how she waited.

Then looked for them at the Burger King.

They weren't there

and she went to the take-out Chinese

where they weren't, either.

In the street was the principal

who gets mad if she sees you eat

outside.

It’s after lunch that she finds them

and she lays down the law:

I'm not waiting for anybody.

Thinking of all

the boys who have broken my heart

all the phone calls that

still don't come

I tell her, it's a good way to live.

Fortified she interrupts:

I'll hang with anybody

I don't have to stay with one group.

She boasts how easily she can make herself welcome.

We are halfway there,

Winter’s been forgotten.

I am proud of my level-headed girl

Grateful for this inadvertent canal

between chores

to learn who she is

and love her even more.

I Have Started School

Which is why I'm using it as an excuse for not posting.  Truth was I was away last weekend, in the City, pretending I was 25 years old.  But, yes, school has begun with an innocuous class called "Foundations of Mathematics".  Sounds simple, right?  How to count?  And multiply (cf. life before effective birth control) and divide (cf. Republican Convention, Tampa, 2012)?  No.  The course is none of the above.

You have to study logic.  And do proofs.  Husband No. 1 is waiting in the wings thinking this will knock some sense into my head.  I am headed to the nearest medical supply store to buy a leather helmet with a chin strap.  I've only had one class and already my head is starting to swell.  Excelsior, my ass ...
 

A Warning to All Those Ladder-Climbing Hot Mamas

Even MILF's get old.  Sigh ....