Writers Friendship, David Alpaugh cheers the soul

My friend David Alpaugh, author of “Counterpoint,” “Heavy Lifting,” and widely read and discussed essays on "The Professionalization of Poetry" and "New Math of Poetry," responds to my new poem, “Legacy: Muse Neglect,” which opens

We’re comin’ up to my birthday./I’m seventy-seven—twenty-three more and I’ll be a hundred!/So what’s it all about, sixty-odd years of writing, scribbling?/Etc.

Hello, Robert:

My apology for taking so long getting back to you on "Legacy: Muse Neglect." Been tidal-waved by late days of summer, gearing up for fall obligations (Coolbrith, Valona, etc.).

"Legacy" is a brave poem. You certainly touch a responsive chord in this poet, as I, too, am starting to wonder if I've lost the muse, have been treading water post-Counterpoint. Didn't old man Wordsworth and young man Byron have similar doubts? ("Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?").

I love the concrete "eye to eye" confrontation with your "first mutt," that "first published poem." The metaphorical sense here is as sure as it is quiet. The paradoxical reversal of the dog becoming master and wagging the man is richly comic, and most poignant in that manly dogly reproach, "Bad poet, bad poet!" Unpretentiousness that comes from truly having the goods rather than just the flash has always been one of your most appealing qualities.

Cheer up, Bob. "Legacy" is proof that you're poems have not lost their canine magic. Dogliness was and is the metaphor for what you continue to aim for in your work. Falling a bit short much of the time is inevitable. (When Samuel Beckett was asked if he had a favorite work he shook his head and muttered: "Something wrong with all of them.")

The more I look at the history of poetry the more I believe that our mission is (in Frost's words) "to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of." You've done that with "Uncle Dog," "God is in the Cracks," "Heavenly Sex" and a dozen others, and now "Legacy" will be in the running (or, as you would say, trotting!).

The only question is the crucial one for our Po-Busy time: will the gatekeepers get out of the way and allow poetry to live not by status and accreditation but by love? Here, I'm afraid that "the worst are full of passionate intensity." Let's hope we can overshoot their papier-mâché palace and land a few good poems on the other side!

With deep respect for your generous, generative humor,

David

Podiatrist Father, "God is in the Cracks," Black Moss Press

In answer to a recent query from 'Podiatrist Melbourne' ( see below)

"Podiatrist Melbourne has left a new comment on your post "Podiatrist Father":

Interesting blog. It would be great if you can provide more details about it. Thanks you..."

I'd say 1) my poem "The Podiatrist's Son," which opens God is in the Cracks (Black Moss Press, Canada) is the best introduction to that blog and the directions in which it flows. The Globe & Mail (Canada) noted in a review, "The heart and core of this book is a series of dramatic monologues and dialogues between father and son..."

2) In addition to being a podiatrist, Dad evolved his own blend of kabbalistic, Christian hermetic, and prescient New Age mysticism which lent its colors to his medical practice... (quoting here from the Globe and Mail review). Podiatry is the take-off point...

Red Room Writers.com

Thanks for checking in... for latest, please visit:

http://www.redroom.com/author/robert-sward

and, also,

http://writerfriendships.webdelsol.com

Working simultaneously on 3 blogs (how did that happen?), I'm focusing more now on the Red Room Writers.com and, in addition, "Writers' Friendship / Writers' Enmity." Introduction to Writers' Friendship follows:

"Humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist. It is often pride,
emulation, avarice, malice, all the odious qualities which drive a man
to compete, elaborate, refine, destroy, renew his work until he has
made something that gratifies his pride and envy and greed. And in
doing so he enriches the world more than the generous and good, though
he may lose his own soul in the process. That is the paradox of
artistic achievement." So says novelist Evelyn Waugh.

If Waugh is right, then what is it like for one writer driven by
pride, emulation, avarice and malice, to sustain a friendship with
another?

Anyway, for more, click on http://writerfriendships.webdelsol.com

Casting and Gathering - Friendship, On the Contrary...

_____________

by Andrew Boobier

--
In his poem, Casting and Gathering, dedicated to his friend Ted Hughes,
Seamus Heaney writes:

I love hushed air. I trust contrariness.
Years and years go past and I do not move
For I see that when one man casts, the other gathers
And then vice versa, without changing sides.

Heaney evokes here the push-pull effect of friendship, the fact that
two people can have different natures, contrary impulses yet be united
in the common bond of mutuality and respect for each other as fishermen
and poets. The poem is also about growing up and learning to respect
these differences, 'I have grown older and can see them both...' he
says.

There is a dialectical movement in which the two opposing forces of
Heaney's and Hughes' language (the 'hush' and 'lush') are not only
synthesised into their bonds of friendship but also as a resolution
within the poem and Heaney's own contrary. The strong resolutions
within Heaney's poetic output in general are indicative of his
allegiance to his Romantic forbears and his own particular need for
balance and redress (e.g. see his lecture, The Redress of Poetry -
essentially a post-romantic rebuttal of post-modernism).

I have a great [*word missing?] of sympathy with Heaney's trust of
contrariness, though I have a harder time coming up with cosy
resolutions. I once wrote a poem combining
suicidal American poets with the need for public displays of mourning
after national tragedy, it ended:

Human beings,
as Eliot says, cannot bear too much
reality.
History is a register of fancy.
War is a matter of personal
taste. Poetry is the language
of saints.
If only everything
were so black and white.

That last line is an ironic, wistful sigh mimicking the
romantic-capitalist desire to categorise discourse and ideology into
neat manageable parts which can be subsumed or appropriated into a neat
manageable whole. I certainly do not blame people for seeking these
kinds of resolutions; we're all looking for something to hold on to
when reality gets too heavy [*to] bear. But having been schooled these
last twenty years in existentialism, surrealism, and the works of
Georges Bataille, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida and Foucault, I tend to have
a more sceptical eye on such matters.

I, too, trust contrariness. But it is one that is intuitive, left open
to its own raw and rough edges, dark and often unresolved. This kind of
operation is not always easy to undertake when you have also been
influenced by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Wallace Stevens, Eliot, Heaney,
Hughes, and others who have trod the well-worn path of Romantic
academic poetry fed to the young on undergraduate courses. Like
Whitman, I say: Do I contradict myself? Well, then, I contradict
myself. This attitude is undoubtedly rooted in the fact
that I am a working class kid educated to highfalutin middle class
intellectual values.

So, on the one hand I am a poet - the ne plus ultra of post-romantic
narcissistic navel-gazing. On the other, I hate that kind of widely
accepted and highly-acceptable form of egocentricism. Poor Andrew, torn
between the ego-impulse to express himself and desire to lose the
'self' in a more communal project!

Anyway, a few years ago this came to a head. I've always been too
much of a misanthrope to be enthused by 'community arts' and so instead
I was drawn into the more cerebral collective adventure of surrealism.

One day I was browsing through one of the larger chain-store bookshops
when I came across a strange 'calling card' which had been left in a
book of surrealist short stories. I can't recall what it said exactly
but it intrigued me enough to contact the authors. I thought it was a
flyer for a magazine and I had just starting writing 'surreal' poetry
and so I sent them a letter with a couple of poems and told them I was
familiar with surrealist history and had even translated a novel by
Georges Bataille at university. They wrote back immediately and set up
a meeting in a nearby pub. So I then met up with four people calling
themselves The Leeds Surrealist Group. They were four friends who'd
originally met at university, united by a passion for black attire and
exploring the darker side of the imagination first begun in the 1920's
by Breton and his band of collective adventurers.

For some time the Leeds Group had been adhering to strict Bretonian
principles: collectively drawing[s] and writing, and devising games in
the single-minded pursuit to wrench the imagination back from the
all-devouring profit-motive and market forces. It was all very
idealistic, historically informed and seemingly exactly what I was
looking for. Inevitably we hit it off and I passed the 'interview' - my
wife and I were invited to one of their creative evenings. In the
candlelight and semi-gothic darkness we'd sit drinking red wine
discussing the politics of surrealism, the activities of other groups
in Prague, Paris and Stockholm, the mutual respect for Artaud and the
equally mutual hatred of 'Avida Dollars'. We'd play exquisite corps and
initiate new games. Once every week we'd sit in a pub, seething into
our beers with hatred for the 'system', all the while plotting a
'revolution of the mind' by collectively drawing on a beer mat.

The real glue that held everyone together was a deep, though often
fraught, friendship. Being newcomers, it took some time for the others
to let their guard down and let us into their inner sanctum of trust
and bonhomie. And yet, group dynamics being what they are, a certain
strained tension was never far away. There was a definite leader of the
group. He was the one who would organise sessions, the intellectual
force behind the whole project, be the overall spokesman etc. Coming
into the group from my own intellectual position (my 'Bataille' to his
'Breton') shifted the weight in the boat a little. Not that this would
come out in any overt way - we never argued - it was more subtle in the
way I would question given assumptions or undermine some of the
pomposity of what we did with humour. The group could be very serious,
sometimes to a point of blind self-righteousness. I find it difficult
to be totally serious about anything that doesn't appreciate the
absurdity of one's own human, all too human, situation.

There is no text without a context, and I wanted to understand more the
context of what made the group and its friendships tick. I therefore
devised a collective game called The Misfortunes of Memory which would
explore the limits of surrealistic discourse and what held us all
together. The game itself was quite complex, involving players choosing
objects from their past, writing them down and distributing them
secretly among the others where they would undergo various
'transformations' (visual representations, narrative reconstructions,
etc). One controlling individual called 'The Puppet Master' would have
little to do with the game except at the end when he would create a
small 4 act play based on material given by the others. The players
would then have to act out this play. The fifth act would be an act of
revenge whereby the actors view the puppet master's objects and devise
an ending to the play (including the Puppet Master's inevitable
'death') based on this new material.

The idea of the game would be for people to give up some aspect of
their past, like a gift (in more anthropological terms, an act of
'potlatch') and allow this to be manipulated and changed by others to
create something new. It would be an act of artistic trust and faith in
the Other. What it ultimately meant was that no act of self-reflection
would fall into a single 'fetishised' discursive form; it would be open
to a series of manipulations and interpretations outside any
individual's controlling ego. All-in-all I thought it quite an exciting
(and difficult) challenge and felt it would take the group's activity
to a new level.

My wife was equally enthusiastic about it though the rest of the group
were highly suspicious of my motives. They didn't seem to take in the
spirit it was presented: as a game. They wanted to analyse it and
discuss it further, reformulate it so it conformed to a mutually agreed
format with a more defined outcome. The fact that the game was
dictatorial was intentional; imposed by an Other like so much that goes
on in society. That's why I included the role of the Puppet Master
(i.e. the role of Authority) who has an unequal amount of power yet
gets his comeuppance. What I hoped the game would produce was a
microcosm of the power structures both within the group's own dynamics
and in society 'out there', as well as how collective engagement (i.e.
artistic friendship) could transform and corrupt power's own corruption
through the work of the imagination. It was everything we'd talked
about, enacted. OK, it might not work as a piece of art - it was the
taking part that was most important - lessons would be learned; the
armour (amour) of our friendship would have been tempered in the
white-hot forge of collective and imaginative engagement. Blimey, it
would have at least been a laugh!

It was not to be. I felt by this time the group had moved on and fallen
foul of the need to justify its existence through the production of
more bone fide 'works'.

Endless discussions, overt lack of enthusiasm, needless suspicion... it
was the beginning of the end, at least for us. And my wife and I began
to see less of the group.

In the end we re-enacted one of the more sordid episodes in the history
of surrealism - the ideological split. Breton vs Bataille all over
again.

You cannot blame the group or any individual for this outcome. It was
an experiment after all. It's just disappointing that we couldn't take
the risk and that, in the end, the ego's defences were set too strong
for this particular collective adventure.

People confuse my contrariness with being just plain awkward or
difficult. Perhaps I am. But being contrary, for me, means exploring
given assumptions about the world, seeing how far you can push things
before they fall off the edge or transform into something new. For me
it's nothing aggressive or nasty; it should be fun, playful. It's just
a tool of the imagination that many poets and artists employ. How far
should it go though? Should this imaginative prodding extend to the
bonds and boundaries of friendship too? As I found out there's a risk
involved. Is it worth taking? That depends. One man casts the other
gathers...

CODA
All this happened six or seven years ago now and I haven't heard from
the group since. Despite our differences, I still think about them and
wonder what they are up to. As for myself, I still live a contrary life
- relatively alone - between writing acceptably narcissistic poetry
(which has found a modicum of success) and devising more 'weird' stuff
with a new writer, Anton Brassiere (which has also had a slight drizzle
of public approval).

My wife and I have also resurrected the Misfortunes of Memory game
which we are currently playing: less as husband and wife but, more
comfortably, as friends. Where it's going, we're not sure yet, but we
are enjoying the ride!
----

BIO:
Andrew Boobier was born in Haworth, West Yorkshire in 1963.
He has published poetry and translations in the UK &
US. In 2003 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Andrew is also the editor of the Alsop Review's
prestigious online quarterly magazine, Octavo
(http://alsopreview.com/octavo). Andrew has just
launched his own web site at http://www.boobier.com;
He'd be pleased to hear from you.

Collin Kelley: Modern Confessional: Poets On Twitter

Collin Kelley: Modern Confessional: Poets On Twitter

Writers' Friendship Renewed

by Robert Sward

Barry Spacks, Poetry Matters

Reading an Old Friend's Poems
by Barry Sparks

The wonderings and sweetness of this voice
bring to my thought
the scent of fine paper, fine linen,
shirt with a white collar
for the first time worn,
long evening with a new book,
dwelling over the pages.

But in its sayings
of loss, this voice
tastes blood on its teeth, tart taste of blood
that can neither be spit out nor swallowed.
In reverence for loveliness
my friend's word-music comes upon me
like air before rain: remember? ?
that freshness, cool, ultimately delicate;
though air so offered
may lift at times into a wind
carrying sand, or into a deluge to follow.
"Where will we go," asks the poem's voice,
"when they send us away from here?" ?
the body gone
from all its familiar desirings
and gone this mind
that was a savoring,
while its voice alone continues,
a comfort to desire.
_________

BIO NOTE:

Barry Spacks earns his keep as a persistently visiting professor at UC Santa Barbara after years of teaching at M.I.T. He's published many poems in various journals, paper and pixel, plus stories, two novels, and seven poetry collections, the most extensive of which is SPACKS STREET: NEW & SELECTED POEMS, from Johns Hopkins. A CD of 42 poems, A PRIVATE READING, appeared in October 2000.

Always the Beautiful Answer - Prose Poem Primer

Poet Peter Klappert's Circular Stairs, Distress in the Mirrors, Six Gallery Press,Pittsburgh, PA, 2008.
---

My friend Peter Klappert sends a copy of his new book plus Ruth Kempher's Always the Beautiful Answer: A Prose Poem Primer (the anthology was first published in 1999 and is now back in print). RK begins with a definition...

PROSE, n. 1. Speech or writing without metrical structure: distinguished from verse. 2. Commonplace or tedious discourse.

POEM, n. 1. A Composition in verse, characterized by the imaginative treatment of experience and a condensed use of language that is more vivid and intense than ordinary prose... any composition characterized by intensity and beauty of language or thought: a prose poem.

Age 19 serving in the U.S. Navy (LST 914) in the combat zone in Korea (c. 1952), I began writing... something... and reading everything I could find in the ship's library. In fact, I was ship's librarian... anyway Ruth Kempher includes Carl Sandburg's Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poetry, which I read then and haven't much looked at since. Now it all comes back... vividly, stuff that helped tease me into wanting to write. Sandburg's definitions of poetry include:

1. Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.

2. Poetry is an art practised with the terribly plastic material of human language.

3. Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, 'Listen!' and 'Did you see it?' 'Did you hear it? What was it?'

Anthology includes Charles Baudelaire's "The Stranger," "The Soup and the Clouds" and the editor's note, "The prose poem began as a conscious form in nineteenth century France, pioneered by Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire. The form represented a kind of reaction against the strict poetic dictates of the French Academy...

And Michael Hathaway's tribute / "Ode to Grandpa Hathaway," poet and editor I knew in the mid-1960s when I was teaching at Cornell and serving on Prof. William Hathaway's magazine, EPOCH. Michael Hathaway's poem meets / satisfies all 3 of Carl Sandburg's definitions.

Anyway, I send thanks to Peter Klappert, whose new book Circular Stairs, Distress in the Mirrors, I turn to next. Then to play his CD / Library of Congress Podcast,"The Poet and the Poem."

Wisdom through excess

“It takes several lives to make one person.” I believe that and that we are also, all of us, phoenixes rising, or so it seems, from the ashes of our old selves. The rise and fall of the phoenix. Phoenix. Pheonix. Phoenix.

“The soul is a vast domain," wrote Arthur Schnitzler. "So many contradictions find room in us… We try our best to maintain order in ourselves, but this order is really just synthetic. Our natural condition is chaos.”

I think of that as I come across reviews of an earlier book. “Four Incarnations is named for four distinct periods in Sward’s writing career… shaped by four marriages and four dramatic changes…”

Friends ask, “Does it get easier… does getting divorced and getting divorced again… does it get easier, the second or third time around?”

NO.

In the 60s and 70s I took pride in being called a wild man, a crazy. Experimented and bought into the Romantic notion that to carouse, to indulge, to choose excess over order would help me as a writer. Excess. I'm thinking of Blake who suggested that the way to wisdom is through excess. I'm pro-Blake, but I'm re-thinking excess. These days I’m paying more attention to Ben Franklin and less to Blake. “Early to bed, early to rise...” In truth that's what works. That, for me at least, is what furthers the writing.

It's late in the game, but these are the confessions of a much-married man.

Why do you write?

Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize Lecture, 2006... 

In his Nobel Lecture, Pamuk provides a fairly comprehensive reply to the question, "Why do you write?" 

"Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can't do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. 

"I write because I love the smell of paper, pen and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten.. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but--as in a dream--can't quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy."

The New Yorker, Dec. 25, 2006. Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely.

Men have breast tissue, too! Later... #2

Medical Clinic

Procedure is for "US BREAST UNILAT... lump or mass in breast. Clinical data:

lump at 9 o'clock about 8 mm-1 cm size, cystic..." 

"...at 9 o'clock"? Can't help thinking of World War II movies, gunnery specialists, air force pilots and sailors locating the enemy's position. 

So there's the waiting, then these two procedures, imaging of where I'd have breasts if I had breasts. Thinking of re-reading Philip Roth's novel, "Breast." Maybe there'd be something there for me. A fan of his, but that's not a favorite book. I like Patriarchy, the one about his father, nonfiction, actually... 

So awaiting the second procedure, another imaging, I pick up a copy of an old New Yorker, Dec. 25, 2006, and the page I open to is Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Lecture titled "My Father's Suitcase," 2006. Usually I browse magazines before reading, but this time I plunge right in... 

A good long wait so I'm able to read Pamuk's Lecture in its entirety. I'm a 75-year-old writer, Jesus Christ! And what's the point? You wanna read my poetry? Yes or no? Don't even think. Just say what comes to mind. Do I want to read my poetry? No, actually. True, I wanna read it out loud to an audience. That I enjoy. And I wanna write new stuff... but do I want to go back and read it off the page for pleasure? Hell, no. 

Orhan Pamuk's Lecture is about himself and his father... and the suitcase full of writing his father left him. It's a meditation on the life of a writer. So here I am with my breast tissue and a whole bunch of questions, not the least of which has to do with mortality. It's the kind of thing that would stay in people's minds. "Oh, he's the man with the breasts."  That they'd remember, the biographical detail. Okay, I'm no better than anyone else. That's probably what I'd remember too. Better than someone's poems. Most peoples' poems.

But Pamuk gets it right: "Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors--and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signs that dark and improvident times are upon us.

"But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for that is what literature is."

"Men have breast tissue, too."

Mammogram - "Men have breast tissue, too."

August 7, 2008

"Men have breast tissue, too," said my doctor, a woman. And I got this little cyst or lump or something. So there I am today in Radiology, the only man in the waiting room. I don't know if the thing is benign or not, but the muzak they're playing is positively toxic. Hell, for me, would be an eternity of canned music. One tinny, one cloned musical cyst after another. Suspiciously benign music. Lumpy music made up of... I hate being here...

Women over 40 get these things, mammograms, every year, says the technician. Only one man in 500 gets breast cancer? Is that what she said? Or only one man in 500 gets to get a mammogram? Better my male breast tissue than my nuts. X-ray technican holds and squeezes my "whatever" into position so she can shoot the first of four x-rays. She sticks little "nipple dots" ("nipple markers") on the places where the little cyst(s) might be hanging out. I put my arm up, first the left arm, then (later) the right and lean into this contraption, we shift around, struggling, plump technician and I... together we try to produce enough of something to be squeezed into immobility and x-rayed. What the fuck! And I don't mind her squeezing me. It's an odd way to spend your morning. We do a little dance. She leads, I follow... it's all about getting my breast tissue into position. It's a struggle... we finally get it done.

Then the wait for... we need to find out if she needs to do it again, if the first set of x-rays don't work out. So I wait. Lying down. Sitting up. Dressing. Preparing to leave. Then simply waiting. Room has a pink orchid, possibly real. But stiff and unlife like. It wears a label: www.shopflower.com. And there's a can of Suave, "fights sweat... 24-hour protection."

And a copy of the Ladies Home Journal. What am I gonna do? My mother used to read this thing and I did too... years ago the Journal actually published some decent fiction. This issue offers "125 Beauty Boosters." It's for women. "Can This Marriage Be Saved? The Case of the Boring Husband." And, to round things out, "Sizzling Summer Cookouts!" plus, just what we all need, "Fatal Drug Side Effects (What Your Doctor Isn't Telling You.)"

Still waiting. One pink wall and three cream-colored walls and x-ray room itself is the size of a prison cell. Pink gowns...

X-ray machine has a name, the manufacturer? " Lorad - M-IV" it says on the glass (?) shield to protect technician as she shot those images. Yeah, how am I going to know where I am if I don't write these things down? catalog... it's a way of paying attention. A kind of writer's x-ray?

I read somewhere that men, aeons ago, were equipped to suckle their young. That's why we still got nipples.

Keepers - Garrison Keillor's Writers' Almanac

In an emergency:


[Karl Menninger] often said that it would help anyone "to be getting three square meals a day and to know that there is opportunity ahead—things to be done, land to be turned, things to build." Once, when someone asked him what to do if a person feels he is about to have a nervous breakdown, Menninger replied, "Lock up your house, go across the railroad tracks, find someone in need, and do something for them."

* * *
This blog is something of a journal and one thing I do with my journals is use them, in part, as scrapbooks. What follows are some recent additions, excerpts from Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac:

It's the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, (books by this author) born in Oak Park, Illinois (1899). His first important book was the collection of short stories In Our Time (1925), and he followed that with The Sun Also Rises (1926) and the book that most critics consider to be his greatest novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929).

Hemingway said, "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."

* * *
It's the birthday of the man known as the "dean of American psychiatry," Karl Menninger, (books by this author) born in Topeka, Kansas (1893). His ideas about mental illnesses and how to treat them were revolutionary for his time—and many of the approaches he advocated and developed became instituted in modern psychiatric treatment centers.

Menninger built on some of the foundations that Freud had established, and some of his achievements rest in explaining Freud to the general population through magazine articles, books, and letters. But he also diverged in many ways from the founder of psychoanalysis. Where Freud believed in treating individuals through set therapy sessions, the Harvard-educated Menninger advocated a total immersion experience to help mentally ill individuals get well. He-co-founded with his father and brother, who were also medical doctors, the Menninger Clinic in Topeka. It was inspired partially by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, which Karl's father had visited many years prior and had come home to report, "I have been to the Mayos, and I have seen a great thing."

The Menninger Clinic started in a farmhouse with only 13 beds for patients. At first, local citizens sued to stop the opening of a "maniac ward" near them. The clinic expanded greatly and eventually grew to 39 buildings on 430 acres—and to a staff of 900 people.

In addition to disagreeing with Freud on the best approach to therapy, Menninger had differing notions as to what caused mental illness. While Freud attributed mental illness largely to conflicts within a person's mind, Menninger thought that societal influences played a large role in an individual's mental health. He believed strongly that mental sickness often came about because of a lack of parental love during childhood.

Also, he thought that criminal behavior was often a stage of mental sickness and that it should be treated accordingly. He was a lifelong advocate for prison reform, believing the current system did nothing to help stop antisocial behavior. He told Congress in 1971: "I sometimes feel as if I would like to scream out to the American public that they are squirting gasoline on the fire. The prison system is now manufacturing offenders, it is increasing the amount of transgression, it is multiplying crimes, it is compounding evil."

[Karl Menninger] often said that it would help anyone "to be getting three square meals a day and to know that there is opportunity ahead—things to be done, land to be turned, things to build." Once, when someone asked him what to do if a person feels he is about to have a nervous breakdown, Menninger replied, "Lock up your house, go across the railroad tracks, find someone in need, and do something for them."

He wrote more than a dozen books, including several best sellers. His works include The Human Mind (1930), Love Against Hate (1959), Man Against Himself (1956), Whatever Became of Sin? (1988), and The Crime of Punishment (1968).

* * *

Cormac McCarthy wrote in All the Pretty Horses: "They ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised."

Eucalyptus--California Fires Rage On

Santa Cruz weekly "Good Times," runs cover story, "Eupocalypse Now, California FIRES rage on, so why are eucalyptus trees still the city's most protected menace?"

Ron Oliver, Fire Chief, is quoted as saying, "Eucalyptus are more dangerous because of the resins and oils, so they burn hotter than other trees. But in Santa Cruz they've been declared a heritage tree so we can't do much."

How do you define a "heritage tree"? Well, it "has a trunk with a circumference of 44 inches (approximately 14 inches in diameter or more), measured at 54 inches above existing grade..."

Why this arbitrary designation? Why this "circumference of 44 inches"? One of the city's arborists swears it's true: 44 inches was the waist size of the mayor of Santa Cruz at the time the heritage tree ordinance was written.

Fact: "Hummingbird nests are lost at a rate of 50 percent in eucalyptus, as opposed to 10 percent in native trees."

"Species diversity drops among the trees by about 70 percent, according to bird experts at Point Reyes Observatory."

For more, see the Good Times, July 24, 2008. GTWEEKLY.COM

Solid, well-researched article by Good Times News Editor, Chris J. Magyar, who quotes our neighbor David Zicarelli, "I have no sympathy for people who think of them as natural here. I've never met anyone who actually has these trees on their property who wants to save them. They're all people who look at them from afar. I like to call that sentimental environmentalism."

And, later in the story, a neighbor nods and remarks, 'After the atomic apocalypse, there will be nothing but cockroaches and eucalyptus."

Sonoma Book Festival, Sat., Sept. 20 - Santa Rosa

P.O. Box 159
Santa Rosa, CA 95402
707.527.5412
www.socobookfest.org
email: info@socobookfest.org


NINTH ANNUAL SONOMA COUNTY BOOK FESTIVAL


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Cathy Balach
Electronic Art Available 707-527-5412
info@socobookfest.org


The ninth annual Sonoma County Book Festival is scheduled for Saturday, September 20, 2008, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in Old Courthouse Square in Santa Rosa. It is the oldest general interest book festival in Northern California.

The square will be transformed with the white canopies of more than 70 booths, showcasing writers, independent booksellers, publishers and other literary exhibitors. Over 60 authors from the Bay Area and across the country read from their published works and participate in discussion panels and workshops.

Admission is free and includes readings, panels, and activities for all ages. Among the broad range of topics and genres represented are mystery, thriller, nonfiction, debut fiction, poetry, self-help, travel, children’s and teen/young adult.

For a full list of authors, panels, and other information visit www.socobookfest.org


###

Pill-Popping Pets, S.S.R.I.'s for dogs

Home-Alone Dogs. -- 42% of American dogs sleep in the same beds as their owners...

Excerpted from James Vlahos' Pill-Popping Pets in NY Times Magazine, 7.13.08.

Lead: "Americans are spending millions on mood-altering drugs for their cats and dogs. Is it because we've driven them mad?"

1. Dogs too suffer from separation anxiety and compulsive disorders like hours and hours of tail-chasing.
2. More than 20% of American dogs are overweight.
3. Slentrol, approved by the FDA in 2007 is the country's first canine anti-obesity medication.
4. Aging dogs can become absent-minded ("where did I put the dog dish?").
Pfizer's Anipryl "treats cognitive dysfunction" to help absent-minded dogs remember...
5. "For lonely dogs with separation anxiety, Eli Lilly brought to market its own drug Reconcile last year. The only difference between it and Prozac is that Reconcile is chewable and tastes like beef."

6. Dogs develop mental illnesses "that eerily resemble human ones and respond to the same medications."
7. "Marketers have a new name for the age-old tendency to view animals as furry versions of ourselves: 'humanization,' a trend that is fueling the explosive growth of the pet industry and the rise of modern pet pharma.
8. Americans forked over $49 billion for pet products and services last year, up $11.5 billion from 2003; other than consumer electronics, pet products are the fastest-growing retail segment...
9. The market expansion is being driven both by more pets and by more spending per pet, esp. by affluent baby boomers whose children have graduated from college..." the fastest growing category is health care, with treatments formerly reserved for people--root canals, chemotherapy, liposction, mood pills--being administered to pets.
10."...77 percent of dog owners and 52 percent of cat owners gave their animals some sort of medication in 2006, both up by at least 25 percentage points from 2004. 'Owners want their pets to be more like little well-behaved children.'"

11. Darwin's theory is that evolutionary continuity applies not just to bodies but to brains. "The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind," Darwin wrote.
12. "In laboratory experiments and field observations, practitioners have presented evidence of analogical reasoning by apes, counting by rats and the capacity of pigeons to distinguish the paintings of Picasso from those of Monet."
13. "Prozac, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (S.S.R.I.), prolongs the effects of that neurotransmitter to reduce impulsivity, stabilize moods and lower anxiety, [Dr. Nicholas] Dodman says. He is friends with the noted Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey, and they once compared the drugs they employ to treat violent people and animals. 'You superimpose my portfolio on top of his, and it's the same thing,' Dodman says."
14. "There is evidence that animals experience auditory and visual hallucinations and can temporarily enter deluded states in which they attack... 'By engaging in and winning aggressive encounters, dominant animals drive up serotonin levels and gain in composure...' Prozac can boost the effects of the neurotransmitter.
15. "Archaeologists and geneticists estimate that the domestication of wolves (Canis lupus) into dogs began at least 15,000 years ago." See Jack Page's book "Dogs: A Natural History."

16. "Many dogs, 42 percent, according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association) now sleep in the same beds as their owners. Extreme attachment to people is one of the defining traits of dogs."
17. "Extreme attachment, unfortunately, also causes some dogs extreme suffering when deprived of their owners' company... an estimated 14 percent or more of American dogs have separation anxiety. The problem signs include home and self-destruction; prolonged whining, barking or drooling; or simply standing by the front door all day in a lonely, panting vigil. ('Nannycam'-type video recorders have captured all of the above.).
18. "...more than half the dogs on the drug [Reconcile] experienced short-term side effects, including lethargy, depression and loss of appetite."
19. "Modern owners are increasingly trying to 'sterilize' pet ownership [Dr. Dunbar says] ... trying to pharmacologically control dogs so that they don't act like dogs. 'What people want is a pet that is on par with a TiVo, that its activity, play and affection are on demand,' he says, 'Then, when they're done, they want to turn it off.'"
20. "Training is basically about forming a relationship, but for some people, that interactive process is now giving the dog a pill." [Dunbar]

21. "Long before Prozac, Paxil and the like were taken by people, they were tested for safety and efficacy in legions of laboratory creature. You can plausibly argue--and Dodman and others do--that humans are in fact using animal drugs."
22.
a. German shepherds tend to tail-chase,
b. Doberman pinschers tend to suck their flanks
c. Cocker spaniels may have genetic underpinings for what looks like psychotic rage...

23. "...the causes of mood disorders and obsessions in humans and our pets aren't so different--faulty genetics, dreary environments..." [Dodman]

24. "All of the behavioral issues that we have created in ourselves, we are now creating in our pets because they live in the same unhealthy environments that we do... that's why there is a market for these drugs." [unnamed pharmaceutical company executive]

25. The healthiest dogs in America today belong to homeless men and women, says the "dog whisperer." They're well enough behaved so they can move about without leashes, they get plenty of exercise, forage for food... and, in short, unlike the druggies, they're allowed to be dogs.

----

"Americans are spending millions on mood-altering drugs for their cats and dogs. Is it because we've driven them mad?"

Pill-Popping Pets, by James Vlahos, NY Times Mag. 7.13.08

sperm

father's day image from NY Times.

Brain fitness class, neuron

Structure of typical neuron... image from Wikipedia.

Taking a Brain Fitness class. Notes from first three hours... learned that MRIs show "Islands of Inactivity" in the brains of those fried by marijuana.

Twelve or so students show up and, when asked why we are taking the class, one woman says she'd had a brain aneurism (sp?) and wanted "to find out what's left." Another had had electric shock therapy... others, like myself, were having problems remembering names. Insomnia can mess with the brain... poor diet, booze, drugs, trauma... all of us, for whatever reason, sensing some slippage. A loose connection of two...

Learned that there are as many brain cells (billions!) as there are visible (?) stars in the galaxy. That some dendrites are very long. Several inches... That giraffes, so said the instructor, have brain cells that are 6 to 8 feet long and that every cell in the brain is replaced every 7 or 8 years. So you have, so speak, a different brain now than you did eight years ago when George Bush first became President.

Talked to 81 year old man who lives in a Senior Trailer park. "There are funerals every day... they're going like flies... they're going like dying is going out of style."

Just as continents eons ago were once joined in a solid mass, for example, Australia and South America; China, Alaska and North America, so too were our brains once more of a piece, so said the instructor. "You generate new brain cells all the time... right up to the minute you die, you're generating new brain cells." And brain cells travel to where they are needed. The brain of a musician is different from the brain of an athlete. But if an athlete seeks to become a musician, the brain cells begin to accommodate. There's something called brain plasticity... instructor says, Until your last breath your mind can change.

Melancholy, Baron Wormser

Melancholy
by Baron Wormser*

Weakness—the pale succumbing to loneliness,
Refusing to admit anyone else, indulging
The blue perquisites of adolescence
Long past their sensible deliquescence.

He knew it but went on drinking and regretting,
Not calling his friends and regretting,
Making scenes over nothing and regretting.
It helped to make him despise himself,

Which was, he sensed, what he wanted. He was
Then, in his oblique way, at ease to wander
The city's brazen or quiet streets, conjuring
Random lives and how the slim arc
Of emotion was pulverized. Back home, he put
On some Monk, lay down, half-cried.

"Melancholy" by Baron Wormser, from Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems. © Sarabande Books, 2008. Reprinted here with permission of the poet.

*Wormser has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize along with fellowships from Bread Loaf, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2000 he was writer in residence at the University of South Dakota. For eight years he led the Frost Place Seminar at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire.

L.A. Times, Tassajara, Big Sur fires...

[photo from L.A. Times]

Retired English teacher, I pride myself on an ability to recognize an author's style... Frost, Eliot, Pound... Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth... yeah, I'm of another generation. So tonight, reading L.A. Times for news of the Tassajara, Big Sur fires... I'm startled to recognize the voice of a particular reporter, the author of a feature titled "Tempest in the Treetops," L.A. Times, Tues., Sept. 17, 2002. The subtitle to that Column One, front page feature has some bearing on today's calamity: "Some prize the blue gum eucalyptus for its beauty and scent, while others see a messy fire hazard. Battles are being waged across California."

I've read other pieces by that reporter, but had no idea who had written the following until I came across the lines,

"Hours before sunrise, the 20 remaining monks still meditate and chant.

"Buddhist tenets say that all things are impermanent, and fire can be a great teacher in that," said Alec Henderson, a former defense attorney from Los Angeles who forswore material wealth to take up the Zen creed of "one robe, one bowl."

Henderson left Wednesday with the task of safekeeping Ginger, the monastery dog. Now he's holding his breath, along with thousands of Zen followers and former Tassajara guests, hoping the monastery emerges intact.

But if the flames prove too tough to defeat, the monks plan to retreat along with the Forest Service firefighters.

"We won't risk anybody to save the buildings," said Devin Patel, a bearded 28-year-old who serves as the monastery's fire marshal.

"The buildings can burn, but you can't actually burn down Tassajara. Fire can never touch Tassajara's heart."

And then, somehow, I knew without looking who had written it, The L.A. Times feature writer, Eric Bailey. And, not far from Tassajara, ourselves living near a eucalyptus grove with the ever-present danger of Urban Wildfire, as opposed to forest fire, I somehow took heart in the Buddhist tenet that "all things are impermanent, and fire can be a great teacher in that." It's the first time in days that I felt uplifted, odd to say... almost inspired by something I read in a newspaper. One takes something away from the poems one reads, from fiction and nonfiction... Jesus, maybe it was the context and our own situation re: Urban wildfire... the risk... of loss... home and... all that's in it. And yet, and yet... [reading this over, retired English teacher, I'd mark it up... awful, awful writing... oh, fuck it! I'm just trying to make a point.]

Anyway, excerpting more from Eric Bailey's 6.27.08 story:

"...By Wednesday, flames were just three miles to the west. The sheriff ordered an evacuation, but a skeleton crew was allowed to stay.

They cut branches, raked leaves and laid out fire hose. They triple-checked the two big pumps that can be used to draw water from the 50,000-gallon swimming pool and the riffles of Tassajara Creek.

• 
  
  Photos: Wildfire closes in on Big Sur
• 
  Video: Fires threaten Big Sur

As ash fell from the sky, Mako Voelkel, the monastery's tenzo, or cook, was cutting fire breaks as well as vegetables.

"I'm feeling pretty good about it," she said. "We're prepared."

She and the others were working from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m., with time off only for meals.

Fires hit the monastery twice in the last three decades. In 1977 and 1999, flames burned all around the complex. Each time, the losses were kept relatively minor, thanks to the firefighting monks and professional crews from the U.S. Forest Service.

That's auspicious: With its remote locale, the monastery can't get fire insurance.

David Zimmerman, Tassajara director, expects a rerun. The monks will don yellow, flame-resistant fire jackets and yellow helmets with protective shrouds and will work to stamp out spot fires. Everyone, he said, feels "happy and honored to be here right now."

Late Friday, help arrived. A Forest Service strike team pulled in, along with a 30-man crew of firefighting inmates. They'll be fed out of the monastery kitchen.

Hours before sunrise, the 20 remaining monks still meditate and chant.

"Buddhist tenets say that all things are impermanent, and fire can be a great teacher in that," said Alec Henderson, a former defense attorney from Los Angeles who forswore material wealth to take up the Zen creed of "one robe, one bowl."

Henderson left Wednesday with the task of safekeeping Ginger, the monastery dog. Now he's holding his breath, along with thousands of Zen followers and former Tassajara guests, hoping the monastery emerges intact.

But if the flames prove too tough to defeat, the monks plan to retreat along with the Forest Service firefighters.

"We won't risk anybody to save the buildings," said Devin Patel, a bearded 28-year-old who serves as the monastery's fire marshal.

"The buildings can burn, but you can't actually burn down Tassajara. Fire can never touch Tassajara's heart."

eric.bailey@latimes.com

Killer Of Killer Trees Out On A Limb, Eucalyptus Worship vs. Urban Wildfire

Eucalyptus Worship versus Urban Wildfire. See Mike Neff's Web Del Sol / The Potomac / a journal of poetry and poetics (Washington, D.C.) for more on this story.

The issue: 1) we and our neighbors live near a grove of blue gum eucalyptus, AKA "gasoline trees"; 2) summer is now upon us and so, too, is the risk of urban wildfire; 3) after 20 years of debate, the issue is still unresolved.

Now, following the "Martin Fire," our neighbors and friends in Bonny Doon are moving back into their homes, i.e., those lucky enough to still have a home!
-----

The story:

So there was the headline, “The killer of killer trees is out on a limb in Santa Cruz... with a lead, “Robert Sward, 68, of Santa Cruz, doesn’t look, sound or act like a tree murderer.”

The paper, The Sacramento Bee, after a few kind words about my poetry (“his verse, more lovely than any weed tree...”) went on, “One might suppose Robert would obey the city ordinance that protects ‘heritage trees.’ Instead, he flings it down and dances upon it.”

Yes, much as I love Santa Cruz, I’ve been at war with the city fathers, the majority of whom defend all trees no matter where they came from or what idiot planted them in the wrong hemisphere because only God can make a tree. [I'm paraphrasing here from a feature on blue gum eucs in Audubon Magazine.]

“These so-called progressives speak in a way that would delight Lewis Carroll,” I am quoted as saying. “A local version of the Duchess recently told me, ‘Diseased or not, two blue gum eucs constitute a grove... and the tree you removed was a member of a grove.’ All that was missing from our exchange was a queen to declare, ‘Off with his head!’”

The blue gum eucalyptus—or ‘gasoline tree,’ as firefighters call it—is an invasive exotic from Australia that evolved with fire. Fire doesn’t kill blue gums. Instead, it clears out the competition and opens their seed pods.

Soon after murdering a tree, I stood before Santa Cruz City Council, our lawyer present, facing a $9000.fine. For what? Removing one euc and lopping off a few branches from another.

The grove in question, the four or five shallow-rooted, fire-prone monsters endangering our home, is situated on our property, property on which we pay taxes. Our property, our trees, our taxes.

It all started in 1991 with the Oakland Hills/Berkeley fire which killed 20 people and caused more than $5 billion damage. Fire officials determined the blue gum euc was a key cause of that tragedy and also the fire storm that later struck Australia. Australia, where the shallow-rooted, unstable gasoline trees are also known as ‘widow-makers.’ Why? Because of their tendency to drop heavy branches or fall over without warning.

After reading about the Oakland Hills fire, I did a little research. What I learned was that eucs are the original burn baby burn trees. A little lightning, a careless smoker, a kid with a firecracker, that’s all it takes.

Hearing of our plight, which we share with hundreds of other Californians, the Los Angeles Times ran a front page feature, “Tempest in the Treetops... Some prize the blue gum eucalyptus for its beauty and scent, while others see a messy fire hazard. Battles are being waged across California.”

“After a decade of unsuccessfully fighting City Hall for permission to ax his grove, Sward—a poet, retired college professor and avowed environmentalist—resorted to a botanical form of civil disobedience. He hired a tree cutter to take them out.

“Scarcely had the buzz of the chain saw kicked up when city parks inspectors—‘tree police,’ as some locals call them—stepped in, halted the cutting and hit Sward with fines initially totaling $9,000.”

Maybe I should have known better when, in 1985, I moved here and learned that the most popular film ever shown in Santa Cruz was The King of Hearts, starring Alan Bates. In World War I, as a German army retreats, they booby-trap the whole town to explode. The locals flee and a gaggle of cheerful lunatics escape the asylum and take over.

Again, I love Santa Cruz. I love the people... so much so that prior to the 1991 Oakland Hills fire I might have been persuaded to strip naked, join hands with my friends, encircle and protect a euc tree—see photo above!

But then, after what I learned, innocent no more, I tasted the true nature of the tree.

Yes, I was once politically correct. A stoned out of his mind innocent. Yes, yes, and holier than thou. That was in the days before political correctness became a force that would determine the outcome of elections. That was back before I became “an enemy of the people.” That is, an enemy of the blue gum euc. Fucking trees.

You don’t run for office, certainly not in this arena, unless you’re PC and pro-euc. Hence the power of those who would fine us $9,000.

That, in brief, is the story. True, City Council later reduced the fine to $1500., which our lawyer suggested we pay.

“All of which has Santa Cruz’s tree-killing poet [and his neighbors] bewildered,” says the L.A. Times. Yes, it’s true. I am bewildered.

“Sward doesn’t see the sense of it: These are his trees. This is his danger.

“’There are people in Santa Cruz, Sward said, ‘who believe the blue gum euc is more important than human life.’” And that’s not an exaggeration. An esteemed arbortist who himself works for the city told me, “There are people on Santa Cruz City Council who wouldn’t move a eucalyptus if it were lying across the body of a small child.”

Anyway, the blue gum eucs are still there. The grove overhanging our home is still there. The politically correct are still in charge. Nice people, well-intentioned. And so it is we, and thousands of other Californians, face another year with our homes and our lives, and our children’s lives, still at risk.

We're talking here about urban wild fires. "Okay, so what would constitute an emergency whereby we could chop 'em down?" I once asked a politically saavy fire chief. "Well, the trees would actually have to be on fire. Then you could remove 'em!" he replied.