Category: Uncategorized

 

“Beware of serious people for their reality is flat; and they have come to think of themselves as merely flat paste-ons. Their rage at the flatness of their lives knows no end; and they keep all their little imitators scared to death.”

—Russell Edson

They are everywhere the flat people: vituperative and a bit greasy and their eyes are popping and they wave paper or they sneer because they don’t need to wave paper they’re so damned smart who needs to advertise facts–but anyway you get it in the pus because they’re angry and they’re flat as sandwich boards that say “Eat at Joe’s”.

I say the whole situation would be tolerable if the flat people were limited to TV. You can always turn off the overgrown fraternity boy who’s spouting about Obama’s recovery package as if he’s ever in his life swallowed a morsel of a thought but what to do what to do when the flat ones are all about you and you’re still a round hominid and you’ve got a book by Kropotkin under your arm? You think about hiding. But you don’t.

Flat people are addicted to verticality. They think money is supposed to flow upwards. Power is supposed to course downwards as if from Mt. Olympus. This makes sense because flat people come from the ancient Grecian underworld and by the way they also live on blood.

 

Flat. Serious. Addicted to vertical power relations. Filled with envy.Sounds like a good resume for working in the punditocracy. Trouble is you can find them in business; higher education; churches; local school boards–people flat as roofing tiles, serious as porcupines, and not a shred of community minded curiosity in a one of them.

And that’s the  true idee fixe of the Flatsters: they don’t want anymore communities in America. They’re done with all that Bingo and bake sale sentimentality.

“Close the failing banks!” they cry. “We don’t need a middle class main street!”

The Flat people are impatient cuz they want to stack together in their verticalized heaven which trust me ain’t taking you or your vaguely round children or your dogs.

 

S.K.

 

By Anrea Scarpino

 

I teach composition and writing classes at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and my students are generally a pretty hip lot. CSUDH is an urban commuter university located near Compton (of 90’s rap fame) and my students write papers about being shot, about working two jobs to pay for school, about having a beloved family member kidnapped and ransomed in Mexico. They have seen a lot, may already have children, and work incredibly hard. It’s an immensely satisfying and humbling job to stand in front of my students twice a week.

And that was particularly true this past week when things took a turn for the absurd. On Tuesday, my upper-division composition class had written a short essay on a quote that describes Los Angeles as a city constructed by and for the automobile. No other city in the world, I would argue, has the love affair with cars that Los Angeles has, and this is a subject my students understand quite well. We talked about LA’s lack of public transportation, its ever expanding highway system, how people drive even when they’re doing an errand close to their house. One student said, I have a grocery store across the street from my house and I still get in my car and drive there. Another spoke in depth about his THREE cars, one used only for transporting his kids to and from sports events (they’re a sweaty lot), one for work, and one for special events. Other students nodded. Cars are status symbols, one said. You can’t be seen without one.

That’s when I dropped this bomb on them: I told them when I first started teaching at CSUDH, I researched how I could get to school on the bus. I was going to tell them that the bus route would have taken 2 hours and involved something like 8 transfers, but I couldn’t even get that far. The class erupted in laughter. And not polite, my-teacher-is-making-a-joke, laughter. Uproarious laughter. Students hit each other, they were laughing so hard. One girl doubled over in her desk. In all my years of standing in front of a classroom, I have never said anything as funny as my admission that I wanted to take the bus to school.

Cut to Thursday. For Thursday’s first year writing course, I brought two versions of the song, “Hot in Herre” to discuss in class, the original sung by Nelly (of course) and a cover by a folk musician named Jenny Owen Youngs. I played both versions, and we discussed what the song is about, who the target audience for each version is, what the purpose is. Despite hearing that, as a 30-something, my students consider me middle-aged, and that only people who go to poetry readings listen to folk music, I pressed on without offering much commentary. Then I asked the students what they knew about each musician. One woman who sits in the back of the class immediately raised her hand. Nelly’s from the country, she said. I looked at her, puzzled. Nelly? Is from the country? He’s actually from St. Louis, I replied. She nodded her head, Yeah, the country. Now, I’ve been to St. Louis many times and it is decidedly NOT the country. There’s an arch, for God’ sake. And close to 3 million people live there.

Cut to Saturday night. I’m trying to understand what my students have taught me about growing up in Los Angeles, that it would make sense to think of a city like St. Louis as “the country,” to drive your car across the street to buy a gallon of milk, to find riding the bus hysterically funny. They’re hip, smart people who live in one of the world’s biggest cities, a place with incredible diversity, and yet, at least this week, they’re mired in a very narrow construction of the world. Of course, aren’t we all? It’s difficult to see outside of our experience, to understand another person’s way of life. I’m no better at it, I’m sure. I just live in a world with a slightly different set of experiences and values. Cars are king in their world, public transportation a non-issue, and anything east of Los Angeles just pastureland. Until, I guess, you reach New York.

 

 

Andrea Scarpino is the West Coast Bureau Chief of POTB

Visit her at: www.andreascarpino.com

As a child Sunday evening meant the resumption of school and children are perhaps even more keenly aware of the declining moments of freedom than their elders. There were only a few more hours as the day darkened.The morning would bring arithmetic and the variegated rhetorics of adult enforcement and certainly by the age of 9 or 10 a kid knows the dolorous shadows caste by the prospects of the upcoming week.

These days I think of the unemployed who have no structure and for whom such nostalgic sensibilities would undoubtedly be lost. Who can dread the coming week’s worth of schools or hjobs when homelessness and humiliations are all around and with no end in sight? 

Anyone of us will take the coming week with its humdrum and structured inconveniences. We count ourselves lucky to have this old Sunday feeling and to know the value of feeling. Our jobs (those of us who still have them) remain larger than our employments. We work for the larger community around us and try as best we can to serve our neighbors. The days are hard in America just now. Very hard.

When I hear a politician say, “Let’s just let the banks fail,” I wonder what strange brew he or she has been nipping.

 

S.K.  

 

People with developmental and associated disabilities are dying in the United States. They are dying in facilities that are horrifying and that no American should tolerate. The stories below should be on the front page of every news outlet in the country. These are our neighbors.

 

S.K.

 

Client chokes to death at Howe
http://www.southtownstar.com/news/1459170,030409howe.article
Related:
Family of Howe resident files wrongful death lawsuit against state
http://www.southtownstar.com/news/1457212,030309howe.article

You too can hear three lies in three minutes. Anyone can play this game. Just turn on your TV, limit your viewing to 180 seconds and use your remote like Toscanini used his baton.

On A B C I heard George Will, that superannuated gas bag salt the dead carcass of the United States by saying that everyone knows Reagan’s vision that the free market offers the best means of handling the economy and that’s the way to go, etc. etc.

On N B C I heard Lindsey Graham, the king of mush mouth G.O.P. toxic salesmanship announce that the only thing   that needs to be done for the U.S. economy is to open lines of credit for people who want tu buy cars. Man talk about Typhoid Mary meets your used auto dealer! Who lets these people have a microphone?

And of course that’s the third lie: the Sunday news roundup programs are largely run by corporate apologists and Washington bubble children who grew up under the Reagan-ite beanstalk and accordingly now carry on as though the disaster we’re in is just a matter of the government spending less and then, as a reward our good old corporate pals will open their secret spigots and all will be ducky in Oz. 

I’m going to take a shower and wash off the pixellated cooties. God Save the United States from its Washington pundits.

 

S.K.

It is unfair to suggest Michael Meteyer is simply an advocate of the blind–we all know that just as blind people themselves are widely diverse and interesting so too are those who work on their behalf. Michael is a writer, poet, teacher, artist, traveler, husband, educator, free spirit, and as  all of this implies he’s a man with “a far roving mind” (to borrow a phrase from the Kalevala).

 

Michael travels widely as a field representative for Guiding Eyes for the Blind and on any given day you might gfind him in South America or Colorado or in the mountains of northern California. Now he has decided to start a blog that allows us to follow him both “on the road” and in reminiscences and spirited journal entries. He is also looking for contributors and if we understand things correctly he’s even going to give away airline tickets to anywhere in the continental U.S. if you’re one of the correspondents who answers his festive questions correctly.

 

Visit his blog at: http://michaelmeteyer.blogspot.com/

 

When you’re with Michael you’re in good company!

 

S.K.  

 

From Northrup Frye:

 

“Psalm 148, in the fourth verse: “Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens.”

Well, it’s a matter of common observation that the rain clouds are below the heavens. And the implication of there being water above, or behind the windows of heaven, indicates another dimension of water. So that you are, first of all, presented with a conception of a water of life which is both above and below, and that leads to the suggestion that the water of life that is being talked about here is not quite the same thing as ordinary drinking water. In other words, the suggestion is that man could live in water like a fish: there would be a state of existence in which water does not necessarily drown, in which man can live in water as one of his own elements”

Speaking personally I like a good metaphorical water. Still I don’t try to live in it. . This is because drowning is an even worse metaphor. One doesn’t have to be Herman Melville to figure that out.

Biblical metaphors differ from the metaphors in poetry in two essential ways: they offer a promise of resolution if one follows a creed–that is, if you change your life in a devotion to spiritual  governance you wil finally resolve the illogic of the figure; and if you in turn undergo that transformation your longing for deeper understanding will be forever satisfied. Hence the image of heavenly water in which mankind can breathe.

Me? I’m too weak for that. I shop at CVS and I buy Odor Eaters and sour ball candies and I like my water to behave like the water I can swim or drink. I don’t want my heavens filled with sting rays and anemones. Can you imagine having to spend eternity talking with Flipper? C’mon. I expect some comments on this urgent matter.

 

S.K.

 

The Department of Justice has warned the governor of Texas that the state’s residential schools for the “mentally retarded” are putting people in harm’s way.

The article below is indicative of the incapacity of the state’s legislature to fully grasp the human rights dimension ofthis matter. 

 

Rename ‘state schools,’ add cameras, panel says
http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/2008/red/1217c.htm

 

 

S.K.

By Jon Chopan

 

Rochester is snowed in.  Like the rest of New York and all the cities layed down along the lake.  The city is under siege.  There is gray in the sky and the smoke funneling from Kodak.  The lake threatens to wash away the summer homes of people who do not stay to brave the winter but anxiously watch the weather report. The city council has been gassing up the plows since August in preparation.  Grade schoolers still walk to school, tunneling through six-foot tall snowdrifts and arriving late after epic snowball wars.  The parking lots conquered and reconquered with the removal and arrival of fresh snow.  Rush hour traffic and holiday travel go unaffected except for the out-of-towners who are going too slow.

The bars along the river have closed their doors until April and handed out what was left of the summer stock.  We’re moving into the city, moving closer to one another.  The warmth of 100,000 people melts the snow on Saturday nights.  But we don’t retreat into our homes.  There is ice fishing and snowmobiling and games of hockey to be played on the frozen canal.  Everywhere you go you hear whispers: hypothermia, through the ice.  Children are not praying for snow days because they know there is never enough, that more snow only means longer walks and salt stained pants.  The hills of salt at the town hall become smaller as the snow piles higher, as shopping carts from Wegman’s grocery become mangled and lost, as the inevitable child goes missing, a snow fort caved in.

On R News Yolanda Vega is calling out the numbers for the New York “Take 5” and we are on the edge of our seats because my mother always buys a ticket and because we are mesmerized by Yolanda’s voice.  When she calls out her name, “Hello New York, this is Yo-LAN-dah VAY-ga,” drawing it out, it almost makes it all right that we will never win.  We love Yolanda.  We love the snow.  They are constant.  They are here to stay.  Or they will return again.  There will be no layoffs, no jobs shipped to other cities never to return. 

After the break the news reports that sales are down at local retail outlets, and they explore the connection between that and decreases in Kodak bonuses and layoffs at Delphi and cutbacks at Xerox.  It is no wonder everyone in this town is holding a lottery ticket.  The weatherman comes on with spectacular photos of the city covered in snow, and he describes some kind of effect with the light.  There is always something new to learn about snow and winter weather.  My friends and I, though we are too old and do not have the right winter gear, find old sleds in our garages and go out into the snow with beer and a camera.  We have forgotten flashlights but the weatherman, for once, was right.  The light from the city is bouncing off the clouds and it is bouncing back off the snow and it is almost like the sun is just now rising, even though it’s well past midnight. All at once the world feels beautiful, more than I can say.  From the top of the hill where we stand, in one of those silent moments that comes when the world appears covered in snow, every inch of the city is burning.                  

 

Jon Chopan is a roving correspondent for “Planet of the Blind” and we urge you to visit his website: http://www.pulledfromtheriver.blogspot.com/

 

 

When the country gave up on justice

We imagined the poem

Had a soul, we

Spoke of poems

As being like refugees

Or prisoners.

When you strangle a poem

It chokes

Like a real man,

Thrashes about

In its hemispheric

Dying brain,

And the poets

Of my dead country

Salt that poem

With studied tears.

Think of all the elegies

We will write for the Republic!

Think of the poem

Carried through the streets

Weighed down with flowers,

The poem, burning

On its pyre

In the great public square.

Of course you should think what you will:

Perhaps poems are not human at all

Or they represent something worse?

Can I say the poem

Alone is a verdict—

A slave who recites at Ephesus,

The speech of a captive child,

And the morning star, the moon up…

 

S.K.