Religion

“Church Going” by Philip Larkin

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Grateful to have grown up in a home (okay, homes) free of superstition. Superstition is to our collective shame now and guarantees future generations will laugh at us (would we grow solemn if people attributed the latest quake/tsunami to Poseidon?). Photos in this post are ones I took in Vatican City. If it looks like gold in the image, it is gold.

Church Going
by Philip Larkin

Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
‘Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognizable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation – marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these – for whom was built
This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Uncategorized

Hoarding – digital & real life

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Yes to hoarding books — up ’til 2007, when we unloaded 14 cases of books before moving to our current home. Even so on our shelves to this day – THREE different copies of ‘Middlemarch’, THREE of ‘Lolita’, and 5 or so Collected Works of Shakespeare that I can still rationalize with quasi-scholarishness.

Yes to hoarding magazines – SPY, Q, Rolling Stone from when I subscribed from ’87-’91. Also ditched in 2007 upon realizing society was not going to rely on MY collection to reconstitute pop culture. Though I sustained a hope the kids would come across this trove and be impressed by their hip dad who would let them tear into all this stuff for their authentic/ironic study/collage projects.

Yes(ish) to hoarding DVDs and CDs. Sometimes go months between getting new movies or music, though. Not feeling sheepish here.

Yes to hoarding VHS tapes of tv miscellany. Got halfway through digitizing them this past year. Lots of phenomenal morsels, but my eye and mind when appraising the crate full of them is getting cooler and more severe.

Yes(ish) to hoarding email from the early 90s onward. Haven’t read them in decades, actually, since they were current. Oh, when email was new! “Whoah, I can type words on the Mac Plus, and this telephone wire in the back running along this janky carpet will send these words to my friend in Texas? GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE. WITCH! WIIIITCCH!”

No to hoarding cats, though our dog looks at the two cats and disagrees.

No to hoarding old letters – in a very modest box is a collection of damning and charming letters from the 80s and 90s to serve as a reality check when my own spawn roil in dating intrigues and frustrations of COSMIC IMPORTANCE.

Poetry

“Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold

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A zillion years ago in a Victorian Lit class in college, the professor required that students memorize “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold. We were reading several of Arnold’s essays, esp. “Culture and Anarchy” so reading some of the poems in the same book was CONVENIENT, but the face-making at having to ABSORB something and recite it before the class was HUGE. How DARE this professor at a middling state university require his students memorize & recite a poem like we were in elementary school! And the professor, at the time the head of the department, RELISHED the pained looks we were giving out. “It’s important that you have at least one poem in your life you can recite,” he admonished. The more time passes, the more I respect that.

The last five lines are the only ones that spill into conscious thought. So, not a poetry share from the core, but as a show of respect for the professor who insisted a room full of 20-something ponces LEARN something. National Poetry Month has only a few days left, so expect the posts to get cruder come May.

Dover Beach
by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; — on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Parenting

Bookended moments

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This morning —

Dropped off J at school, who is almost 11. In the parking lot he made me roll down the car window and gave me a kiss goodbye. When we walk together, he still sometimes reaches out for my hand. Those times are diminishing, but I’m still grateful for them.

Tonight —

Setting L down to sleep, giving her a dream about (done nightly – I suggest an amusing dream) I made a joke about not being useful. She said “Papa, you are very useful. I could talk about the reasons why for 28 hours.”

Gush.

Poetry

“We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks

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Gwendolyn Brooks is from Topeka, Kansas. As a fellow Kansan, I love that.

We Real Cool
by Gwendolyn Brooks

The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Writing

Writing is grouchy-making (sometimes)

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During the last serious writing jag 10-12 years ago I wrote a rough novel (167,000 words) about a lot of things, among them the anxiety of impeding parenthood (a meticulously planned process – we were following a choose-your-baby’s-gender book and recording daily temperatures and environmental descriptors on a spreadsheet. Really.). First child on the way providing fuel to finish off an outline I’d been dragging around for 3-4 years.

Went through a LOT of giggling to myself, writing during lunch breaks at my corporate job. Then typing late into the night, or on weekends, back to the world. Highs of enjoying what I was doing, or at least making something, good or bad, that would last to the next day. Better than marking time by passively consuming media.

What I did NOT like was the attendant touchiness. Not about the work itself, but a higher susceptibility to perceiving slights (real or imagined) and crankiness. I had less patience for not-writing moments.

Life has been very even-keeled for me, and I didn’t have the wisdom to think “Aah, this is a biochemical phase as a come-down from peak creative moments.” and ride the wave out. I didn’t have a coping mechanism. I could WATCH myself shorter-tempered around the house “Ugh, you mean I have to go to the STORE? Oh, the impertinence of it all!” and generally behaving above the baseline for assholery, but hadn’t sorted out where that came from.

Spouse tolerated it all, didn’t even remark on my change in behavior. [Note to self: Maybe I only felt assholy INSIDE, while externally I projected the same … uh … Oh, shit. I may be an asshole alla time.]

The start of 2010 marked another writing jag pushing now into 2011, and I find I’m monitoring exercise, diet, and dosing myself with copious amounts of dark chocolate. 119,000 words on the current project, and over halfway done. My guess is that editing will cut the final version by at least 1/3. But I’m enjoying creating something that lasts to the next day, even if crappy. And this project FEELS different. Instead of writing up a LOT of inside jokes for only myself, while in the zone of inspiration I find I’m embedding jokes for 1-2 other people. That’s growth, write?

Poetry

“Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats

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My favorite poem in my twenties. Though Yeats wrote it at the age of 62, its boasting and yearning resonated with my aspirations to write. Every few years I return to it to check in with the young man and measure what I had in mind for myself back THEN compared to what I’ve accomplished NOW. Similar to what I do with locations in the real world – return to old haunts. If the location has bad memories, revisiting it in presumably a happier time (or less melodramatic) let me take the power of the moment back. An idle fancy may strike where a shimmer of Future Me might be visible to assure Then Me that the trial of that moment would be temporary: only endure it, lad.

Sailing to Byzantium
by William Butler Yeats

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
— Those dying generations — at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling
To keep a drowsy emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Uncategorized

Magical bunny whose power is … making us hide candy

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Kids down for the night, and we’ve just finished hiding another large stash of candy-crammed plastic eggs all over the place.

Unclear how much the children put stock in the concept of a magical rodent (a normal-sized rabbit? a horrifyingly GIANT rabbit?) impishly apparating within their home at night — while the family sleeps — and hiding candy in nooks and crannies. I remember the Easter Bunny being an abstraction as a kid. Media depictions were inconsistent, but it didn’t really matter if the candy was manufactured, purchased, or excreted by the Bunny: free candy, delivered to our home!

Unclear what a magical bunny has to do with celebrating the alleged life, death, resurrection of the Great Zombie Jesus. Maybe that it has NOTHING to do with the magic zombie story is its appeal.

So, 2,000 years ago, a guy I never met gave his life for … what exactly? To expiate my sins, twenty centuries before my birth? Did he ask me before doing this? And I’m supposed to thank him, nay, I OWE him obedience for this whatever-it-was?

Astonishing how, even with 200 cameras on her at all times, it’s not even possible to document what Lindsay Lohan is doing with herself week by week, meanwhile great credence is given to Iron Age rumors shared word-of-mouth by illiterates for generations before any of the stories were written down. Imagine wars being started over conflicting Lindsay Lohan rumors.

Candy? Real. Yay! Nom nom nom. All-too-human cranky sanctimonious sky gods who watch over us and require constant appeasement? Not so real.

Team Candy.

Pop Culture

‘Twilight: New Moon’, My Deeper-Than-Necessary Thoughts

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Okay, this movie is not intended for me, at the ripe age of 40.

When I heard about this series of books, I sniffed at it as abstinence-porn. Given the media onslaught and rabid mania, I slung more than my bodyweight of vitriol at the whole enterprise over the last year. But experience has shown that if I tear into something with zest, there’s something deeper fueling me, and diving in to explore may be rewarding.

Drama saved for your mama, and you.

Sitting in a theater with my spouse, sister-in-law Erin, and her husband Patrick, there was a lot of time to reflect. Frequent outbursts behind us during the previews from someone (who apparently doesn’t go to moving pictures very often) happily subsided by feature time. For the best, as it hurts the anecdote if I got into a fight at this movie, but was the one who slapped first.

I’d watched about the last 2/3 of ‘Twilight’ on DVD, enough to think that vampire baseball was a really neat idea. Then snorted and laughed at the rest. Sparkly! Aaaaa, so dreamy…

Still, I’d be lying to pretend to have been always above this.

In high school, chances are high that me and my above-it-all friends would have passed these books around and snarked heartily, after reading all of them cover-to-cover.

For two years in high school, I was involved in a relationship that fostered all the hormone & adrenaline charged drama and emotion two intelligent teens could muster. Proclamations promising the metaphysically impossible, wrung-out poems, 6-8 hour phone conversations (sometimes with half-hour long measured silences), nocturnal sneaking, exhilarating reconciliations, crying jags, pleading, yelling, counsel & support, quiet confidences. And at the time, we meant every syllable and exertion (paths diverged, all lives turning out happily and full).

I can’t cast stones in the region of heightened adolescent melodrama. Billions of teens before went through it, billions will go through it now and in the future. The pituitary gland is an agonizing mistress/master.

So, now that I’ve checked myself out of being snarky about 85% of the content of these ‘Twilight’ movies, what’s left to say?

For starters, Jeepers Christmas I cannot abide the pent-up dry-humping blue-balling abstinence fixation that throbs and rubs through these stories. Vampires who are exquisitely pained to give just one kiss, for fear of being stirred to more! Same for dog-people, apparently. Get too hot, and a were-boy has to leave the room lest his clothes fly off. And the dudes still end up with their shirts off, a lot. Pants are ALWAYS on, though. Quelle frottage!

I’ve been told, and have read plot summaries (Wikipedia FTW!) that Edward & Bella eventually do what their bodies are screaming at them to do, after marriage, but the longed-for deed gets conspicuously skimmed over, only to jump into a horrifying, bloody birth that leaves poor Jacob with one of the worst dating/dance cards ever.

Not a fan of abstinence-only education or perspective. Unwanted pregnancy rates rise where those programs flourish, and only drives kids to thinking they keep their virginity if they limit themselves to oral sex and doing it in the pooper (too ashamed to get prophylactics, natch). Teens will do what their bodies want them to do, and it’s dumb to not teach them broadly about all their options. Back to the fangs…

I laughed at a scene where two werewolves are scrapping in a forest, and there’s a shot setup as if the CGI tussle had knocked the camera down.

I respect that Taylor Lautner fought like hell and beefed up to keep his elevated role in this movie. He’s not charismatic onscreen, but serviceable, and naturally sympathetic when you know about the shit hand his character will be dealt at the end of the fourth book.

Robert Pattinson is okay. How a dude can be put in his spot and strike those poses and keep his wits together is a miracle. Given that brooding and tragic airs are required, the guy gets a pass there, too. And it lets me feel that Cedric Diggory is actually okay, if a bit glower-y.

But wowie, why does every other female student in that high school seems LOADS more tolerable and interesting than the lead character, Bella? I begrudge her the pain and the howling and other manifestations of high emotion, but she’s still a pill to hang around. Even as a tormented teen, I could usually pull my shit together for consecutive hours of unalloyed hilarity.

She’s largely passive, too: why does everyone ELSE seem to drive Bella’s pickup truck more than Bella? Appropriate, given all the other characters drag her along, or that things happen to her, but she rarely causes anything to happen. Maybe the DVD will have several deleted scenes of her driving her own damned truck.

How many movies have been made where the sole purpose a US citizen goes to Europe is to confer or be judged by some gilded/marbled room full of weary Europeans isolated from anything vital? Of course, when the US citizen doesn’t like the decree, shit gets busted up.

And the dad is there as the sanity-saver for those of us who are not Twi-hards (ironic phrase!), Twi-Moms, or there to admire beefcake. Clearly, Bella’s dad gets better and more solid sleep when she disappears for days on end. Maybe that’s why he approves of these supernatural hyper-drama boyfriends.

So, lousy movies, but I have a better understanding what the stories are about, my visceral revulsion toward them, and how they got hooks into several of my friends.