Going rogue
May be in vogue,
But if everyone does it,
It wasn’t rogue, was it?
When an elephant has a cold,
I bet that that gets old…
Real fast. Who wants a trunk
That’s stuffed with gunk?
In my youth, I always liked the way
Beat poetry cavorted on the page...
Rhythms all irregular, of course,
And not a rhyme scheme there to save your soul!
But with a chanting quality - unprosaic -
Of never becoming merely a boring stream
Of less-than-consciousness lined up discreetly
To please a crowd of academic critics,
Instead, an onslaught of outrageousness
Up in your face and catching at your ears.
With zero fear of speaking loud and clear.
Stoicism has its virtues
But it certainly asks a great deal
When it asks you to suppress
The way that you naturally feel.
It’s possible to write a sonnet which is so prosaic in its subject matter, that though its meter flows without a hitch, it sounds so much like ordinary patter that if you write it without breaks in lines the unsuspecting reader may not see the format follows classical designs, quite suitable for soaring poetry, but here constricted to dull observations about the fact that verse forms without feeling do little to ignite imaginations and nothing to set tender spirits reeling. Real poetry requires a certain drive, a pulsing power to make you feel alive.
How do all those wiggly legs
Fit inside of centipede eggs?
Admittedly, they can run like champs,
But I bet they’re all born with a bad case of cramps!
Yes, Excel was used. Computers leave such nice audit trails of when things got written.
Last night I reviewed how Kitties got written,
How it all started off as a ten minute kitten,
How I soon began to try to extend it
Without much of a clue as to how I might end it.
Feeling my way, an uneasy man,
Writing chunks out of order without a real plan,
But with some vague sense of a story arc
Glimmering distantly in the dark.
Train tracks built
On iron stilts
Let you loop around
Chicago’s downtown.
But the track’s clatter
Makes it hard to chatter
Beneath the El.
You have to yell!
Or else, just wait
Till the noise abates.
Told my doc I had insomnia,
The worst I’d ever had!
He said don’t lose any sleep over it,
It doesn’t sound that bad.
Mathematicians sometimes speak
Of 4-D Euclidean space
But nowhere in Euclid’s Greek
Can we actually find any mention
Or diagrammatic trace
Of figures in four dimensions.
My good deed for the week: told young family with luggage where
They could find the elevator to the Blue Line so they could get to O’Hare.
Chicago summers are too short.
I’m suing to lengthen them in court.
Can it be done? Let me count the ways…
August will now have 32 days!
The orchestra has the numbers
To generate the thunder,
But defiance is exciting
So the soloist brings the lightning.
There's an article today in the Wall Street Journal about violent crime having spiked in rural America — during "the pandemic". Which makes sense to me. Suicides were up. Drug overdoses were up. I knew about those. Those are already forms of doing violence to yourself, in my book. So to me it's intuitive that violence in general would climb.
I put "the pandemic" in quotes because it wasn't just the disease, it was the response to it, including the overhyping and the lockdowns, that hurt people emotionally and spiritually.
I think a lot of people's brains
Lost control under the strain.
If you make lots of keyboard errors,
You may have to face the reality
That you have inherited
A Type O personality!
Gravel full of glittering broken glass,
Seems like it should be pretty in its way,
But somehow my eyes would rather take a pass -
I prefer looking at gravel that’s dull and gray.
If there were eight days a week
What would we call the new day?
And would it be for working
Or would it be for play?
What began as a ten minute adventure
For two wacky augmented cats,
Became more stand-alone episodes
About their outer space spats,
And that was welded together
In a stunning story arc
To create the Kitties Saga:
Funny, and light, and dark.
May, you must go away,
June is arriving soon,
And lacking a Tardis, I’m…
Required to live just one month at a time.
When running in the USA
In contests such as a 5 or 10 K,
There are mile markers along the way.
Kilometers set the length of the race,
But with miles we measure our pace.
Happy families are all alike.
That’s what Tolstoy famously said.
I suspect happy families simply bored him,
So he wrote about the others, instead.
It’s cold.
The train is late.
I stand
And refrigerate.
At last,
The train is here.
I sit,
And thaw my rear.
Soviet student of ichthyology
Was good at studying sharks
But struggled with political philosophy
In which he got low Marx.
An examination of history,
Even one that’s fairly cursory,
Reveals that every date
Is a major anniversary.
The calendar is too crowded!
The solution is simple and clear:
We need to stop using the same months
Over and over each year!
I long to be in Antarctica,
Where summer has just begun.
Yes, I’m sure that it’s still fairly cold,
But petting penguins sounds fun!
Most English nouns possess
Other nouns with apostrophe S,
And when we make a contraction
With IS… we use the same action,
And say: “The dog’s collar’s wet.”
How confusing can you get?
My father owned the house for fifty years,
And all those fifty years I had a key.
New people live there now, and it appears
They love the place. That’s gratifying to me.
But still at times I feel the house is mine.
The empty garbage bins - I want to haul
Them up the drive. I leave them there. It’s fine.
The chores belong to them. Not mine at all.
Most days I walk by twice, it’s on the way
To where I catch the train. I feel its presence
More than I see it, as my memories play
On automatic - mostly rather pleasant.
I have an edifice complex. That’s a pun.
I carry it with me, as a dutiful son.
Biology has been complicated needlessly,
Reportedly through evolution.
The Soviets simplified it heedlessly
After their revolution.
Lysenko had theories of botany
He said would grow more food.
Results? He hadn’t got any.
The masses were thoroughly screwed.
The silkworm and the honeybee
Make useful products for you and me.
Not sure what the other bugs are for,
Can’t find their products at the store.
And as for mosquitoes, well I declare,
I’d like to blast them from the air!
I’ve been thinking over Walter Donway’s new novel, Retaking College Hill. I enjoyed it, was moved by it, was moved to thought by it. Gave it a full set of stars.
I’ve heard some people don’t like the sexual relationships in the book. I thought they were a bit quirky at times, but I thought they were well written and reflective of the author’s personal sexuality in some way. I’ve read a bunch of his fiction and poetry. At times he definitely leans into the erotic, with what you might call a traditional “me-Tarzan, you Jane” attitude. A retro attitude. I think he’s actually strong in such scenes, they come across quite vividly. But someone else’s vivid fantasy can be disturbing at times, and I imagine that’s what’s going on here. I found them a little jarring at times, not in a bad way. I think they are meant to be a bit startling. This book is full of unconventional characters doing bold things.
The setting is an Ivy League school. Basically, it’s Brown, which the author attended long ago. And the college is beset with activist protesters and political correctness - and violence and intrigue. It’s the violence and intrigue that lead to this book being a thriller, a tale involving multiple murder attempts. Did I warn you there would be spoilers? Well, I will try to keep them to a minimum.
This is not a book which looks at its villains from the inside. The tactics of the Left are sketched in detail, but we don’t get invited into the heads of the Left. This is not a Dostoevskian approach. Nor do we have a major waffling character, you know, a person we follow along with while they must choose between the two sides. I would say the book is written for people who already have their minds made up about campus intimidation tactics as practiced on the Left.
What the book means to explore is the best way to respond to such intimidation. This is what the lead characters have trouble coming to a consensus about. Without giving too much away, I think the author believes that, when necessary, force should be met with force, but that the real battle is one of ideas, and that alumni and donors should stop funding postmodern causes, and start funding rational philosophy. Ayn Rand is repeatedly singled out as an ideal basis for an antidote to postmodernism.
The storyline agitated me. I kept thinking that characters I cared about were in more trouble than they knew. I felt tragedy looming on the horizon. I was not totally wrong about that, but there was triumph on the horizon as well. I came away, after all that, with my heart lifted, surprised by a book that had worked its share of visionary power, by making me live through an intense adventure.
Obligatory rhyme:
Consider giving this book
A look.
At the Chicago Symphony last night
The usual gang of older people was nowhere in sight.
There were lots of newcomers who violated one of the audience laws:
They gave each movement of Schumann’s symphony a big round of applause!
In rock, pop, and jazz, you clap for each song,
But somehow, for symphonic movements, it’s regarded as wrong.
Give due weight to un-lived experience.
It isn’t really a mystery.
It’s where you learn from mistakes
That others have made throughout history.
Without this skin I wear
All day and every night
I would feel extra bare
And look a ghastly sight.
Asleep upon the beach, I hear a sound.
I startle, raise my head, and look around.
A helicopter, like a dragonfly,
Buzzes over the water just so high.
Besos and Musk had data revealed
From the vaults of the IRS.
Why does mine remain concealed?
I’m just lucky, I guess!