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Adapt, Migrate or Die

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A day after the Phillies won the World Series, unleashing a reasonably benign celebration that left only a few windows smashed, a dozen planters destroyed, negligible looting, a tacky bronze statue of a businessman tottering and 76 people (symbolically?) arrested, I took a bus from Philadelphia to Allentown to do a reading at Muhlenberg College. Amra Brooks had invited me. I’ve been in Philadelphia off and on for 20 years but that was my first visit to the Lehigh Valley, a mere one-hour-drive away. It’s hard to motor when you don’t own a car, and each time I boarded a train, it was headed to either New York or Washington.
The views on I-476 were lamely monotonous, so I dozed until 309, between Quakertown and Coopersburg. Looking out the window, I remembered a bus ride from Cromer to Norwich in East Anglia, where I sat in front of a middle-aged black man who debated with himself continuously. At first, I thought he was on his cellphone. I also address myself, OK, but only briefly, mostly in expletives, and never in public. “You’re an idiot,” I’d mutter with genuine disgust. During a World Series broadcast, a commentator said of Harry Callas, “If I had a voice like that, I’d just stay home all day and talk to myself.” Eventually, his meaty hand appeared on the window pane, just behind my face, and he left it there, mostly immobile, for a minute or two. In the village of Aylsham, this strange man got off, and I could see that he was wearing an old tweed suit and toting a brief case. Looking serious and confused, he approached a girl and a boy and asked them something. On another occasion in Aylsham, I saw the most beautiful gardens in my life, with all sorts of roses and tulips. I also examined a magnificent lich gate and the 17th century Black Boys Inn, with a carved black boy, sure enough, grinning on its cornice, flanked by two very pink female nudes.

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11.08.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Linh Dinh

Impossible Life

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If This is a Man
You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
   Hot food and friendly faces:
   Consider if this is a man
   Who works in the mud
   Who does not know peace
   Who fights for a scrap of bread
   Who dies because of a yes or a no.
   Consider if this is a woman,
   Without hair and without name
   With no more strength to remember,
   Her eyes empty and her womb cold
   Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
   Or may your house fall apart,
   May illness impede you,
   May your children turn their faces from you.
–from Primo Levi’s preface to his Holocaust memoir, translated from the Italian by Stuart Woolf

An archaic definition of “to strike” is to lower a sail, since disgruntled sailors formerly struck sails to disable a ship. Thus, to remove from production any tool, including one’s own body, is to go on strike.
One retaliates, flails at the man by doing nothing, since this refusal is the most convenient weapon at one’s disposal. A striking worker is not dissimilar to a sulking child if not an abbreviated saint. Withdrawing into myself and becoming immobile, I’ll not play, chatter, buy anything or fuck anybody any more.
No one wants to hang with you anyway, asshole.
From every fresh or foul mouth, an invitation, every dusky door, lolling, expectant figures on some funky couch. Fingers beckon. I see bright teeth. In this come-on universe, it takes strength or satiety to just say no and turn away, but many have never been invited to the gorge now, pay-later-with-interest bash. Worldwide, a billion people live in slum conditions. In 2005, the wealthiest 20% accounted for 76.6% of private consumption. The poorest fifth, 1.5%. Ten million starve to death each year, thirty thousand a day. Enough already, stop getting so righteous. Who do you like in the World Series? I say Phillies in six games. They’re hungrier.

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10.21.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (12)

Linh Dinh

Numbered

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In “Doctor Brodie’s Report,” a 1970 short story by Borges, there’s an Amazon tribe with no notion of cause and effect and no sense of the past. N. T. di Giovanni translates, “Since they lack the capacity to fashion the simplest object, the Yahoos regard such ornaments [produced elsewhere] as natural. To the tribe my hut was a tree, despite the fact that many of them saw me construct it and even lent me their aid. Among a number of other items, I had in my possession a watch, a cork helmet, a mariner’s compass, and a Bible. The Yahoos stared at them, weighed them in their hands, and wanted to know where I had found them.” And, “The words ‘Our Father,’ owning to the fact that they have no notion of fatherhood, left them puzzled. They cannot, it seems, accept a cause so remote and so unlikely, and are therefore uncomprehending that an act carried out several months before may bear relation to the birth of a child.”
The Yahoos’ numerical system stops at four. “On their fingers they count thus: one, two, three, four, many. Infinity begins at the thumb.” Yet even more stingy and sublime are the real life Warlpiris, Australian aborigines whose language only allows for one, two, then many. Eternity snaps into being with one’s middle finger. There are also the Pirahas. Numbering less than 350 souls, this Amazon tribe has no creation myths, no fairy tales, no arts, not even tattooing, no words for colors and no numbers except hói, which means either “one,” “few” or “small.” Compared to the 112 phonemes of Taa (spoken in Botswana and Namibia), 40 of English, 30 of Italian, the Piraha language only has ten. They also have no concept of the past. According to linguist Daniel Everett, the Pirahas believe that “everything is the same, things always are,” and nothing matters but the present.

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10.08.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Linh Dinh

Death, with Compound Interest

Give money me, take friendship whoso list,
For friends are gone, come once adversity,
When money yet remaineth safe in chest,
That quickly can thee bring from misery;
Fair face show friends when riches do abound;
Come time of proof, farewell, they must away;
Believe me well, they are not to be found
If God but send thee once a lowering day.
Gold never starts aside, but in distress,
Finds ways enough to ease thine heaviness.

–”Of Money” by Barnabe Googe

Cool, the American stands on two legs, favoring neither left nor right, his weight equally distributed. No contrapposto wuss, he declines to lean on stumps, cherry trees, walls, chaise longues or, god forbid, another man. In his mind at least, one or more babes could be seen draping themselves, melting, practically, all over his dry solidity. For a casual yet don’t-mess-with-me equilibrium, his feet are set slightly wider than his hormone-bred, steroid-fortified shoulders.

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10.05.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Linh Dinh

Empire in Funkville

“The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetic nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem [...] One sees it must indeed own the riches of the summer and winter, and need never be bankrupt while corn grows from the ground or the orchards drop apples or the bays contain fish or men beget children upon women [...] Of all nations the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets and will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.”–Walt Whitman, from his preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855.

Whitman’s projection of the poet’s central and celebrated role in American society never came to pass, obviously. Many of our best have been ignored, angry drunkards, suicides or madhouse inmates, while others groomed themselves into clowns, not wise fools, mind you, just giggly or lugubrious. (But clowns are born, not made, you’re huffing, slamming your wireless mouse on the table.) Eliot changed his citizenship.
With his desolate blog and countable band of readers, identifiable by name, face and even favorite beer if not deodorant, the American poet lives in a forgotten dwelling furthest away from the corridors of money and power. Each morning, brushing his uninsured or just barely tenured teeth, thank god, the American poet is glad and relieved to be reintroduced to his best and only attentive reader. Speaking of arithmetic, Don King said, “If you can count your money, you ain’t got none.”

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09.29.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Linh Dinh

Shove It!

On December 3, 1937, Attila József, age 32, scissored his right sleeve, lay down, draped his arm across a rail and stared at the train arriving on time to kill him. It was his second attempt, the first pointless and disappointing because someone else had been wheeled over up the tracks. József knew his train schedule. He also wrote:

To shove this chair away from here,
to sit down in front of a train,
to climb a mountain with great care,
to shake my bag into the valley,
to feed a bee to my old spider,
to caress an old, old woman,
to sip a delicious bean soup,
to walk on tiptoes in the mud,
to place my hat on railroad tracks,
to stroll around the banks of a lake,
to sit all dressed up on the bottom,

[from "To Sit, to Stand, to Kill, to Die," translated by John Batki]

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09.14.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Linh Dinh

Clayton Eshleman on 9/11

“The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him.”–George W. Bush, 9/13/01
“I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority.”–George W. Bush, 3/13/02
“Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”–George W. Bush, 9/17/02

Sure we can. Among major American poets, only Amiri Baraka and Clayton Eshleman have challenged the official version of 9/11. On Hunger Magazine, 2003, Eshleman was asked by J. J. Blickstein: “How are you addressing the current events on the world theater, 9/11, the imminent ‘War for Oil’ with Iraq, the North Korean conflict, in your work?” He answered:

My initial response to the 9/11 assaults, as a reader/investigator, was to start making myself more aware of what we might have done to others, beyond our borders, to instigate such action. I read William Blum’s Rogue State, and am now reading his Killing Hope. Learning of Bush’s bizarre and utterly irresponsible immediate response to the assaults (he continued listening to school children read to him in a Sarasota grade school for nearly a half hour), I also began to learn more about him by reading Mark Crispin Miller’s The Bush Dyslexicon. Then Gore Vidal alerted me to the considerable possibility that the official version of what happened on 9/11 was bogus. Vidal’s information was based on Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed’s The War on Freedom which I studied for several weeks, at the same time checking its information with the numerous 9/11 sites (e.g., Paul Thompson’s The Complete 9/11 Time-site). I have not found any information that contradicts Ahmed’s. There is additional material in David Icke’s Alice In Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster, but one must ponder it in a context that is Blakean and obsessed with global fascist conspiracy controlled by reptilian “entities.”
After studying the Ahmed book, I wrote “The Assault,” which opens with compressed time-line data on some of the evidence that contests the official 9/11 version. Part II is my own lyric response, written out of the angry indignation I associate with Robert Duncan’s “Uprising,” the key declaration by a poet during the Vietnamese War. My poem can be read on the Skanky Possum web site.

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09.10.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (22)

Linh Dinh

Wrd Wthn Wrd Wthn Wrd

From Troy Lloyd ’s blog:

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09.02.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Linh Dinh

Thank You, Thank You, You’re Too Kind

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Solipsism n. 1) the theory that the self can be aware of nothing but its blog. 2) the theory that nothing exists or is real but one’s blog.
In 1984, there’s a telescreen in each room that can never be turned off, only dimmed. A sort of two-way mirror, it studies us as we watch it. Before writing his diary, an act punishable by death, before he could blog, so to speak, the protagonist, Winston, had to hide in an alcove, out of view of the telescreen.
In 2008, we love to stare at a screen as we share with a bored, restless and concurrently blogging universe an endless stream of our disconnected, autobiographical factoids; political, philosophical and literary half-thoughts; reading and publication announcements; digital self-portraits, sometimes crotch shots; and hasty poetic skits to be ignored if not sensibly deleted a day later.