MERIT

Merit is very hard to judge.

In sports, there is the notion of points scored that can separate someone like Michael Jordan from someone like Hanno Mottila (Mottila was a Finn who played for a couple of years with the Atlanta Hawks). Mottila was extremely talented, but next to Jordan, he came off as almost crippled.

Or differently abled.

Or otherwise gifted.

Suffice it to say he was making about 6 points a game, and his team was losing almost every game, and he ended up back in Finland. Still, I was a fan of his because he was the only Finn to make it into the NBA and my wife is a beautiful Finn.

Outside of sports, we can look at cars, and their respective merits. The Russian car called the Lada fell apart at the slightest touch. Doors fell off. But it didn't cost much. You could buy a new one for about a thousand dollars back in the 1990s in Finland. Low cost has its merits, and it might trump the fact that the doors would fall off if you hit a pothole in the middle of winter. It was kind of fun to get out and put them back on.

In America, the car I own now (Dodge Caravan) has certain merits. It is easy to repair. They are not as expensive as a Toyota Sienna or a Honda and they're American, so if you buy one, you're helping the people in Detroit remain employed.

You can look in Consumer Reports April Edition and see the merits of a given set of cars.

When you get to an empirical thing -- an ice scraper, for instance, you want it to be able to scrape the ice off your windshield and yet not scratch the actual glass. You want it to be strong enough not to break. You don't want it to be so ugly that you can't stand having it between the front seats, where such things usually sit through the winter season.

When it comes to morality, this becomes harder to assess. Because morality isn't what is seen, it's what isn't seen. All of us until two months ago thought that Tiger Woods was a moral being. Then suddenly he was morally crazy on most scorecards: lying to his wife, paying for hookers, sacking up with at least a dozen women concurrently and telling them all he loved them truly.

With Allen Ginsberg, many of us had the sense that he was a moral person. But toward the end of his life it became increasingly apparent that he was a member of NAMBLA, and in his last book are two poems that solidify that notion.

Morality is not so much what you do when you can be seen, it's what you do when you don't think anybody is looking.

But even so, we can't judge Ginsberg's entire life on the basis of his being a member of NAMBLA. He had other sides to his life. Let's try to see all of it. We don't even know if he hurt small children, or what his commitment to NAMBLA really meant. Plus, he wrote some wonderful poems, and was fairly nice to Gregory Corso, among other things.

Judgment of others' morality is easy to do if you're willing to bear false witness. We bear false witness when we focus on one thing about another person, and say it's the entirety. You can say that so and so is a monstrous racist because they think that Obama is a socialist. You can say that someone hates all people of disability because they haven't been convinced by the aesthetic merits of Larry Eigner's poems. You can argue that because someone doesn't like Sarah Palin, they hate all women.

These gambits are tried all the time, and I find them somewhat appalling, and yet probably no worse than any other kind of "thought," that comes trotting along in the guise of truth while actually pushing any kind of convenient lie that makes the money spin -- whether it's global warming, or whatever you want Sarah Palin to be in terms of your politics -- whether it's Peg Bundy or a mental imbecile or a moral genius (it's possible to bear false witness by taking too good a view of someone in order to convince others, too, isn't it? Is it possible for instance to put Larry Eigner next to Shakespeare and claim they are equivalent in terms of their accomplishment?).

Total depravity is often seen not only in the judged, but in the judger, and even (and especially) when the judgement is a positive one.

More serious, and perhaps hopeless in terms of the ability to judge its merit, is aesthetic reception. The drawings of Pierre Klossowski, for instance, are probably not as subtle or as fluid as the drawings of his brother Balthus. But because Klossowski was also a philosopher who focused on the ways in which the virtuous hide their vices behind a wall of self-righteousness (the face behind the face), I find him rather Lutheran in the way he ferreted out sin. And this capacity helps me to see his merit (see drawing above).

Others might just think -- well, others draw BETTER, or others are not as pornographic.

Aesthetic merit is probably more impossible to decide than moral merit, and the two are easily confused.

The moralistic recovery system in which black, Asian, Hispanic and other writers are rapidly being recuperated depends for its success on the notion that these writers were not taken seriously in their own day. Zora Neale Hurston, however, was taken seriously, but she disappeared after a morals charge eclipsed her career when she was tried for molesting a small boy. The charge was dropped, but the threat to her reputation lingered, and she ended up in an unmarked grave. It may also be that the vogue for the Harlem Renaissance petered out during the Depression (I haven't looked hard into the nature of her particular eclipse).

An eclipse can easily happen, just as a person can attain prominence for spurious reasons.

Some want to dispense altogether with any universal notions of merit that might underwrite a meritocracy, and decide simply on politics.

In the 1950s, McCarthyism eclipsed many writers in Hollywood. And, in the Soviet Union, to be thought to be non-communist, meant a death sentence in almost every case. Even keeping a private diary, or telling a joke (Ivan Denisovitch's crime), could mean you were -- in basketball parlance -- benched for years.

But those writers who managed to publish in spite of this terror -- Solzhenitsyn -- for instance, were vaulted to the very front lines of prominence -- again irrespective of the aesthetic merits of their work (I find his work to be a bit too long and uniformly grim and I can't get through it any more than I can get through the insanely long and humorless books of Marcel Proust). Solzhenitsyn got a lot of play on the American side during the Cold War, but I doubt if anybody reads the guy for fun.

If blacks, women, and other ethnicities and genders can say we were eclipsed, and have it matter, so that whole departments of study are formed around their works, then it creates a motivation to gain a back door to brilliance. Disabled writers along the lines of Larry Eigner are now forming into blocks, with disabled critics demanding a reading with an unparalleled virulence. (I inquired into Eigner's aesthetic power about a year ago on Ron Silliman's blog, and the enmity at the time was only via the amateurs -- now the professionals are weighing in!).

I'm still not convinced that the minimalists of the seventies were very important writers. One of my commenters -- Curtis Faville -- has recently published the Complete Works of Eigner -- and I hesitate to judge -- but from what I've read of Eigner's -- I don't want to read this book. Eigner is great on occasion -- and he's got some of the power of say, Robert Creeley (also disabled because he had only one eye to work with but whose work I also find difficult to read) -- I have never seen the merit of either writer as being on a scale with a poet like Marianne Moore. I don't see a giant scaffolding of ideas, for instance, or a deep taproot. I see hilarity, and exquisite beauty, but in a very minor mode. Other poets who worked in the seventies in this school -- Richard Brautigan (I love his short fiction, but don't feel that his poems amount to much), or Tom Clark, or Anselm Hollo, or Larry Fagin, or Joel Oppenheimer, just don't have the ambition of someone like Marianne Moore or -- going back -- to even a poet like Henry J.-M. Levet. And in at least some ways, they were all disabled. Brautigan suffered from very serious depression of the kind that led to his suicide. Anselm Hollo was writing in a second language. Larry Fagin wasn't all that gifted. Oppenheimer was lazy, and preferred to drink. Of these, however, I think Eigner (from what I've read) is the most ambitious upon occasion, and the most interesting, and perhaps had the soundest mind, in spite of suffering from Cerebral Palsy. But I often wonder to what extent any of these writers wanted to be GREAT. Maybe they just wanted to be minor. Or great, in the way a candy bar tastes great (to quote the comic book artist Lynda Barry).

That, in fact, may be part of their charm. They may have the relationship to great writers that Lucky Charms have to a 5-star French restaurant, and perhaps it is wrong to judge them from the perspective of the Michelin guide.

At least for me, it's hard to know how to take it seriously unless I take it seriously.

On the other hand, a poet like Charles Olson had a very ambitious mind -- but again, I find him to be missing any deep engagement with religion, so the work seems slight, and without any serious framework (I think a writer can only write well within a deep religious tradition -- a writer who leaves such a tradition and goes off on their own is not writing to millions of others -- but is merely autonomous -- and crippled or disabled by their not working within a vast group). It would be like praying alone as opposed to belonging in a congregation, or singing a song to oneself, as opposed to singing a song for others, and really trying to communicate something.

If religion is a person's driving concern -- the most important thing in a life -- the highwater mark of one's existence, and the only thing that finally truly matters -- writers who don't engage with that subject lose merit (I find it hard to take Ezra Pound or ee cummings seriously for similar reasons). They might have other merits, but not the chief one that I am looking for.

For yet other critics -- it may be that engagement with race, or gender, or disability issues -- are the most important aspect of a writer. That, to them, is their religion -- their point of highest value.

And for some readers -- it may be that irreligious artifacts help them with their irreligious existence (Mencken appeals to some for precisely this reason).

All these ways of reading have their merits.

As a Lutheran reader, I'm often looking for religious thought, but I also want humor because I think that without that you don't have much of a persepctive. And yet feel that I must speak across an enormous chasm to the irreligious, or to those whose sense of religion is so different from my own.

At least so far it is still a democracy. It is still a sense of virtue I think to reach across the chasm to try to find the merits of a person -- and to not forget that in spite of everything else -- Tiger Woods had a mean 5-wood, and incredible putts that would roll incredibly over a green before dropping into the cup. And at least he didn't kill anybody, and there were no children involved. These days, that's huge.

Even Hitler had his merits as a watercolorist -- however minor his art might have been.

That he killed upwards of 30 million people and disrupted all of Europe for ten years and more probably does outweigh those remarkable watercolors in terms of assessing his overall merit. But let's never say that he was all bad. He could give a speech, for instance. Many of us are afraid to stand up and give a speech. Not Hitler! He could give a speech to millions and not suffer an instant of bashfulness!

In assessing merit, let's try to see the whole of a person, and not just one thing about them that we want to wring their neck for, and for which we want to make them into an example. That, at least, is my New Year's Resolution. Now let's see how well I stick with it.

Jesus was able to do that with the thief next to him on the cross, and forgave him. It's an amazing thing to be able to forgive. But, then, he was God. I'm just a mortal. I struggle with forgiveness, and I am not a universalist. Should I be?

I think just as only some books should get into the canon, only some people should get into heaven. And merit has to be part of that discussion.

Canons within Canons

An article in the most recent Lutheran Forum (Winter 2009) by Micah D. Kiel (Assistant Professor of Theology at St. Ambrose U. in Davenport, Iowa) claims that,

"Ostensibly, his [Luther's] canon was shaped by what promoted Christ. But more practically, that which promotes Christ is that which promotes the proper distinction between law and gospel, because where one does not properly distinguish faith and works, even 'Christ is not rightly known.' For this reason, Luther judges some books of the New Testament as better than others. John's Gospel, Paul's Epistles, and the first Epistle of Peter 'are the true kernel and marrow of all the books"; they are 'foremost.' This leads to the denigration of some other New Testament books, most famously James as an 'epistle of straw.' (p. 30).

The two quotes from Luther are from his "Preface to the New Testament," in the Reformation Reader, pp. 108-109. This particular article from Micah D. Kiel that quotes these lines, is called "Why Luther Liked Tobit."

It seems to me that everyone cuts and splices when reading, finding some parts more to their liking, more to their taste, than other parts of the Bible.

If the above represents an accurate reading of Luther's canon within the canon, then what would be Calvin's mini-canon?

It seems to me that the Calvinist Puritans emphasized a much tighter correlation between law and Gospel, ousting anyone who didn't fit their tight notions of virtue. Simultaneously, they had the notion that everyone was completely fallen. How could you be both things simultaneously? I wish we had a Calvinist on board to explain this discrepancy.

How could you have a deterministic God, and yet still hold anyone responsible for not towing the line? Calvinism no doubt has some logic in it, but it's not a logic I've been able to master.

Luther's logic is as plain as day, even though it also has some shortcomings. 1st Peter emphasizes obedience to any and every earthly authority, from the Pope to Caesar, and seems to have been one of the reasons why Lutherans under Hitler were somewhat loathe to assassinate the tyrant.

Every logical framework facilitates some actions, and denies others.

Micah D. Kiel argues in his article that Luther's acceptance of the Apocryphal piece called Tobit allows for a rethinking of the Apocrypha in general. He concludes:

"The complete exclusion of the Apocrypha sets too rigid a boundary around the canon, a boundary not firmly set in Protestant and Roman Cathlic circles until well into the sixteenth century. I am not arguing that Protestants accept these texts as canonical, but Luther's attitude toward Tobit could provide a model of respect in Protestant circles for the Apocrypha's historic place in the Christian tradition"
(31).

Argument over canons and the underlying values that such canon-making implicitly contains is always value-based. Luther's attempt to clarify the two kingdoms and the notion of a kingdom of law and a kingdom of Gospel helped him to focus on those texts which most clearly provide for such a basis and to shunt to one side those texts which muddied the clarity of the two. I don't know much about Calvinism but would he not have chosen texts that caused the two kingdoms to more thoroughly merge?

The surrealist canon with its emphasis on the Marquis de Sade, Sigmund Freud, Charles Baudelaire, Charles Fourier, and others, placed a heavy emphasis on sexual desire, especially that in which the male's desire could receive an almost total affirmation even to the extent of the obliteration of the female (as with Sade).

Some of the surrealists (Soupault) however, completely denied Sade, and were perhaps even unfamiliar with his work. For Soupault, friendship between lovers is the basis of any love affair. Without that, there is no love at all. It seems to me that for that reason, he does not even appear to have read Sade (perhaps however he mentions Sade somewhere -- but in the sixty odd books of Soupault's that I've read -- I see no mention of Sade).

We often proclaim the universal value of a text, when in fact what we mean is that a given text has a private meaning for us, and helps to orient us as to what we believe to be valuable.

How it is that certain texts are passed down, considered authoritative, and valuable for study, is not often clearly studied.

We still do not have a definitive Lutheran Surrealist canon.

The Mystery of Richard Milazzo in Evergreen Review #120

I was going through the online edition of the Evergreen Review, and was astonished that I knew all the contributors. Willie Smith is an old friend from Seattle who I've known for decades. Mike Topp is an old friend (though I've only met him once or thrice). Jim Feast is a friend. Our commenter Ed Baker has a poem in this issue. Valery Oisteanu is a Romanian poet friend who lives near St. Marks Place in NYC. Virtually the only poet I didn't know is someone named Richard Milazzo. I opened his poems, and read them with interest:

http://www.evergreenreview.com/120/richard-milazzo.html

To my surprise the poems reminded me intensively of the poet Henry J.-M. Levet, who died in 1906. Levet only published a dozen poems in his lifetime before he died of consumption in his early thirties. I translated all his poems for Jacket Magazine, where they appeared online about seven years ago:

http://jacketmagazine.com/18/levet.html

Levet's poem "Algeria" in which he discusses the hotels of the capital city, and also the opening poems in the triptych that includes Outwards and Homewards and British India seem to have influenced Milazzo's poem.

I sent the poems to Ron Silliman and to John Tranter (editor of Jacket) and asked if they saw a connection between Levet's poems and Milazzo's. Silliman said no. Tranter said yes. There is not only the exoticism of the foreign, but the slightly amusing viewpoint which comments objectively on itself, while naming the whereabouts of the narrator, and his geographic as well as historical situation, while writing quick takes on cities and places. It's a style that is so particular to Levet, and yet opens out into a very specific world view, too, that influenced major poets in France such as Cendrars, Apollinaire, and many others.

I sent the comparison to Valery Oisteanu who said he was confused. I also sent them to Barney Rosset, editor of Evergreen Review. Rosset was quite polite (he's a titan and I'm a tyro and he didn't owe me a response), but said he didn't see the connection.

Does anybody else see it?

I grant that the content is quite different. Levet is a romantic and is tender and nostalgic and delicate. Milazzo's narrator is a whore hound who stands in line to do some woman on Yaowarat Road in Chinatown at a brothel called The Green Lantern in what I think is Bangkok? (was Milazzo an American veteran of the Vietnam War, or is he appropriating another's experience, or just what?). Milazzo's narrator is a sex tourist in Bangkok.

The poems reference hotels, and depict the exotic perfumes of the east in a manner recalling Levet. Is he consciously borrowing, or not? I checked the contributor's page in Evergreen Review, but there is no note on Milazzo. I had hoped that there he would have mentioned his debt to Levet. Levet himself was in Vietnam, but none of his extant poems are set there. I wondered if Levet had in some way borrowed Milazzo and used him to voice some poems he hadn't written. If so, the content is markedly different. Levet's in love with women who are promised to others.

Milazzo on the other hand visits whores (and falls in love with one without knowing her name). Levet always gives us the names of the women he got to know (or invented) in his lovely delicate poems, and he never slept with any of them.

There are lots of tantalizing similarities between Milazzo and Levet. The differences are scintillating, too.

But who is Milazzo? Barney Rosset wrote to tell me that Milazzo has published many volumes and is also an editor of books. I ordered a few to get a better look. There is also a Wikipedia page on Milazzo's work. He's British, but I think he lives in NYC. There is a Wikipedia page on Levet, too, which lists my translations. Did Milazzo consult them before composing his own poems? I wish I had an email address to ask him myself. I don't have this.

Can anyone else see the similarities? Read "Algeria" by Levet and then read Milazzo's first poem, called "Saigon."

Silliman suggested that such a style is "in the air." He mentioned Cendrars. The poets of surrealism wrote similar poems, but they knew about Levet. Levet's poetry certainly ought to exercise a larger influence. Perhaps he did influence Milazzo. Or maybe Milazzo arrived at this style in some other way. Whatever happened, I can't help but wonder. Have I lost my mind?

What is Freshman Composition?

Freshman composition is a mandatory course at almost all of our 6000+ colleges and universities. Exactly what the course should entail has been under fire. What do you think should be accomplished in freshman composition? Do you remember such a course, and whether it achieved anything for you?

I've taught it or some version of it for close to twenty years. My agenda is to

1. get students writing, and to show them that they can enjoy writing.

2. get them to write a research paper that addresses a significant question, and shows them how to assemble such a paper.

I generally ask for three major papers.

The first paper is about a disappointment, and tells the story of a death in the family that didn't need to happen, the loss of a pet, the loss of a friendship, the loss of a job, the loss of an opportunity on the basketball team, your arrest for selling drugs, the death of a friend from drugs, a friend of yours who cheated with your girlfriend, etc. So you write up the movie (beginning, middle, end) and you also make an argument of some kind as to what the reader should do with the story that's been presented that will either make them do things differently in the future, or else think differently about similar situations in the future.

The second paper is an examination of a beautiful experience. This could be a date that went well, a job interview that went well, a game performance that went well. Again, there is the movie, and there is also the argument part. In general in this paper I ask students to think about law, too. So in this paper, you might think about a law that will protect something beautiful -- whether it is marriage, or a state park, or the ability to French kiss in high school. You either argue for a new law, or against an existing law, and you use beauty or ugliness as the underlying rationale for your argument.

The third paper is the examination of a Gregory Corso poem. This is a standard research paper.

Each paper has two drafts. The second draft should be at least 5 pages long, and no more than seven.

I honestly don't know what the other 120,000+ composition classes are doing. If there are 6000 colleges and every college has on average 20 sections of Freshman Composition (about 2,400,000 students taking freshman comp every semester?), then should there be certain standards?

Some teachers do a lot more with grammar. Some do more with classical terms for logical goofups from ad hominem to post hoc.

I do touch upon these issues. But I am quite interested in aesthetics. I wish I could find a textbook that wasn't so focused on ethical concerns. I can't find one. Most of the textbooks try to get students to fall into line with the PC mandates.

Profession 2009 just came out (the annual journal of the Modern Language Association of America), and the first third of it are arguments for and against political indoctrination in composition classes. Stanley Fish in his book Save The World On Your Own Time (Oxford 2008) kicked off the inquest. Fish argues that there should be no political indoctrination in composition or literature courses.

Fish believes that the teaching of composition has to do with teaching sentence-making, and analysing the relative power of various kinds of rhetoric. In a seminar he offered in the Catskills a few years ago he said that George Bush, on a purely rhetorical level, was much more powerful than John Kerry, who used double-negatives and trailed off into thickets of abstraction that muddled his points. Bush was clear and cut to the quick. Fish was nevertheless for Kerry, because he liked Kerry's politics better, even if he thought he was a doofus on a sentence by sentence basis.

The standard idea is that professors should teach HOW to think, rather than WHAT to think. This distinction makes an implicit argument that many of our academics are teaching WHAT to think at the expense of HOW.

But can you be taught how to think?

Patricia Bizzell who teaches at the College of the Holy Cross says, "an ideological tyrant I am not. I hope I am a humble writing teacher who is helping her students write better, analyze various American rhetorics of persuasion, and reflect -- as Plato, Cicero, and Quintilian have warned every rhetorician to do -- on the moral, ethical, and political commitments entailed in wielding the power of words" (98).

Judith Butler writes of Fish's position, "We are in agreement that it won't do to impose a political point of view on students in the classroom or to require a political point of view for participation in the classroom" (93), but are we to not reflect at all about morality or politics in the classroom? "Maybe he wants to say that there is morality, but it is outside the texts in question; or maybe he wants to say that there is no morality, only a discourse about morality" (93).

Butler (Professor at UC-Berkeley) sums up her own position in saying that, teaching composition courses "doesn't mean we tell anyone what to think, only that we teach a resistance to dogmatism in order to make room for thinking" (93).

She thinks that Fish's model is one of "prohibiting thinking in the course of combating the specter of political censoriousness" (92).

Is thinking necessarily thinking about political and ethical issues? Is this sometimes used as a pretext to bully freshmen into taking our own political and ethical stands? Gerald Graff (president of the Modern Language Association) writes,

"Patricia Bizzell argues that this specter of the bullying radical teacher is a straw man invented by Fish and others. I disagree. The writers of the many recent manifestoes on behalf of liberatory education make no bones about their belief that radicalizing students is a legitimate goal of teaching. At the least, I think Fish is right that politically engaged teaching has led to unprofessional and unethical classroom behavior" (9).

If we ram our ethics down the throats of freshmen, is that in itself unethical?

Moreover, is it efficacious (does it work?). You'd think it wouldn't work, and yet, many now come out of college "radicalized" by their four years of brainwashing and peer pressure to an extent that a vigorous opposition movement has been mounted, steered by David Horowitz among others, and has become the subject of intensive conservative editorializing in newspaper, and television format, and increasingly also in book forms. Serious institutions such as Fire.org are formed around the issue of protecting freedom of speech and thought for students. And yet the bullying continues unabated.

What are the answers?

One might be a conscious decision to try to hire people of various political persuasions as composition instructors. At present, almost everyone in Humanities departments is on the left. Out of 500 professors at Duke University, only 3 identified themselves as Republicans in a report published by John Leo at one of the big weeklies. Trying to find a self-identified Republican on most campuses is not as hard as finding a self-proclaimed scholar of classical languages in revolutionary Kampuchea but the exercise is reminiscent.

So, how would you encourage Pol Pot and his hordes to politically diversify? How would you go about enforcing title IX that disallows discrimination in hiring on the basis of religion and political creed, in order to let in a few more conservatives, even if it doesn't in any way yet match the numbers of conservatives and religious people who are not now welcome on most campuses?

Or should the goal of composition simply be something else?

I never took a composition class. I took a simple test at East Stroudsburg University back in the day (1974) that showed I could write full sentences, and skipped right over composition and got into literature courses. At Evergreen State College likewise I never took a composition course. At Naropa Institute I never took a composition course. I emerged full-blown from the sea like Diana on the half-shell, and simply started writing papers. I could always do this. It was like breathing.

I don't know why this happened to me, and not to others.

Is there something to be taught in composition classes? Is it just a place to practice writing, and get some feedback, before moving on to doing it in classes and for what remains of the print medium?

I never learned anything from any of my professors in classes. They seemed to be speaking to other people. For me, college was four years to talk to myself. The professors were more or less irrelevant. Graduate school was a different story. There, I actually did learn, but probably never in the classroom, and only because I befriended many of the professors. I learned from hanging out with professors and asking the odd questions that actually mattered to me, the kind of thing you can't ask in a class, but can ask over a coffee table, or over dinner, or while walking around a lake. The Socratic method of discussion is the only method in which learning actually takes place. It's wrestling with other individuals and seeking the truth together that counts. I usually learn best by wrestling with my own conscience, even though I am often pinned.

I never learned anything in a classroom except how the leftists try to take them over and prevent any kind of genuine discussion.

I think I also did learn in writing my papers. But I never learned anything from the feedback I got. It was almost entirely useless. It was the writing of the papers that mattered. I think people can only think on a one-to-one basis when they are friends and actually care about each other, and know each other well. Or maybe that's just me?

I hope my own students are having a different experience but how would I know? All learning is individual. Is that true for you, too? A single remark made as I left a class with a friend was often twelve times as much illumination as anything actually in the class. Talking with a teacher one on one, as I sometimes got to do with Corso, Burroughs, and Ginsberg -- taught me everything I learned. I don't think I ever learned anything in any of their classes.

Why not? I think it's because classes force professors and students alike to adopt social poses as opposed to saying that they actually think. What a person actually thinks is embarrassing, and odd, and would get you fired. People are individuals and can only think as individuals. Education is mass-produced and doesn't teach anybody anything. At best it fits an individual about as well as do our mass-produced pants and shirts and coats. We are an ungainly bunch who think that we can teach other people to think. People can only teach themselves to think. Not that anybody else will actually listen. We are in an autistic world of self-important goof-ups. And it's important that we play ball.

POLITICAL DIVERSITY

Let's just take it as an axiom that everyone is selfish, and saints only exist in their own minds. Let's therefore argue that there is no good group of people, and no bad group of people. There are only selfish people.

Therefore, there is no good political party or bad political party. There are only selfish people with their own goals in mind.

Therefore, one-party states are bad. Political diversity is good, because it recognizes that there is more than one viewpoint. There are as many viewpoints as there are people, and conflict is not only impossible to avoid, it's welcome, and it's a sign that people are free to express their differences.

Therefore, peace is fascism (which is a synonym for communism) because it argues that everyone can get along, because there are no true differences. Peace is a tyrant, therefore, an ideological tyrant, and is just war by other means.

What we need instead of peace is comedy.

Peace is self-righteous.

Comedy is self-wrongeous.

Comedy says, I'm a worthless bitch or bastard, and intend to make of it whatever I can. Comedy also recognizes that others are the same.

Comedy laughs at simple dichotomies of good and evil. It says that anyone who receives a peace prize is a war monger who divides in order to conquer. Comedy sees underneath, and reduces everything and everyone to rubble. Barney Rubble.

I had these thoughts while watching Lisa Lampanelli last night on the Comedy Channel.

Very Slow News TV?

I'm getting close to or more than 1000 hits a day. I could easily up these numbers by referring to a wider variety of people and ideas. But I really am interested in quality of discussion.

I wanted originally to open this blog as a place of VERY SLOW NEWS, in which a kind of consensus could develop, against the polarities that talk radio, and the nightly news work on.

Originally I wanted to create peace between the avant-gardes and the
Protestant tradition.

But I fell into the trap of polarizing in order to up quantities, and threw quality out of the window.

Rush, Imus and their like live on feeding red meat to the consumer. Red meat makes you mad as hell, and ready to kill somebody. I wanted instead to slowly build common ground between various factions.

While I have done that, I wonder if I could do it better.

Finding common ground is a very very slow process. It's inherently untelegenic where every news second costs so much, and what we seem to want are train wrecks, terrorist attacks, and child kidnappers being taken from their walled compounds.

Very Slow News -- even Jesus couldn't stand to go slowly. He had to race right into Jerusalem and get himself killed, so that the good news would shoot around the world.

What about patience? What about people who make peace at work, so that no one ends up chaining themselves to a column, and tearing the place down ala Samson?

What about the people who notice that someone is upset, and chill them so that they don't ultimately run berserk?

Would anybody watch?

Would sponsors pay for such a molasses show?

What about all the countries in the world like Liechtenstein and Greenland, where there is no indigenous revolution, and where people are relatively happy?

What about all the denominations that aren't splintering, and aren't fomenting rage?

Terrorists of various stripes and news stations have a natural alliance since they both want attention and they want it NOW.

Peace is inherently boring. Could we liven it up and make it more telegenic, more readable? what about the thousand acts of ordinary decency that don't get reported? What about all the areas of our lives with which we're basically satisfied?

All those things would make for a Very Slow News day. I wish a station would come on called VERY SLOW NEWS based on the principle that collisions of values and cars and planes with buildings may make neat visuals, but they are a distraction from the real work of finding adequate solutions to everyday problems.

BUSY DAY

I went over to the Elementary School to be my son Tristan's lunch buddy since it's his special week. I was nervous about it. Somehow I had the paranoid idea that the kids would throw food at me. I went into the school, and the kids walked Indian file to the cafeteria, quietly. My son taught me how to order a triangular slice of pizza, and as I was sitting down, a piece of pepperoni hit me in the face.

I thought, oh, here comes all the food.

But no more came.

A little boy apologized profusely.

"Tristan likes our pepperoni, so I was just giving mine to him," he said. "I'm sorry."

I said it was ok, and sat down.

The kids talked about hunting with their dads. We were sitting at a third-grade cafeteria table that held about 13 kids. The boys had names like Nathan, Matthew, Tyler, Jeremiah, and Alex. There was a girl named Meredith. Suddenly the topic switched to Webkinz. These are a kind of stuffed animal that has a web page. My son has nineteen of them. Some of the other kids have even more. The kids then played a game in which one boy puts his palms up on the table, and the other kid lays his palms down on them, and the kid on the bottom tries to quickly trap the boy's hands on top.

The pizza crust was doughy and enjoyable.

Will the Real Barack Obama Please Stand Up?

I listened to Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize with astonishment. He is on the home team, and doesn't wish America's destruction. He's a Christian, with his feet squarely within Niebuhrian rhetoric and principle. He understands Just War theory. He's familiar with the Geneva Conventions, and he's against complicity with Maoism, with N. Korea, with Iran, and with the communist rulers of Burma (he mentioned this TWICE!). He had good words for Ronald Reagan and the dissidents of Eastern Europe. He had kind words even for Nixon, who opened diplomatic ties with Red China. He even said something good for capitalism: he said that "commerce has stitched much of the world together" after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And yet he also believes that MLK and Gandhi are our "north star," and that "the human condition can be perfected" (I think he really said this). He thinks that we can make true what ought to be true, and that our "moral imagination" should be extended lest we lose our "moral compass." He didn't say anything about the bloodbath of Tibet.

But Obama defended war, and the American tradition of war. He said we defeated the Nazis, and it is the blood of our soldiers that has kept the world decent for the last 60 years (I'd say 100 years if we include WWI and the Spanish-American War). Obama is not a determinist. He argues that it is our willingness to do something that has made the difference. We can't leave everything to God in history.

America's greatest moments are military. Nothing stirs an American like the thought of our soldiers on that half-frozen river as Washington crossed the Delaware. Nothing stirs us so much as the thought of 50,000 fallen soldiers at Gettysburg working out the notion of equality. The 271 word Gettysburg Address stirs us, but it's also the blood on the "hallowed ground," that seals it. The Battle of the Bulge in which America gave ground only to recover it, and finally push the Nazis back across the Rhine. American fighter pilots taking on the Japanese fleet at Midway and obliterating their aircraft carriers. All these moments stir Americans to tears.

Peace is stupid.

We are not a peace loving people, if peace means we sit and do nothing while idiots take over governments and clobber their own people with the cudgel of the military and use their police to keep human rights from them. We do not stand idly by while the leaders of Burma bully their people. We don't sit still for terrorism. Violence brings out the best in Americans.

That Obama recognized this means that he's American. He is a little too idealistic still when he argues that we have to fight in an idealistic way, with our hands tied behind our back, while our enemies "abide by no rules."

We must remember that it is the atomic bomb that destroyed the Japanese will to fight. We must remember that it wasn't Lincoln's Gettysburg Address that defeated the South, but it was Sherman's march to the sea. When Reagan told the Russians that they were an empire of evil, it was only then that they crumbled. Truth is a sword of lightning, and it must strike to the heart. Julia Ward Howe recognized this when she penned The Battle Hymn of the Republic and ignited holy hell.

Obama is half-way there. He recognizes that evil exists. He recognizes that we will have to fight it, and that this fight will last as long as does our world. But he still thinks that the human condition can be perfected, and that Gandhi and King should be part of our military thinking. Obama seems to be two persons in one. Will the real Obama please stand up? Is he with General MacArthur, or is he with Mohatma?

When he speaks out of the dark (or realistic) side of his nature, I'm with him. But seemingly no one present in Oslo was with that side. When he talks of Gandhi and oughtness they erupted into applause. I hated that syrupy and nonsensical side. I found myself tapping my fingers and muttering, get real.

War is not a beer picnic.

Thinking proportionally while the enemy chops childrens' heads won't cut it. War is a last resort. I don't think we should enter into it lightly. But when we do, let all hell break loose. When we let slip the dogs of war, we enter an animal realm, in which survival belongs to the fittest, and survival belongs to the one that can take the other by the throat.

Washington did this at Valley Forge. Jackson did this in New Orleans. Sherman did it in Georgia and South Carolina. MacArthur did it in the Ardennes, and again in the Philippines, and would have done it in Korea had he not been recalled by the supercilious fussbudget.

We fought an idealistic war in Vietnam with our hands tied behind our backs by peace protesters. It got 50,000 of our men killed, and there was no good result. That's what fighting an idealistic war will get you.

If you're going to fight a war, fight it.

We can never soften the hearts of our enemies. We can only tear out their hearts. In the process, we become monsters unrecognizable to ourselves. The only thing that makes this justifiable is the end result: Lockean justice. The end justifies the means. Does Obama understand Locke's four principles? I think not. It's part of his moral vocabulary that is missing. If he had that, he would have a sense of what the Woodstock generation was missing: Country Joe had no idea what we were fighting for in Vietnam. No one at Woodstock did. They thought that you had a choice to "make love" or to "make war." But you can't "make love," especially the way they were doing it. That way you can only spread diseases. True love is a promise to the other that you will stick with them until death, and have their back in all things. War, on the other hand, is something you can make.

If we feel justified in going to war, then we have to fight like we mean it: whole hog. Anything less is complicity with evil.

Does Obama plan to fight like a saint, or like an animal?

Gandhi and King fought against basically enlightened people. We are not fighting that kind of person. We are fighting people who chop off the heads of children for the crime of learning to read. We are fighting devils who keep more than one wife, and who do not allow anyone to speak or worship in their own way. The people we are fighting are worse than the Third Reich. At least the female children of Nazis could read. We are fighting for Locke's four rights: life, liberty, health and property. Obama did understand that we have never fought a war with another democracy. If we can spread democracy around the world, and erect democratic institutions, then war will be a thing of the past.

Bush recognized this. Obama recognizes it, too. But he hasn't yet steeled his will. I hope he does. If he ever does, he will become a human hammer, and justice will triumph, as it did under Charles Martel, at the Battle of Tours. May God be with our president. God is not only a God of Peace. He is also a God of Wrath. He destroyed civilizations: burning Sodom to the ground, and destroying the Egyptians who held our dear Moses captive. Lockean liberty has a price, and the price is war.

But it also has an end: the freedom and human rights of all people around the globe.

COUPLA THINGS

I am curious. I was recently writing on the flyleaf to my novel a dedication to mathematician Stuart Kurtz of the U. of Chicago.

My original thought was to write,

"To Stuart Kurtz,

A decent man,
A decent Christian,
And a decent mathematician."

The first two sounded ok, but the third sounded like an insult!

How did the term "decent" suddenly become an insult?

Why is it ok to be a "decent man" but it sounds so mediocre to be merely a "decent mathematician"!?

If someone were to say about me that I'm a "decent man" I would be happy. But if they were to say I'm a "decent writer," even that wouldn't be so bad. A "decent poet" however sounds like a slap in the face.

Maybe you are either extraordinary in some fields, or else you suck.

I ended up writing something along the lines of,

"A good mathematician,
A good Christian,
And a good man."

I thought that sounded ok, without going over the top. "Good" and "decent" appear to be synonyms, but they have a part of their meaning that doesn't overlap. What part is that exactly?

*

The December 2009 Lutheran Forum Letter has appeared and it has a mini-article about the flu panic, and "drinking from the common cup" as well as being handed the communion wafer by a hand that no one knows quite where it's been! (Honestly, that's something I've never thought about, but many people apparently do.) For them, there is a new product out from PURITY SOLUTIONS that looks like a Pez dispenser. It has a cross on the front, and it comes in three colors (your choice of silver, gold and white). It shoots the hosts into mouths such that no one needs to touch them (you can load in packages of hosts that look like the packaging for Ritz Crackers without touching them). It seems PURITY SOLUTIONS out of St. Paul, MN has the answer for disease-conscious Lutherans. Congregational attendance is upped through lower illness rates, and there's also the novelty factor. Hallelujah!

Museum of Modern Art Conversation Ca. 1971

In high school I lived about an hour of New York City, and used to take the bus down with a neighbor to the city to look at art and walk around.

We were about 14. One of the problems was that it was hard to find bathrooms. Museums had good bathrooms, and we did visit those. But it was harder to use the ones in restaurants. One place let us use the bathroom, but said, "We don't allow tricks in there."

I wondered if they thought we were magicians. It was years before I learned what that word meant.

When we went into museums, which we often did, we typically went into the Museum of Modern Art. I liked their garden cafeteria, as it had a very nice Ellsworth Kelly painting/sculpture which was green and red triangles abutting one another in a fresh dialogue of shape and color.

While sitting there once my friend had gotten up to go to the bathroom.

Next to us at the table were two elegant older women tucking in. One of them was saying to the other, "I don't think we can go on paying the mortgage and also keep Bob on the life support. He's going to have to go."

The other woman showed her support in this, and said, "His quality of life has already been gone for a decade."

I used to like to commune with art and still do. But now I find that communing with God is even better -- a purer and more lustrous experience. Many people complain about abortion, but the roar has less decibels when it comes to the aged and euthenasia. I was nevertheless astonished by the casual discussion of what was apparently the woman's husband, and the need to kick the plug. Will such discussions become more moot after Obama's redistribution of health care and insurance costs, or more likely? Will it be family members who discuss the merits of kicking the plug, or will it be death panels, as Sarah Palin alleges?

My kids are out on the back hill riding snowcoasters down a hundred yard path with four other neighborhood kids.

READING THE FORESTED LANDSCAPE

I don't like nature, because it makes me itchy. I rarely go into the woods, and when I do, it's with a certain disdain multiplied by incomprehension. I don't know why nature exists. I'd prefer that this nation was one big mall with bookstores from sea to shining sea. For some reason, however, nature (like opera) exists, and there are even people who think it's a great idea that we should preserve what's left of it. I read a book called Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England, by Tom Wessels. It was published in 1997 by Countryman Press of Woodstock, Vermont.

Here's what I learned.

Most stone fences that you see in the woods were actually fences for pasture land, or farm land. Most stone fences were built around 1810-1840. Barbed wire was invented in the 1870s.

Indians kept settlers out of much of interior New England until about 1790 when they were finally defeated by diseases and war (they lost the French and Indian war in about 1760, but continued guerilla tactics kept settlers out until about 1790). At that point, most of the upstate towns were founded during the massive immigration that followed the complete collapse of Indian resistance.

There were 1.7 million sheep in Vermont by 1840. Overgrazing exposed bedrock.

About 1850 many farms went belly up due to overgrazing and folks started to move west. By 1930 there were fewer people in New England towns than were there in 1840.

20,000 years ago a giant glacier covered most of North America. It receded about 13,000 years ago leaving boulders and junk all over.

Nature regrew at that point, with many trees sneaking up at the rate of about a mile every year or so from the south. Pine trees, oak trees, elm trees, and many many others. White pine trees were often 2 or 3 hundred years old or more a few centuries ago. There is a White Pine in the Smoky Mountains that is 206 feet tall. It's the only immense White Pine left. Most of the big White Pines were harvested by the British for use in ships as their main mast back when the colonies were controlled by the Queen.

If you're a good detective, you can figure out whether a forest area was once a pasture, whether it had been hit by a hurricane, what kind of soil it has (acid or not so acid), what kinds of bugs it has in the bark, and other stuff.

Many new plants and animals came over on the colonial ships as seeds in the dirt that colonial ships used as ballast. Species such as the gypsy moth were introduced to make silk, but escaped from the labs and with no natural predators have destroyed a lot of the trees of the New England area. If a tree has its leaves eaten, it can't do the photosynthesis that allows it to make something nutritional out of what its roots are taking up. If that happens, the tree dies.

The book has drawings of stuff like "ostrich fern."

It has checklists of different kinds of trees and animals. People have been around for about 100,000 years. About 12,000 years ago there was something called the short-faced bear. We apparently killed it off, but in its heyday a grizzly bear would barely come up to its chest while standing on hind legs. It doesn't say how we killed these amazing creatures. It doesn't seem that we had howitzers 12,000 years ago, but I suppose the bear was stupid, and you could hit it from 100 feet away with a bow and arrow dipped in poison, and it would rage about until it croaked.

The book goes on for about 160 pages. I liked learning about beaver dams, blowdowns, moisture levels, and hemlocks. Since I live out in nature, and since it's almost incomprehensible, I thought that reading about it would make life more fun. The woods bore me, and I would prefer to be surrounded by malls full of bookstores and foreign newspapers. But I should probably get over this, since these environmentalists are determined to get me out into nature, instead of into Barnes and Nobles. Maybe if I work at it, I can turn the woods into a library of Natural History.

REFORMATION VERSUS CORRUPTION

Luther's Reformation was based on an attack on corruption in the Papacy.

Whenever too much power gets invested in a single agent or agency, you will have corruption. "Absolute power corrupts absolutely," Lord Acton said (as a Lord, he must have known!).

David Hume's political writings "anticipated ideas of Madison's", such as when he writes, "Political writers have established it as a maxim, that, in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest. By this interest we must govern him, and, by means of it, make him, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition, co-operate to public good" (William Lee Miller in James Madison and the Founding, and Hume cited in same, p. 56, University Press of Virginia Press, 1992).

If one assumes that all politicians are particularly sociopathic, then it is more and more relevant that we see that any one branch of government not get too much control over health insurance, banking, car industries, or even the Olympics. There has to be a separation of powers. Set the church against the state, and the various branches of the state against one another, and against the corruptions of private enterprise.

With the Papacy, religious and state power coalesced and formed oppressive conditions for knowledge (which they controlled), and for any and every individual freedom (as listed in the Bill of Rights). Luther sought to break down the Papacy, and divide freedoms, so that marriage was now a state enterprise, and knowledge was not controlled by a theocracy but subject to "freedom of investigation."

The Papacy was bad and everywhere it had sway, it stuntd the intellectual growth of its people. Marxism is even worse, as it abolishes freedom altogether, and insists that it is the only party that is permitted to speak, and the only legitimate political or economic player, and has total right to extinguish anyone who thinks against it. Marxism is Satanism itself.

Now science is getting too much power. One of the great problems of the modernists is that they imagined with the coming of science that people themselves would be made over, and that we would enter a new and golden age. In fact, we entered into diabolical genocide attempts featuring atomic bombs and Cyclone B. We need to remain realistic about human nature and to realize we are fallen, which can mean totally selfish and depraved. Scientists are no different, whether we are talking about Mengele or Dr. Frankenstein himself. People are depraved. Hume writes, "All plans of government which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind are plainly imaginary" (cited in William Lee Miller, p. 54).

The surrealists thought that with opium, the freedom permitted to the ID, and the removal of government via anarchism that humanity would embark on a fresh golden naturalism reminiscent of Rousseau. The hippies wanted something similar. They thought if we could drop out from Protestantism, dress ourselves up to look like Native Americans and wear beads, and stink a bit, we would get back in touch with our naturally lovely selves.

The hippies did stink, and they spread diseases, and most of them who still remain look just as creepy as Charles Manson and his ilk.

Meanwhile, we must also fight against the Calvinist notion that government can be made saintly, and that human beings who are saints can guide us toward better tomorrows if only we remove all checks and balances and vote in someone perfect. We must always remember that no one is perfect, and that the only way in which people are perfect is that they are perfect pigs. Miller writes that it was Madison's view that, "...religion can make matters worse, by associating partial views and collective egotisms with the sanction of heaven" (30).

Let's never imagine that anyone is good. Let's ban the disgusting notion of saints.

People can be good, just as children can be. It's a lovely miracle when it happens, and it does happen. But you can't count on it. Shakespeare makes this perfectly clear in his play Measure for Measure, as he gives total power to Angelo, who then uses it to advance his ambitions to fornicate at will with underlings in their underthings.

The French centralized power in Paris under Louis XIVth. France began to decline as a nation from that point forward. America instead decentralized power and has it located in 50 state capitals, and in regional counties, and even in small towns. Let's hope we never get a president who can single-handedly destroy all opposition and centralize too much power by distributing czars all over Washington who are ostensibly in charge of whole areas of the economy. Let's constantly try to trim the president's power.

"As Madison in his notes quotes himself as having said in the convention on July 11, 'The truth was that all men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.' Every person should submit his or her will, each group should submit its will, to the criticism and restraint and balance of others, other wills, other interests, other conceptions of the common good" (92).

Even the media, which is supposed to act as a watchdog, is filled with corrupt players. Katie Couric is an evil pig. Bill O'Reilly of the Fiercely Orthodox Nationalist news channel, is an evil pig. Doberman and Madcow, violent pigs. But at least we still have them at war with one another, challenging each other's views.

"the Americans drew upon many sources -- scholars dispute the proportions and rankings -- but certainly the mainstream of the English and Scottish Enlightenment and Reformed Protestant thought that had different configuration on this point from that of the continental reactionaries and proponents of realpolitik, or romantics, or later Marx and Lenin and a new sort of revolutionary. Law for the Americans did not begin at the barrel of the gun; it began where reason and conscience met and managed force" (94).

More and more we are forgetting our origins in Madison. To the left, we have a sense that nature should guide us (that nature is pure, and that we should 'go back to the land,' and develop 'organic products' as if whatever is natural is also pure); to the right, we have more a sense that theocracy should lead us toward a world of perfect manners, where righteousness should reign, and detrmine for one and all what's good.

With Madison we had the sense that everyone had all the virtues of a pig and a dog combined, and that the only way to keep any particular group of pig-dogs from one-party rule was to constantly set them at each other's throat and to proclaim a diversity of power centers -- geographic, and in terms of interest factions. Diversity, sure, but a diversity of power centers and interests. Instead of unifying power, we should always move towards its diversification.

Any institution that forgets this is always already in decline whether it be a sect like the one at Waco or Jonestown, or the one in Moscow under Stalin, or the rapidly converging centrists in Washington at this moment, or in academic departments across the land. Long live diversity. (Of power and faction.)

HUCKABEE

HUCKABEE SAYS HE WOULD DO IT AGAIN!

Presidential contender Mike Huckabee explains some of the process by which he reviewed the case of mass murderer Clemmons and says that based on the facts alone, he would probably commute the crazy man's sentence again. The story is in Newsmax, one of the only newsmagazines that allows conservatives to speak for themselves.

Here's part of what Huckabee has said. At least he's honest.

http://www.newsmax.com/headlines/huckabee_clemency_police/2009/11/30/292403.html?s=al&promo_code=9249-1

SUCCASUNNA, NEW JERSEY

People tell me that bookstores are closing down. In the western Catskills, however, bookstores are coming in, and thriving. In a town called Hobart about twenty minutes north there are four bookstores in a town of about 200 people. It's a book village. Most of the stores are run by retired people with a reasonable income from something else, and are only open on the weekends. Just outside of Hobart in a town called South Kortright, is a bookstore with about 200,000 volumes, called The Bibliobarn. Twice a year they have a 50% sale. People come from all over the northeast to shop there. The shop is run by two green-party people from Virginia who have been there full-time for about fifteen years.

I went this last weekend with my daughter. We listened to a man read a Christmas story by Truman Capote. The story made me aware of how similar Capote is to the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird, and also how similar he was in a certain way to Kerouac, whom he despised. Lots of daily details, and long running curling sentences. And I bought a few books. The most interesting:

Succasunna, New Jersey, by Sander Zulauf (Breaking Point, Inc., 2006, from Wharton NJ, 6 $).

60 pages of poetry set in a town called Succasunna. It's apparently a small town about twenty five miles into NJ from PA on Route 80 (I looked on a map). The poems are set there, and appear to be William Carlos Williams-esque notations by a guy who grew up in the area and taught at County College of Morris in Randolph, when the volume appeared in 1987.

I'd never heard of him, or his book, but have now read it through three times.

Sonnet in Succasunna

Yesterday, in fog,
We played tennis.

Behind the courts
The sod was cut,
The backhoe dug the grave.

Today, in clear sunlight,
We played tennis.

The funeral was
Held, the cars
Drove off, the
Casket disappeared
Forever,

The dirt tumbled in.

(p. 22).

What a charming little book. Pictures of life in a small town. After I'm done reading the poems, I have a delicious sense. But the poem I remember is this:

THE FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY VISITS SUCCASUNNI, NEW JERSEY

Gentlemen: The enemy are now in full force bending their march toward Morris Town... Remove the stores and baggage from Morris and Succasunni toward Sussex Courthouse...
-- George Washington, June 23, 1780

His horse is posted at the local inn.
It casts a host of shadows when it ripples
From the flies. His boots befoul the little room
Where he repairs his heady weariness.

"A vigorous ride by pike from Morris Town,
summer preceding forthwith, and New Jersey
A veritable jungle these days, steamy,
Now no relief from the enemy, now no relief from
Mosquitoes, and rain flooding out the Rockaway again.
But sweet lady, you are relief,
Nipples like thumbs on melons; I love
To feel your nipples on my tongue.
Ahh, I could lavish in this luxury a fortnight.

"But brandy now, then I must attend
The churchyard down the way
To hasten my good boys in their retreat
& seed the unmarked pit.
With every sentiment of Esteem and Tenderness,
Lady,
Yours Ever and Most Obliged."

(p. 30).

No note illuminates if the letter is invented, or to whom it was addressed (Martha?, or some Monica Lewinsky type?), or even if it was a real letter. This is Zulauf's only complete volume of poetry, although there are a couple of chapbooks listed in Amazon.com at boutique prices. (This book cost $1.50 after the 50% sale.)

Pointillistic poems set in a small town. Aside from the Washington poem, none of the scenes are exactly momentous on a historical scale, and perhaps that's the point. This town is about 30 miles from where I grew up. It has a population of 4000, according to Wikipedia.

Summer Evening in Succasunna

How the impatiens speak to me --
But what do the flowers say?
Locked up in eternity
Much briefer than a day
They all stare back in silence
Radiant in the shade
(Redtangerinemagenta/
Lavenderpinkishwhite)
Asking for some water.
Then the brown chihuahua
In the next door yaps,
The sparrows preen,
And the mosquitoes get smacked.

(p. 11)