EPITAPH

Without error, life would be a mistake.

Who Can Ordain, Who Can Marry, Who Can be Senator, Who Can Be A Lutheran Surrealist?

A lot of firsts coming down the pike. First black president.

How long before we get a gay president? I don't think we've had a major contender who has been gay.

Some point to the precursor to Lincoln, as an actual gay man. What was his name again? Polk? Not Polk. Pierce? No, not Pierce. Starts with a B. Bum? No. Buchanan. If you check B's Wiki page it says at bottom that back then there were more presidents than there were beds. They had to sleep in stacks. Contemporary historians see that and think it was by preference, but it was actually an exigency based on the dearth of beds or too many sleepy presidents without a Booth.

Who knows?

Let us think of the many firsts. Caligula appointed his horse as a senator. That was a first.

Being first doesn't necessarily mean best. I want a ladybug for president. Ladybugs for president!

I like nature, and therefore I like the country, but I prefer acid rock to country music.

Who wants to go back to country music? Not eye, said the blind man.

Many people still like country music. It's often about fidelity, and about families.

One of the things that has surprised me is how well the conservatives have actually held their side. They listen to country music. They like the myth of the cowboy. Reagan openly played on this, as did Bush 2. Lincoln's hat was too high to be called a cowboy hat. But even if the hats have shrunk, they still mean something, and are similar to the hats of Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I think that Scott Brown in his Massachusetts run often wore a stocking cap. It's hard to make those look authoritative.

Whatever we can say about politics is often old hat.

I'd like to see a presidential candidate with a basket of fruit on their head in a Carmen Miranda type of hat.

The last important conservative poet was Marianne Moore. She wore a triangular hat that recalled Washington. In Brooklyn, where she lived, Washington fought a battle with the British and lost three thousand men in one go, almost as many as we've lost in Iraq. But Washington took it in stride. Marianne Moore wore a hat similar to Washington's. She wrote only one hundred poems or so that she kept in Complete Poems. She did of course write more but she wrote them off as losses.

Moore appreciated people like Reinhold Niebuhr (they were friends). It's more a liberal German and Scandinavian thing, and maybe an old English thing, and maybe there's some kind of watershed in James Madison. I love Madison. He was a mainline Protestant. They were all mainline Protestants.

Moore was anti-communist, but she wasn't anti-liberal. She wasn't a racist. And she was also a mainline Protestant. Everyone should be a mainline Protestant. If you want to be happy, become a mainline Protestant. When everybody is a mainline Protestant, however, what would there be to protest?

I think it's important to get back to Moore's hat.

Not only of a kind of a poet, but as a kind of political thinker, and as a person, and as one who believed in military action. She was for the war in Vietnam, she was for the war in World War II. This is not to say that she was an all-around nut for war. You don't have to ride roughshod over people. Should poets wear a star?

There has to be law. People who break the law have to be called outlaws. They don't get to wear a star. They should wear the black hat.

The Evangelical Lutheran church of America accepted gay ordination last fall. It takes a long time to break out of the church because of a lengthy two-tiered voting system. each vote requires a super-majority of 66.6%, same as it took to accept gay ordination. About 300 congregations out of ten thousand are going down that route:

http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/02/24/355838/lutherans-seeing-fallout-over.html

Some things are make or break, but I wonder how many individuals have already left ELCA churches. That is something I see. And once people leave, they take their votes with them.

Some Romans found it appalling that Caligula appointed his horse as a senator.

Some might herald Caligula's appointment as the beginning of animal rights.

It's important for animals, if they want rights, to wear hats. Beavers should wear hats. Squirrels should wear hats. Hats with stars. In some cartoons, animals wear hats.

I don't want to see any particular group not wearing hats. It will be hard for insects to take off if they wear hats. So perhaps an exception can be made.

Anyone not wearing a hat should be excluded from the system of rights.

All Lutheran Surrealists should wear hats. We want to put the hatters back to work.

What Social Problems (if any) do Left and Right Agree On?

Are there any social problems that left and right agree upon?

We do not for instance know if global warming is true, or whether it's a "sky is falling" scam to obliterate small businesses and institute a bigger government. Even if that is not the primary intention it may be a secondary outcome.

We do not for instance know whether universal healthcare is not a scam to make for a bigger government for the Acorn president to control. Even if that is not the primary intention it may be the secondary outcome.

We do not know if America is evil or not (let the country with no sin throw the first stone). If America is evil and it should be replaced by a groovy multicultural society, why did all the groovy multiculturals come from societies that were even worse to the point that they left them at great cost to come here?

If Mexicans think America is so bad for stealing Texas, why would so many of them prefer to live in Texas, instead of in their ungovernable home country? If Texas belonged to Mexico, would they still want to live there, or would they prefer to move to Oklahoma, or some place that had actual laws?

From immigration to global warming, from minimum wage to gay marriage, from the very definition of America, to any presentation of what America should do, the two parties have almost no overlapping interests. It's a divided country with a no-man's land in-between.

Do we know anything in common on which we can all work together? Is there an overlap such that the two parties can accomplish anything without the other being all upset? Do we have a common scapegoat that will bring us together?

Al Qaeda worked for a while. For about five minutes after the WTC "man caused disaster" America felt like one.

But is there something less drastic that can bring the country together?

Arts? Parks? No, those only create squabbles.

Lyme disease, I say, is the cause around which the entire nation should rally! It only afflicts 1% of us, but the numbers are growing. We need more money for our cause. We need helicopter gunships. America, let's get busy and wipe out Lyme Disease!

What Made America Great?

Fertile land along the Mississippi? Mineral deposits? Relative isolation via-a-vis competitors? Sucked the most able-bodied men and women, the most enterprising entrepreneurs, from around the world?

Or is Hell what made America great?

Is it not the fear of Hell that stoked American industrial might, ignited the ingots of Pittsburgh, built the bridges, and baked the bread? Is it not fear of Hell that marched our champions into the the sweaty south and freed the slaves?

The idle hands of St. Francis dropped a moisture into the blast furnace. It was a strange ointment with many odors. It was an odd perfume that all but extinguished the fires of hell. The Reformation Past was sacrificed on the altar of Tolerance.

Tiger Woods stands smoking before us telling us his crimes were private, no one else's business but he and Elin's. He evokes the spectre of Tolerance, a universalist balm that guarantees peace, and mutual understanding.

Michelle Obama appears on TV angry that her father had to work a "shift," at a "factory."

While I myself would prefer not to work a shift at a factory, I'd prefer that to a shiftless population obsessed with tossing down pastries. Michelle Obama is trying to get kids to get the lard off. I agree that we should do this, but how can we do it without reigniting the fires of hell, and walking on a treadmill, and invoking industry? Isn't it true that hard work burns calories, and that we've gone soft, reclining on recliners, declining on decliners, while we let the Chinese build our goods while plying us with sweet drinks, and getting us to lie down on cushions?

Love is not a bad thing, but it has to be very narrowly defined as that which we will crawl through Hell for, that for which we are willing to sacrifice, and never forget. It is not something easy or sybaritic. The fifties were already a lazy time. The Beats Pied Piper'd many of us seemingly out of the endless Egypt, moseying like Moses, meandering like Menanders, to the endless sybaritic false idol of the San Francisco Beatific vision at the end of the rainbow.

To reject that love and demand instead the Puritan view of love, with marriage as a divine institution, kids raking leaves for a dollar, everyone doing their homework, people willing to work in shifts, working at least as hard as the trees and plants, who around us strain for the skies, doing their best, putting out thorns, protecting their inner lives, protecting their roses for the one they love.

While we may never reignite the fires of hell to the extent that our ancestors knew them, dowsed as they may be now with the unguent perfume of Tolerance, smoke billowing up in the names of Amy Bishop, Tiger Woods, and Saint Francis, and as immigrants pour in that have never read the Ten Commandments, and if the volcano of Puritanical Industry has been exchanged for the moonwalk, and hip hop, and sitting idle on a cushion and saying, um, um, we do look back on the greatness of American life as a time in which America's butt was scorched, long before the universalist message became a soothing balm, and we became marshmallows looking to the government for a bailout, an easier grade, a softer pillow.

Tolerance is what America must fear. And the answer? A narrower conception of love, an aperture, surrounded by the fiery foe & the furnace.

New Poetry Chapbook Due Out!

I published a chapbook called Waiting for the Rapture a few years ago. It came out in an edition of about 75 copies, and I gave them all away in about a week.

Another chapbook entitled Love Never Ends will be out sometime this spring. It will again be a tiny edition, given away in one week.

If I don't have your snail mail address (I have one for Stu, and JH) be sure to send it to me via my email address at kirbyolson2@gmail.com. Once the edition goes out, I won't reprint it, and the edition will be tiny again -- less than 100 copies.

Phil Primeau of Persistencia Press made the first one available, and is now going to publish another one. It should have ten to fifteen poems in it.

LUDIC OLYMPICS

Curling makes me laugh, as do some of the snowboarding events. They just seem so unnatural. I can understand how skiing and shooting have some evolutionary purpose, since in Finland for instance that might have been related to survival 300 years ago.

But I can't understand how anybody would ever have to have been good at curling aside from Shirley Temple.

So I was thinking, let's make the Winter Olympics truly ludic and invent sports in which the things happening are totally unrelated. Bag-pipe racing, for instance, would be a sport in which you had to ski as fast as you could while playing Campdown Races on a bagpipe without skipping a single note. You get both an aesthetic score and a speed score.

Half-pipe ironing: in this you have to do double and triple flips while ironing a shirt. The shirt has to be ironed without a single wrinkle within the two minute period, and you also have to execute a certain number of flips and twirls without getting wrapped up in the cord.

PROSPECT PARK & ADMINISTRATIVE ISSUES

I was just talking with an administrator at Prospect Park in Brooklyn, which is the masterpiece of Frederick Law Olmsted.

She was saying that while Marianne Moore was a Republican in the 1960s, that this was not necessarily bad. Back then, she said, the Republican party was the liberal party. She pointed to Mayor Lindsey Wagner, and said that he had been a Republican and a liberal, and that the Democratic party of the period were "party hacks."

Why did this change, or has it truly changed?

Who are the best people in the Democratic party from a Republican viewpoint?

Who are the best people in the Republican party from a Democratic viewpoint?

Who are the worst?

Rather than thinking of the two parties as monolithic pillars of good and bad (depending on where one stands), what do you think are the bright spots in the other party, and the worst part of your own party?

If you're an independent, or in a no-man's land and don't vote on party lines, what would pull you over to one party or the other?

What is your single biggest issue?

AMY BISHOP SHOOTS SIX, KILLS THREE

Amy Bishop was a biology professor at University of Alabama at Huntsville. She was also a virulent Obama supporter, a leftist, and had lost her tenure battle.

A few days ago she shot and killed three professors, and injured three others, before she either ran out of ammunition or her gun jammed.

It turns out that twenty years ago she pumped her brother full of hot lead in Boston, and killed him, after an argument. She was exonerated without a trial, after her well-placed mother called an authority, who had Amy Bishop released. All police records pertaining to the case are missing.

Bishop was apparently quite a distant person. After she shot the six in the faculty meeting, she calmly called her husband, asking him to pick her up.

The Bishops have four children.

All the facts aren't in yet, and the case remains shrouded in mystery. The relevant facts seem to be that

a. Bishop was denied tenure
b. She has a record of using guns to settle disputes
(b1) -- she did not possess a permit for the gun
c. She was emotionally distant
d. She was an avid Obama supporter
e. She was a serious scientist with a Ph.D. from Harvard, and a relatively impressive track record in her field.

Lately there has been an uptick in the universities with regard to violence. Virginia Tech lost thirty students and a prof or three after an enraged student slaughtered them. This student then turned his gun on himself. A year later another student chopped off a student's head at the same university. We have 6000 colleges and universities in this country, and they are mostly thought to be oases of calm and civility when compared to the postal environment, or the business environment. Is there something we can do to hasten the exit of faculty and students who are loose cannons? Will the phrase, "Going postal," become a new phrase, like, "Enacting tenure loss"?

What criteria are needed to identify a potentially violent classmate or professor?

Are there now for some reason more of these on campuses? In our society? Bishop was apparently an ardent Obama supporter. She was not a conservative, who was ousted by liberals. She shot women (including a member of the support staff) in her cold and contained fury. She then calmly called her husband, who claims that from the tone of her voice he had no idea of the havoc she had wreaked.

In order to clarify the narrative, we need to know -- did she shoot indiscriminately at the people in the meeting, or was there a pattern of people she specifically chose to eliminate? Did anyone close to her know that she was about to commit this crime? Did she make any notes beforehand, that could be discovered on her computer or in her private notebooks? What is Bishop's own narrative?

Is there anything that could have been done? Should someone with a violent history and a tenure denial be invited to meetings, or should the meetings be held privately?

Right at this moment, the details are still too fuzzy for me to be able to put this into a coherent narrative. The only pattern I see is that violence appears to be erupting on a more regular basis. Now that faculty members are counted among the violent, it seems that we must think about the issues.

Naturally, people are a bit upset when they are denied tenure. But the point is to write a few hundred more job letters, and get back in where you can, or find employment elsewhere, and to think of the future. What good does it serve to use violence in this manner? Bishop not only checkmated herself, but comes off as a kind of Red Queen, way off to the far left, and unable to handle the cognitive dissonance between her own apparent self-esteem, and the lack of esteem in which she was held by other faculty members.

Personally, I think the problem is that the left looks the other way when they have problems within their own ranks. No one was willing to oust Edwards. No one was willing to oust Charles Manson. Stalin rose rapidly through the ranks. Amy Bishop should have found herself sequestered after she blew her brother away with a shotgun. A Democrat from Massachusetts let her go without any police inquiry.

The new multicultural understanding is that all violence is committed by straight white men. So they are stunned when a Cho emerges, or when an Amy Bishop goes berserk, since it's not part of their theory. The left has yet to understand the murders of Stalin, or Mao, or Pol Pot, or the show trials of the East Bloc, to say nothing of the vigilante bombings of the Weathermen, or the cruelty of the Black Panthers. Rather than projecting lawlessness on to others, we should assess the lawlessness of our own group, and ask ourselves what's wrong with us.

The Colossus of Kling

Every century a colossus arises. In the 16th century it was Luther. In the 17th, Shakespeare. In the 18th century it was James Madison. In the 19th, it was Frederick Law Olmsted. In the 20th century, Marianne Moore. In the 21st century it is Arnold Kling.

Kling's brief article, "The Root of the Financial Crisis," appeared in the December 2009 - January 2010 POLICY REVIEW, pp. 21-34.

In it, Kling traces the creation of the house of cards. While the left says the house crumbled because of Bush the Joker, and the right traces it back to the jack-asses from Acorn and their mega-lawyer from Hawaii, Kling says it's a long series of policy blunders originating in the Government National Mortgage Association that President Johnson created, in order to bail out the Federal National Mortgage Association, created by Roosevelt II.

To get the debt of these organizations off its books, the government created Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, two colossal national banks, twin pillars of dumb and dumber.

The rising costs of servicing the debt combined with falling housing costs produced a Samson that pushed the twin pillars apart, collapsing the economy not only on Uncle Samson, but on all the philistines who never saw it coming.

Kling alone saw it coming, but his was a voice in the wilderness. Kling says that Freddie Mac and its twin needed less than 3% collateral to sustain billions of mortgage debt created by outside agencies. This was fine as long as housing prices rose. When they declined, many dropped their mortgages, and the house of cards collapsed.

"Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are subject to different regulations. In practice, their ratio of capital to assets was less than 3 percent, which was well below that of banks" (27).

The Community Reinvestment Act ensured that "a sizable percentage of mortgage loans went to low-income borrowers" (29). This meant that banks couldn't set their own prices or determine their own customers. They were regulated into making untenable loans in turn secured by government banks FM1 AND FM2.

After Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bought up the bad mortgages after the housing bubble burst, they expended their puny capital, and then were themselves bailed out by yet another stimulus, as numbers of homeless grew, and the debt ceiling rose, and this threatened to collapse the entire world economy, and we ended by borrowing trillions from Red China.

Kling's article is as picturesque as Klingons at a Tupperware Party, as they try to outbid one another in the plastics market. Credit cards are thrown everywhere, but at one point the sellers will no longer accept them. The bluff is called, and Kling says this creates static electricity.

Instead of artificial markets, Kling wants us to think of "natural buyers" and "natural sellers" and to watch out for regulations that make these market forces into unnatural players, since that creates an unsustainable imbalance in the business environment.

Can Kling personally reconstruct such a natural market? Can he singlehandedly reconstruct the Temple of the Philistines? No, he cannot. The debt ceiling is likely to continue to collapse until it has an earthquake proof foundation.

Kling's prescription says that we need fewer "suits" and more "geeks." Arnold Kling is the king of the geeks. A clear-sighted geek who can appropriately assign risk, so that the world economy can once more turn with robust vitality, is what is needed. What Locke was to Keynes, what Marx was to Engels, Kling is to Lutheran Surrealism, elucidating our own economic puzzles. We picture him as an orangutang juggling through the vines of our economic jungles, above the fray, muscular, a bit hirsute, perhaps, but clear-minded, steady, and with his eye on the bottom line, and the tricks and sleights of hand of the government:

"Mortgage securitization has always had two major advantages. One is that it permits accounting gimmicks, such as moving mortgages off the government books and thereby lowering the official national debt. Similar accounting tricks occur with every major surge in securitization" (23).

POLICY REVIEW is a no-nonsense journal available at most Borders' bookstores. I like to go through it. It's only $6. Kling is especially helpful, but there are articles on Terrorism, why China worked and Russia didn't, the problems of nation-building, and articles about the goofier aspects of the humanities just now. This journal is quite sensible. Writers focus on structural problems in our thinking and attempt to correct them. Kling writes that one of the problems of the banking industry now is that they can assign mortgages that they turn over to Freddie Mac.

In a more direct model, which he prefers, each organization is responsible for its own loans, and for garnering repayment. Thus, "You establish standards, policies and procedures for loan origination. You choose the markets in which you would like to originate loans, and you will probably focus on communities where you know the local economy. You hire and train personnel to follow internal guidelines" (23).

When the loans are made indirectly through an agency that doesn't originate the loans but bears responsibility for their failure, the risk assignment disappears, and risky loans are given out willy-nilly, which endangers the entire economy.

At any rate, when poets and humanists have to look into economics, as Ezra Pound and WCW did in the 30s, you know something's wrong. Way out of my field, I cling to Kling, in an attempt to understand the bankers and politicians. So far, Policy Review's Arnold Kling's the only one who's made any sense. You go, Kling.

JIM CARROLL MEMORIAL READING

Went to the Jim Carroll Memorial Reading at St. Marks' Church. Snowy winter Feb. 10, 2010, headlines in NYT about heating up of climate debate, as the intensive winter storms pummel the east coast, prompting presidential humor: "Snowmageddon."

Audience filled up with the poetry crowd: you never see so many thin people. Poetry still attracts aesthetes.

I sat in one of the few unoccupied spots, later realized that my sightline was blocked by a massive speaker-system.

Bill Berkson read first. He'd given Carroll good clothes and a place to live in Bolinas, and he quoted Tom Clark on Carroll's jump shot.

Some little-known poets followed. They read some of Carroll's poetry. I found this hard to follow, although one poem said that Carroll's girlfriend unhooked her bra on the Staten Island Ferry. I got the impression of a guy who liked to take risks, and who had a kind of exhibitionism? He apparently was dressed up as a woman by someone. Who dressed him up? Claes Oldenburg's ex-wife.

Anne Waldman called Carroll her "kid brother," and read peregrine falcon prose about her many years with Carroll. St. Marks is an institution and they went back to its beginnings some forty years ago.

Anselm Berrigan read a chunk of prose about Carroll seeing Edwin Denby talking about Willem de Kooning attacked by a butterfly. This segment was very effective.

Lenny Kaye and Patti Smith closed down the night with choked memories and a rendition of People Who Died, which now includes Carroll himself. This was very effective, and was an appropriate ending. Smith told us to name out loud our own dead. Few did this. I thought of my dad.

Smith named Kerouac, Corso, Ginsberg, Burroughs, as people who died, and then added, Howard Zinn. My mind worried the connection between the avant-garde and socialism.

I liked the evening and wondered to myself on the way home while negotiating the massive blizzard why the poets backed socialism in the 20th century. What did the revolution do for Mayakovsky? Where are the poets of Vietnam? Where are the student poets from Tianamen Square? Where are the poets of North Korea? What happened to Mandelstam, or Attila Joszef?

These are people who died, too.

Even the politicians who backed the artistic avant-garde rarely fared well.

Trotsky was rewarded for his fervor with an ice pick in the skull.

The Lutheran Revolution succored Cranach and Bach, Durer and others.

The reading took place in a former church (I think it's been turned over to the avant-garde). One man with a rough face that looked like the actor Philippe Leotard said he had breakfast with Carroll and he thought the poems were like prayers.

Many registered an ethereal Catholic sensibility that floated above the drug addiction and casual sexual encounters of his life.

I'm glad I attended the event. I hadn't been in St. Marks' Church before. I was in NYC doing research when I saw the event listed on Silliman's blog. Waldman said that Carroll picked up others' phrases, like "What garbage," and played with them until he made them his own. You got the sense of a poetic ragpicker, someone who was used to living on good finds. Patti Smith said he was unreliable, often stoned out of his mind, but kind.

I didn't think this event was garbage. But I don't know if he was a poet. He had poetic phrasing, but I liked his prose best: sharp, droll, and filled with scenic insight.

His friends struck me as funny. A guy named Richard Hell said Carroll had called him fat. He was fat by Carroll's standards.

Carroll appeared to me in a beatific vision the day he died. Two days later I read his obituary somewhere, maybe in the NYT. For some reason he had seen fit to say goodbye to me, or hi to me, or something. I hadn't really known him, but he knew some of my writing, and told people he thought I was funny. I'm actually not. I just sound funny to other people. The audience had several hundred people who chose to say goodbye to him, too, having gotten perhaps the same beatific vision. R.I.P., and hope to see you soon, Mr. Jim Carroll.

Baptists Held in Haiti

The ten American Baptists who are presently jailed in Haiti should be released. Among other issues, there was the attempt by their own lawyer to ransom them for $60,000. The situation is sidetracking media attention from the problems of distributing food and water. While Bill Clinton was able to secure the release of the Asian-american journalists in North Korea, he has been unable to do anything in Haiti. We got hikers out of Iran, but again, no help for Baptists. Is it because they are likely to vote as Republicans?

The Baptists have had a presence in Haiti for many years, and have their own seminary there.

It does seem that Baptists don't recognize human laws, and instead recognize religious law as trumping civil law. It was the Baptists who led the fight against slavery leading up to the Civil War.

Apparently, the Baptists lacked papers to get the kids out. But Haitian law is rudimentary, and getting such papers can take years. How is it that the Haitian government can't do anything for their own people but can nevertheless imprison ten Americans who were clearly only trying to help Haitian children by getting them out of this collapsed country and to a point of safety in the DR?

It appears now that the American Baptists have been taken captive by some shadowy remnant of the Haitian government and will only release them if a ransom is paid.

In Darwin's The Descent of Man, 2nd ed., (1874), he writes, "In a rude state of civilization the robbery of strangers is, indeed, generally considered as honorable" (113-114).

MINMALISM: THE LESS SAID THE BETTER?

Minimalism was a term used for the poetry, fiction and art of the 1970s. In fiction it meant the spare style of Raymond Carver and his associates (ok, it mainly meant Raymond Carver). In poetry it referred to the work of Robert Creeley, Richard Brautigan, and especially Aram Saroyan. There were others who worked in similar veins such as the poet Larry Fagin, and Tom Clark. Saroyan was the best-known of the poets because his entire book of poems was read on the nightly news. Among these poems was the single word poem -- ligh-ght (I recite it from memory -- is that how it went?).

In art the work of Carl Andre (better known for having given a push to his wife's career -- ! -- as she fell out of a skyscraper window after an argument). His piece SULCUS is represented above (Sulcus, 1980, Western red cedar wood, overall 150 x 90 x 90 cm).


In general one could say that the minimalism of the 70s comes about because of the lack of belief in transcendence. This leads to a paring down to the basic "It is what it is." This Buddhist approach is deeply intertwined with the rise of Buddhism among the lapsed left who find in it a corollary for their paring.

Poems are reduced to single words.

In sculpture it is a basic shape, or a building block. Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Richard Serra.

There was a precursor to this movement among the Objectivists, and in the notion of WCW's, that there are NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS.

In some branches of LANG-PO words themselves become things and have no significance beyond themselves (Viz-PO).

The Humean notion that only the tangible exists because of the unproven provenance of God creates a meaning-poor art work that is nevertheless suggestive in its material existence. However, aesthetics itself takes a nose-dive (as did Carl Andre's wife), as do morals, and many find themselves without words to describe larger universals. The flattening affect of Andy Warhol is part of this. He "presents" soup cans, traffic accidents, and major Hollywood stars next to Mao and the electric chair, but these become merely tangible surfaces. Everything becomes surface, and larger meaning is a joke. (One wonders if Warhol wasn't lampooning the movement, and instead asking us to get serious. His secret Catholic paintings presented in the Dillenberger book make this an open question.)

For the secular left, transcendental universals such as beauty and morality disappeared with God. As God disappeared, they nevertheless felt guilty about dispensing with justice. How could they dispense with justice, and still be the guilt-provoking left? how could they lord it over others if there were no larger meanings? Therefore, they decided that guilt is a matter of tangible surfaces. If you were identifiably white and male, you were guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors. If you were not, you had to be freed from the white males. What attracted the left to the simplicity of race and gender judgment was the tangible aspect of these categories. Race and gender were something everyone could point to, and it could determine guilt or innocence, as if the sign of race and gender determined the transcendent and universal nature of individuals.

To those of us who continued to believe in God, there was a laughable idiocy about the denial of a universal soul, and God, and the misrepresentation of justice via an idolization and demonization of race and gender, irrespective of any actual narrative, or any actual action or activities on the part of an individual. OJ Simpson was innocent because he was black. Tiger Woods was a good man because he was black. Albert Schweitzer was bad because he was white and male. If a woman chopped off her husband's penis she should go free because she was lopping off a signifier that had entrapped women for millenia. etc.

Yoko Ono presented an apple just as it is.

Meanwhile, there was a rush to find tangibles that could mark the fight for justice and give the squirrelly left something to squeak about. Glass ceilings were invoked. IQ and sports scores were idolized, and became real, and scientific, signs. But then the left said, let's go back and look at this IQ business. Signs in a narrative that presented a very simple narrative having to do with the superiority of the underclasses, a bizarre notion that came from Marx, but then leaked into race and gender discourse, and turned everything upside down, were not supported by Herrnstein's IQ discourse. Therefore Herrnstein was an evil idiot and it was a good thing he was dead. (Nevertheless, the left will still tell you they are smarter than the right, and will invoke IQ scores and college degrees to prove it.)

The young went for Buddha, and the notion of the eternal present. But time also got into the mix. As people smoked pot and saw things around them for the first time (Saroyan was stoned as he wrote his one-word poems, like, man, like, like), the particular turned into universals as huge quantities of dope went up in smoke, and women went out windows, and the intuitive faculty, too, came to distrust signs like the American flag, but to put total faith in signs of race and gender, which became the ultimate reality.

Quantification mattered, but not when it came to IQ. That was too difficult to decide. Race and gender were easy to decide. White meant bad. "Of color" meant good.

Quality is harder to read and so is largely forgotten, but not entirely. In the work of the best minimalists one can discern quality, but I would be hard-pressed to say why a Creeley poem is better than a Fagin poem, or why a Saroyan is better than either. Some of the secularists such as Ed Dorn crept back toward God and an implied Protestantism, but they never worked out a broad goal, or actually went into the church. The smarter ones almost said oops! But never issued a mea culpa.

Somehow it wasn't their style. Style was still problematic.

In sports the raw quantity determines the winner, but there might have been one stylish triple-play by the loser that is the only thing we recall ten years later.

In getting rid of narrative, and turning to the immediately simple, as Hume did, and as the lapsed left did in the 1960s and more so in the 1970s, after lapsing into drug use and giggles, a serious narrative snuck back in to the vacuum, in a simple set of signage having to do with race, and gender, and superiority crept back in with it, as a linear narrative again began to arise. Women were better than men, and had more wisdom than them. If women were racial too, then they had twice the wisdom, and became wise Latinas, and were promoted to the Supreme Court.

IQ was a tricky concept because one wondered if it was scientifically valid. It didn't seem to back the concepts that were wanted by the race and gender thesis, so it was concluded to be invalid.

Meanwhile, the now nearly invisible right reformulated itself, and began a counter-narrative. A huge tsunami having to do with equality, and the reassertion of universal rights, and the Lockean notion of the four freedoms, swept back into the presidency in the person of George Bush. The left objected. Bush was white and male and from TEXAS. The conservatives found a channel on TV (FOX), and got tremendous numbers of visitors, and in the fine arts realm they began to tell a whole different story. In poetry, rhyming and meter and stories began again (ask GM), and in novels, there were again symbols, and characters, and morals. The quality of representation began to matter again in paintings. Things that cannot be measured or quantified such as humor and quality again became touched upon and known through the intuition. And some even started going back to church and believing that there is a timeless God in spite of a lack of tangible proof. But there is no proof of anything. We take our marriages on faith, and we take our children on faith. We know that our father is in heaven, and that life is good and that love exists, and that it will never end.

Haiti

In colorful dresses the Arawaks
Were pushed off the edge of a cliff by the conquistadors
In metal armor the conquistadors
Were pushed off the edge of a cliff by the French colonialists
In plumed shirts the French colonialists
Were pushed off the edge of a cliff by mulatto revolutionnaires
In neo-colonialist plumed shirts the mulatto revolutionnaires
Were pushed off the edge of a cliff by American imperialists
In business suits the American Imperialists
Have the woods stripped
And the cliffs of Haiti are washed into the sea
Leaving on the surface only the black hat of Duvalier


This poem appeared in Ed Dorn's journal Rolling Stock #11 in 1986, p. 33.

PARKS AND PLAY

I'm confused. I'm doing some research on Central Park, which was built in the mid-1800s. It was originally a swamp, but was filled in with millions of tons of dirt, and replanted, and is now an urban oasis, the world's most popular park. Also among the very first.

Parks are a nineteenth century invention, it seems, the first one having been opened in 1808 in Hungary. In about 1846 the English start to open them.

There were some deer parks that stretch back into the medieval era. These were something like game preserves attached to the houses of royalty. But the commoners weren't allowed in, and if found inside, they were hanged as poachers.

Central Park was designed by a man named Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner (business partner) Calvert Vaux (the last name is pronounced Vox). Vaux was an English architect who was one of the first landscape architects. Olmsted was the scion of a wealthy Connecticut family and a kind of good-for-nothing until at about age 35 he submitted a design for Central Park. After that he did Brooklyn's Prospect Park, had something to do with the creation of the National Park system, as well as the greenspace in front of the National Capital, and designed insane asylums and so on. The nineteenth century invents industrialism, but there is a counter-trend in which the Romantics return to nature, and even try to bring nature inside of cities.

There are amusement parks, and baseball parks, and even PARKING lots, and when young people make out in cars, they call it parking.

We have a tiny park in Delhi about a quarter of an acre in size that has very pretty flowers in the spring. I have tried to get the side of a building painted that abuts this park, donated by a man who once lived here and who worked in Chase Manhattan Bank. He also donated the local library.

I am spending a lot of time in libraries researching parks.

But I also see parks as libraries.

Museums are a kind of park for the mind.

When I lived in France I loved to go to see the Parc Monceau in Paris, or the Parc at Fontainebleau.

Some people want to throw frisbees in parks, and others wish to snowmobile, and still others want to hike or climb, and yet others just want to sunbathe, or moonbathe (Addam's Family liked to moonbathe on their roof at night).

Central Park was one of the first parks open to the public. People thought this would eventuate in enormous murder rates and rape rates. It hasn't. Most years there are only one or two rapes in Central Park out of a rape rate of about 845 rapes per year reported in the city. Red-tailed hawks and all kinds of mice, and fabulous trees of every description, squirrels, and even raccoons and other creatures live in Central Park. There is also the zoo. Many people don't believe in zoos, because they think animals should run free.

I don't know what to think about parks and zoos and museums and libraries. I like them a lot, and find these and colleges to be a great open space for play and freedom.

What have I forgotten about parks? Most people in the suburbs come out so they can have a lawn. But the lawns are filled with ticks, and the ticks have Lyme's Disease.