Dwarf Priests

I was reading through the Bible's Leviticus today. Among the things it's illegal to do: consult with fortune tellers, get a tattoo, be a priestly dwarf, look at your aunt when she's naked, sleep with your parents or a goat. These things create confusion, God says.

I wasn't surprised that you're not supposed to sleep with your goat or get a tattoo or consult with wizards or boff your parents. I was especially surprised by the interdiction against dwarves becoming priests. Come to think of it: I don't think I've ever seen a dwarf priest. Do they exist? I'm not so sure what I think about dwarf priests but I'm sure I haven't seen one. I have, however, seen a midget nun. It was in the summer of 1987, and I was walking on Montmartre in Paris, and way on the back of the hill, I saw her climbing a short set of steps. It seemed normal.

Leviticus 21:18-21: For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose... Or crookbakt, or a dwarf..."

SPORTS AS THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION

If the question is community, then sports is the answer at least for some. My kids love sports, and play them all day long. I look out in the back yard and they are either playing baseball, or wrestling, or playing some version of soccer. Sports are one area in society where aggression is ok, and even encouraged. Of course, you can't go as far as Mike Tyson did and bite the ear off of Evander Holyfield!

But when I look back on my childhood what I most loved was playing sports: baseball, basketball, soccer, (I didn't enjoy wrestling so much because it smelled so bad!), but also riding bikes, and kick the can. I like the all-out quality of sports, but how inside of a sport there is still a certain morality. You have to be able to lose with grace, and win with grace (harder I think to win with grace when you're bursting with pride). Just playing the sport correctly is fun. I loved playing Little League baseball. I always played first base and took pride in bagging a bad throw and still getting an out. As a batter, I loved to smack a short hopping grounder through the hole between first and second for a stand-up double. Get some wood on it! and other phrases that we use in everyday life: a lot of it comes from our love for sports. (Of course today the bats have morphed into aluminum because they do not so easily splinter.) I hate aluminum bats. They seem so fake. I hate the little ping they make when you get a hit.

Swimming, throwing frisbees, hitting golf balls at the driving range, playing kickball, and then at night watching sports on TV with my dad. We loved the Phillies!

Many people hurt themselves or others playing sports. I never did. I never broke or sprained anything until two weeks ago when I sprained an ankle in the rut of a truck tire impression that had been left down in the grass at the far end of the soccer field. First real injury, ever. It sucks, because even after two weeks of lying low I can't do my normal exercise routines, or even play soccer with the kids. Best I can do is hobble from one end of the town to the other.

Sports aren't Christian, per se. You never hear of Jesus throwing a Frisbee with His disciples, or getting a dog to fetch. Jesus was not a boxer, and he was never invited to participate in the gladiatorial combats at the Coliseum (most Christians were executed during the lunch recess, and simply put on crosses for the delectation of the Romans who had their lunch while reflecting on the impaled). Total devotion to the emperor was part of the price for being Roman, and not wanting to do this meant capital punishment. Usually it was murderers and bad people who got the execution, and obviously killing nice Christians didn't go down so smooth as killing a serial killer. Most early Christians didn't like the Coliseum, and resisted the gladiator shows. Slowly Christianity has morphed, and now increasingly includes athletics.

YMCAs and YWCAs are very sports oriented, and yet Christian. How did that happen?

Perhaps it's something about building character. Doing your utmost, and yet not losing control and becoming a barbarian in the midst of an agonistic contest? I don't know. Sports are a mystery. In Eastern European countries they shot up the women with steroids to get extra muscle tissue to create the Bulgarian weight lifter phenomenon. In Colombia their mafia shot a goalie who let in three goals in an international match.

I love America: we are so fair, and so perfect. We are constantly evolving the sense of what's right and wrong in sports and in life. We have referees and they are perfectly impartial, like our judges. This country is so great.

In the Beginning was the Word

In the beginning was the Word. Many think this means the triumph of the verbal, but perhaps it's more about fairness.

Or, the advent of Law.

Silence is probably as important as words. There are many different kinds of silence: scary silence, a pregnant silence, a jittery silence, the silence of the afternoon in which a calico cat steps through the neighbor's cucumbers. A humorous silence, a demanding silence, an embarrassed silence. The final silence of Christ on the Cross.

Words can be used as swords, or as the ability to demonstrate one's superiority. They can also establish relationships of love and trust. They can seduce, or they can silence.

I'm dubious about words, but not about the Word.

Surrealism and Lutheranism were both primarily verbal and narrative in their intentions. Surrealism privileged marvelous moments of love, outside of time. Lutheranism did the same, but the love was agape, as opposed to Dionysian.

Love is something quite real for both movements: they posit a dream of love that rises above families, and toward an ideal. The surrealists thought of ideal women, usually in the form of prostitutes. There is of course true love, and then false love. Surrealists generally discover that their love for a prostitute was a false love at the end of their novels, that it was a mirage. Christians on the other hand posit that their love is a true one, and that it's eternal.

What is love, and what does it have to do with words, and with the Word?

Dionysian love is fraudulent, although captivating. It turns one into a prisoner.

Surrealists were not generally close to their families of origin. They floated away in a miasma of irrelational love (Soupault's novel Last Nights of Paris is the ur-novel of all surrealist novels in this respect). That kind of love is also praised among the modernists. William Carlos Williams (who translated Soupault's novel) also dealt in that kind of love.

There is another kind of love announced by Mother Theresa.

A love for the poor.

The surrealists had their own communities and journals, as do Lutherans. I see writing as productive and predictive of certain kinds of communities with certain values in the texts that tend to reproduce themselves in their readers.

In the same way, manifestoes, Bibles, and Constitutions predict and prefabricate certain kinds of communities. The specific phrases of the different candidates who are now running offer a glimpse of the kinds of community they seek to call into being with their candidacies. Who will pay for it? Who will benefit? All must speak to our central values of equality and fairness, to God and to country, and yet they must joke out of existence competing kinds of fairness and community.

If I hear the slightest trace of Marxism in a candidate's speech or in his or her writings, I am dead set against them. We've seen Marxism in the twentieth century enough to know that it is at least as virulent and lethal as smallpox. On the other hand, candidates who recall Madison, Hamilton, Lincoln, or the notion of Protestant and Catholic communities, fascinate me. Robust mixed economies founded on the Word.

That sounds like a hymn to me, and I will sing along with Mitch (although Daniels just dropped out). Or Bobbie, or Herman, or Sarah.


IMAGE ABOVE: Vasnetsov's Christ (Russian Orthodox).

Ron Paul in, Huckabee Out

Huckabee was the only Republican I truly liked. He had a good sense of humor and could probably finesse Obama. Huckabee said last night he wouldn't run for president in 2012.

A sense of humor is an interesting thing: you have to have a moral dimension inside of it that works well in order to show the discrepancy between how things should be and how they are. And yet not get too indignant, or too nasty.

Obama is dangerous with his sense of humor. His remarks about the moat that the Republicans want along the Tex-Mex border, and to fill it with alligators, was amazing. It did about twenty things at once. It introduced a note of levity. It drew comparisons with the French aristocracy. It was superfluous and jolly, and yet it implied sadism on the part of the Republicans. It also showed that he thought the Republicans could be very wasteful to put a moat through a desert.

It was a very charged image. He probably didn't come up with that himself.

But this is very highpowered imagery coming from the president. He throws it lightly, but it packs a heavy punch.

Sarah Palin has a good uppercut, and can clock an opponent, but she's not reliable in her imagery. It's often a kind of lucky hit that takes an opponent out. As a woman, she might pull in the moms. That would be great, but most moms can't relate to her. She's just too feisty, and her kids aren't normal.

Romney is not quick with his imagery.

Huckabee had the relaxed dancing charm of a Ronald Reagan. He could hit without seeming nasty. He had only a few blemishes: the clemency issue with Keith Richards, and the demented killer come to mind. He's way too clement. He should have never allowed Keith Richards to get out of the speeding ticket.

That said, I don't now see anyone else for the Republicans who's going to matter.

I will, of course, vote for any Republican who runs, whether it's Gingrich or Paul, Palin, or Lurch. Bobby Jindal might get the Indian vote. What's that, 500,000 tech geeks in Silicon Valley? Of course he would get mine, too.

I would even vote for Thing if (he or she?) ran as a Republican.

But you have to have a clear solid moral dimension to run for the Republicans, and a very good deflective sense of humor to keep from getting too indignant from all the communists in the left media who will constantly bait you, and try to take you down as a greedy alligator with the heart of an ancient reptile. Huckabee with his pastoral sense might have been able to arrive on top, and yet take out the One.

Now, I think that Thing would have a better chance than any of the remaining candidates. Ron Paul is 75. He still looks fit, and the Tea Party would back him. But he often appears to me to be kooky, rather than wise. On further inspection, I often like his ideas, but he couches them in a slightly crazy manner. And he doesn't want ANY foreign involvements. How are we going to learn about other countries if we're not busy invading them? Why, I had no idea that Mosul and Ninevah are one and the same! I wuz learnin'!

If Paul wins the nomination, we might find out something about economics. He can't win, but he might bring up good issues that will school the perpetual adolescent. That would be a plus.

Public Transportation Poetry Contest

Recently I got an email from the University of Washington which is studying the feasibility of public transportation, and wanted to know about my experiences. They want everybody to use public transportation because it's greener, and well, it's more economical and doesn't use as much space. If you can pack sixty people on a bus and transport them across town it frees up the highway that would otherwise have sixty cars on it, and then it leaves parking spots free at the destination, and the gasoline used is far less.

That makes sense to me.

For a long time I lived on Capital Hill in Seattle or later in Leschi (on Lake Washington) and commuted to the University of Washington, first to work as a temporary secretary for about eight years. That commute was only about four miles to six miles (depending on where I lived) but you got stuck at rush hour because of the Montlake cut -- a canal that was crossed by two bridges. Sometimes a bus would sit still for ten full minutes or longer, or even a half an hour. The Montlake bridge would meanwhile open for yachts and commercial shipping, while the bus just waited.

After the first year I stopped using the bus. One day a young man started waving a revolver around. Prior to that, the hairsprays were the deadliest problem, or someone getting on the bus with BO, or the fact that the bus just wasn't moving. I hated having people I didn't know sitting next to me. I felt forced to make conversation. I never made a real friend in that way. It was mostly defensive talking, talking that was meant to defer any kind of friendship into some sort of see you next summer kind of deal. I preferred walking to work or taking a bicycle. It was healthier, and often quicker.

The truth is that I hate public transportation. I don't like being around people I don't know crammed into a vehicle and they all either smell awful, or way too good (hairspray and cologne in the morning made me sneeze myself into paroxysms). I could fly on a bicycle twice as fast as the bus, and breathe clean air.

One of the reasons I like living in a small town is that if my car breaks down I can still walk to work, to the grocery store, or anywhere.

I do get on public transportation a few times a year when I go to New York City. I love the rats down in the train tracks. I love the people pretending to be blind with their cups out. I love the buskers with their guitars and flutes. Public transportation is a hilarious thing to visit, but I wouldn't want to make it part of my daily life. Public transportation is a favorite attack point for terrorists. They hit three commercial airlines on 9/11. The Spanish attack was on a train. Many scary movies are made on public transport: Speed, and Pelham 1,2, 3 come to mind.

Public transport is for the birds. I'd prefer to walk, or to ride a bicycle, or to take my own car, thank you very much. But I admit you are sometimes stuffed in with weird people that you'd have never looked at without the vehicle of the bus or the subway. Here's my first entry. Contest closes Memorial Day, May 30th, at midnight.
Limit: 25 lines, no limit on number of entries. Judging is done democratically on May 31st, all entrants get one vote but must vote for someone beside themselves.

PUBLIC Vs. PRIVATE TRANSPORT

The bicyclist falls in the path of a train.
The train derails and falls on a tourist boat.
The tourist boat explodes & singes a hang-glider.
The hang-glider survives but lands on a bus.
He kills the bus driver
When he flies through the windshield
and the dead driver drives the bus into a train.
The train derails and hits another tourist boat.
The tourist boat explodes and a particle of fire
Touches a zeppelin that explodes.
An airplane is touched by the flame
And falls like a shooting star into a milk glass full of tricycles.

Quelling the Rumors!

Quelling the rumors! Thousands of people all over the world have written to me suggesting that one of the reasons I may not have been very active over the last weeks on the blog is that I was among the Navy SEALS who participated in the raid on Osama Bin Laden's compound. I understand the confusion. I did recently suffer a sprained ankle. And I've been nowhere around with regard to the Blog. What could explain it? To set the record straight, I've been quite busy finishing the semester, putting the finishing touches on the literary magazine, and learning Arabic.

JIM MULLEN CAME TO MY CLASSES TODAY

My two creative writing classes convened today with Jim Mullen. Mullen is a comic writer whose novel It Takes a Village Idiot has been a huge hit in these parts. He lived between the towns of Delhi and Walton when he wrote the book, so the town in his novel is called Walleye. The novel opens with a description of Mullen's high society life in NYC in which he knew the likes of Malcolm Forbes and dined on his yacht with 102 other sit-down guests while VIPs flew in and out on helicopters as they had to get to their next date.

Mullen's wife got sick of that life and they moved up here, and soon Jim found himself stoking his castiron fireplace in May with woollen gloves with the fingers poking out (local style). He describes my college as the vandalization of a perfectly good hilltop by a cabal of Soviet architects.

We went to the local Sushi place and I ordered a Bento box with salmon. He ordered some kind of sushi special followed by a fried ice cream. He used the chopsticks while I asked for a fork. I drank green tea, however, while he had a Diet Coke. He regaled me with stories of his illustrious youth in NYC including the 700 guests who came to his 33rd birthday party, and how he knows the editor of Parade Magazine, Reader's Digest, and many other journals from his days as a Bohemian writer living in Chelsea, and scrambling between Forbes magazine, various radio programs, and so on. I'm not sure what the bill came to, because he paid. I put in four dollars for tip. He said it's important to pay your dues in writing by living in NYC for at least a decade, to meet the muckety-mucks. He said you do this by drinking in decent bars for years on end. Since I don't drink anything but tea I wondered if there were alternatives.

He has self-published a new book called Now Out in Paperback, and has many other books (Baby's First Tattoo), plus he has a syndicated column in 600 newspapers that tell jokes on strange stuff like how the summer's tomatoes are doing (two years ago when it first came out they all had blight), and why his wife gives him flak for his Hawaiian shirts. Mullen has 200 ties, but he never wears them up here. He said he feels overdressed in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and sandals at a funeral in these parts. I wonder if he should add a straw hat, just to add a subtle touch. Straw hats are de rigeur at Catskills funerals.

He seemed to be an endless repository of the work of odd writers. He recommended Moonwalking with Einstein, about mnemonics. He also recommended Sol Stein on writing. And there is The Short Happy Life of Oscar Wao. The last name is apparently how a Hispanic would say Wilde.

I felt like I had my finger in a socket for four hours. I hope my students got half as much out of it as I did. I'll ask them on Wednesday for feedback.

One Question Personality Test

In a forced pairing when asked if the Woodstock Festival or the Statue of Liberty is more symbolic and representative of the best of our country: which would you choose? Be sure to give the reasons for your answer.

Woodstock and the Statue of Liberty

My wife's Finnish brother and his fiancee appeared this weekend. After getting them at Newark Airport I started driving up Route 9 over the Pulaski Skyway. Looking down one could see the Meadowlands spread out over a landscape littered with boxcars, rusting industrial landscapes, and prefabricated housing units amidst the remains of the ecoscape, the Jersey City and the New York City skylines in the distance. Spotting the back of the Statue of Liberty we went up to it, and looked around Liberty State Park. It was pretty, and well-maintained, but the rain was coming down so hard we soon vacated. What does the Statue of Liberty represent today?

We then went up Route 17 toward the Catskills and saw a sign for Woodstock NY which isn't really in the real Woodstock, but about an hour southwest in the town of Bethel, NY (the original Woodstock was denied permission by its city council for an impromptu concert of this magnitude). The event was held in Max Yasgur's farm in a natural amphitheatre. 400,000 people came. Lines to toilets were a mile long. Hundreds of injuries including three deaths resulted. A raccoon bit someone. Skunks sprayed about a dozen people. Many barefooted hippies (thousands) cut their feet. The tiny roads couldn't handle the cars and deadlock with dreadlocks were the result.

There were hundreds of bad trips, and the food ran out. It was utopia gone into dystopian phase, but after three days it was disassembled, and everyone went home. Today there is a very good museum on the site. It costs 15 dollars per head and you can't take photos. The Merry Prankster bus, and much else, is copyrighted in the name of the museum. (A book in the bookstore was written by a local nurse who went over to help out, and spent decades researching the logistical nightmare of caring for a sudden city of a half million. I can't remember the name of the book. It was published in Kiamesha, NY, and had charts of medical personnel, and injuries. There were at least three deaths -- including a sleeping boy run over by a local tractor.)

New York has always attracted utopians. Coleridge and Southey thought of putting in a utopian city near Binghamton, NY. There was the Oneida Community. The Bruderhoffs are another community in upstate NY composed of some kind of Christian communists.

Woodstock has become a giant symbol, somehow linked to the Statue of Liberty. The reality of it of course was major problems, and it wasn't a sustainable community. There was no food, and no bathrooms, or there was too little to support a community of a half million. The problems of the feeding tube had been overlooked.

The organizers lost a lot of money. The community of Bethel was frustrated and upset and refused for many decades to allow another such event. Now, the community has apparently seen the money in the event. So, the museum opened in 2008. It's a neat place, very well taken care of, with large musical events from various acts. Genesis will play this summer.

Woodstock was meant to be a replay of the Garden of Eden, restocked with a half a million hippies. I wish I had been there. I was 12. I spent that weekend playing Little League baseball, camping outside in my backyard in a tent, swimming in the local pool, and eating hamburgers with my dad and mom and brothers at a small state park, going to the local Lutheran church. I wanted to go to Woodstock, but my mom said no.