Distance From Loved Ones

I've been thinking about this poem recently, for reasons I'm not sure I understand. The poet responsible, James Tate, taught at the University of Massachusetts when I as at Amherst. Once or twice, I saw him wandering around town. He typically had a dazed, self-absorbed, fragile kind of aura about him--very much like a poet is supposed to. A holy innocent, he seemed, although I don't know how much of that was contrivance and how much was truth. Regardless, I love this poem.

Distance from Loved Ones
by James Tate

After her husband died, Zita decided to get the face-lift
she had always wanted. Half-way through the operation
her blood pressure started to drop, and they had to stop.
When Zita tried to fasten her seat-belt for her sad drive
home, she threw-out her shoulder. Back at the hospital
the doctor examined her and found cancer run rampant
throughout her shoulder and arm and elsewhere. Radiation
followed. And, now, Zita just sits there in her beauty parlor,
bald, crying and crying.

My mother tells me all this on the phone, and I say:
Mother, who is Zita?

And my mother says, I am Zita. All my life I have been
Zita, bald and crying. And you, my son, who should have known
me best, thought I was nothing but your mother.

But, Mother, I say, I am dying. . .

Caffeine

As anyone who has been made to listen to the stories of my on-again, off-again love affair with caffeine will know, I regard the drug with a wary combination of fear and admiration.

Right now I am back "on."

Caffeine is to the human mind as the moon's gravity is to the tide. We drink caffeine in the hope that by increasing the force of the moon's gravitation, we will increase the power and the frequency with which we are blessed with waves (human thoughts). However, if the power and force of the moon's gravity grows too strong, then the waves break up--are torn apart, dissolve before they ever reach land. This is what it feels like to have too much caffeine. You have a million thoughts, each of last two seconds. You can't follow through on anything. The mind becomes a vortex, consuming without producing.

At the moment, luckily, I seem to have some waves coming to shore. On which I place surfers (words?) in the hope that their peripatetic and awkward stabs at beauty may, occasionally, succeed.

The Onion is still funny

"Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play In Time, Place Shakespeare Intended"
My favorite part:

Hiles said he became drawn to the prospect of setting the play [The Merchant of Venice] in such an unorthodox locale while casually rereading the play early last year. He noticed that Venice was mentioned several times in the text, not only in character dialogue, but also in italics just before the first character speaks.

"A Certain Alienated Majesty"

Emerson is insane. I love him. This is from "Self-Reliance." I believe it was recorded in '77, just after Live From Budokan.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius. Speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time become the outmost,--and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to use with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impressions with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

I Also Would Like My Own Rocket Sled

I have never in my entire life had any desire to jump out of an airplane. Several friends have done so; they all report it as being a glorious and life-affirming experience--one that I "have to try." Well, no: I don't. I'm perfectly comfortable here on the ground. I like not having to worry about plummeting thousands of feet to my death.

Strangely, though, I've always been fascinated by people who do jump out of airplanes. I'm especially interested in high-altitude drops--people jumping out of planes so high above the earth that they have to wear pressure suits and oxygen tanks to keep from dying. Part of my interest comes from my experience on airplanes. I sit there: I'm afraid; I look out the window and I always imagine what it would be like to fall from that height. ("Unpleasant" is my best guess). The fact that people actually jump from those heights--and much much higher--amazes me. And baffles me. (There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt in my philosophy). Why do they do it? I guess it's the same mindset that causes people to climb high mountains, or live in trees. They want to prove to themselves it's possible.

Or, they're completely mad.

Such, I think, would be a fair assessment of John Paul Stapp, an Air Force physician who is among the various pioneers of super-high-alitutude skydiving profiled in "Falling", a fantastic article appearing in this week's New Yorker. (Unfortunately, the article in question is not available online: you'll have to get the print edition. For further information, go here.) To really get a sense of the true courage--and insanity--of the kinds of people who jump out of balloons suspended nineteen miles above the surface of the earth, you need to read the whole article. (It's well worth your time). Here, though, is a brief excerpt. The passage I'm quoting describes early tests conducted by John Paul Stapp to determine, basically, how much misery the human body could endure. Among his goals were to figure out if it were possible to parachute out of a jet, flying 70,000 feet above the earth at near the speed of sound, and live.

Stapp wanted to know the true limits of human tolerance. He used cats, chimpanzees, and human subjects for his research, but reserved the most dangerous tests for himself. Beginning in 1946, he made repeated flights to forty-seven thousand feet in an unpressurized plane, racking his body with the bends. (By breathing pure oxygen before a flight, he discovered, he could rid his blood of the nitrogen that would bubble up as the pressure dropped.) Later, he had a rocket sled built on a track in southern New Mexico and fired himself across the desert at up to six hundred miles per hour. By December of 1954, Craig Ryan writes in his 1995 book "The Pre-Astronauts," Stapp had broken his ribs and wrists, suffered concussions, hernias, retinal hemorrhages, and "searing headaches that lingered for days." His final sled run subjected his body to forty-six times the force of gravity and left him temporarily blind. But he survived.

The Porcupine-Lay

I first learned about Patrick O'Brian through David Mamet, of all people. He claimed--I think it was in an interview--that the best novelists then writing (this was 15 years ago) weren't the so-called "literary" ones (Auster, DeLillo, Roth, etc): they were genre writers. As examples he listed John LeCarre and Patrick O'Brian. I read LeCarre almost immediately. (He's excellent, by the way). O'Brian, for some reason, I put off. Maybe I wasn't ready for twenty straight 300-page novels. I think I knew that once I started, I wouldn't stop. It was a big commitment.

Five years ago, I finally picked up Master and Commander, the first book in the series. I read it, then I read the series. A year later, I read the series again. In the process, I bought eight of the novels. Perhaps unfortunately, they now reside six inches from my reading chair. The result is that I reread them over and over--generally to the neglect of whatever book (usually 'literary') I'm supposed to be reading. At this point, I've probably read each of them at least ten times. I know them better than anything else in my shelves.

I don't have the time or ability to attempt a full-length appreciation of O'Brian. Briefly: he is amazing, and I would encourage you all to read him. As far as it's possible to know what it would be like to live in a different era, O'Brian, I think, knew. (By which I mean: imagined.) To read him is to have, at least in flashes, hints of that same knowledge. He's a writer of phenomenal intellect and great wisdom, of course; but more than that, he is a writer, like Shakespeare, able to depict fully-realized portraits of society on every level. Dukes and princes, admirals and captains, sailors and whores: they're all there. None of them are sentimentalized, and all of them are somehow real.

Big claims, I know, and ones that I can't illustrate in a single passage. Here, though, is one of my (current) favorites. The ship is about to leave port. "Jack" is Jack Aubrey, the captain and one of the book's heroes. The other character, Heaven, is insignificant to the plot:

...and now they had been together long enough, with a good deal of foul weather and some very hard fighting, to have formed a distinct community with a great sense of their ship and a great pride in her.

A somewhat anomalous community however in a ship that looked so very like a man-of-war, for not only did it contain no Marines, no uniformed officers and no midshipmen, but people walked about at ease, even with their hands in their pockets; there was a certain amount of laughter in the forecastle in spite of the parting; and the quartermaster at the con, wiping a tear from his cheek and shaking his grey head, did not scruple to address Jack directly: "I shall never see her like again, sir. The loveliest young woman in Shelmerston."

"A lovely young woman indeed, Heaven," said Jack. "Mrs. Heaven, if I do not mistake?"

"Why, sir, in a manner of speaking: but some might say more on the porcupine-lay, the roving-line, if you understand me."

"There is a good deal to be said for porcupines, Heaven: Solomon had a thousand, and Solomon knew what o'clock it was, I believe. You will certainly see her again."

Prognosis

That Louis MacNeice is less known and less read than W.H. Auden, his friend and fellow poet, has always seemed to me a shame. Auden, it's true, attains greater heights ("Musee Des Beaux Arts", "In Memory of W.B. Yeats"), but MacNeice is a far more consistent read. Brilliant lines litter the Selected Auden, but long stretches are tedious and hectoring. It is also increasingly irrelevant. Auden's poetry has become less useful now that the historical eras with which it engaged (Nazism, Fascism, Socialism) have faded.

The Selected MacNeice is less showily brilliant. It's pleasant, approachable, and humane. This is not to say that MacNeice was never virtuosic. "Sunlight On The Garden" and "Bagpipe Music" both are monuments to craftsmanship. But what distinguishes MacNeice's poetry is their matter-of-fact-ness. It's a volume you can open at any page and find that most desirable poetic commodity: pleasure. This is one of my favorites.

Prognosis

Goodbye, Winter,
The days are getting longer,
The tea-leaf in the teacup
Is herald of a stranger.

Will he bring me business
Or will he bring me gladness
Or will he come for cure
Of his own sickness?

With a pedlar's burden
Walking up the garden
Will he come to beg
Or will he come to bargain?

Will he come to pester,
To cringe or to bluster,
A promise in his palm
Or a gun in his holster?

Will his name be John
Or will his name be Jonah
Crying to repent
On the Island of Iona?

Will his name be Jason
Looking for a seaman
Or a mad crusader
Without rhyme or reason?

What will be his message--
War or work or marriage?
News as new as dawn
Or an old adage?

Will he give a champion
Answer to my question
Or will his words be dark
And his ways evasion?

Will his name be Love
And all his talk be crazy?
Or will his name be Death
And his message easy?

Fun With Fatwas

Nutty fatwas from important Islamic leaders. The second is the best. Apparently, it is forbidden for married couples to be completely naked during sex. The workaround, proposed by a fellow Imam, is even better....

Pure Intentions

Next time you’re in the supermarket, go to the soap aisle and read the label of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap.

Actually, that’ll take too long. Just read this. It’s a selection—one of the milder ones—from the aforementioned label.

The 2nd coming of God's Law" Mohammed's Arabs, 1948, found Israel Dead-Sea-Scrolls & Einstein's "Hillel" prove that as certain as no 6-year-old can grow up free without the abc, so certain can no 12-year old survive free without the Moral ABC mason, tent & sandalmaker, Rabbi Hillel taught carpenter Jesus to unite all mankind free in our Eternal Father's great All-One-God-Faith! For we're All-One or none: "Listen Children Eternal Father Eternally One!" Exceptions? None!

Yep, that’s a soap label being quoted. And it goes on. And on and on and on.

Dr. Bronner, it turns out, cared about more than getting people clean. He wanted to reform mankind. The soap was a vehicle; it allowed him an outlet for his…philosophy.

I know all this because last night I saw Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox, a documentary on the great man. It was outstanding. With a subject as…intense…as Dr. Bronner, how could it not be?

I cannot possibly do justice to the movie or the philosophy in a few paragraphs. Here, though, is a very small selection of what I've learned about both.

1) Dr. Bronner’s philosophy (explicated, at length, on the bottle) centered around something called the moral ABCs. He believed his mission on earth was to teach the world the moral ABCs. Once he had done so, war would end and mankind would unite in love and happiness.

2) The Moral ABCs appear on every bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap. There are thirteen (which makes me think they should actually be called the moral ABCDEFGHIJKLMs. But no matter). Here is ABC number 11.

Essene & Chinese birth controls must reduce birth or Easter Isle type overpopulation destroys God's Spaceship Earth! God's law prevents all conception below pH3. Therefore, Essene contracepted for 400 years with rosehips, pH2! So, absolute clean, apply vaseline oil, butter or cream, insert teaspoonful juicy lemon pulp, pH2. O.K.! Next day, douche with qt. soapy water, pH8, restoring pH5 balance God made! Eggwhite is pH9. Dr. Bronner's soap, pH8, guaranteed the mildest made; below pH8 soaps biodegradable, synthetic-sulfides cannot. At conception, 10 grams contain 100 million humans! or... 10 HUMANS IN 1 INVISIBLE MICROGRAM - SMALLER THAN DUST!

3) Dr. Bronner believed that every 76 years, in time with Haley’s comet, a prophet would return to help guide man back towards peace and unity. Examples of past prophets include Jesus, Muhammad, Hillel, and—and I am not making this up—Mark Spitz.

4) Really.

5) Dr. Bronner was institutionalized in the mid 40s. He escaped and made his way to Los Angeles, where he dedicated himself to selling soap.

6) During the 40s and 50s, Dr. Bronner called the FBI on a near-daily basis. He complained, mostly, about the presence of communists within America. He hated communists.

7) As who does not?

8) During his life, Dr. Bronner filled more than 3000 audio cassettes with thoughts about his philosophy. Unfortunately most of it remains, to this day, untranscribed.

9) Dr. Bronner’s grandsons, who run the business today, are major figures in the drive to legalize industrial hemp.

10) His son, Ralph, recently starred in a one-man, off-Broadway play. In it, he tells stories about growing up with his legendary father. In his youth Ralph was left with strangers for years at a time so that his father could travel the country lecturing on the moral ABCs. Amazingly, Ralph holds no grudge.

11) This list captures no more than 10% of the Bronner family’s craziness.

12) Really, more like 5%.

13) You need to see this movie. Believe me.

A New Town

"When he enters the territory of which Eutropia is the capital, the traveler sees not one city but many, of equal size and not unlike one another, scattered over a vast, rolling plateau. Eutropia is not one, but all these cities together; only one is inhabited at a time, the others are empty; and this process is carried out in rotation. Now I shall tell you how. On the day when Eutropia's inhabitants feel the grip of weariness and no one can bear any longer his job, his relatives, his house and his life, debts, the people he must greet or who greet him, then the whole citizenry decides to move to the next city, which is there waiting for them, empty and good as new; there each will take up a new job, a different wife, will see another landscape on opening his window, and will spend his time with different pastimes, friends, gossip. So their life is renewed from move to move, among cities whose exposure or declivity or streams or winds make each site somehow different from the others. Since their society is ordered without great distinctions of wealth or authority, the passage from one function to another takes place almost without jolts; variety is guaranteed by the multiple assignments, so that in the span of a lifetime a man rarely returns to a job that has already been his.

Thus the city repeats its life, identical, shifting up and down on its empty chessboard. The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the actors changed; they repeat the same speeches with variously combined accents; the open alternate mouths in identical yawns. Alone, among all the cities of the empire, Eutropia remains always the same. Mercury, god of the fickle, to whom the city is sacred, worked this ambiguous miracle."

-from Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino.

Poker III

My first foray into the LA poker world went...badly.

You never really know, when you lose, how much of it is due to bad luck and how much is due to poor play. It’s easy to assume that every time you win you played well. Similarly, it's easy to beat yourself up every time you lose. (As I have been all week). But the two don't necessarily relate. You can play very well and lose, and you can play very poorly and win. To play “well” means that you play in a way will win over the long term. It means you put money into bets that will win more often than they lose. But in the short term, anything can happen. If you’re constantly putting money in on hands that are 80% favorites, you’re a good player. Even so, 20% of the time—1 in 5—you’ll lose. And if your opponents are any good, realistically you’re much more likely to be putting money down on hands that are only 55-60% favorites.

So it’s helpful for me to think about how I play independently of how much I win or lose. To evaluate decisions, not results. (A tactic, by the way, that I think is useful outside of playing poker. That's why poker is REALLY interesting--because of how much it connects to).

I think I played OK last night. B-, let’s say. Maybe I’m just being charitable.

Most of my losses occurred in one hand. I describe it below. I still don’t know if I played it well, badly, or somewhere in the middle.




Game: No Limit Hold’Em
Blinds: 5/10
Place: Mos Eisley (otherwise known as Commerce Casino--“a wretched hive of scum and villainry”)

My hand: 8d Qd

I’m on the button. Everyone folds to the cutoff, a terrible terrible player. He limps in. He’s already shown a willingness to call enormous off bets on very thin draws. He’s also on tilt. I have position and I feel pretty good about my chances of outplaying him after the flop. I raise to 40.00$. I figure I’ll either take down a small pot (of the blinds and the donkey’s limp) or he’ll call, and I’ll play heads-up, in position, against a poor player.

Instead, the Big Blind re-raises, making it 75.00$. Limping donkey calls (putting in 65.00$ more on top of the 10.00$ he’s called with, on a hand not good enough to raise the button and the blinds).

It comes back to me. I consider the Big Blind. He’s a decent player, I think. But, like most players at the middle-limits of NLHE, he’s already shown an inability to fold big hands. (He’s lost a large pot earlier when his overpair got beat by a set.) He’s clearly ahead of me at this point in the hand—I put him on KK or AA. However, I have a hand that will be very easy to get away from if I miss the flop. And if I do outflop him, I think he might pay me off. Also, there’s limping donkey. He can’t lay down anything; god knows he’ll pay me off.

If I call the BB’s raise, I’ll have a little more than 400.00$ left. The big blind has more chips than I do; the donkey has about 200.00$. That means I have a chance to turn my 400.00 into 1100.00$.

Or so I tell myself as I (perhaps mistakenly) call.


The flop: 8h 10d Jd

Huzzah and hurrah. This is about as good a flop as I can ask for. I have a diamond flush draw, an inside straight draw, and a pair. If the Big Blind has AA or KK, I have a total of 17 outs (two eights, three queens, three (non-diamond) nines, and nine diamonds). It's impossible to put the donkey on a hand, but even if it's something as good as 9/Q , I have outs to beat him.

The big blind bets 150.00$. The donkey goes all–in (it turns out to be $280.00). I think for not very long, and go all-in as well. The pot has gotten large enough to justify a call, and if I'm going to call 280.00, I may as well reraise. It's unlikely I'll push out the BB, but it's not impossible. Anyway, I'm willing to play for all my chips. Even though I’m trailing, I doubt I’m worse than a 40% dog. As long as neither player has a diamond draw, I like my chances.

The BB thinks for a while, and then calls.

He tables: Ad Ah
The donkey tables: Js 9c

I am 44% to win at this point. (I find, now). I have invested a total of 450.00 to try and win 1150.00$. I am being laid the correct odds. Which is small comfort when the turn and flop come 10, 2 no diamond, and the Aces rake the pot.

In retrospect, I guess I could have folded preflop. There was enough dead money at the table that it might have been smarter to wait for a more clearly favorable opportunity to get all my chips in the middle. While it's true that this was the statistically correct play, it's also true that, psychologically, it can be difficult to open a session by losing 600.00$.

Once the flop came, though, I can’t get away from that hand. Can I?

Thoughts?