The Pages of Plagiarism

Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the NY Times, “has done something dishonest,” claims Nicolle Weeks, in an interview reported in the Times (Business, 8 Feb.) Weeks is the author of a 2005 Ryerson Review article that Abramson plagiarizes in her new book, Merchants of Truth. Michael Moynihan, a reporter for Vice News, is said in the Times to have tweeted that Abramson’s book contains “passages that appear to have been lifted from other sources, in some cases word for word.” Both Vice and the Times juxtaposed a pair of these virtually identical passages so that the plagiary was plain to see. But when Abramson appeared on Brian Stelter’s MSNBC show Reliable Sources (10 Feb.), and he asked her about the plagiarism, she denied guilt and said any plagiarism “is just your opinion.” A subsequent guest on Reliable Sources—a woman ethicist—said that any Times reporter who had done what Abramson did would “be fired.” Abramson’s bald-faced denial seems astonishing in view of her lifetime achievements as a reporter, editor, and author, and it recalls my days as a professor of English who heard the same sort of lies from students whose plagiarism was equally obvious. Fortunately for Abramson, the Times reports, her publisher, Simon & Schuster, will give her the chance to “fix” this and other problems “in future editions and in the e-book.”

I finished reading today the 126 pages of Timothy Snyder's ON TYRANNY: TWENTY LESSONS FROM THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (timdugganbooks.com, 2017). In this pamphlet, RIGHTS OF MAN for our day, Snyder, professor of history at Yale, draws on the history of 20th-century totalitarianism to make analogies for our own time, especially since November 8, 2016, in the hope of saving us from a descent into autocracy similar to that in Nazi Germany and Putin's Russia. While this blog of mine has only 27 followers, and I contribute a new post only a few times a year, I want to thank anyone who takes the time to read my observations, and I recommend ON TYRANNY as the best gift I can offer you at this fraught time. Be brave, George

Terror and the New Hedonism

Terror and the New Hedonism The Guardian reports today (4 Nov.) that “terror is the new normal,” so New Yorkers act “preternaturally calm” in the wake of the recent truck attack that left 8 dead in TriBeCa on Halloween (31), and along the afflicted bike path downtown are seen “cyclists back out with a vengeance.” Yes, maybe terror has struck so frequently of late that human beings just roll with its punches and quickly resume living as they had. But this account doesn’t distinguish between radical, ideologically driven acts of terror, like the one in NYC on Tuesday, and less explicable attacks like two of the worst, the Oklahoma City bombing and the sniper assault in Las Vegas last month, both carried out by domestic white men with Christian backgrounds. Our President quickly condemned to death the Isis adherent who struck in NYC, while deferring any comment about the Vegas sniper and even declaring it too soon even to discuss the role played by his firearms, adapted to fire like machine guns. But that act of mass murder, which killed 58 and wounded around 600 others, nevertheless adds to the mounting sense of terror and horror inflicted on the vulnerable public. Thus, the recent truck assault in NYC, reported on soon afterward and causing 8 deaths, six of them inflicted on foreign nationals, had less impact than the rush of live coverage of the Las Vegas shooting with its mass casualties. And I say that sitting just 2 miles north of the TriBeCa bike path where the truck driver ran down his victims. So, yes, part of the rapid resumption of daily life in NYC, including the annual Halloween parade a few hours after the truck assault, might reflect a sense that terror is the new normal, but other reasons might be identified. One is that much of Manhattan has become the playground of the affluent, and the bike path that now encircles the island is one of the public facilities for living a pleasurable semi-suburban life in the middle of Gotham, America’s “safest big city,” as its mayor described it today. Closely related to this view of the recreational city is the emergence of a new hedonism. The affluent and their adherents throng our major cities’ restaurants, sports clubs, entertainment venues, and recreation centers, living a life of pleasure while ignoring those without the disposable income to play along with them. When an act of terror occurs, the new hedonists resist feeling terrified or recover quickly to resume their pleasures. While terror might not be “the new normal,” it might help to desensitize our response to violent death and suffering inflicted by terrorists, and the new hedonism might help to welcome us back to the urban playground.

Hard Times revised

Hard Times “These are times that try men’s souls.” Yes, a Sanders Democrat shot some Republicans on a ballfield in Virginia yesterday and was shot and killed for his efforts. No, in this country we don’t want people shooting each other for any reason. But who is primarily responsible for easy access to firearms, people of the left like yesterday’s shooter or people on the right who have fetishized the Second Amendment to prop up the most liberal gun laws in the industrialized world? I’ve read and heard today (June 15) so much apologist hand-wringing by liberals in the press and on social media that I must remind my fellow lefties that just one leftwing nut job was guilty of yesterday’s shooting and that every day Republicans in office wage war on the common people of America. Who else but Republicans are conspiring in secret to write a partisan health-care bill that does away with our health care, abandoning protection of the critically wounded environment, designing a tax reform bill that redistributes wealth upward, denying women the right to choose how they manage their own lives and bodies, delaying the urgent need to repair our infrastructure, ignoring the daily toll of violence on black Americans, exacerbating the daily trials of Spanish-speaking immigrants working to better their and their children’s lives? In almost every area of government concern, elected Republicans pursue policies to aid the affluent and to hurt the rest of the country. They don’t need guns to prosecute their war on common people, because they have political power and loads of money to back it up. While we must deplore the use of weapons, the Left needs to be more militant in working to retake political power. We must not tolerate yesterday’s shooting, but we should not act as if we are somehow culpable for the increased violence in America, especially when Donald Trump on the stump egged on his followers to commit violent acts upon protesters in their midst. The rightwing has a disproportionately large role in the escalating violence around us, while we of the Left must continue the non-violent struggle for social, political, and economic justice for all.

Post-Election Outlook

While the Trump victory seems deplorable to some folks, it's a well-deserved comeuppance for the ineffectual and snotty crew who have been leading the Dems down this election losers' trail: D. Wasserman-Schultz and Donna Brazile, Robbie Mook and Joel Benenson, and Old Bill Clinton. Who are the strategists who saw to it that Hillary never visited Wisconsin, which she lost, during the campaign, who failed to insist that she offer a clear alternative to Obamacare, who let her endlessly and tediously attack Trump instead of offering her vision of the future (assuming she has one)? Why did she avoid the conflict over the pipeline in North Dakota and ignore the costs to the ecosystem of fracking? Also sharing the blame for her loss are the legions of feminists who put their desire for a woman president above the national interest and thus defeated the Dems' best hope, Bernie, in the primaries.

For years we have needed a new party, an aggregation of the “minorities” who reject the two-party system—and find Bernie and/or Trump attractive alternatives—the disaffected of all identities and persuasions whose focus is unity, not individual causes. And how about a parliamentary democracy, sans electoral college, as a form of government? Most free modern nations have one. Without multiple parties espousing essential issues, like our perishing environment, that the two-party system ignores or downplays, we will blunder on while the rich get richer, the poor poorer, under the status quo.

9/11 Poem

Below is my poem "That Tuesday Night," which I wrote not long after 9/11. It's in my chapbook Bleak Splendor (Muddy River Books, 2016) and first appeared in the anthology An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind: Poets on 9/11 (2002).

That Tuesday Night

That Tuesday night, after the towers

burned & fell down-

town, after watching them crumble—

unlike the one Paul Newman

saved in Towering Inferno—

from the plaza in front of Rosenthal

Library, after walking home

from the subway in the yellow

summer twilight, gagging

on the acrid air and looking

at the thick sooty column rising

downtown where the towers

had loomed Gargantuan on the skyline

for over three decades,

I went to wash my face,

as though cold water and soap

would wake me from this dream

of violence and violation,

and I saw that man in the mirror,

red-rimmed eyes, yes, but

the same sagging wrinkled

skin, the same thinning,

graying hair above the same lined

forehead, and I knew that he

was lucky to have lived

to sixty-five—too young for WW II

and Korea, too old for Viet Nam—

lucky to have lived his soft

American life without much fear

from abroad, except spotting airplanes

as a kid and catching a breath or two

as JFK stood down the Russians in ’62,

and in the glare of the bathroom light,

the sirens screaming just up the street

at St. Vincent’s, I knew nothing

could ever make me

safe again.

President Obama: Public Intellectual

President Obama: Public Intellectual

The November 5 issue of The New York Review leads off with the first of a two-part conversation between Marilynne Robinson, the distinguished novelist and theologian, and President Obama. The setting is Des Moines, September 2015. The subject is American citizenship and the role of Christian thought in a democracy, now fraught subjects because of growing sectarianism and exclusiveness in this country. 

               As the President and Ms. Robinson converse, they sound earnest and thoughtful. Robinson speaks of “a terrible darkening of the national outlook” as a result of growing “in-group” distrust of “the other,” while Mr. Obama looks at the longer term: “I’m always trying to push a little more optimism,” and to allay her discouragement, he says, “Well, we go through these moments.” He shows an easy familiarity with Robinson’s writing, suggesting that the characters in her novels show that it’s not “easy for them to be good Christians.”

               Early in their conversation, it becomes clear that both the writer and the politician, who is also a good writer, share a Midwestern low-Protestant background, so that that when she describes her upbringing in Idaho, he says it “sounded really familiar to me when I think about my grandparents who grew up in Kansas.” They share a “sense of homespun virtues.” This Obama is one that is often obscured by the snide, bigoted rejection of him as nonnative, Muslim, and black. But he is after all half-white and a Protestant. When he reads Robinson’s novel Gilead, he recognizes that she is “thinking about American democracy, or, for that matter, Christianity …” and treating “the issue of ‘the other.’”

               I look forward to the continuation of this conversation in the next issue of The New York Review, and I heartily recommend this first part for two reasons. One is that it shows we have a President as conversant with the writing and ideas of his time as any president of France. Our Obama is an articulate public intellectual. And second, the conversational form allows him to be both professorial and empathic in talking with another prominent public intellectual, Marilynne Robinson. (Her initials, by the way, match those of Mrs. Obama, née Michelle Robinson.) As chief executive, President Obama sometimes falters by sounding too professorial, intellectually detached, pensive as Hamlet. But in conversation with an intellectual equal, President Obama reveals a compelling grasp of significant issues in our troubled republic and in doing so, deserves our attention.

New Poems Online

If you are still following me, I apologize for a long absence from this blog. I have read, by the way, that the blog is obsolete, superseded by social media. Do you agree? In any case, a new poetry chapbook of mine, Bleak Splendor, is soon to be released by Muddy River Books, in Brookline, MA, and two of the poems included are now up at Five Willows Literary Review:

http://fivewillowspoetry.blogspot.com/2015/10/two-new-poems-from-george-held_14.html

Another pair of poems is at Literary Matters: 

http://alscw.org/PDFs/Literary%20Matters_7.4.pdf

on pages 34 and 36 of this pdf publication. Please check them out.

The New Devil's Dictionary

Here's a link to new work of mine at Five Willows Literary Review: http://fivewillowspoetry.blogspot.com/2014/08/george-held-definitions.html

Haiku Workshop

I'll be giving my fourth haiku workshop at the South Fork Natural History Museum, Bridgehampton, NY, on Saturday, 26 July, at 10 AM. If you can attend, that would be great. Here are the details:

Writing a Haiku Poem with George Held 7/26/2014 · 10 am - Saturday Bridgehampton, SoFo Leader: George Held In this small group workshop George Held, who has published more than 100 haiku and 18 poetry books, will teach the philosophy and practice of the haiku, a concise Japanese form of verse that is written widely throughout the world today. Because the haiku focuses on an instant in nature, the SoFo Museum and adjacent field and woods will offer many opportunities for a "haiku moment": this occurs when the writer sees a natural object and has an insight into it that can be expressed in about 12-17 syllables. Only a pen or pencil, a small notepad, sharp eyes and a clear mind are needed. Limited enrollment. Photo: Writing To make a reservation for this program, please call the museum at 631-537-9735

377 Bridgehampton / Sag Harbor Turnpike
P.O. Box 455
Bridgehampton, NY 11932-0455

Telephone:	631-537-9735
Fax:	631-537-9621
E-mail:	sofo@hamptons.com

Debby Mayer is a Hudson, NY, novelist and journalist, whose memoir, RIPTIDES & SOLACES UNFORESEEN, I have reviewed at http://www.whlreview.com/no-9.1/review/GeorgeHeld.pdf. I hope you'll check it out and consider reading this remarkable book about the death, from brain cancer, of her longtime partner, Dan Zinkus.

Jeremy Lin Comes Out

Jeremy Lin Comes Out

Houston, May 2, 2013. In the wake of Jason Collins’ recent revelation in SI that he’s gay, Jeremy Lin told Houston sports radio KROK that “I’m tired of being in the closet and want the world to know that I am an NBA point guard, a Harvard man, and I’m Taiwanese.”

With these words Lin revealed that he is the first major-sport professional who is Taiwanese. So far, the response from other pro athletes has been positive. Charles Barkley, the former NBA All-Star, said, “I support the brother for his candor. It’s about time we had a new cause to lend our support to.”

Keyshawn Johnson, the NFL star who retired to become a sports commentator, added, “Jason who?”

Boomer Esiason, the NFL quarterback who is a professional Norwegian, chimed in: “Now Taiwanese boys and girls with athletic ambition will have a role model. But how long will it be before the NFL admits Taiwanese into the locker room?”

Lin’s announcement rocked Houston like a Roger Clemens fart, and the Texas sporting intelligentsia bombarded local talk radio with speculations about who might be the next jock to come out of what closet.

Among the nominees were Dallas QB Tony Romo who might reveal that his family name used to be Homo, NY Knicks marksman Carmelo Anthony who might admit he’s a secret member of Opus Dei, and Alabama coach Bear Bryant who might confess that he’s really alive.

The New Pope Finds His Footing

Please check out my new poem at New Verse News: http://newversenews.blogspot.com/2013/03/getting-off-on-right-foot.html

Passover & Easter greetings to those who celebrate.

George

Poetry Reading

I'll be one of 3 featured readers this Saturday, Feb. 16th, at the Yippee Museum Café, 9 Bleecker St., noon-2 PM. I invited Eileen Hennessy and Francine Witte to join me, because they are first-rate writers and readers. This will be varied and terrific reading, and an open-mic is included. So please be there and bring something to read in the open.

Phoenix Reading Series @ The Yippie Museum Cafe

Saturday, February 16, 2013

12—2 pm

9 Bleecker Street

New York, NY 10012

212.677.5918

George Held, Eileen Hennessy, Francine Witte

 OPEN READING SIGN UP @ NOON

 Francine Witte is a high school English teacher. She lives on the Upper East Side with her husband, poet and comic Mark Larsen. She writes poetry and flash fiction. In 2012 she received four nominations for a Pushcart Prize -- two for fiction and two for poetry. Her newest poetry chapbook is "Only, Not Only."

A seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee, George Held publishes widely both online and in print. His work appears in the current issues of I-70 Review, Drunk Monkeys, Wilderness House Literary Review, Deronda Review, Mobius, Plainsongs, and Verse Wisconsin, and the anthologies Connections: New York City Bridges in Poetry and Songs of Sandy. His most recent book is Neighbors Too (2013), a sequel to his children’s book of animal poems, illustrated by Joung Un Kim.

When she is not writing poems and flash fiction pieces, Eileen Hennessy earns her living as a translator of foreign-language documentation, studies languages as a hobby, and teaches courses in translation in the Translation Studies Program at New York University. Since the mid-1980s she has built up a lengthy record of publication in numerous literary journals, including The Paris Review, The New York Quarterly, and Confluence, to name just three. This Country of Gale-force Winds, a collection of her poems, was
published by NYQ Books in 2011.

$8 Donation

Early last year I had occasion to read three debut poetry books, each by a woman whose work I was encountering for the first time. Their books made such a strong impression on me that I wrote an essay about them. I now want to share it on my blog and hope you will send it to others who might enjoy it. (The review of Kris Bigalk's Repeat the Flesh in Numbers will appear in Mindy Kronenberg's Book/Mark.)

Luckily, I will be reading with one of these poets, Eileen Hennessy, on Saturday, 16 February, 12 noon, at the Yippee Museum Café, 9 Bleecker St. Please come.
 
 
 
 3 Poets

 

In 1977 Robert Altman made a thoughtful movie called 3 Women, the idea for which came to him in a dream. Two of the women live in the same apartment and the third, who is married, lives in the same building, and their relationships shift during the movie. Today, it would probably seem inappropriate to use that title, and this film would be unlikely to become the cult movie it has, many women having firmly established themselves as independent agents beyond the scope of Altman’s treatment.

These thoughts arose after I’d finished reading three extraordinary first books of poetry, each by a woman of independent spirit and highly personal style. In ascending order of age, they are Kris Bigalk, Katrinka Moore, and Eileen Hennessy. Bigalk, a mother and teacher from Minnesota, has recently published her first poetry collection, Repeat the Flesh in Numbers (NYQ Books, 2012), a book primarily about a sensuous woman’s flesh and spirit that might be just “a woman’s book” in the hands of a more conventional writer. While Bigalk does address conventional subjects like marriage, family, and sex, she has a strongly idiosyncratic take that can result in memorable poems. “Exegenesis,” for example, might be the best poem ever written on menstruation: “I bleed / without permission, / without injury. / I bleed prophetic, a / waterfall, a flag, / a protest, an insistence / on rest.”

I mention that Bigalk is a mother because, among other subjects, her poems convincingly treat pregnancy, birth, and mothering, but do so in an idiosyncratic way. Thus we have the macabre “Dr. Barbie’s Abortion Clinic,” which conjures various taboo Barbie dolls, like “Morning-Sickness Barbie,” “Single-Mom Barbie,” and “Leaky Saggy Breast Barbie.” The poem concludes:

                       

Step-Mom Trophy Wife Barbie –

                        that’s the kind of thing

                        a little girl should really

                        set her sights on.

             

Bigalk’s iconoclasm also takes on the biblical origin story by positing Eve as precursor to Adam, in “Apocryphon of Eve.” The first person/Person begins, “There was no rib that begat me” and adds that “There was no snake, no forbidden fruit,” and “There was no thirst for the knowledge of good and evil”; there was just love for “Adam’s body, the way it fit into /

mine. . . .” Only later, at Abel’s grave, did this sensuous woman understand what a disappointment she was to the Lord. Thus the poem subtly contests traditional views of Eve and woman and ends without resolution of the eternal question of our earthly purpose, if any.

If Bigalk sees the flesh repeat in numbers, they are the ones inscribed in our DNA. The first two poems in this volume, including the title poem, recognize that “in / the end cells practice themselves / to ruin, to death, to dissolution,” signifying that we are “the imperfect, the mortal,” but she sees her decline giving way to her son’s rise; not consolation but continuity. A strong, wise poet/mother, Kris Bigalk tells both her story and the history of humankind.

 
 
 
 

In Thief (BlazeVOX, 2009), Katrinka Moore uses the page as a locus for text as well as visual art, including reproduced images from paintings and drawings, examples of book-making art, and collage. Indeed, the book itself exemplifies the art of fine bookmaking, and Moore proceeds by way of esthetic juxtaposition and collage, pasting together disparate elements to make a collaborative yet new work of art. In this she brings to mind two predecessor artists, Susan Howe (b. 1937), an experimental poet, and Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), maker of small magical boxed assemblages of photos and bric-a-brac from his era.

Indeed, the title poem, “Thief,” mentions “cigar-box drawers” found in a roll-top desk and assembles such various items as “a framed topography of the moon” and “frayed postcards, tangled filigree chain,” and speaks in direct address to Archilochos, the ancient Greek poet. The facing page is an illustration of a topographical map with an insert of a pair of cranes from Hokusai’s Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji. The juxtaposition of prose poem (“Thief”) with an illustration on the facing page is characteristic of the way Moore works in this book. So are the sentence fragments that infuse her poem, one of which says, “Sings a string of words under her breath,” which is probably an example of her work’s self-referential quality. Another sentence fragment here is “Forager,” an apt describer of Moore the thief, who forages through and pilfers literary, cartographical, and visual documents to create her hybrid forms.

On the one hand, she will quote from Shakespeare in “Skimble, Scamble,” while on the other, she imports Into “Aeschylus in the Bronx” quotations “from Ted Hughes’s translation of the Oresteia and writing by students at the Bronx High School for Contemporary Arts”: “Jacqui in her skin tight dress is a cute / Clytemnestra but she’s pissed and whacks / Adinson/Agamemnon on the side of his head.” Later, in a girl named Jelani’s words, “Agamemnon sacrifices his precious daughter Iphigenia so Clytemnestra kills him . . . ,” and Aliya sings Clytemnestra’s welcome song:

 

                        Look at you now,

                        You low life son of a b—.

                        Now you laying there bled,

                        Still full of it.

                        Baby, you dead.        

 

That the left-hand margin and the bottom of the page reveal the lines of a page of notebook paper—on which the text has crookedly been pasted—both suggests the off-kilter nature of Moore’s project and reinforces the debt her tour de force owes to her students. The resulting poem is both tragic and comical, reenacting Aeschylus’ great drama in Hughes’s serious translation of it, and drawing on the Bronx students’ savvy handling of that drama, without condescension on Moore’s part. Her postmodern sensibility has deconstructed a classic yet has made it new, in Pound’s words, through an unlikely commingling and juxtaposition of sources.

 

The title of Eileen Hennessy’s This Country of Gale-Force Winds (NYQ Books, 2011) looks back to her parents’ Ireland and at her native Long Island, both places well known for stormy winds. Symbolically, her gales might evoke blowhards, authority figures, and the winds of change. “Cemetery, summer afternoon” in just ten lines characterizes her poetry, referring to both “country” and a coming storm: “This is no country / for plastic wreaths. // Along the

horizon, bridges of lightning bolted / to the charcoal sky. / Between two tombs, a man jerks off.”

The allusion to W.B. Yeats’s “That is no country for old men” (“Sailing to Byzantium”) speaks of Hennessy’s absorption in Irish poetry, while the last line carries the candor of Yeats’s Crazy Jane, a keen observer of uncensored reality. Hennessy combines both Crazy Jane’s peasant wisdom and the poet’s ability to juxtapose it with the pretensions (“tombs”) of polite society. The word-play (“lightning bolted to”) and the surprising incongruity in this poem’s ending also typify Hennessy’s fierce attention to language and rejection of conventional expectations.

When she ends “Crossing,” about a cross-country train ride, and tries “to measure how much farther I must travel,” she concludes, “I have not come all this country alone / for nothing.” Here her plain-spokenness, as it often does, sounds depths of theme and practice for this poet who rejects qualifiers in choosing the exact word every time. Despite the formality of her poetic line, she writes in free verse and eschews fixed forms.

Hennessy’s poems often address objects, like boxcars, or animals, like lobsters, hares, a worm—entities that can be only observed but cannot talk back. Yet she exploits such entities expertly to reveal some larger truth. In “Then the worm turns,” for instance, she says she once “smashed a worm,” yet “still shudder[s]” with guilt, for etymologically wyrm meant “worm, serpent, dragon,” that is, it was once deemed of equal value with other denizens of the earth itself. In the end, she’s aware, the worms will “have a party on my dock. / It will not be my party, yet / I will be guest and host.” That we will be food for worms has been a subject for writers since time immemorial, but Hennessy’s originality lies in her beginning with the introduction of worms into her compost pile and the confession of her careless stomping of a worm. From using and killing them, she arrives at an awareness of the ultimate role these “rulers // of death, decay, transformation” play in composting our bodies.

The one poem here that spans more than a single page, “Incandescence,” is arguably her most memorable, possibly because it is the only poem here that addresses another human being with whom Hennessy’s speaker has a personal relationship. He’s her lover, whose visit interrupts the narrator’s reading of a scene of multiple shipboard rapes by pirates of “their booty.” The ensuing sex between lover/pirate and speaker/booty conjures memories of other marauders and their captive women until her imagination takes over and calls up “my unit of female partisans” gang-raping her lover, with her “perhaps” penetrating his penis with “the long nicked blade / of my knife.” At poem’s end, after her female cohort wears the man out sexually, “tiring of you, I order you taken / to the woods and shot.”

The cold eye that Hennessy casts on life and death might seem distant from the warmth Kris Bigalk brings to her poems or the charged invention Katrina Moore brings to hers, yet that eye gleams with the passion and searing intensity of a woman who speaks for centuries of oppressed Irish women whose bodies belonged to the men who owned them. Did such a woman, she asks in “This is how her body,” after having borne endless “heirs,” “dare to dream / her body whole again, entire, unbreached?” If not, Hennessy has, rejecting the malarkey of female idealization in favor self-realization, seeing the body as

 

                        Not the gate of heaven, not house of gold,

                        not star of the sea. Not idol.

 
 

                        Not work of art. Just body.

                        Just self. For herself.

A Scream

MOMA isn’t the first institution to turn Edvard Munch’s THE SCREAM into kitsch. Maybe it was kitsch to start with, but at least Munch was trying to create an image of genuine terror in the early 1890’s, when he painted it. One evening the sky turned “blood red,” Munch wrote, and “I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.” In fact, the evenings did look red at that time because of ash from the volcano Krakatoa, which had recently undergone a huge eruption. Was Munch also perhaps thinking of his sister Laura Catherine, at that time hospitalized for manic depression? And then, oddly, a photo of the Sandy Hook shooter, Adam Lanza, made him look like the model for that painting.

Now on display at MOMA, The Scream has been turned into a commercial image reproduced on all matter of objects for sale in the museum shop: notepads, pens, tote bags, iPhone covers—you name it. The image of The Scream on whatever utensil or knickknack you desire.

What idiot would buy such a bastardized version of this masterwork? The same sort who would buy similar images of a Rembrandt self-portrait or the Mona Lisa or any other facsimile of great art for sale in museums worldwide. The version now on view at MOMA is the one for which, early in 2012, a collector paid just short of $120 million, the highest price ever for a painting sold at auction.

New story now online

http://www.epiphmag.com/Epiphanymagazineissue17Fiction.html#ghe

Please click to check out my new story, "Harding's Choice," online.

Poem Set to Music

The composer David Morneau has set to music my poem "Brand Name," which draws its them from Shakespeare's Sonnet 153. Here is the link:

Click here: Cupid's Song by David Morneau on SoundCloud - Create, record and share your sounds for free

Prescient

Going thru some old poems, I came across "Defeat," which I finished on 6 July 2010. It has a concatenation of names and events that seem especially ironic at this moment:

                                                            Defeat

We are in this to win.

            --General David Petraeus, on assuming command in Afghanistan

 

The general says we will win in Afghanistan

The president says we will plug the leak in the Gulf

The governor says we will close the budget deficit

 

Senators say we must reduce Social Security

Al Gore says we must reduce CO2 emissions

And switch to renewable energy

 

And in every case we know in our hearts

That we are headed for defeat—in the war,

In the Gulf, in the economy, in the environment . . .

 

 

                                                        The New Verse News

Surviving Sandy: Powerless

Powerless

The forecasters got it right this time. This storm would be one for the books. At 943 millibars, the barometer registered lower than in 1938, when the previous worst storm hit the Northeast.

The Northeast? . . . where once a decade a hurricane actually made it ashore and caused a few hours of power outage and eroded a few beaches? Big storms like Iniki in Hawai‘i in1992 and Katrina in 2005 hit the warmer latitudes. Wouldn’t Sandy be just another media event like Irene a year ago, when warnings proved exaggerated in the Northeast? Well, actually, the coast might not have suffered greatly, but tell the flooded-out citizens of Prattsville, Margaretville, and Binghamton the forecasts were overblown.

This time the forecasters were right, and by Monday night power was out for over 6 million homeowners in the Northeast. I was one of the lucky ones who live in “Lower Manhattan,” the term that the media used for everyone—about 220,000 people—living below 30^th Street who would have no power till Saturday.

What’s it like to live without electricity in 2012? It means living in the dark from 6 pm till after 7 am. And it means a long series of negatives: no heat or hot water, no use of appliances like refrigerators, TV’s, or coffee-makers, no recharging of batteries for phones or shavers, no computer for online services like banking and bill-paying, no landline phone service, no postal service, no reliable mobile-phone service, no ATM’s. And no public transit.

All of this is mere inconvenience, however. For those whose homes suffered damage from high wind and falling trees or from flooding, the negatives are still irritating but secondary. And how about the dozens of New Yorkers dead from Sandy?

The testimony of callers to local radio stations tells the story of true powerlessness: houses no longer standing or otherwise unlivable, doubling up with friends or relative who themselves have no power but do have a dry house to sleep in, waiting 13 hours to find gasoline for the car, seeing no utility workers in the area to make needed repairs, and receiving estimates of restoration of power as late as mid-November.

Briefly, here’s how a Lower Manhattanite coped. On Tuesday, after the first night without power, my wife and I walked north to 28^th Street on 6^th Avenue, where we found a fast-food restaurant open and she could buy her daily cup of black coffee. Sponge-bathing by adding hot water—the gas stove still worked—to the icy cold water from the tap reminded me of similar cleaning rituals with only cold water in Paris and Amsterdam as a budget traveler in my 30’s. On Wednesday through the courtesy of a friend I was able to take a shower and wash my hair at his private club, and while uptown, my wife and I ate a hot meal at the self-service eatery on the ground floor of Rockefeller Center. Hot food was a welcome change from the tinned tuna fish and sardines on which we’d been subsisting.

But even as I write on Saturday, when our power was restored, more than a million people in New Jersey, New York City, and Long Island remain without power. They are cold, hungry, thirsty, and need sleep and a shower. They need warm clothes as the nighttime temperature falls toward freezing, and many need cars.

And they continue to testify by phone on our local 24-hour radio stations, particularly WFAN, sports-talk radio, and WCBS, all-news radio.These are the two stations I listened to through the dark nights on my black Panasonic transistor radio the size and shape of a thick smart phone, but smarter because its AA batteries lasted throughout the blackout, while I had to walk uptown to recharge my android once a day.

Finally, the fallout of a powerful storm reminds me of the role of chance in our lives: my luck living only 15 blocks south of where electricity still flowed and being able to walk there and back, the bad luck of the two boys in a car that a falling tree crushed, killing them.

Beyond “finally” is the resolve to rebuild wisely and strengthen our infrastructure to withstand the rising tide and ferocity of Gaia, Mother Earth, whom we’ve abused for too long and whom we must take into account as we fashion a new, sustainable way of life.