VOTE FOR CHANGE.

THE TIPS OF YOUR FINGERS

A slackening rain offers its small rhythm
to the rooftop, a soft shudder runs
through the house. On the radio,
Roethke is reading
of a woman he knew.
You are wearing
one of my shirts.

Now, I know it’s no more
possible to own a moment
than a person, but sometimes
we can settle into one,
like a tide returning from the shore,
a soft relaxing back into the sea.

Wind slides the unlatched door
open, mist from the rain
catches the ends of your hair.
On the tips of your fingers,
my body seems achingly beautiful.

Today, we could begin to grow
back every limb we have lost.

Andy Weaver

Desktop

Lately I like to keep the desktop of my computer extremely empty. I used to go months without changing the picture. For a long time I set it to rotate every minute from a folder of asofterworld comics I had downloaded. But I've got a few folders on my computer of pictures I've taken and lately I've been changing the image once a week, just to shake it up.

You'll notice I have not included a picture of my actual physical desktop. That's because it's covered with so many things in such a state of disarray that seeing it would probably give my mother (who reads this) a heart attack. But in case you are curious, here is (moving left to right) an inventory of some of the things on it:

A tupperware container of laundry quarters which I use in lieu of a coffee mug, Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks anthology, my electric bill and a check written out for it, a bottle of blue nail polish, my day planner, my empty glasses case, my cell phone, my external hard drive, my speaker subwoofer, empty Orbit gum wrappers, a coffee mug from The Oasis restaurant on Lake Travis that holds pens, a stapler, the empty Orbit gum box that the wrappers came from, a stack of burned and labeled DVDs, a stack of blank DVDs, the TV remote, scissors, a take-out menu I found shoved under my door, a desk lamp, a mouse (the computer kind), a paper towel I used to clean up coffee I hadn't realized had dripped down the side of my mug this morning, a Sharpie.

Over everything like dead leaves in early autumn is a layer - varying from thin to medium thickness - of paper made up of syllabi, course readings, articles, a few class notes, and the occasional handed-back homework assignment. Once every few weeks I gather up this detritus, sort it, throw out what's un-needed, and put the rest into file folders.

So, what's on your desktop?

Favorite Things

For some time now, I have felt quite strongly that the key to maintaining sanity and banishing disproportionate melancholy is to have Favorite Things. I should here note that I have never seen Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music or whichever children's musical that song comes from.

For example, my number one favorite thing in the entire universe is snow, specifically falling snow.

Favorite Things are the kinds of things about which you can say, "Well, my ___________ just ____________ me, the dog ran away, I lost my keys, my socks are wet, I forgot my homework, and I think I'm coming down with a case of _____________, but at least --" and here you insert one of your Favorite Things.

And just now, as I was about to turn out the light, I realized another Favorite Thing: When you're reading a really great book before bed, and you can't put it down because it's so good, so you stay up past when you told yourself you'd go to bed, but now you're so tired you just have to close the book and turn out the light - but there's still at least a hundred pages left in your book for tomorrow.

(I'm reading The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. It's bloody fantastic. Go get a copy. No, seriously. Get up right now and go to the bookstore.)

Philip Larkin

Oh, gosh, I love Philip Larkin. I mean, really, I love him. I was introduced to him probably the way most young writers are nowadays, with "This Be The Verse," although it was read to me by Billy Collins, which is probably at least a little uncharacteristic.

Funny, I thought, and wrote it down and memorized it and never looked any further, which is probably what most people do.

And then we met again last spring in British Literature, in the Norton Anthology, which is probably not where most poets would choose to meet readers, if they had any say in the matter.

I know enough to know I wasn't disciplined enough in my literary studies as an undergrad. I don't have access to the paradigms of academic discussion of literature; my access is much more instinctual, observational. But I know that Larkin loves words, loves their sounds and their rhythms and uses them in ways that make me mad with jealousy and ridiculously reverent.

I mean, his name is Philip Larkin. How could he not? Just say it over a few times, out loud, to yourself: Philip Larkin. Philip Larkin. Philip Larkin. Here's a poem.

Home is so Sad

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

Theoretic Poetry

This afternoon, doing reading for my television class, I wrote "poem?" in the margins three times, and because I don't see actual poems materializing from these readings any time soon, I thought I'd share the "roots," if you will, of the thoughts.

" ... we are full of the rag-bag and debris of ancient ideologies which have lost their systematic form, but still hang about. Even when we don't think with these bits, we feel with them ..." (John Fiske)

" ... McQuail, Blumler, and Brown (1972) found that many women alone in the house during the day had the television on because the sound of its voices made them feel less lonely ..." (also Fiske)

"Take, for example, the simple-structure, early (and now children's) TV Western, modelled on the early Hollywood B-feature genre Western; with its clear-cut, good/bad Manichean moral universe, its clear social and moral designation of villain and hero, the clarity of its narrative line and development, its iconographical features, its clearly-registered climax in the violent shoot-out, chase, personal show-down, street or bar-room duel, etc. For long, on both British and American TV, this form constituted the predominant drama-entertainment genre. In quantitative terms, such films/programmes contained a high ratio of violent incidents, deaths, woundings, etc. Whole gangs of men, whole troops of Indians, went down nightly to their deaths. (Stuart Hall, emphasis added)

It seems I can't escape the poetic impulse, even in relatively dry theoretic territory ...

Okay, For Real Now, the Last Word

It is so, so, so ridiculously telling that in the second-to-last interview question here, the point of which is to build the comedic tension for the punchline, the SNL writers didn't really change all that much dialogue from what Palin actually said in the interview. What they added was mostly for exaggeration (the line about dollar meals, the drop of Barack's name with the little hand gesture).

Do we really want a vice president whose words, nearly verbatim, are good enough for an SNL skit?



I mean, maybe instead of electing her Vice President, we should be trying to get Sarah Palin a gig on SNL?

The Final Word

Look, I don't enjoy talking politics. Issues of political representation (in media), maybe, but to sit down and have a discussion about what's happening in Washington DC is just not my idea of fun. Part of this is because I usually end up finding such discussions pretty pointless pretty quick, because given the ridiculously partisan atmosphere lately, I either already agree with whoever I'm talking to or I disagree and talking to them makes me want to hit my forehead against a wall, repeatedly, with increasing force.

I was raised, I can safely observe, pretty conservatively. Not just with conservative politics, but conservative ideals. Two things you never talk about at dinner in a conservative household are religion and politics. (Maybe that's why Republicans seem to be so against the separation of church and state - that way there's only one thing they have to remember not to talk about.) I don't know who my parents voted for in any election. "You don't talk about those things," they said.

Maybe so. Maybe in a time with less at stake, it's okay not to talk politics. But not this time.

Here's what I need you to do. First, go here and watch this very short, a minute and a half clip of Sarah Palin talking to Katie Couric. I'd embed the video here, but I'm not sure if YouTube will take it down, and Heather's blog is pretty neat and you should check it out anyway.

Okay, now I need you to read the following excerpt from an AP article. It's only a paragraph, you can do it.

Asked why she only obtained a passport last year, Palin said, "I'm not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say go off and travel the world. No, I've worked all my life. In fact, I usually had two jobs all my life until I had kids. I was not a part of, I guess, that culture."

Now I need you to listen to me, because I am going to tell you something very important, something that has only become clear to me in the last few days.

I don't hate Sarah Palin. As a feminist, I have to believe that educated women have the right to be instruments of their own oppression. If Sarah Palin wants to deny rape victims abortions and then charge them for their own investigative medical exams, she has every right to try to do so, and I have every right to try to stop her. This is what feminism means, and this is what equality means, and this is what freedom means.

But look. This poor woman is in ridiculously over her head. Go watch that video clip again, if you can stand it. This is a woman who seems to have pulled herself up by her own manipulative, bitchy bootstraps - in the same way that men have been doing since well before this country was founded, might I remind you - to a position of relative power in a state the rest of us in these "united" states generally forget about, unless we're talking about oil or polar bears. She was plucked from this relative obscurity by a much more powerful man (and if you're a feminist, the fact that you only know Sarah Palin's name because of John McCain should make you at least a little angry) in a desperate attempt to attract votes. Whose votes, I don't know. Any Hillary supporters should be seeing straight through him, and I would think true religious conservatives would prefer voting for Mr. Palin, not Mrs. Maybe they think they'll trade places if they get elected?

So don't vote for Sarah Palin. She's in over her head. Let her go home and help her daughter raise her granddaughter and make as much of a mess of Alaska as she can. Feel bad for Sarah Palin all you want, think she's pretty and buy glasses that look like hers, be glad that she's one more crack in the glass ceiling, wish she was on your PTA or that you could have a beer with her or whatever that poll last week asked.

But I don't want a president (or a vice-president) I feel bad for. I don't want a President I want to drink beer with. I don't want a pretty President. My President could be the ugliest, most unsympathetic, most cantankerous old bastard in Washington, as long as he was smart and determined and openminded and honorable, because he's got a hell of a job to do, and I don't really give a damn whether or not I like him as long as he gets it done.

Listen to me very carefully. In this election, you cannot vote for the candidate you like the most. You must look at the mess around you, and you must vote for the candidate you think is most ready to fix this. And then you must consider what you cannot consider, which is the mess that the future could become. You must consider as many what ifs as you can. What if an earthquake wipes out Los Angeles? What if a tsunami hits New York City? What if there's a massive food contamination crisis and thousands of people all over the country are poisoned? And these are all things I can imagine off the top of my head! You must vote for the candidate you think could best deal with that which you cannot imagine.

And Sarah Palin is so obviously not that person. So vote for anyone. Vote for Mickey Mouse. But don't vote for Sarah Palin.

Also, as just a little piece of helpful trivia, may I remind you of the fact that committing the same actions over and over and expecting different results is usually characterized as a symptom of being absolutely off your nutter bonkers?!