Paris

It is a beautiful day. The world is a troubling (terrifying, horrifying) place. It is difficult to feel these two things so strongly at exactly the same time.

Lake Superior, July 2015

"At one point that night, she remembered, they spoke of how much they loved their country. In spite of everything. No Westerner would understand the love they had for the place. 'But I could never leave here,' Gamini had whispered.

'American movies, English books--remember how they all end?' Gamini had asked that night. 'The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That's it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He's going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That's enough reality for the West. It's probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.'"

- Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

2011 so far:

A circus, many naps, a night locked out of my apartment, 4 coffee spoons. Nearly everyone I went to the circus with left with a clever disguise. I saw a young man spin on the floor in a hula hoop like a coin embossed with da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. Never faltered. It was beautiful. When he finished, he couldn't stop grinning. It felt like a moment where someone should be hugging him. I wonder how it feels to create dynamic art. You never get to keep it, the way I do my poems. I speculate that this might be both a relief (the mistakes disappear behind you like engine smoke) and a sorrow (the good things are only there when you're doing them?). I want to have this conversation with a dancer or a singer or C's cellist.

And also a thousand dead birds thudded across Akansas.

Love Train

Oh Wisconsin. I love you so much. It's the kind of love where I want you to be even better than you are because it will be good for you, not because it will be good for me. For what it's worth, Wisconsin, I think a train would have been really, really good for you. Especially a train that went from Chicago to Minneapolis and stopped in Madison. Think of that glittering modern future, laid out on tracks. The movement of people is the movement of ideas, and the movement of ideas is a good way to stimulate a knowledge-based economy. Not to mention ship goods efficiently in an age when oil is increasingly dear (money-wise and environmental-cost-wise). You know, no one outside America really knows Wisconsin? We are a wasteland. North of Chicago, south of Canada. I want everyone to know how lovely you are, how good and caring your people are. Even when sometimes your people are actually a lot like people everywhere - dumb, easily mislead, and yes, sometimes actually selfish and not at all caring.

My 5-year plan, not so much a plan as a "Eureka!' scribbled on a a napkin, includes grad school. Even though I believe firmly in sticking to a thing you love even when it's cranky and run by idiots and not so fun to be around, I've now, today, this minute, decided I am not going to bother applying to Madison. Not even as a "might as well give it a try." I have lived here so long. I am curious about other places. The near future is as good a time as any to seek them out. That's still at least 2012, anyway. Maybe the world will have ended by then, like they say it will.

We live in interesting times, friends.

Lately I have stopped really reading about global warming. The Cancun talks. Ocean acidification. Ice melt. The Republicans' plan to hold Scopes-esque hearings on climate change next year. It grinds at my kidneys to think about. There's too much else on my to-do list. Poems and plans and projects.

Plans abound to dive back into the world of bad news in 2011. Flippers & oxygen tank at the ready.

If the world is really ending in 2012

More people should read books with science fiction and fantasy and any other word for "alternative version of life as we know it" involved. The world is a strange place, and the likely future seems in many ways sadder and more wilted, but it is stranger and harder to cope with if you've never mentally visited the "what ifs."

I think, if we are parachuting into a new universe, and it is in one way or another dystopian, at least those who have read The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx&Crake, Pastwatch, The Player Piano, etc etc etc, will not be shocked that such things can exist. We have visited that country in our minds. It's grim country, but we will not be flattened by shock. Maybe we'll get our sleeves rolled up and get started on whatever meager repairs we can that much sooner. I like to think, anyway.

I also have this theory about zombies. Because we've incorporated them so smoothly into our pop culture mythos, we're more likely to survive them because we already know what they are and have a set of possible survival strategies to start out with. They may be completely wrong, but at least we won't be paralyzed. I like to think, anyway.

Forward

Dear blog. I want to talk about politics, I want to talk about poetry, and I want to talk about the things I am doing that are not my job.

There is just too much happening.

I do miss my cat, though.

Also, I kind of want to give Wisconsin a big hug. We'll make it, guys. In one form or another, we'll make it through these politics we do not like, which scare us, which make us clutch our guts in pain at their illogic, and we'll do what we can do limit the damage, and when we get the chance, we'll turn things around in a better direction.

I hold up the hope that the new Republican leadership will somehow stumble upon success by accident, and, worst case, I hope they are somehow right about what will fix this state's economy. Because that's better than them being wrong and all of us suffering for it.

Southeaster

I decided to compile a list of today's wind-related news. This will be updated until I get bored with wind.

7 a.m., Dodgeville: Winds down power line, close US 18
7:40 a.m., Sun Prairie: Semi rolls over, blocking traffic (maybe this is not wind)(but it is probably wind)
8 a.m., Milwaukee: Tornado touches down in Racine, other ill omens and portents
12:30, all over: School's out!
1:30, Madison: Fallen tree limb cuts wires, damages roof

Also at work we were told not to use the external doors (they're heavy, they could knock about and hurt us), and had to creep from building to building via tunnels and skyways. I discovered more crazy art as a result.

There's a really flabbergasting slideshow on the NYT website of photos from nuclear weapons testing between 1945 and 1962.

If you have 3 minutes for an audio voiceover, photographer George Yoshitake, who himself lost family at Hiroshima, has good things to say.

when I was 12 I wrote "dear diary" and asked how my diary's day had been

Hey blog, did you hear about the latest oil tanker exploding in the Gulf of Mexico? I am worried we're going to get used to it. I have serious doubts about the future of Us, blog, as in the human race. I don't think we're going to achieve that Star Trek egalitarianism any day soon. I am thinking about a trial separation.

It was my birthday yesterday, and I've been referring to myself as "Ms. Quarter-Life-Crisis" for a while now, but I guess it's official now and I'm supposed to consider joining the Peace Corps. Someone pointed out teeny smile wrinkles on my eyes a few days ago. But I was smiling at the time. Anyway, I am kind of excited to have such things.

I am behind on everything, blog, but it's mostly okay that I am.

Post-move update

Hi, blog. How have you been? Yeah, me too.

Oil boil toil trouble

Hey, so you know how the Gulf of Mexico is slowly turning into a wasteland, ja? Well, there have been a couple really good stories lately about the fact that spills like this have been happening in Nigeria's oil-producing regions for more than 50 years.

From the New York Times last week:

(By some estimates) The Niger Delta, where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years...

That's as much as 546 million gallons of oil. Shell, one of the companies which operates there, blames sabotage and theft. But:

Richard Steiner, a consultant on oil spills, concluded in a 2008 report that historically “the pipeline failure rate in Nigeria is many times that found elsewhere in the world,” and he noted that even Shell acknowledged “almost every year” a spill due to a corroded pipeline.

So it's not just BP (and for the last time, please stop calling it British Petroleum), and it's not just here. That doesn't make it less of a tragedy. But it's a reminder that rather than boycott BP (whose gasoline is actually sold everywhere, and who does not own most individual BP stations), the most important thing we can do is find ways to stop giving any oil companies our money. None of them is prepared to deal with major safety risks like deep-water drilling, and at least a few have proven themselves unwilling to deal with easily-fixed safety risks like a corroding pipe in an impoverished West African nation.

A good summary of Nigeria's oil issues:

Anup Shah, Nigeria and Oil, Global Issues, Updated: July 03, 2004

The Gulf of Mexico disaster as BP would like you to see it

It's very hard not to look at pictures from the Gulf of Mexico and feel like some flavor of "the end of the world as we know it" is approaching. The red muck on the open sea, the smoke and flames. The diagrams of enormous potential "plumes" suspended deep underwater, and all the maps of surface oil, like Rorschach blobs or tea leaves spelling out, at this point, a dismal but still unknowable future. The wetlands, already browning. The expected but haunting oiled birds, who are, for all their charismatic woe, still luckier than everything we can't scrub off one at a time because it is either too small, too fragile, or still an unknown problem.

If you go to BP's spill response website, though, it's easier to be cheerful!


Wow, look at all that scrubbing! I don't know what that white thing is or why it needs to be cleaned off, but those workers in their hazmat suits definitely look effective.

And look! BP is crunching a lot of data in a fancy war room! Surely they must know exactly what to do to fix everything, after crunching all of that data with their multiple flat-screened computer monitors.

BP doesn't tell us what is in those bags, but there are so many of them. And they look so clean and white! If they're full of oil, then surely that oil can't be so bad, either, because otherwise the bags would be all saggy and hydrocarbon-colored.


All this picture needs is a rainbow where that caution tape is. Look how blue that sky is. And we can't see much of the ocean, so it must be fine. There's some brown mucky stuff in the lower right, but those workers (again looking very efficient in their clean biohazard suits) who are probably actually displaced shrimp fishermen being paid far too little per day, will have that right-hand corner cleaned up in no time. There are so many of them, so just chill, everyone.

And if you read the short version of what they have to say about Operation Top Kill, you still have to wait until the very last clause of the very last sentence to understand that the operation failed. A very good use of inverted syntax, first taking you past all of the very good things they did in attempting this failed operation. The Columbia Journalism Review has a damning list of their other informational sins re: this disaster.

I'm just saying, thank thank thank thank somebody for journalists.

Slew of links

Charming & thrilling: Genderfork.com
Hilarious & scathing: The latest Thursday Lost Roundtable at Feministe. (spoilers)
Amazing: Times Online interview with Lady Gaga.
Adjective adjective adjective: Raw video of the collapse of BP & TransOcean & Halliburton's Deepwater Horizon rig.

this is all one big @carrie

I learned the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is red, "rust-colored." It's like the ocean floor woke up one morning and decided to be a portent or a plague. Also, what the hell kind of name is "Deepwater Horizon"? It sounds like a spaceship. It definitely sounds like a rig that would explode in a Ben Affleck movie. I hope there's a heart-warming speech at the end.

Don't worry, though, it's not half as bad as Exxon-Valdez, if all you look at is millions of gallons of crude oil.

Lucille Clifton, 1936-2010

Lucille Clifton died Saturday. She wrote poems about uteruses and menstruation and Clark Kent and one poem with "yeti poet" in the title. She was smooth, she was sharp, her writing had such a quietly lovely way about it, even when about menstruation or lynchings.

I haven't read her in a while, I almost forgot I had ever, the book I was assigned in English 301 slipped through me like a boat on a river. I use this metaphor because the book was titled "Blessing the Boats." I went back to it, and here are the three pages I had dog-eared:

grief

begin with the pain
of the grass
that bore the weight
of adam,
his broken rib mending
into eve,

imagine
the original bleeding,
adam moaning
and the lamentation of grass.

from that garden,
through fields of lost
and found, to now, to here,
to grief for the upright
animal, to grief for the
horizontal world.

pause then for the human
animal in its coat
of many colors. pause
for the myth of america.
pause for the myth
of america.

and pause for the girl
with twelve fingers
who never learned to cry enough
for anything that mattered,

not enough for the fear,
not enough for the loss,
not enough for the history,
not enough
for the disregarded planet.
not enough for the grass.

then end in the garden of regret
with time's bell tolling grief
and pain,
grief for the grass
that is older than adam,
grief for what is born human,
grief for what is not.

shapeshifter poems #4

the poem at the end of the world
is the poem the little girl breathes
into her pillow the one
she cannot tell the one
there is no one to hear this poem
is a political poem is a war poem is a
universal poem but is not about
these things this poem
is about one human heart this poem
is the poem at the end of the world


wishes for sons

i wish them cramps
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
i wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.

later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn't believe. let the
flashes come when they
meet someone special.
let the clots come
when they want to.

let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves

"Corpses piled like little mountains."

And yeah, Haiti is still in trouble, guys.

My donation to Partners in Health finally exited my bank account. I'm not sure why it took 4 days. I'm not happy about it.

Yes yes yes yes

USA lifts HIV 22-year-old travel / immigration ban.

night harvest

The farmers are harvesting by night to get the corn and soybeans off the ground in time. It's eerie, I keep passing them whenever I venture beyond central Baraboo after dark. I can't find many good photos on the internet. Big machines bumbling about in the dark with floodlights before and aft, corn streaming into the collection bins.

Here, a relevant news article.

You say tomato, I say tomato famine.

Outbreak of Fungus Threatens Tomato Crop
Julia Moskin, the New York Times

A highly contagious fungus that destroys tomato plants has quickly spread to nearly every state in the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic, and the weather over the next week may determine whether the outbreak abates or whether tomato crops are ruined, according to federal and state agriculture officials...

...A strain of the fungus was responsible for the Irish potato famine of the mid-19th century. The current outbreak is believed to have spread from plants in garden stores to backyard gardens and commercial fields. If it continues, there could be widespread destruction of tomato crops, especially organic ones, and higher prices at the market...

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