"Barbara Lee Speaks for Me"

CLICK ON HEADING ABOVE TO VIEW A SLIDE SHOW OF BARBARA LEE, the ONLY member of the U.S. House of Representatives, who voted against giving Bush the blank check of power that led to the horrors of the war in Iraq. She has proposed a bill to block further support of the war in Afghanistan, and spoke here in front of the Oakland City Hall on 23 November 2009, preceded by someone whose name I missed; then Tom Haydn; then Danny Glover, who introduced Representative Lee. There are more photos of Danny Glover as his native acting ability lead to many gestures.

Friends With Great New Websites, or New News

Added to my accompanying list of blogs/websites,
ONE
Be sure to check out the beauty of the work of Gail Horvath at www.gailhorvath.com



TWO
Already in that list, but check Louise Nayer's website again to get news of Louise's book, BURNED, that will be published in April. Let her know if you have ideas on where and how to promote her intense and important book. Read more about it on her websitehttp://www.louisenayer.com/ which has a link to her blog.



THREE
While I have a link for him, when Fred Goldsmith has finished his new website, with his unique photographic vision, that will be added to my accompanying list of blogs.

Exploring My New Neighborhood

Settling Into My New Space

REDISCOVERIES, Part 2

When I lived on Rhode Island Street in San Francisco, I ended up with two cats. The black Burmese whined constantly, which was very annoying, and yet when she died I was more distressed by her death than by the death of my other cat Cirrus. Here is that annoying Sweet Pea Hecate Isis Marie, peeking in.


Cirrus Psylocybin, when I brought out the camera, always began to strike poses, like a Vogue model, and in this case knew that she would reveal how brilliant she was by sitting on the Collected Verses of Wallace Stevens.



Responding to a False News Bulletin in San Francisco
on Saturday Night, October 18, 1980

A cloud of radiation is floating over from China tonight.
The Wise Virgins’ Suite I am playing may be my last tape.
Skipping the fact that tomorrow night I may be puking out
my intestines like a string of sausages, I carry on. Give us
this day our daily death. A stack of quarters rests on zebra’d
wood: the coins belong to empire, but I sanded and stained
and polished the wood on that table and brought out the grain.

My cats purr. Recorded strings reanimate the row of human
arms that sawed them once so gently, while recording.
The cloud of radiation from China – Will it arrive in the shape
of a dragon? A cat rumbles at my shoulder. The one at my side
leaps away, chasing nothing, it seems – no mouse. A moth!
She leaps in the air, a flight of my black cat Sweet Pea Hecate
Isis Marie – or, for daily communication, simply Sweet Pea.
She’s at my foot, enticing me to drag my toe along her spine.

Will I be scratching the cat’s back when the heavens scour
us out? Sweet Pea chases out Cirrus, the cat at my ear:
replaces her mother behind my head, eager to be a pillow
for the dead. Dead cat. Dead cat. Dead killer. Sitting in
my electric chair, will I have crazy cats in my hair? a fur
fire cap? my brains a blaze? A terrible unknowing comes
toward us, cats. It is forgetting us hour by hour, and nothing
of us will be here in the dawn – so let’s trail away
and along the wind – smoke-cats, man-moth blasted.
James McColley Eilers, copyright 2009

MORE THINGS UNEARTHED FROM STORAGE. For its significance, you must know that it is from a period when the San Francisco State Strike of 1968-69 had come to an end. Many were uneasy about ending the strike and returning to work, fearful that Strike demands would not be met. Following the poster is a verse I wrote at the time:



At that time, Beverly Dahlen included this in our AFT #1928 newsletter:

In 1969, Ending the San Francisco State Strike


Anger, tears, and resentment fill the hot, smoky room

where the teachers deliberate: Shall we end the Strike?

In the distance the firecrackers of the Chinese New Year:

a snorting sound. I dream of a great blue dragon

twisting through the empty streets, tearing aside the veils

of rain. It approaches this room, hot with betrayal,

thick with regret, “Whatever may influence our decision – “

With the possibility of violence ever present – Boom!

a firecracker lands outside. Tension breaks into laughter.


Like a room full of frantic mice our Magic Markers

dance and squeak as Local 1928 rectifies its picket

signs, and races back to the picket line. The teachers

return to abandoned classrooms, ponder the future

in deserted offices, and repeat their rosary of intangibles.

Those still out walking the line hope to free themselves

from their elders’ dreaming. Roger Alvarado says that

enough bites from enough fleas can make the dog get up

and move. If now we too must return, break momentum,

we tell ourselves, it is but to loose our frightful mice

on the haunted rooms where ghosts are lecturing ghosts,

and hope we will not become ghosts ourselves: We are

determined to be forever biting the Dog of State.


[Printed, AFT Local 1928 Weekly News, Vol. I, No. 5, Mar. 7, 1969]


Another rediscovery -- the poetry reading at Glide Memorial with an amazing collection of poets, to raise funds for the strike:

THE FIRE

How do you explain to anyone the experience of shipwreck – call it great exaggeration to use that metaphor for the effect of a fire in my old apartment building in an apartment above and one apartment over, leading to smoke and water damage (water sloshing the deck on the sinking ship) that forced me to move. You think first of survival. Find something to cling to and stay afloat.

The surviving parts of my cabin are transferred piece by piece. I am a strong bird constructing a nest from the detritus of my previous nest. In a few weeks my cabin looks much the same as my cabin in the ship that sank. I recreate the illusion of stability that I had before, but now it feels like a preparation for an Egyptian tomb. Death is imminent now, and I have gathered all I will need in my afterlife.




But this is my afterlife, the life after I, whose sole and most urgent longing all my life has been to have a stable habitude where my inner life might thrive, may briefly be free of the constant fear of merely floating on an ever melting ice floe, waiting to be forced into the next dislocation.

The cabin looks a great deal as it looked in the old ship, but inwardly the shipwreck lives on – the broken beams and floorboards, and the sinking into the cold ocean waters. And you know it is just a matter of time, too short a time, when you will be forced to move on, not even into death, just another laborious, mundane Judgement Day, an0ther grim reckoning, while comedians make jokes about how old people “seem to move into smaller and smaller spaces.” We who are growing older are not supposed to mention what it is like.

I feel like the man in Galway Kinnell’s verse “The Man on the Hotel Room Bed”:

“a man lying alone to avoid being abandoned,
who wants to die to escape the meeting with death.”

Meanwhile my numb self looks whole, polished to smoothness like a stone on the shore (that wishes to be that stone that skips merrily on the surface of moving water), and that is better than for anyone to see that inside you are all sticks thrusting out in all directions and wires impossibly entangled. After this time while you still lack the strength for the distraction of the common everyday lies, you will find the old awareness-deadening routine? Or be a changed man?

Of course, I can only write this because I have finally stepped out of packing, moving, unpacking, arranging, and played the idle man, spending an hour in a coffee shop – in my old neighborhood.

I told friends how, during the transition, I awoke one night to find the hose of my apnea C-PAC machine wrapped twice around my neck –


In that twisted time of the move, sleeping first on a mattress on a floor, then, amid debris, in my old bed, I awoke in the middle of the night and wrote,

“The lonely animal awakened again, having slept only briefly, and, using one hand as a grip, slide it down the length of his other arm as if removing an invisible sleeve. He froze there for a moment, his long thin arms hanging away from his bed like the two crossed legs of a sleeping deer.

“What vigil must his body make each night, waking to know-not-what. Wander out of bed – bathroom, kitchen – nothing needed there, but he takes a drink of cold water.

“Soon sleep will cushion him again, take him back into its arms, an invitation to return to some dark place in the foliage, nest of the soul.”

It reminded me of another time when I felt displaced and became a sleepwalker. At about age 8, after returning to my family from the year when they left me with an Italian family, the first clue that I was having a nervous breakdown was when an aunt discovered that I was a sleepwalker. Was I looking for a way to return to my Italian family? They, of course, could not accept my living with them forever while that was precisely what I was looking for, trying to find my way back to the Marantos, although there, too, I would feel displaced, on loan, borrowed. Am I always longing for “the place” (I know I am, but I never know for sure what that is), and never finding it? Is that true for everyone? Does everyone have a sense that anyone’s life is an exile? Maybe this newly reconstructed nest will become, albeit briefly, my “place.”

It feels important to find my “present life” again, but, with this move, even more than previous ones, I am looking through every storage box – This will be a slow process -- and each box releases some number of ghosts, dragging me back into the past to reconcile why I have kept these mementos, like old bones. A couple packets of letters – not many, but saved, clearly, because they were the most intense and meaningful. On my blog, I may have a series of “REDISCOVERIES.”

REDISCOVERIES

I hope I can find (and trust) some historical archive – the Gay Lesbian Historical Society, or the Gay section of the San Francisco Library?) – that would esteem and want to preserve this collage: It is from the first ever showing of the AIDS quilt – at the Moscone Center.

Click on this if you want to see it closer:

I think the photos are arranged well, but, most important, the sad child gives the human touch to the collage. One of the quilts is for someone I knew, Morgan Pinney, who was a one-man Gay Liberation before there was a Gay Liberation. He was a professor at San Francisco State who early on addressed State-wide teachers conferences with the announcement that he was gay. He was also the man who doled out union funds for those who were involved in the San Francsco State Strike of 1969. As with so many gay people, his family’s rejection of him for being a gay man had an embittering effect, but did not keep him from fighting for equal rights. His executor, James Hicks, if he reads this, might want to add more information, but one great irony is that James knew that Morgan would want to respond to gays in Moscow who needed a Xerox machine for their leaflets – at a time when the Russians overturned the old system, and that Xerox machine helped them to spread the word of their new revolution.

I will have to send the Robert Helps Archives at the University of Southern Florida in Tampa a letter that Bob sent when he was granted a residency at the MacDowell Colony so that he could concentrate on composing, away from performing as a concert pianist or teaching half-years at the Boston Conservatory of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.



Click on the image of the letter if you want to read it:

A Perfect Nugget of Ignorance

In response to the entry (quite a while ago) where I showed the votive candle on which someone had placed Obama's head on the body of St. Martin de Porres (a charming bit of whimsy), I got this comment from Anonymous (Anonymous may not have a sense of whimsy). Wonderful to have such a perfect nugget of ignorance, although I do agree that we should give the country back to the original inhabitants (more about that below).

"From: Anonymous
Date: August 31, 2009 12:36:05 AM PDT
Subject: [The Blue Elephant] New comment on Saint Obama.

"I think that is totally out of hand stupidity! He's more like the anti-christ and is fooling everyone...he's about to turn this nation into Socialist Country and his face is everywhere and didn't do a thing about anything except give his banker friends our money! Give the nation back to the American Indians before the Latinos and Jews destroy it! Long Live the Truth!"

Hey! Anonymous left out gay people! I wonder if the anti-Socialist Anonymous realizes that the original people on the continent assumed that the earth belonged to itself. Those who nearly decimated them felt the earth should be parceled out and owned, and it is ironic that it is they who suffer a sense of rootlessness. As their sense that their portions of the earth were not true places on the earth, real as dirt and grass, but "liquid assets," they too became liquid assets, and thus their mad vision spreads its disconnection from reality (otherwise called "the environment") A mad vision -- Save us, Tecumseh!

Duboce Street Mural, San Francisco

CLICK ON TITLE ABOVE for a trip across the Duboce Street Mural

Event Honoring LGBT Pioneers

CLICK ON HEADING ABOVE to see slide show. At the San Francisco LGBT Center, on Saturday, 22 August, LGBT Seniors were honored. On the slide show you will find a few of those honored and featured: State Senator Mark Leno, State Assembly member Tom Ammiano, Felicia Elizondo, decades-long political leader Howard Wallace, Janaki Tompkins from New Leafe, Lorraine Hunter, Heather Lamborn, and others.

In Gualala, to escape Xmas

On the way north....





Near the end of December 2000, I checked into Cabin #8 at the Mar Vista Cabins in Gualala, California. I readily believed the owners, Tom and Renata Dorn, that Cabin #8 was their best cabin, standing a bit away from other cabins and near the woods.

Every now and then it is good to follow the Buddha’s example and meditate “under a Bo Tree” until you are certain that you can still live with yourself amicably and peacefully. With every solitary retreat, one is visited by the same spirits that visited Buddha: loneliness and desire and the fear of aging and dying.

For the pangs of loneliness and fantasies of desire that flew around my “Bo Tree” – that is, Cabin #8 – there was the fish-slender Japanese-American youth at the Cove restaurant in Point Arena, like all the waiters, wearing a black T-shirt with a logo on the back, an altered yin-yang – the tip of the white part ending with the peak of a wave, the end of the black part being a tiny surfer.

It was also a writing retreat, but I found time to write in a journal too, where the part about aging flowed from my pen, and gave me some lines that evoked laughter and nods of recognition when they were spoken in my one act play, TURNING:

THOMAS:
Trying to pull on my sox this morning – What are these toenails? I say to myself. I live alone now so I talk to myself that way. Growing strange – hard to pull on sox without getting caught on some odd splinter of a toenail. I’m growing stems now – I’m growing branches – I‘m becoming a tree!

LENNOX:
What’s with this long list of complaints? It goes on and on –

THOMAS:
Well, excuse me, world. It’s just that I am feeling a little worn in places – one eye, one ear – the way any fabric will grow thin in time, and then holes appear. Like old wallpaper, yellowing, drying, but not flaking off the wall – a picture that no-one sees anymore.

No longer troubled by that Xmas phobia in 2009, it is difficult to remember that I was also in that cabin for a few days in Gualala as a means of hiding out from Xmas. What that was all about would require a separate exposition, but now it seems very silly. Among the people I know, Xmas does not exist so I have no need to fear the day, the things that day used to evoke.

I don’t know if they are still there, but Tom and Renata Dorn were politically liberal, friendly toward guests with dogs, and had a watchgoat Buster tethered with a generous length of rope in the yard near their office, the red cabin amid all the yellow cabins. Renata had given personal attention to everything. Was it a little painful to see that Cabin #8 was set up for lovers? Everything in twos, including two champaigne glasses and a sprig of mistletoe over the bedroom door? The embroidered and ribboned window curtains were clearly her handiwork, and she must have placed the book of local women writers, given to her by her mother (as it said in the front of the book), inviting us to share her mother’s gift. Looking out the window one afternoon, I saw that Renata was sitting in a chair under a pine looking toward the sun and Buster the billygoat. Lonely people create cottages, and lonely people stay in them, I mused, inviting too many people into my loneliness, except that the solitude of natural places seems to open space for everyone.

Mid-mornings I would drive to do tai chi on a cliff where three sides looked over white water crashing against cliffs – a space just wide enough to do all the steps without falling off into that beautiful swirl of water where rainbows sometimes lingered before the spray fell back into the sea. I am most in love with the ever-changing beauty of water, the patterns of water close up, or the rucked and sequined sea. And in that place, and before reaching it, the sea was the dominant character. Driving past Valley Ford, I came into a landscape less familiar to me, and I felt the old paradox – You can be in a “quiet” forest and realize that it has its own “traffic noise.”* Nature at that point of the coast was not calming to me, as I saw foam slather around the monumental black teeth of the sea, those rock sentinels compact with millions of years of earth-time. Driving past those ominous dark and ancient ogres, electricity shivered through me.

I loved to cross the road from the cabins, unhook the leather thong that held a gate closed, and stand on cliff’s edge, over a hundred wooden steps down to the beach. The pre-dawn might be purple and red, and you heard the bull of the sea snort and stamp loudly on some mornings. That night, the ocean might still bellow, stomp, tear, and snort – while the stars…were silent.

*Wind in the Pines

Listening to the wind in the pines,
I hear the traffic in distant towns;
the roll of surf; the cheers from
a stadium crowd; the falling away
of the world when it rushes by
a diver or a suicide; the restless
murmur of an audience before
a concert or a play; the faint wail
of a far-off train; the keening
of an antique song: The wind
in the pines sings to me every day
in the voice of the bustling Earth,
with, once in a while, a hush
when it pauses to take a breath.

A Few Recent Photos

CLICK ON TITLE ABOVE to see a few new photos.

New Design

July 2009, Lake Merritt, Oakland

Click on subject line above to see slide show

Oakland Cathedral, Part Two

Click on the heading above for additional Photos of the new Oakland Cathedral...with an unfortunate climax:

Deborah Butterfield's Horses

...currently on exhibit off Market Street, downtown, San Francisco:

Turning 72

Sending this virtual tart to those who celebrated my birthday with me:



I am certainly saturated with the loving kindness of my friends after a week-long series of celebrations of my birthday. Don't do it again. You will kill me with kindness. I hesitate to include the names and photos of people I know on the blog, never certain whether they will want that, but there was food, flowers, music, more attention than any one person can endure. Here are some of the results:







And at last I go to sleep under my birthday lei -- Yes, the kind that's spelled l-e-i

Code Pink's Monthly Golden Gate Bridge Demonstration

Hurrah for Code Pink (who have the determination and vigor of the Suffragettes). In this photogaphy by Jess, friend Martha Hubert is in the lead!

Karen Emmerich at the Center for the Art of Translation

Click twice on the title above for a slide show of Ms. Emmerich speaking.



On 12 May 2009, friend Martha Hubert and I went to see Karen Emmerich at one of the Center for the Art of Translation's 12:30-1:30 events. She read from her translations of 20th century Greek writers, beginning with selections from I'D LIKE, described as "a collection of thirteen linked stories by Amanda Michalopoulou, in which the characters are brought together by the repetition of seemingly random details: blossoming almond trees, red berets, bleeding feet, and accidents both large and small." Then Ms. Emmerich read selections from translations in process -- a novel by "feminist writer Margarita Karapanou," and "short stories by Ersi Sotiropoulou, a controversial writer whose award-winning novel ZIG-ZAG THROUGH THE BITTER ORANGE TREES was recently removed from school libraries throughout Greece." She is also translating "nine short books by the experimental poet and art critic Eleni Vakalo, work for which she received a 2007 Translation Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts." She has received numerous other awards and teaches Greek and writing at Columbia University. Finally Ms. Emmerich she read from POEMS (1945-1971) by Miltos Sachtouris, for which she was "the first translator to receive a nomination for the National Book Critics' Circle Prize in Poetry." She described Sachtouris as never having recovered from the horrors of World War II so that his poetry has a searing and bloody imagery, reminiscent perhaps of Mayakovsky.

Fortunate websites

Old friend E.J. in Idaho has advised me of some civilized and useful websites:

Newslink.org
You can connect with newspapers all over the country.
You can check radio stations.
Well, I have not checked it thoroughly yet, but it seems a a great warehouse of news sources

http://www.aldaily.com
Arts and Letters Daily

He also let me know of a good station for endless classical music: Otto's Opera House. 1.FM. I found it under "Classical" on the radio lists on iTunes, but you can also sign up at their website to get a better idea of the variety available there.

Sand Paintings at Bhutan Exhibit

Embarcadero Tents, Oakland Derricks

Easter Parade 2009

Italian Euro

Fireboat, Embarcadero, San Francisco

Energy: Original and Derivative

What's that creature climbing up that pole?

Potato Sack

Plastic Potato Sack Resting on Photos of Sun Storms:

Things That Need to Be Said

1. Make it clear at every opportunity: Both the so-called Pro-Life people and the so-called Pro-Choice people are pro-life people, one for the life of a fetus – a life that is still a notion, someone who does not exist yet, and the other for the life of a grown woman who has a history and is known and loved. Remind anyone who challenges this that both sides are pro-life, while the pro-life side behaves as if the pro-choice people are Satanic killers. There is the other irony that some of the Pro-Life people, besides verbally abusing women, don’t mind being pro-death, killing doctors and bombing clinics. But rather than be drawn into a them-versus-us game, it is sufficient to explain that both sides of the argument are pro-life.

2. Old age is not a disease. Old age is not the same as death. In fact, old age is the ripening and fulfillment of all a person has been for a lifetime. In fact, old age is the ripening and fulfillment of all a person has been for a lifetime. There are endless advertisements, however, where people with worried faces are watching older relatives and friends as if they were looking for an admission of communist party membership. They are shown almost to have a certain of relief or satisfaction when an elder relative finally develops Alzheimer’s disease. How relieved they are to give their seniors the drug being advertised, and perhaps there is an added pleasure for them that the drug will torture these burdensome elders who go on clinging to life with numerous side effects, such as diaharrea, depression, heart failure. The worried relatives are finally content, having established old age as an illness, meaning that they, the younger, are not marked yet as people who will get sick and die. The youngest family members are also happy to see that the old will no longer get in the way of their youthful obsessions, frankly using the words “old person” as a description for something bothersome, repugnant, no longer fully human. Of course, if the older were not, in their maturity, more compassionate, they might let the younger know the great obstacle the young represent for civilized life. There is a constant outpouring of these commercial dramas, miniature sentimental films, worthy of satire.


3. Regretting my own time in the military during these decades of empire-driven wars, I must remember to be more understanding of veterans than I am of myself. Buffy Ste.-Marie’s UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, reminding every human in the service that they have made an existential choice to be there, is a message forever suppressed. But when I read the intelligent and sorrowful accounts of veterans who are also excellent poets, I know I need a more tolerant attitude toward them – and myself. There is also the most important fact – that many young men may be able to find no other work where they are except to join the military. That said, let me vent:

I forget the full list of terms used for war trauma over successive wars (“battle fatigue,” “soldier’s heart,” etc.). In World War I, the reality of the trauma was somewhat conveyed in the term “shell shock.” With the Iraq War, in the same way that they would not allow photographs of the coffins of the dead soldiers, it is infuriating that they disguise the effect of war with an abstraction, a series of initials, PTSD. How many translate PTSD each time they hear it into Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Does PTSD convey the weight of human tragedy? No, war must be antiseptic. I think we should all find some other way to translate those initials in some other way, such as the Pissed-Off and Totally Screwed Syndrome.

We are expected to respect the parents who still refuse to believe that the death of their children in Iraq was a sick joke they voted for, still repeating the reasons long proven as lies. We are expected to go along with the young, apolitical men for whom war was living out a fantasy of knights on crusade or the heroes of war movies. And when they come home with the Pissed-Off Totally Screwed Syndrome, and hate themselves for falling out of the war, feeling they are betraying their warrior buddies, or failing to fulfill the fantasy of being a hero, it is terrible that we don’t interrupt the parents who allow their children to see themselves as failures, reinforcing that self-hatred when the true cure would be for everyone to say, “Thank you for getting sick of killing people! I see that you are among the first members of a better human race. We are proud that you have become sickened with torture and killing. F--k manhood – Welcome to your humanity. We have enrolled you in one of our Peace Academies. We will be sending you out to high schools to teach young people the difference between movie comic book violence and the murder of actual human beings. You will teach them that political leaders are in no way their friends; that wars are not games, but the political manipulations of leaders who themselves would never get near a war zone.” How many join up without illusions, but simply because they need work? We really must have a bail-out for the young and desperate, forced into street crime or world crime – not, as in Germany, given the ability to choose an alternative service.

Alice Walker Returns from Gaza

At an Oakland event entitled, "The Siege of Gaza is an Attack on the Common Heart," Alice Walker, author of THE COLOR PURPLE and other books, gave a grim account of the horrendous injuries and devastation resulting from Israel's 22-day bombing and invasion of Gaza. "An old woman sitting in the ruins said to me, 'May God protect you from the Jews.' I answered, 'It's too late. I married one.' You've got to keep it real." Ms. Walker suggested that Israel is "like a big Ponzi scheme" -- so many investing so much for so long in something, expecting esteemed values to result, only to end with the legacy left from "grinding a people into dust."
Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink and Global Exchange, spoke after Ms. Walker. She said that people in Gaza would bring them the shells that had destroyed their houses, the shells all marked "Made in the USA"

Robert Haas, Poet, Translator, U.S. Poet Laureate

At the Center for the Art of Translation on 14 April 2009, poet, translator, and U.S. Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997, Robert Haas, who has a sweet and amiable presence, recited some of his translations. Learning Japanese in order to translate haiku, Haas discovered greater details about the haiku form. It is generally known that every haiku refers to a season, but Haas learned a more detailed code; for example, that a reference to plum blossoms suggests the end of winter; cherry blossoms indicate the fullness of spring; etc. -- information is detailed in his book, The Essential Haiku. He recited several of the published haiku with interesting commentary on most of them, or sometimes an ironic pause or a twinkle in his eye was commentary enough. He also recounted the decades-long personal relationship that has facilitated his translations of the work of Czeslaw Milosz.



I intend to write an account of the journey one takes beginning with an original verse in a language other than English and ending with the final version in English. For the artist, and others perhaps, art in the highest sense is in the process of making what ends up as a "piece of art." On the exploration that takes place In the art of translation, you will often find that you have taken the wrong path and have ended in some cul-de-sacs; you must retrace your steps and take a more likely path. In the process of not finding the right way to express the verse in English, you see that forest of that verse from many angles, and some of them are true shadings of the original verse that you would not have discovered without going through the process of translation. Yet you cannot include every shading in the final verse. With the final translation, you have accumulated a personal subtext that contains the multiple layers that cannot be included in the final choices in the final lines. For the translator, the journey of the translation is a three-dimensional structure. The better the verse, the more you are able to walk into it and walk around in it. It can be maddening at first to realize that your true experience of the verse must be truncated, remain a private experience. There is at least one verse where I regret that I did not keep every failed translation of the verse as they record that journey. For that verse, I wished I could make a sculpture of it. I suspect that some of the Mayan stella may reflect that wish – Perhaps after you read each flat surface, you can also read through from one side to the other. If not true of Mayan stella, it is certainly a possibility for some artist.

Tai chi on the pier…
Cormorant drying its wings,
the first position.

Me and Obama

O.K. -- Obama and I... Or is it a strange delusion?


.

Gregg at Mountain View Cemetary

13 March 2009, Fountain Activity, San Francisco

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When you want to escape the slide show, push your ESCape key.

Poet, Fady Joudah

Friend Martha and I went to the Center for the Art of Translation on 10 March 2009 to hear 2007 Yale Younger Poet, Fady Joudah. He read his translations of Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish, who died in August 2008. ("His lyrical poems of exile and longing speak eloquently for displaced persons everywhere, at once evoking his Palestinian homeland and transcending national borders." The translations of Darwish combined three of his books as THE BUTTERFLY'S BURDEN, published by Copper Canyon Press. Mr. Joudah also read from his own beautiful verses, THE EARTH IN THE ATTIC (Yale University Press).

It may sound decadent to say so, but I have always felt that esthetics and ethics can be said it to be the same thing. It sounds superficial to say that certain political attitudes and actions show "a lack of taste" or "poor taste," but I think it is as true as to speak of "good" and "evil." And isn't a lack of taste that Hannah Arendt is speaking of when she sees in "the banality of evil."

The usual guidelines for this slide show: After starting the slide show, hit the lower right hand frame of arrows going in all directions to make the slides fill the screen. When you want to escape the slide show, push your ESCape key.



While he was born in Texas in 1971 to Palestinian refugees, Joudah sanely realizes that he is a step away from the plight of the world's oppressed people. He rejects compliments for his work as a field member of Doctors Without Borders, seeing that work as natural responsibility, common decency, not a particular heroism. What he has seen of terrible human conditions around the earth is implicit in his verses, yet he sanely knows he cannot speak with perfect truth about such things, that he lives a step away from the misery he witnesses in the earth's great mass of displaced persons. His attitude toward words, writing poetry, and translating is equally modest. It was a treat to listen to what he said, with a wonderful grace and intelligence, when he paused to make comments between the verses he read.

Swan

We have a solitary swan on Lake Merritt (Merritt Estuary) at the moment:

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The Way (yin and yang = tao)

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Saint Obama

"St. Obama Candles Spark Priest's Ire," reports John P. Connolly, of The Bulletin, a Roman Catholic publication, 18 February 2009 -- referring to events in Noe Valley, San Francisco:

"A San Francisco priest has called on his parish to boycott a local shop that has decided to sell devotional candles to 'Saint Obama.' The candles, which sell for $15 apiece at a local shop called 'Just For Fun,' were originally devotional candles to honor St. Martin de Porres, widely considered the first black Roman Catholic saint in the Americas. President Barack Obama’s face has been pasted over the head of St. Martin, making it appear that Mr. Obama is the object of veneration. Fr. Tony La Torre of St. Philip the Apostle Church, is calling for a boycott of the store.

“ 'I am appalled that in such a family-oriented neighborhood, any retailer would be so bigoted and so hateful [as] to carry such merchandise just to "make a buck",' Rev. La Torre declared recently in his parish newsletter."

The Good News: While the "store owners Robert Ramsey and David Eiland say they’ve sold more than 700 candles since putting them on display over the Christmas holiday," sales have really exploded because of the disapproval of the Catholic church. I am waiting for one celebrating Saint Harpo Marx.

Walt Whitman Faces Financial Depression

In the U.S. financial depression of 1873, Walt Whitman wrote, "Wandering at Morn":

Wandering at morn,
Emerging from the night from gloomy thoughts, thee in my thoughts,
Yearning for thee harmonious Union! thee, singing bird divine!
Thee coil'd in evil times my country, with craft and black dismay,
with every meanness, treason thrust upon thee,
This common marvel I beheld -- the parent thrush I watch'd
feeding its young,
The singing thrush whose tones of joy and faith ecstatic,
Fail not to certify and cheer my soul.

There ponder'd, felt I,
If worms, snakes, loathsome grubs, may to sweet spiritual songs be turn'd,
If vermin so transposed, so used and bless'd may be,
Then may I trust in you, your fortunes, days, my country;
Who knows but these may be the lessons fit for you?
From these your future song may rise with joyous trills,
Destin'd to fill the world.

What's That You Say?

A Fellow Hoosier Turns 200

Abraham wrote one verse, when he visited the terrible landscape of early childhood in Indiana:

The very spot where grew the bread
That formed my bones, I see.
How strange, old field, on thee to tread,
And feel I’m part of thee!

Lincoln recorded this nightmare:
“About ten days ago I retired very late. I had been up, waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into slumber for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible.
“I went from room to room: no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards, and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon this corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. Who is dead in the White House? I demanded of one of the soldiers. The President, was his answer; he was killed by an assassin! Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and though it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.”


"There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” (Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, 27 January 1838)

" Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today." (Notes for a Law Lecture, 1 July 1850)

“The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
” (1 July 1854)

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.” (ca. 1 August 1858)

"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed." (Lincoln-Douglas Debate at Ottawa, 21 August 1858)

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” (Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861)

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." (Lincoln’s First Annual Message to Congress, 3 December 1861)

"In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just - a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.” … "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. (Lincoln’s Second Annual Message to Congress, 1 December 1861 or 1862)

“In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and eternity. (1 December 1862)














“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.” (Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, 4 March 1865)

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

“But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” (Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, 19 November 1863)

"Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.” (Speech to One Hundred Fortieth Regiment, 17 March 1865)

"Perhaps a man's character is like a tree, and his reputation like its shadow; the shadow is what we think of it, the tree is the real thing."

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people, some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

“Improvement in condition is the order of things in a society of equals.”

Happy 200th Birthday, Uncle Abe

FATHER ABRAHAM ON ALCATRAZ



I would like my Lincoln-On-Alcatraz to look even more elongated than the actual Abraham Lincoln, stretched out of history into myth and fairy tale, impossibly tall.

I would like the skin of this monumental statue to be metal, perforated with large openings so that people ascending or descending internal stairways may look in all directions at the surrounding landscape, city, ocean, bay, bridges, etc.

Two elevators in the center would stop at various landings, with winding stairs throughout the statue connecting the landings. Some people will challenge themselves to climb or descend all the stairs. Most of the interior would be empty space, with nothing on the various landings, unless some food vendors. The ocean wind and fog would blow through the statue.

This Lincoln would require an excellent sculptor to take the stiffness out of the figure I have drawn, or to exaggerate it even more. It would require great engineers: Alcatraz is called The Rock, but is the rock deep and strong enough to anchor such a tall statue? able to withstand the strong winds there?

My Lincoln should not face San Francisco precisely, nor face the Golden Gate Bridge directly, but face in a direction a little south of the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge.

All right, my fantasy is absurd, and the notion of having a Peace Center on Alcatraz may sound more attractive, but the absurdity is intentional. I want a droll representation of Lincoln -- We've had enough of the historical Lincoln, which is already turning to myth -- So let him be a fantastical creature, a gateway to the imagination, a stick figure Wizard of Oz...

The Lincoln stovepipe hat, of course, must have terraces on the brim and at the top of the hat; an inner observation room when the weather is too fierce; a cafe or restaurant; restrooms; etc.:

Afghanistan Actions

The 30 January 2009 Bill Moyers Journal had a good observation on U.S. plans for Afghanistan. If you have time to read the transcript...
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01302009/transcript3.html

The Bryan Harrison Band, with Elisa Welch

The Bryan Harrison Band at Jack London Square: Elisa Welch, Bryan Harrison, Dave Coan (playing djembe), Jim McLaren.

The Two Wolves

Perhaps everyone heard the "parable" a woman minister presented in the church the Obamas attended on the morning of the Inauguration:

THE TWO WOLVES

An elder cherokee was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them, "A fight is going on inside me. It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves.

One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.

This same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person, too."

The children thought about it for a minute and then one child asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"

The old cherokee simply replied,"The one you feed."

The January 30, 2009, Bill Moyers Journal had a great exchange about U.S. bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01302009/transcript3.html

My New Walking Stick

Thank you, friend Carrie, for the wonderful walking staff.




Walking home from BART, I passed the new cathedral in Oakland and decided to go in to see if there was some other photograph I would like to take there. As often happens, something I wanted to photograph -- the bottom part of a stained glass window -- was so low that I had get down on one knee (not to pray!) And, as happens lately, getting up again was quite a challenge -- so it was heaven to have that beautiful, serpentine staff to lean on and pull myself up again. Did I say, "Thank you, Carrie?"

The Bush/Obama Transition Sonnet

The time was dark, the mood was blue.
Did Worry grumble in your head? – that fool,
I know, is hard to shake – the darker me and you.
Our careless hours were shackled by the rule,

so long, of men whose arrogance offended.
(While we felt lost, they just don’t feel.)
For our shame and anguish, they pretended
we need only pray, join the Army, steal.

Our godless night is coffin cold, but safe.
No phantoms of regret or hope to rock
our feelings up and down. Just relief.
Here no ranting priest warns us of the shock
of a hot hell, or disdains our childish fright.
Embrace nothing. Love someone. Shine bright.

Remember Them

I hope everyone had a chance to see the PBS documentary narrated by Peter Coyote, “Torturing Democracy,” a good follow-up to Academy Award winning “Taxi to the Dark Side.” As Joe Klein column said in his column in TIME, 19 January 2009, if there is to be a Bush Memorial in Washington it should feature “a statue of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner in cruciform stress position – the real Bush legacy. … On Feb. 7, 2002, [George W. Bush] signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention – the one regarding the treatment of enemy prisoners taken in wartime – did not apply to members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. That signature led directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. It was his single most callous and despicable act. It stands at the heart of the national embarrassment that was his presidency.“

Many will avoid seeing film of the tortures or reading accounts of them, but I hope that no-one will forgot those who made it possible – because in the years to come, these people will show up again, all white-washed, and many will forget who they are, as they have with past villains. They will grow rich, of course, with memoirs and delivering lectures, etc., and will look like perfectly respectable human beings. But remember their names.

Remember that the August 2002 Justice Department “torture memo,” requested by the then White House Counsel, Alberto Gonzales, was written by John Yoo, a Justice Department lawyer, and Jay Bybee. The memo argued that as commander in chief, the president could order torture without fear of criminal liability, and that in any event the torture statute did not prohibit threats of death, as long as the threatened death was not imminent….” Involved all along were Douglas Feith, “a leading neoconservative and undersecretary of defense for policy;" William Haynes, Dept. of Defense General Counsel; David Addington (Dick Cheney’s legal counsel at the time); and Donald Rumsfeld.

As reported in David Cole’s “What to Do About the Torturers?” The New York Review of Books, 15 January 2009, “The tactics used by the CIA in its interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other ‘high-level’ detainess, including waterboarding, were specifically approved in the White House situation room by Vice President Dick Cheney, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft, National Security Adviser Condolezza Rice, and Secretary of State Colin Powell. Ashcroft is reported to have remarked that ‘history will not judge us kindly,’ …”

Remember the names of these villains, as later they will be presented as innocents.

As described in the Joe Klein article and in the documentary, “Torturing Democracy,” the program “called Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE), in which various forms of torture are simulated to prepare U.S. special-ops personnel for the sorts of treatment they might receive if they’re taken prisoner” was instead used as instruction on how to torture. “The Bush Administration decided to have SERE trainees instruct its interrogation teams on how to torture prisoners. … Prisoners held by the U.S. were tortured – first at Guantanamo Bay and later in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Armed Services Committee reported details of the techniques used on one prisoner”: Over fifty-four days, beginning in late 2002, Mohammed al-Qahtani [al-Khatani] was interrogated for eighteen to twenty hours each day, denied anything more than four hours sleep per night, threatened by military dogs, stripped naked, hooded, forced to wear women’s underwear on his head, humiliated sexually by female interrogators, made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks, subjected to extreme heat and cold and loud music and loud noises, doused with cold water, and injected with intravenous fluid and not allowed to go the bathroom so that he urinated on himself. And yet this does not convey the nature of the tortures nearly so well as the images shown in “Torturing Democracy.”

Let any make amends in any way they can, but do not forget the history of these citizens (Please add in a Comment the names of any I may have neglected to list):

George W. Bush, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Douglas Feith, William Haynes, David Addington, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George Tenet, John Ashcroft, Condolezza Rice, Colin Powell. They will all show up on your television as if reputable people – you know, like the villains of the Nixon and Reagan regimes.



[The sight of people wearing signboards, or costumes -- living advertisements -- is so reminiscent of the Great Depression, and looks like "slavery continued." But as this man said, "I need to help my children."]

Grand Lake Marquee, Post-Inauguration

Inauguration Day 2009

At 6:30 a.m. I was at friend Victor's place so that we could watch the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama. Then we took a walk around the Mission District. We stopped in at Carlo's Bar. Later, we sat in the playground across the street from Victor. A mother tried to pacify her child who was intent on getting ice cream from the ice cream cart that had already passed. We watched a young Palestinian-American from the neighborhood as he lovingly played with his little sister. (Watch this way, or 'VIEW ALL IMAGES.")

On Martin Luther King, Jr., Day

I bought a new T-shirt...

Hope

"Sen. Barack Obama is surrounded by supporters' hands...."

On the marquee of the local theater

Around Lake Merritt This Time of Year

To stroll around the bird sanctuary that is Lake Merritt is to enjoy the contorted movements of birds. But I did not realize until informed by Jacqueline Marie, a friend in the neighborhood, that our White American Pelican is not going to disappear. Jacqueline has let me know that he cannot fly, and was himself flown down from the Northwest to live in this refuge:

Matinee at the Symphony

11 January 2009

It is January in Oakland, and, for this native American, that signifies the Moon of the Dancing Gulls. As I walk along the edge of Lake Merritt on the way to BART, I see the seagulls dancing on the grass as they do at this time each year; they stamp with one leg, then the other, on the rain-wet earth, to make the worms lift their heads from the earth and be eaten.






Sunday Matinee at the Symphony.
The audience for a matinee, and especially for the lecture before the concert, has a uniform look that is elderly. Most decorative are the white-haired women: the curly white swansdown of the well-coiffeured; sometimes white clouds of hair; sometimes molded meringue. On the other extreme are heads where thin grey hairs look like old mopheads long in service. There are the pebbled stretches of men completely bald. Others have a yamulka of bare skin at the back of their heads (why yamulkas came to be, I suppose) where the hair is still black or brown; others, mostly bald, have a laurel wreath of hair. Here is a head where the hair is the straight, grey wing of a graceless, aging crow, indifferent to appearance. Some grey hair is short as a clipped poodle’s; with others, the short hair is so soft that it looks like matted cobwebs. While all the clothing on the elderly (I am one of that crowd) is dark, there in their midst is a bright red coat – a younger woman, yet her hairdo has the indifference of some of the elderly – long and brown, but pulled straight up to a drab brown clip; it looks like an imported palm tree with the branches still tied up.

Michal Tilson Thomas begins the concert with Copland’s “Music from the film OUR TOWN (1940).” I had never heard the music of Copland when I experienced certain feelings in a Hoosier village of 300 and then a small town of 5,000, but precisely those feelings were there again with me as the Copland piece unfolded – one of the mysteries of Copland’s art: It is uncanny how Copland captures the essence of small towns and out of the way places. It may have something to do with what MTT had to say between that piece and the Berg “Three Pieces for Orchestra (1915/1929)” that followed – that the Copland "sounds like familiar melodies.”
Oddly, while it is music that evokes it, what the Copland hedges for me with the music are the familiar silences of small towns and obscure places. He does not include the wail of a train going through town in the middle of the night, but something is there of the silence before and after that wail. Something too about coming to a break in the canopy of trees where you see the long, long way to a star, and in your head, you hear a note like the high A minor that passing train made, a tone that connects you to that star with a silver thread. It also evokes walking through empty Sunday morning streets, all the Christians gathered into the many chuches, and hearing from a distance the organ playing or the trance-like singing of soporific hymns, , while the maple leaves applaud silently above, nature celebrating that it is not in a church where the atmosphere is funereal. The music partakes of the silence of the view down long, empty tree-lined streets, where the music is all inside the heart experiencing the loneliness and obscurity of individual life in such a place, or just on the earth in general. But I think it is mostly the nesting of the wind in tree after tree high above the houses and over the lives of the people in a small town, like the spirit of sweet obscurity hovering over Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town.” The breeze is the music, or the music is the breeze that moves high up in the trees that, in their motion, comprise the green river that flows over the small town lives of the happily concealed.

Although a sharp contrast, I felt equally at home with the Berg pieces, but they describe an internal landscape, the modern mind. It carried you down a thousand strange streets just as we subjected to an endless variety of experiences in our own lives and in the lives we witness on the earth. At one point, the music lead me into a strange and ominous fantasy, but that kind of music is at home in most of us, and we do not fear it. It felt as strange as dream logic, and yet we are familiar with dream logic, so much so that one nearby member of the audience (we looked at each with amusement as we heard) was soon snoring softly. I understood what dream he was having. While MTT tried to prepare people for Berg's wild and “demanding” music, such music, in its daring, is also constantly surprising, and not foreign to this mind.

I was surprised that I had not noticed before how the woodwinds are like the conversationalists of the orchestra; located dead center on stage, they personalize the music with their individual voices, while other parts of the orchestra tend to be their chorus, the rest of the community adding to their comments. (This is a generalization that will not always apply!)

Finally, Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 was a familiar and comfortable pleasure, of course. What is most remarkable to me about Brahms is that he, more than any other, I think, writes music that makes the orchestra “breathe.” More than going for any special effect or startling impression, the orchestra, with his music, seems an organic being breathing on the stage, a special quiet miracle.

The " 'Immature' Black Crowned Night Heron"

"Immature" Black Crowned Night Heron -- and one mature Black Crowned Night Heron. "VIEW ALL IMAGES":

B E A U T Y ? ?

On Mission Street. You may want to click 'VIEW ALL IMAGES."

The Death of Bob Wilkins

I had read recently that Bob Wilkins, Oakland KTVU host of late-night horror films, "Creature Features," in the 1970s was living in Reno now and suffering the effects of Alzheimer's. In 10 January 2009 editions of the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle are accounts of his death. At my age, 72, the people I would like to advise about Bob's death are either dead themselves, or I have lost contact with them. The blog Scott Moon has maintained on Wilkins www.bobwilkins.net has a good slide show of the "look" of Bob Wilkins. I sent Moon these thoughts:

For my last two years at Indiana University, Bob and I were constant companions, most frequently having a beer in one Bloomington, Indiana, bar or another (sometimes in a wonderful stonecutters' bar where the music was great and the night usually ended with a drunken brawl -- where everyone was too drunk to land a real punch). I had the delight of hearing Bob's humorous take on the general population passing by wherever we were, as well as hearing about his dreams for being a professional comedian. He gave me an assortment of short stories (and I mean "short," of paragraph length) -- beautifully absurd pieces, and I sent them to him many years ago in case he had not kept copies. I hope he did further writing in that vein after he left TV, while continuing before and after as a very successful advertising man, his talents there described in the obituary articles.

It is fun, on the slide show on his website, to see Bob at the age when I knew him. Barely surviving when I first came to San Francisco, then in the Army for two years, then back to the low-paying jobs a poet takes, I did not have a television set until around age 33, so I was unaware that Bob Wilkins was in the Bay Area, and hosting horror films on TV, but I was with a group of people one night who were describing the TV host for late night horror films, and from the way they described him, fascinated with him, I said, "Is his name Bob Wilkins?!" And they were talking about Bob.

When I realized that Bob was in the Bay Area, I saw that it was unlikely that an impoverished gay poet could renew the friendship with Bob, especially as Bob never seemed to understand non-success. (In college it was the classic Lit Major/Business Major friendship -- a friendly banter). Bob knew how to make money and he was taking care of business like any grown-up, especially as he had become a family man. I recall in college how he told me that while in a sanitarium, recovering from TB, he started following the stock page, then investing in stocks, and he left the sanitarium with enough money to buy his folks a house and to put himself through college. Bob described the tedium of having to lie still for months and how that led him to the small physical exertion of watching stocks rise and fall. He told me how a man in the next room received visitors one day who brought him two or three oranges that he placed on his window sill. Perhaps my memory dramatizes when I recall Bob saying that he heard the man fall in the next room. In any case, within hours after the man's visitors left, the man was dead. Bob, himself feeling the shadow of his own possible death, said how strange it felt to see those oranges, so vibrant, almost seeming to glow in the sunlight on the man's window sill, while the man lay dead.
For me, of course, the memory is of something about Bob that I can only describe as "silky" -- the apparently thread-like texture of his blond hair, the thin hands that he moved with a sort of surgeon-like delicacy, and his thin pursed lips that delivered his incisive observations. I am not sure that I missed the accuracy of his wit as I watched him skewer people with a description -- but that is the way of a lot of comedians, I believe, almost their duty to puncture illusions.

I suppose that somewhere in my old cardboard boxes I may have accounts of times with Bob Wilkins, but I think I could not find them in time for them to be of any importance to his family. I certainly remember many incidents and moments. I wish Bob could have fulfilled his original wish to be a sort of buttoned down Bob Newhart kind of comedian -- He certainly had the talent, and people would have taken to him, I thought, as I know I found him delightful. I notice that the Oakland obituary by Pat Craig mentions Bob's "fairly jaundiced view" of his horror film presentations. Bob's view was fairly jaundiced about everything when I knew him! I will never forget our first encounter when mutual friends thought we should meet. Bob was speaking in favor of some African-American celebrity -- Nancy Wilson, I think -- I don't remember the particulars but he seemed to feel such a particular passion about the subject that I asked, "Why is this so important to you?" Without a second's hesitation, pale white Bob said, "Because I'm Black."

Although our friendship was at the end of the 1950s, I remember Bob with genuine love; he was very important in my life during my last two years in college, and I hope that he had years of happiness and that his final years were not too difficult. Peace and love to his family.

Justin Berton, Chronicle Staff Writer, "Bob Wilkins -- host of KTVU's 'Creature Features'"
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2009/01/09/BAQS15665F.DTL

Pat Craig, "Former late-night TV host dead at age 76"
http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_11416629?source=email

Outgoing S.F. Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman and Gaza

Outgoing Poet Laureate, Jewish-American radical, Jack Hirschman delivers his angry verse about Gaza in the Civic Center, San Francisco; then downtown; then the Castro District.... Hit VIEW ALL IMAGES:

Slipping Past Hibernal Solstice

Slipping Past Hibernal Solstice

The quietude of winter mosses the soul
(a warm home in a hollow log). The low
wind in a velvet tone slides along the satin snow.

The cherry nose of our deity drops below the brink
of earth as he ducks away from us to drink
in darker lands, staining our white fields pink

as he goes. Bearing World Hearth away for a while,
he allows bright snow to fly and children to smile;
before spring’s warm kisses, this world without guile.

- James McColley Eilers (copyright 2008)

Winter Solstice

As usual, Martha and Thom's Solstice Party was full of wonderful humans, ending with the beauty of Toby Blome playing this instrument (I forget its name -- somehow referring to keys protruding from it -- or its origin -- Swedish?)


Elisa Welsh, who plays a stringed instrument in her public gigs, accompanied Toby on her penny flute...


so that could not help dancing.