The Arrogant Emu

The most adorable picture in the history of the world.

Look, I know what you’re thinking, and once I thought as you did. Who wants to look at pictures of other people’s babies? Doting grandparents, dotty officefathers, with images of their progeny plastered on their walls and foisted on their visitors - good for you, said I in my heart, you are associated with a tiny human. Small, squashy, inarticulate, not really distinguishable from all the other ones. Yee for you. But now I understand them - they are simply performing the rightful human office of sharing good things with others, and what could be a better thing than the most adorable baby in the world?

I was thinking about babies the other day. The smile of an infant who has just learned to smile is practically heartbreaking; why is that? Is this because the smile is the first time that the child can not only express, but communicate its happiness? It figures out how to communicate unhappiness pretty goshdarn quick, but happiness takes a while longer. Or it because of the purity of just about any emotion expressed by a three-month-old? Sure, you’ll be a deeper and more complex person twenty years from now, with increased capacity for comprehension and for response.  But can you, twenty years from now, be purely and simply happy with your whole heart?*  No, it’s all downhill from three months old.

*The sad thing is that twenty years from now, being tired and hungry will still make you cranky and hard to deal with.

The future gets less retro all the time; this was written in 1933, I believe.  Stephen Vincent Benet, everyone.

Metropolitan Nightmare

It rained a lot that spring. You woke in the morning
And saw the sky still clouded, the streets still wet,
But nobody noticed so much, except the taxis
And the people who parade. You don’t, in a city.
The parks got very green. All the trees were green
Far into July and August, heavy with leaf,
Heavy with leaf and the long roots boring and spreading,
But nobody noticed that but the city gardeners
And they don’t talk.
Oh, on Sundays, perhaps you’d notice:
Walking through certain blocks, by the shut, proud houses
With the windows boarded, the people gone away,
You’d suddenly see the queerest small shoots of green
Poking through cracks and crevices in the stone
And a bird-sown flower, red on a balcony,
But then you made jokes about grass growing in the streets
And politics and grass-roots - and there were songs
And gags and a musical show called ”Hot and Wet.”
It made a good box for the papers. When the flamingo
Flew into a meeting of the Board of Estimate,
The new mayor acted at once and called the photographers.
When the first green creeper crawled upon Brooklyn Bridge,
They thought it was ornamental. They let it stay.

That was the year the termites came to New York
And they don’t do well in cold climates– but listen, Joe,
They’re only ants, and ants are nothing but insects.
It was funny and yet rather wistful, in a way
(As Heywood Broun pointed out in the World-Telegram)
To think of them looking for wood in a steel city.
It made you feel about life. It was too divine.
There were funny pictures by all the smart, funny artists
And Macy’s ran a terribly clever ad:
“The Widow’s Termite” or something.
There was no
Disturbance. Even the Communists didn’t protest
And say they were Morgan hirelings. It was too hot,
Too hot to protest, too hot to get excited,
An even African heat, lush, fertile and steamy,
That soaked into bone and mind and never once broke.
The warm rain fell in fierce showers and ceased and fell.
Pretty soon you got used to its always being that way.

You got used to the changed rhythm, the altered beat,
To people walking slower, to the whole bright
Fierce pulse of the city slowing, to men in shorts,
To the new sun-helmets from Best’s and the cop’s white uniforms,
And the long noon-rest in the offices, everywhere.
It wasn’t a plan or anything. It just happened.
The fingers tapped slower, the office-boys
Dozed on their benches, the bookkeeper yawned at his desk.
The A.T.&T. was the first to change the shifts
And establish an official siesta-room;
But they were always efficient. Mostly it just
Happened like sleep itself, like a tropic sleep,
Till even the Thirties were deserted at noon
Except for a few tourists and one damp cop.
They ran boats to see the big lilies on the North River
But it was only the tourists who really noticed
The flocks of rose-and-green parrots and parakeets
Nesting in the stone crannies of the Cathedral.
The rest of us had forgotten when they first came.

There wasn’t any real change, it was just a heat spell,
A rain spell, a funny summer, a weather-man’s joke,
In spite of the geraniums three feet high
In the tin-can gardens of Hester and Desbrosses.
New York was New York. It couldn’t turn inside out.
When they got the news from Woods Hole about the Gulf Stream,
The Times ran a adequate story.
But nobody reads those stories but science-cranks.

Until, one day, a somnolent city-editor
Gave a new cub the termite yarn to break his teeth on.
The cub was just down from Vermont, so he took his time.
He was serious about it. He went around.
He read all about termites in the Public Library
And it made him sore when they fired him.
So, one evening,
Talking with an old watchman, beside the first
Raw girders of the new Planetopolis Building
(Ten thousand brine-cooled offices, each with shower)
He saw a dark line creeping across the rubble
And turned a flashlight on it.
“Say, buddy,” he said,
“You’d better look out for those ants. They eat wood, you know,
They’ll have your shack down in no time.”
The watchman spat.
“Oh, they’ve quit eating wood,” he said, in a casual voice,
“I thought everybody knew that.”
–And, reaching down,
He pried from the insect’s jaws the bright crumb of steel.

Since y’all have got me thinking about the Puritans and the mixed bag of a legacy they’ve left us, now’s as good a time as any to link to this, slacktivist’s epic deconstruction of Left Behind. It begins here, and it’s well worth it. Worth it? you say, glancing at the dates of the previous entry. How on earth can spending five years on those things be worth it in the slightest? If a book’s bad, surely five minutes suffices for the summary, and ongoing criticism is overkill, or worse, an excuse to show off how clever you are.

It’s worth it because in the analysis Fred turns the books into a kind of accidental Screwtape Letters, an inverted plea for reason, imagination, and good writing. In excoriating their failures - bad theology, bad morals, an astonishing blindness to political realities, historical records, and English prose - the author illuminates the wider world. And the analysis begins in righteous wrath, to be sure, but amid the horror and the anger are flashes of compassion.

The books have always exercised a perverse fascination for me, and reading slacktivist I begin to understand why. They are the visible evidence of the spectre that haunts American Christianity: the mixture of cultural belligerence and craven superstition that is what you get when you have no healthy outlet for paganism. I’d always thought they were bad books and based on the theological equivalent of an urban legend, but it wasn’t until I read the one that involves the actual return of Christ that they turned from bad to Bad, from merely incompetent to active instruments of detriment.

(My other nomination for Worst Book in the World, by the way, is this.)

I am at that stage in my life, it seems, where I am bound to receive a lot of mail for other people. Mobile and living in housing for mobile people, I have seen mail for at least six other names come to this address. Usually they are not the kinds of missives from which one can glean much as to your ghost-lodgers character: packets of generic coupons, misplaced DMV missives - but the other day I received something truly remarkable.

“Your briefcase or beachbag,” proclaimed the flyer, “a PURITAN PAPERBACK is a perfect fit this summer.” No, this is not a line of romance novels; when they say “Puritan Paperback” they are actually talking about, um, Puritans. Seriously. Among their suggestions: “Acceptable Sacrifice, Bunyan, $8″, “Mortification of Sin, Owen, $9″, and “Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices, Brooks, $9″.

Now, I have a great deal of fellow-feeling for anyone practicing a faith known to most as a historic curiosity. Still, of all the holdovers to revive, Puritanism? I may have grown up one town over from Cromwell, but I was under the impression that Puritanism in America has been pretty thoroughly transmuted into Congregationalism. But no, the Puritans are (or were) alive and well, and living (to judge by this mailing) in my house.

This one is for Martin.

Passing a good idea around (From Mirabai):

1. You guys tell me what kind of music you want.

I can’t make the song permanently available. Unless the song in question is already available on the band’s website (in which case, I’ll provide a link to their site instead of posting an mp3), I’ll be posting them on muxtape. 

This is what I get for capitulating to the patriarchy!

I opened my eyes.  It was 5:53.  Enough time to close them again, not enough time to really sink into sleep, which was what I wanted to do.  Someone presented me with a folded slip of paper.  I unfolded it, there were three headings: “Benign” “Region” and “Option”.  It was describing my alternatives.  None of them seemed really pleasant, the best of them seemed to be the one where I was a hostage in a Middle Eastern country.  “It’s still better than getting up for work,” I thought to myself.  “How glad I am that this is an option!”  Then my alarm went off.

Some notes:
This is a writing exercise, unrefined and unedited; normally not the kind of thing one would inflict on one’s public, but hey, this is a blog, and anyone who reads it is inflicting it on themselves. The challenge is to write a poem with one stanza per metro stop on my morning commute. Once you hit the next stop, no matter where you are, you have to finish that stanza and start the next. If I’d had the brains that God gave a beaver, I would have noted the times of my rail journey, but let us say for the sake of generality that it begins at 6:41 and ends at 7:56

Braddock Road
Those indirect mornings I remember in early Spain
Before the sun had seared away the mist,
The swallows swooping; leaning out over stone walls
to look across the fields.
The birds wheel calling through the rain-shelter ribs
And over cold stone in the morning light diffuse
I set my elbows, leaning, looking out over the field
Where the school busses sleep, and the coaches
Call their sleepy gods to rise.

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport
The sun poked me in the eye like a Stooge
hiding behind the treeline, behind the honeycomb airport
We stop, we stutter, step back, step back,
Allow the doors to close.
The planes’ fins poke above the rim of the on-ramp
little sharks all in a row.

Crystal City
Farewell the light, now morning, fare thee well!
And who, beneath the earth, could bear to know
If the city sitting above us was crystal in truth?

Pentagon City
There he stands, slouched face over slouched coat
His pants a decorous inch down over his shoes
Hand in his pocket, hand on the moveless bar
Unmoving as a tombstone, facing the wrong way
the doors swish open behind, he is unmoved.
He knows when his freedom will come.

Pentagon
Come buy, come buy,
Tanks and helicopters
Fresh-welded learjets
Data and intelligence
Laptops and choppers
Taste them and try.
We leap like airplanes, up, out, and over the river
The world was washed clean by the rain, but this is the rain’s mop-bucket.
Red-banded newsweeks, square gray express
library books that shimmer, flapping printed reports

L’Enfant Plaza
Fold into bags, now the reshuffle begins!
This (we know) the city, there above us
people are moving on their own power, the shoes patter and knock
Against concrete and metal.

Archives/Navy Memorial
The silent circular vault; I somehow believe
it continues like this even into the tunnels
only too dark to see. What architects are these?
What is there to remember in always sp

Gallery Place/Chinatown
The train hisses like something out of Star Wars
and from the open hatch pour forth the legions
(in goose-step plus a million years of entropy)
We jiggle into patterns now,
and for a moment almost attain to ants.

Metro Center
Oh the dull suppressed astonishment on dozens of weary faces
that they, even they, should be here now with you!
Oh the sour holiness of the great morning liturgy
offered up from a thousand weary feet!

Farragut North
They thin and now will thin, we pass the places
that one goes to in fare of the place one comes from.

Dupont Circle
whose hand, whose mind, what contractor group or committee
hid a fragment of grace in those staircases
flanking the tracks? Who moved by mercy or
remembering childhood stacked the up-and-down
behind each other like that? Or was it like most
our good deeds, largely accidental?

Woodley Park/Zoo/Adams Morgan
Not dimpled now, the vault sweeps upward un[???illegible]
striated by lines. There was someone who built these roads.
Of the shoes that now pound them, the wheels that whirl down the rails

Cleveland Park
O earth there is beyond these walls
And earth between the vault and sky.
Earth is coming through the walls
Marring the smooth face of your concrete
Earth shall have you all again.

Van Ness
The sunken lamps flash announcing our arrival
I like that; as if each coming were special
hailing some mighty ruler. Stand up, ye people
draw back in dread, your king is coming through!
(The train said whom?)
I can’t tell how far this is [???]ing

Tenleytown/AU
I am drunk with exhaustion.
I am drunk with lack of sleep.
Hangover and intoxication at once.
How I long to put my head against the window
and close my eye. Sweet mother metro
rock me to sleep. But ah, not home you carry me tonight
(to-morn? It’s light somewhere.)

Friendship Heights
The height of friendship (greater hath no man)
are extremist dial whiskey penult
staple dace redact entire nervth shore
clank tap innumit restive alpicious

Bethesda
There are lights with the train and without
a grid over lights set deep down in the farthest
side. If I do not rest a minute, dear God, a minute,
My words will rebel again, will rise and throw me off.

Medical Center
Grim indeed as a hospital the howling station
For people making agian the long commute
To end from hearth
Never suffered [illegible]

Maybe I’ll try it again sometime going the other way; I bet it won’t have a bit where I actually fall asleep while writing, though I would not be surprised. I fell asleep twice on the metro last night and missed my stop both times.

I had thought out this post, and then I noticed that I wasn’t the only one posting about pet peeves, so now I feel partly justified and partly pre-empted.  Anyway, this isn’t a list, but more of a small cloud of interrelated things that all annoy me.

People who say “I can’t eat that” when they don’t have actual medical, ideological, or religious proscriptions.   You can eat it, you just don’t want to.

People who dismiss - well anything, really - by saying “I’m really choosy.”  If someone has offered you something and you don’t want to accept, it’s downright insulting to say “I’m really choosy”.  You’re implying that you have higher standards than other people - though of course your interlocutor could not be expected to know that - and that whatever you’re being offered simply doesn’t measure up.  And you might, and it might not, but that’s a remarkably rude thing to say.

Tangent to these peeves: while my mother and I were travelling in Benin, I found in the back of our hired car a sun-worn French Playboy magazine.  Reading through the article in which six women describe the most effective techniques to seduce them, I came across a question that was something like “What is the importance of food?” Five out of the six agreed that food was very important - not just that the man should know how to cook and make them nice dinners, but that a man who does not enjoy food is not attractive.  It makes sense. Who wants to be seduced by someone who can’t even take pleasure in something as basic as eating?