Primitive Information

Walk out front: What’s
the racket? Hands

on hips, dog
at heels, now cat,

back porch,
quiet.

*

House’s quiet. Dinner sinks in.
Rustle of paper. Wonder where
wife, dog, cat have been

*

Last night woke up to freeway
cars having driven
(dreamed) and listened

*

Dark soon. Do you expect me to
get upset, too? Wall clock bongs on
half hour,
let’s eat

*

Well, what
faces what? Dark catches up to
day’s light. Heart rate
steady, but dog’s not been
itself, lately

*

My mouth on the tip of
whatever you put there,

darling. Hold it steady,
don’t want to know where
it’s going

*

roast chicken
waits in kitchen.
coolant and unused fluid
taken from trunk before
car got towed

*

on the radio the man said
“surge” is not a good word
for what we’re trying
to do

*

dinner’s an onion
boiled in a pot with
rice and peas, whatever’s
left over from
last night’s meal

*

Well, we can have that
anytime. The prep time’s
practically nil, just chop
wash and serve
lettuce and dressing, apple
tomato with seeds on top

*

four rooms, and each a door
to the other, go back through the house
to cat, wife, mother

*

O to the white
wet heat the season
of madness he sat
writing checks. Nobody
bothered to look for Beatrice
wherever she went

Tags: Workbook by dhadbawnik
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Today’s Lord Byron’s birthday, as noted on Writer’s Almanac this morning on NPR. I hadn’t been a big fan of Byron — biased against him by his rivalry with Keats — until I read a good deal of his work last year in a class on the Romantics. There I was struck by Byron’s legendary humor, but also the stunning versatility of his poetic gift; he could and did shift effortlessly between swift-moving narrative, extended exphrasis, philosophical ponderings, and (perhaps most difficult) simple, beautiful lyrics, such as the following:

SO WE’LL GO NO MORE A ROVING

So we’ll go no more a roving
so late into the night
Though the heart be still as loving
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears the sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And Love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.

—which the host of the musical program after Writer’s Almanac played two different versions of set to music, including a really gorgeous one by Leonard Cohen that I hadn’t heard before. Basically, as I immerse myself in questions of post-modernity, “master narratives,” and “simulacra,” as well as plow through Dante’s world for my current classes, it’s fun to think back on the “diabolical Lord” who had his own problems dealing with his place in the modern world, such as it was. To wit, my favorite passage from Byron, towards the end of the 3rd Canto of Childe Harold:

CXIV

I have not loved the world, nor the world me, –
But let us part fair foes; I do believe,
Though I have found them not, that there may be
Words which are things, — hopes which will not deceive,
And virtues which are merciful, nor weave
Snares for the failing: I would also deem
O’er others’ griefs that some sincerely grieve;
That two, or one, are almost what they seem,
That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream.

—and I seem to remember excitedly discussing this very stanza with my future wife our first night out together…

p.s.: I’ve posted the first four chapters of my nanowrimo novel, The Rose Variations, on some password-protected pages on this blog. The link to them is off to the right at the top of the sidebar. I’m looking for feedback, suggestions and whatnot, so if you’re interested in taking a look, let me know and I’ll send you the password. I’ll be posting more, and cleaning up the wonky formatting of the chapters, as time allows.

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Well, more like sleet. Cooped up here for the past few days in a row, with most things closed in San Marcos (including the University, which was supposed to begin classes today), I decided to go out for a little run. First, we had the flood last weekend, which submerged our backyard, got into our shed — lapping the sides of our washer and dryer, which are now up on cinderblocks — and came through our roof, just a little. The kind of weather you might expect in Dante’s Hell, which I’ve been reading for an upcoming grad. class at TSU — the standard Mandelbaum translation side-by-side with the hilarious, contemporary, “beat” translation by Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders.

It wasn’t quite this nasty out, but… (copyright Sandow Birk)

Once I got out there it wasn’t so bad. A little bit rough at first, frozen on the foot-bridges that go over the river, but I mostly stuck to the trails which were hard and damp in spots but definitely runnable.

Trying to open the frozen-shut mailbox

Anyhoo, it made me think about other arduous runs that I’ve gone on over the years. Most of them are associated with marathon training — which is one of the reasons I don’t run marathons anymore. Doesn’t matter if it’s raining, snowing, or sweltering hot, or if you’ve got a cold; you have to go out on your training runs. One year I was training for the Austin marathon, which is in February, but I had driven home to Detroit for the holidays. There was an 18-mile training run I was supposed to do, and it was snowing outside. I bundled up and ran out in the snow. First I went to my old high school, found a way onto the track, and did some laps there. Then I just cut through some suburbs and kept going. It actually wasn’t so bad. The snow had been around for a while and most people there shovel their walks and drives and the roads are salted, and snow is not hard to run on as long as it’s not frozen solid. Unfortunately, I bonked out somewhere around 17 or 18 mile road, and had to walk/run back home in the cold.

Years later I trained for the marathon again, this time while living in San Francisco. For the long runs I used to set out from the Mission and run downtown to the Bay Bridge, up the Embarcadero to Fisherman’s Wharf and through the Marina to the Golden Gate Bridge, across the bridge and back, down the Presidio to the Richmond District, through Golden Gate Park, back down through the Haight to the Mission again. What a great run that was! Usually the worst part was coming down off the bridge knowing I still had about an hour to go. There were these shrubs that grew in the median of the Presidio as I made my way into the park, and I swear to God they smelled like caramel. I’d get so hungry I was ready to stop and eat them. I’d get home and collapse and drink about half a gallon of orange juice, and feel like someone had hit my legs up and down with a ballpeen hammer.

But that was a better feeling than, after the marathon, when I tried that run again and my knee tightened up and I had to stop with about five miles to go and walk home. Then I had tendonitis off and on for several years, and running was impossible for a long time. Which is another reason I don’t run marathons anymore. The longest run I’ve done in the past five years is probably 10 miles or so. But I feel lucky to be able to run at all.

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My wife urged me to write about the book I just finished reading — devouring is more like it — The Outlaw Sea by William Langewiesche.

Especially poignant in the wake (so to speak) of the recent ferry sinking near Indonesia, in which about 400 people died, the rest found on life rafts up to 200 miles away, or on an oil rig(!), after several days in the open sea.

The book reads like a thriller, with harrowing descriptions of shipwrecks, especially that of The Estonia, a ferry ship that sank in the Baltic Sea on its way to Sweden in September 1994. About 800 died in that wreck, and a little over 100 survived. The ship went down so fast in the middle of the night — probably due to an old, damaged front loading dock that came open and gulped sea water into the lower decks — that those who stopped to throw some clothes on never made it out. The author pieces together testimony from survivors to describe a hellish scene of people fighting for life jackets, overcrowding the few rafts they were able to launch, then getting washed off of them by 20- to 30-foot waves, before the lucky few got rescued. There are also stories of large freighter wrecks, much more common but less publicized because those ships are manned by 15-25 crewmembers, who come largely from Third-World countries that nobody cares about, and the even more common (and incredibly brazen) acts of modern-day piracy.

But what makes the book so great is that Langewiesche goes into great detail describing what’s so terribly wrong with the worldwide shipping industry that makes these catastrophes not only likely, but inevitable. Ships that are much too old to be in use, like The Estonia (and most of the freighter fleet); labyrinthine and ill-enforced international shipping laws that allow such dangerous vessels to keep sailing; the “flag of convenience” practice which allows a ship built in China to be owned by a nebulous corporation in Japan but fly the flag of Malta (or Burma or the Bahamas or…) in order to skirt even more laws and shield everyone from responsibility in the event of disaster.

The author ends the book with an especially horrifying look at what happens to ships that finally do get retired. Basically, they get sold for scrap. Because the practice has such a high overhead cost and a narrow profit margin, the business has bounced around from one Third-World country to the next, with disastrous results for the environment. Workers are paid peanuts to dismantle ships full of oils and toxins, beaches are destroyed, air and water quality ruined. Just check out this brief article on India’s Alang beach, the number-one ship-breaking center in the world.

* * *

O captain my captain

On the lighter side of things, I wanted to give one final shout-out to my man Steve Yzerman, whose number was just retired by the Red Wings. Yzerman is synonymous to me with hockey in Detroit, and I feel very lucky to have gotten to see him play for so many years in his prime, when my buddy Ron and I had season tickets to watch the Wings at the Joe. The Captain! He’s one of those special players who just always gave it his all, spectacular at times (who can forget his 65-goal, 155-point season in ‘88-’89?), consistent (20 years as team captain), and always humble. Just read this article about his relationship with a special fan for more about that. I usually don’t go in for this kind of sports-hero stuff, but Yzerman’s the real deal. Thanks, Mr. Y.

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