Marriage or Don't-Call-It-Marriage?

Tuesday the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8, deciding that an amendment to the California constitution approved in the last election makes the word "marriage" off limits to same sex couples. However, the court seems also to have decided that same sex couples cannot be denied equal protection of the laws, thus the don't-call-it-marriages (in California currently it's Domestic Partnership?) must be precisely the same as dual-sex "marriage" (minus the name).

Today I posted a diary at DailyKos:

Don't like "Marriage"? Here's your chance!

Which dual-sex couples are going to challenge their exclusion from Domestic Partnership in California?

The California Supreme Court just ruled that same sex couples are entitled to all the rights of marriage but for the word. If we are all now equal, what is a Domestic Partnership? (In other jurisdictions the don’t-call-it-marriage equivalent is termed Civil Unions. In California it’s domestic partnership.)

There are many Kossacks who demand the government get out of the marriage business. At least, say they, the government should have all the rights of marriage available under a different name. According to the California Supreme Court, now it does (or must?). At this time you can’t file a domestic partnership if you are a dual-sex couple*.

So you’re a young het couple who doesn’t think the government should be using a loaded religious word like “marriage”, right? Here’s your opportunity to get don’t-call-it-married, ie., Domestic Partnered. In the eyes of the state (the California Supreme Court, anyway) a domestic partnership and a marriage are identical. What’s the justification for denying a het couple freedom from the word “marriage”, just like their gay brothers & lesbian sisters?

Looking down the road a bit, you’re safely dp’d, now you can ask the feds to recognize your Domestic Partnership as a Marriage. After all, it’s just a name. The California Supreme Court says there isn’t (or must not be) any difference whatsoever. Why shouldn’t the federal government recognize a het domestic partnership as marriage? Is there an argument against it?

The more people choose against “marriage” and for marriage-by-another-name the less power the word “marriage” will have? Isn’t that the golden key to this locked up argument? That’s the assertion I keep hearing. Here is your opportunity to test it! Who will step up?

(By the way, can anybody source the “18,000 same sex marriages” figure? I can’t seem to find the authority.)

*There is an exception to the current het exclusion to Domestic Partnership. If you are over 62 you can get dp’d because the federal government won’t consider you married, thus you won’t lose benefits – many of the widowed old rely on pension benefits from their dead spouse, benefits which evaporate upon remarriage. It’s another issue but WTF? Why do you lose pension benefits?

B.H. Fairchild v. David Mills

today’s Poetry Daily poem battles today’s Verse Daily poem:


My memory crowds weeds and flowers onto its shoulders
so the old gray guy & I, shambling in our shackles,
dust in our drawers, and darkness on our scythes,
sandwiches of mincemeat, cockleshell and inebriation
in our iron pocketbooks, our boss’s jaundiced eye

a yellow pall so vile you must’ve puked it out
on the mad ball’s wilful architecture last night late, or maybe
it’s the stout shit the Portuguese left spinning in the bowl
still spinning with each piss swipe, or perhaps
despair in orbit, stripped of ghost, ready to shoulder

harmattan messages. Who knows! Do you know?
Spit! Where was I? Shuffling in chains under a looking
glass sky, water aching from my skin canteen,
poor wounded fruit, weeds all around me like letters
from collectors asking politely, like letters lizards

ape, contorted in sun-smashed meaning, a sea
of slippery clouds and cutting jokes, gold and dull
as fishermen missing their yanks and sighing with
enemy love, the drowned tears diligently drifting
out of childish knots, harried by ferries fetching ancient

promises for fresh plantation and quick twilight.
Wasn’t I going to cut something with this black blade?
Why’s it a spoon now, its yellow stripe a property line
divvying snowing from skipping, sleeping from rowing.

Talking to God

Hello, God?

Yes?

Just making sure you’re there.

Always.

Yeah. Always. Then why don’t you ever talk to me?

What is this?

This? This is an interview. You never just talk to me. You know: God here. Loving you. Nearby if you need me.

What you said.

Gah!

God here. Loving you. Nearby if you need me.

You just said that cuz I said you never said it.

Is this an argument?

Is it?

What is it you would like?

Why do I feel shitty? I would like not to feel shitty. I want just to feel good and happy and content and easy.

You feel that sometimes.

Not very often! I feel shitty way lots more than that other stuff.

Oh.

So. I’m appealing to you, oh Author of the Universe, All Powerful, Omnipresent, help me out here.

No.

No? Fuck you! You can do anything! Anything! And you don’t want to allow me a smidgen of good feeling?

OK. If you insist. Peace.

Huh? I don’t feel any better.

No? Let me try again.

It’s not working.

Oh? One more try.

… Yes? … This is just frustrating.

That’s not a good emotion?

I’m asking you to make me feel better and you’re making me feel frustrated?

I tried. What more can I do?

You’re not God! If you were God you could fucking do anything! My happiness could effected without the slightest effort.

I see.

Is God out there? Helllloooooooo!

What is it?

Are you God?

As ever.

Are you the same guy who’s been yanking my chain, claiming he can help me out with my mood then doing nothing? Or are you really God, the Author of the Universe, etc?

Both.

Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!

Do you feel better?

No!

Come on. You know you feel a teensy bit better. I can tell.

Don’t you have a volcano to belch?

NaPoWriMo Project Thoughts, part 5

I didn’t expect any reaction. I get so few comments on this blog. But, you now, I’m ever hopeful! No good at publicizing myself or my poems but it’d be nice if somebody read!

When I see other people answer the question: Why Do You Write? – they usually say something about how people reading them gives them incentive. Well. People don’t read me. (Except, OK, two or three people. I know, it’s like when someone walks into a concert hall and looks around and there are five or six seats taken and the person who just walked in says, “Nobody’s here!”) So I’ve gotten accustomed to putting a bunch of effort into writing that, so far as I can tell, goes unnoticed. Why would my April project be any different?

I did wonder if using the names of the people killed would make LuvSet show up in searches for those people. I didn’t think LuvSet had a high enough profile to bring attention, though. And I was right. For 29 out of 30 days, that is. Where else you gonna get a prediction 97% accurate?

During the month, the site’s stats bounced around as the search engines briefly brought visitors looking for information about person X or Y or Z. Just about all these visitors quickly moved on. K says the poems didn’t strike him as much different from a news report. They were all pretty bare.

So what about that one day somebody noticed? On April 2nd I edited down a news item about an elderly man strangling his ex-wife. I got two comments – both hating on the piece. One scolded me for not knowing whether the dead woman “loved flowers, or that she loved babies, or that she gave her whole heart to her family.”

I didn’t know anything about the dead woman. That was so. I didn’t know anything about any of the people I was writing about. Learning biographies was not part of the project.

This commenter accused me of making the dead woman “an irreverency.” I hadn’t thought of the series as irreverent, but rather a form of prayer. A meditation on transience. A daily pause to reflect on unexpected death.

Should I have used the real names? If I hadn’t I doubt anyone would have found their way to LuvSet looking to find out about the stories I appropriated. It’s not like I was looking to build an audience that way, anyhow. It did make me uncomfortable – the thought that someone might come across a loved one’s name in this peculiar context. I figured I’d let that play out, though. Probably nobody would, right?

I don’t know whether the commenter knew the dead woman. She doesn’t say. She’s offended for the dead woman or for her relatives or for the very idea of talking about this woman in this manner. Something like that.

A day or two later another commenter showed up, somebody claiming expertise in Death. Her scolding was more sophisticated than commenter #1 and more vicious (& started out with an hors d’oeuvre of self-promotion). Commenter #2 called me (in a particularly clumsy coinage) a “Death Vulture” and accused me of “prey[ing] on celebrity … for personal financial gain.” As she herself quickly acknowledged, there isn’t any money in poetry blogs so the “financial gain” accusation had no traction. And far as I could tell the only celebrity the dead woman had was conferred by the sensational nature of her death – that is, that she was an old woman strangled to death by an old man. The police lieutenant said such a death was “somewhat unusual.” So my exploiting her celebrity? Seems a bit of a stretch.

On the other hand, it hardly came as a surprise that some people were upset by a death. Nor did it surprise that those people would scold me. Commenter #2 did something commenter #1 hadn’t. Commenter #2 (after slagging me) asked me to remove the post.

I didn’t remove the post but I redacted the names? I took out the names because the names were bringing a lot of visitors and I decided LuvSet being a destination for people looking for information about this killing was not what I wanted. I may return the names to the poem in another version. I may redact all the names in the series. We’ll see.

Don L. Emblen, 1918 – 2009

My English teacher from Santa Rosa Junior College died last month. “Of heart failure on April 24th, at the age of 90,” says the latest issue of The Reader’s Rejoinder, a monthly newsletter/zine Don has been putting together for about the last 20 years. He added me to the mailing list a couple years ago after he proposed doing a chapbook for me on the fine letterpress he kept in his garage-studio. I was delighted. The chapbook never happened, either because he wasn’t able to get to it, or because I was a lousy correspondent (I blame myself).

Friends are going to publish one more issue of The Rejoinder, a memorial to Don.

Visit an earlier post to see Don Emblen at Petaluma Poetry Walk 2006

NaPoWriMo Project Thoughts, part 4

What can I say about death? Nothing new, I’m sure.

Does one have to say something new in order to have justification for saying anything? It’s a cultural thing. Originality just messes up the great patterns handed down from wiser ancestors. Some would say.

I don’t know. Does everybody get a unique life, let alone a special death? Are we archetypes recapitulating ageless patterns? If we think we’re doing something new, we’re fooling ourselves?

Considering that rockets don’t go to the moon every year and when I was a kid old ladies weren’t flipping open their Star Trek communicator-look-alikes to make sure the nephew was coming by to switch out all the light bulbs to those energy saving compact flourescents, I guess everything doesn’t repeat itself exactly as it always has. Those thousands of years of hunting-gathering? They probably were pretty uniform - from the perspective of living memory, anyway.

So what’s news? That an elderly man strangled his ex-wife? That another suicide bomber blew herself up in an Iraqi café? That a lightning bolt took out a biker on his way home from a charity event? That an earthquake in Italy killed kids in classrooms?

NaPoWriMo Project Thoughts, part 3

From a story by Julio Cortazar:

“… a writer can argue that if his inspiration comes from reality, and even from the crime news, what he is capable of doing with it raises it to another dimension, gives it a different value.”

NaPoWriMo Project Thoughts, part 2

Was it plagiarism?

Did I write them?

I didn’t add much. Mostly I edited down the original news article. I would rearrange. One of the things a news writer tries to do is put the most important facts in the lede – the first sentence even. That deemed most important comes highest in the article. Partly this is so readers can get all they need without reading to the bottom, partly this is so editors can snip off the last few paragraphs when they have space limitations. The space limitations problem is less salient with news on the internet, though brevity, punchiness, is probably more important than ever.

So did I steal or did I write?

NaPoWriMo Project Thoughts, part 1

I’ve long wanted to do a project based on the news. I’ve thought about working with a front page – whether the front page of a physical newspaper or what’s on the home page of newspaper’s website or newspaper equivalent like Google News.

On April 1st I decided to do that. Rather than work with the welter of information on a news site’s front page I chose to limit the resource. Going with a wish to notice deaths, to bring them out of the ordinary news feed, I went to Google News and typed “killed” into the search box. I copied the first story that came up into MS Word and edited it down, four words to a line, four lines to a stanza. When the story didn’t fit perfectly, I looked back at the source page to see what other (unrelated) story I could use to fill up the form – reintroducing some of the context of the original “ordinary” news feed.

After I posted the first poem I saw that I’d used five words in the line that mentioned the number of persons killed, so I thought that was an interesting addition and tried to retain that in future poems.

Is a compound word one word? “A five-year-old child” – three words or five? Usually I decided that would be five or edited to avoid compounds.

K says the form was invisible to him. He didn’t see that there were a particular number of words per line.

whew

April was National Poetry Month. April was National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo). During NaPoWriMo poets commit to writing a poem a day. Been there, done that, I thought. I learned some things from it; one of the things I learned was that pushing myself to produce a poem every day meant not enjoying the writing of bad poems. Now it’s true that pushing myself to write has produced good or interesting results, but day after day? Best not.

Then the last day of March I got an invite to join a NaPoWriMo group. The morning of April 1st I wrote a piece based on a news article. That piece became the template for a piece I would write (or craft or edit) each day of April.

Was this a successful project? Did it do anything?

I’m going to be thinking on the blog for the next few days about the April series.

Three

Three people are dead
after a vehicle went
out of control and
slammed into a utility

pole in southeast Missouri.
Randy Williams, the driver,
was 55; the passengers
were Larry McKinney, 65,

and Cynthia Hall, 48. All
died at the scene,
four miles east of
Doniphan. Save on Craftsman.


#

Source: Associated Press, April 30, 2009

Five

Five


A bus carrying a
group of tourists skidded
onto its side, ejecting
several, and killing at

least four instantly. The
crash occurred around 3:20
p.m. on U.S. 101.
The bus hit a

center divider on the
four-lane highway in
Soledad, perhaps on an
overpass? Responding to the

accident were more than
a dozen ambulances and
eight helicopters. Without cafeteria
trays, colleges find savings.


#


source: The New York Times, April 29, 2009
Jesse McKinley, reporting

One

Charles Morrow II, 23,
and two other men
were standing near a
taco truck at the

corner of 48th Avenue
and International Boulevard when
someone in a car
opened fire on them

shortly after midnight. The
three were taken by
car to Oakland’s Highland
Hospital, where Morrow was

pronounced dead. Sacramento has
2 more swine flu
Cases, raising the count
in California to 13.

#


Source: SFGate.com, April 28, 2009
Henry K. Lee, reporting

Three

In order to thwart
possible May Day attacks
police conducted at least
60 raids across Istanbul.

In one early morning
raid on an apartment
block in the Bostanci
area shooting broke out.

A leader of the
“Revolutionary Headquarters” was killed.
A civilian and a
police officer also died.

Some officers were wounded
when the “leftist, separatist,
radicals” threw bombs in
response. A television cameraman

is among the injured.
In Iceland prime minister
Johanna Sigurdardottir claims
victory for leftist coalition.


#


source: Al Jazeera, April 27, 2009

One

Six members of Topeka-
based Bikers Against Child
Abuse of Northeast Kansas
were returning home after

visiting children they had
helped (earlier in the
day they had participated
in a ride to

benefit the cause) when
one of the members
was hit by lightning.
The victim, 44, was

alone on his motorcycle.
“Strangest thing,” said Jefferson
County Sheriff Jeff Herrig.
Tokepa Dillons to close.


#


source: Topeka Capital-Journal, April 26, 2009
Kevin Elliott, reporting

Three

Joshua Cartwright, 28, of
Fort Walton Beach, Florida,
was being sought for
possible involvement in domestic

abuse. Okaloosa County Sheriff’s
Deputies acted on a
tip that he was
at the Shoal River

Gun Club. When confronted,
Cartwright engaged officers in
a shootout. Deputy Warren
“Skip” York and Deputy

Burt Lopez were both
shot and airlifted to
a trauma center where
they died. Fleeing in

his truck, Cartwright veered
off the highway to
avoid spikes. The truck
flipped over. After more

gunfire, Cartwright was killed
at the scene. In Jackson
County 30 tubers rescued
from flooding Chipola River.


#


source: WMBB News Dept, Panama City, Florida, April 25, 2009

One

Just after 3 p.m.
Wednesday in a field
near Camp Creek Lake
a gas well blew.

A length of pipe
hit Robert Jost, 38,
in the chest. He
died at St. Joseph

Regional Health Center in
Bryan, Texas. Jost worked
for Express Energy, under
contract to Encana which

owned the well. To
deter camera-shy robbers,
some Houston banks ask
customers to doff hats.


#


source: Associated Press, April 24, 2009

Seventy-Five

At least 75 people were
killed and 120 wounded
in two explosions in
Iraq on Thursday. In

the bombing in Baghdad’s
Karada district, a woman
wearing a suicide belt
exploded herself as dozens

of people lined up
at a food giveaway,
killing 28, including 12
police officers, and wounding

50. The food was
being distributed by members
of the Iraqi police
and the Red Crescent

charity in front of
an apartment building. In
the blast’s aftermath, the
street was littered with

bags of flour and red
apples, and pieces of
human flesh attracted masses
of flies. In the

attack in Muqdadiya in
Diyala Province, a bomb
went off inside a
restaurant where a group

of Iranian tourists were
eating lunch, killing 47 and
wounding 70. Of the
dead all but five

appeared to be Iranians.
Evidence for a suicide
bombing was not clear.
Slump lessens American mobility.


#


source: The New York Times, April 23, 2009
Timothy Williams, reporting

One

Sharon Kelley, 51, of
Kansas City, Kansas, was
killed in Tuesday morning’s
rush-hour crash with

a pickup truck. The
truck, headed north on
North 99th, attempted to
turn left onto Donahoo,

and collided with the
motorcycle headed south on
North. The rider died
at the scene. The

driver of the truck
was unharmed. Vehicle sale
fees in Missouri to
be kept under $200.


#

source: Kansas City Star, April 22, 2009

Five

Five


Christopher Wood, 34, discussed
his family's financial problems
in six notes he left
behind after he killed

himself, his wife, and
their three children Friday.
The 5 were discovered by
a relative a day

later. The sheriff of
Frederickson County, Maryland, said
the man struggled with
depression and was $450,000

in debt. After killing
them the man nearly
decaptitated the three children
using a kitchen knife

and saw. A second
home in Florida was
not selling. 24 hour
towing hotline, all makes.


#


Source: Associated Press, April 21, 2009