Info Desk Blogging

I've completed the weeding project. That doesn't mean it's finished, tied with a bow, put away, all done. After all, we're still getting in new books and the new books have to go on the old shelves. Even though I've removed many books from the old shelves, the new books will fill them up and more weeding will need to be done. Plus there are small collections that I haven't worked on yet - the Chinese books, the oversized books.

A couple years ago I took on the weeding when I was annoyed by the book trucks in the meeting room that had been set aside for overflow, that is, all those books there was no room for in the stacks. I was sitting here at the Info Desk, you know, looking over at the crowded Fiction thinking, "I bet no one checks that one out, or that one." There was a period not long ago when I had made enough room on the shelves to clear the books trucks. That was satisfying. Unfortunately the most popular collection, the Mysteries, is full again. The DVDs are crowded, too. And the area set aside for them was small to start with. I haven't attempted to weed those. I suspect the best way to weed them would be for condition - do they play? But we don't have a DVD player here.

Actually I'm waiting on my boss to approve for deletion that last batch of weeding. Once she gives the OK that'll be the work of a couple hours.

morning jackhammer

Let’s see. A jackhammer is beating away at the concrete that was just laid last week? That would be under the house. I think that’s what’s happening. I haven’t actually gone to look. Or asked. I just get to hear it. That was a hammer wielded by hand, that was. Thunk thunk thunk. Felt that one through the floor boards.

Living in a construction project. Fun? Or not fun?

Ambient temperature outside: 59 degrees fahrenheit
Inside: 61 degrees
I got the first number from Weather Underground. The second was the last number I saw on the thermometer upstairs. The one on the downstairs thermostat is less precise but looks about the same.

There are still holes in the roof. These will be filled by skylights. Sometime. Not by tomorrow, though. Tomorrow a big storm is supposed to be coming in. Supposedly the holes will be covered enough to keep the rain out.

The project is a kitchen remodel. It keeps being other things. The jackhammering is related to the structural deficiencies our contractor discovered upon tearing out walls that were holding the kitchen in. He wants to make sure the house rides out the next big quake. Which is overdue, he insists. Earthquakes are not library books, I almost say.

Angry

Angry that we have to fight and fight and fight.

Watching the fight to keep Maine’s new marriage law with a feeling of dread.

Just as important is the fight in Washington state to keep marriage-in-all-but-name.

Angry that we have to spend lots of money to run these expensive campaigns so we can live out our boring, normal lives.

Angry that we lose these fights over and over.

Nobody wins anything when we lose. Nobody’s life is easier. No one is protected from anything. Nothing is served except pain.

Walk?

I feel like going for a walk. I wonder if I am going to go for a walk. It's getting late-ish, toward dinner time. I feel somewhat less like going for a walk than I did a couple hours ago, time I've spent reading, mostly, also eating the cold, sweet watermelon Kent cut. Drifting around the house.

Part of what's stayed me from a stroll is lack of destination, but all the routes have been traveled, too. If Black Oak Books hadn't closed, I said to myself earlier, I would probably walk over there, a mere two blocks, and while away an hour picking up books and trying to talk myself out of buying them. But today is Labor Day; even if Black Oak were still there wouldn't it have shut for the holday?

Kent & I ate lunch at Bel Forno, a North Berkeley cafe, then took advantage of $10-off coupons to buy some stuff at CVS Pharmacy (formerly Long's). Kent got new earbuds for his iPod. I got toilet paper.

That was our walking for the day. Which didn't seem quite enough. But if I were to step out the door now, where would I go? Half Price Books is open as is, I believe, Comic Relief - and Half Price is even offering 20% off on everything - but we poked around there yesterday and I managed not to buy anything.

I could walk up to the Rose Garden. The sun's getting low so maybe I'd be in time for sunset. (Timeanddate.com says sunset is at 7:29, so I can dally and still make it.) Views of the bay and the Golden Gate are good from there.

I've seen 'em so I know. Plus a walk up that way would be good exercise.

If I walk north I end up at Solano Ave. Which is of interest. But I was there just last week. And what would be open?

If I walk west, what? The Ohlone Greenway? It's okay, a long stretch of urban park. Kids on monkey bars, dogs in the fenced-in off-leash zone, homeless people.

Sometimes I like looking at houses or imagining myself living in different neighborhoods. I could do that in any direction.

It would be fun to have a friend (or three) that's also a neighbor who doesn't mind an occasional visitor dropping by. You know, for a chat, a cup of tea, a game of checkers. Whatever. But I don't have any quite like that these days.

I guess I'm a little bored. Not frustratingly so. I've banned myself for the rest of the day from the political blogs because I was just leaving angry comments that weren't doing me a lick of good, really.

Walk. Or no. Having written about it I'm sleepy. Perhaps I'll take a nap.

Info Desk Blogging

It's quiet here at the Claremont Branch. I can hear over at the circulation desk an older woman is being told she returned a DVD case without the DVD inside. "I found that at home. I was wondering about it. If you really want it, I can get it back today," she says.

Thursday nights we stay open until 8pm. And when the light lasts people linger. During winter by 8 it's been dark for two or three hours. Few people hang around.

A warm day. The front door is propped open.

A man just asked me what our wifi security protocols are. We have security protocols? The Wireless FAQ page on the BPL website says, "Your information is not protected while using wireless." So I guess there aren't any.

Another man asks me if he can talk to me about a missing book. It seems he got a notice saying a book he checked out had not yet been returned. "But I know I returned it," he says. "I know because I opened the door to the drop box and looked in to make sure it had fallen all the way in."

I took the library card, scanned it under the laser frog scanner. The patron's library account popped up. He had exactly zero books checked out currently and had no fines. "No need to worry any more," I said.

I've been working away at the weeding project, book by book reviewing the collection for damage and for books that just don't go out the door. The section I've been going through just lately used to be very tight and has been weeded in the recent past. So mostly I'm carrying books from the shelf to the Info Desk then, a few minutes later, carrying them back. Still, a few things have been put aside: Chinatown, USA: a history and guide (1965), a 17 year old collection of George Will columns, superceded editions (a Suze Orman book, a Nolo book on 401(k)s, a J.K. Lasser Income Tax guide).

poem

The mouth opens black
under an inaccessible sky.
You look at the mouth,
black and open like that,
no way into it.
You're considering the ways
you might get away from it.
There’s left
and right
and back the way you came.
You could walk under it, too,
duck right under its big black gape,
those two broad teeth poised to bite,
one tooth to each stiff jaw.
You could stop,
and with an open palm,
whack that mouth -
whang!
Then on into the unfenced field,
leave the road stopped before the mouth
that’s going to bite, looks like,
going to bite a piece off and swallow it.
You’d be brave,
marching down the throat of that future,
past where any road’s allowed.





photo by Art Durkee
found on blog post by Jim Murdoch
in which he talks about writing poems in response to artwork

Winkie report?

Winkie good. Compliments to David Maxine for putting together a solid program. Um. Nice drive down with John Bell who was visiting from Boston; I picked him up in Oakland and we chatted (or I chattered?) all the way down. I asked him once on the way down & once on the way back what sort of music he liked – I’d intended to bring a batch of the playlist CDs I’d burned, but had forgotten them at home, the music preference question being not just idle curiosity but checking to see whether he would hate what I was going to slip into the car’s CD player – except, of course, I didn’t have the CDs with me. Still, John said he liked “American Standards.”

American Standard?

Sinatra, Rita Hayworth, Eloise McGraw. Um. No? I didn’t put on the radio because I was talking, plus I was driving, so why distract from the moment?

I liked John. Smart guy. Personable. Didn’t interrupt me.

Anything else about Winkies? The old regulars. They are getting older. I guess that was a surprise. We youngsters of the 70s & 80s? Middle aged. Anybody coming up behind us? Um. Anthony? The 15 year old local? I liked him. Bouncy. He was puzzled by the lack of attention to the MGM movie. “That’s what I really like,” he said. “I haven’t read the books.”

Meanwhile David Maxine was saying we really need to get people to join the club who are into the Oz books. The books!

There is only one MGM Wizard of Oz. There are 14 sequels to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. And many sequels by subsequent authors. I run out of things to say about the MGM movie rather quickly.

But I don’t know. I got one thing at the auction, an early edition of The Giant Horse of Oz. The other night Kent asked me if it was a book I really liked. After he noted that I wasn’t answering that question I furrowed my little brow and said, “I’ve never thought of it that way. I’m going to have all 40 books in the Oz series, and, yes, there are some I like better than others … but the issue of whether to buy something has little to do with whether that particular book is a favorite. Some editions of the books have more illustrations. I’d like the ones with all the illustrations.”

videotape

"On a recent night, [diver Shanda] Magill watched ... a dozen squid with doleful, expressive eyes circle her group, tapping and patting the divers and gently bumping them before dashing away.

"One especially large squid suspended itself motionless in the water about three feet away and peered at her closely, its eyes rolling, before it vanished into the black. A shimmering incandescence rippled along its body ...

"Other divers have reported squid pulling at their masks and gear and roughing them up.

"Roger Uzun, a veteran scuba diver and amateur underwater videographer, ... said ... The animals taste with their tentacles ... 'As soon as we went underwater and turned on the video lights, there they were. They would ram into you, they kept hitting the back of my head,' he said. 'One got ahold of the video light head and yanked on it for two or three seconds ... trying to take the video light with him.'"

more

*

"[A] huge search [of NASA archives] that began three years ago for the old moon tapes led to the 'inescapable conclusion' that 45 tapes of Apollo 11 [moon walk] video were erased and reused. ... The original videos beamed to Earth were stored on giant reels of tape that each contained 15 minutes of video, along with other data from the moon. In the 1970s and '80s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes, so it erased about 200,000 of them and reused them.

"[NASA senior engineer Dick] Nafzger, who was in charge of the live TV recordings back in the Apollo years, said they were mostly thought of as data tapes. It wasn't his job to preserve history, he said, just to make sure the footage worked."

more

life in Berkeley

Banging upstairs as our contractor & his assistant tear up the floor. New kitchen on the way. We had walls taken out and the ceiling is gone.

Weather is nice. So if I’m driven from the house by the noise I won’t be wandering in the rain or fog.

I’m off to Monterey this weekend, the Winkie Convention. Looks like I’m giving a lift to another conventioneer who’s making his first Winkie appearance.

Kent will be helping a law school buddy celebrate his 50th birthday. So we’ll be in different place this weekend.

The cats seem to be handling the renovation okay. They make themselves scarce during the day then show up once the strange destructors take their leave. Sundy goes upstairs and cautiously investigates the changes. I don’t know if Sutra has gotten past a frightened glance.

Couple nights ago Sundy came down – his face black! I knew he’d poked his nose into some new hole. I grabbed him up to show Kent. Kent delicately removed the spider web black with dust that had neatly framed his orange eyes.

Try This at Home

I like to pick up cheap sampler CDs. I’ve found lots of great music that way. At Half Price Books this week I found a sampler from Shut Eye Records, “Wrapped in Plastic”. The names of the songs, the bands, even the engineers and studios come together into fascinating tiny stories.

Catholic School Girls “Meat Wrench” (from the new album “Emily’s Basement”). Recorded at Smegma Studios.

Female Chauvinist Pigs “You Lied” (from the debut cd “So You Think You’re a Man”). Recorded at Spock’s Brain Studios.

Public Safety “Need a Reason” (from the album, “Try This at Home”)

Happy Campers “Things Could Be Worse” (previously unreleased). Recorded at Bombshelter. Engineered by Adam Bomb. Produced by Happy Campers. Mastered by Alien Audio.

I haven’t listened to the music yet. It would be nice if I liked it at least as much as the liner notes.

Lt Dan Choi

I feel encouraged and inspired by Lt Dan Choi, a man living his principles, his hopes, his love, and wagering his life's work that those really matter to our government, to our military, that America is not just a word but meaning.

I added the above to a Courage Campaign letter of support they will be sending along with Dan:

"On Tuesday," Dan says, "I will face a panel of colonels who will decide whether or not to fire me -- to discharge me for 'moral and professional dereliction' under the military's 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy.

On Tuesday, I will try to prove that it's not immoral to tell the truth."

Dan Choi is one of the West Point graduates who have founded Knights Out, an organization devoted to overturning the military's anti-gay rules.

Dan will be one of the grand marshals for this Sunday's SF Pride. Kent says he read that Knights Out will be riding with Dykes on Bikes at the head of the parade.

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.