bi_janus

Methinks they're selling a notion--that if I buy the clothing, I'll look like those guys. Even I won't fall for that one. Nevertheless, Ann and I do enjoy the images, lately appearing in the NYT among other outlets.

You can't tell much about the potter by looking at his pots. In addition to the usual nonsense, he displays a remarkable misunderstanding of evolution. I can't think of a single evolutionary biologist who thinks that humans "divided off off from chimps." Chimps everywhere should be offended.

Shard Bi Janus The verse is a shard, found in situ in a certain layer. I brush the dirt away with camel hair of vocal cords, slowly sounding its contours. If I speak other shards, I may piece a pot together and hold it up before me. I cannot know if the potter was a saint or a murderous heart.

I commend to you Steven Pinker's recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature in which he makes the case that we have, as societies, particularly in the West, become less violent since the rise of nation-states. Unfortunately, a statistical view of the prevalence of violence doesn't make each instance less a horror. Sometimes, our better angels require assistance and we must stop the nonsense where we are able, by word, by deed, or by both.

Well, Des, if you wanted a distressed hornets' nest, I think you got one. I read the comments following you piece, and somehow I think many who read it missed the point. I must say that phallic symbolism is present in many Asian traditions where it represents one phase of the life force, including libido, arising from an unconscious, motiveless ground. If your point is that making love in all its forms should supplant the encrustations of organized religion, then we will have to move to a point where we trust our natures, a point to which it seems difficult to travel given our profound cultural distrust of that nature. The fine story, in which the father may represent any too long existing prejudice, is sweet.

Much is implied in the space of that held breath before the answer we all hope we would have.

Just finished 28. The story got better and better with each chapter. Very nice read, Colin.

Finished it last night, way past my bedtime. Irritatingly engrossing--a fine, well-written story and, as the Pecman suggested, a bargain. Ann had bunny slippers years ago, but they never affected me that way.

The link below is to a piece in this Sunday's NYT about a group of women who undertake risks that most don't have to undertake to write poetry, in this case traditional Afghan poetry. I suppose, like all people, they express themselves, sometimes at great risk, because something in them insists on expression. http://www.nytimes.c...-poetry.html?hp

Camy, I read this today during the lunch break at a training I was conducting for firefighters and cops. Not one dissonant note disturbed the poem's deep affect on me. Like Cole's experience I was transported to times in my youth when I had similar experiences, and like all fine poems, this verse clarified those memories and their associated feelings. When I trudged home an hour ago, I shared the poem with Ann, who smiled as she read and then said, "He must have been in the same room with us when we first knew each other," such was the evocation for her. Thanks so much for sharing this. I have a small group of poems that I keep handy to read occasionally. This one is going in the file. Sometimes I read a verse and smile so much that I think, "I wish I would have written that."

This is a rather sweet story in this morning's The Sunday Oregonian. I remember teachers we all knew were gay in the sixties and seventies. The decade of the sixties was the last of the era of the Johns Committee and its awful work (the second URL describes its work). I knew I had moved to the South. http://www.oregonliv...and_a_39-y.html http://en.wikipedia....ation_Committee

Thanks, Mike. Two steps forward, one step back is still progress, but the backward steps sure are painful. He who allows oppression shares the crime. --Desiderius Erasmus

I took the comment just the way you intended, Cole. Thanks. I think I was reading too much Eliot when I wrote this; it has the faint odor of too much effort.

Cole, My mother, the sober one of the two parents, was a nominal Roman Catholic. For a time, when I was nine and ten, I was fascinated by church ritual, including last rites, so I learned the word unction. Fortunately, I fell in among Buddhists at age nine! My mother, in infinite wisdom, ditched my father when I was eight; the poem looked back from the age of fifteen at trips to the bar with my father when I was six and seven. My father swore me to secrecy about the visits to the bar, and I kept the secret until well after the divorce. Secrets are often an important part of the lives of children with alcoholic parents or parent. Rich

This one I wrote when I was fifteen. I suppose it's typical of poetry written by children of alcoholic parents. Each year, about this time, I rework the last five lines, which are the only lines of the poem that have evolved. If you need happy verse, this one won't help. The Idea of Usefulness at Snyder’s Bar (1965) Bi Janus No warmth on my palm sliding over the wood table, where sawdust is the unction for a child’s confusion. At the right hand of a beer John Joseph sits in conversation at the bar with an archangel who keeps his glass full. The pucks slide without the friction of our hands held tight when walking with Dad to the tavern for quality time. The silence of that progress, his guilt heart-locked and leaden, fashions my rough desire to find my use in his life. Would I be useful if flesh were stripped from me in a sky burial and my thighbones were wrought flutes?

Maybe I had half a stroke.

Thank you, James, very much indeed. The way of virtue, yes?

Virtue and Integrity (dé or te 德) I made good on a lost wager today. The wager was with a colleague, a woman two months older than I with whom I shared a remarkably similar late childhood and early adulthood. She was a South Carolinian and I lived most of my life in Florida. She and I, in separate parts of the world, marched, sat-in, protested, and worked on behalf of civil rights, women’s rights, sexual minority rights—you get the picture. She was a Nurse Practitioner and Midwife. She cared for poor women who had no other healthcare options. She attended countless births. We both ended up in Washington state, where she was a volunteer EMT and worked on a Search and Rescue team with her cadaver dog, Noble, in a small, rural community. I am out to my co-workers, and she was among the first with whom I shared my sexual orientation. Her reaction defined the difference between tolerance and acceptance. She was also deeply interested in Buddhism. If thought of as Buddhists, we shared a determination not to talk about our shared interest abstractly. We also shared a different form of a common disease. We talked about tips and techniques for surviving chemo and when our hair disappeared, we shared watch caps. The wager was one-sided. If she died first, I would attend any service her family arranged. If I died first, she would attend my service, except that I have been clear that I will have no service. So, today I paid the one-sided debt. Our last conversation was about the concept of virtue as expressed in Chinese thought about how to live as a human being. Virtue in this sense has little to do with the Western concept delivered to us by the Roman notion of vir, in which is embedded in the notion of manliness. The Chinese notion has its roots in growing up from the earth as a plant grows and speaks of integrity and what Buddhists sometimes call suchness or thusness, which brings argument and discussion to silence. Why did she suggest such a wager? I believe she asked because she knew that I would have something to say to her grandchildren about the woman of whose suchness they are inheritors. Selah

Thanks, Mike. Prairie Home got nothing on y'all. I've attended a lot of fires, many involving ethanol, but none involving bananas.

Camy, At least you got the machine. I gave up after the "the number you are trying to reach is no longer in service" message. You little anarchist, you!

I always took delight in the fact that the good Professor Henry, who was a bit of a provocateur, published an article on homophobia in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.

Here's an interesting bit of research on the roots of homophobia conducted at one of the many fine institutions that I attended in a galaxy far, far away. Just read the abstract if the thought of penile plethysmography makes you queasy (although I suspect that Des evaluates volume changes without relying on laboratory instruments). https://my.psychologytoday.com/files/u47/Henry_et_al.pdf

I guess you can't say gay at BYU, so SGA is the more palatable alternative. Some of the individual videos in the series are heartwarming.

I use MS Office mainly because I'm lazy and Microsoft is the standard in my work environment. Most word processing programs will allow me to save documents in a variety of file formats, and most documents I circulate go out in PDF anyway. But, there are always minor formatting issues that don't translate well. Now, the other MS Office components are irritating in varying degrees (the ubiquity of PowerPoint is a catastrophe), and Access is just lamentable. Since I use Macs at home, Filemaker Pro is my DB program of choice, and I wish I could get our IT department to use it. Alas, I am stuck, flailing in the MS spider's web. I will never forgive Gates for almost driving WordPerfect (before Corel got a hold of it) from the marketplace.

Thanks for this, Camy. A nice description of the source of his poetry from the Poetry Archive: "My poems are the product of a relationship between a side of my mind which is conscious, alert, educated, and manipulative, and a side which is as murky as a primaeval swamp." Philip Larkin, who turned down the Laureate gig and was the subject of a Motion biography famously said he was likable, but not tough enough in his writing. I'm not sure that was an accurate description.