It’s a little-known fact that Ezra Pound once proposed that some of the greats of American Literature compete in a boxing tournament. OK, that’s not true, but if such a tournament had been held, here’s what would have happened.

Here’s the bracket:

Fight 1: F. Scott Fitzgerald vs. Franz Kafka

Fitzgerald shows up drunk, on a butcher’s tricycle, and has to be lifted into the ring. He saunters over to the opponent’s corner where he has a conversation with the stool. He calls it Zelda, hugs it, then falls asleep. Meanwhile, Zelda Fitzgerald, his manager, is nowhere to be found. (Suddenly hip to technology, she’s back in the locker room playing the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on a Gameboy.)

Initially, Ezra Pound had informed everyone that the charity matches would be a professional-wrestling style match and told everyone to wear a costume that representative of their work. Soon thereafter, Hemingway suggests they make it a more manly sport, and suggests boxing. Pound agrees, but never gives Kafka the news that the format has been changed. Kafka, having no idea how to represent himself, let alone his work, decides to dress in a giant beetle costume like a post-metamorphosis Gregor Samsa. For added effect, he brings along his manager, a boa constrictor named Indiana.

Result: Fitzie is disqualified.

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Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman sounds like an interesting book:

“Drawing on decades of research in psychology that resulted in a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Daniel Kahneman takes readers on an exploration of what influences thought example by example, sometimes with unlikely word pairs like “vomit and banana.” […}Thinking, Fast and Slow gives deep—and sometimes frightening—insight about what goes on inside our heads: the psychological basis for reactions, judgments, recognition, choices, conclusions, and much more.  –JoVon Sotak

Thinking, Fast and Slow received some good press (selected as one of the best books of 2011 by New York Times Book Review, Globe and Mail, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal), which means more people searching Amazon for the book. Except they might find something else by accident.

Thinking, Fast and Slow was published on October 24^th, 2011, the same day that Fast and Slow Thinking by Karl Daniels became available on Amazon. Read more »

We teach how not to write and we teach writers to teach themselves how not to write.
When we teach how to write, the student had best be on guard.

–Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town, p. 64

There’s an institution, which shall remain nameless, whose H.R. Dept. has asked for a philosophy of teaching.

I thought I’d offer the readers of Bark both the ‘Erasure’ version (followed by the thing that I submitted for the job)…

Thinking The Other

Commodities want
to know
shelter with flesh.

You ask the kind
of reward
virtually.  Through-

out we are known, feel
exposed, full of
weeds worth even more.

The what splintered

too and filth-strewn
glitz grammar

seek partners already
exhausted

and roll.

Why:

To Cultivate Critical Thinking and Imaginative Engagement with The Other

Not all questions are equal. In North America, for example, we often pursue answers like commodities, as if we’re constantly in the market for the idea or the semblance of thought that will make life easier or more convenient. Other answers are born into the marriage of curiosity and vulnerability. We want to know something that matters, that persists throughout generations, a thing that binds us to their pursuit of truth and makes it our pursuit too. Moreover, we feel exposed to the social vicissitudes of life and death without at least trying to find shelter with other flesh and blood participants. Where, you ask, do we find such shelter?

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“I don’t like science being used to manipulate people,” one of my Russian students said about the reading we had done from The Culture Code, by Clotaire Rapaille.

Rapaille, who is French, has a doctorate in psychology and was working as a psychoanalyst before being invited to help Nestlé market coffee to the Japanese. What Clotaire found in his first focus groups was that Nestlé needed to create a positive coffee imprint in Japanese children in order to create a viable market for instant coffee. In response to Clotaire’s discovery, Nestlé began selling caffeine-free, coffee-flavored sweets to children. These sold well and eventually the instant coffee market also increased.

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The 2011 VIDA Count was released the last days of February and the internet was alive with commentary as March began. This was also the beginning of Women’s History Month. So far, I’m not noticing any special celebrations of history or women, or women in history. I’m sure they’re out there, but overshadowed by news of non-celebratory-worthy behavior towards women. Especially Rush Limbaugh’s behavior toward law student and birth control advocate Sandra Fluke. (My reaction is pretty much  that of Christa Desir’s.)

I spent Saturday keeping up with news of advertisers dropping Rush Limbaugh like the rotten potato he looks like, smells like, and sounds like. It comforted me to know the outrage over his comments was strong enough to make people put commercial pressure on his show. Then I ended up on Carbonite Online’s Facebook page, which stated their reasons for not advertising with Limbaugh anymore. For every comment applauding their decision, there seemed to be another siding with Rush. *Sigh*

I’m tired of standing on my soap box shouting about sexist behavior and discrimination. It feels too much like too few are listening. My voice is hoarse.

Instead, I’m now looking for things that make me feel good about being a woman—and a writer. I found one already, Flavorwire’s 10 of the Most Powerful Female Characters in Literature:

Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish adaptation of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." The Swedish title of the book actually translates to "Men who Hate Women."

Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre
Hermione Granger, the Harry Potter series
The Wife of Bath, The Canterbury Tales
Katniss Everdeen, The Hunger Games trilogy
Hester Prynne, The Scarlett Letter
Éowyn, The Lord of the Rings trilogy
Lyra Silvertongue, His Dark Materials trilogy
Janie Crawford, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Hua Mulan, The Ballad of Mulan
Lisbeth Salander, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Thinking of my own history, I would like to add at least one more. As a teenager, I loved Princess Herald Elspeth of the Mage Winds trilogy by Mercedes Lackey. Elspeth rode into battle and kicked some serious butt, never needing a man to do the fighting for her.

Who would you add to this list?

Happy Women’s History Month.

For the last four to five years of my kids high school education, I’ve participated in something utterly unique in terms of fund-raising.   It is an old fashioned (Norman Rockwellish “Let’s Put On A Show”) production, known as Ham On Regal.   And for the past 49, going on 50 years, this hodge-podge of skits and musical numbers has involved a huge commitment of time, effort and resources.  The committed consist of your ordinary middle-aged parents, parents of teenagers who attend the Joel E. Ferris High School on Spokane’s South Hill.   Next week, for example, roughly 300 of them will  perform dance moves (from the 1970‘s) that you thought were extinct.   In full costume, they will flail around in some semblance of rhythm and uniformity to the tunes of the Black Eyed Peas, Devo, Abba and more.   There will be scenes of three minutes in duration — fifteen to be exact — in which characters like Paris Hilton mingle with Rambo and Red from That 70‘s Show.   Yes, it’s all very entertaining.

But here’s my dilemma:   as a co-chair on the script committee for this year’s rowdy rumpus, I tried to do that double entendre thing.   That is, overseeing 18 other writers like myself, I tried to corral those who wanted to introduce a plethora of fart jokes and other assorted potty humor.   For the most part, we were successful and the dialogue for Ham Times At Ferris High is not half bad.   (You might want to check out a show.)  Unfortunately, what wound up on the cutting room floor were seemingly innocuous lines like “Shut up” (changed to “Be quiet”).   When Dick Vitale, an ESPN mainstay, says something about going “number one in the pool, but having Duke at #2 going all the way…,” instead of smiles, we recently got frowns of disapproval.   Moreover, when another hilarious personage complains that the Bible is boring, one individual asks us not to disrespect the Old and New Testaments.   I guess my point is this:   the suburban superego has gone into hyperdrive!

Or, to put it more succinctly, censorship in America shows no signs of abating.   And for a liminal poet like me there’s nothing to do but sigh…   Sigh and write my ass off!

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Bot courtesy of Creative Commons, Mattie B

Amazon gets stranger by the day. Robots are in the middle of crazy bidding wars while we sleep. These “bots” are dropping the price of books to $0.01 or raising them to $2,198,177.95 while we mess our way through discussions on how much a cup of coffee should cost if you bring your own mug. But while the market (well, the cafe here) isn’t listening to customer opinions on cost, it (well, Amazon) is following the advice of the algorithms or bots.

It’s not new that Markov chains collect information from Wikipedia, curate the articles, and sell the finished books on Amazon. Betascript does this kind of publishing all the time. Narrative Science kind of does the same thing with basic sports/business articles/reports.

One computer program, donning the human name Lambert M. Surhone, created and sold such a book about computers pretending to be human. And I don’t think it was a memoir. The Lambert bot was selling its book new, print-on-demand, for $47. Before you knew it, there was a used/like one available for $46.99. The bot bidding war had begun.

Last year a human software engineer at Facebook, Carlos Bueno, wrote  a children’s book where the main character, Lauren Ipsum, meets the Wandering Salesman, fends off Jargon, etc.  Even though you can read it on a tablet, it’s “a computer science book that doesn’t involve a computer.” He self-published as print-on-demand and set the price to $14.95. Enter the bots. Read more »

On Christmas Eve, after a lengthy service at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral (very nice FYI), we arrived home at approximately 12:20 and I lit a fire outside.   This last activity, I think, will be our new family ritual — sitting in the cold, shivering by the flames, sipping something smooth, nibbling on fudge… and…

And, right in the middle of my reading of Thomas Merton:   “Into the world where there is no room Christ has come to those for whom there is no room…”  (Raids On The Unspeakable).  Right there, on the second “no room” we heard a howl in the distance.  We heard either coyotes or wolves… or a quartet of genuinely harmonic terriers.   Yes, in the wake of all the pageantry,  both high church and low church, there came late the sound of the canine other.   Hoooowl…  (No Allen Ginsburg in sight!)  And all during the assembly-process of my 17 year old son’s used Everlast punching-bag apparatus, I could not help but think of that passage in which the Canaanite woman approaches Jesus and leaves him speechless.   She says, after the Anointed One issues the exclusive caveat — that “the Son of Man” has come only to the house of Israel:  “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat crumbs that fall from their master’s table!”

Nice, come-back.  Eh?

I don’t know why these problem verses flash into and out of the sieve of my mind, but they do.   And when these sacred texts are somehow bracketed or emphasized or enjoined by the grunts, snorts, rooster-crows, bird-chirps and, in this scenario, the stylistic howlings of some far-off, somewhat distressed beast in the dark — it’s important that we take notice.   These moments are perhaps the temporal version of what the Ancient Celts refer to as “thin places” between worlds, places where we might inadvertently punch through a wall.   For me though, with my holy-day antennae up and fully functioning, the metaphor might be extended.   Whether a pack of pesky coyotes, one of the three mating pairs of wolves which are permitted to roam eastern Washington, or the 101 domesticated dalmatians with a Disney contract — it’s so clear that the neighbors are noisy.

I’ll say it again:  the neighborhood — as in the entire creation — as in the Ever-Expanding Universe – as in every sink hole that opens up in the  spring, every worm-hole that sucks down a morsel of dark matter and every blessed and bruised bending of the space-time continuum — ALL THIS — cries out.

You may wonder, at this point, two nights later, if the mechanically-challenged poet (me) figured out the punching bag apparatus and the answer is happily, yes.   At precisely 2:30 in the morning (PST), Christmas morning, I finished tightening the last bolt.   But I had been helped by the lingering howls.   The cries in the night haunted me like either Charles Dickens‘ Scrooge, or like Martin Bell‘s Barrington Bunny…
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So I’m sitting here on Schweitzer Mountain, enjoying some snow, sleep and skiing with my two boys, Ian & Philip, plus my spouse, Sheryl…  It’s a beautiful spot in north Idaho that’s been built up through the years with condos, ski-lifts and restaurants.   That recent construction I take or leave. What I truly love is to watch the mist pour through the vast bowl of slopes and silver-frosted trees which line the trails.  Lake Pond Oreille lingers about 5,000 feet below like a pair of blue eyes reflecting on the scene.   And tonight we can expect the longest night of the year!  

The winter solstice!

Anyway, it’s occurred to me recently that tourist attractions like this may not be long for this world, that the place itself may remain with its steep and jagged landscape, but that in terms of the snow and the reason for skiers to congregate here, global warming may have other plans.   Does that sound like pessimism?   Am I pooping on the proverbial party that folks of some means have here on an annual basis?   Should I ask the therapist to increase my meds and do what supposedly comes naturally?   Relax?   Chill out?

The fact is — I’m accosted on all sides with the damage that I have done by driving up this mountain.   A friend, who works for an Orthopedic Center, offered us his vacant pad in which we’ve crashed.   I bought him a bottle of Scotch to show our family’s appreciation.   And yet, the Internet reels with the stories of permafrost melting at the poles, of methane gas leaking into the atmosphere and of temperatures climbing so high that sea levels may eventually ebb and flow around Nebraska.  The only option I have in this scenario is poetry.
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It doesn’t feel like the holidays yet. Is that just me?

I’ve written a few cards and received a few. The mantle is decorated, the lights are up. Our tree (which is a lovely tree, if I do say so) was selected weeks ago, from the same farm we visit each winter. Our cupboard is full of treats from others (parents across America: keep on baking for your kids’ teachers, because I live with one. I had puppy chow for breakfast yesterday. Crack, I tell you.) I’ve listened to a little Christmas music, mostly at the gentle urging/ultimate demand of the person I share my office with that it was time. I even pulled out the heavy artillery: Love Actually.

But it doesn’t really feel like the holiday season to me. And this doesn’t mean that I subscribe to some ridiculous notion that the holidays are either a) so f**king joyous that you walk around grinning constantly and handing out candycanes to small children while assuring them of Santa’s existence or b) a horrible, suicide-inducing time when already lonely/miserable people are constantly reminded of exactly how lonely/miserable they are, while everyone else walks around grinning and handing out candycanes. Neither of those are representative of what the holidays are like for most people.

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