Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Landscape in October

Originally uploaded by Giorgos ~

And the always-amazing Montauk Rider says…

… here are the dusky smells of the past saying goodbye–the future saying hello.

Enjoy the days of nature’s last hurrah.

Stockholm is grayer and cloudier than the landscapes of Montauk Rider’s autumn, the autumn that I grew up in. Even so, I’m glad to be “home” from my latest journey.

There is something inspiring in the sight of Nature preparing for long winter sleep–I was wishing that I could express the thought somehow, I’m grateful Montauk Rider did so.

Toni Morrison

Originally uploaded by Careliu

From an amazing short talk I heard today by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, about the humanities in general and her writing in particular:

• “Standing on the outside looking in was a big advantage for me as a writer.”
• “We have all spent a lot of time and thought at the boundary, the border–at the edge. It’s a place the rich have to police. Those outside study the edge and plot to break through it. Those inside fight to maintain belonging or to belong someplace else.”
• “Literature is full of writers who betrayed their class (Harriet Beecher Stowe or Mark Twain) — who ran away from it to live in exile (Henry James) — who stood at the border so they could critique it (Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville)”
• “A ruthless gaze at the center, whether from within or without the circle–that is the strength of the humanities. It has been my way to be at home in the world.”

Many thanks to Al and Bethellen for inviting me, as their guest, to today’s ceremony to see and hear Drew Gilpin Faust awarding the 2007 Radcliffe Medal to Toni Morrison.

p.s. And my sincere apologies to Ms. Morrison that my reconstruction of notes scribbled onto my program fail to do justice to her own Nobel-quality eloquence.

Cary Tennis, you might think, writes advice columns for Salon–not poetry.

But some of his writing–all it needs to be blank verse is chopping a few line breaks into its punctuation:

You take your place at the table and you do your part.
You do your part in the ancient chain of being and history and fathering,
of war and redemption and wounding,
of burdens too heavy to carry and roofs too old to keep the rain out,
of hardy shrubs aspiring to be trees and old warriors wandering lost among their medals.
You take your place at the table and you do your part.

That fragment was part of Cary’s advice to an adult son unsure how to help his increasingly troubled Vietnam-veteran father.

Only part of what makes Cary Tennis “poetic” is his use of wording and cadence. His work runs in the old (Old-Testament old) tradition of poet as prophet and healer, poet as expositor of the Big Picture.

• A young couple kvetches about their nightmare cat–Cary says that the really big issue here isn’t a cat but “whether you cringe with shame or beam with pride when you think of this years from now.”
• An anxious mother wonders how to explain to her already-troubled eight-year daughter that Dad plans a sex change? Stop with the verbal reassurance and throw a party, says Cory–let the family celebrate that Dad can be happier being who he really is.
• A young woman agonizes over being guilt-tripped toward inviting difficult but pushy friends to her in-laws’ lake house. Cory’s advice helps her figure out how to say no “..in the traditional sense of its meaning no. Or, as Albert Einstein replied when asked if he wanted some coffee: no.”

If some of the problems above seem a bit exotic, not to say borderline twee, here is Cory’s response (expurgating one word you won’t find in my blog) to the modern but heart-breaking question “How long will it take me to get over my divorce?” Cory says healing arrives, but not on schedule, only…

… in due time,
and you will receive it as a gift;
you will see that this was not
some .. accident on the way to an appointment with life
but life itself,
your life, your fate,
with bloody scratches from your own fingernails dragged heavily across its back.

Wow–Christina Aguilera’s music video for Candyman gives you the double pleasure of 1) totally shiny high production values plus 2) the illusion of a retro time-machine view onto 1940s USO totally shiny high production values.

But I repeat myself.

As does Ms. Aguilera, who sings all the parts and co-stars with herself as multiple (blonde, brunette, redhead, etc.) glamorous 1940s performers.

Much as I love the Web 2.0 “authentic” experience of amateurish web video–I have to admit that I also appreciate witty scripting and…did I mention? shiny, shiny high production values!

…and other gems from this month’s Ansible:

• From Thog’s Masterclass, Eyeballs in the Sky Dept. “His eyes ran, literally, across the whole of the upper portion of his face …” (Richard Marsh, The Beetle, 1897)
• Arthur C. Clarke appeared on the BBC website in his favourite t-shirt: “I invented the satellite and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”
• Literary agent Barbara Bauer is suing Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden and others, for blogging about her.

My family is solid New England, and I grew up here except for a couple of years in Michigan, back when I would have been going to kindergarten if they had kindergarten in our little town there.

I remember being laughed at by little Michiganders for my New England accent, and then being laughed at by little New Hampshirites for the Michiganisms I’d worked hard to master.

So I was intrigued when Rebecca Blood linked to an American dialect quiz–and here’s what I scored, how about you?

Dear Ms. Lewis,

I am responding to your letters asking us to renew our NH homeowners’ insurance policy through your agency. My husband Frank Wilczek and I have transfered this policy to the care of Phelan Insurance in Cambridge, MA.

For 20 years, we have had a homeowners’ policy through [your company]. I don’t recall that we ever made a claim on you–just kept paying the premium, year after year.

In August of 2006, a microburst storm hit our NH neighborhood. A huge tree crushed my husband’s car, which is insured (with Commerce Insurance) through the Phelan Agency. When I called Phelan, our agent there was helpful and quick to get everything moving to pay our claim. In addition to paying for the car’s value, they also authorized the $200 payment it took to get the giant tree off the car so it could be towed.

In contrast, when I called [your company's] office, I was treated quite brusquely. “Did a tree fall on your house?” the person asked. I said no, but giant trees had fallen all over our yard–clearing them away was going to be quite expensive. “If a tree didn’t fall on your house, you have no coverage.”

After thinking this over, I asked Phelan Insurance if we could transfer our NH policy to them when the premium next came due. I feel that if I ever need the insurance that we’ve been paying for all these years, the people at Phelan will be a lot more helpful.

Sincerely &etc…..

Pomo blablabla or real information?

Here’s more from the same anonymous commenter on Zephoria:

This incertitude to understand someone, even close, demands two things, and the fact that youngsters grew up facing this problem explains why they have commpletely adopted these behaviors:

- prefered communatarism, strong identity markups beyond the usual “prefered music” categories, ties to others as a social branding: you need those both to lower your cost to be situated, and to be surronded be people who can understand you faster and better;

- transparency, a concerning transparency: youngsters prefer to show to anyone they adress, schedule—anything because they know they won’t know why it will be used for (and they trust openness); setting up a availability rule is too tedious (and artificial: you have to justifiy the rules you want to be followed) and closing one’s access will mostly prevent relatives to find you back; well, you won’t hear about the other ones anyway. . .

I had trouble parsing this but got something out of it despite the annoying mannerism of its own social branding. (the social branding of no upper-case letters makes things hard to read, danah!)…

I got to Zephoria’s post on Wikipedia via a link from David Weinberger, who has a new issue of JOHO online….

…now with a Wikipedia-themed bogus contest…
so even though I am in theory working hard on my own talk for Wikimana, whose title should maybe have referenced Paris Hilton rather than quantum mechanics, but I didn’t think of that when I was writing my abstract….

…it’s only 8 a.m., and I need to refocus.

“I never remembered where the park was, what it was called, or how to get there, but only thought of it as the place where I would dazedly wander at 1 am while holding his hand in the moonlight…”

Read the rest, you know you want to go back to that place in your own life.

(One great side effect of SXSW is that I’ve discovered so many new blogs, including several written by Liz Henry.)

How did anyone learn to write before “Thog’s Masterclass“?

This month’s collection of (published) bad examples just arrived in Dave Langford’s latest issue of Ansible.

Wouldn’t you like a few blasts from Thog’s horrible past?

• `Wearing an aura of rugged-intellectual charm like a plastic raincoat …’ — Sam Merwin Jr, The Time Shifters
• `Gosseyn’s intestinal fortitude strove to climb into his throat, and settled into position again only reluctantly …’ — A.E.van Vogt, The World of Null-A
• `The wagon lurched forward like an armadillo trying to mate with a very fast duck.’ — James P Silke, Frank Frazetta’s Death Dealer, Vol II Lords of Destruction

Thank you, David Langford, and thank you, Thog!