6.13.2022 – enthusiastic

enthusiastic
realistic respectful
different opinion

Reading the morning paper recently, I came across the story, ‘People may be overselling the myth’: should we bring back the wolf? by Phoebe Weston, a biodiversity writer for the Guardian.

The story deals with the complex of idea of the benefits derived from the re-release of near extinct predator animals back into the wild.

What I found somewhat refreshing in the article was one, its use of language and word along with the near blasphemous concept that science might be and maybe should be questioned.

Question the science?

Gosh!

This haiku is one of a couple or more in a series based on this same article.

There were so many good word combinations that I couldn’t pass them up.

And readers of this blog will know that from time to time I struggle with the weight of effort of producing a daily Haiku and any thoughts I may have about the words and time that went in the Haiku that day.

This daily schedule of missing a day can bring on a personal mental paralysis wherein writing these entries becomes impossible.

I learned to deal with this by not dealing with it and let it go.

Then when I look at my register of entries and see blank days with no post, I will grab a topic or book or poem for a source and produce a series of Haiku to fill in those blank dates.

This is one of the great benefits of this effort being my blog and my blog, my rules.

It IS cricket because I say it is.

It is ‘according to Hoyle’ because I say it is.

Thus I have this series of haiku based on this article and the Ms. Weston’s word choices.

I should also mention that this ‘lack of output’ coincided with a trip up to see our son and being away from a computer keyboard for a long weekend and I am playing catch-up.

Other haiku from this passage include:

6 17 2022: being brave enough to

6 16 2022: need to look at the

6 13 2022: enthusiastic

6 6 2022: findings are challenged

6 23 2022: when findings appear

6 21 2022: a landscape of fear

6 20 2022: overselling that

4 30 2022: there are factors that

6.6.2022 – findings are challenged

findings are challenged
most people don’t hear stories
are less appealing.

Reading the morning paper recently, I came across the story, ‘People may be overselling the myth’: should we bring back the wolf? by Phoebe Weston, a biodiversity writer for the Guardian.

The story deals with the complex of idea of the benefits derived from the re-release of near extinct predator animals back into the wild.

What I found somewhat refreshing in the article was one, its use of language and word along with the near blasphemous concept that science might be and maybe should be questioned.

Question the science?

Gosh!

This haiku is one of a couple or more in a series based on this same article.

There were so many good word combinations that I couldn’t pass them up.

This daily schedule of missing a day can bring on a personal mental paralysis wherein writing these entries becomes impossible.

I learned to deal with this by not dealing with it and let it go.

Then when I look at my register of entries and see blank days with no post, I will grab a topic or book or poem for a source and produce a series of Haiku to fill in those blank dates.

This is one of the great benefits of this effort being my blog and my blog, my rules.

It IS cricket because I say it is.

It is ‘according to Hoyle’ because I say it is.

Thus I have this series of haiku based on this article and the Ms. Weston’s word choices.

I should also mention that this ‘lack of output’ coincided with a trip up to see our son and being away from a computer keyboard for a long weekend and I am playing catch-up.

Other haiku from this passage include:

6 17 2022: being brave enough to

6 16 2022: need to look at the

6 13 2022: enthusiastic

6 6 2022: findings are challenged

6 23 2022: when findings appear

6 21 2022: a landscape of fear

6 20 2022: overselling that

4 30 2022: there are factors that

5.29.2022 – bastardization

bastardization
of the promise – Merced to
Bakersfield – who cares?

Reading the article, Train to nowhere: can California’s high-speed rail project ever get back on track?, I could not help but laugh out loud over a comment about the once $9 Billion Dollar high speed train from Los Angeles to San Francisco that was funded in 2008 and planned to open in 2020 has so far cost $5Billions, might get a stretch of railroad (normal non-high speed railroad) open between the California cities of Merced and Bakersfield by 2030.

I am ignorant of much California geography without looking at a map but those two connections didn’t make much of impact on me.

The comment that made me laugh was made by an early advocate and cheer leader of the Cal High Speed Rail, Mr. Quentin Kopp, a retired former legislator and judge, who also felt that connecting Merced and Bakersfield did not make much sense.

Mr. Kopp said, ““Who cares about going from Merced to Bakersfield? I am appalled and angry over the bastardization of the promise to taxpayers … It’s a stupid waste of money. All this is doing is making contractors and engineers and bureaucrats fat and happy.”

The article goes on to explain that while other countries have implemented high speed rail, The United States, by contrast, has a highly decentralized system of government, with multiple competing jurisdictions jostling over land, water, electricity and other vital resources, and a political tradition, especially in the west, that celebrates personal freedom and private property over collective enterprises in the public interest.

In the words of Charlie Brown, “THAT’S IT!”

I propose that the United States Mint add something to our coins.

Where a coin is stamped, “E Pluribus Unum” I want an * added so it reads, “E Pluribus Unum*”.

E Pluribus Unum?

You remember that one don’t you?

One, out of many.

Then on the bottom of the coin, I want it to say, *The United States has a highly decentralized system of government, with multiple competing jurisdictions jostling over land, water, electricity and other vital resources, and a political tradition, that celebrates personal freedom and private property over collective enterprises in the public interest.

Should the word money be added so that it reads, money, land, water …

Or is money understood to be included in that less vulgar term, vital resources?

It works either way and it seems to answer a whole lot of questions today about the United States of America.

Talk about a the bastardization of a promise.

What promise?

The promise that we WERE one out of many.

The promise the we were something new.

Novus ordo seclorum it says on the One Dollar bill.

The New Order of the Age!

The New Order of the Age?

Maybe that’s why it ended up on the $1.

All in all, it comes to Mr. Lincoln’s warning in his Dec 1, 1862 annual message to Congress when he said, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”

5.24.2022 – caring deeply and

caring deeply and
passionately, really, has
gone out of our lives

Roger Angell has died.

Born in 1920 and the son of Katherine Angell White (which made him the step son of EB White), Roger Angell wrote about baseball for the New Yorker Magazine for as long as I can remember.

To say, though, that Roger Angell wrote about baseball is much like saying Michelangelo painted ceilings.

There was so much more than that to what Mr. Angell wrote.

The focus, the reason for the writing was baseball, but the words were brought together in ways that were magical and poetry.

It was after the 1975 World Series, the famous game six that was won by the Red Sox on a home run in the bottom of the 12th inning, late, late at night in Fenway Park, that Mr. Angell wrote:

What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about: this is what we come for.

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable.

Almost.

What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.

And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved.

Naïveté — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

Mr. Angell was a not so much a sports reporter but a baseball commentator.

Each year, it seems to me now, he would write an essay that previewed the upcoming season, then an essay or too on the season so far and then an essay recapping the season just finished.

These 4 or 5 essays over the course of a year all appeared in the New Yorker Magazine.

Written a leisure with thoughtfulness beyond anything but appreciation, Mr. Angell could bring each and every game he covered to life though it had been over for some time.

I was 8 years old when the Detroit Tigers won the World Series in 1968.

It wasn’t until years later that I was able to understand and appreciate what when on in that World Series, the dual between Denny McCain and Bob Gibson and the slow turtle-and-the-hare story Mickey Lolich pitching his way to 3 World Series wins, and I got those stories from reading Roger Angell’s account in an essay titled, “A LITTLE NOISE AT TWILIGHT.”

But like the Persian Rug with the missing knot so it wouldn’t be perfect, Mr. Angell did make mistakes.

I always felt somehow privileged that I caught one.

But to this day, I am not sure if the error was Mr. White’s or his editor.

Here is the passage in question?

Can you find the mistake?

The scene is late in Game 7 of the ’68 Series between the Cardinals and Tigers.

The game is in St. Louis and the series is tied 3-3.

Mr. White wrote: Still no score. Summer and the Series were running out. Gibson had permitted only one base-runner in the game, and here were the Tigers down to their last seventh inning of the year. Gibson fanned Stanley, for his thirty-fourth strikeout of the Series, and Kaline grounded out. At three and two, Cash singled to right. Horton hit to the left side, and the ball went through for a single. Northrup lined the first pitch high and deep, but straight to center, where Curt Flood started in, reversed abruptly, and then stumbled, kicking up a divot of grass. He recovered in an instant and raced toward the fence, but the ball bounced beyond him, a good four hundred feet out; Northrup had a triple, and two runs were in. Freehan doubled past Brock in left, for the third.

It is right there in plain sight.

For me, it made Mr. Angell more human and that much more great.

Roger Angell has died.

This is when I quote John O`Hara on the death of George Gershwin.

I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.

5.23.2022 – the sky and the sea

the sky and the sea
put on a show, every day
they put on a show

Adapted from Carl Sandburg’s, Thimble Islands, which was published in “Good morning, America” by New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928.

In searching for the full text of this poem to copy and paste into this essay, I came across a 269 page document from the Office of Education in Washington, DC that had been written by the University of Oregon, titled The Whole Poem Teacher.

The document was identified as a Poetry: Literature Curriculum – Teacher’s Guide.

Printed in 1971, the first two paragraphs of the introduction state:

In the lessons preceding this one, your class has concentrated on various poetic techniques, isolating them more or less from the total fabric of the poem for the purposes of examination and identification. Such a process is necessary, but it is a rather sterile exercise if it stops there. For the goal of all this investigation has been not the ability to identify poetic devices, but to enjoy more fully the experience of reading a poem. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to “put back” all the isolated elements into the whole poem.

To borrow a useful distinction made by the poet:-critic John Ciardi, we want our students to be able to answer not only the question, “What does this poem mean?” but also the question, “How does this poem mean?” Answering the first question only leads to bad paraphrase and moral- abstracting. Answering the first question in terms of the second, on the other hand, leads to close and intelligent reading, to appreciation of the internal dynamics of the poem, and consequently to a far more sensitive perception of the poem’s “meaning.” For in poetry the way something is said is part of what is being said.

Wanting to avoid the introduction tearing out scene of Dead Poets Society, I think this is rather good as it does not impose a scale but plays on the readers interpretation.

“How does this poem mean?” and “… in poetry the way something is said is part of what is being said.” is good even as it brackets that oh so ponderous statement, “leads to close and intelligent reading, to appreciation of the internal dynamics of the poem, and consequently to a far more sensitive perception of the poem’s ‘meaning.‘”

The document was part of the Oregon Elementary English Project and according to the first line of the abstract, This curriculum guide is intended to introduce fifth and sixth grade children to the study of poetry.

Fifth and sixth grade children?

All I can say about that is to paraphrase the Book of Psalms, Lord Byron and Stephen Vincent Benét (all at the same time!), By the rivers of Babylon, There I sat down and wept, When I remembered Zion.

Here is the Sandburg poem:

THIMBLE ISLANDS

The sky and the sea put on a show
Every day they put on a show
There are dawn dress rehearsals
There are sweet monotonous evening monologues
The acrobatic lights of sunsets dwindle and darken
The stars step out one by one with a bimbo, bimbo.

The red ball of the sun hung a balloon in the west.
And there was half a balloon, then no balloon at all,
And ten stars marched out and ten thousand more,
And the fathoms of the sky far over met the fathoms of the sea far
under, among the thimble islands

In the clear green water of dawn came a float of silver filaments, feelers
circling a pink polyp’s mouth.
The feelers ran out, opened and closed, opened and closed, hungry and
searching, soft and incessant, floating the salt sea inlets sucking the
green sea water as land roses suck the land air

Frozen rock humps, smooth fire-rock humps –
Thimbles on the thumbs of the wives of prostrate sunken
giants –
God only knows how many sleep in the slack of the
seven seas

There in those places
under the sun balloons,
and fathoms, filaments, feelers –

The wind and the rain
sew the years
stitching one year into another