Hugh Nicoll's Blog

Stephen Vincent published Tenderly #6 or The Gertrude Improvs on March 8. Its mysterious music captured my attention almost immediately, and I’ve gone back to his blog on daily basis to re-read. I could of course copy and paste the text of the whole poem onto my computer and re-read at my private leisure, but I’m enjoying the virtual visiting, as if I were in the room and could hear the poet reading his own evolving text. It helps, of course, that I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Stephen, and seeing his way of interacting with others, in addition to the pleasures and challenges of his texts and photographs.

Here, in “Tenderly #6” — and I’m still struggling to understand how this poem works — alliteration, enjambment, and the syncopation of the text achieve a unity that is as fascinating in its precise constraints as the soaring meditation on language, politics, and history through [a sort of] window on Cheney’s quail shooting incident.

Great stuff!

Not that I’m feeling glum, but 2005 was a very exhausting year, so I’m hoping I can increase the intelligence of my game plan and do better in the coming twelve months. I’ve been enjoying, with the exception of a rather sore back, some extreme New Year’s cleaning, helping my youngest daughter move into what used to be my study, Reorganizing, and vacuuming up the cobwebs, does seem good for the mind and the soul.

I’ve been waiting to read what Ron Silliman would have to say about Katrina for a week. And, sure enough, sharp as usual, and calling on the citizenry as a whole to look at the long-term consequences of an underfunded government, and of our shared responsibility for it — the consequence of the erosion over the last thirty years or so of a sense of the commons as something we’re all a part of.

In the 1970s, a very evil man by the name of Howard Jarvis started the tax revolt that has driven the political right’s economic platform from Ronald Reagan — the president who claimed that government was the problem, not the solution — to George W. In between, more than a few others, such as Bill Clinton, have found it convenient to pander to the same general forces. All governmental institutions in the U.S., regardless of level or purpose, are underfunded. We have troops in Iraq buying armor with their own meager funds. We have a space program today that couldn’t safely land a man on the moon if it tried. We have a president who cut flood relief funds for New Orleans by 44 percent. In the 27 years since California put into place Proposition 13, it has seen its education programs — the very state institution on which California’s wealth has been built — nearly starved to extinction.

The disaster in New Orleans was not unforeseeable. But nobody has ever put the resources in place that would be capable of responding to something on this scale, even if it were done correctly. That it was done badly only exacerbates the catastrophe that was lurking all along.

It’s not just the politicians here who are to blame. It’s the fearful, greedy, inner tyrant in every one of us. Every politician — and every voter — who ever voted for a tax cut has blood on their hands this week. Those who have built careers on this may have a little more, as do those who have funded them, but it’s a problem for which we all have to take responsibility. The stench of it is the smell of death rising up from southern Louisiana & Mississippi, rubbing our own noses in our collective handiwork.

Alwin’s latest post is a call to work and a source of hope. He’s relaying field reports and reflections from Dr. Ken Maddox. Dr. Maddox’s closing paragraph includes this beautiful blast:

Please join me and others throughout this country in providing leadership in your community to now rebuild America.

Reading that I was wishing I had a copy of The Chambers Brothers “The Time Has Come” handy with “People Get Ready” to sing along to as well as the title cut “Time Has Come Today.”

Could it be that Katrina and its aftermath will be the start of a long overdue reckoning on the true costs and consequences of race and class as social and ideological constructs in American society?

Paul Krugman on September 2

At a fundamental level, I’d argue, our current leaders just aren’t serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don’t like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.

Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.

So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can’t-do government
that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.

Anne Rice on September 4

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us “Sin City,” and turned your backs.

Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.

I hope I hear millions of echoes in the coming months and years…

Steve Ersinghaus has posted a link to a 2001 Scientific American on what was known.

Frank Rich turns up the heat in Fallujah Floods the Superdome.

Here in Kyushu we’ll have an exciting couple of days with the arrival of Typhoon Nabi. The bigger picture is available from the Japan Meteorlogical Agency site. The satellite image of the northwest quadrant of the Pacific is pretty scary, too. Fortunately, Miyazaki is in no real danger of flooding, though the rains are likely to be heavy, landslides and road closures are inevitable, and there will be losses. My guess is we’ll need to close the storm shutters on Monday night, and that by Tuesday night the worst of the typhoon will have passed.

Mark Bernstein’s “What Ended” is one of the best responses to the horrors of Katrina’s aftermath I’ve read so far, and a great example of writing with power.

What ended this week is the illusion that words can substitute for real work and real knowledge. This was the last, spectacular failure of the internet bubble, the final burnout of paper businesses that had no business and paper politicians who had no cause and paper experts whose expertise lay in their bogus credentials or in the wealth of their pals.

Mark’s latest follows several other very useful posts, including links to Kathryn Cramer’s blog and the terrifying intelligence of press conference assertions by Chertoff so ably discussed at Talking Points Memo and the TPM Cafe.

The whole spectacle has felt like too much, too much to comprehend, and too shameful to be believed, except that it was — as Mark so ably points out — the entirely predictable result of the crony-ridden politics of the Bush administration. (and please, oh Lord, let some wisdom grow within the citizenry that will act a restraint on the dangerous possibilities unfolding with John Bolton as the U. S. representative to the U. N.)

links — the mainstream press and the blogosphere responding in a crescendo of commentary and reflection

• Flushing out the ugly truth — Joan Walsh at Salon
• FloridaBlues — summaries and links
• The Two Americas — Marjorie Cohn on the Cuban government response to hurricanes
• Two Americas — John Edwards’ take
• “What Happens to a Race Deferred” — Jason DeParle at The New York Times
• Dereliction of Duty — Greg Mitchell at Editor and Publisher

Pierre Joris has posted an email from Dahr Jamail’s Dispatches list.
There are moving reflections by Iraq war veterans on the situations they found themselves in, and on the reasons they are now so passionately opposed to Bush’s policies.

Late last year, at the same time my former Moveable Type blog went down in a hail of comment spam, Elin’s blog went down, too; or at least was somewhat unreliable, with posts failing to show up on the home page, and all sorts of other weirdness. Now, she’s publishing a lot again, and proving to be as great a storyteller as ever.

Mark posted a link to a testimonial from William Cole the other day on Tinderbox support. Doug now has a link on his blog, so I just have to jump in with my own story. The preface is that I met Mark, Doug, Alwin and bunch of other wonderful Tinderbox folk last fall in San Francisco at Tinderbox Weekend. There were several aha! moments during the weekend, and it proved to be a very useful and fun event.

I’ve been using Tinderbox for a few years, and before that was a Storyspace user, finding it almost impossible to do real writing in a word processor. I need the options for lateral thinking that tools like Tinderbox can provide. I’m currently keeping my teaching notes, course planning notes, and research and writing notes in Tinderbox. And because I am devoted to a qualitative, narrative approach to research and interaction with my students I need to keep accurate but free-form records of classroom activities, project logs, student work, etc. The monster in all of this is my yearly “Introduction to American Studies” lecture course which usually draws 150-160 students. In my on-going efforts to develop a more learner-centered approach to teaching even in this large lecture room setting, Tinderbox is proving my best ally.

The other day, knowing that there must be a way to import an excel spread sheet of the current enrollees into Tinderbox as separate notes, I started mucking about. I exported the two columns I needed from Excel, but then got stuck trying to figure out how to automate the next step: getting the data into Tinderbox. I went a bit astray, trying to conceptualize regex solutions (Thanks Doug for turning me on to their fundamental importance to thinking in computing space!), Automator or AppleScript, or something, … but I was also thinking there must be a totally obvious and simple way to do this, Mark must have already done this, … (but it was late, I was tired, impatient,)… and though I had searched the Tinderbox manual for “import” options, I felt I was dead-ending, so I sent Mark an email describing what I was trying to do. In just over an hour, I had my answer direct from Mark: drop the tab-delimited file into a Tinderbox document, then use the Explode command (in the Note menu) using the \r (return character on Macs), and presto-chango! you’ve got exactly what you want — each line of your data-set as a separate note. With this basic, but incomparable functionality, combined with the use of simple agents, the record-keeping management of my time-hungry teaching style is a dream come true.

For example, several weeks ago I asked this year’s 150 members of the American studies lecture to form research teams of four or five, choose a topic, and start planning a ten-minute presentation for the whole class. With 150 members, and the inevitable vicissitudes, the result of the group formation process is that we have 33 groups, and the presentations have to be scheduled. We devoted an hour and a bit to negotiating the schedule and topic selection process so that there no redundancies (Five presentations on “McDonald’s” “Coca Cola” or “Hollywood”, etc. — Thanks, but…!) and I took the schedule notes (on paper) back to my office, and created Tinderbox notes for each group including the leader’s contact info, topic, and presentation date. Then in another one of those trivial but terrific Tinderbox moments, I created agents for each of the presentation dates (9 June through 14 July), and had the 33 groups sorted by weeks. Sending reminder emails to the group leaders, and keeping my notes on the student presentations will be wonderfully simple, and I can even use Tinderbox’s linking features to remind me of the location of student group Powerpoint files, add research recommendations, and on and on and on….

So hear! hear! and hip horray for our beloved Tinderbox (and Mark, Elin, Alwin, Doug, and all)

I didn’t read of Creeley’s death until the early morning hours of 1 April in my hotel room in Cardiff, where I am to attend the IATEFL festivities starting tomorrrow evening.

I first read Creeley as a high school student, “I Know a Man” the first poem of Creeley’s I remember distinctly, no doubt because it just felt true, disturbing yet comforting, wrapped as I was in acute adolescent alienation and morbid fear of what was going down in the country at the time: Vietnam, the slipping away of optimism over civil rights, even with Martin Luther King’s assassination yet to come.

After that, Creeley was always a presence on my bookshelves, and in my reading life a quiet guide, introducing me to Cid Corman, Zukofsky, and leading me to think about Williams and the communities and conflicts in American poetry in new ways. I may never shake, however, the feeling that I still have a lot more work to do, will never know enough, etc. etc., which of course none of us ever get to the end to, nor, especially with Creeley as a guide, should we…

So it’s been a fascinating few days, made more acute by jet lag, and the backdrop of mass media attention on the deaths of Terry Schiavo and the Pope.
Wandering alone in Cardiff, trying to catch up on reading, preparations for the new school year and for the conference, the outpouring of reminiscinces on the poetics list and blogs has been touchstone for reflection and re-evaluation of poetry and life. Stephen Vincent and Ron Silliman [1] [2] [3] have provided, as always, new doors and useful starting points for this thinking, and Jack Kimball’s re-publishing of his Creeley article is essential for those starting out, or in need of orienting their maps.

I first heard Creeley speak (in person) last September at the Zukofsky conference, and was astonished at how strong he seemed, and at how familiar his voice was to me, though I had in fact known it only in recorded form and through the page. The mix of open-ness, doubt, sychopations of jazz, and the clear rhythms of New England make the closing paragraphs of Stephen Vincent’s eulogy ring all the the more true.

And beyond or with the work who can ever forget his social presence – a magnetism that brought people up to their best, everyone, in my experience, immedate and alert to each word in the air. A place honored where the poem became as valid as any door through which one may enter to receive a particular gift, where no place else could be more interesting to live and abide.

I – as I am sure of many of us – will miss him dearly.

For any readers who don’t know Creeley’s work, the EPC Creeley page is a great place to start.

A little less conversation, the latest post from Rob Weissman on the corp-focus list, is a call to action for difficult times. The issues are on a bigger scale than the problems we face in educational settings, where we have oodles of data and bundles of experience but apparently very little power as teacher/researchers to effect the policy changes needed to make real impacts in classrooms.

As usual, nearing the beginning of the new academic year, as I try to reflect on the lessons of the year just ending and re-evaluate my lesson planning and materials development processes, the utter inadequacy of the time available, and unavoidable evidence that the bean-counter mentality has as much power to define what happens in my classrooms as I do leaves me feeling irritated, when I’m working to re-charge my batteries and prepare for the challenges of the new year.

Somehow in all the busy-ness over the last three weeks I missed the release of WordPress 1.5. I’ve just upgraded, using the Podz Upgrade Guide in addition to the suggestions on the WordPress site. I like the default theme so much I might just leave it for a while. Update: Nope, the loss of my badges and default home link have driven me back to my old css file. More importantly, I really have to catch up with all the half-written posts maturing in my Tinderbox file.

Welcome to my newly updated WordPress blog. My former “MovableType” blog went down in a swirl of comment spam a week or so ago, and I’ve finally gotten around to re-installing WordPress.

I’ve got all my old posts in Tinderbox, so I will play a bit at re-posting.

Spent a couple of delightful, quiet hours this afternoon with Nakayama-sensei and Uchijima-sensei, the former president of MMU, talking about education, writing, and the future of the planet. Uchijima-sensei, who studies climate change, has just another day or two of writing to do to finish his latest book manuscript. He was looking for an article, “The Industrial Revolution Past and Future” by Robert E. Lucas Jr. which Google promptly produced.

I’ve been an Anthony Braxton fan for a long time, and for many years one of my favorite CDs has been the two-disc Leo Records set, Knitting Factory (piano/quartet) Vols 1 & 2 I found in London in 1996. Braxton’s collected works are challenging, his discography long, and his pioneering sensibility is matched only by the intelligence he brings to the masters of jazz. His “23 Standards” was released by Leo in June 2004, has become my new favorite since I downloaded it from eMusic.com last month.

The CDs consist of a number of concert sessions recorded during his European tour of 2003. Braxton’s phrasings on old favorites such as “Black Orpheus,” “Off Minor,” “Giant Steps,” “Round Midnight,” and “Countown” keep getting more and more interesting the more I listen. The guitar work by Kevin O’Neil is magic. And the quartet also includes Kevin Norton on percussion and Andy Eulau on bass.

Jason Guthartz maintains an outstanding discography of Braxton’s work for those interested in checking out his work.

Gabe is practitioner of Vipassana meditation, and is presently on a ten-day meditation retreat. Check out the code of conduct for the ten-day course.

This is an excerpt from Gabe Gudding’s interview at the Chicago PostModern Poetry site:

I woke up from my Fargo youth and realized there are people whose job it is to wait and wait and then lock people up when they get the chance to. Not saying rioting is good. But this realization shocked me and has never left me: there is a kind of person and a kind of bureaucratic force whose sole purpose is to suppress fun and joy in the name of safety and security – and I understand the occasional need for that – but what shocked me was the realization that this force is constantly creeping outward toward the more benign features of life and it bleeds into this desire to protect “decency,” such that everybody’s at some level a potential rioter. The osmotic pressure of this force is ever constant, and it must be opposed with a disciplined joy. Daniel Kharms was murdered by Stalin’s state apparatus. That’s one reason I work in prisons. Sure there are a lot of people in prisons who murdered and raped. But you can’t do bad unless it’s been done to you first. So all that Lutheranism rubbed off on me: I believe in the political force of love and forgiveness. There are three things, said Henry James, of importance: the first is to be kind, the second is to be kind, and the third is to be kind. I believe in the efficacy of rebellious joy and kindness in the face of pastors and police. This is not a wussy belief. “I have reason doubt the sword,” said Gandhi. Gandhi was not a wussy.

I’m going to have to share this with Miyashita-kun, one of my fourth-year students who will be struggling to finish his graduation thesis on James Baldwin over the next three weeks. The Stein-like repetition — “to be kind” “to be kind” “to be kind” — no matter how hard things may be, no matter how much injustice you may have suffered, is as Gabe suggests a mark of true toughness. Zukofsky’s articulate “uh”…