Unkissed: a Sherman Alexie poem

Sherman Alexie, poet and novelist, wrote a great poem titled “Unkissed: A Fibonacci Sequence Poem” for the alternative newspaper The Stranger. The first stanza is:

Who
Knew
The man
Would jackknife,
Leave his lovely wife,
And abandon his preschool kids?
He told me once, “I hate my life.” So who knew? I did.

A set of Alexie’s sevenling poems were recently published in the online poetry journal Mudlark. (Here are the rules for sevenling poems.) My favorite was this one:

Communion

This is the last poem I will write about salmon,
My tribe’s Jesus fish, our God fish, bedamning
And bedamned. I will no longer examine

And reexamine the sins that doomed our fish.
I will not weep. My pain and fear are banished.
This is my last lamentation, my last wish:

Let my people’s famine become our Eucharist.

You can read Sherman Alexie’s short story “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” in The New Yorker, originally published in 2003 and part of the “The Best American Short Stories: 2004″. Alexie also recently had some interesting expert answers for Savage Love, The Stanger’s always entertaining sex advice column.

I loved Alexie’s book “The Business of Fancydancing” and his book “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” was also outstanding.

books posted by: dan  @  19 Feb 2009 16:45 | Comments (0)

Fields of Fire

I’ve been impressed since I first noticed Jim Webb, the current junior Senator from Virginia, during his run for his Senate seat. While I don’t agree with all of his politics, he seems more of a plain-spoken man with good intentions than the average politician.

The recent article on Jim Webb in the New York Review of Books sparked my interest in his writing, and I recently finished Fields of Fire. Webb, a highly decorated combat Marine in Vietnam, wrote Fields of Fire in 1979 as a fictionalized account of the real war that was fought by men dying for nameless hills in endless jungle only to give them up a day or two later.

In the excerpt below, a newly arrived Lieutenant Hodges (a central character) is being briefed by a battle-scarred Major prior to his deployment to his troops in the bush. I think it both gives the flavor of Webb’s writing and a synopsis of his view of the war:

The Major offered Hodges a small, challenging smile. “They go wild, Lieutenant. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You’ll go wild, too. Wild as hell. You spend a month in the bush and you’re not a Marine anymore. Hell. You’re not even a goddamn person. There’s no tents, no barbed wire, no hot food, no jeeps or trucks, no clean clothes. Nothing. You’re an animal. It gets so that it’s natural to squat when you take a shit. You get ringworm and hookworm and gooksores. You roll around in your own filth. You forget how bad you smell. Dead people, guts in the goddamn dirt, miserable civilians, it all gets sort of boring. You cry when your friends are killed, but a new friend comes in on the helicopter a few days later, and the dead friend becomes enshrined, a martyr to friendship. You teach the new friend about him, and you all remember him. It’s very romantic.”

“It doesn’t sound romantic.” [replied Hodges]

“That’s after a month. Or two. But Lieutenant. When you do it for six, or nine, or even longer, by Christ, you’ll never shake it. The bush gets in your blood and you hate anyone who hasn’t fermented in his own stench for months, or stood inside a dirt hole all night, waiting to kill a man who’s trying to kill him first.”

Major Otto scrutinized Hodges. “Oh, yeah. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it. That’s something a grunt isn’t supposed to do.” He chuckled again, a sort of dry bark. “But what else can a man do in An Hoa? Oh. And An Hoa. It becomes an oasis. You like An Hoa, Lieutenant?”

“I hate it.”

“You’ll like it when you get back to it from the bush, I guarantee. So. What kind of person can take it, for months on end?”

Hodges felt uneasy. He had expected the Major to wave the flag and talk about Iwo Jima, then send him aboard a resupply helicopter with fire in his heart.

“Someone who is very dedicated, sir. Either that or someone who is very crazy.”

“Well, there you are. That’s it in a nutshell. You just hit the nail on the goddamn head.”

Fields of Fire has been well reviewed by critics and grunts for its detailed account of a story told many times over. As one may expect in a book about the US Marines by a US Marine, the book does fail to offer a realistic picture of the Vietnamese as a people fighting colonialism and occupation. But I’ve seen many of the Hollywood movies, read a handful of books, and heard my share of Vietnam War stories. If I was going to recommend one book or movie about the American war in Viet Nam, it would be Fields of Fire.

books &foreign affairs posted by: dan  @  18 Jun 2008 22:36 | Comments (0)

the cluetrain manifesto

One great thing about traveling is having time to read books. Having given up newspapers in print form for the internet, I can’t imagine that books in the physical form will be so easily replaced. Travel is treat because for a rare day, I can put the computer away, turn the cell phone off, and be consumed by a book. The lack of hyperlinks in books results in a lengthy internalized discussion with the author that has no equal on the Net.

On the way home from Jackson Hole yesterday, I read The Cluetrain Manifesto. At that link, you can read it free online. Here is the Manifesto. The book is about how the internet is changing, perhaps returning, the market from mass-production/mass-consumption to conversations among equals. It is a book about the fuzzy side of business and marketing as much as an attempt to capture the ethos of the modern knowledge worker and relay that to megacorp management types. I think the excerpt below gives you a taste of the book, which I thought was good and of general interest beyond tech workers.

To find anything that isn’t overtly complicit with the Great Technology Sitcom, you have to dig down to the underbelly of the Web. You have to get past the sites with commercial pretensions that are slicing and dicing you, counting the legs and dividing by four, bringing in the sheep. You are being incorporated into their demographic surveys. And, predictably, the lowest common denominator is getting all the juice. You are being packaged for advertisers by some of the hippest hucksters on the planet.

Dig deeper. Down to the sites that never entertained the hope of Buck One. They owe nobody anything. Not advertisers, not VC producers, not you. Put your ear to those tracks and listen to what’s coming like a freight train. What you’ll hear is the sound of passion unhinged, people who have had it up to here with white-bread culture, hooking up to form the biggest goddam garage band the world has ever seen.

What are these underbelly sites about? What’s a rock concert about? How about creation, exploring a visceral and shared collective memory we’ve been brainwashed into believing never existed?

Conspiracy theory, my ass. Schools and teachers, the motor vehicle bureau, the IRS, the military, the line at the bank, the television set, the newspapers at the checkout stand, the news on your radio, the billboards along the highway, and now a hundred thousand cold-comfort Web sites. All are tuned to your brain at the deepest level and you have lined up for the coolest, latest-model implant. The carrier wave has been tuned at huge cost to deliver a single message: you are not free, you desire nothing but the products we produce, you have no world but the world we give you.

If you’re OK with this, then eat it up. There’s a bulimic’s dream-feast of killer kontent on the way. But if it already makes you want to puke, get angry. Write it, code it, paint it, play it – rattle the cage however you can. Stay hungry. Stay free. And believe it: win, lose, or draw, we’re here to stay. Armed only with imagination, we’re gonna rip the fucking lid off.

There’s your market.

The Cluetrain Manifesto, Chapter 1

In The White Goddess, Robert Graves writes about creating and sharing art as the only true form of prayer. I don’t have the book anymore and ironically I can’t quote it any better because corporate copyright concerns think they’ll sell more copies by keeping it out of Google Books, but it is, in a sense, the same sentiment as expressed above.

I was familiar with three of the four authors previously, and because of the tone of the book it should probably be mentioned that they were and are highly regarded in the high technology business world. Two are Fellows at Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. The Berkman People blog includes both their blogs, and is very good.

A final quote, from the final chapter:

Imagine a world in which the business of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday.

books &ideas posted by: dan  @  28 Jan 2008 14:51 | Comments (0)

Infidel

I recently finished Infidel, an autobiography by Ayaan Ali Hirsi. Hirsi Ali was born to a Somali Muslim family and raised in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya. In 1992, she fled an arranged marriage and became a refugee in Holland.

The first half of Infidel is about Hirsi Ali’s youth in east Africa and Saudi Arabia. She focuses on her family and the clan system that dominates politics, culture, religion, and economics in the region. She writes very poignantly about her upbringing, but also explores the encroachment of modernity in rural Africa, the Somalian civil war and subsequent humanitarian catastrophe in the late 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic education, and social issues such as female genital mutilation and spousal abuse.

The second half of Infidel is about Hirsi Ali’s adaptation to modern secular Dutch life. She eventually earned her Masters degree in political science and became a member of the Dutch parliment. She studied and contemplated the major issues in Europe today: the integration of Muslim immigrants and the long-term viability of welfare states. She also became an apostate and the victim of violent threats by outraged Muslims. In reference to the 11 September 2001 attacks, Hirsi Ali wrote the following:

People theorized beautifully about poverty pushing people to terrorism; about colonialism and consumerism, pop culture and Western decadence eating away at people’s culture and therefore causing the carnage. But Africa is the poorest continent, I knew, and poverty doesn’t cause terrorism; truly poor people can’t look further than their next meal, and more intellectual people are usually angry at their own governments; they flock to the West. I read rants by antiracist bureaus claiming that a terrible wave of Islamophobia had been unleashed in Holland, that Holland’s inner racist attitude was now apparent. None of this psuedointellectualizing had anything to do with reality.

Other articles blamed the Americans’ “blind” support for Israel and opined that there would be more 9/11′s until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was resolved. I didn’t completely believe that either. I myself, as a teenager, might have cheered the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, and the Palestinian dispute was completely abstract to me in Nairobi. If the hijackers had been nineteen Palestinian men, then I might have given this argument more weight, but they weren’t. None of them was poor. None of them left a letter saying there would be more attacks until Palestine was liberated. This was belief, I thought. Not frustration, poverty, colonialism, or Israel: it was about religious belief, a one-way ticket to Heaven.

I was living in Stockholm in 2001 and the issues described were and still are the major issues facing nearly every European country. Muslims have immigrated to Europe in great numbers, and generally isolate themselves in closed groups that retain the hallmarks of their clan-based societies. Hirsi Ali argues that Islam and Western values of personal liberty and equality are both unequal and incompatible. It is an argument I’m not sure I agree with entirely, but I admit that Hirsi Ali is more of an expert in the true nature of Islam. She scoffs at the media portrayal of Islam as a religion of peace and equality.

Overall, this book was exactly what I hoped it would be. The insight into clan-based societies and Islamic life were great. The insight into the adaptation of young Muslims to Western-style culture and governance will be a major issue for many years to come, especially in Europe. Sweden continues to accept hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants each year, to the point where the core of Swedish culture seems threatened by groups that refuse or are unable to assimilate. Even discussing the issue may lead one to seem unwelcoming or xenophobic, but it seems dangerous and willfully naive to hope for the best rather than investigating solutions that honor others’ cultures while also preserving our own.

books &foreign affairs &politics posted by: dan  @  25 Jan 2008 20:16 | Comments (0)

Bodhidharma and I

 

Once Seung Sahn Soen-sa and a student of his attended a talk at a Zen center in California. The Dharma teacher spoke about Bodhidharma. After the talk, someone asked him “What’s the difference between Bodhidharma’s sitting in Sorim for nine years and your sitting here now?”

The Dharma teacher said, “About five thousand miles.”
The questioner said, “Is that all?”
The Dharma teacher said, “Give or take a few miles.”

Later on, Soen-sa asked his student, “What do you think of these answers?”
“Not bad, not good. But the dog runs after the bone.”
“How would you answer?”
“I’d say, ‘Why do you make a difference?’ “

Soen-sa said, “Not bad. Now you ask me.”
“What’s the difference between Bodhidharma’s sitting in Sorim for nine years and your sitting here now?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I’m listening.”
“Bodhidharma sat in Sorim for nine years. I am sitting here now.”

The student smiled.

Seung Sahn, Dropping Ashes on the Buddha, Chapter 87

books &zen posted by: dan  @  19 Jul 2007 9:31 | Comments (0)