Yearly Archives 2014

I have taken to walking the graveyard,
An oak-tree’d resting place
Under whose towering limbs
A treasure of autumn leaves and acorns fall.

Strangely soothing, this gliding above the dead,
Pausing to note a name, an age, doing the math,
Adding or subtracting my own advancing years in
A fruitless assessment of my place in line.

Fall’s fierce abiding beauty comes at a price,
Golden everywhere sans the dark abyss where it points,
Each October a plaintive call to arms and attention,
Open arms of a love, that is, and attention to time, precious time.

Under every stone, a story of one who breathed, perspired,
Dreamed, questioned, loved, risked—and suffered, of course—
As I suffer now running hard up the hill from the potter’s fields,
Toward the stone monuments of nobles who lie there just as dead.

Breathless, I walk again, blood coursing, eyes horizoned,
Seeking a still point around which everyday life ...

In the 21st century, should we be hitting children as just another form of parental discipline?

And what do we mean exactly by “hit?” A pat on the backside to extra-emphasize to a 3-year-old not to run into the street in front of cars? Or the methodical creation and application of a “switch” with which to raise welts on a 4-year-old who apparently was overly aggressive with one of his siblings?

Minnesota Viking running back Adrian Peterson had the latter in mind, apparently, in disciplining his son over the summer, injuriously enough that it came to the attention of law enforcement (and now, resoundingly, the media). He actually sounded unapologetic about it in his early responses, and found plentiful support from among the majority of the American population that still believes corporal punishment is at least sometimes appropriate in disciplining children.

Later, Peterson offered this official...

Demilitarization would be nice, of course. Blow up all those munitions in far-flung deserts, toss the rifles into the sea, put the B-52s and Hornets and Raptors on display at the military museums, noting them all as relics of the bygone, violent infancy of human history.

But on the way to that rather starry-eyed but ultimately necessary development, it may be even more important that we engage in a process of deliteralization. Meaning that we learn to take all sacred texts and their often contradictory guidelines for human behavior with the proverbial grains of salt they require if we are to finally quell the fanaticism of religious zealots like ISIS, now that they’ve figured out how to organize armies and deploy big guns and use social media to spread their toxic message of hate around the world.

These thoughts occur as I grapple with the most recent essay (Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon, available here

She is sitting on a bus crossing the wintry Algerian desert, seated tight up against her slumbering merchant husband and surrounded by Arabs tucked deep into their burnooses to ward off the cold and the fine grains of sand that find their way through cracks in the vehicle. Suddenly, she notices a French soldier across the aisle who gives her a glance, carrying just a tinge of suggestion.

That glance and a couple of other feeling states to follow are about as far as the “adultery” in this story’s title ever goes, but it sets in motion a long and impassioned emotional storm inside our protagonist, with the reverberations extending far beyond this story and her life.

What transpires from there in Albert Camus’s 1957 short story, The Adulterous Woman, speaks in profound and enduring ways to the human condition...

I think Cole Porter is one of the great writers in history.

No “music history” or “songwriting history” about it.

Just “great writer,” period.

Consider:

You’re the top!
You’re the Coliseum.
You’re the top!
You’re the Louvre Museum

Porter was that rare talent whose gifts and cultivations would surely have made him successful in most any form, but his upbringing, intelligence, tenacity and love of a well-turned phrase landed him in the music world as a major composer and lyricist.

Too bad for you, poetry and fiction!

There’s something wild about you child
That’s so contagious
Let’s be outrageous
Let’s misbehave!!!

***

Unlike many songwriting duos of his era (Rodgers & Hammerstein, Lerner & Loewe, George & Ira Gershwin), Porter was a team of one, writing both the lyrics and the uncannily catchy melodic ditties that make of his music such a joyous and memorable romp.

I get no kick from champagne
Mere alcohol d...