Getting a Jump on Christmas

Every year the decorations go up earlier. It used to be the stores and my neighbors would wait until after Thanksgiving. But now, they're up sometime soon after Halloween. And don't you love the decorations that stay up till April. Something strange is going on inside THOSE houses. The eggnog never stops flowing, I reckon.

In that spirit, I'm presenting the Miami view: (that's the cast of CSI Miami, by the way)



An old fart's view of the approaching holiday season:

Sliced Cactus?

There's lots of remedies.
























This one is tried and true: Bathroom Yoga Position: The Sick as Dog Pose










This guy has a nice list.





Or you might try this classic method. A few household items would do.



Then there's the Eastern Way:



A little study might be a good idea before next Thanksgiving.

Got to Check This Out

My friend, Michael Stern, now has his website up and running, and there are some absolutely wonderful photographs there. Florida wildlife shots, and birds and nature shots. Stuff for sale. Check it out here.

Happy Thanksgiving

Well, at least some guys got their bonus.



(click photo to see all its gluttonous detail)

Happy Turkey Day from those of us at Blog Central.

"Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too"

Since “Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too” a poem I wrote about Spiderman, shows up in a lot of anthologies and text books and therefore becomes assignment material for students of many ages, I frequently get emails requesting more information on the poem. So I’ve prepared the following to answer some basic questions about that poem. Feel free to post comments or further questions either at the end of this post, or in the guest book section of this site.

First, you should realize that just because a writer says something about their own work, that doesn't automatically mean their interpretation is better than yours. Some writers have far too much pride in their own view of their work and don't trust alternative views. But the truth is, a good reader can see stuff in my poem that I didn't see. So feel free to take the following with several grains of salt.

One question that gets asked frequently is: “What was I thinking/feeling as I began writing that poem?”

Well, here goes. After six years of college teaching, I'd just gotten tenure at the university where I teach in Miami and I knew, given the difficult job market, that it was going to be very hard to find a different job somewhere else, so more than likely I'd probably be right there teaching the same courses at that same university and having the same routines many years later. So I just better accept where I was and try to make the best of it. (I was right. This is my 36th year of teaching at Florida International University.)

At the time the thought was kind of depressing. I was also struggling with the whole idea of being a writer. It's a tough profession--especially as a poet. A lot of rejection all the time. Maybe fifty poems rejected for every one accepted. That wears on you. Kind of like Spiderman getting caught in a web of his own making.

I can't remember why exactly I chose Spiderman. I guess I was thinking that as a kid I'd always dreamed of being a writer--and that I'd thought that being one would be like being a superhero of some kind. So I started to wonder if maybe even superheroes got bored with their routines, and their personalities just like normal people did. Voila, the poem began to take shape.

When this poem was written, back in 1979 or so, I hadn't read a Spiderman comic in years, so some of what I describe in the poem is factually wrong. I've mixed him up with Batman a little, for one thing. You could describe these "errors" as "poetic license" or you could just say I didn't know what I was talking about. Personally, I don't think that makes a big difference, but there are some readers who disagree.

The speech impediment (which might be considered politically incorrect these days) simply started out as a technique to try to be funny, but it turned into more than that. As I wrote in that Elmer Fudd kind of voice, I found places in the poem where the words actually meant something different in the new speech (my heart beat at a different wate (weight) I was also thinking that even superheroesmust be flawed in some way. They LOOK like they have wonderful lives—just as writers do---but that's all from the outside. But when you get close and really inspect them, and hear how they talk, wow, they're just like the rest of us, pimples, warts and all.

Of course "buining" one's suit is the punchline of the poem. It's a hard thing to do--recreate yourself, reinvent yourself. Become someone different, someone new. Throw away one identity (and mask) and put on another. We all struggle with that in some way or another. We want to change, to grow, to abandon one set of personality features for better ones. That's why people go to school, to church, to the shrink, and it's one of the reasons why we write. To reinvent ourselves.

But it's a very hard thing to do. Old habits die hard.

So that's it: A quickie analysis. But I'd be willing to entertain alternate views. There's just no right answer to what a particular poem or story "is about." I'm not the expert (as I said above) just because I wrote the poem. A careful reader can often spot things, or come up with theories that are more revealing, or make more sense than what a writer thinks.

It's one of the frustrating and wonderful things about studying and teaching literature. There are no perfectly right answers. There are answers that are righter than others, or answers that are more elegantly argued. But interpreting poems is much like figuring out people. What's on the surface is not always real. And what's below the surface is never easy to be one hundred percent sure of. That's what makes the whole enterprise of reading literature so much fun, and teaching it such a challenge and joy.



Spiderman as just an ordinary guy.


















Here's the poem itself:



All my pwoblems
who knows, maybe evwybody's pwoblems
is due to da fact, due to da awful twuth
dat I am SPIDERMAN.
I know. I know. All da dumb jokes:
No flies on you, ha ha,
and da ones about what do I do wit all
doze extwa legs in bed. Well, dat's funny yeah.
But you twy being
SPIDERMAN for a month or two. Go ahead.

You get doze cwazy calls fwom da
Gubbener askin you to twap some booglar who's
only twying to wip off color T.V. sets.
Now, what do I cawre about T.V. sets?
But I pull on da suit, da stinkin suit,
wit da sucker cups on da fingers,
and get my wopes and wittle bundle of
equipment and den I go flying like cwazy
acwoss da town fwom woof top to woof top.

Till der he is. Some poor dumb color T.V. slob
and I fall on him and we westle a widdle
until I get him all woped. So big deal.

You tink when you SPIDERMAN
der's sometin big going to happen to you.
Well, I tell you what. It don't happen dat way.
Nuttin happens. Gubbener calls, I go.
Bwing him to powice, Gubbener calls again,
like dat over and over.

I tink I twy sometin diffunt. I tink I twy
sometin excitin like wacing cawrs. Sometin to make
my heart beat at a difwent wate.
But den you just can't quit being sometin like
SPIDERMAN.
You SPIDERMAN for life. Fowever. I can't even
buin my suit. It won't buin. It's fwame wesistent.
So maybe dat's youwr pwoblem too, who knows.
Maybe dat's da whole pwoblem wif evwytin.
Nobody can buin der suits, dey all fwame wesistent.
Who knows?

Unpardonable Turkey

On this turkey's watch the US has lost spectacular quantities of wealth. So have I. So probably have you. Part of the problem was that there was "no watch."

Yet the bailouts and pardons are being handed out left and right. The "midnight rules" are being printed up to leave the gates wide open for even more rapacious activity. One more thing Obama's people will have to clean up.

Remember how people howled when the Clintons supposedly clipped a few items from the White House on their way out. Compare that to what this gang of Mongols has done. They stripped the treasury.

And either they watched it happen and approved, or they were so totally incompetent that they didn't know the looting was going on all around them.






So this holiday season, I'm thankful I can still afford a tankful.
I'm thankful it's almost January 2009.

I only wish I'd kept that printing press
my parents gave me as a child.

I Vant Another Drink

You've read the book, seen the movie. Now for the real bloodsucking.

Is this the Twilight of Capitalism? In eight short years (well it seemed very long to some of us) we've gone from 'free and unregulated markets know best' to quasi-socialism: state sponsored banks and insurance companies and probably soon, auto companies and, well, who knows what next? Authors? Yeah!

Can I have my hundred mil now, please.




And the fallout of the bailout is now officially hitting the book biz.

And the magazine biz.

And of course kiss your newspaper good-bye. But that's another story.

Bad Sex

Here's a wonderfully British award which was established by Auberon Waugh to "gently dissuade" authors from including "unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels".

Congratulations, Rachel.

Florida unReal Estate

Want to buy some very quirky Florida real estate?

















Or there's this if you want something a little more old-fashioned:

A Little Self-Promotion

I came across this short movie lately. The guy, who I don't know, says some nice things about Magic City, then he gets to his real point.

Destructive to the Last

The lame duck is quacking away.






















Start inflating the life rafts.

It Just Never Stops

Just when you thought our elected leaders had come to their senses, there's this.

Get Her Done

Yeah, with two months left, who would've thought otherwise.

A little Poetry

Here's my friend Campbell McGrath (and my colleague at FIU) talking about some cool stuff:

Calliope

Calliope was one of those goddesses I never really understood. In paintings she's always seen with a writing tablet in her hand, or a roll of paper or a book. Was she a writer? Her name means "beautiful voiced" and her son was Orpheus, who was able to charm birds, fishes and wild beasts, and even make the trees and rocks dance.

I've always thought of Orpheus as the ultimate poet/writer, one of those silver-tongued guys who could use eloquence and lyricism to cause a rapturous response in listeners. When I was young and starting out as a writer I believed this was the writer's ultimate job. To transport readers to a higher plane.

I guess my goals these days are less lofty. Simply entertaining a reader seems a pretty noble and challenging enterprise. Just winning a reader away from all the other entertainment choices available is a major accomplishment.

But still, somewhere back in the hallways of memory, Orpheus still lurks. I still like to think of great writing as a kind of hypnotism. A trance that the best writers can invoke, that will transport readers to places and emotional planes that otherwise would be beyond their experience. Some small part of me still wants to charm the birds down out of the trees.

I was thinking of this because of the calliope I saw (and recorded below) at Fairchild Gardens last weekend. The music itself is more goofy than inspirational. Though I couldn't help thinking of how metaphorically interesting it is. A mechanical device that "makes music." Not unlike the contrived, artifice of a novel that sometimes, with luck, can melt our hearts.

Writers Hanging Out

Here's a little more of the recent FIU writers conference held at the Marriott on Hutchinson Island. This is a short scene around the tiki bar beside the pool. Most of the people in this video are professors at FIU. All are writers. All seem to be drinking. Writers drinking? How odd.

Stella in the TV Room

Here's a typical weekend afternoon. I'm switching between a football game and a rodeo. The dogs wander in to the TV room and Stella decides that bucking bulls are not allowed in her house.

She's the only one of the three who watch TV and react to it. The other day when I mentioned this to our vet, she said that this indicated that Stella was smarter than the other two.

I don't know how smart a dog is who thinks there's a bucking bull in the room with her. I'd be interested to hear from other dog (or cat?) owners about TV habits.

What Airport Security Sees

An Empty Life

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

A Snippet of the Book Life

At the FIU Hutchinson Island Writers Conference, three luminaries, after too much wine and too little self-control, gather in the street of downtown Stuart. That's Peter Meinke, the poet and short story writer, Les Standiford, the novelist and author of several narrative biographies, and his wife Kimberly who is good at everything she does.

Art by Liza Leigh Colmes

I came across this wonderful piece of artwork on my friend Geoff Colmes' website (which you can find here). It's done by his daughter and it expresses something wonderfully viceral and urpy about the modern world as seen through the eyes of a youngster. Anything can be beautiful. Anything can be turned into art. And check out that spew projecting from the lower right hand corner. Like incoming tide clashing with outgoing.

(click to enlarge)




Art by Liza Leigh Colmes


Any art critics out there tempted to interpret this?

SuperCool

Okay, so he's not Superman. But it will sure be wonderful to have a guy at the helm who can speak in compound, complex sentences and who is an author, a very good author. Check out what writers think about the guy.

And a man who is also an inspirational figure, maybe even "transformational," as Colin Powell called him.

To undo what W. and his band of robber barons and government haters have done in the last eight years will take superhuman powers.

Imagine a kid in America who for the first time in that kid's life, hears the President of his country speak intelligently and articulately about a wide range of subjects. A man who doesn't mock intellectuals or the educated, but sets a higher standard for everyone. Wow, what a minty breath of spring that will be.

For only the second time in my life I feel there's a guy in the White House who can inspire Americans to be the leading force for good in the world. Not through our military power, though I have no doubt he'll be able to handle that role, but through the power of our ideas and our creativity and our industry and our Yankee ingenuity.

Here's a snippet from Reagan's First Inaugural Address that seems appropriate:

"The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we as Americans have the capacity now, as we've had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom."

Put that alongside FDR, in his second inaugural address: “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”

Well, some of us know that. But there are still some who think that totally unregulated markets operate most efficiently. And that government has no real purpose. And that "let them eat cake" isn't such a bad idea.

Back to Reagan's inaugural. The following is a famous passage from that speech that many conservatives hold as a declaration of their sacred position:

"In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else."

In my view government becomes the problem when government hates the very idea of governing, as we've seen in the last eight years. (Remember Jeb Bush's inaugural in which he rhapsodized about some wonderful future day when all those state office buildings would be empty--ie. everything on the state level was fully privatized.)

Bush's White House twisted Reagan's words into an argument against effective and enlightened governing. A White House that distrusted government, that wanted to dismantle or privatize or undermine most of the good programs previous adminstrations had created. The EPA, for one. FEMA for another. If you don't believe in the mission of an agency, it gives you carte blanche to fill it with political hacks and cronies instead of professionals, and to rewrite regulations so you effectively gut the power of the agency to (for instance) keep our air clean, our water pure and our industries from unchecked environmental havoc.

As Reagan's speechwriter suggested, we can't rely on people in Washington to solve all our problems; we've got to learn to govern ourselves. (ie. "fend for yourself") Reagan was making the case for doing away with what he considered the "welfare state" and a safety net for the poor. A good old fashioned American idea of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps." Clinton moved that agenda ahead, dropping millions from the welfare rolls, and Bush did even more. So in the last eight years six million new citizens are now in povery.

Is that because they didn't govern themselves or work hard? In some cases, I suppose so. But it's also because there was one of the greatest "redistributions of wealth" in modern history. Bush's tax cuts moved wealth away from the bottom 80 percent and created an added comfort zone for the top tier.

The train wreck in the economy that we're experiencing now, and we'll be experiencing for years, I'm afraid, is an expression of that trickle down philosophy of wealth creation. Deregulate, trust the markets, give the most to the wealthy, and let others fend for themselves. It's a train wreck that in my most cynical moments I believe was entirely planned, or at least condoned. What better way to demonstrate that government is not the answer but the problem, than to cause the government to fail.

What's different about Obama is that he might actually inspire people to put their faith in government to act responsibly again, and for a few to sacrfice so that many can survive without holding three jobs. That's not socialism, my friends. That's America.

One can dream.

"I ask you to believe - not just in my ability to bring about change, but in yours. I know this change is possible…because in this campaign, I have had the privilege to witness what is best in America. I've seen it in lines of voters that stretched around schools and churches; in the young people who cast their ballot for the first time, and those not so young folks who got involved again after a very long time. I've seen it in the workers who would rather cut back their hours than see their friends lose their jobs; in the neighbors who take a stranger in when the floodwaters rise; in the soldiers who re-enlist after losing a limb. I've seen it in the faces of the men and women I've met at countless rallies and town halls across the country, men and women who speak of their struggles but also of their hopes and dreams."

Barack Obama, President elect

Under the Bus

Miami Book Fair, 25th Anniversary, Coming Next Week

I love the way this hep cat writes.

Here's all you need to know about the Miami Book Fair.

I Feel Blue

America, the Beautiful

Voters in the West Village, that's NYC. What a great country.



Beautiful, except maybe in parts of Florida.

And other parts of Florida.

Easy Rider

Love Onions

Another Legend, RIP

He was one hell of a guy.

Dewey Beats Truman

Stranger things have happened.

A Great Combo

One of my favorite actors reads that old high school favorite.