I laugh at the way I hunt stones at the beach, but tonight I really look at them, fifty of them laid out flat on a fold-out table in my apartment on the Atlantic.
I’m sitting up in bed, my little laptop on a pillow that rests on my legs, the only light in the room a spotlight on the stones. They’re just to my left. They angle into one another on top of a white kitchen cloth, their striations making them — as I’ve learned to call them — graphic stones. Also lucky stones. Lined stones, graphic stones, lucky stones. Lucky if their white stripe wraps itself all the way around the stone. A lot of mine are like that.
I have my own names for their variants — the white stones with yet whiter lines I call Tres Leches; the tan stones with tangles of raised lines I call Hot Cross Buns; the rare black stones with pale veins I call Cy Twomblies.
One stone – a large gray
oval with concentric white
lines up and down – I call
Pere Ubu, because
it reminds me of this picture:
And really, though I laugh,
stones are sacred, and have
been sacred, to so many for
so long. Mine aren’t sacred
stones, but I handle them
a certain way, seek them
out with a certain seriousness,
and find their texture, heft,
shade and shape — and what
the water and the weight and
the calcite have written on them
— moving.
***********************
A lot of it is the ritual. The special green gloves for brushing the sand off so I can put them clean in my pockets. The afternoon departure, when the sun is just so and the tide washes over the stones and makes them shine. I dart back and forth like a sandpiper as the water approaches and recedes. I cast my eyes quickly over twisting paths of stones as I walk (I keep a good pace — this is a walk), noting only stones of a certain size and smoothness and presence, and then lean down, pick one up, and hold it to the sun.
I marvel at the mosaic shapeliness of the beach itself. The sort of beauty I’m seeing in the long tossed up curving paths of granite and basalt provokes a satori… Roland Barthes, writing about Twombly’s painting and artforms like it, describes a satori as a moment of blissful astonishment at a seemingly negligent, random gesture that somehow becomes supremely aesthetic.
And of course there’s everything else around me — The cold rush of the ocean, the sky’s graphic contrails, the colonies of motionless gulls. My pockets become heavy with stones, and I keep my hands in my pockets and move them over the stones as if the stones are worry stones.
Now I sit on a boardwalk bench and examine each stone yet again, tossing back onto the beach one that’s too small, another whose lines are strong but whose surface is rough, and another which looked beautiful wet but lost its looks in the sun.
Back in the apartment, I wash each stone again and then consider its seams and its quartz alongside the pebbles already there. It’s lyrical.
The Leadership Institute or whatever [Find it yourself. UD doesn’t link to porn.] at Kansas State has released this fellatial book about the university’s president. It’s certainly true that his leadership style is much in the news. You can read dozens of articles about it this morning. Here’s one.
Wefald regrets error in pact
K-State president says mistake was giving ex-AD lengthy deal
MANHATTAN — Kansas State athletic director Bob Krause once spoke with optimism about the groundbreaking contract extension awarded to his predecessor, Tim Weiser.
… Weiser’s K-State career ended less than three years later, a separation that will cost the university $1.9 million. In light of those events, Krause and university president Jon Wefald now view the 10-year contract as a mistake.
“I can’t over-emphasize the fact that we just made a mistake,” Wefald said Wednesday, a day before details of Weiser’s $1.9 million separation agreement became public. “I’ll openly tell you that.” [We. Note the president’s willingness to take responsibility for what he and he alone has done.]
Wefald said K-State “got caught up in the BCS arms race” when other big-budget schools began expressing interest in Weiser. [Note the president’s lie. Weiser left because Wefald – against his advice – gave tons of money to keep a coach who crapped out on them.]
… “I don’t think we’ll be paying ADs here at Kansas State $700,000 again,” said Wefald, who will retire at the end of the academic year. “Who knows. I’m only going to be the president for another (few months). I’m just speculating about the future, (but) I don’t think you have to pay an AD $700,000 to have a good one.” [Note the president’s continued accountability: I’m outta here! Note the president’s self-alienation: I TOLD you not to pay him that much!]
… At K-State, one of Krause’s first major moves as athletic director was to give football coach Ron Prince a new contract with a larger buyout. That move backfired when the school fired Prince three months later, triggering the $1.2 million buyout clause…
“When you turn staff over, you budget it as a one-time expense,” said Krause, who estimated the school would pay $1.7 million in buyouts to Prince and his coaching staff. “That’s what you’ve got reserves for.” [Hey fuck you. We got a reserve.]
… One K-State donor said he stopped making financial contributions because of the instability within the athletic department, expressing frustrations echoed by K-State student Anika Bergh.
“It angers me because I pay so much money a year to be here and get the education that I want,” said Bergh, a season ticketholder in football and basketball. “To have them throwing away money like that, it just makes me feel like it’s money coming out of my pocket.”
Wefald viewed the settlement as the first step toward a more fiscally responsible strategy, one he said will not include long-term contracts like Weiser’s.
“Sometimes partnerships can’t last that long,” Wefald said. [Note the president lecturing us on how to run a university so that you don’t run it into the ground the way the president did.]
Potato Heads up close.
“During the last nine seasons, the University of Idaho football team has lost 82 of 105 games. Even with its winning seasons as members of the Big Sky conference, its “all-time ranking” is 118 out of 125 schools.
For the past three seasons, the UI men’s basketball team has lost 73 of 89 games. Its current NCAA standing is 316th out of 341 colleges and universities.
If any UI academic program had such a poor performance record, it would certainly be eliminated or reduced in its mission.
But since 1999, state funding for UI athletics went from $1.78 million to $3.04 million, a 71 percent increase. By comparison, general education budgets for Idaho higher education have increased 46 percent during the same period.
In 2003, athletics was given a $500,000 “gift” from the president’s office, presumably to cover the costs of joining the Western Athletics Conference.
Also in 2003, the basketball coach received a $15,000 pay raise, the second highest in the university. UI athletic director Robert Spear tried to fudge the raise as one based on future performance, but the increment was added to his base salary before the season began.
During the financial crisis of 2004-05, the UI liberal arts college was forced to cut $326,000, but $322,600 was added to the athletics department budget. A faculty committee recommended that then-President Tim White reduce the athletic budget by $300,000, but he decided to fire 27 staff employees instead.
In 1987, the state Board of Education reinstituted the policy of using general education monies for athletics. Since then the annual subsidy has grown from $665,500 to $3,041,679, a 357 percent increase. Athletics on all Idaho campuses experienced a similar increase. Without that subsidy, the Idaho Vandals won five Big Sky championships from 1983-87.
While all other UI faculty and staff received little or no raises this year, the athletic director enjoyed an 8 percent raise, and the salary line for football coaches with record losses has also increased 8 percent.
Since 1997, all UI departments have paid an administrative fee on all external funds to the central administration. The fee has now risen to 8 percent, but athletics only pays 3 percent.
From 2001-2004, athletics paid no administrative fee at all, claiming it had to reach gender equity goals. What is odd about this excuse is this department has received gender equity money from the Legislature, starting with $115,000 in 1997 and growing to $621,560 this year.
Many other departments could have presented equally persuasive reasons why they too should be exempt. For example, auxiliary services and facilities management generate lots of external funds, and they could very well argue that their salaries, 19 percent of which are below the poverty level, should rise before they are required to pay the administrative fee.
The athletic department has defended its low fee by boasting it returns $2.5 million back to the university in tuition, fees, room and board for scholarship students. About half that amount comes from state funds.
Private scholarship funds for all UI colleges total $4.1 million, so they have a much better reason to ask for a lower administrative fee.
If the implication of this claim is that athletics makes money for UI, then this is clearly false. This year, the athletics department estimated that it would take in $2.1 million dollars in student fees and $726,500 in “institutional support,” plus the $3 million direct subsidy from the Legislature. Simple arithmetic shows at least a $3.3 million deficit not “profit.”
A national study concluded only nine athletic programs are able to actually return money to their respective academic programs. Contrary to conventional wisdom, winning athletic programs do not increase alumni funding.
As a vice president at the University of Notre Dame said: “There is no empirical evidence demonstrating a correlation between athletic department achievement and alumni fundraising success.”
At a Dec. 16 Faculty Council meeting, the chair said it was not fair to pick on any one specific unit of the university during bad times. But when one program has been favored over others for years, then an appeal to equitable treatment is the only principled position.”
A couple of professors write in the University of Idaho newspaper.
… has asked her to elaborate on why the inauguration day poem was so bad. Here goes.
Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.
All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.
Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.
We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.
I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,
picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.
Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?
Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.
In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,
praise song for walking forward in that light.
*********************************
Why is this a bad poem?
Forget delivery. Could have been delivered in a shimmery soprano by Kathleen Battle. Look at the language. Look at where UD began to laugh.
She began to laugh here:
picked the cotton and the lettuce
“Why lettuce?” she asked out loud. No one answered. UD‘s alone at the seashore. Only the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the tide replied.
“Why not?” the tide replied. “Why not? Why not lettuce and peanuts and coffee beans and rice?”
“Well … cotton, you know… I get cotton. It’s a reference to slavery. But lettuce…? Man does not live by bread alone, says Woody Allen: Frequently there must be a beverage. It’s like that. What my kid would call random.”
“I see what you mean, UD. But why? Why does it come across as random?”
“Here’s why. The poem lacks a metaphor. It lacks a controlling dominant image. It also lacks a controlling mood. Its title promises a song. A song of praise. That’s a bit vague, but okay. We’re ready. We’ve encountered songs of praise before, and we’re ready for another one. We expect an upbeat mood, etc. But where’s the singing here? Where’s the praising? Where’s anything? We’re looking for a way to ground ourselves in this poem. We’re looking for an image that recurs, or an idea that recurs. We’re looking for language that holds together by means of rhythmic repetition — after all, it tells us it’s a song — or by means of a controlling metaphor through which all of the poem’s images can be understood so that when we get to the end of the poem we feel we’ve had a coherent experience. Something comprehensible, graspable, has been said… Forget beauty. Beauty would have been nice, but there isn’t any here. Plain speech and all that. Okay. But at least give us a coherent utterance.”
“You’re being awfully harsh, UD. Karlson’s right. You’re going to have to elaborate.”
“Line by line?”
“Line by line”
“Hokay.”
************************************
Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.
First off, forget rhyme. You’re not going to get a song that rhymes. What about intriguing, beautiful language instead? Language that sings? Poetry that doesn’t rhyme is fine, but poetry lacking all lilt, all linguistic oomph, is not fine. Especially if its title tells us it’s a song.
The idea in this first stanza is that we live quotidian inauthentic frustrated lives – stuck in daily business, asocial… Sometimes we catch each other’s eyes, and sometimes we speak, but it’s no different from not speaking or not catching each other’s eyes. Rather depressing, this.
All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.
Yet more depressing. In place of speech, mere noise. We note already the use of repetition in this poem. And yet – why? In what way does it strengthen or underline or shift in some noteworthy way what the poem wants to say by having it say certain things twice? I see no point to the repetition.
Many people report having been bored by this poem. Pointless repetition is one of the reasons.
Now we get a new image: bramble, thorn. When we speak, our words are the accumulated words of all of our ancestors, and OUCH. They hurt. They are brambles, thorns. Bleeding tongues. Not pretty. Odd in a praise song. Vague thoughts in the reader’s mind of Jesus here. Should there be? Will there be a Christian element? Er, a little maybe, at the end. But the poet does nothing with it. Which is the other big problem with this poem. Random stabs in the direction of many images, none of which becomes a symbol or metaphor, because each is dropped as soon as mentioned, and no shaping, therefore, of a larger message takes place.
Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.
Put this in the form of a sentence. Same deal. It is a sentence, that’s why. It’s not poetry. Poetry is a special sort of utterance in which plain prose is lifted up into something that sings. This is flat speech. Not poetry. It tries, with ye olde repetition, to be poetry at the end of the sentence — repairing the things in need of repair. But because there’s no content here beyond simple statement, and no poetic elevation of the prose in which it becomes suggestive of more than mere propositional statement, it just sits there, looking stupid. Looking like a tautology. We repair… things that need to be repaired! We speak or… we don’t speak! If there’s no larger meaning, or at least larger implication, that you can lend your language, you’re lost.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.
Again, the sense of arbitrary observation rendered in dull language. We begin to detect a slight theme — the difficulty of expressing ourselves — weighed down by ancestors, by mutual incomprehension, by the dull dailiness of life’s business… But then we get images of waiting and watching… What are they about? And we get a teacher who speaks to her students telling them to start writing… And?… Do we condemn the teacher? She perhaps has contributed to the linguistic dullness, the desperate attempts to communicate, that this song of praise describes…
We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.
Well, it was thorn and bramble before; now it’s still spiny, but also smooth. If spiny means painfully derivative, what does smooth mean? And note once again the deadly repetition that feels not like a song but like a kindergarten teacher repeating things for our slow-witted benefit. words, words… consider, reconsider… This poem is talking down to us.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.
I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
This fails to make sense spatially, and in a variety of other ways. Who crosses highways?
And is it the crossing we’re supposed to be thinking about — Like the chicken, we want to see what’s on the other side — or is it travellin’ down that highway? I know there’s something better down the road. Across or down? See – it’s just muddy. Poetry is supposed to be language at its most carefully deployed. This is a mess.
And it gets worse. Put aside the cliches that comprise this entire stanza. Note instead another pointless transition — again, her transitions come across as pointless because the poem is unstructured by any dominant image or mood — We need to find a place where we are safe. Where did that idea come from? Who said we were in danger? This reads as bathos.
Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,
picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Okay, this is a promising moment. The stifled or failed or painful speech that went before is now set aside, and we are enjoined to say it plain. Sing it out. But if you introduce your stanzas like this, the reader has a right to expect a reasonable elevation of language at this point. It feels like a climax. Yet we get more dully reported examples of human effort. The ugliness of the final two lines – “brick by brick the glittering edifices / they would then keep clean and work inside of.” – cannot be evaded. Brick by brick is a terrible cliche. And ending her sentence with the deadly little creepy crawly of? Really. Look at this language. Read it aloud. And tell me how it could possibly be understood as poetic.
Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.
This is about as good as it gets. She at least alludes to her title. But the stanza remains a compendium of cliches.
Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?
Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.
Because the poet has been unable to rise above cliches, the ancient and beautiful truths she cites here – love thy neighbor, etc. – become as it were infected by her trite linguistic universe. They too wither into cliche. Then we suddenly get love — again, since the metaphorical ground hasn’t been prepared for it, it just jumps out as the next thing the poet grabs — which, in a stale version of Wallace Stevens’ calm darkens among waterlights, becomes a widening pool of light. And why at this late stage in the poem the pool image? Again — nothing in the poem has done anything with that liquidity. As a result it’s just a bore — part of a grab bag of images which together amount to little more than sentimentality. As to the glorious word pre-empt, no comment.
In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,
praise song for walking forward in that light.
The poet pulls herself together here and concludes by returning to her inadequately expressed idea about self-expression.
A poem mainly about the importance of overcoming the difficulty of expressing ourselves should be able to express itself. There lies the depressive dullness at the core of this lament: The poem tells us that we’ll never make any progress toward the light.
*****************************
Update: Here’s another explanation of why this poem failed.
*****************************
Another update: Well, I thought “lettuce” was random, because I recall everyone in my town boycotting grapes, not lettuce. I take the point that lettuce is another clear reference to oppressed farmworkers.
