Serenity… an expedition

Used by retiring or resigning or whatever Dem, Eric Massa, to describe Rahm Emmanuel:

"Rahm Emanuel is son of the devil’s spawn," Massa said. "He is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive."

Er… am I hearing echoes or whistles or my general non-white/ non-wasp folk paranoia?

Update: Well, apparently not paranoia:

1475: Birthdate of famed Italian artist Michelangelo Buonarroti. Say Michelangelo to most people and they respond, Sistine Chapel ceiling. Say his name to Jews and the response is “Moses.” “Moses” is a marble sculpture which depicts the greater Jewish leader. Originally intended for the tomb of Pope Julius II in St. Peter’s Basilica it was placed in the minor church of San Pietro in Vincoli on the Esquiline in Rome after the pope’s death. The statue depicts Moses with horns on his head. This is believed to be because of the mistranslation of Exodus 34:29-35 by St Jerome. Moses is actually described as having "rays of light" coming from his head, which Jerome in the Vulgate had translated as "horns." This horned Moses provided further proof that the Jews were, as the Gospel says, “the Devil’s spawn.

Emphasis mine. I barely knew who Massa was before all this but, me… I’m glad he’s gone. One of these days the "netroots" will learn to – or, I guess, learn how to – vet the candidates they throw so much of their energy and money behind.

But I think  I’d have to somehow arrange to die in Sweden

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Also, it ain’t cheap being green, even when you are dead. Though that’s not really true, either – our carcasses are fairly perfectly designed to give back to the earth that we live off of when we are dead. It’s the rites and rituals, the trappings of death – for the benefit of the living – which can be very expensive.

I can understand well the desire to be protected – or to protect – the body from the busy environmentalists who carry off and distribute nutrients through the earth once we are underground; I hate worms and bugs, no matter how much good they do, and I hate the thought of them having a go at me once I am in their domain. I know, I know, I’d be dead, so what would it really matter? And that’s actually how I feel – when my spirit, self, whatever has left my carcass, dispose of it in the cheapest way possible, because I am no longer there.

However, in case I happen to be a gabillionaire when it’s my time and thus have money to just throw around, frozen, shattered and scattered is the way to go.

[digital art by Mandy Moore – here]

At least one of my classes seems to be chock full of them. Pro-death penalty, anti-choice and who knows what else besides. There are a few other classmates who seem to be a bit more moderate but I appear to be the only flaming lefty liberal.

Whatever happened to college campuses being hotbeds of Marxists, and all that? Maybe they are and it’s just that online education attracts more on the right, or something.

Anyway, other than correcting a few zombie lies (like the “morning after” pill is an abortion pill), I mostly stayed out of last week’s more controversial discussions. I spent years in chat rooms and other places eviscerating right wing arguments (and making people look stupid – or, actually, just putting their stupidity on the table for all to see). I was quite good at it; as one friend put it,  something to the effect that “[Nanette], with a smile, rips their heart out and hands it to them, still beating” but… I don’t like being like that, much. It wears on you. Or it did on me. So, I left the political chats and just hung out with friends.

At this point in time I consciously avoid conservatives, right wingers, (some feminists) etc. Not because I am some Pollyanna or anything – it’s just that I feel my focus needs to be on different things. Nourishing stuff, so that’s what I look for now.

Chris Bodenner, filling in for Sully:

Liz Cheney ratchets up the disgusting campaign led by Senator Chuck Grassley to impugn DOJ appointees who represented Gitmo detainees. Ackerman:

You know, [the lawyers who] provided the representation that the Rehnquist and Roberts Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled those detainees are entitled? And which even the military commissions provide for? Instead, there’s this McCarthyite tactic of calling Justice Department lawyers the “Gitmo Nine,” a name that oh-so-cleverly suggests that those lawyers were themselves detained at Guantanamo.

Of course the "Gitmo Nine" isn’t devious enough for Cheney, so she goes with the "Al-Qaeda Seven." Not only does she presume that all suspected terrorists are guilty before due process, but she ignores the reality that only a fraction of the detainees held at Gitmo were even accused of Al-Qaeda ties in the first place.

There are more examples there, go read.

I don’t really like blogging about politics but it’s stuff like this that makes me realize how important it is, sometimes, to just take a public stand against these odious people.

via

You know those people – they say they get up before dawn, grab their coffee and then sit down and clatter out thousands of words before the morning paper even hits the door?

 
Yeah, that’s not me. I so want it to be but I am not, I have discovered, an early morning writer. This realization has been a shock to me, because I really love mornings, particularly that time just before dawn. Even if I am not watching it arrive I know the light is on its way, the birds are twittering their greetings, all else is city silent – this is my favorite time of day. But it turns out it’s my favorite time to be – not to do.

And really, I should have known. Instead of trying to fit myself into some writerly writer mental image that I have, it would have been a good idea to remember that, unless there is an emergency that requires me to get it together RIGHT NOW, I tend to wake up somewhat incomplete. Parts of my psyche, it would appear, take off as soon as I go to sleep and I spend the first couple of hours after I wake puttering around, coaxing them back into place. I still get flashes of inspiration before I am completely reassembled, mind you – those whispers of the dawn breeze – but my transcription of these undoubtedly brilliant insights does not soar; it plods along, staggers a bit and then flops. Kinda like trying to launch a turkey into an eagle’s nest.

So, what to do? Go with what you know, sure – but also go with who you are, seems the best idea. I can still make those early mornings work for me, as a writer, but only if I change things a bit. Throw out all my writerly writer preconceptions (and misconceptions) and work with my mornings, instead of against them. How to do that?

Let them be. Let the dawn evolve, allow my mind to wander at will over anything and nothing. If a thought occurs, there is no need to rush to get it into a blog post or something. Maybe that thought is only a teaser. Perhaps if I instead take the time to examine it, turn it over and peer into its depths, and scrape away any excess I’ll find that what I was really looking for (or what was really looking for me) lay just underneath.

If it’s shy or coy, it may take more than one morning, or one week so take notes along the way, but let things develop as they will. And when ready, write.

[photo of typewriter keys by Laineys Repertoire via Essential Prose – which looks like a good blog to bookmark itself.]

I completely missed Black History Month. Missed writing about it, anyway. I’m not terribly surprised, though – it seems the last thing I want to do during Black History Month is write about Black history. General contrariness, I think.

Instead, I read a lot. Or downloaded at lot to read, even if not quite yet. I have 3 or 4 different ebook readers on my Blackberry and to test them out I’ve been busily downloading stuff to all of them (and, of course, forgetting which one has what).

They all work well but I think I’ve settled on Mobipocket Reader as my ebook reader of choice, for a number of reasons:

1. It’s free and easy to work with

2. I can download info from anywhere and create an ebook out of it, using Mobi’s ebook creator (it creates in different formats, too.)

3. It’s really easy to make notes and bookmarks as I am reading on the Blackberry then, after syncing with PC, copy the text I want and the notes from the desktop app into some other program – to blog about it or whatever. You can also sync online but I’ve not done this yet.

And, let’s see – that’s mainly it. I know other services do the same, but this one is just easiest for me, and has the advantage of everything being free.

This is not a philosophical question. Or, not entirely, anyway. And yes, as usual this rumination is really about me, not you (unless you want it to be).

No, it’s more the question I’ve been asking myself lately as I sit here looking at the blank screen day after day, realizing I feel I have nothing of worth to write about. “They” say to write what you know – and I wonder, yeah… but what is that? What do I know? Except that’s not really what is being asked, though, is it.

Everyone who has lived, loved, worked, thought knows something. Very few get through life completely untouched by some sort of knowledge – no matter how debatable that fact seems when you come across certain people.

What I am really asking myself is “How much are you willing/have been willing to share of what you know?” And the answer to that, if I am being honest, is often “very little”. There are people who I’ve known for years – friends! -  who know virtually nothing about me beyond what is in the present because other than cute little reminisces of this and that, I don’t talk about myself (even though it seems like that’s all I do, sometimes).

And why is that, I wonder? Is it that I fear being cast out of some community of people who’ve lived “normal” lives with storybook childhoods? I don’t think so. I’ve lived long enough, and listened and read enough to know that storybook’s are often incomplete. And my life, my world, compared to some has been downright boring. So, it’s not that.

I think it’s habit. Mental illness is much more understood these days, but as a child with a mentally ill mother I learned early not to talk about myself, to keep my own counsel, to protect and deflect, to seemingly answer questions and then immediately turn the focus back on the questioner. This is not hard to do, as most people love to talk about themselves, to be understood, and I love listening to other’s stories (most times). This trait would make me a pretty good chronicler of someone else’s life, but it makes for being a crappy witness to my own past.

So, what to do. My mother said something the other day – just one word, which I don’t think she realized she said and which I plan to write about later, that made me realize how much of my reticence is about appearances, about race, expectations and just plain old habit. And how important it is, for me as a growing writer, to get out the crowbar and start prying open the vaults – filled with little enough though they may be.

And yes, I know I’ve said before, in one way or another, that I was going to do this, to open up, but I think I had to get to a place of understanding, first, why everything was closed in the first place.

Now that I’m starting to do that, to understand the why’s of silence, I think I’m about ready to begin to tell tales.

[image at top is my mother, me and one of my brothers. Where my other brother was during this photo is a whole ‘nother story to tell.]

The Atlantic.com has made a big mistake, in my opinion. They’ve decided to remove all personality and reader hooks from their blogger pages (except for Andrew Sullivan’s)and make them almost unreadable. I guess to ensure that casual passersby keep on… well, passing by. It’s not clear to me why they would want to do this.

I really like Ta-Nehisi Coates and James Fallows, but it’s their writing that draws me in – not their headlines or post titles. I might not even plan to stop and read, but (with the old format) invariably something will catch my eye and I’ll have to finish reading the entire article, and sometimes most of the comments. It is less likely I’ll read so many of the articles now that I have to click through to every post.

It’s annoying. They should just let blogs be blogs, sigh.

(Yes, yes this is an odd post but, strangely, my site comes up first (at the moment) in a Google search for “luddite-ism” – who even knew that was a real way of writing that? – I am so proud, lol. Anyway, from the number of people looking for a definition of that term, I’m thinking possibly it’s a school assignment or something, so might as well lend a hand… )

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Luddites were a social movement of British textile artisans in the nineteenth century who protested—often by destroying mechanised looms—against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt were leaving them without work and changing their entire way of life.

 The Leader of the Luddites, engraving of 1812

This English historical movement should be seen in the context of the era’s harsh economic climate due to the Napoleonic Wars, and the degrading working conditions in the new textile factories. Since then, however, the term Luddite has been used derisively to describe anyone opposed to (or perceived to be opposed to) technological progress and technological change.

The Luddite movement, which began in 1811 and 1812 when mills and pieces of factory machinery were burned by handloom weavers, took its name from the fictive Ned Ludd. For a short time the movement was so strong that it clashed in battles with the British Army. Measures taken by the British government included a mass trial at York in 1812 that resulted in many executions and penal transportations.

The principal objection of the Luddites was against the introduction of new wide-framed automated looms that could be operated by cheap, relatively unskilled labour, resulting in the loss of jobs for many skilled textile workers.

I mentioned yesterday that I thought that to re-brand and renew Human Beams, we needed a new name. I still think that – or maybe at least a good tagline.

Anyway, I thought I had found it yesterday. A line of a poem by Langston Hughes just sort of leaped out at me and I thought “That’s it!”.  I loved the sound of it, the lyricism – though it was a few words long. Still, it had the feeling I was looking for, and it even incorporated the “sun”, which has been part of our logo since the beginning! How perfect was that?

Except. A couple of hours later I was warmly thinking of our new name, and then… um, what was it again? How did it go, exactly? I looked it up again and, oh yeah! That’s it, beautiful and perfect.

Only, just now I again tried to recall the words, the sequence, the beauty – and I can’t remember a thing about it, except that it has “sun” in it.

Now, this could be a sign that age has gripped my brain and just refused to let go – or, more likely, a good sign that I should keep looking for that perfect name. If even I can’t remember it, how could I expect my readers to?

Sigh.

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, the train station sign for which is posted above, is the name of a town in Wales. It reportedly means "St. Mary’s Church in the hollow of white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio near the red cave.", so you can see why they wanted to shorten it a bit…