English Ivy

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

English Ivy

Why do some call this vine an English ivy?

Does it wear tweeds, call for a cup of tea,
And tut-tut over a pipe and The Times?
But far away from England climbs this vine,
Far up the bark and branches of an oak
Wanting to see, perhaps, the spring-blue sky,
A squirrel’s nest, the perfect leaf, a bird
Spying on the curious cats below,
On pups in happy repose, tummies up
To the dog-friendly sun. 

                                      O peaceful vine!

Your contract is renewed each day without
An interview, evaluation, or
The filing of an annual report.
You play your days in leafy-green ascent,
Dependant on your sturdy tree, yourself
A pastoral road for ladybugs and ants,
The occasional ceremonial worm
Or caterpillar; an auditor of
The coos and whos and cawks and squawks and trills
There cooed and who’d and cawk’d and squawked and trilled
By merry jays and robins, mockingbirds,
And silly, so-sad-seeming whippoorwills.
Oh, ivy, glad indeed, to celebrate
Your liturgical seasons dutifully!

It's on the 'Net; It Must be True

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

It’s on the ‘Net; It Must be True

 

Alexander Graham Bell, a Canadian who was born in Scotland, invented the telephone so that young Americans could use the thing to talk, text, tweet, and twit to each other during high school graduation and thus ignore high school graduation.  Since Mr. Bell never finished school, we may appreciate the layers of irony.

In May of every year, like buzzards returning to wherever it is buzzards return to, tiresome screeds about the ignorance of graduates arrive to roost in one’s in-box. 

One of the most popular is wrongly attributed to Bill Gates, another successful fellow who did not finish school and who does not write silly stuff, and is usually titled “Rules They Didn’t Teach You in School” or some such, and is forwarded by the sort of people who never vote in their local school board elections because they’re too busy complaining.

The idea of hopeless naivete is not true of most high school students, and it’s certainly not true of college students.  Very few graduates ever finish a degree on the mummy-and-daddy nickel, and for those who do, well, good for their mums and dads.

The reality is that most college students work their way through school, usually in minimum-wage jobs and at odd hours.  A student who works the night shift flipping burgers can only wonder about why he is falsely stereotyped as someone who thinks he’s too good to flip burgers.

My daughter spent some college time shoveling (Newark, New Jersey) in a stable.  Hamburgers would have been better.

Any college classroom will feature, yes, a few princesses of both sexes, but they are far outnumbered by folks who know their way around the loading dock, Afghanistan, and hospital wards at 0-Dark-Thirty, and who can wield with great skill an M4, a broom, and a bedpan.

One of my fish English students was a former sergeant who left the Army after sixteen years.  When I asked him why he didn’t finish his twenty he said that after three combat tours in the desert he figured he had pushed his luck enough.

He and his mates studied English literature in a college hydraulics lab because of a shortage of classroom space.  No ivy grew on the equipment.

Two of my students were in their mid-thirties, had been pals from childhood, owned a roofing company, and were nursing students.  In their late thirties, they said they were getting a little old for climbing up on roofs all the year ‘round and were going to sell the company and work in the shade for a while.  I asked them why they didn’t keep the company and spend well-earned time out of the sun by delegating more authority to their employees.  They said that their names were on each roof (metaphorically), and that they would never sign off on a job if they didn’t have first-hand knowledge of each square inch of that roof.

Oh, yeah, some dumb college kids, huh?

Age and experience are good, but they are only predictors: there are adult students who become angry when they are required to show up on time (which, presumably, was required of them on the job) and actually do some work (ditto).  In the same class there can be 18-year-olds demonstrating a far better work ethic (not the one texting behind her Volkswagen-size purse, second seat, second table on the right) than their elders.

In the end, success is almost always the result of an individual’s choice to show up for work, whether on the factory floor or in the classroom, and hit a lick at it.

That is, after the individual takes the tin cricket out of his ear.  In school we were taught that in ye olden days of yore crazy people who stumbled around mumbling to themselves were kept safely away from others by being chained to a wall somewhere.  We thought that was a bad punishment.  Silly us.

One of life’s lessons – it needn’t come from the classroom – is that stereotyping is wrong.  Just because something’s on the ‘net doesn’t mean it’s true.  Those giddy folks waving their diplomae (“diplomae,” he wrote, for he had been to night school) around and yelling almost surely worked very hard for the moment, both in and out of the classrooms and laboratories.

How Many Dead Aggies Does it Take...?

Mack Hall

College Station, where there is a college but no station, is segregating a section of its new city cemetery for Aggies only.

There is no word yet on whether the Aggies-only section will rest adjacent to the exclusive Elvis impersonator section. The answer might be indexed in the official guide to funerals in America, Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One.
Ross Albrecht (’84), marketing manager for the new cemetery, told the Associated Press that the use of Texas A & M symbols will be “correct and respectful.” The entrance to the Aggie section will be a “Spirit Gate” between two concrete columns faked up to look like limestone, and for the discerning Aggie there’s nothing that says correct and respectful like chunks of concrete painted to look like something else.

Correct and respectful pallbearers could be rounded up from The Dixie Chicken.

Maybe the maroon Aggie hearse will be drawn to the cemetery by twelve little Reveilles wearing maroon mourning plumes.

Although Texas A & M has no direct connection with the city cemetery, the school will license the use of trademarked A & M logos and other symbols. This means that if you – for reasons best known to yourself – wish to have your mortal remains decorated with an image of Ol’ Sarge, you will have to pay Texas A & M for permission.

Licensing agreements guarantee the quality of Texas A & M’s acounts receivable. The difference between a cheap, unlicensed, made-in-China tee-shirt proclaiming “Fightin’ Texas Aggies” and another cheap, licensed, made-in-China tee shirt proclaiming “Fightin’ Texas Aggies” is, well, nothing except a tag.

Will we ever see a tee proclaiming “Studyin’ Texas Aggies?”

Made-in-China Texas A & M coffee cups, made-in-China Texas A & M neckties, made-in-China Texas A & M lunch buckets, Made-in-China Texas A & M portable toilets, and now, dug-in-College Station Texas A & M holes in the ground, license fees payable to the university.

And some people say America isn’t a religious country.

A sales brochure preaches "The concept is that the Spirit of Aggieland travels in a ceremonial way from the campus to the Aggie Field of Honor through this final gateway." If that isn’t straight out of the Gospels I don’t what is.

At this writing no one is clear whether or not having posed nude or semi-nude will be a bar to resting in peace in The Aggie Field of Honor.

If the University of San Francisco were to feature a cemetery, would the trustees establish an Eternal Joint exuding faux marijuana smoke in The Mahareshi Yoga Guru Garden of Like, You Know, Where It Is Forever 1968?

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology would have to license Star Trek Action Figure grave markers from Paramount. Funeral services might be offered in Klingon.

A beauty school – the Dear Departed is buried with a 21-hair-dryer salute.

Good ol’ A & M, coming up with a brand-new century-old tradition every year or so.

But what if…just what if Aggies who Pass On To The Other Side make their last Whoop! at the pearly gates only to discover that Saint Peter wears burnt orange?

Hullabaloo, caneck, caneck!

A Makeshift Shrine

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

A Makeshift Shrine

Teddy bears ribboned to a chain-link fence,

Plastic-wrapped flowers stacked like compost,
Dime-store candles flickering in the exhaust
Of passing mini-vans.  The inanity
Of filler-language falls, descends upon
The shattered souls of the barely alive,
The dead cliches’ of well-planned camera-grief:
“Our hearts and thoughts go out you.”
What does that mean?  Nothing but conventional noise
For generations of lovers and mourners
Long-ago looted of reality,
Programmed with state-sanctioned hyperbole,
And mourners now are left with nothing but
An existential howl against the light,
Sodium-vapor upon broken glass,
While strident Men of Destiny
There rake for votes among the ashes of death.

Come Laughing Home at Twilight

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

Come Laughing Home at Twilight

And, O!  Wasn’t he just the Jack the lad,

A’swellin’ down the Water Street as if –

As if he owned the very paving stones!

He was my beautiful boy, and, sure,

The girls they thought so too: his eyes, his walk;

A man of Newfoundland, my small big man,

Just seventeen, but strong and bold and sure.

Where is he now?  Can you tell me?  Can you?

Don’t tell me he was England’s finest, no –

He was my finest, him and his Da,

His Da, who breathed in sorrow, and was lost,

They say, lost in the fog, among the ice.

But no, he too was killed on the first of July

Only it took him months to cast away,

And drift away, far away, in the mist.

Where is he now?  Can you tell me?  Can you?

I need no kings nor no Kaisers, no,

Nor no statues with fine words writ on’em,

Nor no flags nor no Last Post today:

I only want to see my men come home,

Come laughing home at twilight, boots all mucky,

An’ me fussin’ at ‘em for being’ late,

Come laughing home at twilight...

1.   4 July 2012, Wednesday

The Staretz

In middle life the sunflower bends its head,

No longer to the sun as in its youth,

But to the earth in all humility,

Ripening for us all its dreams and works,

And aging happily to eternal dawn.

2.   15 July 2012.  Sunday.  St. Swithin’s Day

The Farmer to Saint Swithin

O good Saint Swithin, please, to you we pray,

On this your high summer rain-making day –

Of your blest kindness send us sweet, soft showers,

The kind that gently fall for hours and hours,

To heal the sunburnt land of thirst and drought

And nourish the corn that sees the winter out;

And if you grant the boon we humbly ask

We’ll work the harder on each rural task:

We’ll ditch and fence and plough, and milk the cow,

Share with the widder-folk, and feed the sow,

Count out some plantful seeds for poor folks’ needs,

And daily tell God’s Mysteries on our beads.

3.   16 July 2012. Monday. Carmel

Pinon

The incense of the mountains drifts along

The arroyos, and into the narrow streets

Of Taos at dawn, the breath, perhaps, of God.

4.   17 July 2012, Tuesday.

Song Dancer Wind Something Woman

(slowly, soothingly)

Like, you know, crystals are so last week’s feeds;

Magic rocks are the latest transcendence,

Drawing from the mountains the soul’s desire

To be one with the one-ness of all things,

Warmed by the desires of the seeking heart,

These rocks, blessed by the, like, ancient peoples

Bring peace and healing to the soul and spirit

(faster)

And, like, I don’t care what people say

About me and what I done in high school

‘cause that ain’t, like, none of their business

And these people that don’t know me judge me

But they’re in darkness I have found the truth

In Transcendental Earth One-Ness as taught

By the One and he likes me anyway.

(parking-lot cat-fight speed)

And I know what you said about my past

You ***** but I know the Oneness of all

And you’ll never get that, you *****, since you’re

All high and mighty and hoyty-toyty

In that fancy cowboy church you think’s

Gon’ bring you happiness but you’re nothing

But a ***** and I know the truth of One…

Brightly-Colored Brick Pits

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com
April, 2013

Brightly-Colored Brick Pits

On Saturday night ABC, in a worthy annual tradition, once again broadcast Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.  Loud, long, and somewhat bombastic (“So let it be written.  So let it be done.”), the film is dismissed by the more precious sort of cineaste but beloved by everyone else.

In 1956, filmmakers understood the difference between color and monotone – when they made a film in color, the COLOR was capitalized (metaphorically).  The red in Pharaoh’s crown was definitely RED, and the blue of the queen’s dress was most assuredly BLUE.

The tendency now is to make color films as if the world had never been blessed with rainbows.  Most contemporary movies and tellyvision depressants inflict on the viewer a sad little palette of colors redolent of charcoal on cheap paper in art class. Gloom and diminished lighting are art; colors are plebeian.

And let the people say “Existential.”

The reality is that the world is in color -- the flowers this spring, for instance, have been taking Technicolor™ classes.  Lovely!  Monotone is good for what was once known as socialist realism (industrial scenes), and Georgia O’Keefe employed black-and-white to study forms, but Creation really is in color.

As for the brick pits in Goshen, not so much color, but that’s not God’s fault.  Pharaoh was practicing his own form of socialism realism – the people laboring in the heat and filth while he and his family lounged under the awnings in their cute little outfits.  Thank goodness that sort of thing never happens in a republic.

Charlton Heston as Moses is a multi-generational favorite; most movies on religious themes enjoy a brief spasm of popularity and then disappear into some storage unit in West Hollywood.  Every three or so years a new film based on some point of Jewish or Christian heritage is promoted with all the clanging and crashing of Moses presenting Ethiopian loot to the Egyptian court, and the ‘net is asludge with reviews gushing “this is the way it must have been!”  Congregations hire the film for showing in the church hall and enthusiastic fans put up posters and hand out flyers after divine services.  The magic lantern show is a two weeks’ wonder and is then forgotten.

The brick pits of Egypt are now the multi-story factories of the far east in which acid-burned hands labor long hours in heat and dust and chemical fumes to make for us  shoes and garments and plastic boxes that light up and make noises.  

Where is their Moses?

And where is their filmmaker?

-30-

That Island, That Book

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com
March, 2013

That Island, That Book

A favorite discussion topic used to be about what book someone would take with him (the “him” is gender-neutral) into exile on a deserted island.

There was always some princess of either sex (one supposes now that it would be a matter of any of the four or five genders now decreed by any given federal court who takes Psalm 82.6 to new places) who brought up the Bible, and some leveler who snarked “Yeah, well, it’s about time you read it.”

Last week the London Daily Mail published a piece about a life prisoner who is into his twentieth year of talking to six walls and who feels very sorry for himself but not for the several folks he shot for not understanding his special needs and his sensitive, artistic spirit. 

The article mentioned that the prisoner has read about the little plastic boxes that people carry around and talk to (rather like the prisoner conversing with walls) but has never seen one.  He has no computer, no telly, no movies, and no radio.  The prisoner can read about such things because he is permitted to have at one time any twenty books, newspapers, or magazines from the prison library.

This is somewhat more than the one book on that hypothetical island, and certainly more entertainment than fictional Hilts’ baseball in The Great Escape.

If you were locked into a it’s-just-you-and-the-walls cell with a tiny concrete table, concrete stool, concrete bed (with a thin, fireproof mattress), and a steel potty for 23 hours of each day, what would you read?

Maybe the real book: Paul Brickhill’s The Great Escape.

When P. G. Wodehouse was imprisoned by the Nazis, he managed to take with him the complete works of Shakespeare.  He probably didn’t have to worry about his fellow prisoners borrowing the volume all the time.

Under the category “Books for Prisoners,” Amazon.com lists 21,847 results – not only is a significant percentage of this nation in prison, they seem to be more literate than the free population.

When 18-year-old Joseph Ratzinger was marched into a prisoner-of-war camp by Americans he carried a pencil and paper, and wrote poetry.

Giovanni Guareschi, an Italian officer, managed to write his thoughts on scraps of paper while in a series of German prison camps for two years, and used them as the basis of My Secret Diary, dedicated “To My Comrades Who Never Returned.”

Fr. Jean Bernard of Luxembourg was sent to Dachau with nothing, but lived to write about it in Priestblock 25487.

Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, survived four different death camps and after the war wrote Man’s Search for Meaning.

Ho Chi Minh wrote poetry while in French and Chinese prisons.  Those who know both Chinese and Vietnamese tell us that his poems blend both traditions and are cultured, traditional, ironic, and precisely styled.  Thus, one of the few formalist poets after World War II was a Communist mass-murderer.

Many of St. Paul’s letters were written in a number of Roman prisons.  John Bunyan, St. Thomas More, Sir Thomas Wyatte, Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Malory, Boethius, Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill, Charles DeGaulle, James Clavell, Cervantes, Thoreau, Dostoyevsky, O. Henry, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Solzhenitsyn, Vonnegut, Ronald Searle – many of the world’s most famous writers were inside the wire fence, starving but thinking, thinking all the time.

If you wonder what books our sometimes shadowy government provides for prisoners at Guantanamo Naval Base at the southern tip of Cuba, America thus completing Castro’s theme of that unhappy island as one big prison camp, the Guardian (U.K.) has the answer: Harry Potter stories, Agatha Christie, the Twilight series, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Dan Brown, travel books, and Islamic books. The library hopes to expand to 20,000 volumes, which would be the envy of most grade schools in this country.

We do know that despite seques-can’t-spell-it, the remaining few workers in this nation will be required to fund $195 million (New York Times) for improvements to the prisoner compound at Guantanamo, including $750 thousand (Fox News) for a soccer field.  The approximately 166 prisoners must be mad about footer, eh?

The prison also offers cable tv (perhaps Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner is popular), which is a good idea for any entity who wants to keep people from thinking.  Television is anaesthesia.  Books and paper, though, those are dangerous.  Some of those prisoners are scribbling, and maybe one will write another The Consolation of Philosophy, but possibly one will scrawl another Mein Kampf.

-30-

Oberlin College Sounds a Clarion Call for its Smelling Salts

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Oberlin College Sounds a Clarion Call for its Smelling Salts

Oberlin College in Ohio dates to the early 19^th century.  Oberlin claims to be the first college to admit women and black men, though Middlebury College in Vermont says that honor belongs to them.  Certainly men and women from Oberlin helped save people from bondage during the slavery time, and some 1,000 Oberlin men, black and white, served during the Civil War, enabling their classmate Mary Jane Patterson to become the first African-American woman to earn a BA, in 1862.  At the turn of the 20^th century missionaries from Oberlin, then a Presbyterian school, felt a call to witness in China, and many died there from persecution.

Oberlin has truly been a light unto the nations.

Sadly, Oberlin has recently suffered a series of racist graffiti incidents, vandalism, and physical assaults.  Apparently no one did anything about the enormities except feel bad. 

More recently, someone said that someone said that he or she had seen a Ku Klux Klansman, bedsheet in full sail, walking across campus around two in the morning.  However, there is no source or me-phone footage.  Local police report that other witnesses report that saw a pedestrian wearing a blanket, so someone needs to verify the whereabouts of Charlie Brown’s friend Linus.

Oberlin’s president, Marvin Krislov, stood to his tackle like a true Oberlin man – he canceled classes, saying "…let us be very clear, we stand united. We will not give into hate."

However, in canceling classes, Dr. Krislov, hereinafter referred to as Aunt Pittypat, did indeed give in to hate.  A few bipedal pimples with spray paint bullied him and an entire college into abandoning their vocations as scholars.  Instead of standing up for the freedom to learn, to live, to work, Oberlin spent a day feeling sorry for its collective self.

That’s not exactly the spirit of the Oberlin men who helped hold the union line in the cause of freedom.

With classes canceled out of fear last week, the men and women of Oberlin finally did something – they made signs, they staged a sit-in, and they organized tolerance sessions.

Oh, yeah, a sit-in – that’ll stop evil in its clawed tracks.  Hey, and signs.  Wow.

One student told a rally that “I’m feeling comfortable and supported.”  The content and the use of the passive voice says everything we need to know about a young adult who, given the rare opportunity to study civilization, explore ideas, develop concepts, write, dance, paint, compose music, and perhaps, like her Obie predecessors, help free oppressed peoples, could only bleat out in weakness: “I’m feeling comfortable and supported.”

Reports of reports report (finding anything solidly sourced about the problems at Oberlin is at present impossible) that two Oberlin students were allegedly / maybe / sort of arrested / detained as persons of interest / expelled from school, but if so, no one is saying why.

When Aunt Pittypat addressed the newsies at a press conference, his students reportedly yelled vulgarities at him, so maybe a culture of spoken obscenity already obtains at Oberlin, and only written obscenity is offensive to the young scholars.

In addition to sponsoring teach-ins, Oberlin has called in the Federal Bureau of Investigation to, well, investigate crudities scrawled on walls.  And if that’s not a worthy use of the FBI, then what is, eh?

The reader can follow the Oberlin community as they twitter and tweet at

https://twitter.com/oberlin.  Somehow one gets the idea that Oberlin College at present is the sort of place where people seriously read Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Oberlin was once a moral and cultural light, a college of heroic young people who not only called for injustices to be righted, but hazarded their lives in doing so themselves.  Just now about all they seem to be capable of calling for is their smelling salts.

-30-

Goodbye, Miz Burres

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

Goodbye, Miz Burres

Music teachers are even more essentially American than red brick schools, soda fountains on Main Street, Studebakers, baseball, and sidewalk cracks that must be carefully stepped over.  Without a Miss (or the East Texas variant, Miz) Burris or Bernice or Emma to play the piano for school assemblies, weddings, funerals, Sunday liturgies, and visits to the nursing home, America would lose some of her soul and much of her Soul.

After all, some adult once showed young Beverly Sills how to grace a high note and young Ivory Joe Hunter how to echo life on the keys of an old piano.

Our Miz Burres died last week at the age of 102.  At 100 she was still giving private lessons at home.  In her 80s she was infinitely pleased to have her own childhood piano teacher, Miz Lexie / Aunt Lexie, sit in on her young students’ recitals.  And for decades before that she demonstrated infinite patience with schoolchildren, including a few inattentive oafs.

Like the wonderful old three-story school that reposed in pontifical majesty between First Methodist and First Baptist, perhaps in order to keep the peace between them, Miz Burres had always been there and would always be there.  A photograph of her with second-graders in 1955 and a photograph of her at a celebration of her happy century taken last year show exactly the same woman: elegant, white-haired, smiling, surrounded by adoring fans, including her last student. 

And that last student, still a schoolgirl, will in years to come teach other children how to play the piano, and will show them ways of patterning notes, saying, “This is how Miz Burres taught me…”  And so, yes, Miz Burres will always be there when little hearts and hands learn the keys and then grow up to celebrate civilization through music.

A young person of my acquaintance once visited Westminster Abbey, and in a cloister ambulatory now stepped out by sneakers rather than by monastic sandals, noted that she was looking down at the grave of her friend Muzio Clementi, who lived to the age of eighty despite having been married four times.  “Miz Burres taught me his sonatinas,” the young person said, “They’re fun to play.”

While driving to Miz Burres’ funeral, the same person, now a young woman, switched on the CD player and heard the prologue to Mozart’s Die Zauberflote, something else she learned to play from Miz Burres.

Much of what is good in life we all owe to each Miz Burres who blessed us in our youth.

Parade magazine is offering its first ever Music Educator Award of $10,000 to a music teacher working in an American school, kindergarten through university.  At Parade.com/music you can nominate that special music teacher who so much influenced you.  There is surely in your life a Miz Burres who could use that money to buy some better instruments or some new sheet music for her children’s lessons.

Miz Burres never had children at home, but like James Hilton’s fictional Mr. Chips, and in very truth, she can say, and surely does from a happy, happy place in Heaven, “I thought I heard you saying it was a pity... pity I never had any children. But you're wrong. I have. Thousands of them. Thousands of them...”

Goodbye, Miz Burres.

-30-

Cincinnatus

Rough Draft

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

17 February 2013

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

Cincinnatus

When Cincinnatus in a desperate time

Was called to serve the undeserving state
Imperiled by the armies of the kings
And weakened by senatorial whisperings
Our conscript father laid aside the plough
Forswore retirement and his peaceful fields
Unwillingly took up the imperium
And journeyed thus to disharmonious Rome
To teach, to govern, and to sanctify
A people lost and drifting with the age
To hazard all in the forum of the world
Not for himself, not for brittle applause
Blown by the wind, noisy for a brief time
As when October’s leaves make temporal show
And then decay through winter’s cold demands
Nor for the silky smiles of ambassadors
The approval of jugglers and panderers
The cricket-voices of mummers and polls

No

But rather for the fuller at his cloth

The builder with his plans and rule and line
The seamstress working a wedding dress
The laughing child at play with her favorite doll
The sunburnt fisherman drawing his nets
The mother teaching her child his aves
The farmer treading the fruitful furrow
The humble priest offering holy rites
The parish tipstaff on his daily beat
The scrivener with his busy abacus
The chemist with his pots and potions and pills
The healer, whose pallid patients are her prayers
The artist, whose lines and colors delight
The barrister, pleading for true justice
The magister lettering inattentive youths
The woman whose shop displays good, homely needs
The sick man on his penitential bed
The young recruit on obscure weary watch
The wretched beggar who gives holy blessings

For these a Cincinnatus offered all
Repute, honor, perhaps his very life
And when, withered with age and cares of rule
Painfully unsure of step and sight and self
He wisely, humbly left the robes of office
In prayerful trust to the Will of God
And wearily wended to the Altar of beginnings
To give himself and his last days to us
Still serving, bidding for us with priestly heart
Let none he faithfully serves question his prayers
Or mock him with idle speculations
For flattering courtiers are as common as smiles
Painted upon false lips, hiding false desirings
And generals arise from time to time to draft
Houris to their beds and youths to their deaths
As do the successors of Simon Magus
Pirouetting in their temples to self
-
But Cincinnatus – O happy Cincinnatus
Whose memory is incense in the night
Or a candle in the holy darkness:
His Tenebrae is our continued blessing

 

 

Jack Kerouac in Houston

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

Jack Kerouac in Houston

In Houston I saw a man in a shiny metal helmet featuring two antennae (the helmet, not the man) blocking traffic and waving his arms madly while screaming.  Perhaps he was trying to hitch a ride to his home planet.  If he continues that sort of thing in the street he will soon find his way to another world under the wheels of a Mercedes-Benz with a tastefully discreet University of Texas Alumnus sticker.

Before an excellent lunch at Kenny & Ziggy’s New York (it’s really in Houston, but, well, you know) Delicatessen, 2327 Post Oak Boulevard, 77056, www.kennyandziggys.com), the daughter-person took me to Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet Street, 77005, www.brazosbookstore.com. 

Located in a retro-1960s building in a charming neighborhood, Brazos Bookstore is a Texas cultural treasure.  Associated with the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, the Academy of American Poets, the American Institute of Architects, Rice University, the Baker Institute, the Houston Public Library, the Houston Museum of Natural Science, and a number of local publishers and literary magazines, Brazos Bookstore is an independent agora for readers and writers, and swears no obedience to polls, fashions, top-ten lists, marketing gnomes, or the alligator-shoe boys.

The store is well-lit and features comfortable chairs and a large table for spreading out a folio, a map, a picture, a newspaper, a manifesto, or a magazine.  The various genres are categorized clearly, and the staff are helpful and cheerful.  Alas that there is no coffee machine or cat, but towards the back an orange stripe on the floor leads you on an Alice-in-Wonderland journey through a workroom to the minimalist but clean and wheelchair-accessible euphemism with framed art and a neat length of iron I-beam angling from the floor to the ceiling.

Brazos Bookstore nurtures young Tejano, Texian, and Texan writers, yes, but you will also find John Keats and Evelyn Waugh.  As with any good book store, the staff will order “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore” for you, which keeps your credit card information off the snooping and thieving magic electric box of wondrous misinformation and obedience.

A panel of announcements keeps one current with literary, artistic, and musical events, and perhaps it all sounds a little self-consciously artsy, but we must ask ourselves if we as workers and builders and waiters and cowboys are going to celebrate the First Nations, Spanish, Mexican, German, African, Czech, English, Lebanese, Jewish, Swedish, Danish, French, Chinese, and other cultures that Hegelize into our look-out-world-here-we-are Texas culture/s, or are we going to slump into isolated corners passively obeying the mother-ship lights and noises from magic electric boxes of wondrous misinformation and obedience?

As the country-and-western song says, if you’re going to play in Texas, ya gotta have a fiddle in the band.  A flute will do too.  Or your book or poem, your painting, your sculpture, your backyard fence that is your sculpture, or that functional and aesthetically-pleasing iron I-beam that keeps the building from falling down on the night-shift welder and the aging adjunct faculty dude considering the nature of iambs and their relevance in contemporary poetry.

So what’s your fiddle, eh?

But back to the announcements:  Orange Show Monument (I don’t know what that is) at 2401 Munger Street in Houston is hosting a Kerouac Fest on the 9^th of March from three to ten.  For most of us, three to ten means three in the afternoon until ten at night, but with Kerouac-istas one can never be quite sure.

 The occasion features a film screening, a poetry showcase (I don’t know if that’s a metaphor or if cabinetry is part of the evening), poetry buskers (one fears that this might involve English Morris Dancers leaping about with copies of Shelley and Byron strapped to their legs with cords hand woven by Huguenot descendants in The Fens), a panel discussion (be still, my heart), a twitter by Exquisite Corpse (or not), readings, live jazz (as opposed to dead jazz), something about Domy Books, and a chance to exchange Kerouacan bon mots with Oscar Pena, Salvador Macias, Chris Wise, The Free Radicals, DJ Black Slacks, Michael Hoerman, Dr. Chuck Taylor, Dr. Chris Carmona, Kelly Ann Ellis, and Josh Hayes.

You can order a ticket in advance for $10 at orangeshow.org, or you can buy one at the door / gateway / portal to an alternative universe for $15.

I left Houston without seeing Helmet-Guy again.  I wish him happiness.  I hope he drops the helmet of endless and self-destructive introspection, reads a little Kerouac, and learns to play a fiddle of some sort.

-30-

Is This Seat Saved?

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

Is This Seat Saved?

As Abraham was called to leave his home,

To serve one God in haunted emptiness
Where errant spirits misguided pilgrims’ steps
Into those thickets that entangled lost souls

And

As Brother Francis, barefoot in the wild,

With rock and prayer rebuilt long-fallen shrines
When they had crumbled into weed-choked ruins
Where wolves gnawed on the bones of civilization

Now

An old man riding in a city bus,

Wearing spectacles and a cheap wristwatch,
Has come to see us through the wilderness,
And enkindle for us the Easter fire

From My Cold, Dead Paws

 

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

From My Cold, Dead Paws

Last week a police dog discharged a firearm into a house on Crescent Street in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

At around two in the morning the police were in cold pursuit (cold, because of the snow) of three perfectly innocent young men on their way home from Bible study.  At some point the driver stopped the car so that one of other theologians could bury his pistol Bible in a snow bank. 

The police put an end to scripture study and set a specially trained dog, Ivan, to search the snow bank.  Ivan found the Bible pistol and, to everyone’s surprise, discharged it into a nearby house.  That’s a pretty good accomplishment for a critter without an opposable thumb.

Ivan.  That’s a Russian name.  What does this tell us about Soviet moles, not to mention dogs, in the Lawrence Police Department, sniffing out secrets and the ham sandwich Corporal Bronski brought for his lunch?

Among the charges filed on the humans were possession of a stolen firearm, which was also an unregistered firearm, which was also a firearm whose serial number had been filed off (that won’t work, future James Bonds; the cops have ways of making the serial numbers talk), and for shooting at some folks earlier in the night, probably because of a spirited dispute over sanctification versus justification. 

Ivan-the-Dog wasn’t arrested or even ticketed, which seems terribly species-est in favor of quadrupeds.  Quadrupeds get off but bipeds don’t.  What kind of Massachusetts justice is this, hah?  Yeah, tell me something, Massachusetts.  It’s time for bipeds to occupy Lawrence and stand up (on two legs) for our rights!

When the Lawrence Police refer to a bullpup, they really mean a bullpup.

Is Ivan a candidate for the Westminster Dog Show or the Winchester Gun Show?

The perceptive reader can tell where all this is going: when beagles are outlawed, only outlaws will have beagles.

Ted Kennedy’s car has killed more people than your Chihuahua.  Come to think of it, Kennedys flying airplanes have killed more people than your Chihuahua. 

Dog control is careful aim at a fire hydrant.

When a cop is minutes away, miniature French poodles count.

The west wasn’t won with a registered rat terrier.

Collar criminals, not Rin-Tin-Tin.

The SS, when not partying down, might in a panic put the White House on lockdown: (Buzz / click) “All units, we have a suspicious-looking subject with a suspicious-looking Pomeranian on foot near the south gate…”

Imagine the old, grizzled, non-nonsense sergeant on the rifle range: “This, you ****y-looking bunch of *****s, is yer shoulder-held, semi- or fully-automatic, gas-operated dachshund.  Its muzzle velocity is about twenty snuffles a minute…”

The court case against the three young, um, scholars ought to be interesting.  After all, proving that one of them fired the weapon earlier is going to be a matter of testimony and laboratory examination; there are no witnesses.  As for the Ivan-the-police-dog, a number of bipeds (but are bipeds quite trustworthy?) saw him shoot the gun on that wild night in Lawrence.  Wow!  In this trial the fur will really fly.

Fur.  Fly.  Get it?

Didn’t want it, huh?

-30-