Kitsch, Kitsch, Kitsch

Perhaps the least artistic and most sentimental kitsch is an obsession with seeing kitsch in others. 


Reference: the current number of Catholic Phoenix

A Prisoner of Triskelion. Chapter 1: Intake

Spy yarns and escape stories fascinate me: The Great Escape, The Prisoner, Doctor No, and others.  I considered how an ordinary man, most unlike John Drake / Number 6 or James Bond, might keep his sense of self if he were imprisoned, and how he would attempt escape. 

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

A Prisoner of Triskelion

Chapter 1.  Intake

A man sat on a bench in a fluorescent-lit corridor of green-painted cinder blocks in the institutional night.  He did not know that he was in the night; existence only felt of night, and there were no windows to hint the drifting hours through shifting natural light, only painted steel doors here and there, the hum of the fluorescents, and the slight movement of mechanical air.

The man could not remember a time before sitting on the bench.  But yes, he could.  Images of airport waiting-areas flickered across his synapses.  Corridors.  A book stall where he rejected first vampires then spies then bosomy maidens on the covers of fat paperbacks.  A foam cup of coffee and a newspaper.  An airplane below and beyond, through a window.  Baggage handlers driving little trolleys.  He remembered.  A foam cup of coffee.  Was there something else? Name.  His name would come. 

These were not his clothes.  Some sort of scrub suit thing, and cloth sandals.

A man in a black uniform came along and wordlessly helped him to his feet.  Black uniform – with dandruff.  Black is not a good color because it shows dirt and stains and dandruff.  A room, a table, a chair, a plastic tray of plastic food. 

“Try to eat something; you need it.”  A voice neither cruel nor comforting, rather, a mechanical one.

The prisoner’s hands – for by now he realized he was a prisoner – moved clumsily.  Toast – he knew what toast was.  It tasted of nothing.  A foam cup of something.  Not hungry.

Walking slowly along a corridor.  Someone held his arm so he wouldn’t fall or get lost.  The cloth sandals slipped off.  The man in the black uniform picked up the sandals and smiled.  “The floor’s clean anyway.  I don’t know why they have these things.”  Corridors.  Fluorescents.  A lift. 

“Brush your teeth.”  He had been on a toilet.  Why were they watching him?

A door.  A key turning a lock.  A box of white fluorescent light. A bed.  In bed.  A white cotton blanket pulled over him.  Silence.  White fluorescent light.  Sleep.

At some point without time he awoke with a slight headache, but he knew who he was.  He remembered his childhood in Newfoundland, how much he didn’t like his French teacher in school, his time in the Navy, his job.  He remembered everything up until the hour he was sitting in an airport lounge in Copenhagen drinking a foam cup of coffee and reading an English-language newspaper.

The room was a box indeed, a high-security cell – he had seen pictures of them – associated with something called a supermax prison.  But what had that to do with him? 

The cell was slightly wedge-shaped, maybe ten feet long and as high, with a toilet half concealed, and thus not concealed at all, at the back.  He was sitting on a mattress on a bed of smooth concrete, and facing a ledge of smooth concrete with a sink of smooth concrete and a water tap of smooth steel operated by a button of smooth steel.  The bulkheads were smooth concrete and the deck was smooth concrete.

Why did he think in terms of bulkheads and decks and hatches?  His youthful service in the Navy years ago hadn’t influenced him all that much.  Maybe it was the fluorescent lights and painted walls and the smell of chemical disinfectant.  The milieu was like some office block in the bureaucratic wilderness of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, often known to recruits as Saint-Jean-sur-Bitch-ilieu.

A vague click.  The small square of glass set in the hatch was opaque, so he couldn’t see if someone were watching him.  A double knock, and the door opened.  A man in a black uniform brought in a plastic tray of plastic and foam dishes. Behind in the corridor was a cart with other trays, and another woman, a watchful woman, in a black uniform.

“Brekker, old man.  Enjoy it.  You’ll be wanted for an interview in an hour or so.  Oh – and there’s some aspirins next to yer coffee.  That stuff they use on ya gives you a header.  You’ll be wanted in an hour or so.”  The accent was vaguely Yorkshire with a hint of a failed Oxbridge fresher term in it.

The warder set the tray and a fresh set of scrubs next to the prisoner’s own shaving kit and left. 

His own shaving kit.  The prisoner searched it carefully.  His shaver, toothbrush, comb, a few coins, and other untidy odds-and-ends were still there, as well as the large-denomination notes secreted in the probably not-so-secret pockets.

Breakfast was bacon and eggs and potatoes, the bacon somewhat limp in the tradition of roadside cafes where the cookery is indifferent.  The toast was buttered with real butter, not yellow-stained grease, and the coffee was quite good.  Eating with a very soft plastic spoon was something of a challenge, but then, he wasn’t dining in the ambassadors’ room at the United Nations.

After a wash and a cat-bath from the sink he changed into the fresh scrubs, feeling quite vulnerable without any underwear, and was ready for the new day, whatever that might mean. 

The prisoner straightened his bedding, not out of any sort of neatness compulsion but because, after examining everything in the white-lit space, there was nothing else to do.  He wished he’d tucked a paperback into his shaving kit.

After a time which the prisoner had no way of measuring, another double-knock signaled a change and some time out of the white concrete box.

“You’re up for your intake interview,” said the black-clad warder.  A curious little three-armed device in brass adorned his collar.

After a few metres the cloth slippers had made their own break for freedom.  The prisoner paused to pick them up and carry them.  The floor was very clean.  “I dunno what they even bother with them things,” observed the warder.

The prisoner tried to estimate distances and count doors and, on the lift, count floors, but he was unaccountably weak and mentally vague.  He was brought to a white-painted metal door free of names or numbers.  The warder knocked and entered.

The office was clearly an outer one, an interview room with little more than a desk with two chairs facing each other.  The walls were paneled wood, though, and an incandescent lamp on an etagere somewhat humanized the room.

Behind the desk sat a man with the sturdy, no-foolishness-now look of a chief petty officer or sergeant-major.  On the table before him was a file folder with a few typed papers.

“Have a seat, me lad,” said the man, who nodded a dismissal to the warder.

 Was the accent Irish, perhaps, modified by military service in England or America?

“Let me begin this unpleasant interview by giving you the worst possible news in the worst possible way: you have been sentenced to death…easy, now.”

Existence seemed to fade out of the prisoner in a nothingness of white light.  Voices.  Hands holding him up, firmly but without cruelty.  Had he fainted?

“Don’t be embarrassed; if I was to get that news I’d probably turn a little green meself.  Here drink this…”

Brandy?  The prisoner drank whatever it was.  From a foam cup.  He was alive.  The drink had stung his throat and made him gasp for two breaths.

The interviewer’s eyes were very, very blue, the blue of a Norse captain considering whether to let his prisoner live was in his best interest.

“Now, then, back to business.  No one you’ve ever known will ever learn what happened to you.  Your death will be very quick and probably painless – clearly I haven’t taken that trip meself – and your body will be ground almost into powder and disposed of quietly in the ocean.  Your future, lad, is fish sticks.

“Now, then, it gets better.  Your death sentence’s not to be carried out unless you make it happen.  It’s your choice.”

“But…but there must be some mistake…”

“Oh, Brendan, me lad…” 

Brendan.  His name was Brendan.  Brendan O’Cannan. Right.

“Oh, Brendan, me lad, and you a readin’ man – Agatha Christie, Wodehouse, the Romantic poets, all them flamin’ English writers – I was expectin’ you of all people to come up with something more original.”  The interviewer almost smiled.

“I’m not trying to be original; I’m trying to stay alive and figure all this out, eh.”

“Now, then, you’ll stay alive, probably for a good long time, but you’ll never know why you’re here.  Neither will I.  It’s not important.”

“Well it’s important to me.”

“Yes, but you’re not important at all.”

“I’m important to me, eh.”

“Then you’ll want to stay alive.  Now back to business.  You now belong to Triskelion.  I’m Triskelion.  This little rock of an island is Triskelion.  Your world is Triskelion. 

“You’re important only as a source of income for Triskelion.  We deal in humans.  We keep humans.  We’re paid to do that.  Some government, some institution, maybe your employer, maybe some very rich individual has found your continued existence inconvenient.  They’re paying us to keep you, well, convenient.  The world’s a little kinder this century; a few decades ago and you’d have been shot or hanged or starved for being unfashionable.  Tyrants are a little softer these days; they let people like you live.  At least for a while.”

“But I haven’t done anything.”

“I don’t know why you’re here, only that you’re here.  I signed a receipt for you, and that’s it.  I accept that you don’t know why you’re here; I certainly don’t know, don’t need to know, and will never know.”

“There’s nothing I can tell you.”

"Oh, I’m not asking.  All I need to know about you is here in your file.  This little morning exercise is to tell you about this island and the rules of our little family.  Quite a few of you inconvenients here.  You’ll find no Russians or Chinese, though.  Their governments play by the rules of the 20^th century.”

“Where am I, then?”

“You’re in an island.  I won’t tell you where, but you can probably work it out by checking out a book on basic astronomy and looking at the sky.  But it’ll do you no good; you’re not leaving. 

“Bet me.”

“Don’t think about it, me lad.  Triskelion is pretty patient with his children in most ways, but like Kronos he’ll eat you if you try to escape.

“Here’s the plan to begin with: you’ll spend three days in that little closet, and we’ll be lookin’ at you.  Like this morning when you were checking the sheets for labels, and the plumbing, looking to see if there were manufacturers’ names, and in what languages.  Maybe that would give you a clue as to where you are.  But we’re careful about that sort of thing.  And we’ll be looking at you, seeing how crazy you might or might not be.

“If you’re stable, we’ll move you to a ward, a dormitory, like, to see how you get on with folks.  That’s maybe a week.  Then we’ll find you a nice room of your own, unless you want a roommate, and your file indicates you prefer solitude.  When you’re all settled in, you’ll pretty much have the run of the island – but you won’t escape.  If you try, we’ll probably have to go ahead and give you the death.

“And if I’m not stable – by Triskelion’s norms?”

“Then you’ll stay in that little room and you can babble to the ceiling for the rest of your life; I don’t care.

“But I reckon you ought to settle in and enjoy life.  It’s not so bad here – library, movies once in a while.  You’ll find no books and see no movies more recent than fifty years ago.  Newspapers, the wireless, the telly, the ‘net – no longer a part of your life.  You don’t need to know what’s happening out there now and Triskelion doesn’t want you knowing.  And it’ll do you no good to know.” 

“But I don’t know anything.  I have no secrets.  I can’t tell you anything.”

“We don’t need anything from you.  I’m here to tell you things, things that will keep you alive, if you want to be alive, and maybe you don’t, and that’s okay too.  But I’d rather you be alive, because we’re reimbursed for each team member on a monthly basis.  You know, lad, if we have to fulfill your death sentence, we’d wait until the second or third day of the next month.  It’s a month’s more income, you see.  So, hey, choose life.

“Notice the file folders, the typewriter, the old rotary telephone.  Minimal technology, barely out of the 19^th century inside the island.  But outside, this community is enveloped in an electronic cloud of unknowing – you’re a Catholic; thought you’d like the allusion.  I can’t hear it myself, but some people say there’s a perpetual hum from the Cloud.  Radios, the telly, computers – nothing like that’ll work here.  No information comes in except on paper, and no information goes out except on paper, and that’s kept to a coded minimum written in rapidly-deteriorating gel ink on flimsy paper that crumples into powder if someone even gives it a dirty look.

“We once had a fellow who built a radio receiver mostly from an electric shaver.  Remarkable what’s goes into an electric shaver.  Anyway, when he gave it a go the thing blew up in his hands.  He still has his hands, by the effin’ way, but they’re not pretty.  The Cloud picked up the first little signal and immediately fed it back, amplified, into the batteries, and, well, POOF!”

“Sounds like incarceration got him into a lather.”

 “Oh, well put, lad!  You’re fitting in already.  But go ahead and use your electric shaver; you’ll come to no harm unless you try to rebuild it as a boat or an aeroplane.

“Now back to business.  Triskelion have plenty of inexpensive amusements for you – a nice library, movies one night a week, fishing tackle, a little gardening on the few bits of arable ground, musical instruments, records and record players – the Cloud won’t let anything magnetic or digital work.  We even have our own little newspaper.”

“Printed in disappearing ink on disappearing paper?”

“Certainly.  But don’t disapprove; after all, isn’t the ephemeral the very core of everything Steve Jobs ever did?

“We unlock the door to your room at 0600, and breakfast is in the mess hall at 0700.  You are free to roam around the buildings and anywhere on the island except for restricted areas, and those are posted and locked.  We won’t watch you much once you’re out of isolation because, after all, except as a warm-body source of income, you’re just not important.  And, really, you’re not all that capable.  If you were a super spy or something like that, dangerous and skilled, you wouldn’t be here.  We tuck you in all nighty-night and cosy at 2100 hours.

“No signaling with flashlights or mirrors or handkerchiefs, please; we’ll break your hands for that sort of thing and then lock you down in a hole…I mean, therapy…so dark and so deep you’ll think you’re in Hell.  We’ll keep you there until what’s left of you promises to play nice.  And don’t look for rescue; this island is not some sort of Doctor No experience; it is a homeland territory of – well, you’ll figure it out.  Our host nation lists this island as a military no-go zone, so while the Russians and the Yanks occasionally snoop from trawlers and submarines because Russians and Yanks are preternaturally nosy, all they can do is look at you from a distance.  The Cloud and our own careful avoidance of technology mean they can’t pick up any signals because there are no signals.  The antennae on the roof are dummies there to give the snoops the fits about some sort of superior technology.   But mostly the nations think this island is a military prison and don’t bother with it.

“We have men and women, both as clients and as minders, and we’re very progressive about romance.  We also have some troublesome priests on the rock so you can go to Mass like a good, obedient Catholic and pray for the effin’ soul of Triskelion.”

“Triskelion needs praying for.”

“No doubt, me lad, no doubt.

“You patients have names; we, oh, client specialists have numbers.  You may address a caregiver by his or her number if you know it; otherwise 'sir' and 'ma’am' are fine.  No doubt your mother – let’s see – died four years ago – thought you special.  That doesn’t mean anything, so did mine.  You get to keep your specialness; Triskelion keeps itself to itself behind another Cloud, the Cloud of numbers.  Useful things, numbers. 

“And now you’re going back to your cozy little room for the next few days.  Any questions?”

“Lots, but I don’t suppose you’d tell, eh.”

“Oh, yes, I would.  We’ve got all the time in the world.  Eh.”

O’Cannan smiled and rose.  “Maybe another time.”

 A warder escorted him back along the corridor.  They paused briefly so that O’Cannan could take off the cloth slippers and carry them as he barefooted along.  The slippers really were useless.

 Back in his white-lit, white-painted hole, O’Cannan saw that Wodehouse’s Carry On, Jeeves was on the shelf-table.  He picked it up – it was his own worn and much-marked copy from his own flat.

“Lunch in an hour or so,” said the warder as she locked the door.

Death of an Ikonic Visionary (or is that Visionary Ikon?)

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

Death of a Visionary

The death of a visionary is often an occasion for labeling the man an ikon, as if he were a religious image painted on a board.  One longs for accuracy in eulogies.  But how can one speak of such a visionary ikon (or is that an ikonic visionary?) without resorting to florid language.  Let us gush veritable gallons of effusion in celebrating how he touched our lives and changed our world forever.

With hagiographic hyperbole and muddled metaphors let us remember a truly visionary man, a man on the cutting edge of technology, a man ahead of his time,  a man who transformed communications forever, a man whose invention made a cosmic leap (“cosmic leap” combines hyperbole and a tired metaphor in a two-fer) in how people saw the world around them, and how they wrote about it.

This man’s invention spawned new industries, and not only made easier the transmission of traditional cultures from one generation to the next, but in a sense created its own cultures.

This man, before he was thirty years old, created a technology that launched a reformation in the economy and even in literature and art.  His new way of manipulating language and culture through the production of useful objects became in itself its own object of near-adoration, making technology and its physical manifestations as aesthetically pleasing as they are utilitarian.

Generations of tinkerers will surely display the great man’s image as a sort of technology ikon in their garage laboratories, and classroom posters of him will inspire generations of children to work hard so they can be just like him.

Before this man, all was darkness and superstition; after him, a new enlightenment.

Yes, gentlepersons all, let us hold in our hearts forever the memory of Henry Mill, who patented the typewriter in 1714.

 -30-

"A Barrow Piled With Books"

Over the way is a barrow piled with books. A lean young man picks them over eagerly. A working lad: a hungry-looking young man. He counts out six pennies and buys a book. I am curious. I edge up and look. Milton's Paradise Lost! And he so hungry; and lucky, too, in the long run! A thing you always remember happily is the way you starved yourself for books.

 - A Manchester street scene in H. V. Morton's The Call of England, 1936

Ashes to Bambi and Dust to Rocky the Flying Squirrel

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Ashes to Bambi and Dust to Rocky the Flying Squirrel

“Do we all holy rites. / Let there be sung ‘Non Nobis’ and ‘Te Deum.’ / The dead with charity enclosed in clay.”  -- Shakespeare, Henry V, IV.viii.128-130

 A couple of hands in Alabama will, for $850, load the ashes of your loved one into shotgun, rifle, or pistol rounds for that final hunt.  The company is called Holy Smoke, and the owners, Clem and Thad, insist that Holy Smoke is a “reverent business.”

Oh, yeah.  When you think of reverence with regard to the passing of a loved one, you just naturally think of a funeral establishment called Holy Smoke.

In Virgilius’ The Aeneid, that masterwork of Augustan propaganda, funereal cremation is part of several Mediterranean pagan cultures.  When Aeneas abandons Queen Dido after a sure-I’ll-respect-you-in-the-morning moment during a hunt (a hunt perhaps using arrows made from dead people), she flings herself onto her own funeral pyre, possibly singing “C’mon, Baby, Light my Fire.”

In The Aeneid, cremation followed by the burial of the remaining bones and ashes is so essential to the worship of the gods (we now call them film stars) that the soul of someone who is not burned and buried properly cannot be ferried by Charon across the Neches to Louisiana. 

Along the eastern short of the Inland Sea the Philistines sacrificed their first-born to Moloch by throwing them, alive, into a fire, no doubt explaining to the child that this was a mother’s right to choose the autonomy of her own body.

In Nordic paganism kings and war leaders were honored to have their bodies, weapons, grave goods, a wife or two, and a dog piled onto their favorite warship with lots of kindling, and pushed out to sea in flames.  Too bad about the poor dog.

In an episode of the television series Alice Flo says that she wants to be cremated and her ashes scattered over Robert Redford. 

Christianity has historically preferred inhumation, possibly as a reaction to pagan usages, but has permitted cremation on occasions of mass deaths because of plagues, hurricanes, earthquakes, war, or Governor Chris Christie tripping and falling from a podium onto his audience.  Because of land-use issues and population density, Christianity is now more open to cremation.

One of the finest men I ever knew left instructions for his daughter, a pilot, to scatter his ashes at coordinates that were never to be revealed to anyone else.  That’s neat. 

On the occasion of a lengthy visitation before the funeral of a boyhood pal I sat myself down in a pew and wondered idly why there was a cardboard box in the pew along with a Bible and a box of Kleenex.  I read the label on the box – inside was all that remained of the boyhood pal.

And on yet another occasion of visitation I clumsily bumped against a table and very nearly dumped the ashes of another honored friend onto the floor.  Leave it to me to make a complete ash of myself on solemn occasions.

And they were indeed solemn occasions, with loving families making genuinely reverent decisions.

But having Grandma or Grandpa shot from guns, like the childhood breakfast cereal advertised on television in the 1950s?

What is the culinary convention of using powdered relatives for hunting?  Lots of folks enjoy sausage made from pork, venison, and spices, but will they like sausage made from pork, venison, and Grandpa? 

Just askin’.

Will Catholics have ol’ Dad molded into Rosary beads?  This would be one way for the survivors to forget ol’ Dad, just as they have forgotten the Rosary.

Fishermen could have a problem: do they skip the cremation part and have Uncle Clem cut up into bait? 

Reverently, of course.

Our masters, the Chinese Communists, have been recycling dead humans for years, and will have a healthy prisoner shot to specification for an organ transplant for the world’s wealthy.

But the prisoner is recycled reverently.

As for the less wealthy among us, we can only wonder if that nice leather belt stamped “Made in China” was made by Prisoner Chang or of Prisoner Chang.

Reverently, no doubt.

How about that final hymn:  “Abide with (POW!) me; fast falls (KA-BLAM!) the eventide; / the darkness (KA-BLOOEY!) deepens; Lord, with me abide.”

A toxicologist, according to a USA Today article, says that hunting with “ashes would pose less of a problem than any lead pellets historically used.”  That would certainly help the priest or minister with the eulogy: “Ol’ Thad – whatever else we can say about him, he was less of a problem than lead pellets.”

Break out the sniffle-tissues.  But then from what – or from whom – are the sniffle-tissues made?  Maybe from human tissue?  Hmmmmmmmm?

Or perhaps from the tattered, ragged remnants of a collapsing civilization.

-30-

TeleCheck and Tractor Supply Company -- Not Professional

I have shopped at The Tractor Supply Company in Beaumont for years.  If you can avoid the junkier made-in-China stuff, TSC features some good products at good prices.  However, I'm going to avoid the Beaumont Tractor Supply Company altogether in the near future until they become more professional, and will stay away from any other business entangled with TeleCheck.

On Tuesday I bought some pet food and a hose repair kit (made in China, to replace the even worse made-in-China connections on a made-in-China hose not even a year old) at the Tractor Supply in Beaumont, and my check was refused.  I feared that perhaps my checking account had been compromised and so paid in cash and drove straight to my bank.

In the event, my account was fine; the problem lay with TeleCheck and with Beaumont's Tractor Supply for retaining TeleCheck's services. 

The young person at the cash register was professional, and I do not fault her at all; she has been let down by an employer whose concept of customer service is a presumption of guilt.  Having one's check refused in front of several employees and customers is embarrassing.

I wrote TSC corporate a polite but firm letter in the matter.  In addition to not patronizing Tractor Supply Company, I'm going to avoid shopping at any store in collusion with TeleCheck, even though I almost always pay cash.

Leaf-Time

Mack Hall, HSG

Leaf-Time

O may our lives close like a leaf that falls

And laughs in falling at its happy end
Air-dancing down a sky of Dresden blue
Sun-sliding sideways in a blithesome breeze
Soft-singing in a sweet sinopian sun
Who smiles grandfatherly on each blest leaf
Remembering its spring, and summer too
Pushed from the wood after the last fell frost
To grow from mother-tree and taste the air
In the Apollonian sun of youth
To work and play in Saturnian summer
And then to glow in ripe Pomona’s dusk
In celebration of all life, and then
At last to leap into eternity

25 September 2011

A Bed-and-Breakfast...

A bed-and-breakfast is what a brothel becomes when it has lost all self-respect.

The Death of the Medicare Sled

Mack Hall, HSG

The Death of the Medicare Sled

On Friday the last Ford Crown Victoria was assembled and sold, ending the era of the big American sedan.  Except for our humble, democratically-elected, self-denying public servants looking down upon us benignly from the armored windows of their custom-built limousines, sedans are Barbie-cars now, little plastic constructs more suitable for the nursery floor than for Route 66.

This last big American iron was actually built by Esquimaux and Mounties in Canada, between the assembly lines for birch-bark canoes and dog sleds.  What a mess – we can’t even fail in our own country; we have to cross the border so another country can help us commit industrial suicide.

But wait – there’s more.  The Saint Thomas Assembly plant in Talbotville, Ontario was closed with the production of the last Crown Vic, and that last Crown Vic was sent to Saudi Arabia.  From that box of metaphorical parts one can build an irony bigger than the car.

Beaumont ISD has not yet announced its lawsuit against Ford because of the economic impact of the end of the non-compact.

And now the unemployed Canadian auto workers must also worry about a big American satellite (something else we used to build) falling on them.

NASA’s 6+ ton Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite, launched in 1991, is due to fall to earth sometime and somewhere this week, maybe on you.  If these six tons of knowledge bash you, you might be in trouble because NASA has said you’re not supposed to touch any of it.  Your smoking ashes could be arrested.

Something styling itself space.com says that NASA says (and if someone says that someone says that someone else says, hey, it must be true) that there’s only a one in 3,200 chance of you getting evolved and devolved by this somewhat heavier-than-air junior high school science experiment gone rogue.  At last report there were some 312,191,000 American customers for Chinese manufactures, and so if we limit the crash site to Alaska, Hawaii, or the contiguous states, only 9,787 Americans are going to die from a massive satellite fail this week.

The satellite might instead fall on Canada, though.  American weather reporters often tell us that a given hurricane is nothing but a fish storm heading off to the north to Newfoundland, and so no one is going to be impacted.  Thus, since Newfoundland is inhabited only by fish, six tons of recyclables descending upon St. John’s will harm only an unemployed codfish or two.

Beaumont ISD has not yet announced its lawsuit against NASA because of the economic impact of the impact of a satellite cratering Mollie’s Irish Café’ along Water Street.

Just a passing – or falling – thought here – when America’s slide-ruliest math nerds launched this thing twenty years ago, why did they not plan for a controlled landing?

Imagine Ford dropping a Crown Victoria out of orbit to flame down upon a Tim Horton’s in Talbotville, Ontario where a former Ford employee is carrying out the garbage just before locking up for the night.

An engineer would say that’s the price of knowledge; a liberal arts graduate would ask what happened to his doughnut.

Beaumont ISD has not yet announced its lawsuit against Tim Horton’s because of, oh, any excuse will do.

-30-

When Writing About 9/11...

When writing about 9/11, never miss an opportunity to avoid talking about yourself.  9/11 is not about you, where you were, your feelings, how your world changed, how 9/11 defined you, how you made a blankie square; it's about the people who were murdered.

First Morning as a School Volunteer

My Frist...First Day of School

by Mack Hall, Esq.

I woke up early.

I took a bath.

I ate some breakfast of toast and cheese and coffee.

I dressed nice because this was my first day as a Book Buddy.

I said good morning to the dogs and the cats and the kittens. I said good bye to the dogs and the cats and the kittens. I made sure they had food and fresh water.

I wne t...went to school. I was scared. And then I saw lots of my friends and I wasn't scared no m...any more.

My Book Buddy is (name). He is very nice. He wears glasses like I do. He likes to read like I do. He likes mysterys...mysrte...mysteries, like I do. We read a book about lion kittens. It was fun. (name) reads good...well. He took a computer est...test about the book about the lion kittens. He did good...well.

I got candy.

I like school. I am going to go back every Friday.

More old people...um...adults should volunteer at their elementary schools.

My dogs and cats and kittens were very glad to see me.

 

 

The End

The Russian Soldier, 1918

Mack Hall, HSG

 The Russian Soldier, 1918

The Russian soldier, Moskina¹ in hand,

Though filthy, tired, unknown, unpaid, unfed,
Fights for his God, his Czar, and his Fatherland:
No medals, no vodka, no sleep, no bread

His clumsy lowest-bidder boots,² they rot

Into the foulness where the world’s sins pitch
Into the slime of old Iscariot³
Good men to die in some Gehenna-ditch

Saint George, Saint Michael, and Saint Seraphim

Preserve him in his soul from Judas’ crime⁴
Life’s-end tears, life’s-end prayers, a blood-choked scream
And so he climbs the trench wall one last time,

Three cartridges⁵ clenched in his frozen fist,

He disappears at last into the mist⁶

^1.        Moss-Nagant rifle
^2.        Betrayal by contractors
^3.        Betrayal by politicians and Bolsheviks
^4.        The Russian soldier does not fail his duty
^5.        Ammunition shortage / the Trinity / God, Czar, and Fatherland
^6.        The Russian soldier is known to God

The Menace of Unregistered Piccolos

Mack Hall, HSG

The Menace of Unregistered Piccolos

(In green accordance with the green Cliché’ Protection Act of 1904 as greenly amended in 2008 and greenly interpreted by a green and hemorrhoidal federal GS-4 clerk this week, no predictable puns on frets and sour notes were employed in the green construction of this green column)

With the falling dollar, the worst unemployment since 1945, a border so open that the Mexican army makes unopposed raids into the USA, and the ownership of what remains of our economy by our merry friends the People’s Liberation Army, we can take comfort in the fact that our federal government is at last striking back – against Gibson Guitar.  

Extremist Gibson craftsmen in Memphis and Nashville have been terrorizing the American people long enough with their unregistered guitars manufactured from unauthorized wood.

But all is not lost – in the past few weeks crack squads of federal commandos have mounted bold raids against jihadist woodworkers armed with chisels of mass destruction.  Evil guitars have been seized, as well as undocumented alien wood.  The records of the un-mutual activities of the out-of-control Gibson Guitar workers may well lead to a series of trials in the spirit of Roland Freisler, the patron not-a-saint of the modern federal judiciary.

Something styled the Lacey Act and the whims of the Forest Stewardship Council, the Customs service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service (Fish?  Wildlife?  Guitars?) are used to suppress guitar manufacture and ownership in these United States.  A maker of guitars must be able to provide to any of the increasingly numerous and pestilential types of federal police documentation about the species and national origins of any wood used to build a guitar in this country.  Further, any American who owns a guitar must also be able to provide documentation to any of the many types of federal police about the species and national origins of any wood in a privately-owned guitar.  Failure to do so will result in a fine and in the seizure of the guitar.

Don’t try to cross a border or board an aircraft with a guitar you want to keep – if you don’t have the paperwork for your guitar and some fellow with a federal badge wants your guitar, it’s his.

You’ll never see your guitar again.

How’s that for a topic for a protest song, eh?

Your possession of a guitar or any other musical instrument containing wood is now a crime of which you are automatically guilty unless you can document your innocence.  What sort of wood is in any part of your great-grandpa’s fiddle?  Prove it, citizen.  That old guitar you bought in a pawn shop and restored?  Your papers, please, citizen.  The piano your ancestors bought in the 19^th century?  Tell us what we want to know about the ivory and the wood, citizen.   Your grandma’s old high school Bundy clarinet from the 1950s?  You must explain yourself, citizen.

And what offense has the Gibson Guitar company committed against The People to find itself particularly singled out by the regime?

What a better world this would be if the internal security police were to lay aside their stinkin’ badges, their pistols, and their warrants and other inky blots and sit with the Gibson Guitar workers at their work benches for an hour.  Imagine a federal agent who never had a real job learning how a craftsman selects and processes a bit of wood for a guitar fret.  Imagine federal judges learning something about work and art instead of oppressing workers and artists.

In anticipation of Labor Day the feds did an Eliot Ness on guitar makers; maybe in memory of 9/11 they’ll bust some uppity flutists.

-30-

Cellphonia in F Flat

Mack Hall

Cellphonia in F Flat

A chamber piece for two sulks and a soda

He yawns, his head propped up against a wall
Of head-stained, head-banged green-fluorescent blocks   
In the back of the room, in Marlboro Country
Reposing in sad, sullen insolence
Furtively strumming a silent keypad
Flinging his unique existential angst
Into cool, pure, plasticized electrons
And out into the post-Dairy Queen night
Where there’s real life, man, not these books and stuff,
Real life; you wouldn’t understand. I’m me
And you don’t know who I am, man.  I am:
An inspirational singer-songwriter
An artist, a great soul misunderstood
Raging against a machine that isn’t there
An angry Romantic on government grants

Passenger to Frankfurt, by Agatha Christie

Passenger to Frankfurt
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie Ltd: 1970

One of Miss Christie’s stand-alone (that is, not a Poirot or a Miss Marple) yarns, Passenger to Frankfurt is a dated query into the various post-war revolutions that continued the foul works of Hitler and Stalin. Miss Christie considers the world-wide situation of that dark time, and then creates fictional characters to investigate the source. The neo-Nazi denouement is, in retrospect, mostly in error, but then Miss Christie was writing fiction and, anyway, could not have known that the mischief was almost wholly Communist in origin.

The villains of this story are part of a secret, international Nazi resurgence of youth funded by decayed tycoons and even more decayed European aristocracy. That Nazis, like Communists, originate with dysfunctional and uneducated gangs posing as workers’ movements seems not to have occurred to Miss Christie, or perhaps she assumed that the reality would not have the appeal of alpine castles and marching Hitler Youth. With a little more violence and any sex at all this book could have been any one of the hundreds of mass-market, look-alike paperbacks with lurid covers featuring swastikas and / or hammers-and-sickles and / or automatic pistols occupying, like Soviet soldiers along the Berlin Wall, yards and yards of bookstore shelves .

Even so, this is a good read for an airplane trip or a vegetative Sunday afternoon, and the characterizations, especially of the minor characters, are delightful.

Agatha Christie’s books, more than a generation after her death, continue to sell by the thousands and thousands.

The reviewer’s books sell not by the thousands, or even by the hundred or dozens, but rather by the ones from lulu.com.

THE WORLD OF SAINT PAUL, by Joseph M. Callewaert

The World of Saint Paul
Joseph M. Callewaert
Ignatius Press: San Francisco. 2011

What an excellent book! Mr. Callewaert ‘s life of St. Paul reveals a thorough familiarity with the geography, history, and mythology of the Mediterranean world.

With the usual caveat of “I have no window to look into a man’s soul” (attributed to St. Thomas More and to Queen Elizabeth I), one infers that Mr. Callewaert is a believing Catholic, the adjective “believing” sadly necessary at present.

Mr. Callewaert gives the reader an informal but not patronizing style, and deliberately and skillfully comes close to fiction in depicting for us the scenes and characters in St. Paul’s life. He describes the cities, especially, and provides clear maps to show us these cities and the routes of travel. His knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Semitic mythologies is wonderful, and he dissects – respectfully – many of Saint Paul’s letters to show us the historical and mythological allusions the Saint uses to appeal to his audiences. Perhaps without meaning to, Mr. Callewaert makes an excellent argument for returning to the teaching of mythology, the mythology which all Christian knew for 2,000 years and to which most schoolchildren were exposed (on a g-rated level) until the 1970s, when a secular obsession with testing isolated skills and a fundamentalist fear of anything that “ain’t in the Bible” pretty much ended the teaching of Christian civilization in grade school.

The only weak part of the book is the brief introduction in which Mr. Callewaert employs the first-person singular repeatedly and almost as repeatedly uses quotation marks to indicate sarcasm. These lapses into adolescent FaceBook-ese are, happily, not continued in the text.

Mr. Callewaert was born in Belgium and grew up during the German occupation. He is a Knight Commander of the French Order of Merit, has written numerous travelogues, and is now a citizen of the U.S.

The reviewer barely graduated from high school.

Hurricane Season is Here -- Stock up on Filler Language

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

The height – or depth – of hurricane season is here, which means it’s time for us to review all the Weather Channel cliches’ so we can try to sort out the reality:

1. Weather Channelistas always employ allusions to Hurricane Katrina, which, as we all know, was the only hurricane to strike these shores within living memory.
2. “We’re not out of the woods” – curious metaphor for a hurricane.
3. “Rain event” – why don’t they just say rain?
4. “Dodged the bullet” – hurricanes don’t shoot
5. “Stormed ashore” – well, yes, storms do indeed storm.
6. “Wreak havoc” – what, really, is havoc, and why and how is it wreaked? What is wreaking, anyway?
7. “Swath of destruction” – okay, Mr. Weather Channel Dude, quick, without consulting a dictionary, what is a swath?
8. “Mother Nature’s wrath” and “Mother Nature’s fury” – to which Greek or Roman nature goddess would the concept of Mother Nature apply?
9. “Decimated” – not unless the death rate is 10%
10. “Trees snapped like matchsticks” – do matchsticks ever snap like trees?
11. “Looks like a war zone.” No, it doesn’t. No one involved in the horror of combat looks upon the scene afterward and says “It looks like a hurricane zone.”
12. Storms that brew – what do they brew? Tea? Coffee? White lightnin’?
13. Storms that gain or lose steam, as if they were teakettles or steam locomotives
14. Hurricanes that make landfall – well, what else would they make? A gun rack in shop class?
15. Batten down the hatches (Darn, I forgot to buy a hatch; I wonder if the stores are still open)
16. Hunker down
17. Calm before the storm, always “eerie”
18. Calm in the eye of the storm, always “eerie”
19. Calm after the storm, always “eerie”
20. Visually, the stock shot of some doofus in a slicker, standing on the beach, and yelling into a microphone to tell us to stay off the beach.

Finally, always remember that, first and last, hurricane reporting is about Katrina; everything is about Katrina. Katrina, Katrina, Katrina. Audrey? Carla? Rita? Ike? Never heard of ‘em, pal.

Migratory Waterfowl

Mack Hall

Migratory Waterfowl

Loud-quacking, honking, singing, winging, they,
Beneath their wild-wind-beating wings rise up
From the waters of life, towards the sun,
Refreshed in holy pilgrimage along
Cold sky-trails from a long-ago warm nest,
Across the tattered scapes of history,
To a perfect visual landing at dawn
In the golden trees of Jerusalem

Fuhrerbunker

Mack Hall, HSG

Fuhrerbunker

Do not descend into that withering world
Of pale self-pity dying in the depths,
A ghost hugging resentments to itself
And long-decayed hatreds treasured and fed
Upon the corpse of your frail, failing flesh
Hopelessly trapped in souring concrete cells
The empire you carefully constructed
Constricts, constrains, contracts, conforms, condemns

You cry to yourself that you cannot win
And that is true. You are without hope, doomed,
Waiting, lurking in a hugging wallow of
Stagnating fulfillment of the god-Self
Sitting on a floor fetid with refuse
Foul failures feeding on your inwardness
The feeble fluorescent lamps flickering
Shed shadows, never light, and never Light.

You cry to yourself that you cannot win
And that is true. You cannot win. Not you.
Not with the fantasy maps you drew, or
Upon the dead telephones whereon you
Communicated your nothingness to…
Nothing.
Open your hands. Open your eyes.
Don’t go down there. It’s dark down there. Don’t go.

A Dairy Queen Waitress in Tuscany

Mack Hall, HSG

A Dairy Queen Waitress in Tuscany

Eat, drink, pray, love, hamburger, shake, and fries
Boyfriend, baby, trailer park, sad tired eyes
Creepy men, cranky boss, and ice-cream floats
A wheezing Honda with overdue notes
Cinder-blocks, fluorescents, grilled cheese to go
No child-support this month, ‘nother cup of Joe
Ten-year-reunion, can’t go, how time flew
Two shifts that day, the trailer rent is due
Baby at Mama’s, boyfriend still in bed
He’ll look for work tomorrow, that’s what he said
“Order up!” the fry cook hollers, and she
Dreams of a someday-summer in Italy