A Chainsaw, a Printing Press, and Santa Fe - weekly column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

A Chainsaw, a Printing Press, and Santa Fe

Now that I am gainlessly unemployed my fences are cleaner, the views are clearer, and there is an abundance of firewood stacked neatly in anticipation of winter.

A professional woodman would / wood (like that storied woodchuck) / would sneer at my little battery-powered chainsaw but, although I expected only to get a summer or two of work from it before it went off and joined the Marines or found a good job at the refinery, it is still doing well after ten years.

The original battery packed it in only a few years ago, and the several replacements have in their turns faded. The new pair of batteries I ordered on Monday arrived today.

Two days is something less than two years.

Information posted with a museum display in the Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe says that when this part of the world was New Spain an order for anything – books, harness, iron for the forge, seeds, tableware – took from two to three years to be fulfilled.

In Spanish East Texas a purchase, with payments and details, would be worked out with a merchant in Nacogdoches or San Agustin (now San Augustine). Then it would be made part of a mail run taking some weeks through the woods to the coast, perhaps at Anahuac, to be filed away there in anticipation of a ship, which might not arrive that year.

After unloading and maintenance, the ship would sail for Spain, a voyage of some months which might be terminated early by English, French, or Spanish pirates. In Spain the order, among many others, would be processed by manufacturers, wholesalers, shippers, and retailers, then to be warehoused again while waiting for a ship back to the colonies.

The prices would have been very expensive, including insurance against loss, and the buyer would have no idea when his goods might arrive, if at all.

The downside of slow communication and isolation is obvious, but there was a benefit, too: the Spanish brought their technology and their problem-solving abilities with them. When the harness needed mending there was a smith (probably not named Smith) to mend it with locally sourced leather and recycled iron. Farmers learned what seeds, including those from native plants, worked in a given environment, and from each crop store seed for the next season. Artisans fired local earths for all sorts of purposes, taking their culture and indigenous cultures and making useful and artistic wares in new ways and new styles.

As for the books, the first printing press in the New World was set up in Mexico City in 1539
(https://web.archive.org/web/20090209001307/http://reservas.net/alojamiento_hoteles/mexicocity_monedastreet.htm). Mexico City is a long way from both Santa Fe and East Texas, but it’s a lot closer than Spain.

Still, while one admires creativity, problem-solving, and hard work, there is much to be said for the good young man delivering books and made-in-China batteries in a big brown truck.

-30-

If God is Love, Why Does He Permit Software Developers? - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

If God is Love, Why Does He Permit Software Developers?

We are against the death penalty, and so
Of thoughtful caritas one recommends
Life sentences with no chance for parole
(And endless-loop re-runs of Lost in Space)

For

1. The manufacturers of this new computer
2. The famous software company who couldn’t
     Program their ***es out of a pay toilet
3. And the electronics chain who replies
    To emails with “Dear Valued Customer”
    And vaporous words which say nothing at all

And now may Olivetti Underwood
Have mercy upon their polluted souls

Cold Showers and Pure Thoughts for Clean-Minded Youth - frivolity

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Cold Showers and Pure Thoughts for Clean-Minded Youth

Cold showers did not work; they only made
Me want to cuddle up with someone warm

A Re-Post for Canada Day - God Bless Canada

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Come Laughing Home at Twilight

Beaumont-Hamel, 1916

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, into 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.

The Yellow Dairy Barn and the State of Texas Milk Inspector - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Yellow Dairy Barn and the State of Texas Milk Inspector

My father painted his dairy barn yellow
Maybe because he found some bargain paint
Then came along the inspector fellow
With his clipboard, and he said that yellow ain’t

Legal, that dairy barn paint had to be white
My father had The Book, and from it he read
That a dairy barn’s color only had to be light
“Well, I’ll find something else,” the inspector said

He found a fly speck on an old cow bell -
May Texas milk inspectors just go to (Newark)

Twenty Kerenskys Passing in Review - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Twenty Kerenskys Passing in Review

“No doubt they’ll sing in tune after the revolution.”

-Kamarovsky in Doctor Zhivago (film)

Kerenskys marshaled in two ordered lines
Unsure exactly how to stand, to pose
Merry banter, backpats, handshakes, and smiles
A show, a glow of Party unity

And then – a hiss, a strike, a spit, a spat
Atop the tomb in sixty-second bursts
Comrade against comrade, a free for none
The audience applauds the bloody fun

Who is the Trotsky, and who the Stalin, then;
Who will die in exile, and who will win?

Served on a Tectonic Plate - rhyming couplet

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Served on a Tectonic Plate

I ate my lunch on a tectonic plate
It drifted away - my dessert is late!

Is Your Bible Communist? - weekly column

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
26 June 2019

Is Your Bible Communist?

The Washington Post, not everyone’s favorite news source, is suffering Aunt Pittypat vapours over the possibility that bibles in this country may soon be unaffordable. And they suggest that this is President Trump’s fault:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2019/06/21/bible-tax-christian-publishers-warn-that-china-tariffs-could-lead-costly-bibles/?utm_term=.937a3bcb329e&wpisrc=nl_faith&wpmm=1

According to the Post, mega-publisher HarperCollins (sic), a Borg that has absorbed many old and famous American publishers into its continuum, also owns Thomas Nelson and Zondervan, said to be the largest publishers of bibles. HarperCollins (sic), under its Thomas Nelson and Zondervan labels, has many or most of its bibles printed in that garden of freedom and brotherhood, Communist China.

Given the proposed tariffs, according to the Post, the prices of our Communist-made bibles could rise 25%.

Christianity Today (https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/october/bible-made-in-china.html) and Publishers’ Weekly (https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/religion/article/80555-bible-tax-threatens-christian-publishers.html) concur.

Two ironies come to mind. The first is the matter that Communist China, a persecutor of Christians (but, to be fair, Communists persecute everyone, especially other Communists), is a significant printer of Christian books.

China is a Communist nation. Communism is an obscene evil. Communism denies the dignity of the human individual and his freedom to live, think, study, speak, write, sing, compose, believe, play, pray, create, travel, or enjoy the work of his own hands without the permission of the state. As T. H. White says of the collective state in his allegorical Book of Merlyn (sic), everything not forbidden is compulsory; everything not compulsory is forbidden.

Communism, which is also the source of Nazism and Fascism, is the ideology which in one century pretty much halted some 10,000 years of human progress. Communism has destroyed many great and ancient nations with the attendant deaths of millions of human beings, the displacement of millions more, and the catastrophic loss of languages, literature, art, music, architecture, monuments, history, and faith. In sum, Communism is the ultimate expression of genocide.

And Communists print our bibles for us.

The second irony is that the publishers who deprive American craftsman of jobs by outsourcing the printing of books to a Communist collective seem to suggest that this is somehow Mr. Trump’s fault.

Look, President Trump is not my main man. I don’t like him. But I don’t like him because of what he himself says and does, not because of what someone else (The Washington Post comes to mind) says about him. Certain American publishers, not Mr. Trump, shifted American jobs to a terrorist state long before he was elected.

I don’t know if Mr. Yuge Deal would have outsourced printing work to China; the idea of Trump Enterprises printing bibles seems unlikely. But then, the idea of Communists printing bibles seems even more unlikely.

So where was your bible printed? “Published in…” means nothing more than where the head offices are. “Printed in…” – now that is what tells you where the book was printed.

And it is important.

-30-

When Dogs Don't Wanna be Dogs - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

When Dogs Don’t Wanna be Dogs

You send the pups outside to play
This so-soft, sunny summer day

The yard is big and safely fenced
A paradise nicely condensed

And there the dogs have cats to chase
Bugs to eat, and each other to race

Soft rubber toys to squeak and chew
Bowls of water and dog-food stew

And naps to take beneath oak trees
Tummies up in the soft, soft breeze

And yet –

As soon as you have let them out
Then all they seem to do is pout

Unhappy with their vast estate
They glare at you and seem to hate

They hate the cats, they hate their toys
You have denied them all their joys

They bark and scratch at all the doors
They’re kinda cute – like sophomores

Breaking the Dress Code - a weak, two-line wheeze, hardly a poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Breaking the Dress Code

We broke at last the secretive dress code
With an Enigma machine from Singer

A Scientific Afterlife - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Scientific Afterlife

What scientific wreckage is buried now
Beneath a chiseled granite sentiment?
Our clapped-out bones and flesh are not enough
To satisfy The Way That Things Work Now



Maybe our eyeglasses will hit the dirt
Along with dental fillings and dyed hair
Pacemakers with their batteries in place
Still firing dutifully after the peace



That now surpasses all understanding
With God (complete with medical branding)

System Errors - Please know that I did format these scribbles appropriately...

...Something or someone is making a mess of it all.

What is Poetry? - rhyming couplet (Something is botching the formatting)

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

What is Poetry?

Poetry is a language that
Is not prose. Nor is it a hat

"For if a Preest be Foul..." - poem (the system is botching the format - I hope you can read this at all)

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

If the Faith is a Lie

For if a preest be be foul, on whom we truste,

No wonder is a lewed man to ruste

-Chaucer, General Prologue, 501-502

If the Faith is a lie, then let it lie
Let’s not make it up as we go along
Waving a fashionably duct-taped book about
And chanting “This is all you need!”

Because some millionaire has told us to
Nor yet the famous ‘blogging priest who boasts
And posts photographs of his gourmet meals
While begging money for his many trips

If the Faith is a lie, then let it be
But it isn’t – and neither, please God, are we


(No armpit-drying during Mass, please.)

The Robotic Telephone Tree of Lingering Death - poem (of a sort)

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Robotic Telephone Tree of Lingering Death

Hello, you have reached your longtime hometown downhome Saint Swithin’s Family Medical Clinic now an outreach ministry of Consolidated #Jesus Industries Inc.where nobody knows you anymore and wouldn’t care if they did your health care is very important to us you are a valued customer our office hours are from 8 to 12 and 2 to 5 on alternate Mondays and 9-12 and 2 to 5 on Tuesdays and Thursday after Woodchuck Endangerment Awareness Day but before Greenpeace Day except when the latter falls on a Wednesday in which case our office hours are 2 to 5 only and on Saturday 8 to 12 if this is an outside pharmacy please dial X and follow the menu if this is a prescription refill please dial Y and follow the menu if this is to schedule an appointment please dial Z and remain on the line if this to reschedule an appointment dial A cubed and speak slowly when prompted to do so I’m sorry I didn’t quite get that would you like to try again I’m sorry I still didn’t get that if you would like to speak to an operator dial oh, I am sorry your time is expired please hang up and redial if you would like to speak with Dr. Name’s secretary please dial 3 if you would like to speak with Dr. Other Name’s secretary please dial 4 if you would like to talk with Nurse Practitioner Yet Another Name’s secretary please dial 5 if this is an emergency then please hang up and dial 911…

Summer Solstice - Did the Earth Move for You Too? - a wheeze

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Summer Solstice - Did the Earth Move for You Too?

The almanac says that the Solstice came
Shortly after the receptionist called my name
At 1056 – and how do they know
Of stars and planets in their dances slow?

We note the transcendent reality
Of our pale transient mortality
And guard our health with good ol’ common sense
I later noted this coincidence:

The transition to summer came to pass
While the doctor had his finger up my ***


(There might be some mystical symbolism in that, but I don’t know what.)

A Friend Asked Me to Look Over His Book Before Publication - a rhyming couplet and cautionary tale

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Friend Asked Me to Look Over His Book Before Publication

He asked me to review his book (I must be nuts)
I did just as he asked:
                                  And now he hates my guts

Your Liturgy of the Hours - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Your Liturgy of the Hours

A book of poetry is a prayer book
Your Daily Office of verses and lines
Attended prayerfully if possible
But, yes, attended in any event

Wavell’s Flowers for your next deployment
Young Yevtushenko for the bus commute
Or a little volume of Pushkin pushed
Into a pocket past your pocketknife

Beginning with Matins, and all through your day
Make the blessings of poetry part of your Way

A Hank Williams Night - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Hank Williams Night

You’re lonely in an apartment at night
But lonesome way off in a pickup truck

Lonely sitting in an IKEA chair
Lonesome on the tail-gate of an old Ford

Lonely over a glass of single-malt
Lonesome over a Marlboro and a beer

Lonely surfing the channels of emptiness
Lonesome listening to the silence of stars

And either way you hurt; she isn’t there
No, she sure ain’t

The Successor to Steve Allen's MEETING OF MINDS - rhyming couplet

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Successor to Steve Allen’s Meeting of Minds

A cookery show with noshes and gnaws -
People giving a ‘burger rounds of applause