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Gestural Overture

March 13, 2013
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Here are the words to the double acrostic:

Glossolalic shade of mauve–O
Eucharistic Mazel Tov
Such are notions to ignore
They’re not what you’re yearning for
Unitard’s your passe-partout
Releve your deja vu
As you bow the hall will cheer
Levitation’s spoken here

The first two lines do not make a heck of a lot of sense, but then the third line implicitly tells you that doesn’t matter. There would not ever be any such thing as a “glossolalic shade of mauve” unless the hearer/viewer had synesthesia. Analogously, the Catholic Eucharist and the Jewish Mazel Tov might be joined in an odd hybrid.

I wanted to work in Labanotation, the recording of dance movements on paper, but the meter wouldn’t allow for it; Levitation fit nicely, though.

It’s all about the celebration of the human form in four dimensions, the flow of a body through space with lyricism. I am graceless and no dancer myself, despite at least half a dozen dance lessons and hours on dance floors. But I’ve had a studio art education with several life drawing classes, and I’ve owned the classic DYNAMIC FIGURE DRAWING by Tarzan strip artist Burne Hogarth, so I can vicariously enjoy what you luckier folks can do directly.

Blog Post #100 — the Specialest Subject of All

March 12, 2013
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The subject that is the specialest subject of all is my daughter. She is engaged to be married to a fine young man with intelligence and wit to match her own. I wish them the best kind of success, which is not Money nor Fame but Enduring Happiness.

Kate is no stranger to my journal pages. Here is one from a few years ago:

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And here is the one I did on the occasion of her 20th birthday:

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I have thousands of cherished memories of her, from the day she was born to last Friday when I visited her in Phoenix and took her and Denise to Mongolian BBQ. She was a delightful baby, an amazing toddler (she applied for and received a library card less than four months after her third birthday, having signed her name twice in order to do so), a lively little girl–ah, I could name dozens of her incarnations, but the important thing is, she has become more herself every day, and need not dwell in the past the way her mawkish father does. Kate, you are You, and the best Daughter imaginable. I love you and I salute you. I celebrate my One Hundredth Blog Post with the specialest subject of all. Thanks for indulging me by kindly permitting me to do so!

Namelessness

March 8, 2013
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Close to fifty years ago, Paul Simon rewrote the Sermon on the Mount with his song “Blessed,” which begins:

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit
Blessed is the lamb whose blood flows
Blessed are the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on
O Lord, Why have you forsaken me?

And yesterday, at more than twice Paul Simon’s then-age, I found myself also musing about that Sermon, and the huge proportion of Earth-walkers who are some combination of disenfranchised, exploited, homeless, mistreated, but above all ignored. I don’t envy world leaders the challenge of making a world-culture that promotes individual dignity and appreciation. I have almost no notions of what to do, or even try to do, about the lot of these poor souls. I do know it is vital not to pretend that they don’t exist.

Rock It’s Red Glare

March 5, 2013
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When I was a kid growing up in Glendale, Arizona there was a local show for kids called It’s Wallace?  It was the BEST kid’s show I can imagine. The hosts were Wallace, whose real name was Bill Thompson, and Ladmo, whose real name was Ladimir Kwiatkowski. They were often bedeviled by a prissy, pouting fellow in a Dutch Boy wig who claimed to go to the finest private school in Scottsdale, and who was always badmouthing “public school brats” like me. They called him Gerald; his real name was Pat McMahon.

Their cartoons were top of the line, and one of my favorites was Rocky and Bullwinkle. The two were in constant conflict with Boris Badenov (my memory of him reminds me of Jerry Stiller) and Natasha Fatale (voiced by June Foray, who was also the voice of Rocket J. “Rocky” Squirrel). The nefarious couple was a parody of spies in the Cold War, but my page is no joke, though it is a tribute to my fond memories of R&B.

Speaking of tributes, here’s one I did in 2007 for Wallace & Ladmo. Alas, Ladmo died in 1994, less than two years after a co-worker of mine got his autograph for me.

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Anapest Destiny

March 1, 2013
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Here are the words:

As aggression & madness hit home hard & bad
And the fact of the madder: insanity’s sad

Nonetheless we have need of the fight-or-flight urge
Near the dangerous nexus adrenals must splurge

And we’re grateful whilst passing this trail of tears
Agile minds are elastic & friends give 3 cheers

Pick a challenge: adapt and bid Fate do her worst
Ply a cause be adoptive grow hearts fit to burst

Esoteric & oleoresinous G R A I N
Estée-Laundering cheesiness works as a strain

Thus a madness once nasty becomes just plain silly
Take your fun while it’s tasty and run like a filly

Here are some notes:

An Anapest is a measure of meter with two unstressed syllables and then one stressed. “May this sentence exemplify anapest feet.” is a line of anapest tetrameter, that is, one line is four anapestic feet long. Perhaps the most famous example of anapest tetrameter is attributed to Clement Clark Moore, who began “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” thus: “‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house/Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”

The acrostic is a riff on “Manifest Destiny,” a philosophy akin to “Conquer we must/If our cause it is just.” I think Manifest Destiny has had its day, and needs to not eat it too. I like Anapest Destiny a lot better: let us strive to be Poets.

“Estée Laundering” will be familiar to American fashion-conscious folk as derivative of Estée Lauder, the makeup magnate who lived to be 97 years old and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush in 2004, the year she died. The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest civilian award an American can receive. A question I pose to you, dear reader: do you find my reference to Ms. Lauder complimentary?

Anyone else want to play? Here is a page that has been a Work In Progress for about two years. I intend to finish it in two days or less.

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Suggestion: print it out and draw silly stuff in the panels, or let a youngster color it. Then try to fit some words in there that go with the letters already there. Think of it as a puzzle with whatever rules you want to use for it. Hope you have fun!

Leave & Learn

February 26, 2013
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Here are the words:

Living w/dysfunction drives & conflict turns to fuel
Losing situations & frustrations means accrual
Landing on one’s feet & thriving–aye, therein’s a jewel

Entertainers strain & strive to play Fool’s filigree
Enterprising flight & fancy helps a soul to be
Extraördinary & in sight full: Holy See

A voyager & vagabond may find Guadalajara
Voracious in her ampletight & shy an I-dot starrer
Vicissitudinous to one who’s apt & not a martyr
Vast graveyards may yawn wide & sup on such as auk or darter

Entitlement’s a busy beast & wants ingratiation
Enrage thyself at SLOTH & seek an ACTIVE satiation

Here are some notes:

The word Situation once described desirable work. When I was young the classified ads of the local newspaper often had a section called “Situations Wanted” wherein the placer of the ad would describe the sort of job she or he was hoping to be hired for. Thus Charles Addams had Gomez retelling “A Christmas Carol” to Wednesday and Puggsley: “…then good old Scrooge, bless his heart, turned to Bob Cratchit and snarled, ‘Let me hear another sound from you and you’ll keep Christmas by losing your situation.’” As Richard N. Bolles has pointed out in What Color Is Your Parachute?, losing a situation is often a glorious opportunity.

I put an umlaut over the O in Extraordinary so that it would be pronounced in the reader’s head as a distinctly separate syllable. So that’s not really an umlaut; it’s a diaeresis.

An “I-dot starrer” is someone who dots their lower-case I with a star. Compare this with the “I-dot hearter.” Both subsets of humanity are cases of arrested development if the person in question is more than twelve years old.

Certain types of fish called Darters are classified as threatened or endangered. The particular auk known as the Great Auk was hunted to extinction by the same species that killed the Passenger Pigeon: Homo “sapiens,” the “human” race. Enterprise needs boundaries.

Entitlement is a hot topic nowadays. Many of my high school classmates Facebook-post denunciation of people who use welfare payments (which max out at about $900 per month per household of four, for instance) to buy alcohol and cigarettes. Some of these same classmates buy homes in the six-figure range and cheerfully claim a mortgage deduction well in excess of five figures; drive company cars to family vacations; dine and drink lavishly at “business lunches” and write off half the tab as a business expense, etc.

The bottom line of this poem serves as the bottom line of the theme. “Enrage yourself at SLOTH and seek an ACTIVE satiation” is advice I’ve been giving myself for a long time. That’s why, every day this year, I’ve striven to create a new work of art in the form of a journal page, challenging my creativity with a new (usually acrostic) thematic puzzle to solve via meaningful expression. Meeting these daily challenges has enriched my emotional health beyond description, and I heartily recommend such journaling to anyone who feels the need of an expressive centering.

At the end of his Hugo-winning novella Riders of the Purple Wage, author Philip José Farmer has Grandpa Winnegan, a man about a hundred and twenty years old, leaving his great-great-great grandson Chibiabos Elgreco Winnegan with a note, which he’d paid a man to deliver posthumously. Wikipedia synopsizes the note: “The note simply says that Chib must abandon Ellay, leave his mother, and break free so he can paint from love, not out of hatred.” May we all heed such advice, especially if it comes from our own hearts.

Icarus Dædalus Doc

February 25, 2013
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Of all the tragic things that can happen to human beings, the death of one’s child must be near the top of the list. How much more tragic, then, when your child dies through misuse of a device that you yourself designed?

When I started this page it was with a tone of mockery, exemplified by the triple acrostic Icarus Dædalus Doc. The similarity to Hickory Dickory Doc will not escape readers who were told Mother Goose nursery rhymes as little children. But that substrate demanded content beyond mockery, the poem virtually wrote itself, and the illustration–executed after looking at classical images of this famous father and son–demanded the heart of the tragedy: the father watches, helplessly far away, as his child plummets to a certain doom. The child is still alive but his remaining life on Earth will not last the sweep of a second hand around a clock face. So do we all–parents, friends, lovers–so often watch as tragedy unfolds, wanting to turn back time or otherwise alter reality, but powerless; helpless.

It is the truest exemplar of what people think of as “Greek tragedy.” There is also a moral: Today may well be the day a future tragedy might be averted.

So–how are your loved ones doing? What might you do to help them, this very minute?

MagnIFying Glass

February 24, 2013
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Here are the words:

Most life events are humdrum–hardly gracing
And some are harrowing, and some debracing

God’s fans included Sandro Botticelli
No prob–IF “He” made Laura Antonelli

If not–if GOD is naught*–a synæsthesia
False-colors all perceivings; & amnesia

Yin-overloads our lives & drives a stasis
Infecting vectored acts with dreamworld basis

Nor is “AYE” unsusceptible, in this
God knows (or *{}) that much “I” see’s amiss

What does it mean? There is a clue in the emphasis of the IF in the word Magnifying. Agnostics of my bent don’t claim to have any more handle on the Truth than anyone else (except, perhaps, the Texas Board of Education, he said with a wry smile). The Universe is mind-boggling enough to provide endless mystery. One simple either/or is: Either Reality has popped on and off eternally, or there was an ultimate starting point (and I don’t mean THE Big Bang; I mean a First Big Bang). And things like magnifying glasses, falsecolor telescopy, and sunsets present different realities of the same scrutinized item. Remember Claude Monet’s different paintings of Reims Cathedral at different times of day? The same brick and mortar can evoke endlessly different moods.

Anyone else want to play?

As I did a couple of days ago, I again present a work in progress. This one is simpler. The symbol in the middle is an ampersand; so the triple acrostic is “Leave & Learn.”Image

Egad Flye

February 22, 2013
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The Epigram

“Gadfly is what they call you when you are no longer dangerous. I much prefer troublemaker, malcontent, desperado.” Harlan Ellison (Gadfly)

The Sonnet

Enchantment may produce ye Hippogriff
Entanglements may render souls aloof
Emollients may please–here, have a whiff
Endangerment’s not reckless in a spoof

Greek myths & Grimmish færy tales compel
Gore-mandatory ghast will guts unspool
Grim readers have used entrails to foretell
Good luck & otherwise for moneyed fool

And such a fool lives fates here bliss’d there snarly
Augmented: maidens fair & b u l l i e s burly
Assuaged with frothy brews of hops & barley
And ending in a t u n n e l bright & swirly

Do let’s not let affright the stake or spike
D e l i v e r a n c e is kind, & unalike

The Annotation

First I thought of a Gadfly. Then it occurred that there are two words, Egad and Flye, that acrosticized would be Gadfly bookended by the letter E. The result promised to be a startling (Egad!) exercise (Flye!) in nonsensical-but-not hybridization. Myths from early history have done rudimentary gene-splicing: see Pegasus and Hippogriff. When we make up stories, if anything’s possible and it’s entertainingly told, the more outrageous the Nonesuches the better. And story-danger is not reality-danger.

“Gore-mandatory ghast” is a weird tip of the hat to Mervyn Peake and his Castle Gormenghast. I have not read more than a handful of Peake’s words, and I found his illustrations unpalatably crude, but I got enough of a taste to see he was a unique visionary and a singular storyteller.

I use the word Deliverance ambiguously. “Deliverance is kind” is a skewed tribute to Stephen Crane, who wrote “War is kind” while giving only the barest hint of explanation. Like Crane, I think the reader is rewarded if she or he must supply important details without regard to what the “right” answer is. Dear reader, whatever you think Deliverance means in this poem, you’ll be right–if you are sincere.

One last note about Harlan Ellison. He has won innumerable awards for his writing, and is admired by such as Tom Smothers, Robin Williams, and Neil Gaiman. He was Dangerous once. I do not think he is Dangerous any more, not the way he wants to be Dangerous, so I harmlessly rib him with the “Gadfly” tag, but I’d love to be wrong.

Anyone else want to play?

Below I supply the beginning of a page. I may complete the page as soon as later today, or it may lay fallow for a while. The triple acrostic is HARMONIC SYMPHONIC SYMBIOSIS. A hint to writing these is to start with the words at the end of the lines. If the letter I gives you trouble, try doing an Internet search on “words ending in i.” Note also that HARMONIC has eight letters while SYMPHONIC and SYMBIOSIS both have nine; so I’ve supplied line guides that include two lines coming from the C in HARMONIC. Hope you try it for ten minutes, dear reader; you may become hooked, and it’d be an ego boo for me to midwife another acrostic poet into the virtual world. Good Fun and Have Luck!

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Two Replenishments

February 21, 2013
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Here is the first Replenishment:

Repast the point of no return we miss
Evolvements via savorlicious dish
Plethoric culinarities take aim
Loose shafts against the epicuric lame
Engorgeous to assimilate–you’re on
New paths to gain a belly’s rapprochement

Here is the second replenishment:

Rampaging appetites & thirsts
Ensnare entrap enfold enmesh
Plate-ladenness’ll serve to burst ’em
Let’s gorge like famish’d babe in creche
Exceptional refection
Needed? S E L E C T
Ingreedy-ents/cook/eat it

The illustration, done in haste to beat the Midnight deadline, features a sushi selection, a microtrough of soy sauce mixed with wasabi, a bowl of miso soup, a set of chopsticks, a mound of shaved ginger looking like wadded-up paper, and a doodle meant to represent Good Energy; there is also my signature and date as always. I inadvertently revealed the page beneath when I scanned it with the corner of the lower right turned up, but liked the revelation and did not rescan.

There is a remarkable documentary of a man who has devoted his life to the making of sushi. For replenishment of the Soul, I highly recommend it: Jiro Dreams of Sushi.