As If It Matters

This morning I discovered an email in my spam filter inviting me to participate in a research panel as an AT&T Wireless customer. I rubbed my hands together in glee. I’ve been waiting for this opportunity. At the end of the survey (which appeared to be primarily about overage charges), they asked if I had “any other comments”. Why yes, yes I do have some other comments! So here is what I wrote:

Network coverage is a serious issue. I live in a major metropolitan area - Boston - and every day I have dropped calls, even if I’m just sitting at my desk at my home office without moving. Frequently the connection is so bad - with noise and static - that I have to call several times to get a clear connection. And in major areas of the city and the region there appears to be no service coverage whatsoever. It is a constant and daily problem and leads me to despise AT&T. If it wasn’t for the iPhone, I would never come near your products and service. I believe it is borderline criminal to charge the same rates as your competitors whose network is an order of magnitude better. My dissatisfaction with your coverage knows no bounds and the second the iPhone is carried by a superior network, I will leave AT&T behind in the dust.

Kathy Lash just sent me this - and given that my own Westie is a rescue - please help Scout find a new home - photos here:

Meet Scout, a beautiful, sweet, 5 year-old female Westie! Her devoted family has unfortunately found themselves in the situation that they must put her up for adoption. This is an extremely hard decision on their part, as they have loved and cared for Scout since she came from the breeder as a baby. Scout now has 3 year-old twins with whom she shares a home. Her parents have recently come to a point where they cannot appropriately care for the twins and Scout. You see, Scout has an injury and requires special care. Last year, Scout’s tail was accidentally run over by a car. The nerve damage injury was so severe that she ended up losing her tail, has had to learn to walk again and is now incontinent. Scout can walk; she actually can run. She uses both of her back legs as one leg when she runs. She loves to play fetch and go for short walks. She is a very healthy, well-cared for Westie who is spunky and full of life. She is completely up-to-date on her vaccinations and has been spayed. A small cuddle-bug Westie, Scout weighs 13 lbs. As with a typical Westie, she loves anyone and everyone. She simply needs someone willing and able to take care of her incontinent issues, which could probably be controlled by doggie diapers or a female dog panty with pads. Specialists have been consulted, and the nerve damage is permanent. Even so, Scout stands to live a healthy, long life in the right situation. Might you be that special person who would care for and love her? If so, please contact Carol Gore with Westie Rescue of Tennessee at 615.838.4221 or cgore13 [at] yahoo.com, and we will be happy to forward an adoption application to you and/or answer any questions you might have.

(photos of Henry are here…)

Dear Lord, fire-eating custodian of my soul,
author of hermaphrodites, radishes,
and Arizona’s rosy sandstone,
please protect this wet-cheeked baby
from disabling griefs. Help him sense when
to rise to his feet and make his desires known,
and when to hit the proverbial dirt. On nights
it pleases thee to keep him sleepless, summon
crickets, frogs and your chorus of nocturnal
birds so he won’t conclude the earth’s gone mute.
Make him astute as Egyptian labyrinths that keep
the deads’ privacy inviolate. Give him his mother’s
swimming ability. Make him so charismatic
that even pigeons flirt with him, in their nervous,
avian way. Grant him the clearmindedness
of a midwife who never winces when tickled.
Let him be adventurous as a menu of ox tongue hash,
lemon rind wine and pinecone Jell-O. Fill him with awe:
for the seasons, minarets’ sawtoothed peaks,
the breathing of cathedrals, and all that lives –
for one radiant day or sixty pitiful years.
Bravely, he has ventured among us, disguised
as a new comer, shedding remarkably few tears.

(by Amy Gerstler. Originally titled “Prayer for Jackson”)

Another Sunday with Jonas! This time we discuss: his childhood growing up on the Lower East Side when it was slum tenements, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and (of course) Norman Mailer. Enjoy the Show!

From today’s Writer’s Almanac:

It was on this day in 1906 that Teddy Roosevelt went against more than a century of tradition and became the first American president ever to leave the country while in office. He went to view the construction site of the Panama Canal, and when he saw a steam shovel for the first time, he stopped his train and hiked through the mud to take a turn at the controls.

Steam shovels are cool.

We used to live in the city - in a condo in the heart of Dupont Circle (in Washington, DC), with all the joys and ills of city living. Now we live in Medford, a suburb of Boston. Although on the scale of urban to suburban, our part of Medford is closer to the urban. Regardless, it’s the suburbs. When I was younger I could never imagine living in the suburbs. It just seemed so… boring. Then I got older, grew tired of city living, and found suburban life to be much more than imagined. It’s actually kind of great.

I especially love our street in Medford – Douglas Road. We’ve got a great street, great neighbors. Rascal loves it. The Medford Transcript just launched a new blog about Medford, and VoteMedford.org is a great example of how the internet encourages local civic action.

But I’ve got a complaint: how come the traffic light at the intersection of Main St and South St isn’t live? It’s a terrible intersection, accidents waiting to happen, and they’ve even got a traffic light sitting there - but it’s not in use! Come on, folks - turn the thing on! It’s been a blinking light rather than active traffic light since we moved here in early August - and every day the likelihood of a serious traffic accident at that intersection grows.

As usual, we covered a lot of ground… haberdashers, Sylvan Cole, Max’s Kansas City, E. M. Forster, and lots more…

A while back, I saw a note on 37signals.com - I can’t find it now - but I copied it:

We’re always looking to embrace constraints. The presence of constraints make you creative. The more constraints you lift, the less creative you become.

The quote came to mind when I wrote my earlier post on “Craft”, because I was writing about the constraints around producing something really good. Excellence has long been an obsession, because for me, personally, it seems so distant: I feel constantly spread too thin, devoting my time to simply getting things out the door, moving them along, never taking the time to bring a project to level of excellence it deserves.

Which brings me to my next subject: interruption. I’ve written on my work blog about being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of email I receive; being overwhelmed extends beyond email into social media. Look at this list of Facebook requests from my profile. It’s absurd. Who has time for this? Life is short; if I want to write a handful of excellent poems, then the hyper-connected, always available, always interruptible life may not be for me.

If I want to pursue excellence, if I want to approach my work as craft requiring dedication, focus, intensity - then I need to insulate myself from interruption, seeing unavailability as one of my creative constraints. That old time solitude is what I’m talking about.

Obsessive media consumption - obsessive consumption in general - is a great avoidance tactic. (Avoidance of what? Anything real, hearty, or serious.) And now I’m discovering that obsessive social media consumption is also a great avoidance tactic. I am interested in the heart of things, in the “primary and elemental necessities”. I return to an old HG Wells quote (from Tono Bungay, written in 1909) that I have kept around for encouragement and focus:

But in these plethoric times when there is too much coarse stuff for everybody and the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbor’s eye, there is no urgent demand either for personal courage, sound nerves or stark beauty, and we find ourselves by accident. Always before these times the bulk of the people did not overeat themselves, because they couldn’t, whether they wanted to or not, and all but a very few were kept “fit” by unavoidable exercise and personal danger. Now, if only he pitch his standard low enough and keep free from pride, almost anyone can achieve a sort of excess. You can go through contemporary life fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elemental necessities the sweat of your deathbed.

Amen.

“greatestdogever.com” is taken. What is Rascal going to do now?

As many friends know, I love poetry. It fuels me and gives me inspiration and energy. But I generally don’t write poetry; I read other people’s poems, and memorize my favorite ones. I don’t write poetry because it is a fine art, a serious craft, and to come to it requires diligence, patience, intensity. Who wants to write a bad poem? It’s worth the effort to write a good poem - but it’s a lot of work. So given my respect for the craft, and the effort involved, I don’t write poems.

That’s not to say I don’t want to write poems; I just don’t want to write bad poems. There’s enough bad poetry in the world - more than enough. But I’m also an insomniac, and I am sometimes prone to wake in the middle of the night and what else is there to do but write a poem? More often than not an intense dream has driven me to awake suddenly, with a stark awareness of the night, and that’s a place where many of the few poems I have written have been born.

My desire to write excellent poems constricts me; it prevents me from writing too many poems, and it prevents me from publishing (or seeking publication) of most of my poems. Something has changed for me today; I found this bit of a poem I had written some time ago and felt the impulse to publish it on nicco.org. I am also constricted by the intimacy of my poems; given that my dreams provide the raw wood for most of my poems, and my dreams tend toward the intense and intimate, I’m further reluctant to share them publicly. There is the dark stuff, taken from the depths of the subconscious, and although it may be hard to make sense of, it has power and it is intimate and revealing in oblique ways.

Despite all that, I’ve published this poem and maybe that’s the small opening required to publish more - and more importantly, to write better poems.