caleb walker

crying man

Here's another poem, appropriate for the day.

At O'Hare, after a first jump west to California,
I thought my father was dying, as I waited

for the connecting flight. Being hungry
I ate pizza with the people eating pizza.

...

(Read the rest at The Writers Almanac.)

labor day

I didn't know this:

Labor Day became a national holiday in 1894, partly because it was a convenient way for President Grover Cleveland to appease an angry workforce after he violently broke up a strike.

Read the whole story over at The Writer's Almanac.

rewrite

I got to work today and there were open spots in the paved parking lot so I didn't have to park in the gravel overflow lot like usual. Not because I arrived early, but because it's a summer Friday and a bunch of people must be starting their weekends early.

I pulled into a prime spot and turned off the engine, leaving the radio on to listen to Paul Simon's song, "Rewrite," all the way to the end. I'd heard it many times as a witty little ditty but had just recently heard the words in the final chorus.

I once took a course at the Iowa Summer Writers Festival on (if I remember the term correctly, and I don't believe I do) the Dramatic Moment, the point in a story when it stops being about this particular character in this particular situation and becomes a story about humanity or the world or society. Or about me, the reader. It's the point when the skies open up and Capital-T Truth is revealed. I hope to do that. Just once.

In "Rewrite" the narrator tell us he's working on a rewrite of a story. He's gonna change the ending and trash the title so he can sell his story for big bucks. Witty and light-weight, right? Then the last verse:

I'll eliminate the pages 
Where the father has a breakdown 
And he has to leave the family 
But he really meant no harm.
Gonna substitute a car chase 
And a race across the rooftops 
Where the father saves the children 
And he holds them in his arms.

Damn. Little ditty gets me every time.

a comment for us

We rarely get comments on our blog posts. (I've decided today to write in plural, being in the mindset that the blog and its contents are ours - mine and yours.)

But we got this comment today on a post from a month ago:

Thanks for the article, I read it and the post and I have to say that this all gets more confusing when you are new to all this,just when I think I understand it all, someone throws in something new. I guess I will all click in to place at some stage!

It ended with a link, which I've deleted. 

It's vague enough to make me think it might have been legit, but vague enough to make me think it was phony. The link clinched it. It went to a viagra site. We deleted the comment.

lopate

For a guy who isn't into poetry, I post a lot about poetry, don't I? 

This winter (Remember winter?) I went with my writing group to hear Philip Lopate read his poetry and prose. I really liked it.

Today's Writer's Almanac features him:

we who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting
as a group
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift

And it continues.

various things

Some interesting (to me) things I've come across lately:

• Slide Rules! I'm old enough to have owned one of these and learned how to use it, but young enough to have never actually been required to use it.
• The Tunguska event was an enormous explosion over Russia in 1908, caused, probably, by a meteoroid. (Where "enormous" equals the largest impact in recent history. (Where "recent history" is undefined.))
• Pocket Eyes is a keychain-sized pair of pince-nez. I think I need a pair. Pince-nez reminds me of a book I read (but whose title I can't remember) where dogs have become sentient and many of them wear pince-nez on their snouts. And it's kind of a cool retro-y word.

There you go.

happy first anniversary

Tomorrow, let's celebrate the one-year anniversary of humans discovering Neptune. 

One Neptunian year, that is. It takes Neptune about 165 Earth years to circle the sun, and tomorrow is that long from the date that Earthlings first saw the chilly planet. It's way out there. "Light can travel around the earth seven times in a second. It takes four hours to get to Neptune." (via Metafilter)

(Neptune has 13 (THIRTEEN!) moons: Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, Galatea, Larissa, Proteus, Triton, Nereid, Halimede, Sao, Laomedeia, Psamathe, and Neso.) (via Nine Planets)

today in history

On this date 199 years ago the US went to war with Great Britain, beginning the War of 1812, which makes me think of this song:

 

The Battle of New Orleans was fought after the peace treaty had been signed.

(via)

twenty-two years ago today

thirty-one

Ha! I wrote this last night and forgot to post it! Here it is, NOT BACK-DATED.

It's the last hour of the last day of May and my last NaBloPoMo post.

The morale of this story: It's easy enough to post something every day, but not so easy to write something worth reading. You know it as well as I do.

I have a few false starts saved that I can tweak into real posts for June.