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Scenes from St. George’s, Part I: Erosions, First Love, Headmasters

Sometimes you wanna put the past in the past/ but every generation gets bit in the ass

Portastatic

Note: This is a series of “scenes” from Saint George’s, the school in Spokane, Washington I attended back in the 1980s and early 1990s. Although this was all a while ago and I forget all kinds of stuff, I remember a few things. Saint George’s was a good school in many ways, but it was also a pretty loose environment. I’m sure it’s changed now, but back in the day a lot of pretty wild stuff happened. These pieces will collect a few incidents as I recall them; the scenes at best loosely connected; most are funny—a few are maybe a little serious. I plan do a few installments in this series, so if you like this one stay tuned.

Also I make no claim to my memories being authoritative in any sense. As with all memories, these have been colored, and eroded, by time. However, I will try to write only about things I witnessed first hand, or things that I have on what I believe to be pretty good authority.

My Brother Mike Looks for Erosions

When I was in the lower school (elementary school) at Saint George’s I had a teacher we will call L.K. In the lower school each grade had a main teacher, what you might call a homeroom teacher, and students also had classes with other specialist-type teacher such as Science or Music. L.K. was an OK homeroom teacher for me, not very memorable, but not terrible either. However a few years later when she was serving as the homeroom teacher for my brother Mike, things changed.

By the time Mike was in her class, L.K. was apparently in a little entanglement with the headmaster at the time called George Edwards, whom I believe was separated, or separating, from his wife. The headmaster of Saint George’s always lived on campus in a fancy house called The Davenport House, and I guess the action between himself and L.K.’s was pretty widely known. It must have been if even I, as like a fifth grader, was aware of it. I think this relationship, whatever it consisted of, must have been on the rocks though by this time, and there may have been some bad action. In any case, L.K. was totally checked out from her job. Now teachers sometimes totally check out, and this can go unnoticed for weeks or even months. Teaching is an important job, but it’s not like flying a plane or something; a checked out teacher generally doesn’t put students’ lives on the line.

Anyway, L.K. was way checked out. Saint George’s was, and presumably still is, situated on a very large piece of property down there by the Little Spokane river and was surrounded by wilds that were not Saint George’s property, but that students could explore. The lower school in particular was set up against a hill that went for a mile or so up above the school building. So there was a lot of space. However, there was also a basically bounded playground and lower school students would also play on the large lawn of the Davenport House, so there was no need for them to be foraging way up on the hill. Except in L.K.’s class though, because she developed a kind of genius strategy to do no teaching at all for my brother’s class. What she would do was, at the start her assigned homeroom teacher block, let’s say it was three periods in the morning, just tell her students to “go look for erosions.” The students must have learned about erosions in Science class or something, because Mike knew the word as like a second grader. The students would go up on the hill on their own and scout around for erosions, of which there were many, all morning and come back for lunch.

Now, a day of looking for erosions would have been one thing— a little erosion location could easily be justified as a Science class extension, ideally supervised—however L.K. didn’t just pull out this move once. In fact she pulled it out day after day for, I believe, a matter of weeks. Everyday Mike would come home and my mother would ask “what did you do today?” Mike would reply “went looking for erosions.” Like most parents, mine probably didn’t pay super careful attention to the ins and out of what was going on with our schooling, however after some weeks of this my mother started to find all this erosion action a bit strange.

“You went looking for erosions again?”

“Yup,” said my brother. “More erosions.” I think Mike was totally fine looking for erosions all day, as I would have been, however my mother had heard enough.

“That’s too much looking for erosions. It’s been weeks and you’re still looking for erosions. I’m going to talk to somebody.”

I believe my mother did talk to somebody, because L.K. changed up her all-erosion-all-the-time strategy. I think she was still checked out, but maybe made an effort to disguise it a little better. She left the school at the end of that year as I recall and I don’t know what happened to her after that.

That’s the funny thing about teachers—they are often remembered by students for the strangest thing they did. I don’t remember a single thing from L.K.’s class or anything else about her really, but I do remember that she loved her some erosions.

Drawing a Sun for N.C.

As I mentioned, Saint George’s had the Davenport House, which was right across from the lower school, and one of the rooms of the Davenport House was used as a classroom when I was there. We had Science class in this room for a while. One day, the teacher asked us to draw the solar system or something like that, and I started by drawing the sun. Now I had always seen the sun depicted with like pointy rays of light coming out of it—you know, the sun looks kind of angular most of the time. So that’s how I drew it.

There was a girl in my class we’ll call N.C. I don’t know if anyone else from Saint George’s back then remembers her because she wasn’t there for too long, but I do and I had a huge crush on her. In fact, I thought about her all the time. We would play tag games on the lawn on the Davenport House, “freeze tag,” and “television tag,” (I don’t remember the rules) and I would always try to tag N.C. just to be close to her. Anyway, N.C. was in Science class with me, and I showed her my sun, which I thought was pretty solid. Then, another classmate, a boy whose name I forget but who was a bad seed, interrupted my little chat with N.C.

“That’s not what the sun looks like. The sun doesn’t really have rays like that. It’s actually just round. Look at my paper, I have it the right way.”

Sure enough, this little brat had drawn the sun like a big red circle. Now I suspected at the time that on some level this guy was probably right, and that the sun as an actual mass or whatever didn’t have physical rays. But his sun looked super ugly, and also he was putting my drawing down in front of N.C. and just basically being terrible. So I turned to N.C.

“What do you think N.C. Which sun do you like better?”

And N.C. just smiled at me and said “I like your sun better.”

That was all I needed to hear. N.C. was on my team, and the little brat could stick his sun where…well you know. I was elated by N.C.’s appreciation; my sun had carried the day. I was totally in love with her, more than ever, after this sun incident.

A while back I tried looking N.C. up online, and although her name is not super common, I found four or five people who could have been her. I was hoping to send her the sun story and say thanks, but I didn’t want to just fire this anecdote over to a bunch of random N.C.’s, so I held back. If you do know who I’m talking about and you know where she’s at, let me know. Maybe she remembers my pretty solid sun.

More George Edwards Action (with a cameo from the Manimal, Kenneth Faried)

I mentioned above that when he was headmaster of Saint George’s George Edwards was entangled up with L.K. And this is true. He was headmaster for a while though, so he also did some other stuff.

All in all I would say George Edwards was a mediocre headmaster. He looked more or less the part, wore a mustache that was less Frenchy than my middle school French teacher Mr. Dreyer’s, and generally didn’t intervene too much in school matters, which was a positive. He was a decent public speaker, and put on a good showing at the annual auction and things of that nature. On the other hand, he was not especially inspiring, and as we’ve seen, had some stuff going on in his personal life which distracted him. He was from Texas originally and when he first came to the school his wife came with him, but I think this was just for show because she was out of there pretty soon after. Like I said, he was at the school for a while and I actually took a class from him in high school. More on that in a second.

I was at the school a lot because my father taught there and also coached basketball and stuff into the evenings, and myself and my friend J.T., whose father also taught at the school, kind of had the run of the place. J.T. somehow got copies of the master keys to the middle school and upper school made and gave me a set, and we would just open up the buildings whenever we wanted and go wherever. J.T. and I would sneak into the faculty lounge in the high school and pinch sugar cubes from the teacher’s coffee area, and later on we snuck into the science room to appropriate some ammonia packs from the first aid kits. I think someone eventually noticed that the first aid kits were always running out of ammonia. Yeah, that was us. George Edwards was gone a lot, and we would also go on into the Davenport House, which somehow was just open, and poke around. We probably even did this a few times when George Edwards was staying there, which is admittedly a little bizarre. The Davenport House had a kind of servants’ area as I recall, and a back set of stairs which was really cool.

Anyway, because I was always around, George Edwards asked me one time to babysit his daughter when he was off doing something. I was probably in middle school at this time, and his daughter was about 8 or 9. His daughter is probably a lovely person today, but at the time she was known to be a bit of a handful. In addition to the L.K. factor, George Edwards was, in my recollection perpetually, going through a divorce and things may have been a little tense on the Edwards family front. I didn’t know his daughter too well, but I said sure, I’ll babysit. Good he said, you can do whatever you want but just don’t let her dance on the roof.

This seemed like a very specific instruction, and I wondered what he meant. Was he just giving me a general example of a bad idea, or was she an inveterate roof dancer and I’d somehow have to try to control this tendency? It turned out to be the latter. The babysitting was going fine for a while, until she said:

“I’m going to go dance on the roof.”

“Uh, I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Your dad told me not to let you do that.”

“Yeah, I’m going to go dance on the roof. Are you coming?”

Now I was bigger than her, and a guy, but still it’s not exactly easy to corral an 8 year old girl hellbent on roof dancing, and I clearly wasn’t going to be able to talk her out of it. So, I thought, the best thing to do was to go with her and keep an eye on things. The “roof” was actually not the roof of the house exactly, more like an open patio area that a window on the second floor opened on to. It didn’t really have any railings or anything around it, and all in all it was not the safest spot for dancing. However, it was medium big and looked kind of OK. Also she was clearly a veteran roof dancer, so I figured she had it under control.

She danced for a while and I watched, and then we went back inside. I had a pretty nice day with her as she was actually pretty cool, and then George Edwards came home.

“How’d it go,” he asked. “She didn’t dance on the roof did she?”

“No sir, nothing like that at all. We just stayed inside mostly and read books and talked.”

“Good job. She does like to dance on that roof. I’m glad you handled her today.”

I told George Edwards a fib, it’s true, but I felt like I earned my money you know. Roof dancing had occurred, but it has also been contained. You’re welcome there George Edwards.

One day during the George Edwards era, when I was poking around the Davenport House for reasons passing understanding, I came across a soft-core videotape in the TV room on the second floor. There was a picture on the box of some frolicking beach babes and it had some kind of suggestive title. Interesting, I thought, George Edwards likes himself some beach babes. More interesting than that though was the fact that he just left this lying around. Maybe George Edwards needed a couple of lessons in headmaster trade craft. Or perhaps he didn’t expect that J.T. and I would just be cruising around his house uninvited. In any case, I would get a different kind of glimpse into the person behind the role via a story my classmates related to me which happened one day when I was staying home with my trick knee.

What is a trick knee? Well, the trick knee was the patented move of a Seattle Seahawks defensive lineman called Joe Nash back in the day. Basically Nash, and sometimes his teammates, would fake an injury (thus the “trick knee”) to stop the clock late in the game. In American Football it is super important to stop the clock in late game situations; this is why you always see players trying to get out of bounds in these spots. Joe Nash and the Seahawks found a loophole in the rules, which at the time didn’t prohibit the fake injury move. I believe the rules have now been adjusted.

I found an article from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel by one Sharon Robb from 1989 that talks about this. (The South Florida Sun-Sentinel has some super organized archives by the way.) Robb is talking about the 1988 AFC title game between the Seahawks and the Cincinnati Bengals. “Clarke” here is Ken Clarke, Nash’s fellow defensive lineman.

Seven times Nash (five) and Clarke (two) took turns faking injuries on third-down situations to enable the Seahawks’ nickel defense to get onto the field. After the third time Nash went down, the crowd of 58,560 caught on and started booing. Cincinnati coach Sam Wyche and his players were livid, complaining to whatever official was within earshot. The fourth time, Nash went down and feigned injury without ever getting hit, and walked off the field under his own power.

I remember watching this game and marveling at Nash’s trick knee move. To me this was an example of exactly the kind of player I liked. Nash was probably not the best lineman in the league, but he did what he had to to try and help the Seahawks win. I played basketball for a while at Saint George’s and later on as well. As a basketball player I had strengths and weaknesses, but was never going to be the go to scorer. So I developed other skills, especially offensive rebounding. This was my specialty, and my favorite NBA player of all time is the Manimal Kenneth Faried. Like me, Faried wasn’t a great scorer, but he made up for it with his dominating offensive rebounding. He stuck around the league for a while because of just this one skill.

When I was in graduate school in Arizona in my 20s I played a lot of pick-up at the gym there. Pick-up is interesting because players mostly don’t know each other and just have to kind of fit together on the fly. This process is pretty hit or miss; however I was a good pick-up teammate because I could score if need be, but was just as happy to try and dominate the glass on both ends, especially the offensive glass. Most pick-up players don’t rebound all that hard, so by just going all out in that aspect of the game I could pretty much control things a lot of the time. One day I was matched up against a slightly older guy and I was kicking his ass on the glass. I was pulling out all my moves, and he basically had no chance. He started getting mad and began pushing me in the small of the back when I was going for a rebound. In basketball a little pushing and elbowing is acceptable but pushing your opponent in the small of the back is bad form. I let him know his play was out of line and told him:

“Hey dude, you can push me all you want and I’m still going to eat your lunch on the boards.” This was the last straw and my guy said something I’ll never forget:

“You aren’t a real basketball player. You’re just a fucking garbage man.”

What he meant was I was just picking up all the rebounds and loose balls like a garbage man picks up trash. He intended it as an insult, but I took it as a huge compliment. I am absolutely a garbage man, me and the Manimal both.

Anyway, I loved Joe Nash so I copied his trick knee move. Not on the football field though, my trick knee would flare up on days when I didn’t feel like going to school. “My knee hurts,” I’d tell my mother, and she’d let me stay home. I didn’t pull this move out much because I basically liked going to school, but once and a while my chronic knee condition got the best of me. One day in what must have been 1990 (just a bit after Joe Nash’s epic playoff performance) I was trick-kneeing it and missed George Edward’s class, which I recall was some kind of government class or something. The fabulist and video game loser John Innes will remember.

The reason that I know this happened in 1990 is because this was when the First Gulf War was kicking off. It turned out that George Edwards had once upon a time been in the military, or more precisely I think he was at the time in the military reserves. The gulf action must have made him feel nostalgic or something, because the next day after my knee had healed I went back to school and my classmates told me something extraordinary had happened in government class. What was that? I asked. George Edwards had us go outside and march, they told me. March? What kind of marching? Military marching, they told me. He had us do military marches and gave this big talk about the military and he was actually crying.

Now this all sounded pretty odd, and I felt like my trick knee had worsened on just the right day because I sure wasn’t up for any marching.

“What was going on with him?” I asked.

“We don’t know. He was just getting super emotional and he made us march on the road all class.”

Although I was glad to have missed it, I found this story interesting. To be fair, this was not an L.K.-like move where George Edwards just didn’t feel like teaching that day. He was out leading the marching, apparently. He wasn’t a great government teacher, however after I heard about the marching I liked him better. This incident, I felt, provided a little window into the real guy, the Texas native who liked beach babes, didn’t want his daughter falling off the roof, and felt a deep connection to the military reserves.

One thing I wonder about is if any other teacher at the school was aware that all this marching was going on. I think they must have been because it apparently took place right on the road in front of the school. I wrote in my Mr. Dreyer piece about how back in the day teachers would just do questionable stuff and nothing happened. George Edwards was the principal, so he probably had carte blanche on the marching front in any case, but did no one ask him, “hey there George Edwards, everything OK out there today? Maybe we should chill a bit on all the marching” or anything? It can be really tough to tell principals what to do, although I’ve gotten pretty good it in my own career. Anyway, I wonder.

George Edwards moved to Seattle later on and got another head of school job. My brother Mike ran into him over there and says he’s a really good guy. As for his daughter, I hope she’s still out there, dancing her little heart out.

Dedication: For N.C., wherever you are.

to be continued…

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On John Innes, the Fabulist (with cameos from Bruce Innes and Hunter S. Thompson)

John Innes is a high school English teacher in Oregon. He works at a Catholic School there where he also coaches basketball, and probably does some other stuff. His players call him “Coach Innes,” and I think they respect him. And this is reasonable enough. Innes is a good coach, and good teacher, and most of the time a pretty good guy. He used to be a good golfer, but I think he lost it. Too much water on the elbow, can’t control the slice. But teachers show one side of themselves in the classroom and another outside of it. What John Innes has kept hidden from his students and players is that he is big old fabulist.

I know this because Innes, probably to fill the time when his lesson plans peter out or something, is known to tell stories to his students about the days when he and I were in high school and university together. And these stories are all completely bonkers. Innes will tell his students a story about me throwing people into the Little Spokane river back in high school. But I would never do that. I mean the Little Spokane is cold, and what kind of person would toss a fellow student into a cold river just because? Also, to get to the Little Spokane, which ran by our school, you had to cross a super long bridge. I’m not dragging some chick or dude across a super long bridge just to get them wet. Doesn’t make sense. I don’t know where Innes gets this stuff. It’s totally ridiculous. Innes is big old fabulist.

In another of his little “stories,” Innes claims that during university at Hamilton College I snuck into the chapel there on campus and climbed up into the bell tower. Now, there might have been a chapel at Hamilton, sure. There might have been a lot of things. Hamilton has some pretty old buildings, and it’s not impossible that a chapel would have some kind of bells in it. But I’m not gonna go climbing up there. Innes fancies himself a “literature” teacher, and maybe he’s mixing in some part of a Dorothy Sayers plot or something. Also, Innes may be extrapolating from the notion that I generally may attempt to access certain spaces that might seem “off limits.” That’s possible. I mean, if I see a “Members Only” sign on the door of a club, I’m gonna think “hey there pal, I’m a member. In fact, I’m a permanent member baby” and I’m gonna go right on in. I have also noticed that in buildings where there may be some public spaces and some private or closed spaces, if you are dressed nicely, as I can, and are pretty tall, as I am, you can sometimes just wander wherever and people will, by and large, just let you, especially if you wear some kind of lanyard around your neck. But this doesn’t mean I’m going to go poking around a bunch of bells. It’s totally ridiculous. Innes is a big fabulist, and he needs to get over it.

Innes tells another story about me graduating from university in linen. What’s he even talking about? I mean, I did graduate and have a piece of paper somewhere I think, but linen? What a bizarre thing to say. And for that matter, what if I did? Linen is a cloth, clothes are made from cloth, I was presumably clothed at graduation. So what? I think what may be going on here is that the water from his elbow is migrating up to his brain. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, and what I do recall is that I wore a little purple flower in my hair at graduation and some dude from the newspaper took a picture of me and this ran somewhere. Innes may have remembered the flower thing and then imagined a whole bunch of other nonsense around it. Linen. It’s totally ridiculous. His fables are just getting out of control.

So Innes apparently thinks it’s funny to spin a bunch of nonsense about me. I don’t know exactly why he does this, but he may come by his mendacity honestly, so to speak. Innes has a father called Bruce Innes. Bruce Innes is a Canadian, and a pretty interesting guy. He used to be in a band called The Original Caste, and they had a hit called “One Tin Soldier.” The song is still pretty well known to a certain generation, which is cool. That band split and Bruce Innes must have drifted around blowing his money for a while, cause he ended up in Spokane in the late 80s, which is when I met the fabulist John Innes. I went to Bruce Innes’ house sometimes in order to crush John Innes at a video game called “R.B.I. Baseball.” I don’t play a lot of video games, but it doesn’t matter. I crushed John Innes at Sega Hockey a few years later as well and he whined about it for weeks. Guy has water on the elbow from way back.

Anyway, Bruce Innes’ Spokane house was pretty large and had a fully soundproofed music studio in the basement. I’d never seen anything like this and assumed that he must have some serious cash. But I don’t think this was actually the case. Like I said, I think Bruce Innes had spent most of his money from his music heyday by this time. My brother Mike, who remembers some stuff and forgets other stuff, told me recently that Bruce Innes made his living around this time by writing jingles for an audio and video store in town called Huppins. I don’t remember anything about this, but it’s too specific not to be at least a little bit true. It can’t all have been Huppins though, right? He must have done other stuff. Bruce Innes ended up leaving Spokane and moving to Sun Valley where he became the go to guy to play music sets at rich people’s parties. Then he moved to Oregon. I don’t know where he lives now. So yeah, he’s had an interesting life.

Back in the days when Bruce Innes was high on the hog with his music royalties he ran around with some famous folks. He met Leonard Cohen, and told me one time that Cohen was a total dick. Leonard Cohen is a legend of course, and is now remembered best as a genial older statesman, but this doesn’t preclude the possibility that back in the 70’s he may have been a dick. Doesn’t preclude it at all. Mr. Google says that Bruce Innes also knew Joni Mitchell. More well known though is Bruce Innes’ association with the writer Hunter S. Thompson. Most people of a certain age will remember Thompson, the “gonzo” inheritor of Hemingway and a pretty major figure in American literary history. Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, in which he relates a funny anecdote of bonding over college football with President Richard Nixon in the back of a car sometime, despite the fact that Thompson hated Nixon. Thompson also wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I also have read. This is the book that the Terry Gilliam movie is based on, the one where Benicio DelToro plays Thompson’s sidekick and always advises him “as your lawyer…,” a phrase that has entered popular culture and is still widely used.

This is also the book that features Bruce Innes and some story about a monkey. I’m not sure if this next part is in Las Vegas or not, and in fact I think it isn’t, but another story is that Thompson and Bruce Innes were hanging out in Colorado somewhere and decided they would run for political office on the same ticket. Thompson would run for sheriff and Bruce Innes would run for something else. Now, Thompson’s run for sheriff is a well known piece of his mythos, and he did actually have a platform under the umbrella of “Freak Power,” but I imagine that whatever this run really entailed, Thompson exaggerated it pretty dramatically in later telling. I’ve heard Bruce Innes talk about this as well, and he makes it sound like the two of them were actually aspiring politicians for a time. But I don’t believe it. I’ll bet you what happened was these two guys were hanging out and getting stoned, and thought it would be funny if they “ran” for office. They probably got a poster or two made and hung them up around town, told all their friends about it as a lark, and talked a bunch of BS for a while. Bruce Innes is a great guy, but I think he and Thompson are kind of full of it. So like I say, John Innes probably comes by it honestly.

Whatever the source of John Innes’ struggles with the truth, one time after he had told some of his usual whoppers about me, one of his students found these stories interesting and wrote me a request for more information. He actually wrote it in verse, which was pretty creative, so I wrote him back in the same style on a flight out of Adelaide. The poem basically attempts to correct the record that the fabulist John Innes so regularly distorts. It also touches on some of the lowlights of my college career, including my fondness for writing excuses for students who needed extensions, the fact that I sported a tan trench coat for much of my first year, and my inability to get a steady girlfriend. John Innes, the fabulist, is referred to as “J.I.” in the poem. In the interest of having some of my “b-sides” back in print, I am re-posting this guy in its original form. It’s called “An Open Book,” and I gotta say, it’s still pretty good.

“An Open Book”

Not really in the mood
but you’ll think me quite rude
if I don’t make a reply
around me on the plane
folks eat, are entertained
no one’s writing save I

So I’ll take a look back
to days at the dog track
where I ended up by mistake
thought we could beat the odds
just silly teenage sods
there was no money to make

I know not if J.I.
has spun a pack of lies
concerning my personhood
Yes, I wrote poems for girls
who told me they were pearls
ah–but they weren’t any good

About a cold river,
and the rest of his quiver
of myths and exaggerations
well if someone was shoved
it was done out of love
or congratulations

So to upstate New York
in a trench coat–what a dork
but the world took pity
the life there was fine
but naught was on the line
should have gone to the city

I did two things quite well,
needing something to sell
I wrote brilliant excuses
‘bout ridiculous capers,
couldn’t finish my papers
I claimed aces, held deuces

My second great skill
is one I hold still
I fell for crazy ladies
locals, Russians, and Turks
they all drove me berserk
with a boatload of maybes

Four years in the dorms
and countless reforms
led to little of note
I left sans a sob
a plan or a job
and without my trench coat

Dedication: For John Innes, the fabulist. You know I won that Sega game, but I confess I may have tried to get up in that bell tower. So let’s call it a tie there baby.

Postscript: Since this piece was first published, Bruce Innes has sadly passed away, I believe in Vermont. As I said in the piece, Bruce had a fascinating life, and he was also a genuinely sweet guy. I really liked him. RIP Bruce, maybe you can win an election or two up there in heaven.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy “An Open Book,” also about the character known as John Innes. You can find that here.

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Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s “The Social Construction of Reality” and Related Issues

Author’s Note: This piece is a re-write of a piece from my first blog, Classical Sympathies. At that time I was interested in the relationship between the individual and his or her place of work/ organization. Classical Sympathies was fortunate to have a number of regular readers, some of whom took the time to comment, sometimes at length. The blog got a surprising amount of traffic for some reason, although it is now lost to time. Some pieces from back then are, looking back, a little too flowery, however the style was the style. Andrew Inch, a guy that a uncatagorizable cross-section of people here in Japan knew back in the day, was one of the most prolific and interesting commenters, and I have left his remarks in this re-write.

Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality:

This piece will look in some detail at Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality, and comment on some of the ideas that it raises. Anyone who works in an organization will be aware that the intersection of the individual, in all of her preferences and particularities, and the institution can involve some friction. In The Social Construction of Reality, Berger and Luckmann spend 45 pages on the topic of “institutionalization,” so they had obviously gave the matter some thought.

They make the point that while man (The Social Construction of Reality, published in 1966, uses the gender-specific term), makes his world, he is given to losing sight of this and projecting (or “reifying”) aspects of the social world so that they are perceived as entirely external and beyond his control. They write:

“Man’s self-production is always, and of necessity, a social enterprise. Men together produce a human environment, with the totality of its socio-cultural and psychological formations” (51).

Human culture, then, is invented. However, being prone to reification, people tend to:

“{apprehend} the products of human activity as if there were something else than human products–such as facts of nature, results of cosmic law, or manifestations of divine will. Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world {and experiencing it} as a strange facticity, {…} over which he has no control” (89).

When mis-apprehending social reality as something other than the product of his own action and consciousness, man forgets that:

“the social world was made by men–and, therefore, can be remade by them,” but, ironically that,“reification is a modality of consciousness {…} Even when apprehending the world in reified terms, man continues to produce it” (89).

We can extrapolate the statement “even when apprehending the world in reified terms, man continues to produce it” to suggest that the perception of sedimented, externally controlled or created, facticity continually creates the very facticity in question. Put slightly differently, the denial of agency diminishes, even uncreates, free-will, while the exercise of free-will depends in large part, perhaps entirely, on the strength of one’s belief in it.

Now, this is not to argue that reification is simply false-consciousness, or that groupings within society do not go to considerable trouble to perpetuate and legitimate reification of their activities. Berger and Luckmann make this quite clear in their analysis of what they call “socially segregated subuniverses of meaning” such as “Hindu castes, the Chinese literary bureaucracy, or the priestly coteries of ancient Egypt” (85), (and we would add to this list lawyers, doctors, television pundits, university English departments, etc.). They write that subuniverses:

“become esoteric enclaves {…} to all but those who have been properly initiated into their mysteries {…} The outsiders have to be kept out {but} if the subuniverse requires various special privileges and recognitions from the larger society, there is the problem of keeping out the outsiders and at the same time having them acknowledge the legitimacy of this procedure. This is done through various techniques of intimidation {…} mystification and, generally, the manipulation of prestige symbols” (87).

“And generally the manipulation of prestige symbols” indeed. Those who engage, consciously or unconsciously, in the manipulation of prestige symbols are, in Berger and Luckmann’s language, involved in creating a “typification.” The acceptance of typifications, in turn, sediments social facticity and brings into being a taken-for-grantedness in the performance of social actors.

The authors indicate that while the typified actor may “act-into” a socially authorized way of acting in public, the same actor, in the privacy of their home, the confessional, or the bar may seek to establish a certain “role distance” through behaviors which blur, or indeed outright contradict, their public “face;” this distance is apt to shrink again when the times comes once again for the actor to take up their public role. In so doing, the actor re-activates that segment of the self which is objectified in terms of the currently available socially available typification(s).

When I started my first blog in 2009 I wrote at some length about why I wore a necktie at work, even though I didn’t really have to and some co-workers thought it was a little strange. My buddy Andrew Inch wrote an extensive, and highly perceptive comment on the topic which is instructive here. Mr. Inch, it will be apparent, is one smart dude. It’s kind of long, but it is worth it.

“Reflection on MT’s devotion to this apparently innocuous task, knotting a piece of cloth around his neck each morning, leads us towards what has become a key element of many recent theories of ideology. Derived from Pascal’s advice to non-believers, ‘kneel and pray, and then you will believe’, the French philosopher Louis Althusser sought to assert the materiality of ideas, and how ideology works through our actions as well as our words to define us as certain sorts of subjects. For Michel Foucault, one of Althusser’s students who sought to break with Marxism and the concept of ideology, the knotting of that neck-tie might have been considered a ‘practice of the self’, a way of disciplining oneself in line with a particular matrix of power and knowledge. The question that I think both of these thinkers struggle to address, however, is the extent to which we are able to shape our own selves, rather than simply being shaped by power. What scope do we have to resist the power embedded in these apparently mundane everyday motions? {…} By kneeling to pray, or standing in front of the mirror adjusting the knot, we perform belief and so take on socially available identities. And as for the rest of us in that office – what was the effect of not knotting the tie each morning? At times there were no doubt some who reveled in the non-conformity of that not knotting. In truth, however, did our alternative practices of the self not simply reproduce a slightly different, perhaps less respect-able but nonetheless conformist, relationship to the rules and rituals that regulated life in that particular setting? Was not wearing a necktie not just another kind of necktie after all?”

“In truth, however, did our alternative practices of the self not simply reproduce a slightly different, perhaps less respect-able but nonetheless conformist, relationship to the rules and rituals that regulated life in that particular setting?” This sentence is phenomenal, and predicated on a particularly alert and acute piece of self-knowledge. Mr. Inch is saying that those in the office who refused to put on a tie, or who flaunted the organizational dress code altogether, while thinking that they were “rebelling” and “sticking it to the man,” were in fact playing into a pre-determined archetype every bit as much as I was with my neckties and apparent “conformity.”

Mr. Inch is essentially making the same point that Berger and Luckmann do when they point out that roles and typifications are “endemic to social interaction {…} All institutionalized conduct involves roles.” And then, the authors bring matters home:

“The institution, with its assemblage of ‘programmed’ actions, is like the unwritten libretto of a drama. The realization of the drama depends upon the reiterated performance of its prescribed roles by living actors. The actors embody the roles and actualize the drama by representing it on the given stage. Neither drama nor institution exist empirically apart from this recurrent realization” (75).

In short, both Mr. Inch and Berger and Luckmann do not confine the acting out of prescribed roles, the submission to typification (e.g. “conformism”) to those in positions of authority within an institution. To the contrary, I read them both as saying that both the master and the servant, the “teacher’s pet” and the “bad boy,” the necktie wearer and the necktie shunner, the consummate insider and the professional rebel are all engaged in the recurrent realization of pre-typified activity.

Explication With Reference to Obama and Talleyrand:

Now, it is true that the above reading of Berger and Luckmann may leave the door open a purely cynical outlook by suggesting that all forms of behavior by institutionalized actors are equal. This is not quite what I wish to argue. Barack Obama has defined his political philosophy as “ruthless pragmatism.” While I understand this formulation, it does seem a little cold (as Obama is famously said to be) What if we added the word “principled” here? Could “principled ruthless pragmatism” sustain meaning without slipping irrevocably into the realm of the oxymoronic?

Let’s take a closer look in relation to organizational life as opposed to the political sphere. “Principled” because one’s initial agreement to engage with institutionalization (through the acceptance of a job offer for example) assumes a principled acceptance of the role one will be asked to play and the attendant tasks and behaviors that will be expected.

“Pragmatic” in that in order to accomplish anything in the social world, wherein competing interests, visions, and ideologies are, and ever will be, an unavoidable reality, one must be prepared to lose the battle in the service of, hopefully, winning the war. It has been my experience that the inability to lose a battle is a problem for many people in the modern workplace. Related to the ability to lose a battle is one’s attitude toward “compromise.” Is “compromise” a dirty word? It’s hard to say. On the one hand, the actor who blithely declares “there can be no compromise where my principles are concerned” may sooner or later find their principles encased under glass in their own private shrine to imagined rectitude. In other words, total denial of the possibility of compromise is tantamount to surrendering all hope of getting anything done. In the immortal words of William Jefferson Clinton, “sooner or later, you have to cut a deal.” On the other hand, there are a certain class of situations where certain compromises just do not feel acceptable, situations where one has what we could call an existential objection to the terms of the proposed compromise.

The question does not, I think, concern whether deals should be struck in general, they should, so much as whether any individual deals is in the long term interest of the project in question and the people involved with this project. This is where “ruthless” perhaps applies. At the very least, the pragmatist needs to accept in herself a degree of strategic focus where goals rooted in principle are concerned. We cannot deny, of course, that this is an easily misused sentiment—if we continually apply “pragmatic ruthlessness” to a project which we are deeply attached to there is the real danger of a concomitantly continual shifting of the moral goal-posts. In short, these are muddy waters.

Talleyrand, Napoleon’s foreign minister is, perhaps, most famous for his remark that “treason is a matter of dates.” Gives you the chills, does it not? Benjamin Schwarz writes of Talleyrand:

“Arguably a turncoat, possibly a degenerate {…} certainly a shameless flatterer and world-class bribe taker, Talleyrand was also the most skillful and farsighted diplomat of his age and a man of arresting grace, wit, and style {…} He was as seductive as he was obviously dangerous {…} Talleyrand subscribed to the idea that statecraft’s modest but arduous task is to enable one’s country to survive and prosper in the world as it exists–not to transform international relations and not to further the alleged cause of mankind” (The Atlantic, December 2007, 93-4).

A hero or a villain? Schwarz is not sure, but he is charmed. For my part, I see in Talleyrand perhaps an 18th century form of “principled ruthless pragmatism” where France’s survival and prosperity was the principle from which his ruthless pragmatism stemmed. While your own cause may or may not be the triumph of the French nation, the application of a ruthless pragmatism in the service of a deeper principle does hold a certain appeal. However, I just don’t personally feel that “ruthless” is really the most appealing qualifier for pragmatism in regards to acting within the public sphere.

Comment:

Instead, I am more interested in understanding how and when to “follow the rules” and surrender to form, as opposed to how and when to do a little end-run. To function effectively within an organization it is essential to realize the power inherent in form. At times, often times really, a “surrender to form” is required. However, instead of simply surrendering to form and that being that, we may be able to add a qualifier of our own. Certain situations may call for a “strategic surrender to form” for the moment, while at the same time “bracketing” or “pocketing” the possibility of the end-run. Here, perhaps, we may have a window into a pragmatic post-post-modern stance which takes post-modernism’s relentless questioning of form and turns it inside out, recognizing that the tyranny of form is something we bring upon ourselves by allowing form to tyrannize.

Put another way, we can expand slightly on Berger and Luckmann’s claim that “an apprehension of reification as a modality of consciousness is dependent upon at least relative derefication of consciousness, which is a comparatively late development in history and in any individual biography” (90). I would suggest that an apprehension of reification as a modality of consciousness is dependent upon at least relative dereification of consciousness which may then lead into the ability to either and/or alternately i) embrace reification and role typification as a strategy (that is to inhabit a form which brings with it certain prerogatives and forms of access), and ii) radically overthrow reification and typification through the recognition that the establishment of social facticity is but a spectacular bluff resting on the manipulation of prestige symbols and the shaman’s art whereby an illusory thinness is reflected as an eternal massivity. In so doing, we may be of service to truly worthwhile cause, protecting a space for action and free-will in the face of the ever-expanding institutionalization of both the public and the private sphere. That might be worth working on.

Dedication: For Mr. Inch. Thank you for commenting. You rock baby.

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On the Centrality of the No Helmet Law

Once upon a time I was in graduate school. I studied history, which was an error. I should have studied anthropology. It doesn’t matter–it was a long time ago. I was in my 20s, and there were quite a few older students in the department. These “adult” learners were invariably interesting, having backstories and life experiences far richer than my own. One of these older students was Gary.

Gary was probably in his mid-late 40s at the time I knew him and he was a biker. Black leather jacket, boots, the whole deal. Gary was a live and let live kind of character, not the sort to get too worked up about pretty much anything. Except one topic. Helmet laws. Gary hated helmet laws. Hated them to the core of his being. On this topic and this topic alone he would become immediately vitriolic. A biker’s right to ride without a helmet was, to Gary, the very essence of freedom. It was the whole point of being an American. Gary was up to speed on the state of helmet laws pending helmet legislation all over the country. This was in 1999, and George W. Bush was running for president. What did Gary think about Bush? Well, he’d say, when Bush was governor of Texas he didn’t support efforts to pass a helmet law. Therefore, he’s a good dude. That’s it, I would ask? That’s all you need to know? That’s all I need to know, he said. Gary was a true single issue voter.

I marveled at the clarity, the pointillistic precision, of his politics. Would life be better or worse if approached in this manner, I wondered. For the most part it seemed life would be immeasurably better. To know what matters and have that thing be so easy to quantify and discern must free one’s mind up in so many ways. The truth was I envied Gary’s outlook.

Later that year Gary’s brother, also a biker, died in a motorcycle accident on a New Mexico mountain. It was a sad day for the department and for Gary. His brother was a biker and a cop, and I happened to walk past the church where the funeral was being held. There were dudes in Hell’s Angels jackets and cops in dress uniform side by side. Gary came by the graduate student office a day or two later. Yeah, he said, a funeral like that is the only time you’ll see bikers and cops side by side. He talked about his brother and how much he loved his motorcycle. I offered my condolences, but then curiosity got the better of me, as per usual.

“Gary, I have to ask, was your brother wearing a helmet?”

“Of course not. He died like he lived, free.”

“Does the accident make you think any differently about helmet laws?”

“If anything, it makes me more opposed to them. The right to ride without a helmet is what makes a biker a biker. Without that, we have nothing. My brother would feel the same.”

So there you had it.

This was 20 years ago, and I still think about Gary and his views a lot. The Kinks tell us that it’s a mixed up muddled up shook up world except for Lola. Gary felt that is was a mixed up muddled up shook up world except helmet laws were the devil’s doing. My own life since meeting Gary has involved navigating one grey area, after another, after another. I still envy his moral clarity.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy “On the Phrase ‘I Got a Guy For That.'” Available below.

On the Phrase “I Got a Guy For That”

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Half Hours on Earth (A Poem)

Note: I wrote this poem in Auckland in 2009 however it is based on an encounter I had in Adelaide a few days prior. (There are a lot of mussels served in Auckland, incidentally.) The theme here is pretty obvious; it’s about an encounter, or, more precisely, an event, during which time compressed itself almost to a standstill. You have probably had this experience if you have been knocked of your bicycle by a car or something like that. When this happens over a half-hour, that’s a bit of a different guy.

This is one of my favorite poems that I have written. The title, and the repeating coda, are borrowed from the band The Silver Jews.

The quality of experience in half hours
is not uniform.
Some half hours are simply wasted;
in others, something occurs,
leads into something else.

“Half hours on earth/ what are they worth?/ I don’t know”

With the occasional half hour
something actually happens,
(in the Raymond Carver sense)
something that matters.
The air is charged, and thin;
butterflies roil one’s viscera;
and something is on the line.

“Half hours on earth/ what are they worth?”

These electric half hours
even if isolated in time
are frightening, or better
giddily upsetting, and dangerous.
They sear themselves into the memory,
rippling the fabric of the universe.

“Half hours on earth”

Dedication: For Molly. And for David Berman, RIP.

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On Kris Kristofferson’s “To Beat the Devil”

This piece takes a look at Kris Kristofferson’s “To Beat the Devil.” The song appears on Kristofferson’s self-titled debut album from 1970 on Monument, which is, by any standard, an astonishingly good record. The album features “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” and “Just the Other Side of Nowhere,” along with the ol’ Devil. That’s four absolute classics right there for ya.

Sunday Morning features an opening quatrain that most other songwriters would trade their career for:

Well I woke up Sunday morning/ with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt/ and the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad/ so I had one more for dessert

(I could play this game all day—Jason Isbell’s Southeastern features another couple life-work worthy couplets:

The first two lines of “Super 8”:

Don’t wanna die in a super 8 motel/ just because somebody’s evening didn’t go so well

And from “Different Days”:

Time went by and I left and I left again/ Jesus loves a sinner but the highway loves a sin.

If I’d written lines that great I’d call it a career and sip martinis on the house for the duration.)

Sunday Morning and Bobby are probably objectively better songs than To Beat the Devil, yet what I like about this one is that Kristofferson states very clearly a kind of founding intention for his life in song and art, right out of the gate. The only parallel I can think of is Craig Finn’s The Hold Steady, whose first album Almost Killed Me kicks off with “A Positive Jam.”

(Here’s Finn telling it like it is:

I got bored when I didn’t have a band/ so I started a band/ we’re gonna start it with a positive jam/ hold steady.

Rock on Craig baby.)

Anyway, let’s get to the focus of this piece. Kristofferson opens with a spoken intro.:

A couple of years back I come across a great and wasted friend of mine in the hallway of a recording studio. And while he was reciting some poetry to me that he had written, I saw that he was about a step away from dying, and I couldn’t help but wonder why. And the lines of this song occurred to me.

Here the singer is looking up at his idol who is both “great and wasted.” I wasn’t around quite yet in 1970, yet I can easily imagine Ginsberg’s “best minds” line hanging over talented folks across a lot of zones. Klosterman wasn’t quite there either (June 5, 1972–a mid Gemini of course), but he was close, and to indulge not for the last time in a little Klostermania, the zeitgeist seemed to be making people thirsty.

The singer receives some scraps of poetry, shards of shattered inspiration, and a song “occurs” to him. He doesn’t state it directly, however we imagine the song arrives fully formed, like “Pancho and Lefty,” or “Kubla Khan.” Thus, To Beat the Devil is also both an answer and an offer of redemption to his idol, who here is John(ny) Cash.

I’m happy to say he’s no longer wasted, and he’s got him a good woman. And I’d like to dedicate this to John and June, who helped showed me how to beat the devil.

The singer takes up the mantle of the master, and in so doing opens a possibility window onto redemption for his senior. This is no exaggeration—Cash also recorded To Beat the Devil in 1970 and we are basically stipulating that Kristofferson’s genius, descended from Cash while also original to himself, helped rescue Cash from addiction and the whole deal there. We won’t be deep diving into the archive on this one—as we said we’re just keeping it local and breaking it down, so you’ll have to take my word on it or search it up your own self.

Here’s the first verse; the words speak for themselves:

It was wintertime in Nashville/ down on Music City Row/ and I was looking for a place/ and to get myself out of the cold/ to warm the frozen feeling that was eating at my soul/ keep the chilly wind off my guitar

A classic down and out in the big city piece of scene-setting. The singer is physiologically and psychologically frozen, a cold wind gusts across his art. The man needs a break.

My thirsty wanted whiskey/ my hungry needed beans/ but it had been a month of paydays/ since I’d heard that eagle scream/ so with a stomach full of empty/ and a pocket full of dreams/ I left my pride and stepped inside a bar

You might think that the operative nouns here would be “thirst” and “hunger,” but no. This is not a man with a thirst; this is a thirsty man. We also hear an echo of a now-ancient American past where a man with an empty stomach would go in search of, of all things, “beans.”

Anyway, he’s got no money, can’t really bring himself to care. So, a singer walks into a bar.

Actually I’d guess you’d call it a tavern/ cigarette smoke to the ceiling
and sawdust on the floor/ friendly shadows/ I saw that there was just one old man sitting at the bar/ and in the mirror I could see him checking me and my guitar/ and he turned and said/ come up here, boy, and show us what you are/ I said I’m dry, and he bought me a beer

The man in the mirror, the devil himself. The singer comes face to face with the man who checks him out and summons him over. Kristofferson then enters into a bargain–offers up the terms of an encounter: a beer on the old man’s tab. Score one for the thirsty man. The singer faces the old man; it’s to be a showdown. He doesn’t have much, but he’s got some “friendly shadows,” traces of an older map perhaps, an older memory.

I can’t help here but engage in a bit of presumption. When I play the song in my head, I want to hear “in the mirror I saw him casing me and my guitar,” (listen to the way he pronounces “guitar” on the track. Kristofferson was born in Brownsville, Texas in ‘36 and behind the laid back folksinger you can here some roots here baby).

If I could make one edit to the song, it would be to replace “checking me,” with “casing me.” What a great verb “to case” is.

Lexical Interlude: “To case the joint”

1. slang To observe a place in order to familiarize oneself with its workings in preparation for some criminal activity (often robbery). Judging from the security footage, those men cased the joint hours before robbing it.

2. slang By extension, to thoroughly examine a place. In this usage, no devious motive is implied. As soon as my kids walking into the hotel room, they started casing the joint, exclaiming about everything from the TV to the mini-fridge.

The seminal use of this verb phrase comes from Bill Callahan, formerly of Smog. Callahan is an odd duck—he is so artificial, so obviously self-created as an entertainer, that he has become almost post-authentic.  Callahan contains multitudes.

My favorite Smog album, well in the top two, is Red Apple Falls, which features “Ex-Con,” on which Callahan sings: 

Jean jacket and tie/ feel like such a lie/ when I go to your house/ I feel like I’m/ casing the joint

Devious motive implied.

=====

He nodded at my guitar and said/ it’s a tough life, ain’t it?/ I just looked at him/ he said “you ain’t making any money, are you?“/ I said, you been reading my mail/ he just smiled and said, let me see that guitar/ I got something you ought to hear/ and then he laid it on me

The devil has a bead on the singer, and he’s not far off.  Yes he’s broke.  Yes he’s down and out.  Whaddaya want?

=====

Filmic Interlude I: The Long Goodbye

In Robert Altman The Long Goodbye, written by Leigh Brackett, the main character Philip Marlowe gets out of jail somewhere in the first act and heads to a all-purpose pit stop restaurant who’s owner apparently collects Marlowe’s mail. The dialogue is exquisite.

Marlowe: You got any messages for me?

Owner: Believe we’ve got a few over there. As a matter of fact, you’ll find my phone bill in there too.

Marlowe: I wouldn’t worry about that.

When you ain’t got nothing you got nothing to lose. Kristofferson’s got nothing to hide in his mail. Those bills go straight to the wastebasket.

=====

If you waste your time a talkin’ / to the people who don’t listen/ to the things that you are saying/ who do you thinks gonna hear?/ and if you should die explaining how/ the things that they complain about/ are things they could be changing/ who do you thinks gonna care?

there were other lonely singers/ in a world turned deaf and blind/ who were crucified for what they tried to show/ and their voices have been scattered by the swirling winds of time/ ‘cause the truth remains that no one wants to know

The devil’s words speak for themselves. The path of the troubadour is a dead end. The world has not ears to hear nor eyes to see. Truth tellers meet a bad end. Whiners gonna whine. It’s a strong opening bet, made, we presume, with his red right hand.

Well the old man was a stranger/ but I’d heard his song before/ back when failure had me locked out/ on the wrong side of the door/ when no one stood behind me/ but my shadow on the floor/ and lonesome was more than a state of mind

The singer is on familiar territory; he’s has been tempted by this cynical incantation, he’s not immune to tuning out his calling when out in the cold. Who is?

You see, the devil haunts a hungry man/ if you don’t want to join him/ you gotta beat him/ I ain’t saying I beat the devil/ but I drank his beer for nothing/ then I stole his song

This is the key verse in our little tale. You see, when we tango with the devil the devil usually gets to lead. That’s just the way it goes. But the thing about the devil is, his game is a bit of a bluff. A couple of low pairs, maybe. You just gotta call.

and you still can hear me singing/ to the people who don’t listen/ to the things that I am saying/ praying someone’s gonna hear/ and I guess I’ll die explaining how/ the things that they complain about/ are things they could be changing/ hoping someone’s gonna care

I was born a lonely singer/ and I’m bound to die the same/ but I’ve gotta feed the hunger in my soul/ and if I never have a nickel/ I won’t ever die ashamed/ ‘cause I don’t believe that no one wants to know

Kristoffeson flips it right around. The devil’s got a point; the singer may die dead broke, that’s fine. Songs are borne on the wind in any case. The thing is to have faith in your audience. To believe someone is out there, heart in their hands and ear to the wind. And to hold this faith as a mantra. That’ll keep ‘em guessing, cause then you’re not playing their game, you’re playing your own.

Overall, To Beat the Devil is a young man’s song. It’s got a confidence, a swagger, even a hubris. So, after drafting most of this piece I wanted to find a recent live version, see how it’s aged. I stumbled on a version from a live set with Lou Reed released in 2017. The set is part of The Bottom Line Archive, and it finds Kristofferson in a Waitsian stage of life. The voice is richer than ever, but he’s not exactly singing. Then again, that’s what they said about Dylan and it’s B.S. The voice is the voice; singing is just a category.

The set is interspersed with short interviews of the two songwriters. Here is Kristofferson’s spoken introduction that precedes To Beat the Devil. It is instructive.

Interviewer: The devil figures in some of your songs, you know there’s that silver tongued devil and he pops up from time to time. Who’s the devil? What’s the devil for you? What are your demons?

K.K.: Well, I, I’ll do that song then. Ahhh…

Interviewer: Is that a metaphor or is that something real for you?

K.K.: Well here’s a song called To Beat the Devil. Maybe it’ll explain it. I can’t.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Half Hours on Earth

Singapore, October 2018.

Over at @kyotokibbitzer on Periscope we like to “play the hits,” as any self-respecting radio station should. New content is, I promise, on the way soon, however in the meantime we are playing not so much the hits but rather the B-sides from my first blog Classical Sympathies. On Sympathies the longer pieces of linguistic anthropology got the most attention, followed probably by the pieces on the film My Dinner with Andre. There was some original poetry on the site as well, some of my own and some from talented contributors. It is, in my opinion, all worth looking back at.

Here is “Half Hours on Earth,” which I wrote in Auckland in 2009. There are a lot of mussels served in Auckland, incidentally.

The theme is pretty obvious; the poem is about an encounter, or, more precisely, an event, during which time, for me, compressed itself almost to a standstill. You have probably had this experience if you have been knocked of your bicycle by a car or something like that. When this happens over a half-hour, that’s a bit of a different guy.

Anyway, here is the poem, unchanged since it was written in 2009. I’ve always loved a good b-side. Hell, I even like the bad ones.

The quality of experience in half hours
is not uniform.
Some half hours are simply wasted
in others, something occurs
and leads into something else.
Other half hours pass quickly
they are maintenance,
but leave little residue.

Half hours on earth
what are they worth?
I don’t know.”

With the occasional half hour
something actually happens,
in the Raymond Carver sense,
something that matters.
The air is charged and thin,
butterflies roil one’s viscera
and something is on the line.

“Half hours on earth
what are they worth?”

These electric half hours
even those isolated in time
are frightening, or better
giddily upsetting, and dangerous.
They sear themselves into the memory
more–they ripple the fabric of the cosmos.

“Half hours on earth.”