THIS WEEK'S LOCAL SCANDAL

The infrastructure of the small towns of Montana -- the water, sewer, electrical, gas conduits that support our houses -- are about a hundred years old.  Every town employee knows about the emergency pipe breaks, the increased but unmet state standards, the public insistence that dust and potholes take a higher priority than the town wells.  To some engineering firms, this looked like a gold mine opportunity in a time of contractors‘ drought.  

Coming to Valier, they laid out their claim that the town was going to be in dire straits unless they contracted for some upgrades, among them a new water tower.  When eyebrows went up, they rolled out the usual big gun of modern business:  fear.  They produced charts to show that if there were a major fire in Valier (let’s say at the school, which is probably the biggest structure next to the grain elevator), the present water tower would be exhausted before the fire went out and all the children would burn.   And besides there were all these grants and programs and low-interest loans -- a little diligent paperwork and the whole thing would practically cost nothing at all.  What’s not to like?

Another force, an outsider named Tom moved to town.  He made his living selling sprinkler systems, but he sounded like a water engineer.  He questioned the wells, he questioned whether there were backflow valves to prevent the herbicides from the aerial spraying business at the airport from getting into the school water fountains.  (The county, their attention attracted by the commotion, discovered that county property was being used for free.  Poison is one thing -- free-loading is another!  The aerial spraying business had to move out of town.)  Tom crunched numbers constantly -- wringing them out of the town clerk.  He gave out lots of free advice.  Since we’ve had a new and more indulgent mayor, he has volunteered to approach the county commissioners to see whether they would plow the town roads.  (He doesn’t know that the county seat thinks it IS the county.)  Then he became the purchasing agent for the town’s new plowing tractor.  (No word on the amount of the customary broker’s fee.)

Before her election the mayor had been wandering along the idyllic lake next to the town and discovered that the little nesting island had been invaded by a vicious ATV killer who smashed every ground nest, mostly seagulls.  What she didn’t know was that the lake AND the island belong to the Pondera Canal company -- it’s part of their irrigation system.  So, full of indignation, she called the Audubon Society.  The feds got into it.  The Canal company said if that lake was going to be so much trouble, they’d just bulldoze it the next time they lowered the water level.  In the meantime people had figured out who the egg-breaker was.  In the end everyone sort of backed off.

The next major kafuffle came when the mayor was actually elected (no one else ran) but was faced with a Good Ol’ Boy council.  Another outsider had been preaching Union until the three-person work force (including the clerk) had decided they did indeed want to unionize and their spokesman came to defend the water master over the length of his yard grass.  Yard grass is very important in Valier and not unrelated to water. Etc.

That had about run its course when the council came to a regular meeting and were expected to approve a five-figure bill for street gravel that they had not known about in advance.  One of the council members was the local gravel man and he had NOT been asked to bid.  The mayor claimed it would be illegal for a member of the town council to sell the town anything.  She brought in an expert from a coalition of towns in Montana who agreed.  The council brought in a lawyer.  The mayor brought in the town lawyer.  The two lawyers were clearly embarrassed.  This is one of those matters that is best finessed.  Too much scrutiny can make a LOT of trouble and lose a lot of business all around, even for lawyers.

The council resigned except for one guy.  It was hard to find replacements.  The expert from the town coalition had explained that towns could not afford insurance, so they had formed a fund for self-insurance.  The kicker was that to be part of that pool, the towns had to agree to abide by the rules of the coalition.  Small, dusty, cash-strapped rural villages often get things done without too much attention to details.  For instance, the gravel man has the town’s underground pipe maze in his head, because he’s dug most of them up at one time or another.  Same with the water master.

By this time the clerk was finding that all these “free” grants and loans required many hours of work to read, fill out, and deliver by deadlines.  And there were little details that had to be provided at the cost of the town.

All this time Tom kept up his barrage of advice and analysis.  Finally this week he got everyone’s attention.  He had read the state legal specifications for the erection of water towers that were stipulated in the late 1800’s.  The foundation of a watertower is pillars that rest deep in the ground on a massive block.  Each vertical pillar is about twelve feet long, under the ground, and each should have four specific diameter rebar rods through each of them, bottom to top.  He had photos that showed only TWO had been installed.  HALF.

This news was presented at a town meeting that had been rescheduled several times.  No council quorum was present.  Tom, the clerk, and I were the only non-council members.  “Don’t you dare blog about this,” they said.  I gave them a day or so.  It was a public meeting and it will go to our pockets.

The water tower construction was stopped because of weather anyway, but now it will be on hold indefinitely.  What went wrong with the inspection system that ought to have caught this?  Who certified that the work had been done properly?  It appears that the pillars will have to be dug up and done over, which Tom cheerfully informed us might probably cost something like $160,000.  Will that coalition insurance pick it up?  Do we really NEED a second water tower?  Where were the city workers while all this was going on?  They were supposed to keep thing monitored.  

Stay tuned.  Both mayors are female and both have had jobs where they oversaw contracts for construction compliance.  I look for a lot of social stress fractures.

What cheers me is that I talked to one of the Good Ol’ Boys (he was insulating the town hall -- paid for by an energy grant) who declared fervently how much he loves this town and his excellent record of service as a descendent of the previous long-term mayor.  Months ago when there was a public meeting about something or other (probably water) a man who had moved to Valier rather later asked for time to say how much he loved this town.  He had tears in his eyes.  

Then he left because he didn’t have time for the meeting.

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT -- EVEN DIABETICS

At last month’s Town Council meeting I raised everyone’s consciousness by yelling at the Mayor, who is a woman from Seattle used to corporate culture.  What happened was that she tried to soothe my ruffled feathers (I only have to look at her to puff up) by offering me a luxury chocolate truffle.  I said, “Thanks, no.  I have diabetes.”  

She said,  “Oh, but these are really expensive fine high-grade chocolate.”

I shouted,  “Are you deaf???  I have diabetes.”  

She hadn’t registered at all.  She’s a tiny, um, “slim” person.  In her experience the little social routine is one says “I’m on a diet,”  The other responds,  “Oh, surely just this once, a little wouldn’t hurt you!”  Games people play.  Luxury is important to her.  “Treating,” obligating, people is what works for her.  It’s a script.

I’m not on a script.  I’m saving my life.  And I’m in a town and next to a reservation where lives are being destroyed daily by the way they eat and treat.  I expect that processed foods, baked goods, sugar-saturated foods, empty foods, are beginning to rival the damage done by alcohol.  It took a long time for people to fight back against booze and I expect it will take even longer to change the context that creates diabetes.  In the meantime, I’m sure that people are still offering to buy a drunk a drink.

I begin to see how many levels are involved.  Today at Blood Sugar 101, the topic was the phenomenon that people take their insulin, as prescribed, at mealtime in order for the right dose of insulin to be there to deal with glucose.  But their blood sugar takes a nosedive, as though they hadn’t eaten, and then at some unpredictable moment an hour or several hours later, suddenly goes up but out of sync.  Evidently what’s happening is that the valve at the bottom of the stomach clenches, so the food doesn’t go into the small intestine where it passes through the walls into the blood stream.  Then finally it relaxes.  There’s a valve at the top of the stomach as well and it is not served well by food sitting in the stomach.  A loose valve at the top of the stomach lets acid-soaked contents all the way up into the throat and mouth where it dissolves your back teeth, upsetting your dentist.  GERD, they call it.

So that’s a mechanical problem.  Being constantly offered candy and baked goods as a matter of hospitality and social good will is another kind of problem.  The theories about what actually happens during the interaction of glucose and insulin, how nutrition gets into the cell and whether the cell is resisting the action of insulin is a biochemistry issue.  Then there are things to think about in terms of heredity or life-style.  Also, the human body was designed to be on the move all day and many of its systems -- even the pumping of blood -- is meant to interact with that.  People have saluted this principle to the extreme of putting treadmills under their standup desks and walking while they work.  (No word on whether they actually generated enough electricity to operate the computer or keep the light on.  At Heart Butte in the high tech classrooms the body temp of active kids was computed as energy.  If they were sedentary while watching a movie, the lights came on to compensate for the lack of human radiation.  Very inconvenient.)

All the pervasive contextual problems -- like food distribution systems, the ability of people to home-grow their food or find things to eat that are produced locally,  federal subsidies for all the wrong foods (do you think anyone in this village that depends on grain crops is going to fight them?), the genetics of grain -- all have to be changed gradually.  Poor people are fat because rich people are increasingly health-conscious so the surplus foods that sustain commodities and food banks are the things not eaten by the rich: cake mix, frozen cookie dough, prepared dry cereal, etc., high-salt processed cheese.  What IS locally good is the occasional donation of meat.  One woman, not an Indian, told me that she occasionally had to eat ONLY meat for a few days to keep her blood sugar down.  

While society either slowly reforms or implodes itself, one has to buck the tide a bit for the sake of personal survival.  I assume you have a computer or you wouldn’t be reading this, so at the end I’ve listed some of my sources of ideas.

The main thing to remember about diabetes on a personal level is that NO TWO PEOPLE ARE THE SAME.  Every individual has to investigate with the help of an accurate blood monitor, some careful record-keeping, and habits you can’t allow to be challenged if they work for you, but no hesitation about experimenting now and then when something sounds promising.  Diabetes II in particular seems to be metabolic failure of a whole interacting system, not just insulin which can be erosive as well.

At the most recent town council meeting, the FORMER mayor brought candy from the Parrot in Helena.  I love the Parrot.  Looking me in the eye, she told about how she went into the back kitchen to get freshly made hard candies.  She waved them around but did NOT offer me any.  This is an old Montana game people play:  testing, just testing.  Not QUITE punishing.  She IS diabetic, among other things.  I smiled.  It was a very exciting meeting.  I’ll tell you about it later.  They demanded silence -- but it was a public meeting and I’m only giving them a little slack.

Blood Sugar 101

This is the state of the art, gold-standard, believe-it-if-you-see-it-here, website.  Jenny is NOT conventional or mainstream and far more fussy and into detail than you probably need, but this is what I go by and it works for me.

http://mendosa.com/index.html

This guy produces a LOT of information and he seems to be pretty reliable, though he sometimes reminds me of the late beloved Jack LaLane in his level of enthusiasm and encouragement.

Fanatic Cook

If you respond to curiosity about food and a very broad interest in it, this is pretty absorbing.

Diabetes Mine

This one is okay but a little slick.  Don’t be captured by “products.”

Hyperlipid

It’s about fat (lipids) and the writer is a veterinarian.  Technical stuff.  You might need a medical dictionary, but I’m always fascinated.

Whole Health Source: Book Review: Dangerous Grains

Fats and glutens. Celiac.  A biochemist.

There are a ton of these websites out there.  Find your own “sweet spot.”  It’s time for me to fix supper:  a can of spinach with two eggs poached on top.  (Uh, the can is removed, obviously.)  A sprinkle of garlic salt.  You don’t have to be THIS ascetic!  But I do.  I did add a little parmesan cheese and butter.  I have not had eye damage (which is how I was diagnosed -- diabetic retinopathy) since I began to eat this way.

A THOUSAND FRAGRANCES !!

One of the hardest things to deal with in life is the difference between what you expect and what actually is there, whether we’re talking about marriage, weather or cooking.  If the mismatch is too drastic, the result can be fatal.  If it’s too subtle, it subtly disturbs things in a not-quite-perceptible way that can’t be addressed because it’s not known.

I was surprised to find this phenomenon showing up in one of my fav blogs, www.1000fragrances.blogspot.com where Octavian Coifan writes in a fabulously informed and elegant way about the creation of perfumes.  He says (edited):

After 5 years, almost 4500 articles on this blog and a number of readers that surprises me every morning, . . . I imagined that my articles would bring not just feedback, but more knowledge to me in an enthusiastic hope to clarify several things about some perfumes or theoretical aspects. Online or not, it proved to be a dream and the only really engaging conversation is that between me and the perfumes / raw materials. Every day, between 8 AM and 8 PM, I "speak" with a forest of blotters on my table (raw materials, accords, new perfumes, vintage creations, experiments) working on 3-4 projects at the same time, things I've never presented here. Last week I noticed the huge amount of formulae I worked and how improperly they are organized in my notebooks. In a similar situation, I hoped that several of my articles would engage a conversation maybe to help me to clarify some aspects of the 8th art or to bring some depth for a further investigation. But, contrary to what I've expected, the answers to my reflections cannot be found by a different person than me. . . . Web 2.0 changed everything adding a touch of "exhibitionism"  and sometimes the author became a merchandise. But I considered the things in a different way and, in this unscented web garden, I left the seeds for many things hoping to find them in bloom one day. . . . I hoped that one day somebody knowing more than me about something rare (let's say Mousse de Saxe because I worked on the formula) would find my post and would drop anonymously several words or a mail and the reader coming next year will find something richer in meaning. But this did not happen here and last month I changed my mind when I prepared several posts about this type of curiosities from the past and I did not publish the articles. 

One day, when I'll find the perfect place in Paris, I'll hold a fragrance salon, much similar to the artistic salons of the XXth century. It's better to speak about perfumes with blotters under the nose because conceptualization in fragrance is an exercise that very few people are able to do. It is not a work to do between 10 and 12 AM in a company because usually this type of artistic meetings happen when people have a desire to enlarge their horizon and not when they are paid to answer a brief. A blog is like a daily conference on a stadium. True things happen only in small circles unless it is a revolution. A salon in Paris with people I invite because I want to listen and inspire them for new aesthetic horizons is much more exciting and intriguing for me at this moment. We'll see what the future brings. 

The idea that perfumers reading online texts would bring some of their knowledge about old creations they know maybe better than I do is simply Utopian now. Virtual space is public space, often too much polluted by the idea of selling something. In the past 5 years I've learnt the most important lesson: if you want to learn the secrets of a great perfume (let's say Pour troubler by Guerlain) there is only one way: smell it for months because there is nobody in the world to help you with an answer, or those with answers are not usually on-line. . . .  

Maybe the real truth about perfumers today is that very few of them have the time to breathe. Their job is not housed in a dream building. Perfumers are responsible for the multi billion market today but they work in glass boxes. If you want the next Chanel 5 buy a castle for your team, a huge garden to breathe and a music salon for conversation. Without time, space and air there is no creation and our imagination cannot fly.

___________

He's talking about "slow perfume!"  Like slow food.  Slow love?

I was moved by the poignancy of the plea.  In the comments, some of his readers scolded him as selfish and others expressed great appreciation though they simply could not meet Coifan on his informed and complex level.  Myself and Aad (a poet friend in the Netherlands) swap Coifan’s remarks even though Aad has access to fine perfumes and I don’t.  In the past in big cities I’ve been the scourge of the perfume counter but I had no idea about many things.

One of the issues is another of those unexpected differences: European restrictions on substances considered irritating or allergenic have forced their omission from classic formulas.  Noses also change over time, but often a named perfume is truly not what it was, less . . . something not quite identifiable.  Of course, skin also changes its chemistry over time.  And ethnic tastes differ.

I’ve learned so much.  Machinery can identify the molecular structure of the ingredients of a perfume and their proportion, but that’s like saying geometry can identify the movements of a ballerina.  In order to create a perfume that stirs the emotions (which is the point, isn’t it?) there are questions of base, first impact, layering, dry-down, lingering development.  It is the choreography of the responses and interactions of the molecules over time that counts.  Flowers, woods, leathers, designed molecules, amber and many more substances that might be rather unpleasant alone are all part of the design.  Yesterday the subject was a perfume that suggested freshly baked bread.  Coifan can recognize the perfume’s creator, analyze the historical background, suggest what the geographical sources of the ingredients might be, and so on, like a great literary critic unfolding a fine and complex novel.

All this has nothing to do with movie stars or fancy bottles.  It is quite free for those who read blogs.  It’s about awareness in the world.  I expect it daily now and will be much disappointed if it ends.  It’s been years but I can still remember Guerlain’s “Spanish Geranium” or Estee Lauder’s “Aliage” well enough to figure out what Coifan says about them.  They are no longer on the market.  Ended.  The world is faster and more flat.

THE NEW EDITOR IS PROCRUSTES

Last week I got an email query -- usually it is the writers who query -- from a company that does publicity for authors.  They wanted to know if I would like to pay them to promote my books and they provided lots of creds about dealing with big name publicity outlets on TV and in print.  I asked them if they were prepared to take on an earlier task in the “business flow,” that of publicizing “Orpheus” to agents who would presumably then “sell” it to publishing houses.  In other words, I was asking if they would do what used to be the job of agents, who are now doing (for a percentage of the author’s “take”) what they used to do on salary as editors employed by publishing houses.  

Their answer was “good heavens, no!”  We never got to the part about what it would cost.  They wanted to simply plug into another part of the publishing that used to be done by a publisher.  The most recent “old” business model was:

Research the market to see what’s selling -- much of this through “in-house” reports by the regional salesmen who physically traveled to indie, chain, and academic bookstores to see what the clerks and buyers liked.  (I.e. the bookstore people, NOT editors, were the arbiters for what to write.)

Sort through the slush pile to see what might fit.

Contact the author to see how much they were prepared to force their manuscript into this pattern or “platform,” and also to see how attractive that person might be to an audience or at least on a website.

Edit the book.  (Name of the editor:  Procrustes.)

Print and store copies, estimating as closely as possible what sales might be like so that the number would be neither under or over.

Send out the info to the distributors who would transfer copies to their own warehouses, ready to ship to bookstores when the publicity hit.

Provide publicity:  tours, stories, interviews on the radio, websites.

If there are too many copies, either pulp them or sell them through used book stores -- possibly online -- who specialize in remainders.

At every step, the ordinary aspiring author these days is intended to participate by contributing money, effort, and contacts.  One is asked to provide a marketing plan along with the manuscript, name likely bookstores and local interviewers, accept a percentage of profit  (ALL possible costs are deducted) rather than an advance, actively promote the book (one Montana publisher said quite frankly he would not consider any manuscript the author was not prepared to push to his/her limits), and be available for online chats with book club members, maybe invite people into one’s home for tea or whatever.

This works pretty well for the “mommie writers,” who are writing to a demographic like themselves and quite prepared to be social in a regional sort of way, which works better where there is population density -- though the Internet can substitute for that to some degree.  The days of dumping out or delegating fan mail are over.  The assumption that writers will naturally live in Manhattan where the publishing houses are is no more valid than the assumption that all movie stars will live in Hollywood.  BUT the other regional assumptions -- that people will only read about people like themselves -- is alive and dominant.

So now a writer who wants to sell, who is prepared to accept the idea that “books” are a business, must do market research beforehand (the regional salesmen work by phone and internet now and skip small indie bookstores) and pay for or provide promotion afterwards.  What a lot of writers do is simply declare themselves a publisher, which means learning to format and edit (or contracting it to someone -- publishers used to have in-house people), set aside some storage for the physical books and a table for wrapping and shipping as orders come in, set up a calendar for likely promotion events (don’t overlook auctions, rodeos, swap meets, etc.), and contact the local celebrity and political mongers for interview time.  Maybe buy ads.  In short, design and execute a complex business model.

The big flaw in the pitch this promotion company made to me is that they are very likely to know little or less about the subject matter of my published book, “Bronze Inside and Out,” which is the problem the U of Calgary Press itself has.  The world of Western art is a bubble that operates mostly through major museums, historical societies, and auctions which have become social events.  Even the galleries work through these venues and management people move back and forth through them.  There are a small number of magazines and some websites, but they are set up to handle paintings with a few nods to sculpture and possibly paraphernalia, including guns.  An academic press is unlikely to have contacts in those places.  In addition, this press (at least) operates by securing grants for the cost of publishing.  They are nonprofit.  There is no reason to promote.

Now consider the change that ePublishing makes.  What is the business model?  No one knows.  No more wrestling with warehouses, UPS, or bookstore returns, but how does one maintain ownership of a manuscript?  What’s to keep anyone from downloading all the movie reviews from “prairiemary,” taking the pile (or a disc or a thumb) over to Kinkos to be printed and bound -- maybe fifty copies for friends and neighbors -- and zowie -- they’re “publishing.”  There’s no way to “fence the communion” which was an early Christian strategy for keeping unbelievers out.  (In the end they just gave up and included everyone.  Though the communion rail persists in some churches.)

But that’s the equivalent of a monk writing a copy of a Pauline letter for his monastery.  The Gutenberg Bible was made possible by movable type.  There’s still no one-format-fits-all software that can be read on every device.  Even worse, what must be formatted now includes images, movement, music and links that must be kept in sync.  So far one can’t even keep the font and spacing from being changed by devices, which is why some poets have gone to slashes to indicate line endings.  Format, as an element of the writing, limits distribution to whatever device will preserve it.  The kind of device (Kindle, Nook, iPad, iPhone) has not settled and doesn’t look as though it will for years yet.

The skill set for managing complex e-literature is formidable, demanding a new vocabulary at least, but -- more than that -- a whole new mental framework.  You have to “read” a lot of it before your brain adapts, the same as a print writer must first and foremost read a LOT of print.  Hey!  That’s a pretty good pitch for Orpheus!  And blogs.  And vlogs.  Rewire your brain!

AN EREMETICAL OLD LADY

Hard to believe that it’s thirty years since I left seminary in Chicago in order to serve four Montana fellowships.  That’s a long enough time to have lost my grip on some subjects, if I ever had any.  So I need to do a little catch-up on monasticism, a human impulse shaped by circumstances and institutions.  In the early Christian tradition, there are three kinds:  eremitic (the solitary ascetic hermit), the coenobitic (the dedicated community)  and the skete, which is a mid-way form with characteristics of both.  In societies ranging from New Guinea tribes, where old men create “booths” in the jungle where they can be alone, to the urban artists and poets who occupy SRO hotels where they can concentrate on solitary work, this is a recurrent way of life, sometimes chosen and sometimes imposed or maybe both. 

Christians have worked out a good deal of history and much prescription about how such social phenomena should be run, especially when there is a political element.  There have been times when the communities were able to accumulate and protect considerable wealth, which then exposed them to raids and dispersal, sometimes by kings.  At other times they have sheltered civilization: writing, writing, writing.  Providing medical care.  Raising orphans.  Sheltering outliers.  Providing retreats.

In Asia an old person might simply walk the streets while carrying a begging bowl, at the mercy of the generosity of the people, to demonstrate absolute acceptance of the simple fact that everyone dies.  They escape the suspicions directed at European monasticism, which is always being examined for unworthy motives, like escaping prosecution or fomenting heresy.  I don’t know of any described monastic communities in the aboriginal tribes of the American continents, though there were no doubt priesthoods and ritual adepts.  No one has looked or written.   The elements of asceticism, discipline and virtue (hard to describe as it is) might be missing or hard to see.  Some hippie communes might qualify and others not.  Avoidance of sex is often an element, but not necessary.  It’s just that pairs are not usually the basic unit, whether or not they produce children.

Scientology says it has a monastic group called “Sea.org” which seems to me bogus verging on criminal.  It is a demonstration of how easy it is to twist something idealistic through power corruption.  At the other extreme are monastic groups that are ecumenical, stepping away from control by institutions, because an institution too easily becomes devoted to its own perpetuation regardless of the virtue of its goals.

Going back to the original three categories, my preference is eremetic.  (Tim’s is nearly coenobitic.)  And yet his nomadism has been connected to the eremetic wanderer while my staying-put is related to community, a double-community of the reservation and  Valier.  Mine is print-centered; his has been art-centered and -- more than that -- addressing healing and hospice.  The imagery in his vooks is often the hooded monk.  

We are united in what I take to be a forming new religious understanding (NOT an institution), welling up through science and nature to change the way we see the cosmos.  It can be quite terrifying, since it shrinks human beings down to a molecular recipe, rising out of the soup of creation and pre-consciousness into a temporary dance that predicts its own demise.  It motivates monasticism because it sees that all hoarding is futile and because the terror of the night demands some kind of shape.  Every flame must have a chalice.  Monasticism is a chalice. 

http://www.stpetersabbey.ca/  is the only Catholic monastery I know very well.  Intended to support homesteaders on the Saskatchewan prairie, it is an outreach from the Collegeville, Minnesota, Saint John’s Abbey.    http://www.saintjohnsabbey.org/  Those Benedictines came to Minnesota in 1856 from St. Vincent Abbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and, earlier, to Latrobe in 1846 from the Bavarian abbey of Metten in southeastern Germany.  http://wn.com/Metten_Abbey

I know Saint John’s Abbey mostly through their journal, “Worship,” which addresses theories of liturgy in a way I find useful.  They are a highly sophisticated and arts-friendly group, to say nothing of their bread and spirits tradition.

St. Peter’s also has publications: http://www.prairiemessenger.ca/Andrewbook.html  A quote:  “As life becomes harder and more threatening, it also becomes richer, because the fewer expectations we have, the more good things of life become unexpected gifts that we accept with gratitude.”  Etty Hillesum.  (Accompanied by a snow photo taken by David Strachan -- my maiden name -- who is not related to me.)  Andrew Murray Britz, OSB writes from the protection and support of his monastery in the same way that Tim and I try to do, though our content probably only overlaps a bit with his.   I’d bet that an objective reader would find quite a bit.

The internet has made possible a new kind of community in which people are present with their minds and hearts, their on-going conversation,  but never with their physical selves, which might be anywhere on the planet, any age, size, shape, gender, level of prosperity.  Far from scratching out copies with a quill, we are at keyboards and smart phones, flashing and linking images alongside our print.  Many are not religious, simply passing the time, having fun, turning a profit.  That’s okay.  They should go on their way.

When the Unitarians and I visited St. Peters’ in Muenster, Saskatchewan, we were aware that at least one woman lived in solitude in a small cabin.  We were instructed to leave her alone.  Also, it was impressed upon us that it is a great earned honor to live in religious solitude and that no one in the movement is allowed to live that way when they are young.  It is not to be a retreat, but a privileged devotion.  Not an evasion, but a dedication.  As a great sacrifice, this woman occasionally taught, which interrupted her prayers in a solitude that was not a confinement.

I find that my eremetic tendencies chose me rather than the other way around.  I’ve drifted into the ancient Christian worship pattern, even spontaneously rising at 3AM and 6AM.  The Baptist bells next door keep me reminded of 9AM-noon-3PM- 6PM, but they don’t ring at 9PM or midnight.  I am out-of-step with most of the culture, but I am not just religion-centered, constantly praying.  I’m not able to say to whom I would pray or to what end.

Rather I am spinning books into blogs.  Or winnowing.  No longer do I think of grand schemes of success.  It is enough to use my library (which will be dispersed on my death) and create my blogs (which will be orphaned on my death or disability).  How is that different from writing a best-seller that is forgotten in a decade?

THE COMMODIFICATION OF EVERYTHING

The commodification of everything continues to grow and spread.  Today I read about a new trend in Arizona.  Emergency responders and fire fighters are proposing that the people they rescue be billed for the cost of doing so.  Imagine someone you don’t know leaning through the smashed window of your car crash, trapping you inside, smelling leaking gas, your consciousness much compromised -- and this guy asks you whether you can afford the Jaws of Life.  Maybe he reaches into your clothing to check for your bank book.

I ran this past Paul, who has done his share of emergency response.  He said:  “I can understand the issue with the fire department needing to get paid. What most folks don't realize is that 75% of this country (in terms of space, not people) is served by volunteer fire and EMS services, and frequently, they are set up as voluntary subscription services, not supported by tax dollars. Folks that subscribe and pay their annual fees to that particular service get served, others that haven't paid either don't get served, or have to make payment arrangements. I sell fire and rescue equipment to all our county volunteer units at cost, so I know exactly how much all that junk costs and it ain't cheap. Somebody's got to pay for all that stuff. 

“Two of my kids are firemen now, and they'll donate hundreds of hours every year for training and responding to calls. They don't get a dime for their time, nor all the gas they burn. Half the time if there's no handed down turnout gear, they're forced to buy their own. On top of that, they're all the time setting up fundraisers and baking cookies trying to make ends meet. Folks get all upset when they see those shiny trucks with all the lights and sirens, thinking their tax dollars are paying for it, but that's often not the case at all. Even when you try to explain it to them, they still seem to think the volunteers are the ones that should dig deep in their pockets to fund equipment purchases, and fuel and buildings to house it all.

“I subscribe to two separate departments, each about 15 hilly miles away. There's no way in the world that they'd ever be able to save a structure here, but they might be able to keep the fire contained to private property, and not spreading to USFS land that I would be responsible for paying damages on. Pretty cheap insurance if you ask me.”

Part of this is a rural/urban split.  The problem in a city is a growing population of indigent people living in perilous conditions while the tax base withdraws outside the city limits to houses that are regularly safety checked and maintained.  This split and other budget shortfalls are so troublesome now that some people are predicting that the cities will begin to implode in this decade, sending Somalia-style lines of refugees to the small towns of rural America, searching desperately for food.  

We are now to the point of troika economics.  Many are the stories of Russian troikas racing through the snow ahead of wolf packs, only able to escape by throwing someone out the back to lighten the load and keep the wolves busy for a little while.  (Cartooners: should the wolf be labeled “banks” or “debt” or “forecloser”?)  

A troika is a kind of Russian sled that is pulled by a team of three horses, evenly hitched to the sled, rather than two-behind-and-one-ahead.  What I’m after in this image is the dire hardship of a Russian winter (not that different from a Montana winter, especially this one) and the conceptual echo of triage.  Triage is the practice, esp. in war or after a disaster, of separating victims into three groups: one that will be all right anyway, one that needs care to survive, and one that is simply hopeless or already dead.  At this moment governments at every level across the county are struggling with budget triage.

It has become clear that we are willing to throw out the old, the ill, the disabled, the children, the unemployed -- hey, all that stuff costs a lot!  We exploit them for money first.  But that has its advantages to them. Anyone who thinks a drug subsidy is for the benefit of the old and ill is not paying attention.  It is the big pharma companies who rake in the profits from subsidized drugs.  If the only people who buy them are those who can afford them, the sheer quantity will drop abruptly.  Of course, the other dark side of the selling is that big pharma has every motivation to keep prices high, the consumers hardly care so long as they can get what they need, and there is little reason to find cures so that the drugs become unnecessary.  The terms of housing foreclosure are presented in terms of loss to deserving families, but the real “victims” are the developers and financiers.  Those are the people sending lobbyists to Congress.  

Morality/ethics is crucial to the acceptance of triage.  If those who are thrown out are labeled drug addicts, criminals, sexually unconventional, “other” as in foreign, or possibly “useless” or offensive artists, then we don’t feel so badly about doing it.  Those who don’t want their friends and children thrown out must then get busy trying to defend them from abandonment.  Still, drunk drivers should have to pay for their crimes and what’s more effective than leaving them in the wreckage unless they can buy their way out?

But the world is not like a troika.  Many of those people excluded from the ride survive somehow -- maybe by killing and eating a wolf -- and they begin to deeply resent troika drivers.  Let’s kill and eat a horse.  They start walking, just like those apocalyptic movies.

We’re all on the same planet.  In spite of people constantly trying to arrange things so that they don’t have to put out the effort of fighting fires or attending governance meetings, which is the essence of democracy, we all have to take the consequences of decisions made by people who get tired of having to organize bake sales to improve the schools.  Or the manipulation of corporations raiding our pockets while assuring us that it’s for our own good.  If we’re trapped in wreckage, we don’t have much leverage.  Of course, that’s very good for the insurance industry. 

THE REAL "PORTLANDIA"

Sometimes I pick out a topic and fiddle with it for days and other times, the topic more or less spears me with a frog gigger and there I am.  From the photo you can guess what got me this time.  (There’s usually a little cluster of Japanese tourists within trident range.  You can tell they’re Japanese by the cameras.)

According to NPR (wouldn't you know?), a new program on TV is about Portland, Oregon, where I was born and which I have escaped.  (At least I haven’t been back since 1999 when I drove an 18-foot UHaul out of town at 3AM when there was only light traffic on the Banfield.)  It is a comic “sketch” program, little bits of friendly mockery of a small community of persons of a certain age.  Not my community and not my age.  There have been other movies and series made in Portland because cast and crew of a certain kind and age want to live there.  They are from other places.

Recently I sent an article about Cinematheque/The Studio to the editors of an eJournal that shall remain nameless but that purported to believe in very high-minded social theory supporting social action to defend the vulnerable and atypical people of the world.  In eConversation one editor confided that she lived across the river in Washington state and commuted at great inconvenience because she was afraid to live in NE Portland, the only part of the city where she could afford the rent.  That’s where I grew up.  You don’t have to tell me NE is dangerous.  It’s also black.  Henry Kaiser imported a lot of people from the south to build ships during WWII (when I was born) and housed them by the river which later broke the unmaintained levees and destroyed the housing and cars but luckily not the people who walked to NE Portland with all their possessions in their arms, looking for low rents.

One of the anchors of reality is history.  These slacker immigrants are not big on history.  They haunt bookstores but spend their money at the coffee shops next door.  The coffee shops do not hire blacks: they prefer Easterners with piercing, maybe some tasteful tattoos.  The levees are still not properly maintained but political interference has allowed housing to be built in that flood plain.  They are nicer houses than Henry Kaiser’s.

The black gangs and the hispanic drug trade (my homeward bus was caught in a cocaine drug bust once -- very tiresome) are not the only danger.  Through the Nineties when I was working in the Portlandia building as a clerical specialist (secretary) we had training for how to survive an earthquake.  Get under your steel desk -- but then they took the steel desks away.  For a while we all kept water and crackers under there, but gradually -- when no earthquake came -- they were consumed.  They said there was not much prospect of survival anyway -- the building was constructed like the World Trade Towers, which meant that under stress it would “pancake.”

In the end the idealistic journal decided not to publish our article.  They wanted to know more about the Blackfeet.  Would I introduce them to a real true old-time medicine man?  Oh, the shivery romance of it all.

This Portlandia building presents a lovely facade with Portlandia herself brandishing her frog gig.  The sculptor is Raymond Kaskey, who insisted that the building had to include a mezzanine gallery about him and the statue.  He forbids any photos, but he was not there at the time I took these.  

The building itself is by Michael Graves who complained that he was given a very limited budget but Portland wanted a remarkable showcase -- and on an expensively slanting piece of land.  His solution was that of the wedding cake: a standard warehouse/office building with a lot of festoons and decorations.  The windows are small, few, and sealed.  The ventilation was adequate only for a few months until the inhabitants began to increase, to partition, to add machinery.  The head of the Inspection Section of the Bureau of Buildings became so allergic to the air (fungus, bacteria, strange substances) that he had to work in an enclosed office with an air purifier.  Finally the Bureau of Buildings raised enough uproar that it was moved to a different building.  The rule for successful bureaucracies is never to get rid of the cause of the complaint -- too expensive -- just get rid of the complainer.

Every place is a lot of small places pushed close together, overlapping, layered, some only perceptible to specific people.  What all these people who “love” Portland know is where they go.  When I was an animal control officer there in the Seventies, I went everywhere -- places I had had no idea existed.  The Hmung enclave, the “trannie” community, homes of the rich and famous, drug crash pads and motorcycle gang hangouts.  A uniform and badge were a big help in some places, a hazard in others.  A few years ago a woman on an enviro listserv boasted about helping to create pocket parks in NE Portland, sweet little bowers where one could sit on a bench along with one’s choice of companion.  Because there was lots of cover and a little separation from the houses, they became fav places for rapists and muggers to drag their victims.  

The “nice” people often translate to the “naive” people and those are the people who often dominate the bureaucracies.  But they get very indignant and accusing when one says they are out of it.  This is a sign that they are secretly terrified.

“Portlandia” is not addressing the real city of Portland, originally called “Stumptown” for its raw, mud-embedded reality.  This comedy sketch show is after the festoons:  the gay mayor, Starbucks, the Hawthorne district with its leftwing super-liberal preoccupations and quaint little import shops, its hippies and extinct volcano -- or NW 23rd with its more upscale version of the same thing.  I used to be the theatre reviewer for The Portland Scribe, an alernative  co-op weekly paper produced by people who walked in off the streets.  It was on Hawthorne.  In the Fifties on NW 23rd I took ballet lessons from Mr Oumansky not far from where Gus Van Sant’s office is now and not far from the abortion clinic where I took my granddaughter because no one else would.

Some of the people who live in “Portlandia” (not Portland) think Missoula is a suburb and move there to join the Montana lit coterie.  The more dangerous naive "nice" ones move to Valier and play Sim City.  Let’s hope this nice little comedy sketch show entices them into reversing the flow.  We happen to be real in Valier.  A different genre.

YUP'IK "SWAN LAKE"

A swan on the northern prairie is quite a different thing from the tame swans in the park.  They are the earliest of the big migratory birds who come through in the spring and fly in smaller groups, but they have the same magical quality of being able to rise into the sky, becoming more enchanted as their wings take them among the clouds.  Not all of them make noise (“mute” swans) but those who do (“trumpeter” and “whooper”) are impressive.

I’ve captured wild swans (it was a legal hunting season and we wounded one) and I’ve eaten them.  They are fiery, substantial and determined.  Held in the arms, they are about the size and weight of human babies.  I’ve never seen one in the Blackfeet sacred bundles that often include other waterfowl.  I say all this to anchor a poetic and artistic concept in a reality of circumpolar culture, which is a white (snow), powerful, elusive and very beautiful wild bird.  At some point in the Miocene, one branch of the family ended up in Australia where it evolved separately to a black (charred -- Australia is a fire-driven continent) bird that holds its neck in a curve instead of the straight-up way of the northern birds.  In the 18th and 19th centuries when curious ships prowled the world, black swans were brought back to England and gifted to the Queen.  Swans became associated with royalty and the novelty of a black swan paired with white swans was an aesthetic conceit of great charm.

Ballet developed out of European court dancing and depended on the elongation and leaping of dancers, so swans as subject matter was quite natural, especially the long lines of the corps de ballet who sometimes seemed to fly and other times had the choppy gait of waterfowl on land.  In the usual Manichean fascination with good/white versus bad/black and with finding “wild” princesses (African or Native American), the plot line pursued elusiveness and evil.

After all this, the phrase “black swan” as simply an unexpected anomaly that is the title of a popular book about economics, which has no relationship whatsoever.  But in an equally strange anomaly, a poetic explorer’s discovery was mixed with a recent ballet movie, “Black Swan,” so that all those people out there who never really pay attention, merely knew that there was something important about the idea and so “flocked” to the movie.  There they found that historical court dance culture had evolved radically into the celebrity obsessed Manhattan world where torture, madness and love (or sex) mix in our psychologically driven horror film style.  So far away from the serene image of the floating swan.  Not so far away from a wounded wild swan counter-attacking an attacker.

On YouTube there is a startling cultural conflation of the traditional “Swan Lake” with Chinese gymnastics that has the ballerina en pointe on top of her male partner’s head !  It’s even beyond Pilobolus!  Some find it a descration, but I’m always intrigued by cultural synthesis in both arts and religion, because it is so often a kind of access to dreams and assumptions.

Now Mike Dunham of the Anchorage Daily News (mdunham@adn.com)  tells us about a new development, a version of “Swan Lake” called “Qug’yuq” (Yup’ik for swan) that picks up on the “shape-shifting” tradition that is world-wide: seals who become lovers at the seaside, elusive women who become horses on the prairie, destroying men who turn to grizzly bears.  Always everywhere, coyote slipping in and out of tricksy roles.  The enchantment of desire with the extra aphrodisiac of voodoo evil.

This version of the story does not depend upon the Jekyll/Hyde of white swan/black swan, but turns to a trickster figure far better known in the arctic:  Raven, who wants the Swan for himself.  The music is augmented with Yup’ik drumming and singing, the dance with traditional Yup’ik steps, esp. in a village scene, and familiar old Tchaikovsky is nudged over for bits of Mahler.  This is HIGHLY sophisticated and eclectic.

But “Swan Lake” has always been that, a skeleton so strong that it can endure any abuse.  Dunham notes that Tchiakovsky’s brother rewrote the ballet to create a happy ending.  “There have been animated film versions . . . Cheery ‘Swan Lakes.’  Obsessively morbid ‘Swan Lakes.’ ‘Swan Lakes’ set in a Victorian insane asylum.  Matthew Bourne’s stupendously successful all-male ‘Swan Lake.’”

To think of the story in a pendantic, academic way, one could refer to what Dunham found: “a folk story written down by Johann Karl August Musaus around 1780.”  Collected in much the same spirit as capturing a black swan to give the Queen, I expect.  Even more interesting is Musaus’ own story in Jena, Germany.  He evidently liked to write satire and had intended to become a preacher, but in those Protestant repressive times he was disqualified because he had been a dancer.  Perhaps ‘Swan Lake” is not so much the innocent story about birds and princes as we think it is, so irreproachably upscale and suitable for children.  Maybe “Black Swan” returns the dynamics to something like its roots.  A satire.

In the Yup’ik version presented by the Alaska Dance Theatre in collaboration with the Eugene, Oregon, Ballet Company, both the Raven (Tulukarusk) and the male lover (Ciuqnaq), are entranced by the beautiful woman, who is made into a Trumpeter Swan by Raven.  What happens from there is not disclosed.  

Both the producers and the performers are mixed between Yup’ik and Oregon dance world figures.  Codie Costello is executive director of Alaska Dance Theatre; Gillmer Duran is Alaska Dance Theatre’s resident choreographer; Ossie Kairaiuak leads the Heritage Center’s drummers and dancers.

I’ll make these principles plain:  all culture, art and religion is syncretistic because it is a mimesis of something real, transformed by the traditions and experience of people in a way that has meaning to them, and then possibly RE-transformed by a culture or reality previously unknown but now meaningful.  The success of this is determined by the validity of the inner structure and the skill with which the new mimesis is managed.

If I were a choreographer first inventing a dance about swans, I would be divided about whether the arms should imitate the long necks of the birds or the extended and pulsing wings.  I would want the wings to be as much weapons (they can bruise you -- I know) as flight.  But my biggest problem is that I see black and white as thoroughly mixed.  I would have to invent gray swans.  Of course, the babies ARE gray.  So here we are, arrived at the Ugly Duckling who turned out to be a swan.

NO CHOICE BUT TO WRITE

and then there are some of us/ be sure to put this properly in your proper query to your proper editor-slash-agent; they’re all suits/ who do this shit/ who write this stuff/ who put it together/ who paint it/ scream it/ perform it/ i would say teach it but i am not sure it fits here, teaching/ teaching is not doing it’s teaching/ it’s not the risk this is/ this is you’re putting it out there and you’re standing behind the thing because you believe in it/ usually with your hand out/ i have known famous poets who lived in one room sro hotels/ who had no idea where their next meal was coming from/ who stared fate in the eye and dared it/ smokin’/ and then there are some of us who do this because there is no other choice/ at all/

Tim Barrus

http://after-the-last-collapse.tumblr.com/

The media (movies and books) have so convinced the general public that writing is a kind of talent like embroidery or piano playing except that now and then there is a genius who in agony brings forth masterpieces.  No mother wants that for her child, but every mother would like a child who writes some nice poetry or a little story for an upscale market.  This mythology dominates, even as everyone mocks grammar and rails against the sedentary life.

The invention of movable type brought forth raving Bible thumpers who could read the Book for themselves, esp. their fav parts, as well as novelists who did scandalous things and pretended they were only stories.  (What a hoax!)  Two kinds of publishers evolved: those who saw that a book is a product that can be managed and sold as such and those who were idealists who saw a book as a carrier of important and beautiful ideas.  The first kind of publisher has by now nearly crushed the second kind.  Even academia is no refuge.  Now authors speak on TED or The Edge, so we can see who they are.  Respectable?  Presentable?  Did he look suicidal to you?  The first kind of publisher sees the advertising possibilities:  “building a platform” they say.  The second kind of publisher is acquiring velocity, hurtling through the pelting rainstorm of new data, new theories, new paradigms, but nearly blinded -- operating on faith.

There’s a certain kind of writer who has not changed, though maybe before literacy was widespread he or she played a lute or a drum and sang or chanted the words.  Danced.  It’s a kind of visionary madness, a shifting of the brain that makes words into drugs, story into hypnotism, and yet there is a clarity to it -- even a usefulness.  Scholars veer off from direct experience, but study it all afterwards.  Once in a while there is a time and place Dionysian enough to celebrate it, offer it an ecstatic home.

This is what Tim is talking about above.  People wonder why more Native Americans don’t write.  The ones who write this way are generally killed early, because there is enormous vulnerability.  The ones who are tough, even callous, don’t write like this.  Maybe something like the same with women.  Who are the great United States mystics?  Brautigan?  Dead.  The black ones go to jazz.  Miles Davis?

This kind of writing can’t be taught but it can be learned.  It is a matter of brain management, identity ransacking, censoring only for dishonesty rather than for propriety.  It takes time and the agony sometimes begs chemical amelioration, so this sort of writer doesn’t generally manage a day job.  If you go to the library looking for this kind of writer, tell the librarian you want poetes maudit.  War creates them, so they tend to be French or maybe South American.  There are probably more, but we lack translators.

I do not QUITE write like this.  My morning blog is five-finger exercises so I could if my heart went into a wringer.  Maybe if I weren’t such a stick-in-the-mud straight-arrow -- that seems to be my true nature.  Yet Tim breaks through to me.  My fingers grow strong.

I don’t KNOW Gide and Burroughs or even Ginsberg or Kerouac.  I don’t read them.  So I can’t approach Tim as a scholar.  My efforts to read up on sado-masochism made him laugh his butt off, though I thought it did help understand his books.  No one understands sm except sm people and they like it that way, but there are little signals so they can recognize each other.

WHAT IS IT?  What makes Tim write like that and me (and others) appreciate it and want to reach out to him?  It’s not his careful grammar or dazzling vocabulary, his revelations about misery (misery is tedious), his willingness to go into risky territory.  It’s not even the waving veils of video, the cascading dance of images.  I’m a lousy agent and don’t see the commercial value.

It’s feeling, poetry.  He’s so human, this former whore who innocently signs his emails “hugs,” or -- in a grateful mood -- “I love you madly.”   (Does anyone want to be loved madly?  Be honest.  OF COURSE.)  He is a flayed man of ceramic hips, steel shoulders, blown veins and a nervous system so ablaze that electroshock torture would be redundant.

Does he lie in bed suffering and weeping?  No, he seizes the night to post images and poetry with lines separated by backslashes so the internet won’t make hash of the line endings.  Nearly five hundred posts to “After the Last Collapse” right now, each with its image, and yet there are others that I remember vividly from years ago that aren’t here -- must be lost.  

They say that the virus is in his brain cells now and the meds are molecularly related to LSD or the ergot that made Puritan girls go mad.  It seems to clarify the poems, untangle them a bit, slow down the tarantella.  I stay up late in the Montana winter cold, thinking “oh, this might be the last,” and get up in the snow-blue morning to find on my screen that Tim is working on a new poem, having made coffee, walked the dogs, roused the boys, done his medical rounds among them.  I marvel.  I take notes.  I write my blog.  I fail to shovel the walk.  I play opera very loud.