Thanks: For The Giving, For The Taking, For It All

My friend Tom Smith died last Thursday.  I think I might have mentioned him in an older post; he was my advisor at The University of Hartford, and we formed a friendship that lasted until dementia robbed him of his life, long before his body actually gave in.  The last time I saw him I was really moved to think of what a life is, what of what we do is of value and of how, as Annie Dillard so memorably put it in her essay "Living Like Weasels," "death (is) where you're going, no matter how you live...."

Tom was maybe the most passionate and enthusiastic man I've known:  in front of a class, even just in conversation, when he was driving a point home he'd sometimes do it leaning forward, through clenched teeth, as if he needed to try to find some way to hold in check all that he was feeling, all that he believed about what he was talking about, as though otherwise the torrent of emotion that underlay it, if loosed, might physically harm the listener.  And it might've, for all I know.

A Medieval and Renaissance scholar, Tom loved the great Norse Sagas, and Beowulf--all the blood and guts and man being pushed to the edge of human capability.  He loved Andrew Marvell, Don DeLillo, and The Rolling Stones.  And every May 1, he would read to his classes James Dickey's amazing, 11 page essentially prose-poem called "May Day Sermon To The Women Of Gilmer County, Georgia, By A Woman Preacher Leaving The Baptist Church,"  an apocalyptic vision of sex and incest and beasts and Bibles and chains and whips and assorted cruelties and indignities routinely inflicted upon women and, not least, a ghostly flying one-eyed motorcyclist savior; Tom would finish reading this stunning, terrifying skein of word and image tumbling over, around and through itself, look up, and dismiss the class with a cheery "go out and enjoy this lovely spring day."  Any of you with a poetic bent who choose to find this piece and read it all the way through need just try to imagine a sunny room filled with rosy-cheeked innocents sitting and listening to this.  It was wild.  Rest well, my friend, and good luck to a universe that has to keep that soul contained.

And I know, last week I said that this week would bring Arlo and "home" stuff; but life can change things.  Arlo's still here, but rather than home I went with "hunger," just to remind the great majority of us of all that we have to be thankful for, and that there are many who can't share our joy without some help.  And not just on one or two days, but every day.

So, the songs, with lots of Stones stuff in the mix:

Caravan                                                                                    Van Morrison
Alice's Restaurant Massacree                                                   Arlo Guthrie
Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again       Dylan
Beast Of Burden                                                                           S
Dead Flowers                                                                                T
Gimme Shelter                                                                               O
Imagination                                                                                   N
Jumpin' Jack Flash                                                                       E
Let It Bleed                                                                                 S
Paint It Black                                                                                .

Hunger                                                                                    Darden Smith
Hunger And Thirst                                                                 The River Singers
Awful Hungry Hash House                                                     Loudon Wainwright III
The City Is Hungry                                                                 Bruce Cockburn
Every Hungry Woman                                                            Allman Bros.
Gettin' Hungry                                                                        Beach Boys
Hungry                                                                                    Clapton
Hungry Country Girl                                                              James Cotton
Hungry Flower                                                                        Los Picadors
Hungry For Your Love                                                           Van
Hungry Man                                                                            Steve Winwood
Hungry Planet                                                                         The Byrds
Mama's Hungry Eyes                                                              Emmylou Harris
Dem Belly Full (But We Hungry)                                           Bob Marley & The Wailers

'Case you're wondering: "Caravan" because every once in a while I like to play the whole song, not just 30 seconds, and this version is from The Last Waltz, The Band's farewell concert on Thanksgiving night, 1976; and "Stuck Inside Of Mobile..."  because in the first class I took with Tom Smith he quoted a line from that song just as a throwaway part of something he was saying, which let me know he was someone to be reckoned with.

Love Everyone.  And oh, yeah--Happy Hanukkah (it's so early this year!)

Tragedy Is When It Directly Affects ME...

In the misfortunes of our best friends we find something not altogether displeasing to us.

Pretty cynical view, huh?  Surely casts human nature in a fairly damning light, and has since Francois de La Rochefoucauld put the thought to paper in the mid 1600s.  The Germans have a term for it:  Schadenfreude, which literally translates in English to "Harm-Joy."  And I'm gonna guess that most of us, if we really looked deeply and honestly inside ourselves, would have to acknowledge the existence of such feelings lurking there.

I wonder, though, if there's a term for the opposite; when witnessing or hearing about the misfortunes of others, isn't it also pretty much human  nature to say, or at least to think, "That's nothin'.  You think you've got it bad?  Lissen to this...."  Seems like we tend to play up our own misfortunes while pooh-poohing others' troubles as though our travails were a badge of honor, theirs a mere inconvenience:  my hangnail's way worse than your broken arm.

I started thinking about this last week when we hit a little glitch in the project I'm working on.  The house we're building was sited according to information provided by the seller, and it turned out that, rather than meeting all setbacks and being safely nestled on the lot, the house was actually half on the new owners' property, half off: exactly, neatly, diagonally bisected.  It surely caused some consternation and a flurry of communication between lawyers, but in the end was resolved in one day.  After the initial "holy shit"s and hand wringing, it was no biggie, really. Makes for a good story, though.  While it was happening, though, it was a flat-out crisis.

Bill Maher, host of HBO's Real Time With..., got himself into quite a lot of controversy this week by downplaying the Boston Marathon bombings and the whole "Boston Strong"  movement, as regards the Red Sox victory parade:  "It was a bad day; 3 people were killed,  many were maimed, and that's horrible, but your city didn't get leveled by Godzilla."  On the face of it, that's very cold, callous, even cruel;  on the other hand, all one need do is listen to any newscast or read any newspaper on any day and discover far worse tragedies happening somewhere on the globe, generally in the Middle East.  People are killed by the dozens every day by suicide- or car-bombers, in pitched battles, in drone strikes (oops), and we pay virtually no heed.  Shocking as Maher's statement is, it should at the very least provoke some thought, if not discussion, some reflection and perspective, rather than simply reflexive outrage. To the poor sod the tree falls on, it's tragic; for the rest of us, maybe not so much.  Perhaps that's how it has to be, and maybe we are all islands.

This week, songs of crisis, tragedy, catastrophe, trouble and fortune, to wit:

Crisis                                                                        Bob Marley & The Wailers
Crisis                                                                        Poncho Sanchez
The Pointless, Yet Poignant, Crisis Of A Co-Ed     Dar Williams
Tragic Magic                                                            NRBQ
Tragic Magic                                                            Traffic
Tragedy                                                                    Emmylou Harris
Tragedy In Waiting                                                  OAR
Perspective Changes                                                Tommy Flanagan
I Me Mine                                                                 Fabs
Catastrophe Rag                                                       Rory Block
Fortunate Fool                                                          Jack Johnson
Fortunate Son                                                           Bruce Hornsby
Fortunate Son                                                           Creedence
How Fortunate The Man With None                        John Martyn

There But For Fortune                                             Phil Ochs
Fortune                                                                     Carla Olsen and Mick Taylor
No More Trouble                                                     Bob Marley
Nobody Knows The Trouble I've Seen                    Grant Green
So Much Trouble In The World                               Bob Marley & The Wailers
Trouble                                                                     Bob Dylan
Trouble                                                                     The Jayhawks
Trouble                                                                     Robert Palmer
Trouble And Strife                                                   Bela Fleck & The Flecktones
Trouble, You Can't Fool Me                                    Ry Cooder
The Trouble With Normal                                       Bruce Cockburn
Trouble No More                                                     Allman Bros.
Trouble Blues                                                          Sam Cooke
Trouble In Mind                                                      Mose Allison
Trouble Soon Be Over                                             Geoff Muldaur

Next Week:  Home for the holidays--and Arlo, of course.

See you on the radio, Tuesdays from noon til two on wool.fm.          

With This Laurel, And Hearty Handshake...

That is, of course, a line from one of the five funniest movies ever made, Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles.  It's from the scene where the townspeople are preparing for the arrival of the new sheriff (unaware that he's a "Ni"), and the unctuous and officious mayor is rehearsing his welcoming speech, which contains that line.

Well, there's a new sheriff in New Hampshire poetry circles, too, who received a figurative laurel (in ancient Greece, the laurel was sacred to Apollo, god of, among other things, music and poetry; thus, the recipient of the crown became known as a laureate) and probably a hearty handshake, too, from Governor Maggie Hassan last week.  Alice B. Fogel was named Poet Laureate of the State of New Hampshire on Wednesday, in recognition of her body of written work as well as her efforts to promote poetry statewide for almost 30 years.

Poetry has become the redheaded stepchild (ironically, there is a magazine called Redheaded Stepchild, which publishes poems which have been rejected in other places) of the literary world, it seems to me.   There is actually a bi-monthly publication, a bible of sorts for all sorts of scribblers, called Poets & Writers.  I've always found that name amusing, slightly baffling, and, on behalf of poets (though none has asked me to weigh in on it), insulting in its implication, to me at least, that poets somehow aren't writers.

Mention poetry to 'most anyone and watch them subtly take a step back, shift their gaze, check their watch--unless the poem in question comes from the--as Gary Smith put it so amusingly-- "Nantucket Series,"  if you catch my meaning, if you get my drift.  'Cause we've all learned from bad and/or ignorant English teachers to fear the stuff.  It looks different from real writing, of course, and it's chock full of symbolism and references to Christ and who knows what-all else, and it never says what it really means.  What's it hiding, anyway?

Worlds of emotion, wonder and insight into the human condition, to name a few.  If you're among the poetry-phobic, help is available in the form of Strange Terrain, Alice's last book, which is basically a twelve-step program for those who might like to feel more comfortable with poems; it'll help you find your own way in to poems--and who knows, there might be some stuff of value in there.

I just referred to Strange Terrain as Alice's last book, but I guess that "most recently published book" would be more accurate.  It's been a pretty good couple of weeks for her, at least professionally, because she also found out that Interval:Poems Based On Bach's Goldberg Variations, a book she has been sending out for 11 years (!), was accepted for publication by Schaffner Press in Tucson, Arizona which has never published a book of poems before, but whose publisher dug what she was doing with language as a way to mirror what Bach had done musically in the Variations.  It probably doesn't need any more explanation than that, but I couldn't give it even if it did, as I know pretty much nothing about the Bach, and thus don't quite get Alice's poems in relation to it, much as I like the poems.

It may seem reflectively-aggrandizing to have written about this, although if ya can't be proud of a loved one's accomplishments on yer own blog, then what the hell?  These are fairly big things, though, and deserve to be celebrated.  It's also a chance to say a little something about poetry (you could also visit Alice's website, alicebfogel.com), of which noted New Jersey physician and poet William Carlos Williams once said, in "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,"

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

A celebration of Alice and poetry this week, then, on Tuesday from noon till two on wool.fm, with these songs and poems:

Poet                                                                                Cassandra Wilson
Poet                                                                                Sly & The Family Stone
Don't Pick A Fight With A Poet                                    Madeleine Peyroux
Death Of An Unpopular Poet                                        Jimmy Buffett
Maybe The Poet                                                             Bruce Cockburn
The Poet Game                                                              Greg Brown
Poetry                                                                            Victoria Williams
Poetry Man                                                                    Phoebe Snow
Queen Of The Slipstream                                              Van Morrison
Eight Line Poem                                                            David Bowie
Poem 58                                                                         Chicago Transit Authority
Poem For The People                                                    Chicago
A Poem On The Underground Wall                              Simon & Garfunkel

Poems, Prayers & Promises                                          John Denver
Symphonic Poem Danse Macabre                                Roland Hardtner
Country Poem                                                               Pat Metheny
Tone Poem For My Father                                            Mark Egan
Love And Some Verses                                                 Iron & Wine
Boxy Variations                                                             Uri Caine Ensemble
Disturbance                                                                   Alice B. Fogel
The Necessity                                                               Alice B. Fogel
Something Left Out In The Rain                                  Alice B. Fogel
Starting Small                                                               Alice B. Fogel
Elemental                                                                      Alice B. Fogel
Aria                                                                               Joseph Payne
Variatio I A 1 Clavier                                                    Joseph Payne
Variatio XIII A 2 Clavier                                              Joseph Payne
Variatio XXIX A Ovvero 2 Clavier                              Joseph Payne
Variatio XXX Quodlibet A 1 Clavier                           Joseph Payne
Rhymes                                                                         Donald Fagen
Variation 29                                                                   Dmitry Sitkovetsky
Variation 30                                                                   Dmitry Sitcovetsky

I don't mean anything by this, but I do want to point out that before she met me, Alice had published no books, won no NEA grants, never been a Poet Laureate--none of it.  I'm just sayin....

Lambs To Slaughter

Note the lack of the simile-creating "like" in the title:  I am being literal here.

When we lived in Lempster, NH,  we had a small flock of sheep.  Every fall I'd select out 4 or 5 ewes and have them bred (believe it or not, you can rent rams for this purpose--what a life!); in late February or early March, then, I'd be an ovine ob-gyn and assist as necessary in the birth of 8 or 10 lambs.  Come Fall, we'd sell a few, kill and freeze a few, and begin the process all over again.  I really liked the cyclical nature inherent there; I also made a little maple syrup then, and that along with the lambing made for a really nice, and organic, transition from winter into spring.

Since we moved to Acworth, it turns out I've gotten older, added more responsibilities, and haven't the same facilities as we did then.  Consequently, I buy my maple syrup (Acworth is the syrup capital of NH, after all) now, and I don't raise sheep "from scratch" anymore, but every spring I do buy two feeder lambs to raise for the freezer.

They're so cute when you get 'em, and the whole world is fresh and new:  the grass as green as it ever will be, wildflowers everywhere, everything seeming young, verdant, renewed, two little lambs gamboling about and, more importantly, fattening up. This year, the strangest thing happened: my friend Travis was helping me transport the new lambs from their moms and home (traumatic for all of us, isn't it?);  as we were unloading them from my truck into their new pasture, they were bleating pretty piteously.  Suddenly, a white-tailed deer doe appeared from the woods, ears erect, sniffing and blowing and bleating, also in apparent distress, evidently sure that those cries were coming from her own babies.  Had she left them in the woods nearby, and become confused?  Had hers already been killed and eaten by the coyotes that so freely roam our land?  Was she barren, with an overriding maternal instinct?  We'll obviously never know, but it was a fascinating tableau.  She paced the area for ten or fifteen minutes, then reluctantly left.

 Like all creatures, these annual lambs are born to die; unlike most, maybe, their deathday is pre-arranged and known in advance.  For this year's guys (and it's almost always guys, of course:  in the rest of the animal kingdom, females are the more important, so the expendable members are the ones with the extendable members), today was the day.  This morning, November 3, dawned cloudy, windy and cold--28 degrees, to be precise.  I started the tractor to warm it up--one hangs carcasses from a tractor bucket to aid in skinning and eviscerating in small-time operations like this--and sat on the porch to await the arrival of the Grim Reaper (I'll assist, but I'm not killing those things myself), he of the honed knives and skilled hands.  By that time, the sun had come out, and it was really quite pleasant to sit there in the rocker, watch the lambs--now 100-plus pounds of dirty, antagonistic (these are males in rut, remember) mattedly-bewooled balls of protein look for their morning serving of grain--and to think about the arc of a lifetime, however long, in whatever form.

Now, I imagine that, for many of you reading this, the whole idea must seem at least slightly barbaric, but it is nature; as Tennyson had it, "red in tooth and claw."  We are animals, after all; at or near the top of the food chain right now, cloaked in a veneer of "civilization," whatever that means at any point in our history, but animals, nonetheless.  I do not wish to engage in a debate with non-carnivores about whether humans are meant to eat meat:  I respect those who don't eat meat way more than I do those who do eat other creatures but are repulsed by the idea of hunting, or by the thought of slaughter.  You can't have that steak, veal, lamb, chicken or fish without it.

The act itself is a bit aback-taking:  one grabs a lamb, wrestles it to a sitting position, and slits its throat.  Once that is done, the major arteries severed, what happens is muscle-memory.  The brain has been deprived of blood, the animal feels nothing more, while the heart pumps out the blood coursing through the veins.  Lillian Hellman, in her memoir Pentimento (there's another term from the art world, Leonski), recounts a time when her husband, Dashiell Hammett, killed a large snapping turtle which inhabited a pond on their property.  The heart, removed from the body, beat on its own for more than 10 hours.  Hellman found that heroic; Hammett countered, correctly, I'm pretty sure, that it was just biology.  The muscle, the machine, works until it doesn't any longer.  It's just design, if, as Frost said,  "I use the word a'right."

Yes, there are death-throes--the animals flip and flop, not at all going gentle into that goodnight; no, the death is not heroic, instantaneous, antiseptic, with the animal's discrete parts suddenly appearing as specific cuts, sitting in styrofoam trays, wrapped in plastic, waiting to be selected and tossed thoughtlessly into a shopping cart.  There is violence (minimized, but, nonetheless...), and mud and blood and sweat and shit.  And then there is silence, and surgical slicing, and order.  And on to the freezer, and the oven, and the plate, and the septic tank.  'Twas always thus, and 'twill always be, in one way or another.  It's the circle and cycle of life and, like it or no, we're all riding on it, clinging tightly until we no longer are able.  The lucky ones get the kind, soft voice and the sharp, swift and sure blade at the end.  And that is figurative language.

Here are this week's songs:

Can't Stand To See The Slaughter                                            Tower Of Power
Slaughter                                                                                   Billy Preston
Blood Of The Lamb                                                                  Billy Bragg/Wilco
Poor Little Lamb                                                                       Tom Waits
Mary's Little Lamb                                                                    Otis Redding
The Lamb Ran Away With The Crown                                     Judee Sill
Mary Had A Little Lamb                                                           Stevie Ray Vaughn
Sacrificial Lambs                                                                       Warren Zevon
Closer To The Bone                                                                   Louis Prima
You're My Meat                                                                         Joe Jackson
It Ain't The Meat (It's The Motion)                                           Maria Muldaur
Pigmeat                                                                                      Ry Cooder
Red Meat                                                                                    Brad Upton
Mango Meat                                                                              Mandrill
Meat                                                                                           Phish
Ram On I & II                                                                            Paul McCartney
I'm A Ram                                                                                 Roy Buchanan

Hard Time Killin' Floor                                                             Geoff & Maria Muldaur
Killing Floor                                                                              Mike Bloomfield
Killing Me Softly                                                                       Jaco Pastorious Big Band
Life'll Kill Ya                                                                             Warren Zevon
Killin' The Blues                                                                        Chris Smither
Time To Kill                                                                               The Band
Death Don't Have No Mercy                                                      John Martyn
Death Sound Blues                                                                     Country Joe & The Fish
Keep The Circle Turning                                                            Lee Michaels
Will The Circle Be Unbroken                                                     Allman Bros.
Changes, Circles Spinning                                                         Moby Grape
Within You Without You                                                            Fabs
Wheel Within A Wheel                                                              New York Stories
Bloodlines                                                                                  Tanita Tikaram

When the kids were younger, I used to caution them to avoid getting attached to the lambies, 'cause they were food, not pets.  Mariah named the first pair "Shishka" and "Bob...."

See ya Tuesday, noon till two.