Third-Rate Poet

Welcome

2007-11-19T02:45:00.000-08:00

[Note: this is going to stay at the top of the page for awhile for new readers; I'll bury it in a week or so. Please proceed on to the next post if you haven't the time for this nonsense.]

Why am I here? Why are you here? Of course we don't really know.
But my profile to the right gives you a decidedly un-cosmological shot at explanation about why I think I'm here (you're free to try the same).

My harshest critics, though somewhat insightful, have pointed out the oddity that I've actually registered four blogs, though I'm only heavily active on two. It is telling of a person though. Let me just say, though, that "everything but the kitchen sink" blogs/sites may not be very pleasant to read. This is an age of narrowcasting. People want to customize and nichefy. So it is with blogs. One of my sites is broader, covering vast terrains of media, culture, and politics, and yet, it didn't really comfortably house my third-rate poetry. It was time to find a home for it somewhere else. There's the rationale, which no doubt works in tandem with the mysteries of the unconscious.

The volatile mix of life's demands and expectations and my own ill-considered actions brought me here, a third-rate poet by default. I was always impressed by the story of how the precociously Leviathan intellect John Stuart Mill, having learned Latin, Greek, and algebra by age eight, all the classics of history, much philosophy, and political economy by age 13, suffered a mental breakdown at age 21. In his Autobiography, he claims that nothing could comfort but the poems of William Wordsworth, his Lyrical Ballads. Like Mill, I have always turned to poetry in times of crisis, at least in moments when I could bring myself to read at all. I have also written some poetry in times of non-crisis over the years. I used to think that poetry was for me, as it was for Keats and Shelley, a time of youthful productivity that would blaze magnificently, then take its exit like the locust that sings short-lived in summer. But now I understand why some feel compelled to write across their lives, however so short or long.

Honestly, millions of people consider themselves "writers" and "poets," and good for them if writing makes them feel better. On the other hand, I don't believe all things are equal (though it's true that standards are culturally constructed--Rimbaud is not good poetry from the point of view of the courtly poets two hundred years before him). I don't pretend to be a first-rate poet, though writing does take practice. Much of this material will be constantly revised. In addition, every Western monopolizer of world resources and his dog has a blog these days (indeed, I'm thinking of giving my dog M her own blog) . Most aren't read or heard, sad trees falling into deafening inexistence, while others are out-of-control egos, substituting for unresolved inadequate parental love and childhood recognition traumas, resulting in obsessions with statcounters, hits, being seen, comments, and strategies to increase traffic on their sites: "Look at me! Please, will you pay attention! I exist! I'm smart! I'm beautiful! I'm loveable! Please say something nice about me (or go away)!" Sometimes the sites are little more than clubs of backscratchers, cyber-group therapy, criticism necessarily being expelled from a discourse of eternal positive regard. Networks are built and can be good or bad for mental health, since many people are afraid to explore their demons and so spend life bouncing around from one unconscious fix to another. Sometimes sites are little more than boring, poorly written, intellectually and stylistically arid diaries and effusions of "I": I went to the park. I took a runny dump. I saw Cameron Diaz naked on a beach in San Torini. Sometimes they are shallow but cleverly executed prose, period. People like Harlequin romances and E entertainment as much as Virginia Wolf. I'm sure this blog runs all those risks and will fall into some of those boxes, for some readers. Feel free to let me know if you think I'm doing exactly what I want to avoid. I'm surely not going to be the one to point it out to myself. I don't believe in self-made man bullshit. People change, with great effort and will, in dialog with others. I have a friend who told me she hates blogs. She finds them pathetic cries for attention and confessions about matters that should be private--it's the Clinton-Lewinsky phenomenon that people gobble up like pizza samples in the supermarket. She also thinks people are doing the same thing when they dress in ways that call attention to themselves. But if someone has something to say, they must do something to get attention. It's true writing on the internet at all requires some ego, some desire to share and be recognized, even if we don't really know why or what we want in the act of recognition itself. Perhaps that desire is worth the writer's scrutiny?

The poetry here is often that genre whose authors are said to "take themselves too seriously." Not everything written here is bleak, dark, morose, and tumultuous. It is a mix, but you'll see my view has a hearty dose of Baudelaire's spleen. I do have acid reflux. Perhaps, in the end, I bear more darkness than light. And yet I laugh, here and elsewhere. I love. Above all else, I make mistakes, try to learn from them on a life journey toward the man I've meant and mean to be. Some see it as romantic folly. So be it.

There will also be an ongoing series of poems about Paris, where I currently dwell.
I'm mainly speaking to other third-rate poets, those who take comfort and interest in third-rate poetry, and first-rate poets who feel better about themselves by comparing their work to that of third-rate poets.

Perhaps you're a third-rate poet, too? Or you gain comfort from third-rate poetry,too? I will be sharing my works in progress, which will also include translations of French first-rate poetry (eg. Francois Villon, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire,etc.). Perhaps you'd like to exchange comments and your poetry with me? This is not a gated community. It is hopelessly quaint: the front door is always unlocked, and I am usually on the porch, playing guitar or accordian, singing, weeping, thinking, laughing with a friend. Don't be shy.

Free Contemporary Men and Women

2006-12-24T03:56:00.001-08:00

Today, in many places, thanks to globally circulating culture, the privileged highly educated man and woman have high expectations--of one another, of themselves, of lives and life. Their constitutions, politicians, social movements, and media products relentlessly assault them with a refrain: you are free. No matter the protests of his successors, Sartre lives on, his bastardized words become biblical.

Women. Women are just as capable as men (or more so) in any number of careers. The property of husbands a distant echo--despite pay ceilings and the recalcitrance of unconscious expectations in the habits of their husbands' domestic workload. The demand to have everything a real and maddening pressure. Forget the physical abuse and financial and intellectual infantilization of the unliberated past (and, to be sure, for some, sadly, still in the present). The new restlessly dogged pursuit of perfection brings little-studied impacts profound. How many know what they are pursuing? How many know what they want and how they acquired those wants, expectations, and desires? Women: Mothers, Grandmothers, Wives, Lovers, Sisters, Daughters.

Grand/Mothers. Impossible role models wearing scarves over whiptoppinged hairdos, throwing apocryphal tupperware parties, keeping immaculate homes, and forming welcome wagons for the new neighbors. Taking orders. Never communicating inner problems and desires. Repressed. Pathetic to the new women, and both know it. A sense of a worthless life entire. Grand/Mothers.

Men. What has become of them? Shall we continue to generalize in a poem? They are as much in a crisis as their counterparts (or even their same-sex ones--what are their expectations, with their public models all but banned?). Do you hear Faludi whisper? Men.

Their grandfathers/fathers. So their role models, pater familias unpatered by a cultural revolution, are paranoid and resentful toward the gendered world going to hell in a handbasket, which they desperately vote against through brands of "family values." Used to giving orders (including sexual), they find themselves generals being ordered by their mutinied subordinates, peasants who have stormed the Bastille and all but wheeled out the guillotine. Their grand/fathers.

Their parents/they: rebelled. Free love. Expensive divorce. Were the answers! Broken homes, parentless children, emotional holes that would land on the doorstep of future relationships, loves, marriages. Unwitting unrequited demands for parental attention, for parents, in the couple, in friendships, on the job. Unperfected changes from grandfathers, -mothers, parents. Heavy baggage--but invisible. Their parents/they.

They. New men, New women. The territory is un-charted; the exigencies to be other than their models like making every move under gunpoint. What are the new 7-year itches? The new mid-life crises? The new couple dynamics that volatilely mix with unresolved individual pasts in a misunderstood witch's potion voarciously lapped up? Pressure to move on, not develop, not mature, not learn from mistakes, not develop new maps together--change fast, a cheap panaceac promise. No devotion to a life-long best friend and lover, a companion above companions, ups and downs, maturation. Too much trouble. Too quaint. Too humiliating. Too unfree. Too grand/mother. They.

They. If the job is not bliss, if/since the husband or wife is flawed, there are pangs of change from fears of inadequacy. When crisis sticks its fork-tongued head out of its hole and visits them, they remember promises of change just last year, big and permanent changes, not slow ones. Instant Gratification, Speed, even though, to be sure, the trials of time have not been insignificant. From the view of free men and women the past is then a long dark night, the memory of which an endless nightmare. Staying the course, developing, maturing is humiliating, is old-fashioned, is torture when it should all be there in the job, the family, the couple, the life. Too keep on would be to regress, would be masochistic. What would it take to resist the desultory destiny of the newly freed men and women, eternally but vaguely searching for constant love, physical gratification, social and professional recognition, and unconscious resolution of deep internal wars without repeating the crimes of the grand/parents?
They: the free contemporary man and woman.
We?

Christmas, 1943

2006-12-24T03:56:00.000-08:00

Christmas, 1943

Being first a farmer in
The Great Depression,
He always hated Christmas,
No matter the
Endless cups of
Amnesiac cheer
A commercialized
Holiday offered.

And secondly why?

On Christmas Eve 1943,
a teenage sailor,
residue of hay bales still clinging to his ears,
dreaming of thistles and harvests,
horse-powered ploughing
in the middle of the South Pacific,
was still seasick when he
switched duties with his
best friend,

But on Christmas Day 1943
a teenage sailor met
a never-ending war

On Christmas Day 1943,
a teenager who rode
ponies to school
watched 108 of his comrades
kick and scream prematurely into
dark, wet un-holidayed sepulchers--
wailing armless torsos,
legless arm-flailing torsos,
always screaming, "don't leave me!";
swam instinctively against
the violent sucking black
hole

On Christmas Day 1943
War's cruel gift exchange.
God's inscrutable will.
The year without a Santa Claus

On Christmas Day, 1943
a pompous and derelict Captain
laughed at the alarms of his
subordinates--

Murder--

On Christmas Day, 1943,
surviving men lined up their shoes on deck,
insanely perfect, as their drills
had promised,
and leapt to their deaths

On Christmas Day,
a teenaged Veteran, father, husband
gives painful gifts to his wife
and his children;
refuses all presents,
refuses the waste,
refuses the universe,
and Memory,
all in vain, in vain

On Christmas Day, 1943
a teenage boy, a husband, a father
a Veteran,
was saved by a passing ship,
And lost his life,

On Christmas Day, 1943.

war poetry mental+illness christmas holidays

Trustworthy Maps

2006-12-24T01:55:00.000-08:00

They tell us we’re free,

A tempting cult, indeed.

If you don’t get everything you want,

Stop, change course, you will get it

On another if you just take charge.

A man who lost his map

(it actually never occurred to him

that he needed one, so great

was his faith in naturally

following his good instincts)

while hiking in the mountains

came to a fork in a path

and chose one leading to

death-defying precipices and bridgeless chasms,

so around he turned,

went back to the fork,

the other path he took,

which led to the same risks and horrors.

Romantic to go mapless, but liberating?

Secure to go mapful, but boring?

Disquieting to make new maps, but wise?

Someone said that the flea markets

And thrift stores are full of old maps,

For new ones must always be made,

If people are to learn from the mistakes of
Explorers,
To say nothing of becoming them.

Labels: life, third-rate poetry, WTF?

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

2006-12-21T03:00:00.000-08:00

Tonight, I came home. I took M out. She took a long dump, the kind where she squat-walks the length of five or six feet, dribbling turd chunks here and there, then jumps up as if squirted freshly out of the womb, swiveling her head and stretching out her paws, crouching and then running in circles, full of child-like glee--mirth. She sniffed the piss-marked buildings, and tree trunks, and various detritus on the sidewalk, sometimes giving them a fresh coat of her own. She whined as we ascended in the elevator in anticipation of a treat, a nuzzle, a prance across the hardwood floor. She begged for the last remnants of the baguette we nearly finished last night, as I re-heated a bowl of chili. She turned away from baguette watch, toward the door as she heard the elevator clanking and someone arriving above. She waited and finally dropped her head sorrowfully. I took the almost-too-hot-to-handle yellow bowl out of the microwave and lumbered indifferently toward the couch. I turned on the TV as M darted up on the couch and turned methodically in her circle to snuggle up next to me only to then unravel herself to beg for food. On the cable channel that slowly illuminated before me was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The ending was happier than I remembered.

Paris (Revised)

2006-12-20T02:52:00.000-08:00

Paris (revised)

Paris,

Shadowed,
Tunnelled,
Tenebrious
Old bourg,
Glittering vainly
In the past;

Fortified
With ipods
And cell phones,
Fleetingly
Focused and
Unfocused
aliens,
citizens;

With
Hairdos, boots,
Silk cravats and
Colored scarves--
Some humans
Attention
ain't human
elegance;

Where shopping
Substitutes
Cheaply for
hierarchy
And homeless
Armies on
The canals;

Long journeys to Day
Short jaunts to Night where,

Well chiseled
Facades bow
One to the
Other, dykes
Repelling
Vigorous
Day as much
As flowers
Stretch sunward--

Umbrell-ed
Metropole--

Daydreaming
People down
Her sidewalks
Shuffle while
Studying
Cobblestones
Dark with age,
And searching
For Haussmann’s
oases,
Middle-class
Safety Valves,
Monopolies
On envied
resources;

Properly scarved
Republicans
Claw their way out
Of stinking
ratful caves
And labyrinths,
Escalating
Like moths.

Living as
Advertised.

Paris,

Neither Eiffel’s
Nor the martyr’s—
Baudelaire’s nightmare:
A dim damp bourg
Burning bright on
A Page.

Labels: life, paris, third-rate poetry

technorati tags: poetry, poem, paris, france

The Hour

2006-12-19T03:11:00.000-08:00

By the fung-dappled stones

Two flies cavort

Above marrowless bones in their bliss

Through the soil slides the worm

Happy, hungry, then devoured,

When round earth

Opens mouth up above

And the hour gains its grains

And the sea immortal rains

And the jackalous earth is unsated

But the heart shrinks in horror at the earth, the sea, the hour

Falls to its knees and bays for our tombstone-earth-sea-hour.

Light In December

2006-12-18T02:55:00.000-08:00

Light in December

Like a green love pushed

Surprisingly forth

From the brown compost

Of a scorched summer.

Labels: life, third-rate poetry

First-rate Poetry, Villon revised 12/17/06

2006-12-17T23:49:00.000-08:00

Ballad of the ladies of old Poème de François Villon Poem by François Villon

Tell me where, in what land, tell me
Is Flora, lovely Roman lady?
Where Archippa, where Thais fair,
Who was her cousin? Please tell me!
Where now is Echo, who bellered
Back at you o'er rivers and ponds,
Whose beauty surpassed any human's?
O where went the snows of past winters?

Where is Heloise chaste and wise,
For whom celibate and monk-made
Was Abelard in Saint-Denis?
For her love so much he suffered .
And likewise, where now is the queen
Who commanded that Buridan
Be bagged and cast into the Seine?
O where went the snows of past winters?

And Joan so dear of Lorraine,
Whom the English lit bright at Rouen?
Where are they all, Sovereign Lady?
O where went the snows of past winters?

My Prince, seek not endlessly the knowledge
Where now are they, why passed the time;
But only remember this chorus:
O where went the snows of past winters?

Translation, Third-Rate Poet

Twilight at Hyeres

2006-12-16T02:57:00.000-08:00

Twilight at Hyeres Beach

On Hyeres' twilight beach,
The hunted sun offers
a rose sky above
Hills veiled in a fine mist;
A miniature dog
barking at the small waves;
A blissful naked child
And his mother so full
Of an adult's envy
And parental love too,
Simultaneously;
Lovers who kiss without
Any embarassment
In the still warm waters;
A one-legged seagull;
And us eating well
And having a good time--
The sensation of a
Stolen eternity.

From September to March!

2006-12-02T03:03:00.000-08:00

From September to March!

Women of the Republique,
We give you boots, boots!
Brave men of the Republique,
We give you femmes, femmes!
Women of the Republique,
We give you boots, boots!

Armies, Armies, Armies!
Bootlickers!
Bootlickers!

Sex in the city
"liberated boots."
"We feel good in boots."
"It's not for them boots."
"It is for us boots."
Women power boots.
Androscopophilic boots.
Les francaises are boots?

High-heeled ankle-bending boots;
“Tres Sexy” leopard-skin boots;
Pointy-toed canoe shaped boots.

“Ladies” over 22,
Get in your boots, boots!
Girls of the banlieue,
We give you boots, boots!

Boots, boots,
Over yer foots,
The boots you wear,
The boots you are,
Françaises in boots:
Feel the power!

Boots, boots,
Over yer foots;
Together in boots
The better you feel
Ignore the pain
Ignore your heels.

Boots, boots,
Things on your foots—
Things.

Liberty Boots,
Fraternity Boots,
Equality Boots--
Et ou sont les bottes d'antan?*

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,
Do not ask, young prince,
in a day, a week, a year,
but remember this chorus:

Always leather,
procrustean—
boots, boots, boots, boots!
From September to March.

*Thanks to Satchmo for "les bottes d'antan"

Labels: boots, delusion, france, third-rate poetry, women

Late Autumn Shock Therapy

2006-11-25T03:05:00.000-08:00

On a warm late-autumn day

In Paris,

A man stumbles down

A narrow cobble stone street

In the Seventh,

Staring up at the chiseled embellishments

Of the shadowing buildings,

Which he’s never noted before, thinking,

“Why does it take this kind of a day

to get me to notice, my God,

thou great Snuffleupagus?"

Stumbling down-headed on a

Cobblestone street,

In Paris,

On a warm late-autumn day.

Mirabeau Bridge, Appolinaire

2006-11-24T23:54:00.000-08:00

Mirabeau Bridge,
Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools (1913)

Under Mirabeau Bridge runs the Seine
with all our loves
need I recall
joy always comes after pain

Night rings the hour
days disappear, I remain

Hand in hand let us stand face to face
while under
the bridge of our arms pass
our eternal gaze a weary wave

Night rings the hour
days depart I remain

And love runs like this running water
sure as life drags
sure as hope's violence

Night rings the hour
days depart I remain

Days pass into weeks that pass
Neither times passed
nor my love return
Under Mirabeau Bridge runs the Seine.

Night rings the hour
days depart I remain.

Translation Third-Rate Poet, 2006.

Autumn's Song

2006-11-22T23:52:00.000-08:00

Autumn's Song/La Chanson D'Automne by Paul Verlaine

The Long Sobs
Of Autumn's
Violins
Drown my heart
With a torpid
Monotony.

Suffocating
And all pale when
The clock tocks,
I recall
The old days
And I cry.

And I go away
To the windy day
Which takes me
Here and there
Just like a
Falling Leaf.

Translation, Third-Rate Poet

Planes and Automobiles...Definitely no Trains

2006-06-28T03:09:00.000-07:00

Planes and Automobiles..definitely no trains

Planes and Automobiles, definitely no trains (which are for those Eurotrash wimps, of course; here trains are drafthorses; get with the post-industrial age, pal). This thread will be in two parts: To Chicago and flight from Chicago to Kansas. Then Kansas and return. Perhaps it will be three posts. Like a mini-series. Networks like to use the mini-series to secure a loyal audience for at least three evenings. Will it work on a blog?

So, I don't usually make strictly personal posts. Usually about politics, culture, music, not about me per se/per son. So savor this rare sortie. Not much analysis, just third-rate poetry.

The flight over. Bad omens.

No more free wine or beer, to say nothing of cognac,etc. on American Airlines. At least it didn't cost an arm and a leg--just an arm.

The potbellied 50-something man in front is reading Anne Coulter.
I will never again say, "At least he's reading."

The stewards and stewardesses do not even try to hide their contempt for the passengers, for their jobs, for their lives. Keepin it real. Keepin it real comme ca: somewhat charming (the charm of refusing to fake), mainly depressing. It's a country's export of services that people don't like to render--not like that--and people don't like to receive--not like that. But there's no alternative--not like this.

I land in Chicago (to sound post-post modern, I'll just say that I thought of the old Stephen Wright joke--"and boy are my arms tired"--but I didn't say it, just thought it) . No people selling tickets, making change at the O'Hare CTA (Chicago Public Transportation/Transit Authority) entrance. Just machines. Oh, wait, there were people who had no contact with the money, with the machines. They were there to tell you that you could put your money in the machines, like this and that. There you go. After withdrawing money from the money machine. I am forced to put 20$ into the train-card machine, even though I don’t plan on using 20$ worth of train service. Moral of the paragraph: in this country, you are encouraged to waste--everything.

I'm aware that time register is erratic in this post. Shifts between present and past. I'm too lazy to correct them. Correcting is for fascists and neurotics (as is rationalizing).

A few minutes on the train and a small, patchily goateed man in a NASCAR cap and sunglasses boards behind people at whom he’s grumbling: “Fuck, get on the fuckin’ train!” He moves toward me and my two suitcases: “Can you move this shit so we can fucking sit down?!” I am stunned, trying my best to ignore him while I move my bags, slightly. I notice that he is shorter than I. Luckily, I'm distracted. An African-American woman approaches an African-American man on the train a few feet away from me. They don’t seem to know one another, but she immediately starts talking about how she was attacked recently by some “punk” in her neighborhood. “What kind of world are we living in?” is her refrain. The man appears to get off the train early to escape her anecdote. Are you still reading? Are you off the train?

An hour later I get to my friend’s place. I’m loving the ethnic restaurants I pass (Vietnamese, Chinese bbq, Thai, Ethiopian. Average cost of main courses:$6). The two-story, brownstone walkups, and small houses, both with big porches, on some of which are sitting old men with beers and/or pulp fiction. The dogs and their walkers. The homemade yard signs admonishing fecalphobic dogwalkers. The trash. The SUV’s, possibly 75% of the vehicles on the street.

That night I find myself munching a great burger and fries--stereotypically for you foreign readers, bien sur--for 8$ (it's not a fast food joint, but a tavern) and drinking a bottle of Czechvar beer for $3.50. They're playing Devo, Beck, and a few I can't recognize. I really miss having bars in Paris where I hear music I like. It's so rare that I will make a show of it when it happens. It has happened once. How does one compute all these things that aggravate and enamor?

Next day, after going to Siam Noodle and Rice and having a delicious Pad See Eew for 5.50$, I head down to Powell’s books. Great academic and fiction books, remainders in fact, dead cheap. Dead Cheap? Max Horkheimer’s essays, new (Continuum Press), for 5$. On the way back, people are descending from the el tracks, down the stairs. It’s two-way: left-side coming down, right side going up. But wait. There’s a lone man walking down on the right side, coming right for…me. “I’m going down, muthafuckah, before you’re going up.” What to do? Go all the way back down? No! I freeze. I do the cliché American macho shoulder bump with him and he goes on. I love American masculinity. Really. I long ago walked into Dostoyevski's Notes From the Underground--is there no exit?

The next morning I’m on another American Airlines flight from Chicago to K.C. Typical (?) American 14 year-old next to me? What’s he like? Big white basketball shoes;casual, new Eddie Bauer shorts and shirt. He has no patience. No attention span. He’s addicted to stimuli. Society of the Spectacle. He's fidgeting crazily. When the announcement of safety precautions asks for attention to be given to the steward/esses, he drawls, "Shuuut UUUp!" When he pulls out his portable DVD player (sort of like a Sony Watchman but bigger) and finds that the power is dead, he lets loose a "fuuuuuhck!" His dad is about my age it seems and apparently has the "I'm in junior high with you" parenting style. "Really?" dad queries. "That sucks." Indeed. It also sucks to sit by you guys. But I'm sure you're holding Bush's pants to the fire, vigilant citizens, when you get a break from your Gameboys and portable . (I also don't like to start new paragraphs. Too lazy. I just sat down. Not getting up to get another new paragraph. You're just going to have to wait.) So we're taxiing down the runway, and the kid blurts, "Come onnnnnn! Hurry up!" He's in the throes of tech-attention withdrawal. I recall the de-toxing scene from Trainspotting, where the kid is locked in the room by his parents and images of a sweaty, bulgy-eyed drug-addled kid clinging to the ceiling are offered to express what's going on in the kid's mind. I'm imagining the kid next to me in that room. It's not hard.

At least the kid has some fallback technology, the trusty MP3 player. He still treats me to epithets and sagacious observations nonetheless. I look out the window of the plane, away from the annoying teenager. Between Chicago and K.C. the ground below is a green patchwork quilt of astonishing symmetry. Squares of well-tilled and planted land are carved by straight and narrow dirt-rock roads. There is seldom a winding road to be seen, though I occasionally spy a diagonal. I try to remember my theorems from high school geometry. Those classes would have seemed so much more real if we had practiced on aerial photographs of the Midwest.

The Mississipi River snakes into the distance. It's a brown, thick snake. It's not poisonous though. It won't spew venom. Don't worry it's harmless, white people. Not much traffic on it today.

Back to the geometry of the fields and country roads. Oh, look, ma, it's a city. A little city, so well planned. So gridded to serve the shopping centers, the economy, which of course means it serves the people. From above, all the houses look the same. Sadly, they look the same down on the ground. I know, I can't be there while I'm above, but I'd bet all my highschool year books that they are. (It's a safe bet: I'm going to burn them anyway). More quadrants, sines and cosines, alternate interior and exterior angles, congruities, similarities, terms and rules that are learned and forgotten. Now the perfect square plots are getting some variation, thanks to little plots of brush and timber which look strangely similar to the tops of brocolli heads. It's like someone put broccoli (I don't know how to spell it, so I'm going to try and do it two ways, and hope I get one right) heads on the fields. They're slightly darker than the green fields around them; they're healthy heads of broc.

We land, and the kid takes off his MP3 player. The fidgeting is renewed. "Finally," he spudders when the plane touches down. He jumps up before the "fasten seatbelts" sign is dimmed, before, in fact, the plane has stopped taxiing. I will never forget the kid or his dad. God Bless America. People say the Founders had great foresight. That's why they created the Constitution, such a durable and adaptable document through the years. I'm sure they saw the kid and his dad when they debated and drew up that time-honored prescription for the good life.

I get out in the K.C. airport. I'm struck by the obesity. The khakhi shorts and golf shirts. The midrifts on girls and young women--comme il faut. Strange, violent even, extremes of sculptured bodies clearly belonging to fitness nuts and, on the other end, Supersize-it obesity everywhere. There's also a semiotics of sports that can't be avoided. The bodies and the clothing. If you're obese, you're still going to perform your cultural legitimacy with a ball cap or t-shirt. Testosterone is visible like the fog when you breathe on a cold day. Encore: SUV's. Shopping. Pollution. My favorite ad, ever, is the native American shedding a tear as he looks down on the polluted river. I think it's still downloadable at the Prelinger archives. It never left me and now has new company in a tech-stimuli-deprived teenager.

Moral of the post: I feel happy to live in Paris. But I feel like I've just walked into an elitist, facile, East Coast caricature of the Midwest. Have I just committed cultural suicide? I'm listening to Cracker and feeling trashy. Is moral the same as "main idea?"

The end of this section of "PLanes and Automobiles" part I is:

I don't hate the States, I don't hate it. I don't. I don't.

(My East Coast liberal Elite friends with imaginary knowledge of the Midwest would change that for me: "You don't hate the States. You hate the Midwest." Thanks for reminding me that I don't hate the entire country. I don't. I don't. Not even the East Coast prep school liberals. Honest. I don't.)

This post is finally over, finally, at least one paragraph too late. This is the way it ends.

Labels: culture, Midwest, third-rate poetry