Three Watercolors Find a Home

Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, which published my poem about biting an apple in 2013, was kind enough to publish some recent watercolors of mine. Two are from Ireland and one is of a Monarch butterfly emerging in our backyard in St. Louis. Now to find homes for my other stray poems and paintings!

Index Ferguson Feature

Here's the link to my feature for the Truman Index on the Ferguson protests. For those of you who read the perspective that Nick and I wrote for the Prep News, it's mostly similar stuff, but this one is more from my viewpoint as a participant and less as an observer analyzing the situation at a remove, and is therefore a bit more personal to me. I also felt that the need for this kind of work at Truman was greater than at SLUH, since in Kirksville we are hours away from St. Louis, and many of us come from elsewhere and do not have a local angle on the story. 

I wrote this thinking it would just be in my normal opinions page column spot, but they made it a full-spread feature. I'm not sure how I feel about the design above the story, but I'm glad they used some of my pictures (recognize anyone in the bottom left corner?)

More importantly: the #HealSTL office, led by Alderman French, is open as of this morning in Ferguson. They are calling for volunteers from anywhere and everywhere to help work on solutions for St. Louis. Their website is due to launch soon, but their Twitter is live.

Ferguson Perspective

Nick Fandos and I teamed up once more for the Prep News as emeritus editors to write a perspective on our experience of attending a protest march in Ferguson. I was deliberately hesitant to publish thoughts on the Ferguson crisis on this blog, because I feel that there is a lot of substantial work as well as a lot of unhelpful noise out there on the Internet already about this issue. While the press corps has done good in bringing national attention to the protests, some have also done a disservice to the community by only focusing on the late-night confrontations with militarized police forces, making what was in fact mostly a series of peaceful, passionate protests look merely like a string of dust-ups. I don't want to add even in a small way to that mistake. The minority of violent agitators are as much of a menace to the nonviolent protesters as they are to the police. 

But we sat with our thoughts for a while, and this piece is what we have so far.  (If you're like me and prefer to pretend you're reading a print newspaper, click here and turn to page 6. Check out the other great coverage there, too.) What we hoped to do with this piece was engage with our high school community, the place we learned big lessons in journalism, civic engagement and the value of urban neighborhoods. However, I think it could also serve as one source for my friends who do not live in St. Louis to get a handle on the situation, which looks quite different day-to-day than what cable producers have typically chosen to show.

But for the developing story, I suggest you follow protest leaders on Twitter. The hashtag #HealSTL was recently created to bind together actions directing the protest's energy towards initiatives to move forward and combat racial injustice.  Look up State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal (@MariaChappelleN), Alderman Antonio French (@AntonioFrench) and Committeewoman Patricia Bynes (@patricialicious), for a start. We could be nearing the crucial point at which protesters either disperse slowly or coalesce into a unified movement, and leaders like these have a good sense of what's happening on the ground and what's coming next.

While I will welcome questions and comments about this issue, please be civil, and please read up elsewhere on the issue before making claims about it. Our feelings and opinions are complex enough; we can at least try to be familiar with the set of established facts and debunked myths.

Orono Sketches, Part 2

Well, I don't like this one as much as the one I did at NUI-Galway, and I paid for the dusk setting in blood collected by the diligent campus mosquitoes, but I'm glad I got to give watercolor a shot here.  This is Stevens Hall at U. Maine-Orono.

Summer Leaves

Here's the link to my first post for the blog of the vernal pool research program at University of Maine-Orono, "Of Pools and People." They're also on Facebook. It's my first foray into writing about a branch of ecology which is still very new to me: biogeochemistry, the study of fundamental environmental processes. There's a couple formatting hiccups in it that will probably be rectified soon, but I figured I might as well just link to it now, trusting in your generosity not to condemn me too badly.

Mind-Congestion Release-Valve of the Weekend

"All rivers are full of sky.
Waterfalls are in the mind.
We all come from slime.
Even alpacas."

-Dean Young, "Belief in Magic," Poetry magazine (July/August 2014)

Risking Delight

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.

Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not

be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not

be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women

at the fountain are laughing together between

the suffering they have known and the awfulness

in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody

in the village is very sick. There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,

but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world. To make injustice the only

measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,

we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.

We stand at the prow again of a small ship

anchored late at night in the tiny port

looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront

is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat

comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth

all the years of sorrow that are to come.

                                                —Jack Gilbert

This Fourth of July, my bike lock fell off my handlebars sometime on a three-mile trip to the grocery store. This is one of those things that instantly reminds me of the feebleness of my body without wheels, and reawakens my dread of losing the ability to travel freely and without the worry that my vehicle will be stolen. I checked every foot of trail between my apartment and the grocery store, under a bright gray headache-inducing sky and steady cold rain. I did not find it, and decided to look for a bike lock at gas stations, the only other places open on this holiday.

The first, nearer one did not have a bike lock, nor did another convenience store. I had been in the rain for almost two hours at this point and was losing courage fast.

But like in an old story, an inner voice told me—Just ride to the top of yon hill, lad. Then ye may return home. This inner voice was apparently from northern England.

And upon reaching the top of the hill, I saw the sharp lights of a gas station, like Jane Eyre seeing the parson’s house across the moor.

I arrived at the convenience store and found an attendant leaning against the outside wall, smoking a cigarette.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hi,” she replied, clearly peeved at being distracted on her smoke break.

“Do you sell gas—er, bike locks here?” The speaking part of my brain was short of oxygen.

“No,” she said, looking back at her phone.

“Okay.” I mounted my bike and turned back to ride through some more oily puddles.

In a moment my story had changed from one of classical Providence to something like Sergey Dovlatov’s tragi-farcical sketches of late Soviet life.

At least I had already bought ibuprofen.

This morning, I had been planning to go to Acadia National Park. However, I woke up to howling winds and driving rain. I knew it would rain, but not this hard. I had already begun composing an essay in my head about my trip. It would parallel Ishmael’s arrival in port during a storm in the opening chapters of Moby Dick. It would celebrate the sights of huge waves driven by (comfortably distant) hurricane winds, and perhaps speculate about unseen whales in the Atlantic, the horrors of modern whaling, and our changing relationship with Leviathan in the days of climate change.

But I won’t be able to write that essay yet, because I was not willing to go to Acadia on a day forecasted to have two inches of rain. Apologies, Ishmael.

Instead, I went into town, bike-less, in the pouring post-hurricane rain, ordered French toast and corned beef hash at a diner, and listened to an audio recording of Patrick O’Brian’s H.M.S. Surprise. All the time hearing, for some reason, David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” in my head. And I had a grand time doing it, especially since I knew I was denying Fate the satisfaction of making me miserable.

It made me think of something I had thought of many times before—what matters is not external events but one’s response to them—which is often a matter of rallying against them. To me, this is a source of happiness: the knowledge that we are making an effort to live well in the world. What draws me to Moby Dick is ultimately not its setting but Ishmael’s narrative voice, delighting in absurdity even in strange and terrible conditions. It's the same reason I admire Lizzy's voice in Pride and Prejudice, delighting in other absurdities, though in surroundings usually reckoned much more pleasant than the 'tween decks of the Pequod.

Compared to the suffering of many people, the kind of problems I have would be relief. And yet I don’t advocate being thankful for the kind of problems we have—an impossible if possibly noble task. Nor yet do I advocate feeling guilty for one’s gifts, an unproductive and merely Puritanical task. I suppose we have to risk delight, wherever we are, as Jack Gilbert encourages us.

Reading in the afternoon of a day that was no longer titled “The Day I Didn’t Go to Acadia” but instead a free day whose meaning I was still uncovering, I arrived at this passage in Moby Dick: describing the Pequod for the first time, Ishmael tells us, “Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull’s complexion was darkened like a French grenadier’s, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia.” The wide-traveling experience suggested here instantly delighted me. It led me to consider the degrees of separation between me and the (imaginary) French grenadier. First there were the original, and probably none too enjoyable, experiences of shooting musket-balls at the British in Egypt and the Russians in Siberia. (By the way, Napoleon's army was turned back near Moscow. Poetic license.) Then there was the distance of time, which allowed the grenadier to pick out the meaningful parts of those experiences and craft them into a story which he wore proudly on his weathered cheeks. Then Herman Melville either saw such a person—or, more likely, read about one. One day at the docks, in an imaginative moment, he connected this person with a ship he admired. Finally, he wrote this thought down, and over a century later, I read it.

And yet all those sequential frames are instantly fused into a single windowpane by the magic of human communication—in this case, by the written word and the power of story. Is telling and listening to stories, however small, our most accessible way of risking happiness?