I teach at a Community College– mostly introductory classes, so the majority of my students are young enough that 9/11 is either something they weren’t alive for, or something that they only dimly remember, without having understood the event at the time.
I’m continually having to remind myself that they have no idea how different the world was before that day, or just how profoundly traumatized everybody–not just in NYC or DC, but everywhere–was.
My parents compared it to the day JFK was assassinated, my grandparents to Pearl Harbor–a day that you always remember exactly where you were and what you were doing. There is now an entire generation with no memory of that trauma, and I’ve seen it slowly fade from their collective consciousness over my years of teaching. When I started in 2013, it was one of their earliest memories–they would have been five or six in 2001– but now it’s something incoming freshman only know from history books. It means as much to them as those prior national traumas do to me, possibly less. I say less because I remember 9/11 and can draw on that to relate. They have no such great tragedy to call upon for empathy–whether this is because tragedies and loss of life have sadly become far more commonplace and therefore less traumatic for those not directly involved, or because something on the same scale hasn’t occurred in their lifetimes, I can’t say.
My point, I suppose, is that it can be difficult to truly understand or appreciate the deep scars something like 9/11 leaves on us–as individuals (directly affected or not), as a nation, and as a world– when your entire life has happened after the event itself. We tell ourselves we’re “over it,” that we’ve “healed” and “moved on” but we haven’t. We never really will, not in my lifetime, anyway.
R.I.P. Adam Zagajewski
Adam Zagajewski passed earlier today; I had the privilege of meeting him while I was an undergrad, and it was a formative experience for me as a writer. My poetry professor was a former student of his, and convinced him to travel to our small liberal arts school in the middle of nowhere in Northeast Pennsylvania. He was humble, helpful, and gracious beyond words. The world is a little bit darker without him.
Electric Elegy
Farewell, German radio with your green eye
and your bulky box,
together almost composing
a body and soul. (Your lamps glowed
with a pink, salmony light, like Bergson’s
deep self.)
Through the thick fabric
of the speaker (my ear glued to you as
to the lattice of a confessional), Mussolini once whispered,
Hitler shouted, Stalin calmly explained,
Bierut hissed, Gomulka held endlessly forth.
But no one, radio, will accuse you of treason;
no, your only sin was obedience: absolute,
tender faithfulness to the megahertz;
whoever came was welcomed, whoever was sent
was received.
Of course I know only
the songs of Schubert brought you the jade
of true joy. To Chopin’s waltzes
your electric heart throbbed delicately
and firmly and the cloth over the speaker
pulsated like the breasts of amorous girls
in old novels.
Not with the news, though,
especially not Radio Free Europe or the BBC.
Then your eye would grow nervous,
the green pupil widen and shrink
as though its atropine dose had been altered.
Mad seagulls lived inside you, and Macbeth.
At night, forlorn signals found shelter
in your rooms, sailors cried for help,
the young comet cried, losing her head.
Your old age was announced by a cracked voice,
then rattles, coughing, and finally blindness
(your eye faded), and total silence.
Sleep peacefully, German radio,
dream Schumann and don’t waken
when the next dictator-rooster crows.
Polish; trans. Renata Gorczynski,
Benjamin Ivry & C.K. Williams
Xmas to-do list
(in no particular order)
-Make waffles, as is family tradition. Hopefully won’t mess them up too bad
-open presents
-bake cookies
-Watch How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the animated Chuck Jones one; you know, the good one)
-Plan and make dinner
-wash, fold, put away laundry
-install new weather stripping around back door & windows
-stream Christmas music
-try not to dwell on the fact that I’m spending Christmas alone because my wife is working (she always has Friday shifts, and pets need emergency care, even on holidays) and there’s a pandemic that makes spending it with family a poor idea
-try not to dwell on the fact that my wife hasn’t done any of her Christmas shopping and thus there are no gifts from her waiting for me to open
-maybe make some Uber Eats deliveries? Tips should be good, hopefully and I could use the money since I don’t have a paycheck coming for over a month…
-try not to get angry/depressed/self-hating for feeling angry/depressed/self-hating
-sleep.
-don’t let the mask slip. Maintain the masquerade. Push it all down into a super-dense black hole of emotion so nobody suspects that anything is wrong.
The Chicken Joke
“Why did the Chicken cross the road?”
“To get to the other side!”
It’s simple, straightforward, and so well-know as to be a cliche. It has spawned a number of related jokes:
“Why did the turkey cross the road?”
A) “Because it was the chicken’s day off!” B) “Because he was stuck to the chicken!” Both are common answers here, and both rely on knowing the chicken joke first to be anywhere on the same continent as actual humor.
The problem with cliches, as George Orwell points out in his essay “On Politics and the English Language,” is that we stop thinking about them and what they actually say. We rely on the chicken joke as short-hand for really bad, groan-worthy humor (see Fozzie Bear of the Muppets) without stopping to ask “wait, why is this even considered a joke?”
The fact is, it isn’t a joke. Not really. If we asked “why did Doug cross the road?” the answer is obvious, and the same as in the chicken joke. There’s really only one reason anyone or anything crosses a road, and that’s “to get to the other side.” So why a chicken? Because chicken is a fun word to say, and the image of a chicken is sloppy shorthand for funny (you don’t see many rubber sheep or ducks, do you? But the rubber chicken? Another comedy cliche). Don’t ask me why chickens are funny, but they are.
And therein lies the secret of the chicken joke. Like most simple question-based jokes, it contains a set-up and a punchline. The set-up typically contains a question, designed to stump the listener (How is a raven like a writing desk?), and the answer to the question is the punchline, where the terrible pun or unexpected surprise is. The chicken joke flips the script on this formula, while still operating within it: the only thing remotely funny about it is in the set-up, the fact that it contains a chicken. This fact primes the listener for an unusual answer–something about “poultry in motion” for instance– which never happens. We get the most mundane answer possible, instead.
It’s actually a subtle form of irony: jokes rely on the listener knowing how jokes work and create an expectation for the punchline. The chicken joke subverts that expectation, by presenting n odd question with a mundane answer. It is not the answer we expect, because the chicken (forgive my mixed metaphor) is a red herring. Humor is about subverting expectations, and the chicken joke takes this to another level, subverting the very expectations of the medium it is being presented it. There’s no pun, no groan-inducing word-play or nonsensical answer, just the simple statement of the obvious.
The chicken joke deserves more respect. It seems stupid, ridiculous, cliched. But there’s a lot more going on once you actually examine it. It is one of the simplest, and possibly oldest, forms of meta-humor. It is a joke not about chickens and roads, but about jokes themselves.
Rip van Winkle… 2000!
I’m teaching an 8-week course on early American Lit for the Summer (via Zoom, which I should probably also post about at some point), and we just read Rip van Winkle. In attempting to create some context, I asked the class to imagine a modern version; someone who had fallen into a coma in mid-2000 and just woken up now.
I felt my age, as I realized that many of them weren’t born in 2000, or were so young at the time that it was meaningless. The exercise, therefore didn’t go over very well, but it helped me, at least.
This modern Rip wouldn’t know anything about the Bush presidency, 9/11, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama presidency, SARS, the bird flu, the swine flu, YouTube, the entire concept of social media, reality TV, online streaming, Amy Winehouse’s entire musical career and her death, wifi, smartphones, Uber… Hell, Google had only been around for about two years and Amazon mostly still operated as a bookseller (they began selling other media in ’98).
And then he wakes up to a world that’s burning due to global warming, is in the middle of a pandemic, but has citizens in the street despite that protesting police murdering them, a president he knows as a New York weirdo who only let them film Home Alone 2 in his hotel if they put him in the movie and who apparently wants to build an actual wall around the country to keep certain people from getting in…
He’d probably encounter an Alexa or Siri and assume that Skynet had taken over (having come from a wold that only had two Terminator movies(not to mention two Jurrasic Park movies)) and he was now in a dystopian future. And I’m not sure that he’d be wrong.
And none of this even begins to describe the horror he experiences when he tries to go to the airport and fly somewhere else with only an expired driver’s license as ID.
I mean, his biggest fear when he fell into a coma was the Y2K bug. Just try to imagine what waking up to this mess would be like.
Irregardless
I know that title is making you cringe, grit your teeth and prepare to yell at me about how “that’s not a word!”
Bear with me a moment.
“irregardless” is a word. People use it, and have been for a long time. So long, in fact, that it has developed a linguistically distinct usage from “regardless.” This is why it is in your dictionary.
Dictionaries are NOT arbiters of English usage “as it is meant to be used” but repositories of English “as it IS used.” The language changes and evolves, and dictionaries try to keep up with that. Hell, “twerk” and “fleek” have definitions and those are words that don’t tell you ANYTHING about what they mean by themselves; at least it’s easy to figure out what “iregardless”means.
All that said, I still hate this word and do my best to avoid it. I catch myself using it occasionally because it just plain sounds better in certain situations/sound patterns.
Hell, I don’t recall anybody complaining about this word until we heard President George W. Bush use it,and then everybody hated it, mostly so we could have one more example for “our president is an idiot” lists. That is a terrible reason to hate a word.
Yes, in most cases you should use “regardless” and doing otherwise will get you lectured by pedants with nothing better to do with their lives but “correct” your usage. If you can put up with that, please feel free to continue using “irregardless.” It IS a real word, whether they like it or not.
Trump claims Americans have to flush the toilet ’10 times, 15 times’
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/12/07/politics/trump-americans-flushing-toilets-intl/index.html
…wait, what? If you’re having to flush 10-15 times, the problem isn’t the toilet, it’s you.
Because you’re full of shit.
Year 36
Another trip ’round the sun. Another 525,600 minutes. One more candle on the cake.
Older? Yes.
Wiser? I’m not so sure.
News!
You Can Hear the Ocean is a new anthology from Brighten Press, and it includes a poem I wrote about the Mediterranean, as well as other amazing work from poets both past and present.
The anthology is available from the publisher’s website as well as on Amazon in both print and Kindle forms.
B. Bever, poet 