Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

�� Arthur C. Clarke, "The Nine Billion Names of God" ��






My chapbook, The Language of Exile, is available from Main Street Rag. I like to trade chapbooks. I want yours. I want it now ....

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2011-05-01, 2:00 p.m.:
The wonders of the Internet for research purposes, aka the Finding of Lost Things.

I found a book I read as a tween or teenager with only the following details to search by: set in Greece during some sort of 20th century conflict; heroine Melia.

Just about five minutes of googling led me to the goldmine.

The description thereof:

Set in 1936, the story centres on a family living on a Greek Island whose members react in different ways to the changing political climate after a Fascist dictatorship is installed. Nine-year-old Melia, the narrator, fears for her beloved cousin Niko who is in the resistance movement and has had to go into hiding, Grandfather, Mama and Stamatina hate what is happening, so too does their father, but he is concerned he will lose his job at the bank if he is not seen to outwardly comply with the new rules and regulations. Great-aunt Despina doesn�t see what all the fuss is about and Melia�s older sister, Myrto proudly joins the Fascist Youth organisation at school unaware of the sinister undertones of the fascist doctrine.

Combined with changing life on the Greek island due to the war, is the portrayal of the idyllic summer holidays Melia spends in Lamagari with her friends Artemis, Manoli, Odysseus and little Aurora. The stuffed Wildcat in a glass cabinet holds a place of honour in the family home and comes to symbolize the spirit of freedom that was kept alive in Greece after the Fascist dictatorship came to power.

Alki Zei successfully combines humour � the bumbling policemen as they tail the children up the mountainside � with the chilling image of books being burnt in the town square, including Grandfather�s beloved �ancients� and Myrto�s changing character as she is slowly indoctrinated with the fascist beliefs. The author skilfully weaves a story of every-day events set against a backdrop of the changing political situation in Greece, a land where democracy originated but that is now slowly being eroded.

On Amazon, I could confirm immediately that this was the very book since those Dell paperback covers from the 1970s - the Golden Years of my youthful reading, in 6th grade, in junior high, as freshman in high school - are all now imprinted in the deepest hidden pockets of my memory core. (The S.E. Hinton books, that book 'Deena' about the girl who is diagnosed with Scoliosis, 'Island of the Blue Dolphins,' 'Johnny Tremain,' 'The Witch of Blackbird Pond,' 'Why Have the Birds Stopped Singing?')

Here the dell cover:

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2011-04-08, 9:03 a.m.:

"Finally, we have found some part of medicine in which our system is as efficient as France�s."

Gail Collins, "Medicine on the Move." There's no way around it: Gail Collins funny.

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2011-03-24, 10:03 a.m.:
Addendeum on "Burden of Dreams," below:

This incredible speech comes right at end the documentary detailing the, if not doomed, than difficulty- and despair-ridden shoot in which success never appeared near at hand, nothing was ever done easily even when it might have been, and Herzog by the end seemed ready to turn his back on (his "failed" attempts at) filmmaking forever. The speech is so much more moving and memorable as it shows that he, too, has become Kurtz in the jungle. That we all do, eventually.

That he has gone in there to chronicle it - the bigness of it, the sheer size of the feelings and dreams involved, of the utter butt-fucked-up-ness of the human condition, like a tragic operatic plot: like "Pagliacci" who is set for doom yet still so laughable, so ludicrous; like tattered, run-down Tosca; like Mimi who will never have any real hope and whom love will NOT redeem ...

That he has gone in there to do this thing because he is willing to make this sacrifice, and because he cannot do other than make this sacrifice - for us. And I am duly grateful.

I can't wait to see "Fitzcarraldo" again. And the long, the nearly war-length version of "Apocalypse Now." The doc is called "Burden of Dreams," by the way. Herzog is one of my heroes. I have put "My Best Friend, Klaus Kinski" in my Netflix queue. There was far too little crazy bug-eyes Klaus in this documentary for my taste!

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2011-03-24, 9:48 a.m.:
I supported tsunami effects in what turns out nowadays to be a plethora of avenues to helping. I "rounded up" at local retailers, I added a $10 donation at Ideal Market, I bought several items (Japan soccer league t-shirts for the boys) whose entire proceeds go to relief efforts, and I bought various curiosities and objects of obscure desire from my favorite in-Japan retailer, J-List (little travel chopsticks, Hello Kitty watch, odd doll-related art photobooks, manga merch, old-fashioned kid toys like that low-tech telephone-on-a-string game, some tasty flake-style flavorings to go on top of rice. (I also gave a $20 to a girl on a Boulder streetcorner holding a sign that read, "Never thought I'd sink so low, " but this is maybe neither here nor there. It did shock Ronan out of his backseat five-year-old reverie, however, and led to many interesting discussions that easefully circled back on Japan and the tsunami.)

A good chunk of J-List proceeds go to tsunami relief. It just feels good to support Japanese business, and not just Sony (whose travel headphones I was forced to buy at the airport last weekend). Not that Sony is not deserving.

But how to get it all to the little guy? Won't logistics, as well as fuel and water rights, be the main raging issues over which wars are fought in the coming centuries? Who cares about religion? Even the realist in me is thinking these cult-backed convictions sweeping the face of the earth will fade in prominence once grave, life-ending shortages of vital goods are the way of the world and not just in global pockets of want that the rest of us can (still) conveniently ignore

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2011-03-18, 11:00 a.m.:
Watching "Burden of Dreams," the documentary about the making of "Fitzcarraldo" deep in the South American rainforest with a surly, germophobic Klaus Kinski and a mass of local tribesmen becoming unhappier by the day (their women not being on location to chew and ferment their beloved cane sugar drink for them, their one soccer ball having deflated, and generally living in such close quarters while work proceeded at a very slow pace).

In the middle, right before the section dealing with the chaotic and injury-ridden filming of Fitzcarraldo's boat being sacrificed to the river gods, Werner Herzog delivers this incredible speech:

Kinski always says it's full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just - Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and ... growing and ... just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they - they sing. They just screech in pain. It's an unfinished country. It's still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is - is the dinosaurs here. It's like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever... goes too deep into this has his share of this curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It's a land that God, if he exists has - has created in anger. It's the only land where - where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at - at what's around us there - there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of ... overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle - Uh, we in comparison to that enormous articulation - we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban ... novel ... a cheap novel. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication ... overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the - the stars up here in the - in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.

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