Where I Became a Playwright

Watching the Houston Astros in the World Series for the first time ever reminds of the place where I became a playwright, just like my hero. Not the easiest spot to choose, mind you, but I saw a future in entertainment there. Now it's coming true they tell me; a real-live "entertainment district" to put Dallas to shame.

"The Ugly Tattoo Blues"

Nothing you can say will stop somebody from getting a tattoo, but many regret it later. Tattoo removal is more painful than the application. Enduring the procedure often leads the sufferer to say getting a tattoo in the first place was the stupidest thing he ever did.

It's enough to give you "The Ugly Tattoo Blues".

Getting Better

A great benefit I get from posting material to the internet is the chance to make it better. Switching from the creative to the editing mode accounts for much of this, of course, as does time away from the project. The brain continues to work on it even when I'm consciously focussing on other things.

Sometimes a poem's up there many months before I print it out to read at some event. That usually involves a pointing up; two really. One before I read, and one after.

Sometimes I even get feedback. Like how bad a poem is. That's a cue to go in and spiff it up.

The biggest contributions to the improvement process are growth and experience. Writing poetry--and lyrics and plays, too--contibutes greatly to my emotional, psychological, and intellectual development. My "head moves" in between readings. I'm a different person--perhaps a touch more aware--the next time I pick something up. Now it looks juvenile; then it looked ready.

I'm also growing as a poet: pursuing different genres, delving into diverse topics, reading other people's stuff. All this makes me a slightly better eye for editing, proofing, and polishing.

Of course there are always those "pieces" (hate that term) that just tumble out exactly as they should be and for all time. To get to those few I must slog through the rest.

Thanks to all for putting up with the chaff.

Cold Exterminator

According to Nancy Einhart, Senior Editor of Business 2.0, Source Naturals Wellness Formula is the answer to fighting off a cold once the symptoms have set in.

I'll know soon enough as I just started taking it. Three horse pills every three hours. Hope it works as I've had this bug now for weeks.

I may have to try a few more tricks before all is said and done.

http://www.sourcenaturals.com

What I'd Do With New Orleans

I'd make the low-lying drowned section into the new Naples--Florida, that is. Carve canals in place of the streets, raise the homesites a few dozen feet above sea level (no building below sea level!!). Let the rich people live there. That solves the class and race issues. If the rich people can't get away from hurricanes on their sail boats nobody can.

Lower- and middle-income housing I'd rebuild on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, just below Route 10. That looks to be well above sea level, and it would give them some buffer against future storms.

Polish up the French Quarter, sell it as a tourist destination once again, and voila! You're back in business.

Understanding the "The Curse of the Bambino"

"The Great Bambino"

To figure out "The Curse of the Bambino", consider the source. Babe "The Great Bambino" Ruth himself provides the key to understanding the collapse of Red Sox success after New York purchased his contract in 1920 — but not because of any mystical "curse". 

Ruth was both a great left-handed hitter and left-handed pitcher. Boston would never see these traits in one package, again, and would find it hard to attract either side of the equation to their team.

Great left-handed pitchers don't generally want to squander their careers at Fenway Park where home runs are so easy for right-handed hitters — whom they would inevitably be "platooned" to face — due to that "Green Monster" in left.

Left-handed hitters, meanwhile, are at a distinct disadvantage to their right-handed counterparts in Boston, as the distance to the fence in right field is considerably greater. To add to all this, Red Sox owners tended toward filling the hitting line-up with righties to maximize crowd enjoyment (and get bums in the seats).

That's great for the home field, but what about when the team goes on the road? Without a good mix of both righties and lefties on the mound and at the plate the team can't do the proper "platooning"* to compete well in away games. 

What happened when the Red Sox convinced a sufficient number of pitching aces and great left-handed hitters to join the team?** 

They won the World Series. 

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*any baseball team has a mix of right- and left- hitters and hurlers. This is partly natural and partly strategic: hitters often have better luck against opposite-handed pitchers — for a number of reasons — and certain defensive positions favor one wing or the other.
**being relatively small, and located downtown, the limited number of seats in Fenway Park has historically restricted ticket sale revenues needed to attract the sort of talent the Red Sox need to compete at home and on the road. As ticket prices soared across baseball, leading to the creative addition of seats, and new sources of revenue arose — cable, internet-driven, merchandising — Boston was better able to convince such talent to sign.

Heaven and Hell Joke

What's the difference between heaven and hell? In heaven all the policemen are British, the chefs are French, the car mechanics German, the lovers Italian, and everything's run by the Swiss.

In hell, however, the policemen are German, the cooks are British, the car mechanics are French, the lovers Swiss, and everything's run by the Italians.

I liked this joke so much I wrote a whole play about it.

Marxists Everywhere

I was shocked at first, but less and less surprised with each encounter, how many Marxists I find casually lounging about our American coffee shops. Didn't those ideas murder one hundred million people? (Not to mention completely impoverish them first and destroy their environment).

LIBRA: September 23 - October 22

Wild horses wouldn't drag the truth out of you. They couldn't. You've been defending yourself from knowledge of wrong-doing through a mixture of forgetting and re-creating plausible back stories for the current moment. Yet one skeleton still isn't in the closet. Repent.

From MetroWeekly.com, September 29, 2005 issue.

Memorize the Classics

" . . if you wanted to draw a lesson from Anonymous, it might be this: read and memorize as many classics as you can, in as many languages as you can. They may keep you going better than canned kohlrabi." Gabriele Annan's conclusion to her take in The New York Review of A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, an anonymous account of life in the post-war rubble, fending off drunken Russian soldiers.

Politics in Art

"Politics in Art" always bothered me, at least since I've been old enough to care about Nazism and Communism and such. So did so-called "slam" poetry" when I first encountered it on the L.A. open-mic circuit. Just seemed like a lot of guys aping other guys with made-up urban angst and all-to simulated rhymes and rhythms. 

Seemed angry, too. And distant from their true feelings. 

I, on the other hand, had made my rather surprising detour into poetry largely because I had so much in me that had to get out, and I couldn't see any other way of doing it. 

Then, in Charlottesville, Virginia, I wound up "hanging" with some true slammers. What they were doing didn't make any sense at first through my prejudicial haze, but then I read one guy's poetry from a book he was published in. 

That's when I decided to try some. 

My first "free verse" (or what I call "Beat") poem — "An End to War" — I consider today one of my all-time best. 

What it opened up, though, was "politics in art", political rants and such, just what I'd hoped to avoid doing with my poetry. But, I've always been somewhat politically-minded — government was my major in school, after all — and quick with an opinion on what's going on in the world. So there you have it. 

May the Muse forgive me.

Liberal Arts of Yore

Trivium
LANGUAGE:
--grammar
--rhetoric
--dialectic ("logic")

Quadrivium
MATHEMATICS:
--arithmetic
--geometry
--music
--astronomy(cosmology)

Scholastics
SCIENCE:
--philosophy
--theology

See The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had.

The Muse

"Muse" means the one who remembers. The nine Muses are the daughters of the titan Mnemosyne, who is the personification of remembrance. All nine have a science or an art to protect:

1. Cleo protects the stories of heroes
2. Urania astronomy
3. Calliope elegies
4. Melpomene the tragedies
5. Euterpe flute playing
6. Erato love poems
7. Tepsicore choir lyrics
8. Thalia the comedies
9. Polyhymnia dance and music.

See Bullfinch's The Age of Fable

Telling Stories in a Baseball Poem

The home run Kirk Gibson hit to win the first game of the 1988 World Series was the most spectacular athletic achievement I'd ever experienced — even if I was home watching it on television.

Hurt in the locker room, legs in ice, he wasn't even in the line-up. When he improbably swaggered out, he couldn't take a practice swing without hurting. He was barely able to run to first base on a foul ball.

How could this man possibly save the day?

To find out you have to hear me read my narrative poem "The Man Who Gave All the Dreamers in Baseball Land Bigger Dreams to Dream", which I modeled on Ernest Thayer's classic "Casey at the Bat". Writing parodies of his most-popular poem has become almost a side industry.*

The idea for it came from an article in USA Today chronicling the greatest home runs of all time. Third on the list was Gibson's. Dodgers catcher Mike Scioscia was quoted as saying:

". . it was like 'Casey at Bat,' but this time 'Casey' hit it out."

That's what gave me the idea. Those who watched that remarkable event on TV always tell me how much they appreciate my poem.**

My thanks — and apologies — go out to Ernest Thayer.

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*my rather poor attempt at one has been published with others in Baseball Almanac.
**which sticks faithfully to what actually happened.