Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 67

Another Poem

I'm writing poems at the moment. Here is one:

October Signs

On a day like this --
the low sky spitting cold rain,
November in October --
the demonstrators outside
the City-County building look miserable.
So does the guy
standing at the freeway exit ramp,
his sign asking for money,
theirs for justice.

I keep hoping this country's heart
would be open and generous
like a golden autumn day,
not hunched down, closed in, cold.

I wrote it yesterday, riding the bus home from an appointment in Minneapolis. The day was, in fact, cold and gray, more like a November day than an October day.

I'm writing poems at the moment. Here is one:October Sign...

I'm writing poems at the moment. Here is one:

October Signs

On a day like this --
the low sky spitting cold rain,
November in October --
the demonstrators outside
the City-County building look miserable.
So does the guy
standing at the freeway exit ramp,
his sign asking for money,
theirs for justice.

I keep hoping this country's heart
would be open and generous
like a golden autumn day,
not hunched down, closed in, cold.

I wrote it yesterday, riding the bus home from an appointment in Minneapolis. The day was, in fact, cold and gray, more like a November day than an October day.

Fred Ho

The wonderful saxophonist and composer Fred Ho is ill with cancer. He's 54, too young to be so ill. I wrote a poem:

Cancer shouldn't take down
like guy like you,
six foot plus
and wide through the shoulders,
with a sax like a machine gun,
like Monkey willing to shake up heaven
and travel ten thousand miles
to bring truth to the people.

You should outlast illness
like a Taoist sage,
kick ass
like a Shaolin master,
blow that sax
like it's the International
sung by all the planet's people together.

The dragon king
of the Eastern Ocean
should bow his crowned head
and carry you
beyond mortality.

The poem is flamboyant. So is Fred Ho. I am really hoping he beats this. He is someone we need. If I had a way to reach Monkey or the dragon king, I'd be asking for their help. Where are all the Taoist sages when you need them?

Cosi fan Tutte

I went to the opera last Sunday. It was Cosi fan Tutte, a Mozart opera about how women are all unfaithful. The two young heroes decide to test the loyalty of their girl friends by pretending to go away, then courting the girls, disguised as Albanian soldiers. Of course the girls fall in love with the Albanians, and then the ruse is revealed. The master mind of all this, the cynic Don Alfonso, then says, "Cosi fan Tutte, thus do all woman," and suggests everyone get happily married. A noxious plot. So I wrote this poem:

The two girls married their soldiers
and settled down to be happy,
though their eyes still roved a little.

The baker's boy had handsome shoulders.
That noble sat on his horse like a centaur.
Every dance was like a banquet table
spread with delicious dishes --
flourishing mustaches, lusterous hair,
bodies like Adonis, angel faces.

Only Don Alfonso seemed ugly.
Cynical and malicious, he was not invited
to either of their houses.

*

In spite of everything, they remained faithful,
asking only this of their husbands:
to come each night to the marriage bed
in costume:
Albanian soldiers. Turkish merchants,
Russians in furs, Indian sachems,
almost naked with feather crowns.

It cost a fortune.
How Don Alfonso would have laughed,
if he had known.
But the soldiers had learned their lesson
and kept quiet.

Every evening, as the girls dressed for bed
they wondered, who would visit?
A Chinese mandarin?
A prince from Africa?
And English lord, full of ice and manners?

"Cosi fan tutte," they told their husbands.
"This is the way it is."

Weather Report

A lovely day, grey-white clouds and a bright blue sky. The current temp is 47.

The Denver police and Colorado state troopers broke up the Occupy camp in Denver.

I had a busy day yesterday, running errands in downtown Minneapolis, then attending a meeting of the Wyrdsmiths, my writing group. As always happens when the Wyrdsmiths meet, I drink coffee in the evening and can't get to sleep. Though one other member says she can't get to sleep, either, and it isn't caffeine, it's the buzz that happens when you have a good time with other people.

In any case, I woke up this morning tired and disinclined to do anything. Maybe a run to the grocery store. Maybe some work on writing.

I think, when I had a job, I paced myself; and I have to do the same now. I'm not one of those vibrate, active senior citizens, able to keep going all day. I need time to read and think and maybe nap.

Occupy Minnesota

I had to be in Minneapolis today, so stopped by Occupy Minnesota. It's a small group right now, spread across the plaza, and they look as if they have settled in for a long stay. There's a food station, a first aid station, a media station and a sign-in table, also heaps of picket signs and bright blue tarps.

They said they needed coffee, so I went to a nearby Caribou Coffee and bought two cardboard containers of coffee and took them over to the food station. They thanked me and offered me food. I took a piece of a bagel. Next time I come, I will being bagels as well as coffee.

A woman handing out "Stop War" stickers told me there will be rally Friday at 3 pm.

Cops arrested 300 people at the Boston occupation, and New York is telling the demonstrators they have to move out of the Liberty Part while it is cleaned. After, they can come back, but cannot have tents or sleeping bags and cannot lie down on the ground or benches.

This is about what I figured would happen. If the demonstrations didn't simply wind down, the cities would close them down.

If the occupations can't be maintained, then I think there will have to be daily demonstrations and other actions.I'm trying to remember how this was done in the 1960s and what I've read about the 1930s.

Occupy Minneota

I had to be in Minneapolis today, so stopped by Occupy Minnesota. It's a small group right now, spread across the plaza, and they look as if they have settled in for a long stay. There's a food station, a first aid station, a media station and a sign-in table, also heaps of picket signs and bright blue tarps.

They said they needed coffee, so I went to a nearby Caribou Coffee and bought two cardboard containers of coffee and took them over to the food station. They thanked me and offered me food. I took a piece of a bagel. Next time I come, I will being bagels as well as coffee.

A woman handing out "Stop War" stickers told me there will be rally Friday at 3 pm.

Cops arrested 300 people at the Boston occupation, and New York is telling the demonstrators they have to move out of the Liberty Part while it is cleaned. After, they can come back, but cannot have tents or sleeping bags and cannot lie down on the ground or benches.

This is about what I figured would happen. If the demonstrations didn't simply wind down, the cities would close them down.

If the occupations can't be maintained, then I think there will have to be daily demonstrations and other actions.I'm trying to remember how this was done in the 1960s and what I've read about the 1930s.

Unemployment

Results of a poll in Pennsylvania, via the blogger Atrios:

The poll found that one in four Pennsylvania residents has had someone living in his or her household lose a job or be laid off in the last 12 months - and two out of three had close friends or family members who were put out of work in that time.

More than three out of every four Pennsylvanians said they knew individuals or families who struggle every month to afford basic needs such as rent, utilities, health care, clothes, or food.

"The poverty question was startling," said Joseph Morris, a professor and director of the college's Center for Applied Politics, which conducted the poll, "as was the fact that a strong majority of Pennsylvanians have had to make lifestyle changes because of the economy."

This is something I've been saying all along. If you have 10% unemployment -- or almost 20%, if you use the U6 figures -- then almost everyone knows someone who isn't working or isn't working enough. The exception is the upper middle class, who have an unemployment rate of 3%. But the vast majority of Americans have family members, neighbors, friends unemployed or underemployed. Of course, we care. We worry for the people we love. And our own lives are changed. We have a son living in the basement. a buddy who can't go out for beer, a neighbor who's being foreclosed. Because most ordinary people are generous, we help if we can, and we worry, and we get angry.

Happy news from the government does not make this situation better.

The Stars Abide (Courtesy NASA)

Thirteen years ago results were first presented indicating that most of the energy in our universe is not in stars or galaxies but is tied to space itself. In the language of cosmologists, a large cosmological constant is directly implied by new distant supernova observations. Suggestions of a cosmological constant (lambda) were not new -- they have existed since the advent of modern relativistic cosmology. Such claims were not usually popular with astronomers, though, because lambda is so unlike known universe components, because lambda's value appeared limited by other observations, and because less-strange cosmologies without lambda had previously done well in explaining the data. What is noteworthy here is the seemingly direct and reliable method of the observations and the good reputations of the scientists conducting the investigations. Over the past thirteen years, independent teams of astronomers have continued to accumulate data that appears to confirm the existence of dark energy and the unsettling result of a presently accelerating universe. This year, the team leaders were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. The above picture of a supernova that occurred in 1994 on the outskirts of a spiral galaxy was taken by one of these collaborations.

OWS # 2 - Facebook Notes

I went to the Occupy Minnesota demonstration Friday morning. When I was there, it was several hundred nice Minnesota people drinking coffee and chatting. Later on, apparently the group decided to march from the City-County Building to the Federal Bank Building and back. One guy told me he was planning to spend the night.

(Per Firedoglake, demonstrators are planning to stay at the Hennepin County Building plaza least three months, into the Minnesota winter. The key is good insulated sleeping bags.)

One of my facebook friends asked, "Is this finally it? Is this the socialist revolution?" I don't know what it is yet. But in the last half year we've had revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, ongoing demonstrations in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, strikes and demonstrations throughout Europe, the Madison mobilization and now demonstrations throughout the US. If nothing else, this is a lot of activity. It reminds me of 1968, but that was the end of something, and this feels more like the beginning.

I have been talking to old friends. We can remember when white working people were not supportive, when union members came after peace demonstrators with baseball bats. There were a lot of Americans in the 1960s who were not in favor of peace and civil rights.This looks much broader... And with better communication. I just found Occupy France. It is both an attempt to organize in France and to cover the US occupations for Francophones who don't know English.

One thing that heartened me Friday was a big tractor-trailer driving along one side of the plaza in Minneapolis, blowing its horn for the whole length of the block. A couple of minutes later, it showed up going the opposite direction, down the other side of the plaza and blowing its horn. Of course we all yelled and waved and raised our fists. I remember when truck drivers didn't much like young people with signs.

Massive student demonstrations in Chile, which I knew nothing about till ten minutes ago, when Patrick handed me a flash drive with two stories...

(The Chile protests have nothing to do with OWS, but they are part of many, many demonstrations worldwide.)

Bridge occupation in London today, protesting cuts to health care.They are using the "we are the 99%" slogan in solidarity with OWS.