Hooooo Hoooooo
Stay tuned for the “Mothers Day 2000” report from OWL (Older Women’s League), which will soon have, online, its analysis of how Bush’s hopes to privatize Social Security will devastate the financial stability of older women. From the OWL site:

Social Security Privatization and Women
As OWL members know, women are the face of Social Security, comprising 60 percent of beneficiaries over 65 and 72 percent of recipients over 85. Women depend on Social Security's guaranteed, lifetime benefits: 27 percent of women over 65 rely on Social Security for 90 percent of their retirement income. A comprehensive discussion of Social Security and its future cannot be had without women's realities, perspectives, and needs being made perfectly clear. OWL's 2002 Mother's Day report will prove instrumental in this discussion.

For those of you not versed in feminist mythology, the owl is associated with Lilith, the first “uppity woman,” whose identity merges with that of the Crone.

Blueprint for Children

Tonight, David Letterman begins his monologue with “Tomorrow is Mother’s Day – that’s the day we honor the person who we blame for all of our personal problems.”

I was one of those kids who felt as though she must be a changeling or else adopted. My dreams were never my mother’s dreams. My “otherness” confused her, angered her, frustrated her, disappointed her, made her cry. My mother seemed to see me as an appendage of hers; she couldn’t understand my independent will, my need to separate myself from my family’s strong conservative attitudes.

I couldn’t wait to go away to college, but as glad as I was to leave home, I still wished that my mother would somehow come to understand me and accept me for who I was. And so, my freshman year, I sent her a copy of Kahil Gibran’s The Prophet for Mother’s Day.

And on the book’s flyleaf, before my signature preceded by “Love,…” I copied the following from the section On Children:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Since my mother has always been a committed Catholic, I figured that Gibran’s language style and references to a capital He might make the passage have the ring of “sacred truth” for her. It didn’t work.

It didn’t work for her, but it worked for me and the way I have tried to view my own children.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

Today CNN reported that A U.N. summit approved a new blueprint late Friday to improve the world for children in the next 15 years. The agreement came after contentious negotiations between the United States and other nations on sex education, abortion and the death penalty.

Succumbing to conservative pressure, the United States stood in opposition to the180 nations that adopted – by consensus and with a round of applause -- the final summit document, "A World Fit For Children." However, at the insistence of the United States, the intent of the original document regarding "health and reproductive services" was diluted to skirt the issue of abortion counseling, and, in addition, the United States is excluded from a requirement barring the death penalty or life imprisonment for those under the age of 18.

"A World Fit for Children" – except if they live in the United States, where an adult minority of small minds and stagnant souls refuse to acknowledge that life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

A Basil Reader

I planted my garden today. That’s the grave-sized garden that we who live in this hotel-sized, up-scale senior warehouse are allotted if we sign up before they’re all taken. (The only reason I I live here because I take care of my 86-year old mother, who lives across the hall from me. I try not to dwell on where I dwell.)

I planted my garden today, and that means that now I have an excuse to dig in dirt, sweat in sun, smell growing things -- parsley, that, having weathered the winter, already has claimed its place at the center of things – new lavender buds poking through old growth – melissa (lemon balm) that I plant in honor of my daughter – the usual rosemary, sage, and thyme – and most of all basil. Lots of basil. Basil for pesto. Basil for tomato sauces. Basil for cold chicken and pasta salad. Basil for herbed vinegar. Mostly basil. And tomatoes. Beef steak tomatoes to eat with the basil, fresh mozzarella, and olive oil.

I planted my garden today. It’s mostly basil. According to a website called Horsetail Heaven, In Italy, a pot of basil placed on a balcony signaled that a woman was ready to receive suitors…. In India holy basil is considered a sacred herb and at one time was used to protect the dead from evil. It is still found growing around temples ….Early Greeks and Romans believed that a good basil crop would only develop if the gardener shouted and cursed while sowing the seeds.

I neither sowed nor cursed; I went to the local greenhouse and bought a dozen basil plants. And six beefsteak tomato plants. That pretty much takes up most of a grave-sized garden.

Except for Pan (and a pink calla lily bulb that a friend of mine gave me). An infant Pan has reigned over my basil-laden herb gardens for the past five years, which seems appropriate, given his connections to the Mediterranean region from which basil mythology springs. Each year, I plant him to watch over my grave-sized garden. Perhaps, one day, someone will think to plant him on my garden-sized grave. Along with basil. Lots of basil. And maybe a pink calla lily.

Gonzo for the public sector?
Based on my experiences working with "public information and outreach" for a government education bureaucracy, I've been doing lot of thinking about how very appropriate Cluetrain's philosophy and the Gonzo Marketing approach is to the public sector. Does anyone one know if there's been any thought in that direction?

Macromedia sticks a toe in the Gonzo Marketing sea.

Well, they at least them seem to be trying to get the first part of what Chris Locke has been saying to businesses in Gonzo Marketing. An interview with Locke in the current online issue of The Guardian (which the Bombast guy calls the “best article on my checkered career to date") includes the following quote from Locke that pretty much sums up that first part.

What I'm telling them is: drop this invasive, intrusive advertising - it's not going to work any more - and build relationships around shared interests, and that will create good will towards your company. Instead of turning people off, you can turn them on by hooking them up and getting out of the way. And if this works, I see trillions of dollars shifting towards a bottom-up artistic web renaissance. What could come out of that is a cultural flowering that we can't imagine, just as the middle ages couldn't imagine the Renaissance. I don't think that's a whacked-out vision.

According to wired.com, Macromedia (the company that makes Flash and Shockwave) is going to use weblogs to provide a forum for the managers to discuss the new products, show developers how to use some of the new features and answer questions. Most importantly, the community managers would write like bloggers, with that casual, this-great-idea-just-occurred-to-me tone which sometimes makes weblogs so addictive…… Macromedia asks only that its bloggers keep their postings relevant -- no blogging about what they ate for breakfast, in other words. They're free to discuss any aspect of the software…

I think that it remains to be seen whether Macromedia will be successful in getting to the next level that Locke insists is of utmost importance – keeping the “voice” free. As reviewed online in Tom’s New Commonplace Book, On one level, Gonzo is a mythic tale of the reallocation of voice. The power to speak that the giants of mass marketing and mass media tore from us – the rape of voice – is envisioned restored to the multifarious intelligences of the Net.

One can’t help waiting to see just how much freedom Macromedia will allow its blog voices.

Tin Men and Fallen Angels
There are certain men that capture my attention and interest almost immediately. My women friends tell me that, from their perspective, it is the “arrogance” of these men that attracts me. And, for sure, on the surface, there is the appearance of arrogance. But is it only appearance.

Tin Men and Fallen Angels
She is drawn to the dramas
of Tin Men and Fallen Angels,
the loose threads of their dreams
tangling too easily
with the thickets of her own.

Their gestures hint at faded grace.
Their eyes belie the freedom of their stride.
Their touches fire the sun,
birthing shadows fierce as flame.

She flies into those shadows
like a bat
out for blood.

And so she cannot turn her hand
from the sweep of sky
that sheds his battered wings,
cannot hide from his shadow,
so dense it masks her senses,
stretches the edges of scars,
stirs her skin open
to the haunting lure
of a lone tin man,
a feckless
fallen
angel.

During the twenty-something years after my divorce, I managed to get entangled with two such men. I’ve lost track of one of them, although I believe he still spends the summers in the cabin that he remodeled into an elegant A-frame. He is the one who gave me the antlers. He is the one with whom I once spent April in Paris. We went dancing in a ballroom on the Champs Elysees after a day of window shopping among all of the best designers. Rode up the Eiffel Tower late at night, lost in the lights of the city, in the drama of the journey.

The other I keep track of on the web. He’s an ex-priest and astounding artist. He finally married the ex-nun who continued to love him through all of his various adventures, one of which was me. I run into them every once in a while. She looks at me coldly. But he and I still smile at the strange, short, and passionate time we spent together. I stirred his interest in non-Christian mythology, some of which he began to incorporate into his paintings. He paints big – I mean BIG. Canvases that cover walls. At least he used to. He lives big, open. At least he did. I don’t know how he lives now, and I haven’t been to one of his exhibits in a while. I only know how he still paints. And how he stirred my soul.

Pan Makes a Personal Appearance
To think it was you I summoned!
All those incantations,
those spells dispatched
to shift the stars,
returned as this immortal face,
this ancient tale.

To think the gods still answer prayers!
Make bright, deft-handed landings
right before my eyes,
fall haloed and goat-footed
deep into my mark,
breathing mischief and mayhem,
and bold, bewildering dreams.

Angel, satyr, shepherd,
your music stirs the skin.
Play your syrinx
now for me, my kin.

We will dance, dance,
to your tune.

Reading Chris Locke’s/Rage Boy’s Bombast Transcripts brought me eye to word with someone whose persona, at least, seems to define him as one of those men who, indeed, are so open to, in love with, entranced by, plagued by life, the world, people, contradictions, possibilities, ……..that their passion and energy pull like a magnet, make us want to know more about what’s under the next layer, and the next, and the next…..

On the oldies radio station I have on, Don McClean is singing “Vincent.” Poets and artists dancers and ranters. Tin Men and Fallen Angels. Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t live without ‘em.

(poetry copyrighted by Elaine Frankonis)

I’ll trade you a Foucault for two Erving Goffmans
The pop culturization of the international egghead class has begun. So begins an article in my local paper about (according to the site) free downloadable trading cards depicting theorists and concepts close to the hearts of people interested in social and cultural theory, gender and identity, and media studies.

Of course, I immediately thought of AKMA, Steve Himmer, and Mike Sanders, especially since Card # 5 is the “Postmodernity Card.” And, of course, there’s always Card #3, the “Michael Foucault” card. My favorites, of course, are # 11, the "bell hooks” card, and #22, the "plastic.com" card, which includes – RageBoy take note – the word “fucknozzels!”

They’re looking for more cards, which you can design and send to them, using a format described on the site. Do you hear that, Gary Turner, creator of "blogstickers?" Oh, and “cards about people who are not old white men are encouraged!”

Oh Yeah!
I love this quote, lifted from the site of the Heartless Bitches:

Here's the thing: If you ever get me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do with me." -- Maxine (in "Being John Malkovich")

Depth Charges
On Blogsisters, Jeneane Sessum posts about Helene Cixous, whose urgings and urges find their visceral marks in the writings of such as Chris Locke, Mike Golby, and Jeneane herself -- bloggers who careen headlong down those brambled, precipice-riddled paths of memory and desire, prodding our pulses with their raw prose and challenging our own emotional inhibitions with their soul-full honesty. What they mean is what they say. Unlike my word trips that have always tended to slide along within the protective cover of metaphor.

Take Spring, which always seems to put me in a funk; it always overwhelms me with its sweetness, its promise, its newness, its hope. Yet, despite the prolific stirrings of nature, I have never felt any kind of passion generated by that season. It offers me heavy pregnancy but not heady passion.

Waiting for the Fall
I was never one to yearn for spring,
the sky too full of eager wings,
the air a burden of song.
Even the ground swells, straining
under a yoke of seeds.

I wake with the winds of autumn,
when a cold sun
fades the trees to clarity,
when the line of the sky
cuts clean and sharp
above the leveled land,
when the earth is a slate
set for the poet’s chalk.

Leave me in spring
to wait for the season’s passing,
and look for me then,
when I turn with the leaves
and hold my mouth
to a hungry sky.

Maybe it’s that Spring is mating season, and, not having a mate at the moment, I’m out of synch with the season. Rather than feel fertile and rooted, I feel separate, untethered. There’s something major missing, something just beyond my grasp, something unspoken, some fundamental secret just beyond my ken.

The Hunter
On the rise beyond the stream
on Trout Mountain,
they say, he shot himself—
a still-young man
despaired of a world
too full of fear.

On the west wall of his cabin,
hang the antlers he tore
from some stalked fair game,
banging the nails bent
through thick bone,
clumsily shattered skull.

In the shifting summer light,
their shadows writhe
in fearsome memory.

(They say he loved the land,
the hunt, the kill.)

Some think the land is haunted, now.
They say they can feel the fear
in the heavy mountain mist,
hear it in the hollow scrape
of bone on stone.

(They say what he feared
he loved too much.)

When land was finally sold
(to someone starkly purged
of love and fear)
the new owner found a photo
face-down on a dusty shelf –
a stiff-faced young man
in an unforgiving setting,
sternly victorious over
his finally fearless prey.

And so I ask for the antlers,
chipped and weathered, now --
artifacts made unworthy
of either fear or love.

Is the answer hidden somewhere
in the pits of those old bones?
If I scrub them clean, soften the scars,
set them like icons on an altar
ringed with strings of stones,
will I dream one night
of some daring beast
who lifts me gently
on his gleaming horns
and tells me
the unspeakable secret?

Speaking of "Deep Throat"
According to the SF Gate,
John Dean, the White House counsel whose revelations about the Nixon presidency were the first flames in the volcano of Watergate scandal, is about to turn up the heat again by revealing the identity of Deep Throat. .....At an L.A. Times book festival discussion of "Abuse of Power, Then & Now" -- including panelists Oliver Stone and Arianna Huffington, moderated by Chronicle Columnist Bob Scheer -- Dean said "The Deep Throat Brief" will be published online by Salon.com on June 17

Nixon and Watergate: now there's a scenario that's really obscene.

Go Transgenics!
In the Dark Angel's season finale tonight, Joshua, the artist/transgenic who looks an awful lot like the "beast" in the old "Beauty and the Beast" TV series of several years ago, paints a red, white, and blue flag with a white dove that I wish would be published online as an image that could be copied. I'd love to have it in my site. They should promote it as a symbol around which all anti-violence "outsiders" could rally.

Hee Hee!
I just have to share this Comment that "Uncle Sam"left on my blog about Linda Lovelace's death .

You should be ashamed of yourself for likin pornography.
This is is the type of material that weaknes us so that the Muslims can take over.
-Uncle Sam

Now, what am I supposed to make of that? No email address; two misspellings in the two-line Comment; no "voice" and no Comment feature on his/her own site. I guess he/she is either (1) a terrorist posing as an American in order to undermine our democratic right to free speech, (2) a complete illiterate idiot and an embarrassment to the American educational system, or (3) someone trying, unsuccessfully, to demonstrate a sense of humor. No wonder he/she chooses to hide behind anonymity.

And just to make it perfectly clear, I never said that I liked pornography.

Even if it's not real, it's still true.
b!X emailed me the following, attributing it to Nazi monster Hermann Goering. I don't know if Goering ever really said it, but even if he didn't, he could have, and it's still true:

Why of course the people don't want war! Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

Almost Famous
Thanks to my blogfriend Anita Bora, who writes for rediff.com, Blog Sisters and Kalilily Time got some play in that online magazine this month. The article also links to Mike Golby, Gary Turner, Anita (of course), and b!X.

It always amazes and delights me how these loosely joined pieces keep constantly reconfiguring and reconnecting. The feature article, written by Nidhi Taparia Rathi, profiles the online experiences of three "older generation" netizens, including me. How cool is that!

Inside Out and Upside Down
While Blogsisters readies its first ever monthly Burning Issues soapbox (Turn Beauty Inside Out), b!X finally gets around to finding something he thinks is worth posting, and it’s a glimpse into an alternate universe, where the assumptions of the corporation's mission are inverted. His post explains that the manner in which we have structured the entities known as "corporations" is not some sort of inherent natural law, but one we have deliberately created. And it is one that is in no sense the only way in which a free market "corporation" can be constructed.

The “inverted” version, as he quotes from The Divine Right of Capital , certainly gives one pause.

Brave Hearts
Shelley Powers, Tom Shurgart, and stavrosthewonderchicken all have beat me to making this post acknowledging the uncanny talent that both RageBoy and Mike Golby have for peeling back their skin and letting you not only see, but feel what they're made of.

Chris Locke/RageBoy is a pioneer in publicly and purposefully dissolving the boundaries between his passions and the hearts of his readers:
For better or worse, I said, I am trying to live my life in public. Online. We've never had any channel for this. No models. And the models we need are not "model" lives but real ones. Uncertain and afraid, crippled, broken. Trying to make sense of our minds and our hearts and the world we encounter out here. Telling each other what it's like to be human. Making what we can with all we've got. Not shitting ourselves and each other with facile platitudes, easy formulas, empty slogans. A human life for all to see, for what it's worth. It may not be worth much, but that's what I'm doing here. Not a model life, but writing that shakes and shivers and burns and speaks for whatever life we have.

I have just finished reading both the Cluetrain Manifesto and Bombast Transcripts , which I promised Chris I would. Soon I will post my reactions to those texts, as I promised Chris I would.

Just Curious.
Who is Samuel Mcauley and why is he leaving very brief compliments in my Comments without indicating contact information?

I like tracking down people I don't know who leave comments because they usually have compelling blogs of their own. So, who are you and where are you hiding?

Lapham hits the mark, as usual
Jason of museunlimited pointed me to an article by Lewis Lapham in this month's Harper's which analyzes Ashcroft's and Bush's crusade mentality. There are two quotes from that article that particular grabbed me:

I happened to read "The Psychology of War," a study of the ways in which human beings adjust their interpretations of reality in order to recognize the mass murder of other human beings as glorious adventure and noble enterprise. First published in 1992 but fortunately brought back into print this year by the Helios Press, the book, written by Lawrence LeShan, draws a distinction between the sensory and the mythic perceptions of war. Let war become too much of a felt experience, as close at hand as the putrid smell of rotting flesh or the presence of a newly headless corpse seated in a nearby chair, and most people tend to forget to sing partiotic songs.

and

Because the civilian population finds itself drafted into service as the target of opportunity for terrorists armed with asymmetric waeapons, we're being asked to believe that we're opposed by Morgoth and the Corsairs of Umbar rather than by an incoherent diaspora of desperate human beings, most of them illiterate and many of them children, reduced to expressing their resentment in the impoverished vocabularies of violence. Best not to see our enemies as they are; better to go quietly into the caves of myth thoughtfully prepared by our news media and our schools, there to find, praise be to Allah, our comfort, our salvation, and our glory.

See also Jasons post on the Politics of Fear.

There is a fraternity of us, the abyss walkers....
from Outer Banks by Anne Rivers Siddons

There is a fraternity of us, the abyss walkers. In our eyes, the world is divided by it, made up of those who walk frail, careening rope bridges over the abysses and those who do not. We know each other. I do not think it is a concsious thing with us, this knowing, at least not most of the time, or we would flee from each other as from montsers. It is an animal thing. It is only on that wild old neck-prickling level that we meet. It is only in our eyes that we acknowledge that our twin exhalations have touched and mingled. Sometimes, though not often, one of the others, the non-abyss people, will know us too. You may even know the feeling yourself; you may have met someone about whom otherness clings like miasma; you can feel it on your skin though you can't name it. When that happens, you have me one of us. You may even be one of us, down deep and in secret. The other half of the world, the solid, golden half, the non-abyssers...they feel nothing under their feet but solidity. They inherit the earth. We inherit the wind.

Anne Siddons is someone I read during those lazy summer days when I don't want to think too hard; I just want to be entertained. But the above quote is something that must have caught in my thoughts one summer because I found it typed up and lost among my many drafts of many poems. I like the notion of "abyss-walkers." It kind of goes along with my view of myself as a "rim-walker" -- definitely NOT one of the "solid golden half."

A Sense of Scent
This afternoon, I walked over to check on my grave-sized garden. The parsley patch I planted last year was already up and dancing in the wind. In the corner, small green sprouts of new lavender peered through layers of winter-grayed spikes. I held one of the new lavender leaves up to my nose. I love the smell of lavender, only in part because one of the great romantic adventurers of my life loved it too. The scent lingering in my memory prompted me to unearth this poem I wrote in the early 90s.

The Sense of Scent

She thought she was done with him,
but one night the moon rose
clear and full-faced,
and an early autumn wind
swept the scent of lavender
through her open window.

Some times are harder than others
to sit silent,
hands clenched against
the lure of the pen,
mouth set against
the call of the phone,
thinking to oneself
that some things are better
left to silence,
to the slow decay of time,
the turning of moons
and lavender seasons.

But even in the darkest of corners
some things refuse to die –
some small husk still
riddled with seeds,
some insistent root
defying the dust,
some dormant dream
of a riotous clash of hearts,
curious clutch of minds,
a dance of hands that
hope and hold and, too soon,
let go.

She thought she was done with him,
except his voice
still pulls at her belly
like the insistent tides of the moon.
So when he calls
from places lush
with a thousand thriving things,
she sends him dewy lavender
wrapped in familiar black lace,
because, they say,
the sense of smell
is the most visceral,
holding even the darkening
memory of the dying.

Sigh. Spring.