Contemptuous Coffee Table Books

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Last week’s post ended with a contemptuous: “You know what? The Chinese can keep their thought police. It’s time to recognize Taiwan.”

Now, speaking of contempt, in these quarantine lockdown times, here is a nurturing paragraph, but with righteous swear words, from the blog of best-selling writer John Scalzi: (Whatever, for April 26, 2020)

• All the above, incidentally, is why you have my official permission to tell all those people who are saying that you should develop a new hobby under quarantine and/or if you’re not doing six different things all very well, then you are wasting this precious gift of time, to fuck right off. Motherfuckers, I released a bestseller in quarantine and promoted the crap out of it and am negotiating some genuinely breathtaking business deals and I’m still mostly feeling like sleeping until 3 fucking pm in the afternoon and then going back under the covers an hour and fifteen minutes later. If you’re getting out of bed these days, you’re ahead of the game.

One of our local National Hockey League coaches would concur. “I’m pretty good,” Matt Brown replies. “And I keep telling people, ‘Pretty good is the new great’” 

Wes Gilbertson, in a sports article for page C1 of the Calgary Herald, May 9, writes ‘Sadness. Frustration. Boredom. Fatigue.’ 

He then quotes coach Matt Brown: 

“I think probably the most universal theme is that everyone, almost every day, goes through some sort of low-grade grief, and the reason is just that the emotion of sadness is always in response to loss…. 

If you look at our Flames players, for instance, the two things that they love most are playing hockey and being together. Both those things are taken away. Every day that you wake up, it’s another day that you’ve lost those things, so it’s a bit of a Groundhog Day of grief right now.

“As a result, what sadness does is it causes a drop-off in energy…. (By design) 

So we can process loss, so we can wrap our head around it…. So what people find unnerving is that you get high-functioning, very motivated people that suddenly have no energy. They know what they want to be doing…”

So, dear reader, let’s not have self-contempt. Note: The article covers the whole front page of the sports section, having much practical advice for coping with COVID-19.

Hello Reader,

Got pretty books?

Of course I’m proud to be a member of the human race—not like being a Martian—but still, sometimes I have contempt.

Oh, how I wish humankind could learn two simple things, just two: 

First is: ‘Don’t invade other countries,’ 

Second is: ‘Don’t introduce invasive species.’

So while the pretty peacenik with a guitar sings “Where have the native flowers gone?” hoping her fellow civilians will get a clue, I know the truth: 

All we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history.

… Here’s a poem from my Tracing the Martians of H.G. Wells poetry manuscript:

Coffee Table Books

Before I was born

there were books made for boys,

boys who wondered, “What’s it like on the inside?”

I saw how in a bomber fuselage

rivets and structural lines stretched along through rings,

with the turret gunner’s seat dangling like a swing.

The bombardier had a mattress to lie belly down on

looking through rings of plexiglas.

In a big cramped submarine

bunks lined the torpedo room,

with a sack of potatoes hanging inches

from a sailor’s nose.

They called their subs pigboats

as diesel fumes clung to their clothing.

A boy wants to see into the corners

of an airplane, submarine, battle-tank:

“What’s it like on the inside?”

An adult only wants to view the whole machine 

at a long glance,

posed clean and pretty on a stage,

in a coffee table book.

A grownup has trouble imagining 

the wreckage of war,

as I learned when they did a product-recall 

of a G.I. Joe battlefield command post: 

Toy soldiers with their map table and walkie-talkies 

were set in a jagged corner of an open brick building.

Grownups prefer their toys on a clean flat coffee table.

As a boy reading The Martian Chronicles

I learned that when adults saw newsreels of wars in China, 

they saw the footage as dim and unreal, too far away.

I felt war as a child 

during a nightmare in darkness.

I was with Danny Beck and Bobby Johansen 

and we were all crying.

We were soldiers by the black barn, 

and across the field was a creek.

And down in that dark creek, we knew, unseen, 

were the Germans. And we were in utter despair.

Adults live in their bright world of sunny 

coffee table pictures,

with no shadowed corners, 

never asking, “What’s it like on the inside?”

Sean Crawford

Calgary

May

2020

Atheism on Mars, Imperialism in Canada

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got love of creatures?

(Got distaste for imperialism?)

Love of Creatures

War of the Worlds Poem

...Pause for Blog Identification

Bonus material

Epilogue

Love of Creatures

There’s a church hymn, a “Doxology.” You may have read it or heard it. I have the words in my annotated copy of The Secret Garden.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow,

Praise Him all creatures here below

Praise him above ye Heavenly Host 

Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost

Amen

Here is a link to some singers; they repeat the lines.

The Secret Garden is set in Yorkshire, the same region where years later a famous veterinarian, who also wrote It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet, cribbed from another hymn for his book title, All Creatures Great and Small. Link to pictures as kids off camera are singing.

I must confess that after reading the doxology, my own poem seems dull. 

I composed in the shadow of the London Museum of Natural History, featuring respectful exhibits for Darwin and the balance of nature. The British even put Darwin’s ship on their five pound note: I think that’s because the British are, as a Columbian engineer told me, so empirical. They also had a coin (which I never saw) of Darwin facing an ape: I think that’s because they are “just saying no” to having Yankee imperialism from powerful Christians in the city of Washington and the state of Tennessee. 

Yes Virginia, the Yanks imperialize. 

Luckily, the United Kingdom is a “have nation,” as the U.S. federal government, in the name of "the people," denies aide funding to any nation where "the people" allow abortion. 

The republic of Ireland, 

(a catholic nation with an openly homosexual before-he-was-elected prime minister) 

last I heard, was about to “just say no” to the U.S. on that one, rather than have their innocent lonely girls going over to the U.K. for their (legal-in-the-UK) medical procedure) 

In my favorite “have nation,” Canada, according to the most recent Conservative party prime minister, abortion is legal and remains legal, with no opposing bills to be raised by the Conservatives in parliament, because the Canadian people do not want that can of worms opened. He did not, of course, apologize to our U.S. neighbours for our differing views on everyday life.

As for life far, far away from Earth, you may recall the sinister Martians of H.G. Wells were evolving into creatures with simplified digestive tracts (they only took in fluids) and great round heads.

War of the Worlds Poem

God’s Creatures

Camouflage meets eye

Stout armor meets teeth

Toxin dances with anti-toxin

Day mice dare the sky birds

Nocturnal mice meet the owl

A feather floats on currents of air

Centipede legs are fleet

Millipede legs will ram

Creatures circle and gyre

Island dodos grow larger

Across time dodos grow

Across space Martians grow

Heads grow as limbs shrink

Grow and increase and drink blood

Without God

...Pause for Blog Identification 

You are reading

Sean Crawford

Calgary

April

2020 

Bonus Material

Distasteful Yankee imperialism: 

During Obama’s administration, the U.S. built enough oil pipelines (according to someone I overheard) to reach to the moon. The only pipeline that was opposed? The one that would have reached over the U.S. to almost meet tidewater in Texas, to almost break the U.S. world monopoly on buying Canadian oil. (It stops at a refinery) Meanwhile, both Europe and the U.S. have oodles of pipelines, but Canada, with the longest coastline in the free world, somehow has no room for either of the three—count ‘em, three—pipelines that would have gotten the oil out to Canada’s tidal coasts, escaping American clutches. Two were killed, the last survivor has been on life support for a few years: We will see what happens. 

As for the one that stops in Texas, at least this week our province invested heavily to get that pipeline finally built. We'll see.

In Canada, when someone proposed to “follow the money” to see who was funding anti-pipeline efforts, it was the communists and other leftists who were opposed, and were quoted saying so in the newspaper. Sure, the leftists like transparency for others, but communism is an ideology, and as with any ideology, their reality is stone, transparency is opposed. 

Decades ago, the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, was supposed to give Canadians permission to legally have their own culture. But I read once in the paper that U.S.capitalists keep winning every time they oppose Canadian culture in court, such as, for example, a Canadian country and western magazine, so that Yankees can make money selling their own music magazine across the border. 

Well, maybe instead of country and western, young Canadian guitarists can sing the blues. A pity, for I had always thought it was charming how Canadian western culture did not mean “wildness” or six-guns being worn. Truly the CBC would never make a violent TV show about Paladin on Have Gun Will Travel “…a knight without armour in a savage land”)

Incidentally, here’s a link to that Paladin song the kids sing in the Stephen King movie Stand By Me. I used to sing it 

For my U.S. readers, if you are pleased with having your plausible denial, then OK, but if any of you wish to take a grownup interest in what your government is doing to imperialize in your name, then I think you might painlessly start with the arthouse feature film State of Siege. 

Here is a link to Roger Ebert’s movie review, at the very end of which some U.S. companies are mentioned, including (“but not limited to,” adds my Yankee lawyer) the United Fruit Company.  

(As it happens, a business executive in my toastmaster club did a seven minute speech on the imperialism of the United Fruit Company) 

Or view ( link to Ebert’s review) view the mainstream feature film Missing starring Jack Lemon and Sissy Spacek. 

Or view (link to) the comprehensive-to-a-fault C.I.A. documentary On Company Business.

You may wonder:

By my posting this essay, am I hurting the feelings of, offending, my dear longhaired leftist fellow Canadians? No, I’m sorry to say. No, because those imperialist leftists, according to my blog research, won’t read my site.

Epilogue

Speaking of church music, in these COVID days you may wish to have a virtual choir, like this Youtube (three minute) spiritual, which has how to make one at the top of the comments. 

This song is on the Odyssey-inspired 1930’s movie with George Clooney, Brother Where Art Thou?

The Uptight Aftermath

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got emotional suppression?

How do individuals, and communities too, become normal after things like an abuse or the loss of a town factory? I don’t know; I can only grasp parts of the truth.

To me it’s normal to be uptight and to insulate one’s emotions, for however long it takes to process healing inside… and of course to also change circumstances outside…

I can imagine someone processing things at one level while playing with his grownup toys and gifts. In my family when I was a boy any Christmas gifts with store-bought gift wrapping would be from the Legion or father’s workplace. Relatives used newspaper. In today’s War of the Worlds poem, I imagine all the fancy electronic toys have been rendered inert by a Martian magnetic pulse, and the economy shattered, worse than when Sherman marched through Georgia.

All my future poems to be posted here, of heroic survivors, will be from my last manuscript section, called After the Martians.

Uptight Man

In a boy’s mechano set

screws and nuts extend steel plates and girders.

After every Gameboy got pulsed out,

the kids enjoyed their flat black mechano engine.

Hook it in and wind it tight

to have a mechano moving truck.

Just swivel the black lever,

release the hidden spring—whir-r-r-r-r.

Maybe I grieve for lost dogs, and birdsong,

and Mother Nature, so bent over her walking stick.

She’s not the upright girl in the smooth green dress 

she used to be.

I grieve for gentle Uncle Jack. 

Maybe I miss my mum and dad,

and childhood,

and I don’t even know what I’m so sad about,

but I know I’ve lost something.

In my grief I am a mechano man,

wound up tight, unable to whirrr.

I still walk and talk like a man,

tough like the other guys,

to hide my flat spring heart.

Beneath the open ribs of a church,

with sagging stained-glass windows,

I tightly curve over my prayer book,

in a silent congregation of strangers.

Can a single blade of grass, poke through a wasteland?

Will a warm church of fellowship, ever form here?

I swivel my jaw, “Amen.”

A tear falls to the page.

Splat!

Everyone can hear it.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

March

2020

Two Footnotes: 

A book I regret not buying:

In a London library, I found a collection of pre-television children’s games, many more than I ever played. It was being discarded for a (dollar) pound but I had too many books at home, or so I thought at the time. Too bad, for I could have taken it from the shelf anytime the world was getting me down, the nerd reader’s way of having a playground in my mind. You know, like in the 1972 hit song. (link)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFONCfjewgM

A question posed by our principal which no child in my elementary school class could answer:

Where does nylon come from?

SIDEBAR ON TOYS

In place of big leggo, we had small red blocks like bricks that snapped together along the tops. The blocks came with a cardboard green roof you could cut to shape. 

The counters in the monopoly set were carved round wooden abstracts; the most “real” was a “milk bottle,” the houses and hotels were wooden too. In the affluent 1960’s there came along plastic toys, including a plastic cannon that did everything, including having a flip up grenade launcher. (like a fancy vacuum with attachments) That was the “Mighty Moe,” hence the song kids still sing today:

Jingle bells, 

Christmas smells, 

Santa Claus is dead,

Someone took a Mighty Moe 

and shot him in the head.

Plastic swept in during the 1950’s, and was still rolling along at the time of The Graduate. But the age of cheap plastic only lasted a few decades. Now toy soldiers are tiny, cheap and squished, and you just cannot collect figures in the cereal boxes anymore, not since the Arabs raised the price of oil.  

…Economic Interlude…

—Oh, if only the U.S. economists, capitalists and the public had WAITED, knowing from Pareto’s law that cartels don’t last more than a few years—I suspect the former two did know, as it would be business school 101, but didn’t tell the public— 

Instead of waiting, capitalists invested in big oil wells, the Arab cartel predictably broke up, and then the Americans needed to keep the price of oil HIGH so big capitalists could get their investment back—I suspect Americans then purposely inflated their money supply, without telling the U.S. public about the “mysterious new inflation,” to help with their balance of payments to the Arabs… 

(Of course, this all makes me sound like a conspiracy nut, I mean, surely someone else would have noticed while inflation was screwing with us. And raised the public’s ire. So you are welcome to check into my suspicions yourself) 

My favorite essay to leisurely “sneak up rather than throw truth in your face like a wet dishrag” is called Conspiracies and Inflation, mostly about inflation, not climate-gate, archived November 2013. https://essaysbysean.blogspot.com/2013/11/conspiracies-and-inflation.html

…End of Economic Interlude…

The pre-sweetened cereals never had the toys because those junk cereals could already count on kids to want them. I collected sports figures, Robin Hood’s merry men, the jungle book animals, Eskimos and even “computers wearing tennis shoes.” Never any wee dinosaurs or soldiers in the cereal, though. Those I had to buy as tiny critters in a store-bought package. But hurray—Now that I’m an adult, I can buy big dinos! 

(For a while I had a big Dino with a leg hooked over my flat screen to help me see if I had the wrong picture size) 

Many of the toys of the sixties were silly novelties, sold through silly TV commercials showing pretty people smiling too hard for real life, made for affluent families with too much money on their hands. For example, a collection of beetles that would flip through the air, using the principle of squeezing soap, if you hit them with the plastic bat. The target was a big frog. 

Bop, bop, 

bop the beetle;

hit, hit, 

hit it right.

When you hit the frog,

It’s mouth, 

Shuts tight.

Joy of Mother Indira

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got joy?

At our Friday Free Fall writing a lady of East Indian heritage did a poem about how her parents were so pleased, here in the New World, to have a Ford car, a house that wasn’t made of mud, and—I forget what else she wrote. She was writing to honor and appreciate her parents. Me too, in my own poems. I said, “Well, I have a poetry manuscript… where some of the poems deal with poverty after the Martians.” I didn’t tell her that one of the characters was someone the British would call Asian, or, less often, South Asian.

Mother Indira

Mother Indira, 

who fled harsh parents in India, 

once had crumbs of love, 

lots of learned books, 

but no husband or children.

Now in a commune she knows love and orphans.

Harry and Molly have lost their father and mother

but not their need for love

to fill them in the morning and at bedtime. 

Mother Indira wears army boots,

and a sensible sweater under a thin pretty shawl.

Harry enters the kitchen,

“May I please have a glass of milk?”

“Have you had one today?”

“No.”

“Then you may.”

Molly enters the kitchen,

“May I please have a slice of bread?”

“Have you had one today?”

“No.”

“Then you may.”

Mother Indira saws the bread for Molly,

as Molly always ends up cutting a triangle.

Molly returns the loaf to the breadbox.

Mother Indira clomps around the kitchen.

There is a little extra milk,

and a little extra bread.

Her eyes crinkle with affection,

thinking how surprised the kids will be to have this dessert.

“Bread pudding—oh boy!”

“You may, you may, you may” 

Sean Crawford

Central London

February

2020

Living Past Poverty

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got determination?

After the Martians passed on, leaving behind a ruined land, I imagine the remaining society: A few people would have wimped out, escaping into addictive substances and unhealthy attitudes which they would defend as being perfectly natural. But others would have found reasons to carry on, perhaps for the sake of their surviving children, or other people’s children yet unborn. Grief can be a dragging sea anchor, but still, I suppose, good citizenship is possible when all your neighbors are trying as hard as you are, trying to get healed while stubbornly appearing normal, trying to “fake it till they make it.” 

God bless the wounded healers. 

When my parents were little, back in the old country, children got an orange just once a year, at Christmas. There is a reference to this (blink and you’ll miss it) in the Tilda Swinton and Ewan McGregor art movie, set in 1954, Young Adam. (review) 

Immigrating to Canada helped my parents, food-wise. In Canada, during the Great Depression, my father felt badly about sometimes having nothing to feel the dog; my mother had sores in her mouth, stopped speaking in class, until the public health nurse advised grandma to get some fruit for vitamin C.

Here are two poems.

Guitar by Firelight

As I walk from the cold

into the warm tavern

 my neck is bent down slightly,

my gait is slightly uneven

and things are out of joint.

A man bends over a guitar in the tavern.

Some say he’s not meant for television prime time,

not for satellite international broadcast.

I say he is meant for here,

where plain people get a life.

We can see his face shining above his guitar.

Here we know our lives,

tensed then relaxed,

as guitar strums by firelight.

Once, when there was still a power grid,

back in my living room,

I lived in a dying-room

with instant coffee and instant feelings

and paper dolls posed flat on my screen 

as I escaped into the mute button.

Such a muffled life. 

The artist in the tavern locks his gaze on mine,

strums my heartstrings, and I feel what I feel.

Memories squiggle free.

From my radiant fellows infra-heat billows

around me like a firemen’s rescue hoop.

Such a raw life.

After midnight, a loose upright man

walks out the tavern door.

I am not the same man who entered.

Yearly Orange

The Martians had swept over the land like a plague,

felling people in the streets and poisoning the crops.

Like a rash the Red Weed had smothered farms

jammed canals and blocked harbors.

The Reading rail yard is still a jumble of silent rusting cars.

The Red Weed has gone, crumbled to dust.

Our ruined land is a harsh world.

Thin children are excited

as lean adults quietly talk 

about goods speeding under the sea

from the new world, to the old.

In the holds and tubes of a submarine

are spare circuits and seed stocks

artfully stowed without a wasted inch

clean and never contaminated

speeding towards us from New London.

The surface fleet was beamed and shredded,

the same day a storm of silent particles

made dead every child’s device,

every Nintendo, Atatri, Playstation, Gameboy,

leaving the children nothing.

Nothing but the timeless games:

Kick the can.

King of the castle.

Kite flying.

Robin Hood.

A tired adult perks up as children run by,

laughing and smiling.

A girl feels 

life is good, 

she raises her arms saying,

“It’s all carrots and apples!”

The children will never grow as tall as their parents.

The submarine will be an early Christmas.

Excited kids tell each other,

“Everybody gets an orange!”

We don’t tell them

oranges are good for their health.

Some day,

we will give the children

peaches and cream. 

Sean Crawford

Central London

February

2020