Just call me Maya, honey.

I took The Which Famous Poet Are You Test and came out as Maya Angelou!

Gay marriage in South Africa

In today's International Herald Tribune is an article about a new South African bill allowing gay marriage. The catch is that it includes an "opt-out clause" for "religious and civil officers to refuse to marry same-sex couples on moral grounds." Considering that the starting point for this bill was a South African Constitutional Court decision that "existing marriage legislation was unconstitutional because it discriminated against same-sex couples," it is surprising that this law still allows for such discrimination.

In the same newspaper is an article about how traditional customs in Africa can contribute to the spread of AIDS. For example, an HIV-positive mother who is advised not to breast-feed her baby did so anyway, because she had to breast-feed the baby for two weeks as part of a traditional ritual. Of course, there are those who say that the traditional rituals should not be subject to any challenges from science.

From Atheism to Baptism

Okay, I'm a Militant Darwinist and an atheist. But my children get baptized, so I am not, I guess, a true full-scale militant Atheist. Andrea wants them to get baptized, and I like the ritual.

So Sara is being baptized on Sunday, one day before she turns six months old. In Switzerland (as in Germany where Miles was baptized), the parents are asked to choose a verse from the Bible as a Taufspruch (baptismal motto, or something like that). For Sara, we chose this:

Meine Kindlein, laßt uns nicht lieben mit Worten noch mit der Zunge, sondern
mit der Tat und mit der Wahrheit. (1. Johannes 3:18)

That's how Luther put it. King James's team put it like this:

My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed
and in truth.

I like the way this seems to undermine Luther's emphasis on faith, as opposed to works, by keeping the focus on what one does ("in deed") as well as on what one believes ("in truth").

We also considered this beautiful verse from Proverbs (31:25), in Luther's words:

Kraft und Schöne sind ihr Gewand, und sie lacht des kommenden Tages.

The KJ team put it like this:

Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come.

We like the German version, with its beautiful echo of the way Sara (also known as "the rooster" in our household) often wakes up at around 5 a.m. and begins to laugh and coo and enjoy the very fact of being alive. (I also like the lovely genitive of "lacht des kommenden Tages," but I'm funny that way.)

Gary Wolf on Atheism

Here's an interesting article from Wired in which Gary Wolf pursues the idea of being a militant atheist, including interviews with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett.

My favorite line:

"... there are certain actors in history who change the world by staging their own defeat."

What's on my desk

C. Dale Young posted a list of everything on his desk. I posted a comment with what is on my desk, but actually only with what is on the top of the piles, plus a few stray things:

These are the things on TOP of the piles:

The latest issue of Conduit.
Bill Coyle, The God of this World to His Prophet (which I received because I did not win the New Criterion Prize for 2005)
Two DVDs of Greg Brown concerts.
Amy Clampitt, The Kingfisher (waiting to be given to a friend, since I have her Collected Poems)

Then some stray things:

A pink highlighter; a lost pen cap; a small post-it pad; a black Pentel mechanical pencil; some ungraded papers; a guitar tuner; an electronic letter scale; a green clothespin; a small package of Kleenex.

What do you have on your desk?

Updated list of publications

It has been years since I last updated my list of publications on the Basel English Seminar website, but I have finally done it again. The list also contains updated links to publications that I have been able to locate in on-line versions. (If you do happen to try any of the links and discover that they are incorrect, please tell me so that I can fix them.)

Light Quarterly 52-53, Spring-Summer 2006

The latest issue of Light includes four more poems of mine. If that sounds like a lot, well, they add up to a grand total of fourteen lines. The titles:

Walk with a Five-Year-Old
Certain Persons
Postcard after a Visit
The Day after Writing a Poem

There are more words in the four titles than lines in the four poems! :-)

Poetry Calendar 2007

My poem "Cabinet d'Amateur" appears as one of the 365 poems in the Poetry Calendar 2007 published by Alhambra Publishing in Belgium. I have been enjoying the 2006 calendar published by the same house, not only because it includes my poem "Thomas Hardy Listens to Louis Armstrong," but because it is full of interesting poems, both contemporary and historical, often nicely paired (as when my poem is preceded by Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush").

The 2007 calendar also includes poems by my friends Geoffrey Brock and A. E. Stallings, along with many other fine contemporary poets.

The same company publishes poetry calendars in French and German, as well.

Great Uncle Andrew

I hope that my nieces and nephews all think that I am a great Uncle Andrew, but now I am a Great Uncle Andrew: my German nephew Nils and his girlfriend Jessica had a baby on Sunday (Jessica's own birthday), Luca Jannis Delpho. And Andrea (who has always been a great Aunt Andrea) is now also a Great Aunt Andrea.

This, by the way, is my 100th post to my blog.

The Neighborhood Bully

Back when George H.W. Bush talked about the "line in the sand" after Iraq invaded Kuwait, I finally understood why I had always disliked him: it was because he was a bully.

Like father, like son, then: the morning after the election in 2000, a student asked me why I disliked Bush so much, and since I knew she was a fan of Harry Potter, I told her it was because he was a bully, just like Draco Malfoy. She immediately understood. :-)

It's nice to see others coming to the same conclusion; here's Paul Krugman on GWB:

"At this point, nobody should have any illusions about Mr. Bush’s character. To put it bluntly, he’s an insecure bully who believes that owning up to a mistake, any mistake, would undermine his manhood — and who therefore lives in a dream world in which all of his policies are succeeding and all of his officials are doing a heckuva job."

And here's Joan Didion on Dick Cheney:

"The personality that springs to mind is that of the ninth-grade bully in the junior high lunchroom, the one sprawled in the letter jacket so the seventh-graders must step over his feet."

Don Brown on Fall

My friend Don Brown's reflections on fall today are quite beautiful. I recommend his post highly!

Math and German

C. Dale Young wrote today about his decision to do medicine and poetry, instead of Studio Art.

Twenty-two years ago, I decided to drop the Math part of my planned double major in Math and German. Later, I switched to English, still writing poetry all the time. Today, I wonder why I thought I could not do mathematics and literature at the same time. I have even considered doing a B.S. in Math part-time here in Basel. Maybe I'll still get around to it, but not before Sara goes to kindergarten, which will not be until August 2011.

My reflections on this, as well as CDY's, reminded me of John Koethe's poem "Hamlet."

Doublage

Miles and I don't play cribbage any more since we invented doublage, which is kind of "double cribbage." Instead of dealing six cards and putting two in the crib to create two four-card hands and one four-card crib, play with two decks (104 cards), deal nine cards, and put three in the crib to create two six-card hands and one six-card crib. All other rules are the same, except that we go four times around the board rather than twice. (You need 241 points to win instead of 121.)

The highest possible hand is 112 points (seven fives); the next highest is 91 (jack, six fives, nibs; the equivalent of the 29-point hand in cribbage). The highest-scoring hand we have had is a 58-point hand that Miles had once (when he needed only 20 to go out); my best hand was thus ruined: a 50-point hand that I did not get to peg because of his having won already!

The funniest thing to have was double nibs, when I had two jacks of the suit of the card that was cut. Finally, in doublage it is nearly impossible to get a dry hand or crib.

Senators who voted for the "enemy combatant" law

Garrison Keillor has helpfully provided this list in his article "A Shameful Retreat from American Values":

Alexander, Allard, Allen, Bennett, Bond, Brownback, Bunning, Burns, Burr, Carper, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Coleman, Collins, Cornyn, Craig, Crapo, DeMint, DeWine, Dole, Domenici, Ensign, Enzi, Frist, Graham, Grassley, Gregg, Hagel, Hatch, Hutchison, Inhofe, Isakson, Johnson, Kyl, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Lieberman, Lott, Lugar, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Menendez, Murkowski, Nelson of Florida, Nelson of Nebraska, Pryor, Roberts, Rockefeller, Salazar, Santorum, Sessions, Shelby, Smith, Specter, Stabenow, Stevens, Sununu, Talent, Thomas, Thune, Vitter, Voinovich, Warner.

As Keillor points out, "If your college kid were to be arrested in Bangkok or Cairo, suspected of 'crimes against the state,' and held in prison, you'd assume that an American foreign service officer would be able to speak to your kid and arrange for a lawyer, but this may not be true anymore. Be forewarned."

Further: "None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Idea. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor."

And finally: "Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them."

Paint my love a morning sky

In another entry from the category of misheard lyrics, there are these lines from "Touch of Grey":

Must be getting early
Clocks are running late
Paint by number morning sky
Looks so phony

Until I had occasion to look them up a few minutes ago, I thought the second line was "paint my love a morning sky." Which is a beautiful line, actually, just not what Robert Hunter wrote!

20 Science Myths

I enjoyed this page about common "facts" that are not true. I had only recently read that it is not true that water drains one way in the northern hemisphere and the other way in the southern hemisphere, so I was pleased to see that confirmed.

Fire on the Mountain, Ventura, July 13, 1985

Mr. Jumbo has posted some pictures of wildfires currently burning along his biking route in Southern California. They reminded me of a Dead show in Ventura, CA, on July 13, 1985. From the fairgrounds, in the mountains on the other side of the city, a quiet drama was taking place before the show: a wildfire was creeping down the hillside toward some houses. My sight might have been playing tricks on me (or my memory is playing tricks now), but I can still picture how the arcs of water were playing over the roofs of houses to keep them dry. Then the Dead came out and opened with "One More Saturday Night" seguing nicely into, you guessed it, "Fire on the Mountain."

I thought I'd put a link to the Live Music Archive recording of the show here, but for some reason it is no longer available. So anyone who wants to hear that version of FOTM will have to get a copy from me!

What Miles Heard

Miles likes the Rolling Stones. This is how he heard the chorus of the song "Happy":

I need a loan to make me happy!

Good poets steal

Bob Dylan's been at it again, borrowing lines and images from one source for Modern Times, this time from a nineteenth-century American poet named Henry Timrod. One article on the subject is in The Independent.

As for the Eliot line that I stole the title of this from, I have always heard it as "bad poets imitate; good poets steal," but the web is full of references to "bad poets borrow; good poets steal." The former sounds like a better maxim to me, and since TSE was good at maxims, I hope he said "imitate" and not "borrow." But the web is not very useful in answering this question, since a search only gives you a zillion unreferenced citations of the maxim, in both forms!

(I'm expecting at least one occasional reader of my blog to be able to provide an immediate answer to this question!)

Timrod, by the way, wrote South Carolina's official state anthem, "Carolina."

Eggcorns

Here's a site for language fans (and nitpickers): the Eggcorn Database. "Eggcorns" are misused words or phrases, like "mute point" for "moot point" or "eggcorn" for "acorn," and this database has collected over 500 of them!

One of them is "ten year" for "tenure." When I was growing up, my father was a tenure-track professor in Math at the University of Toledo. I was always puzzled about the fact that "getting ten year" meant "getting a permanent contract" when it ought to mean "getting a ten-year contract"!