How low can you go?

Well now, this is exactly why I cancelled my subscription to the Wisconsin State Journal – for printing headlines such as today’s: “Two sides to minimum wage hike” No, Ms. Beth Williams of the State Journal, there are not two sides, no matter what you’re being told by the business community. The minimum wage in Wisconsin is insanely low.

I can understand, BTW, Ms. Jennifer Alexander from the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce attempting to articulate the “other side” at the public forum held here yesterday. She knows who butters her bread. Besides, no slander intended, but that is NOT a name I’d generally associate with one who gets her elbows dirty.

But Sandi Torkildson ( owner of “A Room of One’s Own”), how could you? Don’t you ever let us hear you say again that you need to keep wages low (and take away benefits) to keep that extra part-time employee. The problem of mega-bookstores swallowing the little guys is not going to be solved by your paying less than a living wage to your staff. Or, maybe you want to display the tip jar more prominently so that you could argue that they are only entitled to the tipped employees’ $2.33 (to be increased to $3.88) an hour? You do that, and A Room of One’s Own is going to become a Room of Your Very Own. To think I once liked hanging out there (before I switched to Border’s).

Literati schmati

Once again a reader wrote to let me know that she felt my blogging about European poets was pretentious and that it made her feel that there was something wrong with preferring to watch a DVD over reading poems about dead men (see blog, February 5). Some explanations are in order:

1. Bukowski, though born in Germany, moved to the States when he was a toddler, and so he doesn’t qualify as a European. Mary Oliver is, of course, beyond a shadow of a doubt American. Born in Ohio – how American can you get!
2. I didn’t put a Bukowski bumper sticker on my truck (for one thing the truck’s too dented and rusted, insofar as plastic can get rusted), I was just reporting on what I saw.
3. Anyone can find any info on Bukowski on the Net, which is the source of much blog wisdom after all. A reader would have no reason to suspect that I’d heard of "Hank" Bukowski [um, those in the know call him Hank] before yesterday, and few people know that I occasionally glance at small press literary journals – usually at the table of contents and at their submission policies should it ever strike me to write something good enough for their worth.
4. In order to pander to the odd person with a 4th grade reading level that would find my blog (I’m thinking of the one who found my blog yesterday by googling ha+ha+ha+ha), I make a point of avoiding words with more than three-syllables in all posts that have the possibility of appearing high-brow.

If you’ve nowhere else to go, look outside and watch the snow

Once you get your mind wrapped around this poetry thing (see yesterday’s morning and post-midnight blog), it’s hard to move away from the topic. Today, looking outside, I thought about the different ways to blog about what we in Madison are seeing. I went so far as to write a header for this post, just to show how bad a blog entry could be.

But if you want cadenzas that are more palatable, there are options. For instance, you can usually find something in the (Pulitzer Prize winning) poems of Mary Oliver that’ll give you an appreciation for natural beauty. Sure enough, the following lines are worth printing out. I think knowing that she was about 65 when she wrote it makes this even more "joyously unrestrained":

Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.
Oh, I could not have said it better
myself.

(permission from author to cite this was not available at the moment since she is preoccupied with feeding the homeless in Bethesda, but to avoid infringement on copyright, I want to link to a site available to the public which will bring up the same poem)

Ouch, that hurt!

According to CNN.com, Laura Bush says she takes political attacks on her husband personally. Note that we're talking about political attacks. Isn't it true that a person holding the office of president will always have dissenters who express opposition to administration policies? If the presidential spouse is personally offended by this, does that mean that political confrontation must cease? Or does Ms. Bush regard her husband as having a hegemony on political ideas? There's a frightening thought.

For Laura Bush, going through the political process leading to elections must be akin to rubbing coarse salt on bleeding, exposed sores. One has to feel sorry for her. Perhaps she should seek counsel from Judith Dean on how to get a medical degree and turn off the TV.

Ending the day with author-worship

A reader (I assume from Iowa) was surprised that I was surprised that Iowans are literate (see post on Charles Bukowski, February 5). Actually, I want to correct that: I did not intend to favor Iowans in this regard. Credit for lack of interest in esoteric indie-market poetry (I think they call it small-journal poetry but I’m not sure) should be extended way beyond Iowa’s rural borders. Most anybody would rather flip on a CD/DVD/TV than read about withered leaves, revenge-driven cats, and dying men. Except for the woman in the white car cruisin’ along University Ave this morning with that bumper sticker. Her man is the 73 year-old writer who drank away the first half of his life, and wrote, they say, some 60 books in the second. Amazing, on all counts.

Voting with reservations

Go ahead, ask someone if they vote strategically, or if they cast the ballot for their preferred candidate. It’s a question that guarantees fireworks.

I remember in the year 2000, sitting around with some of the pony-tailed waiters at l’Etoile, after the last dish had been plated and served (when they’d—ok, we’d—polish off uncorked bottles that hadn’t quite been drained by the night’s guests), explaining that to me, it was irrelevant that “Nader isn’t the sell-out to capitalist institutions that Gore is”. As to Nader’s Green policies (if he had policies, but that’s a separate issue)? Forget it, I didn’t care. I used the crude and simple slogan “a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush.” Not to gloat, but I was soooo right.

I think these last three years have erased the phrase “they’re all the same” right out of our political discourse and this is a good thing.

Still, there remain the true believers who will only vote with their heart. You cannot sway them. They’re the types who have definitive answers to such questions as “do ends justify means?” or “is truth relative?” You can't reason with ideologues. Just remember, a vote isn’t a marriage proposal. It’s a political choice, rendered with an awareness of the consequences of making that choice. Frank at L’Etoile may hate me for saying this, but I'm convinced, now more than ever: you campaign and root for your hero, but vote for the one who may actually win.

Out to get you, for sure…

In an earlier blog (January 29) I wrote about the trials of mailing a grant proposal to a government agency in D.C. and about my fear of transmittal failure (given a suspected premature, off-schedule pick-up time by Fed Ex). My inbred distrust then of both FedEx and the governmental agency made me, on my own, chase down the last plane for DC at the airport (virtually), just to make sure that the grant proposal reached D.C. in time.

Well well well well, my skepticism about fair treatment by such stalwart institutions as Fed Ex and the US government (a skepticism that produced much laughter and ridicule from well-meaning but misguided people) has been completely vindicated today as CNN reports on the plight of the Fulbright applicants from Berkeley – all 30 of them. These guys failed to get their applications in on time because Fed Ex messed up the pick up and therefore the delivery schedule, getting the apps in a day late as a result. Even though Fed Ex took full responsibility for the mistake, the US governmental agency (the Department of Education in that case) said no, too bad: Berkeley should not have waited til the last minute: the applications were late and so their final destination will be the trash can.

Would the outcome have been different if the sending institution had been West Point? Or Bob Jones U? What makes me think that the top brass in DC probably felt just a touch smug as they were shredding 30 files originating from Berkeley?

Apparently, last year Berkeley managed to have a success rate of 50% in the application process. A student, interviewed on NPR, was asked if he would be happy with the Fed Ex proposal to pick up the costs. “No,” he said. “It’s just not the same. The prestige of a “Fed Ex scholarship” just would not measure up to the stature of the Fulbright grant.”

Poland water in trouble

Arguments over whether Poland spring water is true spring water always makes me think that the debate is misguided. The story in Fortune raises the following question: is Poland spring water from a spring? Call me Poland-obsessed, but whenever I see the bottle with the Poland sticker I think of THAT COUNTRY, not the technical merits of the “spring” issue.

Please, don’t bother reminding me that they mean Poland, Maine. That's deliberately misleading. How many people, when confronted with the words “water from Poland” conjure up an obscure town in New England?

Alright, deep down I understand it really is not water from the Polish Tatra mountains, not even close. Nevertheless, I feel a sense of loyalty to the product, just because of the name. I have been told by close friends (who should know better) that the taste is rather inferior – something about the water is a bit sweet, not appropriate to pure spring water. I grow defensive. I insist on a blind tasting test. I buy ten bottles just to show my allegiance. It’s Poland water, P-O-L-A-N-D, and if you use the name without mention of the country, be prepared for another class-action down the road.

If the shoe squeaks, wear it.

Having a shoe that squeaks gives you a new perspective on things. For example, if you leave a meeting while others remain, the others will watch and listen as you exit. If you pace during teaching, students will stare at your shoe rather than at something undefined, like the law. Squeaking makes you feel old-fashioned (do modern shoes squeak?), oblivious to life's details (can’t you get that thing oiled?), slow (so as to cut down on the noise).

Over all it is a good distraction from the obvious: the meeting was not to your satisfaction, you’re an impatient pacer, with an alarming tendency toward the old-fashioned, the distracted, the slow. Only the last is a point in your favor. The rest: best forgotten, blissfully out of mind because of the squeaky shoe.

Genius is the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way

I was driving in this morning behind a car with a license plate from Iowa (why do I find this relevant?) that had the bumper sticker: “I’d rather be reading Bukowski.” That’s pretty impressive. I’ve seen “I’d rather be dancing” “I’d rather be bird-watching” “I’d rather be surfing” – in fact, it seems people would rather do anything but drive. But reading Bukowski?

I have to think that the person picked up a tome of Bukowski at the writing program at U of Iowa. How else do you get from Des Moines to Bukowski? This is a guy whose books of poetry do not collect dust on your average shelf (including mine), even one with great literary aspirations (not mine). They’re not “pretty” poems, and his life was tough tough tough (apart from being beaten routinely by his dad, he had absolutely the worst case of acne ever seen by the medical profession), nor had he any connection that I know of to academia—that place where self-selected great thinkers determine what is literature and what is not.

But there he is, on a bumper sticker. Bukowski is credited with the statement that “genius is the ability to say profound things in a simple way.” It gives you hope, doesn’t it, that someone out there, every time she is driving her car, would rather be reading Bukowski.

A liberal dose of laughs

Michael Moore (winning the 03 Oscar for best documentary) says he almost did not deliver his anti-GWB political message during last year's ceremonies: too nervous, too much wanting to, as he puts it "just thank them, blow them a kiss and walk off the stage." (quote from today's Cap Times) Instead, as I recall, he got booed off the stage and everyone talked of how inappropriate he had been.

Is it wrong to use the Oscar stage for plugging away at a "Message"? Well now, I almost said 'no' and then I thought of the pleasure of watching Charlton Heston speak his bit. I take it back. All (especially the Charlton Heston part) = highly inappropriate.

Moore says that even if you don't agree with him, at least he tries to be funny in his messages. In truth, he claims, there are many more funny liberals than funny conservatives. This is a good point. Has anyone ever successfully made you keel over with laughter with their bashing of a social welfare program? "I know an old lady, she lived in HUD housing, she had so many children she didn't know what to do, so she had some more children and stayed out of work, and sent them to watch the big-screen TV and charged it to YOU!" Not funny. Not even remotely. In fact, anger-inducing, mud-slinging, cowardly and mean-spirited, but not funny.

On the other hand, try this:

Cheney gets a call from his "boss", W.
"I've got a problem," says W.
"What's the matter?" asks Cheney.
"Well, you told me to keep busy in the Oval Office, so, I got a jigsaw puzzle, but it's too hard. None of the pieces fit together and I can't find any edges."
"What's it a picture of?" asks Cheney.
"A big rooster," replies W.
"All right," sighs Cheney, "I'll come over and have a look."
So he leaves his office and heads over to the Oval Office. W points at the jigsaw on his desk.
Cheney looks at the desk and then turns to W and says, "For crying out loud, Georgie - put the corn flakes back in the box.

Or this:

One night, George W. Bush is awakened by George Washington's ghost in the White House. Bush asks: "George, what is the best thing I could do to help the country?"
"Set an honest and honorable example, just as I did," Washington advises.

The next night, the ghost of Thomas Jefferson moves through the dark bedroom. "Tom," W asks, "what is the best thing I could do to help the country?"
"Cut taxes and reduce the size of government," Jefferson advises.

Bush isn't sleeping well the next night, and sees another figure moving in the shadows. It's Abraham Lincoln's ghost. "Abe, what is the best thing I could do to help the country?" Bush asks. Abe answers: "Go see a play."

Ha ha ha ha ha ha, ohhhh, I can't stop myself, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha (the two real jokes are courtesy of www.jokesnjokes.net).

Dean’s at the Majestic, I’m at home

I went to hear Nader, I listend to Gore, I got an eyeful of Clinton as he stood in front of the Capitol, right there where they sell cheese curds during the summer Farmer’s Market, Clinton the candidate, me listening (or, as I recall, waiting for hours so that I could sort of hear what I could otherwise read lucidly in the paper), taking it all in, watching history being made.

But Dean at the Majestic, tonight at 7? I’ll pass. I was in the Majestic a number of years ago when one still made the effort to search for parking downtown just to catch a run of an indie or a foreign film. I saw it close down as a theater, watched it wither into a ghost of a movie house, once so popular and funky and avant garde, now just an ikon from the past, struggling to reinvent itself (I hear it will open as a dance club later this month?).

Kind of makes you wonder—why DID they pick the Majestic to spotlight Dean? It can’t be a good omen.

Apocalypse charm

Newsweek (to Sofia Coppola): You’ve said that some of your happiest memories are of being a kid on the set of “Apocalypse Now.” That sounds a little weird.

Coppola: I had a great time. I had no idea there were problems. I was riding in the helicopters, and I had the costume department making stuff for my dolls.

[nc: maybe we should reevaluate the efficacy of “bring your daughters to work” day]

Potato, potahhhto, spaghetti, spaghettini..

Potato and orange growers, bread-makers, pasta producers, rice growers -- all are worried about the shifting tide of consumer preferences away from carbs (see NYT today). One frustrated spokesperson for the orange juice industry stated: “no one has EVER gotten fat from drinking too much orange juice.” He could be right, though the issue now is no longer what caused obesity, but how we should go about getting rid of all that accumulated blubber.

It’s interesting to go back to the land of dumplings and gnocchi and spaghettini and see what they’re saying about obesity and carbs. There appears to be an organization in Italy called the “Italian Society of Obesity.” I’m not sure if their goal is to eradicate it or support it, but it is presided over by Professor O.Bosello, a name that just looks fat.

In their newsletter, they talk about how Italy has one of the lowest rates of obesity in Europe (so maybe this group was formed to combat thinness…this sounds incomprehensible to us, I know, what with dried pork rind being an acceptable snack to buy at a gas station, but we have to have enough imagination to contemplate the possibility of an industrialized nation worrying about people not being plump enough). Moreover, though they acknowledge that some studies go so far as to claim that 14% of Italians are overweight, others claim that the figure is closer to 6 – 7% and FALLING.

Are we bored enough yet with the carb thing to switch our attention back to the “Mediterranean Diet?”

Betcha By Golly Wow

While listening to the debate on Public TV following the announcement of the primary results, I remembered a favorite song by the Stylistics. Sometimes a phrase out of a song from 30 years back will click with what is happening and you find yourself humming the accompanying tune until someone tells you to cut it out because it’s annoying.

The discussion was getting quite good – Congressman Clyburn was spectacular on the Edwards phenomenon [why isn’t Clyburn a contender?], and Senator Biden was positively beaming, because Kerry-Edwards were flickering a light at the end of this tunnel (this is what prompted the song lyrics). You could hear him thinking “don’t lose it, whatever you do, don’t lose it, we’ll all unite behind you, you’ve never seen the Democrats so willing to unite [this is true].” Biden worried only that Kerry would snap up the nomination too soon, leaving the Republicans with plenty of time to turn their multi-million dollar fireworks against him. Somebody remarked how interesting it was that Dean paved the way and legitimized a front-line GWB attack, without which this race would not have picked up its brilliant momentum, and having served that role, Dean is now expendable.

Throughout, I was (unbeknownst to me) humming what turned out to be “Betcha By Golly Wow, you’re the one that I’ve been waiting for forever..” (it had different associations back in the 70s) and so eventually I looked up the Stylistics to see what they’re up to. Did you know that you could actually hire the Stylistics these days for your own personal event? I don’t know if people now would appreciate the subtlety of song lyrics like “Betcha By Golly Wow,” but, oh could these guys sing!

With ZERO percent reporting, CNN is projecting Kerry the winner in Arizona

This reminds me of the election day party we had in 1980. It was to be dinner followed by a night of TV and rowdy comments of the football game type: “how about that Carter!” Dinner was over at 8, so were the elections.

The idea of an election day party ceased to be appealing after that: you never knew how long (or how short) they were going to be. Take the year 2000 – it would have been like the caricature of the never-ending Polish wedding. Would we have had to feed the crowd until the middle of December?

Tall and cuddly = a mismatch?

How can you explain the slanderous reporting that blasts away at the warm and fuzzy traits of tall people?? The NYT today says this about Kerry: “He will still never be cuddly. He is too tall, too gaunt, too lantern-jawed, too serious for that. His Iowa caucuses victory speech was solemn and windy, and he sat watching the Super Bowl on Sunday night with a band of firefighters from Fargo, N.D., whose union has endorsed him, tapping his right thumb and forefinger nervously against his teeth without making much effort to converse or connect.”

Is there an expectation that he should have been warm and cuddly with the firefighters?

Growing the pool of money

Krugman’s Op-Ed comment today is based on that tired but neglected truth: if you want something you can’t afford you can only hope for a sale or wait for an inheritance. Meaning: either the price has to come down, or the pool of money has to grow. The administration’s proposed budget relies, as we know, on cuts in discretionary spending. But think of it, what is the source of the deficit to begin with? Krugman writes:

The prime cause of giant budget deficits is a plunge in the federal government's tax take, which fell from 20.9 percent of G.D.P. in fiscal 2000 to a projected 15.7 percent this year, the lowest share since 1950. About 45 percent of this plunge can be attributed to the Bush tax cuts. The rest reflects the end of the stock market bubble, the still-depressed economy and — probably — growing tax sheltering and evasion...

So what will it take to get the budget deficit under control? Unless Social Security and Medicare are drastically cut — which is, of course, what the right wants — any solution has to include a major increase in revenue.
Many Democrats have called for a partial rollback of the Bush tax cuts, preserving the "middle class" cuts… that would help, but one hopes politicians realize that it's not enough.

Another major source of revenue could be a crackdown on tax loopholes and tax evasion, which has reached epidemic proportions. In particular, what's going on with the tax on corporate profits? That source of revenue is down, as a percent of G.D.P., to 1930's levels. No, that's not a misprint. And receipts are not growing nearly as fast as one would expect, given an economic recovery that has bypassed workers but given big gains to their employers. An administration that actually tried to make corporations pay their taxes might be able to find $100 billion or more each year.

I don’t even mind that I can never ever find any tax loopholes at all ever when I fill out the IRS forms on April 14th. This is always a source of amusement for others: ha, ha, ha, she’s a lawyer and she can’t find the loopholes, ha ha ha. However, I do mind terribly that last little comment “an administration that actually tried to make corporations pay their taxes.” You mean it doesn’t? And they don’t? I mind.

Middle-of-the-night questions

The phone rings at 1 a.m. and the voice of a person whom I like very much says “there are two huge mice chasing each other around my apartment!”
“I’m so sorry” I tell her, meaning every word.
“What do I do?” she asks, genuinely wanting to know.

But the fact is, I don’t know. I could say “call pest control in the morning and hide all your food in the refrigerator” but that doesn’t address the issue of the mice having a rock’n roll good time right in the middle of her bedroom floor right now.
.
What to do…“Make sure they’re not rats” I want to say, but this seems mean and unhelpful.

Make a cheese trail to the door? Meow quietly and hope they’re mice of the low IQ type? Use a fly swatter? What? Really, nothing comes to mind.

Never assume anything

Today was “common law marriage” day in class. Typically this is a real breather lecture – the doctrinal law is vague and undefined, the cases are "sexy" and involve such notables as William Hurt, David Winfield (it took me years to learn that he was famous), Mick Jagger and Lee Marvin. What do they all have in common? Yes, okay, they’re all “has-beens.” But they also were in relationships where one person (always the woman) claimed a valid union (of sorts) and the other said no. All but Lee Marvin (do you remember “Cat Ballou” with Jane Fonda and Lee?? Crazy..) allegedly had components of a common law marriage.

So the class moved along in a fast and lively way (law students love digressions where you do Mick Jagger and Lee Marvin imitations—try it!), and we got through the boring and mundane as well (“what’s habit and repute and where did it come from?”), and I’m summing up with such terrific doctrines as the “putative spouse doctrine” and the “presumption of the validity of the later marriage” (can you believe how far courts will go to validate an absurdly defective if not outright bigamous marital relationship!), and it’s all cool, and I take my last sip of tea for the day (a must when lecturing first thing in the morning on a winter day), start gathering my papers and texts, and a hand goes up.
“Yes?” I ask with satisfied and confident smile of encouragement.
“What is common law marriage anyway?” she asks.

Stopped me dead in my tracks. I assumed we were all on the same page on that one. Doesn’t everyone know what a common law marriage is? Where was she in the 60s anyway? Oh, not born yet. That’s right.

Yes, well, I did then oblige with a definition, but after the Lee Marvin & Mick Jagger stunts, it seemed anticlimactic.