Month: January 2020

READINGS

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I used to require my college writing students to attend:

MFA in Writing Residency Brings Top Writers to Seaside for Nightly Readings in January

BeachThe Pacific University Master of Fine Arts in Writing program hosts readings by top contemporary writers during its 10-day residency in Seaside. The series offers a rare opportunity to hear these writers read on successive evenings. Free and open to the public, the evening readings begin at 7:30 p.m. and take place from Friday, January 10 through Friday, January 17 at the Best Western Ocean View Resort, located at 414 N. Prom in Seaside, Oregon.

This year’s lineup includes Kwame Dawes, recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize and Pete Fromm, five-time winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Literary Award.

7:30 p.m. at Best Western Ocean View Resort in Seaside, OR

Jan. 10 — Marvin Bell, Claire Dederer, Pete Fromm
Jan. 11 — Ellen Bass, Jack Driscoll, Debra Gwartney
Jan. 12 — Frank Gaspar, Scott Korb, Mahtem Shiferraw
Jan. 13 — Chris Abani, Mike Magnuson, Mary Helen Stefaniak
Jan. 14 — Claire Davis, Valerie Laken, Joseph Millar
Jan. 15 — Sanjiv Bhattacharya, Shara McCallum, Kellie Wells
Jan. 16 — Kwame Dawes, Cate Kennedy
Jan. 17 — Molly Gloss, Shelley Washburn

The authors who are reading also teach in Pacific’s low-residency MFA in Writing program. For more information about the writers or the MFA in Writing program, contact Shelley Washburn, MFA in Writing director, at 503-352-1531.

WOUND

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The sky is raining down hard, we expect a “king” tide flood at the time I am supposed to be driving north, and I should be asleep as I type this. I am thinking backward and forward. I will not get back to sleep.

I think about war and how it is wound and stain. I wish I could explain myself better.

During WW2, my father served in France and Germany. He earned a Purple Heart and insisted he would probably have lost his leg if not for penicillin. My mother’s sister served in San Francisco, working with military personnel returning from and leaving for the Pacific theater. My father- and mother-in-law both served in the Southwest. They would marry in Roswell, where some people believe beings from outer space landed. People will believe such tales.

During the second Gulf war, we believed in weapons of mass destruction, even though UN investigators on the ground were quite certain that they did not exist. They didn’t.

During the first Gulf war, we were told babies were being tossed out of incubators in the maternity ward of a hospital in Kuwait. That lie was invented by an American PR firm and testified before Congress by a person with ties to people who had a financial and political interest in leading us to war.

It is always like this. War is great for business. War unites us. War solidifies national pride. It distracts us from what matters most. It gives us an enemy. Korea. WW2. The Great War. Spanish American War. Remember the Main. Rallying cries built on lies.

Some men such as Teddy Roosevelt believe war is ennobling, many believe that a uniform conveys automatic heroism. Such an adrenaline rush! Powerful men are eager to send others off to war because they will profit. Some advance their political futures with the blood of other people’s children. Some look forward with religious zeal to the coming Rapture. (A reminder that these last call themselves Christian.)

“May the best man win.”

The best man win? He won’t. He almost never does. I have heard that line spouted all my life, but it’s true only in the narrowest sense. Fastest on the day in a race (unless he’s using drugs, unless, unless unless), perhaps, but fighting is an irrational determiner of righteousness. War does not determine the “best” of anything, merely the biggest, best armed, luckier.

The allies did not win WW2 because they were righteous, because they were better. They won because of superior firepower. It might have gone the other way. If Hitler had won, would that have made him “best”?

I knew someone who got all the way to Vietnam and realized he was a pacifist, successfully claimed CO status, and got home again without killing anyone. The great poet William Stafford was a CO in WW2. The actions of these men required tremendous courage. Instead of the knee-jerk reaction to praise soldiers, perhaps honor those who refuse to kill on command.

I know, I can hear the “but-what-abouts” hustling up in all our minds. The Nazi war machine was an abomination. But it is not so simple. Life is not about our team versus their team, a sporting event with clear winners. In war everyone loses, except those powerful men making money in the back room. And everyone, weak or strong, win or lose, everyone sins. The Allies also committed atrocities. Warriors always do. Brutality, murder, rape, theft, torture—always in war. War makes us mad. War makes us ruthless. War makes us cruel. We commit unspeakable acts in order to win. We always do. We should admit that. Instead, we make excuses, we praise and hand out medals. We hide truth. We should acknowledge what war means to other people’s children. And to our own.

You cannot trust battle to reward the “best” of anything. War hurts everyone it touches. Those defending their homeland will go beyond what seems possible in acts of sacrifice. Those with bigger bombs will kill them anyway. Superior firepower is not determined by who is better, but it determines who wins. And both winner and loser suffer destruction.

Allow me to say it again: War destroys good people. War is a violent crime. Fighting in any war is damaging. Monstrosity does not happen to everyone, but those who fight are invariably injured even if they come home walking because we ask them to do something deeply immoral: kill other human beings. We struggle afterward to justify killing, to tidy away the inconsistencies, to hide our horror at our actions, to deny our trespasses, to minimize awareness of lingering destruction. (My student’s father came home whole-bodied but forever lost in his mind.) The uniform does not convey heroism to those safe playing music in Utah, recruiting in Seattle, training pilots in Arizona. They are free to pump themselves up for their service. They are safe. No one escapes battle unwounded.

We are all supposed to admire those who “sacrifice” to keep our country safe. But now, late in my life, I want a greater sacrifice. I want us to abandon this ridiculous notion that battle serves justice. I want an end to the pretense that all members of our military are automatically heroes. The lives of those who fight are ruined. I want that ruin recognized, that lasting ruin of those who survive. I want an end to the destruction of people’s children.

 

LUCKY

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The Conditional

Ada Limón – 1976-

Say tomorrow doesn’t come.
Say the moon becomes an icy pit.
Say the sweet-gum tree is petrified.
Say the sun’s a foul black tire fire.
Say the owl’s eyes are pinpricks.
Say the raccoon’s a hot tar stain.
Say the shirt’s plastic ditch-litter.
Say the kitchen’s a cow’s corpse.
Say we never get to see it: bright
future, stuck like a bum star, never
coming close, never dazzling.
Say we never meet her. Never him.
Say we spend our last moments staring
at each other, hands knotted together,
clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.
Say, It doesn’t matter. Say, That would be
enough. Say you’d still want this: us alive,
right here, feeling lucky.

HUNGER

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I have read Berkeley Wellness Letter for years. In their latest report they applaud the new Canadian dietary recommendations.

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“Canada has done away with the dairy category altogether (instead including dairy as just one of many sources of “healthy protein foods”) in favor of reminding people that water is the best beverage overall. Its previous guide advised two to four servings of milk (or milk alternatives) a day, depen­­­­ding on one’s age.”

The USDA continues to emphasize meat and dairy in diet because “unlike Health Canada, whose sole mission is to improve the health of Canadians, the mission of the USDA is not only to safeguard the health of Americans but also to promote agriculture production (including meat and dairy foods)—which is a conflict of interest.”

Intense lobbying has created the plates Americans are encouraged to eat. Advertising supports the industry paying for it. Advertising and industry-biased research has fed us a pack of lies.

We have lost faith in dieting as a way to control or lose weight because the soda industry has devoted millions to convincing us, often through bogus research, that changing what we eat (and how much) will not work. Hello. What we eat matters. What we eat, how much, and when does impact our body weight. Exercise is critical for a healthy body, but what we feed ourselves matters most of all.

I share this in full knowledge that I eat badly, that I should lose weight, and that baking rugelach and cake is one reason I have gained weight over the past year. We have been vegetarian/pescatarian for decades, and there is little chance of our abandoning dairy any time soon (cheese!) but we hope for small stage changes toward more vegetables.

The colorful illustration above does not represent how my husband and I eat. It is entirely different from how my family ate when I was a child. In those days our plates were half brown (meat), a quarter each green or yellow or orange (peas, corn, carrots) and a quarter white (potatoes). In my childhood a salad meant chopped iceberg lettuce and Catalina dressing (sweet). Dessert was something large, sugary, and baked, cut into four pieces. Sweet drinks vied with whole milk (or powdered milk in lean times). It was a diet driven by culture and industrial interests, not health. Our meals were all too valid and sweet.

“Eat food, not too much, mostly vegetables.”

The very concept of meals has disappeared in our country. We eat all day, though recent research strongly suggests that we are meant to feel a bit hungry each day. Breakfast is intended to break a fast of at least 12 hours. We are meant to feel and to be empty. People all over the world literally starve, but Americans are deeply afraid to feel hungry and so we snack and nibble and “graze” all the hours we are awake. We encourage our children to develop lifelong habits that will impact their health and shorten their lives.

The way we eat is not healthy. I should have seen this coming when the sleep surveys I have been completing online began asking me not only about hours of sleep, sound, lighting, and how quickly I got out of bed in the morning, but also how many nights I went to bed a bit hungry. Never, I responded. But then I wondered and sure enough the research began to come out.

Eat within a 10-12 hour window, between 7am and 7pm, for example. Or between 7am and 5pm. Fill our plates with vegetables. A little grain, a little protein. (Protein is actually easy to come by. Almost everything we consume contains protein.) One large meal, ideally earlier in the day. One very light meal, ideally the last of the day. (Or first like the French, back when we envied how they were all so slender.) Give your gut a rest overnight. Feel genuinely hungry for a few hours. No, you are not “starving” when you feel a bit hungry. Each day I hope to experience just a little “hunger” because my body needs a rest from eating.

Berkeley Wellness Letter also warns that by midcentury “the world will have nearly 10 billion people. One looming challenge will be how to feed them healthfully and without wreaking even more havoc on the environment. Our current eating habits, especially in wealthy Western countries, are responsible for creating an excess of greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change, largely due to our penchant for red meat and other animal foods. What’s more, the typical Western diet plays a major role in obesity and other chronic health problems; meanwhile, millions of people elsewhere are undernourished.”

I need a break from feeling full.

I need a different fullness: Full of hope. Full of passion. Full of intent and wonder and admiration and love. I am hungry for conversation and compassion and kindness. I am hungry for productivity and purpose.

 

on another note: Today is Zora Neale Hurston’s birthday.

DO AS I SAY, not as I do?

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Why is it that I do not feel better when my country is doing it instead of some other country doing it? Isn’t that what we are all supposed to have learned in Kindergarten?

“ ‘A nation that willfully destroys another country’s heritage would be no better than the criminals who have destroyed irreplaceable sites in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in recent years,’ Sara C. Bronin, a lawyer and specialist in historic preservation, wrote in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in response to Trump’s threats to target cultural sites in Iran.

“ ‘Targeting civilians and cultural sites is what terrorists do. It’s a war crime,’ tweeted Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Japanese tourists visit Persepolis, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, northeast of the Iranian city of Shiraz, in May 2002. (Vahid Salemi/AP)
Japanese tourists visit Persepolis, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, northeast of the Iranian city of Shiraz, in May 2002. (Vahid Salemi/AP)

“In Britain, a spokesman for Prime Minister Boris Johnson cautioned that ‘there are international conventions in place which prevent the destruction of cultural heritage.’ ”

“In March 2017 — only weeks after Trump’s inauguration — the U.N. Security Council, with the United States as a permanent member, unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the “unlawful destruction of cultural heritage, inter alia destruction of religious sites and artefacts” in armed conflicts. …

“According to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, warring parties should take all possible steps “to protect cultural property,” which includes “monuments of architecture, art or history, whether religious or secular,” among other examples.”

These standards of ordinary decency have been confirmed throughout the civilized world from the Geneva Convention (1949 and 1977) to the recently International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (1992) and Mali (2012). NPR has a lot to say about this including direct quotes from U.S.Military law.

Trump has threatened to destroy cultural sites in Iran—his way of countering potential repercussions. Despite the fact that we have consistently supported respecting such sites. Leaders as diverse as Germany’s Merkel and Russia’s Putin have vowed to do whatever they can to prevent this outrage. Consider the last time significant civilian and heritage structures were targeted. Yes, consider 9/11. Imagine if the Statue of Liberty and Golden Gate Bridge, Bunker Hill and the Grand Canyon were— threatened because one of our leaders were killed in a foreign country. No, wait: Imagine we assassinated military leaders of two countries in a country we occupied for going-on twenty years. No, wait . . .

not a YEAR END REVIEW

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I just reread my year-end reports from 2018. (I have some work to do.) One of those posts was about what I had read. One of them had to do with paying for college. My mother was famous as a worrier, which was not great but did result in a daughter who was careful about money.

My husband and I have managed full retirement quite well financially. We are maintaining a small reserve in the bank, taking a day now and again to travel nearby and stay the night, and thinking ahead to what we need for the future. We need a new roof and some other major repairs. Our wood-burning stove needs replacing—it’s necessary in a location where the power routinely goes out in the winter, usually for a day at a time, but sometimes for a week. All of this means we have decided to budget more tightly in 2020 in anticipation of these expenses. We got through college without debt and entirely under our own steam because we had cheap habits and careful spending. Some of that is still true. We still do not smoke or use drugs. We drink good coffee and cheap wine. We have not eaten most meat for decades, not because we disliked meat, but because it felt morally wrong the way animals are raised, and increasingly dangerous to our health and the health of the planet. We eat organic food but plan to be completely vegetarian for the rest of this new year, abstaining from our habit of seafood once or twice a week. We’ll see how that goes. But cheese. We both think we will always have cheese.

This past couple of days we had our children and their children here for a visit. The the tea party for the kids was a bust, but we walked the beach and I knit with Ruby. There was a scavenger search around the house with written clues (thank you, Emily), The Family Stone (thank you, Kerris), and eleven for dinner last night. There was a lot of food. My baking and cooking plan included a detailed timeline for chili verde, sautéing mushrooms and onions, roasting various vegetables, poaching salmon, putting together frittatas, frying latkes, Waldorf salad, pumpkin custards, cranberry bread and also orange-cranberry sauce, wild rice, and rugelach. I made vegetable stock. I cooked like a crazy person. Saturday morning, I baked two loaves of bread—which was not even on the list!

We managed. Everyone is gone now because of work tomorrow, and I would be feeling pretty great about now but did not sleep last night.

You do your best, and the best is never perfect, not even close. But you hope that the people you love most in the entire world understand you are imperfect but trying hard.

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GATHERING

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We gather trash and treasures from the beach most mornings: plastic twine and bits of flattened plastic foam the size of a dime. We look for agates and glass worn smooth in the rocks and sand. In and out the ocean throws its skirts up on shore. The twice-daily wash of water tumbles the basalt, lifts and shifts sand into a new landscape each day.

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There is a bit of polystyrene foam a couple of inches in front of my shoe. I picked it up and also six more bits of plastic shown in this photo. The green is seaweed.

Continue reading →

SNEAKER WAVE

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During heavy surf, the ocean pounds up sea foam. “Sea foam, ocean foam, beach foam, or spume is a type of foam created by the agitation of seawater, particularly when it contains higher concentrations of dissolved organic matter derived from sources such as the offshore breakdown of algal blooms.”

During our walk yesterday, a wave swept up a hundred yards over the sand and another ten yards into the rocks. This was nothing unusual. We pay attention, so we knew to move higher onshore and are rarely caught. We are particularly careful where there is no place to escape should a wave sweep all the way up to the green line. We work our way along searching for trash and treasures, but always with one eye on the surf line. Continue reading →

A SENSE OF HUMOR

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Monica Hesse in the Washington Post has a tongue-in-cheek article about men she’s talked to who are afraid to see Little Women alone: “The Little Women Men feel slightly nervous about going to see the movie without a female chaperone, for the same reason that some men have told me they are nervous about attending a yoga class solo, or assisting a lost toddler in the supermarket: because our society still — still! — gets confused by men displaying traits of nurturing or sentimentality, and these kindly men don’t want to creep anyone out.” I laughed.  Continue reading →