Accommodatingly

Upcoming gigs and new writings online by us: I’m in the new Believer on Noah Eli Gordon, whose book with a fiddle in its title I liked a lot; at Harriet, I recommend a Romany poet (not Roman; Romany). I’m also going to be at the Wallace Stevens society session next Saturday afternoon at the Modern Language Ass’n Big Thing in Chicago, the first time I’ve been to the MLA in eight years in which I was neither seeking a job, nor interviewing job-seekers for Macalester. I’ll be talking about Connecticut in Stevens’ late poems. And speaking of Macalester, the Scots are finally winning some women’s hoops games. You had to wait till after we left, didn’t you?

All this is by way of ground-clearing so I can talk about what’s really fascinating this minute: Nathan’s new set of arts-related behaviors. This afternoon he woke up from his nap and told me he had “a dream, with letters– C and D.” Whenever we look at pictures, or at picture books (e.g. Frog and Toad, a set of kids playing basketball) he tells us that one of the bigger people or creatures is the littlest one’s mommy (or, usually on a second try, his daddy).

He’s long been able to recognize himself in photographs, but now he looks at photographs of himself from 2006 and says “That’s Nathan– little.” This morning he named his stuffed orangutan: the orangutan’s name, we now know, is “Owie.”

And most recently– that is, say, two hours ago– he made up his first song: given an out-of-tune guitar to play with (he’ll be getting a sturdy toy banjo for Xmas, but he doesn’t know that yet: this was a closely supervised real guitar) and about twenty minutes to touch the strings, he came up with a song called “My Tuba.”

He knows it’s his song, too– he’ll sing it again if you ask (while playing guitar). Here are the lyrics: “My tuba, my tuba, my tuba, my tuba, Mommy tuba, Daddy tuba, Nathan tuba, my tuba.” Elvis Costello had better watch his back.

Well of course I thought highly of today’s post at Beacon Broadside, about an education official in Texas who got fired for forwarding an email about a speaker who argues against creationists. But it’s not what I think that matters, in such matters: it’s what they think at Pharyngula, the very good and hugely popular science blog by P. Z. Myers, whose referral today broke records for Beacon’s blog traffic. Thanks, Pharyngula! (More science posts on the way?)

Also around the Web from one or both of us: I recommend more poetry books at Harriet, as do Ange and my other co-bloggers there; Mike puts online– I didn’t know it was up, really, officer!– an essay on Young Marble Giants I wrote about twelve years ago; and we attend our first Crimson women’s hoops game.

Also in music news: I still owe several people mix CDs– perhaps in the New Year, after I’m done with a talk about Stevens a review of Ashbery a troublesome piece about Philip K. Dick some other stuff? And track two on this great CD spent most of November in my head. It may even come back. Look, Mike reviews the same record! Small indiepop world.

Not very well connnected to one another, but all worth noting:

The NYTBR’s sf critic has recommended sf reading for presidential candidates. I found it hilarious: that doesn’t mean you will– I think I might be precisely the target audience.

You can now purchase Minor Threat hot sauce. Apparently it’s not so hot.

My mom and dad have now been married for 40 years! Cool.

My dad recommends a Jewish book.

And I recommend this Xmas Hannukah book, by one of the most successful authors of our time: we just got in in the mail from some awesome people, and I’m hoping Nathan enjoys it as much as I did.

Part of my job as Blog Editor over at Beacon Broadside is to find other blogs who care about the same things we do and let them know we exist. I try not to comment-spam blogs, and I much prefer, when an email address is available, to contact the blogger directly. I do this after researching their blog, reading their posts, and carefully assessing whether I think that they might actually be interested in our blog generally or a specific post.
In the course of doing this part of my work today, I searched for blogs linking to this piece in the Boston Globe yesterday on the history of torture in the US (since bloggers who linked to that might also be interested in this piece by Jennifer Harbury on BB). But it looks like nobody has linked to it yet, which is a shame, because it’s a fascinating, damning analysis of the history of torture, as perfected by democracies.

We think torture is mainly the province of dictators and juntas - the kind of thing that happens behind the iron doors of repressive regimes. In a democracy, with open courts and a free press, torture should be a relic. In the words of an American World War II poster, torture is “the method of the enemy.”

But a closer look at the modern history of torture suggests that exactly the opposite is true. Torture isn’t an alien force invading our democracy from the benighted realms of dictatorships. In fact, it is the democracies that have been the real innovators in 20th-century torture. Britain, France, and the United States were perfecting new forms of torture long before the CIA even existed. It might make Americans uncomfortable, but the modern repertoire of torture is mainly a democratic innovation.

Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College, goes on to outline both how torture techniques have been developed by democracies and how often those techniques have then been employed not only against foreign enemies but also on citizens at home.

If the spread of torture techniques suggests a blurry line between “us” and “them,” it also teaches that there’s no real boundary between “there” and “here.” It would be ignoring history to assume that what happens in an American-run prison in Iraq will stay in Iraq. Soldiers who learn torture techniques abroad get jobs as police when they return, and the new developments in torture you read about today could yet be employed in a neighborhood near you.

In Chicago, in the decade after Vietnam, the use of magnetos and other clean tortures left a disaster: At least 11 men were sentenced to death and many others given long-term prison sentences based on confessions extracted by torture, and in 2003, Governor George Ryan of Illinois commuted the death sentences of all 167 death row inmates. Earlier this month the City of Chicago agreed to pay nearly $20 million to settle lawsuits filed by four former death row inmates who claimed they were tortured and wrongly convicted.

So, even if you can’t muster enough outrage to care about us attaching electrodes to the bodies of prisoners of war, in defiance of international treaties and respect for human decency, bear in mind that soldiers interrogating prisoners in Abu Ghraib or at Guantanamo Bay or other, lesser-known prisons throughout the world, they will come home someday. And just pray to god that they don’t become your local sheriff.

Yes, it’s another one of those hi-out-there posts consisting largely of links:

More praise from another political blog for  Beacon Broadside.

Nathan loves Hannukah. Not just the presents: the group singing, and the candles, and the Hebrew letters. He also likes to say (among several other new phrases he’s picked up): “Guten tag!” (from a teacher at his school who speaks German) and “Stay in bed all day!”

One of Nathan’s Hannukah presents: more music by the great Dan Zanes. It’s a good thing D.Z. is talented enough to make music that parents like, too, because Nathan likes his songs (and likes us to sing his songs) so much that otherwise we’d go bats. Odd discovery (well, it was a discovery for me– Jessie pointed it out): all waltzes are sad. Especially “Sidewalks of New York,” in D.Z.’s version, even though he and his band make it delightful too. Odder discovery: the talented and relentlessly perky accordionist and keyboard player with D.Z. has another life as a very good alt-country and live theatre act. Of course, the Del Fuegos weren’t bad themselves.

One of my longest, most speculative, or maybe most whimsical, essays about poetry is now available as a pre-print online (pre-prints are online versions of essays that will be published soon in scholarly journals; they’re standard in the sciences and show up every so often in fields like mine).

Wordpress still hates Firefox: if you clicked on the links in this post quite soon after I posted it, you got nothin’, because Firefox’s interface changes a href into a xhref. Fortunately I remembered to go into Safari and change everything back. Grrr.

I recommend another poetry book. Amanda recommends a science book, and Meghan recommends a novel, at the same place.

I’ve been thinking about poems about snow.  Also thinking about Wallace Stevens: do Stevens scholars, in general, realize that the Connecticut River for part of its length is tidal, i.e. “flows nowhere, like the sea”? The fact’s not in Eleanor Cook’s new, good reference book on Stevens; I shall spend part of next week trying to see who has and hasn’t noticed the fact (the relevant poem is “The River of Rivers in Connecticut”) before. If it’s not generally known, I’ve got something else to say when I talk about Stevens in Chicago in a week and a half.

Macalester’s women’s hoops team is winning games now that we’ve left– and Helen is seeing them. No fair! We see our first live Harvard women’s hoops game (knocks on wood) this Tuesday. Unless we get a ton of snow again.

For about the past week Nathan’s favorite activity, by a large margin, has been the making of visual art. He wants to go into his playroom to draw with crayons when he gets up, he had trouble leaving school yesterday when it was time to go home because he wanted to do more work on a picture at his easel (where the kids have taped-up paper on which to draw), and when we got home, he headed for his playroom to draw some more. He’s sometimes fascinated by the abstract-ish patterns he can make with monochromes (”circle!” he says) or with combinations of crayons, but he’s also figuring out how to make patterns that look (at least to him) like attempts to represent objects in the visible world.

In fact, he’s so intent on making such representations, and so exacting about them, that he’s asking us to draw them and then telling us when our drawings fall short: this morning he was happy to have Jessie draw, and then happy to have me draw, heart shapes, but yesterday evening he got very frustrated when he asked me to draw his “chapeau-hat” (a kind of round hat Jessie used to wear, which Nathan now wears, and which his Uncle Andrew, who lives in Montreal, has named) and my crayon drawings didn’t look enough like the hat to please him. Jessie saved the day by drawing a batting helmet, which (we explained to Nathan) was what Manny and Big Papi wear.

Nathan also has ideas of abstract art that come in part from the bit of Jackson Pollock in the first Olivia book, in which Olivia sees a Pollock at a museum and then comes home and tries to reproduce it on the wall, the result being not a Pollock but a mess: “Jackson Pollock” and “mess” are Nathan’s favored terms for big scribbles. It turns out there’s a Pollock at the Fogg. We’ll have to take him there quite soon.

Not today, though. I do think that Nathan can expect (if not today, then sometime before night eight) another art-making tool or two for Hannukah.

New writing elsewhere from us (not related to children’s art): Jessie herself writes for the Beacon Broadside today, on injustice at Guantanamo; I apply anti-rust treatment to an early poem by Donald Revell. (Also, I don’t think I ever mentioned in this space the flatteringly attentive review I got from a Minnesota writer named Stan Sanvel Rubin last year: I think it’s the most, and maybe the best, in-print attention my poetry has ever received.) Happy Hannukah!