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SPEAKING MY HEART |
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Last Updated: 2009. gada 05. novembris plkst.22:56
— Last Comment: 2009. gada 07. novembris plkst.15:32
Halloween is the season of horror. Goblins, ghoulies and ghosties skulk around the edges of consciousness. Television movie channels pull from their graves the remains of plots that refuse to die ~ Psycho, Vertigo, Rebecca - while Hitchcock's Birds wheel through the air. The little ones may delight in dressing up as princesses, pirates or warlords, but blood drips and body parts pile up for the vampires, zombies and other assorted creatures of the night who seek to displace chainsaw-wielding psychopaths as the epitome of evil terror.
Everyone understands "there's gold in them-thar dismemberments", and across the country everything from neighborhood haunted houses to Universal Studios' famous Halloween Horror Nights in Orlando is trying to take a bite out of the consumer. We love to be entertained, and we love to be scared when we know it doesn't count. With its witches' brew of Dia De Los Muertos skeletons, decorated graves, black cats, and whacked-out pumpkins, Halloween is our perfect holiday. All those sugar highs are lagniappe.   One of the most unlikely purveyors of horror might be the American poet, Carl Sandburg. He's not much in favor these days. He's too common, too plain-spoken. He wasn't considered "literary" in his day and today he'd be left out of most symposia and cocktail parties. But he had vision, and he understood people. Like Whitman before him, he acknowledged his debt to the workers and builders, the families and businesses which knit this country together. I've often thought of Sandburg during this past year, after decades of ignoring his work. Standing in the midst of the detritus of Hurricane Ike, the first words which resonated in the silence were his, the introduction to his gripping Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind. "Yesterday" was gone, indeed, along with Bolivar Penninsula, a good bit of Galveston and the security of people up and down the coast. "What of it?" asked the woman named Tomorrow. "Let the dead be dead." Whenever I've pitted Sandburg against Faulkner in this matter of the past, Faulkner always won. Sandburg felt too bleak, too resigned, too dismissive of the possibilities inherent in life. When Faulkner's character Gavin Stevens says, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past", the tone is quite different. But both men are communicating truth, and it is Sandburg's truth I ponder today. In recent months, as economic devastation, social upheaval and political crosscurrents have surged their way through our national life, I've been unable to stop thinking about Sandburg. He couldn't have known when he published his works what form his beloved country would have taken years hence. And yet his words are chilling, nearly prescient, as sharp and timely as though he meant to speak them precisely to us, the countrymen and women he never would know. A Lincoln scholar, a lover of history, a straightforward man of integrity who could touch the hearts of his contemporaries, Sandburg should speak to us today. Let the thrill seekers crowd into their theatres or the living dead prowl their haunted houses. Let the role players smear their blood and the would-be vampires try for a second bite. This Halloween, I'm tired of tricks, and I don't need the treats. I'd rather look at my country clear-eyed, and hear the poet speak, and share his unmasked words with those who dare to face our own, unnerving horrors.                 
What I was reading was John Steinbeck's Cannery Row. Unlike another of his classics, The Grapes of Wrath, the saga of Doc and Dora, Mack, Hazel and Eddie never was banned by any library or school board I know of, but in my parents' household, banning would have been irrelevant. Books were written, and books were meant to be read. If the reader happened to be a third-grader who'd pulled a grown-up novel off the shelves because she was attracted by the cover, so be it...
Writing has brought innumerable changes to my life. In addition to solving quite concrete and practical problems like finding enough time in a day to write, I've been forced to confront issues which, quite frankly, didn't concern me even a year ago.One of those issues is content theft, known more formally as copyright infringement. Across the web, musicians, photographers, writers and artists of every sort have been forced into a kind of guerilla warfare with folks...
What happens when you give a nice, serious, aspiring writer too much eggnog? If you're lucky, she starts to laugh at herself.Most of you know I've got this "thing" about graphics. I love photos and illustrations that go along with a blog theme, but I just get all twitchy when folks load up the comments section with unrelated gifs, jpegs and YouTube videos. Maybe it's snarky, maybe it's pretentious, or maybe I'm just flat weird, but that's the way I am. Now, if we...
Whether you've been day sailing in Galveston Bay or managed an offshore jaunt to Port Aransas, everyone has to come home. Tacking or reaching through the Gulf toward Galveston, you'll find moored buoys marking the shipping lanes and jetties. Chirping and moaning across the waves, their bells, whistles and horns speak an ageless sea-language, and patterned flashes of light make them easily recognizable even for the night watch. Slipping through the bay, there are da...
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