It's Pop Culture, It Makes Me Cry

I'm a recent Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast devotee. I found out about the NPR podcast a few weeks ago when Dean Trippe, a comics artist I admire, posted a link to an episode where Glen Weldon, a writer for NPR, plugged his comic on the podcast. I like Pop Culture Happy Hour because it's got a bit of snark, a bit of emotion, they talk about comics, and I love that, but they also talk about TV, opera, music, theater, etc. I hear conversations there I feel like I've had with my friends over the years. When I first started buying comics my friends and I would go to one of the Local Comic Shops, buy our books, then take them to Schmuckers, a local burger joint. Before we were allowed to read our comics, we had to finish the signature "Wimpy Burger", and an order of fries, and a cup of coffee. When that was all gone we ordered a slice of one of a dozen or more homemade pies, got our coffees refilled, and tucked into our comics. We talked about creator dream teams, which characters we'd like to see team up, who should star in the movie about our favorite characters. It was like our own little pop culture happy hour.

So, every PCHH podcast has a theme, and last week it was Pop Culture that Makes Us Cry. I took a cue from them and made my own list of pop culture that gets me every time I encounter it. Here it is, for your pleasure, with some visual aids when applicable.

1." In a Season of Calm Weather' It's a short story by Ray Bradbury, the opener in a collection called A Medicine for Melancholy. There was a bookstore called Friedly's Books here in Toledo, and they specialized in Sci-Fi before they finally went out of business. I used to go to a lot of the used bookstores looking for Bradbury books because I love him and I wanted as much of his stuff as I could find. Friedly's had a copy of A Medicine for Melancholy, wrapped in plastic, on a shelf in a display case. I asked to see it, and I held it with due reverence, saw the price, written in pencil on the first page, and regretfully handed it back the the staff person. It was $35, and I had $9. And then the staff person said, "You know, the pages are kind of yellow, and the binding is going to go any minute. If you have five bucks, the book is yours." And I did, so it was.

The story, 'In a Season of Calm Weather', is about a man who loves Pablo Picasso, who finds out he is vacationing only minutes away from where Picasso is vacationing. He takes a walk down the beach and sees an old man drawing in the wet sand with a popsicle stick and that's all I'm going to tell you. I cry every time I read this story. I've read it out loud lots of times, to girlfriends and dear friends, my wife and my son, to myself, it's beautiful. I mean, it's Bradbury. Of course it's beautiful.

2. The Iron Giant It's an animated movie about a boy who finds a giant iron robot in the woods near his house. Its'a movie about heroes, making good choices, and the wild imagination. When my dear friend John Swaile was alive, he did a passable impression of the robot's voice. Also, Superman. If you haven't seen the movie yet, don't follow the link to the clip. Big, big spoiler.

3. The opening credits score for the Superman movies, by John Williams. I cry like a fool, because Superman is the greatest hero, even if he isn't my favorite hero, and that score is just perfect.

4. The Black Cauldron, book two of the Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander. If you've seen the abysmal Disney adaptation of this book, don't hold it against the story--the story is brilliant. Brilliant. I've read the whole series nearly every year since I was 9 or 10. When I worked at Borders I must have sold the first book in the series, The Book of Three, to a thousand parents who said their sons wouldn't read. And when those boys came back for the second book they were readers for life. Just about a month ago, while I was at Barnes and Noble with my son, I over heard a mother encouraging her son to find something to read, and I recommended this series. I saw them leave the store with the first two books. Success!

The Black Cauldron finds our protagonist Taran in the midst of a great adventure. He is burdened with responsibilities both joyous and odious and seems several times to lose more than he gains. I'm moved to tears several times throughout this boy's challenging, heart-wrenching adventure.

5. Every year I get to read the penultimate selection for the annual Jack Kerouac Memorial Reader's Theater, called Back to Jack. It's the closing passage from On the Road, where Sal, the novel's protagonist, is thinking about his friend Dean who has just walked off into the American Night. I've read it one hundred times, and every time I get to the part where Jack describes nightfall, and I read the words "...cups the peaks and folds the final shore in...", I think of my beloved friends who have passed on and I crack, tears well up and my voice loses strength, every single time.

7 Word Biography

Talks a lot about writing, but doesn't write.

Spider-Man Says Our Choices Make Us Who We Are

When you let your mind wander, where does it go? Where are you, or what are you doing when you open the door for it, like a dog or cat that needs out, noses around tree trunks or tires, nudges corners with its cheek, and pisses the boundary of its wide, private territory?

National Jazz and National Poetry Month, Gardening, Stanley Kunitz hidden inside

Outside under a gun metal sky and a looming threat of rain, Henry's helping me work in the flower beds. By help I mean he's loading dirt into his John Deere construction toys and hauling it from the pile I made to a pile he's made opposite mine. It's fine, I haven't planted anything yet, we're just weeding, re-cutting the border and digging out ornamental rocks and resetting them in a ring around the bed.

It's National Poetry Month but I'm not writing much poetry. It's also National Jazz History Month, and I listened to Kind of Blue five or 6 times to celebrate. I reach a lovely bliss state when I listen to that album. If I had to imagine what a milk drunk baby must feel like, I'd compare it to the feeling I get listening to "Flamenco Sketches", wholly satisfied, even my soul at ease, joints disconnected in a feeling of weightlessness, almost heavenly.

It's National Poetry Month, as I've said. I submitted a few mid-grade, uninspired lines to a few contests this month and they were duly unrecognized and rightly so. I'm a slow writer, filling up eighteen to twenty pages with notes and false starts for one short poem. I'm trying to accept that about my creative nature but I wish I was prolific, and I wish I could land every poem I start writing with a just a few scratches of a ballpoint pen and the most minor revisions.

Sometimes I listen to Red Garland's solo on "Bye Bye Blackbird", from the 'Round Midnight' recording, and I think, if only I could make something so sublime, so beautiful, so perfect. I mean, I'd like to make a poem so expressive and concise. And I'll tell you what, for the longest time I was convinced I was listening to Wynton Kelly on that track. And I'd like to thank all the jazz-heads who I've ever talked to about that track for not correcting me and embarrassing me, although maybe they should have corrected me. I don't know.

The garden needs more attention. I have to move hostas from a bed on the East side of the house to a bed on the North side which is protected from full sun by two enormous maple trees. I have a lot of work to do in the yard. When we moved into this house it had been empty for seven years, and though the landlord maintained the property adequately, no one cleaned or replanted beds and there's a mess of overgrown foliage to trim, pull out, prune, transplant, and tend back to life with some tenderness and patience. Plus I'm getting married in the front yard in three weeks and I want it to look beautiful for the wedding, the wedding I haven't selected poems for yet, the wedding I don't have a suit for yet, etc. Hopefully it'll rain, and I can stay in after I'm done writing this and maybe read for awhile, or watch Spider-Man with Henry again. Work's always waiting for you, after all, so patient, so persistent.

Children, My Favorite Wilderness Area, A Poem

So I'm in the midst of planning my wedding, and even though I'm writing a lot about it, and other things, I'm just not getting to the computer for the solid blocks of time I need to get it all down. Tonight I'm going to post a few older pieces, one about my step-daughter's cat (not really), and one about taking my son to the Irwin Prairie when he was a mere babe. Finally, I'm going to give you a poem I wrote for both of them more recently.

My Reading Year

I set myself a goal to read 52 books this year. Ideally I'd read a book a week, knowing full well I'd encounter some books that demanded to be read in one sitting and other books that I'd put down for whatever reason: to play with my son, to do laundry, because there's a cedar waxwing in the tree outside the kitchen window, and I might not get back to it for a few hours, or even several days.

I established a few rules for myself, too. Here's why: there are hundreds of books in my personal collection I've still never read. I want to read those books, but sometimes I go to the Library, and don't you know, I get a little...well, crazy, and I walk out with a stack of books I have no hope of reading through, and meanwhile the books I actually own and make room for in this dwindling living space languish on the shelves.

Spring Peepers

Last night there was a modest, almost peaceful, thunderstorm somewhere South of Ida. I saw the lightning brighten the sky in the distance but I heard no thunderous report. Lord knows what it was like in the city or town or wooded lot right below, but from my vantage point it was a delight and I rolled down my window to allow the fresh ozone fragrance and cool spring air to fill my car.

An Introduction, Radio Lab, On Book

Hi. 
Hi, everyone. 
Anyone?

Anyone out there, maybe? 

Well. I'm Michael. I've been keeping a blog called The Toledo Poetry Museum for a little while now, but I'm mostly not writing about poetry over there, instead I'm writing things mostly not about poetry. But I wanted to do a blog that was a catalog of interviews with regional poets, so I thought I'd start a new blog that could be miscellaneous, and wild, and free, right here, and I could keep doing exclusively poetry stuff over there. So I'll post more interviews there soon, and some new poetry maybe, and a little book talk when the mood strikes, and right here is where I'll put the nature writing, the political rants, the life experience stuff. Because you know, I love comic books and poetry, and bugs, and cooking, and I care about Equal Rights and Reproductive Rights, by which I mean I'm Pro-Choice and pro-Woman in general, and let's just get the show on the road and be decent and equal all the way around. I care about that. 

And I want to know why we're still going to war, I mean, why are we still doing war when it clearly hasn't worked in the slightest, not for us or our opponents. I mean take a look at the place, we live in a shit house now. And I'm not religious but I love Jesus, I think about Jesus a lot for a non-Christian I'd guess. I like talking about what he meant when he said all that stuff many Bibles print with red letters. In fact I do a lot of mental gymnastics with that stuff at work, where I'm alone often, with only myself to talk to. 

I'm a prep-cook in a pizza kitchen and I stand at a stainless steel prep table about 40 hours a week and I think about Jesus, and Conservation, and Metaphors, and I re-stage panels of my favorite comic books. I write notes in small yellow legal pads and a lot of those notes are going to turn into blogs. I listen to Radio Lab and I take notes. I listen to On Being and I take notes. I listen to the Talking Comics podcast and I take notes about that, too. Few months ago I heard a Radio Lab rebroadcast of its "Space" episode and I almost lost my mind, it made me so happy to hear what the host was saying about space exploration and the likelihood of visitors to Earth from other planets. See, I don't believe we're being visited by aliens but I do not discount the possiblity of life of some kind or other elsewhere in this gigantic and ever enlarging Universe. Is Universe capitalized or not? I'll do it anyway, but I'll find out for later. Anyway, the host was saying the chances that we've been visited are so slim that it's unlikely but it's not also unlikely that there's life on other worlds. And I agree, but I'm not so eloquent, so I'll ln you to the show so you can hear it yourself. Plus, there's an interview with Carl Sagan's widow that will make you weep. 

Here it is: http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blogland/2012/aug/20/rebroadcast-space/ Go Listen, you won't be sorry. 

I don't know how long blogs are supposed to be. I mean, what's your attention span? I don't know. I don't read a lot of stuff on the internet, so I'm afraid I don't know what a polite or customary blog length is. 

So I'll stop here because I want to. I have a few things to do, poetry to write, for example. It's National Poetry Month so I'm challenging myself to work on poems new or old everyday, regardless of my ambition or the duration of my work day. I haven't done that yet today except to think about it, so I should before it gets too late and I fall asleep while On Book. 'On Book', that's what my friend Don calls it when he's writing. I recently adopted the phrase. So I'll be On Book for a little while tonight. Let's hope something lovely comes out of it.