Donald Duck Qua Swedish Christmas Eve Tradition. Quack.

I'm half Swedish and also a great fan of Donald Duck and extended family: Huey, Dewey, Louie, Daisy Duck, Uncle Scrooge. When I was a kid, Swedish Christmas Eve was wildly traditional in our household and actually enjoyable. But there was no Svenska Donald at that point, that we knew of. Now there is, at least in Sweden and granted I was in N.Y. or California, so who knows, but a Duck tradition can only improve an already sparkling day.

From Atlas Obscura:

Every year since 1959, at 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve, the 1958 special Kalle Anka och hans vänner önskar God Jul (Donald Duck and His Friends Wish You a Merry Christmas, in English) is screened on Sweden’s main public television channel, TV1. Known in English as From All of Us to All of You, this hour of Disney mayhem is hosted by Jiminy Cricket, who leads viewers through about a dozen “Christmas cards” that open to reveal shorts, film clips and other cartoons dating from the 1930s through the 1960s. For decades Sweden only had two channels, and this was the only time of year when people could watch Disney animation or American cartoons on television. And the tradition stuck. Swedes are so compelled by the cartoon that last year during the program, cell data usage fell 28 percent and calls to emergency services dropped 16 percent, reports the Local.

Here's the full article: In Sweden, There Is No Christmas Without Donald Duck. 

Two poems enjoying cucumber sammies at Queen Mob's Tea House

Thanks to Erik Kennedy, poetry editor at Queen Mob's Tea House.

Poem the first: "Keeping It Holy"
(Fairfax Avenue, anyone?)

Poem the second: "Embalming"
(Look under the porch.)

***New poems published yesterday!***

Like a Fat Gold Watch: A Sylvia Plath Anthology now available for presale! #poetry

Available for pre-sale! Like a Fat Gold Watch: Meditations on Sylvia Plath

Edited by Christine Hamm.

To order, please visit https://theplathanthology.com

Contributors include:

Christine Hamm   Barry Napier   J. Hope Stein   Julia Gordon-Bramer   Angela Januzzi   Angela Simione   Sarah Sarai   Daniel Guerra   Maria Garcia Teutsch   Rebecca Loudon   Melanie Graham   Ivy Alvarez   Sean Labrador Y Manzano   Chris Girard   Heather Lenz   Ann Bogle   Angela Veronica Wong   Kelly Forsythe   Crystal Hurdle   Christine Swint   Elizabeth Kicak   Kevin McLellan   Jessy Randall   Liz Robbins   Sarah Busse   Monique Roussel   Melissa Guillet   Daniela Olszewska   Amanda Auchter   Lisa Cole   Joanna Penn Cooper   Janet McCann   Cati Porter   Cami Park   Mairi Sharratt   Juliet Cook   Phillip Ellis   Tasha Cotter   Gregory Schwartz

In Denzel Washington's Gaze & The Blood of Billy Bob Thornton - 2 poems

These two poems were published in Sprung Formal, which is published by the Kansas City Art Institute. 2009? 2013? I'll keep investigating. ...I'm cataloging-isa. Sarah

Winner of The PERSONALSAVIORLORDJESUSCHRIST Poetry Contest

Promises Had Been Made 

          

The women hide nothing.

She, captured in 

         accusation,

a collaborative creator.

Her envelopment has no meaning

         to a dead man

         whose death won’t 

         even end death.

Promises had been made.

Would that be me in her arms?

Not me here on 

         a bench in the gallery’s center

         squaring off

with loneliness and imagination, 

         both being among art’s disciples.

But some me – with a body 

         almost human as his.

         I know much of everything 

         but not enough.

An other Mary, 

         head lowering to his arm – 

         his conjuration of a once life

                    – touching but for

the confident artist’s oils of

         celestial buoyancy.

The men are concerned in their way,

         eyes averted from mine.

         I’m no Mary.

Loyal middle-management, they deny

the present’s threat of pain, 

         the present’s carry-through.

He is translucent in her arms,

         an embodied splay of 

         too much beauty to be real.

_____
Sarah Sarai. 2017. 
Winner of The PERSONALLORDSAVIORJESUSCHRIST Poetry Contest 2017, sponsored by Chris Rice Cooper. Chosen by Helen Losse, emeritus editor at The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature journal. Ekphrastic: Based on The Entombment by Moretto de Besco, at the Met.

Aristotle . Tipton Poetry Journal . Archive

I didn't originate in dust nor did my mother nor my father nor my sister Judy who, like our parents, was shoveled into that fiery furnace from which there is no return, in which the undertaker smelts our souls, and as an bonus, our corpses. There is, however, logic in the demise of literary journals signifying a from-dust to-dust scenario. Paper burns and there is little mystery as to its source, crafted as it is, by hand or factory, in sight of any who wish to watch.

Journals go out of print. Bookcase shelves sag. Small apartments do not expand. I am, therefore and now and then, taking a photo of poems from out-of-print journals and posting them here.

"Aristotle" was published Tipton Poetry Journal ten years ago. He knows from hubris.

#poems "2." "By Any" "Six Aunts Wobbling" "Science and Change" "And the Ships Set Off"

In Vending Machine Press this week, my #poems: "2." "By Any" "Six Aunts Wobbling" "Science and Change" "And the Ships Set Off" PLUS a really awful photo of me I CHOSE. In an authentic New York City apartment building lobby, a six-floor walk-up. No photo available of Vending Machine Press editor, Michael Lafontaine who is Australian. Who I thank for this journal and for selecting my work. 

Congratulations to my fellow poets. Again, please visit and comment on the poems. Thanks for supporting me. I do appreciate it.

"An Interrogatory" - In Which Isaiah Sees Seraphim as Did Sarah Sarai #poem

An Interrogatory 

     Nothing but smooth sailing.
     —The Isley Brothers

Those aren’t birds are they are they, 
are they?, or are they insects of an ilk

glowing and hovering hummingbird- 
like though not hummingbird, not bird,

no, I see it, that which I wasn’t seeing, 
a lingering phosphorescence, no

luminescence, oh!, it is incandescence 
and those are seraphim I see, I am

seeing seraphim, six-winged seraphim, 
seraphim having six wings or so said

Isaiah, a seraphim seer, two wings, 
fans over a mighty face, two enfolding feet

and two neon wings to lift them aloft, 
smoothly sail above prophesies for our

tangled times, two wings golden as honey 
is gold, as amber is gold, as transparency

is gold, carry us to a feared eternal now, 
tolerable, almost, when we sing along. 
____
Sarah Sarai. From Geographies of Soul and Taffeta, published by Indolent Books, 2016.

Can't Protest Weather, Can Protest Porn

I don't know how to publicly empathize with victims of natural disasters. I think that's because there is nothing I can suggest or support to change the situation. I can't join a stand-in against the ferocity of Hurricanes Harvey or Iris. I can't call a slew of Congresspeople and demand they deal with fault lines in California. I can't carry a poster to Union Square to protest natural devastation. 

What is possible is pushing legislators to finally rebuild infrastructure; insurance companies not to enable building in areas likely to get swept up (i.e. much of Florida); Congress to wake up. Science is a real live thing and they know it. They just like the feel of sand in their ears. This may or may not connect with what follows.

I was moved to post today after reading an article about porn. David Simon and George Pelecanos have created a new t.v. series on the porn industry that sprang from Times Square when the center of Manhattan was skeevy. I neither love nor hate Simon and have mixed feelings about The Wire. I have no mixed feelings about porn and Simon has illuminated aspects which have had a deadly and long-lasting effect on women.

The article is: "If you're not consuming porn, you're still consuming its logic." Some of Simon's and Pelecano's thoughts, as quoted in this article.

He admits: “I don’t have any real way to prove that, but certainly the anonymity of social media and the internet has allowed for a belligerence and a misogyny that maybe had no other outlet. It’s astonishing how universal it is whether you’re 14 or 70, if you’re a woman and you have an opinion, what is directed at you right now. I can’t help but think that a half century of legalised objectification hasn’t had an effect.”

On women and the latest election: "The code words that were used against not just her but female journalists and everybody that was involved peripherally in the campaign was awful. Never seen anything like it.”

George Pelecanos, 60, thinks about the two sons he raised and the conversations he overheard when their friends came to the family home. “The way they talk about girls and women is a little horrifying. It’s different from when I was coming up. It’s one thing what was described as locker-room talk, like, ‘Man, look at her legs. I’d love to…’ – that kind of thing. But when you get into this other thing, calling girls tricks and talking about doing violence to them and all that stuff, I’d never heard that growing up, man. I just didn’t.

A Little Night Bullshit

When dust clears or settles and I take the time to study a current object of my scorn or someone I insist has caused me pain, has hurt me, I realize all I am doing is blaming that person for being themselves, to wit: the idiot they are, the person who doesn't care about me and never did, the narcissist, the egotist, the disinterested. I am talking people I know, who act exactly as they have forever, but me, despite my insight and intelligence remains unaware - that's who they are and who they were and who they will be. If I'd hold off on my indignation and hurt, in other words IF I DIDN'T RESPOND SO QUICKLY, I'd see, over time, I was arguing the anteater out of the anteater - why anteater? Arguing that the tiger bites that the vulture hovers and dives that the snake bites and so does the shark. Oh yes. The shark. Dust doesn't settle quickly. 

A check cleared my bank acct. this morning. I can afford a sheet cake. #TinaFey

I don't mind if I lose friends or admirers or haters (but please, not lovers) over this: 

Is this for real? People are analyzing Tina Fey's 5-minute comedy gag and assessing her as not "woke" or not "woke" enough? Some dumbass sugary skit is getting in-depth criticism? She IS a college-educated white woman who has known extraordinary privilege for years and years, de facto, goes with the territory of success in the industry. She's not the perfect activist but did anyone expect her to be? Until today when a check finally cleared my bank account, I considered her privileged to be able to afford a sheet cake. 

There is generalized and damaging thinking all around, and no, it isn't the same as institutionalized hatred of black people which I have seen first-hand but have not experienced first-hand by a long shot, being white. I am clear on what I have and haven't lived through, and on privileges I have and haven't had, as an old person, as a fat woman, as a too-smart woman, as white in a white country, as educated, as having been duped into getting a sham of an MFA, as angry, as an adult child, as daughter of a religious maniac, as funny, as charming, as friendly, as not cool enough for idiots, as too strong for scaredy cats of the self-adored hip post-New York school mimics, as angry and mean and full of blame. I put "" around woke because the word in its new meaning so instantly became its own parody I dislike it. 

Back to the bitches of media. To quote Jerry Lewis, L-a-a-a-d-y!

#Poem: Revolt of the Extras (Zsuzsa Takács) ...we have/played our part for a full year...

Revolt of the Extras

We long to be continued after the last
episode, although the producers opened
the champagne and gave us a small farewell
party. This afternoon even we sit
on the kitchen stools in front of the camera
hoping to see ourselves in the new chapter: we have
played our part for a full year and this recent
indifference to our fate, the plotlines unfolding
without us in the new scenario
hurt us to the quick. No, this is not
what kept us pacing up and down the street,
shivering as usual at winter’s
end. Is it possible that the audience is losing
interest in us? Has our time passed
for good, our story passé, even though we are still
stirring? Coming and going we can hear
the camera’s buzz. As before, we tread with nimble
feet, but a low growl comes from the machine’s
jaws. We fear it might be disapproving.

by — Zsuzsa Takács, Translated from the Hungarian by Erika Mihálycsa

found poem (hah, not really, but really) on the Numero Cinc Magazine site - in the final issue. The journal's archives of many stunning poems, essays, translations, art, will remain online.

 Zsuzsa Takács has also be translated into English by the Hungarian-British poet George Szirtes.

.by 

Dear White People: Yesterday I Told You We Are White - Guess What - Another Day and Still White. Deal with It.

What I forgot to mention when chatting myself up yesterday* on the topic of whiteness was that a particular white person, Frank Bruni, who pens Op-Eds, has moments of pain in the ass-ness.

He's also a writing prompt. His NYT op-ed this weekend, I'm a White Man. Hear Me Out, prompted me to barf. Or almost. He begins with this whine. (A whine should be an orchestral instruction.) 

I’m a white man, so you should listen to absolutely nothing I say, at least on matters of social justice. I have no standing. No way to relate. My color and gender nullify me, and it gets worse: I grew up in the suburbs. 

Waaaaaaaah! What a coy maiden he is. But wait! He's gay! And from ye olden times, when it was tougher to be queer. I'm older than he is, from when it was tougher to be a dyke. And? You know who was from oldener times? Oscar Wilde. Imprisoned. Shamed. Despised. But so eternally loved.

So I wanted to reference one of Bruni's idiocies parading as insight and argumentation. He quotes black writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who wrote, Losing My Cool.

“My black father, born in 1937 in segregated Texas, is an exponentially more worldly man than my maternal white Protestant grandfather, whose racism always struck me more as a sad function of his provincialism or powerlessness than anything else. I don’t mean to excuse the corrosive effects of his view; I simply wish to note that when I compare these two men, I do not recognize my father as the victim.”

A quotation which Bruni uses as EXHIBIT A, if the court please! He maintains that because a black man, Williams exalts his father and because black people who do not have the limiting disease of racism, everyone should pity Bruni who does have that limiting disease. 

Of course white people know suffering and learn to transmute it in fire, in which souls are purified. But so what. Bruni states, "My gayness no more redeems me than my whiteness disqualifies me." Ahhh. He's a walking embrace of all mankind, that Frank. I wonder what a logician would say about his reasoning which goes like this: That person has welts because he was beaten. But I hurt too, Ma, and much of MY hurt bubbles in the shallow hole of my not having been beaten. Am I not a man?

Odd and distasteful, Bruni's argument is EXHIBIT B. 

I suggest that  when we accept who we are under the pretty big umbrella of being human, we won't hate difference because we'll see connecting threads
and the beauty and accept our limitations. It's not easy, I agree. One of the wisest bits of advice I ever heard was from a lover: Learn to take your lumps, Sarah. BRUNI!!! Learn to take your lumps, you poor sodden fool with your meagre NYT op-eds.

*Yesterday's post. Click.

Dear White People: We're White. Deal with It.

I've been seeing op-eds and postings by white people about our whiteness. White-like-me people are holding forth that our skin color doesn't define us. That they are the other kind of white person, not the frustrated, angry, slow-thinking KKK member, but the enlightened type of white person, who has known sufferings and tribulations. And loves Aretha. I have thought the same thing at times, about my whiteness, that because I have had a hard time because I'm not a stereotypical, Vogue model-worthy white woman, or even a reasonably competent and attractive woman who navigates life any too well. I'm not white white, am I? Hello, me?!? Swedish and Russian and white all over.

I won't bother with white-people pleas of having suffered as much as black people, because that is plain old dumb ass. The dyke-iest dyke and the queenliest queen, if white, has an easier time of it -- riding the subway, working, renting an apartment -- than a black counterpart.

Is it possible for white people to suffer? Do we have to prove our humanity? Yes, to the former. Yes, to the latter, although that yes is a bit wry. We BETTER demonstrate empathy and kindness. As for pain and suffering, jeeze, watch an opera, read some great literature. Sorrow and suffering, suffering and sorrow. Anna K. didn't throw herself under a train because she was looking forward to a picnic at the dacha the next day. History, the kind with nonfictional characters, is nothing more but the record of the ruling class ruling, screwing, cheating, enslaving the majority of people. Rapes, betrayals, jealousies, theft, murder, war. Feudal it was and feudal it still is. Do billions love religions because of ice cream socials in the basement after services? That would suffice for me, but, no. It's because religion at its best offers comfort. Why do we need comfort? Because we suffer. White or black, yeah, we all suffer.

But, fellow white folk. It's been different for us and that is a hard pill to swallow, an uncoated pill requiring a full glass of water to get down.  I understand why it may feel unfair and even why it may be unfair, a little, a bit. What else is unfair? Racism. Institutionalized mean-ass racism. Being the black guy delivering mail in a corporate office and getting hate looks from the Partners. Being the only black person in the drug store or business or small town. Being afraid day in and and day out that some asshole white person will choose to not feel their sorrow, but take out their frustration on a random black person or simply model their horrid shallowness by causing damage.

Yes, women know some of that fear. We do. We know institutionalized privations. And, yes, gay people, too. But that's how we now define ourselves? As victims? Uh. Have we white folk lived through over four hundred years of unrepentant cruelty and good old American meanness? We really have to bite the bullet and stop whining that we do participate in the very thing that has been despised for over 400 years in this country -- blackness and ethnicity. Do we envy black people? If we have any sense, we do. But envy is such an invalidating emotion. In this so important issue we have to acknowledge that we are different, an idea that runs contrary to good will-thinking of we're all the same and God loves us all the same. God does, God doesn't. In this minute, white people are different from black people. Like the rich are different from the most of us. Deal with it.

"There Is" ... A Louis Simpson poem

I've been a fan of Louis Simpson's poems since 1984 when I read him in The Kenyan Review. I wrote him a fan letter in the 1990s. He never responded. Oh well. 

There Is

Look! From my window there’s a view  

of city streets 

where only lives as dry as tortoises  

can crawl—the Gallapagos of desire. 

There is the day of Negroes with red hair 

and the day of insane women on the subway;  

there is the day of the word Trieste 

and the night of the blind man with the electric guitar. 

But I have no profession. Like a spy 

I read the papers—Situations Wanted.  

Surely there is a secret 

which, if I knew it, would change everything! 

2 

I have the poor man’s nerve-tic, irony. 

I see through the illusions of the age! 

The bell tolls, and the hearse advances, 

and the mourners follow, for my entertainment. 

I tread the burning pavement, 

the streets where drunkards stretch  

like photographs of civil death 

and trumpets strangle in electric shelves. 

The mannequins stare at me scornfully.  

I know they are pretending 

all day to be in earnest. 

And can it be that love is an illusion? 

When darkness falls on the enormous street  

the air is filled with Eros, whispering.  

Eyes, mouths, contrive to meet 

in silence, fearing they may be prevented. 

3 

O businessmen like ruins,  

bankers who are Bastilles, 

widows, sadder than the shores of lakes, 

then you were happy, when you still could tremble! 

But all night long my window 

sheds tears of light. 

I seek the word. The word is not forthcoming.  

O syllables of light ... O dark cathedral ...

__

Louis Simpson, “There Is” from The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940-2001. Boa. Copyright © 2003 by Louis Simpson.