Song: Alive & Well

I wrote these Joycean alternate lyrics to The Dying Californian (from the Sacred Harp, pg. 410t, music by Ball & Drinkard, 1859) outside La Val's Pizza on Durant.

I'm alive & well in Berkeley,
When you'll write I never can tell.
Eat & think hard, bawl & drink hard,
I survive alive & well.

Cain't harass, her donkey's quirkley,
Natural gas our bodies expel.
Educate her issue, pink card,
Damn Lord Clive, alive & well.

Sixty-five & quell the turkley,
When we fight, I never do swell.
Soon you'll miss me in your berth-tard,
Still I thrive, alive & well.

E-mail: Ee Gad, the Frustration of Waiting for the English Version to Arrive in the Mail

Date:	Wed, 25 Jul 2007 15:17:37 -0700 (PDT)
From:	"Sue Welsch" <________@yahoo.com>
Subject:	I finished
To:	"James Welsch" <_@itwaslost.org>

James,

I finished the book last night. No hints.

Love, MOM

Deus Patheticus

Our God is acting pathetic & shamefully,
Expelling her friends from our small community,
The secretary has become the accuser,
Translated texts interpreted literally,
He has denied amnesty to the refugee,
Don't they know they're going to lose her?

He created this ecology for us to love him,
Created the pilgrim pirates to find his treasure,
And it adores itself thru itself;
But how can the rebellion look up from above him,
When the pain he condemned is actually a pleasure?
And the nonsense texts are dusty on the shelf?

She has continually renewed her lust on a spinning wheel,
And he has lost interest in every thing
Except keeping the price of corn whiskey low;
She has learned to stay alive by remembering how to feel,
One day in his mason jar he found her cursed ring,
Now he measures his friends by the kilo.

Pollan & Blake, The Bestial Diversity of Pleasures

"When you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry, & transport the corn, you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter & a third of a gallon of oil to grow it - or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food."

-Michael Pollan, "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (2006), pg. 45-46

I've just been reading that great book, which has been quite popular round here for a year now. I had started reading it a year ago in Moe's Books, but I didn't want to spend twenty-five dollars on it (which I needed to spend on gasoline), so I had to wait for a friend, who had been given the paperback, to lend it to me. I guess I hadn't ever really realized that chemical fertilizer is made from fossil fuels, & that without the innovations of Fritz Haber, who also developed chemical weapons for WWI Germans from the same science, the world couldn't support as many humans as it does, just off of sun-fed crops.

"In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy."

-William Blake, "Proverbs of Hell" from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (1789)

I thought of Blake's proverbs this morning when reading about crop monoculture. One of the major themes thru the proverbs is the diversity of joys, & he often employs a whole poetic bestiary to symbolize the range of unfettered pleasures possible upon this earth. "The eagle never lost so much time, as when he submitted to learn of the crow", et cetera. (See also the "Arise, my Theotormon" speech from Visions of the Daughters of Albion.) Michael Pollan was describing the transition from the family farm, which grew a diversity of crops to support a small community of people & animals, & of course that diversity comes in yearly cycles to keep the soil healthy & fertile. Blake compares the cycles of agriculture to the growth of the mind/spirit (the above quote), & Pollan writes that "Planting corn on the same ground year after year brought down the predictable plagues of insects & disease". He also mentions the cliché that we are what we eat, which Blake might have agreed with (and might also argue that we are what we let ourselves become, like in "The Book of Thel", if we choose, worm-nourishing soil.) The more we eat processed food, which masks as diversity with forty-five thousand varieties in the supermarket, but actually largely comes from corn, soybeans, & chemicals, the less we allow the diversity of our spirit to reap the joys from infinite interlayering cycles. Don't forget Blake's pillar-rocking confirmation in the Marriage: "Man has no Body distinct from the Soul, for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age." Those inlets must be left open to nourish the whole, & we can't let any breach of imagination delimit the quality of what we let in.

"Faith, which the president has, reduces the complexities of history into a simple explanation, in the same way that Genesis reduces the wondrous product of billions of years of evolution into seven simple days. That is not leadership."

-Prof. James E. Coleman Jr., Duke Law School, Durham, N.C.,
from a letter to the New York Times, July 17, 2007.

Rhythm of Tonight's Dinner

My wife believes she is being transported to a holocaust of cookery.
Her watercolors are important,
Without them my illuminations are only two-dimensional,
And even though our doctor says she can't,
I know she can make this mutual contribution when she will.
The Sous-Chef beneath our Poet Laureate's refrigerator has been eaten by dust bunnies.
This is a great responsibility for the spaceships of the world, but they've never known hurry.
The radio has been turned off.
My nine Latvian Nannies have been sent home.
There is a strange magic in my daughter's cough.
I detect in my apéritif an undertone of mermaid foam.
And the rising politician next door, whose scandal is flavored with yellow & red curries,
Like tonight's dinner, will be squished neath the weight of ten thousand vicious inquiries.

What happened to the questions of last February's poem? Who invited that wanker?
The health inspector's knocks,
Always punctual & always ill-timed,
Have shaken the staff to the holes of their holy sox.
In strictest verse & meter his report is rhymed.
The administration of the household will look both ways before deciding the vegetarian option.
The Princess of Belarus has arrived without her secret friend to spank her.
I have been struggling to change the subject
Away from the issues plaguing Rwanda's economy,
But my idiot brother has no respect
For what the upper-class doesn't find funny.
And the lovely young heiresses, whose blouses' integrities fragilely depend on a safety pin,
Like tonight's dinner, are already looking to East Asia for a righteous multicultural adoption.

This 1897 Cognac can barely wash away the taste of those peasant dishes.
Has my wife forgotten the reason
I've lost my robes to the hungry wind?
And why we don't serve pitted fruit at the end of the season?
But all my opinions she must naggingly rescind.
My brother & the Princess are still arguing about whether the Solanum Nightshade was genetically modified,
While the Gringo slaves of minimum wage are buried beneath piles of dirty wishes.
Putting my feet up on my great-great-grandmother's ottoman,
I can reflect upon a couple well-phrased biblical verses.
There are a few hostile mergers which I ought to plan,
But right now I'm content to let the demitasse scream its curses.
And the taxidermied venison heads, near the ceiling, noble & sad-eyed,
Like tonight's dinner, have been taken from the wild & irreverently deep-fried.

Poem about Spiders & Birds

Some spiders build their webs up high,
And some build them low,
And I can guess why.
Some spiders can neither walk nor talk.
Some spiders look like walruses
Fighting dying polar bears from their polar webs,
Eugene V. Debs,
Eugene V. Debs;
But the Imagination has a poor lock,
Xanadus Interuptus, like this prophecy from the Webb Block.

A fake door is off its hinges.
There are submerged forests just past the beach.
The somnambulists have grown corpulent from their ambient binges.
And I have heard the presidents singing each to each.

Many birds don't use their wings for flight,
But of course many do,
Just like you-know-who.
Some birds can neither look nor cook.
Some birds are actually spiders or walruses,
But no birds are crawling incubuses.
Huge underwater birds catch dugongs in their webs,
Eugene V. Debs,
Eugene V. Debs;
But the Endangered Species List has become a phone book,
When my table is wobbly, it's the first place I look.

That phony door has been completely obliterated by dynamite!
The ancient summits of the Atlantean hills
Are covered in campfires, the night before the fight.
Silent! I hear the presidents taking their sleeping pills.

Mime Review, and my July Fourth Set List

I was separated from my friends this Independence Day, curses from a dead mobile phone battery, & I ended up alone in San Francisco's Mission Delores Park for the least patriotic birthday our country's ever felt. The San Francisco Mime troupe put on a free musical about Dick Cheney & some gay war reporters, which was some sharp & broad political humor. One of the songs was about 'where you find love, you'll find America'. Another song, a love song between the gay soldiers reminiscing about their homeland rendezvous, had the hook "we're not in Wisconsin anymore." The show also included Condi Rice zapping Cheney with a heart attack remote control. I had sort of written off anti-Bush political humor as having nowhere to grow, but this was the best I've ever seen it; our country's just gotten bitterer & the jokes blacker.

I was dressed in light blue & white, to match my new Fluke ukulele, with a flag tie, & I played a forty-five minute set on the sidewalk - pulling in a whopping four dollars (£2), which I'm drinking right now. My God-Bless-America set list, to tickle the curiosity of those in Hawaii & in the Twenty-Second Century, & to make me grin in my sweet dementia when I live in Hawaii in the Twenty-Second Century:

Rocky Mountain High (Colorado's State Song, written by some God-fearing stoner, the "Seam Thong" of the Mountainous Ukulele Style)
My Home Town (Alan Price)
I'll Follow the Sun (Lennon/McCartney)
Vatican Rag (Tom Lehrer)
Tiptoe Thru the Tulips (Al Dubin & Joe Burke)
I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper (sung for a young lass's birthday)
River del Montague (which I wrote when I was sixteen)
Broadway Baby (Stephen Sondheim)
Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head (Burt Bacharach & Hal David)
Little Grass Shack (Bill Cogswell, Tommy Harrison & Johnny Noble)
Dear Someone (Gillian Welch)
Yankee Doodle Dandy (George M. Cohen)
Battle Hymn of the Republic (with some of my own verses).

I am not attempting this record for the money. It is enough for me to know that I have inspired an entire generation of young people to grow long body hairs and achieve their own dreams.

-Doug Williams, my colleague at Sarah Lawrence College,
who was just entered in Guinness for the world's longest nipple hair, from his press release.

Liberals don’t believe in free exchange, tolerance, or the marketplace of ideas. They believe in the iron boot of liberalism stamping out any view that upsets the liberal apple cart.

-Brent Bozell, President of the so-called "Media Research Center",
waxing all mixed metaphoric on Elizabeth Edwards & Ann Coulter

Stepping in a rhythm to a Kurtis Blow
Who needs to think when your feet just go?
With a hiditihi & a hipitiho,
Who needs to think when your feet just go?
Who needs to think when your feet just go?
James Brown,
James Brown,
James Brown,
James Brown.

-The Tom-Tom Club, "Genius of Love"

Two Limericks Composed during a Ninety Minute Bath

A Tango that started in Bloemfontein,
By Tuesday had reached South Carolein,
This exhaustive endeavor
Will last till forever,
Or at least till we Begin the Begein.

A theater troupe in Naples, New York-ass
Had employed as its resident dork-ass
A hard-shoe tap dancer
With a question for an answer,
At sushi he always ordered pork-ass.