Waxing Philosophical – The Framework of Now

Posted January 19, 2010 by ManicDdaily
Categories: Blogging, poetry
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

One of the negative side effects of being a writer and blogger is difficulty being a “liver”.  (I do not mean here an organ that filters blood, but a person who does not filter experience.)

When you focus a great deal on ongoing narratives and commentary, it can be very hard to just be (as they say) in the moment.  The ongoing mental monologue (or dialogue if, like me, you are a Gemini) unfortunately leads to a lack of attention, also a lack of wonder.  This is terribly self-defeating as both attention and wonder are important tools in coming up with something real/good/unique to write about.

Of course, it’s not just writing and blogging that make for difficulties in being present in the actual ongoing physical world.  Modern life cultivates customs of pre-occupation.  Cell phones, blackberries, make avoidance of the direct physical moment seductively easy; a screen on which one can project one’s own narrative and constant commentary (whether texting, emailing, or simply identifying) is compellingly addictive.

There’s also the fear factor.   Turning your attention to the moment, to the right now physical world, can be scary simply because you are typically such a small part of that moment, such a teeny, transient, corner in that world.

Here’s a short poem about it, written while trying to take a walk.  (In short, it’s a poem written about being in the moment while avoiding actually being there.)

The Framework of Now

How hard it is
for the mind to fit
into the framework of now;
the reason may be
that ‘now’ is not ‘me’;
how the mind hates to see
how much goes on,
and will go on,
when it is gone.
Can’t rationalize the lack
of its active participation,
a bulwark
unto itself.

All rights reserved.  Karin Gustafson

P.S.  – the above poem is really a draft.  These are always especially hard for me if no formal verse structure, i.e. sonnet, villanelle, pantoum, is involved.  If anyone has any ideas, let me know.

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The Downside of a Three-Day Weekend

Posted January 19, 2010 by ManicDdaily
Categories: elephants, Stress
Tags: , , , , ,

Tuesday Morning

That it’s not four days.

(Check out 1 Mississippi, also by Karin Gustafson, if you like elephants, and sleep.)

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Missed The Kandinsky Show? One More Reason to Leave New York?

Posted January 18, 2010 by ManicDdaily
Categories: New York City, Stress, Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wassily Kandinsky, The Garden of Love (Improvisation No. 27), Alfred Stieglitz Collection, The Metropolitan Museum, New York

This weekend, possibly my 1500th weekend in New York City, I asked myself once again whether I should keep living here.  Here’s a bit of the analysis:

Why You Might Leave

1.  The last play you saw (on Broadway or Off) was The Fantasticks.  (Not in revival.)

2.  About 60% of the apartment that you spend about 60% of your disposable income upon is used for storage.

3.  Repeat, in case some of that last bit was unclear:  you spend about (at least) 60% of your disposable income on said apartment.

4.  One of the best things about that income-expending apartment is that it is located in a part of New York City that hardly feels like New York City.

5.  More importantly, you love Kandinsky.  Boy, do you love Kandinsky.  What, the Kandinsky show closed already?  After only 4 months!?

6.  You pride yourself on knowing such esoteric things as the location of the very best public bathrooms in downtown Manhattan.  (The fifth floor of the Surrogate’s Court building.  The cubicle doors are made of real wood with real carved patterns.)

7.   No, you didn’t get to the William Blake show at the Morgan either.  Is it still open?  (You’re too tired earning disposable income for that apartment that you store your stuff in to check.)

8.  The stress of the City has turned you into a vampire junkie. (There’s something about sucked-out lifeblood that really speaks to you.)    Let’s just say that the last movie you went to was not an art film.

Why Stay

1. The last time you drove a car was almost a year ago.  You don’t miss the experience.

2.   You never really get tired of the Kandinskys that are part of the permanent collections of the Met, Modern and Guggenheim.

3.   The Met also has some good Blakes.

4.  The ladies’ room in the Surrogate’s Court building (fifth floor) really is extremely nice.

5. Your apartment has great closets (at least for the City.)

6.   And is below market rates.  Meaning that there are people paying even more for even less. (Question:  does that truly make you feel better?  Answer:  yes.)

7. Besides that, there’s a gym in your building where, every evening, you can read vampire novels while working out on the elliptical machine.  Yes, they are vampire novels, but hey! you’re working out.

8.  More importantly, said apartment is located in a part of New York City that doesn’t feel like New York City, but is in fact a part of  New York City.

9. Where you can walk nearly anywhere.

10.  Even to permanently-hanging Kandinskys.

11.  Aaah.

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How To Feel Rich, Sensual, Happy, And Free to Turn Off Telethons.

Posted January 17, 2010 by ManicDdaily
Categories: children's illustration, news, Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Endangered Cheetah Stuffed Animal



Ten Reasons You Should Give To Charity (Haiti and Elsewhere.)

1.  It gives you free (i.e. non-hypocritical) license to make fun of Pat Robertson.

2.  And Brangelina.

3.  It allows you to guiltlessly  switch channels whenever a telethon comes on.  (No matter what stars participate in these events, they always remind me of the boy who was paid $5 to sing, $10 to stop singing.)

4.  It will make you feel good, on a sensual level, and happy, on a satisfaction level.  See e.g.  recent studies cited by Nicholas Kristof in NY Times op-ed, about food, sex and giving.

5.  That satisfaction thing works.  (At least for me.  Whenever I make a charitable donation, I feel immediately less broke.  Actually, I feel immediately kind of rich.)

6.  On the sensual level, you can do it in the middle of the night.  In the privacy of your own home.

7.  You can avoid that embarrassing silence that follows your accountant’s question, while computing your income tax deductions–“charitable giving?”

8.  The range of options as to how you spend money allotted to charitable gifts is even greater than those offered by Amazon–Haiti, rainforests, girls’ schools in Pakistan, a llama for a family in Bolivia, Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees….

9.  Some charities will even send you a stuffed animal.

10.  A personification of the warm fuzzies.

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    Attacks of Amnesia – Giuliani, Perino, Matalin

    Posted January 16, 2010 by ManicDdaily
    Categories: 9/11, news, Uncategorized
    Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

    Not quite breaking news:  Rudy Giuliani has fallen victim to a sudden infestation of swine amnesia.  Unlike the former brain glitch of Mr. Guiliani, a rare “towerettes” symdrome which caused him to blurt out the numbers 9/11 every few moments, the new affliction has  caused his brain to blank out these numbers.  Symptoms were manifest recently during a televised discussion of the attempted Christmas day attack by Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, in which Mr. Giuliani insisted that there had been no domestic terror attack under the presidency of George W. Bush.

    Other victims of this amnesia appear to be Dana Perino, ex-press secretary to George Bush, and Mary Matalin, a former senior advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney.

    To give Ms. Perino the benefit of the doubt,  she may not have truly “forgotten” the attacks of 9/11, but have attempted to make a distinction between an attack carried out by a U.S. citizen, such as the shootings at Fort Hood, and attacks by foreign nationals.   (I’m sorry not to have done better research here—the tapes of people saying things like this make me too upset to spend a long time listening to them.)

    Without wishing to diminish the horror of the terrible shootings at Fort Hood, I can’t help but remind Ms. Perino of the U.S.-born Beltway sniper,  John Allen Muhammed, who spread terror throughout Virginia and Maryland in 2002 (a Bush year).

    Unlike Ms.  Perino,  Ms. Matalin seems to have simply “xed” out the first year of Bush’s presidency; her disorientation alloting it to the Clinton column.

    All of these killings are horrible; the fact that they are used to score political points is itself a sickness.  Hopefully, this amnesia will not be contagious.  Unfortunately, Giuliani, Perino and Matalin, are already beyond cure.

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    Friday (At the Cathedral)

    Posted January 15, 2010 by ManicDdaily
    Categories: writing exercises
    Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

    Because my brain was kind of dull today as I boarded the subway,  I thought simply of writing about “Friday”.

    Friday was the day we had Cathedral services when I was in high school.  We wore blue green tweed jackets with a little insignia patch at the breast pocket, which were matched, on cold days, by plaid kilts, or tweedy a-lines; on warmer days, coupled with  seersucker dresses of regulation pink, green, blue, yellow.

    It was a private school, with a vague (given that it was Episcopal) ecclesiastical bend.  The most important sign of that was our location, of course, on the grounds of a Cathedral, or, as it was called, the Cathedral “close.”

    It was a genuine, or at least authentically copied, gothic cathedral.  Our Friday service was held in the nave.  While most of the high vaulted space was a soaring rebound of grey (stone and huge pillars of air surrounded by stone), the nave was carved from dark shiny wood.  It had an almost cozy, feel, like a breakfast nook in a mansion.  The pews of the knave sat in two or three rows that extended along its sides; hard and high-backed like the banquettes in a diner, they were stiff but comfortable, loungeable despite a design intended to enforce posture, smooth enough to accomodate sliding shifts of position.

    It was a school service.  In a girls’ school.  So I can’t say that we were completely quiet.    Talking was was accomplished,  homework sneaked (though white blue-lined paper showed up pretty sharply against that deep dark wood.)  Still, there is something about a cathedral—did I mention the stained glass?—that enforces a hush.  (Even a whisper seems to echo in those tall stone spaces.)

    Kids do not have very much of this kind of quiet today.  (Adults either.)  I’m not referring to the religious instruction, but to enforced (more or less) stillness.  No talk, no texting, no digital images, no electronic stimulation, no digital stimulation, no screen.  The primary excitement was the occasional standing hymn, which, due to Episocopal school traditions, was actually quite dramatic if you thought about the words.  We didn’t.  The meaning of all that soldiering and crusading passed us by, though the melodies were rousing enough.

    Friday:  the morning began with an hour of drone and contemplation, music and bottom-shuffling, in a place where we could not help but feel small, caught between the heavy gravity of all that stone and wood, and the uplift of  glass-painted light.  Our heads, if not exactly bowed, were also not bombarded.

    Afterward, we made our way across a large green lawn, the manic among us half-skipping beside our friends, the youngest holding hands.

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    Sad Day

    Posted January 14, 2010 by ManicDdaily
    Categories: elephants
    Tags: , , , ,

    Sad Day

    All rights reserved.  Karin Gustafson.

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    Why I Like Rob Pattinson Better Than Pat Robertson

    Posted January 14, 2010 by ManicDdaily
    Categories: news, Robert Pattinson, Uncategorized
    Tags: , , , ,

    1.  He plays guitar.
    2.  And piano.
    3.  And not on the desperate wish of sometimes desperate people for a prescribed means of being safe in a unpredictable and unsafe world.
    4.  He (Rob) readily acknowledges that the vast amount of admiration he receives is simply insane.
    5.  When he says something deceptive, he is openly tongue-in-cheek.  (The doleful shakes of his head are accompanied by self-deprecating laughter.)
    6.   He admits (at least,  in vampire persona) that no one can truly know the fate of souls.
    7.  He admits (in every persona) that he’s an actor.
    8.  I wouldn’t want to even think about whom Robertson might be secretly dating.
    9.   And then, well, there’s the hair.

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    Robertson’s Rule of Unreason

    Posted January 13, 2010 by ManicDdaily
    Categories: news, Uncategorized
    Tags: , , , , , , , ,

    Appearing on the Christian Broadcasting Network today to raise money for  Haiti, Pat Robertson gave, with conviction but seeming reluctance, an explanation for the long-term suffering of Haitians.  There was a reason, he said, that “people may not want to talk about.”

    The problem, he went on, arose a long time ago when the Haitians were under the heel of the French, “Napoleon III or whatever,” and the Haitians “had gotten together” and made a “pact with the devil” to throw the French out of Haiti.  This pact had succeeded (in that the French were thrown out), but the Haitians had suffered ever since.

    I’m glad that Robertson is raising funds to help Haiti, but he’s also just nuts.

    Even on the most basic factual level, Robertson is wrong.  The revolt to which Robertson seems to refer was from the French under Napoleon I, that is, Napoleon Bonaparte, the guy with the hand in his waistcoat.   (Okay, okay, what’s in a roman numeral?)   As my husband who knows all things historical points out, the famous revolt against Napoleon III was in Mexico.  (Okay, okay, same hemisphere.)

    The Haitian revolt against the French was also the first successful slave revolt in the New World, and led to the end of slavery in Haiti.  (Somehow, it’s hard to think of the ending of slavery as the product of a pact from the devil.)

    Robertson’s “pact with the devil” seems to be inspired by the fact that the signal to start the rebellion was supposedly given, in 1791, by Dutty Boukman, a high priest of voodoo and leader of the Maroon slaves, during a nighttime religious ceremony.  (The French Revolution also influenced the rebels, but it’s my guess that it’s the voodoo ceremony that really gets to Robertson.)

    I don’t pay a lot of attention to Robertson’s pronouncements, but even I have noticed a history of linking catastrophes to divine retribution.  In 2001, for example, he “totally” concurred with Jerry Falwell who said that Americans in favor of abortion, homosexuality and the separation of church and state had “helped” the World Trade Center attacks to happen by angering god.

    What ever happened to the religious and philosophical conundrum of bad things happening to good people? (Was the 2004 Tsunami “helped” by Buddhism?  Is “don’t ask don’t tell” responsible for the casualties in Iraq?)

    Robertson’s God seems to punish with a very broad brush.  (The problem of a fly in the ointment is resolved by the burning down of the whole pharmacy.  Serves those prescription drug users right.)

    Yes, Haiti may lie upon a fault in tectonic plates, but whose fault is that?

    On the good side ( the New Testament, turn-the-other-cheek side), Robertson does seem to want alleviate the  suffering of poor people.  Still one can’t help but hope that Jeudy Francia, the woman, in Port-au-Prince, who cried “there is no one, nothing, no medicines, no explanations for why my daughter is going to die,” has not had to bear the additional misery of hearing Robertson’s reasons for her pain.

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    Joe Rollino – Bending Minds As Well As Quarters

    Posted January 12, 2010 by ManicDdaily
    Categories: New York City, news, Uncategorized
    Tags: , , , , , ,

    Is it too late?  Should I see my dentist first?

    Here’s the big question:  is it the bending of quarters with one’s teeth that leads to a sprightly 104, or is it the ability to bend quarters with one’s teeth?  Or is it the wacky bravura that thinks up the idea of bending quarters with teeth and then actually tries it?

    I like cold water.  I even swam at Coney Island (okay, dunked) on January 1, 2009 when it was 18 degrees on the beach.  But as I contemplate whether it’s worth going out there this weekend, the question once again comes to mind:  is it the swimming every single day for 8 years that leads to long-lived gusto? Or the gusto that gets you into that water in the first place?  (And also saves you from all the bacteria? )

    The great Coney Island strongman, Joe Rollino, died yesterday (January 11, 2010) at 104, hit by a minivan, walking his typical five miles a day, somehow too far from a crosswalk, too close to the road.

    A wonderful obituary in the New York Times describes Rollino bending a quarter with his teeth at 103, and shows him at age 10, already buff and tendon-y.   At age 89, he kept four motorcycles stationary at full throttle for twelve seconds.

    He was a relatively small for a strong man, so seemed driven towards creative stunts to prove his strength.  (Lifting 685 pounds with one finger.)  Somehow the ability to come up with zany, but impressive, tricks seems almost as integral to Rollino’s youthful aging as the discipline that gave him the strength to do those tricks.  (No meat, no cigarettes, no alcohol.)

    You almost feel that at, a slightly younger age (say 98), he might have been able to stop that minivan.  With one hand.

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