en retraite

Time for a new posting.  I have been recently liberated from the world of work, en retraite, as they say in French -- no not on retreat (although that's coming up shortly as well), but having passed into the realm of retirement, non-work, unstructured leisure, 24/7 do-whatever-the-fuck-I-want (well that's obviously a gross exaggeration, in that I still exist within the multiple matrices of marriage, parenthood, neighborhood, and so on -- not to mention the overarching societal web).  Perhaps it's the hippie dream revisited 30 years hence, but drug-free and without having to live on subsistence.  Anyway, that's my initial hit on being en retraite...

Well it has been a while hasn't it? How the time does fly! Or is this an illusion? Anyway, the news is of having been liberated from an asylum of sorts -- i.e., "downsized", laid off, pink-slipped, shown the door (literally), canned, axed, FIRED (!). Feels liberating indeed. like being on fire at least a simmer, maybe embers coming to life. We -- well some of us -- do seem to need a situational kick in the pants sometimes as a stimulus to renewed alertness and aliveness. Well if this is the mania preceding the downer, so be it...

mamie and me: a dream on irony

(This dream really happened, as unlikely as it may seem.) I was writing a long poem. Mamie Eisenhower was next to me, dressed in a nurse's uniform (weird little hat and all). Was I a patient? I don't know, but for whatever reason I sat there or lay there and listened to her going on and on encouraging me to write an irony-free poem. Meanwhile, guess who sat demeurely in the corner, winking (ironically) at me -- Jackie Kennedy! As this was going on, I was composing a poem about the dream itself (a meta-dream?), accompanied by persistent thoughts: hey this is a really good poem -- I've got to remember this -- I can get this published by The New Yorker! -- they'll love these images of Mamie and Jackie and the theme of playing off against irony.

Mamie was relentless; not obnoxious, but unremitting, insistent. I kept looking over at Jackie (who was dressed very stylishly, even with the pillbox hat of the era), wishing she would be more helpful, stick up for irony or whatever, but she never said a word, just kept looking at me with knowing looks.

In Defense of "Living Room Scrabble"

It is depressing that in contemporary American culture every activity, virtually every object becomes assimilated into the capitalist/imperialist framework -- including key features such as fierce competition, goal over process, and reworking the rules to suit the participants (cf. Bush administration on torture). I am one of many excellent Scrabble players who plays for fun; is not especially competitive; finds the type A tournament player mentality antithetical to the recreational essence of the game; and most of all, finds the so-called Official Scrabble Dictionary absurd, with its vast number of words unknown to fluent English speakers. If a letter combination doesn't appear in a standard dictionary, it's not a word -- it's that simple. That's how the game was designed, and that's the way millions of us still play the game. The term "Living Room Scrabble" is presumably meant to be belittling; I find it ennobling, and a far superior alternative to "Bunker Room Scrabble", which is my just-invented epithet for the tournament mentality.

I'd love to find or create a website exclusively for Living Room Scrabblers.

BHL and BHO

This -- the week of Barack (Arabic for blessed [cf. Hebrew baruch], I learned today) Obama's (BHO) inauguration -- is a very exciting time in our sociocultural collective psyche. What's next? Do we (not just he) get a honeymoon period, or do we head straight for boot camp/rehab aka sober reality, essential for recovering from the the disastrous Bush administration?

Who's BHL? Bernard-Henri Lévy, French public intellectual. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard-Henri_Levy

In the beginning...

This is my initial blog posting (ever!! what planet have I been on??)...

Perhaps I could blame this on my son-in-law. At any rate he planted the most recent seed, by suggesting that I begin a blog, with some suggested content...

Okay, let me get to the nub of the problem for me. Isn't there really a virtually bottomless narcissism at the core of a blog? Namely, the assumption that numerous fellow humans will be fascinated with the productions of your grey matter on any and every subject.

Okay, full disclosure. I've read very few blogs, period. A couple here or there, such as an Iraqi guy writing a fascinating portrayal of life in Baghdad a couple of years ago.

So, the bottom line is that I'm a neophyte, running onto the playing field of a sport I don't really understand or trust. Okay, that's an appropriate amount of cynicism to get this off the ground.