Rewrite of Bordeaux poem

Rampage

The glass tapers so the wine avoids the tongue
and worms down the throat into the brain’s meaty pit.
In the browning edge the waitress says something I miss.
The glass breaks like an egg. A few drops bleed
into the table’s grain. Disappear. I hold the glass still
aloft so she could see. A peony slumped on the asphalt
defeated by the morning dew. A crumpled bird that smacked
a window. Is wine contained like yoke in a broken belly?
My palm is wet. Red drains down my wrist, pastes jeans
to my leg. Dig out the shard. Make blood run like wine.

Link to previous version. I tried to fix some problems. 1. Old title did very very little--making sure the reader knew the wine was red and that the glass was more tapered than, say, a burgundy glass. 2. "More glasses would survive" was trite, and symptomatic of the shock I was in (Jack) at the time. It undercut the point of the poem which was my prayer for rage.

More on songbirds, from Annie Dillard

Nature is vaster than we will ever perceive.

"Our meaningful activity scarcely covers the terrain. We do not use the songbirds for instance. We do not eat many of them; we cannot befriend them; we cannot persuade them to eat more mosquitoes or plant fewer weed seeds.

"[Their] show would play to an empty house, as do falling stars which fall in the daytime.

"That is why I take walks."

From pages 72, 73 of the 1982 edition of Teaching a Stone to Talk.

"When Women Were Birds"

From Terry Tempest Williams, pg 205 of When Women Were Birds,

Once upon a time
when women were birds
there was the simple understanding
that to sing at dawn
and to sing at dusk
was to heal the world with joy.

TTW cites the hermit thrush; the song sparrow.

Eve took the apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and is no longer a bird. On pg 89, TTW writes "What I came to appreciate was how the transgression of Eve was an act of courage that led us out of the garden into the wilderness."

The garden is filled with mosquitoes, thorns, predators and prey. We are predators. A wasp stings; poison ivy burns. Biting the apple is revelation. A garden more clearly perceived is a wild place.

TTW concludes "there is comfort in keeping what is sacred inside, not as a secret, but as a prayer. "  The sacred is that which must be kept private.

Pg 92, "The world begins with yes."

The 5 Types of Poems

1. Songs
2. Companion calls
3. Territorial aggression (often male to male)
4. Adolescent begging
5. Alarms

Found in What the Robin Knows by Jon Young.

Reading Heinrich's "A Year in the Maine Woods"

Build a nest-level blind in a maple tree.
Clear shrubs near seep for a pond.
Cut brush for a view of the mountain
or for a grassy bank down by the brook.
These naturalist memoirs seduce us
as the authors themselves are seduced
by a shiny new purpose--an old apple orchard
returned to the sun--brewing coffee on a stove
fueled by hardwood you limbed, hauled, sawed
and split. Honest about midges and horseflies,
but seductive the way washing your car is not.
Unless you don't have a car
and you hear Sheryl Crow and it's sunny
and the hot is softened by a pretty steady breeze
blocks inland but still smelling of Sound.

Bannon's Reading List

Update 4/5/17: Bannon ousted from NSC. (Original post 2/7/17)

Various White House sources are downplaying the significance of his departure. Given my skepticism of anything that comes out of the Trump White House, I'm going to believe this is good news.

Lawmakers of both parties welcomed the reversion to a more traditional NSC structure.

“I'd be very pleased that he would not be on the national security council,” Sen. Ben Cardin, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on Capitol Hill. “My hope is that he would have no role in government at all and would be completely out.”

Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) said downgrading Bannon was a "good move" -- and praised the reinstatement of the joint chiefs chairman as a permanent member of the security council. "The chairman of the joint chiefs should be in a permanent position, so I think it's the right thing to do, but it's a decision of the president's," McCain said. "I said at the time that I didn't think a political adviser should be a member of that body because it's never been, so I think it's the right thing to do."

Here are excerpts from reporting on "Bannon's Reading List" by Eliana Johnson and Eli Stokols of Politico:

Bannon’s readings tend to have one thing in common: the view that technocrats have put Western civilization on a downward trajectory, and that only a shock to the system can reverse its decline. And they tend to have a dark, apocalyptic tone that at times echoes Bannon’s own public remarks over the years—a sense that humanity is at a hinge point in history.

“The West is in trouble. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that, and Trump’s election was a sign of health,” said a White House aide who was not authorized to speak publicly. “It was a revolt against managerialism, a revolt against expert rule, a revolt against the administrative state. It opens the door to possibilities.”

“They look like the incarnation of ‘antifragile’ people,” Taleb said of the new administration. “The definition of ‘antifragile’ is having more upside than downside. For example, Obama had little upside because everyone thought he was brilliant and would solve the world’s problems, so when he didn’t it was disappointing. Trump has little downside because he’s already been so heavily criticized. He’s heavily vaccinated because of his checkered history. People have to understand: Trump did not run to be Archbishop of Canterbury.”

By the way, I've read several of Nassim Taleb's books, and I, like Bannon it seems, think he is a brilliant writer.

Curtis Yarvin: “nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth.”“To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable [sic] demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.”

Michael Anton: “[T]he ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.”

Yes, things change. They've been changing since before 1776. Puritans from England, from Holland, later Irish and Italian, ... there have always been immigrants, and there will continue to be long after Trump has faded into the past. (I can't think of the right words for this, but also the enslavement of Africans working Southern plantations, the Chinese immigrants working to complete the transcontinental railroad. My point here is that the vast majority of Trump's voters descended from immigrants, and have benefited immeasurably from the work that slaves and low wage migrant workers have performed since the beginning of America.)

More articles on Bannon:

• DailyKos reporting on Bannon's 2014 presentation to a small conference on poverty at the Vatican
• Foreign Policy “But there is not a lot of infighting right now, because to have infighting, there needs to be a power struggle, and there is no struggle, the intelligence official said.”
• A 2015 article from Bloomberg Joshua Green

“In the 1990s,” [Bannon] told me, “conservative media couldn’t take down [Bill] Clinton because most of what they produced was punditry and opinion, and they always oversold the conclusion: ‘It’s clearly impeachable!’ So they wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber.”

"Bannon realizes that politics is sometimes more effective when it’s subtle. So he’s nurtured a Dr. Jekyll side: In 2012 he became founding chairman of GAI, a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) research organization staffed with lawyers, data scientists, and forensic investigators. “What Peter and I noticed is that it’s facts, not rumors, that resonate with the best investigative reporters,” Bannon says, referring to GAI’s president."Evola eventually broke with Mussolini and the Italian Fascists because he considered them overly tame and corrupted by compromise."

Whose Science?

In December, The New York Times's David Hakim reports on Scientists Loved and Loathed by Agrochemical Firm Syngenta; and vice versa, corporate research grants loved and loathed by scientists.

The article goes into the 3 different examples of scientists working in Agrochemical research.

• Pesticide effects on bee health (Dr. James Cresswell)
• Herbicide atrazine effects on prostate cancer & other health issues (Dr. James Simpson)
• GMO corn engineered to kill insect larvae (Dr. Angelika Hilbeck)

Issues covered: It starts with money of course. In UK 15% of university research is funded by private industry.

Scientific findings bound by confidentiality agreements. The funding source has "editorial control."

Partnerships between corporations, researchers and government which include secret patent deals.

Regulators as collaborators not watchdogs.

This pre-dates Trump; it is a good example of why March for Science shouldn't focus just on what is going on in Congress and White House today.

This is the questions I have: "whose science?, and how can an informed citizen know?

I listened to a great podcast this week where David Axelrod interviewed Former HHS Secretary, former Utah governor, and former head of the EPA, Mike Leavitt.

Why @GOP Congress should proceed with caution on Obamacare. Former Bush HHS secy Mike Leavitt on #AxeFiles. https://t.co/uGG6gUgGf5 pic.twitter.com/6XVQrMtlKl

— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) February 16, 2017

I've been seeking out podcasts recently which feature thoughtful Republicans. I want to learn where the common ground is. The first half of this podcast is on the Affordable Care Act (good listening too), but at minute 35 the conversation shifts to the EPA. When talking about the environment, Leavitt found political balance between, for example, sustainability and development, almost impossible. The objective of policy makers, Leavitt says, "is to find that balance."

In minute 43, when the conversation shifts to nuclear power, Leavitt asks "whose science?" I've found a transcript for an earlier conversation that captures the same point:

People continue to ask me, "Why is it that you politicians ignore the science in developing public policy?" The frustration I feel is the question: "whose science?" because, as a policymaker, I am constantly having scientists of general, good reputes give me different points of view. I have come to find out that all scientists do not agree; that it's not something that is absolute, and there are people of substantial sincerity and enormous credential who see the world differently. So, when you're in a public policy making role and you follow one science,there is always another science that disputes what you've said.

In Seattle Science March, and the work the group continues long-term, this is a central question.To find the scientific consensus on an issue, where do we go? Who do we ask?  There is always doubt, additional questions, unknowns--that is the nature of scientific pursuit--but we do learn things over time. Our knowledge of how things work does progress.