The cruelest month: Richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow

So far, my poems for National Poetry Month have been by the great and the good. Or at least the well-known. My entry for today comes from a collection of poems and drawings from the children of Terezín, the “model” ghetto the Nazis built as part of their Final Solution of the Jewish Question.

Terezín was the Nazis’ Potemkin lager—a transit camp-cum-ghetto for Jews removed first from Prague, then from other areas of the Reich. Built on the old Hapsburg town of Theresienstadt (pre-war population around 5000), it housed tens of thousands in ghetto conditions, although it was considered posh enough to show to visiting Red Cross officials as an example of benign treatment of Jews. Of those who didn’t die of starvation, disease or brutality at Terezín, most were murdered at Auschwitz.

I first saw I Never Saw Another Butterfly while working at the Children’s Room of the Pasadena Public Library. There’s a newer edition on Amazon, with about 50 more pages than mine, so I’m thinking more context setting.

Anyhow, the poem that gives the collection its title is “The Butterfly”, by Pavel Friedmann:

The Butterfly

The last, the very last,

So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.

   Perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing

   against a white stone...

Such, such a yellow

Is carried lightly ’way up high.

It went away I'm sure because it wished to

   kiss the world goodbye.

For seven weeks I've lived in here,

Penned up inside this ghetto

But I have found my people here.

The dandelions call to me

And the white chestnut candles in the court.

Only I never saw another butterfly.

That butterfly was the last one.

Butterflies don't live in here,

   In the ghetto.

The poem was dated 4^th June 1942, when Friedmann was 21. He was transported to Auschwitz and murdered 29^th September 1944.

You should see the picture that faces “The Butterfly” in my edition. It’s by Eva Bu (Bulová), undated.

Bulova was born 12^th July 1930, deported to Terezín 12^th September 1942, and killed in Auschwitz 4 October 1944.

Years after my introduction to Terezín, I was reading some poems written by German soldiers who’d been caught by Russia’s greatest military leader, General Winter. I can’t remember the source, or even where they were—Stalingrad? Leningrad? Moscow? Dunno. But from their frozen hell they expressed the same kinds of longing the children of the model ghetto spoke of.

Just a butterfly. Just a flower. Just a smile from a young woman. Just a hint that life holds out something good, when in fact as far as you can see it's ugly and painful and fearsome.

That's one of the functions of poetry, to focus on that hope.

The cruelest month: 'Satiable curtiosity

I believe there must be an entry from Rudyard Kipling in National Poetry Month. You gotta have a representative of that muscular Christianity style of the late Victorians, don’t you?

For a guy who never wore the uniform, Kipling did a whole lotta evangelizing for empire and the military effort it took to support it; he’s the one who enjoined the Brits to “take up the white man’s burden”. He also wrote shedloads of wonderful stories, collected in such offerings as The Jungle Book and Just-So Stories; and every once in a while I haul out Kim to reread, just because it’s a great adventure about the Great Game.

One of my favorites of his Just-So stories is “The Elephant’s Child”, because that Elephant’s Child was just full of ‘satiable curtiosity. Which is how elephants got their long trunks. Don’t believe me? Here’s how it starts:

“IN the High and Far-Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side; but he couldn't pick up things with it. But there was one Elephant--a new Elephant--an Elephant's Child--who was full of 'satiable curtiosity, and that means he asked ever so many questions.”

I don’t know how exactly it works out, but it turns out that I’m actually related to that Elephant’s Child, maybe second cousin once removed, because I’m always asking ever so many questions. And, like the Elephant’s Child, I’ve had my share of spankings by way of answers.

Anyhow, at the end of the story (which I do recommend highly; you can find it here), Kipling adds this poem:

I Keep six honest serving-men:

  (They taught me all I knew)

Their names are What and Where and When

  And How and Why and Who.

I send them over land and sea,

  I send them east and west;

But after they have worked for me,

  I give them all a rest.

I let them rest from nine till five.

  For I am busy then,

As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,

  For they are hungry men:

But different folk have different views:

  I know a person small--

She keeps ten million serving-men,

  Who get no rest at all!

She sends 'em abroad on her own affairs,

  From the second she opens her eyes--

One million Hows, two million Wheres,

  And seven million Whys!

Anyone ever trained as a journalist knows this six honest serving men. And anyone who’s read the story knows what a workout the Elephant’s Child gave them.

Working it out

Here’s something I’ve wondered about for going on for a couple of decades: why is it that people going to the gym always try to park as close to the doors as possible?

I’ve noticed this in Virginia, the UK, Washington and here.

There can be rows and rows of parking spaces vacant, and yet people trawl through the aisles close to the gym like mall shoppers on the 24^th of December desperate for that one spot 30 feet from the entrance. If you look like you’re going to a car parked close, they’ll hover on your heels.

I don’t get it: they’re going to the gym, for pity’s sake! To get a workout! They’re paying money for this. Why the bloody hell does it matter to them where they park—the farther away, the longer the cardio effort. It's all good.

I wonder if I could get a research grant to study this?

Questions & answers

So, regarding my conundrum reported yesterday—what to tell interviewers when they ask what you do when you’re not working, I got the best suggestion from my friend Danger Girl:

“I have hobbies that make me sound more interesting the less I reveal about them. I assure you that they are all legal. Okay, legal-ish.”

It’s either that or chirping right back at the interrogator, "And what do you do for fun?" And watch him take on the outraged expression of one who's just sat down on a sofa and discovered a poker rammed up his butt.

The cruelest month: Daughter of Elysium

Naturally, English is not the sole language of poetry. My focus is on my native tongue, but today’s entry in the National Poetry Month listing comes from Germany.

I could go with Heine, or Goethe, or Rilke; I had to read bits of them all in my German classes. But I’ll let you off easy: here’s “Ode an die Freude”, from Friedrich Schiller.

Well, I’ll give you the first stanza:

Freude schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium

wir betreten feuertrunken himmlische dein Heiligtum

Deine Zauber binden wieder was die Mode streng geteilt

alle Menschen werden Brüder wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

Here’s an English translation; frankly, I don’t find it nearly as…interesting:

Joy, bright spark of divinity,

Daughter of Elysium,

Fire-inspired we tread

Thy sanctuary.

Thy magic power re-unites

All that custom has divided,

All men become brothers

Under the sway of thy gentle wings.

Now—poetry is meant to be heard, not just read. The way the words strike the ear is almost as important as the meaning they convey; or at least it’s a key component of the meaning. (I had this, uh, discussion with a French professor once; he insisted that poems are all about the sounds and not about the meaning. But then, being a Hungarian Olympic water polo player, he might have been suffering from too much time in chlorinated water trying to beat the vodka out of the Russian team.)

But in the case of “Ode to Joy” you can hear them sung—because Ludwig van Beethoven was so entranced by Schiller’s sentiments that he built a magnificent, iconoclastic choral element to his Ninth Symphony.

Beethoven, you’ll recall, was an ardent admirer of the principles of the French Revolution and the post-enlightenment hope in the brotherhood of mankind. (He originally dedicated his Third Symphony to Napoleon, whom he viewed as a revolutionary hero. After Bonaparte crowned himself emperor in 1804, Beethoven sent it to the publishers as “Sinfonia Eroica…composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grand Uomo.” Heroic symphony composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.) “Alle Menschen werden Brüder”

Well, we still live in hope of that. So crank up the volume on your PC and drink in Schiller and Beethoven.

The cruelest month: Lone and level sands

You can’t run a National Poetry Month in an English-speaking country (okay—mostly English-speaking; in certain parts) without having at least one of the Romantic poets. So today I give you Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”.

(As an aside, why does MSFT Word’s spellchecker recognize the “Bysshe” in Shelley’s name but the title of one of his greatest poems? Philistines—they’re all Philistines.)

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear –

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

As with many of the poems I’m posting this month, “Ozymandias” has been with me since high school; Mr. Sheinkopf—probably the best English teacher I’ve ever had—did a poetry module in the tenth grade.

Here’s what we did with “Ozymandias”: we diagrammed it—you know, breaking apart the structure and laying it out in a diagram so you can see how everything hangs together. (Well, maybe those readers who aren’t clear about the differences between direct and indirect objects, or between transitive and intransitive verbs might want to skip this part.)

And the first 11 lines are incredibly complex and convoluted, building up to that ultimate self-puffery, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” We had that sucker all over the chalkboard, spiking out into all directions, doglegs of dependent clauses hanging off like Christmas tree ornaments.

And that is followed by the ultimate in stark simplicity and absolute put-down: “Nothing beside remains.” Subject, verb, preposition (with implied object—the colossal wreck).

I always thought about that colossal wreck in the boundless and bare setting whenever I saw scenes like the tearing down of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad, or collections of discarded socialist-realism statues of Soviet heroes that alternately molder and amuse.

Shelley so perfectly captured the ludicrousness of megalomania; sadly, still applicable.

(That's you, Larry Ellison.)

Questions, questions

I had an in-person interview last week, for a product marketing position with a company that’s in the Big Data space. (Yeah, I know: that’s like saying “for a company in Texas”—it covers a lot of territory. But that’s all I’m going to say.)

On the up side, when I pulled out possible outfits to wear, there were a whole lot more interview-worthy garments that I could get into than I could nine months ago, including several suits. So my exercise program is obviously having positive results.

On the other hand—you know, it’s just so hard for me to read how well I’ve done in these situations. Plus—well, if I played poker, which I do not, I wouldn’t want to be at the table with this guy.

He asked me questions like, “What’s the Cloud?” and “How do you define SaaS?” (Software as a Service allows you to use software that’s hosted by the provider, so you don’t have big up-front purchase costs; have all the tsuris of installation on your own, expensive, hardware; or have to employ an IT department to maintain and upgrade it. The Cloud is where you can keep your software and data, so it doesn’t live on your own servers or hard drive, and so you can access it from whatever device you have, from wherever you are.) So far, I was with him.

Then he asked for an example of enterprise SaaS. Well—Salesforce.com; kind of the “duh” answer, but it counts. But then…he wanted an example of consumer SaaS.

Well, blow me—no freaking idea, Jack. I kicked around a couple of possibilities, but I really just didn’t have an answer. I said I was going to go looking for it; but I have to say that I still don’t know. Maybe TurboTax; possibly something like online photo-editing software; personal healthcare record (PHR) portals, perhaps. Some sources tell me Facebook is SaaS, but I’m not seeing it, and the SaaS experts I consulted had mixed opinions on that, too.

Anyway—that’s one horror. But where I really tanked was when he asked, “What do you like to do when you’re not working?”

I hate—no, I loathe talking about myself. I am the dullest dog on the face of the earth (okay, technically, that would be dullest bitch; but that's probably another story, if not an oxymoron). No one wants to know what I do on my own, including myself. My life would put you into a coma; it certainly puts me into one. So I never have an answer prepared for that question. And so I completely screwed the pooch again.

What did I say? Oh, I travel when I can. I’m a photographer. And I’m researching and writing a novel. He waited for more. He obviously has never tried writing a novel—he must think that’s a 15-minute-a-day kind of thing. (I didn’t mention the blog. I never tell anyone who might be in a position to influence a hiring decision about the blog. I may be quirky, and dull; but I’m not actively suicidal.) I didn’t bring up gardening, or book club, or hiking local trails, or ballet, or whisky-tasting meet-ups, or anything else (you decide which would be, strictly speaking, truthful and current), because my mind just emptied like a power toilet.

So now I have to make a list of acceptable answers to that question and commit it to memory.

And I also need to come up with a definitive monologue on where “web applications” leave off and “SaaS” picks up.

It just never ends.

The cruelest month: All jive

For Day 2 of National Poetry Month, I give you a taste of Langston Hughes:

Motto

I play it cool

I dig all jive

That's the reason

I stay alive

My motto

As I live and learn

Is dig and be dug in return

There’s a wealth of Hughes I could choose from; but I was introduced to this one in an episode of Law & Order, where the detectives are on a stakeout in an empty apartment. Det. Lennie Briscoe, a true renaissance man when it comes to le bon mot, is playing cards with Lt. Anita Van Buren. He recites the first four lines, with Van Buren completing the poem, with raised eyebrows.

Briscoe explains: quoting Hughes used to work well as a chat-up line “on the Jewish girls from Riverdale.” Van Buren answers that it still works pretty well on girls from Jackson Heights.

On girls from Pasadena, too.

Joking giants

Okay, so the corporate kings of April Foolers are Google. These guys plan for April First like wiccans setting up for Samhain.

But it turns out that Microsoft, in its quest to take search market share from the Big G, are fighting back.

Yesterday, if you went to bing and searched on the term “Google”, here’s the result:

If you’re one of the millions who don’t use bing, you should know that the little squares are incidentals to your search. So, hovering and  clicking on the four would get you respectively (starting with blue):

Which led to:

The red one was:

Which brought you a video of paint drying:

The yellow was:

And this link:

Finally, the green was:

Which was the ringer—click that link and it brought you to the bing v. Google “blind test”:

Well—A for effort.

The cruelest month

Well, April may or may not be the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot tells us in The Waste Land, but it is National Poetry Month. And I intend to celebrate it by posting a poem a day, the poems in mind being ones that have particular meaning to me.

Prepare for a cultural assault such as you’ve never encountered in this blog.

To start us off, I’ll give you a few lines from The Waste Land:

 

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

(If you'd like to chow down on the whole thing, you can find it all over the place, including here.)

The thing about Eliot is that he’s exactly the poet you want to be reading in high school, when you’re ready to be so full of cynicism and world-weariness. He makes you want to go totally Goth.

Plus—high school is the period where you’re most likely to have the bleeding excess of energy necessary to read The Waste Land all the way through, and then actually discuss it.

Since this is April Fool’s Day, I’ll soften the weltschmerz with a sop from Ogden Nash:

 The Hippopotamus

Behold the hippopotamus!

We laugh at how he looks to us,

And yet in moments dank and grim,

I wonder how we look to him.

Peace, peace, thou hippopotamus!

We really look all right to us,

As you no doubt delight the eye

Of other hippopotami.

That’s the beauty of poetry—you can cover so much ground with so few words. If you do it right.

The cheese stands alone

Just in time for April Fool’s Day: this story comes out of New Jersey. Well, of course it does.

Seems some guy with $200,000 of stolen cheese (42,000 pounds) from Wisconsin was apprehended at one of the rest areas off the Jersey Turnpike.

To be specific, it was the Vince Lombardi Service Area.

I’m reminded of an exchange from an episode of The West Wing, between President Josiah Bartlet & FBI Special Agent Michael Casper:

FBI Special Agent Michael Casper: "In thirteen years with the Bureau, I've discovered that there's no amount of money, manpower or knowledge that can equal the person you're looking for being stupid."

President Josiah Bartlet: "God, well... Some of the stupidest criminals in the world are working right here in America. I've always been very proud of that."

Also, I keep coming back to the phrase: you just can’t make this stuff up.