(posts) a poem, "Bedecked"

Bedecked

  —Victoria Redel

 

Tell me it’s wrong the scarlet nails my son sports or the toy store rings
               he clusters four jewels to each finger.

He’s bedecked. I see the other mothers looking at the star choker,
               the rhinestone strand he fastens over a sock.
Sometimes I help him find sparkle clip-ons when he says sticker earrings
               look too fake.

Tell me I should teach him it’s wrong to love the glitter that a boy’s only
               a boy who’d love a truck with a remote that revs,
battery slamming into corners or Hot Wheels loop-de-looping off tracks
               into the tub.

Then tell me it’s fine—really—maybe even a good thing—a boy who’s
               got some girl to him,
and I’m right for the days he wears a pink shirt on the seesaw in the park.

Tell me what you need to tell me but keep far away from my son who
               still loves a beautiful thing not for what it means—
this way or that—but for the way facets set off prisms and prisms spin up
               everywhere
and from his own jeweled body he’s cast rainbows—made every shining
               true color.

Now try to tell me—man or woman—your heart was ever once that brave.

 

 

 

Note: Using smaller font to preserve more of the poet's own line breaks.

 

something about "Excellent Sheep" by William Deresiewicz

Critics of academia often mock liberal arts studies of obscure and apparently unprofitable subjects like basket weaving (does such a degree even exist?). Critics also diagnose academia with a fatal case of aloof pretentiousness. But William Deresiewicz is a fierce proponent of the value of a classical liberal arts education.
 
Deresiewicz has criticisms of his own. Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life starts on the offensive, putting a harsh light on modern trends in higher education—especially at elite institutions. But then Deresiewicz quickly pivots to an impassioned defense of the university. Excellent Sheep argues for the personal and social benefits of higher education.

I used to read William Deresiewicz's weekly columns in "The Chronicle of Higher Education." A few columns stuck with me: "Get Real," published in 2012, is my favorite. My fondness for those columns steered me toward Excellent Sheep, which was published in 2015 and grew out of Deresiewicz's experience as a professor at Yale.

something about a human archive

I remembered a girl who thought of herself as scribblings on scraps of paper. Notes made here and there—notes that are only briefly relevant. When those notes are rediscovered after a time, they don't make sense anymore, and it is best to throw them away.

about the Crossfire

This car is enjoyable; it looks decent and handles nicely. But it takes a certain sense of humor to fully enjoy it. If you drive this car thinking, Here comes the badass, you are a moron. If you want that kind of status, you need a Porsche--you need at least a Porsche. The Crossfire is a Chrysler and is sort of a Mercedes but the thing is plopped into the shape of a Porsche. It ends up being ... well, a Crossfire. And good thing. Enjoy it!

About self

We spoke first in terms of the soul and the vessel, then the spirit and the flesh, and then the mind and body. Now we speak in terms of identity and biology.

Pictures of him as a boy

For leaking classified US government information to the website Wikileaks, on July 30, 2013, Army Private First Class Bradley Manning was convicted of 17 charges, including five counts of espionage and theft. On the heels of this verdict, The New York Times published an article titled "Loner Sought a Refuge, and Ended Up in War". Here, Manning is described as a lifelong outcast. The article further reveals that it was not his crimes that he was being tried for, but his identity:

As prosecutors accused Private Manning of being a self-promoting “anarchist” who was nothing like the tortured man of principle portrayed by his lawyers, supporters around the world celebrated him as a martyr for free speech. But the heated language on both sides tended to overshadow the human story at the center of the case.

The article does the sense-making for us. In its narrative, Manning's online connections--first with Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, then with computer hacker Adrian Lamo--that led to this conviction follow a pattern, and add the apparently unfortunate conclusion to his coherent life's story. However, contrary to what the article says, it is precisely the human story that has been at the center of the case and the center of media coverage from day one: international outlaw, Julian Assange; guilty martyr, Bradley Manning; narcissistic fugitive, Edward Snowden--these are the characters, and they are the story.

James Holmes, madman

The New York Times article "Before Gunfire, Hints of ‘Bad News’" unfolds for us the life of James Holmes leading up the massacre. It pins him down, makes him a subject of analysis, takes us down a path that runs parallel to his even while he diverges from his own. We learn how witnesses remember him, forming a cohesive picture of the subject we can use as a collective memory from which we draw out the identity of James Holmes, an identity through which we can say, "That was something James would do" or "That was not like James," until we know when the madman appeared. So it goes: James was normal when he was quiet and shy, attending school, and, at times, acting goofy and awkward; but then he became a loner and, more troubling, unconcerned with school, which is abnormal. Normal James worked, was willing to work, assumed a career, a productive life. And so his divergence was here--not in the movie theater.

On July 20, 2012, James is said to have killed 12 people and wounded 58 at a midnight screening of "Batman: The Dark Knight Rises". The movie depicts the saga of a crime fighter, Batman, and James allegedly referred to himself as The Joker, Batman's nemesis, a powerful and enigmatic villain, a clever perpetrator of crimes. But James likely will not be judged to have committed a crime, and therefore not be labeled a criminal. He will exist outside the binary of law. The judicial system shines a light on the accused, and they are judged innocent or guilty. James performed his violence in the dark, and his mind just may remain beyond the light. His peers and the experts may decide that James was a madman before he entered the theater. A sane man doesn't just shirk off his ambitions, lose all interest and sympathy for civil society, and abandon his social pretensions. Lock him up. Society must be defended.

Swinging

It was here it ended. In a humble city park with a prefab playground and paint chipped picnic tables--a slice of Bermuda grass supposing to make a bunch of houses a community. My wife found the first clue a year prior and had by then in-person seen me here with Liz three times. Liz and I met at work; she was initially drawn, she says, by the curious pairing of my young, kind face with my old man's ways, me being 44. Her telling me so was enough for me. Light flirting, then a few lunch dates, then a walk in the park followed by other walks in the park. After a while I held her hand. We walked, slowing and stopping here and there as if oaks and a few pines strewn amid scrub trees and dry weeds were something to look at. We also ran errands together. Sometimes we just drove. We went to hotels. We even arranged to meet in the evening five times. Five, despite my being a dedicated homebody, despite my sensing how the absence of your mate makes rubber of your skin and demolishes a home save for its shadows and corners. This sense drove my wife who drove her Prius to my job and then to the park, pulling up to the curb behind the scrub trees lining the man-made runoff creek where water moved ambivalently to its grave. It was here it ended, with my wife waving to Liz and me from the swing set.

Something on Tom Perrotta's novel The Leftovers

With somewhere around 30 pages left, Perrotta's books usually end with a flurry of page turning, a race to what happens. Not so with The Leftovers. But what The Leftovers lacks in action, it makes up for with meaning and emotion. I've read every Perrotta book and although this one ranks low, his low is still high.

The story picks up shortly after a mysterious happening likened to the rapture in which half the Earth's population vanished in an instant, and in the quiet aftermath we watch a cast of characters deal with the loss best they can. One facet of loss that interested me was that of identity. The subtraction of so many peers seemed to leave people wanting for their own identities, as if they were only who they were with everyone else around to verify it. This suggests we're all social constructions.

Also missing are the identities of the vanished, most of whom are unsurprisingly canonized, honored at small parades, days of remembrance and the like. Likewise, relationships are recreated in the minds of the rememberers. One of the novel's characters, a teenaged girl named Jill, lost a childhood friend-turned-acquaintance but, in the friend's absence, the two girls are recast as best friends who were much more alike and much closer and more dear to each other than they had ever been before the rapture.

I don't know that identity was an issue Perrotta intentionally explored. Anyway, good book.

Jose Antonio Vargas

• Gay
• Undocumented
• Journalist

If you wanted to invent someone that the political right just could not sympathize with.

The Wrestler

It is not a role; it is not even an alter ego. In the film The Wrestler, professional wrestler Robin Ramzinski's in-the-ring persona, Randy "The Ram" Robinson, is real. It's who he is.

"The Ram" fights larger-than-life villains, endures incredible punishment, and absorbs the adulation of fans. His life is high drama. But the needs and ego of such a character render the man outside the ring dysfunctional. He can't sustain a relationship or a job because each demands that he recognize the needs of others and endure punishments that are less physical and bloody but real nevertheless--and often less dignified.

And as the times change and his original fans move on, the limbo known as life between matches gets longer and harder. By the time the film begins, Randy is already nearly invisible, sleeping in a van in a trailer park, far out from under the lights of the ring. By contrast we see Randy's fictional former arch enemy "The Sheik", who now runs a successful car dealership. When he returns for a reunion match, "The Sheik" is thinking business because that's his life now.

We don't know why or how Robin became Randy so completely. The Wrestler just gives us a biographical glimpse of professional wrestler Robin Ramzinski in the twilight of his career. But as far as Randy "The Ram" is concerned, this is simply the end.