Category Archives: Uncategorized

February 19, 2016

Goodbye, Miss Lee

By Joe

  

Alabama legend and literary master Nelle Harper Lee has died at the age of 89. May she rest in peace with her father and sister, who passed on before her. She may have been a tiny woman but she was a literary giant with her masterpiece To Kill a Mockingbird.
http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2016/02/harper_lee_dead_at_age_of_89_t.html

Leave a comment | posted in Uncategorized

February 18, 2016

Relaxing

By Joe

I’d thought about doing a political post, but it’s been a long and busy week at work and I just wasn’t up to it.  So I decided to relax and do nothing, which included writing a post for today.  More at another time.

Leave a comment | posted in Uncategorized

February 8, 2016

T.G.I.M.

By Joe

  
Yes, that does stand for Thank God It’s Monday. When I was teaching, I dreaded Mondays. I dreaded Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays as well. I’m probably one of the very few who ever say this, but I’m glad for Monday to be here. While I used to look forward to my weekends to be away from the students and school bullshit, I now dread the weekends. They are so lonely. After I moved to Vermont, I rarely see anyone on the weekends. I’d much rather be at work and surrounded by people than be here alone.

Besides the loneliness, Sundays seem to be the hardest because it’s the day of the week that my friend died on and I often can’t stop thinking about it. I used to be happy on Sundays but now I’m just sad all day, but emails and blog comments are what I look for most because they make my day and make it a little better. I miss my friend, and some days, and especially Sundays, are almost unbearable at times. I wish I could just skip the weekend all together. I worked at the museum Saturday, and being away from my apartment really helped but then I dreaded Sunday.

I think that thinking about my friend who passed away more on the weekends when I’m so lonely is why my Sunday posts always mention my friend these days. I can’t help it because it’s all that’s on my mind when I think of Sunday. I know there is nothing I can do about it, but I wish with all my might that I could go back to that day and change what happened.

It doesn’t help that I don’t have a church to go to. I’d planned to go to one of the three churches on the same block that I live on, but I overslept for the Methodist and Episcopal services and I thought the United Church had 11 am services, but it turned out to be at 10 am when the other services were. This may sound strange but while I love church, I don’t like to go when it means going alone.

How fucked up is it that I hate the weekends now. At least it goes to show just how much I love my job and the people I work with on a daily basis.

Leave a comment | posted in Uncategorized

January 25, 2016

Pretty Picture

By Joe

  

I fell asleep last night without writing a post because I had a bad headache, so I am posting a pretty picture instead.

Leave a comment | posted in Uncategorized

January 18, 2016

Ugh

By Joe

About 7pm last night, I got a bad case of the chills and was running a fever. I went to bed soon after. The fever is gone but I still feel like crap.

1 Comment | posted in Uncategorized

December 29, 2015

The Feast of Stephen by Anthony Hecht

By Joe
I
The coltish horseplay of the locker room,
Moist with the steam of the tiled shower stalls,   
With shameless blends of civet, musk and sweat,   
Loud with the cap-gun snapping of wet towels   
Under the steel-ribbed cages of bare bulbs,   
In some such setting of thick basement pipes   
And janitorial realities
Boys for the first time frankly eye each other,   
Inspect each others’ bodies at close range,   
And what they see is not so much another   
As a strange, possible version of themselves,   
And all the sparring dance, adrenal life,   
Tense, jubilant nimbleness, is but a vague,   
Busy, unfocused ballet of self-love.
II
If the heart has its reasons, perhaps the body   
Has its own lumbering sort of carnal spirit,   
Felt in the tingling bruises of collision,   
And known to captains as esprit de corps.
What is this brisk fraternity of timing,   
Pivot and lobbing arc, or indirection,   
Mens sana in men’s sauna, in the flush
Of health and toilets, private and corporal glee,   
These fleet caroms, plies and genuflections
Before the salmon-leap, the leaping fountain
All sheathed in glistening light, flexed and alert?   
From the vast echo-chamber of the gym,
Among the stumbled shouts and shrill of whistles,   
The bounced basketball sound of a leather whip.
III
Think of those barren places where men gather   
To act in the terrible name of rectitude,   
Of acned shame, punk’s pride, muscle or turf,   
The bully’s thin superiority.
Think of the Sturm-Abteilungs Kommandant
Who loves Beethoven and collects Degas,
Or the blond boys in jeans whose narrowed eyes   
Are focussed by some hard and smothered lust,   
Who lounge in a studied mimicry of ease,   
Flick their live butts into the standing weeds,   
And comb their hair in the mirror of cracked windows
Of an abandoned warehouse where they keep   
In darkened readiness for their occasion   
The rope, the chains, handcuffs and gasoline.
IV
Out in the rippled heat of a neighbor’s field,
In the kilowatts of noon, they’ve got one cornered.   
The bugs are jumping, and the burly youths   
Strip to the waist for the hot work ahead.   
They go to arm themselves at the dry-stone wall,   
Having flung down their wet and salty garments   
At the feet of a young man whose name is Saul.   
He watches sharply these superbly tanned   
Figures with a swimmer’s chest and shoulders,   
A miler’s thighs, with their self-conscious grace,   
And in between their sleek, converging bodies,   
Brilliantly oiled and burnished by the sun,   
He catches a brief glimpse of bloodied hair   
And hears an unintelligible prayer.
The Feast of Stephen

If you are interested in seeing the complete short film by James Franco based on this poem, it can be found at the following link: http://m.sinemalar.com/mobileweb/movieInfo/169207. It’s only 4 min. long and is quite interesting.
You may know of this poem if you are a huge James Franco fan.  He used this poem as the basis for a student film he made in college.  When he was at NYU, he made three short films based on the following poems: “The Feast of Stephen” (Anthony Hecht), “Herbert White” (Frank Bidart), and “The Clerk’s Tale” (Spencer Reece).  Of the three poems, he said that this was the one that had the least character development. It has characters in it, and there is a progression, but until the last stanza, the characters are described as a group, rather than as distinct individuals. The first two stanzas, set in a locker room and a basketball gymnasium, describe boys coming into their new bodies. The boys are not differentiated. Sometimes there is subtle distancing from these boys, like the last two lines of the second stanza that seems to be describing the gym from a distance. Even when the boys are described as inspecting each other, it doesn’t sound as if the voice of the poem is their voice. It is too sophisticated, the metaphors are too advanced, the diction too high. There is another kind of consciousness present, even if it isn’t described within the actual substance of the poem. 
In the third stanza, there is a sharp change in the development of the poem’s subject. The pubescent and exploring boys are now described as violent. They are compared to an SS officer and are at an ominous hangout where there are cracked mirrors and weapons like gasoline and knives. The members of the group are not distinguished from one another, but the group’s identification has changed. The boys have become evil and potentially destructive. 
The last stanza finally differentiates some of the characters. The description recalls the martyrdom of St. Stephen, described by Luke in Acts 6–8. The character of Saul functions on two levels. In the context of the poem, he is the witness who observes and does nothing to stop the violence. Without Saul, the attack would unfold at a distance, with no possibility of outside intervention. To have him there but doing nothing places the reader there as well, asking us to consider occasions when we have stood by in the face of injustice. The boy who is being beaten is another new character freshly differentiated from the group. He is compared to a martyr. It is not clear why he is being beaten, although the first two stanzas lean heavily on homoerotic descriptions, suggesting that violence is homophobic in nature. If the first stanzas show the boys in a state of discovery and uncertainty, the later stanzas could be read as moments after the boys have decided that the innocent observations that took place in the early stanzas were wrong, that that kind of behavior should be punished.
Anthony Hecht
One of the leading voices of his generation, Anthony Hecht’s poetry is known for its masterful use of traditional forms and linguistic control. Extraordinarily erudite, Hecht’s verse often features allusions to French literature, Greek myth and tragedy, and English poets and poetry stretching from Wallace Stevens to John Donne. Hecht, who died in 2004, was often described as a “traditionalist.” George P. Elliott contended in the Times Literary Supplement that “Hecht’s voice is his own, but his language, more amply than that of any living poet writing in English, derives from, adds to, is part of the great tradition.” Though his early work was often slighted as ornate or Baroque, his collection The Hard Hours (1967) is generally seen as his break-through volume. In that book, Hecht begins to use his experiences as a soldier in Europe during World War II. The often unsettling and horrific insights into the darkness of human nature told in limpid, flowing verse that characterize the poems in the collection would become Hecht’s trademark. According to Dana Gioia: “Hecht exemplifies the paradox of great art…He found a way to take his tragic sense of life and make it so beautiful that we have to pay attention to its painful truth.”  
Anthony Hecht was born in New York City in 1923. Though a self-described mediocre student, he nonetheless counted his first three years at Bard College some of the happiest of his life. His college career was interrupted, however, when he was drafted into the army to serve in World War II. As an infantryman, he fought in Germany, France and Czechoslovakia. His division also helped liberate Flossenburg concentration camp. Ordered to collect evidence from the French prisoners, the experience marked him for the rest of his life. Hecht returned to the United States and finished his degree at Kenyon College where he studied under John Crowe Ransom. At Kenyon he also formed friendships with poets like Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Tate and Randall Jarrell. Hecht’s first book, A Summoning of Stones (1954) displays great technical skill, but for some critics, the style seems mannered and dated. 
A longtime professor of poetry at the University of Rochester, Hecht also taught at institutions such as Georgetown, Yale, Harvard and Smith College. He was the Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1982-1984, and won many of America’s most prestigious poetry awards, including the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award and the Frost Medal. His collected poems were published in two volumes, Early Collected Poems (1993) and Later Collected Poems (2005). His death in 2004 was marked by a great outpouring of tributes and eulogies. In the New York Times, David Yezzi offered this praise: “It was Hecht’s gift to see into the darker recesses of our complex lives and conjure to his command the exact words to describe what he found there. Hecht remained skeptical about whether pain and contemplation can ultimately redeem us, yet his ravishing poems extend hope to his readers that they can.”

Leave a comment | posted in Uncategorized

December 27, 2015

Lost

By Joe

  

12 What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? 13 And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. 14 So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.  Matthew 18:12-14 (NRSV)

You may have noticed that there was a different post here earlier. For several different reason, I chose to delete it. I started these Sunday posts to better understand my relationship with God, and I have lost my way. I feel as if I am the lost sheep mentioned above, but that my Shepherd has left me to the wolves. That feeling was all to apparent as I sat in church this morning. I felt so disconnected and sad, and it horrified me. With very rare exceptions, the church I grew up in has always been a source of comfort. No matter how far away I may have roamed, I could be in that church and feel closer to God. Today, I didn’t. Today, I only felt sorrow and abandonment. The music did not ease my heart as it has in the past. The sermon offered no comfort. I even got choked when I took communion. I so wanted to feel God within me after I took communion, and I almost did for a few short moments, but it quickly faded. I couldn’t bring myself to sing along. When we sang the song “How Beautiful Heaven Must Be,” I cried and tears flowed down my face.

The friend who I lost was not perfect, none of us are. He had his problems like we all had, but he’d always believed me when I told him that God would always be there to love him and care for him. I believe that he is with God right now. It’s the only comfort I can take from all of this. I feel as if God did not protect my friend as He should have. Few people in this world are truly selfless and giving but my friend was. I know that he is blessed in the hereafter, and that I will see him again but I needed him here longer. He needed to be here longer so that he could fulfill all the wonderful things he was going to accomplish. My friend still had a lot of love to give, and I am sorry that he won’t be able to do so. I am making it a point to carry on his legacy. I want to be as giving and as loving as he always was. I don’t expect to ever be able to fill his shoes, but I will do my best.

By the way, if you think that I am exaggerating on the goodness of my friend, then you’d be wrong. If he thought someone needed it, he’d literally give them the shirt off his back. If you were upset, no matter what his problems were, he made sure that you were okay first. If there was something you needed, he’d either get it to you, often without taking credit, or he would help you get it. I’ve honestly never known a more selfless and loving person. While some may think it was just the way he was with me, I don’t know of a single soul who truly knew him that didn’t love him and feel the same way. That is one of the reasons that this has been so difficult to deal with.

Maybe one day I will be back to being more idealistic and optimistic about God, but I have a lot of issues to work through right now. I have not given up, nor will I, but there are a lot of things to work out and reality can be a bit too harsh at times. One of the hardest things has been my feeling of separation from God. I miss my friend, and I miss my relationship with God. While my therapist may help me deal with the loss of my friend, I need someone to help guide me spiritually. I am begging someone to help me.

I know that there are ministers and former ministers who read this blog, and I want to ask a favor of you. For now, until I work out my own issues with God, I cannot wrote my usual Sunday posts. I do not feel the guidance of God that I had felt before. Therefore, I beg of one of you to please help me. I would love it if one of you would write my weekly devotionals for me. I need help to be guided back to God and I cannot do it alone, so if you are willing to help, please email me at jec1918@gmail.com. I know that I cannot do this alone, which is why I am asking for help. Many of you have written such encouraging comments and emails, and I know some of you are up to taking over this task for a short while. I cannot write about overcoming grief and dealing with issues of sadness and feelings of abandonment by God any longer. After a while, it is just the same thing over and over, and for my sake and others who read this blog, I want this to be a positive place. I am unable to being that positivity and optimism at the moment. I hope someone will agree to help.

Leave a comment | posted in Uncategorized

December 26, 2015

Post Holiday Post

By Joe

  
Let your imagination run wild with this lovely picture. To be honest, my internet connection is so limited at my parents’ place, where we spent Christmas night, that this post is by necessity brief. I hope that all of you had a very Merry Christmas.

My tradition of Saturday Moments of Zen will return in the new year. I haven’t felt like posting them this month as a way of mourning the death of my best friend in a tragic accident. I haven’t felt many “moments of zen” in the past month. In fact it may be quite a while before I do so again, but my friend loved my moments of zen and he’d be sad that I hadn’t posted any since his death. The new year, 2016, will be just that a new year. I have been so sad since his death, but I know I need to start living again and doing my best to enjoy life, because that is what he would want. I have to honor what he told me once. He said that if anything did happen to him to not be sad for long, that it mean that he was not longer battling the demons of his depression and the trauma of his youth. He knew I’d have a long period of mourning over his death and with his death being such a tragic and sudden accident, it has made it even harder.

1 Comment | posted in Uncategorized

December 24, 2015

I Made It

By Joe

  
Merry Christmas Eve, everybody! What a long day yesterday was. I did a few update posts yesterday, and the only highlight was that I got to fly first class to Atlanta. If you’ve never been through the Atlanta Airport then you probably don’t know that the whole place is one big cluster fuck, which is why originally I had been happy to be able to miss it. I should have known I’d end up there anyway.

Anyway, this post is really all about the picture above. You see, my friend who passed away had a special affinity for nutcrackers. Since he was a kid, he’d loved nutcrackers. I had planned it to be a tradition to give him a nutcracker each year for Christmas, but sadly I want able to give him one this year. I will always love him and miss him, but I missed him a little less yesterday. He knew I was terrified of flying, and it seemed like he was with me the whole way home. From the moment I stepped on the first of the two planes I flew on yewterday, it seemed like,he we right there with me and doing his best to keep me calm.  

Leave a comment | posted in Uncategorized

December 23, 2015

Sorry, American Airlines 

By Joe

  
Thank you for upgrading me to FIRST CLASS, so I could get home before Christmas.

Leave a comment | posted in Uncategorized