Eiffel Tower: 360 degree view

C'est magnifique! Go here.

Was it hemmorrhoids?

Why was Jay Leno in the hospital? Was it hemmorrhoids? Ahhhhhhhhhh, I'm just being silly. If I were him, I wouldn't tell people no matter what the problem was. And, I don't really want to know. Why do people care? Why is this a big story?

You go, Jay. Heal well.

Million Dollar Thieves

Uptown on Lenox Avenue
Where a nickel costs a dime,
In these lush and thieving days
When million-dollar thieves
Glorify their million-dollar ways
In the press and on the radio and TV-
But won't let me
Skim even a dime-

Langston Hughes

In Memoriam and With Profound Respect

From today's Writer's Almanac ...

April 19 It was on this day in 1943 that an uprising began in the Warsaw ghetto. There were about 300,000 Jews in Warsaw, and thousands more refugees streamed in from smaller towns. In 1940, the Nazis built a wall around a small section of the city and forced all the Jews into it. Conditions were horrible. In the winter, there were fuel shortages, and people succumbed to influenza. A small resistance movement began to organize. Then, in 1942, the Nazis deported more than 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to the concentration camp in Treblinka. Reports of mass murder leaked back to the ghetto, and the resistance movement gained momentum. And on this day in 1943, the first day of Passover, hundreds of German soldiers entered the ghetto in rows of tanks, planning to destroy the ghetto in three days. But resistance fighters fought back, and they held on for almost a month.





And one of my favorite poems ... printed in the March 25, 1991 issue of The New Yorker ...



The Yellow Star That Goes With Me

Sometimes when I’m really thirsty, I mean really dying of thirst
For five minutes
Sometimes when I board a train
Sometimes in December when I’m absolutely freezing

For five minutes
Sometimes when I take a shower
Sometimes in December when I’m absolutely freezing
Sometimes when I reach from steam to towel, when the bed has soft, blue sheets

Sometimes when I take a shower
For twenty minutes, the white tiles dripping with water
Sometimes when I reach from steam to towel, when the bed has soft, blue sheets
Sometimes when I split an apple, or when I’m hungry, painfully hungry

For twenty minutes, the white tiles dripping with water
As the train passes Chambers Street. We’re all crammed in like laundry
Sometimes when I split an apple, or when I’m hungry, painfully hungry
For half an hour, sometimes when I’m on a train

As it passes Chambers Street. We’re all crammed in like laundry
It’s August. The only thing to breathe is everybody’s stains
For half an hour, sometimes when I’m on a train
Or just stand along the empty platform

It’s August. The only thing to breathe is everybody’s stains
Sometimes when I board a train
Or just stand along the empty platform―
Sometimes when I’m really thirsty, I mean really dying of thirst

-- Jessica Greenbaum

Jessica Greenbaum was born in Brooklyn, where she now lives with her husband and two daughters. She is the poetry editor for upstreet (www.upstreet-mag.org).

What about Oakland?

What happened to Oakland during the 1906 earthquake? Well, a visit to the Oakland Museum's website tells you some of the story. In 2006, the Oakland Museum had an exhibit called Aftershock! which showed in a variety of ways how the Bay Area residents coped with the huge earthquake. In fact, the exhibit dug a little deeper and documented how certain San Franciscans tried to downplay the severity of the disaster and protect their commercial future. (By the way, the Oakland Museum is a great place to visit. Very interesting exhibits plus it has great food -- mostly organic -- in the cafe. On weekends, there is live jazz in the cafe.)

Here's what the Oakland Museum website says:

Oakland to the Rescue!, a companion exhibit (through December 31), shows how Oakland, largely undamaged by the quake and fire, with a busy port and railroad lines, served as the base for San Francisco’s recovery efforts. Gov. George C. Pardee and San Francisco businessmen temporarily moved their offices to Oakland. Many refugees took shelter across the Bay; Oakland’s Chinatown population boomed during the influx.

At the turn of the century, Oakland was California’ssecond largest city, with a population of 67,000. When the 1906 earthquake struck, Oakland suffered considerable damage, but it avoided the devastating fires that crippled San Francisco. Oakland’s residents responded quickly to the disaster and welcomed almost 200,000 San Franciscans who sought refuge. Oakland’s Chinatown boomed during the influx. Overnight Oakland, with its port and railroad lines, banks, and communication lines, became the base for the relief effort.

Oakland. I love it.

Anniversary of the San Francisco Earthquake

I get the Writer's Almanac emailed to me each day. Today it has a description of the 1906 earthquake that happened right here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I've read many accounts about it ... but this one had so many shocking bits to it. Read it and see if you don't learn some new things. Kinda reminded me of Katrina in New Orleans.

It was on this day in 1906 that one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States occurred: the San Francisco earthquake. The shaking started at 5:12 a.m. on a Wednesday, and lasted just over a minute, with the main shock 42 seconds long. It erupted along the San Andreas fault, which runs the length of California. The epicenter was two miles off the coast of San Francisco. It was probably about a 7.8 on the modern Richter scale.

In 1906, San Francisco had a population of 410,000 people. The earthquake and resulting fires left about two out of every three residents of the city homeless. The earthquake ruined many buildings, but historians estimate that 90 percent of the destruction to the city came from fires that followed the earthquake, rather than the earthquake itself. The initial fires were caused by ruptured gas lines, and then firefighters decided to blow up buildings with dynamite, hoping that they would create firebreaks. It didn't work, and it's estimated that half of the buildings blown up by dynamite would have otherwise survived. On top of that, since insurance covered fire damage but not earthquake damage, people started setting their own homes and businesses on fire. But as it turned out, insurance companies could not cover the massive disaster, so people didn't get their money anyway. About 500 people were shot and killed by police and federal troops who had been called in to keep order. Some of the people who were killed weren't actually looting — they were trying to rescue their own possessions.

The city of San Francisco hurried to rebuild in time for the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915. In the rush, many building codes and regulations were ignored, and buildings built after the 1906 earthquake were actually less seismically safe than those built before.

Some pretty awful stuff ...

• "The earthquake and resulting fires left about two out of every three residents of the city homeless."
• "... insurance companies could not cover the massive disaster, so people didn't get their money anyway."
• "About 500 people were shot and killed by police and federal troops who had been called in to keep order. Some of the people who were killed weren't actually looting — they were trying to rescue their own possessions."
• "... and buildings built after the 1906 earthquake were actually less seismically safe than those built before."

Would we fare any better now?

[To receive the Writer's Almanac yourself each day in email, go here.]

Poetry and Books: Let's Read!!!

The Edible Schoolyard
(c) 2006 K. Smokey Cormier

Hi, everybody!

I am reading two books right now ... vaguely complimentary ... neither one on my yearly booklist. But I'm enjoying each one thoroughly:

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie. It's a novel with graphics. Meant for young adults. Alexie is very good. I've enjoyed his short stories in the New Yorker. I loved Smoke Signals -- movie based on one of his short stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. And he now has a book of poetry out ... one of them is below. The thing I like about him is that he's got a great sense of humor and he's irreverent. Breaks stereotypes about First Nation peoples.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus - Charles C. Mann. It's nonfiction and dense with stories and facts. I'm reading it AND listening to it on CD in my car to and fro wherever. Wow, so much interesting stuff. Another book that challenges the myths we all learned about First Nation peoples. For example, we think of the Americas before European invasion as "untrammeled by man." Here's an excerpt about The Beni -- a Bolivian province:

The Beni is a case in point. In addition to building roads, causeways, canals, dikes, reservoirs, mounds, raised agricultural fields, and possibly ball courts, Erickson has argued, the Indians who lived there before Columbus trapped fish in the seasonally flooded grassland. The trapping was not a matter of a few isolated natives with nets, but a society-wide effort in which hundreds or thousands of people fashioned dense, zigzagging networks of earthen fish weirs (fish-corralling fences) among the causeways.

Stopping
by Sherman Alexie

Wait,
Whose
Woods
Are
These?
Mr.
Frost,
Please.

Haven't
You
Heard
Of
Broken
Treaties?

Of
Course,
You
Still
Have
Promises
To
Keep.

Your
Pastoral
Horse
Shit
Is
Deep.


Today ... a few more poems ... these two from The Writer's Almanac ...

In Early Spring
by Larry Smith


Road catkins, russet and tan, let the
wind sweep over them as dusk
seeps in along the lake,
and I pass road puddles
swelling to ponds, mirroring
the sky's own silveriness.
At the railroad tracks seven geese
veer off and set down in a field
so that only their necks
speak for them, telling us all
to go on while they rest
by the barn. Today a man
asked me if I were depressed,
and I looked up and smiled.
No more than these geese or catkins
as light falls around them, no
more than those pine boughs
lifting in the wind—just so,
life goes on.





April Prayer

by Stuart Kestenbaum

Just before the green begins there is the hint of green
a blush of color, and the red buds thicken
the ends of the maple's branches and everything
is poised before the start of a new world,
which is really the same world
just moving forward from bud
to flower to blossom to fruit
to harvest to sweet sleep, and the roots
await the next signal, every signal
every call a miracle and the switchboard
is lighting up and the operators are
standing by in the pledge drive we've
all been listening to: Go make the call.

"In Early Spring" by Larry Smith, from A River Remains. © WordTech Editions, 2006, and "April Prayer" by Stuart Kestenbaum, from Prayers & Run-on Sentences. © Deerbrook Editions, 2007.


Hey, it's Poetry Month ... here's another from Poetry Daily:

Fog

That dense fog I'd been groping through, cursing
at every tentative step I took, lifted
at least for an instant so that I could glimpse
on every side the dangerous chasms, worse

than anything I had imagined. Then, at some slight
shift in the wind, it closed in again, thick
as ever and leaving me worse off than before.
It was no dream but the waking truth of aging,

common to everyone, the depressing secret
nobody tells us, not even our parents—
out of kindness, perhaps, for they know that sooner or later
we each come to this place and learn for ourselves.

David R. Slavitt

The Seven Deadly Sins and Other Poems
Louisiana State University Press



And, no, I'm not finished yet.

Here are several books I want to add to my reading list. The list of books below and the comments are taken from last Sunday's SFChronicle/Examiner book section):

Shakespeare Wrote for Money by Nick Hornby: The author chronicles his battle between "books bought" versus "books read." Brilliant. In paperback. [Ms. Manitoba L-O-V-E-S Nick Hornby. His sense of humor just has me rolling.]

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson: Johnson illustrates how science, art and beauty can occasionally be the same thing. In paperback.

Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea by Alice Waters: A chronicle of the transformation of one abandoned plot of land at a Berkeley public school into the Edible Schoolyard - a model for institutions everywhere. [Folks, I photograph there all the time. See my post in July 2008 and the one in November 2007.]