Friday, December 18, 2020

This Land Is Her Land


 On another day of accelerating carnage, consternation and confusion, a brilliant moment of light, of more than historic impact.  I can't begin to explore the possible dimensions of it, which in any case will become clearer in time, for I can't remember when I've been so emotional about a cabinet appointment.  Probably never.  So I cede the floor to the admirable compression of the New York Times lead to begin the explanation, and the celebration.

"In a historic decision, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has chosen Deb Haaland, a congressional representative from New Mexico and a Native American, to lead the Interior Department, an agency that for much of the nation’s history played a central role in the dislocation and abuse of Indigenous communities from coast to coast.

 Mr. Biden’s transition team announced the decision Thursday. If confirmed by the Senate, Ms. Haaland would be the first Native American to lead a cabinet-level agency. She would oversee a sprawling department responsible for some 500 million acres of public lands, including national parks, oil and gas drilling sites and endangered species habitat.

 

Ms. Haaland would play a major role in implementing Mr. Biden’s promised climate change agenda. She would further be responsible for working to strengthen federal protections for vast swaths of territory that the Trump administration has opened up to drilling, mining, logging and construction. Historians and tribal leaders said that her selection represented a watershed moment in the United States’ scarred history with its Native people.

 “It’s momentous to see an Indian promoted out of the shadows of American history to a seat at the table in the White House,” said Elizabeth Kronk Warner, dean and professor of law at the University of Utah, and a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie tribe of Chippewa Indians. “Tribes and the federal government have a relationship that goes back to the 18th century — but despite that relationship, we have never had an American Indian at this level of government.”

Ms. Haaland, a citizen of Laguna Pueblo, one of the country’s 574 federally recognized tribes, would helm the federal agency most responsible for the well-being of the nation’s 1.9 million Indigenous people."

The Times story also noted that her nomination was supported by more than 120 tribal leaders.  Rep. Haaland is politically skilled as past leader of the New Mexico Democratic Party, where she helped turn the state blue.  She was elected to the House in 2018, one of the first two American Indian women in Congress.  She became a forceful opponent of Trump policies to open public land to destructive fossil fuel exploitation.

  With a compelling personal story, she describes herself as a 35th generation American.  Now she will be the cabinet officer overseeing American lands and waters, and their public voice.

Thursday, December 17, 2020

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote 12/17/2020


“I keep meeting poets who say something like, ‘Well, I’m trying to do something that is worthy and lasting and beyond my lifetime,’ and so on. I think that’s just frivolous. That’s something only society decides and I don’t see that it makes any difference anyway. But the process is the process of living centrally and paying attention to your own life. Surely that’s worth doing. If you don’t, who will? That’s what living is about, and you can be distracted from living by trying to create things that will last in the terminology and the mode of society that may or may not be harmonious to your life.” 

 William Stafford

Monday, December 14, 2020

Poetry Monday: People Like Us

 

People Like Us

 for James Wright 

There are more like us. All over the world
 There are confused people, who can’t remember
 The name of their dog when they wake up, and people
 Who love God but can’t remember where

 He was when they went to sleep. It’s
 All right. The world cleanses itself this way.
 A wrong number occurs to you in the middle
 Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time 

To save the house. And the second-story man
 Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,
 And he’s lonely, and they talk, and the thief
 Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,

 You can wander into the wrong classroom,
 And hear great poems lovingly spoken
 By the wrong professor. And you find your soul,
 And greatness has a defender, and even in death you’re safe.

Robert Bly


 Bly published this in 2013 when he was 87, and dedicated it to his old friend James Wright, a poet who was a year younger than Bly but never got old, because he died in 1980 at the age of 53. When I saw this date again, I realized that when I heard Bly and Wright read together in Pittsburgh, it must have been in the last decade of Wright’s life. Bly had published a book on Wright in 2005. Bly gave his last public reading in 2015. His Collected Poems were published in 2019. He is 94. 

The top photo is by Henri Cartier-Bresson, French photographer of mostly urban scenes from the 1930s through the 1960s.  For awhile he was my favorite photographer, and at least in the way he frames his photos, he is again.

Sunday, December 13, 2020

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote 12/13/2020


 "...the center of reality is wherever one happens to be, and its circumference is whatever one's imagination can make sense of..."

Northrup Frye

as quoted from memory by one of his students, Margaret Atwood

New York Times Spelling Bee Update

It’s been awhile since I mentioned the New York Times Spelling Bee but that’s not because I abandoned it.  With decidedly mixed feelings but apparent commitment, I’ve done this puzzle every day for more than a year, scoring at Genius level and getting at least one Pangram (a word that uses all seven letters in a particular puzzle, which always has one and sometimes two or three) every time.  By now that’s probably 400 straight Bees.

 During this time the New York Times published a story on its Spelling Bee puzzle.  The Bee was a feature of the paper edition that followed the crossword to the digital edition, with spectacular results.  It’s enormously popular.  I learned what I should have assumed: that there are numerous social media sites in which a given day’s puzzle is discussed, clues given, complaints made.

 The puzzles are created when seven letters are selected, including the one required to be in every word, and all possible words are generated by a computer.  It is the job of the puzzle editor to select the words that the puzzle will accept.  The idea is to include familiar words, including slang, plus a few more esoteric or technical words.  Though the article didn’t admit it, the selection includes a hefty number of words that go unused except in word puzzles, from crosswords to Scrabble. 

 I learned from the article that there is a level higher than Genius, called Queen Bee, which requires getting all of the words for that puzzle (which may be fewer than 20 or more than 60.) This neither bothers nor tempts me because I disdain those questionable Scrabble words, and try to avoid them even when I remember one.  Getting to Genius without them is my game within the game. 


The article’s description of how the puzzles are made leaves a few things out.  As any long-time player knows, there are words that recur in these puzzles that become almost signatures of the Spelling Bee (for instance roto, toro.)  While the adventure is seeing which new words a given puzzle evokes, there is the inevitable process of keying in words from this remembered list of Spelling Bee words.

 It’s also true that if one puzzle rejects a word (with the neutral message “not in word list”), all Spelling Bee puzzles will.  I thought I’d made my peace with my own list of perfectly good words it won’t accept, until a recent puzzle didn’t recognize “immanent.”  That’s disturbing.

 And then there is the matter of the absence of one letter of the alphabet: S.  No puzzle ever has S.  I guessed the obvious rationale would be that many more words could be made simply by adding S at the end.  That in fact may be why, but in the past few months I’ve noted the frequency of puzzles that include e and d among the letters, or i, n, and g. Both combinations create many new words from words already made.

 But because of the four-letter rule (words must have a minimum of four letters), these suffixes often make words that otherwise wouldn’t qualify.  What interests me is how many times it has taken me a long time to see the “ed” or “ing” possibility in a given seven letters. 

 One of the attractions of the games—which is also its greatest drawback—is that I never know how long one is going to take me to reach my Genius goal.  It might take 15 minutes.  But it can also throttle me for three hours, I am loathe to admit.  Usually a big chunk of those hours is finding just a few words, or even just one.  Since this has become a nightly ritual (almost always, right after midnight, when the new puzzle drops on the West Coast), a major change in duration can affect everything afterwards, including bedtimes.

 And yes, it has occurred to me that doing the puzzle every day is more than a habit and suggests addiction, and that continuing it until I reach those levels suggests compulsion as well as a game.  I’ve thought about quitting, especially after I reached a year straight. 

 And maybe I will, or maybe I’ll slack off now and then. But the basic pleasure of it recurs, which is the fun of making words. (The puzzle mostly doesn’t take proper names, but I like to make them anyway.)  Words come to me that I haven’t heard or read in years, including a fair percentage that I couldn’t define.   I could use most of them in a sentence, even if I didn’t know what I’d just said.  (The truth is that in my writing, even when I use the precise right word I can’t necessarily define it.  It means exactly what it means, right down to the sound.)

 I also learn from the frustrations of the Bee.  Over the course of this year I’ve gotten deja vu more than once, so I assume I’ve done the same basic puzzle multiple times.  But I’ve also noticed that a word I got on one puzzle eludes me when it is possible on another.  There are always ways to do better.

 Now I want to work on the compulsion to finish in one sitting, when I know (as others also know) that returning to the puzzle after leaving it for awhile often results in seeing words that had eluded me. But the discipline to put it down is something I need to work on.

 I am also sure doing the Bee relates to my writing, and even this blog.  When I write and publish something here, I mostly have no idea of who reads it or what effect it has.  The Spelling Bee has less possibility but more certainty.  In my ongoing writing projects, or even discrete pieces, there is always the question of when is it really finished (and why.)  The Spelling Bee has a minimum definition of finished—and a 24 hour life.

 I also wonder whether I would have been so faithful for this long if there wasn’t a pandemic outside keeping me in, or if trying to absorb the ongoing shock and bewilderment of the news didn’t suggest a daily respite in a closed world of letters, and words yet to be formed.  But here I am, and here I will be for months to come.  Maybe this helps my writing projects or maybe it hurts them by distracting me. But I know my main job right now is to not get sick.  If this helps, why not?