Unanswered Questions by Karen

[I published this narrative essay in Segullah Journal, 2008]

“How would you describe your classroom management...philosophy?” I asked her awkwardly, trying to read my own handwriting.

“Love and logic,” she spat out just as casually as if I'd asked her what time it was. She was mostly occupied with gently pushing away the four-year-old tugging on her sweater sleeve.

Great, I thought to myself. This is perfect, I'm supposed to write a three-page paper on a real English teacher's comprehensive answer to a single question, and all she's got for me is a four-syllable slogan. On the other hand, she did use alliteration; maybe I could take up a couple of double-spaced paragraphs by analyzing that...

“Oh, interesting,” I inserted as a verbal filler; I was grasping for a way to get her to explain without letting her know how clueless I was, “and ...”

“Maddy, go find your shoes, please, we'll go home in just a couple minutes—”

“...and how does that philosophy literally... play out in your classroom?” That would have to do, I sighed.

Art Deco--Modified Picasso by Karen

Justin and I put together a little creative project a couple weeks ago. We went to D.I. to find a frame for the Picasso painting I received for Christmas (Guernica). We knew the poster was pretty big, so we took our time, looking for a few weeks to find just the right frame.

Finally, we found a white-and-gold art frame with a painting in it. It was an old style desert landscape. An art print of an oil painting--very much like the oil painting landscapes that grandma and grandpa have at their house--lots of green and yellow. We imagined that we'd just slide the Picasso in over the existing painting in the frame and put it up on the wall. When we got home, we realized a couple of problems. One, the Picasso (black and white) looked silly and washed out in the white and gold frame. Two, the frame was actually much too big for the poster--we'd have to put in additional matting around the poster, which we really didn't want to do, matting is so expensive, and the poster was really special, not the kind of thing a person could matte with sheets of construction paper.

Meanwhile, we'd had a good laugh at the back of the desert landscape painting--a thin particle board with a very amateur half-done painting on it. Cheap paint was used probably by a high school art student, or any non-professional just having fun. At the top, a dramatic, fantastical sunset in orange and blue and yellow, with black ominous clouds; to the left a great and spacious building of stacked-up, pueblo-style architure, brown stucco walls, red, rounded doorways. Poor attempts at a 3-effect. At the bottom, a fluffy, green blob, possibly meant to represent a bush. To the right, streaks of random color, maybe someone had been testing the paint, unsure of what colors would come out. Justin and I, as a joke, placed the Picasso poster on this underbelly of the desert landscape painting. Then we looked down at it. And looked up at each other. We laughed. And both knew that this was the answer, the true destiny for our Picasso.

I carefully cut the Picasso painting out of its white poster background and centered and pasted it to the amateur painting. I spray-painted the frame black, to bring out the dramatic contrasts in the Picasso. On the undone spaces of the amateur painting, the parts where no paint had ever touched the flat, particle board surface, I scrawled depressing, war poetry in pencil (to add to the effect of despair). Some e.e. cummings, some Charles Boudelaire, some T.S. Eliot, some Walt Whitman, a paragraph from a novel about Hiroshima, and a poem of my own. and Voila! A beautifully dramatic abstract modernist commentary on war and violence as the new focal point for our room. After we put it up, we stared at it for several minutes in awed reverence. "This is really beautiful, honey," Justin said, "a real piece of art."

For your reading pleasure, here are the poems/excerpt from the painting:

T.S. Eliot (From The Waste Land, a tedious, modernist poem about the depressing face of post-WWI America):

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

Walt Whitman (From Pioneers! O Pioneers! Expressing the violence and vigor of Manifest Destiny--he thought his encouragement of Western Expansion was quite noble, I use it in this collection, because I find it sick, and ironic considering the fact that it was not just trees, but Native Americans who were the victims of several pioneer movements):

Come my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? Have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O Pioneers!

Charles Baudelaire (The most highly acclaimed depressing French Poet of the canon of literature. This is the English translation):

O, Death: old captain, it is time!
Let us raise anchor!
This country bores us, O Death!
Let us set sail!
Though the sky and the sea are black as ink,
our hearts are filled with rays!
Pour us your poison, so that it comforts us!

e.e. cummings (The postmodernist who always finds contentment in his exploratory writings about despair):

Faithfully tinying at twilight voice
of death earth's innumerable doom
againing (yes by microscopic yes)
acceptance of irrevocable time

particular pure truth of experience heard
above the everywhereing facts of fear;
and under any silence of each bird
who dares to not forsake a failing year

--now, quite before your whisper's whisper is
subtracted from my hope's own hope, receive
(undaunted guest of dark most downwardness
and marvellously self diminuitive

whose universe a single leaf maybe,
the more than thanks of always merest me

Quote from Hiroshima:

The day before the bomb, I went for a swim. In the morning, I was eating peanuts. I saw a light. I was knocked to a little sister's sleeping place. When we were saved, I could only see as far as the tram. My mother and I started to pack our things. The neighbors were walking around burned and bleeding.

Me (This is a poem about many things. Mostly about how my disgust for war and violence is making me want to be vegetarian. Also, about my annoyance at President Obama for accepting the Nobel Peace prize, when we knew that sending a few thousand more troops into Iraq just before accepting the prize was dishonorable.):

She,

of whom it is said would,
in a million sentences about years,
never take an axe in hand against,
much more than a cherry tree, an
innocent, running sans head chicken,
or any chicken for that matter,

is no more innocent of bar-B-que finger-licking
than the man who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize
for ordering only a few thousand more friends, Romans, Countrymen
into the
out of the frying pan and
into the
hands of Macbeth, his wife, and other red-fingered Fates.



I hope rather than getting sad by these literary excursions, you think of them as important social commentary--just one more effort to inspire the community with feelings of anti-violence and other optimistic Ghandi-isms.

All Roads Lead to Wal-mart by Karen

All Roads Lead to Wal-mart

How generous of the Superstore to let local brands rent space on the shelves!
The Roman Empire allowed its peoples to govern themselves.
No Nazis, no Redcoats.

"Convenience, convenience, convenience!"
We chant this, and render coins before pagan altars.

"What are we going to do tonight, Sam?"
"The same thing we do every night, Caesar, try to take over the world!"

NYC Poetry, May 2009, by Karen and Justin

I. Hot Dog Poem

I think hotdogs must be standardized
'cause that's all you get
ketchup and maybe mustard
for 99 cents,
2 dollars,
3 dollars--do I hear 4?
the price increases at the same rate
subway standers change color,
from black and brown to yellow and white


II. Everything (In NYC) is Poetry

Sticky garbage is art,
but only if you put it in a frame,
or if you can sell it to tourists


III. Subway Map

But why no sushi?
connect the dots! la la la la!
Stringy strings stringing through
and where is my Italian fantasy?!
Fabuous fabled fettuccine forthwith
no North--only Bronx--
Bedford Park Blvd--
Brighton Beach--
Two stops late to proper payment make
are we at the end of the line?


IV. Sunscreen

Screens screened tourists between filters
High culture, green culture, criss-cross
Strained Shakespearean sunlight.
Quoth the illuminious poet,
Smirks like the sunset twinkling on the twilight ocean water
Admit more wry depth than an organic net of streets.


V. Shell

This shell is like my sea-coated ears
there's something alive inside,
a gooey monster.

And Coney Island is like the humid bletch
that spotches the boardwalk and clings to my skin.
Once the fair fare of fairy tale 20th century fairs is long melted,
just a discarded, dry, sugar puddle.


VI. Ode on a Choking Victimé

Choking victim, choking victim,
Wherefore doest thou obstreprous?
Whereforest dost thou nottest clamp thyne palate?

Rats spoiled again didst thou masticate?
Manging mangey morsels porcelain caught
after omniverous laugh.


VII. Gratuitous Gratuity

This is kind of ridiculous.
Golden paneled golden panels
reinventing today's forecast.
Technology makes us unaccountable;
we reverse our consequences.
O Catharsis! Feed thy fantastical
fictions to us--May they taste
in us some flavor of truth.
The curtain, ostensibly decadent.

Is composition in the traditional sense an abandoned art form?

Is composition in the traditional sense an abandoned art form? The concept of a masterwork seems to have already been embalmed before I was even born. The only people who even bother with it anymore these days are film score composers, musical composers, and dreaming, private hacks in the ignominity of their own garage.

But there are those exceedingly rare, highly canonized exponents who already have their own name and can demand a fortune for each five minute commission. The ideal of a Mozart or a Beethoven composing day and night, scribbling out countless pages of manuscript seems to be gone from our culture. Ellington, an American, but also someone beyond the classical realm wrote master works in ostensibly art-for-art's-sake experiments, but composition doesn't seem to have gotten any salutary attention aside from his tributary works.

Of course in so many implicit, subconscious ways American culture is just the annex of lichen-overgrown European idioms. Europe got too overcrowded for its own art and history, so we were bumped out here. The Fates and the Muses wanted us to seize the opportunity to find a new expression of ourselves, to cut and tear away from the new earth a new art, a new thought. We were to declare a new philosophy of creativity, but what have we got?

Sonny Rollins knows what we got. The one class of people who came into America, carrying in their bosom the new, bright expression the gods demanded Americans to place on the altar of music as a condition for coinheriting the New World were invidiously punished, because they weren't made in the tired old European design.

When we Americans think art, it is in the European context. When we think travel, we think Europe, or those places worldwide that our father Europeans have already established a cultural base for us.

And when we think music, we think fine music halls with precision acoustics. We think of all those thousands of highly skilled and talented musicians we trained on traditional instruments to play masterworks from the canon for us as we listen to them in ceremonial attire. It is an complex religious affair, with seating rules for each type of ensemble, and a comprehensive etiquette. We do not sigh, rapture, or otherwise participate. We expect them to play the masterworks flawlessly and with the precise amount of conviction. They are interchangeable, our players, in their black, formal robes. Occasionally one great musician will stand or sit out in front of the rest, piercing our hearts with fiery passion. Every decade or so the man standing backwards in tails whisking the stick around in dizzying, calligraphic artistry gets replaced, but we don't care too much about that, the perfect music will stay the same, just like it came from Beethoven's pen; authenticated, authorized, scholarly reproduction. Beautiful music performed in a gilded hall. This we call art. That is what Beethoven wanted, isn't it?

(Justin)

Homework Paragraph After the Manner Forbidden by George Orwell

Going along the lines of this assignment I decided to turn my own hand
at running the gamut of ready made phrases since I couldn't find an
example to fit the bill, therefore the buck stops here. Not even when
sentences negate themselves, but when none of them do not convey a
single original idea not unlike authorial relinquishment of intended
meaning, readers come away with no gain in understanding. In an
effort to put perfume on a pig, I'm now going to introduce some irony
by hanging the Sword of Damocles over this paragraph. Often
oligopolic ontologies occlude rhetoric and coerce the mind of the
reader towards either a subconscious submission unto confusion or an
overt reaction of frustration. All of this ties in with a general
pollution of meaning, no matter what the audience or the subject
matter. Writing is the currency of communication and we must
steadfastly guard against forces which inflate its
essence.

(Justin)