The Brooklyn Bridge - David McCulloch

Under construction from 1870 to 1883,over fifty sand hogs died of nitrogen narcosis also known as the bends or caissons disease, while working over sixty feet below the surface of the water under massive wooden and steel caissons (think of a square pot upside down seventy five feet on a side).  It was the bends that killed the principal construction superintendant of the bridge Washington Roebling, son of the designer, John Roebling.  Building the Brooklyn Bridge was deadly work.  Medical doctors were called in to try to help.  They pronounced that work should proceed that nothing could be done.  The wire rope used on the Brooklyn Bridge is identical in principal to the wire rope that supports the Golden Gate Bridge and made by the same company: Roebling Steel.

Reading: past two years - partial list

If you see any titles here that you would like me to comment on please make a request and I'll add it to "Book Notes". Books to review: 1.  A Few Bloody Noses - Robert Harvey 2.  Horse People - Michael Korda 3.  Ike (bio) - Michael Korda 4.  The Making of the Atom Bomb - Richard Rhodes 5.  Tuxedo Park (radar development in U.S.) - Jennet Conant 6.  Stalin (bio) - Edvard Radzinsky 7.  Grant (bio) - Michael Korda 8.  Underworld - Don DeLillo 9.  Don Quixote  - Miguel Cervantes 10.  Moby Dick - Herman Melville 11. Bond of Union (Erie Canal) - Gerard Koeppel 12.  Essays and short fiction - John Barth 13.  Confederates in the Attic - Tony Horwitz 14.  The Englishman’s Boy - Guy Vanderhaeghe 15.  Seven Days in the Art World - SarahThornton 16.  Secrets of the Model Dorm - Amanda Kerlin 17.   I’m Sorry You Feel That Way -  Diana Joseph 18.  Slavery By Another Name - Douglas Blackmon 19.  American Heroes - Edmund Morgan 20.  Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts - Robert Kaplan 21.  Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (re-read) - Robert Venturi 22.  The Red and the Black - Stendahl 23.  My Revolution (Hungarian- 1956) - Michael Korda 24.  Bushwhacked Piano (re-read, fifth time) - Thomas McGuane 25.  Gallatin Canyon - Stories - Thomas McGuane 26.  Sixty Stories - Donald Barthelme 27.  Waveland - Frederick Barthelme 28.  This Republic of suffering (Civil War) - Drew Gilpin Faust 29.  A Team of Rivals (Lincoln and Civil War Cabinet) - Doris Kearns Goodwin 30.  Louis Brandeis (bio) - Melvin Urofsky 31.  The Coldest Winter (Korean War) - David Halberstam 32.  The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway 33.  For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway 34.  A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway 35.  This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald 36.  The Beautiful and the Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald 37.  The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald 38.  The Last Tycoon - F. Scott Fitzgerald

39.  Rogue Warrior Novels (7 total)- Richard Marcinko ( like crack )40.  Hugo Black (bio) - Gerald Dunne

41.  Le Corbusier (bio) - Nicholas Fox-Weber

42.  Danube - Claudio Magris (remarkable book - don't miss)

43.  Founding Brothers - Joseph Ellis

44.  The Winning Spirit - Joe Montana and Tom Mitchell

Happens Every Day - Memoir - Isabel Gillies

6-12-09  - book ReviewStarbucks and Borders sell exactly the same things - just in different proportions.  I bought this memoir at Starbucks, one of my bookstores.  I enjoy writing to authors of books I read and the following is a letter to this author.

I finished reading your memoir last week and have had some time to think it over.  It reads like a sinewy case study from the Havard Business School.  You have laid out the facts of your case and I get to try to  figure out what really happened, the subtext, the deeper unwritten dynamics at work in the dissolution of your marriage to Josiah (self-centered prick! - just kidding)  Your story opens with the, hubby-assembled, wall of photos and herein lies the key to the mismatch.  We fool ourselves regularly as a society into believing that we are not intensely hierarchical, that we are democratic, “all men are created equal”, meritocracy, blah, blah, but alas, we are hard-wired for a vicious, brutal, always cruel sorting that was feebly expressed by the French nobility prior to the French Revolution and less feebly entertained by Eastern Seabord  (includes southern states) American WASPs.

Although the generation shared by you and your husband manifests outward signs of the spirit of equality: you were summer neighbors in Maine, you two shared excellent private schools, Josiah was a crew jock (how upper crust can a type “A” male get!) and you both had glamorous careers, one doesn’t have to go far back on Josiah’s side to see his “Lynyrd Skynrd” relatives as you call them.  You were perhaps thinking “Deliverance” but being diplomatic.  Your family traces its upper middle-upper class credentials back to the turn of the twentieth century.  Your mother had an “aristocratic upbringing” your father attended Choate, a WASP enclave and Ivy League feeder school.

Your roots are higher on the society food chain by any measure, than those of Josiah.  Due to his upbringing in the scalding cauldron of east coast WASP gunmanship, he knew he was / is your social inferior and as you and he both know, no amount of brilliant poetry or young life altering teaching experience will erase or diminish this cruel arithmetic of generational class dominance.  That you can so carefully describe it, speaks to your acceptance of its rules ie although you may have submitted to bearing Josiah’s children and to following him on his career travels, you knew you had his ass kicked socially.  Was it really a “miracle” that your child was admitted to the tony nursery school, no.  It was a natural benefit of your easily demonstrable social heft.

Josiah felt intimidated by you even though his behavior would seem bossy and dominant to most.  When that mink Sylvia showed up with her pheromone cloud and her more humble origins and her admiration for his status as a teacher, Josiah sensed an escape route from a future as the husband of a Streep-scale movie queen or, given your patrician roots - a Hepburn.

You can look at his fear, his marriage exit, as a validation of your incipient resonance an an American actress.  You have written this story as if you were the sorrier of the two of you.  That he is the hot, young stud-scholar-jock who has, without a thinking past his organ (Jacobsons), abandoned his young family.  I don’t doubt anything you have written or that your experience was shocking, heartbreaking and very dismal but you have given us barely enough back-story to peel the infinite onion that is human love, to see that you are the more dominant and powerful of the two of you.

I wonder if your book has affected his academic career?  I’ll bet your current husband grew up on the West Coast, another country socially than the East.  I have a few tales from my Harvard experience of briliance not being able to trump multi-generational, family social clout.  It is a very interesting book.  Thank you for your superb, thought-provoking story.  I like to think you wrote it just for me, Joe Reader, thus this note.

"The Bliss Engine" Excerpt from the book - 2010

c 2010  Jim BlakeIntroduction This book  focuses on achieving elevated consciousness through diet and how  expanded consciousness  multiplies creating an enlightened population.  A higher state of collective  wisdom referred to in this text as The Bliss Engine.  An engine is our entire cumulative thought and action - our culture.  We are now living in The Big Engine.  It is the end product of The Enlightenment Project that has run a marvelous,  awesome and brutal course but is currently wrecking the planet and oppressing eighty percent of its population give or take a billion.  Parts of The Big Engine are: global capitalism, rogue financial institutions and insurance companies, the corporatocracy, the military-industrial complex, global media, fast food, box retail, corporate farming, big cars, mean people, obesity, pollution in all its forms, exploitation, etc.   This essay proposes the next kinder, gentler engine, The Bliss Engine. An epoch of a civilization, usually three to five hundred years,  is an engine.  The current epoch  is The Big Engine.  The Big Engine is actually an extension of the Renaissance-Enlightenment epoch  referred to by Ken Wilbur as “The Descended Grid“.  This Grid has been skewed by Picasso, Einstein, Schoenberg and Joyce among others.  It has been further skewed by our growing awareness of its lethal qualities, as well as by its  demise as its fuel of choice,  petroleum, is exhausted.  The Big Engine will be replaced within fifty years as the last of our proven oil reserves are depleted.  The Big Engine can be replaced by The Bliss Engine. The Bliss Engine is a culture in which we minimize living at cross purposes.  We minimize our cannibalization of each other’s fortunes.  We search for and institute Bliss Engine systems that enhance rather than destroy the participants in our culture.  We align our collective energy more efficiently. The Bliss Diet focuses on how one may regularly experience a better self through diet.  This text will focus on how a  higher state of consciousness might be manifest and harnessed in the service of the Bliss Engine.  A key precept in my exploration is that democracy is a powerful agent of change and  each individual, is vastly important to the success of our shared enterprise. *** I first became conscious of the powerful link between food and emotion when my mother, who had grown up in poverty during the depression, would get annoyed at my three sisters and me for eating the last of a particular leftover.  If she went to the refrigerator for a bite after an evening of beer drinking, smoking and railing against the people on her shit list and found that the food object of her desire, usually a piece of chicken or a glop of tuna casserole was not there, she would launch a tirade  “Who in the hell ate my chicken!?”  Who is the greedy little monster who ate the last of ‘her’ food without offering it to her or asking for permission to eat it.  These outbursts are mildly humorous in retrospect but were not funny at the time.  Food was never taken for granted when surrounded by such drama.  After those eight years of food madness, I have never eaten a meal in my life without a dollop of guilt, without my reptilian brain inquiring as to whether the food I was eating actually belonged to someone else. As a sixty-year-old ex-intercollegiate oarsman and lifelong jogger, food has a powerful effect on my sense of well-being, my emotional state, my closeness to or distance from a flow state, the zone or state of bliss.  If I eat too much, I feel guilty.  If I eat meat, I feel tired.  If I drink a glass of wine or scotch I feel depressed for at least a day.  I am an architect, an artist, a writer and a songwriter. When I am doing creative work, I am often in a bliss state - in the zone.  This term has a variety of definitions that border on new-age –South Asian enlightenment.  For me it means that I can concentrate for many hours at a high level of intensity for many months.  My best work is created in a bliss state.  If I don’t have access to that state of mind, I try not to be demanding of myself for new creative conceptual material. I have phased into and out of bliss states for over thirty-five years.  Sometimes it lasts for months, sometimes for minutes. Sometimes the zone is inaccessible for weeks at a time due to life circumstances, mundane commitments that do not require bliss for their performance.  Looking back over these years it is clear that food and drink are powerful determinants of my ability to achieve a bliss state.  If I’m in the zone, then eating meat will end the bliss, as will drinking wine or  liquor beyond half a  shot.  Being even slightly bloated from a meal is a bliss-killer.  Bliss is fragile.  It must be tended, respected and nourished properly.  It must be carefully cultivated.  It is our most sensitive, perceptive, soulful selves speaking. I developed The Bliss Diet by accident at a time my finances dwindled from desperate to chilling.  I was accustomed to a thrifty lifestyle but it was the shift to penury that revealed a path to dietary enlightenment.  I went from eating in restaurants and pubs every night to eating canned soup and crackers, to eating oatmeal with raisins and walnuts, to just plain oatmeal.  When I stopped eating at the pubs and restaurants, I stopped drinking alcohol and Italian coffee,  I could no longer afford my daily double-latte that would boost me at three p.m. from the lingering lethargy of mild wine or beer hangovers.  At a time when I should have been feeling anxious and desperate from lack of money, I felt energized and optimistic.  I began to radiate positive energy instead of being an energy sink - a karmic void.  I’m guilty about singling out my mother for chronic food issues when my father contributed his share of suitcases to my food baggage train.  He was a champion heavyweight boxer in the Navy during WWII and was obsessed all of his life with being in good enough condition to “lower the boom on some cock-knocker.”  He regularly taunted my slightly overweight eldest sister and made scathing, barely audible remarks about people who were not “in condition” anytime they appeared in his field of vision.  He believed that being overweight showed a lack of character.  My mother made me afraid to eat and my father made me afraid of fat - an effective combo for staying trim and neurotic!  Acknowledging the scope of my own hang-ups around food,  I have discovered a powerful relationship between food and drink and the bliss state in which I do my finest work. The Bliss Diet is as follows:  Mornings - plain oatmeal, lunch - oatmeal with raisins, dinner - oatmeal with raisins and walnuts.  Coffee as required.  Take vitamin supplements as needed.  This foundation Bliss Diet, due to its lack of protein should only be used for fifteen days at a  time and not more than six times a year.  It is an effective tool for generating ideas, breaking out of writer’s block and clearing the head during times of stress. The Bliss Diet takes your mind and body away from food and redirects psychic energy to art, job, tasks, and your loved ones.  It removes you from the destructive alcohol/caffeine cycle.  It draws you away from fat, sugar, cholesterol and the unknown pharmaceuticals in meat to a simple, nourishing fare that enables weight loss, spiritual and emotional cleansing and a high level of creative performance.  This diet is designed for people in relatively sedentary jobs.  It is not for coal miners, steel workers or construction workers.  It is a diet that is light in protein so not recommended for those burning many calories every day.  It is a diet for architects, attorneys, businessmen, artists, writers, poets, teachers.  You are all working very hard, but you are not burning many calories at work. The oarsman and the iron worker achieve bliss from neurochemicals released during hard labor. Your bliss, however,  must be coaxed from your body and mind and tended carefully.  It is fragile and easily replaced by anxiety, stress, anger and worry.  Control your food, know your food,  nurture your bliss state.  It is a refuge from despair, burn-out, that empty feeling. The Bliss Diet is very simple.  It is not a joke, nor is it as simple as it seems.  If the notion of dealing with your bliss state frightens you as it does most people or if the reality of losing five pounds per week and one quarter of an inch per week from your waist disturbs you,  then read no further.  The principle of this regimen is that either your stomach or your brain is governing each waking moment in your life.  If you spend the bulk of each day thinking about your next snack or meal, eating the snack or meal then putting your mind on pause while your body digests the food and drink then little time remains to work and play on matters that make you happy and advance your reputation for excellence. Most of us are suckers for seduction.  To be seduced is to be removed from the pleasure of the spirit and to fall victim to the pleasure of the eyeball,  the stomach or erotic realms of the brain manifest as sex, cars and or rock and roll.  Americans are inexorably drawn to shiny stuff, loud stuff, sexy stuff.   Food is a vehicle for seduction.  Shiny cars, exposed midriffs,  pretty colors, sexy voices, soft fabrics are agents of seduction.  Americans invite and embrace seduction.  A fine cabernet loosens your self-control for those sauce-slathered medallions of pork, the roasted baby potatoes, the eight dollar combo of green stuff saturated with water – the salad, the key lime pie, the port, the espresso, the sexy glance from your date, then the bill!  Who cares! Pay the man – you have been seduced. It is of interest that the boom in fast food consumption as well as the upswing in the use of carbonated soft drinks and fat-laden processed food has coincided with the sale of massive packages of bulk toilet paper.  It takes three times the yardage of Charmin to wipe your butt.  Obese Americans use far more forest products than other cultures.  This is in addition to massive amounts of fecal waste generated by diets high in meat products and grease-laden carbohydrates, wine and rich desserts that strain our waste management facilities.  Now that Kitty Litter is dumped into toilets, our fat pets are exacerbating the problem.  Cat feces also pollutes the ocean with  bacteria that kills sea otters.  We rage, rail and sing to stop the cutting of the world’s rain forests while our own northern stands of trees are sucked into a vortex of over-eaters and blown through our waste management facilities and out into the ocean.  Is it possible to make toilet paper out of soft drink bottles? Little paid work, art or athletic achievement is created when your stomach rules your consciousness.  Anything you can do to shift your psychic presence to your brain is a good thing - unless you are suffering and your brain is an unhappy place.  One is ultimately happier and far more productive when the mind and not the stomach is the governor of your mood.  The Bliss Diet ensures a shift from stomach to mind, enabling the bliss state .  This diet will sell itself in ten days.  It will need no further explanation.  At that point you will be ready for Julia Cameron, Eckert Tolle or Yoga class.  When deprived  of your seductive diet you will savor smaller increments of pleasure, nature‘s more sublime gifts.  The Bliss Diet deprives you at first and then rewards you on a scale that enables bliss as well as the  bonus of weight loss.  The pleasures of fine wine and gourmet food are fleeting and destructive of bliss.  They are fattening and require further drugging, more stomach abuse the morning after, then again at noon.  A life ruled by one’s stomach is dominated by a vicious cycle disguised by seduction.  It is a spirit-deprived existence.  It is a soul-killing treadmill that breeds mediocrity and reduces the good things of life. Americans get seduced all day long.  We are bombarded by seduction, with shiny things.  To allow yourself  the pleasures of seduction more than once a week is to invite spiritual dissolution.  The Puritans, with all of their bleakness, may have had a few good ideas.  Food is politics.  Politics is food.  The American diet kills bliss dead.  Dead bliss produces aggression, susceptibility to seduction, dependence on pharmaceuticals, heart disease, lung disease, stroke, child abuse, elder abuse, road rage, selfishness, cancer, fear, loathing and Las Vegas.  America exports its diet, its seductions: shiny cars, big, colorful, noisy, violent movies – its darkness.  America should be cleaning up at home and exporting more oatmeal, not wine, wars, and genetically engineered seeds. The corn dog is a bliss killer on a stick.  It is filled with ground offal that can be tracked to the ten million gallon lake of pig shit on the factory hog farm in North Carolina.  Can anything this disgusting produce anything of real value?  No!  Track oatmeal – it is innocent.  The sins of your father stop at your steaming bowl of oats.  You are forgiven. In order to fully understand the value of The Bliss Diet it helps to understand the concept of the additive negative.  It is as follows: Two wrongs not only do not make a right but create a reality that is worse than the sum effect of two isolated wrongs.  There is a synergy of dissolution, negatives are additive.  Civilization is a great reciprocating engine whose mechanism is the storm of opposing synergies both positive and negative.  An individual can easily lose control of geometrically multiplying negatives they inherit, assume or pursue.  This loss of control initiates nervous collapse and may lead to over-eating.  Additive negative meltdown may lead to psychic convulsion and projectile ejection of whole cultures from the surface of the earth. The state of bliss is heavily affected by additive negatives.  Bliss is binary.  You are either in a state of bliss or you are out.  Out prevails and is the default condition in our culture.   Bliss must be actively pursued, cultivated and protected or one easily ends up out – in a state of blah.  Blah is the absence of bliss  There are a million combinations of normal food and drink that will kill your bliss and keep it dead and these effects are additive.  A little bit of meat may be alright.  A glass of wine may be OK but together they are guaranteed to destroy a bliss state. You don’t deserve bliss?  You get anxious when you’re happy.  You drink bliss-killing alcohol to celebrate a blissful achievement.  Your ancestors replaced an indigenous civilization.  Your grandfather built radar towers in Argentina for the CIA or drilled for oil in the Amazon displacing still another indigenous population.  You just do not deserve to be happy.  Two thousand people around the world starved to death today.  Your bliss is the only thing that could have saved them.  Your guilt and reluctance to be happy is a knife in their heart.  The sins of your father stop at the steaming bowl of oatmeal.  You are forgiven!

My Dinner with Norman

In the fall of 2006  Norman Mailer invited me to visit him at his home in Provincetown, Massachusetts .  We had been corresponding for nine years at the time, exchanging a few letters each year.  Our friendship began in 1997 when I wrote him a letter about his new book Picasso as a Young Man,  my letter was quite long.  In it I discussed many aspects of Picasso’s life as written in Norman’s book and concluded with a discussion of Cubism, a topic on which I had lectured at Harvard, USC, and many other places.  To my amazement, Norman wrote back, a two page, single-spaced typed letter, in which he said my criticism of his book was the finest he received from any publication in the country and he appreciated it very much and….if I was such an expert on Cubism that I should write a book on it.  This was a challenge too potent to deny and I proceeded to write this book, Station Point, Two Steps Publishing Co. 1998,  Norman coached me on the text at a few milestones and helped greatly with his editing suggestions.  On the weekend of my visit,  I flew into Boston, spent the night at the Harvard Faculty Club and on the following day I rented a car and made the four hour drive out to P-town.  I arrived in the late afternoon and appeared at the door of Norman’s beautiful brick house (mansion - a former nunnery).  His gorgeous wife Norris (former couture model, author of Windchill Summer - a superb novel) answered the door, invited me in and informed Norman of my arrival.  I busted out in a massive grin and overcame my nervousness at being in the presence of my favorite writer, philosopher, American public figure . I began reading Norman’s work as a nineteen year old and felt he was the only writer who understood and wrote so clearly about the passionate chaos of my childhood family life.  His writing was a bright light  in the emotional/intellectual turbulence.  Norman had a great big smile himself and welcomed me in, Norris left us and Norman invited me into his den with a big row of picture windows that looked out on Boston Harbor.  Norman asked my what drink I preferred and upon hearing scotch, he opened a new bottle of a great single malt, 25 year old Balvenie,  We began a conversation about writers and critics and art and after finishing our drinks,  Norman mentioned that he made a reservation for dinner at Provincetown’s finest restaurant for us.  Norris was working on her next novel, Cheap Diamonds,  and bowed out of joining us.  It was fun to walk into a public place with a big celebrity and sense the heads turning and the whispering.  Norman was greeted by the hostess as a distinguished local citizen rather than a big star.  Our dinner lasted for four hours, we shut the place down.  Once the conversation began it just stormed like a hurricane over a hundred different subjects.  Norman recounted his experience as a movie director (four films) and likened it to being a general in the Army.  He savored the total command  of organizing a movie production, opposed to his status as a private in the real Army during WW II.  We discussed Muhammad Ali, Ryan O’Neil, Isabella Rossellini, both of whom appeared in one of Norman’s movies.  Norman was surprised to hear that my father had been married two more times than himself,  five for Norman, seven for my dad-ouch! Who were those women? Maaaa - meatloaf ma!    My mother (my father's first wife - fifteen years)  was only married three times.  We talked about going to school at Harvard.  We talked about the Kennedys who Norman was close to when Jack Kennedy was running for president.  My Kennedy experience was limited to passing Caroline on a very long snowy path across some Harvard real estate over a winter break.  Here comes someone on the narrow path through the snow,  off in the distance, it’s a woman, the path isn’t wide enough for both of us, she’s getting closer, she’s wearing a long black overcoat.  I’m going to have to turn sideways at some point to let this woman brush past, It’s Caroline Kennedy! We smiled at each other, passed and continued on our way.  One morning at Elsie’s Café I was sitting at the counter eating breakfast after running my daily thirty flights of stairs at Harvard stadium.  Joe Kennedy and his entourage walk in.  I’m facing a large African-American waitress whose face lights up like she’s staring at Jesus himself - I turn around and there stands a smiling, laser blue-eyed Kennedy.  It was wild to see the effect on the staff - the place went electric.  The only other time I’d seen cosmic scale charisma like that was the night Rick Derringer and his entourage crowded to the front of a line at a Dave Brubeck concert in Cleveland the night before they opened for Aerosmith at a local arena.  During our conversation, I told Norman a story about an Army experience of mine and he laughed, said it was a classic and insisted that I write it.  Here is that story.

In 1971 I was a buck sergeant in the Army, three stripes.  Not an insignificant rank in the world of enlisted men.  I was twenty years old and in charge of the graphic design office at the XVIII Airborne Corps headquarters at Fort Bragg North Carolina.  My duties included preparing slide shows for visiting foreign heads of state that instructed them on the features of modern U.S. Army airborne operations.  I once walked past Joseph Mobutu, president of Zaire,  as he chatted with some generals after one of these presentations.  I also drew a cartoon each week for the Fort Bragg newspaper, The Paraglide, I painted large, humorous portraits of retiring colonels that were presented at their banquets and on the side I painted large pictures for top sergeants to hang in their homes and I jumped out of a plane once a month.  I had a great stereo hooked up in my office where my hardworking staff of six could listen to the latest Hendrix, Cream, The Who, Ten Years After, Santana, Dylan, Janis, Mike Bloomfield, Joe Cocker, The Band,  etc.  The walls of this office were covered with my drawings and paintings.  This was a command center for the counterculture in the belly of the beast,  as the XVIII Airborne Corps is the headquarters group for the 82d Airborne division (known at the time as the “Jumping Junkies).  Lots of officers and enlisted men in the headquarters building liked to hang out in my office and during evenings where the lights were on until my hand cramped up from drawing,  usually around eleven. I listened to many very wild war stories from Vietnam on some of those nights.   None of the high ranking officers in the building seemed to mind the tenor of my office as long as we turned out great slide show material which we did,  thanks to Curt Moore, Joe Cusumano and Tommy Budzinski.  Ray Higley would stop by from G-2 (Army Intelligence) for advice on his architecture and love poems and Jerome Smith was a regular with tales of growing up in the Cleveland Ghetto and his fifty five victories as a light heavyweight Army boxer.  Smitty was a sparring partner of Cassius Clay during preparation for the 1960 Olympics in Rome.

In May of 1971,  Army troops from Fort Bragg and Marines from Camp Le Jeune were airlifted to Washington D.C. to subdue student anti-war protesters who threatened to shut down the federal government with a “Mayday ‘71“ event.  The protester's motto: “ If the government won’t stop the war - we’ll stop the government“.  Many tens of thousands of protesters were led by Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden , Lee Weiner etc.  After we landed at Andrews Air force Base, the troops from the XVIII Airborne Corps rode in  trucks to Fort Mc Henry near the capitol.  My job was to prepare large battle- maps with many  plastic overlays of tactical troop movements that involved countering stated strategies of the protesters to shut down traffic in the city.   The protesters printed up a very useful (to the Federal troops) “Tactical Manual” that listed the twenty one key bridges and traffic circles they intended to snarl.   Areas that I was working on  involved these roadways as well as the Pentagon, The Washington Monument, The Lincoln Memorial and many others.  I used colored grease pencil and Chartpak tape to create large red and green arrows indicating troop movements and chopper landing zones just as if we were in a foreign war. After working all day on these maps in the basement of the Fort Mc Henry Command Center, I was hanging around for further instructions in a  large day-room where ten or so top Army and Marine generals and colonels who had gathered in a semi-circle on folding chairs to watch the ten o’ clock news on a little black and white television.  After watching footage of large masses of students on the streets with thousands getting arrested (13,000 total)  the newscaster stood next to Rennie Davis, the chief organizer of the march and its appointed leader.  Rennie was a little, frail looking, long-haired, young guy wearing John Lennon glasses.  After Rennie spoke, a gruff Marine general sitting near me leaned forward, pulled his cigar out of his mouth and jabbing it at the tv screen said:  “You mean to tell me we flew 70,000 troops to Washington D.C. for that skinny little prick!”  Norman found this greatly amusing.

See drawing done at 3:00 AM  while guarding the Top Secret Library - XVIII Airborne Corps, Fort Bragg, NC - 1970  (listening to "Truth" album by Jeff Beck at "Artwork" this blog  "Kooper Rico Ratso"

One and two liners

1.  Highway Patrol:  Rolling tax collectors 2.  Female colossal gorilla:  Thong Kong

3.  I  mistakenly called AA to get my car towed instead of AAA - the driver told me it was going to take twelve steps to get my car hitched up.

4.  New law firm:  Fleetwood, Mack, Arroni and Cheese

5.  TV sitcom: Black high school basketball player works in his father’s grocery store in gang-heavy Compton: “Kobe Gillis”

6.  Older man hitting on waaay younger woman:  Guy: “Have you ever dated older guys?” Young Woman:  No, but I’ve dated a poltergeist and you don’t have a ghost of a chance to get in my pants.

7.  Money maker for the two-tier society:  Dog plastic surgery-breast reduction, tummy tucks, tail adjustment, jaw reconstruction.

8.  Punchline to a joke that remains unwritten:  Absinthe makes the fart grow Honda.

9.  Pre-teens have Hanna Montana - Boomers have Tacoma Glaucoma

10.  Man to anger management counselor after one year of classes - “Well - yeah, I cold cocked the bastard but this time I didn’t get angry at all - stayed cool as a cucumber - he steals my barstool - I knock him out.  This class has been great.

11.  Accountants of rock legend:  Ed Zeppelin, Barnaby Wild, Roland on the River

12.  Happy song for Psychiatric professionals: “Jung at Heart” - It is hard you will find to be scrambled of mind - when you’re Jung at heart….if you should survive all that Freudian jive - think of all you’ll derive from bein’ alive - and here is the best part you’ll have a head start, if you are among the very Jung at heart.

13.  It is 1850 London we’re standing on the bank of the Thames when a huge white whale swims slowly past as hundreds of hungry street urchins gather to watch…. Moby Dickens

"In the Morning Road" - a poem

Lawns, cerulean blue on broken brushes, water that goes on foreverPeople of greater depth, suffering and money “I’m afraid you are going to have to go.”

The rhyme  fails to seat the hook, a design of sex and crime.

Pretty flowers bend  but your deceased father and husband  are hovering here. Your father’s omniscient reticence suffuses every word you speak. His wealth suspends you. You are dying shy waiting for  things that never come to those who wait.

Your husband’s ghost is in your house suspended in every room watching his  son and his wife.  He likes the Squeak of death, of grief, and doom above the blonde wood, the expensive light and hills of Naples yellow Inclined sacred  native graves. Sailing with the large brown ships of alcoholic, heavy-handed  Don The neighbor’s pool, so sparely swum, so splash,  so rich.

The dogs are strange, too big,  too swank.  Register and show, Send the children to Arizona for anthropology camp. Generosity radiates entitlement.  As long as we’re giving, nothing gets in alive. At fourteen when girls go south to stretch and snap away from mom and father-dominus,

where were you?  And at twenty, when parents dissolve and minds blossom did you forget to rebel?

Triangulated by three men, by two ghosts and boy-cypher who knows all and calls lots of shots, not as many as an infant but more than most. Fatherspawn within the web of your legs at center, still and steadying the strands waiting for a simple conversation.

The rich so thin they drip in their dawn jog, middle-aged stupor staring and smiling stupidly at the smashed deer still steaming and bleeding in the morning road. Two blondes near fifty too embarrassed at the utter violence and those dopey smiles Those dogs again

The rapist oh, therapist who sympathized profoundly with angst and attention

as your fortune loomed over your head like a giant bag of packing bubbles. He ruminated  and speculated and cogitated and watched the residue on his walls You flowed with measure and depth. He listened - you paid, he listened - you paid So easy to be sympathize.

The chex, the chex, the chex, the sex, the rice, your honeymoon so nice. Troubled sleep in double bed and snoring soft and listen waking twenty five times a night and wonder about  cold air, the deep game beyond describing playing out all innocence of course who knows your inner child, your secret sharer, your silent snow His dark and vaporous Virginia love for little girls.

Just one is not enough but you are the last of five at Christmastime. It’s you, it’s me, we’re five, now six and endless seven. Love comes dripping down from heaven one cold drop flows down my skin to my toes and shines inside the hole. Then eight and nine we stay in line with just enough to spare the cat from falling.

So where’s my woman in this crowded house bent from carrying her obedience. It is too crowded for me.  Too many ghosts.  Too many things beyond speaking. The part of me that calls the shots says  run!  They’re bigger than the both of us. *

"Rat Kids" - Short Story - 1995 ( sci-fi-fantasy)

In the year 2210 Rat kids live in the dim, stinking underground levels beneath the great domes of  America.  These subterranean, concrete lined zones are used for composting garbage. Every city in North America with a population over 100,000 has been re-built as a mega-structure over the past generation and  covered with a tinted plastic dome.  Each dome has a swarming population of rat kids.  They live in dim, dank and violent squalor.  The only light is from six inch diameter grilled air vents at one hundred yard intervals that cast a faint glowing patch of light onto heaps of rotting garbage.    Abortion was outlawed in 2015. Unwanted babies are dropped down the garbage chutes from as high as the seventy fifth level of the mega structures.  Many survive the fall from the intermediate and lower rings and if they are not immediately torn apart and eaten, they are cared for by female children who feed them and keep them warm as if they were dolls.  Most dropped babies suffer broken bones and severely bruised internal organs in their ricocheting fall through the chute and collision with the pile of garbage at the lower opening.  Sometimes the trash at the bottom of the chute is deep enough to break the fall and  if the older boys, the seven to ten year olds, are in a merciful mood, usually after eating, the new arrivals are spared.  Babies dropped from the upper levels inhabited by the dome aristocracy rarely survive the drop. Biodegradable waste is typically thrown into the chutes where it decomposes at ten year intervals as though in a vast composting device.  Composted organic matter is flushed out every decade and used to fertilize the greenhouse dome crops that along with flavored cockroach paste feed the populations of the domed cities.  The Earth’s ozone layer was burned off by the warming earth one hundred years previously, making it impossible to remain in the direct sunlight for more than a few minutes at a time without sustaining life-threatening sunburn.  There is no food grown beyond the protection of growdomes that surround each of the vast, urban structures.

By the time they are three years old, the rat kids are strong enough to fight for food.  At least once every day a rat child gets into a kicking, biting, slugging battle over a new scrap of food that falls to the garbage pile from one of thousands of garbage chutes that extend vertically for hundreds of feet to the upper levels of the dome and empty into a dim slot of space over hundreds of near dark acres of garbage strewn concrete slab.  It is warm in winter in the garbage underground and there is plenty of food but the rat kids must fight all summer in the hot, gassy, damp stench of this lowest slot to keep their place at the inner circle of a garbage chute during the freezing time.  The kids know that the finest morsels of food come tumbling down from the shafts connected to the living units of the upper levels of the dome.  The strongest kids, few younger than eight years old huddle and play and fight around these shafts from on high.  The eight year olds rarely win their fights with the older boys and girls but they are strong enough to beat back the ones younger and weaker than themselves.  All of the kids are covered with pustulating wounds, aching muscles and scar tissue from the relentless fighting.  Many of the older kids have been bitten too many times by age nine to fight successfully for a spot at a food chute and they huddle in the dark fastnesses of the zone and die.  There are no rat kids over ten years old because they have died from disease, infections from their bites and ripped flesh, blows to the head or suffocation.  There are many gangs of six to eight year olds who roam from shaft  to shaft smothering or clubbing sleepers during the early morning hours.  Sometimes the twenty or thirty kids gathered at a shaft will all be killed while sleeping after  a particularly savory feast, the remains of  roast beef dinners or Thanksgiving meals.  The death rate for rat kids accelerates greatly late on Christmas night after myriad kitchens in the dome above have been cleaned and leftovers dropped down the chutes.  A trick is to listen closely and hear the upper shaft hatch opening then rush in toward the shaft, pushing the others aside just as the scraps drop out of the duct opening that is ten feet or twelve feet above the maggot infested, slimy, stinking pile - jump into the air and catch a few choice scraps in mid-air, then run away before getting pummeled and torn apart.  Rat kids know it is dangerous outdoors in the ultra-violet sunlight.  They know they would starve to death outside of the dome or they would be murdered on sight by any ordinary citizen after failing an instantaneous birth-chip verification glance.

Rat kids know their place.  The garbage levels under each urban dome are flushed once every ten years, killing all of the rat children in the garbage zone.  Rarely does a rat kid survive the flush.  After the flush, the rat kid society is reborn as fresh garbage piles up at the base of the chutes high enough to break the fall of the first new baby who then becomes the potential elder of the new ten year colony.  Each of the dozens of chutes of  supports its own gang of rat kids.  Rat kids are, of course, totally ignorant of sex.  They never see babies born.  New members of their society drop from the chutes.  Each garbage chute is two feet in diameter.

Dome Salt Lake is the fourth largest population center in North America.  Down in the garbage zone there lives a colony of one thousand rat kids.  High above the rat kids on the exclusive seventy-fifth ring live two eleven year old girls Margie Roux and Aria Purcell who have recently graduated from talking dolls to Barbies.  Margie and Aria have just agreed via text  message to drop their two dolls, Chatty Cathy and Talking Tina down their respective garbage chutes in a private little ritual that will, at least for them, symbolize their transition into big-girlhood.

Seventy six levels below there are dozens of clusters of naked, vicious and hungry children waiting for the sound of a hatch opening, then the drop then the extremely violent version of the game King of the Hill with the spoils going to the strongest, most vicious kid who fights off his competitors with bites,, kicks, scratches who grabs the prize and runs away through the darkness to gnaw at the morsel.

At opposite sides of the fifteen mile diameter mega structure each of the two talking dolls falls onto a pile of old bones, rinds, peelings and coffee grounds.  The population of kids has known, as long as they have been alive, which chutes drop the highest quality garbage and the dolls fall onto the piles of the two most vicious, brutal and experienced of the entire subterranean population.  The dolls are immediately tossed aside by the two girls who have won this particular battle when they discover that the dolls are not edible.  The abandoned dolls are inspected in turn by the eight year olds and then the six year olds.  The dolls are finally picked up out of the darkness by a curious boy called Gip who pulls the string in Talking Tina’s back.  Tina Speaks and Gip drops the doll in terror and runs away.  He creeps back and pulls the string again introducing his generation of rat kids to the English language.  Fifteen miles away at the opposite side of the ring, a seven year old girl named Rika is struck by Chatty Cathy by an angry older kid who has tossed it away.  Rika is huddled by the vent…. (to be continued )

Too Much of a Good Thing

When I put single peanuts on the top fence rail outside my window the squirrels snatch them up immediately.  When I put a whole pile on the fence they become skittish.  They run up then back away then run up and sniff and back away then they proceed to snatch one.  Are all animals afraid of too much of a good thing.  Is this why humans are afraid of bliss?  It is simply too good to be true that we have access to this state of mind at most times.

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Dylan and Painting

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Bob Dylan, as a great artist who had so many brilliant ideas about his chosen art - songwriting, Dylan, a gifted painter and draughtsman,  should be able to make the distinction between concept and expression.  In his memoir, Dylan fails to make the distinction between art and painting. The following is an example for Bob.  Andy Warhol was a mediocre painter, silk screener but a great artist. He had a big idea about art and popular culture.  A person can look at a Warhol work and say he was an uninspired painter,  Andy would be the first to agree but one cannot say that he was an uninspired artist.  It’s not about the painting, it’s about the art.  Millions of civilians fail to make this distinction, Bob Dylan among them.

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