Readers and writers blog

I don’t know about the rest of you folks, but I’ve spent this week glued to the television as the government and Wall Street try to avoid a financial disaster. You’d think I had something to lose.

Not so.

What I mean is, my only retirement capital is Social Security and a savings account of considerably less than the $100,000 protected by the FDIC. I suppose both of those could melt down, but I doubt any of us would see it. We’d all be bent over, kissing our butts goodbye.

As the week on Wall Street came to an end, the Dow Jones average had two straight days of triple-digit gains totaling more than 300 points as investors apparently were ignoring all the bad economic news and instead were focused on the negotiations in Washington on a $700 billion bailout proposal.

Just like me.

Meanwhile, in Washington, a Democratic-led series of amendments to President Bush’s bailout plan were gaining steam when they ran into an oncoming locomotive driven by House Republicans and everything went off the rails. Today, negotiators were still trying to clean up the wreck.

I wrote earlier this year about my fascination for things that don’t involve me, a penchant I indulged during four decades as a newspaper reporter and editor. In that Jan. 10 blog entry, I confessed that my two favorite daytime TV programs were a New York City sports talk show and the daily stock ticker on CNBC, even though I seldom watch televised sports other than Yankees games and I own no stocks.

I described it as rubbernecking — what other drivers do when passing a traffic accident — and that’s the same feeling I have now as I watch the bailout debacle. Yes, I know the consequences of an economic meltdown ultimately could affect me, but I grew up in circumstances where poverty never was too far away, and I’ve returned in retirement to a similar life of frugality.

In fact, the worst financial disaster facing me — and many other retirees — was averted four years ago when, shortly after Bush’s reelection, Congress and most of the American public rejected his last serious attempt to privatize Social Security. Oddly enough, the amount of Social Security funds his plan would have diverted into Wall Street was — guess what? — about $700 billion.

I hate to think about how much of that would have been lost as the stock market goes into the tank. We might be talking about a bailout plan not of $700 billion but of $1.4 trillion. Either way, it’s a lot of zeros.

All I can say is that frugality isn’t such a bad life. And we’ll all have plenty of company. And hopefully, that will include some Wall Street tycoons.

This week’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapters 36 and 37 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring:

Chapter 36: Tess and Brian attend church for the first communion of their friends’ daughter, a joyful event that makes even more burdensome the death of Brian’s sister Rachel. The sorrow that Tess feels is made worse by a dread that something is changing in Brian, and it is: He wants to split up. And so they do.

Chapter 37: Tess moves out of the house she has been sharing with Brian. As she tries to settle into her new apartment, a bottle of Rachel’s shampoo sets off a chain of events that takes Tess on a trip to another town and a quick liaison with a stranger in a bar, an experience that brings up a lot of bad memories from her past.

• Chapters 12 and 13 of Ann M. Pino’s novel Steal Tomorrow:

Chapter 12: Cassie and her fellow Regents gang members pore over information on a recovered research computer, hoping for clues to cure a lethal virus that has killed the world’s adults. The remedy may involve human growth hormone, a substance that no longer can be synthesized and may explain why a rival gang is kidnapping children.

Chapter 13: A trip to an ally to exchange scientific equipment for medical supplies ends in tragedy when Cassie’s friend Leila is killed in a street battle with a gang of religious zealots called the Christian Soldiers. The Regents decide to mount an attack to wipe out the zealots, but Cassie is barred from taking part in the attack and avenging her friend’s death.

– Sid Leavitt

I realized just this past week that it has been 50 years, almost to the day, that I first read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a fact brought home to me by a note from one of our contributing writers, Marjorie Pagel.

Those 50 years have made a difference in my appreciation of Kerouac. He’s still a genius to me, but for different reasons.

Pagel, a retired newspaperwoman in Franklin, Wis., was searching the Internet for a favorite quote by Kerouac about writing when she ran across an open letter by Robert Genn, a noted Canadian painter, advising other artists to consider Kerouac’s words:

And this is the way a novel gets written: in ignorance, fear, sorrow, madness, and a kind of psychotic happiness as an incubator for the wonders being born.

As Genn tells his fellow artists, it’s this “psychotic happiness as incubator” that might interest them. It certainly interests Genn, who expresses the idea a little differently as he discusses it with a friend, artist Joe Blodgett:

Incubation is the business of anticipating surprise. Sure, there’s calculation in trying this and that in the studio of the mind — better pattern, more light, tone down, subtraction, injection. But there’s also the matter of letting the thing hatch naturally. Sometimes the solution just simply appears. ‘Sometimes the egg has been shaken and there’s no hope,’ says Joe. By that he means too many early sins that are difficult to erase — too much unpleasant history in the piece.

When I read On the Road in the late summer of 1958, just after it came out, what I loved about the book was Kerouac’s nervous energy, eccentricity, lust for experience — yes, psychotic happiness. To the restless 18-year-old that I was then, those words seemed so radical:

‘Oh, man,’ said Dean to me as we stood in front of a bar, ‘dig the street of life, the Chinamen that cut by in Chicago. What a weird town — wow, and that woman in that window up there, just looking down with her big breasts hanging from her nightgown, big wide eyes. Whee. Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there.’

‘Where we going, man?’

‘I don’t know but we gotta go.’

I read On the Road again a couple of years ago, and now that kind of dialogue seemed so stilted, so dated. And what I thought in 1958 was so conventional, so sentimental, now had a depth I couldn’t have imagined at 18. Not until I also had driven in Mexico:

The boys were sleeping, and I was alone in my eternity at the wheel, and the road ran straight as an arrow. Not like driving across Carolina, or Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into the places where we would finally learn ourselves among the fellaheen Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from Malaya (the long fingernail of China) to India the great subcontinent to Arabia to Morocco to the selfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico and over the waves to Polynesia to mystic Siam of the Yellow Robe and on around, on around, so that you hear the same mournful wail by the rotted walls of Cadiz, Spain, that you hear 12,000 miles around in the depth of Benares the Capital of the World. These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore – they had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it. The waves are Chinese, but the earth is an Indian thing. As essential as rocks in the desert are they in the desert of ‘history.’ And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment.

‘The waves are Chinese, but the earth is an Indian thing.’ My god, what poetry.

This week’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapters 10 and 11 of Ann M. Pino’s novel Steal Tomorrow:

Chapter 10: Members of the Regents gang raid a research lab but are unable to find evidence that human growth hormone will help cure a lethal virus that has left the world without adults and is killing the surviving children as they approach adulthood. Meanwhile, Cassie is concerned that one gang member with strong religious views is growing dangerously unstable.

Chapter 11: Cassie joins Julilla, a member of the Regents military wing, on another raid — this one on a brownstone that is home to an odd couple named Thing One and Thing Two — where they find a laptop computer from the research lab the gang already has searched. Initially captured by the odd couple, the two girls eventually escape with the laptop.

• Chapters 34 and 35 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring:

Chapter 34: Tess’ and Brian’s worst fears are confirmed: Brian’s sister Rachel was lured out of rehab by her drug dealer boyfriend and then killed by one of his other addicts. Tess is beset by guilt that she should have helped Rachel more, and Brian is having even more trouble dealing with those and other thoughts.

Chapter 35: Tim, the drug dealer responsible for Rachel’s death, has come out of hiding. Rachel’s father, Rick, who abandoned her and Brian as children and now seeks some kind of redemption, avenges his daughter’s death by killing Tim. It’s unlikely Rick will be caught since Tess, who earlier had planned to do the job, shares her research with him.

– Sid Leavitt

Hey, we survived the Large Hadron Collider. At least, so far.

As those of our more scientifically literate readers know, the collider is an enormous circular tunnel lying beneath the border of France and Switzerland that can accelerate subatomic particles to near the speed of light. The idea is to crash some of these particles — specifically, protons — into each other at high energy to get a better idea of what happened at the birth of the universe.

Sort of a small version of the Big Bang.

Trouble is, a few scientists worried that this mini-bang would create black holes that would swallow up the Earth. Maybe even blink out the universe.

Well, it didn’t happen — at least, not at 4:27 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday when they switched on the collider. Of course, it didn’t start up at full power — it has a capacity of 7 trillion electron volts — and didn’t crash any particles together. That happens in late October.

Still, some people were worried about even starting the machine. Including me, although I realized these concerns were more humorous than serious.

An hour before the collider was to fire up, the Dallas Morning News ran a story headlined: “This may be the last thing you ever read.” The first comment on the newspaper’s website — actually, more of a shout — was from a Camron Wells: “WERE GUNNA DIE.” To which a Randy commented, “Maybe you should use your last moments alive learning how to spell.”

Well, at least we’re over this hump. And there are worse things to worry about. For example, after the past eight disastrous years, it’s possible that this country will choose as its new leaders a once-proud maverick who has spent those eight years toadying up to George W. Bush and a woman whose cultural and religious views make her the American equivalent of the Taliban.

Makes you want to crank up that collider right now to about 8 trillion electron volts.

This week’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapters 32 and 33 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring:

Chapter 32: Jeff, a friend summoned by Tess, has beaten Brian into submission before he can avenge his sister’s hospitalization by killing her drug dealer boyfriend. But Brian and Tess are still in a hell of their own. Tess quits a lucrative cleaning job after the client’s son insults her. She refuses to go back for more money because it would mean she has a price.

Chapter 33: A phone call on a snowy weekend: Rachel is missing from rehab. Her drug dealer boyfriend, Tim, claims not to have seen her. Brian is enraged at Tess for not telling him more about Tim’s assaults on Rachel, but Brian eventually concedes he didn’t tell himself the truth, either. Then, ominous blue lights approach their home.

• Chapters Eight and Nine of Ann M. Pino’s novel Steal Tomorrow:

Chapter Eight: Human growth hormone turns out to be a substance of interest to gangs of children and teenagers trying to survive in a world left without adults by a pandemic virus. Cassie and fellow members of the Regents learn that raids on the laboratory of an ally may have been carried out by two rival gangs seeking the hormone.

Chapter Nine: Cassie learns the boy she’s interested in, Galahad, once was a member of a death squad, but he explains his past, and they end up closer than ever. Meanwhile, there’s a rumor that some of the gang kidnapping children may be adults. But how can it be? The deadly virus, nicknamed Telo, attacks the chromosome telomeres at the onset of adulthood.

– Sid Leavitt

As the ‘dear diary’ bloggers might say, not much is happening, but I’ll tell you anyway. One high point: We got a new short poem from our British contributor, Laura Elliott. Other than that, a pretty gloomy week. The days are growing shorter, our spam is getting more creative but still just as depressing, and we’ve been doing a lot of TV watching — two or three hurricanes, the Republican National Convention, the Yankees losing games they shouldn’t.

And, oh yeah, I went to the emergency room because I thought I might be having a heart attack. I guess that qualifies as a high point, because I wasn’t.

Maybe it was the GOP convention. Woeful. Although I did find myself agreeing with Republicans who say four years of McCain wouldn’t be like eight years of Bush. For one thing, McCain would be 18 years older than Bush at inauguration and apparently doesn’t work out every day like W. does. And Dick Cheney, whatever his shortcomings, hasn’t been trying to get books banned and creationism taught in schools.

Maybe that’s why I’ve been rereading Elliott’s new poem, ‘Beneath the Apple Tree,’ an uplifting verse about a beautiful immortality.

Not so uplifting is some of the new spam that’s clogging our comments section. One piece we got this week, probably because it’s the political season, offered us a “bush and blair gay bar video.” It was from someone with the user name StottFepe at an IP in Argentina, and it made me angry. I’m no great Bush supporter, but this stuff is just crap.

Most spam just makes me laugh because it’s either ridiculous or nonsensical. Same with pornography, most of which I have no problem with as long as it shows consenting adults involved in the sex. But this is the cheap and dirty variety — including the stuff that shows women being subordinated — that brings out attack censors from both the right and the left.

Speaking of attacks — specifically, my ‘heart attack’ — I’d been having a sore throat and lung discomfort for about a week when, early Friday on the treadmill, my chest started getting really tight and heavy. My older brother, who’s a medical professor, a few years ago had a heart attack, his first, that he believed was triggered by a bout of the flu. That’s what I was thinking when I went to the ER Friday.

As I sat all wired up to a monitor, the physician on duty, Dr. Victoria Chamieco, made the following observation: “If you’ve had these symptoms for a week and it was a heart attack, you’d be dead.”

Bronchitis, it turns out. Never had it before. Probably due to the humid air along the Hudson River in Kingston, N.Y., carrying god knows what life forms. Well, it was good to find I’m still generally healthy. Because I’m only a few years younger than John McCain.

This week’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapters Six and Seven of Ann M. Pino’s novel Steal Tomorrow:

Chapter Six: Work continues on creating a potato garden to help Cassie and her fellow Regents gang members survive in a world in which a pandemic virus has left only children and teenagers alive. Among those who may help is a slim girl named May who makes and sells jewelry but also has a talent for manufacturing basic pharmaceuticals.

Chapter Seven: Cassie and her friend Leila visit May’s jewelry shop and find it has been burglarized by someone apparently looking for chemicals. By now, it is apparent that street kidnappings of young children are being committed by a gang called the Obits, and May says one of her allies, the Pharms, may be helping them.

• Chapters 30 and 31 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring:

Chapter 30: Tess and Brian take his sister Rachel to a hospital where she will stay for detox and then rehab from her drug addiction. It is Christmas night. On the way home, Tess is beset by thoughts that she should have helped protect Rachel better and that Brian also needs protection now — from what he might do to Rachel’s drug-dealer boyfriend.

Chapter 31: On the first day after leaving his sister at the hospital, Brian fills with rage that erupts when he storms off to find Tim, the man who supplied Rachel’s drugs and who got her pregnant. Tess calls a friend to intercept Brian before he commits murder. Meanwhile, she finds a diary of Rachel’s that shows a caring young woman descending into despair.

• Poetry of Laura Elliott, a short poem entitled ‘Beneath the Apple Tree.’

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is a photo of a crow in motion by Penelope Dewar, a photographer, artist, writer, biologist and blogger who lives in British Columbia. The image was found on the photography website flickr. To see more of Dewar’s photos, click on the Photostream link beneath her name.