the coffee philosopher

Posted on December 15, 2015December 14, 2015 by the coffee philosopher

Can’t Wait

Going back to Thailand I cannot wait. Absolutely ready. One hundred percent. Too much going on: buying a house, jam packed holiday season for my better half (she objects when I say that I ‘work’ for her; she prefers something like ‘help’ or ‘volunteer,’ but let’s be realistic, I’m an unpaid employee [so maybe the correct term of art should be that I ‘intern’ with her]), work stuff, work stuff, work stuff, family stuff.

Ready for a vacation. Ready to get away. Especially, knowing that it will probably be a while before I get away again. Logistics, and all.

Perhaps this is what adulthood is like, the constant, ceaseless nervous tension (I stole that turn of phrase about tension; I think from William Gibson; google it, I’m not your babysitter). Or perhaps it’s middle age. Did I skip adulthood and go directly to midlife?

Part of it is struggling, as always, with depression, which feels like a perpetual weight on your internal organs. Something is constantly pressing down on your heart and lungs and so they don’t work properly and you can always feel them about to fail and that knowledge of their being on that precipice takes your mind away from everything else and keeps you psychically crippled, after a fashion.

Let’s hope it’s the break I want it to be. I’ve downloaded several books to my Nook and are keeping them unread for the journey (mostly fantasy novels) and I’ll take some pleasure soon in picking out one or two physical books for the journey. At least one book of poetry, something worth re-reading. In the past, I’ve taken Wordsworth, for example. Perhaps this time I’ll bring Eliot or Shelley or Clare. And something else, something in prose. Could be a novel, but I’m inclined towards something non-fictional. While unpacking, I saw my cope of Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and maybe I’ll bring that. It’s a little bulky, but perhaps if I put it away and don’t read anymore of it, Quintillian’s writings on the education of an orator. But probably not. Cicero might be better. Plato would be perfect, but I don’t have a compact copy of any of his books.

We shall see. Here’s a picture from Thailand, in the meantime.

Posted on December 14, 2015December 9, 2015 by the coffee philosopher

Monday Morning Staff Meeting – Somebody’s Got A Crush

Art loves poetry. Or manipulates the idea of poetry. Or appropriates. Poets still get no respect.

Better business through literature.

Mean writers.

Posted on December 11, 2015December 8, 2015 by the coffee philosopher

Weekend Reading – Potluck

The only reason for putting ‘potluck’ in the title is that today is the annual office holiday potluck party. You’re not invited. Probably. Unless you work with me. Which you probably don’t. Statistically, it’s very unlikely.

The pro-capitalist, anti-communist origins of MFA programs in creative writing.

It’s time for those end of year, ‘best of’ lists. And some of them are about poetry! Not lists by me, though. Not that I haven’t read a lot of poetry this year, because I have, at least compared to the average person, who probably reads none in a year, but more that I’m still catching up on the greatest hits of the nineteenth century (it might have been last year that I read him, but you should totally check out the mostly crazy, but sweet English pastoral poet, John Clare). Fortunately, The Guardian, over in merry old England, actually pays attention to poetry. So they did a top ten list that is probably worth looking over.

The poet on art.

Posted on December 9, 2015December 8, 2015 by the coffee philosopher

Frost In The Poetry Aisle

Caveat emptor: I am not a huge Robert Frost fan. I don’t dislike him. I’ve got a nice volume of his collected poems at home. But that’s more because he is someone you want to have in your library (by the way, check out this article – it talks about how having a physical library is very important for children; a library of one hundred books will give your child a 1.5 year head start in reading comprehension over her/his peers and a five hundred volume library a 2.2 year advantage), not because he’s someone I turn to in certain moments of melancholy or confusion or whatever (that would be Anne Carson, William Wordsworth, Paul Eluard, Shakespeare, and Kenneth Rexroth, among others).

So when I first heard a middle aged couple talking a little too loudly next me near the poetry shelves of the soon to be closing downtown DC Barnes and Noble, trying to decide between editions of Frost, I felt some never to be spoken, but nonetheless curt (if they had ever been spoken) words rise up.

But, it didn’t take more than a moment of thought to realize my mistake. Eavesdropping, some poem by Frost had struck the man forcefully and now he had to have a book of his poetry. Surely this is the goal? What poetry lovers and promoters want to see happen?

I hope you found some more poems in whichever edition you chose, sir.

Posted on December 8, 2015December 4, 2015 by the coffee philosopher

Rootless/Rootful

We bought our first home recently and it is still filled with boxes and bits of cardboard and trash that needs to be taken out (but how? when is trash day? I don’t know).

The neighborhood is nice, but not so nice as where we were renting, and a little further away from work and what not.

Homeownership has never been a dream of mine. It’s not something I object to and there’s no doubt it will be an important generator of future wealth, but was not something important to me as a thing, in and of itself.

The process is one of dislocation. My routines are dislocated and left rootless. My budget is a mystery. I have less money now. I even know approximately how much. But I don’t really know what that means. Certain luxuries, yes. And, yes, I am frightened of that. There was a line in the movie Pitch Black to the effect of, it is amazing how well one can do without the necessities of life, if one has the little luxuries.

But mostly change. My life has always been about change, which meant it was also about not changing for the sake of change. Change happened enough on its own. The rest was about limiting change. This was deliberate and optional change and is the more disconcerting for it.

Posted on December 8, 2015December 7, 2015 by the coffee philosopher

Leicester City

When I was flying back to my dreary, dismal home from Thailand and was wandering the shops and stores of the Bangkok airport, I saw a store selling exclusively Leicester City swag. T-shirts, scarves, banners, etc.

At that time, Leicester was a terrible team. They had only just escaped relegation and aesthetically speaking, ran the gamut from mediocre to downright unpleasant to watch.

So this store, in an international airport, felt like the equivalent of an unaffiliated, single-A team from central Nebraska having a gift shop in the Yucatan (though truth though, as usual, is far more prosaic; Leicester is sponsored by King Power, the duty free vendor for BKK Airport – they even play in ‘King Power Stadium’)

Well, five months or so after I saw that fateful store, Leicester is topping to table in England and fun to watch, to boot. Feels like fate.

Posted on December 7, 2015December 4, 2015 by the coffee philosopher

Monday Morning Staff Meeting – How Liberal Is Your ‘Hood?

Ozawa and Twain... weirdly similar hair — *Ozawa and Twain… weirdly similar hair*

My neighborhood (H Street, or the Atlas District), is conservative by DC standards and slightly less liberal than my old haunt of Capitol Hill/Eastern Market. But this is DC, folks. Doesn’t really get that conservative.

A little creepy, Mark.

The Kennedy Center is honoring Seiji Ozawa (who I saw conduct a mostly Dvorak program in Minneapolis).

Posted on December 6, 2015December 5, 2015 by the coffee philosopher

Duels

While (re)reading Remembrance of Things Past, I’ve noted that the narrator (who has not yet been named but who will eventually be named Marcel) has mentioned having fought several duels over the Dreyfus Case. If you don’t know what the Dreyfus Case, I can’t help you except to say read a book and also to say that this isn’t a small part of history and you can see a historical precedent for the virulent, genocidal anti-semitism of the Holocaust and its enablers.

But what struck me is how the duels themselves are glossed over. Until I remembered that, at this time, a duel was typically a fairly harmless affair. Usually, two gentlemen the would show up at the appointed place and time and fire their pistols harmlessly into the air, having proved their courage by appearing. Only rarely would the parties aim at each other or use swords (which would necessitate an exchange or two until first blood was drawn, at least).

So, the duels were not described because the real danger would have been catching a cold in the early morning air.