listen.

If you are not listening to this, you should be.

carl sandburg.

The first two years of my formal education were spent at Carl Sandburg Elementary School in West Valley City, UT. I think, even in Kindergarten and First Grade, I was vaguely aware that Sandburg was a writer of some kind. Now 26 years removed from those opaque days of youth, I just finished reading Sandburg's Chicago Poems. Several things struck me upside the head while reading this book.

I wonder how on earth an elementary school in the Salt Lake Valley was named after an outspoken socialist. There seems to be some incongruity in a school located in the heart of our nation's most conservative state being named after a man that was integral in the American socialist movement of the early 20th century. I mean, he was the private secretary of Eugene V. Debs! I wonder if the school board knew he was the man that wrote

Voices of dollars
And drops of blood

Could they have known?

I wonder if there was a teacher in the entire school who knew who Sandburg was and what he stood for? I am not saying definitively no one knew, but given my basic knowledge of teachers today I am pretty doubtful. I know many elementary school teachers, I doubt they have read "Chicago". I doubt they had read "Fog"

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

Finally, I wonder if, in some way, I was meant to find Sandburg more than 25 years later. I don't particularly love him as a poet, or agree with his politics. However, in some small manner, I feel connected to his words. I did go to a school named after him, although I can't believe that in any way that school embodied the name above the door. There is always some lesson in the words of poets concerned with the topics of their day. As The Great War raged on he wrote:

JAWS

SEVEN nations stood with their hands on the jaws of death.
It was the first week in August, Nineteen Hundred Fourteen.
I was listening, you were listening, the whole world was listening,
And all of us heard a Voice murmuring:
“I am the way and the light,	5
He that believeth on me
Shall not perish
But shall have everlasting life.”
Seven nations listening heard the Voice and answered:
“O Hell!”	10
The jaws of death began clicking and they go on clicking.
“O Hell!”

until something goes wrong.

a few words of inspiration.

One Hour to Madness and Joy
by Walt Whitman

One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)
O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children,
I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)

O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me
in defiance of the world!
O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!
O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of
a determin'd man.

O the puzzle, the thrice-tied knot, the deep and dark pool, all
untied and illumin'd!
O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
To be absolv'd from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and
you from yours!
To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature!
To have the gag remov'd from one's mouth!
To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am.

O something unprov'd! something in a trance!
To escape utterly from others' anchors and holds!
To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!
To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
To rise thither with my inebriate soul!
To be lost if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy.

music.

Sometimes you have to wade through mountains of crap to find music that doesn't suck. As it has been a couple of years and in case you have forgotten....

Jake

I will have more thoughts on this later, but as of now, all I can feel is excitement. Go Dawgs!

fiction!

I don't know if it was slight dehydration or fatigue or maybe it was a touch of food poisoning, but I was pretty sick for most of the day. The details I will spare. One good thing, however, did come out of it. I was able to finally finish, Theodore Rex, by Edmund Morris. The completion of this book also signifies my renewed commitment to fiction. I figured it was time to knock out some books I have been putting off for a long time.

On tap:
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
Ulysses, James Joyce
The Guermantes Way, Marcel Proust

Should be quite the task as I often loose focus when I begin reading projects, but as of now, consider me committed.