Gaia Community: Nathan's Blog

'tis the season

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 05:28:43 GMT

december is not

as cold as it used to be

due to climate change

Tags: poem, haiku, climate change

Sorry, what was the question?

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 05:27:51 GMT

I dreamt I was teaching English, and I posed a question that did not remain with me when I woke up; but the answer, collectively arrived at by the students and me, was “Dropping elephants onto houses from helicopters flying at low altitudes.”

Tags: elephant, helicopter, dream

längenfeldgasse

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 05:22:49 GMT

canal water flows;
where does it think it’s going,
lit by brown sunlight?

Tags: poem, haiku, vienna

At the Dog Tower

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 14:13:12 GMT

I have begun to understand German language TV commercials and now find them almost as annoying as English language ones. Ka has the TV on in the bedroom now. We are lying in bed and she is looking for something to watch. On this channel, someone is in nature, surrounded by green. It is Peer Gynt. "Nach einem Theaterstück von Henrik Ibsen."

At the moment I'm particularly fond of Gnarls Barkley and have been watching their videos on the web about twice a day.

Today is Wednesday. Tomorrow will probably be Thursday. After that, unless something unusual happens, Friday will come, unstoppable, a pile driver, a juggernaut, like death, like birth.

Peer Gynt just left his mom sitting on top of the house. This is beautifully photographed in windy summer with grain and flowers waving in the wind. The sky was momentarily green: Peer squinting up at it having mystical experiences. Some other young people are teasing Peer from the other side of a chain link fence. Now they are beating up on him. A bald man appears that only he can see.

I was reading about Thomas Calloway today on the web, the singer of Gnarls Barkley. His songs make a lot of sense in light of his personal history. I haven't written anything as good as his songs "Crazy" or "Smiley faces." Which is OK.

Peer Gynt seems to have stolen a boat and a bride. In the next scene, she's topless and they're drinking champagne. She has lovely red hair. He has a tattoo on his shoulder. She's saying he's crazy because he keeps talking about the devil. Suddenly he plunges into the tall grass and gets back into the boat. He whoops with the feigned joy of a talented actor. The sun shines through the trees, not acting. The sky is white and blue. Geese fly and honk. Lying on the grass next to her, the redhead says to Peer's mom: "Tell me about him. Everything."

I was thinking this morning as I was riding to work that I would write something if I were not riding to work. I was buzzed by the first rush of caffeine, one and a half cups of coffee, the mind riding atop the body like a monkey riding atop the head of a mountain sheep. I was wanting to write about something that I only think about as I ride to work. Certainly tomorrow morning I will remember what it is again. But I will not write it down because I will be riding on the 12A bus.

OK, I remember it now. It was about one of the bus stops. I get off at the bus stop called Siebenbrunnengasse, Seven Springs Avenue, but the one that perplexes me is the bus stop called Am Hundsturm, which I think means "At the Dog Tower." There is no tower visible there, only apartment buildings and shops. I wonder why the place is called At the Dog Tower. It wasn't even that I really wanted to write anything about it. I'm not sure what I would say about it. What would one say about something like that? I'm not sure why I write. I rarely do it anymore. I'm not sure if that's true or not. The other night I was thinking about writing as throwing a dust of words over the landscape. Now I think it's also a way to tame things; to get a kind of control over things. If I can describe them, if I can pin them down, they can't hurt me. Of course that is an illusion. But it probably helps to think things through.

Ka is asleep now and Peer is being tormented by some possibly supernatural people inside a barge. Now he's hearing a disembodied voice and screaming back at it. Ka just woke up from the noise and turned the TV off with the remote. The screen is blue, I have to get up and turn off the set myself.

Back in the captain's chair, from which I pilot this universe into ever more complex uncharted waters. Sometimes I dream of a settlement built on the water, always a little different, I ride across it on boats. Now, deep in the night, cars are driving by on the Gürtel, the beltway road around downtown Vienna. Perhaps the drivers are thinking of other things, living in their own worlds while driving in this one, remembering riding on their fathers' shoulders while driving at night in a present whose complexities mount up in tangled layers, one humming cable at a time.

The letters I'm writing don't look like anything else, or, to put it another way, they do; but they keep on being deployed, disposed, inlaid and outlaid across the green sky of a new mind; or, to put it differently, each bird sings its own tune, unstoppable for as long as it continues, and when you put them all together, they are the tuning up of a great orchestra, too beautiful for the mind to see.

Tags: gnarls barkley, peer gynt, days, nature, television, dog towers, vienna, austria, writing

Findings

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 14:15:08 GMT

Back in the USA, my wife and I were driving to my stepfather's house, and we saw some boxes of books out on the curb. I pulled over and we scavenged some. A year later, one night in Vienna at about one in the morning, I started looking at one of the books, In America by Susan Sontag, and I found that Sontag had autographed it. The other morning I was sitting in front of the classroom wearing my new green suit and I noticed that a black human hair had been deliberately sewn into the sleeve near the buttons. Carefully, I pulled it out. It was about 20 cm long. Some worker saying hi from China. At a used bookstore I bought an English language textbook published in Dresden in 1932. It was full of sentences like "Have you ever ridden in an airship?" As I was leafing through it, I found a page of sentences written by some student in 1945; and then two dried, flattened edelweiss flowers fell out. I had never seen them before, but I knew what they were right away because they were shaped like the silver edelweiss pins on felt hats from the Alps. In real life they looked like little fuzzy white starfish on stems. My first edelweiss flowers; they're lying on my bookshelf now.

Tags: sontag, china, globalization, book, edelweiss, fuzzy, white, starfish, stems

Instant message

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 06:46:20 GMT

The writer wrote and wrote, drop after drop of ink skydiving out of the pen to land on the page, saying nothing and everything. Meanwhile the wind wrote and wrote upon the earth in its transparent language. The fire wrote upon the wood, and, in doing so, destroyed or transformed it. The smoke sketched its poetry upon the sky, which tore it apart and scattered it to the four directions. The waves wrote upon the shore, endlessly revising. The light wrote upon the darkness and the darkness upon the light, the night upon the day and the day upon the night. The sun writes flowers on the earth. The earth writes people on the sky. The people write poems. The poems contain things like people and animals, suns, moons, and stars, fires and winds and waters. The poems cradle these things gently like immense hands. Everyone knows that people write poems, but what's a little less obvious is that poems write people too.

Tags: poem, writing

Quick trip

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:28:51 GMT

Dreamt I went to the moon with some friends, just for a couple of hours, to pick strawberries, then came back.

Tags: dream, moon

Basic Business English, Unit 3, The Telephone Call

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 19:51:37 GMT

Hello, can I help you? No, I’m afraid he’s out of the office right now, he’s just stepped out for a bite, it seems he has a meeting at the factory, drinking tea out of the bottom of a very old bathtub seven meters deep. Is there anything I can help you with? Can anyone else help you? Would you care to leave a message? No, I’m not sure when he’ll be back in, could be weeks, days, nanoseconds, he could be here already, hiding, invisible, dissolved in the air or perched like an insect on the curtain, I can almost smell his cologne, I can almost feel his sweat drying on my back. Shall I take a message for him? Just a minute, let me get the message pad. “Bite the wizened rhinoceros at dawn.” Sorry, how do you spell rhinoceros? OK, let me read that back to you. R-H-I-N-O-C-E-R-U-S. Oh, R-O-S. Rhinoceros. Bite the wizened. At dawn. And you need how many pieces of part number 3136655449? Only six? Delivery by airship and antback to be paid by client and takes six business yugas. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. No, I don’t think that’s very wise. In fact it seems to me that you must be some vile creeping carnivore for suggesting it. It’s unforgivably dangerous, cloudy, insipid, mind-boggling, mind-flaying, mind-frogging, 75-sided, wondrous. Goat flames licking up your trouser legs. This naked aggression will not stand. I will unleash upon you the mother of all telephone calls. Have you ever seen an invisible werewolf? I’ll throw hundreds of them at your head like baseballs. Even now I am virtually grinding your naked foot in the invisible meat grinder that I keep on the floor beside by desk. It was very expensive, something like $599, but I got it this past January at a post-Christmas sale for 30% off. It is encrusted with precious stones, but who would ever know, because the darn thing’s invisible, heh-heh. I’ll dam up your workflow with a fifty-billion-dollar construction project. But these are empty threats, because when all is said and done, I am a peaceful person. Currently I am deep in meditation. I have not even stirred to answer the telephone. I'm sitting in a deep golden bathtub atop a high stone tower with the soles of my feet pressed together. So if you think carefully you will also come to the conclusion that I am not speaking to you. You and I are simply fleeting thoughts in the mind of a loving, though somewhat dizzy, God. Good. Good. I’ll tell him you called. OK. OK. Have a nice day. Thanks, you too. Goodbye. Goodbye now.

Tags: poem, butoh writing

Negative buildings

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 13:46:55 GMT

The other evening I was reading some of Walt Whitman's prose works from the 1860s, and that period of time in US history seemed vividly alive in my imagination, both oddly familiar and completely alien. In the night I dreamt I had a thick book that described architectural projects undertaken then. I was looking at etchings of monuments. Architects had designed eight or ten different lofty neoclassical buildings with columns and domes, and workers had carved them out of solid stone in the Rocky Mountains, but as negative spaces, leaving building-shaped holes like molds into which some substance could have been poured or sprayed. Tourists would enter them through broad tunnels underneath, and look up into the dimness at the vaults of the domes; there were small skylights cut into the top to let light in.

Tags: architecture, dream

Raptors

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 03:45:37 GMT

A couple months ago in the mountainous center of Austria I attended a conference and trade fair on shamanism. One day, members of a local club devoted to birds of prey showed up, dressed in traditional Austrian clothes and carrying their pets -- two falcons, two hawks and a golden eagle. The birds were very comfortable around people, allowing themselves to be petted. Their faces seemed the essence of pride. They kept forgetting that they were tied to their owners' arms. They would see someplace they wanted to fly to, and launch themselves toward it, and immediately fall in a flurry of feathers that hung by a strap from the owner's leather glove. When this happened, the owner would immediately hoist the bird up again to his wrist, and for another few minutes it would not try to fly anywhere, just stare around boldly, the sovereign of all it surveyed.

Tags: bird, eagle, falcon, hawk, austria, animal intelligence

Click languages

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 18:54:16 GMT

The Kalahari Bushman tribes have four different clicks that they use as consonants. Other South African tribes employ clicks to lesser degrees. The first consonant in the name of Nelson Mandela's tribe, the Xhosa, is a click. Based on DNA evidence, Bushmen groups are thought to be remnants of groups that split off from all of the rest of us, some tens of thousands of years ago, before all of the rest of us split into blacks and whites and Asians and Native Americans and such things. Several extinct Australian Aborigine languages -- spoken by descendents of people who took the first major migration out of Africa, about 40,000 years ago -- were click languages. Some linguists factor in the Aborigines and the Bushmen and triangulate back, and figure that the earliest human languages were probably click languages. I was talking about that with my students and one of them pointed out that nowadays, people use clicks to communicate with animals. You can get the attention of a dog or cat with a few clicks. Some people click at horses to get them moving. Soon after, this video http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=cae7e462bfa605f980fa6844326075a875e13c10 appeared on the New York Times' website, showing a Dinka boy in Sudan taking care of his family's cattle and talking with them using clicks and clucks and other sounds. So I wonder if using clicks to talk with animals might go back thousands and thousands of years. Maybe at some point they fell out of fashion for talking with people, but stayed on in our animal talk as a forgotten remnant of what once was.

Tags: language

Remembrance of things past

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:00:58 GMT

Sanded a small floor with a big sander, warped pine boards from 100 years ago, the servant's room.

Tags: vienna, austria, work, class

Learning languages

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 19:34:43 GMT

About nine years ago in Ann Arbor there was a young Turkish guy in one of my classes. He was about the worst one in there. He had a great attitude. Every time he spoke to me, I had no idea what he was saying. The words were English, but they were completely jumbled. He certainly didn't seem insane or stupid, but his sentences were like a Cubist version of English. Two years ago in Linguistics class, I learned that Turkish has a general Subject-Object-Verb word order, different from English, which is basically Subject-Verb-Object (as in the sentence "Carl smokes cigarettes," which, in Turkish, would be something like "Carl cigarettes smokes"). In the last couple of months I've been taking a Turkish class at the school where I teach, from one of my colleagues who's a German teacher from Turkey. As I was reading my textbook, I remembered my former student's word salad sentences. The order that information appears in a Turkish sentence is really, really different from the order it appears in an English sentence. Let me demonstrate this. If you want to say: "We're going to Germany with my friends," you say "Arkadaslarimla Almanya'ya gidiyoruz," that is, "Friend-s-my-with Germany-to go-we." That is basically the same kind of English sentence I was hearing from my student. It's comparatively easy to learn vocabulary in a foreign language; it's much harder to rearrange the invisible patterns in which you express your information. I experience this difficulty when speaking German. Specifically, the verbs appear early in my sentences, as they would if I were speaking English, and often I don't have the foresight or the strength to push them to the end.

Tags: language, german, turkish, english, learning, education, esl, efl

Mummy in running shoes

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 01:55:24 GMT

I bought a prehistoric Russian mummy and put running shoes on it, then laid it down, for the time being, against the south wall of the living room in the house where I grew up. Sat down on the sofa facing it and suddenly realized that I couldn't remember why I had bought the mummy, or why I had put the running shoes on it. My stepbrother walked in, looked at it, frowned, and muttered, "It's disgusting, the things that people own."

Tags: dream

Death

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 21:06:42 GMT

Death was in an apartment building, in the hallway. All the doors were closed. Some people were looking out through the peepholes. Nobody wanted to let him in. Death transformed himself into several hundred rubber duckies in many colors. But the doors remained shut. "It doesn't matter what I do, nobody likes me," he said despairingly.

Tags: Death

Student Presentation: Italians go in supermarket

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 17:24:06 GMT

(I didn't write this one, one of my students did. Franco Zecchin, from Italy, lives outside Vienna and works in marketing. He gave me permission to post it here. If his spelling or grammar don't impress you, try writing something in Italian and see how easy that is. Me, I like closely-observed, humorous depictions of culture and psychology, and I think my readers will too.) Italians and Austrians 12 Juli 2007 I think about this thema almost every day in this time. The first thing that I had, it was … Yes I wanted to speak about crazy people… but I was not sure that this thema would be interesting for all. Then I taught I wanted to speak about this whether. .. but it would be also not interesting Then I taught I would be speak about Islam… but I needed so much time or about Bush or about a rock &roll music but maybe this theme would be also not interesting for all or probably I needed more time. And suddenly I had to think about the difference between the Italian and the Austrian people. Maybe it´s the same differences between American and Austrian people. I think I really need much time to describe many situations. And now we can speak about one situation. For example: Supermarket The Austrian people wait, they have always patience… Italians go in Supermarket! The Italians need to park. We wanted to find absolute a place in front of the main entry and if we don´t find immediately… we are nervous and we think badly about the other (Italians) who have found a place! We go around also 10 minutes, 20 until 30 minutes and we think badly about the government about the husband or wife or about the colleague in our office… they are all stupid! If we don’t find the right place we go in the other supermarket, maybe we need the other 20 minutes… probably we come back and now we are angry! Normally in this situation we park our car in second line (in a lane in the street, outside the parking spaces)…because we think, we can do it. The laws are only for the other people. We are creative in all situations! Finally maybe we need sometime one day only to buy 1kilo tomato, that we need to make spaghetti at home…but it was so difficult to buy and we are tired… and maybe we go to restaurant or to pizzeria. When we go to supermarket? The supermarket is usually open from 9 to 7.30 p.m. but the shopping centres are open every days until 10 p.m… I would ask you: “ what do you think about Italians, when do they go shopping?” May be at 9 in the morning … or around 13 in the break or maybe at 6 p.m. when we finished our work or… around 9 in the evening? Oh Yes! we prefer to go at this time… we know before, that all the other people go in the same time… but it´s always the same story… we go and then we say:” oh my God… so many people today!” What do we buy? If we need for example 200 grams of ham we go in that department and we take a number, because without we always discuss with the other people, and we think:” I was here before you”!... If the real number in that moment for example was 48 and we have 63 we can´t wait , we go around to buy other things…suddenly we hear our number and we run back as fast as possible with our trolley. But now number is probably the 65… we`ll discuss with the other people and with the employees …we want to be served before the number 64 and 65. Sometimes we don’t speak friendly. We decide that we are right… it´s not important the theme, we are right in all situations! Checkout counter When we are ready we go to the checkout counter… and could we in this situation wait and think about our things? No! we do it so: we look around and we wanted find the best checkout line … We have no time to lose or to wait… When we pay… in Austria we need the right Money… in Italy we are creative… we pay with old money of Zambia, it was the rest of the last Holiday… and in that moment we look around…with “nonchalance”. If the employee said: "excuse me… it´s not possible…? This are not the right money…” we said: ”What...? This is not possible…” we discuss about that money…and we are right! If there are other people, who wait… the colour of its faces became a little yellow, orange, red, violet, blue, grey and finally… black! The Trolley Why the trolley has a chain and we have to have a key and one or two euros? It´s so because many people take the trolley at home. It´s comfortable and we bring back 6 months later…because our child need to play. The wife and husband go together to the supermarket. Ten years ago the wives went to the supermarket for a shopping, but recently they don´t go because they have to work. If it´s so the family go to the shopping centre all together… Normally the husband don’t need many things…and the wife always say:” we need this one, or this one… or the other one…” The man say: ”what is that?” and the wife said: ”My love…we need 10 Kilos tomatoes, 18 pieces of shampoo and 25 kilo carrots…" and now we have two solutions: The first one: ”ok. You are right!" but don’t think so. The second one: ”why? We don’t need so much carrots…!” If will be the second one… you can see the face, and for the rest of the weekend the sun will be not here. Maybe he can look for dinner with his mother or friend. Normally wives prefer the other shopping…in the centre of the town. The children The Italian children are different than the Austrian. They go to the supermarket and touch all. And go around like in an amusement park. They play with all toys and with trolley and go around. They take some things in one department and put down in the other department. The Italian children need a little time to play… and the supermarkets are perfect for this. They are also creative!

Tags: italy, austria, culture, student, esl, efl

Love data

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 18:37:24 GMT

Search me Select me Upload me Save me

Tags: poem, data, love

Holocaust Remembrance Night

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 17:57:48 GMT

I dreamt it was Holocaust Remembrance Night in Austria. I was walking on a grassy slope in the dark, when into view came a cluster of about forty helium balloons, some gray and some black, that had been released to symbolize the souls of those who had died in the concentration camps. The balloons were flying together close to the ground, moving across the landscape like solemn, beautiful ghosts.

Tags: dream, memory, ghost, holocaust, austria

Versöhnung

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 17:35:46 GMT

They buried Waldheim today. There was one Jew at the funeral: The one up on the cross.

Tags: poem, politics, austria, jewish, christian, reconciliation

Truth and reconciliation

http://jackrabbi.gaia.com — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 21:20:33 GMT

Vienna, June 16, 2007 Kurt Waldheim--former Secretary General of the United Nations, former President of Austria, former First Lieutenant in the German Wehrmacht--died two days ago. His picture is in all the newspapers, and the question of his character has come up again. Today his two-page political testament was published in the papers. "Ich bitte um Versöhnung," he wrote shortly before he died. "To all those who critically confronted me, I send my greeting, and ask them to think about their motives again, and--if possible--to grant me a late reconciliation." Today there was an event in Kirchstetten, Austria, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of W.H. Auden, the British/American poet who summered there from 1958 until his death in Vienna in 1973. There were some talks about Auden, and some lunch, and then we all went to Auden's old house, whose upstairs study is preserved as a mini-museum. Many of the poet's things are still there, including books, furniture, and slippers. In Auden's study, the British poet Glyn Maxwell read a number of Auden's poems very movingly. Before and after Maxwell's reading, I spoke with a local man who turned out to have been close to Kurt Waldheim during Waldheim's tenure as Secretary General of the United Nations in New York. I offered my condolences. I asked him whether Waldheim had been unjustly attacked for having covered up his past, and he said yes, absolutely. "Let's be honest: the United States government is controlled by Jews," he said, adding, "And the World Jewish Congress raised millions of dollars in funding by attacking Waldheim." He further noted that his own father had been in the Wehrmacht, and told him that if anyone questioned what was happening--i.e., the war effort--they and their family would be killed. He said that at the UN, Waldheim was a bridge-builder, a man skilled at negotiation, a tireless negotiator, a worker for peace. I said, "I'm half-Jewish and I completely accept that individuals in Waldheim's generation could not go against the Nazi machine without committing suicide themselves. But I want the truth to come out. I don't want people hiding what they did. I don't think badly of people who had the bad luck to be swept up in something terrible when they were young." He said, "People in Waldheim's position preferred to be silent for fear of being attacked." I said, "Maybe we can begin more sensible dialogues now. I don't want to attack people. We just want to know what happened to our families." We parted. Questions hung in the air: Whose story is this? How much information needs to come out? On what terms can reconciliation happen? The image I have of Waldheim today is of someone very human, caught up in something he didn't understand, later regretful about it, though not as regretful as his critics would have him be. One of the men Waldheim served under was executed for war crimes in 1946. So at what point should Waldheim himself have felt comfortable telling the world everything? He certainly seems to have known what was going on, but he seems not to have been personally responsible in any criminal sense for atrocities. The Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal publically defended Waldheim along these lines. Misleading people about one's past is not in itself a crime. It seems natural, though less than ideal, that people who were still furious at the Nazis would have wanted to criticize him. Today the Holocaust is as much a nightmare for the Austrians and the Germans as it is for the Jews. One of my Austrian students told me tearfully once of the day he learned of the Holocaust at the age of nine when he walked in on his mother watching a documentary on TV and she explained to him the bulldozers pushing emaciated human corpses. Former Wehrmacht soldiers have either remained convinced of the rightness of the Nazi cause--a small minority--or, more commonly, refused to talk about it. Or both. One of my current students tried to interview his grandfather about the war for a school project, and his grandfather flatly refused to talk about it. The impression I got was of a concrete container full of toxic chemical waste that wants to be buried just like it is so the poison won't leak out. It's one response, heroic in its way. I'll finish this post about reconciliation with some lines from Auden's elegy for the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, who died at the beginning of 1939 as the Second World War was about to break out. Whatever side of whatever nightmare one is on, Auden's challenge--for action that is personal, psychological and emotional, even spiritual in the best sense--is worth taking seriously: Make a vinyard of a curse. Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice. With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress. In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountains start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.

Tags: waldheim, auden, glyn maxwell, reconciliation, memorial, holocaust, nazi, poem, yeats, austria