the 2009 tally

high points

• San Francisco in January
• Portland International Film Festival
• Trani's Memorial Day weekend visit
• Reconnecting with my childhood friend Mendal Bouknight, who contacted me after coming upon a Memo essay about growing up in Dutch Fork and Irmo
• The addition of a Kelsey Mosley painting to my modest art collection
• The 3 Friends poetry reading with Norval Willey and Curtis Whitecarroll in September
• Vancouver BC in October
• The Oregon Literary Review/Blackbird Wine Shop poetry reading earlier this month with Michael Shay, Rogers Truax, and Ric Vrana
• Dinner with Sylvia at Besaw's, The Firehouse, Indish, and other dining spots about town
• Dinner with Devon at Ciao Vito
• Invitations to my old Atlanta friend Jerry Pagane's art shows in New York even though I was unable to attend any of them
• Cranking up the mileage on my weekly runs last summer after Trani tried to peer-pressure me into training for a marathon
• The upcoming Christmas visit to Tulsa

2009 has in many respects been a difficult year, but even a difficult year may have its bright moments to redeem it and us. I look to 2010 with realism and hope, determined to cleave to the vision, sometimes in spite of all, sometimes in spite of myself. As if it were a matter of choice.

I like this time of year. Hope you are all enjoying a wonderful holiday season.

affairs of the day

Americans now seem to be largely ruled by passion and ignorance. Most of the public does not read anything of value. Television shows like "24" constitute their image of foreign affairs. The Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower is enraptured by a politician who could not recall what she reads to be informed.
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An emerging third world country can not continue to fight wars that it does not understand in places it can only vaguely imagine. — Col. Pat Lang (Ret.) read more

I first encountered Col. Lang when he appeared on The NewsHour on PBS in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Later I came upon his blog, Sic Semper Tyrannis, which I check out regularly. His background includes service in Vietnam, U.S. Military Intelligence, and U.S. Army Special Forces. He struck me from the first as intelligent and knowledgeable, something of an old-fashioned conservative (as opposed, say, to a neocon), and a patriot. I do not always agree with what I find at Sic Semper Tyrannis, but I almost always find it worth reading and considering as I attempt to fashion something coherent out of my own muddled views on affairs of the day.

'twas a night of bitter cold

He went to his desk, picked up a file folder, flipped through the sheets of paper, thought in a delirium of wild optimism maybe some of the poems were almost pretty good. Yet what was there to them, these little nothings that once came to the page as if of their own accord, some phrases and some lines inexplicably bound in narrative that carried itself along without will or reason, a bit of lyric to evoke a fleeting mood or memory, an image that might give reason to take another breath and perhaps even the breath after that. Why were these so modest accomplishments so hard come by? And why did he agonize so over such things we call art, in a delirium of wild optimism compelled to place on them more burden and weight of meaning than they could ever bear? It was nothing he could hope to fathom, much less explain.