Dip Me in Molasses and Call Me Shirley!

What follows is a fake history of a fake form of poetry which I made up for a formalist poetry workshop. Yes, I am partaking in a formalist poetry workshop. No, you cannot read my sonnets. Anyway, the name of this form is "Dip Me in Molasses and Call Me Shirley." I might get around to putting up a good example one of these days, but for now, here's the history:

The Dip Me in Molasses and Call Me Shirley may have one of the oldest and richest histories of any poetic form. The form dates back to Ancient Sumeria, where archaeologists have found five-line stanzas using words from the preceding stanza inscribed on the walls of ziggurats. The traditional name for this kind of stanza was either “coat the high priest with pitch tar and call him Surshlash,” or “the one with the honorary title ‘Shurlash’ is covered in resin,” translators remain divided. This likely refers to the embalming practices for the bodies of high priests. The form appears to have been preserved through the Mesopotamians and Babylonians, as several key passages from the Epic of Gilgamesh are written in a similar form, most notably the scene in which Enkidu burns down the cedars in Lebanon after being mocked by the goddess Mishmash for putting his left boot on his right foot. The form was also one of the most popular in use by the common people of Babylon…

          The tradition was adopted by the Jews during the Babylonian captivity, and was brought back to Jerusalem, where it was used as the format for a number of psalms and various other passages of the old testament, notably the book of Amos. Following the conquest of Alexander the Great and the establishment of the Selucid Empire, the form was adopted to Greek, which flourished in not only the Selucid Empire itself, but within Ptolemaic Egypt and the Greek Mainland itself. At this point there is no evidence that the sixth stanza had developed. The Greeks only used the pattern seen in the first five stanzas. Most were written in dactylic hexameter.

            Virgil, Pliny the Elder, and Cicero all wrote this form, but it was not popular with the Roman nobility. In fact, the Emperor Nero threatened Pliny the Elder with being impaled from the anus to the mouth if he “wrote one more stanza of [that] detestable form!” The form would disappear from the European continent for over a millennium.

The tradition, however, had survived through Greco-Bactrian traders on the Silk Road, who would compose long songs in this form to pass the time as their caravans rode through the Taklimakan Desert. Few were written down, but from what has been recorded, it seems that this was where the form of the sixth stanza developed, sung as a kind of refrain. However, this stanza would never change throughout the entire song, which would sometimes last for upwards of one hundred stanza. The skill of the poet would be measured by how many stanzas he could manufacture using the same end-words in the same configuration, but with different content and meaning.

Emperor Han Shundi received one such merchant and was so impressed by his abilities to improvise that he commissioned all one hundred and sixty seven of his court poets to write similar poems, and executed the poets whose work he deemed unworthy. His method of execution was to dip them in a thick boiling liquid known as “fang gao,” which was described as resembling tar but smelling of young lychee blossoms. The form was therefore known as “feng gao dip shrieking tradition.”

Famous navigator Zeng He brought copies of his favorite poems with him on his voyages, and one of them was a poem composed in the early-modern Dip Me in Molasses form, which he read to the Sultan of Zanzibar as an overture of diplomatic goodwill. Despite some adaptation in mainland Tanzania by tribal populations under the cruel heel of the Sultan, the form would see little use until its reading was again used as a token of diplomatic goodwill, this time to Portuguese explorer Vazco Da Gama, who brought it back to Portugal where it gained wide use among the Portuguese nobility.

In his later years, Milton penned what were allegedly translations of a “mergulhe me no molaço,” but were actually creations of his own. His senile brain is thought to have imagined poems allegedly in some language vaguely Portuguese-sounding. The “translations” themselves are mostly gibberish. Never the less, Byron, Wordswroth, Keats, and Coleridge all tried their hand at the form, finding it to be, in Byron’s words, “so bombastedly complicated and inelegante that it is only suitable for orphanes, trampes, and streete urchines of the loweste birthe.”

Meanwhile the Portuguese tradition continued, coming with the Empire to Brazil, where it flourished among Amazonian and Highland backwaters, before spreading to the Pampas and eventually to Buenos Aires, where it was discovered by Borges. It was in this form that he wrote his long narrative “Un Sueño de mi Sudamerica Cósmico,” (A Dream of My Cosmic South America), which was mostly a thinly veiled critique of the Pinochet regime in neighboring Chile.

The form got its English name from Brazilian immigrant João Fermin da Cunha arriving at Ellis Island in 1893. When trying to explain the pronunciation of his name to immigration officials, one official was reported to have said “Well dip me in molasses and call me Shirley, where did you get a name like that?” Da Cunha promptly changed his name to John Clemens to avoid any future confusion. But the phrase had stuck in his mind, and he penned a poem in the form which now bears this phrase as its name. It became wildly popular, posted on broadsides across the nation. It did not, however, catch on with educated city dwellers. Carrie Nation wrote an anti-liquor propaganda poem called “The Dip Me in Molasses and Call Me Shirley of Prohibition,” and the Woodrow Wilson campaign was known to have distributed pamphlets with Dip Me in Molasses poems to remind voters to get to the polls while keeping their black neighbors from doing so.

It was for this reason that Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen appropriated the form, feeling that it would empower blacks who were disenfranchised at the polls. The Duke Ellington Orchestra performed “The Dip Me in Molasses (And Call Me Shirley) Suite” to commemorate Hughes’ and Cullen’s work.

Ginsberg, in his early years, dabbled with the form in his early years, but found it to be “too heavy, maaan.” However, an early draft of “Howl” was found among Ginsberg’s papers after his death, indicating that he had intended to write his magnum opus as a Dip Me in Molasses before abandoning the idea.

The form has seen recent resurgence thanks to its frequent use by poet Billy Collins, and many alt-lit “authors” (the term used very liberally) on the blogosphere. A recent adaptation has been the “Tweet Me in Molasses,” where Twitter users collaborate to create an entire poem, tweeting one line at a time. There is also resurgent interest in places where the form has history, including Iraq, Xinxiang, Tanzania, Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, and New York City. President Obama has stated that after his second inaugural address, current poet laureate Natasha Tretheway will read a Dip Me in Molasses and Call Me Shirley. He hopes this poem will be less of a disaster than the last one.

Four More Years of Meh

"The clock just struck and it's democracy time!"

-Abe Lincoln

Four years ago I was one of the youngest voters. I had turned 18 days before, and had registered well before my birthday. I had sixth period off so instead of napping in my car in the parking lot before practice like I usually did, I went to participate in my first ever election. My polling place was in my neighbor's garage. Since it was the middle of the day the only other voters out were retirees. My neighbor himself was handing out the ballots. When he asked if it was my first time voting, so he could show me how to fill out a ballot, I said "yes" with way too much enthusiasm. I marked  the bubble for Obama and for no on Prop 8, and got my sticker. Actually, I got two stickers, one in English and one in Spanish. They might have only made that concession because it was my first time. (Apparently absentee voters don't get a sticker, which completely defeats the purpose of voting. Just like it doesn't happen unless you post it on facebook, your vote doesn't count if you don't have the sticker don't have the sticker to show for it.)

When I got home from practice my parents were watching CNN showing that Obama was already crushing the electoral vote. I had been anticipating a long night of white knuckles and electoral math, but it looked like it was already over before it started. But that wasn't what made me happy. What made me happy was that this was the first time that the youth vote was a significant demographic. And I was one of the youngest out there, only eligible to vote less than a week prior. In fact, the yellow card with my polling location on it had only come in the mail the day before. Watching those people celebrating in Hyde park, I felt like I had done something, I was part of the movement that was pointing this country in the right direction. I still haven't missed an election since.

Now, four years later, I stood outside some grungy building a block from campus, with a short line of people, mostly college students, moving pretty quickly. But people still complained. I told the group of girls standing behind me they should stop complaining, octogenarians in Florida are standing in line for hours. People in rural Uganda waited in line all day to vote a few years ago. There were allegedly precincts this year , two thousand and fucking twelve, where poll station workers tried to intimidate black people out of voting. People stand in long lines to vote, people have gone to jail to vote, people have died to vote. On the democracy spectrum, we got it easy.

But it wasn't the same this time. Of course I'm happy with the result. And I still felt that solemnity while filling in my ballot, even though I might have been checking out the girl voting in the next booth over. (But what could I have said as an opening line? So... vote here often?) But this election wasn't a movement, it wasn't optimism sweeping the land. We know that Obama can't just waltz into the Oval Office and kick the budget deficit in the teeth. It was a grind, resisting a dangerous culture of absolute materialism, the health-and-wealth gospel, and corporate excess. And even though the figurehead of that has been handed a narrow defeat, this election gives me little optimism. Maybe things will get done in the next four years, maybe national sanity will be restored, maybe we'll all find something to satisfy us other than all the stuff we have. And maybe our leaders will be supportive of that kind of culture.

But, still, fuck yeah, we got to commit an act of democracy today. And that's enough.

Something Silly About Poetry and Nature

            Two competing desires struggle within me. There is the desire to carve out a place in space of my own, where I am aware of all things as they are and as they change. This would be the place from which I drew my sustenance. And then there is the desire to be a constant nomad, physically and intellectually, to draw inspiration from the myriad peoples and nations of the world. I could synthesize a culture endemic to only myself, amalgamating and adopting the fragments I could glean.

I want to ride on the roof of a train, a stowaway, as some new scrubland unfolds before me, caravan lines running parallel somewhere off near the horizon, and know that I am looking their way as they look mine. This is my nomad aspect. It scours the land for nutrients, amino acids, fuel to burn, parts for the machine. At the same time I want to know a singular piece of nature, carve out a habitat for myself, where I can observe the subtle changes that take place from day to day and year to year. This is my farmer aspect. It harnesses natural processes to subtly refine matter into a form which will sustain me. This distinction, I have found, is reflected in the poetry of two writers who champion reverence for the earth, Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, Snyder representing the nomad aspect and Berry representing the farmer aspect. Of course, this is not simply because one was a bit of a nomad and one farmed for a living.

Wendellberry Cobbler

Berry is the farmer, basing his life and livelihood on a single patch of land and working it, becoming intimately acquainted with its character, with every hill and valley, and even the soil itself. The land is comfort, and the slow rhythms of nature provide stability, respite from the chaotic rhythms of civilization. Berry’s poem “February 2, 1968” reflects the stability and isolation of being tied to the land: “In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, / war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, / I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.” There is a sense that Berry feels entirely content in the presence of the land he has chosen to remain on, feeling a satisfaction with being in a place that few can feel in a post-agrarian society. In fact, one gets the impression that this connection with a specific piece of land is itself something that very few do feel. In his poem “On the Hill Late at Night,” he writes:

I am wholly willing to be here

between the bright silent thousands of stars

and the life of the grass pouring out of the ground.

The hill has grown to me like a foot.

Until I lift the earth I cannot move. (129)

It is isolation, but a liberating isolation. While the world changes around him, Berry is content to foster a connection with the land he knows, and the land he works.

            Berry’s reverence for the land grows from his understanding of the particular patch of land he has chosen to call his own. Salman Rushdie quipped in order to understand one life, one must swallow the whole world. But Berry’s life seems to suggest the opposite, at least in terms of understanding the natural world. The soil of Northern Kentucky is the soil of the whole Earth in its cycles of growth and death, freezing and thawing, nourishing and decomposing. His poem “Enriching the Earth” begins:

To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass

to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds

of winter grains and various legumes,

their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.

There is a cyclical nature in these four lines, beginning and ending with the phrase “to enrich the earth,” evoking the circular nature of time for a farmer. (It has been documented in ethnographies of traditional farming societies that time is not perceived as proceeding linearly, as is common in Western culture, but instead moving in a circle.) This evokes a fact of nature that often does not play out in human time: that everything organic grows from and returns to the soil countless times over. Berry’s observance of the soil, both its ecological properties and philosophical implications, extends to all soils of the world. And he recognizes that he is himself part of this process. “After death, willing or not, the body serves, / entering the earth. And so what was heaviest / and most mute is at last raised up into song.” In this model of perpetual decomposition and regeneration, it is entailed that all living things are made from the same matter, and therefore are in communion with all other living things, united by the soil. Cultivating a piece of land results in Berry cultivating all of nature.

The Pacific Northwest Bushman

            Snyder possesses this same reverence for the soil, but in his worldview it may be more dirt than soil, emphasizing the vibrancy without the decay and consuming aspect. His is the hunter-gatherer’s earth where Berry’s is the farmer’s. Being nourished by the land does not come from careful cultivation, but from vigorous exploration. This sheer joy in discovering nature through furtive exploration – akin to a forager happening upon a patch of nourishing tubers – is reflected in “Meeting the Mountains.” In this poem, a man is discovering nature through furtive exploration.

He crawls to the edge of the foaming creek

He backs up the slab ledge

He puts a finger in the water

He turns to a trapped pool

Puts both hands in the water

Puts one foot in the pool

Drops pebbles in the pool

He slaps the water surface with both hands

He cries out, rises up and stands

Facing toward the torrent and the mountain

Raises up both hands and shouts three times!

This discovery is not made by careful cultivation of the soil, maintaining a small patch of land to learn the universal truths of Nature. Nature must be encountered in as many places with as many senses and appendages as possible.

            Yet the realization of the near-eternal scope of natural time is there in Snyder’s poetry as well. Snyder is preoccupied with the impermanence of nature on geological time rather than the cyclical properties driven by the seasons. This understanding of the beauty in the changing landscape is brought to life in “Poem Left in Sourdough Mountain Lookout.”

I the poet Gary Snyder

Stayed six weeks in fity-three

On this ridge and on its rock

& saw what every Lookout sees,

Saw these mountains shift about & end up on the ocean floor

Saw the wind and waters break

The branchéd deer, the Eagle’s eye

& when pray tell, shall Lookouts die?

The recognition of nature’s constant flux no doubt dovetails with Snyder’s studies in Buddhism, particularly with the notion of impermanence. Snyder’s conception of Nature as encompassing all physical phenomena could them be said to apply to Karmic cause and effect. This isn’t the Western pseudo-karma, a kind of moral causality that is invoked only when something very fortunate or unfortunate happens. This is the true Buddhist philosophical Karma, a force natural as gravity, which shapes the illusion that is the world through linear cause and effect. In this worldview, everything was once everything else in the scope of eternal time, and so man is tied to Nature through its intrinsic properties. In “By Frazier Creek Falls,” he writes “This living flowing land / is all there is, forever // We are it / it sings through us” (477).

Despite this blissful (again, in the true Buddhist sense) erosion the boundaries of the self, Snyder still seems to be conscious to define himself in relation to nature, keeping himself as a separate “I.” He maintains his role as an experiencer of nature while himself being tied to it in the appropriately named poem “Nature: Green Shit.” Notice the italics when recognizing his identity as something fleshy rather than a structure of cellulose:

The brittle hollow stalks of sunflower

            heads broke over full of dusty seed

            peeld, it tastes good, small

Why should dirt be dirty when you can clean up.

            stop to like the dead or dying plants,

            twisted witherd grass

Picking the last peppers

Soft and wrinkld; bright green, cool

            what a lump of red flesh I am!

What was soil for Berry is dirt for Snyder; it is medium rather than resource. Both authors are reverent of the stuff. To Snyder it is as much a part of nature as are the majestic peaks surrounding Kitkidizzi. And in fact, to Snyder, every part of nature may be nothing more than equal parts. But there is a sense that Berry’s soil is something sacred. It is his to cultivate and it is what sustains him.

The Mad Farmer's Sanity

            A restless mind can never reconcile its competing desires. It may be that there are simply too many places in the world to experience in a human lifetime, and countless more when accounting for the places in space where we will one day settle. But never the less, I feel this extreme restlessness, a feeling of being incomplete without having known intimately every city, culture, landscape, and biome that can be experienced. The term, which seems to be prevalent in the communal lexicon thanks to its being integrated into tumblr graphics and facebook cover photos, is wanderlust. Of course a term doesn’t any legitimacy when it is appropriated by popular culture, and my compulsive need for exploring and learning is a shared trait of humanity. Snyder encourages this. Between the lines he is nodding at me, encouraging me to act on these mad impulses. And I know he is right, this is what I must do.

            But then there is Berry to temper what I will call my wanderlust, for lack of any more appropriate term. In Berry’s worldview, to work the land is to become acquainted with the whole world, because the whole world is present in the working of the land. I could be that Siberian woodsman, to whom Berry says “the forest / whose ways, strange to me, are well known to you as the sound of your own voice.” Whatever form that forest may take, be it a city or a field of study, I will know that an enlightened man has spoken with reverence of this kind of exclusive familiarity. I may not settle some place for long, the nomad aspect may be too much of me. And I know that both aspects, the nomad and the farmer, are meaningful, productive futures to carry out. There are many ways to know the whole of the Earth.

I write about this sometimes. Deal with it.

This Plug Has No Shame, Because It Is Not Sentient

You there, reading this! You obviously like the internet because you're on it right now. You also probably like music. And you might like radio. Then  I got good news for you! My friend Weston's radio show, Resistance Radio, is on tonight, and every Sunday night, broadcasting on KUPS Tacoma, THE SOUND! which can be streamed live on the internet. So if you want to do some loud rambunctious rawkin tonight, at 10:00 PM pacific time check it out here:

http://tunein.com/radio/Yuri-OYABB-Kahan-p381928/

We tune in to this every week, gathered around the computer-radio like old-timey assholes, darning our old-timey socks and burning down the small businesses of old-timey immigrants because IT WAS A SIMPLER TIME DAMMIT!

Of course you should listen for the music, which runs the spectrum from loud to really loud, from snorting coke off a toilet seat on the Sunset Strip to wakeboarding on a archetypal Dante-esque lake of fire as Satan himself drives the boat at speeds upwards of Mach 7. And there's the ethical argument to be made for listening to a real human DJ. But most compelling reason to listen is that you might hear an ad for Taco Night at the New Frontier, which usually plays during his show.

When adjusted for production quality, this might be the most effective advertisement ever. The ad is for some kind of bar/restaurant somewhere in Tacoma, which apparently has taco night, as well as pizza and beer. Let me break down the add for you:

It opens with some clicking sounds that are probably supposed to be a horse's hooves, but it might just be the a corruption in the audio file. Then there is a dialogue between a voice that is a few octaves too low to be human, and someone whose speech is being manipulated by an auto-tuner into a kind of Tom Haverford does R-Kelly sing-song. I suppose this technically means that he's singing, because all of this takes place over a few twangy acoustic guitar chords. The auto-tuned voice asks the deep voice how his herd is doing. And then, "speaking of herd," asks if he has heard that The New Frontier has taco night.

"On Tuesday?"
"No."
"On Thursday?"
"No. On We-e-e-e-e-dnesday!" It takes him a long time to sing Wednesday. Because when you have auto-tuner, you might as well run with it and drag out those melismas.

Then, they singe a jingle! A real live fucking jingle! It goes "They've got pizza they've got beer, down at the New Frontier, oh man, oh man." Let's recap the elements here. We have: 1) a country/bluegrass style acoustic guitar 2) a high pitched, auto-tuned voice, and 3) Fat Albert. This is the instrumentation for a jingle, something they haven't made in decades.

And you know what, I really want to go to taco night at the New Frontier, if I ever am in Tacoma again. All because this ad was so bad, it's memorable. My parents' generation always talks about how everything used to have a jingle, and how they're still trying to get "You'll wonder where the yellow went / when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent!" out of their skulls. And they just know that when they have Alzheimer's or dementia  those neurons are going to be the very last ones to go. It makes me wonder why advertisers ever stopped making jingles. I know that other forms of advertising used back then stopped working. They were so mesmerized by the concept of television that if anyone came on the story box and said that something was the best, they would believe it. If they told you it would make you happy, then it would make you happy. If they told you it would get you a date, then it would get you a date.

Then people started to realize that you could lie on TV just like you could in the real world, and advertisers had to pinpoint and attack our insecurities, most of which are that we are afraid of being undersexed and appearing foolish. If you don't buy Old Spice, you will be undersexed, they say. If you pay too much for your car insurance, you will look foolish, they say. And all of your friends are out somewhere having fun drinking Bud Lite while you sit at home and watch your lackluster team, which represents your decaying city, lose yet another game to that team whose fan base really irritates you. We live empty lives when sitting in front of the TV, and advertisers know this. They strike when we are most vulnerable.

But the jingle just makes us all feel good. And if you tune into Resistance Radio tonight, you just might hear one of the best!

And Weston, if you read this in time, I'm in the mood to hear some Suicide Machines tonight.

In Soviet Russia, Payday Loan Advances YOU!

I had to take down the Oregon Trail post. It was one of my most popular, so that's unfortunate. However, it had become a magnet for spam comments obviously generated by some devious Russian spam farm. For the last few days my email has been blowing up with comments that need to be moderated, all of which turn out to be shameless plugs for the same payday loan website, even the ones that claim to link to other things, like pirated Russian DVDs or online universities. These all sound like Eugene Hutz on Valium. I imagine some Russian factory, belching smoke into the sky over the Volga, and inside the propaganda-lined walls are rows and rows of men with patchy beards in tracksuits cranking out links to this shady payday loan site. Here are some of the most entertaining that I have received:

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• "Your weblog evokes many good times. It is with good times that come good credit loans. Experience good credit here. If you do not like it you can leave, but none have had the dissatisfaction ever to leave! Check it out on my weblog today!"
• "Friend, I see you like the television. Check out this site where you can watch all television shows as they are live, including Men in the City and The Regular One."
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So ask yourselves: who really won the cold war?

Bird!

Yesterday, for about fifteen minutes, I was a bird. And let me tell you, life is a lot simpler as a bird.

I ran around my apartment flapping my arms/wings, making bird calls, which mostly consisted of: cuh-CAW!! cuh-CAW!! But I lacked most of the tools to communicate my feelings in language. I didn't even know what language was, because, well, I was a bird. One of my roommates asked me how it was going. Another asked me what time it was. I could not answer either of these questions, because I have no concept of conversation, nor do I have a concept of time. I responded with another bird call to tell them that I was ab bird.

I began flying around my apartment complex, making bird calls. For some reason, no one thought this was very strange at all, because they approached me as they would if I were in human form. Actually, I shouldn't be at all perplexed by that. I know, and I know that you know, that I'm a weird dude. As they tried to interact normally with me, I reminded them that I couldn't, because I was a bird. I had no concept of language, let alone social customs. Someone asked me if I had left my book in their apartment. I told them that I had no concept of ownership, because I was a bird.

Being a bird is simpler. As humans, we waste our time writing symphonies and painting masterpieces, trying to reconcile ourselves with the inadequacies and imbalances of the world. But birds just want to peck at shit and spread their seed, peck their seed and spread their shit everywhere, especially to put the exclamation point on your particularly bad day. And keep other birds from pecking at shit that they're pecking at. I had no concept of my own mortality, no concept of politeness or social customs, no concept of right and wrong. I was a bird! Life was simple. All I had to do was keep flapping my wings and make bird calls to announce my presence (but not my existence, because I was not aware of what existence was, since I could not conceive of anything resembling non-existence). That's all it takes to make it as a bird.

But then I encountered a problem. I walked into someone else's apartment, and I couldn't figure out to get out. Of course, the way you get out of everything is to fly up, so why couldn't flying up get me out of here!?!? I hopped around and ran into walls for a while, until I thought I found a way out. Unfortunately, it was a window and I slammed my face into it. It was at this point that I decided to be a human again.

Next time I decide to be a bird, I'll stay outside.

Come On Baby Light My Saber

Unless your yurt in rural Montana doesn't get internet (and most yurts in rural Montana do these days) you've heard that Disney bought Lucas Arts and is planning on making a seventh, and possibly eighth and ninth movie. After the carnage caused to the franchise by the prequel trilogy, which was basically George Lucas going back in time and sodomizing every member of Generation X as an eight year old, I can't help but worry that the three new films will look a little bit like, well, like this:

The biggest problem with this is that the new generation of Star Wars movies are going to be Disney movies. As if Disneyland weren't already enough of a trip through the wormhole of Angelean Hyperreality, now there are going to be stormtroopers walking around, posing for photo-ops. But that's the least concerning implication of this whole thing. In a Disney Star Wars universe, Greedo will always shoot first. Because there is no room for ambiguity in a Disney movie. Characters are either good guys or bad guys.

A New Hope would have almost worked as a classic Disney movie. You have an orphaned protagonist who is dragged into a wild adventure that pits good against evil and good emerges triumphant, with some whacky best friends he meets along the way. And for the most part, these characters are either good or evil. Light side of the force or dark side. 

But who's the only character to transcend this duality of light and dark? Han Solo. Han Solo is the linchpin holding the entire Star Wars universe together. Because he's not the light side, he's not the dark side, he's human. They tried to do that in the prequel trilogy with Hayden Christensen being sad and angsty, showing how people can be corruptible, but something was glaringly off about not just his character, but every character in that trilogy. But Han Solo, he's rough, he's crude, he's crass, and his banter with Princess Leia in Empire got an estimated 500,000 girls pregnant worldwide. The only thing close to that in the prequel trilogies was the image conjured in one's mind by the presence of Samuel L. Jackson that he would call someone "muthafuqqa!!!"

But Han Solo didn't only make the movies entertaining, he made it philosophically compelling. This isn't some sort of binary universe, dominated the light god and dark god of the Manicheans, or the asha and druj of the Zoroastrians. Han Solo is a dude, like the rest of us, who shoots first because dammit, he's got to survive, but later flies his beloved ship into a battle which he well might not survive. Yoda said "do or do not, there is no try," but most of us, like Han Solo, are just out here, trying our best.

And ostensibly, Han is going to be in this one. But, we saw what happened last time a Lucas Films character portrayed by Harrison Ford happened. He was old. Indiana Jones could have sealed his legacy, but instead our lasting image is of him wearing a catheter, hobbling around a temple with a walker, complete with tennis balls on it so he doesn't scuff up the booby traps. Also, Mark Hamill looks like this:

And remember how you thought Princess Leia was hot? Remember how she'll always be immortalized in your mind at the age and hotness she was when she wore that metal bikini in Jedi? Well not anymore:

Now I'm not saying I'm not excited. I'm incredibly excited, I'm going to the midnight showing dressed as a wookie whenever this thing comes out (and you can hold me to that, Ozone Nation). I'm just dubious. I don't want another Phantom Menace. If we get one, I am self immolating. Ozone Nation, please don't hold me to that one.

The Parable of the AL West

"There's always someone younger
someone with more hunger
don't let em take the fight out of you"
-Ben Harper & the Innocent Criminals, Fight Outa You

If you've been reading for a while, you know that sports are important. We really need to look no further than Noam Chomsky for proof. Noam Chomsky doesn't like sports. And Noam Chomsky has a medical condition that is known, scientifically, as Chronic Sad. Yes, being on a high school football team probably does suppress the part of your mind that questions authority, and you should probably care about the plight of the Kurds instead of the Kansas City Chiefs, and your money would benefit human culture better if it were spent on an NPR tote bag instead of a Drew Brees jersey, but no one likes a chess club kid who pats himself on the back for "activism" and "raising awareness" for the Kurdish people and spends his evenings listening to Terri Gross interview important Jewish figures in the media. And who knows. If Noam Chomsky had joined his high school football team, he would have suffered a concussion and never would have come up with Universal Grammar and X-Bar Theory and all the other misguided ideas he had. (Maybe some of you are drinking the UG Kool-Aid. Most of you don't know or care. That's fine because for the rest of this post it won't matter.)

For someone who talks about psychological nativism, Chomsky doesn't seem to understand that all of us want and need to move, and to compete. I've said this before and I'll say it again: There are no more mastodon to hunt, no more saber tooth tigers to run from, no more plains of the Serenghetto to cross on foot with only a handful of dried berries and an animal skin filled with your own piss.  In post-industrial America, we don't have anything to physically test us anymore.  Things weren’t always this way. To feed myself and my caveman family, I would have had to grab my spear and my piss skin and run around the desert for at least a day until a wildebeest or a deer or something dropped dead from exertion, then carry it all the way back to my hut, which I built myself out of sticks and mud and the bones of my brother who got his head smashed in by a neighboring band of hunter gatherers, and come home to an entirely new member of my family, because the homely yet powerful woman with whom I had chose to procreate solely based on genetic potential, had to give birth all by herself while I was gone and then made a dust and placenta pudding because in the three days it took me to drag back a smelly, picked-apart squirrel carcass that was supposed to feed the three of us through the next twelve years of drought and then the subsequent locust swarm, she got a little hungry. And this would have been my day job. Now my day job consists of trying to get kids to put together coherent sentences and moonlighting as an unsuccessful wordsmith. This is all sitting down. I don't need to move, or even exert myself. Sports allows us to exert ourselves as God (or Jehovah or Allah or Ahura Mazda or the evil demiurge Yaldoboath) intended. The biggest fear in my arsenal of first world problems is the fear that I’ll never really be tested. I’ll never have to rise to the occasion to save my life, the life of my family and loved ones, the life of my tribe or my people, the proverbial life of the gene pool. I believe that spectacle is something that we need as humans, just like we need community and meaning for our lives. The more technologically advanced we get, the more physically useless we will become.  (Except of course if that technology leads to some great catastrophe and we're once again fighting to survive as a species against psychotic crocodile-buffalo hybrids that some R&D asshole thought would be a great idea to start manufacturing.) We’ve awkwardly been retrofitted into cubicles. We don’t move the way we evolved to move, we’ve been retrofitted to sit in cubicles and push pencils. And that's why we have sports, and that is why sports are important.

But sports can also teach us lessons. Baseball has been used to explain love, war, and everything in between. In fact, here's a real political cartoon from the Civil War:

Notice how back then, every figure in a political cartoon got to make a little speech. Lincoln also looks a little bit like the homeless man who lives in the alley behind my apartment.

Anyway, for those of you paying attention, baseball just taught us another lesson.

The last few seasons for A's fans have been a little bit like being an orphan on Christmas. You're really excited, because maybe Santa will bring you your real live parents, who were actually racecar drivers or explorers or wizards who totally loved you this whole time. But deep down you know all you can expect is an extra helping of gruel and a day off shoveling coal. This season though, at least one of our parents showed up, and, as I write this, it's still up in the air as to whether or not mom died of TB, we'll see how game 3 goes.

But losing is a part of winning. For the A's to win the AL West, someone had to lose it, and that was the Rangers, who were up, I believe, by 13 games in June. For the Rangers, it would come down to a 3 game series where all they had to do was not get swept. The lesson: never let up, no matter how far ahead you are. Because someone is gunning for you.

Since they didn't take the AL West, the Rangers, the team that had been leading their division all season, usually with a comfortable margin, had to play a one game wildcard play-in game, where the winner went on to the ALDS and the losers went home. This format is new this year. I'm surprised that it happened. Baseball is a sport that seems the most resistant to change. I thought the purists calling the shots in the MLB would reject such a change. And some purists don't like it. The whole city of Atlanta is ready to stab someone over it.

In baseball, more than any other ball sport, statistics mean something going back decades. Batting .300 might be just a step below the 4 minute mile in immutably significant sporting benchmarks. But the world needs to stay the same in order for statistics to mean something. The NBA lockout was the worst thing to happen to Chomsky's straw-man "Joe Six-Pack." You think we want to deal with a wartime cancellation. "Gee guys, I really would like to overthrow the government* but the game is on. Maybe tomorrow. Actually, let's hold off until after the playoffs, my team might win it all this year, and I would hate to have it cut short by a violent coup, filled with atrocities, damaged infrastructure, and hell, maybe even a genocide." It might not be the LA Philharmonic, but it keeps the kids out of trouble.

But I digress. The point is, I'm glad we upset the traditionalists so that we could witness this life lesson played out. And I'm really glad to be on the winning side of it.

*These are only meant to be the words of a fictional character, and I have no intention of, nor do I advocate, overthrowing any government, including but not limited to the United States Government. If you want to change something, write your congressperson.