A good writer is basically a story-teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
– Isaac Bashevis Singer
Month: November 2011
Occupy: And Then They Fight You
Remember the saying: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
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A Timeline of Force Used Against the Occupy Movement
September
1: First day of OWS
4: First arrests using 1845 law banning masks at demonstrations
24: 80 arrests; police use tasers and mace on peaceful crowd; police officer caught on video macing a young woman (he lost 10 vacation days as punishment)
October
1, 2: Police arrest demonstrators on Brooklyn Bridge
8: Police pepper spray protestors in Washington, D.C.
10: Boston police arrest 140 protestors
15: Police across the nation arrest peaceful protestors
25: Oakland, CA, police attack peaceful protestors en masse with teargas, beanbag grenades, rubber bullets; Marine veteran of Iraq War shot in head with rubber bullet, hospitalized in critical condition
29: Denver, CO, police attack Occupy demonstration, fire pellets filled with pepper spray
30: Portland,OR, police arrest two dozen peaceful demonstrators
November
3: Riot police attack peaceful Occupy Oakland protest with teargas, flash-bang grenades; more than 100 arrested, another Iraq War veteran seriously injured by police
14: Police clear out Occupy Oakland protest site, arrest 20 peaceful protestors
15: Beginning at 1 a.m., NYPD officers carry out surprise raid, cordon off OWS site, keep residents of area inside, prevent journalists from observing, arrest more than 70 people. Journalists barred from area even hours later, including CBS helicopter prevented from entering airspace above protest site; NY’s billionaire mayor ignored court order to let OWS protestors back on site; NYPD continued to arrest protestors, journalists; NY mayor says if he has to choose between people’s rights and safety, safety wins. Another judge sides with city to remove protestors. Oakland mayor says attacks on Occupy Movement in 18 cities coordinated. Seattle police use pepper spray on peaceful protestors, including a pregnant woman and a blind woman, make arrests.
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haiku 189
strong wind –
I walk unheard
past sleeping dogs
Pen to Paper: Senryu
There is a tradition that haiku is divided into two parts: real haiku, which are about nature, and senryu, which are about people. These basic divisions get redivided by whoever is doing the analysis. Elizabeth St. Jacques has three categories of haiku (the third one is an overlap of the first two), and in her article she has plenty of examples of how to tell one from another.
Michael Dylan Welch sees four categories, which he describes. He notes that the division between haiku and senryu is sharp and serious in Japan, but believes English-language poets and lovers of poetry can afford to do without the distinction.
Jane Reichhold gives us the sordid history of senryu and why the gulf between the two forms is so wide in Japan. She also tells us how one of the great early importers of haiku-form poetry was very selective in the ones he gave the English-speaking world. She goes further than Welch and makes a cogent argument for English poets to drop the very idea of senryu in favor of, simply, haiku. Her reasoning makes good sense to me, and I intend to follow it.
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In other haiku news, I learned yesterday that one of my haiku will be used at tinywords, the haiku site run by poet D. F. Tweney. So if you aren’t already, start reading tinywords daily for all the wonderful haiku found there and to, eventually, see this Catsignal classic.
Author’s Note: Nothing New This Week
Apologies, but I’ve got nothing for you this week. Too much work, too many migraines, and too much other life going on.
In lieu of new material, take a look at what I did three years ago in Catsignal’s first November. It’s aged pretty well.
Quotable 77
We need images and myths through which we can see who we are and what we might become.
– Christine Downing
haiku 188
dinner
nearly ready –
power failure
Pen to Paper: ‘Your Story Can Change the World’
The briefest of introductions will suffice today. I’m sending you to read plenty of someone else’s words. Writer David Farland reminds us of the power of storytelling and that what we do is most emphatically not a trivial waste of time. This is one to help recharge your battery.
Fiction: At Death’s Door
Conor had seen this in a comedy program once, and it had been amusing. Now, it was puzzling.
He had discovered the little lane – a seldom-used back route to town – almost ten years before. It was a pretty and pleasant walk between green fields, and it provided just enough exercise to keep his old body limber and the blood flowing. He took it daily, had a cup or two of tea in town with friends, and then walked the lane back home.
Today, the path had a new feature: a doorway.
Quotable 76
I never found out the moon didn’t come up in the west until I was a writer and Herschel Brickell, the literary critic, told me after I misplaced it in a story. He said valuable words to me about my new profession: “Always be sure you get your moon in the right part of the sky.”
– Eudora Welty