a web site that doesn't function as a page

Roderick Coover's hyper-narrative "Voyage into the Unknown" program traces John Wesley Powell's journey down the Colorado River in 1869. River-like, the site moves horizontally rather than vertically. You can take side trips. Etc.

function as form

Jane, who has a fabulous eye for such things, loves this particular view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art just as much as anything hanging from the walls in this corridor. (It's the corridor just outside the Walter & Louise Arensberg modernist art rooms.) The tall white ELEVATOR lettering in contrast to the elaborate elevator doors. As if the entrance to some deco baptistry. Anyway, it surely all gets to count among the artwork there, yes?

NASA's Nazis

Back in the 90s, Linda Hunt (who had been with CNN) was writing a book about all the former Nazi scientists who had then come to the U.S. and worked at NASA. She was particularly irked by the NASA distinguished service award being presented to Arthur Rudolph who later left the country rather than face charges as a Nazi war criminal. I posted her short article about this to my Holocaust site years ago, and just this morning re-read it.

I don't see that Hunt published a book on this but I do find these two articles:

[] Linda Hunt, "U.S. Cover-up of Nazi Scientists" Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. April, 1985. [4]

[] Linda Hunt, Arthur Rudolph of Dora and NASA, Moment 4, 1987 (Yorkshire Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament)

alphabet review

Here's a video of Rachel Blau DuPlessis' statement about Ron Silliman's The Alphabet, which she (with the help of Phillip Barron) prepared for the Silliman celebration earlier this week at the Kelly Writers House. An entry I made a few days ago gives you a little more information about the event and a link to that video.


Rachel Blau DuPlessis on Ron Silliman's The Alphabet from Phillip Barron on Vimeo.

Rimbaud

We've just uploaded a recording of Wyatt Mason talking about Rimbaud. The event took place in November 2005, and the audio is here.

Wyatt is a contributing editor of Harper's where his essays regularly appear. He also writes for the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the London Review of Books. Modern Library has published, in three volumes, his translations of the complete works of Arthur Rimbaud. Translations of Dante's Vita Nuova and Montaigne's essays are in progress, as is his book of essays about American fiction.

Oh, yes, and I'm proud to say that Wyatt was once my student here at Penn.

(Here too the beginning of the recording is over-run by the intro music we used to use at the Writers House before programs began. Sorry about that. Be patient.)

funk talk

Naomi Beckwith considers funk a language. Listen to her 2005 talk, with lots of musical samples. (Don't be put off by the beginning of the recording; the music is too loud at first.) For more about Naomi and the program, click here.

elders and youngers

Belladonna Books has just published the fourth in a series called The Belladonna Elders Series, featuring Susan Bee, Marjorie Perloff and the late Emma Bee Bernstein (with an introduction by Johanna Drucker). You can buy a copy of the book here. This is Belladonna's bio on Emma:

Emma Bee Bernstein was born in 1985 and grew up on the upper west side of Manhattan. She graduated in June 2007 from the University of Chicago with a BA with honors in Visual Arts & Art History. She wrote her senior thesis on feminism and fashion in contemporary photography, and showed her Masquerade series as part of her senior thesis show. She also exhibited her photographs at A.I.R. Gallery in NYC, the Smart Museum in Chicago, and in numerous student exhibitions at the University of Chicago. She was featured in the New York Times for her work in Vita Excolatur, a University of Chicago erotica magazine and wrote an article on feminist art for M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online #4. Emma was the star of the film Emma's Dilemma, directed by Henry Hills, in which she interviews dozens of artists from the downtown NYC scene. She worked as a curatorial assistant in the Photography, Contemporary Art, and Prints & Drawings departments at the Art Institute of Chicago, at the Renaissance Society, and was a docent at the Smart Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. She worked as a Teaching Artist at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and was an involved mentor and teacher for Step Up Women's Network. With Nona Willis Aronowitz, Emma conceived the GIRLdrive project: a cross-country trip to interview and photograph a multitude of diverse women, reflecting on the present state of feminism and social activism. GIRLdrive has a blog and is a forthcoming book from Seal Press. Emma died in December 2008 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy, where she had an internship. Emma is survived by her parents Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein and her brother Felix.

Earlier related entries: 1 2

regarding and beholding

Each January, at our "Mind of Winter" event, I lead a communal interpretation of Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man." This year we caught it on video, and here it is.

her Emily Dickinson

Charles Bernstein hosted the "Linebreak" radio series, which, in digital form, was originally presented in RealAudio format and then converted to mp3. (MP3 of course is PennSound's and many others' preferred format - downloadable, nonproprietary, free.)

In the spring of 1995, in New York, Charles conducted an interview with Susan Howe that has all along been my favorite of the Linebreak shows. We've now segmented it - by topic - and created what amounts to a table of contents. Above is a snapshot from the freshly revised Susan Howe PennSound page.

Ron Silliman reading at KWH earlier tonight

Ron read a sampling from the 1000-page The Alphabet, taking sections in (why not?) alphabetical order. He ended with a beautiful piece from VOG about Larry Eigner. I don't think I've ever heard him read so well. He was on.

Here's the video recording of the event.

when words peel away

Screen is a short video that shows the 3D-text-based, virtual reality experience of hypertext in a "CAVE" at the University of Iowa. Click here to watch the video.

visiting the kiss on V-Day

On Valentine's Day, Jane and I paid a visit to the great Arensberg rooms at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and stood for a long while in front of Brancusi's "The Kiss" (1908). If you glance at it, it seems (by this point) a cliche. But that tiredness is of our own making. Stay with it long enough and its revolutionary qualities come back at you. They did for us indeed. I took this photo with my iPhone (the lowest-quality aspect of that otherwise beautiful device), so forgive me.

KWH-TV 2/24 10:30 am (eastern): Robert Coover

I invite you to join experimental novelist Robert Coover and me in a conversation on Tuesday morning, February 24, starting at exactly 10:30 AM (eastern time). We will be at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia, but the session will be available as a live video. Our internet audience will be able to pose questions to Mr. Coover by email or by telephone.

If you would like to watch - and/or participate - please RSVP to this address

whfellow@writing.upenn.edu

Once we've registered you for the event, we'll send you detailed instructions, including the web address for linking to the live video stream.

If you would like to test KWH-TV's streaming video, please click here.

- - -

ABOUT ROBERT COOVER

Robert Coover is an avant-garde novelist, critic and playwright lauded for experimental forms and techniques that mix reality and illusion, frequently creating otherworldly or surreal situations and effects. A leading proponent of hypertext fiction and metafiction, Mr. Coover is known as a true revolutionary in contemporary American literature and language.

Mr. Coover's first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, won the William Faulkner Award in 1966. He is also the recipient of the Brandeis University, American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment of the Arts, Rhode Island Governor's Arts, Pell, and Clifton Fadiman Awards, as well as Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Lannan Foundation, and DAAD fellowships. His latest honor is the Dugannon Foundation's REA award for his lifetime contribution to the short story.

His most recent books are The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors' Cut, Stepmother, and A Child Again. Other works include the collection of short fiction, Pricksongs and Descants, a collection of plays, A Theological Position, such novels as The Public Burning, Spanking the Maid, Gerald's Party, Pinocchio in Venice, John's Wife, Ghost Town and Briar Rose.

the end of books

From Robert Coover "The End of Books" (June 21, 1992, NYT):

As Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry put it in the opening "directions" to their hypertext fiction "Izme Pass," which was published (if "published" is the word) on a disk included in the spring 1991 issue of the magazine Writing on the Edge:

"This is a new kind of fiction, and a new kind of reading. The form of the text is rhythmic, looping on itself in patterns and layers that gradually accrete meaning, just as the passage of time and events does in one's lifetime. Trying the textlinks embedded within the work will bring the narrative together in new configurations, fluid constellations formed by the path of your interest. The difference between reading hyperfiction and reading traditional printed fiction may be the difference between sailing the islands and standing on the dock watching the sea. One is not necessarily better than the other."

Here's the link to the original article.

Folkways liner notes

In 1967, Mark Van Doren made an LP record of his poems - at Folkways. We at PennSound, for a year or so, have had this recording available on our Mark Van Doren page. Just yesterday we added a link to a PDF of the whole 6-page liner notes, a sheaf of stapled 8.5x11 mimeographed pages that were tucked into the LP sleeve--a fairly rare document. None of this would have come about without the kind involvement and permission of Mark's son, Charles Van Doren.

book as sculpture

TypeBound is the name of an exhibit curated by Craig Saper at the University of Central Florida. It consists of books as sculpture from Florida collections, and a number of typewriter poems borrowed from the great concrete & visual poetry collection of Marvin and Ruth Sackner (of Miami). "Two of the book’s most fundamental elements—-its bindings and its type—-are separated and examined for creative possibilities as they are freed of their basic, traditional functions."

Listen to a 5-minute podcast interview with Craig Saper, originally recorded at WUCF-FM or Orlando.

PennSound on facebook

If you use facebook, click on this link and see the PennSound facebook page.

poetics of fairy tales

Tisa Bryant and Rachel Levitsky, at the Writers House, a few hours ago. Tisa read from her critical fiction, with its "poetics of fairytales" and tons of structures borrowed from somewhat randomly watched movies.

HBO dialogue c. 2004

Wild Bill Hickok: You know the sound of thunder, Mrs. Garret?

Alma Garret: Of course.

Wild Bill Hickok: Can you imagine that sound if I asked you to?

Alma Garret: Yes, I can, Mr. Hickok.

Wild Bill Hickok: Your husband and me had this talk, and I told him to head home to avoid a dark result. But I didn't say it in thunder. Ma'am, listen to the thunder.

history of the future of narrative

Robert Coover on the history of the future of narrative - a video recording of a recent lecture: LINK. Coover will be here February 23-24. You can go here at 6:30 PM on 2/23 or at 10:30 AM on 2/24 and watch by live video stream.

pot banger from an early age

Our perception of space depends as much on what we hear as on what we see.--Max Neuhaus

Neuhaus died last Tuesday at 69. He was the creator of site-specific works of sound sculpture. On the "audio and video recordings" page of his web site, you can click on a link and watch a wonderful eight-minute video about his famous piece, Times Square, which is installed under a street grate where Broadway and 7th Avenue converge. Seems to passersby like a steeam hatch, but as you walk over it you hear a deeply resonant and wavery body-piercing drone.

Here's a little bit of Neuhaus on Ubuweb.

The Times obit, facing its apparent responsibility to say something about Neuhaus' childhood, quotes his sister thus: "He was a pot banger from an early age."

describing language

Joseph Kosuth, No Number #6 (On Color, Blue) (1991), neon tubing with argon gas and mercury. In the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art's permanent collection: "I am only describing language, not explaining anything." (neon on wall, circa 1997, displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the original neon is blue) A succint definition of Conceptual art, in "Inquiry into the foundations of the concept 'art', as it has come to mean," given by Joseph Kosuth, requires "a linguistic rather than plastic context."

Lisa New

On Thursday evening, Lisa New returned to Penn to read from her forthcoming memoir, Jacob's Cane: One Family's Journey from the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of Baltimore and London, A Memoir in Five Generations, which is being published by Basic Books in the fall. But it was more than a reading. Lisa left Penn about 10 years ago (been that long?) to join the faculty at Harvard. She had and has lots of ties to Philly, and the room was full of family. And Erin Gautsche (KWH program coordinator) did her magical thing, producing (with help from the students) a fabulous Mediterranean spread for the reception. All in all, a memorably warm evening inside 3805 Locust on a bitterly cold night outside. The Writers House web calendar entry describes the event further, and provides links to the video recording as well as to the audio-only recording (mp3). And I took some photos also--not great in quality but they give you a sense of the spirit of the gathering.

Above at right: Nancy Bentley, Lisa New, and Jim English.

reads good, bad & ugly--all of it

Michael Davidson's positive review of my recent book is being published in CLIO. Here is a link to a PDF copy.

Citation: Davidson, Michael. [review of The Counter-Revolution of the Word]. Clio 38.1 (Fall, 2008): 117-122.

freedom is a light

Linh Dinh snapped this photo yesterday, during a long jaunt around Philadelphia with two visiting Chinese poet-scholars. Zhimin Li gave a reading at KWH the other night as part of the Writers without Borders series.

local TV news covers....advising

Oh it seems to be Archiving Old Media week here. Well, we found another item. This was a local TV news spot on the all-online pre-matriculant advising I was doing in the 90s. Innovative in those days. Not innovative now, but--amazingly--rarely practiced. Huh? Yes, students are admitted to colleges and universities beginning in mid-December but the faculty who will work closely with them don't really interact with them in any meaningful way until September. I can understand why people balk as such an "extra assignment" when the students are random admits, all across the board of interests, passions and talents. But the kids I advise are those who are writers and who are going to be, or in a sense are already, a part of the Writers House community. Start with them early, watch them flourish all the more when they set physical foot on the property. In '99 the local news "discovered" this "story" and did one of their personal-interest angles on it. But you get the gist. Click here and watch the video.

"raging online debate"--yes, and it's about poetry

"Teaching Revolution" 2001-style. That was the topic of a Philadelphia Sunday Inquirer Magazine story by Jim O'Neill, then the higher-ed beat reporter for the Inquirer. Jenny Lesser has kindly prepared a PDF of the article, which is now linked to a page that presents the article's text.

dystopian music

In 1999, several Kelly Writers House regulars (among them Andrew Zitcer and Kristen Gallagher--both of whom are still involved with us in one way or another), created a second radio program out of the Writers House. The first, of course, was and still is "Live at the Writers House," which continues to this day to air monthly on WXPN 88.5 FM. This second show--meant as an experimental alternative--was called "Dystopia." At least several of its shows aired on XPN 88.5, and maybe they all did (Andrew and Kristen can tell me otherwise). Recently we found recordings of all seven Dystopia shows and, with the help of Andrew Zitcer, put them back together. And just today Mark Lindsay did the work of uploading them and linking them to a new KWH Dystopia page: HERE.

the c that precedes the choir

The newest PoemTalk is out now. Episode #14, a discussion of Wallace Stevens' late poem, "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself." Have a listen!

you are free except to be restricted

In 1949, Raymond B. Allen (pictured at left), then president of the University of Washington at Seattle, published an article titled "Communists Should Not Teach in American Colleges." (It appeared in a magazine called Educational Forum in May of that year.)

Allen did not mean that people actively involved in plots to overthrow the American government by violence should be banned from teaching at American colleges and universities. He would have meant it had that been an issue, but it wasn't. No, he meant those whose beliefs are determined (by him or by a panel of administrator and faculty) to be communist should be pulled from the classroom. Since bona fide members of the CPUSA in those Cold War days were not typically open about their membership, this wasn't simply a matter of ascertaining membership. Real communists might not even be formal members. So beliefs (what they did, what they said, whom they met with) could be used to determine such status.

Anyway, surely the most interesting sentence in this essay is this one:

The University's insistence upon academic freedom goes beyond the traditionally held concept that academic freedom can be abridged only by the institution and asserts that members of the faculty must likewise be free from other restraints that may restrict their freedom.

It means that faculty are free in the usual way that academic freedom guarantees but, at the same time, that faculty must be free from "other restraints." Must be. Those other restraints are ideologies that tend to make one unfree in one's thinking. So, having academic freedom, you are not free to engage in a way of thinking that limits your thinking. Of course this was a vague way of referring to communist ideology. A faculty member, Allen thought, could proceed intellectually and pedagogically under any set of principles or ideas, even those--let's say one's Catholicism even if one is a biologist exploring conception--that otherwise limit one's exploration of research topics...any set of principles except this one (communism).

In other words, academic freedom is the granting of freedom but it is also a demand that one must be free from an unfree worldview determined by the university to be such.

My position that Communists are not qualified to be teachers, Allen also wrote, grows out of my belief that freedom has little meaning apart from the integrity of the men and women who enjoy that freedom....The Communist Party, with its concealed aims and objectives, with its clandestine methods and techniques, with its consistent failure to put its full face forward, is a serious reflection upon the integrity of educational institutions that employ its members and upon a whole educational system that has failed to take the Communist issue seriously.... The classroom has been called "the chapel of democracy." As the priests of the temple of education, members of the teaching profession have a sacred duty to remove from their ranks the false and robot prophets of Communism....

Here's to whole article from '49.

The photograph of Allen above at left was printed in the Washington Post on March 27, 1949.

the rest of it's there too

Jon Pareles has gotten some great quotes from Bruce Springsteen for his big piece in today's New York Times. Pareles knows it's big, that his claim is big. The piece is called "The Rock Laureate."

I, for one, accept the claim (happily as well as logically).

Others have seen Springsteen in the Whitman/proletarian Guthrie/folk American tradition (the best writer about Bruce in this mode is David Wyatt in Out of the Sixties--and Greil Marcus gets it too), but I still can't help feeling as a fresh wind in my face the vague faux-rough visionary romanticism of Springsteen's spoken rhetoric. Below are two quotes from Pareles' essay. In the first, the phrase "eight years" obviously refers to the two terms of George Bush. The oracular ("swimming in the current of history") is flattened and made humble really really nicely by "your music is doing the same thing."

The second quote begins unpromisingly with yet another Where were you when Obama was elected? anecdote but then indulges gorgeously, I think, in the vaguest American pronoun referent - the it of liberationist folk spirit. This is the same "it" that Steinbeck uses clumsily at various points in--and at the end of--The Grapes of Wrath. But Henry Miller, when he really got going, used it well. Dreiser, too, in rare upbeat passages. And, at several crucial moments, William Carlos Williams. And early in Kerouac. And Ashbery in several poems about America, most movingly in "The One Thing That Can Save America" (ironic title--but the sentiment about "it" is true). And, in his hyperdemocratic WWII newspaper pieces, Ira Wolfert. And in times of crisis, Eric Severeid (he of Upper Midwest labor-populism), spoken on the air in the endless insistent sentence. And Whitman, often.

At its least interesting, all this takes us merely to a cheap, easy spot where, because of some momentary alliance, Kate Smith meets Woody Guthrie. At its best, though, it's the great provocative American cultural confluence.

"[E]ight years go by, and that’s where you find yourself. You’re in there, you’re swimming in the current of history and your music is doing the same thing.”

"[O]n election night it showed its face, for maybe, probably, one of the first times in my adult life,” he said. “I sat there on the couch, and my jaw dropped, and I went, ‘Oh my God, it exists.’ Not just dreaming it. It exists, it’s there, and if this much of it is there, the rest of it’s there. Let’s go get that. Let’s go get it. Just that is enough to keep you going for the rest of your life. All the songs you wrote are a little truer today than they were a month or two ago.”

Well, this is a circular and probably self-serving final statement. Of course the songs are "truer" now that you're on the inside--you're in and so you can sing them as part of the bona fide (but, alas, temporary) language of the nation. No, the songs being truer now than before is not what's remarkable about Bruce. What's remarkable is his strong antipoetic (and thus very poetic) sense of the big "it," and he enacts this sense out of two great talents simultaneously: first, a resistance to narrowing or clarifying it and an ability to flow fast with it and yet not infuriate listeners; second, his sense that new songs will come from the place where the rest of it is to be found. He's on a roll, no doubt. Listen for some of the rest of it in the new album.

needed: curator with sandwich-board

Have you been following the financial troubles at MOCA? Combination of woes: the endowment has taken a big hit (as all endowments have) in the current recession; major mismanagement from the top; allegedly, boring curatorial choices ("Everyone i know just go to shop at the stores anyways. The shows have been either really good or really bad, but the store is always worth the trip and the hassle to park"); and, the presence already in LA of LACMA, which isn't supposed to cause overlap or redundancy, but perhaps does. The inner workings of this crisis are of course much more complex than I've just now conveyed. I recommend KCRW's "The Politics of Culture" (radio show that is also an audio podcast available on KCRW's web site and through iTunes), which hosted a fascinating discussion on the topic among several long-time LA art people.

Well, yesterday MOCA announced that 20% of the staff will be laid off. And they will cut other operating expenses. It will reduce expenses by $4.4M annually, but when I last understood the math here, I think they were $12M in the red annually even after a pledge of a major endowment gift by Eli Broad.

Here's the L. A. Times story on the lay-offs. One commentator snarks as follows: "Anyway, what I don't understand about the cuts is why they are aiming them at the marketing department. After all, they are the ones who actually put together the programs meant to lure people into the museum, and therefore bring in the money. What they going to do now? Have the prints assistant curator stand at Union Station with a clapboard [sandwich board] around their neck??"

true meaning of giving

Behold! I do not give lectures or a little charity,
When I give I give myself.

- Walt Whitman [source]

alt-poetry, alt-pedagogy

In June '99 I and a hundred or so others (teachers, poets, poet-teachers) gathered at Bard College for a conference on the possible connection between experimental poetry and experimental pedagogy, hosted by Joan Retallack among others.

There must have been about six or seven of us from the Writers House at the conference and on the last morning of the three-day confab (there on the slopes leading down to the eastern side of the Catskills-region Hudson, it did at times feel like summer camp) we presented about the Writers House itself as an alternative learning community focused on poetics.

We promised ourselves we'd do some kind of followup at KWH, and did in early 2001. Joan Retallack came down from Bard, reading some of her own poetry that seemed more relevant to the them (alt-poetry, alt-pedagogy), and then Kerry Sherin, then the KWH Director, described a transition to the next and longer part of the program: a discussion, as a follow-up to Bard, about actual pedagogical issues and practices. There were about forty of us in the room there at the Writers House, in addition to about thirty who were tuning in by live webcast. Louis Cabri, for instance, was in Calgary - and participated by posing some questions.

Just yesterday Jenny Lesser converted the old RealVideo format into audio-only mp3, which of course these days is a much more usable, portable mode.

Here's Kerry Sherin setting up the discussion, by, in part, remembering the Bard conference.

Here's 9 minutes or so on experiential learning.

Here's a discussion of what makes it hard to teach experimental writing.

And here's a link to the whole 2-hour audio mp3, and, for your video fans and users, still, of the Real player, here's a link to the streaming video.

not as good as pro wrestling

From Stanley Fish's ridiculous, broad-brush dismissal of biographical writing (1999):

My criticism of biography does not hold for autobiography. It makes none of the claims made for biography and is therefore not subject to any of the criticisms. You cannot fault the author of an autobiography for failing to be objective, or for substituting his story for the story of his subject.

He is his subject, and his performance, complete with the quirks and blindnesses of his personality, is not a distraction or deviation from the story of his life but an extension of it. Autobiographers cannot lie because anything they say, however mendacious, is the truth about themselves, whether they know it or not. Autobiographers are authentic necessarily and without effort.

Biographers, on the other hand, can only be inauthentic, can only get it wrong, can only lie, can only substitute their own story for the story of their announced subject. (Biographers are all autobiographers, although the pretensions of their enterprise won't allow them to admit it or even see it.)

Biography, in short, is a bad game, and the wonder is that so many are playing it and that so many others are watching it and spending time that might be better spent on more edifying spectacles like politics and professional wrestling.

so it's so, Joe

At the blog Last Exit Joe Milutis gives Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem a positive review. To start, he quotes William Carlos Williams as follows: “You’re not putting sugar on cake. You’re building!”

loopy, almost

As I've noted here before, Tony Green (of New Zealand) makes poetry objects. His latest is called "loopy almost." In a Facebook video (2 minutes in length) posted yesterday, he shows the object, describes it, and reads it/reads off of it. Here's your link to the Facebook video. And here are some other related videos by Green.

what makes a poem a poem

Charles Bernstein once gave a 60-second lecture on what makes a poem a poem. Set your watch, and watch.

McCarthy, the good guy patrolling the neighborhood

This ad begins, "Open up... it's the police!" Terrifying words.

For years, preparing to write my book Counter-revolution of the Word, I spent a lot of time trawling through newspapers and magazines of the 1950s. At one point I found this ad for Republic Steel. Usually nutsy about jotting down precise bibliographic info, I apparently slipped this time, perhaps so elated at having found it, and alas never made a note about date or source. (I think it's from the Saturday Evening Post, but that's a guess.)

Two dark almost noir-ish vertical panels, lots of words (tons--far more than usual even for a full-page ad) in the central panel. Left panel: the neighborhood cop, standing at the suburban-neoGreek front door of the home owned by the frightened couple in bed in the right panel, is knocking loudly in the middle of the night. The husband narrates the middle panel.

You see, they'd listened to a radio show before going to bed - a program about "secret police dragg[ing] a family off to a concentration camp." (Not the Nazis - you can be sure the reference is to the Soviet gulags. Hubby was certain, when he first heard the loud knocking, that they were on their "way to some Siberian salt mine.")

But at the door it was indeed only the friendly night cop, McCarthy. The cop's name is McCarthy. McCarthy was there to save the day, or night: It was only a little easily extinguished wiring fire in the kitchen.

"I couldn't get back to sleep for a couple of hours. Kept thinking suppose it was the secret police! But that was nonsense. Here in American the police help us... not hound us like they do in countries where folks have forgotten what the word 'Freedom' means." Then, new paragraph: "Ah-h-h....Freedom! Pick your own church [oh you have a choice of churches; I suppose synagogues and mosques are beyond the choices freedom bestows, but never mind...], your own newspaper, your own candidates. Pay your taxes but do what you want with the rest.... Loaf or pick out a good job like I have with Republic. Help produce steel or autos or tanks...or work in a store or a bank, as you please." And so on.... [We have the option to "loaf"! If only I'd known...]

And then finally--almost too late--comes the pitch for Republic Steel. America is strong and needs strength. Republic makes strong steel. America is freedom and Republic is like America in its strength so it's freedom too.

Thank God for McCarthy! He woke us up to the risks of losing our freedoms!

After all, that little fire in the kitchen could have spread. Were it not for McCarthy's frightening, fascistic middle-of-the-night intrusion into your private suburban life, it might have consumed the Whole House. Be thankful for that 2 AM banging at the door. Be thankful for McCarthy's vigilance. Someone has to watch out while we're all asleep.

your daily Al

Get your daily Al daily. (The link to my entry on conservatives' sense of conservatism as poetry is here, an entry from the other day.)