This is China

I've been teaching English in China and not really writing about teaching English in China. So here goes.

I did pen a poem in my first week here.

In China students take tests that determine their progress. After seven or eight years of daily English lessons one might think they could speak English. Such is not the case. They are able to pass tests, yes, but tests of the reading and writing kind. Not oral English.

The tests they take are standard tests, given by Chinese teachers, teachers who can't and needn't speak English. This, more or less, is the way it's done for a hundred million Chinese(but who's counting).

The Chinese have naturally recognized this and remedy it through oral English lessons administered by college level courses and private English language schools.

All this presents a bifurcated challenge to the would be teacher of English: teach to the test or teach oral English to the finished product. That is, if you want to get a job. Teaching to the test would seem to replicate a broken system that favors rote memorization and a general dullness to, if not all language, at least English. The kids are tired, their eyes glazed over, not enthused. Teaching oral English, at the college or private school, at least finds some motivated students. But now you have the prospect of an 18 or 22 year old embarrassed to stumble in putting together a simple sentence. His immediate concern is, as in taking a test, not to make a mistake, and when he does, it's akin to losing face.

I joke that I'm out to change all this, one Chinese at a time. We'll see.

Death in the Digital World

Missing You

In the listing from page two of the Times:

the departure time of the ocean liner.

When you're there, it's so huge,

it doesn't seem to move. Still,

soon the throwing of kisses

and more civil gestures ends.

Greeted now by the mists,

just over the horizon.

So, I have a brother who has a daughter who teaches English in Korea. She's just out of college, actually starting her second year of teaching now! They're very close, and I know he misses her. When I was over at his house last, they had pictures from her vacation with girlfriends on the computer monitor. "When are these from?" I asked.

"Oh. Today."

"Oh."

This column isn't about some old guy not understanding computers. It's about missing someone. Well, it turns out they have a regular "date" each Friday evening to talk for 20-30 minutes on Skype. Plus, she has a blog to which she contributes each week. That and emails and the rather old fashioned telephone! Hell, they're more connected than when they lived together. Perhaps a little too connected. No, I'm just kidding!

So, what's say, shall we race ahead and imagine a digital file on each of us, viewable by our "followers" after our death. A virtual after-life. Would that not be like some elongated wake, a time for friends and family to get together at www.yourname/eternalhost.com. Although it's a little like the family that couldn't afford to buy Daddy a nice suit for his funeral, so they rented one. . . I'm sure there will be something like it.

Like a lot of places, the free version would have just the basics: mug shots, important dates, posed photos; the 29.95/mo. version gets you video from the trip to Tahoe, his living will and goodbyes to the children, drunken attempts at humor. Very novelistic. Keep it real, right?

I had an idea for this treatment, but in the newspaper version. Called Truebituary, it never got to its literary feet. It only reported the truth, how much money he owed and to whom; why nobody liked him; the many employers who gave him a chance, only to throw up their hands; short remarks from his children.

Anyway, in my version, these bad guys, who knew they were bad guys, loved Truebituary and paid big money to have theirs written in such a style. Imagine.

Perhaps it was a good death. My newspaper treatment, I mean.

The problem of Pain and the SF Giants.

I never understood why people complained about pain being incongruous with a loving God. Pain's a great organizer. What's a priority? Let pain decide. What's worth dying for? Pain will re-direct you.

Pain and writing are close cousins. I'm reminded of the guy who had a bad case of the flu. His friend empathized. Later, that friend got the same flu. The first guy, when told about it, said "Good." He meant now he could truly understand what he had gone through.

So writing is like talking about that flu. It's probably best if you really had an especially virulent case and that you took notes. Readers will instantly sympathize.

But this thing I choose to call a column, it's not about God or writing. It's about a particular strain of a pathogen born from frustration, more like a mental health affliction than like, say, full blown AIDS. The San Francisco Giants were have supposed to have exorcised their demons by winning the World Series last year. Finally, I thought, they may go in peace.

But the devil wears orange and black. Yes, they are in first place. Yes, they have the best pitching in baseball. But their offense is anemic, the worst. Their division, NL West, affords them some time yet to devise a solution while prolonging the agony of one run losses and even one run wins. A team should have one run games sprinkled in amongst 8-3 and 7-1 scores, games where both the fans and the players can take a breath.

In the SF Chronicle today one fan compared it to that scene in The Deer Hunter where the guy keeps putting a loaded gun, one chamber out of five, to his head and pulls the trigger. Anyway, it's like losing 10-1 allows one to relax, say something philosophical like, "Tomorrow's another day." That's healthy, isn't it? The Giants don't grant you that health plan.

So count your blessings? Say a prayer? Alright. Dear God, Help Misters Sabean and Bochy to do the right thing. I know they're trying. Show them the way to get a runner on third with one out to score, say, 50% of the time. That alone would bring peace to my heart. Trading for a power hitter or two would bring joy(I think Konerko is available). And Lord, in your infinite wisdom, could you take Pat Burrell out of the line-up? That would be love, the greatest of these gifts.

I have accepted losing as part of the game. Hitting, even at its best, is an exercise in failure. But the Giants . . . I can't stand their misery. Take away their pain. Support their pitchers. Give a parched throat a drink of water. Amen.

Computers: here to stay or just a passing fad?

Before you go betting the farm, the ranch and whatever else you've mortgaged on "computers are here to stay", think back about a hundred years. No computers, no cars, no facebook. But we had horses!

Everyone rode horses. Horses worked the farm. Whatever was around mechanical was measured in horsepower. I think some still do refer to it: "you know what this baby has under the hood?"

The calvary. Camptown races 10 miles long. It was a man and his horse, not his hand held device.

That era is, yes, gone. And it won't be another hundred years, nor fifty, before people will look back, saying to no one in particular, "Remember when everyone had a computer?"

In which case, we are left with having to define what a fad is. Less than fifty, thirty, twentyfive?
I think it depends on the context. In geologic time, a fad would be awesome in its length. In terms of our species, a fad could be a few thousand years. In terms of . . . I think you get the point. I mean, I'm just trying to adjust the spread to balance the action.

What's seems obvious though is that people can oooh computers without knowing what in hell they are ooohing about. It's hard to say what's going on exactly, harder yet to say what will be going on in a faddishly short time. If computers continue to grow smaller, so small that we don't notice them, then I think we could say they have gone away. Your guess may be as good as mine on that. So, are computers here to stay?

Back from Vacation!

Wonderful time was had by all.

Well, I see we are still in the Middle East. But now we're in five countries, authorized, sort of, to be in three. I consider that a bargain, five for the price of three. For those keeping score: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan and Yemen. We won't touch Syria, but otherwise it's like "Clean up on aisle seven."

I try to find a poem that fits the current political or cultural concern but am thinking maybe it would be easier to find a scene in our world that matches a poem. In other words, start with a poem and search the world for some counterpart. It's not that difficult. Plus I just got back from vacation, rife with developed ideas.

I just can't recall any. But wait, wait. OK

Tony Hoagland writes in a manner I can understand and enjoy; yet further readings yield more. This poem turns on itself, which, I think, is natural. I wish we, as a nation, would turn on ourselves, ask ourselves what in the hell we are doing. I can't help thinking a lot of us a lot of the time are numb. Perhaps we're getting less numb.

A long poem, but middle readers should handle it fine.

Still Life

"I'm sorry,"

the novelist apologized—
"my story has a beginning,
middle and an end." Then she commenced
her explication of

the tapestry hanging on the wall.
Usually these large, time-faded rectangles
of textile
woven in the fourteenth century
depict some martial glory; two armies
bivouacked on a plain
beneath the fluttering pennants of their lords;
knights galloping on horseback, a sky
crisscrossed by arrows.

Or sometimes, a damsel and her maids are
picking flowers in a glen
while from the left, the fiend
disguised as an old peddler
approaches on a mule—

But in this case, a construction site
is what we get—
giant yellow bulldozers
and dirty trucks
arrayed around a squared-off hole
of scraped-out, reddish dirt—

Down in the pit, the foreman
is shouting into a shoe-box sized, old-fashioned
telephone—
He's telling the crane operator
to dump the thick grey porridge of wet cement
from the mixer
into a long chute
for the foundation—
It's a cool tapestry,
because you can see such detail;
the lines around the boss-man's eyes
and the half-crushed packet

of cigarettes in his front shirt pocket
that marks him as a proletariat
of another era.
A sort of young guy
considering the responsibility he has,
yet not too old
to take pleasure in the work,

and he likes this part,
where the grey oatmeal of the pour
gushes clumsily from the rough
gutter of the pipe
into the maze of
wooden troughs and molds—

As in a scene from Moby Dick,
the men, armed with poles and spades, are staged
around each trench and ditch
to herd the concrete into place
before it sets—
That's why this part is called "The Push"—

and one feels the beauty of these guys
engrossed in the alert companionship
of work
—laughing, cursing, joking in the sun—

I like this tapestry—
It's not that I know these men, or
know how to run one of these great blue
smokestack-belching tanks.
It's not that something bad is going
to happen
to teach us all a lesson. There is
no "behind" or "underneath"—

But in the background
your eye is drawn to
an iron ladder fastened to a wall,
which is strange until you see, high up
the narrow metal door it leads to,
and now I can explain

the anxiety I feel about
the time it took to get here—a shame
about the dreaminess I have indulged
throughout my life
that caused me to forget just what was happening—

Behind me in the distance
I can hear some people
who used to be my friends
saying something about the
problem of language in our time

but I don't care. For me
the story is
the feeling of the rungs, one by one,
pushing up into the arches of my feet,
the chilled bars of metal in my hands,
the dusty smell of morning
turning into afternoon,—

as I climb to see just what the world
has brought me to.

Online and Hyperbolic

Some things get exaggerated to get noticed. I like exaggeration, the grosser the better. The grossest, that infant of opinion, if not infantile, is the list. To wit, here are the Top Three Comments about the Internet. #1 It is the marketplace not of information but rather attention. Eighty million websites and what shall we see? Interested in #2 and #3? Of course you are.

I like such lists. They draw my attention. Lists can be poems, a sort of category easily accessed by beginners. Like list the colors of the things you love. The black and white of words on a page. The green confident fairway. And so on.

I searched for a William Stafford list poem, unsuccessfully. No matter. It's been raining here, a few miles from one of Stafford's more famous efforts.


"undisguised rhetorical tricks we might prefer cloaked with artifice" doesn't apply to Stafford, necessarily.


Traveling Through The Dark


Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

Things that come in Opposites

I have asked once and again to all and no one in particular, what are we to do? I mean, what is your vision for America, in these last days of the Bush presidency? I stumble with words that lead in a circle, i.e. that don't get anwhere. I pray for a vision. As an appetizer for such, I give you this link http://www.politico.com/arena/bio/david_biespiel.html. Here David gives his vision for Christmastime in the age of fear and retribution. "Despite our many disagreements, the dog still needs his walk . . ." It's concrete. It specifies an action. It exhorts. It gets you out of your head.

What else? That compassionate communication can replace the felt duty to punish! For my own daily offering of a poem, here's one by Robert Frost, always a delight, and with rhymes for those that thought them lost. May your vision before the New Year come!


To a Thinker

The last step taken found your heft
Decidedly upon the left.
One more would throw you on the right.
Another still——you see your plight.
You call this thinking, but it's walking.
Not even that, it's only rocking,
Or weaving like a stabled horse:
From force to matter and back to force,
From form to content and back to form,
From norm to crazy and back to norm,
From bound to free and back to bound,
From sound to sense and back to sound.
So back and forth. It almost scares
A man the way things come in pairs.
Just now you're off democracy
(With a polite regret to be),
And leaning on dictatorship;
But if you will accept the tip,
In less than no time, tongue and pen,
You'll be a democrat again.
A reasoner and good as such,
Don't let it bother you too much
If it makes you look helpless please
And a temptation to the tease.
Suppose you've not direction in you,
I don't see but you must continue
O use the gift you do possess,
And sway with reason more or less.
I own I never really warmed
To the reformer or reformed.
And yet conversion has its place
Not halfway down the scale of grace.
So if you find you must repent
From side to side in argument,
At least don't use your mind too hard,
But trust my instinct——I'm a bard.