Hold your breath/float down to the seabed/and we’ll see how long we can sleep…
Our real first gay president
The new issue of Newsweek features a cover photo of President Obama topped by a rainbow-colored halo and captioned “The First Gay President.” The halo and caption strike me as cheap sensationalism. I realize airport travelers look at a magazine for 2.2 seconds before moving on to the next one. I grant that this cover will probably get Newsweek a 4.4 second glance. I also understand that Newsweek is desperate for sales. Nevertheless, I doubt that the Newsweek of old, before it was sold for a dollar, would have pandered as shallowly.
The caption is a superficial way to characterize an important development of thought that the president — along with the country — has been making over recent years. It is also entirely wrong. Like the mini-furor a couple of months back about the claim that Richard Nixon was our first gay president, the story simply ignores that the U.S. already had a gay president more than a century ago.
There can be no doubt that James Buchanan was gay, before, during and after his four years in the White House. Moreover, the nation knew it, too — he was not far into the closet.
Today, I know no historian who has studied the matter and thinks Buchanan was heterosexual. Fifteen years ago, historian John Howard, author of “Men Like That,” a pioneering study of queer culture in Mississippi, shared with me the key documents, including Buchanan’s May 13, 1844, letter to a Mrs. Roosevelt. Describing his deteriorating social life after his great love, William Rufus King, senator from Alabama, had moved to Paris to become our ambassador to France, Buchanan wrote:
I am now “solitary and alone,” having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.
(via heatburg)
I found myself reading Chuck Bukowski the other day.
I call him Chuck not out of familiarity,
seeing as how he died when I was a boy, but
my oldest brother is named Charles… locked away in prison
for 30 years, I somehow still use the familiar
the comfortable and familial
Chuck,
though I haven’t seen him since I was a boy.
Too often, and by that I mean
too often,
I wonder about the man I have become
and the man my brother has yet to be — Funny
how the words of a dead word-drunk poet
seem to bridge the spaces between head and heart,
your shore
and my shore
more easily than the sad-song chicken scratch
of blood behind bars,
of hard blue eyes beneath tattooed
tear-stained flesh…
Fam’ly. Fam’ly. Fam’ly.
It holds a strange shape when repeated by the mouth
more times than one would deem necessary… a word repeated
so oft
as to become a meaningless thing — sorry, forgive. Sorry, forgive. Sorry,
forgive — the dissonant, the discognizant.
So often, which is to say
too often.
New Alanis is always an exceptionally special thing in my music galaxy… I’ve been a fan for quite some time now (16 years, roughly). Her lyrics have always had a poignancy; a ‘to the core’ sort of thing. No matter how complex the emotion, she seems to always be able to express it in this open, earnest manner that goes beyond the realm of self-indulgent and into the universal… Yet again, she nails it. So, so excited for this new album out on August 28.
To thy own self, be true… to my core self, be true.
Joe Thornton brings to life proteins that have been extinct for hundreds of millions of years, rebutting intelligent design with his findings.
Fucking Nuisance <3
Gray river song
come quietly with the wind — mid-afternoon sun shares
in this, my companionable silence
paying no mind.
I have come to know your love
as the quiet, lonely places inside,
which is to say it’s something comfortable
and easily worn over this dull frame.
How I sing of my own foolishnesses
like any other moth caught in a jar,
a frantic fluttering
and then that settling gaze — always,
always this business with the flame…
Like those isolated places I love so well,
spaces inside not bothered with conversation,
I find myself sinking into the unspoken
as an unbroken river flows, slows
but drifts always on.
…and then collapse into a field of wildflowers, singing a song of the wind in my heart; the rhythm in my head.
Usually, though, I’d rather get lost within the worlds of T. S. Eliot in some pointless suburban cafe
listening to the traffic breathe outside as the March humidity scrawls its name
across my any-given Monday,
lazy, somber, mundane.
So… I keep seeing reports from a lot of news media outlets proclaiming the wonder of the American economy as the DOW once again hits the 13,000+ mark. The last time the stock market was putting up numbers this large was before the financial market collapsed, when the figure was above 14,000. After the stock crash, the media seemed to work itself into an indignant swarm of outrage. The notion of the economy soaring to such heights was an unsustainable coke-high that everyone was aware of, but no one seemed capable of calling it out for what it was at the time: A giant fucking scam. When everything came tumbling down on top of the Wall Streeters, there was this groundswell of coverage from the media; it became en vogue to run very intelligent reports on exactly how we were scammed and by whom. ‘Never Again’, People seemed to say. ‘Never Again’, Media trumpeted.
And yet here we are again. The stock market has returned to bafflingly-high numbers, yet there seems to be calls for celebration. The last time I checked, a lot of people in this country are still suffering from a lack of funds, a statistic that has remained frighteningly unchanged. But the stock market has returned! What joy for the rest of us! What light through yonder window breaks! Once again, unimaginable numbers of success for Big Business are being held up as a sign of the health of the American economy and somehow, again, no one in the media seems to be asking, “Why?”
Why are the numbers so high at a time when the rest of us out here in Libertyland are having to skimp and scrape every shred of cash in order to decide between which bill to pay and which to let roll over into the next month? What can I get away with paying and not paying this week? Do I pay on my student loans (for a degree that sees me jobless), or do I pay for power? Money for gas and telephone, which is the difference between job hunting and not job hunting, comes from skipping breakfast and lunch for a few days… But hey! The stock market is doing splendidly, and that should give pause for celebration, right?
Somehow, I can’t find it within me to throw confetti. Too many people, for far too long, are suffering in the grande ol’ U. S. of A… I call bullshit on this stock market rally. I call bullshit on unreasonably high numbers of success in an economy that makes so little, and benefits so few. I can’t help but feel like we’re being scammed all over again by the same freeze-dried, re-packaged toxins that landed us in this mess to begin with.
The Great Depression? Welcome to The Great Derision.
- S.
Lost bridges washed away
come the flood, come the day;
old friends with smiles familiar
have flown t’distant shores; faces recorded in memory.
Alone on a beach with toes that sink
beneath the sublimating sand
like mangrove roots, I take hold and lean into the night — that gentle lover
of fools like me
who set too much store by the ticking of a watch,
the quickening of a heart; a finger crook’d, tobacco-stained
It’s there, a story in the eyes
beneath gilst’ning skein, echoes of a songbird
too long in suffering set free — another layer
added to This person behind my eyes (the softest of limestone),
to be recited on some future day when no one’s around to hear
but distant ghosts, numbered like all other grains of sand
Which is to say,
“Too many, and I haven’t yet had my coffee today.”
