Magazine
In a new series, As It Ought To Be will be providing semimonthly updates on different topics ranging from literature to food policies. This week provided us with a number of interesting interviews with various food experts.
− Interviews –
DOROTHY VISITS THE CYCLONE IN THE CONVALESCENCE HOME FOR NATURAL DISASTERS
by Amorak Huey
“The cyclone had set the house down
very gently – for a cyclone – in the midst
of a country of marvelous beauty.”
– L. Frank Baum
I know you seek scarlet-toed memories,
small dogs, doorbell songs, but my stories
these days happen outside my apartment window:
rock quarry sparks & flares all night,
I watch dusk-smeared men holding hands,
if there’s no wind I hear them singing.
Our lives are littered with what we do not say,
unkempt promises. Do you ever
think things should have been different READ MORE
Last month, I posted an inside view of the American corrections system by Mark Unger. Today, I examine another aspect of our criminal justice system—the death penalty—with a preview of the documentary, No Tomorrow. The film premieres on PBS this Friday, March 25.
Think of the issues you’re most passionate about. If you’re reading this blog, they might include universal health care, our social safety net, climate change, civil rights, feminism, reproductive rights, gay marriage, war, nuclear proliferation, or capital punishment.
Now imagine that someone uses two years of your most intensive, committed work to argue, eloquently and effectively, against that issue.
That’s what happened to filmmakers Roger Weisberg and Vanessa Roth, veteran documentarians whose films air regularly on PBS. Their work has won numerous awards, including two Oscar nominations for Weisberg and one Oscar win for Roth. (Full disclosure: Weisberg is a long-time family friend.) READ MORE
Part 2 (click here for Part 1 of “Size Matters,” or visit the 3/14/11 issue of AIOTB)
I hobbled toward my bike, fishing the keys out of my jacket pocket. One look at the hard saddle and I knew that I was in for one hell of a ride. I gingerly cranked the ignition lever, cringing in pain and seriously considering pulling off my tight jeans despite the cold. The ride into Athens was going to be a journey straight into the Beelzebub’s fiery inferno. Maybe the winter wind chill factor would relieve my strained boys, kind of like putting them on ice. After a few excruciating cranks, my pecker almost exploding in agony, my motorcycle started doing its classic boxer jiggle back and forth. I clambered on board, horror sketched on my pasty face. I was surely going to rupture something down there. The police report would read something like: “Anemic looking man found next to a gigantic detached penis in gruesome highway motorcycle accident. Witnesses report that the penis was the apparent driver of the cycle.” My Ramburglar was beginning to feel larger than the rest of me. I was now officially becoming an appendage to my penis, rather than the other way around. Was I the monkey on my penis’ back? READ MORE
from PHANTOM HOUR
by James Meetze
I want to be ferried from this world
to whatever beyond.
I will not pay the ferryman’s tax.
I want a tether to this life’s treasures,
to remember each name
and address, each ingot of gold worn on the finger.
This is not abstract thought.
A thing is or it isn’t.
A thing works or it doesn’t and if that is the case,
then it is of no use to me.
Man lets loose his complaint,
dissent among the unwashed ranks.
No bird in the bush,
no books in the bag, but what worthless words
these are when vapor.
I complain that memory squandered is worse
than memory lost.
What can one hold in empty hands?
There comes a demonstrative need to articulate
every significant totem,
then articulate the surprise in discovering totem’s existence.
I want to drink from the River Lethe.
I am waiting to cross.
I am thirsty. READ MORE
by Robert Archambeau
Assaults on collective bargaining, a proposal to eliminate child labor laws, a tax structure that favors the wealthiest of the wealthy, no financial gain for workers despite huge increases in per-worker productivity, a tax-funded bailout for the financial speculators who all-but-destroyed the American economy, a law allowing corporations to anonymously give unlimited amounts of money to politicians, increasing employment insecurity, a jobless “recovery,” and a billionaire-funded scheme to pit the public-sector middle class against the private-sector middle class so as to reduce both sectors to a lowest-common-denominator of economic insecurity. Looking at all this from across the Atlantic, a German acquaintance of mine recently noted “if this happened in Germany, cars would be burning in the streets.” Why, he wondered, were working and middle class Americans so docile in the face of this aggression by Wall Street and its paid-for politicians in both major parties? Why were the protests in Wisconsin an anomaly, rather than part of a nation-wide outcry against the persistent assaults on the vast majority of the population by the plutocratic few? READ MORE
Part 1
The pain started sometime around noon, a little before our 45-minute lunch break. The slight tingling I’d been feeling in my stomach suddenly became an intense and nauseating throbbing in the groin area. It felt as if a vindictive Darth Vader was reaching down my throat with his arm, slapping my stomach out of the way for good measure and then grabbing my boys with an iron fist, trying to squeeze the life out of them. I stagger-sat on one of the suicide-car pillars in front of the El Venizelos Airport main terminal for some relief but sprang quickly to my feet. Sitting only made matters worse. I could not shake the intense pain or my increasing distress. Cold sweat trickled down my back and I swallowed stale spit. READ MORE
ONE GOOD THING ABOUT YOU IS YOU’RE ALWAYS LOOKING FOR LIGHT REFRACTION
for Ryan Joseph
by K. Holden Pumphrey
1
Where I grew up, in thunderstorms
everyone comes in from the rain out of breath and says
Oh my God it’s like a WAR out there!
People in Chicago get prideful about surviving the weather
It’s fun, because you still feel like you survived.
Which is a good feeling to have.
You won’t remember this, because it was a dream,
but we descended from the bus
in some French-colonized place
and I didn’t know you
but I think we’d both given out some kind of war cry that day.
We cross the street together
as if we knew ourselves. READ MORE
an interview by Jason Tucker
An associate professor of writing at Ithaca College, Tom Kerr began working with Steve Champion while teaching an undergraduate writing course. The idea was to get college students to engage with people and worlds beyond their own. Naturally, this happened to Tom as well, forging an unlikely friendship and giving personal depth to otherwise abstract political philosophy. After much work and much negotiating of the complex ethics of such a project, the two have shaped Champion’s story into the memoir Dead to Deliverance. READ MORE
wflyby Andrew Hudgins
Half awake, I was imagining
a friend’s young lover, her ash blonde hair, the smooth
taut skin of twenty. I imagined her
short legs and dimpled knees. The door scraped open,
but eyes closed, I saw nothing. The mattress sagged.
She laid her head on my chest, and murmured love
against my throat, almost humming, approaching song,
so palpable I could hold her only chastely,
if this was chaste. I couldn’t move my hand
even to caress her freckled shoulder.
So this is how imagination works, I thought,
sadly. And when at last she spoke,
she spoke with the amused voice of my wife,
my wife who was at work but also here,
pleased at the confusion she was causing.
This is a lesson about flesh, isn’t it?
I asked. Blowfly, she whispered on my throat
as we made tense, pensive love. Blowfly, blowfly. READ MORE
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