One more entry for National Poetry Month

Musee des Beaux Arts W.H. Auden About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well, they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 1940

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus Pieter Breughel c. 1558; Oil on canvas, mounted on wood, 73.5 x 112 cm; Musees royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels

“It’s not time to panic.”

Once again the government has told me it’s not time to panic. It’s the same thing it told me when the terrorists attacked, when the banks all failed and now that a swine flu pandemic is threatened. In fact it’s the only thing that both the Bush administration and the Obama administration seem to agree on.

It makes me nervous. I’m afraid the time to really panic will come and no one will tell me. I’m also worried that I haven’t been given any instructions what to do when I’m supposed to panic. My wife thinks panic means a run on the banks—just like It’s a Wonderful Life. I sort of think it means that you need to go buy water, canned goods and a generator—just like the turning of the millennium. We all panicked then and I think it brought us together. Of course I already have enough canned goods to feed us for a year. I think it’s hereditary. When my grandmother died, we found enough canned goods set aside for another decade. If you have enough canned goods, then you never need to worry about panicking.

In Mexico the government cancelled all the bullfights. That’s a satisfactory act of panic, but I don’t think it would work as well here. Although cancelling something you don’t have certainly smacks of panic.

Anyway, since it isn’t time to panic yet, I just went into work this morning like always. Otherwise the swine flu wins—or something like that.

Who Shall Bell the Cat?, Part III

[The first two parts of this discussion appeared on March 13 and 14, if you are interested in going back to read them.]

For the past month, since I wrote the first two parts of this series, I’ve been thinking about where Dallas needs to build its permanent supportive housing. This isn’t a new topic for me—we’ve been working for more than four years on building permanent supportive housing. No matter how long I think about it, I come to the same conclusions. The only places that work are near downtown, or near excellent mass transportation.

We’ve looked at permanent supportive housing projects all over the country, and have yet to find a successful project that isn’t located in one of these two ways. There is a story about a man in Tennessee (I think Memphis, but I’ve heard different cities so the story may be apocryphal) that tried to solve homelessness on his own. He owned a large tract of land about a dozen miles outside of the city, so he built a tent city, installed porta-toilets, a mess tent and arranged to have food brought in. Then he invited homeless people to move there. Only a few came, and the people that did soon left. They were isolated, without transportation and had no reasonable way to access the services they needed.

Saying either near downtown or near excellent mass transportation doesn’t even begin to pick a specific location. It only rules out most locations in most of the City of Dallas. Now we need to think about not only what both of terms mean—what is “near” and what is “excellent”, but about neighborhood influences, political realities and, most importantly, cost and financing

Wallace Stevens: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, Part II

Continuing, in honor of National Poetry Month, our discussion of Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, I’d like to take a few moments with my other favorite stanza, the last one, Stanza XIII:

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat In
the cedar-limbs.

This verse comes to my mind often whenever I have time that I just have to pass. A rainy Saturday when I can’t work in the yard, a time when I’m sick and feel bad, or a boring meeting that I have to endure all bring it to my mind (although since I’ve moved to Texas, I often remember it as “It was raining; And it was going to rain”).

The bird in the tree, protected beneath the cedar limbs is the image of patient endurance. It can’t move until the snow stops, and the snow shows no signs of stopping. I think of it hunkered down within itself at the mercy of outside events over which it has no control. I find in this image the proper attitude (at least for me) to take in the face of unpleasant times of waiting.

There are simply times in life when you can’t do anything but wait. If you have to wait, then I think it is best to do so as unemotionally as possible. Frustration or anger won’t accomplish anything. Go inside yourself and wait for the time to pass.

Wallace Stevens: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, Part I

Wallace Stevens has always been one of my favorite poets. Partly for his work, but partly for his life as well. He worked most of his life, full-time, at an insurance company after graduating from law school. I like the idea that he didn’t feel that he needed to live as a poet (whatever that might mean) to write poetry.

So, in continuation of the celebration of National Poetry Month, I wanted to talk a little about his iconic poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. The first thing you notice about the poem is its modernity. Like most modern poetry it’s not so much about the thing itself as about how we think and talk and look at the thing—here a blackbird.

In keeping with the title, the poem has thirteen stanzas, each containing one image of a blackbird, each distinct, almost Japanese in the sparseness of its aesthetics. One of my favorite is Stanza II.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

The image is extremely spare. Only fourteen words are used and only the last one, blackbirds, has more than one syllable. The idea, however, is as complex as the language simple. I think we often don’t admit the extent to which all of us hold different and contradictory opinions at the same time. We feel more than one way about the same event or idea. Pollsters take advantage of this fact by asking a question that taps directly into one of those opinions without giving rise to the opposing impulse—all kinds of studies have shown that the answer may depend on how you ask the question. I find the most interesting ideas are in exploring those contradictions.

I know that on some issues that I have gone years without resolving the issue in my own mind. The poet John Keats named this idea “negative capability”—the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time. If we want to learn about ourselves, then I think we need to make those contradictions manifest so we can explore why we believe as we do and whether the contradictions in our mind can be resolved.

In any event, Wallace Stevens gives us an image to stand for our contradictory mind: a tree with three blackbirds. The tree is one thing and the birds are within its space. But the birds are distinct, individual and capable of taking off in their own direction at any moment. Our opinions exist similarly within our mind.

Read FiveThirtyEight

I read two blogs every day—there are a bunch I read most days, some more that I read occasionally, but only two that I never miss. One is Larry James’ Urban Daily (http://larryjamesurbandaily.blogspot.com/). I read it for two reasons. First, it’s good and it is entirely specific to the world I live in. Second, he’s the chairman of my board of directors, which means he’s as close to a boss as I’ve got. I don’t know about you, but if your boss is kind enough to let you know every day (and Larry posts every day) what he is thinking about, then you need to take advantageous of that opportunity to look at his or her thoughts.

(BTW: I find more and more that when someone comes to interview for a job or even just to volunteer, that they are likely to have read not only our website but my blog as well. The first time that happened, it was a little uncanny. The person seemed to know more about me than was reasonable. But all of us better take notice in these difficult times. The bar on research before a job interview has gone up again. Not much is more important than doing your homework.)

The second blog I read every day is Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight (http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/). Nate Silver writes a political blog from a leftist perspective, but so do lots of people. I read Nate Silver because he teaches us how to think in a new way. He started analyzing baseball statistics and became, by almost everyone’s opinion, the best at it. Now he’s switched to political analysis but retained his emphasize on rigorous compilation of information and sophisticated statistical analysis of that information. His predictions in the last election cycle were uncanny—so uncanny that he now is treated with awe in some circles.

One example: Nate Silver predicted that Al Franken would receive the most votes for Senator in Minnesota once all the votes were counted—at the time Norm Coleman was leading on election night. Time and time again Nate Silver shows that the obvious is wrong and that the facts are there to determine what will happen if we just put aside our biases and look.

A great example is his blog from last Monday (April 22, 2009), “When does close become too-close-to-call?” If you think you can’t determine who won a close election at some point, because there will always some uncertainty, then you’re right, according to Nate Silver. But what he does is lead you through an analysis of error rates and size of voting leads to let you know exactly when an election becomes too close to call and with what margin of certainty you can know the winner.

After reading Nate Silver, I always feel lazy. I know if I just thought harder about things and put my prejudices aside, that I could make better decisions. Nate shows me how.

Registration Closes for Re:Vision Dallas

I’m excited. I think we will get designs to build at the southern edge of downtown just as brilliant, if different in purpose and kind, as the designs at the northern edge of downtown (like the Winspear Opera House) that are making Dallas a real center of modern architecture.

Central Dallas CDC’s Office, Part I

Buyer’s Remorse?

Am I pleased with what I got for my federal tax dollars? Yes and no. (See yesterday’s blog for a chart of where the federal government spent my family’s income tax last year). On the whole, I think the priorities are about right. We need a sufficient military and we need to take care of our poorest citizens—and since we’ve already borrowed the money, then I guess we have no choice but to pay the interest on it.

On the other hand, I don’t doubt that a fair portion of money is wasted. I’ve worked at enough company’s to have a pretty good idea how efficient we are in general, and I’m pretty sure government isn’t any better than the private sector when it comes to efficiency. I am afraid we’re limited by the human condition as to how efficient we can get. I doubt much is possible to improve.

There are some costs that just seem too high to me, and a few that seem too low. Defense takes over one third of my tax money. Couldn’t we try to get that number down a little—maybe to twenty-five percent of the total. That would open up money for a number of other areas. I don’t have a problem with the amount spent on welfare benefits (you’ve got to take into consideration where I work), but at some point I’d like to look carefully at just where it’s going.

The amount spent on Medicaid and SCHIP drives me crazy though. Our whole medical system costs twice as much as it ought to, and we don’t get the benefits of good public health that we should. That affects productivity and the economy, so we lose twice.

I think we should double what we spend on Veterans—easily affordable if we cut the Defense budget a bit. I’d like to see more spending on foreign aid, if we could figure out how to do it without too much waste and corruption. I’d like to see more spent on energy (let’s find a way not to have to buy so much foreign oil). If NASA would do something cool, like send a man to Mars, then I’d be willing to pay more there. I would easily being willing to double what we spend on the Interior Department—I love the National Parks.

A friend suggested that we ought to be allowed to designate where our taxes are spent. I don’t know that that is a practical idea, but it would be interesting to see where people would put their money if they had a direct choice, rather than the indirect one of electing representatives.

What my income taxes bought

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