From the archives

Click here: THE INFAMOUS DROPPED DRAWERS by Red Emma

Busy Doing Nothing

This ditty was featured in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (1949) and Rebel Girl presents it here per the special request from a longtime IVC denizen.  No word about which sector of the college inspired this request. You'll have to figure it out yourself.

Enjoy!



Yes, that's Der Bingle.

*

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "what world is this that makes our lives sufficient even as the horizon’s rope is about to snap"

     Khaled Mattawa 's book, Amorisco, features a long poem, “East of Carthage: An Idyll.”  Mattawa was born in Libya and has spent much of his adult life living in the United States.
     Here's the opening.

EAST OF CARTHAGE: AN IDYLL

1.
Look here, Marcus Aurelius, we’ve come to see
your temple, deluded the guards, crawled through a hole
in the fence. Why your descendent, my guide and friend
has opted for secrecy, I don’t know. But I do know
what to call the Africans, passport-less, yellow-eyed
who will ride the boat before me for Naples, they hope.
Here the sea curls its granite lip at them and flings a winter
storm like a cough, or the seadog drops them at Hannibal’s
shores, where they’ll stand stupefied like his elephants.
What dimension of time will they cross as the Hours loop
tight plastic ropes round their ankles and wrists?
What siren song will the trucks shipping them back
to Ouagadougou drone into their ears? I look at them
loitering, waiting for the second act of their darkness
to fall. I look at the sky shake her dicey fists.
One can be thankful, I suppose, for not being one of them,
and wrap the fabric of that thought around oneself
to keep the cold wind at bay. But what world is this
that makes our lives sufficient even as the horizon’s rope
is about to snap, while the sea and sky ache to become
a moment to peel itself like skin off fruit, and let us in
on its sweetness as we wait, smoking or fondling provisions,
listening to the engine’s invocational purr. In an hour
that will dawn and dusk at once, one that will stretch
into days strung like beads on the horizon’s throat,
they will ride their tormented ship as the dog star
begins to float on the water, so bright and still,
you’d want to scoop it out in the palm of your hand.

*
( This poem - and this poet - was brought to Rebel Girl's attention by Forest Gander in his essay post, "Libya: Don't Look Away." Photo of Medusa Head by Forrest Gander.)

*

I have a dream (and faculty have a union)

"We're an organization, and we have tasks to perform!" said the rabbit

    [Colleagues, on Monday, at IVC, the SOCCCD Faculty Association held a Rep Council meeting.]

     Gosh, I woke up this morning from a terrible dream, and you know how that is: you’re in a twilight zone as your brain stumbles from sleep to wakefulness; it's like a trip in one of those Star Trek transporters, which means that, for all that you know, the old you is obliterated and a new you comes into being, oblivious that he’s just then started to exist, a fraud, a copy, with fake memories and a fake ID.
     So maybe I’ve got nothing to do with this dream, but, anyway, in that dream I seem to remember going yesterday to a meeting of the AARP, which somehow was the faculty union, and it was just horrible, man. It was in some awful room at IVC where, on the wall, there’s a map of the world, but China and Indochina are obliterated by a handout. What’s that about?
     I sat there, feeling unwelcome, like people with harry eyeballs kept expecting me to say something obnoxious, but I had no intention of saying anything, and, in any case, I remained silent and just sat there, marveling at the decrepitude and lunacy around me. Everybody seemed old or sick or demented. I wanted to get out of there, but I was frozen.
     “We’ve got a new office!” screamed geezer #17, and then a group of oldsters suddenly ran to the white board and tried to pin up a poster of James B. Utt, but every time they got it up there for a second or two, it just fell down again, and the pins flew across the room causing everybody to duck and run, but in the manner of elderly folk.
     Then somebody who was lying on the ground, sleeping, suddenly got up and started reciting a nursery rhyme followed by the numbers 30, 32, and 38. It was some kind of geezer mantra I guess, and it caused some of the old farts and lunatics to get mad and start tearing up chairs. “These are chairs,” they declared. “And they’re worth more than you think!”
     OK. That was weird. But then some gal said we could rescue the whole situation if we just get everybody to give a quarter of their senses. But that didn’t make sense to me since we’ve got five senses, not four, but I’m pretty sure that everyone was agreeable nonetheless, and that worried me plenty, cuz I started to think that I was that quarter or that sense. You know dreams.

RG in England, years ago

     The geezers started singing a song that everybody knew and liked. “Make rich bastards pay and pay!” they chanted, whilst one guy with a really big two-toned head started laying out spread sheets with zillions of numbers on ‘em. “15 to 1,” he said, and everyone understood. Not me, boy.
     “Get your clingy car stickers!” shouted the lady from kindergarten. "Talk to your friends!" Don’t know what that was about. She drove a Honda, I think, but how would I know?
     Somebody handed the guy with the head a sack of nickels, and he eagerly grabbed it, as he carped bitterly about his predecessor, a “political consultant” that “we paid for” through those cool automatic deductions that some people think are downright un-American.
     It was all very Alice in Wonderland, complete with Mad Hatters and white weasels and a greasy fat guy sitting high above us on a wall, smiling and cracking and seeming to know something important.
     Somebody scrawled “Meldau” on the whiteboard, and, just then, that Utt poster popped one of its two pins and started swinging across the room straight at me like some giant tractor blade. That’s when the Wizened Ones sauntered into the room, saying little but smiling at the fat guy up on that wall. “We’re here,” they said, and they started to cry. They invited Fat Boy to “come on down” and receive valuable cash prizes in the amount of just over $5,000—evidently, a gift from the AARP. But there were some oldsters there who were totally against the idea somehow, but, despite that, the appearance of the Wizened Ones and the Fat Boy caused the “Meldau” on the whiteboard to fade and disappear. Evidently, that was some kind of disaster, and some people started to moan.
     That’s when a rollercoaster suddenly roared through the room, first threatening to kill the organization’s new Prez, who was oddly silent for a moment, but then it veered violently to the right into that greasy fat, stupid, and corrupt guy, who was clutching his $5K. He dropped and farted but hung onto his cash, still smiling. The Wizened Ones then commenced carping about their latest round of plastic surgery and the inconvenience of keeping tabs on their many investments. “Fuck Brown,” they chanted. “Long live the Tio Fountain.”
     Sheesh. I’m getting too old for dreams.


A joker is not a devil, but a demagogue is a jackass

     Then somebody dragged a huge chair into the room, demanding that it be valued properly, but that activity got “tabled” or something, and nobody knew whether to shit or go blind.
     “Well, we can make a motion that we’ll just sit here and wait,” said the blond robot with the glasses, but the guy sitting to my right said flatly, “You don’t need a motion to do nothing, stupid.” I looked over at ‘im with admiration, but then he, too, disappeared, leaving only a smirk and a late grade submission form.
     “Breast implants!” screamed somebody, probably a woman. “We now get breast implants!” Everybody seemed to agree that that was a good thing. Guess so. “Didn’t we get those before?” I asked. “No!” screamed the crowd of oldsters in unison. “It’s your union at work,” they insisted.
     Next, the Prez stood up and said that the “evaluation forms are written,” and that we’d all have to use them to get evaluated by our students. On the other hand, said geezer #5, after students take 'em, nobody gets to look at ‘em, and they’re just gonna be thrown into the trash along with collegial consultation and single-semester sabbaticals. That seemed to please everybody except the guy who wanted MySite evals.
     Well, that’s about when I woke up, unless you buy into the "five second hypothesis," which, as you know, has never been disproved and that may well be true.

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "Alabanza. In Praise of Local 100"

Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100
by Martin Espada
for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 100, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center Alabanza. Praise the cook with the shaven head and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye, a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo, the harbor of pirates centuries ago. Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea. Alabanza. Praise the cook's yellow Pirates cap worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua, for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes. Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza. Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up, like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium. Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations: Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana, Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh. Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning, where the gas burned blue on every stove and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers, hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans. Alabanza. Praise the busboy's music, the chime-chime of his dishes and silverware in the tub. Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher who worked that morning because another dishwasher could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs. Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza. After the thunder wilder than thunder, after the booming ice storm of glass from the great windows, after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs, after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen, for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo, like a cook's soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us about the bristles of God's beard because God has no face, soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations across the night sky of this city and cities to come. Alabanza I say, even if God has no face. Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan to Kabul two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other, mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue: Teach me to dance. We have no music here. And the other said with a Spanish tongue: I will teach you. Music is all we have. * (Here is Espada reading two poems. "Alabanza" begin at 1:38.)