Review: Tempo Maps by Daniel Hales

Reading good poems is like being in a knife fight that ends with a kiss.

Daniel Hales’ new book Tempo Maps is an ambitious piece of work, an object worth pursuing. No matter which way you turn it, it delivers.

“… Love is air and electricity every day.

This is just.”

Tempo Maps opens at both ends. Read the poems each way and you hear them talking to each other. Good poetry has to be at least a little risky, should put you on edge. This whole book is pretty damned risky. There’s a CD of Hales reading the poems and music, songs with street noise, rain, birds and instrumental work mixed together. It doesn’t conform to the expectations of a book or music. This is a musician’s geography, the pin on the map is the microphone. It’s the soundtrack to You are Here, and stays with you everywhere.

“metered mail direct deposit preferred method of withdrawal sale

complete printing receipt prickers versus thorns soda versus pop”

So there’s reason to be nervous. 

When I went to a reading, Hales turned on the soundtrack. “Oh shit,” I thought, “this could be bad.”

Then I sat still and listened to what turned out to be the best reading I’d ever been to. The music is lovely and true. The rhythm is sometimes loping, sometimes precise and sharp  – but always trustworthy; the lines are beautiful, funny, both measured and melodic and they feel good on your tongue.
The more you pay attention, the more there is to see. It’s a book you can trust.

“For the last few years, mom’s started each phone call like this: how are you

doing: good?”

It still makes me nervous, scares me in the way good poetry is supposed to scare the hell out of you.

“Most of our brain is for forgetting, the gray poofy parts no one can explain.

Vast erasures half-hilled with the trills of common birds”

This is an unlikely book to get made because it defies category. It speaks to the dedication of a writer and musician with skill, guts and a vision, and it is evidence of the necessity of small presses like ixnay press willing to make original work -- weird, wonderful things -- come to life.

“The ghostly shiver in the guts

     is called butterflies past the ferris wheel”

Some lines I won’t quote because I like them too much. Get your own copy.

http://ixnaypress.com/books-chapbooks/tempo-maps/

Let's talk about surveillance

When I read "Fahrenheit 451" and "1984" in the 1980s they read as cautionary conspiracy theories.

Picking my daughter up from school now, she says "In 1984, it's like the NSA and the screens are our phones. They can hear and see everything we do."

"Yes." I hear myself saying it and I wonder how I let this happen.

On 9/11 she was 3. We were on our way home from a preschool open house at the Y, driving up into the gorgeous western Massachusetts hills on a sunny morning when I switched on the radio and heard the first tower was coming down.

I looked in the review mirror at this pigtailed little creature.
We will never be the same, I thought. Her world is different than the world I grew up in.

Some things must be said now more clearly than before. Our responsibility for our government has not diminished. In fact, we bear an ever increasing duty to steer it.

Our imaginative force and the duty to express it demand more of us.

Constant surveillance is not just. It is wrong. Living in a society governed by fear is wrong. It abdicates power to so few, and infantilizes the free intellect and rights of the people.

Our literature holds fast. Our kids aren't stupid. But freedom now, we must regularly stretch and exercise like a muscle or it's gone.

Ferguson to Foley: Will journalism keep its promise?

Around the world we see the press and its role under attack.That means it’s a bad time to be a journalist and one of the most important times.

In the U.S.there has been a drop in the number of local daily news outlets. Some municipalities, wealthy and poor, go entirely uncovered by reliable journalists. If you live in such a place, you may have no idea what is happening at your city council, in the schools, how your money is being spent.

Much has been written about the decline of newspapers. These pieces talk a lot about how hard it is to keep a newspaper in business and howto monetize the online product.

I haven’t seen as much about the damage this does to communities and the erosion of democracy.

Disenfranchised citizens are the prized possession of the powerful. Regardless of income, people who don’t keep up with local news, who don’t vote, don’t work to find and promote candidates they can support, don’t demand good policy and leadership from their elected officials – these people can’t keep a hand in piloting public policy. In this country, with a pervasive anti-intellectualism, speaking knowledgeably about or even questioning public policy can earn a person a reputation as bad company: no fun. I hear some people proudly, sort of defiantly announce that they don’t know anything about ______.It used to be that working class people, poor and struggling people kept up with the news and argued passionately about it. Now, that is seen as the arena of moneyed people who are intolerably out of touch and humorless. But maybe that is changing.

Money stress is exhausting and disenfranchising. Sometimes,the people involved in community projects look comfortably upper middle class,like they have the time and money to give back. Other people ask themselves: How can I attend community events when I can’t keep up with my bills or my kids’needs? And who will take care of the kids or work my second job so I can go?

In Ferguson, Missouri, and around the world,people are starting to pay much closer attention to their local governance. With Ferguson, rancid American racism has been getting a much needed lancing. People who have long been beat down, especially African American people, are getting together and are getting involved.

NPR’s Michel Martin moderated a forum there with the mayor and community members Aug. 28 and it was heated and lively. Michael Brown’s death, Eric Garner’s death – just two of the unarmed black men killed by white police this summer in America– maybe these horrifying and all-too-common incidents will help to wake us all up. Because we shouldn’t tolerate this. We should remember that no matter what color or religion we are, if our neighbors aren’t safe and free with a right to privacy and dignity, none of us are.

But even if we wake up, we can’t get involved if we don’t know what is happening locally, when elections are coming up, when the school board is meeting, what happened at the last town council meeting. We need good writing to give us background and context, and timely reporting to keep us up to date and keep officials accountable. Regional planning is closely related to quality of life. It deals with affordable transportation, housing, and public spaces where you would actually want to spend time. Good regional planning is a force for social justice. It says: we are all worth a beautiful place to spend our leisure time, a safe, healthy, inspiring place for children and adults to relax and meet their neighbors, a city you can walk in. But you can’t keep up with and participate in good regional planning if you don’t know what’s going on where you live.

Your ability to exercise your rights and responsibilities as a citizen erodes as your access to information diminishes. People in power know this very well. What we saw on the streets of Ferguson — if we watched the livestreams of journalists and dedicated citizens — was a systematized violation of U.S. Constitutional rights. From my apartment’s kitchen in Massachusetts,I watched and listened as police on the streets of Ferguson, broadcasting from booming PA systems, repeated the same illegal messages – do not stop on the sidewalk, do not congregate, we do not want you on the streets. I watched live as a police officer pulled a press badge off a journalist and threw it on the pavement,saying it was worthless, telling journalists to get to the designated “First Amendment area.”

“I thought the United States was the First Amendment area,” friends responded on social media. This sounds like a joke –but it is real.

Police officers aimed assault rifles at unarmed citizens and arrested and detained journalists without charging them. The only way we know this is because other people bothered to document it. The same police shot teargas night after night straight at people who were doing their civic duty – citizens protesting injustice committed by their government and journalists trying to get the story. This is your America, people.

A citizenry is only powerless if it refuses to pay attention and refuses to act. Many of us are discouraged and disconnected from our local government. But what our government does is never disconnected from us. From police policies to street paving, it all affects us, and we are paying the bill.

Journalists have a special responsibility to remember and carryout their adversarial relationship to those in power. What stories reporters seek out and how they ask questions should take into account the least powerful in a community, those without a platform for their own voices. Editors bear a different peculiar weight in telling the news. They assign stories and then choose where they run and how much ink or broadcast time stories get.Complacent, spineless editors don’t serve the citizens in their communities. And no matter how hard reporters push, editors are the gatekeepers for choosing which stories run.

James Foley risked his personal safety to tell the truth about people who were living and fighting in Syria and other conflict zones.These stories need to be told, and if journalists don’t do it, no one else will. He thought the risk was worth it, and many people have come forward since his death, civilians, colleagues and members of the U.S. armed forces, to say he was getting it right.

Will we?

Tanglewood

In the center of the idea of civilization, is the sanctuary of the imagination and what it makes.
Perhaps there really is no sanctuary, but a place for the making, the practice and its pain.
Nothing safe in art, but without it we are nothing. Not human anymore. The truth of the brain and it's non-stop question-thirst, formula-finding, math-mechanism is coincident with the boiling point of creativity. After twisting wires, cranking tight the circuitry, there is a point at which we flip the switch and come alive.
I'm not arguing that a creative life is as important as a career in designing and problem-solving, because that argument is a waste of time. Civilization is here to make sure the people are fed, the worst of our fears are held back by the dam of our best efforts, and that we have a critical mass of intelligence to produce the best things we cannot yet see. What we make, and make of this, is our only measure.
It's summer still, though barely.
We planned the trip to Tanglewood, weighing it against the trip to the latest country fair, because if we don't go now, we will have missed it.
The fairs pile on quick, weekend after weekend. Barn yards, beloved food, prize-winning rabbits and elaborately frocked chickens. The cows, brushed and bathed, stand in their stalls waiting for a pat. The colossal horses pull stone boats. We will get to one of the fairs.
I look into the kaleidoscope of the near future.
My Twitter feed flashes with lightning messages from Egypt, rolling in faster than I can read. It looks to me as though the army is prompting chaos to capitalize on it. The attack on the Morsi supporters was calculated, but toward what end, other than the Joker's love of busting apart civilization?
It was the ringing bell that quieted me.
We had gotten out of bed early and made it to the point where we were standing in line for cheap tickets for a rehearsal, less than a movie would cost us.
At Tanglewood, the ringing bell means the concert will begin in a few minutes. The musicians have been warming up; it is time to take your seats.

The day is sunny, the lawn green, the sky blue. The old trees are so, so tall. 

Do these trees grow more or better because of the music? 

This natural laboratory of notes, the breeze coming up the hill, the brains at work all day to find the right time, the right frequency, the vibration that somehow turns the language of sound into a new water we can breathe: how do we make something explosive and beautiful out of silence?

We reached the lawn and found a spot.
"This place was a good idea," I said to myself, thanking Koussevitzky and his co-conspirators.
It was my last thought as the relief of the quiet of my own mind came on strong.
Then they began to play.

Dear Mr. Henry and Mr. Bezos

It's a cool night in August. Lovely and totally unlike what we expect.
Local news lately is violations of the Open Meeting Law and how towns plan to pay for emergency services, like ambulance rides and paramedics. Big news this week everywhere is rich men buying big newspapers: the sales of The Boston Globe and The Washington Post.

The Boston Globe is really my first daily. As a horse-crazed kid living in the city, I dutifully spread it out on the floor to study the racing line-up and memorize the names of the jockeys working at Suffolk Downs. I read about the horses first and then turned the pages over, always surprised that anyone would write about anything else.
The Washington Post brings a different kind of affection, for journalism's history, an example to all in the necessity of news coverage to a democracy. The simple things, like finding out the truth.

So I say this to the new owners: my dear sirs, covering local news in a big city requires a lot of reporters.
That's what we've all been watching slide away for the last decade. The Globe started to weaken when it stopped covering Boston's local news. You can't be a daily news magazine and still call yourself a newspaper. You need reporters on the ground covering neighborhoods, local government, local crime, small businesses, schools. Without enough reporters, the corners of the city blur out as the news focus pans back. We take in the wide view of the beautiful city. With luck, this migrates into careful feature and long-form writing. But the loss is never more acute than to the daily readers who live there. When you stop covering their world, they will leave you, and they'll hate to do it because you were their paper.

The thing about rich - seriously rich - people buying these papers is: newspapers need cash to become good again. I firmly believe that we need reporters on the ground, covering meetings that are boring only so long as local governments are functioning well, but immediately become interesting when things go wrong, and not surprisingly, when the reporter stops watching. You have to pay people to cover these properly. Maybe the new owners with the deep pockets will give this some thought. We keep talking about the new paradigm and the fickle web audience -- we need a commitment to news coverage.

By all means, entertain. But if we only give people what they want, what they think they want, we will have to rely completely on our whistle-blowers sacrificing themselves to let us know when our government is betraying our trust. But we shouldn't really trust so much to begin with - we should be watching and reporting, nonstop.  

Mr. Henry, Mr. Bezos bless you for taking an interest and paying for it. But remember, these papers belong first to the people who live in Boston and Washington, D.C., and to everyone who counts on them to get the story. Do them justice.

Breaking

On the night Wendy Davis stood up in the Texas Legislature, I happened to check Twitter just as I was about to try to sleep for a couple hours.
I had been helping my daughter pack for camp and we had to leave before the sun came up.
I never did sleep that night. I watched the last couple hours of the Texas session, switching between the live video feed and Twitter. I periodically checked major news sites to see what they had. It was stunning. I continue to be amazed at the growing spread between who is covering live news and who is not. It almost hurts.
I understand that we are in the midst of a shift.
Used to be, commercials paid for TV, which you could pick up with a set of rabbit ears perched on your TV set in your living room.
Now, I have a TV in a box in the cellar.
I won't pay for cable and I won't live without an Internet connection.
But newspapers and news wire services are supposed to cover news. I work at a newspaper.
I keep my eye on Twitter all night because it will tell me what I need to know.
You can't trust most of what you see, but if something happens, Twitter will set you off asking the right questions in real time.
You can click on those news sites to see what they've got.
Click again.
That happened earlier today when there was an explosion in NYC and my partner was in Manhattan.
Nothing on the news sites. Twitter gave me what I needed to know.
At least one thing social media has taught us is that many humans want to communicate.
A paid news staff is essential to knowing what is going on in government and to putting things in context. Democracy depends on that information.
Some of the major news sites are clearly putting their money into writing. I love that. I also want drop-dead fast coverage. It's what we can have and, to be clear, it's what we want.
Used to be, newspapers would print a special edition just to get the news out fast.
This week a letter came in the mail from my daughter at camp.
"Send me news updates," she said. "I can't be cut off from the world."

On error and risking everything

I have been stuck at home for days with a fierce cold.

Hot & sour soup from the local Chinese restaurant was the best medicine, and a steady stream of episodes of The West Wing. Then, when I could read a little (coffee suddenly brings back the focus), Malcolm Gladwell's new bit in The New Yorker about Albert O. Hirschman and how errors in planning lead to innovation - and the first example: the stunning miscalculations that preceded work on the Hoosac Tunnel. 

Gladwell does a great job of pitching Jeremy Adelman's recent biography of Hirschman, but more than that, he reinvigorated for me the notion of a true thinker. Hirschman was an economist who wrote unashamedly about unpredictable outcomes, and the role of creativity in problem solving. Interdisciplinary thinking is what we call it now, but all great thinkers have been able to draw on a broad body of knowledge and a good gut instinct.  

The other current in Gladwell's piece is his characterization of Hirschman as a man of action - and summing up Hirschman's opinion on the choices of exit or voice in responding to problems within an organization. Leaving, being the choice of exit and voice, staying and contributing your opinion, trying to fix something broken from within. The example given in the essay is school vouchers. Quoting Hirschman 'Those who hold power in the lazy monopoly may actually have an interest in creating some limited opportunities for exit on the part of those whose voice might be uncomfortable." Gladwell's argument is that Hirschman wasn't always afraid of the losing battle, or at least of not knowing whether success would be clear.  

This, from a man who fought in the Spanish Civil War, and in World War II brokered deals with gangsters in brothels to sneak Jews out of Nazi territory. An economist who routinely got his hands dirty, one of his enduring lessons must be: You can't always know if it will be worth the fight, but perhaps it is better to fight.