{"id":154,"date":"2005-11-25T13:07:20","date_gmt":"2005-11-25T17:07:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2005\/11\/25\/rough-draft-for-a-black-friday-rag\/"},"modified":"2010-03-02T15:15:19","modified_gmt":"2010-03-02T23:15:19","slug":"rough-draft-for-a-black-friday-rag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2005\/11\/25\/rough-draft-for-a-black-friday-rag\/","title":{"rendered":"Rough draft for a Black Friday Rag"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning I read an interesting article about a singing iceberg, but more importantly, I heard the iceberg (link follows, to audiofile). Combined with the general level of continuing insanity, I was inspired to get the following rough draft onto paper (and now, inter-textually, onto the blog). Yeah, yeah, I know it’s not exactly Howl<\/a>, I’m not a poet, but that don’t mean I don’t feel like howling along with singing icebergs, either….<\/p>\n

The Sound of An Iceberg Singing<\/strong><\/p>\n

I heard the trash-trawler’s purloined shopping cart
\nRattling past my house at eight.
\nThe man pushing by, one<\/a> of
\nA thousand in Victoria<\/a>, drug-addicted,
\nMentally ill, or simply<\/a>
\n“Hard to house,”
\nOne of the thousand
\nHomeless, he collects refundables
\nTo trade for cash at the Bottle Depot<\/a> recycling place.<\/p>\n

Workers with earplugs, protection
\nAgainst the constant crash of breaking
\nGlass shattering, the empty wine bottles,
\nThe softer thud
\nOf extruded plastic, now empty, once fruitjuice-full,
\nTossed by earplugged workers into appropriately sorted bins.
\nBut mostly it’s the hard, hard sound
\nOf glass — bottles of beer, bottles of beer,
\nRivetting noise
\nRecycled into new bottles.<\/p>\n

My son has been listening to the radio,
\nA Seattle station —
\nHe comes to my room to spread the fantastical news
\nPolice were called when earlybird “Black Friday”<\/a> shoppers,
\nMobbing a Renton, WA-Walmart’s electronic section,
\nCaused major damage to the aisles,
\nCrashing shelves, fragmenting TVs stereos computers,
\nAssembled in China
\nWhere city centres relocate
\nTo newly-paved-over farmland<\/a>,
\nThe ageing infrastructure of the old centres
\nAbandoned to further decay.<\/p>\n

Assembled in China where a factory explosion<\/a>
\n(Would the trash-trawlers on the Pacific Rim have heard it?)
\nPumped benzene into the Songhua River.
\nHarbin<\/a> the city and its 4 million residents have
\nNo clean water now rushing by.
\nThe loud injection of chemicals into the river
\nSilently kills anyone who drinks from it.<\/p>\n

In other news (still incredulous),
\nHe tells me that a one-hundred pound woman<\/a>
\nWon
\nThe twelve-minute, ten-pound turkey eating competition<\/a>
\nBy gorging four pounds three-plus ounces of flesh.
\nThis was news-worthy — previous winners
\n(As well as this year’s runners-up)
\nWere invariably heavy-weighted, veritable behemoths
\nEmbodying the outsized rapaciousness
\nOf The Very Large.<\/p>\n

A one-hundred pound woman seems anomalous,
\nA shifting centre, perhaps
\nA blurring line between the very fat
\nAnd those more slim.
\nAP News leads the news like this<\/a>:
\n“It’s a question just begging to be asked: How much turkey can a person gobble down in 12 minutes?
\nBut two hundred people die<\/a> in twelve minutes
\nOf starvation. Every twelve minutes of everyday<\/a>…
\n(Did you think that was a question just begging to be asked?
\nVictoria, too, is full of beggars…)
\n…Even when Black Friday shoppers cause
\nWalmart shelves to crash and
\nChinese manufacturers relocate entire cities
\nPoisoned by water, or not,
\nTo paved-over farmlands where
\nFood no longer grows,
\nEven when the International Federation of Competitive Eating<\/a>
\nRegisters yet another Thanksgiving Day Triumph,
\nEven when the actually slim are able to join
\nThe ranks of the utterly unbalanced,
\nEven when it all comes crashing down,
\nUnbalanced as it is.<\/p>\n

A bit of fast-flowing water,
\nPerhaps the Songhua River’s,
\nAdds its sound to all the world’s sounds,
\nAnd that hell freezes over in Antarctica<\/a>,
\nAlthough it will all thaw out soon enough,
\nAnd that’s what the iceberg’s singing<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(If you made it to here, that last link is to the audiofile of the singing iceberg. Make sure you listen to the whole thing, it’s interesting.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning I read an interesting article about a singing iceberg, but more importantly, I heard the iceberg (link follows, to audiofile). Combined with the general level of continuing insanity, I was inspired to get the following rough draft onto paper (and now, inter-textually, onto the blog). Yeah, yeah, I know it’s not exactly Howl, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1826,1642,678,1404,1651,1586,96,1897,880,1002,2345,1418,1903,600],"tags":[873],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guerilla_politics","category-homelessness","category-ideas","category-justice","category-local_not_global","category-offspring","category-politics","category-scandal","category-scenes_victoria","category-social_critique","category-street_life","category-victoria","category-writing","category-yulelogstories","tag-poetry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1726,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions\/1726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}