Via Superbarista Sarah Wilson Jones:

Big news from the jones household: carl jones is taking over delphic books on coventry as of july 1st! that’s this thursday. so for all you cj fans, now you can stop in and chat with him live and in person on coventry again. and buy a book or some incense while you’re there.

West Virginia Senator Robert Carlyle Byrd is dead.

In the past I have celebrated Constitution Day each year on 17 September. While this will remain the official day, I am moving my personal observance to 28 June in recognition of the senator who created the day of reflection and remembrance six years ago and who was famous for always having a copy of our Constitution in his pocket (a habit I emulate). I will also encourage my senators to follow my example and move our celebration next year in honor of the man.

I will remember Byrd for the moment last December when, rolled down the aisle of the Senate at 1 a.m. because Republicans were praying that at least one Democratic senator would miss a roll call vote on President Barack Hussein Obama’s historic health care bill, he chastised his Republican colleagues with “a cadence of shame, shame.”

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Please keep reading…

West Virginia Senator Robert Carlyle Byrd has gone home.

When England was old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people, they would dig up coffins, take the bones to a bone-house and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, one out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus,someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer.

Yes, it almost makes sense…

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

Nicholas Dillon comes to visit me in his wheelchair, and he”s talking about how the TV”s have stolen the Irish storytelling. There just isn”t the same power of the storytelling because the people aren”t in the bars carrying on, they”re in the bars watching television. And they”re in the hospitals watching television. There”s no conversation. People looked at us very suspiciously, that we were over there talking while they watched Judge Judy, Ricki Lake and Survivor dubbed in Gaelic. p. 77

From Life Interrupted: The Interrupted Monologue by Spalding Gray.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Earlier this week I wrote about drug production increases in regions of Myanmar seeking independence. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, however, in a report indicates that drug production in those areas not controlled by the military forces of Myanmar are down while production in controlled areas is on the rise.

The production of yaba, speed, however looks to be the greater problem.

From Eurasia Review:

Production of synthetic drugs in Burma has soared while seizures of methamphetamine have risen 23 times in the past year, a UN report warns.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime said however that production of opium, once a hallmark of Burma’s globally dominant drug market, has dropped from 410 metric tonnes to 330, despite more than a doubling since 2006 of land allocated for poppy growing.

But the report’s claims that the main focus of drug production was in areas controlled by Burma’s armed ethnic groups, particularly in Shan state, was refuted by a leading Burmese drugs expert, who said that opium production was predominantly in government-controlled areas.

“We found that [opium cultivation] by the Wa, the Kokang and other ceasefire groups has dropped, but has increased in the regions controlled by the [government] and the people’s militias. The Burmese commanders actually encourage the opium growing; they agree that they won’t get [profit] without the growing,” said Khun Sai, head of Shan Drug Watch.

Furthermore, the fall in opium production has been largely due to poor weather and not the Burmese government’s so-called 15-year drug eradication programme, the validity of which regional analysts have closely questioned.

Yaba translates as “madness drug.” What is it about Southeast Asia and methamphetamine? (Remember, Red Bull was inspired by a drink used by Thai taxi drivers to combat fatigue.)

For many years Wendell Berry has been one of my favorite writers. His words are beautiful to read in the moment and his stories a pleasure to sink into. His poetry is. In recent years, however, in discussions with my good friend and poet Sherry Chandler, I have come to see another side of Berry that my own prejudice as a white Ohioan of Mountaineer heritage and river valley upbringing with romanticized Southern writer aspirations was blind to.

I continue to intently read Berry, but now I do so with an eye and ear that challenge myself and my own writing. I recently finished his 2007 addition to the Port William cycle, Andy Catlett, Early Travels. The tale is told looking back from the present day to the days between Christmas and New Year’s of 1943, when nine-year-old Andy Catlett for the first time journeys alone the ten miles from his home to visit his paternal and maternal grandparents in rural northern Kentucky.

The author as elder self reflects on changes from then to now and considers good and ill. In this book two passages caused me to read again, ruminate and ultimately transcribe the words into my electronic chapbook. The first passage concerns matters of Race.

So in those days my mind was perfectly compatible with Aunt Sarah Jane’s. Everything that was vivid and wondrously true to her was vivid and wondrously true to me. Everything she told me fell upon my consciousness like seeds on fertile ground.

But not everything she told me came from the realm of wonder. She also spoke that day, as she often did, of the rights that her people had been promised but had never been given. She was my first preceptor in the matters of race and civil rights. Because I always listened attentively to her, everything she said struck in. She made me feel responsible, for I knew, as she required me to know, that I was a product of my culture; but I felt it vaguely, for I could not precisely locate in myself the cause of the injury. I had no ill will toward her or Dick, or in fact toward any of the black people I knew, and besides, if I were greatly to blame, why was she so nice to me?

Both the sense of responsibility and perhaps necessary vagueness have stayed with me until now. starting probably with those conversations so long ago with Aunt Sarah Jane, I have learned to understand the old structure of racism as a malevolent convention, the malevolence of which is hard to locate in the conscious intentions of most people. It was a circumstance that was mostly taken for granted. It was inexcusable, and yet we had the formidable excuse of being used to it. It was an injustice both accommodated and varyingly obscured not only by daily custom, but also by the exigencies and preoccupations of daily life. We left the issue alone, not exactly by ignoring it, but by observing an elaborate etiquette that permitted us to ignore it. White people who wished to think well of themselves did not use the language of racial insult in front of black people. But the problem for us white people, as we had finally to understand, was that we could not be selectively complicit. To be complicit at all, even thoughtlessly by custom, was to be complicit in the whole extent and reach of the injustice. It is hard for a customary indifference to unstuck itself from the abominations to which it tacitly consents. But we were used to it. What is hardest to get used to maybe, once you are aware, is the range of things humans are able to get used to. I was more used to this once than I am now.

Aunt Sarah Jane’s plain talk of racial injustice as she knew it, thereby introducing the fester of it into the conscience of a small boy, who knew only it only as the accepted way and a mandatory etiquette, was by the measure of that time remarkable. To the extent that her talk was a discomfort and an instruction, it was a service. To the extent that it was interesting and a part of conversation, it was hospitality. Her conversation could sometimes be the wildest mixture of sense and what I still regret to call superstition. I listened to her with the keenest interest, sometimes with a fearful eagerness, trying to penetrate even a little some mystery that she spoke of or from.

By her charity, good cheer and love of company, it was eminently pleasant to sit with her in that warm room, mindful of the cold outside, mostly listening and asking questions while she followed her thoughts along their wandering paths, now and then renewing the bolus of snuff that she kept inside her lower lip, or making use of her “spit can.”

She sang me a song in which a young man plowing corn, dreams of Saturday night:

Diddle-um, diddle-um, di-de-o,
Gon’ take Sal to the party-o.
Haw, Lige!

“But Aunt Sarah Jane, who’s Lige?”

“Why honey, Lige was his mule!”

I would gladly go back to sit with her again. She too I loved. She too is a knot in the net that has gathered me up and kept me alive until now.

Clearly, Berry struggles here with his own place as a white, male living in Kentucky, a state with its own particular racial history as a slave state that remained with the Union and as such was not subject to the Emancipation Proclamation. Considering this I think I should seek out texts that detail life in Kentucky during Reconstruction.

Twice in the passage Berry uses a distinctly ’60s term — Black — to describe Aunt Sarah Jane when I am reasonably certain that Andy Catlett would have used Negro. Precisely what that says about Berry and his 2007 feelings about his fictionalized 1943 self, I am unsure, but I sense that the word is too foreign and, while not pejorative, uncomfortable for him.

Berry and I are from opposite banks of the Ohio River and separated by a generation, but I wrestle in my own way with the culture that I am of and how I ought to be.

That, without recourse to any other, is a great enough reason for me to read him.

(I’ll look at the second passage, on matters of economy and the authentic life, tomorrow.)

Before you jump on my headline, I think that the commercials are a masterfully despicable bit of misdirection worthy of a snake oil salesman.

And all the respones on YouTube are hilarious.

0802: 28% of Americans Believe the Military Should Have No Civilian Oversight?

When lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky, the combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a wake.

Yes, it almost makes sense…

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

That we do not know you
is your perfection
and our hope. The darkness
keeps us near you.

-from To The Unseeable Animal, p. 118

Found in my electronic chapbook.

From Farming: A Hand Book by Wendell Berry.

Via Daily Dish…

When I first wrote what I thought was a unique post after my blogsister Shamash informed me that the State Peace and Development Council (aka, Myanmar’s military dictators) had banned Have Coffee Will Write in their country, I confess that I felt a little lift that my blog could be considered some kind of national threat.

I did not begin to conceive that more than five years later I would find myself wrestling with what I might say in the 1,000th post — nearly 10 percent of all my posts — on the tiny country in Southeast Asia.

I asked Shamash what she thought — she’s back in the United States and doing well, more from her below — and she suggested I write about the people of Myanmar. Of course, she is right. the story is not the generals or the nuclear weapons or Aung San Suu Kyi or even the thousands of political prisoners in Myanmar.

The story is the men and women and children who open their eyes each morning to the reality that they are alive and have the many tasks of living to accomplish so that they might close their eyes at the end of the day with some sense of surity that there will be a tomorrow.

In my reading of books written by those who have lived and still live in Myanmar I have found moments of humanity removed, often only very slightly, from the strife that is their country.

Their country. These two words are in and of themselves problematic. Myanmar is not one country but rather an artificial confederation of nation states cobbled together by the colonizing British in the 19th century and then bequethed to those people with wishes of good luck at independence following World War II.

This explains why each day I say Good Morning! to the people of Myanmar and not Burma. Burma is the confederation’s colony name assigned by the British in recognition of what they considered to be the dominate people: the Burman. But in the terms of Malcom X, née Little, Burma is also Myanmar’s slave name.

I understand that even this artificial name created by the country’s military dictators diminishes the Arakan and Burman and Chin and Kachin and Karen and Karreni and Mon and Shan peoples of Myanmar but until someone can present me with a superior alternative, it is the name I use.

I begin with the writing of “Mac” McClelland, a young woman I briefly met here in Cleveland where she was reading from her book For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question: A Story from Burma’s Never-Ending War.

She writes of her visit to a refugee camp on the Thai/Myanmar border:

From a distance, Mae La is a little bit gorgeous. The earth of the settlement slopes high up from the road, the neat thatched roofs of the dwelling poking out of a vibrantly green forest, the border mountains a few miles to the west. You had to get right inside to realize that there were 50,000 people packed into those one and a half square miles. Though you probably couldn’t get right in it; Htan Dah had called me at Office One the night before to say that he’d confirmed a camp leader’s approval of our visit, who had in turn told the Thai soldiers guarding the camp to be on the lookout for two white girls who were coming to conduct business and to let them go about it.

Abby and I followed our friend and host, learning within seconds that the terrain was as difficult as it was lush. Narrow uneven paths ran around huts crammed helter-skelter on the hill. The rain had let up for the moment, but for the duration of the monsoon season, the steep trails are more like swamps, slick rivers of mud and washing water and rainwater and pig and chicken shit streaming down toward the concrete road that skirts the settlement. The shelters were on stilts, little ladders connecting their doorless entryways to the oozing ground. Htan Dah was wearing mesh shorts, like a runner.

He stepped careful and steady, his flip-flops sinking past their beds in muck before he lifted a bare calf and planted a foot farther up the slope. He gestured around him at things we could or couldn’t see from here — “There is the school;” “Over there so-and-so used to live” — but we were concentrating too hard on not slipping to pay much attention. Though he kept his hands in his pockets, Abby and I grabbed onto trees, people’s houses, to keep our balance. Stuck flip-flops had been abandoned everywhere; Abby and I counted them until we lost track. We averted our eyes when we passed someone bathing clumsily, her clothes half off, at one of the communal pumps set among the huts, and we moved out of the way of others carrying water buckets back to their kitchens to cook or shower. Htan Dah turned around occasionally, checking our progress, stopping so we had a chance to catch up. The treads of our boots had been overwhelmed by caked mud, rendered useless in seconds. I looked up at him while he waited for us a short ways up the hill without a trace of a smile on his face.

“This sucks,” he said.

Emma Larkin in her Everything Is Broken: A Tale of Catastrophe in Burma recounts her Dorthyesque noir visit in August 2008 to a village drowned by Cyclone Nargis three months before.

I had traveled to Pyay Chaung together with a Burmese aid worker and, when our boat docked at the waterfront and the boatman cut the engine, it was eerily quiet. There were no other boats and the area looked as if it had been abandoned. Once I climbed up out of the boat, though, I saw a narrow strip of frail, tentlike huts strung out along the riverbank. As I stood uncertainly on the bank there was some slight movement among the huts. Tarpaulin sheets were folded aside and people began to emerge from their dwellings. They walked slowly toward us and, before long, we were surrounded by a crowd of silent, staring villagers.

The Burmese aid worker I was with had been to Pyay Chaung before and identified the village leader, explaining to him that I wanted to hear people’s stories and find out what had happened to them after the cyclone. The headman told us that there had been around 360 people living in Pyay Chaung, but the cyclone killed over 200, more than half the population. He pointed to a dark-skinned, barefoot man standing at the edge of the crowd and told us that 12 members of the man’s family had perished in the storm. The crowd parted slightly so I could get a better view. The man bowed awkwardly toward me. Not knowing how to respond or what to say after such an introduction, I bowed back.

Then a woman in a ragged and faded red tamein was singled out. She had lost her husband and only child. Her baby had been just ten months old, one villager said. When I looked at the woman, she quickly pulled down the edge of the broad-brimmed straw hat she was wearing and hid her face.

A farmer told me that his wife and daughter had been killed. He explained that he had one surviving daughter but she was living elsewhere, further north. He had no family left in the village and was unable to to muster the will to begin working his fields again. “I am trying hard to overcome this,” he said, “but I’m not sure it’s possible.”

The introductions continued. It was a miserable litany of loss and I found myself wishing it would stop, but the villager kept on pointing out the bereft.

Kare Conelly’s memoir — Burmese Lessons: A True Love Story — travels back nearly fifteen years to a time when the military dictators of Myanmar referred to themselves as the State Law and Order Restoration Council. (I still marvel at the Orwellian nature of the names these men pick for themselves. I wonder if Orwell learned or taught the phrasing during his time in Burma.)

Now the woman splashes the smooth stone disk with water. She pushes the heel of her hand against the soft wood; an ivory wedge has opened in the bark at the base of the stick. She rubs the thanaka against the stone in slow circles, adding more water every few seconds until the ground wood becomes a creamy paste. We watch her silently. It’s a simple daily thing, something that all women do, but it becomes the first ritual of my arrival, a ceremony attended by children, women and the Buddha himself, glowing there. The woman mimes putting the paste on her own face, then gestures at me, at my cheeks, asking if it’s all right. I smile. With soft, cool fingers, she smoothes the hair away from my face. The intimacy of the act makes my chest tighten. Food and drink are spread out before me, and a stranger touches my face. Without design or craving. Just thanaka.

She pats the wet stone and then touches me again, smearing the mixture on one cheek, then the other. She makes two spiraling circles. Then sits back on her bare heels to look at her work. Touches the stone again and draws an ivory line down the center of my nose. “Hla-deh! Hla-deh!” This aspirated sound at the beginning of the word makes it soft, a breath, though the first syllable has a bright rising tone.

I point at her with my chin. “May May hla-deh!” May may means “Mama.” My voice elicits more laughter from the children, the women, the lady of thanaka, the boy in large glasses, who is back, I see when I turn around, with his friends and a few more neighbors. The woman with tattoos claps her hands.

This is my first day in Burma, my first two hours in Rangoon.

Hla-deh is the first lesson the people give me. It is the word for “beautiful.”

Zoya Phan, author of Undaunted: My Struggle for Freedom and Survival in Burma is a Karen born in the Irrawaddy delta but raised in the eastern mountains of the Karen state bordering with Thailand. In her chapter titled “The Bamboo People” Phan writes:

When my parents first moved into the village they had nowhere to stay, so they lodged with the family of Ter Pay Pay, a Karen man in his thirties. Ter Pay Pay lived with his parents, and they were getting on in years. Over time he became a close friend of ours, and his parents became our honorary grandparents. Of course, they weren’t related to us, but we loved them as if they were family, and they were the nearest we ever had to a real grandfather and grandmother.

Their house was on the oppostie side of the school from us, just a short walk away. In Karen culture, adults are usually nicknamed after their eldest child. My father would be called Bwa Bwa Pah — father of Bwa Bwa — and my mother would be called Bwa Bwa Moh — mother of Bwa Bwa. Everyone called Grandma and Grandpa Ter Pay Pay Pah and Ter Pay Pay Moh, after their son, Ter Pay Pay. We never knew their real names.

Grandpa was a quiet man, but Grandma was the opposite. She seemed never to stop talking and was always telling stories about her youth. She and Grandpa were in their eighties, and they had lived through the British colonial times. When she was in her twenties, Grandma had worked as a teacher at a school founded by the British, called Per Ku School. Whenever we talked about the resistance, Grandma would share her memories of how things had come to be. She recounted how the Karen and the British colonizers had gotten along well. The British did their best to respect Karen culture; while they were in Burma, the Karen were granted the right to have Karen New Year recognized across the whole of the country. It had been a long, long fight to reach this point, and it meant a lot to the Karen people.

Why, if you haven’t noticed, are all four of these books written by women? Are men somehow not drawn to or perhaps even repulsed by events in Myanmar? Or is it that men are tone death to the songs of the people? Do men miss the magic of how the people of Myanmar can find moments in between waking, struggle and sleep to smile for even a moment showing us that there is hope. I finish with the words of a fifth woman, one whom I trust on all matters Myanmar. Shamash writes:

TO BURMA WITH LOVE

One year ago I left Burma, with no more answers than when I first arrived. My memory of the six years I spent there is enshrouded in humid heat, monsoon clouds, and smoke from burning fires. I cannot write about Burma because my fingers are sluggish, and only a cup of Shan tea at a Mandalay teashop will wake them up. When I think of Burma, it is the words of Joseph Kessel in “Mogok, The Valley of the Rubies” that speak to me most, “And life took root, settled in, slipped into a routine, amid backdrops and characters of a dream.”

I don’t know why I stayed in Burma as long as I did. Was it for the morning mohinga, the afternoon la phet? Was it the monsoon rains that came fast and strong after the heat of the dry season, pelting my roof? Was it the teashops, the morning monk chants, the swaying of the three-story palms at the front of my house? Was it warm mangos, just fallen from a nearby tree? Was it the barking dogs and boys playing soccer in dusty fields? Was it the cawing of the angry crows, the scent of rice and curry as I spooned it into the 50 alms bowls of monks who walked single file down my street, barefoot, in the dark of pre-dawn? Was it the over-stuffed buses, exhaling dark smoke from exhaust pipes? Was it the longi-ed men and women on bikes, carrying bamboo or bananas or onions to market?

Did I stay that long because I thought something would change?

That The Lady would be freed?

I stayed through bombings, fires in monasteries, demonstrations that filled the streets with wave after wave of maroon-robed monks, the shot-dead reporters in nearby streets, the endless nights of long, dark curfews, and a cyclone that killed over 130,000 people. And yet, now, even now, nothing much has changed. I came to Burma with hope, and left a little more hopeless. I brought my own little bit of carefree freedom, and left with the weight of chains dragging behind me. Burma ravaged me. It is not a place for the fragile.

Burma is a country where history is unwritten, stories are untold, and truth is blanketed up and pushed out to sea for someone else to find. It is land where rumors hold more news than the press, where resistance is shrouded in riddles, rhymes and song, where the lips of the prophets are sewn up for good and poets are thrown into jail.

I honor the strength of the Burmese people, for their tenacity, their ability to find humor even in the darkest of days. I honor them for the silent way they taught me long-suffering and their compassion even for those who bring evil upon them. Most of all, I honor the way they get up each and every morning, feed their children, care for their loved ones, and carry on.

Every, single day they carry on.

I close with this video (you might want to turn your sound off to avoid the cheezy Barry Manilow soundtrack) of the smiling faces of Myanmar.

B’shalom.

In earlier societies bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the upper crust.

Yes, it almost makes sense…

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

Via Daily Dish…

Suddenly I know I have passed across
to a shore where I do not live.

-from The Heron, p. 114

Found in my electronic chapbook.

From Farming: A Hand Book by Wendell Berry.

If you were a casual observer of the actions of Myanmar’s State Peace and Development Council, you might think the country’s military dictators were in league with that central arm of the Axis of Evil: Walmart, internationally famous for its patholgical crusading against any form of orgaized labor.

From The Irrawaddy:The Burmese government on Wednesday rejected an application to form

a “Burma National Labor Union,” telling seven labor organizers that they could be prosecuted if they formed a union, a group leader said on Thursday.

Poe Phyu, a lawyer, and six others were summoned by the Rangoon Division Police Department and the Minister of Labour to a meeting on Wednesday.

“We met with the delegations led by four directors from the Ministry of Labor and police officials of the Rangoon Division Police Department,” Poe Phyu told The Irrawaddy on Thursday. “They said we’re not allowed to organize a labor union. They said we could be prosecuted if we continue our activities to organize.”

Poe Phyu said that during the meeting, the officials said that anyone who issued statements or documents about a labor union could be prosecuted under the law.

Labor unions are, at their core, one more example of people seeking to exercise a right to peaceably assemble, and we know how the generals feel about that freedom.