Who Do?

A question comes me: am I getting more(or less) agreeable with age? In years past I thought my taste was completely out of the mainstream, that maybe one in ten of
my friends and aquaintances would concur with my opinons about films, books or other cultural events. So when I shared this poem with some friends and 50%
concurred with me that it was delightfully creative, I thought maybe I'm coming around, maybe meditation is helping, maybe I won't become a grumpy old man after all.
(Of course the other 50% thought I needed more meds).
So here is the poem in question by Barbara Hamby :


Who Do Mambo
A sports writer complained to Joe Louis about another boxer who didn't like
to take punches to the body. Louis replied, "Who do?"

Mon Dieu, said the Hindoo, I don't want to stop drinking. Who do?
But sometimes you have to put down your glass so you
can pick it up for another round. At the University Ladies' Tea
with the pill-popping dean's wife and Marxist shrews,
you don't want to talk to them or anyone else. Who do?
But like Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady you say
How do you do, call on Andrew Marvell and George Herbert
to rescue you, but you draw the short straw,
and there's Julie Andrews in The Sound if Music with her igloo
smile and Christmas sweater. You are the Sioux
in this cavalry charge, and you need some firewater pronto,
gin and lighter fluid or a gun, but that's so American,
and who would you shoot but yourself, so you try to spin some voodoo
around this vampire soirée. Where are the chicken bones
and bat fangs when you need them, Miss Nancy Drew?
Face facts, you don't have a clue. Let me preview
my upcoming bout of spinal meningitis for you,
or shall I invoke Bob Dylan, mathematician and Hebrew
troubadour, for I am tangled up in glue or something like it, goo
or ooze. If I were a cow, I'd be bigger than I am, say moo
and pray to Shiva, but as it is, I am a fourth-rate kangaroo
praying for rescue in a bottle, my mind a zoo,
a giraffe popping out my left ear, a zebra out my right. Whew,
that hurt, but so much does these days. Much Ado
About Nothing, that's my play, Beatrice and crew. Let's review.
Everything I adore is either forbidden to me or taboo,
which is pretty much the same thing. O Alice, I grew
an inch with that one, or was it my nose? Hey, Pinocchio, you
want me to chop you for firewood? Who do? Wait, I have a few
things to say about hue. I'm orange but, carissimo, you
are as blue as you were the day Picasso, or was it Braque, drew
you in Montmartre in the Bateau Lavoir, and now that my shoe
is wedged in my mouth again and my underpants askew,
I'll take this opportunity to bid you an affectionate adieu.
Parting is such sweet sorrow that I would pitch some woo
with you till next Wednesday; O Shiva, the queue
to your divine brain is teeming with supplicants, so in lieu
of the old one-two, I'll sign off. Something nasty just blew
in from Kazakhstan, and my electric bill's twenty years overdue.
Mirror, mirror on the wall—Oh, God, not you.

Barbara Hamby

All-Night Lingo Tango
University of Pittsburgh Press



Here are some reviews of the book (now wouldn't you like to get such nice reviews?)

About All-Night Lingo Tango

All-Night Lingo Tango

This collection is a love letter to language with poems that
are drunk and filled with references to the hyperkinetic
world of the twenty-first century. Yet Zeus and Hera tangle
with Leda on the interstate; Ava Gardner becomes a Hindu
princess; and Shiva, the Destroyer, reigns over all. English
is the primary god here, with its huge vocabulary and
omnivorous gluttony for new words, yet the mystery of the
alphabet is behind everything, a funky puppet master who
can make a new world out of nothing.
"Scant verbiage cannot rise to the occasion of these
brilliantly overbrimming, beautifully bountiful, life-stuffed,
word-smart, unconstrained but strangely formal, wise and
wicked and zaftig lovelies. They turn 'wretched excess' to
'blessed excess' and declare a new physics of plenitude."
—Albert Goldbarth

"With its hyperintensity of imagery, humor, and substance
sustained throughout, All Night Lingo Tango is a whirling
genius of a book."
—Susan Hahn
All-Night Lingo Tango
University of Pittsburgh Press
Pittsburg, Pennsylvania

Surviving a cruise

How do you survive a Cruise?

Learn to read.

Learning to Read
by Franz Wright January 19, 2009 New Yorker

If I had to look up every fifth or sixth word,
so what. I looked them up.
I had nowhere important to be.
My father was unavailable, and my mother
looked like she was about to break,
and not into blossom, every time I spoke.
My favorite was the Iliad. True,
I had trouble pronouncing the names,
but when was I going to pronounce them, and
to whom?
My stepfather maybe?
Number one, he could barely speak English;
two, he had sufficient intent
to smirk or knock me down
without any prompting from me.
Loneliness, boredom and terror
my motivation
fiercely fuelled.
I get down on my knees and thank God for them.
Du Fu, the Psalms, Whitman, Rilke.
Life has taught me
to understand books.