A Laurel and Hearty Handshake

and continuing the Vardathon

I think it’s pretty friggin’ awesome that

Chris La Tray

has been named Montana’s poet laureate! Couldn’t happen to a better and more talented person. If you don’t read

An Irritable Métis

you are a ding-dong. (Who am I kidding? Most of you probably found me via Chris!) I’d like to extend Chris my congratulations on this fantastic achievement.

When Chris made the announcement, I looked up who New Jersey’s poet laureate is.

And then I remembered, we don’t have one. But once, we did. And I met him.

New Jersey’s second and last poet laureate was Amiri Baraka, a poet, playwright, and beat writer who had always been controversial and outspoken. A Newark native, I met him at Rutgers University when he read some of his “low ku” poetry. His son Ras Baraka was with him, and announced his first candidacy for mayor, attempting to unseat the notoriously corrupt Sharpe James. (It took Ras Baraka a few runs, but after Corey Booker left to become Senator, he finally became mayor, and seems to be doing well.) Amiri Baraka became poet laureate in 2002, apparently without anyone having read his often anti-Semitic, misogynist, and homophobic poems. When he read “Somebody Blew Up America” after 9/11, the state tried to remove him, which they couldn’t, and then to make him resign. He refused, and served out his two-year tenure. Legislators then abolished the post, like cowards.

Removing the post was cowardly; I don’t have a problem with legislators trying to remove Baraka. At the time, I defended him, even though I found portions of “Somebody Blew Up America” hateful and offensive. Now, I am less forgiving; the only mass shooting committed in New Jersey with an AR-15 was by members of an anti-Semitic hate group who espoused hateful conspiracy theories, like the one Baraka wrote in that poem.

Following up on previous posts, Thomas Dambo’s troll sculptures continue to spark joy. If you missed my visit to his New Jersey troll, here it is:

If you’d rather be intrigued, this Outside article on unsolved mysteries in national parks was an interesting read. If you go exploring, bring more water than you need, and tell someone where you are going.

If you enjoyed my long piece on Spirited Away, you may enjoy this one by

Animation Obsessive

about the attempts to bring an animated Pippi Longstocking to screen:

The Strongest Girl in the World

Watching that old favorite made me pick up the Vardathon again, and I watched Vagabond. I’d watched it before, and it remains very powerful. The story of Mona, a young woman who lives on the road and refuses to settle down with anyone. She is defiantly free, and dies for it. Perhaps the strongest example of Agnès Varda’s pseudo-documentary style, its French title was Sans toit ni loi, or “with neither shelter nor law.” This is a pun on the saying, “sans foi ni loi,” or “with neither faith nor law,” which means you fear no god and no man, and live godless and lawlessly. With the advent of private property and the erasure of all commons, “homelessness” was invented; Mona can’t squat, or even sleep safely in the woods. She was once a secretary who left that life; now there is no place for her, as one who will not work within the system.

You can watch Vagabond on The Criterion Channel.

An anecdote, of how dehumanizing the term “homeless” is, and why we say unhoused. When I trained in martial arts, my teacher was not one of the kind who embrace the honorific “sensei” and demand obeisance. If you could kick his ass, he welcomed it. He didn’t want respect he didn’t earn. But some students wanted to be that way. And one middle-aged white guy joked that for the teacher’s birthday, we should get him “a homeless person.” To kill, he meant. For fun. Nobody laughed, but the casual way he said it chilled me then, and still does now.

On that note, something more positive. I had a lovely evening at our local bookstore’s Romance Date Night, with Sarah, where I served as arm candy, and picked up Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead (I loved Harlem Shuffle), Good Night Irene, by Luis Alberto Urrea, and A Year of Birdsong: 52 Stories of Songbirds. It was nice to see a bookstore full of joyful, laughing people (the champagne and framboise with raspberries certainly helped.) I wore the vintage aloha shirt that I wore on our honeymoon:

I’m reading Bitch: On the Female of the Species, by Lucy Cooke, recommended to me by

Hannah, the WanderFinder

. Evolutionary science that breaks the narrative we’ve been told by biased men from Darwin onward, who tell the story through a warped lens. From hyenas to bonobos to songbirds and violently matriarchal lemurs, meerkats, and mole rats, it ain’t all about slinging sperm wildly to fertilize coyly hidden ova. It’s a varied and wonderful world out there, and this is a great read.

I’m also enjoying The Book of Delights by Ross Gay very much. This Sunday, I’ll share my foray into Philadelphia with my niece and her man, where we visited Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, and the US Mint. After that, I’m plumb out of adventures for a while, so I may steal his idea and begin writing one short piece a day for an entire year. I’m terrible at journaling, but I always remember to write my two posts a week here. And a lot of things bring me joy. I won’t barrage you with one entry a day, but you’ll get a “best of” twice a week. I will be writing with a pen on paper, and transcribing them here, because even I can’t read my own handwriting. I hope to write a nature journal like Susannah of

Cricklewood Nature Journaling

someday, but that will take a lot of work on my patience and presence.