Reflections: In the Red

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The Red Mandala was created long ago in a notebook, freehand, in red ballpoint pen. When it was finished, and I began to contemplate it, I was given this message:

This figure is a self-portrait; each of its formal imperfections maps a corresponding flaw in your soul.


Ah-so.

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Readings: Blaise Cendrars

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If you happened to have dropped by this site a couple of weeks back, you may have seen one or more of the posts I put up quoting from Henry Miller’s excellent book, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. In that book (and probably in others), Miller touts the writings of the French novelist, Blaise Cendrars. Having never read any Cendrars, Miller’s endorsement sent me off to the stacks, resolved to fill this gap in my cultural heritage. I came away from the library with two books by Cendrars: The Confessions of Dan Yack; and Moravagine.

Of the former, the less said the better. The latter is a more interesting and substantial work. In the end, despite Miller’s enthusiasm for Cendrars and my enthusiasm for Miller, I can’t say that reading these two works has left me with any desire to pursue further studies concerning the fiction of Cendrars: c’est fini.

In Moravagine, he does manage to create one of the most cynical, amoral protagonists that I’ve ever encountered. Some thought typical of this character is presented below:

…In the last analysis scientific knowledge is negative. The latest discoveries of science as well as its most stable and thoroughly proven laws, are just sufficient to allow us to demonstrate the futility of any attempt to explain the universe rationally, and the basic folly of all abstract notions. We can now put our metaphysics away in the museum of international folklore, we can confound all a priori ideas. How and why have become idle, idiotic questions. All that we can admit or affirm, the only synthesis, is the absurdity of being, of the universe, of life. If one wants to live one is better to incline towards imbecility than intelligence, and live only in the absurd. Intelligence consists of eating stars and turning them into dung. And the universe, at the most optimistic estimate, is nothing but God’s digestive system.

And with that, I toss Monsieur Cendrars into the oubliette.

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Rodak's Renderings: Sky Pilot

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Remembrances: Boxing Backwards

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“Boxing Backwards” is the title that I gave to a collection of my poems, mostly composed after my move from New York City to Ohio in the early 1990s. The words are taken from a line in a poem, (to which I link you here) which I ended up not including in the collection. It was not that I felt that the poem didn’t work. Its exclusion was based upon my decision that the tortured syntax and neologistic compounds used in the poem (originally titled “In Retrospect: 1994”) clashed with the style of the bulk of the works. Structurally, this poem is an example of an experimental form that I created and used in the composition of a dozen or so other poems which were included in the collection. Its form is based on a strict linear syllable count, repeated in two stanzas of twelve lines each. The syllable count forces word choice and presents the poet with interesting problems of creative composition.

The term “boxing backwards” functions for me on a couple of different levels of meaning. In a pugilistic sense, if one finds that life is landing a series of sharp jabs to one’s chin, while one flails ineffectively, unable either to counterpunch or to mount a defense, one is soon on the retreat—“boxing backwards” into the ropes. On a more immediate level, with reference to the afore-mentioned move from NYC to Ohio, “boxing backwards” suggests the unpacking of the corrugated cardboard boxes into which the treasures and detritus of the life one has left behind had been packed for the move. As one opens the boxes and digs down through layers of documents and other items, one travels “backwards” through time and the boxes, deluged by memories of things past.

As I stated at the conclusion of a recent post, having become increasingly dissatisfied with dissecting the present world, where very little that is good—and less that is worth discussing—is happening, I have instead turned to the past. I have been going through the physical boxes stored in my closet—boxing backwards—and building blog posts around the items found therein.

As some of my Facebook friends have already seen, one category of “treasures” found in a box of very old items was certain pages torn out of some of my college notebooks (1965-1969), the margins of which are adorned with pencil, felt-tip, or ballpoint pen doodles made while obviously paying less than rapt attention to the words of my teachers. I will, for awhile, be using some of these doodles to illuminate selected blog posts. The doodles will most likely have nothing at all to do with the content of the post of above which they appear (as the one on this post does not); they will be art for art’s sake.

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Reflections: Pigging Out

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The question was never whether natural cycles of climate change occur. The question is, rather, whether human activity will push a naturally occurring climate trend a couple of ticks past a tipping point which would result in a global disaster for the unnaturally huge current human population.

As things stand with Man, however, a significant human die-off could be considered quite desirable.

So, as they say out in pork country, Happy Thanksgiving, m**therf***ers.

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Remembrances: In the Desert

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Below is another poem from the Rodak archives, composed for the same woman to whom this previously posted poem was addressed. This one is obviously more appropriate to her then still embryonic vocation as a rabbi:


Song for Leah

Leah, my face in your eyes,
dark stars, flashing on and off,
as night more slowly turns to day
than love devolves into sorrow.

Leah, your name is lovely
to my tongue. I do not hate you.
Though I loved your sister first,
I cherish all that you have borne for me.

Leah, your lips are dry,
chapped, as if in fever.
But your proud brow is cool,
smooth as a patriarch’s proscription.

Leah, is it your own?
Or is it Laban’s will,
rising like Sinai
behind your eyes?

Leah, time's bright eye
has focused too acutely,
parching love’s most tender flesh,
leaving my heart a desert place.

Leah, you show me out.
You fix the latch.
You shoot the bolt.
Life is a caravan, departing unladen.

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The photograph, taken during my travels to the Holy Land, back in the day when “Leah” was more recently in my life, is of the desert near the Dead Sea.

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Quote du Jour: Serving Mammon

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Quote: Bob Dylan (more on YouTube); Drawing: Heinrich Kley (more here)

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Remembrances: 520 Linden Street

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The following piece of juvenilia is distinguished by having inspired the primitive watercolor sketch which accompanies it on the page. The picture was, in turn, inspired by the neighborhood in Ann Arbor where I lived for three or four years as a grade-schooler. The house was at 520 Linden Street. Linden ran between South University Street, where my school, Angell Elementary, was located, and Geddes Avenue, which ran alongside the cemetery. The street was lush with tall elm trees then, just before the great Dutch elm disease plague that swept them all away. The backyards of many of the homes were graced with fruit trees; cherries, apples, pears. There were at least a dozen kids around my age living in homes on Linden, and also on South U. and Geddes. In the summer, we had it made in the shade, playing all day beneath a canopy of green. My several years on Linden Street were the happiest of my childhood. They ended in the summer following fifth grade, when we moved to Muncie, Indiana.

The house at 520 Linden still stands, apparently little changed. The families are all gone, however. Due to its close proximity to the central campus of the University of Michigan, the neighborhood has long since become a student ghetto. A look at the contemporary Linden Street, is provided by Google Maps.



Hymn

There are gray days when the trees drip crows
And the cries of dark birds fly over the hills
And into the towns, like the words
Of the locust eater, out of the wilderness.

Roaring seas of boiling black tumble in
To fill the empty bowl of the morning.
The belly of the sky is green with storm.
Shadows of branches, shivering with leaves,
Twist at our feet, writhing in the lightening flashes.
Then rain combs the grasses.

Afterwards the ground is wet
With the waters of the broken storm.
The odor of worms rises from the loam.
For all this praise the empty sky.



Amen, amen.
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Remembrances: Sinner Man

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The woman for whom the following poem was written—over thirty years ago—was a dancer, an artists’ model, and a poet. She lived alone in New York City, in a walk-up apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen. Her building stood in the Westside Manhattan neighborhood called Hell’s Kitchen, where rats rumbled along the gutters of 9th Avenue; where streetwalkers plied their trade from dusk to dawn, beckoning without hope from the urinous recesses of darkened doorways.

Bacchanal

sad the thrill-thin blood
of sober being
x __________

sister, sister
incest appeals to an only child
x __________

the canine tooth of doggèd love
can’t bite itself
and requires an assassin—
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tear out the throat of my urgent cry
drink the blood of reason’s walking corpse
and revel, drunken, in the mess you make—
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then sleep your sleep
in the bowels of a finished thing
x __________


A little over a year ago, I learned that she whom I am remembering here is now living in California. And she is—are you ready?—a rabbi.

A rabbi. Wow.

How cool is that?

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What, me Rodak?

Reflections: Memories

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Here is a beautiful passage from Czeslaw Milosz’s great novel, The Issa Valley. These words— the reflections of the book’s protagonist, Thomas—perhaps have relevance—on a grander scale— to some of my own recent posts:

…No one lives alone; he is speaking with those who are no more, their lives are incarnated in him; he is retracing their footsteps, climbing the stairs to the edifice of history. Their hopes and defeats, the signs left behind, be it a single letter carved in stone—here is the way to peace, to mitigating the judgments he imposed on himself. Happiness is given to those who have the gift. Never and nowhere will they feel alone, as they are comforted by the memory of all who have struggled like themselves, for something unattainable. Whether or not Thomas was rewarded, such moments as those spent in the company of his grandfather abided with him, anticipating an age when voices muted by time would become precious.

And here is another:

The nightingale cried out, was answered. Dampness seeped through the window. Whatever has been cannot endure; it fades, flickers, scatters; a man, doubting that he has been, can only pray. If a star ablaze in the bluish-green firmament was millions of miles away, and beyond it other stars, other suns; if all that was born passed without leaving a trace, then only God could rescue the past from insignificance. Even a past full of pain. Oh, if only one could say with certainty that it was not a dream.

We must remember that the past has relevance only as it is reshaped by our acts in the present.

With that thought in mind, it is my intention—the present growing increasingly less tolerable with each passing day—to dwell a bit more on my past for awhile than has been my habit to-date.

It may hurt some.
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Writings: Turner's Rhapsody

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Below is a contemplation of patriotic capitalists and their fruits:


The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement, explain American development. ~ Frederick Jackson Turner


Dig in deep, little Injun,
Here rides Kit Carson
Who counts coup with a boning knife;
Who translates vast tempests
Of thundering bison into one
Proper, prairie-rocking noun;
Who funnels all that rolling force
Through a single humming strand
Of transcontinental copper,
Which carries, encoded, the awesome
Name of shaggy Destiny;
Which grinds out at each end
Pale entrails of tickertape,
To fall from the turreted casements
Of meatpackers and railroad kings;
From the raspy digits of wrinkled domestics;
From the inky thumbs of chirruping clerks;
Down, down, down, descends
This glyphy slough of American laurel,
To wreath the rude brow, anointed
With the unclarified fats of beasts and bipeds,
Where beads of blood like flies in buttermilk
Persist, pronouncing the Passion
Of our Messiah of Manifest,
Now honored in grand procession;
As dime novels generate like maggots
In the sun-soaked meat that glorifies
Every distance from Independence to sunset,
Dig in deep, little Injun,
Here rides Kit Carson,
His saddlebags bursting with letters to Santa Claus.
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Religion: Fuse It, or Lose It

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The following excerpt is taken from Marilynne Robinson’s* preface to the Vintage Spiritual Classics volume, John Calvin, Steward of God’s Covenant, Selected Writings. Robinson’s preface serves not only to introduce Calvin to the reader, but also as a brief apologia for Protestantism and the Reformation.

As a Protestant who is wont to visit Catholic blogs, both to observe how the “other side” lives, and to defend the Christian brand under the aegis of which I was baptized and made my Confirmation, my positions have frequently been subject to the very criticism against which Robinson here defends Luther and Calvin:

To assume that objectivity can be looked for in matters of religion, as critics of the Reformers often do, when it is not naïve, is a pure statement of faith. Tradition is simply the accumulated subjectivities of individuals—Paul, Augustine, Francis of Assisi. That these are authoritative figures only underscores the fact that subjectivity is in itself nothing to be dismissed out of hand. If tradition sets these men apart on the grounds that God, so to speak, acted upon them directly, those who revere Luther and Calvin feel that they also were instruments of God. The Reformers’ sola Scriptura is often treated as literalism or bibliomancy, in either case as an evasion of discipline and reason. But such a view is by no means consistent with the acute critical attention both of them, but Calvin especially, brought to bear on the text.

This all seems so patently obvious that one is tempted simply to go, “Well, d’uh!” and move on to more challenging subjects. Ah, would that it were that easy. Would that Christian disunity--in an age when the Jihadists are off the rez and streaming across every Western frontier, bearing a law so harsh, yet so stark, that Father Abraham would have found little fault in it--did not render the decadent West so vulnerable in its collective hubris.

The potential site of that crucially-needed healing is an open Communion.
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*Marilynne Robinson is the author of the award-winning novels Housekeeping and Gilead, both of which I have read and recommend without reservation, and of The Death of Adam, a nonfiction book which I have also read and likewise recommend.


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Writings: Utopia

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Another oldie-but-goody...



Of those who champion the power
Of profane love, I ask—
Where stand the monuments
To passion's seizures?

To those who exhort faith
In the sophistries,
The promises, the pledges
And coercion of Politics,

I say—Once I can vote
For Wisdom as against Reason,
And for Justice as against Law,
I will have found my faction.

With those who speak of Progress
I would make this compromise—
To live with a lithe dark woman
In a dome of hand-packed mud:

A garden, a few useful animals,
A bronze chronology of children
Laughing through the mists
Of a waist-high meadow.

Beyond, an amphitheatrical forest,
Enclosed again by a range of hills
Mounting with pines to Himalayan majesty—
At my back, an unsailed ocean.

Yet, within walking distance
A great medical center, side by side
With the ultimate library,
At the end of a path known only to me.

Complete—I would worship Time.
Content—I would keep a place
Always set at my table
For the anticipated savior: Death.
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Readings: of (R)evolution and Lemonade

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From the Introduction of translator, Kimon Friar, to The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises by Nikos Kazantzakis:

…[Kazantzakis] never accepted the Soviet’s materialistic bias but looked on the Russian experiment primarily as the violent and cyclical upheaval of matter from the fires of which the refined spirit springs: “Not that I have any new illusions about Russia, but because, on the whole its soul is the deepest, darkest and most luminous, the most god-bearing soul of the world today.” He saw in Soviet Russia those barbaric yet necessary forces which periodically disrupt the world, seemingly sudden mutations in the surge of evolutionary progress which either destroy previous softened and decadent civilizations or challenge them toward resurrection. Thus the Dorians descended on the Minoan and Mycenaean civilization, the Romans on the Greek, the Goths on the Roman, inundation after inundation in the cyclical, barbaric, and implacable progress of the world.

Perhaps the way in which Kazantzakis chose to regard Russia’s struggle to infuse the West with a Soviet-style system, suggests that we might do well today to try to make conceptual lemonade out of the corrosively sour fruits of the Islamic neo-Jihad.
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Writings: Luckyland

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The following was composed some years ago. It still seems to work:


In the land of the lucky we specialize in irony. The words
Father and sky are linked by legerdemain. Skilled engravers
Etch shamanistic totems on the currency. We need to be seen.
It is not understood how these things are related.

In fine weather we circulate mainly by night. Heedful to
Whom we criticize necessity, we gather around tables in
Subterranean settings to share emphatic liquids, safe
Beneath the great spiked shell of the overhead city.

We scissor between tables, or sit in the din with the
Warm weight of opinion pressed upon our thighs like the
Unwelcomed cat of an arbitrary host. What the mind cannot
Contain, the flesh must often assume. We need to be heard.

Lips sphincter on eggs of darkness. Hands flutter urgently
Like doves snared in a fog. Eyes strobe the pounding ether
For omens of potentiality. Foiled by the tyranny of
Triangulation, do we still hope to be touched?

Boney-fingered dawn now prods a commotion of public events.
We note that the statues on the commons have ceased bellowing.
We hunker close in the deep purple dust of dead presidents
To attend their muttered contempt for the styles of the faithful.

We need to act. Here a committee is formed to oppose a task
Force. There a cetacean is rescued from stardom. All
Future walls must be clearly labeled BIODEGRADABLE. The
Think tank across the river hums like a Tibetan revival tent.

Vouchers for tennis lessons are distributed to the indigent.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff declare a moratorium on the production of
Blues harps. Bumper stickers are found to be edible and the
Parking lots double-up on muscle. Disney annexes Havana.

Weary, rosy, we now trudge our way westward. The
Dying orphans of High Romance are with us yet. We step around.
A large yellow dog of which Dickens dared not to conceive
Makes meat in the gutter of our national thrift.

We need to be seen. We need to be heard. Do we hope to be
Touched? We need to act. It is not understood how these
Things are related. The dog makes meat. The statues are silent.
This latter we take as a sure sign of progress.
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Reflections: Lovely Revenants

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Below is an excerpt from Samuel Beckett’s quirky novel, Watt, which I recently finished reading. This particular passage struck me in an odd way, making me aware, for the first time in a long time, of a mental gizmo I’ve intermittently recognized as part of my own apparatus.

The excerpt from Watt is lifted from one of the last few pages of the novel. The novel’s plot is too minimal to require much of a summary by way of setting up a context for the passage to be quoted. Most of the book is, in fact, much like this passage: a noting of mental events, often so fleeting and so experientially “disembodied” that they would go almost unnoticed under normal circumstances. The circumstances in Watt are, however, seldom “normal.”

Briefly, then, at the beginning of the novel, we see the character Watt setting out for new employment in the home of a Mr. Knott (“Not?”), a personage who sometimes (as when he walks in his garden) might strike us as some kind of a “God” figure (or Knott, as the case may be). One apparently holds the position towards which Watt (“What?”...”Wot?”) is travelling, until one day another man comes, unannounced, to take one’s place. Then it is over.

Toward the end of the story, Watt’s replacement has arrived, and he has therefore set out by night, carrying with him the two valises that he carried when he first embarked for Knott’s house, sometime in the indefinite past. He has now arrived at the train station, just as the night station master, his shift over, is about to lock up. After some deliberation, the night man decides that Watt may be admitted to the station to await the dawn arrival of the day man, so long as Watt remains locked in the Waiting Room. And so, in the Waiting Room Watt...waits:

Part of the waiting room was faintly lit, by light from without. …The waiting room was empty of furniture, or other objects, as far as Watt could see.
[…]
Whispering it told, the mouth, a woman’s, the thin lips sticking and unsticking, how when empty they could accommodate a larger public than when encumbered with armchairs and divans, and how it was vain to sit, vain to lie, when without the rain beat down, or the sleet, or the snow, with or without wind, or the sun, with greater or lesser perpendicularity. This woman’s name had been Price, her persona was of an extreme spareness, and some thirty-five years earlier she had shot, with colors flying, the narrows of the menopause. Watt was not displeased to hear her voice again, to watch again the play of the pale bows of mucus. He was not displeased either when it went away.

It took me a minute to realize what is going on here. The disembodied presence of a woman named “Price”—a person from Watt’s distant past—has for no readily apparent or causally-related reason, manifested, and is phantasmagorically explaining to Watt why the Waiting Room is devoid of furniture. Watt can “see” her familiar lips as she “speaks” and “hear” her ghostly voice.

This passage made me realize that my own soul is haunted by such female presences who float up from the submerged past to deliver instructions such as “Squeeze from the bottom!” when I pick up the toothpaste tube. Or, who chant “Home again, home again, diggy-diggy!” as the car pulls into the driveway at the end of a trip.

Just as they are familiar to Watt, so these presences are familiar to me; yet they wax uncanny, if consciously contemplated. Why, for instance, did Beckett choose to name this female apparition that comes to Watt “Price?” Is it not because of the price that these lost relationships demand of a man’s soul? Is the price not those points subtracted by the referee, Necessity, for what we must now consider to have been our unforced errors? Is this not the price we pay for having played and lost? And does this all not explain my fondness for the Steve Earle song, I Still Carry You Around, a stanza of which laments:

You’re with me everywhere I go
xxxIn my heart and in my soul
Down every road, no matter where I’m bound
xxxI still carry you around.

I think so. Yes, I do. And it has also occurred to me now, thanks to Beckett, that I had once fictively described this mental phenomenon myself, in a story entitled, Solitude. To wit:

But I had already gone too far. Inadvertently, I had strayed too near the crushing gravitational pull of that merciless black hole. For I heard a voice, a soft, barely audible, whisper of a voice, distinctly female, though disembodied, that said quite clearly, “Want to smell something funky?” And simultaneously I saw, wavering before my mind’s eye, the vision of a lovely, ghostly little hand; a hand that had slipped through the tiniest crack in the ramparts of memory; a hand that extended an index finger freshly withdrawn from the very fundament of my physical being to emerge redolent of the forbidden aroma of erotic misconduct.

If you have come with me thus far, I invite you now to see and hear a video of I Still Carry You Around here, and/or to read my story, Solitude, in its entirety, here. You deserve no less.
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Quote du Jour: Easier Said Than Done

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It is easy to use the words faith and repentence, but the things are most difficult to perform. ...Men will allow themselves to be constrained by numerous severe laws, to be tied to numerous laborious observances, and to bear a severe and heavy yoke; in short, there is no annoyance to which they will not submit, provided there be no mention of the heart.
XXX~ John Calvin, The Necessity of Reforming the Church
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Reflections: Conservatism

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American political conservatism is populated by a compliant mob of the intellectually-challenged, all desperately seeking leaders who will condone the acting-out of their fear and hatred of anything that looks "different" to them, and which they don't understand. The conservative mob is to be pitied, as are all the confused and disoriented.

The leaders who exploit the weakness and disability of this sorry herd cannot be called "conservative," since the substance of their purposes and agendas transcends political definition by entering into the spiritual arena of Evil.

The strength of such men is derivative of the failure of our age to recognize the objective reality of Evil. This moral vacuum has allowed them to corrupt even religion, twisting and manipulating sacred doctrine to serve their perverse ends.

Ultimately, it must be understood that even these leaders, influential and powerful as they may become, are also to be pitied. No mortal being serves Evil knowingly. We therefore understand that each of these rabble-rousing plutocrats and power-brokers is radically ignorant of the reality of his world, as well as of the nature of his essential self.

One day, men such as these--each in his own time--will come awake to an awful terror, as a shield against which all of his worldly status, riches, and power over little men will be of no avail.
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Rants: Making a Federal Case of Health Care

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The following consideration of the constitutionality of a proposed national health care system was originally composed in the comment section of Kyle Cupp's excellent blog, here. I am an advocate of a fully-nationalized, single-payer health care system. I think that to question the half-assed compromise system that is currently before congress on constitutional grounds is a joke and a diversionary tactic, being promoted in defense of corporate profits at the expense of the general welfare of the citizenry. That said, please consider the following:

The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution states that its purposes are the following: ...to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty...

I believe that ensuring access for all citizens, regardless of their ability to pay, to live-saving and life-enhancing health care fits nicely into the category "promote the general welfare." I believe that a national health care system is every bit as constitutionally sound as providing for the common defense. Is not defense against disease as important to the individual citizen as is defense against foreign or domestic enemies? Is it not, in fact, very likely to actually be much more important in the life of almost all citizens?

Much of medical research is funded by tax dollars. Why, therefore, should there not be equal, and guaranteed, access to the fruits of that science for all citizens?

I don't see the problem here. If a national health service, in which the government actually employed the health care providers were being proposed, the argument against it might be stronger. But that is not the case. The only difference here would be in who is writing the checks to pay for the services.

Government agencies are answerable to the people through their elected representatives. Insurance corporation bureaucrats are answerable only to their boards of directors and their shareholders. And what those entities are demanding of them is not good health care, but good profits. You do the math.
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Reflections: A Collage

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Two lines of poetry often tell us more, give us more, than the weightiest tome by an erudite. To make anything truly significant one has to poetize it. …Knowledge weighs one down; wisdom saddens one. The love of truth has nothing to do with knowledge or wisdom: it’s beyond their domains. Whatever certitude one possesses is beyond the realm of proof.
xxx~ Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

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Ironic Couplet

Although the gates of Hell
Were locked,
Determined Billy
Kristol knocked.
xxx~ Rodak

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Matt. 18:3 …Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

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The intellect is a product of ego, and the ego can never be stilled, never be satisfied.
xxx~ Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

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It’s only when we stop trying to see, stop trying to know, that we really see and know. (ibid.)

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Freedom is a misnomer. …Freedom implies choice and choice exists only to the extent that we are aware of our ineptitude. (ibid.)

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If we abandoned fear and prejudice, we could meet the murderer as easily as the saint. (ibid.)
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Rants: Built on Sand

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All one needs to do is criticize Pres. Obama*--no matter how unfairly, and upon whatever petty, nitpicky grounds--and the mouth-breathing droves of clueless goobers and bleating merinos come marching forth in drooling, lockstep droves, chanting the talking-point du jour in the best approximation of unison that they can muster in their immeasurable incompetence. Send in the Clowns.

If such as these are the foundation of our democracy, this building has not much longer to stand.

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*See comment threads following the posts "Open Thread" and "Presidential Disconnect" (Friday, November 6th)

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