Go Empty into My Debris

 

Two poems in Arvilla Fee's Soul Poetry magazine. View it as a PDF or read it as a flip book.

A Soul's a Sort of a Fifth Wheel to a Wagon

 

But they still have souls, right?

Soul Poetry, not Seoul Poetry, had published two poems of mine in their first issue. Nothing much about the soul per se. 

Nardo Goes West, Part Three

The next leg of my trip was the longest (not counting my flight back from Seattle). The Empire Builder left Chicago and Carlo, one of the attendants, came around to take my dinner reservation. I had the option of dining at 5:00, 5:30, 6:45, and 7:15 PM. I picked 5:30. While they do try to make people stick to the schedule, space often open up. They tell you if this is the case. There are also announcements for the last call.

I chose the 5:30 option for my first dinner on Amtrak.  It was still daylight while I made my way to the dining car. My roomette was on the ground level, so to speak. In order to get most places I had to take the stairs up and cross over the train cars. My bathroom and shower were on the same floor as me, so I didn't have to go to far to get to them. But in order to eat, drink, or use the observation car, I needed to climb up and down the stairs and sneak my way around people and corners. It's like being in a ship while still being on land.

The stairs I took every day, they also offer a decent view,
when nobody's trying to use them

At the top of the stairs was complimentary coffee and orange juice.
This cup was filled by me, it wasn't just standing there
waiting for someone to come pick it up.

Dinner, along with other meals, is taken in the dining car. It's cramped but Amtrak does its best to make the experience like a restaurant. There's silverware, wine, and napkins folded into little florets.

The menu is limited. They have salmon, chicken, steak, seafood cakes, and a vegan pasta dish. There was a butternut risotto as well. I wanted to try the chef's special, which was a kind of gnocchi with kale. However they were out of it the whole time I was on the train. Soft drinks are complimentary, along with the food itself if you're in a sleeper car. You have to pay for alcohol. People bring their own food on board. It's a popular option in the coach car. I saw families eating snacks and dishes they brought in Tupperware. There's also the cafe area under the lounge car. You can't really buy food at the stations we pass through. The Empire Builder either gets in too late, stays too short, or stays too long at towns with too few places to shop.  

For my first meal, I had the land and sea. I guess it's Amtrak's answer to the surf and turf. You get a steak and a seafood cake that blends together several different creatures from the briny deep. I believe it mixed in crab and shrimp, with some kind of fish. I preferred it to the steak, which I found a little chewy. I had iced tea to drink, which is also complimentary. For dessert I had a flourless chocolate cake. It was good and dense. They also have a caramel parfait, a fruit and cheese plate, cheesecake, and vanilla pudding with no sugar added. I mention that last detail because our waitress brought it up every time when telling us about our options.

In all likelihood, you'll be eating with other people at your table. It doesn't matter how much seating is available. Every time I got to the car, I was put into the nearest opening where people were already sitting. I must've been one of the few Easterners on the train. I was probably the only person who came all the way from New York. It was a common question, not just where I was from originally, but where I got on board. Chicago was the main answer for most people, but a fair number got on the Empire Builder in St. Paul and Fargo. Several people came on at Milwaukee too, including my first mealtime companions. 

They were from Michigan's Upper Peninsula and older than me. Nearly everyone on the train was, or they were much, much younger. That's fine. You meet people you normally wouldn't otherwise this way. Especially people from the Midwest. We talked about our respective communities and trips we've taken around the country. They were Packers fans and I told them about how my father was a fan too (he's also a shareholder). We noticed people taking pictures and video of the train along the way, which I didn't expect. I know there's all kinds of people in this world, and some of them are Railfans. Normally they tend to be into either freight trains or older locomotives. It was surprised some of them also like to take pictures of Amtrak trains. They're nice, but they all look alike with no interesting livery. Now the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe on the other hand...

It was my first experience with Wisconsin, which was all I really saw that day. We didn't hit Minnesota until the sun set, so it was either too dark to see, or I slept through the sights. I never realized how big, green, and wet Wisconsin is. I guess I thought it would look like Illinois, much drier and flatter. Maybe that has less to do with the natural geography and more to do with how human have used the land. Either way, I saw lots of hills, waterways, trees, bushes, and waterlilies. We passed through the Wisconsin Dells, and it reminded me of Missouri's Lake of the Ozarks. 

Columbus, WI, which is basically the stop for Madison

Socialism in Wisconsin! Eugene Debs lives!

Where we paused on the Wisconsin/Minnesota border for a smoking break

With no internet, people interacted more. Not just at dinner, but through the cars, including in the coach class and in the observation areas. Men in mullets laughed together while Mennonites sat together and watched the world going by. I saw a man with a tricorn hat and a big feather sticking out of it. Below them all, families played card and board games.  Other people just talked. Everybody's got a story. In the lounge car there was a woman from LA who was a waitress but aspiring to be a trainer, which is a variation I hadn't heard before. Usually it's an actor or screenwriter (in NY it's an actor or a novelist). One drunk woman came down into the lounge and hammed it up, lamenting she missed her stop in Toomah and had to figure out a way home from La Crosse. 

With no internet, I had no need for my headphones. Note the efficient use of a coat hanger.

A lot of pundits and thinkpiece writers like to lament the bubbles we've sorted ourselves into, and yet none of them seem to have any idea of what to do about it. They love to point and wag their fingers at the people living on the coasts for refusing to interact with people in Middle America. Of course, they love to live in those same bubbles and never get out of them, unless they're writing about Iowa state fairs before the Presidential caucuses. Even when they do that, they just take the bubble with them, putting people under the microscope wherever they go. On the train you have to sit down with people, look at them, share space with them, and listen to what they have to say on their terms. There's no interrogation, only conversation between the bread rolls and the dessert. If you really want to get people in this country talking, you don't have to bring back the draft as some have suggested, just get people to take long train rides together. If they can't afford it, subsidize it.

Then again, the bubble is probably overstated. Outside of La Crosse I saw "Go Gay or Go Home" sprayed on an overpass. The only thing that stays the same are the differences between people I guess.

An American Diplomat in Franco Spain: A Book Review

An American Diplomat in Franco Spain by Michael Aaron Rockland (paperback, 178 pages, Hansen) is a memoir from a former member of the Foreign Service who was stationed in Spain during the late 1960s, a period of time when the country was still under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The work is a quick read and filled with many amusing anecdotes along with comparisons between the American and Spanish ways of life. Several famous figures make an appearance within its pages as well as a first-hand account of a military disaster that threatened to become Spain's version of Chernobyl. However, Rockland's work has a tendency to digress into observations about the present as well as his life back in the States after serving in Spain. Both of these make the book seem padded for length. In addition, even though the term "Franco" and "Spain" are in the title, the memoir itself deals little with the everyday reality of life under the Caudillo. 

At the heart of the memoir is the story of a young diplomat's struggle to put his personal politics and beliefs aside to serve his country abroad. When Rockland arrives in Spain, he is overjoyed to be in a land whose language and culture he admires, but he is dismayed having to work with a fascist regime his parents raised him to oppose. Making matters worse, Rockland often encounters ex-Nazis the government is sheltering at routine diplomatic functions. Rockland does try to resist as best he can without becoming a persona non grata.  In one scene for instance, the author manages to sneak out of having to shake Franco's hand when the dictator comes to an event and the other diplomats have to stand in a line to greet him. As his time at the embassy goes on, Rockland's idealism wears away and when he is transferred from Madrid to Saigon, he decides to leave the Foreign Service for good.   

But he makes the most of his time in Spain and treats the reader to a series of amusing anecdotes and encounters.  As an aspiring writer, Rockland visits the haunts of Ernest Hemingway and meets a female bullfighter who has a secret theory that explains why the famed author killed himself.  Meanwhile, he engages in a battle of wills and wits with his neighbor's dog, whose owners he suspects of being Nazis exiled from Romania.  He also learns to adapt to his position as a Jew in Spain, which means clarifying numerous misconceptions among the Spanish, such as Jews having horns. For his part, he learns not to take offense at such things as the costumes of the Semana Santa despite their resemblance to those worn by certain groups back home. In a particularly fascinating turn of events, Rockland's son auditions for and wins a role in the movie Dr. Zhivago, which was filmed in Spain. 

Through his position at the embassy, Rockland gets to meet some of the important people of the era. One of these is Martin Luther King Jr. The author acts as an unofficial interpreter and assistant to the civil rights leader while he stops in Spain for a brief visit as part of a tour of Europe. In their time together, Rockland gives King a lesson in geography and helps him get over a bout of diarrhea.  King makes Rockland realize his own prejudices, particularly against the South, and that Black Southerners are as much a part of the region and its culture as are its Whites. A little while later, the diplomat meets Ted Kennedy and largely performs the same role for him, except that he also gets to serve as the senator's social companion. This comes with the downside of having to pick up the Senator's bar tab, which serves as another reality check for Rockland because it was his idolization of JFK which lead him into the Foreign Service in the first place.  He is also involved with the diplomatic response to the Palomares incident when a B-52s collided with a Stratotanker over Spain during a refueling mission. The collision caused the bomber to inadvertently drop several hydrogen bombs which had to be retrieved without setting off mass panic. In the end, Rockland went for a swim off the coast with Ambassador Angier Biddle Duke to assuage concerns about radioactivity   

Despite these picaresque incidents and others, they are not enough to justify a book-length treatment for Rockland's years in Spain. All too often, the chapters are bulked up with gratuitous asides which take the reader out of Franco's Spain (or Francoist Spain, why "Franco Spain" was chosen for the title is a mystery) and into the present with only the flimsiest link to the author's experiences in late sixties Madrid. Sometimes the asides can be interesting, such as his observations on bullfighting and tipping, but they still digress, along with his idea to have special personal ads for garlic eaters. All too often, Rockland tackles topics such as Columbus, cosmopolitanism in America, the Protestant work ethic, and our changing terms for Black Americans, instead of discussing the nature of the dictatorship he had to work with.  

An American Diplomat in Franco Spain starts out strong but finishes weak. Perhaps Rockland could have made his memoir about the sixties in general instead of his time in Spain since he often references what he was doing during the decade before and after his tenure in Madrid. He mentions the Kennedys, hearing Bob Dylan for the first time, working in South Vietnam, and dealing with campus strife, all subjects which could be elaborated upon to form a more perfect memoir. It would certainly give Rockland an opportunity to dig through his personal archives to find more interesting pictures. The photographs supplied for the book mainly feature him in a variety of seated poses, either by himself at a desk, or next to older men proudly crossing their legs to show off bit of calf.  

When Sartre Talked to Crabs

"Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?"  

"After the politicians, I went to the poets, the writers of tragedies and dithyrambs and the others, intending in their case to catch myself being more ignorant then [sic] they. So I took up those poems with which they seemed to have taken most trouble and asked them what they meant... I am ashamed to tell you the truth, gentlemen, but I must. Almost all the bystanders might have explained the poems better than their authors could. I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say... At the same time I saw that, because of their poetry, they thought themselves very wise men in other respects, which they were not. So there again I withdrew, thinking that I had the same advantage over them as I had over the politicians."

I think this section from Plato's Apology (spoken by Socrates) pretty much explains how I feel about this poem of mine in the Fox Chase Review.

Read Me on Your Kindle

I have a short story up at The Write Room. You can read it the old fashioned way online or the new and improved way on your Kindles! Me? I will be reading it on vellum.