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Jason Crane Posts

The Great Men’s Room Escape!

Published 15 March 2009 by Jason Crane

toilet-stall

We had 15 or so folks at the house today for John’s third birthday party. After the party, a dozen of us headed to El Mariachi in downtown Albany for some great Mexican food.

Toward the end of the meal, my 6-year-old son Bernie had to go the bathroom. I took him to the bathroom and he entered the toilet stall, locking the door behind him.

When he finished going to the bathroom, he tried to open the door. I could see the handle moving, but the door didn’t open. After about 30 seconds, he started to panic. “I can’t get the door open, Dad!” He said. “Go get someone!”

I asked him what the lock looked like, and tried to calm him down by getting him to describe the mechanism to me. It didn’t really work, though. He was really in a panic and asking me to get someone. The stall and the door went all the way to the floor, so there was no way for him to crawl out.

I looked up and noticed that there was a two-foot space between the top of the stall and the ceiling. Next to the stall was a urinal. Not knowing what else to do, I climbed on the urinal and waved my hand over the top. Bernie climbed onto the toilet and reached up for my hands. I grabbed him and he tried to climb up the wall of the stall while holding my hands. I had no leverage at all, and I couldn’t exert much force to pull him up.

Bernie slipped back and almost landed in the toilet bowl. We decided to try it again. This time he got a little more traction on the wall and was able to climb up high enough for me to get my hands under his arms. Together we got him on top of the wall. I put one arm around him and yanked him off the wall at the same time as I jumped down off the urinal. We landed on the floor together and instantly started laughing at the ridiculouslness of the whole thing.

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Call for government response, in rhyme

Published 10 March 2009 by Jason Crane

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A classic Burma-Shave sign poem

From today’s Albany Times-Union:

Greenfield residents use touch of humor to push town for road repairs

By DENNIS YUSKO, Staff writer
First published: Tuesday, March 10, 2009

GREENFIELD — Denton Road residents have adopted an old advertising technique to protest the street’s poor condition.

Upset that the nearly 2-mile corridor straddling Greenfield and Saratoga Springs hasn’t been repaved in years, neighbors plugged campaign-style signs with balloons into nine bales of hay and planted them along the road.

In an echo of the old rhyming roadside ads for Burma-Shave shaving cream, the green placards form a jingle for passing motorists: “Try to avoid, The hazards here, And say out loud, Elections are near! A safe road, Is just a mirage, But we do have, A new town garage, Thank you Greenfield!”

Read the rest of the article at the TU site.

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Drinking the Ubuntu-Aid

Published 2 March 2009 by Jason Crane

I’ve been a Mac user since that was possible (in 1984) — first through school and then with every personal computer I’ve ever purchased. (Caveat: My parents purchased my first computer, my beloved Commodore64. The first computer I actually bought myself was a Mac.) Over the years, I’ve also used Windows in various jobs, although I’ve always tried to use Macs and even worked with our tech guys to convert Jazz90.1 to Macs when I was station manager there.

My good friend Kevin Baird, author of Ruby by Example: Concepts and Code, has long been an advocate of open source software and the Free Software movement. And while I’ve wanted to join him in that advocacy, I’ve never really been able to get my head around Linux.

Recently, though, Kevin recommended that I give Ubuntu a try. Ubuntu is a version of Linux that describes itself as “Linux for human beings.” Well, that sounded right to me, so I downloaded a CD version of Ubuntu that I could run on my work laptop without making any changes at all to the laptop. And you know what? It just works.

With that positive experience in hand, and needing to add a second computer to our home in advance of grad school and new jobs, I decided to order a Linux-based laptop. Of course, Linux (and Ubuntu) can run on whichever laptop you have, but I wanted a laptop that came right out of the box with Ubuntu installed. I Googled around and found System76, a company based in Denver, Colorado, that makes laptops, desktops and servers with Ubuntu installed. I decided on the Pangolin Performance model:

It should arrive sometime this week, so look for updates on my entry in the world of Linux.

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BOOK REVIEW: 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border

Published 28 February 2009 by Jason Crane

Poet, teacher, author and Chicano activist Juan Felipe Herrera has collected some of his most provocative and autobiographical writing in this volume. These “undocuments” chronicle Herrera’s travels in the U.S. and Mexico, and his relentless search for the soul and story of a people.

Herrera’s poetry is shouted with an upraised fist at one moment, intoned with a somber brow the next. He has no illusions, but his best work is powered by a grand vision of the past and the future.

Some of the work is helped by a knowledge of Spanish, which I don’t possess. Even so, I had no trouble being caught up in the sound and spirit of Herrera’s writing.

We need more documentary poetry like this to capture the real history of this country, and of the peoples and cultures within it.

Highly recommended.

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BOOK REVIEW: The Wild Party

Published 28 February 2009 by Jason Crane

Joseph Moncure March wrote this tale of debauchery and deception in rhyming couplets in 1928, just before the world descended into the depths of the Great Depression.

Decades later, artist and author Art Spiegelman (of MAUS fame), found a copy in a used bookstore and fell instantly in love with the darkness and depravity of March’s lost classic. In 1994, nearly 70 years after the publication of The Wild Party, Spiegelman published this illustrated version.

March’s short, taut thriller beautifully captures the grim determination of a group of down-but-not-out actors, dancers and vaudeville performers as they use drink and sex to mask the depression of their everyday lives. Spiegelman’s woodblock-style illustrations add the perfect touch of dark sensuality that at times turn to stale, harshly lit reality. The poem builds to an inevitable climax of violence that nevertheless leaves the reader sitting up straight and waiting for the end.

William S. Burroughs said of The Wild Party: “It’s the book that made me want to become a writer.”

Highly recommended.

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Cubicle workers of the world — unite!

Published 25 February 2009 by Jason Crane

I don’t work in a cubicle, but I am a fan of the labor movement and thought this ad from ThinkGeek was funny:

Fellow cubicledwellers, join us in solidarity against The Man. OfficeMax estimates there are 80 million cubicle workers worldwide. And they’d know, cause they’re trying to sell them all one of those mousepads that stinks. Imagine the collective bargaining power of 80 million people crying out for one thing: doors.

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Book Review: Quiet, Please

Published 24 February 2009 by Jason Crane

Scott Douglas’s memoir of his life as a librarian is hard to put down. So hard, in fact, that I took some additional bathroom breaks at various points just to keep reading.

Douglas loves libraries, but not for the reasons you might think. In fact, this look behind the curtain shattered many of my notions about who librarians are and why they choose to be librarians. (Hint: It’s not about the books.) I appreciated Douglas’s look at his profession as an example of public service.

Douglas is skilled at allowing his personality to come through without it taking over the story completely. Case in point: I was very surprised when he identified himself as a conservative Christian about halfway through the book.

Because the book is nonfiction, several of the storylines had less-than-satisfying conclusions, at least from my “Hollywood ending” point of view. That made the stories feel more real, though, even if they left me a little sad by the end of the book.

Douglas’s writing is fresh and fast-moving, and certainly worth reading for anyone interested in the secret lives of librarians.

Recommended.

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POEM: It isn’t merely the fashioning

Published 20 February 2009 by Jason Crane

It isn’t merely the fashioning
of new meanings from the threads and whisps,
rather it is the intention, the

unsounded affirmation of a
relationship, woven into each
chosen strand and intricate pattern.

Pearls uncovered in the depths, the craft
rows back to shore, where it is met by
the warm wool and the gathering in.

One must take stock in it, and accept
the gift for what it is, speech rendered,
unspoken, as textile manuscript.

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Lincoln jailed my cousins

Published 12 February 2009 by Jason Crane

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Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, which seems like a good time to mention that back during the Civil War, two of my cousins were jailed by Abraham Lincoln for sedition. You can read the entire story in the March 2006 issue of Flanders Family News. (This links to a PDF file. The story starts on Page 9.)

Enjoy!

By the way, lest you interpret this the wrong way — I’m a big fan of Lincoln. But how could I pass up this story?

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Live from the Living Room

Published 12 February 2009 by Jason Crane


Jan Marin Tramontano

For the third time in as many weeks, I went to a poetry open mic last night. This one was the Live from the Living Room reading at the Capital District Gay & Lesbian Community Center on Hudson Ave.

The featured poet was Jan Marin Tramontano, an Albany-based poet and fiction writer. She read several poems about her trip to Paris and its museums from her book Woman Sitting in a Cafe. I quite enjoyed those poems, particularly a wry and observant take on the Mona Lisa. Tramontano also read several love poems, or as she described them, “love poems, self-love poems, and a love poem about our little boy.” All were very poignant, particularly those that mentioned her husband, who was sitting in the room.

Following the featured reading, a half dozen poets read a couple poems each. Dan Wilcox read a wonderful piece about wanting to read love poems to someone … a poet whose name I didn’t catch (but who I always see at the library where he works) read a funny poem about heaven as a gated community … and performance poet A.C. Everson recited a piece about what a bastard Cupid is. I read two recent pieces, “Luxury Hotel” and “Robby Burns’s Hat.”

I’m impressed with how diverse and active Albany’s poetry scene is. As I said at the reading last night, “I go to whichever poetry reading Dan Wilcox writes about.” Good advice, if I do say so myself.

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John Ashbery on themed books

Published 8 February 2009 by Jason Crane

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

I was listening to an interview with poet John Ashbery (from the excellent PennSound archive) and was struck by the following exchange with the host, Tom Smith. Smith is referring here to Ashbery’s collection of poems Hotel Lautreamont:

Tom Smith: Does it have a particular principle of organization we could talk about, or does it reflect a span of time, a creative span of time?

John Ashbery: No, none of my collections of poetry has a principle of organization as some poets like to do. I suppose it merely reflects a span of time, the time in which it took to write the poems. I write pretty regularly, and when I feel I have enough to make a book, I put them together and send them to a publisher.

I was interested in this because so much of the received wisdom about publishing poetry suggests that Ashbery’s method is the wrong way to do it. Of course, it helps if you’re John Ashbery, but it was important to me to be reminded that there are as many ways to create a manuscript as there are poets to create them.

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POEM: Luxury Hotel

Published 8 February 2009 by Jason Crane

Luxury Hotel

Room after room after room with no stopping, no let-up.
How many in a year? Five thousand? Six thousand?
The human body can only take so much.
So many liftings of the mattress, so many bends of the knees.
Then there are the chemicals, the solvents, the cleaners.
Scrubbing with your face right down in the fumes,
breathing deeply from the exertion.
Cracked skin, aching muscles, arms like rubber.
You can’t even lift your baby girl for a kiss.
Other people’s pubic hair, other people’s vomit and blood.
One time there was a man hiding in the closet.
He put one finger to his lips and told you to be quiet,
but how could you be quiet when there was a man in the closet?
So you screamed and ran and they gave you half a day off.
Another time you begged and begged for shoes,
the kind with the special soles so you wouldn’t slip.
After days and weeks and months, they ordered them
on the very day your head hit the tile floor,
the same day they cornered you in the manager’s office
and nobody called for a doctor, the same day
you passed out waiting for the bus and a passerby
took you to the emergency room. A stranger had to do that.
There are seven Dominicans and three women from Jamaica
and five Senegalese and one Vietnamese lady in the laundry
with no English who keeps to herself in the mouth of the furnace.
Eight hours, ten hours, twelve hours if it’s busy.
Then it’s home to cook and do your own laundry and help
Javi and Lisa with their homework. Make the lunches
for the next day. Shrink into the bed and fall asleep
to the throbbing in your joints. The alarm at 4 a.m.
Then it’s room after room after room with no stopping, no let-up.
How many in a year? Five thousand? Six thousand?
The human body can only take so much.

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