Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Debtmageddon vs. the robot utopia

It seems likely to me that almost everything prescribed by politicians as a remedy for America's economic doldrums is wrong. I'm not an economist, so my opinion should probably be taken with a grain of salt. But since reading the news has begun to take on an Alice in Wonderland quality for me, I wanted to try to set down in words how my understanding diverges from theirs.

Just so you know where this is headed: I suspect that the flow of money in America has broken down because wealth is too highly concentrated, and that for at least a generation or so, the government ought to tax the rich heavily and spend on the poor and middle class just as heavily.

Why do all politicians and most pundits recommend the opposite? Flawed metaphors, I think. Most people make a natural comparison between a nation's budget and a family's. If a family is sliding into debt, the only remedies are to earn more and spend less. But a nation's economy is not at all like a family's. For one thing, within most families, communism prevails: the rule governing money is, From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. For better or worse, this doesn't happen to be the rule governing money in America at large. Also, within most families, money is not exchanged for labor. In a pedagogical, largely symbolic way, Jimmy may be given $2 a week in exchange for taking out the garbage. But the person who cooks and cleans does not clock his hours; the children do not buy their dinners. The exchange of labor and goods within a family is for the most part unmeasured and invisible, and it makes more sense to understand a family as a group of people functioning a single economic agent. If the sort of thing that brings a family from debt to prosperity also helps a nation, it's logical coincidence. Family and nation are so unlike each other that there's no reason to expect it to.

The nation-family metaphor is nonetheless powerful. Even though most economists believe that reduced government spending will worsen the current recession, almost all politicians have caved into the "common-sense" idea that a nation in economic trouble ought to reduce its debt, leaving Paul Krugman to cry in the wilderness. The metaphor also drives, I suspect, another popular economic idea with almost no empirical support, namely, the notion that instead of taxing the wealthy, the government should reward them, in hopes that the wealth they accumulate will trickle down to others in the nation. The wealthy have proven that they know how to make a profit, this line of reasoning goes; get out of their way and let them make the economy grow.

The notion appeals, I suspect, because it, too, would make sense if a nation were like a family. In fact it's excellent economic advice for a family. If Mother is a whizbang software engineer and Father's just a freelance writer, it doesn't make economic sense to tax them with household chores equally. Father should change more diapers and wash more dishes, freeing up Mother to devote more energy on coding the latest breakthrough app. (Whether this sort of inequity is good for the marriage bed, as well as for the pocketbook, is a different question. But it's well understood that marriages are economically more than the sum of their parts only when spouses differentiate in their skills and tasks, rather than splitting all responsibilities identically.) If the richest people in a nation were analogous to the primary breadwinners in a family, and if income taxes were analogous to housekeeping chores, then it would make sense for the nation as a whole to indulge the rich in their profit-making and to believe in the existence of the trickle-down fairy. But neither analogy holds. Mother the software engineer, remember, deposits her paycheck every week in the family's communal bank account; this bank account feeds her freeloading children, not to mention the dog; Mother may even let Father the freelance writer buy a new laptop that his personal earnings don't yet justify. By contrast, when a corporate executive is given a break on his capital earnings tax, he is thereby exempted from, say, providing food for fellow Americans who can't earn enough to feed themselves or investing in the future earning potential of a worker who's not yet up to speed. Yes, he's now able to make money faster, but the reason that other family members make sacrifices for Mother the software engineer is that they know she's going to share her wealth—that her wealth is also theirs. The wealth of the little-taxed corporate executive is only his.

Proponents of trickle-downism will argue that the little-taxed corporate executive will in fact share his wealth by spending it, and that his purchase of goods and services will drive economic growth more efficaciously than mere giveaways would. But it turns out that the executive doesn't spend more, or not enough more for his increased spending to be helpful to the economy—for the simple reason that he doesn't need to. In the hands of rich people, money moves slowly. That's what it means to be rich: you have more money than the cost of all the things you need or want. A poor person, by contrast, needs more than he can afford. The poor therefore spend money faster. If you want to boost a nation's economic growth, it's better to give to the poor, not the rich. A dollar given to a poor man multiplies faster, Keynes observed, than a dollar given to a rich man.

Economic inequity has been extremely high in the past decade, much as it was in the 1920s and 1930s. The popular understanding of the Great Depression is that it ended because World War II finally obliged American politicians to forget their prudence, and borrow and spend enormous sums. Supposedly this great deficit expenditure stimulated the American economy, like an adrenaline shot. Maybe. But what if the metaphor of stimulation is wrong too? What if it wasn't the deficit spending of World War II that stimulated the American economy, but the war's redistribution of wealth? The war obliged America to employ a literal army of people as soldiers and factory workers, and after the war, America felt obliged to continue to reward the working classes with expanded social services, including free higher education for veterans. The period from World War II to the 1970s turned out to be the greatest era of prosperity America has ever known. Is it a coincidence that it followed a massive, government-run redistribution of wealth, which happened to take the form of a war? When TARP and a fiscal stimulus bill were passed a couple of years ago, I remember thinking to myself, well, if the mainstream economists are right, and the problem with America can be remedied by an injection of deficit spending, then my gloom will be disproved. But if my suspicion is right that the underlying problem is economic inequity, then no stimulating injection, however large, will succeed. The economy will be lackluster until something happens that shifts wealth from the rich to the poor. Such a shift is unlikely in today's political climate, of course. Political power naturally follows wealth, so the rich, owning as they do a disproportionate share of the nation's wealth, now also control a disproportionate share of its political decisions. In a catch-22, the inequity undermining the economy makes impossible the political action needed to remedy it.

Why haven't our current wars had the same effect that World War II did? I don't know. Maybe we're not paying our soldiers enough; maybe the military's heavy investment in technology and equipment has muted war's impact as a redistributor of wealth. (And maybe, of course, I'm wrong. I don't have the statistical chops to back up this analysis.)

The mention of military technology brings me to my last idea. This is the challenge of the robot utopia. You remember the robot utopia. You imagined it when you were in fifth grade, and your juvenile mind first seized with rapture upon the idea of intelligent machines that would perform dull, repetitive tasks yet demand nothing for themselves. In the future, you foresaw, robots would do more and more, and humans less and less. There would be no need for humans to endanger themselves in coal mines or bore themselves on assembly lines. A few people would always be needed to repair and build the robots, and this drudgery of robot supervision would have to be rewarded somehow, but someday robots would surely make wealth so abundant that most people wouldn't need to work and would be free merely to enjoy and cultivate themselves—by, say, hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, and doing literary criticism after dinner.

Your fifth-grade self was wrong, of course. Robots aren't altruistic beings; they're capital investments; and though robots may not ask to be paid, their owners demand a return on their investment. We now live in the robot utopia, which isn't one. Thanks in large part to computerized mechanization, manufacturing productivity in the past century has increased many times over. Standards of living are higher than they ever were, but we no longer need as many humans to work as we once did. Perhaps not coincidentally, human wages, in America at least, have stagnated since the 1970s. If humans made no more money in the past four decades, where did the wealth created by the higher productivity go? Toward robot wages, as it were. The owners of the robots took the money—that is, the capitalists. Any fifth-grader can see where this leads. At some point society has to choose. Either society accepts the robots' gift as a general one, and redistributes the wealth that the robots inadvertently concentrate, or society allows the robots to become the exclusive tools of an ever-shrinking elite, increasingly resented, in confused fashion, by the people whom the robots have displaced.

The robots are here. By now they automate even much of our social lives. You might compare the political challenge they represent to what's known as the "resource curse"—the infamous difficulty that oil-rich nations have in preserving democracy while sharing the oil's proceeds. Do we want to be Norway or Saudi Arabia? The choice seems to be between democratic socialism and tyranny. I know my understanding will strike many as implausible, if not unspeakable: I'm saying that the country is suffering economically because it doesn't know what to do with all its surplus wealth.

I review a book without meaning to

I'm tempted to do something I don't usually do: write critically of a book that I have no intention of finishing. The book in question bothered me. I've been tussling with my botheration, trying to figure out what exactly I disliked, and I wonder if it will clarify my objections if I try to put them into words. Since it doesn't seem quite fair to the book to judge it without finishing it, I'm not going to name it or its author. This disguise is not meant to be impenetrable. Please understand the anonymity as a polite veil, not at all hard for an internet user of average resourcefulness to tear away.

As a reviewer, I'm sent a fair number of books by publishers, and I don't remember whether I happen to have requested this one, though I suspect I didn't. It arrived while I was suffering from a mild fever, a condition that's relevant because I won't be able to get to the bottom of my final dislike of the book unless I start with its initial appeal, which was considerable. I was feeling muzzy, bored, and a little vulnerable. My attention had been tenderized by a sick-day's indulgence in Twitter. The book in question is a novel, written in the first person. In the first few pages, in simple and declarative sentences, modestly spiced with British slang, the heroine-narrator lets herself be seduced into a risky sexual encounter. She enjoys herself intensely—the experience seems to fracture an idea of herself that she has—but she doesn't seem to have done this kind of thing before, and it isn't at all clear that she's going to be all right.

I kept reading, conscious that the plain grammar (subject-verb-object) and the explicit sex suited the debilitated state of my mind. The sentences practically read themselves. Sometimes, as a writer, one is aware that one also has the specious motive of doing something so as to be able to write about it later, and my conscious rationalization for continuing the novel included the somewhat recursive notion that if I did continue to read, I might be able to mine the experience for an essay about the kind of book that appealed to people who were spending too much time on Twitter and whose brains were befogged by toxins, viral or otherwise—about the limitations that the novel as a genre might have to accept in order to seize and hold attention in the current environment.

Less consciously, I had perhaps identified with the heroine, as someone who, like myself in an earlier era of my life, was putting herself in danger through a sexual responsiveness that she didn't understand.

My resistance to the text first became conscious to me in questions of style. Though technically written in the past tense, the short, plain sentences and their narrow time-focus gave the impression of a story unrolling in the present tense only. The heroine never thought about her past, though visits with a grandmother and with parents suggested that she did have one. She never reflected on how she had come to have the career that she did, or what had drawn her to her best friend, let alone on how she had become so cut off from her inner life that she could only return to it through episodes of violent, near-anonymous sex. This limitation in the telling of the story seemed one, however, with the urgency of the story's appeal. The narrator was Everywoman; the reader was not put at a distance by any details of her past or by any elements of her personality that the reader might not happen to share. On the contrary, the reader was constantly being invited to join in a fantasy: What if I were to have an irresponsible fling? What if I were to antagonize my friends? What if I were to mess up my safe but boring job? There was no awareness of anything in the heroine's life or mind that might hold her back. She was completely free. Or, to look at another way, her vanity and neediness were uncompromised by any consideration of other people as beings just as real as she was. The book began to remind me of Jay McInerny's Bright Lights, Big City, which I read twenty years ago when I was under the impression that I ought to keep up with best-sellers; the transgression began to seem monotonous in a similar way.

Because of the narrow focus—limited to the narrative's present, and to the perceptions of a narrator not motivated to understand anyone around her—a number of scenes had the flat feeling-tone of a certain kind of comedy routine, which depends for its success on the audience's collusion in a sadistic ridicule or dismissal of embarrassing feelings. Some of these scenes "worked" as jokes, but on second thought, seemed unlikely to be able to "work" in the real world. In one such scene, the heroine half-jestingly hits some children that she has been asked to take care of, and the children respond by precociously and coldly turning against her and voicing their hatred of her. I found myself thinking, well, in fact it is kind of awful of the heroine to have hit the children, but I doubt that real children would be able to find on such short notice sufficient insight and sufficient confidence to punish a faulty caregiver. In another scene, the heroine undresses while drunk for a man who is disgusted by her drunkenness, and I found myself thinking that if this character was charming enough to hold my interest as a reader, she probably wouldn't be the sort who, even drunk, would so badly misjudge the responsiveness of a potential suitor. In real life, she would have noticed his recoil, even through the haze of alcohol, before going quite so far.

I stopped reading when I found myself resorting to diagnosis of the characters. The heroine becomes obsessed with the man she has the sexual encounter with, despite his commandeering, abusive manner, or maybe because of it. He is portrayed as someone at ease with himself—at ease with his sadism and manipulation. Oh, I thought, a sociopath, charming and dangerous. And the heroine's focus on connection with him as the only source of meaning in her life: Oh, I thought, she's a borderline personality, who disintegrates unless she maintains contact yet needs the drama of always falling out of contact. It occurred to me that in real life the story of these two people would be so exhausting to hear about that it would be hard to stay focused, while listening, on how sad it was. In real life, it would end badly, unless disrupted by care and insight. It would probably end badly even if it were disrupted by care and insight. One way for it to end would be by his killing her. I thought of a book with a similar setup (whose plot and ending I will implicitly be giving away, in order to make my analogy, so look away if you need to), Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat, though Spark's heroine understands herself in a way that this novel's heroine does not seem to. Though I admire Spark and would be happy to re-read her Girls of Slender Means or Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I didn't enjoy The Driver's Seat and have no intention of ever re-reading it. Once I made the comparison, I couldn't bear to keep reading the novel at hand—the thought of having to sit through the tedium of a borderline's relationship with a sociopath, only to be punished for my patience with an unhappy ending, was too much.

Does he kill her? I flipped to the end. (Spoiler ahead, obviously; if you think you might track down this book and read it despite me, stop reading now.) It turns out that the author—in a reversal of expectations that to my eye again functions better as a joke than as a plausible rendering of human experience—gives her heroine the opportunity and the strength of purpose to kill her beloved torturer. I don't think this is really a happier ending than it would be if he killed her; it certainly wasn't an ending that I wanted to spend any amount of time or effort reaching, once I knew it. What keeps Spark's Driver's Seat interesting (though it remains unpleasant) is that the borderline personality in that novel fails to find the sociopath she's looking for and has to make do with another personality type altogether, by blackmailing him. There's no such complexity of motive and outcome in the new novel. I don't think the unexpected reversal would have any chance of convincing a reader if it weren't for the stylistic constraints on its telling, which make it harder to see how unlikely it is—if it weren't for the impairments that also function as appetite stimulants.

Admittedly, I broke the rules of the reader-writer contract. It's possible that if I read every word of the novel in sequence, I would find the reversal of roles at the end psychologically plausible. I doubt it, though. I suspect that if such "funny," impoverished consciousness—the final triumph of "showing" over "telling," in the specious language of writing instruction—is the only way to hold attention in a splintered world, the novel is in trouble. If the novel must always be recapturing the reader's attention, by prurient means, the novel is in the plight of a needy borderline, doomed to tedious pursuit of the cruel, elusive reader, who alternates between taking his pleasure from the book and dropping it for more compelling pleasures elsewhere. My own reading pattern here—beginning to read almost in scorn for the book, finding itches scratched by it almost despite myself, ultimately dismissing and abandoning the book—is weirdly complicit. I've even kept my encounter with the book, like the heroine's with her sociopath lover, anonymous, as if my meeting with this book were somehow disreputable for both of us. I must have fallen more under its spell than I realized. For the sake of disenchantment, then, maybe I should reveal the name of the book after all: True Things About Me, by Deborah Kay Davies. It comes out next week in paperback from Faber & Faber.

Packing my library

Peter and I have moved! My Earthlink email address is kaput, though my Harvard forwarding email address (the one on my About page) remains intact. Here it is again, should anyone need it:

If anyone has a wish to snail-mail me something, please get in touch by email and I'll let you know the new address.

Apologies for the blog silence. I have discovered that the reason that there are so many essays about unpacking one's library and so few about packing it is that the latter process more or less does to you what Dave does to HAL at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it begins to seem prudent, with such a diminished capacity, to remain silent. Today, on day five of a flu of some kind, I seem to have lost my corporeal voice as well, so the silence apparently is to continue. We love our new apartment, thanks for asking, except for the bathtub drain that had to be unclogged by professional "snake," the two successive leaks under the kitchen sink, the busted lock on the front door, and the fiendishly permanent child guards on the windows, which required five trips to the hardware store in order to collect all the equipment necessary for their uninstallation. (Babies apparently wish to hurl themselves out of apartment windows with all the ingenuity and resourcefulness of inmates at a Supermax prison, and must be correspondingly restrained.) Air conditioner brackets were my Waterloo.

The last count that I made of our book boxes before moving was 146, and we packed for another full day after that, so I think we ended up moving about 200 boxes of books. (We were able to stack them in an empty apartment on the floor below us, thus the weird orderly accumulation of volume in the photo above.) Furious and hasty has been the deaccessioning, but we still haven't found enough bookshelf space in the new apartment to fit what remains. Some day soon I plan to return to being a writer, instead of just a subpar handyman and occasional haunter of Twitter, but that day is not yet, alas. There are no plans to acquire an e-reading device. Where would it go?

Blowup

The American government has released a photograph taken on Sunday of President Obama, Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Clinton, Defense Secretary Gates, and other high-ranking officials sitting in the White House's Situation Room. According to the government-authored caption, the officials are shown receiving "an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden." The fixity of their attention, however, suggests that the word "update" is an understatement. Almost certainly they were watching moving images on a screen. The New York Times has reported that "The president and his advisers watched Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, on a video screen, narrating from his agency’s headquarters across the Potomac River what was happening in faraway Pakistan." An early report, however, claimed that Obama was able to watch a live video feed of the attack, and there has been speculation, without evidence, that such a feed might have come from a camera mounted on the helmet of one of the Navy Seals involved. When PBS asked Panetta himself what the people in the Situation Room were seeing, he gave an equivocal answer, denying that Obama and his team were able to see the shots fired at Bin Laden, but admitting that "I think they were viewing some of the real-time aspects of this as well in terms of the intelligence that we were getting." Since so many details of the killing have been revised by the government in the past forty-eight hours, and since there are as yet no sources other than the government itself, the safest thing to say is we don't know what was on the screen, except through what we can see reflected in the watchers' faces.

At a minimum, then, the people in the Situation Room were watching Panetta describe in real time how three men and one woman were shot. "This was a kill operation," an official has told Reuters. In its newly released "Narrative of Events," the Department of Defense now admits that Bin Laden was unarmed and that Bin Laden did not use a woman as a human shield, despite earlier government claims to the contrary. The shootings were probably at close range. "The encounter with bin Laden," Politico reports, "ended with a kill shot to his face," and White House spokesperson Jay Carney says that the photograph of Bin Laden taken by the Seals is so "gruesome" that the White House is hesitating to release it. ABC News writes of the photograph that "The insides of his head are visible."

Photography of the killed seems to be standard operating procedure these days for American special forces. (When the American Raymond A. Davis was arrested in Lahore in February for having shot two Pakistanis, he claimed to be a consular official defending himself against a robbery attempt. A consular official who, after shooting two men through his windshield, got out of his car and photographed the corpses with his digital camera? Davis turned out, of course, to be a CIA security officer.) Perhaps such a photograph of Bin Laden was being displayed on the screen in the Situation Room at the moment that the picture was taken.

A book could probably be written about the expressions in the photograph. It's possible to download a 1.6-megabyte version; the ambivalences of its revelations become even finer upon magnification. At first, for example, I thought that the look on Gates's face was one of pride and satisfaction, maybe even smugness. Heh heh, Gates seemed to be saying; this is going well. But in an enlargement of the photo, it is possible to see fear in the outer, lower corners of his eyes, anxiety in the set of his chin, and sorrow in the sagging corner of his mouth. What I at first mistook for smugness turns out, on a closer look, to be a mask of confidence. He's a warrior; he's not supposed to mind what he's looking at; he's supposed to convey to his subordinates that the violence of war is necessary and lawful. But even he doesn't like to look at such an image, whatever it is, despite having seen images like it before.

Biden's face has a similar ambiguity. His left eyelid droops; he's tired. He has widened his eyes in compensation, making an effort to look alert. Probably in order to reassure others, he's also making an effort to look as if he's equal to what he's seeing—as if it's all right that the leaders of America are watching a killing in which they are complicit. It is probably legal, he may be telling himself. By any definition, Osama Bin Laden is an enemy of the United States, actively plotting its harm. Perhaps Biden is reminding himself that Harold Koh, a legal adviser to the Obama administration, has justified America's program of targeted killings abroad as acts of national self-defense. Even the ACLU approves of targeted killings if they take place in a theater of war against an imminent threat. The United States is not at war with Pakistan, but it is at war next door in Afghanistan, and Bin Laden certainly posed an ongoing danger. What's happening is reasonable, is the thought that Biden seems to be projecting; reason led us here, at any rate.

Two faces in the picture do not seem composed for view by others. The first is Obama's. After a glance at it, there can be no question that it is his will driving the mission: the grim mouth, the hungry eyes. There's an uncanny stillness to Obama's features. One senses that he has been holding himself in one pose for some time, like a hunter. There is no acceptance in his face. What he is watching is awful to him, too, but he has chosen it. He's not going to let himself out of any of it. He has to see all of it.

The other naïve face, of course, is that of Hillary Clinton. Her eyes are widened; she has unconsciously covered her mouth with her hand. Her grandmotherly hand. Her expression is one of pure horror. When I first saw this photograph, I thought, Thank God, there was at least one human being in the room. I find the image of her strangely beautiful, even though I've never been drawn to her as a politician. It makes me want to cry.

Why shouldn't I? What else should I do when I see my country's leaders watching a killing that they have ordered? It is legal for the United States to kill its enemies in war; maybe it's also legal for us to kill those enemies far from any battlefield, unarmed, in the middle of the night. But America didn't use to think of itself as the sort of nation that did things that way. Now it is proud of such actions? In his speech on Sunday night, Obama compared the killing of Bin Laden to other triumphs by America:

Tonight, we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. That is the story of our history, whether it’s the pursuit of prosperity for our people, or the struggle for equality for all our citizens; our commitment to stand up for our values abroad, and our sacrifices to make the world a safer place.

Let us remember that we can do these things not just because of wealth or power, but because of who we are.

These words are false. A killing is not comparable to the Apollo space program or the War on Poverty. It is not a moral achievement, let alone a technological one. If the Navy Seals had brought Bin Laden to the United States and we had then put him on trial, that would have been a moral achievement. But a nation need not be a democracy in order to kill its enemies. Revenge is not special. We can take it no matter who we are, and no matter who we become.

Review of Professor X's "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower"

My review of Professor X's In the Basement of the Ivory Tower appears in the 1 May 2011 issue of the New York Times Book Review.

The Nother Dog

The sixth and final children's poem of half a dozen that I wrote many years ago.

Hair of the Dog That Bit Me

I gave my Spot a brushing;
He shed a lot of hair,
So much that when we finished, a whole
Nother Dog was there.

The Nother Dog was shadowy.
Its soul was black as fur.
Spot barked hello. It growled out
A snarly, wolfish grr.

We found Spot's tug-me toy and gave
The Nother Dog an end.
The Nother phoned for take-out: beets
And carrots, julienned.

I offered it the kibble
To which my Spot was used.
The Nother Dog preferred to read
Six books by Marcel Proust.

Biscuits were available
To dogs who learned to sit.
The Nother Dog liked biscuits, but
Instead of sit, he bit.

"Enough!" said I. "Arf-woof," barked Spot.
"This Nother Dog can't stay."
We turned the ceiling fan on high
And let it blow away.

Spot played with his tug-me,
And didn't bite my hand.
He ate kibble, till we both agreed
That life was kind of bland.

He fetched the brush, and soon we coughed
In tickly, furry fog.
But when the fur had settled—
A whole 'nother Nother Dog!

A Taste for Power

The fifth of half a dozen children's poems, written by me a dozen years ago.

A Taste for Power

Alexander was a fly.
His eyeballs were metallic.
His wings had scales like dragon's wings.
His friends knew him as Aleck.

He liked to boast that in the swamp
The lordliest was he,
Insect emperor of all
The sludge that he could see.

"Aleck the Great am I," he sang,
But when his song was sung,
A low voice croaked, "There comes a day
when every king has kung."

The croaker blinked his bulbous eyes.
Tongue lassoed out like fate.
He said, "Since eating made me king,
Please call me Aleck-ate."

Aleck-ate, the Lotus King,
Gave low, burplike decrees,
That belched across the waters
To frogs on bended knees.

But a visitor with glassy eyes
and underwater smirk
Gurgled, "Empire looks to me
Like a tasteful line of work.

"Your deed was great," the visitor hissed,
"But my deed shall be greater.
You may be known as Aleck-ate,
But I am Aleck-ate-er."

The Last Neanderthal's Love Song

Fourth installment of a set of children's poems I wrote a dozen years ago.

The Last Neanderthal's Love Song

O ancestors! Please hear my cry.
I'm eighteen summers old.
I need a wife, but evolution's
Left me in the cold.

I'm the last Neanderthal.
I have some woman friends—
Nice-looking, others tell me—but
They're Homo sapiens.

I'd like to meet a girl like Mom
With a rich potato form.
These sapiens are willowy;
They don't look very warm.

A woman looks her best, I think,
With low, protruding brow,
But the female forehead fashion
Is high and flat right now.

A lady's lower jaw should sink
Delicately in.
Beneath their lips, these girls have got
A pointy, prickly "chin."

A sideways egg's the pretty shape
That suits a female skull.
But modern girls have heads as round
As the moon does when it's full.

Alas, O ancestors! Alas,
Our race will not survive.
I'll never wed, and I'm the last
Neanderthal alive.

Boing

Installment #3 of a set of children's poems I wrote a dozen years ago.

Boing

What if rubber was in everything?
Short skirts could be stretched to make them long.
Swords would wilt, and bullets mildly sting.
Knitting would be dangerous and wrong.

Anything you threw would boomerang:
Bricks, an egg, a sister (not too young).
Hanging plants would lurch instead of hang.
What you spat could land back on your tongue.

Crashing cars would ricochet and twang.
No one would wear any kind of thong.*
Meetings would begin when people sang
To synchronize their bounces with a song.

And given all the spring in everything,
A tug would turn a swing into a sling.

* Fearing that a thong might be deemed too racy a detail, I proposed as an alternate here the line 'Skyscrapers would oscillate King Kong.'

The E. T.

Installment #2 of a set of children's poems I wrote a dozen years ago.

The E. T.

Grandmother Gladys and Grandson Todd
Seemed normal in every way:
She knitted him mittens and pompom hats,
And he normally threw them away.

BUT . . .

When Todd and his Granny went down to swim
At the beach, when the tide was low,
Todd saw on his grandmother's barefoot feet
An extraterrestrial toe!

Her toe number two made a sharp left turn
Where a regular toe wouldn't swerve,
And her toenail was crinkled and squiggly and thin
Like the side of a shell with a curve.

"Is my grandmother human?" Todd asked himself.
The footprints she left in the sand
Might be signals to orbiting ships—who knew
What the alien forces had planned?

"What if my grandmother turns out to be
Pod unit L-52?
What if the toe is in charge of her body,
And she's just the puppet it grew?"

So as not to alarm either her or her toe,
Todd asked in an offhand way,
"How come your toe is uniquely shaped?
Or aren’t you allowed to say?"

Granny explained to him: "That's the way
Our family's toes are grown.
Your great-uncle Ira's, your father's, your aunt's—
Haven't you noticed your own?"

Since Grandmother Gladys was already wet,
Todd took off his shoes to swim.
And there was an extraterrestrial toe—
With an alien toenail—on him!

Fluffy Pie, the Angel Kitty

In anticipation of a move, I've been weeding through boxes of old papers, trying to throw out as much of the last couple of decades as possible. Most of the attendant archival discoveries are now looking forward to useful reincarnation as cardboard or napkins, but one folder seemed worth translating into the electronic realm, if only for the sake of confusing as many people as possible about the "brand" that my byline represents. About a dozen years ago, as I was finishing graduate school, my friend Chris Duffy, who was then an editor at the children's magazine Nickelodeon, now defunct, asked if I'd try writing some children's poetry. He ended up buying a few of them, and even printing at least a couple, along with illustrations by cartoonists. I seem to have written six in all; I'll post one a day over the next week.

Fluffy Pie, the Angel Kitty

When Gwendolyn went skating, she
Slipped and skinned her knee.
Her mom and dad were far away.
She howled in agony.

But then Gwen saw, mid snowy clouds,
Some furry, beating wings:
'Twas Fluffy Pie, the angel kitty,
Who flies around and sings.

"Dear Gwendolyn, I feel your pain,"
The angel kitty sang.
"I bring you catnip, herbal treat
With pain-relieving tang."

Fluffy Pie was radiant, like the
Summer sky at dawn.
But Gwen thought catnip tasted
A little bit like lawn.

Jerome was glum when he received
A D-plus-plus in math.
"Who cares?" he growled, but then a wingèd
Kitty crossed his path.

"Behold," the flying kitten sang,
"I bring celestial food.
I caught this mouse in heaven to
Improve your earthly mood."

With downy fur and winking eyes,
Fluffy Pie was cute.
But mouse for dinner, Jerome thought,
Didn't quite compute.

Sandy had a wobbly tooth
That kept her in suspense.
It jiggled and it wiggled
And it made her rather tense.

Then Sandy heard a meow above
Of "Peace," and just for her
Fluffy Pie coughed up a ball
Of special kitty fur.

"Ick," said Sandy. "Ack," said Gwen.
"Yucky," said Jerome.
"My work here is finished," Fluffy
Smiled, and flew home.

Sybille Bedford centenary reading

In honor of Sybille Bedford's centenary, I'll be one of several writers and editors reading from her work at the Paris Review offices at 62 White Street in Manhattan tomorrow night, Thursday, March 24, at 6:30pm. Free and open to the public, if you RSVP.

If you aren't already a fan of Bedford's, please check out the appreciations of her at the Paris Review Daily by Brenda Wineapple and Lisa Cohen.