The Palin Prophecies: Sarah Prays for Sarah

Lordy, Lord, what am I gonna do, they’re laughin’….I mean, no: Dear Father God in Heaven, which art nearest Alaska, I pray that you’ll get me out of these messy interviews and slay somebody. I don’t mean Obama because that would be against the law, but maybe just all the heathern TV reporters, especially that Witch Katie Couric.  So I ask you Lord right now, lay your hands on my hairdo (careful not to muss it, though)and bless my mission, which is for you, after all. I mean, Don’t you get it? I’M DOIN’ THIS FOR YOU?!! Ok. Get busy makin’ me famous. In Jesus name. Amen.

The Palin Prophecies

Yup! Yup! Nuckin’ Futs!

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Brent Mooseburger, Alaskan Pentecostal sports reporter, has been selected, much to his surprise, by God Our Heavenly Father as the man to channel Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s messages to the American people, since neither she nor God trust the elite media. In this almost-daily blog, Mr. Mooseburger will decode Palin’s prophecies for a nu-clear age. Reader responses are not welcome, unless you show the proper respect and deference.

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The Palin Prophecies are archived at www.thepalinprophecies.com. KenArnoldBooks will be publishing Brent Mooseburger’s messages as he channels them. His inspirational messages will be collected into an ebook sometime in October and published by KenArnoldBooks on Amazon Kindle. Entries are copyrighted by KenArnoldBooks, LLC.

The End of More Book Review Sections?

An article in today’s PW suggests that more newspaper book review sections may face extinction. The redesign of the Tribune Co., according to PW, may threaten coverage: “Amid the pending real estate sale and newsroom cutbacks, rumors have surfaced about book sections being cut at Tribune-owned papers. One freelance critic told PW that the Tribune Company is planning to slash overall page counts across the chain.” Read the story here.

Following my post about publishing out of the box, this hint of less to come helps make the point. Publishers and writers need to work together to get out the word, the words, the books, because the traditional media do not and increasingly can not. We are lucky in Portland to have a newspaper that still runs book reviews (thank you, Jeff Baker), but no one thinks that it is enough.

I will be following up on my idea for a Portland network in the next couple of days. Linda Meyer at InkandPaperGroup suggests we need a roundtable to talk through ideas. Let’s do that. (Those of you reading this post who are not in Portland are not excluded from the network I hope we can create. There is a lot of writing and publishing energy in Portland and that’s why it’s a good place to start. First Portland and then the world.)

Let me know what you think. If you’re shy about posting something here as a public comment, write to me directly at ken@kenarnoldbooks.com.

Tree of Heaven, by Ken Arnold

Last week, a tree that had stood for seventy-five years in the Isamu Noguchi museum garden in Long Island City, Queens, was taken down. It was the centerpiece of the garden; despite its name, it was a tree known as a noxious weed, an invasive species, the Ailanthus altissima. Those of you who have read my book, Circle of the Way, will recognize this tree. It has an important place in my emotional and spiritual history. Soon after I heard of its demise, I attended the screening of a video on invasive species. The result was the poem I reproduce below.

Tree of Heaven

We were watching a video about

invasive species, plants and animals

we don’t want here in Oregon,

to be aired in April on public

television, soon after Earth Day.

Massed at our borders, the zebra

mussels, yellow star thistle, red-

eared turtles, English ivy—

we put on our gardening gloves,

wade into the waters, point

accusing fingers at the invaders.

 

And I thought about the Tree of Heaven

that had stood in Queens across

the river from Manhattan

for seventy-five years and

was the Tree that Grows in

Brooklyn, book and movie,

and then the heartbeat of the garden

Isamu Noguchi made in this

industrial neverland outside

the warehouse he converted to

a museum for his sculptures,

massive many of them, struck

from basalt, marble, rock, almost

as natural when he got through

as when he found them, dragged

them in, and eased the insides out.

 

The tree was cut down on the weekend.

It was diseased, a threat, a tree

I’d sat with one long winter of my own

disease, not knowing it was just

a stink tree, as it’s sometimes called,

Ailanthus altissima or China-sumac,

Varnishtree,: a weed, or as the books

describe it, an invasive species

to be pulled up by its roots as soon

as possible or it will spread, take

over all the other shrubs and trees.

It has, some say, no landscape value.

Its flowers stink. It reproduces aimlessly.

 

Because it grows so fast so high

it came to be called The Tree

of Heaven, so I knew it, though in

Philadelphia our alley was choked

dead by these same weeds, we hated

them and wished them gone.

Once sixty feet in height, this one’s

reduced to stump, its wood to be

recycled into benches for the garden.

 

Noxious weed of my memory,

my desire, of a place where I was quiet

when there was no quiet for me

anywhere, the only heaven I could

hope to know, right there in that

improbable oasis where the very stones

would talk, the greenery transform

the air, and I was able once again

to breathe—is gone, but in its stump

stir shoots, the gardeners say. They say

the things just won’t lie down and die.