BIRTH | July 28–John Ashbery

Ashbery Receives National Humanities Medal from
President Obama in 2011.

This day in Rochester, NY in 1927 was born John Ashbery. He is a time traveler in the way people thought of it before Einstein's followers started to think of it in scientific terms.

Garrison Keillor in 2014 describes Ashbery in a brief bio (in his Writer's Almanac - from which Keillor retired this year) as growing up on his family's fruit farm near Lake Ontario. Ashbery went to a small, rural school, where they read some poetry, all of it classical.

Then he won a contest, and the prize was Louis Untermeyer's anthology Modern American and British Poetry. He didn't understand many of these contemporary poems, but he was fascinated by them - poems by W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.

A generous neighbor, seeing how bright Ashbery was, paid to send him to a good academy for his last two years of high school, and he started writing poetry more seriously. He went on to Harvard, and he published his first book, Some Trees (1956), when he was 29 and since then Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), A Wave (1984), Where Shall I Wander (2005), and Planisphere (2009).

Comment

Keillor describes Ashbery as having been helped by a generous neighbor. Ashbery and David Kermani are neighbors in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York and they have themselves been generous.

An article in the NY Observer says that when Ashbery grew up on a farm, he didn't like it. He preferred living with his grandparents in the city to attend school. His grandfather was a professor at the University of Rochester. When he was 12, Ashbery's younger brother died of leukemia. Ashbery spent most of his time by himself until a wealthy friend of his mother (the "generous neighbor") put up the money for him to finish high school at Deerfield. Ashbery explains:

By that time I had already discovered modern poetry. High schools used to have current events contests sponsored by Time, if the class subscribed to the magazine. They were quite easy. I won the prize of a book. Of the four that they offered, the only one I was vaguely interested in was an anthology of modern American and British poetry by Louis Untermeyer.

Garrison Keillor in a bio of Ashbery in 2014 gives us two quotes from Ashbery. One is about the fact that Ashbery's poetry is not easy. People say they don't understand it. Especially freshman students in college or high school who have to read it for their English courses. 

I don't quite understand about understanding poetry. I experience poems with pleasure: whether I understand them or not I'm not quite sure. I don't want to read something I already know or which is going to slide down easily: there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience. [Italics added.]

Dorothy Parker once said: "Millay did a great deal of harm making poetry seem so easy that we could all do it but, of course, we couldn’t." Ashbery tries not to make poetry too easy because he believes it should stop you in your tracks - he wants his poems to stop you and make you spend some time. Keillor cites Ashbery's poem "At North Farm", which follows. It has a time-travel aspect. 

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you? 

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

The basic problem with the science of time travel is that in order to travel in time, we would need to travel "at incredible speed" - incredible because weight is a function of speed. We would need to be very light, preferably weightless. The only way that science knows how to time-travel so far is in the mind. But that gives us an important degree of freedom.

Physicists have been driven by unexplained phenomena to come up with a hypothetical fifth dimension that could unite the dimensions of space and time. Until they tie up the loose ends, we will have to rely on time-travel in the mind. We will have to rely on poetry.

SPRINGS | Citizens Advisory Committee (Updated August 1, 2015)

Plan to Upgrade Parking at the Springs School Defeated 56%-44% in May.

July 27, 2015–The Springs Advisory Committee is appointed by the East Hampton Town Board and meets about once a month.

Ineffective?

It has been judged ineffective by the East Hampton Star editors, but against what standard?

The Committee's job is to provide information to citizens and get their input, and it does that.

Based on my having just sat through a two-plus-hours meeting of the Committee as well as having attended earlier meetings, I would say it is a useful source of information.

It helps Springs residents keep up to date on taxes, schools, zoning, environmental and other issues. From the attendance of various Town Board members it is serving its purpose of giving them feedback on citizens' views.

Report on July 27 Meeting

Here's my subjective report on the information at the meeting that interested me enough to write down:

• On August 6 the Town Board is having a public hearing on issue relating to public beaches - access, beach fires and so forth. It is encouraging people to express their views, but wants them to inform themselves first about the laws and proposals. 
• The Springs Invitational art show will be coming up in August and is a two-week art show. Most of the other shows are just for a few days.
• The Fisherman's Fair is Saturday, August 8 (earlier on the same day as the Author's Night at the East Hampton Library).
• Trucks parked on residential property continue to be an issue, and a maximum size of 12,000 pounds is proposed, with a 12,500-pound size being advocated. The option of renting parking space was proposed. Screening will be required for trucks on residential sites.
• Creation of a Registry for Rental Properties is moving along.
• A proposal is afoot to prohibit bedrooms in basements unless an existing permit was issued.
• After a recent heavy rain, 67 beaches were closed on Long Island because of the runoff water.
• Although the meeting was advertised as being focused on water quality, the water quality report was a brief complaint about spraying over Accabonac Harbor, with discussion held over to the next meeting in September.

Springs School

The biggest single topic was facilities issues at the Springs School. The Spring School District Board of Education created a facilities committee that met May 27 at Springs School and again in June. A third meeting in July was postponed (I showed up for it, not being on the mailing list and therefore not understanding the cancellation).

The Springs School facilities committee was appointed to "collaborate" with architect Roger Smith of BBS Architects of Patchogue, N.Y. on plans to upgrade the aging and overcrowded Springs School, i.e., to review and analyze the recommendations of Mr. Smith’s firm. The plans were presented originally in December in a slide show.

The recommendations review existing instructional and other space and consider other infrastructure needs outlined in the district’s state-mandated five-year building conditions survey and staff reports. Board of Education President Liz Mendelman said at the time of the committee's formation in May:

The architects have outlined a substantial amount of work for the school. We felt it was important to involve our community in shaping whatever plan may come forward. This process needs to be open and inclusive.

Roger Smith, the architect, said that the committee members will:

tour the building, read the reports, ask questions, and help us understand what to ultimately bring to the Board of Education as best meeting the aspirations of the community. We will be talking about the big picture items, like how to address current space deficiency and inadequacy, down to the more basic infrastructure items like the needs of mechanical, electrical, plumbing and other systems. 

The 13 members of the committee are composed as follows:

• School staff (6) - Principal Eric Casale, Chief Business Officer Tom Primiano, teachers John Gibbons, Jodie Hallman and Colleen McGowan, and Library Aide Linda Kernell.
• The Board of Education (1) - Jeffrey Miller, Trustee.
• Springs residents who are parents of current students (3) - Scott Faulkner, Susan Gentile Hackett, and Dave Conlon. 
• Springs residents without children in the Springs School (3) - Susan Harder, Carol Campolo and Pamela Bicket.

At the Springs Advisory Committee meeting, the three public members reported on what they had found from the first two meetings, and others chimed in:

• There are 700 students at the school. Between 400 and 500 students are driven to and from the school each day.
• The facilities plan calls for $20 million to be spent, financed by a bond. (The voters in Springs approved a $27.4 million budget, but voted 232-184 (56%-44%) against using a $2 million reserve fund for a new parking lot, a reconfigured drop-off/pickup loop, and other changes.
• Several people questioned the construction of new facilities when schools in the neighboring school districts are underutilized. The Springs School population has been stabilizing and will reach its maximum in the next two years, and then fall. It is already too late to build for the next two years.
• What might happen is that the School Districts on the East End could cooperate in creating a new Middle School. A group called SCORE has been created to look at possibilities for cooperation.
• Someone complained about the NY State Wicks Law, which requires that HVAC work be bid separately instead of being subcontracted by a general contractor. This forces up the cost of public projects.
• The NY State school aid formula is not designed to be very helpful for Springs, which is much more needy than Amagansett but receives less than two percentage points more in aid.
• The RFP relating to the construction of the facility was announced on June 25, with a closing date of July 2 - an unheard-of deadline of one week. Usually there is a Bidders' Meeting in the first week, to answer questions. Furthermore, the RFP does not seem to have been widely announced. There was a call for a repeat of the RFP with a wider notification and a longer period for response.

Comment

If someone was attending their first meeting of the Citizens Advisory Committee, the proceedings must have been a bit bewildering. 

The chair rules with a gentle hand, pleading rather than demanding order. The chair, secretary and third person at the front table are not identified. Speakers are rarely identified. No agenda is distributed, posted, or methodically referred to. The announced main purpose of the meeting, water quality, focused on a single chemical and was brought up only in the last few minutes after two hours of discursive reports. These problems don't vitiate the value of the meeting, but they are so unnecessary - and so easy to fix...

Meanwhile, what did come through loud and clear was that the operation of the Springs School is worthy of our attention. If the RFP for facilities construction was fairly presented, the process was nothing short of bizarre. 

I spoke up and noted that the New York State Comptroller, Tom DiNapoli, monitors the finances of municipalities in New York State (he has recently taken on the Public Service Commission for its LIPA reform in 2013 - with the endorsement of many local officials) and if the Springs School does not voluntarily reopen the RFP of June 25, I suggested that DiNapoli be notified and asked to invalidate the first RFP on the basis of improper procedures.

My suggestion did not meet with enthusiasm from the facilities committee member who brought up the question. Why would we want to bring the State Comptroller into our affairs?

Why? Because what was described is unconscionable - professionally, legally, ethically.

If the concerns presented at the Citizens Advisory Committee are valid and are not addressed, I am determined to follow up with a letter to DiNapoli.

1947 | Washington, D.C.

L to R: Sheila, Eddy, John.

We lived in Washington, D.C. at 3728 Northampton Street, a couple of blocks south of Chevy Chase Circle on the Maryland border.

I remember playing in the front yard a lot. It was raised up from the sidewalk.

There were garden hoses lying around for the Victory Garden during World War II, as described in The Mitchells.

I remember that these hoses got me into trouble if the water from them reached the people passing by on the sidewalk.

That year, 1947, was the first year we all went to Europe. We visited Holland during the summer. Many of my mother's relatives were killed during the Nazi Occupation, because of illegal Resistance activities or because of the lack of food snd good health care.