EARTH ~

Since we last saw the roof job came four days of steady raininess ~ which means a half inch one day, then drizzles the next, followed by a good inch of nice rainfall which splashed up the river a notch, juiced the gardens, grew the grass, and kept us off the roof.







By Tuesday we figured we could play between the rain drops. Overcast all day, ideal for hunkering up at the chimney where I could tear out the old and rebuild new flashing and lead escarpment, and with Greg slide on two more sheets specially cut to work around the chimney. For awhile there it was Greg on one side of the roof where I had built in roof brackets so he had a landing to perch. And from there, the letterpress man could hand me hammer, drill, caulking gun, metals with the same grace and delivery of handling his type, fonts, ink and special papers. All with a certain deckle edge, graceful. I made the chimney water-tight. Sweetheart was up on the scaffold tending to any loose ends, checking the guys' work, putting that ever wondrous woman's touch to things. I wouldn't want a house without it.

A day off for another rain day Sweetheart and I got many town errands done. This means two weeks of groceries, two weeks of laundry, paperworks for printing at Longhouse and, an ice cream cone (shared).







Thursday was pitch perfect ~ not hot, not cold, not real windy, but a breeze ~ Sweetheart and I started the day and finished it building the rest of the scaffold across the face of the house and it would be one we think Michelangelo would have climbed up there with us. Had a look around.

Now we have 42 feet wide scaffold and we can walk like a stroll in a park (almost) down the whole edge of the roof eave and get at everything. Put up the ladder and hook and climb to wherever. Work either side of the roof.

I still have a day ahead of me to level off the old roof and set in the last of the spruce purlins for screwing the steel into. I'll work that alone with my one board helper who holds one side of the long and flapping sixteen footers.

When the purlins are anchored, we go with more steel.

Mr. Nonchalance up there has actually gone to the trouble of building all this wood scaffold because for once in his life he's doing a roof job with complete safety in mind. It must come with age. I'm also a traditionalist and remember as a boy working on hardy work crews where guys in simple cars and trucks arrived at a job and nothing stood in the way — need to get over an impasse? grab some 2 x 4s and build a bridge, a scaffold, a tower. Take it all down later, use it again, or bury it into something else. Plus I'm wanting everyone dear to me, and helping out, to feel safe. Plus halfway across with the steel, and a closer look at the chimney, I've gotten it into my bandanna skull that maybe it is time to rebuild the chimney while we're at it — either stucco and fully seal it, or maybe even rebuild the outer frame in slate. Yes, slate. I know, I've never seen one either, but no one gets anywhere interesting without first a dream. Or two.

So far we have found two damaged sheets and await two new ones from the lumberyard who awaits from the steel supplier in Pennsylvania. Everything connects. It's a map.

Our wedding anniversary is on Saturday.

photos © susan & bob arnold

EARTH ~

Hot? Up on the roof I've been broiled alive. I get up there early and work hard until 11, then break for breakfast and maybe deal with mail and a short film. Rossellini's film on St. Francis this morning. Then I go back to work from 12:30-2:30 and broil, take a break and bicycle with Sweetheart where we dunk in the river work clothes and all. I go back to work at 4:30 and I work steadily up there until 7:30, or real dark. Late supper. Start all over again the next day. Until the roof is done. This old roof is causing all sorts of surprises and tricks to hurdle. An old roof is three times the work of a new roof or modern house. But it has stages and angles and each inch is a discovery. Good poetry.

I'm finding light dips and slumps in ye old roof, my buddy. I've just ordered longer screws to go along with my regular artillery. I once worked on an old house where I had to build the middle of the roof up 8 inches! When the job was done, from the ground, one would never see the skirmish. All buried. A bridge under the steel.


I'm tearing off layers of shingles this morning and have reached the bone of 1790. The age of this house. Timber that hasn't seen the light of day for maybe a half century. "Hello in there", I say, as John Prine once sang those words.

O what a day. I mean O What A Day. We got 5 sheets of steel onto the roof and things are coming up roses. Bountiful. We are over the hurdle of what the roof will look like, the imagination runs wild. Even after all the years I've put on roofs. I don't know everything. I'm proud of that. Greg Joly came down in his newly rebuilt Toyota truck (re-call and Toyota gave him a whole new frame) and climbed the roof and worked with me, like when he got this job for me in his neck of the woods to rebuild an old country cabin falling into the ground. I did it. I hired him as a helping hand.

Think of it, Greg has also published two of my books of poems, each letterpress, each put together like the awls and screws and hammers in our hands. Thoughtful. Deliberate. Type that bites into the paper.





The day strung beautifully, low humidity, and Sweetheart ran between taking many photographs and some movies of the work, plus always there to help lift the steel sheets from the ground to us on the scaffold. What a pal!


In the stack of roofing, sheet 5 came up damaged. Bad news of the day. Took three photographs and emailed them immediately to the lumberyard. A new sheet expected late next week.


Neighbors wave to us on the ridgetop as I screw on the new ridgecap. Shiny. I wave back. Greg saddle rides the ridgecap to keep it all down tight as I move along.






Sweetheart and I go for a swim at 3:30 when work is done. Drench off the work grime. Sweetheart sits like a wood nymph on the ledge of stone inches from the water splash. Her hair all light. Then she is up to her knees in the water. Pants sky blue.

photos © susan arnold

RISING ~

Shane MacGowan

Born in Kent, UK to Irish Parents in 1957 on Christmas Day, Shane MacGowan helps us celebrate the rising of the (full) moon today at 1:05 PM EDT. For more: go to MacGowan's own recordings, and with The Pogues.

shanemacgowan.com




Nino Rota

The prolific maestro (1911-1979) who composed 150 film scores over his grand lifetime filling the cinema shoes of mostso Fellini and Visconti, and flowing when not stalking through both The Godfather I & II. When away for a moment from films, Rota wrote ten operas and five ballets.
A great one.







8notes.com

EARTH ~ EMILY CARR

All her life Emily Carr lived by the seat of her pants (1871-1945) this Canadian icon. Painter, writer, explorer, lover of the indigenous tribes & folk of the Pacific Northwest coast all the way to Alaska, which is portrayed in her many paintings of natives, nature & woodlands. Much of her mature and enduring work occured after the age of 57. A late bloomer for sure. She ran a boarding house for fifteen years before that, barely picking up her brushes. And then there was the love for her dogs. For every O'Keeffe one is shown, a Marsden Hartley and Emily Carr must be requested and embraced.

emily carr age 21

PUBLISHED WORKS ~

Klee Wyck (1941) encounters w/ Aborginal culture
The Book of Small (1942) childhood in Victoria
The House of All Sorts (1944) keeping a boarding house and breeding her beloved dogs
Growing Pains (1946) Emily Carr's autobiography

Many many posthumous works published, journals, biographies and letters not to be missed!

acknowledgements:
calgary.cityguide.ca/emily-carr-lecture-at-th...

jaksview3.wordpress.com/2009/06/20/the-vag-today

www.emilycarr.com/store/product.php?productid...

grave monument: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Emily_carr_2.jpg

joyner.waddingtons.ca/.../highlights-nov-1990/

emily carr photo: particle.physics.ucdavis.edu/bios/Carr.html

young emily carr photo: www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/EmilyCarr/en...
www.artcountrycanada.com/group-of-seven-carr-...

judsonjournal.blogspot.com/2009/11/emily-carr...

CINEMA ~

Silent Light, a film by Carlos Reygadas, 2007.

If you have two hours of life to give, give it here.

Gorgeous. Devastating.

SINGER ~

printed & published as a poem card by Bob & Susan at Longhouse 2010

FARAWAY, LIKE THE DEER’S EYE

for Victor Jara, Chilean folksinger



Ah yes, now I believe I know —

A cool breeze and very early morning

A wood thrush breaks from the pasture,

Fences have all been mended,

Here and there animal hair.




I think of Jara; Victor,

By jesus as they busted your fingers

And you kept to the last moment

Something loving, say your sister, far in your belly.

Then they beat you like the backside of a horse

And it all fell — my chore bucket spilled

Suddenly in Vermont.




I may still have the gathering of birds,

The pull of this long river

Where I wade to my waist, undo my hair and wash slowly

Strong sweat and black flies,

A quiet day with the saw

Now near its end.




But Chile stays — forever.

How in the hell can you ask me to forget

A father dragged down from an attic

And pumped into a scream

In front of his huddled family?

The blood goes everywhere

And they live with it

And the killers — shit,

Something the raccoon wouldn’t even wash.




Daylight goes.

Evening is soon.

My friends, we are to become

The last light in the pond.



Bob Arnold
from For Neruda, For Chile ed. Walter Lowenfels (Beacon)

See more Victor Jara at A Longhouse Birdhouse here

victor jara: democraticunderground.com
home: photo © bob arnold

BO & the GOAT ~

BO DIDDLEY

Some days rock 'n' roll seems to begin and end for me with Bo Diddley. Today is one of those days.

The master inventor — as a matter of fact known and called "the Originator" for his forceful transition from deep-rooted blues to rock 'n' roll. He played about everything: guitars (most often rectangular-shaped), violin, keyboards, drums, synthesizer. Born in 1928 in Mississippi with the name Ellas Otha Bates...how'd I go this long before telling you that? There's been a million stories how he came upon the name "Bo Diddley", from the Bo Diddley one-string instrument, to something Leonard Chess at Chess Records concocted. Just listen to his songs — that insistent and steady driving rhythm and edge — most likely first influenced as a young man by seeing John Lee Hooker perform.

Like Bob Dylan, Bo Diddley managed to get himself banned from The Ed Sullivan Show for not performing exactly what the squire wanted. Jim Morrison did the same thing. Those of us watching the shows in real time were raised another notch by the electric insubordination.

Bo Diddley passed away in 2008, not exactly recognized for all his charms except by his peers who adored his music. The British Invasion of the 60s came over to the USA fueled on propane called Bo, Chuck and Muddy. But Bo Diddley blazed his own path, including a stint for almost three years in Valencia County, New Mexico where he was a deputy sheriff. His own cruiser and all.

SONNY BOY WILLIAMSON II

Because of his chin hairs and maybe demeanor he was known as "The Goat". By whatever name, and there were a ton for the fabled and foiled and ever self mythologized Aleck "Rice" Miller, better known as Sonny Boy Williamson II, not to be confused with the slightly younger Sonny Boy Williamson I from Chicago. Both dyed-in-the wool bluesmen. No one goes wrong with either.

Sonny Boy II was such a mystery to folks, no official birth date has been given. His gravestone in Mississippi (he was born in Tallahatchie County) states 1908; researchers persist with 1912; the Goat says 1899.

He played with Robert Johnson, Elmore James, Robert Lockwood, and his sister was married to Howlin' Wolf. He appears as "Big Skol" on Roland Kirk's Kirk in Copenhagen.

I think of him as the sidewinder by his movements on the stage, with other performers (including Led Zepplin and various white blues bands from the sixties). The bowler hat. His way of maligning and abiding. It's a toss up which version of "Help Me" smolders and eventually burns the house down late at night — Junior Wells, or Sonny Boy's. I love them both, but when I hear the latter's, every time, and not planned and linked up and all ready like this, but sudden, sneaking up...it stops me cold.

It may be the greatest ambush blues song alive.

rollingstone.com
thehoundblog.blogspot.com

GONE WORKIN'

Okay — I'll be here & away over the next few weeks as I rebuild an old roof

and put on long steel sheets for a new roof. Sweetheart's left the garden to take

a snapshot of the kid in his balancing act. Thirty years ago I put on the asphalt

shingles you can see I am strapping over with spruce. The country style method

of burying one style with another. Under every old household with a steel roof

in the country, it's a good bet it is hiding something. Or attempting to straighten

up something else. I have a roof line with a bad slump which isn't too bad for a

house raised timber-framed in 1790 — by farmers and sawmill workers. Go

across the road with me and I can show you the mossy stone foundation where

the mill was, abiding the river. They raised this house of chestnut and oak,

axe hewn, notched and pegged. We're going to do our best to save the old roof

frame and allow the steel to tighten up ridge-to-eave with anchoring screws.

Shed the softest snow. And tolerate whatever else, since whatever else always

comes.

photo © susan arnold

EDEN ~

At last I fell to my knees
in the middle of the field
not because I was tired
but because my soul was burning

RUSSIAN FOLK SONG





CROSSING

In the real world people gather in crowds of sunshine on chilled spring mornings — smoking cigarettes, in hoods, cheap slacks, puffy sneakers always white, they joke and use words like words were meant to be used — direct, homely, getting from point A to point B — which is just what they are waiting for the bus that is free in this rural state to do, where cows out number people, and where busses cross over mountains.



MY LOVE. . .


wonders every winter-to-spring about a garden that grows on the way to town. This year she is worried about the man who plants and tends that garden every year. She hasn’t seen him at all out there working. Ground unplowed. She remembers him in the fall looking frail. There is a small pickup truck in the driveway. The gardener has no idea about my love’s thoughts. The space between the road and the house is maybe one hundred feet and within that space is a possible eden.



ADORE


I adore the concentration! A woman walks on the sidewalk toward me and tries the locked door where I am waiting. We both hear the lock hold. We’re strangers but she looks at me and speaks as if I am the door, “No...Wait. Oh, wrong door.” She moves down fifteen feet to another door and where things work.



STAIRWAY


I climbed the cement stairway of the four-tier parking garage — on the first tier I met up with a man who carried a large box down the center of the stairs, and he apologized for this. On the second tier I came face to face with a cherry condition F-150 pickup, turquoise painted stem to stern. My dream truck. I hesitated awhile there and just looked. On the third tier a man I’ve seen before was rattling on the parking ticket machine dreaming of loose change, and on the top tier of the parking garage a blond ponytailed woman in a soft pink sweater was stopped in her tracks and offering no eye contact. As I politely stepped aside she softly murmured, “Sorry.” It’s sunny on the top. The pigeons like this place. A man was leaving his brand new car to fetch himself a ticket. Nobody up there on that moonscape except him and me and the creaking sounds of his parked car relaxing.



THERE HE IS. . .


Nosferatu, his figure, painted on the cement wall of the parking garage when you descend the stairs after crossing all the top tier, pigeons, full sunshine and all. At the very bottom he is waiting. . .

from A Possible Eden, Bob Arnold, 2010

photos © bob arnold
photo of Judy Dater's "Imogen and Twinka, Yosemite 1974"

BABY BLUES ~

ANDREA ECHEVERRI



This song is maybe written to a lover, maybe written to Milagros the first child of Andrea Echeverri, Colombian musician, of Basque descent born in 1965, releasing her first record Andrea Echeverri in 2005. She also plays acoustic guitar in the group Aterciopelados. "Baby Blues" is dedicated from the Birdhouse to all friends having babies born this year as mothers, grandparents, or expecting.

photo : nacion.com

FRANCE ~







Ah, the French couple, Margaux and Gregoire.

She 25 long auburn soft curls to her hair.

Gregoire age 32 and looks ageless. Same with Margaux. Wonderful youth.

I had to slowly write out their names when they told me so I had it just-so when I signed over one of my books to them. Gregoire has an accent over his name, but I haven't yet figured out how to place that with my keyboard. Forgive me Gregoire!

Newly moved in romantically after knowing one another 3 years, both in Paris, both connected with the cinema and music, as French as French can be. If this is Paris, give me more of it.

Stepped right out of a Eric Rohmer delicacy.

Gregoire the step son of Paul Kahn, once of Bezoar the small press stapled in one corner publication, later a book on the Mongols from North Point, now married to Gregoire's mother in Paris. Paul edits and publishes NEW.

Susan and I saw immediately how enriched these two were, modest, curious, absolute sweethearts for the world.

Traveling with old stage coach driver Jim Koller, in his neat slouched hat, gray long strand ponytail, beatific grin, the warm crinkled eyes. He brought a small box of cheap beer in brown bottles that he shared with Gregoire, a dozen bottles. Two left at midnight. Bob, Sweetheart, Margaux happily sipping lemonade in our Rohmer film. Two quarts of our fresh picked blueberries being passed around. Music playing in all our ears.

Margaux and Gregoire almost pleading with the stage coach driver they would give anything to spend another day in Vermont. Ward Bond smiling and saying they were expected in Evanston "tomorrow night". Nothing but nothing standing in the way, not even NY State, Ohio or the width of the Hoosiers. He'll definitely get the mail through.

We were all asleep at 1 AM and up at 5 saying good morning and tally-ho by 6. Koller will take them everywhere on a USA trip they'll never forget. Poets, relatives, old sites. Remembrance.

Sea to shining sea.

fading light photo © susan arnold

PETE'S BEST SONG ~

Pete Seeger, that is. Taking one of his old songs that helped end one war (believe it or not) with the help of many younger musician friends, singing it into the next war and the next. They say there were only seven years without a war in the history of the world.

Keep singing.

photos:
freemuse.org

hilobrow.com

(IF YOU LOVE YOUR UNCLE SAM) BRING THEM HOME

If you love your Uncle Sam,
Bring them home, bring them home.
Support our boys in Vietnam,
Bring them home, bring them home.

It'll make our generals sad, I know,
Bring them home, bring them home.
They want to tangle with the foe,
Bring them home, bring them home.

They want to test their weaponry,
Bring them home, bring them home.
But here is their big fallacy,
Bring them home, bring them home.

I may be right, I may be wrong,
Bring them home, bring them home.
But I got a right to sing this song,
Bring them home, bring them home.

There's one thing I must confess,
Bring them home, bring them home.
I'm not really a pacifist,
Bring them home, bring them home.

If an army invaded this land of mine,
Bring them home, bring them home.
You'd find me out on the firing line,
Bring them home, bring them home.

Even if they brought their planes to bomb,
Bring them home, bring them home.
Even if they brought helicopters and napalm,
Bring them home, bring them home.

Show those generals their fallacy:
Bring them home, bring them home.
They don't have the right weaponry,
Bring them home, bring them home.

For defense you need common sense,
Bring them home, bring them home.
They don't have the right armaments,
Bring them home, bring them home.

The world needs teachers, books and schools,
Bring them home, bring them home.
And learning a few universal rules,
Bring them home, bring them home.

So if you love your Uncle Sam,
Bring them home, bring them home.
Support our boys in Vietnam,
Bring them home, bring them home.

Words and Music by Pete Seeger
© 1966 Storm King Music, Inc.