CELAN ~

Paul Celan

"If there is a country named Celania — as Julia Kristeva once proposed — its holy texts are filled with doubt, and they overcome this doubt almost successfully, with words of wrenching, uncompromised beauty. . .The book in your hands is not intended to become one of those heavy scholarly tomes that serve as a "proof" of one's position in the literary/academic hierarchy. Rather, this is a collection of various works, directed at, or inspired by, the words of Paul Celan. What we wanted to make was a living anthology, in which authors observe the poet's work, read it deeply, penetrate and discuss it. but also play with it, remake it, and attempt to fit it into their own worldviews.

A great poet is not someone who speaks in stadiums to a thousand listeners. A great poet is a very private person. In his privacy this poet creates a language in which he is able to speak, privately, to many people at the same time."

Ilya Kaminsky, from the Introduction

______________________________

THERE WAS EARTH INSIDE THEM

There was earth inside them, and
they dug.



They dug and dug, and so
their day went past, their night. And they did not praise God,
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so they heard, witnessed all this.



They dug and heard nothing more;
they did not grow wise, invented no song,
devised for themselves no sort of language.
They dug.



There came a stillness then, came also storm,
all of the oceans came.
I dig, you dig, and it, the worm, digs too,
and the singing there says: They dig.



O one, O none, O no one, O you:
Where did it go, then, making for nowhere?
O you dig and I dig, and I dig through to you,
and the ring on our finger awakens.

translated from the German by John Felstiner

Homage to Paul Celan
edited by Ilya Kaminsky & G.C. Waldrep
Marick Press, 2011
www.marickpress.com

"It has an inexorable logic about it. A poetry that seems — now that we have it — had to be. A six-pointed star etched into our minds — a splintered star.

How could it not "stand out"?"

~ Cid Corman

MUSIC TOUR ~
( mv & ee )

MV & EE

Free Range Festival ~ Belfast, Maine
April 29, 2012
w/ Matt L'animaux on bass, Carson Arnold on drums
Erika Elder & Matt Valentine

"MV & EE is a Vermont-based group of musicians focused around Matt "MV" Valentine and his partner Erika "EE" Elder. Matt Valentine was in the neo-psychedelic group, The Tower Recordings and has also released music under his own name and the pseudonym, Matthew Dell. While the duo recorded under many different names, including MV & EE Medicine Show and The Bummer Road, most of the records center around both artists and feature a rotating cast of additional musicians. Their style is self-described as "lunar ragas", with many of the lyrics dealing with celestial imagery. They combine Indian raga style composition with Appalachian folk and post-psychedelic electrical experimentalism. "



Our son Carson is about to hit the road again with MV & EE. If they are within a stone's throw of you, maybe you can catch one of their shows

The first show is in Albany, NY
TONIGHT !

(click on image to enlarge for concert dates)




Albums
_____________________

Tonight! One Night Only! MV & EE In Heaven 2001 (Child of Microtones)
Ragantula 2002 (Child of Microtones)
Daybreak Of Cocola & The Plumage Overtones Of Black Patti 2003 (Child of Microtones)
Fantastic String Music 2003 (Child of Microtones)
Moon Jook 2004 (Child of Microtones)
Cosmic Dust & The Electrobeam Hermit Thrush 2004 (Child of Microtones)
Lunar Blues 2004 (Child of Microtones)
The Uranian Ray 2004 (Child of Microtones/Spirit Of Orr)
Ragas & Blues 2004 (IDEA)
Livestock Moon Forms: Rural Ragas Volume One 2005 (Child of Microtones)
The Light Of Cocola Octo Escapes The Golden Dawn Of Blues: Rural Ragas Volume Two 2005 (Child of Microtones)
The Suncatcher Blossoms A Nova And Is So Grateful It Is No Longer Willing To Dark The Sun: Rural Ragas Volume Three 2005 (Child of Microtones)
Zone of Domes 2005 (Child of Microtones)
We Offer You Guru 2005 (Child of Microtones)
Suncatcher Mountain 2006 (Child of Microtones)
Mother of Thousands 2006 (Time-Lag Records)
The Cowboy's Road 2006 (Child of Microtones)
Play Ellas McDaniel's "Who Do You Love" 2006 (Three Lobed Recordings)
Rural Dimensions 2006 (Child of Microtones)
Green Blues 2007 (Ecstatic Peace)
Goodbye Moonface 2007 (Wabana Records)
Mars Delta 2007 (Child of Microtones)
Eye in the Pines 2007 (Child of Microtones)
Ragas of the Culvert: The Ground Ain't Dirty 2007 (Child of Microtones)
Gettin' Gone 2007 (Ecstatic Peace!)
Foxgod in Flight 2008 (Child Of Microtones)
Pray For Less w/ Willie Lane 2008 (Blackest Rainbow)
Total Loss Songs 2008 (Three Lobed Recordings)
MV & EE Meet Snake's Pass & Other Human Conditions 2008 (Singing Knives)
Drone Trailer 2009 (Dicristina Stair)
Barn Nova 2009 (Ecstatic Peace!)
Space Homestead 2012 (Woodist)


http://www.mvandee.blogspot.com/

BACK ROAD CHALKIE ~

Once In Vermont film
© bob arnold

HAND WAVE ~

Ah!


Just went out with Sweetheart, shade taking over and an elegant coolness starting for evening (still roasting in the sun) and put a new chalkboard quote up.


When I got done and was walking away, a young fellow slowed down in his silver pickup truck (a kid in the back bed ), shirtless, cap, wrap around shades, stopped and read the board:


"My formula for success is rise early,
work late,
and strike oil"

~ J Paul Getty.


Guy says, "We just went down to go swimming and were so disappointed nothing was on the board. So happy to see something now on."


I held up and showed my thick piece of chalk.


The guy smiles.
"Have a Great Day!"
Big wave goodbye.


Old America just paid old America a visit
all's well, Bob




1st as a letter to JD
photo : "Obi-Wan Kenobi" (Alec Guinness)

EARTH ~

Liu Xiaobo


___________________________

The most painful thing about translating this collection was not being able to consult with Liu Xiaobo or Liu Xia — the former serving hos eleven-year prison sentence, the latter under strict house arrest. It was an unnerving, unsettling experience to think of Liu Xiaobo's isolation while fiddling with his ruptured lines from the tomb. My study is a room with open doors and windows, my country a democracy of drone planes killing Pakistani and Afghani villagers, a democracy of more prisoners than any other nation, of privatized prisons, people directly used for private and public profit. And there the walls of Angel Island, there Guantanamo. China, meanwhile, holds around a trillion dollars in US bonds. Or elsewhere consider the artist Owen Maseko who was recently arrested in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, for organizing an art exhibition around the memory of the Gukurahundi Massacre. Or the circle of Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring. Where does the code of signals lead to and through? Toward what reckonings and reconciliations? There is no ground here for self-righteousness to root. The only conversation I could have with Liu was through his poems, through the verb of translation, thinking of what I thought he might say to a certain translation choice along the way.


Jeffrey Yang
from translator's afterword
June 2011


_____________________________________________

Experiencing Death

Qincheng Prison, June 1990
First anniversary offering for 6/4



1


Monument waves of weeping
marble grain fused with blood-stained veins
Belief and youth beaten beneath
a tank's rust-chained treads
Ancient story of the East
leaks out new hope unexpectedly



The glorious crowds have little by little disappeared
like a river that slowly, steadily dries away
landscape on both shores transformed to stone
Every throat has been strangled by fear, every
trembling has traced the dissipated niter smoke
Only the executioner's steel
helmet glints, luminous glints




2



I cannot recognize the flag anymore
The flag like an unknowing child
who's flung upon Mother's corpse
returns home weeping
I cannot tell day from night anymore
Time has been petrified by gunshots
like a paralytic without memory
Gun's muzzle presses into my back
I've lost my passport and identity card



Into the bayonet-inflamed dawn
that once familiar world
cannot find a handful of dirt
to bury itself in



Naked red heart
collides with iron and steel
Earth without water without greenness
ravaged by sunlight






3



They wait and wait
wait for time to invent an exquisite lie
wait for the transformation of the bestial hour
Indeed, wait until
fingers transform to sharpened claws
eyes transform to a gun's mouth
feet transform to chained treads
air transforms to a command
It arrives
at last it arrives
the five-thousand-year awaited command



Open fire—kill people
kill people—open fire
Peaceful petition, hands unarmed
as old man's cane, a child's torn jacket
The executioner will never be swayed
Eyes burnt to red
Gun-barrels shot to red
Hands dyed red
A bullet
A mud-thick secret spills out
A crime
A kind of heroic fast



How relaxing
death's arrival
How easy
bestial desires are satisfied
Young soldiers
recently clothed in uniform
still haven't felt
the intoxication of a girl's kiss
but now in an instant
experience the bloodthirsty pleasure
of murder, their youth's beginnings



They who
cannot see the blood-soaked dress
cannot hear the struggle's scream
through steel helmets cannot perceive life's fragility
They aren't aware
of the fatuous old man
transforming the ancient capital
into another zone of Auschwitz



Brutality, inquiry rise up from the earth
like the splendor of a pyramid
while life crumbles into the abyss
where even the faintest echo cannot be heard
The massacre has engraved a nation's tradition
years, months as remote as an abandoned language
that enacts a final farewell






4



I had imagined being there beneath sunlight
with the procession of martyrs
using just the one thin bone
to uphold a true conviction
And yet, the heavenly void
will not plate the sacrificed in gold
A pack of wolves well-fed full of corpses
celebrate in the warm noon air
a flood with joy



Faraway places
I've exiled my life to
this place without sun
to flee the era of Christ's birth
I cannot face the blinding vision of the cross
From a wisp of smoke to a little heap of ash
I've drained the drink of the martyrs, sense spring's
about to break into the brocade-brilliance of myriad flowers



Deep in the night, empty road
I'm biking home
I stop at a cigarette stand
A car follows me, crashes over my bicycle
some enormous brutes seize me
I'm handcuffed eyes covered mouth gagged
thrown into a prison van heading nowhere



A blink, a trembling instant passes
to a flash of awareness: I'm still alive
On Central Television News
my name's changed to "arrested black-hand"
though those nameless white bones of the dead
still stand in the forgetting
I'm listed up high by the self-invented lie
tell everyone how I've experienced death
so that "black hand" becomes a hero's medal of honor



Even if I know
death's a mysterious unknown
being alive, there's no way to experience death
and once dead
cannot experience death again
yet I'm still
hovering within death
a hovering in drowning
Countless nights behind iron-barred windows
and the graves beneath starlight
have exposed my nightmares



Beside a lie
I own nothing


_______________________


from JUNE FOURTH ELEGIES
by Liu Xiaobo
translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang
(Graywolf Press 2012)

Chinese poet, literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist who called for political reforms and the end of communist single-party rule in China — Liu Xiaobo (b. December 28 1955) is currently incarcerated as a political prisoner in China.

He has served from 2003 to 2007 as President of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, an organization funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which in turn is almost entirely funded by the US Congress. On 8 December 2008, Liu was detained because of his participation with the Charter 08 manifesto. He was formally arrested on 23 June 2009 on suspicion of "inciting subversion of state power." He was tried on the same charges on 23 December 2009, and sentenced to eleven years' imprisonment and two years' deprivation of political rights on 25 December 2009.

While in his fourth prison term, Liu was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for "his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China." He is the first Chinese citizen to be awarded a Nobel Prize of any kind while residing in China. Liu is the third person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while in prison or detention, after Germany's Carl von Ossietzky (1935) and Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi (1991). Liu is also the second person (the first being Ossietzky) to be denied the right to have a representative collect the Nobel prize for him.

(wikipedia & other)

ARTIST ~

please click onto image to enlarge

Alex Katz
Naked Beauty

DERROLL ADAMS ~

Donovan & Derroll Adams



Derroll Adams was a folk musician born in Portland, Oregon November 27, 1925 and died in Antwerp, Belgium 74 years later. He is best known for his husky style and voice, banjo playing, and teaming in his early years with Ramblin' Jack Elliott and later taking Donovan under his wing. Some say the American traditional music heard in early Donovan recordings is a result of Derroll Adams.

Have a look again at Pennebaker's documentary film of Bob Dylan's 1965 tour in the UK, Don't Look Back (1967), where Derroll Adams also shows up.

Here Donovan returns a favor, singing one of Adams' songs — a beauty, and do listen to the lyrics — with that Donovan gypsy quality for his American troubadour friend.

The Mountain

(Derroll Adams - Donovan Music Ltd. London)

It was up some laughing river
Where I'd gone to spend the day
I had such fantastic visions
I could hardly stand to stay
And I stood up within myself
And suddenly felt free
And I stood above the burdens
That puzzle you and me

I became awareness
That was shared with all around
With the trees the sky the flowers
And the wind the sun the ground
I heard the birds were singing
And I found them same as me
And I understood our sorrows
And why they should not be
I saw this plane of living
It was nothing more than faith
A skin that covered glory
Far beyond our love or hate
A living crystal fairy land
Where loving is our grace
A pyromanic garden
That knows no time or space

I saw what we've been doing to it
Saw it as insane
Still a-marching like good Christians
With our wars the sword the flame
To crash down all those infidels
To defend what should be shame
And again I shared our sorrows
Knew we all must bear the blame

I see it all as part of us
To know and share alike
With a universal willingness
To know and do what's right
To understand our brotherness
And stop this awful race
Let our children run and grow in peace
Know their lives shall not be waste
First there is a mountain
Then it seems the mountain's gone
But then if you take another look
Why - it's been there all along
We can be just like a river
As it laughs along it's way
Or stand beneath the shadows
That take the sun away

DAY OFF ~

ONE MORE RIDE! ~
( Holiday )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_%28roller_coaster%29

MORE TRAIN ~
( prone )

I wouldn't

EARTH ~
( Full Moon )

CROSS COUNTRY



In all our windows

It’s the moon

On the train





[ BA ]







see: Go West
(Coyote Books ) or
American Train Letters
by Bob Arnold
(Coyote Books / University of New York at Buffalo)

BOB'S MURAL ~

Think of yourself on the back of a bird — a barn swallow — viewing Bob Arnold's double wall mural from his tool room in Vermont.

The mural was painted on the off hours while rebuilding a room on the other side of these two walls.

once in vermont films

art & film ©bob arnold

EARTH ~

please click onto image to enlarge

Looking for Bruce Conner
by Kevin Hatch
MIT Press

LOVE ROLLERCOASTER ~

Summer, Saturday night — here's summer Saturday night in case you haven't felt it yet via Big Joe Turner. He was wide in girth and sang across the chasms. Took you into Sunday morning; took you to the Fourth of July. He'll bring it up in this song.

Who doesn't like a rollercoaster, just to look at! You can stay on the ground if you want to. Who doesn't like the Fourth of July? Fireworks?! You can still hide away on the Fourth of July.

Revere Beach rollercoaster & boardwalk, 1914

For American history sake, Henry David Thoreau moved to his habitat Walden Pond on the Fourth of July 1845. It was a small, self-built and well-built hut on land owned by Emerson in a second-growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond. The hut was in "a pretty pasture and woodlot" of 14 acres that Emerson had bought,1.5 miles from his family home. Think of that when crowded with heralders, noise, traffic, shoppers, fireworks, jams, bonanza wheeling & dealing. One of the great experiments in American history, so long ago, and today if you make a visit to the pond it doesn't look any older than you.


Play the song a few times. It's a rollercoaster.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

HENRY DAVID THOREAU
"Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"
Walden





early 20th c. photograph of Thoreau's Walden site with stone cairn
(there to this day, enlarged, a stone at a time)



Henry David Thoreau's last sentence, while dying
"Now comes good sailing"

BIRTHDAY BOY ~





Today is Cid Corman's birthday. If you don't know who Cid Corman is, Google his name and go and have some fun exploring. I could pinpoint to our own website of Cid and a ton of his books we have available by Cid but you'll come across all that if you go searching. It's sometimes fun to search, especially on a summer day. Or evening.


We were painting the big red farmhouse today and as I started to climb the 30 foot aluminum ladder with swinging paint bucket in my right hand, Sweetheart said from her step-ladder below, matter of factually, "Today's Cid's birthday."


It was said with such common decency, like, "Look at those morning glories." No pomp and ceremony. Like it will be important and will be with us all through the painting day, and so it was.


And so I loved two people even more.

drawing of Cid Corman © bob arnold
Calligraphy by Shizumi Corman
Cid Corman
(b. 29 June 1924)

EARTH ~

The Long Way Home [Shanachie, 1994]

Dama is a classic folkie, a cosmopolitan leftist credited with inventing Malagasy nueva cancion, an elected legislator as renowned in Madagascar as Victor Jara was in Chile. D'Gary is a classic find, a prodigy-protégé from cattle country where the main road is an 11-hour walk away. Though their rainbow rhythms are formally unique and patently pleasurable, not even producer Henry Kaiser claims to apprehend them fully. The hook is D'Gary's distinctively Malagasy way with his recently acquired guitar, and even more, since that wasn't enough to put his solo album over, Dama's calm, good-humored, deeply assured vocal presence--a politician's gift from a place and time where oratory is still entertainment. Despite excellent notes, the satisfactions remain fairly general for the English speaker. But Kaiser and friends' understated filigrees remind me that said satisfactions far exceed those of similar projects--Ry Cooder's Ali Farka Toure soundtrack, say. B+
~ ROBERT CHRISTGAU

HELL ~

I have read some reports from Estonia that detest this book, its author, the ground he stomps around on. You just have to get used to Alexander Theroux. He isn't out, necessarily, to make new friends; he's living, a moving target, carousing, thinking steadily, deadly opinionated and probably already hates the semicolon I've used in this sentence. He goes nuts if a percentage point has a comma typo instead of the appropriate period. Or, better, decimal point. He's fussy, flinty, and while he does write about the visit with his artist~wife (Sarah Son-Theroux) to Estonia, and it is one of her paintings on the book jacket, this beast Theroux can't help himself but to storm off-message and attack or support almost any other subject you could possibly think of. He's not of this time, he's of his own time. It doesn't matter what I think. I want to know what his travel writing scholar brother Paul Theroux would think of the book, and would he include it in his pantheon of travel writing classics The Tao of Travel? I don't believe Paul Theroux is capable of writing a book like this one. Maybe Celine would have, if he wanted to bother. I'd like to see a sequence from this Estonia, maybe the chapter "Rumble Strips on the Road", embedded in the Tao.


___________________

Poking Around the Periphery


Although Estonia is presently considered a high-technology country, computer-wired and all — citizens were given permission in 2007 to cast ballots by way of the Internet in parliamentary elections, and by parliamentary approval it will become the very first country to allow its citizens to cast their votes by mobile telephone in the next parliamentary election in 2011 — I began slowly to suspect that too much of the country was still local and pretty much a boat-axe culture of potato-sellers and loggers, apiculturists and cabbage-hoers. I took for granted that it was all there in the Kalevipoeg, the national epic, which in its legends depicts a rude and rustic world. So was I correct in my smug and self-assured estimate? Not at all. The incontrovertible fact is that Estonia has the third-highest literacy rate in the entire world (99.8), following — yes — Georgia and Cuba, higher than the United States. Its almost unresponsive smallness is what gives it, sadly, the rustification tag. Sparse as Norway, which has the lowest population density in Europe—only 4,3000,000 people — Estonia has fewer residents than the present-day Gaza Strip, only a few more people than Mauritania. Estonia's dwindling population-rate which has not quite reached the lower reproductive potential of the California condor poses something of a scandal even to them, and to know that it ranks somewhere near the bottom of the world in terms of world-population is a source of no small awkwardness and, to a large degree, even sorry to them. With only 1.3 million inhabitants, Estonia is one of the least populous countries in the European Union. The current fertility rate there is 1.41 children per mother. (Benefits for pregnancy in Estonia include a more-than-generous 16-month paid leave for the mother-to-be, so eagerly are births welcomed there.) I was often reminded of this in the way that Estonias almost superstitiously love children — to see, to pamper them — even though in a weird paradox they seem to rarely hold them. During the Soviet occupation, the country of Estonia also had the highest rate of emigration than any of the other Soviet republics, with people looking to emigrate at every possibility.


I walked everywhere. I tried, by walking, to observe the people and places. Walking in the electric blue cold always helped me proceed much faster and perhaps more purposefully. Harry Truman on his post-presidential constitutionals — for exercise — always saw to it that the fast pace he kept was precisely 120 steps per minute! I will bet that on a windy Baltic winter day if I did not match him, I came close. I walked past beet fields, through green mists and spoiling fog, walked out at night to outlying highways where it was eerie and soundless until roaring trucks would go past like a herd of Triceratops.


A sense of depletion in the outlying sections of Estonia still sadly maintains. There is a vastness of long woods outside all main cities. Nearly 40% of the country is forested, mainly with pine and birches along the coasts. Cutting down trees and selling lumber is probably the major small industry there, for its forests are vast, its countryside a flat, ongoing sameness.


Food, construction and newly-burgeoning electronic industries are Estonia's most important. The country exports mainly machinery and equipment, wood and paper, textiles, food products, furniture, metals, and chemicals products. It also exports 1,562 billion kilowatt hours of electricity annually. The country had a frighteningly high unemployment rate — 14.3% — in 2010. It has a fairly high tax burden, with its VAT (value added tax) of 20% to make the comparison, even higher than it presently is in the UK. Its border with Russia is the fourth highest in Europe, but, from what I managed to see, little of significance is happening along that eastern march. A visitor looks around to try to find a figure in the carpet. What exactly is there in the country's profile that can be drawn as a way to know them? I felt confounded in the main, for there is in the national personality a guard that is rarely dropped, a methodical indifference that with an almost fatally easy sense of disobligation steadily refuses to invite one in. A want of identity is invariably a topic raised but rarely pursued in essential Estonian conversation. I have always considered it depressingly apposite to this situation, a sort of objective correlative, that in Theodore H. White's Fire in the Ashes, a book that specifically addressed the subject of "Europe in mid-century," an astute, thoroughgoing report documenting the Soviet bloc and the merciless stranglehold that it held on so much of Europe for so long, he mentions the country of Estonia not at all. The country is not named, not referenced, never alluded to, not once. Neither is Latvia or Lithuania, and that includes the index. So much for postwar value.


I mention technology. Skype, the Internet telephone service, was once strictly as Estonian company. It was the pride of Estonia. It was bought in 2006 by eBay for more than two billion dollars. In May of 2011, however, Microsoft went on to purchase Skype for $8.5 billion in cash, the largest acquisition that Microsoft has ever made, but chump change for the Seattle giant. As I say, Estonia is more than just technologically hip; it is mobile-phone addicted and completely Internet-literate. (In 2010, Estonia got rid of every one of its street telephone booths and canceled the use of telephone cards intended for them. The number of calls made from them had decreased by 30 times over the past 10 years, and they were no longer in demand.) In this small country, Wi-Fi is everywhere. Voting can be done on-line by way of a national identity card. I believe that they have more cell phones in the country, percentage-wise, than does the United States, and there they are used for everything from buying newspapers from a vending machine to selecting numbers in the lottery to ascertaining when the next bus is coming. It is amazing how geekishly "connected" the country is in regard to technology. Identity cards in general are popular entry tools. As a visitor to that country, I had to buy a card in the University of Tartu library just to walk around. I may mention here, however, that Estonia is a highly dependent country in terms of energy and energy production. In recent years many companies have been investing in renewable energy sources. Wind power and interest in it has been increasing steadily in Estonia, and many projects in wind, to capture the robust east wind coming across from Russia, or sinewy west wind relentlessly driving in from the oceans, are being thoroughly developed even as I write. The country, which has no nuclear plant, however, is presently investigating nuclear power and looking to increase its oil shale production.


While technological growth is hugely important for the country, one also hopes that coming out of a long night of relative obscurity Estonia will not become a slave to science at the expense of free-ranging imagination. H.G. Wells' verdict on Lenin was that he was "a dreamer in technology." Lenin's gnomic remark, "Communism is Electrification plus Soviets" surely indicates a blind faith in the machine as savior and agent of socialism. As Andre Malaraux told Bruce Chatwin,

As the young have discovered, the secret divinity of the twentieth-century is science. But Science is incapable of forming character. The more people talk of human sciences, the less effect human sciences have on man. You know as well as I do that psychoanalysis has never made a man. And the formation of man is his most pressing problem facing humanity.

Estonia by Alexander Theroux
Fantagraphics Books, 7563 Lake City Way NE, Seattle WA 98115
www.fantagraphics.com

WRITER ~

May 19, 1941 ~June 26, 2012

I didn't at all like hearing that Nora Ephron may be dying. Then moments later in Internet-life, she was gone. That can't be possible — not a writer like Ephron, with her dazzle and humor and bite. I almost like her style and swift delivery as much as I like Saroyan. She writes the size of book that you can go to the library when it opens and find her latest book and have it all read by noon time. Go out (it's raining) and have a pizza slice and a Coke with your sweetheart, then come back and read another book — maybe the one that came out recently about To Kill A Mockingbird. Another terrific writer. Another woman. It isn't lost on me that these writers are women, and it isn't lost on them that they write like only a woman can. A different verve and tough humor that most men never realize. Spunk, yes, that's what it is.


When Nora Ephron is gone a little bit of spunk will be gone. But she'll never be gone. There are books and her films; and you know, no one looked like her either.

Selected filmography

(1983) Silkwood (writer)
(1986) Heartburn (writer, novel)
(1989) When Harry Met Sally... (writer, associate producer)
(1989) Cookie (writer, executive producer)
(1990) My Blue Heaven (writer, executive producer)
(1992) This Is My Life (director, writer)
(1993) Sleepless in Seattle (director, writer)
(1994) Mixed Nuts (director, writer)
(1996) Michael (director, writer, producer)
(1998) Strike! / The Hairy Bird / All I Wanna Do (executive producer)
(1998) You've Got Mail (director, writer, producer)
(2000) Hanging Up (writer, producer)
(2000) Lucky Numbers (director, producer)
(2005) Bewitched (director, writer, producer)
(2009) Julie & Julia (director, writer, producer)

Awards & Nominations

(1979) Perfect Gentlemen -Best Television Feature or Miniseries- Edgar Allan Poe Awards (Nominated)
(1984) Silkwood -Best Drama Written Directly for Screen- Writers Guild of America Awards (Nominated)
(1984) Silkwood -Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for Screen- Academy Awards (Nominated)
(1990) When Harry Met Sally -Best Screenplay for Motion Picture- Golden Globes (Nominated)
(1990) When Harry Met Sally -Best Original Screenplay- BAFTA Awards (Won)
(1990) When Harry Met Sally -Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for Screen- Academy Awards (Nominated)
(1990) When Harry Met Sally -Best Screenplay Written Directly for Screen- Writers Guild of America Awards (Nominated)
(1994) Sleepless in Seattle -Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for Screen- Academy Awards (Nominated)
(1994) Sleepless in Seattle -Best Original Screenplay- BAFTA Awards (Nominated)
(1994) Sleepless in Seattle -Best Screenplay Written Directly for Screen- Writers Guild of America (Nominated)
(1994) Crystal Award- Women in Film Crystal Awards (Won)
(1999) You've Got Mail -Best Motion Picture Comedy or Musical- Satellite Awards (Nominated)
(2003) Ian McLellan Hunter Award - Writers Guild of America Awards (Won)
(2006) Bewitched -Worst Screenplay- Razzie Awards (Nominated)
(2009) Julie & Julia -Best Screenplay, Adapted- Satellite Awards (Nominated)
(2009) Golden Apple Award- Casting Society of America (Won)
(2010) Julie & Julia -Best Screenplay, Adapted- Writers Guild of America Awards (Nominated)[14]

Essay collections

Crazy Salad
Wallflower at the Orgy
(2010) I Remember Nothing: And other Reflections
(2006) I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
(1975) The Boston Photographs

EARTH ~

Drummond Hadley

Drummond Hadley has lived and worked over forty years along the Mexico-New Mexico-Arizona border as a cowboy and rancher. He is most recently the author of Borderlands and The Light Before Dawn, plus a handful of strategic books of poetry and song. Drum founded the Animas Foundation, which supports sustainable agriculture in step with the environment. He is also a founding member of the Malpai Borderlands Group, a community-based ecosystem management project. He lives in the Arizona-New Mexico borderlands, when not tucked away in the James Fenimore Cooper region of New York State.

Thinking of Drummond Hadley

I first met Drummond Hadley about a quarter century ago when we drove from Vermont into New York State to hear him read with mutual friend Jim Koller. Both poets spaced their readings nicely, revealing their long friendship, and I thought Drum that night sounded like Jimmy Stewart.


Our next 'meeting' was when my book of poems Where Rivers Meet was published and I don't know how Drum got a copy but he got a copy and he called me from his southwestern ranch. He told me it was on his cellphone and he had driven to the highest point he could find on the land where he was working, standing outside of his pickup truck and he wanted to tell me what the book of poems meant to him. Certainly memorable to me.


The third time was just yesterday when Jim Koller was visiting here and wanting to go over to New York State to visit with Drummond. He was concerned about his old friend's health. We all are, too.

EARTH ~

SIDEWALK SERENADE


We read aloud on the sidewalk eventually at kneeling level
The legs can only take so much


There is another world halfway down toward the earth
Cigarette butts come large, dogs are more our size


While a poet friend prepares
One of her new poems to read


I ask three little girl chums in very pretty rainbow wash clothing
If they would like to sit awhile and hear some poetry?


“Sure!!!” they cheer


They sit immediately attentive, dazzling keepsake wallets & purses
They hear the poem, talk about the poem, say they have written poems


The Earth momentarily seems healed

all true, I'm but a camera
photo : national geographic

BLUES ~

Larry Davis

(December 4, 1936 – April 19, 1994)

A terrific blues guiatrist and soul singer, too little known except by die-hards to the blues, Davis is best known for composing "Texas Flood", later made famous by Stevie Ray Vaughan. The Davis blues tune is perfect for the bar arena and the long open road. A blues life, motorcycle accident, and passing away to cancer at age 57 has kept his discography sadly shortened. Play some songs.

Funny Stuff (1982) - Rooster Blues
I Ain't Beggin' Nobody (1987) Evidence
Sooner or Later (1992) Bullseye Blues
B.B. King Presents Larry Davis (2002)
Sweet Little Angel (2002) - P-Vine Records

EARTH ~

Peter F. Drucker







Back Road Chalkies



Peter Ferdinand Drucker (November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005) was an influential writer, management consultant, and self-described “social ecologist".

Back Road Chalkie

photo © bob arnold



Books by Peter F. Drucker

1939: The End of Economic Man (New York: The John Day Company)
1942: The Future of Industrial Man (New York: The John Day Company)
1946: Concept of the Corporation (New York: The John Day Company)
1950: The New Society (New York: Harper & Brothers)
1954: The Practice of Management (New York: Harper & Brothers)
1957: America's Next Twenty Years (New York: Harper & Brothers)
1959: Landmarks of Tomorrow (New York: Harper & Brothers)
1964: Managing for Results (New York: Harper & Row)
1967: The Effective Executive (New York: Harper & Row)
1969: The Age of Discontinuity (New York: Harper & Row)
1970: Technology, Management and Society (New York: Harper & Row)
1971: The New Markets and Other Essays (London: William Heinemann Ltd.)
1971: Men, Ideas and Politics (New York: Harper & Row)
1971: Drucker on Management (London: Management Publications Limited)
1973: Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices' (New York: Harper & Row)
1976: The Unseen Revolution: How Pension Fund Socialism Came to America (New
York: Harper & Row)
1977: People and Performance: The Best of Peter Drucker on Management (New York: Harper's College Press)
1978: Adventures of a Bystander" (New York: Harper & Row)
1980: Managing in Turbulent Times (New York: Harper & Row)
1981: Toward the Next Economics and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row)
1982: The Changing World of Executive (New York: Harper & Row)
1982: The Last of All Possible Worlds (New York: Harper & Row)
1984: The Temptation to Do Good (London: William Heinemann Ltd.)
1985: Innovation and Entrepreneurship (New York: Harper & Row)
1986: The Frontiers of Management: Where Tomorrow's Decisions are Being Shaped Today (New York: Truman Talley Books/E.D. Dutton)
1989: The New Realities: in Government and Politics, in Economics and Business, in Society and World View (New York: Harper & Row)
1990: Managing the Nonprofit Organization: Practices and Principles (New York: Harper Collins)
1992: Managing for the Future (New York: Harper Collins)
1993: The Ecological Vision (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers)
1993: Post-Capitalist Society (New York: HarperCollins)
1995: Managing in a Time of Great Change (New York: Truman Talley Books/Dutton)
1997: Drucker on Asia: A Dialogue between Peter Drucker and Isao Nakauchi (Tokyo: Diamond Inc.)
1998: Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing)
1999: Management Challenges for 21st Century (New York: Harper Business)
2001: The Essential Drucker (New York: Harper Business)
2002: Managing in the Next Society (New York: Truman Talley Books/St. Martin’s Press)
2002: A Functioning Society (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers)
2004: The Daily Drucker (New York: Harper Business)
2008 (posthumous): The Five Most Important Questions (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass)

SECOND SIMPLICITY ~

Yves Bonnefoy

(born 24 June 1923)

Happy Birthday !

French poet and essayist, Bonnefoy was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, the son of a railroad worker and a teacher. His works are at the same time poetic and theoretical, examining the meaning of the spoken and written word.

A BIT OF WATER



I long to grant eternity

To this flake

That alights on my hand,

By making my life, my warmth,

My past, my present days

Into a moment: the boundless

Moment of now.



But already it's no more

Than a bit of water, lost in the fog

Of bodies moving through snow.





LE PEU D'EAU



À ce flocon

Qui sur ma main se pose, j'ai désir

D' assurer l'éternel

En faisant de ma vie, de ma chaleur,

De mon passé, de ces jours d'à présent,

Un instant simplement : cet instant-ci, sans bornes.



Mais déjà il n'est plus

Qu'un peu d'eau, qui se perd

Dans la brume des corps qui vont dans la neige.


_________________________________



YVES BONNEFOY
SECOND SIMPLICITY
New Poetry and Prose 1991-2011
( Yale / Margellos )

translated by Hoyt Rogers

photo : Eric Garault pour Lire