AMBROSE BIERCE, 1842-1913(?) ~

An Occurrence At the Styx River Ferry


I love the dead and their companionship is infinitely agreeable.   Ambrose Bierce


It was his asthma, we're told, that kept him on the gad, a livelong search for disembarrassed air. He'd quickly arrive and as quickly leave, as if the asylum he pursued had shut its doors and moved away. That's all he was up to, seeking a sanatorium to ease his spasms and quell his rale — that's what drew and drove him, they say, a place to free his bated breath. But they mistook the man: the goal of his long-drawn chase was death, and he dogged it all his life.


He coursed it as though it were a species game, studied its terrain, its ways and hours, its own particular prey, became a mine of old campaigns, till, a soldier rising twenty, he himself began to kill. In the Rebellion, he was cited fifteen times for the red badge he was thought to wear, and he rose to rank from meat to major — but it was only death that he sought, the bright and brass-buttoned Angel. He failed to find it at Corinth and Shiloh, failed again at Stone River, failed once more at Kenesaw, though there, with a Minie ball in his head, it came close to finding him.

 
The warning was writing on the wrong wall: he was still fighting when the war ended, and thereafter he fought with his quill through fifty years of peace. Into his printed stint, he wrote a duel a day for the papers and on a good day more, and he wore a pistol for the beasts he hated most, vicious dogs and men. He frequented graveyards, walked among the stones, and tombs, read the names of buried bones, but always death had been there before him, delivered its dead and gone — and then his son was killed in gunplay, and from there to the end, dirty cerements filled the dore skies.


He came at last to the river. The Rio Grande, it was called, but its name might've been the Chickamauga, which in Indian meant River of Death, it might've been the Acheron or known merely as the Black Water, so rank, no mephitic, that no cup, no can would hold it. Whichever it was, he reached its bank one day, and there, not far from crossing . . . .




_________________________

John Sanford
View From This Wilderness
(Capra Press 1977)

American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist — Ambrose Bierce wrote the short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and compiled a satirical lexicon The Devil's Dictionary. He was born in Ohio and to this day no one knows where he ended his days. He was last seen traveling with rebel troops during the Mexican Revolution (1913).

WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND ~

We used to call them "Woodburners"
 meaning not to burn (hardly)

 but burn with & within and stay warm by. . .

like sugar maple, beech, oak, yellow birch, ash


BOOKS! MUSIC! FILM!
 

________________________________________

Clifford Burke. Dream Confluence, Love Poems for Gibi 

 Desert Rose Press

John Currin

Gagosian Gallery

Dancing Around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Duchamp

edited by Basualdo and Battle

Yale

 

Lydia Davis and Eliot Weinberger, Two American Scenes

New Directions 

Susan Howe, Sorting Facts: Or, 19 Ways of Looking at Maker, 

New Directions Poetry Pamphlet # 3

A Thousand Thousand Fireflies Never Equal Zero
George Kalamaras, Omowale-Ketu Oladuwa, Michael F. Patterson

Midnight Lamp Records

Sylvia Legris, Pneumatic Antiphonal

New Directions

Rebecca Lepkoff photographs, Life on the Lower East Side. 1937-1950. 

Peter E. Dans and Suzanne Wasserman

Bernadette Mayer. The Helens of Troy, NY. 

New Directions 

Lorine Niedecker, Lake Superior 

 Lorine Niedecker’s Poem and Journal, Along with Other Sources, Documents and Readings Wave Books 

Octavio Paz, The Poems of Octavio Paz

 Edited and translated by Eliot Weinberger

 New Directions

once in vermont films

film © bob arnold

CACHAO ~

American Masters (PBS)
"Cachao : Uno Mas"

http://video.pbs.org/video/1595847416/

EARTH DAY ~
(is every day)

Octavio Paz

on a day we remember Richie Havens

( 1941 ~ 2013 )

back road chalkie earth day 2013

photo © bob arnold

"LISTEN, WHITEY!" ~

EARTH ~

O Navigator



I'm an innocent bystander —

it's my lover who hikes

up river for mail and some-

times meets curious things

along the way, like the fellow

in the car just now, after the

flood in this valley, who needs

to get to "west layden road" — my

lover corrects him, "you mean west

leyden road?"  "yes," he says, then adds

"my navigator says it's this way"

pointing to his dashboard, then southward

"but there isn't any road this way since the flood"

she points south

"but my navigator says it is this way"

he points south

she kindly continues, "it is this way"

pointing south

"but the road's gone"

still pointing



inch by inch

pointing someone

back to earth





_________________________________


BOB ARNOLD
Beautiful Days
Longhouse 2013




photo © bob arnold
when "River Road" became a river
during Hurricane Irene

BOSTONIAN ~
 

"There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones, —they alone with him alone."

(The ninth chapter in The Conduct of Life, 1860 by Ralph Waldo Emerson)

CHATTERIN' ~

frog pond April 2013
film © bob arnold

THE TRAIL ~

Here we are in that schizophrenic month of April. Whether it's the cruelest month in New England, or 'poetry month' (too bad poetry enthusiasts only want to celebrate one month!), it has been, already, one crazy spring (adding a little March with all of April).


Today we were raking every spot in a large yard where the snow has disappeared, melted, vanished, soaked into the softening ground. A bunch of snow is still around but we're working the opened yard. The work was going along very well for a few days, then two days ago came enough snow to cover every part of the earth we could see. All over again. Good ol' cuckoo April. We knew it should melt off if the next day broke some warmish sunshine but on snow day it didn't creep out of the low 30s. Pathetic. April just doing what April has always done all my New England life — acted the way it wanted to. It's getting rid of vast miles and ranges of snow and having to have mud up in its mouth and ears and nose so it can do just what it pleases. So relax. Summer could be boiling.


We're raking around a large flat stone my son and I put down after one of our great dogs died. Aren't all our dogs great? Of course they are. Yours and mine. We wept over this dog's passing worse than any person who has yet died in our lives. I think that's because a dog often comes with joy, or for healing, or for true companionship — when the dog often does what we say. A true companion. A humble guest. A dog's passing also allows passage for all those others we couldn't cry for, either because it wasn't in us and should have been, or we didn't know quite yet how to appraise and weep properly. I mean, with a dog, we are losing maybe the closet living being to ourselves. Or the dog was a gift. Or, as it happens, the dog was bought as a puppy for a child and lived the lifetime of the child at home and then passed away as the child was starting to think of leaving home. It's a loss beyond words. So we weep. Maybe for some years.


I know when we rake around this grave we say hello to our old pal. Aloud.


Aloud is quite something. To hear a voice. Yesterday, between the recent snowfall and this raking today we climbed a mountain we often climb and like a lot. I had a little birthday party up there last summer and maybe you saw the film? Well, we've been climbing up there every week ever since. The party was me, she, a chocolate cake, candles, matches, and the mountain. A river in the distance. Clouds. Sunshine. Breezes. Falling pine needles. Fellow climbers we didn't know, didn't matter. It was a party.


On the way back down the mountain on the woods trail yesterday I could see a young family coming our way: mom, dad, little boy, a little older girl. We met the boy first who stood himself right off the trail so we could pass. I remember being that little boy myself — getting a little higher up off the trail and then sneak a peek at just who these people are who are passing. He's wearing a pirate bandana and she's in an orange flying skirt, I must have a look, the little boy seems to be saying as I get closer to him. Right up close, and not wanting to frighten him, I stop a moment, smile, and ask the boy, "How're you doin'?" He stands fast, hands behind his back, studies me quite a bit like my own cat back at home does, and then says, "I'm climbing the mountain."


"I'm climbing the mountain." Said so beautifully matter-of-fact and all his. As it should be.


The boy was seven or eight years old. All in dark blue, no hat, brown blowing hair, jacket zipper all the way up.


He's exactly the same age as the children massacred at the school in Newtown, Connecticut. I looked at the boy and replied, "I know you are, and that's great."


I turned away down the trail and smiled at his approaching and glowing family.

'birch stump'
photo © bob arnold

GHOST REPEATER ~

Jeffrey Foucault

(b. Whitewater, Wisconsin)

Discography

    2001 – Miles from the Lightning
    2003 – Redbird (with Peter Mulvey and Kris Delmhorst)
    2004 – Stripping Cane
    2006 – Ghost Repeater
    2009 - Shoot the Moon Right Between the Eyes: Jeffrey Foucault Sings the Songs of John Prine
    2010 - Seven Curses (with Mark Erelli)
    2010 - Cold Satellite
    2011 - Horse Latitudes

man alone with guitar, people walking by

STAND UP ~

Jonathan Winters

( 1925 ~ 2013 )






It was never called "bonding" but in the late 1950s through the 60s I used to watch television comedians with my father and that's how we bonded — not throwing a baseball or football or basketball since he didn't play — but with the comedians, and he taught me how to play drums, via Gene Krupa, which was okay since I was playing on my father's large and dull tuned kit with its huge base drum and tom-tom without a bottom skin, more like a kettle. That's how those old guys lived. It was white and loud and yet sincere. The greatest tv show for comedians we watched may have been "The Steve Allen Show." I was too young to know I was watching Jack Kerouac one night, but I was watching Jack Kerouac one night, reading aloud, Steve Allen on piano. It all looked too cool for words. Louis Nye, Don Knotts, Lenny Bruce, probably Jonathan Winters came on the show. Winters was square-shaped, clean cut, reminded me of our grade school janitor until he opened his mouth and used his eyes. There would never be another comedian like him. So many of the best ones came from the American midwest. Like almost everything great from America, Jonathan Winters didn't quite fit in — he was in films but he couldn't swing with it, or on a television series. He just had to appear and have someone interact with him, and then the genius showed, like Groucho, like Buster Keaton, the two other geniuses of that ilk. I'd go on to teach my son how to play drums. . .who became the best player in the family tree.

MOTHERS & SONS ~

~ Etta James ~

Blues to the Bone 

A gorgeous and gritty LP James cut, selecting twelve of her favorite blues tunes, with two of her sons and the rest of the band in 2004

BIG YELLOW PEACHES ~

Grey DeLisle

Discography

   2000 – The Small Time

    2002 – Homewrecker

    2003 – Bootlegger, Vol. 1

    2004 – The Graceful Ghost

    2005 – Iron Flowers

    2005 – Loggerheads soundtrack

    2006 – "Willie We Have Missed You", song on Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster

    2007 – Anchored in Love: A Tribute to June Carter Cash

LAND OF LITTLE RAIN ~

Mary Austin

[The Land of Little Rain] "It aims to be, first of all, a meditation on place, though the place itself is also effaced a little, and is two places actually, which you can find by consulting a map: the arid country east of Bakersfield, California, where the San Francisco Valley ends in the transverse range of the Tehachapi Mountains, and the long narrow valley east of the Sierra Nevada that runs from Bishop in the north through Big Pine and Independence (note the name: the author of this book lived in these towns — Independence had a population of three hundred — at the age of twenty-six, having left her husband, and taught school to earn a living and tried to raise her retarded two-year-old daughter, without child care, while she worked, and tried to write) and Lone Pine, and south to the Coso Range and the Slate and Quail and Granite Mountains, places you cannot see much of now, since they are home to a U.S. naval weapons center and access is restricted. It is no surprise that the book she wrote is, save for the dreamy idyll of its last chapter, a cool-minded mediation on freedom and necessity, adaptation and survival."

~ Robert Hass, from his essay, "Mary Austin and The Land of Little Rain"

What Light Can Do

(Ecco 2012)

"For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars. It comes upon one with new force in the pauses of the night that the Chaldeans were a desert-bred people.  It is hard to escape the sense of mastery as the stars move in the wide heavens to risings and settings unobscured. They look large and near and palpitant: as if they moved on some stately service not needed to declare. Wheeling to their stations in the sky, they make the poor world-fret of no account. Of no account you who lie out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you and howls and howls."

~ Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain







Owens River Gorge and the White Mountains looking SE from Swall Meadows in the Eastern Sierra foothills




 

Owens Valley

 Lone Pine Peak w/ the Alabama Hills in the foreground

Mt. Williamson, Owens Valley, California

Owens Valley and Wheeler Crest

Old wagon road down Sherwin Grade near U.S. 395, Mono County

RE THATCHER ~

Glenda Jackson 
 criticises Margaret Thatcher in Commons debate

DARK HOLLER ~

"Dark Holler: Old Love Songs and Ballads is a 2005 compilation album released by Smithsonian Folkways. The album is composed of Appalachian folk music 1960's recordings made and compiled by musicologist John Cohen in Madison County, North Carolina. Most of the songs are done in an a cappella style.

More than half of the songs on the album are sung by Dillard Chandler, a "mysterious" illiterate man who knew hundreds of songs. "Allmusic" writes that Chandler sings with "deft precision, often with the song's strong sexual undercurrents intact".

The songs contain several dark topics and themes such as murder, revenge, infidelity, and abandoned children. The New York Times describes the album as "traditional songs about love and murder usually traceable to England, a century or more before, but sung in a style rooted in the region: the singers all stretch out, irregularly, on vowels of their choosing, and add upturned yips to the end of stanzas".

Cas Wallin, who sings on two of the album's songs told North Carolinian author Sheila Kay Adams, "They’re studying this for a reason, Sheila, it’s because they don’t think it’s going to last much longer". Despite Wallin's fears, Cohen writes in his liner notes that traditional singing is still alive and well, and a source of pride in rural North Carolina. "

Track listing

"The Carolina Lady"     Dillard Chandler
"The Soldier Traveling from the North"     Dillard Chandler
"The Sailor Being Tired"     Dillard Chandler
"Young Emily"     Dellie Norton
"Pretty Fair Miss In Her Garden"     Dellie Norton
"When I Wore My Apron Low"     Dellie Norton
"Pretty Saro"     Cas Wallin
"Fine Sally"     Cas Wallin
"Neighbor Girl"     Lee Wallin
"Juba This"     Lee Wallin
"Gathering Flowers"     Dillard Chandler
"Gastony Song"     Dillard Chandler
"Cold Rain and Snow"     Dillard Chandler
"In Zepo Town"     Lisha Shelton
"Don't You Remember"     Lisha Shelton
"Awake, Awake"     Dillard Chandler
"Mathie Grove"     Dillard Chandler
"Scotland Man"     George Landers
"Love Has Brought Me to Despair"     Berzilla Wallin
"Johnny Doyle"     Berzilla Wallin
"Short Time Here, Long Time Gone"     Dillard Chandler
"Drunken Driver"     Dillard Chandler
"Jesus Says So"     Dillard Chandler
"Meeting is Over"     Dillard Chandler
"Little Farmer Boy"     Dillard Chandler
"I Wish My Baby Was Born"     Dillard Chandler

EARTH ~

Paolo Soleri

(1919~2013)

"Paolo Soleri was born on June 21, 1919, in Turin, Italy, the second of three children of Emilio and Pia Soleri. His father was an accountant. Paolo Soleri spent part of  World War II in a unit that built and maintained Italian military facilities.

In 1947, after receiving a Ph.D. in architecture from the Polytechnic University of Turin, Dr. Soleri traveled to Arizona to apprentice with Frank Lloyd Wright Wright at Taliesin West for 18 months. 

In 1949, he designed the Dome House in Cave Creek, Ariz., for a divorced woman from Philadelphia. Made from cast concrete and natural stone, the house featured a sunken living area and a glass dome overlooking the desert. He ended up marrying the client’s daughter, Corolyn Woods (known as Colly). 

In 1950, while the newlyweds were traveling in Italy, Dr. Soleri was hired to design a ceramics factory in the hillside town of Vietri sul Mare; he came up with the idea of using fragments of pottery for walls. Returning to Arizona in 1956, he designed a studio, gallery and foundry for a Scottsdale site he called Cosanti. In the late 1960s, he purchased 860 acres of desert north of Phoenix, near Cordes Junction, and began building Arcosanti. 

Dr. Soleri’s few buildings outside Arizona include the Paolo Soleri Amphitheater, an eccentric performance space in Santa Fe whose stage design evokes Salvador Dalí. In recent years it has sat unused, and preservation groups have been fighting to prevent its demolition. 

Dr. Soleri hoped Arcosanti would show other cities how to minimize energy use and encourage human interaction.  “He was part of a flock of utopian dreamers who designed mega-structure cities in the 1960s, but he had more of a social and ecological agenda than the others,” said Jeffrey Cook, a professor of architecture at Arizona State University, in a 2001 interview. “When so many others were theorizing, Soleri went out into the desert and actually built his vision with his own hands. That’s the reason he became such a counterculture hero.” 

Some critics detected a contradiction between Dr. Soleri’s communitarian ideals and what they perceived as an authoritarian insistence on a singular aesthetic. Mr. Goldberger saw “an arrogance” to Mr. Soleri’s designs, “a certainty that he knows what is best for all of us.” 

But Dr. Soleri’s work also showed a generation of younger architects an alternative to corporate modernism. 

“Paolo’s mind was always going out into the cosmos,” said Will Bruder, a Phoenix-based architect who apprenticed with Dr. Soleri in 1967. “I learned how much you can do with very little, the potential of simplicity and the ability to make unbelievable things from modest means, to dream huge dreams.” 

Dr. Soleri is survived by two daughters, Kristine Soleri Timm and Daniela Soleri, and two grandchildren. His wife died in 1982 and, at his request, was buried on a hillside at Arcosanti in view of his studio window. His foundation said it would honor his wishes that he be buried next to her." 

the nytimes 

9/11 ~

Network (1976)

"Arthur Jensen" preaches to preacher "Howard Beale"

"You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it! Is that clear?! Do you think you’ve merely stopped a business deal? That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and You Will Atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state – Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel. … Because you’re on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday. … You just might be right, Mr. Beale."

Network (1976)

Script : Paddy Chayefsky
Actors: Ned Beatty and Peter Finch
Director: Sidney Lumet

HAFIZ ~

At This Party

I don't want to be the only one here

Telling all the secrets —

Filling up all the bowls at this party,

Taking all the laughs.

I would like you

To start putting things on the table

That can also feed the soul

The way I do.

That way

We can invite

A hell of a lot more

Friends.

A Gigantic Ego

The only problem with not castrating

A gigantic ego is

That it will surely become amorous

And father

A hundred screaming ideas and kids

Who will then all quickly grow up

And skillfully proceed

To run up every imagianable debt

And complication of which your brain

Can conceive.

This would concern normal parents

And any seekers of freedom

And the local merchants nearby

As well.

They could very easily become forced

To disturb your peace;

All those worries and bills could turn to

Wailing ghosts.

The only problem with not lassoing

A runaway ego is

You won't have much time to sing

In this sweet

world.

A Gauge Of A Good Poem

The gauge of a good poem is

The size of the love-bruise

It leaves on your neck.

Or,

The size of the love-bruise

It cn leave on your soul.

Or,

The size of the love-bruise

It can leave on your brain.

Or,

It could be all of the

Above.

I Knew We Would Be Friends

As soon as you opened your mouth

And I heard your soft

Sounds,

I knew we would be

Friends.

The first time, dear pilgrim, I heard

You laugh,

I knew it would not take me long

To turn you back into

God.

The Subject Tonight

The subject tonight is love

And for tomorrow night as well.

As a matter of fact,

I know of no better topic

For us to discuss

Until we all

Die!

I Cherish Your Ears

Dear Pilgrim,

I love your shoes, your coat,

Your pants, your hat, your furry head,

Your cup, you bowl,

You messy closets,

And most of all — I cherish your cute ears.

Why? Don't ask!

Just speak what you love about me.

Come closer if you are feeling

A little timid today

Or dense

Because surely you would find something

Very endearing about

Hafiz.

Then

We can pass many years

Talking so silly,

Like two Highly Advanced Aspirants —

Like two Emancipated Holy Vagrants

Who are sharing His Bottle

Of Truth

And feeling so damn good

And Drunk and Free.

I Follow Barefoot

I long for You so much

I follow barefoot Your frozen tracks

That are high in the mountains

That I know are years old.

I long for You so much

I have even begun to travel

Where I have never been before.

Hafiz, there is no one in this world

Who is not looking for God.

Everyone is trudging along

With as much dignity, courage

And grace

As they possibly

Can.

A Suspended Blue Ocean

The sky

Is a suspended blue ocean.

The stars are the fish

That swim.

The planets are the white whales

I sometimes hitch a ride on,

And the sun and all light

Have forever fused themselves

Into my heart and upon

My skin.

There is only one rule

On this Wild Playground,

For every sign Hafiz has ever seen

Reads the same.

They all say,

"Have fun, my dear; my dear, have fun,

In the Beloved's Divine

Game,

O, in the Beloved's

Wonderful

Game."

____________

HAFIZ

The Subject Tonight Is Love

(Pumpkin House 1996) 

Seemingly forever, Hafiz (Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz, 1320-1389) has been called "The Tongue of the Invisible" and is the most beloved poet of Persia (Iran). To many Iranians Hafiz is a dear and personal friend speaking to them now.


"The foundation of Hafiz's poetry is rooted in the beautiful human need for companionship as well as in the soul's innate desire for the complete abandonment of all experience except Light."



In many ways, Hafiz is playing music right next to us.