READING LIST FOR THE STRONG ~

http://www.guardiannews.com/world/blog/2011/nov/17/occupy-wall-street-day-of-action-live



http://boingboing.net/2011/11/17/ows-library-is-rebuilding-afte.html

http://www.democracynow.org/



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/17/dorli-rainey-keith-olbermann-pepper-spray_n_1099198.html?ref=media



"The top 1 percent of Americans possess a greater net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute."

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/professor-of-profits/?ref=opinion



http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/movies/20tillman.html



http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/11/21/opinion/100000001183275/the-umbrella-man.html



http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/nov/10/penn-state-jerry-sandusky-indictment


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-cohen/jerry-sandusky-grand-jury_b_1109885.html?ref=sports&ir=Sports



http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/secret-dread-at-penn-state.html?_r=1







NOT TO BE CRUDE, BUT TO FACE THE CRUDE

First rule of thumb on the road to progress (further) is: Don't Shit Where You Sleep. I don't care if you are in the Marines, Occupy Wall Street (another Marines), coaching football, or camping out with me. Don't. All articles above and visuals concern themselves with how don't works and does work. Where it doesn't work affects civilization, just trust me on that. Or go read your history.

Sure there are bad eggs and dead-beats in the Occupy army, but the majority show a force, a glow, for something magnificent: camaraderie, heart, soul, and a dedication to their country and fellow brother and sister, which, by the way, is all about what the Marines are supposed to be about.


The Penn State scandal is the scandal of our time. The subject of sexual abuse is demoralizing and underground and everywhere, and the names and institution involved here showcases an American Pie story. The top of the mom & pop, white picket fence heap: college football, team play, leaders to trust, myriad of millions in annual profit, in the halls of education. It isn't in absolutely every school or church, thank goodness, but it is with us. There remain terrific teachers, coaches, priests, ministers, preachers, yet the evil is there and ruining. Far worse than any boogieman Terrorist. Sports radio, which I've been hanging with for the last few weeks listening, is turning in its conservative guy grave. Coach Joe Paterno of Penn State (a certain god) is having his name erased off the trophy and perhaps soon the building in his name — which is like taking Reagan's name off the airport. We go to war and push our children (many go from a sports salute to a military salute) to die or return disabled and crippled for life. We give them trillions of dollars in debt to take care of when we all pass away from our war chest bravado and endless infidelities. And for good measure, we rape and fuck them and their lives to kingdom come. Never ever again talk or preach to us about "the children" or "the village" you've burned to the ground. Don't.

~
photo: ipernity.com

AMERICAN TRAIN LETTERS ~

Carson and Bob Arnold once upon a time out on the windy plains

Take a ball of string
let it go — that was our
trail


WE LEFT WYOMING through West Yellowstone where Susan wanted a photograph in the town of two road signs indicating "Leaving Wyoming" and the other, "Welcome to Montana." We like the Wyoming sign because of the bronco rider who also appears on the license plate. We once had neighbors who took their first trip out west for two weeks hunting, and for the journey they bought a large used pickup truck topped off with a camper. Each year they headed west in the fall to hunt until there just wasn't any more space on their garage or over the doors of the house to nail up elk racks and various other horns. By that time horses and trailers were bought and the couple started to don rigid cowboy hats, and of course it was only a matter of time before they got sick of our partisan New England wooded valley and left for the west. We heard it was to Wyoming.


From West Yellowstone we were to drive that afternoon to Big Sky, Montana which didn't look more than fifty miles away. We decided on Big Sky since, after all, it was a nickname of sorts for Montana, plus it was the title of a once popular novel by A.B. Guthrie — who I didn't think lived in Big Sky — having him confused with Chet Huntley, who had. Choteau was the town Guthrie lived in, a town much farther north on Willow Creek. A friend told us once while traveling with his teenage son about a visit they made to A.B. Guthrie — totally unannounced, and according to this friend's report the writer and his wife were amiable, treating the two to a few hours of Montana hospitality. At that point in Guthrie's life, around 1980, he was past his prime in writing the distinguished historical novels of Montana and the west; the type of books that would star Kirk Douglas when made into a film by Howard Hawks. The type of book or film that is rarely read or watched anymore. By the time our friend knocked at Guthrie's door, he was publishing mystery entertainments like No Second Wind and was a specialist on small town Montana life, and I guess he was available to talk with.


As Guthrie was fading away in the eyes of many on the literary scene, Thomas McGuane was picking up, and like Guthrie he earned a bit of money in the film world with his screenplays. For awhile in the 1970s, McGuane single-handedly invented the modern western script — though his westerns might wrangle from the past or present, his interpretations of the west are upbeat and generally acquainted with Montana. My favorite film from a McGuane script is Tom Horn (and come to think of it: Missouri Breaks) which has everything to do with Wyoming and nothing with Montana but McGuane might have identified with the real life figure of Tom Horn especially played through the eyes of Steve McQueen. Not a great film, but McQueen is pokey enough and striking. In a McGuane script come wily unpredictable lines that A.B. Guthrie would never use, and in Guthrie's early novels are body and tenure that McGuane's followers think he has finally achieved in his succession of novels and short stories, plus a fine book of essays on sports — An Outside Chance — sport, like rodeo and flyfishing. In the books of A.B. Guthrie and Thomas McGuane you measure just how big, big sky Montana is.


Most readers are delighted to fall into the hands of Norman Maclean and his book A River Runs Through It. The secret of this book is its middle ground of Guthrie and McGuane, and most of us know by now it was written by a retired English professor with nearly unbearable patience and dexterity to the scribbled line. Maclean's boyhood, for anyone who read the book the year it came out, was then perfect for someone like Robert Redford to play one of the parts in the film — since like Redford, the storytelling is a little too finished. However, the idea lay fallow and Redford developed into the director of a film from the book. Now all these writers struck a chord with Hollywood, and for Norman Maclean the final product of his book resulted in a film appearing after his death. I'm not sure he would be the type to become excited about all the fanfare. You will know almost enough about a person on the decisions they make and the following book by Maclean: Young Men and Fire was again from Montana, though the subject wasn't as allegorical as boys and their fishing lines — this posthumous book was about smokejumpers — fourteen young men who lost their lives fighting a forest fire and revealing some truths about life and death. It would make a terrific film. It might be a film about westerners and not movie stars, and it could have a principal of young men, hardships, families and the livelihood of a wilderness. There would be no heroes, Paul Bunyans or crackpots as in the films made from Guthrie, McGuane and the first Maclean book — if it wanted to, it might be one of the few effective movies spun from Montana.


As we drive a nearly desolate road shared with tractor-trailer truck drivers steering like us through a course split of rainy fir trees I begin to wonder about other writers from this state, perhaps less popular, with none of their works, so far, engineered into films. We're already in Big Sky — population not much, and a few writers predictable to the area pop up: James Welch, William Kittredge and Ivan Doig; however these will do just fine, especially Doig whose book This House of Sky is, I believe, one of the finest memoirs ever written from Montana, or anywhere. I can say nothing more than the book was written as powerfully as religion and love. A writer could compose this one book in a life and perhaps be content. I wouldn't think again about Ivan Doig and his first rate book after leaving Big Sky — it turns out there isn't a whole lot around the town in the off-season and we have to think further about a ride to Bozeman.


Gulfed in mountain ranges, dark is coming on. What were supposed to be cabins for rent clumped by a river look damp and boarded up. We start to laugh when we think how we left that morning from Salt Lake City, drove to the Tetons through the rime of Yellowstone and are now in a convenience store at a Big Sky road junction with maybe forty-five miles to Bozeman. In the store we buy three hotdogs turning on a heated tray. The only other customers in the store are two teenage sweethearts with nowhere to go, but they're familiar with the owner of the place telling us after we ask for mustard and how far is Bozeman, that she just moved here from Kentucky two weeks ago with her husband, a state trooper, but she had a job once as a hair dresser. If the new business gets off the ground she wants to open a beauty parlor. She was the spitting image of Southern benevolence. All of this on a high road to the sky, and maybe only in Montana.

~ Bob Arnold, from American Train Letters
(Coyote Books, 1995)








photos © susan arnold

BACKROAD CHALKIE ~

photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~

Gabriela Mistral

FRUIT



---I'm scattering fruit around
on the sun-white ground.


---Tightwoven wicker baskets hold
piles of Brazilian gold.
From Brazil, look, child, they sent us
sleepy clusters of siestas.
As I empty out the glory,
colors and scents go rolling.


---You crawl off in hot pursuit
of the fleeing-maiden fruit —
see the melting medlars roll,
the tattooed, prickly pineapple.


---And they smell of Hy Brasil,
breast where earth can suck its fill,
that lets the whole Atlantic spill
from its lap when it's too full. . .


---Touch them, kiss them, play and suck,
learn the different ways they look.
Tonight you'll dream your mother's chin
has become as black as sin,
and night's a basket black as soot,
and the Milky Way bears starry fruit. . .




FRUTA


---En el pasto blanco de sol,
suelto la fruta derramada.


---De los Brasiles viene el oro,
en prietos mombres donde canta
de los Brasiles, niño mío,
mandan la siesta arracimada.
Extiendo el rollo de la gloria;
rueda el color con la fragancia.


---Gateando sigues las frutas,
como niñas que se desbandan,
y son los nísperos fundidos
y las duras piñas tatuadas. . .


---Y todo huele a los Brasiles
pecho del mundo que lo amamanta
que, a no rener el agua atlántica,
rebosaria de su falda. . .


---Tócales, bésalas, voltéalas
y les aprendes todas sus caras.
Soñarás, hijo, que to madre
tiene facciones abrasadas,
que es la noche canasto negro
y que es frutal la Víe Láctea. . .



~ Gabriela Mistral
translated by Ursula K. Le Guin
(University of New Mexico Press)



from About Mistral


Like most North Americans I knew nothing about the poet. She was a whole world to discover, a wild terrain, a new language.


I'll say little here about her work; it seems better sense to let it speak for itself. My introductions to the six parts of the book sketch out her life story and the nature of the poems. Of her life it's enough here to say that she was born in Chile in 1889, traveled and lived all over Europe and the New World, and died in the United States in 1957.


I do want to talk about her current obscurity, for she was a famous poet in her lifetime. One would expect a Nobel Prize winner to be well represented in English. All I have found is a small volume of translations by Langston Hughes; a larger selection by Doris Dana; a good recent selection by Maria Giacchetti of poems and prose; and a translation by Christiane Jacox Kyle of some early prose-poems.


It is not just a problem of language, or a North-South problem. Mistral's work is only partly accessible even in Chile. Her roving life left her works curiously dispersed. The four books of poetry published during her lifetime came out in New York, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Santiago de Chile...


...The problem of Mistral's reputation also has something to do, alas, with gender. Having been adulated as a poetess, she is not read as a poet.


Who's afraid of Gabriela Mistral?


I'd say anybody who reads her might well be afraid of her. She can be frightening strange. Many of those who wrote about her had to tame her, to reduce her, before they could admire her. The formidable woman who scared off her suitors and fled from her patrons got petted and patted down into acceptable femininity. Biographers have magnified an adolescent romance into a lifelong obsession, while either deploring or ignoring the fact that she lived most of her life in sexual independence of men. They have crooned over her for being childless, while scarcely mentioning the fact that she had a child by adoption and brought him up for seventeen years. The "Gabriela" they give us is all cliche — a blighted romance then a lifetime of tears . . . a sexless schoolmarm yearning over children . . .


She was a school teacher and also an eminent, internationally recognized, professional educator. She was for years a brilliant cultural envoy for her government — Madrid newspapers in 1933 called her the "spiritual ambassadress of Spanish America." She took children seriously and wrote poems for and about them; she also wrote about children and other underprivileged people with fierce political topicality. She grieved at being barren, was fascinated by motherhood, achieved it by adoption, wrote about it often, and was almost mortally wounded by the death of her son. Evidently a person of great kindness, who made deep, long friendships, she seems to have found her true home only in an absolute internal solitude. She left Chile at twenty-four and never lived there again and wrote about it all her life. Her passions and self-contradictions are like those of her native landscape — immense, volcanic, absolute.


What she was above all was a poet, self-taught, almost wholly self-made, who worked constantly, tirelessly, all her life, at her craft.

...


Mistral published about four hundred poems; this book contains a hundred and sixty-four of them.


My selection was almost completely subjective. I worked on those that I could translate and abandoned those I couldn't. Personal taste and prejudice certainly led me to some and away from others, but the act of translation is so mysterious to me that I'm unable to explain the process of finding the translatables and the untranslatables. Love and language lead where they will.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

photo:

redalyc.uaemex.mx

THANK YOU, BOBBY ~

Bobby Byrd



We just received a lovely bear hug from Bobby Byrd, and so did Janine Pommy Vega, all together. It immediately reminds me of a Southern Proverb that I share from Travis Ball, another old friend from the south: “If you want to travel fast, walk alone. If you want to travel far, walk together.”


http://whitepantiesanddeadfriends.blogspot.com/


Bobby was born in Tennessee and has lived with his great family for many years in El Paso writing great books of poems. http://www.cincopuntos.com/products_detail.sstg?id=110




photo:
jill somoza

AMERICAN TRAIN LETTERS ~

Jaime deAngulo (1948)

Sunlight colored
blonde flies by
in white sports car
Calif. Rte. 1, low
on the Big Sur
rear bumper
sticker says
"Just do me"

Jaime deAngulo. Anyone who has been to California for a visit and wants to see the state — which can be persuaded to have six, seven and maybe eight different regions — the journey will require a car, and if you haven't much time the driving will be extensive. Nothing wrong with that if you like that sort of thing and at least have plans to return someday to tie-in what you passed through.

I was lucky on my first and second and now this year's third visit to the state because I was with Susan who knew a good many places, whereas I knew none except from my reading, so naturally I followed her leads. Carson took to the Pacific as his mother once must have, while I walked to its surf as if saying, "Well, it's about time," and could cry at how well it lived up to its beauty.

In California, thinking again about these regions, there is a coastal range surging north to a coast that feels as sonorous as the Pacific Northwest, most so around the Klamath region which has seen its share of cantankerous floods. Up there you can lose yourself in a fathom of redwoods. The Great Central Valley has been exclaimed by people who know the state as being one of their favorite locations — it's mostly open road south from Mount Shasta foothills with all types of bugs spattered on the windshield from a fertile and irrigated georgic — a memory of olives, rice and sugar beets. Hard to believe it was once swamps and shallow lakes. The Modoc plateau we would have missed if another friend hadn't insisted we visit: "Go there," he said, pointing to the map, "you'll drive on a highway with hardly anybody on it." Of course he was right. It came to pass we would drive to Alturas after first going to two places: Carson City and Susanville for obvious reasons, and the drive north in the evening, through miles upon miles of juniper and sagebrush, brought us closer to where Jaime deAngulo met and lived with his book of the same tide Indians in Overalls.

Of all the writers that have come to live or even pass through California one of the most colorful had to be Jaime deAngulo. Known to be more beautiful than handsome by women when he was younger, long black hair blue-eyed playful intellect who roamed the Big Sur coast on horseback stirring up dude ranch ideas to earn a living and in the bargain scaring off any prospects by his own freewheeling prospectus that forewarned potential visitors that this ranch had no cowboys, not even a cow, and forget any picturesque corrals because you would be hardly on a horse anyway — the trails on the coast were too tricky and twisted — the country too rough for good horses; Jaime's horses were like sure-footed goats. He would go on to describe his guides as "crazy," the cook was foul-mouthed and ill-tempered, bring a bathing suit if you like because there was a beach, but it was six­teen hundred feet below the ranch. Expect sleeping on hard ground in some weird canyon. To say the least no visitors showed and those few in support of the ranch began to grow restless, finances were broke, and it was about then deAngulo began shooting cattle due to a neighbor's trespassing which spiraled out of control leading to his arrest; an unfortunate embarrassment for a man raised by a Spanish noble­man who preached how one should never have his name in the papers except when one was born, mar­ried and at his death.

This Spanish nobleman Jaime deAngulo ran away from at age eighteen after those early years in Europe, landed in San Francisco at the time of the city's great earthquake and soon after achieved a medical degree from John Hopkins. His special field, genetics and research on the fruit fly, brought him back west to study at Stanford University. Although that plan would be diverted — how deAngulo was a medical doctor who became an anthropologist on a visit to northern California — and the horse ranch he bought out in nowhere-as-can-be Alturas, home territory to the Pit River, Modoc and other Indian tribes and today better known in motel lobby pamphlets for its volcanic residue. It was right here Jaime deAngulo discovered a big piece of American pie, teaching himself how to record the Pit River Indian language through his enchantment with linguistics. Throughout his travels of California, New Mexico and parts of Mexico, changing his life with each visit, deAngulo ended up recording an outstanding twenty-seven Indian languages, the greater portion in this estranged area of northern California.

This is the part of California the Spaniards never settled; a stronghold to this day for pioneers and nonconformists — those who need leeway. Steep chaparral flanks, conifer timber, beach dunes, marshes, up to arctic tundra, the Baja, Mojave, Owens Valley, White Mountains on one side and on the other the Sierra Nevada range. Take Jaime de­Angulo as your guide, as thousands have, writers from the east coast journeying to the west coast, like Van Wyck Brooks — notable literary gentleman with a piped curiosity who remembered deAngulo on an "Arab horse and his red sash and El Greco beard, had all the look of a remnant from an earlier time;" and who would publish, long afterwards, his early experiences with the Pit River tribe in the pages of the Hudson Review, peddled there by Ezra Pound, the very Indians in Overalls. This book, and all the stories and other books, researched by an anthropologist who would just as rather gain his studies by rolling in ditches drunk with shamans and specters, while his poised colleagues set forth bundled for research.

Never mind how Jaime deAngulo died, he died as the majority go squarely fascinated by living and greeting, studying and flying by the seat of their pants; now older and ragged, living alone and looking out at the Pacific from a room in Berkeley, Jaime became almost forgotten. But of course deAngulo never has died, he's with us today and with you tomorrow and while in California you will have to cross it, climb it, duck under it and wind around if you plan to meet the state .

~ Bob Arnold, from American Train Letters
(Coyote Books, 1995)

Jaimie De Angulo on Hudini circa 1920s, Big Sur, CA.

lower photo:

redegggallery.squarespace.com

OCCUPY ~

image:
motifake.com

AMERICAN TRAIN LETTERS ~

Neal Cassady & Ann Murphy in '39 Pontiac
(Allen Ginsberg & Charles Plymell in the back seat)

rollin'
tumblin'
ridin'
sleepin'
over the
wheel

Neal Cassady. Some writers and even former Presidents have had close calls on trains. John Quincy Adams escaped injury aboard the Camden & Amboy in 1853; a derailment killing one and harming a number of others. The philosopher Lin Yutang was involved in a wreck in the 1940s — once again, a derailment, and just as the train was picking up speed leaving its North Philadelphia station. Eye witnesses couldn't shake the memory of seeing one coach being pitched vertically in the air only to be busted in half by an overhead signal bridge. This was the same train Henry C. Mencken rode regularly from Baltimore to New York.

As towns grew, the cut-through railroad tracks had to be crossed by streets spreading out to new neighborhoods. Train depots were situated right in the center of town or at the outskirts, it all depended. Located in the center of town established travelers and cargo, businesses and citizens all together. Some towns hated to see the railroad and its watertowers, worker shanties, rail-yards, etc., other towns made a show of it.

Today, no passenger train passes through Santa Fe, New Mexi­co; while trains skirt the edge of town in Whitefish, Montana — right at the end of the main street, a big Burlington Northern yard — and how many times have we awakened in the early morning just in time to see Hutchinson, Kansas fly on by...looking up its lonely opening daylight street running at a right angle to the railroad tracks.

One writer who worked for the railroad and literally died beside the tracks; no longer with the face of a boy born on the road with parents enroute to California, this birth taking place in Salt Lake City which is a jump on the map away from his upbringing in Denver which is another jump to his death in Mexico so many years later, so many stolen cars later and the go, go, go that went into the railroad work and the railroad work went into the driven cars as he crossed America at the drop of a hat taking any­one who would come along with him was the nature of his writing. Welcome to Neal Cassady. His best writing tabulated in first person speed letters, whole-hearted vividly confessional pages written to Jack Kerouac, which lit the lamp for serious book writer "John Kerouac" — as his name was printed on his first novel — to never be the same writer again. Stumped by writer's block after the first book, with experiences of road and sea travel and not sure exactly how to let it all go, it was the letters from Cassady that poured forth Kerouac's next book On the Road. It is no sur­prise that Neal Cassady, as "Dean Moriarity," was the central figure in the book; a book written and now as legend on a long paper-roll during three weeks of feverish remembrance. It all came out as a brilliant letter to a friend.

Dead along the tracks in Mexico after wandering away from a wedding party and barely dressed, rain slapping down, his body fueled on alco­hol and barbiturates, Neal Cassady wasn't too far away from Kerouac who wouldn't believe the news his old friend was dead, and then Kerouac was gone the year after. Neither made it to age fifty. Their road and sea and trains had by then all changed. By the time they died their living and celebrations in books of that liv­ing was becoming a big business, a catalyst that pin-wheeled thousands of other writers, but really these two of all the mess struck like iron one hundred years later and by far the best those early visions of America sung as songs to the open road by Whitman. All the other writers were oriented from a European, Far East, or intellectually dressing down to a common.

Cassady would know, without ever having to read the twentieth century's great long poem of America — Carl Sandburg's "The People, Yes" — published when Cassady was ten years old; poem of wide flood gates glory, from the people not just about the people, sprawled and dangling and music voice ridden long before anything beat or beatnik, and Cassady and Kerouac knew enough to tip their hats to a Whitman or Sandburg butter-rich in their mouths, big as pas­tures these folksongs, and often coolly angular as a nonstop jazz. The folk opened their shirts and beat their chests, but jazz would later skip flight and im­provise their lines.

Drugs did something too, spangled to the next generation as just the key to get "some­where;" in hands of the travelers it stimulated the drive, wrote more books, perhaps matched the energy of what was experienced to somehow getting it all down on paper. But without a doubt the car, the road, sweethearts, and stars above the railroad yard were more important. But how to make it all work? On tape today the speed-rap Neal Cassady is obviously a drug induced in the limelight young girls by the side trav­eler. It's heart-breaking to know the performance was egged on by a merriment that was going nowhere for him, by a counter-culture self-possessed yet search­ing, though in no way raised and belonging to daily work habits and customs as Cassady knew in the post World War II years and his job on the railroad along the coast of California aboard the Southern Pacific. He would work here as a young man, and he would work here as an older man. No matter if color blind he started at the bottom of railroad work and earned his way up as boomer, switchman, passenger brake-man — moving on the trains that pushed produce out of Salinas and Santa Clara Valley truck-farms — these workers still bend and chop and freight trains carry it along today.

Cassady was a family man, a married man when scheduled to the railroad. A pho­tograph taken in 1949 out in the bright California sunshine shows Neal Cassady standing beside two of his co-workers — older men, all in uniforms like Cassady's: ties and vests — and Cassady looking the tenderfoot and not at all the later champ of Beat legion; hands behind his back, pants pressed, hat cocked, railroad pins like his colleagues on both lapels of his jacket. How lovely. He doesn't appear to be wearing the official pocket watch nor retractable key chain for switch keys, but the shoes are steel-toed and there might be a future for this kid of twenty-three. Neal Cassady, dead at forty-two, faraway from any railroad but somehow walking the town tracks in San Miguel de Allende, always the railroad man.

~ Bob Arnold, from American Train Letters (Coyote Books, 1995)

photos:
allen ginsberg
worldhum.com

dedicated to friend & beat scholar joy walsh (1935-2011)

DELTA ~

"Three pictures from a recent excursion around the Delta and Hill Country."

That's what Longhouse friend Whit Griffin wrote to us this morning and I thought the setting and timing was quiet enough to share.

Whit often takes photographs and sends them our way from his travels. I didn't even ask him this time if it was okay to post — it always seems okay between us. I kinda wanted to surprise him back with the shots.

The legendary life dates for Robert Johnson are barely wide enough to get a breath taken. Just one song from him is worth a life time.

I remember reading once that Fred McDowell's original gravestone (where his name was spelled incorrectly) had been damaged and replaced by this one above. Bonnie Raitt paid for the new stone, and that photograph of the great bluesman on the stone, born in Tennessee, may have been taken the year he died.

Rest in peace, and song.










photos © whit griffin

OCCUPY ~

Ishmael Reed

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/opinion/trouble-beside-the-bay.html?hp







© ny times

photo:
citylights.com

EARTH ~

land of well being


the world is flat, then, after all. musically
curved at its finite edges, where
the few houses stand like scattered dice.
this lake, i'm told, is called green shimmer.
how reluctantly the light leaves the water,
the gentlest waves, tiny wrinkles, still
faintly illuminated. such magnanimity.
panoramas, not extending sideways,
not stretching like straight lines, broadly
from east to west, not these tired perspectives,
but curving round behind me with a whisper,
as if of their own accord, joining
to make a perfect shape, the circle.
"a parte ante" and "a parte post", i read
there, are the names given to the parts
of eternity that lie in front of me and behind,
and i thought to myself: what the heck.






each and every one


feelings like dropped pebbles, show me your hand.
the oval shape of summer, do you remember: euglena,
it will all be simple, all of it, and each and every one a nucleus,
it's like chemistry, your elements are void, void, void,
you repeat yourself, you're adrift, the stroke of the hour smudges.
shoot skywards, with the crazed efficiency of a water sprout
then crown the stalk with a ring of withered leaves: this year you can do.
the letting go, two people descending into formlessness.






jardins des tuileries


in the gardens a sweltering inclination
to symmetry, box trees, conically civilized,
heat, and once again the selfsame fountain,
overloaded, mirrored along a psychic axis,
just faintly confusing. so hot. then me
as a variant, holding his sweaty hand, a veil,
like an inner mist, condensation, droplets,
we think with our hair, with our cilia, and
where it exits the body it enters again,
it's warm like stepping indoors,
a steamy room in the lung's midst perhaps,
the cunning softness of oriental cushions,
devotion to the beat of chopping hands and
the symmetrical aftertaste of our boundaries.






my thinking


today, around lunchtime, i saw my thinking,
it was a meadow, grazed bare, with hummocks. though
it could have been foothills of moss-covered mountains,
the kind of fuzzy green carpet fed on by reindeer.
no, just a busily bulging landscape beyond
the tree line, and it sure was close-cropped.
the thoughts passed over it, a little light-headed,
like currents of air made visible, no, more
like a fleet of immaterial hovercrafts. they used
the hummocks----------------------as ramps.






tour de trance
my task, she said, was poisoning time


how everything turned, repeated, expanded
and rotated, heat was a space so vast,
so disastrously large, was an arena
in which the wreckage of objects drifted,
savage impacts in the distance, no one heard,
everyone felt, the pulsing aftershocks.
where something was missing, it all got bigger,
turned, rotated, lurched about
and then came to rest in the centre.
fatigue was a cure, the weight
of the atmosphere, hallucinogenic heaviness
cushioned, it was turning less now,
as if the impacts, in their very substance,
were subject to dilution, as if
time, torrential space, were being precisely and
tenderly poisoned, the chemical weakness
rising in its fabric, frothing, suffocating,
the accumulated white layer of
crusts becoming richer, the impacts
fading into toxic noise, it turns,
turns imperceptibly, and stops.




MONIKA RINCK
to refrain from embracing
translated from the German by Nicholas Grindell

www.burningdeck.com

Spectacular Diseses
Paul Green
83b London Rd
Peterborough, Cambs. PE2 (BS
England

monika rinck b. 1969 Zweibrucken and lives today in Berlin.
www.begriffsstudio.de

KEYSTONE ~

Surrounding the White House with a Pipeline

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/7/10_000_surround_white_house_to




photo:
Joshua Robert/Reuters

QUIET ~

Greta Garbo

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/gallery/2011/nov/06/ten-best-silent-movie-stars-in-pictures




Photo:
SNAP/Rex Features

EARTH ~

While we turn the clock back . . .

Wizz Jones

nite~nite

WITH ME ~

Rick Danko

Personally, I got a real thing for people shambling in with their heart on their sleeves. It may appear sloppy, noisy, jangling, disruptive, and it often is, and if that's all that it is, I'm not interested. But if it has that other little ingredient, the sleeve and the heart, with the sleeve wiping the mouth of soup, well okay.


Rick Danko of The Band and other bands (Paul Butterfield's etc) always came across to me when performing as the kid with heart. You get to watch it all through Martin Scorsese's seminal concert film The Last Waltz, where Rick Danko and The Band are in their prime. If you've never seen this film, you can't leave the earth before doing so. Please proceed.


Then return sometime and listen to this one song, sloppy and heart felt, that I've pulled from the film that you may click on below. It's Rick Danko up and down.


And years later when he grew older and slower and died far too young, the same rock 'n' roll kid forever came through. I see him as a guy who would have traveled awhile with Woody Guthrie or Joe Hill; who would have fought in the Civil War and survived, who would like to sing to the troops at Occupy Wall Street; who would have said, 'Sure, I'll help you unload that load' when the truck backed in to the drive. Someone to miss when he's gone.

photo:
planetlyrics.co

MORE NOVICA TADIC´ ~

IF YOU WERE TO GET A JOB



If you were to get a job

you'd become some kind of big shot

and give me a job in turn.

Then your head would swell,

and I'd suffer.

It's better that you don't get a job,

that we continue to live here

--in the cardboard box.

I only need bread and milk

and a blanket to cover our limbs.





=





NIGHT PASSES



1.


Poor us, we are all kings
when we gaze at the starry sky.




2.


The noise of the crowd grows faint
on the town square and in our blood.




3.


The voice will re-enter the angel's trumpet.
Once again hell will rise on its feet.



translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic
Dark Things (BOA Editions, 2009)

1st photo:

© by Gardabelle

EARTH ~

We worked six weeks since Hurricane Irene on our island by the river and cleared up all the mess. Call it what it was — a mess, with full trees smashed together with everything else plus the kitchen sink, wrapped up in the trees debris. It made us plenty of firewood. Some dry elm, ready immediately and in the woodstove as I write.


I won't bore you how we got the wood cut, split, lugged, and back home. Think: little engines that could. I’ve become a lousy writer retelling this story over and over as if the work drill has been unavoidable from the actual work to what is caught in the cycle of my brain. Repetitious log lugging by foot over land and water with only my mind and landscape as company? What luxury, if keeping with the right attitude. Work like a work horse, speak like a work horse? I think so.


A respiratory cough also came with the flood aura and work. Talk to many who have been working steadily around flood damage and wet conditions and there's a cough.


While working on the island, large cottonwood style poplar trees were dislodged and instead of carting all of that home, I sculptured out by chain saw four chairs and one stump table seen above in the photograph. All the background oak logs were bucked up, split and carried home.


One morning we decided to bring breakfast down to the island. Hobos retreat.


The tree damage was severe but it brought us firewood. Much land was washed away but it brought us a fresh crop of stone. We make things.


And then — heavy, heavy early snow for Halloween! Everything in this photograph, but Sweetheart, is now buried.


Since October snows at almost two feet it has melted down to one foot the third day of November, but it looks more like March melting to April. Except the oak and beech leaves are golden and dying instead of greening. If climate change is here, we may have to change the names of the months.




photo © bob arnold

BEDTIME STORY ~

read more!

http://www.goodnightkeithmoon.com/index.html





I put this on for our son Carson, who over a period of his early years, we read Goodnight Moon to at every bedtime. Even after we all memorized the book, we still read from the book. One had to have the pictures. And lo and behold Carson grew up to be a musician and drummer.

OCCUPY ~

MOVE YOUR MONEY ~ IF YOU GOT ANY






film by:
eugene jarecki

OCCUPY ~

They say the "homeless" are coming in droves, or infiltrating, or bothering the protestors at the Occupy sites nation wide. Blending in. Bothering with their unreeled minds, madness, appearance, what have you.


I have a home, you may have a home, at least a computer, even if borrowed in a library setting, or cafe, call it a momentary home.


But the way this country and world has become we are all "homeless", until we wake up to the fact anyone made homeless, especially by banking and mortgage and false-swap thieves right in our midst! then we are all of the 99%, homeless. One false move, hiccup, accident, and you could be there.


Those ghosts, those phantoms, those zombies, those human beings left to cold, left to rust, left to rot, are you. Are me. Are you.


A guy my age, dressed quite like me, asked me for 25 cents on a bridge yesterday. He said he needed it for the bus. I gave it to him. Then I watched him run for the bus.

photo © bob arnold