EARTH ~

TREEPLANTER

Never see how —

But see how —

The pine tree

Has grown a foot

Since a year ago







SKY


Hiking down from a hillside

Snow packed, saw on the shoulder

There is no doubt now

Of rain in the air

I stop at a sound

Far / nearing / wait

Two crows flying

Calling, wide apart

One straight south

The other — eastward

Belly on the tree line

I've lost sight of one

For keeping with the other







ON BUILDING A STONEWALK IN NOVEMBER


This river drifts the land,

In the long air of pines

I smell spring.

Down here, don’t wear gloves,

Don’t wear boots with leaks,

Stay working, and of course

Use the flat stones —

All the things

One learns

In a first year —

The boots take awhile, I know.

But come to you water gentle,

Very clear

Draw strong

Carry the river home to bathe.

It is November / wide open / colding

There is ice you shouldn’t trust.







from Where Rivers Meet, Bob Arnold
photo © bob arnold

SUMMERY ~

june '10

july '10

july '10

now '10

drawings © bob arnold

FLOWER ~

COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER

For me, Wildwood Flower will always be sung by the Carter Family, and after them June Carter Cash.

Written in 1860 by Maud Irving with music by Joseph Philbrick Webster, this legend has seen many variations, including some retooling by Woody Guthrie, the master of tools...plus Joan Baez, Iris Dement; Merle Travis gave us an instrumental and so did Bill Frissell, plus Jean Ritchie, Hobart Smith, and even Mike Ness took it home, wherever.

Now we have Loretta Lynn with a mountain stream opening and her usual but ever genuine Butcher Holler Kentucky way of phrasing and keeping it honest.

Born the second of 8 children, Lynn married at 13 and stayed married 50 years to a man named Doolittle. Their lives at the start was portrayed by Sissy Spacek and Tommy Lee Jones in a film with the above title, directed by Michael Apted (1980). It is well known Lynn and Doolittle tusseled but, she said, "he never hit me one time that I didn’t hit him back twice."

Lynn, at age 75, has never stopped singing. Always this good.

GORAN SONNEVI ~







from Mozart's Third Brain



LXIX


At night once more the moon's quiet, mystical light

The moon is in the trees in the forest, no wind at all xxxNo one sees it

but me, from inside the sleeping house

Now a light breeze moves stiff leaves in the heat

What does human light have to do with me? Have I

turned away, esoteric; though this was never my choice

I don't know I cannot abjure inner sovereignty

Which is also external xxxI taste blood

in my mouth, on my lips xxWho am I sacrificing?

For whom shall I become an offering? Perhaps no one xxxNot even for that

would I be of any use xxxBut I shall touch you with life . . .

Native of Lund, Sweden (b. 1939) Goran Sonnevi is translated here by Rika Lesser.

The above poem is from Mozart's Third Brain (Yale).

photo: norden.org

OLD SCHOOL ~

KOKO TAYLOR

The daughter of a sharecropper born (1928) Cora Walton in Shelby county Tennessee, Koko Taylor may be one of the very last of the hard blues singers/interpreters, and here we have her singing Lefty Dizz's "Bad Avenue" in true Muddy Waters style.

When people say they like their blues the dirtier the better — well, here you go.
Keep in mind the singer's almost 80 years old.

After recording with Charley and Chess in her early years, Taylor moved exclusively into
the good hands at Alligator Records until her unfortunate passing in 2009.

EARTH ~

JAMES GAMMON

(1940-2010)

If you watched the classic television westerns of the 1960s: "Gunsmoke", "The Wild Wild West" "The Virginian", etc., you know James Gammon. He was in Cool Hand Luke. He didn't last long in Natural Born Killers, which was unusual for him. Everything about his presence and face was about endurance. Nobody was like him and he was like everyone when you saw him in character as an outlaw or a gunman or a regular joe. With a voice that sounded like not a voice, maybe a boot on gravel. On film he'll only grow. From the stage they'll be someone missing.

“This was a guy who could act circles around most other actors,” Sam Shepard said. Gammon was a favorite of the playwright in many of his plays.





photo: butthorn.wordpress.com

EARTH ~

STONE JOB

It was one of those stonewall jobs I laid up once upon a time

Hand dug the foundation ditch

Crushed in small stone

Someone brought me the rock each day to keep things busy

No machinery, no radio, no rattle, no traffic

The river through the trees

stonework & photo © bob arnold

THINK BACK, PILGRIM IX

The Grapes of Wrath, director John Ford

MORE LONGHOUSE BOOKLETS !

please click on image to enlarge

Back by Popular Demand! more hand-made booklets & jewels ~

Thomas Meyer, Dudley Laufman, Bob Arnold, Austin Smith, Daniel Smith, Tom Clark, Ed Markowski, Marcia Roberts, John Levy, Gloria Frym, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann (trans. Mark Terrill)

Each title is the length & breadth of a chapbook, using far less paper product & waste.

Inquire about purchasing all eleven titles at one saving price.

HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER ~

MY WIFE'S MERITS


My wife's merits are too numerous

for an A4 sheet of paper.

She is multicellular, with rustling hair

thriving wonderfully at night, in her sleep.

Each and every hair is dear to me. She's well provided

with soft spots. Whenever her nostrils

vibrate slightly, I know: she's thinking.

How often she thinks, and how in arbitrarily she lives!

I know she can curl her tongue,

play footsie. When she laughs or grumbles

a new wrinkle appears at her mouth,

which I like. She's not entirely white,

is of more than one colour. Her breaths, too,

are numerous, not to mention

the manifold souls in her breast.

I am amazed that here,

where I happen to be, is where is usually is.


translated by Esther Kinsky





IN SEMI-DARKNESS


When she's lying there, so entirely

of this world as a cow or a cat,

without intention or regret,

in the semi-darkness a halo

hovers around her shimmering skin.



You can sense it, feel it,

when you're close enough to her,

this soft radiation

in the more distant glow of infrared.

A Fourier transform

No one will decipher.



It is only a breath,

touching you more deeply

than the touch,

and not to know why —

perhaps that is happiness.


translated by Esther Kinsky






THE COPY


When Steinar Petursson, a gaunt man

from Borgarnes in distant Iceland,

carpenter by trade,

arrived in Copenhagen by packet steamer

a good hundred years ago,

he saw a wonderful machine.



It was a band saw

of gleaming steel.

Yet when Steinar discovered what it cost,

as much as one hundred and fifteen

sheep by Faxafloi Bay,

he closed his eyes.



He ran his fingers

over belt pulley, hand wheel and step.

For four days on the packet

Steinar Petursson was silent.

At home he took the hardest wood

and shut himself into his workshop.



His work, a band-saw made entirely of wood,

only the blade is iron,

can still be seen today, among spinning wheels,

stuffed puffins

and old birch spoons, in a corner

of the local museum at Borgarnes.


translated by Martin Chalmers






AT TIMES


When you meet someone

who is smarter or more stupid than you —

don't make too much of it.

The ants and the gods,

believe me, feel just the same.

That there are more people in China,

say, than San Marino,

is no misfortune.

Most people, no doubt, are

blacker or whiter than you.

At times you're a giant,

like Gulliver, or a dwarf.

Somewhere or other you're always discovering

an even more radiant beauty,

someone even worse off.

You're mediocre,

luckily. Accept it!

Seven degrees centigrade more

or less on the thermometer —

and you would be beyond saving.


translated by Martin Chalmers






A LITTLE SWAN SONG TO MOBILITY


It was cold in Bogord.

All the restaurants were shut for the day

in Much-Binding-on-the-Marsh.

In Fiji pouring rain.

Helsinki was booked up.

In Turin the refuse collectors were on strike.

Roadblocks everywhere

in Bujumbura. The silence

over the roofs of Pecs

was something close to panic.

It was least unbearable

under the pear tree

at home.


translated by Martin Chalmers






ALSO ONE HALF OF LIFE


At first it's just a tiny number falling prey.

One is run over, the bigmouth from 6b,

or the chubby cousin with her plaits

who had this funny smell is gone,

suddenly gone. Others died in a fire

or were taken away, late at night. Later

bordered letters arrived. Like shadows

it grew, the little group of the absent ones,

and you can't remember this one's

hat and another one's mouth.

And then, one day, the moment comes,

imperceptibly, and passes, when half

of those who fed you, hated, taught

and kissed you have disappeared.


translated by Esther Kinsky



from A HISTORY OF CLOUDS
(Seagull Books / seagullbooks.org)


Poet, translator, novelist, essayist, children's book author, and editor of the book series Die Andere Bibliother, Hans Magnus Enzensberger was born in Germany in 1929. In his teens he joined Hitler Youth, but was kicked out soon after for what may be termed a general insubordination, or nonconformity. For those seeking Enzensberger, he also writes under the name Andreas Thalmayr. Curiously, with the closing of this year's World Cup and a Spain victory; HME was a collaborating inventor of a machine that automatically composed poems which was used in the 2006 games to provide commentary on the games.

photo: © flickr.com

PIANO ~

If you listen to Monk / you listen to Mary Lou Williams, or you should. She was teacher, friend, mentor with him and many of the giants in Be-Bop. Born in the south and raised in Pennsylvania (1910-1981), at the age of six Williams was already playing for money to support her family. Self-taught and overwhelmingly spread through jazz, spirituals, ragtime, blues, swing; one can build up quite a record collection gathering and knowing the world of this composer, player and arranger, who gave some of her finest stuff to Duke Ellington. At the end, dying of cancer, she added it up, "I did it, didn't I. Through muck and mud."

BACK ROAD CHALKIES ~

from Music's Mask and Measure
Flood Editions
www.floodeditions.com





photo © bob arnold

IRONWOOD ~

Over many years when working in the woods I cut out ironwood chunks and brought one or two home to bark peel, dry out and eventually paint to install on the wall as a clothes hook. We used them all the while Carson was growing up. Sometimes he carried one home for me as we came back from work. Eventually they all got moved for something new and Sweetheart took the hooks as a good sport thinking she would use them in her weaving room. Years ago.

This morning in a general cleaning-out-the-corner ceremony, I noticed the hooks all in my tool room, no word said. Everything said. I figured I'd take a photo of the gang before I start distributing them back outdoors where they always belonged. They got painted to 'go with the room'. Now I'll see how they do in the great paint-never-lasts outdoors. A place for a cap, a work rag, an old shirt, a canteen strap. They'll find their place.

Once upon a time a friend and I built a footbridge, heavy enough to take a tribe all at once. We cut out of the neighboring woods and used ironwood as stringers. But unpeeled. We had a boss who thought he knew better than we did, and of course the unpeeled stringers rotted.

How I was later hired to replace those rotted stringers, with a ladder, in a river, is another story.






photo, ironwood © bob arnold

LESSON ~

BARN RAISING ~

A psychedelic barn-raising.

Great things were happening in the great state of Wisconsin recently.

A poetry reading by an old lamp in front of a great tractor. Hay on the floor.

Please have a look at Joshua Corey's spirited website and learn more.

p.s. folks: when you see "Clay Smith" mentioned, this is an error, innocently. Joshua Corey means Daniel Smith, the fine midwest farmer and poet, a favorite at Longhouse.

SO LONG (AND WE MEAN IT) ~

Naphtali "Tuli" Kupferberg (1923-2010)

TWO GARGANTUANS
"FROM OFF THE STREETS"

Harvey Lawrence Pekar (1939-2010)

photos Tuli Kupferberg: © Christopher Felver/CORBIS
Harvey Pekar: © Chris Buck

EARTH ~

photo: w. eugene smith

W. EUGENE SMITH

Driven. Native of Kansas. An almost lifetime of amphetamine use & hard drinking kept up the drive to become one of the great photojournalists of the world.

Making legendary portraits of Schweitzer, Nurse Midwife, the terrible legacy and beatings near the end of his life withstood in the city of Minamata, Japan at the hands of thugs as he documented the flushing of heavy metals into the city's waters and the cause of Minamata Disease. The heartbreaking portraits of diseased children. Always directing his camera at innocence, tenderness, even his brutal shots from WW 2 or the working-class boroughs of UK.

Coming home to settle into a personal survey of Pittsburgh which would consume his life for three years...the job that was meant to take three weeks. Parting company with his employer Life Magazine and going to work at Magnum.

In 1957 W. Eugene Smith needed a place to hole-up as he tried to make sense of his massive photo-essay on Pittsburgh. He left everything behind — a fine home, wife and four children, and moved into a hustlers region of Manhattan, 4th floor. Then described as a dilapidated five-story loft building. The flower district by day; running with drugs, thieves, night-crawlers and musicians by night.

Smith had his head wrapped around Pittsburgh, but soon found out he was in one fascinating spot. Amongst the lofts and artists in his building he heard and saw and became friends with a whole new world too good to be true.

Thelonious Monk or Zoot Sims were visiting and playing upstairs, along with countless others unknown and terrific in the BeBop era, playing their hearts out night after night. The documentarian put his keen instincts to work. And this is all of a great book collected by Sam Stephenson, who seems a near equal with Smith in work horse ethics to get a portrait made. And the portrait is: our hero from 1957 to 1965 wired up the building where he lived — his room, hallways, other rooms as if his own private recording studio and made, count them! 1,740 reels of stereo and mono audiotapes. That's 4000 hours. And on those tapes are jam sessions supreme with Roy Haynes, Don Cherry, Alice Coltrane, Sonny Clark, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Roland Kirk and many more. Conversations in street movement, passersby, sounds of an underground.

Smith's camera was never idle, even when one or two were in hock: he exposed 1,447 rolls of film making roughly 40,000 pictures. The beauties are in this book. Many shot right from Smith's dingy apartment window, around and about the building, in with the musicians jamming.

When anyone laments or whines, "But I'm only one man"— they're forgetting about W. Eugene Smith.

Walk into the Paradise Garden by W. Eugene Smith

W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978)-----------www.pbs.org

JIM DANIELS




EFFICIENCY, BOWLING GREEN, OH


I lived in an ancient motel turned into efficiencies

barely big enough for the double bed.

Two electric burners and a sink.

Four friends from Michigan came to visit.

So happy to see them, I poured beer

over their heads, up their sleeves. They in turn

did not hurt me. I'd started smoking again.

I blamed the whole state of Ohio. In the small town

you could walk everywhere and nowhere

and in between. Three bars — two with the word

"Dead" in their names. The wind smacked us upside

our drunken little heads. One friend, a woman,

shared the bed with Marc. The rest of us lay

on indoor-outdoor carpet in a U-shape around them.

We listened to each other breathe in that stinky room.

Months later, in the middle of a shower, the entire wall

of plastic tiles crashed down on me. It could happen

that quickly. An awkward bruise, an unfamiliar

number, a misplaced ring. When the phone rang, I didn't

answer it. Nobody did. They might've done something

under the covers, Marc and Lee Ann. The sound

would've been a blessing. Maybe I heard it, maybe I didn't.

In the morning, I made eggs and instant coffee

and Tang. We stood without coats in the ravaged parking lot.

I lived in #2. There was no #1. We smoked and coughed

and laughed till they drove back to Michigan

and I walked down to work at the Korner Grill.

Maybe they'd stolen Marc's K and stuck him

with the C. At least they didn't add an E on Grill.

My ex was back in Michigan — her name ended in E.

The woman I'd followed to Ohio was lost in between

the O and o where the clouds had numbers

and the hills were either imaginary

or man-made or laced with unknown

chemicals. I slept at the foot of the bed

and was almost never happier. Four friends.

If I was a dog, I'd have licked their feet.

The U can be a beautiful letter, softly catching

falling things. The room key, attached

to a large plastic motel, jabbed my pocket

like a worn knife. My friends convinced me to use

my porch light for its radiant yellow,

its optimistic glow. In case somebody might

come home, even if it was only me.


from Revolt of the Crash-Test Dummies
(Eastern Washington University Press)





Jim Daniels is the Jack Daniels of American poetry workingclass joes and janes — a college teacher with a great ear and eye for the American tale. To tell you the truth (always) I was packing this book up for a customer this morning and had to glance through the poems again. This poem caught my fancy as did so many others, but I can only balance the book open with one page wedged under my leg and a new biography of Hamsun holding down the other side of the book so I can read (squint) and type. Hopefully I got it all right.

MAHMOUD DARWISH ~

Mahmoud Darwish is one of the poetic legends of the Arab World (1941-2008)

Put your name in my hand and write

please click on image to enlarge

translated from the Arabic by Jeffrey Sacks
Archipelago Books
www.archipelagobooks.org

RAIN ~

Finally — after a good week of temperatures looming & zooming from 90-104 degrees, we get some rain. And with any luck we'll have 50 gallons of rainwater in our roof edge bucket-brigade to help water the gardens with the next heatwave. Love dem buckets. . .






by the way...speaking to a South Dakotan visiting our neck of the woods the other day, and while serving us an ice-cream cone (life is tough), he reminded us of what it was like to go through a 7 or 8 year drought Dakota/midwest style. Like everything, the story was mostly in his eyes.

photo © bob arnold