Have you noticed how
It's a great daylilly
Summer?
photo © bob arnold
It's a great daylilly
Summer?
photo © bob arnold
Sunday, July 10, 2011
WITH ME ~
Manuel Galbán has passed away (b. 1931)
"Born in 1931 in the small fishing town of Gibara, Cuba, Mr. Galbán began his professional career — playing piano and drums as well as guitar — with the Villa Blanca Orchestra in 1944. He moved to Havana in 1956 and joined Los Zafiros in 1963. After leaving Los Zafiros in 1972 (the group disbanded shortly afterward), he worked with Cuba’s national music ensemble and toured for more than two decades with Grupo Batey."
New York Times
photo : montuno.com
Manuel Galbán has passed away (b. 1931)
"Born in 1931 in the small fishing town of Gibara, Cuba, Mr. Galbán began his professional career — playing piano and drums as well as guitar — with the Villa Blanca Orchestra in 1944. He moved to Havana in 1956 and joined Los Zafiros in 1963. After leaving Los Zafiros in 1972 (the group disbanded shortly afterward), he worked with Cuba’s national music ensemble and toured for more than two decades with Grupo Batey."
New York Times
photo : montuno.com
Friday, July 8, 2011
WITH ME ~
During the colorful and splendid coronation of the Mikado held in Kyoto toward the end of the year 1915 a gold medal and ribbon known as the Sho-shii, which is the fourth class of the junior rank of court, was conferred on Lafcadio Hearn under his Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo. But this honor came too late. Lafcadio Hearn had already been dead for over ten years. And what honor could there be for a departed spirit who, even during his mortal life, dwelt in the weird ghostly realms of his imagination?
His strange name came from one of the Greek Ionian islands, Leucedia, which is pronounced Lafcadio. Here he was born in the year 1850, the son of an Irish surgeon serving in the English Army of Occupation and a Greek girl mother. Six years later the little family moved to Ireland, but here they were not very happy. The call of the East was too strong for them to resist. The little mother soon abandoned her husband and child, ran off to seek a warmer and happier clime, married again and ended up going to Asia Minor. The father also married again, turned Lafcadio over to the care of a great-aunt, and left for India. Many, many years later, Lafcadio Hearn himself abandoned western civilization and found a home in Japan.
His education was strictly religious. He was first sent to Jesuit school in the north of France and later to a Roman Catholic college in the north of England. Here he acquired his haunting horror of Gothic cathedrals and conventional beliefs. The idea that ghosts lurked in the dark corners of old churches took hold of him and was greater than his fear of Hell. He soon lost his religion. An accident caused him to lose his sight of one eye and this misfortune greatly influenced his entire life, for the eye that remained was very defective and near-sighted. The vivid world of reality faded before him, the pictures that make up life became dim, the sun became clouded over with a milky film, and he was ready for the life in the ghostly spheres of his own imagination -- the life that was later dedicated to a literature of rare magic beauty.
At sixteen or seventeen, we find him in London suffering from illness and extreme poverty. We find him sleeping in a hayloft for the sake of the heat rising from the well-fed horses in the stalls below.
At nineteen, he was penniless in New York serving as a waiter and sleeping in the parks, and at twenty, he had wandered out to Cincinnati and was working first as a messenger and then as a peddler of mirrors for a Syrian merchant. Mirrors for Cincinnati from a young, wall-eyed peddler who could himself reflect the strange, dark phosphorescent beauty of the Orient!
He had other jobs but lost them all. At every stroke he met defeat and soon he lost his courage and with that he became timid and afraid. He was afraid of the real world, which he could see but for dimly as though it were a haunting ghost. But at night, when all was still and peaceful and the inhabitants of the prosperous and enterprising city were snug in their beds, then he marched forth into the kingdom of this imagination, into the fairyland that he conjured up in his romantic brain . . . then he crawled, half-starved, into a rusty boiler, that lay among the rubbish of vacant lot, and went to sleep.
His first start in the field of letters came several years later when he secured work on a newspaper. His extreme shyness prevented him from doing general reporting; and, apropos of this, the editor of the paper once remarked that if Hearn was sent to interview anyone, the person would have to come out into the street and invite him into the house or he would come back to the office empty-handed. But he soon distinguished himself in the reporting of a horrible murder. The ghost and corpse set his imagination working, and from these companion spirits, he had nothing to fear. More work, allowing play for his marvelously vivid descriptive powers, followed and for a time he was almost comfortable, when suddenly he lost his job, and, owing to an illegal marriage contracted with a negress, had to leave Cincinnati.
New Orleans seemed warmer and in character closer to the Orient. Here he walked the streets and wrote short sketches describing the oddities of the city. Failure after failure beat him down but at last he secured work on a newspaper. Then with a partner he opened a five cent eating house called, "The Hard Times," which would have proved a success had the partner not rung off with the money and the cook. Hearn was left with the debts.
At about this time, Hearn began his translation from modern French masters. He never made a mistake regarding literature. His first translation was Gauthier's One of Cleopatra's Nights, and at a later date, he translated Anatole France's The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, and Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony. It was also during these days in New Orleans that he began contributing Oriental stories to the newspapers. These he collected and made into the first volume typical of his strange genius, and now famous under the title, Chinese Ghosts. "The volume, Chinese Ghosts," he oncc wrote, "is an attempt in the direction I hope to make triumph someday, poetical prose."
Each of the six legendary stories contained in this volume cost him months of study and painstaking work. His contribution to literature may be found in the simple flow and subtle sense of his words, chosen for their musical interplay of vowel sounds as well as for their power to express clearly the desired ideas. And more than this; he gives the reader a ghostly shudder by building up an intimacy with the unseen. He makes us feel the great unknown, as though the air in which we move were filled with weird, haunting spirits, companions somehow to those locked in our hearts.
It is true that he worked within the sad limits set for him by life, but within these boundaries he performed miracles. He made tragedy a thing of great beauty and pictured it without irony or bitterness. Passionate flights of suffering he recorded without cruelty and even death and hopelessness he clothed with a certain fragrance. His pen could hurt no living creature for it was directed always by an affection for nature and a love for the mystical.
From New Orleans he went to the West Indies where he wrote some travel sketches and finally, in the year 1890, he arrived in Japan. The call of the Orient that drive his mother to Asia Minor and sent his father to India brought Lafcadio Hearn to Japan. He was now forty years old and weary unto death of the industrial Anglo-Saxon civilization in which for the past twenty-five years, he confessed, he lived like a rat and "must have acquired something of that disposition." In Japan he found no difficulty in fitting himself modestly into the picture, and he at once began the process of suppressing and even stamping out the smoldering remains of his Occidental civilization.
He gave up his journalistic work and became a teacher of English in the schools. He married a Japanese wife who gave him several children and he enjoyed a home life of great sweetness and simplicity. Now his chilled nature began to thaw out and, to amuse the children, he translated the fairytales and other romances of Old Japan. Now there were times when he seemed to kneel at the feet of nature or sit in the lap of one of the giant bronze Buddhas and again he would stand in the spray like shade of tall bamboos and look up at the pattern against the glowing sun, all to see how it could best be told with a pen. At last he was happy!
For the sake of his children and because of his contempt for the Western world he renounced his citizenship and became a subject of Japan. He threw away Western science and, attracted by the poetry and glamor of Eastern religion, became a Buddhist. To the very end, civilization, of which he had been given a full bitter taste, remained to him a hideous thing. But the ghost of his life, the idea of universal evil, never left him.
He died in the fall of 1904 after having brought back to life many of the dead romances that had lain moldering in the ancient dust of old Japan. With his exquisite style he has given Eastern folklore its important place in our literature. He blew the breath of life into those weird spirits in whose realms he really lived and died.
Manuel Komroff
New York
March, 1927
from his introduction to Lafcadio Hearn Some Chinese Ghosts, Modern Library 1927.
During the colorful and splendid coronation of the Mikado held in Kyoto toward the end of the year 1915 a gold medal and ribbon known as the Sho-shii, which is the fourth class of the junior rank of court, was conferred on Lafcadio Hearn under his Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo. But this honor came too late. Lafcadio Hearn had already been dead for over ten years. And what honor could there be for a departed spirit who, even during his mortal life, dwelt in the weird ghostly realms of his imagination?
His strange name came from one of the Greek Ionian islands, Leucedia, which is pronounced Lafcadio. Here he was born in the year 1850, the son of an Irish surgeon serving in the English Army of Occupation and a Greek girl mother. Six years later the little family moved to Ireland, but here they were not very happy. The call of the East was too strong for them to resist. The little mother soon abandoned her husband and child, ran off to seek a warmer and happier clime, married again and ended up going to Asia Minor. The father also married again, turned Lafcadio over to the care of a great-aunt, and left for India. Many, many years later, Lafcadio Hearn himself abandoned western civilization and found a home in Japan.
His education was strictly religious. He was first sent to Jesuit school in the north of France and later to a Roman Catholic college in the north of England. Here he acquired his haunting horror of Gothic cathedrals and conventional beliefs. The idea that ghosts lurked in the dark corners of old churches took hold of him and was greater than his fear of Hell. He soon lost his religion. An accident caused him to lose his sight of one eye and this misfortune greatly influenced his entire life, for the eye that remained was very defective and near-sighted. The vivid world of reality faded before him, the pictures that make up life became dim, the sun became clouded over with a milky film, and he was ready for the life in the ghostly spheres of his own imagination -- the life that was later dedicated to a literature of rare magic beauty.
At sixteen or seventeen, we find him in London suffering from illness and extreme poverty. We find him sleeping in a hayloft for the sake of the heat rising from the well-fed horses in the stalls below.
At nineteen, he was penniless in New York serving as a waiter and sleeping in the parks, and at twenty, he had wandered out to Cincinnati and was working first as a messenger and then as a peddler of mirrors for a Syrian merchant. Mirrors for Cincinnati from a young, wall-eyed peddler who could himself reflect the strange, dark phosphorescent beauty of the Orient!
He had other jobs but lost them all. At every stroke he met defeat and soon he lost his courage and with that he became timid and afraid. He was afraid of the real world, which he could see but for dimly as though it were a haunting ghost. But at night, when all was still and peaceful and the inhabitants of the prosperous and enterprising city were snug in their beds, then he marched forth into the kingdom of this imagination, into the fairyland that he conjured up in his romantic brain . . . then he crawled, half-starved, into a rusty boiler, that lay among the rubbish of vacant lot, and went to sleep.
His first start in the field of letters came several years later when he secured work on a newspaper. His extreme shyness prevented him from doing general reporting; and, apropos of this, the editor of the paper once remarked that if Hearn was sent to interview anyone, the person would have to come out into the street and invite him into the house or he would come back to the office empty-handed. But he soon distinguished himself in the reporting of a horrible murder. The ghost and corpse set his imagination working, and from these companion spirits, he had nothing to fear. More work, allowing play for his marvelously vivid descriptive powers, followed and for a time he was almost comfortable, when suddenly he lost his job, and, owing to an illegal marriage contracted with a negress, had to leave Cincinnati.
New Orleans seemed warmer and in character closer to the Orient. Here he walked the streets and wrote short sketches describing the oddities of the city. Failure after failure beat him down but at last he secured work on a newspaper. Then with a partner he opened a five cent eating house called, "The Hard Times," which would have proved a success had the partner not rung off with the money and the cook. Hearn was left with the debts.
At about this time, Hearn began his translation from modern French masters. He never made a mistake regarding literature. His first translation was Gauthier's One of Cleopatra's Nights, and at a later date, he translated Anatole France's The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, and Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony. It was also during these days in New Orleans that he began contributing Oriental stories to the newspapers. These he collected and made into the first volume typical of his strange genius, and now famous under the title, Chinese Ghosts. "The volume, Chinese Ghosts," he oncc wrote, "is an attempt in the direction I hope to make triumph someday, poetical prose."
Each of the six legendary stories contained in this volume cost him months of study and painstaking work. His contribution to literature may be found in the simple flow and subtle sense of his words, chosen for their musical interplay of vowel sounds as well as for their power to express clearly the desired ideas. And more than this; he gives the reader a ghostly shudder by building up an intimacy with the unseen. He makes us feel the great unknown, as though the air in which we move were filled with weird, haunting spirits, companions somehow to those locked in our hearts.
It is true that he worked within the sad limits set for him by life, but within these boundaries he performed miracles. He made tragedy a thing of great beauty and pictured it without irony or bitterness. Passionate flights of suffering he recorded without cruelty and even death and hopelessness he clothed with a certain fragrance. His pen could hurt no living creature for it was directed always by an affection for nature and a love for the mystical.
From New Orleans he went to the West Indies where he wrote some travel sketches and finally, in the year 1890, he arrived in Japan. The call of the Orient that drive his mother to Asia Minor and sent his father to India brought Lafcadio Hearn to Japan. He was now forty years old and weary unto death of the industrial Anglo-Saxon civilization in which for the past twenty-five years, he confessed, he lived like a rat and "must have acquired something of that disposition." In Japan he found no difficulty in fitting himself modestly into the picture, and he at once began the process of suppressing and even stamping out the smoldering remains of his Occidental civilization.
He gave up his journalistic work and became a teacher of English in the schools. He married a Japanese wife who gave him several children and he enjoyed a home life of great sweetness and simplicity. Now his chilled nature began to thaw out and, to amuse the children, he translated the fairytales and other romances of Old Japan. Now there were times when he seemed to kneel at the feet of nature or sit in the lap of one of the giant bronze Buddhas and again he would stand in the spray like shade of tall bamboos and look up at the pattern against the glowing sun, all to see how it could best be told with a pen. At last he was happy!
For the sake of his children and because of his contempt for the Western world he renounced his citizenship and became a subject of Japan. He threw away Western science and, attracted by the poetry and glamor of Eastern religion, became a Buddhist. To the very end, civilization, of which he had been given a full bitter taste, remained to him a hideous thing. But the ghost of his life, the idea of universal evil, never left him.
He died in the fall of 1904 after having brought back to life many of the dead romances that had lain moldering in the ancient dust of old Japan. With his exquisite style he has given Eastern folklore its important place in our literature. He blew the breath of life into those weird spirits in whose realms he really lived and died.
Manuel Komroff
New York
March, 1927
from his introduction to Lafcadio Hearn Some Chinese Ghosts, Modern Library 1927.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
EARTH ~
it used to be so easy
gallopingdog.com
all of these drawings were made in response to titles contributed to the artist
sam brown
at his website explodingdog by viewers here there and everywhere.
i've never been to his website. i'm old fashioned. i read his books.
sam brown
at his website explodingdog by viewers here there and everywhere.
i've never been to his website. i'm old fashioned. i read his books.
where does it all go?
mom says i'm special
this seems to be quite interesting
it used to be so easy
i am building a better world for you
she is my sunshine
gallopingdog.com
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
NEW FROM LONGHOUSE ~
FROM THE TOP OF THE WORLD
for Lynn Nankivil
At the horizon, I sit at the center of the Universe
observing all living creatures,
inhaling, exhaling the universal soul;
I discern each individual fate carefully:
Alexander the Great, President Abraham Lincoln, Czar Nicolas,
Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, people
who sailed on the Titanic, people who flew
on Pan Am flight 103 and others,
and Buddhist monks in the cursed nation of Cambodia,
and hovering in front of me--- the Kennedys---
what rose up from John-John’s karma? Or maybe JFK
wanted his son to join him
in the Nagaraja realm
and not ascend to the Devaraja?
All these beings, their appointments
set so bizarrely--- violent death.
When the body is dead
Ignorance or Knowledge adheres to the soul
and it comes back again and again….
I gleefully contemplate Knowledge;
but Ignorance frightens the wits out of me.
Greed! Anger! Hatred! Are roots of Ignorance!
Wisdom! Love! Compassion! Are fruits of Knowledge!
I pray that Wisdom, Love, and Compassion should prevail.
Looking at the sky, I see Walt Whitman;
when I look at the trees, Walt Whitman peers out at me;
when I look at the grass, he beckons me;
and when I close my eyes,
Brother Walt is beyond the earth waiting for me and you.
FROM THE TOP OF THE WORLD
for Lynn Nankivil
At the horizon, I sit at the center of the Universe
observing all living creatures,
inhaling, exhaling the universal soul;
I discern each individual fate carefully:
Alexander the Great, President Abraham Lincoln, Czar Nicolas,
Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, people
who sailed on the Titanic, people who flew
on Pan Am flight 103 and others,
and Buddhist monks in the cursed nation of Cambodia,
and hovering in front of me--- the Kennedys---
what rose up from John-John’s karma? Or maybe JFK
wanted his son to join him
in the Nagaraja realm
and not ascend to the Devaraja?
All these beings, their appointments
set so bizarrely--- violent death.
When the body is dead
Ignorance or Knowledge adheres to the soul
and it comes back again and again….
I gleefully contemplate Knowledge;
but Ignorance frightens the wits out of me.
Greed! Anger! Hatred! Are roots of Ignorance!
Wisdom! Love! Compassion! Are fruits of Knowledge!
I pray that Wisdom, Love, and Compassion should prevail.
Looking at the sky, I see Walt Whitman;
when I look at the trees, Walt Whitman peers out at me;
when I look at the grass, he beckons me;
and when I close my eyes,
Brother Walt is beyond the earth waiting for me and you.
Please inquire about purchasing with a credit card. You may order by check (total $9.95) made payable to "Longhouse" & send to
Longhouse, Publishers & Booksellers, PO Box 2454, West Brattleboro, Vermont 05303. Thank you!
Or, Order now with easy-to-use Paypal ($8.95 + $1 s/h - US addresses only). Thanks!
Longhouse, Publishers & Booksellers, PO Box 2454, West Brattleboro, Vermont 05303. Thank you!
Or, Order now with easy-to-use Paypal ($8.95 + $1 s/h - US addresses only). Thanks!
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
NEW FROM LONGHOUSE ~
holding my breath—
a drive to deep right field
and the rising moon
Please inquire about purchasing with a credit card. You may order by check (total $9.95) made payable to "Longhouse" & send to
Longhouse, Publishers & Booksellers, PO Box 2454, West Brattleboro, Vermont 05303. Thank you!
Or, Order now with easy-to-use Paypal ($8.95 + $1 s/h - US addresses only). Thanks!
holding my breath—
a drive to deep right field
and the rising moon
Please inquire about purchasing with a credit card. You may order by check (total $9.95) made payable to "Longhouse" & send to
Longhouse, Publishers & Booksellers, PO Box 2454, West Brattleboro, Vermont 05303. Thank you!
Or, Order now with easy-to-use Paypal ($8.95 + $1 s/h - US addresses only). Thanks!
Monday, July 4, 2011
EARTH ~
Eilen Jewell Band
We've been visiting Grafton, Vermont for many decades now, always as a side-trip passing through and never for the 4th of July fireworks and Vermont Symphony Orchestra extravaganza which we can't afford the tickets to anyway. I know there are other Vermonters like us.
The village of Grafton has a population of less than 700 — easily half the size of its Civil War era.
The town was named after Grafton, MA., supposedly during a bidding & drinking episode — so connect the dots. Lots of American history was made this way.
The town was first founded as "Thomlinson".
The Old Tavern inn was established when Thomas Jefferson was newly President and has stayed afloat continuously ever since, a feat with few rivals in this country. The folks we visited with on the hotel's broad front porch seemed extra comfy and happy with their stay.
In the 1960s the Windham Foundation restored the village, making it almost impossible for any hardscrabble Vermonter to own much of anything in the village, but it also spiffed up buildings and decorated the spot as an authentic New England town with much success. Greg Joly and I did a poetry reading to raise money for flood victims of Hurricane Katrina on the town library porch without ever being invited and no one chased us off. In fact few were there. Likewise, when Sweetheart and I visited recently and had a little impromptu picnic by a village brook, boots off, books with us, lunchpail, no one said "No". We arrived at 9AM and would stay for Eilen Jewell's Band who were to perform at 5 that afternoon right behind the Old Tavern.
Since we were there for the day we roamed all the village on-foot. To the school playground and the swings, then down to the working forge — a fire pit and blacksmith hammering away inside the darkness. After that it was a stroll over to the minerals museum with a fellow running the one room quite friendly and quite batty about all things rock: from Zaire to local Vermont-bred gems. We took a run through the Grafton Cheese station, neighboring deli, out to a well used baseball diamond and scrubby bleachers, small garden pockets, through backlots of barn and homes, taking photographs, the one country store not exactly decked out for tourists and more homespun (we like it always), finally back to the library, and with a mental note we would delve into the town historical museum after our little picnic and deep reading.
The tools are a hallmark in the historical museum, as is the back history of soapstone manufacturing and sheep raising from the region. There is a legacy of African-American families in the town, maybe the most notable is the native storyteller Daisy Turner, who died in 1988 in Grafton at age 104. In Ken Burns film The Civil War, one can watch Daisy Turner reciting Civil War poetry on her dying year. She was one of a kind.
By 4 in the afternoon we got ourselves to the Eilen Jewell Band. A free concert, which is absolutely giving of the town. A small short step-up stage with canopy was placed in the parking lot and folks just gathered round — under the huge maple trees, on the lawn, walking past; you'll even see a kid on a bicycle caught in my film pumping around the parking lot in his own time with the music. The little film was shot hand-held right on the spur. This is a performer and band working in the great tradition of the self-employed — they tune their own instruments and put up the whole show and take it all down, travel to the next town — which will be on Thursday in Burlington, Vermont as the opening act for Wanda Jackson.
film © bob arnold
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Saturday, July 2, 2011
TELLING IT WHOLE ~
(the best damn writer in the NY Times)
(the best damn writer in the NY Times)
TIMOTHY EGAN:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/conservative-cash-crop/?hp
Courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY.
Courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY.
Friday, July 1, 2011
WITH ME ~
DAVID TRINIDAD
ODE TO THELMA RITTER
There's no one like you in the movies
anymore, Thelma, no lovable, middle-aged
character actress, gravelly voiced and
hard-boiled, with a sharp-tongued flair
for the cynical as well as the comical. You
could work miracles with a little screen time,
turning out indelible performances in a matter
of minutes: Bette Davis's acerbic sidekick
in All About Eve, Jimmy Stewart's down-to-
earth nurse in Rear Window, Doris Day's
perpetually hung-over maid in Pillow Talk.
You played women with names like Clancy,
Aggie, Bertha, Birdie, Lottie, Leena, Della,
Stella, Sophie, Sadie, Maude, Mae, and Moe.
But what of you, Thelma? Online I find only
this mini-biography. Born in Brooklyn on
Valentine's Day in 1905. Trained at American
Academy of Dramatic Arts. Stage career
mostly unsuccessful. Married Joseph Moran
in 1927; briefly gave up acting to raise two
children. Started working again in radio in
1940. Bit part in Miracle on 34th Street launched
noteworthy screen career. Appeared in thirty
films between 1947 and 1968. Died of a heart
attack in 1969 in New York. Thelma, six times
you were nominated for Best Supporting
Actress, and six times you lost. You, who
could save any movie with your wisecracks!
A Google search uncovers this little-known fact:
"Shirley Booth was not the first choice to play
Hazel. Thelma Ritter was. Miss Ritter wanted
the role badly, but due to illness had to bow out."
Booth would win two Emmys in the early '60s
for playing television's sassiest maid — your
rightful part. O elusive trophies! O tired heart!
You, who survived the Titanic in one picture,
would say sadly, world-wearily, in the next:
"I have to go on making a living so I can die."
from The Late Show
David Trinidad
Turtle Point Press 2007
DAVID TRINIDAD
ODE TO THELMA RITTER
There's no one like you in the movies
anymore, Thelma, no lovable, middle-aged
character actress, gravelly voiced and
hard-boiled, with a sharp-tongued flair
for the cynical as well as the comical. You
could work miracles with a little screen time,
turning out indelible performances in a matter
of minutes: Bette Davis's acerbic sidekick
in All About Eve, Jimmy Stewart's down-to-
earth nurse in Rear Window, Doris Day's
perpetually hung-over maid in Pillow Talk.
You played women with names like Clancy,
Aggie, Bertha, Birdie, Lottie, Leena, Della,
Stella, Sophie, Sadie, Maude, Mae, and Moe.
But what of you, Thelma? Online I find only
this mini-biography. Born in Brooklyn on
Valentine's Day in 1905. Trained at American
Academy of Dramatic Arts. Stage career
mostly unsuccessful. Married Joseph Moran
in 1927; briefly gave up acting to raise two
children. Started working again in radio in
1940. Bit part in Miracle on 34th Street launched
noteworthy screen career. Appeared in thirty
films between 1947 and 1968. Died of a heart
attack in 1969 in New York. Thelma, six times
you were nominated for Best Supporting
Actress, and six times you lost. You, who
could save any movie with your wisecracks!
A Google search uncovers this little-known fact:
"Shirley Booth was not the first choice to play
Hazel. Thelma Ritter was. Miss Ritter wanted
the role badly, but due to illness had to bow out."
Booth would win two Emmys in the early '60s
for playing television's sassiest maid — your
rightful part. O elusive trophies! O tired heart!
You, who survived the Titanic in one picture,
would say sadly, world-wearily, in the next:
"I have to go on making a living so I can die."
from The Late Show
David Trinidad
Turtle Point Press 2007
photo : flixster.com
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
NEW FROM LONGHOUSE ~
TEST MILE
Lost the big herbivores but gained
all these trees. The fir tree is formed
like a flame and is thus the Universal
Root, the foundation of all things.
Enormous and immediate, the dynamic
expression. Alive in a molecular world.
A world estranged from the Mysteries,
reduced to fingering detective fiction.
Science is great when it confounds
fundamentalists, not when it modifies
corn. In the front room pounding
Beethoven with the door locked. Sleeping
with too many afghans. Staff around
to make life nicer. Knit me a corgi.
I was thinking about it and then I was there.
Not important what others call it, so long
as you have a name for it. As the
monarch follows the milkweed. The king
in the custard pie. Even his bookmarks
are interesting. The temptation to be smart.
To dwell inside a cave and glow green
from living off nettles. We are the mountain.
TEST MILE
Lost the big herbivores but gained
all these trees. The fir tree is formed
like a flame and is thus the Universal
Root, the foundation of all things.
Enormous and immediate, the dynamic
expression. Alive in a molecular world.
A world estranged from the Mysteries,
reduced to fingering detective fiction.
Science is great when it confounds
fundamentalists, not when it modifies
corn. In the front room pounding
Beethoven with the door locked. Sleeping
with too many afghans. Staff around
to make life nicer. Knit me a corgi.
I was thinking about it and then I was there.
Not important what others call it, so long
as you have a name for it. As the
monarch follows the milkweed. The king
in the custard pie. Even his bookmarks
are interesting. The temptation to be smart.
To dwell inside a cave and glow green
from living off nettles. We are the mountain.
Please inquire about purchasing with a credit card. You may order by check (total $9.95) made payable to "Longhouse" & send to
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
NEW FROM LONGHOUSE ~
HIGH WATER
Running downstream on high water
you don’t have to muscle the paddle;
just knife it in the current to stay straight.
When a whirlpool roils to the surface
your body flexes and veers with the boat.
Watching the shore go by:
red granite, white birch bark,
the bronze-green thickets of trapper’s tea
your mind drifts.
Where the river widens into a lake
you start working again,
and step back into the world;
searching for the next portage
or a good camp site,
thinking about supper.
Look at that raven playing with the wind:
his mind isn’t penned in
by deadlines and maps,
his body’s not burdened with tools.
Setting his wings,
he swoops, and gives us the eye.
Flapping them twice,
he climbs, clears the timber
perches in a jackpine snag,
talks to us as we float past.
For him, the sky is water.
Clouds mark the currents
of the rivers he runs.
Cirrus River
HIGH WATER
Running downstream on high water
you don’t have to muscle the paddle;
just knife it in the current to stay straight.
When a whirlpool roils to the surface
your body flexes and veers with the boat.
Watching the shore go by:
red granite, white birch bark,
the bronze-green thickets of trapper’s tea
your mind drifts.
Where the river widens into a lake
you start working again,
and step back into the world;
searching for the next portage
or a good camp site,
thinking about supper.
Look at that raven playing with the wind:
his mind isn’t penned in
by deadlines and maps,
his body’s not burdened with tools.
Setting his wings,
he swoops, and gives us the eye.
Flapping them twice,
he climbs, clears the timber
perches in a jackpine snag,
talks to us as we float past.
For him, the sky is water.
Clouds mark the currents
of the rivers he runs.
Cirrus River
"The Bob Love (booklet) is especially perfect, almost as if it should have a waterproof pocket to carry it in in one's backpack." ~ Ken McCullough
Please inquire about purchasing with a credit card. You may order by check (total $9.95) made payable to "Longhouse" & send to
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