WILLIAM EGGLESTON ~

Steidl, 2014

http://erickimphotography.com/blog/2013/04/01/10-lessons-william-eggleston-has-taught-me-about-street-photography/

DAVID CARR'S LAST VENUE ~

David Carr

September 8, 1956 – February 12, 2015

http://new.livestream.com/nytimes/events/3800646/videos/76929642

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/business/media/david-carr-media-equation-columnist-for-the-times-is-dead-at-58.html

TRIGGER ~

Roy Rogers' famous horse "Trigger"
A permanent resident of the Roy Rogers
and Dale Evans Museum

One can play "Happy Trails"
recording on the postcard
on any nonautomatic return
phonograph player at 33-1/3 rpm

MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ ~

A long time ago, way back, there were beings

Who formed a circle to keep the wolves

At bay and stay warm; they were bound to vanish

They were a lot like us.

We're here, our last words are fading,

The sea has gone

For one last time lovers are embracing,

The land is naked.

Above our bodies sound waves rise

And fall and move

Around the world,

Our hearts are nearly cold

Death must surely come, deep and gentle;

Soon, human beings will run off from this world.

The dominion of machines will then be complete

And pure information will triumph and fill

The empty carcass of the absent divine;

And this noise will rule until the end of time.






The Long Road To Clifden 



West of Clifden, headland, 

Where the sky changes to water

Where water changes to memory

At the edge of a new world



Along the hills of Clifden

The green hills of Clifden,

I shall lay down my pain.



For us to live with death

Death must change to light

Light change to water

And water change to memory.



To the west, all of humanity

Gathers on the road to Clifden

On the long road to Clifden

Humans lay down their pain

Between the waves and the light.

___________________________________

MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ 

The Art of Struggle

translated by Delphine Grass & Timothy Mathews

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6040/the-art-of-fiction-no-206-michel-houellebecq

SILVINA OCAMPO ~

Fragrance

I who live close by

bear witness that at certain hours

of the night or day

it floods the areas of the square where it lives

and enters the windows of neighboring houses;

it's more important than the corporeal

beauty of the trees because even the blind can see it

through the illusion of perfume,

as through music.

Often, at any hour,

I tried like a sleuth to find where that heavenly

fragrance came from and I reached the conclusion

that it's simply like the soul

lodging nowhere and all about.

~





Love



I would like to be your favorite pillow

where you rest your ears at night

to be your secret and the fence

around your sleep; asleep or awake



to be your door, your light when you go away,

someone who does not try to be loved.

To escape the anxiety in my complaints,

and manage at times to be what I am; nothing,



never to be afraid of losing you

through fickleness and unfaithfulness,

nor pointlessly grant to you



the tedious, vulgar faithfulness

of those abandoned who prefer

to die instead of suffer, and do not die.

__________________________

Silvina Ocampo

translated from the Spanish by Jason Weiss

New York Review Books, 2015

http://www.nybooks.com/books/authors/silvina-ocampo/

SIT DOWN ~

B E C K

_____________________________________________________________________________

The born loud and now rich Kanye West picked on Beck last night at The Grammys, grumbling about how Beck, of all people, isn't worthy of the album of the year award. He may as well have picked on George Martin of The Beatles. This is what I mean by loud. His mother or father never got across "think" then "speak."

______________________________________________________________________________

STEVE ~

Steve Sanfield & Doc Dachtler

I just learned of an old friend's passing. This is what I get for living so tucked away in the snow. 

News comes from a snail mail letter from another old friend in Colorado telling me about Steve's passing in the Sierra of California. And I'm not sure how long my letter sat in the post office box but I opened it tonight sitting by the wood stove on a small bench in barely any light and when I came to that part of the letter about Steve I moved into the light and read the paragraph again to make sure I was hearing things right.  That's right, hearing things right.

Above is a photograph of two long-time Longhouse poets I always liked to publish and be in touch with. You can see they were pals.

 Steve Sanfield was one of the founders of the American Storytelling Renaissance, becoming the first storyteller-in-residence in the United States in 1977. He is also the founder of the Sierra Storytelling Festival. Steve had over thirty published books under his belt — poetry and prose, but really it was all poetry.

We both lived as long as we lived in our respective spots on earth — 45 years in our spots — which I believe was part of why we contacted one another in the first place. Brotherly Place. Steve's spot on earth was the San Juan Ridge at his home on Montezuma Hill.

_____________________

BOB DYLAN WOODSTOCK ~

Bob Dylan
photograph by Elliott Landy

DEEP WINTER TUNES ~

music compiled

by bob arnold

feb 2015

WARRIOR ~ EDDY VAN WESSEL ~

http://www.edgeofcivilization.com/

 

THE EDGE OF CIVILIZATION

Eddy Van Wessel

edgeofcivilization.com

SHAPING THE LOTUS SUTRA ~

Shaping the Lotus Sutra

Eugene Y. Wang

University of Washington Press 2005

Buddhist visual culture in

Medieval China

http://www.bokus.com/bok/9780295986852/shaping-the-lotus-sutra/

ONE MORE LEO KOTTKE STORY ~

WHEN LEO KOTTKE MET BOB DYLAN ~

EDWIN DICKINSON ~

SHACK, PEAKED HILL BARS, 1955

E d w i n   D i c k i n s o n

 

EDWIN   DICKINSON   IN   PROVINCETOWN,   MA 






http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-edwin-w-dickinson-11644


http://www.driscollbabcock.com/artists/slideshow/edwin-dickinson/4#

HUGE LATER PAUL CELAN ~

 P A U L   C E L A N

Farrar, Straus 2014
 

P I E R R E   J O R I S

"Just read and keep reading!

Understanding will come by itself."

PAUL CELAN

GEOFF MULDAUR MUSIC BOX~

Geoff Muldaur

photograph by

Catherine Sebastian

music box

compiled 1 March 2015

by bob arnold

HAPPY BIRTHDAY THOMAS MERTON! ~

How to Enter a Big City 
Thomas James Merton
(1915-1968)
 
I

Swing by starwhite bones and
Lights tick in the middle.
Blue and white steel
Black and white
People hurrying along the wall.  
”Here you are, bury my dead bones.“

Curve behind the sun again  
Towers full of ice. Rich  
Glass houses, “Here,
Have a little of my blood,”  
Rich people!”

Wheat in towers. Meat on ice.
Cattlecars. Miles of wide-open walls.  
Baseball between these sudden tracks.  
Yell past the red street—
Have you any water to drink, City?  
Rich glass buildings, give us milk!  
Give us coffee! Give us rum!

There are huge clouds all over the sky.
River smells of gasoline.
Cars after cars after cars, and then
A little yellow street goes by without a murmur.

There came a man
(”Those are radios, that were his eyes“)  
Who offered to sell us his bones.

Swing by starwhite buildings and  
Lights come to life with a sound  
Of bugs under the dead rib.

Miles of it. Still the same city.  


II

Do you know where you are going?  
Do you know whom you must meet?

Fortune, perhaps, or good news  
Or the doctor, or the ladies  
In the long bookstore,
The angry man in the milkbar  
The drunkard under the clock.  
Fortune, perhaps, or wonder  
Or, perhaps, death.

In any case, our tracks
Are aimed at a working horizon.
The buildings, turning twice about the sun,  
Settle in their respective positions.
Centered in its own incurable discontent, the City  
Consents to be recognized.


III

Then people come out into the light of afternoon,  
Covered all over with black powder,
And begin to attack one another with statements  
Or to ignore one another with horror.
Customs have not changed.
Young men full of coffee and
Old women with medicine under their skin
Are all approaching death at twenty miles an hour.

Everywhere there is optimism without love
And pessimism without understanding,
They who have new clothes, and smell of haircuts  
Cannot agree to be at peace
With their own images, shadowing them in windows  
From store to store.


IV

Until the lights come on with a swagger of frauds  
And savage ferns,
The brown-eyed daughters of ravens,
Sing in the lucky doors
While night comes down the street like the millennium  
Wrapping the houses in dark feathers
Soothing the town with a sign
Healing the strong wings of sunstroke.
Then the wind of an easy river wipes the flies
Off my Kentucky collarbone.

The claws of the treacherous stars  
Renegade drums of wood
Endure the heavenward protest.  
Their music heaves and hides.  
Rain and foam and oil
Make sabbaths for our wounds.  
(Come, come, let all come home!)
The summer sighs, and runs.
My broken bird is under the whole town,  
My cross is for the gypsies I am leaving  
And there are real fountains under the floor.


V

Branches baptize our faces with silver
Where the sweet silent avenue escapes into the hills.  
Winds at last possess our empty country
There, there under the moon  
In parabolas of milk and iron  
The ghosts of historical men  
(Figures of sorrow and dust)
Weep along the hills like turpentine.  
And seas of flowering tobacco
Surround the drowning sons of Daniel Boone.



_________________________________

The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton
(New Directions)

http://merton.org/chrono.aspx

GEOFF MULDAUR ~

bpNichol ~

A fine poet

A fine press

This gift 

bookmark

brought home

to us from

a friend

while in

Vancouver

http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/bpnichol/bp.htm

NOTHING LIKE JACK'S HOT DOGS ~

The first time I ever stepped up into Jack's Hot Dogs in North Adams, Massachusetts was fifty year ago this year. Can you believe your eyes and ears that the establishment is still in business? Yes it is.

 
In fact it may be one of the longest and enduring establishments in that dying slowly but surely Berkshire town, hard to admit for me as a native and as I recently roamed the streets with my true love. All my old haunts, except Jack's, are long gone. The shoe store, the clothing store, my mother's shoe store, my mother's clothing store, both movie theaters, the hardware store, my uncle Frank's lumberyard, where my father cut his own commercials at the local radio station for his lumberyard (Herb Alpert was the preferred music used as his theme), my dentist Doctor Greene, Lily's Music Shop where I bought my Dylan and Hendrix and Traffic and Led Zeppelin and Miles and where I looked a long time at Linda Ronstadt on an album cover sitting very pretty in a sty of pigs.


As we haunted up and down and sideways on the sidewalk these places and store fronts were vacant, boarded up, echoes. A few of the side alleys were still there like mountain passes and how I loved them as a kid and how I still love them as an old timer, taking my sweetheart by the hand and down an alley way we'd go, flushing out into a parking lot and the back door to a vintage Italian restaurant opens and an old woman sticks her head out having eye contact with us at the same time we land in the lot looking wildly about and she waves us over that it's okay to come into her establishment that way, through the kitchen back door, around the pots and pans, the hot grilles and spitting grease and the young workers surprised we're suddenly there and quickly moving out to the front where there is no one at all but a sunny picture window and old tables with a fake flower vase at the center. How not to sit down? We sit. Order two pizza slices. The woman who invited us in serves us like it's a full course meal, she knows best, she's old town, disciplined, worked all her life, reminds me of my Irish aunts once down the road in Adams, except she is fully Italian. All gone. I'm in that moment.


There was a fish market on a side street up a hill in North Adams where my mother and I would stop on the incline and my mother would jerk up the emergency brake and leave me with the words she'd be back in a minute, and she almost was, with a roll of fish n' chips sopped in good grease of the newspaper, and we'd eat it all right there in the car where we sat. The town spread out before us through the windshield.

 

All gone but Jack's. The smallest restaurant I believe Sweetheart has ever been in and she loves it. Loves me. There's a short counter and maybe ten stools, it's all too small to count. Why bother? You're in a heavenly nest of short order cooks behind the counter grabbing orders as soon as you arrive, plunk down, and before you know it at 3 in the afternoon all the stools are taken. The guy next to me orders four hotdogs, two hamburgers, and a plate of french fries topped with a plate of onion rings. He's scrawny and thin. Eats this pile like he's lucky. No doubt a regular. Once you find and try Jack's you become a regular. The prices will set you back on your heels — a hot dog for $1.20. Hamburger the same. The fries are ridiculously nasty, ridiculously tasty and ridiculously cheap. A glass of Coke is 75 cents and the glass, I swear, is the same size glass used in my junior high school cafeteria just down the road from here. Except that school is also gone, as is my elementary school across the narrow street.  Pulverized. Disappeared. The great oak floors that snapped and buckled and gleamed.

 

Sit on the stool and watch the world of Jack's work. Two guys man the grille and the orders and a third guy is thumbing through receipts. His 'desk' is the narrow counter you're chowing down on. He's a foot from me, leaning over making meticulous on the orders and today's earnings. I stood up a moment curious as ever because I see a door in the back corner to somewhere and stick my head into another closet size space dark with an ATM machine and maybe two pinball or game machines. It looks ancient. Spooky. Sweetheart guards my stool with her hand or else it will be swiped by the next hunger artist.

 
There's a window that looks out where the cook does his magic but it's worthless with steam, grime and smeared sunshine. We're on the greatest side street in North Adams once known for bakeries and side dives and antique stores and other restaurants. You can walk up the street, jump across and hurdle the intersection of traffic coming out of Vermont and more Massachusetts, sidewind around a parking lot of a grocer's and come to Mass MOCA, the intellectual of the town. If the powers that be there haven't yet drawn together the vintage artwork and flavor of Jack's Hot Dogs and put it up on display in their museum as a supreme example of local-yokel, some one is missing their beat. Where Mass MOCA is was exactly where Sprague Electric was when I was a kid. You can walk through the museum and forget the artwork for the first visit and just admire and be overwhelmed by the original architecture of the former factory's massive wooden beams. I used to deliver sheetrock into this building with my cousin Alan. Two flights up. Heavy work.

 
I came for my first hot dog in 1965 off a lumber truck delivery with my co-worker Big John, a Polish monster lumberjack I drove hundreds of deliveries with between 1962-1969. I was the kid in the passenger seat, conservationist, know-it-all, and helping hand. John liked to eat. Eat big. He could just fit through the only door to the place, and in the summer it was a screen door.

 ~ Bob Arnold