Sweet Emily

The tangled web. I'm never really shocked by anything sexual. Congress with a goat, Portuguese sailors and the ducks they took along for eggs, certain religious practices; even I have the occasional stray thought, watching one of Pegi's girls bend in an unusual way. We have the proscribed history, and then we have the nature of things. Reading this new book, mostly about the family, and Emily's legacy, the paradigm changes. Like that moment, in the cab of the truck, when I suddenly have fruit flies in my ears and eyes, realize I need to alter the focus of my attention. I'm not really post-modern, I'm stuck a couple of movements back, when I lost interest in keeping up to date. I knew history lied, I knew we were mostly mislead. The big deal with Emily is how the poems came down to us. I turned on the radio, to drown out the fridge, and Mr. Allison makes thinking difficult. Too many buzzards sitting on the fence. The blues always sweep me away. Never a conscious thought. It's a hard-wired thing. James Taylor should cover that song "Fever". The cast of players is such that I have to make a note card, Emily's extended family. Her adored brother, married to her very best reader, Sue, and then Austin's affair with Mabel and that first edition of 1890. Technology rears its ugly head, because we have the invention of the typewriter, a weird machine at this point, where you spin a dial and punch a key and the letters are all capital. How do you codify her punctuation? Peggy Lee did a version of "Fever", a really hot take. She was hot. Cutting to the chase, which was my point, I think. Emily left us those forty little booklets, and a whole bunch of letters embedded with poems. All writ in a difficult hand with strange punctuation. Different versions, variations: an editing nightmare. I haven't seen a modern variorum edition. A long list, at the museum, of things to do before next week, when Construction Zones comes down. Tuesday I have to take down the Goss glass pieces and wrap them, Wednesday D's taking them back to Cleveland and picking up the show for upstairs. You need to go to the museum web site -- somacc.com<http://somacc.com> -- and check it out. Altered furniture. A perfect match for the Alice show going in downstairs. Maggie Taylor's set of illustrations. Manipulated images. The big fund-raiser this year, November 12th, is the opening for Alice, a Mad Hatter's Tea Party and an auction featuring really nice stuff and some art. Several paintings that I quite like, a Carter serigraph (silk-screen, not sure why it has a different name), some jewelry, glass things. The board member in charge of the event is not going to be there, his partner had booked a cruise without consult of the calendar, and Pegi wanted to kill him, Sara intervened, but demanded a notarized codicil to both their wills, that if the boat sank, the museum inherited EVERYTHING, including the house. Daffy James, he won best in breed at Westminster and just sold a pup to Martha Stewart for a lot of money. Martha's secretary had called to see when he'd be available for Martha's call. I love America, you can go anywhere and something strange is going on. Pick up art in Ravenna at the wrong time of year, and you'll find yourself in the middle of a Sauerkraut Festival. Coming home today, my god, was so beautiful. Most of the leaves that are left are yellow (mostly poplar) and the slanted light makes Upper Twin Creek Road a golden tunnel. It's breath-taking, it's sublime, it's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. I'm actually crying even remembering; or at least, my eyes are leaking. Could be those damned fruit flies. Small bugs seem to be acidic. I wonder if that's true. I marvel at what I actually say, such a small part of what actually happens. The things I remember. The laughs we shared on the loading dock. We had Sara in tears. I wish you could have been there. It was very funny. I forget the punch line.