Library Time

Mold mitigation and remediation continues. Infused with insuperable inertia. I manage, after false starts and two trips to the hardware store, to rebuild the kitchen faucet, seat and stem and a new supply line. After hours, waiting for the crew, I spend some quality time in the library. The history of concrete: arch, vault, dome, those Romans. Then move on to a study of American realism. Not a bad way to kill time. I can't see my circumstance through other eyes. I know my house is a mess. What you save can never be the same as what's dying. Just a thought. Nothing prepares you. Tomorrow is supposed to be the last day of the clean-up, steam-cleaning all the floors in the basement. They have to stay until they're done, so I have to stay. Really want to go home. I miss my library and cookstove. Glass show comes down Saturday, so I can bring up the crates tomorrow. I dread carrying the largest piece down in the elevator. Brent said he never told exhibitors how to handle his pieces. They look so delicate that those of us who do this tend to be very careful. Brain-stormed with K and Stephanie (a volunteer) for a while after work. Actually, after beer, as I'd already gone over to the pub after closing time, for a Murphy's, and they were still at the museum when I got back. Demographics and such. They're both bright, and young, and their ideas are interesting. Palpable intelligence. Read a funny line in a new book by John Connolly (now there's a dark writer) about a central character, "that Dodo eggs had been laid more recently than him", spit whiskey on the screen. Polyvalency, in linguistic cant, is the the ability of a sign to mean more than one word, depending on context. Evidently making the translation of Sumerian a nightmare. The strange churrascaria of a trapped insect coming from somewhere, I can't track it down, and I can't concentrate. Driving me crazy. A cricket in the house and I become a recd-eyed killer with a fly-swatter in my hand. Finally find a logy fly, behind a painting, and pinch it's little head off. Of course I can't remember what I was thinking about before I was thinking about a trapped insect, I'd made a note, but it made no sense, but it made no sense, so maybe the signs meant other words, in that context. They were, all lower case, "small chicken", I think. My handwriting is no longer really legible. Also what I choose to note. I leave a post-it on Pegi's desk, and she finds me, wherever I am, to ask me what is says. No one ever writes me notes, because there's no place to put them. There wasn't a place, but now there is, the office, to which I had been assigned; that/which I actually, really, want to give to K so I can just hole-up in the kitchen and broom closet and not be bothered by all the notes. Interoffice communication and the attendant bullshit. Navigating upstream without an apparent means of locomotion. Read more...

What To Think

Life is confusing. Nature of the beast. The Extraction Crew finally shows at noon, finish filling the dumpster, tomorrow another crew arrives to steam clean. I don't get anything done, overseeing what's happening. A thankless chore, but I promised two members of the board, Terry and Chris, that I'd monitor things. In so far as I can. Just on my way out the door for lunch, when the insurance adjustor arrives for inspection. I docent her through the damage. Stress failure analysis. We bandy terms and seem to understand each other. I just want the claim to be settled. Have to stay another night, as all the equipage is still running. It's going to take a month to recover my hearing. They blew a circuit in the basement, I knew this was coming, and I knew that I wouldn't even know what breaker panel the circuit was in. Totally in the dark. These days I carry a flashlight, in a leather holster, on my belt. Beginning to look like a funny cop, with my tool-belt. And I have to trace the chased wiring back to a source. An interesting task, because there are so many branchings, do find it, restore power, but now that circuit has once failed, I look for a way to spread the load. Means running some other cords, and I have a kind of rough schematic in my head, so for a short period of time I actually look like I know what I'm doing. You'd have to say that I did know what I was doing, because I fixed the problem. Sub-text. Let's be clear, we really don't know what's being said, and heaven forbid you just construe. What is said and what is meant. I make a phone call, which I almost never do, to hear a voice I need to remember. Affecting a 'Joe Casual' I can pretend that nothing has happened. Common response is to bury your head in the sand. I've known several hermits, have actually been one myself, so speak with some authority. Diminished by the myriad failures. I can't help but I see things the way I see things. I've trained myself to just observe phenomena, What you do, is your own business, I look at small plants closely. Ships passing in the night. Lay my down pallet on the floor. I don't require much, a small strip of space. I don't want to be compared to anyone, I'd rather be a dismal failure on my own.

Small purple flowers,
covered with snow,
blow away the chaff. Read more...

Dumpster

Confusion reigns supreme. I saw our dumpster go by, but I couldn't get outside quick enough to stop them. Fulgent morning, the light almost painful. Phantasmal. Day three of the clean up, they should finish tomorrow and I can go home. Haven't wanted to leave the museum with 6 dehumidifiers and 20 squirrel-cage fans running full blast. Dumpster finally arrived and a crew of four were steady carrying 'contaminated' stuff out of the basement, which is very cool because most of it was junk and needed throwing away. K came in today, reorganized and cleaned the kitchen and back room. I read about Etruscan art for a while, kept checking on the crew, finally ended up in the kitchen, washing some things. It's estimated that Sargent did over 800 portraits. Imagine. I was explaining to K that to make a good elderberry wine, you need to make a gallon of elder flower (called elder blow) wine in the spring, then use that to top the elderberry wine in the fall, because the berries don't have any nose. You lose a fair amount of volume went you rack the wine off the lees during fermentation. Nice to use the flower wine to top it up. We made 12 gallons one year in Mississippi (and many gallons of other sundry beverages) of elderberry, with the flower wine, and with a zinfandel concentrate we got from California. Best wine I ever made, silky and huge. The only wine to serve with opossum and sweet potatoes. We made a sherry, with green tomatoes, brown rice, lemons, and pineapple juice that was quite good. Don't eat sushi while you're using a keyboard. A run to the liquor store, after work, then over to the pub for an Irish and to admire the case D made for them to store the Irish in. Nice, looks old, looks original. I'm liking this having another person at the museum, one who wants to work. We needed another person. Speaking of persons, went over to the pub this afternoon, to help D unload the display case, and there was a goth person there, with a lot of metal dangling, the word meretricious popped into my head. In the sense of gaudy, not particularly in the sense of attracting attention in a vulgar manner. Some people, they do disport themselves. Maybe not merely recognition they seek. I don't know. I call as little attention to myself as possible. Maybe not, I'm not sure. I was called on to docent, after the event on Saturday night. Six interested people, all bright, almost all of them vested in a fast-track sophistication. It was fun, I'd had a couple of beers, during the performance, and I was understated and remarkably lucid. Terry, now on the board, stayed for part, and he enjoyed it. Today K mentioned we should offer that service, docenting a small group through, after hours. I'll do the docenting, it's like being on stage, without the anxiety. I enjoy it, and I'm good, because I research everything, as a matter of course. Picked up sushi at Kroger, got back, started writing you, and had a small brown rice emergency. Lost the 'm' there for a few minutes, but Kim had explained to me how to take the keys off the keyboard, clean and lubricate them. I'm on top of this. The reports back, from the group I docented, were glowing, I was evidently quite amusing or something. Word back through K, staying in the carriage house that Clay and Sara once owned; and there was a reunion, or something, that was the group; and that I was like one of the best docents ever. I'm proud of that, like a runner with his time. I throw a few things away, into the dumpster; life, the universe, and all that, and still come out ahead. It's looking good for the home team. We get rid of shit, and don't have to do it ourselves. Read more...

Fairly Precise

I try to be clear. Thinking about that today. For a great many years I was remarkably opaque. Interestingly, it's more difficult to be fairly precise than it is to just let your imagination run. For me, at any rate. There's a small yellow flower in the spring that I often get down on my knees to examine. It grows in disturbed ground, often in the medians of dirt roads. Prolific. They promise warmer weather, but are usually covered, once, by snow. Lovely little things, and so bright it breaks your heart. Next will be those miniature iris, I don't really know what they are, either, that are a deep purple, and are so small I use a magnifying glass on them. They're perfect, one of the most beautiful things in the world. They don't smell, that I can detect, and I thought about that for a while. They don't have to, because the pollinators are looking for color. Fucking winter, man. It's amazing we don't all kill ourselves. Add a basement disaster, kick in a few of the dead and dying, and I could go for a Murphy's with a Paddys back. K had retyped that last page I finally sent, back into a sendable form. I'm so slow with two fingers, that I cramp up, so I tend to not correct errors. But I wanted you to have that two-day page, because if you didn't have it, you'd be out of the loop. Clearing a Class Three Site is quite complex, I don't want to get too technical, but there are stations of the cross. It's hard to predict but easy to say, when the shit hits the fan. I'm a Structualist, for gods sake, I'm generations behind, I just write words and place commas. Really, if you isolated me, a monad, nothing special. I can barely tie my shoes. Not quite enough, when they give a detail, a video, and it's not you, really, it's another skinny white guy with his hat turned backwards. Look around you. This is what you are become, other, not me, K commented on the commas, I appologize. I thought something, I was off, somewhere. Hang on here. I was right, correct, when I said I couldn't connect with anything other. Feigned ignorance. I actually connect fairly well when there might be a conversation worth having. Often poignantly contrary to what is expected. Charon is the only satellite of Pluto. also that ferryman. I was looking something up that began with the letter 'c' and one thing led to another. I forgot the word I was looking for. Charmeuse is a satin finish silk. A charmed particle is a particle with nonzero charm. Charnel house is a repository for the dead, from the Latin carnalis, of the flesh. Carrageen is the same as Irish Moss, which I have eaten, on occasion. Squamule is a lovely word. Means a small, loosely attached thallus lobe (means undifferentiated in shape) of certain lichens. Some of the stones, literally just rocks, in my graveyard of neglected graves collapsing, are spotted with squamule. As a rule, I seldom panic, in spite of everything anyway. D acknowledged that I handled the shit-storm very well. It's nice to be appreciated. Circumstances having been what they were. Music event at the museum, two actually, Steve Free played his brand of singer/songwriter for gifted high school students this morning, then a group called Local Girls playing right now. Free food and drinks, nice turnout, lights down low and a sound like the Andrews sisters. One of the board members, sends another board member upstairs to get a real drink off me. Pretty funny, really. I tell Terry to add ice and a splash of water, knowing how Julia drinks her bourbon. They want a lighting effect, that they can't really have, to mark Earth Day or something ,and It's hard to think fast enough, to come up with something. This was in the middle of the performance, right after Julia had requested a drink. A little late in the game. I cob something together. Dimmers played with four hands. Also, the Extraction Company had sent a man over to turn off all the blowers and dehumidifiers and then to come back and turn everything on after the show. Glad I was there. When the event is over, K's friend Seven, has some people visiting from all over the place, a kind of reunion, and I tour them through the various galleries with a line of talk. I enjoy them, they're bright and vibrant, exuding a kind of sophistication not common in these parts. I enjoy the company and the stimulation. If I can't read and write, I'd rather listen and talk. But I've been wearing my work boots for 16 hours and I really want to flex my toes. When they leave there is suddenly quiet. Engaged with people, most of the day, it's interesting when that filter is pulled out of play. Pressed into service,, I do well as a docent, I know too much, which serves me well. I serve a function. If you need somebody, call one. understood. Me. Read more...

Basement Disaster

Wasn't ready for this. I thought I was going to paint the new walls. One of the storm cells that just glanced off the ridge hammered downtown. Smelled it when I unlocked the door, flooded basement. And I'd just cleaned the space out on Saturday, so I could paint. At least nothing was on the floor. The drains backed up and the toilet regurgitated. It's a mess. Life. Walking out this morning, lovely though overcast (because of that new color) and passing the puddles, there are two dead frogs, head-shots by quarter-sized hail. They're big enough to eat, so I go back to the house for a plastic bag; cut of the legs with poultry shears, slit and peel off the skin, two minutes maybe. I'll just pan fry them with a little garlic, served on toast, to soak up the juices. The debris in the basement, back-flowed through the drains, looks a lot like macerated paper pulp. It could be cast, no question about that, I've cleaned a lot of it up before, it sets-up hard. I need to talk to Anthony. We should probably save it, and cast something obscene. The smell is terrible, Pegi has to breathe through the neck of her blouse. Jack Vetter said it rained three inches in fifteen minutes. He offered me a job, either full or part-time, as his second in command, renovating some apartments; eight of them right now, plus a 10,000 foot home and hall he wants to make into a B&B. Interesting, and flattering, to be asked. I might work with him a day a week, for a few weeks, to see what he actually is about, what he's like. Work with someone on a project like that, you need to be able to communicate. At this point in my life, I need to like someone, before I can work with them. So, I'm controlling my gag reflex, in the basement, thinking about casting really awful crap into offensive pieces. And the elevator inspector arrives, for our annual certification. I know, from past experience, that the bottom of the elevator shaft, the lowest point on the building, is ankle-deep in water. I tell him, up-front, that we have a problem, and that I wished he'd inspected the damned thing last Friday. He agrees to pass us if I swear to sump the water out. Fucking promises are killing me. Hydrostatic pressure is an interesting thing. I met with two board members today, both off the cuff, and we talked about that very thing. The insidious ways of water. The second board member was the Chairman, also sitting on the board of some bank, holding their monthly meeting at the pub. My kind of board. And I called him out, a little, that we had to address this problem. He's right there, it's cool, everything is really under control, because he runs a huge plumbing retail business and understands drainage issues. A few frogs are still fucking, but way slowed down. Last night it was an overlapping chorus, tonight it's just an isolate, a blues guitar, over in the corner. Slack, delta stuff, teasing meaning from a stroke, what Ry Cooder learned from Mississippi John Hurt; listen closely, it's slightly off-beat. There wasn't a point. No Entry is just a sign. Read more...

Thunder Storms

Hail, whipping winds, rain, and in the midst of all that, the frogs in full reproductive mode. I go out to watch, between squall lines, and they're completely oblivious. Supposed to rain most of the week, so I ran to town, liquor store, library, laundromat, brought everything in and took the truck down to the bottom of the driveway this morning. The rain held off until late afternoon, then struck with a vengeance that kept me away from my keyboard. Made a nice clam chowder. Always reminds me of Cape Cod where I could collect enough razor clams for a big pot of chowder in thirty minutes. Winslow and I would night fish for cod, off the beach at night, the ocean side, near Chatham, and freeze the fillets. I ate codfish cakes, with a yolky egg, every morning for breakfast, for years. Available food establishes a diet, best to live somewhere where you like what is available. Going into morel mode here. I've got one bottle of walnut oil left, from a great buy, several years ago, when we were picking up some art in Athens, and I bought a few discontinued bottles at a health food store. I love the stuff. A lot of wild Black Walnut trees around, I could collect a considerable quantity, pay kids to collect them for me, but then what? They're notoriously hard shelled, but if I could somehow shell them, these wild nuts fairly exude oil. Be easy enough the extract the oil. Break up the kernels and put them out in the sun on several layers of un-bleached muslin, press them. Presses are easy to build, a seven ton jack is less then twenty dollars, and I already have a couple. Still, the first gallon of oil will probably cost $100. I hope some of the frogs are taking a break, it's wearing me out. I feel like I need a nap. Another squall, I'd better save. The energy in one of these cells is amazing, the millions of BTU's, billions, in a single lightning flash. Our problem is storage. It's clear, right, some places you have sunlight, some places you have wind, so why are you taking the tops off mountains? From the wind in Wyoming and the sun in Nevada, you could run the entire grid. If you'd just run the cables. You'd have to reconfigure the grid. My first thought is a very large fly-wheel, something that would store a great deal of kinetic energy. Everything's potential, right? what might distort whatever. Fact is, the coal companies have a lot of cash, and we are all subject to bribes. Not that you would take one, or me, but money is a lure, for most people, and they justify it, some way, as their due. I don't understand finance. Read more...

Lost Marbles

A loud noise in the night, something has fallen over. Pretty sure I'm alone, I don't sense another presence, and the sound was a one-time thing, but I have to get up and see what it was. I keep a bunch of tools stacked in the corner next to the back door and a dynamic tension or a gust of wind shook the house just enough and the shovel decided to fall. Turn on the radio, the show on NPR called "Crossing Boundaries", usually quite good, and it doesn't disappoint. A sound that can only be Bela Fleck. Get a drink and roll a smoke, consider my failures. A Greg Brown song I haven't heard in a while, about putting summer in a jar. I'm hungry and there's just enough tenderloin left for a sandwich, spread with roasted parsnip and mayonnaise. Elvis Costello, then Robert Clay. More music than I've listened to in a while, gets me out of myself, or deeper in, I can't decide, really. What I meant to write about, last night, but got distracted, was life at the margin. Through the afternoon, yesterday, I was thinking how small choices led to major changes. Reading those Magic Realists will do that to you. I think about translation, an almost impossible task, for which I depend on others. I can tease out Catullus. Harvey used to read Lorca to us, when we were printing. It was beautiful, begged the question of understanding. Those days were like that. Hypo Clearing Agent would breeze in, recount a tale from doing "Peter Grimes" in Baltimore, we'd walk across the marsh and get a couple of quarts of ale, toke, and talk until the sun came up over Cape Cod Bay. Still tripping on what we'd left behind. K had a friend visiting over the week-end, Robert, vacating his house so the soon-to-be ex could pack her things. Awkward, but shit happens. We had a beer Friday, then Saturday he came in the museum and looked around. He was impressed with how well the Modernism show was hung. It's virtually perfect, visually, everything centered at 57 inches and the spacing is meticulous. Then I talked him through the glass show, he seemed to understand how one handled such things. Ships passing in the night, you know? Not sentimental, or anything even close, but I do miss that other warm body in which I could confide. Life on the edge is rough, because you're always alone, and a single step away from disaster. You take measures, wear a vest, carry matches, watch the footing, but a single misplaced step and you're over the rim. Some frogs fucking is no cause for alarm. It's Spring, today, I think, and this is what happens, the frozen world awakens, sheds the burden of ice and snow. Black stick trees are a thing of the past. You can't deny there is color now, fucking pink, man. I saw pink today, and the first blush of red-bud. When I was hunkered down, on that opposite ridge, smoking, out of the wind, with copious sunlight, I had to grin, another winter dead and gone. Not that we can't still get bad weather, but I've been warm and there is color. Hope springs eternal. I need to do my laundry because the house smells like dirty socks. My early warning system. But I think I'll just clip brush and read tomorrow, do my laundry on company time during the week. Paul Simon is a good song writer. The wind picks up from the northwest. The moon is insistent, out my writing window, a lost love, darting away. I try to not make too much of anything, but there was a crow, today, that bothered me. I was walking back to the house, from some excursion down the driveway, and there was a crow hopping along in front of me. I'm a sucker for crows, they seem to portend something. I only followed because it was the way I was going. One crow hopping down a logging road. It doesn't mean anything. It's just a crow. Wait. What is meaning? Read more...

Absolute Marginality

Sick of people who believe in God and worship idols. I'll take the entelechy of a hollow emerging from winter. Just today, some russet color, background pinks, and a few reds as the maples wake from hibernation. It's a lovely sight and I walk out the transverse ridge-line over to the graveyard. A perfect day for the shallow-black-pool method for identifying graves. The leaves are thick, and collect in the depressions where cheap pine coffins have collapsed underground. The indentations hold water, the leaves rot too. Shallow black pools. On the south slope of the next ridge over, the color is wonderful. It warms me. Back at the house, I drink chicken broth and eat saltines smeared with a dab of butter, reading Carlos Fuentes all day. A lively mind and a lovely writer. I know just enough about celestial mechanics to get everything wrong, so call Mac but he doesn't know the period between apogee and perigee of the moon either. Everyone else could find out the answer instantly, but I don't have a mobile device, or any service, for that matter. I do have some gorgeous celestial maps, brimming with just such information, but I can't find them. That German map publisher, who's name I've forgotten. One downside of a ceiling high bookcase, double sided, that's 12 feet long, is that stuff falls between. Clearly each side should have a back, but I built these bookcases for nothing. The uprights are peeled dogwood sticks, the shelves are one inch oak, milled from the beams, cut on-site. They cost nothing but a few screws. That sounds cheap. You know what I mean. I certainly couldn't afford even cheap paneling to put backs on the damned thing, besides I built it in place, and could never have slipped between to put on the second back. Pretty amazing bookcases, really, minimalist; strong support, and the loading is carried very well. I surprise myself, sometimes; not a bad thing. I had half a pork tenderloin in the freezer that I took o last night; a perfect, maybe, eight ounce cylinder. I butterfly it, pound it flat, roll it around a core of mango chutney with caramelized shallots, tie it up with cotton twine. Bring the cookstove oven up to temp, and hold it there, for thirty minutes, then let the fire die. The tenderloin, the roast parsnip and turnip thing (I rolled them in walnut oil with a lot of freshly ground pepper) and the sauce. The bread, who's in charge of the bread? there really needs to be a last piece of bread you trail through the drippings. If things were ordered and predictable. Which they're not. Still and yet, you should be allowed to clean your plate. Take one last dripping morsel toward your mouth, not pay for the additional dry-cleaning, if you held the drip away from your shirt, and just dropped it on the floor. As janitor I see desire paths, where we wish we might have gone. The dancer that struck me with her eyes. I have to think about that, I thought I was moving toward nothingness. Suddenly there is real shit, I have to deal with it, I'm the default number. It's you and me, not a good palisade, against an army that large. They merely send in enough troops and we are over-whelmed. No evacuation possible, you just jump off the cliff. Clutching a bag that might contain your salvation. I just mop the floors here, but I'm aware other things happen. The floors look really good. I may be nothing other than a decent janitor. Read more...

Perigee

The moon is as close as it gets. Full, tomorrow, will be the largest for years. Finished the walls in the basement and it's a dramatic improvement, isolates places that need isolating. One space, now enclosed, can morph into a greenroom for the theater. A place to lounge. Still have water issues to deal with. I clean the new space, think it all works pretty well. Built a nook for the prop table and fridge. Some doors that we left standing, now make sense because of the walls. I don't think we ever drew any plans, just empirically connected wall planes. Some of the concrete work, the basement of a bank, is fairly crude, massively overbuilt and crude. The wall planes are skewed. K is in, in the afternoon, to man the desk, and I talk with her about museums and life. D and Sara emailing back and forth about the brochure for the new membership drive is pretty amusing. One liberty I allow myself, as the person in charge of the library, is that I can check books out. Started a biography of Thomas Hart Benton we had, and I'll need to bring it home for a few days. After I finish the new Fuentes. So many books. Anthony was at the back door, quitting time. I had asked him for a glossy black bowl, to replace the one that had been stolen, and he had for me this utterly beautiful vessel. He'd just made 80 bowls for a benefit or something, and I seem to have gotten the pick of the litter. I have a lot of bowls, as it happens, because I like the possible shapes; I like the idea of containment, wherefrom I'm spooning my chicken soup. I had set Anthony's bowl, on the white synthetic cutting board, centered on the lower tier of the island, adjusted the track lights. Anthony's bowl, installed, at my house. I start pulling out other bowls, I stop myself at 20. I know I have to put them all away again, and I have bowls everywhere: on the stairs, on the drain-board, on the island, an ephemeral installation of bowls. Most of them are handmade. I imagine a show that might be based on the concept of vessel. Put the bowls away, Anthony won best in show, probably means I don't want him to know. Wait, fuck, I lost some lines, there was a transition, something about the chicken or the egg, it flew past, so fast I hardly breathed, but I remember something. A bat wing, the way your wrist smelled, tangled up in glue. Clearly, you need an alibi, where were you last Tuesday? Oh god, now I remember, I was taking notes. That was this. Read more...

Apple Gone

I communicate with the fox via apples. I've been putting one on the compost pile. A accumulation of compacted stove ash is on top on the pile. A very good medium for looking at tracks. Definite fox prints. Don't know if it's the same one or not, but that, and the three crows, seemed omen enough. St. Anthony was an Egyptian ascetic monk, considered the founder of Christian monasticism. He popped up on the Met Museum calendar today. I usually look up whatever it is and today's reference took me through an article about the systematic destruction of holy images, which is called iconoclasm. I don't know if I've ever heard that word. Hung a few things at the museum, in the offices, did a brilliant patch and repair on the front staircase wall. Looked on the paint schedule, to identify the color, then down to the basement, to see if by chance we still had some. We did, and the paint was still good, but the can was rusting away. I mixed the paint, had to, it was completely separated. There seems to be another short paragraph stored in Mail Waiting To Be Sent, I'll send it along, I had to save, because of an approaching squall line, and found it there, when I opened back up. Anyway, stirring the paint added flecks and flakes from the can, so I had to strain it, recover what I could. Stored it in a plastic container, with saran-wrap right down on the paint surface. I need this paint, because I don't want to paint that wall. The surface never gets sunlight, there's a chance the color will match well enough. It was funny, because Pegi had just noticed the patch and repair, wondered how I was going to fix that. The match is close enough. I went in to rag Pegi a little, she harasses me all the time, so I have my due, that the repair she had noticed, an hour ago, was now history. I am the gallery manager, after all. Part of my job description. Along with 'everything else' which, literally, includes everything. May have made a mistake driving up the driveway, I might not be able to get out tomorrow, not a concern, in terms of spreadsheet, I have hundreds of hours banked, but D and I had planned to do a certain piece of work. Wouldn't bother me if the schedule, as amended, didn't indicate anything. I just respond. It's really all I can do. Throw a dodge ball at me and I duck. Hello. I learned to duck in the first grade. Read more...

Heaven's Door

I like that version where Dylan plays with The Dead. The flood recedes, a drift of things at the high water mark, down four or five feet in 24 hours. Two crows in a dead snag on Mackletree, I stopped, to hear what they had to say. Doom and gloom, which I really don't buy. Walked K through the physical plant, and we stopped, in the library, she got out books that pertained to the exhibit, displayed them. I'd never thought of that. I use the library more than anyone, but I hadn't thought about keying open books to what was on display. Old dog. New tricks. Nothing matters, but everything does. Saint Paddy's day, I forgot to wear green and got pinched a lot. Reminded me I was not a complete monad, a hermit. Sargent painted one, right at the end, a gestural thing I like quite a lot. Last trip to the holy lands, a grain of salt; an over-exposed photograph of you, shading you eyes, looking at what could be the grail. It might be an academic question, but what is right in front of you? Could be just a trail of horse poop, but might be more than that. Strip away the habit of light, strip away drawing, replace everything with a charged brush. Color, and the stroke, are everything. Look at those Cezanne's from that time. 1905. I make some notes. Color was everything, outlines were a thing of the past. And that's just a first take on what floats in the field. All this water, it bothers me, all the ground is saturated, all the wet-weather springs are spitting forth, water is everywhere. I think about the desert Southwest, where there is no water. Maybe a sprite, the odd outpouring, however many pounds of molten iron. Read more...

Dignified Tenseness

I forget where it started. I was defending J. S. Sargent as a great painter of portraits. Had to go to the museum library to see if I could find a picture of the painting I saw in Naples, Florida. No luck, but I did read some interesting text; his sitters were/are known for their dignified tenseness. Warm day, warmest of the year, pigeons mating in the parking lot. This time of year, you develop an aesthetic of insinuation. Preparing to stand-by. The wind in the stick trees, the wind generally on the ridge, is a kind of moan, a breath blown in your ear. I feel old, and held together with baling wire. Don't recover as quickly as I used to. To make up for the extra day I work, I think about spending an hour a day in the library, sitting, reading. An art history update, now that I know what I think. I take care of the library anyway, so I can justify my time there. There was a post-it note on the book I'd just gotten from the public library, the newly translated book by Carlos Fuentes, "Destiny And Desire" (can't wait to read it, I skip lunch to read a chapter), and the note refers to a question that had come up about naming. Frust is that small line of debris that refuses to be swept into the dust-pan, also that debris (I use a newspaper) that accumulates when you trim your toenails and pumice off whatever dead skin. I had said that there was a word for anything, or you coin one. Anthony Burgess has added a lot of words to the language. Maybe more than anyone recently. Robert Graves always looked for absolute clarity. I was rereading recently his account of the First World War, "Goodbye To All That", a terrific book, and a good opportunity to use that word correctly. My day hinges on events like this. To use 'terrific' correctly. Get a copy of McCord's "The Man Who Walked On The Moon", this has been reprinted, so there should be copies, look at the attention to detail. I steal from anything that might be germane. Push-pin recipes over the top of newspaper clippings. Layers of stuff. Meaning in a different mode. Irish dancing is down, a hard push with those fixed arms (we're not dancing, merely passing the time), and ballet is up. Every point Irish dancing makes is on the downbeat. See for yourself. The pub is so crowded I can'r not go there for a drink, but the crowd is such, I turn away at the door. I'd rather drink alone. Read more...

Going Home

Luncheon with a talk by the curator of the Modernism Show. Informative. Set-up involved the morning, clean-up the afternoon. Hung over, too many whiskeys, but the music was outstanding. Anthony, K and I, met for a round then Anthony had to back to a kiln he was firing, K and I stayed for the music, jam, really good. Sat at the reception desk, the last part of the afternoon, read about Fauvism. 1905, only lasted a couple of years. I like some of the work a lot. Doing away completely with drawing on the canvas, and filling in what is drawn. Just color. Paint on canvas. The first round of frog eggs bought the farm. Frozen solid, disappeared into the muck. Warmer nights late this week, and I expect the 2nd frog fuck fest. The first sign of Spring, being awakened in the night by copulating bull-frogs. Excellent. The scene is still as stark as can be, a few buds, the poplars; no green to speak of, just a few tufts of those earliest plants, pushing through the leaf-litter. All the young bramble, the first year growth, is twisted by the wind. Under-story grows fast, to catch the sun, but is weak compared to even a very small tree. Which then shades out the under-story and you work to whatever climax. I add some hyphens just because the red lines are driving me crazy. On the way home, I had to stop at the lake, the ribbon of water, going over the spillway, was between eight and ten inches, a blanket, flowing to the sea. The flooding is significant but not a real danger. Some roads are closed. Go around the long way. Sometimes a way you've never been. At the museum, I seem to be the docent of the moment, and I'm more than ok with that. By the time a show is installed, I know it pretty well. One of the board members asks me for guidance. I walk her through the show, pointing out things, she makes notes. I felt a little weird, a feeling I looked at later, considered. Not unlike that feeling you get when you take credit for some fortuitous coincidence. It looks like you did something, but you didn't really do anything. I'm on this like a Blue-Tick on a coon. The way we assign meaning. It's a joke, right? Fucking Robins, shitting in my yard. Or whatever. A wave of leaves, from down the block, they had to blow them somewhere, and I'm in a fenced yard without a blower. You know what that means, up the creek. Not only my own leaves, but everybody's else. I start sentences with something in mind. Usually just a vague idea, usually a noun, and I don't have a verb yet, but I have sources for verbs, I can always find the action. A soft light falls. Make what you will. Read more...

Completely Still

The quiet is what you notice first. No wind. Then the birds resume. I suit up in there black Carhartt bibs, with a thick canvas shirt, long-sleeved, to ward off the briars and blackberry canes. Set about clipping the yard. The drive out from town, I think the water is higher, in the Ohio floodplain, than I've ever seen it. 54 feet, and the Great Flood of 1937 was 20 feet higher than that. Reading accounts of that, last week; it had rained for three weeks straight, and there was no where for the water to go. Lovely outside, cool enough to work without raising a sweat. Need a new pair of leather gloves, and saw some nice ones, fairly cheap, at Portsmouth Cement And Lime. Should have bought a pair when we were buying the concrete blocks. I use fairly tight fitting, thin gloves for this, so I have some hand-feel, but, of course that means they get pierced by bull-vine thorns. At least a pair a season, then thicker leather gloves Iuse for working firewood, then an insulated pair of gore-tex that I use mid-winter. Another pair than I only wear when I walking up and down the hill. I started a fire from a rick in the house, perfectly seasoned, having let go its last moisture in side the house, where I need it. Warm enough at 60 degrees to heat some water on the cookstove, strip down and take a sponge bath, wash my hair, shave. I make some rice, a wonderful aromatic Louisiana rice that tastes faintly of pecans. I make a rue of flour and butter, cook medallions of pork tenderloin in butter and walnut oil, add the rue and some mushrooms I'd cooked separately. Lousy presentation, because, really, everything looked the same, pale gravy on rice with pale meat. Tasted fantastic, and I wasn't cooking for presentation, I was cooking dinner. Did you ever wonder about how you had brokered a certain deal? Not trying to be mysterious, or anything, but when I'm clipping, or doing any other chore like that, my mind drifts by free-association. One thing reminds me of another. I have to stop, sometimes, in the middle of whatever I'm doing, think about point-loading or stress failure analysis. So I need a job that allows that. I can't really accept anything less. I've always found it, wherever I found myself, even at the worst, which in my case has been pretty bad. I've made a lot of mistakes, almost died several times, but still, here I am. Back in the middle again. Must be a line from a song. Keep one shoulder against the wall, you always need to find the door. I try to surprise myself, in what might take my interest. I could control it more, but I choose not to. Whatever happens is usually good enough for me. Go home, and go to sleep. I don't even make any phone calls. Why bother? Essentially, you're on your own, take the traces in your teeth. What is Modernism, exactly? Read more...

Cook Book

Funny conversation with Barb about my writing. She's a good reader. Paddy Day parade is tomorrow, I'm going over to help out at the pub in the morning. She assumed the recipes were real. Which they were. I never feed roadkill to anyone without telling them. And it is true that I eat a wide variety of things. Actually, "The Cistern" was reviewed somewhere as a very strange cook book. Which it is. The rest of the text is so intense, the recipes become comic relief. I usually refer to it as the book that saved my life, and eating was a part of it. K has been hired as the intern, starts next week, then this other young woman comes in today, wants to volunteer and has some talents. She maybe would work with K some and we could get some of the load lifted off Pegi. This is my plan. D is in, and we go get concrete blocks, it's important that we do all the heavy lifting on Friday and Saturday. Saturated concrete blocks. Get them inside, into the elevator, take them to the basement, walk them through the maze to where we need them. We're going to use them, spaced apart, to build some walls, where they're needed. Have to be spaced apart because the basement floods, much less now, but, still, a couple of times a year. Have to allow water to get to the drains. Which are on our side of the walls Need to put in a sump pump, but these walls will be very cheap, we scrounged most of the material, and we needed a project for tomorrow with stuff we had on hand. We have a list. Projects to suit any occasion. Added greatly to the list today, in that we hung a Carter painting, behind the reception desk and it's smaller than the previous painting, so there's exposed wall damage. I patch and fill, but we don't have this paint anymore, and that presents a problem, because it's a difficult wall, a stairwell, going up two flights. I really don't want to paint the whole thing, carpeted stairs and landings, and the various stages of scaffolding. It would consume several days of my time, on the other hand, they pay me, so I'll do whatever they say, seems to me we might draw a vertical line between that soffit above the stairwell, and not paint the whole thing. Fell asleep at my desk. Up early to get to the pub to help tote things up from their basement. Sound system, extra kegs, hang another banner. Breakfast there, bangers, eggs, blood pudding, toast, At the museum we set spaced concrete blocks with large tap-cons in the holes, around which we pack asphalt patch, which we just happen to have. After lunch we shoot together the three wall sections, tap-conned into the blocks and the concrete/brick walls. Nice piece of work, somewhat crude, as everything was salvage, but by the time we get some sheet-goods covering the frame, and slap on a few coats of paint, they'll be the best walls down there. We banter, as we work; but the saw. the compressor, and the nail-gun (a triplet) conspire to curtail much of what is said. He rags me about getting old and I rag him about his MFA studies. Pegi and her Irish dancers came in at lunch, to eat and try out the dance floor. Hot little troupe. I've watched them all grow up. The ones that stay dancers, keep with it, don't put on the extra weight that is so endemic, probably pandemic around here, most places I've been, really, except for western Colorado. They don't have time, out there, to get fat. I'd started this paragraph at the museum on a Mac, and though it is my AOL program, I wasn't sure if I could retrieve it on the ridge, so I sat down to look at it, and just finish it off, ship it out. But I can't finish a paragraph to order. Doesn't work like that. I end up breaking into my ridge-bound whiskey, going up on the roof to have a smoke. Town is festive, live bagpipes in the airways from the pub. Two other bars, thus forming a triangle in this case (in most cases it would probably form a straight line, bars lined up on a street) are partying hard. I elect to go nowhere. I'd rather spend a couple of hours working on this paragraph. Language is a plastic medium, and I like that about it. The number of ways something could be said. From the simple declarative to the future pluperfect. From the real or from the purely imaginary. I question boundaries. Would never really stand in line to fill out the paperwork for my next incarnation. This is it, the window of opportunity, cool enough to wear long-sleeves, and clear the fucking brush. Mostly blackberry canes. I'll be a bloody wreak by tomorrow night. If you've never done this, you shouldn't. There must be worse jobs than hacking blackberry cane, but I don't know what they are, I'm sure I'll think about that later. Little is lost on me. No, wait, that sounds like an arrogant boast, that little would be lost on me. I'm more a vector, than disease, I just chart logistics. Looks like a Bell Curve, but what do I know? My knowledge of statistics could be held on the head of a pin. I know they only apply to groups, not to individuals, but I can't help think we're at cross purposes. Clearly, there are patterns that overlap. Not unlike one of those rugs we had talked about, maybe I didn't mention it, there was a search out for a particular Highland Color Your guys got a little rough. I never said they could do that. Read more...

Baroque Age

I can remember how it started. I wanted to see some Piranesi etchings that I had looked at 14 or 15 years ago. I found them in a book on the Baroque we had in the museum library. Flipping pages, looking at the pictures, stumble on a London church by Sir Christopher Wren. After the great Fire of London, 1666, he designed and built 51 churches just in London. And, of course, one really must check out the Bernini marbles. His "The Ecstasy of St Teresa" is stunning. You have to look at Rubens, you have to look at Rembrandt. The gestural brushstrokes by Rembrandt, at the end, when he was no longer filing in outlines, are phenomenal. The hands, in detail, a mastery that I see again in Sargent's hands and then again in a different way, in the way Chuck Close works. A quiet day at the museum, I spent some time in the library. Research, to make me a better docent, or as it happens, instructor to docents because there's no one better qualified in the building. The docent instructor by default. The Ohio, four feet above flood stage, is flowing at the volume of 506 thousand cubic feet per second. At this rate, it makes a noise. Up top, at the confluence, there's a walkway and small picnic area, a nice spot, I go there often, in summer, with a footer, and watch the rivers flow. Today, in the rain, there was no conclusion, just the thought that in the rain, river towns are all about water. I walked around this morning, looking down storm drains. Free lunch, at the pub, for hanging the signs yesterday, and the staff all tell me to come back at Happy Hour because it's the Chamber Of Commerce, "Business After Hours" event, free food and beer. Event hosted by the pub, Sponsored by Sherman Insurance, family of Josh the fireman friend. Why not? I get there and Anthony and Josh have saved me a stool at the bar, the place is already crowded, the food smells heavenly. Josh's father has cooked pork shoulders and there are mounds of pulled pork. As good as anything I could do. It's loud, lots of close physical contact. When you have a bar seat, at an event like this, you become a mediator between the free Guinness on tap and the people behind you. I know some of the people, and have a series of short conversations interrupted by other people. Anthony and I kept up a dialog through the whole thing. A testament to raising our voices, though often we'd just grunt and point. I have to leave, finally, before I get a headache. Bernini's "Angel With The Subscription" which is, I read, one of the instruments of Christ's Passions, and I know nothing about this, don't have a clue what they're talking about, dude seems to be holding some text, a vellum scroll. Look at his face, look at his hands, this is new. The gestural. I've already got a month's reading lined up. There's a dome you need to see, Chapel of the Holy Shroud, Turin. It's cribbed up in a way a stagehand might, sloppy, but close enough. The attachments would have worked, if you hadn't had to back out those screws. But by then even the anchor is in question, and we're drifting. Coffering is how eastern roof systems came to my attention. Shoring something. Give me long enough, I'll remember your face. I'm not so good with names, too many silent letters. The Farnese Ceiling. The first of the great painted ceilings of the Baroque Age. Illusionistic in detail. Annibale Carracci. A wonderful self-portrait, with his first wife Isabella Brant, again, look at the hands, her cocked hat, Rubens and his palette. One last image, for the night, a particular scene, we have it several times, but the one that takes me is George de la Tour's "St. Sebastion Tended by St. Irene." The painted figures look as if they were carved from wood. Then there's Velasquez and Caravaggio, Vermeer, for god's sake. I look at pictures until I fall asleep. Dream of fallen saints. Nothing prepares you for the real world world, where babies are born, and hips are broken. A no-brainer, what appears to be. The illusion of meaning. Sure, the water is high, but there's no reason to panic. Merely finding a place to stop. Read more...

Later

Cats and dogs, the rain. Hot tin roof. We were in the Sarah Lawrence cabin, the wind was blowing water horizontal. We had stayed too long, and there was no getting away now. Visibility was zero, I couldn't see the key in my hand. Zero. So I broke apart an end-table and spiked the pieces to hold blankets over the windows. It was really blowing. I figured the blankets would breathe and hold out some of the water. Electricity was gone, she had lit several candles, they flickered, but stayed aflame. At some point, after we'd eaten some crackers and potted meat, he pulled out a harmonica and played a blues thing that combined an old dying dog with a train that was leaving. I'd put some pickle buckets under the eaves, on the lee side of the cottage, to catch some hurricane rain to wash my hair. We all have a different life-list. A given day, a Pileated Woodpecker might be enough. Check out enough of these backwaters and eventually you find a body. When dawn broke, the worst seemed to be past, so I collected my kit and went home. At the time, a rented room, with use of facilities. A couple of times a week I'd cook, for the other inmates, and we'd share a bottle of wine. Awkward conversation. You can imagine. During the day, I stayed busy, mopping floors, whatever, but I remembered we had spent that night together. Wind blowing rain horizontal. And I wondered what you remembered. I hear snatches of conversation, isolated phrases, there's no context, so they don't make sense. Like an ad you'd hear on the radio. 'Go Home And Change,' is something I hear, in the line at the supermarket. Jolts me. A pregnant phrase. I chew on that through the day, cleaning. The new finish on the floor cleans beautifully. At lunch, John the manager, asks me to hang a couple of things for them at the pub, free dinner and drinks. Sure, I agree, after work. Finish the afternoon doing mindless chores. Take the hammer-drill and a five gallon bucket with the things I'll need to hang a Jameson mirror, a metal Harp sign, and an electric Guinness sign on a curved bracket. Anthony's there, to save the day, for a free meal and drinks; we hammer-drill holes for anchors, yelling out to the patrons 'A bit of noise, mates!', get the job done. The Guinness sign requires tap-cons and a trip back to the museum. Anthony, finally, with his greater mass, and potters arm strength, punches through the holes and hangs the damned thing. A poorly designed, piece of shit bracket. Still, later, when John runs the cord and plugs it in, everyone breaks into applause. You hang a Thomas Hart Benton, and there's barely a stir, you hang a lit Guinness sign, and you get applause. Some of these holes were through hard plaster, into concrete. No wonder they called in the pros. Also, the mirror hung on D-rings and they didn't know how to do that. Interesting evening after that, because Barb is reading "The Cistern" and has some questions. The recipes for cooking roadkill had mounted up for her, and she wondered if I had actually eaten all those things. I tell a couple of stories for a select circle of patrons. There had been a substrate problem, in one of the walls, and a guy sitting at the end of the bar recommended tap-cons. I wasn't thinking. I usually don't hang anything after 4:30, whether it's in the afternoon or morning. The perfect solution, from a by-stander, I don't even have control of my own text. I use a tool, a simple tool, called a 'drift', used usually to align things. I have one that's 6 inches long, maybe half-an-inch hardened Rockwell steel, the last inch-an-a-half tapers down to a conical point. I use it to start holes in very hard surfaces. It impressed the guy, at the end of the bar, that I used a drift to start my holes. We talked about irregular surfaces and miis-alignment. I usually just have a cup of tea and go to bed. Read more...

Cleaning Up

Coming into town, various roads closed, had to come around the long way. The big river at 47 plus feet, full flood is at 50 feet, supposed to hit that Thursday morning. Drove down on Second Street on top of the floodwall in places. Impressive amount of water. Rain starting again tonight, then the next couple of days falling steady. Checked the Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service, a great site, and we should be fine, nor should D's house flood, but it's a close thing. Interesting hydrological event at the confluence. The Ohio is too high and fast, and the Scioto backs up against it, the floodplain is a huge inland sea. Serious happenings. I need cash so I go to the branch bank across the street and there's a zaftig young teller, with so much cleavage I forgot to speak. Zaftig's a cool word. From the Middle High German, meaning 'juice', probably from ripe fruit being pregnant with nectar. Read a food essay, recently, that used the word nape, which I use in the context of that sheet of water going over a dam or spillway, but an embedded recipe in the essay, used it in terms of that coating on the back of a spoon that carries much information at certain times, doing certain things. Making jelly, making gravy, checking the viscosity of a great many things. Nice use of the word. Should have gone home, but met Anthony for a Murphy's, and I had a shot of Irish to sip, then an old friend, Janice, and her husband bought me a shot, then I stopped to chat with the chairman of our board. Not wanting to chance a DUI. This whole St. Patrick's Day thing is way out of control at the pub. I'm going to help Barb cook breakfast (bangers and rashers and eggs and bread) before the parade on the 12th, maybe watch Pegi's girls dance a jig, the rest of the time, before the day itself, I'll try to spend on the ridge. I don't suffer crowds well. The kegs of Guinness lining the walls. They have a count-down clock. I suspect there will be people in green hats. Not to rain on their celebration, but I'd rather be alone. Most of the time. I enjoy the hours I spend with D, look forward to every minute I might spend with Anthony, but there's too much information, and we really need time to process. I attend seminars, occasionally, under false identity, to see what the other side is doing. A terrible spy, I mostly talk about the finger-food, but it's interesting, posing as a Republican. Sometimes you have to bite your tongue to spite your face. Think about that. For a few minutes, let your imagination wander. I do this on a regular basis, and I'm not sure it's a good idea. To imagine light and warmth, hot-running water, at the end of the tunnel. What would you chose? Or which? My little hands are clean, I didn't do anything; stack a few tables, rack some chairs. I'm sure we have some of these words wrong. Listen. Fucking Frogs Are Fucking Again, I can't believe it. You and me, the surface conditions that existed, what they called gravel we called diamond in the rough. Just saying. Read more...

Cleared Out

Cleared out and exhausted. Did my laundry and got home before noon. Started a little fire, split a little wood, made scalloped potatoes as I had stabilized the oven temp at 400 degrees burning small sticks of red maple and letting them almost burn out. Potatoes need 35 minutes, there about. Having a clumsy day, running into things, dropping, spilling. The potatoes are good, I fry a small steak. Nice to be back in the presence of the stove. Saw two movies on Hulu during the past week. "A Simple Curve", nice Canadian award winner, about a handmade furniture shop, father son thing. "The Wooly Boys" about a couple of old sheepherders, Peter Fonda dies. If I wrote, like I know I should, in Word, then export from there, I'd have a better record and I could just file everything by date. Eliminate titles completely. Down With The Aristocracy. Yes, all the low lands are flooded, water everywhere. All the drainages are swollen and clogged. Tis the season. We've haven't seen the end of it, more big rains in the forecast. The ridge is good, the driveway holding. I actually drove up in two-wheel drive without a problem. Surprised to see a dusting of new snow from yesterday's flurry. Never even stuck in town, the surfaces still too warm. Manage to get the house fairly warm, maybe 60 degrees, before dark. The moon, not quite a ghostly galleon, more like an ad for a high-tech kayak, a narrow crescent, but in that phase when it looks like a boat, dips down into stick trees. Nice thirty-second commercial for a small boat-building company would have it in the background. A picture, you know, all those words. Cleaned up my act at the museum, brought most of my stuff home. Pegi's getting assistant soon and I've been using that office to write in, so I brought the first pile of books and papers home. I have to keep everything sorted in piles to correspond with co-equal piles, here, now, home, where I am. Armload of books that I didn't have an immediate place to put; so I piled them on the island, knowing I'd have to do something with them before I fixed dinner. Force my hand, so to speak. One of the few systems that works for me. It would dodge the issue to say I was 'Old School' because that implies a campus or process of thought. Empirical measurement works for me too, I'm seldom without a tape measure. Since I've been smitten with Specific Gravity, the last couple of years, I always want to know how large something is, so I can calculate its weight. Tables, and formulas I use for this, I keep as loose sheets, folded in half, held by a rubber band. It's always under the top book on the southeast corner of the book-table behind me when I write. I need to get it a box, because it grows; a book sized box, then it could not only carry its own, but function like everyone else in that particular stack, carrying the load. Something about the ridge, always gets me thinking. The absolute solitude is a factor, the fact that you don't speak to anyone else, and look out every window on a completely barren landscape. Complex, but a good period, the way thought collapsed in that last sentence. Sometimes I is unavoidable, if you're being honest. You can be honest in other ways, but we're not talking about that, we're talking about being true to yourself. Whatever twisted monster that might be. You and your broomsticks. You and your pom-poms. You and your cheerleaders in short skirts. I'm not that kind of guy, usually. I don't need the press, trying to stay under the radar, and that means not getting arrested for anything. I've got red-herrings and false identities backed up. This me could be a surrogate me I'd planned months ago, to make you think a certain way. Probably a ruse. Which finials as the rose, by any other name. Commander Jack smashes through the optically perfect plate glass, snatches the painting, and is away; even though we're watching we marvel at his dexterity. No one should be able to do that. Pour cleanly from a bottle when his daughter's climbing an un-climbable face behind us. but now we have to get down. Raising kids is never easy. The rules change all the time. What you can say, what you can do. Almost nothing, really, a jump-start at best. Get you on the way. Slip Basho in your backpack. Read more...

Some Transactions

I looked into someone's eyes tonight, it doesn't happen that often for me, the lady swing dancer (number one in the world, I swear to god) and the opening was winding down, everyone leaving, and I docented her and her partner, Dan, through the glass show, and Brent was suddenly at my elbow and I wanted to talk with his wife, Marty, about quilts; so I foisted Brent off on the woman dancer, Mike. She saw what was going on, that we'd be able to talk later, and we never exchanged a word. Later, when we had a few minutes, we talked about line and form, wow, I thought, cool, it's possible to have a conversation. And I looked at her fully frontally straight in the eyes for the first time, and it knocked me out. I felt we'd already spent countless hours together. Talking about mundane things as if they mattered. Let's see, where do we start? We opened the show, the croquettes were a favorite, feel I strike a blow here for collective bargining. Then this lady looks at me and I totally dissolve. Major melt-down. I'm just saying there might be a connection. I parse things way too closely. Almost everything is more or less a fiction. You and me, certainly we never met, the history we create is. I never mean anything. I have to go to bed. Croquette commission is consuming my life. No way I could ever be on the Fenestration Council. I don't have the time. What you imagined, I have no idea, I was just mopping, cleaning the floor, I noticed in the sweep of the fantail loop, I'm nothing if not attentive. there was a kind of neglect. I can't say, really, I was occupied elsewhere. but there seemed to be something missing. When the janitor parties, no one pays him any mind. So it's later, Mike is looking at a particular piece and I come up behind her. I make a noise, to let her know I'm there, she turns and looks at me. Eye contact. I read too much into everything, but if words could speak. There was a kind of promise implied. Like something had been agreed to. Maybe a binding document. I wanted to leave, go someplace with her, hole-up in a tar-paper shack and watch the world go by. A common enough dream. Not realistic, but dreams seldom are. I dig graves, as a matter of course, but this woman's eyes were a transport of joy. I don't necessarily think that would lead somewhere, I have no expectations, really, all I want to do is go to sleep. Forget today and move onto tomorrow. The way I learned the drill. A cold shave with dawn breaking. The next day, today, felt like I'd been beaten by a small army. Exhausted, but wanting to get the food garbage out of the museum, meet D for the usual monster breakfast wrap, We discuss the planned assault on the basement where we plan to put up walls to separate the used from the unused space. It's ugly down there. Sara calls, to see how it went. Just fine, the right amount of food, music, and the swing dancers were good. A nice evening. Talking about his basement plans with the newest board member, at the end, I guess it was just D and Carma, me and Terry, was very casual. Brent and Marty were wonderful. He was an engineer, first time around, and we talked 'loading' as a component of his art. The piece has to stand, the weight has to be carried through to a suitable base. I have to be able to carry it. Something about my job description, Pegi said yesterday that next year's contract would include the phrase "And everything else." She was cool, all day Friday, changing clothes between one event and the other, work clothes in between, making 80 four-shrimp cocktails, arranged around a little cup of cocktail sauce. Anthony recommended we reconvene the Committee once a week, to fry something. We want to try a sweet potato version, with nutmeg. I mentioned to Anthony that we might consider opening a croquette wagon in Columbus. Get a license and make it legal. Designer Croquettes, we also bronze shoes and walk dogs, did I mention the other services? Need a new identity? We can make you come from anywhere, give you deep history; we have people working in the vaults, in the salt domes, in Utah. Fun is fun. Anthony left early, to take a load of his stuff back to Cincy. One truck load of possessions to carry him through the year, there, in Pennsylvania. I don't have to be there. I can be almost anywhere else. No, What I meant was the circumstance allows a certain leave-way. Slop, as we say in the trades. Nothing is ever perfect, but a lot of things are good enough. Code is good enough, but I always work above code. My nature. Soon, we'll be having mushrooms on toast points. I hate to even admit how many morels I'll find and eat. But they'll number in the dozens and even into the hundreds. I have maps, and I can smell them, when they burst through the litter. Read more...

Walking About

A different walk than being in the woods, over to Market Street, then down below the floodwall. The Ohio in spate, both the terraces flooded. The debris field is expansive. I'll need a day off, next week, to scout the areas I know where eddies are created when the water is this high. It's in the backwaters, where crap accumulates, that I find the most interesting stuff. Several years since the water was this high and that means new and engaging items from upstream. I can skirt, on foot, the barricades the road crew uses to block access. Sit on a concrete railing and roll a smoke. A small flask, less than half-a-pint, of Irish in my coat pocket, working up to Paddy's Day. A nip and a smoke, watching the river roil. Sitting on my foam pad glassing the water with a cheap little telescope, watching for balls. More than you can imagine. In any given five-minute period I'm watching at least ten. Studying the way they float on the currents. A lot of balls. A purple one I covet. And there are dozens of balls, already, amid the litter. I don't harvest a single one. I need to talk with Anthony about doing an installation with just twenty ounce pop bottles and balls. "Debris Piles" we could call it, super-glued in place, site specifically. A rubber and plastic show. The signage would be on metal fence posts, anchored in a paint can of concrete. I want to build a kind of ziggurat from pop bottles, with the balls I see a pyramid. Just thinking out loud, but alternating layers of balls and bottles might lead somewhere. Ideas are cheap, assembling is a chore, do you really want to do anything? I have lots of ideas every day, I have to be more careful about what I chose to actually do, otherwise I end up with a woodshed full of bottles and balls, and then the usual disposal problem. Nine ways from Sunday. Like the man said, there ain't really any guarantees. Go ahead and collect the balls, deal with disposal later. This idea, for instance, has a kind of terminal mass, a point at which it would become real. I don't know where that point is, I just muddle along, but when Brennschluss is achieved, everything is history. When we have enough numbers to calculate. Or whatever arcane system you use to determine where you are. For decades I've only used the rising sun for both direction and time. I know where I am, but is it morning or night? I write beyond my abilities often enough that I have to think about that, how could you, or not do that. What you said, what you thought you meant. I'd rather be in Richmond, or Charlottesville, anyplace Jefferson had designed something. Curious, looking around, I notice you haven't done much since I'd been away. Does that mean you don't care or was there just a logistical problem? I'm open to any explanation. Having studied this at length, I'd say sweep, then mop.I need a new ringer, is that in the budget? I hate having rusting bits of metal staining my floor. My concerns. Fucking glitter, man, it is the shades of hell, all sparkle and no meaning. Been there, done that, and it's not worth the bother, I'd rather solve a word puzzle at home, and I don't like word puzzles, I'd rather just drink a beer and eat a piece of pizza. I don't carry an axe and wouldn't use it anyway. Whatever you do is fine. I just write, as a habit. Read more...

Forming Committee

Anthony, K and I. Formed all the croquettes, 160 of them, in three hours this afternoon. A melon baller, then rolled in flour, then dipped in a milk and egg mixture, then rolled in bread crumbs. Figure to start frying them about 4:30 for the 5:30 event. Keep them in the warming closet. We ran some experiments this afternoon. KAT Squad. Noon Smarttalk with Brent Kee Young tomorrow, then the opening. Then a break. Clear some brush. It was pointed out to me that I hung the show, did all the labels, mopped the floor, and tomorrow make croquettes for the patrons. Only because I had two weeks, enough time. In China, I read today, there are strict new guidelines for reincarnation in Tibet. The monks have to get a monthly sticker. Lunch alone, a beer after work alone. High in the art of suffering. Yesterday, the entire staff, except for me, and D calls today to say he's bad down in his back and has a Doctor's appointment tomorrow. I've got a list, of course, the things I need to get done, before the opening. Barb, the owner at the pub, is reading me right now, "The Cistern" and was not the first person, over the years, to say that they could only read a page a day. Exactly the way it was written. I read a few pages tonight. It holds up pretty well. She also mentioned that she'd never read anything so intense. The composition of that book, a page a day, after working hard physically, adapting the cistern to a studio, was intense. I ate fairly well, I had to, it was winter and the work was outdoors. The computer ---this at least iconic, if not apocryphal--- was on a sheet of plywood on saw-horses. I had a lawn chair. Running water, but no heat other than a wood-stove, piped out the flue of a great huge fireplace. An intense time. I was very close to crazy. Knew I'd tapped into something, and wasn't going to let go. I missed my girls terribly. I'd been with them for hours a day, up until the separation, then, nothing. Woke up sleeping under my truck in Utah. I had just room to roll over. A truck makes a good tent, as long as it's not leaking oil. You simply park on a high spot of ground. You can live out of even a small pick-up, a king-cab is like a bridal-sweet, a full-size truck, king-cab, is died and gone to heaven. You could sleep a guest and neither be uncomfortable. Put the books on the floorboard, lay your pallet down, maybe you could use an air-mattress, you know, to even out the spaces, so we'd be on the same page, if we were to find ourselves, talking about that. Whatever it was. A difference in level, or something other. Maybe the way you had felt about him or her, or the way anything else felt. Something else. Could we agree on anything? I don't think so, What we hold is tight to the breast. Mostly, your neo-Americans are lame. Look at the history of the modern horse in North America. Consider volcanic glass. A sharp point and a fast steed insures an easy winter. What I mean. You could argue otherwise. I don't know well enough go otherwise, I operate in a very narrow band of the spectrum. What I see. Really just reds and yellows. So I ask you, what is modernism? Read more...

Labels

More information, which I think is a good thing. Complex, difficult period. Define modernism by what it's not: strict representation. A lot of data on the labels. I make 60 pages of them. Rough trimming the sheets (in order to save material) then spray gluing them onto poster board, then vacuum pressing them, then final trim. I spend all day working on them, just affixing the last to the wall about 4:30. Missing four. I've got some extras, but they're not the ones I need. Worry about it on Friday, when D's back. I wouldn't know where to look for the file. Gotta find time to clean. Another trial batch of croquettes tomorrow, because Anthony wants to tweak the recipe. They were late at the pub, which meant I had to stay for another beer, which meant I stayed in town. Pegi wanted me to stay anyway. Everyone else is sick, and I told Pegi to sleep in tomorrow, we need all hands for the opening, not a bunch of leakers. She wanted me here in case anything went wrong. Short-handed, and everyone else sick, the janitor sweeps in on his roller-blades. Calls an emergency meeting of the Croquette Committee. Just had a funny idea for a show, 3D, on pedestals, would be objects, and the labels would be wrong, maybe ironic, maybe a stupid pun. A croquet set, for instance, with a label that said The Croquette Committee. I do the rounds, with my can of mace and my baseball bat. Find a dehydrated bat in the basement, still alive. I can see why it was in the basement, so cave-like. With my bat-knowledge, from the last couple of experiences, I pick it up with one of the thick leather gloves we use for handling hot light bulbs, and take it to the kitchen. Turn off the light in there, but leave a light on in the hall, so I can see, get out a plate, put some water in it, and set the bat on the rim. I could probably force some water down it's throat, but I don't have an eye-dropper. On the ranch, I always had several. I pull a stool over to a dark corner, and watch. It stretches its wings, moves its head about, seems to sense the water, does a belly-flop into the middle of the plate, and I can hear the slurping. Bat rescue has become a sideline. I read all the labels, of course, I handle each one of them seven or six times, you know? So, of course, I'm familiar with the text. Which is what led me down that path. Labels are the path of tomorrow, mark my words. I think I might just work up a really good set of labels, and then find the objects I need. There's a Hugo in my future, and maybe a dumpster. I'm serious about this. As serious as I ever am. I have to go over to Rush Welding and get them to make me a giant fish-hook, out of rod stock, crude, maybe 14 inches tall. I have a great label for that. No, no, you'll just have to wait and see the show, I can't give everything away just because you like the way I look in a short skirt with high heels. More about you than me, I don't subscribe to anything. I get a magazine from the Electric Cooperative, because I'm a member. I use a very safe identity for that person, and I would know, immediately, if anyone tried to gain access. I'm more careful than I need to be. Which is the level of security my mentor taught I should seek. Read more...