Familiar

I left something out. Something important, but I can't remember what it was. You'd think I'd remember, after all the repetition, but no. No amount of remembering brings anything to mind. She had nice ankles, I remember that, I wanted to say something about the way she walked, but I lost that thought. Had to make the extra trip to town, to do laundry and look at some vehicles. The truck is on its last legs. The laundromat, for once, was incident free. Stopped back by the museum, to leave a change of clean clothes, went to the pub and had the special, a grilled turkey sandwich and fries, and a pint (rare for me, at lunch, but damn was it good), then drove home the back way, so I could drive through the fords and clean my undercarriage. A sea of blackberry blossoms, and the Trillium is blooming, looking lovely, reminding me, for some reason, of the Lady-Slippers on Martha's Vineyard. I went to Big Lots while the laundry was washing, and stocked up on cans of Mandarin Orange segments, one of my favorite snacks; found some more boxer shorts, two for four dollars. The wall of green is almost complete, Mackletree is become canopied. Going to be a terrible tick year, as the winter kill never happened, two on me today, just walking from the truck to the house. Took a nap when I got home, haven't been sleeping well. Nodded off reading a history of The Army Corp Of Engineers. When I came back around I got an early drink and answered some mail. I'm part of the syllabus at another college. I wonder what those kids think, reading me, droll old bastard, living a radically different life than them. It must sound slightly strange. Some of the aspects sound desirable, but taken as a whole, 99% of the populace would choose to not live this way. And I suspect, when someone first reads me, they don't know what to believe, despite the fact that I'm honest and transparent, mostly. Locked into this way of working, hard-wired, at this point, I remember everything, but leave most of it out, because it's not germane to the argument. By which I mean just that on-going conversation. In this accelerated season, the day-lilies should be next, operating a month ahead of time here, and it's taken for granted I could deal with that, wrap and package and ship a show off in three days, a show that's never been wrapped and packaged before. I probably can, TR's a quick study, and he's enlisted Klaire, to update the condition book. We should be fine, if I can find enough large sheets of cardboard between now and then. Just saying. Read more...

Sense of Wonder

I had reason to open "Gravity's Rainbow", looking for a particular word and thought to call Glenn and Linda. I have burns on the back of my hands that I can't explain, and the frogs are very loud. There's probably no connection, but I was thinking about Derrida, and what's signified. I wanted the calm voice of reason. the purpose of my call, but after talking with Linda, and then taking with Glenn, I realized I was not the normal correspondent. Whatever my concerns. Linda mentioned and Glenn confirmed I was writing well, authentic, if that word hadn't been used to death by now, which it has. In the sense that I reveal myself. Fucking bugs and frogs make it difficult, a maelstrom of confusion, what actually happens is more a matter of happenstance. Sometimes nothing makes any sense. Like the other day, I was walking over to Kroger to buy some coffee, and I forgot to stop at the ATM and get some money, distracted by the sex life of trees. It's spring, after all, and the outdoors is confusing, a playground of sexuality. Stamens and pistils, birds fucking on the sidewalks, a horny squirrel looking for a mate; and I needed to turn around, go back to the bank, get some cash. Right then, exactly when I needed it, I found a twenty dollar bill, wadded up in the gutter. I'm not a lucky guy, but it's happened a few times, that I found what I needed. Not often enough to form a pattern, heaven forbid an algorithm (no, Tom, this is not a pattern, merely footprints in the sand), and the sum total of our knowledge is almost nil. I reread the opening page of "Gravity's Rainbow" and I was blown away. Actually, it's not possible to write that well. Some witchery going on. You and Bobby meeting at the crossroad. Just happened you had a mouth-harp, blew a few notes, cleared the air, super-hero. Jesus with a saxophone. I only write as well as I do by paying attention to detail. Whatever. Late, trying to roll a cigaret, my fingers aren't working, I'm struck with a sense of inadequacy. Read more...

Otherwise

Stayed at work for an extra hour after TR and D left yesterday, to let the driveway dry a bit, then came home, where, of course, the power was out. I almost turned right around and headed back to the museum, but I wanted to be at home. Cool enough to start a fire, and I wanted an omelet with what could be the last morels of the season. Fired up the oil lamps and lit a couple of candles, read at the island for a couple of hours. No way of telling when I went to bed, it was dark and I was tired, crawled into my mummy bag and went out like a light. Still overcast this morning, but the power was back on and the soft greens of spring were glowing in the diffused light. Greeted by a Pileated Woodpecker on the white oak outside my writing window. Along with crows, my favorite birds, always solitary and intent (crows, on the other hand, I generally see in 3's and 4's, bitching about something); and I was fascinated with the efficiency on display of a powerful beak that is disconnected from the cranium. A nose that knows. D was awkward and funny yesterday, preparing his thesis installation, finishing the written component; he's getting anxious, worried (needlessly) that his work won't be up to par, despite the fact that he carried a 3.9 grade point average through grad school. He still managed to get the next museum News Letter off to the printers, and designed a nice little flyer for something else. The main item on my list was to get the theater piano (we have two baby grands) moved onto the stage so Gerry could come and tune it, whenever his schedule would allow, for the Chopin Competition next Sunday. Sometimes it's hard to keep the thread, especially when I miss a night's writing, because there are too many things, and the time line is skewed. Tense becomes an issue, and then there are the commas. Skip said, when we talked the other evening, that inside every comma there's a coma, and inside every coma there's a comma. I wrote that down and push-pinned it to the wall. I post, it's what I do. Patter of raindrops and maybe a little hail, yesterday, and I threw on my clothes and beat it down the hill. I was not going to miss the Saturday burrito and I wanted to shave and wash my hair with running water. Moved the piano, dumped the trash, could have gotten home early, but Billy, at the pub, had finally made his chili, we'd been begging him for weeks, and I couldn't pass up a bowl of that, and I wasn't actually working that day, so I had pint of bitters, watching the top ten plays of the week on ESPN, on a wide screen over the bar with no sound. It's an abstract reality. I wanted to read Mary's letters from the last part of 1951, because there was a show in Elmira that I was curious about. I know a particular watercolor (we have it, it's hanging currently) and I was trying to nail down it's history. I just went back and added a comma, but I'm not sure about it. I only achieve whatever I do by not thinking about it. When I'm at my best I'm completely disassociated. I just went back and took out a comma. Punctuation establishes syntax, thinking about B's train and track, the guy is a fucking genius, it doesn't matter what I think about his personal hygiene. That's and in-joke about not having running water, it sounds important but it's not. The real issue is whatever you were thinking. Skip and Steven are way ahead of me on this, read them, if you can, but they are both so difficult to understand because they're trying to be clear. Even Pound, at his most difficult, was trying to be clear.  Even my personal demons, Levi-Strauss and Wittgenstein's various wonderings, are simply fence posts. We should talk about this, if we ever had a chance. I'm sure the divorce is final. Read more...

Not Nothing

At first I thought it was nothing. An over-active imagination. But the noise persisted and I finally had to go see what it was. A feral cat facing off with a possum on the compost heap. Ugly critters, I wanted nothing to do with them. I threw a couple of rocks, from the pile I keep by the back door, and they scampered off to wherever they go. I spend thirty minutes bringing the tense into line, the present becoming the past. A nagging itch, someplace I can't see, indicates a tick, so I get out the hand-mirror I use to shave with, and sure enough, there's a bloated bastard in the middle of my lower back. There's a tendency for everything to become present. Remembering is like that. I had two encounters with women today that beg that question. The first was with Gina, the Architect/ Designer working on the alley project, and she had specifically dressed-down to jeans and a denim shirt, making a play for my attention. Let me say, first off, I have no idea why someone would play for my attention, I'm a loser and an easily sidelined anti-hero with issues. But Gina was clearly coming on to me, and I didn't want any part of it. I don't want to have a relationship. I'm comfortable, dirty and alone, maybe it's just a primitive phase, but it's quite real to me right now. Being alone is just easier. It doesn't involve all that compromise. The natural state, where we negotiate. The second was with Ursula, I think her name is, a lawyer, the daughter of a lawyer. I was out at the smoker's lounge, a concrete ledge on the loading dock, and she was walking through the alley. She has great ankles, and she noticed me noticing her feet and asked what I was looking at. Caught. I told her that her ankles were beautiful. What are you going to say? She just smiled, a lovely smile, and went on her way. I'd fix her dinner; no, really, I mean, I'd love to cook a meal for her and talk. Or Fatima, she's so lovely, I'd forget to breathe. I've written for several more hours and now it's dawn, time slips away, I'll continue this later. Drove into town early, so I could cleanup and shave with hot running water. Yesterday, during the long board meeting (elevator re-build) when I had to be upstairs staff person, I started reading Mary's letters from 1950. In April of that year, Portsmouth celebrated a Clarence Carter Week, big exhibition, gala banquet. I don't know where the exhibit was, but the work hung for several weeks after, and from that show, Carter sold 26 paintings. Discounted prices, but still hundreds of dollars each, in 1950 dollars, And he was at the top of his form, around then, as a graphic designer, making a thousand bucks a pop for magazine covers and such, doing at least one a month. Teaching in the summers at some Art Colony or another, for another thousand a month. Mary still bitches about their finances, in the letters to Mom, but it's pro forma parent manipulation by then. Mary was devious and a control freak, but that allowed CC to do his work; and the way she farms out the two boys (the third is in a home, and rarely mentioned), mostly to her mother and uncle, the more cultured family (CC came from humble roots) is shameless. If you don't want kids, don't have them. Got the theater ready for Ronnie and the band. Pegi called D and I together to relay that there were comments that we (he and I) clearly didn't have enough to do or we wouldn't be out back smoking all the time. I didn't know how to take this, as they're my breaks, and I'll take them as I will; that I was being watched at all is shocking; and that someone would imagine what I do or do not do, based on observation of my breaks. I usually go have a smoke before I hang a $250,000 painting, call it what you will. I go out and have a smoke with Sara, when she gives me the high sign, that we're going to have a cigaret break. AND we're often working, when we go out and have a cigaret, discussing a particular packing problem or some skewed logistics. I get more pissed the more I think about it. Is a dress code next? Pegi should have told them, whoever it was, that they should eat their socks, that they had no idea what they were talking about. Also, one or two of those smoke breaks occur before I'm supposed to be at work, and D and I often have a smoke after work, to discuss what we need to do the next day, who's counting here? I don't get it. Why would they want to get rid of D and me? It's not a museum without us, it's the Cirque, wagging a tail. A hard truth, and I'm hardly involved, I just mop floors after events. Read more...

Rolling Thunder

Concussive thunder wakes me, hammering rain, but I see, by the lightning, that this cell is SE of me, and as my power comes in from the NW, I'm not too concerned. Even when the rain gives over to pea-sized hail and the noise is something awful, I'm not too worried about my connection, because the storm is moving away. Now that the trees are leafed out, I'm not even concerned about the driveway, because every ounce of moisture is sucked up into spring growth. My anxiety is more general, the heat-death of the universe. But that probably doesn't affect me in more than a peripheral way. I'm dead anyway, by the law of averages, so what would I care? There is a moment, when it's hailing to beat the band, that I'm a little anxious, but it tails off into nothingness, frogs in the puddles on the driveway. I don't pretend to any particular position when it comes to the ways of the world, I just try to keep my head above water. Tenuous connections, at best. but it's good to stay abreast of the situation. Purely by chance, I'm looking deep into the cleavage of some push-up bra reality. I don't want to play the game. I tell those people close to me that I'm no longer a player, I don't want to deal with it, the role-changing, the bullshit. Please, just let me rot in my tree-tip pit. More rolling thunder, I'd better go. Circuitous route. This meaning that. With this rain and cooler weather there could be another flush of late morels. Power was out because my digital clock was blinking when I got home. Skip Fox just called, one of the best writers in the language, and he has a new Selected Poems coming out from University Of Louisiana press. He was checking that my snail mail address was still the same. Nice extended conversation. Talked about punctuation. He reads me every day, and I have four of his books out on the table in front of the sofa. He's a gifted writer. We talked about projects. He's doing a lot, works harder than I do. We agreed there was a certain reverie, every time we used a comma. A nice break, the whole conversation was one I could only have with a handful of people. Reminded of that time in Rest, Virginia, when I only talked to four people: B, called him twice a week, the owner of a used book store, with whom I did some reciprocal trading, and two crazy doctors. I wrote a great book that winter, and moved here the following spring, longer than I've ever lived anyplace. Here, the ridge. Not to draw to fine a point. Read more...

Patterns

Funny, how connected we are. I was writing last night, and it was slow going, wading through memory. I write slowly, going back, often, to delete words or change a tense, and I'd been working for about four hours, which seems like a lot, for a paragraph. But then again, I have nothing better to do. And I got to the phrase "...even the water seemed medicinal." And I thought, damn, that was a good line; it was literal, I drink filtered or boiled water and it has a slightly sharp taste, almost sweet, that I like very much. It makes good coffee. But that line jumped off the page (screen, actually, then) with a different sense, and it seemed powerful to me. I maybe over think this kind of phenomena, but you have to remember, I've adjusted my life to make it possible to sit and consider a comma for an hour. I finished the post, which is a relative thing, as you might imagine: a paragraph, for me, is like a Blue Tick Hound; of a given night I want to wear one out. I felt like I was writing fairly well, and that line had hit me broadside. I'd just gotten up to get a swig of orange juice and roll a smoke, and I wasn't thinking so much as riding a rift. The zone. I'd written out a recipe for the pate I need to make for the next opening, I'd made a list of boxes I needed to collect, I was feeling guilty that I hadn't talked to my daughters, and then that line. I thought it sounded biblical or Shakespearian, some over-tones or something, and I specifically thought, at the time, that someone would respond. And it wasn't an hour later that Glenn responded that I sounded like Amos coming off the mountain. TR and I spent time in the main gallery, trying to come up with the language for the condition report. Exacerbated by the fact that folk art is often not that well made and put together out of spare parts. We're originating the show, and the report has to accurately reflect condition at the beginning of the run. The other venues have to check it in , then out, at the end of their run. We don't want to write any more than necessary, because the other perparators will hate us, but we need to be complete, so that no one gets blamed for damages. I'm thinking we should take a digital photo of every piece, and include it in the book. Then we could just circle things and add a spare comment. "Visually Literate" comes down the 10th of May, and from them until the 13th of June is going to be a mad-house: uninstall, pack, ship out, patch and repair in all three galleries, then install a huge show in all three, and open with a gala event, for which I need to make pate. I have to make the pate on the 4th, as Kim may arrive on the 5th, so I'll need to confit the product under pork fat, where it should mellow nicely before the gala on the 12th. Sara said she wouldn't mind having some for the new Carters unveiling to 'members only' on the 6th, so I need to make a large batch. It's fun making it, except for the cleaning up, and it's always different. As long as someone else is paying for the ingredients. Like I told Terry (a board member) when he told me he had moved the grill up to the roof-top patio, so that D and I could cook ribs again for an invited audience. I told him that, yes, we could do that, but this time someone else had to buy the ribs. I remember cooking ribs for a huge number of people at Tim Dibble's house in Brewster, he owned a meat shop, and got things wholesale, but nonetheless a fifteen pound box of ribs was $19.99. Maybe ten slabs of baby-back ribs. Now a single slab is $13. That's a dramatic spike. I prefer cooking neck bones or baby-back ribs specifically because they don't have a lot of meat on them, rendering connective tissue edible, sucking the bones. I don't wear a bib, but I do eat hunched over the island, trying desperately to keep one hand clean, to turn the pages. The story of my life is a quest to not leave fingerprints. My goal in life is to leave a completely clean slate. To be absolutely transparent. Maybe 'goal' is too strong a word. Read more...

Dark Quiet

One last round, two, actually, of polenta, with butter and maple syrup. I don't know what got me up, an errant sound, but I did need to pee and the vault of sky was oddly clear considering all the coal-fired power plants in the area. I read back through some notes and they didn't make any sense. Almost no verbs. A mass of carefully noted things. There's a neat pile of folded papers I use for notes. Mostly, they're reject sheets from the recycling bin at work that had some blank space I thought to fill. I'll jot something down, "the role of distortion" for instance. I know what I mean, in a vague way, it's something I want to think about, and the note is a reminder. Coffee, cream, avocados. That's misleading, it's not a shopping list. But there are those too. Word lists. Any given folded sheet might yield nothing but some things I needed on a particular day. Not much of interest, but interesting in a distracted way. I try and stay ahead, with certain commodities, coffee, peanut butter, saltines, so it's necessary to make lists. And when I'm home for long uninterrupted periods of time, I can burn through the coffee and cream, the peanut butter and saltines, the eggs, for god's sake. When I make polenta, I'm a fool for eggs. It's so quiet, four in the morning, that when the refrigerator kicks on I go over and kill the breaker. Sound pollution is a very real thing. My black Dell hums, I can live with that. It's cold outside, but I have a good fire going and I open the window at my desk, so I can hear the natural world. The litter layer, the duff, is extremely sensitive to movement; when I'm attuned, I can hear the worms. You can always hear the bugs, moving about, dislodging the dry leaves on top. And when a deer makes her hesitant step you have to turn down the amplifier, mute the reverb, because it's so goddamn loud. I listen, closely, in the dark, building this sound-scape, that may or may not represent a specific reality. The world as I imagine? It hardly matters in the great scheme of things. I don't want to sleep, I've had enough of that, so I take my sleeping bag and foam pad out to the edge of the clearing and intend to listen to bugs until sunrise. I did nod off, and when I woke up I was completely disoriented, outside, in a mummy bag. Jesus, what was I thinking? I stumbled inside, suited up in the bag on the sofa, pulled Linda's hat down around my ears, and slept for a fitful hour. That horrible recurring dream about being atop some very unstable scaffolding. My mouth was dry, even water seemed medicinal. More and more time to dawdle on the way in to work. Went below the floodwall, hadn't been in a while, and poked around in the debris piles. I started collecting doll parts. One thing I want to do is put a doll together from the wrong parts. Also, I'd like to arrange dolls as famous sculptures. I'm putting out a call for old dolls and doll parts. Didn't get much done today, I kept getting sidetracked, the elevator guys came over, I talked with a student concerning a paper he needed to write about a Carter painting, cleaned the kitchen, tightened up the lock-nuts on the faucet for the upstairs bathroom sink. I need to go to the dumpster tomorrow. Ronnie and the band playing in the theater on Friday night, and that's a beer drinking event, so I want all the trash cans empty. Wouldn't mind staying for that but I'm already committed for a couple of nights in June and I don't like to be over-exposed, taken for granted. People start thinking they know you, and the troubles begin. Relationships are the bane of our existence. I think everyone should be assigned a cave, where they live alone, of difficult access, carrying water for hundreds of yards. But that's just me. Designing a perfect world. I thought that was funny, the very idea that you could design a perfect world. I have a lot to learn. Read more...

Blackberries Blooming

Everyplace a tree has fallen, wherever a logging crew has worked, if there's a patch where light falls, the blackberry immediately intrudes. Ubiquitous and common. Reading Kant and getting a headache. I'd rather direct the flow of water with a screwdriver, which I've done, on occasion. "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals" is an odd book, because it speaks directly. Ignores the bullshit. Not unlike reading Emily. Just saying. Or reading Umberto Eco on the platypus. The most difficult book I've attempted in years. I'm the docent of choice, when it comes to the Carters. One of the Art History teachers called me out yesterday, D rolled his eyes, but I'm good at this, I easily deflect any blow... when it comes to what I know. Took a couple of tours through the permanent collection and I was very good at drawing them into the pieces. Informed bullshit. I can go off, you know, sound like I know what I'm talking about. Fool myself sometimes. Fuck a bunch of cherry trees. When the blackberries are blooming all's right in the world. That spectral white against a dark green background. Not spectral, a soft white, red not blue, and when I go get my glass, I see pink veins, running toward the outside. A hidden effect. If it hadn't been for my glass I never would have noticed. But of course the pink makes sense, I was seeing something warm. Red, not blue. Huge difference, really, the difference between night and day.The Lyrid showers, another example. What you see. Going back through"Varieties Of Visual Experience" and I've got dozens of markers, notes that need to be transcribed before I can take the book back to the museum library. That pretty much used up today. Big winds. Power was out for a while this morning. Because of that book, I spent much of the day thinking about the role of distortion. The way Modigliani painted Anna's face like an African mask. Very beautiful, and he used that same face on the last nudes. I'm looking at one right now. Braque and Picasso were looking at the same African masks. Then those caves and the over-drawing, image over image. It's an interesting process, coming to understand something. BIG winds, better save. 40-50 mph and the newly leafed trees are dancing. I can feel it in the beams of the house, transferring load. Send Later is the 'Save' program when you're working in the Mail Waiting To Be Sent file. Like I say, I need to change the way I work. Much cooler, frost warning for tonight, which means the May-Pops, down on Mackletree, will take a hit, they're extremely sensitive. The corn, in the bottoms, is still underground, so it'll be fine. So many shades of green in dappled light. It's a lovely thing, with that soft susurration all around. Usually, a day like this, you get a couple of cart-wheeling crows, but I haven't seen a single bird all day. I made polenta that I molded in frozen orange juice cans. I don't particularly like frozen orange juice, but in the winter, weight is an issue. I can always melt snow for water. So I keep them, the cans, and I can reuse them, several times, so it's a sensible investment. I drink a lot of juice, between a pint and a quart a day, depending on circumstances, a lot of different juices. Recently I've been unsuccessful finding a frozen tangerine juice that was one of my favorites, as a juice, but came in that smaller can. Makes these small polenta rounds, but you can arrange them in tasteful piles and do things with the toppings. I'd only found a few morels, but I had some good fresh eggs and a small container of salsa I picked up somewhere, good stuff, made recemtly. I browned six of the little polenta rounds in sweet butter, dressed a perfect plate. Two of the rounds were covered in mushrooms cooked in butter, the next two were covered with a perfect fried egg, and the final two swam in an amazing gravy that I cobbed together out of various pans. Some chicken stock, some cream. The final gravy is always the best. That accumulated flavor of the day. I have to go, I might have to kill a dog. Tom I didn't have to kill the dog, thank god, there was a female in heat, or something, that drew his attention away, but if he had snarled at me one more time, I would have blown his head off. He was disturbing my concentration. Pets, and partners in general, are a hell of a distraction. I'd rather live alone and be lonely. Read more...

Mute Radio

Chilly and overcast, everything is gray and soft greens. I burn junk mail and another chair I got from the dumpster. I can't write, listening to the NPR fund-raiser, so I mute the radio, but every once in a while I go over and punch the volume up so I can get a snippet of news. There's a disembodied quality to it. I listen to a single fact, a perfect game (baseball) for instance, and I explore that fact for a while, maybe an hour, the contingencies of a perfect game. A good soup is right there, so I have a small bowl with a few buttered saltines. One of the butchers at Kroger has agreed to save veal scraps in exchange for pate. Running through an ingredient list in my head, I think about the largest batch I can make, which would be about five pounds, and what the ratios are, the algorithm into which I plug. Badly said, but you know what I mean. It'll dirty every vessel in the house and require over an hour and five gallons of water to clean up the mess, but there will be this product, at the end, an incredible product that I'm actually capable of producing. In a dead heat I probably cook better than I write. I'm hoping I don't have a single unexpected guest, nor a phone call for the next couple of days. It's cool enough that I have Linda's hat pulled down over my ears. I don't want to hear anything. Fucking input overload. Don't remind about the memos, I thought about writing in that form for a few days, how it might appear, 'Memos From The Janitor', and I blew it off, no reason to be sarcastic. I don't care what you do in your off time. I look up words. A fairly benign occupation. Not wanting to be sent. Couple that with actually wanting to be heard. You, with your speech impediments, and me, with this uncontrollable desire to dance. A passing fancy. A jig. It's the Church Of England that did this, fuckjing Anglicans, what they thought they knew. I don't have the patience for anything religious. Read more...

4:33

Have to trust Glenn on this, he's nine degrees smarter than me, and still has all his hair. Obviously we were talking about John Cage, and I'd called him, to talk about the docenting movie that we'd been talking about doing. In the planning stages these projects defy grammar. Future pluperfect. Out there on the fringes of know-ability. But I understood some things, in this conversation, that I hadn't quite got before: how the me, a character, would elide into being. Not a big deal, and certainly not played with a heavy hand. "The Docent" of the title is actually a recluse that gets called out of hiding. He lives in a tree-tip pit in Southern Ohio. I've met him, we've talked, I have a way with hermits. You let them ramble and ask leading questions. I carry a book and a flask with me everywhere, it's only ever a question of when you'll be trapped in an elevator, so I'm always prepared for the odd encounter. The two groups I took through the Carters yesterday were oddly pensive, their teacher had referred to me as a genius, and I was batting that aside while talking about Carter in Europe, 1927, and what impact that had on his career. I defer quite well. What I mean, taken literally. He never embraced the modern. That's the single reason I resisted him as long as I did. But he's a good painter, and I know him now, very well, and my attitude is changed. Mac said I was writing well, and I trust that, if we're being honest. but the boat sinks, regardless. Glenn said it was attention to detail and I agree with that. It feels great to go back and take out a few commas. In control. Not the confused, sloppy, homeless guy you met at Wal-Mart. I have to laugh. Maxwell's second equation. Just saying. I have to go and put on some soup. I amuse myself. Read more...

Tattoo Artist

There's a new store-front down the block, a tattoo parlor. Why is it a parlor? What does that mean? Parlor is an old and domestic word. So there's a new clientele between us and the bank, just beyond the bar next door. Bikers and over-weight women getting images on their ankles. Some athletic guys with every square inch covered, from their shoulders down to their wrists. Scarification. I almost understand the justification. 'Look at me', I underwent this painful procedure so that when you talk to me, you have to look at the virgin Mary on my arm. Some very precise women, bank people, have the names of various Lotharios stippled on the inside of their wrists. Maybe it's just counting coup, I don't know. I avoid certain trains of thought. The fact that I have skin cancer, or a hernia, hey, just life, is what I'm saying. I bow to very few conventions, but what I pay attention to is probably worthy of notice. That sounds like more than it is. Meaning comes from nowhere. It's not a predictable sum. The dogwoods are in bloom right now, they're beautiful. They don't mean anything, but they signify. Whoops. Maybe a mistake in reasoning, but maybe not. If something is merely beautiful does it mean anything? Is beauty its own reward? If that were true, should I pay more attention to cultural phenomena? Is society worthy of any attention at all? Probably not. But you have certain needs. The tree-tip pit you'll sleep in tomorrow. Not to put too fine a point. Power was out last night. Read by oil-lamp and have no idea when I went to bed, but got up at four and started this paragraph. Went in to the museum to have the Saturday morning burrito and conversation with D about the upcoming change-over. A beer at lunch, as I was officially not working. Talk with TR and D in the afternoon, watched an episode of "Endgame" on Hulu, and left an hour early. Stopped at Kroger and got the makings for a mixed-bean and lentil soup with ham. A crock pot meal I'll put on tonight and eat for the rest of the weekend. Got a huge Vidalia onion, almost a pound, that I'll caramelize, such that it'll disappear into the chicken stock. This should be good. I'll eat it with buttered saltines, which are one of my favorite things in the world. Unsalted butter. An email from a person in North Carolina today, and she started reading me last fall and had just yesterday gotten completely up to date. She complained that I was the only writer she had read for the last six months, but that now it would only take her five minutes a day, and she could get back to her normal habits. I'm going to ask my best readers to cull from the archives what will become the syllabus for the gig at Chautauqua. I'm a terrible editor. Or lazy, more like it. Like Janis sang, "worked all my lifetime...". A punctuation construct. Little structures. Now, with TR around, I find I'm listening to sound more closely. This is a good thing, but you can't have any type of electronic gizmo, as far as I'm concerned, which is my drift, right? toward just natural sound. Actual books that you open on your lap.The smell of sage in western Colorado. Almost a list. I'd grant myself the benefit of the doubt. Which three things? We all know about lists, right? which three things matter. Just kidding, I don't really care, he's jerking your chain, but that's not my problem. Read more...

Simple Division

Twelve months, two checks a month, but if you get paid every two weeks, that's twenty-six checks, not twenty-four, so twice a year, you get three checks instead of two, usually a month in winter, and again in the spring, couple that with Social Security, an IRS return, and May is looking pretty good. It's a precession, not unlike time, gathering unto itself. I'm just trying to balance my check book. I hate direct deposits and any transaction where there's not a paper trail, leaves me cold, suddenly I have more money than I should (have) but I understand where it came from, I see I even made a note not to be surprised. Started working through the logistics for the next switch-over with TR. Much to be done to see that everything comes off smoothly. A terrible schedule. Worried about the condition report. Need to replenish the supply of picture hangers. Need to start thinking about my next computer and what changes I need to make in the way I work. Maybe a lap-top and a flash drive. I need to start a list of my requirements, it's not a huge list, but the components are essential. I just use my personal computer only as a word processor, so I could drop AOL and the whole dial-up connection. I hate lap-top keyboards, but I only use two fingers anyway. I'd still need a printer, so I could make a hard-copy; I enjoy holding a page in hand and reading it, and I like the way the pile of pages grows. The pile is substantial right now, because I store this stuff in the vault at the museum, and I use boxes that I score free at the PO that hold two years of pages, 6 to 7 hundred of them. A friend that keeps track of things, said that I would exceed the number of words in Thoreau's journals sometime this year. Imagine that. Not that word-count is important, but there is something to be said for becoming facile. Whatever your business. Best to be good at what you do. I enjoy watching anyone who is good at anything doing whatever it is. I'll stop in the middle of the street, to watch a sewer guy pop the cast-iron grate. Seriously. I never knew how to do that. All our sunsets are haloes, why don't we stop to notice that? Fucking hummingbirds beating against the glass, I hate them, they're so violent. Read more...

Phrasing

Thinking about a mushroom pot-pie, or maybe a calzone. Don't know if Justin finished recording last Sunday or if he wants to cook next Sunday. A cold cream of squash soup would be good, doesn't sound seasonal, but I know someone who has squash from last year. The season went so late, and they've kept quite well. Real root cellar. Layered in straw and not touching each other. Excellent technique. We generated so much food in Mississippi that for four months we worked 60 hour weeks just dealing with it. Beyond self-sufficient, into enough profit to pay the bills. They were good times, we were doing it all: diary, meat, eggs, vegetables, hay, feed corn. I guess they were more like 80 hour weeks. I didn't do a lot of writing in that 10 year period, though there were about 1,000 pages of notes toward writing a book about a still deeply segregated South. Maybe it's best that they were stolen. I could have been another writer caught in that bogus issue about whether or not something 'really' happened. I'm not seeing enough dead trees for next year's firewood, so I need to go girdle a couple; break through the bark, deeply, with a hatchet, to kill them. They'll run all the stored liquid out through the leaves and be quite dry by early fall, a couple of months under cover, they'll be great to burn. Dry oak splits are pretty much the standard. I do strongly recommend that you taste an acorn from every oak tree you pass. If you find one that's sweet, try to buy that piece of property. You can live off a single tree, with a few foraged herbs, a squirrel you might kill with a thrown rock (I only throw the squirrel in as a grace note, because someone said it takes three things to make a list, I wanted a list there, structurally, because a list was required). I read what I write and alter the punctuation, almost always delete words. The guiding dictum, the word of God, is that you only say what is necessary.Not another fucking word. Commas are a specialty of mine. I'd been suspicious that I didn't understand anything, and realized it was merely a matter of notation. I don't have a very good memory, so I keep notes. I don't think they incriminate anyone. Just some notes. I like the way he docents a rill, with just the tip of an awl, it's cool, it makes sense, fit that in somewhere, moving leaves so water could flow. Drainage. Read more...

Commotion

A feral dog and a coon on the compost pile. Four-thirty in the morning. The dog looks like a cross between a Pit Bull and a German Shepard, the coon is just pissed. Appears to be no game, the dog has a ten-to-one weight advantage, but the coon has the high ground. The dog moves in slow, snarling, the coon, spitting and hissing, rears up on its butt, rakes his front paws across the dog's eyes and bites it on the nose. The best defense. Dog runs away, yipping, and the coon goes back to his broccoli. Five-forty, no reason to go back to bed, I'd never get to sleep, so I make a double espresso and soft boil a couple of eggs. A perfect soft-boiled egg has a calming effect: it requires attention and the texture is soothing; a grind of fresh pepper, a heavily buttered piece of multi-grain toast with sharp English marmalade. I used to have some egg scissors, I don't know what happened to them, left behind, somewhere, forgotten, in that drawer relegated to implements of (generally) highly specific operations. In my head, I think of it as 'The Implement Drawer', but it probably has an actual name. Now I just knock the top off of them with the knife I'm using to butter the toast. The soft-set white and liquid yolk are a wonder. Andy, our light bulb guy (and a hell of a guitarist), supplies us with hot sauce. Both D and I have a Jones for this, so we're what you might call 'a hardened audience', looking for a balance of flavor and heat. He grows his own peppers and makes a great sauce, but he'd brought both of us a green and red sauce in little nip bottles that you could carry with you (I don't know about you, but I always carry a small LED flashlight, a small book, and a small bottle of hot sauce, wherever I go), with a heads up, that this sauce, from Belize, was very hot. When you hear the phrase 'very hot' everything depends on the source. Suzanne thought bologna sandwich's on white bread with mayonnaise were pretty exotic. I have other friends that nibble extremely hot peppers when they need to stay alert for a long drive. Andy's to the left of all that. I think he's one of those people that doesn't feel pain. This new red sauce is the hottest damned thing I've ever ingested. A single drop, on a tortilla chip, my standard method of testing, and I was crying. Diana, who I trust as a critic, said that I was writing well, I don't know about that, I just try and pay attention to detail. Leave out everything else. What you're left with is a residue, almost a resin, not unlike those back waters when the river floods. That seasonal sandbar has appeared again, downstream, where the Scioto flows into the Ohio. It represents the millions of cubic feet of soil washed away. It's all about fines, and specific gravity, where things fall. Read more...

Natural World

Limited as I am, hands tied behind my back, I still feel compelled to say, the fox would never ask permission. Foxness, right? I see it clearly. Being of or like a fox. The marching band only added confusion. Our beat is out of time. Acting on a whim. Let me explain. Like that. Bursts of understanding. If we're lucky, we get the fox on tape. She was at the compost pile. Fifty% leafed out, and the blackberry is starting to bloom. A lovely invasive plant. It and sumac are the first plants anywhere there's sunlight, then the poplars shade them out. So still and lovely this morning that I drove out down the creek, went through the ford a few times, to clean the wheel wells, found a few morels by chance (I'd stopped to look at a plant I didn't recognize). I'd been thinking about plant succession up until then, but afterwards all I could think about was dinner. I'm going to have them with shallots in a cream sauce over egg noodles. A simple but delicious meal. Trish is taking off tomorrow, to make up for an extra day she worked, and Pegi has meetings and a power lunch for most of her day. TR and I holding down the fort. Put away tables and chairs, and then I wanted to stay off my feet for another day, so I went through some Carter things and read some letters. I think Mary was a better wife than mother, she's always foisting the two boys off on her mother or Uncle Harlan. Retrace my tracks going home. A thousand feet in elevation, in seven-and-a-half miles, and there's a noticeable difference in the timing, what the same plants are doing at different elevations. Myriad factors at play, a complex algorithm. You'd want to docent the run-off, during a serious rain, you'd want to docent the breaking of the bud, probably Sassafras, because it's so colorful, and I look at so many Sassafras blossoms, that I think I'm going insane. Who spends their time that way? Ten minutes can be a long time, and you have it to spare. So you try and notice everything: you can't, of course, you merely see some things.The big picture is beyond me, I merely note details; the big picture is an academic construct, it doesn't really exist. What we have are tadpoles, becoming frogs, not some metaphysical bullshit. Harvey said it best. "Seven tigers/ nothing unusual/ never mind." Read more...

Gone

Pissed. I worked all day yesterday on building a page, and it was a good one, recounting a phone call with Glenn where we talked about the next movie we wanted to do. "The Docent", in which someone like me, played by me, took tour groups, or sometimes just the camera, through things. Explained installations or situations or natural phenomena. Maybe getting some things wrong, making stuff up on the fly (pissing up a rope, as my Dad used to say), but allowing the camera to linger. Spilt milk. The page was lost to a power surge, but we probably will do the movie because Glenn gets an idea and shakes it, like a terrier might a rat. It's cool. I work well with other people, though I might complain that the combined arts are a pain in the ass. Which they are, because if there's more than one of you involved, you have to start making compromises. I did actually start the 'spring cleaning' in that it was windy day, perfect for cleaning the shop vacuum cleaner, which is a job from hell. I put three gallons of rainwater on to heat, knowing I would be dirty later, cleaned the damn machine and vacuumed corners. This was enormously satisfying. After I had worked a few hours, and cleaned up, I got a drink, rolled a smoke, went out and sat on the back stoop, another sour mash sunset, thinking life couldn't get much better than where I was right then. Just a moment in time. I might be showing Fatima the Carter nudes and talk about those last paintings of Modigliani , which are currently driving me crazy. In a sidebar I might talk about eroticism. Any port in a storm. What appears to be. Read more...

Used Up

Didn't get home until late, had to let the driveway dry out a bit, don't like driving after dark but I wanted to get home. A couple of quick drinks, wrote a couple of lines, and fell asleep in my chair, woke with a start, went to bed. Slept late, got up to pee, then fell back asleep on the sofa. That hasn't happened to me since my theater days and hundred-hour work weeks. Still groggy, so I went for a walk and found a few morels, came back home and fried them in butter, served them, with a perfect basted egg. on toast. Read a long essay on the functions of art. If you agree that art isn't useless, it actually is possible to discuss its functions, and this guy, Feldman is pretty good. In my case it keeps me out of trouble, and, for the most part, off the streets. I was thinking about architecture and design, and that got me thinking about indigenous architecture, the regionalized styles, the use of particular materials. I think about this fairly often, because I traveled so much, driven so many miles, so many times between here and Colorado. Tobacco barns in Ohio, chicken houses in Indiana, hog pens in Iowa, silos in Nebraska, wherever function is the entire point, what best serves for the lowest possible price. And I do design building in my head, you can't design and build as many houses as I have without having ideas. The shape, the space that is enclosed in a tobacco barn, leads to a thought-train about how otherwise that space might be used. I'll be driving somewhere, Kansas maybe, and see a slightly odd detail on a farm building (there are no codes in farm country, you can build any damn thing you want), like an exaggerated hip on a gable, and see clearly that it provides protection for that last wagon of hay, before it starts to rain, and what a cool idea it is. It could provide protection for a small balcony, maybe outside sliding doors from a master bedroom. Where you could sit outside and have a drink while the storm passed. Hip on a gable like an eyebrow. Consumes much of my time, a specific cantilever. I can see how to do it, that's not a problem, but I wonder what it will look like, a structure in space. Glenn mentions it is about a few things, the way I treat students as adults, the way no one is guilty, as no one holds the towel, what we thought was being said. You and your floating notebook might be caulked, strategically located, in the dark, actually, a mere shadow. Whatever you think. I just make a note, and move on. You and your markers, the droppings you left behind. I have to go. Read more...

A Little Lost

I must have missed the memo with the mission statement. What we have here, if I'm not mistaken (and that could well be the situation) is the tail wagging the dog. I'm trying to open a show, and everyone else has their eye on a different bouncing ball. Most likely, as Jerry Garcia said, I'm just "Old And In The Way", but the fact that the Celtic Dancers don't have Black Watch kilts doesn't seem that important to me. Costumes, don't get me started, are frivolous. I mean, really. I wear the same thing every day, a denim shirt and jeans, an outfit, right? I don't have to think about it. At some point today I did a kind of inventory of what people were doing, and I was appalled. Maybe I should just take a week off and address my wardrobe. Some hair extensions and a different eye shadow. Even TR said he hadn't read me for the last week and I'm thinking you can't spare three minutes a day, what the fuck is the world come to? It doesn't matter, in the great realm of things, whether or not I'm read, or even whether or not a particular show opens: nothing matters, actually. Global warming is a joke, glorified by this past non-winter, and the fact that we will run out of oil. Things are finite. Get used to it. Water is, I think, the big issue. I only have enough because I harvest rain, filter it through old tee-shirts and call it safe enough. I can digest anything, a habit I learned in Catholic School, those fucking carrots. Read more...

Some Thoughts

Building techniques spring from ingenuity and from the inherent possibilities of available materials. James Agee said "It is doubtful whether most people realize how extraordinarily slippery a liar the camera is." Reading an essay on Max Ernst I run into some words that describe some of his technique, Frottage, which is essentially making a rubbing of something and using that as the starting point for a painting; grattage, which is scratching the wet surface of a painting with a variety of implements; and decalcomania, in which wet blobs of paint are squeezed between two canvas surfaces. When I'm working the front desk, the library is only a few steps away, I sample books, look at pictures, and read essays. In the morning D and I discuss logistics, as in a month or so the shit hits the proverbial fan, and we need to be prepared. We have to pack a show that has never been packed, ship it out several days early, start accepting work for the juried local show, install same, with two weddings that interfere with, first accepting the work (that wedding is at 3:30 in the afternoon of the final day we accept work, and artists almost always work right up against the deadline, and we don't close until 5:00, so there will certainly be arrivals during the actual wedding): and the second one falls the day after the judging, when we had planned to start setting the show, we'll lose two days and have to work both days-off that week. So we need to think things through. There's a brunch concert tomorrow, that D and I didn't know about (nor did Sara), and the ladies designed the postcard announcement without consulting D and he was frigging livid when he found out. Hard to blame him, as he's the face of our graphic design and it therefore reflects on him. We have to talk through that, and I have to haul away garbage from the last two events and mop the floor before tomorrow's event, before lunch, because after that I have to be the receptionist, After lunch, the musicians arrive, following the long night of celebrating a premiere, to load their vehicles and head back to Cincy. Serious artists, it's good to talk with them, for a bit, about stage presentation and what their intentions are, when they're playing a piece by John Cage for instance, which must be intimidating. A rainy afternoon, D comes down, and we go out back for a smoke, propping the door open so we can hear if anyone comes in, and we talk about his thesis, which concerns, essentially, what constitutes a book. I'm just a sounding board, because I cling to paper, in truth I love the smell, of paper, it doesn't have to do, completely, with information, but with the experience of reading, which, for me, involves turning pages, and physical bookmarks, on which I make notes. Old-school crap, to which I'm addicted. It's just the way I work. Read more...

Two Events

Two events in two nights and three tours in between, and tomorrow I have to cover the desk for TR because the second event was new music (a Cage piece and two pieces of TR's music) and he'll be out late partying with the musicians. A decent crowd that was appreciative of some fairly strange sounds. Found instruments and snatches of tape. One of the guys, Austin, did a talk, earlier, about percussion and found instruments, and for the performance, the stage was crowded with bottles and cans and various pieces of metal, racks of suspended objects and a great many implements with which to strike them. Exhausted by the end of the concert, a week of being on my feet almost the entire time. I like Fatima, so touring her classes was an enjoyable interlude, Three classes through the entire museum in one day is a push, but I made it fun for the kids, and Fatima jumped right in with information and questions. She stopped me, to talk, after the third tour, and said that she was frankly amazed at my enthusiasm and depth of knowledge. I reminded her that I installed the shows, and told her that I read very fast and that the museum had a great library. Finding out about things is pretty much all I do. But I also knew several other things that she meant, so it was an interesting conversation. We'd connected several times during the tours: she'd start something, or I would, and the other one would finish the thought. The kids see that something is going on. They're not quite fast enough to keep up with it, they don't have a lifetime of art history, even, probably, the vocabulary, to understand what's happening, but they notice it. And that's the first step, riight? noticing. So if someone you're interested in is having a conversation with a person that you, in a million years, would never talk about, We could ask what you wanted for breakfast, ask your opinion, what do you say? What do you want for breakfast? Read more...

Almost Done

Again, if there was a schedule, other than my mental calculations, I'd be where I need to be. Surprised myself. Everything installed. D came in after I had left yesterday, and lit the show, put up the vinyl signage. He even focused lights on places where I hadn't yet hung paintings and got them almost exactly right. All I had to do was nudge them a bit. The show looks great. The first time, for most of these kids, that their work is treated professionally; lights, labels, and perfect alignment centered at 57 inches. I have to finish putting the labels on the wall and take a couple of loads of packing materials, and tools, the job-box, to the basement. One small drawing got lost, but we found it, TR did, in the bottom of a box, covered by another box, in Pegi's office. I have a place to hang it, but it's no big deal, ten minutes. Leo came in and got out the tables and chairs, and the big screen, for the power-point presentation of awards at the reception. I might stay for the beginning of that, because I know some of the kids (of course, they're not really kids), and for the display of personality. I almost remember being that young and acting out whatever it was. It's good to be ahead, because I need to think about taking three tours through on Friday, what I'm going to say. This is a new teacher at the college, and I want to engage her, and her students. I'm going now to fry a perfect egg, and have it on buttered toast, with what you might call a morel sauce. A thing I do with wild mushrooms and butter, black pepper and an herb, you can take this any direction you want, this particular one is just a couple of scallions, a fried egg on top; this is so good, I eat two of them, just to prove my point. Good eggs and wild mushrooms are an unbeatable combination. Whatever you do. You could serve this on the sole of an old boot. Pre-chewed walrus hide isn't that bad, assuming there was someone willing to pre-chew. Walrus cracklings are ok, but always taste a bit muddy. What I like about finishing a hog on whey and corn, so that the meat was so sweet, it was almost unbelievable, sugars are so water soluble that they all come off in the whey.You can cook this down, to a great spreadable cheese, if you have a wood cookstove going all day, otherwise, you couldn't afford it. You have to stir it a lot. but that isn't a problem for me, I stir as a matter of course. Old paint, and more recent girlfriends, it's an amalgam of sticky situations. Still, it's awkward that no one comes forward to accept the blame. Maybe I'm wrong. Read more...

Exhausted

Didn't realize how tired I was until I fell asleep in my chair. When I woke, cramped, hungry, and needing to pee, a beautiful three-quarters waning moon right outside my window. It seemed personal. Very quiet and it takes me a few minutes to hear that the wind has stopped blowing. A couple of deer, prancing in the leaf-duff, is a distinctive sound; a few frogs, but isolated, not the cacophonous symphony of a mating ritual. It's cold in the house, so I put on my bathrobe and Linda's hat. Something was bothering me. I didn't know exactly what, but I know myself well enough to recognize the symptoms, so I rolled a smoke and got a drink: I can afford to pay attention. TR did the math for a couple of wall sections, and I was happy for the help, my brain was winding down. There was a noise in the background, inside the museum (which is practically soundproof), and it was Pegi and Cirque Trish rehearsing a number in the theater. What had bothered me was that I was hanging a show, and I was booking tours, and that I was the only one in the building with the interests of the museum at heart. Everyone else was working on ancillary (from my point of view) projects. I'm hanging a fucking show here, and I'm docenting three groups through the Carters on Friday. Please, please, don't get in my way. I can be a prick, I know, but some things are sacrosanct. The holiness of language, for one, and the sanctity of a certain space. Well said, I think. Just another well-spoken arrogant bastard in point of fact. One thing I never do is pretend. I was pretty sure I could hang this show today and I actually exceeded my expectations. Cool, right? to be ahead of schedule, no longer the runt sucking hind tit. A phrase I picked up in Mississippi that may or may not be germane. Pegi had no idea what was actually going on at the museum, she didn't have a clue, and I realized I had to make this possible. Which I can do, but I'm tired, I've been on my feet for days and my patience is running thin. I'll do it, not because I want to, but because I can.

Tom

Almost arrogant, the bullshit you listen to.
Read more...

Installation

Big winds sound like a fright-train on the ridgetop. Lost power last night, read by oil-lamp until the susurration of the wind put me to sleep. To the museum early on Monday, TR joined me for the morning. We took down the photography show and wrapped it. After lunch he left. I stripped hardware, patched & repaired, sanded, painted the walls, then painted the two extra pedestals that were needed for 3-D work. Long day, sore feet, but I'm kind of on the schedule that I set out for myself, and as long as somebody else sets up for the opening reception I should be fine. Today I had the lights on, hanging art work at 8:30. You chose a wall, run the numbers twice, and hang the pieces. Doing it alone is quite different from doing it with another person. When D and I hang a show together (as we have, dozens) I do the numbers and he hangs the work; when TR and I work together, he runs the numbers and I do the hanging. When you're working alone you have to wear a couple of hats and switch modes. It's more than twice as fast to do this with two people, which is just an observation, because I actually like doing everything myself, unless the piece is so large or heavy that it absolutely requires another person. Not a complaint, is what I mean. And as it turns out time is not a factor, because I got 40 of the 50 pieces installed today, and TR is going to be there all day tomorrow, so we can clean up and do the labels, finish the show with most of a day to spare. Which is always a factor in my equations, because something will happen. Interrupted a couple of times today, both of them perfect interruptions. I needed to un-focus. Two of Lane's students needed to tour the folk-art show, and I respect Lane and his knowledge, and am flattered that he knew I'd take his students through; then the new hire in the art department, Fatima, came over and asked if I'd take three of her classes through the entire museum on Friday. I readily agree because Sharee had asked to be specifically available if Fatima asked to bring her classes over. I am the docent of choice, mostly because I read a lot and talk a line of talk. I love that last postscript, good form. The wind is increased to a gale. If these young leaves weren't so firmly attached, we'd be looking at fall again. Finn again. I spend a lot of time in an Irish pub, it's hard not to become Irish.

Tom

I cooked some morels, nothing special, some butter, salt and pepper, served them on an angel-hair pasta, there was a fresh, green, Mexican herb I'm forgetting. a different taste, an oregano. Read more...

Simple Narrative

Claude Levi-Strauss said "The idea of beauty can take curious shapes." An essay on him in the London Review Of Books had me rereading favorite passages. The last chapter in the four volume "Mythologiques" is a masterpiece. It's also 70 pages of difficult, complex prose. His big book on Kinship was published by my mentor in the book business at Beacon Press. There's a great little book, an 'introduction' to him, by Octavio Paz. Opened a filing drawer today, I had forgotten what was in it, filled with manuscripts, mostly by poet friends, but I found the first three chapters of my book about building this house. One of the manuscripts stolen in the fire-proof lockbox taken years ago. Nearly killed me at the time, over two thousand single-spaced pages. I wept. I had to read the chapters, they'd been read by a friend and sent back, so there were marginal notes. I was in good form. I like the language, the way it lapses into the patois of construction, and the way things are explained. I was working on the final chapter, about building the stairs, when I was robbed. I never drew a set of plans for this house, I just wrote every night about specifically what I needed to do the next day. So the book completely documented building a house, working, usually, by myself, thinking about things. It holds up well. It was such a labor, building and writing, that as soon as I moved in I stopped working on that manuscript, and wrote a much shorter funny thing, the only copy of which was stolen in the same box. As luck would have it, I've only ever recovered one of the nine sections from that book. The third thing stolen was the Mississippi Book, or, at least the sample chapters and all my research, pages of word-lists and colloquial sayings. Some pages of that were published in small-press mags, but it's almost wholly gone, I can just catch a glimpse of what I was thinking. Mostly, what I write now are single-sitting events, about what happened just a few hours ago, I only make up what I need to, to fill in the gaps, and bridge the parts where I don't actually want to say what happened. Some things are left better secret. You can leave out almost everything and still string a narrative. You don't have to include everything, we're missing a main character here, and it doesn't seem to matter. Who's asking the questions? I think I deserve an answer.

Tom

The inverted tale of the maiden and the frog, you know that one, where the frog becomes angry and kills the entire wedding party. The moral, or narrative, is that you can't spring sudden changes without unexpected consequences. Frogness requires certain traits, adaptive and provisional. Who you slither with and where. How phenomena unfold. The old frog, years later, sitting on his back porch, having a drink and smoking an expensive cigar, turned to the young frog, just losing his tail, and told him to not run, but to walk down, and fuck them all. You read a lot of CLS and it messes with your mind. The way things flip. Which is true, accurate, according to the way we observe the world. How things become their opposite. The situation becomes charged with the energy of the transformation. Intense love, for instance, might become intense hatred, where it's the intensity that matters. The way you might come around to a different point of view. Somehow I've changed Whip-Poor-Will into Chick Corea and it's working better. Solutions to life's little problems, and the moonlight is great, paints a scene. At least spills over. The way things change. This is it, it's a zit, pretty baby, whatever, toenails you wouldn't believe. I'd better go, ranging far afield. Read more...

Planned Events

I don't have an agenda, or even a schedule; my calendar is usually flipped to the month before last, because I liked the picture. An outhouse in Alaska or a very large catfish someone caught in China. Staying current is a concept I struggle with, though every two weeks I know what day it is, because it's written on my check, and I note that, somewhere in my brain, use it as a referent. What day this is, what I need to be doing; and in small talk at the pub, I'll occasionally notice what day of the week it is, and make a check mark, at random, as if something made sense. It's a joke, right? assuming. Drew sent me a quote that indicated whip-poor-wills never drank water, they just sucked the fluids from insects, and went their merry way. I've watched whip-poor-wills drink from a puddle, so I know this is a conceit, whatever you want to believe. I'm no judge, heaven forbid, the world is a wide and various space, but I do tend to notice things. Meaghan went home and cleaned up before her weekend with TR; that girl, at Market Street, has a beautiful ass; the poplar buds, on the ridge, are fully erupted. Spring is sprung, sing goddamn. Read more...

Another Saturday Night

New person making the Saturday burrito and we had to talk her through it. Then a smoke out back, D catching me up on the thesis trek. Then over to the University to check out the student show which was ok but not great. Then freighted the whole "Visually Literate" show upstairs and unpacked it. Spent several hours arranging that, around on the floor. We had to get that done today, while D was there, despite the fact that I'll have to move almost everything so I can take the photography show down on Monday, and patch and repair and paint. So, two extra days this week. I did the labels yesterday, and have most of them trimmed. D will have to meet me one day after work so we can light the show. Spent most of the afternoon repairing or altering attachment devices, and figuring out how some odd pieces could best be displayed. It's going to be a crunch on getting it all done, but I can stay late if I need to. The high school show might be better than the college show. Fairly subjective judgement, but three of us agreed (TR was at the reception desk), and I think I'll probably buy a piece out of the show. There's a painting of a chicken that I quite like, and a drawing of a tree, both handsome works, but I'll withhold final judgement until they're hung and lit. I have a plan for getting everything done, but it involves a monster Monday and my feet hurt already. Tomorrow's a sofa day. Chicken pot pie and a book on bridges. I'll go out once, to pick a few morels, but I fully intend to spend the day in slippers. Just soup and crackers at lunch, cream of broccoli, and I was hungry going home, wanted to write as soon as I got in the door, so I stopped at the Diary Bar and got a fish sandwich and some jalapeno poppers; I'd eaten everything, by the time I'd gotten home, food all across my shirt. I stopped at the lake, stopped to look at a bush that I couldn't identify, stopped to admire the dappled light cutting across the road. This time of year I'm a terrible driver to be behind. I pull over as often as I can, to let people by, but everyone is in such a hurry that I'm an inconvenience. What did Garcia say? old, and in the way. I actually have charts of where certain wildflowers occur when; and like an Iris, for instance, you can tell, from the color, when you need to add a couple of rusty nails. Fuck a bunch of mystery. Almost everything is clear. For the rest, devil take the hindmost. Read more...

Full Moon

I always forget the goat-suckers and their rather trying song. The repetition would strain the patience of a saint. Nightjar, whip-poor-will, pain in the brain if you have to get up to pee, because you can never get back to sleep. And I have the first of the logistical nightmares upcoming starting tomorrow and though I had decided to not think about it, I can't not. It's not that big a deal and just means I have to work Saturday and Monday, which I don't mind, because I'll be working in a museum, installing art, which is fine. Even working with very cool people, it occasionally happens that wires get crossed, or that something unexpected intrudes. Your daughter is visiting or someone is getting married and plans have to change. I'm nothing if not flexible. The fly in the ointment is opening "Visually Literate" on Thursday next. The photography show doesn't close until the museum closes Saturday (today, as it happens), the photographs have to come off the walls, the hardware has to be stripped, the walls have to be patched, repaired, and painted, and the new show has to be installed by Thursday. Theoretically, I don't start doing any of this until I go to work on Tuesday. I trust you see the problem, can't be done. Logistical nightmare, like I said. I have an algorithm for logistical nightmares because they've been a part of my life forever, and you learn to live with certain conditions, adjust, shift the fucking paradigm. I tell D we have to take the Photography Show down one hour early, so I can remove the hardware and patch the holes, then, if I come in and paint on Monday, I can install the show, with TR (whatever his schedule is), on Tues and Weds, set up and open on Thursday, and then a concert on Friday. Pretty sure we can do this. D will need to come in for an hour, sometime, to focus lights. I suspect I'll be a little manic for the next couple of days. They don't really pay me enough to do this. The logistical shit. But I like doing it. Solving problems is better than just sitting on your ass. I'll come back in on Monday and paint, then address the various issues of the installation. All right, got that done (in my head), I'd better grab some sleep. Actually I intend to sleep in tomorrow, listen to NPR, have a morel omelet, read a book, after I get done with today. Not a problem. I'll do the things that I can do today, and then it'll be tomorrow. I'm having trouble keeping track of time. 2/4, right? it doesn't get any easier than that, but what is thrown in your face is 13/14 and you're not prepared for the odd numbers. The question is whether or not to send. Come on, we're not young anymore. Doesn't mean we can't rock and roll. This moon, cutting across my visual field, is an awakening, something about the light, the pearl-like detractions, like nothing I've ever seen. I may have to stop writing entirely. At some point, just seeing something is enough to make you believe.

Tom

Curious what that meant.
Read more...

Stratification

The ridge is about a week between town in springness. A thousand feet higher. Which is about right using what I think of as the Colorado Index. That every thousand feet is a bench mark, where things are different. A hundred shades of green. I can still see the forest floor on the ridge across the hollow, in a week it'll be gone and I'll start that season in which I am completely encased in green. The oaks are breaking bud, only the hickory and the black walnut are lagging behind, as usual, but they never make a mistake. The oaks have their ass covered, they have an entire second set of buds, waiting in the wings. Frost warning tonight, but it won't frost on the ridge, the heavier cold air flows down into the hollows, I escape at least four frosts in the fall and another four in the spring, but as a consequence of being so exposed, unprotected, the winters can be hell. I have to go to Wal-Mart and I'm wondering when the best time would be. I have to go because I need some new underclothes and I just got my second goddamn Wal-Mart gift card in appreciation for taking several groups through the museum. Coin of the realm, right? the Wal-Mart gift card. And I might as well use them. I think I'll hit the store at eight in the morning, grab six boxer briefs, the style I prefer, and six tee-shirts, be on my way, stop for a breakfast burrito and still be at work by nine. Commando foray into the world of commerce. I can do it, I just have to remember where I park so I can make good my escape. Getting by isn't all that hard, if you're willing to give up running water and companionship. I don't actually live in a tree-tip pit, however much I might fantasize about how I should or one day might. My mind is working faster than my fingers, so a certain incoherency creeps in. I hate it when that happens, because I always try and take a few notes, and I can never read them later. They're squiggles. They don't signify anything except the attempt to keep notes. I'll have to think about that. Meaning is mostly hidden in plain sight. Daffodils where a house used to be. You know what I mean, no reason for an elaborate explanation, the past is a bucket of ashes. The best poem he ever wrote, trailing off his lips, was what he had said to me several days before, about the dogwoods in Mississippi, that occasional pink one. Read more...

Magic Realism

What a moon. So much light I thought it was morning. The moon appears often in the work of Thomas Hart Benton, and Carter's work is hardly complete without a sliver. Probably means more than the passing of time. And the way figures are enjambed into the foreground. Again, with that implied narrative. You could put together a powerful show of Benton and Carter. I should have gone back to bed, but I spied the second bag of pistachios and got a short drink, rolled a smoke. I think about the anti-modern movement, how Benton and Carter should have gone into those ancient caves with Picasso and Braque. Eight ounces of pistachios is a serving size. I'm making a pate for the "Cream Of The Crop" opening, a forcemeat, actually, and I'll put them in that. Shallots, butter, wine, nuts, various spices including a pinch of a new green powder from New Mexico that reminds me of a period of time when Marilyn and I made different mustards almost every day. That's probably another story. Some slightly kinky things. The base of the pate will be the big three: equal parts chicken livers, mushrooms, and ground pork. All cooked separately with garlic and butter, and watercress, if I can find it, then processed together into a paste, smeared on crackers. In truth, a lot of people don't like this, but the people that do like it actually clamor for more. I'm promised single-malt scotch and a particular California zinfandel that my closest friends know makes me salivate. The problem is it trashes the kitchen. Every cast-iron skillet, the blender, all the bowls, it's a fucking mess. Takes me maybe two hours of solid attention to make this 'spread' and at least another hour, and five gallons of water, to clean up. What I think of as a dear product. I'll make it for myself maybe once or twice a year, and there are half a dozen people I'd make it for on request, because they'd have a duck, or just killed a pig, or had something they wanted to eat that they didn't know how to cook. Enough butter and I can make a spread from anything. Probably not that healthy, but I'm from that school that says it's probably better to occasionally indulge yourself. Let your hair down and tie one on, at least once in a while. Enjamb yourself into the foreground. Pistachios are not a meal, it's not brain surgery, nonetheless. We know we're going to die anyway. Paint that. I'm on a deadline here, it's already tomorrow. Read more...

Staging Day

The next dance starts tomorrow. The last of "Visually Literate" came in today and some of it will be difficult to display. It's always a challenge because the kids tend to attempt the impossible, or maybe they don't know what is possible, stuff that's too heavy, stuff that's not acceptably rigged for hanging, the wrong kind of glass (makes them difficult to light), too delicate, too sharp (really common), and often poorly assembled. It's a juried show, and Sharee was a bit unhappy about the selection. The judge makes the show. I was running late, odd for me, and had forgotten I'd agreed to docent two groups of art students through the Carters. Very good tours, both groups were interested and engaged. Their teacher was a local boy, I know him fairly well, Charlie, he's a fine painter himself. He'd given the students some background, we talked about techniques and mediums. Several hours of this and I was used up, so had a huge lunch late at the pub, steakburger and fries (with mayo instead of ketchup), and chatted with John The Barkeep about the Masters. Satisfying day. Drove home slowly on back roads because it's so beautiful. The Forest Service roads are in good shape because of the mild winter and I usually don't encounter another soul. I can just stop in the road, to get out and look at something closely. I picked up another large cheap magnifying glass that I keep in the truck. Several times a Park Ranger has stopped to see what I'm looking at. They all recognize me at this point, know where I live, know some of my interests. There's what you might call a free flow of information. Today I was examining young oak galls, about which I'm fairly knowledgeable, and one of the guys stopped next to my truck, on his way home, too. He had a cold six-pack, and made the universal sign for 'do you want one of these' to which I made the universal acknowledgement, he came over and we sat on the tailgate. These people, the Rangers, are mostly very bright, they bring a lot to the tailgate. We talked about oaks, exclusively, I told him about eating leached acorns and he was all over it, an instant convert; and, in just a short walk, he showed me the way in which oaks morph, accepting characteristics from different species. I think of it as docenting in the woods. Arrived home with a slight buzz and a list of words I needed to look up. This is an almost daily drill, not the buzz so much as the list of words. If I don't spend some time, every day, in an unabridged dictionary, I start getting a rash between my toes. It doesn't make any sense, but it seems true, nonetheless; maybe I scratch when I'm confused, but it's true. I keep a record of things, so I know when what happens. A habit, right? Tight collar and a crucifix. Jodi got my taxes back to me, with pre-addressed envelopes and little stickers that showed me where to sign. She has chickens in a show this weekend, they raise varietal chickens, and they hadn't been shampooed yet, so she was going home to do that. I can't help but notice, from the way she'd organized my returns, that she'd realized, in many ways, I'm an idiot. It's perfect, because I am, and the way she did it is absolutely perfect, fool-proof, even for someone who can lose pages of text. 
 
Tom
 
And start another, what are going to do? Read more...

Dimly Mirrored

The past is a bucket of ashes. Just enough moonlight to glimpse a shad-bush out of the corner of your eye. You can't see anything, it's dark and you're not a cat. You might wish to be, strangers in the night, but the truth is much more boring, bagels clashing. I'm only attached to any of this in so far as I can actually move, which same is severely limited by the mummy-bag in which I find myself restrained. Life, as we know it. You must have noticed that the big show is fairly lame. The fault, I think, is completely logistical; given a different body, or a different place, you'd be completely different. Like shooting squirrels in a washtub, no, wait, like shooting fish in a barrel, nothing makes much sense. An exercise in futility, like reading Beckett's letters. What's not said. I'm a master of the pregnant pause, in truth because I lose my place, there's no higher calling, no "Fountainhead" thing going on. I simply forget what I was saying. Pegi, or TR, or Sara might say something that snaps me back to attention, but life is really about whether or not you can find morels. Not to draw too fine a line. I found so many, mushrooms on toast and a mushroom omelet before I think of a marinara with mushrooms on cornmeal mush. If you don't collect wild mushrooms yourself, you couldn't understand this connection. We're talking morels here. I had so many that I dried a batch and still ate as many as I wanted. Which is cool, because reconstituted morels, in cream, on pasta, is one of the great things you might ever eat. But it's a seasonal thing, not unlike herring roe or wild asparagus. So you accept a certain grace and lead with your tongue. It's not even a difficult equation: A then B and C follows. The audience might gasp, but we knew all along that I'd defer to anyone that had a clue. My nature, and the nature of the game. Read more...

Squall Lines

Power out last night, intense squall lines moving through, but enough wind that the driveway is passable. Stopped for a pint at the pub, tonight, and ended up staying for two, both bought by others. I must be good pub company because a lot of people buy me pints or a shot of Paddy. The last time I stayed to listen to music, my entire tab was the tip I left Astra. Sharee started bringing in the Best Of High Schools art show, yearly event, "Visually Literate", which is always fun and easy to criticize, a lot of angst and depression. At lunch time a large tour group came in, the art classes from the Catholic High School, and their teacher, Anisha, ask me to docent them. Wasn't on the calendar and no warning, but I was the only person there and couldn't go out for lunch anyway. A good time. I took them through the entire museum, every exhibit, and was in rare form for an hour and a half, interacting and making them laugh. I'm the cool art guy, as Anisha calls me, because I'm anecdotal and use a few naughty words. The kids lap it up. This batch was particularly interactive, and a handful of them were quite sharp. Two of the boys asked some very good questions about the valuation of folk art, and one of the girls very quickly pointed out the two photographs, in that exhibit, that aren't photo-shopped. I lost them for a bit in the Carters, until we got to the later work, where there's an egg in everything, and they wondered what was up with that. I gave a five minute lecture on life and death, touching on all the major points. They were quite attentive. One of the two boys (I have to smile, that phrase is so like one of my favorites, in a story I tell about Juan Of The Two Beauties) touched me on the elbow on their way out, and asked me how I knew all that shit. I told him to read a book a day for 60 years. Pegi yelled out, on the Appalachian Telegraph, 'when was the "Snap Shot" show' and I immediately yelled back that it was March to May, 2004, and TR yelled back that he hoped to God I was reading that, and didn't just remember. Where Glenn and I started, all those years ago: to recall is not same as to call. Fucking whip-o-wills. I always forget. My older daughter calls, and we have a great conversation about hops and beer; and I barely have time to roll a smoke and get a drink before the phone rings again, and it's Sara from Hilton Head and they got the painting back, unpacked, and hanging on the wall. They love it, it's a great painting, and they went to great pains to explain how they appreciated our packing it for transport. Clay and I talked about hacking apart "Henry The Fourth, Part One" into a pub drama, I petitioned him to come up with a script. I'm excited about this, as long as someone else does the actual work. Ideas, as they say, are a dime a dozen. For recreation, I build houses in my head, complex structures that involve joints that haven't been invented yet, or knots that haven't been tied. What I do, is simply come up with solutions. In a weird way it relaxes me, figuring how the load is carried, like there was an algorithm for a complex variable that I didn't understand.
 
Tom
 
I wish I'd bought that two pound bag of pistachios, several hours ago. They, really, are the only thing I'm after. Read more...

Added Tax

I don't know what to say, it seems apparent enough, that the world is an illusion, nothing is what it seems. Thunder, I'd better go to.bed. I breathe into my cupped hands, it seems to make a difference, but really, the rolling thunder is the statement. What's said. You can hover around any number of issues, but at the end it's you and a bunch of Redbuds, some Shad and a few Dogwoods, the verge is lifted to new heights. It happens, occasionally, in my world. I have to go, a squall line moving through. Then quiet and still. Try to sleep in, tired all last week, but the thought of morels on toast gets me up soon enough. Fabulous breakfast, another cup of coffee, a long essay on Turner. Several issues of the London Review Of Books. As is often the case on Sunday and Monday, I don't say a word to anyone. I have to get my tax stuff to TR's mom, Jodi, tomorrow, and next weekend I have to start Spring Cleaning, as the dust is starting to get to me (and I'm the most dust resistant person I know). The squirrels are out in force, I've never seen so many of them this time of year. They seem to like the buds on Hickory trees. I walked the ridge top, the new leaves are so soft and velvety. Even the first batch of frogs is going to make it, and those eggs were laid in February, but I am going to drain the puddles, as soon as they are gone, and buy some fill. I have a large amount of firewood I need to get to the woodshed, and I'm tired, frankly, of carrying everything an extra 100 yards. The walking is good for me, but I'm going to walk anyway, I just don't want to carry forty pounds of water or a fifty pound log anymore. Training for the Pioneer Olympics is becoming a thing of the past. My records stand. Just let me out the side door before they're broken. Easy to say things might have been different, but there's no proof anything would be. In most systems, things stay the same. Read more...

Planting Trees

What could the matter be? I don't even remember today, something about something I remembered doing, then cloud cover obscured the sun. I was planting trees, on the opposite ridge. Nothing special, some sugar maple maybe the next generation would enjoy, and some birches that tend to cluster. Probably some deer will graze them, and they'll die as infants, a succulent mouthful. Nothing more. The wind stirs the leaves. Simple geometry, the wind, and dust devils. I find it hard to believe I'm being taken seriously now, after all these years. I assume they're just taking me for what I am, but I don't know for sure. Maybe something is expected. I can't imagine what. That I'd know what I couldn't possibly know, or that things would take a different turn, somehow things could spin mid-stream. a back-water, an eddy or something, and go back the same way, and sense would emerge. The chance is remote, but hope springs eternal. Everything is covered with pollen, to move is to sneeze, and the gentle breath of even a muted breeze stirs a winter's dust. I'm pretty sure it's night because it's dark and there's a half moon setting. Leave well enough alone. I have to shave, tomorrow, and wash my privates, but for now, I just scratch myself like a ball player and call it good enough. If you listen to "Moby Dick", a very good recording, is it the same as a book? What is text? I have to call Glenn. Whenever I'm not sure, I call Glenn. Reality check. Making sense is a relative thing. Text is a slippery subject and Glenn is one of the few people I trust when it comes to what's said. We share a passion for Melville. Read more...

Midnight Confessions

Never not nothing. Brain dead, I'd been reading all day, and I was tired. A screeching cat-fight woke me, two coons fighting over a rotten banana. Spare me the spats where nothing is at stake. Illuminated by their glowing red eyes, I shot between them with a load of rock salt from a shotgun and they scampered off in a hell of a hurry. Half a moon, maybe two in the morning, but the blast blinded and shocked me into consciousness. The smell of cordite. I drink my juice directly from the carton anymore, living alone, why should I bother washing glasses that aren't necessary? My hands are shaking a bit, but I manage to roll a smoke; I want to listen to some music, to get my hearing back, and I put on Clapton covering Robert Johnson. 'Crossroads", Clapton is so good, then I dig back through the pile and listen to Johnson, then Son House, then Skip James. Listening to the blues, you find a part of yourself, identify an aspect you don't like to talk about that is very real, where you hurt the most. Given that we all hurt, those slings and arrows. Amazing we're not dead. Longevity is mostly genetics, so maybe we were merely designed to fulfill a pathic function. It's nice, in the spring, to see the cherry blossoms. Winter is a killing floor. The noir quality of it all, black and white sunk to a dirty gray, then, suddenly, color. Walt Disney. But also Blind Lemon Jefferson and Mississippi John Hurt. A slack lead guitar. Anything in G, where the minor pitfalls, the petty differences are shed, and everything is reduced to the dregs in a glass of wine. Not that I'm depressed, or like to hear depressing things, but it assumes the cloak of the mythic, and hearing that story again restores my faith. Hard to not sound pessimistic, but that the various gods had suffered, and that allowed us to hike up our pants and get along down the road. Slept for a few hours then got up at dawn, when the orange light fairly blasted through the east windows. I brewed a mug of coffee strong enough to resurrect a dead mule, built a small fire against the morning chill. The radio was such an intrusion that I couldn't even listen to the news. Someone made the finals of a tournament. My attention was drawn to the growth pattern of Sumac, the second-year plant especially. The first year stalk is a five or six foot tall stick, with tight buds along its length, but when the notion of spring occurs, the very end of the stick explodes into a kind of crown, the first leaves in a fan of feathers. Soon I'm shuffling along outside, in my slippers and bathrobe, examining the tips of an invasive weed with a magnifying glass. Invasive is probably too strong a word, call it, rather, opportunistic. A Towhee threatens to drive me crazy with its song, but it's nice to have the song birds back, after a winter diet of crows. I made a porridge overnight in the crock-pot, good stone-ground grits and the last of the acorn meal, I finish a scoop of these with excellent English double-cheddar in the microwave, because making cheese-grits in the crock-pot is an impossible mess, and top them with a perfect fried egg. Store-bought eggs, because TR absconded with my last dozen farm-fresh. Bastard. But such is life, you line up a good supply of eggs, and suddenly the intermediary develops an appetite. Go figure. I'm working on an algorithm that would provide the greatest happiness within any given context, and it allows for a disruption in the flow of eggs, but I never thought it would be so quickly questioned. No then yes, yes then no, a simple binary, but when you apply it to real life, everything is called into question. Whether or not you should have another cup of coffee. Whether or not you should kill a co-worker. Whether or not you should make it look like a suicide or the work of a serial killer. The crows are outside, and I have a couple of dead mice for them. They're so insistent, but I love the way light plays off that apparent black. Iridescence. Where all colors are revealed. Not a rainbow exactly, but something close, a color chart, that swatch-book from Porter Paints. I tweak what I write as I go along, aligning grammar and syntax, not always an easy chore, sometimes I lose what I'm saying by changing a single mark of punctuation, but that's just the cost of doing business. I was looking for shark's teeth once, down near St. Augustine, and I had found a particularly fine tooth, several million years old, some particularly predator shark, I can't remember it's exact name, that had prowled these waters, those waters, sorry, in the day. Now, what do you think? Was that an innocent glimpse or something more? Song birds are already driving me crazy. Spring is sprung, sing goddamn. Read more...