Elucubration

To produce (mostly literary) work by long and intensive effort. A lovely word. You see all those other words inside it. Joyce was so fond of the pun, he'd often go out of his way to make a connection. I make a point of not doing that. If I had my choice, I'd just try and bring us back to the real. You, with another nudge in a liberal direction, but it was John Paul, who changed his vote. As I'm am outsider, nothing I say makes a difference. Thank god. You wouldn't believe what I thought anyway. That even Bush's appointment would lean toward labor. The moon peeping through a break in the trees, no wind, a few stars. Yes, I do have power, and no, I don't have a phone, the lines come in from different directions, and there are completely different crews. This will create another backlog piece, where the tense gets confusing, but it so nice to be sitting in my chair, looking out at a familiar landscape. Ninety-one degrees, inside; turn on the AC, put away groceries and laundry, waiting for Black Dell to chill out. I read a profile of Nicolas Serota, director of the various Tate galleries in England. A major mover in modern art circles. England was incredibly resistant to modern art, as it threatened their world, which had ended with Turner. The tense is difficult, in these back-logged pieces, because I'm both in and out; days later, of course, everything is in the past. But there's an immediacy, in the moment, that seems very present. I want that confusion to be apparent, because it is. Tense is tricky. If our narrator tells something in the present, then he uses present tense, even though the actual event is history. Read Procopius, "The Secret History", makes you wonder what was really going on. History is a construct. A fact is watching the legs emerge that change a tadpole into a frog. Things happen. You can either watch the things or read the commentary. Neither is better, I tend toward a middle way, where I try and balance the two. I watch a lot and read. Habits. Hobbits, tree-tip pits. Meaning must have a place in this. Now it's the next day, and the phone company swears I'll have a phone by the time I get home from work. More late afternoon squall lines expected for the next couple of days. D's truck isn't starting and we spend time trying to jump it, the AC guys come and the fins need cleaning on the roof-top units, which means running water from the kitchen, out the door, and up three floors. All the couplings leak, so the back hallway is a dreadful mess, the inter-net is down, and Wendy calls from Columbus, she's bringing twelve docents down on Wednesday, the 25th, for their Carter tutorial. I'll be with them most of the day. It certainly will be interesting. It was silly of me to think there wasn't a name for Friday's storm, even though it is generic. These clear-air phenomena, what they're called is "Derecho", which is a Spanish word meaning 'straight'. The way the wind comes at you. In meteorology it means a hard-assed, violent, convective wind storm. It's so cool to find that word, which I had never heard before. I've never been a good speller, but I have a good memory for the sound of a word and I can usually tease out the meaning from context. Google is my friend. In many ways I'm just a fact-checker, which justifies the countless hours chasing down a word. Now I can just look up, when I hear the wind in the trees, mutter 'Derecho' under my breath, and sign off.