Free Range

Silent explosions of snow out of the trees, mid-afternoon the overcast breaks into patches of blue and intense light, and then the crystalline nature of snow becomes incredibly beautiful. I work outside for a while, but it's fairly brutal, blowing snow filling every crevice of clothing and cold hands finally drive me back indoors. If it clears completely, as it's threatening to do, tonight could be very cold; so, after a mug of tea, I close off the upstairs with an old comforter. Brought my sleeping bag downstairs and I'll sleep on the sofa. I have a good reading lamp there (I don't have one upstairs, because I almost never read there) and since I finished the Sandford this morning I scour my shelves. I have about 300 linear feet of bookshelves, arranged in no particular order. Most of the individual bays are about four feet long and the shelves are all back supported, and made from either one inch thick oak or five-quarter pine, and they don't sag, even when overloaded. Since I use and relocate books constantly, I get familiar with each of the bays and I can usually find what I'm looking for. But I was roaming around, and found a book I didn't know I had. The usual routine is that I have a place where I stack new and old books that I haven't read, and books live there until I read them and then either give them to the Goodwill or find them a home in the stacks. This book should have been in that pile. I know it's from the Goodwill, because of the 59 cent label and the fact that part of the cover is cut off. Long way around. but the be-all is that I'll be reading "The Collected Stories Of Wallace Stegner" for the next couple of days. I've read a lot of them, but I didn't know I had a copy of The Collected. A few birds, as the sunlight emerges. A raucous pair of crows and a Pileated Woodpecker that weathers several showers of ice crystals that he actually generates with his insistent hammering. I need an egg-poacher pan, because I'm not very good at swirling the water and dropping an egg in, they end up a mess, and I tend to top a great many things with an egg. At lunch today I made a batch off instant mashed potatoes, the Ida-Reds are wonderful. It's supposed to be four servings, but it's three for me, and two for most of my friends. I had a serving at lunch, with butter and black pepper, then for dinner I took the second third and dished it out with the back of a tablespoon and nuked it while I poached an egg in a metal measuring cup, suspended on a coat-hanger rack above boiling water. Crude, but the result was perfect. I've long extolled the virtues of egg yolk as sauce. The cold encourages a nap, and as soon as it's dark I sleep for a couple of hours, then get up to stoke the fire, a piece of an oak table top (The Year Of Burning Furniture) and a stick of Osage Orange. The moon has broken free of the trees to the east, still almost full, behind a hazy overcast. Moon-dogs at twenty-two-and-a-half degrees, and the clouds are illusioned into a halo. The quiet is absolute. It's spectacular. I still don't have a phone, so I can't call my girls, and I wanted to talk with Mom and Dad. On the ninth of January Dad will be 93. I think about the compression of history for a while, get a drink, roll a smoke, sit next to the stove in the rocking chair that came from Selma, Alabama. Turning the corner on another year, that I should live so long. Two months of renovations, repair, and painting at the museum (I am going to take a week or two off) and editing myself for the Janitor College manuscript, the various research projects, navigating the physical world, it's all I can do. I'm much more careful now, in everything I do, to not damage myself, especially in the field, where I could well go unnoticed until the spring. Splitting wood today, I noticed I was taking longer than previously; I'd set the splitting wedge with a few taps from the back of the hatchet, then stand and hit it with the maul. For decades I've just put the wedge in a heart check and wailed away. You see where that's gotten me. Mangled hands and a sour outlook. Not really. I love the world and it's machinations, eight inches of snow is a perfect place to begin. I assume you'd melt snow for drinking water. Country Mama, take me home. I'll filter everything through an old tee-shirt, you can't be too careful, but the future is looking good. Noon, New Year's Eve, phone restored, I'd better send this. Read more...

Blanketed

Woke up to six inches of snow, still coming down, no power or phone. I retreated to my sleeping bag and went back to sleep. Finally heard the refrigerator come back on, got out of bed, started a fire, turned on the electric heater, and curled up on the sofa with the new John Sandford novel. The woods are beautiful, every branch holding a couple of inches of snow, and with every small gust of wind a wave of tree-snow is blown adrift. I'm nominally trapped, for a day or two at least, as Upper Twin is the last road in the county to get plowed, and then there's the problem of getting up the hill unto Mackletree, which is impossible before it gets plowed and salted. Fortunately, I have tobacco, whiskey, and food. I'll need to clear a path out to the woodshed tomorrow. I have the Sandford novel, the huge Sargent book, and the holiday double-issue of the New Yorker. It's so quiet outside, I'll be able to hear the snowplow when it passes. Every hour or so I do the entire circuit inside the house, looking out every window. This is more snow than there was all of last year. I get out my insulated Red Wing boots and my gaiters (neither of which I used last year) and waterproof the boots. Dig out the insulated Carhartt overalls from the laundry basket where I keep specialty clothing, bring them downstairs and drape them over a chair near the stove. Cold insulated overalls are a pain in the ass. A day like this I'll read for ten hours. I finish preparation for the foray, outside, tomorrow; and eat a wonderful Muir Glen Organic Chicken Tortilla soup with buttered saltines. It's an expensive soup, but I found a couple of cans in the discontinued cart at Kroger for eighty cents each. Wish I'd rummaged for more, it's very good. I save what I'm writing (turned on the computer as soon as the power came back on) every few minutes, because it is a given fact that the electricity will go out again. I'm amazed I have phone service. I get the house almost warm enough, burning a rock maple kinder-garden desk, but tomorrow I'll bring in some Osage Orange wood, which shares with Live Oak the distinction of barely floating. Specific gravity of .95, 59 lbs to a cubic foot. Oddly, I find a fair amount of it in the flood plain, I think because it's so heavy it grounds out first when the waters recede. It's a beautiful wood, but brutal on tools because it's so hard. I have a piece I'm saving to take down to my friend Kim, in Tallahassee, who carves the most elegant spoons in the Western Hemisphere. Glenn and I burned several large branches, for a couple of weeks, cut laboriously by hand, from a large tree outside the de-sanctified Congregational church where we lived together for a year or so. It's very hard wood. When I was building my pirogue with Les (he was the brains of the operation), we carved Osage Orange knees for the ribs and it was like filing steel. It's so goddamn dense, that I suspect a silicate, like with Ebony, in there somewhere. Just before dark one of the young squirrels came out of their nest, I caught the movement of bushy tail out of the corner of my eye, scampered down the hickory tree and burrowed into the snow at the base of the tree, came out, shaking himself, with an acorn in either cheek. The winter larder of nuts. I'd best go hibernate. A down sleeping bag, military issue, mummy type, is a great comfort on a night like this, despite the difficulty in rolling over. Read more...

Something Different

A bit late for work, because I had to start a fire and get it damped down before I left the house. Cold last night and I went to bed early, so I didn't keep the fire going. Then it was overcast this morning and I was snug in my down bag and didn't want to get up. Just D and I at the museum, so I didn't worry about it. D worked on the ceiling repair, I hauled trash, then ran some personal errands, Library, tobacco store, Kroger, to carry in the last of the supplies for the next week. We spent all afternoon redesigning the lighting for the upstairs gallery. We'd had to take down one of the light tracks, and it seemed like a good time to solve some of the problems that have always existed in lighting that space. All afternoon on that problem but we arrived at a solution, so it was time well spent. The first phase (there are three bays, the first phase is the one where we took the track down) will be very inexpensive, because we have a lot of the components for the track and the connectors, AND the light cans for that section. I left an hour early, drove home under a wonderfully mottled sky, something a scenic painter might paint, with broken patches of light in shafts. At the bottom of the hill I repacked my backpack and the Oak Hills Bank canvas bag that I carry in my left hand (mop handle in my right, assuring against slippage and a fall), wrapped a scarf around my neck, put on gloves, and hiked in. It's not a big deal, this is who I am and this is what I do. A different vehicle has been using the driveway, I can tell from the tracks, something with a wide wheel-base, a full-size truck by the looks of it. And it is. When I get to the top of the ridge there's a full-size Dodge Ram backed into B's space, FRE 3299 (I notice license plates) that I remember as B's son-in-law Josh's truck, and I assume that either B's truck is in the shop and he borrowed a ride, or that he bought the truck as a up-grade. I don't really care, and the good news is that I achieve the ridge without being winded. This is not an easy hike, with a full pack and library books, so the very fact that I arrive alive is good news. Snow is in the air. I write for a while, then make a pasta and pesto dish, read the first chapter of the latest Sandford novel, tweak a few commas, and go to bed. Something wakes me, the oppressive silence, and I get up for a drink of juice, flip on the back-porch light, there's a new layer of snow and it's falling at a rapid rate. Snow dampens sound. The silence woke me. The north wind blows. I hope to meet my pilot, when I've crossed the bar. Read more...

Planning

The days are beginning to run together. If I stay in town, and I go over the pub for a drink, maybe dinner, and the owners are there; since I just have to walk half-a-block back to the museum, we might have a couple of shots of Irish whiskey and listen to live music. In which case, I usually don't write. Which bothers me a little in a couple of regards: one, you have to put in the jetty time; and two, that it would bother me at all. Went back in the front door, last night, and the art library is right around the corner, so I read for a while, fact-checking and comparing versions of stories. I'm becoming a research fellow, I guess I always have been. I can't pretend to be interested in something, but if it catches my attention, I'm probably going to follow a lead (lead led me on a dictionary search) somewhere. Method is a procedure, by which technique achieves an end. I worked on that sentence for about two hours. I knew what I wanted to say. That method was the train, and technique the track. I thought about 'plein-air' painting for a while, Sargent in the field, with Monet. I'm sure the local cathedral was ringing Double-Round-Bobs. Almost all the scene paintings occurred when S was on a trip, and there are a bunch of them, 1,200, maybe more; he loved his studio, wherever it was, but he painted all the time. In a punt, painting in a backwater, he complained that the boat was moving, which is the point, I think Monet was (could be) expressing, that, yes, the point of view was changing. After lunch today, we'd spent several hours doing mundane chores, D wanted to sit down and draw out a plan. So we started talking about things that needed to be done, and the order. I'm not a Luddite, but I resist change-for-the-sake-of change. I don't understand why certain things are going to be done, nor do I understand the finances involved, but I see how they could happen, and where I could be involved. Looks like a lot of work to me, which I don't mind, in terms of 'keeping busy', which I'd rather do than not. I'm editing a book, which is way more important to me right now than anything else, that world out there. Read more...

Sargent Again

Found another huge volume, an art book in it's own right, but also the exhibition catalog of a giant retrospective of the artist's work, staged by the Whitney Museum Of American Art in 1986. Wonderful long essays about the different periods in Sargent's life, with the proper illustrations in their place. Spent all morning reading and referencing (many trips up and down the stairs to the library, before I just moved down there, and set up shop) about the times he had spent with Monet in both Paris and Giverny, 1886-87. S's technique is almost orthodox Impressionism during that period. Except that the brushstroke isn't quite as broken, and he never stopped using a lot of black paint. Walking with M one day (and an art dealer from Paris), he hadn't brought his own paints along, and asked to borrow M's. Fine. He burrowed in the canvas satchel and asked where was the black paint. Monet said he didn't use black paint and Sargent was mortified. I hadn't paid much attention to this period before, but when you look at the painting (1887) S did of M, "Claude Monet Painting At The Edge Of A Wood" you see it clearly. My up close and personal introduction to Sargent was at the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston, when I was working at the Opera Company there. Isabella had been a great fan, collected his work from almost the beginning, she sat for him, in 1922, for a watercolor portrait, died two years, later, he died three years later; was only painting then, he said, as a sort of occupational therapy. I walk a few deserted streets, nobody anywhere, and everything is closed; which they should be, which is fine, I'm only walking to take the air. Below the floodwall I smell something dead and I walk the edge of the river around to where the Scioito flows into the Ohio. There's a large dead sturgeon that stinks to high heaven, which I push back into the river with a stick. Push the problem, as they say, downstream. Sturgeon scales are called scutes. I don't know what that means. Probably Old English, or Coptic or something. Language kills me. Read more...

Wintry Mix

Rain, sleet, snow. Changing from one minute to the next. I leave the back porch light turned on, because the cone of illumination is so alive in refracted rainbows. I keep getting up, from the chair where I write, to go stand inside the door, and watch, through the nine lights, the forms water can take. "Budgets are moral documents." MLK said, and of course, that's correct. What, and the way you spend. I'm frankly embarrassed by our 'defense' spending. Sailed through Congress because of the vested interests, but 700 billion seems excessive. Sometimes I feel like Jesse James. Wait, who's that playing the Hammond organ? Booker T, is that you? Another massive storm rolling out of the Rockies, so I think I'll batten down the house and head into town later today. I need to be at the museum, because it'll just be D and I, everyone else taking the week off, and I expect D will take off an extra day or two. I've got plenty of Carter research to do, and I'd rather be stuck in town, with a private library, than having to deal with icy roads. Christmas doesn't mean much to me, the days getting longer is what I care about. The bean soup turned out well, and I can take that with me, some cornbread, walk over to Kroger and get a sweet onion. Plenty of whiskey, plenty of tobacco. It'll be quiet and no one will know where I am, which suits me. The quiet especially, and the hot running water. What more could a poor boy want? I love the way light rises, behind the overcast, a brighter gray, with a silhouette of trees. It's a lovely thing. Two young squirrels scampering, three crows squawking, a Pileated Woodpecker hammering on a hickory tree. I have to go take a nap, it's all too much for me. Read more...

Holiday Depression

I've replaced the concept of being married with a bamboo backscratcher. I don't have to be sensitive to anyone else's needs and I can scratch exactly where it itches. The learning curve was long and laborious, and the imagined need for companionship was a constant attraction, but the fact is, I like being alone. I can get up, at three in the morning, add some white wine to the crock-pot of bean soup, give it a stir, listen to a couple of blues numbers on late-night radio (Buddy Guy, Clapton), roll a smoke, get a drink, and not have to explain myself. Almost an illicit feeling. I'm sure there's a law in Alabama that says I can't do this. A pack of dogs woke me, I'd kill them all, but I'd have to deal with the bodies, so I just run them off with a few well-thrown rocks. I need to replenish my supply of rocks because I've been throwing them frequently recently. Maybe it's the time of year. The shortest days are the most difficult, when you get up in the dark and get home in the dark, and in the interim there's only the barking laugh of a co-worker. Sure, I could be depressed, though I choose not to be, focus my attention, instead, on something that caught my eye. I know it has a name, that refraction of light. I'd gone outside to pee, and turned on the porch light, prismatic ice crystals were falling from the sky, not snow, exactly, but some form of water turned solid. It was so beautiful I peed on my left foot. The bean soup is taking forever to cook, the dried Navy Beans are several years old and even after twelve hours in the crock pot they aren't done. It's not really a problem, the soup will be better for it, I just turn the pot up to High for an hour, then back to Low to simmer for another few hours. I'm somewhat of a connoisseur when it comes to dried beans. Dove Creek, Colorado, is the Pinto Bean capital of the world, and in the first years after my separation and divorce, before moving to Ohio, it was on one of the three routes I'd take to get my daughters every other weekend. There was a Bean Co-op there and I'd always stop, to get a ten-pound burlap bag of one bean or another. The people that worked there had a knowledge of legumes that exceeded my wildest imagining. I'd spent ten years, before Colorado, in Mississippi, growing between 40 and 50 different varieties of beans and peas, including several heirloom Crowder Peas, African in origin, that are incredibly delicious. I gave some seed to Carlos, at the Co-op, and I never paid for beans again. When I came back east, he sent me off with fifty pounds of assorted dried beans. I lived on them, and corn bread, the nine months I worked on Peter Jefferson's house (Tom's dad), outside Winchester, Virginia. A brutal time, during which I wore a hair shirt and carried my feelings on my sleeve. I still cultivate, through a surrogate, a Black Crowder, that is all-time favorite bean. I got the seed from a friend of Roy's in Babylon, the black section of Duck Hill, Mississippi. Going on about nothing. Beans, for god's sake. I get the house comfortable, but I'm still shuffling around in my bathrobe, because I like the way the collar keeps my neck warm. It's beautiful outside, so I suit-up for a walk, insulated Red Wing boots and insulated Carhartt overalls over sweats over long underwear. Like that character from the tire commercials, or the Dough Boy. The outfits I affect. Choose your vowels carefully. At one point I retreat to the sofa and look at Sargent portraits for several hours. They continue to amaze. Open the Old Vines Zinfandel so it can breathe until the soup is done, but I need something to sustain me. A sardine sandwich, a snack I learned at the bar at the end of the loading dock at the theater's back entrance in Boston. The Combat Zone. Where they just dumped a can of sardines on a piece of bread, with mayonnaise and a slice of onion; bar food, for those that choose to never kiss another human being. It's as good as I remember. Memory being a poor test of anything, but goddamn, it is a very good sandwich. Oh, am I alone again? it must be a holiday. Everyone else has someone to be with, but you can lean on, because we all need someone to lean on, even me. Read more...

Getting Home

Sublimation. Ice to vapor without ever becoming a liquid. Bought a few things at an incredibly busy Kroger for the long weekend, the makings for a Ham and Bean soup, an Old Vines Zinfandel, an extra bottle of whiskey; and when TR showed up to cover at the museum, I headed home. The roads were mostly dry until I got into the State Forest where there was still some black ice. Mostly concerned about getting into the bottom of the driveway where I could safely park the Jeep, but it wasn't a problem. Organized my pack, put on crampons, and walked in, my aerobic exercise for the day. The snow on the opposite ridge revealed every contour of the ground. I always forget about that. It's a lovely thing, the way depth perception is so dramatically increased. Four deer feeding. The wind had died down, but it was still a fairly serious hike, with ice under fresh snow; I had my pack, maybe twenty pounds, and a canvas bag in my left hand, maybe another ten pounds, and my mop-handle walking stick in my right hand, so I took it slowly. One can't afford a fall, as isolated as I am, without a cell phone, in weather like this. Achieved the ridgetop without incident. The two steps and deck at the back door were crusted with snow and ice. When I got inside, having banged both feet against the outside wall (I screwed a Goodwill cutting-board just to the left of the door), I still carried a load on the crampons and my boots. What I've learned to do is put down whatever I'm carrying, immediately, and take off the crampons, which makes an ice and snow mess, and quickly sweep up (I keep a broom and dustpan right by the back door) and throw it outside before it has a chance to melt. Then I start a fire. I always have everything necessary to start a fire right at hand, including a small propane torch that I can use to ignite almost anything. You need to think about these things. Be prepared. I think we gained a scant minute of light today. I remember reading somewhere that the gain is loaded toward the morning or evening depending on where we are in the cycle. I'll take whatever I can get. A minute here, a minute there. Light is critical for me, the fact that there will be more of it. It's not that I hate the dark, I just sleep more, and wear more clothes. My black Dell is always an inspiration. She claims to prefer the cold, when we snuggle. I think she's troubled by something she hasn't mentioned. I have to move paintings around in my winter windows, to block the sun, but I don't talk about it, so I know what it's like to avoid an issue. Sometimes it's best to not say anything. I put the beans on to soak in rain water, cull the pebbles and the shriveled, caramelize a large diced yellow onion, add the remaindered package of ham bits, a quart of chicken stock, I'll let this cook on low for twelve hours. A master of disguise. I make a great ham and bean soup. People tend to lower their expectations when confronted by a mumbling skinny dude in an olive green motor-pool jump-suit. It's a fact. Even if what they're mumbling is "The Seafarer" and they're only wearing the jump-suit so they don't get plaster down their neck. Mostly I've conditioned myself to not respond to any kind of peer pressure, but I still bristle when someone tells me something that isn't accurate, or true, or distorts facts in a way that bothers me. Any criticism of Sargent is misguided. Look at Lady Agnew. I'm probably off the track here, but she seems to embody a latent sexuality that is more Sargent than Lady Agnew, more the painter than the sitter. Any painter of portraits reveals in what they choose to notice. (It took me over an hour to write that last sentence so that it wasn't gender specific.) And Sargent is always apparent; one, I looked at for an hour tonight, some kids, playing with lanterns, it's so vibrant. The way color makes a statement. Read more...

Cold

Huge winds hit at 6 PM last night, I'd already decided to stay in town. Rain changing to snow, all snow this morning, sustained winds of 35 mph and gusts to 50 and 60. Sure to have lost power and phone at the house (as it happens, lost power at the museum, but only for a little while). Didn't even go to the pub, just walked over to Kroger, got a Thai dinner and a bottle of my cheap whiskey. The wind heroic, tearing the eyes and cutting through my Carhartt jacket. I would have been trapped on the ridge and I needed to be at work today because of an all day event, involving four musical acts and 150 kids. The school called at 8:30 and cancelled because of the weather. I knew I'd be trapped in town tonight. Another cold, biting day and before it started snowing harder. Pegi's husband, Steve, called and told her not to drive home. She's going to Dayton tomorrow, to do a Cirque performance at the women's prison there. Roads out in the country are bad, but it's supposed to get above freezing tomorrow, so I should be able to get home. Unless TR calls in and says he can't make it to work, in which case I'd be staff and probably have to stay another night, because it would be after dark when I got home and the roads would be black ice. A wasted day, I've would have been fine, trapped on the ridge, and the view would have been ever so much finer. But it's OK, someone else is paying for the heat and I have an Art Library at my disposal. Also hot running water, so I got up early this morning, shaved, washed my hair, and took a sponge bath. Such luxury. I have the Janitor College file on the Mac I use at the museum, and after everyone had gone I got a drink and worked in that for a while. Got to laughing so hard I had a coughing spell; suited up in peacoat, scarf, and Linda's hat and went out back for a smoke. The Pin Oaks the town favors for those circular beds they cut in the sidewalk every hundred or so feet (lined with pavers) were bending at extreme angles. This was a stupid tree-choice, because the surface roots pop the pavers and the sidewalk into a serious challenge. It's amazing how close to the surface your foot is, when you take a step, and a buckled sidewalk is hell. Read more...

Always Leave

Whenever a question is raised about your perfidy. Whenever your honesty is called into play. It's always best to say nothing and just slip out the back door. I've been in a few shouting matches and always felt like an idiot afterwards. Opinion being what it is, there's no winning or losing. I've gotten to where I don't argue with anyone about anything, it's a waste of time. I'm usually on the edge of trying to figure out what I think about something, usually an insignificant minor thing, like why the water went a certain way, and I don't even know how to discuss it, much less argue about it. I play the slightly-hard-of-hearing gambit fairly often, or the stupid-country-drunk, and turn away. If you mumble to yourself when you do this, you appear slightly crazy, and people leave you alone. I've escaped some fairly serious situations by just appearing dumb. Listen, it's all true. You get up at three in the morning, and maybe you write a few lines, feeling your oats (one of the things I love about writing, is that you stumble across phrases), get a drink, roll a smoke. The morning is young. A particular state, it's hard to describe, where I stare off into space, and try to formulate what I think about a specific thing. It's what I do. Formulate opinions. Complete bullshit, but it seems real enough. I always leave, when harsh words are expressed, even if it's after dark and raining. I'd rather slide off the road and crash into a tree than be involved in any disagreement. Read more...

Hard Listening

Pretty sure it was Roy Blount Jr. used that phrase, talking about music he made with some other writers. An evocative turn. I love his writing, and hearing him on the radio. My southern side. Where, when you asked someone a direct question, instead of an answer, you got a story instead. My cousin Jackie, for instance, you tell her you're going to the store, and ask do we need a loaf of bread, she responds with an elaborate tale about Jasper and Eli, Pocahontas, Tennessee, in the 1930's, and you glean from the story, that, yes, in fact, we need a loaf of bread. In the deep south, there's a resistance against saying anything directly. Like it's more responsible to elude to something, as if to say. Jackie speaks in a patois that is graced with nuance. It's difficult to understand sometimes, but always worth the effort. Elliptical. The last funeral in Mississippi, Aunt Pete, at the graveyard in Pocahontas, I was talking with some distant relatives, I had to be careful about my word choice, because I didn't want to appear a jackass. Michael, who'd taught me to shoot, black walnuts at a hundred feet, stepped into the conversation. He mentioned a particular day when I had been on my game; a matter of luck, shot a running squirrel in the head, occasionally you get lucky. Satisfied that the leak has been repaired, and the damaged ceiling has dried, tomorrow we start repair. Scraping the rotted plaster. It'll be a mess. I took in a set of clothes that will go directly into the trash when we finish the job, and a set of painting clothes because all three pair of newish black jeans currently in rotation are too good to sacrifice to painting a ceiling white. I have a laundry basket of dead and dying clothes that I wash one last time and store there. I've never washed a pair of my insulated Carhartt bibs, they are what they are. I need to buy a new denim shirt, and a pair of work jeans with a hammer loop, for installing shows. After the holidays. You couldn't pay me to go shopping now. I'm trying to figure how much whiskey I'll need to survive. It's a complex algorithm. I've decided to just make a bean soup in the crock-pot and maybe buy a couple of avocados; depending on what the weather does, I'll go for several long walks, stay in the woods for hours. I don't buy Christmas, the whole idea makes me want to burrow into a culvert and die. Those fucking bells, where the Salvation Army has encamped, at the exit from Kroger, drive me crazy. Normal people wearing Santa hats. Doesn't it seem weird to you? Way too much wasabi with the sushi I'd brought home for dinner, I was cursing like a sailor and loving it. Wasabi inspires expletives. Especially if you're sitting at the island. reading a "New Yorker" and not paying too much attention to the volume of fork tine quantity coming to bear. Some bites, the tears are streaming down my cheeks. But my sinuses, it must be said, are clear. Read more...

Not Said

At least there's that. What remains. A skeletal framework devoid of flesh, but enough to reconstruct, there's a program for this, a way you might have looked; add some muscle and fat, a layer of skin, you almost have a person. I tend to avoid the body politic, not that I'm unaware, just that I don't give a shit. When you camp above 12,000 feet, always carry an extra pair of socks. You can tuck your hands into an armpit, but it's hard to do anything with your feet. Extremities are a problem. A nip of Glendronach might help, at least seemingly, when the cold nips at your toes, but it's a false positive. Not unlike that sense of euphoria you might experience when the rubber hits the road. It's hard to segregate feelings. My phone is out again, and I couldn't talk to you if I wanted to. B is off to Massachusetts, everyone at work is taking time off. D was there today and we finally delivered an Empire Dresser that was bought at the last fund raiser. The house, perched on Timlin Hill, is accessed from the back, by awful winding steps. It was a chore, but we got it done. Just time to pick up a few things and get home before dark. Much to do this week, snow, they're saying, next weekend, so I need to lay in supplies, go the library, split some red maple. I'll have to leave the Jeep at the bottom of the hill. Break out the crampons. Sherpa mode. Survival mode. Fox prints around the puddle in the driveway. They're beautiful, perfect. I think I could probably cut one out of the ground and bake it in the stove, it's mostly clay. It would make a nice paperweight. A nice object. The prints, when the clay is the correct viscosity, are clean-edged and sharp. They're exquisite: coon, possum, various birds; dogs, cats, and my own tracks, where I skirt the puddle. Astra announced at the pub today, that she was pregnant, over three months in and she hardly shows; she and Issac, I think, will be good parents. A bean soup for the holidays, and biscuits I can finish in the toaster oven. My holiday plans. Read more...

Sargent

He painted what he saw, even as a child, never the fantasy of imagination. At eighteen he was doing signature work. Born in 1856, died in 1925 (the same year Wyatt Earp died, my father was born in 1920, just saying) and spans, embodies, the entire discussion of modernity. Painted, in the open air, with Monet; shared, for a time, studio space with Whistler. His oil paintings sometimes look like watercolors. Some of his watercolors are unbelievably fine. Over 600 portraits. In his wonderful painting of Lady Agnew, not just the hands, but the way the arms look, under sheer fabric, is astounding. I've studied a full page reproduction of this painting, with a magnifying glass, for hours. A large and heavy book, thirteen by eleven inches, five pounds; I have bruises on my thighs, where I rest it, propped against my desk. I've seen a great many of his paintings, in Boston and elsewhere, and I always make the guards uneasy, because I mimic what I know to have been his manner in the studio. He set his easel close to the sitter and walked away from it, to view from a distance, then charged the canvas, to make a few strokes. One guard, who also was a knowledgeable docent, this was at the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston, understood exactly what I was doing, and told me notice the knuckles in a particular portrait. Whipped out my glass, I've always carried a magnifying glass, ever since I first read "Sherlock Holmes", to see what he was talking about, and the knuckles were mere blobs of paint, not unlike what Chuck Close does, and from the 'viewing distance', which is to say, in the case of Sargent, in the life size portraits, about 15 feet, they were perfectly articulated fingers. Magic, as Sargent's friend Henry James often said about S's ability to reproduce the effect of fabric. Effect, I think being the operative term. James tended to pair painting and writing as methods of cutting to the heart of experience. I tend to think of it as the Americanization of Proust. Neither the written word nor a painting is reality. All I can do is narrow the difference. He, I mean, Sargent. Even with the very best of non-fiction writing, the writer is revealed. It's the nature of words. A painter, in the line, the choice of color, in the tonal modulation, is revealed. Sargent's models were Velazquez and Frans Hals. He played with Impressionism, especially in the watercolors, but he loved sharp lines, which they did not, where one thing becomes another. Rocks, for instance, have sharp edges, not a dalliance with transition. I'm also reading Otto Rank, which should count for something, Freud never addressed the creative mind. Phone's back in service, I'd better send this. Read more...

Lost Wax

I had spied B carrying splits from the head of the driveway to his woodshed from the upper curve of the driveway. He was wearing a faded orange vest and looked like a Chinese lantern. Dropped my pack, jacket, and walking stick (a worn out mop handle) on my side of the driveway and walked over to the back of his truck. I knew he'd return because he sets up a rhythm on his wood hauling trips and he had a lot of wood to haul. He returned; we exchanged greetings, and I ask him where he had obtained such a splendid red oak. We know these back-roads well, and I knew exactly which tree he was harvesting, had wondered who had been, because I had seen evidence that someone was. "That first slight curve after the clear-cut on the right." And I knew exactly which tree he was talking about, not treeness, or treeabilaty, but the exact tree, in a forest of a million trees. Blew me away. I'd steered away from that tree, because of the boles, I knew it'd be hard to spilt, but B waded right in, as if that was the challenge. Anymore, I just prefer saplings, that only have to be split in half. I've gone easy, in the scheme of things. DUV, QUI, AWAC, EXEBOW, whatever those acronyms mean. I'm better spent cutting rounds of poplar; an idiot with a measuring stick and a bow-saw, than thinking about what something actually is. That's not quite correct, and probably misleading, isness I understand, meaning eludes me. I had left the radio playing, softly, late night FM, doing an extended set of James Taylor, his brothers and son. What you might call the new American songbook, some Greg Brown, the Allman Brothers, up through the Grateful Dead, covering Stephen Foster. Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson. A warm might, December 17th, 2012. Rain patters the roof. I'm napping on the sofa. When the hour changes, the music changes and I have to get up and mute that, kill the breaker on the fridge, roll a smoke. Something's bothering me and I need silence to figure out what it is. I play a game, where I align the fingers of one hand against the other, creating arches that span very small spaces; my mind is off in left field, considering string theory, multiple universes, how that might affect our concept of god (the gods), and rather or not I should get another drink. I decide to, and roll another, because the night is deep and dark and I don't want to talk to another soul, just reflect on the way things play out. The holidays, when I'm not with my daughters, is not a good time to be with me. First off, I'm libel to say anything, and secondly, holidays are so artificial. I have to go because the phone is working. You understand. Read more...

Follies and Frolics

Phone service was out again, it's become a joke. Folly to believe. Went in early yesterday, because Pegi had asked to, as Julia, a board member, was decorating for an event tonight. It rained, and I didn't want to go home and have to climb the hill in the dark and wet, so I stayed in town. Watched an episode of "Elementary" and read Carter clipping. I'm about to broach the last two four-drawer filing cabinets, in which I know there are some folders devoted to single paintings. Highly specific information. Delicious. I might be able to tape record a book about Him. The docent approach to biography. Yesterday I was asked a couple of questions about particular paintings, and I had to go get support material so that I could show the connections. 1928 was big for Cartie and I could do a dense thirty minutes on that year alone, which would translate to 20 manuscript pages. I"d have to get someone to do the transcription, and then I could edit. So I could technically do a Carter book, I just wouldn't have to do as much physical writing. The actual hunt and pecking that I do, with my two fingered typing and my myriad diversions, has to be mostly reserved for "Ridgeposts" which is unscripted, almost the exact opposite of doing a biography. I love nothing more than getting a drink, rolling a smoke, and talking to Black Dell; I forget to eat, I'm reminded to do laundry only by the smell of dirty socks, I forget what I'm doing, I walk aimlessly in the woods. Maybe I get back to the house with a noun/verb combination, maybe just a noun, or maybe just a verb. I start writing, then I usually have to look up a word or two, roll another smoke and get another drink. It's slow going. I aim to make every word, and every mark of punctuation mean something. No reason otherwise for me to be doing this. There must be other things I could do. I always think of Falstaff, "I would I were a weaver..." The way meaning collapses on that phrase. Saying he wishes he had a safety net, but he enjoys being king of the bar, and given his druthers, he'll continue bar-hopping. Reading Zukofsky on Shakespeare. Damn. "Bottom: On Shakespeare", is probably one of the great books ever. It assumes so much, that you know Shakespeare well, that you understand the play of language. A typical Amish frolic is raising a barn., nothing like a post and beam frame to tie things together. Read more...

What?

Soon as I got the house warmish, I went to bed. Weary. And, of course, a ruckus in the night. Never fails. It's a cat of some type, either a feral house cat or more likely a bob cat (which I think is the North American lynx) defending the compost pile against a coon. Much snarling and hissing. I throw a few rocks, to settle the contention, wondering why I live where I do. Then I remember, rekindle the fire, roll a smoke. Not so much a choice, as just the way things happen. Extensive seasonal flooding. The bottoms along the river are sheets of ice, the hollows, up where I live, hold several day's frost; in the shade everything is white. Essentially winter. The lake is freezing around the edges. The geese have gone. A pallor among my co-workers that I associate with not having to hike in to their house. What we assume. Black ice in the bottoms. Stuck at the front desk all morning, as the receptionist. Spent the time reading about and looking at paintings by Sargent. He does good hands. I brought the book home for weekend study. The hospital crew was in, to get all their stuff. The pub needed to store food in our refrigerator for an event tonight, so I cleared out space for them, which gained me a free lunch; and Jennifer left me some deviled eggs (too bland, but fine with a dash of hot sauce) and egg rolls from the Doctor's Party. She also gave me two bottles of wine. I'm set for the weekend, so the brisket will have to wait. And further, in the interest of recycling, I saved all the wine bottles for a local guy who melts then into very nice whatever you call those things you store a stirring spoon on between stirrings. Three cases of bottles made his day. TR came back in, after dropping Meagan off for "Nutcracker" rehearsal, which allowed me to get home just before dark. The new heater kicks on at four o'clock, and tonight I didn't even start a fire, since I didn't have to cook. I'm staff tomorrow, so I can continue my Carter studies. The archives go on forever. And because the museum has them all, in house, it's impossible for me to not go through them; I know more about him, and his family, than I do about my own. It's nice to, as Olson said, know something well. I do tend to study things closely, a habit I indulge increasingly as I do less physical labor; and I love it, watching tadpoles for hours, befriending a fox, reading through a box of newspaper clipping from the 1940's. Read more...

Believing

I have my own stubborn faith. A mixture of awe and science. I don't buy the 'prime mover' argument, but the whole shebang started from something; we come along, 4.6 billion years later, wondering what that was. Even if it was just a very large blast in a completely empty space, it begs several questions. What I can know are little things, the way water wends downhill, the smell of lilac, the sound a deer makes moving cautiously through leaf litter. Hard to quantify. Mostly I leave the big questions behind. I just watch tadpoles becoming frogs. I was once having what could probably be called a depressive event, sitting on a stump out in my graveyard. Eating some trail mix, clearing a spot with the toe of my boot, so I could roll a smoke and put it out safely, and the fox walks up, like she's surprised to see me there. Cocks her head, in that curious way, as if to say, get over it dude. And I start thinking about a comma that needs to be a semi-colon; and the next thing you know I'm making a very good omelet with caramelized onions and mushrooms. I'm not saying that punctuation could be a cure for anything, just that it might have been for me. You have to admire the pluperfect. Then, of course, you actually have to do something, whether you want to or not. Weird, the way meaning follows. I can try to make sense, but I can't, and I when I let go of making sense, everything falls into place. Letting go isn't easy, a whole dynamic at play, but you have to let go, before any of it makes sense. Those lines in the Amazon. Busy day. Jennifer back to finish decorating, the roofing guys came (and finished by two o'clock), then the beer and wine arrived, then the food crew and food arrived. Nothing more for me to do, so I left an hour early, stopped at Kroger for a few things, and beat it on home. Lovely sunset, ribbons of pink against a pale blue sky. Going through the various Carter papers concerning the prints today. There is a ledger, that collates the information (I don't recognize the hand) and then there is a considerable pile on information on sundry scraps of paper. The backs of cards and envelopes; and someone unstapled a mimeographed set of recipes and wrote on the back of those, so I get to read recipes from the fifties. Most of them sound dreadful, but I did copy one out for cooking a brisket that sounded interesting. The only way I currently cook a brisket requires 18-20 hours of attention, slow-smoked, away from the heat, on a grill. This recipe only requires three hours, in the oven (which is 'on' when I'm home anyway), and was quirky enough to attract my attention. I love brisket, it has a great mouth-feel. I might cook one next weekend, certainly soon, as I need to use The Sauce, which is fabulous on brisket, and needs to be pasteurized besides, put to bed under fat. Sauce Confit. It's amazing right now, hot, a hint of sweet, with fruity overtones and a touch of smoke. I'm told it's one of the great sauces ever, which it should be, as I've been working on it for eight years. Great on mashed potatoes. I make a hill of the potatoes, with a depression in the middle, which I fill with the sauce; then eat around the edges until a wall collapses, then mix them together and clean up with a sop of bread. Amusing myself with dinner is only one of the reasons I live alone. Fantasy can be expensive, because you usually have to pay the other person, but I've found that if you live alone in the woods, the fox, an imagined woman, and honey, are enough. Also not having to explain why you were trying to live through a snow storm, perched under a rock. Or making opossum pate. I'll never live that down, not that I'd want to, and it was just on a dare, when I had said I could make a pate out of anything. Ronnie rose to the bait. I could, in fact, make a very good pate from acorns and shoe-leather. There's a nutrient value attached to leather, and it's great fiber. Don't dismiss me out of line. Read more...

Sure Enough

There are a few commas I would change, not that they matter. Meaning is variable. I tweak language constantly, during the course of a paragraph, flipping the nouns and verbs, to see how that alters things. Usually, a given night, the actual meaning doesn't change that much. It's nuance. Subtle change. Wet leaves covering a substrate you know too well. Just because you have a phone doesn't mean you have to use it. There's a rock overhang I retreat to frequently, almost a cave, it provides protection against most weather, if I wrap myself in a caribou skin and lower my heartbeat, I can survive extreme weather there. Met with the guy who's going to do some repair, tomorrow, on a parapet wall that I'm sure is the cause of the leak; then the rest of the day working with the lady (Jennifer) who sets up for the Doctor's Party every year at this time. Said event is tomorrow night. She always does a great job with the decorating and she doesn't use glitter. When I went to the pub at lunch (a wonderful chicken-noodle soup) almost everyone in the place greeted me by name, and the few people I didn't know looked at me curiously, as if to ask the question, who was this Tom person that everybody knew. Piddled around, after Jennifer left, shimming tables (the tile floor is very uneven), and cleaning the back hallway. Pegi told me to leave at four, because it was going to be cold tonight, temps dropping like a rock when it gets dark. Crystal clear sky. No argument from me, and I'll leave early tomorrow, because they'll be setting up the sound system and testing it with Christmas carols. Spare me. As soon as I got home, and I don't listen to music much anymore, I put on Miles, "Bitches Brew"; built a fire, and heated some water, to wash and soak my feet. A year or so ago, I mentioned to Anthony that I was sorry Kroger didn't carry socks, because I needed some and I didn't want to go to Wal-Mart. He looked at me, with a glint in his eye, and said to look no further. He was holding socks, he'd give me some. The next day he gave a package of twelve pair: black, cushioned, comfortable, tube socks. They're all I wear now, except for the over-socks, which I wear when it gets really cold (alpaca, knitted by a friend), and the few days I go shoeless. Great cheap socks, and some aunt or uncle, every year, gets him a package as a present. The problem is that the cushioning agent degrades and ends up between your toes as black gunk, but I enjoy washing and soaking my feet, because I use that occasion to trim my toenails, which are horrid and malformed. I use electric tools on them, a Dremel, a random orbit sander; not because I care about appearance, but because I need to fit inside shoes. Read more...

Work Related

Thank god I went in late yesterday because the buckets under the drips were full to overflowing. I put a larger trash can on the new dolly, and poured them into it, then mopped. May be able to save the ceiling, because we drilled a couple of holes to relieve the pressure and direct the drips, but all the paint and skim coat of plaster has fallen in and area maybe eight feet square. A mess. Spent most of today cleaning up. Left an hour early to get a fire started, supposed to be in the low twenties tonight. The phone was working, so I sent the log jam of paragraphs, just three, actually, but they represented four days work, and are probably rife with mistakes. When I send something at night, I read back over it fairly carefully, but if I put it into storage, not so much so. Need to work on that. The fire-box in the cookstove is 16 inches deep, and I cut most of my firewood almost exactly that long; but I have a separate stack cut to ten inches, that way, after the fire gets going, I can rake the coals toward the back, add ten inch sticks, and still have a six inch oven right in the front of the firebox, where I can cook things. I make a campfire meal in there often, bake potatoes and apples. The campfire meal I finally learned to layer in reverse. A couple of layers of foil, then a small sliced onion, then a layer of thick sliced potatoes, then a ground meat patty, preferably venison. Salt and pepper on all layers, and maybe some chilies. With a spoonful of the sauce, this is an incredibly good meal. First off, when you open the foil you're hit with this blast of smell; and it tastes so good, the way the fats have percolated down through the potato and onion. I make a breakfast version of this, with a home-made sausage patty, which involves searing the potato slices in very hot peanut oil, to give them a crust, and caramelizing the onion, which takes a ridiculous amount of time. You shoot for breakfast but you barely make brunch. Sometimes, if I make the chorizo from scratch, it's dinnertime before breakfast is ready. I fill the interval with cod, or salmon, or crab cakes that I make quickly, with left over mashed potatoes, and fry in the peanut oil which is already hot. Be a fool not to. I make a simple tartar sauce for these, mayonnaise and sweet pickle relish; minced, reconstituted, smoked, hot peppers. You need to join Sam's Club just for the crab-meat. I need to research the life-cycle of the Blue Crab, they're being farmed now, way beyond the chicken neck on a string and dip-net with a long handle I'd used to harvest them before. Read more...

Later Patter

Just rain, like the poor man said, you duck under an awning, it's not brain surgery. I don't pay any attention to the weather anymore, Barb has offered me the sofa, at the pub, and there are any number of places I could spread my down pallet. A certain credence, inspired by repetition, I'm not a threat to small children or pets, benign is the word usually applied. Hard rain starts to fall. The drumming is so loud I can't hear the radio; it's like a chainsaw, more than a hundred decibels. I mumble a few phrases, but they're incomprehensible in the din. I've never heard it so loud. Glad I left the Jeep at the bottom of the hill. Allows a bit of flexibility in terms of coming and going. The best guitar I've heard in years, Tommy something, like Leo in spades. Overlapping harmonics. Scat, Saint Peter. Paul. Number nine coal. Tommy Emmanuel. God, he can play. Let it rain, I've got those deep river blues. If you're on the banks of the Ohio, you're granted that. Real talent is rare. A huckleberry Finn. Walking my baby back home. I'd better go. Finally got my phone back. I'd better send these. Read more...

Supposed To Be

Ground fog, thick as gravy, and I can't see across the hollow. It's not so much raining, as the sky is simply leaking. No discernable pattern, just clusters of drops, and the wind has died completely. Nothing stirs. I made a crock-pot of grits when I got up to pee sometime in the night, so I wouldn't have to be concerned with food, and that's working fine; I refry a hefty spoon-full in a six-inch cast iron skillet; make a depression in the middle and poach an egg. Steam an egg is probably closer to the truth, break an egg into the depression, add a squirt of vermouth and pop on a lid. I found a lid at the Goodwill that perfectly fits the six-inch cast iron skillets (I have five of them) in which I'm fond of cooking. One o'clock in the afternoon and the fog still lingers. Ten degrees colder and this would be a massive ice storm, or twelve inches of snow, but it's just a quiet afternoon, and I'm thinking about output, not input. Sargent did 600 portraits and I'm just getting started on the watercolors; Carter must have done several thousand paintings. And the prints, Jesus god, there are dozens of them, in editions of 50 or 100, mostly sold out, and the Newark Library system bought one of each of them. In a drawer somewhere. Collections. I have tottering piles of books, and a stack of manuscripts that probably qualifies as a collection, and several thousand pages of my own work in a cloud somewhere. My literary estate. I was working on the Janitor College book, WIP, "Modified Chevron" when the power went out today. Lost some changes, but the core is stored in several different places. I've lost more books to lightening than I can remember, so I tend to store things in more than one place. There's a thousand pages next to my printer that I need to put in the vault at work, a shelf of my own, I keep there, hoarding paper against the apocalypse. The suffering is acute but not life-threatening, more like the pain in your foot when you stub a toe. You walk around for a few days, limping, bitching about the slings and arrows, but that table has been precisely there for 13 years. Reading Walter Benjamin by candle-light, which should be a required course, and I realize the mall is his arcade. Strikes me that I'm slow. Read more...

More Rain

Going to rain all weekend, a Low settled in the Ohio Valley. I got out this morning without any problem and set about prepping the museum/theater for Pegi's young person Xmas show, cleaned the theater, cleaned and stocked the bathrooms. Next weekend she does her version of "The Nutcracker" on the main stage at the University, but I won't have anything to do with that. I never want to hear "The Nutcracker" again. Left an hour early, still raining, knowing I was going to be walking in to the house, first time in seven months, and I needed to carry a few things. I'll need to go back to town tomorrow, to get a few more things, and walk in again, but then I can hole-up for a couple of days. Just as it was getting dark a lovely fog infiltrated the trees, filled the hollow and brimmed over the top. Visibility maybe fifty feet. Pea soup. First walk in is the most difficult, by February it'll be easy; I had to stop four or five times today, not just because I was winded but because there are certain vantage spots, and I hadn't stood there and looked at what could be seen from that place in many months, and the view was different, from each of them; I had to register memory against what I was seeing. In this fecund zone, fertile and plenty of rain, things grow and change so rapidly. In the desert Southwest, things looked almost exactly the same for hundreds of years, but here, in seven years everything is completely different. The Red Maples grow so fast, the Poplars; the succession is a litany of nature: blackberry canes, sumac, Poplars and Red Maples, then the oaks and other native nut trees. The trees will probably survive our demise. The fox was at the compost heap, as I was walking in, and I saw her before she saw me, and was able to stop, sit on a stump, and watch her for a while. She danced around, with her ass in the air, and was cute in every other way besides, digging with her nose, examining possible tidbits; I sat there until she was lost in the fog. It often takes me an hour to write a coherent sentence, which seems like slow going, but I have a lot of hours. Factor the week and there I am. X number of hours. More rain spatters against the metal flashing on the northwest side of the house, which lets me know that this particular storm traveled through St Paul. Nice to know we share weather systems. Hard rain wakes me, napping on the sofa, a jarring staccato beat; South American or African, slack guitar, Congo drums, street dancing, the house vibrates in the night. I pick up where I left off, being aware, listening closely. I can't see a thing, because the darkness is absolute, what do they say, you could cut it with a knife. Black thick as tar. When I move away from my desk, to get a drink; from the island, where I pour a libation in shadow, my writing seat looks so artificial, a cone of light and the computer screen, off in the corner, otherwise, nothing. Phone was out last night and still out tonight, so I can't send. A fine walk down to the Jeep. The headwaters of Upper Twin Creek are in my hollow and it was running full, making a lovely sound in the still morning. Heavy smell of rotting leaves, the fecund odors of fall. I carry a small metal cup in my pack, and I sampled the water from several wet-weather springs. Excellent stuff, mineral rich, and cold enough to freeze your brain. I make a note to get some watercress seed. The napp over the spillway is 8 inches deep, a solid sheet of water crashing against the baffles below, Turkey Creek is running spate. I trust the Army Corp is on their mettle, because there's a lot of water flowing into the Ohio right now. I had only gone to town to get a few things to ferry to the house, but I spent most of the day at the museum. Nosing around in the Carter archives. I found a book, a ledger actually, stuffed with incidental papers that concerned the prints (serigraphs, mostly, (a silk-screen technique) but also some lithographs, that I didn't know existed, "Jane And Dora" for instance, and I'm sure the staff at the Columbus museum doesn't know that) and the hours just slipped away. Mary kept a very good record: each print, how large the edition was, who bought them, how much they sold for, and kept a running total on the sales. Starting in 1952 this was a large part of their income. The prints are beautiful, incredibly well printed; for eight years I've been trying to find out who printed them, and today I found an invoice from the printing company, outside Philly, that did them. It's very cool, when you've wondered about a particular thing, researched it as best you could, to suddenly find the answer. I think about writing a fictional account of Cartie's life. I know so much about him, viewed from the outside, very little from the inside, I'd have to invent, but I can do that. I spent an hour today, looking at Sargent's watercolors. Some of them are very good, and now I understand a little bit better where those great mid-western watercolorists were coming from. Like with bagpipers, it's good to know the history. Who studied with whom. The rain wakes me again. The phone is still dead, I checked it, as a matter of course, and there's just a deafening silence. Turn on the radio, for some company, Buddy Guy, you can't get that stuff no more, after midnight, searching for you. Lonesome as I can be. Let's go where the sky is blue. Lord have mercy, snow eight feet deep, what's to become of me. Feel like a broken engine, ain't got no driving wheel. I used to be a good man, now I have to be your dog. Saying nothing. Thoughtless ways. A lap-guitar, lingering chords. I hate country music. You won't ever make a fool of me again. What's that in the background, an accordion? no way I'll dance a polka. I was half asleep, my senses out of reach. Don't let me wake up yet. The waters so blue, Pete and the banjo. I was thinking about that today. Doc Watson, keep on the sunny side of life. Was in the spring? one sunny day, now she's gone, I don't worry anymore. I'm sitting on top of the world. A fiddle in the back-ground. You hear it? I'm no carpenter, but it's clear to tell, I was born with common sense, that wall is designed to fail. I'm just rambling. Signs of life. Too much reality and not enough fantasy. I've been around long enough to see. Dueling mandolins. Jesus. Read more...

Short Day

When we have a noon Smart Talk it makes for a short day: setting up chairs, the talk itself, taking the artist to lunch, breaking down the chairs. And on my winter schedule of leaving work an hour early. Built a fire, then changed into sweats and put on an extra pair of socks. Very good talk by Art Werger, the printmaker with the show upstairs, about the way he works. Even better talk at the pub for a late lunch. An extremely visual person, of course, and we talked about installations and variations of installations. Shop talk. Back at the museum, D had a tech meeting with a local genius and I couldn't understand a word they were saying, web stuff, new software; I'm technically a genius, though not with anything technical, and I feel like a moron half the time, because I don't know how to do something; but I do know how to do a surprising number of things, and my ability to jury-rig is legion. Honed by a career in theater. Actually I left theater just when I got a serious and high-paying job offer, but the education has served me well. To fall into the museum, at this point in my life, was serendipitous. Hanging art and mopping floors are two things I can do. Hooting owl outside, I haven't heard one in a while, it took me away, remembering owls. Drift-fishing for Crappie, in tributaries of the St. Johns River (I checked the atlas, there's no hyphen) we'd often see them, bedded down for the day, in trees along the banks. Their eyes would open and their heads would pivot to impossible degrees, watching us float by. I don't know very much about owls, I need to put them to the list. Their necks must articulate differently. A couple of tenderized veal steaks in the remaindered bin at Kroger, I freeze one and bread the other in some highly seasoned bread crumbs (washed first with a beaten egg) topped with a simple tomato sauce and cheese; I'd roasted a few red potatoes, cut in quarters, with which I cleaned up the remains of sauce. Very good, but would be so much better served with a marinade of caramelized onions and fire-roasted tomatoes, which I intend to try next weekend. There's always 'chopped' steak, of one sort or another, in the remaindered bin. Linda and I were talking about this, living on food-stamps, $3:60 a day, or whatever, could you do it, and of course I could, I get a fair amount of my protein from outside the normal loop. A brain-dead squirrel, lovingly cooked and deboned, served on pasta; and egg noodles I make myself, costs maybe twenty cents, maybe forty cents, I'm a cheap lay, what can I say? Read more...

Ear Work

Anymore, having notes is a pain in the ass. They're a distraction. I like having a key word, fox or rain, or a phrase, janitor college, or slippery slope; something that allows me into the narrative. But I do hate transcribing. I write best out of the back of my mind, with very little intervention, except for The God Of Punctuation, that perches like a crow above my left shoulder, giving me a raft of shit, in a high-pitched voice, like a maiden aunt imagining some imposition. I set my table a certain way, not unconsidered, to allow for whatever whims and fortunes. An imperfect system, but it allows me to write myself out of a corner. Our town clerk is resigning to accept a job with Taco Bell, because it promises advancement and a huge increase in salary. Benefits, a retirement package. She'd be a fool not to. But I can't imagine a life spent working for Taco Bell. This is a kind of Calvinism that I can't really justify. Jana threw back that it was hubris, but I'm not sure that's actually the case; I don't care, one way or the other, what you think of me; I could disappear tomorrow, well might. I don't have to do this. I have a complete other life set up, on the sea islands of Georgia, as a short-order cook with an attitude. And another identity in Utah as one of the brothers. It's not difficult to impersonate an imagined persona. In many ways it's easier to be who you're not. Wish I hadn't said that, because it's so true, that it's so much easier to be who you're not. Babylon. A mental lapse, sorry, what were we talking about? Read more...

Crazy Weather

70 degrees on the third of December. Some years the lake has been frozen by this time. I needed whiskey, so I drove into town, the long way around, a lovely drive, with the windows down and bird song. Stopped at the museum and read Carter clippings for a couple of hours. Watched an episode of "Elementary", had a beer at the pub. John (the manager) killed a deer last week-end and said he'd have some venison for me tomorrow. Glad I waited to make chili. Black beans, venison, onion, several cans of diced green chilies, and chili powder from my excellent stash. If it stays this warm I'll have to cook the cornbread in the toaster-oven. He said there would be some little steaks too, my favorite breakfast meat; with a fried egg and a piece of toast, it is the way to start the day. Found an interesting clipping, in which Carter talks about his technique: most of the watercolors took a few hours, some (Cannon Ball House) took a few days, because there are all those damned bricks. I don't hear his voice that often, I read Mary and Mary's Mom and Carter's Mom, but Cartie doesn't say much. He's pretty much in his studio, or on a trip drumming up business or satisfying contracts with another magazine cover, or designing the costumes and sets for an opera, which I just found out about, wondered why Mary had kept a clipping about a Pittsburg production of "Figaro", then noticed his name at the bottom. And now I'm going to Chautauqua, where he taught painting, painted his most iconic painting, for a show at Carnegie, the fall, 1943. Neil sent me a great essay, about Emily and looking closely. A double tap. Tammy, at the liquor store, within Kroger, asked me where I lived, I give her the short answer, the middle of the forest, almost to the Adams county line, and the woman behind me, we were the only two people in the store right then, looked up at me and said "you're that writer, aren't you?" I had to admit that I might be, that I was a writer and lived "out there", if you viewed the headwaters of Bloodly Twin Creek to be at all important, in the great scheme of things. I do control the high ground, I don't mean morally or anything, just that I have a strategic advantage: if I control the ridgetop, I can knock you over with a potato and assume you won't talk for several hours. Read more...

Docent Tom

Heavy rain all day yesterday, started before I left the house, the drive down was a bit dicey, and I knew I wouldn't be able to get back up the driveway, so I went to the pub after work, for a beer and one of those giant pretzels with a jalapeno cheese sauce. When I got back to the museum Pegi was rehearsing a Christmas program in the theater and TR was taking a group of Cub Scouts through the galleries. I retreated to my office and read Carter material, found another reproduction of the third painting of Elenore, a better one, on glossy stock, with higher definition. It's a good painting and I wish I knew where it was. Spent all this morning in full janitor mode, trash, bathrooms, the floor, but after lunch, Pegi had begged off on me that I take a Board Member (Julia, who I like) and a guest, through the museum. Especially interested in the Carters. I give a good tour and I was on my game. But spent afterward, a ninety-minute lecture, and Pegi told me to go home. Temps in the twenties and I needed to get a fire started before dark, so I readily agreed. On the drive home, I was thinking that I was one of the few people who could lecture on Carter for a semester. The course would jump all over, regionalism, mid-westernism, magic realism, technique. Probably be a pretty good course. I accrete these layers of information, if something takes my fancy. Just went back and added a comma, it always makes me feel good, at first. A few warm days and I hadn't started a fire; and I think the flying squirrels moved into the spark-arrestor at the top of the flue. (I just say some things because I can.) Started a fire and there was no draw at all, like a beaver had built a dam on top of my stovepipe. Cleared out the smoke, let the fire go out, calmed down, got a drink, smoked a pipe. To clear the obstruction I leaned out an upstairs window and beat the stovepipe with a bamboo pole. All of the crap fell down into the stove. Took me an hour to clean the inside of the smoke-chase, where the heat circulates around the oven. A fucking mess. But that's ok with me, a mess is better than freezing to death. It's not a staged event, me, two crows, the third suite. Cute, the way you avoid the issue, but I know you know what I mean. Read more...

Rain Day

The day opened, early, with a volley of gunfire, then the rain moved in. I let the first of the rain wash the roof, then put out buckets, to harvest rainwater. By mid-afternoon it's warm enough to heat enough of the new stash of soft water, for a sponge bath and a shave, and since the cookstove is hot (even with letting the fire go out) I cook a potato, wrapped in foil, right in the firebox. An excellent meal that I can eat one-handed while holding a book in the other. Rereading Gertrude Stein, "The Making Of Americans", thinking about the architecture of narrative. The manuscript I'm editing doesn't actually have a plot, it's just an episodic dance. Even the characters are often thrown away after a single use. The attention to detail is a characteristic, often at very close range, with a magnifying glass, noting fractal patterns on leaves, and Brownian Motion when cream is added to a Butternut Squash Soup. A day like this, mostly curled up, with a fleece blanket over my feet and legs, and a mug of sweet hot tea with cream, I tend to get a little maudlin. Patter of rain on the roof, the smell of certain herbs, and the deep sense of solitude. Being alone allows me greater freedom of action, I can live without a clock, I can eat when I need to, I can read all night, call in to the museum the next day and tell them I can't make it to work because I read all night. But sometimes it's tough, being alone; it's human nature, I think, to want contact with other human beings. The fourth wall is fire. I just understood something I hadn't gotten before. Think about it, living in a cave, you'd want a barrier, a fourth wall, that could be taken down during the day, and fire, read Bachelard, "The Psychoanalysis Of Fire", he nails it. A productive day. The origin of drama. Don't know why I hadn't realized that before. I'm often as dumb as a draft horse, and for all their lovely fetlocks they are stupid breeds. I can't abide stupidity, but I'd like to get laid, once in a while, so I'm willing to adjust my standards. Wow, what a pretty horse. Did you build that from Legos? What did Lopez say? Something about the threshold of memory. We topple in. I might be mopping the floor, in the fashion I've designed, completely in my head, probably humming a Grateful Dead tune, watching every stroke of the mop, to see where I might need to go back over a spot. Someone will ask me about a specific painting (the word is out that the janitor knows) and if the timing is good, I'll prop my head on the end of the mop-handle and allow what I know. Some times I act dumb. Depends on my mood. I'm often distracted, arguing a point with myself, and when I'm mopping hard and talking out loud, people rarely mess with me. I meant to send this a while ago, but the phone is out. All this rain, another tree fallen, down on Mackletree, I'd venture. But I had to pee, so I just started writing on the end of yesterday's paragraph. It gets confusing, the tense. Janitor College, for instance, is always in the past, but sometimes, remembering, it elides into the present. I can exercise control, but in the interest of flow, I often just go along. Olaf The Red was a hoot, drank like he had an empty leg. We were a year apart, but we crossed over in several classes, so I knew him, to speak to, and he was always drunk, but he functioned fine, which is more an indication of modern culture than anything else. We were in a class together, "Modern Dirt, 1935 To The Present" and he didn't like the professor, a sweet little Jesuit without an axe to grind; and decided, early on, he was going to bury him. He did, which is a sad story, ugly in places, the way we can hurt other people, the way we do. But it was funny, too, which is embarrassing. I hate the fact that I've laughed at other people's failings. The anodyne, of course, is just to fail at a few things. Which is easy to do. I can't cane a chair or weave a basket. Read more...

December Now

Time flies. The average day takes twenty minutes. Sometimes quicker than that, the blink of an eye. Suddenly tomorrow. Awoke to voices in the yard, six guys in orange vests with guns. They're lost. Wondering where my cemetery was as they were supposed to 'start a drive' there. Others of their friends are in ambush two hollows over, where the church used to be. Hollows are logical funnels. No reason to go back to bed, just to be awakened when the shooting starts, so I make a pot of coffee and reread a brilliant essay on Louis Agassiz by Guy Davenport. You can't just read one essay by Davenport. So goes the morning. The two young squirrels seem to be denning together in a crude nest they've erected in a hickory tree. They're collecting a stash of acorns around the base of their tree. There are several families of coal-black squirrels, along Mackletree and Upper Twin Creek. Always startling to see one, it takes a moment to register. The fox is hiding out while the hunters stalk the woods. Me too, you couldn't pay me to walk in the woods during hunting season, even on my own property. I have "The Prague Cemetery", I think it might have been Umberto Eco's last book, though many more volumes of collected essays and letters are yet to come, and I just settle in with a mug of chicken broth and the book, after turning on the computer, on which are the two working documents: the file I'm editing, and the open file I send to you. Some little thing (breaking an egg yolk comes to mind, but in this case I don't remember what it was) set me off thinking about 'right' and 'wrong' which led me back to Wittgenstein, and that led to a few other things. A day like this, I often just graze on pickled things, cheese and crackers, open a bottle of wine, flip the breaker on the fridge, unplug the phone, and allow my thoughts to wander. A day alone with Black Dell is different from a day at work, but it is exhausting work, and I'm always amazed, when I wake up dazed, on a Sunday or Monday, from having read and written for eight or ten hours the day before, that I have to relearn how to walk. Read more...