Involucra

Walked down this morning. The driveway was an ugly mess, and it required great care, especially at the top, to remain upright. Got to the bottom and the Jeep wouldn't start. Slogged back up the hill. Called the museum and D said he didn't think it was the battery and that I should disconnect the negative cable, wait a few minutes, reconnect the cable and try it again. Back down the hill, the cable thing didn't work, slogged back up. A second cup of coffee, then hauled some red maple from it's depot. Reread Guy Davenport essays through the afternoon. Walked over to B's cabin in the late afternoon and left a note that the Jeep needed a jump and could we do that tomorrow morning. He came over later and said yes we could, had a short drink, and we talked about classical Greek writers. He's teaching a new (for him) course because someone is on sick-leave. Affords us a chance to talk about certain authors, then a chance to talk about translations. I'd been thinking about translation recently. How impossible it was. Even between you and me, ostensibly using the same language. The translation between writer and reader. Met B at his truck (at the top of the driveway!) at 7:15 and we went down in a barely controlled skid. He's very good at that. The Jeep wouldn't jump, it's not the battery, so I ride in with him. Arrange a ride home with Drew. Talk with Chris, next door at the bar, and he says it sounds like the solenoid. I'll call Dave, my most excellent mechanic who lives on the creek, ask him to pick one up bring it out, and install it. I always pay him more than he charges me, so we're in good standing. The bathroom remodel crew was in today, for the great demolition: jack hammers, sledge hammers, and a merry mess. I wanted to restore the vault, because I've got things leaning against many of the walls I need to paint, and I want to get started painting. Instead I dabble in some Carter stuff, up on the third floor, as far from the noise as possible; I can't even really clean anything, because the mess is so ongoing. I did vacuum the library and straighten all the books. I've taken to keeping a copy of Basho's Haiku in the inside pocket of the dark brown canvas Carhartt farm coat that I wear as a winter outer layer. The best one today, I was standing outside, having a smoke (might as well read a poem and think about it), popped out. In this lovely edition, translated by David Barnhill, published by State University Of New York Press, the poems are presented in sequence, therefore, of course, by season. This is number 356.

no moon, no blossoms,
  just drinking sake
    all alone

I love it, it's so completely stark. The earliest extant poem is 1662, dies November, 1694, this poem comes from 1689, going into winter. I can identify with that. Read more...

Physically Exhausted

Before dark I make twenty or thirty trips carrying billets of wood into the shed. I can smell the rain coming, feel it on my face, but I finally have to throw in the towel; ten more repetitions and I would have got it all, but I just couldn't do it. Physically whipped and exhilarated in equal measure. When it finally starts raining I put out a couple of buckets to get water for a bath. I'm filthy and smell strongly of smoke and earth and the various piles of scat I've tracked inside. It's not a bad smell, like rotten potatoes or rotten eggs, and I like it, but I have to work with other people, so I heat water and bathe in the sheep-watering trough. Not a care in the world. Fulfilled my various functions without damaging myself. When I finally come inside, I sit in a stupor for several minutes, before I can shed the insulated work-boots and the outer layer of winter clothes; then I stoke up the fire, get a drink and roll a smoke. I'm clear on a lot of issues recently, I resolve questions by carrying either an odd or even number of logs for the stove. Not a life for everyone, but it works for me. Rain on a metal roof. "Delta Blues." Consider the desert, where nothing might happen for a very long time, various beaches in southwest Africa, an island you might find yourself. Suddenly it's tomorrow. I wasn't even aware of going to sleep. Stretched out on the sofa for a brief rest, woke up at three in the morning to pee, and went right back to sleep. Up at dawn and, after coffee, started hauling wood until the rain moved in. Then moved inside and started cleaning the smoke-chase. A wood cookstove circulates hot air and flame around the entire inside of the stove. In the case of my Stanley/Waterford both the inside and outside are cast iron, a box within a box. There's an access port below the oven and a special tool for raking out the ash and you open the top and rack the sides down to the bottom, open the port and rake then into the ash bucket. It's a dirty job. When I'm doing this I also knock the stovepipe, where there's always some creosote, so that I can rake that out as well. Then I have to vacuum and clean the inevitable mess. One of those chores, though, that I always feel good about, because it insures safe operation of a critical component in my life. My cast iron skillets migrate to the stove and to the stone counter that butts up against it (for sliding hot pans off the stove) and I spend an hour cleaning and seasoning them. I clean them with salt, as an abrasive, and a piece of old tee-shirt, then season them with a little walnut oil and heat them gently. Just went and counted and there are about twenty cast iron pots and pans, and two more that are at some stage of conservation. I just finished restoring an oblong pan, with a lid that can be used as a griddle (called a Sportsman's Pan), that measures seventeen inches by nine, four inches deep. It's seems designed to cook a whole loin of something. When I was last in town I watched several episodes of "After Hours With Daniel" on one of which he cooked an entire rack of venison, for which I'll substitute a pork loin, that I want to try, and the pan is perfect, as I can both sear and bake in it. The idea is to oil the piece of meat, then roll in crushed grains (sunflower seeds, oats, wheat berries), cover the top with sage leaves, then bard with bacon, truss it up, sear it on all sides, then bake at a low heat for several hours. I might deglaze the pan, after searing, with wine, leave it in the pan, then deglaze, after baking, with a bottle of stout, add a goodly pat of butter, call it "The Sportsman's Sauce"; serve this with roasted root vegetables and a salad. The day could best be described as one of drizzle, with waves of rain. It's dark in the early afternoon. I turn to Basho, days like this, or Emily, to be well and truly in the given moment. I'm warm enough, I have rain water, food is not a problem, and at this specific moment, there are no expectations that I even exist:

like nothing
  its been compared to:
    the crescent moon

Dusk, I go out one more time, with a rain jacket, and make five more trips to the sourwood tree. Three trips, tomorrow afternoon, after I've started a fire, should see the job done. Basho blows me away.

Into my moon and flower
  folly, I'll drive a needle:
    start of deep winter

so admirable
  even on a day without snow
    straw coat and bamboo hat

Survival is too marginal to brag out loud, but I feel good about this weekend. After I clean up and wash my hair, I go out with my LED head lamp and survey the woodshed. It's a lovely thing, to see the piles of wood. My phone is out, so I can't share this with you right away. but I had a minor epiphany, standing there. Several hundred thousand units of heat, maybe a million or more, under roof (I can't help but notice I used hurricane clips on all the rafters) and several buckets of kindling. Bring it on. My sweet Irish stove is looking for a match. Chess? ping-pong? cross-word puzzles? Actually I've never ever won a single game. What you might call an inveterate loser. I think I just lose on purpose, to end the game, I hate fucking games. And losing has always seemed the better part of valor. Rain, dripping on the roof. Listen, clearly it beats a time, 2/4 or 6/8, something in the key of G, the way sounds conspire, but I would never imagine any intention, just that it does rain and there is a certain percussion. Dial tone, I'd better send. Read more...

Woodshed

B came over and said he'd cut up a couple of trees for me, so I could rough them out of the woods, but first he had to go tap a bunch of maple trees for Ronny. I suit up and go out to the woodshed to clear out the last of the furniture, which I split into kindling and small stuff, and to move some things around. Right at freezing. Squirrels at play. Bits of snow still clinging here and there, on the north side trees mostly. I smash the furniture, the last school desk, a broken rock maple chair, part of an oak table top, with an axe, then kneel on a foam pad and split what I need with a hatchet. Lunch is an excellent Shepard's Pie that Carma had sent via D. B is back mid-afternoon and in forty minutes he's cut enough wood to occupy my time and supply heat for several weeks, and I have enough red maple and osage orange to last for several more. He cuts up a sizeable oak, then drops a dead sourwood tree. Sourwood honey is a local delicacy, the wood is very dense; and like dogwood, when the bark slips, the exterior surface is so smooth and hard, that water barely penetrates. The grain is twisted, like elm or osage, thus difficult to split, but B assures me that it burns forever. I've never burned any before. I'll need to haul wood tomorrow, then next weekend, or a day I get trapped at home, I can split everything and stack it. I have a nice supply of oak pallets. It's supposed to get much warmer for a few days, and I let the fire go out in the cookstove, to let it cool completely, so I can clean the smoke -chase around the outside of the inside of the oven and check the stove pipe. February yet to come. I should be comfortable for the next few nights, and that's not usual for this time of year, an interlude at exactly the right time. I make the most of it, and I am exhausted at the end of the day. I left my tools outside, because I knew I would have to suit-up and go out to get them, and I knew, if I suited-up, I'd haul a few loads of wood. I know the way I work. Habit, not discipline. And I get back inside, stripping a few layers of clothing, and consider dinner. We could order out, or we could order in, or we might stir-fry a vegetable thing with meat on the side, questionable mushrooms. But the easiest option is just tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. An apple, I think that was made clear. I'm still alive, that's really all that matters. Read more...

Crossing Boundaries

Gets this cold, you cross over into a different zone. You just focus on getting through another day. Concentrate on not making a stupid mistake. I don't mind the mild discomfort, it's no worse than I expect. Watch where you step, be careful with sharp objects, it's a short list. I need a couple of things, softer shocks and extremely aggressive tires for starters. I never intended to live a life like this. I never imagined what kind of life I might live. I just read books and stayed out of trouble. What was I thinking, how silly we could be, that that would somehow keep us safe, which is, of course, not true. Each of us is a monad of the magnificent, but we lack the ability to tie our shoes. Consider the Marsh Mallows in the field. Frogs in their embryonic form. Four young squirrels running rampant. Just pointing out. God, I love a list. This goes all the way back to Hesiod. Dipping down toward zero, but I don't know what zero means. It's getting very cold, I'd better go. I've lost the timeline. Stayed in town because it was supposed to snow, then it did snow and I had to stay because everyone else went home and there were workmen at the museum. The week was a comedy of errors, started Tuesday, a long meeting with board members, seems an electrician needed to work in the vault to drill a hole to install an anchor to carry the weight of the three-phase power lines, which would allow us to get rid of the power pole in the alley, and run the service underground from there. Which meant that I had to move half of the permanent collection out of the vault. Then a team of guys came in to attempt moving the safe deposit boxes out of the way. This is a double stack, each four feet high and five feet long, two feet deep, and they're made of quarter inch thick steel. They certainly weighed a thousand pounds each. Four hours later they had moved them a single foot. I argued that a foot was enough, because they could drill the hole from the outside and easily attach the flat steel plate on the inside. They argued that they couldn't exactly determine where to drill from the outside, and I argued that they could get close enough. Finally, after several more hours of trying to move the boxes, they didn't just agree with my argument, but tried to make it seem like their idea. They wall they were drilling through was 26 inches thick: the vault (80 years old, so the concrete was fully matured) and two layers of brick. I'd never actually seen a three foot drill bit. The hole is drilled, god save the hole, and now, starting Tuesday, I can restore the vault. What pissed me off most about this whole ordeal, was that no one else considered the artwork. It was a job-site to them. I had to watch them all the time. So I spent a couple of nights in town, I couldn't leave until everyone was gone and then it was too late to leave. Both the power and phone were out at the house, so I'd run home, build a fire, bank it down, so the house wouldn't freeze, then go back to the museum, where there's at least heat and hot running water. Spent a great hour at the pub one evening, with the most beautiful woman in Portsmouth. She was having a glass of wine, on her way to a meeting (she's a Labor Organization person) and we know each other, to speak to. But I'd never engaged her in serious conversation. We talked about living alone. She asked penetrating questions. She's a year into a divorce she didn't see coming, and she's anxious about the loneliness. Read more...

Bloody Cold

Have to crawl out of my bag, one in the morning, bring the radio up from mute and it's blue-grass from West Virginia. Flip on the back-porch light and go outside to pee. A generous five degrees. The leaf litter is a brittle frozen mat. Quick back to bed. Cold in the house, when the sun wakes me, but I manage to get a fire started and heat water to shave. To walk down to the Jeep, I wear high-tech long underwear, jeans, my heaviest denim shirt, Carhartt blanket-lined jacket, muffler, Linda hat, fleece gloves. The driveway is frozen so hard, it seems like a completely new material. Thankfully, no ice on the vehicle, I can get right in, start the heater, and the heated leather seats. I can't imagine why I should feel bad about this, it just seems slightly decadent for my ass to be so comfortable. All the surface water, the lakes, the flooded lowlands, are sheets of ice; even the fast running creeks are frozen in places. It's very beautiful. Before the cold snap, it had been warm enough for water to hit the various levels of cap rock and flow out of the hillsides in a thousand wet-weather seeps: an entire landscape of huge icicles. Layer upon layer, some of them small, but some of them as large as small houses. Especially visible in road cuts. Big group meeting and discussion about the main floor bathrooms at the museum. I draw the line at putting a wood floor at the back entry (being converted into a main entry) because I can barely maintain the ceramic tile that's there now, and these people have no idea the destructive powers of salt. Struggled up to 13 degrees today, and at 2:30 Pegi told me to go home, start a fire; I had no argument, stopped at Kroger, and at the bottom of hill, getting my pack together, B pulled in, gave me a ride to the top. He offered to help me buck wood next weekend, and I accepted. Jesus, it's cold. The next house I build will be underground, have no windows, and one door. I have to go get my hands warm. Read more...

Moonshine

Marilyn and I owned 120 acres in Mississippi for ten years, the 1980's, and thrived. A completely self-sufficient decade except for flour and sugar. Our cash crops were cheese, home-brew, and medicinal herbs. Basic 84 hour work week, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week; milking goats, which, being the deep south, we could stagger the lactations and milk year around. Over the years, I found the remains of three stills on the property, one at the sweet spring (where I built a crude catchment from which I must have hauled four or five thousand gallons of water) and at two of the ponds where other springs had found a basin. I was reading Willie Morris today: " Mississippi was a dry state, one of the last in America, but its dryness was merely academic, a gesture to the preachers and the churches. My father would say that the only difference between Mississippi and its neighbor Tennessee, which was wet, was that in Tennessee a man couldn't buy liquor on Sunday". I printed something of his, for Square Books in Oxford (one of the great independent book stores) but missed meeting him because it was goat-birthing season. Moonshine was still common when we were there, but only the best had survived. I bought stuff, for 20 dollars a gallon, that had aged a for a year on a few Muscadine Grapes (the grape skins actually do absorb impurities from the alcohol) that I quite liked with a splash of bitters on ice. The temps are steady dropping, there's a sound, as things lock into place, winter with a vengeance. I go out to pee, what, four in the morning, in my bathrobe with an LED headlamp and I end up hauling a couple of red maple rounds into the woodshed. Hey, I'm already awake, might as well make use of my time. "On a summer evening some years ago, two of the South's most celebrated writers, William Faulkner and Katherine Ann Porter, were dining together at a plush restaurant in Paris. Everything had been laid out to perfection: a splendid meal had been consumed, a bottle of fine Burgundy emptied, and thimble-sized glasses of an expensive liqueur drained. The maitre d' and an entourage of waiters hovered close by, ready to satisfy any final whim. "Back home the butter beans are in," said Faulkner, peering into the distance, "the speckled ones." Miss Porter fiddled with her glass and stared into space. "Blackberries," she said wistfully." I lifted that completely from a book of Southern quotes, "On the Night the Hogs Ate Willie" which had me rolling on the floor. One of my great failures was not recording colloquialisms when I lived in Ms, but we were so goddamn busy. I only spent as much time writing in a week, then, as I now spend in a day, less than that. B came over for a quick drink, to make sure I was alive, and to see that I was stocked against the impending cold. Ten degrees tonight, five tomorrow night, a high in the teens. I have to get to town tomorrow, a meeting; and I want some red meat, a small steak, with a double helping of mashed potatoes, dripping in butter, speckled with an even coating of fresh-ground black pepper, and an avocado, sprinkled with lime juice. If the driveway freezes solid, and there is no snow, I should be able to drive in. I need liquids, and books I haven't read before. Read more...

Slapstick

Three guys sitting at a bar. The middle guy has to dodge the conversation. Dips in and out, depending on who's talking. D said I should take home a coffee can of the super ice-melter we use at the museum (the science of salts has been a lifelong interest) to clear a walking path through the sheet ice on the back porch and steps. I crawled in, yesterday. TR gave a cogent review of a movie. I wasn't working, so I just had a draft for lunch, after a huge late breakfast that had involved potatoes, sausage (home-made chorizo), onions, and several eggs. I recognize the state I'm in, a kind of grace, and I don't fight it. At the bottom of the hill I arrange my pack so it's comfortable and walk up in the median, because the tracks are a muddy mess. I sprinkle salt, like a blessing, and walk right up to my door. I can do this. Home is where I want to be. No agenda, no phone for that matter; I read and write and go to bed. This morning dawned clear: blue and calm. I wanted to be outside, so I donned the black Carhartt bibs, had a quick breakfast of oatmeal and coffee, put on my thickest leather work gloves and grabbed the long-handled clippers. After an ice storm blackberry canes and young sassafras tend to hold their new bended demeanor, and I spend a couple of hours clearing them off the upper part of the driveway. Then spend some time in the woodshed, which resembles a second-hand furniture store at this point, cutting up various table tops and chairs. It's my new passion in recycling, reclaiming the lost BTU's from abandoned furniture. Editing the Janitor Book is a study in comma removal. It's interesting, the way meaning is slightly morphed by the subtraction or addition of a comma. After lunch, tomato soup and half a ham and cheese sandwich, I got my rucksack that I carry on hikes, an old canvas thing that contains a foam pad, to kneel or sit on, a magnifying glass in a Chivas Regal cloth bag (to protect it against scratches), a flashlight, a couple of small Tupperware containers, a few power bars, because I never know how long I'll be gone, and a compass. A good Gerber knife clipped to my inside pocket, a knowledge of snares and traps, two Bic lighters, I could probably get through the winter. I have the house warm enough that I can shave and wash my hair. It's supposed to be above freezing some time next week. Little mercies. Not that I care, particularly, but that I notice. It's actually easier to walk down a frozen driveway, wearing spiral crampons (TRAX), than it is to walk in mud. My mop-handle walking stick was abrading at the end and I fit it with a copper plumbing part, that I fill with waterproof glue and stuffed over the end, excellent improvement. I could market these in the next Janitor Supplies catalog and make a fortune. Read more...

Severe Clear

An ineffable day, but, of course I'll try. Got up in the night to finish a piece and send it, I think I did, then slept in late. All the ice is gone, the ground is a muddy mess, but it's beautiful. I watched the last of the ice, high in the stick trees explode in the early hard rays of sun. Supposed to get to 50 degrees today before steady sliding down to 5, and I'd already decided to run to town, so I just lounged around the rest of the morning, drinking coffee and rereading some sections from "The Printing Press As An Agent Of Change" and Chappell's "A Short History Of The Printed Word". I needed whiskey, I was going to run out Monday night, and I couldn't let that happen, and I wanted some more of those stuffed potato skins that I can just micro-wave and eat while I read or write. I hope they're fattening, D assures me they are. Needed to go to the library, to return some books, and to get some essays, I wanted to read some decent prose, settled on a book of Coetzee's literary essays. He's an interesting writer, and I'll grant his opinions some weight. He's quite good on Faulkner, and it's difficult to be good on Faulkner. One last gallon bucket of acorns I need to process, so I shuck them out and smash them into a coarse grind, eighth inch pieces and smaller, put them in my three gallon pot with a gallon of rain water. I have a lot of water right now. Put them on a trivet, on the coolest part of the stove-top, put another gallon of water on to heat. Stir them vigorously every couple of hours and change the water, they are both cooked and leached by the time I dry the mass in the oven and reduce it to meal. This yields maybe eight one cup baggies that I store, double-wrapped in the freezer. Enough protein to run a diesel truck for a month. My goal, currently, is to just get the house as warm as possible; when it drops to near zero, you need a plan, and the first part of my plan is to get things as warm as possible before the outsides temps start sucking heat away. Stash everything that could freeze and break, in the fridge, an ironic touch, and maybe spend a few nights in a motel, I could use a bath, my personal habits are suspect. Not even close to someone you would want to represent you. Read more...

The Game

It's all in the game. The way it plays out. Against the wind. Everybody's gone surfing, despite the sharks, various sting-rays, and jelly-fish. I consider complete immersion as a sin against water use, but I'm in that hermetic minority, where we merely sprinkle. A product of living in the desert, where a cave is a cool respite. Breathing outside air. The walk down is the easy part. This time of year I shave at night, or whenever the house is warm enough. Still an ice storm at my house, though it was forty degrees in town. Cold and getting colder, Monday and Tuesday in the single digits. I'll need to run to town tomorrow for a few more supplies. Pegi sent me home early today. D and I talked logistics, but he had to leave early to take two of his kids to the doctor. Everyone's sick. I'm fine, except that my right eye is leaking. Extensive flooding in the lowlands around Portsmouth, very lovely on a day of severe clear. Every time I go to Kroger I bring home another package of Baby Red mashed potatoes and one of the various Spanish, Dirty rices. Feeling better about my stash of food. Next time I can drive in, I have a list of canned goods I want to bring. Saturday afternoon and Sunday I need to split some wood, Osage Orange and Red Maple, it's bone dry, should get me through the cold snap. And, of course, I have to go to the library; I have some reference books on order through inter-library loan, and I need some fiction, to balance the reading load. I don't pretend to know what other people do with their time, I just read. A day I don't work at the museum, I'll read for six or eight hours. It's a great luxury. The fact that I don't have to justify the way I spend my time. There's some give and take, between me and the world, but most of the time, I'm on my own. Not beholding. Though the last time I talked with Sara I think we decided to work on the Carter material together. Which we should do, because we're two of the last people alive who carry these archives in our heads. Like a lost language. Read more...

Ma Bell

Struggling with utilities. It doesn't seem right, that my paragraphs should be restricted by the services available to me, but, of course, that is always going to be the case. It alters the meaning of beginnings and endings. Adams County Rural Electric has spent a lot of money to keep me on the grid, and Ma Bell is deep into overtime to provide me with a dial tone. I didn't design the system, I just bought into it. My only bills are Electric and Phone and Visa, and the price I pay on my body. It seems to be too high a price, from my point of view, to pay for a system that doesn't work half the time. An adequate arrangement, but barely. The back deck is covered in ice, I have to wear crampons to go out and pee. I feel old, leaning on my mop-handle, in my bath robe, wearing crampons, in the brittle cold; but it must be said, it gets your attention. I count in tens and twelves, other people factor reality with different algorithms, the average distance from your elbow to your finger-tips, or a certain fraction of moonshine, but I use the rule of thumb: simply survive. A down bag on the sofa, a crust of bread, the days are getting longer. Buck it up. It's only the real deal in so far as you can accept it, everything else is duff or puff or dust, blowing in the wind. What were we talking about? I have to cover my ears, it's cold. I've developed a flip of blanket that covers the top of my head and whatever ear is exposed. Fuck a bunch of circumstance. Good enough for me. PS, I'm not accountable. A short drink and one more cigaret. In those last watercolors Sargent was almost completely Impressionistic. From 1906 on. They're lovely. Beautiful, walking down, driving through the forest, a winter wonderland. Spent the morning gathering and hauling trash and several 55 gallon bags of recycling; then, in the afternoon, cleaned off some shelves in the basement storage room and hauled several loads of stuff for the next auction/fund-raiser. D and I started dismantling the doll cases, which are to be replaced with built-in benches, and conferred on the new doll case. D worked on a data base for the permanent collection. I have to get three pedestals out of the little upstairs gallery tomorrow and I can start painting. Actually, it might take a day of preparation. Even though the (kid's) art was hung with push pins, I'm not sure the paint will fill, and besides, when you pull out anything there's at least a tiny eruption, so each one of the two hundred push-pin eruptions needs to tapped back flat. Baseboard and door jambs need to taped. I'll just cut the line where the Cubist Gray walls meet the Gallery White ceiling. I've gotten very good at cutting edges. I learned from the great Helen Pond, who said to charge the brush fully and do it. Good advice, and profound in a way. If you try and draw the line, the junction, the interface; you don't fully charge the brush and you have to go back over every part of the line, maybe several times. Dramatically increases the margin of error. You empty the brush by extending the cut edge in far enough to use a roller. If paint gets to the ferrule, you're always working over your head, you have to stop and clean the brush, blot it dry; I try to keep two in rotation. Breathe in, breathe out, paint a foot of line. Sounds like a blues riff, something in the key of G. Read more...

Pollyanna Doesn't Live Here

The history thing. Drew wondered. I was reading Procopius. He'd written the 'official' history of that period, A.D. 500-527, Justinian and Theodora. Wild times by any standards. And it's straight forward bullshit. The kind of thing you'd hire someone to write, which I guess they did; or threaten into existence with the idle comment that if you didn't they'd flay your ass in public. So after he'd done that, he wrote a second book, it probably was him, the style has a certain swag, called "The Secret History". A brutal, raw thing, in which he exposes every crevice of depravity. I don't know how it came down to us, and if I even offered a theory I'd be getting out of line, because the provenance is shaky. It marries nicely with the Marquis de Sade. I don't offer an opinion here, I just read these things, try and discern what's being said. The temperature drops like a stone and I'm so engrossed in the book that I don't notice until I'm extremely cold and realize the fire has gone out. Fuck. I'd swore to myself I wouldn't let that happen. But I have fat pine, and oak splits, and a match, so I can probably keep from dying. Sounds more serious than it is. I have a down bag that would protect against almost any cold, and I just have to walk down the driveway tomorrow (downhill is easy, I can do it with a certain flare), flip on my heated leather seats, get a coffee at Market Street. Retreat to the museum..This isn't so difficult, if you just take one step at a time. Got to work fine yesterday, Pegi called, sounding like death warmed over, said she wouldn't be in for a couple of days. She said Steve, her husband (a weather watcher) said there was a good chance for an ice-storm and would I please stay at the museum so that there would be someone there today. I agreed, went over to Kroger and got some supplies, watched two episodes of Elementary, then read art criticism until midnight. Woke up this morning, and there was very little ice, but my house is a thousand feet higher than town, and every thousand feet in elevation is a different climate zone. I was the only person at the museum, D teaches on Wednesday; Pegi called again, sounding even worse, but TR did come in long enough for me to go to the pub, have a bowl of soup and pick up a few dinner items. Didn't get much work done, because I had to stay in the office to answer phone calls, but I did take two older gentlemen from Texas through the Carters. They had seen some of his work at the University of Texas, bequeathed there by James Mitchner, who was an avid collector. Heading home, as soon as I got out of town and into the hill country, the ridge-tops looked smoky, and I knew there had been some ice. Went I got to the state forest on Mackletree, it was stunning, beautiful, but I could see that the phone line was out, gone slack on it's poles. So I won't be able to send this. By the time I got to Upper Twin, everything was covered with ice, not a lot, just an eighth of an inch, but what a magnificent prismatic sunset. Surprisingly I had electricity, turned on the heater and started a fire. The house was cold, 42 degrees, and it clearly never got above freezing here today. The walk in was so beautiful, it would break your heart; right in it then, of course, face to face with a million miniature ice sculptures. I'm glad I don't photograph anything, because I got home without freezing to death. Out here, in the field. It's so romantic and so anti-romantic, at the same time, that there's a tendency to freeze to death, trying to decide where you fall. I was careful, where I put my foot on the walk up today. Whereby there becomes here, which is a big deal for me. Achieving the ridge. Driving home is one thing, but getting to my house is another.

Tom

Hard stop, the space and then the name, I like it, a certain dynamic. Spaces and punctuation roll along. Meaning is a mystical beast. I really have to go to sleep. Remind me what I was I was talking about. Wait: Houston, we have a dial tone. Force of habit, I check before I sack out, and there it is. Get one more drink and roll a smoke, read back over and decide I'd best just send while the sending is good. I'll pick up the thread tomorrow. Read more...

Editing

Text. Reading text all day. I have an enormous amount of text, thousands of pages. When I get the new computer, I have to learn how to do word searches. What Glenn did for the janitor material actually makes a book possible. There are several of those books embedded in the text. The fox book, the frog book, the cook book, the getting through the winter book, the driveway book. I need to get busy, but I'm older, and I require time, more time, to just think about things, and write what I manage to write. Working outside, which I need to do until I topple, and my usual reading and writing, take all of my time; but with the right software and a decent printer, I think I could edit out some books. There's probably a Carter book in there. I may have already written a Carter book, I just didn't know it. Thank god. I had tried to warn myself ahead, left notes and clues, but I still knew I would try and write a Carter book, with it's myriad failures. I'm not a scholar, I pretend to a high-school education; when they took me out, the third time, to repeat the fourth demand, that you'd set up a squall if it was demanded. We're clear on this? You didn't leave any fingerprints, I know how careful you are. I'm clear on this, I didn't leave any fingerprints either. I'm careful about that. Read more...

Civilize

After the fact, I understood what had happened. I'd gone over to the dictionary table (it's a slab of polished sandstone lab-counter, two feet deep by six feet long) to reference a Latin word, and I ended up on the sofa with the Dictionary Of Americanisms that McCord had sent along a few years ago. It's in a couple of volumes and they're large and the type is small, I have to wear reading glasses to decipher the text, and the format is crazy, twenty different typefaces, in italics and small caps; and I have to go into what I think of as 'comprehension mode' to tease out meaning. ---(2) HUNTER "Trail Drivers Texas" 442. "We would civilize up a bit when we went to a dance, that is, we'd take off our spurs and tie a clean red handkerchief around our neck." And since I had the reading glasses on, the dictionary propped on my knees, the light coming over my right shoulder, I elected to just keep reading, as if it were a novel, some off-the-cuff thing by Mark Twain or Dorothy Parker. One thing as good as another. I spend some time with 'climbing spurs' for which there's one of those confusing line drawings that makes no sense until I walk away and come back looking at it from a different angle. Then 'clod crusher', an epithet used by Americans to describe the large feet which they believed to be characteristic of Englishwomen as compared with those of their own country. 'Clove', a ravine or valley, chiefly in place names. I inhabit the ridge at Low Gap Clove. Not unlike the use of Kill for a small stream. Mostly Dutch. Low Gap Kill. A rill, a merry note, where Upper Twin Creek emerges from the hillside. I have to go, this is too much fun. Rain all day. I read Nobokov. Then finish a history of sunflowers that I seem to have set aside. Phone is out of commission again. I heard it make a little chirp and when I checked it was dead. No Sunday phone calls. I read through a batch of articles written about Sargent after his death. Hagiology, for the most part, but interesting little details. He hated packing but moved around all the time, he was a strong swimmer, he lived a Spartan existence when he painted in the field, favored porridge for breakfast. Good friends with Henry James. Knew all the Impressionists, but never displayed with them. I look very closely, magnifying glass closely, and the brush work seems effortless. He would wait for particular light, and then work feverishly for six or eight minutes. Monet kept ten or twelve paintings going all the time, so he could catch several different lights. Sargent would back up ten feet, cock his head, then attack the painting. Recollections of memory. Nobokov was talking about that today, in a story, how far history is to be trusted. Not far, as history is truly the art of the oppressor. I'll pick this up later, I need a nap. Doctor John, time for a change, listening in the dark, then I curl up on the sofa, having muted the sound, wrap up in a blanket, and let the rain drift me off. Phone back on, so I'll ship this one and start another. Read more...

Do That

I have a long list of things to do, but I break it out into discreet units so I don't get overwhelmed. Tuesday I need to paint 144 linear feet of gallery ten feet high. That's 1,440 square feet, but mostly it's roller work and I can do that, not quite a piece of cake. Gallery White is a forgiving color. I top off all the containers with rain water, a month's supply, easy, when a bucket is empty, I'll start melting snow. The shape I'm in. Standing in the pouring rain, if it makes things right, the wall street side of town. Water to burn, change in your pocket, and a kind-hearted woman. Stubborn love, like a large rock tied to your leg when they throw you in the deep end of the pool. I'm no doctor, but that monkey might be real. I'm not particularly paranoid, but at first light I was walking to the outhouse and there were a couple of crows in a dead poplar, off to the side. They didn't even interrupt their conversation. They must have a kind of lanolin in their feathers, they look like shit but they shed water. First light, I'd taken out a New Yorker, because I wanted to read a book review, but I ended up just watching the crows bitch and moan about the weather. I'd ask them inside, but they always poop on the sofa. Crows are not good companions, they're always complaining. I'd rather be alone and listen to the drone of rain on the roof. I don't need an excuse. Funky, funky, but cheap. Now and then there's a fool such as I. Not that I'm an Elvis fan. I endured way too much of that with my Mom and sister. Warm day, shirtsleeves mid-January. The hill is slick with rain and I walk down very carefully. Needed to go to the library, stop at Kroger, but I first went to the pub for the noon beer I allow myself every once in a while. Barb, the owner, is there, Kori, and Christine. There's a light out, over the bar, and it's driving Barb crazy, so I go and get the step-ladder, change out the bulb, and get my beer for free. Kori doesn't quite understand my relationship with the pub. The owners always sit with me and buy me drinks. Everyone knows me by name. D and I hang difficult objects for them, it's a pub, for god's sake, and there are lots of interesting objects, some of them not designed to hang from the walls. What threw Kori off today, was I said to Barb, jeeze, I know where there ladder is, and she didn't. Maybe it's a guy thing. I always locate ladders and flashlights when I first enter a building. I actually carry a flashlight in a holster on my belt. How often do you want to be in the dark? I'm not really obsessive, but I lean in that direction. A goodly time at the library, because I was on my own schedule, I could read the blurbs and consider. I settled on some early Nabokov short stories, I hadn't read some of them, and a book about paper. Sometimes I lie awake and wonder where the years have gone, usually I just go to sleep. Stopped back by the museum to chat with TR. We talked about doing an opera, and I immediately thought about Sappho. I'd like to do an opera. Though I actually hate the combined arts, they always involve way too much compromise. But I'd welcome the chance to work with TR again. Read more...

Harvesting Rain

Hard rain wakes me, four in the morning, I get up and put out a couple of five gallon buckets to collect wash water. It's supposed to precipitate, in one form or another, for the foreseeable future. A good thing, as the leaf litter will saturate and the danger of fire will dissipate; and unlike the former truck, the Jeep has windshield wipers that actually work. This weather system, it has everything to do with the jet stream, is coming in from the south. Uncommon but not unknown, usually weather here comes from the northwest. I listen to it long enough to realize I won't go back to sleep. It's warm, in the forties, but some of the precipitation seems to be sleet which dances a nice tune on the metal roof. A small fire is all I need, to chase the chill. I put on the Cello Suites, Rostropovich; Bach is sublime, mystical, stirs things I didn't know I had. I listened to the Edgar Meyer transposition for double bass in the main gallery recently, and it was thrilling. The old bank was vibrating. Some notes were so low I didn't really hear them so much as feel them. A penchant for moments like that. Usually involving Bach and being alone. Not that I wouldn't rather be nestled neatly but that I realize my limitations. I'm essentially bogus. And un-improvable. At the end of a day all I have is a string of words. Usually no one says anything, and I accept that. Not unlike a tree-frog asked to identify itself. One more drink and one more cigaret. Damn, I nail myself, there's nothing I can't reveal, but there are some things I can't say. D spent all day working on a data base, I piddled at patching and started sanding. Found a new tobacco pouch on line and D ordered it for me. I may have to run to town tomorrow. Pains me, but I neglected to think through the food-for-three- days issue. Supposed to be in the 60's this weekend, so I won't need a fire, which rules out a pot of beans or chili. The seafood lady at Kroger agreed to get me some salted cod and I can hardly wait for some codfish cakes. Maybe next week. It's a ten pound box (wooden) and will easily last me through the winter. I love them for a weekend brunch or for dinner anytime. One winter on Cape Cod I ate them every day for weeks. Night fishing for cod off the beach at Nauset, I'd bring home 3 or 4 ten-pounders, fillet them out, and store them in the freezer. Bake one, with a smear of mayonnaise and a squeeze of lemon, salt and pepper, let it cool, flake it out, caramelize an onion diced fairly fine, mix with enough left-over (important that they be left over, otherwise the cakes fall apart) mashed potatoes, roll them in bread crumbs and fry in peanut oil. I usually have a fried egg on top. This is damned good. I fed them once to a great cook who had passed out and slept on the sofa, after a meal of rolled and pounded something stuffed with something, and way too many bottles of wine, and she declared it the best damned thing she had ever eaten. Kind of a captive audience, when you think about it, she didn't know how I felt about her getting drunk and sleeping on my sofa. I didn't care, I keep new cheap toothbrushes in a jar over the kitchen sink. Read more...

Naming Things

The new waitress at the pub is Kori, I finally see her name writ on a note for me to pick up lunch for the ladies at the museum. Kori is Kora is Cora, means maiden, another name for Persephone, daughter of Demeter, queen of hell. A derivation. I wonder what her parents were thinking. Or not thinking, maybe just heard the word and liked the way it sounded. My daughters were named after goats, but for the grace of god they're not named Black and Decker. We tended toward paired names, as we tended to acquire breeding stock in pairs, don't get me started on that, we had our reasons, following some early failures. Briggs and Stratton. Night and Day, Ryobi and Suzuki. If I'd ever had a son he would have been Plumb Bob. Thank god I never had a son. There's a kind of mud I call 'shattered', without getting too far into personal vocabularies, is just that frozen crust where you break through to the mud underneath, and it oozes out. I can't tell you the number of times. It climbs up the legs of your jeans. Anyway, Kori is a lovely person and she tapped me on the back, to make sure the order was correct, and I explained to her that this happened, time to time, that someone from the museum would call, with an order, because they knew where I would be. It all seems too familiar, but such is life. Some things are patterned. Grammar and syntax, I get it now, syntax is the train and grammar is the track. Commas are just small towns in the mid-west, where you snag a mail bag. Museum Board meeting at noon today, Pegi was in a panic and D spent the morning preparing. I brought some of the bad Chinese food home. I make better fried rice. Patched and repaired all day. Tomorrow I'll sand everything, refill the plastic anchor holes, of which there are a great many, and break out the painting supplies. I think I'm staff on Saturday and I might have a chance to get into the Carter filing cabinets that no one has ever gone through. I'm beginning to feel the need to organize all the Carter material, but I refuse to do it on my own time. The museum needs to get a grant to allow me to work on the archives for a year. I'd still install shows, because I love doing it; it's such a hoot, wearing white cotton gloves and handling art, doing all the math, hammer-drilling into the walls of an old bank (concrete as god intended), and the endless problem solving. I love solving problems. My strong suit is that I can visualize almost anything. I build houses in my head, on weekends, as a game. Post and Beam houses that involve complicated joints. Generally speaking, if I'm not reading or writing, I'm imagining a complicated joint. A habit I developed early. Look at a schematic of one of the trusses in Westminster Hall. No one, still, knows how they work. We assume certain loads, the way they're carried, but this was 1393-1397 and Hugh Herland worked it all out in his head, the greatest feat of the Middle Ages. He more than doubled any span that had ever been attempted, and it still stands, though some of the timbers are rotted and there's cause for concern. 68 feet, and the previous record was 28 feet, which was why you had rows of pillars, dividing the central seating area from the side galleries. His vision was a Grateful Dead concert in which there were no bad seats. I don't travel, except by car, I don't believe airplanes actually work, I think it's a smoke and mirrors thing, so I'll never go to England and see the real thing, but I've taken the virtual tour many times, and I have photocopies of the structural components. I've studied this roof for 40 years; nothing strange that I'd want to spend a couple of years studying the archives of a minor regionalist painter. I've watched frogs for a couple of years, Pileated Woodpeckers: anything worth doing, as the saying goes. I'd rather spend three months befriending a crow, that she would trust me enough to eat out of my hand, than I would all those hours of meetings. How do I say this? When you meet me, you know what you're going to get, an ass hole out in left field. I guess I pride myself on that, where I stand, the ridge, high ground. Read more...

Losing It

Beyond control. You know there isn't anything to be done. I usually scream a few expletives and throw rocks at a tree, then put on my boots and slog up through the mud. It isn't even that bad, because it's above freezing, and it slows you down. It's doesn't matter whether it takes me ten or fifteen minutes to get to the house. I have my mud-room chair, my slippers, the kindling for a fire. By the time I stop to consider my dinner options, get a drink, roll a smoke, I'm calm, in my sweats. The setting sun was orange bands. Something out of a movie. Strings in the soundtrack. A lonesome cello. I'm careful not to lose it in public. I couldn't stand being locked away. So if someone's shear stupidity, or a situation, or inclement weather, messes with my schedule, I adjust things, as best I can, and rant in the privacy of my personal space. Alliterative bastard. I make several curses that would live in the history of curses. Call paternity into question. Question who's Mom that was. I have tobacco everywhere, I need the vacuum. There. I said it. What I need is a null set, { }, or at least some quiet so I can think this through. I spend a good bit of my time thinking through various constructs. Especially a day like today, I gathered and hauled trash in the morning, and in the afternoon I took off the vinyl signage for the upstairs show. I've modified a cheap paring knife for this chore, with a slight bend in the tip, which allows me to lift a corner of a letter so I can grip it, and not damage the surface. Got the last of the paintings off the walls, the ones that required two people, and I had only waited on those, because D was busy with other things, for TR to be around. I like working with TR because he has to rethink everything, and you can actually watch him do it. Sometimes his solutions are better than what I had in mind, and sometimes they're not. If they're not, I say so, but if they're better (he's a bright guy) I fluidly adopt his recommendations. And he's funny. He and D get going sometimes, and I have to stop what I'm doing and go listen to them. Half the shit they banter about, I don't have a clue: popular culture and technology have left me far behind; but they can be very funny. It's my Dad's 93 rd birthday, and I resolve to talk to him, but they misplace their phone and almost never answer. So I call every hour and finally get Mom, talk with her for a while, and finally talked with Dad. I have to yell now, because he doesn't hear, but he sounded ok and someone is making him cornbread. As long as he has cornbread he's a happy camper. There was a small turkey breast in the remaindered meat section, speaking of cornbread, and I bought it ($1.98) because I wanted some stuffing, and some sandwiches would be good. Dried it off and rubbed it with a little maple syrup, then with a dry mixture, I don't know what's in it anymore, a lot of dried chilies, garlic and onion powder, various herbs. Remember, any single slice isn't going to carry that much of a potent crust. Made a cornbread and apple stuffing that I baked in a buttered Pyrex pie-pan because I wanted a maximum heat to surface area ratio. Made a decent gravy from bacon fat and chicken stock, thickened with flour then reduced. Lots of black pepper. Anyone should eat so well, I see another dinner, in the leftovers, and at least two sandwiches. For less than four dollars. Four meals. I don't know why I'm so good at this. Actually I do know. I left home as soon as I could, not because home was bad, but it was too comfortable, and I sensed a world, out there, that would engage me more completely. And that has certainly has been the case. But suddenly there was no one there to cook, Mom, and if I was going to eat, on a tight budget, I damned well better learn. And I did/have, my ribs are as good as any in the world; it's been said, about my London Broil, that it could actually change the face of history. I don't believe that. Say what you will. It's just a piece of meat. Read more...

Collective Remembrance

Amazing how many of us on the crew for "Les Troyens" remember it as a pivotal event. But of course it was, we merely pulled off the impossible. Of course, we were working 100 hour weeks at the end, napping in the house while Sara C rehearsed the orchestra. There was a Greek diner around the corner where we could get breakfast any time of the day or night. I have a few photographs, not of that show, but what must have been the same year, when, on a day off (there weren't many) a bunch of us went out to the Watertown Arsenal, because the Opera Company stored scenery there, and I had a key. There was a chain hanging from a hoist, way up in the ceiling, Ted Harper had come up for a visit, and took some shots of Fritz swinging like a maniac. We took the house organ apart, so we could erect a statue of Athena in the organ loft, it was, as I remember, 24 feet tall. Everything, for that show, was huge. On the final Sunday, when we did a matinee of the first opera, and then an evening performance of the second; after the matinee, we just opened the stage doors (Kim remembers the alley) and pushed the first opera out the door. Literally. Never have so few done so much for so few. The shop, an old brewery, was in a bad part of town, but there was a barbeque joint "You Can Beat My Meat, But You Can't Touch My Sauce" on the way out, the Green Line, as I remember. We took a dinner break and worked into the night at the shop and one night I finally said I was going to get some ribs, did anyone else want in. They all did, but feared for my safety, and I told them not to worry, going into a barbeque joint in a bad part of town was something I could handle. I looked like the village idiot, covered in paint and spray foam, with splashes of low-fire silver solder on my shoes, took the Green Line back a couple of stops and walked the half-block to the store-front. An ethnic mix that didn't look friendly, but I ask the guy at the counter, Randall, about the ribs, and he explained his process, I explained my variations, and we ended up cooking together, on a couple of occasions. Not the only time I was called to task for being white. After the first time, I had an armed guard, when I went to pick up ribs and slaw. I'd call in an order and Randall would have a gang member meet me at the station. Things evolve. Epicanthic folds. Sideburns. Too much time in the wasteland. Put away a few more painting, then patched an area where we had Velcroed some small etching plates to the wall. The adhesive they use on Velcro is aggressive and leaves gouges in the wall, but sometimes it's the only solution. The crew that's going to do the demolition and re-paving in the alley, was around for part of the day. There was a manhole cover, cemented in place, and D and I had wondered for years what was under it. The crew had to know, so they went at it with chisels and three-pound hammers. There was nothing, there wasn't even a hole; there had been something, obviously, but the hole had been filled with concrete and the manhole cover slapped back in place. I'd thought I might be able to drive all the way in, but I got 150 feet up the driveway and realized that wasn't going to happen. Had to back down, load my pack and the canvas bag with what I could carry and leave everything else in the vehicle. Not supposed to get too cold tonight, thank god, because there are gallons of liquids. I carry in orange juice and whiskey, butter and cream, a couple of frozen Thai dinners, yogurt, and a gallon of drinking water. I try to remember to bring in a one of those tube pouches of something, every time I shop, so that I could survive an ice storm, eating red-beans and rice, or instant mashed potatoes, and other things that only require water and heat. This morning I was walking carefully around the top of the driveway, because I didn't know what the footing was like, B was leaving at the same time, and asked if I wanted a ride down, and I told him no, that I preferred to walk. I was already in that mode, you know, where you consider every step, and stop, to look around. Read more...

Surface Tension

Something about the day. Overcast and the air heavy with moisture. I eat the last of the grits, with butter, cream, and brown sugar. Nestle under a blanket on the sofa, rereading George V. Higgens, "The Friends Of Eddie Coyle". I don't think anyone has ever written dialogue better. The way the characters are revealed by what they say is incredible, masterful. And, if you've ever lived in Boston, it is spot on. We all talked like mobsters. I kept a rented room on the Cape, and if I could squeeze out a day from the opera schedule, I'd go down, walk the beaches, collect mussels and clams for a steamed dinner, and maybe letterpress print a broadside in the print-shop I maintained in the basement of a general store. A blur to me now, I remember almost being killed by a press we were moving into the basement. It took out a door-jamb, but I had nimbly stood aside. More luck, than anything else. The story of my life. The first time I went into a Japanese restaurant I was with a Japanese lighting designer, and he knew exactly what he wanted, every time after that, when I went into that restaurant, they deferred to me, as if I knew what I was saying, despite the fact, as Bobby told me later, I was ordering fish eggs with glue. Tangled up in blue. Freeze-up on the river, in the lee of an abutment is not a bad place to be. After lunch, that old Elvis stand-by, peanut butter and bacon on toast, I read Robert Kaplan's excellent "The Nothing That Is", A Natural History Of Zero. Then spend a couple of hours with a field guide to animal tracks and scat, refreshing my memory. Winter is the season of tracks. Above freezing, and the edges of the driveway puddles thaw. It's a track extravaganza. I have a stump to sit on there, with my ethafoam pad; I look at the tracks and look at the pictures in the book, try and figure out who is which and what was happening. One of the most interesting set of tracks today, was a young rabbit, over near the head of the driveway, and they simply disappeared. It took me a minute to realize it had been taken by an owl or hawk. For dinner I just roast cubes of butternut squash and sweet potato, swishing them through a warm seasoned olive oil; I can eat this with just my right hand and hold a book in my left, but even though I'm careful, wiping my fingers on pilfered napkins, I do get the occasional oil smear on a page. You eat about a thousand meals a year, I eat 192 of those with other people, mostly lunch with D, call it two hundred, which leaves me with 800 meals at which I can read. That's a hundred books a year. I read fiction, non-fiction, and poetry is equal measure, so there's no telling what I'd be reading where. I probably lean toward non-fiction at the island, eating, because I keep a running list, and then to gather reference material while I'm cooking, because you have a moment here and there, and the smells of cooking ignite my brain. I remember odd thoughts I had during the day, one thing, how do you do a zero set, brackets with nothing in between? Read more...

Mud

So many freeze-thaw cycles per season here, that living as I do, mud becomes a fact of life. Tracking in muddy ice and snow. I keep chair near the back door in winter, a stiff brush, and a pair insulated moccasins I favor as house shoes. As soon as I come in the door, after kicking both feet against the steps (6x12 timbers), I take off the work boots with crampons attached, slip on the moccasins, take the boots back outside and bang them together, then sweep up the mess I've made inside and throw it outside while it's still frozen. This confines the zone I need to mop to a small area that I can usually clean with a couple of napkins. I'm a saver of napkins. They serve a triple function for me, so I can absorb their cost to my foot-print. I use them to blot the migrant dribbles of soup, then dampen them, to mop, where I make a mess, then dry them, over near the stove, and use them to start fires. I bring home newspapers from the museum, and anything else combustible, to start fires. I have used bad poems to start fires, but I usually feel guilty later, so I try not to do that very often. I have some coal, which I don't generally have, because it's even messier than wood, a laden truck took a curve to quickly on the river road and I was able to fill a five-gallon bucket in just a couple of minutes. Pieces from golf-ball size to base-ball size. Burns very hot if the bed is properly laid. I might start keeping some around, for holding a fire overnight. I cooked some rice last night, just so there would be some left-over rice (fried rice is better with left-over rice) then today I caramelized a yellow onion and a red bell pepper, fried the cubed loin chops in hoarded bacon fat, mixed them together, stirred in the rice, and that stringy scrambled egg. This was so good, with that Mango Chile sauce, I thought I was weeping. I just have a cold in my right eye, but it was a good meal. Certain selective exaggerations. The world is in an uproar, and danger is everywhere. News from outside the bubble. Moral scruples. Cymbals, not drums. Read more...

Les Troyens

Forty years ago, with the best crew in the world, we did this opera In Boston. Berlioz. The Met is doing it currently, and several people email that they're listening and remembering. Esquire Jauchem was supplying us with state stamped Lebanese hash and we were pulling off the impossible. The opera had never been done in this country precisely because it was impossible. It's two operas, actually, the destruction of Troy, then Dido in Carthage. I have a pirated recording I play once in a while. I was on stage, in a little skirt and a short sword, so I could help destroy Troy. If you've never been involved with something like this, you can't imagine what it's like backstage. Chaos at a level several steps beyond anything you've ever experienced. It was the "T" year, we did "Tosca", Beverly Sills' last "Traviata", and "Les Troyens". Several of the crew went starkers, we just slept in the aisles of the theater. The Orpheum, backed up to the Combat Zone. We used to slip out the back door and go to a bar where we could get a sardine sandwich and a ten ounce draft for a buck. I still make those sandwiches. A flat tin of sardines in oil, dumped on a piece of bread, with a slice of onion. It's very good, though you need to keep some mints around. The crew was fantastic, we'd worked with the scenic designers for years and we'd built these huge sets in forced perspective. I rode in the Trojan Horse, riding with eight or nine kids dressed as adults, that spilled out of the horse upstage, replaced by members of the chorus as they moved downstage. It was right at the edge of believability, the whole experience. Most of us retired to the Cape, afterwards, and didn't speak for several months. Catatonic. We'd walk on the winter beach and hum a few bars, acknowledge each other with a wave of the hand, but we had been moved by the experience and it was hard to face ourselves directly. The myriad failures. What I mean. Read more...

Some Thoughts

When the leaving is hard. The only one left to know. Crossing boundaries. I suppose I do make judgements, it's part of the condition, but I'm careful to not step on toes. I need new shoes, so I understand that. I need a haircut, I need to trim my toenails, I need to ferret out those black hairs that grow on your nose as you get older. What's that about? Did you read about those very old fossils from Australia? Remembering a snatch of music, a rock anthem, Neil Young, The Dead. Moved in ways I don't understand. You are only what you feel. Lost in my mind. Wisdom is all I need. We can start moving forward. Lost in my mind. Lost in my mind. Buffalo Springfield. Heroes And Villains, oh wait, that was The Beach Boys. Confusion is a natural state. You don't remember who you're talking to. Love the one you're with. If you can't be. Love the one you're with. On the bus. Catch me on the bus. Kiss me on the bus. Remember? I love audio hallucinations. Add a cello and I'm gone. John and Carlos. James Taylor, what did Miles say, he sounded like a blind black boy. Midnight special. Shine your ever-loving light on me. I like it when you shake it on the line. Love's a game and I'm not playing. Say darling, say. Hush little baby. Somebody said don't act too smart, somebody said you're so naive, say it out loud, alone and sick and proud. Underneath the moon. Might as well be myself. All the words we've left unsaid. Into dreams. Finally back to sleep, then awake again when the sun rises above the opposite ridge. I had to make a run to town for supplies, so I stopped at the museum, to wash my hair (hot running water!), then got a much needed haircut, went to the library, did my laundry, stopped at Kroger for whiskey, coffee, cream, and the ingredients for another pork fried rice. Stopped at Roosevelt Lake to arrange my pack, roll a smoke, and watch the resident geese deal with the frozen surface. I don't feed them anymore, they're dangerous. I still collect left-over rolls and crackers from events at the museum (and other places), but I strew them over a flat space, off the road, that had been used as a staging area for logging trucks harvesting timber damaged in the big fire a few years ago. It's always gone the next day. If I took all the food scraps from the pub, maybe 55 gallons a day, and dumped then in that place, they'd be gone the next day. Doesn't it seem more logical to recycle waste that way? Then the animals shit more and fertilize the trees. It actually got above freezing, the driveway was messy, walking in, and for an hour there was drip from the eaves. But the sky is clear, and it cools quickly, as the sun goes down. I start breaking icicles into the bucket of snow I'm always melting. Almost pure water. H2O is one of the few things that expands in both directions, as a gas, and as a solid. Tom I filter everything, I don't think unusable is a necessary defense. Hello, are we still awake out there? Read more...

Patch and Repair

The endless saga, though this time I'll be doing most of it by myself. Pulled hardware this morning and that always leaves a little miniature volcano. The second pass around I tap each one of these in, then I make a pass with a eraser, to get rid of the pencil marks, then a pass around with filler. Plaster anchor holes require two fillings. Next Tuesday I'll sand and refill as necessary. It's mindless work and the time flies. Lunch with John Hogan himself, and then right back to work. Put all of the smaller painting back in the vault, they go into bins, back to back, face to face, and there's another bin for medium paintings (medium, in this case, being not wider than 36 inches). Well have to re-hang the huge Carter "Let Us Give Thanks" because there's no place to store it. It's 92 inches (height, always the first number when talking about the size of paintings) by 100 inches, in an extremely heavy frame. The piece is awkward to move, we have to get it back upstairs, and it doesn't fit in the elevator. Everything else is fine leaning against the walls inside the vault. I spent some time clearing space. Handling art all day. I had to carry in juice, bread, eggs: and it was the first of the freeze-thaw days for the driveway; so I have to be careful where I step: I mean, I have to be careful anyway, but I was carrying eggs. Which allows me a wonderful dinner of the last of the grits, with a perfect egg on top, and a piece toast slathered with butter and jam. Doesn't take much to keep me happy. I'm a cheap date. I had John Hogan laughing so hard he sputtered. He'd asked how things were going with the alley project and I told him we were ready to break ground, that I didn't know any particulars, there's a Board Meeting next week and I suppose they'll decide some things. I have nothing to do with the body politic. I handle art and fill holes, the rest of the time I read and write, but I have learned to tell stories, to organize a stream of thought, and John actually did ask about the alley, and as it happens, I did have a story. We're fixing to spend 85 to 100 thousand dollars on the alley, to make it a green space, and it's a cool idea, and could be lovely, if there wasn't a bar next door, but that's not the issue. When I got to work, I had noticed there was some wind-blown trash inside the temporary barricades that block off traffic. After I got shed of my pack and whatever else I was carrying, my coffee, a scone, while I still had on my coat, I went back out to pick up the detritus. I surprised a guy, I suppose a homeless guy, taking a shit in the shadow of a large electrical cabinet that powers The Esplanade. It's twenty degrees, and this guy has dropped his drawers to take a shit. I don't know what to do. Is it a crime, who cares? I gave him five bucks and told him to go to McDonald's. His frozen shit I'll throw in a dumpster later. The snow-shovel would be the appropriate tool. If I was going to design a hundred thousand dollar outhouse, it would be much more swank. I just stoked the stove, and I think a nap is in order. Read more...

Moving Things

Started the day loading out Mark's paintings. He came to get them because they open in another show on Monday, which he's helping to hang tomorrow. D brought his slightly sick daughter to work (a cold), and she went to lunch with us, first time sitting at a bar. She amused herself almost as well as my younger daughter, Rhea (who actually disappears), and it was nice being around a kid. After lunch I took down the print show, and got them all downstairs; D was going to load them in the rental van after I'd headed home, on my winter schedule. From three until a little after four we loaded out the eight wall panels into a low-boy trailer in two batches and sent them over to Pegi's studio. Some of the Cirque people helped and it went smoothly. I always shudder at moving awkward heavy things with people who don't know what they're doing, but we got it done. We now have a new storage area. For the sound system on a cart, and a portable bar, which we'll design and build. I didn't need anything at home, though I felt a bit guilty about not carrying something in to the house. So it was just a light pack, a couple of books. The walk is getting easier, and I love the way walking-in mediates between town and country. I leave the house in winter, all the components for starting a fire are right there when I return; I keep those stations of the cross stocked. And now I turn on the new heater, over where I write, and I am, as they say, a happy camper. Interesting: if I flush a toilet or urinal three times a day at work, I double my water use. It's crazy, all the nutrients wash away, AND I double my water use; the logic defies me. Three in the morning and the dog pack was back, which isn't all bad, because I needed to stoke the fire. They'd cornered a coon on the compost pile, but none of them are fools, they must have gotten the memo about coons and rabies, so it's a stand-off. I'd replenished my store of throwing rocks and scattered the dogs, the coon slipped off, down the path to the graveyard, and quiet was restored. I've found a perfect bed of throwing rocks, in the flood plain of Mackletree Creek just before it flows into Roosevelt Lake. Fines are consistent, considering all the variables; but the angle of the creek bed, the degree of fall, is nominally the same; and the funneling effect of the bed itself, given a hard rain, tends to drop a particularly sized rock in a specific place. I've walked this creek bed for half a mile, and the same size rock occurs upstream, jumbled in debris, but there's a stretch where almost every rock is the same size. I can half-fill a five gallon bucket in just a couple of minutes. They're sandstone and shale, palm-sized and three-quarters of an inch thick, and the edges are all rounded, from the tumbling, so they don't cut your hands. They tend to sail, but at twenty-five feet that's not an issue, and they fit my hand so well. They're a joy to skip. A life-long interest in slingshots and throwing rocks has uniquely prepared me for the apocalypse, talk about low-tech: a pocket knife, an inner-tube, and a pile of rocks. I can make a kind of bread from cattail flour, and I've seeded certain wet areas with watercress. I hoard bean seed, as a matter of course, and I could live on acorns and roadkill until I harvest a crop. Survival is not the issue. It's the reason for survival. Sartre, all those existentialists, are correct, questioning the foundation. I'd rather die than live in this world, or I 'd rather live in this world than die. A choice you have to make. Read more...

Striking Shows

We worked on the schedule for taking down the shows, in the three galleries where work changes, last Friday, and I made some notes. Mark Chepp is picking up his work, because it's in another show next week, and D is taking Art's print show back to Athens on Friday, and finalizing the big print show, from The Kennedy Museum's massive collection (everyone is represented), that we'll install in the main gallery in March. Means that on Friday I can un-hang a million dollars worth of Carters and get them in the vault. Probably all I'll do that day, wear cotton gloves and move slowly. Pegi is going to take all of the panels from one of the two storage closets (it's physically impossible, spatially, to use more panels than are stored in one closet) and that's going to give us some seriously needed storage space. Moving the panels over to the studio is problematic. They're very heavy, and awkward. A sandwich of framing, with a sheet of three-quarter inch plywood on each side, carpeted, with oak trim, and a base that's a six-inch cast iron pipe welded to a flange, which we marry to the floor with set screws. We use them to divide space, create bays. Pegi can use them to create dressing rooms in the basement of the studio. I want to get these shows un-hung, because there's a huge amount of damage, and I want to patch, repair, and god knows, everything needs painting. I'll paint more, in the next eight weeks, than you ever will in your lifetime. And cutting edges, Janus, Jesus, excuse me, the pilasters are Gallery White but the flat surfaces are Cubist Gray. So do you wait a day and tape the line of demarcation, or do you just cut the line by hand? Anymore, I'm good enough with a one-and-a-half inch tapered brush, if I want to get the job done, I just cut it in by hand. A pain in my right heel, a stone bruise; I was very careful, walking in tonight, shortened my stride and considered every step. I have to re-awaken to this routine. Considerations. And did I mention it's cold? 14 degrees when I get up from a nap (sleeping is all naps, below 20 degrees, because I have to get up and rekindle the fire, stay awake long enough to stoke and damp down the stove); roll a smoke, get a wee dram of whiskey, and read an excellent article about a pickpocket in the New Yorker. I go back over what I'm writing here, take out a few commas, aiming toward transparency. Language is so slippery. Trish said today, that "she didn't care to work Saturday" which meant that she would work, as in 'I wouldn't mind to' but sounded like she couldn't possibly. Colloquialisms. I've lived so many different places I'm not shy about asking someone what they meant, even if I come off looking like an idiot. If I'm carrying something heavy with someone, I really need to know whether they're saying yes or no. We just need to work out a Cargo Speak, a Patois, that allows at least limited communication. Starts with sign language, point to something, then mimic the act of lifting, then say "lift". 1, 2, 3, LIFT. In some ways, this is the entire history of civilization. You have the 1, 2, 3; the meme toward a vocal utterance, and the collective horse-power to move a very large rock. You don't need zero until much later, nouns are easy. Verbs and tense are the logjams. "I will have done that by this time tomorrow" is a fairly complex concept. At it's most benign, language emerges as a help-meet toward getting things done, at the other extreme it emerges as a battle-axe you use to behead anyone who doesn't agree with you. Read more...

Strangeness

Weird. In winter, at night, I pee in a large plastic coffee can, and then the first time I pee in the morning I throw it out and rinse the can. I was standing at the back door, putting on my jacket, and there was a owl, puffed up like a feathered football, still as a statue, with head tucked, neckless, into the top of it's body, perched on a low branch of a Sassafras not fifteen feet away. At one in the afternoon it's still there. Every time I get up I go over and watch it for five or ten minutes. I've never studied an owl before. I've seen a great many of them, but never one for this long. In Florida, fishing the tributaries of the St. Johns River, we'd see them, under the tree canopy, on the lowest branch, hyper-alert, pivoting heads, hunting from a tree stand. In Colorado they were prey to eagles. We had a resident owl, that I never saw, on the Vineyard, that drove me crazy at night, endlessly hooting. One time, with the girls, I think we were in upstate New York, we'd exited some highway somewhere for gas or food, and there was a huge dead owl in the road. I stopped to pull it off and took a couple of feathers before I cut it open for the predators. They're on the wall, with several other feathers from specific birds I remember. My walls are ridiculous. I post things there, to remind me of moments I would otherwise forget. Late afternoon, I have the house warm enough to shave and wash my hair. Emmylou Harris, singing a duet with someone, then I have to turn off the radio because I want the silence. Sinking deep into cold. The walk down tomorrow will require care. A few days ago, when the temps were briefly above freezing, some water formed, turned to ice, and then it snowed. The snow has crusted over, a few inches thick, and under that a layer of ice, the footing is treacherous. You have to take small steps and punch down with the crampons, using that third leg as a crutch, to prevent falling; I'm sure the Jeep is buried in snow and ice, still, I will get to town tomorrow, probably late, because I need some things, and I'll hike back up the hill, with a modest pack, tomorrow evening. It's what we do, not a big deal, living on the fringe. I have an alternate ego, to whom I occasionally ask questions, you might call it an internal dialogue, but I'll be puttering about and I'll say something out loud, ask a question. What? And I answer myself, though not with a prepared script. I'm really good off the cuff. Read more...

Dead Calm

The quiet is of that absolute variety. I did suit-up and go for a walk on an old logging road, then back the other direction, to the top of the driveway to see if B got Josh's (son-in-law) big new Dodge Ram safely down. Looks like he had a bit of trouble, near the top, but that he made it. By the tracks I see he took the truck down Saturday, then walked back in, then a newer set of tracks where he hiked out this morning. An hour later he came over for a cup of coffee, having seen my tracks, from where I had looked at his tracks. My reconstruction was correct. Said he went down (through seven inches of snow) in four-wheel low, first gear, fighting for control. Years ago I made a similar passage, had to stop at the bottom and smoke a cigaret until my normal heartbeat was restored. Told him I wasn't going to join the party tonight at Drew's place because I couldn't bear the thought of hiking back in at one in the morning, in the cold, with crampons, a walking stick, and a flashlight. It would be nice to see the Upper Twin gang, but not tonight. A little more snow forecast, and a little more tomorrow, but B said the roads are in decent shape, so I should be able to get to work on Wednesday, though it is supposed to get bloody cold. I'll need supplies, including some meat, which is always available at reduced price after a holiday. I've been eating a lot of roasted vegetables and I'm craving fatty meat. There should be some remaindered lamb. A lamb stew sounds good, with parsnips and onions, potatoes and carrots. I put together a crock-pot of stone-ground grits, to start before I go to bed. Perfect, for this weather. I only have three eggs left, so I'll need to carry in a couple of dozen. On Thursday, I think, because on Wednesday I'll need to bring in a bunch of other things, and eggs require a free hand. I buy large brown eggs and wrap the cartons in bubble-wrap, held with rubber-bands, and walk especially mindful. I'll make a pork fried rice on Wednesday, because it sounds so good, and I need a one dish meal when the weather turns like this, so that I'll eat enough. Tom and Lauren sent a Mango Chile sauce that would be great on this. Grits, lamb stew, and pork fried rice should get me through the week, if I can safely ferry in the eggs. I love making that stringy scrambled egg as the last addition to a fried rice. Winter survival mode, it's just eight or ten weeks: long underwear, a set of sweats, and a bathrobe; soup; access to a decent library; a mop handle for beating off wild dogs, crampons. You just have to take things slowly, think through what you need to do. I have a shopping list broken down by weight, strikes me as perfectly natural. I'm boiling snow for drinking water, decant into jugs when it's cool, and I add a pinch of sea salt to a gallon, because it is so flat, but it serves me, for making coffee or tea. I also tap a wet-weather spring, halfway down the slope, where the water is so cold it takes your breath away. I keep a gallon in the fridge, to swig when I get up in the night. Read more...