SIck Day

These are very rare for me, I remember taking one a couple of years ago, for a bad back pain that left me unable to walk. This was different. I was fine when I got up, drank juice, made my coffee and headed out, stopped at the Pit Stop for a pint of chocolate milk (I'm trying to gain weight) which must have been bad, because by the time I got to the museum I was doubled-over with severe stomach cramps. Serious pain. When C and M got to work they took one look at me and told me to go home. I wasn't sure I could actually get there, I made it though, stopping twice to vomit, and then had to go the long way around Mackletree, because they'd closed off the road at the bridge over Turkey Creek (with no warning) to survey for the new bridge they're going to build this fall. Got home and threw-up all morning, which, thankfully, relieved the pain, finally, by mid-afternoon I could keep down water and was able to re-hydrate, took a nap, and when I woke up I felt fine. I won't be able to look at chocolate milk for a while. I needed escapist fiction and read a couple of Simenon's Maigret novels that I plucked from a box of books that came in for the auction. I tried to eat a scrambled egg with dry toast but I felt a little sick again, and decided to forgo food for the day. It's amazing how completely being sick can alter your plans. I'm fine, which is good, because I need to go in tomorrow, to receive D's photography show, then do some shopping. I need some wash water, for the first time this year that either snow-melt or rain hasn't provided my needs, so I hope Scott does the driveway tomorrow, because if he doesn't, half of the water will end up in the boot of the Jeep. Not half, but surely a quart of water will slosh from even the gasket sealed pickle buckets I use for wash water. Water is devious. And the Jeep will smell like a wet dog. I knew this would happen, eventually, shifting from a truck to an enclosed vehicle, and I resolve to solve the problem, which is easily solved with a plastic container I can put the bucket of water in, one of those sweater storage bins or something. Big Lots has them for a couple of dollars. Equipage for every task. A nice talk with the music guy, Michael, yesterday. He's completely obsessed with losing weight, which he needed to do, and he's being successful, I hardly recognized his profile, talking with TR in the main gallery. I have to go, I'm very tired. Read more...

Petty Squabbles

Bear baiting, it could be claimed, but it's actually just a matter of composting organics, which I've done since the beginning of time. My compost heap is a major source of entertainment. Mostly eggshells and coffee grounds, the occasional bone, vegetable trimmings, but there's always a battle when I clean out the fridge and throw away the last of a soup, or a three-bean salad. I don't waste very much, but I do have waste; and in their rovings, various critters find me supplemental to their intake of protein. I went out to pee, 2:30 in the morning, and there was a pack of dogs digging through my last contribution: rancid coleslaw, some rice, a rotten potato,and they were fairly flinging it at each other. It's not my intent, when I clean out the fridge, to start a feeding frenzy. I'm just cleaning out the fridge. I know when to let things go, a painful learning process where ego is the enemy, and you only learn by burning yourself. Nothing prepares you. I have to pull the plug. At a certain point nothing makes any sense. October temps in August, low in the upper forties, while I'm up I close the windows and get a blanket. Such nice sleeping weather I almost over slept. C is off first thing to retrieve two Carter paintings from the Ohio Supreme Court building. I painted the Richards gallery and started the maintenance book, found the time to start rereading Mary Carter's letters from 1944, which I now see as a pivotal year for the Carter family. Clarence had several shows and sold a lot of paintings, and he had landed a role as the designer for the advertising division of Alcoa, then just a shipping company. He did a painting a month for them for several years, to use in their publicity, and he was paid a thousand dollars apiece for them. Despite Mary's poor-mouthing to her mother, I think they were doing quite well by then. Summers, usually, as a resident artist at Chautauqua or someplace, and painting the rest of the year; there must be a thousand paintings, watercolors and oils, maybe two thousand, and we have maybe 70 paintings and 20 drawings, we know of several hundred others, Sara and I, the Carter brain trust. There are a great many paintings that I've read about but have never seen. It's strange, in a way, we have all this original material, and I'm fast becoming the expert in Carter studies, even though it's not my major field of interest. I spend most of my time thinking about memory, and how it can be crammed into a block of text. It's an imperfect science, even considering what we think about. I take the fifth, on anything concerning meaning. I just do this because I can. Read more...

Bar Jokes

A bear and a fox go into a bar. I forget the punch line. In addition to my usual rag-tag outfits, I now carry a pair of tin cans on a string around my neck, although cursing like a sailor seems to work as well. If you do get home and there's a bear in the driveway, it's best to just sit for a while and listen to NPR. Resist the impulse to panic. I think it's a female, I hate to profile, but I have my bear notes in front of me and all indications are that it's a sow. Someone saw a sow with a cub, and this is probably her, although, if there is a cub, that's indicates a male in the area. Male black bears often have to travel far afield to find an unoccupied place they can call home. This is probably the female, but it could be a young male. If the blackberries are plentiful, you'll occasionally see a bear just sit down in the middle of them (they sit on their ass exactly the way you do) and eat with both hands. What do you call a bear with blackberry juice running down the sides of her mouth? A drunk bear goes into a bar. I had assumed, for most of my life, that crows were my totem, if I had a totem, but now I lean toward bears; that thing with the fox was just infatuation. We're talking identity here. An Irish bear comes into a bar and slaps his briefcase down, he's obviously pissed, and the space falls oddly silent. No one fucks with a pissed off Irish bear. He gets a shot of Paddy, with a Murphy's stout to follow, drinks it down in a single swallow, and storms out of the room as if he had something to do. Two old timers at the end of the bar are not impressed, one turns to the other, nods toward the bear, and allows that he doesn't think animals should be allowed. I have to laugh, the way reality overcomes fantasy. There is, in fact, a bear. A talk with C today, she wants me to compile a maintenance book, which certainly needs to be done. Right now, I'm the only person at the museum that knows where the main water valve is hidden; ditto with the odd light switches. I had just bought local ripe tomatoes, and Bev gave me another bag, so I suddenly have tomatoes coming out my ears. Saturday I'll make a simple tomato sauce I can use a couple of different ways, eggplant marinara comes to mind, and a hot Italian sausage thing on pasta. I'll need to blanch a batch tomorrow, skin and core them, store them in a glass bowl in the fridge, then sterilize a couple of quart jars, make the sauce on Saturday, and store it in the fridge. It'll be good for a couple of weeks. I was concerned about Cream of the Crop, next spring, when I'll be off to Chautuaqua, but the timing is good, perfect, in fact, and I can install that show before I leave, and spend a couple of days with Mac after, and no one will know I was gone. I have to go, think about that. Read more...

Flash Floods

The ground is saturated. Any additional moisture, and it's raining now, floods the bottoms, sheets of water that blanket the low-lands, I don't pay much attention, because I live on a ridge. Everything is downhill from me. I view flooding as someone else's problem. Early in the morning, it rains like crazy, 2:30 or so, the drumming would wake the dead; I put out a couple of buckets, because I'm low on wash water. Severe rain, rain as god intended, to purify the guilty. It lasts for maybe ten minutes, but it must have dumped an inch, and I can't imagine the damage it's done to the driveway. Rain like this would drive the devil away. I lathered up and washed my hair, took a final rinse under the downspout, but the water is so cold I can't stand it for very long, and I end up rubbing myself dry with a towel I stole from a hotel in Colorado. The story of our lives. I'd rather suffer the slings and arrows, than not experience anything at all. The napp at the spillway was running about 8 inches deep, crashing into the buffer curb at the bottom, and Turkey Creek was running full-bore. Mark and I exchange words a couple of times a week and today it was butt descriptors, he hit me with callipygia, which means, essentially, nice butt, and mine for him was steatopygia, which is the cantilevered butt of the women in certain African tribes. I pulled hardware upstairs, then patched, repaired, and filled the holes. Then a water problem, the drain system for the air-handler was plugged, in the equipment room above the third floor, and I got filthy helping the air-conditioning guy, Donnie, getting that fixed. At lunch, TR had asked me about words that completely flipped, in definition, over a period of time. The 2nd definition for literally, he showed me in some on-line dictionary, is 'not literally', which I found quite amusing. The process by which the meaning flips is called something like antagonism, and buried in the literature (of course I looked it up everywhere I could) was the phrase 'the Janus Effect', which refers to the Roman God who looks both ways at the doorway. I need to get to work early tomorrow, to dump the water, dripping into various receptacles, then set about trying to clean the mess. Another day of grungy clothes. I wore them today because I knew I was going to be patching and repairing, thank god, because the floor in the mechanical room has never been swept and I spent a lot of time under the air-handler, where it was very dirty; fortunately I have another set of grungy clothes I can wear tomorrow. Grungy should actually be my middle name, I don't know what my parents were thinking. I'd better go, thunderstorms building up to the west. Read more...

Brush Work

Rained during the night, but B was over at nine this morning for us to clear brush on the edges of the driveway. He carried his chainsaw and I carried long-handled loppers, and we took out anything that might slap Scott in the face. We're at the top of his list, so he should be out with his smaller bulldozer any day. B and I were both drenched by the time we finished as everything we were cutting was full of water. I'm thrilled we're getting this done, as the big rains of July had trashed the already tattered remains of the drive and I'd like for the Jeep to last a couple of years. Back at the top of the hill we chatted for a few minutes, and it seems the bear has visited B's place a couple of times. Big piles of distinctive scat (filled with blackberry), and a bird-feeder, on a three-quarter inch pipe, bent down to the ground. It'll be nice to be able to park closer to the house. TR had asked me to cook a rabbit, and now he and Megan will be able to drive in. When I got back to the house I got out some wild-game cookbooks and read rabbit recipes, and in one of them "The Wild Palate" found numerous recipes using acorn meal. I've had this cookbook for decades, and never noticed. The leaching instructions are quite good too. Makes me wish I'd collected more last fall. I was starved, from the physical work, walking up and down the hill, so I fixed a cheese omelet, baked beans on toast, and a sliced tomato. With a second double-espresso, this was a great meal. Ronnie's tomatoes are perfect right now and I'm eating one every day, usually just sliced on toast (butter, dressed with white balsamic), and a goodly sprinkle of fresh ground black pepper. I make a note to pick up lobster at Kroger (there are two-packs of small ones, from Canada) and I was listening to a show on NPR today that said they were at a ten-year low in price. I love lobster salad, Boston Lettuce, sliced sweet onions, sliced radishes, and thin slices of red pepper, lobster and aioli. Any monarch, with his head screwed on straight, would eat this several times a week. Lobster in cream sauce on toast is a treat, but that whole 'on toast' thing, I see, could become a problem. Almost anything is good on toast. Marmalade, for instance, which is bitter and awful, or a single malt that tastes like railroad ties. Say what you want, say what you will, I only do what I do because I can't do anything else. Read more...

Slip Sliding

One dead mouse and three crows, did I mention how competitive that could be? The squawking is so outrageous I finally get two more mice out of the freezer (mouse-sickles) and toss them up on the outhouse roof. The various piles of papers, junk mail, manuscripts, not to mention the piles of books, finally get to me, and I spend several hours sorting things and actually end up with some cleared surfaces. Also, several wonderful photographs that I had forgotten about and immediately push-pin to the walls. More things to look at. My walls bristle with visual information. There are six sculptures, four of them on fairly massive wooden bases (60 to 80 pound stumps), under my stairs, and the dust and cobwebs situation has become critical. I'd like to hire Deleena to come in for half-a-day a week for a few months, to come in and restore order, but I'm afraid of her husband, B's nephew, as he is the strongest man I know and prone to rants; and I'd hate to think he would think I was coming on to his wife. I can solve that by giving her a key, and having her come up when I'm not there. I should do this. It only occurs to me when B comes over to talk about the work on the driveway. Scott, the Bulldozer Master, is available, but we need to clear blackberry canes and sumac, chainsaw a few small trees, and generally clear the verges, so he won't be whipped to death while he transforms our goat-track back into a drivable reach. The reason those thoughts follow is that Deleena would have to able to drive to the house. B and I talked about the contour of the driveway, the grader ditch, and several books we'd both read recently, about William and Henry James. Decide we can clear the brush away first thing tomorrow, barring rain, and that Scott can provide the fill and dig the ditch to drain the frog-ponds, so that I can actually drive to my house. In my limited scope of things, this is huge, and the timing is perfect. New rear shocks and aggressive tires on the Jeep, my life is going to be a little bit easier. I might hire a local kid to come up and help me clear brush. I'm afraid of fire as well as heights. You could scare me with a stick. Another positive benefit of re-doing the driveway, is that other people might be able to visit. Not that there's a long list, but TR wanted to bring Megan up and have me cook a domestic rabbit (his family raises them) because she hadn't liked the one he'd fixed for her. I do rabbit and squirrel very well, dredged in a highly seasoned corn flour, fried, then finished in the oven with root vegetables. Domestic rabbit is one of my favorite things. I do a great pate with rabbit, mushrooms, and chicken livers. The tomatoes I bought from Ronnie at the farmer's market yesterday are incredible, bursting with flavor, and I just eat them sliced, on buttered toast, with lots of black pepper, sometimes I have an egg on top, just to thumb my nose at the gods. The season of plenty. I can live on acorns, the rest of the year, as long as I have six weeks of tomatoes. My AC keeps time, clicking on at 80 and off at 74, not so much me, as that Black Dell needs to be constrained, within certain parameters. I'd just as soon be completely honest, listen, nothing else completely demands my attention. Read more...

Dead Wood

Yesterday was all about getting ready for Tami's talk about her drawings; cleaning, straightening the installation, getting the finger food ready. And the rain held off until 4:45 when there was a righteous downpour, which meant a small audience. But an attentive one, and she was lucid about her technique, answered all of my questions about how she accomplished the finished product. She actually glues down her watercolor paper, with a glue she can release, so that it stays flat during the watercolor phase (ripples are the bane of paper artists), then she does the graphite drawing on top of that, then, in the encaustic series, fixes the drawing, then paints on a thick layer of a white bee's wax, then scrapes away the areas she wants to high-light. An elaborate process, as I knew it had to be, because I've looked at these drawings for eight weeks. Because of the rain, and closing up the museum, I elected to stay in town; I didn't want to challenge a wet driveway after dark, but instead of going over to the pub, I walked over to Kroger and got some sushi and a bottle of whiskey. I interact fine, in social situations, but I was craving time alone. Got a drink, and set-up at the table in the common room, where I spread out several books on the Renaissance, and splayed the sushi in an arc that I could eat without getting soy sauce on the pages. Navigating the simple workings of life. Nothing prepares you for the real world, where everything clashes and nothing changes. I'm such a realist. Coming home today, cresting the ridge, I'd never been more aware of that sense of inner joy that simple pleasures can provide. I'd walked over to the farmer's market, this morning, sat for a while with Ronnie, and rolled a smoke. He needed some plastic Kroger bags and I knew there were several bags of bags in the back room off the kitchen at the museum, right next door, so I walked back over and got him one. He was so grateful that I got my sack of vine-ripened tomatoes for free, and I had visions of how good they were going to be, with baked beans and a fried egg on toast. I just sat in the Jeep, listening to NPR for a few minutes, with the AC running, thinking that, yes, I had made it back home again. Noticed there was a fair amount of dead wood on the ground, branches that had fallen in the storm last night, great kindling, and in several cases excellent firewood. So I gathered up my bags, carried supplies home, sorted them out, put stuff in the fridge, and lined tomatoes up on the cutting board at the island. Then I got my leather gloves and went back out to haul branches to the wood-shed. I break or saw these branches to a length I can stand up in the wood-shed, lean them against the outside rafters, until they are completely dry, then cut them to stove length with a bow-saw. Any given year, I can heat with branches. First trip, I get to the wood-shed, and that god-damn yellow rattlesnake is coiled in the middle of the open space. Mostly it's a bother. I drop my arm-load of wood, walk back over to the house and get a single fire-cracker (a Black Cat), light it with my Bic, and throw it at the snake. Nature management. I feel bad, in a way, but I really wanted those several branches against next winter's chill. Snake be dammed. If called to court, I could defend my position. Read more...

So Far

I'm so far out of the loop, I don't know what's expected of me. The Board had tasked me with spending more time on the Carter collection, and spending less time being a janitor, but I am the janitor, and since D has been gone there's even more for me to do on that front. Today it was the Lock Guy, changing out the tumblers on the front and back door, re-keying them, then the Security Guy, changing out the code. During the remodel, too many people got keys and too many people learned the code. Now we're secure again. I had pushed for this. Security had become a joke. I sorted hardware, getting ready for the next change-over, and located the wrapping materials for Tami's drawings. She's doing a talk, tomorrow at five, then we pack them up on Saturday morning for the trip back to North Carolina. I'm looking forward to hearing the talk about her process: graphite, watercolor, encaustic. And look forward to talking with her husband, Shane, who works in white cement on armatures, wonderful sculpture; we've exhibited his work, I've handled a couple of dozen pieces. There's a sense of intimacy that develops, if you're the one that physically handles the objects. But someone has to do it. I started working backstage when I was 16, professionally when I was 18; installing shows, it seems in hindsight, is what I've always done. In terms of livelihood, at any rate, though I've always enjoyed what I did, wether it was staging an opera in Maine or building a house in Utah. I've always had other interests, things that took my attention. Reading, for instance, takes up an eighth of my time. Right now, I'm spending an increasing amount of time on my writing: editing, rereading, thinking about being a writer in residence. Most of the time I don't pay any attention to what I wrote yesterday, I have an appointment with what I'm going to write today. So it's both a damper and fuel for the fire. Remarkably unclear, despite every attempt at transparency. Read more...

Petrichor

Later, when the dust has settled, we can determine what has happened. Footprints, tracks in the sand, bones scat, there are countless indicators. On the way from where I park to the house, the frog puddles have just about dried up, and they're like a codex of tracks. I went back out with my animal track and scat book. There were the tracks of deer, coon, possum, fox, various moles and shrews, chipmunks, and a great many birds. It's a lovely imprinted sheet of mud and clay. An interesting word problem this weekend, can't remember if I mentioned it. I had read the word petrichor in a Luca Turin description of a particular perfume, and I could tell from the context what the word probably meant, but I'd never actually seen the word before, so I started hauling out dictionaries, ending with the OED, and, alas, no luck. I can't search the internet at home, with the combination of a dying Black Dell and a dial-up connection. First thing this morning, after the staff meeting, I had a chance to track it down. The reason I couldn't find it was that it wasn't coined until 1964. I have unabridged dictionaries from after that date, but it's a fairly esoteric word and not in any of them; and I don't have any supplements for the OED (completed in 1928), therefore no record of the word. Two Australian researchers published an article in Nature magazine in 1964, the subject of which was the smell after a rain. Seems there are several oils that protect plants in arid places, that prevent them from germinating if the moisture available is just dew. But they are water soluble, rain is enough to release them, and they smell nice. Often intensified by ozone, if there had been lightning. So it means, more or less, the smell of rain on dry earth. Because I've never heard anyone actually use the word, I'm still a little uncertain about how it's pronounced, but what a great word. It comes from the Latin, and if I had known that, I could have found it at home, but it didn't scan as a Latin word to me, and I hadn't bothered to check those dictionaries. In fact I called Glenn, because I thought it might be French. I'll be using this word in the future, because it is so wonderfully specific. I've noticed the phenomena a thousand times, we all have, I just didn't know it had a name; not unlike napp, which I never knew was a word, and now use all the time, since I drive by a spillway every day I work, going and coming. I love words, and jargons, and patois. In the building trades language is rife with phrases that don't make sense in any other context. It's like that in any discipline, you need words to describe things: there usually is one, but if not, you make one up, a dance step or a new way of doing the high-jump, we just need a referent. Add an adjective and object out the remainder. Multiply by the local tax base. It's all corrupt, of course, the contracts and the jobs awarded; but it's good to feel, once in a while, that you advance the token. What the Lord giveth. There were seven stacks of about ten books each on the footlocker I use as a coffee table and I got up in the middle of the night (3:30), could tell I wasn't going back to sleep, so I decided to finish this paragraph. Which meant rolling a smoke and getting a wee dram. Came downstairs in the dark, no problem, and headed over toward my desk, to get my whiskey glass and turn on my writing lamp. Caught the edge of an art book that was protruding into the passage space (Modigliani) with my left thigh, and three of the piles of books fanned out on the floor. There is some organization involved, even in simple piles, but I can't bother with it at 3:30 in the morning, so I turn on a light and crude-stack them back where they were, some of them inside out (so that you couldn't see the titles), and some of them upside down. Clearly I'll need to spend a few hours shelving books next weekend. But I do get my wee dram, roll a smoke; and spend several hours deleting words, changing out commas. Reading back over, fully engaged by text, I amaze myself by the attention to detail. I think about how I might explain that to a writing workshop: how slowly I work, how precise I try to be, how difficult it is to write a speaking voice. I talk out loud, incessantly, when I'm writing, trying out different words, changing the emphasis, considering punctuation. I'm after a seamless sophisticated bar-talk, that conversation we might have with our feet up, swirling an odd single-malt to catch the last rays of sun. Read more...

Moth Attack

The largest onslaught came after I had finally almost fallen asleep, about five o'clock this morning. I'd left a small night light on, because I always have to get up and pee. I've never seen so many suicidal moths. They were smashing into windows on three sides. Needless to say., I turned off the lamp (7 watts?!), it's very dark on the ridge in summer. Never did get back to sleep, because I wanted to run my errands in town early, and I'd prepared a detailed list, including the order in which to do them; one swing out, one swing back in, no wasted miles. First on the list was stopping at Kroger for a Boathouse Protein Smoothie, which are often remaindered on Monday morning, and I scored, with a mango thing, a quart of it (at least two serving) for half price, and I immediately drank half of it, and felt better. Went to the library, to get the books they were holding for me, one genre fiction, which I'm looking forward to, as I need/demand a certain amount of fiction, and another Renaissance book. After the smoothie, I figured it would ok to just have a draft for lunch; then stopped at Kroger again, and got supplies: eggs, sausage, shredded potatoes, a loaf of multi-grain brain, yogurt, a bag of almonds, a large onion, some small turnips, and sushi for tonight; eat wasabi, until the tears run down my cheeks, and nibble on pickled ginger. The fiction is good, it takes my mind off things. But James Lee Burke has gotten very dark in his last few books, and they're so violent. No so different from the games people play and all the rest of current media, I suppose, and I read for several hours. They had been setting up for a Wake at the pub, when I stopped by, Irish pubs serve that function, and I chatted with the staff about how strange it was, to be the servers at such a function. It started to feel like a James Joyce short story, and I thought about hanging around. I could have washed dishes in the kitchen and blended into the woodwork. My status, at the pub, is such that I could do that. Hang around in the kitchen, wash some dishes, make myself useful, and watch the wake from off-stage. But it seems like a mildly invasive idea, and I shrug it off, do my shopping, drive home the long way around, slowly, stopping to look at the flowers. I'd stopped at the first ford, a lovely place, and driven back and forth a few times, to clean my wheel-wells, then stopped, in the middle of the creek, eight inches of water, to climb out on the hood of the Jeep and roll a smoke. Full summer. The light, the leaves, the flowers in the under-story, the water cascading down, a beautiful place to be, and my mind is elsewhere. I didn't even hear his car, the creek takes precedence, when the county deputy sheriff stops on the bridge, which by-passes and is above the ford, and yells down, wondering if everything is ok. Yes, yes, I assure him, everything is fine, I'm just on my way home. Read more...

Luna Moth

Muddy Waters singing with Mick Jagger, 1981, Chicago. Then the rest of The Rolling Stones sat in for a couple of numbers. I don't even like the Stones, but this was a great concert, recently re-released and re-mastered, and it's incredible. Mr. Waters is not even phased by having Mick on stage with him. Only two voices might be better, John Lee Hooker, and Lightning Hopkins. The first of the blues singers were almost contra-tenors, a strained high voice that works very well, but when the blues moved north, out of the delta, and got electric, it was the baritone voice that held sway. Listen to John Lee singing with Bonny Raitt, it stops you in your tracks, a baritone and an alto, singing like a tenor and a soprano, the great American opera. Beverly Sills thought that Bonny Raitt had one of the great voices ever. Beverly had asked me to dinner, after the first of three performances of her last Traviata, at a great Italian restaurant in Boston. I was hungry, and I couldn't not go, despite the fact that I felt uneasy about dining with a diva. I mean really, I don't have running water, and I lick my dinner-wear. But I went, to prove that I could, and we had a lovely conversation about cleaning out the corners where crap collects. She also tends to pile books too high, so we had some common ground. And it comes as no surprise that a suicidal Luna Moth crashes into the window right next to where I write. . What universe is that from? There's a lot of information conveyed but none of it makes any sense. Beverly asked me if I'd ever met Bonny, and I told her, sadly, no, that I had been close, one time in Aspen, but I had to go get a soccer ball out of traffic. She said, I think I quote, "she has the best goddamn voice in the universe". And I only remembered that because a goddamn Luna Moth is trying to get in the south window to mate with my writing lamp. You have to draw the line somewhere. I don't even use my buttery-fly net, I just go outside and grab the Luna Moth, it leaves powder on my skin, and I just wipe it off, fucking Luna Moth dust, and carry the moth out back. Slept late, read all afternoon. One of the two fawns was back today and stayed for hours. It would eat blackberries for a while, right below my writing window, then walk over to the edge of the woods and take a nap. Repeated this several times. I was rereading some sections in "The Printing Press As An Agent Of Change", for my upcoming lecture on the origins of the Renaissance. Very quiet day. Finally heated water, washed the few dishes, and shaved. A couple of glasses of wine, sitting on the sofa, staring out the patio doors, lost in thought. Nice use of the word debacle, when a backed up river breaks through an ice-jam, the headwater is powerful and carries a lot of debris, the event is called a debacle. Reading definitions in Barry Lopez's great collection "Home Ground" is a lovely end to the day. Each of these definitions is a carefully crafted miniature essay. And it is true that everything has a name. Detroit Rip-rap for a revetment made of old cars. Read more...

Dream State

That recurrent dream where I'm on top of a questionable rick of scaffolding, tricking out some impossible jury-rigged solution for a problem that can't even be seen. Do enough theater, or especially opera, and the situation arises more times than you can imagine. That time we were doing Peter Grimes outdoors in Maine, and Miss Caldwell wanted the illusion of water. Sure, we could do that. A yapping on the compost heap brings me out of the dream. A Blue-Tick bitch has spread herself across the top of the pile, and she has her lips curled back, exposing a lot of teeth. There are three or four Black Lab hybrids milling around at the bottom of the pile, but she is the queen, there's no question. They snarl, but it's a questionable snarl, and herself is secure as "King Of The Road". I disburse them, because I don't want to listen. Yapping fucking dogs, give me a break. Theoretically sane, I throw a couple of rocks, and I don't have to listen anymore. Fuck a bunch of idle conversation, the false light of tomorrow; I'd rather breathe through a handkerchief than not breathe at all. Wind it down, that's my advice, it's already tomorrow. Me, proffering advice, is a kind of joke; but when things get out of control, a bad day or some kind of conflict, as soon as I get home, I grab my rucksack and take a walk. It's a light pack, maybe ten pounds, but honed, over fifty years of taking solitary walks in the woods. I carry a foam pad for kneeling, a very good magnifying glass, several plastic petrie dishes, a minnow net, a couple of power bars, a bottle of water, extra tobacco, one of those tiny bottles of single malt scotches (a Glendronach), a change of socks, and matches; a minimal first aid kit, a space blanket, and a small roll of duct tape. On my person I always have a knife and a Bic lighter. Reasonably prepared. First thing that takes my eye, recently it's been small flowers, I kneel down on the pad and examine detail with the magnifying glass. The chaos of the outside world disappears and I'm left with stamens and pistils, or the way tadpoles turn into frogs, or the army of attack geese down at the lake. One of the Chinese students asked why I lived the way I do, and I thought about that question for several hours today. No reason, really, just the path of least resistance. Geese do waddle, I noticed today, they walk like fat old people; the only time one will fly a short distance is when it's bumped from behind, lazy birds grown used to human feed, to which I contribute. I'm tempted to draw back from any sense of inter-action, any actual interaction with anything. Read more...

Foiled

Didn't accomplish anything that I set out to do today. Wanted to clean out the trap for the basement classroom sink, dressed accordingly, got a bucket, and cleared everything out of the cabinet. There's so little pitch to the drain pipe, that it stays full of water, and the water stinks, so the last person to fix the trap had glued everything together. Traps are gasket fittings. Pushing, the nature of things and because you're going to need to take them apart eventually. Before I tear the whole assembly apart, I want to try a small drain snake, and Chris, next door at the bar, says he has one but he'll have to find it. He never did find it. I'll buy one next Tuesday. Cannot find the piece of track I need for the light test strip, and they don't make it anymore. I'm going to need to rob a piece from somewhere, so I started looking around. It has to be the end of a run that is not the powered end. Thinking about Sargent, there was a Sargent book out, in the museum library, and I took the occasion to front out all of the books. For the life of me, I can't understand why people push them back. I front books at the public library, for god's sake, when I'm picking something out. I wish we had put a camera, as part of our new surveillance system, in the library, because this has been a mystery to me for a long time. Pushing books back, what a concept. Driving home, and I remembered this happens every year, watching the Black Swallowtail butterflies congregate, on a mud-puddle, or in a field of Queen Anne's Lace, which they feed on, and wondering what they're thinking; I'm more or less a dufus, but I do then ask some questions, about your eating habits, certain characteristic moves. I have to go, fucking squall-line moving through. Read more...

Dew Point

When I got home yesterday, I didn't need the AC for Black Dell, it was just 80 degrees outside and a few degrees cooler inside, so I turned on the ceiling fan, above where I write, and opened a couple windows wide. It never did rain, and I crashed on the sofa, after a couple of drinks and a mammoth helping of re-fried risotto (mushroom and caramelized onion). I woke up about 2:30, needing to pee, dry in the mouth, with a dream on the tip of my tongue, something hot and steamy. I keep a 16 ounce bar-glass in the fridge, filled with mixed fruit juice, and I take a big swallow whenever I go past on my way outside to pee; it's always such a blast of fruit sugars that it makes me smile, and I usually get a wee dram of Irish and roll a smoke in celebration that something could taste so good. I turned on Black Dell, to make sure I'd sent last night's post, which I had, and all was good with the world, except that everything was damp. I fear for my books, so I close the windows, start the AC, and build a small fire in the stove. It seemed logical at the time. I was a little hungry, and B had brought over some beautiful tomatoes. I made a piece of toast, with this great multi-grain bread that I prefer, slathered it with a jalapeno mayonnaise, sliced on a perfect tomato, grated on a hard cheese, ran it through the toaster oven. Jesus Christ, this is so good I have to weep. It should not be that mere mortals could enjoy should a thing. The lock and key guys were in, to install the automatic door-opening device on the back door. $3,000, but a necessary step toward being accredited (only about 7% of all museums are accredited, and there are some real perks, Smithsonian shows, access to a different pool of grant money), and that's clearly on the minds of the new directors. When the guys were done with the door device, the brought me up to speed on the care and feeding. It's wireless, and the battery that powers everything is actually charged by the normal opening and closing of the door. I keep meaning to get one of those wind-up radios, for when the power is out. I always printed on old presses, which I had adapted to the foot treadle mode, they had an offset in the cam-shaft that was designed for treadle operation, like those old sewing machines. I could print, at my peak, five hundred sheets in an hour, and I could never see why I should upgrade to electricity when I couldn't move my hands any faster than that anyway. Read more...