Menagerie

Cleaned out the fridge, odd bits of this and that, and there's a feeding frenzy at the compost pile, red eyes glowing in the beam of my flashlight. A opossum family and a very large coon. You'd think they'd never had shrimp fried rice. I'd cleaned out the cookstove completely (a twice a year chore, cleaning the chase around the oven) and there was a thick layer of ash on top of the pile, with the recent rains almost concrete, which holds paw tracks beautifully; I briefly entertain the idea of casting the whole thing in lead or bronze or something, but dismiss the thought as above my pay-grade. I think through the process, and I could do it, but it would be expensive and involve molten metal. I'd probably hurt myself. It's a nice conceit though, an installation of bronze mounds with a bunch of footprints. We could argue about what art is. I'd take a fairly liberal stance, if there was an argument. There were some horse droppings, on the way in today, that I found interesting. I could reproduce those and call it art, who could disagree? Nice to be back home, after a couple of days away, though it is colder than a well-digger's ass inside. Start a fire of oak chair parts (dumpster find) and red maple. Change into winter writing garb: long underwear, sweat pants and shirt, fleece bathrobe, fingerless gloves, and my Linda hat. The field mice have moved in, droppings everywhere, so I set all the traps, baited with peanut butter, knowing full-well that I'll be awakened by snapping in the night. I throw the dead bodies on top of the outhouse and they're always gone the next day. Recycling. Disposal is a huge problem, as witnessed by the myriad dead appliances and vehicles that constitute the back yards of trailer-homes out in the country. Good Smart-Talk today with Kate and Renee (pronounced ren-ee), the bird textile ladies. While, of course, the hospital crew was setting-up for the Doctor's Party downstairs. I came home an hour early, taking my winter prerogative, because things seemed well in hand. Could be a long day tomorrow, and I needed to start a fire, get away from all that. The silence on the ridge, this time of year, is profound. When there is no wind and the birds have gone to nest, the insects are gone, and you're not on anyone's flight pattern, the quiet becomes a palpable thing. For the first time this season I kill the breaker for the fridge. All I can hear is the cracking of the fire in the cookstove and the hum of my computer. Johnson had trouble with the word 'sublime', it offended his sense of religiosity or morals, or something: too hedonistic for someone Calvinistic. Virginia Wolff thought Sir Tom was a great stylist. And she, of course, gets that from Emily, but where did Emily get it from? The history of green tea and Buddhist monks, trying to stay awake, that state of alert quietness. I've honed a system of remembering, as accurate as I could get. An imperfect system, with sets and sub-sets, and no rules. I should have gone quite loony by now, if I didn't write you. At least I try to remember. Flights of fancy. How could anyone expect a reproduction to be the thing itself? Expectations are usually dross. Not unlike that crap that floats to the top when you melt sinks for a pour. What dross really is. Some esoteric electron spun off in a fit of passion. Quantum mechanics. I just want to keep the boilers running. Fuck a bunch of speculation. Read more...

Naming Things

A peruke is a periwig. Looking at pictures of Johnson, and others of the period, I had wondered what they called it. But I wasn't looking looking for the name. I had actually gone to the dictionary to try and figure out the difference between perspicacity and perspicuity and I wasn't making much headway so I was readings some other entries. A dictionary isn't a terrible book, but the chapters are awfully short. Read that somewhere in this year of reading about dictionaries. And, it's so cool, I discovered a fast cheap solution to having a portable dictionary stand, like for motels (I travel with an unabridged) is to find an old music stand at the Goodwill. Old, I say, because they made them stronger, whenever, back then, and with a deeper bottom shelf. You can adjust the height. At home, I can keep one at the island, cut down on all that walking. I'm using The American Heritage right now, which is mediocre, but I don't feel like getting into the OED. I do make a note, and thumbtack it to the little cork board attached to the wall above where she resides. A dictionary is like a boat, and most of them are feminine. Anyway, after several hours, what I have is that 'acity is an acuteness of perception, which doesn't imply communication; and 'cuity is that quality of being lucid, which does imply communication. So the first is 'merely' understanding, the second is expressing that understanding. A fine line, but a line nontheless. I'm alone so much of the time, so there's no one there with whom to express; but I write you, and I certainly try to be lucid when I discribe any particular event I might have noticed. Nothing ventured. How honest are we? I can't get a fix, in many ways but I still don't know where I am, hiding beneath the wings of constant travel. Read more...

Something Borrowed

English is scarce homegrown, a scant 5,000 Saxon words remain. Everything else is either borrowed or stolen. The poetry of John Gower, Johnson informs us, is the first that can bde said to have been written in English. A Vaticide is a murderer of poets. You should read Sir Thomas Browne, a nut case, Johnson quotes him over 2,000 times, mostly from an extremely confusing book "Pseudodexia Epediemica" that only muddies the water in its attempt to straighten fact from fiction. Scientific writing, as it existed at the time, was mostly wrong, rehashed from misinformed sources. Herbals and Bestiaries were not trustworthy. A 'boramez', for instance (Browne) was a strange plant-animal or vegetable lamb of Tartary, which wolves delight to feed on. Most of the evening doing word searches, fielding phone calls. Met D early today and loaded the large puppet dolls into a rental car. He's off to Cincy, to pick up a new Cater and take it to the conservor; those dolls live in Cincy. Two birds. Very funny carload: three of them sitting in the back seat and one in the passenger seat. The fifth one we had to put in the trunk. The guys from the furniture store next door thought the whole thing was hysterical as they watched us loading and getting seatbelts around the girls. Got him on the road, then played a game of finding the loan forms for Pegi. They were confusingly in several different places. Got that straightened out, then started a list of the ten thousand things that need doing before Thursday. This is going to be a week from hell. Read more...

Powerless

Going home, I could see the phone was out, a giant dead poplar had parted the line on Mackletree, and then, when I got home, the power was out. Came to the museum early, to enjoy some creature comforts, read, watch some TV on Hulu. My taste for discomfort has dwindled. Spent most of the day reading "Defining The World" by Henry Hitchings, a decent book about Samuel Johnson and his dictionary. Forecast is for rain the next couple of days, changing over to the first snow of the season before we see the sun again. I brought some clothes to work, for when I get trapped there. The vacuities of life and its vacancies. Johnson was an odd duck, and I do have a copy of the (Johnson) revised fourth edition, but I read in it for pleasure rather than for insight into etymologies. Especially after reading books about Murray and the OED, and having spent most of my adult life with five or six unabridged American English dictionaries within an arm's reach. Language. I love it. I spend hours a day with it. Words are weapons, among other things, freighted with meaning. Johnson's reflect not only a wide-ranging intelligence, but open a window on the mid-eighteenth century. Some of his, that I enjoyed today: Rant, high sounding language unsupported by dignity of thought; a Coquette is a female who endeavors to attrach notice; an Uxorius man is infected with connubial dotage; Obsession is the act of besieging, or the first attack of Satan, antecedent to possesion; effumability is the quality of flying or vaporing in fumes. That last is the perfect word to describe the way the lake bleeds off heat into the atmosphere. I'll never see it any other way. The lake's effumable today. The effumibility index is high. I watch the lake effume, as I consume a sandwich, sitting on a table in a shelter hut, watching the napp over the spillway. Edward Gorey once told me that he read everything as if it were a Victorian novel. The attic of his house on Cape Cod was floor to ceiling bookcases of Victorian novels. That's where all those funny little characters came from. Rain, rain, more rain, the ground is saturated and the flood-plain is under water. Not a good time for this, because if the ground freezes when it's saturated, in the spring, when the rains are supposed to fall, there won't be anyplace for the water to go. The Army Corp has failed us, the Mississippi will change course, they standardly blow out levees and flood areas they were protecting; in their defense, it's an impossible job, there's no way you can protect against Mother Nature. Consider a house-boat. Read more...

Edges

I don't so much feed the homeless as counsel the unrepresented. A fine line. When you're hungry, you steal food, it's a matter of genetics, nothing to do with what's legal. A loaf of bread, if we follow Marx at all, is just a loaf of bread. If I ever watched anything closely, it was the way the jug wine played out. Maybe not something to be proud of, but an image nonetheless. More a shadow than anything tangible. Something discussed over a campfire, late at night. No stranger to those conversations, I speak with a certain precision, because I've been there. Diamond in the rough is just a refraction of light, a cat's-eye marble, a sparkle, something that catches your eye. Examine that. I'll get back to you. Tangled up in blue, or as my younger daughter says (the comparative, in Latin), tangled up in glue. Nothing to do with the actual time, which passes, an hour here or there, like silent ships in the night. Maybe it means something, though I suspect the opposite, when drops of condensate fall in perfect 2/4 time. Fucking monkeys with a typewriter. Not unlike what you thought you saw, before you got close enough to see, that it was merely a shirt, not a body; slanted afternoon light, not a halo. There's a tendency toward belief, hoping a life-vest will save you, some Dutch Calvanistic sense of order in which all the ducks are lined perfectly for slaughter. I don't mean anything by that, just that I was thinking about Vermeer and the way every brick was perfect. Gives pause, not unlike that moment in a conversation where everything hinges on a word. You know what I mean. Someone says something and you assume you know what they mean, a noun becomes a verb, no problem, a gerund, right? but the ground shifts. If this then that. Not unlike a checker-board. Or a chicken with his head twisted off. Suddenly nothing makes any sense, which makes sense to me, because I'm not expecting anything, actually, just hovering on the fringe, hoping for crumbs. My life in a tree-dip pit. Remind me to tell you what I really think. Honesty is a myth. I hear your argument, but it's just a diminished chord, I know that nothing actually happened. Maybe you were looking at some pictures, maybe something seemed to make sense, the way a line was drawn; on reflection, the arm was too long, or those fingers could never bend that way, but in the moment, everything is possible. We elide into the probable. A nut-shell. Haven, be it ever so ephemeral. I'm not sure I meant that. You have to watch what you say. Got to work early so I could shave and wash my hair in comfort, the house was cold. D showed up, I wasn't expecting him. I patch, repair and touch-up paint the little upstairs gallery, as soon as it dries we hang the Memory Project, 22 drawings of orphans in South America drawn by high-school students and some of their teachers. We do the show (it only runs a month) every year, this year's is better than most. Make the labels, attach them. Light the show tomorrow. I leave an hour early, to get a fire started at home. An amazing, colorful, beautiful sunset. Pinks and oranges through stick trees. Windless, for a change. The Weghorst family, as they do twice a year or more, were hosting a horse event, must be a Tennessee Walker Society, and they were everywhere. Anxious couple of miles, at creeping speed. TR is bringing me some quail eggs, which I'll hard-boil and pickle. I save pickle juice and use it several times. Pickled quail eggs are great because you can just pop them, no biting required. I had an almost unlimited supply in Missip, after I built a barn for my moonshine supplier, who raised quail for release at his hunting camp. He hunted everything, and had a pack of the smartest dogs I've ever known, Black-mouth Curs he used to hunt wild boar on islands in the Mississippi. They'd pin a young boar live and he'd stuff it in a crocker sack, take it home and feed it out on corn. He'd get top dollar at the weekly livestock auction, mostly from hunters who'd come down from Memphis or up from Jackson to hunt boar, but mostly spent their time drinking at camp. Big Roy and I cured a few hams for him and it was very good meat, richly flavored. I'm curing a whole pork loin in the fridge now, a five pound lump of lean meat I got at the remaindered meat section in Kroger for $9.38. Breakfast meat for a couple of months. Doing a sugar cure, with salt and various peppers, going for a full cure; thin slices soaked in milk, then fried in olive oil. I've done so many, I know it will be great. It's easy, take a measure of light brown sugar, half as much salt (kosher) and half again as much various ground peppers, add a dried herb, if you want, I no longer do. Go to Goodwill and find a roasting rack, rub the loin completely, place on the rack in a disposable pan, to collect the drippings. Rub it every day, for a couple of days, then every other day, then as needed, after a couple of weeks it's done. I smoke it, for a few hours, using the Weber grill, a teeny fire and hickory chips. I just keep it wrapped, in the fridge, cut off a few thin slices whenever I want. I've never had one spoil, I eat them so quickly. Red-eye gravy, which is just pan drippings and black coffee, reduced, suits this perfectly. Read more...

Not Rain

Two shed roofs face away from each other. The upper one, above the clerestory, breaks back, to form a bit of shelter for the second story windows. Most of us, in the building profession, call this an eyebrow, for obvious reasons. It provides a drip edge that falls on the lower roof. I sleep upstairs, usually, and what wakes me is the patter of condensate. It's not really rain, just saturated air that collects on the metal roofing. Irregular dripping pattern, like an off-beat drummer. Not unpleasant, if you like jazz, a sound Zappa would exploit, or Cage. Unusual tonight because the individual drips are large, no wind and the humidity is very high, it's completely quiet otherwise, so every single drop sustains. Surface tension, dust from the power plants, gravity, all conspire; unique, but not all that different. Ephemeral. Music is where you find it. Just enough to wake you. Nothing better to do, 2 in the morning. I listen to Bach, read for a while, fall into a reverie, stare into that middle distance, remembering mistakes and wishing I could change things. The past is a bucket of ashes. Top of my form, I can't write any better than this, what you understand is probably what I meant. Can you read me with a celery spear poised above a pool of peanut butter, sure, not a problem. You have to do the right thing. I have to go back to bed soon, I'm wearing Linda's hat, does that mean anything? Holiday standards. I love I could curtail anything. Just saying. Attention to detail. Back to bed in my old army surplus mummy bag atop the bed clothes. First night in the bag and I forget where I am; attempting a simple rollover I manage to throw myself out of bed. No damage, what with the only rug in the house and the excellent cushioning of down. Reminds me of that last Thanksgiving at Janitor College, when those of us who either didn't have a home to go to or couldn't afford a plane ticket, threw in what coins we could collect from the deposit on beer bottles. Essentially a stone soup, with those packets of crackers pocketed wherever we'd found them. The soup base was congeries of fiction; there was meat because the school raised rabbit for the table, and what vegetables remained in the greenhouse, Brussels sprouts and kale. It was a More Than Open Admission school that regularly admitted illegals, so there was no shortage of hot peppers. We'd brewed a large batch of Celebration Ale months before, resting in the bottle after a long and slow secondary fermentation. One of the few times we'd ever achieved an alcohol level higher than ten percent. We'd bottled fourteen cases and there were fourteen of us which seemed fortuitous. I don't know how it was where you went to school, but at Janitor College, by Thanksgiving the paths between buildings were tunnels, slot canyons with walls of compacted snow. We had started drinking early as though it might be an anodyne against the loneliness. Someone had brought a magazine with a story about kayakers going over waterfalls, and we thought it would be cool to roll off the snow-banks, into the tunnels, and the first one with a broken bone won. We were well protected, in our many layers of winter wear there was little danger of injury, but Maurice (in the Student Exchange program), on his way over the edge picked up a small icicle from an over-hanging bush, and when he hit bottom it pierced his heart. He bled out, before we knew what was happening. Talk about a damper on the day. School of hard knocks, or whatever. That red ice plagues my memory. I'm perfectly comfortable, having survived: it's a random thing, cow-bells in the distance, hearing that distant cloister ring vespers. What we are is established before we speak. I'm confused about you, but I know who I am, just another beggar on the street, you're something other than that. What the reader perceives, and I have to go back to the books, to see what I thought I meant. Nothing prepares you for life. You either have the guts or you don't. Castrating lambs with your teeth. Be honest. Read more...

The Wind

Who could sleep with the house shaking and the whistling sound wind makes in stick trees? A winter concert, woodwinds, and the occasional snap when a branch lets loose. The ridge seems desolate: stick trees, gray sky, rain for days. Then this morning, after the fog dissipated, the clouds blew away, and blue sky rim to rim. I docent a few people, show the vault again, run some errands (get a chicken pot pie for tomorrow) and leave an hour early, to get a fire started and chase the chill from the house before the temps fall at sunset. Another holiday alone, which must not bother me very much, because I do nothing to change the fact. Which I could, easily enough, as I actively fend off offers of company. I don't buy most ritualistic or ceremonial bullshit, not in my nature. I'd rather take a walk and eat alone. The wind was nasty today, but when I got home, just before sunset, it died completely, and the silence was almost complete. I had to kill the breaker for the fridge. Still the hum of my main-frame, but that is become merely a low-level white noise and it doesn't bother me. Decide that I need to work on firewood tomorrow, cut a path to the woodshed (I haven't been out there since last March and the blackberry canes are six feet tall), inventory what I have, then start hauling wood from down the driveway, maybe split a few things. Maybe bleed off some of the frustration I feel about trying to mediate the friction between Pegi and D and failing. Caught in the middle. I just want to keep hanging shows, I don't care about the politics. I don't care about the Cirque and I don't care about D's MFA, fuck a bunch of petty bullshit, what I care about is the next show at the museum. The logistics, when do I get what, and what am I supposed to do with it. No question mark, though there was a question, implied. It's very difficult to write the way you actually talk. Punctuation becomes an issue. Consider the comma. She swore I wouldn't be accountable. What, exactly did she tell you? I make sense of things in my own way, no one pays me for this, it's something I have to do. Not merely numbers, not an algorithm, just a way of life. Those last bullfrogs, burrowing into a bank of clay. Something I noticed. Another thing. Read more...

Strange Assignments

For not the first time, I docent the vault door. TR has two groups of kids to deal with, in his capacity as educational person, and they're dying to see the vault, and especially the door, which is a massive thing of beauty. Sara and Clay left for Hilton Head mid-afternoon, she came in for a couple of hours, late morning; I enjoy her company so much, I'll miss our cigaret breaks together, one of us finding the other and making the universal sign for 'let's go have a smoke'. I intended to hang a few pieces, this afternoon, but I'd brought in several old copies of The London Review Of Books, for emergency reading matter, and there was a feature piece by Susan Eilenberg about two new books on Emily (30 June 2011) and I stopped to read that, and there was another book in the library, "Modigliani" by Alfred Werner, coffee-table book, large format, great color reproduction, and a good long essay at the beginning. I figure I worked Saturday and Monday, and I can read for a few hours. Look at pictures. That 1917 "Portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne" is stunning, and those last nudes, I can't look at them enough, it's like that feeding frenzy I had with The Cello Suites. The "Seated Nude" from 1912 sets the stage, look at her head, look at the line, look at the color. Jeanne was with him at the end, there was already a girl child, another Jeanne; and she was pregnant with their second child, the next day she jumped out a fifth-story window. Look at that 1917 "Portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne", that cock of head, that swan neck. I love the way he places so many models in the corner of a room, intersecting planes, nothing much. Not unlike Munch where there's not much in the background. One thing that's being said is that what's in the foreground is the important thing here. Look at that. Look at the forefinger on her right hand, does that mean anything? Right here, in this painting, I find a connection. But I can always find a connection. A night on the town always involved copious drinking with Utrillo, drinking and arguing with Diego Rivera, often ending with Mondigliani naked. Brancusi was M's sculptural mentor, easy to discern in the early heads and caryatids. Read more...

Too Much

Started raining last night and supposed to continue for several days, during a lull, in the afternoon, I beat it back to the museum. I have to be there tomorrow morning, to deal with the painters; then Sara and I rearrange the Carter's. Rains hard in the late afternoon and I would have been trapped on the ridge, which I don't mind, usually, call in and take a couple of days off, lord knows I have them coming. But I know Sara wants to rehang the Carter's and I enjoy the work. When I get to the museum, I start a pot of coffee, then go down to the library and get a few books, go back up to the office I use, call up Hulu and watch a couple of things, while looking through pictures, Utrillo, Gauguin, Chagall; read through some reviews in The London Review Of Books, read another novel by Alex Kava, an almost decent escapist writer. Not sure what Gauguin was saying, putting those girls in European dress. Patter of rain outside, I crashed early. Painting crew arrived on time, an older guy, the Facilities Manager and two young bucks. They go back to the hospital for what they need, and just the two younger guys come back. They're happy to be away from the boss, and they're good: neat and fast. I've been on a couple of painting crews, and I paint a lot of walls here. Very good work. Sara came in at eleven, I opened the vault and pulled out replacement paintings, took a few things off the wall, Sara rearranged. She made a quick job of it, natural groupings, and we know all these Carter paintings and drawings so well. I restore order, and she leaves early, to pack for Hilton Head. The painting crew leaves. I hang around for a while, walk through the Carter gallery, making sure I can make sense of my notes, lock up, go over to the pub. Their roof is leaking and Barb is upset, I don't blame her, seems to be true that if it's not one thing it's another. Issac comes in, on Xmas break from OU, and then his partner, Astra, and we chat. Last thing, before I leave the pub, I always roll a cigaret, to smoke of my way back to the truck; there's a guy sitting to my right (Barb, Issac and Astra are all strung to the left) watching me roll (it sounds like a football play.) Someone wrote my name (in permanent marker on his forearm.) He leaves when I do and follows me outside, asks if I'd roll him a smoke. There are chairs, and it's a well lit area, and I say sure, sit down and roll him a cigaret. I assume he's a narcotics agent and hope he'll enjoy Kentucky "Gambler" pipe tobacco, hand-rolled, thinking it was a doobie. But actually, he surprises me by saying "You're Tom Bridwell, I Googled you," Third time it's happened this week. In Portsmouth, Ohio. I know where this outbreak started, TR, at that party last weekend. I'm flattered that someone would write my name on their forearm, I think; that I'd need to be Googled. I'd use a lot more semi-colons if Roy Blount Jr. hadn't spoken out so strongly against them. Read more...

What

Something woke me. A pair of coons, fighting over pork-chop bones. I run them off with a couple of rocks from the pile I keep inside the back door. I don't mind them turning my compost, but when they fight, they hiss and squeal like tomcats on the prowl. "Like a girl through a topaz town." Coming home, I was struck with that slanted fall light, the patterns of highlight and shadow; blinding, actually, sometimes. At the lake, enough wind to ripple the surface, the light was slamming the far bank, and it was, if you will, topaz. Yes, I thought, she had simply looked out the window. I'd bet that poem was written in October or November. Minor epiphany, probably a chemical thing, beta-carotenes or that last drink, an acid flash-back, a premonition. A cut, across my right little finger, brings me back into the tangible world. I'd spun off there, into the ether, but suddenly I'm bleeding, which concerns the real; rock and drill, as Ezra said. It's a minor cut, but I don't know where I got it, and I have to retrace my steps, to find where I hurt myself. Sometimes, when I'm writing, I scare myself, when I say something, then realize what I've said. I keep thinking I'm not making any sense, then realize I am. Consciousness is confusing, just when you think you have a handle. Given my parsing, which is what she taught me. Consider the dash, what it means; in the fasicles she varies the length of the dash, mere, what? certainly not whimsey. I had a great Maine Coon cat for years, she'd go for long walks with me, roll over and play dead when she wanted to be carried the rest of the way home. I made enough money being an Equity Stage Manager during the summer to set type and print the rest of the year. Long walks on deserted beaches. Wrote a novel one winter, which I destroyed and now wish I hadn't. It was a meta-text before there were such things. Concerned the exploits of a Steam Punk dancer, before there were such things. Agreed to go in Monday as a free painting crew from the hospital is coming over to paint the downstairs bathrooms, before the hospital Doctor's Party on December 1st. I thought the bathrooms looked fine, but I'll take free painters any day. That will be Sara's last day before she and Clay leave for the winter at Hilton Head, so she's going to come in and rearrange the Carter paintings, change some of them out. Then I'll re-hang everything the old way (I'll leave up all the hardware) until I can strip everything down, patch and repair, and repaint some walls during the January break. We usually don't have a show in January, in the main gallery, so that we can do some serious facilities maintenance. The place gets beat up. D owes me half a day, for the various times I've ferried him, so I'm calling it in, first decent day when he's on break from the MFA program, and we'll re-insulate the other half of the floor. We did the first half in four hours. I have a disposable HAZMAT suit I can duct tape at wrist and ankle, I'll crawl under, do the measuring and installing, all he has to do is rip the rigid foam to width, so I can trap the fiberglass in place. Excellent system, air space between, seal the edges with expanding foam; I have the money to do that now, I never did, before. The new socks are a treat. I was early at the museum, to shave with hot running water (I'm a cheap date, what can I say?) and the town was like a stage set, completely deserted. They had brought out the nightlife, what passes for real, and it lasted for a while. Then you're alone again. Examine that. If I had students I'd tell them to look at anything closely. What Olson advised me, what Ed Dorn brought into the cannon. If you read, you should be able to tell the wheat from the chaff. Read more...

Leonid

Writing in a vacuum. Linda sent a quote, Emily in a letter " Amherst has gone to Eden, and the moon rides like a girl through a topaz town." Now I ask you, what, exactly, was she saying? We can parse meaning. Tonight, for instance, the moon is lovely, but so bright, above stick trees, that I miss most of the show. Passing through the tail of a comet there should be fireworks, "like a girl through a topaz town." But I can't swear to anything. If my Dad had invented pencils, or I was allowed free reign for or any other reason, to just sit, bundled like an Eskimo, to watch shooting stars. There are times I get her, understand what's being said, and in those moments I'm knocked out of my socks; revelatory impassioned bursts that occasionally make you trip. Stumble. You know what I mean. Though meaning is a difficult concept. When Emily says "topaz" for instance; I have to hit the books. What color, exactly. Emily's Imagined reader. What is Eden, how does the moon ride. I could lie. Uniquely trained, in fact. But the truth is no stranger than fiction. Assuming there is a truth. Yes, sure, what we're left with. I'm just saying; I have to go. Sort out what you need. Modigliani was called Medi, short form of maudit, the cursed, because he lived a sort of crash and burn lifestyle. That info from Asher McCord. I have enough readers now, that I can ask almost any question in my postings and get an answer. I mentioned squalene (an oil found on the sides of human noses and in shark livers) which is used as a lubricant in clocks and watches and TR said that it's also used by musicians to lubricate parts of certain instruments. Then synecdoche came up in a conversation about words that are difficult to pronounce, and my definition was almost letter perfect. Bastion (sp?) came in to the museum to deliver D a copy of his book, a very interesting and edgy creation, and we talked about Steam Punk. His book is in that genre, people morphing into machines. Then he mentioned he had been at a party last weekend and was talking to a guy who had, written on his arm in Sharpie, "Google Tom Bridwell". TR was at the pub the other night, mentioned to one of the waitresses, that we had spent the last hour at the museum that day, reading the dictionary, which she found odd, and TR told her I was a writer, and the other waitress, Lindsey, told her that she had just recently read a year of my postings and that I was really good. I have no way of knowing how many people read me, seems to be expanding daily, and what's strange is that I don't communicate with that many people. Get an email or two or maybe none on any given day. In the snail mail department I get almost nothing except my three bills (credit card, electric company, and the phone) and otherwise just piles of crap about supplemental health insurance, and offers for more credit cards. I field maybe a phone call a week. I talk to myself more than everyone else combined. Where I live is incredibly isolated and of difficult access, I've only ever known a couple of places that were more difficult to achieve. Was not my intention to make things as hard as possible. I liked the ridge, it was beautiful, it was a watershed, and the head waters of a lovely creek, what's not to like? Thinking back, working on Thomas Jefferson's father's house, isolated and alone, in a place where I knew no one, set me up for this solitary lifestyle. And I wrote well there, under those circumstances, and I wanted to keep doing that, which required enormous blocks of solitude. Isolation works best for that. And the fact that there were no building codes. My kind of place. Where the toxic sludge washes into the fields, where we raise soybeans for the government and get paid even if the crop fails, hard not to get political, but I operate on a level where morals still matter. I couldn't help but notice Linda had great ankles, and TR poked me,.knowing my affinity for ankles, and he had noticed them too, maybe noticing ankles is important. Maybe your response is being charted. Read more...

Day Off

Which, of course, means reading all day. Read a novel by Alex Kava this morning, an ok diversion, which I needed after 14 straight days at the museum. Awoke disoriented about what day it was and what I was supposed to be doing. Mom called and it was easier to ask her what day it was, than to try and figure it out. They're hanging on, barely, unhappy at my sister's house, though they have every comfort there. Two old, frail, almost blind people, that can hardly get around, who still desire independence. Spunk. Spent the afternoon reading "Mimesis", Auerbach. It's a very good book, he's much like Walter Benjamin, way too bright; and the way he approaches 'the modern', though this book is 50 years old, is complex, multi-leveled, and relevant. I'm reading the last chapter first, then going backward through the book, chapter by chapter, and I recommend this system. Auerbach is an academic, he wants to tell the story told in a straight line progression, but it's a better story if you start with the present and move backward. Like those bagpipe players: I studied with, who studied with, who studied with, who studied with, back to the limits of time. The invention of the bagpipe, releasing pumped air through a shaped orifice. Playing a penny-flute. The Indians, locally, preferred bird femurs, hollow as they are, and drilled holes for keying that were perfect in pitch. That makes music a language, right? No, wait, maybe more like a smell, something that infringes on our consciousness. I don't know what makes the world go round, I do know if you lean back against a tree and stay as quiet as possible, the natural world expresses itself. Rousseau had it right. Thoreau. High winds in the afternoon and the trees are stripped. I admit to colder weather. They're hardly gone, before I start reordering things, recording myself, as a matter of course. I'm probably post-modern, when it comes right down. You and your magnifying glass. Harmonics are another whole issue, where meaning fails The last high winds shook the house like a useless glove. I crawled under the stairs and bit my nails. but it wasn't necessary, what I build stands up well to extreme events. Say the wind blows a full gale, everything gives a little, this house, where I am now, actually flexes. I've trained myself to watch the wind push through. When the mandolin pushes in from left field, you listen.

From last Sunday, my phone has been out. Read more...

Supplies

Stayed in town for a couple of days. The phone was dead because a very large oak had taken out the line. Frontier said they'd have service restored today, and, sure enough, on my way home, one of their trucks was on Mackletree. I stopped and chatted with the guy, he was just fitting the waterproof cover over the repair and said I was good to go. Some function at the museum tonight, so I got out the required tables and chairs. A huge lunch at the pub, Shepard's Pie, so I probably won't eat again until tomorrow, then ran some errands in the afternoon and left an hour early. I needed to start stocking the house for winter: ten gallons of drinking water, 15 gallons of wash water, juices, back-up whiskey, ten packages of Idahoan "Baby Reds", ten of those tubes of saffron rice (for fried rice meals), a few things for there freezer, some shrimp, five one-pound packages of frozen ground pork which I use to make Chorizo (which I can eat a dozen ways), a pork tenderloin, a couple of steaks. Bought some canned goods, evaporated milk, in case I run of cream for my coffee, some coffee, several cans of fire-roasted tomatoes, now that they've gotten cheaper (they use to be just a gourmet thing, but now Hunt's does them). I'm low on dried beans, so I buy a few pounds of those, pintos, great northern, black. I remember toilet paper, buy another of those self-grinder whole pepper-corn units. I need to get lamp oil, because I have grown to hate the smell of kerosene. It's actually fun doing this, because I know, after all the years of living this way, what I need to pre-load, and what I can carry in. So I drive up and park on the other side of the puddles. Four trips, a hundred yards each, nothing to complain about. I like knowing that I could live for weeks, maybe, almost, forever, on the larder I assemble. I need some oil, now that I'm not a goatherd, with an unlimited supply of goat-butter, something I can cook things in, so I buy a gallon of cheap olive oil. Everything is relative. I like cheap olive oil, it actually has some taste. That dozen eggs, from TR's family, they fairly explode; then you have to consider that taste might mediate. Just saying. I deal with these constructs every day. If that then this. The algorithm holds. The metaphor. Go out there, in the field, and try to understand what anyone is saying. Absolutely impossible, but you do get the drift, because the angles were wrong. Something, what gave me away, did you see that I wasn't lying? Read more...

Modigliani

Looking at those nudes, The paintings done between 1917 and 1919. He knew he was dying, that he had successfully killed himself. Look at the sketches, that precede the paintings. The delicacy of line, replaced, in the paintings, by blocks of color; we lose the intimnacy of detail but we gain intensity. My favorite is "Tall Nude, Lying" at MOMA, that torso so elongated. And the way his nudes open out to you, nothing hidden. They're amazing. The way they invite you in. Most art excludes you, but Modigliani, his models, invite you into their world. I know you're looking at me and I don't give a damn. I understand the sexual subtext, it matters less to me than it would to someone younger, but I recognize the strength of it in the nudes. He arrived in Paris the year Cezanne died, saw the retrospective exhibit at the Salon d'Automne the following year, dealt with Cezanne's dictum "the richer the colors, the more solid the forms" for the rest of his life. Short as it was. All of the oil nudes were done between 1917 and 1919, he died in 1920 (the year my father was born) at 36. There's a calendar at the museum, from the Met, an object or painting a day, tomorrow is another Amedeo (Medi, his friends called him, which is probably a pun but I don't know Italian), a portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne. She's posed in an odd chair, in the corner of a room, her head tilted, her left index finger impossibly bent against her cheek. I love this calendar, when I have an idle moment, I sometimes look a day or two ahead, to see what's coming, then get to the museum early, so I can read about whatever it is in the museum library. So this morning I was looking at nudes with my breakfast coffee. Excellent way to start the day. Pegi, TR and Sara came in, and we talked in the common room, over coffee, a kind of jazzed funny conversation that went on for quite a while. TR and I lunched at the pub, from the new menu, the open face beef sandwich with gravy, mashed potatoes and green beans. I could stand to gain a few pounds, I've lost weight since this time last year and I wasn't heavy enough then. Two of my favorite words came up today, squalene, which is that oil produced on the side of your nose and in shark liver, which I knew was the lubricant of choice for watch makers, and synecdoche, which many people have trouble saying. Yarsagumba is a rare fungus from the Himalayas that actually grows on the corpses of a certain caperpillar and is worth thousands of dollars per kilogram, it may actually be an aphrodisiac, viagra came from somewhere, and a dozen people were sentenced to twenty years for beating to death 7 people for picking their mushrooms. The last part of the afternoon we talk about Steam Punk. Corsets and boots? Come on. Read more...