Roaring Outside

A sign of the times. More people bumming cigarets and asking for spare change. I'm always so surprised by that use of 'spare' that I just look stupid and shake my head. There are now three or four people that regularly raid our "Butt Bin" outside the back door. Something woke me, a sound in the night, and I ended up back at my writing station with a short whiskey, rolling a smoke and musing. There's a roaring outside, the wind in stick trees, like a young war in the distance. Hard to keep humidity levels where they need to be when you heat with wood, it's a strain on my books. So preoccupied with Pegi's office I didn't get to the library, to pick up a fiction, to read on my breaks from reading other things. Picture this. I'm sitting at the front desk, clearly a janitor (jeans, denim shirt) filling in for someone better dressed, looking at pictures in an art book, and a couple come in. They're tentative. Born and raised in this town and didn't know there was an art museum. I walked them through the Carter's, glib and slightly profane, they were amused and I was amazed at the way I do this docenting thing. There's no mediation between me and the work, I just say what I think. The stipulation being that I leave out almost everything. I realize I'm bad about getting side-tracked (that's a good looking hyphen), so I get another short drink and roll another cigaret. Kristi said I shouldn't use the word 'fuck' so often, in it's various tenses. So I walk this couple through the Carter's, pointing out a few things, and never use it at all. Fuck a bunch of tattered lavender tights.

Tom

I went on so long the sun finally rose. My early mornings have become confused. Maybe it's just a glitch, but I suspect something more substantial. We'll see how I deal with today: rolling around under the house. There really isn't a referent, maybe a perfectly chipped point, I mistrust everything else. Read more...

Nothing Fancy

A chicken pot pie. Anything with a crust. Apple crisp. I'll do some cooking this weekend. One more hour under the house tomorrow, thank the gods for a nice day (I got lucky) because a very cold front moves in Sunday night. Whatever it takes to get battened up. No rain today, just some spits, and I was able to get up the hill and bring in a few things. I've been carrying two five-gallon buckets of water, as ballast, in the back of truck and I'll need to trade that out with a couple of rocks or something. I saw a nice pile of free wood on the way home tonight, but it was too dark to stop, I might go get it on Sunday, hard to pass up pre-cut firewood. Another dead tree on the telephone line, some local (with enough wood already, one supposes) had cut it up into manageable pieces and just left them by the side of the road. Happens all the time around here, hardwood capital of the world, and everybody carries a chainsaw around in their truck. Work for the day was cutting paint in the two big windows and Pegi's room is now officially Lavender. A little bright for me but she's going to love it. Restored her office, cleaned up, closed up, and D was certain I could make it up my driveway. I was too, because I've developed an algorithm or a system that allows me to judge, from the conditions outside the back door of the museum, whether or not I can get up the drive. There's a lot of boring criteria, but it's over 90% successful, not too bad for someone who never took a course in statistics. Mostly trial and error, a meta-system I apply locally. I learn this way, that if the center hump of asphalt on sixth street is dry, and the potential puddles you learn if you're a smoker, are dry, then probably there's been enough wind to dry the top of the driveway. I'm dressed warmly right now, comfortable; it's forty-eight degrees outside and I don't light a fire. Fuck a bunch of cold. D doesn't understand that I work all those extra Saturdays because I enjoy his company, everyone else is jealous, and they don't even know of what. It's blowing a full gale right now, and this is when the ridge-tops suffer. Stunted trees are bent once again, and when you cut them, they spring apart, like creatures with their own imaginations. What the wood wanted to be, as opposed to what you wanted the wood to do. Classic de lima. I fall down heavily on the side of the wood. Read more...

Painting Day

First thing was to paint a stain blocker on some mold under where a potted plant had been. Actually. first was hearing that we've aquired yet another Carter. A watercolor that was painted as a final study for an oil painting. He often did this. The painting is called "Tidewater". It's being over-nighted from California. The stain blocker needs to dry for an hour. I had to go the hardware store and get roller covers. This is a very difficult office to paint, two big windows, tight quarters, and a monster desk (must weigh 800 lbs.) that D and I swore to never move again. We left room to paint where it comes closest to a wall, but it isn't easy. Since I'm only painting two walls and because of the dropped ceiling and the plastic baseboard, there is an enormous amount of cutting in edges. I only tape the baseboard, everything else I just cut in carefully freehand. I like doing it, it's an imperfect science, in that it's quite difficult to paint a straight line. I'm not the best at this (Herbert, bless his soul, former designer at the Cape Playhouse, was the best, I don't know who is now) but I have painted many thousands of feet of cut-in lines, and I'm pretty damn good. Nice to get to the actual painting part of this, but you have to do the prep work or it don't mean a thing. So I cut edges for a couple of hours, with a couple of breaks outside for a smoke. I rolled the rest of the surfaces in half-an-hour. Finished just after four, D'd had to leave early because Carma's car had lost it's transmission, so I have to stay and close up. The footprint of a brush and a roller are completely different, and your greatest fear, at this point in painting a room, is that the difference is going to be noticeable. Reds are impossible, but this Lavender Lane is fine, it's done in a single coat. It's a really good paint job and a really awful color. But it's Pegi's office, and she's the boss. It hurts my eyes. But it dries out very close to perfect. It's vibrant. I still have to paint the window casings, and they're very deep and stepped, probably take me most of the day tomorrow. I need a list, of course, for the upcoming festivities. I should be able to finish insulating the rim joists on Saturday, which is projected as a 'nice day' but then Sunday night and Monday the bottom drops out, daytime highs in the twenties. I'll get it done. I pretty much have to; I need coffee and more juice, I have enough tobacco and papers, I probably need more whiskey. I have days and nights of stockpiled food against some imagined famine, I keep grits and dried beans in a tin-foil lined cannister. I don't remember what the context was, today, something about being unfaithful, and that woiuldn't have been merely, like a number or something, a tattoo. Read more...

Changes

The bank on Sixth Street either changed hands or they just decided to change all the signs, because the sign guys were working in the parking lot all day with a small crane and a bucket truck. A good crew, the crane operator was very good. No smashed cars. We didn't have a morning receptionist, so D and I split the time there; down side is that when we don't have a morning receptionist and three of the five people at the museum are on vacation we don't get anything done. The rule is that there's always a person upstairs and one downstairs. We did pretty well, considering; D made real progress on the large catalog for the Folk Art show. Printing costs have come down dramatically and the quality has gone up. He found a place online, I think they're in Texas, and he just ships them a file and a week later we get the finished product. This particular catalog is 44 pages, full color, images from all the artists, biographies and a couple of essays. Since the show is playing at five venues we're getting a thousand copies, and the total cost is less than four thousand dollars. Seems like a bargain to me. We give 25 copies to each of the other venues, sell the rest at $10 or whatever; plus the fees the others are paying for the exhibit, this show turns a profit. If D did a show from the massive collection of prints at OU, it could travel, and probably also turn a profit. I need to talk with him about that. Finish preparations in Pegi's office. Paint tomorrow. Replaced light bulbs, goddamn but there are a lot of lights in the museum. Wrapped up the day an hour early so I could get home and try to get the house warm. Warm meaning just not freezing to death. Winter camping with a roof. It's fine, the sunset was so beautiful, and the immense silence is a transport of joy. Mackeltree was a thing of beauty. I was looking at nudes today, when I was being the receptionist, Modigliani especially, those late paintings are exceptional. His very last, I think, painting, of his great love. Seated in a room with a door, which was his motif; fucking doors, I don't know what they mean, maybe that they're just a way of closing things off. Have to think about that. "Naturalia non sunt turpia" pops into my head, and I have no idea where it comes from, a turn of phrase, it means something like 'natural things are not bad in themselves' like M exposing all that pubic and armpit hair. Without the doting hand or branch of something covering the privates. Which we consider civilized. I'm always looking for context. Maybe it's a fault of my upbringing, I'd sign off on that, in certain regards. In another circumstance I might argue the opposite case. That you should never. Which you probably had already done. And we'd argue about that, which one of us had hit the button, the first time in forever that the moon is visible at all. I just watch, my mandate, and add an occasional comment. It's always changing. Read more...

Intimisme --- Nabis

The domestication of impressionism. Bringing it inside. What Vuillard and Bonnard did. The intimate development of realism had its origin in the Nabis group, late nineteenth-century. Influenced by Gauguin's use of flat colors. Read another book about them last night. I really like some of the work. I now keep a dictionary of art terms on my desk at the museum; on a coffee break, I'll read a couple of definitions. The piano movers were in the alley, I was open early waiting for them, but they never knocked or called so I didn't know they were there. D saw them when he came in. Five guys from Luther's Moving And Storage, and their truck wedged sideways in the alley, so they can slide a ramp into the loading door. They have a system, this is not the first baby grand piano they've ever moved, but they're not as good as the guys in Boston (they were the best I ever saw), or even the guys in Tallahassee Florida who were stone cold tokers. When I think back on it, I've been around a lot of pianos being moved. I'm always paranoid, because they've both heavy and delicate. but I've always been interested in the concept of moving heavy things. I've moved a great many printing presses; sometimes buildings, with printing presses and paper cutters inside them. I wouldn't do it any more, my reflexes aren't fast enough. Baby Grands, and Grands, are so awkward to move, they ship on edge, legless, with the wide part of the sounding board down, strapped on very strong dollies. The guys get it done, but mostly because they're very strong country boys. One of them is smart enough to see that the load has to be carried cleanly down to the wheels. And they keep it balanced on the ramp, which is the really scary part, and get it into the truck. I'm done with it, it's not my responsibility, they have their own insurance, the shippers; the church, where the piano is going, have their insurance. My responsibility ended a long time ago. I just wanted to see how they'd do it, I had my own ideas. Loading a fucking piano, come on man, how would you have done it? Read more...

A Good Day

Exhausted, and now the wind is howling. A low drone with branches scraping. The house shudders. This would have been the night I could have used a motel room. I'm dirty, and hacking up insulation, so I pack a kit and head into town; I need to shave and wash my hair, clean my ears and wash my neck. Luther's Moving is picking up the baby grand piano early and I need to be at the museum. But then I have a dozen errands I need to run, end of the year stuff. I cleaned out the fridge at home, throwing away a few things, and I dug a good deep hole in the compost pile, but the coons will dig it all up. It's just a game we play, our various natures. Talked with Samara this morning, she and Rhea had spent a quiet day at Marilyn and Mark's cabin, hiking through deep snow with the dogs. I'm not even remotely jealous. All I wanted was hot running water, cold water first, when dealing with fiberglas, to close up the pores. then I like to use something disposable, paper towels or part of an old tee-shirt, something I can just wad up and throw away. To wipe that transition zone. I wouldn't want to confuse anyone. Lord knows it's a slipperay slope. If you could have been someone you imagined. Don't go there. It's enough to talk the talk. Read more...

Target Audience

Maybe I misconstrued, I thought we were meeting for drinks after. Completely my fault. Realized I was supposed to write you, tell you whatever. It's a memory project, not unlike something you might have done before. Get comfortable and discuss your feelings. Over the years you probably realized I have a problem with holidays. As if they were things snatched away from me. Which might be true. At that level, who do you trust? I'd almost rather trust the opinion of a competent stranger. Hard enough to find these days. I went out on a limb, engaged this once-a-week pub guy, I knew he was a banker because he was/is always in a shirt and bow-tie. My spell-check likes hyphens and I just usually go along with her (we have a relationship (cute, resisting the parenthesis) ) but sometimes it doesn't feel right. Like I'm being manipulated somehow. Despite all the evidence to the contrary. Try to stand back from your life for just a minute, you can't do it, you're always too involved. No down time. His name, actually, was Tyler, which confused the issue, since I spend most of my time trying to make connections and we talked about car loans. I make myself laugh, the sheer or ephemeral way things are constellated. It's already tomorrow, for instance: what do you do with that? There's an internal dialog going on all the time, you and those stupid piles of books, wait, I put them there to remind me about something. Latin from the Greek. I hate myself sometimes, the way I might buy the party ticket. I take off Linda's hat and roll a perfect cigaret. What difference a word might make. Nine ways from Sunday. If I might be so bold. Whatever competent means. You and your left-handedness. Contrary. On a bed of fantastic cheese grits I have several pounded rounds of pork tenderloin with an egg on top. Excellent. I think I'll eat the same thing later and skip the chicken pot-pie. Decided to take the day off and not crawl around under the house. This morning the sky was clear but there were little light-weight crystals, ice dust (I used to know the name of it raining down. Prismatic and incredibly beautiful. Linda and Glenn called, great conversations, Glenn said he recently saw the word 'anacoluthon' in a NY Times article, and only knew the word because it was the title of a little book of prose I wrote back in the 70's. Means "does not necessarily follow" or something close to that. I remember that I was studying the prefix 'ana' and trying to prize some meaning from it. I wrote three extended essays at the time, two of them published as small books, the third "Anabasis" was never published and I can't seem to find a copy. I think the only copy was probably in the fire-proof lock-box that was stolen. There were four books in there, that I could never reconstruct, 3,000 draft pages, single spaced. I keep coming across pieces of those books, here and there, and they always surprise me. Some fragments were published Small Press magazines, some University publications, and things have a way of turning up. Someone sends you a copy or you're rummaging around in a pile of trash. This intense slanted sun is enough to give you a headache. On my way back to the house, a glint caught my eye, a hoop earring, and I can't remember who it was, Rachel, Heather, all those years ago. Pretty sure it wasn't Kristi, because she never wore hoops. I'd remember that. I forget almost everything, a heat-sink at the bottom of the universe. A drain, more or less, where expecturants are washed away. Forget whatever you thought. Where an iris was merely a beautiful thing. Read more...

Maybe Someday

Stories. A rich history of fiction. I could regale you, but you'd never believe anything I had to say. It's all fiction, even the absolute real, which is just a surveillance video from a bad angle. No wind, and it's so quiet you'd think something was about to happen, but nothing does, just an ongoing "Waiting For Godot" state of tension. Tension may be the wrong word, because it implies anxiety, and, actually, everything is very calm. Still, a dynamic state, holding a pose, something contained but straining against some constraint. A common enough feeling. I've got this late dusky light turning all the trees into stick figures, and when I go out to pee the top layer of leaves are dry but everything underneath is mushy and sticks to my slippers. I don't want to go under the house tomorrow, but I have to; no way to get it done but to do it yourself. I have four or five servings of these great whole grain grits that I'll be eating over the next couple of days and tonight I pound out a couple of tenderloin slices, lightly bread them in a highly spiced flour, and fry them in a very hot skillet. I use a little walnut oil, but the skillet is so well cured I could have fried them dry, I really take care of my cast iron cookware; and serve them on a bed of polenta-like re-fried grits. Cheese grits, actually, because I nuked them with a feta while I was frying the eggs. Egg yolk, I would argue, is the greatest sauce ever. I shouldn't eat this well, because it spoils me, at some point you begin to expect things. Someone to pick you up, someone to do your makeup. I'm not concerned with my appearance, what you see is what you get, but I do place things into a context. There could be a narrative. Maybe we had met once on the jetty or something; and fuck you, TR, and the horse you rode in on, maybe there was the sound of surf, extrapolate from that. In so far as what is real.

Tom

Something else. What I say with a great deal of confidence is often not the case. It's a puzzle. Not a lie, exactly, more like a chess move, considered, but with reservations.Even where I might place a period, much less a comma.. Read more...

Waiting

For that moment to arrive. I hate to quote Paul, but he's lived a long time, not to mention Mr. Simon, who has certain skills, especially where the bass line comes in. I'm sorry, were we talking about something? Judas, at the end of the bar, mentioned selling out. I wondered where he was coming from. Seems to me there's a scale, and you weight the gold against whatever hardball you have to play. An odd game, you make the rules as you go along, but there's a referent, a chart, and you compare the results. Bear with me. If ever it had happened that you might have stubbed a toe, say, maybe, drunk, a given night, stumbling around. Maybe there was an ottoman misplaced, or an end-table slightly askew, it happens, in the dark, at night; you stub a toe. A violent discourse involving much swearing, maybe a painting falls on your head, maybe you break some glass. I don't know, but I've been told, we all get clumsy once in a while. The way things constellate. What stupid idiot put a pile of books there? The ridge is heartstoppingly beautiful, full sun, no wind, 42 degrees, I have to take a walk. Haven't done it in a while, so I walk the entire rim of Low Gap Hollow; the complete drainage, like a horseshoe funneled out. I carry my Sassafras walking stick. It has a bulbous root handle that fits my hand and is strong enough to smash things, if I need to smash something. I've been smashing oak galls recently. All those acidic layers harboring a sweet, liquid, inner core. Manna. Once you've gone over to the acorn side, you start subscribing to the whole program. It's best to be leery of systems. I went under the house and my repair to the gray-water drain has held against several freezes, and the ground, under where the break was, is dry. So I'm on for tomorrow. These are exciting times. I'm drinking a lot, but it probably doesn't mean anything, and I'm increasingly careful where I place my next foot. Meaning what? Right. What isn't said. Change a question mark to a period and everything changes. You might have been there, a slot-canyon, nowhere to go. What do you do then? We have a protocol, I'm not allowed to any prior knowledge, BUT.

Tom

Have to go. Make the best of it. Read more...

Organizing Principles

D was there to work. Had that look about him, and wearing old clothes. We assembled the flute boxes, with their dividers, re-boxed all of them. 144, eight extras we stashed in one of the cupboards. Re-organized the top glass storage shelf in the back room of the kitchen. Re-stacked everything. Went down to the basement and consolidated things, threw some stuff away. Pegi had said to store some of the glasses down there, but after cleaning out space, we realized it wasn't suitable for that; however, we were able to get some other items stored down there. Freeing up space, which was the order of the day. More rain. For 80 of 88 counties in Ohio this was already THE record year.; but is supposed to nice (50/30, sunny) for the next couple of days, so I'm excited about finishing stage one of the floor insulation project. Making a crock pot of grits, and I have a pork tenderloin, lots of fresh eggs. I'm beginning to see a lot of breakfasts in my near future. D left while I was still locking up, anxious to get home to the family. I wasn't in much of a hurry, thought I might watch an episode of "Person Of Interest", which I like quite a lot. The phone rang, and it was Kristi, from Kentucky, and it was so nice to hear her voice. We talked for a while, catching up: the metaphysics of missing someone or a place or even a particular job. She seems to be doing well, a car, a couple of jobs, I told her she had to get up here for The Emiliy Project, or before that, and we could close out the pub, singing Jack Vetter's version of Bob Dylan's "Knocking On Heaven's Door". There's some Garcia there, from when Dylan toured with "The Grateful Dead", so I'm sensitive to that; Garcia is my household god, so I'm sensitive to any nuance. Not that I hear anything different, it's the same noise; loading a dishwasher, whatever, dishes rattling down on a table, fucking silverwear, man, why do they call it that? Oh, of course. Fucking holidays are a pain in the ass. Clearly there are walls, I construct them to protect my ass. Not always as clear as I should be, I generally think about protecting my ass first and think about the consequences later. Read more...

Hard Rain

Starting falling late afternoon and my windshield wipers aren't working. TR's car wouldn't start. We retired to the pub. Sorted hardware, actually an interesting chore because we have some interesting hardware. Things that don't get used fairly often are stored in small bins on shelfs in the vault in the basement, which is our tool room. It's a mess right now, but there's no reason to clean and sort everything, because we have three shows coming down at the end of next week. D ordered the Master Boxes (specifically for art), dense, double thick, with archival foam lining, but essentially card-board boxes. $186 apiece, also ordered some boxes for the champagne flutes, $7 each. Trying to keep things organized is a frigging battle. Start in Pegi's office tomorrow. Repair some rotten plaster, actually more a matter of containing some rotten plaster above the new windows (the problem is fixed); there's a wierd soffit and whatever we do will be hidden. Another messy job. Then repair sheetrock and paint at least two of the walls, she's specified a periwinkle color. Then rehang the Carters. We're getting the Folk Art show early, so D can photograph everything for the catalog; it travels to three other venues after we assemble it, so we'll have to figure out how to pack it for travel. Another interesting task. The same art shipper is going to transport the work for every venue, and then back home. Which makes the whole process easier. We've worked with him many times. Art shippers are a strange breed, only the good ones build a reputation. Fed Ex has an art shipping branch, and they're quite competent; but the idependent guys are much more interesting. Weather looks good for this weekend, cold but no rain, and should be able to finish stage one of the floor insulation. Read more...

Running Down

For the sake of argument let's say I agree with you. That's how I usually avoid upset. Not making a point. A by-product of not giving a shit what anyone else thinks. A main consideration in living the life I do, is that I don't have to compromise very much of my time. Four o'clock in the morning and I'm reading David Bainbridge on balanoculture (acorn eaters) among coastal California native tribes. My mouth is dry, so I get just a splash of Irish whiskey, to wet the palette, smoke some local herb, roll a coarse Kentucky tobacco into the semblance of a cigaret. I don't have to ask permission, I don't have to be twenty feet away from the door, I don't have to dress accordingly. I prefer a solitary life, precisely because there is no mediation. Me and whatever gods there are. After a lifetime of working with other people, what I want to do now is just read and write. I'm still drawn to the combined arts, the Wrack Show, the Emily Project, though I do absolutely hate the fucking bureaucracy necessary. Some fat-assed office manager controlling the flow of cash. The very idea that I'd have to get angry. I thought we'd agreed we wanted to do this. Does Trish, in fact, run the museum? I just need to know. I like this job, but I could go somewhere else. Ply my trade in Phoenix. A nice phrase, I like the intent. I've lived here longer than I've ever lived anywhere, but that doesn't mean I can't move. Fuck a bunch of inertia. I let my anger boil over the top, and I'm not even sorry, fuck a bunch of punctuation. What is a museum, what does it stand for? I don't know, and I'm not sure I care. The whole idea of working with a community. Most people are full of shit. Nothing makes any sense. Better off living in a tree-tip pit and not giving a damn. Pardon the alliteration. A shopping cart from Kroger, collecting cans. I amuse myself. Read more...

Wind

A howling in the trees, snapping branches sound like gunshots; the house, in winds like these, creaks and sways just a bit. Three crows acting like drunken pilots. Pegi starts vacation tomorrow, so we might get started on some repair and painting in her office, and, sensing a rather busy schedule for the next few weeks, I left early. Stopped at Ohio Builders Surplus and exchanged the staples. Then on a slow trip in the back way, looked closely, through the now barren trees, at the actual land formations. Exposed sandstone with seeping springlets that will be frozen soon enough. The creek was running full and the dozens of small waterfalls were beautiful in the slanted light. Need to make a list of supplies I'll need for the long weekend. An extra bottle of booze, I've got plenty of tobacco but I need extra cigaret papers. For food, knowing the cookstove will be hot anyway, I'll roast some vegetables, and the Linda trick of roasting kale leaves into the greatest chips ever, and a pot roast. Got enough coffee, need half-and-half, a couple of Honeycrisp apples, a small piece of very good cheese, maybe an English cheddar. All of which will provide for several omelets, and I've got farm fresh eggs for that. If I could finish stage one of the insulation upgrade Saturday, it would make Sunday truly special. Everyone else is wrapped in their holiday protocol, everyone has an itinerary. I suppose I do too, I'll probably take a walk. Either field or make a couple of phone calls. I'll eat, and shit, and wash between my toes: have to get to the library and check out some escapist fiction. An alternate reality, in case I need to escape. I have a dish-pan, plastic, that I scored from a dumpster, that I use for soaking my feet, and I think I'll do that twice yearly session with my toenails sometime over the long weekend. Other than that, I don't have any plans.

Tom


It must be blowing a full gale, backlit, with lightning; pretty sure I'm going to lose something. Read more...

Cricks And Pops

Not as bad as it could be, in that I can still move, and the house is more comfortable. An even trade. Creature comforts win every time. Still, I had to go to town, I'd had dirty laundry in the truck for three days and it was starting to smell like sneakers. And I needed food and booze. I have all these fresh eggs, and I want to use them. Linda had brought me a tin of very good pate from France and I had written the firm, to ask where I might get some more of that incredible product, and they'd sent me a tin, mentioned a few stores in NYC, so I make an omelet with pate and a decent goat cheese. Excellent. Fog everywhere this morning, even the parking lots in town. Open up the museum, there's a school group scheduled for all day, TR, and Pegi's Cirque to entertain them, a docent to take them around the galleries. I hole up, most of the day, reading Mary's letters. Getting into it. Receptionists (volunteers) canceling, so we're all covering the desk and the staff starts thinning out tomorrow, by the end of the week, and all of next week, just D and I here. Which is fine, I have to re-hang some Carter walls, do some painting, D has a major catalog to design. Less distraction, and there won't be many visitors. Actually I had a great chat and mini-docenting session with the brother of a former employee today. He was good friends with B, knew all the people on the creek. We talked easily with each other, and it's always nice when that happens. After work I went over to the pub, for a beer and a shot of Irish. TR was in the back corner, writing out music on a staff, and I didn't want to disturb him, I knew he was working on the Emily piece. Jason was sitting at the bar, and I knew we could talk or not. Two scruffy guys come in, they sit a stool away, and the nearest guy looks at me. Said that he knew me and he used to live on Mackletree, and I realize it has to be Dennis, from the octogon house, another Emily is his sister, and his mom shoes horses. And this explains who that woman, wearing a helmet, on horseback, who waves a stilted wave at me occasionally, actually is. A breakthrough, and how cool is that? it's EMILY. Of course she would be waving from horseback, with a helmet, such that I could only tell you her gloves were tan. Essentially, I saw nothing. Maybe they were gloves, maybe they were her own hands, if she'd spent forty years herding animals, her hands would be pretty tough. Maybe, just saying, there could be another reason. Read more...

Mistakes Happen

Cicero's mistake gives me pause, because I really like the word 'syllabus' and because I imagine he'd been drinking whatever that diluted wine beverage the Romans were fond of. Probably translating something from Greek, has that feel to it. I make mistakes all the time, a dozen a day, most of them are learning experiences, like where not to put your foot. I hate those Salvation Army bells, at the exit of Kroger's, can't wait for the season to be over. All three shows close at the end of the year, and I have six weeks to repair and paint everything, including two walls in the Carter Collection, which need to be re-hung. Compared to crawling around under the house, it's nothing. Several rounds of fried egg on toast (great eggs from TR's family chicken farm, in your face eggs) later, a roaring fire of red maple, nearly dawn, I'm positively giddy. Crashed early, I don't keep track of time, then woke in the dark, needing to pee, and didn't know what day it was. Went outside but didn't turn on the porch light, operating in the dark here, because I wanted to see the stars and didn't want my vision marred by even 40 watts of artificial light. Paid off in spades, if I can say that, I don't know if I can say that, politically, and there were a few. Not the night sky of Utah, but a few visual pricks. Some I recognize. Enjoying the view, when I hear a pack of dogs, working the ridge-line. Coon dogs, Red-Bone Hounds by the sound of them and I love these dogs, they have the greatest voice. Just saying. Talking to yourself, this time of morning, is fraught with dangers. The dogs get closer and I go inside. Fuck a bunch of confrontation. All that nuzzling and wet noses leaves me slightly nauseous. I'd really rather go inside. Read more...

Ephemeral

Fleeting pain. Sure, I hurt; anyone that crawls around under a house is going to be sore. I need to get a tetanus shot sometime soon, for now I just flush minor wounds with kerosene and scrub out the dirt with a finger-nail brush. Damaged goods. Nothing special. But it felt good, tending my needs, and on my breaks I was reading an extended essay about Braque and Picasso, 1910, cubism, how the world, our perception of the world, was changed. From my position, on all-fours, it seems perfectly natural, the way I glide from one thing to another, like there was a path, or at least an inclination. Something was being transmitted, a high-sign, or something. I figured four more hours under the house, and would have finished, but ran out of staples. I knew I was going to run out, so I had stopped and picked up an extra box, but my hammer-stapler (whacker-tacker in the trade) is a Bostitch H-30 and will only take staples up to three-eights of an inch and I bought half-inch ones. I've owned this tool for twenty years and I must have known, but I haven't used it much in the last decade, so I had forgotten. An hour shy of stage one. Still the house is noticeably warmer. I need to clean up and eat but I blow that off for a while, get a drink and roll a smoke. A small celebration for getting off my ass and getting something done. While under the house I discovered that the gray-water system had burst at a fitting, probably last year during one of the below zero nights. Easy enough to repair, though it does mean another couple of trips down on all fours. Goddamn I am sore, but with any luck, just three more trips, maybe six, will see the job done. This progress, and it is progress, has only cost me the time it might take to read one book. Not even a good book, just something I'd picked up at the library, to idle away an evening. So it's a fair trade, you exchange a certain amount of time for goods or services. We trade time, there's more to it than that, of course, it would be nice to be fully or even partially engaged. Words take my breathe away, for some reason I was looking up the word syllabus today, and it's a ghost word. There is no etymology. The word was made of whole cloth, by Cicero, translating something, wanted the word sittybas, which is "label", more or less, and miss-spoke himself. Mistakes happen. Ghost word, I like that usage. What I thought I was saying. Later. Read more...

Abrupt Knowledge

A fist to the face. Just saying. Slapped with your own inadequacies. A steady state, for me. I think through what I'm going to be doing tomorrow, an imperfect tense, future pluperfect. My Whacker Tacker is a Bostitch H-30 and it takes an odd crowned staple, the only stapler of it's type not to take a T-50 which is the nine millimeter round of the construction trade. When I was building I bought these by the case, because I loved that staple gun, from Marathon to Waterloo, we had stapled the world and back, several times, and I liked the way it fit my hand. Feel is important with a tool. My favorite tool is that odd twisted piece of metal that only opens paint cans and bottles of beer. Painters always drink beer, it's a matter of course. Phone was out last night, so I'll send both of these tonight. Pretty good day working under the house, messy and awkward, but crawl-spaces always are. Mostly I hauled stuff out, if it was wood I hauled it to the shed; matted insulation I bagged in a couple of 55 gallon garbage bags. Should be clear sailing tomorrow. The batts of insulation are 94 inches long and the length of each bay is 141 inches. I might be one or two bays short, but I had to over-buy because if I am short, I can probably scrounge the piece or two I need from somewhere. I itch a little, after tomorrow I'll itch a lot and probably need to spend Tuesday night in a motel, so I can shower multiple times, and maybe soak in a hot-tub. Too old for this crawling-around-under-a house shit; but I can still do it, which says something. I saved the outer layer I wore today, a sixties jump-suit in electric blue from the Goodwill, by carefully brushing, then stripping it off outside and beating it against a tree. I'll throw it away after tomorrow, along with the tee-shirt and the socks. Brutal jobs have their own rewards though: not dying, if you're successful; maybe an improvement in the quality of your life; and, after you've hawked lugers and blown your nostrils clear, a cold beer on the back stoop. I knew I wouldn't feel like cooking, so I had picked up a couple of frozen dinners, a pot pie, a lasagne, and a Thai thing that someone had told me was quite good. I can't work outside, spend a couple of hours reading (my minimum), write, do all the other stuff, and cook, I just can't. No reason to cook if your heart isn't in it. Some of this frozen stuff is very good, they've made dramatic improvements. Liquid nitrogen, listen, freeze dried cherries on your pudding, taste is reconstituted, what you thought you smelled. Pretty it would be red onions. Did a search and came up with some interesting sidebars. Who would have thought an alternative storey? Just saying. Read more...

Rake's Progress

I don't think of myself as a rake, or as a pervert either. I will admit to that thing about ankles, though it seems to me more like a birder's life-list. I don't have a social agenda, or even what most people would call 'a life', I just bumble along, letting most things slide. Today, though, I put my shoulder against that great wall of inertia I've cemented into place. I work at the museum, I read and write, maybe I spend an hour a day doing other things, personal hygiene and eating. Cooking, of course, but I'm usually either reading or writing while I'm doing that. Heaven forbid I should ever have a hobby other than foraging, which I usually do in slow transit going somewhere to do something. But today I spent an hour buying the necessary materials for re-insulating the half of the floor the goddamn dog de-insulated. Off my ass and get it done, I need to restore creature comforts, this fucking winter-camping INDOORS is for the birds. The new insulation system for the crawl space is a three step program. The first step is loosely fitting fiberglass batts into place. These joists are very deep (I always over-build) so then there is an air space, then a piece of very dense two-inch foam is suspended on four-penny nails; then the edges are sealed with expanding foam. Bomb proof. On a roll. Everything up the driveway safely; and what with normal three-day weekend supplies, I make seven trips to the truck. I still park 100 yards away, because I need to drain those goddamn puddles and haul in some fill. That's next on my list. The truck is dying and I can't even think about that until after the first of the year, even then I can only spend six or four thousand dollars on something I need to drive (for) fifty thousand miles. Most days I drive 34 miles, when I drive at all, to the museum and back. I should probably being doing this on a bicycle, right? if I was serious. Does that mean I'm not serious? Just asking because water is coming in over my boots and I need to seek higher ground. No, and no again, I don't like being put in that position where everything you say is wrong. Fuck a bunch of cops. I'd rather "float like a bumble-bee" if that was an option. Not be too attached, I get that. What about the way you feel? Assume nothing is secure, where does that leave you? Read more...

Mistaken Identity

Perfectly natural perception. This is how it happens. Rehearsal is still going on and I'm upstairs, writing, in my office, and I want a cigaret. Roll one and go downstairs, through the crowd of kids and parents, out the back door, to the place where I've smoked a thousand cigarets. There are two young girls outside, I don't know them, even Pegi doesn't know all these kids, the ones that are in classes with her instructors. The girls are 10 or 12 years old. They're texting and laughing. I walk over to the corner of the building, near the alley, light my cigaret, and I'm just standing there, one foot against the wall, pondering a particular comma, in my black jeans and dark brown Carhartt jacket, with my Eyrie Vineyards' cap pulled down to ward off the chill. An SUV pulls into the alley from 6th street to collect one of the girls; two moms, several kids in the back, and the driver rolls down her window, to call over her daughter. As this space is constellated, she's only eight feet away from me, and the daughter asks which side, and I smile when I realize there's a seating protocol. This would leave one young girl outside and me, leaning against the side of the building, and the two moms in the SUV are very uncomfortable. I look enough like a pervert, if you watch TV, to make them uncomfortable, and they call out to the other girl, who's name I now know is Bailey, when is her mom coming, and she answers probably in the next ten minutes, and they look at me again. Banter doesn't work in this situation. I tell them I work here, but they don't know me. I tell them to send Bailey back inside, where there are many people, milling, to watch for her mom out the door. I can see how uncomfortable they are, but there's nothing I can do about it, nothing I can say. They're right, to be concerned, and I vow never to be caught in this situation again. I'll go smoke on the roof. Fuck a bunch of politically correct. I don't traffic in underage pudenda, I'm much more interested in soccer moms, their tight jeans and knee-high boots. It all comes down to ankles. What carries the load. Consider the lilies of the field. Read more...

Four-wheel Drive

Can't live this life without 4-wheel drive. Have to wait one more day to get home, Went out, but the driveway was undoable. Backed down, and redrove into town. Pegi's having a rehearsal for the last two performances of the Xmas show that will be at the museum. Zoo time, 100 small kids and their parents; fortunately the building is sound-proof. I'm reading more of Mary's letters. There's a biography in them, actually, two of them, but I don't feel like writing them. Nor capable. Washed the last 75 flutes, love my baby-bottle brush. We ordered some heavy cardboard storage boxes for them; I'd been keeping them in Budweiser long-neck cases, but they rattle around. Handled over 200 glasses twice and didn't break one. I carry a great many scars, from before I learned to be very careful. I still bleed fairly often by most people's standards, mostly because I live in the woods and don't always wear gloves. I wanted to be home tonight, working on my Black Dell; it's warmer, and I needed to ferry in supplies for this weekend. The Insulation Fest. I'm looking forward to it. I have a disposable jump suit. I duct-tape my wrists and ankles, vasoline my nose, cover my ears, and take my breaks outside. You don't want to contaminate the inside of your house with this shit. Two four hour stints in three days, nothing I have to do; I'll have time to read, so I need to go to the library. Noticed I was short on whiskey, and needed to buy a bottle, I really have to do my laundry, the truck smells like dirty socks. What I do, that I like, is nail certain things down. You and whatever that was. Read more...

Kitchen Duty

There was a problem, and it had seriously backed things up throughout the kitchen. The upper cupboards were pulling apart, amazing they hadn't already failed under a load of nice but quite heavy dinner wear. Serving for fifty. Had to unload the cupboards completely, and part of the larger problem was that there were a whole lot more dishes and mugs, clean and ready to be put away. All the flat surfaces were covered. The dishwasher was full of the wine glasses that could be washed that way, but there were also four cases of champagne flutes that needed to be washed by hand (baby bottle washer, TR's recommendation). All the other debris from the wine-tasting is still around, jumbled in boxes and on the big cart. There isn't room to move. The ladies are preoccupied with Pegi's Xmas program So D and I tackled it today. D brought two four-foot clamps. The problem is in the middle of the cupboards where they've pulled apart almost three-quarters of an inch. We put a 2x4 on top, to spread the pressure, and crank it back together, then measure what we need, a leg that will span the entire depth. We know we can scrounge anything we would need, from somewhere in the museum. We talk about it, examine the sub-strate behind the wall; we're on the same page, which is not unusual for us. Decide we need flat flanges of 1x4 on the back and top, so we can make the necessary attachment; build the little unit, check the fit empirically, get a first coat of paint on it and go to lunch. Solving problems is so rewarding: saving money is incidental, but part of the algorithm. After lunch D gets a second coat of paint on the leg-brace thing. Waiting for that to dry he became a dervish and we put things away, for a couple of hours, then we installed the unit and put more things away. Close of day, the kitchen is retsored. Crazy, really, the way we blow things off. Read more...

Memory Loss

I lose track of where I am. Reading about some dead painter, a flight of fancy, a conceit, almost, where a particular play of light trips my memory to a particular fall afternoon on Cape Cod. I only vaguely remember, she was backlit, a halo shimmered, a double rainbow; I remember thinking at the time that nothing should be that beautiful, the way specific aspects feathered into my consciousness. Every year, at this time, watching the last of the heat escape into the ether. It's a dance. Mike or TR should write a score, diminished chords. Nothing as it's ever been. Bach is always fall into winter. Barges pushing upstream. Not unlike a dream you might have had, where everything could be lost, and nothing won. I have a headache, and that doesn't happen often, I don't keep aspirin around. Sitting in one place too long, reading. The cure is a bundled walk along the ridgeline, It's nice to be outside, poking things with a stick. Sometimes the jokes are a little too private, that damn french fry had lodged in my brain, a Ragu commercial from hulu, a mom telling a kid that asparagus was like a green french fry. I did go on to make a risotto, though I wanted to stop and make a cream of asparagus soup. Next time. Standard risotto recipe, but the stock elevated things. Ted Enslin died last month, one of the great outsider poets. I published six or seven of his books, and we had a falling out, as often happened when I was publishing a lot, eight books a year and maybe 20 broadsides, that a poet would assume I'd publish whatever the next thing was. He sent me something, I didn't like it and sent it back, he never talked to me again. Nonetheless, a fine poet, a man with whom I foraged on several occasions, with whom I fixed several meals. He was fearless in the littoral. Would eat anything that had a shell. We'd boiled periwinkles in sea water, dug them out of their shells with safety pins, and dipped them in garlic butter. Broke into the Celebration Stout, which I'd brewed for the Queen's Jubilie, or some imagined occasion. With some nutrients and a great deal of patience, I'd gotten the alcohol level above ten percent. We got snookered. When I got him on the bus back to Maine, the next morning, he looked like shit. Read more...

Going Home

Noticed a plant, off the verge, in the bottom-land near the river. Shouldn't be flooded this time of year, but it was, and the edges were beautifully encased in ice. Plant stalks held rigidly isolate. I found a place to pull over and walked back; I know the plant but can't remember the name. The dried seed-pod was formerly used to card wool, still can be, for that matter. Oh, right, Teasel, thus the name, tease it out. Memory loss, I've forgotten so many things, or maybe just too much to remember. Most is simply archived in the storage areas of the brain, but when needed, or called out by some sharp smell, or brought to mind by a pattern of rain drops. I actually once saved a bag of fleece, after a shearing in Colorado, carded it with teasel seed-pods. (I like hyphens, they can't take that away from me.) Not to make a point, but just because I wanted to know, that in a pinch, I could do that particular thing. Put it in my tool box. You can make cloth with very primitive tools. Noted. You can make paper that way too. Teasel paper is a beautiful thing and will last as long as papyrus. Samara calls, and my first thought is goddamn it, because I'm afraid I'll lose the thread, BUT I want to talk with her, I love her, and I love her world, and I want to visit, and the thing about threads, assuming a woven example, is that there always is one. That's awkward, but you get my drift. It might have been a metaphor. More likely a simile. I'm sure I meant something. A good survival trait is to stay flexible. I'd been thinking about various soups, the muddle we get in; and the kinds I'd be making, of which I'd freeze a portion or two, so I needed to clean out the freezer. Led to a memorable risotto moment. I collect pounds of various stalks, I freeze them. When I make a vegetable stock I smash them up with the edge of a spoon. Conan The Barbarian. What was that thread? I was going somewhere, but I was distracted by something. For the first time this season I'm wearing Linda's gloves, which have no fingers and only half-a-thumb, she knew I needed to roll cigarettes. Is this just another French Fry? That she'd know. I boil pounds of stalks, and end with a broth. I make the best asparagus soup in the history of the universe. The rest of this leaves me behind. One thing well. Read more...

Frozen House

Woke up a little late, no time to start a fire, much less get the house warm, so I just throw on a coat over my writing/sleeping clothes, make a cup of coffee, and hit the road. Pegi and Trish were across the street, breaking down the wine-tasting. 200 wine glasses, serving trays and utensils, table-cloths, empty bottles; D and I sort things out in the kitchen, start the dishwasher, and haul garbage. All day cleaning. The library calls and they're holding a copy of Chuck Palahniuk's new book "Damned" for me. When I run over to get it I hear that there's been a horrific accident on Rt, 125, my primary route home, and that, coupled with the slight chance of snow, and a new Palahniuk to read, convinces me to stay in town. I intended to write, but the book is quite good, and I read it at a sitting. A study of hell and Satan, told from the point of view of a fat 13 year-old girl. "My mom and dad said you (Satan) and God were invented in the superstitious, backward pea brains of hillbilly preachers and Republican hypocrites." Slept like a rock, warm for the first time in several days, get up early, get a cup of coffee and drive below the floodwall. A string of barges pushing upstream, like an apparition through the fog. When Market Street Cafe opens I get another coffee and a scone, sit for the better part of an hour, bantering with customers (all of whom I seem to know) and the help, reading the newspaper. Small town. They won't let me pay for anything. At the museum I read an essay on Utrillo, his drunkenness, and his hundreds of paintings of churches, many of which he traded for a single glass of wine. There's a huge squirrel and a smallish town cat that live on the street (6th) out back and I've wondered about their winter living arrangements. Inter-species relationships are hell. They both live, live together, in an abandoned storefront a few doors down, I finally found their entrance. It doesn't seem large enough, but I've watched them both go in and out, several times now, and I know they can somehow fit through that hole, though it seems impossible. Ocesola squirming through the bars, you know that story, the way he escaped from the fort by starving himself to slip between the verticals. If you can get your head past, and you don't have any body fat, you can manipulate your hips. Cold, then colder. There's a dress code for freezing writers, involves many layers, and gloves that make it hard to actually write, but there are guidelines, a certain protocal. If one thing, then another. An algorhithm, right? punch in some numbers and get an answer. I never really find it that simple, whatever the guidelines say,: I start with a clear conscioiusness and end muddied in clay, and I'm always confused. Read more...

Notation

I'm staff again on Saturday, no one else available to work, so Pegi and D send me home early. We got everything over to Terry's for the big wine event tonight. $250 a head, 25 people, great menu, expensive wines (though not a single one to my taste) and mostly donated, so the museum should make over five grand. I pick up a pot-pie on the way home, and drive slowly, looking at the changes in landscape as we slide into winter. You can see so deeply into the woods with the leaves gone. With no 4-wheel drive the driveway is barely doable and I just manage the top, where the clay, in this early freeze-thaw cycle, is holding a lot of moisture from the recent rains. 53 inches so far this year, not a record, but a bunch, compared to the scant eight inches we got in western Colorado. A foot of snow there is an inch of rain, an average year was four feet of snow and four inches of rain. A lot of rain didn't reach the ground, the air was so dry, 'virga' like a scrim that doesn't quite make it all the way. Pick up some chain for Leo to rig the hanging apparatus for Pegi's big winter show (the Cirque) on the main stage at the college. Sets me off thinking about rigging, which I've done a lot of, always carefully: dangling people make me anxious. When I do, as I think to myself 'achieve the ridge' it's barren and stark. And I must immediately change into winter camping clothes. It's cool though, has it's own set of perks, watching incredible winter sunsets over Dead Man's hollow. The sun is setting exactly now, it's cut into two semi-circles by a chestnut oak, orange, bright. The underside of vagrant cirrus clouds are lit pink. I have to roll a cigaret get another drink, put on my bathrobe over my winter camping garb, go sit out back and watch it. Yes, I think, this is it. Last night at the pub the past president of the Board Of Directors was meeting someone for a beer. Language is weird, isn't it? The way we make sense. And I asked him about the pallets in the side-yard where they store their debris. He's a plumbing wholesaler. I don't know what they do with it, he doesn't know either, he'll get back to me, but he thinks I can take whatever I want. Some of the pallets, for large heating or air units, would heat my place for several days. I'm on this, like a monkey on a stick, whatever the fuck that means, do monkeys like sticks? The bottom skid, for these pallets, is a 4x4 oak beam. It may be the perfect firewood, once you've got things going. I see pallets in my future, a new station. Never too late to learn. Read more...

Winter Routines

Too much rain and too cold. A small steak, a fried egg, a piece of toast, no expectations, just sustenance. I listen to three of the Cello Suites, Edgar Meyer, and they are so lush, they sweep me off my feet. Annie Dillard says that most living writers live in the middle. I'm rarely in the middle of anything, usually at one extreme or the other. The rain stops, there's still the intermittent drip of condensate, from the overhang onto the front roof, but it isn't rain. It's rain-like. Drips or drops that seem like rain. Walking from point A to point B, a desire path, simple enough, but the walkway leads to a place where loud music is playing, and I don't want to be there, so I detour, down to the river, along a deserted main street, whistle mindlessly, imagining Meaghan in tattered tights. Leave the ankles out of it completely. Nowhere, the middle distance, and there's nothing to indicate direction, except for that faint trail that you'd have to have had a degree in tracking to even notice in the first place. Franklin Riehlman, who gave us an idea about the reappraisal of the Carters last summer, had aquired another Carter water-color, a nice one, "Brick Kiln. Near Portsmouth, Ohio" and since he was supposed to be the expert, did we know where the painting was painted. As it happens I do, I did some research on brick pavers a few years ago. The deposit of clay, used in all the local pavers, came from an area of what is now Wheelersburg, all the kilns were there. Clay's heavy, you don't want to move it many times. I know the painting was done in 1943, so I read his wife's letters for that year, hoping for a mention; there isn't one, but I get a sense of the times. He painted "Let Us Give Thanks" that summer, in Chautagua, that summer, when he turned the quarter, I look at it now. Here it is, part of the permanent collection, merely paint on canvas. Paint that looks like a tree. Read more...

Crick

I sat reading most of the day, in my rather uncomfortable writing chair, and ended up with a pain in my neck; a police procedural that was pretty good. I needed fiction, wanted to get away. R. J. Ellory "A Simple Act Of Violence" complex story and interesting characters, a fine read for a day off. I never get out of my bathrobe. I can take off days like this because I live alone, no one is expecting anything of me. A paragraph, maybe, if I have power or a line to send on, but nothing more. I can just listen, usually what I'd do. And that would give a clue, what direction I was headed. Rain starts in the night, a soothing sound, continues all day. At dawn clouds in the hollow below me. The lexicographical circles have decided that the word of the year is tergivesate (ter-JIV-e-sate), a word I've never heard, that means to change one's attitude --- equivocate. Mac says Browne is more Baroque than Rococo, more Bach or Purcell than Mozart, and after thinking about it for a while, I tend to agree. Heavier rains for a while, then backs off into a slow soaker. I harvest ten gallons of wash-water off the clean roof by just setting out a couple of pickle-buckets on the back stoop. Mid-day I open the other bottle of mead that Kim had brought from his brother Kurt. I think it's orange blossom honey, but I'm not sure. It's very good, crystal clear and a delight on the tongue. Marilyn and I, for years, brewed a mead variation called cyser (spelled several different ways) which is a fermentation of apple cider (instead of water) and honey, sometimes bottling it as a sparkling wine. By a system of primitive distillation we could make an apple brandy. Calvados for blue-collar workers. I have to turn the radio off, usually get my hit of news from NPR on Sunday and Monday, but can't stand it today. The last time I was in Florida, I got Mom to show me how to make milk-gravy, and finally got it right, made a wonderful double helping of caramelized onions, chipped beef and mushrooms, in gravy, on toast. Comfort food of the highest order. Need to get outside, don't want to take a walk in the rain, though I often do, so suit up, go out to the woodshed and split kindling. When starting two fires a day, as I do most days now until March, I use a lot of kindling. Then there's the next step in fire-building, what I think of as starter sticks, something very dry and larger than kindling that can actually get a split or log burning. I found a bunch of oak class-room chairs in a dumpster behind the new high school, I just smash them up with a small axe. Also the pallets I scrounge from behind the paint store, which are usually oak, but sometimes a different hardwood. Both very good for this purpose. For years I worried about getting the nails out of the pallets, before I burned them, then realized they're actually an asset. I never walk across the compost heap in bare feet, and after the compost is tilled into the raised beds, I'm not really in danger of eating one, AND they're a great source of iron. Leave them, cut between the nails. Circular saw firewood is very easy and safe. Position yourself to the left of the kick-back zone, right, if you're left-handed; the average cut takes a few seconds. In an hour you have a month's supply. I use a carbide blade, wear goggles, doesn't matter if I scrape the occasional nail; a few sparks, maybe a singed patch on the back of my hand, nothing threatening. Except for the shipping, the logistics, pallets are the answer to third-world housing. I could build a mansion out of these, much less a hut; world enough and time, but I seem to be busy, doing something else. Read more...

Saturday Staff

Went in early to shave and wash my hair, went to the library, went to Kroger (where I can now buy food, booze, and underwear), then the pub for lunch. TR arrived to be receptionist, I stayed upstairs, reading Sir Tom, he is a great stylist. You can see him in Melville, especially. That tone. It's rich. Tending toward the over-arching, Rococo. I was going to reread "Moby Dick" this winter anyway, because of some recent critical theory, and now I have another reason. It's a three day read for me, reading full time, eating, taking a walk each of the days, because I actually can read myself into a kind of paralysis, and probably going to town, once, for something. This time I'd probably keep notes, report my responses to you, just as a reader; even as a publisher, I was never a critic, or an editor, for that matter, I just read closely and liked some things. Enslin is dead, an old oak in the forest. I published six or seven books of his, visited him, him me, I must have a hundred of his letters, I need to dig them out, someone will be doing a dissertation or a biography soon enough. I love so much of his work, but we had a falling-out over his assumption that I would publish a particular book. I didn't like it. This situation arose with several poets, but the fact is that hand-setting, treadle-printing, and hand-binding a book is a lot of work, and I only did things I liked. Still do. The museum is my ward, right now, someone has to listen for that hammer in the pipes, scrape shit off the floor, act under the assumption that art matters. A sign of the times is that three or four people scrounge cigaret butts from the 'Smokers Section' outside the back door. My butts are a particular favorite, because I often roll a smoke, go outside, then get called back in for a phone call or something, and ditch half a cigaret. Because I roll my own, a cigaret costs me almost nothing, the cost of a paper, I roll Kentucky tobacco I buy by the pound and keep in the freezer. Figure it out, a cigaret costs me between two or three cents, not a big deal, I can ditch one, mumbling, under my breath, fuck me in the shower on Tuesday. Tergivesate was the word of the year. How do they arrive at these things? Glenn would know what I meant. To change one's attitude, to equivocate. I'll never use that word except that i just did. Share your lexicon with me. I recognize that Santa by his canopy games with me. Whatever you say can be used against you. Read more...

Something Blue

The sky last night hurt. I was thinking about something. Escapes me now, what I'd been thinking about, but the blue was so intense, I nearly drove off the road. A perfect night on the ridge, I wrote well, made some notes, slept well. Knew today was going to be awful, the aftermath of an opening AND one of the largest parties of the year. Truly a mess. Thrown away food is always the first issue, and unless I stay until the end of an event and supervise, they overfill the trash cans with heavy wet food. You can't pull the bags out of the containers or they'll burst, so I tie them off and haul the containers over to the dumpster. Two today that weighed over 150 lbs.each. TR is there, so it's possible, I couldn't wrestle these things alone. The caterers can't take food back, will not, and will not take the stuff to the homeless shelter, and won't let me take it there. It has to be thrown away. A stupid mind-numbing rule. If I only had a pig. It takes until almost noon, wrangling garbage, but it does go off without a hitch, and there are, believe me, terrible things that can happen. The floors are all in awful shape, but I can't clean them until the hospital moving crew has come and picked up their tables and decorations, the left-over beer and wine. I clean the kitchen. The guys finally come, to get the tables, their boss takes the booze in a different truck. I expect some skimming. I run them out the door, a few minutes after five, by helping them carry the last few pieces and shutting the gates behind them. I wanted to leave early, but left late. For three or four days, right now, the setting (actually set) sun is aligned perfectly with the bare and bended river. By the time I get to the place where I park, it's almost dark. I don't have to use a flashlight yet, but I keep a small one in my pocket, just in case. For some reason I was looking at myself from some remove and I didn't like something I saw, wondered if I could change it, if I should; fairly furious there, but what you had, the gods bless whatever teetering pile, was a period of waiting for someone else to do something before I could do what I needed to get done. The nature of things. I get upset, slightly off-kilter, when someone else's logistics affect mine. While they're loading, chomping at the bit, I go to the museum library and look at pictures of Shaker artifacts. I mean, really, who makes their own brooms anymore? Finally, I have to let go, it's cool, I'll work tomorrow, another extra day, to get the floors decent for the event on Sunday. A brunch, I don't know, it's not even on the calendar. How the hell am I supposed to prepare for an event that's not even on the calendar? That's where the furious came in. I wanted a day off, everyone else is taking them in batches, and I can't get one to save my life. A mote on the screen looked just like a comma, but it was in the wrong place, and that upset me because I'm careful with my commas. When I'm upset this easily, it's time to make scrambled eggs with reconstituted morels; and toast, with horseradish jam. Fuck a bunch of convention. Whatever gets you through the night. Roll a smoke, get a drink, consider your own inadequacies: inescapable, indifference, inconsistency, inaccuracy, implantation, imminent, ignominious. I forget what word I was looking up. Had to do with what I couldn't face directly. That slant, like the light through winter trees, illuminates things differently. The dictionary has a calming effect on me: a dervish, at the edge of a tree-dip pit, but rational enough to see what needs to be done. I can't begin to tell you ---actually I could--- what goes on in the mind of a maniac. The same, except for the eye shadow, and a few dangling pieces of silver, that you see played out everyday. The dance. A double stopped cello piece with the strings reversed. Nothing that couldn't be played. Just harmonics. Alone in the distance. Read more...

Reciprocity

Reduce the infinite to finite bites. 128 steps, whatever; divide that by the time needed for each individual step. You get a number. Half a drink and one more cigaret, you get an answer, should have gone to bed earlier, when I could have slept. I'm only partially responsible for the things I seem to have caused. Finally did sleep, and almost late, don't have time to warm the house, don't shave, head into town. The lake has released almost all of its heat, just thin wisps rising. Crisis management. The stage manager in me comes out. Relegate, eliminate, fix with baling wire, find something that will do. Took down the Laura Sanders painting, on loan from the Columbus museum (can't be in the same room with food or drink) and hung another painting there. Jennifer coordinates these events and she's good, I think I've done seven of these with her, we banter and touch on the arm, but the other hospital ladies don't know how to take me. I must seem cryptic and a bit strange to them, at first. I usually win them over. Mostly they're married and well kept; but I'm having a drink with one of them, single and bats both ways (she made that clear), on Saturday. She's bright, we talked about Chaucer. I did a few lines in Middle English. She asked the usual question about why I was here, and I explained about cheap land and no building codes. She asked about my house, and I explained about building without a plan, cutting the timbers on site. I could tell she was intrigued, was ready to ask her out to my house for dinner, when she suggested we meet for a drink. I can do that, though the staff at the pub will question me for days. Get set up for The Memory Project opening, high school students and their drawings, their parents, and their aunts and uncles, and I stay through that, until I see we have secured the cheese balls and the olives that are left over, then I go home. It's Thursday, right? I have the day right, at least. I almost email TR about what is a diminished chord. But I just went to bed, instead. You and conflict. We should make a poster. Read more...

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...