365 Crush

Making the world a better place

2010-07-13T08:57:00.000-07:00

Hello from Kansas, loyal and neglected readers.

Look for a large update soon. The move from Felton (and Albany) to the Smoky Hills has been quite disruptive and this blog, among many things, has suffered. In the meantime, here is a letter to Craigslist on a very important issue.

Dear Craigslist,

I am a huge fan of your services, having lived in SF during your start and watched you go world-wide. Hurrah for you.

I have since moved home to central Kansas to start a restaurant, and one of the filters for your posts has become a seemingly unnecessary impediment to my usage.

As you move into less populated regions, like the Great Plains, the prohibition on posting to multiple cities, or to cities other than where the job is located, becomes seriously detrimental. (Most services in this part of the world operate at least state-wide for this reason.)

In my particular case, I am looking for a trained chef. There are not many, if any, candidates to be found locally. In Wichita and Kansas City my chances would be better-- but it is doubtful any applicants would even look at the Salina postings.

Rural areas rely on importing talented people from other places and often offer opportunities those more crowded markets cannot.

If you simply added a section to your job listings marked 'out of town' or 'relocation opportunities' or something similar, it would greatly enhance the utility of your site for rural America-- and trust me, we need all the help we can get.

Thank you,
William E. Justice

The night in reverse

2010-05-17T15:37:00.000-07:00

I'm not cutting and pasting to make this right. But now I know when you upload photos to go in the other direction. I love how serious everyone is at the dinner table-- that's the exact right response to that meal.

Pensee & Vignette

2010-05-14T17:10:00.000-07:00

The Irish Goodbye

Because the gesture goes so deeply into the infinite. Each goodbye is every goodbye and names the distance between us.

Because the meeting is so fleeting.

For some the word is a placeholder, a bookmark, the other half of hello. But I think it the echo of an ever-shouting oblivion.

When I leave the world it will be through a window if all the other exits are blocked.

**

the things are against us

I have been friends with Su since my freshman year in college. We were going to be writers!

And goddammit if we're not.

She's the only writer friend I ever had until recently. Lawrence Kansas is a stray dog in need of a tick shave, flea bath, some serious worming to rid it of the pestilence of writers, but I always felt the word signified a posture rather than an avocation.

And thus avoided the self-proclaimed as though they were lepers.

I have since learned that those personalities in Lawrence I thought were frauds are the same people who became fairly successful writers in the Bay Area and New York. Real estate and publishing is all

location location location.

But I'm not here to gripe. All writers are fraudulent in essence, otherwise we'd utter the holy words that would immolate the universe or glow silent against the fire the flood until it consumed our silence instead.

It's the clay and not the breath of God that makes us human.

But Su and I have grown into this life together. And though we have read each other's work for years...

In fact just a month ago she sent me an old poem of mine. Something arcane about a moon-lusting monk... here's a bit.

An old man of the earth
Not of the cloth
His mouth is wafer thin and ill suited for this passion
Which has conferred with the ice covering his white brier beard
And the tides of his brain:
A fever for seven days to allow her another quarter
And his escape
A fever for tonight’s dance he moves
Gracefully at a boil

**

...and last weekend was the first time I have seen one of her plays.

I like red-eye flights. We arrived in New York at the same time everyone else was arriving and we began the day together. We took the train into New Haven with a great number of young people dressed in now wrinkled evening attire and night-randy hair through the green green of early North Eastern Summer. Another playwright friend of Su's was there for the opening, Sharif, and he has a delightful story about Mexico's premier Shakespearian scholar, Yale, a young woman, and his inability to make out the word 'betrothal' on his phone, and her downstairs neighbors visited, bring the gift of homebrewed stout, their lovely near-newborn, and fantastic conversation that ranged from Tom Waits to The Watchman to Roland Barthes to Axe Cop and then our chocolate maker friend Alexandra arrived from Cornell and invited us to her aunt's beautiful home in the woods, where rhubarb pie awaited and her grandmother from Charlotte who said I could be from the south because I was so good-looking and then we saw the show, although I had to park and run a desperate few blocks alone to be ushered quietly into the back by an usher who was waiting just for me.

Of the show I may speak later. Old houses are scary. So are Germans. Also now we know why Lorca died young. And redheads are still totally hot. Afterwards we rang in the new day with a bonfire despite a driving North wind.

The next day we day-tripped up the Atlantic to visit a Book-Barn, which is a barn that is filled with books, and nommed some seafood in Mystic, which is actually a place.

Other quotidian adventures followed but the main point is that I strode the wide earth, met fellow workers in song, ate and drank art in the great comfort of a green deciduous old mountain earth. It felt like a window into a happy future. I will fight for it. Thank you, Susan Soon He Stanton.

Sometimes it really does feel like we travel through time together and that space is an illusion.

Happy ABD Abhijeet

2010-05-12T20:18:00.000-07:00

Forty-Dollar Fine

2010-05-11T20:05:00.000-07:00

Maybe because I just had my first beer, maybe because I've paid my share of fines and lament the dearth of songs about it, but this song by this guy really struck me tonight.

The Webb Wilder character was created for a short film about a backwoods private detective who fell out of the '50s and happened to also be a musician. With his group, Wilder combines the surf guitar of the Ventures with the rock roots of Duane Eddy, drawing on the feel of both country music and film noir. Though sometimes bordering on the gimmicky, the band is quite humorous yet plays serious music. It Came from Nashville featured a cover of Steve Earle's "Devil's Right Hand," appropriate because, like Earle, Wilder rocked too hard to be country but kept a twang that might put off mainstream rock fans. Wilder's next two albums didn't necessarily forge new ground but refined the band's sound somewhat, making its R&B influence more apparent. In concert, Wilder often gives stream-of-consciousness recitations that touch on motor homes, voodoo, television, and other somewhat kitschy subjects; usually they're funny enough to work.

Click here for a video of them honky-rocking out in someone backyard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9pya1XUqNE

Mammoth

2010-05-06T21:41:00.000-07:00



The harvest of mammoth has begun. Verdant Siberia 
eats the meat; the tusks are carried to a warehouse 
in Moscow. The ivory trade saw the rise of 
civilization and will endure its fall.

A vulture luftwaffe racks the kempt neighborhoods 
of Kansas with its shadow

     and three mice died in the same spot of pantry 
floor three days running.

“They like to die together” you said and it's true 
the suicides take hands on bridge and cliff-face and 
it's other hands that string the noose.

                               Helpful, helpful dead.
But the living are recalcitrant.

     The owls are edging into day,
     each wing riding a transparent balloon.

     With the fields burnt of cover
     prey is too numerous to care for craft. 

“It's the little creatures taking over,” you said and 
so we go around scattering bread.

329 Hihn Street

2010-05-05T18:01:00.000-07:00

At least I think that's our address. I never got 'round to learning it.

Here are some pictures Olga took of our place for our craigslist ad. I thought I'd post for those who didn't get a chance to visit. It's a great place and we've been happy here.

Francesco Marciuliano, Author of "Sally Forth" as Pat Robertson

2010-05-05T09:08:00.000-07:00

The Onion's Summer Movie Round Up led me to the reader's comments where the upcoming Marmaduke movie inspired commenters to bitch about other comics they hate, like Family Circus and Sally Forth, which I have chuckled at, and was later defended by a link to his blog

Which is really good! The conversations with his brother, who works as the Lycos Mascot, are worth the time alone.

Here's the Pat Robertson.

"Halloween is an abomination, a dark temptation. It encourages young Irish boys and girls to cut school, consume alcohol, get into fights and fornicate right on the parade route. Now, you might be thinking I've confused Halloween with St. Patrick's Day but let me tell you, those Micks will use any holiday as an excuse to get drunk."

Weed Scientists

2010-05-03T21:08:00.000-07:00

As an agent of chaos, weeds are my friends. While weeds are a problem in any farmer's field, should that field be small and mostly tended by human, rather than chemical, attention, they will always been a problem with a solution.

Weeds can be pulled up by hand. At most, you may have to wear gloves. It may even take years to tame a particularly weedy patch of ground. I once saw Mike Madison spread clear plastic sheeting on a new field. The idea was that, in the sun, the plastic sheeting would collect moisture and heat up, thereby steaming the soil underneath and killing the seeds.

It didn't work. Round-up used to work, but now in an unprecedented and unforeseeable turn of events...

No, I'm sorry. That's wrong. Wrong words, William! Let me start again.

...in a completely predictable and almost unavoidable turn of events, weeds have become resistant to poison! It's the Rise of the Super Weeds! Monsanto is twitchy about it. (Each link is different! It was quite rewarding to type 'Monsanto' and 'Evil' into an image search.)

Monsanto, which once argued that resistance would not become a major problem, now cautions against exaggerating its impact. “It’s a serious issue, but it’s manageable,” said Rick Cole, who manages weed resistance issues in the United States for the company.

Kansas has, of course, all six Super Weeds.

This will could either eat away at the nasty authority of monoculture farming, or force Monsanto to fulfill its Destiny of Poisoning Us All.

So, oddly, the farmer's great enemy, the weed, is actually a farmer's great friend.

Here's to you, noble Pigweed.

Excerpts from a how-to manual for building a walk-in cooler

2010-05-03T12:39:00.001-07:00

I'm trying to figure our cooler solutions for the Green Horse and ran across a primer on the subject that was unexpectedly entertaining. Here are the best bits.

(By Ron Kholsa)

A "down" economy might be waking the rest of the country up to the importance of savings and DIY, but for farmers working on low margins and high risk it's business as usual. Although we still live off the income from our 200 family CSA, I developed and now sell the “CoolBot,” a device that makes a standard window air-conditioner run down to 33 degrees, turning it into a walk-in cooler compressor.

**

Which leads to... “Water Falls”! Cold air, like a cold heart, leaves no space for love. When you open the door of your cooler and the warmer, more water-vapor-laden air comes whooshing in, within moments it sadly suffers the pangs of rejection and condenses in tears on the cold heartless walls of your cooler.

**

Don't use Fiberglass insulation! I know there are people out there who've done it and seem happy but inside, they are not happy at all and you might want to tell them that. What's happened with them is that (even with a very good vapor barrier) moisture laden warm air from outside somehow found it's way into their walls where it condensed back into drops of liquid on the cool inner wall of their cooler. It saturated the fiberglass batts, reducing the insulation value and ultimately growing a goth-style black mold which dragged down both the spirit and loft of the fiberglass even further until they have whole areas of their walls with gaps in the insulation.

**

Here in NY, grungy male farmers who happen to be suffering from tree-allergies and sneezing into their shirts will find that this stuff is cost-prohibitive at over twice the price of the rigid foam products. But if you happen to be a more attractive neighboring female farmer, the same company might spray-insulate your 12x20 cooler for around $100. Go figure. Folks living in the midwest seem to be finding prices are neither gender specific nor prohibitive, so check with your local spray-foam installer.

**

Don't cut your insulation up and fit it between the studs! Not only will you invariably leave a few gaps and holes, no matter how careful you are polyisocyanurate shrinks a bit over time, making your kids think you were a sloppy builder when they re-build the cooler 15 years down the road because the cooler costs too much to keep cool!

**

Many people just leave the exposed insulation on the inside of their coolers. If you don't have employees and you're careful, that's fine. We have aggressively destructive employees and our cooler is open to a public I seriously suspect to be drunk most of the time by the way they ransack the place so our inner walls are sheathed with $7/sheets of "OSB board."

**

We live in a registered historic district and we are often in trouble with the village elders for not taking their “hysterical” district as seriously as we should, but our cheap plywood siding solution (properly stained a dull green) apparently looks nice enough from the road that it's one thing no one has ever bugged us about!

les choses sont contre nous

2010-05-03T08:19:00.000-07:00

This is a link to an article about the 2010 Carlotta Play Festival in Yale. My friend Su, on the far right in a very, very, very awkward video interview, completes her playwriting program with a full length production of The Things Are Against US (les choses sont contre nous) about a murderous house, Lorca, two sisters, and the dangers of pear cider.

The Play is brilliant, (not just because my friend wrote it-- that is an objective judgment and not one I make lightly) and we'll be watching it with the playwright some this Saturday.

Shunned

2010-04-30T07:06:00.000-07:00

I joined facebook in order to track down a slippery cousin who isn't returning my calls.

First, that is some weird ass shit.

I feel like the Boar God in Princess Mononoke, when his madness finally overtakes him and he mistakes soldiers dressed in boar skins for his own people, and they huddle and nose and stab him on to his evil destiny.

But that's mostly my own hang-up and will be rectified by the fact that I will never be on that damn site.

What's worse is this: so that's where all you fuckers are. When I'm not being emailed back, when no one calls, when I'm left wondering who the hell my friends are, you are all on the facebook 'liking' random bullshit from people you haven't seen face to face in years. Which makes sense-- you too can get all the attention you ever wanted for virtually free, without the price of actual friendship, and all its hardships, and faces hang like trophies on your page for all the world to see.

And if facebook is your agora, your marketplace, your church, those on the outside are unintentionally but effectively shunned, not only because of their absence, but because facebook, like any community, creates its own mode of discourse by which its community members are known to each other.

I'm making the case more forcefully than I need to, and I'm not blaming my recent sense of loneliness on a stupid website-- I moved to a new town, I'm about to move to another state and I apparently find myself drawn almost exclusively to highly intelligent and highly ethical but emotionally withholding people, but dammit if there isn't some truth to it.

So there. I've become a citizen. 'Like' me.

green horses

2010-04-26T11:14:00.000-07:00

I need a website. Double D is on that. I also need a logo. Anyone artsy wanna make me a green horse?

Um.

2010-04-25T18:39:00.000-07:00

We're taking a trip in May to see Su's play. We might stay in a hotel. We might stay in this hotel.

But in researching prices and location, I found this image of a room.

What you don't know is that the picture hanging above the bed in the hotel is of the hotel.

Which contravenes the entire purpose of portraiture.

Fuck Uganda

2010-04-25T14:47:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I decided I was done being broke all the time. One of the first decisions I made? I quit my job.

I work in mysterious ways. That was not the reason for quitting, but it was one stitch in the net of reasons. Tending bar part time gave me just enough time and money to live well, but provided almost no incentive to move on.

First I thought I'd make money off my writing. Many people do, and I am in as good a position as any to start. I conceived grand adventures in travel, food, and wine.

But my commitments to my family are more important to me than (modest or immodest) fame, wealth, and travel, and when those roads diverged, I chose family. I tried to get excited about freelance writing-- but querying magazines, making contacts, hustling all the time is humbug. I'd honestly rather not have an article in Spirit than get a couple grand for one. Nothing against all the word-workers making all those magazines happen, it's just not the life for me. Plus, to spend all day every day writing or working for my writing sounds like very thin soup .

So my path towards the middle class, which is 'wealth' to me, began with quitting my job and abandoning monetary literary ambition.

Starting a restaurant and bar is the first opportunity that really feels right. Things have certainly been coming together well so far... (no evil eye, please. seriously. please.)

And this allows me to work on my prose poems, novels, plays... perfectly at peace, because I don't need them to do anything for me other than exist. This is the privilege of either the very rich or the very poor and I think the best kind of life for writers-- okay, not writers, but for Writing, the mistress we all serve.

What does all of this have to do with my apparently hostile relationship to Uganda?

Even though we have already been able to cut alot of costs, there is much more we could do with more money, and we will need to find it in other ways.

My favorite way is to steal from the Third World. Not by taking away and educating its best and brightest, nor by exploiting its resources, or even pillaging its cultural heritage, though those are all great ways to steal from the Third World, but by borrowing the idea of micro-finance.

Kiva, a website I hope most of you have heard of, allows people to make mostly small loans to people in need of them all over the world. You can help someone start a bakery, a private school, a tattoo parlor, whatever. Those seeking loans describe their projects and you can decide whether or not to lend them some cash. I do have critical things to say about the idea and its execution, but I don't even care that much about them. It's a pretty solid force for good.

So I've decided to set up an investment scheme that allows those with limited finances but genuine interest in The Green Horse to put in some money. A few hundred dollars could buy a couple sets of tables and chairs. I would not underestimate any contribution.

Naturally I'd like this to be worth the while. I'm thinking of perhaps three repayment schemes. Let's say Alot wants to invest $500 dollars. Here are the options.

In six months, The Green Horse would repay the loan entirely plus 20%. Alot walks away with his initial investment plus $100.

In a year, The Green Horse would repay the loan plus 50%. Alot trots away an extra $250.

Or, Alot might decide to make his investment more permanent and sign up for profit-sharing. If we use $1,000 as a 1% baseline, then at the end of one year, Alot is entitled to .5% of our total profit. If we only make $100,000 Alot get his initial investment back, but if, in year two, we make $400,000-- Alot reaps $2,000, and if our profit doubles the following year, so does his.

All investments come, of course, with VIP treatment at the Green Horse. Although most of them would be, I presume, friends who can expect that anyway.

Any and all comments on said scheme are very welcome. Long Live the Green Horse.

Mine

2010-04-24T20:03:00.000-07:00

Mom went to an auction today looking for restaurant equipment.

(something very like) this:

and this:

Are now in our possession, as well as a couple prep tables and some assorted other kitchen items-- for less than a quarter of the normal price.

I received the news at the Albany Bulb, watching the dogs play, taking in the sun, while our Jetta got four new tires after Olga had a blowout on 80 on her way home. Over all, a fine day.

Alot of the Times

2010-04-22T14:40:00.001-07:00

This an Alot. Read the hilarious origin and various incarnations of the Alot here.

Profusely

2010-04-22T10:20:00.000-07:00

Olga has another story in today's San Jose Mercury News. Apparently Kaiser has spent some serious money to make an interactive robot for doctors and nurses to practice on.

I think Milton Bradley should talk to their lawyers.

The robot patients may soon replace real patients. They can do all this:

# Bleed (profusely)
# Breathe
# Cough, burp, complain of ailments, scream
# Go into labor contractions
# Turn blue
# Have a pulse
# Have high blood pressure
# Possess racially accurate skin colors
# Change gender
# Urinate
# Swell (with an allergic reaction)

Can you?

scary, no scary

2010-04-21T15:08:00.000-07:00

I like this, for instance, much better as a short story than as a poem.

REQUESTING INFORMATION

Please tell me your best
facts about animals. I’m asking
everyone. I’ll begin.

The Tasmanian devils are being wiped
out by a frightful epidemic—like the
bees but worse. The epidemic
is actually called Devil Facial
Tumour Disease. It is communicable
within the species via bites
or especially vehement sex.

To sex a sea urchin, you tap it until
it emits a thin puddle of egg or sperm.
What if this worked on other things!
Imagine wondering what a thing is.
For the price of a few pats on the back,
the thing releases onto your
palm a frank sample, a tiny
pool of its own essence, meaning,
and being.

Maybe in another lifetime. Most
things are coy in our world.
They are couth.

Amy McDaniel

**

Oh, hell. Something else then. The smart little kid voice she's channeling is something of a thing these days. They say it goes back to James Tate and most recently I found Zachary Schomburg who does it par exsalonce. I haven't bought his book yet, but here is a good review of his most recent collection and here below is a sample of his work:

I know a dead wolf
we can climb inside
and beat

like little hearts.
It would maybe
come back

to life,
the wolf.

**

The old man
hunched over
at the front door
will be prepared
to give you a tour,
but first he’ll ask
scary, or no scary?

You should say
no scary.

**

I small-ly resent this mode because it enlists my sympathies so naturally, but is, ultimately, too easy to mimic, too reliant on those sympathies, and too islanded from other modes of discourse to stand perpendicular to the Ages. I don't know, yet, what that says about our times.

But the poems are frequently good.

Literature is a nettle field for some.

The O. Henry Isopod

2010-04-21T09:42:00.000-07:00

Jeremy has an interesting post up on short stories v novels in the no-holes-barred cage match that is the 21st Century, which is cute, because we all know that LOLCATS are the literature of the future and that our grandchildren will be unintelligible cyborg-drones who work for the Apple hive-mind and view us as we view chimps.

OMG! Gmpa ws txtng! Luvs bnanas!*

My favorite part of the post is that he links his usage of 'whatevs' to its urban dictionary definition, wherein we learn that this shortening of 'whatever' is used by cool people-- in case we doubted his coolness, or just to rub it in our faces.

But back to the meat of the post. He ruminates on how difficult it is to write short stories and gives a couple solid strategies for applying 'pressure' to the a story. The underlying notion being that the possibilities of 'success' for a short story are much fewer than for novels... Thus making the genre super-hard, but therefore also specially rewarding, like a 'punch in the face.' The reason short stories lose out to novels in this pre-borgian era is due to this excess of pressure, when want we want is mindless escapism that reinforces our most destructive and least examined cultural assumptions.

But why so serious, Short Story? Jeremy suggests that novels can do more, be more, have larger digressions, like Vic Hugo stopping the narrative of Les Mis to tell us about Parisian criminal argot or retell the Battle of Waterloo, therefore making it a broader and freer medium.

But I like to think of literature in more physical terms, of the generating force of chaos crystallizing into forms according to outside pressures. Think, for instance, of the dizzying variety of life in the insect world vs mammals. Mammals are more complex systems, and therefore, in order to function, must share very basic and unavoidable solutions to the problems of complexity. All the variations average out closer to the mean.

Clearly mammals are novels. We've got one mammal that can fly, a few that can swim, a couple on two legs, and the rest are basically fuzzy with four legs. And hooray! I am certainly on Team Mammal.

But insects, being less complex (but sufficiently complex-- there are only a few solutions to very basic uni-cellular problems), are able to do and be so much more. Therefore, it would seem to me that the short story, having the freedom of prose and the brevity of poetry, could and should and has combined those forces into dazzling variety. But why don't we understand and reinforce this natural creative force? Why do most thinkers of the short story instead make it out to be the most strictly ordered of all media?

I have many theories for this, for instance, that an ordered society fears autonomous forms and therefore applies the most artificial pressure to that which contains the most potential for variety-- like love, for instance. One man and one woman for life, eh?

The literary extension of State Control is Realism and this is the particular fetter of the (literary) short story in the past hundred-so years. If a short story is only comment on a narrow idea of the real, then it's grand, efficacious potential is severely limited and must be very hard indeed to pull off. And thus we are trained to see the narrowness of our vision as an appreciation for the teleology of 'what works.'

Defenestrate Realism like the Old Tyrant it is, and suddenly there is an explosion of Forms. You'll realize that most of our native story-telling is within the realm of the short story-- the rant, the love letter, a joke, the rituals and habits that anchor your days, flights of fancy, your relationship to your father. These all live within us according to the native diversity that the short story is perfect to contain while reinforcing the singularity its material. Death's Head Moth to Fire Ant to the Giant Isopod .

And as this form betrays most naturally the illusion of the Grand Narrative that we all live by, it must be the most misunderstood, ignored, and restrained of all literary gestures.

Which is why no one reads Saroyan anymore.

*Sent Via My Blackberry Neural-Cortex Implant

all I want is to get you down to pray

2010-04-20T10:08:00.000-07:00

And then out of nowhere there's a Creedence song you've never heard that is perfect.

here's why it could help you today

2010-04-18T23:42:00.000-07:00

I've been following the various incarnations of Olga's story on the web for a few hours now and have a couple interesting observations.

When an entity picks up a wire story they may edit it and headline it (yes, 'headline' is a verb, wanna fight?) as they wish.

A scan of the variations of Olga's story shows that these decisions are completely arbitrary with a tendency towards the willfully incorrect.

In O's original lead, it was 'snot' that was sneezed. 'Mucus' would have been my choice, but 'saliva' is just wrong. And yet it was changed thus by the Merc. I already bitched about globules vs. droplets. Internally, sometimes the story is twice or more as long as other times, and I think Olga's original ending was much better than any of the edited versions.

But the worst of it so far is:

"Did you get the flu this year? So did some spacemen. Here's why it could help you today."

from the Greeley Tribune.

--- wait! I'm wrong.

The spoon-feeding of the headline is still annoying and inaccurate, but I was mainly bothered by use of the word 'spaceman' which, I thought, was a term for people *from* space. Linguistic precedent (Norwegian, Caveman, etc) and my sci-fi literacy fooled me into thinking such-- but most dictionaries say that a spaceman is just another word for astronaut.

Example number 47 to the 54th power of 'What the fuck do I know?'

But what I do know is that nothing in Olga's article about stem cell research on Discovery could, will, or should help you today.

Not that journalistic hucksterism is even worth railing against...

otters, now with more awesome

2010-04-18T21:55:00.000-07:00

Holy shit. Also on the cute otters website is footage of Indian River Otters. The first part is fairly predictable-- adults teaching babies to fish, but then a crocodile appears...

And the otters fight it off.

backwards propulsion

2010-04-18T21:05:00.000-07:00

Olga's gone nationwide. A news service picked up a story she wrote about stem cell research IN SPACE for the San Jose Mercury News. The first place I found it was here.

I helped a touch on the lead (which I guess is spelled lede? Like the Zeus-raped maiden-swan? It makes my ass twitch.)-- only I suggested the much more accurate and aesthetically correct 'globules' instead of 'droplets.'

Olga's shitting her pants a little. It's very cute. Her last Merc story listed her cell number and she was roused from needed sleep early that morning by a very concerned man telling her his pet theory that now that the sea lions were leaving SF Bay, that the otters would rebound, because, you know, sea lions eat otters (they don't-- too fuzzy). She started taking notes, thinking it was her editor, until she woke up a little and realized it was just a nice old guy. She's since changed her contact information to her work number.*

By the way, the wife checks the blog now! So watch yer mouths.

*I highly recommend the source website for the otter photo. Ridiculous lots of cute, and news, including the saga of Kitchi, who busted out of a zoo in Colorado and remains at large... what's the word for terrorizing but for being adorable... the community.

"ancay I-yay avehay eethay uffalobay?"

2010-04-15T21:18:00.000-07:00

Last night Olia and I celebrated at a not so great Hoffbrau just up the road. It was still fun. We discussed the Green Horse over dinner and Olkin expressed hesitation over serving borscht to Kansans.

O: "Maybe we can disguise it. What's borscht backwards? Thcsrob?"
W: "Thcsorb?"
O: "No, Thcsrob. And it's not made with beets, it's made with steeb."

Which inspired me: Pig Latin Night.

Yes, because I am drunk with power (and La Rossa... and Mahler too while I am at it), on one (or more than one?) random night the menus at the Green Horse will be in Pig Latin and you, the good-humored customer, will have to order in that language.

Which is of course silly commentary on menu language itself, but mainly just fun for my staff. Okay, just fun for me.

"Ocholatechay ousemay?"

"Onay, eeway areyay outyay ofyay ochaolate ousemay. Ancay Iyay uggestyay eethay emcray uleebray ithway assionfruitpay andyay intmay?"

"Eckchay easeplay!"

Kansas Free Press

2010-04-15T09:17:00.000-07:00

Sarah first sent me the link to the Kansas Free Press which is part of a nation-wide citizen journalism movement that seems to function, without any sense of irony, as a spontaneous platform for the democratic party.

However, there is some diversity to the group, a couple cranky old farmers, a gaggle of enthusiastic women's rights college students, and even the blowhards are genial enough.

I read this article today, a mini-essay on dreaming about Africa while reading Conrad and others as a child and then finally visiting the Dark Continent decades later:

I joined a group that flew into Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, and then traveled out into the wilderness to Amboseli National Park. Arriving at our designated lodge, weary from many hours traveling, I dumped my luggage in the cottage that was provided for me and then stepped out to take in my first real look at Africa. I found myself grappling with a vague sense of incongruity between the idea that I was in Africa, the most exotic, remote place I had ever visited, and a feeling that it was familiar. I puzzled on this and then it came to me.

It was the smells that created the sense of nostalgia, arousing deeply buried memories as only the sense of smell can. As I stood taking in my first view of the high plains of Kenya I realized that the memories evoked by the smells in the air were memories of Kansas. Gradually I sorted out its elements one by one. The grass beneath my feet was a tough, gnarly species, and was identical to the grass in my yard where I grew up in Topeka. We called it Bermuda grass. I had long since forgotten about it and it was the last thing I expected to encounter in Kenya. As I looked out over the plains and saw zebra and buffalo, I realized that I also smelled them, and that their smells were remarkably close to the smells of the horses and cattle on my grandfather's farm in Silver Lake. It was a strange little epiphany, a cosmic joke that I shared with no one as I stood on the plains of Kenya, thinking I was so far from home, and yet feeling so close to the land of my origins, where I spent the first 25 years of my life: Kansas.

The Greek God Hermes, the messenger of the gods was also known as the trickster. I felt as if he had given me a playful smack on the head as I realized what a great affinity the high plains of Kenya had with the plains of Kansas where I grew up. I had traveled to what I felt was the most remote place in my life and found that it felt a lot like home. At that moment I revisited my childhood self, the little boy gazing with wonder at maps of remote places. And I realized that when I played as a boy at Shunganunga Creek and imagined myself to be in Africa, I had been closer than I ever knew.

Unexamined here is the key difference. How much Africa has of itself that Kansas has lost.

An interesting though unintentional commentary can be found in another article on the site, written by an amateur historian specializing in Indians. Many, many native Kansan animals, so much of our grassland Africa-ness, bears, big cats, otters, buffalo, wolves, beaver were killed off entirely or nearly in the first couple decades of statehood.

"I had designed to spend the winter hunting, but now found myself an Indian trader," Mead wrote. Although the Kanzas brought him their wolf-skins for trade, Mead and his partners also gathered their own wolves.

"We found it also a very profitable business killing the big gray wolves which lived with the buffalo and travelled with them, and also the coyotes."

"Our method of killing wolves was to shoot down two or three old bull buffaloes in different places....We would let the buffalo lie one night in order to attract the wolves. The next night, just before dusk, we would go and scatter poisoned bait about the carcasses, each bait containing about one thirtieth part of a dram of strychnine."

Mead and his men gathered the wolf pelts by the score the next day. One morning they found and skinned 82 dead wolves. The wolf carcasses were left where they had fallen, attracting thousands of ravens which "in eating their stomachs and intestines would also eat the partially digested baits. This would kill them, and the prairie about the carcasses would soon be dotted with the glossy, shining bodies of defunct ravens, with an occasional bald eagle among them."

"The buffalo were killed by the bullets of the hunters, the wolves were killed with strychnine for their furs, and the ravens died from eating the poisoned carcasses of both, so that they all became practically extinct at about the same time," reflected Mead.

As the market for wolf pelts remained strong, strychnine sales boomed. Westport Indian trader William Bernard recalled that from the late 1850s on "an unusual article of trade was in great demand, namely, strychnine, and it was imported and sold in wholesale quantities to hunters who pursued wolves for their pelts.

Council Grove merchant William Shamleffer reminisced that a trader "should have on hand in his store a supply of everything from Bibles to whisky and strychnine."

The effect of ingesting strychnine on the wolves was recorded by a "Western Territories Correspondent" of the New York World:

"...the released strychnine takes hold on the wolf's vitals, and then there is music... He will next stand up on his hind legs and walk about and dance, but it all does no good. His shrieks and cries of pain are terrible to hear, and about the last thing he does is to turn two or three somersaults in the air and fall dead. The strychnine kills them every time."

James R. Mead never wrote about the cries of the death-thrashing wolves he had poisoned, but the veteran wolf-killer remembered their calls as beguiling:

"...the most soul-stirring music I ever heard was the clear deep bass voice of a big gray wolf on a clear cold winter night rolling out over the ice-covered prairie. It would commence on a high note and then run down the scale to the bottom, soon to be answered by his companions from every hill and canon for miles around." Addressing a meeting of the Kansas State Historical Society in December 1904, Mead rhapsodized about "the hills and plains of Kansas, God's great park, surpassing anything art or wealth of man has made. To me their primeval condition was the most beautiful and interesting of all the earth."

A few months later a wolf sighting was reported in Kansas. It was the last one.

I intended to end this post with a clip from the movie Dead Man of Gary Farmer as Nobody saying "Stupid fucking white man." But can't find it on the interwebs, so I'm including a Neil Young video from the movie instead.

busted

2010-04-14T18:51:00.000-07:00

I was in Heyday yesterday to talk about an anthology they've asked me to put together. I had been hoping to pick up something from Heyday before I left, and enormous thanks to my girl over there in Acquisitions who made it all happen, and to whom I owe many, many debts professional and personal. ENORMOUS THANKS! (If I knew html that would be even bigger.)

Said girl outed me to Malcolm about my restaurant plans. He asked a couple basic questions about kind of food, the size of the city, etc., and then said:

"So what you're doing is disguising a cultural center as a restaurant. You're going to have art and music and start conversations about Kansas history... you're going to have poetry readings..."

I was stunned. He saw right fucking through me. That is absolutely what I am doing. I'm disguising a cultural center as a restaurant and bar. Goddamn Malcolm.

The anthology, by the way, collects the very best writing about California from July 2009-July 2010. All genres welcome. So if anyone out there has read something wonderful, please send it to me before June 15th.

In GH news, I am shopping for a commercial range...

have and to hold

2010-04-12T09:40:00.000-07:00

This is a section from our lease agreement. I'm not quite sure exactly what this means in a legal sense, but I was caught by the matrimonial language of the provision and thought I would share.

Quiet Enjoyment. Landlord hereby covenants that Tenant, upon paying Rent as herein provided, and performing all covenants and agreements herein contained to be performed on the part of Tenant, shall and may peacefully and quietly have, hold, and enjoy the Leased Premises
during the term of this Lease or any extension thereof, but no rights to air or light are granted.

can I get an amen

2010-04-10T18:34:00.000-07:00

I heard this on the ole npr today.

Part one:

http://p.rhap.com/Tra.7638127

Part two:

http://p.rhap.com/Tra.7638128

Elder Charles Beck was a hootin' hollerin' preacher who preached with a wailin' electric guitar backing him up and some brilliant person recorded his sermons.

This rocking sermon is about the evils of rock and roll. Enjoy, and someone buy me this album. My damn birthday is coming up.

carrie nation

2010-04-10T12:21:00.001-07:00

Unbeleiveably, there isn't a cocktail, or at least a well known cocktail, named after Carrie Nation, whose 'hatchetations' on Kansas bars helped spread the temperance movement.

"Hissssssssssssssssssssssssss!"

Obviously I am going to fix that and I am soliciting recipe suggestions. It should have a lot of booze. She called herself "a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn't like" so maybe a take on the Bulldog (gin, orange juice, ginger ale) would be appropriate... but I am wide open.

Any other Kansas themed cocktail ideas are also encouraged.

the green horse lives

2010-04-10T09:36:00.000-07:00

I've had this fantasy for years, in thousands of variations, maybe some of you have too. You walk through an empty place, a shell, and dream it into existence, a house, a park, a farm, a restaurant.

This morning I met the building owner at the Kress Building.

View Larger Map

Here is the building before the recent renovation.

Now there is a beautiful facade of limestone and brick behind where the windows are in the photo, and a stairwell that leads below street level. Open to the air is a little courtyard, and then the entrance to the basement space. Courtyard and dining space and kitchen are roughly 2200 square feet.

I'm burying the lead. We got the space. Brian, the building owner, as he'll now be known as, is going to start renovating the space to our specifications as soon as possible. We could be open as soon as July. I spent the morning visualizing the space, talking materials, planning everything, from lighting to work stations to flow of traffic. A fantasy come true. I lived the space. My own goddamned restaurant and bar.

There is still lots to work out, but it has started. It's real.

I'll be taking part in a few of the city's incentive programs, if all goes as it seems it will, and I met with one of the Chamber of Commerce people yesterday to get an overview of the opportunities for grants, forgiveable loans, etc. After going over the programs, we talked casually about what Salina was doing, expanding the community theater, 'refloating' the Smoky Hill River downtown (it has been dammed dry stupidly for decades) etc. Eventually Larry says:

"You know there's a brewery in town."

"I'm sorry, Larry, I'm very certain there is not."

"No, I mean the guts of one. One of the big property owners bought some years ago and never did anything for it. Somewhere in town is a warehouse with everything a brewery needs just sitting there."

I just gaped, then shook it off and let the spooky roll over me. Don't know if anything will come from it, if I could jump into a brewery after the wine bar and small plates are up and running, but what if my brewery has just been waiting for me?

Okay-- I have to get some vines in the ground. There's a chance for weather tomorrow.

house of Kress

2010-04-08T22:19:00.000-07:00

I have four days to plant five hundred vines, set two hundred posts, and find a space for my wine bar.

I am moving back to the farm and opening a wine bar in Salina-- not sure I've said that here yet. All that money I spent on food and drink? Investment.

I have been operating on Bay Area rules. I'm not wealthy (broke as a broke-dick dog) so I figured I'd start in a walk-in-closet-sized space and grow? But when I rolled into town, my dream space downtown, across from the fox theater, down the street from the art cinema, in a recessed basement of the newly renovated Kress building, was still free.

So this morning I called. The man answered, I explained myself, he said can you meet me today?*

He gave us a tour of the whole building-- street level shops, second story lofts, and then the open, waiting, basement with courtyard.

Before I know it, this has happened:

He'll build walls, kitchen, etc, to our specifications for a slight increase in (very reasonable) rent.

He suggests grant money from the city for downtown development.

He can set us up with a potential investor, apparently just waiting for this kind of thing.

He can do it all by August.

I'm working on a business plan now to present to him tomorrow, and he's working on a concrete cost estimate.

I also emailed the chamber of commerce about their business incentive programs and got an email back immediately and have a meeting tomorrow about what the city can do for me.

So that's what the menus are for. Just a sample of what I can do. Not to mention the focus on Kansas products, art, music, etc. I'd like to anchor the business in Place, so that it has elegance and meaning inherent to itself, rather than borrowed, like so many restaurants, like so much everything.

Oh-- best part?

GM and Barman? Me.
Host and Front of the House? Cousin Murphy.
Kitchen? Chef Cousin Chris.

My family has been secretly training for this.

All of this is extremely provisional, but goddamn if it doesn't feel right.

'bout time something did.

Hey Stace-- what's your angle?

Speaking of Family, I'm a sorta uncle thrice! Congratulations to Cousin Clarissa on her third weasel, one Levi somethingorother Mackenzie, the first boy of the new Murphy generation, god help us.

*One of the things I love about Kansas especially when compared to the Bay Area: when you find competent people in Kansas, they get shit done. Immediately. No fuss, just done, usually saying it was no trouble anyway, or even if it was, hell, it's just how things are. Bay Area? It's all Yeah, that sounds great, lemme talk to x and y. I'll give you a call. Next week? No, I don't know. I have a meeting. I'll talk to you in April after I get back from Japan...

please, drink

2010-04-08T21:59:00.000-07:00

specialty cocktails

the meadowlark
grey goose, elderberry wine, bitters, egg white

b & b
buffalo trace bourbon, benedictine

old fashioned
rye whiskey, bitters, soda, simple syrup

sour cherry martini
sour cherry infused vodka, simple syrup, lime

the green horse
absinthe, champagne, grand marnier, simple syrup

kansas wines

red

smoky hill vineyards norton
somerset ridge buffalo red
campbell winery cynthiana

white

somerset ridge chardonnay
blue jacket crossing seyval
smoky hill vineyards luce d’bianco

dessert wines

holy-field saint francis port
windswept winery whispering wind white
pome on the range homewood hooch apple raisin wine
somerset ridge ambrosia

welcome to the green horse

2010-04-08T19:01:00.000-07:00

with bread

gravlax – house cured salmon & pickles
charcuterie —our choice of meats with mustard & horseradish
cheese —generous portions of aged & fresh cheese
jam –a selection of homemade jams

soup

winter greens & egg flower
borscht: russian beet soup
extreme chicken noodle: garlic, ginger, chilies, citrus

starch

olivieh
couscous
mashed potatoes
egg noodles

more

butternut squash ravioli & cream
basque lamb
portuguese sopas: beef, wine, cabbage
stuffed tomatoes

sweets

house made ice cream
bread pudding in whiskey caramel
truffles

Civilization

2010-04-08T15:11:00.000-07:00

Carlsberg brewery workers have gone on strike.

The warehouse and production workers in Denmark are rebelling against the company's new alcohol policy, which allows them to drink beer only during lunch hours in the canteen. Previously, they could help themselves to beer throughout the day, from coolers placed around the work sites.

Delivery truck drivers are exempt from the rule, however, because they don't always have time for a full lunch hour.

We are with you, brewery brothers. This is certainly what unions are for. Solidarity & Struggle... and suds.

In neither taste nor precision

2010-03-31T18:13:00.000-07:00

Publishing friends, have you heard of this coinage? Muphry's Law states

(a) if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written;
(b) if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book;
(c) the stronger the sentiment expressed in (a) and (b), the greater the fault;
(d) any book devoted to editing or style will be internally inconsistent.

It goes on to say:

Muphry's Law also dictates that, if a mistake is as plain as the nose on your face, everyone can see it but you. Your readers will always notice errors in a title, in headings, in the first paragraph of anything, and in the top lines of a new page. These are the very places where authors, editors and proofreaders are most likely to make mistakes.

I make enough honest mistakes (my recent favorite-- claiming that I want a brewpup some day, and I do! but that's not what I meant at the time) to avoid making one ironically to end this post.

Tom do this. Tom do that. Tom, don't do that.

2010-03-30T13:20:00.000-07:00

Are linguists the hipsters of language? (What do you think, the answer is no?)

This question arose from the following logic fun:

I'm going to write about descriptive vs prescriptive theories of language as a follow-up to a previous post.

This is a pet debate among linguists.

I hate linguists.

Linguists like things I like, such as thinking about language and culture.

Hipsters like things I like, such as records and thrift stores.

I hate hipsters.

Therefore... (I skipped a number of steps in this syllogism but I assure you they exist and cohere.)

The relationship of each to their art is... positional... as is their choice of art-- superiority to subject is essential, as is the ubiquity of the subject. Language and pop culture are natural choices with nearly everyone participant in each, allowing the lording of said superiority over the largest number of people possible. This superiority is demonstrated in the usual ways, the invention and proliferation of extremely complex and preferably ever-changing jargon, fierce and intractable Balkanization (poor Balkans! Don't worry, I love you!), and, it must be said, a wealth of accurate & detailed information.

Viola! You've just been shown that your love of language or music is unexamined and founded on sand, and moreover, your love of it leads you into political error, as it cannot be as easily discarded as interest and presumes advocacy of an actual thing! (radiohead, western shirts, subject-verb agreement) rather than your position to it.

For instance, I found that orthography rant on a blog run by linguists who proceeded to point out its obvious and intended inconsistencies and accuse it of loathsome Prescriptivism-- Oh, but first I should define the debate shouldn't I?

People who say you should use words rather than letters that happen to sound like words and use words that mean what you intend instead of words that mean something else are Prescriptivist. As are people belonging to subcultures that more or less knowingly defy these mainstream rulez, totally, like teen gurlz and ppl who are po' an stuff. :) Many of us playfully engage both.

People who say you cannot advocate any usage of language because it makes you racist and classist and ageist and besides you don't even know your ablative from your absolute social deixis from a hole in the ground are linguists.

Generally the insurgent category of Prescriptivists is used as a poniard against the first category but this is not, as they suggest, because Linguists are Friends to the Downtrodden, but actually because the powerless are not a threat to their authority, whereas the dictionary and style-guide people, old hand at authority, are. For instance, there are whole languages dying at this very moment and Linguistics doesn't really care. (Some linguists do, of course and hooray! for them) One language isn't really better than another language, and more languages aren't really better than fewer, so how can one get involved without being intellectually compromised?

Linguists seek to create a new, ultimate authority, one that undermines the fortresses of its enemies while offering no citadel of its own for attack. Linguistics does not build, does not create, does not rule. It merely sees and knows all.

Luckily this delegitimatizes the language of oppression!

But also the language of struggle.

So, um, who do you think wins this now silent battle?

I could rant for a very long time I am now realizing, so I will wrap this up with some good old fashioned name calling.

Dear (certain) Linguists,

You're not fooling anyone. You're not good enough at math to make it in Science (no, Linguistics is not a Science) and not word-gifted or human-loving enough to create anything useful or beautiful with language. You are bean counters but not so honest. Your basic inferiority, from laziness, inability, or cowardice, in genuine mental pursuits led you to participate in this mongrel study. You are opportunistic, disingenuous, and bullying. You are not dignified by your willingness to look down on everyone. Expression is craft. I, for one, wish I had been taught it better. But I also wish I wasn't taught this colonist tongue, but spoke instead a language rooted in my geography, genetic or accidental, Gaelic or Kaw, but you offer me nothing; you offer us nothing. You parse and squabble a pile of fingernail clippings as if it were the man.

**

All this comes down to something very simple. Well, two things. 1) I have been out of writing for a week or more and this is like priming the pump. Dirty water out! Clean water to come. 2) Fundamentalism is always annoying. Just as annoying the antagonist in the joke that ends "Can you tell me where the library is at, asshole?" as the mocking hipster who disdains all that is not fashion.

Take us home, Tom. Take us home.

Well I don't mind working
cause I used to be jerkin off
most of my time in the bars
I been a cabbie and a stock clerk
and a soda fountain jock jerk
and a manic mechanic on cars
It's nice work if you can get it
now who the hell said it
I got money to spend on my gal
but the work never stops
and I'll be busting my chops
working for Joe and Sal.

And I can't wait to get off work
and see my baby
she said she'd leave the porch lite
on for me
I'm disheveled I'm disdainful
and I'm distracted and it's painful
but this job sweeping up here is
is gainfully employing me tonight

Tom do this Tom do that
Tom, don't do that
count the cash, clean the oven
dump the trash oh your lovin
is a rare and a copasetic gift
and I'm a moonlight watchmanic
it's hard to be romantic
(sweeping up over by the
cigarette machine
sweeping up over by the cigarette machine...)

I can't wait to get off work
and see my baby
she'll be waiting up with a magazine for me
clean the bathrooms, clean um good
oh your lovin I wish you would
come down here and sweepameoffmyfeet
this broom'll have to be my baby
if I hurry, I just might
get off before the dawns early light.

The great and terrible infant

2010-03-30T10:24:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday, Large Hadron Collider!

Today the world's largest atom smasher came fully online and conducted its first high speed proton collision.

Some people say these experiments might cause black holes that could destroy earth. Most people say 'Sure, there might be black holes, but they'll be really wee and collapse before any damage is done.'

Me? I don't care. Either new discoveries are made in particle physics or Earth is the punchline of some cosmic joke. I think it's the best way to destroy the planet I have heard of so far.

Mazel tov!

front lines of the language war

2010-03-30T09:46:00.000-07:00

It is sad that things have come this far. It's a humorous curse-laden multi-font letterpress-y rant against common (sigh) uncaring abuses of English.

Some people would say that this is not safe for work, but those people are cowards. Or they have jobs.

velvet knickerbockers

2010-03-26T13:00:00.001-07:00

My mood has shifted somewhat, and some interesting things have happened.

Firstly, Olga has been offered (and has accepted) a wonderful summer internship in Trieste at the International Center for Theoretical Physics which I think is sexy as hell.

She'll be there for two months in the summer, and I plan to visit and travel with her to Venice, through Slovenia, etc when her tour of duty is up.

Just this afternoon, she also had an interview with The Stowers Institute, which is in Kansas City and would almost perfectly suit out plans to move back on excellent terms. They like her, but would like to see some freelance work from her before proceeding with a job offer. Naturally she's going to turn out a couple great articles for them and I think it is very likely that something great could come from it.

I also figured out some problematic formal questions concerning my most recent attempts at a prose poem and am excited by the direction it is heading. Much work needs done, however, and more discipline (took me three times to spell that right-- not a good sign) to live daily.

well

2010-03-24T23:07:00.000-07:00

It's always a bad sign when a writer quotes a Persian mystic on the uselessness of language. A long silence is usually brooding to bear down.

I haven't been completely useless, but I have lost a certain spark. I've been researching Paul Morphy (Murphy, via Spain and her colonies) a strange New Orleans chess player born two centuries ago.

Research doesn't sit well with me, though I am happy about this project. In truth, I don't know what the great bother is.

I am largely happy with the progress of these prose poems. I am working on my novel again but that is not going well. Belief seems to have deserted me. So much of my life is (has been) geared towards an apprehension of what was wanted. And novels and poems are by definition unwanted. So that's part of it.

It is the first time I have been unemployed and in such money trouble. I can't gauge how much this bothers me endemically, as sometimes I feel like hanging myself and sometimes I feel as though this time is a great gift. But if it is a great gift, I must make the most of it and so frequently I know that I am not. Also the flatness of the tone of my life, resonance coming only from engagement with other people or familiar places, bothers me and I rarely have the energy to keep up with my dear friends as I should, even though every message or visit is like a star in my sky.

And then there is the persistent unreality of this life. My mind has always been prone to such speedy abstraction that it thereby distorts sensation-- and suddenly I am crushed by the weight and noise of the world around me, a room full of people suddenly overcrowded with each person's fears and desires and secrets, every conversation lambent in what should be pitch black noise, grain through the mill, every action impossible, and then when taken, farcical.

We're the punchline but not the joke.

False sounds, false smells, the touch of no one, memories not mine, litanies of despair that live like idols within me, and Time a tangle, events without agency or context, little by little an acquaintance with Evil-- tangible, agile, discreet.

Everything running to the finish. It is the final sprint. I guess I ran cross country so that I might recognize it better.

Which I hated. Torment is not its own reward. To endure is the curse of this life, not its highest aim. Our efforts must be twained with their infinite betters. We must barter our lives for that which will outlive us.

So that's how I'm doing-- stuck at an intersection waiting for the goddamned light to change, more than a little suspicious that I'm in the wrong lane and a few hours late.

Winchester

2010-03-19T12:54:00.000-07:00




The house has lost its houseness; the haunting has 
come undone. 

                O the widow still walks her labyrinth 
                              a stubborn ghost or two 
                               lashed to the skirting 
                         knotted to an inverted stair 
             waits out the hurricane of tourist steps 

      The vengeful seek now their vengeance elsewhere 

Or they were sold off in the early days of the gift 
shop. Take one home! We have millions. The buffalo, 
even, are coming. Your own pet haunting. Can you 
believe it? The child still calls for his mommy.

     The dried blood faces of the men 
     who wait for work and return 
     haloed with drywall dust say

     “The earth is wider than high; 
          we're rebuilding Babel across it.  
     Encampments like hives on the skin
     the suburban fleur-de-lis
     every strike of the nail a killing blow.”

We build--but to confuse. A drunk may switch cities, 
apartments, and wives; his keys still open every door. 
Barracks  and dollhouses, all dressed up for the 
endless masquerade. Swing your partner, do si do. 

But the ghosts keeping looking for the one who has 
killed them

     in the crowded chill of empty boxcars 
     in the shops and gas stations 
     and hotels of endless San Jose.

And here in the house of this head, a tug at my 
sleeve, a ghastly tread, this writing, a whispering 
in the hall, the scream of something tricked into the 
cupboard of an e.

3 from Herbert

2010-03-16T23:38:00.001-07:00

MR COGITO-- THE RETURN

1.
Mr Cogito
decided to return
to the stony lap
of his fatherland

the decision was dramatic
he will regret it greatly

he can however no longer
stand the colloquial turns
--comment allez-vous
--wei geht's
--how are you

questions apparently simple
require convoluted answers

Mr Cogito will rip off
bandages of kind indifference
he has lost all faith in progress
he cares about his own wound

displays of abundance
fill him with boredom

he grew fond only
of a Doric column
a church in San Clemente
a portrait of a certain lady
a book he never finished
and a few other little items

so he returns
he now sees
the border
a plowed field
murderous watchtowers
a thicket of barbed wire

without a whisper
a bulletproof door
closes slowly behind him

now
he is
alone
in the treasure house
of all misfortune

2

so why does he return
he is asked by friends
from the better world

he might stay here
somehow settle in

entrust his wound
to the dry cleaner

leave it out in the lounge
of an enormous airport

so why does he return

--to childhood waters
--to his tangled roots
--to memory's embrace
--to the hand the face
burned on time's grate

questions apparently simple
require convoluted answers

perhaps Mr Cogito returns
to give an answer

to promptings of terror
to impossible happiness
to a blow out of the blue
to a treacherous question

**

TO YEHUDA AMICHAI

Because you are a king and I'm only a prince
without a country
with a people who trust in me
I wander sleepless at night

And you are a king and look on me as a friend
worryingly--how long can you drag yourself
through the world

--A long time Yehuda To the very end

Even our gestures differ-- gestures of mercy
of scorn of understanding
--I want from you nothing but understanding

I fall asleep at a fire with my head on my hand
when night burns out dogs howl and guards go
to and fro in the mountains

**

LOOK

The cold blue sky like a stone on which angels
sublime and quite unearthly sharpen their wings
moving on rungs of radiance on crags of shadow
they gradually sink into the imaginary heavens
but in a moment they emerge even paler
on the other side of the sky the other side of the eye
Don't say that it's not true that there are no angels
you immersed in the pool of your indolent body
you who see everything in the color of your eyes
and stand sated with the world-- at your lashes edge

To a Novel Half Born

2010-03-16T20:45:00.000-07:00




1.

May the work stumble and swift and nodding be  
     sightly as stubble over the field. 
 
Set bridle to Time. 
Be and be as

      the notation of tiddlywinks 
           an empty church
      an algebra of hide-and-seek 
           an old warehouse
      a geometry of marbles
           a buried city.

You have enemies.
Put your house in order     so that they will be well 
served.




2.

                                           O, novel,
                          Orality's monument & tomb,
                           scholarship your theater,
                                 a Punch & Judy show
                             after all, what of you?

Perhaps this:

“One cannot read a book; one can only reread it.”
         with rereading akin to speaking and hearing

                   and the words standing in the ear 
                          like a prophet on his box.

When Ted Johnson read out in relay the white whale 
on the concrete deck of our listing humanities 
building for a week in our skies like a comet--

      Day whelp--
      suffer the night.
      Write to be read
      by the dimmest of light.

Pell-Mell

2010-03-13T15:04:00.000-08:00




He salvaged what doors he could and set them across 
the roof beams of the shed for wasps to hang their 
paper cities from and mud daubers their fortresses 
of mud.

     I still don't know what do to with them. 

                                 This inheritance of
                          women, whiskey, and a hand
                                 for meeking horses.

In perpetual shadow in the patio of the burned house 
he planted 

     evergreen and burning bush 
     to unremember the skein of evil days
     in the conflagration of our blood.

ball and hammer

2010-03-13T14:05:00.000-08:00

after an evil night

2010-03-03T17:59:00.000-08:00

This world hurts my head with its answers,
wine filling my hand, not my glass.
If I could wake completely, I would say without speaking
why I'm ashamed of using words.

--Rumi,

sucking up to Nabokov

2010-03-01T12:39:00.001-08:00

Hey Jeremy

Just thought I'd toss off a few reactions to the writing advice post from the Guardian. Like you, I don't take it too seriously, but that doesn't mean certain advices don't boggle or annoy or that I won't waste a couple hours thinking about them.

Such as: PD James beginning her exhortation to respect 'words' and the English Language with "Increase your word power." Jesus F-ing Christ. Bad writing IS contageous.

It occurs to me that the only interesting advice comes from people who are playing with the notion and form of advice-giving and are not taking themselves or the format too seriously. Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson being two favorites, and also, not surprisingly, two writers I admire (both of whom, however, I have some advice for: write less!). Atwood is wryly pragmatic:

"1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do."

Winterson is just friendly:

"8 Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.

9 Trust your creativity.

10 Enjoy this work!"

Everyone who seems really excited, or exaggeratedly unexcited, to tell us (presumably in need of their advice) how things work provides terrible advice in usually appalling language, like this from Hilary Mantel:

"Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world. People don't notice their everyday surroundings and daily routine, so when writers describe them it can sound as if they're trying too hard to instruct the reader."

As opposed to the spoon-feeding she suggests? Not to mention the devastating assertion that human beings are incapable of paying attention to the world around them, or the fact that she finds-- not duty-- but expediency in leaving this supposed blindness unchallenged.

Of course, she poisons her advice for me with her rule number 1, hateful in tone, content, and underlying socio-politi-aesthetic assumptions: "Are you serious about this? Then get an accountant." That and the fact that I hated Wolf Hall.

Or this from the extremely long-winded Sarah Waters who apparently ironically believes one should:

"Cut like crazy. Less is more. I've often read manuscripts – including my own – where I've got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: "This is where the novel should actually start." A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it. In fact . . ."

and also:

"Don't overwrite. Avoid the redundant phrases, the distracting adjectives, the unnecessary adverbs. Beginners, especially, seem to think that writing fiction needs a special kind of flowery prose, completely unlike any sort of language one might encounter in day-to-day life. This is a misapprehension about how the effects of fiction are produced, and can be dispelled by obeying Rule 1. To read some of the work of Colm Tóibín or Cormac McCarthy, for example, is to discover how a deliberately limited vocabulary can produce an astonishing emotional punch."

Or maybe Waters is only talking about fiction and not, of course, the writing of writing advice or writing generally. Has anyone written writing advice for writers of writing advice? Someone should (maybe I am?).

A surprising amount of name-dropping is going on (see Waters) as well, from the wonderful:

"Don't be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov." (Geoff Dyer)

to the disarming: "Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters." (the very unfortunately named Michael Moorcock)

to the obnoxious yet baffling: "If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of JG Ballard." (Helen Dunmore) who follows up with
"Don't worry about posterity – as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed "What will survive of us is love"," which, aside from being extremely sentimental, is also plainly false. Luckily for us, we carry our love with us to the grave and leave behind, instead, words on paper and material goods.

Among the many simply unhelpful or too personal or simply silly pieces of advice, or non-advice such as:

"The first 12 years are the worst." (Anne Enright)

"Don't write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)" (Richard Ford)

"Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting." (Jonathan Franzen)

this, though charming, is my vote for LEAST helpful piece of advice as it requires use of a time machine and may result in a universe-destroying paradox: "When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else." (Zadie Smith) I would further like to point out that her advice, if able to be taken, means that your adult self (reading these sage words) should spend more time making sure your child-self is reading than doing anything else, including writing.

The invited writing rules from anonymous commenters were slightly less stupid than most online comments for a second before devolving into off-topic inanity. Things I liked...

"6. A celebratory cigarette after every really good passage is probably not a good idea."

Or this, which rightly calls attention to the fact that few people want writing advice that is not also publishing advice.

1. Learn to kiss gatekeeper arse; kiss it early and often
2. Pick the creative writing program best positioned in the school best positioned in the part of the country best positioned in the country best positioned in the hemisphere best positioned to maximize access to gatekeepers' arses
3. Identify your Target-Audience by matching your hypothetical jacket photo with the jacket photos of successful authors already catering to said Target Audience
4. Identify the needs of your Target-Audience by watching lots of the same Television programs your Target Audience watches (your "style" will flow naturally from total immersion in this resource)
5. Cater to the Target Audience's needs by A) giving the reader the impression that he/she is The Best and that B) everything, somehow, eventually, is Gonna Be Alright (if not for the characters in your Product, then certainly for The Reader)

Thanks for this-- a lively distraction from writing! I think I'm due for a celebratory cigarette!

William

stone flight

2010-02-28T17:13:00.000-08:00



1.

The plum tree nearest my door although beaten and 
shorn and accused of collaborating with winter has 
begun indifferently to bud. Standing in three-quarters 
redwood shade, she is a little behind the others. The 
buds on her few thin branches remind me of animal feet. 
Dewclaws run the length, deer hooves at the end.  

     Running not where but when.

I have begun to feel the Spring, as the books and poems 
and oldwomansong say I should. It is like the beginning 
of a nosebleed. 

                            On the edge of sight stands
                                   a messenger from the
                                  eyes that are to come

                                      who folds up when
                              I turn to see him better.

The fox knows when there is meat in the trap.


2

Afterwards the streets look different because they look 
the same.

     Your intentionless faults
     in which you are suspended  
     in approximation of flight. 

The houses are bright with expectation, the wind is ready, 
the stars are in place. A hand invisible wields the baton 
electric. The silence of rehearsals gives way to the 
newsprint of applause. Know though knowing does no good

your life is not your own. 


3.

Denied the grace of air, in admixture tragic and by 
gravity fixed, we wear pride like heavy feathers 
with which we soar through stone. 

It is not like drowning, this stone flight. 
     Our wings are harrows teeth; our harrow 
          harrows heaven. 
It is like sitting in the place that has been prepared 
for us at the ceremony for which we have been prepared 
and hearing the breaking of the gates.

Here Are Lions

2010-02-27T21:04:00.000-08:00





     ...barefoot in the garden, 
     I do not know the names 

          of the flora that eddy and thrust 
          of the birds that batter the branch.

Yet I am brought in my ignorance to school. I learn 
that Antares is a star, Narcissus a flower, Cicada is 
the siren of the grasses, and the black crickets of 
conscience pin our eyelids to the night. Words press 
me like disciples, fall like rain and each is a fine 
house filled with all manner of meaningful things, 
objects acquired, bread in the oven, clothes for the 
naked and geese in the yard. Once learned, words build 
villages and trade routes and the lace of empire, each 
a cartographer and seller of maps and we are 

                                     gullible as gulls.





If all my names for you were false,
in truth, nothing was lost.

shipshape

2010-02-26T12:23:00.000-08:00

I've been revising Kodoku, the play. Out of sheer perversity, I am posting an entire scene on this blog. As my mom says, "If you don't like it, there are seven other ways to look."

SCENE 2: A PARK

(A wooded area, a large stream, a place of soft light and soft shadows where one dreams, be dreams large or small. In the back corner of the stage the workers continue to build the boat.
A spotlight falls on Kenichi, who is holding a model sailboat. )

KENICHI
The world needs sailors. Sailors have been around since the earliest days of civilization. Before sailing, everyone was bored and stayed at home all day eating radishes, or, if people went onto the water, they had to row, row, row-- like the song says, and who wants to row?It's really no fun at all. I think the Pharaohs invented slavery just so they wouldn't have to pick up an oar themselves. And if you weren't rowing you were just-- adrift. Luckily, sailing was invented and everything was okay for a while.

(Kenichi's spotlight goes dark. Another light reveals Susumu slinking with exaggerated disrepute through the forest.)

SUSUMU
Susumu, the master thief, moves through the forest as silent as a mouse... no, even more silent, as silent as three mice, seeking his next target. Ah-ha! I knew that I walked out to the forest today for a reason. What a beautiful sailboat! That kid doesn't look rich, but-- look at that boat. If I can just get my hands on it-- Poof! Susumu, Master Thief, a ghost, a breeze, a falling leaf. His parents will buy him another one, right?

(Susumu's spotlight goes out. Kenichi's resumes. This back and forth continues until they are together. )

KENICHI
Sinbad was the perhaps the greatest sailor ever. He sailed the seas seven different times and found seven different fortunes.

SUSUMU
Something is strange about this guy. Who is he talking to? You may ask: who am I talking to? But I have an excellent answer. I am talking to myself, my favorite audience, but he's talking to imaginary people, and that's just weird. If I get closer I'll be able to make out what he's saying...

KENICHI
Sinbad also fought sea monsters. Nowadays, however, sea monsters have gone extinct. Some may say that this makes the oceans safer for adventurers, but I'm not so sure. What if the sea monsters were keeping something really terrible away? What if not having sea monsters is worse than having sea monsters?

SUSUMU
Almost there! Jeesh, this guy sure can talk. I bet he won't even notice his little boat is gone for an hour or more. I was kinda hoping for a challenge...

KENICHI
The absence of sea monsters is but one of the many mysteries that I, Kenichi, the greatest sailor since Sinbad, will investigate on my first voyage. Here, hold this.

(Kenichi picks up the sailboat and hands it to Susumu who has finally crept behind him. The rest of the stage fills with light.)
I need to find a place to put my boat into the water.

SUSUMU
Sinbad was a terrible sailor!

KENICHI
What do you mean?

SUSUMU
He wrecked every single time he sailed. He only had adventures because he never got to where he was going. He was just a salesman with weird luck. And after he got rich, he just gave up.

KENICHI
I will never give up.

SUSUMU
Now Alladin is a better hero. He lives by his wits, like me, Susumu, Master Thief. What's your name?

KENICHI
Kenichi, World's Greatest Sailor. I'm a shipwright too, although not as great as Mr Ouchi. I built that boat myself. This will be her first time in the water. Here, this will be perfect.

(Susumu brings the boat to the water's edge and together they set it free. The boat sails happily and slowly but-- rocks await it.)

SUSUMU
Kenichi! You're a genius! Look at her go... oh, oh no. She's stuck on the rocks... she's taking on water, quick, quick.

KENICHI
….No. No... I worked so hard...
(Kenichi faints but Susumu half catches him.)

SUSUMU
We can save the boat, come on!
(Susumu tries to rouse Kenichi and save the boat at the same time, but they become tangled up and both fall over.)
Get off me! What's happened to you?
(Susumu tries to pick Kenichi up, pinches him, does whatever he can think of to rouse his new friend. Nothing works.)
At least tell me where you live so I can get your family!

KENICHI
...Ihave no family...

SUSUMU
No family? Who is this kid?

He mentioned Mr Ouchi. I'll go get Mr. Ouchi-- although... He won't be happy to see me.

(Susumu runs off stage, and continues to run back and forth until he reaches Mr Ouchi and the workers.)

Mr. Ouchi! Mr. Ouchi!

MR OUCHI
What? Oh, it's you! I told you never to come back here. What's your scheme this time?

SUSUMU
There's this kid-- he won't get up. He mentioned your name... I didn't know who else to--

MR OUCHI
This isn't a trick?

SUSUMU
On my grandmother's grave.

MR OUCHI
Okay, where is he?

SUSUMU
Follow me if you can keep up!
(Susumu, Mr. Ouchi, and the workers all retrace Susumu's path-- some better than others.)
Here he is. We were sailing that boat over there, but it started to sink, and then he just collapsed.

MR OUCHI
Oh, it's Kenichi Horie.

SUSUMU
You know him!

MR OUCHI
We should get his mother.

SUSUMU
His mother? But he said “...I have no family...” Well, you go find her and I'll stay with the kid until you get back.

MR OUCHI
I don't know where they live. Kenichi just visits the shipyard sometimes. They must live close to the harbor.

SUSUMU
That's no help. What are you going to do, run through the streets screaming her name?

MR OUCHI
No, I'm not. You are. Now, you little thief! Her name is Mrs. Horie. Run!
(Exit Susumu. His voice is heard shouting periodically. Mr. Ouchi sits next to Kenichi)
Well, Kenichi. What has happened to you? You're breathing. Your heart is beating, one two three four. Did something scare you? Was it Susumu?

(The workers, who have finally arrived, attempt to rouse Kenichi, who is a limp noodle. This proceeds until Kenichi is quite compromised and Mr. Ouchi steps in.)
Who told you to come! What am I paying you mongrels for? Let him go! No! Not like that! Gently! Back to work! Back to work!

(The workers scatter and vanish. Susumu enters walking backwards.)

SUSUMU
Mrs. Hooooooooorieeeeeeee! Mrs. Hooooooooooooorie! Mrs. Hooooooo-- whoa!
(Susumu, stumbles and falls over the prone figure of Kenichi.)
Oh. It's you. Hey, hold on Mr. Ouchi-- I've been calling all over. I must have gotten a little lost. Are you sure you don't want to go?
(Mr. Ouchi growls threateningly)
Eeeeek! Mrs. Hoooorieeeeeeee!
(Exit Susumu yet again.)

MR OUCHI
What am I, an old bachelor, ready to retire and think only fine and noble thoughts, doing here? I guess that is the way of the world. A man is finally ready to go, and he is called back. And others... are gone before they've even tasted life, let alone had their fill. A widow, a bachelor, soldiers-- all ground up in the mill of life in their own way. What about you, Kenichi, what is so heavy on your shoulders? Why won't you get up?
(Susumu enters leading Mrs. Horie and Hiroko.)

SUSUMU
He's right over here, Mrs. Horie.
(Mrs. Horie rushes to her son.)
MRS HORIE
Kenichi, Kenichi. What happened? Can you talk?

MR OUCHI
He hasn't been talking, Mrs. Horie, but his--

MRS HORIE
Mr. Ouchi! Where you here? Did you see what happened?

MR OUCHI
No, the boy, Susumu, brought me here, apparently--

MRS HORIE
You, Susumu, is it? Did you see what-- did you do anything to Kenichi?

SUSUSMU
Do anything to him? I've run across Nishinomiya three of four time trying to help him. I'm Kenichi's best friend.

MRS HORIE
Okay Susumu, it is Susumu, right? Please tell me everything.

SUSUMU
Well, after I decided not to steal his sailboat, Kenichi and I made friends and I helped him put his boat in the water. It sailed like a dream... until it didn't. It got snagged over there and began to take on water. Then Kenichi just... went all noodle-y. I remembered he mentioned Mr. Ouchi and we've... had dealings... so I fetched him, and then he told me to run through the streets shouting your name, which was actually really fun, and now here we are.

MRS HORIE
He just collapsed?

SUSUMU
Went all noodle-y.

MR OUCHI
His breathing sounds good, and his heart rate is normal. I don't know what else to do... I'm a shipwright, not a doctor.

HIROKO
I know what's wrong with him!

SUSUMU
You do?

HIROKO
Hi! I'm Hiroko. I'm Kenichi's sister.

SUSUMU
A pleasure, Miss Hiroko.

HIROKO
He's just lazy!

ALL
Lazy?

MRS HORIE
But Kenichi is always working, Hiroko. Something must be wrong with him.

MR OUCHI
And he never stops asking me questions.

SUSUMU
He told me he built that boat all by himself...

HIROKO
I think I know my big brother pretty well. Watch this.

(Hiroko sits heavily on Kenichi's chest and squeezes his nose.)
Hey! You lazy bum! Get up!

KENICHI
Mmmmrmhmm... off me...

HIROKO
Make me!

KENICHI
Get...off...me... so tired...

HIROKO
No. I like it here. If you're not going to get up, you'll be my chair.

KENICHI
Nuuuugggna.

HIROKO
Okay, Kenichi. I didn't want to have to do this.
(Hiroko licks her finger, slowly and thoroughly sticks it in Kenichi's ear. Kenichi lurches to his feet.)

KENICHI
Gah! Oh, ick, gross. That's my ear! Oh... Wait, what happened? Why is everyone here?

SUSUMU
You had some trouble, Kenichi, after your boat sank.

KENICHI
My boat!

SUSUMU
So I ran and got everyone to help. I didn't think to lick my finger and put it in your ear though. That's genius!

MRS HORIE
Are you okay Kenichi? Do you remember anything?

KENICHI
No-- it's like I was another person. Someone... lazy. It was terrible. And there's my boat, sinking, lost. What did I do wrong? Ahem-- I am very sorry to have bothered everyone. Please forgive me. I will work even harder from now on.

MR OUCHI
Don't be too hard on yourself, Kenichi. You have your whole life to fill with regrets. I'm glad you're feeling better. Mrs. Horie--

MRS HORIE
Mr Ouchi. I can't thank you enough for leaving your shipyard to help my son. He must be a nuisance.

MR OUCHI
Yes, well. I am a very busy man.

SUSUMU
Hey Kenichi, Hiroko, they're flying kites over there. Let's go watch!

HIROKO
I love kites!

KENICHI
Kites are a little like boats. Maybe I could learn something...

(The children depart, excitedly, the stage.)
MRS HORIE
Well, I can assure you that Kenichi will not bother you any more. I've given him too much freedom. It's hard raising two children without--

MR OUCHI
Mrs Horie! I'm afraid you misunderstand. Please don't keep Kenichi away. A day isn't complete without his visit. I've never known a boy with such a keen interest in sailing. He is welcome any time. And if you would ever like to come along, to, um, keep him out of trouble, you, um, you can.

MRS HORIE
You are too kind, Mr. Ouchi. But I think one Horie is more than enough. I should go join the children. I'm still worried about Kenichi's fit. Goodbye, Mr. Ouchi.

MR OUCHI
May good luck haunt your days, Mrs. Horie.

MRS HORIE
That would be nice.
(MRS HORIE EXITS)

MR OUCHI
There she goes. Quiet down, old heart. The world doesn't need any more adventures from you. Those are rough seas and you're hardly shipshape. Leave it to the young, like Kenichi. There's something about that boy. Something otherworldly. How far do you think he'll go?

a sake primer

2010-02-24T10:42:00.000-08:00

(I have an interview at an Izakaya-- I am training)

Sake is an alcoholic beverage made from milled and processed rice that is then fermented with Koji-kin, a strange (gross?) mold. Sake is categorized mostly by how polished the rice is (because sake from more highly polished is more expensive to make, and because the flavors of the interior of the rice grain are considered more delicate and desirable) and if water or alcohol is added.

The patterning of these qualities are still non-intuitive to me. X is X if under y and if z is added. Xx is Xx is under y and z is added or---

But let's try to get some handle on it anyway. The easiest distinction is between Nigori and other sakes, because Nigori looks different. It's cloudy, 'unfiltered' (which means coarsely filtered) to allow rice solids to float around in it. I've always liked this kind of sake-- finding it smooth and sweet and easy. Sake often includes some more sour flavors that I do not love but might have to learn to appreciate.

The other obviously different sake is called Koshu, which is aged, tastes a little like sherry, and is an amber color.

Most sake is meant to be downed cold or at room temperature. Certain Junmai sakes can benefit from being warmed, but for other sakes heating destroys the flavor.

Note: Sake evolved, like so much of Japanese culture (pre-war), aesthetically. The flavors are intended to be gentle, subtle, and refined. I've yet to read any large treatise on the matter, but this seems to distinguish it from most Western fermented beverages. Red wine can be complex-- blackberries peanut butter and pickles!-- oh! the '04 Carignan-- but usually in big, obvious ways. The flavor profile is more akin to (fine) vodka than to any other beverage I can think of.

Oh! And what is Junmai and why can it be heated? Because Junmai is made with rice polished to only 70% (or less!) of its original size and (most importantly) without any additives (which are usually mellowing agents- neutral alcohol or water) and so contains more aggressive flavors that mellow as the temperature rises.

Hold on! Junmai acquires other terms if the rice is polished more. If it drops to 60%, it is called Junmai Ginjo, and if 50%, Junmai Daigino-- but no additives are allowed in the classification.

But a sake can be Ginjo or Daiginjo if it has additives and is made from rice polished to 60% or 50% respectively. Dai- means extra?

Things begin to come together.

On our Honeymoon, I went Sake shopping the day we left for Ireland. (and apparently have just become Germanic in my Capitalization) I went into the Berkeley Bowl and was trying to move my head around the selection when a quick moving little man introduced himself to me as America's premier Sake importer and gave me a heady introduction to the subject before exclaiming 'My God, what are these doing here! These must be drank immediately!' and began to pull the bottles off the shelves and cradle them awkwardly with his fingers, elbows, armpits, etc.

These, it turns out, were 'ghost sake', a kind brewed for a special festival, intended to be drank within a couple months of said festival, and named 'ghost' because the flavor is supposed to change radically from glass to glass. Each sip, even, should be different.

Yeah, so I bought one. You would have too.

Olga and I shared it on the transatlantic flight out of an eggcup I had placed as a joke in a strange eggcup sized pocket in the strap of my recently purchased backpack. We decided the flavor did change.

On to cocktails, quickly! Naturally bartenders and owners of sushi restaurants have decided it would be useful to use sake with other mixers, often hard liquor, for the age old reason of getting people drunker faster.

First- the old stand by, the Sake Bomb-- which is a 'shot' of sake in beer.

Sake can be used in place of almost any liquor-- add a funny reference to the name, and you have a sake cocktail. My current favorite: the Duncan MacCleod-- named for the Scottish Highlander/Immortal who wields a Japanese blade. Yes, it is basically Scotch and Sake.

I think that's enough. Olga and I went to Totoro Sushi in Santa Cruz last night as a date/celebration/offering, had some amazingly over-the-top rolls, and tried Uni (sea urchin) supposedly the rough pinnacle of the 'true' sushi experience for the first time.

Maybe they'll let me wear a kimono?

Kanpai!

Exegesis of Cash

2010-02-20T21:39:00.000-08:00

It doesn't seem to make sense that "Walk the Line" has become the signature song from Johnny Cash. Some song had to and why not that one, right? But there is usually a reason for these large, strange collective decisions-- or, if not a reason, as such, a rightness, a significance.

I woke up-- was wrenched from sleep-- last night to Johnny singing 'Hurt.' Yeah, that's just how things are going these days. I needed to hear it and sleep has always been 'just what keeps me alive;' has never offered protection, certainly not from wounds or their healing, and so I greeted the song as an old friend who has come to shame you but to whom you are grateful for it. So this evening has been devoted to his songs, including "Walk the Line" which I usually only half-hear.

"I find it very very easy to be true."

It is rare that we are able to speak honestly. Language is built upon this basic need, to speak near, around, through, and to truth, but not truth itself. "Walk the Line" seems like a simple devotional to love-- probably earthly but every earthly love becomes allegorical to the divine by squinting. But why did he repeat 'very?' Truth needs no ornament, no hyperbole, no emphasis. The second very is a give away-- he doesn't find it easy to be true.

"I find myself alone when each day's through"

Speaking of the distance of the lovers, and the hermit-life her absence condemns him to. It is possible for a man to do this-- but it is not likely and for some men, nearly impossible. An accusal, also, of her who has left him alone when each day's through.

The song is riddled with other impossibilities-- "I keep my eyes wide open all the time." "For you I know I'd even try to turn the tide" is very powerful and very telling. He is helpless "I know I'd even" unto death, for what happens if you fail to turn the tide?

"And happiness I've known proves that it's right" I've known-- not know.

The central metaphor becomes even stranger in this light. Walk the line. I used to be able to sprint down the iron rail of a railroad track-- but even with little feet and a child's singular focus, I never got farther than a half mile. "Because you're mine" is not the beginning of a causal statement, it is a desperate plea.

Be mine. Come back. Save me. No man can walk the line. I will betray you, not tomorrow, but maybe the day after.

They came together briefly-- they are now apart. Life is false and worthless without her, but he will falter, nonetheless, into that life in part to punish her with his debasement. Which is why the sweetness and hopeful innocence of the lyrics and the delivery is so touching. It's a fairy tale that he wants and almost believes can be true.

And like many fairy tales, it's also a threat.

Keep a close watch.

Protestant work ethic

2010-02-19T21:05:00.000-08:00

Well, the money's run out. My life of letters and lentils a shambles of sorts, though good work was done and many lessons learned. I drove out to Mountain View with a more humble sort of resume and applied at an Irish Pub downtown there. Not that I mind working, but the writing is a wire in the blood, and every day that passes, passes and is lost without it. I will hold true. After dropping off my resume and getting the manager's name for tomorrow's call back, I headed North to Redwood City, god help me, to apply at a Mexican place there.

What I found caused me to gawp like a stunned carp. My destination was a Chili's on 'riods. A small army of red-shirted servers swarmed across a restaurant larger than many a parking garage bringing frozen margaritas to families with too much money and too little taste. It was a place of power for the Enemy.

So I walked on and found a strange cafe in an old theater that houses also an antique shop with roughly thirty beers on tap where three waitresses waiting for the dinner rush chatted and cheered me up and gave me recommendations of places to apply. (Universe, you're sending me mixed messages these days and I don't know what to make of it all.) On my way back to the car I stopped dead in my tracks outside of a closed-down auto parts store, held my head and laughed to tears.

See, when I have to write something deplorable, like a resume, I usually include some kind of harmless private joke or two-- a little bit of sugar to make the medicine go down. So in my Qualifications section, after shamefacedly referring to my 'extensive wine and beer knowledge' (vomit) and other necessary bullshit, I added 'Protestant work ethic,' and chuckled. The joke is not that I'm a lazy fuck, but that I rather loathe that phrase and the history behind it, and self-identify rather strongly with my Irish Catholic heritage. (Just a few days ago I was at a bar in Oakland calling anyone with laugh-lines a noble Celt and accusing the somber faces of Englishness...)

And didn't I just drop that resume off at a fucking Irish pub called Stephen's Green? I still can't believe it. I hope it's an ice-breaker when I call tomorrow.

Then given over to a profound sadness on the drive back. Dwight Yoakam's keeping me together though. Thanks, Dwight, and here's to you.

Maybe I'll break hearts too.

my friend of these

2010-02-09T22:17:00.000-08:00

The angry nettle and the mild
Grew together under the blue-plum trees
I could not tell as a child
Which was my friend of these.

Always the angry nettle in the skirt of his sister
Caught my wrist that reached over the ground,
where alike I gathered-- for the one was sweet and the other wore a frosty dust--
The broken plum and the sound.

The plum trees are barren now and the black knot is upon them,
That stood so white in the spring.
I would give, to recall the sweetness and the frost of the lost blue plums,
Anything, anything.
I thrust my arm among the grey ambiguous nettles, and wait,
But they do not sting.

E. St. V. Millay

Bibliomancy brought me to that poem and I suppose it is as good as any for what I am about to post.

Last week I finally got called up-- marching orders back to Kansas. The California adventure is done, all that remains is to negotiate the treaties and then the new war begins. In July I'll be dropped in the mosquito grass jungle and for good this time.

This has long been a potential and desired assignment-- my countenance has turned towards it as sunflowers the sun for years-- but the finality remains new and fearful. So much left to do. So much to leave.

But I've a horse there and a motorcycle too. A vineyard, twenty acres and a good dog named Jethro. Over in Lawrence I've the Paden family, the Kipp's, and perhaps the best brew-pup in the world. And the work, the work that waits for me there because I don't write from memory, a functional amnesiac, but I want to know the grasslands, learn again the stars, brace against falcon winds.

Gee up, old heart. The nettles will sting again.

unease

2010-02-09T10:36:00.000-08:00

The last two nights were reserved for restlessness. Fitful dreams and fitful wakefulness, and last night the rain was briefly so-- that it sounded as though the sky had been ripped open and I doubted the roof would bear it.

The night is perhaps reasserting its claim on me. Daytime has always been an embarrassment to me, a foreign climate, a posture. I have come to love the sun, but perhaps I will always be a basement dweller and night-skulk.

Bleary morning metamelodrama aside, I am dealing with interesting upcoming enormous changes, and this is probably the cause of what are really very common sleepless nights.

ox-eyed

2010-02-05T22:02:00.000-08:00



The universe frays into nothing at its ends and hums 
        a song     of waiting
        in the splendor      of stars
as she takes out the stitching of the nebula in her 
hem. She's about to give up, undress, pour a bath. 
Atoms within her have done so already. You, perhaps.

She removes an earring and sets it on the edge of a 
worn white swirling table: a gold sun and nine lesser 
stones that shimmer     like a lure.

*

One day, a woman tells a man she's given up smoking 
and turns him—like a child, like many children—out of 
doors so that she may rest. The woman drinks the 
relief of the traveler in a glass of cold tea.  

The train to the woman's door takes the man to the
ends of the earth. The woman has harnessed herself to 
her window and spun a cocoon from dark matter. She 
will live for others but has died for him.

     The man remembers

she took his hand so suddenly, her other hand around
the muscles near his shoulder as though a wind 
pulled her away

                                          to the ends.


*

Ox-eyed, the bringer of fire bears wood to the kiln. 
An unknown figure sets a tea cup, draws a miniature
in gold of the yard without. Winter, and look, even 
the beast that draws the cart.  
     An engine for intimacy. 
One day, he will close the distance between his body 
and his gaze. He will sweeten his breath with 
marjoram and mount the steps of the china shop.  
     Cold porcelain, warm blood

the pristine confusion     of her hand in his.

Doug's Cauliflower & and other people's poetry

2010-02-05T15:17:00.000-08:00

A belly dried with foam
has gathered up the pieces of the house of the sea.
All that's missing is the deepest fish
of the first tenderness,
all that's missing is the glance that turned into hair
to understand the wind,
all that's missing is the form of the touch
of the first tree and the first light.

But there is a liquid sign that gathers together what is missing
like the line that draws the sea on the sea.

--Roberto Juarroz
tran. W.S. Merwin
*

Border Zone, Minefield, Snow East of Bebra

Only the barbed wire and glaring arc lamps
make this fresh snow distinct from any other.

All things are anguished at having
to exist in one form or another--

so many hawks glide over the mined snowy field
not even small animals, one might suspect,

cross it unharmed. Catch and
pin have been so set

the lightest creature, even, would be blown to bits.
Out of blown clouds the full moon comes,

and the birds are gliding on and on, hungry still.

--Lars Gustafsson
trans. Christopher Middleton

*

Damn Mexicans!

2010-02-05T00:08:00.000-08:00

rereading a previous post it occurs to me that the above would be a fine title for a Broadway musical.

This is usually where I make a pretend phone with my right hand and dial up my pretend agent and shout with belligerent incoherence details about my brilliant and lucrative late-night idea.

Texas Tornados-- call me?

The outer life is not violent enough

2010-02-04T22:51:00.000-08:00

"Multiply emotions. Not just one life in one isolated body; make your soul the host of several bodies. Feel it vibrate with the emotions of others as well as with your own; it will forget its own griefs when it ceases to think only of itself. The outer life is not violent enough; more poignant tremors result from inner surges of rapture. Let it feed on admiration; then it will be haughtier and its vibrations stronger. Not realities but chimeras, for the poet's imagination brings out more clearly the ideal truth hidden behind the appearance of things.

Let the soul never fall back into inactivity; it must be nurtured anew on surges of rapture."*

--Andre Gide

Gide has been my great good companion for the past two months, taking over when Soseki, who had been with me since August, grew exhausted. I read the Immoralist when one should, as a teen, in a Dover Thrift edition that cost a dollar, but at that time my mind was already ruined with the greatest works of other, more obvious, masters-- Hugo, Dostoevsky, Nabokov-- that anything less than the apex of literary ambition went read but unpondered. In a French Literature course from the beloved, generous, and brilliant Professor Ted Johnson, we read The Counterfeiters, which I was rather amazed by, but we also read Beckett.

Professor Johnson wrote to Beckett once, inviting him to a celebration of his work at the University of Kansas. He told us this story with tremendous humility, amazed still that a lowly professor had invited the great Beckett to Kansas, and produced a plastic bag in which Beckett's short but grateful refusal was handwritten on a postcard from Paris. It was one of Professor Johnson's most treasured possessions. He read it out loud to us, his voice shaken, and then gingerly returned it to the bag.

This dear moment and the fact that I was Beckett's sole advocate in the class, and, it must be said, because the aggressive nature of his genius appealed more to my college mind than Gide's elegance and restraint, caused me to write a lengthy paper on his short play, shown once on the BBC decades ago, '...but the clouds...' which interrogates and ultimately releases Yeats and his poem The Tower. I'll give you the end of the poem because I have it memorized and because it has come to mean a great deal to me.

Now shall I make my soul,
Compelling it to study
In a learned school
Till the wreck of body,
Slow decay of blood,
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
Or what worse evil come -
The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in the breath -
Seem but the clouds of the sky
When the horizon fades;
Or a bird's sleepy cry
Among the deepening shades.

So I did not at length study, as it deserved, Gide's singular, in both senses, novel and only came back to him when lingering over the shelves of a (new and)used book store in Santa Cruz. (At that time in college I think I was privately working through the whole of Bulgakov.) I purchased a beautiful British Standard copy of Strait Is the Gate and a charming Vintage copy of the first volume of his journals.

Strait Is the Gate is one of the most perfect and heartbreaking books I have ever read. Gide intended it to be the mirror and compliment of his much more widely read Immoralist, but while the latter has become default reading for the benighted Western Civ. canon (owing to its misreading by the fucking existentialists), the former, though numbering fewer than one hundred and fifty (perfect) pages, is rarely referenced.

But I read it, wept over it, and passed it on to Gayle. Gide's journals are with me now, but in The Fear that has overcome me as the right hand pages become thinner, I ran back to Logos to buy the rest of his work I had previously passed over. Thank you, dead reader, who owned these books before me, dating, as they all do, from the fifties, but why did you die without the second volume of his journals? Did you lend it, poor darling/cad/fool to some book-eating friend? Did some terrible accident befall it-- which would be strange considering the pristine condition of the rest of your collection-- or are you blameless? Did someone buy volume two (for a dollar) but refuse to pony-up for volume one so that I might go a-wondering?

...um, so I guess my point is I bought a couple new books, spending nearly the price of a pack of cigarettes, (vice is dear these days: my sole line to freedom and dignity) both by Gide, who, I think, is a great writer. Well, obviously it is more than that. His style and person appeal to me for distinct and intimate reasons. He is sentimental about animals. Fuck you, that's important. (not you, clearly)

Doubtless more will follow. The passage I quoted is from his first youthful work and simply what I read when opening The White Notebook at random when beginning this post. I copied it because I collect literary references to multiplicity, which should not surprise any readers here.

...Seagram's and Hansen's Root Beer, if anyone is curious.

*rerereading this quote I am struck by how awfully it must be rendered in English. Beauty, for Gide, was nearly truth. I might attempt a new translation.

Wherein I make an accounting for myself and beg your indulgence, dear readers

2010-02-01T23:22:00.001-08:00

I am taking a break from writing to write. My better brain-bits are disconnected but many might think this makes for better reading than my more effortful work.

When I began this blog, I promised to take you through the publishing process of a grand idea to follow the harvest of wine grapes around the world. The blog would be filled with practical examples of proposal writing, fascinating research into the many corners of the earth, from Thailand to Peru to New Zealand to Madagascar and even Kansas.

Now I'm posting prose poems about the moon and shit? What the fuck? Where'd the sexy go? And you're right. An explanation is owed.

First I got distracted by Kodoku, both the children's book, (publication date: 2012!) and the play, which a couple theaters are interested in but I'll say no more for fear of the Jinx, which led to another children's book manuscript, currently under review by a publisher, about a spider silk tapestry, and a series of short stories that use many of the tropes and forms of children's literature to produce adult work naturally, rather than just dumping a bunch of sex into old fairy tales. Magical realism that consciously invokes children's literature-- something like that. I still owe an ending for a Kansas giant that is very dear to me and realization to a glass city that grows inside the Pub.

All of this happened during the harvest in Kansas. It was a productive time.

When I returned I became very, very busy but not with writing and then the holiday black hole and now prose poems?

Well-- there's yet another project you don't even know about yet. I went to the Land Institute's annual Prairie Festival when I was in Kansas and conceived the brilliant (!) idea of riding my horse from Kansas to see Wendell Berry and write a book fusing the travel narrative with my emerging agrarian ideas and a reaction to the grand old man's work. Wes Jackson, who IS the Land Institute is a neighbor (he likes to remind me that he was there when my grandpa's old house burned down) and a close friend to Wendell. I figured he could put me in touch, so after I charted the route and assured myself it was possible, I asked.

And he Wendell-blocked me. He was quite nice about it and right to do so (Mr. Berry is taking a break from his globe-trotting schedule to actually be on the farm he talks about sometimes and maybe even do some writing!) but it still ruined a very fine idea, and a saleable one as well- which was important because of various systems of mathematics.

System one: With Olga in Santa Cruz for a year as she learns to be a Science Journalist, and me part time there and in the Bay Area, I began to add up the total amount of time we have spent apart during our nigh seven years of marriage. After reaching two years my brain went wonky and I stopped counting. I still don't know. But we decided things were a little out of hand, so perhaps my plan to travel around the world for a year while she finished her program was less than ideal. 365 Crush still lives! but has been put off for a year.

System two: I've realized that the very comfortable and engaging work at the Pub was colluding with backward elements of my personality to produce little real writing. It afforded me money, esteem, a sense of purpose, community, plenty of free time, and women to flirt with. So really, why write? I needed a new algorithm.

System three: My novel still needs major work and will likely a) not sell b) sell but not make any money or c) sell for some money but not for a long time. Both 365 Crush and my overland horse adventure could very likely have been sold, thereby kick-starting my career as a working writer. But both are on hold and/or the scrap heap. None of my other ideas, even in wild champagne-filled bathtub fantasies, will pay the rent. So I've learned to accept and enjoy my writerly dissolution.

I am sorta playing with entering the William Saroyan Playwriting competition, which shells out a sweet ten grand for a play on Armenian themes, and I have a doosey of an idea about a famous Armenian writer who takes his son to a whorehouse near Fresno when he's thirteen where the son, or the father, unknowingly impregnates one of the women, who keeps the child who (the child) grows up with this secret mythology and then goes looking for her pa when she reads one of his stories about visiting the whorehouse! Also she has psychic light-bulb breaking and bat calling powers. (J-- you were there when I got that call... and it is actually a wonderful story)

But if I don't win I'll always wonder if it was because I wasn't Armenian. Maybe I should Armenianize my pen name. W. Emerionian? It's due in two weeks.

So that is what has been going on, dear readers, and why instead of telling you about the unique and delectable properties of Santa Cruz Mountain Pinot Noir sipped in the heady late afternoon hour of sunlight after two weeks of rain, watching steam lift from the sequoia and fir, tasting of ollalieberries and earth or reprinting my homoerotic correspondence with a Lebanese sculptor/oenophile/war profiteer who I'd have to seduce/fend off in August.

And yet the brain still boils! Other murky projects-- a TV series about the Russian experience of WWII, KRISH-2: a Bollywood Space Opera, The Dying Counties of Kansas, and the New Agrarian Manifest!

God help me I'm not making any of those up, except for the Lebanese guy, who I'm more intuiting.

But do keep reading... something interesting is bound to happen, right?

The air thin of howling

2010-01-31T22:14:00.000-08:00





Behind layered glass, dark-veined with clouds, in the 
abandoned ward of his birth, the wolf moon has gone 
visiting, tarries, winters, in the sootsilk writes: a 
dimmed light nevertheless will not last. We are born 
indoors but buried without. The cloud -- moving glass-- 
the wolf moon, still.

Part and Parcel

2010-01-29T13:18:00.001-08:00



Parcel

Our numbers rise. I am twice ten and nine now. The 
bitter herbs of suffering, the flesh of my flesh, 
the coin of my good intent  
                                      my gratitude 
                  to a god that does not need this 
                                           from me 

a blank check in an envelope without address. 

 Each day a debt. 
 
And in the infinity of god in the finity of which 
I have taken note, of the marks my steps have made, 
there lies the ledger wherein this debt is held 
    by an unnamed angel
   with a pigeon quill
  and plenty of ink

in a decommissioned post office in the general store 
at the intersection of S. Washington St. & Mentor Rd. 
formerly, 6-7-4-6-5.

I went with empty hands to settle. I tapped transom 
window and rehearsed.

 The spirit that moves me 
 is not mine
 nor the expense 
 of the expanse 
 not the jewels of sunset 
 neither the golden ring of a year. 
 If I die you'll get nothing.

*


In the middle of this writing it came about that I 
needed a stamp. I exhaled myself out of the writing 
room into the walking world and thus the short 
distance to the post office in the old lime kiln town 
where I now live.    
                                         I who am old
                                       enough to know 
                                   whose side I am on

A dog there. He called and I heard his call and went 
to him saying
“Be wise, my sorrow, and tranquil,” 
 be tranquil, my sorrow, and wise...
but then I heard else

 titter 
 natter & whisper
 he comes from the hunt 
 he comes from the kill
 born a whinging runt
 now he roils his fill!
 
from the mountain people down to fetch their mail. We 
were as if drawn by the same hand, part and-- in 
another place we may have died together. Neither snow 
nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night would--

I mailed a letter to a stranger begging for a job. 
The postmaster locked the door and said Don't look him 
in the eyes.

and the unnamed angel unquivered his quill.


*


A storm burrowed into the sky, 
 a traveler at home wherever she goes,  
and declaimed with the cold authority of a spoiled child 
 “Out–out are the lights–out all!”
The earth, bent as a widower, obeyed. 

The little copper doors sit one atop the other. Within, 
the nameless angel insured 
 the usury of letters
and burned with borrowed light.

buckwheat dumplings

2010-01-27T00:05:00.000-08:00

I applied for a job today. I have been applying for various jobs in the Santa Cruz area since we've moved down. My writing is going well and some money might come in from it in the coming months, but I'd prefer to be working down here as well. Work provides purpose and people as well as money. A job is the easiest way into a place. I have been quite lucky on with my jobs over all.

But jobs are few and far between here and my resume is unconventional. I was really excited about a ranch hand job-- it was mostly feeding horses and cleaning out stalls-- work I know how to do and would be glad to do, but they didn't even call! Damn Mexicans taking my jobs!

I was wallowing a little today and had a good bout of staring-at-the-ceiling. When I came downstairs (down ladder?) and dissolutely checked craigslist I saw a posting for fancy cafe/take out help nearby and checked them out. They are part of the Alice Waters empire, and the food does look exciting and the place cozy and cute. So I dashed-off a cover letter but also compiled some of my menus from my various cooking events to try to razzle-dazzle 'em. I really should keep a journal. But I thought I'd post the descriptions on the ole blog because, well, who is going to stop me?

Christmas '09
Christmas Goose with kumquats, drizzled with a prickly pear reduction
Neapolitan Mashed Potatoes with red potato, sweet potato, and purple yam
Daikon Radish Salad with shaved fennel and mandarin
Mushroom Goulash with buckwheat dumplings
Cranberry Apple Compote
Blanched bok choy & shallots with fresh cucumbers in a sriracha sauce

Homebrew BBQ
Stuffed Squid marinated in our own Belgian Saison beer
Irish Soda Bread with horseradish butter
Grilled Fig Salad with pomegranate and queso fresco

6th Anniversary Meal
Fresh Black Tobikko and Ikura served on baguette with butter
Opah Poached in Viognier, lime and butter, served on a bed of charred lipstick peppers and green onions, garnished with a kumquat medley
Ruby Crescent Potatoes Au Gratin with bacon, squid, and wild porcini mushrooms
Buckwheat Salad with watercress and yogurt
Homemade Bing Cherry Ice Cream

And a few other dishes just to round it off:

Barley Jambalaya with Sourdough Pancakes and homemade Meyer Lemon Marmalade
California chili with artichokes hearts and chickpeas
Roasted Pork Loin with rhubarb-Gorgonzola sauce on a bed of dandelion greens

an honest American poet

2010-01-21T23:40:00.000-08:00

In the suddenness of my research of Hayden Carruth, I discovered this essay on his poetry and the quality of his friendship by, of course, Wendell Berry and the following response to an invitation to the White House in 1998.

April 7, 1998

President and Mrs. Clinton
The White House
Washington, D. C. 20500

Dear Mr. & Mrs. Clinton:

This is to acknowledge your invitation to attend a "Millennium Evening" at the White House in celebration of American poetry on April 22nd. Thank you for thinking of me. However, it would seem the greatest hypocrisy for an honest American poet to be present on such an occasion at the seat of the power which has not only neglected but abused the interests of poets and their readers continually, to say nothing of many other administratively dispensable segments of the population. Consequently, I must decline.

Yours sincerely,

Hayden Carruth

*

There is so much bitterness, irony, and sheer playfulness in this terse, formal reply... the fruits of honesty perhaps.

Make Slim Pickins Proud

2010-01-21T20:28:00.000-08:00

Olga, in her science journalism adventures, stumbled across this fun toy. Enter the coordinates of your choice, choose a bomb and/or asteroid, account for wind, and enjoy a simple description of your blast radius. Yeee-haw!

Labor pains

2010-01-21T14:30:00.000-08:00

A beautiful poem by a poet of whom I was just made aware. What would I be had I a proper education? Stay 'til the end.

Emergency Haying
by Hayden Carruth

Coming home with the last load I ride standing
on the wagon tongue, behind the tractor
in hot exhaust, lank with sweat,

my arms strung
awkwardly along the hayrack, cruciform.
Almost 500 bales we've put up

this afternoon, Marshall and I.
And of course I think of another who hung
like this on another cross. My hands are torn

by baling twine, not nails, and my side is pierced
by my ulcer, not a lance. The acid in my throat
is only hayseed. Yet exhaustion and the way

my body hangs from twisted shoulders, suspended
on two points of pain in the rising
monoxide, recall that greater suffering.

Well, I change grip and the image
fades. It's been an unlucky summer. Heavy rains
brought on the grass tremendously, a monster crop,

but wet, always wet. Haying was long delayed.
Now is our last chance to bring in
the winter's feed, and Marshall needs help.

We mow, rake, bale, and draw the bales
to the barn, these late, half-green,
improperly cured bales; some weigh 150 pounds

or more, yet must be lugged by the twine
across the field, tossed on the load, and then
at the barn unloaded on the conveyor

and distributed in the loft. I help –
I, the desk-servant, word-worker –
and hold up my end pretty well too; but God,

the close of day, how I fall down then. My hands
are sore, they flinch when I light my pipe.
I think of those who have done slave labor,

less able and less well prepared than I.
Rose Marie in the rye fields of Saxony,
her father in the camps of Moldavia

and the Crimea, all clerks and housekeepers
herded to the gaunt fields of torture. Hands
too bloodied cannot bear

even the touch of air, even
the touch of love. I have a friend
whose grandmother cut cane with a machete

and cut and cut, until one day
she snicked her hand off and took it
and threw it grandly at the sky. Now

in September our New England mountains
under a clear sky for which we're thankful at last
begin to glow, maples, beeches, birches

in their first color. I look
beyond our famous hayfields to our famous hills,
to the notch where the sunset is beginning,

then in the other direction, eastward,
where a full new-risen moon like a pale
medallion hangs in a lavender cloud

beyond the barn. My eyes
sting with sweat and loveliness. And who
is the Christ now, who

if not I? It must be so. My strength
is legion. And I stand up high
on the wagon tongue in my whole bones to say

woe to you, watch out
you sons of bitches who would drive men and women
to the fields where they can only die.

Many hotels are run successfully without it

2010-01-19T22:32:00.000-08:00

This is an excerpt from an early 1900 history of Iowa. I was going to just post the Indian section, for being so well-meaning, so wrong, and so sad. But then I saw the temperance rant that ended the chapter previous and decided the irony was too much.

I think Satan was some better tools at his disposal than drink, don't you?

TEMPERANCE
Forty years ago as has been before said, all the people in this region of
country were accustomed to use intoxicants as a beverage. Liquor was
freely used at the polls on election day. The several candidates furnished
it for their friends, and it was not uncommon to see men drunk, fighting
drunk and noisy, before the polls closed. Here and there at the boat
landings along the river, whisky was kept for sale, and the imbibers
thereof were wont to frequent these places for social merrymaking. Broils
and fights, and reckless smash-ups, were not uncommon. Whisky used to be
termed a good creature of God, but time has shown the fallacy of such a
statement. For if Satan has any one tool more pliant, skilful, Satanic,and
more destructive of all good than any or all others, it is Alcohol. It
blunts conscience, and prompts to the commission of crime; it beats
mothers and beggars families; it ruins character and destroys souls; it
poisons the body and crazes the mind; it drags down the talented and noble
and plunges them into the ditch. Murder, robbery, theft, adultery, anger,
malice, blasphemy and the whole catalogue of crimes are incited and warmed
into life by this fell destroyer. But much has been done to curtail this
evil. It is made unchristian to use it, make it or sell it. It has
disappeared from the public gaze. It finds no place in the most genteel
families. Many hotels are run successfully without it. Elections are
conducted quietly and honestly and honorably without it. In no case is it
indispensable. In most it is decidedly hurtful. Temperance has made
decided advances. Great changes have occurred for the better in the past
fifty years. May we not hope that intemperance will yet be banished from
the land?

CHAPTER XIV
INDIANS IN IOWA

THERE are no adults among us, and few children, who have not heard of
Indians as dangerous creatures - a strange people to be greatly feared;
but many children have never seen an Indian. Some years ago a Pawnee
Indian boy named "Ralph" attended school here in Tabor. He dressed, and
played, and talked, and studied, and recited his lessons just like other
boys. The United States government removed the Pawnee tribe years ago to
the Indian Territory, and Ralph went with them. Geo. B. Gaston and wife
lived several years among the Pawnees in Nebraska, and became deeply
interested in them, so that some of them visited in Tabor more than once.
When we first came to Iowa, forty years ago, Indians lived just across the
Missouri river from us, and when the river became frozen across in the
winter they frequently came over on the ice. Some unprincipled white men,
who kept whisky and drank of it themselves, would give it to the Indians,
and sometimes they got drunk, and then it crazed them and made them
dangerous, just as it does white men. Drunken Indians came to a house in
California City in Mills county once, more than thirty years ago, when the
men happened to be away from home, and the women shut the door against
them. When they could not get in, one of them attempted to shoot through
the open chinks at the side of the door with his bow and arrow; but no
sooner was the arrow-point inserted between the logs than Mrs. Cordelia
Clark Martin, with great decision and prompt presence of mind, seized it
and snatched it out of his hand. Mrs. Cordelia C. Hinton probably retains
that arrow to this day. as a souvenir of the perils of the past. Baffled
in their endeavor to enter that house, they went to other houses, and made
themselves so disagreeable generally that some of the party were killed
before they recrossed the river into Nebraska. So Alcohol proves to be the
apt tool of Satan for the destruction of man kind, whether he be white, or
red, black, brown, or yellow.

Many still live in Fremont county to whom the Indian trails or paths, that
wound over the hills and through the vales, from grove to grove and from
stream to stream, were as familiar, if not as numerous, as are the roads
that accommodate the traveling public now. Indeed their camp fires were
still burning when some among us first came to Fremont county. The forks
and poles which formed the frames of their dwellings, and the bark which
covered them, reminded us often of the singular race that had so recently
disappeared. No history, then, of the county would be complete without
some account of the native tribes which preceded the white man on this
soil.

A feeling of sadness involuntarily steals over us as we contemplate the
waning glory of the nations that once with elastic step,proud mien and
brave hearts chased over these beautiful prairies herds of innumerable
buffaloes, stealthily pursued the bounding deer and graceful antelope, or
more leisurely fished in the rivers, streams and lakes, or waylaid the
numberless birds of passage that vibrated between their summer and winter
homes - nations that displayed their military prowess in sanguinary tribal
conflicts on the field of battle. Strong nations have dwindled to
insignificant bands in their retreat before the influx of the Anglo-Saxon
race, until they may fittingly adopt the poet's sad strain:

"They wast us! Aye, like April snow
In the warm noon we shrink away;
And fast they follow as we go
Toward the setting day."

to wrest from the oppressor his victim

2010-01-19T11:47:00.000-08:00

Last week there was a rally at the state capital in Kansas by supporters of the Tenth Amendment Movement (which is distinct, I think, from the Tenth Amendment proper, which all of us, unless tyrannically ruling the Union, implicitly support by not tyrannically ruling the Union) and this was the first I had heard of it.

I honestly don't know much about the history of the movement. I imagine it has much in common with the 'tea party' folks and all that rabble-rousing in town hall meetings over health care. It seems pretty fucking clear that the movement, as it stands now, is just a way to express 'revolutionary' distaste for Obama's policies.

Which is a shame, not because they don't like Obama--fuck that guy-- but because they've hijacked a potentially very interesting debate that could be happening on the role of states vs. the federal government, a small hobby horse of my own for a while.

My basic idea runs thus:

Hey, let's limit power of all kinds!

Or at least think about it.

I don't know. The more I think about politics the muddier everything becomes. Why is so much of liberal thought based on the idea of a strong central government? That seems to go back to monarchy on one side and Marxist control of production on the other. Neither really worked out very well, and no liberal really wants to imitate either model. Is there a credible alternative vision? If there is, I haven't heard of it.

Now, the liberal tradition, which it's preference for a powerful centralized protector of liberty (from who?) is distinct, in my mind, from various Leftist movements that, when not actively aligned with the socialist or communist ideals, are generally against the centralized consolidation of power. Or is that just my own personal interpretation? Maybe the Left is made of wittle baby Castros, I don't know.

And the Right is equally compromised. Theoretically opposed to a strong central government unless they are in office (also weird, they want a weak central government but a BIG STRONG leader like Reagan or Bush...) while providing an umbrella for all kinds of racism and xenophobia.

And all this energy devoted by kind, brave, sincere, passionate people on both sides to simply discredit the other side so that their side can finally fix everything. This has been going back and forth for some time now. Did anyone ever fix it?

But why are we even still stuck with this 'grand experiment?' I don't think it worked, I don't think it's working, I don't think it's going to work. I think we done fucked up.

Let's try to devote some time to thinking up new communities, new possibilities, that learn from the excesses of this representative democracy. Is this really the best we can do?

Eh. I hate this post. I need to get out of the house.

contention continued

2010-01-16T21:28:00.001-08:00

First, a fun slight alteration of a translation from Nerval:

"This life is a shithole and a whorehouse. I am ashamed that God should see me here."

The version I found said 'hovel' and 'house of ill-repute' which I just don't believe can be accurate.

The in-laws were dispatched without incident. Our little shack was approved of, our food was prepared and eaten with pleasure (sour-dough pancakes and barley jambalaya, oddly enough) and I missed most of it because I've come down with some sniffles. So I threw myself at some prose but my foggy head produced little of value.

As I was saying, prose poetry, according to what few rules are (mostly) agreed upon, should look like prose but magically be something different, although what, exactly, no one knows.

Both prose writers and poets tend to scapegoat the prose poem for this vagueness, but scapegoating is exactly what it is. The trouble is, no one is really able to define either prose or poetry, especially poetry. Prose can always fall back on its 'Hey, we don't use line breaks okay!' Poetry, however, being on shakier ground, usually resorts to socio-political theory to explain that if we think it sucks, we voted for Reagan. (My political reference is dated but so are most of these poetic movements.)

And the ubiquity of MFA programs for writing ensures-- insert rant against MFA programs here.

Anyway, I'm gonna fix everything. Aren't you glad? Shit, I am. (Also, I've been drinking this 'yogi tea' which is pieces of various tree barks and peppercorns and cinnamon and ginger that you boil for my cold and I think it has other odd properties...)

Now, bear in mind that most of what I am about to say has been discredited variously throughout literary history-- or, rather, bear in mind that I know that.

I think that certain modes of thought have inherent and natural forms of expression. Political argument, argument generally, expresses itself most easily and perhaps most forcefully in prose.

Evocation of the undefinable, whether varieties of love or God or nausea, finds itself most comfortably in poetry.

Time is also an easily divisive quality. Prose deftly creates the sense of time's passage, either slowly or abruptly, while poetry has at least a foot in the timeless.

Through the accumulation of these formal properties and their, to my mind, natural alignment (which is not to say they can't switch sides with powerful results) I'd like to create a kind of compass by which to navigate my ideas about text, and also create a kind of living map, via these prose poems, as a record of those explorations.

What makes this (i.e. the two pieces I've already posted) prose poetry is that it contains 'unbroken' prose elements and exists at the boundaries of prose space. The presence of the page, of the prose rectangle, defines how the prosy and lyrical play together. They are, perhaps, something like sculpture, half painting, half drama.

While all this may sound airy and theoretical it is really just the explication of my ambivalent, ambidextrous, ambiguous relationship to reading and writing. I've never fit comfortably into any genre of writing and I was never pruned or trained to believe anything about it by those who know better. The epic poem, the novel, the lyric, philosophy, tragedy, journalism, comedy-- none of these forms have ever moved me as such, but when any written work undoes me (which is how it feels, like I have been split, pared, unraveled, and have to begin all over again) as each of these have, it all feels the same.

It feels like a human being with rare gifts groping past the edge of their abilities.

In short, I think that each idea, each phrasing, each story, etc, had its own form. I'm trying to draw out these possibilities and the prose poem is how I think this can best be expressed.

Tall order.

my comma problem and yours

2010-01-16T09:11:00.000-08:00

I do have a comma problem but this post is not about that, it is about prose poetry and the perversity of my instincts.

There's a physical law yet to be named but it goes like this. The fewer people that care about any given topic or medium of art or scholarship, the more vicious and unyielding are the differences within its community.

I am, as you may all attest, a peace loving man. So it is certainly not from a love of combat or word-bludgeoning my weaker opponents into inchoate babbling followed by cellar-light vows of vengeance that I am interested in prose poetry.

Which is a very contentious subject indeed. Many poets and readers of poetry claim it doesn't even exist. People who don't read poetry are even less likely to read prose poetry. There is currently just one journal that specializes in it, though others do accept submissions. Which means that, what, maybe three people out of ten thousand actively read poetry. Which puts readers of prose poetry at <1 out of ten thousand, by my quick and dirty math. The numbers are probably actually far worse.

Which is not really that important to me. What is important is that what I am actually writing, the form of engagement with poetry and prose in these pieces, are likely not even to be accepted as prose poems by the few people who care. There are many, many accepted formal definitions, but they almost all agree that a prose poem should *look* like prose but *be* something else.

(Shit! My in-laws are a half an hour away! Gotta clean the bathroom... and myself...)

To be continued...

brought up short

2010-01-15T21:44:00.000-08:00



Our route grew like
                    grass
                          over the sea granite
as we moved across the rocks and sand with the
sweep of centuries.

You spoke of beauty
                    simply
taking the fabric between finger and thumb and I
began to warily discourse, rabbinical as I am able, on
the topic that rests like an explosive behind my heart.

     I thought: the edge of the ocean is her bridal veil.
White lace on the face of the waves.

     And I thought: or a horse brought up short and
foaming to go on.

We may be made known to each other. The imperfect
sphere of our perception may be passed from my
hand to yours. We may pronounce in chorus:

     “Yes.”
     “The ocean is beautiful.”

                                 But I am plainsman born
                                   an inheritor of ruins
                            
                                      The conduit of awe
                                    the ennobling terror
                           gone from there to its ghetto

     the ocean
     a horse brought up short
     and foaming to go on
     raging and halt at her edges
     for hers is an endless thirst
          to wed
               to range
                       to run.

                             Oh to loose her from stable
                              to rain beauty like sparks
                               across the widower plains
                                         across Kansas--

How better to spend a day at the beach than with a
beautiful girl, a bitter past, and apocalypse.

An ugly victory

2010-01-15T21:16:00.000-08:00

After trawling through some dreaded html tutorials, I was able to approximate my intentions, so I posted a prose poem. The font turns out strange, but I actually like it.

Thanks to those who offered support, including one Hale True who is less than a year old and already knows more about computers than I do, mainly because it showed a tacit willingness to read such things.

Do check out Hale True's blog. There is video of him chasing a laser pointer. It made me laugh until I cried.

The Broken Vessel

2010-01-15T20:52:00.000-08:00



     The broken vessel-- 
     the gestures 
     of a beggar child.

From the rooftops the buildings of the lobster village 
looked like shards of ancient pottery and we shattered
the bodies of the lobsters and exhausted the limes and
drew strength from butter and salt and paid with
American dollars before running down the prone stairs and
into the mud brick streets.

The archeologist. The tourist. The thief. 

     (We are the finders.)

We found him, the child with limbs thin as fingers and a 
body like a hand, curled around an accordion in front of 
a sweet shop near the ocean. The radiance of candied
oranges gave him a carpet of shadow. He was

an open letter
                that said yes
                                to anything
                                               but death.

     I yearn to strike
     all yearning from me
     yet so often
                        the fingers of an outstretched hand
                        are the five points of my features

and I am like a son reaching for his father.

I renounce evil powers.

2010-01-13T16:39:00.000-08:00

I really liked this essay by Garrison Keillor. Perhaps we can celebrate an 'inner republican' day.

oh my beautiful formatting!

2010-01-12T22:53:00.000-08:00

Well.

This format won't allow my formatting, or at least not with the limited tools in my possession (e.g. "cut" and "paste") so until or unless I can figure out how to post my prose poems as I want them, you will be spared reading them.

An Introduction to the Prose Poem

2010-01-12T22:40:00.000-08:00

I am trying to write a prose poem a day. Mostly I accomplish some phrasing and a page or two of notes that come together over the course of other days. As a strong draft emerges I will post it.

There is not an adequate definition of prose poetry for my own formal purposes, so I am attempting to define and illustrate with some rigidity my understanding of the form in this work. I do think that prose and poetry are distinct modes for writing and thinking, but believe that most texts are composed of both.

But the most important thing, as A-- reminded a few weeks ago, is to show up for work.

chia is a verb

2010-01-11T17:40:00.000-08:00

This is a story by my college roommate. Some of you will recognize him.

It's a story about 'manscaping.'

To put this in context, one Halloween Gavon took a rented axe to my Furbie dressed in nothing but a pair of tighty whities with "I *heart* Phil Collins" written on the ass.

Cybracero!

2010-01-07T22:48:00.001-08:00

I'd like to recommend the movie Sleep Dealer to all fans of Science Fiction who also have a soft spot for labor & immigration issues. It is available on DVD.

The romantic interest/female lead is also easy on the eyes, but as we know from watching Mexican television, every woman under 50 is ridiculously attractive while every man over 30 looks like a mariachi, and if this is accurate, why they are crossing the border but we are staying here is beyond me.

Essentially, it shows a not too distant world where the global south can provide for the real American dream-- all the work without the workers. The Mexicans stay in Mexico, but telecommute to robots who pick oranges, do construction, drive cabs, etc.

The concept is top-notch, the story is occasionally maudlin, the acting is serviceable, and the direction often inspired.

--- I guess living down here has me grasping a little for friends. No reason to write this, really, save it approximates human contact. 'Hey, I saw an interesting move.' 'Really, what was it?' 'This odd Mexican sci-fi film...'

wince noticeably

2010-01-06T21:19:00.000-08:00

In my continued quest to make all my interests and areas of specialty outdated, arcane, or just very odd, I came across a book called:

The Complete Book of Absolutely Perfect Housekeeping by Elinor Goulding Smith.

We visited Olga's parents in College Station Texas (Happy New Year, by the way, and Merry Orthodox Christmas!) and the title leoparded out at me from their inset kitchen bookshelves. "Hey now," I says to myself I says, "that seems like a joke."

And it is. This little book came out in 1956 and the cover, by the fantastic cartoonist Roy Doty, depicts a proper young housewife in a neat red dress and white apron with one arm cast dramatically across her forehead and the other holding a gun to a miniature house of four disastrous rooms- a burning stove, tower of laundry, etc. Doty's illustrations run throughout.

I've been going through it in order to find something to quote, but the humor builds on itself so much that, taken out of context, I worry they are a little flat. That's a fairly ridiculous worry, now that I see it written out.

On dishwashing

"Here a pet comes into his own, and you may speed the work greatly by simply placing the dishes on the floor for a half hour or so, while the animal does his share. A dog or cat is the most useful type of pet for this work. Birds, goldfish and turtles fail to perform effectively at this task.

While the dog or cat is completing his chore, you have your cue to retire for a minute to make a phone call or powder your nose, thus leaving things squarely up to your husband and children.

If this ruse won't work-- and it won't because they've all disappeared-- you may as well make up your mind that you're in for it... The hotter the water and the stronger the soap, the quicker the job will be done, and the quicker all the skin will slough off your hands. The trouble with dishwashing is that if you do it slowly you'll miss Groucho Marx but if you do it fast you'll break all the dishes. The latter is the less of the evils, and when you husband wonders why you're buying up so much new china you can honestly reply that you need it."

On Laundry

"First, throw away all your curtains. This will not only save washing and ironing time, but also taking down and putting up time, mending time, shopping time, starching time, etc. Second, throw away all your bedspreads. This will save hours of bedmaking time. They're awfully shabby anyway on account of the cat pulling off all the fringe. Third, throw away your table linens. They're old-fashioned.

You can't throw away all the clothing-- at least not if you're going to continue living in the same neighborhood-- but there are steps to be taken to cut down on the quantity. Every time you see one of your children taking a clean T-shirt, slap his hand. Every time your husband takes a clean pair of socks, wince noticeably. You might give up darning for a while, too. In time, they'll catch on all right. And you'll save hours of work."

And finally, Interior Decorating

"Sometimes accessories serve as conversation pieces. I don't know just what a conversation piece is for exactly, because if you and your guest can't think of anything to say to each other but 'My, what an interesting ashtray' it's my opinion that you shouldn't have invited the guest over in the first place. Why didn't you invite a friend over instead? Ashtrays are shaky foundations for an evening's conversation-- I don't care if they were part of a hubcab."

She wrote other books as well, a guide to child-rearing, and a book that includes these wonderful step-by-step instructions for building a Greek Temple.

Her husband seems a gem as well. Robert Paul Smith, author of Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing, a book advocating that children be left alone more, like they used to be, so that they could invent the world for themselves.

The book with the Greek Temple instructions is dedicated very humanely "to all the people, all over the world, who drop things."

narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life

2009-12-20T10:22:00.001-08:00

Little cat, so
thin on love
and barley.

--Basho

I have been scattered for the past few days. This post will bear the heavy mark of that. After a heady first week of work, I fell off a little. The intention is to recover, but with the holidays it is likely that little will be done between now and the first of the year. What has gone wrong? Perhaps my cooking hasn't been spicy enough.

A friend passed recently, a dog named Tess. I had known her for seven years. She was the companion to Liam, who comes to the Pub every day at noon and drinks a few pints of Hen. Tess was a fine old black lab who, in her younger days, would occasionally come by the pub without her old man and we'd have to call him. (This was before my time.)

In the past year she lost a great deal of weight and her trouble walking became more pronounced. She lost interest even in the treats we would give her. Liam had her put down last week.

Off to the Pub in the sky, old girl. I'll see you when I get there.

I found a new dangerous place in Santa Cruz, a bookstore called Logos. Despite the dandified sneer of the middle-aged host, or maybe because of it, the shelves are filled with odd and old used books for very little money. All the poor remaindered Tuttle editions of Natsume Soseki, two of which I hadn't found previously, and a number of old volumes of Andre Gide's work... I read and was much impressed by The Counterfeiters years ago, but hadn't sought out the rest of his work at the time. I devoured Strait Is the Gate in a single sitting.

The distance between such writing and writing now is too sad to really think on this morning.

But, like many major foreign writers, (Pessoa, Soseki, etc) Gide is hardly if ever read even by literate people in the country. The culture of reading has changed, I guess, and turns to books for reasons different from my own.

I read somewhere that the percentage of books published each year by foreign writers in translation hovers around 0.4-- Oy. It's probably higher, at least statistically relevant, if the books were limited to Fiction/literature, but still.

The Orthodox church nearby is devoted to St. Lawrence. I do enjoy all the stories of the saints, so I looked him up. The story is not usually told as a joke, but it is, and an excellent one.

St. Lawrence lived in pre-Christian Rome where to be elected to an office in the church almost assured martyrdom. St. Lawrence was elected Treasurer. He was promptly brought before the judge who ordered him to turn the treasure of the church over to Rome.
"But your honor, I will need three days to gather up all our riches."
Three days were granted to St. Lawrence.

During those three days, St. Lawrence tended the poor and sick and desperate just as he always had, but asked all those who were able to appear outside the courthouse when he was being tried inside.

One the appointed day, the judge asked St. Lawrence if he was ready to turn over the church's riches to Rome.
"I am ready, but our wealth is too great to fit in the courtroom. It lies outside. Come."

So the judge and the soldiers and all the observers followed St. Lawrence out of the courtroom. They found the steps and the streets filled with the poor in their rags and the sick in their torments. St. Lawrence turned to the judge.

"This is the treasure of the church. I entrust its care to Rome."

And when they were flaying him and roasting him on a spit, he couldn't stop laughing.

Something like wit

2009-12-16T09:50:00.000-08:00

Discovered yesterday afternoon in conversation with A.

'Pynchon is Dan Brown for assholes.'

Glib, over-simple, and mean-spirited, but I stand by it.

A Mind That Touches the Past -- Kuchment 2009 (1214): 2 -- ScienceNOW

2009-12-15T08:10:00.001-08:00

A Mind That Touches the Past -- Kuchment 2009 (1214): 2 -- ScienceNOW

Posted using ShareThis

Growling each letter to itself

2009-12-10T19:18:00.000-08:00

Letter to the Light

Morning's paper is splendidly unfolded
on the Earth, it is a new day
and a tractor is already out there with its lumpy fist,
writing a letter to the light, growling
each letter aloud to itself, for it's important
to get everything in, the thunder and the bees,
the ant trail that's extended it's little
silken foot in the grass, our peace
and the unease we feel about everything-- it has to get
all these in.

Large moist lines and a slow hand
that shakes a lot but now it's all said,
the page is full and everything's laid out in the open
like a letter to no-one, the plow's letter
to the light that anyone who wants to can read.

Rolf Jacobsen

amendment

2009-12-09T10:37:00.000-08:00

It should also be noted that my little sister, Stacie, also attended the church in Mentor, and that its function was also very social. We both benefited from the kindness of many of the Mentor United Methodist Church.

Feastless

2009-12-08T17:31:00.000-08:00

The St. Lawrence Orthodox Church occupies a broad, barn-like and very beautiful redwood building a scant two minute walk from my apartment in Felton on Highway Nine. Orthodoxy has fascinated me since my acquaintance with it, academically thru my Russian Studies major, and personally thru a lovely Professor, one Masha Kipp, who more or less adopted me in college, often providing my meal for the day accompanied by wine, brandy, good bread and literary argument. It values beauty, in an opulent, Near-Eastern manner, and retains enough old church qualities, like the singing of the service, the dedication of each day to one saint or event or another, to please me and seem, somehow, essentially honest. It will often surprise you with its modern lyricism. The church blooms 'like an orchid in Siberia' and the Lord is asked for mercy for all those 'unwatered by the streams of grace.'

However, incense makes my throat close.

Having a longing for devotion, prayer, and ritualized beauty, and believing in building my life thru the accident of what surrounds me, I stopped in last night for their Vespers service, sung almost nightly, and twin to Matins, a morning service more or less the same.

I can't say I grew up in any church per se. Our family was vaguely Irish Catholic but my grandfather had had a falling out (or, rather, a casting out) and this carried over to Mom, who also honestly worked too much to have time for church. The only church in Mentor, the little grain elevator town I lived in before the farm, was Methodist. Being a civilized sort of feral child and immensely curious, I began attending by myself, sitting in the unoccupied second row, and devouring everything, hymns, parables, homilies, that the services and their books provided.

Now, since the fervor of prohibition has mostly come and gone, Methodism has become one of the most milquetoast of the Protestant churches. They use grape juice for communion, and only do that once or twice a year, but other than that have adopted a bland, Mid-Western, middle-class tedium of faith, which was, for me, saved by the garrulous, fearless, melodramatic personalities of the mostly elderly membership. They hated and thwarted each other so politely! And the pancake feeds where all the kids served and stole sausage links dipped in syrup on the sly.

At ten I encountered my religious crisis, my first thoroughly intentional and conscious act as the man I have become, and left the church, tho retaining a sort of automatic monotheism and habit of prayer. The rest has been a reflexive animism grounded in the transcendence of beauty.

So I attended the small service, made up mostly of the monks actively serving, and stood along the back wall with one of those thin aged to agelessness women heavy with suffering and devotion found in every Orthodox church everywhere. They may not even be people, rightly speaking, but a kind of goblin native to the buildings.

How good it felt to sing the response, Lord. Have Mercy. in the ancient lilting minor key melodies. The plea for mercy-- I believe in this.

Kýrie, eléison.

After the service, I spent a modest amount of time looking at the many icons and the organization of the church. Imagine my surprise, and complete lack of surprise, when I turned to the icon directly behind me and found St. Patrick. Has it been you the whole time, Pat?

I could go on. I have an entire line of thinking based on Religious 'gesture'
for instance, but I'll leave you with some words from the newsletter that I essentially, tho clearly not in every detail, agree with, and describes what I try to counter when I invite people into my home.

"It seems thousands of years removed from us, but it was not so very long ago
that life was marked out by religious feasts. Although everyone went to church,
not everyone, of course, knew the exact contents of each celebration. For many,
perhaps even the majority, the feast was above all an opportunity to get a good
sleep, eat well, drink and relax. And nevertheless, I think that each person felt, if
not fully consciously, that something transcendent and radiant broke into life
with each feast, bringing an encounter with a world of different realities, a
reminder of something forgotten, of something drowned out by the routine,
emptiness and weariness of daily life.

Consider the very names of the feasts: Entrance into the Temple, Nativity,
Epiphany, Presentation, Transfiguration. These words alone, in their solemnity,
their unrelatedness to daily life and their mysterious beauty awakened some forgotten
memory, invited, pointed to something. The feast was a kind of longing
sigh for a lost but beckoning beauty, a sigh for some other way of living.
Our modern world, however, has become monotonous and feastless. Even our
secular holidays are unable to hide this settling ash of sadness and hopelessness,
for the essence of celebration is this breaking in, this experience of being caught
up into a different reality, into a world of spiritual beauty and light. If, however,
this reality does not exist, if fundamentally there is nothing to celebrate, then no
manner of artificial uplift will be capable of creating a feast."

Things not to do

2009-12-08T16:31:00.000-08:00

I could fill up the internets with my own personal list, but today's lesson is this: don't completely rewrite your work after a publisher has already agreed to publish it. It bothers your editors, who are very good people (and at least one them reads this blog) and will eventually earn you a reputation for being difficult. Which really isn't as interesting as you might think. As a once-editor myself, trust me, difficult artists are not more passionate or more interesting than others, they just get off on being willful, like two-year-olds.

And for complete transparency, here is basically the manuscript they first agreed to and prefer.

Oh, and in case there is any doubt, I rolled over. My revision will just live in my heart!

This contains some storyboard based suggestions, but you're all smart people. You'll get it.

KODOKU

1
Kenichi, the brave, Kenichi, the adventurer, but first, Kenichi, the little boy, sat perched like a bird along Osaka harbor. Sailors filled Osaka Bay with little sailboats, and all the boys liked to watch them. But no one watched as closely as Kenichi Horie.
The wind took the boats far from shore until Kenichi could see only the white dots of their sails. Before the day grew dark, all the white dots came closer and turned into boats again.
Kenichi wondered why.
Why come home when
the wind blows forever
across an ocean that never ends?

2
Kenichi's journey began with that question. Kenichi began to transform. He studied the living map of the stars. He learned the names of clouds. His hands became practiced with needle and thread.
During the day, Kenichi sailed with men and older boys. They teased him and worked him until his bones ached, but Kenichi never complained. At night, Kenichi drew sailboats, studied them, and then threw the drawings away.
One day, after Kenichi had learned all he could, he visited the shipwright in secret.
“Build this,” he said, “but tell no one.”
Kenichi visited the shipwright every day after that. Planks were slowly sanded and slowly bent. Wooden mallets slowly drove in wooden pegs. The workers moved so slowly!
“Stop yelling at my workers,” said the shipwright, “your boat will be ready tomorrow.”
Finally, the boat Kenichi dreamed was real. It floated proudly before him. He named it: The Mermaid.

[Two page Mermaid?]

3
Kenichi slung a fifty pound bag of rice over his shoulder. He squeezed rolled maps of the ocean floor and the sky under his arm. He put thirty jars of jam, a radio, and some books into a box and carried it all toward the Mermaid. He pulled eighteen gallons of water behind him in a wagon as he walked alone down the deserted streets to the harbor. Shadows filled Osaka Bay.He boarded the Mermaid, untied it, and sailed into black Osaka Bay. Only the little old woman who sold rice balls to the sailors saw him go. From Japan to America. From Osaka to San Francisco. From one edge of the Pacific Ocean to the other, because
the wind blows forever
across an ocean that never ends.

[Two page departure?]

4
But the ocean is a monster, and is home to monsters. Innocently the Mermaid floated, small as an eyelash, across its uncaring surface. The first monster came on cloud feet: the Typhoon!
The ocean scoured the sky. The wind drove its fists into the sea. In between, Kenichi was lost. Helpless. Alone. The typhoon fought the sea for fourteen days before it became bored and went away.

5
The ocean and the sky were bright and new and calm, but Kenichi could not see them. He sat huddled in a shadow. He had been so scared, but there were no arms to hold him, no eyes to warm him, no voice but his own. He cried out: Kodoku-- the cry of loneliness. Then Kenichi breathed evenly. He mended the little things the typhoon had broken. A porthole. The sail. His courage.

6
Swarms of fish followed Kenichi as he sailed. He bent his arm to the water, waited, then snatched the little fish from the sea. The good days tasted like fish.

7
Sometimes, in the enormity of life, we find friends we will never see again.
Kenichi met a pod of whales sunning themselves lazily in the wide soft ocean. When the wind told him that it was time to leave, he was full of sadness..

8
[The world grew bigger each day.] --Can be cut in favor of a two page spread.

9
The ocean hides great hunters. As the fish liked to follow Kenichi, Sharks liked to follow the fish. When the sharks came to feed, they slammed against the side of the Mermaid. Kenichi hid, trembling, until they were full, until he was sure they had left.

10
Ships are floating cities propelled across the ocean by enormous engines. They carry thousands of people. They weigh a million pounds. As the Mermaid passed through a ship's shadow, Kenichi waved at hundreds of people on deck. Then he sailed on, alone, with only the wind to help him.

11
Kenichi forgot about land. He forgot about everything but the never ending ocean, the wind that goes forever. Once the ocean was full of man-of-war, jellyfish like creatures that use the wind to sail. Kenichi forgot he was not one of them.

12
San Francisco carved a hole in the night with its lights. This was the end of his journey. Had he won? Was the ocean defeated? San Francisco Bay is filled with rocks. Biting his lips, Kenichi dropped anchor and waited until morning.

13
As the sun rose over North America, Kenichi sailed into San Francisco Bay. His soul was as big as a bridge. He stepped on shore and kissed the comforting earth. He burst with joy. But somewhere inside him, he heard, like the beating of a drum, the words:
The wind goes on forever
across an ocean that never ends.

the shout

2009-12-05T17:14:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I met with Hanae Rivera, illustrator of Kodoku, to try to work out her storyboards. I had known since my meeting with J. at Heyday that I couldn't stand most of my previous draft, but had hoped the feeling would go away. It didn't because I was right. My previous draft was not good enough. It was muddy, went in all directions, lacked form.

I had written it before I worked on Kodoku the play. In writing the play, I finally realized why Kenichi was important to me and why I felt the thrum of the story so powerfully. It's about becoming an artist.

Here is the new version. The first bit is just an informational paragraph. The later part of the manuscript is intentionally sparse to allow for some purely visual storytelling.

In 1962, twenty-three year old Kenichi Horie boarded a
sailboat called The Mermaid, left Nishinomiya, Japan and
began to cross the Pacific Ocean. His destination was San
Francisco, California. His solo journey lasted ninety-four
days and was the first of its kind. Kenichi Horie has spent
his life as an adventurer. His first sailboat, The Mermaid
was donated to the San Francisco Maritime Museum.

Kodoku

Kenichi watched the waters. The waters watched back.
They showed him the wind and the boats and the wind
moving the boats across the waters. White smudges on
Osaka Bay. The waters shouted to him.
The wind moves forever
across an ocean that never ends.
That is what Kenichi heard, but the shout is different for
everyone who hears it.

The shout leaped inside Kenichi like a heartbeat. To be a
sailor on that wind... To launch a boat across that ocean...
To prepare, Kenichi studied the living map of the stars. He
learned the names of clouds. His hands became practiced
with needle and thread.

Kenichi grew older but the shout stayed young.
The wind moves forever
across an ocean that never ends.
He bent wood into a boat that was small, sturdy, and fat.
She was built with his sweat. She was built with his blood.
She was built with his breath. He called her The Mermaid.

The journey began in a night with no moon. The waters
that called to him were black. The wind kissed the sails
softly, as if frightened to wake them. Only an old woman
saw him push off slowly from shore. No one knew he was
crossing the ocean.

The ocean is a monster and is home to monsters. The
typhoon came on cloud feet. Kenichi and The Mermaid
fought the monster for fourteen days before it became
bored and went away.

The waters were bright and new and calm, but Kenichi
could not see them. He sat huddled in a shadow. He had
been so scared, but there were no arms to hold him, no eyes
to warm him, no voice but his own. Those who follow the
shout will hear this also: Kodoku-- the cry of loneliness.

His journey became broader and stranger.
The good days tasted like fish.

In the enormity of life, there are friends you will only meet
once.

The shout can consume you. Kenichi began to forget
himself. There was only the ocean, only the wind. He lost
his past. He cared nothing for his future. He rode the wind
with men-of-war and thought he was one of them.

San Francisco carved a hole in the night with its lights. It
said, warm bath and it said hot meal and it said people!
Other people! Kenichi dropped anchor and waited until the
sun rose to show the way.

Kenichi's soul had become as big as a bridge. But even as
he touched the land again, and even during the parades and
parties and fame that followed, he heard it. The waters. The
wind. The leaping shout.
The wind moves forever
across an ocean that never ends.

The Daybooks of Samuel Brentano, Gestalt Detective

2009-12-01T11:54:00.001-08:00

Photographer Scott Squire and I are collaborating again this winter. He approached me some time ago about an imaginary documentary project, which became something of a docufiction exercise because that's how my brain was working at the time.

Scott sends me a batch of photos and I write a thousand word response to one of them. Then Scott responds to my story and sends more pictures. Eventually, we hope, this collaborative improvisation will be able to be published at great expense personally. Ha.

Here is the first installment.

The Daybooks of Samuel Brentano, Gestalt Detective

In the Autumn of the year ---3 an otherwise
unremarkable friend of mine inherited a sum of money from an
aunt at Marienberg am Rhein whose immediate line had died out.
The freedom thus conferred upon my friend allowed him to leave
our company suddenly and completely. Some years later I received
a letter containing the address of a decommissioned secondary
schoolhouse in West Seattle written in my friend's hand. The
envelope also contained a small, worn key. I was compelled to
wait until the completion of the winter quarter to make the
inevitable though vexatious journey. When I arrived, I found the
schoolhouse inhabited by a community of artists . The manager of
the property led me to a classroom on the third floor of the
building. The door that accepted the key bore the name of my
friend and a stencil of an eye. The door opened to a well-ordered
room. The shelving that covered the walls and windows contained
various cameras and equipment. Photographs had been clipped to
wires that ran across the ceiling from wall to wall. A broad
mahogany desk occupied the center of the room. My friend's
rather imposing high-backed throne sat at the desk while two
modest wooden chairs faced it. On the desk was a pile of
notebooks containing the following accounts of his cases. The
drawers of the desk contained colored pencils, aromatic pieces of
dark tobacco, and three rolls of jute twine. I have not edited the
notes of my friend and make no comment on their worth other than
this introduction and the sponsorship of their private publication.

Edmund Furey, PhD
Ithaca, New York

I am a detective. My name is writ thus on the door. The advert is in
the paper. I wait. I am waiting. Three weeks have passed. This
feels right. Something is coming-- the wind has come up and last
night looked like it would hail but did not. Rice has lost its taste
completely. The water tastes like radishes. The Brahms concerto is
still heroin. Something is coming.

Private Investigator-- the term doesn't fit. The discomfort we feel
turned it into Private Eye, a redundancy and a joke, or P.I. or pi,
which is better. Pi is the solution to all circles. We 'solve,' but the
answer goes on forever, unresolvable unwavering and unknown.

This is reflected in our literary history. When Poe, Edgar Allen,
invented us, he invented also our existential predicament. The
killer was an orangutang. That is to say, an innocent. The crime
was solved and at the same time the crime was erased.

Orangutang. A burning cathedral.

Something has happened. The precision of the causal chain is
clear. The radiator over-heated. I opened a window. The driving
wind caught the strap of a camera and slowly pulled it off the
shelf. It fell, but not into pieces, on the pillow where I rest my
head. The message was clear.

A gestalt detective doesn't wait for his case. He walks the street
until the sensitive ordering of his perception discovers and creates
it. I am out then with my camera on a walk. The hard streets of
West Seattle ring like a bell struck by a clapper of autumn light.

§

I heard the absence of the For Sale sign loud in the wind. Then the
immobility of the mobile. The truck stalled, acquiring roots of rust.
The camper a rolling stone no longer, now and for a long time now
rimmed with moss. Inside I knew and later found true it contained
an autonomous country of wasps, asleep in its winter. Mushrooms
instead like stalagmites and a child's toy as well, a green absinthe
sauropod.

I entered the home thru the window with the winding sheet. No
corpse tho. Only a pile of clothes holding it down and preserving
its sepulchral shape. The wind thru the window earlier, thus: the
detective thru the window at the scene of the crime, doubled by
my presence. Breaking, they say, and entering. The light breaking.
Breaks. Light breaks in. Crime in its absence, evidence in its
presence.

Why do we take photographs? They are evidence, either official or
sentimental, tho in fact we could consider sentiment the evidence
of our emotional, rather than criminal, history in the case life
makes against us. All the pictures had been taken off the walls.
Their absence squares of moonlight in the cigarette smoke yellow.
Witness and testimony.

The 'i' in those two words are the same. The private eye. I am there
in each of those words. In witness and in testimony. This is
important work!

In the corner of the largest bedroom a nightstand bore traces of
wax and dark stains from candles. An empty shrine to the Virgin.
Faintly, still, the caterpillar feeling of incense.

I heard the boots of two bulldozer men quickening the stairs but
they were so like the 'sound of boots' that I didn't know that they
were real until I felt them. While I was conscious they said
nothing. When my six senses returned I could perceive that they
had spoken of important subjects while I lay insensible beneath
them. A man's name had fallen onto the carpet. The fleeting nature
of time had touched the door frame. Nothing useful. Just the
itching of lost events.

Their boots smelled of seawater and engine oil. I remembered this
as I attempted to stand. A clue, I thought, falling over.

I should explain the sixth sense. To the five senses of taste, smell,
touch, sight, and hearing, is that which moves between them,
emphasizing and erasing, composing, posing. Called apprehension,
called perception, that sense of destiny, the sense of now.

Now! I left the house thru the front door, retrieved my camera
from the empty engine parts box where I had hidden it and caught
the bus just as it rattled to the stop.

The pain in my head tasted of raspberry sorbet.

The months and days are wayfarers of a hundred generations

2009-11-22T09:45:00.000-08:00

Yesterday my wife Olga turned 30. We were not able to celebrate together because she was down in Irvine at a conference, getting hugged by Joe Palca (NPR), and sang to by an entire room during a panel discussion. Instead, Irene and Jeremy came down to Felton to visit. We celebrated on Olga's behalf by wine tasting in the mountains.

After Irene and Jeremy headed back to Oakland, I settled in for my first night alone in our new place. As I was was operating on roughly four hours of sleep over 56 hours, had been wine tasting all day, and had nothing else to do, I poured myself a nice glass of Jameson, put on some Brahms, flipped thru Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior, stripped to my wife-beater and boxers, and got all dozy.

But first I wanted to charge my phone so that when the wife did call, I could talk to her. As she had taken our wall charger with her, I had to improvise. I went out to Nash Lenin, our second car, turned the key so the electrics would start, and plugged my phone into the car charger.

All of these details are important, really.

I read: "My close friends, who had been gathered since the previous evening, sent me off in a boat. When we climbed out of the boat at a place called Senju, I was depressed by the thought of the three thousand miles that lay ahead and shed tears at a parting in this illusory world." and fell happily to sleep.

It was roughly 6:30.

At 8:30 I wake to find two deputies standing at the threshold of the now open door to my apartment.

So there I am, half awake, half-dressed like poor white men always seem to be when John Law pays them a visit, staring blearily at two armed men.

They ask me my name, ask where my wife is, ask if I've been drinking ('not that we care, we're just asking'), and then proceed to enlighten me as to the reason for their friendly call.

Apparently a neighbor had seen my car with the keys in it, the phone on the seat, and the radio softly going, and had decided that I had been abducted or worse and called the sheriff, rather than knocking on my door or even just minding his or her own business.

The deputies give me my keys back, tell me my phone is in my car, and that I should probably keep my doors locked.

"We almost came in with our guns out."
"Well, I appreciate your restraint."

They also called the last number in my phone, which was Irene. They didn't tell me they got a hold of her and freaked her out with their (im)probable abduction story.

My phone retrieved and John Law gone off to protect and serve elsewhere, I pour myself another glass of Jameson and dozily keep Basho company on his journey.

Then Jeremy calls to see if I have been abducted, because the sheriff called and told them I had been. They are relieved that I am in possession of my own person.

Then Olga calls to see if I have been abducted because Irene had called her to see if I had been. She was pretty sure I was unabducted.

Quite a bit of fuss. A drama involving at least one nervous neighbor, a dispatcher, two deputies, and three cities, (Oakland, Felton, Irvine) two friends and one wife, all around a phone charging in a car and a man napping in his apartment.

before the stoneday blows the men and animal-swarms empty

2009-11-08T12:41:00.000-08:00

That's a line from Paul Celan.

Hello neglected readers, neglected intent. One would think that my own crush in Kansas would have made for ample posting here, but somehow, things worked out differently. My writing has proceeded apace, as they say, but on many other projects.

For instance, Hanae and I signed our contracts with Heyday Books on Wednesday for Kodoku.

It lives.

But I have no time to pause. Remember: "It's later than you think."

My work has been filled recently with a Minotaur, the mythical city Quivera, a giant named Hunger, the diaspora of pigeons, and, today, the ancient oak forest of Long Valley, north Monterey Co, and the crack of a whip.

Tomorrow I'm finally going to make the pilgrimage to Tor House, the stone home built by Robinson Jeffers and his son. Robinson Jeffers is one of the finest poets of the 20th Century but only a handful of people know it. Here, I'll prove it.

Tor House

If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:
Perhaps of my planted forest a few
May stand yet, dark leaved- Australians or the coast cypress, haggard
with storm drift; but fire and the axe are devils.
Look for the foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art
to make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.
But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years:
it is the granite knoll on the granite
and lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel
River-Valley, these four will remain
in the change of names. You will know it by the wild sea-fragrance of the wind
though the ocean may have climbed or retired a little;
You will know it by the valley inland that our sun and our moon were born from
before the poles changed; and Orion in December
evenings was strung in the throat of the valley like a lamp-lighted bridge.
Come in the morning you will see white gulls
weaving a dance over blue water, the wane of the moon
their dance companion, a ghost walking
by daylight, but wider and whiter than any bird in the world.
My ghost you needn't look for; it is probably
here, but a dark one, deep in the granite, not dancing on wind
with the mad wings and the day moon.

--Robinson Jeffers

Of more topical things I will speak later.

clouds

2009-10-02T08:57:00.001-07:00

I translated a poem this morning. I like it, so I'm posting it.

Clouds

There is nothing that is not
a cloud. The cathedrals of unbound
stone, yes, and the stained glass,
all wait to be erased.
The Odyssey, shifting with the sea,
is strange again with each new reading.
Already, your face in the mirror has changed
and the day is a dissimulating labyrinth.
We are the ones who go. The cloud that disintegrates
is our image. Incessantly, the rose becomes another rose.
You are the clouds, you are the sea, you are oblivion.
You are the one you have lost.

--Jorge Luis Borges
(trans. William Emery)

Kodoku

2009-09-24T07:31:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I sent a proposal for a children's book to Heyday. Last week (my god, it was just last week) I received some happy noises from them, and and was then inspired to work the material into a play, as my friend Su suggested. This has taken over my writing time and led me away from this proposal. It is going very well, so I don't want to let it alone until I get a draft done. But, as this blog is about my writing as a whole, and publishing, obviously, I thought I'd mention it.

Gee, ain't I laconic. In truth I am very, very excited by this news, not the least of which because I am working with artist Hanae Rivera.

Anyway, here is the proposal. It is inspired by more formal proposals but tailored to Heyday Books and the people I know there.

Kodoku
a story for children by William Emery
illustrated by Hanae Rivera

Proposal for Heyday Books

Summary

Kodoku is a 32 page picture book about the legendary Japanese Marine Adventurer, Kenichi Horie. He first made history in 1962 when he sailed alone from Osaka to San Francisco, the first man to ever achieve such a feat. The book begins with Kenichi as a child, fascinated with the ocean, in love with the winds, watching the sailboats ride the waters around Osaka. Kenichi's plan takes shape as he grows older, learns to sail and to read the stars as a map, until he leaves Osaka, in secret, to sail alone across the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco on his boat, The Mermaid. The rest of the story contains Kenichi's adventures on the ocean until he arrives in San Francisco, 94 days after his departure.

Sales and Marketing Potential

50th Anniversary
Kenichi made his historic journey in 1962. 2012 will mark the 50th anniversary. Kenichi Horie continues to be an important figure in the world of sailing and 'maritime adventuring.' A children's book of his beginnings will be perfectly timed.

Kenichi Horie
Kencihi Horie continues to make history with his solo sailing. In 2008 he became the first man to sail across the Pacific in a wave-powered boat. He celebrated the 40th Anniversary of his first voyage in 2002 by sailing a replica of the original Mermaid made from all recycled materials across the Pacific. It seems very likely that he will be celebrating the 50th Anniversary of his voyage in a similarly newsworthy fashion.
I have contacted a few yacht-clubs that he has ties to and a couple reporters who have interviewed him in the hopes of getting in touch with him. It seems likely that he'd be interested in being involved with the book in some capacity.

The Mermaid
The Mermaid, Kenichi Horie's original sailboat, is a part of the San Francisco Maritime Museum's collection. A co-publishing arrangement would be worth pursuing, though I understand that currently the museum is closed for renovations. I have not been able to contact anyone directly involved. Maritime Museums in general will be great nontraditional sellers of the book. There are 648 Maritime Museums alone in the United States.

Audience
The simple bravery of the story, a man sailing the ocean alone, will appeal to a wide variety of readers. At the same time, the inherent multicultural message and the Japanese protagonist will appeal to the Asian American community, and anyone interested in diversity in children's literature.

Foreign Rights
Though Kenichi Horie is well-known in sailing circles world-wide, in Japan he is extremely famous. Japanese rights would seem like an easy sell.

The Story of the Project

Joanne first came to me with the idea when we both worked at Heyday. She was just beginning her push for more children's titles and had run across The Mermaid in the SF Maritime Museum. They displayed the boat with a plaque that told the basic story. She told it to me and I ordered a copy of Kodoku: Sailing Alone across the Pacific, Kenichi's Horie's log, out of curiosity. But, as writers and illustrators cannot be ordered out of thin air by the staff of a publishing company, I set the book and the idea aside.

When I encountered the art of Hanae Rivera, a friend and co-worker, the idea came back with great force. Something about the soft, sinuous muscle of her art, and her fascination with things aquatic inspired me to attempt the story in collaboration with her.

I first wrote up a very literal re-telling of his log. The book began when Kenichi left Japan and ended when he arrived in America. The story moved through a series of events, ranging from atomic explosion to eluding rescue, from sharks to man-of-war. I tried to use the simple charm of his prose style and included direct phrasing such as 'like a astronaut on the loose.' I showed this version to Joanne, now at Tricycle, to get her feedback. While still excited by the project, she gave me a tutorial in the rules and formal preferences of the children's book world (information neither of us had when we were at Heyday, incidentally).

Hanae's illustrations and sketches for the project date from this first draft. She is flexible enough to change her style and/or tone as Heyday sees best.

I worked out a new version that followed Joanne's advice. I abandoned the attempt to reproduce his naive language and began the story in his childhood. What eventually emerged was a much more emotionally forceful retelling in a language more my own. I again showed the draft to Joanne who said that it was ready to sell.

Of the ways in which this project could become a book, my first preference is publication by Heyday. It was born there, was shaped by two former-employees, and is a place that I love that produces work that I adore. I think Kodoku might be a good book for Heyday and I hope this project might be another moment in a life-long relationship with the press.

So that's my story and this is my proposal.

Sincerely,

William Emery Justice

I am at war

2009-09-09T16:20:00.001-07:00

This is the first draft of the first three stops along my world-and-year-wide tour. It begins in immense turmoil (and Lebanon is next, followed by Uzbekistan). I've realized that there are three historical divisions at work in this story. Muslim vs. Christian world. Colonialism vs. well, everyone, really. And finally Globalization vs. Economic Independence (also, everyone, really.)

To throw myself into these worlds, currently imagined from research's thin gleaning, to attempt it at all-- Well, I have to be Faust once in my life.

Crete
Arrival on the Island of Aphrodite. The impetus for this strange journey explained, my small host of vines on the Kansas plains. Commandaria, the world's first wine? Ayios Mamas: a partisan village from the war for independence. Revecca Spirits Winery. Traditional, preserved. First harvest. Then, travel north, towards Nicosia, a city torn in two. Arrival at Vlassides Winery in Kilani. Innovation and chemistry. The Turkish legacy, once settlers, now laborers. The future of antiquity.

Turkey
Is this enemy territory? Armenian genocide, Islam, Cypriot invasion. Black market production. Arrival at the Corvus Winery on the wine island of Bozcaada. The vanguard of quality Turkish wine. Then, off to Elazig, in Eastern Turkey, to harvest Oküzgözü, one of Turkey's traditional varieties. A trip to Mt. Ararat, site, it is said, of Noah's vineyards.

Israel
Arrival in Galilee. Wine and the Old Testament. Yekev Ben-Zimra Winery, Israeli co-operative agricultural tradition. The Golan Heights Winery. Wine-making in a contested land. A spectator in the experimental wine-making station. Then, the Cremisan Winery in Palestine, founded in 1885.

Messina Hof

2009-09-08T13:48:00.000-07:00

Howdy! I'm in Texas.

First, the personal update: We have moved house. I now have a cozy little room in what was once our garage, and an apartment in Felton, California, north of Santa Cruz, which has yet to be set up.

Today, this work begins again. The proposal will be done by the end of this week.

I'll be in touch.

in spirits

2009-08-28T13:32:00.000-07:00

Last night, Jason, the manager of Solano Cellars, which is my living library of oenophillic study, and where I frequently get drunk, made an Old Speckled Hen pilgrimage to the Pub where I tend the taps. The week previous I tasted Francis Coppola's "Sofia" Riesling. And dammit, it was good, and the price was right, so I ordered a few cases.

I admitted this to Jason when he arrived.

"Hold out your hand." Smack!

But at least, he allowed, it's a Riesling.

I have been well. We've been 'moving' for two weeks now, are perhaps 70 percent finished, and I haven't had time for almost anything else. This project has been paused, but I am going to make more time for it. I'm finally done fucking around. My life is my own now, no more wasted time, no more whine-y namby-pamby bullshit.

But first, I have to box up my kitchen.

dehousing

2009-08-21T17:06:00.000-07:00

Despite my best intentions, life has overrun this project for now. We're moving to Santa Cruz and our garage, respectively, and I've had no time for else. Things should improve next week, marginally.

The revolution in Wine-- thoughts

2009-08-18T22:47:00.000-07:00

(This was written two years ago before a research trip to upstate New York. I was then interested in a book on Native American Wine-- to follow up the then unpublished Edges of Bounty. I couldn't convince myself of its worth at that time.)

"To come to terms with the shallowness of the material. Cups and saucers. It is neither the small specific eternal, an axe, much wood use, a thousand hands in its atmosphere, nor a useful catagory-- love, honor, truth.

Moreover, it is corrupted. Surrounded by midge noise black flies gnats mosquito hum. Luxury, expertise, power.

The enormity of the fortunes and the span of empire.

These forces carry a kind of psychic weight. Once can fight or play into or attempt to see honestly. The force is real but the basis is false.

The author's option is to create his own world in story or a personal associative philological texture of expression.

But in nonfiction, every thing is more immediate- the distillation doesn't happen... or that is my fear. A fear of immediacy.

I am discontent.

Wine as peasant craft.
Expression of place, but ignoring the fetish of place, the privilege of it... specificity and distinction without the exclusion of others... kaleidoscope. Non-hierarchical.

I must always return to the thing itself. It is not a redemption- the is no solution- (or, what is 'solution') but it is a touchstone, a grounding moment a method of honesty.

'Discriminating.' Don't forget the larger issue-- this is part of a liberating work. Take this seriously. It is good work.

The thing is, this has not been clearly articulated..."

There is a lot here to cling to, enlarge, and finish. A fine document found while cleaning out my garage.

late night cleaning

2009-08-18T13:52:00.000-07:00

"Knowing that it is the earth that we walk, we learn to walk carefully, lest it be rent open. Realizing that it is the heavens that hang above us, we come to fear the echoing bolt of thunder. The world demands that we battle with one other for the sake of our own reputation, and so we undergo the sufferings bred of illusion. While we live in this world with its daily business, forced to walk the tightrope of profit and loss, love is an empty thing, and wealth mere dust before our eyes. The reputation we grasp at, the glory that we seize, is surely like the honey that the cunning bee seems so sweetly to brew only to leave his sting within it as he flies. What we call pleasure in fact contains all suffering, since it arises from attachment. Only thanks to the existence of the poet and the painter are we able to imbibe the essence of this dualistic world, to taste the purity of its very bones and marrow. The artist feasts on mists, he sips on dew, appraising this hue and assessing that, and he does not lament the moment of death. The delight of artists lie not in attachment to objects but in taking the object into the self, becoming one with it. Once he has become the object, no space can be found on this vast earth of ours where he might stand firmly as himself. He has cast off the dust of the sullied self and become a traveler in tattered robes, drinking down the infinities of fine mountain winds."

--Natsume Soseki, from Kusamakura

I'd like to rewrite this section, this entire book, really. But, regardless, what I can only imagine is the beauty of the original is discernible behind the fog.

A dirty joke for Kyle

2009-08-14T10:58:00.001-07:00

I first heard this from my friend Maggie. We trade jokes.

Every year a pub in Dingle holds a dirty limerick contest, and every year, since the contests inception, Seamus O'Shaughnessy, the dirtiest old man in the county, wins. The prize is gentlemanly- a free pint of porter.

The contest came around again and Seamus scratched his head and arse and downed glasses of malt whiskey until inspiration struck. Snickering filthily and leering at lasses, Seamus O'Shaugnessy took his dirty limerick, yet again, into the pub the morning of the contest. After giving the barman a certain look, Seamus went home, had some soup, and recited some of his thirty or more winning dirty limericks, already savoring victory.

When he ventured back to the pub in the evening and demanded his free pint of porter the bartender shook his head.

"You didn't win this year Seamus."
"Wasn't my limerick filthy enough for you?"
"It made me sick to my stomach, Seamus, but someone wrote something even worse."

Seamus couldn't believe what he had heard. Everything went black, and there was an irritating little whine in his ears. When reason resumed her seat, he had only one question.

"Who is it what wrote a filthier limerick than me? Tell me!"
"It was Sister Mary Agnes, from the nunnery, Seamus."

Everything went black again and when Seamus returned to himself he was walking furiously toward the nunnery.

He smashed his fist into the door until someone opened it. Sister Mary Agnes greeted him shyly and inquired after his business.

"You know very well what I want. You beat me in the dirty limerick contest and I can't believe it. I need to hear the limerick that beat mine."

"Ok," said Sister Mary Agnes slowly, "but I'm too embarrassed to say the really dirty parts. So, if you don't mind, I'll simply say 'ta-ta' for those instead."

Seamus thought this ridiculous but told her to go on, out with it, let's have it then.

Sister Mary Agnes cleared her throat and recited:

"Ta-ta ta-ta ta-ta-ta

ta-ta ta-ta ta-ta

ta-ta ta-ta ta-ta-ta

and they fucked in a river of shit."