Hillary's Speech at the DNC Tonight

made me think of Lucille Clifton's lines:

"...come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed."

Kurt Vonnegut

to Norman Mailer: "I am cuter than you are."

I'm enjoying Letters: Kurt Vonnegut, edited by Dan Wakefield, nearly as much as I am (concurrently) enjoying the novelist's Timequake.

Elephants May Help Us Cure Cancer. So Maybe Now We Should Stop Torturing These Intelligent, Social Creatures, Stop Putting Them in Circuses and Zoos and Stealing Their Lives from Them.

Hope.

The Devil's Ice Cream Spoon and the Devil's Flypaper

And there is the devaluation of the thing, which is taken for granted, because people are generally willfully blind. I see a great deal of worth in the thing, a spiritual dimension that opens, quite often, and in this (yes, transactional) super-surface of the joined bodies, I often see pathos, noblesse and sometimes even generosity (as in, say it: a marriage). Although this is the surface of Eros when it goes out walking, when it goes for a stroll. It is true that this is rarer between men and women in this context, but it is by no means absent. It depends on what there is and what one is seeing. The act does not vary. The perceiver fluctuates wildly. There must be the genuine. It is not an abomination to see pleasure or even kindness there, even if you believe it is Golgotha. We must allow for the human softness, as ubiquitous as the human armor. The question of projection is sometimes seen as the crux of the thing. But that's not a given. It depends on one's objectivity versus one's primal (some would run to "infantile") cathexis. But I am mostly talking of men. Men are perhaps more transactional. There's really no way to talk about it without some idiot reverting to the sexism meme. And it's double-edged. You're guilty of sexism if you acknowledge its worth, because women are generally prey in this world.  And to say men are capable of a form of transcendence, a workable empathy, in what the pure believe is Golgotha, you're guilty of a second sexism, of bronzing an inequity in performance or affect. Something like that. These are, admittedly, generalizations. There is everything to be seen there, in that creamy realm, good and bad. To pretend it is one thing is like pretending that literature is one thing. It's madness to talk about it as if there were a unified field theory concerning its ultimate structure. Its substructure. Probably there will never be an atomism. It's as random as all other human interactions. In this lies the possibility of human ugliness and/or human beauty. Schools of social fish will veer as one, in an anxious silvery pack of pure reflection, hoping to demonstrate how aversion is enacted. It's like the flexing of a muscle under the sea. It's pure automatism, the subconscious, fear. They are trying to school you. But to allow one's surface to become a mirror at that moment is to admit the absence of any true interiority. It is to be as dumb as a fish.

(exist)

friend deer at the bottom of my street, early morning...

TIL that Meryl Streep is So Good...

that when Margaret Thatcher died, a news program in Thailand broadcast this photo of La Streep as The Iron Lady, mistakenly believing it was a photograph of the former Prime Minister.

Black Swan Rampant

I have this sinking feeling that Hillary Clinton will be subject to a major sneak attack in the eleventh hour of this election countdown. I am virtually certain Trump will have prepared a destabilizing blow that will upend the media to the point where a fair election will be impossible. I just do not see this guy going quietly into the final hour if he's down in the polls. It does not comport with his personality and his tantrums. Something "yuge" will happen. And I worry that this will be the defining, "Rubicon" moment when democracy is no longer respected. Because Trump's faith has always been in media and spin, not in democracy. Prince of Lies, move over; there's a new sheriff in town.

If this happens, this should surprise no one as Trump has already disrespected and disavowed all of the Four Freedoms. He said he saw no problem with Putin killing journalists ("freedom of speech and expression"). He believes those who write unflattering things about him should be stifled. He wants to ban Muslim immigration ("freedom to worship God in one's own way). Fearmongering is his modus operandi;  he indicated that he saw no problem with torturing the innocent families of terrorists. So much for "freedom from fear." He has indicated that he will cut programs which provide essential services to Americans ("freedom from want"). So many millions are following this demagogue because he wants to "make America great again." Apparently, he wants to do this by traducing the very principles which made us America.

Here's How the People Who Probably Shape American Culture More than Anyone Else Feel about the Possibility of a Trump Presidency

An Open Letter.

Existence

Existence is the first miracle. Explanation is the second. Now, which one lies?

Air Force One

Air Force One passed over my head so many times today you'd think I had it on a string. I was shooting expired film, walking around Highspire (little riparian town named for a church spire boatmen--bargemen?--could spy) and apparently the highly-beefed, big ol' jet airliner was doing practice runs at HIA (Harrisburg International Airport). I googled just now and learned it was doing those there as early as 2010. I bet it flew over Three Mile Island more than once. Not surprisingly, its flight pattern favored the Susquehanna River.  I didn't really have an appreciable zoom. But maybe it's best I didn't. That plane probably knows if you're looking at it too closely. And then I'd hate to get vaporized where I stood just for an aesthetic appreciation of a form. It was sort of sweet to see. There was some apophenia. It felt as though I were watching a high school instrumentalist oh-so-earnestly practicing a piece soon to debut in the school's spring program. It felt very kidlike, Air Force One. I felt the innocent desire to please in that plane. It's a slightly awkward youth pretending (hoping) it's graceful. It wants to be deemed stalwart. It is hoping you believe it's these things. If only we could ask it for its autograph, we would make its year. It would sleep well that night.

Seeing a World That Isn't There (Okay, Maybe One Aisle Over)

If I ever bought a racehorse (and this won't happen, since I don't believe in horse torture) I would name the thoroughbred "C'est à pleurer." Or, rather, I would name it "Cestàpleurer." And the man with the old-timey voice who calls the races over the track's loudspeakers as it all goes down live would excitedly narrate, "Sestaplurrer has just taken the lead!"

Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn married somebody's daughter.

If

If you are going to be an alcoholic to the degree that you die of it, probably a good place to do it is a house or condo or apartment beside the ocean.

Every Day

Every day I walk alone for many miles and the (dark-holding) trees look at me and say, "Please hurry up and be meaningful." 

Quainter and Quainter: On the New York Times' Use of Honorifics

Apparently, I"m not the only one slightly put off by the New York Times' use of honorifics ("Mr.," "Mrs." "Ms." etc.).

I found this exchange interesting. (The comments there are also very much worth reading.)

I agree with the writer who is being queried there that this obsessive use of honorifics feels increasingly archaic, quaint and almost parodistic.

It's not that I think there is no use for honorifics in journalism . But I feel the Times writers use these honorifics excessively. I realize this probably speaks to the idea of consistency; that is, if the writer uses it once in an article, he or she must use it throughout. I don't think that's necessarily the case. I think if you find a rhythm and respect the language you can alternate somewhat. Otherwise, the honorific starts to sound like a verbal tic.

The problem is that by now we are used to the metonymic principle that the surnames of public figures represent those figures quite well. So these honorifics end up sounding a little silly, as if we were constantly bowing and introducing these figures upon their arrival at, say, an overly polite tea party.

I'm guessing the biggest argument among those marshaled by the pro-honorifics camp is probably the most superficial one: cachet. This obsessive use of honorifics certainly marks the Times as distinct. But I don't think that necessarily means it confers distinction.

Mad Person's Bill of Rights

Lately, I've been wondering whether there shouldn't be a "Mad Person's Bill of Rights." For example, I think it's terribly unfair that as a mad person I cannot ask sane people mad questions. Yet sane people are allowed to ask me sane questions all day long. How is this fair?

Approval / Disapproval

When I am in the human world, the opposite of "approval" is "disapproval." When I am out walking in the woods, the opposite of "approval" is "do something else."

Never Explain Your Poem

I am telling you never to explain your poem while I am preparing to explain mine. In the poem below, the quaint image of the mail process used by poets in the pre--internet Stone Age to submit poems via snail mail (and still practiced by a few voodoo doctors or superannuated atavists) focuses upon the importance of the placement of the poem in the faith of the envelope, which vessel is then placed in the faith of the mail ("dark water") to reach an "editor of loneliness" (I, too, cringe) who then pounds a nail into the hull of the (poem? envelope? both?) before returning the poem/boat sinking to the ship maker poet. Maybe the important thing for the ship maker is not the return of the boat but the congress with the sea. It is a perverse thought, but sailors and ship makers usually are perverse. You can find them in the most unusual beds. The faith of putting the poem in an envelope is a physical faith. The tongue participates, licks the body of the envelope in a poor man's Eucharist (moistening with a sponge is for the insincere) and this is like the faith present in every moment in which one licks one's beloved (or near-beloved). Like a cat. I can remember the intimacy of these moments in my youth, the church of this boring rite. I mean the licking of envelopes, not the licking of lovers, which wasn't so boring. I think why the words emerged thusly in that poem is this idea that the boat is not complete without the envelope, the social envelope of the poem. The social envelope is meant to be torn to bits whether the poem's "ship-setting ritual" is successful or not. Its protective body will be torn like Bacchus in an act of violence which will turn out to be, nevertheless, very disappointing should this act be too carefully or closely compared with that revelry of ancient, mythological destruction. But the metaphor suggests a kernel of divinity. Bacchus's body may be torn to bits. But Bacchus may not be torn to bits. Maybe the Bacchantes got off on this fact. The ship is torn to pieces and either the poem sails back or the laurel leaves of an acceptance (is there not secretly then a grieving by the poet for the child stolen as if by fairies and, possibly, actually by fairies?) The returning (rejected) poem is like the prodigal son. It might be hated and spurned by its maker. It might by stomped in front of its more comely and promising siblings. It might be embraced for itself, the spiritual fact of itself, or for its growth potential. It depends on the degree of enlightenment of its maker. Perhaps the returned poems should be our great loves. They stayed loyal to their maker. Only he or she could love them. The poem that was published would rather lose its maker. It dances on the sea with its show-off sails. But those are copies, reflections, fame ghosts. The real poem, published or not, languishes in a drawer or on an electronic device somewhere. The one the maker's hands touched. It will doubtless be destroyed and no one will be there to console it. It seems a lonely business all the way around. The only solution, apparently, illogically, is for the ship maker to be buried with his or her ship. Or burned with it.  Probably Vikings did this, sincerely. Authentically. But we are traitors when compared to the Vikings. We might not drive as many spikes into as many heads as they did, but we know something is missing. All those little shining beads of character woven into that long, gnarly hair. We smolder with envy. But we have attempted to recapture this with the resurgence in Viking beards lately, a fad which I note is now nearly over. We have no sticking power for the feral things we desire most. We are pagans manqués. We know inside that Vikings were never slumming it, and one glance at the contemporary scene lets us know that we are only too happen to fall into that modus vivendi.  Let us for once be glaringly truthful and admit that most forms of social media are couches and that most occupants of those social media couches are couch louts. 

Corner

Let us agree to blame everything on the speed at which things happen.

From the viewpoint of contemporary (provisional) physics, this is certainly a tenable argument. It holds water, or whatever arguments are expected to hold today. Quarks.

I mean by this that I am very interested in the dilatory aspects of existence. Maybe this is because art largely lives in the dilatory. A moment--a painting, music, vicissitudinous poem--dilates, opens a space within you and that interiority breathes, or does something very much like long, slow breathing. You walk the wet city streets afterwards, breathing that poem, song buried alive by that car door you just slammed, that series of paintings where the real action happened in the wall space between bright canvases in which you (correctly) intuited the real abyss the painter had felt between canvas A and canvas B. That long gone interim respires. And your body is the perfect nook, like a sunlight corner on the perfect floor of prime architecture in a city where "to recede" costs a great deal of money.

I am looking at the INSERT key and thinking

so much depends
upon

But this is an argument of Logos and not an argument of physicality. Hence bullshit

Stamp

It used to be
when you were lonely
in the way that forests are lonely,
you would lick a stamp
and put that particular bit of loneliness
in a thing like a sailboat made of paper
which was called an envelope
and set that little boat down
on the dark water of the mail
and wait
for someone at the other end,
an editor of loneliness,
to scoff and send it back
with a nail driven in its paper hull
so that it arrived back,
sinking,
ridiculous.

The Monster Says

The monster says, "Oh, you have antipathies. Those are as good as gold. Those are as good as endearments." By this, my monster means there is motivation, a bad surfeit of it in the world. There is motivation in the world. This is gold. To have motives is gold, an endless fountain keeping one at rapt attention. Antipathies are such a fountain. What could be more nourishing to this inner spirit than a QWERTY dipped in vitriol and not even held at any place in the magic, dipping moment, like Achilles with that baby heel of his, dripping with it, and oh those annealing properties of the nasty stuff? Use a magic string.  Certainly, it gets you out of bed. It makes you believe in magic numbers between you and the objects of your antipathies, which are the subject. The unreal interface of these magic numbers is everything. It is as real and interesting as the molten gold of a trashy pond's surface when the sun is at the perfect angle to produce phantasmagoria. The things that humans dropped are focal points. Trash. In those moments, you believe the quickening gold surface of the water, its arabesques and trills of light, is a secondary source of being, a symptom of light and not light itself. So the illusion is had, which is exhausting and somehow tainted with pleasure, like all illusions. But this impels you forward. So your monster falls silent at the "correct moment," to keep you grasping at this texture which is ultimately itself, other, another wasted opportunity to swallow an actual star and feel its slow burn, the gift of a certain form of blindness burning inside you, that acid star, so brightly at home within one that to open one's eyelids is no longer seeing.

The Literature of Quint

Watching Jaws in the middle of the night and relishing Robert Shaw's performance as Quint. 

Did you realize this man was actually a literary phenom too?

Oh Puhleez

I was looking at a list of people who have gone missing under mysterious circumstances.

I was particularly taken with the ridiculously quick "resolution" achieved in the disappearance of Guma Leandro Aguiar.

The family got him declared dead after less than three years when the usual legal requirement is seven?

That boat driven up onto the beach totally looks like a set-up. His body would almost certainly have been found if he went overboard that close to shore.

This article has the GPS info (see the embedded video) showing he almost certainly jumped from one boat to another.

Note the reassembly of Aguiar's "team" in the Netherlands.

This man is almost certainly alive.

I'm sure he was declared dead so soon because the rich generally get their way in court.

It sounds as though Aguiar was having a really hard time of it with bipolar disorder. Maybe he needed a way to exit a marriage that wasn't working for him and find a space to clear his head.

It would have been so easy for him to secret away funds in any number of overseas accounts or to have had friends hold money for him. It's also possible that he is acting in collusion with certain members of his own family. I suppose it could all come down to fiduciary and other financial forensics. That's probably where the answer lies.

P.S. Guma, call me. I avoid people a lot too, know what it's like to be bipolar, and I would love to have a bowling partner I could hit up for the occasional ten thousand dollars "until next Friday." I know you're not swimming with the mermaids.

Suzanne Vega Revival Catch-Up Phase

Listening to Suzanne Vega again and realizing how different she (still) is from everyone else.

I knew she was married and then I heard one song that made me wonder if that song might make people question (singer persona confusion) whether she might be gay.

So I googled it and found this hilarious reply by her to a somewhat impolite tweet.

“@Poop_Dragon: Is Suzanne Vega a lesbian? She looks like she would be a complete disaster around a penis.” I have NEVER had complaints, sir.

— Suzanne Vega (@suzyv) March 12, 2014

And why does this artist only have 23K followers on Twitter. She's one of our finest living songwriters.

An Old Man Who Knows He is Going to Die Soon

An old man who is utterly alone in life and knows he is to die soon spends a lavish amount of money on a new roof for the old house in which he has lived a great number of years. This seemingly irrational expenditure is not for any sense of security it will give him (which is meaningless) but rather out of gratitude to the house which sheltered him. He wishes the house to "live on" and afford other people (strangers he will never meet) the same comfort it gave him for so many years. No difference between the this and the tenderness the artist feels for her artistic creations. Perhaps the feeling is even similar to the parent-child protective love. We are the animal which endows objects and abstractions with spirits. Really, most of us can't get through a single day without being an animist at some point.

Has Alejandra Pizarnik's La Condesa Sangrienta

Has Alejandra Pizarnik's La Condesa Sangrienta really not been translated into English yet?

It seems surprising to me that this should be the case.

Maybe I missed a translation through a small independent press somewhere?

(addresses are dreams)

(singing) ..."fancy poultry parts sold here..."

Tomato

All the person wants to know is "Does this person leak?" Is there glorious leakage from this person, like eating a tomato with your mouth only. Can you bite into this person and the juices will all come out? Can you infiltrate the soul of this person and is it runny enough that you may take nourishment and then do something with the nourishment involving translation into more nourishment for you? The person, no the tomato, is sitting at a safe distance. You are eyeing the tomato (no, the person). Doesn't the person look round and fat even if they are skinny? That is because of the Tomato Phenomenon. People who are tomatoes possess a certain rotundity of spirit. The person's DNA must be information as the tomato's juices are filled with seeds all DNA information. Runny on your chin. It is like after oral sex except it is talking and desire and desire for more DNA. Little seeds float everywhere in the vaguely sexual juices. Did you know that people and tomatoes share as much as sixty percent of the same genes? What is the tomato's acidity, what is its alkalinity? If it is too alkaline, run. You need the edge of the acidity in the juice to make the tomato really worthwhile, really worth your scheming time. Worth your tongue's probing. Record your experiences with tomatoes in a journal. Sound mostly like a nun.

Book Order

You have to love a book retailer that gives you free shipping as soon as you spend ten dollars.

My order this week:

Kurt Vonnegut: Letters
Timequake by Vonnegut
Zither & Autobiography by Leslie Scalapino

The History of Iron Mountain is Fascinating. Its Future Will Probably Be More So.

I was standing next to an Iron Mountain van today in the parking lot for a greenbelt park and it got me remembering the company's strange Cold War genesis (mushroom mines that became data shelters).

I just caught up with the company's history and was surprised at how many entities they swallowed (part of Bell & Howell, etc).

And I read this:


The storage location in Dighton, Massachusetts was once a missile storage battery during the cold war.The best known Iron Mountain storage facility is a high-security storage facility in a former limestone mine at Boyers, Pennsylvania, near the city of Butler in the United States (41.093°N 79.911°W). It began storing records in 1954 and was purchased by Iron Mountain in 1998. It is here that Bill Gates stores his Corbis photographic collection in a refrigerated cave 220 feet (67 m) underground. Nearby, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management leases another underground cavern to store, and process government employee retirement papers.


Iron Mountain has additional underground storage facilities in the United States and the rest of the world. It stores the wills of Princess Diana, Charles Dickens, and Charles Darwin It also stores the original recordings of Frank Sinatra and master recordings from Sony Music Entertainment.Most of the company's over 1,000 storage locations are in above-ground leased warehouse space located near customers.

How long will it be until these sorts of things are stored in outer space? Because the planet isn't as safe as some might think. A supervolcano (to give one weird example) could wipe out all these things. I think eventually earth will be surrounded by its data-core the way Saturn has its rings. I think it's inevitable these Akashic records will girdle the planet.

Documentary

How not to look at the Shakers' idea of utopia and wonder.

It's so mystifying and so practical at once.

Hancock Shaker Village Round Barn

This Shaker structure is so ergonomically interesting.

I Guess

I guess it's not long until we have a massacre like the one which just occurred in Nice happening every day.

Anyone can see all the "modern states" will soon all have to become police states. It just seems inevitable. Private information is on borrowed time.

(comment addressed to a Shaker village which closed in 1960, found under a youtube video)

"To the Hancock shaker village I am looking for somebody who can teach me to draw comic books"

Good Things Come in Small Packages

(CNN)

Steelton: Then and Now

I hadn't yet moved here yet when these Dickinson college students came a-projectin' through our community in 2001.

I love seeing these photographs, but they're already outdated. Things have changed again. The "school" they show (last photo) is now an apartment complex with some pretty decent lofts.

There is a typo (error, anyway) on that page. We have nowhere near sixty thousand residents. Make it a tenth of that and then subtract a few hundred more.

John B. Yetter's book (below) is filled with priceless photographs and other documents of early Steelton.

The first one, a beach in Steelton. Unimaginable today. Although we do have a little boat launch at the end of town still.

From the Dickinson site:

 The river has been used for many recreational purposes over the years.  From 1886 to the 1930s, a Steelton Ferry took visitors and residents around the River, averaging about a dozen trips a day.  It also used to haul wagons so that customers could attend the Steelton Market. 

        A few of the islands, especially Bailey's Island and White Island, were used for church picnics, fishing, swimming, and boating.  Several steamboats and boat rentals took people to the islands.  Frank Albert and Harold Kerns remembered the boat rentals and islands in one interview: 

FA: That was the way they used to go over. Now, there was another fellow's name, Willard Shrauder.  He ran a boat place and he had what they call big batties...Anyway, he had two big boats they were called the batties, but he also rented canoes. And at one time, the beaches were sandy, just like you see at the beaches at the shore... He would charge you a nickel to take you over on a big battie [which could hold] fourteen people.

HK: They had canoes.  Pop said, at one time, they had forty boats that he rented.

FA: Oh yea, he had a lot of boats. On the other side, the railroad owned it. He had buildings and his canoes were on 

racks... Not only that, he put a dance pavilion over there on the island. And he made homemade root beer and stuff and sold it to them too! Now this was when things were tough, man! For a one-armed man, he was a hard worker! 

It absolutely amazes me that there used to be a (perilous!) "walking bridge" out to little Bailey's Island. Check out the photo. How'd you like to be on that in a thunderstorm? The Susquehanna is not shy about drowning people in any of its stretches. It's usually the deceptively "slow" parts of the river which claim the most lives.

This (1903)

becomes this (1911).

West End of Steelton.

Dredging the Susqehanna off Steelton for coal on the bottom (dropped from previous operations). They could gather and sell twenty-five thousand tons a year.

Men paving.

Poor mule whose life is tied to dredging.

Oh Gosh, this photograph gets me. I can't tell you the number of times I have stood exactly where those girls are standing. It's right down at the bottom of my street, such a pretty view still. And I can instantly overlay the past with the present through this photo. You would totally recognize this today, as the principal buildings seen here are still standing. The church has lost its belfry. That church is beleaguered, for sure, has seen better days, but the voices still peal out of there on Sundays. It has one little air conditioner below the big stained glass window (at right, cropped out of the photo). That little unit can't do much in summer to cool down that worship service. Such glorious voices I hear coming out of there. 

I'm Surprised There Aren't Any Niantic Conspiracy Theories Yet*

*Oh wait. I spoke too soon.

It's so funny that now I am rarely alone in places where I am accustomed to encounter no other human beings.

This is because Pokemon Go has turned a whole nation of young people out of doors in search of elusive virtual creatures.

I was wondering where the Pokemon Go app was getting all the photographs of pretty obscure landmarks for this game. I figured they had to be pre-existing photographs and I figured they might be geo-tagged, but I had no idea they were largely the infrastructure of Niantic's other game Ingress.

So a significant number (millions) of these photos were contributed by Ingress players. This makes sense. Because one of my favorite, outre tombstones in this one particular cemetery (buried in the middle of the grounds) was tagged as a poke stop. It has some unusual art on it. I had photographed it several times but couldn't have imagined that there would be other photos of it online. And here it was in the Pokemon Go game.

Everyone is expecting horror stories because 1) players get so distracted while driving and 2) players are going into areas of which they have no real knowledge, often at odd hours of the night. This is a little worrisome.

It's not unusual for me to be in a cemetery before dawn taking long exposure photographs by using a tombstone as a tripod. But to look over and see a college kid hunting pokemon, his face lit by the glow from his phone at 4 a.m., is definitely something new. I wonder how long this fad will keep up. It's good that people are getting out of the house for once, I suppose. I know the system keeps crashing because of the level of usage. It did get me interested in geocaching, which sort of overlaps this phenomenon. I assume the Ingress game is actually ongoing. So there are armies around you unseen, green and blue factions. The company Niantic separated from Google in August 2015. I suppose Pokemon Go is the game which will finally make it a household name. 

A Thought

To reject the artistic works of the makers because of the imperfection of their earthly lives is to spit in the face of the possibility of spiritual transmutation. That work might be the sheltering haven of an idealization, some desideratum of life or codons for such a desideratum, and this might be something which was in no way reflected in the earthly, physical, "concrete" life of the artist. Art is not something ingrained in the individual. As soon as it is created, it is free of its creator. At "birth," it is already as if the creator no longer existed. So to "punish" the work for its association with its maker is retrograde. The work of art is totally clueless as to its parentage. Good orphan that it is, it is only too willing to be adopted by others and taught different values. It waits in the public thoroughfare for any benevolent souls charitable enough to see something good in it and take it in.

(the birdcage)

loosely after Ross Bleckner (cough).

Blogger seems to have trouble with videos. It's cleaner on tumblr: better upload.

Heart of a Dog (2015)

Heartbreaking and lovely film. If you've ever loved an animal, known his or her spirit, this is an elegy that will probably have you in tears. But you will be very grateful for having had the experience.

There's great humor here too.

Laurie Anderson on her dog Lolabelle learning to play the piano after going blind: "And she used some of the same programs and samples that I use."

And, of course, there's the wonderful music of Laurie Anderson throughout the film.

"Crying is not allowed, because it's supposedly confusing to the dead."

Marie 7/11/2016 17:11

If you were reborn as an animal, which animal would you want to be?

A cat.

I Only Need Five Hundred Years to Do This

I feel sort of ripped off. Because my life is generally good now, apart from the grieving I do for all the suffering in the world, natural suffering and that gratuitous suffering caused by human so-called consciousness. I realize I continue to learn and grow and enjoy this process. But my learning curve isn't so sharp that I am making it exactly where I want to be "on time." I realize that "on time" is a purely subjective feeling. I feel if I could have five hundred years of life, it might happen. Is there an extended life package for late-bloomers? Can I get another four hundred plus years on credit? And then there are things in the world that make you think you will welcome the silence of the grave. So maybe if someone were granted five hundred years (write it out as short fiction) he or she would end up feeling like Tithonus, because of the problem of "moral absorption." The world's membrane is filled with such toxins. 

"I ignore critics usually. I believe the perfect story is a dream."

The quote is Paul Zindel.

I picked up a bunch of fast reads the other day.

One of these was Zindel's play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.

I found myself thinking of Albee, but the comparisons were mostly unfavorable ones. This read like the work of an Albee epigonus. I did not know until I read Zindel's online bio just now that he actually was mentored by Albee.

It's not a bad play. It just feels too much like a play modeled after other plays, and perhaps it did not feel all that contemporary, even when it debuted to acclaim at the very beginning of the seventies. Think Eugene O'Neill territory long after the fact. Think Long Day's Journey into Night Lite. Yet it won Zindel the Pulitzer. He claims in the introduction to have authored the play at twenty-five. He won the Pulitzer when he was roughly a decade older than that.

Zindel is probably most well-known for his many YA novels, many of which were regarded as controversial and which were often challenged in the schools by the censorious-minded, even up through the nineties. This seems silly, as it's evident he's as well-loved and useful as Judy Blume to that age group of readers.

He died at sixty-six or doubtless he would by now have published a hundred novels. Because he managed to publish fifty-three and he died at sixty-six.

Killing with Kindness

I was wondering if I could give the deer some corn.

Good thing I Googled this: NO. YOU CANNOT.

This is geared more towards the winter situation, but worth reading.

Digestion problems

The problem is that deer digestion is a finely tuned physiological process. Just the right combination of microorganisms, enzymes, and pH enable deer to digest a normal winter diet of woody vegetation. When offered a sudden supply of corn, a deer’s digestive system doesn’t have time to adjust to a high carbohydrate diet. The result can be acute acidosis followed by death within 72 hours.

At the time of death these individuals can appear normal and well fed. It’s just that they cannot digest the corn. Within six hours, corn alters the environment in the rumen. It turns the rumen acidic and destroys the microbes needed for normal digestion.

Not all deer die immediately from acidosis. Its effects vary with the age and health of the individual. Some may simply slow down, get clumsy, and become easy prey to speeding traffic and hungry coyotes.

It takes deer two to four weeks of feeding on a new food source to establish populations of microbes necessary to digest the new food. It can’t happen in just a few days during a snowstorm. And healthy individuals that might survive in the short term often succumb to complications weeks later.

The article is here.

So, one wonders, can they deal with corn in the spring or summer? Apparently, no, bad idea all around.

Q: I know not to feed deer corn in the winter but can you feed them corn now in April?

A: Deer are found in corn fields not so much for food but for cover. They will eat corn but on a limited basis. It will bloat them and basically cook them from the inside.Any corn left on the ground and gets wet becomes toxic.ROTS. Deer will feed on all available grasses and fruits far before they feed on corn,  Flowers, Alfalfa, soybean, wheat, rye,oats, acorns,wildgrape & roses etc. I have 3 friends that have deer farms and raise white,fallow and elk for both meat and game purposes and they never include corn as a staple source of feed. Only as a byproduct of some source in their feed. 

Mainers tell you all about it.

Proper feed is natural browse items such as;
dogwood, maple, ash, birch, or witch hobble. Oats or
acorns can be given as diet supplements.

• If providing artificial feed consider the following:

• Deer require up to three weeks to adjust to
new foods, so deer should not be overfed, nor
introduced abruptly to new foods;

• Food with high sugar content must be introduced
in early December; if later than introduce
very gradually or rapid death can occur;

• Deer feed should not contain animal proteins
from animals rendered into feed;

• DO NOT FEED: hay, corn, kitchen scraps,
potatoes, or cabbage/lettuce trimmings;

• Use a complete horse, dairy, or deer formulation
in pellet form. Other feeds are available
with corn and molasses but offer less nutritional
value increasing the volume you need to
provide and ultimately costing you more (even
though the price per bag is similar);

• Feed should be protected from moisture or
located on a platform off the ground to prevent
mold which can be fatal; and

• Consider that an average deer may consume
2 to 5 pounds per day (depending on quality),
a 50-pound bag is about $11, and duration of
feeding could be about 90 days in northern
Maine. That equals $40 to $100 per deer,
per winter or if you are feeding 30 deer than
$1,200 to $3,000 for the winter.

• Once a feeding program is begun, do not interrupt or
terminate it until spring greenery emerges.

• People who feed a few deer in December should expect
to buy food for considerably more deer by February.

• Watch for over-browsing or stripping bark off
trees, this can be an indication of too many deer and
not enough food

Photoworld

My companion camera this week has been the Mamiya MSX 500. This little darling was born in 1974. This is my second camera purchased in 2016 from that year (a Minolta was the other one). Both cameras have electronic light metering, which was the "big new thing" in those years. Both light meters still work. The Mamiya has a built-in "hack" to allow you to do clean double exposures. Nice. Also, I can finally shoot up close and in somewhat dark rooms. This camera is a dream with helping you get the exposure right. You can't be lazy though. It's a manual universe. But would you want it any other way? The deer down at the end of the street have gotten so tame with me that I can now stand comfortably closer to them than I would with most humans. I am starting to know their families. I just photographed two lover deer in the woods that the Cherry Street Steps go down through (they are always getting overgrown). The one's ears were orange translucencies in the late sun. We locked eyes for quite some time. She's so sweet. I found out today one of my favorite streets in town (on a sort of bluff) has a geocached treasure that's been waiting to be discovered since 2007. I always worry that someone has planted a human head there or something equally dire as the "prize." Has that happened yet with geocaching?

Love Jart

You had me at bigarrure,
pronounced unpretentiously wrong,
but charmingly unselfed-aware,
competent translator that you unbecome.
For these are juggaloed things of which I am made,
bricolage, squat thug of mood, spurn and error
of Eros, exceptionally poorly-aimed,
juicy as a Texan steak, lambent, rude
as a November evening in October.
And bigarrure is the minds of painters
queerly calm enough to consider the cosmos
a mere collation, feat of the thrown-together,
which is the everything. Heraclitan, poofy.
I mean the bigarrure of Kandinsky,
Frankenthaler, Kansas, oh  I must stop
this pretentiousness that quacks like a duck,
have a text I must take. It is another,
and by another I mean morning.

The Poetry of Wiki (Entry for Katsuobushi)

"Upon being placed on hot food, the heat waves cause the thin and light katsuobushi to move about, giving it a special aesthetic look. It is placed on pizzas to make the top of the pizza seem alive with the 'dancing' katsuobushi."

Tunnel

One or two of them

  I don't know what they are

        I mean who

 so I look
   much longer at them
   One or two of
                            them

     I can't decipher

        decipherment does not

         entitle
         engrain
         ensorcel

   the thing is there as a stone
     as a philosophical monograph

         the delight in a stone
                challenged to prove
                     its exisssstence
               (hiss of rain
                        through its hot pores)
                       
                         through language

         The tunnel is speaking

           Not language itself

                    but the tunnel through which

                         language
                                        do go
 

Our

This notion of our

The roundedness of it
in that the definition comes back around

             to a self wanting
                kneading
              a pronoun

You can say "this is difficult,"
   but this is not difficult.

                          It is sane.

     Sane things
        are not difficult.

                They hurt
                 and are not

                          difficult

It Said

I am not bitter

           as a coin is bitter.
         as a used plant is bitter.

(as a used planet is bitter)

I can recoil recall just as
   anyone else
                    almost

   I go out and walk, a hot wind.
       there is no bitterness anywhere.

                   I am like a sheet blown against branches
                       down along our mill canal
                                 (we thought of Her as poison

       when it was our water
         that was poisoned
                                chlorine byproducts.   carcinogenic

        If we had drunk the dark bracken

                      black tea where carp swim

                                       Our stomach would turn
                                           
                                               and be better.

                     I find no iron in that world.

                                   The water's long sleeve

                         is enough         many times

                                

First

I am losing memories

no. don't say losing.        say misplacing.

it is all the sense of location (sequence is location,

un-
interrupted

daydream of continuity.

cannot remember my brother's cat's name

(can list the litany of the dead,
                                               say the mass for dead cats)

but a vibrant, living one

standing on my lap. struggle not to try
to remember
to try
to not remember
if one
cannot

but, too, associations grow richer

if a sky is a sapphire set on the windowsill

        I can wander for hours just on sapphire

        Google can replace thought

        I have this new faith    (see

seeing is more than knowing

        and memory is
                            embroidery

When

When a person's photos at both Model Mayhem and Find Mugshots come up side by side in a Google image search. There should be a name for that.

Friend

Keiko followed Marissa down the hallway, but at a safe distance. She blended into the crowd of other girls changing classes. If Marissa had looked back, she would have seen Keiko just standing there, the one still point in that flux of bodies. She would have stood out. And Marissa would have seen her odd stare.

But Marissa didn't look back. She entered the girls bathroom.

Keiko waited as the girls aflutter with conversation, with graded papers in their hands, vanished into the doors of classrooms up and down the hallway. They broke up quickly, like a cloud of butterflies or a snow squall that is over as soon as it's begun

Only Keiko was left standing there. Like a statue in the hallway.

She slowly made her way to the door of the girls bathroom. She made no more sound than a cat. That's how she visualized herself as she looked down at her shoes while she walked.

She managed to open the bathroom door as quietly as it was humanly possible and crept inside.

Marissa was standing at one of the sinks, combing her hair.

"Hello, Keiko," the older girl greeted her. She never turned her head to acknowledge the other girl, and there was no way she could have seen her in the mirror. She was just always aware of everything like that.

Keiko advanced but remained silent.

"Oh, silly me. I forgot to flush," Marissa said. She still hadn't looked at Keiko and continued to fuss with her hair.

Keiko walked to the toilet stall opposite the sink at which Marissa was standing She went to flush the toilet and then realized something was swimming around in the bowl.

She gasped.

"Disgusting, I know," Marissa laughed.

It looked like a salamander. But not quite. It wasn't any animal Keiko had ever seen and she loved to look at books filled with photographs of animals. Then she got a better look at it. It looked like several seahorses glued together.

"You're not going to tell anybody, are you?" Marissa's voice was pure sarcasm. It was a threat.

Now, finally,  Marissa turned and in one quick jump was at the toilet. She used her hand to scoop out the creature swimming around in there, and brought it up to Keiko's mouth, as she forced the younger girl against the wall of the toilet stall.

Keiko tried to fight her but Marissa was so strong. She forced the creature into Keiko's mouth, and by using her hand to nearly suffocate her, forced her to swallow the slimy, jagged creature.

Keiko felt the creature scrambling around in her mouth. Then she could feel the thing making its way down her throat. She knew the moment when it reached her stomach. Marissa stepped back and smiled.

"No, you're not going to tell anyone." She smiled.. It was the same wicked smile which had first attracted Keiko to her, which had made her want her for a friend. Though her other friends had warned her. Even her mother, who liked all children, had disapproved.

"Be good and I'll tell you what it eats. Be even better and I'll tell you how to get rid of it. Are you going to be good?"

Keiko nodded in fear.

"Good. Now you better get back to class. Social studies, isn't it?"

Keiko ran from the bathroom, feeling like she was going to throw up. If only it were that simple, she thought.

A Man Woke Up

A man woke up holding his wife's hand. He hadn't opened his eyes yet, but he was contemplating asking her for his favorite breakfast. Or was it his turn to make breakfast? He felt waking up was harder than usual that morning. Instead of using his eyes, he kept them closed and let his fingers explore his love's dainty hand. His fingers "read" the unusual setting of the wedding ring they had spent such a great deal of time picking out, designing together. The baby must still be asleep, he thought. He smiled at the quietness of the moment with his eyes still shut. It was nice. His fingers lingered on that strange asymmetry of diamonds.  But she was not in bed with him. Why was she standing next to his bed? As he continued to trace a curve in the ring's setting, a harp of diamonds, he opened his eyes

When he did see her, confusion came flooding in.  His wife was many years younger. She was smiling, but there were tears in her eyes. How could she be younger? His mind briefly entertained the ridiculous notion that he had traveled back in time. He searched his mind for what had happened the previous night, before he had gone to sleep, but there was nothing. It was a blank. This nothing disturbed him greatly. He felt a chasm of dread opening up. He spoke his wife's name and watched as one of the tears which had gathered into her eyes made its escape and traveled down her lovely, impossibly young face.

He tried to rise to comfort her, but something was holding him in the bed. He saw the machines then, he heard one of them, he realized where he was. It was a hospital room and a cheerless one.

"Dad, I'm Rebecca," the woman he had at first seen as a younger version of his wife sobbed as she bent over to kiss him on the forehead. "Mom's gone. You've been in a coma for nineteen years. She died in the auto accident. You survived, but they weren't sure if you would ever wake up. I told them you would. Eventually. I promised myself." A smile broke through her lovely face. Her mother's face.

He saw the ring on her hand as it came up to caress his face. It was indeed his wife's ring.

Doing

Doing something selfish to hide from terror. All the "good days."

Interview

Job interview in which the first mental task is to differentiate the meanings of instantiate and reify. "Give examples."

(groceries)

The seventy-four year old child with the long white hair had gotten separated from her parents. She had gone skipping down many aisles of the grocery story, singing out the names of products at random. This is not a good thing for a "special" to do.

Looking over her shoulder, she ran until she crashed into the stern arms of a forty-four-year-old woman who had been turned into a witch by things which happened to her in high school. She still engaged in behavior unseemly for her age, personal level of attractiveness and socioeconomic status, things like barhopping and bubblegum.

"Well, what have we here?" she asked sardonically as she sized up her catch, her shining prize. "I bet you are mommy and daddy's little princess, the little apple of their eye? Aintcha? I can tell by that little red coat you have on that looks like it came over here from England on a slow boat that came through many fogs. I bet you like to suck toffee and read magazines, dontcha? I bet you have a record player. I bet you have a bedroom all to yourself. I bet..."

The girl turned her head, hoping her ninety-nine year old parents were close behind. She heard with gratitude the squeaky wheels of her parents' cart turning the corner of the aisle where she was presently being held (if we accept that this next word as one loosely construed) captive.

"Mummy! Daddy! This harridan has accosted me, this terrible hard-on of a woman," the little princess explained in her best pretense of calm.

Her parents took out their weapons at the same moment and pointed them at the middle-age woman stocking the store's shelves.

"We are frail. Our bones are more like the bones of birds every day," Mummy said. "But we do believe in our (what is the number again?) amendment rights. And we like to shoot interlopers. So please unhand our child."

(dripping escher gifs for the middle of the night)

Happy Birthday

How old was the Eckes boy when he disappeared?

That's what Joe really wanted to know.

Once a year, that creepy old dude who now lived alone in the Eckes house would come into the bakery department and place an order for a customized "Happy Birthday!" cake. Last year, it had been "Happy 9th Birthday!" This year it was a birthday cake for a happy tenth.

"Please just give me your basic, generic boy's cake," the old man had said.

"Who even talks like that?" Joe had muttered to one of his co-workers the second the old creep was gone.

Joe always made the cakes to order and the old man, Edgar, that's all anyone really knew about him, his name, had always picked them up shortly thereafter.

Some of the girls in the bakery said Joe was being too harsh, that it was probably a part of the grieving process for him. It was a way he remembered his son.

"Not son," Joe would correct the women. "It was his stepson."

Joe finally found the article the night the creepy old dude had picked up the "Happy 10th Birthday" cake. It had been archived online by the local newspaper four years ago: "Six Year Old Boy Missing." So the birthday cakes were definitely keeping up with Damian's birthdays. But the date was wrong. Joe read the article again. Damian Eckes was believed to have disappeared somewhere on the walk home from his elementary school. It had only been a five block walk. Joe wasn't convinced he hadn't made it home and disappeared from there. But the police had found nothing which made Edgar anything more than a person of interest, at first, and then he had been cleared. Joe began to wonder if the boy wasn't still alive somewhere in that big house that creepy Edgar had inherited. For the boy's mother had also gone missing. Two years after her son's disappearance. True, there had been a suicide note and her grief at the loss of her son had been crippling. The woman was inconsolable. That had been her only child. So the suicide had been understandable to most. There was little suspicion. Her car had been found parked by a bridge over a river that had been in full spring torrent at the time. But her body had also never been recovered. Joe wondered about that too.

Joe had called the local police and talked to his old classmate Ed Shanks, who was sheriff now, but had been politely told to mind his own business. The missing boy case was ongoing and the case of his mother had been closed. That's all he could tell the baker playing amateur detective and thanks for calling, Joe, see you at the next high school reunion.

Joe decided that wasn't good enough.

It was a moonless night and Joe was creeping around the Eckes house. He couldn't get over how weird the old man was. He saw there was a chicken coop out back now. Everyone put the man's eccentric qualities down to the double loss he had suffered. They all made excuses for him. But Joe couldn't see it that way, and tonight he was putting that serious suspicion into action.

As he crept around the back of the house, he noticed the back door was wide open. It was a warm summer night.  Maybe the guy was baking. The light from the kitchen lay in a long plank across the backyard, nearly touching the edge of a dark cornfield that covered many acres back. There were no other houses in sight back there.

Joe edged along the house and noticed the two basement windows were painted black. There were also rocks piled up against them, blocking all but a soupcon of the basement light, which was so dim as to make one wondered if one imagined it, if there was really light at all.  But there seemed to be a slight flickering. The windows were mostly buried. Flowering bushes and rocks had been banked up against them, curiously.

Joe had made it up to the back door now, edging along the back wall of the house, and he took a quick peek into the kitchen. There was nobody to be seen. The table was covered by what appeared to be a new, attractively colored cloth. There was a centerpiece and the usual assortment: sugar bowl, shakers, cruets, fruit bowl.

Joe could hear music somewhere. He listened carefully. It was "Happy Birthday." He had pulled his head back after that first quick glance, but now he looked again. It was coming from behind the basement door, which was shut.

Joe felt a sudden boiling of bravery that came out of a boil of insatiable curiosity and he charged the door. Just like that. He realized he didn't even have his cell phone on him. How smart a thing was this to do, he wondered. But he knew he could take that old man. He wanted to take that old man.

"Hey!" he shouted as he yanked the door open so hard it banged against the corner of a kitchen counter, scarring the yellow door. "I'm coming down there!"

It was dim and the old wooden stairs were rickety. "Happy Birthday" was coming from an old record player in the corner of the basement. It was a scratchy old record and this version of the song sounded like something from a kid's show in the fifties. It sounded like a television cowboy singing. Joe saw why it was dim as soon as he reached the basement floor. The single, unshaded light bulb hanging from the ceiling had been coated with red paint. It was unbelievably warm. Joe felt himself start to sweat right away. It was just that hot.

He saw the cake on a low end table in one corner of the room. It had not been sliced. Ten small candles were now burning atop it.

"Hey! Kid! Where are you? Damian, are you here?"

Joe heard a rustling in the corner. He saw something there, a gathered mass, but he couldn't make out what he was actually seeing. It looked like a dark blanket. But it looked full and there was a stirring under it. Was it the poor kid help captive all these years by that freak? And where was that freak right now? Joe's eyes searched for the sort of tool you always find in basements, anything that might be used as a weapon, but he saw nothing.

And then he felt it and screamed. Something had reached out and touched his ankle. It was gripping his leg through the thick denim of his jeans. A hand?  It was so dark he couldn't see. It must be the boy's hand, his mind told him. Get the boy up and moving and get the hell out of there, his mind told him.

But now the "hand" of the "boy" was growing longer and longer, winding up Joe's leg, and down Joe went, struggling. He ended up yanking the blanket for which he had been reaching, and that's when he saw the full size of the creature. Coils and coils of it. It was the sort of pet people warn you against keeping. Because they never stop growing and their appetite grows exponentially too. And it was all over Joe now, all through and around Joe now, tightening. "Amazon" was one of Joe's last thoughts as he heard the door at the top of the stairs slam shut. Now he knew why it was so hot. He also knew where Damian and Julia Eckes were. And he knew he was going to the same dark place.