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Remembrance of Trees

2009-07-11T04:57:00.000-07:00

Tree Reader at elimae

When I was last in Poland we were visiting historic sites on our way to Chopin’s house. Across the road, a major truck route out of Warsaw (which in Poland is a two-lane road) -- across from one old wooden church was a large tree with a low iron rail fence around it. The fence was built with carved stones of granite at the corners. I asked what that was about and was told that it was revered, and considered an historic site, as an old tree. The tree was considered special for being old... it was down the road from the copse that we were casually told marked the first military use of nerve gas by the Nazis. I presume there may have been something more to the old tree reverence but the discussion was along the lines of, “Why are you looking at that? Here we have this old wooden church to look at.” My thought was, Wow, this is really kool, a tree marked off as special and nobody is even asking a dollar for us to look at it. [Hear about that trip to Poland that includes raven caws and dog barking. Radio Free Preservation v1 i1 April 2008]

In the Podlaskie region of Poland, on a previous visit, where there is an historic wooden architecture that is vernacular to the region, a comment was made as to the sacred nature of trees as a connecting link between the earth and the sky... and that thus when building a church or synagogue or mosque or barn or house of wood one needs to carry this sacred connection into the work. When you are there and you look around at the fields and the groves of trees it creates an epiphany in vision of the biota... the relatively thin layer of bio-mass that trees provide to our common earth. It is nice that there are a few humans who can perceive this sustainable connection in nature.

I am reminded that Thoreau's family made their fortune in pencils.

As a kid I had a friend who was something of a romantic in the classical Germanic sense of the term (at that time I was not particularly aware of my German roots). We were walking along from school one day on the sidewalk when suddenly he ran up to and hugged the trunk of an elm tree. He then excitedly confessed to me, the ever present confident, that he would rather hug a tree any day than hug a girl. I am all for hugging trees but I don’t see that as a higher calling in life than hugging people, women and men, children, that sort of friendly breaking through the barriers to grab hold of each other. At the time I was not too sure what to make of his confession. I see now that he is married with children and we can assume that a few trees here and there are safe from untoward assault. One of the primary reasons that extraterrestrials keep visiting and abducting humans is that they have lost the tactile consciousness of hugging each other. They know that they are missing something but you never hear of them abducting our trees and eviscerating them as with stray cattle in Wyoming. So much for intergalactic lumbering around.

Recently I was reading a book about Joan D’Arc. My interest stems from my having been told as a child that our family is descended from Joan D’Arc. Now, as this does seem implausible (about as implausible as my being convinced that I was present at the Last Supper at the moment of my earthly conception -- and we can argue over exactly when that occurred in the history of biological evolution, I mean, considering that everything is pre-designed) I must confess that I am fascinated by the unrealistic pieces of ancestral data that we carry around with us, sort of a psychic DNA. Information that intrigues me in odd ways such as that my maternal great-grandfather, the Iowan sheep farmer (he had trees on his land too, I have seen them), a bonifide descendant of Daniel Boone (who wrote flash fiction on the trunks of trees) raped the traveling school teacher in his barn (I think I was told that she had red red hair), thus a family was born and bred with the violence of an intellectual background... that is, one of them could read.

Regardless, back to Joan. I like to associate myself with a female religious warrior background (especially when playing WoW), it just seems so kool to me even if it is unlikely that I am sort-of related to Joan D'Arc but probably not really. So I was reading this book about her, supposedly written by one of her male childhood friends, that tells about a large resplendent tree on the hill outside of their French village, and since I can’t find the book in all the mess of books I am winging it here... and the humble village children would play at the tree and for hundreds and hundreds of years they would play there along with the faeries. Then one day a fairy did something rude... was seen spying out a naked grandmother through her kitchen window or whatever, and the local priest (Catholic) came along and banished the fairies from playing with the children. This all sounds so damnably contemporary when you think about it. But the impression I get is that the tree was made unhappy and that Joan D’Arc took the local priest to task to defend the fairies. I am proud of my brave ancestors even if they are not. I hope that the tree is still there, one of a few places that I would like to visit and maybe read a book, more on that later, and nowadays when people no longer believe in fairies it just may be the little magical buggers are free to dance around and party unmolested. It is France.

As a kid we had five acres of woods surrounded by hundreds of acres of woods and farm fields. There were many trees, a few of them quite distinct. A very large basswood was one where I spent hours building forts -- basswoods are good for that. It gave me an early sense of the engineering of building, particularly on the day when all of the logs rolled out and Ronnie Harkness (he is Italian, sort of, and his sister had very red red hair), who was up in the tree on top of the logs that I was handing up (well, they were a bit rotted and fairly small in diameter) made a sudden move and everything came tumbling down.

Ronnie ended up on the bottom of the pile; I ended up on the top. Lessons learned, round elements roll off from sloped branches of basswood real easy and -- don’t stand too close to Ronnie when he is pissed.

We had another tree way off in the back corner, near to the wild strawberry patch, a tall white pine, taller than all of the other trees around. Most of the trees were maple and ash with a small dose of hickory and hawthorn, and ironwood and there was the area that had once been apple orchard.

Diversion, apples, green apples, small worm ridden hard little round apples, we would cut a stout switch of maple or ash or whatever was handy, sharpen one end and poke it into the apple. This created, at minimal cost to us or the environment, a neat toy and an amazing weapon. The principle was that if you swung the apple on the switch overhead that the apple would fly off at considerable speed toward whatever target you were aiming, though rarely if ever able to hit on target. It was fantastic! Unfortunately from about a hundred feet away I hit my younger brother directly in the eye.

That was enough of that, back to the white pine... so I was in a habit to climb up to the top of the white pine, an act that usually got my hands covered with pine pitch (so these days when I muck my hands with epoxy I feel childlike in my dirtiness and digits stuck together so that I need to manhandle a screwdriver to pull them apart -- just yesterday I remarked on how I purchase latex gloves but never remember to use them), and I would sit up there for hours, particularly on a nice sunny day, and watch the wind sway the top of the woods, and sway me with it. I like to be swayed.

There was a place along the local crick a ways down where people did not wander where a group of hemlocks grew. It was actually a small island where the crick divided to go around the root base of the trees. I love the aromatic smell and the branch movement, springy with grace, and the gentle leaves of Hemlock. I built a Dan Beard type of lean-to down there below the trees. That was where I would wander off to be alone to read Shakespeare.

There is something I believe very important about where one reads, and where one writes.

Where we live now, on Long Island, for our house and property we were particularly attracted to the diversity of trees, and bushes, and ocean, and weeds, and bugs, and birds and squirrels and deer and racoons... well, the racoons are not particularly good neighbors, especially when you have pet chickens... but you can get the gist of it.

We had a very tall and regal Hemlock at the corner of the house, within fifteen feet of where I sit now, but sadly it was taken out by wooly aphids. Diversity is grand!

Flocculate with Expansive Clay

2009-07-09T03:19:00.000-07:00

I wish I had found this when I was ten years old. It would have helped a whole lot w/ my crik bed dam building projects.

Google books, "Clay Materials Used in Construction " edited by G.M. Reeves, I. Sims & J.C. Cripps

12.1.2. Bentonite

The name bentonite is popularly used for a range of natural clay minerals of the smectite group, principally potassium, calcium and sodium monnnorillonites derived from the weathering of feldspars. The name derives from the discovery of large deposits near Fort Benton in Wyoming. USA. Because of the chemistry and micro-structure of the clay particles they have a strong ability to absorb water and are able to hold up to ten times their dry volume by absorption of water. Montmorillonite (after Montmorillon, southwest of Paris) consists of very thin flat crystalline sheets of clay minerals which are negatively charged and are held together in 'stacks' by positively charged sodium or calcium ions in a layer of adsorbed water. In particular the soil particles comprising a stack of sheets of sodium montmorillonite form extremely small and thin platelets, being typically of the order of 1.0 pm or less in length and 0.001 um thick. The ability to absorb water comes from the relatively low bonding energy of the sheets, which allows water molecules to be adsorbed onto the internal and external sheet surfaces. Calcium ions provide a stronger bond than sodium, so that calcium mommorillonite swells less readily than sodium monnnorillonite. Potassium ions provide much stronger bonding between clay sheets as the potassium ion is of exactly the right diameter to fit between atoms in the sheet structure with negligible gap between the clay sheets. A similar material to mommorillonite but with potassium bonding is the non-swelling clay mineral known as illite. The substitution of sodium by calcium or potassium ions in monnnorillonite greatly reduces the ability of the clay structure to hold water.

The very small particle size of bentonite results in an extremely low hydraulic conductivity for intact clay, with a coefficient of permeability of typically less than 10-1" m/s. This allows the clay to be used to form 'impermeable' or 'waterproof layers and sustain high hydraulic gradients across thin layers with negligible water flow. The swelling property is also important in such applications, since should water permeate a layer of dry bentonite it will swell even against high pressures and tend to seal any crack or fault which might otherwise develop into a leakage path. The volumetric swelling of particles can be up to 13%. but that of an agglomeration of particles is somewhat less depending on their packing.

Many applications of bentonite involve the use of slurry. Mineral particles in a slurry generally carry electrical charges, the nature and intensity of which vary with the particle surface characteristics and the chemistry of the liquid phase. Polar water molecules may then be adsorbed on to the particle surface, forming a layer of 'bound' water surrounding each particle. The result of the two effects is to produce repulsive forces between par¬ticles, which are greater than attractive Van der Waal's forces except when the particles are very close together. The particles in a slurry therefore tend to keep apart from each other in a 'dispersed' condition (Fig. 12.1a). The effects are most noticeable with small particles (clay/silt rather than sand/gravel, and in practical terms only with finer clay particles) since the relative surface areas are much larger. and gravitational forces are much smaller. Under some conditions the plate-like particles of clay minerals may have different charges on the edges and faces of the particles, and are able to clump together in a 'flocculated' structure (Fig. 12.1b). The large flocs settle out of the slurry much more readily than the small individual particles.

Some slurries demonstrate the effect known as thixotropy, whereby they 'set' into a gel if left undisturbed, but revert to a viscous fluid (sol) when sheared. The alterna¬tion between sol and gel may take place any number of times. The phenomenon is well known in 'non-drip' paints. A gelled 'house-of-cards' type of structure with edge to face connections is illustrated in Figure 12.1c; gels of thin clay particles may contain only a few per cent of solid material. The gelled structure is also able to sup¬port larger soil particles and prevent them from settling out. Bentonite slurries are thixotropic and typically form a gel at concentrations of a few per cent by mass in water: this is an important property of bentonite slurries in many applications. For a more detailed discussion of the nature and properties of bentonite slurries see Jefferis (1992).

Bentonite clays occur, and are mined and processed commercially, in many pans of the world. Some natural deposits, notably those from Wyoming, have a high proportion of sodium. These tend to produce slurries with high viscosity but relatively low gel strength. The depos¬its mined in the UK, near Woburn, are mainly of the calcium form, and these are converted by ion exchange to the sodium form by ball-milling with sodium carbonate. These materials tend to be less dispersive and give lower viscosities for the same slurry density, but higher gel strengths. As natural products, bentonites vary widely around the world in quality and content of other minerals, even after commercial processing, and these 'variations must be taken account of in their specification and use.

Bentonite is available commercially in a variety of forms. but nearly always in a dry state, as powder (in bulk or bags. like cement), pellets or blocks. For applications in construction it will usually be hydrated, although in some waterproofing materials the hydration is allowed to occur in situ. For use as a slurry, the bentonite is mixed with water at a rate of a few per cent of solids by mass. The aim is normally to produce a slurry in which the bentonite particles are well dispersed and fully hydrated. For good mixing and rapid hydration, a high-shear colloidal mixer (shear rate >900/s) should be used, and the slurry then left to stand for some time while the clay particles hydrate. The quality of the slurry obtained depends on the hydrogen ion concentration (pH) of the water used in mixing; saline or acidic water or water containing impurities may cause the clay particles in the slurry to flocculate. This may initially cause the slurry to 'thicken', but there will then be a tendency for the flocculated particles to settle out of suspension and form a sludge. However there is not normally a practical problem with seawater coming into contact with a slurry, provided the slurry cannot mix freely with the seawater and has previously been fully hydrated with fresh water. Deliberate flocculation with flocculating agents may be used to help remove bentonite from suspension when the slurry is no longer required or has become too contaminated with cement, clay or silt. A combination of low hydraulic flow into the slurry (so long as hydraulic heads are low), and long diffusion times for salt compared with exposure times, usually causes few problems in the presence of seawater.

Bentonite is also used in combination with other materials, in particular other soil materials and Portland cement. At one extreme a small quantity of bentonite may be added to a concrete mix to produce highly plastic concrete able to undergo quite large deformations without cracking: while a small quantity of cement in a bentonite slurry can produce a hardening slurry with a small shear strength. Natural clay, silt and sand may be used as 'fillers' to produce cheaper material while keeping most of the benefits of the scaling ability and low permeability of the bentonite. Gleason et al. (1997) found that about 5% of sodium bentonite and 10-15% of calcium bentonite had to be added to fine sands to achieve a sand-bentonite mix with a permeability of less than 10-9m/s. Hardened bentonite-cement slurry mixes containing 180 kg/m3 of cement and 60 kg/m3 of bentonite had permeabilities of about 10-7m/s with calcium bentonite and 10-8m/s with sodium bentonite. These mixtures arc discussed further below in relation to various different applications. Small quantities of polymers and other chemical additives may also be used to enhance or modify the properties of bentonite slurries for particular applications. These are also discussed further below. [not below here, though, you gotta go read the book if you want more!]

What I am working on getting shorter and shorter...

2009-07-08T14:36:00.000-07:00

frm Randall Brown in comment to a previous entry that I made to this blog -- “With your own writing, GO, how have you approached "short prose"? I'm curious about what you are currently working on to meet the demands imposed upon the writer of these short forms? Also, I've recently read some discussions about making Twitter's "character limit" add up to so much more than those 140 characters. Any thoughts about how that might be accomplished?”

I can give a long or short answer. I will try short and hope that it does not take too long to read.

I am not sure that I see short prose as being demanding any more or less than other forms, in general, possibly less demanding than say a good sonnet. A bad sonnet is not very demanding unless a reader considers bored doggerel a chore.

Demands are either external or internal. External being expectations of readers, critics, I suppose, the world-at-large, and internal being the demands the writer places on themselves.

Rowing a small boat is demanding on the rower, but if you do it regularly and often then it becomes a pleasure. So I would want to frame the question, How do we meet the pleasures of the short form?

So, as to working on, I am working on enjoyment in writing of the short form.

Other than that I spend a good deal of time looking around at what people are writing and what readers are reading. I could present my analysis of what I am reading, but here and now I will not.

Short prose, for me, is not new. My life, in construction, building a business, building community, networking at-large has been active and it has always been spattered with bursts of short prose as that is how it happens for me. My attention has always wandered and skipped about. I am happy that the world is catching up with what works for me, though as I have complained elsewhere everyone important in my life seems to be getting younger and younger.

I am intrigued by the interest in flash with a sort of humor one has of new people, curious strangers that show up in the side yard to pet an old dog.

There are so many young lions and fresh priestesses that it is all a dazzle to behold!

I recently ran across a quote from Cyril Connolly, it has been a long time since I have read his critical work, but it seems apt enough, “The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.” Note that there is no indication here as to requirement of length.

As to Twitter, at one time I was told by a distraught reader that I should never write an e-mail longer than one page on the screen. So I wrote a serial novelette in weekly e-mails that went on, engaged with an active audience, for two plus years. Now we have Twitter, even shorter yet. I use it for glitter sprinkled in the hair or the bulbous red nose of a clown. Though I feel the best thing to do with Twitter is to point at other things.

Samuel R. Delany (I happened to meet and spend an hour talking with him one cold night in a bookstore, it was snowing, it was supposed to be a reading, but I was the only audience that showed – he has been teaching Creative Writing for 30+ years) in About Writing, his interview/essay Inside and Outside the Canon talks a whole lot about pointing at things. The more a thing is pointed at, let us say the more an author or a flash is pointed at the more likely it is that people will look at it. The more often it is looked at the more likely it will have an opportunity to be considered worthwhile.

Even if for no other reason it is worthless, trite, possibly drab, clumsy or stupid if enough people look at a thing it gains value for having been looked at. We are fortunate that eventually the collective forgets a whole bunch of stuff in fairly short order of appearance.

One can do same serializing w/ Twitter, but it needs to be kept exciting, lots of cliff hangers and plot twists... it needs to be fun. It also takes a bit of energy to consistently keep doing it and finding ways to make it work. I would tend to suggest that several writers could gather together as a collaborative and write line by line, hitting off of each other, trying to trip each other up, but there would need to be an overall structure of background rules for everyone to maintain their focus, and to make sure the story does not fall flat or meet a timely death.

Learn Flash in a Flash

2009-07-04T07:14:00.000-07:00

Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, Tips from Editors, Teachers and Writers in the Field, edited by Tara L. Masih, published by The Rose Metal Press.

For me an early experience of learning to write stories, of any length, was reading Aristotle’s Poetics. What I mainly learned from that was that reading about how to write usually does more to ruin one’s writing than never reading about writing at all. That said, I own a whole slew of books about the process of writing, and when I am not writing I am often reading them. There is a way to read books about writing, a sort of offhand, “Yes, yes, I get what this says but I will do my best to forget it as quickly as possible.” This is not a book to be forgotten so easily.

This is a book for writers. That is, most readers who are not writers, and who may not have a specific interest in learning to write in the short prose form, would not find this collection of brief essays (most of them brief, as can be expected from writers who are used to cutting their word count to the bone) interesting other than from an historic perspective. By that I mean, this collection may have greater value to the general reader years from now than it does today, particularly after it has made it through a decade of classroom use, as it should. For a writer, however, particularly one who is writing short prose, this is an invaluable resource right now.

As the title suggests, this is a collection of essays, comments, from people who have some sort of international experience with the activity of creation and propagation/distribution of short prose. I know of or have read other work by most of the essayists contained here, and with a few of them I correspond. The ones I do not know, I will seek out, because they all are interesting, experienced, and at the top of their game. If as a writer you want to know what is going on in short prose - I am avoiding use of the word “flash” for no particular reason - then this is the essential guide.

Apparently each contributor was asked to write a brief essay to provide an example, and to suggest an exercise. There is material here to explore for several months of scribbling; for a writer looking for inspiration from which to step forward to write, the exercises should be a good resource. Over time it should be interesting to trace the influence of this book on short prose writing. I believe it will introduce new themes and fuel the current Internet trend toward short “bits” of attention-deficit feeding prose, and also, of course, help us see where the authors featured in this collection are going with their own work.

The caveat, my detraction, goes back to my initial encounter with Aristotle. Although I believe the material in this book is essential, I also find it to be confining, not for any fault of the editor, who has performed an admirable task, but exactly because of the way the approach to short prose of each essayist is revealed. It can be confusing to find so many divergent opinions and viewpoints all together in one swarm. Nevertheless, I suddenly find that I have a better idea of what I did not previously understand. I do not know how long it will take for me to adjust... like finding out that driving your foot on the brake, as you have done for twenty years, is not the optimal method.

My advice for the writer who is learning to write in short prose is to get into the book, sink deep, follow the examples and exercises, explore as many comments and threads to their infinite conclusion... and then walk away and forget all of it, or at least most of it. By then it should be about June of 2015.

Copies may be ordered directly from the publisher at The Rose Metal Press

Writer's Apartment Building Falls Over

2009-06-27T06:42:00.000-07:00

When we found out that we had been assigned an apartment on the eleventh floor and that we would have a view out over the city with an enclosed balcony we were very excited. Kim and I had waited a number of years on the list to be housed in the newly built exclusive writer’s building, “弯曲泥泞的沼泽”. It was only last week that we visited the apartment. We had the library and the locations of our writing desks all worked out. We both appreciated that it would be a perfect setting for us to finish my last novel and for Kim to complete her poetry collection. Unfortunate for us, I suppose, the last week has been something of a let down.

Ladders Can Be Dangerous

2009-06-26T07:25:00.000-07:00

The only time I fell off a ladder, and want to tell about it, was when it was hit by a boxcar that had been let loose to roll down a slope. It was when I worked at the salt mine.

I was running electrical conduit at the entrance to a tunnel below the salt sifter building. I had five bosses on the ground telling me what to do. The classic too many chiefs, not enough Indians.

Regardless, the rail car was let loose, nothing unusual in that at the salt mine -- but this time it rolled toward me. I saw it and started to climb down off the ladder. The bosses all yelled at me to climb up the ladder saying the rail car would miss me. They were correct, it did miss me. But it did not miss the ladder.

I jumped atop the rail car and thought that was OK. But there was only about three feet of space between the ceiling of the tunnel and the top of the rail car. The ceiling was very rough, blown on clumps of concrete. All would have been fine at this point except it being an active construction site there was a large electrical cable draped down. I got tangled up in it and was worried if I did not get loose then I would be hanging quite a distance up in the air when the rail car went away without me. Let alone I was worried I might get a bit bashed up dragged along the top of the rail car more than absolutely necessary.

So in the three foot of space I did a summersault around the cable. I then lay down on the top of the rail car… on that long steel platform where you see dandies in the movies that walk a train.

When the car came out of the other side of the tunnel I staid down and there was no sign of me. All of the bosses were mystified that I had vanished.

This was one lesson; it was fairly quick and over with, where I learned to suspect authority figures of being full of crap and it being dangerous for me to pay too much attention to them.

A bit of history about the salt mine here.

Check This Out

2009-06-15T16:29:00.000-07:00

Queen Isabella Eats a Pineapple and Misses the Jews
by Cami Park

Go Figure -- Cross Section

2009-06-12T16:53:00.000-07:00

How Wordsmith’s Erode Language

2009-06-10T02:04:00.000-07:00

I have a bone to pick; it is a small and insignificant one. Lately in my wandering around reading creative work, poetry, novels and flash, I have run up on a number of occasions where a writer referred to ‘cement’ when what they actually meant was ‘concrete’. This inappropriate usage of the word ‘cement’ drives me just a little bit batty.

I feel each time like I had got some of that wet cement hit in the eyeball.

Not meaning to pick on Chris Middleman in particular, I do not know him, never heard of him until this morning I came across his poem online where he has the line:
“on the bone-white cement”
Cement for at least the last 100 years is the stuff that comes in a bag, as a powder. You mix it with sand and water to make ‘mortar’ and you mix it with sand and water and gravel (aggregate) to make ‘concrete.’

When I make something out of cement it is usually unintentional, like leaving a bag of it out where it gets rained on and turns hard, and pretty much useless. If I am lucky I can bash it with a sledge and turn it into mud puddle fill.

Sidewalks are made out of concrete... yes, there is cement in them, but if the poet walks onto a construction site they will quickly learn that cement is not concrete and sidewalks are not cement. Walls are not cement. Concrete buildings are not cement.

Middleman’s verse is almost like saying, “on the bone-white glue” because cement is the glue of concrete, sort of. Since so many writers say ‘cement’ is it a cliché? Why not say, on the bone-white mastic? Or, on the bone-white avenue?

In The Polish Woman (see me review elsewhere) I remember to imagine in my reading that I ran across 'cement' used at least a half dozen times, and never once an appropriate reference to the intended 'concrete'. Is it that 'concrete' just does not sound poetic? Or is it that poetics, and prose, are disjointed from a sensitive appreciation of modern industrial technology?

I can only begin to be bothered when writers do not bother to connect their metaphors into the reality of the industrial world where stuff like cement comes from. They should get out of whatever room they are sitting in and go visit a cement plant. If we want to have an environmentally conscious literature then it makes sense to know where 'cement' comes from (it begins with a really really big hole in the ground), which understanding may start with a distinction to know what cement is, and what it is not. Cement is not concrete.

The energy consumption in the production of cement is one of a small few critical GLOBAL environmental issues alongside oil and coal. The production of cement is also a top air pollution issue. The Interstate Highway system is made of concrete, as are dams for hydroelectric plants, and that concrete is made with cement, Portland cement to be even more specific, and when the government starts to talk about repairing 'infrastructure' you can bet the market cost of cement goes up.

Because of the cost of transport of heavy materials, like crushed rock on barges, cement plants need to be close to the really ginormous hole in the ground and therefore it is an industry not easily outsourced. The general rule is that a cement plant supplies cement for a 200 mile radius from the plant. The world is dotted with cement plants -- and they are all using massive clumps of energy and they are all exhausting into the air that we breath.

For creative writers to be ignorant of the world, as witnessed by their not even knowing the ramifications of what they say when they say 'cement', amazes me. But, as I said at the start of this rant, it is a small bone to pick. A larger one would be how poets, flashers and novelists ignore science and paint pretty pictures of a world that does not exist... not that I particularly care for the austerity of realism. Hopefully writers all practice intelligent design and we can rest assured in the feelings of faith that they spread with their creative use of words.

It is very rare that concrete would be bone-white. That in itself is a bad observation of color. Usually concrete is a soft gray, and off-white, if old concrete it will be darker in color, maybe, and in an historic district it may have been tinted black, but it is not black, it is only a darker gray. The basic color of concrete is GRAY, not white, not bone.

If you want WHITE concrete then you need to use white cement, and white cement costs a whole lot more than GRAY cement and hardly anyone in their right mind (other than an artiste or a poet slightly disconnected from reality) would ever think to make concrete with white cement, and certainly would not consider to make sidewalks of concrete made with white cement. White concrete in a sidewalk will not remain white for very long.

Now, if we really want to get esoteric let us talk ‘terrazzo’. Hardly ever do we hear from the creative writers about the bone-white terrazzo.

Morning Visitors

2009-06-08T05:44:00.001-07:00

This is my morning visitor. Very wary. Every move I make to position the camera he flies away. If I cleaned the window outside of my writing desk it may help my photo and bird watching ambitions?

The Polish Woman, a novel by Eva Mekler

2009-06-01T05:18:00.000-07:00

The Polish-American experience is a complex one and there is a vast disparity in that experience between if one is a Jew or a Catholic. I am neither of the above, and I am not Polish.

“Americans are not interested in Poland,” she concluded as though this were a foreign conclusion. “Why should they be? When our artists and intellectuals leave, they go to Paris or Prague and live with respect as émigrés. Only our poor go to America where they become refuges – which Americans make sound like a dirty word.”

As an American my interest in Poland derives from a business partner of some 20 years whose mother was from Poland, living in Williamsburg-Greenpoint, Brooklyn amid the Polish community (before it became fashionable to live there), in the construction business of historic preservation employing Polish mechanics over many years, several Polish friends (particularly Misia Leonard, deceased, a Polish born actress who became an architect), and lastly a friend who has been gracious to bring me to visit his homeland on several visits. One of those visits in connection with the desire to reconstruction a 17th century log and timber synagogue near to Bialystok.

Mekler’s novel, a romance, explores not so much the Polish-American experience, though it is certainly evident in very subtle and striking details, as she explores the very difficult relationship between Polish Catholic and Jew.

“So this is how you will decide?” Meyer grumbled. “Over coffee and a danish?”

It is an incredibly bitter relationship full of emotional land mines and deep scars of distrust and hatred, and has to do with the Holocaust and how it was played out in Poland, and continues to play out in the lives of the characters. It also plays out in the lives of my friends, a few of whom have distanced themselves from me as I have become increasingly interested in the richness of the culture of Eastern Europe, and in particular the Polish facility for heritage restoration.

The novel takes place in the late 1960s, prior to Solidarity when Poland was under Soviet domination, and prior to the assassination of Martin Luther King (an historical detail I throw in for benefit of the disinterested American). Since the 1970s Poland has gone through a whole lot of changes in politics, I suspect though that the land, the trees, the rivers, the birds have remained pretty much the same. My personal forays have been with a look in a range of the 1300s, or earlier up to the current post-EU Poland. What I can say, and this from visits to a variety of synagogues, churches and mosques is that the Catholic-Jew relationship is not as volatile in Poland today as it was in the late 1960s. It did no help anyone that in Poland the history and memory of millennia of Jewish culture was repressed by decades of Soviet domination.

“The Soviets would bleed the country dry before letting the Poles succeed in anything but growing potatoes...”

Karolina Staszek is the female protagonist of this novel. She is a sculptor, works with stone, and she has come to New York from Warsaw as a young artist. In the unfolding of the plot she is faced with the quandary if she was the child of a Jewish leatherworker who was harbored during the Holocaust as a child by a Catholic farmer and his wife. If her father was the Jewish leatherworker he subsequently survived the Holocaust and moved to America where he became wealthy as a construction contractor. Karolina becomes enmeshed in seeking out the truth of her background, if her identity is as a Jew or a Catholic. Along in the plot there are various emotional and romantic attachments, and for those needing it some very pleasantly subtle sex scenes. Oh, yes, and there is a Jewish lawyer involved.

There is also much beauty to the Polish-English language of the dialogue of this novel, a particular breaking down in translation that often creates new measures of understanding between cultures.

“Good,” Karolina said. “Soon you will speak like a native.”

Philip broke into a grin. “Yeah?”

“No,” she said, without breaking her stride. “But I wish to encourage.”

Soul of Athens, Ohio

2009-05-29T03:42:00.001-07:00

Soul Of Athens 2009 Trailer from AthensHasSoul on Vimeo.

Baby Birds

2009-05-21T15:06:00.000-07:00

Little baby birds have been falling out of the house for two days now.

Yesterday I was sitting in the yard harvesting dandelion greens and a baby bird walked over to me, talking up a storm. It took me a while to figure out what to do about it. Eventually I figured out what hole in the eaves that it had come out of. I tried to put it back, but it fell. I had to go retrieve it again. The second attempt worked, and they baby bird joined its sibling mate at looking at me out of the hole.

This morning I walked around the corner of the house and there was a baby bird sitting on the sidewalk. I said to myself, "Oh, great, can't they control themselves?" So I picked this one up, mind you I am not touching them but with hats and shirts and gloves... and I was walking around front to show David... we were in the process of mixing up a bucket of poltice... and there was another baby bird sitting on the ground chirping at me. So I scoped them both up in my hat, thinking they had come from the same hole. I stuffed them both back in the hole but they did not seem to fit. A few minutes later one of them was back on the ground again. So then I realized there are two holes and I was trying to stuff one of the baby birds in the wrong hole. I went around to the side of the house and we got the ladder and I stuffed the baby bird back up into the eaves on that side of the house. Not sure if I got it in the correct hole, or not. Seems they are starlings, least ways the birds that I assume are parents and that are freaking out making all sorts of noise in the trees are starlings.

These baby birds are way too young to be on the ground, they can't fly, and we have neighborhood cats that come around when the dog is not out.

One year I found a baby starling, just like this one, huddled up in a corner of a sidewalk against a building. I brought it home and nursed it up to an adult starling. We called it Persnik... because he was always complaining and persnickety. I decided one day to let him out of his cage outdoors and he flew away making a hell of a racket. Never saw him again.

2.0 The Machine is Us/ing Us

2009-05-10T02:22:00.001-07:00

wake up and smell the roses

2.0+ The Machine is Us/ing Us - Dance Mix

2009-05-10T02:20:00.001-07:00

Transparency

2009-05-03T05:10:00.000-07:00

“People often sound dumber and more incoherent on paper than they really are.” – Peter Elbow, Writing with Power

As a writer I am fascinated by the many ways in which people relate with their own subjective process of writing. This is not a unique fascination on my part, but I do wish to focus on the subjectivity of writing here.

The nearly illiterate laborer who writes a shopping list of boards and nails and glue for building a closet, with their misspellings, lack of order, rough handwriting and omissions presents an example as intriguing in what is revealed by ‘text’ associated with a human creator, the list maker, as with the workings of a highly refined poet, a potentially more subtle list maker. We will try to avoid novelists, short story writers and flashers for our examples and focus on seemingly polar extremes.

The laborer in general hopes that their effort to write will result in someone going to the lumber yard, purchasing the appropriate materials, and returning with those materials to the worksite. That they write ‘screws’ means something to them, but the person standing in the aisle faced with a vast array of hundreds of different kinds of screws may feel at a loss for detail. Long ones, short ones, stainless steel, galvanized, brass, slotted or exotic, wood or machine?

The poet we do not always know what they hope for in their composition and in part the delight we often have in not-knowing and the potential to discover may be our most compulsive reason to read their list, but even with a poet there is usually something, some end-goal that they generally aspire toward as a result of their effort.

Granted that when a poet writes ‘screw’ it can mean many more things than intended on a lumber shopping list. In the case of many young writers the word brings up an image of horny birds with plumage where the poesy list making is a hope to attract sex. This intention, this motivation is prevalent and transparent on the internet for anyone who has a mind to look around the aviary. For some writers it is a desire to remain in a paid position and a need to publish, a need to get a quota of closets built in order to remain monetarily viable. Regardless it is difficult to imagine no motivation to exist prior to poetic composition, any more than that there would be no desire to assemble the parts needed to build a closet if the actual desire of the list maker is to drive a truck, and not to build a closet.

There is a phenomenon that occurs in the process of written composition in which the writer, be they laborer or poet where they know, understand, and imagine more than what they are able to convey in the text that they have written.

I stand in the hardware store and I look at the list and say, “Exactly what type of screw am I supposed to purchase here?” That question, if one actually cares to know the answer, initiates a process of having to find out, to seek out, to trace down, to call on the cell phone and ask, “What do you mean by this?” Or, it results in, “Gosh, I don’t know. I will get the blue ones and see if they work.” Either the originating writer of the shopping list gets what they need, and they move on with building closets, or they do not. The reader of a poem gets what they need, or not, or move on.

If one accepts that the intent of an author is not important to the reading of a text, then for a writer to leave out maybe three-quarters of the story may result in a text that is generally useless or at the least unsatisfactory to very many readers.

This is one reason why if you are inclined as a writer to write a story for closet builders that a primary suggestion is that the sentences are kept simple, and short, very brief, and minimal. If kept to simple communications, like ciphers, it is hard to imagine anything left out, and very easy to imagine a whole host of received meanings, none of which need be bothered by the need to buy the rightly needed type of screws.

In the case of my being able to call up the laborer and ask them for clarification I do not stop for more than a nano-second to determine a theory of poor communications through written media (Ugh, I should have asked him when he handed me the list!), we simply want to know what kind of screw we are supposed to put in our cart. This immediacy is aligned with the point-and-shoot school of conflict resolution. But in the case of a poet, particularly when they are deceased, there is not always very much to go on. Not a whole lot of ways to call them up on the phone and say, “WTF did you mean by ‘blue concrete carport dizzy in the genome’?”

Though I will admit that I am a proponent of phone calls to the dead, rarely do they respond. As likely to respond as a celebrity poet.

So, for an example: A daily record of weather information specific to Podunk, presented as a poetic composition may be of interest to Podunkers (a crossroad in the NY State Finger Lakes region), but remain inaccessible to all those not of Podunk, who never visited Podunk, and who have no idea why there is a prevalence of pig farmers in Podunk. Bet you did not know any of that.

And when I visited Podunk, climbed through the fence and walked right out there into the field and read that Weather poem for those farmers they were curious in their reception. Though weather is relevant to their livelihood they were hoping for a story with beginning, middle and end, a good joke line or a moral to it all, and not a need to decipher the aesthetic history of weather. Possibly there was a semiotic sign-symbol gap, my delivery was mumbled, or we can blame it on the weather. Here I thought that my voice was admirably attuned to the universe. Water is water. Sun is sun. Pig shit is pig shit. Not knowing quite what to do with me they invited me to dinner that evening where I proceeded to drink their bourbon -- then later on the somnolent porch I tried to hit on their least attractive daughter.

One does not need to be a critical enthusiast or academic extremist in order to feel that there is an inadequacy that can, if one so desires, but rarely does one really desire, to trace back to the poet and dig out of them what it was that they may have meant, or that they imagine it is that they were conveying. It takes a mental reader to read minds through a relatively blank text, and that mentation is very much like work. There are those instances when the motivation to write a list is to avoid substantive work. “Gosh, rather than measure and cut this board to make it exactly fit I will spend fifteen minutes with a pencil to my lip, and write this list.”

This came up to my mind yesterday in reference to something totally alien to creative writing or shopping lists, it had to do with how an estimate for construction work is formulated by one individual working in a solitary mode, without need to necessarily play with others, and how they can themselves, all to themselves without interference be very satisfied with dollar numbers that make sense to them, but have no attachments of ‘roots’... in that I mean here that a person from the outside coming at the estimate cannot easily see where it came from, how it was assembled, or what any of the assumptions were that went into forming it, or informing it, or sometimes not informing it.

So, desiring a list that is comprehensible to our general state of flow through confusion we ask for transparency. The level of transparency is that we are given what they see, what is transparent to them, but somehow lacking in the details to make any useful sense out of the information whatsoever. It is kind of like where faith begins.

I am reminded in math exercises in school the discipline to trace back to the origination and the habit of leaving behind calculations to delineate a trail that was followed... I admit a habit we wean ourselves away from when we use a calculator... but at some point people contained within their selves seem to lose the need as individuals to know from where it was they arrived.

“We got here. It is a wonderful sunny day for a picnic. What is your problem?”

But this does not do well for the needs of a reader, who very well may want to know what is missing in a story, or very much need to know what is missing in a cost estimate, or exactly which screws to purchase, if given the reasonable opportunity. In the final end it occurs to me that the majority of the world functions on not paying very close attention. In my mind this lack of attention is a good thing.

What I derived from this line of thought is that the solitary individual may or may not be transparent to their selves... they may not have that level of “understand thy self” for there to be a consciousness on their part that they need to translate out of their own cloud of understanding, or fug, or whatever goes on inside, all those bright shiny imaginings that go on wily nily in their head, and to understand that to be transparent to the world-at-large, or a readership or your fellow construction team, one needs to be to a degree rigorous in transparency to oneself, at least to nail down details and communicate them accordingly so that people who are other than and outside of oneself can take action, either action to build a closet or action insofar as to read a story and understand some of it.

“The father, as ruler of a realm of pig manure, is also associated with anality and waste, a common association frequently uncovered in psychoanalysis.” -- Ken Sanes, frm Mad Max as a Disguised Account of Personal Development: Ethics, Independence, and The Family Drama

Sharing Spaces

2009-04-23T14:30:00.000-07:00

first published Gator Springs Gazette, Life Sentences, August 2004

click the arrow to start the audio >>

check out the writer's spaces here at Sitting Pretty Magazine

A sense of work space--for an architect a sense of space is a tactile feel of narrow enclosure, of walls and the density or lightness of their materials, the sun penetrates through stained glass windows, the sound of a sibilant murmur echoes, the smell of a cavernous hollow and the feel of the stone floor as it is walked upon. Tibetan monks bang their drums. For a poet space is like a rapidly expanded universe without end, the topographic map winds as far as the umbilicus of the disembarked soul will reach. And then there is the place where we sit and write.

"You don't just sit down and write that stuff out, do you?" The answer is, "Well, NO, not exactly."

I sit at my keyboard and I look out past the monitor through the window and the leaves of the trees are green with the early sunlight from the east filtered through over the Atlantic. I can just pick out amid the biosphere and fresh birdsong the white and blue edge of the bow of my neighbor's boat perched in his mown yard. I am at the helm of my imagination in this space. I invent myself as a small Mark Twain secluded in an isolated pagoda in Elmira, NY where I look out over stretches of timothy fields with goats and cows in them and tentatively peck at this newfangled typewriter. My family flutters around me and the energetic dog Mudslide waits outside on the porch, or comes inside begging for me to come out and play in the lawn.

Here I am on a lazy boat in the Caymans in pursuit of tarpon while I smoke a Cuban cigar. From this roost I can see the Post Office of Hell. A friend of mine told me the last time he was here it was a hundred feet under in a sub in the 50s. It is his confined space to remember and mine to relate as I sit in this writing space on Long Island, east of Manhattan in the unHamptons, and write of a sense of place that is noplace.

Or I am Stephen Hawking's spiritual clone, confined to a wheel chair afloat in a hot air balloon where I imagine entire universes and black holes while I peck out with a soda straw on keyboard instructions to my students on where to look for the hidden mystery of one. A space can be so many things to match our desire to fill. I am within his space of body and without of it in story. Like with Baudelaire, I am anywhere and anyone I want to be but here.

It is an elaboration of the advice to those who want to be writers to find a space within which to write, to form a habit of writing. We seek a space within, more likely a space within which we can be most within ourselves comfortable to dream ourselves different, and in a dream to become as that which is and is not this person confined within and without and yet entirely free. We each make it as our own cell, a few stuffed cats on the firm shelves smile at us, paper rockets lay dormant next to duck decoys, or we sniff the subtle burn of sandalwood incense mixed with a scent of sauteed garlic in the back grounded kitchen. My cave, I wander all around in and out of business--battered here and there with the cosmic tide, I get a haircut or fix a flat tire or ease blindly into the ocean's surf or find myself arrested--and then I retreat to my cave where I write, and rewrite, and communicate, with you.

I am surrounded by books, sorted, unsorted, piled up on three sides. There are precarious cliffs of non-reference books anchored to the desk, while more humble piles of them tower over the threatening arcs of flying buttresses escaping from the floor. A fourth side of the space is left partially open, just enough room to avoid the tangle of computer wires. It is to this writing cave that my broken body returns to find the dream where my mind runs wild, wickedly, softly, near close to slumber and catatonia on occasion, excited, angered, confused, drunken with your imagination, but always with a desire to be free. It is this place to write.

Sound Poetry: Eight Geese

2009-04-21T12:01:00.000-07:00

Listen to this sound poem at Poesy Planet.

Eight Geese

...........o-ak, o-ak, o-ak

o-ak

o-ak o-ak, o-ak, o-ak

ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch

o-ak, o-ak, ch ch

o-ak, o-ak o-ak, o-ak o-ak

ch ch o-ak, ch

ch ch o-ak ch, ch ch

o-ak

o-ak, o-ak o-ak o-ak ch ch ch, ch

ka, ka ch ch o-ak ka, ch

o-ak ka, ka ch o-ak

ch ch ka o-ak o-ak o-ak ka ka ch ch ch ch ch ch, ch

o-ak

ka ka ch, ch ka

ch, ch, ch

ch ch ch ch ch ch, ch ka o-ak o-ak

o-ak ka ka, ch o-ak

feather grouped under sun of white-green lilac

...........fragrant flocked

......................geese

o-ak.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

"I just published eight geese online." -- GO
"I did not know geese could be authors." -- Kathy Follett

Try to figure out what this traditional poetic form is about at Sound Poetry.

Text Analysis

2009-04-19T09:11:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Matt Bell who today brought up the subject of the repetitive use of words, and someone else to mention the use of text analyzers... I was curious to check out a flash that I recently published at elimae, Tree Reader. This short text has developed a bit of interest for itself beyond elimae, hopefully more on that later.

The data below, not in a table format (meaning no vertical alignment) is confusing but interesting. For one thing, out of 104 words 93 are shown here as unique (without my going to any further work to verify this). For another, the Gunning-Fog Index for readability seems to be off the chart.

The most frequently used word in the piece is 'fell'.

A much longer (1,800 words) non-fictional essay, composed as an educational tool, came back with a Gunning-Fog Index of 10.

~~~

Textalyser Results
The complete results, including complexity factor, and other features

Total word count : 104

Number of different words : 93
Complexity factor (Lexical Density) : 89.4%
Readability (Gunning-Fog Index) : (6-easy 20-hard) 79.2
Total number of characters : 1006
Number of characters without spaces : 567
Average Syllables per Word : 1.4
Sentence count : 1
Average sentence length (words) : 197
Max sentence length (words) : 197

(in furrowed bark of the old basswood tree as i read an older brother say ten with a younger sister on the train she was all over the place in and out of the seat she fell in the aisle and taunted him then bumped her elbows into commuters who smiled or winced or stared defiantly or shut their eyes to retreat to sleep if they saw nuisance or themselves reflected in their memory of childhood as a climber of trees as he said eat and they ate cold fries and paper wrapped hamburgers she yelped and whined they spilled dark brown soda while all he wanted was his own seat to sit he pushed her down and off of his head where she grabbed the leaves away from his own room and as the commuter train slid on the iron line further east the passengers thinned out stop by station stop until eventually the young boy got to sit alone he fell over and slept and the ride fell quiet as it passed the old basswood tree in the lawn of the cemetery as i read in the metallic flicker of sunlight on the afternoon window)

Min sentence length (words) : 0

Readability (Alternative) beta : (100-easy 20-hard, optimal 60-70) -111.5
Frequency and top words :
Word Occurrences Frequency Rank
fell 3 2.9% 1
sit 2 1.9% 2
train 2 1.9% 2
own 2 1.9% 2
stop 2 1.9% 2
seat 2 1.9% 2
tree 2 1.9% 2
old 2 1.9% 2
read 2 1.9% 2
basswood 2 1.9% 2
Word Length :
Word Length (characters) Word count Frequency
3 56 28.4%
2 38 19.3%
4 37 18.8%
5 19 9.6%
6 14 7.1%
7 12 6.1%
8 8 4.1%
9 5 2.5%
10 4 2%
1 4 2%
Syllable count :
Syllable count Word count Frequency
1 133 68.9%
2 45 23.3%
3 13 6.7%
4 2 1%
2 word phrases frequency :
Expression Expression count Frequency Prominence
in the 3 1.5% 31.6
on the 3 1.5% 40.3
of the 3 1.5% 63.3
to sit 2 1% 31.4
his own 2 1% 39.5
i read 2 1% 50.5
as i 2 1% 51
basswood tree 2 1% 53.6
old basswood 2 1% 54.1
the old 2 1% 54.6
3 word phrases frequency :
Expression Expression count Frequency Prominence
as i read 2 1% 50.8
old basswood tree 2 1% 53.8
the old basswood 2 1% 54.4
4 word phrases frequency :
Expression Expression count Frequency Prominence
the old basswood tree 2 1% 54.1
Unfiltered wordcount :
Expression Expression count Frequency Prominence
the 16 8.1% 39.6
and 9 4.6% 48.1
of 7 3.6% 50.8
as 6 3% 44.8
in 6 3% 57.5
he 4 2% 41.5
to 4 2% 50.4
she 4 2% 65.1
or 4 2% 71.1
fell 3 1.5% 37.9
his 3 1.5% 39.6
on 3 1.5% 40.6
they 3 1.5% 57.9
stop 2 1% 24.1
sit 2 1% 31.2
own 2 1% 39.3
read 2 1% 50.3
i 2 1% 50.8
over 2 1% 52
tree 2 1% 53.3
basswood 2 1% 53.8
old 2 1% 54.3
out 2 1% 54.8
her 2 1% 59.4
train 2 1% 59.9
seat 2 1% 63.5
was 2 1% 66.8
their 2 1% 67
all 2 1% 67.3
a 2 1% 76.1

Steinbeck: Not Found in Sag Harbor

2009-04-15T13:47:00.000-07:00

Though I have lived on Long Island nearly 20 years I had never previously visited Sag Harbor until recently. I have heard of various artists who took up residence there – something about the light -- and I have held just a smidgeon of curiosity. I have certainly been out on the South Fork and done work in the Hamptons and at Montauk, but for whatever reason I had not gone to Sag Harbor. My forays to the Hamptons, which are closer to us than we are to NYC, have always been exploratory as in many respects the culture of wealth at play for me is prohibitively alien.

My travels tend to be brought on by either a purpose, as in business, or on the downside by no other reasonable alternative -- as in a wedding or funeral.

For a living I am in the business of fixing old buildings. My specialty, if I have one, and many who know me wonder what I actually do with my time, is historic masonry.

Whenever I have an opportunity to combine my writing and reading interests with my paid work I am always delighted. So I was quite happy, and intrigued to be asked to come out and look at the brick and limestone masonry ‘free’ library in Sag Harbor. The only problem with all of that is that the free library was actually looking for free work, on our part (my son being my business partner), thinking that we would be seduced to do a full survey of their really incredibly unique and absolutely amazing historic masonry, find all of the problems, and give them an itemized price list... in fact, tell them what to do, how to do it, and the materials to use. It is a scam that I have been stuck with in the past, and it was very clear to me once we got into conversation with our contact where we were going with it and what they wanted from us. It was also obvious to me that the person we were talking with had no clue what they were talking about, as far as the actual work goes.

They told us all of the granite steps need to be replaced and I looked at them and at the steps and wondered what in heaven’s name they thought was wrong.

They had no architect on board, no written scope of work (you tell us what we need to have done) and no specifications (we have a guy in town that likes to do that historic stuff and he will tell you the mix for the historic mortar but not any time soon, and we need prices by Monday). I was perplexed and came right out and asked them if they had the money for the project, and for whatever reason they were honest and told us they had no money at all (usually people wait until you have finished the project before they admit to that little detail -- and people wonder why contractors get antsy), but they want to get some.

I won't be shy, we need to get some too!

If we were to give them the information they needed then their intent is to go ask the taxpayers for a bond. I suspect that they had this idea, a lame idea in my mind, that if they could sucker a bunch of contractors into doing free work to come up with a budget that they could line themselves up for all of that “shovel ready” stimulus money we hear about on the news these days.

There is some sort of epidemic of irrational fantasy that folks come up with when they are associated with an old building that nobody but them cares much about. It is like being the used book seller that has to keep explaining that the collection of old National Geographic, the one’s Aunt Rose saved in the attic until she expired, stacked in very neat piles, are worthless.

Sag Harbor has a bunch of really neat old buildings that look like they will never be restored in this millennium.

I kind of felt like we had really wasted an entire morning, and these days wasting an entire morning without pay, and to have to pay for the gas to get there, it sort of hurts.

To do what they really wanted done would have taken me at least four days, three days on site and a day to estimate and write it up. That is a lot of time to put into speculation and I asked, “What chance have we of getting any work here at all?” “As much chance as anybody, we will look at your price and if it is a good one then we will come back to you.” That is the voice of a death knell for any idea that they will want a quality restoration, as the masonry butchers are always cheaper. So the game here is we get all anxious to tell them everything that they need to know and then they take it and shop it around for a lower price. Been there, done that. I would like to say some nice choice badass things right about now, but I remain polite.

So then while waiting for the sap (I think he was a kitchen renovation guy with a sad task to conduct this ruse as a favor to some local grand dame) to close the roof hatch and get down off the ladder I see this bronze bust on a pedestal. I go over to look at it and I see it is John Steinbeck.

There was also some rather nice Guastavino tile vaulting.

I think, oh, gosh, Joseph Heller is buried in Easthampton and one day when I was out there I tracked down his grave... and the plaque under the Steinbeck bust tells about how Steinbeck wandered all around the globe in a state of constant internal torment but finally found a place of peace and rest in Sag Harbor. I think, yes, rest, as in he must be buried here. You see, I had not exactly thought to do extensive research on the culture and history of artists in residence or entombment in Sag Harbor before we got up that morning and prepared to go out there.

Like almost anyone I read Grapes of Wrath under duress in school and a few of his other books at a time in my life when they did not grab me very well. But as an adult I read East of Eden, read it rather slowly and deliciously, and consider it for an American writer a must-read, as much as Huckleberry Finn is a must read. So my thought here is that we will not have wasted all of our time if we can go visit the grave of John Steinbeck and I get my picture took.

I ask the sap, I figure his being local he will know, if John Steinbeck is buried in Sag Harbor.

He has no clue, I mean; he has no clue who I am talking about even when I point at the bronze bust.

He suggests I ask the library staff. So we go down stairs and the person at the library desk, the one there in what looks like maybe it was supposed to be a brown uniform (either that or a weird sense of sailor's fashion), the person that would check out your books, and she has no clue who I am talking about.

I say that they have a bust of him upstairs... then think twice maybe she does not know what a bust is either.

She tells me to ask the woman dressed in white that walks up with the mop, and I ask. She has no clue either, but has some idea who I am talking about and she says if not here then maybe in New York City he used to spend time there as well.

Where in the world is John Steinbeck?

Well, we leave there and a friend calls me on the cell and asks me how things are going at the library and I say, “They suck. It all sucks.” My candor was genuine. I am a bit fed up.

I tell my friend about how the damned librarians, of all people, have no clue if John Steinbeck is buried in Sag Harbor, or not. They get no sympathy from me (Notice how the name plaque is kind falling off?). I tell him about the crap sucker ruse we walked into, he knows what I am saying, and I am slightly peeved at everything including the sky with the nice light right about then. We hang up. I want a coffee. I want to leave Sag Harbor. In a bit my friend calls back and tells us that Steinbeck is buried in Salinas, CA.

My son says to me, “Good thing we did not decide to just wander around and look in cemeteries the rest of the day.”

Styxbiometricks

2009-04-13T00:30:00.000-07:00

After kissin’ his soul mate for 4,096th time Guarana divided a binary quandary as she suddenly found herself transformed into an albino cyber amoeba. Spit and sizzle. Yet, every word spoken at floating stuff switched Guarana from AC to DC and Mrs. Blob is unsure if she is attractive today or not all depending on their packaging. But hooking, with her infrared watch, Guarana propositions the floater's wrist and with immediate excursion his ark module mates her musty hippo. Kazam zip fuck!

Bump flesh, flesh bump.

Mere cells exuding projectile meaning as water-eyed Guarana studies nascent gel before now after then telegraphs unto wee hours of mourning for metronome stations across her balmy poolside music, steam air, and palms burnished over hades swim zone. Guarana caught in a buoy can jumping up tears ligaments to cause his mate to shut her lid so darkness gives him cause to want weed tinted portals on their wandering affair. You know, underwater breathing keeps Guarana safe from predators and sex change artists who will not disembark from warm safety of shored rock lines. Sinking, submerged, androgynous amber burning croak bytes. Oceanus' thin cosmic slush line spurting between here and there on targets.

First published Magazine Minima vol. 0.1 for Jonathan Carr, sometime in the late 20th century. The piece was written for the FLASH form, it is worth looking at the original publication to get a sense of this symbiotic integration.

The following narrative was NOT included with the original publication.

I like a story that leads one to believe that there is a story but hints at the same time that there may not be any story at all. Collage is a model to build upon for this purpose in that recognizable elements are blended with strips of color and alluding phrases to mimic connections of meaning that may, or may not, have substance. Synaptic jumps. Indecisive discomfort of question, a condition of life, is not quite hell, so the dividing river as an aquatic biosphere of myth & imagination is the primary metaphor. The thin line is like that space between dark and dawn when the swamp creatures suddenly go native and the birds sing eerily. Condensation of post-modern prose requires techniques of indirection and reflection to elicit a vision of a full world perspective in few words. Mrs. Blob, a cinema twist, familiarity with the hilariously camp horror. Here we have a note that triggers recognition surrounded by notes that submerge meaning. The meaning flows in and out of the sequential progression of the prose. Cut n' paste method with an applied intelligence of complex pattern recognition and selection. Taking the absurd and arbitrary and giving them a fantasy of meaning. Our mask is one of action, things moving around, and attracts through recreation, the creating of the new, in sex, the biologic counterpoised against the mechanical, AC/DC. The alliteration tends one towards feeling sedated, and missing the encoded meaning hid behind the rhythms of repetition, then bang, verisimilitude occurs in the flashing of common and vulgar, vulgate words, Spit. The enunciation of speech is a projection of thought in a river biosystem that is an imagined place conditioned and created by imagination… everything changes shape and meaning on the edge of hell, the veil of our sanity torn. Oceanus is the mom of the river Styx, a river that I imagine flows very slowly and stagnant. A log file not restored in order on the launch time.

Brevity

2009-04-08T02:21:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a thing said simply needs to be kept short.

Book Reviews and Personal Culture/Canon

2009-04-05T05:39:00.000-07:00

"Writers who are familiar with classic literary works are better able to engage with the ideas deemed most relevant to a culture." Well, yeah sort of, but I think this concept is a big load of propoganda that diverts us from an understanding of, "Who's culture?" Most often in these canonical reading lists I find quite certainly the culture that is identified and pushed is not mine. The ideas deemed relevant may not be relevant to me, though I am sure it is relevant to a drunken Robinson if I slip my lift-boy tips into Robinson's pocket.

Show me please, I ask of these lists, What is my culture?

For me a good book review is a writer’s review of a writer’s work, and as such it is not meant as an uber-analysis, best-of, recommended that the world buy this and read this for the purpose of a publisher's marketing department to enhance sales of product, but an explication of why I, as a writer, would appreciate or learn something from this or that writer’s book, and why I may propose that other writers, or curious (dare I say discerning) readers, may want to read a particular book.

Yesterday my wife and I discussed around the futility of critical words to ever recreate the essence of a work of art, to which eventually I agreed once I had a clue what it was that we were discussing. The variations of human experience are multiple and if not unique to each individual at least they make a good show to appear unexpected. Critique is an artifice conditioned by our talent, and in some cases training, to observe ourselves in the process of observing and to be able to articulate that experience.

In a world that works so desperately to depersonalize our understanding and to capture our attention, my only interest finally is in the local and the personal, wherever and however it may occur, and as much as possible to do so in the purely subjective. This is what I think, and what I feel. If I did not intend to communicate then I would not bother to try, but in the end Dear Reader you are free to go where you so desire and think whatever suits your fancy.

I like to listen (though my wife may tell you that I prefer to bounce around the room and shout). Talk at me.

Add to that, too often my impression is that writers, young and old, neglect a habit to read a whole lot of really good trashy sub-par not-perfect material in preference to what they have been pointed to as the canon of great examples. This tendency, IMHO leads to a sterile literature.

A good gardener knows without thinking how to turn manure into beautiful flowers. And lest one not understand, a sustainable human population requires that we do something imaginative about the accumulation of night soil. In the light of morning one person’s steamy pile is as good as another’s.

Well, great examples have criteria of selection and what I intend to say here is that the canon that appeals to me is the one that I select for no good reason... and I encourage all writers, and readers, to carve out their own canon, to ignore the bright lights, bright signs, best sellers, pillars of literature and to look into themselves, see and sense what they feel and experience in reading a book, and settle as to what they themselves desire to read, and why, and to stick to it.

How a Poem Happens

2009-04-01T15:04:00.000-07:00

Philip Levine interview by Brian Brodeur.

http://tinyurl.com/dlkxwb

Levine is one of my favorite poets.
Excellent poem, excellent interview.

Quick, Google Alert me!

2009-03-29T05:58:00.000-07:00

We suggest that rather than read this blog entry you may want to visit with us for a view at the real time ant cam.

A friend, a fantastic writer, relates that she does not understand the stories in The New Yorker. She wonders, as I wonder, how they can be so finely written and yet so boring to read. She ends off to say that her curiosity is piqued by the idea that people pretend to enjoy the stories in The New Yorker and that this thought makes her giggle. I like that.

Another friend, another skilled writer, relates that they regularly critique stores from The New Yorker in their blog, and with that practice they admit that they do not particularly get the stories either, though they try to say good things (that is where craft comes to the surface) -- they suspect that the mentioned authors may be making anonymous comments in return to the often well measured critique.

Then there was a comment, an inquiry as to a comment one writer made in their blog about the poor show of a specific author (not one to do with The New Yorker, whose name I will not mention here for reasons to become shortly apparent) who suddenly found his backwater blog comments being questioned in a semi-stalker manner by the so specifically named author.

Seems as writers we can all Google Alert, particularly if we have a unique name, to see who does not like our product. To which, the incessant reading of obscure reviews and paying attention to answer to every one of them no matter how incurably trivial I wonder if there is not a certain latent obsessive compulsive psychosis on the horizon.

So that got me to think how I do not relate at all very well to the stories or poems in The New Yorker, and my thoughts about how I as a happily obscure writer do relate to the venerable publication more through the people that I have known associated to it than ever to the merit of any of the literate material.

When I first came across The New Yorker it was at the home of a world expert on ants, his son was my best friend in High School.

When you meet a world expert in most anything there is a certain cache to the experience that bleeds over to wonder what culture there is to the renowned. Their ancestry was 1st generation American from Australia, and that lent a sense of the exotic, for me at least, to the renowned ant expert. Within the northern most reach of the Appalachians, Tompkins County, NY they had come from outside the small circle of our hick farming and university burb. They landed on the university side of the Ag situation, as ants and etymology in general have a lot to do with things like growing three-hundred acres of beans.

She is the first woman that I know who was involved with the League of Women Voters. As an aside, she had two daughters who quite tragically died each of rare and quickly terminal diseases in the prime of their young adulthood.

On his hearing that I wanted to be a poet the word I got back from the world expert on ants was that poetry is a good start for a novelist. It has been one of those tenants that has stuck with me as a guiding light and when I am able to sustain an entertaining narrative past a few thousand words it may yet prove true. I do not know if that maxim to me came in full cloth from the ant expert from the bowels of The New Yorker, or not. You can never quite know where an influence originates.

The world expert on ants took up cultivation of orchids when he retired. He had a room built onto his modest home in order to accommodate this agrarian hobby. The very last word I heard from the ant expert was to all us younger ones to not waste our money to drink cheap beer. He advised us to pay a good price for a good beer. Then he died of complications of diabetes.

It was my friend's mother, who read The New Yorker, while us younger savored the cartoons, and so I have always associated the style of the stories as appealing to my friend's mother. In short I suppose I see a reader of The New Yorker as the spouse of a world expert on ants, and folks who drank a whole lot of beer. God knows what they were actually reading.

At one time The New Yorker was one of a few paying markets for short stories and in part I sense that as with many print media, or old established companies, they are feeding off the weight of the baggage of their legacy. What I mean is that they created through their promotion and publishing a type of literature and in doing so they also created their own ideas about what they were doing in creating a type of literature and that their support of the stories, and poems that they feature now has everything to do with what they think that they are doing. And what they think they are doing has to do with what they did before, and very little, as I see it, to do with the risk of doing something entirely different in the future. In short I suspect that they publish what they publish because they feel it is safe... as long as they do not spike down their subscription base that may, or may not, actually be reading the magazine if not laughing at the cartoons and wondering about the class oriented advertisements.

Though I am not a world expert on anything, not even myself, my wife likes to read The New Yorker and when she finds something that she thinks will interest me she passes it over. Otherwise I tend to keep my distance. We have ants in this approach to Spring season that crawl around our bathroom sink. I like to watch them.

In the work side of my life I have a friend, an architect and not a writer, who is, or was, it has been a while since I was told this story, a friend of the poetry editor at The New Yorker. My friend related how a cadre of younger poets was complaining that the magazine was catering to a clique of specific older writers. The poetry editor got it worked out to include these complaining poets. Then another group of poets came along and complained that they were being excluded. Then I consider that I can't remember ever reading a poem in The New Yorker that I liked and/or had any clue what it was about. I kept my mouth shut on that one when my friend brought it up.

Sometimes a smile is the best answer.