Lichtenburg Figures

World's largest model train railway.

Yesterday on the train I finished reading Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and started re-reading Kafka's Amerika. It has been a very long time since I read Kafka's book. I look forward to learn what the years have done to my understanding. When I first read the book I was not much older than the protagonist.

I am fascinated by the European conceptions of America, and the reverse in American conceptions of Europe. Also I like model trains, transportation and railroad simulations. Likewise fascinated with the connection of these narrative/action dioramas with the construction of story. As well, that this simulacra is a tourist attraction, as is any historic theme village a knock-off of an amazement park.

Outside of Madison Square Garden yesterday, standing on the corner waiting for the light to change so that we could cross the street, I noticed a tourist with a vid camera recording the traffic in the intersection. My first thought... boy, will that be fun to edit when he gets home. Then it occurred to me that it would be an interesting project to do a NY'ers tour of Manhattan. Ride around on top the red double-decker faux English bus thing. Put together a video so that bedridden people could get a 1st hand sense of 'being there' without having to leave Wisconsin, or wherever these lost people show up from.

In another on-the-street incident we were walking down the sidewalk and there was a fellow pointing his camera at his own face, holding it out at arm's length, not a cheap camera, mind you, a pretty classy one with lenses. I am sure he included his face with the tall building in the background. In retrospect I think it was the Empire State. Just as we passed him I said loudly, "It looks good!" Just as the flash went off. We kept on the move. I wonder if he smiled.



Off the train into the parking lot of thousands of cars at Ronkonkoma, and I mean thousands, I was walking along and heard one car running. I looked around, nobody there, nobody in sight. A Civic was sitting there running, locked, keys in the ignition and nobody around to be seen in the parking lot anywhere.

I stood there for like three minutes looking at the car running and thinking WTF should I do about this? My conclusion, please please please remember this long enough to tell someone about it. I walked away. Went home.

It is the only time I have ever felt actually tempted to steal a car w/ the idea that the owner who I imagine was stressed out had to walk out of the parking lot, across the station tracks into the station, so far away they would not be able to see their car, to get to a phone. Why no cell phone who knows, call a locksmith. Either that or it was a very absent minded commuter that had arrived there in the morning, run out of their car, left it running and never thought twice about it. So I had this idea to like move the car to the other end of the parking lot, about 4 acres away. So, if they had returned and found me sleeping in their car, warm and belligerent with an opened copy of Kafka’s Amerika saddled over my nose it certainly would have made for a fun scene.

Yesterday in a business conversation with my son/partner I told him that I had read about a 300 acre organic bean farm in my home village in Upstate NY that the owners come down to NYC every Wednesday to sell dry beans at the Union Square Farmers Market. Several years ago I did the exterior restoration of the Barnes & Noble across the street from the market. I am quite familiar with the street scene there. So my son wanted to know why I talked about dried beans. It is not his home turf so he does not relate to the place in any semblance to how I do -- which for me is a mix of desire, fabulation and repulsion. I told him that I thought it interesting to contemplate if I had taken a different road in my life and been a bean farmer and never left home. He thought it was funny that I would want to go into the bean business, rather than play with stones as I have done. I took it as a really interesting story with zero economic value other than that to play with stories keeps my mind off our meager position in the current economic situation. We also had a longer conversation about Iceland. Some fishermen should keep fishing.

When all else fails, make up a good story.

~~

I thank my friend Carrie Berry in Scotland for directing us to this very kool vid.

In Search of One-Word Answers

As writers we lay down text then we push it around to readers and we see what happens.

I have been doing this for more than 45 years. Write something down, show it to someone, and say, “Hey, what do you think of this crap that I wrote down?”

To me that complex process is writing, and it is a whole lot more important to my life as a kernel of activity than publishing. Publishing is mostly an accident and for the most part as a writer we have no control over how it goes. But we do have control over our decision to write something down and we do have control over a decision to share it with anyone.

As readers we read what is in front of us and we can either comprehend it, or not. If we do comprehend it then we have a choice if we want to pay attention to our comprehension, or not.

What is comprehension? It is what we as the reader think happened when we read the text -- the reading was an event in our consciousness (and this is one of those interesting places where the idea of the character changing over time or the reader changing in their consciousness over time through the reading is plot -- and why some readers think some writers write stories that don't go anywhere or end in a galaxy far far away). So then we have another choice, we can either write down as best as we can figure to do it what we think happened, or we can keep our mouths shut, or say 'curious'.

So, my response to a recent question in regard to my response of the one-word 'curious' to my reading comprehension of a three sentence story written by a friend, another writer:

Your brain is warped? Curious means it left me curious. I am not really sure what is going on with it. I figure I am not supposed to know. So I am curious. I suppose I could have said intrigued. Guba is a curious name, at least for me it is. At first I think it might be a dog’s name. But then the ten years makes me think it must be a young woman, possibly a teenager. Ten years is a bit old for a dog and they do not remember even five minutes all that well. I wonder what Guba was doing before she looked up. If Guba is a dog I can kind of imagine what they were doing, as a young woman I don’t know, there are so many things that she could be doing. Possibly she was darning a sock. Or maybe she was eating oatmeal with cinnamon and raisins on a cold morning, mist rising up from the forested valley behind the house. I don’t really know but then I am told it is a funny thing. Then again I’m not sure what the narrator was holding in front of Guba. As I don’t know how they looked at whatever it is the way they looked at it before I cannot judge for myself if they looked at it differently, or not, but there is a nice little flash back with feelings. Is it a mirror, is it a photograph? If Guba was a dog then I kind of have an idea it could be poop smeared on a newspaper. I would say not a mirror, but a photograph. Or maybe it is a camera. That is curious. It is surely something if it makes Guba to make faces. Then the narrator scratches their head. I suppose this should be taken in context to signify thinking and not that they have itchy dandruff, and as it does connect with contemplation it seems almost a meditative scratching. It seems to me almost unconsciously scratching the head. The narrator is trying to dig at something, again, curiosity, possibly the brain warp? And then ‘somehow.’ We don’t know how. Some sort of mystery. Makes me curious, again. A sister in law, ok, another character, so now we have the narrator, Guba and Rita. At least I feel comfortable in thinking that Rita is not a dog. I do not know very many people that would name a dog Rita. Then the reference to Carly Simon, which though I presume is a singer, since she has an album cover, means pretty much nothing to me. Is she Canadian? I am not good at keeping catalogs of celebrity faces in my head, my bad. But I presume Carly Simon is shorthand for an entire nexus of facial image, with, I hope the safe presumption that it is her face on the album and not her bum... though these days you never know. Not that I have anything against album covers with celebrity bums on them. I also kind of feel that it is reasonable to assume that the narrator was not showing Guba either a photo of Guba’s bum, or the narrator’s naked bum for real like, though that would be curious too, right in Guba’s face I would not blame her if she made a face. Then there is Leah. Now, I have no clue if Leah is a male or female name, so the gender here is androgynous until proven otherwise. So that makes the narrator’s gender curious. Meaning, I don’t know for sure anything much but I am curious. They gave birth, hmmm, it may be safe to assume they are a heterosexual pair, but that these days is never certain, either. They could have had a surrogate or had it done with artificial insemination from a sperm bank and be a lesbian couple. I’m not clear on that, and do not feel comfortable to read too much into the story. Then the mini Cherokee Indian... seeing as half of my family is Seneca Indian I can go along with the idea that they look a bit unique and I can kind of get the idea that the reference is to the afornamed Guba. So then I am thinking that the narrator and Leah are parents of Guba. That Rita and Leah are siblings. That Rita looks like a lounge singer, so Leah must either be a genetic facial mutant, or the narrator is a facial mutant, or a bum mutant, or maybe Guba has Down Syndrome, but the reference to the Native American heritage seems to preclude this simple answer. The potential stereotype of movie injuns causes me to have a brain synapse, and I ignore it. Is Carly Simon a Native Canadian? Then we end off with a pretty blue dress, which seems odd, seeing as blue is usually associated with boy children. So then I begin to think that there is a human baby, it is a boy, not a girl, and that the narrator can’t see very well – due to a warped brain, or they need glasses real bad -- and insist that his boy child is a girl and that he cannot quite understand why his boy child makes ungirly faces at him. And so there it is a Family Portrait and I am made curious. It seemed, for me, the first time around it was safer to say curious.

It takes less energy to say nothing, less energy to read nothing, a little bit to say one word, but to say what you think went on in your consciousness usually gets someone upset and a whole bunch of crap goes on and so the QUESTION to speak, or not to speak, is always gauged by an assessment of the transactional cost... as in, "If I speak up what sort of crap will I have to deal with after that?"

As writers we can take this scribbling habit and step away a bit from our personal autobiographical relationship to the text and like flip a switch in our heads so that we are not ourselves, but some other reader that is like not quite us, and we read what we wrote as if we were a reader and if we have comprehension, and pay attention to our consciousness, then we slowly adjust... until suddenly one day a real other than us reader says, "Oh, I get that."

Then it is over because immediately you turn around a few times and suddenly nobody has a clue, including yourself, what you were trying to get at. So, if you are actually a writer then you start over because you don't quite know what else to do with yourself. If you are a wood carver then you give up writing and go carve wood. In my particular case I find it more convenient and profitable to put holes in walls and then not to look into them. More on that later...

Riverside Park, probes day before Xmas 2008

This commemorative terrace and balustrade, part of the staircase inserted at 97th Street into the 19th-century, rustic perimeter wall enclosing Riverside Park, honors the distinguished architect John Mervin Carrère (1858–1911).

Find more photos like this on PTN Live

Keeping Up with Keeping Up

I am working on a review of My Life at First Try by Mark Budman... but as usual I am cogitating on it long to get my impressions in order. But in the mean time for some real decent online reading:

Vestal Review Web Issue 35
Vestal Review has been published continuously since March 2000. Mark Budman is the Publisher/Editor/Webmaster.

Sean Thomas
Robin N. Koman
Mary McCluskey
Kate Blakinger
Douglas Bruton
Folding Shackleton
Alison Christy
Elizabeth Kuelbs
Craig Daniels
Bruce Holland Rogers

Smoke Long Quarterly Issue 24

Sarah Black
Edmond Caldwell
Bill Cook
Thomas Cooper
Scott Garson
Shane Goth
Tiff Holland
Tim Jones-Yelvington
Darby Larson
Tara Laskowski
Samuel Lee
Charles Lennox
Ravi Mangla
Heather McDonald
Jen Michalski
Gregory Napp
Susannah Pabot
John Riley
Ania Vesenny

The term "smoke-long" comes from the Chinese, who noted that reading a piece of flash takes about the same length of time as smoking a cigarette. All the work we publish is precisely that—about a smoke long.

Snow Walk at the Saltgrass Marsh

Mobius Click or the Electrical Pliers

Klein, my maker.
[Insert 200 pages of National Electrical Code.]
My handles are cobalt blue. How about you?
I am a tool slave used by Joe the electrician.

In his leather pouch I snuggle to the red beaks. Many a copper wire I've bent, till Joe shorted me on 440 volts. FLASH -- burnt him back, WHANG BANG! Laid him out square between kisser and the eyes. Before Joe came to I skipped with a screw driver in the pouch of his arch enemy Tecumseh.

He should not have stuck me in that box. Did he not see the skull and bones? Whacked with electric -- now he sees nothing. Don't worry, they all come round.

We are riding along Sunset Blvd., Tecumseh and I, in a canary yellow corvette.

Joe is in love with Alice, his anima -- before I skipped I snipped Joe -- an id lobotomy. Very quick... painless. Hit them with one thing then snip with another. So Joe the electrician fumbles in darkness looking for my handles.

If I were you I would sneak up on him and clip free his tool belt.
But watch for the groping fingers.

(first published Gator Springs Gazette)