June 22, 2009 - Caribou Coffee - Homewood Illinois

Still didn’t get my mail – but had a nice visit – caught the 8:30 METRA University Park train back – made it by 10 minutes – I always worry about making a deadline – would have had to wait for two hours – surely you can find something to do for that time – this is downtown Chicago – yeah but it’s Sunday night – still! Will I could have sat and read which is what I do a lot of anyway. I ran out of books and found five at the Homewood Library Friends used book sale – only one of which I really wanted to read – the biography of Marcel Proust – off to visit Borders this morning – gotta have some poetry.

As you proceed further with me, the slight acquaintance which is now beginning betwixt us will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is at fault, will terminate in friendship – Odiem praeclarum! – then nothing which has touched me will be thought trifling in its nature, or tedious in telling – Lawrence Sterne


The appeal of thunder
        Is a rumble

Blood flowing in the street
Torrents of violence
Demanding surrender


The aftermath of thunder
        Is nostalgia
A longing for a return
To the womb


        Distant thunder
Receding and proceeding
Horizon to horizon
Reverberations of waters
Headed towards the sea


Then it is over
And it’s the return
        To the mother
Only the accounting remains
What is gone and what
        Still remains

I am much less interested in their being good ones or bad ones, clean ones or dirty ones, rich ones or poor ones, well-mannered ones or badly mannered ones, sick ones or well ones. I want to know about each one the being in them in them to make of them ones succeeding, ones failing – Gertrude Stein

A great novelist could just as well
Have been a grand entrepreneur

It takes the same single mindedness

And determination for simple ideas

The former creates the future and the later

        Confirms history

But whether a grand entrepreneur would
Make a great novelist is doubtful
Although he might be splendid
As a hack writer or advertising
         Sloganist

So then I will go on writing, and not for myself and not for any other one but because it is a thing I certainly can be earnestly doing with sometimes excited feeling and sometimes happy feeling and sometimes longing feeling and sometimes almost indifferent feeling and always with a little dubious feeling. I could though be so wise and I am so wise and it would be so nice for me to be certain what from me some other one could be a wise one a little less wiser than I am – Stein

The poem does not exist prior to its being written

History overflows and floods whole continents and peoples then the waters recede and the survivors count up what is missing and what remains –Albert  Camus

Travelers seek wealth
As they appropriate
As they create
As the despoil
As they enchant
The one is the tourist
The other is a poet

Man not only thinks of the world by means of his language… his vision of the world is predetermined by his language – Ernst Cassirer

How can the pendulum

Mark out time when

It does not march,

       Travels no line

Swinging into the future
And then back into
       The past and
It passes through the
Present as fast as
        It can

I certainly will later be telling something that I will be telling about her later. I certainly will be telling more about her later – Gertrude Stein

Prairie thunderstorms, more threat than actual violence, most of the time. Something crashed in the woods early this morning and I awoke. A dead tree perhaps. The State is a little negligent about its maintenance here. A druggist turn apiarist said he was trying to get the city to take it back. He reached behind him in his truck and retrieved a honey bear which he held out to me. I have it still. Why did the state take in on then, I ask. Greedy, he replied. I agreed with him as I had gotten a hint of his political leanings. And it was the WPA who had built the lake and the park and that led to Obama’s taking on government employees (when the private sector was reducing its workforce) and the evils of deficit spending and I didn’t want to go there – where private enterprise is always right and the government is always wrong – a world of imaginary absolutes (and all of them are). I successfully steered the conversation away from politics and back to bee keeping and colony collapse. He was not very knowledgeable about it said something about a infestation of mites which led me to believe he was an investor more that a practioner. He was out here cruising the park on a Sunday afternoon killing time in his pick-up truck.
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Reference is the lesser part of meaning, part of meaning, patternment the greater – Benjamin Lee Whoof
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Everything in the world … by dear brother Toby, has two handles… At least, replied by father, every one has two hands, - which comes to the same thing – Laurence Sterne