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.
-

Reference is the lesser part of meaning, part of meaning, patternment the greater – Benjamin Lee Whoof
-

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

June 21, 2009 - Millienum Park - Chicago Illinois

Back in Chicago – well almost - headed into Chicago this afternoon – to visit with my niece – her father, my brother is in town and I haven’t gotten my mail in four months. I returned from the Lake and shaved my head. When I looked at my head on my 61st birthday (two months ago) I could see my scalp – hair getting thin – better none that spotty – so I’ve been growing a beard – and now it’s looking good – so I shaved my head an hour ago and it feels strange – gee I look like my father. I'll take the META downtown from Homewood – runs every other hour on Sunday. Due to get in at Millennium Station (Below Millennium Park) at about 3 this afternoon.

The final and most revolting injustice is consummated when poverty is wed to the life without hope – Albert Camus
-

Getting over the blahs again
I awoke in slow time
In homogeneous time
Time without division
     Or addition

Exponnetial time
It was all one – that 59
      Ford Galaxy and the 47
      Chevy pick-up
Could as well have

       Been the Astrovan
Just a jar of jellybeans
Such a grab bag of time
Any flavor will do
Just don’t make me decide

I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things – Albert Camus

So how much did the Slum Dog Millionaire win in US dollars – one million rubees is about $20,000

Lifting dumbbells is not a hobby. It is a confession of subservience, not an assertion of freedom – Aldo Leopold

The greater the urge
The more it needs

    Resisting
Sit still
And when urged
To remain calm
    Get up
    And run
One needs be
A contrarian
To achieve
     Anything
At all

Powers do not have to show it. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it; you know it – Ralph Elllison


Words lie intermediate – forming a relationship, between the specific and the general

Remember you don’t have to be a complete fool, in order to succeed. Play the game, but don’t believe in it – that much you owe yourself… Play the game, but play it your own way – part of the time at least. Play the game. But rise the ante, my boy – learn how it operates, learn how you operate – Ralph Ellison

What ever it is that we wreck
Nature shall correct
Its just that once we have done it
It shall not return in our lifetime


Things that you make
You can unmake
But what you didn’t
You can’t resurrect

Perhaps only the unreliable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie – Ralph Ellison


Half a dozen different
Wildflower in bloom
Including the claret cup
But Abbey’s cliff roses
Are the most prominent
Filling the night with
Their perfume


The lizards
Scamper about

Catching bugs
The only thing about
In the heat of the day
Darting from shadow
To shadow
Stopping only to
Palpitate the air
For edible scents

Pioneers usually scoff at any effort to perpetuate pioneering – Aldo Leopold

Chiggers hadn’t bothered me in a long time. As a kid we got them inside the band of our socks. My buddy Gerald got them so bad that his doctor ordered that he not wear cloths for a week. I though that was funny – having to be naked (I didn’t know then that adults did it for fun – got naked in pairs). And in May I got the worst case of chigger bites that I have ever experienced. That and the onset of Memorial Day and the onslaught of tourists (RVs prowling the byways) – well it all just soured the camping experience. It was that as much as anything that turned me back. And what is a chigger anyway?

A chigger is the larval stage of a mite – kin to the tick – and it doesn’t bit but injects the host with an enzyme and feed on tiny parts of the inner skin. This causes severe itching accompanied by a red-pimple like bump that usually appears only after the larvae have detached themselves.

For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. One can no longer cheat – Albert Camus

Last year RV purchases were down 32.9% from the previous year: 237,000 vs. 363,400 units. 90% of the RV market is composed of motorhomes, travel trailers and fifth wheel trailers. Folding towed and truch campers compose the remainer.

It is better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others – Ralph Ellison

For like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hardwork and progress and action, but now, after first being ‘for’ society and then ‘against’ it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the time. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities – Ralph Ellison

Going counterclockwise is
The left-handed way
The spiral is the most common

Symbol of rock art
And if counterclockwise is right
And there was no
Statistical preference for
Left-handed men then
It would have indicated they were
True artist and not just priests

While the actual working cowboy disappears, along with the genuine non-working Indian, the make believe cowboys flourish and multiple like flies on a pecan pie – Edward Abbey

Is not mathematics the
Universal language
That offended the gods
And the just cause that
Brought the towers down
Imagination and reach
Without limitation are
The precursors of tragedy
According to the Greeks

While the Greeks used reason to restrain the will, we have ended by placing the impulse of the will at the heart of reason, and reason has therefore become murderous – Albert Camus

In a curious paradox, humanity has refashioned a hostile destiny with the very weapons it used to reject fatality – Albert Camus

There is something profoundly sad
In the promise of a long life

We do what is quickest, which is to report what we have done and what we have seen – Albert Camus


The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually thing of, but the sort that attempts to led dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die – Camus

LOWEST COMMON DEMONINATOR

Conceived by bureaucrats
Designed by a committee
Executed by lowest bidder
Administered by professionals
Upon the advice of the experts

The criticism of language cannot get around the fact that our words commit us and that we shall remain faithful to them. Naming an object inaccurately means adding to the unhappiness of the world – Camus

June 18, 2009 - Sister Lakes Michigan

‘Tis not my intention to persuade
That’s what advertising is for
I plan my attach on the walls
Of your metaphors
I start by circumvaliation
Your reality

Circumvaliation – the initial process of surrounding a besieged fortification with trenches from which trenches are extended towards the points of attack

Our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy – Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold is the father of wildlife management in the US and promoter of the establishment of wilderness areas – the first being the Gila Wilderness area in New Mexico. An adjoining wilderness area to the east of the Gila was established in 1980 and named for him. He earned a degree in forestry from Yale and served 18 years in the forest service mainly in New Mexico and Arizona. He taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison until his death in 1948

What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory – Aldo Leopold

A collection of Aldo Leopold’s nature writings was published as “A Sand County Almanac” in 1949. It is considered a landmark publication of the American conservation movement.

The most ugly of Americans

Flies his colors the highest

Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers – Aldo Leopold

And along comes man
Tackle box and fishing pole
    In hand
Intent upon his gain
The birds scatter
Waiting for the remains


Patience is a poor substitute
    For necessity
And lacks any pretence
Of festivity

Out ability to perceive qualities in nature begins as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language – Aldo Leopold

The question should not be

How to make the world safe

For more people, but

How to make the world safe

From more people


There is something inherently
Insane about this notion that
Infinite density will provide
Infinite benefit


This concept of infinite growth
Is fundamental to civilization
The problem is that there is
Not enough growth


And the application of reason
To insane ideas
Is a how we display intelligence


This is the mystery
That has become our
Religion

I know nothing whatever about true underling reality, having never met any. They are many people who say they have. I know, but they’ve been luckier than I… for on my own part I am pleased enough with surfaces – Edward Abbey

As Aldo Leopold was the founding father, Edward Abbey was the bad-boy of American conservation having little faith in modernism and the efficacy of accommodation regarding wilderness protection – going so far as advocating sabotage of development project – coining the term “to Monkywrench” (see his novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang” and its later sequel “Hayduke Lives” ) Although proclaimed a ‘nature writer’ he did not like such categorization – perhaps ‘desert anarchist’ would be more apt but then again it is just another label. Larry McMurty called him the “Thoreau of the American West”. The quotes here come from his collection of essays “Desert Solitaire: a season in the wilderness”

[Objects and monuments of the vanquished had become] safe to play with in recombinations emptied of previous vital meanings, as in tourist souvenirs, antiquarian reconstructions, or archaizing revivals – William Weber

Stupidity is not remedial

It flourishes on barren soils
It has no wants
Its lack of success
Is its only encouragement

I am glad I hall never by young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms with a blank spot on the map? – Aldo Leopold

If you would only listen you just might hear the sounds of the rhythms that have cycles beyond the ear – the day, the year, the centuries and perhaps even the millennium. There are such sounds in the universe.

Parks are made to bring the music to the many, but by the time many are attuned to hear it there is little left but noise – Aldo Leopold

The truth is that there is no surplus
Reliance on it, other than temporarily
Is foolhardiness and all civilizations
     Do it
And their success is directly related
To the rapidity of their decline


A surplus is the same as a loan
Try as we might it must be repaid
To comprehend this is to have
     No vision


What you take you must
Give back
That and a little more

All are restrained by an ironclad taboo which decrees that the construction of instruments is the domain of science, while the detection of harmony is the domain of poets.- Aldo Leopold

Nature is that which lies out there
Just beyond the picture window
It’s imperative that they be mobile
For our unlimited viewing pleasure


Surveys rank this second highest
Outdoor recreational activity

I cannot explain why a red rivulet is not a brook. Neither can I, by logical deduction, prove that a thicket without the potential of a quail covey in only a thorny place – Aldo Leopold

They don’t recycle paper here!
They should have a solar shower here
    Yeah, I know
Constant but ecofirendly
Consumers ever seeking
     Improvement
Eco-conscious modernism
Still believing in the
Enlighment project
Wanting to see it
Carried to its fruition
The progressives
   On the greens

We need more predators. The sheep man complains, it is true, that the coyotes eat some of their lambs. This is true but do they eat enough? I mean enough lambs to keep the coyotes sleek, healthy and well fed. That is my concern… The lambs, accustomed by tradition to their roles, do not complain; and the sheep men, who run their hooved locusts on the public land and are heavily subsidized, most of them as hog-rich as they are pig-headed, can easily afford these trifling losses – Edward Abbey

To life off the fat
Of the land
As if one is living


On the fat of the lamb


To build up storehouses
Of fat
Off someone’s else
Land is both


Our ewe and their cry

We strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness… but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run – Aldo Leopold

Poor land may be rich country, and vice versa. Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches – Aldo Leopold

A sportsman is one who gives his quarry a chance to escape with its life. This is know as fair play, or sportsmanship. Animals have no sense of sportsmanship. Some like the mountain lion are vicious – if attacked they defend themselves. Others like the rabbit, run away, which is cowardly – Edward Abbey

One in twelve vehicle owers also own a recreational vehicle - 8 million households have an RV. The recreational vehicle industry has sales of $15 billion a year. The averave vehicle is driven 4,500 miles and is used a total of 28-35 days a year.

Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building recreation into the still unlovely human mind – Aldo Leopold

There are 13,000 private RV parks in the US and 1.600 state and national government campgrounds. But how many developed  sites are available for camping  and what porportion of the have utillities is not clear. Tent sites without utilities at state and other govenment sites range from six dollars to sixteen dollars a day. Utility access is an additional four to ten dollars. Day usage fees frequently apply which add an additional four to six dollars a day. Average cost of tent camping in developed campgrounds is $6-$20/day.

Most devloped campgrounds have utilities. If a site has utilities you pay for it wheter you use it or not. Increasingly 'primitive' sites (those without utilities) are being developed (utilities included). The number of availabe of tent sites is drastically shrinking - many parks have no undeveloped sites.

Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another – Aldo Leopold

June 15, 2009 - The Caribou, Homewood Illinois

Andy Warhol - Gertrude Stein from Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twenthiet Century, 1980

Well, I’ve finally finished Stein’s Long Novel – it only took a year. But it’s not a record – it took me ten years to read Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain which was a little longer than Castrop was up on that mountain. I don’t include here the serial novels – I’m still working on Marcel Proust’s Times Remembered Past (finished four of seven volumes), Henry Miller’s Rosy Crucifiction (two of three volumes). But to be honest I didn’t read every word – I skipped a lot of repeating and that is a lot of what she writes. And so in honor of the accomplishment, this will be an all Stein (all the time) compliation.

-
Everyone has then their own way of being important inside them from the things in them each one that are virtues in them to them, or vices in them to them, or strong things in them, to them, or weaknesses in them to them – Stern

-

How are you to know

That you know

This is a very hard

Type of knowing to be known

-

It is a very hard type

Of knowing
And when known or at
Least believed to be know
It is still hard to really
Be knowing
It is really knowing
-
It is much easier to not
Be knowing
This type of knowledge

In oneself and strange

But true it’s much easier to know

It of someone else that that one

Has this knowledge

Of oneself

-

The Long Novel (The Making of Americans) contains approximately 650,000 words. I’d be interested in seeing word frequency analysis of the text. I’d bet that the total vocabulary is less that 5,000 words and the repetition would be unlike that of any other English language text or codices. Has anyone ever done such a linguistic analysis of Stein? But of course it has been done – one only need query the Internet - http://hcil.cs.umd.edu/trs/2008-33/2008-33.pdf. Well that’s not exactly what I had in mind – what I wanted was a relative word frequency index for Stein and a comparison with other English writers such as Shakespeare or Faulkner for example. A 5,000 word vocabulary is about the minimum that one would need to communicate in English – I would argue that it is probably about what you would find in a soap-opera or in a telephone conversation. If Stein can do it, why can’t I. I tried that argument in the sixth grade about Hemmingway’s grammar and I was told that yout have to know the rules before you can violate them (sort of the same as saying that ignorance of the law is no excuse).

Remember the argument I had with Joe regarding English being the richest of any language in an earlier post - will this is along that same lines. There is more to language than the size of its vocabulary and there is more to a writer than the number of big words that they know.

-

To be using a new word in my writing is to me a very difficult thing. Every word I am using in writing has for me a very existing being. Using a word I have not yet been using in my writing is to me very difficult and a peculiar feeling. Sometimes I am using a new one, sometimes I feel a new meaning in an old one, sometimes I like one I am very fond of one one that has many meanings many ways of being used to make different meanings to every one. Sometimes I like it almost always I like it when I am feeling many ways of using one word in writing. Sometimes I like it that different ways of emphasizing can make very different meanings in a phrase or sentence I have made and am reading. Always in writing it is in me only one thing, a little I like it sometimes that there can be very different ways of reading the thing I have been writing with only one feeling of meaning – Stein

A metaphorical way of viewing the process of writing – a hygienic approach (and more than I really wanted to know about her:

It should come out of me without pressing without any straining in me to be pressing. I can be doing thinking to be helping. I should not be doing any pressing and straining. I have been doing a little it has not come to be a complete thing simply coming. It is to be then to re-begin to come out from me. Always each thing muse come of completely from me leaving me inside me just then gently empty, so pleasantly and weekly gently empty, that is a happy way to have it come out of me each on that is making itself come out fairly quickly, very slowly with a burst or gently, any way it feels a need of coming out of me, but being out of me I must be very pleasantly most gently often weakly empty – Stein

"But she does not look like her portrait" - and Piscasso replied "She Will"

Writing as a form of constipation

It’s strange! What is?
What different people
People can be
What they create
And why
The structure by which
They do what
It is that they do

Some follow form
To a style conform
And are very boring
Others are original

And very incomprehensible

Some do just as they
Have been taught
And they will get by
Some take what
They have been shown
And use it as a model
And they shall be praised
Although never meritoriously
But good enough to get paid

Some never try

And some try too hard
Some make it look
Effortless
Some are worth quoting
And a few lucky ones
Do it for the fun of it

There are many many
Ways of doing it

As there are those

Who do it
And everyone who is
Worth noticing
Does it a little differently
This is very noticeable

Gertrude Stein claimed
That she was a genius
And that she only ever
Met four
You would have to be
To make words come out
From the other end

Some take a hatchet

To words

Some massage

Their words

Stein sits down
And extrudes them

Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything. Disillusionment then is living that gives to many then melancholy feeling, some despairing feeling, some resignation – Stern

Sculpture of Gertrude Stein located in Bryant Park, New York City based on a 1923 model done in Paris by Jo Davidson

It is a very queer thing this not agreeing with anyone. It would seem that where we are each of is always telling and repeating and explaining and doing it again and again that someone would really understand what the other one is always repeating – Strein

What a tale this
Story that Stein told
About the Battle
Of the Marne

She had to take the
Streetcar into Paris
Where she would catch
A taxi back

But the taxis were not being
Allowed to leave the city
The driver winked

She had to go back
To Boulogne the way
That she had come
On the hill above the
Marne

That night the taxies
Ferried the soldiers
Out there
And saved France
That’s the story as
Gertrude Stein told it

She wore her white beret
And her blue denim jeans
On the streetcar out as
Far as the Battle of the Marne

Extraordinary things happen
All the time in every
Place
Just not here; just not now

Paris! To be ridiculously
Delighted

Everything has a core
Time – a past and a future
It starts now

If not present at the point
Of origin. Much shall be missed
It is impossible to be
Everywhere at once

It passed by undetected
It will go by unsensed

If not present at the point


The amount they agree is important to you until the amount they do not agree with you is completely realized by you – Stein

It’s not the bareness of
Of the winter landscape
Or the many ways that snow
Reflects light
That attracts the poet

It is that nothing distracts
There is nothing else
But to write

Like Gertrude Stein with
Her scribbled and dirty
And lined paper late at night
Which Alice shall dutifully
Type up the next day

Undistracted, dutifully working

You write a book and while you write it you are ashamed for every one must think you are silly or a crazy one and yet you write it and you are ashamed, you know you will be laughed at or pitied by every one and you have a queer feeling and you are not very certain and you go on writing – Stein

Just wanted to say:
Gertrude Stein has
Now left the arena

Some are doing ordinary living without any need in them to have courage in them to do that thing, to be every day completely living ordinary living. For some it takes courage to be killing anything like a buzzing thing or a fly, to buy anything, to sell anything, to eat anything, to decide anything, to like anything. Some and someone is telling this to me and I am listening do not need courage for any such thing – Stein

When some one having been feeling all their living one way of feeling living comet to be feeling in them another way of feeling living, that is very disturbing to them – Stein

And Gertrude lived in France from 1907 until her death in 1946 with Alice B Toklas who wrote a cookbook if not her own autobiography. Her most notable recipe was the one for ‘Haschich Fudge”. I lived across from her family home in San Francisco – or would have if it had not been razed to build an medical/dental office building. And there is that photograph of Alice in St Mark’s square feeding the pigeons and I stood there too. There is a sense of reality in a geographic connection – that you are looking, feeling, remembering, thinking, hearing some of the same that some one else may have seen, felt, remembered, heard and that is so much different that being told, being shone what someone else saw, felt, herd, remembered. These little connection across time mean something – they mean something to some. They don’t mean anything to some other ones. We can do with place what we can never do with time. Place is something personal unlike any artifact.

Forest City Iowa - June 5, 2009

Whew what a swing - from out of the Southwest desert to the upper Prairies! What got ahold of your tail? Memorial Day - It was Memorial Day - Between Memorial Day and Labor Day the amateurs come out like the chiggers and the mosquitos come out and it's no time for any self-respecting bumb to be out in the woods.
--

From Moab to Canyonlands, then the Colorado National Monument, Dinosaur Monument, Flaming Gorge, Wind Cave and here I am. I had a few days of 300 mile plus driving (I like to average 50 a day). Time to find a place to hang my hat for the summer. My National Park pass (next year I can get my Golden Age pass) and my New Mexico camping sticker will still be good.

We were in the company of white-colored brown colored cows. They watched us quietly as we made a path between them and changed their attitudes slowly as if to show us all of the maps on their fat sides. They gave us to understand that they know us personally and thought a lot of our families and I lifted my hat to the last of them as I passed her as a sign of my appreciation – Flan O’Brian
--

What did you do when you came to that herd. I went through the middle. There was a group of rocks where one old bull was grazing. He said he went around them. It’s a little intimidating walking through a herd of a couple of hundred buffalo but I took it slow and was aware of the nearest refuge (rock or tree) but what I would do when I got there with a charging herbivore (or worst a herd of them) after me I am not sure what I would do – I suppose I would wait him out, wait until he lost interest – they don’t appear to be the most alert of animals. Can’t roller-skate in a herd of buffalo – it’s true!

--
Oh I’m worn out / just watcing the cats / lick their fur / I’m worn out / fading fast – Joanne Kryger

And I never did spot a rattlesnake – and I so much wanted to find a faded midget. One gopher snake and a couple of garter snakes and some tails disappearing in the grass. And along the highway in South Dakota there were seveal large blacksnakes sunning themselves along the shoulder.

Brandon had a birthday today
Brandon is three today
Brandon’s mother told her sister

Even before she told her mother
And that is resented even today

And it’s a good thing that I am returning to the urban life – I’m running out of books again. That bookstore in Grants turned out to be a treasure – six books for ten dollars including Laurence Steren, Ralph Ellison, Aldo Leopold, Robert Herrick, Edward Abbey and Albert Camus. But I’ve read them all now and I am back to Stein’s long novel with which I am almost to the end. I need so desperatley to find somewhere to replenish by bookshelf or better yet a locating where I can ILL (that Librarese for borrowing books from distant libraries – my homelibrary in Kansas City will even mail books to its barrowers).

The young are an alien species. They won’t replace us by revolution. They will forget and ignore us out of existence. – William S Bourroughs

Like a camel hair coat
I drag my mystery across
    The desert
From sand dune to sand dune
     I have a patina
And any fresh wound
    Well bled white

A lifetime // What happened / it stopped – Joanne Kryger

Light sky to the right
Drops of rain plink on sheet metal
    And echo
It hasn’t thundered this time around
The sky just sighed, then cried
The wind went its own way
Mesas of enchantment disappearing
The sun hasn’t shown all day
But it makes sleeping easy
    Rain drops on tin

That melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realize that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal – Proust

Watch their feet from the far side
    Of the vehicle
His feet; her feet
    Back and forth
His are the bigger boots
    The feet with the longer stride
She is wearing boots with high heels
    She takes tiny little steps
Seen from afar looking beneath
    Their vehicle
Back and forth
Towards each other
Away from each other
In the same direction as the other
She following him
He following her
Stepping into space
At a snail’s pace
Occasionally at a stand still
Four feet far away
    Seen below their vehicle
Now the feet are together
Face-to-face or toe-to-toe
    If you will
Just one silouette showing

I know this girl and she said  / she was on a mountain once and could put her tongue right on / a cloud, it was fuzzy. I wish she was right – Joanne Kryger

And the ants would come
    And eat it all up
And the birds would come
    And take it away
And the wolves would come
    And mark it
And the lions would come
    And chase them all off
Then the people would come
    And they would make speeches

I know I do not suffer, more than anyone / in the whole world / But this morning I had to have first thing / 2 cigarettes, half a joint, / a poached egg and corned beef hash, 1 piece toast / 2 cups tea / Jung, Williams, Shiek, Stones, 2 slugs rum, depression, rest of joint, cigarette, 7-up, and it’s only 10 O’clock / Because I wanted to write a poem / Because I want something to come out of me – Kryger

May 18, 2009 - Moab Utah

Now I’m in Grants (yeah, still in New Mexico) doing my laundry (campsite washing in a plastic pail works only half-ass – the socks come out still stiff and the smoke smudges still show). I’m headed up towards Chaco Canyon. I’m getting to dislike even to come into town to shop (replenish my propane, buy food, fill up the gas tank) and in this part of New Mexico the towns are composed of stirp malls full of pawn shops and Indian trading posts (Indian turquoise jewelry wholesale – dealers welcome) and of course the bars (Gallup has the biggest DUI mobile van that I have ever seen). And I turn on my phone to see if I have any messages and I don’t (and that’s good – like they say no news is good news) and I hunt for a place to connect to the Internet.

In Grant! Untrue, I'm no loner in Grant – that was a couple of weeks back – now I’m in Moab Utah and it’s getting hot. Got bitten alive by the bugs and I am tried of the tent and I want a place to rest for several days.

I am of the order whose purpose is not to teach the world a lesson but to explain that school is over – Henry Miller

First the moon, just a sliver

Tonight, then Venus

Then the rest of the vault

Slowly at first then

Rapidly Busby’s beauties

Fill up the stage and

Descend the grand

Staircase

But what we have gained in depth and breath we may have lost in immediacy and intensity – Edward Abbey

There seems to be millions of stars up there but there are only about 2,800 that are visible to the naked eye (magnitude 5.5 or greater) and that would be in the entire heavens (both northern and southern hemispheres) and if there were no light pollution from cities – so about 1400 visible stars at any one spot and much much fewer than that near a city (which I am not). Gee, that don’t seem like very many. And while on the topic of natural phenomena, what causes wash boarding (you know those little speed bumps that form on dirt and gravel roads). It is the type of suspension systems used by automobiles – length of wheelbase and weight have little effect and wash boarding is inevitable on any lose surface byway? It has to do with the way the suspension system makes the vehicle and its axels travel vertically and with longitudinal travel this creates a harmonic wave of weigh distribution – it sort of like a big metal violin. And for all the miles of gravel and dirt road I have had to lately travel I have discovered that the faster you go the less rough the washboards are – again it has to do with harmonics ( but be cautious – speed does not eliminate the ruts, potholes and rocks sticking up and it may be a very inconvenient place to tear open the oil pan)

They say (they are always
      Saying something or other)
We are making it better –
A better place for every
      One. But they (there they

      Go again) also say people

Will not apply themselves
     Without misery as a motivation
Yet when shall we know
When we’ve stockpiled

Enough and don’t have

To be miserable anymore

Alas, occult visions seem to come to those who believe in them beforehand. First the faith, then the hairy little miracle. First the pill, the tab, the wafer, the space capsule, then comes the ruby-eyed six-legged alligators swimming through your psychedelic dome – Edward Abbey

I was in the Gila headwaters – the birthplace of Geronimo – visited the Gila cliff dwellings and did a thirteen mile hike with 1600 of elevation gain (half on the way back and I hate those step climbs when you are already exhausted). So it’s a new personal best. And Geronimo was born here in 1829 and he is another whose path I keep crossing (met him at Ft Sill Oklahoma and met him in Florida). This is a land where the native American will not be ignored – and when you marginalize someone they always have a way of returning and getting even. Now it’s the Anglo’s turn to bitch.

I have spent a lot of time among the ancients – Gila Cliff Houses, the Salinas Missions, the Acoma Peublo, Chaco Canyon, Canyons of the Ancients and Hovenweeep

I call nature all that isn’t are and I include in it the heart of man – Antonio Machado

Turning back
Without regrets
Such an in decidable
    Moment
How can you help
    But regret
Not going all the way
But you have to know
    Your limits
You have to cut
Your loses

The good ol boys from San Antonio pull out – put what they had (the grandkids' ten and the patio chairs) into the truck and headed west – Where are you headed? West! How far? Arizona, heard there was gold to be found there lying at your feet. Yeah, I heard them rumors before and every time I get there it has all been thoroughly picked over. Yeah, know what you mean. I went to Arkansas hearing there were diamonds to be found. Just Hope, I replied

Listening to repeating is often irritating, listening to repeating can be dulling, always repeating is all living, everything in a being is always repeating – Gertrude Stein

All the really good repartee happens in text – most of it in books but enough on cinema to make us think it the norm. The best is always in retrospect and we only communicate in the here and now. For a couch potato real time is so very tedious and boring. I have been told that there's a French word that means thinking up the perfect repartee after the fact.

This is not just talking, this all has real meaning – Gertrude Stein

Improvements rarely improve anything
Development do not make things better
Merely words for cash flow enhancements

If all the personnel of the US Border Patrol were lined up along the Mexican border there would be one every 500 feet which is about a fifth of the strength of the front line trenches in World War I but of course they were shorter.

And another reason for coming into town – I have almost run out of books to read and I am really having difficulty finding anything worth reading (of course I could always get a Harlequin Romance at Wal-Mart). This Laundromat is next to the only bookstore in town. I came by here last Sunday but it was closed (was that Mother’s Day?). They also will probably have mysteries and romances but I have to give it a try. I bought a history of the Spanish frontier (California, Arizona, New Mexico and Florida) at the National Park bookstore at El Morro but have almost finished it too as well as Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. Then I shall have nothing to read and have to head towards the city. Well I just moved my laundry from the washer to the dryer. I have been to the grocery store and will stop at the gas station and bank on the way of town. I will also stop at the library and see if I can connect to the Internet (otherwise this will not get posted anytime soon).

Tell those who worry about their health that they are already dead – Henry David Thoreau

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