BMC
Posted on June 22, 2008
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Writing from my secret internet connection at the Blue Mtn. Center — which I have because I’m teaching the last weeks of an online course. It is a fantastically quiet & beautiful place. I’ve been sleeping well — did I mention it was quiet? — and have begun getting my work organized: an essay and a book-length poem. I’ve taken these first two days to ease into a quiet frame of mind, but tomorrow is the first day of the work-week & I intend to start spending long stretches at my desk.
The food is wonderful at BMC & my fellow campers are lovely, an amazingly diverse & friendly & talented group. Sunday is the cooks’ day off, so we are responsible for getting our own meals together. Everyone improvises for breakfast & lunch, but dinner is a group effort. Tonight we grilled burgers — I volunteered to be the burger maker. Others made salads, cut condiments, toted trays of food down to the lean-to. Q. was the grill master & the whole thing came together without a hitch. Clean-up was just as easy: the food was put away & the kitchen spotless in twenty minutes. Just a remarkably sweet, cooperative attitude from everyone. Helping with dinner made me realize how much I love kitchens. Deeply human spaces. Maybe I can get a job cooking here when I retire from teaching.
Heading Out
Posted on June 19, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Philosophy, Poetry, Writing | 2 Comments
Tomorrow I’ll be leaving idyllic South Colton for the even more idyllic Blue Mountain Center, a place where artists and writers spend a month working free from the distractions of . . . What? Exactly? Well, anyway, we call it work so our spouses will let us go. What was that old New Yorker cartoon? Guy with a pipe in front of a window with a woman looking through a door at him. Caption: “A writer is a man who has convinced his wife that staring out the window all day is working.” Anyhow, I do have a project — a big folder of drafts of poems in syllabics that I have been working on, off & on, for more than twenty years. I hope all those rough pages want to become a book — I know I want them to. We’ll see. I also hope to rough out some of my ideas regarding poetics & some of that stuff may show up here on the blog. Or maybe not. (I will have internet access, but I really want to focus on the writing & plan to stay off the internet for the most part.) There is one piece of prose I’ve been working on, about who is responsible for torture done in the name of Americans and about how we ought to think about such acts, that I’m going to post as a draft this evening or first thing tomorrow morning. It is a kind of writing I want to pursue, but for which I have had insufficient confidence until recently. It’s not that I’m all that confident now — I just don’t worry as much about how my thinking / writing will be received. Maybe that’s what confidence is in the final analysis.
Sport as Transcendence
Posted on June 17, 2008
Filed Under Personal | 5 Comments
I’m not much of a sports fan, except for golf. It’s probably because I still pretend to go out & play golf three or four times a year. Mostly I’m a fan, though. I never understand when people tell me they find golf boring. But then I find football & soccer boring. I used to be a boxing fan, but the sport’s corruption finally drove me away. Yesterday afternoon, I watched something like a boxing match on a golf course — the playoff in the US Open between Tiger Woods & Rocco Mediate. Everyone knows who Tiger Woods is, of course, but unless you follow golf you probably have not heard of Rocco Mediate. Mediate has been playing the tour for twenty years, as several wins, but also a bad back that has nearly driven him out of the game. He’s 45 years old and had fallen to 157th in the world rankings. You can read an account of the tournament at the link above, but it came down to Sunday afternoon — after four rounds of golf over four days on a very long & very difficult Torrey Pines course — to a tie between Woods & Mediate. Woods played all week with a painful knee, having returned to the game only tow months after arthroscopic surgery. Most golf tournaments that end in a tie go into a sudden death playoff in order to decide the outcome for the Sunday TV audience, but the US Open has stuck with the old-fashioned 18 hole Monday playoff. Which in this case ended in another tie between the two players. Woods won on the first sudden death playoff hole, but Mediate had the moral victory, I think. He played better than Woods over the course of the tournament, but Woods has a way of making luck work for him. Every lucky event has a long history of preparation invisible behind it. The narrative arrived at its inevitable end, with the young hero defeating the wily veteran. The gods love young men, though they make them pay. Woods may have washed out the rest of his season by coming back from injury too soon. In any case, most golf matches — most sporting events — are entertainment; but very occasionally sport rises to the level of transcendence. This year’s US Open rose to that level. Woods called it “probably my best tournament ever,” but by “best” he didn’t mean “most brilliant” or “most dominant.” He knew he didn’t play all that well by his standards. Woods meant “best” in the sense of most difficulty or most competitive or hardest. He meant he was barely able to win.
Sexism
Posted on June 7, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments
Another Original: Utah Phillips, 1935-2008
Posted on June 3, 2008
Filed Under Music | 1 Comment
What Can You Say? Bo Diddly, 1929-2008
Posted on June 3, 2008
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“He’s Not Dead He’s Only Sleeping”
Posted on June 1, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | 4 Comments
. . . as the old gravestones say. Had a lovely birthday yesterday — A & M came out & helped me make pizzas. ( made little individual-sized pizzas (about six inches in diameter) with red bell pepper, roasted garlic, olives, shiitake mushrooms, & red onions. C made one of her famous tosssed salads with mustard-honey dressing. We would have grilled but it had been stormy all day so we thought best not to risk it. As it turned out, we were able to spend some time on the deck enjoying the breezy post-storm weather we get this time of year. We had ice cream & brownies for desert. This morning C & I woke to the sound of a pair of loons calling to each other. C has gone off to the barn where she boards her horse to muck out stalls & ride, so it’s just me & the dogs on a very quiet gray Sunday morning.
Also, one reason I haven’t posted much here the last week or so is that I’ve been working on something a bit longer & more complicated than my usual blog post, which I will probably put up (as a draft) in the next couple of days. (My hope is that it will turn into an actual essay of some sort over the next couple of weeks.) Then there has been all the weeding & planting (Peppers & herbs in pots, my only non ornamental gardening these days) over the last couple of weeks & my online course has begun, though it is not much work yet. I’ve been sorting through old notes & drafts in preparation for going to the Blue Mountain Center in three weeks & have come across several pieces I had completely forgotten about, which may get into the mix of work I’m laying out for myself during my residency. So: I have a couple of things in mind to put up here, but it is shaping up to be a busy summer.
“My Mother Would Be a Falconress” Read by Robert Duncan
Posted on May 23, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | 4 Comments
I’ve been meaning to point to this text & audio page with Duncan’s poem about his mother & now I’m finally getting around to it. It’s a remarkable poem both for its music & for the precision of its language. The beauty of this poem startles me every time I read it, but I had never heard it in Duncan’s voice.
Buying a Chair
Posted on May 23, 2008
Filed Under Personal, River Notes | 2 Comments
I ordered a leather chair today, as a gift to myself for my 58th birthday later this month. A chair for reading. And when I say a chair, I mean a chair — it’s not terrifically large & its lines are simple, but it’s the sort of chair you you have to special order & have built to your specifications. I looked at about a hundred leather samples this morning & going strictly on look & feel chose nearly the most expensive one. Fuck it — 58 is creeping me out slightly. It won’t be ready for about six weeks, so I will have time to rearrange my work room to accommodate it.
Update: Ooops! I’m only turning 57. Hope this doesn’t mean I have to cancel the order for the chair. 57 isn’t creeping me out quite as much as when I thought I was turning 58. The even numbers are the worst.
Late Spring Birds
Posted on May 22, 2008
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In the yard, mostly goldfinches, sparrows, & chickadees. Heard a loon call around 5:00 a.m. the other morning, then spotted him flying over an hour later while we were walking the dogs. Carole says she hears a kind of crazy desperation in the loon’s cry, but I hear more mournfulness — anthropomorphizing in both cases, of course. There appears to be a pair of crows nesting in the woods beside the pond just across the road: at least I’ve seen them hanging around that location & they fly through our yard several times a day on their rounds. Driving out Rt. 11 toward Potsdam yesterday, I saw an oriel dart across the road with its unmistakable orange. Then we have our usual population of jays, flickers, swifts, Canada geese, turkey vultures, & herons.
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