Nature, etc.: animals, plnats, geography, weather (or not) ...

...the fifth iteration of the wildly popular thread consisting of prose, poetry, photos, music, and video from all over the planet. No kidding!

Concerning subject matter, our credo: "Everything that's natural, and then some!" (For instance, plnats, because to err is human.)

Our antecedents:

Nature Redux

http://www.librarything.com/topic/89569

Nature III

http://www.librarything.com/topic/88286

Nature: the Sequel

http://www.librarything.com/topic/86448

Random Thoughts about Nature (Deer, etc.)

http://www.librarything.com/topic/82276

A detail man you most assuredly are, PW.

It is my perfession, after all.

Speaking of which, another detail, so it doesn't get lost in the epic thread switch, Jane's second offering of the man who chose to call himself Rubén Darío, obviously one of her favorites:

The revolutionary poet Félix Rubén García Sarmiento (1867-1916) of Nicaragua changed the course of Spanish poetry and brought it into the mainstream of twentieth-century Modernism:

http://www.vianica.com/go/specials/10-ruben-dario.html

My trees are still about me on my back porch. The neighboring trees show a breeze in their tops. The sky is bright but through clouds. It is warm enough that I need a fan where I am within three walls. The cat has not made his appearance yet today and may be living off the land.

That's all; see you next thread.

Robert

Edited to reduce liability.

I am back from a very boring meeting to say, good work Peter! Long may your plnats flourish.

Thank you, Anna. My plnats, alas, are a mess. And my cats ain't in such great shape either. And then along comes Durick, to confound me as usual. "See you next thread"? Is he already tired of this thread? And where does he live anyway? I've been trying to find out forever. And what kinda house is it whose rooms have three walls? And what does he mean, "edited to reduce liability"? Guy drives me crazy.

Easy-peasy: the trees are all about - drum roll - him. Here's for Annapdx to chew over:
has not made his appearance -
yet today -

He does everything he can
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCpGy3pwkKM

Cut down a tree with a herring, it cannot be done!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crX4E-dul4Y&feature=related

A little quiz. Which U.S. statesman of the past had a little bidness he called Arbusto?

The Internet ruins everything. The answer to puzzles is just a click away:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbusto_Energy

Ahhh, a refreshing short trip into town (not the city) for Mama to get a hair perm and some quality reading time for me. Whilst there I picked up a few packets of seeds to plnat in the warmer weather we are finally experiencing. Some blue fescue, lavender, pampas grass and rock cress. Looking forward to spending time playing in the dirt. Note to self: do not plnat tulips in the middle of a forest full of Bambi's family. Stick to daffodils and allium and any other perennials that are not tasty to deer.

I think that Mr. Durick has posted maybe a few very short posts on each thread, no? So I assume that this is his obligatory post and will join us again in the next iteration of our beloved Nature thread to vex you yet again, Piero.

Well, I must get along and prepare dinner for the older people in my household. Ciao, for now!

4 - I've been reading through a collection of his writings. I have a short intro on my ClubRead thread. The short, short version being that my husband is Nicaraguan.

The natural bottom line:
Weather - surprisingly cold
Wildlife - a black bear is running amock in NJ
Food - Spelt, Leek and Root Veggie Soup

(Pietro, I rather anticipated you'd have something against Pete. It's not you, somehow.)

It really feels here as if something huge has gone to sleep. The wind is cold without any life in it. Sunshine still, but it's thin and sharp.

I rather envy you people in spring plnating things all over the plcae.

Yes, Mushka! I am so happy it is finally here. I will begin spraying the weeds tomorrow and then plnat all over the plcae when I return from the valley next Monday. The weather outlook is divine! Mid to upper 70s for 4 days (unfortunately two of which I will be gone) then back to 60s but tonight is the last low near freezing. Woo Hoo!

Oh my gosh... I have just witnessed a 6th grader who is amazing! Singing a Lady Gaga song and playing the piano. Oh how I wish I had been more confident in my youth! I will find the youtube of him and post it.

Greyson does Paparazzi

In another few days it will be time to thin the corn. The okra has broken through and the seed leaves are up but it's still cool at night and the okra, a native of Africa, doesn't like being cold so it's hiding under the seed leaves and will for a few more weeks. The beans just went in a few days ago, haven't seen anything from them. My wife got me a tub of deer repellant, Ill have to put it out next week.

Obla-di, obla-da, etc. etc. ad nauseum ad infinitum.

The Crystal Ship is being filled...

A Dream of Trees

There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,
A quiet house, some green and modest acres
A little way from every troubling town,
A little way from factories, schools, laments.
I would have time, I thought, and time to spare,
With only streams and birds for company.
To build out of my life a few wild stanzas.
And then it came to me, that so was death,
A little way away from everywhere.

There is a thing in me still dreams of trees,
But let it go. Homesick for moderation,
Half the world’s artists shrink or fall away.
If any find solution, let him tell it.
Meanwhile I bend my heart toward lamentation
Where, as the times implore our true involvement,
The blades of every crisis point the way.

I would it were not so, but so it is.
Who ever made music of a mild day?

Mary Oliver

Local flora and fauna, etc., report:

The trees, deciduous and nondeciduous, are in jungle mode, surrounding the house.

The moss (thankfully) overtaking my backyard lawn is encroaching nicely. It's a two-inch pile carpet in places.

My exhibit of prehistoric ferns to one side looks less impressive than last year, but that might change; hopefully.

The back deck is still bare; next week is the time to bedeck it in hanging plants, flower boxes, and the usual tomato plant whose August output will probably be inedible.

St. Francis, on the edge of the woods, overlooking the grave of a dead cat, is still atilt, at about 60 degrees; I really must straighten him out.

#16, thanks for the Mary Oliver. She is so good.
In April, I did the Poem-a day thing for National Poetry month. Actually, I posted poems on 2 sites which made 60 poems for the month. Most of them will fall by the wayside. Here is one from last year

Green
All through the month of March
We have waited for the grass
To turn green and now it is
April
And yes, the grass is
the ripe color of early apples
The bright green of the green
crayon in the box of crayons
or the green of the stoplight
That tells us when we can go
And now I want to go and walk
Barefoot across its wet surface
and let the blades tickle my feet and know that I am still
here and still able to touch the world and let it touch me.

It is so wonderful to wake to poetry in the morning. I do miss the Frost poetry, Porius, my friend. Well I do not have poetry to share, however, I have a photo to share and I think I must title it:

Perseverance

Say no more, tc.

REVELATION

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.

Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.

Robert Frost

>18 MarianV:. Welcome back, Marian. It's been a thread or more since your last poem.

>19 highdesertlady:. Sometimes you do give the impression, Tani, that you're covered in snow. Now I see the true picture.

>20 Porius:. Yeah, that's what I'm talkin' about, or was talkin' about, on another thread the other day: how some of us have shticks, like our pussycat dictator Henri (who I expect will drop in a photo or video of a crazed cougar or somesuch later, to prove me wrong).

I'm off to the big city, again! Jeez, I go there a lot, don't I? Be back Sunday.

Crazed cougar!. (I wish we could embed videos here.)

Robert

I was covered in snow up until a month ago, Piero! It's just been super cold and wet this year, quite unusual for the high desert, I assure you. Right now it is 69 with blue skies and just the hint of a breeze and I am taking a break from my weed killing spree. I must go and seal the sprayer and get at it again. Ciao, for now!

Beautiful photos from the High Desert and a totally amazing video from Mr. D! What a red letter day this is.

It is beautiful and warm and sunny out, here in Portland. I had lunch on the top of our building and could see beautiful views of both Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Hood, which is often not the case because of cloud cover.

Awww! Kitty, kitty... prrrrrrhhhh

Hope it will be nice on Saturday and Sunday over there, Anna! We have to go over for a bridal shower.

The rain it raineth everyday.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLso0ZBqOi4

It is 71° inside and out today. I love flip flop and tank-top days. I finally feel normal again.

A real classic Porius! Maybe today isn't a good day to die after all...

What day is Sandydog?

Little Big Man is one of my all-time favorites. The movie was very true to the book. Both were excellent.

I'm not walking up to the ol' burial scaffold soon, not today.

Sunny and gorgeous today. Everything is bloomin' early: fireflies last night, pink lady slippers all over the forest today. The dogs (me and the bitch; my blond enormous-nosed accomplice) even saw a Box Turtle today. It had red/brown eyes, so we don't know if it was a boy or girl and I don't remember what to examine on the plastron. Hey, wait a minute, who's got the damn time to spend their precious day off, sexing turtles!!!

I digress. Anyway, it scurried across the trail like a gazelle.

Well, not like a gezelle, but it scurried.

The instinct that keeps it out of the soup.

Turtles are the bane of my pond. I can't keep plant eating, sterile carp in the pond because the turtles eat them. As a result my pond has a plant filled shallows all around. This leads to floating detritus which clogs the drain, clouds the water, and fouls fishing gear. This is a spring fed pond and it's important the water turn over (at present it does so every three days, which keeps it from stagnating). Turtles eat the catfish, but don't eat much of the things catfish eat. I have at least two turtles that are a couple of feet across the back, what the people here call loggerheads (I worked one summer with real Loggerheads so I know better), but they may be alligator snappers. The only way turtles are good, around here anyway, is in soup or fried.

Once again, my question about who has the luxury of sentiment becomes apropos. The further one is from nature, the more sentimental one may become with regard to it. When I see a painting of a large open expanse of American Midwest, with its gorgeous flowers and open, spare trees, I think of that poor fellow, who while examining the area for Lewis and Clark, in Nebraska I think it was, in the midst of all this beauty found himself running as fast as he could from a pissed off Grizzly bounding after him. It gives me pause when I think of all the city bound environmentalists who have no understanding of, or sympathy with, people who wrest their daily bread from the competitive grasp of mother nature.

Gene, to paraphrase that bloke Dundee, "Now THAT's a turtle!"

I Vent My Wrath on Animals

I came alive
when things went
crazy.
I pulled the plug on
the reports of
sturm & drang
When someone
signaled I
left open
what I
could not close.
I broke a
covenant that
was more fierce
than murder.
I vent my wrath
on animals
pretending they will turn
divine.
I open up
rare certainties
that test free will.
I take from animals
a place in which
the taste of death
pours from their mouths
& drowns them.
I support a
lesser surface.
I draw comfort from
the knowledge
of their
being.

Jerome Rothenberg

The Turtle

The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex.
I think it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile.

Ogden Nash

Jeeze, every time I miss a day or two you folks move the thread. Are you trying to tell me something?
>19 highdesertlady: wonderful picture.
>30 Sandydog1: You are aware I am sure of The Return of Little Big Man which I thought was an excellent sequel.

It's certainly not personal, Paul. The other thread grew to about 360 responses and then Anna screamed for mercy, so the fifth iteration was created. I notice that when I complained about how slowly a previous nature thread was loading, I was told to get a new computer. Just shows you that sexism is alive and well on the Salon.

I'm sorry you're not happy with your turtles, Gene.

I personally like The Turtles

Thank God you're back Peter. Or Buddha, Fate, the Cosmos, or whom/whatever. I'm glad you're back. How was life in the big city?

What happened when I left town that I'm in such demand? Surely you couldn't have come to the conclusion that life is meaningless without me. I mean, I'm just as virtual as anyone, wondering every now and then what I'm doing here. Is that what you've been going through, Henri? Are you in the throes of a virtual existential crisis?

On the city: every once in a while my body takes me back to Brooklyn. I don't know whether it's fanciful, because it's where I had my earliest memories, or real--the pagan notion that every landscape emanates a certain vibe that accounts for its character and how we feel about it. I just feel at home there. I spent a couple of hours with the missus in Prospect Park, she reading, me watching young people in uniforms (recalling how proud I was when I was on a similar team) playing baseball on one of seven diamonds in a vast field; watching little girls creating make-believe scenarios as their parents sat around talking and eating, and teenagers made cell phone calls, and guys with beer guts grilled meat and drank beer and tossed or kicked balls in another vast field ... and marveling how green and perfect the day was and how content everyone appeared, all these different ethnic and age and racial and gender combinations. It was sweet.

It's
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsTK2LHZKPQ&feature=related

This thread has turned depressing. Everyone else is celebrating spring, and here it's grey, and cold, and dim, and cold, and grey. And it's only going to get greyer, and dimmer, and colder. For months.

Virtual-Peter, of course you are indispensible. I often think about how cool it is that being here in Le Salon is kind of like talking to fictional characters in real life. And it's like being a fictional character myself. Even though the LT me is a virtual representation of the real me, whoever that is, and interacting with the virtual representation of the real you, probably, though I can't be sure of that.

*needs to try Murr's herring and vodka cure*

On the subject of virtual reality vs. real reality, which itself is of course not a fixed, agreed-upon notion: there are books to be written on this subject, and not just dry nonfiction, but actual novels. It ain't my bag (I'm too busy memoirizing things), but I'm ready to read about it. Maybe Henri, who has been through quite a bit of unreal reality arund here, could tackle it. The shtick vs. the je ne sais quoi.

Forget about the Internet: even without it, nothing that's written--that's representational--can ever be as "real" as the actual thing. Obviously. But I'm an idealist. I have the urge to try to convey actuality (subjective as it is), albeit with humor, and there are certainly writers and poets and others who strive in that direction as well, in various ways. It's the reason (excuse me if I blow my cover) why on this thread I want to know where people live, what their surroundings look like, what they like to do, to eat, and even (!) what they read, though we get quite a lot of that elsewhere. I think that's why, with its ups and downs, periods when the thread comes alive and periods when it's dormant or perhaps even dull, why it's lasted longer than most.

Here's a little get-ready-for winter poem. I'm one of two vir-tual Petres here at the Salon:

IN HARDWOOD GROVES

The same leaves over and over again!
They fall from giving shade above
To make one texture of faded brown
And fit the earth like a leather glove.

Before the leaves can mount again
To fill the trees with another shade,
They must go down past things coming up,
They must go down into the dark decayed.

They MUST be pierced by flowers and put
Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.
However it is in some other world
I know that this is the way in ours.

Robert Frost
from COUNTRY THINGS AND OTHER THINGS

Thanks, Virtual-Petres, both of you.

Pietro #42, probably you're right that all this reality attracts us to this thread, but sometimes one can have too much reality. Maybe those are the down times on here.

Yes, Rena, that is it! Real reality has been getting in the way of virtual reality just a little too much for me!

Sorry for piling on, but it was a beautiful day in Chicago yesterday. (I am always in the city, and I am glad.) Bright sunshine and relatively warm so long as one did not poke one's real head up high enough to catch the breeze blowing from the only 50 degree (F) lake. And everything was very green after our showers last week.

Now heading out to real reality for another week. Maybe I will find a minute here and there to pop in.

I crossed the river yesterday, to the hamlet town of Rhinecliff, with its funky old Amtrak station and a renovated roadhouse, now a posh eatery where, on the second floor, local artists had donated paintings for an auction to raise money for the homeless. A band of sixty-year-old guys with gray hair warmed up the gathering with James Taylor, the Grateful Dead, the Beatles ("When I'm Sixty-four," of course), while I nursed a glass of red wine and soaked up the scene out the French doors: the wide Hudson, sailboats and other pleasure craft, the low green hills across the way, the Catskills in the distance.

We had a visitor to the homestead this morning. I don't know if it was a cock or a hen, but there was a major wild turkey in our yard. He or she strutted around, checking out the changes since last it was here, pecking at the ground, and taking the sun. After a half hour or so something spooked it and it ran about thirty yards, got down by the pond at a full gallop, I was wondering if its plan was to jump in, and, about five feet or so from the pond spread its wings and soared, quite literally soared, powered by a few economical wing flaps, into the tops of the hardwoods across the pond. I lost sight of it in the trees. What a magnificent sight. It brought to mind Benjamin Franklin's wish that it represent our nation in the world. A truly regal bird.

Cool. We get a lot of wild turkeys here, strutting across the roads and often into my backyard a dozen at a time, young ones and old. I assumed, was taught or heard, that turkeys didn't fly, and then I saw one of them take wing, followed by another, then a few more, then the rest. Not soaring type flights, but enough--economically, as Gene puts it--to reach the protective limbs of nearby trees, where they perched for a while before moving on.

A wonderful description of the wild turkey visit. We are getting early peas, onions, and Kohlrabi from the garden and the busy time is almost upon us. The rains have been kind so far and the animal visitors have not taken much. Some crows have been fired at but none have been hit. It is hard to hit a crow with a rifle but they do not like it and tend not to return.

I saw a hummingbird right in the middle of downtown Portland on Friday. I did a double take and it obligingly hovered near me so I could confirm without a doubt that it was indeed a hummingbird. I hope it found its way back to the more residential areas where there are so many nectar bearing flowers in the height of their blooming season. Downtown is a bit barren for a hummingbird.

My SO is raising a pair of chickens with his kids. I am amazed at how fast they mature. They keep outgrowing their box and the kids have to add a sort of rube goldberg system of stakes on it to make it bigger and higher. It's going to be quite fantastical by the time they are old enough to go live outside.

I am a detail person, a hedgehog rather than a fox, according to Tolstoy, and brimming with mainly useless trivia. So it's embarrasing to admit my ignorance of Kohlrabi. It's green, right? Do you put it in salads? Cook it? Does it taste bitter, like broccoli rabe, or pleasant, like bok choi?

51 - They are Sputnik in vegetable form:



Very good grilled. ETA: Light in flavor, not bitter that i remember.

Oh, Sh-t, you guys did it again. took me back to my childhood during WW2. Everyone had victory gardens. The seeds came in a set, according to the size of your garden plot. And they included weird things like kohlrabi, New Zealand spinach, & a strange squash no one ever heard of called zuccini. Soon everyone was cooking & eating zucchini. But kohlrabi -neh, didn't catch on. No one was quite sure what to do with it. The NZ spinach was OK if you liked spinach. Its virtue was that you could keep picking it & eating it all summer. Is anyone here from New Zealand? Is that really where that spinach comes from? Actually, it tastes pretty good, better than Swiss chard, another veggie forced upon us patriotic gardeners.

I once made the unforgivable faux pas at a wedding I went to, where I was seated next to a guy from Australia with whom I had nothing in common, of bringing up New Zealand--as if it were just next door to his country (on my map, it is only an inch or two away). Apparently, it's not that friggin close, and he took umbrage.

Overcast. Breezy. And cool-ish. We've had a cool-ish May here just north of Detroit. The green is very green with all the rain and damp weather. I don't really mind the cool weather. It could be like this everyday and I wouldn't complain. I get fed up with the relentless coming one day after another sunshine in sunny Southern California. I'm born and raised Northerner and very much like gloomy, or what sun-lovers would call gloomy weather. Now gloomy 'weather' to me is being forced to sit through NBA basketball or when obama's on the stump with sleeves rolled up to show everybody he's ready for work when the damage or the heavylifting is done, already. He beats old "dubbyya" to the scene but only by just a little. If "dubbyya" didn't sound like such a yahoo he mught have helped himself. obama puts us to sleep straight with his deadly dull perorations. Gawd that fellow is dull as ditchwater. It took him 2 weeks to scold BP. If you remember it was only just a while ago that he was, as EF would say, 'pimping' for off shore drilling. I'm sure that if you look into Romm 'the bomb' Emmanuel's finances he's gotten a couple fat little checks from BP, just as he has from Fanny May and Goldman 'who's needs another bonus' Sacks. But this is the Nature channell isn't it.

Your disgruntlement, Peter, seems quite natural.

Porius is high on my "favorite curmudgeons" list. Which is quite extensive, so that's no mean feat.

I've been out in the yard digging and busting stumps, not big ones, but big enough to do me in. They were keeping me from using my lawn tractor to mow that section. I got them all out and mowed the area, finally.

But that's not why I am posting this. In an update to this morning's visitor sighting, I guess it was the Tom checking things out because this afternoon we were visited in the backyard by Mama and seven chicks. I wonder what destruction these birds plan for me, now. You see. I'm becoming less sanguine about the joys of nature. Sometimes, nature just sucks. But, on a livelier note: I guess we'll just have to see, now won't we?

>54 copyedit52: that's actually quite odd. Usually the Kiwis take umbrage when they are too closely associated with Australia, but I've never known the reverse to happen. Maybe I don't get out enough.

I gather that Kiwis feel like they have no national identity in the eyes of the rest of the world; that everyone thinks of them as mini-Aussies but greener, and with more sheep. Hey, even the Aussies think of them that way a lot of the time. I don't blame them for resenting it.

Well, this Aussie guy was an odd character, to be sure. He quit his office job, bought land in upstate New York, and became a farmer growing exotic vegetables. But like Gene in his recent land-owning incarnation and his no nonsense attitude toward nature, the Aussie was so infuriated by the deer that prowled his fields that he erected a twelve or so foot electrified fence around everything. But just in case, he told me fiercely, he'd erected an observation perch where he sits with his sniper rifle, to protect his arugula. He didn't seem to have a sense of humor about that. He was also, as noted, touchy about being associated with New Zealand. Speaking of which, Sheila: They don't mind being called Kiwis?

Most Kiwis I've met refer to themselves that way. Doesn't mean you won't meet some that resent it though, I guess.

Sounds like your Aussie acquaintance was not the ideal co-wedding-guest, though amusing to talk about after the event. Sounds like a bloke I sat next to on a train for five hours once. He was an undertaker, recently out of gaol, who, after talking about scraping three-week-old bodies of the floors of apartments, then proceeded to expound his skewed life philosophies for the next few hours, which wierded me out somewhat. Later in the night, he began to flirt with a bunch of teenagers (he was in his thirties) and tried to draw me into it. I was forced to pretend to sleep, when all I wanted to do was quietly read my book. I'm sure this kind of experience is fairly common to travellors on public transport, but I'd never had one quite like that before.

Here's something from a Kiwi:

Butterfly Laughter

In the middle of our porridge plates
There was a blue butterfly painted
And each morning we tried who should reach the
butterfly first.
Then the Grandmother said: "Do not eat the poor
butterfly."
That made us laugh.
Always she said it and always it started us laughing.
It seemed such a sweet little joke.
I was certain that one fine morning
The butterfly would fly out of our plates,
Laughing the teeniest laugh in the world,
And perch on the Grandmother's lap.

Katherine Mansfield

What better opportunity to give today's weather report, since it's so easy, especially since I don't intend to tell you whether it's raining--just stick your head out the window for that.

In the Northeast; Northwest, Midwest (including Chicagoland); Sydney, Australia area; England; even southern Cal: high in the sixties.

Everyplace else naturalists live (the Southeast, Arkansas, Texas, and Taiwan, China), except perhaps our incognito friend Mr. Durick: high in the eighties.

About the HBO television program Treme:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/05/portraying-new-orle...

Overcast. But no rain. The leaves in the Red Maple tree right out my window are doing the slightest flutter. At 61 degrees F you'd have to call it coolish. A little thick: humidity 93%. Spent the morning at the exotic plant house at Belle Isle, a little oval of land on the Detroit River between Detroit & Windsor, Ontario. In past years I would spend the day in delightful Windsor and come back to what looked like for all the world, an outdoor nuthouse, ie. Detroit. Windsor is struggling thru some bad economic times these days. It's a little tatterdemalion but still a marvel of organization and cleanliness next to dear dirty Detroit.

>53 MarianV:, I wonder if the New Zealand spinach was actually Silver Beet? This is common in New Zealand, but rare in other countries, and is, I think, a type of chard.

Think of New Zealand's relationship to Australia much as Canada's relationship to the US - always mistaken for the larger neighbour, always fighting for share of voice.

We, in the U.S.A., are the head, and Canada is like our dandruff.

So that's what that white stuff that always falls on Canada is, eh?

I'll have to ask the parliamentarian whether we allow metaphors on this thread. Porius, do we have a parliamentarian?

Allow? Pfunny word for a Democrazy?!

Obviously, Porius, you have never had children.

We are all the great dictator Enrique Freeque's children. He fell and then rose again from the Mt. Ulysses avalanche. He alone allows stuff in the Salon....

So I say that 69 is premature. First we need to ask the GD (bowing, waving hands) if we are allowed a parliament.

I was just kidding, of course. There is no parliament. And you of course are kidding too. How could I be Enrique's child, except as a metaphor, whose legitimacy is in question.

you too PW!

On another note, New Zealand spinach is a perennial green thing in a separate class from chard or silverbeet. Also known as Warragul Greens. If interested, here is a link: http://www.edenseeds.com.au/content/default.asp

Me too, what, PT? You think I'm a metaphor? But seriously, I don't care for the dictator trope. Never have, never will. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

We're all meta-fours on this bus PW. But back to Nature. A coolish still night here in Michigan. The temperatures will be climbing some over the next few days. As high as 80. Humidity 82%. The dew point is high. A full moon. Air quality is good! The low temp tonight 47. With a 20% chance of rain.

I tell my wife when she complains about the rain in May (not to mention the sixty middling degree days), to consider June and July, that rain now is a good thing. (I am nothing if not adaptable.) But then, yesterday was her birthday, and it rained buckets.

More about metaphors (and similes, while we're at it).

Very Like a Whale

One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by the authors of simile and metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can't seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to go out of their way to say that it is like something else.
What does it mean when we are told
That that Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?
In the first place, George Gordon Byron had enough experience
To know that it probably wasn't just one Assyrian, it was a lot of Assyrians.
However, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and thus hinder longevity.
We'll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity.
Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold,
Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a wolf on the fold?
In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy there are great many things.
But I don't imagine that among them there is a wolf with purple and gold cohorts or purple and gold anythings.
No, no, Lord Byron, before I'll believe that this Assyrian was actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;
Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof Woof?
Frankly I think it is very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say, at the very most,
Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host.
But that wasn't fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them,
With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers to people they say Oh yes, they're the ones that a lot of wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them.
That's the kind of thing that's being done all the time by poets, from Homer to Tennyson;
They're always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison,
And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket after a winter storm.
Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of snow and I'll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical blanket material and we'll see which one keeps warm,
And after that maybe you'll begin to comprehend dimly
What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.

Ogden Nash

In the Saturday Review of Literature in the 1960's a columnist noted that the word 'cohort' is always used wrong. That sadly is also true of the generally irrefutable prosodist Ogden Nash.

Robert

Your comment chased me back to the poem, Robert. And I can't see how it's wrong here. The Assyrians in the poem are the bad guys, and bad guys have cohorts, no? Why do you say it's not used correctly?

Back then, and I'm a stick in the mud, a cohort was literally a fairly large contingent of specified size in the Roman army; so figuratively a cohort should be a group of people and cohorts should only mean multiple groups. I suspect that Nash meant a cohort of Assyrians, companions and raiders not a whole deployed brigade or whatever those big clusters are called.

Robert

I also take issue with Nash's gnashing of teeth over the use of The Assyrian as a collective noun. Besides, metaphor is what makes the language bloom, both in descriptive power and meaning. However, as Agonistes Dictionarius would say, "Simile? Not so much."

I can't belief that you didn't see that major error ! A wolf does not bark ! Woof Woof lol lol

Things I need to say about this thread:

Nature, in its ongoing iterations, has clearly become a thread that includes more than deer and flowers and weather. Along the way, I've become more than the editor I wanted to be; I've become a reporter as well. And though I do like to express myself, I had hoped that I could pull back as time went on; that is, that there would be more participation from the family of sorts I hoped we would become.

Since this has consistently been the most popular thread within the Salon, to judge from the listing of hot threads, it's merely my impatience that makes it seem to me that this hasn't occurred; that I haven't accustomed myself to the normal woof and warp that occurs on these threads. Nevertheless, it's how I feel. So for now, I intend to make an entry in the morning and perhaps one in the afternoon, unless there's a conversation that crops up in which I have something to say. And we'll see what happens.

On my way to somewhere else yesterday I noticed the flags were hanging without much life. Today there is still not much breeze of any kind to bother the leaves on the trees or anything else. Will be warm out there today with temps hitting the 80's. I doubt that the Michiganders will flock to the local beaches. We are of the sort that doesn't put on our shorts or pick up our tennis rackets till the proper day. Some of the younger voters are different in this, but most of the older will not ever be seen in the wrong outdoor outfit before it's time for it.

What am I looking at there?

It looks like a very young onion or a shallot. I'd go with young onion with the greens cut off.

90 > dirty fingers

In Chicago, sometimes nature lets us know it is spring, but sometime it does not. In April, nature was talking; in May, not so much. But I am absolutely positive that it is Spring because the weekly farmers' market has returned to the downtown Daley Plaza (where the lovely Picasso is located which is outside the building where I work).

For those of us who live, work and play surrounded by concrete, that is our source of good, fresh things.

This early in the season there is little edible outside of the onions (I think geneg is right about Paul's picture--looks like the ones I saw outside) the spinach and the asparagus. But some of the farmers are selling herb plants which do very well in our urban gardens. Others are selling hanging flower baskets--another good one-- and fresh cut flowers that are a riot of color.

Actually, looking northwest from my 28th floor vantage point, it is amazing how green the city looks. And looking east, I can see the mooring cans almost filled with their seasonal tenants and a few sailboats actually underway. The lake is flat and inviting. Lucky folks--either playing hooky or retired, I guess.

Is that your hand, Paul? If so, I wouldn't want to have to slug it out with you.

>87 copyedit52: So Pietro, was that a gentle hint for us to post more on here? Or just an announcement that you will be doing so? I'm a little confused, which may come from being upside down all the time.

Apropos of me being 'upside down', it took me years to realise that the placement of the world map as we know it is entirely theoretical. Have you seen THIS? If I'd thought of it, I would have posted it in Australia Appreciation Week. Sorry it's late.

I posted one of those in the office I supervised. The powers above me did not believe in credible work, however, and the people working for me continued to churn out the same old crap. I have a counteclockwise clock that I was intent on hanging up at work, but because of the effect of the powers above me I did not do.

That's government and, from what I have seen, big bureaucracy in general.

Robert

95: I have not seen that before - but I wish I had. (Should that have been "had" both times?)

Also, I've seen "had had" crop up in two books recently. It seems like one "had" is enough. No?

87> I hear you man. Take a break if you need to. Pull back.

I used to get peeved sometimes when the salonistas slowed down or got completely quiet. Don't they realize, I fumed at myself, how hard I've worked to make this place entertaining and enjoyable? (free of charge)!...and how do they reward my valiant efforts? With silence!? With fewer posts?! But then I realized, it's impossible to keep things hoppin' non-stop no matter how much time I'd put into it. Too much of me, anyway, isn't a good thing. So now, sometimes, I'll go days without posting. Whether this thread remains the most popular here or not, it's okay either way, as long as you're cool with it. People will come and go -- that's the constant. But nobody will replace what you bring to the table, either qualitatively or quantitatively, has been my experience.

Pretend you're a bull for second, Peter, and the salonistas are like matadors....the image has helped me cope on occassion.

>95 ChocolateMuse:. I love that shit--uh, maps, I mean, ChocoMuse. Sometimes I sit down to read a book, for pleasure (not for pay), and I'll see one of my many atlases lying around and put the book aside to look at the maps instead.

>96 Mr.Durick:. You supervised an office, Robert? I am writing that down in my book of clues about you. When the book is full, I will reveal you to the world, where you live and everything.

>97 slickdpdx:. I hate that: had had. When I'm editing, I twist sections of text out of shape looking to rectify the ugliness of had had. I've probably lost a bit of work as a result.

>98 absurdeist:. It's fitting that you should give me such understanding advice on the subject of operating a thread, Henri, since it could be said that I am one of your creatures (in a creative sense; let's not get into that shticktator stuff again), having been hatched by the underappreciated author thread, back when I was Peter, not Piero. Which reminds me: you had a good thing going there and now it's quiescent. What happened?

I'm proud of those underappreciated author threads, but as much as I enjoy the process when they're on, they're also a bit exhausting and time consuming.

I enjoyed the process, but not every month. There's nothing there on the docket until August, when a very high profile salonista's stepmother (who's written a novel I'll be reading next month). After that, who knows? I've had my eyes on another writer for awhile but I doubt I'll convince them. They're already being featured in a forthcoming LT author chat, so I doubt they'd want to spend time here too.

I'll leave that dicktater on the other threads...

Tell them that Salonistas don't do no LT author chat. If they don't come to the Salon, they ain't nobody.

It's turned gusty and rainy, throwing spatters of rain onto the windows. The autumn trees are burning orange and gold and green against all that light-filled grey. So beautiful.

Why is autumn such a nostalgic season?

Like the Cherry Blossom it doesn't last very long.

It is indeed a very young onion. My brother-in-law and best male friend was telling me complex things about plant growth at the time and I thought it made a good gardening picture. Mike (as seen above) is a master of all the arts of building, repairing, and growing. I mostly do as I am told and stand ready to provide any medical assistance that might be required.

Got a new front tire on my hybrid bike, had some work done on the derailleur (derailer, to you Americans), and began training seriously for the Tour de France. Beautiful day for it; in the eighties, but not much humidity. Another 80 degree day today in the Northeast, they say, then seventies, eighties, and 95 on Thursday. Ninety-five? I'll have to find a stream to sit in.

It is warm, sunny and lovely here in Joizy, as dear Peter calls it. Great weather in which to see "Emily Dickinson's Garden" at the New York Botanical Gardens. Going tomorrow with family. I'll report back.

Teresa: Not far from there, only blocks away (though you'll have to drive, and it's hard to park), Arthur Avenue, the best little Italy in New York City. Saturday is the liveliest day. Check out Teitel Bros., the busy corner store where you can buy gallons of extra virgin olive oil for twenty bucks (I get Edda, from Lucca); the fish store, with raw oysters peddled outside; and the indoor marketplace at midblock, a few doors down from Madonia's bakery, which has a dozen different kinds of biscotti. If you or yours are squeamish, turn away as you pass the butcher shop with dead sheep hanging in the window.

107--Peter, that sounds like a great addition to our excursion. Thanks, we'll try and check it out, especially as my family practically swims in extra virgin olive oil.

Piero, Il mio amico, If 95° is too much, come out west we're expecting mid 40s to mid 50s for the next 4 days. We may even see a few 60's late next week.

Mio amico, my friend, as distinct from:

amico mio, about which an online dictionary says: "A derogatory phrase used ironically as a putdown on many message boards. Taken from Italian for 'my friend,' it first was used sarcastically and now essentially equates to a 'flame' or calling another member a curse word. Phrase popular with fans of a Boston Red Sox message board."

And: degli amici, "friends of the lord," an aka that means: the mafia does business here.

Rained this morning. Cooled off quite a bit for the nonce. Overcast with a fluttering breeze or a breeze that flutters the green leaves on the trees. An unprepossessing day I'm afraid.

full sunhine here in Belgium for the next two days !

Rain, overcast and gloom. Right on time. I was going to water the garden today, but the Dear Lord did it for me.

My wife and her mother just got back from a short trip, they were gone about three hours, and brought me home a meal from some little gas station cum restaurant they stopped at for lunch. It was two huge catfish planks, three hushpuppies, the ultimate in southern green beans, baked squash casserole that was to die for, and the best creamed corn I've ever had. What a lunch! All for $6. Well prepared American Food rivals any other cuisine on earth. Start with a cast iron skillet, throw in a big hunk of fat back, let it begin to render, then ... ! Be sure you've got your salt and pepper handy. This is the food they were made for.

My wife found this on the web. This is where the lunch came from. Check out the menu.

Caro Pietro,

degli amici literrally means "of the friends". What web site is making it into "friends of the lord"? That would be amici del signore, methinks.

And in Italy, I think amico mio would be a term of endearment directed to a male friend. Was it some Amurrican who made it nasty?

Ciao, bello

I thought about you while I was writing that response, wondering: What will Lisa say about this? We should make you Italian translation editor, I think. Gene would be in charge of cast iron cookery and southeastern cuisine (on Top Chef there are always more competitors from Atlanta than anywhere else, for some reason). Porius would of course be political editor, in charge of fulmination (Gene tends to fulminate on other threads). Tani would be our consultant for computer hieroglyphics, ellipses, and other Huh? things ...

That's as far as I've gotten so far.

THIS JUST IN: Breaking news

Mr. Durick aka Robert has just inadvertently divulged enough information on another thread for me to figure out where he lives. I will give him a week to announce it himself and then I'm going to out him.

Or maybe not. A conscience can be an annoying thing to have.

Agenbite of inwit.

Agenbite of inwit is an archaic phrase that originated as the title of a French treatise on morality. It was translated into English in 1340 by Dan Michel, a monk at Canterbury. The title (originally spelled "Ayenbite of Inwyt") means "he remorse of conscience," literally, "the again-biting of inner wit." The English word agenbite is a translation of both elements of the Latin verb remordere, "to bite again," the source of English remorse. The English word inwit usually means "an inner sense of right or wrong," but its more general meaning is "reason, intellect, understanding, or wisdom." It is often cited in connection to the character Leopold Bloom in Ulysses by James Joyce.

Get back in the witness box, Clara, you are too sharp today. There's more than a touch of the artist about old "Poldy" isn't there? The wirmofconscience. Where would the civilized world be without it?

I don't want to hear anymore talk about Ulysses.

EFproteststoomuchmeethinks.

Is there such a thing as a Ulysses complex?

>121 absurdeist: Henri, I didn't make any comment on the other thread when you started about Camus again. So let Ulysses alone my friend.
Clarabel - Porius - super interesting commen t thank you !

But what did I say about Camus on another thread, my best Belgian (and Flemish speaking!) friend? All I did was pimp a review.

And look at the excellent reactions I got by saying what I said about Ulysses, Mac. Two snarks back in ten minutes! Or, one snark every five minutes. That's just what I call creating a dialogue, Friend.

Come closer, so I can give you a kiss.

holaho, that is not you !

EF old boy, that could be a great front cover for Gunter Grasses FLOUNDER.

Ya never know what'll set people off. A recipe for turkey hamburgers leads to poetic waxings about burger joints. A comment about cats brings on a chorus of meows. And now Ulysses, who begat Camus who begat a smooch that begat Gunter Grass ... and thanks to James Joyce, this nature poem from his countryman, Seamus Heaney:

Rite of Spring

So winter closed its fist
And got it stuck in the pump.
The plunger froze up a lump

In its throat, ice founding itself
Upon iron. The handle
Paralysed at an angle.

Then the twisting of wheat straw
into ropes, lapping them tight
Round stem and snout, then a light

That sent the pump up in a flame
It cooled, we lifted her latch,
Her entrance was wet, and she came.

I feel somewhat intellectually over matched and geographically jealous after reading the above. The one drawback to living near a small town in Arkansas is the access to the kind of shopping so wonderfully described in > 107. I to want to assert, in my own defense, that I at one time looked at each and every word in Finnegans Wake. I would not dare to say I had read it. (Grin). It is by the way 73 and sunny in Guy today. A fine supper last night featured fresh picked Kohlrabi and English Peas.

Yes, Paul, there are some advantages to urban life. Then again, out in Guy your dog can run free and leashless, chasing herons (or whatever the hell that was).

Speaking of which: having alluded to cat people today, and since this is an equal opportunity thread and Ulysses is of the moment:

... Soon as he perceived
Long-lost Ulysses nigh, down fell his ears
Clapped close, and with his tail glad sign he gave
Of congratulation, impotent to rise,
And to approach his master as of old.
Ulysses, noting him, wiped off a tear
Unmarked.
... Then his destiny released
Old Argus, soon as he had lived to see
Ulysses in the twentieth year restored.

From The Age of Fable
Thomas Bulfinch

I had one of these up in the State Forest this morning. Now if this doesn't say "Neotropical Migrant"...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFpsVyCY9Bk&feature=related

Muggy and most still out there tonight. The clouds have all but gone away, just a few veiling the almost mid-night moon. A slight chance of rain tonight. Breezes out of SSW at 4mph; the gods are snoring with mouth closed this night.

Thanks for the bird video, Sandy. One of the first books I bought was Audobon's Birds of America, with its colorful plates, or maybe I stole it from the book warehouse where I worked after school. It's around here somewhere ...

Gonna get hot this week, and me without air conditioning.

Finally caught up to the rest of you on the plnat front: bought this and that; got the pots and boxes out of the garage; the fertilizer and spades. Connected the hose and snaked it up to the deck behind the house. And went to work plnating things.

This year, instead of the tomato that looks good but tastes lousy in August, I've got catnip, having been told it'll keep fleas off my two scruffy old cats. And I actually bought that hanging geranium I resisted getting all these years, forgetting that I admire their toughness. This year's little rosebush now sits on the ledge next to the bonsai I've nursed for almost twenty years, inside and out.

Finally, I filled the hummingbird feeder with water and sugar and hung it amidst a newly flowering colorful plant outside the bedroom window, so I can lay in bed and during TV commericals watch the alpha hummingbird try to keep the others away. It's late enough so I expected they'd arrive and buzz me aside as soon as I put it up, but no sight or sound of them yet.

Not a cloud in the sky today. Tem-pra-tyoor (George Kell's pronunciation) is 85 degrees. But with a good breeze NNW and humidity 42%, it's tolerable. Saw a turkeyvulture this morning. We gimlet-eyed each other briefly and went on our merry way. What a magnificent bird, big too, when you get that close, which isn't often. They are extremely rare in Michigan. Valuable scavengers they are protected in some states. They soar in wide circles. TV's hold their long wings slightly above the horizontal line. The naked red head tips off the fact that they are indeed Turkey Vultures
More for those who are interested: Eggs: 2.8 x 1.9; usually 1-3; Dull white or buff, irregular brown spots.
Birds can be found on the ground, on a rock ledge, or on a hollow log in a secluded place, near water or in the woods.
http://www.birdingperu.com/upload/masterperu/Turkey%20Vulture%201.jpg

Way to go, Peter. Man of Nature. I almost feel reluctant (an emotion that is hardly in my nature) to declare that having gotten tired of my own company, I started another book today: the one after the one that hasn't been published yet. It begins:

My marriage had crashed, I had no bread, no job. Making the best of limbo, I liked to look at it as a cleansing, a fresh start. Not that I headed in new directions; I'd come back to the city, which wasn't the same place at all.

Hard to believe that you get tired of your own company. You strike me as someone who can always amuse yourself. Your posts are always interesting, but of course I really don't know that much about you, save having read your book and the stuff you post here everyday.
I on the otherhand am rarely tired of my own company. And when on the rare occasion that I am, I can turn to some few pleasant others to keep me reasonably happy.

The writer in me, whether in comments or stories, is somewhat different than the me you don't know. But not that different: I don't stay tired of myself for long.

Yes, now that you mention it, it makes sense that you don't tire of your own company. That you can turn to others in a pinch: I understand that too. And the way you put it--"some few pleasant others to keep me reasonably happy" (I'll wager this will make you feel good) reminded me of Montaigne.

Ex-tatick as I love the old Frenchman this side of idolatry.

Sometimes idleness can be a problem for me.

OF IDLENESS
As we see some idle fallow grounds, if they be fat and fertile, to bring forth store and sundry roots of wild and unprofitable weeds, and that to keep them in use we must subject and employ them with certain seeds for our use and service. And as we see some women, though single and alone, often to bring forth lumps of shapeless flesh, whereas to produce a perfect and natural generation they must be manured with another kind of seed. So it is of minds, which except they be busied about some subject that may bridle and keep them under, they will here and there wildly scatter themselves through vast fields of imaginations.

As trembling light reflected from the Sun,
Or radiant Moon on water-filled brass lavers,
Flies over all, in air upraised soon,
Strikes house-top beams, betwixt both strangely wavers.
Virgil Aen. viii. 23

And there is no folly, or extravagant raving, they produce not in that agitation.

Like sick men's dreams, that feign
Imaginations vain.
Horace Art. Poet. vii

The mind that has no fixed bound will easily lose itself. For we say, TO BE EVERYWHERE IS TO BE NOWHERE.

Good sir, he that dwells everywhere,
Nowhere can he say that he dwells there.
Martial vii Epig. lxxii. 6

It is not long since I retired myself unto mine own house with full purpose (as much as lay in me) not to trouble myself with any business, but solitarily and quietly to wear out the remainder of my well-nigh-spent life; where methought I could do my spirit no greater favor than to give him the full scope of idleness, and entertain him as he best pleased, and withal, to settle himself as he best liked; which I hoped he might now, being by time become more settled and ripe, accomplish very easy; but I find:
Evermore idleness,
Doth wavering minds address.
Lucan iv. 704

That contrariwise playing the skittish and loose-broken jade, he takes a hundred times more career and liberty into himself than he did for others; and begets in me so many extravagant CHIMERAS and fantastical monsters, so orderless and without any reason, one huddling upon another, that at leisure to view the foolishness and monstrous strangeness of them, hoping, if I live, one day to make him ashamed and blush at himself.

Pumpkin and Bacon Soup
About 2kg pumpkin - Queensland Blue or JAP is good; butternut is probably even better
2 onions
Several rashers of smoked bacon, rinds removed
Sprig of fresh herbs - I use oregano
Chicken stock, maybe three cups
About 1 cup of buttermilk
salt and pepper to taste

Saute onion together with bacon. Add chunked pumpkin and stir around to spread the flavour. Add chicken stock - enough so there's still a pumpkin mountain poking above the liquid - and herbs. Simmer or boil until pumpkin is soft. Blenderise - I use one of those nifty stick blenders so you don't even have to take anything out of the pot. Add buttermilk, salt and pepper.

Result: pumpkin soup (a common staple down under) with an unexpectedly rich and smoky taste. Inexpensive way to feed a crowd, good for any rainy night in late autumn.

(Meddy and other vegetarians may have to settle for potato and leek instead)

Peter: you and your interlocutors have me figured out.

Rena: no pumpkin soup for me, thanks, until October, but thanks for the recipe. By the way, the Socceroos of New Zealand (no joke, that's what they call themselves) beat the All Whites of Australia yesterday in a World Cup tune-up. Or maybe it was the other way 'round.

Oh, I'm sure you have something up your wily sleeves. Push us to greater efforts. There's precious little else, isn't there?

My dear Peter, I do not know if you did that on purpose, but the AUSSIE team is the Socceroos, and the NZ team is the All Whites.

I did not know that, and as a result I don't know which of you two island nations actually won that soccer game, or which of you is going to the World Cup. But I do know that a bloke named Rogers from Australia, or maybe Rodgers, won the Tour de California yesterday. On his bicyclette.

when sailing or playing rugby the NZ turn black

Oh, I get it now: Kangaroo, Socceroo. Took me long enough, dint it?

At a Certain Age

We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers.
White clouds refused to accept them, and the wind
Was too busy visiting sea after sea.
We did not succeed in interesting the animals.
Dogs, disappointed, expected an order,
A cat, as always immoral, was falling asleep.
A person seemingly very close
Did not care to hear of things long past.
Conversations with friends over vodka or coffee
Ought not be prolonged beyond the first sign of boredom.
It would be humiliating to pay by the hour
A man with a diploma, just for listening.
Churches. Perhaps churches. But to confess there what?
That we used to see ourselves as handsome and noble
Yet later in our place an ugly toad
Half-opens its thick eyelid
And one sees clearly: "That's me."

Czeslaw Milosz

150: love that one

Says it just right, doesn't it. Gadszooks, beyond the first sign of boredom - who shall scape whipping?

129
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad,
Made in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe,
Before, a joy proposed, behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Wm. Shakespeare

Alfred Leslie Rouse would have us compare this Sonnet to these lines from LUCRECE, II, 211
Tarquin's reflection:
What win I if I gain the thing I seek?
A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy.
Who buys a minute's mirth to wail a week,
Or sells eternity to get a toy?
For one sweet grape who will the vine destroy?

LUCRECE was written 1593 -4, the date of the affair with the Dark Lady. It was the dark side of that experience that entered into this poem, with its perturbed and gloomy atmosphere, its more self questionings and self-reproach, and marks it off from the gaiety and insouciance of VENUS AND ADONIS of the previous year.

I can't help thinking about cheney and his minions when I read: for one sweet grape who will the vine destroy?
Halliburton's cement failed down there in the Gulf wrecking havoc on the Pelicans and all the sea-life for miles around.

Peter said on the sports thread that he thought we would talk about geography here. (Probably why it is in the "Topic" line)

So, I decided to talk about cities on the water. I love water and I love cities. I appreciate the country that many of you talk about, but cities are my preference. I look at cities and think all of the concrete and angles are beautiful.

So, first, of course, my beloved Chicago with one of the most magnificent skylines in the world. Every time I get to a port city, I compare it to Chicago. IMHO, every one has come up short. And I am not in the least prejudiced toward Chicago.

However, other great U.S. cities that I have seen and that are on the water: San Francisco, Seattle and Boston. Outside the U.S., top is probably Hong Kong. I have also loved Naples, Italy and Bari, Italy. Although Bari itself might more properly be considered a town, the port is relatively important on that side of Italy. Venice of course. What is not to like about a city that not only is surrounded by water but is crisscrossed by water?

A list to which I'd add Marseille, another city of hills like San Francisco, with a sense of Africa across the historic sea; Amsterdam, with its canals and Zuider Zee; and New York City, Chicago lady--is it not a great city on the water?--with its island(s), bridges, ocean, and harbor.

Newport News, Va. with its navy yards and capital ships sliding down Hampton Roads to the sea.

Can't tell you how many times I've held the fairly recently, last five years or so, published Complete Poems of Czeslaw Milosz. His poetry resonates deeply in me (and is readable) a rare combination in a poet. It's the high price tag that's kept me away. Keep hoping to find it second hand someday.

That Will Shakespeare fellow is none to shabby either! Can anyone match the elegance, the wit, the breadth, the depth and the sheer volume of that man?

Speaking of water and cities, the rain is blowing freezing and horizontal just now, and people with umbrellas are blowing along with it in the grey half-light. It's a Beethoven day.

Gonna be 95 sun-blasted degrees here today, Lorena. What's the opposite of Beethoven? And speaking of water and cities and heat, there's this, from "Day at the Beach," I Think, Therefore Who Am I?:

Sitting by the open window, I lit a joint and drifted out beyond the tarpaper rooftops, the Con Ed smokestacks, the sluggish East River, the squat factories on the other side, the ochre haze rimming the scene, to a childhood memory of yellow safety barrels bobbing on the ocean surface, wooden jetties marking blocks where people roomed in houses during the summer, canvas-backed chairs and umbrellas camped in the sand where hamlets of adults conversed, babies and toddlers crawled and waddled, children played.

The beach . . .

The cluttered scene out the window as I dripped sweat conjured sweltering millions, summer upon summer, suffering the heat and humidity, all of us together, jamming into trolleys, subways, cars and buses, in utopian exodus.

It choked me up.

When Michael walked in and saw my long-lost look, he asked me what was wrong.

"Nothing," I said. "It’s beautiful, actually," and I told him about the beach, that ennobling, collective escape.

"Let’s go!" he said when I was through.

His enthusiasm sobered me. I’d promised a place where age and sorrow did not exist, a Holy Land where we would find nostalgia alive and well, in all its recollected fullness.

"Let’s go now!" he said, and paraphrased me, in his own poetic way: "All of us, moved by the heat of a hazy summer day, repairing to the ocean, to the beach . . . "

"Well, all right!" I declared, reinfected with my own virus. "We’ll do it!"

>156 geneg: geneg: I haven't been there, but I am adding it to my list. A city on the water with navy yards and "ships sliding down to the sea". A wonderful picture!

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to commune with the spirit of the Universe, to be intoxicated with the fumes, call it, of the Divine Nectar, to bear my head through the atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet, is perennial and constant.
Henry David Thoreau

#160
And how was the beach? Did it live up to your memories and/or expectations? Were people actually in the water, wading, swimming with those cartoon floats, mothers holding hands of squealing children. Did you see young girls in the barest of bikinis walking past? Were there still people lying flat on their stomachs trying to get a sun tan? Or is that all over now. We have been indoctrinated in the belief that sun causes cancer, that millions of microscopic organisms dwell in every pool of water, waiting for a bare foot to penetrate and spread some unpronouncable disease. Did you have to shout over the blast of boom-boxes? Was there a little step-laddeer thingy with a young man and a sign that said "life Guard" sitting on top? Did you watch whole families grabbing the edges of their blankets and pulling them over the sand as the tide came in?
Did you actually put your feet in the water? Your body? Did you swim? Float on a yellow plastic raft?
Was it really the same beach you had imagined before you went there, only with different people?Did you and another person smooth sun-tan lotion on each other's backs? Can you still smell the lotion? And maybe some algae and parts of water-creatures who had beached themselves and lain in the sun too long? Will you hurry back? Or will this visit be filed with your other memories of beach trips & pulled out some snowy January afternoon?

Marian: The passage was from a chapter in my memoir, in which the dream of the beach said something about my state of mind, and then the actuality of the beach--and getting there, and with whom--was depicted as a dose of reality. The beach on a hot day, the communality of the experience, of course did not live up to my expectations. But it had its own satisfactions as a story.

The other day a deer's head appeared above the computer where I work, startling me. It was chewing, its lips working in that odd sideways mastication. Though about four feet away, it stared right at me, perhaps not seeing me through the window's reflection, or not knowing what it was looking at, or just not caring. A big, surprisingly awkward looking animal that eventually sauntered away, into the backyard and then back to the woods.

The awkward galoot visited me again this evening. But where are the hummingbirds?

Nice deer sightings (and stories) Peter.

Your seeing that deer so close inside your home reminds me of a book I enjoyed as a kid, A Deer in the Family. This family adopted a doe and they let the doe (soon a large deer!) roam at will in their home like a dog. Strange. But very cool also.

I'm hoping to get away this weekend for a hike in the San Gabriels, maybe meet me a mule deer or mountain goat if I'm lucky and up there early enough in the morning.

Dear me. Over the town of Noirfontaine, France, one day in April, 1842, there was a cloudless sky, but drops of water were pfalling. Pfalling , as if from a fixed appearing-point, somewhere above the ground, to a definite area beneath. The next day water was still pfalling upon this one small area, as mysteriously as if a ghost were holding the nozzle of an invisible hose.
I take this account from the journal of the French Academy of Sciences (Comptes Rendus), vol. 14, p. 664.
What do I mean by that?
I don't mean anything by that. At the same time, I do mean something by the meaninglessness of that. I mean that we are in the helpless state of a standardless existence, and that the appeal to authority is as much of a wobble as any other of our insecurities.
Nevertheless, though I know of no standards by which to judge anything, I conceive- or accept the idea - of something that is The Standard, if I can think of our existence as an Organism. If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until it comes steam-engine-time. For whatever is supposed to be meant by progress, there is no need in human minds for standards of their own: this is in the sense that no part of a growing plant (or pinat, for that matter) needs guidance of its own devising, nor special knowledge of its own as how to become a leaf or a root. It needs no base of its own, because the relative wholeness of the plant (or pinat) is relative baseness to its parts. At the same time, in the midst of this theory of submergence, I do not accept that human minds are absolute nonentities, just as I do not accept that a leaf, or a root, of a plant (or pinat) though so dependent upon a main body, and so clearly only a part, is absolutely without something of an individualizing touch of its own.
It is the problem of continuity-discontinuity, which perhaps . . .

from Charles Fort, LO!

I was once in a heated conversation with a friend of mine when, in frustration with some point I was making, he blurted out, "But there have to be Standards." To which I responded, "Yes, but be sure they matter." He looked at me as if I had just condensed out of the atmosphere in front of him. Apparently the idea that "Standards" may not be important and thus not useful had never occurred to him. Too many "Standards" are, in the long run, meaningless and can be harmful when wielded by the wrong hands.

I like my house to be built to certain standards, I like my doctor to meet certain standards, the slogan on my T-Shirt, the bagginess of my trousers, the length of my hair, not so much.

We are promised a glorious weather weekend in Chicago with sunny skies and temperatures in the low 80s (F). It is 1500 CDT, and I can see that many people have started their weekends just a bit early--many sailboats out on the very blue water of Lake Michigan. Of course the water temperature is still in the 50s, so they are probably bundled up. But it sure looks good.

Looking forward to getting out of here in an hour or so to enjoy three whole days without work. Maybe I will plnat some plnats.

The town of Woodstock (not the one in Georgia, but in New York) is filling up for the long weekend, with so-called weekenders (second homeowners) and tourists. The cops are giving out tickets on Route 28, leading up to the Catskills, where the speed limit is 45 (and you can go up to 55), which is routinely violated after getting off the Thruway, where the limit is 65 and you can go up to 80 without being pulled over. What a crappy way to start a weekend: with a $150 (or maybe more) speeding ticket.

Very surprised to have a wire-less connection here in the lakeside boating club in Pisz ( what's in a name ? ), Poland. I am off for a weekend sailing on the Mazurian Lakes but the weather looks so-and-so and there seems to be no wind...I'll stuf Painter's bio of Proust in my kit bag : )

Some Polish verse for Macumbeira in Pisz:

Window

I looked out the window at dawn and saw a young apple tree
translucent in brightness.

And when I looked out at dawn once again, an apple tree laden with
fruit stood there.

Many years had probably gone by but I remember nothing of what
happened in my sleep.

Czeslaw Milosz

All that yellow crap in the air, and white crap--pollen, I guess you cogniscenti would call it--finally abated enough for me to take my 8.5-mile bike loop with my eyes open.

Blue skies. Blue skies. Nothin but blue skies. Winds NE 10. Little or no chance of rain. Dry air, Temperature 81 and will climb to 85 before the afternoon has had it.
The month of May it seems has just about had it. Hurricane season has officially opened. Supposed to be an active one this year. I wonder what a hurricane would do in the oily Gulf of Mexico and environs? Did anyone happen to see obama down in the Gulf yesterday with sleeves rolledup. Wery impressive as old Sam Weller might have said. He assured the denizens of the area that after the cameras had all packed up and gone that he would not forget about them. He was not so certain as to what was to be done, but forget them he would not. It sometimes seems to me that we are being governed by a bunch of TV weathermen on the take. Think John Kerry. Woulnd't he make a dandy weatherman?

The best coverage of the oil spill iis on the Weather Channel. BTW, the 1st. hurricane of the season is now officially Hurricane Agatha.

Hurricanes, through their rather violent spinning create a vacuum that lifts the surface of the sea, breaking it up and the water is raised through the stack and spread out to become gobs and gobs of rain for miles and miles around. My question is, is oil too heavy for this process to occur? Is their a danger, if a hurricane crosses the path of the slick, that the resulting rain will be oily? If yes, this oil slick could potentially do damage well beyond the immediate gulf region. Dallas was hit several times by hurricanes as they broke up over land. I was in W.Va. when the remnants of Hurricane Hazel came through in '54 or '55. Is this a potential problem? Imagine a coating of oil on homes, vehicles, roads, buildings, vegetation, anything outdoors when the rains came. What would this do to municipal water supplies.

Yes. The oil spill and hurricanes. Good questions. I once wondered why it didn't rain saltwater when clouds that gathered over the ocean blew inland and then dumped water on us. I was told that the moisture that gathered somehow excluded the salt. If true, I'd think it would leave the oil behind as well.

The water lifted in hurricanes is fresh. It rises by evaporation due to temp differences. A good discussion complete with home experiments can be found at http://fcit.usf.edu/florida/teacher/science/mod2/resources/cyclones.experiments....

Thanks Copy ! apreciate.
Actually had a nice day on the water, regatta in Q - class. Really Nice these Mazurian lakes. No time or need for reading

Mac,

Ever thought about the Chicago to Mackinac Island race? Longest freshwater race. I'm just the check-in boat, but I like to track my friends with the latest GPS gizmos.

And Mac, whatever you do, don't throw the Polish drifter's knife in the water.

182 > I don't get it ! Polanski or Conrad allusion ?

Polanski, but Conrad is so much funnier!

sounds like a blast you yachters!: http://www.cycracetomackinac.com/

Give me a Hobie Cat up on one pontoon, and I'm content. Though sailing on a boat that has more amenities than a tarp sounds nice too.

Watch Knife in the Water here.

There is an old boat being restored here on the wharf,
It is named "the shadow line".
Nice

Water

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

Philip Larkin

Salonista's, You are all an endless source of new discoveries for me as well as a daily inspiration

Mac, this is neither a discovery or an inspiration: today I had to stand in the driving rain talking to a mobile mechanic (who has since arranged for my car to be towed away) and now I have to sit on wet clothes all day. This salonista is grumpy.

Thinking of you yachting in Poland - which of all places in the world I yearn to go to, that is the one I yearn the most - in early summer, makes me admittedly happy for you, but not for myself, with my wet rear, gone car, and soon-to-be depleted wallet.

grmph. But Piero, I do like that water poem, no sarcasm intended.

A while ago (I like to keep chronological details vague so people won't suspect I'm ancient) I moved into the only Polish neighborhood in New York City, in the borough of Brooklyn, a neighborhood called Greenpoint ("Greenpernt," to its old-timers), best known as the origin of the charming localism youse, as in "youse guys." Those old-timers were mainly Irish actually, and had been overwhelmed by the Poles, and then over-overwhelmed when more Poles began to pour into the city during the days of Solidarity. I thought of the neighborhood as Little Krakow, because I liked the sound of the word.

My landlord was a priest named Longin Tolczyk, who owned the building; I didn't know that priests were allowed to own buildings, and I'm still in the dark about it. (It's one of the things about Catholicism that fascinates me.) I was the only one in the building who spoke English. A warren of immigrants--of Tolcyzks, to be precise--lived in the basement and on the first floor, and Longin's sister and her two teenage girls lived on the second floor. I lived on the third floor and was the only one who paid rent. It could be I supported everyone. At times it seemed I was the only one in Greenpernt who spoke English. (Artists and faux artists have recently appeared, speaking their own language.) I knew one Polish word, shmata, since it's also a Yiddish word meaning old clothes, or maybe rags, since my grandparents, immigrants themselves, were in the shmata trade, along with most Jewish immigrants in the United States at the time.

So I must admit to a smile when I hear about the regatta over there. A regatta. It boggles my mind.

>191 copyedit52: Peter, that sounds like the beginning of a Russian novel (not that I've read many Russian novels, she says humbly, conscious of the company in here). A Russian novel set in Polish New York.

Actually Poles are keen sailors with the Baltic sea lapping at their shores. ( 15°C in summer ). The Germans and the Russians did not really create a regatta atmosphere for them last century. Speaking about lost generations, you should have a talk with the Poles of 60 to 70 years old and who did not get away.

But they are catching up all right

Poland Appreciation Week snuck up on us out of nowhere, didn't it? Before it disappears altogether:

Going Home

He came home. Said nothing.
It was clear, though, that something had gone wrong.
He lay down fully dressed.
Pulled the blanket over his head.
Tucked up his knees.
He's nearly forty, but not at the moment.
He exists just as he did inside his mother's womb,
clad in seven walls of skin, in sheltered darkness.
Tomorrow he'll give a lecture
on homeostasis in metagalactic cosmonautics.
For now, though, he has curled up and gone to sleep.

Wislawa Szymborska

Time to bring out the... Zubrowkaaaaaaaa...

Thunderstorms are coming from the west. Very hot out and the air is thick even though the humidity is only 50%.
I lived in Hamtramck for a few years. It had a heavy Polish and Eastern European population. I loved all the Polish restaurants and bakeries. The Polish cabbages rolls were delicious as were all the various noodle dishes. I love noodles and dumplings and all that sort of thing. I can still close my eyes and see the Polish grandmas vigorously shoveling snow and putting a chair in the street to protect the spot shoveled.
There's a great Clint Eastwood movie called Grand Torino that captures the 'Hamtramack Experience' wonderfully well.

Lifted from Porius on the birthday thread, to capture this glorious late spring day:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPEMZteFjWc&feature=related

Another MB song that might have found it's way in PW's coming of age story.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmmPFrkuPq0&a=hjzvEKcfBSo&playnext_from=M...

A storm she is a-brewin out there as my old Dad used to say. The green against the charcoal sky might even cause Krishnamurti to lose consciousness. Lightning flashes with no thunder or rain as yet. Clouds Without Water. Probably not. With an 80% chance (don't you just love that word) rain.

The insistent rhythm guitars raise the Nabokovian hairs on the back of my neck.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1YWtQ5n7Es

Late Ripeness

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than they were before.

I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget--I kept saying--that we are all children of the King.

For where we come from there is no division
into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part
of the gift we received for our long journey.

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago--
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef--they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.

Czeslaw Milosz

A dart to the heart that poem.

VILLAGE DARKNESS

What's barley cut but now
the human world turns to summer
the paths that looked so straught
disappear under a frenzy of green

If a poet's job
is to see invisible things
then the human summer
is hell for ordinary poets
under their wide straw hats

A thin man runs between ricefields -
since a poisonous snake
is poised in every beautiful poem
that man must be running from
the tiny universe of the village
so he won't be bitten

Tamura Ryuichi

Off to the big city again, this time to paint an apartment, which will take two days. How did it happen that I became such a busy person?

You take me back to the first summer of our marriage when we lived with my Mother-in-Law who came from Galicia, near Krakow & preferred speaking Polish instead of English & on Sunday afternoons everyone sat in the yard on chairs dragged out from the kitchen & the Piwa flowed like, well, beer & I was 8 months pregnant & sat next to my mother-in-law who, when i seemed completely removed from the scene would whisper some English words in my ear so I wouldn;t feel left out, though I knew some Slavic words from living off St. Clair Ave. in Cleveland . She taught me how to cook Polish dishes which I taught to my daughters who prepared them in Palm Springs & Seattle & other strange places. We had relatives who visited from Hamtramack.
The old Hamtramack & the old St. Clair Ave. have passed into history, but the 3rd. & 4th. generation of Slovak & Polish people live on in Marblehead where they came to work in the limestone quarry but we are being out-numbered by people from Cleveland who build McMansions, & other un-ethnic stuff.
Yes, I know priests who own property
BTW we have a fb site "You know you're from Marblehead..."

202: My sis lives in Cleveland, my mother went to Case Western Reserve (actually they were separate at the time, she went to Western Reserve) and she's from Akron and my dad's from Youngstown. My mom's mother's family are Hungarians from Lorain. Small world...

TREE
I don't know its name
but a large tree
bends down its limbs

Grows into the ground
releasing leaves releasing leaves releasing leaves
releasing purple fruit - -releasing gold fruit

Leaves the color of whiskeys
the color of sunset
and blood

Before these colors turn the color of earth
there must be time there must be time
I can see this time

Clearly
approaching, eddying
in slow spirals

Through translucent space
but I cannot locate
the water beneath the ground

Tamura Ryuichi

The Trees

There is unrest in the forest,
There is trouble with the trees,
For the maples want more sunlight
And the oaks ignore their pleas.

The trouble with the maples,
(And they're quite convinced they're right)
They say the oaks are just too lofty
And they grab up all the light.
But the oaks can't help their feelings
If they like the way they're made.
And they wonder why the maples
Can't be happy in their shade.

There is trouble in the forest,
And the creatures all have fled,
As the maples scream "Oppression!"
And the oaks just shake their heads

So the maples formed a union
And demanded equal rights.
"The oaks are just too greedy;
We will make them give us light."
Now there's no more oak oppression,
For they passed a noble law,
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet, axe, and saw.

~Neil Peart

Uh oh. Gene?

Wow Henri ! I like that one.

Thanks Mac! Neil Peart is the long time lyricist and drummer for Rush.

Here's The Trees as a song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvQ2JF-glvw&feature=related

the things you listen to !

Weather!! Really incredible lightning storm last night. It is amazing how much louder the thunder is when sleeping on a boat instead of inside a house. Also scares the heck out of one when the thunder and lightning are just about simultaneous and one wonders if it hit a nearby boat. (One being me!) The dogs were not too happy to go out this morning, either. Come to think of it, the owner was pretty miserable, too, in the pouring rain.

Is it headed up toward Detroit?

Awful southern wind and hard rain falling on the 2nd of JUNE in Portland. We already had the wettest May on record. I keep breaking out the sandals hoping to force summer to make an appearance but it is not working. Our Rose Festival is coming up and the carnival is already open and though we are used to having iffy weather for it, I believe this year is a real disaster.

On the up side, not much danger of forest fires...

Not too severe N. of Det. where I am for the nonce. Gray skies, nothing but gray skies. Sprinkles of rain, the kind of rain the vegetation minds not. Not much in the way of wind, it would be a challenge for old Beaufort to weigh in today. Hardly even registering on the Beaufort Scale. A feather might have a subtle tremor. The air of course is very thick. Humidity 99% and dew point 66.
But severe storms may be on the way. 50% chance (that delicious word again) of storms. To the south of us in Ahia, in Orrville and environs, storms are a-rumbling. Look out Akron. And any idlers along the banks of the Cuyahoga River.

Oaks achieve their stature as a function of their nature, Maples don't grow where they can't. However, some Maples, because of their beauty or their utility, have, through those things attracted the notice of Man, and through Man's desire become useful and thus, looked out for by the one who wields those axes and saws. Maples have found their own way to survive. How many Oak trees does one find on a Maple Sugar Plantation?

I understand the analogy, but don't believe it to be quite adequate. Neither Oaks, nor Maples, nor any other denizen of the woods expresses agency with regard to one another beyond schemes to ensure their own survival. Only Man does, and we are eat up with it. Even to the point of writing poems about how the wealthy deserve their wealth because of their nature, when in fact, they deserve it because they are more cunning and ruthless than their neighbor. Analogies attempting to explain man through nature just don't work beyond a certain point, and I think the sentiment in that poem has gone beyond that point. There is nothing laudatory in your average captain of industry or finance. They destroy their ecological niches through a greed for more than they need. The Oak tree stops pretty much at what it needs. We go way beyond what we need. Witness the near collapse of the global finance system. Oaks can't make sunshine out of sunshine, so they are required to stretch for it, but people can make money out of money to and beyond the point the money represents anything other than money.

Re 213 Is not man a part of nature.

Yes, but he can to degree far greater than any other part of nature, hold himself separate from it. In humans survival of the fittest is a cooperative venture, not an individual matter.

"Natural selection," Darwin’s name for the mechanism of evolutionary development … is the process by which individual characteristics that are more favorable to reproductive success are "chosen" because they are passed from one generation to the next over characteristics that are less favorable. Darwin regretted that the word "selection" suggested an intention: natural selection is a blind process, because the conditions to which the organism must adapt in order to survive are never the same.

…

Evolution is simply the incidental by-product of material struggle, not its goal. Organisms don’t struggle because they must evolve; they evolve because they must struggle.

Louis Menand
The Metaphysical Club

Mostly gray. Rain threatens. 10 mph out of the NW make it tolerable. Pretty muggy though.

Pantagruelian Prognostications.
Ch. VII. - Of Summer. - In the summer I cannot justly tell you what kind of wind will blow; but this I know, that it ought to be warm weather then, an d now and then a sea-breeze. However, if things should fall out otherwise, you must be sure not to curse God; for He is wiser than we, and knows what is fit for us far better than we ourselves: you may take my word for it, whatever Haley (an Arabian philosopher and mathematician) and his gang may have said. It will be a delicious thing to be merry, and drink cool wine; though some have said there is nothing more contrary to thirst. I believe it; and indeed contraria contrariis curantur (the opposite is cured with the opposite).

Talking to Little Birdies

Not a peep out of you now
After the bedlam early this morning.
Are you begging pardon of me
Hidden up there among the leaves,
Or are your brains momentarily overtaxed?

You savvy a few things I don't:
The overlooked sunflower seed worth a holler;
The traffic of cats in the yard;
Strangers leaving the widow's house,
Tieless and wearing crooked grins.

Or have you got wind of the world's news?
Some new horror I haven't heard about yet?
Which one of you was so bold as to warn me,
Our sweet setup is in danger?

Kids are playing soldiers down the road,
Pointing their rifles and playing dead.
Little birdies, are you sneaking wary looks
In the thick foliage as you hear me say this?

Charles Simic

TRESPASS
No, I had set no prohibiting sign,
And yes, my land was hardly fenced.
Nevertheless the land was mine:
I was being trespassed on and against.

Whoever the surly freedom took
Of such an unaccountable stay
Busying my woods and brook
Gave me a strangely restless day.

He might be opening leaves of stone,
The picture book of the trilobite,
For which the region round was known,
And in which there was little property right.

'Twas not the value I stood to lose
In specimen crab in specimen rock,
But his ignoring what was whose
That made me look again at the clock.

Then came his little acknowledgement:
He asked for a drink at the kitchen door,
An errand he may have had to invent,
But it made my property mine once more.

from A WITNESS TREE, 1942
Robert Lee Frost

Lots of strange birds out there.

Some bits from Heinz R. Pagels' THE DREAM OF REASON.
BIG SUR AND THE APPLES OF CEZANNE

When the penis goes up, reason goes out the window.
Robert Hutchins, from the satiric short film Zuckerkandel.

Stradling two of our planet's tectonic plates, California is a geologically violent place where the land has only temporary stability. Here the Pacific plate, slipping against the continental land mass along the San Andreas Fault, moves ever northward and finally, in the vicinity of the Aleutian Islands, subducts deep into the molten bowels of the earth. Ca.'s geologic activity produces one of the most dramatic meetings of land and sea that I have ever scene, especially the coast near Big Sur south of the city of Carmel and north of Morro Bay. Here the Santa Lucia Mountains, which long ago moved north with the plate, rise a 1000 ft. right out of the Pacific, directly confronting the irresistible force of the sea.
Big Sur is an awesome and for the most part still primitive place that owes much of its magic to the quality of its light - diffuse in the Winter and in early morning fogs and lucid and intense during the Summer afternoons. The mountains are covered with grasses, dry and golden in the hot Summer sun. Cooler forested areas, shaded by cedars, pines, and oaks, and redwoods, shelter wildlife. Just off the coast lie the giant feather boa, bull and bladder kelp beds undulating in a complex pattern with the waves. It is a rocky coast punctuated with occasional beaches harboring a rich and varied marine life, including tidepools filled with purple sea urchins, stars, hermit crabs, sea palms, and occasional black abalone. Pelicans, birds that seem to have forgotten evolution, patrol the surf, while cormorants rest on the cliffs, awaiting the fish that are attracted to the upwelling plankton carrying currents out of the depth.
The main evidence of human presence is the coastal highway (Route 1), which was built in the 1930's with convict labor as part of the coastal defense system and which is the only rapid access to the region. With the highways came people, mostly artists and Bohemians, to join the ranchers who were already there; a few inns, restaurants, and houses were built, but the lonely damp winters, inaccessibility, and absence of jobs kept the extensive development that California has seen elsewhere, and most people, out.

>215 geneg: As many have suggested, the evolutionary process in humans tended to stop with eyeglasses and wheelchairs. Also man cannot be separate from nature; every action we take has a footprint on the world. It is the nature of any species to attempt to arrange its surroundings to meet its interests.

The grass in my backyard has grown to stalks about a foot and a half high. This is not unusual. I put off mowing as long as I can. Last year, when I got around to it in late August, I discovered that my mower didn't work, so I didn't get to it until September, when it resembled a wheatfield.

What is unusual this year is that the hummingbirds still haven't shown up. The missus blamed it on the feeder, which is about three years old. She said the openings where they stick their beaks must be clogged. I scoffed, but then hung a new feeder, about an hour ago. We'll see. I'm the kind of person who sees omens in everything. If those humming birds don't come at all this year, what will it mean?

My favorite word when it comes to yard work? Manana. I've got a garden to fertilize, manana.

Have you ever observed a humming-bird moving about in an aerial dance among the flowers - a living prismatic gem.... it is a creature of such fairy-like loveliness as to mock all description. ~W.H. Hudson, Green Mansions

At Ninety-four

Pop started to spend more time
on the front porch than his workshop.
He watched barn cats disappear under cars
and the tractors under the overshoot,
while their kittens pounced
on unsuspecting crickets.

“Yes we have no bananas” never got old
nor did, “You are growin’ and I am shrinkin’”

And with great excitement
he would tell us how many hummy birds
had visited the Rose of Sharon today.

No one dared to tell him
the visitors were impostors.
Fuzzy bellied moths with a pair
of wings that hummed and hovered
before the blossoms.

He passed believing he was leaving
his great grandchildren a world
with more hummingbirds than ever.
And kittens that caught crickets in the grass.

Jennifer Van Buren

A description of a Cheyenne Indian male by anthropologist E.A. Hoebel:

Reserved and dignified, . . . the Cheyenne male . . . moves with a quiet sense of self-assurance. He speaks fluently, but never carelessly. He is careful of the sensibilities of others and is kindly and generous. He is slow to anger and strives to suppress his feelings, if aggravated. Vigorous on the hunt, in war he prizes the active life. Towards enemies he feels no merciful compunctions, and the more aggressive he is the better. He is well versed in ritual knowledge. He is neither flighty nor dour. Unusually quiet, he has a lightly displayed sense of humor. He is sexually repressed and masochistic but that masochism is expressed in culturally approved rites. He does not show much creative imagination in artistic expression but he has a firm grip on reality. He deals with the problems of life in set ways while at the same time showing a notable capacity to readjust to new circumstances. His thinking is rationalistic to a high degree and yet colored with mysticism. His ego is strong and not easily threatened. His superego, as manifest in the strong social conscience and mastery of his basic impulses, is powerful and dominating. He is "mature," serene and composed, secure in his social position, capable of warm social relations. He has powerful anxieties but these are channelized into institutionalized modes of collective expression with satisfactory results. He exhibits few neurotic tendencies.

from Robert Pirsig's LILA.

A song for all those who were helplessly and needlessly butchered on the Great Plains in the second half of the 19th Century.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc3OnSQc48s

My gosh, Peter, you've taken us in an unexpected direction. Could it be the heat?

Here's a book I spend a lot of time with: Atlas of the North American Indian by Carl Waldman.

And three books I was called upon to edit, all by James Alexander Thom:

Sign-Talker, the adventures of George Drouillard on the Lewis and Clark expedition

The Children of First Man: "the 700 year journey of the mysterious white Indian tribe through the heart of the American continent"

The Red Heart: the story of a woman and her captivity with the Lenape Indians (the touchstone has this wrong)

Is the second of Thom's books to do with the Mandan (Welsh) Indians?

Hummingbirds, lets see.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXs29SpLGpU

>229 Porius:. Yes. I didn't want to give it away. It's what might be called a spoiler, but what the hell: it's the details along the way in Thom's books that matter.

Their complexion (if I remember right), the mounds the Mandan lived in--different than other plains Indians--and a crucifixion ceremony, gave birth to the thesis Thom expounds (it's a work of creative nonfiction, I suppose you'd say), that they were a branch of white settlers long before Columbus. The book traces a 700 year epic. And this might interest you, given the trip you said you'd like to take: the course of the Ohio River and what he calls the Great Falls, or something similarly honorific, figure prominently.

Madoc. The Welsh St. Brendan. There's not a little material about pr-Columbian settlements, etc. David Hatcher Childress is a modern apologist for these 'Damned Things' as Charles Fort called them.

Por-Man, I LOVED that Wildfire song when I was a boy of six, circa '75, and it does indeed still attract with its poignant pull upon my memories.

Pierro, you speak of native americans and Indians. Has anyone hear ever read Leslie Marmon Silko?

She's probably most renowned for her first novel, Ceremony in which an American Indian just returned from WWII comes home to the reservation and can't conquer the war-horror in his head via booze and violence like so many of his fellow Indian soldiers returned, and so instead seeks the old indian ways, rituals and shamans, to find healing for his despair. Moving, moving work.

I'm pretty convinved that one of the tomes we'll tackle in 2011 will be her epic follow up, Almanac of the Dead - a 750-plus page Indian manifesto that's been called by some, "The Native American's "War and Peace." Would reading that interest you, anyone, down the road, next year?

NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS

8. Wakan Tanka, The Supreme Deity of the Dakota

Following are the words of the Sword, an Ogala of the Teton division of the Dakota Indians, as recorded by J.R. Walker

Every object in the world has a spirit and that spirit is WAKAN. Thus the spirits of the tree or things of that kind, while not like the spirit of man, are also WAKAN. WAKAN comes from the WAKAN beings. These WAKAN beings are greater than mankind in the same way that mankind are greater than animals. They are never born and never die. They can do many things that mankind cannot do. Mankind can pray to the w
WAKAN beings for help. There are many of these beings but all are of 4 kinds. The word WAKAN TANKA means all of the WAKAN beings because they all are one. WAKAN TANKA KIN signifies the chief or leading WAKAN being which is the Sun. However the most powerful of the WAKAN beings is the NAGI TANKA, the Great Spirit who is also TAKU SHANSKAN. TAKU SHANSKAN signifies the Blue, in other words, the Sky.
. . . Mankind is permitted to pray to the WAKAN BEINGS. If their prayer is directed to all the good WAKAN beings, they should pray to WAKAN TANKA; but if the prayer is offered to only one of those beings, then the one addressed should be named. . . WAKAN TANKA is like 16 different persons; but each person is KAN. Therefore, they are only the same as one.

J.R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Ogala Division of the Teton Dakota (American Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Papers, vol. XVI, part 2 (1917), pp.152-3)

The Irish poet Austin Clarke wrote THE SUN DANCES AT EASTER

I read Almanac of the Dead a number of years ago -- the major aspect of it that I remember is the incredible insight I got into different cultural world views -- not just European and Native-American, but a variety of subcultures including Vietnam Vets, the criminals. etc. I remember being blown away, but I'm not sure that I'd go there again.

I remember buying Almanac of the Dead long ago before public access to the Internet and before big box book stores. I started it and encountered such unrelenting and purposeless dreariness that I quit and haven't been back.

Robert

Raining steadily after a mostly overcast Saturday. The air has cooled somewhat, thankfully, and there's more breezes than latterly, he said breezily. God's green earth is getting a good soaking. There will be plenty of protein packed wormy fellows for the bob bob bobbin robins to peck and poke away for on tomorrow, Sunday.

Finally saw a hummingbird darting about the brand new feeder. It didn't stick around long, so I'm wondering whether the sugar water is sugary enough for him, or her. Friggin prima donnas.

All the hummingbirds I've encountered have been skittish in the extreme, at least from my sedentary point of view. Of all the fine feathered friends they are the least social, in a species not known for its social graces.

Have you seen the movie the Matrix ? In it they use the concept of " bullet time". Some characters move so fast that it is as if the others stand still.

Hummingbirds live in bullit time. I am sure that your hummingbird, did not only drink a long time from your sugary juice in the breeder, but it also rested a bit, read the newspaper, cleaned it's nails, went to the toilet, had a nap and then flew away.

But it went so fast, you just didn't see it.

Much like T.C. Lethbridges's ideas concerning the pendulum and vibratory rates. Or old Blake surrounded by spirits he could see but others could not.

This magic machine with its umbilical cable propels me online to be immediately assaulted by headlines, photos, assertions, news, gossip, things I don't want to see, at least not right away, before I've had my monster cup of cappuccino.

The World Is Too Much with Us

The world is too much with us: late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. -- Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

William Wordsworth

There are moments when only WW can be a sop to our weary lives.
Rains off and on this unprepossessing Sunday. Coolish and not the veriest hint of a zephyr or any other report for the Beaufort Scale. Nothing for the Aeolian Harp that WW would know much about. Nothing for the pot. Nothing for the heart. To mangle Roger Waters lines a bit.
The tiniest of Finches is gamboling outside my window. They are somewhat mysterious as hummingbirds are. They, in this case, The American Goldfinch, has a yellow body, black forehead, and black wings mark this bird. In the air the AGf can be recognized by its roller-coaster flight and its clear song. It is a bird of fields and meadows, feeding and nesting near the ground. Goldfinches are close relatives of our native sparrows and, like them, are birds of open weedy fields. - Length 4 1/2 - 6". Female and male in Winter dull yellow-brown, with wing bars; no black on head.
http://www.science.smith.edu/stopoverbirds/birdpixs/images/American%20Goldfinch....
For those of the tribe of Louis Halle:
http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/American_Goldfinch/id

Lines for the Fortune Cookies

I think you're wonderful and so does everyone else.

Just as Jackie Kennedy has a baby boy, so will you--even bigger.

You will meet a tall beautiful blonde stranger, and you will not say hello.

You will take a long trip and you will be very happy, though alone.

You will marry the first person who tells you your eyes are like scrambled eggs.

In the beginning there was YOU--there will always be YOU, I guess.

You will write a great play and it will run for three performances.

Please phone The Village Voice immediately: they want to interview you.

Roger L. Stevens and Kermit Bloomgarden have their eyes on you.

Relax a little; one of your most celebrated nervous tics will be your undoing.

Your first volume of poetry will be published as soon as you finish it.

You may be a hit uptown, but downtown you're legendary!

Your walk has a musical quality which will bring you fame and fortune.

You will eat cake.

Who do you think you are, anyway? Jo Van Fleet?

You think your life is like Pirandello, but it's really like O'Neill.

A few dance lessons with James Waring and who knows? Maybe something will happen.

That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.

I realize you've lived in France, but that doesn't mean you know EVERYTHING!

You should wear white more often--it becomes you.

The next person to speak to you will have a very intriquing proposal to make.

A lot of people in this room wish they were you.

Have you been to Mike Goldberg's show? Al Leslie's? Lee Krasner's?

At times, your disinterestedness may seem insincere, to strangers.

Now that the election's over, what are you going to do with yourself?

You are a prisoner in a croissant factory and you love it.

You eat meat. Why do you eat meat?

Beyond the horizon there is a vale of gloom.

You too could be Premier of France, if only ... if only ...

Frank O'Hara

It is very difficult to get used to the idea that we may be shared, rented, occupied in this way. It goes against the human grain. The paragon of animals nothing more than a taxi for a bunch of chemicals. Ridiculous! And yet the evidence is strong, and direct. We die, but the gene doesn't. It never even grows old, but leaps from body to body down through all the generations, manipulating each in turn for its own ends, abandoning a long succession of convenient vehicles along the evolutionary highway, where they lie rotting until another genetic passenger comes along and scavenges the spare parts to build itself a better gene machine.
This genetic viewpoint was crystallized a long time ago in Samuel Butler's famous observation that 'the hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.' * The body is only a gene's way of making another gene. An organism does not live for itself. Its primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms like it, but to replicate genes for which it serves as a temporary carrier.
What about free will? Where does the individual figure in all of this? Am I not unique and possessed of a particular destiny? Yes, up to a point, but the life of even the greatest of individuals is short, and posterity is totally confused with that of one's mate. My children are only half me, and my grandchildren no more than 25 %. The best I can hope for is a large number of descendants, each of whom bears a tiny portion of me and equally tiny parts of many other people. There is no future for an individual. We are just fleeting things. Even our chromosomes, the hand we have been dealt and of which we are so inordinately proud, are evanescent. They get shuffled into oblivion with each new deal. Only the cards themselves remained unchanged. The cards are the genes, and genes are forever.

from Chapter Three, The Flower: Evolution
LIFETIDE by Lyall Watson (1979)

*Cole, G.D.H. (ed.) THE ESSENTIAL SAMUEL BUTLER, London: Everyman, 1950.

Seems to me that if you don't approach evolution, or "natural selection," with the proper (which is to say disinterested) state of mind, it's a bummer ... for those (like me) of an optimistic and/or expectant nature, who like to believe in progress; or those who confuse spirituality with actuality (there is no Holy Land, never has been, never will be); or even for Malthusians, with their own perverse ideology.

I don't necessarily subscribe to the message in Watson's chapter. As a matter of fact I am somewhat more optimistick like yourself. I thought it might stimulate some thoughts, etc. I always know that I can snap a brisk chestpass to you ever relying on your sure hands.

There are lots of holy lands. I've only been to a few hundred of them, but from reports I know there are more. There's one within walking distance of my house, although there's a gated community that blocks access to it nowadays.

Robert

That's wholly a matter of opinion now isn't it Mistah Durick he said enduringly.

I feel sorry for the people who don't find glory in a forest and grandeur in the ocean, et cetera.

Robert

Oh yes Mr. D. - The Benighted.

Of course there are lots of lowercase holy lands, Robert; in a forest, in the ocean, and don't forget vacant lots. It's Holy Lands to which I was referring, as I believe you know. Just pfunnin' us, weren't you?

Do you think too many folks make a Holy Land out of

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?"

And will that kind of thinking finally kill the gene?

Postcard day here in Michigan. Comfortable temperatures and some dry air for the nonce.

10. TIRAWA, THE SUPREME GOD OF THE PAWNEE

Once among the strongest tribes of the Plains Indians, The Pawnee were found from the shores of the Platte River in Nebraska south to the Arkansas River. Today they are to be found mostly in Oklahoma.

'The white man,' said the Kurahus, 'speaks of a Heavenly Father ; we say Tirawa atius, the Father above, but we do not think of Tirawa as a person. We think of Tirawa as in everything, as the power which has arranged and thrown down from above everything that man needs. What the power above, Tirawa atius is like, no one knows; no one has been there.
When Kawas explains to the Kurahus the meaning of the signs in the East, 'she tells him that Tirawa atius then moves upon Darkness, the Night, and causes her to bring forth the Dawn. It is the breath of the new born Dawn, the child of Night and Tirawa atius, which is felt by all the powers and all the things above and below and which gives them new life for the new day . . .

H.R. Alexander, THE WORLD'S RIM.
from Mircea Eliade's, GODS, GODDESSES, AND MYTHS OF CREATION. Harper Row Publishers (1967)

For a Velvet Revolution

The winds of change dance in our lives,
Like northern lights chasing their own shadows in the sky.
We can see better ways and easier days,
We know there must be a more honorable and humane way.
It is for us to pick the flower in our minds,
It is a matter of standing up and not just standing behind.

We dream the soft solution alive,
With the strains of peace and duty with which we strive.
It is the wind of time that crosses our path,
It is the scarred skin of our souls that know human wrath.
We, standing together, are the solution,
We are the warf, weave and frame for a velvet revolution.

Timm Ondamitagos

IN THE TIME OF CLOUDBURST
Let the downpour roil and toil!
The worst it can do to me
Is carry some garden soil
A little nearer the sea.

'Tis the world-old way of the rain
When it comes to a mountain farm
To exact for a present gain
A little of future harm.

And the harm is none too sure,
For when all that was rotted rich
Shall be in the end scoured poor,
When my garden has gone down ditch,

Some force has but to apply,
And summits shall be immersed,
The bottom of seas raised dry -
The slope of the earth reversed.

Then all I need do is run
To the other end of the slope,
And on tracts laid new to the sun,
Begin all over to hope.

Some worn old tool of my own
Will be turned up by the plow,
The wood of it changed to stone,
But as ready to wield as now.

May application so close
To so endless a repetition
Not make me tired and morose
And resentful of man's condition.

from A FURTHER RANGE (1936)
Robert Lee Frost

http://blog.syracuse.com/shelflife/2008/03/frost.jpg
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/blog/Robert-Frost-big.jpg

According to the description and photos on the following website, the hummingbirds that have (finally) come to my feeder are called "ruby-throated":

http://www.wildbirds.com/Favorites/Hummingbirds/tabid/694/Default.aspx

Here's a couple more pictures of your ruby-throated friends.
http://www.csrasportsman.com/images/uploads/Male_Ruby-Throated_Hummingbird_1.jpg
http://a1.vox.com/6a00e398b114200005011018045871860f-500pi

That's the guy! I should note, in the spirit of realism in which evolution has no transcendent purpose, that when they're not humming, they make annoying twittering sounds that resemble complaints.

mutteringbirds

I finally straightened the listing St. Francis of the Woods, who, if I remember right, nestles a bird in one hand; the grass is too high for me to see him. It's coolish today, a good time to mow. Will I do it? Stay tuned.

did you ? did you ?

Not yet, but I have been busy nonetheless, noticing that you showed the folks on another thread where you lived but did not show us. As I looked at your lovely medieval town, I couldn't help but think about the mayhem that went on In Bruges, the movie. You got one of those tall tourist towers where people can plunge to death?

Overcast an on the cool side today. Winds W10. Very damp air. It looks like hot weather towards the weekend. No exotic birds out of my window, just a pair of cardinals. I call them Claudia & Jose. The bright red male looks almost, what's the word, garish, next to the russet female. Not much personality there. They seem to be content to peck and let peck. A far cry from the great hurler Robert Gibson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cardinal.jpg
http://mopupduty.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/t1_gibson.jpg

Yes, it's called a "Belfort" or "Belfroi" and every medieval city has normally one. It shows the power of the people ( so to speak ) against the power of the church.

We very rarely plunge to death from a Belfort. It's way too tiring to get to the top to start with...

Gray and chilly today; raining too. The kind of weather I imagine they have in Belgium, a lot. So, let's have some poetry:

Sleep now

"Go to sleep now," I say
to a daughter who is already asleep
and wakes from my words.

The thunder crashes. Perhaps
I want her scared, so I can be dad.
But there’s nothing I can do except
do nothing, together with her.

It’s like words. Things happen.
Without words they would still happen.
But then without words.

Herman de Coninck

it is indeed gray and rainy today, whole day.

> Brugge is 20 minutes driving from Ghent
> Paris is 3 hours driving from Ghent

On this, Be Kind to Belgium Day (the national team did not make the World Cup, after all), a quote from the Belgian national hero:

"I won! I won! I don't have to go to school anymore."

Eddy Merckx,
after winning his first bike race

: )

Ooh, I think a Belfort is where Frobisher went in Cloud Atlas! (forgive me for mentioning a book on this thread) To think you live there, Mac. How ravishingly romantic.

I don't feel like mowing the lawn today.

I just assumed the deer in your vicinity "mowed" your lawn with their grazing.

Not hot and not cool today. Was a lovely night, though, last night. Sitting under a Japanese elm after midnight. Not even the slightest breeze to disturb the leaves on the Japanese elm or anything else. Just about perfect.

If 'twere only true, about the deer mowing my lawn. Which brings to mind the goats you can rent in Seattle, whose purpose is to chew up your lawn. No kidding. I've seen pictures.

In So Cal they've used similar goats for fire prevention around homes on hillsides.

Man Listening to Disc

This is not bad--
ambling along 44th Street
with Sonny Rollins for company,
his music flowing through the soft calipers
of these earphones,

as if he were right beside me
on this clear day in March,
the pavement sparkling with sunlight,
pigeons fluttering off the curb,
nodding over a profusion of bread crumbs.

In fact, I would say
my delight at being suffused
with phrases from his saxophone--
some like honey, some like vinegar--
is surpassed only by my gratitude

to Tommy Potter for taking the time
to join us on this breezy afternoon
with his most unwieldy bass
and to the esteemed Arthur Taylor
who is somehow managing to navigate

this crowd with his cumbersome drums.
And I bow deeply to Thelonious Monk
for figuring out a way
to motorize--or whatever--his huge piano
so he could be with us today.

This music is loud yet so confidential.
I cannot help feeling even more
like the center of the universe
than usual as I walk along to a rapid
little version of "The Way You Look Tonight,"

and all I can say to my fellow pedestrians,
to the woman in the white sweater,
the man in the tan raincoat and the heavy glasses,
who mistake themselves for the center of the universe--
all I can say is watch your step,

because the five of us, instruments and all,
are about to angle over
to the south side of the street
and then, in our own tightly knit way,
turn the corner at Sixth Avenue.

And if any of you are curious
about where this aggregation,
this whole battery-powered crew,
is headed, let us just say
that the real center of the universe,

the only true point of view,
is full of hope that he,
the hub of the cosmos
with his hair blown sideways,
will eventually make it all the way downtown.

Billy Collins

ON LOOKING UP BY CHANCE AT THE CONSTELLATIONS
You'll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.
The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,
Nor strike out fire from each other, nor crash out loud.
The planets seem to interfere with their curves,
But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.
We may as well go on patiently with our life,
And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun
For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.
It is true the longest drouth will end in rain,
The longest peace in China will end in strife.
Still it wouldn't reward the watcher to stay awake
In hopes of seeing the calm of heaven break
On his particular time and personal sight.
That calm seems certainly safe to last tonight.

from West-Running Brook (1928)
Robert Frost

I like that one, Peter, and might as well admit that before you started posting Frost poems, I dismissed him, out of abject ignorance, equating the name with America and apple pie; he was too renowned, you see. But now that I've actually read the poems, I've changed my mind.

A poetic take on the law of large numbers, but compare the law of truly large numbers.

I like Frost for a number of reasons, but one that really stands out is that he writes poetry.

Robert

That's, if anything, is what this LT is all about. I couldn't be happier that you've changed your mind about RF. I've gobbled up most of the Poems, etc., the criticism I could stomach, and the biographical material. Frost was a prickly character chocked full of contradictions, but that is why I admire him so much.

Those last two poems are particularly good ones, thanks Peters.

Another smokin' poem from Billy Collins:

The Best Cigarette

There are many that I miss
having sent my last one out a car window
sparking along the road one night, years ago.

The heralded one, of course:
after sex, the two glowing tips
now the lights of a single ship;
at the end of a long dinner
with more wine to come
and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier;
or on a white beach,
holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.

How bittersweet these punctuations
of flame and gesture;
but the best were on those mornings
when I would have a little something going
in the typewriter,
the sun bright in the windows,
maybe some Berlioz on in the background.
I would go into the kitchen for coffee
and on the way back to the page,
curled in its roller,
I would light one up and feel
its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee.

Then I would be my own locomotive,
trailing behind me as I returned to work
little puffs of smoke,
indicators of progress,
signs of industry and thought,
the signal that told the nineteenth century
it was moving forward.
That was the best cigarette,
when I would steam into the study
full of vaporous hope
and stand there,
the big headlamp of my face
pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.

Billy Collins

The Mind’s Games

If a man can say of his life or
any moment of his life, There is
nothing more to be desired! his state
becomes like that told in the famous
double sonnet--but without the
sonnet’s restrictions. Let him go look
at the river flowing or the bank
of late flowers, there will be one
small fly still among the petals
in whose gauzy wings raised above
its back a rainbow shines. The world
to him is radiant and even the fact
of poverty is wholly without despair.

So it seems until these rouse
to him pictures of the systematically
starved--for a purpose, at the mind’s
proposal. What good then the
light winged fly, the flower or
the river--too foul to drink of or
even to bathe in? The 90 story building
beyond the ocean that a rocket
will span for destruction in a matter
of minutes but will not
bring him, in a century, food or
relief of any sort from his suffering.

The world too much with us? Rot!
the world is not half enough with us--
the rot of a potato with
a healthy skin, a rot that is
never revealed till we are about to
eat--and it revolts us. Beauty?
Beauty should make us paupers,
should blind us, rob us--for it
does not feed the sufferer but makes
his suffering a fly-blown putrescence
and ourselves decay--unless
the ecstasy be general.

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams we really miss you in this day of cardboard men.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes to expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odor of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydidides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In a euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow:
'I WILL be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair
Show an affirming flame.

Wystan Hugh Auden

Audio versions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWtVYYoJFl4
D.T. reading in high style:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED4sN16x1ls

William Carlos Williams in a lighter vein:

THIS IS JUST TO SAY
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

And which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

282> Exquisite evocative poem, Piero. Thank you.

Who is this Billy Collins? I mean besides the former NBA coach and broadcast announcer?

285> If I were to make a list of the 100 most iconic poems of the 20th century, don't know exactly where Williams' plums would land, but it'd be high up there.

Might make a nice thread, Por-Man, the 100 most iconic or 100 most evocative poems of the 20th century. Though I'm certain such a listing could be had here as I know Piero don't always like it when we post poems or nature stuff in other (and of course, lesser) threads in le salon.

I'm biting my nails guys, over Andrew Bynum. I do not trust Lamar Odom. I doubt I'll even tune in until the 4th quarter as my family simply can't take my histrionic fuming at the TV.

Wonderful poems! And I am not much for poetry.

In Chicago, a really lousy weather weekend. Got a new bike last week, and I have barely been able to ride it. I need good weather--I haven't spent much time on a bike in lo, these many years. But, it is a handy gadget for getting around when the car traffic is crazy, and we have miles and miles of bike paths along the lakefront and through Lincoln Park. I did manage to ride from the harbor to the grocery store during a lull in the rain moving through. I think it took me less time than it takes to get there by car.

>286 absurdeist:. What a provocative character you are, Henri; the histrionic fuming at the TV is probably the least of it. The Collins you refer to (his name is Billy?) is a much stiffer character than the one who breezes down the street listening to jazz. And what's this about what I like and don't like? Surely you jest. Post poetry and nature wherever you like; see if I care. Not that I'd know. I periodically boycott most threads, including this one.

I like getting on my bicycle, but as with writing, find every excuse I not to do it (it's too hot, it's too cold, there's too much pollen in the air) ... but once I actually get on the machine and start to pedal, I am one happy fellow.

And speaking of Lamar Odom (should this go on the sports thread; will I be annoyed if it isn't?), I like him because he's highly intelligent, based upon his bearing and speech, and leaving aside how he appears and disappears in games.

Which reminds me, now that I'm here: l have a hard time watching sporting events at times because of the human element that occasionally slaps you upside the head. When that young man fluffed the ball in the soccer game (is this the right thread to say this?) and it dribbled into the goal, I hid my head in a pillow.

Billy Collins was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 until 2003.

re: 285

Right you are, Gene. I didn't want to embarrass Henri by pointing that out. And welcome to our thread, Florida Jane (we have a New York Jane, though she thinks she's living someplace else). And thanks for the plums, though how you have time to post such gigantic fruits and also read uptillion books is a puzzle. You must read while you eat, I guess, and while doing other things too.

Robert Frost spent a few days at the college I was attending in the 1950's. He looked a bit like Santa Clause, white hair & beard, but not as heavy. He was a big flirt. At a reception after a reading, I remember sitting at his feet while other girls perched on the arms of his chair & leaned over the back. This was when Ezra Pound was confined to a mental hospital in Washington DC & all the faculty kept asking him his opinion. It was probably the McCarthy era, because everyone was careful what they said in public I think they were trying to get Frost to say what he really felt about Pound, but I don't think he ever came out & said what he thought. Or if he did, it was hard to tell. You could tell he was an accomplished lecturer . He also quoted Keats' "Ode to Autumn" which he thought was one of the best poems in the English language.

Which of course is a cue to someone (anyone?) to present "Ode to Autumn." Or begin a debate about Pound. Preferably the former.

TO AUTUMN.

1.

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

2.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

3.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats

Bravo!!!!!! and bravo the Auden and Frost. Great stuff.

A nature question, to the Does Anyone Know department:

Filament, spiderlike growths (or whatever they are) festoon the mossy sections of my backyard, appear to spurn the (as yet unmowed) lawn. They defy rainfall. What are they? Should I be concerned?

It sure as Hell sounds like an invasion of the Triffids. Run Copy Run !!!

I'm not afraid. Their day is over.

Re: Does Anyone Know - you gottem picture?

That would be a good idea.

Alas, I have to admit, not for the first time, that I am too low-tech to supply a photo.

Looks like that miserable kind of day that old Thomas Hardy would have relished. Gloomy, dark and (of course) dank and not much to skip around the redoubtable maypole about. It's been threatening to rain for a few days now with just a paltry sprinkel thus far. Only the softest fluttering in the trees.
It looks like more of the same for Bloom's Day tomorrow. Here's a little turgid comment from Wyndham Lewis who loved and hated Joyce as he loved and hated just about everyone else he knew, or thought he knew so well:

But on the purely personal side, Joyce possesses a good deal of the intolerant arrogance of the dominie, veiled with an elaborate decency beneath the formal calm of the Jesuit, left over as a handy property from his early years of Catholic romance - of that Irish variety that is so English that it seems stranger to a continental almost than its English protestant counterpart.

I would remember Bloom better, I think, if not for the woman who sat next to me in class. I was interested in her, but she didn't come to class much, and when she did, it seemed it was to ask to look at my lecture notes as we all, presumably, made out way through Ulysses. Came time for the final paper, which we handed in. The professor, a snooty sort to who lived in the city, on Washington Square, of all places, maybe in Henry James's old digs, for all I know, passed them back the next week and remarked that she doubted whether some of us had even read the book, that one student thought the protagonist's name was Blum. I looked over at my femme fatale's paper--she was in class that day, a rare occurrence--and sure enough, it was her.

>303 copyedit52: http://macumbeira-macumbeira.blogspot.com/2009/08/dont-you-just-love-this-girl.h...

Wouldja lookit that: art! I refer to the "Journey round my skull" entry in your blog. We need more of that kind of thing around here.

Journey round my skull is a Blog made by a bloke named Will. He contributed to the Salon when we were tackling the Master and Margarita I think.

Your right,it is a superb blog

Harkening back to messages 263, 265, and 270, concerning the Belfort, or Belfroi, tower in medieval cities, the following, lifted (some might say stolen) from an entry in the Belgian's blog (message #304):

"During this state of repose, he took his station winter and summer by the stove, looking through the window at the old tower of Lobenicht, not that he could be said properly to see it, but the tower rested upon his eye as distant music on the ear--obscurely, or but half revealed to the consciousness. No words seem forcible enough to express his sense of the gratification which he derived from his old tower, when seen under the circumstances of twilight and quiet reverie ... At length some poplars in a neighboring garden shot up to such a height as to obscure the tower, upon which Kant became very uneasy and restless, and at length found himself positively unable to pursue his evening meditiations. Fortunately, the proprietor of the garden was a very considerate and obliging person, who had, besides, a high regard for Kant, and accordingly, upon a presentation of the case being made to him, he gave orders that the poplar should be cropped. Kant recovered his equanimity, and once more found himself able to pursue his twilight meditiations in peace."

--Thomas de Quincey
The Last Days of Immanuel Kant

Can de Quiney's book pass for a tome ?

Porius, you want to field that question? I'm out of my league when it comes to those old-timers.

Not a 'tome' so called. But always worth reading. de Quincy was always held in high regard till about the 20th Century. Eliot and his tribe were suspicious of Romanticism. The Bloomsberries including Lytton Strachey hated fulsome characters like the Mancunian who wrote: ON MURDER CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS (1854). His most famous book of course was THE CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH Opium-EATER (1822), he got addicted to the stuff for the relief of neuralgia. From the start he was interested in German thinkers including the diminutive I.Kant. He also early on became a friend of Coleridge and the Wordsworths, but all this is readily available, isn't it.

Today's weather and atmospheric report for selected spots:

Abroad:

New South Wales: in the sixties, but humidity at 93%; sounds awful

Belgium: in the sixties and actually sunny

England: in the sixties

Taiwan: the weather service posts the temperature on mahjong tiles that I couldn't read

United States:

Southern Cal: Earthquake; otherwise, in the seventies

Northwest: Following a very hot yesterday (in Seattle, at least), coolish, high in the sixties

Texas: high in the nineties, unbearable, weekly forecast, from today: 96-97-97-97

Georgia and Arkansas: high in the nineties

Florida: high in the nineties, unbearable and humid too

Chicago: in the seventies, they say, but this morning Lisa reported from her boat (on the great lake): "rainy, foggy, cool"

Ohio, Michigan: in the seventies, not half bad

Northeast: Lovely, superb, the best ever; high in the seventies, low humidity, no earthquakes or hurricanes or floods

I felt that one last night, Piero, the earthquake, a 6.1 right on the border. My wife did not, however, feel it. Slow roller, like being on a boat on a gusty day. Made me feel dizzy.

Indulge yourself this evening, Henri. Take it easy. Watch a soothing basketball game.

I was in L.A. for the Northridge Quake of 93. It is nothing to kid about. It felt like Blake's God picked up the house and shook it real good. Not Robert Blake of course, though the poet did have a brother named Robert.

I apologize for my insensitivity. You're right: not a joking matter.

I experienced an earth quake many years ago. It sure does scare the hell out of somebody.

We experienced the Whittier quake in '88(?). I didn't get a decent night's sleep for days. Take care, 'freeque. Hope the kids are okay.

Earthquakes happen. Tragic and sad but not much we can do about it. Oil spills shouldn't happen and those responsible should be kept fully accountable.

Por, in 310, it may be readily available, but no one presents it like you do. Please don't ever hold back on what you know, sport.

Dostoevsky mentions De Quincy in his letters. I'll try to dig it out. Coleridge was also a notorious opium addict.

We felt that quake too here, either that one or a rebound this end of the Pacific, about 8.00 in the morning our time. Freeque hope you and all the folks are ok.

I am an earthquake veteran. I was here during the 921.99 quake in Taiwan. Killed 2416. That was very very scary. My sympathies to all those who endure earthquakes.

Today was Dragon Boat Festival, one of the four important holidays in the lunar year. It was the first sunny day after weeks of a drenching Plumb Rain season. Auspicious start to the summer. They were racing dragon boats on the lake behind my house today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PallrMZwF_k&feature=fvsr

Happy Dragon Boat Festival everyone!

Here are some zhongze!



(I would love for someone to show me how I can upload pictures from my computer to the thread. I know how to grab things off the internet, but what about pics from my computer? can I do that?)

We have a ton of people who know how to do that, but I'm not one of them: Jane, Henri, Mr. Durick, Gene, Tani, Paul, Lisa ... help this guy out, wouldja?

Peter, Murr, I don't think it is possible to upload straight from your computer. I have done it by saving photos in Shutterfly and then getting them from there. I know a lot of people use Photobucket for this.
Murr, if you know how to get photos from the internet, then I think you know how to get them from a place like Shutterfly or photobucket, but I am including a link with instructions from TadAd.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/80911#1689470

And while I am here, posting from the 28th floor looking east to Lake Michigan, finally a gorgeous day in Chicago. Bright sun, low humidity, temps to be in the low 80s F. Not predicted to last, but a day like this pushes away the memory of the foggy, rainy, cool we have had. This morning when I took the dogs out for their first walk at 5:45 a.m. the sun had already risen quite a bit above the eastern horizon that is Lake Michigan. And the fisherman were looking happy to be out without rain gear.

When I lived on Guam as a kid we had small temblors on a near daily basis. They were not earthquakes, but they made the lamps rattle a lot. Like an eighteen wheeler rolling by just outside.

I once saw an episode of Nova (an American teevee science program) that discussed earthquakes. The part that stuck with me the most was a place called the Glendale Bulge. It looked like a mound of dirt twenty feet high or so and twice as long, not very imposing at all, but what it is is where the Pacific plate and the North American plate are stuck against each other and the bulge is from the pressure being created by their inability to move. I don't know if any of the California quakes of the last thirty years have eased any of that pressure, but if they have not, I don't want to be there when it goes. In the SF quake of '06 the earth moved about 12 feet (there are some interesting photos illustrating this). What would happen if the bulge gave way all at once?

You know Freeque, for all it's glorious weather and wonderful beaches, I really get the impression man was not meant to live in Southern California. Fires, mudslides, earthquakes, flash floods. Didn't the Native Americans of the region consider it Holy Ground?

>319 QuentinTom:. We felt that quake too here, either that one or a rebound this end of the Pacific, about 8.00 in the morning our time. Apparently there was a quake in Indonesia too; maybe that's what you felt.

>321 LisaCurcio:. Oh yeah, that's right, Lisa: you have to use photobucket or whatever. I'll go into an earlier nature thread, find that info, conveyed by Henri, and reiterate it here.

>322 geneg:. I lived in the Bay area on and off for five years, but the only quake I experienced was one that took place in New Jersey, of all places. I was sitting in a chair, on the top floor of a building in Brooklyn, and it started to wobble, and that was it.

On posting photos on a thread, courtesy of EnriqueFreeque, from Nature: the Sequel:

Step One: right click on whatever photo you want and save it in whatever file you've got handy

Step Two: open a free account with photobucket: http://photobucket.com/ (there's others; but I like photobucket best)

Step Three: Upload your copied picture into your photobucket account (nearly the exact same process as uploading your logo into LT on your profile page)

Step Four: With your uploaded pic before you, click on edit pictures or photos (I forget the exact language) and you'll see 4 lines of urls and whatnot appear; copy the second line (right click copy)

Step Five: open a post (preferably in Le Salon Litteraire) and paste your picture.

Step Six: You'll now need to write some brief "code" on each side of the url you've just copied.

For this example, a "less than" symbol will = { and a "greater than" symbol will = } Were I to use the less than/greater symbols, it would actually create a link to nowhere.

Okay, so you've got what you pasted in your post and just need to slap down some code on each side; here it is:

{img src="your copied url of your picture"} and that's it! Do note there is a space between img and src.

thanks, everyone, for the well wishes, but really, the quake the other day was 150 miles away, "only" a 6.1, and certainly small potatoes quake-wise.

322> What would happen if the bulge gave way all at once?

Have you seen 2012, Gene? Seriously, though, the San Andreas fault worries me more.

319> I think Taiwan has has had it far worse in my lifetime than SoCal. That quake you mention...nothing like that over here since 1906.

317> Ah yes, the Whitter quake. I was at a stop sign in Long Beach, and my truck (lightweight Toyota) started shaking so badly, for a sec I thought the car behind me was ramming into me. I didn't put my truck shaking and earthquake together till I got over to my friend's house and he said,

"Did'ja feel it?"

"Did I feel what?"

"The earthquake you idiot!"

322> I agree, Gene, with the proviso that not so many men (and women too, I suppose) were ever meant to live in the L.A. Basin. The L.A. River was able to support a population between 50,000 and 100,000 people, dependent on which source you cite. William Mulholland and his city cronies, some of which posed as government officials to Owens Valley citizens interested in learning how better the U.S. Gov't could "help them" irrigate their farms and ranches, essentially (long story short) duped them into selling every foot of their land along the Owens River and its tributaries so that L.A. could lease the land (and their water) back to them, and acquire enough of it that men in suits could build a bigger empire called Los Angeles. City of Angels, my ass.

Read the full story in Water and Power or watch Chinatown, where corrupt city officials (fictionally?) released water under cover of darkness from their own reservoirs to "prove" to the gullbile Los Angelinos (except that P.I. played by Nicholson) that there wasn't enough water for everyone so the vote for Aqueduct (i.e. "Aquadeath" for the Eastern Sierra) had to be a yes vote.

Pardon my rant.

A book citation, on this thread! How novel! Though not a novel.

Though as I said above, I don't recall any earthquakes when I lived in your great state (I was gone before the Northridge Quake of '93 that Porius mentions above, which hit the Bay area), everyone was always thinking about and worried about them ... me too. It was in my psyche even after I moved back East and was living in the gardener's cottage (soon to become famous in book form) on my rich father-in-law's property in Fairfield County, Connecticut; the so-called Gold Coast.

A huge hurricane was coming up the coast (August 13, 1977, I think), and we were following its progress on the radio. They said it would slice through Fire Island, cut that long spit of sand in two, creating two islands, lose steam over Long Island and then strengthen again on the north side, over the L.I. Sound, then wallop us straight on, in Westport.

So I'm in the cottage (about 500 feet off the Sound) with the former missus as it comes on, the wind whipping the trees, the cats and dogs going crazy, and then there's this huge THUMP!!!, and the house jumps three feet in the air, with us in it, and my first thought, though we'd been following the progress of the hurricane for hours, was:

"Earthquake!"

Then I looked around and saw we were surrounded by what appeared to be jungle, covering all the windows, and realized that a tree had fallen on us, and had in fact sliced through the roof.

A lovely day here in Mi. 80 degrees, tolerable humidity. Breezes all over the place. Been in the basement all day trying to sort out what I should keep with me for the next segment of time alloted to me. I've got more stuff that I will never use in the days ahead. LP's dozens and dozens of them of all persuasions. Books from 40 years, I must get rid of the ones I will never return to. I can give them to the local library for their used bk. store. Clothes. T-shirts from 25 years of basketball tourneys. And all the stuff that you get from the tourn. site. Stuff all over the ----------- place that gathers dust, dust, dust. It's enough to give you heartburn on your arse as old John Joyce wd. say. Reason. I want to move to Northern Mi. I don't want to be at the head of a wagon train, and I will be right there if I don't get rid of some of my 'valuables'. I'll keep the Tommy Armour Iron Master putter that I bought at a garage sale. $1.00. Might be worth 600 dollars to the right buyer. Ben Crenshaw, Phil Mickelson, or someone who places a lot of value in this sort of item.

Is there somewhere out there a great "earthquake book"?
Jack London was a reporter in the early 1900 and covered some shakes, but are their others ?

A "good" earthquake book, right off the top of my head, would be 1906: A Novel.

Great question! I'm going to hunt for more.

Now, I expect a list of the 10 best earthquake books in the world !

Finally got "Digging Deeper" off to a printer, three months after I offically announced it was done. But then, I'm a finicky sort ... like Mr. Durick. It includes acknowledgments to Gene, who did a bang-up job going over the manuscript, as well as Peter aka Porius, for reasons you'll have to buy the book to discover, ganeshaka, Henri, and a few others.

Feeling a bit bereft now, like someone took my baby out of the hospital just after I gave birth and I have no idea if they'll do the right thing by it.

Looking forward to it Peter. You sure did dredge for this book.

326 - Thanks for that. I'll be in L.A. and Santa Barbara shortly and haven't gotten around to researching some good reads about the area.

332 - Very exciting.

Got my first pick-up of veggies from the farm share yesterday - lettuce, mesclun, spinach, bok choy, snow peas, garlic scapes, cilantro and kale - so I'll be cooking up a storm for the rest of the summer. Last night was cilantro pesto; tonight probably just a big salad.

That's great news Peter! We'll have to get a Digging Deeper thread going once it hits the market. And how's the Italian publisher doing with your first novel?

334> Don't mention it. Water & Power is a bit, uh, dry reading (irony intended) but its unbiased and not influenced by a P.R. campaign unlike so many accounts of the conflict. Might be a bit pricey as its out of print.

John McPhee's The Control of Nature has an excellent long essay on the SoCal fire, flood, and the consequences of constructing-homes-on-hillsides-situation, as well as a piece covering the Mississippi River and New Orleans, which I know is up your alley.

Cadillac Desert has some good info on the water crises of LA as well as some early history. I highly recommend it, it's a really great read.

Anything by John McPhee is also a great read.

On the eve of the big game, which I am only somewhat interested in, to my own surprise: Where in northern Michigan, Peter, and what would you do there?

Well I'd love to live in Petosky but East Jordan seems a place I could afford. What would I do? I have some very solid connections. But I could see my self working as a starter at a golf course or a ck. out type at a helalth food store. It would be pfun to chat with the customers. I've got about 3 seasons left as a bball coach. I could make considerably more $ if I stayed in S.D. yr. round. But I really love it in Mi. late summer and autumn. And after all it is the place that I call home.

I'm watching the game with voice off. I have very little interest in the outcome. I'd like to see Luke get his second ring and tie his dad (for NBA rings), though you know what I feel about that blighter Jackson. He could spend a lot of time in Purgatory for all I'm concerned.

Looking forward to DIGGING DEEPER. Let us know where we can BUY it.

On the book: I have no idea when this outfit, located in England (though they print in Pennsylvania) will finish the galleys; plus, I have an artistic friend working on the cover, and then we have to jibe that with the interior of the book. But whenever it's published (I hope it'll be done by September), it will again only be available on amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and other dot.coms, at least until the French or Norwegians or whomever want a piece of it. Meanwhile the Italians are driving me crazy with completing the contract for I Think ... It appears they have a holiday every other day over there. Last week they had one that lasted four days!

On living in Michigan: I like the changing seasons too, Peter, but if I had the opportunity to miss a few weeks or months of the winter, I'd do it.

I love S.D. too. I've lived there for 25 years sometimes as much as 1/2 a year. If its snow that I want the mountains are 45 min. east of S.D. And Big Bear is not really that far.

Congrats Piero! This is the book I have been waiting for.

Announcements:

For those who find this thread too long and slow-loading--as well as those who don't--hang in there, we'll be making a switch on Monday, June 21: the Summer Solstice. The new thread will be called "Nature Something-or-Other"; I'm working on it. Mythical intonations will be appropriate that week, as well as whatever else comes to mind, and then, beginning Monday, June 28:

"Water Appreciation Week": riverine travel, ocean voyages, surfing and swimming, singing in the rain, bathing and boating and fishing, where one finds the best tasting drinking water (?), irrigation (or not), the movie Chinatown (mention of which at least once per is de rigueur), the oil spill, the god Neptune, ocean voyages and riverine adventures, houseboats and speedboats and sail boats and rafts ... Perhaps a week won't be enough, but we'll try to fit everything in.

Let's not forget 24 June is St. John the Baptist Day.

Say it one more time and I am sure not to forget.

So sorry, it seems I hit the thing twice real quick like.

Add baptism to that list of water things, above.

A rare treat: Oscar Wilde dancing the dance of the 7 Veils, here 'Salome' kneels before the reward.
http://www.shanmonster.com/belly/gallery/misc/belly007.jpg

>348 Porius: Por, that is fabulous!

It is quite stunning, isn't it? Old Oscar is far, far away here from the wink Brechtian, noh?

Well! We had quite a scary time in Chicago this afternoon. At least it scared the heck out of me sitting on the 28th floor with the windows moving, the lightning flashing, the thunder rumbling and the birds BLOWING--NOT FLYING--up on the wind gusts. The Sears Tower (I refuse to call it the Willis Tower) lost a couple of windows. The building across the street from me had some broken glass, and some of the picnic tables with metal umbrellas that are anchored to the concrete in the Daley Plaza (I think so no one steals them) actually broke loose and flew around a bit.

Weather is amazing, isn't it?

Weather update from Chicago. Big storms again! Now I am on the boat, it is blowing like stink, as we say, and the boat is doing "figure eights" in the slip. I can hear the bimini flapping; it needs some restitching so I am hoping it does not blow away. Are we having fun yet?

Yikes, Lisa. How do you sleep when it gets like that?

When I think "Windy City," I recall the frigid wind coming off the lake in the winter. Clearly it blows at other times too.

You'll be featured, of course, during Water Awareness Week. Who else on this thread actually lives on a boat? And I wonder how many know what a bimini is? Maybe Gene, but certainly not me. My nautical knowledge begins and ends with riprap.

Well, I hate to give too much away before Water Awareness Week, but a bimini is just the canvas top that shades the top of the boat. 'Rique, clearly I am not sleeping since I am typing here :-) Pietro, funny you should mention riprap. One of our friends is an excavating contractor, and his boat's name is "RipRap".

Actually, I am blessed to not easily get sea sick. Right after I finish this, I am going to bed no matter what the boat is doing. My poor husband, on the other hand, has been known to get off the boat if it is weaving too much in the slip. This storm looks like it is going to pass soon, so I think he will stick it out.

A Bimini is an Awing. If it flaps tighten it. In bad weather anything that flaps will damage. Flapping is bad.

Yes, Mac, flapping is bad! Ours is not quite flapping, although I did use that word. If I don't get it fixed, though, it will be flapping. The canvas guys are supposed to be here soon--I am hoping before the next wave of storms.

We will be safe today, at least. Bright blue sky and mid-80's or about 30 Celsius, I think.

There will be plenty of water to talk about on Water Awareness Week (or is it Water Appreciation Week? I have to get a better grip on my confabulations), so I'm curious, now, about the setup. Your boat's in a marina, I suppose. Where? The Northside? Southside? How many other boats are around you? And on how many of them do people live? (When I was Seattle, my daughter took me and the missus to neighborhood of houseboats on Lake Union, a backdrop in the movie Sleepless in Seattle.) And how hard is it to get to work while living on the boat? And where do you buy groceries?

Well,

We are in the Belmont Harbor Marina in a slip. All city of Chicago marinas are owned by the Chicago Park District. Belmont Harbor is between 3200 north and 3600 north--from Belmont to Addison. On our dock, there are three or four of us out of 34 who live on board full-time. Most others come for a few days, usually on the weekend. It is a little neighborhood--probably more so than around my house. When you have boats in common, there is always something to talk about. We sit on the decks in the evenings with a glass or wine or beer or sparkling water or regular water or whatever, and solve the problems of the world. Nice life!

I work in downtown Chicago, and my husband works on the north side. It is about 4-5 miles from the boat to my office. It is about a mile and a half for him. He drives me to work in the morning and then goes to his job. At night, I walk a block, hop on a bus that takes me to Addison, walk under Lake Shore Drive and about 1/2 a mile to the boat. Not hard at all. I do most of the grocery shopping on Saturday when I have the car. I go home then, too, to make sure everything is fine there. There are lots of grocery stores of different types a short distance from the harbor. If I don't need too much, I can take the bike. It is faster! Every couple of weeks I go a few blocks further west to Costco. Everything we need, including the marine store is within a 4 to 5 mile radius of the harbor.

And then there is Slip F-18 at Bahia Mar Marina. Just a quick nod.

I love Travis McGee mostly because he lives on his boat! Of course, he gets to do it year round.

When I ride my bike to town, usually on a Saturday, when there's a carnival atmosphere around "the green," my chosen route there and back is alongside a stream, the Sawkill. This, because it's picturesque, but also cooler on a hot day. I imagine living on the water cools things down during the summer months.

Or heats things up depending what things are of course.

Actually, I was wondering about that just after I made the above entry: whether something like the horrendous oil spill alters that cooling effect, while affecting myriad other things of course.

What about the stuff BP's putting in landfills wherever available, they are doing a good job of poisoning our continent, at least a goodly portion of it.
We let Canada dump their garbage in our landfills for a price, how much goes into granny granholm's summer cottage fund, and our trustworthy line of Detroit mayors. Think of all the phony politicians who took $$$ from BP and corps. like it? All those who are sympathetic to BP. It's all too hideous, isn't it?

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
P. J. O'Rourke

Queens Cemetery, Setting Sun

Airport bus from JFK
cruising through Queens
passing huge endless cemetery
by Long Island’s old expressway
(once a dirt path for wheelless Indians)
myriad small tombstones tilted up
gesturing statues on parapets
stone arms or wings upraised
lost among illegible inscriptions
And the setting yellow sun
painting all of them
on one side only
with an ochre brush
Rows and rows and rows and rows
of small stone slabs
tilted toward the sun forever
While on the far horizon
Mannahatta’s great stone slabs
skyscraper tombs and parapets
casting their own long black shadows
over all these long-haired graves
the final restless places
of old-country potato farmers
dustbin pawnbrokers
dead dagos and Dublin bouncers
tinsmiths and blacksmiths and roofers
house painters and house carpenters
cabinet makers and cigar makers
garment workers and streetcar motormen
railroad switchmen and signal salesmen
swabbers and sweepers and swampers
steam-fitters and key-punch operators
ward heelers and labor organizers
railroad dicks and smalltime mafiosi
shopkeepers and saloon keepers and doormen
icemen and middlemen and conmen
housekeepers and housewives and dowagers
French housemaids and Swedish cooks
Brooklyn barmaids and Bronxville butlers
opera singers and gandy dancers
pitchers and catchers
in the days of ragtime baseball
poolroom hustlers and fight promoters
Catholic sisters of charity
parish priests and Irish cops
Viennese doctors of delirium
now all abandoned in eternity
parcels in a dead-letter office
inscrutable addresses on them
beyond further deliverance
in an America wheeling past them
and disappearing oblivious
into East River’s echoing tunnels
down the great American drain

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

As promised on this first day of summer, the Solstice: a new iteration of Nature.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/93352

Peter (copyedit52), what a small world it is with the age of computers. In your post dated May 30th, 2010 you spoke of a "warren" of Tolczyks that lived in a house in Greenpoint where you happened to occupy an apartment on the third floor. I must say, you sound like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment when you recount your story. I must correct you on some items though. My Mom, who was Rev. Longin's sister had three daughters, not two. I happen to be the third daughter. Yes, I remember you well. My family owned the home together and hence as homeowners, no we did not pay rent. It is customary for the tennant to pay the property owners' rent. Hence, you did not support us. As I recall, my family was very kind to you and you in turn were not. I remember you were either married or living with a girlfriend at the time. Anyway, I recall she was a sweet woman and moved out. I could say much more on this topic but I will not as I was raised to be respectful of others. Please be careful what you write on the internet as it may come up to bite you in the you know what. My apologies to other posters on here for having to address this but I had to defend my family as I felt they were not portrayed in a very good light. We a hard working family of Polish descent and I am proud of that. Oh, and by the way, priests are entitled to own real estate property just as are rabbis. This is one of the things about Judaism that fascinates me! And please don't knock Greenpoint, as it is a wonderful neighborhood.

natureshot: I've written a private response on your profile. I will only say here--to defend myself to others who might still be reading this old thread--that I don't agree with your interpretation of what I wrote; that my tone reflected wonderment, not malice; that I don't dislike people of Polish descent, or Greenpoint, which I remember fondly; and that to see something in a humorous way doesn't mean you dislike it.

369> stop bashing Raskolnikov! He already paid his debt to Russian society in prison more than 150 years ago. And he repented of putting that axe in that wench's head too, you might recall, at the end of Crime and Punishment. That old hag was about to croak anyway.

The Salon is better than " Crime and Punishment " !

"I could say much more on this topic but I will not as I was raised to be respectful of others." is assault by implication.

"I've written a private response on your profile." is a far more adult way of handing an event of the past that is always perceived differently by the participants after a lapse of years.

What with private messages and all, I don't see why we were drug into this in the first place.

I agree, except on my end, I wanted to make part of my response public, since there was the implication of prejudice. The other, personal stuff, should be of no interest to anyone.

And I find her dissing of Dostoevski egregious in the extreme as well.

: )

#374 (geneg)

> What with private messages and all, I don't see why we were drug into this in the first place.

Welcome to LT.

She obviously hasn't read Crime and Punishment. I hope you slapped her good and hard in your PM to her.

I like your groovy new past tense of drag gene, or is that an Americanism I have not yet encountered?

Murr, I grew up with drug as the past tense of drag. I don't think there's anything new about it, if anything it may be headed toward obsolete or archaic, just like me. I've seen dragged, but I generally stick with things I've grown up with. Sometimes, too I tend to slip into accent, especially when I wish to be forceful, but more often when I'm feeling sarcastic. I internally pronounce each word as I read, which makes me a slow reader, but it also gives me an ear for what's being said and the way it's being said, so I tend to write how I speak. At least in informal settings such as LT.

Bookmonk, I appreciate the welcome, but I've been on LT for nearly three (or is it four) years now. It's been a while. I'm a graduate of UUNet (UseNet) Online University with a post graduate degree in The Great Flame Wars of the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Century, so I have a thick skin when it comes to online discussions. One thing I learned early on is that no matter how hard one tries, one can't slug someone through their computer. It makes for a lot of puny bastard tough guys. Newsgroups taught me to be mentally and emotionally tough and bitingly sarcastic. I tend to hold the biting aspect in check, but occasionally it gets away from me. One of the things I love most about LT is the enforced comity. The community has decided what kind of community it wishes to be, and airing dirty laundry in public isn't part of it. I like that. A lot. However, I do sometimes think Tim and Co. err on the side of caution and propriety, but I would rather have them err on that side than wait until things degenerate to the point of being out of control.

Nature is finally being kind to us. We are off and on getting a nice easy light rain alternating with fog rolling off the mountain behind us. The garden thanks God for this rain. We've needed it.