The difference between a despicable regime and one that’s barely acceptable is often so slight that one is tempted not to see the difference.
One can’t help but notice, however, that Klimt’s best known, most recognizable paintings have other smaller paintings embedded in them, and when looked at this way are more understandable than previously understood.
Gustav Klimt’s painting “The Kiss”, from the book “30,000 Years in Art“ (Phaidon, 2007).
If you leave early enough in the morning you can live all day off of a bike ride and borrow from it for 24-hours, interest free.
If you don’t leave early enough you can get all cooped up in those molecules that like to strangle adventure, and before you know it it’s noon and you still haven’t done what you said you’d set out to do today.
View of the author‘s bedroom, San Francisco, Ca, 9:20 am, November 6, 2017.
The liberal humanist, what’s left of him, keeps small portraits of his grandchildren on the desk to help him continue believing in the value of human beings, individually and collectively.
Often during daylight hours he finds himself talking to people who have no idea what he’s talking about, people not only incapable of defining liberal humanism but who don’t show the slightest interest in its definition.
The liberal humanist is tempted to emphasize decline – his own and others’ – while yearning to import a more positive message.
Hallway, 2nd floor, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, November 2, 2017.
I see things in batches–I either see lots of things or see nothing at all, and both seem to happen all by themselves, without pre-determination. The thing that intrigues me is this very random, happenstance way I have of seeing and not seeing, the time when I see everything and how that time capitulates to my other way of seeing, when I see nothing at all.
In any case, I see that wherever I am I have to keep my eyes on the path because that’s what I really need to see.
Point Reyes, Ca., Saturday, October 28, 2017, near Limantour Beach.
Aunt Lois, now 97, remembers being in Rotterdam days after the Axis powers surrendered in World War II. She said she took a streetcar to the city center and that all that could be seen downtown was the streetcar and the streetcar track, otherwise there was rubble everywhere.
I’ve always wanted to ask Aunt Lois, “how could the streetcar and the track be intact if everything around them was pulverized?” But it’s too late to ask her now, as she no longer remembers.
The New York Times, op ed pg, October 23, 2017.
So often it’s that time when I don’t know what I’m looking at that becomes the time I’m actually seeing.
Staircase, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, October 12, 2017.
It came in the mail today, all the way from Brazil.
There was a warning on the box, written in small print: reading the contents may cause extreme literary pressure.
When I went to open the thing I was flabbergasted! I’d never heard such an outpouring of pure undiluted silence.
The contents in fact hadn’t settled during shipping – another disclaimer written in small type on the side of the box. In fact there was a whole jungle, several rivers, and at least one great city inside.
I wonder if all the members of The Clarice Lispector Fan Club received the same kit when they joined, or if I have her all to myself.
Clarice Lispector, Complete Stories, A New Directions Book, 2015.
The irony of our Supreme Court is that it has turned everything political, while claiming apolitical impartiality.
We have become a nation of not knowing where we come from: in contradistinction to our home grown citizens, immigrants know where they come from and why they have come here; this country is fortunate to have them.
Whole hours go by in which I have no thoughts and no imagery occurs. Iam troubled by their absence; it’s as if I’m not living. I suspect the majority of my fellow citizens have similar episodic feelings, and that only a very small minority of them are not troubled by these times.
Neil Goresuch, appointed Associate Chief Justice of The Supreme Court of The United States by Donald Trump, to replace Antonin Scalia, as drawn on notebook paper, October 12, 2017.
I tried to Tweet; it didn’t work.
Facebook makes me feel phony, so I cancelled my account.
Suspicious of Google I now resist consulting it, preferring to look up things in dictionaries or encyclopedias.
Instagram, SoundCloud etc etc—the minor leagues—hold such little interest that they might as well not exist; in fact, I respect those who refuse, for whatever reason, to use any of these social media platforms.
Auden was wrong: poetry makes everything happen.
Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, Golden Gate Park, Friday, October, 6, 2017. Photograph courtesy of the author.
Imagine a security system sophisticated enough to take a photograph of your soul so that the authorities would be able to see whether or not you have one.
View from Rm 722, Hotel Deluxe, Portland, Oregon, October 5, 2017.
While we’re at it we might as well expand our definition of evil to include the as yet unimaginable, so that when the unimaginable happens we will not be taken by surprise.
Yard sign, Kerns neighborhood, Portland, Oregon, Oct. 1, 2017.
I woke as a potted plant, having been told I’d grown up overnight in the hallway. Someone had been thoughtful enough to place me in an orphanage and to put a small plate beneath me to catch the water.
My first thought was to make a video of the event, as visual imagery now has a far brighter future than do words, though I still believe that when the history book is written words will be much more valuable.
Hallway in the author's home and the mysterious new houseplant there, discovered shortly after reading the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, San Francisco, September 14, 2017.
Will I ever forget the time and place where I first heard the phrase, 'the decisive moment'?
It was about the same time I first listened to Love, the band led by Arthur Lee, and their incomparable LP, "Forever Changes."
Asked the other night whether I liked or disliked the Vermentino--a white Italian wine--served at dinner I answered that it possessed, "an inward dryness." This wasn't 'wine-talk', this was the wine talking directly to me, without an intermediary.
Hearing myself say such a thing, I think, "Brooks, you shouldn't have said that, you might be suspected of being Republican." And then I remember that Balzac was republican, as was Stendhal.
Alexandria Theatre, Geary & 18th, San Francisco, Ca. The theatre opened November, 1923 and closed January, 2004.
There aren’t many among us who say "our" instead of "my," and some of us, not many but a few, are fortunate enough to know those who say “ours” rather than “mine.”
Sunflowers, housewarming gift of Sam and Mary Lou Haskins, San Francisco, September 7, 2017.
If you can't solve a problem, enlarge it,?Dwight Eisenhower is supposed to have said; and he might have, it sounds like good military strategy.
Writers enlarge problems all the time; the enlargement of a problem is a writers specialty; the smaller the problem the better the possibilities are for literary enlargement.
I read the news this morning on my laptop. Two good things happened: 1) an ex-football player turned announcer resigned from broadcasting football on ESPN, protesting the violence in the sport and 2) a writer named Terry Pratchett requested that all his unpublished manuscripts be steamrolled upon his death. His request was honored.
Backyard, author's home, Richmond neighborhood, San Francisco, Ca. 8:30 a.m. August 31, 2017.
There's this little café in Eureka, Nevada and we're hungry so we stop there. Mennonites own it; the women in the kitchen all wear little white knit caps.
I order the omelet and sourdough toast. What I notice especially about the women is that they all look me in the eye.
The night before we had dinner in Ely. It was one of the most remarkable meals I've ever had. The restaurant owner and chef was from Guadalajara, Mexico–the mole sauce was extraordinary, perfectly bittersweet–and he'd somehow created an atmosphere in which everyone could be happy, both servers and diners, in the middle of nowhere.
Hwy 50, between Ely and Eureka, Nevada, 10 a.m., August 24, 2017.
Our new president, commander and chief of our forces of enlightened divination, is making many white men, his chief subjects and syncophants, re-think the white male narrative. It now goes something like this: The Born Rich bequeath To Those Born Beneath Them an extremely small portion of the working capital The Fathers of The Born Rich bequeathed Their Sons. In turn, the bequeathments to those Born Beneath Them by The Sons Born Rich become even smaller and smaller, causing The Sons of Those Born Rich to appear larger and larger in the eyes of Those Born Beneath Them. Meantime these poor people, Those Born Beneath Them, are constantly being shown by The Sons of Those Born Rich a distorted picture of everything they don't have but feel they should.
This is a crucial new twist to the social order known as Our Democracy: Those Born Beneath Them are the ones actually Born Rich, and what was once thought of as Being Born Rich is now a kind of curse, a Class of Men made up mostly of venal little white sociopaths who fear that those who have far less than they have might someday become One of Them, The New Born Rich. Thus The Sons of Those Born Rich, as our new Trump president was, become determined to not only hold tightly to their inherited wealth but to expand it by torturing and exploiting Those Beneath Them, many of whom, for some curious reason, lap up their punishment in the name of The American Way of Life.
El caballero at the "Eclipse Rodeo", Pavillion, Wyoming, August 20, 2017.
About 8 miles west of the little store the guy with the funny last name burnt down for the insurance money, and approximately 25 miles or so east of the East Gate of Yellowstone Park, is where I fish.
I walk down the dirt road from my cabin in the late evening, and fish with wet flies or with live terrestrials I've caught and put in a little jam jar.
I can't tell you the name of the river; it's sworn me to secrecy.
My river, northwest Wyoming, 7:20 p.m. August, 19, 2017.
IDEA: let's send this guy to outer space. NASA built, state-sponsored rocket ship, replete with 9-hole golf course, small casino, game-show nymphets and a McDonalds. A perfectly good expenditure of federal tax dollars.
Trump Tower Space Mission, (prototype sketches by the author), August 19, 2017.
I went out to the parking lot late last night in front of Cassie's Steakhouse, and who do I see there sitting in his old GMC pick up truck? Montgomery Clift.
Monty sat in the front seat, his Stetson lowered so that I could just see the bottom half of his face, from the nose to the chin. The rest of him was in shadow.
He nodded when he saw me, the kind of nod two men who understand each other's need for privacy allow themselves. 'You're free to think and feel whatever you want to think and feel' is what Monty nodded to me, and I agreed, nodding the same back to him.
Drive-up liquor store, northwest Wyoming, August 13, 2017.