In the old days movies were called 'the pictures'

Sometimes literature is a question of who gets there first.  The thought of W. C. Fields reading Trollope as a child explains a great deal about the evolution of American comedy, which ends in the death of Buddy Hackett and, more recently, Professor Irwin Corey.

One thing leads to another in a good murder mystery, as unnaturally though as the leaves fall from the tree, and pretty soon as leaves keep falling you have as good a writer as James M. Cain or Jim Thompson.

In the old days folks read books. Words filled up the time that wasn't filled up with work. On Saturday night they'd go downtown to a picture show and really let their hair down, seeing everything up there on the silver screen they'd read about in the book they'd just read. One of these folks might have been named Hope Read, the picture perfect name for a reader.

Bookplate for "The Postman Always Rings Twice" by James M. Cain, Knopf, 1934, First Edition, in the collection of The Park County Public Library, Cody, Wyoming. 

Rabbit on a stove

Civilization is the most fragile construct known to man; every time it's imported from one country to another the people lucky enough to have it foisted upon them go crazy and elect an ape for govenor.

Take the paint company's logo--Sherwin-Williams, "Cover the Earth"--and pair it with their graphic symbol of a bucket of red paint pouring itself over the globe, and you get the corporate equivalent, first of "America, Love It or Leave It" and then its corollary, "Make America Great Again."

For the first time in a long time (The Civil War?) we are living in a country where we can't believe what is happening is happening.  Even those happy with what is happening, can't believe what's happening.

Civilization's the little rabbit, hiding beneath sagebrush, shivering, its fur catching the gusts of prairie wind, one eye on the monster who's watching it, and one eye on the hole where it will soon go to hide.

Tea kettle in shape of a rabbit; cabin, Wapiti, Wyoming, April 12, 2017, 

When microclimates collide

What you see here is the full moon rising just enough to keep a high pressure system from encroaching on a remote mountain-top, with the possible intention of pulverizing the little mountain towns in the valley down below.  The full moon acts as a ball bearing, lessening the friction between the two opposing forces, in much the same way that tectonic plates operate in land mass dispersions. Stars don't understand the process, and consequently feel under appreciated. The wind blows all night, creating a chimney of sound that sounds like a prarie of frail elk being protected by a small man with bad teeth who lives in an ill-fated master-planned community that's gone belly-up, drives a big white pick-up truck and likes to tell lies.

Moon over Carter Mountain, Cody, Wyoming, 7 p.m. April 10, 2017. 

The poets endless apprenticeship

I think of Kendra, waitress at The Wyoming Rib and Chop House in Cody, Wyoming, who writes her name with a blue crayon upside down (to her) and right side up (to me) on our table's paper tablecloth.

That's amazing, I say to Kendra. There's no way I could do that, not in my wildest dreams. Sometimes I can't even read my name when I write it out right in front of me.

It doesn't come naturally, Kendra says. Believe me, I have to practice over and over and over.

In the hall of the mountain king

A woman once said to me, "I'd really like to see where you do your work." 

"There really isn't much to see," I said to her. 

Ptarmigan Mountain, Wapiti, Wyoming, April 2, 2017, writer's cabin in foreground.

Dr. Strangelove in upstate Wyoming

Watching Noam Chomsky on "Democracy Now" just now, talking among other things about the Doomsday Clock–that symbolic clock maintained since 1947 by members of the Atomic Scientist's Science and Security Board at The University of Chicago to represent the measure of danger humanity faces from nuclear war, and now from climate change–and how the clock is now set at 2 1/2 minutes to doomsday, one of the most precarious, alarming settings in recent history.

In regard to the present leadership of the US, the best I can do to make sense of it is to see it is a reenactment of the Cold War. The leadership is nostalgic, having no more than a 5th grader's worldview, informed by the times they were told as 5th grade students to dive under their school desks if and when Russia dropped the big one. All grown up now and in power, their relationship with Russia is certainly different than it was back in the day, much more friendly, cozy even, and so other enemies must be found to fulfill the satisfyingly familiar notion of American superiority.

Thinking of present leadership as re-enacting a sitcom of the 1950's is somewhat comforting, as the memory of Kubrick's film, "Dr. Strangelove", is not.

Nor is something Chomsky said when the present leadership first assumed power, January, 2017: "The Republican Party is the most dangerous political organization in history." 

Trial run for nuclear winter, Hwy. 14, between Cody and Wapiti, Wyoming, 20 miles from the East Gate of Yellowstone National Park, April 1, 2017. 

Wyoming diptych

The Christ and the anti-Christ.

Jesus of Nazareth and Rimbaud.

Having this one thought about these two people is all I can manage this morning.

View from cabin at dawn, Wapiti, Wyoming, April 3, 2017.

Snow job

I asked the lady librarian at the Cody Public Library if she was worried that library funding would soon be drastically cut in her state.

Yes, she said, unless things improve dramatically in the extraction industries. 

Oh, I said, I thought it was more a matter of the new administration slashing federal budgets for things like the arts. 

She looked at me as if she truly believed I was fascinated with her idiocy. 

Snowfall, 9 a.m., April 2, 2017, Wapiti, Wyoming. 

More jobs for cowboys

Make America Great Again is junk language, a greasy fast food lapped up by those most susceptible to its poisons.

So when The President came on the radio today and said he was signing an executive order that would create more jobs for coal miners, I substituted "cowboys" for "coal miners " and got pretty much the same meaning.

Highway 120 between Meeteetse and Cody, Wyoming, 6 p.m., March 29, 2017. 

The University of Science Fiction

Here in Salt Lake City the line between religion and commerce collapses as if it never existed. Being Mormon is just part of it, being Human is the other part.

As I study Christianity it becomes another team I can't root for, and so I'm down to three--Buddhism, Hindu, and atheist. Studying each, each seems less preposterous than Christianity, Islam, or the seventh great world religion, New Age.

Mormonism, it turns out, is neither Christian or a cult. It's a mountain of wildernesses to be wandered through without the water required to stave off delusion. 

University of Science Fiction, Salt Lake City, Utah, March 28. 2017. 

Red state

I am traveling from the time when it was first assumed that anything coming from outer space was alien, thus to be feared, to a time when planetary science leads me to believe there's water on distant planets, therefore life, and life is a good thing, hypothetically.

The challenge, as one moves from a state of despair to one of hope, is not to become one of those people who are always disappointed in everything they encounter, even when discovering themselves.

Hotel room ceiling, Fillmore, Utah, March 27,  2017.

Sorry, the ice machine is out of order

Ah!

We have come to the point in our national journey where politics are now more interesting than sports, and sports have never been more interesting. 

I've been on the road. It's tiring to drive all day and then find a place to sleep within financial reason, seeing a hotel room as being only a place to sleep, to hold unconsciousness, as it were, safely behind a locked door that is quite possibly the same door also installed in the hotel that charges $400 a night and not the $93 I'm paying for this room.

Once inside my $93 room I desperately want to check in on the tv news, to surf between politics and sports, more interested in politics perhaps in this new time of being administered continuous civic lessons by the bungling inefficiency of this new administration, but I can't figure out how to work the tv. The tv's far too sophisticated for me, computerized etc. etc., and I give up. 

I walk to the ice machine to fetch some ice for the Perrier and vodka I've made. The thing doesn't work, though I can hear the ice stirring deep inside. 

View from Rm. 112, Rodeway Inn, Washington Blvd., Culver City, Ca. March 22, 2016. 

72 degrees of diffusion

Some places are too diffuse to take a picture of, taking a picture would ruin the diffusion. I speak at the moment of Los Angeles, the city I was born in so many years ago and just had to leave, returning now as a visitor and seeing how diffuse it is, that diffusion is its beauty.

I drive east along Washington, which diffuses and becomes Venice Blvd, make a left on Crenshaw, a right on Wilshire, and find the little house on Lorraine Ave. where Lea Ann and I lived as caretakers when we first married. There's the little park and the house across the street from it where I played ping-pong with the rich Chinaman who owned the house; he beat me almost every time we played.

I park, get out of the car, sit on a rock in the sunshine. It feels like a perfect 72 degrees. A light breeze moves three white clouds around in the sky, rearranging their diffusions. Los Angeles seems to be on some sort of adventure of diffusion.

Driving east on Washington Boulevard, Los Angeles, Ca. 10 a.m., March 23, 2017.

A small thought, remodeled

People who truly love poetry don't know what's inside its walls, only that it has something to do with light and warmth, and that what goes on in there has to do with things they cannot see, much less understand, and are often the things that will save what cannot be saved.

Kitchen demolition, 614 28th Avenue, San Francisco. Ca., March 21, 2017.

Why I read the classics

I've come to the time of life when I don't read much, if any, new literature, knowing how much there is of it and knowing how good so much of it is, so much of it so good that it can't be great, its goodness crowding out greatness, overwhelming the possibility of greatness, strangling that possibility as it were with its goodness, so that the great is forced by the clamor of the good, and all the hustle and bustle which attends the good, to hunker down in the reeds and bulrushes and wait to be seen by passersby able to see the cloud in the puddle.

Cloud in puddle, near Big River, Mendocino, Ca., March 17, 2017.

Sawdust

In Mendocino, walking from the trailhead at Russian Gulch and then along Fern Creek to the waterfall two-plus miles northeast, walkers can see some of the changes the forest has gone through in the winter of 2017. 

Trees have fallen everywhere, without a thought for where they were falling. Trees have snapped off and fallen from their roots downward and from their tips upward. Trees have fallen suddenly from heights of hundreds of years, and trees have fallen downwards from the day before yesterday.

Men and women from the California State Parks and Recreation have cleared the trees that have fallen across the path so that we can continue walking up toward the waterfall. We can see the sawdust that has fallen on the ground beneath the tree that has fallen all by itself, either across the path or into the stream. We can see that the men and women have had to cut the fallen trees we see into pieces with a saw so that we can keep walking along the path and the stream can keep flowing.

What we see from these fallen trees is that they've often been cut up into pieces by a saw into ever smaller pieces, and that at the very bottom of the pieces cut is something that usually ends up being called by all of us, 'sawdust'.

But some of us may object to the word 'sawdust', hoping that the people who've used the saw don't really think of what they've made as 'sawdust', hoping that we may someday think of it as something else, as the dust of wood that came from trees that fell all by themselves in the forest, giving 'sawdust' a new name, a name less presumptuous, less domineering, less assumptive of the notion that men control nature, more faithful to reality, a name like 'wood dust' instead. 

Russian Gulch State Park, Mendocino, Ca. March 15, 2017. 

Amid the redwoods

If there's one thing worth worshipping it's a tree.

Stout Grove, Jedidiah State Park near Crescent City, Ca. March 13, 2017. 

From Portland where it is raining

Well the best that can be said of this present era is that we are being given a civics lesson for free.

Everyday I do something, some little thing to register my displeasure with the new US administration--sign a petition, call the White House, write my congresswoman--believing when I do that I'm doing my part to make America great again.

I recall reading Auden's biography, recalling the story he told there of taking baths as a child in the bath water left behind by his parents or other members of the family. This is more or less the feeling I have now when thinking about this country.

Portland somehow seems more normal than anywhere else I've been lately. It's rained everyday I've been here. It's cold. There are no blossoms yet on the fruit trees, as there are on the trees in California and Washington D.C. And there are stories written in the local print media by nonbinary writers.

NE Broadway, between 12th and 13th Sts., Portland, OR, March 7, 2017, 8am. 

From the Cascadian Subduction Zone

Now that everyone has been equipped with their very own conspiracy theory, tailored precisely for them, personalized to the degree that it explains everything they can't understand about their own life and times, it's time to get on with the business of living or, as Mary Baker Eddy called it, "the great problem of being."

Even then it seems as if we spin, a teacup within a teacup, at either DisneyWorld or DisneyLand, circle within circle within circle, watching ourselves on CBS or NBC, watching ourselves be watched.

News article, The Cottage Grove Sentinel (Oregon), March 3, 2017. 

CNN and its brethren

The noose tightens, as the news comes in that someone in the administration lied, around the neck of the one who lied. He's not the only one who lied--the lie came down from the top--but he's the one caught in the lie in service to the one who first told it. The question from which the lie originated becomes less important as the lie enlarges itself all by itself, almost without the question that created the lie in the first place; the lie gathers everyone in its wake--the creator of the lie, the subservient broadcaster of the original lie who lies on behalf of both the creator and himself, and the questioners' themselves, implicated in the lie by asking the question they already know the answer to.

CNN, Thursday March 2. 2017,  9:42 pm, panel discussion: newly appointed Atty. General Jeff Sessions has decided to recuse himself on any investigation into his testimony in the confirmation process that led to his appointment as Attorney General.