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.
My Clarice Lispector fan club kit arrives
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.
Killing time, I make a quick sketch at the Bloodmobile
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.
Auden correction
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.
Privacy and transparency
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.
Post-dystopian future
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.
Reverse perspective in the stories of Clarice Lispector
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.
Theatre and anti-theatre
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.
The International Luxury Conference
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.
Breakfast outdoors
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.
Eating the middle of nowhere
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.
The new male narrative of democracy
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.
A place on the river
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.
President in Space
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.
Going to the movies in Cody, Wyoming
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.
American eclipse
Shoshoni, Wyoming--there's a kind of beauty to downtown Shoshoni, the kind artists and documentarians like to walk around in, not only to feel what the past must have felt like to those living in it but also to feel what the future might become. The buildings themselves are beautiful, walked away from by those who once owned them, boarded up, windows broken, stuffed to their ceilings by everything left behind-old furniture, cash registers, display cases, hat racks, bubblegum machines–almost all the old rag dolls of capitalism a person could possibly imagine.
Shoshoni is where Lea Ann and I will soon come to watch the great solar eclipse of 2017. Just outside of town is supposed to be one of the best places in the world to see the moon cover up the sun for a few minutes.
Downtown, Shoshoni, Wyoming, population 649, August 10, 2017.
The Good Life
I used to think that the good life was the life that most faithfully recreated childhood, but I was wrong. The good life is becoming old enough to know how to fill up an inflatable pool with air and water, then pulling up a chair on the lawn to watch the children swim around in it for hours.
Inflatable pool, $19.95, backyard, Spencer Roddan's home, Salt Lake City, Utah, August 8, 2017.
Robert Frost Roddan Garfunkle
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not be Stuart Davis, a painter from the 1930's, or a Brazilian poet who wrote poems on scraps of leftover paper only to throw them away. Hello darkness my old friend, I've come to photograph you again.
The author at 2 a.m. in his favorite chair, San Francisco, Ca. July 28, 2017.
On a theme by Ellsworth Kelly
Heather had never liked her name. When she said to people, "hello, I'm Heather," she didn't feel good about the way they looked at her. This difficulty had persisted since childhood; one therapist suggested Heather's dislike of her name gave her the ability to abstract, to literally "step outside herself," making it sound as if self-loathing was a gift. It's true, Heather could be two places at once, sitting for instance at a dinner table with others while imagining she was laying on her bed in mid-afternoon, her favorite time of day, the window open a crack, the curtains three-quarters drawn, not so much to keep the light out but to encourage the breeze to move the curtain softly, like someone was behind the curtain breathing.
Spectrograph, Ellsworth Kelley canvas, pre-gesso, concept and photograph by author, July 26, 2017.
Poem for Bill Knott
What if you sat at your typewriter
as if you were looking into a mirror
while you were writing?
Would you see your words
looking back at you,
or the faces of the words
themselves?
Screenshot of the late Bill Knott's blog, 2014, the year of his death.