That all makes sense--and it reminds me of "Ode on a Grecian Urn," where the speaker is a little envious of the people on the urn, some of whom are always just about to achieve whatever it is they are doing, like the ducks here. Decay and preservation is a helpful way to look at this, and at the age of 48, it's in the front of my mind daily. The image of tugging back and forth can be found (is some form) in every stanza--I guess that's what contradictions do? Really interesting poem.

Another favorite.


Elizabeth Bishop "In the Waiting Room"

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
--"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities--
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts--
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How--I didn't know any
word for it--how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?

The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

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I just realized two of my favorite poems of all time take place inside dentists offices.

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No one has ever written that sentence before. That's cool.

Yeah, Bishop is great. Takes me a while to get through one of her poems, but there's always a payoff. I don't think I have read this one since I was 19. Only downside is that my least favorite prof was a Bishop devotee.

"Hitting Golfballs off the Bluff," by Jeffrey Harrison

They come back now, those nights my friend and I
hit golfballs off the bluff behind his house.
We were sixteen and had our learner's permits
but no girlfriends, unlike the football jocks
we couldn't stand but secretly envied.
Neither of us actually played golf,
but late one night we took his father's clubs
and started what became a ritual.
A Freudian would have a field day with it:
the clubs, the balls, the deep ravine below
with train tracks and a river running through it.
But for us it was pure exhilaration:
the sure feel of a good connection, zing
of the white ball disappearing into blackness,
then silence as we waited for the thud
against the ground below, splash in the river,
or bang against the roof of a freight car.
That drawn-out moment when we only listened,
holding our laughter back, seemed never-ending
and one time was: no sound came back at all,
as if we'd sent the golfball into orbit
like a new planet - one we might still see
moving across the sky on any night,
pocked like the moon, but smaller, shining green
with envy now, now deep red with desire.

"Chin Music," by Alan Soldofsky

The high hard one-up
and inside. The brush-back pitch
from which the batter reels out of the box.

Newcombe threw one, and Drysdale,
and Bob Gibson, who hurled smoke
in St. Louis. It was never an accident

like the other day in Detroit
when the A's rookie south paw
hit Kirk Gibson square in the mouth

with a fastball. He didn't go down,
but glared at the kid on the mound
then trotted to first, the blood

spilling from his mouth. It's a kind of honor,
a badge of toughness, to stand in
like that. Like the drivers who

pass you every now and then
on the two-lane, though they can't see
the collision coming toward them

up the hill that you can. The sky
a blue smear above the asphalt,
the fields of brown grass

being excavated into subdivisions
a few streets already paved
on which some of the kids will learn

bravado among cars, tempting fate,
standing in while everything
comes at them headlong.

The Outlaw Josey Wales (Gone to Texas), by Forrest Carter.

Brief and quick little book, but worth reading. The writing is pulp-y (whereas the film is definitely not a B movie, or at least doesn't seem so today) and the fact that the writer was an anti-government paranoiac shines through, but it's still a good story. The ending is different from the film, and Lone Waite, Wales's Cherokee companion, is slightly less funny in the book, but oddly enough, even though the author was once a member of the KKK, he talks about kinship as being something you can, in part, earn; at the end of the novel, the Wales family includes Indian and White cast-offs. The real kinship in the novel relates to the idea that real folks (in this case, mountain men) can make rules for themselves just fine (and don't need a meddling government back East to do it for them), which is why Josey and Lone (both mountain men) get along so well. (A former slave would have made this even more interesting, but Carter, like Caller Bob, didn't like black people.) I guess that's a favorite pastime of Americans, and probably all people: In the past, we had it so much better before ___________ came in and ruined it. On the other hand, both Josey and Lone Waite had some traumatic pasts, so they get a pass.

Like I said, it's pulp-y, and so we have stock characters (like noble savages). But the best parts of the first 100 minutes of the film are in the book, and you get a little more backstory throughout. Definitely worth the read--for a fun story and for a glimpse into a world of surprising affiliations and allies. Seems like the book is well-researched about the history and culture of the time.

Just started Max Hastings new Book on Vietnam

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When I am stuck and need to figure something out I always remember the Immortal words of Socrates when he said:"I just drank what?"

Just finished “Doing Justice” by Preet Bharara. Well written and thought provoking. It makes you appreciate our legal system while acknowledging some of its inherent flaws. And for the record it is not a Trump bashing book. He is referenced by name only in a few lines and there are a couple of quips which note the current climate but it is not a political book. For those who are interested in the mechanisms of our legal system it is worth reading.

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If we nominate Trump we will get destroyed & we'll deserve it.- L Graham
I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.- DJT 2016
MAY THEY ROT IN HELL. AGAIN, MERRY CHRISTMAS!- DJT 12/25/23

"How to Play Night Baseball," by Jonathan Holden (1972)

A pasture is best, freshly
mown so that by the time a grounder's
plowed through all that chewed, spit-out
grass to reach you, the ball
will be bruised with green kisses. Start
in the evening. Come
with a bad sunburn and smelling of chlorine,
water still crackling in your ears.
Play until the ball is khaki--
a movable piece of the twilight-
the girls' bare arms in the bleachers are pale,
and heat lightning jumps in the west. Play
until you can only see pop-ups,
and routine grounders get lost in
the sweet grass for extra bases.

Iroquois County

It took three weeks of driving
before the sky turned
to an ocean over Henry,
Illinois. It was only after

the forty-first, or forty-seventh car
turned to a pinpoint then disappeared
forever over the horizon

that the world was drawn
finally into focus. For the first time

the concrete silos lined like batteries
of Roman sentinels, ready to burst forth
with something more meaningful
than feed corn. Stand long enough

on the shoulder and you convince yourself
that grace can be found
in the grid-lines of soybean fields

and prefab housing,
that forgiveness is the sun setting

into the outstretched arms
of high-tension power lines.
Each car that zooms past is just
another fool. Willing to be

anywhere but here. It can go on
what seems like a lifetime. Until
drawn back from the edge

by a passing truck, the town reveals
itself. Wearing its history like a scar.

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Holy Christ....where'd you get that poem?

I wrote that motherfucker.

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Wow . . . that's pretty great. That's some good imagery, and it's crossed with some big ideas. It also pretty much describes my life, so it's kind of astonishing to read it. That grace (and forgiveness) is never quite there.

Great last line, too. I don't think I've been in Henry, or if it's meant to be an actual town, but that figuratively describes many such towns. This will be fun to think about and re-read.

Henry is real of course but not in Iroquois County. I just wanted to force a Berryman reference in there.

Driving on I-57 between Champaign and Chicago filtered through the lens of a particularly dark time in my life was the inspiration.

First thing I finished writing in 10 years.

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Gotcha. More later, but I had a prof down there (Van Walleghen) who was a Berry fan. We read some of the Henry poems in that class...

Pretty good!

I think Henry is in Marshall County. I raced a trotter at the fairgrounds down there awhile back.

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Communists are just people who are terrible at capitalism.

Forgive the formatting please.

Jorie Graham, The Geese

Today as I hang out the wash I see them again, a code
as urgent as elegant,
tapering with goals.
For days they have been crossing. We live beneath these geese

as if beneath the passage of time, or a most perfect heading.
Sometimes I fear their relevance.
Closest at hand,
between the lines,

the spiders imitate the paths the geese won't stray from,
imitate them endlessly to no avail:
things will not remain connected,
will not heal,

and the world thickens with texture instead of history,
texture instead of place.
Yet the small fear of the spiders
binds and binds

the pins to the lines, the lines to the eaves, to the pincushion bush,
as if, at any time, things could fall further apart
and nothing could help them
recover their meaning. And if these spiders had their way,

chainlink over the visible world,
would we be in or out? I turn to go back in.
There is a feeling the body gives the mind
of having missed something, a bedrock poverty, like falling

without the sense that you are passing through the one world,
that you could reach another
anytime. Instead the real
is crossing you,

your body an arrival
you know is false but can't outrun. And somewhere in between
these geese forever entering and
these spiders turning back,

this astonishing delay, the everyday, takes place

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So as I wait for the new John Douglas and Rick Atkinson book(AWI). I am reading Serial killer books again.
Just done with the Larry Elher one, operating in same time/area as Gacy.

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When I am stuck and need to figure something out I always remember the Immortal words of Socrates when he said:"I just drank what?"

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could be an interesting summer. Stay tuned!

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Flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami

Fresh from the Library
John Douglas new Book
and Rick Atkinsons. His new trilogy is about the American War of Independence

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When I am stuck and need to figure something out I always remember the Immortal words of Socrates when he said:"I just drank what?"

Oddly enough, my fat ass drove through Henry today!

things will not remain connected,
will not heal,

Just started The Outsider by Stephen King.

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Flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami

Just noticed the book I’m reading will be an HBO series beginning of 2020. I better get moving on it

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Flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami

Just read a really good book called There, There by Tommy Orange. I don't even know how to describe it...the gritty experience of urban native americans in Oakland. easy to read and really captures the social environment.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

I'll definitely check it out. Being a fairly avid reader for 40 years, it's getting really hard in these times to find anything unique and interesting. This sounds like both.

If you're a blue collar guy from the Chicago area, you should check out the fiction of Stuart Dybek, the modern heir to the Chicago naturalist tradition inaugurated by Dreiser, Sinclair, Wright, and Algren. His work is the only writing I've ever seen that captures the contemporary reality of the city (at once postmodern and traditional, blighted and beautiful) from a working-class ethnic perspective. His contortion of the naturalist aesthetic of abjection into magical realism is a remarkable achievement.

Check out his short story collections Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, The Coast of Chicago, and I Sailed with Magellan. If you do, let me know what you think.

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