Update from the street..

so to speak, actually from Kiskdadees in Plymouth Center.. had my sax lesson tonight early (at 430) because I have a County Commissioners meeting to attend at 6:30 (in town, at the old court house). Its still raining. Judging by the other PCs in use around me, things are not looking up for the common folk ( a young lady is helping a 30-ish man fill out an online unemployment application). Things are okay with me: still doing the Itex thing with the guy from Fitchburg; getting better on sax (though Dennis says I play the jazz tunes I am trying to learn now with a total lack of swing, bop, funk, rhythm... in short, I turn all the tunes I am attempting (Miles, Wayne, et al) into cream of wheat (but I like Cream of Wheat!?). And yet, somehow, I remain unassailable: I continue to live on in lalaland. It's the singer - as Jagger sang some forty years ago, not the song. At least to my ear, eye, ego. What are you up to? I hope you're still painting somewhat regularly. I hope as well, you're going to find some meaningless, low pay job - with good people to assuage your sense of absurdity, so that you can contribute to the 'Sweet Jane-ness' of your situation. By the way, the guy who came to the house yesterday to give us a new phone/internet modem and move the system down into our newfangled basement, knew you from the Mall, from Old Navy to be specific.. He was a short, light-haired young man about your age, medium build, Shanahan, I think. Said to say hi, and congratulations on your up coming nuptials... about 15 months away now. Remember, when I was engaged to your mother I was working seven days a week (weekends at the BC switchboard, weekdays at Jordan Marsh (in their 'Sign Shop')), while going to school full time and pretending to write poetry. Busy-ness has a deafening buzz all of its own: a lovely white noise-ness that tends to drown out the little voice saying that much of what you are doing is meaningless... ("Much of what I say in meaningless, but I say it just to reach you..Julia [Lennon/McCartney]) Get busy man! You'll fee better. Well, off to the County Commissioners (talk about white noise)..

Be the B&B

Hey, I thought you were going to take advantage of my barter B&B's.. I've sent you a link to a new one, in Bar Harbor, that has a lower priced period from the 5th of May to about the 20th. It's near Acadia, and includes a big breakfast every morning. If Amanda needs to get away, and thats a good time for y'all, let me know ASAP. Also, I sent you some link info on the movie script site - so you can look over what I have there. Ask Amanda about my death by Jello idea. I'll be you didn't know that Cthulhu was cold-blooded... And oh, oh, I'm happy to announce that our basement reconstruction is almost finished. In a week or less we should have walls, wooden floors (faux), lights, heat, ceilings, doors... gawrsh almighty it will be livable. You might rethink your fear of this unter-welt.

Did I ever show you this poem?

I wrote it while you were at Colby. I'm going through some old work, trying to cut it up into little 'chap books'. I'm not sure if the formatting will hold in the transference, so feel free to supply your own meaningful pauses..

Grasping at Straws

Your droll intonation –
the words leaking out
somewhere along the aqueduct
of wires, through the splayed fingers
of metal mesh towers
(this age of Aquarius),
blue sparks splashing upon the Maine Turnpike
-- thrilled me: becomes you.

Or is it that what I hear in your voice
becomes me:
distant,
unfocused,
ungrounded;
making up with enthusiasm
for a lack of clarity?

I want you to be enthused:
infused with an other’s
electrons: steel plated;
charged;
electrostatically
immune to rust
or mere invention.

I want for there always to be
for you, an undercurrent:
nevermind how pure the waters;
nevermind how swift the stream;
nevermind how insistent the babbling;
there to always exist the possibility
of your own voice, flashing scales
on the concrete ladder; crashing
against the out rushing tide;
instinct above all reason.

This despite my present confines.
This drafted on a pad usually reserved for notes to the second shift:
straighten up the stationery;
price-check the new jewelry;
remove all poetry from the counter,
all algae from the glass

History of the Town of Plymouth From Its First Settlement in 1620, to the Year 1832 By James Thacher

History of the Town of Plymouth From Its First Settlement in 1620, to the Year 1832 By James Thacher: "1741 On the Sabbath March 30th the town of Plymouth was alarmed during divine service by Joseph Wampum a native who gave information that eight Spaniards had landed at his house situate four miles distant from Buzzard's Bay War existed at that time between England and Spain This notice therefore justly excited an universal panic The drums beat to arms and the militia were ordered out It proved however to be a false alarm and has ever been called Wampum's war" (I hope to use this historic oddity, in a column suggesting that the cry for a new mayoral form of government in Plymouth is just another, Wampum's War.)

Rugby, Lovecraft, and the Musepaper

..Rugby. You may know but ask Amanda why the extra point kick in rugby is taken from a different point at times. It seems to have something to do with where the 'touch' was made, but that wasn't clear from watching (we watched a bit of the 'Sevens Cup', the other day, where the US was more competitive than I would have expected)
..Lovecraft. Started reading that collection you gifted me with for Christmas, and went right to The Call of Cthulhu and, despite some misgivings (the never-ending layers of incredulity) enjoyed it (so far) and started to think of a screenplay based on this story. In my ear, was the blurb from Stephen King about how HP is the original, and 'unsurpassed practitioner of the classic horror tale', and I thought I recognized, in Lovecraft's approach the kind of madness beneath madness Escher-like geometry of language that you find in works like Hellraiser and Saw and other modern 'it only gets worse' horror tales. So why, I wondered, have there been so many horrible adaptations of HP's brand of horror? And I thought - its because they probably (like me) felt the works were too predictable, and tried to spice them up by more elaborate stories, more complicated plots. What they are really, I thought, is psychological horror stories, that depend on a slow reveal, that onion skin sort of peeling of layer and after layer - and since tales like The Call of Cthulhu are told from the first person, they do not lend themselves to a cinematic treatment, where the camera is the all-seeing-eye. So I thought - off the top of my head, why not give the narrator a buddy, almost a Dr. Watson to his Sherlock, who gets to be the incredulous one, make the dumb comments, ask the dumb questions.. Anyway, just a thought.
...Musepaper. Here's today's main course to chew on. I have revealed to Mary that I am seriously exploring how I might start a one-sheet 'Musepaper': not a newspaper, but almost a kind of bi-weekly performance piece on paper, that is hawked around town, has some appeal to tourists, but is overall a quirky, satirical, hopefully humorous broadsheet concerned only, myopically, tunnel-vision, on life in the once historic downtown of Plymouth. There would be regular set pieces on the Billington Brothers, a Dead Pilgrim of the Week, a Bigfoot Not Seen at _____, poetry, real art.. Anyway, I have lots of things written down about this, and am about to explore the associated costs. What do you think, off the top of your head? I wouldn't expect to make a lot of money, but if I could clear a few hundred per week I would be content and my madness, apparently, contained.

Conspiracy of Dunces

The lottery is wonderfully pathetic. It's like hitch-hiking: inevitably a car slows, and you end up in the back seat of an old convertible, bouncing down some rural route as a bottle is passed around. You have to take a sip, out of common courtesy, though to do so is to help empty the bottle of its suspect liquid, is to put your hand - figuratively at least, on the wheel of this old Electra 88, is to be at least partly responsible for any and all of the calamities that will surely follow.
Mary loves the Bingo scratch game: it's just a two-dollar ticket, but it takes a good five minutes to work your way through each of the four mini-games on each ticket, so it has more of the pharmacologic effect that she is looking for.
She gets a batch or two every week, and whittles them down to their truth and, generally, places the winners on the 'glass cabinet' and tosses the others away.
So the other day I grabbed the single ticket that was up there - on my way out to run a few errands, not knowing how much she had won, but assuming that particular ticket a winner that I could exchange for a few more of the same. In that way a two dollar winner is like a case of empties: its a down payment on another case of beer.
Later that afternoon, after Patrick's guitar lesson, I stopped by the convenience store on South Street and, with Patrick waiting in the car, went into claim Mary's winnings. As I handed the clerk - an older, heavy-set woman in her fifties (God its still hard to accept that these older people are, in fact, about my age) I remarked to her that I didn't know if I had won $2, or $2 million. Looking quickly at the ticket she remarked, 'its not a winner'. Then she put the ticket on the counter in front of her, off to the side where I couldn't see it. She then added -without any prompt from me, that if she were to check it on the machine, and it wasn't a winner, it would cause the machine to crash. I was surprised, but I accepted her assertion, and even purchased another set of tickets before driving home.
Later that evening I remarked to Mary that the ticket on the glass cabinet had not been a winner. But she was adamant that it had been, for $15. Thinking back to my encounter with the clerk, I suddenly realized that I had set myself up for a rip-off. I had first asserted I didn't really know what I had won, and then I had not asked for the unsigned ticket back (they are supposed to give you the ticket). The clerk never scanned it. And she didn't trash it. It was clear to me that this was something she probably does all the time, and that it could net her hundreds of dollars a week.
I called the Lottery and spoke with them, but did not lodge a specific complaint. Rather I decided to devise my own sting. I plan to take a small winning Bingo ticket back to this same clerk, make essentially the same 'garsh I'm stupid' comments, and see how she proceeds. I have taken the precaution of scanning the ticket in question (front and back) and also scratching it to create the impression that it may be a big winner (instead of just a $5 dollar winner). If she takes the bait, I am going to bring in the federales. If she doesn't..
I hate the pettiness of this. I hate giving any time to this. The lottery is best when it is an ephemeral diversion.

BTW, Clare is here, staying with us for a week. She is visiting for a week, so she can see her father. And BTW2, I did a little research into kilt purchase and rental: there seems to be no way that you could rent the Clan Ranald kilt in the US, and if you purchased one it would cost in the vicinity of $1000 (for all the parts). My initial suggestion is that you try to find a place that has the gray mourning suit variety of dress kilt (and jacket)(which is, I think, the best looking set up anyway) and that you supplement that rental with an authentic Clan Ranald kilt pin and ribbon.

Suttree

I'm a good three-hundred words into Suttree, one of the lesser known works of Cormac McCarthy. One of the blurbs on the back cover suggests that it combines Faulkner's 'gentle, wry humor' with Flannery O'Connor's freakish imagination. That's a nice, succinct way of luring prospective readers in - but its not true, in my opinion. First, I wouldn't say that O'Connor had a freakish imagination. Her characters were certainly not the kind you might expect to find in a standard novel, but her imagination was not freakish. I don't think an imagination can be freakish. Certainly the setting is Faulknerian. But it is foolish, and disingenuous I think, to offer any kind of blurb-sized summation of what is or is not appealing about any of McCarthy's work. This piece, especially, is difficult to define. Another blurbist says that Suttree reads like a doomed Huckleberry Finn. Again, that description is only useful as far as it goes. Yes, Suttree lives on the river, and passes up and down at times, but he is not on a voyage of discovery, or moving toward any greater awareness. Rather he, and the novel, are given to a dispassionate exploration of the river itself: the purlieus of its reality. Suttree walks from its muddy banks and their lesser known neighborhoods, to the shanty-towns hidden in the weeds or under the bridge, to the hustle and hucksters of Front Street, all of it around and about (and at times underneath) Knoxville circa 1950. Twain was in his own way, a moralist. McCarthy is in some ways, a scientist: he leads us on a thorough exploration of the sociological, biological, and psychological settings of this particular time and place. There is no movement up or down the river, figuratively speaking. There is movement in and out of the murk, a burrowing into the muck, a groveling in the mire. There are literal and figurative drownings of allegedly sentient beings, along with the evolutionary emergence of primordial, mud-sucking, primitive life forms, gasping with new gills for the stale speakeasy air. So, given McCarthy's reputation, his Pulitzers and National Book Awards, couldn't we just forego the blurbs entirely? It might be interesting, instead, to list the kinds of characters the reader is likely to encounter: blind gamblers, mad rag pickers, goat-herding healers, violent behemoths, idiot savants, dwarf black witches, junk men, winos, brutal cops, melon-bungers, thieves, murderers, alcoholics, a gay prostitute who calls himself Trippin through the Dew, to name a few. McCarthy is more than content to simply wallow in this madness. Other reviewers speak of Suttree's dignity, but that implies, I think, that the lead character is slummin. Suttree isn't slummin, though perhaps McCarthy is. It would be helpful to prospective readers if the cover previewed a small selection of the vocabulary that McCarthy has incongruously scrawled on the walls of his carefully constructed outhouse of a novel. From one early session of about 40 pages I jotted down a few that either puzzled me in their entirety, or in their usage. Knacker. Neap. Miring. Marcid. Gouts. Autoscopic. Sedge. Purlieu. Deckle. Concantenate. Revetment. Bunged. Nates. Tellurian. Leptosome. Let's see if I can remember what I found these words to mean? Knacker is a person who deals in distressed animals: horses for the glue factory, diseased cows for.. Neap is a word that I think is used to describe mediocrity, or staleness, as it comes from the 'neap' tide: neither a low nor a high tide. Miring I couldn't find, but took to mean getting bogged down, in the mire. Marcid I couldn't find either, but took to be a Faulknerian type of made-up or combined word, perhaps comprised of parts of marbled and rancid. Gouts! This novel could have been called 'Gouts'. McCarthy uses 'gouts' over and over to describe - at times, drops of blood, bits of sawdust extruding from a stuffed Lynx, or almost any other secretion that is not gushing out. It could be gouts of rain, or sap, or shit.. It is an archaic usage. Deckle is the rough edge on paper, or cloth or - in places, stone when it has been chipped. I have noticed that there are many words in Suttree that describe the edges of things, or the boundaries, or the lack of the same. Anyway... how's that for a love letter? A book review, of sorts. And don't worry, before the year is over I'll get to the ones you gifted me with. DF

The Basement

I spent the entire weekend in the basement, preparing it for the people that are supposed to come today, to clear it out. I wanted to make sure that I knew what was down there.. I ended up re-boxing a wide assortment of old antique glass, china, and such, that we had long ago carefully wrapped and stored in the basement - most of which will go back down in the basement once it is cleared out, cleaned up, and the walls and ceilings re-constructed. I found an old leather attache - which I think I had used for cover, when I was supposedly the Exec Editor of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine. It had a combination lock, and I thought I knew what the combination was, but only one side would open. So I pried it open with a large screw driver and, lo and behold, it held a screenplay, faux romance novel, and a good deal of poetry that I had thought was lost to all but the deepest recesses of my brain. I put together about 25 large plastic bags worth of trash, not to mention all of the furniture and equipment that will have to be removed, not to mention my 335 albums - the covers of which were soaked and are now moldy. I'll keep the 'platters': purchase new inner sleeves and special storage boxes, and I was thinking perhaps the cover art could be turned into a massive collage of sorts (if you have any ideas about that, let me know). I'm hoping that, in the end, the basement is livable, with a nice exercise area, a den for Patrick, and an area set aside for tools and repair work. It won't all come together until the summer, but if the insurance comes through it could be, as you used to say, scha-weet!

Sorry this was so straightforward, factual, and uninspired. I am sitting here waiting for the 'recovery specialists' to show up, and thought I would write. DF

Ass Over Tea-Kettle

I'm a scared. The accumulated drips, leaks, fallen limbs, occult car noises, and wild fluctuations in temperature have me spooked. I wander the house looking for signs - like Vincent Price in the 'Fall of the House of Usher', of our inevitable doom. This morning, like a mountain man checking his traps, I baby-stepped my way down the ancient river bed of a driveway that I am re-naming Bower Brook (more on that later)to the old new Camry - which had been positioned close to the road in case.. and, though the river bed seemed passable (having frozen, thawed, and re-frozen during yesterday's psychotic weather) the car itself would not come to life. It cleared its throat, fahrted, groaned, shuffled its feet and emitted an odor of un-combusted gas but would not start. So of course, dressed like a mountain man, in my Maine Hunting Guide boots, my jeans soaked to my shins, I felt no embarrassment at all popping the hood and pretending I knew what I was looking at. Actually, I hoped to see a hunk of ice draped over a fuel line or a cable. But seeing none, I rapped on the metal surfaces, pulled at a few cables, and gave it a stern look before getting back in and turning the key again and again until I heard the faintest sound of life at which point I force fed the beast a few droppers of gasoline and nursed it to a sputtering start.. Well, that's all for now. Hope all is well down in the flatlands.

Giddy-up

Gawrsh, wasn't the inauguration bootiful? I'm serious. I was at the Plimoth Plantation's theatre - which was full by the way, and the excitement of the crowd was palpable. Hell, people in the theatre were crying. I think if Obama realizes how much hope that people have invested in him, he can't help but succeed. Already the changes to the lobbying rules, the freeze on some salaries, the excitement at the State Department, the closing of Guantanamo, the withdrawal from Iraq, not to mention Aretha, Yo-Yo, Bruce - already the funk that was always there, in the shadows of the monuments, on the un-numbered streets of Chocolate City is beginning to overflow its banks and 'tag' the white-washed edifices of our Democracy. A President that can dance? A President that loves his wife? A President that shoots hoops? For all the wrong reasons it feels like were going to do all the right things.. Then again, maybe its just that George is back in Texas, for good.

Hansel and Bruno

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

It must have rained last night. The areas that I had shoveled last week, which had all but disappeared under a few inches of snow that had fallen since, reappeared, then froze. The cars are all at the end – the front that is, of the driveway. We haven’t attempted to drive them all the way to the house end for several days - having had to have the older Camry dragged out of the swamp by a AAA truck last week. Now the temperature is plummeting, expected to plateau around ten degrees by mid-afternoon. In many ways it feels as if we have moved north, to some primeval forest, where we have to haul water from the river, keep the fire going, hunt, chew our own food.. use the microwave no more than ten times a day. And in the midst of this new primitive life comes a knock on the door. Mormon Missionaries, no less. Two brand spanking new Latter Dayers bearing gifts. Of course I put them in a pot and, after a slow boil, made a column out of them. Hinted at Hansel and Gretel. Say instead, Hansel and Bruno. That’s all for now. Dad