Sounds vaguely familiar…

China Earthquake

I heard from one of my online friends yesterday who lives in Chengdu, China, which is prime earthquake territory. Here’s part of what he had to say:

“…we spent the night sleeping in an open space at a nearby university campus, braving the flat again after torrential rain forced us indoors! i’m sure we may end up there again tonight. it all feels a bit like something out of War of the Worlds, or Cloverfield, which we just watched a few days ago. my heart goes out to those caught in the epicentre though, and i pray that things don’t get worse over the following days. anyway, time to get back outside. i really, really shouldn’t be indoors. good luck to anyone else stuck in this.”

Pay him a visit to find out more. Hope things get better soon.

Corporate Greed

The Michigan Land Use Institute has an excellent story on its website, outlining the efforts of a certain Timothy Stoepker, attorney to the big box stores, who is aggressively litigating to override local government decisions to exclude the stores from their townships. Some of their methods are downright diabolical.  From the page:

“BEAR CREEK TOWNSHIP— An attorney with a controversial history of suing public officials as private citizens has helped force this Emmet County township to spend $388,000 to defend itself against multiple lawsuits he’s filed on behalf of a local developer with downstate roots.”

Bastards.

First lines

I’ve got a  dozen of em, and here’s one - first lines to short stories which never panned out:

“On Tuesday morning Jack spotted his neighbor’s hippie wife, who used to be fey but now looks like a feral tribeswoman, running around in her sleeveless print dress, her toes pointing in all the directions of the compass after years of shoeless abandon, her legs coated in a wiry fir, her skin perpetually swathed in the dusty residue of the garden, from which she had recently emerged.

Old Fart in Springtime

I could claim it’s doctor’s orders, or that I made a pact with myself to lay off literary endeavors for a month, or that I’ve been too busy with domestic duties to write, or any other number of lies, but in fact what has happened is that a month has gone by and I have not written much at all. But I have been thinking, in my own shallow way, and I hereby resume with my observations, this one about how old age creeps up on you unawares.

I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that when I’m old I will probably end up as one of those cowboyish old guys, all gangly and gravelly voiced, wandering around saying “howdy” and nodding his index finger to you as you pass. I’ll wear a preponderance of plaid and shoe myself in regulation white mall walkers.

Spring arrived, and then it didn’t quite pan out, as so often happens in this neck of the woods. So I’ve been doing odd jobs and wearing that old plaid shirt-jacket around, the kind you wear between winter and spring, because the seasons mix for so long. It’s lined with kapok and lumpy as an old life jacket. I’ve been engaged in such archetypal equinoctial old guy activities as fixing the bird feeder, which had fallen victim to the depredation of hordes of marauding squirrels. On my head I wore my old kelly green mesh baseball cap, broad as the brow of Moby Dick himself, and tacky to boot. The sunglasses I wore seemed chic when I bought them, reminiscent, I suppose, of that Peter Fonda Easy Rider era but in fact strangely like one of those geezers from Vernon, Florida, which is to say shopworn and overdone, reminding me now of an old guy who has just been let out of the hospital on a sunny day and must wear the wraparounds to cope with his eye condition.

And so, arriving this way at the top of the stairs, having come in for a moment from outside, (to pee, probably - I can’t remember) I am surprised with my reflection in the mirror. “Who is this old fart?” I ask myself, and see that it is me, is always me, with the silly hat, the big sunglasses, the lumpy plaid jacket and the enormous expanse of upper lip and jowl extending downward like Boris Badenov himself. Or is it Fred Ziffel that I resemble, and visions of domestic vicissitudes - men holding toilet plungers, that sort of thing? How did I end up looking this way, and how do I get out of it before the routine persists and hardens into habit, driving out the dashing dude who lives inside?

Some days were running legs

Some days were running legs

Some days were running legs and joy
and old men telling tomorrow would be
a fine day surely: for sky was red
at setting of sun between the hills.

Some nights were parting at the gates
with day’s companions: and dew falling
on heads clear of ambition except light
returning and throwing stones at sticks.

Some days were rain flooding forever the green
pasture: and horses turning to the wind
bare smooth backs. The toothed rocks rising
sharp and grey out of the ancient sea.

Some nights were shawling mirrors lest the lightning
strike with eel’s speed out of the storm.
Black the roman rooks came from the left squawking
and the evening flowed back around their wings.

Iain Crichton Smith from ‘The Long River’ 1955

A Scottish poem I used to teach, and had almost forgotten about, resurfaced yesterday, and here it is, in all its old glory.

Paradise

My current read is Paradise, by A.L. Kennedy, a younger Scottish novelist. It’s a good read, though difficult in places due to the harsh realities of its alcoholic narrator. Here’s the blurb from “The Seattle Times:” “A stunning depiction of alcoholism, as funny as it is sad, as ironic as it is romantic.” In this passage the narrator is standing in the doorway of a barn, soaking up the feeling of a Scottish summer, and remembering her childhood.

“Beyond the lintel’s shade, there is the sweetness of grain fields on the breeze, the bland dust of poor soil, baked to a yellowish crust: and salt, too: something of the high-tide line, bladderwrack and rock clefts dank with scrub and gorse: that slightly human, musty fug of heated gorse, the snap of its seeds, the blood drop in the yellow of each flower: which is to say, the smell and taste and everything of my being a child in summer, of running between the blue, narrow shore and the racing depths of barley with my brother until the sun had fallen and the sandy earth was cooled to match the temperature of skin.”

A beautiful evocation of place, strangely punctuated, and a delight to read aloud. As a matter of fact, you could chop it up randomly and call it poetry.

I speak real good

On the same day (yesterday) that Barack Obama was busy giving one of the most eloquent speeches on race for decades, the Chimp in Chief was in Sarasota, mangling the English language … yet again. It’s like the crazy uncle everybody has gotten used to, so we don’t even think about it anymore when he says amazingly stupid things like, “I heard somebody say, where’s Mandela? Well, Mandela is dead, because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas.” I’m not making this up. Click on the link yourself if you don’t believe me.

Yesterday’s pronouncements, while not as bizare as the above, still demonstrate that the guy is not playing with a full deck. Here’s one example amongst many:

Spending Research And Development
“But there’s a lot of research and development being spent here in America.”

Lord, give me strength to endure the remaining months of this so-called presidency.

Bovine masses

Kate Christensen’s satirical novel, The Great Man, has just won The PEN/Faulkner award for Fiction. She gives a great interview:

“We live in a profoundly conservative time. The pendulum has swung backward to “family values,” whatever the fuck that means, fundamentalist religions, and a tame and docile population who’s being scarily and almost cartoonishly manipulated by the most criminally dastardly government this country has ever had. We dress alike, we talk alike, we are a big homogeneous bunch of domesticated cows in Pottery Barns.”

You go girl! Couldn’t agree more.

Two Odes to March

As I Go From Here

I’ll look up at the sky
As I lie in the snow of March
Smiling, staring up
And the sky will be blue.
The trees will be bare
At the end of winter.
The sky will be blue
With the sound of the
Wind and Waves.

Partridge Tracks

An abortive thaw makes for a
Thin crust.
Attenuated ice crystals
Glisten where they pucker
On the ridge, in the sundown,
Where the partridge went by.
The roar of the pines, hushing.