Hangover haiku

I am a wienie
had to make a martini
and now I'm sorted.

Son talks to mom

My Secret History

A cyclist went past and cleared his throat and spat a squirt of red betel juice at us, just missing Eden's dress. Eden did not see it as hostility. The man was just a bumpkin on a bike."

- Paul Theroux

I just googled our names and this came up

"those bodacious dudes have an excellent time playing games with death"

cliffhanger

"by the end the only thing I wanted to know was how Wordsworth was going to help that poor soul with his asshole"

News from nowhere

Bit scary not having my team of poets to back me up on this one, Marty. Just me and the Chilean anti-poet and my indefatigable sloth.

A great image

Sometimes I think of my dad in the summer. He’s in the backyard sitting under the small leaf maple tree eating a hot dog with sauerkraut and watching the hummingbirds. They buzz across the suburban lawn shining in the sparkle of the sprinkler’s rainbow mist.

Jim Harrison (1937-2016)

Key figurehead in the development of a bawdy literature

In Tate's typewriter when he died

Translated a bit of Geoff

Canterbury Tales

Prologue

When in April the kind showers fall

grooming March who was parched to the root and all,

filling every vein with the liquor and the power

to inject life therein and grow many flowers.

Zephyr, too gassy and bloated for words, blows

heathen gusts into every husk, every rusted heath,

while the tender crops, and the young sun,

middle-aged scum, sleeps —

and wired warblers

drone

on through

the night with dead eyes open-wide.

(Coaxed by nature, we rampage lightly)

men and women-folk alike, palm-reading pilgrims,

reed-playing palmers, we long to go on long pilgrimages

to seek out new Strands and pay respect

to the old shrines well-known in distant lands,

from every shire's end

of England to Canterbury we go,

to find the great leader

and bliss-out our souls.

For Monday

Read "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville. Pace yourself it's a long one. Also, it's kind of funny, so don't forget to laugh.

Metropolis Cafe, MIlledgeville

1 story called 8 different things

Humdinger's Unite

Bobby Went Down to The Sea

Tangerines

63 Blue House

Sitwell's Getting Better

Getting Better

Redemption Story

One Life to Live

I'm sure there's more.

News at Eleven

Sold!

Carla Davidson writes, “That eighteenth-century British curmudgeon Dr. Samuel Johnson once remarked, ‘I would rather see a portrait of a dog that I know than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.’

A hundred years later an American who shared this sentiment, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (1844-1934), began painting the daily life of some very humanoid canines, an artistic subspecialty that was preceded by a string of careers. In the upstate New York town of Antwerp, Coolidge worked, almost simultaneously, as a druggist, painter of street signs and house numbers, and founder of the first newspaper and earliest bank all within the years between 1868 and 1872. It was after a trip to Europe in 1873 that he turned up in Rochester, New York, as the portraitist of dogs whose life-style mirrored the successful middle-class humans of his time. Coolidge’s first customers were cigar companies, who printed copies of his paintings for giveaways. His fortunes rose when he signed a contract with the printers Brown & Bigelow, who turned out hundreds of thousands of copies of his dog-genre subjects as advertising posters, calendars, and prints. “Coolidge’s poker-faced style is still engaging today. His dogs fit with amazing ease into such human male phenomena as the all-night card game, the commuter train, and the ball park. His details of expression, clothing, and furniture are precise.

Uncannily, the earnest animals resemble people we all know, causing distinctions of race, breed, and color to vanish and evoking the sentiment on an old Maryland gravestone: MAJOR Born a Dog Died a Gentleman” (“A Man’s Life,” American Heritage, February 1973, p. 56).

http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2015/american-art-n09425/lot.78.html

Dicky B holding court

The Montana Gang at Tom McGuane’s Deep Creek, Montana ranch, 1973. (L to R) an unknown person, Jim Harrison, Richard Brautigan, Tom McGuane, Bill Roecker, Becky McGuane, and Dink Bruce

Today's haul + Thrasher

"Thrasher"

They were hiding behind hay bales,
They were planting
in the full moon
They had given all they had
for something new
But the light of day was on them,
They could see the thrashers coming
And the water
shone like diamonds in the dew.

And I was just getting up,
hit the road before it's light
Trying to catch an hour on the sun
When I saw
those thrashers rolling by,
Looking more than two lanes wide
I was feelin'
like my day had just begun.

Where the eagle glides ascending
There's an ancient river bending
Down the timeless gorge of changes
Where sleeplessness awaits
I searched out my companions,
Who were lost in crystal canyons
When the aimless blade of science
Slashed the pearly gates.

It was then I knew I'd had enough,
Burned my credit card for fuel
Headed out to where the pavement
turns to sand
With a one-way ticket
to the land of truth
And my suitcase in my hand
How I lost my friends
I still don't understand.

They had the best selection,
They were poisoned with protection
There was nothing that they needed,
Nothing left to find
They were lost in rock formations
Or became park bench mutations
On the sidewalks
and in the stations
They were waiting, waiting.

So I got bored and left them there,
They were just deadweight to me
Better down the road
without that load
Brings back the time
when I was eight or nine
I was watchin' my mama's T.V.,
It was that great
Grand Canyon rescue episode.

Where the vulture glides descending
On an asphalt highway bending
Thru libraries and museums,
galaxies and stars
Down the windy halls of friendship
To the rose clipped by the bullwhip
The motel of lost companions
Waits with heated pool and bar.

But me I'm not stopping there,
Got my own row left to hoe
Just another line
in the field of time
When the thrasher comes,
I'll be stuck in the sun
Like the dinosaurs in shrines
But I'll know the time has come
To give what's mine.

Joni Mitchell quote

"I have this weird, incurable disease that seems like it's from outer space, but my health's the best it's been in a while, Two nights ago, I went out for the first time since Dec. 23: I don't look so bad under incandescent light, but I look scary under daylight. Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin like mushrooms after a rainstorm: they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral. Morgellons is a slow, unpredictable killer – a terrorist disease: it will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year. But I have a tremendous will to live: I've been through another pandemic – I'm a polio survivor, so I know how conservative the medical body can be. In America, the Morgellons is always diagnosed as "delusion of parasites," and they send you to a psychiatrist. I'm actually trying to get out of the music business to battle for Morgellons sufferers to receive the credibility that's owed to them." --

I didn't bother to find where this quote came from, but it is from 2010 and barry sent it to me when I told him that i think Court and spark and Hissing of Summer Lawns are simply the best.

James Tate Poem

Man with Wooden Leg

Escapes Prison

Man with wooden leg escapes prison. He's caught.

They take his wooden leg away from him. Each day

he must cross a large hill and swim a wide river

to get to the field where he must work all day on

one leg. This goes on for a year. At the Christmas

Party they give him back his leg. Now he doesn't

want it. His escape is all planned. It requires

only one leg.

from Le HUman Stain

"Eat that raccoon no matter what." 

- Nathan Zuckerman on the m.o. of a crow