Coincidence and Photography: Lost and Found

I took some pictures of a large caterpillar that has cocooned itself over our doorway, a kind of threshold over a threshold, silk above wood and aluminum. I can't find the disk with the photos to post, so instead of blogging about autumn yesterday, I decided to get some work done gathering publication information for the acknowledgments page of my forthcoming chapbook, Other Medicines, coming out in January from Redbone press.

Two of the poems were commissioned (thanks to the efforts of Patsy Hicks) by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for photographic exhibitions, so I had to look up titles and dates. One of the poems was for an exhibit titled An Eclectic Focus: Photographs from the Vernon Collection. Leonard Vernon and his (then) recently late wife Marjorie had collected thousands of photographs from 1840 to the contemporary era, and Leonard attended the reading on August 28, 1999, to listen to poems written in response to his collection. David Oliveira, Barry Spacks, Chryss Yost, and I read our poetic responses as visitors walked around and viewed the photographs, some with our poems beside them. Leonard Vernon was wonderful at this event, and it was clear how much for him the exhibit and our poems in response connected him with Marjorie. He smiled and spoke so fondly of her and of their collecting. I had the feeling that for him this exhibition was not about the pride of owning rare, often very famous work. The exhibition was about their love, and about their time together finding beauty. She lives on through this collection. They live on.

I was saddened to learn yesterday that Leonard Vernon had died the previous day, October 30th, his threshold to cross, I hope, back to Marjorie.

For me it also brought back warm memories of dear friends, of our poems and our work together, of an event that showed how art makes living possible.

Wall Shadow

—after a photograph by Josef Sudek (from the Vernon Collection)

A sign above the avenue is blank.
A window pulls the dark across its pane.
A single figure leans beneath the sign.
Everyone who should be here is gone.
The cobbles bear our shadows down the lane.
The grey walls grind the coruscating moon.
Something else was written on the sign:
“Everyone who should be here is gone.”
Moonlight pools beneath the figure’s robes.
The avenue keeps busy with its cracks.
The pipes bear out the effluent of hope.
Everyone who should be here is gone.
A window pulls the dark across its pane.
The cobbles bear these shadows down the lane.

The Dalai Lama Comes Down to Georgia

I saw no sign of Charlie Daniels or Richard Gere. But I did see the Dalai Lama himself, post W., if from some distance. I saw him once before, almost thirty years ago, when I lived just above the Tibetan Monastary in Berkeley, but this was from my window and he stepped out of the limo and was quickly escorted into the lovely wooden building.

At Emory, the Dalai Lama performed a sangha, and I went with sweet Amy. He entered while monks sang in the traditional throat style, sat, chatted and joked a bit in English, then started the lesson in Tibetan. Another man, seated near him in a business suit, interpreted, and we listened to a lesson on mindfulness and emptiness and achieving the kind of awareness that may lead with much practice to enlightenment.

This blog, however, composed as it is out of the fishnet of words, is firmly grounded in the samsara, so I won't burden you with a spiritual discussion just now. I would just like to put in your mind the image of half a dozen Tibetan monks in their maroon and saffron robes after the event eating pizza at a tavern across from the university. I remember wondering where they keep their wallets. Meanwhile, someone outside protested David Horowitz's Islamophobic events and people drank and watched as Byron Leftwich became the latest Atlanta quarterback/victim and Amy and I and her parents and our friend Anna sat and waited for food, or, in Anna's case, a ride.

We had come down from the mountain where Amy's folks now live, after hiking, moving boulders, killing a scorpion (my scorpio soul winced), buying and drinking fine wine (Buying='03 Sociando Mallet; drinking=Talley Pinot), eating great Thai food at N'ham in Alpharetta, driving and driving in the cooling autumn air and enjoying a fine weekend outside of wet, swampy Valdosta, where the drought has abated a bit of late. Om, mane padme, Om; Oh, dharma, keep on spinning. . .

George's Random Ten and the Dalai Lama

I refer you today to George's weekly random ten + 1 songs for a lesson in ultra-cool music history, because I'm off to see the Dalai Lama at Emory University Sunday morning. (If I have the chance, I'll try to talk him into putting up his own list next week, George. )

On not blogging

Is it because I have little to say? No. I wrote a blog and buried it, because instead of whining about a local political issue, I decided to make direct contact with someone concerned hoping to effect change more directly. We'll see how that goes. At any rate, I'll be talking about appropriate responses to Virginia Tech at the upcoming AWP Conference in New York, and I'll have more to say later.

I have a few other ideas, fits and starts of them, but I need some pictures for a couple of them.

Local band Ninja Gun is having success getting songs on Friday Night Lights. I'd give them some kudos, but I hate that word. So, ya'll will have to accept my mere congratulations.

Oh, and vote for Night Driving in Small Towns, our local Rolling Stone-approved indie/blugrass band selected as a finalist in zigzaglive's contest. Hit the "Vote for Bands" button and vote for their song "Cast Your Love Around." Do it now. Both of you.

October Already

and the Cubs are blowing it again and I can't really care too much for baseball as I used to when the Dodger's pitched and ran and I pretended to be Don Sutton or Claude Osteen or Bill Singer or Jim Brewer in the ninth twisting screwballs into Joe Ferguson's glove, or Davey Lopes stealing second or the Penguin (Ron Cey) or Steve Garvey hitting one out or Bill Buckner making the play at first base (as he did with great regularity before he became unfairly stigmatized for the one cursed play with the Red Sox). Manny Mota was the greatest pinch hitter ever (remember that old guy stealing home? Might be my favorite baseball moment), and Walt Alston managed the team like an old law professor waiting for the right answer. It was Vin Scully's fault, really, because I'd rather listen to the game on the radio than watch it, though I watched plenty, watched Al Downing give up an unasterisked 715 to Hank Aaron and was happy for them both, watched Steve Yeager stabbed by a broken bat and it scared me and scarred him.

But now the Dodgers have collapsed and the ex-Dodgers (Mets) even more gloriously and I don't know their names anymore, haven't since a few years after Kirk Gibson hit that one-legged homer out. I don't know why. Steroids? Selig? Players changing teams so often it's hard to feel the word "team" after baseball anymore? All of it? At any rate, you'll likely have to watch the world series without me. Mr. October's cameoing in bad movies and the game has lost any sense of grace.

My Beautiful Chanterelle: Art Deux

Cantharellus Cibarius

Photo by sensesworking

The good news: this was delicious tossed with pasta, butter, and garlic. I found this perfect chanterelle within walking distance of my house, across the street from a park where I'd found lesser examples of this fungus. It was just after a light rain and it fairly glowed, orange-peel bright and smelling typically fruity.

The bad news: I returned three days later to see how the smaller eruptions were doing, only to find that a construction company had untreed part of the property and laid it upon the holy ground, perhaps removing the rhizomal foundation the mushrooms need to survive.


Note: reports on mushrooms that I found and/or cooked represent my personal experiences, and in no way should be taken as recommendations for readers. This is not a guidebook. Eat wild mushrooms at your peril.

Art and Politics: "The Industrial Complex"

The Faculty Art opening last Monday featured many fine works by VSU faculty. The following piece by Michael Schmidt, one of my first new friends here, was for me the most striking piece.

Photo by Michael Schmidt (click photos for full size)

Oil in, bullets out? Bullets in, oil out? It depends on where you stand, how you read--left to right (English, western) or right to left (Arabic, Hebrew). Michael Schmidt's work features a melange of styles and materials, as he indicates on his web site, but the two most interesting are used motor oil and cast 50 caliber bullets. The oil is from all of us and represents our rapacious appetite. The bullets are molded from an actual spent round provided by a young soldier who will soon leave for Iraq again, if he hasn't reported already. (We hope he will return soon and safe, hopefully accompanied by most or all of our troops.)

Photo by Michael Schmidt

The bullets enter or leave from a vaginal, gothic-cathedral-style door that pierces the blue line, penetrates some watermark, exceeds a reasonable limit. Their whiteness violates the meaning of the word purity.

The oil in porcelain "styrofoam" cups drinks in your eye. It shines back, accusing. It's not subtle, not meant to be. It is, however, a beautiful sculpture. The cathedral door is too big, but barely large enough, as though the cups were once smaller, the factory walls wide and high enough. Everything now is squeezed, soon to be crushed perhaps. I also imagine bullets and oil both entering, filling the factory with the blood we refuse to see boiling down into our want for more and more, "honoring" our spirit of rapacity, of privilege, soon to go up in smoke.

Photo by Andrew Nuse

Mike also produces a lot of functionals, many embellished with old logos from oil and gas companies, many no longer in existence. They function as art. I call them post-oil retro pieces, because they already feel quaint and nostalgic, but they also suggest an apocalypse, like kitsch from the future come back to warn us that our thirst will make deserts everywhere, that the age of oil was some dream become myth. They make us remember the future.

Crying Game, Porcini style

Photo by Jamie Harmon/uberphoto.com

At twilight on the way to the Faculty Art Opening Monday evening, I spotted these two large fungi under some old longleaf pines. "Porcini," I said to myself, salivating, planning meals in my head, "Big ones!" I picked them quickly and headed off with my bounty, catching odd glances from students who must have thought I'd lost my mind (or that I'd hoped these might help me do so). I bore them proudly, however, arriving at the opening, entertaining numerous glances and, from friends, questions about what the hell I held and what the hell was I going to do with them. I patiently explained that these were porcini, worth about $40 a pound on the fresh market, and that I was going to eat them. They asked whether I might poison myself, and I explained that I knew which were poison, which weren't, and I wouldn't risk my life for a taste of amanita phalloides, the death cap, or any other liver killers. I enjoyed the art (more about that later, I'm awaiting another photo), talking to friends, chatting with my students afterward, and then taking these home for verification and an immediate place on top of my pizza. I Berenstain Beared these babies (If they look like porcini, if the smell like porcini . . . ). However, I noticed a certain amount of staining and the pore tubes, upon closer inspection under a lamp, were browner than normal. I decided to give it the definitive test--the taste test--so I sliced the smaller of the two up and sauteed a sliver in butter. It wasn't bitter, which was good, but it wasn't porcini, either. It was a Tylopilus, a boletus edulis lookalike. I put a little on my pizza anyway, and while it didn't detract, it didn't add much flavor and its texture was a bit grainy. No, this wasn't the choice dish I had expected, and I ended up discarding the rest of this bland date.


Note: reports on mushrooms that I found and/or cooked represent my personal experiences, and in no way should be taken as recommendations for readers. This is not a guidebook. Eat wild mushrooms at your peril.

Early Halloween Photo

A reason to look up once in awhile while foraging for mushrooms. This cluster of argiopes stretched their webs over a cluster of mushrooms in the lot beside my house, and I nearly walked into all of them. (I'm learning to appreciate the dangers of hunting and gathering.) Their prey is a rhinoceros beetle, mine, boletus edulis. We resolved the issue peacefully.


Note: reports on mushrooms that I found and/or cooked represent my personal experiences, and in no way should be taken as recommendations for readers. This is not a guidebook. Eat wild mushrooms at your peril.

Yes, We Have No B. Ananas

I found this warty mushroom growing at the base of a longleaf pine on the VSU campus. It's boletellus ananas, an odd bolete due to the presence of a veil remnant on its warty red cap, but it's a little dried out so the cap has dulled.



This shows the classic blue staining qualities that many boletes possess. Just behind them, drying porcinis, and just behind that, the base of a glass of cab and a sliver of my swiss army knife.

Last week I went to the Mostel estate and picked mushrooms with Aileen and Jane Whitehead (an Etruscan scholar). Most weren't edible, though one bolete was tasty sauteed in butter. We found two deadly destroying angels, too, but the highlight was a mushroom giant, the macrocybe titans, growing near their house (photo by the Mostels). These can grow to enormous proportions (larger than two feet tall) in Central America and Mexico, but in North Florida they tend to stop at dinner plate size. They are supposedly edible, but one commentator described their cooking smell as something akin to "dirty laundry," so we left it to sporulate.




Note: reports on mushrooms that I found and/or cooked represent my personal experiences, and in no way should be taken as recommendations for readers. This is not a guidebook. Eat wild mushrooms at your peril.

Reduxing the Zeitgeist

Movies, even mediocre ones, are being remade with greater frequency as our culture demands "new" entertainment without new ideas. We're no different politically.

As Iran unconscionably replaces Iraq in our warspeak, the nation prepares to replace a Bush with a Clinton again. I believe this will be a national mistake, not because she isn't qualified, but because she will merely employ the same old executive ideas (and their expert spin-sters) we've suffered through for a generation. She's essentially a Reagan Democrat, recently a Jesus-freak lite, all for big money and lobbying and executive power and free market solutions. She galvanizes the opposition because she is too like them for their own power-loving comfort.

Certainly she will mollify some on the left with standard centrist positions, but she'll take what she can get from W's excesses. She'll come back 50 steps from his 100 steps into crazy and consolidate power in the executive branch. She'll do better than W, but not necessarily different when it comes to power. She'll crony and spin. Support for the third Bush will crystallize around what will become hatred of all things Hillary, as the conservative hounds will bay mercilessly after the old Clinton scent. As much as I'd love voting for a woman to be president, I believe a vote for Hillary in '08 will result in President Jeb in '12. I hope I'm wrong.

We need new ideas, not yet another Poseidon Adventure.

An Itch to Scratch: Unintelligent Design, or Reducible Stupidity

Balls, the very testicle--that haphazard refugee from the body and its sterilizing heat--offer proof of the opposite of intelligent design.

This shifty pair, rather, proves hasty design:

trailer-park-engineer, duct-tape-spliced-extension-cord, tinfoil-rabbit-ear "entertainment system" design;

neophyte-deity-pulling-an-all-nighter-after-bingeing-all-weekend, hoping-to-pull-a-C- design.

What god except a punishing trickster would've--rather than ensconce the family jewels in, say, an irreducibly complex velvet-lined cooling system secure deep in an abdominal haven--hung these all-important procreative nuggets in a handy sack, providing easy, painful, and potentially emasculating access to dangers as varied as invading hordes, royals who like their singers permanently falsettoed, angry ex-lovers, and careless leg-crossers?

Testicles--those perfunctory dangling shape-shifting afterthoughts fashioned from leftover skin and wires exposed to all manner of nauseating abuses--are prime evidence of theologically shoddy design. I suppose Dr. Behe might say the Prime Mover--the Causus Ballus, if you will--was too busy fashioning the flagellum for bacteria to spend time on a proper house for our homunculi. So, Dr. Behe, I say nuts to your intelligent design, ballocks to your irreducible complexity.

Global warming feels like Fresno

Perhaps if global warming were described in this way, people would pay more attention to it.

Meanwhile, Dean begins perhaps the latest fall onslaught as it starts winding up in the mid-Atlantic. Will it be Nolan Ryan in his prime, or a Hoyt Wilhelm knuckler that floats around and dies at the plate? At any rate, I'll be checking the forecast, watching the satellite, wondering, worrying, thinking about the weird arcing blue light, the hum of power lines crashing, blowing out the transformers, watching the trees all night.

In California, we worried about earthquakes tacitly, distantly. Your disaster or relief comes instantly. Hurricanes come in like political campaigns, with a lot of noise and bluster, polls and forecasts, this sick anticipation and even disappointment should it fizzle, pure terror if it comes full strength. Global warming feels like Fresno. Global warming feels like junior high, bully on the corner you have to pass to get home.

Meetings

Not much to post about lately. The beginning of school is upon us here and every day is devoted to meetings. We're all wonderful. We're going to have to tighten our belts. The parking situation is a mess. Correcting the parking situation will be a mess. We have to do more with less. Growth. Attrition. Retention. Accountability, accountability, accountability, and more (fake) accountability. The missionstatementization of higher education is rampant and sitting in meetings on metrics and efficiency and infrastructure occur with increasing frequency. It's not that these things are all inherently negative or useless. Some of those things lead to positives: cool new buildings, a giant Starbucks, a bigger bookstore. It's just that what seems to get lost in all this kind of consideration is our students. Our students as individuals. That will, I hope, change Monday. School will start. They'll be looking at me wondering what the hell we're going to do all semester. And that's when it will finally be real again.

For All Those Lost

Fresno High School's class of 1977 will hold its 30th reunion this Saturday Night in Fresno, California. Circumstances don't permit me to attend, but I thought about going, so I looked up info on the alumni web site, perused a few pictures, read names I hadn't thought of all these years trying to raise a family, start a career, move to Salt Lake, Santa Barbara, finally the Southeast.

I'm thinking of Jerry Haydostian right now because his name isn't listed among the dead with old friends Kurt Pempek and Craig Jue. He isn't the only one missing, but he was as much a member of our class as anyone else. He moved around the corner from my parents' stucco tract home on Lafayette when we were still in elementary school. I knew him a little from the neighborhood, stingray bikes in summer, his shock of blond hair, his intelligence already clear in the creative ways he approached things, the way he talked, the way he looked at things. We became better friends in Jr. High-- Cooper with its low roofs, caves for locker rooms, Algebra with Shegeby, wood shop with Peterson ('rrrrrRRRR-ight! cut the horseplay!), English with Ms. Wofford. He was one of the smart kids. At FHS we joined Senate together along with Jim Bane and Paul Luby and Danny Morgigno, and we took German and his hair grew longer, but he was still that smart, friendly kid. He always made you laugh with his wry sense of humor and easygoing personality.

He also didn't let on too much about what was going on in his head, his confusions. He didn't quite fit in, not completely, not in Senate, he wasn't an athlete, and he didn't like to showboat. We all talked about girls, but I don't remember a particular girlfriend. We also once talked about a teacher we shared, a teacher who liked to have students over to his house, our German teacher, Mr. Roy, who told stories and made you feel intelligent if he was interested in you, and it was hard to imagine him as anything other than a fat old kraut, but he had illicit designs on the young men he invited to his house, and both Jerry and I were unfortunately objects of his predilection for young men. My own story is documented in a poem I published years ago, only remarkable for its sad banality. Jerry's story remains implied in the questions he asked me that day. He nodded a lot. He didn't say a lot. He didn't need to. Back then, confused as we would have been even in the healthiest of environments, the added confusion of Andre Roy's affections doesn't necessarily explain anything, but it added an unnecessary burden. Maybe more than most, though, Jerry was one of our classmates, and this is for you, Jerry.