In Passing

"It's so quiet here."

he speaks softly as we stand

waiting for the elevator. He is slight,

There is an easy smile beneath his mustache,

the faintest whisper of an accent.

"It is like you say... a funeral? or a hospital?

I don't like that. I like it much louder."

He laughs, I smile.

"It is somber," I agree.

His gaze follows the lights,

as the humming elevator descends.

He seems hesitant, his eyes flick towards me,

his smile fades slightly

"Everything is changing.

It's all so sad."

There is silence

and the doors open

before I say

"Yes."

Harvest Season

November, driving south of town to a dinner party.
 Among sloping verdant hills in vespertine light
 punctuated by single crooked trees.
 Here and there a moss-ridden barn
 roofs a tractor picking itself to pieces
 since the Roosevelt administration.

I'm boring lately, I know.
 Describing the trees and the weather and tractors.
 But the starting is difficult, What is there
 beyond the sweeping clean the door-frame
 of the mind anymore?

The other day on my walk,
  beneath a sky filled by clouds heavy with rain
  between leaf-splatter beneath the trees,
  bursts of red and yellow like
  nature's best impression of a Pollock,

Two black-and-white cats lounged atop the broken Chevy
 gazing at me. In a word:
 witheringly.
 Totally certain that Yes, Man-Person,
 You Are The least Important Or Interesting Thing We Have Seen This Day.

Two houses down,
 still no clues concerning the
 out-sized rusting orb on the unkempt lawn,
 a kohlrabi starship the size of a boulder.

It's gone now.

I wanted to mine it for some kind of insight on the
 post-soviet post-west post-post-east
 post-everything life we're leading.
 Imbue it with something of the ineffable
 stuffed inside of that spaceship hidden in the
 garage of my ex-Kremlin neighbor,
 brought out only in times of dire uncleanliness.

...Or:

Maybe it was just a stupidly-designed septic tank
 caked not with timeless truth but with shit,
 like every septic tank.
 Maybe it was just a strange image
 that got etched into my head
 to come screaming back out when I'm 85
 and even crazier,
 force-fed anti-psychotics 'cause
 I won't shut up about Sputnik. 

But those damn cats! My self-esteem was shot.
 Those damn cats made me feel the lowest
 I have felt in months. Positive that these walks
 will yield  a pitiful mental crop
 and the tractors up there will go to rust.

Such that even in preparation for this party
 I have plumbed and scraped and grasped
 at the bottom of the closet of my mind
 for the last possible witticisms I might
 have misplaced there months ago,
 In the hopes that in a matter of moments
 I shall appear to be
 a Vaguely Interesting Person
 one encounters at a dinner party
 and not the dull weirdo I so often fear
 I've become.

Literanea

I have been utterly neglectful of you, blog. For that I offer my apologies and in recompense I have decided that this place will also archive a notebook of reading habits.

Since January, I have polished off a scant two and two halves books. I say scant, but in light of my reading and writing habits since June (which have been abysmal) my habits following the new year have been nothing short of stupendous.

I began with Steve(n) Milhauser's Pulitzer prize-winning 1997 Martin Dressler, a richly imagined if slightly anemic exploration of the American through Milhauser's brand of the fantastic. It was finely wrought, but in calling it anemic, I mean in reference specifically to a cast of shallowly drawn characters, or in the case of its titular hero, a kind of empty, chauvinistic shell (Although perhaps that was the point.)

As I've read just this novel and a smattering of other stories by Milhauser and all seem to fit into a semi-fantastical category which I might be willing to label a kind of Magical Realism Americana shared and created by James Tate or John Crowley.

Milhauser also seemingly felt the need to hammer the theme through your skull, page after page. Not that I'm opposed to open-ness (Think Vonnegut) but he doesn't exactly go for subtlety. The American dream is (chorus!) vapid, empty and endless.

Grade: B-

Next on the docket: Neal Stephenson's 1992 Snow Crash. Apart from some awkward plotting, dialogue and character development, a fantastic, intelligent, engrossing novel about power in the digital age, eerily prescient (For 1992) predictions. Stephenson has a firm grasp on and the ability to bring together a veritable library of subjects; digitization, Sumerian history/mythology, linguistics, computer science, economics, politics, etc.

Barring its few amateurish missteps (including a protagonist cheekily named Hiro Protagonist, who seems written intentionally as THE MOST BADASS GUY IN THE WORLD00 Indeed he even refers to himself as something similar at one point), it was such a compelling read I immediately went out and purchased the first book in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

Grade: A-

Working on now: Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind, which, like Snow Crash, suffers from a cloyingly too-perfect protagonist, as well as a near insufferable need to write damsels-in-distress and no other kind of female... might be the best book I've read yet. It even manages to pull off a framework of stories within stories within without giving me a headache, as Christopher Nolan did.

In a kind of high fantasy university level Harry Potter with inklings of god knows what else, Rothfuss has (after about 400 of 700ish pages) created a world I will be sad to leave at this novel's completion. Luckily, it's part of a trilogy.

Working Grade: A-

And 2010's Man-Booker prize-winning Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. The most frustrating and hopefully most rewarding book on this list. This historical novel recasts the world of the early years of Henry VII as seen through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell (Who, since watching "The Tudors" I can only envision as being played by James Frain.)

Despite choppy phrasing and the occasional murky passage, Mantel displays moments of real beauty and displays prowess with her meticulous research. Further, she does not hold the reader's hand as she leads them through 1530s England, but rather expects them to keep apace with cultural and historical references. (ie, if you're a history snob you'll probably enjoy it.)

Working Grade: Too early to say.

Suburban Elegy IV

There are all these children screeching
in the park next near my home
and I worry that soon,
I might be morally obligated
to make sure they're not dead.

Gandhi

If Gandhi were alive, I would like to sit with
him on our porch. swing I would invite him to smoke
a little weed, but he would politely decline.
I would resist the urge to say C'mon man,
it's not a fucking porterhouse. Instead,
I would nod and gaze out at the harvest moon.
Eventually, the tension would build and Gandhi,
in his affable robed manner,
would ask me what was wrong,
but at that moment, there was was no course
but for me to say Oh, I'm fine.
In part because Gandhi seems like a genuinely nice guy
and who'd want to unload all their problems on him?
But also because discerning the list of what's wrong in my life
is like trying to mow the lawn in the middle of a snowstorm,
it's a goddamn frustrating mess that very rarely makes much sense.
But, knowing Gandhi, he would suspect this, in his
perceptive robed manner. In return, he would
just smile at me and say he'd changed his mind,
could he please have a bit of bud? and I'd tease him
about it, and then we'd sit and stare up at the burning moon,
silent for hours.

Kites

My great-grandfather
was widely regarded
as the Arnold Palmer of kiting.
He was a world-renowned expert on kitemaking
and on the intellectual history of kite-patenting.

(Which I suppose must be a vast and
relevant area of study.)

He was also, in his time,
an advertising Vice President for Kodak-Eastman
after working his way through college
as a Magician on the Vaudeville circuit, a hobby which
he later recanted as falsification and deception.

(Though I wonder if he ever thought the same of
Advertising.)

He and his wife,
my great-grandmother,
a warm, kind woman
with a penchant for cocktail-hours
and tautologies

(and of whom my memories are sadly hazy,)

would travel the world
collecting tribal masks
for some purpose or another:
solemn sentinels warding off
invading mildew from posts
along the staircase.

In my last, feeble memories of him,
I am twelve and he is hunched over,
I am giggling and his moustaches gently droop,
his withered fingers curl around a pencil,
writing down a grocery list.
His failing ears
cause him to mistake 'Corn Chex'
as 'Corn Check,'
a phrase repeated
dutifully.

(a mistake we don't have the heart
to correct.)

His wife is
only recently deceased,
something which seems to have left its mark
in a quiet corner of his heart,
its loneliness settled even in
those careful fingers.

Kites, though. what a wonderfully silly interest.

Koi

There is a thin copper pole
from which our plentiful rain
drips off the gutters of my parents' roof
into a barrel sliced in half.
My father got this idea somewhere,
probably a gardening magazine or Bob Villa,
to fill this barrel
like a makeshift fishbowl
with two or three twenty-five dollar Koi.
Every few weeks, these Koi,
which should theoretically grow
in proportion with their surroundings,
instead grow far too large
and eventually float stomach up
to the top of the water.
When this happens,
A riot erupts in my confounded father's mouth,
"Dagnabit!"
"Fuckin A!"
before he goes back to the pet store,
forks over at least fifty dollars for more Koi
and once more plays the role
of their confused and bumbling God.