I was surprised to discover, having moved north from French-Catholic Louisiana, where I experienced three distinct types of Mardi Gras celebrations, that St. Louis residents liked to say they had the second-largest Mardi Gras celebration in the country after New Orleans, as if it was inevitable, based on historical ethnicity.
In the digital age, something strange has happened to people’s perceptions of their own walking-around knowledge. Perhaps they feel the walking-around has been accelerated and covers more ground.
Stanley Crawford married RoseMary, an Australian journalist, on Crete; they moved to Ireland, where they had their first child, then returned to San Francisco in the late sixties. Things were so tumultuous there, he says, that when friends invited them to northern New Mexico for a visit, they stayed.
Herzog is not my “favorite” director, but I have followed his art and career with interest. Even as a fan it is sometimes hard to know if he is being brilliant in this, banal, or manipulative.
Reading John Balaban’s poems and translations, you gain the camaraderie of poets as far-flung as Basho, Li Po, Anna Akhmatova, American John Haag, Georgi Borrisov, Bulgarians Kolyo Sevov and Lyubomir Nikolov; epigraphs by Homer, Polybius, Brecht; the people who wrote, remembered, and sang folk ca dao, and the many characters who live to speak again, from Ovid, miserable in his exile in Tomis, to Root Boy Slim, “lead singer and composeur for his Sex Change Band.”
I go my own way, but my kids are back to school or off on an internship now, and with that, the season is officially over for me, and all for the best. It is time to get up off the couch, work, walk, be ambitious, and take in the sun. To transition from a Christmas-stocking diet back to apples, Napa cabbage, lean proteins, and water.
After a time the bin contents blurred into a single substance the color of meat hash. I grew up with food insecurity and unlivable housing, and the deep misery of poverty is always accessible to me.
Never ask your children or close friends to name or represent you. My son, taking his cue during our conversation from trash bins at the curb, said my classical-poet name could be Bald Trash Can. Later, a friend of thirty years said it should be Dirty Worn-Out Apartment Dweller.
As a child of an ironic, counter-cultural age I had to find my way through comic appearances to serious intent and personal bravery. Tommy Smothers was maybe the first entertainer I understood in this respect.
A real tree is a sacrifice, a once-living being nailed to its stand, bleeding sap, a star on its crown. The artificial tree has no smell, no bark, no particularity. It never faced a north wind or nurtured a cardinal.
Rocks and stones are reality agents, signifying only their own existence. Irreality stems from perception, thought, and language. In this respect, stones are easy; people and their choices are hard.
Some chairs are sons of bitches, of course, and deserve what they get. But so many chairs say, “Rest in me, weary one. Rest your back against mine.”