Edmunds Township
Month: January 2024
Sometimes things just don’t add up
It’s one of those days when I can’t put two and two together as one.
Here these go again
The random notes in no particular order continue:
- Did college recruiters ever come to my high school? We weren’t elite and we weren’t any of the other demographics they were hot for. How about yours?
- Our high school guidance counselors did little more than sign you up for a draft card, as far as I can see.
- Genji was a definite historical character.
- Argentata chard … doesn’t taste like chard … hardier and cleaner than spinach.
- Gentrification versus decay.
- An inept lover, too charming by his very incompetence, unintentionally funky, nothing more than some everyday world seen through myopia. So why am I bothered?
- I love some of the drone videos filmed around here. But definitely not all.
- And then we learn that the mayor’s involved. As we said in the news biz, this story has legs.
- Yes, I remember Hudson, it’s up in the Cuyahoga Valley, a lovely New England style village not far from the Cleveland Orchestra’s summer home.
- Some writers place most or all of their plots in a particular locale, usually a big city or perhaps a state. Just never mine.
Homemade bagels
I get to sample the results of many experiments around here.
Acid test poet: Aram Saroyan (1943- )
My first encounter with concrete and minimalist poetry came as an art exhibit in the late ‘60s. Maybe I already knew of otherwise traditional verse presented typographically to represent a visual image on a page – a vase or bird, perchance – but this time, the words themselves took on an independent visual wonder. Think of Robert Indiana’s famous LOVE as a cube of giant building blocks.
The writer I most appreciate in this field is Aram Saroyan, the son of a famed Depression-era novelist. Aram came to fame at age 20 with a one-word poem:
lighght
which became a source for right-wing scandal when it won a $750 award from the National Endowment of the Arts. As conservatives charged, it wasn’t spelled right and it wasn’t a real poem anyway. Things got ugly.
Others, me included, find it a vibrating both in the thought and the image. If that silent “gh” adds something to the sense of the word, either as illumination or as featherweight or even carefree, why shouldn’t two intensify the sensation?
It revives that wonder and puzzlement we’ve all felt, but many writers, I think, more keenly, when we first encounter many quirks of the English language but then later glaze past.
In this vein, Saroyan also has a playful
aaple
as another entry.
His small collection, Pages, has traveled from one side of the continent to another with me. A downside of these works is that they don’t work at an open mic or featured reading. They really do belong to the page.
For my own ventures along these lines, check out Sun Spots and Drumming at my Thistle Finch blog as well as the weekly Kinisi entries here at the Red Barn.
Kinisi 194
Where do fruit flies come from
even in the dead of winter?
Time to meet her, the Louis R. French
So who was Louis Robbins French?
Father of the three sons
who built this in South Bristol, Maine
The French is 101 feet overall, 65 feet on deck, with 19 feet of beam, as the brochure proclaims. She draws 7.5 feet with a full keel. A proven vessel in all conditions, she is a nifty and quick sailor, having won the Great Schooner Race many times. The French has also participated in recent Tall Ships gatherings in Boston. It spent part of its life based out of Lubec just south of Eastport.
the French was largely stripped and gutted
and rebuilt for passengers
what’s left?
As my buddy Peter grinned at me at the end of our week:
“Your first love. You never forget.”
MICE contradance
That’s Moose Island Contras Etc., a very fine traditional country dance band with a very fine caller. We do have fun around here.
Hard to believe, but it’s really happening
With a sense of despair regarding the roof project and our lack of a contractor on the horizon, we went ahead and set about erecting raised garden beds for what would be my third summer of dwelling here. We would try to leave some space for a contractor to get at the house, should we ever, ever, find someone.
During one of the inevitable conversations with passers-by while installing the garden and its fencing, a trusted neighbor mentioned that she had just had some carpentry done by a former student, someone who had returned home after living and working away. She gave us his name and phone number, and an introductory conversation followed.
Yes, he could do the project, and he thought in could start at the end of August. I was startled when he said that was the upcoming August, not a year off. Could it truly be?
Naturally, there were delays while he wrapped up some other commitments, but we did find ourselves in a stunned state of disbelief when work finally began in earnest at the beginning of this past October. We finally had a contractor who not only showed up on the morning he promised, but also on the dot of the hour.
He hit the ground running, methodically, precisely.
At the heart of our big project is a new roof on the house. Not just the asphalt shingling, which itself has needed replacement – we could have found someone to do that – but the actual shape of the supporting rafters themselves. To gain much-needed interior space, the walls on the second floor are being raised. That structural work’s the complication. And how, as you’ll see.
When we were considering making an offer on the house, we were told to check out the rafters for signs of charring, a consequence of the 1886 fire that destroyed the canneries, wharves, and downtown. Sure enough, ours was one of the homes suffering damage though left standing.
A few weeks before starting on the renovation, our contractor stopped by with his mentor slash consultant for a closer look. More concerning, from their point of view, was the lack of a ridge beam. The rafters from each side were simply mitered together. In addition, they were further apart than current coding would permit.
Our project would be taking place in two phases – the back half of the roof last fall and the front half in the spring. Without a ridge pole, there was nothing to hold up the remaining half and nothing to support the new raised framing.
You’ll discover where that leads.
It’s been what you might call a zig-zag path
My professional life didn’t follow the conventional course, where the goal was to land on a major metropolitan daily. If not the New York Times, then the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, or the down the line from there. What were also called “destination” newspapers, with decent pay and more focused work in contrast to the sweatshops in smaller communities, or what are now called markets.
I had some near misses, but my route instead led me into places that remain largely unexplored, at least as far as literature or public awareness are concerned.
In my case?
- Binghamton, New York, along the Susquehanna River and the Southern Tier of the Allegheny foothills. What I encountered there appears in Pit-a-Pat High Jinks and, with a heavy New York City connection, Subway Visions.
- The Poconos of Pennsylvania, when I took off for a few years in a monastic setting based on yoga practice and back-to-the-earth community. This is the foundation of Yoga Bootcamp as well as portions of Subway Visions.
- Fostoria, a railroad crossing in the flat but very fertile farmland of northwest Ohio. Gives rise to Prairie Depot in Nearly Canaan and to the opening novella in the Secret Side of Jaya. And, personally, the bride in my first marriage.
- Back to Bloomington, this time not as a student but as a public policy research associate make that social sciences editor at Indiana University. My experiences as an undergraduate frame Daffodil Uprising and What’s Left, while those as college staff feed into Nearly Canaan and the middle novella of the Secret Side of Jaya, both extrapolated to the Ozarks in Arkansas.
- Yakima, Washington. It’s the Promised Land in Nearly Canaan and the final novella in the Secret Side of Jaya.
- Dubuque, Iowa, along the Upper Mississippi. Adds some detail to Daffodil and What’s Left. Personally and professionally, it was a disaster.
- Warren, Ohio, in the Rust Belt. Hometown News. And how!
- Baltimore, Maryland, my base as a field representative for the Chicago Tribune’s media syndicate. More detail for Hometown News.
- Manchester, New Hampshire, and later commuting from Dover an hour to the east. Revisions to the manuscripts and earlier versions.
- And now, Eastport, Maine, in supposed retirement.
Curiously, my professional locations before Baltimore all infuse my fiction. Strangely, I’ve never written about Dayton, where I grew up, or the places later, at least as fiction. Poetry is another matter altogether.
Jnana's Red Barn 