No man is allowed to be the judge of his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.
James Madison in Federalist No. 10
Month: January 2024
Forced bulbs are a welcome tradition
This time of year, the fresh green is as welcome as the eventual flowers.
Vincent Katz and my little red journal
When I set about planning and packing for a week on the water last year, I knew I wouldn’t be bringing my laptop. The electrical power on the schooner was mostly from some powerful batteries and two small solar panels. We could charge our cell phones and had small lights in our cabins, but that was about it.
I did pack a Paris Review and a Harper’s magazine, should I feel like indulging in reading, but the heart of my “literary” life focused on a small red journal I had picked up a year or so earlier plus a few printouts of Vincent Katz poems that set a direction that has intrigued me.
Katz, like his father, the American painter Alex Katz, can look at mundane things in a seemingly flat tone that feels seminal.
Consider the line, “I wish I lived here but I do live here,” from “Francis Bacon.” It’s a feeling I know.
As he says in “Back on 8th Ave.”:
The job of the poet is not easy:
be utterly observant, tracking,
and to note down, in plain language,
with minimal emotional distortion,
what s/he sees.
For me, it had been ages since I’d sat down before a blank page and started off without any idea of where the words would be going. My usual journaling at least has a calendar full of events to catch up on, plus notes I’ve scribbled out, maybe even emails. And my more public writing has been things like this, with a purpose.
My goal was to fill the little notebook in a week. Quality or substance was not the measure. Just look and listen and try to be very much in the present moment.
It was a harder assignment than you might think. But it did provide much of the text for many of the posts you’ll be seeing this year.
Here are a few samples of what I entered:
looking for the obvious can be a challenge
~*~
Yellow house
behind a brown one
on a hill
flagpole and staircase
down to a wharf
the dreadful verses
you attempted
page after page
of aspiring youth
reached and fell
that stuff now is flatter
but more secure
likely no more profound
or less
don’t worry, Jnana, nothing’s happening
you’d think I could fill this small notebook with drivel in a week
but I’m halfway short
I did end the entries
[to be continued]
Hopefully, on an upcoming cruise in late summer.
A few thoughts spinning around Scripture
- Even if Biblical Scripture is essentially the “men’s minutes” of divine history, the women therein generally come off much better than the men – and whenever the women are named, there is growth in the church: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, etc.
- Because the male gender language has been inclusive, representing the universal, there is no English way for men to refer to themselves in the particularity of being male – no way, in other words, that we can distinctly represent the specifics of being male only. So just who has been more impoverished by this defect?
- When I get away from my emotions, I’m also far from my God … (God is love).
- Argument: It’s possible to do religion without faith, but impossible to maintain a mutually loving connection without faith i.e. trust. Thus, positive relationship exists with the Divine.
- Hosanna and Alleluia as universal expressions of awe and ecstasy.
- Hashem = “the unnamable name” = neutral.
- Adoni = lord = male.
- Elohim = breast = female.
- The idea of “casting spells” is that you can order God/the gods/spirits to do your bidding rather than the other way around.
- Zionism originated to save a language. That is, a language needs a place where it lives.
Paper bags star
Those were lunch bags.
Acid test poet: Anne Waldman (1945- )
Perhaps best known as a cofounder of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan as well as the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics each summer at the Tibetan Buddhist Naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado, Waldman has worked with many of the famed Beat poets a generation older in a life of experimental writing and social activism.
In preparing this post, I was surprised to find she’s only a few years old than me. She’s often seemed to be that much further ahead in the history of contemporary literature.
She first impressed me with a few poems in Disembodied Poetics, an annual review she co-edited. I liked the way the disparate elements danced, something in common with much of what I’ve written. Later, in her collected works, I was taken with the ways she employed repetition, something I had avoided as, well, redundant. My Preludes & Fugues, especially, are beholden to her on that front.
Kinisi 193
SO NOW
SLOW
PLOW
Get primed for a windjammer experience
It’s like camping, with the canvas over your head rather than a tent.
Peter tried to brace me for the, uh, unique quarters. And the pause when I mentioned taking a shower.
I had a snug berth, as you’ll see later. The only electricity on board came from some strong batteries and a small solar array.
Rather than a floating night club and hotel of a typical cruise ship, a Maine windjammer is small and laid-back. You even have to wash your own dishes.
As the windjammers’ association brochure says:
Unlike large cruise ships, windjammers have bunks and cozy cabins, not monster staterooms and 24-hour buffets. Windjammers are woody and compact below decks. Crew and guests live and work in close quarters. The ship’s galley and dining areas are like your kitchen at home – everybody mingles there.
The Maine experience dates from 1936, when Captain Frank Swift started offering adventurous passengers sailing opportunities formerly only available to private yacht owners.
Last summer I got to be one of them. It really was memorable.
Homemade turkey potpie
One of my favorite comfort foods, especially the way my wife creates it.
We were on hold – as in stuck – even with our money shrinking in the bank
Our gloating over our timing of selling our previous house at the giddy peak of a hot market soon darkened when we realized two nationwide tides were running against us as we tried to move ahead in our current dwelling. One was the soaring price of construction materials. The other, as inflation kicked in, was the erosion of the purchasing power of our working nest egg.
If it were only me here, I could pretty much survive quite nicely in two rooms. One of them was what I came to call my dorm, the quarters where I slept in one half and wrote in the other. The second chamber was the kitchen. That left our north parlor, with the video screen and two sofas, and the south parlor, as a guest room and storage.
When it’s been two of us, the space situation became more problematic, especially with just one small bathroom.
We still didn’t need the upstairs for much, except when others visited. We certainly didn’t want to pack in too much storage until the new roofing and reframing were done. Everybody we approached about the overhead project was booked out a year or two ahead, and most of them declined to commit to another. One who promised to the job then backed off for a season, so we waited, only to be ghosted in the end.
Whether it was just me here or maybe four of us fulltime, the overhead work and much more needed to be done. It couldn’t be put off forever.
In the absence of a dependable contractor, we did inch ahead on a few fronts.
One was a large garden shed that cost us half-again as much as it would have a few months earlier. I can joke that it’s my new barn, though it’s not red and is much, much smaller than the namesake for this blog. Still, it’s surprising what a difference it makes – almost like a garage without parking for a vehicle or two.
Another concern was a classic wood-burning cookstove that occupied the heart of the kitchen and was an inefficient supplemental heat source. Besides being a major weight on our sinking floors, it had a stovepipe feeding downward into our surviving chimney, which was also used by the furnace, a violation of current building codes. I saw the stove as a both fire and health hazard. It had to go. Distinctive it was, both as a liquor cabinet/bar and as a fun place to stash junk food and other treats for visiting family to raid, I’m glad it did find a new home, as I explained in Chief Doe-Wah-Jack’s Pride and Joy, June 10, 2022.
And then, as you may have followed here last year, we went ahead with some raised garden beds. I do wish you could have tasted some of the harvest, and I’m happy to repeat that the ravenous deer around here did not penetrate our improvised barriers, unlike the previous summer at the community garden.
Living in these conditions has carried a sense of camping. You know, as in not quite permanent. I haven’t even described our makeshift kitchen setup or the rain dripping inside windows or the cramped, windowless bathroom.
All the same, I can say I’ve never felt as much at home as I have here. Maybe that has something to do with the abundant natural light in the first-floor rooms. Or maybe with my life in general. Or maybe the lingering good vibes of Anna M. Baskerville. Or more likely, all three.
But that couldn’t go on forever. Repairs and renovation needed to be done, if only we could find an available superman. I mean, this is my fourth winter in this place and I wasn’t the only one aging. I could sense it in the walls, too.
Hope I’m not sounding whiny.
Jnana's Red Barn 