Out the side of my house, the long hayfield that lies between my lawn and the gray house next door lies slain. The first cut of this hay season was Monday. At about five in the evening I cracked open the basement door for the breeze and lay down a moment on the couch to watch a documentary about Mongolian camel drivers Read the rest of this entry »
Dr Thomas Hargrove was kidnapped by the Columbian rebel group FARC and held for ransom for eleven months. Almost from the moment he was taken, a group of people — his wife, his brother, his neighbor, his children, his neighbor’s children — galvanized around his rescue. Twice, ransom sums were raised and rendered. One day, for no clear reason, the FARC released him. He walked home to Calli. He walked in on his wife, who was on the phone with his brother. Walked in on the neighbor who was firing up the barbecue to cook some t-bone steaks she’d bought and put away for him — not because she expected him there, but because the ritual of preparing a meal for him consoled her. Read the rest of this entry »
This is my second blog; the first one is Discipline Deficit Disorder. “DDD” is a place I park my fiction; it is subtitled, “Shouldn’t you be working on something?” Two things about this blog here: its title reduces to the acronym T’DAI, which serendipity I discovered only after the fact. And its subtitle (“Go on about your business; don’t mind me”) is of a piece with the subtitle of my other blog: both express my impulse to divert the attention of any casual browser away from whatever might be discovered in their pages. I contemplate both subtitles and soon I see: I have some kind of problem with getting caught. 
Read the rest of this entry »
Hey, look:
from www.vimeo.com posted with vodpod
This is “the new short film by Blu: an ambiguous animation painted on public walls. Made in Buenos Aires and in Baden (fantoche). Music by Andrea Martignoni; produced by Mercurio Film assistant, Sibe.”
What a freakin’ gorgeous day Saturday was! A bonus day – it was supposed to be rainy and chilly, and instead it’s been absolutely beautiful outside. The snow is utterly gone at last, the grass is coming up thick and bright, the apple trees are in bloom, and so are the dandelions. Dandelions grow so thickly around here this time of year that it is easy to overlook their distinctive characteristics. But according to World Weeds: Natural Histories & Distribution, by Holm, Doll, Holm, et al., Read the rest of this entry »
I am not the first person to imagine that U-Haul’s ”Adventure in Moving”TM is quite possibly the loudest misfire in American branding. But I bring it up here because I am in the midst of moving, myself, and I could use a chuckle about now.
I hate moving. Adventures or no (and I much prefer NO), moving simply sucks. And I speak with some authority on this question. I have moved twice a year every year since September, 2003. All that’s going to come to a feathered edge pretty soon, though, because I just bought myself a place that I will not have to move out of. I am DONE with landlords, DONE with leases, DONE with not-doing what I want to do with the space I live in 9 months of the year. Read the rest of this entry »
I just found out an old, old former friend is on Facebook. I am on Facebook, too. So I friended her. I wonder if she’ll answer me.
If she didn’t, I would understand; it’s been thirty years since we were friends. We were students at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Pope Paul VI had just died. Then his successor died too, about 8 minutes after becoming Pope. Jim Jones and his bunch had just dosed themselves. We were in New York. There was a newspaper strike, so our courses were taught by otherwise idle Practicing Professionals. Read the rest of this entry »
I need a place to put stuff. Circumstances conspire. I witness people behaving well, or badly. I find things, lose things, choose among options. I read good stuff. Or I re-read good stuff. Or I hear an excellent lyric. I see something that says it all. Or I make a mess, some of which is salvageable, even promising.
Sh*t happens. I need to write it down or paste it somewhere. Pictures. Found objects: sounds, footage, bits of art. I need a place to keep this stuff. My mind is not as limber as (I once thought) it once was. Not as sticky. Or the shelves are shorter. Or something. Anyway, I need to collect this stuff somehow, somewhere, in a way that won’t get away from me.
If I don’t collect this stuff, I’ll lose it. But also, I like collections in their own right. I like the order that asserts itself. I like the way that grouping a passle of disparate objects forces them all to turn their common credential to the sunlight, like matching badges pinned to the undersides of their lapels. I like the patterns generated by juxtaposing instances that seemed initially to have absolutely nothing in common except my attention. I can even make entirely new moments by tossing the detritus of elapsed moments together in a big …collecting place.
I spend a lot of time online, so I figure I might as well collect stuff here.
Recent Comments