[JULY 2016.]
TO DO
• Vanity
• Chasing after the wind
Pulse flow
On the theory that life was going to pot, we took an unplanned 24 hours in Monterey. R. is now more interested in the natural world, will stare with her parents at sardines, mackerel, anchovies, lookdowns stamped from tinfoil with their spines showing, leopard sharks; though for some reason, what she most enjoyed was a piece of live-action theater on the history of the bay. Ohlone reed boats, Chinese immigrants night-fishing for squid with lanterns in baskets, collapse and recovery of sardines.
I was surprised by the recovery story (partial, temporary) of the Colorado River delta. (Journalism, journalism, video produced in the way of videos.) Old memories there, hiking through ten miles of gully until you get to the stream, because the stream is where the general hostility of things abates and you can stop for a while. Parts of the gully itself can also work, if enough rainwater collects for cottonwoods or sycamores to grow; but a stream is better.
I have to-read list of Analytical Work around this: Beyond the Hundredth Meridian; Cadillac Desert; Dead Pool.
The paintings I saw in L.A. are still in front of me—when I’m driving, say, in place of the road. The milliners are still on the clock.
Geoffrey Hill, To the High Court of Parliament
November 1994
Where’s probity in this—
the slither-frisk
to lordship of a kind
as rats to a bird-table?England—now of genius
the eidolon—
unsubstantial yet voiding
substance like quicklime:privatize to the dead
her memory:
let her wounds weep
into the lens of oblivion.
Strange week for his death; I had been thinking about this poem in particular, with the UK taking itself apart. One of the great, mournful questioners into the nature of that country (PJ Harvey the other).
