October 21, 2010. Thursday.
Situation: This morning Moi goes to a Mennonite store, says she can pick me up a new pair of good-quality rubber boots. When she gets there, she phones to tell me they don’t have any size 10. When I checked my shoe size on my old boots, I saw they were made in USA. “Must’ve been one of those products Wal-Mart told the manufacturers to make real cheap,” Moi says. “The boots at the Mennonite store are made in China now. Maybe that’s all you can get these days.” She tells me she’s seen some boots at a discount store that’s along a route I frequent, so I’ll try to stop in there sometime soon. I have to work tonight. I was just getting ready to take Mway for a walk, but Moi and Mway have just gone for a nap – I’ll have to wait till a little later. I go to lie down – fall asleep, when I wake up, it’s twenty minutes later than the time I wanted to take Mway for a walk. Have to rush now.
State of the Path: Set the sticks against a small hemlock near the pig pen to pee. A vine twines up it, its still green leaves ovoid with a distinctive tip, just one of the many plants I haven’t been able, or haven’t even tried, to identify. Look at what I used to think of as pin oaks, see a second small tree near the one I walk under, now I think of them as black oaks. At the narrows, a branch from a big locust has fallen across the path, must step over it. I cross the plank without thinking too much about it. Look at what I used to think of as black oaks, now think of them as pin oaks, the leaves maybe really do look different. Don’t see any New England or New York asters – maybe they’re gone now. Boneset gray like gray goldenrod, the latter growing everywhere more fuzzy.
State of the Creek: At log jam, note grasses in the water turning brown to black. Much of stream looks black, from rotting vegetation. Up by car tire, water getting low, filled with pin oak leaves.
The Fetch: Mway and I continue trampling down the goldenrod, I intentionally, she accidentally. Mway seems to really like the long crooked stick, maybe because of all the sticks we’ve used its most like the jointed leg of an animal. Before I say “that’s enough,” I even get swept away by Mway’s enthusiasm, a couple times taking the stick by its jointed end and spinning it around several times like a baton or a lasso, feeling like the Boy, a young man, enjoying the physicality of what I’m doing, for a brief moment.
4 comments:
Well, I’m back. Almost feel reinvigorated after this trip to a college in the Finger Lakes. I just have one comment I’d like to make, before I ask you how you’re research on the novel’s been going – just something I feel I should add to my sadly cursory portrait of Wade. After “my” trio finished our performance of what I suppose you could call a concert, we retired to the house of the professor who had hired us (an old friend of Wade) for wine and cheese. Randy had his camera with him, and because he and Tanya Wells are making some sort of documentary of him (and even have a grant for this), he was taking shots every now and then of Wade, for example, of Wade telling his story of how he had been bitten by the dog of a certain famous rock star (this happened when Wade went over to the rock star’s house to receive $1,000 payment as pay off for not being hired for a concert tour). After a while Wade got a call on his cell phone. It was from some musician hiring him for a gig. After the call, Wade made some sort of comment to the effect that he didn’t know who would be playing on that gig. He then added: “It doesn’t matter, as long as I get paid. I’m just a whore.” I immediately asked Randy if he got that down on film. He smiled and said “no,” and I said, with a considerable amount of vehemence, that he should have.
Anyway, let me know how you’re research is going and when you need the next volume of the encyclopedia. And please treat these books with as much care as you can.
Re-reading this blog since my last post of December 24, 2011, I see I could make another comment here. Wade’s professor friend, Graham Storms, is the head of the English department and a proponent of the New Formalism, of which Dana Gioia is the most well known practitioner. The first time we played this college a number of years ago Graham and I argued poetics over wine and cheese late into the night, while Wade listened with heavy-lidded raptness. (I think the only point I was really trying to make was that a poem didn’t have to rhyme to be good.) As the first few crackles of a snore crept from Wade’s slumped nose, Graham concluded, conciliatorily, “perhaps New Formalism -- and language poetry -- are the only new things to happen in poetry in the last forty years.” (I also recall, perhaps on a second trip to the college, that I once asked Graham what he thought was the hardest book in English to read, offering as choices Gravity’s Rainbow or Finnegans Wake. He chose the first, adding “of course, I like puns.”)
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