Inside the bowl, the two goldfish are making a Pisces sign, head-to-tail
and very still. Penelope sits and peers into their world. There is a little
sunken galleon, a china diver in a diving suit, pretty stones and shells she
and her sisters have brought back from the sea.—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Bishop Arts District, Dallas, Texas
You’re living in your own Private Idaho
Living in your own Private Idaho
Underground like a wild potato
Don’t go on the patio
Beware of the pool
Blue bottomless pool
It leads you straight, right through the gate
That opens on the pool—-The B-52s, Private Idaho
Dallas, Texas
“Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.”
― D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
The bartender pouring the absinthe, note the clear green color.
Pirate’s Alley Cafe, New Orleans
I’m not a very neat, organized person – I live in a constant battle with chaos and increasing entropy. I’m a Marie Kondo failure.
This failure does not only apply to the real world – but to the digital one as well. Still, I try.
I have been cleaning out old computer files, found on a dizzying collection of old hard drives and USB sticks. I try the Marie Kondo test – if it brings joy, I keep it, otherwise I throw it out (delete). I don’t delete much. I do come across a treasure or two, though.
Yesterday I found a reference to a website I had forgotten about that used to bring me joy – and I am glad to find out it is still there and think I’ll visit it some more. This is an old streaming music program, produced from Kansas Public Radio, based in Lawrence, where I went to school. That is surely how I stumbled across the program, though I don’t remember.
It’s called The Retro Cocktail Hour and it features… stuff you don’t hear everyday. Let me see if I can find a description…. Ok… from the Facebook Page:
The Retro Cocktail Hour serves up the music that’s “shaken, not stirred” every Saturday at 7:00pm Central on Kansas Public Radio stations. Pour the Mai Tais and join in for two hours of exotica, crime jazz, bossa nova, Now Sound, space age pop, groovy soundtracks, Bollywood weirdness and other incredibly strange tunes. Hosted by Darrell Brogdon. Visit http://www.retrococktail.org/ to stream shows from our program archive.
Think Mad Men. I love to listen to this stuff. It is so cool and so uncool at the same time. I’m not old enough to remember hearing this stuff but I’m old enough to have heard the echoes.
So make yourself a tray of Martinis and kick back and listen to an archive or two. If you want one to start with, try the All Exotica Show from January 19. From the show – “Exotica is the fantasy music of the South Pacific and the Orient, music of a make-believe Shangri-la, white sand beaches, warm breezes, and tropical libations.”
It doesn’t get any better than that.
“But in the dynamic space of the living Rocket , the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled…’Meters per second ‘ will integrate to ‘meters.’ The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It never did fall.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Fence around the campus near my work. With remaining wood that has grown into the fence.
The campus where I work is surrounded by a wire-mesh fence. I had been ignored for decades and was, in many places, covered with various vines that had grown up and expanded until the wire was covered with green.
One day, years ago, too many years ago, a coworker approached me with a request. He was part of a naturalist group that was working to remove invasive species of plants from Dallas and the areas around. There were a couple of nasty species (unfortunately, I don’t exactly remember which ones) living on the fences of the campus. “The berries are attractive to birds and they spread the plants all around,” he said. He asked me to see if I could get the landlord to remove the plants. I did my best, but nothing ever came of it – for a long time.
Finally, last year a crew appeared and removed all the plants. I think they did it more for fire prevention than environmental reasons… but they cut them down, hauled them off. But it had been so long, the thick, tough wood of the vine stems had grown into and around the wires and they could not remove all of it without breaking the wires.
So now, when you drive by you see these odd patterns of old vine wood scattered across the diamonds of galvanized steel wire. I guess they will eventually rot and fall off – but I’ll bet that’s going to be more than a few years.
Wood grown into the fence.
But those in the mix know what blood tastes like.
—-Nancy M. Michael, Sea Change
Approaching Storm, Dallas, Texas
I used to take a month each year to comment on and link to short stories published online.
Short Story Months:
I haven’t done that for a while, but have been thinking about it. That doesn’t keep me from reviewing them one at a time. Last year, I wrote about Driven Snow by Nancy M. Mitchel. The author commented on my blog entry (with the surprising revelation that the story was true and the woman survived). She mentioned that she had another story on the Akashic book website, Sea Change.
Go read it – a short, pithy read. Then you can come back and read the rest of what I wrote.
It’s of an interesting construction in that the protagonist isn’t directly involved in the action. Stories like that are cool because there are two stories – the main, observed action… and the reaction of the observer. It’s quite a feat to accomplish this in so few words.
“Will Postwar be nothing but “events,” newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Deep Ellum, sometime ago
Out at sea a single clarinet begins to play, a droll melody joined in on after a few bars by guitars and mandolins. Birds huddle bright-eyed on the beach. Katje’s heart lightens, a little, at the sound.
—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Travelling Man, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
