Jay Wrote

I think I skimmed a Time Magazine article about Samuel Beckett’s play in the 1960s.  Probably a black and white photo and a headline using the label “absurdist.”  Yeah, the play where nothing happens. I had pushed my way through a Kafka and Camus or two long, long ago. No Beckett. So my expectations were fuzzy and not high. With some sense of adventure and a feeling that “this is something I should see, even if it is dreadful” I made plans with my English major friend, Mike. I decided to listen to two podcasts before seeing The Guthrie Theater’s production with Jason Strathairn this fall. They were both helpful to understanding, understanding of the context, the spirit of the play.  Most importantly I was advised:  “Don’t try to understand the play; just experience it.” What a great approach!  I experienced great theater, though perhaps not a great play, not in the traditional sense, where plot, character development, action, language, beauty, humor and insight...

My Brother Knows Nabokov * When with close listening we draw meaning from disarticulation his constricted life expands and rolls along in curves and cuts   as alluvial streams trace through the silting out  of memories and plans, of Bond movies watched on DVD,  the nightly news of ’76, his two flights west and Alice Cooper lyrics.  Broken twigs and latticed leaves tumble loose  pressured by his very certain reveries of hard-edged, dark, unbounded efficacy.  Today:   His guilty premonition  of the oil train explosion,   a smoldering conspiracy,   just across the border. This tragedy rises, not  from a loss of meaning, but in the raging  floods of consequence. *Vladimir Nabokov wrote about parents caring for their schizophrenic son and “Referential mania” where he      “imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and  existence…. Clouds in the sta...

  It Could Have Happened Like This… December, 1959. Betty and Truman on opposite ends of a lime green polyester couch at a party in The Village, nodding in angular bebop time with an eyes-closed piano player who danced a nervous shuffle in his pork-pie hat. Capote yawned: “Betty my dear, do you think that I should fly to Provence with Jackie Kennedy? Or take the train to see that bad boy in Kansas?” Behind smudged glasses, his eyes strayed as a well-muscled boy tangoed an empty tray through the crowd. Betty kicked at him with a red pointy-toed shoe. “Damn it, Truman, first fetch me another drink. Two olives, lime twist and just a rumor of vermouth.” Truman rubbed his sore ankle, rolled off the settee and careened a rolling stumble across the room. Martini in one hand, Old Crow and Lucky Strike in the other, Capote returned, swayed and hiccuped back to her: “Cannes or Kansas, Betty?” Betty sipped in the smoky party, twirled the glass between her fingers, “Kansas, Truman, Kansas. For...

A Rumor That in Danville Dowsers Drown Skeptics   May be a lost Kinsey title Slipped from his hunting coat pocket The kind of whiskey breath intelligence Shared when striking tents At the Tunbridge World’s Fair. ( Leland Kinsey: Vermont’s late poet, farmer, carpenter, logger, sugarmaker, Morgan horse trainer, printer, and teacher of birding, canoeing and astronomy. His "The Immigrant’s Contract" imagines the truth of a fateful flood that brings deep violence to the penstock, smugglers struggling over the Notch and sailing to Cuba, the burning of mummies to power pulp mills and old temptations in Tunbridge. His family farmed for 200+ years in NE Vt near where my mom grew up. )

  Blood Poisoning JFK and Jackie are in the news, game show hosts and soaps,  but without the Maytags and Mercuries, their profiles of luck, success and beauty  beyond what boys could achieve or girls imagine. We catch a scent of distant threat and hunker under desks  and hear about oriental dominoes  and missiles south of Miami.   Every May a repurposed army truck rumbles down South Street  with a monster fan mounted on its cab waving back and forth,  blowing storms of DDT into elm trees in a failing war against the gypsy moth.  We run alongside and it was an early Fourth of July,  especially when we heard the sonic booms  of F4 Phantom jets streaking toward a MIG-free coast.   I still see planes crashing in my dreams. The dads, the uncles, the village cop, the Boy Scouts’ Sergeant Major,   the Peyton Place- exile guidance counselor  the pastor and the priest all have much to say.     We...

  Three Cold Holsteins Three down Holsteins  before the first dark milking of March the oil tank echoed empty overdue assessment tacked on the milk house door frayed hemp rope reached from the shadows hung over the rafter stronger than spring eight inches short of sunrise .       Note:  from dark episodes in a largely idyllic childhood, recollected in my Sutherland Falls Survey reminiscence.

Flashing Negatives  Mississippi, south-bound at summer solstice  endorphins wheeling  eyes down  sensing  without seeing:        a loss in the leaves        a disappearance  and again        a break in the phone line        an absence  and again        a topped-off light pole        a vanishing  and again  and again       and now,        a flashing eclipse in a bough.  The gorge’s green palisade drops  and I am jarred because  a high-looping stone’s throw  west of my shoulder,  wings are beating my cadence and keeping pace.  That fierce-eyed, lovely, troublesome symbol spirit  casting performance art in raptor shadows.  Dr. Kramer (Captain of the Carl Jung) called:       “I’ve got those m...

of what sacrifice Should you grasp that desiccated rib of basketry  from some high and rocky shelf or commodify a shard with camera; take too the stony yellow dust  that abrades emerging gasps at birth and colors each breath of prayer.  In time’s fading light  scuff another’s memory or echo  disperse it like spores from a puffball; your steps like stitches  that pierce and hold and sunder. A rock.  A village. A ruin. JW (bouncing off Gertrude Stein) LET US DESCRIBE.         Let us describe how they went. It was a very windy night and the road although in excellent condition and extremely well graded has many turnings and although the curves are not sharp the rise is considerable. It was a very windy night and some of the larger vehicles found it more prudent not to venture. In consequence some of those who had planned to go were unable to do so. Many others did go and there w...

Appreciation: Galaxy Express 555 (Christopher Farstad) “Can you hear the real me?” is a question which is not quite heard in the improvisational soundscape performed Thursday at the Khyber Pass.   The computer generated downpour and hail-storm yielded to quadraphonic waves crashing on Brighton Beach.   The amusement park there is closed but loose ride parts and flapping signs sing with the wind and animated orchestrated pipes and valves ask the question:   Where is the Lizard King? Electric organs breed with birdsongs that haunt this unseen movie’s soundtrack before the Yamaha electrosaxophone stirs up Zappa-esque but guitar-less feedback. Does it matter if Christopher tells the truth about not playing the sax?   Hard to say.   That’s a problem with electronica - if there is skillful intonation, can anyone identify it?   But this music is not about tunefulness, not when your overheated wookie cries elicit eruptions of hilarity...

Morning Moves A shadow dances the foxtrot among this morning's leaves trading and chasing partners,  the erratic monarch and ever-shifting sun king.