Recognition

It's like seeing sky after years in a closet. Suddenly it's there, and you know it's sky, and it can't be anything else but sky, and there is absolutely nothing better. That's what it means to experience a work of art made by hands born to the task. Often the finished product is far from perfect: so it is with the movie I watched tonight, after quitting a piece of hack work with not a convincing moment in it. It makes little sense to say that someone was born to make movies: it's like saying a cat was born to curl up on my lap. But certain sensibilities do find their finest expression, today, in making people move around and make sounds in front of a camera and some lights and a team of people holding their breath until the scene is over. Tavernier is a recent discovery of mine, and Coup de torchon is a far better work than Ça commence aujourd'hui, which is often preachy and relies too much on cute kids and extreme situations, but it is also wonderful, real, impassioned, hopeful, sad. Still, I felt a disappointment every time the immaculately beautiful Maria Pitarresi appeared: she belonged on a billboard advertising lipstick, and making her a sculptor was another false note. Her looks clashed painfully with the utterly convincing homeliness of the schoolteachers and the slatternly mothers of the kindergarteners. One longed for her scenes to end, so that we might see the scarred and cloud-smeared sky again.

With

Things I have:

lamps
books in foreign tongues
a Tibetan coat
an automobile
100 bottles of wine
preserved lemons
cross-country skis
two bicycles
pens
50 cookbooks
a diploma
deer antler
a vacuum cleaner
2 cleavers bought in Taipei in 1986
spices
teas
photocopied Qing military examination records
lots of records and compact discs
a MiniDisc recorder
dozens of videotapes and DVDs
a sleeping bag
5 pillows
dog toys
the lock from Fred's storage unit in southern California
pictures of Eloise and Lucy and Itzhak
nice cotton shirts
a Brioni suit
other suits
bow ties
a garden hose

Without

Things I do not have:

a cellular telephone
a Blackberry
an iPod
a Wii
a laptop
a big TV
a cable connection
a dog
a baby
debt
a digital camera
a garage
a washing machine
a dishwasher
hired help
self-control
trackmarks
a tattoo
a piercing
discursive flexibility
a table saw
a Ph.D.
Harry Potter books
a couch
a pocket knife
a pirate costume
facial hair
a brother
a leather jacket
a yoga mat
cocktail glasses
a firearm
issues

Baboon vocalizations

Thanks to a kind communication from Dorothy Cheney, one of the authors of the magisterial and utterly fascinating Baboon Metaphysics, I've been listening to a variety of calls made by male and female baboons.

Males use forceful and deep vocalizations, called "wahoos," to assert dominance: rather than attack each other, two males in conflict launch into wahoo contests. The animal who can produce sustained, resonant calls while leaping about is fitter, and this display settles differences without the need for high-risk fights.

Here is a wahoo or two, both from Cheney's research section of the University of Pennsylvania website.

(The second compares a high-ranking male's call with that of a low-ranking male.)

Cheney and Robert Seyfarth's long-term study is a remarkable example of profoundly humane science. No animals are intentionally harmed: the scholars and their assistants observe baboons in the wild, relying on stool samples, for instance, to analyze stress levels in individuals.

Poem

By a Roadside

Waking from drear dreams, a dozen robins
In a bare tree.

To count them all, without wanton addition,
Address their silhouettes.

Their shivers and upruffled shoulders
Speak of spring.

An engine throbs past, robbing them
Of something spoken.

A scrub jay peers through lead leaves
Cocking his mutter.

Half a dozen now, no wetter, no colder,
Waiting for an ending.

Allen Ginsberg writing about fucking boys

All Ye Brave Boys

Come all you young men that proudly display
Your torsos to the sun on upper Broadway
Come sweet hearties so mighty with girls
So lithe and naked to kiss their gold curls
Come beautiful boys with breasts bright gold
Lie down with me in bed ere ye grow old,
Take down your blue jeans, we'll have some raw fun
Lie down on your bellies I'll fuck your soft bun.

And so on for three more stanzas full of "studs," "sturdy cocks," "tight assed," "come in your butt" et cetera. He really did produce a lot of tosh, that Ginsberg. And there's no excuse in his remark that he wrote this at 4 a.m. It's simply not a civilized time to be writing a poem.

Twenty-two years later he wrote

I am the King of the Universe
I am the Messiah with a new dispensation
Excuse me I stepped on a nail.

This is possibly even worse. He's like a photographer who elaborately printed and framed every single out-of-focus snapshot he ever took.

Destroy your cell phone

Evidence is increasing that cellular telephones are a direct line to Satan. (More fun if you start the two clips at the same time.)

Saint Valentine's Day entry

For as long as he could remember, Sam had accompanied every meal worthy of the name with a small salad of julienned baked tofu and cilantro dressed with lime juice, sesame oil, soy sauce, salt and black pepper. Today is no exception.

Last night's dream: a love affair with a soft blond woman whose front yard needed work and afterward was bare dirt and tree trunks. She knew her neighbors. I kissed her by drawing her lips into my mouth and holding them there. When I went inside she and Bono were watching her music video, which was a single close-up black and white shot of her hair being blown about. I said something about her fans.

John Updike was a fussy writer, but unlike so many of his epigones, he was able to write the occasional sentence that did not have the padding of artistic adjectives. Memories of the Ford Administration.

Is there an English word that does not rhyme with "pish"?

What Nat and I cooked

(1) Cucumber onion salad
(2) Watercress sesame salad
(3) Taro watercress soup
(4) Braised shiitakes with Shaoxing wine
(5) Lotus root stew with tomato and fennel
(6) Noodles with bean paste and shiitake sauce

We drank California wines with dinner, after Nat and I swilled a Nigl grüner veltliner as we cooked.

恭喜發財

一帆風順， 二龍騰飛，三羊開泰， 四季平安， 五福臨門， 六六大順， 七星高 照，八方來財， 九九同心， 十全十美，百事亨通， 千事吉祥，萬事如意

fuggery, aka "In the great bowling alley of your mind, I am your pinboy"

Last year I bought a biography of Allen Ginsberg and a big, handsome collection of his poems. The poetry is magnificent, funny, wild, and it goes on and on. Reading about AG, I saw he was a gentle apostle of love and pot, a tamer of Hells Angels, traveler, experimenter. One has to love him.

Two days ago, home from work a bit early, I walked over to Vinyl Planet and bought some videotapes (The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, 9 1/2 Weeks, Who Am I?) and some records (Bob Dorough, Enrico Rava, X). I got an album by The Fugs, and Allen Ginsberg, who used to open every poetry reading by chanting "Hare Krishna," does just that on this marvelous Fugs record. (It also has a picture of a naked AG inside.)

I think The Fugs are good.

Edges

I am drawn to the places where built meets natural. Gardens, the surfaces of buildings, the tidal zone under bayside houses. Such places are forever incomplete: I take on the role of finishing. Sometimes gardens work different degrees of built into a web. The statues of Cervantes, Emmet, Verdi and Key, no matter how rusticated their plinths, impress me as more fashioned even than the pollarded London plane trees on the music concourse.

New year's resolutions

During 2009 I hope to write an opera entitled "The Marbles," write a screenplay entitled "The Lynx," find a new job, read "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Boswell's journals and as much as I can stand of "Capital," see spring blossoms in Point Reyes and Ring Mountain, listen most attentively to Purcell and Haydn, and look the world in the face.

A certain angle

I want to present a new ethics that responds to biological and cultural drives. I don't believe that an appeal to nature justifies human behavior. We stand outside nature, though our shadows are sucked into it. Culture with a history that stands outside of our genes, culture that involves planning and reflecting, is possible only when we forget much of our animal being. Animals are not peaceful. Animals are not wise. Animals do not settle for a reasonable amount. Animals simply are: there is no point assigning emotional descriptors to them.

I also want to appeal to scholars to remember that every document is produced for a different audience and with a different attitude toward that document. People who study books and words too often forget that it is extremely difficult to compare a book Virginia Woolf wrote when she was young to one she wrote when she was no longer young: not only had Woolf changed, her attitude toward what she was writing and who was reading it changed. This must be considered at every turn.

Not I

Ballast installation

Click on subject heading.

The sheet looks marvelously shiny in the rain.

When I saw it yesterday, the surface details were beautiful, especially along the edges on the eastern sheet.

doorkijkje

I flirt with life.

Purchase

I buy things because I like making things happen. Money moves things and people around.

Film

A few of my favorite places

I live in a town of sixteen thousand people, mostly Euro-white and Latino, with a few visas granted to those who run and staff the handful of mediocre Chinese restaurants. People drive pickups or Priuses. We're on the border between redneck and California liberal.

Years from now I'll ennoble the railroad tracks, the empty lot with oaks and fearful housecats, the footbridge over the river. For now, though, my topophiliac thoughts drift to a bay, a financial zone, a Hyde Park playground viewed from a garage roof.

There are places that lift my spirits. Places are more reliable than people because it takes more to kill them, they're always there when you need them, they never say mean things. And there's a marvelous blend of the predictable and the chance: you know that if you walk along Battery between three and four the light will enchant, the architectural sculptures will cast handsome shadows, the flags atop the Embarcadero and a few other tall towers will be backlit; but you don't know which way the breezes will twitch, who will pass you in alligator boots, what unexpected Chinatown scent will slap you.

115 million annually

The following is a quotation from a report announced in August:

The Dr Hadwen Trust and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection have collaborated on a major new initiative to produce the first ever statistical analysis of global animal research numbers, the results of which have been published in peer-reviewed journal ATLA1.

Our research reveals that an estimated 115 million animals are used in laboratory experiments around the world each year. However even this massive figure could be an underestimate due to the way figures are compiled.

Despite widespread public and political interest in animal research worldwide, our research reveals that a mere 21% of countries (37 out of 179 countries) actually collect data on their national animal experiments. For the rest, no official record is kept of the animals used in their laboratories or the suffering that they might have endured.