Long time gone....
busy with the start of classes and family events. (And Jack and I sailed with Steve on his Flying Scot and are being inevitably drawn, like a depowered star cruiser around a black hole, into that passionate band of boat loyalists.)
Browsing the Internet and found an article on the Christian Science Monitor from Aug. 18:
click here
One of those heroic ideas in a glorious but misguided tradition, it seems to me. Saving the dwindling stocks of African animals by moving the Serengeti to the Great Plains. Herds of revenant Stone Age wildlife thundering across the plains. Lions and cheetahs stalking ...
Lions? Anyone remember the outcry over re-introducing wolves to Yellowstone?
And what about diseases, plants that evolved for the bison but not the eland, introduced aliens that don't match with the local ecosystem? And what about that ecosystem, by the way, which is in sad shape?
"Jurassic Park" was a cautionary tale about mingling ecosystems as well as time streams. Instructive here, perhaps.
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Sunday, August 07, 2005
A cozy visit to hell
I've been checking in on Allison Perkins each day.
I worked with Allison at the News & Record, knew of her struggles as her husband was posted to Iraq and back, and learned of her decision to go with him this most recent time. With children in tow, she followed him to Kuwait, so that their family could be a family.
While there, she's become a war correspondent, telling stories from the field that are paired with accounts from "the home front" where families left behind struggle with absence and anxiety.
Allison's not new to the military. She worked for Stars & Stripes in Korea, and can bivouac with the troops or hop a helicopter with the best.
This kind of war reporting, like the classic dispatches of Ernie Pyle, remind us that making war is a retail operation - one soldier at a time.
Visit here to read or listen to Allison's stories
I worked with Allison at the News & Record, knew of her struggles as her husband was posted to Iraq and back, and learned of her decision to go with him this most recent time. With children in tow, she followed him to Kuwait, so that their family could be a family.
While there, she's become a war correspondent, telling stories from the field that are paired with accounts from "the home front" where families left behind struggle with absence and anxiety.
Allison's not new to the military. She worked for Stars & Stripes in Korea, and can bivouac with the troops or hop a helicopter with the best.
This kind of war reporting, like the classic dispatches of Ernie Pyle, remind us that making war is a retail operation - one soldier at a time.
Visit here to read or listen to Allison's stories
Friday, August 05, 2005
3 ways of considering a carnival call
Automatic pencil
Autopencil, to write moving finger without thought, to fill page after page like a signature machine freed of the loops and squiggles of a program, like the mind in long stretches of waiting for something, waiting is all, waiting is the empty place from which understanding blooms like a seed sudden from the desert after a breath of rain.
Automatic pencil
My father’s clipboard, his pencils, shop pencils thick in the barrel, industrial.
I have one, black plastic or Bakelite, steel at each end where the lead came out and where the eraser sat, now an empty tube. The legend:
Champion Tool & Die Co.
McKeesport, Pa. 15131
412 751-6000
I wonder if they’re still in business, or rusted with the rest of the belt, foundries and steel suppliers, solvent and paint dealers, tool and die works, trucking companies, designers, fabricators, merchants. A whole world whittled away, year by year, until now the red brick buildings stand like historic sites, Hadrian’s Wall or the Great Wall or some other useless thing, a single bare bulb burning over a back door.
Automatic pencil
Is not to be preferred over the traditional sort. Thin lead in yellow plastic. Ersatz. No smell of cedar, no scalloped shavings, no angled shading across a ruled page as faces and horses emerge from doodles, no pencil-point under the skin from grade-school bullies.
Autopencil, to write moving finger without thought, to fill page after page like a signature machine freed of the loops and squiggles of a program, like the mind in long stretches of waiting for something, waiting is all, waiting is the empty place from which understanding blooms like a seed sudden from the desert after a breath of rain.
Automatic pencil
My father’s clipboard, his pencils, shop pencils thick in the barrel, industrial.
I have one, black plastic or Bakelite, steel at each end where the lead came out and where the eraser sat, now an empty tube. The legend:
Champion Tool & Die Co.
McKeesport, Pa. 15131
412 751-6000
I wonder if they’re still in business, or rusted with the rest of the belt, foundries and steel suppliers, solvent and paint dealers, tool and die works, trucking companies, designers, fabricators, merchants. A whole world whittled away, year by year, until now the red brick buildings stand like historic sites, Hadrian’s Wall or the Great Wall or some other useless thing, a single bare bulb burning over a back door.
Automatic pencil
Is not to be preferred over the traditional sort. Thin lead in yellow plastic. Ersatz. No smell of cedar, no scalloped shavings, no angled shading across a ruled page as faces and horses emerge from doodles, no pencil-point under the skin from grade-school bullies.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
The Twist in the World
I thought it would be a day – tomorrow will be three, and if everything works out, I’ll have my glasses back.
Without the lenses that put the world back in shape, my own poor natural lenses have had their way with perception. I’ve always been nearsighted. And astigmatic, which makes everything twist and shimmer. And with age, I’ve lost the ability to focus on text and other things close at hand.
So these days I’ve seen through prescription sunglasses, darkly. I hope people think it’s somewhat mysterious, and not just that I’ve been on a binge, when I wear the shades to shop.
I can’t read easily, a real handicap for a writer and editor, though if I squint and tilt my head I can manage a computer screen at three feet away. Like right now. A new novel is on the desk, waiting. I’d been meaning to read Isabel Zuber’s Salt but kept sampling book after untouched book from the stacks in my office. Meeting her at the North Carolina Writers Conference brought a spasm of guilt and put her book on the top of the pile.
So, stymied, I have sorted papers in my office.
I moved a gardenia bush that unlike its mate four feet away, refused to thrive.
I pruned and clipped and fertilized.
I’ve fretted about things undone, but this has been a good interruption in some ways. I’ve had to slow down. Return to doing simple hand-tasks that don’t require reading. I’ve listened more.
Tomorrow maybe I can see again.
Without the lenses that put the world back in shape, my own poor natural lenses have had their way with perception. I’ve always been nearsighted. And astigmatic, which makes everything twist and shimmer. And with age, I’ve lost the ability to focus on text and other things close at hand.
So these days I’ve seen through prescription sunglasses, darkly. I hope people think it’s somewhat mysterious, and not just that I’ve been on a binge, when I wear the shades to shop.
I can’t read easily, a real handicap for a writer and editor, though if I squint and tilt my head I can manage a computer screen at three feet away. Like right now. A new novel is on the desk, waiting. I’d been meaning to read Isabel Zuber’s Salt but kept sampling book after untouched book from the stacks in my office. Meeting her at the North Carolina Writers Conference brought a spasm of guilt and put her book on the top of the pile.
So, stymied, I have sorted papers in my office.
I moved a gardenia bush that unlike its mate four feet away, refused to thrive.
I pruned and clipped and fertilized.
I’ve fretted about things undone, but this has been a good interruption in some ways. I’ve had to slow down. Return to doing simple hand-tasks that don’t require reading. I’ve listened more.
Tomorrow maybe I can see again.
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