Last House on the Left

Another candidate for thriller/crime novel cover art?

Story-Board

Tools of the Trade

Shelf-love.

Reflections: 5 + 9

Reflections on Turning 59:

Sometimes I am arrogant enough to think my death will mean that no one will be reading books the way I do--and the world will suffer--and I mean that far less selfishly and less egotistically than that may sound.  Feel free to laugh.

I mean that I have read and have trained and have practiced to be a Reader, so I should be able to recognize and understand what is true and what is not true--and others will not have trained so long or so hard or so well as I have.

That's been my motivation as a teacher since 1990 (and even before, as a friend): to share, to guide, to model.

Reading well takes practice and guidance and more practice.

I think I have been a true reader since my early teens, and I have worked at it for decades and decades, trying to teach my own students to Read Like Readers, but more importantly to Read Like Writers.

I still need to write the books I want to write.

Not done yet.  That's the battle-cry.

What's-the-Story?

Story: characters in action in a setting through time.

That's how I process everything.

Give me a poem, any poem, and I look for the story in the lines, behind the lines, and/or after the lines. Give me a photo, and where some see a static tablieau, I see dynamism, before-and-after, presence-and-absence. Give me a problem, personal or societal, and I look for the story in the same way.

On the upside, I look for motivation and context and nuance. On the downside, some people think I am wasting my--or their--time with this approach, with my concern for accuracy and understanding of plot, POV, and narrative shading.

I'll be 59 soon, but that mostly means I've had a lot of practice with stories and story-telling; I think I am (still) in tune most of the time. Yet I know I may be wrong in my emphasis in certain circumstances and with certain texts, and that encourages me to be humble, which is always good.

Still, what's the story is my favorite question.

As Audience, As Witness

As I was getting coffee at the cafe this morning, I had a gentleman walk up to me and ask about the Bamboo Reef t-shirt I was wearing.  He wanted to know if the business were still in operation, and I named Monterey and SF as ongoing locations.  He then told me his father had been one of Bamboo Reef's three founders--with Al Giddings and Leroy French -- back in 1961.  We chatted briefly, me asking about his father's name (which I now can't recall, grrr), and then he moved on.

I'm guessing he wasn't a diver like his father, or at least not a local diver, or he would have known . . . but we didn't talk about any of that.

I like how the man wanted to connect with something his father had helped make -- and to say it out loud -- and I, random fellow that I am, was able to participate as audience, as witness.

Expedition

Moya Cannon's Sheep: Trust and Manipulation

Here are two poems by Moya Cannon that I just found and do admire:


SHEEP AT NIGHT IN THE INAGH VALLEY

For Leo and Clare

Maybe the dry margins draw them,
or grass, sprouting among limestone chippings --
they are here, as always,
on the edge of the tarmac
on a bend.

They shelter under the clumped rushes --
white bundles in the night --
their eyes are low green stars,
caught in the trawl of my car's headlights.

Occasionally one hirples across the road
but, usually, they stay put
and gaze at the slowed-down car.

I envy them their crazy trust.


WEANING

He carried a lamb
up over the bog to the hill,
took sugar from his pocket and let it lick.

The clean tongue searched the crevices of his hand,
then he set it down to graze.

It would never stray from that hill,
tethered by a dream of sweet grass.

--by MOYA CANNON


Respectfully borrowed from
Carrying the Songs
Carcanet Press Ltd
Manchester, UK
2007

Face: Fresh from the Kiln

Silverstone clay;
Reitz's Green glazing, lightly applied.

He lacks a name as yet . . . .

Saline Drip

Step Sideways Towards A Truth

I have always preferred Herodotus to Thucydides and Byron to Wordsworth.

That meant, that means, according to grad school criteria (don't you know), I am damned to frivolity, to the frivolous.

At least by association.

(Or, so they say.)

Terrible that I let old school judgments color my own thinking, my own self, now.
Hard to resist, I think.

My other response is to give in, to agree, via an essential insight:
ham-bone connected to the brain-bone.

What I Have Learned

English 1B: two questions.

How does X serve the story?
And, what does the story serve?

English 1A?
Shift "story" to "argument".

Understory

What do you see?
What's happening?
How does the shot feel to you?

___

Or, is this is a crime scene photograph?
If so, what's the crime?
What happened?
Or, is it about to happen?

-------

Story-thoughts always make me happy.

-------

"Why do you think in terms of crime, Matt, especially crime stories?" a friend asks.

Family tradition?

Literary tradition?

Even Homer's epics are crime stories, if you want to take that angle . . . .

Understory II

Whiskey Friday

Or, The Devil Is In The Details

Body English:
sculpture mix; transparent brown and shino glazing.
20-minute exercise.

The Winding and Unwinding

THE WINDING AND UNWINDING

The shape of your thought
Entices me
Quite as much as
The thought of your shape.

Clay-minded,
Bloody-brained,
Fickle as a stick in water:
I swim towards you.

I reach for you
Again and again and again
In thought, in force,
Not withholding aught
Save what wyrd demands
From each of us.

The winding and unwinding
Of time and tide,
Again releasing,
Again embracing,
Tasting and chasing,
Like river-otters sliding
Down the sloped bank.

The winding and unwinding
Of time and tide:
The rounded lift and heft,
The nipple’s assertion,
The twinned-blood rising
Like the swift pull
Of the river’s pulse
And penetration --
Flowing,
Falling,
Following –-

That shared current
Streaming just past the shore,
Stranding us between
Just enough
And quite enough.
___

Coda:
Laughing lips sip --
Swallow -- another draft.
Glasses, glances,
Clash and chime,
Toasting the new year.

Harken to the hearty
Admonition:
Draft, not drift.

--Matthew Duckworth

HWAET!

Lead figurines from the 1970s:
orc-warrior
vs. Spear-Dane.

Hurly-Burly: Poetry in Motion

This was a last-day hurly-burly of What-Poetry-Can-Be-And-Do and How-You-Can-Enjoy-The-Ride. Some of the following works were treated fully, but the others received glancing treatment, mere introductions or excerpts or highlighted singular effects: sacrifices on the altars of poetic efficacy and exuberant aesthetic trail-guiding.  Voice and story, voice and story.  What and how, what and how.

Hughes' "Suicide's Note"
        (body of the poem first, then the title revealed);
Auden's "The Shield of Achilles"
        (for we've read The Iliad this term);
Grimm's "Hansel and Gretel" paraphrased to set up
Gluck's "Gretel in Darkness"
       (trauma and serious poetic conversations);
two quotations matched and set
       from Auden's "September 1, 1939"
       and Shelley's "Julian and Maddalo"
             (mere bits in parallel and contradiction);
a foray into Jackie Leven's lyrics
       from "Classic Northern Diversions"
(to read mood even if you don't know what the song is about, to find signs);
close-reading exercises
       with Frost's "Stopping By The Woods on a Snowy Evening"
       and Wyatt's "They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me Seek"
       and Keats' "When I have fears that I may cease to be";
then, Frost's apocalyptic "Fire and Ice";
Spenser's logical/romantic playing with "My Love is Like to Ice, and I to Fire";
Donne's twisty-fun "Woman's Inconstancy";
a quick look at Dante Gabriel Rossetti's artwork to set up
       Christina Rossetti's beautiful and incisive "In An Artist's Studio";
and finally Herrick's playful "Cherry-ripe" -----------

(I had some Elvis Costello one-liners for flavor and effect in my back pocket, but I ended up not having time to use them appropriately and so held back.)

a very full 75-minute class.

Oh, I also quoted with context that venerable bumper sticker "Question Authority" and that mug I saw at Pegasus On Solano with "Birds have wings / Humans have books".

Burton Raffel's How To Read A Poem -- along with a slew of handouts -- was the textbook at hand.

The Adventures of Kelpman

Close-up: Kelpman in the surge.

Kelpman:
chicken wire figure (1996);
kelpflesh (2015).
Bodega Bay surge channel.

Cargo From Cumae: A Fragment

CARGO FROM CUMAE

Latium, 1164 B.C.

Nisus sighed as the shore lifted
With the easing of the tide before his eyes.
Younger, he'd have been under,
Working the wreck, allowing
Muscle and sheer will
To offset mere depth.
The boat shifted beneath his feet,
And the Trojan diver bowed his head --
Gray locks cropped against
The cloy, clammy, clinging weeds
Of long cold nereid fingers
And hotly wanton nereid needs.
Scars he touched and counted breaths . . . .

What youth ignores, age hoards.
Each foot ebbing meant
Longer labor, greater benefits
Below.  Both lungs and eyes
Less exercised by the low tides
Granted -- too soon denied --
By Diana and the marches of her moon.
Nisus surveyed his small domain,
This modest craft, consecrated
By Neptune's priest; nets; ropes;
Reeds; knives; hooks; weights;
A clay cup; worn sponges;
And that flask of olive oil,
Diver's mystery, for sight below . . . .

(an old fragment, newly polished a bit)

MD