A samurai in a latrine; outside, his three attendants hold their noses. Coloured woodcut by Hokusai, 1834. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
I stumbled across an item from the Poetry Foundation, “Haiku on Shit” by Masaoka Shiki, in my virtual wanderings and thought it a delightful departure from the daily shit monsoon, against which a parasol, a wetsuit, or a subterranean bunker are no defense.
The first edition of VeloNews in which a cartoon
by You Know Who appeared.
VeloNews was found dead on Jan. 1. It was just 50 years old.
Was it murder? Suicide? Natural causes? (i.e., a slow-moving form of frontotemporal dementia?)
Nah. Darwinism. Nature red in tooth and claw, baby. Or, if you prefer your poetry in the original Sicilian, “It’s strictly business.”
• Editor’s note: A tip of the VeloNews cycling cap to Steve O. for the sharp eye on the velo-news.
Due in December from Copper Canyon Press.
Good news for the readers in the audience.
First, the fall issue of Alta Journal includes a special section featuring seven of the last poems by Jim Harrison. A complete collection of his poetry is slated for release in December by Copper Canyon Press.
Second, Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstore will be opening a new location in downtown Bibleburg. The story doesn’t mention that it will be about a block from where the fabled Chinook Bookshop once sat. It was B-burg’s Tattered Cover Back in the Day®.
Zeezo’s they remember, but not Chinook. So much for institutional memory.
Walk this way.
I don’t fly the flag a ton. I know where I live; sometimes I’m happy about it, and sometimes I’m not.
Today, right after Joe Biden’s hand came off the family Bible, I moseyed out front and planted two flags, one for Joe, and the other for Kamala Harris.
I wish I’d had a third one, for Amanda Gorman. But we can’t have everything, not even in a country that’s already better than the one we left at noon today. Another hill to climb.
In the loo and adieu for you.
Hoo-boy. Pee-yew. That’n looks like a double-flusher to me. Might have to break out the plunger. Or a stick of DuPont Extra.
But it’s gotta go, come hell or high water, and I won’t miss it once it’s gone.
Twenty-fuckin’-20.
We put an old woman in a home. My foot in a splint. My cat in an urn. And our lives on hold.
We’re alive to bitch about it, which has to count for something. [Insert thunderous sound of knocking on wood here.] Plenty of other people aren’t.
Also, I finally made it to Social Security, so, yay for me. Plus Herself remains on the clock in a real big way, so, bonus. We want for nothing. Call it a lamp so that we need not curse the darkness from beneath our designer masks.
It feels greedy of me to miss my cat. Running. Road trips. Hot springs. Random acts of shopping. Long bicycle rides. Stand-up comedy. My favorite non-alcoholic beer. Bookstores. Mexican restaurants. Living in a country that helped defeat fascism, not resurrect it.
You know. The little things.
Still, I miss them. I do. And I don’t expect to get a lot of them back just like that, with a simple change of calendars, or administrations.
Especially my cat. Not unless Stephen King gets involved, and that’s a bridge too far for me. Turkish v1.0 could be scary enough.
We already have plenty to be scared of, thanks all the same.
Nevertheless, here we are, on the threshold of a new year. That I am not optimistic is not helpful. Time to show the affirming flame. We must love one another or die.
Miss Mia Sopaipilla on the cushions.
We should
sit like a cat
and wait for the door
to open.
—”Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry,” by Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison
Ken Nordine, a voice you may recall from “Word Jazz,” a staple on NPR for years, has left the studio. He was 98.
A baritone storyteller who began with voiceovers on radio and TV, Nordine would go on to collaborate with Tom Waits, Jerry Garcia, David Grisman and others.
He once said that the goal of his poetry was to “make people think about their thinking and feel about their feeling, but even more important to think about their feeling and feel about their thinking.”
I think he succeeded. Whenever I’d hear that impossibly deep voice softshoe out of my radio and into my head, I’d stop whatever I was doing and pay attention. They’re nodding and yessing and popping their fingers at Next World Coffee this morning.
OK, I’ve been threatening to resurrect the Radio Free Dogpatch podcast for a while now, and the stars finally came into proper alignment this week, so here we go.
For the first time Radio Free Dogpatch is not a solo effort — my friend and colleague Hal Walter joined me for a chat of about 75 minutes that I boiled down in editing to just over an hour.
Call it “Two Dudes Mystery Theatre.” We talked about the passing of poets Jim Harrison and Merle Haggard; Hal’s autistic son, and what it’s like trying to do creative work while raising a child who is not “neuro-typical”; and cooking.
For anyone who’s interested in the nuts and bolts of this Frankensteinian project, we chatted via Skype (Hal lives in Custer County, Colorado, while I’m in Albuquerque). On my end I was using a Samson C01U USB condenser microphone and an old pair of Bose earbuds plugged into an equally old iMac; Hal went even lower-tech, using a $50 Kindle Fire and some Apple earbuds, the kind that include an inline mic’.
I recorded our conversation using Ecamm’s Call Recorder, then split the convo into two tracks and dragged both into Apple’s GarageBand for editing. Once the thing was more or less the way I wanted it, I uploaded it to Libsyn, which hosts RFD and sends an RSS feed to iTunes.
During our ‘cast I promised to provide links with more information about some of the topics we discussed, and here those are:
• Tom McGuane’s “Postscript” in The New Yorker.
• Mario Batali recalls mealtimes with Harrison in Time.
• Jimmy Buffett bids a fond adios to his hermano on Facebook.
• Doug Peacock on Harrison and the art of friendship at The Daily Beast.
• A recollection from Patrick Doyle in Rolling Stone.
• NPR’s “Fresh Air” reprises a 1995 interview with the outlaw country legend.
• The food of Apulia, from Florence Fabricant in The New York Times.
• Her recipe for orecchiette with cherry tomatoes and arugula (being a barbarian, I add hot Italian sausage).
If you find yourself interested in Hal’s writing, you can visit him at Hardscrabble Times (yeah, it’s been a while since he updated the ol’ blog) or order up one or more of his books (check the link in the sidebar).
Meanwhile, let us know in comments what you think. It’s a little rough around the edges, but so are we. Happily, the podcast can be improved.
Not exactly the Battle of the Bulge, was it? Unless you count the bulges at the portly patriots’ American-flag belt buckles.
Could the Battle of the Budgies be coming to a peaceful resolution?
The Oregonian reports that the last holdouts at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon are ready to give themselves up, and that their patron saint, Cliven Bundy, was snatched up in Portland and faces charges from the 2014 debacle that triggered this whole clusterfuck.
Perhaps as they continue to enjoy the hospitality of the State at another venue these small fellows can take solace from a Longfellow, translating Friedrich von Logau:
Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience he stands waiting, with exactness grinds he all.
It was a mother of a Mothers Day at Chez Dog.
The weather has been, shall we say, unsettled.
One minute a fella’s cycling around and about wearing little more than a bit of team kit marinated in sunscreen, and the next he’s huddled over a furnace grate in a snowmobile suit, Ruger Mini Thirty locked and loaded, ready to repel a terrorist yeti raid on his bacon and beans.
I made my preparations on Saturday, whipping up two steaming tureens of Southwestern fare, the first of a pork-and-potato-laden green chile stew and the second of pinto beans with onion, garlic and chipotle chile. To say the atmosphere has grown heavy indoors since would be an understatement of epic proportions.
The weather wizards were shrieking about inches and feet of white stuff, but this latest resurrection of winter proved to be not so much of a much. What little we got was heavy and wet, to be sure, and at one point I had to venture out with a broom to flog it off the tender branches of the young Canadian red cherry in the back yard.
This morning we have gray skies, temps below freezing, a stiff wind, and flurries, which is to say it’s May in Colorado. It caused me to compose a protest song in the style of Mr. Robert Zimmerman, though it’s tough to be musical without guitar, harmonica or talent. Still, I had a whang at it in an email to a friend and colleague in the mountains.
How much snow have you got there?
They said we’d get it everywhere
But mostly, down here below
the worst was that the wind did blowIt sucked, actually
Real cold
Movin’ t’Arizony(squee honk blaat hoot snort honk twee)
Patrick O'Grady has been making stuff up since, well, forever. He started doing it for money in high school and didn't quit until he retired in 2022. (To be honest, if you waved enough Dead President Trading Cards at him, he might do it for money again.) Until then, this blog is his pro-bonehead work. For more on Your Humble Narrator, click the comic.
The Radio Free Dogpatch podcast, which has been enjoying a refreshing dirt nap for the past two years, has arisen from its foul grave, casting aside its moldering blankie of refuse, dog shit, and critical letters to the editor. It will shamble around and about as the spirit moves. Click the graphic for the latest episode.
Know your rights, and defend them.
Fight hate.
Defending press freedom since 1970
Hal Walter ranches burros, a teenage son, and words from his rancheroo high in the mountains of south-central Colorado. Click the pic to sign up for his Substack newsletter, which goes out to subscribers whenever he's in the mood.
Drink the Kool-Aid
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