To airport in an hour. I am ready to be home - I miss Planet. Lots. I miss Fleabus, I miss Napoleon. Planet sent me daily Napoleon sighting updates, I didn't need activate the NEAS from Maine. I miss my house. I don't miss my neighbors, the effing U-Turn on 355 three times a day to get into my neighborhood, DC heat and humidity (heat index 115 when we land), work. Fuck work.
I will miss hiking daily - we did, by Earthgirl's calculation, fourteen mountains, by my calculation seventy-four miles, most of it straight up or straight down. I will miss the straight up (I am good at straight up), I will miss growing to like the straight down, rungs, ladders, four foot granite slides on my ass. Hiking is a skill, sometimes - I'm better now than I was two weeks ago. I hope to not lose it in the less rugged green tunnels of near home. I hope to not miss getting my ass in shape though - fuck work - hiking daily is over. I miss hiking in green tunnels near home, but I'll miss hiking in not green tunnels. I'll miss this cottage (we've reserved it for the last week of July next year). I won't miss the same three roads we drive everyday to trailheads, the local cops speed-trapping. I'll miss the loons screaming at three in the morning. I'll miss reading from six until nine at night. I won't miss reading on the iPad. I'll miss this view from the dining room table out the window in the morning, right now.
We scoured the map and found one mountain we hadn't climbed, an out and back, not a circuit, and circuits first always, the most popular mountain other than Cadillac (which can be driven to top) because Bar Harbor vacation residents can hike to top from town, Champlain Mountain. Hubris: Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday past hikes with barely a break on the difficult ascents beyond the occasional and necessary water gave each of us a sense of rediscovered strength and endurance: Champlain, the west ascent, brought us both close to vomiting. Straight fucking up, straight fucking down, lots requiring hoisting and dropping our fat asses over boulders, using spruce roots as hand holds. The day off we took to go to Stonington Wednesday, thinking a day off would un-knot quadriceps, hamstrings, and calves? Nope. Fine metaphors abound. Spectacular hike.
One last hike today, a back route to a mountain we've already climbed via a path along a lake we haven't yet. Lake hikes here are obstacle courses, no stroll on flat pine-needled, shade-covered walkways while ducks quack for bread crusts. We're talking about doing Sugarloaf's five mile tough circuit Sunday to compare us on it now, post-Acadia, versus the last hike there before vacation. Hubris: we've learned nothing, though my ass is slightly less fat now.
How Clinton enables the GOP. Her ability to maintain the -.06% less-shitty ratio against Trump - be honest - awes: We’re now seeing the fruition of that campaign, as Clinton rolls outone endorsementafter another: John Negroponte, enabler of death squads in Central America; Michael Hayden, the man who, according to Jane Mayer,
made “living on the edge” the motto of US foreign policy after 9/11;
and, if Clinton can land him, the biggest prize of them all: Henry Kissinger, of whom Kissinger biographer Greg Grandin recently wrote:
“He stands not as a bulwark against Donald Trump’s feared recklessness
and immorality but as his progenitor.” All of these men are among the
most bloodthirsty elements in the right-wing firmament. But now they’ve
been re-branded as “center-right foreign policy voices.” Also ▼
I'm tempted to think Hillary Clinton's sole consideration in everyfuckingthing is that she wants to be president, fuck everyfucking thing else: There is plenty more to say about how Clinton and her surrogates have
taken this election as their opportunity to attack leftist activists,
positions, and priorities, but her campaign's relationship with
down-ballot candidates is the clearest indication of how she will wield
power. Given the opportunity to win back the House and Senate, overcome
Republican obstruction, and advance an agenda - not just a leftist or
progressive agenda, but an agenda of any kind - Clinton has
chosen instead of consolidate her power and maintain the political
status quo. She is not only leaving down-ballot candidates to fend for
themselves, but is actually placing them in a weaker position by refusing to nationalize this election and turn every Congressional race into a referendum on Trump. In the past I would highlight the hands of the oligarchs at work here: you must have a Yankees to play the Red Sox in a legendary rivalry to keep the league profitably, unassailably afloat. It's still true, and I need remind myself that beyond my (not even fun anymore) contempt for Hillary, the Hillarium, and motherfucking Hillaryites, Triskelions demand the status quo and no one - since it's to her direct benefit in her myopic determination to be POTUS, dammit - can ensure it more cynically than Hillary Clinton.
It fascinates me, and unfortunately I may end up writing about it more here, but one side-effect of work seems to be that I pay less attention to the clusterfuck than I do on vacation. One obvious reason is I can't/don't sit around in the evenings at home or in the morning over coffee like I can on vacation, but there's much more to it than that. I think. I'll speculate, maybe here, maybe not.
UPDATE! Yes, ▲ as Landru points out in comments is from 2010, does anyone doubt the sentiment has changed? That they would if they could? But yes, I should have acknowledged the Hillarium Official's real call for extrajudicial murder was not recent, as in, contemporaneously counter to Trump's not-call for Hillary's execution.
I downloaded Hemon's latest, and meh so far (not given it enough of a chance yet but will), but I'm not spending any more money on kindle version of a novel.
In the Ls title-wise on the playlist. Lordy, I love Neko Case's voice:
We'd climbed all the major mountains of Acadia National Park proper, hiked all the major trails, so yesterday we decided to go on an adventure. Isle au Haut, an outpost of Acadia in Penobscot Bay, a hundred mile round-trip from the house in Tremont, our destination, we got up early, we drove, we missed the morning ferry by ten minutes because I misjudged the time it would take to get to Stonington where the ferry launches and returns. We ate breakfast at
walked around town, clouds rushed in, temperature dropped twenty, rained poured, we - in nothing but t-shirts and short pants - lucked out, weren't stranded wet and cold on slick hiking trails of wet granite bedrock on an island without shelter with six hours to wait for a boat. Will try again next year, the island.
It's foggy right now as I type this, rained all night. The sun will burn the fog (▲, just now from my porch), not supposed to rain again until tonight, I assume the wet will evaporate from the bedrock, there will be a hike today, how ambitious I don't know, wet-wise: descents here in slippery conditions are not worth the chance. My knees needed yesterday off, my body - and my Dark, which is aching if no longer panging - need be beaten to exhaustion today. Will resume googling non-Acadia alternatives as soon as I plunge publish. This plant - what is it? - across the road from Oddfellows:
I finished - I felt obligated to finish since I publicly started - Whitehead's Underground Railroad. It's - perhaps it's my permacynicism & my autocynicism, the taint of the Oprah Bookclub tag, the feeling it was written to be discussed over coffee and scones - fuckawful. It told me nothing new and, worse, it told me nothing new in the oldest of cliches. Truly shitty.
Quick - suggest a novel I've never heard of I can download and read on my iPad, a novel I will love even if I hate reading it on the iPad.
It's true I finished The Dick Gibson Show on the iPad early in the vacation, but I can't read anything since on the iPad because I hate reading on the iPad. It's not a moral stance - I wish I liked reading on the iPad, carry a library with me wherever I go. When we break a hike on a mountain so Earthgirl can paint, to be able to choose between novels and poets and aargh-filled non-fiction. I have Karamazov in paper, the house we're staying is wonderful - fridge, oven, stove, washer, dryer - but dark. Past sunset, can't read, the lights are few, the bulbs are weak. Beyond my attention-sluttery, why do you think there have been so many links for you while I'm on vacation? There's a hi-def TV here, there's nothing worth watching. For the first time in a week I thought about work. I woke up this morning thinking about work, what the foolish, shallow, vindictively prideful Bookkeeper has waiting for me when I get back. We're gonna hike today, but my knees ache. The poem I started yesterday on Dorr Mountain while Earthgirl painted, the first draft I liked, when read aloud minutes ago sucks - my head has one sense of rhythm, my mouth another, it's always been so. I made the mistake of yesterday reading, but not finishing, on the iPad, which I hated, Ben Lerner's The Hatred of Poetry. I, too, dislike it, to quote him citing Marianne Moore. Trochaic. Anapestic. Being reminded of my failure - it is my failure - to get Emily Dickinson. This fucking paragraph. Woke up Dark, Dark overdue. Discovered there's new Lambchop! ▲ so Blessed Serendipity! Lambchop is a featured band on my soundtrack of Dark.
Yesterday's post and the anti-vaxxing debate in comments - we're going on an adventure today to Isle du Haut, a passenger ferry ride to an outpost of Acadia National Park, should the comment debate continue it might be this evening before I can approve additional comments - blame my trolls.
Up to J by song title on the drive-around sound-track:
HERACLITUS
T.R. Hummer
After I learned to read I became hermetic, wrestling at six with names like Bumppo
And Nemo, who weren’t Marx Brothers—them I knew first hand from the black cube of the RCA
My father installed in the corner. After I learned to read, I sealed my cloven brain in crystal,
I moved on from pure orality, I no longer climbed into the black limbs of the ancient cedar
To croak back the gossip of crows. While cotton gins pounded in the distance and tractors groaned
All night in fields of the family desperation, pooling light around their furious bodies to finish
Writing our story in the earth, I murdered Kipling, I strangled the wonderful wizard, I ate Ishmael.
Who did I think I was to abandon singing what the bees were thinking, how did I lose
My voice? When I failed to understand Brontë, why did I mislay my daemon the Logos,
Why did my thoughts turn into bad dialogue from pulp science fiction? Always before,
I would meet Heraclitus on the footbridge in the forest, he would straighten my toga
And tell me how to memorize fire, how to become an egret or an ant. But when I read Plato, Heraclitus
Vanished, and the wind stopped stoking my larynx, I became a millstone rotated at a distance
By the power of the river, but never gazing into the water where quicksilver minnows were being forever
Devoured by the turtle lodged in the gut of the world.
Ascending Bernard Mountain yesterday ▲. I have a second complaint about Acadia National Park - parking blows. I understand why, and to the park's credit they run constant shuttles from the large parking lot at Park Headquarters, and we've been the fucks who won't use them. My complicity and fine metaphors etc. We got to the Gorge Path trail head yesterday at nine, all four parking spots taken, no road parking allowed. Instead of Dorr and Cadillac Mountains yesterday we climbed Mansell and Bernard Mountains. We've now done all of the western half of Acadia. We going to try to leave the house shortly to get to Gorge trail head, and I've alternatives for when we find the four spots taken already anyway, but Earthgirl is still asleep and I'm not gonna wake her, so maybe Door and Cadillac tomorrow and Champlain and Penobscot today. Right now? From where I'm typing, taken just now, a photo of a shadow of a hummingbird dipping at a red feeder!
O! I am way better - though still responsibly cautious - with rocks and on heights than I was two weeks ago.
In yesterday's post I mentioned the Hillarium smearing Jill Stein as an anti-vaxxer. I had no idea whether Stein is an anti-vaxxer or not, but I knew beloved Landru (who will get the sillyass Star Trek allusion in this post's title) would and would respond. From comments:
It's no smear. At best, Jill Stein is pandering to anti-vaxxers. And she
knows it--she made an effort to walk back her position and got busted
at it. If that is true, it's completely unforgivable and absolutely
disqualifies her from any leadership position in organized society. I
understand that you don't give a shit about that, since you're
fundamentally opposed to organized society in general, and that's your
business and I've long since accepted it, kindly and lovingly, I hope.
But no quarter for a fucking idiot of her magnitude. An idiot who is, I
hear tell, an actual medical doctor. Fucking despicable.
At
worst, she's an actual anti-vaxxer, and it looks to me like that's the
case, because the language she uses in pandering to anti-vaxxers is
exactly the language that anti-vaxxers use to claim they're not
anti-vaxxers. EXACTLY that language. I know that you trust my
qualifications to gauge that without reference to politics. And I credit
that it's possible that she's pandering, which is not, as I noted, a
save for her. Not even close.
She's a nutbar and has no business
running for office, and if she's actually an anti-vaxxer instead of just
another pandering shithead politician, she and any offspring for which
she's responsible have no business being around other humans.
To which I responded:
I'll take your word for it on
Stein and anti-vaxxing: this is how I figured to do my research on the
subject: I know the issue is important to you and you're far more
informed than most people on the subject.
I was hoping the
Hillarium was *right* on that: it throws so much bullshit that accurate
insightful and useful information that would be vital in forming an
opinion about a candidate just sounds like so much Hillarium
disinformation. I wish I had been clearer in the post that was part of
my point in the first place. As I said, I don't know shit about Stein,
but I do know how the Hillarium works.
So that's that on Stein and anti-vaxxery, and that's that on what I was trying to do.
Almost a year ago today on this blog: Larry Lessig?
The Whitehead - um, I'm running out of patience. It's not fantastic, in any of the uses of that word. And what the fuck is a published novelist doing using the word "enormity" to mean "big." That's borderline disqualifying right there.
On Lerner's Hatred of Poetry, which I know I should read but can't yet make myself.
Up to the I's playlist-wise (blessed Serendipity, the first one):
[rain frog thorn bug tent bat]
Francine Sterle
rain frog thorn bug tent bat
along a broken mosaic a spongy ever-dwindling path
soaring trees woody buttresses their massive twisted fins
lofty crowns shoulder to shoulder climbing lime-green
vines restless palms one strangling plant clinging to
choking another a discontinuous canopy of branches and leaves
impenetrable alive and teeming tangled underbrush
the deeply shaded soil lumpy roots writhing
across the forest floor low-growing ferns seedlings
struggling for light jewel-colored hummingbirds
insects sizzling and clicking and the dripping water
trickling into the tiniest crevices steamy
claustrophobic air a dazzling bellbird lost
in a shaft of sunlight a golden eyelash viper
sinuous as a vein on a broad-leafed frond flat worms
land leeches walnut-sized spiders goliath beetles
camouflaged butterflies on dead leaves parasites bees
leaf-cutting ants atop glorious white lilies everywhere
gripping climbing twisting floating through the trees
stilt-like aerial roots the mouth-amazed pitcher plant
buried larvae fruit-eating fish the perpetual battle to adapt
the ruthless drive to survive under a punishing sun
what grows bursts forth at astonishing speed then decomposes
to be reabsorbed so much unknown unfamiliar
unnamed but before long the trees seem the same
the rocks every bird track who would dare think of such a place
who would dare construct one of his own imagining
and be utterly abandoned in the middle of it all
if to be lost is to be fully present if confusion becomes
the only boundary and then the decision [to divide space
until a direction is created] only a madman would begin
thought is its own cage the mind already anticipating
the first step deciding every turn will be coupled
by disaster and perhaps some bestial creature
crouched at the center crying waiting
for our hero our everyman our Elijah wandering the earth in rags
Acadia rangers/volunteers do a wonderful job of using cairns on the bedrock at the top of mountains to mark trails, but in woods the blazing is haphazard and spotty. I don't know if the policy is to blaze as little as possible and trust the hiker to follow the obvious (which is not always obvious) path or whether there is not a volunteer organization (such as Potomac Appalachian Trail Club) that maintains the blazes. We've not got lost, though we've had to backtrack more than a couple of times. My only complaint. We'd thought of going inland to hike Maine, we've five days of hiking left, we haven't covered half of Acadia yet, I'm not spending hours in a car I could be hiking here. We've booked the house for next summer.
Yesterday was Sargent Mountain, Gilmore Peak, and Parkman Mountain, hardest, most beautiful, best hike yet. Today is more ambitious - Dorr and Cadillac Mountains, two ascents, two descents.
We stop after the last ascent of each hike so Earthgirl can paint (I read and write) for a couple of hours.
I'm told Hillarium asswipes are smearing Jill Stein as a Putin stooge. I'm told Hillarium asswipes are smearing Jill Stein as a anti-vaxxer kook. I have no idea what Jill Stein thinks or has said she stands for, but here's today's stupidass Star Trek allusion: (Worf voice) I know nothing about Gauron other than he's an outsider who has challenged the Council. But Duras? I know Duras.
Floyd tweeted out ▲ last night, the evening after I had posted Elkin's Dick Gibson's manic monologue on the, to steal from Floyd, living death of perpetual emergency. Elkin wrote Dick Gibson in 1971. I tweeted the link to me back to Floyd, hastening to say that while some of us are wired to dig the perpetual emergencies, there are more people percentage-wise now so wired for the reasons Floyd cites (24 hour news networks, internet, etc). So yes, I dared directly address a bleggaldigitaloverlord, and got the no acknowledgement/no response I deserve.
I am a quarter through Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad. So far it's been a conventional novel on the horrors of slave life, but now that the two main characters have runaway from the plantation and actually gotten on an underground railroad - as in a train underground in Georgia in 1822 - it's getting good and weird.
Offer ends at midnight tonight! One of you has an Elkin on the way, if you want one email, comment, or DM/twoot me by tonight.
Up to H in song titles in the drive-around soundtrack:
THE ARISTOCRACY
Sandra Simonds
I like when the form is kind of stuck-up
even though I’ve got a Southern accent and my place
I wrote - my apologies, I've mentioned this already recently - my masters thesis on Stanley Elkin. A quick author search in the University Library's catalog reminds me I finished in 1997, almost twenty years ago. I'd read Elkin constantly since discovering him in 1979 when I read a review of his novella The Living End, bought it, loved it, quickly went back and read the already pulbished novels Boswell, A Bad Man, The Dick Gibson Show, the novella collection Searches and Seizures, the novel The Franchiser, then read as soon as they appeared the novels George Mills (Elkin's favorite), Magic Kingdom (my favorite), The Rabbi of Lud (the only one where Elkin was his own editor - you can tell), The MacGuffin, the three novella collection Van Gogh's Room at Arles, and his final novel, Mrs Ted Bliss. I then read them each again at least three times (well, Rabbi of Lud only twice) to write the thesis. By 1997 I needed a break from Elkin, a break that lasted (as in, before it was love again) until August 2016. Start at the break (I dare you to read it out loud - everything worth reading should be read out loud), "His thought...."
grass? What'll it be this summer, the sea or the mountains? Have the kids heard from the college of their choice? What's happening? (it finishes).
Obsession and impending catastrophe two of Elkin's big themes, as an obsessive obsessed with impending catastrophe he sang to me once, and - after a vacation of nineteen years - he sings to me again.
Don't worry, no essayistic blogpost is forthcoming, for my sake.
If I like you and you ask nice I'll send you your choice of Dick Gibson, The Franchiser, or Magic Kingdom (my favorites, dammit). I've already sent some of you one or the other of these - ask nice and I'll send you another. blckdgrd at gmail dot com or DM me at twitter.
