The big run of major birthdays the end of July celebrated here start tomorrow so quick, some observations after six days from Seal Cove, Mount Desert Island, Maine, from our cottage across a pond from Bernard Mountain, Acadia National Park (here's this morning's sunrise (5:45) from our backporch):
- Goldenrod is in bloom and always blooms a month earlier in Maine than it does in Maryland, which never has made sense to me
- I have not seen one car on the road or in a parking lot with a Canadian province license plate and I've made it a point of looking and asked L to let me know if she see's any and she hasn't. In past years at least twenty percent of visitors to MDI in general and Acadia National Park in particular have had plates from Ontario and New Brunswick and especially Quebec
- The number of tourists overall is far less than in previous trips, at Acadia's most used hiking trails if you didn't grab one of the limited number of parking spots by seven in the morning you are fuck out of luck, we have yet to have an issue at any time of the day so far, and even Ellsworth, on the main land but a bottleneck everyone in and out of MDI must drive through isn't a total clusterfuck traffic-wise from sunrise to sunset, and the tourist-trap lobster pounds don't have stupid long lines of stupid people paying $24 for fifty cents worth of lobster and mayonaise
- We did not come last year because Rosie was sick and near death (she's happy and healthy now) but a number of stores and restaurants in Ellsworth on the mainland and Bar Harbor, Southwest Harbor, and Northeast Harbor on MDI have shuttered since we were last here in 2023
- I'd read stories of the drug abuse epidemic in Downeast Maine in general and Deer Isle in particular for years but had never seen this before: in two restaurants we've been in, one in Ellsworth and another in Stonington on Deer Isle, and in two gas station bathrooms I've been in, there are free fentanyl test kits, test your heroin before using!
- Very few Trump 2024 signs and flags still in yards but a surprising number of rainbow RESIST! signs in yards with no pick-up trucks in the driveway and yard
- Maine pick-up drivers assholier than Michigan pick-up drives, and native Mainers HATE the tourists that float the local economy, I mentioned this an earlier year, a Mainer once told me a significant number of Mainers, if they see your car coming with an out-of-state license plate they pull in front then deliberately slow down for at least a mile
- Fun being had but something (not *us*) off, (including the owners of the house we're renting who also insist something is off on the island and Downeast)
- The grid below is proof I haven't ignored the clusterfuck but the relative lack of links and the fact that some are from earlier last week is proof my attention the clusterfuck has not been as all-consuming as normal, as is the fact that I'm halfway through James' *The Ambassadors* and Rachel Kushner's *Creation Lake* and, get this, am enjoying reading
- I've played only two courses, the nearly Hapana and the faraway Step Back, with only four discs! Orc, Archangel, Roc, and Alpaca, and playing well, paired up with locals at both, they confirmed the economy sucks here, tourism is way down, drug-abuse is way up, and despair is rampant
- Whatever concessions shitlords wanted from Dump as they reminded him who's boss must have been received, they've backed-off shivving him with Epstein for now
- I've made an effort to reestablish my unconditional love for Destroyer's music with only partial success, though Gastr del Sol getting a LOT of airtime!
COMMOTION OF THE BIRDS
John Ashbery
We’re moving right along through the seventeenth century.
The latter part is fine, much more modern
than the earlier part. Now we have Restoration Comedy.
Webster and Shakespeare and Corneille were fine
for their time but not modern enough,
though an improvement over the sixteenth century
of Henry VIII, Lassus and Petrus Christus, who, paradoxically,
seem more modern than their immediate successors,
Tyndale, Moroni, and Luca Marenzio among them.
Often it’s a question of seeming rather than being modern.
Seeming is almost as good as being, sometimes,
and occasionally just as good. Whether it can ever be better
is a question best left to philosophers
and others of their ilk, who know things
in a way others cannot, even though the things
are often almost the same as the things we know.
We know, for instance, how Carissimi influenced Charpentier,
measured propositions with a loop at the end of them
that brings things back to the beginning, only a little
higher up. The loop is Italian,
imported to the court of France and first despised,
then accepted without any acknowledgment of where
it came from, as the French are wont to do.
It may be that some recognize it
in its new guise—that can be put off
till another century, when historians
will claim it all happened normally, as a result of history.
(The baroque has a way of tumbling out at us
when we thought it had been safely stowed away.
The classical ignores it, or doesn’t mind too much.
It has other things on its mind, of lesser import,
It turns out.) Still, we are right to grow with it,
looking forward impatiently to modernism, when
everything will work out for the better, somehow.
Until then it’s better to indulge our tastes
in whatever feels right for them: this shoe,
that strap, will come to seem useful one day
when modernism’s thoughtful presence is installed
all around, like the remnants of a construction project.
It’s good to be modern if you can stand it.
It’s like being left out in the rain, and coming
to understand that you were always this way: modern,
wet, abandoned, though with that special intuition
that makes you realize you weren’t meant to be
somebody else, for whom the makers
of modernism will stand inspection
even as they wither and fade in today’s glare.
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