Late Summer

Before the moths have even appeared
to orbit around them, the streetlamps come on,
a long row of them glowing uselessly

along the ring of garden that circles the city center,
where your steps count down the dulling of daylight.
At your feet, a bee crawls in small circles like a toy unwinding.

Summer specializes in time, slows it down almost to dream.
And the noisy day goes so quiet you can hear
the bedraggled man who visits each trash receptacle

mutter in disbelief: Everything in the world is being thrown away!
Summer lingers, but it’s about ending. It’s about how things
redden and ripen and burst and come down. It’s when

city workers cut down trees, demolishing
one limb at a time, spilling the crumbs
of twigs and leaves all over the tablecloth of street.

Sunglasses! the man softly exclaims
while beside him blooms a large gray rose of pigeons
huddled around a dropped piece of bread.

~ Jennifer Grotz

Twilight, late July

In the apple orchard it is already dark,
though down by the road the last stem of day flares.
I walk the dogs in the Janus-faced shadows.
The moon rises from mankind’s doubts.
You can live with sorrow
If you walk with your face open and your hair light.

~ Stephen Kuusisto

The poet has a new book, Letters to Borges; lovely work. And a big h/t to Lance Mannion, who first posted this.

This time of year the Northwest is deep blue with those shadows, dark, knife-edged under the brilliant moon of midsummer; the sort of shadows that hide lovers and fools whose madness and joy and sorrow drift across the warm night like memories not yet made.

Light Bedside Reading; the Zombie Apocalypse

I'm reading Max Brook's World War Z.

Let me start by saying that I'm not a "horror" genre fan by nature. I figure that between epidemic disease, war, and the collected work of Toni Tennille the world is replete with horror enough that seeking out horrible things to "entertain" myself is both redundant and insulting.

But I read a review of the film that said "don't go thinking you'll see the book on film; this isn't like the book at all..." and suggested that the book touched on much broader and deeper subjects than the living dead feasting on human brains.

And I can report that, yes, it does.

Not sure which part I've enjoyed more. The Palestinian recounting how his father dragged him to asylum in Israel where he found that the "Zionist plot" was, in fact, the true assessment of the rapacious dead rising from their graves? The former White House chief of staff sneering about misplaced idealism and political "realities" driving the failed response to the Zombie Apocalypse from his current job shoveling pig-shit at a manure farm? The old Red Chinese combat surgeon's tale of the very first "Victim Zero"?

Politics, espionage, corruption, democracy, dictatorship, free markets, hope and fear, delusion, skepticism, credulity...the book does a pretty damn decent job of describing all the ways people deal - or fail to deal- with the immensities of Fate and Nature that we try and pretend can't destroy us with a vast and utter indifference (not to mention the usual human miseries and buffooneries) at any moment.

Good stuff. If you're looking for a damn good summer read, you could do far worse than the "Oral History of the Zombie War".

Then go watch Shaun of the Dead.

Shaun: "Look, I don't care what the telly says, all right? We have to get out of here. If we don't they'll tear us to pieces, and that is really going to exacerbate things for all of us."

August

When my eyes are weeds,
And my lips are petals, spinning
Down the wind that has beginning
Where the crumpled beeches start
In a fringe of salty reeds;
When my arms are elder-bushes,
And the rangy lilac pushes
Upward, upward through my heart;

Summer, do your worst!
Light your tinsel moon, and call on
Your performing stars to fall on
Headlong through your paper sky;
Nevermore shall I be cursed
By a flushed and amorous slattern,
With her dusty laces' pattern
Trailing, as she straggles by.

~ Dorothy Parker

Hot fun in the summertime

Here's the soundtrack for this one, by the way...)

[five six seven eight...]

All: End of the spring and here she comes back

Hi Hi Hi Hi there

Them summer days, those summer days

That's when I had most of my fun, back

Hi hi hi hi there

Them summer days, those summer days

Rose: I "cloud nine" when I want to

Freddie: Out of school, yeah

Larry: County fair in the country sun

Sly: And everything, it's true, ooh yeah

All: Hot fun in the summertime

Hot fun in the summertime

Hot fun in the summertime

Hot fun in the summertime...

(Just a couple of notes:

The eighth picture down (after Freddie sings "Out of school, yeah) is the great little soccer bar on Hawthorne 442. My friend Janelle and I went to watch the Timbers' awful debacle at Dallas (see the "Nibbled by Goats..." post down the feed) and met the couple on the far left of the picture. They were young teachers, moving to Idaho for their new jobs and getting married this fall, and were just ridiculously and painfully adorable.)

Two pictures below that is the truck cab on the way to work on a hot summer day, with everything I need to make things happen; phone, camera, notebook, lunch, vis-vest, reading glasses, novel (for the down times), coffee.

And I think the rest pretty much speak for themselves. How's your summer going...?)

Summer's End

The cool mornings and slanting light of evening are reminding me that our summer is drawing to a close.

Unlike the East Coast, this year Portland's summer has been brief, cool, and drizzly. We've had almost no hundred degree days, few of the brutal dog-mouth days that make you want to set in the shade and do nothing.Now the nights will draw out, and clouds lour in, and the cold rains of autumn begin.

"For summer there, bear in mind, is a loitering gossip, that only begins to talk of leaving when September rises to go."

- George Washington Cable

Thalatta, thalatta!

Well. Here it is, halfway through August and I have yet to find my voice. I am wandering about lost in midsummer, unable to find anything compelling to speak of. My family is fine, I'm actually on vacation at the moment, but I have been unable to get a moment to myself to sit and think, and write.

And I can't really find anything to write about that doesn't drive me batshit crazy.

So I am going down to the Oregon Coast with my family for a little while, in hopes of enjoying some quiet time in a peaceful stretch of the coastline near Tillamook. Hopefully the sea will work its way with me, as it has in the past, and restore a portion of breadth to my vision, and some depth to my reflection.Thalassa by Louis MacNeice

Run out the boat, my broken comrades;
Let the old seaweed crack, the surge
Burgeon oblivious of the last
Embarkation of feckless men,
Let every adverse force converge--
Here we must needs embark again.

Run up the sail, my heartsick comrades;
Let each horizon tilt and lurch--
You know the worst: your wills are fickle,
Your values blurred, your hearts impure
And your past life a ruined church--
But let your poison be your cure.

Put out to sea, ignoble comrades,
Whose record shall be noble yet;
Butting through scarps of moving marble
The narwhal dares us to be free;
By a high star our course is set,
Our end is Life. Put out to sea.


For those of you fellow military historians reading here you probably recognize the cry of Xenophon's troops at reaching the Black Sea, having marched back across Asia Minor:

"On the fifth day they reached the mountain, the name of which was Theches. No sooner had the men in front ascended it and caught sight of the sea than a great cry arose, and Xenophon, in the rearguard, catching the sound of it, conjectured that another set of enemies must surely be attacking in front...(b)ut as the shout became louder and nearer, and those who from time to time came up, began racing at the top of their speed towards the shouters, and the shouting continually recommenced with yet greater volume as the numbers increased, Xenophon settled in his mind that something extraordinary must have happened, so he mounted his horse, and taking with him Lycius and the cavalry, he galloped to the rescue. Presently they could hear the soldiers shouting and passing on the joyful word, "The sea! the sea!" (Book IV, Chapter VII)

I note in passing that the actual words these soldiers cried have been debated ever since. Were they shouting "Thalassa!" ("θάλασσα!"), which is the classical Greek for the word "sea" or "ocean"? Many historians, and many publishers, have believed so and copied the passage as such. But the mercenaries escaping Cyrus' disaster were largely Attic, and in the dialect of Αττική the word for sea is "θάλαττα" - "Thalatta". The soldiers would probably have shouted their happy news in their local tongue, and as such have I quoted them at the head of this post.

But thalassa or thalatta, Alexandra Lianeri does well to remind us that

"Most significantly, the march itself did not end at the glorious point of encountering the sea, and the next day revealed a gloomy picture contrasting with the shining moment of the shout.

The Ten Thousand did return to Greece, but there they found themselves as much at a loss as at the start of their journey: the political confusion they encountered when they crossed the Bosphorus left them isolated and without support. An escape story that began as a eulogy of the Greek achievement subverts itself by exposing Greek weakness."

The sea doesn't always afford us a means of escape, and even when it does, we often come to land only to find that we have been pursued by our own failings and futility. We can change our skies, but not ourselves. In the ripe heat of late summer, is it too late to hope that I can find some change of heart in a change of scene?

"Sometimes, in my green retreat,
the weather makes a joke,
with early falling leaves
and snowy flowers.
It’s August;
nothing will change
until we tell it to."

Dorothea Grossman