A Start

I was going to start with a tale of how I got in this mess. I have it all written out and saved over in the draft folder. It's a good Hemingwayesque romp around Paris. It has cafes, a woman in a French maid outfit, Les Halles, bets won and lost, and me back in the States buying a van,

but these 1's and 0's that I call my blog ain't that. That's the past. This isn't going to be a Hemingway. For how could it be when this current trip, journey, slow passage will be nothing but meandering and dusty. Hemingway liked his prose tidy. No, I don't see this as a tidy thing.

This is going to be a Whitman. A van, a country, a song of myself. This is the man-with-the-beard-and-the-paunch's territory. A good bloviation is needed. A ramble for a ramble. I'll leave the precision to writers of Facebook code and Iphone apps.

My posts like splashes of tar.
Parts will miss, but those that hit will stick
and stick good.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
From "Song of Myself"

I will awake with a view from Dutch eyes, and all that is passe will shine like the top of the Chrysler Building. I will once again be bold despite the fear, or maybe to spite the fear.

We will rattle-on in a van with no AC or rear shocks through this country unsure of its destiny. We will find its original energy and inhale its musky fume.

Therefore, to utterly misquote Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians by removing a t, "So i goes."

I'm blogging about my 6 week trip around the USA. This is the first of what I hope will be many posts at http://nothingmorethanwhatisaw.blogspot.com/

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One month in (Part 1)

I got off the 6 line at Blvd FDR and climbed the steps in to the glitter of the Champs Elysees night. The huge stores lining the street with names like Nike, fnac and Hugo Boss are filled with high-end merchandise I have no money for. This is the area for the serious shopper. A red carpet is rolled out in front of the movie theater across the street, and, since I don't meet up with Chris until 8pm, I walked over and peeked over the heads of the paparazzi to see if I recognized any movie stars bathed in camera flashes. I didn't, so I wandered down to the Arc de Triomphe to kill the remaining half hour.
The Arc is in the middle of a big round-about, and the stairs leading to the tunnel under the street are guarded by Paris's finest. I worried they may find suspicion in my big blue backpack and strapless guitar case, but they've seen tourist before and don't bother looking up from the latest La Monde. This monument to victory is much bigger than the St. Denis and St. Martin ones. I ran into these two Arches while lost the day before. They sit side by side on the road that divides the Right Bank into the haves and the haves-not-so-much. Irish pubs and Footlockers flank these over shadowed siblings in the "Arc de" family. You can actually go up into Triomphe, but like most things in Paris there is a fee. I stay on ground level and watch the eternal flame of the unknown soldier flicker. There is a story of a group of Australians who came one night and cooked their hotdogs in it, and of the Brazilian footballer who pissed in it when Brazil beat France in the World cup. I don't know about the Brazil story, but I've met enough Australians on this trip to believe that one. I smoke a cigarette in honor of the fallen and try to read the plaque dedicated France's Vietnam soldiers.
At 8:15 Chris emerges from his office door, and I recognize him from his couchsurfing.com profile. I get his name wrong twice before he reminds me it's not Charles or Steven. We head to the pub-quiz at the Scotsman via taxi. Chris is a Chinese American working as a consultant in Paris. He's young and corporate looking and seems to be enjoying his time away from the States. He also writes rap. He graciously let me crash on his couch for two nights. One night, in an exchange of underdeveloped talent, he rhymed and I played guitar.
We get to the pub and find it reserved for a private Robert Burns dinner. Damn Scots. Mike, the Welshman, comes up the Metro stairs. A multistripped scarf is wrapped twice around his neck and his unkempt light brown hair falls to his collar. He shakes Chris's hand and we're introduced. Without the Scotsman as a destination we are flummoxed and spend the next half hour deciding "what and where." Eventually we divide up my luggage and head across the Seine to the Galway Pub's open mic night.
We cross the river and marvel at Notre Dame's flying Buttress awash in light. ND disappointing me the first time I saw it. It seemed smaller than it looked in films and pictures. The branch of the Seine that flows around the Left Bank side of Ile de la Cite is narrow and non-picturesque. First of all, no one told me the damn church was on an island. The big island as it is called here in Paris. Actually its called Ile de la Cite, but who speaks French now a days. Brown and Black with boxy architecture its almost drab compared to the white and curvaceous Sacre Couer standing high on Montmartre with a beautiful view of Paris at its door.
But. And there is always a but, Notre Dame grows on me. Every time I pass it, it is taller and more ornate. Stories and gargoyles have been added by giant elves while I slept. I wait for the perfect sunny day when I will take the ND tour and walk along the edge of the bell towers. The carved figures around the doorways, the large stain glassed rose window above them and the ornate decorations already whisper in the night air.
-I have been here for 700 years. Why don't you climb? Climb the front. Grab hold of Abraham's robe. No, you dumb ass American, the other figure above the center arch. And pull yourself up. There are handholds aplenty. The gargoyles managed. They are stone. They crawled up cursing and biting until they could get no further. Why do you think they look like that? Some made it to the top others stopped halfway up and must spit rainwater for their failure. Methusala sits at the top of the southern bell tower. Her wings and head bent back. Her mouth open singing or screaming or both."
As we pack-laden pub-crawlers passed Shakespeare and Co., I ask Chris and Mike if they'd ever been in it. They both said no and asked what it was. I was aghast, and my head swiveled in large exaggerated arcs back and forth as I tried to look both them in the eyes to see if they were fucking with me. How could they not know the most famous English Language bookstore on the continent. My order of business on the Left Bank was Notre Dame then Shakespeare and Co.
Both are churches in their own right. They are across the Seine from each other. What ND is to gargantuan and Gothic, Shakespeare's is to tiny and cluttered. This most independent of independent book stores could fit into the Romanian Lesbian Lit section at Powell's. Housed in half the ground floor of an old monastery every available space is used for books. If you don't knock over some pile of books while weaving your way through customers, you might as well pack it in and head west to the Champs and break out the credit card. Most days you have to push passed other tourists lingering to read titles on the bookshelves. An old upright piano in the history section with books stacked on top of it. It is sound by random customers at least once every hour. The selection is diverse but not necessary extensive. And the coolest part of the whole thing is...wait for it...you can live there for free. You can live in the store (on the second floor-which is just as open to the public as the first.) Currently housed there is an international menagerie that includes Mike, Tom, Marlous (you might spell her name that way. Damn Dutch) and Brendan. There are more. Shakespeare's houses six or seven. For room and board you, have to work two hours a day and get your ass up when the store opens. I've thought about making a petition to stay for awhile, but compared to these 20 somethings I'm old and wealthy. When you're happy living on the money collected from the wishing well, you have me beat in the poor column. I drop by now and then just to see what's up. Usually just good conversation.
We had some of that at the Galway, but what we really experienced was Jahn...

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New harvest

In one
final grasp
at the fine threads
of a thick, old rope
we turned back the clock --
one more hour asleep,
one more hour
to dream
but
sixty minutes can't stop the sun
from rising
never stopped the crops
from ripening
never pushed a day away.

and this day --
oh!
this day
has been pushing for a long time
like a tender sprout
through frozen soil,
like a woman into a mother,
pushing
like Sisyphus up that mountain,
an eternity
in our lifetime.

And -- is it time now?
for turning over spent soil
to give new life
its breath
time
for that chance to see the sun
rising every day
for the first time?
has that hour come
where we
shake off our sleep,
put our dreams down
and reach out timid toes
to feel the cool floor
before standing?

is this our curtain call --
calling us
to the curtain
to make our history
a new harvest?
i would turn back the clock
two hundred years
for this day to come
before tomorrow --
i would wake from
every American Dream
to see one
actually
being born.

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Ode to an Autumn Hangover

There appears to be a wildebeest in my head, stampeding,
Bouncing off the walls and generally misbehaving,
It must have been there hiding in that cask of Old Peculiar -
It’s like a cow you see, but around the front its woolier.
You say you have one, too? Then surely there were two!
Squashed inside that cask of Old -

Peculiar that, wouldn’t you say?
A brace of wildebeesties hiding in a common barrel?
Can it be right in any way?
Two bovines, riled and yeasty, biding at their frothing peril?

I merely raise the question -
If I might regain your scant attention -
For I feel I must make mention
of the contradiction in scale,
Which one simply cannot fail appreciate
Is somewhat inappropriate,
Tangentially unfortunate,
And quite beyond the pail.

Dr. Samwys

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Tumblr Weed Revolution

It seems the recent fracas over in the Eastern Block has spilled over into our humble Writer's Block. After a bloody series of skirmishes, The Grand Conspiracy has decentralized into a confederacy of autonomous sites.

Fortunately, moves towards total independence were forestalled by a combination of apathy and laziness on behalf of all concerned.

Until a new constitution is written and a new seat of permanent government is found, a temporary governing body will reside at the present location.


Dissidents can be found at:
The People's Peopledom of Uncle Pilot.

The Free Radical Enclave of ZeeK the Destroyer

The Nefarious Pub Relic of Rev. Dr. Samwys

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Hot on the heels of the Tin Ceiling's riotous seven/24 vii, the Tin Ceiling continues its eighth season with an exploration into the heat of fraternal tension and the dark lands of the creative writing process with its production of True West by Pulitzer-prize winning author Sam Shepard.

True West is a comic nightmare of confrontation. Austin is an ambitious Hollywood screenwriter working on a potential million-dollar deal when an ill wind off the desert blows in his brother Lee, a hobo thief with a six-pack and a case of sibling rivalry. The conflict arises when a film producer offers Lee the chance to write a "true" western. In a role reversal as intricate as it is riveting, the brothers head toward Shepard's outrageous showdown.

Come join us for the second show of our eighth season, a highly kinetic production that will make you wonder where your toaster went, solve the age old question of typewriter vs golf club, and leave you looking twice at your sibling.

"True West" will play Friday-Sunday, July 11-13, 18-20, 25-27

3159 Cherokee, St. Louis, MO 63118.
All shows at 8pm for $10.
For more information call (314) 374-1511 or visit http://www.tinceiling.org.

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The Scarlet Spectacle

Kamoojlian Dortmand Riloblaster III stood silently on the bridge of the HSS Spectacular Scarlet admiring her work. She had achieved what had hitherto been thought impossible. Or at least, entirely improbable. To the extent that something can be entirely improbable without erring overly on the side of slightly impossible. You see, Kamoojlian Dortmand Riloblaster III had successfully destroyed the whole universe. Or at least a whole universe. Actually, one of an infinite number of universes. A fact that did poke a modest dent in Kamoojlian's sense of accomplishment, but nevertheless did no violence to the essential truth that nobody else had hitherto accomplished an accomplishment quite like this one. It was a masterstroke for universal feminism, at least among those universes that remained. A terrific monument to what could be done, if one only put her mind to it.

Kamoojlian's green eyes remained fixed on the nothingness of the expired universe before her, as the ship's internal PA began to etch the silent atmosphere of the bridge with the sculptural rhythms of Boccherini's 4th Movement of "La Notturna della Strade di Madrid". A sound choice, and one which the Spectacular Scarlet's onboard AI, Milo, had considered to be most appropriate for the occasion. Kamoojlian filled her lungs with the symphony and, as she exhaled, allowed her crimson lips to part and curl at the corners in an expression communicating the sweet decline of momentary ecstasy.

After a while, when the violas had fallen silent, Kamoojlian relieved her First Officer from duty and took the helm of the Spectacular Scarlet,steering the ship away from the interminable void. She destroyed universes, for Heaven's sake. She could drive her own bloody spaceship.

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