Journeys: Mornington Crescent

Speller.

Gibbons.

Hayward.

Minn.

Draper.

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All five street covers found on the pavement of Mornington Crescent, London, NW1.

Project: Journeys

Journeys is a project featuring images from travels, sometimes in pairs or sets – sometimes with captions that tell a story.

A Natural History: Ross Gay

A Natural History of My Sweet Potato

Text and Photo by Ross Gay

fig. 1 Sweet Potato

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Harvest

Think of the twining, lascivious vines

as guides undulating from the mother stem.

Use a light touch with the pitchfork

so as not to pierce the ambulant

and stray.  When you’ve found and heaved

the whole flock, the gnarled, sappy thatch

of kin, brush from them the dirt

from which they grew.  Brush it

from the nodes and nooks, from the scar

and the moonfaced split.  Brush from them

the small dead, the innumerable dead,

microbial vertebrae and earthworm shit;

brush from them the trillion teeth and tongues

whispering their rot into soil, and scrub

now, with warm water and a dash

of soap, use a toothbrush for the crannies

if need be—scour, if the need be—

until is gone the least remains

of the earth from which they grew,

and instead we praise

the sheen and luster of the clean

and ruined thing.

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Ross Gay grows sweet potatoes and had a pet groundhog named Greg.

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Notes:

“A Natural History of My Sweet Potato” is part of the Natural Histories Project. Click here to learn more >>

Ross Gay’s first book, Against Which, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2006. You can find out more about Ross Gay and his work at the From the Fishouse website.

N.B.: Kid Millions Letter

Not-So-Great Books of 2009
With Suggestions for Alternative Reading

By Kid Millions

Note: The Owls asked some thoughtful people to comment on their favorite books of 2009. Kid Millions responded with these far more extensive notes. -JMT.

Hey Owls – I read a bunch of awful books published in 2009. . . I’ll reveal them and tell you what to read instead.

Night of the Gun:
A Reporter investigates the darkest story of his life. His Own.
By David Carr
Simon and Schuster PB, June 2009

This book presents a rare quandary – an egregiously self-indulgent memoir written by an insufferable bore self-aware of his tremendous human failings and of the unmitigated self-obsession this kind of book project suggests.

You should read:

Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper
By Art Pepper
Westview Press, 1994

One of the most brutal, uncompromising looks at life as a junkie ever written.

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Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit
By Matt McCarthy
Viking, February, 2009

Like most of Matt McCarthy’s teammates on the Provo Angels minor league team where he spent one season, I’m sick and tired of Ivy League bullshit. Add to all this that McCarthy’s debunked (another fraud memoir!) tale is told from the safe confines of the hospital where he’s now doing his residency.

You should read:

A False Spring
By Pat Jordan
Mead, 1975

Probably the best sports book I’ve ever read and I don’t make this claim lightly. False Spring is a kind of miracle of self-awareness. Pat Jordan spent 10 years in the minors as a pitcher and in the process composed this elegy about human failings, lost dreams and just plain living life.

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And my final dig?

Cat Power: A Good Woman
By Elizabeth Goodman
Three Rivers Press, April, 2009

The bio starts with the classic journalistic ruse: “Chan Marshall [aka Cat Power] does not want you to read this book.” OK – so it’s not official. . .and it’s a few steps above a hack job. The author also makes a big deal about Marshall not talking about her half-brother with cerebral palsy as if she’s trying to sweep a family skeleton under the rug. That strikes me as a loathsome reach for Goodman who seems to have a chip on her shoulder about the fact that Chan wasn’t psyched for her to do the book. Cat Power clearly has good taste if she tried to sink this.

You should read this instead:

Black Postcards: A Memoir
By Dean Wareham
Penguin PB, May, 2009

Wareham captures the ambivalence, emptiness and simple pleasures that make up a large percentage of the life of a small-time touring musician accurately and poignantly. In terms of music memoirs I’ve read this one is closest to my experience as a micro-time indie rock musician straddling the period between the industry’s feast and famine years (late 90s vs. current day)…

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Kid Millions is the drummer in the band Oneida.

Stamps: Skip Horack

from The Gulf Sturgeon Project

By Skip Horack

A map of the panhandle coastline was spread out across the table, and Landon confirmed that four of his tags had surfaced in the Apalachicola – two just beneath the big dam near the Florida-Georgia line, another two within a few miles of where he was now sitting.

But the fifth tag confounded him. That fifth tag contradicted everything he knew about predicting the tendencies of Gulf sturgeon. Those last coordinates fell far off the chart. Landon consulted another map and realized that Bertha had strayed three hundred miles west of her home stream. In fact, as of midnight, she was just north of New Orleans and traveling up the Mississippi River.

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A week later, on the last day of spring, Landon took his john-boat north of Tallahassee and fished a far, empty corner of Lake Jackson. Push-poling through the water hyacinth at dusk, he bumped a pair of wood ducks that flew off squealing to roost in a distant cypress swamp. They were local birds – ducks somehow born without the instinct to migrate north – but in a few months the teal would return to join them in the lake, and soon the widgeon and other big ducks would follow.

A ridge of hardwoods ran along the north shore of the lake, solid save for a wide fairway of lawn that plunged like a scar from the foot of an eggshell mansion on the hilltop. Black men in white jackets floated through a linen crowd scattered across the great lawn. A slight shift in the evening breeze carried piano music across the water, and to Landon it sounded like glass breaking gently.

He worked his boat closer to the party as he cast his spinner bait. Tucked among the cypress knees was a boathouse where he and Cassie had once trespassed and made love. She was a fool for that kind of thing. He supposed they both were.

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Skip Horack’s story collection, The Southern Cross, won the 2009 Bakeless Prize in Fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ conference. A native of Louisiana, he works as a Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford University.

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This excerpt from “The Gulf Sturgeon Project” is part of the Stamps projects, click here to read more >>

A Natural History: Laurie Clements Lambeth

A Natural History of My Canes

By Laurie Clements Lambeth

Skirted Cane

When does it start, exactly,  the crook and derby, the carved handles, the ash, chestnut and hazel wood?  The horn, the bone, the scrimshaw? The lucite and carbon fiber?

It has been put forth that the true origin of my canes occurred here, in Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic sequence of a nude woman’s gait.  A representative of spastic (choreic) symptoms of multiple sclerosis—then called cerebro-spinal sclerosis—she walks with a tightness, there in her ankle. (Figure 1).  Note the height of her foot in frame 8, the tight flex, as though she is marching or stepping upon an unseen pedal.  Note the turn inward of the right foot, as seen directly below frame 8.  There she drags her toes.

Fig. 1

The model’s left arm is supported by a figure in a long, dark dress.  Taller than the model, the figure braces both the back of the upper arm and wrist, tight.  A very literal prop: a tall, living cane to support her and display her body against its ample skirt.

“Come along, dear,” the cane might say. The skirted cane casts its gaze downward, but it is impossible to know why.

I have dragged my toes, my left foot turned outward. I have leaned, wavered, flexed tight at the ankle.  The feeling is heavy, like thick skirts wrapped round, bewildering in their unseen layers.

Bearded Cane

Fig. 2

The man lecturing in Figure 2 is Jean-Martin Charcot.  The woman, swooning in a voluminous skirt and blouse slipping off her shoulder, is supported from behind by a bending bearded figure in a suit.  This collapse is a sign of her condition, which Charcot defined as hysteria.  The medical students watch attentively.  The bearded cane holds her steadily.  A number of years before, Charcot discovered upon autopsy some grey plaques scattered through the brains and spinal cords of patients with partial paralysis, spasticity, or tremor.  He had discovered multiple sclerosis.

Some cases of MS were misidentified as hysteria.

My First Cane

A red plastic tube with large, hollow plastic disks at either end: giant tinker-toy.  Mrs. Beaumont kept them in a yard behind our first grade classroom.  Ideally, we would build with them.  I danced with mine, held it across my body, back and forth, a child’s soft shoe.  My audience?  A boy, a crush.  Class had been called in, but we were late.

“Robbie, lookit. Look at me: Tea for two, and two for tea . . .”  My ankles crossed, tap here, tap there. “Me for you, and you for me . . .”  My voice grew faint, wavered. I stood the cane upright, leaned my right hand upon it, slowly twirled around it.

He’d disappeared when I stepped back around.  Heat flooded my cheeks.  I put the cane down.

Boy Scout Cane

A strong arm is preparation enough, he seemed to say.  He was never in the Boy Scouts.

When my stride matched the length of my legs, when I could still run if the weather was right, my boy scout cane suitably held my hand or put his arm around my waist.  I was half his size.  He was not a cane yet, just my boyfriend, so hand holding was expected.  We were living in a two-story house when my legs stopped cooperating for the first time.  MS had been part of my life for eight years by then, but hadn’t affected my walking much.

It was in this house, called, in the South, a “carriage house,” that he held my body as it shook and jolted one night.  I lay awake on my side but could not control the flailings.  With one hand he pressed my leg down.  With the other, he held my arm and back.  He stilled me.  This was practice.

Left leg weak and numb, I gripped the banister and pulled myself up the staircase past our novena candles.  I took my time going down, weak leg first.  At the university where we studied and taught he helped me down stairs by carrying—hitching—my elbow with his one hand, while holding my wrist aloft with the other.  My limp hand swung with his stride.  I had become an old lady in my twenties, the boy scout helping me across the street.  I pulled loose, reached for his hand.  I didn’t want to recognize that he had become a cane.

That summer I would learn that my childhood crush, my audience when I danced the soft shoe with my first cane, perished in a car wreck.

Crook cane

If I had been asked, as a child, to draw a cane, I would draw the iconic one with a crook handle.  Wouldn’t we all?  This cane (Figure 3) was discarded by an old woman. She had graduated to a walker with tennis ball casters.

Fig. 3

I wanted to paint a design on the cane, but instead wore some paint off with my grip.  Once I got my stride back I neglected it.  Because I used to row myself along as fast as I could, the crook cane produced calluses. In its retirement this cane enjoys gardening, like its former owner.

Anise Cane

Wild anise stalks lined a trail I rode often when I was a teenager.  My horse chomped their five-foot high tips, uprooting the hollow stalks—canes—and dragging their length along the ground.  Strong scent of licorice.  Feathery leaves caught in his bridle.  I’d lean forward to reach his cheek with my hand, pull the rest of the now-frothy plant from his mouth and hang on to it above his flank, like I would a crop.  With each stride of the horse I punched the ground with the anise cane, occasionally offering bites along the way, until it was too short, until it was nearly gone.  Licorice foam flew from his mouth, dotting his neck, my knee.

Derby Cane

Though it may look like a horn, this cane’s flat derby handle is wood.  Flora dressed up as fauna. I have hung it on tables and leaned it on walls and chairs; it has fallen and chipped: all wood.  The handle felt right in the hand until the slow eruption of splinters.  I return it to its source (Figure 4).  Note the chipped handle.  Even now it is knocking to get in.

Fig. 4

Glass Cane

You wanted a glass cane after you saw one in a movie.  What you found was a clear lucite one with a handle that looked like a wing, molded to fit the right hand (Figure 6).  You learned that when you need a cane to walk, unless you cannot use the hand opposite the affected leg, you should lead each step with the cane in one hand, then step with the leg on the other side.  In the movie with the glass cane the actor holds the cane on the affected side.  You were once warned this could cause falls (Figure 5).  Things fall no matter what you do, though.

Remember dropping your clear cane in the airport when you realized you had lost your passport?  With what fury you had hurtled (pitching, rowing, the cane delivering you) from one terminal and through another to find the gate for your transatlantic flight, so certain the passport was in your bag.  You gathered the air and the ground with the cane in your right hand and dragged your bum leg and body through the space the cane had made.

Fig. 6, replacement of the original

And then what? At what precise moment did you understand the passport was truly lost and you were stuck in a strange city?  It was after you were turned away from the security queue, unable to produce the proper paperwork for your next flight. You found an open space of floor and sank down to sit there, frantic, determined to search through your bags yet again.  Your right hand’s fingers shook open and let the cane fall.  The snap of impact—like a bone breaking—silenced you as it hit the gold-flecked tiles.  A crystal fracture rose up through the sculpted handle and branched off, lightning.  It held the light and reflected your tears, or that’s how you remember it.

Cracked, the cane served you well for years after, didn’t it, the crack branching further and occasionally pinching the flap of skin between thumb and forefinger.  The day the handle finally broke from the shaft, mid-step: admit it, that was kind of funny.  The handle stayed in your tight grip, your arm still cycling forward in its repeated motion, while the shaft fell out, as in a cartoon: the underweight hero swings and swings his fists at air, never reaching his target, while the huge villain holds the little guy’s head at arm’s length.

Indestructible Fabric Cane

When the first clear cane’s handle separated from its base, my poetry student Joel offered to make me one from carbon fiber.  There was a lot of carbon fabric scrap lying around his work shop, and he wanted to make something different than brackets and motorcycle parts.  The cane’s tube and especially the seamless molded handle offered a challenge.  He took the old handle and lucite shaft to guide his measurements, trying to get the ergonomic wing of the handle just right.

“It amazes me that this stuff can be cut with scissors, yet it will end up lighter than aluminum and stronger than steel,” he told me.

Soaked with epoxy the carbon grows stronger and is cured.

He tells me he fashioned the handle with a modeling clay mold of the old handle filled with epoxy, then he fed it small snippets of carbon fabric “until the mold is overflowing with carbon splinters and hot epoxy.”  Splinters of a different kind, cured and smoothed.  I can tell the handle is composed of small shards: observe the gray lines and swirls (Figure 7).

Fig. 7

The clear cane contains light.  The carbon one enacts lightness.

Floating Cane

I carry a pink foam noodle when I teach my body to walk again in the physical therapy pool.  It floats along the surface and I hold it horizontally as I did the giant tinker-toy, like a dancer would, but with less grace and more pressure from my hands when I lose balance.  Later I use the noodle as though I’m walking a tightrope.  Cue circus music.

Canes with Carved Heads

Fig. 8

What must it be like to confront a wooden, perpetually fierce representative of one’s own species?  The cane in Figure 8 bares its teeth and stares down a living dog.  The first time the dog saw that cane she balked. Now she approaches with caution.  Although they share the same curl of nostril, the dog’s nose is moist and more textured, her eyes able to shut at will.

Fig. 9

To feel the carved solid form cupped in my palm, to rest my fingers upon its smooth glass eyes, its teeth under my thumb or its jagged mane jutting into the center of my hand, to know the texture of those lines scratched into the surface by heart, is to have held the form in one’s hand so many times that a transference has taken place.  Notice, in Figure 9, the trace of color—a deeper chestnut—by the horse’s glass eye or above the nostril.  This cane was much darker in its youth; as I propelled myself with the cane, palm sweating, shoulder aching, the stain absorbed through my skin.  It still pulses throughout my body.

What is a cane with a head if not an imitation of the brain atop the spine? Cerebrum, cerebellum, brain stem, then the cervical, thoracic, and lumbar regions of spine (Figure 10).  This is your cane, all your life.  How will it carry you?

Fig. 10

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Laurie Clements Lambeth lives with her husband Ian and their animals in Houston, where she took many of these photos, but not the 19th century images.

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Notes:

“A Natural History of My Canes” is part of the Natural Histories Project. Click here to learn more >>

Laurie Clements Lambeth is the author of Veil and Burn, selected by Maxine Kumin for the National Poetry Series and published by University of Illinois Press.  She is the Reviews Editor for Disability Studies Quarterly and a contributor to Stephen Kuusisto’s blog, www.planet-of-the-blind.com. This fall she is writer-in-residence at Saint Mary’s College of Maryland.

N.B.: Films of the Decade, Again?

So various magazines are doing their Best Films of 2009 features – Time’s Richard Corliss leads with…The Princess and the Frog. Others have more ambitious lists of the Best Films of the Decade. Paste magazine suggests City of God, while Reverse Shot lists Children of Men amongst others, and The Onion A.V. Club picks Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Of course, all this is pretty pointless, not to mention aggravating, as the thread “Stop the Lists!” on The Auteurs site notes, with one member giving their excellent “top ten reasons not to list things.”

Not that you asked, but I find my personal tastes mirrored back to me in a year-by-year recounting of the films I remember liking most – basically, a predilection for rather grim stuff: 2000 – In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai), 2001 – The Man Who Wasn’t There (Coens), 2002 – City of God (Fernando Meirelles), 2003 – Monster (Patty Jenkins), 2004 – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry), 2005 – Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog), 2006 – The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck), 2007 – There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson), 2008 – Gomorra (Matteo Garrone), 2009 – A Serious Man (Coens again). But I didn’t see everything…

It might be slightly more interesting to introduce a few extremely specific, admittedly eclectic, and personal categories. See below – JMT.

Surprising, and Not in a Good Way

Dreamcatcher (2003)
As a friend put it, “Stephen King, Lawrence Kasdan, and William Goldman – What could go wrong?” Well…everything. I will say that this film is not predictable, and that it will astonish you. Its badness – about an alien invasion stopped by a group of psychic friends – goes far beyond what can be explained by mere mortals. Spoiler: the aliens inhabiting your body come out of your…digestive system. (Hat tip to Jim Gavin for showing me Dreamcatcher.)

Rare Display of American Public Acumen

Troy (2004)
This film actually made money internationally – remarkable. In all it has grossed nearly $500 million to date, the same amount the Saudis pledged to rebuilding Lebanon, the same amount the World Bank spent on social projects in Russia. This, after flopping in a drastic way in the U.S. Opening weekend did not even cover the marketing costs, and Troy ranks in the Top 20 of the most expensive films ever made. So, take that, world – who said Americans were stupider than thou? There’s an interesting controversy regarding Gabriel Yared’s original score for the film, rejected as “dated” by a focus group. Much as I hate to flog a movie based upon a poem, or one that contains both Brian Cox and Julie Christie, the score wasn’t the problem.

Misjudged in an Epochal Manner

Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005)
Patton Oswalt has the final say on why these films don’t work. Personally, I think the paradox of Star Wars is that the early films worked a lot better precisely because the technology that produced them was so delightfully primitive – and also because the scripts contained wonderful doses of all-ages humor. Finally given the power to realize the contents of his imagination on film later in life, Lucas…did precisely that. A hat-tip most go to Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull (which Lucas helped produce). Baby Boomers, thine ice floes await.

The Passion of The Passion

The Passion of the Christ (2004)
Eddie Izzard once remarked that the very last thing Jesus would want to see if he returned to earth was the crucifix – some bad memories there. Little-known fact: Mel Gibson’s epic story of a charismatic guy rising from the dead was ripped off in a recent series of novels and movies called Twilight.

A Baffling Case of Vast Acclaim

Crash (2005)
I know lots of folks just adore this film. Lightweights like The Academy of Motion Pictures and reverse weather vane David Denby. Well, nobody’s perfect. To be well-meaning about the issue of race in America is not enough. You also have to make something good, on top of that. This Crash playlist on YouTube really made me think…

That’s Not Film

The Wire (2002-2008)
There came a moment during this decade when it became clear that cable television shows could compete with film on a purely artistic basis. The Wire was probably the high water mark of this new cultural phenomenon – 60 episodes of a five-act tragedy about the fate of the American inner city. Ridley Scott’s American Gangster (2007), a decent but poorly edited film, pales in comparison. TV did it better.

Documentaries

To name only a few highly memorable English-language titles: Jazz & Unforgivable Blackness (Burns), Encounters at the End of the World & Grizzly Man (Herzog), Of Time and The City (Davies), My Winnipeg (Maddin, a so-called “docu-fantasia” mixing fact and fiction), Man on Wire (Marsh), Fog of War & Standard Operating Procedure (Morris), Darwin’s Nightmare (Sauper), When the Levees Broke (Lee), 51 Birch Street (Block), and…

Totally Intriguing

Collapse (2009)
Michael Ruppert is an ex-L.A.P.D. cop whose newsletter From the Wilderness predicted the economic collapse of 2008 based upon theories of Peak Oil, amongst other things. In the film, Ruppert also appears at the very least slightly batty at certain key points, tending to sink his own ship. So are his other theories about the imminent demise of civilization around the bend or simply before their time? Chris Smith, who directed American Movie (1999) and helped produce The Yes Men (2003), interviews him at length in a similar style that Errol Morris brought to The Fog of War, with the camera focused almost entirely on the subject, and the filmmaker interrupting only when he’s too exasperated to allow some piece of bona fide weirdness to go unchallenged. Is the film endorsing or criticizing Ruppert’s theories? Neither – Smith simply shows his subject As Is. Ruppert emerges as a fascinating guy who combines elements of the crap artist down at the bar, your favorite college prof, and a brilliant friend in trouble.

“Late” Spike Lee

Inside Man (2006)
By “late,” I don’t mean to imply any other wish than a long productive life for Mr. Spike Lee. It’s just that I don’t think his recent mainstream work since Clockers (1995, based on Richard Price’s novel and influential on The Wire), though acclaimed, has gotten as much credit as it deserves. Consider He Got Game (1998), Summer of Sam (1999), 25th Hour (2002), Inside Man (2006), and When the Levees Broke (2006). Inside Man is just an elegant first-rate thriller.

A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever

A Bully Gets Bullied (1990, 2006)
The web site Panopticist posted this clip of an angry crowd freaking out on Rush Limbaugh during his ill-fated television appearance guest hosting the Pat Sajak show in 1990. They essentially, like, shut him up. (Actually, they denounce him as a murderer.) The poor guy is flustered and scared. After cutting to commercial to try to calm the waters, Limbaugh appears at the end of the program in an empty theater. The audience has been removed in order to let him have his say.

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These notes originally appeared on 3quarksdaily, click here for a post containing video.

Stamps: C. E. Perry

Why Lovers in Trouble End Up at the Rodeo

By C. E. Perry

We have driven eighty-seven miles and paid
four dollars each to see that cowboy’s wrist
snap like fresh chalk. My love, the meadows
are pressed flat by the young Montana backs
of young Montana men. It stuns us to witness
such torque and to crave it. It stuns us to recall
bookshelves fainting to the floor and rats
swimming away from us in bed. We are still
alive and the beer is cold. We each swoon
when our hero takes flight – his hat a swank
hurrah, his head lost, loose over those horns.

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C. E. Perry’s first book of poems is Night Work (Sarabande), from which this poem is reprinted.

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This poem is part of the Stamps projects at The Owls site, read more >>

A Natural History: Alicia Jo Rabins

A NATURAL HISTORY OF MY INSTRUMENT

Text and music by Alicia Jo Rabins

I.  THE FIRST TIME I SAW IT

I was thirteen:  pink blemish like a stain on the sheet of my neck.

That was the year I realized I could transmute myself into waves of sound and, through my body, project myself far beyond my body.  Practicing to free myself.  I knew I was lucky, like a happy young nun.

Leila Waddell

II.

The strings, the scroll, the nut, the frog, the tip, the F-holes, the purfling, the bridge, the soundpost, the chinrest.  From far away it looks handsome, proportional.

Seen from under your chin, it’s too close to focus.   The four strings blend and merge to converge in an impossible point past the scroll.   The riddle of the eyes can give you a headache.  Best to close them and feel the vibrations travel through your collarbone.  Your fingertips’ soft pads on the wound metal strings.

Skye Boat Song

III.  ROUGH RED MARK BELOW HER LEFT JAW CORNER

- not the red of blood leaking beneath the skin, but of skin itself rubbed raw – you’re probably looking at a violinist.

Well, she could be a violist.

X Violins

IV.  I NEVER SAW THOSE DEER

I knew no one on the entire continent.

Mornings in beginner Hebrew class on Mount Carmel, afternoons in the Baha’i temple, nights staring into the bonfire outside the Christian hostel.   I’d gone there to understand what it meant that I was a Jew.   Strange.

One day Ian surprised me at lunch;  he was backpacking through the Middle East and decided to find me.  I finished my tuna sandwich and took him out to the clearing in the woods behind the university where I went to play violin between classes.   He left the next day, and I was alone again.

Two years later, Filip told me about the deer.   Ian said he’d watched them emerge from forest as I tuned my violin.   They stood around us in a circle as I played with my eyes closed.

Bubover March

V.

Rabbi Yochanan said: Happy is he who has never set eyes upon his parents. [Because it is impossible to honor them adequately-- Rashi]

–Talmud

Dear Mom,

You told me you hadn’t wanted children, weren’t sure you’d know how to raise them, with your mother the way she was.  Then you and Dad had three girls, and you stayed home with us and loved us and knew exactly what to do.  You took us running around the track;  we hugged your calves.   I remember the smell of your sweat.  You saw a Phil Donahue special on the Suzuki method.  You thought it looked good for children.  You rented-to-own a series of tiny violins.  We ended up owning all of them.  I’ll never be able to thank you.  This is a beginning.

Love,

Alicia

Tiny violin

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Alicia Jo Rabins has played her violin on board schooners in three bodies of water:  Baltimore Harbor, New York Harbor, and the Caribbean Sea.

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Notes:

“A Natural History of My Instrument” is part of the Natural Histories Project. Click here to learn more >>

Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet, violinist and songwriter based in Brooklyn, NY.  Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Court Green, 6 x 6, and Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn.  Girls in Trouble, her art-pop song cycle about obscure stories of women from the Old Testament, was released in October 2009 on Jdub Records.

Stamps: David Ker Thomson

New Mud

By David Ker Thomson

My wife says I travel like a suitcase. As I apply a nail file to my left big toe, it occurs to me that I’m releasing Guatemalan mud into the Toronto sewer system. In the long run it’s all just plain old stardust, I suppose, but that particular configuration, of Mayan microbes wrangling with some local Toronto toughs through sunless caverns down to our inland sea of precious fossil water, well, that was enough to give me pause.

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David Ker Thomson writes for CounterPunch.

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This post is part of the Stamps project, read more about it here >>