ron reed | found poem | typos, misread, overheard and dreamed 2020

27 Contact Lenses Are Found in Woman’s Eye, Doctors Report

She felt a sharp pain in her left eye while taking part
in an annual tradition of tomb-swapping,
four bees living in her eye, feeding on her tears.

Dr. Hong said the situation could have been much worse.

"This is the first time in Taiwan we've seen something like this," he added.

how do you improve on the power of fluff?

a mis-hit swivel high volley

blackberries
hose winder
bury the frog

I’m you could purchase an entire baseball team for $365M years old.

define anything:
false prevention
power outrages
mental sweater vest

I am indeed a nephew.

I'm trying to understand how technology works. A friend told me that we were supposed to have something fly by to push the smoke away this morning, but whatever it was was too high and didn't do what we needed it to do.

In case of volcanic eruption, you will hear mermaids. 

Do not ignore the mermaids; they are there for your safety.

Weird how Governors can see a snow emergency and say "Hey, stay off the roads because it's dangerous for you and others" and no one is putting on their Gears of War cosplay and jumping in a Dodge Ram with between 4 and 20 flags on it to throw a tantrum.

"I love you more than apples!"
the orange are the same chair as the grey one

steamed as Stimson in stasis

Hi! Speech (aphasia),
church Lutheran, movie, zoo,
Spark, National Music,
YMCA, Military Museum,
strokes,
newspaper.
WCB Manager 11, Alberta Health Services Manager.
Old friends .
Move??

My phone was open in my bag and typed this:
the first 5o and then you can get the good taco shelled by any chance
think paste it to to to you and then we will be be in a few weeks of my
parents and I have a decent time time time time time in my way home
home from work work work work work work work work work work work work work
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the final stanza was written by autofill on Danielle Klaudt's cel phone

job title: dilettante

"I'm in the group of those who aspire to be dilettantes." 

Duke Ellington 

dilettante, 

gadabout, 

layabout,

flâneur, 

amateur, 

connoisseur,

dabbler,

dropout, 

idler.

dilettante : a person who takes up an art, activity, or subject merely for amusement, especially in a desultory or superficial way. "It was unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van Weyden, a scholar and a dilettante, if you please, in things artistic and literary, should be lying here on a Bering Sea seal-hunting schooner." Jack London

amateur : 1) a person who engages in a pursuit on an unpaid rather than a professional basis. 2) a person who is incompetent or inept at a particular activity. Late 18th century: from French, from Italian amatore, from Latin amator ‘lover’, from amare ‘to love’.

gadabout : a person who goes out a lot and does not worry about other things they should be doing; an habitual pleasure-seeker. "I'm quitting my job to go to gad school." Steven Gomez

flâneur :  the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of “stroller”, “lounger”, “saunterer”, “loafer”—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means “to stroll”. 

"The French poet Charles Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as a 'gentleman stroller of city streets, and wrote that in the modern city we become a flâneur or stroller. This was an entirely new urban figure, associated with the era of modernity. According to Baudelaire, the flâneur moves through the labyrinthine streets and hidden spaces of the city, partaking of its attractions and fearful pleasures, but remaining somehow detached and apart from it. They aren’t walking to get something, or to go somewhere, they aren’t even shopping (which is as near as most of us get to this Baudelerian ideal). Flâneurs are standing in deliberate opposition to capitalist society, with its two great imperatives, to be in a hurry, and to buy things." lightgraphite 

"The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life." Charles Baudelaire

"The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque'." Susan Sontag

"I have to walk to survive." Fred Herzog

Flaneur, Granville (1960)

Fred Herzog

royal sproule | it's simple

 

illustration by royal sproule, 2020

rehearsals for 'the furniture of heaven' (nov/dec 1990), conversation about dramaturgy

"the supply room is out of paper clips" : crib notes for a prairie home companion

Every week on Prairie Home, Garrison tells the news of Lake Wobegon; a small Minnesotan town where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” Wikipedia labels it a fictional town, while strangely adding: “said to be the boyhood home of Garrison Keillor.” 

As an adult, Garrison has lived in New York and St. Paul – neither place small. How do you bring a small town to life every week without living in one? 

One thing he did was call in help. Holly Harden. A writer who lives in a small town, a Lake Wobegon-type town of ice fishing, loon calls and Midwestern values. Each week she sent concrete details of life there, allowing Garrison to set his tales in proper time. From her notes in early June 2016: 

“The cottonwood fuzz is floating about now, blowing everywhere like a light springtime snow, drifting against the curbs.” 

“There’s a solar farm going up a mile out of town and it’s causing a lot of controversy.” 

“Vacation Bible School starts next week. Seventeen kids are enrolled and the teachers are doing some decorating.” 

“The school secretary is at her wit’s end. Parents are calling about grades. The supply room is out of paper clips. The lost and found box is overflowing. Someone threw up in the teacher’s bathroom. There is a tornado drill scheduled for Monday morning. One of the cooks is out with whatever chest thing is going around. It’s a kind of chaos, a hot mess.”

from What I Learned Living in Garrison Keillor's House 

by Katy Sewall

garrison keillor | when snow falls, can spring be far behind?

It snowed big-time in New York last week and overnight the city was transformed from gritty realism to a TV Christmas special, the city hushed and magical, skaters skating in Central Park and every sled or saucer, garbage can lid, flattened cardboard, employed in sliding. For the old man, walking flat-footed in tiny steps on an icy sidewalk, sliding feels treacherous but still the snow brings back memories of Minnesota and homemade hockey rinks, using magazines for shin pads and lawn chairs for goals. We had no laptops or video games then. Indoors belonged to grown-ups so we went outside for independence. It was joyful. I still look at snow and feel joyful.

As a Minnesotan, I’ve known people who felt oppressed by snow and cold and escaped, as people once escaped from behind the Iron Curtain, so they could sit outdoors in January and barbecue steaks and drink mai tais. I never longed for the patio lifestyle. People sit on patios in the sunshine and they yell at their kids and complain about schools and taxes and their neighbor’s lawn ornaments. People who sit in a cozy living room on a cold day experience gratitude. They pull a quilt over their lap and feel comforted. They look out the window at snow falling and feel joyful.

I went to the post office the other day and stood in a long slow line and felt endangered by the virus. In my living room, I don’t. The newspaper is packed with grim stories about death tolls and death threats against local authorities who impose masking requirements and long-term effects of COVID and I set the paper down and pick up Dickens and feel better. Nobody reads books on a patio; the light is too bright. Dim light is conducive to ratiocination.

The newspaper says that the pandemic has made Mr. Bezos richer than rich and is leading to the obsolescence of shopping malls, hundreds of which are closing, and what shall be done with them? Some say they can become nursing homes. I say they could become arts centers where unemployables like me can go to write, paint, compose, play in a band, and get a sense of self-esteem even if nobody likes our work except friends and family.

The indoor shopping mall originated in Minnesota, due to winter and suburbanites’ dread of downtown traffic, so along came this miniature Main Street of shops under a roof with acres of asphalt around it, but now Mr. Bezos will sell you anything with a click of your mouse, books or buckets, blankets, bicycles, buckles, bric-a-brac, boxes of buckshot, and one of these days, when he figures out how to do optometry and dentistry and psychiatry online, he will own the world. He will purchase the U.N. building in New York and, for a reasonable fee, bring about world peace and climate stability. He will own Facebook, Instagram, and the Sirius earbuds that will be implanted in every child at birth. I’m joking, I’m not sirius.

Life will get back to normal in 2021 but it’ll be a beautiful new normal. In a society in lockdown, social media has a lot of traction, but when the vaccines get around and life loosens up, we’ll get back in the real world of work, friendship, conversation, the arts, travel, church, and the mystical science of baseball. I expect to get injected in Phase 2, along with incarcerated felons, homeless, K-12 teachers, and critical workers. I am not critical, I’m only skeptical, but I’m an older adult with underlying conditions (depending on which side I lie on), and so by the time June rolls around, I expect to be running loose, shaking hands, eating at Murray’s steakhouse, sitting out in right field watching Max Kepler of the Minnesota Twins, one of my favorite players. It isn’t only that he is one of the few European guys in the majors, it’s also his quickness and readiness, but his Germanness is certainly germane. A kid growing up in Berlin who chooses baseball over soccer is sort of inspirational. I’ve been to Berlin and never saw a ballpark. If a Berliner could choose baseball and get good at it, maybe instead of being a paragrapher, I could be an oceanographer or choreographer. Or ornithologist — as Emily said, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” The papers talk about a dark depressing winter but I think about the right-field bleachers and feel hopeful. 

Thanks for reading. Be good to yourself.

Garrison Keillor, December 23, 2020

edward burtynsky | photographs

 

1  Xiaolangdi Dam #3 Yellow River, Henan Province, China, 2011

2  Stepwell #4 Sagar Kund Baori, Bundi, Rajasthan, India, 2010

3  Colorado River Delta #2 Near San Felipe, Baja, Mexico, 2011

4  Dryland Farming #2 Monegros County, Aragon, Spain, 2010

5  Salton City California, USA, 2009

6  Colorado River Delta #9 Sonora, Mexico, 2012

7  Cerro Prieto Geothermal Power Station Baja, Mexico, 2012

8  Log Booms #1, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, 2016

9  Freeman Island, Long Beach, California, USA, 2017

10  Coal Mine #3, North Rhine, Westphalia, Germany, 2015

11  Oil Bunkering #1, Niger Delta, Nigeria, 2016

12  Oil Bunkering #7, Niger Delta, Nigeria, 2016

13  Uralkali Potash Mine #2, Berezniki, Russia, 2017

14  Uralkali Potash Mine #4, Berezniki, Russia, 2017

15  Uralkali Potash Mine #6, Berezniki, Russia, 2017

16  Saw Mills #1, Lagos, Nigeria, 2016

17  Saw Mills #2, Lagos, Nigeria, 2016

18  Phosphor Tailings Pond #4, Near Lakeland, Florida, USA, 2012

19  Markarfljót River #1, 2013

20  Salinas #2, Cadiz, Spain, 2013

21  Dryland Farming #24, Monegros County, Aragon, Spain, 2010

22  Pipe Coating Plant, 2017

23  Shipbreaking #10 Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000

24  Shipyard #7, Qili Port, Zhejiang Province, 2005

25  Pivot Irrigation #7, High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA, 2011

26  Oxford Tire Pile #1, Westley, California, USA, 1999

27  Greenhouses, Almería Peninsula, Spain, 2010

willa cather | one of the truest artists i ever knew

 

Annie Pavelka

“One of the truest artists I ever knew 
in the keenness and sensitiveness of her enjoyment, 
in her love of people 
and in her willingness to take pains.”

Willa Cather, about her friend Annie Pavelka, inspiration for "My Antonia"

connie wanek | for a change

                             

Earth had become a job that required 

constant customer support. 

Humans didn’t seem to understand 

the basics of their service. 

Mrs. God suggested a standard message 

when people first connected: 

The Kingdom of God is within you. 

“Honestly I think it gives them 

a sense of agency,” she said. 

 But God thought the problem stemmed 

from a confusing owners’ manual. 

“Some of these translations are inscrutable,” 

he said, paging through the dense instructions. 

“What about a series of drawings, 

where steps would be illustrated with a 

puzzled little angel, sort of like IKEA? 

And of course an extensive 

FAQ on the website.” 

“It’s worth a try,” said Mrs. God. “The most 

important thing is that people know

they’re getting accurate information.”

 “For a change,” said God. 

jim harrison | overtrying

Sometimes we live without noticing it. 

Overtrying makes it harder. 

 from Carpe Diem, by Jim Harrison

william shakespeare | god's spies

Come, let's away to prison. 

We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage. 

When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down 

And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live, 

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh 

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues 

Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too- 

Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out- 

And take upon 's the mystery of things, 

As if we were God's spies; and we'll wear out, 

In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones 

That ebb and flow by th' moon. 

King Lear

Act V, Scene 3

russell mang | house, south central saskatchewan

garrison keillor | staying home is an excellent idea

"I’m a Scot on my mother’s side and so I expect the worst and for us pessimists, staying home is an excellent idea and the pandemic gives me a good excuse. I can imagine walking down the street and a 500-pound anvil falls out of a tree and crushes me and someone gets it on video and it goes viral, a tall scholarly man suddenly obliterated and it’s horrible but also weirdly humorous — he’s a white male and then suddenly he’s a pile of clothing — and though you ask, “Why was a 500-pound anvil parked in a tree on Columbus Avenue?” it’s too late for Nowhere Man — he’s being carried in a coffin the size of a fruit basket and his death video has gotten 57 million hits. I refuse to be him; I am the man happy to be eating waffles in his own kitchen."

ursula leguin | art is work

"If you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you’re writing. And, if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn’t flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work.”

keaton patti | trump rally

 

Author's note: "I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Trump rallies and then asked it to write a Trump rally of its own. Here is the first page." But not really; all credit goes to Mr Patti.

jim harrison | my great-uncle floyd

I can't forget my great-uncle Floyd, who was the most unsuccessful knife thrower in the history of the American circus. An emigré from Sweden near the Arctic Circle, Floyd had an uncommon flash and sense of showmanship but ended up wounding a total of eleven women, none fatally, before the Barnum and Bailey authorities convinced him to retire. Curiously, despite his public record, Floyd had no problem finding women to stand there and take their chances. A cousin told me that when Floyd died at age eighty-eight in Wisconsin on May 18, 1957, he said on this deathbed, "I could have been a famous knife thrower, but I just couldn't throw knives."

Jim Harrison, "A Really Big Lunch"

“I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me.
What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.”

H.P. Lovecraft

photo | café de flore, saint-germain-des-prés | dennis stock

Screen capture from the documentary "Miles Davis: The Birth of the Cool"

The photograph is "Café de Flore, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris - 1958" by Dennis Stock

sarah larson | in praise of phone calls

Perhaps you’ve experienced something like this cycle of emotions recently. This morning, as I woke up after a few days of isolation, dread, and an incipient sore throat—all of which resulted in an unpleasant stupor of “Dateline,” napping, wall-staring, and phone Scrabble—I put my feet on the floor and said to myself, Today is going to be different! I marched determinedly about my apartment, tidying, making coffee, preparing to work, listening to podcasts. I felt somewhat optimistic. But soon I had tears in my eyes, because I was listening to the news. (It was Tuesday’s stellar episode of “The Daily,” in which Michael Barbaro talked to Dr. Fabiano Di Marco, the head of the respiratory unit of a hospital in Bergamo, Italy. “It’s like a war,” Di Marco said.) But my goal, in addition to staying informed, was to be productive, and that would require avoiding my stupor. So I took my own advice from the piece I was trying to write: I called a loved one on the phone.

I picked up my landline—yes, landline—and called Janet, my late mother’s best friend, a retired music teacher who lives on Cape Cod. Janet had e-mailed to see how I was doing during social isolation, decorating her message with shamrocks and kissy-face emojis. It was a great e-mail, but I wanted to hear her voice. “Sarah!” Janet said. She was smiling—I could hear it. “Let me put down my chanter.” She was practicing her bagpipes; it was St. Patrick’s Day, in the time of the coronavirus, and she was preparing for a one-woman parade. “I’m going to play ‘The Minstrel Boy’ and march down the street,” she said. “I’ll send you a video.” Talking to Janet, I could hear the amusement and energy in her voice; she’s always ready to laugh, even now, and she’s always up to something. She talks in vivid anecdotes. We caught up, gossiped, railed against political incompetence, laughed our heads off. Hanging up, I felt more alive.

I’ve wanted to write for a long time about the particular joy of talking on the phone. Not video chat, though that has its charms. (Among them, this week: virtual coffees and cocktail hours, Zoom meetings, seeing how your parents look, saying hi to your favorite rambunctious little kid.) But for sheer connectedness, the phone has something other forms of communication don’t. For the past few years, I’ve harbored a secret theory—that our love of the intimacy of podcasts, of the near-startling pleasure of curling up with the immediacy of a human voice in our ears, is connected to our loss of that pleasure from talking on the phone. People too young to have grown up doing so tend not to get why you would do it at all. Suggesting a phone call gets a laugh; saying that you have a landline gets a polite, reeling covering-up of something like pity. (A friend of mine, a few years ago, called his younger date, after some cumbersome texting, to sort out meetup logistics. She was freaked out. A phone call? “That’s what my dad does,” she told him. Then he was freaked out.)

In any case, I get it. Messaging has overtaken phone calls for good reason—convenience, desirable asynchronicity, privacy, a certain respecting of boundaries. When you’re using your phone primarily as a screen, flipping between, say, Twitter, Scrabble, Overcast, Instagram, the weather, your camera, a document, Google Keep, and the neurotic bunch of timers you keep for yourself to try to impose structure on your day (or maybe that’s just me), having your phone suddenly come alive, vibrating, making noise, being overtaken by the name and image of a gabby relative—in short, turning into a phone—can be jarring. (Aaah! What are you doing here?) Suddenly, this person is in your house. Beyond that, phone calls now tend to take place over crappy-sounding technology—tinnier, spottier, less reliable than during the golden era of the phone gab. It may be hard to remember, under those circumstances, the appeal.

But we all know, instinctively, about the power of the human voice. You may even have voice mails, left years ago, that you’ll never delete. I have them from loved ones who have died—the “Hello, dear!” of my Aunt Adelle, the mile-a-minute thinking aloud of my friend Michael. (“I kind of feel like we’re dealing with ethics, and I hate dealing with ethics. Call me back, bye.”) Think of the recent videos from Siena and Wuhan, in which people sing or call out, connecting from windows and balconies during social isolation, across distance, à la the twilight bark in “101 Dalmatians.” This week, I’ve been doing that with relatives I’ve loved all my life but haven’t caught up with in a while, their distinctive voices coming to me from Santa Barbara, Lubbock, Memphis, Hartford, Barre. And I’ve been doing it with people across town.

The phone calls have reminded me, with new clarity, about the things that are expressed in tone, beyond words. Last night, I listened to a younger co-worker friend tell me a story he’d planned to share over a drink, about a burial he’d arranged for an elderly friend who’d died. As he described the series of kindnesses he’d encountered—of a city worker, of volunteers at a Jewish service organization, of the men in the minyan who came to the burial—I could hear a whole bouquet of notes: amazement, respect, quiet gratitude, affection, his own understated kindness. Before we hung up, I told him I was glad to know him. A couple of hours later, he called again, for a different kind of bonding: out for a walk on the deserted night streets, he’d accidentally kicked a rat. Now he needed someone to shudder with. “It was soft,” he said. We recoiled together, noisily commiserating. Then, hoping to consolingly redirect the rat energy, I told a story about a time when I’d made a yowsers connection myself: scurrying down Mulberry Street, past a gesticulating anecdotalist, I inadvertently caused my own groping. (“Was it as good for you?” the startled man called after me.) Roaring about the surprising little revulsions of New York City streets—all our shared notes of surprise and hilarity and empathy and horror—is exactly the stuff of a good gab. And when you’re living in isolation, it’s reassuring to make some noise.

If you’ve fallen out of the habit, or never had it to begin with, here’s what to do. First, find the best equipment you can: ideally, a real phone. A landline is optimal, or a cell phone with decent audio, held right up to your ear. Avoid the diffuse echoey sadness of the speakerphone, the vulnerable voice bouncing around an open room or, God forbid, an open car. No screens, no juddering technology or buffering, no contending with the distracting horror of your own disembodied face. Just voice: mind meeting soul meeting timbre. Don’t have a TV on; don’t have a laptop in front of you. Sit in a favorite chair and look at your plants and your books. They are beautiful. Look out the window, the trees outside. Listen to your friend.

Second: the friend. The right friend. A good-laugher friend, a pal-around friend, a rollicking-bear-hug friend. Often, at the beginning of a really good phone call, my best friends and I do a little joyous hollering—ha-HA! There you are! It’s good to hear you!—to voice, in brouhaha form, the happy relief of being together. (The older I get, and the more complicated hanging out with my friends has become, that kind of togetherness feels like a gift.) Usually, these conversations, these in-cahoots, let-it-all-hang-out gabfests, feel like an illicit stealing away of time: a pleasurable combination of life-strategizing and zingers with my friend in L.A., who’s driving through traffic or navigating Gelson’s; or with the friend in Riverdale, who’s walking her lovable three-legged dog; or with the one in Manchester-by-the-Sea, who’s sneaking out to go night-surfcasting after her kids are asleep. Now we’re all in our houses and apartments, trying to stay sane.

That’s it. Find a good phone, focus, and be together. It will do you some good. On the phone, you’re not performing for a camera, or observing your friend and their house. You’re not typing. You can get to essentials with a different, more human part of your brain. At work a week or two ago, we got certain things done efficiently because of conversation. Now, working remotely, a similar efficiency, involving tone, back-and-forth, joking, and brainstorming, can happen on the phone. Boring things are best handled electronically; complex, more abstract things, involving ideas or problem-solving or solace, are better handled with the nuance of voice. People who grew up in a phone-centric age—being fourteen, say, and lugging a rotary phone with a curly cord into a bedroom and closing the door, working up the nerve to call a cute boy, talking to his mother first—understand the phone’s particular immediacy very well. For decades, the phone company’s jingle was “Reach Out and Touch Someone.” Now, for a while, it’s the safest—and best—way to do it.

from The New Yorker
March 18, 2020

And here's another article that talks about some of the same things
Psychology Today
Why Video Chats Are Wearing Us Out, 
by Doreen Dodgen Magee 

photos | matt oswalt | quarantine city

photos of los angeles, march 10, 2020