Quick notes...

Arrived in the rain to Las Angeles Friday morning, everything there goes green when the rain hits and it was beautiful and fun to watch all the cautious drivers, suddenly, in the rain.

I went out to Venice to visit and look around to see how everything is changing, it didn't look quite as run down, but the boardwalk still looked like something out of a Bazooka Joe comic. The waves were loud and the hills in the distance still seemed like impressive things when imagining the Spanish boats that must have crawled up and down the coast hundreds of years ago.

I drove to Vegas to see Arnab and Mac, there were a lot of Arnab's other friends as well, they gambled a lot, I watched them gamble. I gambled a little.

Mostly I walked around, I watched all the old people coming up from Arizona, and all the other people from California and Iowa running around looking to be entertained. It was what it always was, fun for 36 hours and then time to head for the hills.

Mac still makes me laugh, and I love how class conscious he is, and how quick he is to deflate bloviated pompousity. I drank quite a bit of sake, and found some good stuff. I don't drink too often these days, and hardly ever sake, but it seemed to be what everybody was drinking, besides vodka tonics, and to be honest, I think vodka tonics are what people drink when they don't really know what they like.

Then it was back to Los Angeles. More rain, it almost felt like San Francisco, which made me homesick for a place I haven't been in years now. The lights from the hills in the night reflected the same way in the same chilling rain. Fog rolled in and waves crashed, the beaches were empty save some addicts and teenagers looking for a place to make out. I liked looking at all the things the ocean brought to the land. The waves would sometimes run up the shore, soaking my all-stars so that my socks got wet and uncomfortable. I thought of something John Straight told me about wool and how it doesn't get cold when it gets wet.

Coming back to Brooklyn I thought about how I needed to start packing, how I had to write, read, move, record and apply and it all seemed pretty overwhelming. But spring is here now, and the breeze was beautiful, I fell asleep pretty quickly and didn't wake up until late, and then I stayed up deep into the night, not doing anything more meaningful or useful than catching up on all the baseball I had missed.

I'll put up some pictures next time. It's time to sleep.

Vonnegut

"To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon."
-Kurt Vonnegut

Reading Bluebeard was one of the great pleasures of my life. Slight really, and not nearly as visionary as some of his other books, it carried a grace through it that I thought the author might have if you happened to catch him, on a nice day, with some time to kill. It was a book, in the end, on the virture of kindness, among many other things you could say about it.

Slaugherhouse-Five is something beautiful. It insists, like the best of Twain, on a moral order founded on the ability to scorn what a particular culture might, at any one time, hold up as an ideal of itself.

There was no pretense about Vonnegut. He wrote urgently and without the stink of academe. He had no use, as Orwell didn't, of any words that sought to do anything else than tell exact things. If one loses that exactitude, it becomes too easy to lie, or to say easy things.

Vonnegut never did that. He was brilliant and generous.

New York Again

First period - there's Mr. Johnston in the corner.

The studenten were back. I knew it would be an ok day when I got to push Clifford against a wall on my way in and demand his lunch money. I threw some pennies at Daniel and Shaira and got very excited while I was talking about Samuel Gompers.

Fifth period we looked at some newspaper articles I found from December, 1937 - a brutal month. Nanking alone, but the Nazis beating the hell out of the Jews, the fascists in Spain and the continuing problems of the Depression at home along with the various other et ceteras that are omnipresent, I also got excited talking about all this, and the studenten were not horrible. I'm not saying it was a brilliant class, but when the fifth period can kind of hold its own, be recognizable as a place of potential study, then the day's not wasted. Rare.

AP Government practiced some questions and we went over them, for some reason, when somebody asked a point about Federalism I really got into it and moved the discussion toward Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase and the fragility of ideology, I wanted to talk about all kinds of things, my mind was all over the place, but it's always a quick class. I want to get on Kelvin a bit, as he's coasting. So is Catherine, come to think of it...

After school, teaching the literature class, there were about forty or forty-four students, and we went over some poems. I felt they did a good job with some of the stuff and they were really discussing each other's writing pretty well. So getting back to school wasn't awful. One of my kids joined the marines, I have to admit, I felt for him, he wasn't into the idea of joining the marines, but what else is he supposed to do he asked? He said when he was signing up there was another guy there who was being promised to have his police record expunged if he joined up. He said it was odd to think about what the government can do for you if it wants to, if it has a reason to, and odd to think of what it can do To you if it wants to, if it has a reason to. We were talking about surprising or sudden thoughts we'd had over spring break.

It makes me sad just thinking about it.

Ashlie and I went to the movies, she'd been at the library on 42nd so we met at Union Square, we talked some more about her job. It really is time for her to move on from that blight. We got to the movie way early, and so we stared north up toward Union Square, and for some reason, it really did look beautiful today, even in the gathering grayness that turned to drizzle by the time I walked home.

I also talked to the Beej today, my godson has some weird little infection, it's nothing horrible, but potentially, apparently, it could be, so they all had to take chlorine baths (cholorine? I don't know...). I was horrified, but he said there's just a little chlorine (sp?) in the baths, but he also has to use anti-bacterial swabs in his nose every once in awhile. Odd that.

I've been reading mostly at books for the classes, but I'm really curious about this book I found at the Strand yesterday - that sounds so New f'n York that I hate it, but whatever - it's a book about New York in 1946 and that just seems filled with all kinds of potential brilliance. It's about this guy who escorts a "dame" home, and then she's killed by his boss and the boss tells him to go and find the guy who saw her home. Properly seedy, it's supposed to be brilliant. Many books are.

I'm just going to throw this out there - we saw Firehouse Dog today - it was the only movie playing there at a decent time and I like dogs a lot, so Ashlie was a total martyr-angel, but you know, as bad as it was, when I was about eight, I would have been all about this movie, except for the sunglasses on the dog - even at eight I think I would have been thinking "kid, you're trying to hard, bring it down a notch" - yet at thirteen I probably was trying that hard myself. Anyway, Jules et Jim or Wild Strawberries it was not, nor was it Because I Said So however.

This is pretty all over the place, but it was also odd, today, before the after-school class (Credit Recovery Program - really), I was reading a bit and kind of thinking about the poetry, things I wanted to ask them, mostly I was looking at this Randall Jarrell poem, I hadn't read him in a few years and I was enjoying looking at a few of his poems there and then I thought of Karl Shapiro's "Auto Wreck" with that great first line about the silver bell beating and then suddenly, there was this brave mouse running around my room, right up to me almost. It had been awhile since I'd seen a mouse, but this guy, I don't know if he was hungry or what, he was all over the place. Floribel, this student who came to visit and wait for her friends to get out of lab, was not amused. The other girl who was in there, Kraehl, she just kept reading, I don't even know if she looked up.

Another one of my girls is pregnant, she said to her friend right before class - "look at me being dumb again," which sounds kind of slight, considering, but her voice was so intense, so filled with absolute belief and self-disgust. Then she read about her surprising thought to the class, which was "how do we know we all see the same shade when we look at a color?" I've thought about that one too.

"Were you in the shit?"

I think I'm going to have to watch Rushmore again soon...

I love the churches in Milwaukee

I left my camera in Brooklyn. I can see where it is in my head, right next to the desk on the second shelf in the corner, just below the shoebox with the shoehorn and all the tax papers from last year in it.

Today Milwaukee felt like late October or early November, everything gray, the wind blowing across the choppy endless water of Lake Michigan. I love Lake Michigan so much, it looked like the past today.

I went to see the Cubs play the Brewers, left a day's work on the damned thesis (today it would have been the lit review) and ignored the fact that my computer suddenly won't run iTunes without crashing. Who needs it when Soriano is leading off and Rich Hill is throwing curve balls that hang on a string and then drop to the earth like so many anvils. It was good to be away from Chicago and New York, where I am all the time it seems, even if it was just 85 miles north.

I love Milwaukee because the churches jut out at all angles toward the sky, they are the skyline really. I mean, there's this kind of half-assed thing of a skyline just off the Lake, but coming up 94 you know you're in Milwaukee when you start seeing these beautiful silhouettes that are especially beautiful against a fading gray sky.

It made me want my camera but it's in my head pretty good. It was there even before I got there, but I liked that it didn't disappoint, that view of the city.

Yesterday I saw Adam for dinner on Milwaukee and Kimball back in Chicago. We talked a bit about baseball and he said he enjoyed the idea of it, the narrative and strategy of it, but not necessarily watching it. He likes to listen to it when he gets home from the hospital, a break from NPR. Meanwhile, for me, or for some others I know, watching it is a great pleasure. I have always felt that there is an exactitude in baseball well-played that is even more precise than poetry, and because it is so exact, when it slips, it surprises, creates tension and devolves into narrative. But narrative is also satisfying. As well there are so many ways to define baseball, so many different levels on which to measure it, that it can be approached from infinite directions and lead into many different kinds of thoughts, so that it is also endless replicable as an event. Baseball is an infinite crossroads. I think this more than other sports, more so than most things.

I feel that way about the Crusades too I guess.

I have to go back to New York on Monday, not really ready for that. I need a few more days just to work and get my brain back together. It's been a long year and the last couple months are going to be even tougher. Mostly I want to be back in San Francisco for awhile, and just walk up and down all the hills and end up in half-remembered neighborhoods. Instead, I think I'm going to start running again.

It's something.