Thursday, May 31, 2012

WASTELAND ~









Had a kid come up to me today on the street (I may attract them: the guy in town once a week), my height, and say, "Hi, you're Carson's dad, right?" (pause). I nod, smile say, "Right". "Yeah, well, uh. . . do-you-remember-me?" I do but for some reason I say I don't. I'm trusting my instincts. So he goes into a whole song and dance about how he's hit hard times, and I can see it, it actually hurts me, too. I remember him vividly, or it seems the vividly is rushing to me and into my eyes and head as I listen to him talk, from some years ago when I was reading on the street in town for Katrina Hurricane relief. Making money with Greg Joly and we'd read a few hours on the street, at least once a week, and everyone thought we were preachers. Of course they never got close enough to us to hear actually what we were saying or doing, but that didn't stop them from having their forthright inaccurate opinions. We sent that money earned while reading down to New Orleans. None of the poets of the town would step near us, whatever poets there were. Greg told me they didn't, or wouldn't. I didn't care, who needs poets when you have street people, kids, children, dogs, bums, stragglers, smiling strangers. An ideal audience. We read this way for over two years. This kid coming up to me today was one of them and he would come with two of his buddies out of high school and the boys were beautiful boys, bright eyed and active, dreaming, sweeping with doubts and stumbles and hearts alive. They listened to us talk and read poems and the next day or the next day after that one, who knows, they came with money in hand to buy books. Wanted a signature. Left to go read. I could watch and feel their dedications. It was there. Today I see the best looking one of the three boys, actually handsome with a boldness Carson also once had, come to me bleary-eyed, rheumy in spots, hair dismissed to a gaudy henna something or other. He tells me he cuts his hair himself. Asks me how does it look? I say, not bad. "Chicks like it longer," he tells me. He says he figures you learn how to cut your hair by the shape of your face. He has a war torn and blitzed Kurt Cobain satchel over his shoulder. Hates it when people call him Kurt Cobain, because of the satchel and because, well, he does look a little bit like the dead grunge rocker. Now he asks me for money. Says he hates to do it so he asks the people he thinks he knows. I give him some money. Tell him I do remember him from some time ago. He has a Walkman in hand and the headphones are over his head. He can still hear me. Thanks me for the money. I move down to the door where I'll wait for a store to open. I watch him bum a cigarette from a bum. The bum takes out a packet of Bugle, they roll cigarettes and talk. Fifteen minutes later he is with me at the door, cigarette no longer lit flouncy in his mouth, about to talk more with me. A half hour's worth. He's looking half-baked. I'm just to listen. Sweetheart is with me, sitting on the concrete eating her brought from home breakfast pocket sandwich. She's taken her lovely shawl off to sit on it. The little crowd that usually comes to the store on this day is there and listens or watches me listen to my new friend who is unraveling. He situates between making perfect sense, even some brilliance, and absolutely no sense at all. Asks me like an eight year old girl again and again if he looks all right with his self-cut hairdo? Needs to know. Finally tells me he wants to be a writer. He's actually related to T.S. Eliot, and his middle name is "Eliot". He tells me his fully elegant and royally rich name. There's something about it all that I believe. There was one sentence he said during the whole visit of over a half hour of unadulterated bullshit that was indeed brilliant and could remind me of Eliot.



Wednesday, May 30, 2012

DOC ~






Doc Watson

March 3, 1923 – May 29, 2012



I saw Doc Watson perform so many decades ago, with his son Merle, an outdoor stage, thousands of us camped on a hillside all day being overblown and overflown with folk music. A place in the heart. You saw Doc Watson, too, I would bet; many saw Doc Watson perform, or owned his many records, always reliable and wholesome and very good. Doc Watson spoke, as a blind man, how scary the road could be for him, and still he came forth and played for us. We may as well thank our lucky stars.


One of my favorite Doc Watson moments is on the triple Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album where Doc Watson and Merle Travis meet. You can listen to the difference in the guitar masters strumming and in their voices when they talk, spontaneously, the record picking it all up. What Doc Watson says in but a few words, just like his playing, almost sums up his entire life up to that time. His sharing was seamless and expansive. And the Merle Travis chuckle and laconic humility balances the scales of the meeting. They went on to play a tune like a team of horses charging across a stream.
. .



Doc Watson & Merle Travis: First Meeting (Dialogue) by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on Grooveshark




another favorite album (I'm playing it now) was this beauty titled Elementary Doctor Watson (with Merle Watson) on the tiny Poppy label. I used to watch that poppy design on the album spin on the turntable while the tunes played. . .




Going Down The Road Feeling Bad by Doc & Merle Watson on Grooveshark







farewell





Tuesday, May 29, 2012

LIKE A ROLLING STONE ~






President Barack Obama presents rock legend Bob Dylan with a Medal of Freedom, Tuesday, May 29, 2012, during a ceremony at the White House in Washington.

(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)




WATCH THE AWARD CEREMONY HERE









EARTH ~






HERE -IS -THERE
____________



Earth as




a pillow




is one




place






~


bob arnold
may 2012











photo © bob arnold





Monday, May 28, 2012

DIGNITY ~







President Obama paused during a trip last week to meet Archie Hackney, a World War II veteran, in Newton, Iowa






photo : stephen crowley/ nytimes








DIGNITY ~






David Lawley-Wakelin speaks out about Tony Blair
via a "secure corridor"









NEW FROM LONGHOUSE! ~








please click on image




Never before published portrait when this Vermont homesteader and her husband (Scott Nearing) picked up roots and resettled in rural coastal Maine



Two Independent Maine Cats ~ Longhouse, 2012. First edition. New and limited. A signed edition is available upon request.
$8, unsigned


Buy now (U.S. addresses with $2 s/h) with Paypal:
















Sunday, May 27, 2012

like a bead falling into a gap ~







Ai Weiwei SELF PORTRAIT


EARTH ~


LOVE POEM ~






Jesse Winchester



It was Jesse Winchester's birthday a week or so ago, age 68, still writing and singing songs strong. Same birth date as Sweetheart's favorite childhood dog "Cary", so she remembers the date. Her mom loved Cary Grant.

Here's a two-minute masterpiece, as fresh as the day it was first sung




Dangerous Fun by Jesse Winchester on Grooveshark





Year Album


1970 Jesse Winchester

1972 Third Down, 110 to Go

1974 Learn to Love It

1976 Let the Rough Side Drag

1977 Nothing But a Breeze

Live at the Bijou Cafe

1978 A Touch on the Rainy Side

1981 Talk Memphis

1988 Humour Me

1989 The Best of Jesse Winchester

1999 Gentleman of Leisure

2001 Live From Mountain Stage

2005 Live



Love Filling Station









http://www.therhumbaman.com/




Saturday, May 26, 2012

Friday, May 25, 2012

THE ROAD ~
(& hope)







John Waters traveling with members of the band Here We Go Magic as he hitchhiked from Baltimore to San Francisco.




http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/john-waters-tries-some-desperate-living-on-a-cross-country-hitchhiking-odyssey/?hp



By the way — this photograph of real time travelers on the road, looks far more true than any film still I've seen from the new film On the Road. As in the classic novel:
a guy, a guy & a girl.




photo : Here We Go Magic/Secretly Canadian
nytimes





EARTH ~








12.


The young she-bear is away up in the hills near the meadow where Maple Head and No Horses are holding each other and laughing and laughing. The bear had smelled them before she heard them and now she sees them, holding each other and rocking slightly like slender trees in great winds. The bear's two cubs trundle along behind her in ragged parade order, fascinated by bees and berries. By now the cubs have names in the dark tongue of bears. The smallest is called smallest and the largest is called eats snakes. These are their very first names. Bears wear many names over the course of their lives, sometimes carrying several at once. Names having to do with lust are forbidden by ancient custom. There have been bears in these hills for four million years. Bears remember everything having to do with bears. Bears love eating more than remembering stories about bears but it is a near thing. One time a small bear killed a wolverine in an argument about an elk calf and that story was told for seven thousand years, mothers telling it to their cubs in the cold dark places where they prepared to sleep through the winter. There are stories of white bears and blue bears who swam in the sea and bears who could learn the languages of other animals and a bear who could climb even the thinnest trees even when she was very old. There was a bear who killed a whale trapped at low tide in the mouth of the river, that was a story told for many years, and a bear who would eat only fawns, and a bear who would eat only fish, and a bear who destroyed any horse he ever found, and a bear born without rear legs who lived on berries and nuts and never left the meadow where he was born, and bears who climbed trees to eat the eggs of eagles, and a bear who clambered onto a log in the river just to see what would happen and the river carried him out through the surf and he went away into the sea and was never seen again. That is the story of the bear who went into the sun, a story every bear hears while young. Bears do not tell stories about animals other than bears. By ancient custom all stories about other animals are told through the manner in which they affect the lives of bears. So that cougars, for example, who are called deereaters in the dark tongue of bears, figure greatly in the stories of bears, but always through stories of bears who fought them, or outwitted them, or tricked them into leaping on dark bushes they had mistaken for bears, or ate their tails, or lost an eye to their razor fingers, or imitated their yowling so successfully that they would come bounding toward romance and find instead a bee's nest, which is a story that happened to a bear who once lived not far from where Maple Head and No Horses are still laughing at the ouzel, who is still wondering what to make of the new liquid noise in the world.




please click on image to enlarge






Mink River by Brian Doyle
Oregon State University Press
2010




Thursday, May 24, 2012

EARTH ~








"Tree for Goat in the Snow"
Nathaniel Offing
15th Anniversary of BIG BRIDGE

please click here:

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

SMALL IS NOT LITTLE ~












once in vermont films
film © susan & bob arnold
the massachusetts review






Tuesday, May 22, 2012

CHAMP ~






Kevin Durant



Class-act Kevin Durant and The Oklahoma City Thunder
just took out The Lakers







Formerly the Seattle SuperSonics, the team relocated in 2008 after a dispute between owner Clay Bennett and lawmakers in Seattle, Washington. The SuperSonics qualified for the NBA Playoffs 22 times, won their division six times and won the 1979 NBA Championship. In Oklahoma City, the Thunder qualified for their first playoff berth during the 2009–10 season. They followed this success by winning their first division title as the Thunder in the 2010–11 season.
(wikipedia)







Monday, May 21, 2012

NEW FROM LONGHOUSE! ~








please click on image



Creations by the author under the influence of British folklorist Shirley Collins, with Scotland's Laurie Clark drawings throughout



An Anthology Gathered for Shirley Collins. Longhouse, 2012. First edition. New and limited. A signed edition is available upon request.
$8, unsigned


Buy now (U.S. addresses with $2 s/h) with Paypal:










Inquiries, please write the Bookshop with thanks




Saturday, May 19, 2012

EARTH ~





SINCE HURRICANE IRENE IN VERMONT:




If we are to survive in the environment we have made for ourselves, may we have to be monstrous enough to greet our predicament? ~ Nicholas Mosley



We're all in the struggle. Let's help one another out.


I've had to scribble a little bit more
after almost a year since Hurricane Irene and my earlier postings about the rocky storm. I'm writing here about an overall corrosive element in society, no matter urban or rural, it has seeped in: the lack of etiquette and good manners. Subjects that are now mocked, ridiculed and easily laughed at, as we go down the drain. As a lawman said to me today in so many words, trooper hat off, sitting in my house, raining outside, "Your life style is pretty much over no matter how great you made it, there's only a few of you left. I admire it. But the bad stuff is now epidemic." It was nearly a line or two borrowed out of the film Shane.


I like this lawman, he works his trade with a thorough hand, and like me he likes straight-talk. He also was active with his whole department deployed into the field during Hurricane Irene saving lives, escorting very large machinery onto narrow highways or over mountain passes into small towns drowning in mud, sludge, broken buildings and rising water.

In the meantime, we are back to almost normal and the roads are repaired. Bridges are back. They may not be the original bridges, but they're bridges. We're crossing.


I watched our road that hugs the Green River in Vermont that was completely wiped out in long sections be rebuilt within months of the water avalanche. Remarkable work by a small town work crew and abiding towns. We hiked down into Massachusetts a day after the flood and had to portage our bicycles on shoulders to get to the next town. A normal half hour bicycle ride became a three hour hike. Where there once had been road — all gone. Sheer ledge, not a grain of gravel from the original road anywhere in sight. This was all rebuilt inch by inch by cribbing new large stone, backfill, plodding forward with what machines and trucks were available. It was a hallmark of individual duty unified. Including many neighbors taking part in the general repair. Vermont can be, when it wants to be, a maple tree with many branches.


That's all the good news. Plus our covered bridge is still standing, if a little wracked and leaning to the right. Go see for yourself when you walk or drive through the bridge from west to east. I've watched buildings stand for decades looking just like this, just a little weary, worn torn but with character and heart. We have to allow our buildings more & more heart.
Tear-down has become two miserably unwise words.


Bad news is trespassers moved in, and I don't mean interlopers not part of the road, or strangers. No, strangers have all been curious and polite. While working our river land for months after the flood at woodcutting detail I had a few wayfarers come around wanting to search up some distinctive small rock or gems that had maybe come forth with the flood. They walked up to me and asked permission. They talked, held conversation, showed themselves, and I saw a person. This is always very good. They poked around for 15 or 20 minutes and the next thing I saw was someone giving me a wave of "thanks" and driving off. Maybe he found something, maybe he didn't. But we met.


Then there's a few locals, bad apples who think they are doing good, providing a service. They speak and communicate to the ones they wish to speak to, and they banner their goodwill under a self-leadership of a "cleanup crew", never once giving a thought that they may be on someone's land who doesn't wish their brand of cleanup. In this case, gathering a few co-workers with saws and chain saws who light up and begin cutting trees and property, not on their land, but on our land. Without asking. Without talking. Without meeting. Without discussion. And what does the leadership do when confronted by someone in our family asking what are they are doing? the leadership say they "Have no time to talk", and then bum rush off. It's a hard life being this busy and unwise. My wife actually asked me if she should check up on this cleanup crew the day they started working. We've known the leaders of this crew for over 30 years as a slight acquaintance, but I gave them every confidence that they wouldn't try anything asinine. We were working that day woodcutting down river from this cleanup crew so I said, "Nah, it should be okay." But my wife has her own intuition and moseyed up the river anyway to have a peek. Sure enough, part of this crew had launched onto our land with bowsaws and chain saws gunned and were cutting trees and brush. I still can't believe the people in charge were acting this way. I've worked decades in this region as a builder and treeworker and can't begin to imagine trespassing onto anyone else's land and being this irresponsible.


Strike two: another local person is seen one day down on our property gathering small stones and rocks. I see the bucket in her hand from some distance off. I don't know the woman personally but my wife does. I figure I'll go down to the river and see what is up. I work down there almost every day cutting wood so I know exactly where she is. I get close enough to say hello and then ask what she is doing. I'm told by her she is taking stones from the river, which is now dry river bed, with the river flowing further over to the eastern edge of shore. The woman has reached where she is by using a stone stairway I built from the roadside down 16 feet to the river. I built this stone stairway after the flood primarily to lug firewood on my shoulder up out of the river basin and up to my truck and drive it home. I don't mind the woman taking some rocks or stones, there are millions there, but I wonder why she didn't come to ask permission to do this? What's worse, when I share with her it is our property, she curtly cuts me off and tells me the river belongs to the state. Except she is on dry river bed and not the river, all land of stone, and the state doesn't own anything. People do. In fact this piece of property we are taxed handsomely on not only runs on both sides of the river, but includes the land under the river. I'm not concerned about talking policy with the woman, I'm just wondering what happened to good manners and asking permission to take property off our property. And it only gets worse. After I'm told what isn't my property and what the state owns, the woman then leaves in a huff (with her bucket of rocks; I said, "sure, go ahead"), and she calls the town clerk who is away from her job. The woman talks to a very much second-in-command, nice young fellow, who went to school with our son, but he doesn't know the rules of land or property and speaks anyway with authority which this woman takes as gospel. That leads to a conversation later by my wife with the woman on the phone who tells my wife "You don't know your land" and to make things even more interesting, there's the woman's husband in the background screaming at my wife. After the phone call burns apart, and a few hours go by, I write the woman and her husband an email letter and invite them over for a visit to talk over whatever disagreement, which may be easily smoothed over by facts and some clarification. No reply.


Strike three: It might be best to boil property rights down to this simple credo: if you're not standing on your land, you're probably standing on someone else's land. Be wise. Also I want to make it perfectly clear — I'm not against anyone being on our land as someone passing through. For forty years I have snowshoed both ridges west and east along this river valley and passed my way over uncountable pieces of property, never taking anything away from it, nor wishing any confrontation with any landowner against their wishes. I was passing through. It's a freedom we should all be able to enjoy.



Two things fill the spirit with renewed and ever greater admiration and awe the more often and the more sustainedly we reflect upon them. They are : the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.
~ KANT



At the height of Hurricane Irene we were out in the storm hiking the road with movie camera running. We ran into two young men rain-soaked who seemed to be enjoying themselves with their curiosity and the storm. We talked awhile, bonded as neighbors should during a phenomenon. They live up the road about a quarter-mile from us in a big house with a large open yard and enough land to raise chickens and keep a horse, or two. Their northern boundary is along a brook which also curls along our property right across the road from theirs. A week after the storm and things were re-settling we hiked through all the river edge of our land which is all wooded. In those woods we found a campsite made of good-sized rock pulled out of the brook and off our land to fashion chairs like King Arthur's court. For a stone-builder like myself, it was a cool thing to find. And in the circumstances of post-hurricane, it showed a togetherness and a council of brotherhood that we liked. We let it be. We figured, correctly, it was at least two of those young men and their other younger brother grooving away from home and by the brook. It was late Fall, winter was coming on and a small campsite would most likely bust up by first snow. We forgot about it. Never mentioned it, nor encouraged it, just let it be for now. By spring, and little snow cover all winter, we went back to the campsite and now it was a full-fledged campfire ring, and this was a very dry spring and fires had been made. Beer bottle empties were everywhere and things were now out of hand. Wood was being cut and shaped to make things. A well-worn path was now showing from the road to this campsite, and worst of all, others were asking us if it was okay to camp down on that land where the "campsite is". Terrific. My wife happens to know the single mother of the three young men who all live together and spoke to her one day while hiking up for mail and having a visit. Like the local woman taking stones that she believed the state owned and so it was "her right", this mother said boys-will-be-boys and didn't my wife remember when "she was young". How that has anything to do with our land when this woman owns many acres of land and a brook to build a campfire by is beyond reason. My wife asked the woman to have her sons remove the campsite, retrieve their beer bottles, absolutely no fires, no campsite; if you don't mind we'd like to keep our land wild. And this is really the crux of the issue: we wish to keep our land wild, and some wish to use it however they please.


Of course the mother never spoke to her sons as Susan had asked — two of her sons told us this four days later when we met up with them as we dismantled the campsite, set stones back into the brook, and raked up the mess. Not : clean up our mess, but clean up their mess. One son comes down and seems disturbed at the news and insists it's a great place for a campsite. I point out, like I shouldn't have to, that his family has land with at least 200 feet of brook frontage where many campfires can be made. It seems lost on him because our site "is the best." He leaves only to tell his older brother who comes down to prove a big point, that I'm "an asshole". He said this four times, with a mounting fury, and on the fourth "asshole" pronouncement my wife went home and phoned the state police and then the sheriff. While she was gone I shook the young man's hand as a greeting, explained what we were doing, and how we like the land just as it is: by a river, collecting dust and debris and its own happiness. When we come down and cut firewood from driftwood trees from the storm and work at a general cleaning up, we would like the land left as land and nothing else.
Space. Emptiness. Woodland.


For this, a young man in his twenties with a future, calls me "an asshole". I forgot to tell you the woman taking stones from our land is selling these on-line as a product. She called me the "most unfriendliest man" — because I wanted the land left alone where she is taking our property. Perhaps you should know that simply walking to our mailbox a quarter mile up the dirt road we live on to a wood stanchion of neighbors' mailboxes, my wife was accosted by the mother of the son who likes to say "asshole". They live along the way on this walk. Years of her belligerent, loose and biting large dogs has also been one more entertainment. It's kept other people away from walking for their mail. Today this woman yells over from her parked vehicle that she is very unhappy my wife has called the state police. She proceeds to bully and lecture and lets-go into full drama, with shocking and complete inaccuracy, all the recent acts concerning her family onto our property and ourselves. There's nothing to listen to but a delusional litany of self-protection and rising anger, which concludes with the woman reminding my wife (again) that her son would never use the word "asshole", followed by more hopeless litany, then screaming at my wife, at the top of her lungs, "Fuckyou!" The benediction to the sermon was the woman then appearing out from behind her parked vehicle, crossing into the road where my wife is and onto our land, where she deposits her garden garbage of plastic and compost, jumping up and down onto the garbage and screaming "Call the police, call the police. I'm trespassing!" Which she now actually is doing, but she'd rather mock us and the law she should respect.


Try working with that.


We also have a son we like to believe never does wrong. Once upon a time, long before this woman moved here, our son and one of his pals (ages about 12) decided to lightly monkeywrench a parked logging skidder that was working a job in this valley. The logger had his senses about him and backtracked both boys to their parents doors. While having supper one summer night there was the logger knocking at our kitchen door and wanting to talk. I went over and we talked. The man was still in his mess of clothes, it had been a long day. When I heard what he had to say I called my son over from the table, he met the man with me and listened to what he had to say. Not easy to admit, but he did, my son agreed with the logger's assessment to his equipment (no damage) and apologized to the man right on the spot. Things lightened considerably and the man and I continued to talk about other things. He'd later go back to his job and get it all done, untouched, and our son would write, on his own initiative, a formal written apology which he mailed to the man. If you don't believe me, go ask the man yourself; his name is Don West, and he's a friendly fellow.


One more little story concerning present time: we have neighbors who bought a beautiful home for themselves that they are only making more beautiful. It's a sight to see. I knew the former owners, and in fact I cut the woods out and opened the ground for this house site and long driveway when it was built thirty years ago. Time goes on, people come and go, these new people move in. They couldn't live more quietly and abiding with their surroundings, but now and then visitors come and these visitors seem to like firecrackers and now and then firecrackers have been used. Firecrackers are illegal in Vermont but sometimes are tolerated on the 4th of July, as I might like to do. Who doesn't like firecrackers? It's quite another thing when they are being used on Christmas, and various other times of year that make no sense as a public celebration. At 10-11 at night they can be very loud. When your family has been shaken from sleep, even louder. When the rockets and red glare is directed over their grassland and into your woodlot, louder still. By 11 one night, taken out of sleep, my wife finally had enough and walked down the dark dirt road to where she could see the revelers on their sparkling hillside and shouted "Shutup!" One word efficient. It'd been going on for well over an hour this jamboree. For her one word she received back a unified shout-back, "Go Home!" Imagine that, from visitors, while my wife is at home. She returned to tell me the tale which didn't at all seem right, or like our neighbors, so after 11 o'clock in the night, firecrackers still resounding, I wrote our neighbors an email. I inquired about what in the world was happening, and did it seem right, never mind the potential danger of fire, a dry season and vulnerable woodlands. They wrote back immediately, apologized, and the firecrackers subsided as if with a magic wand. The magic wand was mutual respect. I saw it happen. I took part, others took part. If you think this is self-congratulatory, you're missing the point.


A little town history: there is a tax and property map in our town office on the wall that anyone can look at and study closely, and this map is about as large as a barn door. Can't be missed. Correct boundaries are surveyed on this map with precision. For anyone reading this missive, and are close by, or even a troubled neighbor, go have a look at this map. It will teach you things.


As I wrote to our town selectmen once upon a time about these very concerns: "I would ask the Selectmen and the town to take notice to a new arrogance now afoot on our road (River Road). This original trespassing and its repercussions (chatter amongst neighbors with vicious gossip against character) has only empowered some others to take sides and react in a similar vein. All of it fueled by prejudice and entitlement, with no regard for simple true etiquette. True etiquette is having all the facts and addressing the problem(s) with a decency toward mutual understanding." No one from the Selectmen or the town ever responded.


The Green River, from its village (its headwaters is in Marlboro, Vermont) and the covered bridge, that Irene spared, runs approximately four miles from that bridge down to the Vermont and Massachusetts border. I've hiked it thousands of times, on road and in the river, on both shores of the river. On the road for those four miles and all along the river there are three known swimming holes: one is in the village right at the covered bridge which many use and much love. Heading down our road for the majority of those four miles are two known swimming holes. They have always been open and available for swimmers. Only recently, for personal circumstances, has one been posted "No Trespassing" by landowners new to the region. The other swimming hole is on our property and freely open. Never posted. Swimmers use it. Fishing enthusiasts, canoeists, kayakers etc. beach there momentarily. All no problem. Because of the three incidents with neighbors we have been labeled either "asshole", "unfriendliest man" and the best one yet, "You don't let people on your land." Actually we let people on our land more than any landowner on this road by the very open policy of the swimming hole. There is a visible pathway from the road down to the swimming hole that crosses only our land and it's always been there. Yes, we've cleaned up for decades after people their litter, garbage, diapers, broken glass etc., but it isn't anything unusual. It comes with us.


A week after the Sheriff came out and listened to our tale and went and served papers of No Trespassing on the campfire / foul-mouth neighbors up the road, we went down to the dismantled campsite and its return to a serene setting of
brook river trees and found moose tracks. Wild is back. What do you know.


We are now in a world that can be easily driven out of hand. There are no more wise and wily grandmothers and grandfathers pivoting in a neighborhood their sound tidings and ample advice. No matter how we turned out ourselves, we had our grandparents, or someone's, to show us the difference between good and evil.


For the forty years I've lived here, I've run into much more dicier and heated problems and disturbances on this road with neighbors and others with differing minds. The difference is they were country folk who walk with an ethic and almost a code as to manners and outcome. The majority don't wish to cause trouble. The majority know conservation
and conversation; they work with tools, land, wood, stone, and principles. Animals. It stands to reason to listen to reason. So I've always been able to talk together with others and smooth things through, often compromising an idea or a plan.


No longer. The new rural country is filling fast with know-it-alls and big talkers behind your back. They take sides. They move only with their self-appointed desires. They actually accuse us of beating them up with our protective actions to property when we've kept a public swimming-hole open for forty years and sought out everyone to talk with when there is a problem. It's small potatoes on the big map of horrid troubles and big fires in the world, but it's actually the backbone breaking on all manner of manners. It is corrosive, since common decency, communication, and fluency one-to-another are at stake. Without these three ingredients, you're no longer making a village.


~ Bob Arnold



_______________________

The above is the long version.

Here's the short version : Get Over It.----I Have.----Call in re-enforcement.

________________________


http://longhousepoetryandpublishers.blogspot.com/search/label/Hurricane%20Irene%20Album

http://longhousepoetryandpublishers.blogspot.com/search/label/Hurricane%20Irene%3B%20Lao%20Tzu

http://longhousepoetryandpublishers.blogspot.com/search/label/Hurricane%20Irene






photo © susan arnold

Friday, May 18, 2012

EARTH ~




Lars Hollmer



I'm arriving four years dreadfully late to the untimely passing of Lars Hollmer, my apologies to music heaven. Lars Gustav Gabriel Hollmer (21 July 1948-December 2008) is still too little known in the United States. He was and remains in his recordings a Swedish accordionist, keyboardist, composer and overall poet of sound space. His work has drawn from Nordic folk tunes to almost every style of music, all shown in his solo recordings or as a member of a half dozen groups. He was known to be giving of his talents and time to so many musicians and events. Most of his work was recorded at The Chickenhouse, his well outfitted studio in Uppsala, Sweden. Lars Hollmer passed away to cancer on Christmas 2008.


Have a listen:

Boeves Psalm by Lars Hollmer on Grooveshark





Discography

With Samla Mammas Manna

  • Samla Mammas Manna 1971
  • Måltid 1973
  • Klossa Knapitatet 1974
  • Snorungarnas Symfoni 1976
  • Kaka 1999
  • Dear mamma 2002

With Zamla Mammaz Manna

  • Schlagerns Mystik / För Äldre Nybegynnare (The Mystery of Popular Music / For Older Beginners) 1977
  • Familjesprickor (Family Cracks) 1980

With von Zamla

  • Zamlaranamma 1982
  • "1983" (Live) 1983
  • No Make Up 1984

With Ramlösa Kvällar

  • Ramlösa Kvällar (Nights Without Frames) 1977

With Fem Söker En Skatt

  • Fem Söker En Skatt 1995

With Looping Home Orchestra

  • Vendeltid 1987
  • Lars Hollmer.
  • Looping Home Orchestra Live 92-93 (DOOR FLOOR SOMETHING WINDOW) 1994



  • Inte Quanta by Lars Hollmer on Grooveshark


With Accordion Tribe

  • Accordion Tribe (live, 1998)
  • Sea of Reeds (2002)
  • Lunghorn Twist (2006)

With Japanese jazz players

  • SOLA 2000

With Fanfare Pourpour

  • Karusell musik 2007

Solo albums

  • XII Sibiriska Cyklar 1981
  • Vill Du Höra Mer 1982
  • Från Natt Idag 1983
  • Joggingcharleston (Single, 1984)
  • Tonöga 1985
  • The Siberian Circus 1993
  • Vandelmässa 1995
  • Andetag 1998
  • Utsikter 2000
  • Viandra 2007




Starlep Signs by Lars Hollmer on Grooveshark





photo Lars Hollmer:
http://www.myspace.com/pourpour/photos/albums/album/804708

Thursday, May 17, 2012


NEW FROM LONGHOUSE! ~








please click on image




Travel with this poet and eco-essayist on one more journey into the US Rocky Mountains interior



Mount Blanca with Ute Creek at Dawn. Longhouse, 2012. First edition. New and limited. A signed edition is available upon request.
$8, unsigned


Buy now (U.S. addresses with $2 s/h) with Paypal:













Wednesday, May 16, 2012

SORRY ~



Here's how you say "sorry", when you are.


Whomever delivers our newspaper, which isn't our newspaper, but an old Boston friend's who has a home in our town which I've worked on through two generations (the man's parents and now his). He likes our local newspaper and so we have it delivered here for him and we get to read it and keep it all together with its nasty flyers and advertisements which I never look at (but he does) and every other month or so we get to see one another when he comes up from Boston to pick up his newspaper bundle. Another style of the old way of doing things. Share and share alike. Read and also visit. While whomever delivers the paper between 3-4 AM (we hear the vehicle go down and back, especially in the snow bundled winter months, a lone pair of headlights) couldn't on one day. And this is the kind note that was left in our newspaper delivery the next day.


Whatever it takes.













Tuesday, May 15, 2012

EARTH ~










Back Road Chalkie
photo © bob arnold




EARTH ~








"hound, bay, horse, and turtle dove"



We were sitting around the fire waiting
for the coffee to boil I was seeing
the first sun rays begin their dance upon
the dew when three deer walked into the clearing
on the hill above our camp they were there
browsing the young blackberry tips
and I poured myself


some coffee and realized that we
were all of a piece when they moved
into the clearing a circle was drawn
around them and the field and our camp
the firs and the tamarac faded into each
other while all the grasses and brambles shone
with their own light and nothing
seemed to escape my vision and


my ears turned to the sounds of the worms
burrowing and the insects seeking food
and shelter then my dog barked
and I wavered and the circle
undulated the landscape but the deer
remained then the tremor passed and still


the deer remained and we were one piece
of a land no longer puzzled and someone
shouted Aye! The deer!
a tractor echoes at the boundary
a chainsaw cut
into my wildness. I watched


the deer, the muscle go tight, their ears spring to.
Then it was but a quick leap to safety in the wilderness.



____________________


Joe Napora
The Daniel Boone Poems
Travels into the Interior
(Wind Publications
600 Overbrook Dr.,
Nicholasville KY 40356)













Monday, May 14, 2012


NEW FROM LONGHOUSE! ~






please click on image



These early poems of travel from the USA to India by this long time literary, spiritual and musical troubadour.



Early Poems ~ Longhouse, 2012. First edition. New and limited. A signed edition is available upon request.
$8, unsigned


Buy now (U.S. addresses with $2 s/h) with Paypal: