“Power is only important as an instrument for service to the powerless.”
-Lech Walesa
Power is the ability to get people to do what they don’t want to do, or wouldn’t do otherwise. Getting people to see what they ought to do, and making them inclined to do it, is leadership.
Kindlegarten, get it? ‘Cause this post is about the Kindle digital book-reading thing. I amuse myself.
Thinkiing about buying one? Or getting your book published for it? Here’s a blog post on johnaugust.com, with a pretty comprehensive assessment.
Over the years, I’ve written a lot of poems and bits of fiction about birds; crows mostly, also gulls, hawks, pelicans. Owls are said to be the familiars of the poet. One fall/winter in the mid 1990s, I had a pair of them nesting in a tree outside my house. If if was a good omen, as they say it is, I can’t say of what. There was no watershed of fortune, inspiration, or even good digestion the attribution of which to those hooty little beasts would not amount to logical fallacy. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
Below is one of my favorite poems about birds. I wrote it in Delano back in the late 1990s, sitting in the cold Valley autumn air, and thinking about a girl. She’s long decamped, and the poem has probably been posted here before. So if you’re looking for something a little fresher, and maybe better, here’s a link to somebody else:
A Meeting Of The Birds by John Kinsella. Read it aloud; his language is crisp and tactile, and much to be admired.
THE CROWS
Having breakfast with Papa
as the morning slowly warms
from freezing, thinking of animals.
The coyote cultivates his heart
to sadness, moves alone for food,
dies on the road.
Out in the almond orchards and grapes
from electric wires and trees
a flock of crows is lifted up.
By noon I’ve seen a few
perched in the old mulberry
cut back for winter.
The crows speak of my unspeakable
solitude, and though I struggle
and pray against such thoughts,
I think of your body: your throat,
breasts, delicate hands.
Your hands. I know that a man
must die of such thoughts, or
die of how distant you are.
Like the distance
from this quiet house in a flat town
to the silent encircling hills,
with clouds pretending to be snow.
(c) by J. Kyle Kimberlin
all rights reserved
You should go to the pound and adopt a dog. Get two if they’re small. I live in a condo where I can’t have a dog, but I’ll come and visit. Deal?
Well, I aint always right but Ive never been wrong.
Seldom turns out the way it does in a song.
Once in a while you get shown the light
In the strangest of places if you look at it right.
Now there’s my muse, kids. The Grateful Dead playing Scarlett Begonias live. It makes me so happy I want to dance around the house, I want to weep. I want to give you tonight I can write the saddest lines, and have you believing it until you want to dance too.
The planet is spinning through the night in an etched groove of beautiful grief.
I have a longstanding interest in the writing spaces where other writers do their work. It’s not because I think one can learn a lot about people by seeing where they live and create. It’s just interesting. The work spaces of writers like Faulkner, Hemingway, and Frost are especially so.
The Guardian has a site exploring the studies of writers working today. It’s pretty cool.
Wanna see my Fortress of Solitude? Here you go.
The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.
– Charles Darwin
I used to talk to my dog Tasha in complete sentences, like, “Why don’t you move over into your seat, Tasha,” and she understood. My Dad tells a story of a time when he took our Stella to a picnic area of a small lake near Delano.
Dad often took Stella for walks off leash on the bluffs here in Carpinteria, and sometimes on the beach. She had a unique habit of looking back frequently, to make sure her people were still with her. That day in Delano, there was no one else around. Dad let Stella off leash and let her sniff around the trees, and he hid behind one of them to watch her. In a moment, she began to look for him. She looked all around at the trees and the lake. She walked all around his pickup truck, looking up at the windows. She did not wander off. And she was so happy when he stepped out from his hiding place.
Our pets have intelligence beyond our understanding of it. Their capacity for companionship simply cannot be overstated, and their legendary unconditional love is far more than pack instinct. It is a gift from God.
with not much to do but maybe
some laundry and to hang out with a dog,
write some stuff I get to make up as I go
and a coffeemaker all to myself,
a book to read, full of thoughts that don’t matter
then float some dark clouds over, pushing
cold wind that worries no one but the trees,
so I feel no guilt for a day spent indoors
unshaven and in worn out clothes
and when the dog falls asleep in an old
leather chair, I will care not
who writes the nation’s laws.
In remembering Updike, Poets & Writers magazine has posted links to several sites, whereon are found many tributes. You don’t want to miss these on Granta.
Doc Searls has a post on the passing of John Updike that’s worth reading.
Metaphor 