Little Boats

2008-07-29T13:48:00.000-07:00

Note from Privilege

You love this town,
and even if that doesn't ring true,
you've been all over,
and it's been all over you - U2

It's a beautiful day - the fifth or seventh one all summer? Perhaps only Alaskans can appreciate my finding the sun down in Whittier of all places two weekends ago. But today - and yesterday, too - not a cloud in the sky, the sun pounding my bald spot this morning and afternoon as I hoofed it one last time around downtown Anchorage, strolling through a stream of errands, the list of which seems to mysteriously expand rather than shrink.

I'm not sure if it's just some old piece of "writer's lore/myth", of which there's a hefty batch, but there's a story that - depending on the source - features Chekov sitting at a table at a cafe or restaurant and telling his party that all it took to "grow" a story was to give one's undivided attention to any person or object, and to then start writing. He's said to have - and this is where sources diverge/conflict - then pointed to a glass of water on the table and said, "Even this glass of water..." and then something that suggested, "There's a story in there, you just need to start writing." In some tales, it's water, in others...I forget. Two out of three sources said a glass of water, so I'm saying water.

My grandfather gave me the above pictured mug probably close to fifteen years ago, telling me at the time that it was an antique, from one of the old Pennsylvania Railroad passenger steam trains. He also told me that that being the case, it might be worth money someday, that it might be "valuable."

I've never done a check on ebay, craigslist, or some online collectible site - never had it to an antique store, or railroad memorabilia collector's shop. I have, however, instead opted to haul it around with me pretty much everywhere I've lived since he gave it to me. I only heard the above-mentioned Chekov story for the first time a few years ago, and I must admit that while I can't exactly explain how the two relate, especially since I've yet to write a story or essay revolving around or even slightly featuring this mug, this little coffee cup from an old steam train has sat at any of a few desks and "work stations" at which I've had the opportunity to sweat and struggle, while simultaneously entertaining self-doubt and the manifold quirks of attending to this nutty writing craft. (The ghost of Raymond Carver - or, duh, Chekov, must be ready to wield his writer's axe on that sentence, to hack it up a bit.)

There is a story in that cup - not one, many - and they're always there if the thing I'm working on isn't going anywhere. For starters, for instance, does it blow anyone else's mind besides mine that that little 8 oz. cup used to qualify as a legitimate cup of coffee? ("Does American culture need a 12 step program for caffeine addiction?" he kind of joked.) Of course, maybe people drank 110 cups of those little guys before they stopped for the day - I don't know - but if some server put that cup in front of me at a diner or restaurant too early in the morning, I imagine I'd go into insta-Woody-Allen-mode, whining and sighing till at least the 12 ouncer showed up.

I digress. I'm counting hours now till I leave - and must do a ton of things in as many hours as I have left in the States.

I walked into town today, sun shining, and felt comfortably upbeat and cheesy enough to put the above-quoted U2 song on my i-pod and take long last looks around at everything, everyone - while briskly, semi-madly darting about from shop to shop, obligation to obligation.

Everyone who knows me here in Anchorage knows I've never quite known what to make of this city - and, perhaps more so, my feelings about the city (less so, on the whole, Alaska - and they do still remain two different subjects for me).

But today - and oftentimes these last few weeks - everything's looked a little different. Instead of my story, my agenda, I've been let free of the Big ME just long enough to catch this other glimpse, this other gorgeous little thing going on: All these little stories, all over the place - not worrying about who's in the wrong, who's in the right. Little dramas, yes, but mostly people working their shit out and bumping up against each other in the mess of it. And it's never long when I'm hit with the idea of all the new little stories I'm about to enter into.

A part of me has wanted to say these past couple weeks something idiotic and hokey like, "Mission Accomplished" or "I got what I came for" and to then post the picture of me holding the bound copy of my MFA project as it appears at the University Consortium Library. And a part of me does feel that way - but with a great emotional groundswell of gratitude, and not so in the fashion of soon-to-be-former-Occupants-of-the-White-House flying in on aircraft carriers boasting banners that read Mission Accomplished when the war has just begun...

Digressing again. (I'm filling out my absentee ballot though! Boy am I!)

That cup, above, hasn't stopped giving, and probably won't. I derive a lot of nerdy writer-specific excitement and fun imagining Chekov using a glass of water, or a tea kettle, a traveling caravan, or a birch branch and arriving at one of his stories, and I probably always will. It's a lot like all these places in which I've had the chance to live, call "home" for a bit. They've never stopped giving, despite my oftentimes cranky, melancholy take on what singer Greg Brown calls, "the whole damn deal."

When my grandfather said that mug might be valuable someday, I saw dollar signs. But these days it's hard to imagine I'll ever sell it.

So many folks in my thoughts lately. So much gratitude.
Take good care.

2008-07-29T13:24:00.000-07:00

RE: New Digs

Doh...

I nearly attached info on my new digs - post-8/9/08, following trainings and preliminary things - right below this picture. That's all we need, really, is random, blog-passersby to know where we live...

I've updated my info in the "signature" settings of my outgoing emails. If you email me with something simple like "address" or "addy" I'll be happy to reply by shooting you that info. Probably no time to email much - a one-liner, maybe? The end rapidly approaches, though my apartment looks once again like a hurricane pushed through and not so much like we're/I'm clearing out...

2008-07-29T10:16:00.001-07:00

Outro: Of Mountain Beds, tears, photos, etc.

Sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears. - Paul Simon

There are certain songs I try to stay away from - rather, to which I won't venture too/overly frequently close. This only so as not to overplay them and thus spin them into the mundane or ho-hum; as well b/c they detonate a deep, rapidly swelling thing in me when triggered. They're like mini-emotional-power-reactors, like the dead center of the Death Star or something. If Wedge Antilles or Luke Skywalker fired a photon of Paul Simon's "Cool, Cool River" at me under the appropriate circumstances - say, driving solo down the Seward Highway anywhere b/w Anchorage and Seward, and not while surveying kitchen appliances at Sears, or reading Rolling Stone at Barnes and Noble - I'm done. Consider me collapsed, broken - throw up the hazard lights, pull off the highway, get out and stare at the water or mountains for a bit. Have that good cry. It happens.

...couldn't hold back the tears during "Remember the Mountain Bed" at the Wilco show this rain-soaked Saturday evening. Have always loved the song and never been sure how much of it is Tweedy's, how much is Woody Guthrie's - if you can quantify these things - b/c I've heard that Nora, Woody's daughter, gave Wilco and Bragg wide berth/creative liberties with her father's material, sometimes only in skeletal form, if that...

But this Saturday - when not a mountain could be seen beyond the cloud cover, and a sea of young'uns bounced and swayed in all their Marmot/North Face/REI rain gear - a cloud cover that my heart seems to be soaking full up like a sponge these last few days - I missed a certain trio of someone's in Russia terribly, to the point of disorientation.

It's a good song for that, but for other things too - such as summing up the magnetic pull I've felt towards mountain and wilderness areas for close to fifteen years. It's a fitting sort of "outro" for this chapter of my time in AK, which is fast drawing to a close. (Cleaning carpets today! Unplugging and defrosting the fridge!)

I've taken a few short trips around the state in the time Anya and the boys have left - much to my apartment's neglect, and now my hysteria - and have uploaded some of those to a new Facebook album. It'll be the last for a good long while. Additionally, I'll unplug my phone today or tomorrow and would recommend any last minute callers ring the cell. If you don't have it, email soon and I'll send it to you. However, after Friday, I won't have the cell either, in which case expect updates in a few weeks...

Here's the link to the "Jon Solo" photo album. It lacks the stunningly gorgeous kids and wife, of course, and I've tried to keep my mug out of it as much as possible, to all our lasting benefits:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=43324&l=819ef&id=515486533

You know, if you look at the last few posts, you might spot/sum up Little Boats in a nutshell: Cinema (Extras), Literature (Carlson and Dillard), and Music (Wilco, Paul Simon). This is a non-sequitur on the one hand, but I'm just noting that some things - try as I might - don't and might not ever change. Hard to say and not that they have to either.

I'm posting the lyrics to Mountain Bed below, but you really should hear the song. It's one of the most gorgeous lyrics I've heard/seen, and well beyond worth the price of a download. The band - and Guthrie - had a shining moment here.

Sometimes that moment shines so bright in my eyes that they burn, for which I can't help but feel grateful.

Remember the Mountain Bed

Do you still sing of the mountain bed we made of limbs and leaves?
Do you still sigh there near the sky where the holly berry bleeds?
You laughed as I covered you over with leaves
Face, breast, hips, and thighs
You smiled when I said the leaves were just the color of your eyes

Rosin smells and turpentine smells from eucalyptus and pine
Bitter tastes of twigs we chewed where tangled wood vines twine
Trees held us in on all four sides so thick we could not see
I could not see any wrong in you, and you saw none in me

Your arm was brown against the ground, your cheeks part of the sky
Your fingers played with grassy moss, as limber you did lie
Your stomach moved beneath your shirt and your knees were in the air
Your feet played games with mountain roots as you lay thinking there

Below us the trees grew clumps of trees, raised families of trees, and they
As proud as we tossed their heads in the wind and flung good seeds away
The sun was hot and the sun was bright down in the valley below
Where people starved and hungry for life so empty come and go

There in the shade and hid from the sun we freed our minds and learned
Our greatest reason for being here, our bodies moved and burned
There on our mountain bed of leaves we learned life's reason why
The people laugh and love and dream, they fight, they hate to die

The smell of your hair I know is still there, if most of our leaves are blown
Our words still ring in the brush and the trees where singing seeds are sown
Your shape and form is dim but plain, there on our mountain bed
I see my life was brightest where you laughed and laid your head...

I learned the reason why man must work and how to dream big dreams
To conquer time and space and fight the rivers and the seas
I stand here filled with my emptiness now and look at city and land
And I know why farms and cities are built by hot, warm, nervous hands

I crossed many states just to stand here now, my face all hot with tears
I crossed city, and valley, desert, and stream, to bring my body here
My history and future blaze bright in me and all my joy and pain
Go through my head on our mountain bed where I smell your hair again.

All this day long I linger here and on in through the night
My greeds, desires, my cravings, hopes, my dreams inside me fight:
My loneliness healed, my emptiness filled, I walk above all pain
Back to the breast of my woman and child to scatter my seeds again

2008-07-28T20:38:00.000-07:00

These, these...

This was going to be the summer I finally plowed through Moby Dick. While I'm enjoying the novel way more than I imagined possible, we reached a point where...let's just say I craved a little rest stop along the way.

Without saying too much about the above books, (What are they about, really? Hard to say...) I'll just say I've had the opportunity to take a couple "11th hour" trips around the state, and I can't imagine two better works that could have sat in as companions along my way.

Neither am I ready to let either of them end yet - I miss not returning to them each day since I finished them - enough that it's easy to look forward to reading them again someday down the line...maybe sooner than later.

Dillard's book, I will say, sure made me heart sore for my fam in Russia. Enough so that I heard my thoughts lob - about a quarter or midway through the book, as Lou and Maytree begin life with Petie - a big ol', gushy and mushy cheese-ball that declared something like: How do people live without children? Was there life before Sam and Mat? Is that possible?

By book's end, the elderly Maytree is contemplating the past fast fading behind him, with his grandson nearby, and Annie writes:

...With the book length poem, the long-range cannon full-bore, Maytree had had a blast. Whether his work lasted was less crucial now than whether Manny would straddle his shins a little while longer.

This is kind of beside the point, and really ridiculous on the one hand, but that passage pretty much sums up my MFA thesis in a nutshell.

As for Five Skies - it's rich, very rich - language, description, characters. It'll make you hungry - very hungry - but only after you've earned your meal in work, via labor.

2008-07-18T14:51:00.000-07:00

On Extras

Well, I have to say, I've had this combustible smile and smirk erupting across my face the past 2 days now, and it's entirely due to the superior series finale to Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's second BBC/HBO series, Extras.

Tickled, mostly, by it's stunning and ultimately biting commentary on celebrity culture. This is a show that really didn't sway me until a couple episodes into Season 2. And that only b/c I had the bar raised so "high" on one hand, wanting more than a new original series from these 2 guys, a repeat of the shenanigans of their first series, the original, BBC The Office.

But I'm looking at this post - and had occasion via phone the other night - trying to recommend something that's plagued by those god-awful TV terms, "season", "series," "episodes". Unlike The Sopranos, or West Wing, or anything else I might try to convince you is worth zapping your eyes out in front of a screen while you munch chips and put off honest, good clean fun or work, understand something:

For Gervais and Merchant, a season consists of 6 episodes, each clocking in at, oh, about 40 minutes? Two seasons then is less than a single Hollywood series season. To Gervais and Merchant's credit, they've appear to possess the dignity, intellect, and craftsmanship - with 2 acclaimed series now - not to beat the proverbial dead horse as proves Hollywood's timeless method, by continuing longer than proves remotely necessary, eschewing any glimpse of excess (save for in the DVD extras to both series: Gervais is the poster-child for excessive tomfoolery). Twelve episodes, wrapped with a single hour long wrap-up to the show.

Extras was not The Office - not by a longshot, and I'm now at a place to remark that this is ultimately to its credit. While I adored the series wrap up to The Office - the way it served to bring a pleasing, big-hearted closure to the series by tying up the few loose ends lingering at the end of Season 2, I'm more impressed by far with the end of Extras. Its series finale, by contrast, goes a step further and offers a respectable commentary on a culture run amok...I'd say "celebrity culture" run amok, but it's viewing culture too - me and you, all of us sitting on our duffs, taking in everything a big, ominous (not really) "they" throw at us. It almost makes the whole show resemble a lengthier than customary stage play.

Well, if any series proved worth sitting on my jiggly duff for the whole shebang of it, this was one of them, as was their previous one as well. If you're looking to fill your Netflix Queue with something short and sweet, but longer than a movie, Extras proves good quality entertainment, and I don't use that term lightly. (Someone out there's snickering a "Yeah right" this very moment, I just know it.) Give it a little time, stick with it - the payoff is pure delight.

2008-07-17T10:17:00.000-07:00

Sam's song. (I think.)

For a few months now I've been hanging onto this old envelope addressed to Anya, on the back of which I one night quickly jotted down the lyrics to a song I heard Sam singing as he played alone in his room.

It went on for a little while before I started writing, but what I jotted down was pretty much how it went from there word-for-word. I had no doubt he was making it up as he went, given his melody (and lack thereof). I did check with him when he stopped singing, asked him where he learned that song, to which he replied, "I'm just singing." Nicely put.

Been recycling and tossing things so much that - in addition to sharing it with readers - I'm putting it here just to back it up in case I blithely toss an empty envelope addressed to Anya in the trash without checking the back. It's nearly happened more than a few times already:

There was a boy who had a kite
and it would fly around
so it would fly in the sky when he let go
and with a stick he'd catch it
and he had a train on a track
and he rode on top of it.

Well, it's only my opinion, but for a songwriter - if he ever chose that route - I'd say he's off to a pretty good start...but I'm biased, of course.

2008-07-15T20:53:00.000-07:00

pics and words and music

Well, by gum...I do believe I taught my son to stick his tongue out, beginning at day one...ask me about it another day...He's saying "Hello" - really, I swear.

Just found these on the camera. I thought the only pics there were for our "craigslisting" and "ebay" auctions...Which reminds me, yesterday during his craft talk at UAA, Ron Carlson used the word "download" to illustrate one of the ways his mind works when he's playing with memory and details and warming up a new story. He threw the word in his sentence - got his idea across, and it made sense to us young'uns - and he talked a little more but then pauses a moment after which he says, "Back when I started trying to write stories as a teenager, I wanted to learn words - good words - and I loved working with them. We've come up with a lot of words since then, and none of the words we've come up with in that time are worth a shit."

Download, Google/"-ing," Craigslisting, Netflix/"-ed," etc.

He's right, you know.

Anyway, those 2 pics above can be found at a small follow-up album to the photos I downloaded yesterday. They're mostly aimed at Anya and family - purely for how obsessive they make us appear - qualifying for the most part as a collection of "series" of each kid...

Here's the link:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=41745&l=e6e27&id=515486533

In other, totally unrelated news? I never totally "got" (understood) the deal with - no, about - the band My Morning Jacket, and just started chalking it up as one of those things with being 30-something and totally on my way to "out of it," but on the advice of more than one friend I "Netflixed" (see above) their concert film Okonokos to play/watch/hear in the fore- and background as I clean and move out of the apartment.

Short of it: I dig. My Morning Jacket. Live - more than I've been able to tell from their albums - they play like it's their last night on Earth; they play the way I wish more bands did, more writers wrote, more books read. The movie makes me feel a lot like I used to feel watching live music as a teenager, and in my 20's, too - the way I always imagined I would feel - or a person could feel - playing guitar with intentional devotion, if one would become a full-fledged guitar-nerd, with nothing to distract or deter him/her/me.

If nothing else, the concert film makes me feel amped at the very least the way I felt the first time I heard Neil Young and Crazy Horse's live album, Weld. And I know a crap load of things were/are better than Weld then, and before then, and of course since then. But so much was going on back then that I wasn't aware of (though I wanted to be), but I also didn't give a rip either. Why would I? Powderfinger to Rockin' in the Free World, into Like a Hurricane - all in a seamless, icky-messy, distorted jam. Sure - and so what if - Sonic Youth could do it all (jam/solo/experiment) better? The point is I didn't know any better then, and I still don't now, actually - in fact, lately I think I know less now than ever -most of all when I feel on a visceral level the physical sensation associated with whatever the hell Young and Crazy Horse - or, rather, today/now/here Jim James and his band of nutjobs (My Morning Jacket) - are doing with their instruments live.

"Live" being the operative word here.

That's it. Jam on.

2008-07-14T23:06:00.000-07:00

Came on this moose chowing on the fireweed by our dumpster as I was heading out last night...

2008-07-14T14:16:00.000-07:00

Sung to the tune of I Still Miss Someone

These are not the photos you'll find at the below link. However, many of the ones in that album - at my facebook page - will look eerily similar to the ones I've placed here. The album is called "Last Days in AK", but it was really just an excuse to get a glimpse of the fam, who flew to Russia almost a week ago...

Cut and paste this link to your browser if you'd like a gander at what we were up to in the weeks prior to Anya and the boys' departure:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=41562&l=c2abe&id=515486533

G'day.

2008-07-14T13:43:00.000-07:00

Blazo

Do read (or, re-read) Ron Carlson's widely-anthologized short story, "Blazo". For starters, it "tells Alaska" better than any single episode of Northern Exposure you'll have ever watched, and proves better, too, than Krakauer and Penn's Into the Wild.

I had a chance to hear him read it last night, and though I've read it before, he left me with that "socked in the gut" feeling you usually only get with the first reading of a great work. He told the audience it was only the second time he'd ever read it aloud - and the first was a decade earlier - and that it would take about a half hour to read.

Forty minutes later, he stopped reading and asked, "Are we all ok? Still on board here?" He grabbed his water bottle and started sipping and apologized for the length going, "It's longer than I remember - sip - Only the second time I've read it to an audience - sip - It's interesting."

You had the sense not that he was patting himself on the back, or humoring himself ("It's interesting") but that he was rediscovering his own story, right there with us.

It's a beauty. Check it out.

2008-07-03T12:47:00.000-07:00

Prologue: On Last Days in AK/ Like John Gorka said...

My, oh my - how the phone keeps ringing here like we're suddenly some far-thrown outpost booth for a Jerry Lewis telethon! And how I wish I could send you out-of-staters the multiple greens that blanket acres and stretch miles across Alaska in summer!

In my ongoing duels with borderline narcissism, or at the very least, obsessive-levels-of- navel-gazing and self-absorption, I've tended to "forget" - or, maybe more like "neglect" - that Anya, Sam, and Mat are officially, fast winding down - rapidly speeding through - their final days as bona fide Alaskans. They leave the state for Russia next Tuesday, July 8. Me, I'm still a month away from my departure for Tokyo, August 2nd.

Which has evoked a barrage of calls, sudden-onset-sobs and tears from visitors and well-wishers.

When I'm not tossing my marbles (brains) to the floor and doing that slack-jawed-Bower thing for hours on end as I haul boxes from one room to another to - if I'm lucky - the car, it's all enough to put in mind - like some never ending mantra - that old John Gorka line: People love you when they know you're leaving soon.

We, on the other hand, can't get over the boxes still remaining, belongings still requiring a haul to Salvation Army, and the ever-insurmountable task of packing a few months worth of luggage within the 50 lb. restriction. So please forgive any distracted-seeming or over-weary airs. I imagine six months from now we'll collectively collapse in a sudden puddle of tears, wracked with sobs over our currently-repressed-bottled-up emotions. Wait, no we won't - in six months it'll be December/January in AK. I imagine we'll postpone our emotional response to this period in, perhaps, July of next year - quite easily, as far as climate and scenery go, the best time to be here and nowhere else. Period.

Anyway, Anya and Sam (and, now, in that effortless way that comes with babyhood, Matvei) have always possessed this Pollyanna-ish set of attributes so that at the end of the day, in the event I wake up from the nap/coma of perpetual navel-gazing and count my actual blessings, it's impossible not to wake up and notice how much of our social network (the day-to-day one, as opposed to the transient, distant, mostly email variety that has become mine) is the result of Anya's and Sam's seeming effortless way with people of all stripes and persuasions. That people are breaking down in our living room, or - panic-stricken on the phone line and requesting that last meal, evoking images that we're about to become refugees or prisoners and not simply residents of another country for a time - it's all proven a tad overwhelming and hard to exactly know how to process.

For reasons related to a sore wrist (again) and hand, and because words I've semi-labored over are better at capturing my mood, tone, emotional landscape better than haphazard, flung-about emails and blog posts, I'm attaching to this post the text of my final commentary for AK as it appeared on local NPR stations this past weekend.

I meant to give a short heads up before it aired, announcing to friends and former profs: Attention! May read/sound like a smattering of revisionist history on my part!

This, only because a short paragraph somewhere near the end - about there being friends and grad school here in AK to attract/pull us this direction - had to be edited out of the piece for time. Despite that, let it be a little note from my end, a tribute to that incessantly clucking telephone, the teary ones in our living room...and to the kitchen empty of our just-sold, too- rickety-to-be-safe table and chairs. It was always my feeling here that I might someday try and write a play - no clue about what exactly - but that table and those chairs would figure as its center piece. The place around which all its action would occur.

A lot like they did in real time.

On Leaving Alaska (or, I Smell a Bunch of Hunches)

In the months since I accepted a teaching job in Japan, my wife, Anya, and I have had a lot of explaining to do. It makes sense that our loved ones would have specific concerns and questions about the decision to move so far away, enough so that we’ve become accustomed to a steady gamut of inquiries: Will you come back to Alaska? What about your kids’ schooling? Will they learn Japanese? You don’t even speak Japanese, right?

Uh, right.

Taken separately, each question seems legitimate, meriting its healthy dose of contemplation. However, taken together in the usual punctuated, rapid-fire manner, I feel like I haven’t so much entered a conversation as consumed a heady cocktail: It’s hard not to feel almost dizzy with vertigo, or to experience varying degrees of delirium.

As the date of our departure nears, and more of our belongings find their way into boxes, or leave our apartment in some new owner’s arms, I’m sometimes nagged by my own tug-of-war with self-doubt: What am I doing anyway? How many men closing the gap on forty years old elect to pack up their families and move to a country where they don’t speak or read the language? What about retirement, 401K’s, and equity? Also, why can I do little more than clumsily stammer and stumble my way through the jungle of other people’s inquiries and concerns?

I’ll admit, the entire move makes little rational or practical sense, as do so many of my responses to people’s questions. “Well,” I hear myself dishing out, “a couple years ago I saw the poet Sam Hamill read his translations of Japanese poets at Title Wave and thought I’d like to live there someday.” Try sharing that with your bank teller or current employer. Admittedly, however, it sounds at least a smidgeon less vague than the more common, “I don’t know - Anya and I like the food and art?”

I recently had the fortune to stumble on the quieting insight of travel writer Pico Iyer’s memoir of his time in Japan, The Lady and the Monk. It appears I’m not alone in following some indecipherable hunch, at least as far as his decision to spend some time living in the country. He writes:

[Through] whatever curious affinities propel us towards people or places we have never met, I had always been powerfully drawn towards Japan. [Though] I knew almost nothing about [the country] and had never had the chance to study it, I felt mysteriously close to the place, and closest of all when I read its poems – the rainy night lyrics of Japanese women, the clear-water haiku of itinerant Zen monks. From afar, Japan felt like an unacknowledged home.

Don’t be surprised if, over the next few weeks, you spot me handing out photocopies of this paragraph to well-intending, inquiring souls.

Added solace for embarking on this new path came when I began noticing the ways our recent decision feels reminiscent of five years ago, when Anya and I announced to friends and family in Pennsylvania that not only were we expecting our first baby but – by the way! – we had also decided to move to Anchorage, Alaska.

I had recently turned 30 and was making $8/hr stocking produce at our local supermarket, while moonlighting in a rock band hurtling absolutely nowhere with alarming speed. Anya was waiting tables. On what seemed a sort of whim, we did what any broke, clueless, panic-stricken couple might elect to do: We packed the car with our essential belongings, left Pennsylvania, and drove to Anchorage – where we’ve remained these years since becoming pregnant with Sam.

Maybe surviving that impulsive leap into the unknown with the bulk of our sanities intact has left us with just enough collective gumption to experiment with what else we’re able to pull off. Granted, it’s not as though moving to Alaska allowed me to follow in the footsteps of the state’s writers I have most come to admire and adore. I haven’t spent these years contemplating grizzlies, whales, or life as a reclusive homesteading trapper and fisherman. Instead, I’ve spent more time seeking out the best deal on diapers, or trying to remember how to light a camp stove.

Still, it’s impossible not to reflect on what’s ahead without also looking at what’s about to drift into the rear view behind us. So hard that lately I’ve heard echoes from one of Alaska’s most revered writers, John Haines:

Alaska, what I have known of it, has given me a great deal…With that never-to-be forgotten sweep of river, hills, and clouds held in mind, one says good-bye one more time, not knowing when or if he will return, nor which, the place or himself, will be the most changed.

It comes from Haines’s essay, Leaving Alaska.

(AK Commentary, © 2008)

2008-07-03T01:11:00.000-07:00

neko: a welcome segue/following a recurring theme - no, obsession...

you'll find m. ward's headed for a fall on his to go home ep/single, and - as with a couple other of mr. ward's songs - it's the arrival of neko case to the track that helps rocket the tune into orbit. consequently it's also her bgv in headed for a fall - post-heavenward hurtle, even going on double-digit listens this week - to blame for lifting me off the m. ward-obsessing-train and onto the neko case round-robin playlist for the so-far portion of this week. still, headed for a fall is a fine, damn fine tune - well worth the 99cent download: a cross between the stones' dead flowers and some springsteen # circa the river...

you hear her lilting signature croon loud and clear - it's obvious enough - on the first chorus of the single, just enough so that you know she's in there - in the mix, on the track - but it's when she steps out on the second chorus that the angels dump out of the sky and drag you up jacob's ladder for a spell.

it's enough to send a (sleep-deprived, scatterbrained, restless-as-all-get-out) guy spilling into a constant fox confessor brings the flood and live austin city limits and furnace room lullaby rotation. with periodic appearances by her this little light of mine and wayfaring stranger from the tigers have spoken.

related aside: it's my opinion her this little light of mine easily sweeps the floor of all other versions of this song, your youth group bonfire/summer-camp version included.

sorry.

2008-07-03T00:39:00.000-07:00

Mover's Log, #@!!!*&%$@~!!!/or, Thanks, Mo

We've become big fans of children's author Mo Willems in recent months - ever since Chris and Gabe lay a copy of Don't Let the Pigeon Ride the Bus! on us for Sam's birthday. Since that time, I think - between frequent trips to the library and bookstores - we've read almost everything by the guy.

However, it wasn't until recently dining with Jae and Sonja and their kiddos that I happened on both Mo's Knuffle Bunny and Knuffle Bunny, Too for the first time.

If you have kids and have read neither, well, get to it. IF you don't have kids and couldn't give a rip either way, but you want to get a pitch-perfect clue of Jonathan's current state of mind as illustrated by a noted children's author, well, then proceed directly to Knuffle Bunny, Too.

On the one hand, it's my current fave kids book-of-the-moment, speaking solely from a bleary-eyed, fumbling, foolhardy dad's perspective - as a father who, in a very short amount of time, managed to unwittingly inhale a dessert intended for Sam, and then later arms full of boxes, blaze across the living room at which time I unintentionally crushed with foot one of his trucks.

Then, imagine also this morning 7am waking to Sam whimpering that he can't find his fire truck and assuming, drafting a teary scenario that I hauled it off in a box of things for the Salvation Army yesterday. Of course I didn't, but you try telling him at 7am on only 4 hours sleep (me), sans caffeine (me again) and weeping at the foot of our bed (him).

Mo's depictions suggest he's reading my mail.

Additionally, as a general cartoon-y glimpse at my overall inner-forecast: Again, Mo's reading my mail.

That's it so far this week. To bed.

M. Ward Chinese Translation

2008-06-27T01:47:00.001-07:00

Hello, Dear -

Have you never seen this? It's one of my favorites.

Recorded my last commentary. It streams at AK's website starting Friday night, and airs on the radio Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday. (If I'm lucky, snippets of this song appear in it.)

Now sit back, watch, and listen.

Toodles,
J.

2008-06-25T22:43:00.000-07:00

pics

got a cd-r in the mail a couple days back full of photos from shawn's visit. here are a few, but for the chock full exhaustive album of our time together in may - and for more recent pics of the boys than anything i've managed to send out lately - cut and paste this link into your browser, then follow where it leads:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=39405&l=0d700&id=515486533

peace.

2008-06-25T01:30:00.000-07:00

re: wrist, radio, m. ward, less blogging (summer, but also...)

truth is, the past few weeks have been so chock full of happening and emotion - and indescribable encounters and those personal minor and not-so realizations - so much beauty, as well as dreadful packing and a barrage of tear-inducing memories but all while experiencing a mostly shooting and oftentimes just plain throbbing, chronic pain that manifests itself and nests somewhere between my neck and right shoulder blade, and proceeds to reach clear through to my right wrist, thumb and fingers. it's made typing a complete drag, and has led me to contemplate making the job in japan a full-on deliberate/intentional immersion spent working over or through my past failed attempts at and neurotic fears of poetry - returning, as has proven most recently helpful - back to the good old-fashioned handwritten word, with minimal - oh-so-minimal - typing on a computer keyboard. way i see it, it's at least worth the a shot in the dark...

on the one hand this development - which one can safely, immediately figure, after four years of MFA work and then a whole lot of blogging and emailing and fat and lazy internet surfing, just absolutely wreaks of something like carpal tunnel, if not also perhaps something arthritic, or just plain out of shape in my arm. complaining about it to gabe this weekend, he mentioned hearing about a rise in problems with people's "mouse-clicking" arms and all the muscles that work during a single click and so - it being the culprit in this minor misery, i can't help wondering what kind of fine dumb mess i've gotten myself into.

ah well and ho-hum.

i want to also write here that i recently set up a facebook account - partly b/c my health insurance-less ass expects to be doing a whole lot less blogging for the near future, as well as maybe in japan too (though i do intend to at least be posting a ton of pics), but this is a way to peripherally catch up (at least in theory) and to remain in pseudo-touch with a lot of friends, old and new. seemed from what i could tell at the writing conference i attended in homer some weeks back that "facebook" proves the more professional - as well as artsy and writerly - of the "friend/network" sites, and after only a few days with an active profile, i'll readily say that it's infinitely more likeable and less annoying than that god-awful myspace. if you're there - facebooking - look me up. pretty please with sugar on top - no, honey - no green tea ice cream.

additionally, i'm working on deadline to finish my "last" commentary/story for the dear folks at the AK radio program. it will air in an episode the theme of which is "detours" this week, which you can stream on your computers beginning friday evening by heading to their site:

http://akradio.org/

safely bet on a piece that attempts to get at or sort out some up-to-date feelings and thoughts about going to japan and leaving alaska.

my personal soundtrack while working on this piece has proven the timeless sounds of portland, oregon's infinitely likeable m. ward. if i have my way, some of his guitar work will show up in the piece, though no one's promising...

wish i had time and energy to devote a heap of loquacious praise on/about the guy. but, sigh, like i said: something about a deadline and chronic pain - gotta end.

at the most simple basic level, however, it's my firm belief that the world - or at least the people i know and love in it - would be even just a fraction better off with a little m. ward in their day's diet. strikes me as a good soul, though i know nothing about him.

just going, as always and forever, only on the music...

2008-06-19T13:47:00.000-07:00

putting this one of greg brown here for my own personal reference. broke the tiniest piece of my heart pulling it off the sidebar a few minutes ago - where it sat for a good few weeks - in a spot now occupied, deservedly so, by someone else.

just looks to me like the image of someone totally in the moment, doing what it at least appears he absolutely, wholeheartedly loves. we should all be so lucky, eh?

2008-05-31T00:13:00.000-07:00

Who Knew?/Gary Snyder, Ten Years Later...

Gary Snyder's "For All" was the featured poem on The Writer's Almanac today. I have a fabulous reading of the poem by Greg Brown on one of his live concert albums. Hearing Keillor read it today sent me back to my long-neglected copy of the book in which it appears, Axe Handles. My copy is signed by the author, from when he appeared for a reading and book signing nearly a decade ago in Missoula, Montana. Damn if some of these poems don't make a heap more sense now - or resonate, strike some pitch-perfect chord at the deep of me - so much more so than they did then. I think back then I was more attracted to "Japhy" - the character of Snyder as he appears in Kerouac's Dharma Bums - than I was with the man himself. And so back then who could have convinced me that nearly ten years later his poems would find me mulling things over in an emotional landscape similar, though not entirely in content, at least in tone.

I won't include "For All" here, but it's a poem worth finding (say, at the Writer's Almanac site). In times like ours, poems like that one prove too indispensable to pass up.

Couldn't help thinking about Sam with this first one below, and the difficult patch we seem to keep returning to lately, and the process of trying to navigate these rougher terrains with something at least slightly resembling skill and care. (Otherwise known, as I like to think of it, as "the parent's koan".)

The title poem, and the book's opener:

Axe Handles

One afternoon the last week in April
Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head
Without a handle, in the shop
And go gets it, and wants it for his own.
A broken-off axe handle behind the door
Is long enough for a hatchet,
We cut it to length and take it
With the hatchet head
And working hatchet, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
"When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off."
And I say this to Kai
"Look: We'll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with—"
And he sees. And I hear it again:
It's in Lu Ji's We Fu, fourth century
A.D. "Essay on Literature" - in the
Preface: "In making the handle
Of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand."
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.

Then, on a semi-lighter note, this one, which put me in mind of the other guy - the baby, Matvei (who's 4 months old this week. Yikes.):

Changing Diapers

How intelligent he looks!
on his back
both feet caught in my one hand
his glance set sideways,
on a giant poster of Geronimo
with a Sharp's repeating rifle by his knee.

I open, wipe, he doesn't even notice
nor do I.
Baby legs and knees
toes like little peas
little wrinkles, good-to-eat,
eyes bright, shiny ears
chest swelling drawing air,

No trouble, friend,
you and me and Geronimo
are men.

However, just for the record, I don't own a pic of Geronimo, though I reckon he has seen the pic of Hank Williams Sr. hanging by my desk, and I'm ok if that one stands in for the one in Snyder's poem, at least for now...Though I'd welcome a pic of Geronimo any day, actually.

2008-05-30T18:12:00.000-07:00

RE: Why the Precepts?
(Short List)

(My method of relaying/sharing info too, too often resembles my potentially-/semi-hazardous method of revealing my emotions with friends, family, spouse, etc: The whole deal all too often goes down a lot like a loosely packed snowball, briskly collected together and hastily packed, and then tossed at its target, chunks slipping off or shooting out as it soars. Telling by a couple responses to the "Mokkai" post below, that's not a too-far-out analogy...)

Some reasons why I a.) took the precepts, b.) am grateful for the dharma name:

1. "It was said of Abbot Agatho that for three years he carried a stone in his mouth until he learned to be silent." - Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers

2. "Abbot Ammonas said that he had spent fourteen years in Scete praying to God day and night to be delivered from anger." - Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers

3. Ten New Songs - Leonard Cohen

4. Since I first read it at 19, the epigraph in Salinger's Nine Stories hasn't stopped repeatedly kicking me in the ol' noggin...

5. Bo Ramsey (pictured, background) - as in, that guitar on Brown's "Treat Each Other Right"...the background is a fine place to be...

6. A cadre of poets.

7. Not least of all, the woman and children with whom I reside...

Below are brief descriptions of each of the first five precepts, as defined by Thich Nhat Hanh. In some ways, it's a tall, daunting order. And don't I know it:

The Five Mindfulness Trainings
(according to Thich Nath Hanh, www.plumvillage.org)

-First Training-

Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I am committed to cultivating compassion and learning ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to condone any act of killing in the world, in my thinking, and in my way of life.

-Second Training-

Aware of the suffering caused by exploitation, social injustice, stealing, and oppression, I am committed to cultivate loving kindness and learn ways to work for the well-being of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I am committed to practice generosity by sharing my time, energy, and material resources with those who are in real need. I am determined not to steal and not to possess anything that should belong to others. I will respect the property of others, but I will prevent others from profiting from human suffering or the suffering of other species on Earth.

-Third Training-

Aware of the suffering caused by sexual misconduct, I am committed to cultivate responsibility and learn ways to protect the safety and integrity of individuals, couples, families, and society. I am determined not to engage in sexual relations without love and a long-term commitment. To preserve the happiness of myself and others, I am determined to respect my commitments and the commitments of others. I will do everything in my power to protect children from sexual abuse and to prevent couples and families from being broken by sexual misconduct.

-Fourth Training-

Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful speech and the inability to listen to others, I am committed to cultivate loving speech and deep listening in order to bring joy and happiness to others and relieve others of their suffering. Knowing that words can create happiness or suffering, I am committed to learn to speak truthfully, with words that inspire self-confidence, joy, and hope. I am determined not to spread news that I do not know to be certain and not to criticise or condemn things of which I am not sure. I will refrain from uttering words that can cause division or discord, or that can cause the family or the community to break. I will make all efforts to reconcile and resolve all conflicts, however small.

-Fifth Training-

Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful consumption, I am committed to cultivate good health, both physical and mental, for myself, my family, and my society by practising mindful eating, drinking, and consuming. I am committed to ingest only items that preserve peace, well-being, and joy in my body, in my consciousness, and in the collective body and consciousness of my family and society. I am determined not to use alcohol or any other intoxicant or to ingest foods or other items that contain toxins, such as certain TV programs, magazines, books, films, and conversations. I am aware that to damage my body or my consciousness with these poisons is to betray my ancestors, my parents, my society, and future generations. I will work to transform violence, fear, anger, and confusion in myself and in society by practising a diet for myself and for society. I understand that a proper diet is crucial for self-transformation and for the transformation of society.

(Have a good weekend.)

2008-05-30T17:03:00.000-07:00

For Montana-bound Shane, gone almost a week, and belatedly for Shawn, gone nearly two...

It ain't hard to find the groove, when you don't have to try.
- Greg Brown, Coneville Slough

Taking Leave of a Friend

Green mountains rise to the north;
white water rolls past the eastern city.

Once it has been uprooted,
the tumbleweed travels forever.

Drifting clouds like a wanderer's mind;
sunset, like the heart of your old friend.

We turn, pause, look back and wave.
Even our ponies look back and whine.

- Li Po, trans. Sam Hamill

2008-05-28T06:30:00.000-07:00

For Cousin Kurt, the Astonishing Noodler

Back in college, we used to prod dear Scott Tyson, joke every now and then about his odd habit of preferring to play his band's albums at unusually loud volumes in his dorm room. Seemed a well-intending, innocent brand of narcissism on one hand, which made the whole deal more humorous than irritating. So it's with some level of sheepishness that I'll confess to periodically slipping my headphones on and listening to an EP I made with a few friends and two family relations (my brother, Daniel, and cousin, Kurt) back in late 2001/early 2002. Called the ensemble The Mean Reds (see/read Breakfast at Tiffany's) and titled the work Demos and Junk Fires.

However, let me issue a single disclaimer: I pop that baby on for one of 3 reasons. Number 3 is for Cousin Kurt's guitar noodling on tracks 1, 2, and...I believe, 6. Number 2 is to listen almost exclusively to his specific noodling on the (cheese-wad, over-emotive, melodramatic lyrics be damned) bridge of track 2, "Pretty #1."

Numero Uno, Chief Reason #1, and I shit you not, is a tie. First, I pop that well-produced sucker on i-tunes semi-occasionally to hear: A.) Frog Holler's Todd Bartolo's heartrending lap steel on track 5, "Sick". (An aside: Consequently, I frequently blame "Sick" for a near-decade's worth of songwriter's block. But that's another story.)

And B.) Cousin Kurt's butt-rock-meets-Neil-Young-
meets-George-Harrison-ish guitar solo on track 1, "The Mean Reds (theme)". Sure, it took all damn day to nail the sucker - that, and I believe some pot and pizza, but the kid (he was, what(?), 21 at the time?) nailed it, and nailed it so well, and then followed up our lazy, wannabe-Scud Mt. Boys-outro with more nutty noodling and pedal-switch-flipping-twisting-and-turning.

That solo still does so much for me on certain glum, gray days when I resort to a shameful, almost-adolescent-specific version of self-pity at which time the potential for resorting to Woody Allen-ish whining seems almost impossible to avoid.

And so it should surprise no one then, especially those who caught us play nearly five years ago at the now-defunct but legendary Point just a stone's throw from Philly, that I entirely and intentionally stepped offstage and away from and out of the outro-jam to our show's "Mean Reds" closer, well after Dan and Jay and Shawn had already vacated the stage, to leave Kurt up there solo and alone, to noodle his heart out on that gorgeous Les Paul of his. A semi-sort-of-handing of a baton that I never quite figured out how to twirl or toss around with quite the right level of "oomph" for my tastes. (Inner-critic's having a field day right now.) On a semi-related note, this was the night before Anya and I flew the coop, drove my little blue bucket of bolts clear out of PA and west across the U.S. and then North up the Al-Can, and eventually to Los Anchorage, AK, where we have since resided. And I haven't been able to nail a tune since. (I say that more out of curiosity now than with any of the punctuated worry and angst with which I've regarded it in the past.)

Well, telling from recent press, Kurt's done quite damn well with his baton in the time since then - and, it should be noted, was doing quite fine without any help from me at the time that he stepped on board to help with my tunes.

It's a pleasure to report that some weeks back, ol' crazy, shaggy cousin Kurt showed up on the back page of dumb and dumber music rag-mag, Rolling Stone. Damned if I don't still read its drek from time to time and so didn't find out about Kurt's mention at Barnes and Noble in Alaska. Along with a small review, they mentioned that his album was/is currently one of the top sellers at one of my fave indie-record shops in downtown Philly. Bravo, my boy - hats off to him.

This press was followed, or appeared in proximity to, a profile/feature on him in one of Philly's two versions of NY's Village Voice, Philadelphia Weekly. If you have any interest in the work of a guy who grew up worshiping Steve Malkmus and Beck and John Fahey, and who currently produces tunes that sound like the single corner in the universe where punk band Suicide, 80's Springsteen, some Neil Young and Crazy Horse, and a demon possessed L. Cohen collide, then maybe the article - not to mention his new cd - will interest you:

http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/articles/16956/music--stereotypewriter

But none of this - my rambling, or any of the press, does some of his recent material any justice. Not really. The kid has come leaps and bounds in a few short years and though I knew some time ago that the dear fellow had a little magic something, I had no idea the ways it would manifest itself. More than any of the writing, I'd just recommend bounding on over to his myspace page, dialing up the first song, "Freeway", then sitting back and trying not to enjoy it. We're talking roughly 2:30 minutes of pure, alterna-pop bliss, and I say that with absolutely no idea or clue what the hell he's singing in the lyric:

http://www.myspace.com/kurtvileofphilly

It's one of my recent favorite songs to play really loud when Anya's out with the boys.

To think, one dull Saturday evening in my sophomore or junior year of college, I dragged a few of the same friends with whom it was fun to prod ol' Scott Tyson off-campus and drove down into sleepy Broomall, PA, and arrived at a coffee house in the cafeteria of Marple Newtown High, where I had learned earlier that evening via phone that "my little cousin Kurt" was going to play some songs he'd written.

We were easily the oldest people in the place, and likely the only folks concerned afterwards about my dear cousin's mental health. He did his pubescent version of Pavement-meets-Beck (I guess) - with a dash of Sonic Youth maybe? - but performed everything entirely on banjo. A lot of deep yells, and incoherent, stream-of-consciousness lyricizing - and more than a fair bit of angst, if I recall.

But I can't talk - not really. There was probably no one brandishing or funneling more angst into feeble songs more than me then.

The kids loved him. And it appears even more of them do now.

Bravo, bud.

As for The Mean Reds. If you find that you're needing a good set of drink coasters this sticky summer, won't you try a few copies of the EP? Or maybe you're sick of your kids playing boring games like "House" and "Doctor" or "Dress Up" and you'd like them to try something new, like "Record Store." The CD's also make excellent frisbees, and if you're in the process of teaching your new border collie some tricks, I'd recommend well more than one or two. For free, of course...

2008-05-24T15:56:00.000-07:00

Jonathan, meet Mokkai. Mokkai, Jonathan...

I recently shared that I took the Buddhist precepts a couple weeks ago. (And so he enters a new chapter in the ever-puzzling matter of trying to know how to correspond/post/talk about his interest and endeavors in this practice.)

What I can do with a limited measure of "know-how": I can download and then upload a couple photos of my rakasu (see above). It's the first and only thing I've ever sewed, and for all her help along the way, Anya should have received an honorary one. Both Anya and our resident priest Koun displayed a treasure trove of instruction, patience, and occasional, necessary pointy-pronged pitchforks in my patookus that would no doubt put even a Mr. Miyagi to shame. (Yes, that Mr. Miyagi.) I can also share that on the day of the ceremony, Koun - after an ongoing dialogue and correspondence during the weeks leading up to the occasion - fitted me with a dharma name that couldn't have seemed to come at a more apropos time (on many levels): Mokkai. From the Japanese, it translates as "Silent Realm", and I'll only share that in the short two weeks since Jukai the name's given me more than enough food for thought and contemplation. It was a treat to have Anya and the kids, as well as longtime friend Shawn there at the ceremony. It brought as special something to the whole affair that I hadn't even considered as I raced to complete that danged bib (rakasu) the evening before the ceremony...

In semi-related news: We're going to Japan! Sure, we've been saying so all along, but yesterday we learned that we'll be living on the western coast of the southern Kyushu region, within the Kumamoto prefecture, outside the city. We had started to wonder if they were having second thoughts about us or if the program was low on funding or something, only going on how long as it took them to inform us of a work placement. For a glimpse of what we can expect, we've been googling "Kumamoto" off and on for the past couple days and would encourage friends and loved ones to do the same, especially if you want to visit and find where we are in comparison to the more popular destinations. We've spent the past two days poring over as much as we can about the area. We wanted something smaller than Tokyo and even Kyoto, and something that might give us the impression we were at least a little removed from the hustle and bustle that has defined the last four or five years of our lives. And, at least according to Koun and his wife Tracy, it looks like that's what we landed. Of course, so much of Japan seems just fine and peachy when it comes to hustle and bustle, so we're not assuming this venture constitutes as some kind of extended spring break or zen sesshin either. Pretty much, we're just happy that we can now look in that direction with some measure of confidence, excitement, and expectation.

For those of you entirely unaware of what this guy in AK is blabbing about when he says things like "the Buddhist precepts" - or for anyone looking at those pictures and saying, "Oh, they do cloth diapers and bibs?" - I thought to type sections from Diane Rizzetto's recent Waking Up to What You Do, and Thich Nhat Hahn's For a Future to be Possible. Both books discuss at length the nature of the precepts and what it means when a person elects to take Jukai. But time grows short on this end, and so the best I can do is direct you to those works. They're easily found at Barnes and Noble, Borders, or your local libraries, and maybe even your used/indie-owned shop.

Have a good weekend. We're staying in this Memorial Day. Had our holiday(s) with our Philly friend last week, though I do imagine we and a few neighbors will BBQ, rain or shine.

Be well.

2008-05-21T00:12:00.000-07:00

(After Seuss)

Fat

Mat

Fat Mat.

Mat is fat.