03 Mar

Posted at 01:38h in Uncategorized by
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Sometimes they come like padded cat's feet, sometimes crashing down in a sinus headache before dawn. Some writers think of them first (they become guides) and for others they're an afterthought. I remember when an artist friend of mine did me the honor of naming one of her pieces.  It was made of hog gut--twisted, stretched, dried into a provocative elliptical form now dangling from her Kailua (Hawai'i) home ceiling.  This was the same house she had to tent and treat because of the pervasive termites that plague the...

09 Feb

Posted at 19:31h in Uncategorized by
8 Likes

Never mind, for now, who will read it.  We are seduced by a book's cover--or not.  I hope you will like this one which features two photographs by Rick Dingus.  No, this is not his "blue" period (note the sky) but work from the twenty years in which he created "photo drawings."  With graphite or silver colored pencils, sometimes colored crayons, Rick challenges the notion that photographs are objective, real, true.  He calls them incomplete "quotations" rather than facts and uses the drawings to blue the distinction between...

11 Oct

Posted at 02:49h in Uncategorized by
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Sometimes I feel the old house calling to me through its almost 100 years of existence.  Through its builder, Jess Giles, its subsequent owners, my great Aunt Alice and Uncle Vern.  Through the no doubt mice ridden electrical system and sputtering toilet, the kitchen's hot water barely warming the dinner dishes as it makes its way from the basement water heater upstairs.  Nighttimes there I can sometimes hear something in the old chimney (the red foxes occasionally spotted? a squirrel? what?), a comfort rather than a scare. This past...

27 Jul

Posted at 01:11h in Uncategorized by
2 Likes

I'd just engaged in an argument with a feisty Cuban-American woman in which I said nothing. Nada, y pues nada.  I was speechless though alert to what was about to happen when I saw her striding down the hall to the lost baggage claim, flanked by children and perhaps her mother, dragging a luggage trolley stacked high, bearing the same weary look we all had--all of us just arrived at the Tampa airport from Havana.  She was shouting, shall I say, discouraging words. I had her bag all right....

13 Jun

Posted at 23:35h in Uncategorized by
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Growing up I liked to think about how my home-town region had been called "a sea of grass."  Riding out to our farm where there was still native grass stretching to the horizon, I imagined the Spaniards' and American Expedition leaders' apprehension as they tried to lay track across the llano estacado. But years later, the weight of that epithet really came home to me as I gazed at the ocean surrounding O'ahu near University of Hawai'i where I was teaching.  When the local swimmers took off unfazed into...

07 May

Posted at 19:21h in Uncategorized by
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I'd seen pictographs before.  West of Vega at what we call "Paint Rock," what archaeologists call "Rocky Dell."  It's an important pictograph site (pictographs are painted on rocks rather than incised like petroglyphs).  In fact that site is the only Panhandle painted rock site cited in Kirkland's The Rock Art of Texas Indians (l967), based on field research done in the l930s. Turns out Kirkland, an artist himself and amateur researcher, made watercolor renderings of other major cites in Texas, the most stunning and prolific in the Lower Pecos...

03 Apr

Posted at 14:58h in Uncategorized by
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Mornings find us surfing the news.  Same ol'.  A tweet a day keeps the real news at bay.  I somehow think of Robert Benchley, time-worn member of the New York Algonquin group, along with Dorothy Parker and others.  I once reveled in that brand of humor, so sly, redolent, and droll.  Parker could wound with a feather and Benchley, well, Benchley never went over with my college students.  Too effete, maybe just too silly? Still.  I xeroxed copies of his "Decent into the Alimentary Canal," and "The Tooth, the...

26 Feb

Posted at 18:39h in Uncategorized by
1 Like

It's time.  The fire lanes, I hear, have been ground; there are red flag warnings on the weather site.  California may be wet this year, out of drought threat, but the Texas Panhandle remains dry. It's time to go home.  To check the farm.  It's been on fire twice, once because the highway department truck dragged across high grass in the nearby bar ditch igniting the pasture. The other fire was on the land near town.  Someone apparently tossed a cigarette.  There are blackened out patches all along this...