Thoughts on dying and love

I am thinking of two people today. One is a wonderful widow woman I spoke with online about eight years ago named Anjolie. She was happily married and her husband slipped and fell in the shower and was dead in two days. She's living with his family in Scotland now. Another is a friend on Twitter named @siren_sweet who's battling cancer and not expecting to live much longer, she has two teenaged children she's leaving behind along with family and friends.
Death could arrive at anybody's door at any hour and I am thinking of the great tenderness and care I showed Angie and Siren when in conversation with either one.
It occurred to me that we should always be conscious of how fragile life is and of how much gratitude we should always show anybody we love or care about or meet in a day.
They could be gone tomorrow morning.

We are Love

We are Love.
Beyond questions of time or place,
Beyond the past, present or future, we are Love...
Amongst the stars, or floating
Together in a little boat
On the warmest trade winds
Across the sea together, we are Love.
Clifton Goodwin
Autumn Twenty Twelve

One lifetime, a poem for @siren_sweet

One lifetime

A heavy velvet curtain hangs
Across the last day of our lives
Hiding the unseen beyond
Never to be known or shared
We leave this forlorn vale of tears
In sadness, taking nothing with us
The pain of being gone is left
Unfairly to our too young children
And growing up is hard enough
Without your mother by your side
There can be no easy answers
To give a child whose mother's gone
The only comfort is to know
Your love lives always in their hearts
There's nothing else to say or do
But wonder when our own time comes
What we'll find beyond the curtains
Dark and heavy hanging down
Over this life's final day

Clifton Goodwin
Autumn Twenty Twelve

Night, A Poem for @Cheyarafim

Night

By the Universal Light, 

  You are not alone

The world of Energy Divine, 

  Fills your heart with Love

If you but allow it so,

  There can no heart roam

The world of Night is quiet now, 

  Just the stars above

Cold and clear and twinkling, 

  Calling out your name

The world is full of Joy and Life,

  Every heart plays love's grand game

Let your heart rest easy now, 

  Lay your head down lightly

You can never be alone by Universal Light

Clifton Goodwin
Autumn Twenty Twelve

Review: Ordinary Substance by Zayra Yves

NOV

21

Ordinary Substance by Zayra Yves

Zayra Yves is a California based poet who reads, writes and travels the world and nearby satellites reading her work. In Ordinary Substance we see a woman writing with abandon, leaping into the sky of inspiration...

Impressions:

Zayra Yves presents a surprising difficulty in reviewing her book of poetry Ordinary Substance. There are both abstract poems of love and very concrete discrete imagistic Impressionistic poems. She writes of lovers yes, but they're not coming to her bed, they're coming to the beautiful sun-drenched flower at the center of her being.

There are four chapters, chapbooks perhaps, combined to one unified whole. The highlights of the first book are Becoming Abstract, where the poet begs to be concrete and whole and prefers 

"to be held more often" and Bodies of Angels, fallen people like you and I perhaps, who

"wait for their voices of transmutation while ancestors shake the rattles, cast healing bones into a circle" and "we remember being born dying falling... Our salty hearts torn from shells"

 The Dream That Love Sent is maybe the best of the volume, her lover a dream who

"came from the waters of ancestors/ ancient wonder, dust and isolation"  he is

"open hearted without tears/ like a soul shaped in a Mandala/ that circle of fire burning from within" and together they became "light swimming toward more light"

Part two yields gems like What I was not Counting On and What Cannot Rest in Peace and the poetry takes a darker turn, graveyards appear and love is sometimes lost, lovers leave before or after her heart has seen to protect itself, she gives an ex-con a name on the subway and lets God roll you in a joint and smoke you.

The third book is heavy, freighted with lust and the scent and surrender of sex, as in Thrust of Sky and Bittersweet where

 "in the heart we move undiluted, uninhibited"

Sheba's Song is another memorable verse, her

"heart is a vineyard of grapes ripe and full" 

and Discovering Agamemnon followed by Temple Dancing where her

"body uncoils, unveils coral hues, sapphire blue" is another treat of the third book.

The final book starts with a collection of portraits, as Island Goddess, Street Monk, Healing Hands and At Ugly's Saloon all work enchantments of the poet's vision. She writes an ode to Pilgrim Hitchhiking on the Road of Life, in

"gratitude for sharing this road of phenomena, where I too am lost sometimes in the unknown" 

and speaks of being

"abandoned to your song as a first and last kiss / of immense awareness while our lives / circle around each other / to meet again at the crossroads."

The volume is finished with a powerful chain of poems, she vanishes between water molecules in Dissolving, sees all the stars of heaven in Pinholes, writes of

 "uncharted love just waiting to be discovered"

 in The Heart Moves into the Body, or begs to be allowed to

"cultivate the light (the sweet songs from your voice) and bloom in the night like magnolia" in And, it was going to rain... 

The volume finishes with the bold statement of Sanctuary, a poem about her love who

"arrived in a dream / and left the same way", 

who rises

"like a sweet fragrance in the strangely lonesome field / I call "myself", to populate it with love"

and when she starts to think it is dead then

 "Suddenly the selfless joy of our embrace / emerges like a rose in sunlight / ... and once again / I am surrounded by flowers / in full bloom." 

Zayra Yves is described in the introduction as a Mystic Poet and this work contains many such flights of fancy but she's also sometimes very down to earth here, especially in the second book. But for the most part this is an ambitious work, these are poems to read at the beach perhaps, when you can close your eyes after each one and let the sun bake their dreams into your brain.

They intoxicate the careful reader like opium.

Clifton Goodwin

Autumn Twenty Twelve

Ordinary Substance is published by Magdalena and Co, Santa Clara Ca Copyright Zayra Yves 2007

Review: A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

How do you review a melancholy book of essays by a gifted, world-weary writer like Rebecca Solnit? By impressions...

In "A Field Guide To Getting Lost" Rebecca Solnit has given us a wide ranging series of essays that begin by getting lost and end up in far flung realms of introverted ruminations ranging from the mundane to the brilliant. Four chapters are titled The Blue of Distance, "the color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go." This longing is a major theme of the book, the longing of Spanish Conquistadors looking for gold in the New World, of whom she writes "no one will ever be as lost as those conquistadors ever again". She tells many little stories of loss and finding in this Field Guide, of her grandmother, having lost her mind in mental hospitals after the wrenching horrors of war and being a refugee from the Pale, appearing from a hospital to give her a lipsticked kiss that made her mother scream in terror, thinking she saw blood; of making a film in an abandoned hospital called "The Cure For Living" inspired by a dream of Joy Division; of her dazzling meteoric girlfriend Marine who was in a punk rock band and shared countless adventures with her in California before succumbing to the numbing allure of deadly street drugs... but what ties these essays together is the constant authorial voice, intense and focused even when examining the most rambling subjects, sharing nostalgic whispers from a time and space shared with so many of our generation, the lost suburbs of the '70s or the nostalgia of finding and reading essays like this in The Atlantic or Harpers or The Nation; and finding so many other treasures of history to share and personal stories to relate. Solnit has given us all a wonderful book to lose ourselves in, or find our inner introvert in.

The Comb

You are the honey
The sweet essence of the flowers
Distilled by hungry honeybees
For their beloved Queen
Saved in a jar to drizzle
On toast or flavor
An exotic Greek morsel
A comb still floating in the pot
A hundred chambers of life therein
Each filled with the loving labor
Of a thousand brave bees

Clifton Goodwin
Autumn Twenty Twelve

Luna

Luna

The moon is a judge at midnight,
An angry parent, disappointed teacher
Telling us important truths that we mustn't forget
I will outlive you mortal,
You haven't many turns of my face
A thousand at most, so Go! Live! Shine!
Don't waste another second of moonlight!

Clifton Goodwin
Autumn Twenty Twelve

Not Love You?

Love you? How could I not?
How could I learn to train my heart to pale,
to turn away from beauty?
To shrivel in its thumping to a shadow of life,
to form the word NO
for the heart is made to dream,
the heart IS dreams
and my heart dreams and calls and cries and swoops for you

Clifton Goodwin
Autumn Twenty Twelve

Walking

Lost, he walks the earth alone.
He doesn't quite know how he lost her,
What was done or said or meant,
He couldn't recreate the steps
That led so far away from her,
Did he lose her, or she lost him?
Why are they now so far apart?
Was something unforgivable?
A heart betrayed, a harsh truth made him fail?

Maybe they weren't meant to be,
Maybe she was never his,
Maybe fear trumped courage cold
Or passion died in arms of lies
The million ways a love can die
Have left him all bewildered, lost
And she is silent now.

Clifton Goodwin
Autumn Twenty Twelve

Primary Colours by The Horrors

Stately, haunting church bells, misty washes of synthesizers, this is the becalmed beginning of this stunning record. A minute, ninety seconds of peace and yes it is going to be disturbed. An insistent drumming comes up through the floorboards of the chapel, the bass player wakes up with the melody while a guitar seems to be playing backwards. The main synth line runs bright major-key blips up the stairs to the belfry and back down again before the shattering drum and chainsaw lead guitar crash through the stained glass windows. Faris Badwan wakes up in his black velvet lined coffin and starts singing about you needing to leave a beautiful woman, telling you to "let her memory die, walk out into the night." The loss is borne by you, he's very detached even in the midst of this roller coaster of a song. He's detached from the proceedings throughout the album actually, with the exception of the moment on Who Can Say where he dumps his girlfriend, kissing her "with a kiss that could only mean goodbye." On other parts of the album he might well be singing from Ian Curtis' grave. The music is a wonderful blend of the weary, haunted introspection of The Psychedelic Furs, the inventive intriguing rhythm section interplay of Joy Division and a lot of the splashes of the shimmering glow that My Bloody Valentine captured in the studio. The titles of Three Decades and New Ice Age are particularly overt in reverent reference to the legacy of Joy Division, the bass and tambourine intro to I Only Think of You is very mindful of the JD song New Dawn Fades or The Psychedelic Furs' Sister Europe while the last half of Scarlet Fields could almost BE an MBV song. Lots of shoegazer synth candy to digest on the record, like the sonic wall of guitars on Do You Remember and the beautiful central musical theme of the title track. <br>
The last track, Sea Within A Sea takes the beautiful grooves laid down by Neu! and Kraftwerk and sails them "across the shallows" to the end of this brilliant record.

Poem : music...

Music of the Heart

A bell chimes ever in my heart
Or sometimes strums a box guitar
An angel's chorus sings on high
Or a child singing a lullaby
I seldom ever hear the words
I only know the steady beat
Sometimes the music plays a verse
And then your name's the chorus, repeat
Until your name's the song in whole
Your name is all I need to hear
Your love song playing in my soul
Your own sweet voice sings love clear

Clifton Goodwin
Autumn Twenty Twelve

Poem

Love's New Strength

When you have tasted love's mad passioned fever,
And drank so deeply from her naked breast,
Given yourself up and failed the test,
And by love's madness lost your love forever,

When you have scaled her glorious slippery heights,
And fallen from the last ice covered peak,
And lay down in the valley crushed and weak,
It's harder then to trust again love's. light.

So now in taking time to piece my dashed heart back together,
And finding strength and courage now to scale that peak once more,
I know the cost of failure and the great gift there in store,
My heart and love are bonded strong to be your greatest treasure.

Clifton Goodwin
Autumn Twenty Twelve

Elder Oak

I wish to live out all the years I've got left, like this Oak
Watching in serenity each day the setting moon and turning
My face always back to see the sunrise to the east
Reveling in rainfalls long and drinking up through deep deep roots
Nourishment from nearby graves of some forgotten family
Watching over springtime's green and loving how my leaves turn red
Waiting for the single dusting winter's meager snows afford
Standing ever tall and proud, even in the bleakest winter
Embracing even lightning strikes and standing up through every storm
Loving every animal that finds a home beneath my branches
I know this tree and it knows me and peace is our one final fate

Clifton Goodwin
Autumn Twenty Twelve

... And sunset soon after the sun dog

Seen in northeast NC

Sun dog!

Seen at center...

A tidy little bog

In Virginia Beach

The mouth of the Chesapeake Bay

Hampton Roads, or Newport News

More sunsets

Always make me happy

Another shot

Of the Pee Dee River near Sumter SC

Foggy morning

On the Greater PeeDee River

Rainbow

Over Utah

Clouds

Over New Mexico

Rainbow in Utah

Seen near Mount Nephi

Cloudy mountain top

In the Wasatch south of Salt Lake City

Another colorful sunset

Endless colors

Kentucky storm clouds again

I enjoyed taking these pictures

Storm clouds

Misty forests of Kentucky

Misty forests of Kentucky

Bands of color

Sunlight

At sunset

Sunbeams

Truckstop sunset

In SC

Sunset and moon

This was north of Nashville near the State Line

Lightning!

I am very proud of this picture! Lightning in Kentucky on Rte 9AA

Huge clouds

Sunset

Sunset June 17

Trucking at sunset

Sunlit clouds

And the small foreground cloud in shadow

Clouds

Over Georgia

Carolina Sunset

Doesn't need fancy color manipulation

Indiana

Sunset off 65

Wisconsin

In the summertime

Sunbeams

In the Georgia clouds

Layers of clouds

Location uncertain

Indigo to Rose

Location uncertain

Carolina Sunset

This was with the nearly full moon in the sky behind me...

Nearly full

May 12th

Sunlit clouds

Enormous mass of clouds

Seen here

Very nice

Sunset image

5/20 partial eclipse

At sunset near Houston

The Pyramid

In Memphis

Tree

In central Texas

What IS that?

I was thinking today, of the eternal question of children and explorers... What is that?
I know that question needs context, but let's say you're looking at a eucalyptus shrub or a terrifying little spider or some other phenomenon of nature that you have a pretty good idea of it's nature and essence, you just don't know it's name.
What is it's name? I think the real question in this case is, what is it known as? What name do experts in the field of botany or entomology etc call this funny rock or body of water?
That led me to thinking of the first thing Adam did in the Garden of Eden, he settled down to naming everything. We have to name everything. Things aren't real until we attach a symbol to them. And that my friends is a paradox and a filter through which everything is perceived.
We see the world through labels and filters and through the wrong end of a telescope and through a glass darkly.
It behooves us to remember how far apart perception and reality can be.
Just a thought from an amateur philosopher...

Rte 1

... Near Wrens, Georgia

Eclipse

The Curing

President Obama has been the Curing.
When we belatedly discovered that OBL had the means to carry out the attacks of September 11th, Congress, Bush Cheney and Gonzalez rushed to create extraordinary powers on the part of the Federal Government. Surveillance, torture and imprisonment, and even new undeclared wars i.e. Libya, Yemen, have been carried out by two presidents and their officers on a non stop basis ever since.
Obama has refused to change course, refused to bring indictments against his predecessor's blatant criminal acts and has himself proceeded with dangerous new powers of surveillance and widespread legal harassment of journalists and whistleblowers like Assange and Private Manning.
President Bush and his administration were apparently in many ways acting out of desperation and crossed many lines that never should have been breached. But Obama lacks even that excuse. Indeed it's easy to imagine that al Qaeda might never again launch a significant attack on US Territory or civilian populations. But the fact is inescapable, we now live in a nation at permanent war and the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments lie permanently sullied and the people of this once free land have to stop this frightening concentration of power. We have to pressure Congress and keep shining lights of justice into the dark corners of our Federal Government.
And most of all we have to understand something. This could have been stopped. Ford let Nixon go and Obama has been culpable of everything Bush did and more. These new powers of the NSA and the CIA and the extra-judicial powers of surveillance and covert war weren't written in stone by the Bush Administration, only wet cement. Obama and all of us have allowed that cement to cure and dry and set up hardened.
Obama has been the Curing and we all have to get to work with chisels if we want our freedom back.

Hunger Games film

I think that here we see an example of how the medium changes the story. The narrative is essentially unchanged, the SF story of Katniss and Peeta forced by chance and a moral dilemma into a bloodsport arena, but the themes are subtly different. The movie is slightly more driven by spectacle not in a bad way but the audience for the Games are more a part of the story, the citizens of the Capitol with their fanciful decadence and Cinna's contrasting normalcy-Kudos to Lenny Kravitz by the way!- are more important in the film. And Jennifer Lawrence embodies Katniss to perfection. The movie is thoughtful in the same way that Rise of the Planet of the Apes was, a fine example of SF placing us in the milieu of revolution.
I very much enjoyed it.

Katniss -- The Hunger Games

My thoughts on the first book are the author has created a very strong character who has been placed in a terrifying 22nd century milieu. The pacing is relentless and I don't recall the last time I read a first person POV story that was so cinema friendly. I will go see the movie soon and look into the rest of the books after I've read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

Shaima al Awadhi

A mother is dead at 38. She leaves five school aged children behind, orphans. Her teenage daughter found her beaten almost to death in her own home. The killer left behind a note: terrorist go home.
When she fled Saddam's Iraq 20 years ago she must have thought that she and her family would be safe in America. She surely never dreamed that the ghosts of Hitler and the KKK would be waiting to take her life.
She was murdered for the crime of being foreign, alien, darker skinned, worshipping Allah, wearing a head scarf.
When you listen to the news on the radio or cable this week you learn that we have yet to exhaust the subject of the Trayvon Martin case but you learn nothing about this entire family being destroyed in California. Why not? Where is the million hijab march? Where are the coast to coast rallies for justice? Whither the endless television coverage of every detail?
Maybe because there is no great controversy? No weird gun laws or police misconduct? Do we really need controversy and manufactured conflict in order to demand justice for a dead woman? Is that what passes for journalism now? That's the way it looks from here and it's a damned shame.
Rest in peace, Shaima.

James Cameron

The creator of Avatar spent three hours exploring the floor of the Marianas today... I think we're not appreciating what a true genius he is.
Wow

Zimmerman

George Zimmerman is a cop nerd. There are many kinds of nerds in the world. Star Wars and Star Trek nerds, Civil War nerds and D&D nerds, Harry Potter nerds, the list is endless. I was in the Army with a Special Forces nerd. He had the SF patch sewed on his civilian jacket and baseball hat and he never shut up about how he was going to go off to Bragg and join such and such Army Unit and be one of the baddest of the bad. It took about thirty seconds talking to him to figure out he was all talk. You knew that he would be lucky to finish boot camp and sure enough he washed out. So George Zimmerman is another kind of nerd who attached himself to an honorable subculture to wrap himself in the glory of it. I bet he has a police radio scanner so he can listen to the radio transmissions and watches endless police TV shows and movies and there is no way he possesses the self awareness and judgement and faculties and sensitivity to complex social situations and the ability to function under pressure that a good policeman simply must have. Now these shortcomings are no sin. I presume myself to be similarly limited in many ways and if I was in a high pressure career like policing I would surely make mistakes and somebody might get hurt.

But I am not running around with a 9mm.

And I don't view black people as people who "always get away with it" or "fucking coons"

And I would never track anybody down and get into an altercation that got a teenager killed.

I don't believe that George Zimmerman is a cold blooded killer. But I know, I KNOW that he's a foolish imbecile of a man who was viewing Trayvon Martin through some very dark glasses and that was the genesis of the tragedy in Florida this past month.

Tragic.

Roadside truck repairs

My radiator hose blew out on me today. I was inching through a bad traffic jam near Little Rock and started smelling the coolant. I got my rig off the road and sure enough there's a huge blowout in the short hose right on top of the engine. I called work and let them know what happened. They asked if I could get the truck off the highway and we decided to try the trusty old duct tape temporary repair. Coolant was all over everything under the hood, a slippery greasy mess. By then dusk was falling and I was juggling tape and the flashlight while standing on top of the engine block. The bad part was climbing back down without falling and breaking my collarbone. But I managed well enough. The worst part is that I fear I've ruined my pants by getting the black stuff all over the legs. I added a gallon of water that I had standing by and was ready to try to make the fifteen mile ride to the next exit. I made it with a couple of stops to let the motor cool down. So now I'm parked at a quiet truckstop in Arkansas west of Memphis. There's a shop here and I hope they'll be able to get me on my way in the morning.

City

My favorite novel is a hard question to pin down, but sometimes my answer would be City by Clifford Simak. It's really a series of short stories that tell of a future Earth populated by intelligent dogs that sit around the campfire trying to make sense of great questions like What is a city? What is a war? What is a man? Where did the robots come from? The stories in the book are the dogs' legends and creation myths told with an immense melancholia. The stories tell of humanity's withdrawal from one another into states of isolation and retreat until we abandon Earth completely. The mood is conveyed with the great subtle skill of a grandmaster science fiction author and City is unforgettable.

Limbaugh

I have been interested in talk radio for years, I remember a forerunner to Rush Limbaugh who had a local show in Fayetteville called Wrestle with Kwessel, a very edgy conservative host who didn't really get a lot of disagreement on his show. I remember Limbaugh's television show and the embarrassingly monochromatic (white) audience he had back in the mid '90s, he spent hours relentlessly blasting president Clinton.
I think the whole Republican establishment is going through a crisis of purpose and the firestorm of controversy that started a month ago over The Pill is a reflection of this crisis. Limbaugh calling this appealing and wholesome seeming woman a slut, prostitute and all the other vitriol he's been hurling at her reflects on him more than her. I think the crisis started a decade ago and it's growing. Bush started it or was a reflection of it. He left his party in shambles and the wreckage isn't being put back together again. The only real purpose and passion we see from them is about keeping taxes low on rich people and the kind of divisive culture war brush fires we're seeing playing out in the new controversy over the Pill.
Limbaugh particularly seems lost at sea this week. The audience he's playing to is getting older and the good old days he's trying to bring back are more and more remote. He has long played the game of ginning up outrage over his antics and now that his sponsors are bailing out on him, I think it's going to begin to look like an unmistakable trend. Limbaugh's Republican Party is a regional party that's increasingly irrelevant to modern political discourse in our nation. They might raise fair objections sometimes to a government policy but they have nothing positive to offer our country now.

Political ideals

I wasn't a politically aware youth.

Bishops

Isn't there something strange about wanting the blessing of a morally bankrupt organization like the Catholic Church, especially when they hate you for who you are i.e. gay/lesbian...?

Epic Anomie

....  From Radiohead

Boots and shoes

I am wearing a pair of eight year old boots. I got a close out deal on them at an outfitters store back home. They're black leather hiking boots with Gore Tex and I paid fifty bucks (!) for them. I love wearing them and I hope I have them on when the zombies show up. I imagine characters in McCarthy's The Road murdering each other over boots like these. Sherlock Holmes, or Doctor House who said "shoes never lie" could probably tell you a lot about me from examining them. Recently the NBA had their All Star Game in Orlando and Nike celebrated by releasing a $220 pair of Air Jordan sneakers. Riots ensued. Now I'm a basketball fan but I don't get it. Who gets into a stampede over shoes? Upper middle class men who want to collect them? Sell them on ebay? Take them home and stick them on the shelf with your other dusty Air Jordans? That mentality is so alien to me. I want the kind of shoes that let you feel prepared for Justin Cronin's North American Viral Cataclysm, thank you very much. In a size twelve, please.

The View

... From my office window today

My Personal Award for Film of the Year...

goes to the Green Lantern movie I wanted to see, the one I had in mind when I saw the trailer and the alien says "What's your name?"
Hal Jordan was the answer and a childhood memory came roaring back to me at the start of the Harry Potter movie I had come to see, I think it was The Half-Blood Prince.
I had no idea they were making a Green Lantern movie.
In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight... I still recall the affirmation of courage and determination recited by the wielder of the most powerful weapon in the galaxy, the Ring of Power that will create anything your willpower and imagination can invent, protecting and giving the power of space flight to the members of the Green Lantern Corps, a grand mythology of the creators of the Ring and the power batteries that charge them and on and on. It's a wonderful comic book creation.
But why did they botch it so badly? Why was this Hal Jordan such a small person, a jerk, a loser who would never be allowed to pilot experimental jets?
Why did you do this to me?
The Green Lantern movie I wanted to see was the coolest movie of the year. The one I saw was maybe the worst.
Thanks a fucking lot, Hollywood.

The Artist

The Artist begins with a wonderful bit of dialogue, printed on a card in wonderful Hollywood circa 1925 text...    "I won't talk! You can't make me talk!" A man is being tortured for information in grand Hollywood style with electrodes sitting on his head and special effects electricity coursing through the air around him. 

We're watching a movie in a movie, the star of The Artist is playing an actor and we're watching his film in a grand theater with a great orchestra and conductor and the audience enraptured. We go backstage and see a big sign requesting silence behind the screen during the show. If you wandered in off the street in 2012 and didn't know what to expect in this film you would wonder, where's the color? Where's the audio? Why does that crazy (LOUD!) music keep playing? And the significance of the first line becomes clear, it's one of several very broad puns scattered through this very playful movie. Valentin won't talk for his captors and he won't talk for Hollywood. A chance encounter with an ambitious starlet leads to a professional relationship that turns into a love story between George and Peppy. His faithful terrier is a devastating scene stealer, John Goodman turns out to be a perfect silent film star and you learn that you don't need color, dialogue or sound effects to tell a compelling story, you just need a story. The downfall and resurrection of a great film star is told through the compelling artistry of Hollywood film. This is a feel-good, stand up and cheer film that will send you from the theater in love with this amazing storytelling artistic endeavor called film making. I loved it. I was so happy to see it get its due... Best Film, 2012 Academy Awards

Cronin's The Passage

The Passage is not a novel about vampires. The monsters -variously called virals, smokes or jumps- aren't very interesting characters. Almost all of them are stripped of personality, immortal superhuman killing machines who take over North America. The author tells Salon.com that they are suspended in the moment between life and death. But really the novel is about the little girl Amy who's destined to save the world and the other survivors. The enigmatic Amy is the beating heart of the story and the single chapter told from her point of view is a shimmering literary masterpiece. As a young girl who has lived a hundred years by this point, she has a unique point of view. Many of the novel's characters spend a lot of time either imprisoned or in hiding from the monsters and the theme emerges of the effects of isolation and being trapped. As a long distance trucker I can relate to this condition of existence quite well. There are times when you feel like you're seeing the world pass by through your windshield but you're not really living in it anymore. Also, I must admit to having certain fantasies of living on as a survivor of apocalypse or as a superhero.The characters who survive and even thrive in their captivity are the strong willed resistors who eventually escape and end the novel with a declaration of war against the monsters to be fought in the sequel.
The narrative is immensely compelling and Justin Cronin is a very engaging writer who leads you effortlessly through hundreds of pages. I hadn't ever heard of him before this novel appeared on the best-seller lists but he is a wonderful talent.

He tells the website io9.com "If I was going to place these characters in a great deal of jeopardy and send them across the continent, where many would die, I had to earn the right to do that to them. And you earn that by giving them the full dignity of their humanity." 


And so he truly does.

February 25

Dunn, NC

Disappointed

As a trucker, I get my news over the radio mostly, and from my smartphone to a lesser extent so I was disappointed that I didn't get to see television news coverage of Mitt Romney speaking this past weekend to 1200 people in Ford Field in Detroit. And then it occurred to me that images would be inadequate to the task of comprehending this failed spectacle. 64000 empty seats surrounding a midget of a Republican making a speech proposing that taxes be raised on the poor. I think maybe I don't really need to have seen this empty suit speaking to a cavernously empty football stadium. I reckon my Imagination is adequate for this failed sales pitch.

Clouds over Virginia

Stretching into the distance