Remembrance Day

One year ago today:

Subject: Belated Hey
Date: 11/10/04
From: Fanny Beaudoin
To: Daniel Priest

Well. I never, ever, check my weedsblog email (frankly, it doesn't get much action) but I did, randomly, today, only to find out that you've alerted the masses of a change of email back in August, and that by my not replying I may have inadvertently given the impression that I do not wish you to get in touch with me, which isn't the case. So. Hey.

I think I'll be spending more time on the computer now that I have speakers and can download Wilco tunes to listen to as I write. Ages and ages ago, you left a scrap of lyric of theirs as a comment on my blog, which has now disappeared (I think it was on my Dispatches from the Writer's Desk posting.) You wouldn't happen to remember what it was, would you?

And I really like you opera/sausage poem. It's funny and lovely and has great fast-moving movement. (Or perhaps I just happen to like sausage.) I know I've said this to you before, and I hope I don't annoy you by telling you again because it's high praise, but some of your writing has wonderful Billy Collins echoes, and, well, the world can use more of that.

I thought I would share a poem by Czeslaw Milosz that just undid me. ( I could die happy if I'd written that first line, and nothing else, ever.)

G'night.

Fanny


"A Confession"

My Lord, I loved strawberry jam
And the dark sweetness of a woman's body.
Also well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,
Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.
So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit
Have visited such a man? Many others
Were justly called, and trustworthy.
Who would have trusted me? For they saw
How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,
And glance greedily at the waitress's neck.
Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,
Able to recognize greatness wherever it is,
And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant,
I knew what was left for smaller men like me:
A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud,
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

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Subject: Re: Belated Hey
Date: 11/11/04
From: Daniel Priest
To: Fanny Beaudoin

I could easily be wrong, but I think it was either "All my lies are always wishes" from Ashes of American Flags or "The truth proves its beautiful to lie" from Reservations. There's a lot about lies on the album...

Either way they're a great band.

RE: Billy Collins. Interesting story about that. My first exposure to him was a CD he's got out (called The Best Cigarette; a WONDERFUL recording if you can get your hands on it). A friend played it for me with the introduction "This guy writes exactly like you." So there's some natural similarity, although even more from what I've learned by reading him. My current poet-crush, though, is Andrew Hudgins. And Heather McHugh.

but in payment for the Milosz poem here's another back at ya, with a first line that I would love to have written.

how has your life been?

--danyul


"Account"

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle's flame.

Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, thought it is a warning, is ignored.

I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.

But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own -- but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.

The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it's late. And the truth is laborious.

# posted by Daniel at 10:53 PM.

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Recommends

I'm two-thirds of the way through John Graves's Hard Scrabble. Graves is (was?) a Texan who spent some years away in Europe, taught awhile at the University of Texas, and eventually purchased a few hundred acres in Glen Rose County southwest of Fort Worth, which spread he named "Hard Scrabble." The book is a collection of writings on his land and the process of making it both habitable and profitable. Topics covered include local Texas history (both natural and social), ecology, building houses, building fences, and a handful of other topics. His treatment of the subject should be endlessly fascinating to anyone with a sense of connection to Texas, or to any patch of land--his treatment of the particulars of his property is nuanced and thoughtful enough to apply generally (I hesitate to invoke the adverbial form of "universal") to anyone's relationship to land, geography, and heritage. He writes with a pleasantly understated, self-effacing voice. This doesn't keep him from gracing the text with a plenitude of grin-inducing verbal flourishes ("Such contemporary fondness as I have for machines--a little, I admit--is cooled by the fact that they war almost totally with the Thoreauvian ideal of simplicity to which I subscribe without ever having practiced it very purely.") He also has a knack for aphorism: "Sooner or later a mood is going to commit you to something more or less lasting". He's informative, but cuts himself off before slipping into technical minutiae. One of the more enjoyable books I've read (by which I mean the actual reading is itself pleasurable, something that happens all too infrequently) in some time.

The other recommendation comes from Fanny's and my recent obsession with Six Feet Under, the HBO series that ran for five seasons before being cancelled. In brief, it's a show about a family who runs a funeral home. This is not a show for the weak of heart--it deals graphically and extensively (exclusively?) with such airy, light-hearted matters as death, sexuality, family dysfunction...it's pretty dark. And darkly funny. The writing, though, is top notch, and the characters, for all their troubles, are consistently treated with dignity. It's not a perfect show--sometimes the sheer volume of accumulated dire circumstance crosses the threshhold of even fictional belief, and some of the story lines (2nd season in particular) grate a bit after awhile. But on the whole we've both really enjoyed it. Just don't watch it with children in the room...or the neighborhood

# posted by Daniel at 2:37 PM.

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Something for the Wind

The wind woke us up this morning. It whistled, it banged against the bathroom window and bent the tall branches of the poplar in the backyard. It scattered the crowds of leaves assembled at the curb for the last two weeks.

This is the strongest wind since I've been on Vancouver Island. It knocked out power to some schools and neighborhoods here in Victoria, and (according to the radio) Tofino and a couple other towns on the west coast of the island lost power entirely, with winds gusting fifty to seventy kilometers per hour (we call that thirty-five to fifty miles an hour in the States, except in West Texas, where we call it a light breeze).

A cold wind. Hard wind. Leaning into the wind. Crouching in the corners of buildings to light a cigarette; the wind smoking the cigarette twice as fast, thin taste of cigarettes in strong wind, whistling away with the smoke before you taste. Remembering football games, squinting against the wind and the stadium lights, the Friday night wind sharp as frozen water pressing the marching band against the field. A wind that knocks you over, that charges like a linebacker when you walk around a corner or through a door, that stretches clothes against your body like flags, that blows flags taut as sails. Blowing birds out of trees, thrashing trees and the empty miles of grass north of town.

When Michael moved to Nashville after graduation he told me he missed the wind. Smoking pipes and cigars with my friend Kelly, who grew up in the Texas Panhandle, he said one of his favorite things about his new house was that it caught a lot of wind, like home. I started laughing--knew exactly what he meant.

You don't get used to the wind. Not the sort of wind I grew up with. But you get familiar with it. You can miss it, even.

# posted by Daniel at 2:22 PM.

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