This pic doesn't come close to showing how vibrant an orange and red there is in these leaves.

Crimson vines rip up the trees like fire.




The ceiling of a mosque?

More, as promised. More to come.

Fall colors. Nice patterns like in Persian art. More to come.

Geraldine R Dodge Poetry Festival

Just got back from the Geraldine R Dodge Poetry Festival. As usual it
was superb. (Actually I thnk it wasn't as good as last time...) I recommend everyone go though. Trouble is, it won't happen for another two years.

Got there Saturday morning in time for the end of Celebrating Rumi's
799th birthday with Coleman Barks and Robert Bly who were backed by
the Paul Winter Consort. Some gems from that: (some are misquoted by
me):

Coleman mused, 'The dawn: What all human beings want'...

Rumi - 'There is a field, I'll meet you there'....
http://www.mowensculpture.com/poetry.html#Poem32
Check out the many other short (Coleman Barks translated) Rumi poems
on that page too.)

Rumi -
"I am so small I can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside me?

Look at your eyes. They are small,
but they see enormous things."
http://www.nlight.org/A%20Sampling%20of%20Rumi's%20Poems.htm

There were many sessions on Allen Ginsberg. I sat under the Gazebo
Sat and Sun and listened to and read some myself. On Sat it started
off with

Hum Bom
http://www.caterina.net/paw/archives/000071.html

Howl was read through twice. I read one part, the extremely graphic
homosexual sex part. (I was the next reader in the circle and that part was next.)
I also heard some graphic homosexual sex described in someone else's poems at a later session and thought, we don't really need to hear about this. Honesty is one thing but we've heard this before. Do we need to hear it again?. It's better a private thing. Enjoy it on your own, whatever your sexuality. Someone touched on that as well. Talking about the government trying to find out what people did in the dark, which was funny.

Howl
http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poem=0&poet=6613&num=21

The footnotes to Howl
http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6613&poem=30496

Others included:

A Supermarket in California
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/supermarket.html
(I heard it at least three times this weekend making it the most
popular poem heard at the festival.)

America,
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/america.html

Diane Wolkstein: Told the story of Inanna, a Persian creation myth,
wonderfully.

Ko Un: A Korean poet. Haiku-like short pieces. Some funny. One
paraphrased: A baby dragonfly rests on a ? leaf. The whole world
surrounds it, watching. (?)

Taslima Nasreen read the most depressing poems/prose about the
horrendous treatment of women in Bangladesh/India. Very depressing.

The Poets of New Jersey reminded me that not all poetry is good
poetry. Some less than inspiring stuff there. B J Ward read some
stuff. I'd seen him at a Rockland County Jazz Society event a few
years ago. His stuff was better than most of the others but not that interesting.

Ekiwah Adler Belendez was very impressive. At 18, he is someone to
look out for in the future.

I had never seen Brian Turner before but was impressed although I was
not sure what his political bent was other than all war is hell. He
did remind the crowd that we will have to prepare ourselves for more
violence at home at some point.

I only saw Kurtis Lamkin at the evening session. He was perhaps not
the most eloquent but was certainly spirited. I wish I'd caught the
session he did on jazz with Sekou. He did a very interesting piece on
language. How children go from making unitelligeable sounds to
communicating and how we then lose the desire to speak the truth,
hiding our feelings.

Sekou Sundiata was very impressive. I recommend seeing him if you get
the chance. He did a piece on his reaction to Sept 11.

Anne Waldman: A force of nature.

She read Selections from Marriage (There is supposedly video of that here

http://www.freespeech.org/ramfiles/waldman.ram but I can't get it to
work.)

She also did an amazing rant in two parts with the first part being a
take on a more familiar piece/song (title?) and then "Rogue State"
where she becomes possessed, by the spirit of the poem or possessed
like you'd see in a voodoo ceremony or The Exorcist. The poet that
followed echoed my sentiments when she said she was having a hard
time getting Anne's voice out of her head. I would LOVE to see that
piece air somewhere, either from the festival or another performance
of it.

Here is one version of Rogue State (at U of Penn), much more subdued
than what we heard.
http://www.sonicyouth.com/prmp3/Rogue_State.mp3

Here she is reading Global Positioning (at U of Penn) .
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Waldman/KWH4-15-03/Waldman-Anne_Global-Positioning_UPenn_4-15-03.mp3

More sound files of her at U of Penn here:
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Waldman/KWH4-15-03/

I think it was Jorie Graham who said that we needed to counteract
Anne's reading with something boring like some dead English poet's
rhyming poetry. Unfortunately, Andrew Motion followed her. He is the
British Poet Laureate. Self-depreciatingly, he joked in his
opening that he might be thought of by some as a dead British poet
but that he would read a really dead English poet. I thought was
tactless of whoever said that with Andrew coming up. Jorie was
beautifully soft spoken but her poetry wasn't memorable.

The next morning, I saw more Coleman Barks and Robert Bly reading

Rumi and telling about their trip to Iran. (They had mentioned going
to Afghanistan the day before. Sent by the State Dept! The rep told
Coleman to not say anything bad about W. They had their meeting with
academics in the morning and in the afternoon told Nasrudin jokes, Nasrudin being the stereotypical wise fool. One joke: Nasrudin heard that most accidents happen close to home so he moved away. That kind of thing. Would apply rednecks or any other stereotypical character we are used to making fun of.) See more here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Nasrudin

When asked about how these poems should be sung, Coleman offered that
Shape note singing was a pretty good way to do them. He had had a
dream where he and Joseph Campbell were sitting on his mother's bed
(He wondered what the significance of that was...), and Joseph said
that in Heaven we do that all the time (sing Rumi/Emily Dickinson to
Shape Note songs.)

This is all one big yes. Very inspiring. You miss it when you get
home and are not hearing it anymore.

At one point someone said poetry is (something to the effect of) the
one truth. It sounded reasonable when she said it but later I
thought, no, science is the one true thing in this world. Poetry
certainly tries to name the unnameable but it too falls short. It
does cover some areas other fields cannot touch and for that I like
it but it isn't the one truth.

Someone, Sunday, read Allen Ginsberg poem Kaddish Part1: "...Death is
that remedy all singers dream of"... Maybe. Is that what song leads
to?

People at the Gazebo read Stanley Kunitz's The Layers twice (and I
think another poet read it in the main tent, so I guess it is a tie
with Ginsberg's A Supermarket in California.)

Describing the little epiphanies is what interest me in poetry. This
weekend is full of them. Very addictive and inspiring. When Taha
Muhammad Ali said "the flowers bend down and sparrows (flew?)", it
was describing the feeling you have when someone you love reassures
you that they love you. You could say that in prose but the poetic is
so much more powerful although the meaning can be lost by using
metaphors.

Anne Waldman read, amongst other things on Sunday, Skin, Meat, Bones.
(read at U of Penn below)
http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Waldman/Battery/Waldman-Anne_02_Skin-Meat-Bones_Battery_1978.mp3

Sprachsong?: Pieces of "Pieces of An Hour" (for John Cage) at U of Penn:
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Waldman/Alchemical-Elegy/Waldman-Anne_06_Pieces-of-an-Hour_Alchemical-Elegy_2001.mp3

I enjoyed Linda Paston's Minor Surgery:
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~dalryaug/poems/index.shtml?98/103198.shtml
She and this piece were entirely low key. Used common phrases. When I
hear poems like this I wonder if common sense would rate as poetics
if rearranged just so. Still, I liked it.

Mark Doty's reading on Sunday was more memorable to me at this hour
than what I heard on Saturday night. He had a longer session and read
more interesting stuff.

Billy Collins repeated several poems I heard him read at the 2004
festival. Why did he repeat so many?

The Revenant
http://www.bestcigarette.us/2004/09/the_revenant.html

Dharma
http://plagiarist.com/poetry/7844/

Litany (look down the page for it)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/release_100604.html

The Lanyard
http://www.bestcigarette.us/2004/09/the_lanyard.html
I do love this poem and want to give a copy to my mother but it
didn't do much for me this time around.

One I hadn't heard last time or at least don't remember. Japan
http://www.contemporarypoetry.com/dialect/poetry/collinsjapan.htm

Someone at the festival mentioned this Nelson Mandela quote: "It is
our light, not our darkness, that frightens us." This festival makes
you renew the light in yourself.

I look forward to it two years from now... Sigh.

C-Span 1 & 2 have looked different for years. Why? C-Span 1 looks like it has less contrast. C-Span 2 has richer, sharper colors. I use DirecTV now but this has been going on since I started using cable, about 15 years now.

Back when Bush gave his State Of The Union speech I took screenshots of each channel. Here they are. Same location, same feed. I would be very currious about any explantion.

Two things that are still not working with Firefox:

1) Even though I have the cache set to zero, I still have to force
reload a page to see changes made in it. Supposedly, Firefox, any
browser I would think, should compare the page to the cached copy and
if there is a difference, it would load the new page. Well, that
isn't happening even with no cache!

2) It still freezes often enough after a period of inactivity, so
that I can't write in a field on a page or in the address box (for
URLs). Very annoying. I have to either create a new page or restart
Firefox.

These two problems have occurred with previous versions of Firefox. I
am using 1.5.0.7 for Mac now, started with a pre-1.0 version. I'm
not sure when these troubles started.

As I was eating breakfast I saw some wild turkey's ambling about.
Overall I counted 15! (I count 11 in this pic). All seemed to be
adult and healthy. It's been a year practically to the day since I last saw some!
Then as I was watching them, I noticed a hairy or downy woodpecker checking
out the eastern bluebird birdhouse! Peeking in, again and again. Maybe he/she will make that its home. Haven't seen any activity by the birdhouse since July I guess. (Some song sparrows were using it then.)

And then a little later, I notice a caramel and white cat moving
through the woods next door. I picked up my cat to show her, which
she protested loudly about, squirming like crazy to get away, but she
didn't see it. An animal day today!

Went to the Arts and Crafts and Blues on Bedford concerts in
Stamford yesterday and today. Saw Lil Brian and the Zydeco Twisters,
Walter "Wofman" Washington, and Dr John Saturday, Bonerama, Syreeta
Neal and (I forget the name of her backup band), and Sonny Landreth
and the Goners Sunday, all playing what I'll call New Orleans music
although some are based elsewhere (but I think all are from LA). It
was pretty good. A bit disappointing actually compared to what I've
heard (many of them) do before but since I hadn't heard some of them
in a long time, Bonerama and Sonny Landreth are two New Orleans music
favorites of mine, it certainly was good to hear this kind of music again.

Here are some pics from Sunday.

Bonerama (4 trombones, I sousaphone, 1 electric guitar and 1 drummer)

Craig Klein and Mark Mullins

They played lots of rock (cover tunes and favoring a rock beat rather
than a New Orleans second line beat) which I see according to their
website, is how they bill themselves,

Syreeta Neal. Kenny Neal was originally scheduled as the main act for
that slot, with Syreeta as a guest. Her guitar was a little off key
which she realized a little too late but she was sweet, fun and a good
singer.

Sonny Landreth with an amazing drummer (who looked like Alan Caulter from the David Letterman show and who would twirl one stick in the air as
he was playing!) Lots of real hard slide guitar.

All were loud and good. And all of this was free!

Saw this guy on the screen the other night. Nice red eye, real, a
marking to convince prey that it has a big red eye, or the result of
the flash, whatever the explanation.

I just got back from a walk around the block. Saw a fawn that had
been hit by a car, dead on the side of the road. It was probably one
of the 3 I'd seen (and have pictures of earlier, see 6/29. I also
have a few I haven't posted.). Sad to see.

(Something to consider: We had the fallen tree, and two others, cut
down yesterday. Were the deer/fawns scared away by the racket,
causing the fawn to be hit? (I feel a little guilty but it is
admittedly a stretch.) I don't know how long the fawn has been dead
there. When I've walked in the bushes between the two houses I have
seen quite a few spots where it looks like some large animals have
been nesting. Will the trees that were cut down have wiped those out
when they fell? There are probably more that weren't affected but we'll
have to see. I also look forward to seeing the mom deer with however
many of the fawns there are.)

Cool. I can get right to the control panel so I can upload the pics
and edit my posts. I hope they have fixed things so we don't need to
go to that alternate URL to do that. Hope this lasts.

I may have to stop using Blogger. They won't let me log in or upload
pics. I can send posts like this but that's it. I was able to log in
once lately but had to throw out some cookies. I'm not going to keep
doing that.

Rev Michael Jacques of the St Peter Claver Catholic Church of New
Orleans made up a new word in his prayers for New Orleans at the
memorial service 8/30/06 (broadcast on C-Span). Shero. The female of
hero. Too bad it isn't a word. It should be.

Great horned owl

Heard a great horned owl a few minutes ago. Posted it's hooting on my
Yahoo briefcase. (http://briefcase.yahoo.com/lipwak)

(Still waiting for Blogger to let me sign in... Blogger has been buggy lately. Won't let me sign in.)

Cool spider

A cool spider seen today.

The best discussion of why Katrina wasn't handled better aired on
C-Span 8/22/06. With PJ Crowley, Director, Center for American
Progress, National Defense and Homeland Security; Robert Block,
Correspondent, [Wall Street Journal], Homeland Security; Chris
Cooper, Correspondent, [Wall Street Journal], White House; Oliver
ThomasJr., President, New Orleans, LA, City Council.

Watch it here:
rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/hur/hur082206_katrinabook.rm

Info here:
http://inside.c-spanarchives.org:8080/cspan/cspan.csp?command=dprogram&record=196946286

An equally good show, pretty much a rehash of what Robert Block said
before, interviewed by James Lee WItt, aired tonight on C-Span.

Info here:
http://inside.c-spanarchives.org:8080/cspan/cspan.csp?command=dprogram&record=196892632

--
***********************************************
renew orleans
the new orleans musicians hurricane relief fund
http://reneworleans.net/

At breakfast I see a mom deer then a baby/fawn, then another smaller
fawn, then another fawn (the same size as the first) walk in a line
through the side of the yard. I've seen mom and two fawns all spring
and summer but not three. I wonder what the smaller fawn's chances
are for survival.

Well. My computer is back from Apple. Keyboard had been replaced.
Let's see if that fixes the problem with it typing numbers instead of
letters or not typing at all.

Some pics;

Back when it was hot, a baby grasshopper on the front door screen?

A pretty red flower in the butterfly garden.

Comfrey?

This may be familiar to me but I am drawing a blank. Purple ajuga?

I've seen the deer lately. Got pretty close this time. Talked to it.
I'm wondering why it's eyes look blue rather than red. Blue-eyed deer?

Some interesting mold on a plant by the birdbath.

Finally. I noticed this pile of crap in the grass. Poking at it I
noticed it had bones in it. What kind of animal would make scat like
this? Awfully small bones. Too small for mice? Birds?

I don't eat much beef that isn't already processed. When I eat some hamburger I've cooked or better yet, steak, I sometimes notice that I feel like I am having the same reaction I'd have if I was taking medicine when having a cold. I suspect I am reacting to the antibiotics they feed beef. Does anyone else have this happen to them?

Thanks.