Still digging this:

Reading

Jim Harrison's food writing will lead to

10 pounds of fat this winter

&

1000 pounds of joy

Father's Sonnet

Mechanic's hours and grocery aisles. The
laundry, the wine, and the in-laws. Rainwater.
Eggs. Tylenol. Oh broad and unreasonable
swaths of life, I want more
goddamn grace, more grace. She is finally
a ballet, a stumbling near-language.
She will say the world soon
the way no one ever exactly
has. And the boy, her brother,
colors his way into corners
only to backflip out, crawing --
like a crow sketching
a broad, imaginary chest.
The only thing that could ruin
the good, grabbed, goosefleshed world
is the too loud voice uttering
the wrong word, wrong time
from me, Fatherhood Unfurling.
And you ask me why I call poetry
the most practical art, prayer's
pushup, and you ask me why
I sing a blues of not singing it
while washing my hands, my cups, my eyes.
The sink fills up, splashes, spills
as a speech that risks more than the silence, too,
that kills.

Nabokov on Gogol

"The Russian who thinks Turgenev was a great writer, and bases his notion of Pushkin upon Chaikovsky's vile libretti, will merely paddle into the gentlest wavelets of Gogol's mysterious sea and limit his reaction to an enjoyment of what he takes to be whimsical humor and colorful quips. But the diver, the seeker of black pearls, the man who prefers the monsters of the deep to the sunshades on the beach, will find in The Overcoat shadows linking our state of existence to those other states and modes which we dimly apprehend in our rare moments of irrational perception. The prose of Pushkin is three-dimensional; that of Gogol is four-dimensional, at least. He may be compared to his contemporary, the mathematician Lobachevsky, who blasted Euclid and discovered a century ago many of the theories which Einstein later developed. If parallel lines do not meet it is not because meet they cannot, but because they have other things to do. Gogol's art as disclosed in The Overcoat suggests that parallel lines not only may meet, but that they can wriggle and get most extravagantly entangled, just as two pillars reflected in water indulge in the most wobbly contortions if the necessary ripple is there. Gogol's genius is exactly that ripple..."

". . . Jim Harrison's belief that . . .

a writer is someone who 'consciously or unconsciously takes a vow of obedience to awareness'" is

(a) true

(b) false

(c) golden

(d) bloodset

Bruce

Gillian