A Possibly Ill-Advised Idea for Structuring the Kolob Stories

I may regret this later. Usually this kind of thing I do. I mean, I feel a moment of clarity, which feels tons like the Holy Ghost and other good stuff and I get carried away on that feeling and then, maybe early the next morning when I am filled with nausea looking ahead at a long day of fruitless and overfamiliar labor and it's raining and there's a new letter from Dooshbag's attorney and I am filled with murderous rage and capitalism is most deifinitely in retrograde, etc., I feel shame at yesterday's exuberance and youthful hope. But maybe not this time.

The idea: I basically crib the basic premise of Absalom, Absalom!. Not the structure, just the skeletal story, in which a stranger shows up in a remote place, finagles this huge land deal, and disrupts a small town, and his son meets his secret past and etc. I rearrange the Faulkner telling to something far more linear, first things first. Then I pretty much plug in my peeps. I am way too overcome with lethargy and ennui to say more than this right now, so I hope it's clear what I mean. There is a murder. there is blind fate, there is lust and greed, and the whole thing I basically rearrange as modern Sophocles. Someone must die.

Huh. Not so appealing once I write it out.

Maybe I won't do that.

Feck.

To Be Read in a Thick Japanese Accent

I tried to please my wife. But I could not turn straw into gold. I brought water every day from the stream. I heated it at the fire and filled her tub, and she bathed. But the water would grow cold and she was displeased.

One day she made a robot husband with fingers of aluminum and ruby eyes that saw everything at once. This robot did not drive me from the house but I was so ashamed that I betook myself to the barn and dwelt there weeping several days, lamenting my estate. It was clear that I was not so good a husband as the robot. He brought water that did not grow cold. He did not need her to be warm or vulnerable. He could lift her and carry her so that her feet were not soiled until quickly she forgot that our house was a farm house surrounded by dirt.

I studied the robot and learned how to be a robot husband. Hundreds of times I heated the water not with fire but with electricity and with the sun so that it did not grow cold. I watched the robot husband run round and round the house so that my wife could be alone but not feel afraid and I learned to walk round and round the house without growing tired. Finally I cut out my heart and installed a tiny cabinet there where I placed crackers salted only on one side and also batteries with the rays of the sun. I learned to be a robot husband, and when I came back from the barn I had so much power. I explained to the robot that I had learned all that he did to be a good robot husband. He laughed. But I showed him how I made hot water that would not grow cold and how I could walk around the house and many other things. Still he laughed.

But I showed him that I could also be a human husband. I could listen and although nothing seemed to happen my listening would make my wife grow stronger. I did not know what to make for dinner but if I looked through the cupboards an idea came to me that might have nothing to do with what was in the cupboards but seemed to have arrived on its own. The robot grew angry. He took the cupboard apart and searched the kitchen for the idea of food but he found only particle board and laminate. And then I made this dinner for the robot and he said that he understood.

The robot flew up into the sky, farther and farther until he was only a shrinking dot hanging still among the drifting clouds. I went back inside and in the kitchen I saw my wife admiring a puzzle that had been put together by her robot husband. It was a puzzle that was all one color, and it was perfectly assembled.

And He's All, Like

At length, I got to take Geoffrey Hill's seminar on Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is an obscure topic even in the Religion and Literature program of a major university with a seminary program and a Department of Religion and people running around growing their hair out to be poets and playwrights and mystics and indigents. There were nine of us, including Professor Hill, and we met in his large, scholarly edition-lined office, strewn with miscellaneous volumes of the OED and the bones of saints and so forth.

Hill's persona as a teacher is wonderful: he was funny, modest, hospitable, at great pains to be kind to us, well aware that we were intimidated and eager to impress. One of his great gifts, I think, is an ability to draw down the powers upon his own person with great magisterial acts of erudition, eloquence, and immolating scruple--and then to stagger aside with Vaudvillean nimbleness so that the bolt redounds back upon The Tradition or The Obscure Almighty or strikes a wall, leaving clown-shaped hole.
We were starting one session and Hill was laboring to find the particular page of the particular Hopkins poem we had prepared. Which wasn't easy because he had read the pages clean out of the shitty OUP edition of Hopkins we were working with. And I'm realizing that this is a story about making a fool of oneself and being let off the hook.

So he's looking through these rubberbanded-together pages for the poem and we're all preparing our stuff until the whole thing goes on just past the point of endurance, which for me is never very far. And so I ask, "Have you been reading that book in the bath?" Stupid. Stupid. A half-hopeful fuck. He looked up at me through his eyebrows and said in his best prophetic growl, "NO, Mr. WULF." Then glaring at his scattering pages, "I ONLY read MISTery novels in the BAHTH." Two beats. "And the MOD-uhns." So great.

This was such a gift to me. Both because to me what is truly funny has either a note of kenotic condescension or elective folly. And this was both.

The last time I saw Geoffrey Hill was when I dropped in on him at his house in Boston--again vastly inappropriate and misjudged and near-desperate--to give him a volume of theological essays to which Eliot had contributed an essay on revelation and which he had inscribed to some local priest. Even as I found it in some long-closed dusty bookstore far north on Massachusetts Avenue, I knew it wasn't for the likes of me. And Professor Hill invited me in, and he asked me how my daughter was, and I asked about his youngest daughter. We talked for a few minutes about what it's like to raise children knowing that depression is likely to be among the things they inherit from you. He looked so much older than he had just a few years before. I was leaving Boston and knew that I would likely never see him again. I had no words for the kindness I owed him. More than that, for the sense that I was somehow in his lineage, or could be.

We made it back to the door. I said, "Thank you, Professor Hill. I may not see you again."
He smiled and said, with something that was not irony but more like faith in the presence of enormous and fearlessly-reckoned odds, "We'll see each other again. If not here." And I left.

And that was it. That is the tone that he can summon on a broad range of topics until it becomes an article of faith that seems very close about his every line. Maybe that's something of what a poet is.

Yummy Fall Polenta That I Am Love

1 cup polenta (not instant, bc that's some bullshit)
4-5 cups chicken broth
a couple or three shallots
like a thing or half a thing of prosciutto of indifferent quality
red pepper flakes until it rocks
sage and rosemary
Cook up the prosciutto and red pepper/sage/rosemary in some olive oil until the pig is crispy. Be generous with the sage and rosemary. And with the prosciutto. Dump into the polenta while it finishes thickening. Mix in some Parmesan while it cools. Spread on a pan and let it seize up all yummy, a la V.
Eat with steak and sturdy IPA while watching the moon turn blood red and the stars fall from the sky.

I am fully in love with polenta (spellcheck offers 'tadpole') right now, and if I had a pony I'd eat it on my damn pony. All as I can say.

One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick by Matt Kish: MOBY-DICK, Page 373

One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick by Matt Kish: MOBY-DICK, Page 373