training.

I ran across this passage today while rereading a book I, until recently, had not given very much consideration, A Separate Peace by John Knowles. In fact, it wasn't until about 50 pages in did I realize I had read previously. In any case, this specific passage stood out, especially after my run today.

every trace of energy as usual completely used up, and as I drove myself on all my scattered aches found their usual way to a profound seat of pain in my side. My lungs as usual were fed up with all this work, and from now on would only go rackingly through the motions. My knees were boneless again, ready any moment to let my lower legs telescope up into the thighs. My head felt as though different sections of the cranium were grinding into each other.

Then, for no reason at all, I felt magnificent. It was as though my body until that instant had simply been lazy, as though the aches and exhaustion were all imagined, created from nothing in order to keep me from truly exerting myself. Now my body seemed at last to say, "Well, if you must have it, here!" and an accession of strength came flooding through me. Buoyed up, I forgot my usual feeling of routine self-pity when working out, I lost myself, oppressed mind along with aching body; all entanglements were shed, I broke into the clear.

carl sandburg.

The first two years of my formal education were spent at Carl Sandburg Elementary School in West Valley City, UT. I think, even in Kindergarten and First Grade, I was vaguely aware that Sandburg was a writer of some kind. Now 26 years removed from those opaque days of youth, I just finished reading Sandburg's Chicago Poems. Several things struck me upside the head while reading this book.

I wonder how on earth an elementary school in the Salt Lake Valley was named after an outspoken socialist. There seems to be some incongruity in a school located in the heart of our nation's most conservative state being named after a man that was integral in the American socialist movement of the early 20th century. I mean, he was the private secretary of Eugene V. Debs! I wonder if the school board knew he was the man that wrote

Voices of dollars
And drops of blood

Could they have known?

I wonder if there was a teacher in the entire school who knew who Sandburg was and what he stood for? I am not saying definitively no one knew, but given my basic knowledge of teachers today I am pretty doubtful. I know many elementary school teachers, I doubt they have read "Chicago". I doubt they had read "Fog"

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

Finally, I wonder if, in some way, I was meant to find Sandburg more than 25 years later. I don't particularly love him as a poet, or agree with his politics. However, in some small manner, I feel connected to his words. I did go to a school named after him, although I can't believe that in any way that school embodied the name above the door. There is always some lesson in the words of poets concerned with the topics of their day. As The Great War raged on he wrote:

JAWS

SEVEN nations stood with their hands on the jaws of death.
It was the first week in August, Nineteen Hundred Fourteen.
I was listening, you were listening, the whole world was listening,
And all of us heard a Voice murmuring:
“I am the way and the light,	5
He that believeth on me
Shall not perish
But shall have everlasting life.”
Seven nations listening heard the Voice and answered:
“O Hell!”	10
The jaws of death began clicking and they go on clicking.
“O Hell!”

a few words of inspiration.

One Hour to Madness and Joy
by Walt Whitman

One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)
O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children,
I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)

O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me
in defiance of the world!
O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!
O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of
a determin'd man.

O the puzzle, the thrice-tied knot, the deep and dark pool, all
untied and illumin'd!
O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
To be absolv'd from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and
you from yours!
To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature!
To have the gag remov'd from one's mouth!
To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am.

O something unprov'd! something in a trance!
To escape utterly from others' anchors and holds!
To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!
To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
To rise thither with my inebriate soul!
To be lost if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy.

influenced

Recently I was asked about writers who have influenced me. I have often thought about those who have steered my thinking in various directions and wondered whether it was worth commenting on in public. After consideration, I thought it may be interesting to throw up a list.

Ordered alphabetically:

Woody Allen
Paul Bowles
Ed Burns
John Cheever
Tina Fey
Ernest Hemingway
Jack Kerouac
Norman Mailer
Cormac McCarthy
Eugene O'Neill
George Orwell
Aaron Sorkin
Gary Snyder
Hunter S. Thompson
Jose Saramago
Gary Snyder
Wallace Stevens
John Updike
William Carlos Williams

Reading Rejuvenation

Those that have known me for very long know about my passion for reading. Books. I cannot remember a time in my life when I didn't have at least one book going. It started at an early age and continues today. But...as with most things a person can find important there exists the possibility for drudgery. Staleness. The feeling of slogging through without purpose. For the past couple months this has been the case with me and my reading career. I was not inspired in my reading. It has happened before, but rarely for longer than a couple weeks. I didn't like anything on the shelf, bookstores were filled with either books I didn't want to read or already had.

I decided to reread Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Say what you will about Hemingway, I will always love him. He was the first author who truly inspired me. In my most impressionable youth he had the ability to instill radical thoughts in my head and taught me the power of sentence simplicity. (Although, I feel I continue to develop my own style, one far from Hemingway's, there is at times shades of his diction in my own.) He has always occupied a special place in my own cannon and A Farewell to Arms was always near the top of every list I have ever made. There is romance, wonder, pain, and finally tragedy all wrapped into one complete tale of chaos and emotion. It was the perfect book to rejuvenate that passion for books I had recently lost.

Buying books has always been ritualistic for me. Sometimes I know exactly what I want, other times not. The process always includes a quiet meander through the fiction section usually starting somewhere in the middle of the alphabet, progressing to the end, looping back to A to finish where I had started. I rarely collect books along the way, but usually retrace my steps to pick up around three titles and head to the register.

This time, in the effort to get back to basics I went to the Barnes and Noble in Vancouver, WA. Although it is hard to calculate but this store, my home town bookstore, is amongst those I count as being the greatest recipients of my hard earned dollars. It was a great day when Vancouver had a bookstore that carried more than romance novels and dime store westerns. I bought all the books I could for my Senior AP English Class there and after college worked there for about six months. I discovered Bowles, Maughm, Greene, McCarthy, and O'Brien on its shelves. There are other stores worth mentioning, but few hold a more symbolic place in my consciousness. Included amongst these are:

Powell's City of Books
Brookine Booksmith
Harvard Bookstore
University Bookstore

I digress down reading memory lane. In this trip I picked up the following:

The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
Barbary Shore, Norman Mailer
You Can't Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe

Half way through The Maltese Falcon I can say I am back. Reading again is a joy and just in time. As training gets harder and lines of reality begin to blur. As time becomes a premium and is sucked into the vortex of swim, bike, run; carving out that little bit of time to ingest a few lines of prose will prove invaluable.

W.H. Auden

FUNERAL BLUES

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,
Put crepe bows around the necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working weak and my Sunday Rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out everyone;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Again with the Proust.

Although it is rightly said that there can be no progress, no discovery in art, but only in the sciences, and that each artist starting afresh on an individual effort cannot be either helped or hindered therein by the efforts of any other, it must none the less be acknowledged that, in so far as art brings to light certain laws, once and industry has popularized them, the art that was first in the field looses retrospectively a little of its originality.

Dylan Thomas

DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at the end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do no go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good nigh.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

-----------------------------------------------------------

In times when my own words cannot express my sentiments with the great clarity I find in others, I will defer.

from 'Swann's Way' by Marcel Proust

"The truth was that she could never permit herself to buy anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, above all the profit which fine things afford us by teaching us to seek our pleasures elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth."

A Large Pile of Books

This large pile of books will henceforth be called a stack. I have rarely in my reading life had a larger stack of unread books than I do right now. I am still reading at about the same rate I have always read, but with the holidays and my general accumulation the stack has grown to a height rarley seen on my selves. I am both excited about the books and daunted by their number. So as an expirement I have decided to see how long it will take me to read the stack. There are the rules:


1. I may buy only one more book until the stack is gone.
2. I may choose only one book not to read in this stack.


The book stack currently exists as:

The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O'Neill
The Third Man and The Fallen Idol, Graham Greene
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevesky
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ' 72, Hunter S. Thompson
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris
Theodore Rex, Edmund Morris
The Loser, Thomas Bernhard
The Real Life of Sebastain Knight, Vladimir Nabakov
The Deer Park, Norman Mailer
Mason and Dixon, Thomas Pynchon
The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
Danger on Peaks, Gary Snyder
The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever
Angels in America, Tony Kushner
A History of the Modern Middle East, William L. Cleveland
The Autobiography of Johnny Cash, Johnny Cash

Wish me luck.