Fire Chief Collins hoped to stop
the fire at the Yesler-Leary
building on Front Street, tall atop
what is now Pioneer Square. Weary
with fear and exhaustion, townsmen
gathered close to watch a column
of hot air carry showers of sparks
and burning boards, like fireworks.
The holocaust was slow winning
new territory, but debris
rained down upon roofs as a tree
drops its cones—a new beginning
for more fires, and an explosion
in the sky like a second sun.

Cinders and smoke churned through mist
as the brothers dragged heavy, yet eager
steps through the shallows. Abner kissed
the first log he saw on the beach. “I’ll wager
the missus won’t mind too much,” said
the mill man, brushing a strand of seaweed
from the maiden’s face. “Dot’s the forgiving
kind,” agreed Albert. “But after living
through fire, I’m not about to risk the wrath
of Mabel.” Abner, solemn, nodded, “Don’t press
your luck. You’re already in a fine mess
over that pump organ.” “Don’t think our path
leads south. We’ll rebuild, with God’s will.”
Then they climbed home, up Denny Hill.

By this time, flames blocked every exit
from the mill, so Albert and Abner followed
the machinery into the drink. Abner checked it
by swimming deeper. Albert swallowed
brine and dogpaddled on the surface,
the wharf burning above him like a furnace.
Abner popped up again, and motioned toward
the open water. Albert grabbed a charred board,
and lurched after his brother. Mostly they floated.
Using lumber from the mill, they drifted
north with the current on a makeshift raft. Led
by the tide across an obsidian surface flooded
with stars, they watched the fires burn all night,
until they landed in Belltown, at first light.

Keene quickly jumped back onto the pier,
then hurried to the Stetson and Post Mill,
where his brother Abner was a partner. Near
the mill, Albert saw him carrying saws, a drill,
and other tools to safety as the conflagration
began to engulf the quay. At least a ton
of the most expensive machinery remained,
soon to be melted. “Nothing to be gained
by staying with it,” said Abner. “I’ll bargain
we’ll save it yet,” said Albert, right defiant.
Picking up a hot saw, he began cutting a giant
circle in the floorboards—for the pump organ
was on his mind. The gear kept getting hotter,
until Albert just dropped it all in the water.

Albert G. Keene, carpenter, had planned
to move his young family south that very day,
to sunny California, a more prosperous land,
and a lot warmer. He transferred a vast array
of their household belongings from the dock
to the Alameda, within a circle traced in chalk
by the captain, as the boundary of their estate.
The family pump organ was the only freight
left on the wharf. The cautious captain feared
the approaching fire and tarred timber
of the dock like the long fuse of a bomb for
his ship. A window of mere moments appeared,
so Keene began pulling the organ up the plank—
the captain had signaled. The organ fell. Sank.

Most possessions stacked on the docks
were lost to the flames. A few were able
to be loaded onto ships, whose decks
were heaped high with luxuries like rubble.
As if on cue, the ships weighed anchor
and backed into Elliot Bay, passenger
and crew alike crowding the gunnels
to watch buildings turned into funnels
of smoke. Special mention, nay, rhymes
are required for Captain Edward Quinn
of the schooner Teaser, who rescued ten
crates of books owned by The Seattle Times.
As for those belonging to The Post Intelligencer,
Go ask the flames if you want an answer.

With the wind blowing from the north,
the fire wasn’t expected to advance
in that direction. But wood is worth
as much as wind to the spark, and grants
it more air later—plenty of each below
street level. The fire crept at a slow
and steady pace through basements
along the waterfront, through vents
and even doorways, entirely unobserved.
Under the wharfing, it spread beneath
the street and blacksmith shop, then carved
its way to Kenyon Block to wreathe
the entire waterfront district. Every quay
and warehouse crumpled into the bay.

On the west side of Front Street, flames
were temporarily retarded by the walls
of the Safe Deposit Building. On James
Street the fire shrinks and then even stalls,
but the pause is short. A pitiless wind
rose. Dancing orange demons grinned
in expectation before licking the glass
windows and fittings made of brass.
They soon leapt over to Gordon Hardware,
where the roar of their maws was punctuated
by tons of cartridges exploding, unabated.
Civilians dove for cover, said a prayer
and more, then waited in awe and wonder
as all the ammunition boomed like thunder.

While discounting several rumors of death,
The Post Intelligencer was obliged to report
several casualties related in good faith:
An unknown man, trying to stop the fire short
of the trestle of the Oregon Improvement
Company, was struck by falling timber and sent
swiftly into the fire. Fireman Derby rushed
into the San Francisco Store and was crushed
by falling walls. Two blokes, looking tough,
were seen dashing into the Wa Chong
Co. for plunder amidst the pillage … wrong
place, wrong time. Already in flames, the roof
fell the moment they entered. He sendeth rain
on the just and the unjust—but there is no rain.

A Southern Health dental hygienist ceased work a day after being told dozens of images of her posing explicitly in the Cranbourne clinic were posted on a members-only internet porn site.

Which is as if ripped from the pages of Bird’s Nest in Your Hair, the latest publication from Korrektiv Press:

It took them a couple of trips up the elevator, but other than a dropped item here and there, everything went off without a hitch. While Tom and the others set up cameras and the rest of the equipment in the examination rooms, the performers sat on couches in the lobby, smoking cigarettes and thumbing through copies of Highlights and Ladies Home Journal. One fellow wearing a white lab coat was fiddling around with a tank of nitrous oxide, pressing a mask to his face with one hand while turning a dial with the other.

A couple of guys in tool belts were in the final stages of clearing out one of the overhead lights, deemed an obstruction for one of the more complicated shots. Near the front of the examination room were two women, chatting with a man holding what appeared to be a giant diaphragm. The women were unusually well built. This was obvious enough in their tidy little mauve smocks and white leggings—grossly exaggerated idealizations of dental assistants, judged Tom.

Perhaps they were inspired by the novel. Kind of hope they were, kinda hope they weren’t!

Read the rest of Bird’s Nest in Your Hair, available at amazon.com.

The Democrats have made the Bush tax rates permanent for 98 percent of the public, which Republicans couldn’t even do when they controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency.

The fiscal trajectory of our welfare state is not sustainable, no matter how much taxes go up. That is the truth at the heart of our budget crisis. The fiscal-cliff debate ignored that truth from start to finish, and so has achieved nothing worthwhile for anyone.

If you must, read the whole thing here.

Christmas is just another day, and a day in which you can do what you want, as long as you aren’t fooled by the hype of the crowd. Happy are those who never hear Christmas music at all, but happier are those who hear without hearing, and notice the holiday without heeding. Crush Christmas with your awareness of its meaninglessness. There’s no need for despair if you never take it seriously in the first place.

I don’t know which I like more, the one ironic twist too many in the acronym, the overly precious alliteration, or the quasi-biblical intonement of “notice without heeding”.

Happy Holidays, everybody!

November is almost over, and we would be remiss if we failed to note the passing of the composer Elliot Carter on the 5th.

Before he was a composer, he was an English Major at Harvard, and later in life set music to many poets, such as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Wallace Stevens. Carter’s music sounds like a lot of other 20th century music (as Bach sounds like a lot of other early 18th century music), in that it is typically atonal and rhythmically complex.

The Concerto for Orchestra is considered by many to be his finest work; in the comments you’ll even see comments “this is indeed the greatest musical composition ever.” Ever! It is great, but it is also fairly tough going for the uninitiated—much, much more difficult than even Bartok’s great concerto, or Lutoslawski’s.

As Carter himself says about harmonic patterns in his work, “a chord, a vertical group of pitches either simultaneously sounded or arpeggiated, like a motif, is a combination to be more or less clearly remembered and related to previous and future chords heard in the same work. Whether the composer is conscious of it or not, a field of operation with its principles of motion and of interaction is stated or suggested at the beginning of any word. The field may be tonal, employ traditional harmony, or it may be unrelated to traditional harmony, as my music seems to be nowadays …”

There is also something about the rapidly changing rhythms that makes it sound chaotic and dramatic at the same time, and being difficult, it demands repeated listening many times over. But as it becomes more and more familiar, new discoveries are in store for the listener. The flip side of the demanding nature of the music is that it bears up to repeated listening very well.

It moves quickly, and if it sounds as if each of the instrumentalists is doing his own thing, that’s because they are. As Carter himself said, “I regard my scores as scenarios, auditory scenarios, for performers to act out with their instruments, dramatizing the players as individuals and participants in the ensemble.”

Elliott Carter, December 11, 1908 – November 5, 2012. Requiescat In Pace.

Lickona missed this one as well, and Webb must be off smoking a cigar somewhere. So today the task falls to me:

A porcupine’s main defense against predators consists of keeping its backside to a predator. Get too close and you’ll snag 500 quills engineered to embed themselves deeper and deeper into flesh. A mouth full of these painful pins has caused many an animal to starve to death. In fact, the porcupine is so well-respected, it wanders the forest day or night without much hurry or fear. Few animals are clever enough to successfully hunt porcupines, though mountain lions, fishers, and Chevy Impalas have the most success. That mess of quills is equally effective against its own kind.

Whatever you do, do not follow the echidna link. And I don’t mean that in a ‘Ha! ha! Now that I’ve said something you won’t be able to resist following anyway!’ sort of way. This porcupine story contains enough sex and violence for the day.

Jacob Furth, dressed in tails and top hat,
was hastening across Western Avenue
when he saw smoke rising around a slat
near the curb. He hailed a fire crew
busy hauling hoses toward the dock
at Pier Two, then knelt on the boardwalk
to get a closer look. Felt the plank
for heat. As the firemen began to yank
loose the boards, Furth stepped back
to survey the entire block. Up the street
there was a shout, then a blast of heat
as the firemen fell back, their faces black
with smoke. Furth stepped forth … nervous …
the basement itself was a roaring furnace.

It was 1967, several years after she left the institute as a desperate 20-year-old whom doctors gave little chance of surviving outside the hospital. Survive she did, barely: there was at least one suicide attempt in Tulsa, when she first arrived home; and another episode after she moved to a Y.M.C.A. in Chicago to start over.

She was hospitalized again and emerged confused, lonely and more committed than ever to her Catholic faith. She moved into another Y, found a job as a clerk in an insurance company, started taking night classes at Loyola University — and prayed, often, at a chapel in the Cenacle Retreat Center.

Moved into the Y, found her faith: no Will Barrett she. Read the whole thing.

Finally! The third book from Korrektiv Press is now available. I hit the “publish” button a few days ago, and was told the page would be up later this week. My brother called to tell me he’d manage to find it at Amazon today. You can all also get it at CreateSpace (the printing division of Korrektiv Press).

Here’s the description: Diana tends bar at Queequeg’s Tavern, where she meets Pete, a recent retiree always ready with a joke, and Jeb, a homeless student driven by a poet’s Romantic aspirations. Tangled up in a history of the family blues, she sometimes takes refuge in a church she can’t decide to join for good. Tom, the manager of a video store near the tavern, is settling into a new marriage with Helen, an adult film producer wealthy enough to save Tom’s store from impending doom. But when a figure from his past walks through the door, who will save his marriage? Who will help whom as this nest of birds unravels?

Bird’s Nest in Your Hair: a novel about bartending, old-time religion, and the twilight years of commercial pornography. Plus, poetry!

Before the Altar

Two dozen beers on tap and even more in bottles,
and not just beer, but wine and especially booze,
built up on shelves in something like a ziggurat
for a cult dedicated to the certainty of conviction
granted only to drunks in the blindness of an alcoholic
haze. Rituals have their priests; I see you as a high
priestess of drinking, surrounded by the paraphernalia
of your order: corkscrew, strainer and cocktail shaker,
a dozen kinds of glassware handled with a dexterity
demanding devotion, a cloud rising from cigarettes
burned as incense by attendants at your altar.
How well you handle every office—confessions
whispered without sorrow or regret, the jukebox choir,
and a communion of breadsticks and Beaujolais.

And I’m long past that point, anyway. One way of embracing the Manichean division of our political universe is to talk about polling and probable outcomes and suchlike. Sort of meta-politics, but not really, because this is what it comes down to. Before the lawyers come and decide it all for us, anyway. Some time during every election cycle, one’s focus turns from the actual issues to the guessing game of what our schizophrenic body politic is actually going to decide.

Two of the most interesing guessers out there are Nate Silver and Jay Cost; they will certainly be the writers I’m following for the next several days. Silver writes the FiveThirtyEight blog at the New York Times and has a fairly active Twitter feed. He leans left, pretty hard, as might be expected from the Times. More importantly, he’s accurate: in the 2008 election, he predicted the outcome of the presidential election successfully in 49 out of 50 states (missing only Indiana, which went for Obama). He claims Obama has an 85% chance of winning on Tuesday. Cost is at the Weekly Standard and also tweets fairly often. He swings right, as would certainly be expected from the Weekly Standard.

So there you go. Have at it, or ignore it; as you like. Maybe you know about these two already. If there are other weather vanes worth following, by all means let me know.

“…having only learned to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies–my only talent–smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle…”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Prospering includes dancing, and now they’re being provided with rubbery boots made of silicon for some relief from their strenuous exertions.

“Dung beetles are the first example of an insect using a mobile, thermal refuge to move across hot soil,” researcher Jochen Smolka, a neuroethologist at Lund University in Sweden, told LiveScience. “Insects, once thought to be at the mercy of environmental temperatures, use sophisticated behavioral strategies to regulate their body temperature[s].”

The researchers discovered that beetles on hot soil climbed onto their excrement balls seven times more often than when on cooler ground. When the researchers painted rubbery boots made of silicone onto the legs of the insects to protect them from the heat, “beetles with boots on climbed their balls less often,” Smolka said. The scientists think the insects get on top of dung when it gets hot to give themselves a respite from scorching sands and help protect their brains from overheating.

I look forward to seeing kids imitate the dung beetle in discotheques all over the world. And I suppose we can now refer to the 21st century as the Great Discotheque of Scientific Humanism.

Read the straight poop at Live Science.

Monday, 27 July, 1959: 4:10 A.M.
Lunch with Merleau-Ponty this afternoon in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I was disturbed to hear that he has started a photoblog, and skeptical when he told me that although all its images are identical—a lonely kitten staring bleakly into space as rain falls pitilessly from an empty sky—he averages sixteen thousand page views per day. When I asked to see his referrer logs, he muttered evasively about having an appointment with an S.E.O. specialist and scurried away.

So this is hell.

Basically me looking at Potter, back when I used to post at the Quotidian. Back when, you know, I used to post at all.

The man was happy in the garden
that had been made for him,
when naming everything was the best way
of partaking of it. And not just trees,
but especially the trees,
which reminded him so much of … what?
The mind at rest, the mind at play,
which are much the same thing,
together with the mind at work.
O Blessed Fall! We can say what happened,
and in that saying we are further blessed.

So it was with your jump,
when you weren’t heard
to say much of anything,
knowing that you’d do well to listen
to someone who had gone before you,
though not so high, or perhaps thinking
that in breaking the speed of sound,
you might as well just listen to yourself,
silent, falling through time and space
and so much more silence.
Doubtless a lot of preparation
preceded those ten minutes;
a lot of preparation and a lot of numbers,
by which we can now measure your record,
if not your actual achievement.
For the fall itself is beyond math and even myth;
it’s as if you dared to be Icarus,
knowing the end of Icarus,
or even Lucifer, ignoring the end of everything.
This had to be different.
The helium balloon ascent
must have been decent enough,
for who doesn’t like to just float
along for a little while,
thinking of all the earthbound souls below,
taking in the view before
going through a final checklist?
We all hope for some final ascent,
even if we have trouble believing it.
It’s only human. What you’ve shown us
is just how beautiful and right
such a well considered descent can be;
freefalling through the wild blue yonder
at Mach 1.24 depends on a lot of virtue:
Courage, certainly, so little understood
as a kind of humility. Self-control, Diligence,
Patience, Wisdom … the list goes on,
and nothing good is accomplished without them.
Gliding on gossamer to such a glorious finish,
what you revealed to all the disparate
and even desperate souls
peering into screens all over the world
(give us Disaster or a Sign from Heaven,
anything but our all too ordinary lives!)
was a combination of Victory and Gratitude—
fists in the air, knees on the ground—
knowing how sweet the earth must be,
how sweet the earth.

And naturally, I drive a bus to support my independent scholarly activities. Yes, I grew a mustache.

Yet when, through an official interlocutor, I recently petitioned Wikipedia to delete this misstatement, along with two others, my interlocutor was told by the “English Wikipedia Administrator”—in a letter dated August 25th and addressed to my interlocutor—that I, Roth, was not a credible source: “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” writes the Wikipedia Administrator—“but we require secondary sources.”

From racism to political correctness to academic oversight, read all about it here:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/09/an-open-letter-to-wikipedia.html#ixzz25wWSaO5x

The fire had crossed Second Avenue, and was heading up to Third. Smoke could be seen in Tacoma, and the roar of the fire heard for miles. Help had been called in from Tacoma, Portland, and even Victoria, B.C. …

Realizing their geoduck was cooked,
Moran raced into the offices of the Sunset
Telephone-Telegraph Co. and unhooked
the contraption himself. “Get
me Tacoma!” And Portland and Victoria,
B.C., and then, remembering a noria
he’d seen on the faraway Kickapoo
River, put out a call for someone he knew,
had heard legend of, anyway—a Wisconsin
firefighter by name of Paddy or Mick
O’Somethingerother, who with a single lick
and a little spit could put out the fire in
Hades itself. “The name? People are dyin’
here! Wait; I got it … Get me O’Brien!”

Bob Dylan has a new album coming out in September, and he’s going on tour! Potter told me, and so I told my friend, who said, “What about the Pixies? I wish they would go on tour again. Do you remember the Pixies?”

Oh yes, I remember the Pixies …