The Winter Of Our Discontent – John Steinbeck
6 November, 2009 at 6:23 am (Music Matters)
Only one person in early Elm Street, Mr. Baker’s red setter, the banker’s dog, Red Baker, who moved with slow dignity, pausing occasionally to sniff the passenger list on the elm trunks.
“Good morning, sir. My name is Ethan Allen Hawley. I’ve met you in pissing.”
Red Baker stopped and acknowledged the greeting, with a slow sway of his plumed tail.
Ethan said, “I was just looking at my house. They knew how to build in those days.”
Red cocked his head and reached with a hind foot to kick casually at his ribs.
“And why not? They had the money. Whale oil from the seven seas, and spermaceti. Do you know what spermaceti is?”
Red gave a whining sigh.
“I see you don’t. A light, lovely rose-smelling oil from the head cavity of the sperm whale. Read ‘Moby Dick,’ dog. That’s my advice to you.”
The setter lifted his leg on the cast-iron hitching post at the gutter.
Turning to walk away, Ethan said over his shoulder, “And make a book report. You might teach my son. He can’t even spell spermaceti, or—or anything.”
Elm Street runs at an angle into High Street two blocks from the old Ethan Allen Hawley house. Halfway down the first block a delinquent gang of English sparrows were fighting on the new-coming lawn of the Elgar house, not playing but rolling and picking and eye-gouging with such ferocity and so noisily that they didn’t see Ethan approach. He stopped to watch the battle.
“Birds in their little nests agree,” he said. “So why can’t we? Now there’s a bunch of horse crap for you. You kids can’t get along even on a pretty morning. And you’re the bastards Saint Francis was nice to. Screw!” He ran at them, kicking, and the sparrows rose with a whispered roar of wings, complaining bitterly in door-squeak voices. “Let me tell you this,” Ethan said after them. “At noon the sun will darken and a blackness will fall on the earth and you will be afraid.”
The Road Not Taken – Robert Frost
4 November, 2009 at 5:35 am (Letters unite)
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference
Firin’ Line – John Campbell
22 October, 2009 at 12:07 am (Music Matters)
Drove into town / In a Cadillac
1300 miles / Watching my back
I saw two rabid dogs / Fighting in the street
They’s as mean as the woman / I came to meet
My body’s aching / My mind ain’t right
I know she’s out there / In the night
And she’s waiting on me
She’s a Pistol with a trigger happy mind
And I’m her target
On the Firin’ Line / The Firin’ Line
I talked to a priest / With a chiseled tooth
He told me, Boy / You best be bullet proof
She’s a daughter of the coyote clan
And the rumor has it / You’re a dead meat man
If you had sense / You’d turn and run
Well, she’s on fire / And she’s got a gun
She’s got a gun
She’s a Pistol with a trigger happy mind
And I’m her target
On the Firin’ Line / The Firin’ Line
Well, I followed her tracks / To the river’s edge
Back to the spot / Where we made our bed
A Silver moon / A glint of steel
Her sweet payback / For my dirty deal
Lightnin swift / Black night air
Night of the huntress
And I’m trapped in her lair
In in her lair
She’s a Pistol with a trigger happy mind
And I’m her target
On the Firin’ Line / The Firin’ Line
The Ginger Man – J.P. Donleavy
21 October, 2009 at 3:31 am (Letters unite)
No one will ever know what it’s done for me in my sad moments.
In this sad room
In this dark gloom
We live like beasts.
Outside, the world, I think is driven. And I’m right out in front.
The Wildman From Borneo – Kinky Freedman
8 October, 2009 at 4:48 pm (Uncategorized)
The Tatooed Lady left the circus train
Lost all of her pictures in the rain
I wonder if you’re happy, I wonder if you’re free
I wonder if you’ll ever know the mark you left on me
I’m the Wildman from Borneo
The Wildman from Borneo
You come to see, what you want to see
Oh, you come to see, but you never come to know
The Impossible Dream – The Sensational Alex Harvey Band
5 October, 2009 at 7:53 pm (Music Matters)
Ride On Captain ..
..and this is my proof that there is no heaven
15 September, 2009 at 4:11 pm (Notes to Self)
Κανέλλα left me to-day. She left the world to-day. I don’t believe in heaven but if there is a dog heaven I wish she were there. But then I know that if she went to that place and didn’t find me there, she wouldn’t think of it as heaven..
