Or I'll Eat My Bicycle

It won’t be at the level of, for instance, “A Night in Tunisia”---as Dizzy Gillespie perspicaciously described his song:  “It has withstood the vaccisitudes (sic) of the contingent world, and moved, in an odyssey, into the realm of the metaphysical.”---(in my dreams.)  But my book, Aperçus, is close to dropping, completing my production for the year.   

And I make this guarantee: despite all the talk of war and drought and cultural deracination, if you read any of the books in my catalog,  you will feel better, even way better, afterward than you did before you started reading.  Or I’ll eat my bicycle.

When the site most closely resembles a laundromat bulletin board, my work is done

The effects of a far-distant hurricane brings summer in this locale to a hot and muggy conclusion. The season was a busy one for me; my timesheet is much of this blog.  Several projects were successfully completed, several others were started and at this writing are in various stages of progress.  My web site seems perpetually under construction (like certain segments of the US interstate highway system); one of those areas is the newly titled Screening Room, a space for links to artists, photographers, videographers, musicians, and writers who I like---all just a click away.  I recently added two links:  SoCal Salty, which is a site about (mostly Southern California) fishing, and the other is by world political journalist Andre Vltchek.  I don’t fish, and I don’t like to eat fish, but I’m hooked on good writing and the writing on this site, by John Sarmiento, aka SoCal Salty, is very good. Andre Vltchek caught my crypto-Luddite attention through an article about the prevalence and sovereignty of smart phones and digital technology in Southeast Asia.  He writes of the “gadgets” as having “fully overwhelmed” Southeast Asian culture.  He says the digital world has turned Southeast Asia “totally infantile.” And he concludes his observation: “What a joy for corporations, elites, military and the West, to manufacture and then control such societies!”  Does this “infantilization” in Southeast Asia remind us of anywhere else? 

While listening to Brahms' Symphony No. 4

“In my best moments I think ‘Life has passed me by’ and I am content.” 

                                                                        ---Agnes Martin