...my father's 1967 Thorndike Barnhart Comprehensive Desk Dictionary...

I keep my father's venerable Desk Dictionary close at hand.  It retains the deep rooted smell of Carlton 100s Menthol.  He chain smoked for all of his life, easily hitting up two to three packs a day.  His meager collection of items when he passed are in air tight boxes.  My boys and I will occasionally seek them out to smell 'Geegaw'.  The books, in particular, retain the smell excellently.  This smells of both old book and smoke.

 We've shifted to the digital age without looking back.  It's done.  I get it.  However, memory serves us rightly: why not look at the technology that served us for hundreds of years and come to an affectionate understanding of things?

The Desk Reference of yesteryear was a must.  Books were, at one time, a commodity.  Most of the middle class, and very few of the poor, had more than a single bookshelf in their homes.  That is why libraries proliferated after the Depression - they were simply necessary for those that were not part of the elite.  Democracy was available from the Public Library.

And - the home had its own bit of democratic knowledge.  There was always a bible, a dictionary and a family cookbook.  That was the world.

And, as I flip through this poorly kept Dictionary, as best as my dad I kept it, the glue has dried and cracked.  The binding is falling apart.  The pages are intact however.

A jackal squares off with a jaguar across a lake
of memories, or a portal to another place.

The Dictionary was not only 'it'.  It was a reference.  The Thorndike Barnhart I have open before me has: an etymology key, language abbreviations, pronunciation key, foreign sounds, the list of the editorial advisory committee, a preface (pointing out this version has 80,000 words, comprising 99% of the words used in newspapers and magazines, fiction and non-fiction), a grammar section, punctuation, manuscript formatting, proofreader marks, letter writing, and forms of (salutary) address.

The world was truly here.  What is a hauberk and what does it look like?  What is a plebiscite and what power do they hold?  Who knew that a pincer can also be called a chela?

The Dictionary is available.  It was your Internet.  It would expand your understanding and nuances of The New Yorker, or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or The Doors.

There is a section from "J" that has an unprecise square cut out from it.  It was something woefully important, I'm sure.

My earliest scribbles as a child.  I know them well.  I didn't have
access to paper so I have several scribble where I could.  Was paper
a commodity in the seventies?  Come on!

...random tinyurls to a richer night...

http://tinyurl.com/mxbhe82

http://tinyurl.com/nnh5lc5

http://tinyurl.com/lvme8qg

http://tinyurl.com/kcbk9oa

The heat has dulled, it's sharp finish exhausted
Time will do that
The earth sighs, in tired relief
There's little happiness in it
The next rain will be greatly wanted
It will mark the end of one season to the next
Not some date made centuries ago
And purported by printmakers
With paper and ink
We believe it because of what it is composed of
marble
stone
quickened breath
unencumbered sighs.

I turn to Valentine and Raphael
To Eros and Aphrodite
Saints Brigid, Cecilia, Columbia and David
And cast my thought to stone
My sighs to lightening
To cast a thought upon the August skies
This time
Make the sky weep
ink.

...Sylvia Plath at Yaddo 1959...

Yaddo: The Grand Manor (1959 - all poems that follow are also attributed to the same year):
"...The fir tree's thick with grackles.  Gold carp loom in the pools."

The Manor Garden:
"History Nourishes these broken flutings, These crowns of acanthus, And the crow settles her garments."

Selected excerpts: A Poem for a Birthday:
I. Who
"This shed's fusty as a mummy's stomach: Old tools, handles and rusty tusks.  I am at home here among the dead heads."
II. Dark House
"This is a dark house, very big.  I made it myself, Cell by cell from a quiet corner....It is warm and tolerable In the bowel of the root."
III. Maenad
"This month is fit for little.  The dead ripen in the grapeleaves.  A red tongue is among us.  Mother, keep out of my barnyard, I am becoming another."
IV. The Beast
"...Fido Littlesoul, the bowel's familiar.  A dustbin's enough for him.  The dark's his bone.  Call him any name, he'll come to it."
V. Flute Notes form a Reedy Pond
"This is not death, it is something safer."
VI. Witch Burning

 

A draft of  'Ariel'.

"It is easy to blame the dark: the mouth of a door, The cellar's belly...What large eyes the dead have!  I am intimate with a hairy spirit."
VII. The Stones
"Drunk as a foetus I suck at the paps of darkness."

The Colossus:
"Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.  The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.  My hours are married to shadow."

Sylvia Plath spent a fall in Yaddo from early September to before Thanksgiving of 1959.

Flora on the Yaddo Grounds

Dark Wood, Dark Water:
"This wood burns a dark Incense.  Pale moss drips In elbow-scarves, beards From the archaic Bones of the great trees."

Mushrooms:
"Overnight, very Whitely, discreetly, Very quietly Our toes, our noes Take hold on the loam, Acquire the air."

...the moon's light on the white desert sand...

It was 109 today and the relief of night was anti-climatic, 98: this is Cathedral City.

The moon bragged of its brightness and did so by blotting out the stars in the sky with its own selfish aura.  The only constellation I can gather by what little stars were visible, is what is known in Asia as the 'Seven Stars of the Northern Ladle'.  I find it much more romantic than what it is commonly called here.  The other stars that are making its light known are mostly twinkling in the red spectrum.  There is simply too much haze in the air today.  The Seven Stars of the Northern Ladle look much closer here in Palm Springs than back home.  [I math check my perception and it is simply closer this time of year.]

Pictures of the moon.  I finally grappled enough of the Lumix to get what I need out of it.  Shutter priority in some cases to get the night shots much more in line with what I expect.  The other is to use the self-timer to avoid the natural shakiness that is prone to the light bodies of today's camera.

As I walked around the Holiday Inn, I found a fence in which to use as a brace for the shots.  A small brown rabbit, no bigger than my cupped hands together, was startled and ran toward the edge of the little spit of grass that was planted on the outskirts of the pool.  I can see its white tail illumined by the moon's light.

I took a few shots with the standard settings and all had little definition: just a bright orb, like an unthrilling, malshaped light bulb.  But then I switched over to shutter priority and moved the dial to 1/100.  That gave me the familiar pattern of the moon, with detail to prove it out.  Luckily there was enough light, or else it would have stepped down too far and I would have gotten nothing.

I jumped in the kidney shaped pool after I was satisfied with the shots.  Three jets pushed out from its outer edge into the middle.  A few underwater breaststrokes and a few above-water crawls.  I went under the water for as long as I could, easily going over a minute.  A group of teens were throwing a ball around, making as much use of the time as they could.  Mine were screaming and splashing one another in the face.

The real refresher was the shower.  It had the coolest water of the day.  It only spurted out a light, but wide, cone of water, with little pressure, but it was cooling.  I stared at my hands, which reflected the moonlight.  I did as I would as I was little: fill them up and stare at the moonlight within it.  I watched as it fell so close to the hungry, parched earth just two feet from me: little grew around it.  The sand did not sparkle, the light was too dim.  There was a dull beauty to the thousands of them reflecting back the glow on the white sand.

My eyes mingled the light from the water droplets and those of the sand, a second or two of diamonds in my view.

There is a wide gully that connects the Cathedral Canyon Country Club with the Morningside Country Club.  It runs into white desert sand right outside the pool's gate.  The gate is the marker between the wilds of the night and the cut grass functionary of the hotel.  I stand almost naked under the shower looking out, wondering what the rabbit thought of me.  A wet soul shimmering, his darkened eyes looking blankly toward the light sand.

Described Gully Cathedral City and Palm Springs 2014

...it was here that i was assuredly lost...

Those eyes by LucyHudecova on deviantART

unexpectedly comprehensively confused by what this and what it was or what is it supposed to be
a question took shape in a series of glances
do not believe you are confused by mine
I am always assured
and hardly confused

by what I know and as I know what follows
I am confident in here
but it is striking to note what we simply feel
and that unwritten horizon of promise

the sun its beauty and the filter written in emotion
why even quest beyond the view
when of itself sates the soul

as a young sailor strikes for the unknown
so do I in you
it is August
again

...quotes from "The Touchstone" by Edith Wharton (1900)...

Found very little quotes online that are associated with the fabulous short story The Touchstone by Edith Wharton, so I thought I would combine the ones that stuck out for me.  Read it on the way home from Albany a few weeks ago and it had a tremendous impact.

The story of Glennard, all from his lens, is that of love-never-having-blossomed, but the effects of it, the 'unloved' letters of a famous author (Miss Aubyn), are the source of his establishment, the basis of his marriage and the eventual comeuppance for going through with a despicable act of selfishness.

Wharton famously plays with the inner turmoil of Glennard and the effects of the preternatural Aubyn - although little is heard of her - is a constant threat to the world Glennard attempts to create.  All quotes are referring to the Hesperus version, as always I recommend purchasing content - especially such a novella as sublime as this.

"Later, when to be loved by her had been a state to touch any man's imagination, the physical reluctance had, inexplicably, so overborne the intellectual attraction, that the last years had been, to both of them, an agony of conflicting impulses....To have been loved by the most brilliant woman of her day, and to have been incapable of loving her, seemed to him, in looking back, derisive evidence of his limitations..." (page 5)

"....her most salient attribute, or that at least to which her conduct gave most consistent expression, was a kind of passionate justness - the intuitive feminine justness that is so much rare than a reasoned impartiality." (page 9)

"...a proportionate pleasure in being for once able to feast openly on a dish liberally seasoned with the outrageous.  He was at an age when all the gifts and graces are but so much undiscriminated food to the ravening egoism of youth.  Vanity contents itself with the coarsest diet; there is no palate so fastidious as that of self-distrust." (page 11)

"The attitude of looking up is a strain on the muscles; and it was becoming more and more Glennard's opinion that brains, in a woman, should be merely the obverse of beauty....and while she had enough prettiness to exasperate him by her incapacity to make use of it, she seemed invincibly ignorant of any of the little artifices whereby women contrive to hide their defects and even to turn them into graces." (page 13)

"The door was never to reopen; but through its narrow crack Glennard, as the years went on, became more and more conscious of an inextinguishable light directing its small ray towards the past which consumed so little of his own commemorative oil." (page 16)

"Perhaps the only service an unloved woman can render the man she loves is to enhance and prolong his illusions about her rival....This inscrutable composure was perhaps her chief grace in Glennard's eyes.  Reserve, in some natures, implies merely the locking of empty rooms or the dissimulation of awkward encumbrances; but Miss Trent's reticence was to Glennard like the closed door to a sanctuary, and his certainty of divining the hidden treasure made him content to remain outside in the happy expectancy of the neophyte."  (page 18)

"Oh, come, come,' Dresham judicially interposed; 'after all, they're not love letters.'  'No - that's the worst of it; they're unloved letters.'" (page 41)

"We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours." (page 49)

"Our self esteem is apt to be based on the hypothetical great act we have never had occasion to perform; and even the most self-scrutinizing modesty credits itself negatively with a high standard of conduct." (page 54)

"The desiccating air of memory had turned her into the mere abstraction of a woman, and this unexpected evocation seemed to bring her nearer than she had ever been in life." (page 68)

"...as a man who has mastered the spirit of a foreign tongue turns with renewed wonder to the pages his youth has plodded over." (page 69)

"The blow he had struck had blunted the edge of his anger, and the unforeseen extent of the hurt inflicted did not alter the fact that his weapon had broken in his hands...[his] unwillingness to quarrel with him was the last stage of [Glennard's] abasement." (page 78)

...pre-mission briefing to the crew of the Prometheus as led by mission strategist Kenny Powers...

RE: mission proposal to  the specialists aboard the Prometheus on its voyage to the Engineer world of LV_233.  Vickers, Janek and Shaw in attendance, with the briefing led by MLB pitcher, and Giants #19, Kenny "Fucking" Powers.

Firstly, keep an eye on that dick head android, David.  That sneaky sumbitch is spending way too much time learning.  No one needs to learn ancient languages, especially a fruity robot.  He looks like that Australian dude.  What's his name?  David Bowie.  Never cared for that guy.  It's not rock, not at all.  Plus, that fucking toaster likes to sass.  He talks back.  I'd fucking smack that thin-lipped grin off his face.  Dick.

Next, before you land on any planet, after spending four trillion dollars of Weyland's money, you may want to like rotate arounds it for a while.  I know I would.  Get to know the weather patterns, identify any hostile environments, seismic activity.  All that shit.  I mean Janek, you don't want to land your sweet ass space vehicle on a planet you just got to right?  Take your time, at least a few weeks (as recommended to me by the Extra-Stellar Commission - you know scientists).  You don't want one of them space worms snatching at your crotch like in Empire Strikes Back.  I mean, you are not no Han Solo, that's for damn sure.  Vickers, you keep saying you the one in control, what with your hot tight ass and shit, those bodacious tatas - you may want to tee up with Janek and square that shit away.

[Speaking of which Vickers, I'm getting over a relationship, but you can like stack and rack on me when you get that itch in your nether regions.  That'd be alright.  Kenny's got the power to make you cosmic cum all over the damned place.]

Ok, now let's get the mission straight.  You all need to decide, right now, that you want to actually come back.  Unless all 17 of you have a death wish, maybe call a few huddles and say, 'Hey, let's do like our research and shit, get some rocks and skeletons and get back home.  Let's not all die because we refused to make good decisions.'  When I was closing games with the Merman, I would drop those truth bombs all over the dug, right.  Let the team know to back this train up.  I'm looking at you, Shaw.  You're the scientist, I figure you know all about that scientific method and performing all sorts of protocols and procedures and shit and not run into an ancient alien facility like rhesus monkeys on jamboree.

Rule number whatever: never take off a helmet on a foreign body, no matter what the read-outs say.  The human eye is good (and I can hit a goddamned fly off a fence from 60 feet), but you will not be able to tell if there are microbes or deadly alien world viruses, or small-dicked asshole space weeds that'll shoot pearls into your mouth.  Unless you like that sort of thing....Vickers.  I'm up here, baby.  Eye contact.

And, hey, don't just touch shit because its there.  That's what digital cameras are for.  It's 2093, we got the right technology instead of carrying around ancient alien body parts in duffel bags.

If you see any alien snakes, don't touch the little fuckers.  Let them be.  Do we touch snakes in the 'Bama.  No.  That's why we have brains.  David, man, stop looking at me with those dead fucking eyes, bro.  You do NOT want any of this.

A controlled mission means we work together, listen to one another and follow some basic scientific guidelines.  We do not prance off on our own, split up while on a planet light years away from Earth.  Let's do some drills before we go off into dark caverns.

Oh, and take weapons, dummy.  Second amendment is in full effect in outer space.  I looked it up.

Most government agencies, by the year 2014, know pretty damn well that any lab work can be done outside of the main habitation of the Prom.  It's like when you get crabs.  You just don't bring them back home to the family.  You stay in a hotel for a few nights and let the beds take care of it.  They transfer right over like little migrant workers.

The captain doesn't leave the ship, ever.  In fact, a core group should stay well away from the landing party.  That's why they make doors.

Don't kick bodies laying right outside that already fucked with a camera and are looking a lot like Regan from The Exorcist.  Shoot that piece of shit a few times in the head before you get within tickle distance.

In fact, I'm looking at Dave over there eye-fucking me, so you know what?  You just stay outside for the duration of the mission.  I get a sick vibe from this asshole.  Is there like a kill switch?  If anything that James Cameron or Michael Bay taught us in their documentaries is that robots are only destined to kill their maker.  Fuck this dick.

If things happen to look like they are stockpiling an arsenal of shit in climate controlled rooms that are locked and have a pile of dead warriors outside of it - you probably want to live that shit alone.  That's like a 'do not enter' sign.  Maybe send some of those laser eggs along.

If things go south, leave that fucking planet.  There's no need to hang around and yell at one another.  You know who are the smart ones?  The ones that cut and run motherfucker.

All of that being said, have a great mission and hopefully those Engineers have nice taut asses and luscious tits.  Peace out!