you do not have to be good
October 5th, 2008 | Uncategorized
This morning, in the biography of William James that I’ve been making my way through at the pace of about two paragraphs a day for the past year, he described the New England autumnof 1908 as “heartbreaking in its sentimentality.” And indeed, even one hundred years of disastrous human history and climate change later, the foliage is so spectacular, it’s almost maudlin. Here’s the moose yesterday, carrying Mt. Abe on her shoulders.
And here’s a movie I made this afternoon while I was yanking up roots from the garden and flocks of wild geese honked by overhead.
Check out my pal Phranc’s daily variety show on YouTube. If Mister Rogers and Peewee Herman gave birth to a l’il bulldagger, this is what she’d be like.
9 Responses to “you do not have to be good”
Both Phranc and the foliage are disarmingly picturesque.
Hahn’s Macaw! Sweeeeeet… I think it’s a Hahn’s, anyway.
I love that you put Mary Oliver as the title of this post. I was up in the Adirondacks this weekend, and I had that poem running through my bones as I crunched through the leaves. Yun.
I still remember that silly song, “Rodeo Parakeet”…
Ah, the lovely New England mountains. When I was much younger, and going to school in western Massachusetts, I used to love looking to the horizon and seeing the mountains. There’s something about looking at mountains and realizing that they’ll always be there, for millions of years.
And on a non-related note, I am seriously wondering: what if Sarah Palin became the first female U.S. president? What’s that high-pitched humming? Oh, it must be Susan B. Anthony spinning in her grave.
nice mary oliver reference. cleva’.
Last Saturday just before sundown I was handing out cookies to the homeless under the chilly walls of the Armory at Bedford and Atlantic in Brooklyn — and I happened to look up and there, beyond the walls and the wires, far off in the sky, there was a long line of geese flying from one edge of the sky to the other.
i have been dreaming of making time for the James bio. Should I?
i have been using oliver’s text in my work for almost as long as i have been reading you. and autumn’s capacity to stir every emotion at its deepest has to be one of the definitive markers of our species. (yes i know i just caused a syntactical hemmorage.) (yes i know i can’t spell)
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