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Novembrie Six plastic liter and a half soda bottles, tops screwed on, float in the windless and stagnant culvert pool, top to top, radiating into an accidental star The strange and ubiquitous presence of brownfields, garbage and trash The peculiar emphatic of rainsoaked newspapers sodden on a driveway The way sheet plastic goes to opaque windblown slivers as it weathers Trash mountains from Fresh Kills to Kursosawa's Dodes'ka-den Through the junk words of junk-mail ad-copy TV-scripting blather hype Words as moneycraft technique and words as lies We flop around submerged in superfluous and calculated words "The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary" Watched Wanda Landowska one Connecticut November Saturday afternoon, a fluster of energy in mauve and black karakul in a Lakeville grocery. At the checkout she turned to wave a wide goodbye to all Condensation on the store's plate glass window in the cold, already dark outside, gritty asphalt tile floor, the cranked cash register rang up the sour cream she bought, its cash drawer jumped out She who single-handedly saved the harpsichord, principle instrument of the Baroque, from oblivion "The splendor of late medieval happiness has still not completely vanished; it survives in folk song, in music, in the quiet horizons of landscape paintings and in the sober faces seen in portraits" Such a happiness seemed to hang about her Stood agape a few feet from her, the only indisputably significant person I'd ever seen When Claude Simon first arrived in New York, he immediately left for the Philadelphia Museum to see the Duchamps Simon often writes of syzygy, and all the ways of the sun No matter how brilliant Simon's technique leads into the universal, global is not a word used much in French Marcel Duchamp, when asked what he was doing after giving up painting, would answer that he was a respirateur As if in proof that bird names are more complicated in French than they need to be, he called them out as they appear. His plate glass window looked out across her garden to the lake The tourterelles turques, sittelles torchepots, and mésanges charbonnières, huppées and bleues And the foulques macroules, goélands cendrés and harles bièvres out on the water near the slup-clupping floating docks, their strange coot-cry sputter toy short-flight squirty spray Coots readily could turn up in an alien universe with pangolins, wildebeests, armadillos, horned toads and eelpouts Zinc orange is a moderate to strong orange yellower and lighter than carrot red, lighter than Mars yellow, redder than sunburst Chrome orange is a vivid reddish orange that is yellower and much lighter than international orange, and duller and yellower than golden poppy. It is also called orange chrome yellow Le Pen's depleted National Front fürhrered by an embittered para who came out of an Algerian street battle minus an eye Like a French Hulk Hogan, like a transexual variation of Dorothy's Parker's Big Blonde Russia's population, less than Indonesia's and Brazil's now and barely larger than Japan's, has been collapsing in malnutrition, rotten health care and alcohol Near Ostrava in the Czech Republic there are still naked hills with no green at all on the mineral earth In eastern Germany, mountains and sloughs of industrial waste from chemical plants south and west of Halle Small cities like Plauen are not much more than abandoned factories Since 1989 Cold weather in Eastern Europe this week with minus fifteen in the Romanian mountains. The hilly streets of Sighisoara, the old medieval German houses stuccoed now in Romanian raspberry and blues On the way to Baia Mare's lead and zinc smelters A long haul northwest across Transylvania from Brasov that itself is still on the farside of the Carpathians from Bucharest Easiest to fly to Budapest, rent a car to get to there Baia Mare The most direct route would be through Debrechen, still in Hungary, but there is no border point to the east there and so through Oradea and south down the line on the Romanian side Oradea, founded by St. Ladislas in 1080, was destroyed by the Tatars in 1241, was held by the Turks 1660-92, and after the First World War was ceded to Romania, but occupied again by Hungary in the Second War, and is back as part of Transylvania now The way things are in southeastern Europe Where since the acceptance of postwar communist regimes, people have died in their forties and fifties from lung cancer in desperate numbers in smelter towns like Baia Mare As the smelters still sinter away Now under a half moon mildly occluded by drift smoke over shadowless snow The season's rocker moon, the dog-tooth moon Imposing itself on everyone who looks up, demanding alert attention something in the manner of the deeply narcissistic excellence of Rembrandt's self-portraits He painted over sixty of them His portrait subjects, Polish noblemen with fur hats, Staal Meesters, and images of himself, are imbued with awareness beyond themselves It's in their eyes That strange prescient sogginess about their eyes In her gloriously productive advanced years, Wanda Landowska did not, hers flashed and darted We can know only through fine painting, photography now to a degree, but best from having actually seen Purcell we'll never know, cryptic Purcell, died at 35, like so many other urbane provincials of note before and after, apparently never left London Schubert, dead of typhus at 31, almost never left Vienna Sorrel is a brownish orange to light brown that is darker than caramel, yellower than tawny, and redder than raw sienna The tainted soil near the smelters at Baia Mare In which the children play All of us are in great part of where we were and what we did when we were ten Avidly absorbing everything Haydn's 39th, written in 1770, the year Beethoven was born, was his first minor-key symphony Out from Geneva in a misty dawn on the narrow road through Hermance toward Evian One of the three California coast redwoods at Chateau Beauregard off that road is gone It was felled recently and bucked into massive blocks Those big trees were set as seedlings in the late 1800s at the same time as the redwoods in the palace garden in Soglio at the other end of Switzerland in the Bergell From Chateau Beauregard, that then as now was Savoyard, Nyon is barely perceptible diagonally across the lake Endives la flamande, mousseline de poisson au Saint Pierre, fromage Staring up the long glacial lake's drooping shape Papaya orange brilliant vivid red astringent lime juice squeezed above its balanced wedge Families in Savoy and the Valais were defined as poor if they had hollows carved in the planks of their table instead of owning bowls The orange setting sun "So the trail had started, with just a little stream of white men coming through, and the Indian had lifted his hand in welcome and went out to smoke and watch this lengthening village of the whites that moved past him day after day all summer, always headed in the same direction. He wondered that he never saw them come back, yet they must be the same ones each year, for there could not be that many people on all the earth" +++++++++++++++ Sampling credits to Borges; Huizinga (from the new translation); Sandoz in Crazy Horse: Strange Man of the Oglalas.

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