Pages from 'The Children's Encyclopedia'


2. Cranberry Firehall

Stinks to be in the engine
of always conspirin' & pokin'
where it ain't exactly required--

rattlin' around like a tooth
in a paint can achin' for inspection,
but like the firehall's multi-function

a ramp into space
is no longer an option,
no fire escape in the sky--

they're mixin' the gravity with somethin'
or somethin'--but its still a good thing
the lids this big, you turn it right down

step out onto the 'scape
for a couple of cupped Cameos & voila!
when you return everything

is exactly the same
except its ready now,
wreathed in glistening steam!

South Wellington Trees

just in case you hadn't heard, all the recordings of William Carlos Williams are here & free & in your house--kids today have it so lucky!

(pictures & lots else here on the History of Paterson NJ--useful for Williams, Smithson, Shirelles & Sopranos research!)

Pages from "The Children's Encyclopedia"

for Michael Szarpowski & Bruce Conkle


1. Cascadia Border Patrol

I'd like to stop kicking,
but every time I do
something spectacular happens

that people will pay to see--
it's not like its even down to me,
& running my fingers counting

bribes along envelope tops
hurts me as much
as these January pellets

raining from my winkle-pickers
must hurt you, but
Centralia's where the Inland Empire

meets the real Empire &
you've entered our domain
as an ark of infinite sustain--

orchards hazy with
ciderblink down to
Dorn's sound, lowering chopper

heat differential maps
of backpackers loaded
versus ornithologists

lightened by self-hypnosis,
though in real life
if surveillance gets

that close it's probably what's
in your thermos
they're after.

the divine Lani Hall, SERGIO MENDES & BRASIL'66 "Ye-Me-Le" (Music Scene, 1969) (they have Wichitah Lineman from the same show, too)

Nanaimo Trees

some kind soul has put the rarely-seen 1977 Muppet pastoral Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas up in 6 parts on YouTube. My cheap "fur"-lined corduroy jacket I call my "Emmet Otter Coat".

Nanaimo Townsite Arbutus

Rainbow from the "Queen of Oak Bay" Jan 3rd

Truly fantastic score over the holidays, found in the basement of the Literacy Nanaimo store for a measly 5 bucks during half-price boxing week, all ten volumes of an in-decent-shape late 40's edition of The Children's Encyclopedia edited by Arthur Mee, which I must have checked out of the libraries of Ayr a thousand times. I've been looking for a set for some time, but not for the 100 plus shipping I'd found it for online. Just how formative these books were to the development (for good or ill) of my mental habits and worldview didn't become fully clear until I curled up with them, each deeply etched illustration finding its latent impression in my mind--not to mention, the wandering Oxford commas...for a Quicktime movie version look here...

cold comfort from Bill Knott--

"But hey, don't let me stop you, poets. Go on, go ahead and kiss-ass praise the millionaire Pynchon, the millionaire Jasper Johns, praise all the success-practitioners of the Master arts, the crumbs from their tables may fill you yet. It's your duty as slaves to curry favor with those above you, to flatter and obsequiate your betters. And praise most those writers who began as poets but abandoned poetry, who betrayed poetry for the chance to move up the foodchain of the arts, after all if you could hum a tune you too might get rich like Leonard Cohen and fuck moviestars; you'd do it if you could, wouldn't you. Of course you would. Because, let's face it, who would want to be a poet when they could be a novelist or a songwriter or a screenwriter or a rockstar or a Cindy Sherman or a what's his name, that Brit artist who cuts sharks in half,—who would want to remain a poet, the lowest puke on the cultural totempole? Only a fool, a masochist, a scumbag, who can't weasel their way into any of the real arts, who has to sink to the bottom of the bard-barrel, the pegasus-dregs. Poetry, the most ignored, the least compensated of the arts. . . but you already know this; why am I wasting my time telling you what you already know..."

Boundary Bay Trees

The ugly truth about Peter Rabbit ...

"So far, my daughter and I have found Beatrix Potter to be a proselytiser for sadistic punishment, a sartorial fascist, a property-upholding reactionary, an obsessive-compulsive nutcase (or rather nut-kin) and, conceivably, a bystander in the face of an intolerable natural dystopia that, with her sick (though gifted) writer's mind, she culpably imagined. As an adult reader, I must say, I'm beginning to like her..."

Nanaimo Southend Trees

new history of Trees

"Rackham talks often about “storm effects”, and in particular about the ecological benefits of the 1987 hurricane, in its disordering of bland and uniform forestry lots. But I sense a metaphor here, too. A kind of storminess is what real woods and trees live with. They are not human pets or manservants. They are dynamic, autonomous, resilient, different... "

Rec'd (a year after languagehat) the very handsome Lee Valley reprint of Admiral W.H. Smyth's 1867 The Sailor's Word-Book--certainly the best single volume let's-get-lost browsing dictionary I've encountered since the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, enjoyable too on the level of Webster or Johnson in that it is so manifestly the work of one mind, but am sobered (if not discouraged) by magisterial naval historian N.A.M. Rodger's withering entry in the bibliography of his four-masted "The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649-1815"--"An extensive but haphazard, unscientific and often ambiguous posthumous work, heavily used by the editors of the "Oxford English Dictionary" for their forays into nautical vocabulary, in many cases with unfortunate consequences." Ouch! ten points for the double diss, five points for the use of "foray", which made me imagine the hapless land-lubber OED editors bailing like Jumblies in their sieve...