Kosher Fluids

Victory Boulevard and Willowbrook Road, Staten Island

Traffic Lights

The traffic jam on the Garden State Parkway suddenly dispersed. Just where the rainbow began--or ended. The Pot of Gold? (Photo: Monica A.)

Wireless

Roosevelt Ave. (June 2011)

Postscriptum

How sad that my life has not come to mean
for you what your life came to mean for me.
. . . How many times in vacant lots have I
consigned my copper coin, crowned with the seal
of state, to that webbed universe of wires,
attempting hopelessly to stretch the time
of our connectedness . . . Alas, unless
a man can manage to eclipse the world,
he's left to twirl a gap-toothed dial in some
phone booth, as one might spin a ouija board,
until a phantom answers, echoing
the last wails of a buzzer in the night.

Joseph Brodsky (September 1967)

Turning Back the Clock

Rest stops are being renovated or replaced everywhere I go. Maryland House on the southern stretch of New Jersey Turnpike, the old McDonalds-centric stops along 95 outside of New Haven, and the little brick bungalows along the Merritt Parkway in southwestern Connecticut (above). They are gradually moving the pumps away from the front of the building and further into the rest stop (a very good idea) and giving the houses a facelift. In the process, they are replacing the old clocks, like this one:

BTW, we stopped at around 11 A.M.

No Backing out Now

Charles Olson's car without reverse gear recalls another poet car, David Antin's theft-proof Sunbeam, with its backwards gearbox (shifting into first put it into reverse, and v.v.). Your correspondent's mother and family archivist reminds us of the boyfriend of an older cousin, whom we called 'Phizzu' because he wore an old FSU sweatshirt or T-shirt. He drove an old Volvo (I think) which had no reverse: he would always park where he could pull out straight.

Peel P50

A little on-line research uncovered the Peel P50, a street-legal car produced in England from 1962-65, with no reverse gear. The car was  134 cm (53 in) long, 99 cm (39 in) wide, and 134 cm (53 in) high. According to Answerbag.com, the P50 was not a big seller since it was very unstable, cramped, and noisy." It cost £198 and got 100 mi/gallon (take that hybrids). I guess, no reverse gear was the least of your problems. Cute though.

Peel Engineering still exists and has produced a limited number of new P50s. Here's a TopGear video of the P50 in action:

Smoke and Rearview Mirrors

I was tipped off to Edward Dorn's "101 poems" (for the California's U.S. Rte. 101, of course) by the British writer, Iain Sinclair, in his new book American Smoke: Journeys to the End of Light. Sinclair covers a lot of ground, investigating and reimagining the intersecting lives of writers Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Malcolm Lowry, Lew Welch, Gary Snyder, Tom Clark, and others.

Beautiful cover, folds out into a placemat. Strange that it only has one car, Neil Cassady's '49 Hudson, hovering up around Jack Kerouac's Lowell, when so many of the stories have to do with cars. How could it be otherwise...

Olson in Gloucester

Here's a good one about Charles Olson, the thundering prophet of Projective Verse and biographer-mythologist of Gloucester, Mass.:

Olson's car didn't do reverse. When a friend, sent out from the upstairs apartment with the great veiw, on the point, right over the Inner Harbor, to fetch cigarettes and whisky for another all-night session, sandwiches even, asked, with some trepidation, how Charles managed this thing, navigating the icy streets in a defective motor, the poet said: 'Never go backwards.' Arm raised--so!--gloved fist clamped to the fence, Russian cap and trailing coat. 'That way. Always that way now.'

More to come...

Texting at the Wheel

In Edward Dorn's collection, Hello, La Jolla (1978), There is a lovely little black-and-white photo, a profile, taken by Jennifer Dorn, of Dorn driving on a mountainside highway. It introduces the so-called  "101 section."

As Dorn explains, poems in this section were written "with one hand tied to the steering wheel, driving. I mention this not to mention writing is still capable of illegality, but that it is necessary beyond considerations of place and time. A rather open scrawl while one's eyes are fixed on the road is the only trick to be mastered."

Here's the first poem in the series, "A View, from 101":

One flew over the Cuckoo's nest
Playing right next to
Trailer Park Village

The factory neatly retailing
Its product