DOMA Done

Word from on high came down today, and while they gave the bad news first (rolling back voting rights and women's rights), they did deliver a serious blow to the anti-gay marriage crowd. This can't really be shocking, right?

If you're trying to limit protection under the law to a specific segment of society, you're guilty of systemic discrimination. While it's been fifty years since the Civil Rights movement, it seems like some folks haven't learned anything, and while some things have gotten better, some things haven't changed at all.

Still, it's nice to be watching history play out.

Under the Knife Anniversary

I missed Saturday's anniversary. Saturday was stressful, but less than last year's June 15th. Today, June 18th, is the anniversary of being kept at the hospital and being cut and opened up and bolted back together. (Cue sound effect)

I was trying to work out my new edition of Robot Crickets by the 15th. That didn't happen, but this Friday may be the day. Those first editions will soon be a thing of the past. I'm not changing too much of the content, but I will for the third edition. That copy will be a bit more serious--at least that's my plans.

The program that I'm doing right now has me writing a ton, and when it's over, it looks like either I, or our entire cohort, will have a tidy little book about education, albeit by wide-eyed novices.

I've got other things coming as well...but you know...all in due time.

I had a thing on Saturday, and so did Corrie, and when I got home she was already here, getting some well-earned unwind-time. I got upstairs and noticed she was watching an animated feature. I heard a familiar voice and saw:

And all I could hear in my head was: "...and tell those dorks at the Kwik-E-Mart that BOOM I am outta here, I'm a dot, I'm gone..."

Now there's a reference puzzle for you...

Briefly Examining a Relic

My time getting to posts has been pinched, and maybe tomorrow, Friday, will prove more fruitful for this venue, but I thought I'd mention quickly a relic I've discovered.

For me, like usual, relics consist of books.

At the $1 Bookstore in downtown Long Beach, a place even more disheveled than you may imagine, I was digging around in some stacks when I saw the following cover:

I squinted and looked closer, and was pretty sure that was the Ben Franklin statue in San Francisco. Checking the spine of the slim book I saw the title: Trout Fishing in America; and the author: Richard Brautigan.

I opened it up and took a look at the title page:

There was a note that about the cover on the page with  the publication information (it was the SF Franklin statue) and noticed it was published originally in 1967.

I saw that the "chapters" numbered more than thirty, for a book with less than one-hundred-fifty pages. It was published in 1967. It was composed somewhat in the years leading to 1967 in San Francisco. Those three things coupled with that title page led me to a specific conclusion standing in the bookstore: holy moly, this must be an LSD relic.

And it totally is.

One thing it's specifically not is a novel, like the title page says. It's a somewhat lucid collection of pieces, some of which are quite excellent, many of which are frivolous and "experimental" (please remember, in literature, mostly experimental = bad)(I know from personal experience), and a few others are random and possibly connected to each other, and possibly composed while wasted on acid.

Trout Fishing in America at times is the name of a character, at other times is the name of a recipe, and others, just the simple activity that it sounds like. Trout are the spirit animals of the book, a legacy that's influenced Tom Robbins with Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and whooping cranes, and then, passing it along to me with my current novel and bobcats.

I looked up some information on Brautigan. He was mentioned by Patton Oswalt in Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, Patton's treatise on personal history and artistic-minded outcasts, as an influence. He was a big member of the sixties literary movement, apparently, but today Brautigan's influence and importance are disputed.

Influence may be one thing, something maybe easier to establish. But it seems the main debate is on importance. Many folks think the book is brilliant and maybe a milestone. I've seen one "review" that claimed the collection of pieces were connected and made the entire enterprise a novella if not a novel. Once, back in 2002, I put together a collection of "loosely related" pieces that made up one whole story, and from experience I can safely say that a novel/novella is not made by this action.

I can think of another loosely connected short fiction collection that is actually a work of genius: Jesus' Son, by Denis Johnson. Widely regarded as a masterpiece of the form--short fiction--it has never been forced into a categorical title like novel or novella. (I can't recommend that tiny book loudly enough.)

So, my own opinion on this particular book falls closer to one of the few dissenters on the site I was examining. He claimed that the time period for which this book was speaker of and speaker to has passed, and the context in which it is important is not necessarily around anymore, which means it doesn't transcend it's publishing context.

In any case, the book's a trip. Like, literally.

It's definitely not specifically bad...in fact it's mostly charming. I guess I didn't mean to take it to task, just the notion that it's some awesome thing from the hippie era that still influences folks today. That notion, which I've encountered on the Internet, is one with which I do not agree.

Happy Birthday Norm!

So, good buddy, we had a blast this past weekend. I'm not sure if you noticed how Tyler's eye lit up a when he saw the subtitle for that CCF book (How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Rob the Terrorists). That's kinda what I was hoping for from that audience.

The pictures Jules took look pretty great, and here's one Corrie took of the two of us, where somehow I look both angry and taller than you, which, of course, neither was/is the case:

This seems like a good place to announce that while my posting will be light, I've been planning on a series of Robot Cricket-like pocketbook paperbacks that are various collections of polished blog posts. I was thinking of calling them, like the column on the left, Essential Caliboy, but more likely The Essential Caliboy Series. Currently I'm looking at between 9 and 12 separate little (or not so) pocketbooks, a collection of some of the very best from the blogs that can be taken anywhere (or sent anywhere) and can help raise the profile of this enterprise before I go after my first novel.

Would taking the posts off the blogs fundamentally change their status as Literature? Likely not, since it's just a type of content.

Maybe in the memories of the people who know, there was a piece I wrote while living in New York called "Forgery for Lingerie". It was fully before my blogging era by two years, but it completely prefigures one of my types of posts. I'll be getting into that more in a separate pocketbook paperback, actually.

So...eh...Happy Birthday Norm!

Art at the Getty Center

This is mostly a catalog of what inspired me and my imagination, or otherwise important stuff.

This is a glass that was used for drinking games in the 1300-1400s. The nose was from where you'd drink:

This next picture might have been my favorite. It is a scene of cormorant hunters in the Venetian lagoon, but really the scene takes place in the early years of what would become Venice. Houses got built on dry patches in the lagoon, those houses were shifted into palaces as income increased, and then those lagoon islands came together into what we have today. But first, there were Italic hunters fleeing the Germanic hordes in the lagoon:

Walking by, the ladies here caught my eye. Dang, I thought, that sure looks like da Vinci. It was, mostly. It came from his workshop studio, so if he didn't do those faces and flowing dresses specifically, they were done in specifically his style:

Euclid! This is the well-known mathematician Euclid who in antiquity compiled all the known material on Geometry into a book, known as the Elements, and even though the amount of original work attributed to him is low, what he did with compilation was so important, he is remembered very fondly throughout the discipline:

Here's a closeup of his Elements:

This one made me laugh. There's fight going on in the center, with the guy on the right squirting lemon in the eye of the guy on the left while the two on the far right laugh at them. The lady on the far left seems unduly scared:

A very cool 1700s microscope:

The largest pastel in the world, a portrait of the French parliament's president:

Cool battle-mace from Minerva, goddess of war:

The first black portrait, something for which both Victor and I were keeping an eye out:

Monet's wheat-stacks:

Van Gogh's lilies:

There were also two pieces from  Gauguin, a few Cezannes, and a few other names from the early modern age (Degas, Matisse, etc...). That particular room was relatively small compared with the rest of the collection, but it did have heavyweights.

We'll have to go back to make sure we caught everything, but likely not for a time.

The Getty Center

With Corrie's mom visiting the Southland on her west coast tour, we decided it was a good time to head to the Getty Center for the first time. The Getty is like LA's Louvre, and, frankly, is one of this country's preeminent museums. The museum could possibly be my favorite institution, but that's not germane to this discussion.

Getty, the man, made his fortune in oil, and has left for society two museums: the center, on a mountain overlooking Santa Monica and the LA basin; and the Getty Villa, a smaller place closer to Malibu. I'm not sure how much the Villa charges, but the Center, where we went, is free. If you have bike and are near the base, it would be free. For most of the visitors, those who drive, parking is fifteen bucks, and there is a tram that takes you to the top of the hill, and the complex of architect Richard Meier's buildings unfolds from there, in its blinding whiteness:

Above is the approach from the tram, and below is one of the views on the hazy day we went. The day cleared up as it got later, but early on it was this hazy:

Here's our crew, Carol, Corrie, Victor and myself:

This post is going to be more of a location stuff, and a separate post will have some discussion of some of the pieces there.

The lines of sight created from the geometric white shapes are interesting:

And here's a courtyard in between some of the pavilions (this is where we snacked):

West LA's downtown is cutoff in this picture as I attempted to frame downtown LA:

Here's a shot of the cactus garden with West LA visible in the distance:

This is a hedge design at the bottom of the waterfall:

Richard Meier loves his white geometric shapes:

Here's the waterfall above the hedge design at the rest of the Center in the background:

The bulk of the artwork is from the Renaissance, or maybe 1300s-1700s, which  encompasses the Renaissance.

All in all it was a beautiful Saturday on the mountain:

Happy Birthday Dan!

Last year at this time I was preparing to go to Sacramento to help with my brother's wedding and our mom's busted ankle and I scratched out a birthday post. I'm posting a link here to that post because it has links to the first three "Happy Birthday Dan!" posts. My brother's birthday is the best way for me to commemorate the years operating this blog, since it was the first event that got mentioned in a recurring way.

Well, this is mostly anticlimactic. Happy Birthday Brother! Love you!

Dan with the Sentries