O baffled, balk'd, bent to the very earth,

Oppress'd with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,

Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the        least idea of who or what I am,

But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch'd, untold, altogether        unreach'd.

—Walt Whitman

Greetings from the far left coast.

More decades ago than I care to think about I loaned a book by Gregory Corso to a friend. Upon returning it she told me that he had my style. It was the other way around of course.

I was eighteen when I found a copy of Corso's Gasoline at Joyful Alternative, a bookstore and headshop of that era a short walk down Green Street from the University of South Carolina campus. Allen Ginsberg wrote in the introduction: "Open this book as you would a box of crazy toys, take in your hands a refinement of beauty out of a destructive atmosphere." I did.

Corso stepped on a rainbow in 2001, two months shy of his seventy-first birthday. It was a wonderful surprise to learn of the forthcoming publication of a collection of poems written in the last years of his life. I do not know what to expect from the new book. Corso was an alcoholic and addicted to heroin. His output not surprisingly was uneven. I look forward to it nonetheless.

Gregory Corso. The Golden Dot: Last Poems, 1997–2000 (Lithic Press, 182 pp.).

Gregory Corso: A Most Dangerous Art, Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2021.

Washington DC residents have reportedly taken to flipping off People's Convoy truckers who invaded the city to stand up against vaccine and mask tyranny by clogging traffic on the DC Beltway. Truckers are miffed. One complained, "We go around the Beltway, birds are flying. Birds are flying everywhere. That’s the kind of people that live up there" (David Moye, Convoy Trucker Not Pleased That DC Drivers Keep Flipping Him Off, Yahoo!News, March 10, 2022). Perhaps they expected to be welcomed as liberators.

On Biden: "He's been working just like he does, like he's always done. He's steady. He's doing the best he can in a miserable pile of crap." —former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo).

I generally agree with Simpson's assessment. Biden's declarations that the US will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine are an exception. Putin is willing to risk wider war in Europe because he believes that the West is not. The presumed effect of statements about what the US and NATO are unwilling to do is that Putin will double down on the wager and take a harder line in any negotiations. It is one thing to take options off the table in internal deliberations within the administration and among allies. Taking them off the table publicly as Biden has done is counterproductive.

The nuts and bolts of aid to Ukraine are not as clear-cut as advocates for sending aircraft would have it. Plausible arguments have been made that Ukraine needs anti-anticraft and anti-tank weapons more than it needs planes. I do not possess sufficient illusion of expertise to weigh in on this beyond noting that It sounds reasonable. 

In Russia: Angry over invasion of Ukraine and fearing crackdown, Russians trying to move abroad crowd into few remaining trains and planes (Washington Post, March 9, 2022). It is hard to tell how extensive opposition is inside Russia. Recent surveys show that the majority of Russians support the invasion. But protests continue and some Russians have left the country, saying "they vehemently oppose the invasion and were alarmed by the Kremlin’s chilling crackdown on the few remaining platforms of criticism."

"It is pointless to remain. There is no future for us," said a man who left St. Petersburg by high-speed train for Helsinki with his wife and seven-year-old daughter. "Putin is crazy," said a woman who flew to Belgrade.

Two new blog posts. The piece about Portland's NW Film Center was written in haste born of desire to comment on events of the past week in a timely manner. As a consequence it is partial and incomplete. Much more could be said about the end of an institution I have treasured since discovering it my first winter here via the 1999 Portland International Film Festival.

• The Best in Us and the Worst in Us, March 4, 2022. The outpouring of support for Ukraine and for strong sanctions against Russia is heartening. Some of it is performative as people take to the Twit-o-sphere and other social media with inane memes and vapid clichés. The best though is genuine…read more>>
• Northwest Film Center (1971–2022), March 12, 2022. The headline news out of the NW Film Center's 2022 Cinema Unbound Awards on March 8 is that the NW Film Center is now PAM CUT (Portland Art Museum Center for an Untold Tomorrow). Director Amy Dotson announced the change at the end of the ceremony, hyping it as "a new name* for a new era."…read more>>

Keep the faith.

Stand with Ukraine.

yr obdt svt

Pictured below: Laurelhurst Park, afternoon, March 7, 2022