My analog memory, my type, a letter at a time

Analog world--typewriter, paper, book, wood table

I pulled  my uncle Mike's old Smith Corona electric typewriter  out of the garage this morning, where it's been gathering dust since he died almost two years ago.
Plugging it in, I searched for the on button, found it, heard it start humming. Rolled some paper into the carriage, and started typing the first thing that came to mind--
"These are the times that try men's souls...."
When the keys struck the paper, a mechanical snapping, the cats ran for the other room. Susan came down the hall, thinking I was making popcorn.
It's all Tom Hanks' fault. His article in the New York Times today, "I Am TOM, I Like to Type..." grabbed my attention. Tom Hanks collects old manual typewriters, and I don't have one of those, but the Smith-Corona comes as close as I can get, before I buy one on e-bay. They're cheap, most listed under $50, though shipping the heavy things will cost more.
This from a guy who can't type well at all. I was afraid I couldn't get into journalism school because I can't type fast and accurately, and have to look at the keys. But then, when I tried to  take it, it was called "typing," and was for business majors, or teenage girls training how to be secretaries and type correct business form letters. Today, it's called "keyboarding," and an essential for everyone, I guess--until voice recognition on computers does away with it. 
But, oh, this is so much fun...as long as I don't have to hand in whatever I'm typing, with all the errors. And now I am  tippy tapping on a computer keyboard to write this.
Apparently the article struck a chord with many others in love with the analog world. New Mexico photog Craig Varjabedian and friend Billye Johnson "liked" it almost immediately. I told Craig it was sorta like watching a black and white print come up in the developing tray, instead of digital photography. This follows a comment to him earlier about missing Tri-X, the 400 ASA speed film that saved me numerous times as a newspaper photographer. It's not by accident that there are several heavy old analog film cameras in our house. Not as heavy as that Smith Corona typewriter, but all with real substance, compared to this plastic cameras, and keyboard and computer.
This comes a week after I read poet Benjamin Myer's poem, "Sometimes I dream of the analog world," where he writes about playing records, paying cash, and rolling down the car window.

I saw this for sale a few years ago in Paris.

Now that I think about it, the weight of the analog machines says something about their permanence, their importance, compared to this ephemeral digital existence. I don't mean we need to go back  to living in the stone age, because we can't. Digital invades every aspect of our existence these days, except for farmer's markets, I expect.  I like digital cameras, and love computer typing because it is so effortless, and so easy to correct. But there is quality and value in the other.
It's one reason I make my writing students take notes on paper, and write freehand. There is some real sensory connection between paper and pencil and brain that happens, even if you can't read my handwriting. Of course, now they're ceasing to teaching cursive writing in schools. They have no idea what they're depriving people of.
The next thing I typed were my favorite lines of poetry, the line I think is the most powerful in America, from Whitman. One key at a  time, pushing down on the keys, hearing the key strike the paper, embedding the letters and words into my analog memory--
"When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed..."

The Sandias, first attempt

The Sandias at sunset, 12 by 16 watercolor, 300 pound d'Arches paper.

We grew up looking at the Sandia Mountains, at Albuquerque, New Mexico, which you can see in the photo in the blog title and below. After all these years, they always catch my eye and imagination.
I've never tried to paint them, until today. I guess they've been sort of a taboo. My dad painted them in oil and watercolor several times, and those paintings are masters of composition, art,  and craft. But today, inspired by that old black and white photo, I had to try. This is a first attempt, full of mistakes, but lessons learned, for  future attempts. I also learned that trying to paint this is exhausting, trying to get a sense of the drama and subject.
For those of you who don't know, the Sandias were named by some hot and homesick Spanish Conquistadors almost 500 years ago, as they marched up the Rio Grande valley toward La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asis, 60 miles north. When the sun sets, it causes dramatic shadows and  it can turn those granite cliffs red, and the forested top on layers of limestone looks like a rind on a watermelon ("Sandia" in Spanish.) 
The geologic story is also dramatic. The Rio Grand is a rift valley, and these mountains were thrust up, like a trap door at the edge of the Great Plains. You're looking at the west face, the door of the opening. On the other side, the mountains slope gently to the east. Sandia crest is over 10,000 feet high. Albuquerque, straddling the Rio Grande valley, is 5,000. The rock matching the granite and the to of the Sandias, is 5,000 feet below ground on the west side of the Rio Grande.
Of course today, Albuquerque is built right up to the mountains.

Boogie at the farmer's market

Going to a farmer's market is always a treat, both for good food, and for the sights, sounds and stories you can imagine or hear. It just got better in Edmond, with live music. I didn't catch the name of this local group, but there was bluegrass galore, and a great banjo.
Then you wander through the stalls, picking tomatoes and peaches and cantaloupes. I love the sounds and poetry of the names of the towns...Dibble, Porter, Newcastle, Blanchard, Rush Springs, Temple.
We'd be a lot healthier if we could just go to market like this every day, and prepare an evening meal with whatever was available.

You get more in contact with nature attending as well. On e week there is sweet corn, but not the next. Blueberries come and go, as do melons, squash, cucumbers. Though there is produce here from Texas and Kansas, I try to buy Oklahoma produce. I prefer Porter peaches, homegrown tomatoes, farm fresh eggs.
What a feast for all five senses--sight for the bright colors of the produce, hearing for the music and conversation, smell for the odors of fresh cantaloupe, touch for feeling the peaches to make sure they're ready, taste for the samples.
As my Daddy used to say, "Larrapin' Good."

Mammoths and more...pages of the summer

I like the kind of books you can skip around in and not necessarily read in order, front to back. Maybe that's why I like poetry books by authors I know. I can check the table of contents, or thumb through them, and find subjects that interest me most, as with Ben Myers' book, Lapse Americana.
Maybe it's because I have a short attention span, and am impatient, or have attention deficit disorder, though it hadn't been invented yet when I was growing up, so I was spared mind-numbing, creativity-killing drugs. Or maybe, I just like lots of different subjects.
But you can't go to Full Circle Bookstore, as I did to interview Myers (see previous post), and not stumble across a book or two to buy. 
Such it was when I discovered Stephen Harrigan's The Eye of the Mammoth. The title caught me, and then I thumbed through it, meeting a new author. Actually, he was born an Okie, but has spent most of his life in Texas, earning fame as a writer for Texas Monthly and as both a fiction and non-fiction author. He's really well known for his novel The Gates of the Alamo.
And oh, the selection of essays, most about Texas subjects, including mammoth kills sites, the death of Davy Crockett, the secret life of the beach, snapping turtles, hiking Big Bend. But there's more, some with Oklahoma connections like "Comanche Moon," about Quanah Parker and including information on Fort Sill. Then there was the one on the "ice man," the mummified stone age man found in the Alps recently, and the filming of Lonesome Dove. All of these and more in four sections, "Music in the Desert," "Highways and Jungle Paths," "The Shadow of History," and "Where is My Home?"
I've skipped around in it for several nights, and read all but one or two of them. It and Ben's poetry book made for a good July, the eighth and ninth books read this year.

Oklahoma poetry far deeper than our rivers

How do you write about poetry and poets? It's a current task I'm trying to solve for a future magazine article.
But when I met poet Ben Myers in Full Circle Bookstore recently for an interview, I realized there was another problem. I hadn't read his poetry. How can you write about a poet and never have read his poetry? So I ordered his new book, Lapse Americana, from Amazon. Myers, who teaches at OBU in Shawnee,  is catching a lot of attention in the state and nation. As with all these poets I've talked to or heard about, he is a story by himself. But that's later.
I want to tell you about this new book of his, published by a New  York publisher NYQ Books, which tells you his Oklahoma-based poetry transcends his subjects.
While he may be writing about his father's death--referred to in many poems, and who the book is dedicated to--, coffee, the analog world, divorce, tornadoes, Hamlet,  or hauling hay, among  these 70 poems in 116 pages, your imagination leaps at his imagery. It reminds me of some of those poems in The New Yorker, but they're easier to understand. His depth pushes you to think about life and savor words.

His poetry is far deeper than our shallow rivers.

A sampling:

From Odin (About Alzheimer's)
"My friend is forgetting
me, his mind a tree blooming
with bagworms, the gloss slipping
from once green trees."

From French Press--
"And the empty cup waits
like folded hands."

From Hauling Hay--
"...from fuel shaved from the scowling
 face of the prairie, ..."

From A Friend's Divorce--
"He's taken a scalpel to  his brain,
gingerly slicing out matter...."

From Tornado--
"The  utility poles
were a row of broken teeth..."

And finally, my favorite--

"A Family
is a fence line
 through tall grass,

"each post
bent
by a slightly different
wind."