27 diciembre 2012

early morning excitement: the sound of water; rain? no; flood? yes

acequia running? yes; overflowing? no; fountain? yes: pipe break
in the vineyard irrigation system; rapid response from management? no

maybe our olive trees will like it; certainly the weeds will

330 houses damaged by lemon-sized hail

70 people treated at hospitals

11 head wounds

one child sent to BA for treatment

5 people fell from roofs

80 tobacco farmers lost their crop

photo courtesy of El Tribuno Salta

Jane Kenyon’s Otherwise & Hayden Carruth’s Letters to Jane over cappuccino:

dark outsider ambushed by joy, gruff familiar bound to mitigate pain

from Louis Menand’s Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and his Contemporaries:

the author of the fourth “Prelude” feels obliged to demonstrate his ineptitude . . . conceits become riddles . . . the rhyme scheme is disheveled; pronouns displace one another without any apparent narrative authorization. His first stanza is a syntactical cul-de-sac: it cannot seem to decide whether to become a sentence or not, and what looks like synecdoche — the feet, fingers, and eyes — turns out to be fragmentation, parts without wholes. The text itself becomes a sign for what nothing in the text can quite manage to signify: the trouble with the form is a trope for trouble with the emotion. The trouble with the emotion is that it cannot discover whether it is sincere, and not a hallucinatory four-o’clock-in-the-morning thought, because all the objects on which it seeks to ground itself threaten to turn into figures of speech. The trouble with the form is that without a figure of speech to give the objects a grammatical field in which to play, no emotion will be recognizable. It is the problem posed by a poetic that has declared what is merely literary to be illegitimate: where everything must be genuine, everything will end up looking artificial.

Over the past two days Mike has painted the south-facing,western-patio-facing wall of the parilla the same glorious green color (Verde que te quiero verde) as the garden walls. 

the photo does not do justice to the verde

When Mike removed the firewood underneath the parilla grill, he found sixteen toads — sapos — waiting out the heat of the day & tossed them all into the garden to find new hiding spots while he painted.