The rain this weekend brought the snow down. The banks along the road had the appearance of bunkers, white rounded, dirty. Like something you're meant to scramble over and then, as in Gallipoli, go to shreds in a hale of bullets.

I had trouble shoveling the walk out to the Galaxie and stopped even trying. I got bigger, better boots! That's one solution. And also the strange warm/cold/warm/cold has created a lowland of ice. Ice everywhere beneath everything. I've fallen a few times. When old people fall they think, "Well, this is it. I'm done for." Images of death and nursing homes.

When the winter finally dies into the warm palm of my hand, I long to get out into the woods. And for whatever reason I have this image of my old self sitting on a stump and getting rest in that way.

AMV 31 Happenstance/Drillwork has been posted. The description: "In which Sherwin takes a subscription to the Lemon Times, which newspaper he cannot read without special processing.”

Rough old time with olde 31. First, I didn't want to write about the murdering dismal snow, so I went back in time to the hard rains of October/November when I first began getting the Lemon Times. And then I had so many different things and stories to tell about that...but this imprisoning winter is so dissatisfying and so disruptive in so many ways that I could not rightly concentrate.

So there, I blame the snow.

Bastard from a Basket!

Saw There Will Be Blood last night. It's the closest thing I think I've ever seen to a novel. It really sits inside me like a book. And like an old book. Like something from Nathaniel West or Flannery O'Connor. There's a huge gulf of loneliness layered over a kind of silent scream of horror.

Not my favorite film - though I guess the world had led me to believe that I might assess it so. There was greatness all through it and it was artful, but it wasn't important to me. It's themes and movements were all incredible - but I just don't particularly care at this moment about Things Awful.

There was an impressive amassing of verbal silence. Just not a lot of talking. And the talking that was there was peculiar and dream-like, though pedestrian.

There was silence and there was absence. John Fowles wrote something about admiring certain novelists talent for "absence". For not including certain fragments or tie-togethers. For leaving things out. For letting the reader fill things in. PTA has this talent for absence.

Like Magnolia I sensed some lurking cartoon quality throughout. I have no idea where this comes from - maybe just my own strangeness.

And I keep wondering how much Daniel Day Lewis Made the movie. Without him, what would it have been? I can't imagine. He's more than the movie. The movie was like the skin of the story that falls off us at the end when we go into the dark. And it's seen that the story wasn't important at all. Just the person moment by moment.

Anyway - beautiful film made of flint and weeds.

Peas Hold!

Finished Peas Hold around midnight and sent off. Mooch wrote back "this is the business". I love slang cooked up in the crockpot of another culture. When I've been abroad in the past I've been wary of my use of language. Not that I'm much of a slanger, but I didn't want to speak some witches brew that wouldn't be understood.

But foreigners here seem aware that slinging slang is charming and colorful.

Why can't I go abroad and put some slang here and there? Instead I talk like the President of the company. Clearly and businesslike as though the point of communication were absolutely fact based and bottom line. "I would like a glass of water." "Could you please tell me where the Eiffel Tower is?"

But that's a kind of difference between Americans and the rest of the world. We always want to communicate our needs whereas everyone else wants to communicate the idea of who they are.

N-E-W Peas Hold.

AMV1 - Abandoned Barns

Sherwin begins his extended narrative with a recollection from childhood.