I got home from work yesterday, delayed a bit by helping a friend move some furniture with my truck, and after checking for bears I put on my generator and started to make dinner. I pressed play on my CD player, and West End Girls by the Pet Shop Boys comes on, the preferred music of my recent visitor and college roommate Will Corwin. One of the gifts of visitors is the slight impress that they leave when they go – the smiles that you get when you hear those first few notes of a song you might otherwise not put on.
God Bless Friends.
05-Aug-12Where the Bad Bears Go.
05-Aug-12After waking up with a bear on top of my truck, I had forty-eight hours without a bear visit. On Saturday, however, he showed up at my back door at six in the morning. I had somewhat oafishly booby-trapped the back door, putting a cooler full of water in the doorway leading into the extension, so I could hear him splashing his way in. Which he did, putting his paws in the water without moving the cooler at all. I heard the splashing and immediately woke up. I roared from my sleeping loft, grabbed my axe, and headed downstairs. I heard him scrambling to get away. He must have jumped over the cooler because he didn’t splash on his way out. There were two wet paw prints on my back screen door. Since then I’ve gone another thirty hours without seeing him.
I went down to town hall on Thursday to mention that I had a “bear problem.” I was told that there was no way they would move the bear; our town clerk, Joy, said, “When there are problem bears from other places in the state, this is where they’re moved to – to the town of Denning.” I was also told that I should not shoot the bear; it was out of season and illegal. She gave me the phone number of a park ranger to discuss the situation, and she said that there was a bear biologist assigned to the area, and in case of last resort he would come and shoot the bear. Right now I’m willing to let things be. The bear wants into my cabin; this is not good; but he is still afraid of me and so for now the situation is not unbearable.
Amazing and weird religious drawings from a band called The Desert Fathers. Amazing.
Bear Trashes the Cabin.
02-Aug-12I returned home in the late afternoon yesterday, feeling a bit tired from a pair of days in the city. The cabin looked fine, but as I came up to the front door I paused – there was a beer can by the front door. I had guests last weekend, and we drank more than a few beers, so this was not altogether unexpected – but there were two holes and a dent in the can. I looked at it for a few seconds – they weren’t bullet holes. Did one of my guests take the time to puncture a beer can twice for no reason? And with what tool?
It’s hard to say if we suspect things are wrong because we quickly register such small bits of incongruous data, or if we get a feeling something is wrong and then look with heightened awareness at our surroundings. But I opened the front door of the cabin and knew immediately what had happened. The back door was wide open. On the floor were broken plates, piles of napkins, bottles of liquor and water, and the food containers that had been in the cabinets. The kitchen cabinets were open. The floor was covered in grass seed – I had several bags of grass seed that I had stored under the kitchen counter, and they had been ripped apart and dragged out into the extension. The shelves in the cabinets had been pulled down. A bear had gotten into the cabin.
I immediately knew that I had been stupid, and that this was the single greatest mistake I had made since moving to the mountains four years ago. I had to work Sunday as well as drive my guest home; we had a few beers Saturday night and then left the cabin by 7 a.m. Sunday morning; we did a very meager job cleaning up and we left food in the cabin; and I had left the back door open. I do this sometimes when I go to work – a little air circulation does not hurt during the summer – but I knew I had been an idiot to leave only a screen door between a bear and an empty cabin filled with food – for two whole days, no less.
Stepping outside did not make me feel better. In a little clearing in the ferns about thirty feet from the cabin I found what must have been the bear’s first meal: five chocolate bars and a bag of rice that was adjacent to them in the cabinet. There was absolutely nothing left but wrappers. The chocolate is the smelliest thing I have and I have every reason to believe it was the primary lure for the bear. After finishing the chocolate and rice, I suspect he returned to the cabin for more, choosing the things that smelled the most and (disturbingly) eating them a little bit closer to the cabin each time. So the corn chips and (open bag of) unshelled pecans got devoured twenty feet away; then ten feet away he finished off sealed bags of raw almonds, sunflower kernels, dried soup packets, and raisins; and right outside the cabin door he left a bag of grass seed, unfinished. The only good news was that he didn’t feel comfortable enough to eat inside the cabin: he knew that it was dangerous territory and not a good place to stay. But it appears he got increasingly comfortable with each successful trip to the kitchen.
I don’t know how long he was here but he did not finish off the contents of my cabinets. There were still two cabinets he never got to, as well as a bag of grass seed he never opened. Nor did he finish the first bag of grass seed he tried to drag off. So I had no doubt that he knew where the food was and that there was plenty of it. My cabin had become one of his caches. So he was coming back. All I could do was clean up his mess and wait for him.
And come back he did, around 7:30 p.m., just as twilight was setting in – “Exactly on time,” I said as I heard the first footfalls in the forest. He was walking past the front of the cabin, nosing his way around the campfire – damn, there were still some beercans out there – and I came right out to say hi to him. I’ve noticed this before about this bear, but he didn’t notice me at first – he seems to lack the sensory awareness of a wild animal – he just kept walking past, nose to the ground. I clicked at him and got his attention. He looked at me with unusually hateful, almost canine eyes – visible in the shot I took of him at the time, which I recommend clicking onto for a closer look – and I felt that he was processing the situation: “Damn, that lazy S.O.B. over there has gotten into my own private little stash. But he looks too big to try to drive off. I tell you, if I weren’t just a little bear I’d go right over there and put the fear of God into that skinny little writer-dude. People seem to be everywhere nowadays. I wonder how they taste? Maybe next year.” So he put his nose down again and started ambling off.
Of course that was not good enough for me. He couldn’t just decide to leave – I was going to make him go. So I grabbed a two-pound rock, roared at the top of my lungs – the human voice is so impressive, I am sure I have never made that much sound before in my life – and the bear bolted down the mountainside. I threw the rock straight and far and true, but as he was going downhill I couldn’t tell if I hit him or not. If I didn’t hit him, I sure was close to him, because he took it up another gear and as I ran down the mountainside after him I saw him moving faster than I have ever seen any bear move. If you told me he was going forty miles an hour I would believe you. He was moving as fast as the fastest dog I’ve ever seen. So much for bears not being able to run downhill. As he vanished I realized that if he had charged me from the very beginning at that speed I might not have been able to get back into the cabin – only about six feet away – before he covered the sixty feet between us. That’s how fast he was.
It was then time for me to spend a nervous night at the cabin. The animals of the forest seemed to know I would be on edge and they took full advantage of it. I heard some rustling about in the extension, went over there and saw – of all things – a young ermine, or so I believe it was, a weasel of some sort, I had never seen an animal like this before. It looked like a chipmunk that someone had stretched to be about ten inches long. It was incredibly long and skinny, with a brown coat and white underbelly. He went around the entire extension, looking into everything, and seemingly unperturbed by my presence. I opened the screen door and stood there, and he very nearly walked right by and came into the cabin. He’d be a great guy to have around, obviously, to control the rodents that have been enjoying my garden. Though it looked like a chipmunk would give this guy a pretty good fight – as I said, he was very skinny, and though twice as long as a chipmunk he didn’t look like he had any more heft.
I closed and locked all the doors before going to sleep, and shut the ground-floor window. I also brought my maul in and slept with it by my bed. In the middle of the night, sure enough, I heard what sounded like some large animal eating a plastic flowerpot. I came out – honestly, I don’t know where I got the courage, I’m sure now it came from not thinking about it, I just knew that I had to drive the bear away and had to be resolute about it – and found a raccoon ripping open some tupperware that the bear had apparently not finished. His eyes glowed orange in the light. So I yelled at him and off he went.
It was not a great night for sleep, but there were no more events until morning, when I heard the noise of cracking plastic around 7 a.m. I opened my eyes and looked out the window and there was the bear on top of my car, swatting at the windows. I would have preferred to utterly terrify him, but I was afraid he would break the car window while I was gathering my rocks and readying my voice, and so I just yelled at him from the window. He looked up and then sheepishly jumped off the hood of the car and loped into the woods. I went out and yelled more, but he was already out of rock range. He was moving disappointingly without the fear he had the day before, however.
He had cracked the rainguard that protects my driver’s side window. There were also a couple of scratches and some neat pawprints on both the hood and the roof. There was nothing in the car but a banana peel. The good news is that he didn’t try the cabin, but maybe he just hadn’t gotten there yet.
So I’ve really messed things up here, and put myself and the bear in a fair amount of danger. I knew he was trouble before, and now this trouble is on my own doorstep. I will talk to some people at town hall and see what they recommend. He’s just a young bear – honestly, he’s not much bigger than I am, maybe two hundred pounds or so – but he already has a malicious face. This is only the beginning of the trouble. [For more on the bear go here. He only came back that one more time.]
Horatian Easychair.
02-Aug-12Something I have never seen before, an easy-chair whose cover is stitched with quotations from Horace’s Ars Poetica. “There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.” Unfortunately the shop, in Delhi, New York, where this was seen, was closed. “It is not enough that poems should be beautiful; they shall be sweet; they shall send the soul of the listener wherever they want it to go.”
The Wolfman.
02-Aug-12The Film Forum is hosting a celebration of the work of Universal Pictures – a studio which has been operating for a hundred years now. One of its programs was a triple feature of three classic horror films, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and The Wolfman. I had time to catch only the last film of this triple feature. Most of these old pictures play very lightly on the senses: the visually limited in-studio shots, the lack of color, the coyness before blood or the human body, and the stagey and simplified acting distinguish them from the sensory bludgeoning of more modern pictures. It’s hence a fairly pleasant way of spending an hour or two with a friend.
The Wolfman is distinctive for its Poe flavor. The film begins with a shot of an encyclopedia: a volume is then removed, and opened to the page on lycanthropy. The audience is then given an opportunity to read the simplified entry; it’s a visual way of beginning a story the way Poe might, with a brief description of an intellectual problem: in this case whether or not such a supernatural phenomenon could exist, and whether it is a transformation of the body or a kind of madness in the mind.
The story is set in an old English village dominated by an old manor-house, Castle Talbot. A “hunting accident” – which seems more sinister in retrospect – has taken the life of the eldest son of the house, and the younger son, by nature something of a “rude mechanical” played by Lon Chaney, is suddenly the heir and recalled from a prodigal-son life wandering around America. He seems utterly out of place from the very beginning. His father, Sir John Talbot, played with effortless ease by Claude Reins, has turned the tower into an observatory – another great Poe touch – but the younger son’s entire interest in astronomy is in tightening the screws on the stand and spying on the local ladies with the telescope.
Chaney is turned into werewolf, by an elaborate and trite supernatural series of events involving gypsy fortunetellers, the blooming of the wolfbane, some pentagrams, a silver cane, and a bite from a wolf. He then goes on to commit a series of murders as a wolf. The villagers, however, believe that the younger son is a murderer plain and simple, without any supernatural mediation. Chaney himself is aware that he has become a monster, and intriguingly much of the movie is about his own anguish at what he has become. This leads to some Poe-like meditations on the capacity of even good men for evil:
Even a man who is pure in heart
And says his prayers by night
May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright.
There is also a doctor, who believes that lycanthropy is a mental derangement, causing a person to believe he is a wolf – yet another Poe touch. Visually the movie is committed to the physical transformation of Chaney into the Wolfman, but it is strongly suggested that the entire thing may be in the crazy young man’s head.
The result is a generally entertaining film – although some of the Wolfman makeup is a bit ridiculous, especially the wolfman boots which require Chaney to walk on his tippytoes – with just enough thoughtfulness and compassion to justify its taking up of an intelligent person’s hour. The gypsy scenes were also inspiring for me – I want to build a gypsy wagon and park it on my property as a guest house – not least because of Bela Lugosi’s performance as the old gypsy “Bela” – one might say he was merely playing himself. And the visual language of the movie in general gave me room for thought. The entire movie is Gothic: shot in panelled interiors of pointed arches and trefoil, or half-timbered villages, or a spectacular Gothic church set. Castle Talbot has a kind of Xanadu-like feel, high ceilings with full-length many-paned windows which cast astonishing filtered light over all the characters, itself a kind of image of the division and impurity and uncanny primitiveness of the mind. I don’t know why we’d want to have any other kind of living spaces – they suit us, I think, in all our complex humanity, our odd position as half-god and half-beast.
Cord Jefferson looks at some great Pompeian graffiti (where can we get the Latin for this, short of having a copy of the CIL in one’s study?) and comes to the (inescapable) conclusion that people are just as dumb, sex-obsessed, filthy-minded, and lowbrow as the worst television or rap music or brainless teenagers you can find today. The only answer, in my mind, is a kind of Chaucerian, Rabelaisian, Shakespearian, Petronian love of the craziness of it all – a zest for life as it is, an appetite for it, and a loosening of the struggle to always be cleaning up what God hath made in us a mess. Reading through the graffiti is very pleasant, as absurd as it is delightful. For many of these people, these lines are all the literary monument they leave – something like “Secundus likes to screw boys.” This is very consoling somehow.
In Queens.
31-Jul-12Walking down the block in the early afternoon on my natal street, and the wind brings to me the smell of the ocean – the summer onshore breeze that sets in on summer afternoons. So beautiful, and so laced with so many memories – of the small town in the city where I grew up, where on summer afternoons I could always smell the sea.
Finally, Proof of Intelligent Design.
31-Jul-12Frequent ingestion of semen, either vaginally or orally, before pregnancy may help reduce nausea and vomiting during pregnancy – but only if the semen comes from the baby’s father. The medical research looks at this in connection with preeclampsia and more broadly in terms of the health of the pregnant woman. It always impresses me how inclusive nature is – broader than our conceptions of her. “Natural law” thinkers can’t possibly find a place in nature for oral sex, but not only does it exist, it shows signs of being accounted for in nature’s endlessly subtle reckoning. It is proof again that in nature nothing has only one purpose: and sex in particular seems to be infinitely repurposable in our lives, for love and babies and social cohesion and consolation and joy and health and sorrow, and all in all a kind of mirror held up to our minds. And all of it finely calibrated, so that our desires end up being somehow good in the end. It is as impressive as it is obvious, to all but those whose orthodoxies do not admit of facts.
Against The Self-Made Man.
27-Jul-12Philosophically the concept is nonsense, and practically a lie; religiously it is heresy, and politically a mere means of empowering those with the most power. Mr. Tom Paine on personal wealth:
The phrase “my money” can only be provisionally accurate. “Show me a denarius,” said Jesus, “whose face, and whose inscription, are on it?” It is impressive how much the Republican Party has become synonymous with entitlement. You can almost tell this is true because of the fact that they attack the concept of entitlements.