Postcard From Malheur

“Dorothy Parker was too smart to buy the legend and too clearheaded to slide into nostalgia. That left her having to acknowledge some bitter realities…. The tragedy of Dorothy Parker, it seems to me, isn’t that she succumbed to alcoholism or died essentially alone. It was that she was too intelligent to believe that she had made the most of herself.”
—If you cannot read enough of or about Dorothy Parker you will want to add this to your list.

The Labour of Being Studied in a Free-Love Economy

My daughter celebrates May Day
by ring-rosing a stripper pole.
She’s a herdsman who closed
her eyes in a lemon grove,

woke up in a janitor’s closet.
At the chime of mop o’clock
in the morning metro, here’s Marx
thundering down the ghost hose.

She’s wet with the spittle of the greats.
Cagey as a row of roosters shining
like goth lip gloss at the fair.
Your attention a soiled glove

to pinch the maid’s nose closed.
For professional reasons,
I follow a sad foster kid’s
anonymous blog. She writes:

Stereogum notes that the New Orleans classic “Big Chief,” performed here by the late Allen Toussaint on his forthcoming final album, was “sampled in a Lily Allen song.” At first I was horrified by the idea that anyone under 30 might only know this iconic piano roll through “Knock ‘Em Out,” but then I realized that people under 30 probably don’t even have much of an idea of who Lily Allen is at this point. It’s time to die, is what I’m saying. Anyway, please enjoy Allen Toussaint’s take on “Big Chief.” I’ll be sitting quietly in the corner, remember what life was like during the Roosevelt administration. You wouldn’t believe what a nickel would buy you back then.

★★★ The sloshing of the wet city reached the addled brain in its sickbed. Then for a while came drops hitting the window. Later, considerably later, a line of pale blue appeared just over the top of the apartment slab to the west. A whole new sky came on, inviting and possibly tonic. Downstairs some petals blew loose along the bricks; some petals stuck to the puddles there. Teal blue plastic outdoor chairs were stacked outside the hardware store. A newsstand clerk burst out of his shelter to shout and point at a young man making a getaway, moving just slowly enough to swagger. There were no clouds to catch the sunset but fleetingly gold glowed off the underside of the rotor of a passing helicopter.

“An annual competition to see who can hurl a banjo farthest into the Gowanus Canal came un-strung on Sunday afternoon, after neighbors called the cops, and the five-stringed instrument then hit a tree and broke free from its tether, floating off into Brooklyn’s Nautical Purgatory. The snafu brought the contest to an abrupt end, but an organizer said all the drama made it one for the books.”#

“In the age of binge-watching, there is unending faith that consumers who already may pay for some combination of Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and ordinary cable will open their wallets further for esoteric fare like “Lather Fantasies,” a $20-a-month service founded by a Tampa Bay businessman that shows clothed people excessively shampooing each other’s hair.”#

Sorry, ladies, looks like you might throw away your shot to be on the front of currency. I hope for your sake the forthcoming musical Hickory—replete as it is with dazzling wordplay such as “I’m rappin’ Andy Jackson and I’m here to say we’ve got to withdraw federal deposits from the Bank today”—doesn’t remove other bills from potential revision. #

In the ornithologist’s lexicon, there are twitchers, and there are dudes. Twitchers are the hardest of hardcore birders. Myopic. Obsessive. Romantic. “Twitchers,” one birding forum says, “might cross half the country overnight to see one tatty brown thing sitting half a mile away on a bleak expanse of mud.” Even among birders they’re rare. Having recently returned from The Harney County Migratory Bird Festival, essentially the Bonnaroo of birding in Oregon, I can recall meeting only two. The first was a woman I passed on a dirt road, staring tenderly into an open field. I could tell she had spotted something beautiful, so I followed her sight line. The field was empty. The second was a man I saw standing outside a high school, his hands curled lovingly around his mouth, making goose sounds up into the sky.

Those of us comprising the other end of the spectrum (despite that women make up the majority of birders in this country) are the “dudes,” a slightly derogatory label for those who could never spot a black-bellied whistler from a fulvous whistler, but who can just about tell you a duck from a goose. In the dusty lonesome exile that is southeastern Oregon, for a few weeks every year, there is a type of Ornothologia grossus for the dudes, when the spring migration along the Pacific Flyway brings millions of arctic birds home from Patagonia, right over the town of Burns, where they stop for a bit in Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. There I went, a dude among the twitchers, to see what a million birds looks like. It was also there, three months ago, that a group of political extremists bearing assault weapons broke into the Refuge and stayed for forty-one days.

The cephalopod version of “Shawshank Redemption” took place three months ago, but it only became public Tuesday. Inky, who already had some local renown in the coastal city of Napier, quickly became a global celebrity cheered on by strangers.

—Who needs robot octopuses when the regular ones are doing just fine at being creepy as hell! THREE MONTHS this octopus has been gone, having crawled out of his tank, walked across the floor, and squeezed himself through a six-inch-wide drainpipe in the National Aquarium of New Zealand and back into the ocean, where he belongs. HE LEFT SUCTION-CUP FOOTPRINTS. (Maybe he went to Hollywood!) I am telling you, they are coming for us, and none of this should surprise you. #

“Is Staying In the New Going Out?”#