Bob Dylan on how he chose his career:
"Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get ( Read more... )

-  The following are excerpts from some of the emails I sent to Connor while I was in Scotland.  I figure I ought to have a proper travelogue for the journey, rather than just that mish-mash of mystical mumbo-jumbo, so here you go:

"Today we found a slowworm (legless lizard- not a snake, by damn nothing so sensible as a snake; a legless lizard) in ( Read more... )

-  So I drove across the North American continent, how 'bout that?  So I dug holes in Scotland for a month and a half, how 'bout that?  So I'm not doing the music lyrics thing any more, how 'bout that?  So I never write any more and I'm in Oregon now.  I saw ravens dancing over Beinn Resipol and oaks older than money.  I split wood under Scots ( Read more... )

"Cuchulain stirred,
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide." - W. B. Yeats Cuchulain's Fight with the Sea
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-    Some folk say that all hope is gone, but today, the world is one...  Late afternoon sun dappled down through the greening maple leaves onto the stage we'd ( Read more... )

-  Flip the tape hit rewind...  Drove into Silver Spring this afternoon to kaffeklatsch with Mairead, and discovered a mix tape I'd misplaced and had been looking for for some years.  Clacked into the wrong case and left for lost in the tape-caddy of my mother's car all this time.  I'd made this one specifically to impress a girl I had a bit of a ( Read more... )

"...the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that, sometimes, are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine." - Joseph Conrad
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- An apple, a horse, some milk and a little bread, these simple ( Read more... )

- The face forgives the mirror, the worm forgives the plow... Today at the after-school program a gaggle of new kids showed up. They were at the library for some tutoring, but I guess their teacher never showed up, so they tagged along with us instead. We talked about snakes. Before answering any question each would confer with his brother (two ( Read more... )

- Like tiny insects in the palm of history... Most of the time, I can't think of anything to write. For weeks at a stretch I'll form a catalog of interesting scenes and keen turns of phrase, separate little incidences that somehow don't quite make a life. Time comes when I remember a snatch of a song, or don't much feel like going out in the ( Read more... )

- And I ran, I ran so far away... Seagulls have been flocking menacingly over the campus since I got back. Small packs of two or three hover just above the tops of the trees, never landing. Gulls are bad juju animals ( Read more... )

"Bīo nū on ofoste,   þæt ic ær-welan,
gold-æht ongite,   gearo scēawige
swegle searo-gimmas,   þæt ic ðŷ sēft mæge
æfter māððum-welan    mīn ālætan,
līf ond lēodscipe,    þone ic longe hēold." - Beowulf
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-  It's time to say, it's time to know, that it's OK, that some must go...  It's a large ring, hammered gold inlaid with a garnet sigil.  Sits heavy ( Read more... )