Robert R. Mitchell's Blog, page 7

Quiet in the Woods

The brackish fog swirled around them, the raven purred and rasped above them, and the young alders from the East and from the West reached across the road before them, intertwining branches as if bidden by Nature herself to engage the two in a rigged game of Red Rover. The hundreds of young, green alder branches, impossible to snap even when bent completely in half, were so meticulously and tightly interwoven that a V8 Turbo Diesel F-350 pickup would have progressed no further up the road at this point than the two hikers. The unseen raven high above the fog chuckled, flapped twice and was silent. No birds sang. It had been at least an hour of walking since the distant sounds from the main highway had faded to silence. The quiet in the forest was so pronounced that you could hear the thick fog move through the trees leaving behind droplets that coalesced and began to sporadically fall, slapping salal leaves and rolling down to the forest floor thickly carpeted with decades of fir needles and deteriorating wood. The faint sound of a creek far below them in the valley beyond the still-invisible edge of the road now reached their ears, distorted by the fog and distance.

Copyright 2013 by Robert R. Mitchell

Read the book that started it all:
http://www.amazon.com/Only-Shot-At-Go...

Magnificent. Review to follow.

The Seven League Boots by Albert Murray

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


"Listen Schoolboy, he kept repeating during my first month or so in the band, this stuff we play for this band is not just music. This stuff is life, Schoolboy. Life! LIFE. Man, I mean I'm not just talking about cutting some dots, Man, I'm talking about making them dots mean something." (p. 322)

Amen.



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Evening Stroll

On my evening walk, I noticed a tree
I’d driven by ten thousand times.
I know you’ve heard that story before
But a tree is natural ‘cause it ain’t got rhymes.

An hour ‘til sunset, still light enough to see:
Woodpecker-pocked in machine-gunned lines.
Just walking for a beer at the grocery store.
Couple branches pulled like a buck’s drop tines.

Friday night lights echo up from the valley.
Red-hued bark is rough like a pine’s;
Football-shaped cones, three inches, no more;
Nestled in the needles above the speed limit sign.

Twisted like it’s striving, but it can just “be.”
Far off siren: sheriff’s hunting down crime.
Cracked white concrete instead of forest floor:
You know something is natural if it ain’t got rhymes.

Copyright 2013 by Robert R. Mitchell

Like the poem? Give the novel a shot:
http://www.amazon.com/Only-Shot-At-Go...

Rainy street trash

Walked to the grocery store last night and the street trash reminded me of this passage from Only Shot At A Good Tombstone:

Back in the day, the front yards of the neighborhood vied for supremacy in turf, foliage, color and design. As people grew older and the neighborhood grew older, unsightly blemishes appeared here and there: unkempt yards sprouted up like stubble and grime on a wino’s face.  The rain pissed down on empty brown-bagged 22-ounce cans abandoned on the grassy strip of city easement along the roads. The moss grew and spread on the asphalt shingle roofs, the mud rose up from beneath the drowned, trampled lawns, smearing across the yards onto the aging, cheap asphalt driveways. Carelessly abandoned toys, broken plastic and metal, succumbed to the mud and water, joining the aggregate refuse of the streets: wrappers, cigarette butts, plastic grocery bags, beer cans, soda cans, newspapers, and the occasional condom or syringe.

Only Shot At A Good Tombstone (pp. 15-16). Copyright 2010 by Robert R. Mitchell.

Buy the whole damn book for two bucks:
http://www.amazon.com/Only-Shot-Good-...

The Raven

But the young man knew that the raven is both Trickster and Creator, and can be trusted only to act in his own interest, usually for no more noble a purpose than to disperse the clouds of boredom. He is the hunter’s constant, uninvited companion; keeping the human company from dawn to dusk, reproducing every sound of the forest and even the human voice as he announces each canonical hour and tests the hunter with airborne koans. The raven reminds the humans in the forest that he is responsible for the ground beneath their feet, the mate at their side, the sun and the moon that chase each other around the world and determine when we hunt and when we sleep. Sometimes he signals the imminent arrival of game; sometimes he warns the animals of the hunter’s presence, mocking the furless creature shivering in the bushes to the general amusement of the forest’s residents. This morning, soaring easily high above the fog, he gurgled and croaked like a bullfrog dying in a coyote’s jaws. He snapped and cracked like a tinder-dry twig beneath a careless hunter’s boot. He chuckled like the wizened old man who had warned them hours before that the name of Lost Lake applies to its seekers not to the lake itself: “The lake ain’t lost. It knows exactly where it is.”

Copyright 2013 by Robert R. Mitchell

Enjoy the paragraph? Read the book that started it all: http://www.amazon.com/Only-Shot-Good-...

Pacific Northwest Fog

As they continued deeper into the woods through the green alder tunnel, a dense, heavy marine fog rolled in from the West like a tsunami, coursing unimpeded through stands of second-growth fir, shooting up ravines as if to reverse the flow of crashing creeks, and flanking enormous rocky crags like outposts on the Maginot Line. The fog was thick with the refuse of the minus tide mud flats: enormous waxy kelp fashioned into bullwhips and fanfare trumpets by drunken beachcombers; long, thin razor clam shells; conspicuously geometric sand dollars; fly-consumed piles of interwoven jetsam and seaweed; enormous ancient logs unceremoniously dumped into the gray sea by long-ago landslides or frontier lumberjacks; and Dungeness shells discarded by crying, well-fed gulls. From the east, however, a more tentative, wraithlike fog rose off a silent, dark, deep, green lake and insinuated itself westward through the woods with thin grey fingers. The two met at the road and swirled slowly together, roiling and turning in an atmospheric estuary, concealing the bower-sheltered way forward. An invisible raven spoke high above as if warning against proceeding.

Copyright 2013 by Robert R. Mitchell

Also check out Only Shot At A Good Tombstone $1.99: http://www.amazon.com/Only-Shot-Good-...

Long-forsaken old road

I’m not sure if you can call a run-down, long-forsaken old road “ramshackle” like you can a run-down, long-forsaken old house, but if the potholes of this particular road organized themselves and voted as a bloc, they’d have a good chance of reassigning the designation of “street level” to reflect their subterranean elevation. The outnumbered patches of asphalt that stubbornly refused to succumb to winter’s cyclical onslaught of flooding and freezing, collectively resembled the vestigial, nearly submerged, tar-soaked pilings of an ancient wharf abandoned and finally swept away by frigid, steel-gray waves. No yellow or white stripes remained, if they ever existed, to indicate the center or the shoulders of the road, all of which were now more theoretical constructs than actual features, anyhow; the grey ribbon winding through Douglas Firs, cedars and alders having long ago frayed along the edges, often to the point of complete separation. When the road was first cut, the opportunistic alders latched onto the exposed soil like a newborn at her mother’s breast; grew rapidly and tenaciously, weathering both intentional and haphazard assaults from saws and trucks, until the road was forgotten and the thin branches from the East met those from the West, concealing lengths of the time-wracked, gray, cracked road from the telescopic eyes of silent, invisible satellites cruising by high above. The ubiquitous alder, a forest Bodhisattva or Moses depending on your inclination, secures the hillside with wiry roots, converts air into fertilizer and shelters the slow Douglas Fir seedlings until they rise up, eventually surpassing their benefactor and obliterating the rare Pacific Northwest sunlight towards which they’d all stretched.

Copyright 2013 by Robert R. Mitchell

Truth

"You see, it don’t matter WHO speaks the truth.  It don’t matter where the truth comes from.  Whether it’s God, the Devil, or wretched old Job doing the talking, the truth cuts through all the bullshit.  It tears down the towers of Babel.  It rips away the facades of the wicked.  It breaks the bones of the oppressors.  That’s how powerful the words were that came out of Job’s mouth.  Truth.  You don’t hear much truth today, boy.  You hear advertisements, plenty of advertisements.  You hear coercion, whining and negativity.  You hear threats and insults, lies and deceit.  But you don’t hear much truth.  You know…when it comes right down to it…truth is beauty. Yes sir.  Truth…is….Beauty.  And Beauty is Truth.  Ah yes. And Beauty is Truth.  The realization of either….is Joy.”  The word hung over the two men.  A baby in an apartment across the courtyard started crying.  Wilson smiled.

Only Shot At A Good Tombstone (pp. 45-46). Copyright 2010 Robert R. Mitchell
http://www.amazon.com/Only-Shot-Good-...

The buzz on the street

Desperate times call for desperate measures. As a public service (and shameless marketing ploy) I have recorded for posterity several passages from my book, read to the accompaniment of live flies (no flies were harmed in the making of this video). For 90 buzz-filled, psychedelic, ghoulish seconds, spend time with pests who don't work in Washington D.C..

http://youtu.be/4LvqehFd3eY

http://www.amazon.com/Only-Shot-Good-...

The "also and also" of joy

The Spyglass Tree by Albert Murray

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


In Albert Murray’s melodic, synchronistic universe of The Spyglass Tree, the second novel of his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Scooter is the ecstatic, signifying, smile-cracking, knowledge-devouring, hard-working eyewitness and proclaimer of goodness in the midst of the darkest days of Jim Crow. He voraciously pursues his studies at a university alerted by the chiming of the same plantation bell that metered the lives of slaves only generations before. Scooter is still the kid in the chinaberry tree in Gasoline Point cataloging what he could and couldn't see from the most prestigious perch in his yard but his vision has expanded and he desperately and joyfully identifies and names every good thing, every good person, everyone who ever worked with him and contributed and cared and challenged him to get where he knew he could get. Ask yourself, whatever color yourself is, what kind of image of young African American males you’d have if the only information; visual, written or aural was pulled from your daily surfing of the internet. When you think about the word “intellectual” what images come to mind? It’s as if Murray knew, because his universe is simultaneously past, present and future, that no one would believe that these outwardly cool, hip, jook joint jiving young black men were smarter than “all y’all” combined, to quote my friends in the South, so he proves it by frantically but carefully and precisely documenting every book, discipline, artistic nuance, sensibility, skill and discovery of Scooter and his classmates whose insular academic community existed almost invisibly within a Southern white world that all too often relegated the entire student body to the mythological realm of no good n-----s. Encounters with whites were avoided or carefully managed and the city and surrounding landscape were divided into black and white zones in which each respective community circulated freely, careful to avoid friction along the edges. Murray doesn't ignore the bad folks, black or white, but they intrude on Scooter’s world uninvited and he manages them and spends no more time than necessary doing it. This portrait of the artist as a young man is exuberant, lyrical, eye-opening and humbly awe-inspiring.



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