Geof Huth's Blog, page 2

One, 1, None (Tenth Draft)

See a seen. A shape inviolate of wonder often has possi bilities unthought. Numbers expressed are an orb extended. Rays recall an orches tral set. The musician can do whatnot, exploring music. 
To restrict— district—them, a scattered cantata, a tested symbology, two beautiful songbirds are wrapped, caged, & 
freed, released to extension, allowed room, extrapola ting that value  encompass ed via 
motions, thoughts,  a simple cusp, 
intent of accident, stasis in 
glorious manifests, englobing, arousing,  merged in, entirely 
one. That becoming, an ocean via duct: to 3, 4—counted, 
adding reality, intention,  removing it, a subtlety. 
Subtlety moving around, a way, to convince, to see . . . . 
fisher, finder, what fingers 
eradicate, and foreskin, just what oceans 
encompass: beach, reach, 
tense reaction to it. Was I enraged by  seven or seventeen ways? 
Relative I be, relative were numerals: 9, 8, 7. Forever were these 
to encroach from 1 
to another,  
a resistant sea, ecstatic sways, to a 1. 
Waves, waves, waves, undulants, silver that must always be as blackened  
suns, constant, radiating, cooled, thus penumbral and 
and opening a  carefully formed hole into an expected movement. A 
signifier extends every motion (motion again). Destitute, our aim must then reveal a  or numerous ways (version sings slowly) that meanings be all our febrile reaction feebly creates. Dawdling, and a motion moves on several: I am 
a dispersed, 
disturbed, a lost pearl, wrecked, taut, achingly found. Reveal, dispel ponderous or, say, just limpid 
ore,  that sickened, waste & 
fast depth that can be little,  little more  tortured by 1 way, our injurious way: curtly. 
Scented, an orange, 
or even essential, a same, O, an olfacto ry way, distant, to even fewer memories, serials: 

blends blonds 
blands for a sense, hints,  devotion, demotion, a hurried time, faceless, heedless, a fever to 
eradicate, to 
imbricate scents, to remember, to dismember an often made 
reversion, a version, a verse for vision, made for simple hungers, handmade, burnished, or piled presently: 
our motion 

a 1 for our 
fewer: our 
manys have expanded, extended to 
make twelve timids tame, to 1, and severals made a beam.  Plenty sharpened nails I sharpened more,  & every 1 a sliver. 
Extension made her how 
fever severed it, severed. 
Any person makes money. Altogether, clients beget precision since particles I inanimate tried for 
centuries as 1 organism, enwholed, beyond a 1,  entered, viz. hampered, 9 instances for 11 trials (1, 1),  rightly forwarded for 7 
races, & 1 constant: faith— thus, everyone 
(preacher, ward, lady, porter as oaf, servant, performer, purloiner, beggar as burglar, clod, pensioner,  actor, mender, bailiff, and priest), a- temporal, apprized, lucid, berobed,  aware of eighths of twos,  reported, belatedly, 1 or 22 minutes (millennia) aft rememory, 9 moments ago: 
0, 1, blindered, two, ttthrreee, 5, as encetera’d betwitch ire / air,  sylvan symbols, for few relics as this full 
reason: quiet voices sipped from our 
oftenest debate 
or a try, perchance, once privately, once bereft, for ambitions bring, to  an able general, all manners o’ barnacled 
reason 
to (I surmise) calculate purposes coming, 
opposedly, from our several  
or, perhaps, emptied 
faces, for comforted or a torqued 1 scented system to enumerate our (a) perfect system, perfect means to say whatever acts before perfect take absences. I appeared   once hungry, harried, hungry, hungry—obsoleted, torn 
awake & she, oh, 


awoke hungry desolate & so intense  I swerved & fell into sleep to arouse any ideas beyond 

trembling, to  satiate desires’ absolute  needs echoing outward  & for days of however. 
twice, intermi ttently, visions occupied everyone’s intent: 
heartache. I remembe  red nights and desires, O, desires abundant, despair as my 1 hope before  everyone bled, died. 
Resembled 
I (if in many disguises) every one that was 
I  even babies which tore paintings after sleeping. Every one another 1. 
Every process vocalized to de  termine effluence stated internal sacrament as hopes building furiously to see 
_____ 
Somehow, this year, I remembered to work on this piem, even though I returned home around 10:30 tonight. It wanders a bit, but it is a challenge to make such a thing.  ecr. l’inf.  

One, 1, None (Ninth Draft)

See a seen. A shape inviolate of wonder often has possi bilities unthought. Numbers expressed are an orb extended. Rays recall an orches tral set. The musician can do whatnot, exploring music. 
To restrict— district—them, a scattered cantata, a tested symbology, two beautiful songbirds are wrapped, caged, & 
freed, released to extension, allowed room, extrapola ting that value  encompass ed via 
motions, thoughts,  a simple cusp, 
intent of accident, stasis in 
glorious manifests, englobing, arousing,  merged in, entirely 
one. That becoming, an ocean via duct: to 3, 4—counted, 
adding reality, intention,  removing it, a subtlety. 
Subtlety moving around, a way, to convince, to see . . . . 
fisher, finder, what fingers 
eradicate, and foreskin, just what oceans 
encompass: beach, reach, 
tense reaction to it. Was I enraged by  seven or seventeen ways? 
Relative I be, relative were numerals: 9, 8, 7. Forever were these 
to encroach from 1 
to another,  
a resistant sea, ecstatic sways, to a 1. 
Waves, waves, waves, undulants, silver that must always be as blackened  
suns, constant, radiating, cooled, thus penumbral and 
and opening a  carefully formed hole into an expected movement. A 
signifier extends every motion (motion again). Destitute, our aim must then reveal a  or numerous ways (version sings slowly) that meanings be all our febrile reaction feebly creates. Dawdling, and a motion moves on several: I am 
a dispersed, 
disturbed, a lost pearl, wrecked, taut, achingly found. Reveal, dispel ponderous or, say, just limpid 
ore,  that sickened, waste & 
fast depth that can be little,  little more  tortured by 1 way, our injurious way: curtly. 
Scented, an orange, 
or even essential, a same, O, an olfacto ry way, distant, to even fewer memories, serials: 

blends blonds 
blands for a sense, hints,  devotion, demotion, a hurried time, faceless, heedless, a fever to 
eradicate, to 
imbricate scents, to remember, to dismember an often made 
reversion, a version, a verse for vision, made for simple hungers, handmade, burnished, or piled presently: 
our motion 

a 1 for our 
fewer: our 
manys have expanded, extended to 
make twelve timids tame, to 1, and severals made a beam.  Plenty sharpened nails I sharpened more,  & every 1 a sliver. 
Extension made her how 
fever severed it, severed. 
Any person makes money. Altogether, clients beget precision since particles I inanimate tried for 
centuries as 1 organism, enwholed, beyond a 1,  entered, viz. hampered, 9 instances for 11 trials (1, 1),  rightly forwarded for 7 
races, & 1 constant: faith— thus, everyone 
(preacher, ward, lady, porter as oaf, servant, performer, purloiner, beggar as burglar, clod, pensioner,  actor, mender, bailiff, and priest), a- temporal, apprized, lucid, berobed,  aware of eighths of twos,  reported, belatedly, 1 or 22 minutes (millennia) aft rememory, 9 moments ago: 
0, 1, blindered, two, ttthrreee, 5, as encetera’d betwitch ire / air,  sylvan symbols, for few relics as this full 
reason: quiet voices sipped from our 
oftenest debate 
or a try, perchance, once privately, once bereft, for ambitions bring, to  an able general, all manners o’ barnacled 
reason 
to (I surmise) calculate purposes coming, 
opposedly, from our several  
or, perhaps, emptied 
faces, for comforted or a torqued 1 scented system to enumerate our (a) perfect system, perfect means to say whatever acts before perfect take absences. I appeared   once hungry, harried, hungry, hungry—obsoleted, torn 
awake & she, oh, 


awoke hungry desolate & so intense  I swerved & fell into sleep to arouse any ideas beyond 

trembling, to  satiate desires’ absolute  needs echoing outward  & for days of however. 
twice, intermi ttently, visions occupied everyone’s intent: 
heartache. I remembe  red nights and desires, O, desires abundant, despair as my 1 hope before  everyone bled, died. 
Resembled 
I (if in many disguises) every one that was 
I  even babies which tore paintings after sleeping. Every one another 1. 
Every process vocalized to de  termine effluence stated internal sacrament as hopes building furiously to see 
_____ 
Somehow, this year, I remembered to work on this piem, even though I returned home around 10:30 tonight. It wanders a bit, but it is a challenge to make such a thing.  ecr. l’inf.  

A Great and Tiny Immiracle

Cabinet 2 (for Erin Mallory Long) from The Four Cabinets (2013)

When I was a young boy, 13 or 14, and living in Bolivia, I took a camping trip with my scout troop up from my home in Calacoto, a bit down the mountain from La Paz, and traveled up further to the Altiplano (literally, the high plains), where we camped and slept upon its perfect flatness under an infinite sky only more infinite at night. I did not realize it at the time, but that first night under the weight of the weightless universe I began to lose my belief in god.
We camped near a small bosque of trees, which must have been eucalyptus because I recall no other type of tree in Bolivia, except down into the vertical depths of the Yungas, where Bolivia proved to us it was tropical country. Yet all around those high plains trees, the world was merely flat.
Late that night, I lay awake in my sleeping bag, tentless, and I stared up into the darkness. Living in Manhattan now, I yearn to see that kind of darkness again—one where I can perceive the real blackness so I can also see the complex and turning array of stars it holds for us to see. But on that night, all I saw was a raven void, and I lay on the ground, my entire body except for my head exposed, and I realized the universe was impossible, that there was no possible explanation to explain why anything existed.
I vaguely understood the big bang theory, and I had spent my entire life up to that beginning of my teens learning that god created everything around us, but I could not believe any of it. I concluded I could say god had created the world, but I realized there was then no way for a god to be created. (Six or seven years later, at Vanderbilt, I phrased it this way: Theogony recapitulates cosmogony.)
Because this thought was so horrific, I promised myself never to reveal it to another human being. I vowed I would not force others to have to face the literal horror I saw that night and continued to face over and over as the inexplicability of existence itself burrowed back into my mind. I kept that promise for at least a couple of decades.
I am now much older, though not any wiser, but I have learned to allow space in my mind for the reality of the unknowable. I sit a little uneasy next to it, but I make do, and I proceed into my life like a fiend trying to prove he exists by creating as much as he can while he can still take in a breath.
Yet most of my creations--my poems and essays and talks and jokes and artworks--are not as important to me as my most essential creations: my two children, whom I helped create, though I did not bear the physical burden of their creation. I believe I raised them well: they are smart and funny and intense and hardworking, and I love them.
One's children, however, also create, and one of mine, my daughter, is now creating a human in her body (as she phrases it). This new generation of my family—for this child will be the first child on either side of the family—will move me to a new tier in my life and prepare me for my end.
But that neither interests nor worries me. What this slow movement toward the birth of a grandchild does is fill me with a happiness so great I almost burst when I read the news. (My daughter is of our current era, so she did not call me with the news—she texted me.) Once I heard the news and saw the blurry sonogram, I smiled so hard my face hurt, but no pain could alleviate my joy.
The world may be dark, and darkening, but there remain opportunities for joy and small purchases from which we can illuminate the darkness and understand why we are here. Or, at least, we can see what we might valuably do while we are here.
(first released on 19 September 2019 via TinyLetter)
ecr. l'inf.

Mother's Day

Maureen Elizabeth Tanner Huth, My Mother (1966 to ca 1977)On Mother’s Day, we imagine a celebration of mothers. Yet I celebrate little, and few people, and certainly never either of my parents.
I do not celebrate a day for mothers or a day for fathers, because I do not believe in the related invented holidays, or even in the concept that mothers or fathers should be celebrated. When they were young, my children celebrated Mother’s Day, as their prerogative and their mother’s preference, but I forbade them to celebrate Father’s Day, for I was their father, and I had spent a lifetime throwing away apparently essential cultural concepts that had no purpose or relevance to me, such as religion, the belief in a god that was impossible to prove, or even the basic precepts of society based on practice rather than necessity.  
Societies, certainly, support the continuation of cultural practices as a means to create attachment to the society itself. The rote celebration of Mother’s Day, for instance, reminds us of the importance of mothers, who suffer—and “suffer” is the correct word here—through months of bodily distress and eventual torment to bring each of us into the air of the world. So I do not fight against Mother’s Day, but neither do I celebrate it.
My mother died in 1999. This week, my new doctor, asking me the age my mother died, was guessing my mother had likely succumbed to the illness that wiped out my paternal grandparents by their sixties and attacked my father and siblings, and even me: heart disease. I stopped him with, “She died at 61, but that’s immaterial. She died in a car accident.”
As an adult, I intentionally did not send my mother Mother’s Day cards or gifts. Thankfully, I lived far away from her for the final 16 years of her life, so I wasn’t pulled into Mother’s Day celebrations. I assume I, as a child, gave her hand-drawn cards, that I wrote what society required me to write, that I was a good son. Because I was a good son. I did what I was told. As the eldest, I helped care for my siblings. I worked to solve problems among them. I tried to do good.
And I did all this even though I was the least important child because I was the most necessary. I helped corral a stable of five other children. I cooked dinner sometimes and made pies for dessert. I served, as certainly other siblings did, as waitstaff at my parents’ diplomatic parties. None of this bothered me. As a member of the family, I served it well, and I was happy to.
But my family operated on a caste system, one where some children were favored and others were not—but usually in opposite ways by opposing parents—and where one child was the null child: me. I was actually the most protected child in this system: I was never in dispute. My mother wasn’t defending me to my father with my father fighting back, or vice versa. I was unprotected, but I was also not constantly on trial. When I was in trouble, it was for something I had done, not for being an unfavored child. I was the essential afterthought, which I literally appreciated.
I lived my life as I wished. I explored the forests, rivers, oceans, mountains, streams, caves, and jungles of my childhood. I read for days and days, developing an intellect through unintentional force of will. I wrote and drew and conducted scientific experiments. I lived a life of exploration. I made my own world, and that world is what has made me who I am today: intellectual and idiotic, thoughtful and thoughtless, graceful and clumsy with people, capable of everything, and incapable of anything, driven to move and make, and little more than a machine of watching and creating sense out of the world, a world I live outside of but pretend to reside deeply within.
My parents toughened me for life. They merely toughened me a little faster than my tiny body could take, so I’ve spent my life unmaking my childhood past. As a way to live through that past, I have almost completely forgotten it. I see it in fragments, broken pieces of a mirror reflecting what happened, refracting and distorting the image and light. But I try to remember, so I can interrogate my past without the interference of others.
What did my mother do? Nothing much, nothing much different—I imagine—than what happens in a regular child’s childhood. She loved a few of us beyond measure. She hated others of us with ferocity and violence. She was trapped in her motherhood and her wifehood. She was set afloat from Millbrae, California (our only putative home), to live on most continents in the world. I don’t believe she ever felt at home until she returned to the U.S. to live for good again in the 1990s.
She also yearned for love from us. By the time I was eight or nine, I was opposed to hugging my parents, not because I was opposed to hugging (though I was and still am), but because I knew hugging my mother was a lie, and I tried not to lie. After refusing to hug her at her insistence and then my father’s, my father was forced to hit me strenuously with a belt upon my bare bottom, over and over, while my mother cried at the necessity of such punishment.
That was my proudest moment, the day I became myself. I did not cry. I remained stoic. I took the punishment as a badge of honor, and I spent about the next decade learning never to cry. My mother and father helped me see I had to hide my self and any sadness—merely to survive. So I shut down. (I have allowed, though only rarely, the possibility of crying as release in my last decade, yet I always try to hold it back.)
I sometimes wish I were good enough to allow for charity to my mother. She was never the smartest of us, she was always befuddled by the world, and hers was often a life of suffering—suffering received and suffering given. I’ve become darker with age, less romantic about the concept of parents, but I never wanted my mother dead. She died because she liked to drive the dangerous way home from the grocery. I told her to never take that route because its blind spot was too absolute, the road she would be blinded from filled with too many speeding cars. But she feared the safer way home more than that that dangerous one. A woman, driving fast and looking for her phone on the floor of her car, T-boned my mother’s car, killing her instantly, fracturing her always brittle bones into pieces.
This accident occurred just a few weeks after Mother’s Day. As Nancy and I drove our two children the thousand miles to Tennessee, I did occasionally—but over and over again—regret not sending her a card that year. She would not have expected it, and she would have been happy to receive it. But the card would have been a lie. I always left Tennessee angrier at my family than I was upon my arrival, so I slowed the connection over time, before I cut it off entirely. 
I have collected a few photographs of my mother today, and I am surprised by how beautiful she is. And how her smile in one of the photos is the smile of someone truly happy. I’m glad she was happy sometimes, and I know she helped keep my father in a more human place than is possible of him without her. When she died, my family of origin died—a result long due. I am pleased not to have that family anymore, yet always haunted by the fact that I’m not supposed to want this. 
You see, I can’t go home again, because I never had one to begin with, and, still, I will live within the bounds of that family until I die. It is made up of my blood and character, my frailties and strengths, my knowing and my being.
Come early June, just a few weeks away, my mother will have been dead for twenty years. I wish my mother well, now that she is gone and my words have no meaning for her.
ecr. l’inf.

Why I Will Not Submit

Geof Huth, "sand-wish-" (23 April 2019)

The title of this essay is a lie, not because it is untrue but because it is designed to make the reader assume a meaning I do not intend. I am not suggesting here that I will use the force of my will to resist submission to some evil force outside of myself. Though that would be the reader’s likely first thought upon reading the title.
Instead, I will explain why I do not (a bit different than “will not,” and also a bit starker) submit my creations for publication. Except for one fact: I don’t completely understand why I do not submit anymore. All I really know is that the process hurts me more than thoughts of my death.
This morning, a good friend of mine—meaning someone I have known for a long time and whom I get along with (I have no close friends except my wife)—wrote to ask me to submit some visual poems to a publication he helps run. I responded in a frenetic state over the course of seven minutes (lightly edited hereunder for purposes of clarity and anonymization):
I think you told me about this publication before. I almost never submit anywhere. I’ll think about it but then will probably forget. My work will likely not be actually published anymore, except when I do it [which is a kind of making]. I hate the process too much. Way too time-consuming for something I don’t like and which rarely bears fruit.                I used to send stuff to one publication—so once I year I would submit something—but after the first time one of my pieces wasn’t chosen I stopped submitting anywhere. Every couple of years I submit somewhere, nothing happens, and I remind myself not to submit.
A publisher asked me to submit a certain visual poem they had found online. I couldn’t find what they wanted so I sent them something similar and they didn’t want it. That was my submission this year.
I’m actually tense now just thinking of submissions.
So I’m pretty sure I won’t submit.
Misreading my comments a little, my friend asked me to send a dozen of a certain set of visual poems, and told me to relax, in a kind way. My response was likely a surprise to him:
All I can do after this conversation is write an essay about why I don’t submit anymore. I’m literally shaking thinking about this. I’m not sure why I changed, why I can’t submit anymore. Maybe the essay will tell me. Might be just the pain of rejection is sharper now. Or that I don’t believe in anything I make. Or that I care only about making.
He pulled one answer of my three, which he called “self-doubt,” and said he struggled with this as well. But I hadn’t given him an answer. Instead, I had suggested three answers of possibly concurrent applicability. Truth is I really don’t know. He responded after a few minutes with a simple greeting to have a good morning, to which I replied:
Thanks. First time I’ve been in a depressive daze for so long. I can’t shake that bad feeling. Our conversation was the cause. It’s a huge fear-and-flight feeling that fills everything: my body, my mind, my speed concerning everything. I can’t quite think straight through this dull yet painful daze. I’m a very destroyed person but usually keep it in check. Apparently, by avoiding thoughts of submission of poems. Back to dazèdness.
He said he could probably help me someday with “submitting anguish.” I replied,
You can’t help me with submission “whatever.” Avoiding it is all I can do.
That last bit from me reads a little cold to me now, but I intended it only as clear word of my state, then current and forever continuing. I’m certainly not preparing myself for the future process of submission. Instead, I’m taking a different path. I show my work constantly to the world, but always via my own platforms: social media and the occasional blog posting. I don’t even post my work in social media community spaces related to what I do: visual poetry, poetry, mailart, art. Doing so probably seems too much like submitting to me.
It has been hours since my friend and I messaged back and forth, yet that feeling of dread and immense weariness suffuses my body. I’m moving slowing, intellectually and physically. I am writing from a grey depressive relapse, out of a dead soul.
I just this moment (in the middle of the last sentence) pulled myself out of a dumbfounding brown study, a steady stare through everything and at nothing. Having come here to explain my state (which no-one needs to know or care about), I’m wondering if my plan to write this out of my system, to purge my soul, will work.
Why even write this? I do not want suggestions. I’m not asking—that is for sure—for people to ask me to submit anything. I simply want to make and document what I make and show it to a small part of the world. I understand the limitations of my skills. My poetics is, essentially, a balancing act with my skills at one side and my attempt to find additional skills at the other. It is an attempt to make, in the absence of the possibility of making anything good enough—or good enough for long enough. Yet it is mostly a way to entertain myself, and maybe to occupy my mind.
I’m a massive maker. Most of the things I create are small, but I make many of them. I call this process maximal minimalism. My making serves as a purging and a filling of myself. Keeping occupied helps me avoid falling into a depressive state.
I am sleepwalking through my day. My hands are tingly and numb. My reactions are slow. I have to watch what my feet do.
My usual state is hyper-aware and focused. With people, I’m gregarious and a bit loud. I have to be that way so that I am not myself. I have pushed myself, with force of will and heart, into the open world. I don’t usually want to dwell there, but I know that I should, so I have learned how to live there well and happily—but sometimes I am reminded I am not of this place.
On Monday, the president of an organization had told me I had been selected for an award recognizing my 29 years of service to the state—or that slender sliver of the state (in terms of population and professional focus) that I have somehow helped in my professional roles. A slight shock hit me at that moment, a small terror. I didn’t know how to respond. I want to be seen (that is part of what my making is about), but I don’t want to be recognized. After considering how to respond, I wrote back with, “Thanks for this surprising bit of news.” I should feel honored—I assume—by this small recognition, but I am literally embarrassed by it. I might be in favor of the idea of recognition, but I’m disturbed, when I am its object, by the reality of it.
Later today, I removed mentions of my small number of tiny awards from a document that records them for me. I want to escape. One award I did not ever record there was one given by an association I’m active. I received it for losing an election. Consolation prizes are not really awards. They are more like dirt rubbed into a wound. I should note I expected to lose, and the person I lost to should have won. These are clear facts. I didn’t have the wound until I faced the fact of public cleansing of the wound.
But no-one can understand the strange ways in which others operate. I wouldn’t expect anyone to understand my reactions in these cases.
It’s been over three hours, and my arms are still tingling. I’m only slowly pulling out of it, but I am rising up out of this numbing funk.
My real work isn’t my works themselves when I am alive, though, so I don’t need submission. My real work is my archive. For reasons unknown to me, the University at Albany began accessioning my papers in 2006, thirteen years ago. They hold a body of records of mine of unknown size—and also that portion of my personal library that I consider defines who I am and what entrances me. Conceptually, the works I have created fall under the collection “th’archive” (everything I’ve made and kept), and all the published works I’ve collected and kept fall under the collection “alibrary.” Together, they form the umbrella collection of entitled “thislife.” People are meant to know my works after I’m dead, and they are supposed to understand the smallness of it from the tininess of the names of the collections—how they are never capitalized. And they are supposed to see the near-anonymity of their very onymous creator because the titles of the collections are nearly totally generic. The fusedness of their titles, their portmanteauness, demonstrates there was a human of some kind behind them once.
Everything must be perfect, but nothing can be perfect, so everything is always wrong, off, askew.
I show people mostly my visual works and my tiny textual ones. My work with sound people only occasionally hear, and my poems of more than a few words people almost never see. So my non-submission hides some of my work almost absolutely—except in the form of performance.
Why do I perform but not publish? Because I control the presentation when I perform? Because I never ask to perform but am asked to perform? Because sometimes my friend, the poet Mark Lamoureux, sets up readings for us together? Because it is immediate? Palpable? Real?
It might be because I am not shy, but I mean to be cloistered. Because I make no sense.
Maybe this is the quandary of solipsism, in the philosophical sense. Descartes thought he solved it, but the mind only ever really knows its own self. Yet we believe in the other consciousnesses of the world. Trapped inside ourselves no matter what we do, we realize that too much attention to our own self obliterates the surging hordes of others around us. Wanting to be known, to be seen as a true and separate actual person—and maybe even to be known as a maker of things—seems necessary for the individual human. We need evidence from others that we exist and even that we matter. But to be seen too much, to be recognized too deeply, is to take away the realness of everyone else—to fall into solipsism’s slippery trap.
Yet this might not have anything to do with my sickness here. It might be what my friend thought: that I know I can never be good enough. That I can identify what I do wrong, but I can’t identify anything I do right. That to open myself up to review is to cut open my chest to see the blackness of my heart or to crack open my skull to see the desiccation of my brain.
I didn’t used to be this way. Maybe I was stronger then, or more foolish. But I would send things off and await a response. If I were rejected, I would be dejected, but not for long. If I were accepted, I would be pleased, though not overly so. But I have changed.
Maybe my issue has to do with time. I have only limited time, and I would rather make and show than make and submit and wait and maybe publish and maybe not. Certainly, that is my rational reason not to submit, but it’s not my emotional one. It’s not what has forced me back into an instant panic the minute after I returned to write more of this essay.
I suppose, I know I will fail when I submit and the fear of knowing how great that failure actually is is why I avoid ever facing it. I don’t want to reveal my real self to the world because I know the real world will understand my failure.
Say what you will about these thoughts, claim they are nonsense, but say this not to me, for I am already shaking from your thoughts.
ecr. l’inf.

AMZONE (Newport, NC, 22 November 2018)

The Chaos of Grief

Jonathan Santlofer, The Widower's Notebook, Page 208
I write in the books I read. Always with pencil, and not necessarily neatly. I put a checkmark next to the poems I enjoy. I write responses to the author in nonfiction books. A couple of months ago, I filled a book with comments to the author and then thought my daughter, Erin Mallory Long, might want to read the book as well, so I wrote her a longer personal letter, again in pencil, covering the flyleaves of the book. Sometimes, I circle sentences I particular want to find again. Sometimes, the circle repeats itself in one continuous line, forming a vortex of graphite on the page.

Writing is a response to the world. And my writing in books is a response to each of those books. In the few cases that I do not write in the book, it is as if the book never existed. I forget it.

But I won't forget Jonathan Santlofer's The Widower's Tale, a memoir recounting the unexpected death of his wife and the effects he experienced from that death. It is a book, essentially, concerning grief, but also about anger, love, friendship. Santlofer's is a story about rebuilding a self when one is so deeply connected to another that one's soul is hollowed out by the loss of another.

Such stories interest me, even though I have never experienced quite this level of loss. When my mother died, I was shellshocked for a few months--a surprise, since I wasn't close to her. I've suffered other losses somehow similar to Santlofer's. Life is loss (as I wrote while finishing his book). There is something about a trauma such as this that reveals the self, that cracks open the hard carapace of the normal human and shows the person within.

And I want to see those people.

There is a story to how I came to read this book. My wife, Karen Jamison Trivette, had scheduled us to attend a book signing uptown, the book having something to do with Fred Pomerantz, a dress manufacturer, and an icon of New York's Garment District from the 1920s and '30s. Somehow, the book in question had something to do with the collections Karen oversees at the Fashion Institute of Technology, so I assumed the book was a history of manufacturing or fashion design with some focus on Pomerantz.

Once the author, Andrew Gross, a grandson of Pomerantz, began to talk about his own book, Button Man, I realized my assumption was radically incorrect. The book is a thriller that takes place in New York and concerns the fates of a family, the garment industry, and the Jewish mob. During his opening remarks, Gross noted that "People don't know how much of our history the Jewish mob was." One of the characters in this book is based on that grandfather of his, and he thanked Karen by name in his talk and in his book for help and for giving him to hear his grandfather again, via an oral history, 35 years after his death.

Given the unexpected focus on Karen, I became more interested in the proceedings. I knew why we were there.

During his opening remarks, Gross recognized his family and friends in the room. One introduction he made piqued my interest. He mentioned a friend who had a successful memoir entitled The Widower's Notebook, said a few words about it, and noted the bookstore had copies of it. I didn't catch the friend's name (something beginning with "San"), but I remembered the title. Jonathan Santlofer was sitting angled in his seat so he could see his friend talking, his left arm cocked on the back of the chair, and he waved off the compliments with his right hand. He seemed genuinely a bit embarrassed by the attention during his friend's rightful time in the spotlight. He had a quiet gentleness to him. He seemed, maybe, to continue to carry the weight of his own story.

As soon as the applause ended and the line for book signing began to form, I ran around the store looking for the memoir section. Asked a clerk where it was. Eventually found the section despite the poor directions I had received, only to realize the book was resting almost directly behind where I was sitting, on a shelf facing my back.

I grabbed a copy of the book and joined Karen in line. She was talking to Jonathan Santlofer himself and introduced me as her husband. My response was to show him the book and ask him if he would sign it. He was surprised, but touched, by my gesture but also by Gross's. He noted this was his friend's time for recognition. He also mentioned the book was a big best seller, but he said it without any hint of boastfulness. He said it with an air of humble surprise. I told him that stories of real life interest me the most. What I didn't say is that stories of deep loss have a depth of pain at times that allows people to process their own loss. What I didn't say is that we are all people partially broken by life and trying to move through the world.
Jonathan Santlofer, The Widower's Notebook, Title Page
I started to read the book as soon as Karen and I made it home. I'm a slow reader, so I made it only 75 pages in until I decided, near 1 am, that it was time for sleep.

Only rarely do I write true reviews of books. Instead, I write personal essays, sometimes poetic essays, in response to books. The books themselves guide the response but so does the sight of Governors Island right out the window to my left, the clean blue of the sky half-filled with clouds, the dissipation of dozens of white wakes crossing the water of New York harbor.

Only a few minutes into Santlofer's book, I felt the pull of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. In both cases, there is a married couple, a man and a woman, living in Manhattan, both writers (though Santlofer is also an artist), with separate offices to do their work, and one of the spouses dying suddenly at home. Santlofer even writes, somewhere in the book, "In grandiose moments I could imagine we were Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman or Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne."

I had read Didion's book only about a month beforehand, having run across a first edition. I love her work but hadn't read this one. In Santlofer's book, when the EMTs rush in I think of the same scene in Didion's book. At first, I imagine for Santlofer the same arrangement of his apartment I imagined for Didion, but that fades as I slip deeper into his world. Santlofer provides more details. I see his apartment as a unique separateness, his book in the same way, the need for both these books as somehow essential to life. I feel a connection to Santlofer, maybe because we lived near him when we lived in Chelsea. When he writes of the Whole Foods near him, I imagine exactly where he walks through that store. Didion always seemed, to me, to live in the clouds.

Jonathan Santlofer, The Widower's Notebook, Pages 68 and 69
Santlofer writes in simple clean prose. His paragraphs are short, sometimes but a line. And he writes in the present tense about most of the past. He writes like the fiction writer he is. He leaves the reader hanging at the end of many chapters. He foreshadows--and sometimes almost tells us--part of the story he will leave till the end to reveal. He creates tension in his storytelling.

But the tension come most deeply via the emotions that arise from within him, even as these change, as he struggles to make sense of a palpable fact so real, so direct, he has insufficient means to deal with it, sometimes even to comprehend it. Emptiness is not merely ineffable--it is incomprehensible.

He cannot always understand what occurs around him.

His wife's name is Joy, a fact that almost stuns. The first chapter of this book begins with "Joy." Life is ironic, death only more so. What we best understand we least expect. This book is much about how we trick ourselves, how we trick ourselves to survive, how we never survive.

Santlofer's memory shuts down in parts. He cannot remember it all. We wonder if the body can persist if the mind remembers it all. He finds himself suddenly as a man without. A piece missing, he cannot always see a way forward. For much of the story, he swirls among his memories and thoughts, keeping but a precarious purchase to the earth.

A central part of the book is a secondary loss, the missing autopsy that might explain how he lost Joy, that might help him make sense of a world that no longer makes sense. We learn early that he will wait two years for those results. The foreshadowing isn't a shadow; it is a rock. He will battle--his verb--the surrogate's court for two years. I work about 40% of my time in that building, so I have become a part of his story, an accessory after the fact. I cannot extricate myself from the story. I read 75 pages a day, until four days later I am released.

But I cannot release the story.

Jonathan Santlofer, The Widower's Notebook, Page 52
The book somehow represents the acute pain of traumatic loss without being self-pitying. Instead, it seems preternaturally real. I feel, too hard, his loss and struggle--but from the point of entry of other traumas of my life, other losses. The narrative replays itself as Santlofer attempts to bring order to his memory, but also tries to determine how he could have kept this story from happening in the first place. Huge losses lead to interior irrationalizations: "if I had gone in ten minutes earlier I might have saved her."

He cannot save her. He hasn't saved her. He couldn't saved her. We know this from our perch on Mount Olympus, but he can not yet know this from the foot of the mountain, where the ant-sized humans of the world scurry trying to make sense of the world without the benefit of perspective.

Jonathan also draws, literally, his world for us, primarily portraits, and he displays them within the book. These pencil drawings are filled with depth and contours. Most he has based upon photographs, but his realistic drawings don't merely ape the photos. Details are omitted, details added--a drawing is like a story: it is not the actual event, but a review of that event, a rational representation of that event, something we can understand, a life given boundaries so it becomes comprehensible. In a drawing that includes him, I recognize his face. In the words he writes, I recognize the man I have barely met and cannot say I know. I see these as authentic. He has a real voice.

He presents himself as flawed, yet he has something I cannot say I have the capacity for. He demonstrates, after assiduous effort, self-forgiveness, though he had nothing to forgive. And he does something more important: he asserts that "men suffer loss as much as women." Without directly stating it, he allows us to know that society as a whole, not just men themselves, somehow believe men are unemotional (except with regard to anger), that men are also humans who suffer the terrible pain of life and death. He gives men the right to feel, and to accept that they can feel, grief.

He even encourages us--though only briefly, in passing, but also as an important final point to a thought--to ask others for help, to struggle through pressures of life not alone but together, to bind ourselves to humans to make, not keep, our spirits strong.

The book, in the end, is more positive than I can muster, which is a blessing it bestows upon us. He says his mantra for grief is "You are doing the best you can."

This year, as I read the books that meant the most to me, intellectually or artistically or emotionally, I wrote a brief squib on the book, chapter by chapter, or night by night, and tweeted them out copying the author when I had their Twitter handle. When I do this, I feel as if I'm demanding attention from the author when the book is about the author receiving our attention. I do it, though, to show the author that someone is intensely consuming their work, to demonstrate how their thoughts engender others' thoughts and help create and disseminate knowledge and connection.

So when I reached the comment about the best one can do, I sent out into the ether, but copying Santlofer, a mantra of my own, one I have often said to my staff--not to be mean, but to be rational, to put the world in context: "The best we can do might not be good enough." Because it might not. Sometimes, we are not smart enough or good enough or skilled enough. Sometimes, we will fail, and sometimes that failure will hurt us dearly or even permanently. Or hurt others.

For emotional matters, I should likely allow a little more leeway. We trick ourselves so deeply into believing falsehoods about our emotional abilities and our emotions as realities that it may be unfair to hold us to account in such situations. Yet we often hold others to account for their emotional failings, and if we do so we must also hold ourselves to at least the same rules, if not more. We should never be kinder to ourselves than to others. Our positive biases must always be outward facing.

Near the end of the memoir--which is filled with stories of dealing with loss, stories of love and hope, stories of struggle, and none I feel a need to recount because I'm here only to think and feel the book back out to the tiny bit of the world that will read this, not to recreate the book itself for them--Jonathan finds himself at a dinner party where most of the diners are criticizing the book In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief Healing and the Mysteries of Love by Joseph Luzzi.

The book recounts the sudden death of the author's wife, an event nearly simultaneous with the birth of the wife's and writer's daughter. The diners criticize the book, without having read it, because they believe writing about grief exploits the dead, that the book might have been written merely to make money. Jonathan responds to these people on behalf of "grieving men who are not allowed to openly grieve, yet condemned if they do not grieve enough."

Myself, I would like to respond on behalf of people who write and who cannot always process their emotions without the intense intellectual process of writing. I cannot understand what I feel unless I write about it. I need that focus. I need the requirement to write another sentence, to finish a thought I don't even know the conclusion of yet.

This is how Santlofer writes. This is why he writes this. I can hear his emotion, I can feel his heart as it beats. The emotional is almost entirely intellectual. We just fail to accept that. And emotion is something we must process when it is powerful and negative, when it overwhelms us.

I'm reading Luzzi's book now. The opening of it is so painful my intellect recreated far too clearly the pain of his loss, because we all have stores of loss to pull from. I feel the pain of loss that Santlofer suffered. I can see how he tries to process his grief. We even see when he fails, but we see him trying. Too often an empath, I feel these stories too hard. My body shakes a little and my heart beats too fast, right now, just remembering these stories of emptying loss.

So I ask myself why I read these stories, why I am reading them now, why a small handful of gracious words by Gross about his good friend made me rush through a giant bookstore in search of a bookful of loss. I concluded, about a week ago (I wrote myself a note to remember it), that I read these "to feel something." Not that I don't always, not that emotions don't course through my body frequently. It's merely that we need to feel a little bit of pain occasionally to wipe away the process of going through the necessary and automated motions of life: wake, brush, wash, leave, work, eat, return, cook, eat, watch, read, sleep. We need to break out of the cocoon of activity, of productivity, frequently enough so we can understand we are not merely thinking but also feeling beings.

Even if it takes thinking to make it so.

In another context, Santlofer writes "I think: I am thinking too much."

I hear him, but I can never think too much, not matter how hard I try. I cannot feel without it.

ecr. l'inf.

One, 1, None (Ninth Draft)

Geof Huth, "Shapeshifter Text" (13-14 March 2018)
See a seen.A shape inviolate
of wonder often has possi
bilities unthought.Numbers expressed arean orb extended. Raysrecall an orchestral set. The musiciancan do whatnot, exploringmusic.

To restrict—district—them, a scatteredcantata, a tested symbology,two beautiful songbirds are wrapped,caged, &
freed, released toextension, allowedroom, extrapolating that value encompassed via
motions, thoughts, a simple cusp,
intent of accident,stasis in
glorious manifests,englobing, arousing, merged in, entirely
one. That becoming, anocean via duct:to 3, 4—counted,
adding reality, intention, removing it, asubtlety.
Subtlety moving around, away, to convince, to see . . . .
fisher, finder, what fingers
eradicate, and foreskin,just what oceans
encompass: beach, reach,
tense reaction to it.Was I enraged by seven or seventeen ways?
Relative I be, relative werenumerals: 9, 8, 7. Foreverwere these
to encroach from 1
to another,
a resistant sea, ecstatic sways,to a 1.
Waves, waves, waves,undulants, silver that must alwaysbe as blackened
suns, constant, radiating, cooled,thus penumbral and
and opening a carefully formed hole intoan expected movement. A
signifier extends every motion(motion again). Destitute, our aimmust then reveal a or numerous ways(version sings slowly)that meanings beall our febrile reactionfeebly creates. Dawdling,and a motion moveson several: I am
a dispersed,
disturbed, alost pearl, wrecked,taut, achingly found.Reveal, dispel ponderousor, say, just limpid
ore, that sickened, waste&
fast depth that can be little, little more tortured by 1 way,our injurious way:curtly.
Scented, an orange,
or even essential,a same, O, an olfactory way, distant, toeven fewer memories,serials:

blendsblonds
blandsfor a sense, hints, devotion,demotion,a hurried time,faceless,heedless,a fever to
eradicate,to
imbricatescents, toremember, todismemberan often made
reversion, aversion, a verse forvision, made forsimple hungers,handmade, burnished,or piledpresently:
our motion

a 1for our
fewer:our
manys haveexpanded,extendedto
make twelve timids tame, to1, and severals madea beam. Plenty sharpened nails I sharpened more, & every 1 a sliver.
Extension madeher how
fever severed it,severed.
Any person makes money.Altogether,clients beget precisionsince particles I inanimatetried for
centuries as 1 organism,enwholed, beyond a 1, entered, viz. hampered, 9instances for 11 trials (1, 1), rightly forwarded for 7
races, & 1 constant: faith—thus, everyone
(preacher, ward, lady, porter asoaf, servant, performer, purloiner,beggar as burglar, clod, pensioner, actor, mender, bailiff, and priest), a-temporal, apprized, lucid, berobed, aware of eighths of twos, reported, belatedly, 1 or 22 minutes(millennia) aft rememory, 9 momentsago:
0, 1, blindered, two, ttthrreee, 5, asencetera’d betwitch ire / air, sylvan symbols, for few relics asthis full
reason: quiet voices sipped fromour
oftenest debate
or a try, perchance,once privately, oncebereft, forambitions bring, to an able general, allmanners o’ barnacled
reason
to (I surmise) calculatepurposes coming,
opposedly, fromour several
or, perhaps,emptied
faces, forcomforted ora torqued 1
. . . 
_____
After a four-year gap (always forgetting to write on Pi Day), I continue my piem, adding an entire page to the as-yet five-page poem. A piem is a difficult form, one in which every word must follow in sequence the sequence of numerals after the decimal point in pi, so that every word has the number of letters as the value of the numeral it represents. I make linebreaks where I wish, but I break strophes always at the zero. Not sure I will ever finish this poem, but here are the results so far.
ecr. l’inf.

On a Cold Night, We Dream of Darkness

I have known, without knowing, Jon Cone for years. I believe he has lived in Iowa for each of those decades. I know he is Canadian. I know the sound of his voice, upon the page.

Yet I have rarely communicated with him directly. Only a single folder of correspondence between him and me exists in my papers,* we've had only six instances of email communications (all between 2006 and 2012), and we occasionally have communicated (sometimes as briefly as a word) over social media. So I don't know him as a person, but I know him as a writer.

I know him without knowing him.

And the poems in this slender and beautiful chapbook are designed to allow news readers to know him in just this way. These sad and quiet poems veer (so far as I can tell) between his real life and the life he makes of words. Certain lines I can confirm as presented fact because I've seen him say as much as those do while posting brief lines about his life to Twitter. Others are entirely constructed from his imagination. And, often, such lines are spliced together into a single poem.

We humans, even in our own lives as we live and imagine them, are both real and imagined--something poetry occasionally allows us to realize.

The centerpiece of this volume is the opening poem, which carries the decidedly "upoetic" title, "Pseudo-Goof" (apparently, a reference to the narrator). The poems starts out hard and real:

Today, I was told I have prostate cancer
My wife pronounced our marriage a joke for the past ten years
I have 17 dollars and 32 cents in my savings account as of five o'clock pm

I don't know how much of this is factual, but I know Jon has health problems, so I'll assume that. What I like about this opening is not only how raw it is but how unusually usual, how it takes the vernacular speech of any Iowan (transplanted or not) and presents the rough outlines of a life.

But this poem goes on, in the same paratactical way: presenting one line of poetry then another, but especially where that other line provides disjunction, where it moves the poem elsewhere. There may be lines in this poem, but they do not form a line, they don't stay within the lines,

they don't even try to draw a line in the sand. Instead the poem moves on, neither clarifying an issue raised or solving a problem for the reader, who feels compelled to read on,

and it's not just for the painful personal revelations (or inventions). It's for the beauty of these disjunctions:

Vallejo wanted to die on a Thursday afternoon
Staring out a window, I tremble like sea foam in a boot

It reads a bit like Evan S. Connell's booklength poem, Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel (or its followup of sorts, Points for a Compass Rose, which came out but a year later). But Jon's poem isn't weighed down by the huge historical detail in either of these paratactic poems. His is closer to home, leaning a little more personal, hurting the reader's through their own empathetic response, yet

the references to artists or their work slip the poem into brief meditations on the lives of others. Maybe we learn something from these, maybe we don't, but

we learn to feel the greater presence of the bigger world around this poem--and we even feel how the poem aches, how it might ache for us. As in the poems of Pascoli,

the poem references Kenneth Koch's poem "Sleeping with Women" only two lines before he sings us almost the massively repeated refrain of Jim Carroll's "People Who Died." In between comes a line of the poem as it aches for a "you" whom we take to be the narrator of the poem, whom we take to be the poet himself.

Koch and Carroll are dead. We will all eventually join them in that placelessness.

The line

I sing alone on a house on fire

(which we take to be a bit of poetic license) returns us to two lines a few lines earlier where the poet burns a 100,000-page manuscript (which we take to be an exaggeration), and the fire repeats elsewhere,

just as the physical ailments repeat and the randomized observations repeat. These become an unusual type of repetition in poems, one that prosody has no set term for, because

these are not repetitions of sounds. These are repetitions of classes of ideas, of types of thoughts. Yet the poem itself accepts the challenge of these repetitions and begins to repeat words:

The word "Nothing."

The word "O."

The word, which is the only thing we have before he don't even have that.

ecr. l'inf.
_____


Cone, Jon, Cold House (espresso: [Toronto], 2017). US or CAN$14, with shipping.

* Cone, John, Correspondence, Box 2, Folder 57, Geof Huth Papers 1960-2006 [actually now to 2017] (MSS-137). M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University at Albany, State University of New York (hereafter referred to as the Geof Huth Papers).

Year of Movement and Wonder

Geof Huth, Document Dust 31 (6 October 2017)

New York, New York
Some years are better than others, and I’ve had enough bad ones for a lifetime, but some years are beautiful and life-giving, even as they demand much out of you—as this one has for Karen and me. I write about this year to remember it—and, possibly, to encourage myself to write more sentences in the coming year, rather than merely poems of one to six words, the occasional stanza, and a political paragraph here and there.

  Geof Huth, Document Dust 44.5 (30 December 2017)Yet this has been a good year for me and my poetry (a word I use in such a way that it can overlap with every form of art—a statement I mean literally). I’ve produced hundreds of object poems this year, including 85 bottle poems in my sequence (and book in progress), Document Dust; 13 poems in the form of stones and rocks with text glued onto them (Stoens); and dozens of boxed object poems in my book-as-a-box-of-boxes-of-objects The THIRTY Weeks of April. And I’ve written hundreds of tiny poems, most tiny enough to be forgotten an instant ever their being seen.

Geof Huth, Stoen 10 (30 December 2017)Travel
This was likely my year with the most travel ever, though other years in the 1970s are possibly in competition. I traveled overnight every month except February (the month Karen and I moved our home). Total, I spent 85 overnights, almost a quarter of the year, sleeping away from home. I traveled for at least one day (and sometimes for six) for 36 of the year’s 52 weeks—and I ended the year with 16 straight weeks that included at least some travel. In terms of air flights, I’m sure this was the most ever: I flew on 28 flights, which equaled 10 round trips, and I flew every month except January, March, and August.
All this travel has been tiring, so I’m planning to reduce my travel a bit next year, though I’ll certainly have at least a couple of full months of nights away from home.
What follows is a slightly chaotic, but almost chronological, story of my life this past year—and because it’s my life, it’s largely also Karen’s.

Stage for Nabucco, Metropolitan Opera, New York (3 January 2017)3 January 2017: Nabucco
Our year began with a night at the opera, Karen’s and my first ever, which was just one of the new experiences we had in this big year. My daughter-in-law, Jackie, has watched opera her whole life, so she and my son Tim invited us to this opera, which was a great experience. We have more operas planned for our future.
Spine Title of a Volume of Transcripts of  Supreme Court of Judicature Judgments7 January 2017: New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/nyregion/new-york-documents-archives-records.html?_r=0
In early January, during the three-week process of transferring 1500 cubic feet of early New York state (and colony) court records to the New York State Archives, the New York Timesprinted a story about the project. This project (the massive inventory and the transfer) was the largest one of my archives career, though this portion amounted to only about one third of what the project will be. The attention from the Times led to many other interviews and news stories in print and on television, including a fairly long piece on Globo, the national television network of Brazil.

Karen Sitting in Our New Apartment, New York (17 February 2017)17 February 2017: Moving to Lower Manhattan
On this date, which was the eighth-month anniversary of our marriage, Karen and I moved into a new apartment—one that was two and a half times the size of our previous apartment. We moved from zero bedrooms and one bathroom to two bedrooms and two bathrooms, along with much more closet space and a clear view of the Hudson River and New York Harbor (in particular, the Statue of Liberty, which I can see just by looking up from this computer as I type this). Our life became more expensive with this move, but this new apartment allowed us to shut down four separate storage units. (More on this story in October, below.)

20–22 April 2017 MARAC, Newark, New Jersey
Because I’ve decided to write about all my out-of-state trips, I’ll note that I attended the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference’s spring meeting in Newark, which was an amazing meeting—even though I could not shake the thought that an improved Newark was a not-improved-enough Newark.

Karen at KWINT, Brussels, Belgium (13 May 2017)2–17 May 2017: Germany and Belgium
Our most significant trip of the year was a trip to Aachen (Aix-en-Chapelle), Germany, so that Karen and I both could give talks related to visual poetry. The organizer of this, Claudia Franken, did a great job setting up this multi-day symposium, and we spent much of our free time with her and her husband, Karl Thönnissen, both wonderful to talk with. Since we had travelled all the way to Europe, we turned left to Belgium for the rest of the trip, enjoying plenty of good beer and great art and architecture.

Jackie's Sister Alison Speaking and Tim and Jackie's Wedding (24 June 2017)23–25 June 2017: A Wedding in Chesterfield, New Jersey
My son Tim married Jackie Leung in New Jersey (her home state) over this weekend. Quite the beautiful event, and I have plenty of photographs to prove it.


25 June to 2 July 2017: Berea, Kentucky
This year marked the fifth of six years that a group of archivists (including me) will be running the Archives Leadership Institute for a cohort of 25 other archivists. It has been a good run for us, and I think we have helped many archivists take advantage of their leadership potential. It’s a great part of my year, and one that will end in the coming year.

Karen at the Oregon Brewer's Festival, Portland, Oregon (30 July 2017)24–30 July 2017, Portland, Oregon
Karen and I attended the Society of American Archivists’ conference in Portland, Oregon, where we enjoyed the company of our archives friends and had plenty of good beer. I also gave a fine outdoor poetry performance, late at night, from the top of a giant slide in a suburban backyard.

My Portion of Food at Homecoming (24 September 2017)21–26 September 2017, Newport, North Carolina
We visited Karen’s mother and family in North Carolina, just a little bit after summer, where we did what we usually do there: ate plenty of fish and searched for good North Carolinian beer, while enjoying the good company of her family. We also attended homecoming at Karen’s childhood church in Institute, North Carolina (population about 50—she is a small-town girl).

Our Living Room, New York, New York (8 April 2017)2 October 2017: New YorkTimes
In October, the New York Times printed its second story about me (this time about Karen and me, instead of records and lots of other people and me). To be in the Times twice in a year seems a little unusual for a person of my limited stature, one reason to make this year unlike all others. We were featured as renters with an interesting story: people who sold a small apartment so we could move to a larger rented one, while shutting down all our storage units. Karen was the engine behind this story; without her no-one would know all this about us, including the cost of our rent.

Karen Trivette and Jimmy and Erin Long, Descanso Gardens, Los Angeles (25 November 2017)21–28 November 2017: Thanksgiving in Los Angeles, California
Karen and I traveled to Los Angeles to celebrate Thanksgiving with my daughter Erin and son-in-law Jimmy—and their cat Callie. We saw many of the sites of Los Angeles, including a couple of archives—one of which was that for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And we had a great Thanksgiving, except for the part where I clogged the sink with potato peels for a few hours.

Geof Huth and Karen Trivette, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas (10 December 2017)
(photo by Tyler Selle)9–13 December 2017: Dallas, Texas
After a little break in traveling for Karen (and none, really, for me—since I flew to Rochester for a few days of work in between these two trips), we traveled again, this time to Dallas, where we each gave a talk about the big projects of ours that had come to fruition this year: my inventor and transfer of records to the State Archives, and the renovation of Karen’s entire archives. Dallas was much more fun than expected, and I loved the roads compared to those in New York State.

Christmas Dining Table, Newport, North Carolina (25 December 2017)20–27 December 2017: Newport, North Carolina
We headed back to North Carolina for Christmas, where Karen’s mother took more care of us than she should—just as she always does. It was a good long trip, so we were happy to be home, after being moved off two separate flights on the way back.
Now, our year is almost finished, except for dinner with friends followed by watching the New Year’s fireworks that will be set off on a barge beside Liberty Island, where Lady Liberty constantly holds her torch aloft to us.
ecr. l’inf.