Peter Behrens's Blog, page 577

Toolboxes & Workshops

                                                             Brooklin Boat Yard. Brooklin, Maine.                                                                     Don's toolboxes. Marfa, Texas                                  Dan Picasso's shop. Marathon, Texas                                                                    Dan Picasso's shop. Marathon, Texas                                                                                 Don's bike shop. Marfa, Texas
                                                   Don's bike shop, Marfa Texas                                                  Socket set from Liberty Tool. Brooklin, Maine                                                                                       Toolbox. Brooklin, Maine                                                               Bill Grant's Boatyard. Sedgwick, Maine.                                                                              Writing room. Brooklin, Maine.

Rob Fischer at Chinati

Rob Fischer was Chinati artist-in-residence at Marfa this winter. This piece--shed with steel frame and glass panels-- was powerful, delicate, strange. At the old Marfa ice house on Oak Street---a musty, cavernous space, like an ancient indoor hockey rink--RF hoisted his glass shed high into the air using ancient ice block-tackle, then spun it around, smashed it, & filmed it. I was aboard with Rob for while while the spinning & smashing was going on...wasn't sure the tackle would hold....it felt a bit like being on an Italian cruise ship, except the captain wasn't abandoning ship.

THE O'BRIENS in Booklist

Review of The O'Briens in Booklist (Feb 1 2012)
"Illuminating . . . . an epic along the lines of Middlesex in the way it follows a family through time and examines the results of their actions . . . . A brooding novel, engrossing in its scope and detail, The O'Brienskeeps sight of the family's personal stories amid the larger history of much of the twentieth century." —Booklist, February 1, 2012


 You can pre-order THE O'BRIENS at Amazon. U.S. pub. date is March 6, 2012.

A.R. Ammons poem "Driving Through"

Driving Through by A. R. Ammons In the desert midnight I saidtaking out my notebook I    am astonishedthough widely travelled havingseen Empire State and Palestine, Texasand San Miguel de Allendeto mention extremesand sharpened my pencil on the sole    of my shoe The mountains running skiddedover the icy mirages of the moonand fell down tumbling    laughing for breathon the cool dunesThe stone mosaics of the flattestplaces (parting lake-gifts) grouped    in colors andplayed games at imagery: a greentiger with orange eyes, an Orpheuswith moving fingers    Fontal the shrubs floodedeverything with coolwater I sat down against a brimming smoketreeto watch and morning found thedesert reservedtrembling at its hot and rainless task    Driving throughyou would never suspectthe midnight rite or seeing my lonely houseguess it will someday holdlaurel and a friend  in Collected Poems: 1971-1971,orig. in Corsons Inlet (Cornell U P, 1965)

Marfa Trucks. 73-87 GM. West Texas Vernacular

Okay, love the poems, but it's time to get back to metal. Trucks. Don't know why I like 'em, exactly, but I do. Perhaps it has to do with growing up in an apartment in the middle of a city, with a European father, and living inside a totally truckless culture. They came to symbolize removal, freedom, escape. The trope still has pull. Trucks also mean the West to me. When I worked on a cattle ranch in the Alberta foothills in the 70s I drove a '61 Chevrolet Apache from the ranch to the beer parlour in Sundre, Alberta every Saturday night; and once to the Calgary Stampede. Then Toby Clark and I headed from Alberta to Texas in 1984 in a 1-ton grain truck, a 1952 Chevrolet. Oh I forgot to mention learning to drive when I was 12 in Ste-Marguerite Station, Quebec in a 1952 Chevrolet pickup with a suicide knob and Montana plates.

Now we spend a piece of the year in Marfa, Texas where there's a warm wind, plenty of dust, and no rust, so old trucks around: it's distracting. Here are a few examples of everyday old trucks: West Texas Vernacular Vehicles. All 1973-87 Chevrolets and GMCs, except the handsome 1958 Chevy immediately  below.










 

My Brilliant Careerism, part 10

My new novel The O'Briens will be published in the US March 6 2012 (Pantheon.) Starred review in Publishers Weekly. You can pre-order at Amazon.

The O'BriensPeter Behrens. Pantheon, $25.95 (400p) ISBN 978-0-307-37993-1Afamily saga spans the 20th century, from Pontiac County, Quebec, to Venice Beach, Calif., and beyond, through two world wars and countless intimate tragedies, in Behrens's powerful second novel (after The Law of Dreams). Joe O'Brien, the eldest of five children, takes on the role of patriarch at age 13 when his father is killed in the Boer War and his family struggles to make a life in harsh northern Quebec. Joe's business savvy, the power he feels in his bloodline, a strong work ethic, and a mentor in a well-traveled local priest help Joe build a lumber business by the time he's 15. But difficulties remain: their new stepfather, who married their mother six months after their father's death, molests Joe's little sisters and hardens all the O'Briens—to his own detriment. This is a family possessed of a "strange, rough beauty," as the priest describes them, and it's this dichotomy that keeps them struggling internally long after they leave Pontiac County. Joe wins a construction contract for a railroad project that takes him to the Selkirk mountains of British Columbia and then to Venice, Calif., where, en route to Mexico, he visits his brother, Grattan, and meets Iseult Wilkins, who has just taken the first risk of her life by moving into her own apartment near the Beach. Iseult is soon on friendly terms with not only Grattan and Joe but also their gruff sister Elise, who sells the young woman a camera. By choosing Joe, Iseult welcomes a riskier, messy existence, and what follows, as their children age and the couple grows apart, is just that. Moments of grace and romance are rocked by cruel words and violence in this epic, a piece of rough beauty itself. Agent: Sarah Burnes, the Gernert Company. (Mar.)

Don McKay & the syrinx of speed

Ode to My Carby Don McKay As if. As if it oiled your idlenotions, machined,massaged them till there was noclunk no hand me that spanner nocrank 'er over.As if motor were simply the syrinx of speed as ifmovie movie all you ever have to pay is your attention, focuson the docudrama in the windshield, stay tunedto the hummingbird who hums in the accelerator, in the cylindersthe six brave heart attacks are singing and the clutchperforms the sigh with which the lovers shift into                                                                       more comfortablepositions:                there.Something has come from nothing, as ifa handful of its blackberries had beengathered. Something in a toothdeserves to speak in tongues. Something in a consonantattends its vowels, as ifminuet. Synchromesh.Momentum. Here lies the precisemystery of transmission.                                                             in Apparatus (McClelland & Stewart, 1997)

The Detroit Auto Show. Other cities have art fairs...

These billboards were up in Detroit during the auto show in early January. Great to see GM embracing it's heritage instead of driving away from it, too often in something like an Aztek. Can they come up with new cars as wild, dreamlike, & stylish as these bombers but translated into a language that makes sense for a planet waking up to global-warming?  Or has the moment, and the need, passed? Maybe GM and the car industry is no longer in the business of engineering dream machines. Maybe Apple does that for us now. Maybe its all in the cloud. Maybe if you really want to drive something with the crazed feline style of a '59 Impala, you'll have to find yourself a '59 Impala; otherwise, it's Volts,Volts, Volts.

Major Jackson, "Indian Song"

                                                              photograph Jarrod McCabe© 2012Indian Song

Freddie Hubbard's playing the cassette deck
forty miles outside Hays and I've looked at
this Kansas sunset for three hours now,
almost bristling as big rigs bounce and grumble
along I-70. At this speed cornfields come
in splotches, murky yellows and greens abutting
the road's shoulder, the flat wealth of the nation whirring by.
It's a kind of ornamentation I've gotten used to—
as in a dream. Espaliered against the sky's blazing—
coud-luffs cascade lace-like darkening whole fields.
30,000 feet above someone is buttering a muffin.
Someone stares at a Skyphone, and momentarily—
a baby's cry in pressurized air. Through double-paned squares
Someone squints: fields cross-hatched by asphalt-strips.
It is said Cézanne looked at a landscape so long he felt
as if his eyes were bleeding. No matter that. I'm heading west.
It's all so redolent, this wailing music, by my side
you fingering fields of light, sunflowers over earth,
miles traveled, a patchwork of goodbyes.
                                                       -Major Jackson

Jackson's latest book is Holding Company (W.W.Norton, 2010)

Fireball Roberts

I've always had a thing for 1959 Pontiacs and this is maybe the coolest poncho I've seen. The photo is from the Fireball Roberts website:



From the website: "Tragedy certainly describes the end of the life of Edward Glenn "Fireball" Roberts..."