diggers digging, fingers typing, pages turning, noun verb, etc.

by sarah marine


I'm sitting in my library contemplating silence whilst diggers and dumptrucks do their thing in the parking lot next door. Ah, construction. It makes for a very unfriendly reading environment. Therefore, you get a blogpost about what I'm thinking, which is quite lucky- because I know it's what you live for.

The past couple days have been those lovely Wisconsin ones involving the harshest transition from 80 degree days to 50 degree days. Thankfully, I LOVE WINTER...and, thankfully, nothing says winter like Ander Monson. However with the season still much too far away from warranting Other Electricities, I picked up assorted fire events by David Means. It is the perfect foreword to its Monson Michigan companion (who I guess is teaching in Arizona now, which boggles the mind).



Means' description: "the wet mulch stench of the forest floor and the vast emptiness that the Upper Peninsula offers, that stony wilderness scratching the back of the of the greatest freshwater body in the world, a lake deep enough to swallow whole freighters..." geez. Why anyone would want to live anywhere but the glorious midwest is beyond me. It's beyond.

If I could have dinner with any five writers, living or dead, writers whose conversations could veer from the personality of freight trains, to various sounds of walking on snow, to the year-round cold of the Great Lakes it would be these:


1. Richard Hugo
2. David Means
3. Ander Monson
4. John Ashbery
5. Mike Balisle
*6. Bayard Godsave, of course.

Together with Ashbery's April Galleons and Frank Miller's Daredevil series, I have been very very pleased with current literary companions. Thinking about the future, cant wait for new Sarah Vowell and Chris Ware! Have also been obsessively checking iPage and IBID and everywhere for The Art of Recklessness, which is supposedly a prose collection by Dean Young that was scheduled to come out this year- I mean, literally mentioned in the same breath as Primitive Mentor(January 2008).

PS. IF YOU HAVENT REGISTERED TO VOTE OR NEED TO CHANGE YOUR ADDRESS OR DESIRE ANY KINDS OF INFORMATION REGARDING THE ACT AND ART OF VOTING, THE OBAMA-LAMAS HAVE MOVED IN NEXT DOOR THE DOWNER SCHWARTZ LOCATION!

Bonesteel. Then Ander Monson.

In preparation for my annual rendezvous with Ander Monson’s devastating work on the upper Midwest, the stark narratives investigating the smell of static that penetrates all winter outerwear, the line of communication labeled, Other Electriticites,

I have been gathering into myself the works of Richard Hugo and Mike Balisle. You may reply, “Oh, Richard Hugo, yeah, we know Richard Hugo- but, who’s that Mike Balisle?”


Well, curious reader, let me tell you, Mike Balisle penned a collection in 1977, entitled Bonesteel. It is self-published, held together by staples and yellowed by years. I found it in a box at the Renaissance Bookshop in downtown Milwaukee. The fiction at Renaissance is, for the most part, well picked over by Marquette bibliophiles, but the other sections, especially the children’s, are overflowing with yet to be discovered phenomena. So, anyway, I have been carrying this slight volume- Bonesteel- around for about two weeks, taking out and reciting any of the hundreds of amazing prose to whomever happens to be standing the closest- most often boyfriend type person. I have looked online and found nothing on the author or the collection.


"With Unknown Fever"
at that time the holy men of the upper Midwest would strip naked under the
northern lights and fight like angry blacksmiths until caving in gloriously

I imagine Mike Balisle as some silent small-town Midwestern boy, eating lunch at eleven and dinner at five like clockwork, plowing driveways or working construction, this book a brief foray into creativity. He was probably just some fashion vagabond, tramping around the country on trains or flatbed trucks, only to return to place of birth and ultimately become the aforementioned small-town personality. Or maybe he’s in some D.C. think tank or perhaps he lives down the street from me, muttering daily about the price of gasoline.


"The White Axes of Winter"
years inside a blizzard we awaken
to the questioning of the fact
that last night pale children were stalked
by images of ice

this morning it is seen
the white axes of winter whirled until all
oaths and prayers were split from our faces

there we fell
the cold hills
drifting our shoulders


Dear Mike Balisle,

You’re making it difficult for me to move beyond:

I will forget my sadness
and run with lengthening legs
to the tavern in junction city
where anna in her wheelchair
presents me with a grain belt
and
“the soul lives on----don’t you know that yet?”

I mean, this kind of language compounded with the new Weakerthans album (Night Windows may be the most satisfying devastation track of the year), is prohibiting me from doing anything but obsessively consuming them exclusively.

In conclusion, Mike Balisle, I appreciate your work, and hope that somewhere along the line, someone, someone not on an obscure book blog in 2007, someone you knew in the thirty years between Bonesteel and now, was smart enough to tell you that in person.